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 [Page 73]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 [Page 74]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 [Page 75]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 [Page 76]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 [Page 77]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.