THE SKETCHER.

Otago Witness, Issue 2663, 29 March 1905, Page 70

THE SKETCHER.

A TRAGEDY OF MOBSLITY."

(Concluded.)

(T.P.'s Weekly.)

XIII. The delegates meet again at the historic Congress of Vienna; "Lawrence is sent to Vienna, and every facility is given him to make the portraits of the celebiities. Then it is thought that the illustrious peisonages of Rome should have their chance of being placed on canvas by the great aitist ; so to lloiiie lie is sent. There, also, he has special apartments, this time in the. Quini nal, and the Pope and the chief Cardinal are only too proud to give him sittings. And, finally, when, after this prolonged tour on the Continent, the artist returns to his native country, he is met by a deputation from the Royal Academy, and on the very evening of his landing he is the president of the Royal Academy. The Prince Regent is just as much his friend as the old King ; is delighted when the time conies to give him a knighthood and every other favour that Court patronage can secure him ; and, in short, never was there a more prosperous career. I XIV. The prosperity is not confined to mere professional success. The beautiful child and the beautiful youth have been transformed into a man of extraordinary attractiveness of person and of manners. He is not verytall, only sft 9in, but he is well proportioned ; he is athletic as well as handsome, has learned something of the art of pugilism ; above all, he has courtliness of bearing and manners that instinctively attract people, and especially women, to him. And he is drawn to women with, the same irresistible tendency as women to him. Impressionable, vehement, if perhaps not very profound, in emotion, very good-natured, ready to give his money an well «s his affection away to the first comer, he is never free from some entanglement. The desire to please in him is an irresistible instinct — above all, the desire to please women. The very sight of a petticoat seems to inspire and even to transform Lim. "He could not," says one of his biographers, "write a common answer to a dinner invitation without it assuming the tone of » billet- doux : the. very ec-mmonest conversation was held in that soft, low whisper and 1 with that tone of deference and interest which are so unusual and so calculated to please." In other words, lie was that creature of "mobility" which Byron — thinking o f himself — has so well described in the famous lines of "Don Juan. " XV. The portrait gallery of the female figures in his life, if it were all known and recorded, might, perhaps, equal in length, that of the great Goethe himself. We know, however, of only a few of the large family. They start with the wife of a German musician in the orchestra of George JI. Then the all-comquering hero passes into a highei* circle, for he is charged with being one of those wha caught for awhile the wandering fancy of Charlotte of Brunswick, the unhappy wife of George IV. There is a solemn investigation into the charges against Lawrence in this last case, and he is solemnly acquitted. There a.re others, with whom, however, we have, no concern. lot us get to the two pathetic and tragic figures who have suggested this essay. XVI. Which brings me back to Mrs Siddons. "I have at last, my friend," says that worthy woman, "attained the ten thousand pounds which) I set my heart upon, and am now perfectly at ease with respect to fortune." This small fortune secure at last, with ample provision made for her children, Mrs Siddons is about to shout aloud in joy over those beloved ones who are more to he-r than her art, than fame, than husband. And hear the Joud prean in which she sings tine praises of that- little flock of whom she was thinking when she made that historic re-entry on the stage at Drury Lane, and sought to affront fortune into- favour for her and for them. "At Christmas," she writes, "I brino- my d*iar gills from Miss Eaines, or, rather, she brings them to me." And then, comes this comprehensive burst of eulogy for all those beings whom she has brought into the world :

_ "Eliza is the most entertaining creature in the world ; Sally is vastly clever ; Maria and George are beautiful; and Harry a boy with very good parts, but not disposed to learning."

