“Lacy,” he said some days later, “what do you think!  I found her the other day sliding down the banisters!”

Some one says—­I think it is Keats, in a letter—­that the poet lives not in one, but in a thousand worlds, and the actor has not one, but a hundred natures.  What was the real Henry Irving?  I used to speculate!

His religious upbringing always left its mark on him, though no one could be more “raffish” and mischievous than he when entertaining friends at supper in the Beefsteak Room, or chaffing his valued adjutants, Bram Stoker and Loveday.  H.J.  Loveday, our dear stage manager, was, I think, as absolutely devoted to Henry as anyone except his fox-terrier, Fussie.  Loveday’s loyalty made him agree with everything that Henry said, however preposterous, and didn’t Henry trade on it sometimes!

Once while he was talking to me, when he was making up, he absently took a white lily out of a bowl on the table and began to stripe and dot the petals with the stick of grease-paint in his hand.  He pulled off one or two of the petals, and held it out to me.

“Pretty flower, isn’t it?”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Henry!” I said.

“You wait!” he said mischievously.  “We’ll show it to Loveday.”

Loveday was sent for on some business connected with the evening’s performance.  Henry held out the flower obtrusively, but Loveday wouldn’t notice it.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” said Henry carelessly.

“Very,” said Loveday.  “I always like those lilies.  A friend of mine has his garden full of them, and he says they’re not so difficult to grow if only you give ’em enough water.”

Henry’s delight at having “taken in” Loveday was childish.  But sometimes I think Loveday must have seen through these innocent jokes, only he wouldn’t have spoiled “the Guv’nor’s” bit of fun for the world.

When Henry first met him he was conducting an orchestra.  I forget the precise details, but I know that he gave up this position to follow Henry, that he was with him during the Bateman regime at the Lyceum, and that when the Lyceum became a thing of the past, he still kept the post of stage manager.  He was literally “faithful unto death,” for it was only at Henry’s death that his service ended.

Bram Stoker, whose recently published “Reminiscences of Irving” have told, as well as it ever can be told, the history of the Lyceum Theater under Irving’s direction, was as good a servant in the front of the theater as Loveday was on the stage.  Like a true Irishman, he has given me some lovely blarney in his book.  He has also told all the stories that I might have told, and described every one connected with the Lyceum except himself.  I can fill that deficiency to a certain extent by saying that he is one of the most kind and tender-hearted of men.  He filled a difficult position with great tact, and was not so universally abused as most business managers, because he was always straight with the company, and never took a mean advantage of them.