Walter Bentley's Tour.

Feilding Star, Volume XVI, Issue 88, 8 October 1894, Page 2

Walter Bentley's Tour.

This well known and popular actor will play in Feilding on the 12th Oc tober, for one night only, play goers will be glad to welcome Mr Walter Bentley. The advance agent, Mr Charles Sanderson informs us that the company is one numbering twenty one speaking members. Mr Bentley will produce the great clerical study " The Silence of Dean Maitland." The story is that with which the reading public has been made familiar by Maxwell Grey's novel of the same name. It is that of a young churchman, cultivated, eloquent, ambitious and cherishing glowing conceptions of a brilliant future, who, before his ordination, becomes entangled in a liaison with Alma Loe, the daughter of a farmer, who, in one of their stolen interviews, surprises the lovers, and so learns who has betrayed his daughter. In the quarrel that ensues Lee is killed. At the time Maitland is wearing the clothes of a college chum, Dr Everard, engaged to his sister Lilian. Everard is then a visitor at the house, and when suspicion fixes on him Maitland keeps silence. Everard is convicted, Maitland is ordained, and becomes one of the shining lights of the Church, and ultimately Dean of Belminster. Then ho is offered a bishopric, and just as he is about to accept Everard is released, and Alma returns from America where she has been sent with her child. The Dean expects that denunciation will follow, but, after an interview with Lilian, Everard writes to the man who has so cruelly wronged him a letter of pity and forgiveness. This, with the remorse that has boen constantly eating into the Dean's heart, decides him to confess his crime in the face of the whole congregation. He does so, and performs the grand apt of self denunciation on the steps of the high altar m the cathedral, and falls dead at its appropriate conclusion. The plan of the Assembly Rooms is now open at Mr Carthew's, where seats can be secured in advance.