“It must have been beautiful,” Ray hastily admitted. “My Juliet is the daughter of the village doctor, and my Romeo is a young lawyer, who half kills a cousin of hers for trying to interfere with them.”
“That’s good,” said Mr. Brandreth. “I took the part of Romeo myself, and Mrs. Brandreth—she was Miss Chapley, then—was cast for Juliet; but another girl who had refused the part suddenly changed her mind and claimed it, and we had the greatest time to keep the whole affair from going to pieces. I beg your pardon; I interrupted you.”
“Not at all,” said Ray. “It must have been rather difficult. In my story there has been a feud between the families of the lovers about a land boundary; and both families try to break off the engagement.”
“That’s very odd,” said Mr. Brandreth. “The play nearly broke off my acquaintance with Mrs. Brandreth. Of course she was vexed—as anybody would be—at having to give up the part at the eleventh hour, when she’d taken so much trouble with it; but when she saw my suffering with the other girl, who didn’t know half her lines, and walked through it all like a mechanical doll, she forgave me. Romeo is my favorite play. Did you ever see Julia Marlowe in it?”
“No.”
“Then you never saw Juliet! I used to think Margaret Mather was about the loveliest Juliet, and in fact she has a great deal of passion”—
“My Juliet,” Ray broke in, “is one of those impassioned natures. When she finds that the old people are inexorable, she jumps at the suggestion of a secret marriage, and the lovers run off and are married, and come back and live separately. They meet at a picnic soon after, where Juliet goes with her cousin, who makes himself offensive to the husband, and finally insults him. They happen to be alone together near the high bank of a river, and the husband, who is a quiet fellow of the deadly sort, suddenly throws the cousin over the cliff. The rest are dancing”—
“We introduced a minuet in our theatricals,” Mr. Brandreth interposed, “and people said it was the best thing in it. I beg your pardon!”
“Not at all. It must have been very picturesque. The cousin is taken up for dead, and the husband goes into hiding until the result of the cousin’s injuries can be ascertained. They are searching for the husband everywhere, and the girl’s father, who has dabbled in hypnotism, and has hypnotized his daughter now and then, takes the notion of trying to discover the husband’s whereabouts by throwing her into a hypnotic trance and questioning her: he believes that she knows. The trance is incomplete, and with what is left of her consciousness the girl suffers tremendously from the conflict that takes place in her. In the midst of it all, word comes from the room where the cousin is lying insensible that he is dying. The father leaves his daughter to go to him, and she lapses into the cataleptic state. The husband has been lurking about, intending to give himself up if it comes to the worst. He steals up to the open window—I forgot to say that the hypnotization scene takes place in her father’s office, a little building that stands apart from the house, and of course it’s a ground floor—and he sees her stretched out on the lounge, all pale and stiff, and he thinks she is dead.”
Mr. Brandreth burst into a laugh. “I must tell you what our Mercutio said—he was an awfully clever fellow, a lawyer up there, one of the natives, and he made simply a perfect Mercutio. He said that our Juliet was magnificent in the sepulchre scene; and if she could have played the part as a dead Juliet throughout, she would have beat us all!”