Chapter XXIII: Cœur De Lion

It seemed as if fortune was anxious to compensate Nancy for the sudden shattering of her operatic dreams. The very first agent to whom she went on her return to London greeted her with something like acclamation.

“Why, Miss O’Finn, I am glad you’ve looked in this morning. Mr. Percy Mortimer”—the agent’s harsh voice sank to a reverential murmur—“Mr. Percy Mortimer has had some difficulty with the lady he engaged to play rather an important part in his new play at the Athenæum, and his secretary wrote to me to ask if I would send some ladies to interview him with a view to his engaging one of them. He requires a tall dark lady of some presence, and of course with the necessary experience. This would be a splendid opportunity for you, Miss O’Finn, if you happened to please Mr. Mortimer.”

“Naturally I should like nothing better than to be at the Athenæum,” said Nancy in a voice that was nearly as full of awe as the agent’s.

“It isn’t so much the salary,” he pointed out. “In fact, Mr. Mortimer does not believe in paying very large salaries to the actors and actresses who are supporting him. He thinks—and he is undoubtedly right—that to have one’s name on the programmes of the Athenæum is the equivalent of several pounds at most of the other London theatres.

“Now, don’t talk too much about it before Mr. Mortimer has even seen me,” Nancy begged.

“He’ll be at the Athenæum this afternoon at half-past three. I’m only sending along two other ladies. And I think you’re just what he wants.”

Mr. Percy Mortimer was something more than a great figure of the London stage; he was an institution. Everybody agreed that should Her Majesty decide to create another theatrical knight Percy Mortimer was undoubtedly the one she would select for the accolade. The prime cause of his renown in England was that if there was ever any question of choice between being an actor or a gentleman he would always put good breeding before art. This was held to be elevating the drama. If by chance the public disapproved of any play he produced, Percy Mortimer always apologised before the curtain on the first night and laid the blame on the author. Two or three years before this date he was acting in a play by a famous dramatist who became involved in a sensational and scandalous lawsuit. Percy Mortimer did not take off the play. He owed something to art. But he paid his debt to good breeding by expunging the author’s name from the playbills and the programmes.

Nancy had to pass the vigilance of various chamberlains, constables, and seneschals before she reached the Presence, a handsome man with a face as large and smooth as a perfectly cured ham.

“Miss O’Finn?” he inquired graciously, with a glance at her card. “Of Irish extraction, perhaps?”

She nodded.

“A part is vacant in my new play,” he announced. “The public is anxious to see me in historical drama, and I have decided to produce Mr. Philip Stevens’s _Cœur de Lion_. The vacant part is that of a Saracen woman who has escaped from the harem of Saladin. It is not a long part, but it is an extremely important part, because the only scene in which this character appears is played as a duologue with myself.”

Mr. Mortimer paused to give Nancy time to appreciate what this meant.

“Here is the script,” he said. “Perhaps you will read me your lines?”

Nancy took a deep breath and dived.

“Thank you, Miss O’Finn,” said Mr. Mortimer. “One of my secretaries will communicate my decision to your agent in the course of the next twenty-four hours.”

He pressed a bell, which was immediately answered by a chamberlain to whom was entrusted the task of escorting Nancy back into the commonplace of existence.

And the very next day when Nancy, who was staying at St. Joseph’s, went to her agent, she was offered the part at a salary of £5 a week.

Not only was _Cœur de Lion_ a success with the critics, who hailed Mr. Philip Stevens as the morning-star of a new and glorious day for England’s poetic drama; but it was a success with the public. This, of course, made the critics revise their opinion and decide that what they had mistaken for a morning-star was only a fire-balloon; but the damage was done, and English criticism suffered the humiliation of having praised as a great play what dared to turn out a popular success. One or two papers actually singled out Nancy’s performance for special commendation which, considering that the part did not look difficult and that she played it easily and naturally, betrayed astonishing perspicacity for a dramatic critic. She found pleasant rooms in St. John’s Wood, quite close to the convent. Kenrick made several attempts to see her, and on one occasion waited for her outside the stage-door. She begged him not to do this again as it might involve her dismissal from the Athenæum, because one of Mr. Mortimer’s ways of elevating the English drama was to make it an offence for any of the ladies of his company to be waited for outside the stage-door.

For three months everything went well for Nancy except that the expense of London life was a constant worry for her, although she tried to console herself with the thought that she had already saved a certain amount of money, and that after her success in _Cœur de Lion_ she might expect to get a larger salary in her next London engagement. Otherwise she was happy.

Then one night early in April she was informed by the stage-door keeper that a gentleman who would not leave his name had been inquiring for her private address. Nancy supposed that it was Kenrick again; but the stage-door keeper remembered him well. This was a much older gentleman with curly white hair who was quite definitely a member of the profession.

“Of course, I didn’t give him your address, miss. But if he calls again, what shall I say?”

It was her father. What should she say? Nancy’s conscience had touched her from time to time for the way she had let her father drop out of her life ever since that day he had failed her so badly. She did not know if he was acting in London or in the provinces, or if he was not acting anywhere. His name had never been mentioned all these months of touring. On no railway platform had she caught a glimpse of him as two “crowds” passed each other during long Sabbath journeys. He might have been dead. And now here he was in her path. What should she say?

