“Mrs. Wapshawe has revived my hopes. She tells me that you will return sooner than I hoped. Now I’ll begin my cottage again. It has been lying in heaps a great while, and I have shed many tears over the ruins; but we will build it up again in joy. You know the spot that I have fixed upon, and I trust I have not forgotten the plan!
“Oh! what a reward for all that I have suffered, to retire to the blessings of your society; for, indeed, my dear friends, I have paid severely for my eminence, and have smarted with the undeserved pain that should attend the guilty only; but it is the fate of office, and the rough brake that virtue must go through; and sweet, ‘sweet are the uses of adversity.’ I kiss the rod.
“Mrs. Wapshawe was quite delighted with Mr. Beach’s picture of you; but she tells me that you wear coloured clothes and lace ruffles; and I valued my picture more, if possible, for standing the test of such a change as these (to me unusual) ornaments must necessarily make in you. I think I shall long to strip you of these trappings.
“I am so attached to the garments I have been used to see you wear, and think they harmonize so well with your face and person, that I should wish them like their dear wearer, who is without change. I am proud of your chiding, though God knows how unwillingly I would give you a moment’s pain; nay, more, He knows that I neither go to bed, nor offer prayers for blessings at His hands, in which your welfare does not make an ardent petition. But why should I wound your friendly bosoms with the relation of my vexations? I knew you too well to suppose you could hear of my distresses without feeling them too poignantly.
“I resolved to write when I had overcome my enemies. You shall always share my joys, but suffer me to keep my griefs from your knowledge. Now I am triumphant, the favourite of the public again; and now you hear from me.
“A strange capricious master is the public. However, one consolation greater than any other, except one’s own approbation, has been that those whose suffrages I esteemed most have, through all my troubles, clasped me closer to their hearts; they have been the touchstone to prove who were really my friends. You will believe me when I affirm that your friendship, and my dear Mrs. Whalley’s, is an honour and a happiness I would not forego for any earthly consideration. Tell my dearest Mrs. Whalley that neither avocations nor indolence would have prevented your hearing from me long ago but for the reasons already mentioned. I wrote to you last Sunday, when I had not received your dear letters; so you will do me the justice to remember that I was not reminded of you but by my own heart, which, while it beats, will ever love you both with the warmest and truest affection; however, as she is so seldom mistaken, we shall have the honour and glory of laughing at her. Would to God I could laugh with, or cry with, or anything with you, but for half an hour! To say the truth, though, your tender reproaches gave me a melancholy which I could not (and I don’t know if I wished it) shake off. Pray let me hear from you very soon, and very often. I shall be a better woman, and more worthy of your invaluable friendship, the more I converse with you. Surely the converse of good and gentle spirits is the nearest approach to Heaven that we can know; therefore, once more I beg that I may often hear from you, and, if you do love me, do not think so unworthily of me as to suppose my affection can, in the nature of things, ever know the least abatement. I conjure you both to promise me this, for I cannot bear it—indeed, I can’t!”
CHAPTER VIII.
LADY MACBETH.
Contemporaneous critics are unanimous in declaring Lady Macbeth to be Mrs. Siddons’s finest impersonation, and it is with this rôle that we always connect the Great Actress. She made the part her own, and identified herself with it in the memories of all who saw her. It is essentially in Lady Macbeth that Shakespeare proves himself so thoroughly Anglo-Saxon; the whole conception of the person is Teutonic. The idea of the remorse-haunted murderess, with her despairing fatalism and unswerving ambition, is more nearly allied to “Vala,” in the Scandinavian mythology, than anything in the tragedies of Sophocles or Euripides, and this it is that rendered Mrs. Siddons so perfect an embodiment of the character. She was essentially Teutonic in her grandeur, her stateliness, and, at the same time, sustained energy and vitality. Rachel had moments of superhuman grandeur and ferocity, but they only flashed for a moment; hers was the turning-point of passion of the Latin race, but not the voluminous grandeur, gaining strength, like a mighty river, as it rolls along, which distinguishes the heroic emotions of the Teuton.