Peridita, a romance in biography

Front matter

vOo, oo'

o -V^

S'

II

Except for the penalties exacted by a propensity to melancholy and a rare intellectual precocity, Mary's early childhood was happy enough. If Bristol was " the dirtiest great shop " that Walpole ever saw, its merchant princes who grew rich on the purchase and sale of slaves knew how to make the most of their prosperity. The Minster House soon grew too small to satisfy the social needs of Captain Darby. Moreover it was a house ill suited by the irregularity of its construction for the entertainment of company on a large scale. The family moved accordingly into a larger house of more recent date, and here for the twilight that peeped with such fascination for Mary through the Gothic windows was substituted the healthier influence of broad daylight pouring through wider casements. At the same time the lavish equipment of the household provided the child with a new order of impressions, and her memory of this period in later life was associated with an elegant table upon which the regular appearance of foreign wines proclaimed at once the taste and prosperity of her father, a bed of the richest crimson damask, dresses of fine cambric, silk upholstered furniture, and a holiday on Clifton Hill during the summer months. Among all these luxurious surroundings the daintiest object was the little Mary herself, and it was the prettiest sight in the world to see the child's large eyes grow wide over a lesson on the harpsichord or the recitation of an elegy. Sometimes she composed verses herself, and the facile doggerel was extolled with more generosity than wisdom by the tenderhearted mother and the reckless, prodigal father.

When the mail packet from London arrived in Bristol she would go and watch them unload the parcels and hope there was one for her, as there pretty often was, for these fond parents indulged her caprices even to the tune of sending all the way to London for her clothes ; and in those days " The Flying Machine " itself could not do the distance from London to Bristol in less than " the amazingly short space of 24 hours if God permit." Not only fine clothes and accomplished manners were held requisite for Mary's education. In the year of her birth the More sisters had come to Bristol and founded a school in the neighbourhood of the Minster House. Their success enabled them a few years later to take a larger house in Park Street. Here they taught French, Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Needlework and Dancing, and took in boarders. Mary Darby attended the school in the morning and was a fellow pupil with Priscilla Hopkins, who became the wife of the actor John Kemble. The Mores were sisters of the celebrated Hannah, whose lively writings and innumerable activities must be studied to gain a conception of the educational ideas of the time. How different was her idea of " a suitable education for each and Christianity for all " from that of the showier Amazons of learning in her own day — not to mention the elaborate pretensions of the modern Board School. Yet Hannah's practical lo PERDITA

piety feared nothing from the blue assemblages of Mrs. Vesey or Mrs. Montague. Certainly in the course of her long life she changed some of her opinions, and towards its close she would have disapproved of the views which allowed her sisters to take their whole school, including Mary Darby, to see Mr. Powel in a performance of " King Lear."

It was Mary's first experience of the theatre, probably her first introduction to Shakespeare ; but while much of the original text was recited, the play had suffered considerable alteration. Mr. Garrick's versions were then the order of the day, and Garrick took more liberties with his text (with, no doubt; far greater excuse) than any actor of to-day. But Mary was too young to take account of such abstruse matters. For her the story was the main thing, and her heart ached for the sorrows of the aged Lear. Can we not see that eager face intent upon the tragic scenes ^ So keenly does she feel the situations, that she chafes at | the incompetence of Mrs. Fisher's Cordelia. Truly the actress was overweighted by the superior dramatic force of her companion. She ambled mildly through the part. She felt nicely about it, but the spark of her affection for her father glowed dimly even to the last. Hear her towards the close. Are not those accents too tame in which she cries :

O look upon me, Sir,

And hold your hand in blessing o'er me ; nay

You must not kneel.

Mary, child that she was, would have liked to jump from her seat upon the stage and say those words again as they should be said. The nobility of the thing fills her with a new kind of enthusiasm. What

A ROMANCE IN BIOGRAPHY ii

are Pope's " Lines to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady " compared with this ? When she comes home, she is silent, preoccupied ; and the questions of her family about Mr. Powel's Benefit performance receive scant answer. They expect her to be in a flutter of high spirits, to strike attitudes in imitation of the principal performers, but while they tease her for not showing more appreciation, the effect upon her of this first insight into the genius of drama is deep enough to escape altogether a superficial observation.

And so far as their little daughter was concerned the observation of both her parents was indeed superficial. Captain Darby had not the time to understand his children, his wife had not the capacity ; both were content to accept the flattering comment aroused by Mary's beauty, without disturbing the fulness of their satisfaction by an unsparing examination of the character which underlay those graces. True she was impetuous, even wilful at times ; but the peccadilloes of obstinacy were more than compensated by gusts of affection which were enough to disarm any misgivings even in parents of sterner discipline than the Darbys.

With a marriage contracted against the wishes of her parents Mrs. Darby had exhausted her stock of courage. She was between twenty and thirty years of age when for the agreeable importunities of numerous suitors, attracted more by the vivacity of her manner than by the formal beauty of her person, was substituted the practical problem of deciding between the virtues of a young gentleman of good family, genuinely if somewhat lugubriously impressed with her charm, and the dashing advances of Captain Darby, who laid siege to her heart with all the natural artifices of an adventurous spirit quickened by the ardour of a deep infatuation. That he was of Irish extraction (the name Darby having been substituted for that of McDermott on the acquisition of estates in Ireland by a previous generation) was no recommendation to her family ; that he was born American counted as a decided disqualification. Somerset people (and Mary's mother was born in Bridgewater) were not likely to minimise the dangers involved in an alliance with a sea captain whose home influence, whatever it may have been, must have been so remote from the lady's own. Reluctantly they succumbed to the fascination of his presence, and in the eagerness with which they listened to his spirited anecdotes about the glorious perils of the ocean lurked some disquietude. The usual arguments were advanced for dissuading the girl, with the usual result : the roving disposition of Captain Darby would not change in a week or a year ; to which her reply is, that she asks no more than to follow him in his wanderings ; little good ever came from wayward sentiment usurping the throne of reason ; her reply denies the right of appeal to reason in those who sought to marry her in the face of reason to one whom she could never love. The characters of the suitors decide the issue. The eligible young gentleman rests too solemnly upon his merits ; the spirit of courtship is a fountain sealed for one so imperturbably grave. Realising the vanity of his hopes he takes coach for Bristol and embarks on a merchant ship bound for a distant part of the globe, finding a kind of audacity in despair. He is never heard of again by the family. Soon after their marriage at Dunyatt, Somersetshire, Mary's parents settled at Bristol.

Little occurred to mar the serenity of their happiness until Mary entered upon her ninth year. If the husband's irrepressible flow of spirits sometimes tired the equanimity of his less sanguine wife, she knew how to console herself in reflecting on his generous nature and the ready pleasure which he showed in the welfare and happiness of his family. One day early in 1766 Mary found her mother in tears. Her father was striding restlessly up and down the room.

" 'Tis the height of folly," cried her mother between her sobs. " Reason, prudence, the aff^ections of your family all speak against the execution of so mad an enterprise. A perilous journey, and for what .'' To meet a treacherous death at the hands of savages ! "

" If you would have me die in your company, Madam, you should come too." And the Captain glanced with a look of afl'ectionate humour and unshaken purpose at his little daughter. " If you lack the courage, Mary will sail with me."

The child made no answer. She had stolen to her mother's side and laid a timid hand upon her shoulder. Mrs. Darby began to cry anew, and with an impatient shrug the Captain left the room, whistling to himself. The next few days were a novel experience for Mary. She had never seen her parents openly at variance before. Something warned her that her father's decision was unalterable, and yet Mrs. Darby implored him with tears and entreaties to abandon his intentions, or at least to postpone their execution. Mary wondered what was the object of this journey and had not the courage to ask, until one day she found her father poring over a chart, and he took her on his knee and told her how he was going to a place on the other side of the world where the coast was inhabited by- Eskimo Indians (" funny Httle people, like monkeys," he called them). He was going to teach them how to trade in the whales which they caught. He would make friends with the *' monkeys " and bring some home for Mary to see, and Mary was so well entertained by his lively descriptions of how he was going to build himself a hut in a wild forest and shoot game for his meals and take lessons in the Eskimo language from the chief of the tribe himself, that she forgot what the separation would mean for her mother, and began to clap her hands in dehght. As the plan became matured in Captain Darby's mind his absences from Bristol became more frequent, and to his wife's sorrow he always returned from a visit to London with fresh accounts of the favour with which his expedition / was regarded in high quarters. Not only was it encouraged by the opinions of the Chancellor Lord Northington, who was Mary's godfather, but it received the approbation of Lord Chatham himself. The civilising mission of England had frequently been bound up with the foundation of lucrative industries, and the establishment of flourishing whale fisheries on the coast of Labrador under the control of England or her American colonies might prove no less productive than the Greenland fisheries. It was only a year since Government had erected a blockhouse in a small fort at Chateau Bay. This was garrisoned by an officer and twenty men from the Governor of Newfoundland's ship, and a sloop of war was stationed here in the summer, no less to prevent encroachments from the French than to protect the merchants and their people from the Indians. Captain Darby's expedition was to be directed to the north of this region.

