“The Master was a dashing, adventurous fellow, but essentially a crook, and he became a spy in Prince Charlie’s camp, leaking information to the English: Mr Henry was a scholarly, poetic sort of chap, and he stayed at home and mooned after Miss Alison Graeme; she was the old Lord’s ward, and of course she loved the dashing Master. When news came from the wars that the Master had been killed, she consented to marry Mr Henry as a matter of duty and to provide Durrisdeer with an heir. ‘But ye ken she never really likit the fella,’ as Macgregor explained it to me; her heart was always with the Master, alive or dead. But the Master wasn’t dead; he wasn’t the dying kind: he slipped away from the battle and became a pirate—not one of your low-living dirty-faced pirates, but a very classy privateer and spy. And so, when the troubles had died down and Bonny Charlie was out of the way, the Master came back to claim Miss Alison, and found that she was Mrs Henry, and the mother of a fine young laird.

“The Master tried to lure Miss Alison away from her husband: Mr Henry was noble about it, and he nobly kept mum about the Master having turned spy during the war. ‘A verra strong situation,’ as Macgregor said. Consequence, a lot of taunting talk from the Master, and an equal amount of noble endurance from Mr Henry, and at last a really good scene, of the kind Roly hates, but our audiences loved.

“The Master had picked up in his travels an Indian servant, called Secundra Dass; he knew a lot of those Eastern secrets that Western people believe in so religiously. When Mr Henry could bear things no longer, he had a fight with the Master, and seemed to kill him; but as I told you, the Master wasn’t the dying kind. So he allowed himself to be buried, having swallowed his tongue (he’d learned that from Secundra Dass) and, as it said in the play, ‘so subdued his vital forces that the spark of life, though burning low, was not wholly extinguished.’ Mr Henry, tortured by guilt, confessed his crime to his wife and the old Lord, and led them to the grove of trees where the body was buried. When the servants dug up the corpse, it was no corpse at all, but the Master, in very bad shape; the tongue-trick hadn’t worked quite as he expected—something to do with the chill of the Scottish climate, I expect—and he came to life only to cry, ‘Murderer, Henry—false, false!’ and drop dead, but not before Mr Henry shot himself. Thereupon the curtain came down to universal satisfaction.

“I haven’t described it very respectfully. I feel irreverent vibrations coming to me from Roly, the way mediums do when there is an unbeliever at a seance. But I assure you that as the Guvnor acted it, the play compelled belief and shook you up pretty bad. The beauty of the old piece, from the Guvnor’s point of view, was that it provided him with what actors used to call ‘a dual role’. He played both the Master and