“No, I feel rather funny.”
There was the usual burst of complimentary applause, and in an instant he was the Reverend Barnard Coles, about to be deserted by wife and child.
Eliphalet played the first act of “The Broken Heart” very cautiously. Without suspecting that anything was radically wrong with him, he felt that he must be wary. Once or twice his articulation had struck him as peculiar. He had shied badly over the word “constantly”—“consanny” was the nearest approach he had been able to make to the correct pronunciation. Then again, sundry speeches had become unexpectedly involved. For example, he had to say, “You with your great eyes, your scarlet mouth and your white face, are ever before me, a barrier which shuts me off from God.”
What he actually said was:
“You, with your white eyes—your great mouth—and your scarlet face,” etc. Fortunately he had put so much passion into the lines that no one noticed the slight confusion of adjectives. That is to say, no one on the audience side of the curtain; but Freddie Manning, the stage-manager, who had known Eliphalet as a man of temperance during a constant association of countless years, tipped his bowler hat to the back of his head and quoted briefly from the Bible.
“Syd,” he said, addressing the call-boy, “slip along for a glass of cold water and stand with it at the door the Guv’nor comes off by.”
The call-boy grinned and went on his errand whistling a song, the words of which dealt with the pleasures of alcoholic excess.
Catching the implied suggestion, Mr. Manning, nothing if not loyal, directed the toe of his boot at the seat of the young musician’s trousers.
“I say! What’s wrong with the Guv’nor?” asked the lady who played the villainess.
“Nothing, my dear,” was the curt reply.