How inscrutable, indeed, are the ways of Providence. Sally was her eldest daughter and her dearest child. She had been born two months before that terrible period of probation and failure at Drury Lane. Hers were the baby fingers, hers the baby voice, that had coaxed the poor young mother back to resignation and courage. She was twenty-seven when she was taken, and had ever been the sunshine of the home. Yes, she was the dearest. Strange that, deaf to our anguish and suffering, those are so often they who are taken. If a heart in such a trial can still believe and trust and love, then it is faith indeed—heaven-born, sublime. And such, we see, was the broken-hearted mother’s.
During her stay at Birch Farm, John Kemble, Charles Moore, and Miss Dorothy Place, her daughter Sally’s particular friend, came to stay with her. In July they all of them made an excursion along the Wye, after which she paid a visit to her friend Mr. Fitzhugh at Bannister’s, and then returned to London, where she made an engagement to act the following winter at Covent Garden.
Other trials awaited Mrs. Siddons, trials that, to a woman of her proud and sensitive temper, must have been torture in the extreme. Whatever her sufferings had been in the course of her professional career, from scandal and misrepresentation, her character as a wife and mother had been untouched. Now, when no longer young, and anxious to escape from the harassing turmoil of the stage into the dignity and calm of a domestic life, surrounded by her children and friends, a blow fell on her under which, for the time, she almost sank. The circumstance is not alluded to either by Campbell or Boaden, but is so interwoven with Mrs. Siddons’s existence, and so colours her mode of thought at the time, that it can hardly be passed over.
Mrs. Siddons met Katherine Galindo, author of the libel, at the theatre in Dublin. She was a subordinate actress, and her husband a fencing-master. It is difficult to understand how she can have become so intimate, except that her own perfect sincerity and openness led her to bestow confidence on a variety of persons, many of them not in any way worthy of it. Her daughter, Cecilia, who later wrote Recollections of her mother, says that, instead of being hard and calculating, as the outside public imagined, her mother was, on the contrary, too easy—too much disposed to be ruled by people inferior in every way to herself, credulous to an extraordinary extent, always trusting to appearances, and never willing to suspect anyone. Perhaps, also, the great actress’s weakness was a wish to “make use” of people, and a love of flattery—both dangerous qualities for a woman in her position, laying her open, as they did, to the machinations of adventurers. Be it as it may, we are astounded at the girlish sentimentality of the letters she wrote to the Galindos. Allowing even for the Laura Matilda style of expression of the period, they show the substratum of romanticism that underlies her character. The Galindos accompanied her to Cork, and then to Killarney. Mrs. Siddons used all her influence to induce Harris, of Covent Garden, to give Mrs. Galindo an engagement; but Kemble, when he arrived from abroad, refused to ratify it. A letter from Mrs. Inchbald says:—
“When Kemble returned from Spain in 1803, he came to me like a madman, said Mrs. Siddons had been imposed upon by persons whom it was a disgrace to her to know, and he begged me to explain it so to her. He requested Harris to withdraw his promise of his engaging Mrs. G. at Mrs. Siddons’s request. Yet such was his tenderness to his sister’s sensibility, that he would not undeceive her himself. Mr. Kemble blamed me, and I blamed him for his reserve, and I have never been so cordial since. Nor,” ends Mrs. Inchbald, with the prim self-sufficiency quite consistent with what we know of the “dear Muse,” “have I ever admired Mrs. Siddons so much since; for, though I can pity a dupe, I must also despise one. Even to be familiar with such people was a lack of virtue, though not of chastity.”
We read later in Rogers’s Table Talk that, not long before Mrs. Inchbald’s death he met her walking near Charing Cross, and we are not astonished to be told that she had been calling on several old friends, but had seen none of them—some being really not at home, and others denying themselves to her. “I called,” she said, “on Mrs. Siddons. I knew she was at home, yet I was not admitted.”
To return, however, to the Galindos. The wretched woman was stung to the quick by the withdrawal of her engagement at Covent Garden, and although Mrs. Siddons advanced a thousand pounds to the husband to buy a share in a provincial theatre, and showed them much kindness, the jealous and infuriated wife published in pamphlet form a wild and libellous attack on the great actress, to which she added the letters that had passed between them in their days of intimacy. By artfully turning and suppressing sentences here and there, she succeeded in giving a significance never intended in the originals. Although she said she had advanced nothing but what she could substantiate by the most certain evidence, if called upon to do so, she gave no proof whatever except of her own wild jealousy and unreasoning disappointment at being refused an engagement at Covent Garden.
It seems incredible that a woman of Mrs. Siddons’s social knowledge can have been so imprudent as to enter into such an intimacy, and to write in such a strain of deep affection to people she had known only so short a time. The following is a specimen:—
“Holyhead, Sunday, 12 o’clock.
“For some hours we had scarce a breath of wind, and the vessel seemed to leave your coast as unwillingly as your poor friend. About six o’clock this morning the snowy tops of the mountains appeared; they chilled my heart, for I felt that they were emblematic of the cold and dreary prospect before me. Mr. ⸺ has been very obliging; he has just left us, but it is probable we shall meet again upon the road. I thought you would be glad to know we were safely landed. I will hope, my beloved friends, for a renewal of the days we have known, and in the meantime endeavour to amuse and cheer my melancholy with the recollection of past joys, though they be ‘sweet and mournful to the soul.’