Or will it be Mr. Haddon Chambers, who is already known in Paris, one of his works, The Fatal Card, having crossed the channel? Since then he has written a piece entitled John-a-Dreams, played at the Haymarket in 1894, in which Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Mr. Tree joined their talents. It is not a good play, but it is one in which the tendencies of the new drama are clearly shown. I recall one scene of the utmost simplicity, the restrained and sober emotion of which contrasts curiously with the fine phrases a situation such as it contains would inspire in an author of a quarter of a century ago. Kate Cloud loves, and is loved by, Harold Wynn. Before consenting to marry him she gets herself introduced to Harold’s father, a country clergyman.
“You do not know me, sir,” she says to him (I quote from memory), “but I know you. You came to preach ten years ago at the village of ——. I was with Mrs. Withers then.”
“Oh, indeed,—an excellent person,” he replies; “but it is strange that I did not make your acquaintance.”
“No, it is not strange, really,—do you remember the kind of work she was engaged upon?”
“The redemption of unfortunates, was it not.”
“Yes, exactly. And you, doubtless—you helped her?”
“No,” Kate replies gravely, sadly, her voice trembling. “No, it was she who helped me.” She tells him her story, the sad, perennial story, or rather, having begun it, she leaves him to divine the rest. “They came to my help,” she goes on, “but no one came to the help of my mother. She fed and clothed me when I was little; I in my turn fed and clothed her later on.”
Then had come years of endeavour, and the hard apprenticeship by which she had made herself an honest woman.
“Now, sir, if a man who had a heart wanted to marry me in full consciousness of my past, should I have the right to accept him?”
“Certainly, my child,” the old man answers.