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[-291-]
CHAPTER XXVIII.
SAWDUST AND LAMPS.
FOR the last twenty years of my life - and I am now only
forty-five - I have been an old man, a heavy old man; burnt-cork furrows have
ploughed up my cheeks; bald scalp wigs have worn away my once curly hair;
crow's-feet of the blackest Indian-ink have encircled my eyes. In the prime of
my life I lost my individuality, and became "Old Foggles" - Old
Foggles I have remained. It is not of myself; however, that I am about to speak;
my human, like my theatrical career, has been one of simple "general
utility." He whose story I am going to relate was born to brighter and
better things, and kicked down the ladder with his own foot when within reach of
the topmost round.
Twenty years ago I was engaged with Barker, who then managed
the Flamborough Circuit, and, after playing at a few minor towns, we opened at
Wealborough, the queen of the watering-places in that part of England, and
Barker's surest card. An idle, pleasure-seeking, do-nothing kind of place was,
and is, Wealborough. There are rows of grand stuccoed houses facing the sea,
libraries, promenades, bands, old ruins, the very pitches for picnics, within an
easy distance, horses for the swells to ride, officers for the ladies to flirt
with, baths for the valetudinarians to endeavour to regain their used-up health
in, and the prettiest pro-[-292-]vincial theatre in
the world for evening resort. Theatricals then were at no low ebb; for there was
the race week, and the assize week, the Mayor's bespeak, and the officers'
bespeak ; and when things flagged Barker would send round to the different
boarding-houses and hotels, and get the visitors to order what pieces they
liked, pitting their tastes one against the other, as it were; so that business
was brisk, actors were happy, and there were no unpaid salaries-for, as they say
in the profession, "the ghost walked" every Saturday morning. At the
time I am speaking of, however, and for the first season for many years, matters
were not so bright as we could have wished. The combination of circumstances was
against us. An evangelical clergyman, a tall man, with long black hair and wild
eyes, was attracting everybody's attention, and was weekly in the habit of
inveighing against theatrical entertainments, and denouncing all those who
attended them ; while Duffer, the low comedian, who had been engaged at a large
expense, in consequence of the enormous bit he had made in the manufacturing
districts, proved too strong for the refined taste of the Wealborough visitors,
and by his full-flavoured speeches, eked out by appropriate gesture, frightened
half the box audience from the theatre. We were playing to houses but a third
full, and were getting utterly miserable and dispirited, when one day old
Barker, whose face had for some time resembled a fiddle, his chin reaching to
his knees, called us together on the stage, after rehearsal, and joyfully
announced that he thought he had at last found a means for restoring our fallen
fortunes. He told us that a young man, utterly unknown, had offered himself as
the representative of those characters which among the public are known as the jeunes
premiers, but which we call "first juvenile tragedy;" that he had
tried him privately, engaged him at once, and that, if he did not make a
tremendous hit next Monday, the occasion of the officers' bespeak,
[-293-] in Hamlet, he, Barker, did not know what was what in
theatrical matters. The next day came, and the neophyte, who was introduced
under the name of Dacre, attended rehearsal; he was tall, handsome, and
evidently a perfect gentleman; he went through the part quietly and sensibly
enough, but made no new points and gave no exaggerated readings; so that Duffer,
the low comedian, by nature a morose and miserable man, and made more surly by
his recent failure at Wealborough, shrugged his shoulders, and prophesied the
speedy closing of the theatre. I myself held a different opinion; I thought the
young man spoke with ease and judgment ; that he was reserving himself for his
audience; and moreover that, in the presence of none but the other actors, who
were grimly polite, and evidently predisposed against him, he felt nervous and
constrained. I felt all this, but I said nothing, being naturally a reserved and
cautious man. When the night came, the house was crowded to the ceiling. Barker,
who well knew how to work the oracle in such cases, had been about the town
talking incessantly of the new actor, of his handsome person, his gentlemanly
manners, the mystery of his position, coming no one knew whither, being no one
knew what; and, in fact, had so excited public curiosity that all the leading
people of the place were at the theatre. The private boxes were filled with the
officers, handsome, vapid, and inane, thankful for the chance of any excitement,
however small, to relieve the perpetual ennui; in the centre of
the house sat Podder, the genius of Wealborough, who had written seventeen
five-act tragedies, one of which had been acted in London and damned, and who
was intimately connected with the stage, his uncle having been godfather to Mr.