England has always welcomed the services of adventurous men like Nicholas Darby, and Chatham's glowing denunciation of American taxation was recent enough still to linger agreeably in the ears of a man, who, although England had become the home of his election, was still an American by birth. What wonder then that the statesm^an's encouragement, added to that of the Earl of Bristol and other eminent persons whose advice was as readily given as their sympathy was enhsted, should have set spurs to the Captain's intentions. So occupied had he been with the details of the necessary preliminaries, that when the day came for him to depart he realised for the first time what this separation was costing himself no less than his wife ; and the words " I shall be back in two years " faltered on his lips as he took a hurried farewell of his family. The painter Morland has left many a scene of such farewells, in which the grief of the situation is mitigated by the charm of the figures represented in the picture. But '^ good-bye " meant even more in the eighteenth century than it does to-day, and it was no wonder if it took many weeks before Mrs. Darby recovered some of her spirits. The house was all the quieter for the buoyant nature of the man who had left it ; and to make the circumstances still more melancholy, her eldest son had been placed in a mercantile house in Leghorn shortly before his father's departure.

Ill

Captain Darby's letters were read with eagerness by his solitary wife. The spirited nature of their contents did not allay her apprehensions. Now she feared that he would suffer the consequences of indifferent attention to his health in a climate of freezing coldness, now she shuddered at the dangers of his traffic with the native savages. He made his settlement on Seal Island in a spot as high up the river as a boat could go ; it consisted of his own house, a hut for his servants, and a workshop. In due time a fishing-stage was also erected, and it was not long before Mary and her two little brothers were listening to a description of the neighbouring Indians, their methods of extracting oil from the whales which they caught, and the barbarous habits of the women, whose love for their babies was suffered to co-exist with a revolting indifference to the insanitary conditions in which they ■ were reared. After some months had elapsed, however, Mary noticed that the eagerness with which her mother had opened her husband's letters began to abate. A new and unexplained sorrow began to appear in her face, and sometimes she would leave the mail packet unopened for more than a day after its arrival. The letters came, too, at rarer intervals, and even in the extracts with which Mrs. Darby continued to regale her children, appeared a note of haste and frigidity.

i6

The style grew more laconic, and at last a period of several months passed before once more the familiar seal aroused expectation of fresh news from Labrador.

Fresh news indeed, but never had the reluctance with which Mrs. Darby proceeded to examine it been so fatally well justified. This time the curiosity of the children was allayed by no reading of extracts from the letter. Mrs. Darby shut herself up for several days, and even in the brief intervals in which she allowed her children to bid her good-night, the tears started from eyes worn with long weeping. With difficulty she informed them that their father was well ; but the welcome nature of these tidings was dashed with the bitter self-accusations which followed the announcement. Oh that she had been able to overcome her abhorrence of the great ocean, and accompanied her husband ! Prior to the arrival of this letter, a stranger had come to the house, while the family were still in a state of anxious suspense as to the origin of the Captain's long silence. He said he was an intimate friend of Mr. Darby, and had grave news to impart to his wife. Mary watched him wistfully as the servant showed him into her mother's private apartments. The burden of his message was not communicated to the child, who thought, when he had gone, her mother had never before looked so sad. A day later the letter was delivered, but the hopes roused by its arrival were but a source of further disappointment. Mrs. Darby went about like one distracted. Every fresh inquiry of Mary met with fresh evasion. One day when the child was playing with her wardrobe (she was always particularly fond of arranging her dresses) her mother bade her leave them aside, for they no longer belonged to her. Her father had given a bill of sale of his whole property, and to rescue him from his embarrassments his wife and children were by this sudden tide of misfortune compelled to change their manner of life from one of refinement

