He proceeded to give Mrs. Hunter-Hart an account of the shock which had led him into such unprofessional conduct.
“O’Finn, I’m astonished at you! I would not believe that a man of your age could make such an unmitigated ass of himself. Come, let me try you with your cues.
“Even a toy in hand here, sir: nay, pray be covered.”
“Will you be married, motley?” O’Finn muttered thickly.
“As the ox hath his bow, sir,” Mrs. Hart went on, “the horse his curb, and the falcon her bells, so hath man his desires; and as pigeons bill, so wedlock would be nibbling.”
“Yes, I perceive the point you’re making, ma’am,” the old actor admitted. “But with your permission I would....”
“Beginners third act,” cried the junior member of the company, hurrying along the stone corridors past the dressing-room doors.
Perhaps if the interval had been longer, Mrs. Hunter-Hart might have persuaded Michael O’Finn that he was behaving unreasonably and absurdly. As it was, he recovered his sense of outraged paternity, and on the following night he worked up his feelings in the bar of the “Saracen’s Head” to such a pitch that several members of the company began to think that Bram really must have been behaving rather badly with Nancy. O’Finn played Sir Toby Belch that night, and, as the Birmingham Daily Post said, it was probably as ripe a performance as had ever been seen on any stage.
However, what had begun not exactly in jest, but to some extent as a piece of play-acting, became serious; for Michael O’Finn, who had nearly ruined his youthful career by hard drinking, seemed inclined to revert to the wretched habit in his maturity. Bram began to feel thoroughly upset, in spite of Nancy’s protestations of undying love and her promise to run away and be married to him the moment he gave the word. Mrs. Hunter-Hart herself continued to be kind, and was always assuring them of her great influence over the intransigent father and of the certainty that he would soon come to his senses. The rest of the company was on the whole unfavourable to the lovers, so sad was the picture that O’Finn drew of a desolate future bereft of his only daughter and doomed for ever to tour the provinces in lonely lodgings without being allowed to buy that little cottage in the country, where with Nancy in affectionate ministration he was to rest during the rose-hung Junes of conventional idealism, and to which he was ultimately to retire on his savings for a peaceful pipe-smoking old age. As a matter of hard fact, Michael O’Finn had exactly two weeks’ salary in his bank, barely enough to pay the lawyer for the conveyance of a two-roomed bungalow on the banks of the Thames.
A week or two later in the middle of this situation Bram received a letter from his grandmother: