‘If you mean the Devil, that is nothing new,’ said Mrs. Powell; ‘he is always, so we are told, in the play-house.’
She spoke very sharply; she thought it the right remedy to apply under the circumstances, just as she might have recommended bending back the fingers in an extreme case of hysterics.
‘Come here,’ said Mrs. Jordan, leading the young man to a spot where, through a chink in the curtain, they could get a view of the box where his father and cousin sat. ‘Look at your Margaret yonder; she is not a coward like you.’ Indeed, the more the people hissed, the calmer and the more indifferent Margaret seemed to be, though under that unmoved exterior she suffered agonies. She was thinking of her Willie, though she could not see him, and love enhanced her beauty.
It was a frightful scene of turmoil, though up till now a good-natured one. The actor who had last left the stage (or rather who was left upon it, for he had been killed in combat) had had, by some mismanagement, the curtain dropped upon his legs, and had jumped up and rubbed them before the audience in a manner very unbecoming a corpse. At this they screamed with laughter, to which his Highness the Duke of Clarence, in the royal box, contributed his full share. Their good humour was, therefore, for the present, assured, though such mirth was hardly conducive to the success of a tragedy. But at the commencement of the next act there were signs of ill-nature. There were cries set agoing from a box on the upper tier, of ‘Forgery! forgery!’ and even of ‘Thief Erin! Thief Erin! look at Thief Erin!’
Kemble’s magnificent voice alone could make itself heard above these sounds of displeasure. He was apostrophising the King of Terrors:—
Oh sovereign Death,
Who hast for thy domain this world immense.
Churchyards and charnelhouses are thy haunts,
And hospitals thy sumptuous palaces;
And when thou wouldst be merry thou dost choose
The gaudy chamber of a dying king.
And then thou dost ope wide thy monstrous jaws,
And with rude laughter and fantastic tricks
Thou clapp’st thy rattling fingers to thy side;