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82 MELODRAMA
Dacre wants the author to go over the part with him scene by scene and sentence by sentence. Neither in this nor in what follows — the discussion of terms — is there any sign of egotism until the last lines : " I have under consideration a joint offer for my wife and myself— as soon as she is well enough — I will give you an answer soon — but if I hear to-morrow I will throw it over to play in your piece." At length Amy Roselle signed a contract with Irving for the Lyceum. She seemed likely to be restored to her place on the West End stage. Instead she became her husband's leading lady, although even the provinces welcomed them no more. They went to Australia. At Sydney they took the leading parts in a New Zealand melodrama, The Land OfMoa, by George Leitch, in 1895. While they were rehearsing for the next season despair overtook him. One morning, in their hotel bedroom, Dacre shot his wife, wounded himself with the next bullet and then cut his throat. When the servants broke in, he was clutching the mantelpiece and crying " Oh, the pain, the pain ", until he died.
Sensation dramas at popular houses made no pretence of being at all like events off the stage, but the drawing-room drama did insinuate that what was happening to its characters could happen to anyone. Without such attempted justification, this type of play would have been seen as merely the last scene of melodrama long drawn out, in which case an audience might well consider it had been cheated. Careers of crime were over before the curtain rose — too late for anything but repentance. A play which took the place of Jim The Penman at the Haymarket, with Lady Monckton again as an inwardly suffering wife and Tree as another presentable rogue, illustrated this admirably. The author was Haddon Chambers, an Australian stock-rider who arrived in London at the age of twenty determined to starve until he had made his way as a writer for the stage. After eight years of journalism he " arrived " in 1888 with Captain Swift. The hero is a bushranger, friendless in London until he stops a runaway hansom and is invited by its occupant to a house where the hostess happens to be his mother, the butler his foster-brother, and the daughter's fiance a stock-rider he once held up in Australia. If only there had been a prologue about his birth, several scenes of bushranging, and a real runaway cab, the long arm of coincidence — the author's own phrase — would have been not only pardonable but commendable as true to the very soul of sensation. Anyhow the play succeeded because it was a drama in the latest style. The detective arrives. Captain Swift escapes. He is still clever enough to avoid arrest by following the sleuth instead of being followed. But the love of two moderately good women (his newly-found mother and