CHAPTER VII
TRUE LOVE
It was when Bram was twenty-three that he first found himself in the same company as Nancy O’Finn. She was then a tall dark-haired girl of eighteen with misted blue lakes for eyes and cheeks rose-burnt to the sharp crimson of a daisy’s petals. Her voice with just a touch of a brogue in it had the rich tones of a violoncello; her figure was what was called fine in those days when women were not anxious to look as if a steam-roller had passed over their bodies during the night. She was with her father, Michael O’Finn, who had been supporting Mrs. Hunter-Hart in heavies for fifteen years—ever since Mrs. Hunter-Hart had set out to tour the provinces with a repertory of Shakespeare’s comedies. Mrs. Hunter-Hart was now nearly fifty—some declared she was several years over—but her Portia, her Viola, her Rosalind, her Beatrice, and her Katherina, were ageless. This admirable veteran did not fear the rivalry of youth. So here was Bram at twenty-three playing Gratiano, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Corin, Verges, and Biondello, and Nancy O’Finn at eighteen playing Nerissa, Maria, and Audrey. Indeed most of Mrs. Hunter-Hart’s company, with the exception of Michael O’Finn and herself, were under thirty. Bram was enjoying himself so much that out of sheer good-will toward life he fell deep in love with Nancy. For a while, everybody in the company watched the affair sympathetically. Even Miss Hermione Duparc, the second lady, who had never understood why Mrs. Hart had cast Nancy for the part of Nerissa and herself for Jessica, was heard to murmur intensely that the little affair lent quite a sparkle of romance to Spring in theBlack Country and that it was pretty to see the way those two children were enjoying themselves. However, the affair presently became serious when the young lovers announced that they were going to be married and Michael O’Finn woke up to the fact that he was in danger of losing his only daughter.
“But, O’Finn, you’ve only had Nancy touring with you for a few months,” Bram protested, when the heavy father, one hand thrust deep into his buttoned frock-coat, strode up and down the unusually spacious sitting-room he and Nancy were sharing that week in Birmingham, and proceeded to give a performance of a character that had slipped between King Lear and Shylock and fallen into melodrama.
“I had dreamed,” the old actor declaimed in a voice that rustled with Irish foliage and was at the same time fruity with pompous tragic tones, “I had dreamed of many harpy yeers before us, harpy, harpy yeers in which I would behold my only daughter growing more like her beloved mother whose loss has darkened the whole of my existence, since I laid her to rest to wait for the last trump to ring out above the moil and toil of Newcastle-on-Tyne. Young man, you have wounded a father in his tenderest spot. You have shattered his hopes. You have torn the fibres of his heart. In my mind’s eye I perceive my little daughter still clutching at the dear maternal breast, and you blast that sacred vision by proposing to commit matrimony with this tender suckling.”
“But, O’Finn, you didn’t object to her acting in other companies till she was twelve years old; and for four years after that she lived with an aunt in Dublin, so that you hardly ever saw her.”
“Young man, do not taunt an unhappy parent with what he has missed. She and I were clutched by the iron hand of circumstance. The practical considerations of finance ruled that we should live sundered until now; but now, now at the very moment when the clouds are breaking to a glorious day, you descend upon us like a thunderboltout of a clear sky and propose to marry this motherless child and drench the cheeks of a stricken father with tears, idle tears.”
“But, O’Finn, Nancy isn’t as young as all that,” Bram protested.
“Spare your taunts, young man. I charge you, spare them. Be content with the havoc you have wrought, but do not gloat like a vulture upon the reeking ruins.”
“Look here, O’Finn, can’t we discuss this matter sensibly?”
“Sensibly?” cried the heavy father, throwing up his arms as a suppliant at the throne of Heaven. “Sensibly? Ha-ha! Tarquin’s loathly form steals into my domestic hearth and ravishes my daughter’s love, and I, I the broken-hearted parent, am invited by the ravisher himself to discuss the matter sensibly! Tempt me not to violence, young man. Do not tempt me, I say. For twenty years, whenever I have had occasion to visit the metropolis of the Midlands, I have stayed in Mrs. Prattman’s comfortable lodgings without ever breaking so much as a humble egg-cup. Do not tempt me to bring the whole house about my ears in the wild and uncontrollable fury of despair.”
Bram began to laugh.
“He laughs! Ha-ha! He laughs! He surveys the havoc he has made and laughs! A hyena wandering in a desert might abstain from laughter at such a moment, but not this young man. No, no!Helaughs.”
