Lady Bell left the theatre entranced, and fascinated. She was resigned, content to be handmaid to a goddess, to spend her mornings helping to pull up and down, re-fashion and re-arrange Mrs. Siddons’s trappings, since in the evenings she was brought into thrilling, shuddering contact with the love, rage, grief, and despair of Isabella, Zara, Mrs. Beverley, Jane Shore, nay, caused to experience their struggles and despair, and to make them her own. Such was the wonderful effect upon Lady Bell of Mrs. Siddons’s seizure of every character—its rich, varied utterance, its very looks, attitudes, and gestures, to which the beautiful face, with its speaking eyes, the fine figure, with its rounded, supple arms, alike lent themselves, willing slaves to the soul’s catholicism.
The sight was an education worth a state of servitude to the young girl. The very range of characters which Mrs. Siddons at that time played, brought them within Lady Bell’s comprehension, whereas the higher range of the Shakespearean characters could only have struck such a girl in her sixteenth year, blind and dumb with amazement and awe.
There could not have been a broader contrast between the sad monotony and brooding—almost inane hostility of Lady Bell’s life at St. Bevis’s and Trevor Court, and this introduction to the lava flow of human passion.
When Lady Bell recalled the former passages in her life, and put them side by side with this, she felt tempted to hug herself on the change, and to wonder with girlish levity and malice what Mrs. Kitty, Squire Trevor, and Mrs. Walsh would say, if they saw her thus full of interest and joy in existence.
From the theatre Lady Bell was wont to return home with Mrs. Siddons; and, while Lady Bell was still in an ecstasy, to witness what was a greater trial to the preservation of an illusion than any proximity to spangles and lacquer could have proved.
The great actress refreshed herself after her exertions, by eating a hearty supper of beefsteak-pie and porter, which she enlivened with some rather heavy, if feminine enough humour; for the tragic muse had a tendency to be ponderous—call it grandiose, even in her womanly fun.
Mr. Siddons criticized the performance, to which he could only hold the candle, and cumbered with small directions for her next part, the wife whose gifts he believed he could measure, in proportion as he could reckon their commercial value.
It is saying something for young Lady Bell that she came triumphantly through the ordeal. Youth is irreverent, and “quality” is supercilious, yet Lady Bell was able to reverse the proverb of the hero and his valet. She was so much of the heroine herself in playing the waiting-maid, that she still saw a heroine in her mistress.
Lady Bell was selling her birthright, and considering it well sold in return for beholding the creations of a woman of genius.
But the woman of genius, a compound of glorious imagination and shrewd calculation, of truth of heart and some worldly-mindedness, was not so sure of her share of the bargain.