Diddear ; the dress-circle was filled with the belles of the
boarding-houses and their attendant cavaliers ; the pit was thronged with jolly
young tradesmen and their wives, soldiers in uniform, and a sprinkling of the
maritime popu-[-294-]lation of the place; while in
the gallery, wedged as it was from end to end with shirt-sleeved and perspiring
youths, not a nut was heard to crack from the rise of the curtain until the end
of the play, except once, at the first appearance of the Ghost of Hamlet senior,
when the chemist's boy, a lad of weak intellect, whose bedroom looked upon the
churchyard, shrieked aloud, and was led forth by the lobe of his ear by the
constable in attendance.
Talk of a success Such cheering was never heard in
Wealborough theatre before or since After Dacre had been on the stage five
minutes the applause began, and whenever he appeared it was renewed with tenfold
vigour, until the curtain fell. The sympathy of the audience seemed to extend to
those actors who were on the stage with him ; but they would brook no delay
which kept their favourite from them, and Duffer, who was playing the First
Gravedigger, and who, as a last hope of retrieving his lost character, had put
on seventeen waistcoats, and began to gag the "argal" speech
tremendously, very nearly got soundly hissed. When the curtain fell, Dacre was
vociferously called for, and his appearance before the curtain was a perfect
ovation; the ladies waved their handkerchiefs - the officers nearly thumped the
front of their boxes in - the pit and gallery shouted applause; while Podder,
rising to his feet, spread his arms before him as if blessing the actor, and was
heard to mutter, "The Swan! the Swan!" alluding, it is presumed, to
Shakespeare - not Dacre. Barker was in the highest spirits, seized the new actor
by both hands (we thought he was going to embrace him), and then and there
invited him and the entire company to an extempore supper to be provided at the
adjacent tavern. Dacre, however, declined on the plea of excitement and
over-fatigue, and at once retired to his lodgings. From that night his success
was complete; he played the entire round of juvenile tragedy parts, and on each
occasion to [-295-] very large audiences ; he was
the talk of the country for miles around; all the provincial newspapers sang his
praises, and soon the London theatrical journals began to speak of him, and to
hope that a gentleman of such talent would soon visit the metropolis.
All this time he maintained towards Barker and all the
members of his company the most studied politeness, the most chilling courtesy;
except on business topics he never spoke-resolutely declined all attempts at
intimacy, refused to partake of the proffered beer or spirits With which these
jolly fellows refresh themselves of an evening; and upon one occasion, when the
aforenamed Duffer was uttering specially blasphemous language, rebuked him
openly in the dressing-room, and, on receiving an insolent answer, administered
to him such a shaking that Duffer nearly swallowed his false teeth. I do not
think that I myself; though much quieter and steadier than the rest of the
company, should ever have become intimate with Dacre but for the following
circumstance I was in the habit, when I had a new part to learn, of taking my
manuscript in my pocket and going for a long walk upon the sands - not to the
fashionable part, where the horses were perpetually galloping, the people
promenading, and the children playing - but far away on the other side of the
town, where I had it all to myself; and could declaim, and spout, and
gesticulate as much as I pleased, without being taken for a lunatic. Several
times, during my rambles, I had encountered Dacre walking with a lady of slight
and elegant figure, closely veiled; but nothing beyond a mere bow of recognition
had passed between us; one day, however, while declaiming to the winds the
friendship I, as Colonel Damas, held for Claude Melnotte, in Bulwer's Lady of
Lyons, then just produced, I thought I heard a cry for help, and looking
round, perceived at some short distance Dacre kneeling by the extended form of
the veiled mysterious lady. I hastened to him, [-296-] and
found that the lady, who he stated was his wife, had been rambling among the
rocks, gathering wild flowers, when her foot slipped, and she fell, striking her
temple against a sharp flint, and inflicted a wound from which the blood was
slowly falling. Her face, of a chiselled and classic beauty, was deadly pale,
and she was senseless; but we bathed the wound with water, which I scooped up in
my hat, and she soon recovered sufficiently for us to lead her gently to Dacre s
lodgings. These were situated in one of the oldest parts of the old town,
overlooking the sea, far from the bustle and confusion of the fashionable part;
and after rendering all the service I could, I eventually took my leave. From