“I’m really very sorry, O’Finn, but if you will go on talking like that, I simply can’t help laughing.”
At this moment Nancy herself entered the sitting-room.
“Hello, boys, what’s the joke? Do tell a pal,” she cried in a radiance of good-fellowship.
The heavy father sank down into one of Mrs. Prattman’s armchairs and buried his head in his knees.
“It isn’t a joke at all, Nancy. It’s very serious. Your father won’t hear of letting us get married, he says we’re too young.”
“The dear old duffer,” said Nancy. “Why, then we’ll just have to get married without saying any more about it.”
“Never!” thundered the heavy father, springing to his feet.
“Then I’ll go back to Aunt Kathleen,” Nancy vowed. “If I’m old enough to make love on the stage, I’m old enough to make love off it.”
Michael O’Finn, having taken up this attitude in his lodgings, could not resist elaborating it before the performance in the cosy little saloon bar of the “Saracen’s Head” just round the corner from the stage-door. The result was that his delivery of Jacques’s great speech in the Forest of Arden lost much of its austere melancholy and most of its articles definite and indefinite. A pronounced thickening of all the sibilants with a quantity of unnecessary tears left Jacques himself, at the end of that strange eventful history, in a state of mere oblivion and apparently sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. When the curtain fell on the second act, Mrs. Hunter-Hart, who had been watching him from the wings, invited her heavy man to step up to her dressing-room and explain what he meant by it.
“I am ecsheedingly dishtreshed, Mrs. Hart, but a domeshtic mishfortune overtook me thish afternoon and I’m afraid that I drank rather more than wash good for me in the ‘Sharashen’s Head.’”
He proceeded to give Mrs. Hunter-Hart an account of the shock which had led him into such unprofessional conduct.
“O’Finn, I’m astonished at you! I would not believe that a man of your age could make such an unmitigated ass of himself. Come, let me try you with your cues.
“Even a toy in hand here, sir: nay, pray be covered.”
“Will you be married, motley?” O’Finn muttered thickly.
“As the ox hath his bow, sir,” Mrs. Hart went on, “the horse his curb, and the falcon her bells, so hath manhis desires; and as pigeons bill, so wedlock would be nibbling.”
“Yes, I perceive the point you’re making, ma’am,” the old actor admitted. “But with your permission I would....”
“Beginners third act,” cried the junior member of the company, hurrying along the stone corridors past the dressing-room doors.
Perhaps if the interval had been longer, Mrs. Hunter-Hart might have persuaded Michael O’Finn that he was behaving unreasonably and absurdly. As it was, he recovered his sense of outraged paternity, and on the following night he worked up his feelings in the bar of the “Saracen’s Head” to such a pitch that several members of the company began to think that Bram really must have been behaving rather badly with Nancy. O’Finn played Sir Toby Belch that night, and, as theBirmingham Daily Postsaid, it was probably as ripe a performance as had ever been seen on any stage.
However, what had begun not exactly in jest, but to some extent as a piece of play-acting, became serious; for Michael O’Finn, who had nearly ruined his youthful career by hard drinking, seemed inclined to revert to the wretched habit in his maturity. Bram began to feel thoroughly upset, in spite of Nancy’s protestations of undying love and her promise to run away and be married to him the moment he gave the word. Mrs. Hunter-Hart herself continued to be kind, and was always assuring them of her great influence over the intransigent father and of the certainty that he would soon come to his senses. The rest of the company was on the whole unfavourable to the lovers, so sad was the picture that O’Finn drew of a desolate future bereft of his only daughter and doomed for ever to tour the provinces in lonely lodgings without being allowed to buy that little cottage in the country, where with Nancy in affectionate ministration he was to rest during the rose-hung Junes of conventional idealism, and to which he was ultimately to retire on his savings for apeaceful pipe-smoking old age. As a matter of hard fact, Michael O’Finn had exactly two weeks’ salary in his bank, barely enough to pay the lawyer for the conveyance of a two-roomed bungalow on the banks of the Thames.