It is beautiful and it is pathetic; al! the more so as over two of this loved flock there hangs at this moment the coming spectre of tragic suffering and premature death, and tine person who bears in his hand this sharp weapon is none other than that creature of sunshine, and glory, and beauty of whom we have just been 'writing. Did any shape ever appear more unfitted for that of Ambassador of TVoe than the handsome, brilliant youth who has bounded with such exquisite ease from the taproom to the very steps of the throne! But so it is. Generous, beautiful, brilliant Lawrence ; he it is who is to spread desolation amid this little flock over whose bsauties and virtues the poor mother is crowing so loudly. XVII. Sir T. Lawrence's accmarnt-inoe with the Siddons family- began when he was a child Mrs Siddons, then in the height «of her provincial fame, was one of the many influen-

* (1) "An Artist's Love Story." by Oswald ~G. Knapp. (George Allen.) (2) "Dictionaiy of National Biography." Articles an Sarah Siclidons and Sir Thomas "Lawrence. (Smith, Elder.) (3) "Sarah Siddons," by Mr A. Kenned. (W. H. Allen.) (4) "Life of Sir Thomas Lawrence," by D. E. 'Ciliaj&St (.Collmrn ami Beatles^

ml friends he made while, at Bath \rhen he .was astounding the world jyith his brilliancy as a poi'trait painter at the age of 30. It was doubtless a great advantage to the child to secure a sitting from one so famous ; and m ith that motherly instinct which, was her strongest and her finest quality, she probably took to the poor child who, like herself, had upon his tiny shoulders the nil too premature burden of wage-earner for a family. It was a friendship which was destined to bring much sorrow to both her and him — to her in particular ; but yet it is curious that it was a friendship which never was entirely destroyed. Lawrence had many harsh critics for his conduct towards the family of Mrs Siddons : it will be seen that she was not one of them. Throughout the strange correspondence on which I am about to touch it will bo seen that the one judgment which silwavs lias something to say in extenuation for Lawrence is Mis Siddons's. And it is related that even when the last shadows of life were closing around her and when the grave had already closed on the two lovely girls with whose fate the name of Lawrence is inextricably bound up, she one day expressed the wish that Luvrenca should be one of the pall-bearers at her funeral. The wish was not realised : by the timelier death came Lawrence had preceded her. XVIII. Mrs Siddmis had three daughters. The eldest was Salfy, the second was Mollj* ; the third, Cecila, does not enter into the story. These daughters Lawrence knew from their childhood. There is seme obscurity as to which of them it was that caught his fant:y — at once so ardent and so transient. The author of "The Artist's Love Story" believes that his passion was first aroused by Sally, the elder; that then it was transferred to Molly, the younger; and that a thir<l time it was transferred back to Sally. Fanny, the niece of Mrs Siddons, in her well-known memoir, makes i.n mention of the first courtship of Sally; 5-lie is content to represent him as having changed his mind once, and not twice. Be this as it may, it is certain that he did fall in love with the two sisters in succession ; and it was thus that there arose the complications which make the tragedy of the two sisters. It is a kind of tragedy which is not unknown even in literary history. Everybody knows the story of Burger, the great German poet, who fell in love w ith on© sister while engaged to be married to the ether, and who. marrying the t-wo in succession, broke their lives and his own. In the case of Lawrence, we have ample materials for forming a judgment on the transaction, though, of course, nobody ever has all the materials that make up a love story. These stories ai*e made up of a thousand factors ; and not 'even the persons involved can themselves give a. full account of all the incidents, emotions, cross currents of feeling and of events which have made the tragedy. The two or three know more than anybody else, a,nd much of what they know they never tell. XIX. In the case of Lawrence and tlie two Siddon girls there was added a very unhappy complication in the fact that both the girls were very delicate. They were both threatened' with consumption from an earl}' age, and it was of consumption that they both ultimately died. It was probably the seeds of this terrible disease that gave to them something of the unearthly beauty for which they were celebrated 1 ; and perhaps also some of that vehemence of feeling, that ardent desire to live every moment to the utmost which is one of the characteristics of the consumptive. The life that Nature has destined to be short is often, by one of Nature's strange freaks of compensation, made so vehement, so vivid, so avid of emotion and enjoyment, as to be able to crush into its short years as much as has found space enough in. a longer life. But one can see how this constant terror of early death, this intense delicacy and 1 susceptibility of body and mind, made the whole tragedy the more tragic to all those who were concerned! in it. Of all the figures the most pitiful and tragic is that of the mother. This woman, cold, stern, arrogant; the tepid wife, the jealous colleague, the stem and pitiless baggier, becomes simply quivering, throbbing, agonised flesh and blood where the health of the beloved ones is concerned 1 . XX. The hideous drudgery and the constant and 1 tiring change which her profession imposes upon her sends her far away from the sides? of these loved cues; and in days when there were no telpgraphs, no trains, and no penny postage, you can see her agony of suspense reached fo heights of poignancy, uncertainty, sometimes even horror, that move and appal. And in the letters \thieh she sends feverishly from all the spots where she has hastily encamped you see her in the midst of her hard work ami incessant travelling, in the sreenroom where she is dressing, in the stage coach where she is being jostled, in the packet, which vainly awaits favouring breezes in Ibe midst of winter cyclones— in the midst ol it an you see her always compelled 1 to appear before the footlights, and speak her words and play her part in the dreams of rassion, while her own heart -?trino- s are being torn to shreds by anxiety a, s to her own Tittle flock. These are the facts that lend so much additional interest to the letters of Mis Siddons which I find in these different volumes before me. and which give them such an intense life that you can hear through the pale ink and across nearly a century, the low, deep wail of a mothers suffering heart as 'clearly as though it were just at your inner ear. XXI. How the love story began between Lnwr&nce and Molly I find nc- tc-timony. but after it had gone on for some time' Lawrence, for some reason or other, found that it could not be continued. According to Fanny Kemble's account he became deeply dejected, moody, icstlcs*, and eviwSldied^ 1 '^ 14 " a ,

