A slip of pasteboard fluttered from his hand to the carpet; he flung wide the portal, banged it to behind him, and was gone.
Some one, in a sort of spasmodic torpor, picked up the card, and immediately uttered a gasping exclamation. We all crowded round him, and, reading the superscription at which he was pointing, “Mr. Hannibal Withers, Momus Theatre,” exchanged dumbfounded glances.
“Why, of course,” stuttered a pallid youth; “it was Withers, Voules’s pal; I reco’nize him now. He’s the Prime Minister’s double, you know, and—and he’s been and goosed us.”
“What!” screamed Slater.
But I was off in a fit of hysterical laughter.
It was actually a fact. It is a mistake to suppose that your professional scandal-monger is prepared to build except on a substratum of truth. Voules had pricked the bubble as he had promised. The bargain, it was admitted, had been struck—on Slater’s side for such a consideration as would submerge him in champagne had he desired it. He had written and sent the manuscripts to Sweeting, who had had them typed, and passed them on to the “Argonaut” as his own. But the real author knew that his tenure was insecure so long as the other’s colossal vanity was not ministered to. Hence the correspondence, in which the little monster burlesqued his own lucubrations. It might all have ended in a case of perpetual blackmail (Sweeting never could see beyond the end of his own nose) had not the bait answered so instantly to Voules’s calculations.
There was a bitter attack on the immorality of the stage in the next number of the “Argonaut,” which subsequently had to compound with Voules under threat of an action for libel. But Sweeting had his wish. He was “somebody,” as never yet. Until he took his notoriety for a long sea-voyage, he was more crushingly than any gentleman in the “Dunciad” “damn’d to fame.”
A POINT OF LAW
BY A CAPTIOUS LITIGANT
Given a wet night on circuit, a bar parlour with a chattering fire, a box of tobacco, a china bowl of punch, and a mixed forensic company to discuss the lot, and what odds would you lay for or against the chances of a good story or so?