‘And right you are,’ said Abrahams. ‘It’s the curse of the profession, and death to a pretty face. Look at Mrs. Claudesley! She was the talk of the town for a whole season, and yet she drank herself to death. The very year she died they offered her one hundred pounds a night to star in the States, and if she had gone and kept sober she might have come back with twenty thousand pounds.’
The actress was not listening, her smile had faded, and she was gazing with strange wistfulness into White’s face. She did not speak; but her look said something more significant than words, something that filled his eyes and throat with tears, and misted the glasses of his spectacles. He squeezed her little fingers in his trembling hands.
‘I can’t tell you how happy I am,’ he said. ‘More than happy; proud! This is a great night for all of us—a great night.’
‘You think so?’ she returned sweetly; ‘then I am quite satisfied. I don’t care for what the others think; I only want to please you!’ and though her eyes were quite dry, she passed her hands lightly across them, as if brushing away a tear.
Abrahams looked at her with growing admiration.
‘How about the big scene in Act III.?’ he asked. ‘Do you feel quite up to it, my dear? Well, that’s right; and what White here says I say—this will be a great night for all of us, if you only finish as you’ve begun.’
Here there was a rap at the door and a shrill voice, ‘Overture’s finished, Miss Vére;’ whereupon the three, still in conversation, moved slowly towards the stage.
The play was ‘Cymbeline,’ and it was ‘Miss Vere’s’ first appearance in the character of ‘Imogen.’ The regular season at the Parthenon being over, and the eminent tragedian who was generally its chief ornament being away in the provinces, Abrahams had been persuaded to try the new actress in an unfamiliar Shakespearian character.
Of course, as is usual in such cases, the play was ‘scamped.’ All the old scenery of the theatre was called into requisition, and the costumes were a startling combination of all the early periods. This gave the critics of the daily newspapers an opportunity of saying, next morning, that ‘the new and appropriate scenery was everything that could be desired, and that the strictest accuracy was observed in the minutest detail of properties and costumes.’
But the play-going public had come that night not to see the fine scenery or good costumes, not to listen to the dreary spouting of the members of the stock company, but to witness the first London appearance of a young lady of whom rumour had prophesied great things. The house was crammed with ‘paper.’ The critics of the big papers sat in the stalls, and the critics of the small papers were sprinkled through the dress circle. Literature, art, and the drama were well represented. Sir Tilbury Swallow, who had married the once famous actress, Miss Fawn, and who had been knighted for his literary services by the reigning family, occupied a private box with his still beautiful wife. Professional beauties, of less conspicuous virtue, shone resplendent everywhere. Deep in a stall, buried in the abyss of his own personality, and glaring thence occasionally, with saturnine cheek and lack-lustre eye, sat the great Mr. Blanco Serena, the pre-Raphaelite painter. The fact was, nearly every individual present in the better parts of the house possessed, or was supposed to possess, some sort of interest in dramatic, pictorial, or literary art.