Part 16

But this criticism is only true if one can believe his sister's story of the marriage. If it is true that Sheridan set out from England with Miss Linley with the intention of so compromising her that she should be compelled to marry him, at the same time pretending to her and to his brother to be actuated by the highest motives in respect of the ill-used girl, it is impossible to think of him except with contempt.

Happily the weight of evidence is overpoweringly in Sheridan's favour. We may think of him as a rash, an inconsiderate, and a culpably careless boy to take it upon him to be the girl's companion to the French convent, but we refuse to believe that he was ever capable of acting the grossly disingenuous part attributed to him by his sister, and accepted without question by his melodious biographer. There are many people, however, who believe that when a man marries a woman, no matter in what circumstances, he has “acted the part of a gentleman” in regard to her, and must be held to be beyond reproach on any account whatsoever so far as the woman is concerned. In the eyes of such censors of morality, as in the eyes of the law, the act of marriage renders null and void all ante-nuptial deeds; and it was probably some impression of this type which was acquired by Sheridan's sister, inducing her to feel sure (after a time) that her brother's memory would suffer if his biographer were to tell the story of his inconsiderate conduct in running away with Elizabeth Linley, unless it was made clear that he married her the first moment he had to spare. She tried to save her brother's memory by persuading her own to accommodate itself to what she believed to be her brother's emergency. She was a good sister, and she kept her memory well under control.

But what did the father of the young lady think of the matter? What did the people of Bath, who were well acquainted with all the actors engaged in this little comedy, think of the matter? Happily these questions can be answered by appealing to facts rather than to the well-considered recollections of a discreet lady.

We know for certain that Mr. Linley, who was, as one might suppose, fully equipped to play the part of the enraged father of the runaway girl, turned up at the place of her retreat--he had no trouble in learning in what direction to look for her--and having found her and the young gentleman who had run away with her, did he, under the impulse of his anger, fanned by his worldly knowledge, insist with an uplifted horsewhip upon his marrying her without a moment's delay? Mr. Linley knew Bath, and to know Bath was to know the world. Was he, then, of the same opinion as that expressed (according to his sister's narrative) by young Sheridan to persuade Miss Linley to be his bride--namely, that it would be impossible for her to show her face in Bath unless as the wife of Richard Brinsley Sheridan?

Nothing of the sort. Whatever reproaches he may have flung at his daughter, however strong may have been his denunciation of the conduct of the man who had run away with her, they had not the effect either of inducing his daughter or her companion to reveal to him the fact that they had been married for several days, or of interrupting the friendly relations that had existed for nearly two years between himself and young Sheridan. The dutiful memory of Miss Sheridan records that Mr. Linley, “after some private conversation with Mr. Sheridan, appeared quite reconciled to his daughter, but insisted on her returning to England with him (Mr. Linley) to fulfil several engagements he had entered into on her account. The whole party set out together the next day, Mr. Linley having previously promised to allow his daughter to return to Lille when her engagements were over.”

The comedy of the elopement had become a farce of the “whimsical” type. Nothing more amusing or amazing has ever been seen on the vaudeville stage. The boy and the girl run off together and get married. The infuriated father follows them, ruthlessly invades their place of refuge, and then, “after some private conversation” with his daughter's husband, who does not tell him that he is her husband, says to the young woman, “My dear, you must come home with me to sing at a concert.”

“Certainly, papa,” replies the girl. “Wait a minute, and I'll go too,” cries the unconfused husband of the daughter. “All right, come along,” says the father, and they all take hands and sing the ridiculous trio which winds up the vaudeville after it has run on inconsequentially for a merry forty minutes--there is a _pas de trois_, and the curtain falls!

Alas, for the difference between Boswell the bald and Moore the melodious! The bald prose of Boswell's diaries may have made many of the personages with whom he dealt seem silly, but that was because he himself was silly, and, being aware of this fact, the more discriminating of his readers have no great difficulty in arriving at the truth of any matter with which he deals. He would never have accepted unreservedly such a narrative as that which Moore received from Mrs. Lefanu (_née_ Sheridan), and put into his own language, or as nearly into his own language as he could. But Moore found it “so hard to narrate familiar events eloquently,” he complained. He actually thought that Mrs. Lefanu's narrative erred on the side of plausibility! The mysterious elopement, the still more mysterious marriage, and the superlatively mysterious return of the fugitives and the irate father hand-in-hand, he regarded as events so commonplace as not to be susceptible of lyrical treatment. But the most farcical of the doings of his own _Fudge Family_ were rational in comparison with the familiar events associated with the flight to France of his hero and heroine. The _Trip to Scarborough_ of Sheridan the farce-writer was founded on much more “familiar events” than this extraordinary trip to Lille, as narrated for the benefit of the biographer by Mrs. Lefanu.

