"He has suffered a great deal also," she thought; "and he has more to suffer. How sorely he must repent his neglect of his father! as sorely as I repent my neglect of mine." Here the tears, which had already burned her eyelids into a state of excruciating soreness, burst forth again. "What must he have felt when he read his father's letter!--the letter written to be read after the writer's death,--the letter he will show to me, he says, though to no one else in the world, except, I suppose, the young lady whom Sir Peregrine entreated him in it to marry. I wonder if he will,--I wonder if she is nice, and good, and likely to make him happy! It is strange that a similar calamity should have befallen him and me. He can feel for my grief now--I have always felt for his!"
[CHAPTER XXVI.]
MR. WUFF'S "NEW STAR."
"Miss Constance Greenwood, the new actress!" "Go and see Constance Greenwood on the 18th!" "Constance Greenwood as Lady Malkinshaw!" Such were the placards in enormous letters which glared upon Laurence Alsager from every dead wall and hoarding on his passage from the railway-station to his old rooms in Jermyn Street. Laurence could not forbear smiling as he glanced at them--could not forbear a laugh as, at the Club over his dinner, he read the advertisements of the forthcoming appearance of Miss Greenwood at the Theatre Royal, Hatton Garden, for which national establishment she had been secured by the impresario, Mr. Wuff, at an expense hitherto unparalleled--at least so said the advertisements.
Yes; Mr. Wuff had done it at last! He had cut himself adrift from the moorings of mediocrity, as his nautical dramatist expressed it, and it was now sink or swim with him. He was "going in a perisher," he said himself; and having set his fortune on a die, he was just waiting to see whether it turned up six or ace.
When Mr. Wuff came into a sum of money on the death of a distant relative, and, forsaking the necessary but hardly popular calling of a sheriff's-officer, took the Theatre Royal, Hatton Garden, and opened it with a revival of the legitimate drama in general and of Shakespearian plays in particular, he made a very great hit. It was so long since any one had attempted to represent Shakespeare, that an entirely new generation had sprung up, which, egged on by its elders, went religiously to the first performance of all the celebrated plays, and tried very hard indeed to think they both understood and liked them. The newspaper press too was very noble on the subject. Mr. Wuff, so said the critics, was the great dramatic resuscitator of the age.
What! People had said that the taste for the legitimate was exploded! The answer to that was in the crowds that thronged to T. R., Hatton Garden. And then the critics went on to say that the scenery by Mr. Slapp, with wonderful moonlight effects such as had never previously been seen, was thoroughly appreciated; and that the mechanical arrangement for the appearance of Banquo's ghost amongst the unconscious Thanes was a marvel of theatrical deception. Was it Shakespeare or Slapp who drew? Buncle, a heavy, ignorant, ill-educated man, who had played fourth-rate parts with the Dii majores in those "palmy days" of which we read, and who now, faute de mieux, found himself pitch-forked into the leading characters, thought it was Shakespeare--and Buncle! The knowing ones thought it was the novelty of the reproduction and the excellence of Slapp's scenery which caused the success; and the knowing ones were right. Shakespeare, as interpreted by Buncle, Mrs. Buncle, and Stampede--whom Buncle always took about with him to play his seconds--drew for a certain length of time. Then the audience thinned gradually, and Wuff found it necessary to supplement King Lear with the Harem Beauties--a ballet supported by the best band of coryphées in Europe; and that was a really good stroke of policy. While Buncle was lying down and dying as Lear, the club-men came trooping into the house; and Buncle's apostrophes to his dead daughter Cordelia were nearly inaudible in the creaking of boots and the settling into seats. The pit cried "Hush!" and "Shame!" but the swells did not care about the pit, and the curtain fell on Buncle thirsting for aristocratic blood. The ballet at first attracted largely. As the time for its commencement approached, the military clubs were drained of their members, who went away in a procession of hansoms from Pall Mall to Hatton Garden; and you could have counted more peers within Wuff's walls at one time than were to be found, save on special occasions, at St. Stephen's.
But the ballet, after a time, ceased to draw; and Mr. Wuff could not supplement it by another, for the coryphées had all returned to their allegiance to the manager of the Opera-house, whose season had just commenced. Mr. Wuff was in despair; he dared not shut the house, for he had to make up his rent, which was required with inexorable punctuality by the committee of gentlemen who owned the theatre. He must try something; but what was it to be? Wuff and his treasurer, Mr. Bond,--always known as Tommy Bond, an apple-faced, white-headed old gentleman, who had dropped into the theatrical world no one ever knew whence, and who had held a place of trust with all the great managers of the T. R., Hatton Garden, for thirty years,--were closeted together.
"What's it to be, Tommy?" repeated Mr. Wuff for the twentieth time. "They've had it all round, hot and strong; and what's the caper for 'em now, I don't know."
"What do you think of reviving Julius Caesar? The classic costume has not been seen on these boards for years."