Free MASQUES OF SATAN by Reggie Oliver Page A

quite happy to agree with this suggestion, because I had a feeling that my parents would not believe me if I did tell them about Hal.
    ‘Come!’ said Mrs de Walter. ‘I want to show you some things which will amuse you. This way!’ Her hand now pressed firmly against my left shoulder blade, she guided me anticlockwise round the villa to a part of it which I had not seen, a long low structure with tall windows abutting onto the main building.
    ‘We call this the orangery,’ she said. ‘But it’s many years since anyone grew oranges here.’ She took out a key and turned it in the lock of a door made from grey and wrinkled wood, to which a few flakes and blisters of green paint still adhered.
    ‘Who is Hal?’ I asked Mrs De Walter.
    ‘Come inside,’ she said. ‘There are some things here which I’m sure will amuse you.’
    We entered a long, dingy space feebly lit by the tall dirty windows that faced onto the garden. At the far end of the orangery was a curtain of faded green damask drawn across a dark space, and along the wall which faced the windows was ranged a series of rectangular glass cases set on legs at a height convenient to the spectator.
    ‘These are bound to amuse you,’ said Mrs de Walter. ‘All boys like you are amused by these.’ Her insistence on my reaction was beginning to make me nervous.
    At first I thought that the glass cases simply contained stuffed animals of the kind I had seen in museums, but when I was placed firmly in front of one I saw that this was not quite so. There were stuffed animals certainly, but they were all mice, rats, and other rodents, and they had been put into human postures and settings.
    The first tableau depicted the oak panelled parlour of an old-fashioned inn. A red squirrel in an apron was halfway through a door, bearing a tray of bottles, glasses, and foaming tankards of ale. At a table sat four or five rats and a white mouse. Playing cards were scattered over the table and on the floor. The white mouse was looking disconsolately away towards the viewer, while the rats seemed to be gloating over the piles of coin which had accumulated on their side of the table. The white mouse wore an elegant embroidered sash of primrose coloured silk, while perching on one of the finials of his chair back was an extravagantly plumed hat. The setting and costume accessories suggested the Carolean period. Two moles wearing spectacles and Puritan steeple hats were watching the proceedings with disapproval from a corner table. It was clear that the rats had gulled the wealthy but innocent young mouse out of his cash at cards.
    The tableau looked as if it had been made in the Victorian era and had, I am sure, been designed to amuse, as Mrs de Walter kept reminding me; but there was something dusty and oppressive about the atmosphere it evoked. Perhaps it was the implied moralism of the display, a sort of Rodent Rake’s Progress, that disheartened me.
    In the second case the scene was set outside the inn. The two moles were now observing the action from an open first floor casement window to the right of the inn sign, which bore the image of a skull and a trumpet. On the road in front of the inn a brawl was taking place between the white mouse and one of the rats. Both were being urged on by groups of their fellow rodents, the mice being smaller obviously, but more elegantly equipped with plumed hats and rapiers swinging from their tasselled baldrics. The rats had a proletarian look about them and had leather rather than silk accoutrements.
    The third tableau was set in a forest clearing, where the mouse and his comrades had just ambushed the rat with whom he had been brawling in the previous scene. The mouse was plunging a rapier into the belly of the rat, which was now in its death throes. I was slightly surprised by the graphic way in which the creator of these scenes had shown the blood. It surrounded the gaping wound which the mouse had created; there was a dark viscous pool