ON a certain evening in March, 1772, the fashionable folk of Bath were as earnestly on pleasure bent as they were wont to be at this season—and every other. The Assembly Rooms were open, a performance was going on at the theatre, the Cave of Harmony was as musical as Pyrrha's Grotto, a high-class concert was taking place under the conductorship of the well-known Mr. Linley, and the Countess of Huntingdon was holding a prayer meeting. For people who took their diversions à la carte, there was a varied and an abundant menu. Chairs containing precious structures of feathers, lace, and jewels towering over long faces powdered and patched and painted à la mode, were swinging along the streets in every direction, some with a brace of gold-braided lackeys by each of the windows, but others in charge only of the burly chairmen.
Unobtrusive among the latter class of conveyance was one that a young gentleman, a tall and handsome lad, called from its rank between Pierrepont Street and the South Parade. He gave the bearers instructions to hasten to the house of Mr. Linley in the Crescent, and to inquire if Miss Linley were ready.
If she were not, he told them that they were to wait for her and carry out her directions. The fellows touched their hats and swung off with their empty chair.
The young man then went to a livery stable, and putting a few confidential inquiries to the proprietor, received a few confidential replies, accentuated by a wink or two, and a certain quick uplifting of a knuckly forefinger that had an expression of secretiveness of its own.
“Mum's the word, sir, and mum it shall be,” whispered the man. “I stowed away the trunk, leaving plenty of room for the genuine luggage—lady's luggage, Mr. Sheridan. You know as well as I can tell you, sir, being young but with as shrewd knowingness of affairs in general as might be looked for in the son of Tom Sheridan, to say nought of a lady like your mother, meaning to take no liberty in the world, Mr. Dick, as they call you.”
“I'm obliged to you, Denham, and I'll not forget you when this little affair is happily over. The turn by the 'Bear' on the London Road, we agreed.”
“And there you'll find the chaise, sir, and as good a pair as ever left my stable, and good luck to you, sir!” said the man.
Young Mr. Sheridan then hastened to his father's house in King's Mead Street, and was met by an anxious sister in the hall.
“Good news, I hope, Dick?” she whispered.
“I have been waiting for you all the evening. She has not changed her mind, I hope.”
“She is as steadfast as I am,” said he. “If I could not swear that she would be steadfast, I would not undertake this business on her behalf. When I think of our father——”
“Don't think of him except as applauding your action,” said the girl. “Surely every one with the least spark of generosity will applaud your action, Dick.”
“I wouldn't like to say so much,” said Dick, shaking his head. “Mathews has his friends. No man could know so much about whist as he does without having many friends, even though he be a contemptible scoundrel when he is not employed over a rubber.”
“Who will dare to take the part of Mr. Mathews against you, Dick?” cried his sister, looking at him proudly as the parlour candles shone upon him. “I would that I could go with you as far as London, dear, but that would be impossible.”
“Quite impossible; and where would be the merit in the end?” said Dick, pacing the room as he believed a man of adventure and enterprise would in the circumstances. “You may trust to me to place her in safety without the help of any one.”
“I know it, Dick, I know it, dear, and I am proud of you,” said she, putting her arms about his neck and kissing him. “And look you here, Dick,” she added, in a more practical tone. “Look you here—I find that I can spare another five pounds out of the last bill that came from Ireland. We shall live modestly in this house until you return to us.”
He took the coins which she offered to him wrapped up in a twist of newspaper; but he showed some hesitation—she had to go through a form of forcing it upon him.
“I hope to bring it back to you unbroken,” he murmured; “but in affairs of this sort it is safest to have a pound or two over, rather than under, what is barely needful. That is why I take your coins,—a loan—a sacred loan. Good-bye, I returned only to say good-bye to you, my dearest sister.”
“I knew your good heart, Dick, that was why I was waiting for you. Good-bye, Dick, and God bless you.”
He was putting on his cloak in the hall. He saw that the pistols were in its pockets, and then he suffered his sister to give him another kiss before he passed into the dark street.
He felt for his pistols, and with a hand on each he felt that he was indeed fairly launched upon a great adventure.
He made his way to the London road, and all the time he was wondering if the girl would really come to him in the Sedan chair which he had sent for her. To be sure she had promised to come upon this evening, but he knew enough of the great affairs of this world to be well aware of the fact that the sincerest promise of a maid may be rendered worthless by the merest freak of Fate. Therefore, he knew that he did well to be doubtful respecting the realisation of her promise. She was the beautiful Miss Linley—every one in Bath knew her, and this being so, was it not likely that some one—some prying person—some impudent fellow like that Mathews who had been making love to her, although he had a wife of his own in Wales—might catch a glimpse of her face through the glass of the chair when passing a lamp or a link, and be sufficiently curious to follow her chair to see whither she was going?