What seems to be the truth of the whole matter is simply that Sheridan undertook to be a brother to Elizabeth Linley, and carried out his compact faithfully, without allowing anything to tempt him to depart, as he wrote to Charles, “even in thought from the honour and consistency which engaged [him] at first.” It must be remembered that he was a romantic boy of twenty, and this is just the age at which nearly every boy--especially a boy in love--is a Sir Galahad. As for Miss Linley, one has only to look at her portrait to know what she was. She was not merely innocent, she was innocence itself.

When Mr. Linley appeared at Lille he accepted without reserve the explanation offered to him by his daughter and by Sheridan; and, moreover, he knew that although there was a school for scandal located at Bath, yet so highly was his daughter thought of in all circles, and so greatly was young Sheridan liked, that no voice of calumny would be raised against either of them when they returned with him. And even if it were possible that some whisper, with its illuminating smile above the arch of a painted fan, might be heard in the Assembly Rooms when some one mentioned the name of Miss Linley in connection with that of young Sheridan and with the trip to Lille, he felt convinced that such a whisper would be robbed of its sting when every one knew that the girl and the boy and the father all returned together and on the best terms to Bath.

As the events proved, he had every right to take even so sanguine a view of the limitations of the range of the Pump Room gossips. On the return of the three from Lille no one suggested that Sheridan and Miss Linley should get married. No one except the scoundrel Mathews suggested that Sheridan had acted badly or even unwisely, though undoubtedly he had given grounds for such implications. The little party returned to Bath, and Miss Linley fulfilled her concert and oratorio engagements, went into society as before, and had at her feet more eligible suitors than had ever knelt there. We have it on the authority of Charles Sheridan, the elder brother, that in Bath the feeling was that Richard had acted as a man of honour in taking the girl to the convent at Lille. Writing to their uncle, Mr. Chamberlaine, he expressed surprise that “in this age when the world does not abound in Josephs, most people are (notwithstanding the general tendency of mankind to judge unfavourably) inclined to think that he (Richard) acted with the strictest honour in his late expedition with Miss L., when the circumstances might allow of their being very dubious on this head without incurring the imputation of being censorious.”

This testimony as to what was the opinion in Bath regarding the expedition is extremely valuable, coming as it does from one who was never greatly disposed to take a brotherly or even a friendly view of Richard's conduct at any time--coming as it does also from a man who had been in love with Miss Linley.

At any rate this escapade of young Mr. Sheridan was the most fortunate for him of any in which he ever engaged, and he was a man of many escapades, for it caused Elizabeth Linley to fall in love with him, and never was a man beloved by a sweeter or more faithful woman. To know how beautiful was her nature one has only to look at her face in either of the great portraits of her which are before us to-day. No characteristic of all that is held to be good and gracious and sympathetic--in one word, that is held to be womanly, is absent from her face. No man that ever lived was worthy of such a woman; but if only men who are worthy of such women were beloved by them, mankind would be the losers. She loved Sheridan with the truest devotion--such devotion as might be expected from such a nature as hers--and she died in the act of writing to him the love-letter of a wife to her dearly loved husband.

They did not get married until a year after the date of their flight to the Continent, and then they were described as bachelor and spinster. Neither of them ever gave a hint, even in any of the numerous letters which they exchanged during this period, that they had gone through the ceremony of marriage at that village near Calais. More than once a strained situation would have been relieved had it been possible to make such a suggestion, for now and again each of the lovers grew jealous of the other for a day or two. But neither said, “Pray remember that you are not free to think of marrying any one. We are husband and wife, although we were married in secret.” Neither of them could make such an assertion. It would not have been true. What seems to us to be the truth is that it was Sir Galahad who acted as protector to his sister when Richard Brinsley Sheridan went with Elizabeth Linley to France.

THE AMAZING DUELS

WHEN young Mr. Sheridan returned to Bath after his happy little journey to France with Miss Linley and back with Mr. Linley, he may have believed that the incident was closed. He had done all that--and perhaps a little more than--the most chivalrous man of experience and means could be expected to do for the young woman toward whom he had stood in the position of a protecting brother. He had conducted her to the convent at Lille, on which she had set her heart, and he had been able to explain satisfactorily to her father on his arrival at the hotel where he and Miss Linley were sojourning in the meantime, what his intentions had been when he had eloped with her from Bath. No doubt he had also acted as Miss Linley's adviser in respect of those negotiations with her father which resulted in the happy return of the whole family party to London.

