“Ladies—gentlemen!” he cried. “I am ill—very ill! I can’t understand—never—never before have I failed my audience. Let me finish the play—give me a hearing, or break my heart.”
There was a lull, and Freddie Manning, in the wings, seized the character with whom the next scene was played, and with, “Get on and don’t give him time to think,” hurled him on to the stage.
Twice before the end of the act the mists rose before Eliphalet’s brain, but he battled them down by sheer force of will, though the effort brought beads of sweat to his brow. With grim determination he hammered out his lines until the last one had been spoken, and there remained naught else but the heart-attack—the clutching at his breast—the broken cry of “Mary!” and the fall into peace—oblivion.
The curtain had barely touched the boards before Mr. Manning had thrust the manager before it.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Mr. Dyson, “I have not come here to make an apology, but to say that you have been privileged to-night to witness a performance under, perhaps, the most remarkable circumstances under which a man has ever appeared.” And to the best of his ability he told them what had happened. When he had finished it was obvious to the meanest intelligence that the applause savoured of the sceptical.
“Won’t do,” said Freddie Manning, and pushed his way before the footlights.
“Easy there! You’re not going yet,” he cried. “Some of you believe it was a yarn the manager has just put over. But I tell you it’s true, and if any man here to-night goes home and says that my Guv’nor and my friend, Mr. Cardomay, was drunk, he’ll be steering a straight course for the libel court—and what’s more, he’ll get this,” and he held up a closed first with a row of shiny knuckles turned outward. “He’ll get this between the eyes—an’ that’s a promise I’ll keep.”
Right into the hearts of those hard-bit Lancashire lads went those “straight-flung words,” and such a roar of enthusiasm followed them as would have wakened the dead.
But it failed to waken Eliphalet Cardomay, who lay on his back and snored, with his head on a rolled-up stage cloth and his mouth wide open.