His piece, “The Beggar,” written in blank verse, was dated vaguely in the Middle Ages and the device was one of the oldest known to romance. A lord of high degree is experiencing the time-honored difficulty in persuading his daughter of the desirability of marriage with a noble young knight whose suit she has steadfastly scorned. The castle is threatened; the knight’s assistance is imperatively needed; and the arrival of messengers, the anxious concern of the servitors, induce at once an air of tensity.
In the fading afternoon light Constance Mills, as the princess, who has been wandering in the gardens, makes her entrance unconcernedly and greets her distracted lover with light-hearted indifference. She begins recounting a meeting with a beggar minstrel who has beguiled her with his music. She provokingly insists upon singing snatches of his songs to the irritated knight, who grows increasingly uneasy over the danger to the beleagured castle. As the princess exits the beggar appears and engages the knight in a colloquy, witty and good-humored on the vagrant’s part, but marked by the knight’s mounting anger. Whitford, handsome, jaunty, assured, even in his rags, with his shrewd retorts evokes continuous laughter.
A renewed alarm calls the knight away, leaving the beggar thrumming his lute. The princess reappears to the dimming of lights and the twinkle in the blue background of the first tremulous star. The beggar, who of course is the enemy prince in disguise, springs forward as she slips out of her cloak and stands forth in a flowing robe in shimmering white. Her interchange with the beggar passes swiftly from surprise, indifference, scorn, to awakened interest and encouragement.
No theatre was ever stilled to an intenser silence. The audacity of it, the folly of it! The pictorial beauty of the scene, any merit it possessed as drama, were lost in the fact that George Whitford was making love to Constance Mills. No make-believe could have simulated the passion of his wooing in the lines that he had written for himself, and no response could have been informed with more tenderness and charm than Constance brought to her part.
Whitford was declaiming:
“My flower! My light, my life! I offer thee
Not jingling coin, nor lands, nor palaces,
But yonder stars, and the young moon of spring,
And rosy dawns and purple twilights long;
All singing streams, and their great lord the sea—