“It will be all right,” she said, and Ariadne was quite pleased, for of course, this way, her six young men can come, a dozen if they like.
Ariadne and I had costumes. I was the little Duke of Gandia, that brother of Cæsar Borgia that he killed, and Ariadne had the dress of Beatrice Cenci with a sort of bath-towel wound round her head. The funny thing is that she looks far younger than me in it, quite a little girl, while I look like a big boy. My legs are very long. George has a monk’s costume, one of the Fratelli dei Morti, and it is much the same sort of looking thing as a domino. Nobody would ever know him, and he looks very nice.
I am told that at masques you have to speak a squeaky voice or alter it somehow. George will have to, because he has a very peculiar voice, that anybody would know a mile off; people call it resonant, nervous, bell-like—I call it cracked. It is one of his chief fascinations, but he will have to do without it for once, and rely on the others.
The study was to be the ball-room, only George preferred to leave signs of literary occupation in the shape of his desk, which he just shoved away on one side, with the proofs of his new novel left negligently lying on it. We sprinkled copies of his last but one about the house, in moderation; it was rather fun—I felt as if I were planting bulbs. George likes these sort of little attentions, and I knew I was not to be put off by his finding one, as he did, and scolding me and telling me to put it on the fire.
CHAPTER VIII
ABOUT nine they all began to arrive, and by ten o’clock the house was overflowing. Ben was a capital commissionaire in a District Messenger’s costume he had borrowed, with George’s consent, and I do believe he enjoyed himself most of anybody. Of course at first all he had to do was to stand at the door and show people in, but he hoped that later in the evening he should have to chuck somebody out. It was likely, he thought, for all the literary world of London would be sure to be at our party. I’m sorry to say that Ben was wrong there, or else the literary people didn’t come, for those that did come were as quiet as lambs. There were detectives, several of them, and although I looked very particularly at their boots, which I have always been told is the way to spot a detective, I saw nothing at all out of the common. There was a man with a cloven hoof, but then he was meant for the devil. He was masked of course, but the devil needs no domino. And I knew all the time that it was the little man who interviewed me once instead of George for The Bittern, and got me into such a row, and very devilish of him it was, and I had no butter to my bread for a week because of him. How I was supposed to know that George hated the truth instead of loving it, I can’t see, only The Bittern man knew well enough, I expect! Never, never again will I interfere between a man and his interviewer!
There were hosts of newspaper people there; I heard two of them discussing us, sitting in the high-backed Medici seat. I managed to get jammed in behind, “powerless to move,” as they say in the novels, even if I had wanted to. People are careless. I heard heaps of conversations, anyhow, people even said things to each other across me, without stopping to think whether or no I wasn’t one of the family. I suppose because they were masked, they felt anonymous, as if it didn’t matter what they said, and it needn’t count afterwards.
The man I listened to was The Bittern man, dressed as the devil. The woman’s domino was all shot with queer faint colours, and, if any colour, sulphur colour. She was scented too, a nice odd scent. The Bittern man seemed to know her.
“I cannot be mistaken; am I not talking to the most dangerous woman in London?”
The woman seemed quite complimented, and smiled under her mask.