Nought shall make me e’er betray
Thy passion till my dying day:
If I live, or if I die,
Upon my constancy rely.
Siddons sufficiently relied on her constancy, in spite of his statements to “ye ladies of Brecon,” to suggest to his beloved an immediate elopement, which suggestion she, as Campbell quaintly puts it, “tempering amatory with filial duty,” politely declined, and her lover left.
As it was considered advisable to wean Sarah from old associations she was sent away for a time, and lived “under the protection” of Mrs. Greatheed, of Guy’s Cliff in Warwickshire. Some have maintained that she was nursemaid or housemaid; but the terms she was on with her mistress, who presented her with a copy of Milton, precludes that idea, unless, by her smartness and industry, she, within a very short period of her engagement, worked herself into a better position. Campbell also points out that there were no children to be nursed in the Greatheed family at that time. “Her station with them,” he continues, “was humble, but not servile, and her principal employment was to read to the elder Mr. Greatheed.” The secret history of the green room informs us that she was maid to Lady Mary Bertie, Samuel Greatheed’s second wife; and the Duchess of Ancaster told Mrs. Geneste she well remembered Lady Mary once bringing this attractive attendant with her on a visit.
It was remarked that she delighted in reciting fragments of plays for the entertainment of the servants’ hall. Lord Robert Bertie was so fond of listening and admiring her declamation, that Lady Mary had to beg of him to desist, and “not encourage the girl to go on the stage.” Young Greatheed told Miss Wynn later on that he had often heard Mrs. Siddons read Macbeth when she was his mother’s maid.
Lady Mary confessed years afterwards to “Conversation” Sharp, that so queenly was the bearing of the young girl, even at that early age, that she always felt an irresistible inclination to rise from her chair when her maid came to attend her.
We can imagine the romantic girl wandering through the lonely glades, and amongst the stately elm-groves of Guy’s Cliff, or along the shores of the soft-flowing Avon, Shakespeare’s Avon, that glides at the foot of the rocks between green meadows, dreaming of her love, and reading the poet she loved so well, whose birth-place and burial-place lay so near where she was. She must have heard reminiscences told of the great Jubilee that had taken place in 1769, only three years before, when Mr. Garrick and a “brilliant company of nobility and gentry,” had come down to Stratford to celebrate the Shakesperean centenary. She little knew then that it was in a repetition of the Jubilee procession on the boards of Drury Lane she was destined to make her first bow to a London audience. There is a tradition that she met Garrick during her stay at Guy’s Cliff. It is not impossible, as, after the Jubilee, he was a constant guest of the Greatheeds. The statement hardly tallies, however, with his writing sometime later to Moody to the effect that there “was a woman Siddons” acting at Liverpool, who might suit the Drury Lane company, and asking him to go and have a look at her. He might easily, however, have failed to connect the girl Sarah Kemble with the woman Mrs. Siddons.