A Georgian Pageant

by Frank Frankfort Moore

Now if she had really been in love with Hackman this was surely the moment when she should have gone to him, suffered him to marry her, and thus made up by a few years on the lyric stage for any deficiency in his fortune or for the forfeiture of any settlement her “benefactor” might have been disposed to make in her favour. But she seems to have shown a remarkable amount of prudence throughout the whole of her intrigue, and she certainly had a premonition of the danger to which she was exposed by her connection with him. “Fate stands between us,” she wrote in reply to one of his impetuous upbraiding letters. “We are doomed to be wretched. And I, every now and then, think some terrible catastrophe will be the result of our connection. 'Some dire event,' as Storge prophetically says in Jephtha, 'hangs over our heads.' Oh, that it were no crime to quit this world like Faldoni and Teresa... by your hand I could even die with pleasure. I know I could.”

An extraordinary premonition, beyond doubt, to write thus, and one is tempted to believe that she had ceased for a moment merely to play the part of the afflicted heroine. But her allusion to Jephtha and, later in the same letter, to a vow which she said she had made never to marry him so long as she was encumbered with debts, alleging that this was the “insuperable reason” at which she had hinted on a previous occasion, makes one suspicious. One feels that if she had not been practising the music of Jephtha she would not have thought about her vow not to marry him until she could go to him free from debt. Why, she had only to sing three times to release herself from that burden.

Some time afterwards she seems to have suggested such a way of getting over her difficulties, but it is pretty certain she knew that he would never listen to her. Her position at this time was undoubtedly one of great difficulty. Hackman was writing to her almost every day, and becoming more high-minded and imperious in every communication, and she was in terror lest some of his letters should fall into the hands of Lord Sandwich. She was ready to testify to his lordship's generosity in educating her to suit his own tastes, but she suspected its strength to withstand such a strain as would be put on it if he came upon one of Mr. Hackman's impetuous letters.

She thought that when she had induced her lover to join his regiment in Ireland she had extricated herself from one of the difficulties that surrounded her; and had she been strong enough to refrain from writing to the man, she might have been saved from the result of her indiscretion. Unhappily for herself, however, she felt it incumbent on her to resume her correspondence with him. Upon one occasion she sent him a bank-note for fifty pounds, but this he promptly returned with a very proper letter. Indeed, all his letters from Ireland are interesting, being far less impassioned than those which she wrote to him. Again she mentioned having read Werther, and he promptly begged of her to send the book to him. “If you do not,” he adds, “I positively never will forgive you. Nonsense, to say it will make me unhappy, or that I shall not be able to read it! Must I pistol myself because a thick-blooded German has been fool enough to set the example, or because a German novelist has feigned such a story?”

But it would appear that she knew the man's nature better than he himself did, for she quickly replied: “The book you mention is just the only book you should never read. On my knees I beg that you will never, never read it!” But if he never read Werther he was never without some story of the same type to console him for its absence, and he seems to have gloated over the telling of all to her. One day he is giving her the particulars of a woman who committed suicide in Enniskillen because she married one man while she was in love with another. His comment is, “She, too, was Jenny and had her Robin Gray.” His last letter from Ireland was equally morbid. In it he avowed his intention, if he were not granted leave of absence for the purpose of visiting her, of selling out of his regiment. He kept his promise but too faithfully. He sold out and crossed to England without delay, arriving in London only to find Miss Reay extremely ill.

His attempts to cheer her convalescence cannot possibly be thought very happy. He describes his attendance upon the occasion of the hanging of Dr. Dodd, the clergyman who had committed forgery; and this reminds him that he was unfortunately out of England when one Peter Tolosa was hanged for killing his sweetheart, so that he had no chance of taking part in this ceremony as well, although, he says, unlike George S.—meaning Selwyn—he does not make a profession of attending executions; adding that “the friend and historian of Paoli hired a window by the year, looking out on the Grass Market in Edinburgh, where malefactors were hanged.” This reference to Boswell is somewhat sinister. All this letter is devoted to a minute account of the execution of Dodd, and another deals with the revolting story of the butchery of Monmouth, which he suggests to her as an appropriate subject for a picture.

At this time he was preparing for ordination, and, incidentally, for the culmination of the tragedy of his life. He had undoubtedly become a monomaniac, his “subject” being murder and suicide. His last lurid story was of a footman who, “having in vain courted for some time a servant belonging to Lord Spencer, at last caused the banns to be put up at church without her consent, which she forbad. Being thus disappointed he meditated revenge, and, having got a person to write a letter to her appointing a meeting, he contrived to waylay her, and surprise her in Lord Spencer's park. On her screaming he discharged a pistol at her and made his escape.”

“Oh love, love, canst thou not be content to make fools of thy slaves,” he wrote, “to make them miserable, to make them what thou pleasest? Must thou also goad them on to crimes?”

Only two more letters did he write to his victim. He took Orders and received the living of Wiveton, in Norfolk, seeming to take it for granted that, in spite of her repeated refusals to marry him, she would relent when she heard of the snug parsonage. This was acting on precisely the same lines as the butler of whom he wrote. When he found that Miss Reay was determined to play the part taken by the servant in the same story, the wretched man hurried up to London and bought his pistols.

The whole story is a pitiful one. That the man was mad no one except a judge and jury could doubt. That his victim was amply punished for her indiscretion in leading him on even the strictest censor of conduct must allow.