A week or two later in the middle of this situation Bram received a letter from his grandmother:
Lebanon HouseBrigham.May 31st, 1889.Dear Bram,Your father is dead. He was humbly presenting a loyal address to the Duke of Edinburgh and having always had, as you know, a wretched crop of hair, he caught a cold which developed into pneumonia, and that’s the end of my son Joshua. I understand that Caleb is the sole heir subject to certain annuities payable to your aunts and an injunction not to let his mother starve. You are not mentioned in the will. However, since Caleb won’t come of age for a month or two, the executors (neither of whom are Peculiars) think that, if you were to return home immediately, pressure could be brought to bear on your brother to come to an equitable arrangement by which, if you consented to devote yourself to the business, you should be made a partner in the firm. It lies with you, my dear boy. Is it worth while to make yourself pleasant to that sleek Jacob for the sake of perhaps a thousand pounds a year (I don’t think you’d get more out of it), or would you prefer to remain poor, free, and honest? I know which I should choose if I were you. You know that I would like to see you before I die, though I’m bound to say that at the present there is no sign of my dying. More’s the pity, for I am heartily sick of this life, and though I admit I am now faced with the dread of another much longer one hereafter, I’m hoping that the rumour prevalent about eternity has been grossly exaggerated. I rarely leave my own room nowadays, and my eyes have been giving me a good deal of trouble, so that I find it almost impossible to read. However, luckily I have unearthed in Brigham a pleasant young woman with a respect for commas andcolons who reads aloud to me in a not quite intolerable French. She winces at Zola, but then so do I, for he’s such a rank bad writer. Nevertheless, I cannot resist the rascal just as once upon a time I could never resist staring into shop windows. How your grandfather hated that habit of mine! He never knew what it might lead to. People feel the same about Zola, I suppose. Strange your father dying abruptly like this. I had figured him as a perpetual phenomenon like the smoke of the Brigham chimneys. If youdodecide to come home, you should come quickly.Your lovingGrandmother.
Lebanon HouseBrigham.May 31st, 1889.
Lebanon HouseBrigham.May 31st, 1889.
Lebanon House
Brigham.
May 31st, 1889.
Dear Bram,
Your father is dead. He was humbly presenting a loyal address to the Duke of Edinburgh and having always had, as you know, a wretched crop of hair, he caught a cold which developed into pneumonia, and that’s the end of my son Joshua. I understand that Caleb is the sole heir subject to certain annuities payable to your aunts and an injunction not to let his mother starve. You are not mentioned in the will. However, since Caleb won’t come of age for a month or two, the executors (neither of whom are Peculiars) think that, if you were to return home immediately, pressure could be brought to bear on your brother to come to an equitable arrangement by which, if you consented to devote yourself to the business, you should be made a partner in the firm. It lies with you, my dear boy. Is it worth while to make yourself pleasant to that sleek Jacob for the sake of perhaps a thousand pounds a year (I don’t think you’d get more out of it), or would you prefer to remain poor, free, and honest? I know which I should choose if I were you. You know that I would like to see you before I die, though I’m bound to say that at the present there is no sign of my dying. More’s the pity, for I am heartily sick of this life, and though I admit I am now faced with the dread of another much longer one hereafter, I’m hoping that the rumour prevalent about eternity has been grossly exaggerated. I rarely leave my own room nowadays, and my eyes have been giving me a good deal of trouble, so that I find it almost impossible to read. However, luckily I have unearthed in Brigham a pleasant young woman with a respect for commas andcolons who reads aloud to me in a not quite intolerable French. She winces at Zola, but then so do I, for he’s such a rank bad writer. Nevertheless, I cannot resist the rascal just as once upon a time I could never resist staring into shop windows. How your grandfather hated that habit of mine! He never knew what it might lead to. People feel the same about Zola, I suppose. Strange your father dying abruptly like this. I had figured him as a perpetual phenomenon like the smoke of the Brigham chimneys. If youdodecide to come home, you should come quickly.
Your lovingGrandmother.
Bram contemplated the sheets of sprawling spidery handwriting and wondered what he ought to do. His grandmother did not know what a problem she was putting before him. It was not so easy to laugh at the idea of a thousand pounds a year, now that he was engaged to Nancy. A settled prospect was likely to make her father take another view of their marriage. It would be deuced hard to eat humble-pie to Caleb, but with Nancy as a reward he could achieve even that. And life in Brigham? Ugh! Well, even life in Brigham with Nancy laughing beside him would be sweeter and lovelier than life in Paradise without her.
He showed the letter to his sweetheart and asked her advice. Afterwards, he used to wonder how he could ever have doubted for a moment what her answer would be.
“Go home?” she exclaimed. “Why, Bram darling, you must be mad to think of such a thing. What’s a thousand a year compared with your self-respect?”
“I thought your father might take a more reasonable view of our marriage, if I could be doing something more solid than acting in the provinces.”
“Hasheever done anything more solid himself? Never in his life. Well, listen to me, Bram, if you go back home and crawl to that brother of yours, I swearI’ll break off our engagement. Now there it is straight.”