'■ Violent scenes of the most painful emotion of which the cause was inexplicable and 'incomprehensible, took place between himself and Mrs Siddons, to whom, finally, in a paroxysm of self-abandoned misery, he confessed that he had mistaken his feelmo -s . . and ended by imploring permission to transfer his affections from one

to the other sister." Of Maria Siddons there are few records which help one to form an image of her beino-. but there are a few from which one can "infer certain sides at least of her character. Thera is a letter of hers in which she repudiates with almost too much vehemence the charge of desiring an excessive love of admiration. "I am," she says, writing to a friend, '■ a little angry with you for some part of your letter, where you wish I may resume my favourite employment of conquestmaking.' You are deceiv'd, I assure you. I have" an abomination of it. Some people mar do it innocently enough, but I particularly feel how wrong it is, and I hopa I shall always shun it. lam very serious, you think/ but. I always am when lam suppos'd, even in joke, to be a conquestmaker. How little pleasure you have yourself, and you may render another miserable perhaps. " I'm very sure you despise it as much as I do. You say a great manypretty things to me, and I am now so little usd to hear them that I almost fear you flatter me ; yet, if you do, I will imagine you love me well enough not to perceive it yourself. I had much rather be lov'd, I assure you, than admir'd, though I am so fond df this admiration. Well, when you knew me there was more justice in this accusation than there is now, I hope."

Methinks the lady doth protest too much. It is evident from the subsequent acts of Molly that she had a certain strain, of vindictiveness in her character ; perhaps even of not very edifying, though, perfectly natural, jealousy. Her sister Sally, somehow or other, produces an impression of greater amiability and greater softness. But, then, it is hard to tell; the materials are too scanty, and the more I live the more I feel that judgments upon human character are much more likely to be wrong than right — except by those who have had life-long acquaintance with each other, and even those do not often knoweach other. Life has always, with its multiform of facts, revelations to make, even in those you think you know besfc. Helmar was only one of many tens of thousands of households where two people can live beside each other, love, and have children, and yet find out that they have all the while 'been strangers to one another ; have known no more of each other than though they had been dwellers in different planets.

