This ever-present consideration, joined to his love of his calling, sweetened all that was dry and dull in the initial stages of a barrister’s career. While other men of his age were spending their evenings at the Gaiety Theatre, seeing the same burlesque and laughing at the same jokes night after night, as appetite grew with what it fed on, Theodore was content to sit in chambers and read law. It was not that he was wanting in appreciation of the drama. There was no man in London better able to enjoy the dignity of Hamlet at the Lyceum, or the rollicking fun of the Gaiety Bluebeard. He was no pedantic piece of clay, proud of the dulness that calls itself virtue. He was only an earnest worker, bent upon a given result, and able to put aside every hindrance upon the road that he was travelling.
“They that run in a race run all, but one obtaineth the prize,” he said to himself, recalling a sentence in an epistle that he had learned years ago at his mother’s knee, words that always brought back the cold brightness of early spring, and a period of extra church services, long sermons in the lamp-lit church, and the voices of strange preachers, a time of daffodils and fish dinners, and much talk of High and Low Church. He had never faltered in his religious convictions; yet in the days of his youth that Lenten season in a country town, that recurrent sound of church bells in the chilly March twilight, had weighed heavy upon his soul.
Almost the only recreation which he allowed himself in this winter season was an occasional attendance at Miss Newton’s tea-parties. He had secured acceptance for himself at these entertainments on the strength of his reading, and he was now established as a Shakespearian reader; Miss Newton having taken it into her head that Shakespeare is of all great poets the easiest understood by the people, and having ordered him to read Shakespeare until she should tell him to desist.
“I know what they like and what they dislike,” she said. “They’ll not conceal their feelings from me when we talk you over after you’ve gone. As soon as ever I find them getting tired I’ll let you know.”
He began with Macbeth, a story which caught them at the very first page. The witches took their breath away; and when he came to the murder scene they were all sitting round him with their hair seemingly on end. He closed his first reading with that awful knocking at the gate; that one supreme stage effect which has never yet been paralleled by mortal dramatist. There were some of the girls who tumbled off their chairs and grovelled on the floor in their excitement. There were others who wanted to know the fate of Macbeth and his wife on the instant.
“I do hope they were both hung, like the Mannings,” said a meek widow.
“Oh, but he wasn’t so much to blame, Mrs. Kirby. That wicked woman drove him to it.”
“So did Mrs. Manning,” argued a Bermondsey lady, “but they hung Manning all the same when they caught him. I was a child when it happened, but I remember hearing about them. He was took in Jersey, and she wore a black satin gown.”
“Oh, don’t talk about your Mannings, Mrs. Hodge,” cried one of the girls, indignantly. “They were low, vulgar people. These were a King and Queen in a palace. It’s all different. It lifts one up out of one’s own life only to hear about them. You may read about murders in the newspapers till your eyes begin to swim, but you won’t feel like that. I don’t know when I’ve felt so sorry for anybody as I feel for King Macbeth.”
Marian sat silent, and refrained from all part in the chorus of criticism, but she moved to the piano presently and began to play a Scotch air—a grand old march—slow, solemn music that was almost too much for the nerves of the more excitable among Miss Newton’s party. She glided from one melody to another, and she played those wild Scottish airs with such thrilling power that they seemed to sustain and intensify the uncanny effect of the tragic reading.