But Mrs. Siddons showed no annoyance or regret while she resumed her charge, turning aside Lady Bell’s discomfiture with a well-bred, good-tempered observation, “When you have little ones of your own, Miss Barlowe, you will know better how to guide them. I see that you have no little brothers or sisters.”
“Neither big nor little,” admitted Lady Bell; “I was the only child in the house of a grand-aunt.”
“Poor child! poor, old-fashioned, solitary little one,” lamented the older woman, with sincere pity, thinking of her own homely, much interested father and mother, and the many-childed sociality which had belonged to the strolling players’ troop.
At the same time Mrs. Siddons was disposed to proceed to something more profitable than the indulgence of sensibility. She started a question of costume, and there she found Lady Bell capable and alert, Mrs. Siddons did not doubt in practice as well as theory, for every well-brought-up young lady was then fairly versed in the mysteries, not merely of clothes, but of their making.
As Lady Bell conversed with animation and skill on the difficulties of sack-backs, girdles, negligées, Mrs. Siddons took her little revenge, and nodded triumphantly to her husband. Perhaps she had a sense of one of her weak points as an actress, that she dressed often badly, though in some degree artistically. She might have a consciousness that it would be better for her if she could always command the correct judgment, delicate taste, and clever fingers of “a real lady.”
The last stage in the journey of the little party brought them to the town of Thorpe, where Mrs. Siddons was to attend a rehearsal and act the same night, and where private lodgings, apart from the theatrical properties—daggers, smeared with red paint, sheet-tin for thunder—were secured, as the first lady’s engagement was to last for a week.
Miss Barlowe was not wanted at the rehearsal, nor, as Mrs. Siddons decided, after a moment’s thought, to attend at the theatre at all.
But, as a resident in the actress’s family, the girl had a pass to see the play, in her travelling-dress, from a private box. She accepted the privilege reluctantly, out of compliment to her patroness (how proprieties were reversed!), and under the somewhat pompous escort of Mr. Siddons. The great object which Lady Bell proposed to herself was to be as little seen as possible, in her shady nook of the dark little theatre, and to get away from its crowd as quickly as she could. It was not that she feared detection much, for she had never been within many miles (stronger words in those days) of the town of Thorpe, and was not acquainted with anybody in its neighbourhood; but she was ashamed of her situation.
Lady Bell began by admiring Mrs. Siddons’s wonderful beauty, and by idly following the story behind the footlights. Before long Lady Bell had forgotten who she was and where she was. She had forgotten Mrs. Siddons as the lady whom Lady Bell had first seen sitting in a duffle cloak, breakfasting in an inn-kitchen, who was like, but even more beautiful, than Mrs. Sundon, and whose likeness to Mrs. Sundon had something to do with the readiness with which Lady Bell had agreed to serve for a time as a waiting gentlewoman. She had forgotten her fellow-auditors, with whom in the utmost community of feeling, she was straining her eyes, clasping her hands, weeping her heart out.
The girl was transported by the magic of genius into a world of which she had never heard or dreamt—a world which penetrated through, and reached far beyond her world of high life—the only world she had known, or cared to know.