XXII. I pass no judgment, then, on the character of Molly Siddons further than to say that- she was evidently a. woman of veryintense feelings, and that she could hate and; love "with the same intensity. Possibly Lawrence saw something of this — saw dimly into those vast depths of rancour and vindictiveness which were hidden under the softness of a girl's cheek and the sweetness of her smile ; and that this discovery is accountable for his hurriedly drawing" back from the abyss of marriage to such a nature. At all events, h& did cease to love Molly Siddons, and at the same moment was caught in the very whirlwind of passion for her sister. It was in the midst of these events that Molly Siddons developed suddenly and rapidly the illness which was to kill her. One can easily reconstruct for oneself the position of the wretched Mrs Siddons in the midst of such an accumulation of sorrows ana) complexities. Her position was complicated further by the fact that Lawrence always exercised this strange fascination over her, and that when he pleaded her indignation, her disapproval, her suspicion, were gradually swept away by the tornado of his eloquence and his p Q ssion ; backed, of course, by that wondrous combination of fascinations which made him the darling of so many hearts. Was ever, indeed, a mother in a position of such perplexity? To listen to Lawrence was apparently to betray and, perchance, to help in killing one adored daughter ; to refuse to listen, to him was to apparently betray and help to kill the other. And finally the poor woman's horrible situation was rendered! more impossible by the fact that for some reason or other she had made up her mind that the world should hear nothing of th 3 story ; and of all persons in the world the person from whom it must be most carefully concealed was her husband, the father of the two poor girls.

XXIII. In the midst of her hesitations between, the two sisters, Molly's illness became so aggravated that she had to be sent to Clifton air in the hope that t-he breezes of that delightful region might help her to throw off the disease which was steadily gaining upon her in London. It is while Molly is in Clifton that we begin to sea those poignant letters to which I have already alluded. Molly Siddons was entrusted to the care of a Mrs Pennmgtofl, an old friend of the family, a woman who comes very well out of the whole correspondence *as a kindly, well-intentioned, good-bearted woman ; romantic, and ready to listen to a tale of tlespondent love, and yet with some common sense ; weak in yielding up to a certain point when youth, and love pleaded their ever-renewed protest against the difficulties that stand between them and their clamorous passion ; and yet strong enough to draw back when what she regards as the boundaries of decorum and good! faith seem to be ioi peril of being overpassed.

" Your goodness to my dear girl," wiite3 Mrs Siddons to this friend, •' is what I expected, but I am not able to express my gratitude for it. Dear Soul, add still to the number of your favours by telling me every particular about her .- her accounts to Sally are too oeneral to content so restless a creature as I, unfortunately, must ever remain. . • I know she went in the ball ; I hope it did her no luiui. This weather Las rrevcutcdj

lier riding, too ; tell me about her pulse, her perspirations, her cough — everything." '"You give me," she writes again, "all the comfort which a rational mind can communicate." And then she talks of the cruel Fate which keeps her away from the side of her child, where, she could ■watch " each change of her lovely, varying, interesting countenance. Oh, heciyen ! " she says, breaking, after the fashion of her times and of her profession, into quotation. "'I have an ill-divining soul.'" And then she breaks off to say, " I must go and dress for Lord Randolph," and so* she writes, with that curious mi: lure of prose and poetry which is characW'siic of these letters, "so God bless you, f-nd all your house. Give a thousand loves to my beloved Maria, and tell her her mother's heart is always with her. Adieu, dearest and best friend."

XXIV.

The distracted mother has become so anxious that she sends her daughter Sally to sit by the side of her dying sister;. And so the two sisters are together at Clifton — the one that has been, the one that is loved by Lawrence, .and both still more influenced by his strange and resistless personality than by that" of any other human being ; the one changed from love to something like hatred, the other fighting between the passion he has kindled and the sense of loyalty to her sister — the sense of peril to herself in a love that can be so violent and so fickle. Inside this deathbedroom in this house in Clifton there are all the materials and all the dramatis persons; for one of those tragedies and conflicts of real life which are so much more startling than anything that the most .daring melodramatist ventures to put upon the stage. And now imagine, in the midst of all this, the incursion _of Lawrence himself — at that moment in flic very frenzy of his love for Sally ; seeing in her all the perfections, regarding her aa the one thing for which life is worth living, and convincing himself that he has to choose between winning her or facing self-inflicted death. Imagine, also, that he has already some suspicion of the strange and terrible scene which is to be enacted around the last hours of the sister he has jilted ; and then regard such a scene, and the vow which will he extorted, as putting the seal on his happiness — digging its grave. For this is what occurred. Lawrence came down from London to Birmingham, where Mrs Siddons is appearing nightly; sought an interview with Mrs Siddons ; and there, by every appeal in the long gamut, from tears to threats, from declarations of wild devotion to threats of suicide., sought to obtain the mother's approval to his marriage to the daughter whose charms have outrivalled those of the other.

