Bud and Ailie, when they thought of home in these days, thought of it as a picture only, or as a chapter in a book covered in mouldy leather, with f’s for s’s. In their prayers alone were Dan and Bell real personages; and the far-off little town was no longer a woodcut, but an actual place blown through by the scented airs of forest and sea. Bell wrote them of rains and hails and misty weather; Grove Lane gardens breathed of daffodils, and the city gleamed under a constant sun. They came back to the pea-green house each day from rare adventuring, looking, in the words of Molyneux, as if they were fresh come off the farm, and the best seats in half a dozen theatres were at their disposal. “Too much of the playhouse altogether!” Bell wrote once, remonstrating. “Have you heard that man in the City Temple yet?”
In Molyneux’s own theatre there was a break in the long succession of melodrama and musical comedy. He privately rejoiced that, for two ladies of such taste as Ailie and her niece, he could display a piece of the real legitimate—“King John,”—though Camberwell was not very likely to make a week of Shakespeare very profitable to his treasury. Ailie and Bud were to go on Tuesday; and Bud sat up at night to read an acting copy of “King John” till every character took flesh in her imagination, and the little iron balcony behind the pea-green house became the battlemented walls of Angiers, to whose postern came trumpeters of France.
They sat in the drawing-room, astonished at her speeches—
“You men of Angiers, open wide your gates,
And let young Arthur, Duke of Bretagne, in,
Who by the hand of France this day hath made
Much work for tears in many an English mother.”
Or—
“I am not mad: this hair I tear is mine;
My name is Constance; I was Geffrey’s wife;
Young Arthur is my son, and he is lost!”
“Bravo, Bud!” would Molyneux cry, delighted. “Why, if I was an actor-manager, I’d pay you any salary you had the front to name. Ain’t she just great, Millicent? I tell you, Miss Ailie, she puts the blinkers on Maude Adams, and sends Ellen ’way back in the standing-room only. Girly, all you’ve got to learn is how to move. You mustn’t stand two minutes in the same place on the stage, but cross ’most every cue.”
“I don’t know,” said Bud dubiously. “Why should folk have fidgets on a stage? They don’t always have them in real life. I’d want to stand like a mountain—you know, Auntie Ailie, the old hills at home!—and look so—so—so awful, the audience would shriek if I moved, the same as if I was going to fall on them.”
“Is that how you feel?” asked Jim Molyneux, curiously surveying her.
“Yes; that’s how I feel,” said Bud, “when I’ve got the zip of poetry in me. I feel I’m all made up of burning words and eyes.”