Impatient to return to the theatre, the moment the hours destined for instruction, or, as they are termed by schoolboys, school-hours, were over, each prisoner started up with a shout of joy.
“Stop one moment, gentlemen, if you please,” said Dr. Middleton, in an awful voice. “Mr. Archer, return to your place. Are you all here?” The names of all the boys were called over, and when each had answered to his name, Dr. Middleton said—
“Gentlemen, I am sorry to interrupt your amusements; but, till you have contrary orders from me, no one, on pain of my serious displeasure, must go into that building” (pointing to the place where the theatre was erecting). “Mr. Archer, your carpenter is at the door. You will be so good as to dismiss him. I do not think proper to give my reasons for these orders; but you who know me,” said the doctor, and his eye turned towards De Grey, “will not suspect me of caprice. I depend, gentlemen, upon your obedience.”
To the dead silence with which these orders were received, succeeded in a few minutes a universal groan. “So!” said Townsend, “all our diversion is over.” “So,” whispered Fisher in the manager’s ear, “this is some trick of the Greybeard’s. Did you not observe how he looked at De Grey?”
Fired by this thought, which had never entered his mind before, Archer started from his reverie, and striking his hand upon the table, swore that he “would not be outwitted by any Greybeard in Europe—no, nor by all of them put together. The Archers were surely a match for them. He would stand by them, if they would stand by him,” he declared, with a loud voice, “against the whole world, and Dr. Middleton himself, with ‘Little Premiums’ at his right hand.”
Everybody admired Archer’s spirit, but were a little appalled at the sound of standing against Dr. Middleton.
“Why not?” resumed the indignant manager. “Neither Dr. Middleton nor any doctor upon earth shall treat me with injustice. This, you see, is a stroke at me and my party, and I won’t bear it.”
“Oh, you are mistaken!” said De Grey, who was the only one who dared to oppose reason to the angry orator. “It cannot be a stroke aimed at ‘you and your party,’ for he does not know that you have a party.”
“I’ll make him know it, and I’ll make you know it, too,” said Archer. “Before I came here you reigned alone, now your reign is over, Mr. De Grey. Remember my majority this morning, and your theatre last night.”
“He has remembered it,” said Fisher. “You see, the moment he was not to be our manager, we were to have no theatre, no playhouse, no plays. We must all sit down with our hands before us—all for ‘good reasons’ of Dr. Middleton’s, which he does not vouchsafe to tell us.”