‘You said “wonderfully.” I know very well, wherefore—because you saw him smile; and because he smiled, you thought he did not feel his condition as his wife and daughters did.’
‘I confess that is the case,’ said the young officer.
‘Ah! H——,’ exclaimed Mr. Cotton, ‘you are new to this sort of thing. You looked in the man’s face, and thought he was bold. I had my eye on his back, and I saw that it gave his face the lie. It showed that he was suffering mortal agony.’
H—— looked inquiringly at the chaplain, who answered the look by saying, ‘Listen to me, H——. You are young. Some day you will rise to a post that will require you to sit in the dock, behind the prisoners who are tried on capital charges. On one of those occasions, you will see what is common enough—a prisoner who is saucy and defiant, and who laughs in the judge’s face as he puts on the black cap, and while he is condemning him. Well, H——, if you want to know what that prisoner really feels, don’t look at his face—look at his back. All along and about the spine, you will find it boiling, heaving, surging, like volcanic matter. Keep your eye upon it, H——; and when you see the irrepressible emotion in the back suddenly subsiding, open wide your arms, my boy, for the seemingly saucy fellow is about to tumble into them, in a dead faint. All the “sauce,” Mr. H——, will be out of him at once, and perhaps for ever, unless he be exceptionally constituted.’
A little party of visitors was gathered round the narrator of this, the other day, in that dreadful room where Calcraft keeps his ‘traps and things.’ I had my hand on the new coil already prepared and in order for the next criminal who may deserve it; another was looking at Jack Sheppard’s irons, which were never able to confine him; and others, with a sort of unwilling gaze at things in a half-open cupboard, which looked like the furniture of a saddle-room, but which were instruments of other purposes. We all turned to the speaker, as he ceased, and inquired if his experience corroborated Mr. Cotton’s description. H—— answered in the affirmative, and he went into particulars to which we listened with the air of men who were curious yet not sympathizing; but I felt, at the same time, under the influences of the place, and of being suddenly told that I was standing where Calcraft stands on particular occasions, a hot and irrepressible motion adown the back, which satisfied me that the Cottonian theory had something in it, and that Miss Kelly, without knowing it, was acting in strict accordance with nature, when she made her back interpret to an audience all the anguish she was supposed to feel at the sorry sight on which her face was turned.
By way of parenthesis, let me add that Mr. Cotton himself was a most accomplished actor on his own unstable boards. When he grew somewhat a-weary of his labour—it was a heavy labour when Monday mornings were hanging mornings, and wretches went to the beam in leashes—when Mr. Cotton was tired of this, he thought of a good opportunity for retiring. ‘I have now,’ he said, ‘accompanied just three hundred and sixty-five poor fellows to the gallows. That’s one for every day in the year. I may retire after seeing such a round number die with cotton in their ears.’ Whether the reverend gentleman was the author of this ingenious comparison for getting hanged, or whether he playfully adopted the phrase which was soon so popularly accepted as a definition, cannot now be determined.
While on this subject, let me notice that, with the exception of one Matthew Coppinger, a subaltern player in the Stuart days, no English actor has ever suffered death on the scaffold. Mat’s offence was not worse than the mad Prince’s on Gad’s Hill, and it must be confessed that one or two other gentlemen of the King’s or Duke’s company ‘took to the road’ of an evening, and perhaps deserved hanging, though the royal grace saved them. Neither in England nor France has an actor ever appeared on the scaffold under heavy weight of crime. As for taking to the highway, baronets’ sons have gone that road on their fathers’ horses; and society construed lightly the offences of highwaymen who met travellers face to face and set life fairly against life. In England, Coppinger alone went to Tyburn. In France, I can recall but two out of the many thousands of actors who have trodden its very numerous stages,—not including an occasional player who suffered for political reasons during the French Revolution. One of the two was Barrières, a Gascon, who, after studying for the church and the law, turning dramatic poet and mathematician, and finally enlisting in the army, obtained leave of absence, and profited thereby by repairing to Paris, and appearing at the Théâtre Français, in 1729, as Mithridate. His Gascon extravagance and eccentricity caused at first much amusement, but he speedily established himself as an excellent general actor, and forgot all about his military leave of absence. Not so his colonel, who had no difficulty in laying his hand on the Gascon recruit, who was playing in his own name in Paris, and under authority of a furlough, the period of which he had probably exceeded—the document itself he had unfortunately lost. Barrières was tried, condemned, and shot, in spite of all the endeavours made to save him.
Sixty years later it went as hardly with Bordier, an actor of the Variétés, of whom I have heard old French players speak with great regard and admiration. He was on a provincial tour, when he talked so plainly at tables d’hôte of the misery of the times and the prospects of the poor, that he was seized and tried at Rouen under a charge of fomenting insurrection in order to lower the price of corn. Just before his seizure he had played the principal part (L’Olive) in ‘Trick against Trick’ (Ruses contre Ruses), in which he had to exclaim gaily: ‘You will see that to settle this affair, I shall have to be hanged!’ And Bordier was hanged, unjustly, at Rouen. He suffered with dignity, and a touch of stage humour. He had been used to play in Pompigny’s ‘Prince turned Sweep’ (Ramoneur Prince)—a piece in which Sloman used to keep the Coburg audience in a roar of delight. In the course of the piece, standing at the foot of a ladder, and doubtful as to whether he should ascend or not, he had to say: ‘Shall I go up or not?’ So, when he came to the foot of the lofty ladder leaning against the gigantic gallows in the market-place at Rouen, Bordier turned with a sad smile to the hangman and said: ‘Shall I go up or not?’ The hangman smiled too, but pointed the way that Bordier should go; and the wits of Rouen were soon singing of him in the spirit of the wits of Covent Garden singing of Coppinger:
Mat did not go dead, like a sluggard to bed,