“As the managers won’t have you, take a theatre yourself.”
“But I have no money.”
“I’ll lend you money,” said her brother-in-law.
A partnership between Byron and Miss Wilton was the immediate result. He brought his reputation and his puns. She the £1000 which was not hers.
A theatre had now to be found. Near Tottenham Court Road, one of the noisiest and commonest quarters of the town, there was a squalid, miserable-looking street where ill-fed and ill-famed Frenchmen were at this time beginning to congregate; and in it there was a place of entertainment where all sorts of things had been achieved, but bankruptcy oftenest of all. Frédéric Lemaitre had played Napoleon there in French, and had in this capacity passed in review some half-dozen supers who stood for the “Grande Armée” and who cried “Viv’ l’Emprou!” The house bore the high-sounding name of the “Queen’s Theatre,” but the people of the neighbourhood called it the “Dust-Hole,” and in doing so proved their acquaintance with it. The aristocratic seats were a shilling, and when the Stalls had dined well they were given to bombarding the Boxes with orange peel.
It was now cleaned, restored, freshened up at an outlay more of pains than of money. The “Dust-Hole” was transformed into a blue and white bonbonnière. The little manageress did not spare herself, and on the evening of the first night, whilst the queue was already forming outside the door of the theatre, she was busy hammering in a last nail. What would have been said by the devotees of fashion, wandering in the muddy Tottenham Street, and astonished at finding themselves in such a locality, had they seen their favourite squatting on a stool, hammer in hand?
The company she had gathered round her consisted of Byron, John Clarke, transplanted from the Strand, Fanny Josephs—an actress of delicate and agreeable talent, the excellent duègne Larkin, and two other sisters Wilton. It included also a tall young man of twenty-four who had not previously acted in London, and who was not therefore of any interest to the public, though to his manageress he was; his name was Bancroft.
He was a gentleman by birth, breeding, and bearing. But, his family being ruined, he had followed the vocation which led him to the stage. In four and a half years he had played four hundred and forty-six rôles. In one engagement of thirty-six days in Dublin he had played forty. This hard life as a provincial comedian had broken him into his business. Tall and slender, he owed a sort of air of distinction combined with stiffness to his short sight and to his stature. The rendering of cool, well-bred nonchalance came naturally to him, but in the depth of his eye there lurked a gleam of irrepressible humour. He had spent much time in observing and reflecting, he knew much more of things than did his colleagues, and he felt vaguely conscious of possessing qualities which had only to be drawn out. And now fortune, in the guise of a young girl, had come to him and taken him by the hand.
Thus there was both ambition and love in the air that April evening in 1865 when the little “Prince of Wales’s” opened its door as wide as it could. In order not to startle the public or disturb its habits, a burlesque and a comedy were offered it pending the preparation of the new repertory. Marie Wilton’s friends supported her in their hundreds, but their sympathies were soon to be lost. The pieces themselves were almost worthless; Byron would seem to have lost his verve during the removal. Something new had to be found for the autumn. It was then that Robertson was thought of.
Thomas William, or more familiarly, Tom Robertson, was at this time next door to a failure. He was thirty-six, and was fighting an uphill fight against ill-fortune with a desperation that was growing into rancour. The son, grandson, and great-grandson of actors, he had passed the first years of his life in a touring company in the midst of those bourgeois vagabonds whose joys and sorrows I have endeavoured to depict. His father had been manager of the company which worked on the Lincoln circuit, and had ended by giving it up. Tom himself had appeared upon the boards whilst still a child, but, as it would seem, without giving evidence of any remarkable talents. Later, his speciality was the taking off of foreigners—a sorry means of inciting to laughter for a man of intellect. In fine, though there are some who would fain mislead us in the matter, it is clear that Robertson was but a second-rate actor.