/ and ease to one of coarse hardship and penury. For the mock tragedy of Lear which had so powerfully affected Mary's imagination but a little while ago was now substituted the cutting reality of actual misfortunes. People who had envied the prosperity of the Darbys were not slow to condemn the expensive style in which they had carried on their household. The illness and death of little William added sorrow to want, and the multiplied afflictions of the Darby family became a topic for commiseration at all the public receptions in Bristol. The humiliation of their condition was made profounder by the heights of fashionable splendour on which they had lived. Mrs. Darby took consolation in the friendship and kindly offices of a lady now the wife of a medical man, and formerly the widow of Sir Charles Erskine. She knew that Bristol gossip was busy with the retailing of her misfortunes, and she was content to live a life of seclusion. The world was a great deal wider than the confines of Bristol, and she felt the nature of her grief to be larger than that of the idle conversation which it provided in a narrow locality.

In due time Mary was acquainted with the contents, or rather with some of the contents, of that last letter

■' from her father. His scheme had failed. The Indians had risen and murdered three of his servants. His settlement was uprooted. In itself the enterprise was as reasonable as most ventures of the kind, nor was its failure due so much to a want of foresight as to the temperamental incapacity of Captain Darby for ingratiating himself with the natives. Three years after his settlement had been abandoned, the traces of it were rediscovered by Captain Cartwright, an experienced traveller in Labrador, who succeeded in winning the confidence of the Eskimos and actually brought some of them to London. George III. stopped reviewing his troops to converse with the strange captain and his odd little companions. They were taken to a reception at Holland House and ultimately to Court, where they formed a pleasing diversion for the aristocracy, some of whom invited them to a fox hunt. But where the long patience of Cartwright succeeded, the restless impetuosity of Darby failed. He was at once too confident and too arrogant ; and, to do him justice, he credited the Eskimo Indian with as little cunning as he himself possessed.

Mrs, Darby had lived in retirement for a year, when, in a letter of which the coldness chilled her no less than the contents agitated her, she was summoned to meet her husband in London. His message included a request that her children should accompany her. Probably he thought their presence would silence his wife's reproaches. It was autumn, and the leaves of the trees in Spring Gardens, where he was lodging, were turning gold. Confronted with his little Mary, now nearly ten years of age and tall enough to be twelve or thirteen, Darby broke down. The scene in its initial stages was indeed affecting enough ; but a sordid reality soon thrust itself between the sweets of reunion. Mrs. Darby had come armed with forgiveness for her erring husband. Again and again she had blamed herself as the cause of his ' infidelity. Had she accompanied him, all might have been different. In spite of the sorrow and pain which she expected from the interview, she had not been able to stifle the hope of its satisfactory issue. He had come back to her. Perhaps this other woman who had pushed her merciless way into his affections had betrayed him. Deeply she felt the bitterness of the humiliation which had been put upon her, but she had prayed for heart of grace to disregard it in the recognition of the blessings bestowed by a providential reconciliation.

But no demands were made upon her power of forgiveness. In place of the contrition which her fancy had painted, she was confronted with Captain Darby's cold defiance. Not only was he utterly indifferent to the impropriety of living with a mistress, but he was devoid of all delicacy in the air with which he announced his immediate intentions to his innocent - wife. Mary and her brother were to be placed in a school near London ; a suitable allowance would be provided to enable Mrs. Darby to live in a private family ; as for himself he purposed shortly returning to America. Tears and entreaties seemed only to increase his obduracy. He grew impatient at the heat which had escaped into the conversation, and Mrs. Darby's leave-taking partook almost of the nature of a dismissal. She never indulged another hope in her husband's return. Soon afterwards she took up her abode in a clergyman's family in Chelsea with the object of being near Meribah Lorrington's school, at which her children were placed.