that day I became a constant visitor to those rooms, and gradually won the
confidence and friendship of their occupiers; many a night, after the theatre, I
would accompany Dacre home, and after a light supper, prepared by his beautiful
and affectionate wife, we would sit over the fire, while he, smoking an old
German pipe, would talk of literature and poetry, or of what interested me even
more - of his earlier life. He was the son of a wealthy Liverpool merchant, had
been educated at a celebrated provincial school, and removed from thence to a
German university, whence lie only returned to find his father dead, his affairs
hopelessly involved, and utter ruin staring him in the face. Without the
smallest notion of business, and having always had a passion for acting, he had
taken to the stage as a profession, and had offered himself to Barker, of whom
he heard good reports ; bringing with him as his wife a young portionless girl,
the daughter of a clergyman, to whom lie had been attached since childhood, and
who, at the period of their marriage, was gaining a subsistence as a governess
in Liverpool. But the manners and habits of his fellow-actors disgusted him they
were a loose-thinking, underbred, vulgar lot, to whom he could not introduce his
pure-thinking, simple-minded wife, and with whom he himself had no feel-[-297-]ing
in common; and he was but waiting an eligible opportunity to remove to the
metropolis, where he thought, and justly, that his talents would soon secure him
a position in that charming artistic society for which he pined, and for which
he felt himself peculiarly fitted. This opportunity soon came. I had one night
been playing Sir Peter Teazle in The School for Scandal and had been
struck by the vehement applause and cries of "Bravo!" in a strident
voice, which had proceeded from one of the private boxes, when Dacre as Charles
Surface made his appearance on the scene; and on going into the green-room after
the curtain fell, I found a stout, middle-aged, black-whiskered, vulgar-looking
man, dressed in the extreme of the fashion, standing in the middle of the room,
and holding both Dacre's hands in his. This gentleman, I learned, was the
well-known Mr. Batten Flote, manager of the Theatre Royal, Hatton Garden, who
had come from town expressly to witness Dacre's performance. As I entered the
room he was pouring forth the most profuse laudation. "Capital," he
said, "capital, my boy! There was the dash of Elliston, the grace of Kemble,
and the rollicking humour of Wallack! That's the sort of thing to bring 'em
down! Barker, my lad, you've been a fortunate fellow to get hold of such a trump
card as this! Let's have a bottle of sham together! I I'll stand it, and curse
the expense!" I well enough knew what this meant, and so did Barker ; he
fought up against it, and tried to look cheerful. When Dacre gave him notice
that he was about to leave him (which lie did the next Saturday), he gave vent
to a burst of virtuous indignation, and bewailed the manner in which he had been
treated; then he made a faint offer of an additional five pounds a week, and
finally took consolation by engaging a troop of performing dogs and monkeys,
which he had heard of from a metropolitan correspondent, and getting a new piece
written to display their acquirements.
[-298-] So Dacre left us; he
took a farewell benefit, when the house was thronged; and he and I had a
farewell chat, principally about his future. Mr. Flote had engaged him at an
excellent salary, promised him the best parts in the best pieces, and pledged
himself to forward his views, in every way; and as the young man told me all
this, his eye lighted, and he appeared a different being from what I had ever
seen him. The London public, he said, should see that the race of gentlemanly
actors was not extinct ; that there were yet men who could understand the
passions which they had to portray, and appreciate the language set down for
them to declaim; he would not content himself with the creations of the old
dramatists, but he would be the reflex of modern characters, the men of the day
should see themselves represented by one of themselves, one equally well born,
equally well educated, equally well dressed, equally well behaved, His wife,
too, instead of passing her dreary evenings in a wretched lodging, should have
companions worthy of her - companions to whose society his name would be a
passport - society in which the most celebrated in literature and art were happy
to mix. So he rattled on, and I, delighted at his prospects, but very sad at his
departure, listened to him far into the night. Then we parted, with many
promises of long letters to be interchanged, and of descriptions of all that had
happened - on his side at least for my life seemed planned out, one unvarying
dismal repetition of old men's characters in a country theatre.
