"What do you think, Johnny? I discovered today that, among other things, the theatre cleaners at the Lyceum—nine of them—have been having a meat tea every day at my expense—a shilling each, for the past seventeen years. Add it up. Three hundred and sixty-five shillings nine times for seventeen years."
But this was a trifle. I don't think he ever knew how thoroughly he had been robbed all his life. It must have run into thousands of pounds.
I possess the chair on which he died at the Midland Hotel, Bradford He was assisted in a state of collapse from a four-wheel cab into the small hall entrance, sat down, and there died.
It is strange how the chair came into my possession. I was playing at Sheffield, and went immediately to Bradford and inquired if any one knew on which chair Sir Henry had died.
The night porter who had assisted him, I discovered, had been discharged. I eventually found him in a cottage on the outskirts of the city. He told me that I should recognize the chair by finding his ' initial in pened under the seat. I asked him what had made him think putting them there, and he said I knew Sir Henry Irving was a rear man, and that some d: some one might want the chair, as it would be historical."
The man was right.
Both Henry Irving's sons were great friends of mine, specially Laurence, who was playing with me at Toole's and who, had he lived, would certainly have been a great and dignified head of our profession today. Because of unfortunate family differences, both these boys were brought up as strangers to their father, and taught by their mother to regard him as little better than a grotesque I therefore look back as having been part of theatrical history in being the lad who was chosen by Mr. Tode to take Laurence on his 21st birthday to meet his father as a father for the first time.
What happened at that interview I don't know, but I waited for nearly two hours outside the house, an when Laurence came down he was pale and very much disturbed.
He told me little, but showed me a watch that his father had given him. The result of that interview was that H. B. Irving and Laurence both became their father's most affectionate friends.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.