For a woman who has barely scraped through a charge of poisoning her husband and has had to change her name and dye her hair from yellow to sable (contrary to the customary order of things) and lead "the wolf's life"—preying, that is, on innocent lambs—there might be worse hells on earth than the Sleeve Ard Hotel, Ardcastle, Co. Down, with its pleasant lake and mountain scenery, its golf and its real Irish waiter. And it was a cruel stroke of bad luck that into this quiet fold, teeming with woolly lambs of all ages in their crisp fleeces of fivers and tenners, there should have intruded (1) a vulgar blackmailer who knew all about her lurid past, and (2) a K.C. with a deadly memory for the details of causes célèbres. And (3) it was a heart-breaking coincidence that the youngest lamb of all should have borne such a striking resemblance to the lady-wolf's dead lover that she wanted to embrace him instead of fleecing him; and (4) that his betrothed should have been the god-daughter of the K.C. with the terrible recording tablets.
But what would you? We are not talking of life, but of a stage-play; and from the moment of the curtain's rise, when Miss Elsom sat down at the piano and sang, without any provocation, a little thing by Mr. Landon Ronald, for the sole benefit of the Irish waiter, to the juncture when the K.C. and the blackmailer got through a game of billiards in about four minutes, we were seldom allowed to forget that we were seeing things in a light that never was on any land but stageland.
Like so many theatrical plays it was written up to what the profession calls a "strong scene." Even the weather was pressed into a shameless collusion; for it was a wet afternoon that gave the K.C. his opportunity, as it might have been in the house on the road to Fiesole, of narrating, with lavish detail and the whole hotel for audience, the story of the murder trial in which "Mrs. Lytton" (the wolf) had figured as the prisoner; and frankly indicating that, if he had been the prosecutor, he could have established her guilt. His object, more moral than humane, and more histrionic than either, was to confound the wretched woman, to expose her identity and so, by a sudden disillusionment, to restore her lamb to the fold. The end, as it turned out for the general good, did actually seem to justify the means; but at the time it was not a very edifying exhibition.
"One likes to show the truth for the truth;
That the woman was light is very true;
But suppose she says, Never mind that youth!
What wrong have I done to you?"
"Well, anyhow" (as Browning also said) it was an effective piece of stage-work, and the result tallied with the best conventions by which youth is reclaimed from the snares of a baffled and repentant vampire.
