CHAPTER XII
IN THE OLD CEMETERY
The engagement at the new St. Charles was both memorable and profitable, The Picayune, before the fifties, an audacious sheet, being especially kind to the players. “This paper,” said a writer of the day, “was as full of witticisms as one of Thackeray’s dreams after a light supper, and, as for Editors Straws and Phazma, they are poets who eat, talk and think rhyme.” The Picayune contained a poem addressed to Miss Carew, written by Straws in a cozy nook in the veranda at the Lake End, with his absinthe before him and the remains of an elaborate repast about him. It was then quite the fashion to write stanzas to actresses; the world was not so prosaic as it is now, and even the president of the United States, John Quincy Adams, penned graceful verses to a fair ward of Thalia.
One noon, a few days after the opening performance, several members of the company were late for rehearsal and Barnes strode impatiently to and fro, glancing at his watch and frowning darkly. To 363 avenge himself for the remissness of the players, he roared at the stage carpenters who were constructing a balcony and to the supers who were shifting flats to the scenery room. The light from an open door at the back of the stage dimly illumined the scene; overhead, in the flies, was intense darkness; while in front, the auditorium yawned like a chasm, in no wise suggestive of the brilliant transformation at night.
“Ugh!” said Susan, standing in one of the entrances. “It is like playing to ghosts! Fancy performing to an audience of specters! Perhaps the phantoms of the past really do assemble in their old places on occasions like this. Only you can’t hear them applaud or laugh.”
“Are you looking for admirers among ghosts?” remarked Hawkes, ironically.
“Don’t,” she returned, with a little shiver.
“So, ladies and gentlemen, you are all here at last?” exclaimed Barnes, interrupting this cheerful conversation. “Some of you are late again to-day. It must not happen again. Go to Victor’s, Moreau’s, or Miguel’s, as much as you please. If you have a headache or a heartache in consequence, that is your own affair, but I am not to be kept waiting the next day.”