We have full descriptions in the letters of Mrs Siddons of the scene which was enacted between her and Lawrence in the trying circumstances. They are far too long to quote, but I must give a few passages to make the story intelligible. Sally was still in Birmingham when Lawrence arrived, and her departure seems to have produced in him a crisis of nerves ; and in an interview with Mrs Siddons, the two went through the same round of tragic passion as the poor woman was nightly — for bread — enacting on the stage in mimic and invented guise. '" Mr L ," she writes to Mrs Pennington, who is still sitting at the side of Molly as that poor girl is slowly dying, "was at Birmingham. He has left this place without letting a soul know whither he has gone." "My Dear Soul, — I know not if Sally has told you that Mr L was at Birmingham- when she left me. He has left this place without letting a. soul know whither he has gone. His hopes with regard to Sally I, with her own concurrence, told him were entirely at an end, representing at the same time the situation, of her sister. I suppose he is almost mad with remorse, and I think it is likely he may at this moment be at Clifton. I pray God his frenzy may not impel him to som« desperate action ! " The anticipations of Mrs Siddons were realised. Lawrence, a prey to many conflicting emotions — to love, to terror, to remorse, to suspense — had found it impossible to remain away from the small house at Clifton, in which this poignant drama, whose elemental forces had been set in motion by him, Avas speeding towards its appointed end. Mrs Pennington dutifully tells Mrs Siddons all that has happened, and. this brings a letter from Mrs Siddons which te^s in more detail the scene between her and Lawrence at Birmingham, in which he had made so vehement a plea for forgiveness as to the one daiighter and the right to the love of the other. One gathers all the conflict of the scene from- this letter of Mrs Siddons. "Oh, my dear friend," she writes, "how my heart bleeds for all the trouble and anxiety you have and will endure on my account ; indeed, indeed it does. I shudder to think of the effect this wretched lr.adm.'in'*. frenzy lias had on you. I know Ihe effect too well, for he well knows he has terrified me into mv toleration for his love ior Sally by the horrible desperation of his conduct ; and if his own words are to be believed, I have more than once 'shut ■upon him the- gate of self-destruction' by compromising (though without that self3>osseos>ing wisdom) as you have now done. Yes, that dear Sally is indeed ;\n angel, and. my dear friend, she lov'd him; think, then, on the tremendous situation I was placed in, and let my tenderness for his feelings be the excuse of my weak indulgence. You now know the- whole, and she ha? seen and known enough, of him to malt© Iser wary. You will advise, you will warn this best beloved of her mother's heart — you, to whom it has Tbeenj given to calm tlie s?a when it roarp wil<l«Bt, for to that dreadful image have you well compared this unhappy man, on whom an evil fate se^ms to attend, and wreaks its vengeance on all the most UNFORTUNATE SOULS WITH WHOM HE IS CONCERNED. That so many excellencies should be thus: alloyed by ungovernable passion is lament-

able indeed. A dutious son, a tender brother, a kind and zealous friend — all this he is. I have seen him, and I bless God and you that you have reasoned him out of some extravagance that might have been dreadful in its present or future effects upon my POOR GIRLS or on himself. He appeared to be extremely repentant, and I was impelled not onty by policy, but commiseration, tc treat him with more lenity than I thought I could have done. I gave him my sincere forgiveness and calm advice, but told him positively that he had NOTHING MORE "to hope from ME except my good wishes for his success and happiness. Oh, may I never have the painful part to play again ! My love to the dear girls."