That was a likely enough thing to happen, and if it did happen and the alarm of his flight with her were given, what chance would he have of carrying out his purpose? Why, the chaise would be followed, and even if it was not overtaken before London was reached, the resting-place of the fugitives would certainly be discovered in London, and they should be ignominiously brought back to Bath. Yes, unless Mathews were the pursuer, in which case——
Mr. Richard Brinsley Sheridan grasped more firmly the butt of the pistol in the right-hand pocket of his cloak. He felt at that moment that should Mathews overtake them, the going back to Bath would be on the part only of Mathews.
But how would it be if Mr. Linley had become apprised of his daughter's intention to fly from Bath? He knew very well that Mr. Linley had the best of reasons for objecting to his daughter's leaving Bath. Mr. Linley's income was increased by several hundred pounds by reason of the payments made to him on account of his daughter's singing in public, and he was—very properly, considering his large family—fond of money. Before he had to provide for his family, he took good care that his family—his eldest daughter particularly—helped to provide for him.
Doubtless these eventualities were suggested to him—for young Mr. Sheridan was not without imagination—while on his way through the dark outskirts of the beautiful city to the London Road. The Bear Inn was just beyond the last of the houses. It stood at the junction of the London Road and a narrower one leading past a couple of farms. It was here that he had given instructions for the chaise to wait for him, and here he meant to wait for the young lady who had promised to accompany him to London—and further.
He found the chaise without trouble. It was under the trees not more than a hundred yards down the lane, but the chair, with Miss Linley, had not yet arrived, so he returned to the road and began to retrace his steps, hoping to meet it, yet with some doubts in his mind. Of course, he was impatient. Young gentlemen under twenty-one are usually impatient when awaiting the arrival of the ladies who have promised to run away with them. He was not, however, kept in suspense for an unconscionably long time. He met the chair which he was expecting just when he had reached the last of the lamps of Bath, and out of it stepped the muffled form of Miss Linley. The chairmen were paid with a lavish hand, and Dick Sheridan and Betsy Linley walked on to the chaise without exchanging any but a friendly greeting—there was nothing lover-like in their meeting or their greeting. The elopement was not that of a young woman with her lover; it was, we are assured, that of a young woman anxious to escape from the intolerable position of being the most popular person in the most fashionable city in England, to the peaceful retreat of a convent; and the young man who was to take charge of her was one whom she had chosen for her guardian, not for her lover. Dick Sheridan seems to have been the only young man in Bath who had never made love to Elizabeth Linley. His elder brother, Charles by name, had discharged this duty on behalf of the Sheridan family, and he was now trying to live down his disappointment at being refused, at a farmhouse a mile or two away. The burden was greater than he could bear when surrounded by his sisters in their father's house in King's Mead Street.
0277
Elizabeth Linley was certainly the most popular young woman in Bath; she certainly was the most beautiful. The greatest painters of her day made masterpieces of her portrait, and for once, posterity acknowledges that the fame of her beauty was well founded. So spiritual a face as hers is to be seen in no eighteenth-century picture except that of Miss Linley; one has need to go back to the early Italian painters to find such spirituality in a human face, and then one finds it combined with absolute inanity, and the face is called Divine. Reynolds painted her as Saint Cecilia drawing down angels, and blessedly unconscious of her own powers, thinking only of raising herself among angels on the wings of song. His genius was never better employed and surely never more apparent than in the achievement of this picture. Gainsborough painted her by the side of her younger brother, and one feels that if Reynolds painted a saint, Gainsborough painted a girl. It was Bishop O'Beirne, an old friend of her family and acquainted with her since her childhood, who said: “She is a link between an angel and a woman.”
And this exquisite creature had a voice of so sympathetic a quality that no one could hear it unmoved. Her father had made her technique perfect. He was a musician who was something more than painstaking. He had taste of the highest order, and it is possible to believe that in the training of his eldest daughter he was wise enough to limit his instruction to the technicalities of his art, leaving her to the inspiration of her own genius in regard to the treatment of any theme which he brought before her.
At any rate her success in the sublimest of all oratorios was far beyond anything that could be achieved by an exhibition of the finest technical qualities; and Mr. Linley soon became aware of the fact that he was the father of the most beautiful and the most highly gifted creature that ever made a father miserable.
Incidentally she made a great many other men miserable, but that was only because each of them wanted her to make him happy at the expense of the others, and this she was too kind-hearted to do. But the cause of her father's grief was something different. It was due to the fact that the girl was so sensitive that she shrank from every exhibition of herself and her ability on a public platform. It was an agony to her to hear the tumultuous applause that greeted her singing at a concert or in an oratorio. She seemed to feel—let any one look at the face which is to be seen in her portrait, and one will understand how this could be—that music was something too spiritual to be made the medium only for the entertainment of the multitude. Taking the highest imaginable view of the scope and value and meaning of music, it can be understood that this girl should shrink from such an ordeal as the concert platform offered to her every time she was announced to sing. No more frivolous and fashionable a population than that of Bath in the second half of the eighteenth century was to be found in any city in the world; and Elizabeth Linley felt that she was regarded by the concert-goers as no more than one of the numerous agents they employed to lessen the ennui of an empty day. The music which she worshipped—the spirit with which her soul communed in secret—was, she felt, degraded by being sold to the crowd and subjected to the patronage of their applause.