In London he heard that Mathews, the scoundrel who had been pursuing Miss Linley in the most disreputable fashion, was in town also, and that, previous to leaving Bath, he had inserted in the Chronicle a defamatory advertisement regarding him (Sheridan); and on this information coming to his ears he put his pistols into his pocket and went in search of Mathews at the lodgings of the latter.

Miss Sheridan tells us about the pistols in the course of her lucid narrative, and states on her own responsibility that when he came upon Mathews the latter was dreadfully frightened at the sight of one of the pistols protruding from Sheridan's pocket. Mr. Fraser Rae, the competent biographer of Sheridan, smiles at the lady's statement. “The sight of the pistols would have alarmed Sheridan's sisters,” he says, “but it is in accordance with probability that he (Mathews) expected a hostile meeting to follow as a matter of course. He must have been prepared for it, and he would have been strangely ignorant of the world in which he lived if he had deemed it unusual.”

But Mr. Fraser Rae was not so strangely ignorant of the world in which Sheridan and Mathews lived as to fancy that there was nothing unusual in a gentleman's going to ask another gentleman whom he believed to have affronted him, for an explanation, with a pair of pistols in his pocket. In the circumstances a duel would have been nothing unusual; but surely Mr. Fraser Rae could not have fancied that Sheridan set out with the pistols in his pocket in order to fight a duel with Mathews in the man's lodgings, without preliminaries and without seconds. If Mathews caught sight of the butt of a pistol sticking out of Sheridan's pocket he had every reason to be as frightened as Miss Sheridan declared he was, for he must have believed that his visitor had come to murder him.

At any rate, frightened or not frightened, pistols or no pistols, Mathews, on being interrogated by Sheridan as to the advertisement in the _Bath Chronicle_, assured him that he had been grossly misinformed as to the character of the advertisement. It was, he affirmed, nothing more than an inquiry after Sheridan, which the family of the latter had sanctioned. He then, according to Miss Sheridan, expressed the greatest friendship for his visitor, and said that he would be made extremely unhappy if any difference should arise between them.

So young Mr. Sheridan, balked of his murderous intentions, returned with unsullied pistols to his hotel, and set out for Bath with Miss Linley and her father.

But if he fancied that Mathews had passed out of his life he was quickly undeceived. Before he had time to take his seat at the family table he had got a copy of the newspaper containing the advertisement, of the tenor of which Mathews had told him in London he had been misinformed; and now his sisters made him fully aware of the action taken by the same man on learning of the flight of Sheridan and Elizabeth Linley. The result was that he now perceived what every one should have known long before--namely, that Mathews was a scoundrel, who should never have been allowed to obtain the footing to which he had been admitted in the Sheridan and Linley families.

It appears that the moment Mathews heard that Miss Linley had been carried beyond his reach, he rushed to the Sheridans' house, and there found the girls and their elder brother, who had been wisely communicated with by the landlord, and had left his retirement in the farmhouse in the country to take charge of the sisters in the absence of their brother Richard. Mathews behaved like a madman--no unusual _rôle_ for him--heaping reproaches upon the absent member of the family, and demanding to be told of his whereabouts. He seems to have been encouraged by Charles Sheridan, who had unwisely said something in disparagement of his brother. Mathews had the effrontery to avow his passion for Elizabeth Linley, and in the bitterest terms to accuse Richard Sheridan of having acted basely in taking her beyond his reach.

Then he hastened to Richard Sheridan's friend and confidant, a young man named Brereton, and to him he sent messages of friendship and, possibly, condolence to Mr. Linley, though his object in paying this visit was undoubtedly not to endeavour to exculpate himself as regards Mr. Linley, but to find out where the fugitives were to be found. He may have had visions of pursuing them, of fighting a duel with Richard Sheridan, and if he succeeded in killing him, of getting the girl at last into his power.

But Mr. Brereton not only did not reveal the whereabouts of his friend--he knew that Sheridan meant to go to Lille, for he wrote to him there--but he also refused to give his interrogator any sympathy for having failed to accomplish the destruction of the girl. Brereton, indeed, seems to have convinced him that the best thing he could do was to leave Bath as quickly as possible. Mathews had probably by this time discovered, as Brereton certainly had, that the feeling against him in Bath was profound. There can be little doubt that in the course of the day Charles Sheridan became aware of this fact also; he had only a few months before confessed himself to be deeply in love with Elizabeth Linley, and when he heard that his brother had run away with her he could not but have been somewhat incensed against him, for Richard had not taken him into his confidence. By the time his brother returned, however, any ill-feeling that Charles may have felt had disappeared, and as Charles always showed himself to be a cool and calculating gentleman--one who always kept an eye on the jumping cat--it is not going too far to assume that his change of tone in respect of his rather impetuous brother was due to his perception of the trend of public opinion on the subject of the elopement.