XXVII

Meanwhile, pity our poor Mrs Penningtoii', standing between the two girls with all the responsibility of a mother towards them in such an hour, but without a mother's authority. Imagine her approached, too, by this strange creature — semi-divine in his beauty, and diabolic at the same time in his passion-tossed eoul. Mrs Pennington is a typical English figure ; and 1 there is something a little grotesque, amid all the high tragedy of the drama, in her curious combination of prudery and romance, in her compromises between her devotion to Mrs Grundy on the one side and her woman's universal and indestructible sympathy with a love story on the other. Lawrence approaches her with a letter; it is one of the most curious documents I have erer read, and if it were not that my space is limited I would give it in full. Theso old love letters have always a weird and enduring interest. Written in the transient hour of supreme emotion, never expected to reach any but the fevr eyes for which they were "intended, speaking passion in all its sincerity, and throbbing when the hearts from which they came are silent dust ; what pathos there is in them ! what reality ! The letter of Lawrence, perhaps, gains additional interest from the fact that it is written in a language which has passed out of fashion ; it is the eighteenth, century ; it is the language of the times when the ponderous rhetoric of Samuel Johnson was supposed to be the model of all style. I give a few sentences as a specimen of the entire letter :

"Madame, — If you are generous and delicate (and talents should be connected with <hese qualities), not only the step I would take would be excus'd, but you would render me the service I solicit and keep it an inviolable secret.. If you are not, or let suspicion of the person who requests ifc weigh against the impulse of your nature — it ind«ed matters not much, I shall only have heap'd on myself an aggravation of misry that at present is all but madness ! "My name is Lawrence, and you, then, I believe, know that I stand in the most afflicting situation, possible ! A man charg'd (I trust untruly in their lasting effect) with having inflicted pangs on one lovely creature which, in their bitterest extent, he himself now suffers from her sister !

"I love — exist but for Miss Siddons, and am decisively rejected by her.

"If I have touched her heart — would I knew I had — her present conduct is the more noble, correct, and pure as every thought and actiom of her sweet -character! If founded on the consideration. I hope it is, I will not, dare not, rail, hardly murmur, at the decision which exalts the Object of my Love. . . "I know, madam, that secrecy should alwaye be justified by reason ; and the reasons for it in the present case are very obvious. Miss Maria's situation is r . I know, a very dangerous one. If it is really render'd more so by feelings I may have excited, the least mention of me would be hazardous in the extreme. If it is not, and her complainings on that head are but the weakness of sick fancy, perhaps of hope, wishing to attribute her illness to any other than the true fix'd and alarming cause, still it will be giving an additional distress ta her sister, and afford another opportunity for wounding me with a real, THO' NOT INTENTIONAL, Injustice. ... I know her rectitude and worth ! . . . My situation is a desperate one, but my Soul is vet unwilling ta be subdued by ifc. A dreary future, shadows, clouds, and darkness resting on it, and no gleam of lioht to cheer the prospect. All answers to me in the negative, ' Yet Love will hope where reason would despair.' "

xxvm.

And so it goes on in page after page of fine sentimental Johnsonese ; appealing, protesting, indignant, despondent, obviously as sincere as all emotion is when it is face to face with the peril of loss. Here is a pretty situation for our poor fluttering chaperon ; that nairotv-winged, timorous, decorous hen that has to throw her wings around this tragic flock— which is not her own — with the real guardian, tall, stern, look-nosed, brilliant-eyed, authoritative, in far-off Birmingham enacting feigned tragedy, while the tragedy of her own two loved chicks is thus being played in her absence ! It is on a broiling day in August that poor Mrs Pennington has to pass through the fiery furnace of these conflicting passions. Lawrence is at the Bear Inn of Clifton ; and between tbs inn and the house where Molly lic^ dying, and vhere Sally is peeping thrcuch the blinds at that dangerous, changeful, fascinating, irresistible figure, Mrs Pennington has to trudge backwards and fcrwaids — panting, irresolute, distracted — speaking at one moment withe true Anglo-Saxon hard sense that Mr Lawrence must retain liis composure, and the -next promising to bring him and the girl for whom he pours out his lava tide of passion, together ; and all the time compelled to keep away from the death-chamber, with its poor dying creature gazing into vacancy, or bitteily recalling the past so loved and so hated. There, indeed, is a picture of a tortured chaperon ■which may well excite a little sympathy -md some tears, and some of the laughter which alone makes life, ia its poignant

hours, tolerable. Lawrence is induced at last, partl\ by an interview with Sally and partly' by the persuasions of chaperon Mrs Pennington, to leave for London ; and then there comes the hour and the scene he so much dreaded, with evidently the kind of dreadful oath which he had as in a vision foreseen as the destined of the drama and the death of his hopes.