Dacre departed, amid I was left alone, more alone even than I
had been before I knew him, for he had inflicted me with his distaste for my
professional brethren, and I mixed with them no more. So I walked upon the
sands, and studied and read, and in my despair I even made friends with Podder,
went to his room, drank weak tea, and listened to three of his tragedies without
going to sleep. At last three weeks after Dacre left us, I received from him a
long [-299-] letter and a batch of newspapers; he
had appeared as Claude Melnotte, and created a tremendous sensation. The press
had unanimously pronounced in his favour, and their verdict was backed by the
enthusiasm of the public. His letter was written in the highest spirits : from
first to last he had been received with shouts of applause; a royal duke had
come into the green-room when the play was over and begged to make his
acquaintance; he was proposed at The Thespis, the great Dramatic and Literary
Club; the wives of two or three well-known literary men had called upon Mrs.
Dacre Mr. Flote was most kind and liberal, and everything was couleur de
rose.
Six months passed away; we had visited the dull inland towns
on our circuit during the dull winter season, and had been doing but a dull
business; I had heard but seldom from Dacre, though the newspapers still
continued to give the most flaming accounts of his success, when one day, soon
after our return to Wealborough, Barker came to me with a face radiant with joy,
and announced that Dacre was coming to us for a month on a "starring"
engagement. I was hurt at not having heard this intelligence from my friend
himself, but I reflected on the charms of his position and his numerous
engagements, and anxiously expected his arrival. He came, and I was astonished
at the difference in his appearance; from a fresh-coloured handsome youth he had
become a pale anxious man, still handsome, but oh! so worn, so haggard-looking.
The change was not confined to his appearance: now, instead of the old lodgings
with their cracked furniture and their desolate sea-view, he took handsome rooms
on the Marine Parade, in the very centre of the fashionable part of time town;
every afternoon he was to be seen among the loungers on the promenade; he dined
constantly with the officers and entered into every kind of gaiety, I might
almost say dissipation. To his fellow-actors he had always been distant, now his
manner was positively [-300-] rude; he avoided my
society, and seemed ill at ease whenever he encountered me in the street; worst
of all, for whole evenings together he neglected the society of his wife, and
would pass his time after the theatre in mess-rooms, at billiard-tables, among
the loose visitors to the town, and several times he was late in his arrival at
the theatre, and when he did come he was evidently flushed with wine, most odd
and incoherent in his speech. That I grieved deeply over this state of affairs I
need scarcely say, and, after some deliberation, I took upon myself to speak to
Dacre on time subject ; but his reply was so rude, so angry and decisive, that I
saw at once all intervention was hopeless. He finished his engagement at
Wealborough and returned to London, and from that time forth the accounts I
received from him were bad indeed. Among theatrical people there is a great
freemasonry and brotherhood; we provincial professionals hear of all the
triumphs of our London brethren ; and if their successes travel quickly and are
much talked about, what shall I say of their failures? Dacre's great success had
made him many enemies; and the moment that there was anything to say against him
a hundred tongues were but too ready to be the bearers of the news. Rumours
reached us at Wealborough of his unsteadiness, of his want of care for his
reputation, of his passion for dissipation, for excitement, for drink;
"stars" on their travels reiterated these rumours, adding to them
choice little bits of their own fabrication, and at last The Scarifier, an
infamous weekly newspaper then in being, but now happily extinct, had weekly
paragraphs in which Dacre's name was coupled with that of the loveliest and most
abandoned women that ever disgraced the theatrical profession.
