How well I remember the night of our first rehearsal. At its termination, the gentleman who had kindly undertaken the onerous office of prompter thus addressed us from his hooded seat on the stage:-“Ladies and gentlemen, I am most anxious to give you all satisfaction, and in order to do so, I have taken down every separate direction given me by each member of the company, as to the especial manner in which he or she wishes me to prompt, such as, When I look at you, not before. Will you run on in a low voice the whole time?” “Never mind if I substitute one small word for another,” etc.
He then read each order, with the name of the giver, and summed up the total. There were twenty-two entirely different, most specific orders!
OFFICE OF PROMPTER
“May I enquire,” he continued, “what I am to do to content you all?”
His harangue was received with a burst of laughter, and the resolution was carried nem. con. that we must all be “letter perfect.” We very often beat for recruits when we heard of any new English arrival in Florence, and as we were about to cast a play of which one of the characters was a decided plunger, I was deputed to ask a certain gallant hussar, when I next danced with him, if he would help us. I did so, he gladly accepted, and I made an appointment with him to come to Casa Standish the next evening at rehearsal hour, when his part would be read for him. When he arrived, I repeated mine, which contained many tender passages with my Plunger; but each time I approached him he gazed at me in a more and more threatening manner, till at last I fancied that he was more likely to strike than to caress me. The effect was peculiar—the prompter reading declarations in the most affectionate and insinuating terms, while the lover looked daggers, not to say swords and pistols, at the unoffending jeune première. At length the crisis came. I had to recline gracefully on his shoulder (he was six feet two), and to confess how entirely I reciprocated his ardent love.
He bent over me, and in a stage whisper, with a look of thunder that might have shattered nerves less strong than mine, said:—
“If you keep me to my promise, I leave Florence to-night.”
This was the second time I had been thrown over, but this time if I had become hysterical, it would have been through laughter. The Inamorato did not explain why he broke his engagement, but he had never trod the stage till then, and I suppose the prompter’s box, the footlights and the whole dramatic apparatus produced an unmitigated stage fright.
Neither will I omit to make mention of a favourite member of our troupe, who distinguished himself in more ways than one: this was the clever pony belonging to the son of the house, whose stable was in the garden. Often in the intervals of our day rehearsal it was the delight of the then schoolboys to mount me on “Hotspur’s” back, and slipping the rein, he would dash off at the word of command, taking the bit in his mouth, and making the circuit of the garden at the fullest of all speeds. I well knew that those boys fondly hoped that the day would come when they would see their playfellow (myself) dismounted from her exalted position, but I am proud to think I disappointed them.
On one occasion a magnificent ballet d’action was in preparation. The daughter of General de Courcy, a leading member of the Anglo-Florentine society, was to represent “Fatima” in a gorgeous Eastern costume, which became her beauty well, while I took the scarcely less responsible rôle of “Sister Anne.”