The principal theatre of the queen of watering-places in her palmy days
was filling fast, as it had done for the last two nights. Other
attractions lost their power. Ombre, basset, hazard, lansquenet, loo,
spread their cards and counters in vain for crafty or foolhardy fingers.
The master of the ceremonies found his services at a discount; no troops
of maidens, no hosts of squires, answered to his appeal; no double sets
were forming to the inspiring strains of "Nancy Dawson." The worthy,
charming, gifted Lady Betty had come down for three nights to improve,
entertain, and enrapture, and this being her last night the theatre
constituted the only orbit in which the planets would revolve.
The world was here in full-blown variety; sublime, languid peers, needy
placemen, hilarious foxhunters, brave tradesmen, aspiring mechanics,
poor good-for-nothings; sober housewives, whose thoughts were still of
their husbands' shirt-fronts and their hasty-puddings, and who never
dreamt that they were impugning their sobriety by attending a play; and
above all, fine ladies armed with their fans and their essences. As a
whole, the audience was in a vastly respectful attitude--the gentlemen
tapping their snuff-boxes meditatively, and desisting in a great measure
from their loud laughter, their bets, their cursing and swearing; the
ladies only whispering behind their handkerchiefs, and moving to cause
their diamonds to sparkle, all in acknowledgment of the vicinity of the
fair and potent Lady Betty.
The play was _Venice Preserved_, and Lady Betty entered in an early
scene. Truly a fine woman--not so lovely as Anne Oldfield, not so superb
as Sarah Siddons; but with a frank, fair, womanly presence--bright,
genial, quick, passionate through the distress of Belvidera, the
repudiated daughter and beggared wife.
Dressed in the English fashion under the Georges, walked the maiden
reared in the air blowing off the lagoons within the shadow of the grim
lion of St. Mark, to such sentimental accompaniments as the dipping oar
and the gondolier, and finished off with the peculiar whims of Betty
Lumley. She wore a fair, flowered brocade, for which William Hogarth
might have designed the pattern and afterwards prosecuted for payment
the unconscionable weaver; a snow-white lace kerchief was crossed over
her bosom and reached even to her shapely chin, where it met the little
black velvet collar with its pearl sprig; her brown hair (which had
shown rather thin, rolled up beneath her mob-cap) was shaken out and
gathered in rich bows with other pearl sprigs on the top of her head;
her cheeks showed slightly hollow, but were so fresh, so modest, so
cool in their unpainted paleness, and on the smallest provocation
acquired the purest sea-shell pink which it would have been a sin and a
shame to eclipse with staring paint; the contour, a little sharper than
it had once been, was only rendered more delicate by the defect, and so
sweet yet--so very sweet; her beautiful arms were bare to the elbow, but
shaded with falls of cobweb lace; and in one hand, poised daintily
between two fingers, she held a natural flower, a bunch of common rural
cowslips. At this period of the year such an appendage under any other
touch would have been formal as the Miss Flamborough's oranges, but it
was graceful in this woman's slight clasp.
"Enchanting creature!" "Fine woman!" "Otway's devoted wife to the life!"
murmured the company, in a flutter of genuine admiration--forgetting
themselves, these Sir Plumes and Belindas, once in a way.
"I do hope the poor soul will not be deserted and undone--she's so
easy to serve--and all Bath, and, for that matter, Lon'on too, as I
believe, at her feet!" says Mrs. Price, emphatically, to young
Medlicot, whom she is patronizing for one night, because he knows
somewhat of plays and players; and who, in spite of his allegiance to
swimming, simpering Clarissa, would give a fortune to paint that pose.
Belvidera need fear no lolling, no sneering, no snapping at her little
peculiarities this night.
As she came on, "kind, good, and tender," telling poor distracted,
misguided Jaffier, in his humiliation, that she joyed more in him than
did his mother, Lady Betty darted a sharp, searching glance through the
boxes. Ah! yonder they were! The little girls the parson's daughters,
with their uncle the squire, fault-finding, but honourable. Two
round-faced, eager, happy girls, intent upon the play, and the great
London star, beautiful, bewitching Lady Betty, who is now looking at
them--yes, actually staring them full in the face with her deep,
melting, blue eyes, while she reassures her cowardly husband. How dared
uncle Rowland disparage her?
There was uncle Rowland, younger than Lady Betty had taken him for--not
more than five-and-forty--his coat trimmed with silver lace, a little
old-fashioned, and even a little shabby in such company, his Mechlin tie
rather out of date and already disordered, and his cocked-hat crushed
below his arm. His face is bluff and ruddy among his pinched and sallow
brethren: that of a big English gentleman, who hunted, shot, or fished,
or walked after his whistling ploughman every morning, and on occasions
daringly dashed in amongst the poachers by the palings of his park or
paddock on summer evenings; yet whose hands were reasonably white and
flexible, as if they handled other things than guns and fishing-rods,
and whose eyes, at once clear and meditative, had studied more than the
spire of his brother's church and the village street, more than quiet
country towns, and loud watering-places, and deep metropolises.
Master Rowland had no family ties beyond the Vicarage; and was in no
hurry to marry or settle, as the phrase went; though he was settled long
ago, and might have married once a year without any impediment from old
madam, as Mistress Betty would have been swift to suppose. He perfectly
approved of Mr. Spectator's standard of virtue--"Miss Liddy can dance a
jig, raise a pasty, write a good hand, keep an account, give a
reasonable answer, and do as she is bid;" but then, it only made him
yawn. The man was sinking down into an active-bodied, half-learned,
half-facetious bachelor. He was mentally cropping dry and solid food
contentedly, and, at the same time, he was a bit of a humourist. He
loved his little Prissy and Fiddy, as dear god-daughters, whom he had
spoilt as children, and whom he was determined to present with portions
when he presided at their wedding dinners; but he had no mind to take
any of their fellows, for better for worse, as his companion, till death
did them part.
Then Lady Betty stepped upon the stage at Bath, and before a multitude
of frivolous and simple, or gross and depraved spectators, incapable
of comprehending her, she played to the manly, modestly intellectual
squire.
Master Rowland woke up, looked his fill, as open-mouthed as the rest,
and while he did so, his system received a shock. Lady Betty was
revenged to an extent she had not foreseen.
The noble woman went with her whole soul into the sorrows of the
dark-eyed, brown-faced sister whom Titian might have painted, and made
them accord with her fair English love of justice, her blue-eyed
devotion to her husband, her Saxon fearlessness and faith in the hour of
danger: only she did look strange and foreign when, in place of lying
prostrate in submission and rising in chaste, meek patience to rear her
orphan son, she writhed, like a Constance in agony, and died more
speedily from her despair than Jaffier by the dagger which on the
scaffold freed Pierre. The assembly rose in whole rows, and sobbed and
swooned. Mrs. Prissy and Mrs. Fiddy cried in delicious abandonment;
Master Rowland sat motionless.
"I declare I had forgotten the Justice," reflects Lady Betty, resting
behind the scenes. "I do believe I am that poor Belvidera for the last
half-hour. I meant to bring the man to tears. His blooming face was as
white as a sheet;--poor, dear, good man, I hope he's none the worse of
it."
Master Rowland knows full well that she is Mistress Betty Lumley the
great London actress, not Belvidera the Venetian senator's daughter; but
he will never again turn from the chill of his stone-arched hall, where
his fingers have grown benumbed riveting a piece of armour or copying an
epitaph or an epigram, or linger under his mighty oak-tree, or advise
with his poor tenants, or worship in church, without the sickening sense
of a dull blank in his heart and home.