About the time that these paragraphs appeared, I received an
offer from the manager of the other great London theatre, the T. R., Gray's Inn
Lane, an engagement as actor and stage-manager; and as, independently of the
position [-301-] and pecuniary emolument held out
to me, I saw an opportunity of once more meeting Dacre, and perhaps of rescuing
him from the abyss into which he had plunged, I gladly availed myself of it.
Curiously enough, immediately after my arrival in London, the manager told me he
wished to employ me on a rather delicate mission. Mr. Dacre, he said, had
quarrelled with the Hatton Garden proprietors, and he was most anxious to engage
him for the Gray's Inn Lane Theatre. He, the manager, had heard of my former
intimacy with Dacre : would I now consent to be his ambassador? Delighted at the
thought of once more seeing my friend, and thinking nothing of our recent
quarrel, I consented. The next day I called on Dacre at an address in Brompton,
which the manager had given me, and found him sitting in a room most elegantly
furnished, opening into a little conservatory and garden. He was dressed in a
handsome dressing-gown, Turkish trousers and slippers, and was lounging in a
large arm-chair near an open piano; on a round table in the centre of the room
was a confused litter of playbills, manuscript "parts", books,
light-kid gloves, some of the smallest size, some loose silver, and fragments
and ashes of cigars ; on the wall hung a portrait of himself as Hamlet opposite
to a print of Mrs. Lurley (the lady with whom his name had been associated in The
Scarifier), in her favourite character of the Demon Page; on the sofa
lay a handsome Indian shawl, and an elegant airy fabric of black lace, which
looked like a bird-nest, but was a bonnet. I noticed all these timings as I
entered, and my heart sank within me as I marked them. Dacre himself had much
changed ; he had lost all his youthful symmetry, and had become a stout,
bloated, unwholesome-looking man. He received me coolly enough, but when he
heard my business he warmed into life ; and after listening to the terms
proposed, accepted with an eagerness which I thought suspicious. Taking courage
at his altered manner, I asked [-302-] after his
wife. He became confused, hesitated, stammered, walked across to the cellaret,
filled a liqueur-glass of brandy, which he drank, and then told me that she was
not well, that she was out of town, that - in fact what the devil business was
it of mine? I was about to reply, angrily enough this time, for his manner was
most rude, and I knew I had right on my side, when a pert-looking lady's-maid
entered the room and told Dacre that "the brougham was at the door, and
missis was tired of waiting." He reddened as he heard this, muttered some
half-inaudible excuse about "a matter of business," and bowed me out
of the room. The next day, and for several days after, he attended rehearsal
with great punctuality, and entered into the business of the piece with apparent
attention ; he was evidently striving to keep up his character, which had been a
little damaged by the version of his quarrel with the Hatton Garden people,
which Flote had circulated. To me his conduct was studiously polite: he
consulted me as to setting of the scenes and the arrangements of the stage, but
except on purely business questions he never addressed me.
The night of his first appearance at the Gray's Inn Lane
Theatre arrived, a night which, to whatever age I may live, I shall never
forget. Dacre's separation from Flote had caused a great excitement in the
theatrical world, and all kinds of reasons were alleged for it ; and on this
night the house was crammed, many friends of Dacre and many supporters of Flute
being among the audience. The play was a new five-act tragedy by a gentleman who
has now made himself a name among the first dramatists of modern times and all
the London critical world was on tiptoe with expectation.
The curtain rose, and the beautiful setting of the scene
received a volley of applause ; two or three minor personages then entered and
the audience settled themselves down, waiting in dead silence for Dacre's
appearance. I saw him [-303-] for a minute before
he went on to the stage, and noticed that he looked flushed and excited; but,
busied as I was with matter of minor detail, I had not time to exchange a word
with him. His cue was given and he rushed upon the stage; a thunder of applause
greeted him, mixed within a few sibilations, which had only the effect of
renewing and redoubling the approbation; he took off his hat in recognition of
the reception, but in doing so he staggered, and had to clutch at a neighbouring
table. Then he essayed to speak; but the words gurgled in his throat and he was
inarticulate; a cold shiver ran through me as I stood at the wing; I saw at once
the state of the case - he was drunk! The audience perceived it as
readily as I did, a buzz ran round the house, a murmur, and then from boxes,
pit, and gallery arose a storm of hissing and execration. Twice Dacre essayed to
exert himself; twice he stepped forward and endeavoured to speak; but in vain.
