He never did another stroke of work. His kit of tools became strangers to him. He touched chisel and mallet but once more, and that was when he pawned them that he might buy a play-book, and a little bread, with which to quiet for a moment the two devils who tormented him, one gnawing in his brain, the other at his stomach.
In going to and from the theatre I passed the tiny, three-roomed cottage the MacIlhennys occupied, and morning and evening I could hear his high, rasping voice declaiming, ranting, pouring forth pages of old plays, while through the window I could see him brandishing a poker for a sword, and wildly rumpling his little, red flounce of hair whenever he pronounced a curse--whether he was Lear or Richelieu or Sir Giles, it mattered not, he dragged all curses from the roots of his thin, red hair.
Poor Mrs. Sandy had descended from her former state of bombazine, and was daily seen in black cotton, going out to jobs of washing or office-cleaning, so her neighbors told me. And once, when they missed her comfortable blanket-shawl and noticed that she shivered through the streets in an old Stella shawl, which was a creation of thin cashmere meant for summer only, they rashly spoke the sympathy they felt, and their condemnation of MacIlhenny’s course.
It was the first time and likewise it was every other time, including the _last_ time they so presumed. She listened in stony silence, and then with bitter pride and icy resentment in every look and word, she demanded: “What else shall my man do? Is it for the like of him to be pounding stone forever, and he the finest actor-man in all the world to-day?”
Now Mrs. MacIlhenny was a Presbyterian of a blueness like unto indigo, and of a narrowness inconceivable--who have never in her life entered a theatre. Therefore it was but natural that one of the surprised women should ask: “But how do you know that?” And she made answer--oh! loving, loyal, old Scottish wife--with withering scorn and infinite conviction: “Why, has the man na’ telled me so hissel’?” and so went her hard way.
For many weeks MacIlhenny had made the manager’s life a burden to him--asking, praying, demanding an engagement. “Why, man,” he would say, “did you not see the public at my very feet--did you not hear their acclamations, and you know right well that in the absence of garlands and flowers they would have tossed to me anything their hands came upon? What are you afraid of? The enmity of your wee bit stars! I’ll see that you suffer no loss!”