XXIX.

I have rarely read a more impressive and touching document than the letter in which Mrs Pennington describes the last houis of Molly Siddons. I wish I had space enough to give the letter in full; but I must be content with giving the passage in which Molly imposed upon her sister the awful vow which was to haunt and often to torture her for the remainder of her days.

"In her dying accents, her last solemn injunction was given and repeated some hours afterwards in the presence of Mrs Siddons. She called her sister — said how dear, how sweet, how good she. was — that one only care for har welfare pressed on her mind. ' Promise me, my dear Sally, never to be the wife of Mr Lawrence. I cannot bear to think of your being so.' Sally evaded the promise ; not but that a thousand recent circumstances had made up her mind to the- sacrifice, but that she did not like the possitive tye. She would have evaded the subject also, and said, 'Dear Maria, think of nothing that agitates you at this time.' She insisted that it did not agitate her, but that it was necessary to her repose to pursue the subject. Sally still evaded the promise, but said, ' Oh ! it is impossible,' meaning that she could answer for herself, but which Maria understood and construed into an impossibility of the tvent ever taking place, and replied : ' I am content, my dear sister — I am satisfied.' . . .

'"She desired to have prayers read, and followed her angelic mother, who read them, and who appeared like a blessed spirit ministering about her, with the utmost clearness, accuracy, and fervour. She then turned the conversation U.- you, and - <\d : That man told you. mother, he had destroyed my letters. I have no opinion of his honour, and I entreat you to demand them' ; nor would be easy till she had given the strongest assurances that she would use every means in her power to procure them from you. or a confirmation that they vrpve destroyed. Strong and delicate ■<vf>re the reasons that she alleged- for this request. She then said Sully had promised her never to think of an union with MiLawrence, and appealed to her sister to confirm it, who, quite overcome, replied, ' I did not promise, dear, dying angel : but I will, and — do, if you require it.' 'Thank you. Sully ; my dear mother — Mrs Pennington — bear witness. Sally, give m© your hand — you promise never to be his wife. Mother — Mis Pennington — lay your hands on hers.' (We did <-o.) 'You understand? Bear witness ' We bowed, and were speechless. 'Sally, sacred, sacred be this promise' — stretching out her hand find pointing her forefinger— ' REMEMBER ME, and God bless you 1' *

Who can see into the human heart ? What cunning scales are there which can weigh all its motives with unerring skill? That terrible scene ; was it love of her si&ter, was it jealousy; was it the clear vision of coming death; was it the last stab of insatiate vengeance? Whatever bs the explanation, this girl had the boundless affection of her own family. And amid all this awful scene of burning and relentless hatred there are other incidents, which make one feel that there was sweetness as well as gall in this tortured soul. "M - love, there is a heavenly expression on your countenance," said poor Sarah Siddons to her child within a few hours of her vanishing into dust and untrodden space. 'Do you think so?" said Molly Siddons, looking rourfd and smiling graciously uipon us. "Her mother I Her Sally!" were words for ever on her lip^s, and murmured £o the last moment, says Mrs Pennington.

"At one time, under excessive oppression and suffering, she prayed with vehemence. 'Now, now,'- she said, 'let it be now!' but, correcting herself, she added, 'That's not the way' ; and, dropping her sweet eyes ?nd folding her hands meekly, she continued, 'Lord, I beseech Thee to release me.' "'

Such is the human soul with its complexities and contradictions ; its hatreds, its lows, its final softness of surrender when fcbe great hour comes. And meantune, what of the poor wretch who bad been expecting this scene ; who had looked iorward to it as a sentence of death to hop<- — to heppiness? The facsimile of his leply is published in Mi* Oswald Knapp's book ; the writing is blurred and trembling — a revelation of the agitation in which it was written. Above remorse, above all grief, above all the sacred obligations of inspect far death and suffering the voice of the man's passion for the woman he loved so madly ro&e like a sirocco; for this is what he wrote :

"It is only my hand that shakes, not my mind. I have played deeply for her, and you think she will still escape m«. I'll tell you a secret. It is possible she may. Mark the end. You have all play'd your parts admirably ! If the scene you have so accurately de^fcribed is mention'd by you to any human being I will pursue your name with execration."