Stupefied with drink, dazzled by the glare of the lights, and maddened by the
howling of the mob in front of him, he was fairly cowed, and after taking one
frightened glance around, rushed madly from the stage and from the theatre.
After this fatal night I did not see Dacre again for many
months ; for though the management boldly contradicted the report of his
drunkenness, and advertised boldly that the whole scene was the result of a
scheme concocted by the enemies of the theatre, he never could be induced to
return to the Gray's Inn Lane boards. Falling lower and lower in the social
scale, he played for a week or two at a time at one after another of those
dramatic "saloons," half-theatre, half-public-house, with which the
East-end of London is thickly studded; then invent for a flying visit into the
provinces, where he found his fame and position gone, and returned to the
metropolis and his East-end patrons. I myself had also had my reverses of
fortune ; the manager of the Gray's Inn Lane Theatre seemed to consider from [-304-]
my previous intimacy with Dacre that I ought to bear some share in his
failure, and made a point of snubbing me so outrageously that we soon parted
company. I returned once more to Barker, who was glad enough to see me, though
he did not forget to point the moral of that pleasant proverb relative to pride
having a fall, in the presence of the whole company; and after being with him
some time, I at last, through the medium of an agent, made an engagement with
the manager of an American troupe, who was about to make a theatrical
tour through California.
At length, a few nights before I started for Liverpool to
embark, and as I was sitting musing over past and future days, the servant of my
lodgings brought me a small note, for an answer to which she said the messenger
waited. It was written in a hurried tremulous female hand, amid signed
"Emily Dacre." The writer stated that her husband was dangerously ill,
and implored me, for the love of heaven, for the sake of our old friendship, to
follow the messenger and come and see him. I hesitated but the instant; then
casting aside all thought of danger, I seized my hat, and, preceded by a ragged
boy who had brought the note, hurried into the streets. Across broad
thoroughfares, and far away into a labyrinth of miserable little streets and
courts, I followed this will-o'-the-wisp-streets where pinching and unwholesome
poverty reigned triumphant, and where the foul miasma was already rising on the
damp evening air - streets where the shops were all small and all within
unglazed windows and flaring gas-lights, where everything was very cheap and
horribly nasty; where the nostrils were offended with rank exhalations from
stale herrings and old clothes, and where vice and misery in their most
loathsome aspects met the eye. At last he stopped before one of the meanest
private houses in the meanest street we had yet come through (though the
neighbourhood was Clerkenwell, where all the streets are mean enough), and
pushing the door open with his hand, beckoned me to follow him. He [-305-]
preceded me to the second-floor, where he silently pointed to a door, and
apparently delighted at having discharged his mission, instantly vanished down
time stairs. I rapped, and, in obedience to a faint cry of "Come in,"
entered.
I was prepared for much, but what I then saw nearly overcame
me; there was a swelling in my throat, a trembling of my limbs, and for a minute
I felt unable to step forward. On a wretched truckle-bed, covered by a few
miserable rags, lay Dacre, worn and reduced almost to a skeleton. He was asleep
in that fitful uneasy slumber, that mockery of rest, which is granted to the
fevered. As I bent over him I saw that his face was ghastly pale, except just
under the closed eyes, where were spread two hectic patches. His thin arm lay
outside the coverlit, and the attenuated fingers of his transparent hand
twitched nervously with every respiration. His poor wife, so changed from the
lovely girl I had known at Wealborough, so pallid and woebegone, looking, in
fact, so starved, sat on a broken rush-bottomed chair by the bedside; near her
stood a rickety table with a few medicine-bottles, and the dried-up half of a
lemon; an old felt-hat with a broken feather, an old cotton-velvet cloak with
scraps of torn and tawdry lace hanging from it, and a pair of stage-shoes with
red heels, were huddled together in a corner of the room. The poor woman told
me, the tears streaming down her cheeks the while, that the dreadful propensity
for drink had grown upon him hour by hour and day by day; that it had lost him
every engagement, no manager caring to run the risk of his non-appearance at the
theatre; and that for the past few days since he had been attacked with fever
and delirium, they had been nearly destitute - the proceeds of the sale of his
clothes being all they had to depend upon for support. The people of the house,
she said, had been very kind to her, and had sent for the parish doctor, who
came two or three times and sent medicine, but gave very little hope of his
patient's recovery; indeed that morning he [-306-] had
so evaded her questions, and shaken his head so solemnly, that she was terrified
at his manner, and had ventured to solicit my presence and assistance.