“You know there’s only one reason would make me go home.”
“Well, you’ll have to marry a squib, my dear, for you’ll certainly never marry your Nancy if you do.”
“There doesn’t seem much chance of my ever marrying you as things are now,” Bram sighed.
“Will you elope? Now listen to me, I’m serious. I’m after thinking that an elopement is the only solution for us. What is it Touchstone sings to Audrey:
Come, sweet Audrey:We must be married, or we must live in bawdry!
Come, sweet Audrey:We must be married, or we must live in bawdry!
Come, sweet Audrey:We must be married, or we must live in bawdry!
Come, sweet Audrey:
We must be married, or we must live in bawdry!
At least he doesn’t sing it in our version, because dear old Ma Hart is so damned genteel she wouldn’t have such a sentiment uttered by a member of her pure company. But it’s in Shakespeare, for I read it when I was studying the part.”
“But your father, you lunatic?”
“Och, my father! He can’t drink any more than he’s drinking now, and it would give him a gentlemanly excuse for getting drunk if he was to celebrate his daughter’s wedding. Listen. You’ve enough money to buy the ring and the license?”
“Oh, I’ve saved twelve pounds this tour already.”
“Next week’s Leamington and Coventry, and the week after’s Leicester. Let’s be married in Leicester on Saturday week. That’s the only way to deal with father, and indeed it’s a kindness to the man, for he’s getting tired of playing the ill-used father, and a little bit of geniality for a change will do him all the good in the world.”
Bram caught her to him.
“You won’t regret it, Nancy?”
“Why should I regret it?”
“You shan’t, you shan’t, dear Nancy. Listen, I haven’t said anything about this before, because I didn’t want to give you the idea that I was trying to make a bargain over you. But I don’t believe in mixed marriages, andI think I’d like to be a Catholic. My grandmother’s a Catholic, you know, and she’s the only creature in the world I really care for, except you, my sweetheart.”
“Ah, now, don’t think it’s so easy to become a Catholic. You’ll have to have the devil’s own amount of instruction first. You can be married without knowing a thing at all about it. But the priest won’t baptise you so easy as he’ll marry you. Conversion can wait till we have a little more time to ourselves.”
So, on the sixteenth of June at Leicester Bram and Nancy were married. The ceremony achieved, they went for a long drive in a fly through the not very beautiful Leicestershire country and arrived back at Michael O’Finn’s lodgings about five o’clock to announce the state of affairs at the favourable hour when he should be digesting his dinner over a cigar. It was the last evening of the tour andTwelfth Nightwas in the bill, so that, if he should go out and get drunk before the performance, he was less likely to disgrace himself as obviously as in any of his other parts.
“Well, we’ve done it, father,” Nancy began.
“Done what?” he demanded, crackling the leaves ofThe Stageand scowling at Bram over the top of it.
“We’re married. Yes, we were married in St. Aloysius’ Church this morning at twelve o’clock. There’s nothing to be done about it, father.”
“Nothing to be done about it?” repeated O’Finn. “There is a very great deal to be done. Come to my arms, my beloved child. Weep upon my shoulder in the excess of your new-found happiness. Weep, I say. Spare not one single tear. Weep, weep. Young man, give me your hand. I have entrusted you with the guardianship of the being I hold most sacred of earth’s creatures. Honour that trust, young man. Rejoice a father’s heart by your devotion. God bless you both, my children. And now let us make arrangements to celebrate this auspicious event by a supper to our friends and intimates at that best of hostelries, the old ‘Blue Boar.’ There is not amoment to be lost. Mine host will want to make his arrangements with the authorities for an extension of the license to some seasonable small hour that will suitably hallow the occasion. I will leave you here to bill and coo. Did you see whatThe Stagesaid about my Tranio this week? Read it, my boy. You’ll be delighted with the way the notice is written. Judicial—very, very judicial.”
With this O’Finn, humming theWedding Marchin his rich bass, left the newly wed pair to themselves.
“Well, I’m bothered,” Bram gasped. “He’s completely turned round.”
“I rather thought he would,” Nancy said. “I’ve never known him refuse a fat part. He was getting tired of gloom.”
When Nancy and Bram went down to the theatre that night, O’Finn met them at the stage-door, beaming with good-will.