This letter is practically the end of the story. It produced — as it was calculated to produce — an impression of horror on the minds of all th'j women who saw it; on Mrs Pemungton first, then on Mrs Siddons, finally on Sally Siddons herself. That poor girl Teas stiffened in the determination to keep sacred the vow she had made to her dying sister; and never again had she anything like free or loving communication with Lawrence.

But ihe final victory was not achieved without much suffering ; there is even reason to doubt whether ciomptete victory was ever achieved. There is in the letters of Sally Siddons every now and then wistful allusions to Lawrence — inquiries that only too conclusively prove the dominance ho still held over her inner and unchanging heart. "T see him. as he is," she writes to a friend : "yet, oh pardon me, if I sometimes cast over him that brilliant veil of enchantment which concealed his errors from, our fascinated eyes ; I do, indeed.

. I then think that the world does not contain another creature who could so answer my idea of perfection." "It shiould," she writes in a later letter, "be my constant prayer to be always kept at some distance from that being whose fascination I have not t-he power to esca.pe should I be drawn "within the circle of his magic." It is a proof of the. fascination of the man that in spite of that awful death-bed scene of Molly, in spite of the grief he has brought to the other .andi even more beloved, daughter, Mrs Siddons constantly sees him in her dressing room at the theatre, and he remains on terms of friendship with the other members of the Kemble family. Poor Sally Siddons is wounded that her mother never mentions the name which is ever near her heart. One night, too, the girl sees him in the theatre ; she bows to him ; he does not return the bow. She bowed three times then in succession ; he still makes no salute in return. "I began," she says, "to feel a little surprised, and almost to fancy he would! not see me ; to be certain of this I took an opera glass, caught his eye, and immediately repeated my salutation- three times ; he actually stared me in the face without even once smiling or answering me by the smallest inclination of 4iis head. This behaviour astonishes and" grieves me." There was an explanation ; but the two were divided for ever ; and. soon their love story came to the same end as that of Molly.

XXXI

Consumption attacked Sally as it had attacked 1 Molly ; and then there are the same wild wailings by the distracted mother. She shrieks for news ; she beats the air with impotent hands ; when the malady has become hopeless she calls on the winds and the waves to let her reach her daughter, for she is touring in Ireland, and it is in London that her daughter is suddenlystruck down. "I am perfectly astonished"," she writes to Mrs Fitzhugh, one of her intimate friends, "that I have not heard from you after begging it so earnestly. Good God ! what can be the reason that intelligence must be extorted, as it were, in circumstances like mine. . . I hope to sail to-night, and to reach London on t-he third day. God knows when that will be. Oh God ' what, a home to return to, after all I have been doing ! and what a prospect to the end of my clays." At Shrewsbury she gets bad news ; but her husband tells her not to risk her health, and perhaps her life, by over- rapid travelling. Miss Wilkinson is called from the room while she is reading the letter; she returns immediately with a* scared and pallid face; Mrs Siddons looks, and knows her daughter is dead. She sinks back speechless, and for a day lay " cold and torpid as a stone, with sruireply a sicrn of life." Sally

was the eldest daughter and dearest; sin was 27 when she died.

XXXII

As for Sir Thomas Lawrence, he lived nearly 30 years afterwards ; climbing ever higher up the ladder of fnme : and when he died they gave him a great funeral in Ht. Paul's. But what was his inner life ; v. hat he thought in the dim recesses of his mind ; what he remembered in the chambers of his memory only he could tell. And now these letters of his in their mad agonies* their violence, their brutalities, remain ; and also the letters of the women lie loved and ruined ; while he and they are silent enough now ! Which being pondered on, doth teach hs lesson. — T. P.

(The End.)