Brereton had persuaded Mathews that there was nothing left for him but to quit Bath; but before taking this step the latter had inserted in the _Bath Chronicle_ the advertisement of which Richard had heard, but which he had not read when in London, thus leaving himself in no position to contradict Mathews' assertion as to its amicable wording.

But now the newspaper was put into his hands by Charles, and he had an opportunity of pronouncing an opinion on this point. It was dated Wednesday, April the 8th, 1772, and it ran as follows:

“Mr. Richard S-------- having attempted in a letter left behind him for that purpose, to account for his scandalous method of running away from this place by insinuations derogating from my character and that of a young lady, innocent as far as relates to me, or my knowledge, since which he has neither taken any notice of letters or even informed his own family of the place where he has hid himself; I cannot longer think he deserves the treatment of a gentleman, and in this public method, to post him as a L------, and a treacherous S--------.

“And as I am convinced there have been many malevolent incendiaries concerned in the propagation of this infamous lie, if any of them, unprotected by age, _infirmities_, or profession, they are to acknowledge the part they have acted, and affirm _to_ what they have said _of_ me, they may depend on receiving the proper reward of their villainy, in the most public manner. The world will be candid enough to judge properly (I make no doubt) of any private abuse on this subject for the future, as nobody can defend himself from an accusation he is ignorant of Thomas Mathews.” Such a piece of maundering imbecility as this had probably never before appeared in a newspaper. It must have been read in Bath with roars of laughter. But we do not hear that any of the ready writers of the time and the town yielded to the temptation of commenting upon the “malevolent incendiarism” of the composition. A man of the world, had it been written about himself, would possibly have thought that its illiteracy spoke for itself, and so would have refrained from making any move in regard to it or its author. But one can imagine what effect reading it would have upon a boy of Sheridan's spirit. For a youth of twenty to find himself posted as a Liar and a Scoundrel, to say nothing of a “malevolent incendiary,” and remain indifferent would be impossible. Sheridan did not take long to make up his mind what he should do in the circumstances.

The dramatic touch which his sister introduces in writing of Richard's perusal of the paragraph is intensely true to nature. He simply put a word or two to Charles relative to what Mathews had told him in London about his, Sheridan's, family sanctioning the insertion of the advertisement. Charles had no difficulty in vindicating his integrity on this point. Richard knew perfectly well that it is one thing to say that a man has acted too hastily, but quite another to suggest that that man is “a L------ and a S--------.”

So apparently the matter ended, and Richard continued chatting with his sisters, giving no sign of what was in his mind. The girls went to their beds, suspecting nothing. The next morning their two brothers were missing!

Of course the girls were dreadfully alarmed. Some people in the house told them that they had heard high words being exchanged between the brothers after the girls had retired, and shortly afterwards the two former had gone out together. The sister, in her narrative, mentions that she received a hint or two of a duel between Richard and Charles, but she at once put these suggestions aside. The poor girls must have been nearly distracted. Certainly the house of Sheridan was passing through a period of great excitement. The estimable head of the family was himself expecting a crisis in his affairs as manager of the theatre in Dublin--Mr. Thomas Sheridan was never far removed from a crisis--and in his absence his young people were doing pretty much as they pleased. He had no power of controlling them; all that he had to do with them was to pay their bills. Neither of the sons was earning anything, and while one of them was living as a man of fashion, the other had thought it well to cut himself off from his sisters, taking lodgings at a farm some way out of Bath It is the girls of the house for whom one feels most. Alicia, the elder, was seventeen, Elizabeth was but twelve. They must have been distracted. So would their father have been if he had had a chance of learning all that was going on at Bath.

But, of course, when young gentlemen of spirit are falling in love with beauteous maidens, and retiring to cure themselves by mingling with pastoral scenes reminiscent of the gentle melancholy of Mr. Alexander Pope's shepherds and shepherdesses (done in Dresden), every one of whom murmurs mournfully and melodiously of a rejected suit--when young gentlemen are running away with afflicted damsels and returning to fight their enemies, they cannot be expected to think of the incidental expenses of the business, which are to be defrayed by their father, any more than of the distraction which takes possession of their sisters.

The two young gentlemen were missing, and had left for their sisters no explanation of their absence--no hint as to the direction of their flight. And there were other people in the house talking about the high words that had been exchanged between the brothers at midnight. It is not surprising that the poor girls should be distressed and distracted.