“I’ve seen my dear old manageress. She has consented to grace the festivity in person, and the acting-manager of the theatre has insisted on our using the green-room. The supper is being sent in from the ‘Blue Boar.’ Ham. Chicken. Lobster. All the appropriate delicacies. Several of the orchestra are coming. Very jolly fellows. We’ll have some capital fiddling. My dear old pal Charlie Warburton will give us Hood’sBridge of Sighs, and I daresay we can persuade him intoEugene Aramas well. I’ve asked Mrs. Hart to recite us one of her gems. In fact, the whole crowd will oblige. We are going to make a memorable night of it. You couldn’t have chosen a better time to get married. We’ve had a splendid Whitweek, and that showery Whit Monday put Mrs. H.-H. into such a delightful humour. The last day of the tour. By gad, girl, I’m proud to be your poor old father. And the booking to-night is splendid, I hear. We shall have a bumper house forTwelfth Night.”
It was a merry evening in the old green-room of the Opera House, Leicester, now, alas! fallen from itscompanionable status and turned to some practical and business-like purpose. Gilded mirrors on the walls, glittering gasoliers, bright silver, and shining faces, warmth and happiness of careless human beings gathered together for a few hours in fellowship, all are vanished now. Files and dockets and roll-top desks have replaced them.
There is no doubt that the central figure on that genial night was Michael O’Finn. The bride and bridegroom were teased and toasted, but the central figure was the erstwhile dejected father. How many speeches he made it would be hard to say, but he certainly made a very great many. He proposed everybody’s health in turn, and when everybody’s health had been proposed and drunk, he proposed corporate bodies like the theatre orchestra, the town council of Leicester, and Mrs. Hunter-Hart’s Shakespearian Company. And when he had exhausted the living he sought among the dead for his toasts, raising his glass to the memory of Will Shakespeare, Davy Garrick, Ned Kean, and Mrs. Siddons. When the mighty dead were sufficiently extolled he proposed abstractions like Art and the Drama. His final speech was made about four o’clock in the morning—to the memory of the happy days, old friends, and jolly companions.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I am sure that you will agree with me that we have all spent a very enjoyable and—er—delightful evening. Those who have not, hold up their hands. As I suspectednemine contradicente, carried unam.... But there is one more toast to which I will invite you to raise your glasses. Ladies and gentlemen, another night of our earthly pilgrimage has waned. The sun of to-morrow already gilds the horizon, though we may still seem to be living in to-night. We have all wished long life and happiness to my beloved daughter and the excellent young man—may I add excellent young actor—who has—er—joined his future with hers, in short, who has married her. But there is yet another toast to which I must bid you raise your glasses. Ladiesand gentlemen, we have reached the end of a happy tour with my dear old friend and manageress, Mrs. Hunter-Hart. Some of us will meet again under her banner in the last week of July on the sunny South Coast; others will not. We shall probably never find ourselves all together at the same festive board. Let me beg you therefore to drink all together, for perhaps the last time in this mortal life, to the toast of happy days and sweet memories, old friends and jolly companions. Ladies and gentlemen, I confess without shame that a teardrop lurking in the corner of my eye has coursed down my cheek and alighted upon the lapel of my coat as I give you this solemn toast. Happy memories! What a world of beautiful images those two words conjure up! I see again the little cradle in which my mother rocked me to sleep. I kneel once more by her knees to say my childish prayers. Anon I am a happy urchin tripping and gambolling down the lane to the village school. Anon I stand before the altar with my dearly beloved and alas! now for ever absent wife beside me. I hear once more the vociferous plaudits of the crowded pit as I cry to Macbeth, ‘Turn, hell-hound, turn.’ I live again through the delightful moments of first meeting my dear old friend and manageress, Emmeline Hunter-Hart, who has upheld the banner of the legitimate drama against odds, ladies and gentlemen, odds, fearful, tremendous, overwhelming odds. She has seen on all sides the hosts of evil in the shape of these vile problem plays that have degraded, are degrading, and will continue to degrade the sacred fane of Thespis. Happy memories, ladies and gentlemen! And surely I may ask you to count this night as one of your happiest memories. To the young couple who this morning resolved to face the storms of life together, surely this night will be a happy memory. Happy memories and—let us not forget them—old friends, for are not all our happiest memories bound up with old friends? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the double toast to which I hope you will accord full musical honours byjoining with me in singing friendship’s national anthem, the moving song of the immortal Robbie Burns,Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot.”
The party broke up. The footsteps of the company died away along the cobbled streets of Leicester. The night became a happy memory. The bride and bridegroom went dreaming homeward, life before them, the dewy freshness of June around them, and overhead the faded azure of the empty morning sky.