Of course when she spoke to her father in this strain he sympathised with her, and bemoaned the fate that made it necessary for him to have her assistance to save her mother and brothers and sisters from starvation. And so for several years she was an obedient child, but very weary of the r?le. She sang and enchanted thousands. She did not, however, think of them; her mind dwelt daily upon the tens of thousands who regarded her (she thought) as fulfilling no nobler purpose than to divert them for half an hour between taking the waters and sitting down to faro or quadrille.
But it was not alone her distaste for the publicity of the platform that made her miserable. The fact was that she was distracted by suitors. She had, it was said, accepted the offer of an elderly gentleman named Long, the wealthy head of a county family in the neighbourhood; and Foote, with his usual vulgarity, which took the form of personality, wrote a play—a wretched thing even for Foote—in which he dealt with an imaginarily comic and a certainly sordid situation, with Miss Linley on the one side and Mr. Long on the other. Serious biographers have not hesitated to accept this situation invented by the notorious farceur, who was no greater a respecter of persons than he was of truth, as a valuable contribution to the history of the Linley family, especially in regard to the love affair of the lovely girl by whose help they were made famous. They have never thought of the possibility of her having accepted Mr. Long in order to escape from her horror of the concert platform. They have never suggested the possibility of Mr. Long's settling a sum of money on her out of his generosity when he found out that Miss Linley did not love him.
It was not Mr. Long, however, but a man named Mathews—sometimes referred to as Captain, occasionally as Major—who was the immediate cause of her running away with young Sheridan. This man Mathews was known to be married, and to be in love with Elizabeth Linley, and yet he was allowed to be constantly in her company, pestering her with his attentions, and there was no one handy to horsewhip him. Sheridan's sister, who afterwards married Mr. Lefanu, wrote an account of this curious matter for the guidance of Thomas Moore, who was preparing his biography of her brother. She stated that Miss Linley was afraid to tell her father of Major Mathews and his impossible suit, and so she was “at length induced to consult Richard Sheridan, whose intimacy with Major Mathews, at the time, she thought might warrant his interference.” And then we are told that “R. B. Sheridan sounded Mathews on the subject and at length prevailed on him to give up the pursuit.”
That is how the adoring sister of “R. B. Sheridan,” who had been talking to Elizabeth Linley of him as of a knight-errant, eager to redress the wrongs of maidens in distress, wrote of her brother! He “sounded Mathews on the subject.” On what subject? The subject was the pursuit of an innocent girl by a contemptible scoundrel. How does the knight-errant “sound” such a person when he sets out to redress the maiden's ill-treatment? One R. B. Sheridan, a dramatist, gives us a suggestion as to what were his ideas on this point: “Do you think that Achilles or my little Alexander the Great ever enquired where the right lay? No, sir, they drew their broadswords and left the lazy sons of peace to settle the rights of the matter.” Now young Sheridan, who is reported by his sister as “sounding” Mathews, was no coward. He proved himself to be anything but afraid of Mathews, so that one must, out of justice to him, assume that the only attempt he would have made to “sound” the scoundrel at this time would be through the medium of a sound hiding.
It is at such a point as this in the biography of an interesting man that one blesses the memory—and the notebook—of the faithful Boswell. Thomas Moore was quite intimate with Richard Brinsley Sheridan, but he never thought of asking him for some information on this particular incident in his life, the fact being that he had no definite intention of becoming his biographer. We know perfectly well how Boswell would have plied Johnson with questions on the subject, had it ever come to his ears that Johnson had undertaken to play the r?le of a knight-errant.
“Pray, sir, what did you say to Mathews when you sounded him?”
“Do you think, sir, that in any circumstances a married gentleman who is showing marked attentions to a virtuous young lady should be sounded by a young gentleman who has been entrusted with the duty of protecting the lady?”
Alas! instead of the unblushing indelicacy of Boswell, who hunted for trifles as a pig hunts for truffles, we are obliged to be content with the vagueness of a sister, whose memory, we have an uneasy feeling, was not quite so good as she thought it was.
And from the memory of this sister we have an account of the amazing elopement of Richard Sheridan with Elizabeth Linley.
When the young gentleman put her into the chaise that was waiting for them on the London road, Miss Linley had never thought of him except as a kind friend. She had accepted his services upon this occasion as she would those of a courier to conduct her to London, and thence to France, where she intended to enter a convent. The Miss Sheridans had lived in France, and had some friends at St.
Quentin, who knew of a very nice clean convent—an establishment which they could strongly recommend, and where she could find that complete seclusion which Miss Linley longed for, and their brother Dick was thought to be a very suitable companion for her on her way thither. Mrs. Lefanu (née Sheridan), who wrote out the whole story in after years, mentioned that her chivalrous brother was to provide a woman to act as her maid in the chaise; but as not the least reference to this chaperon is to be found in the rest of the story, we fear that it must be assumed either that he............