THE PRODIGAL SON.
BY DUTTON COOK, AUTHOR OF “PAUL FOSTER’S DAUGHTER,” &c.
“A lytel misgoyng in the gynning causeth mykel errour in the end.”—Chaucer’s “Testament of Love.”
CHAPTER XIX. IS THEATRICAL.
The manager of the Theatre Royal, Long Acre, was not a very nice man. He had followed a good many other professions before he took to trading in theatrical entertainments. If moss be not gathered by the rolling stone, certainly a good deal of dirt adheres to it in the course of its revolutions. A man who has been through several businesses must have something of a soil from each left on his fingers; and if he did not primarily start with very clean hands, of course the result at the end is all the more grimy in effect. Labour-stains are very honourable if the labour has been sufficiently honest. But we have no occasion, as we have no temptation, to dig down to the roots of the career of Mr. Grimshaw, the lessee and manager of the Theatre Royal, Long Acre. All diggers do not meet with ore. Some often turn up less agreeable matters in the course of their toils. Let us accept, as the public did, Mr. Grimshaw as a blown manager, and not trouble ourselves about his bud period. Who cares to ponder over ugly chrysalis antecedents when the butterfly is fluttering about in full magnificence?
He was quite the man to succeed as a manager. In the first place, he wasn’t an actor, and had never dreamt, amidst all his changes of life, of becoming one: he was wary enough to know what not to do or to be. He did not take the theatre to assume the important parts that no one else would allot to him; to wake the dreary echoes of the empty house by his own dismal performance of Macbeth; he did not propose to start as an eminent tragedian on his own account, to end on some one else’s, a hopeless insolvent, proffering a fearful schedule to a wrathful commissioner. He took the Long Acre (it had been long empty: he got it cheap) to prosper his pocket rather than indulge his vanity. The Town said he was enterprising. He was in a condition which compels people to be enterprising: he could not suffer by speculation. He was without money, without character, without even credit, which sometimes survives the absence of the others. How could he lose? What could he lose? On the contrary, he seemed to be in such a situation that he must win; because any change must be for the better. He opened the theatre. He pawned his watch and sold his great-coat (the warm weather was