“Ask him to leave his address, will you? And say that I will write to him.”

If her father dreaded another such a disastrous visit as the one she paid him four years ago, he need not leave his address. If, however, he did leave it she would have time to ponder what response to make.

Michael O’Finn did not call again at the stage-door of the Athenæum, but two or three days after this his daughter received a letter from him at the theatre.

544 Camberwell Road, S. E.
2:30 P.M. Sunday, April 17, 1899.

My beloved daughter,

How many times since last we met have I picked up my pen, how many
times have I laid it down again with a groan of paternal despair!
That you had reason to complain of me I will not deny. My head
is bowed before your just and natural ire. But the sight of your
name—your dear, dear name—although you share the second portion
of it with that least worthy of God’s creatures, your wretched
father—the sight of your name, I repeat, in the cast of _Cœur de
Lion_ watered with hope the withered plant that in happier days and
in the glory of his blossoming prime gave that tender shoot to the
world, which is your sweet self.

I will not attempt to condone my fault. I will not attempt it, I say.
At the moment when I should have been standing upon the doorstep of
that humble habitation in which I sojourned for a space to welcome
you with open arms and tears of joy, I was, owing to a combination
of unfortunate circumstances, prone upon my bed in the first-floor
front. I have not to warn you, my child, against the evils of drink,
because in you glows the pure and temperate soul of your beloved
mother. At the same time I should lack all the noble instincts of
paternity if I did not remind you that “virtue cannot so inoculate
our old stock but we shall relish of it.” That being so, do not allow
yourself to be tempted by even a solitary glass of champagne. Water,
pure, wholesome, pellucid water is the natural element of a being
like yourself. But to come to the point of this letter. Two years
ago, weary of being “a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and
frets his hour upon the stage,” I longed to be “heard no more.” I was
at that time lodging in the house from which I write this despairing
epistle. In a moment of folly I proposed to link myself in matrimony
with my landlady’s daughter. The wretched woman accepted my hand. The
Tragic Muse would be rendered dumb by the task of painting my misery
ever since that inauspicious day. Ay, even Melpomene herself would
stammer. One word, one word alone can indicate a dim and shadowy
outline of my existence, and that one word is Hell.

You will observe that I have resumed after a blank. That blank I wish
to draw over my life for the last two years. But I have now reached
a lower depth, a gloomier abyss, where in addition to all my other
ills the spectre of famine looms above me. The wolf is scratching at
the door. In a word, unless somehow or other I can raise the sum—a
bagatelle for a Crœsus or a Rothschild, for me a burden heavier than
Atlas bore—the sum of £158. 14s. 3½d. within the next week, I and my
wife and my mother-in-law will be in the street. I do not for an
instant imagine that you yourself have such a sum handy. You are like
your father only a poor stroller. But it has occurred to me that you
might be acquainted with some fortunate individual who could advance
you this amount to save your father from destitution in company with
the two least attractive companions that can be imagined for such an
existence.

I beg that you will not attempt to visit me. Since I gave up brandy,
this house appears to me as what it undoubtedly is—a mercenary hovel.
Yet I am “fain to hovel me with swine and rogues forlorn in short and
musty straw.” In a word, I am better off in 544 Camberwell Road than
“to be exposed against the warring winds, to stand against the deep
dread-bolted thunder.”

My beloved Nancy, do your best for me. Overlook my failings and come
to my aid.

“Dear daughter, I confess that I am old;
Age is unnecessary; on my knees I beg
That you’ll vouchsafe me raiment, bed, and food.”

These words addressed by the hapless Lear to his unnatural daughter
Regan I take from their context and utter to one who has ever been a
Cordelia.

To that most wretched of earth’s creatures
Her
Father.

Nancy was not deluded by the laboured rhetoric of this letter. She understood that her father’s need was serious. She had the money that would relieve him. She must send it immediately. To be sure he had failed her four years ago, but had she not allowed her bitterness to make her unnatural? Was she not to blame a little for this disastrous later phase of his career? Oh, yes, more than a little. Moreover, that money in the bank, since her break with Kenrick, had never lain there comfortably. It had never seemed to belong to her as genuinely as once it did. The sum her father required so gravely was more than Kenrick could have spent on that Italian adventure of hers. She took out her cheque-book and sat down at the table. Or should she go and see him in Camberwell? She read her father’s letter again. No, it was clear he did not want her to be a spectator of his wretchedness. But at least she could invite him to her rooms—yet could she? That would mean talking about Letizia, and perhaps he would want to see her. Was it very heartless of her not to want him to see Letizia? After all, he had not suggested visiting her. She would send him this money and she could decide later what she should do.

Nancy received a long and emotional letter of thanks, in which her father said that he was feeling very low, but that without doubt her rescue of him from the desperate position in which he had been plunged would rapidly restore him to health. Meanwhile, he begged her again not to dream of visiting him in Camberwell. When the warm weather began in May he would come and see his beloved daughter.

But when the warm weather came in May, Nancy read an obituary in _The Era_ of that ripe old actor, Michael O’Finn, a fine comedian and a tragic actor of no mean ability.