A low moan from the sufferer here arrested her speech, and
she ran quickly to the bedside. I turned and saw Dacre sitting up in the bed and
resting on his elbow. So completely had drink and illness done their work that I
should scarcely have recognised him : his long black hair fell in a tangled heap
over his forehead; his thin hollow cheeks, ordinarily, after professional
custom, so closely shaved, were now covered within thick black bristles; while
his eyes, before so calm and steadfast, now glared wildly round him. I advanced
and took his poor wasted hand, so hot and dry, between mime, said a few words of
consolation, and trusted he felt better after his sleep. He gazed at me without
any sign of recognition. "Ah, sleep!" he murmured, "nature's soft
nurse! steep my senses in forgetfulness! Oh, my God, I wish she could, I wish
she could!" He burst into a fit of sobbing, and hid his head between his
hands. His poor wife advanced, and touched him gently on the shoulder. "
Here is your old friend, Charles," she said ; "your old friend from
Wealborough, you know!" At the last words he raised his head. "Wealborough!"
he cried. "What do you know of Wealborough? Yes, yes, we'll go back there;
Barker, Foggles, I know them all - the long walks, the sea-shore, the blue, the
fresh, the ever free! The mess-room too; and the claret, and - hush the
overture's on. Not yet, not yet - now." And be raised himself in the bed -
"Bravo! bravo! no gagging, the real words - stick to your author, sir -
stick to your author! What a reception - again - again - Will they never let me
speak for applause?"
During his ravings he bowed his head repeatedly; then,
suddenly seizing me by the shoulder, he crept behind me, muttering in my ear:
"Do you hear that hiss? - paid to do it, sir - paid by - no! there! there
it is - that serpent there [-307-] at the back of
the house - see him slowly unwinding his coils ! It is from him that awful sound
comes! See, he's creeping closer - he's about to spring upon me, and crush me in
his folds. Help! help! Some drink; give me some drink, Titinius, like a sick
girl, like a sick girl!" During this paroxysm he had clutched my shoulder
tightly, and almost screamed aloud; but as he spoke the last words his grasp
relaxed, he fell softly back upon the pillow, and slept quietly and peacefully.
So we watched him during the night; but towards morning he began to mutter in
his sleep. He was apparently living again his student days, for he murmured
scraps of German and of Latin, not as it is taught in England, but with a
foreign accent; his face wore a sweet smile, and he seemed happy. About day
break he opened his eyes and clasped his hands, and moved his lips apparently in
prayer. Then turning towards us, began speaking in disjointed sentences that
magnificent soliloquy which, the wisest and sweetest of poets has put into the
mouth of Hamlet, commencing, "To be or not to be?" So he continued for
some time, muttering occasionally scraps of the same speech. At length a
peculiar light broke over his countenance, and he beckoned to his trembling
wife, who hastened to him. Twining his feeble arms around her, he imprinted one
long kiss upon her forehead, then murmuring in an almost inaudible voice,
"Nymph! in thine orisons be all my sins remembered," his grasp
relaxed, and he fell back dead!
So ended the career of one who, under different circumstances
and beyond the influence of those temptations which are the curse of the
theatrical profession, might have lived long and happily, and died with weeping
children round his bed. Before I left London I saw him decently buried in one of
the metropolitan cemeteries ; and, further, induced the relatives of his poor
widow to receive her to her former home.