Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/75

 deep-eyed admiration that was so meek and so trustful that it would have made a sick dove blush for its arrogance. Faro Nell had no such art. She argued with the star at the third rehearsal. And when her part began to dwindle—and Jane Shore's to grow—she knew it was because he disliked her and wanted to keep her down. She began to scheme against him. She even appealed to me, as a friend of the author; and I began to discover, behind the outward seeming of the rehearsals, a concealed activity of intrigues, stage politics, personal ambitions, plots, and counter-plots. Parties had been formed, influences had been organized. The resulting struggle, with its alliances and compromises, its victories and its defeats, was called a rehearsal. A detailed account of it would read like a court memoir of the days of a grand monarch. And the welfare of the play, that was to carry them all, seemed to be consulted as little as the welfare of the country that supports a grand monarch's court.

Jane Shore was obviously of the star's party and high in favor. He deprived her of some of her best lines—for various pretended reasons, but really because they competed with his own—and she merely said, studiously: "I see. Then I take the next cue, do I?"

He made her work down-stage, with her back to the footlights, so that he might face the audience when he addressed her; and she said: "Just a minute. Let me mark the position on my part."