A queerer couple than Mrs. Lorrington and her father, Mr. Hull, it would have been hard to discover, even in a town offering such diversity of persons and characters as London. Hull had been master of an academy at Earl's Court. He was now a widower, and aided his daughter in the instruction of pupils at Chelsea. If he did not teach them much, he succeeded in inspiring them with a well-founded terror of his appearance, for he wore a long silvery beard and a kind of Persian robe which invested him with the air of a necromancer. His conversation was stern rather than erudite, and he was of the Anabaptist persuasion. Had he been born in the first half of the sixteenth instead of the first half of the eighteenth century, there is some ground for suspecting that he would have become a follower of John of Leyden and danced about naked in that *' city of God " which became the scene of excesses as bad as any that have ever disfigured the annals of religious fanaticism. As it was, he was a mixture of fantastic affectation and intolerant ineptitude which inspired Mary Darby with a lively disgust. For his daughter, on the contrary, she conceived a warm affection. Meribah represented for her something very grand and alluringly tragic, a kind of widowed Cordelia whose sorrows were made all the more pathetic by the ridiculous neighbourhood of a sham Lear. In blue learning she towered above the Mores, for she knew Latin besides French and Italian, and possessed a nodding acquaintance with the stars besides a ready familiarity with the Multiplication Tables. As if to make feminine atonement for her masculine intelligence, her painting on silk showed a refinement of fancy that was a model for all the young ladies in the kingdom. The tragic element in her composition was an irrepressible passion for drink, engendered, as she told her little friend one night in a burst of confidence (they slept in the same chamber) by the despair and solitude of widowhood. What a companionship — this of the tender, precocious child and the clever, half crazy woman. Think of Meribah and Mary looking across the Chelsea fields from the casement window of their bedroom on a summer's night, the governess babbling in her drunken way of the stars, and Mary fondly composing verses on the moon in the style of the late Mr. William ' Shenstone. They used to read to each other after school hours. As Meribah's intemperance gained ground, she clung with increased tenacity to the friendship of her favourite pupil. She now frequently entered the class-room in a state of intoxication. Parents began to withdraw their children. The financial status of the school became hopelessly embarrassed, and Mary had only been a year and two months in her new surroundings when the establishment was broken up. She was removed to Mrs. Leigh's - seminary in Battersea, her brother remaining in Chelsea under the care of a clergyman.

In place of the strange companionship of Mrs. Lorrington she now enjoyed the healthier intimacy of Mrs. Leigh's daughter, a girl but a few years older than herself, and suited by the amiability of her disposition to be an agreeable playmate. Mrs. Darby, isolated as she was from daily intercourse with her children, never lost sight of them for long. Every Sunday evening Mary went to Chelsea to drink tea with her mother. Among the visitors she met on these occasions was a captain in the British

Navy, a friend of her father's. Conceive the high state of perturbation into which Mrs. Darby was plunged when the gallant officer suddenly confronted her with a formal proposal for her daughter's hand. How old, she asked him, did he think the child to be ? The inflammable youth had probably never ^ considered her age until this moment, and found it difficult to believe that she had not yet reached her thirteenth birthday. His attentions had in no way disconcerted Mary ; she had been accustomed to flattery almost from her infancy, and so little idea had she of love as a practical factor in life, that she had already wasted many hours in composing poetical phantasies on love.

They were pubHshed soon after her marriage in a volume of poems, remarkable chiefly for their profuse ■ punctuation, although here and there are lines showing that she had studied her models, even at that early age, with discrimination. Her facility for literary expression intensifies rather than helps to diminish the obscurities of her character as a child ; for while these effiasions were intimate enough to make her conceal them from her mother until shortly before their appearance in print, the cocksureness of their form bore all the traces of a skilled technique in verse such as one might expect to find in an accomplished writer of at least double her age. The sentiments of the poems were in all probability no more original than the language in which they were expressed, but the fact that she spent so much time in versifying is an indication of innocence rather than of guile, and it came easily to her to sing the praises of retirement " Far from op'ra, park or play," to rebuke the youths of " this licentious age," to sentimentalise on Charity and to sigh gracefully after a virtuous husband in a poem of many stanzas.

But while she is thus harmlessly engaged in a schoolgirl's recreation with more than a schoolgirl's dexterity — behold a bold captain is actually on his knees in the act of proposing to a mere child. Had he seen her poems he would have adhered obstinately to his belief that she was not so young as her mother wished to paint her. And who could have blamed him ? In some confusion he now took his leave, but not without expressing a hope that on his return to England (for he was going on an expedition for two years) Miss Darby might still be disengaged. A few months after his departure came the news that his ship had foundered at sea, and that he had perished in the disaster. And what does Mary when she hears the sad tidings ? Does she blush, or faint or cry ^ Not a bit of it. She is a child with ah insatiable love of making verses. She meditates upon a new poem : *' To one who perished gallantly at sea."

IV

Mary's sojourn at Mrs. Leigh's seminary was interrupted by the consequences of her father's reckless living and of his passion for speculative adventure. He had failed in Labrador ; but failure with him set spurs to another attempt in a similar direction. In the meanwhile his remittances to his wife became less regular, Mrs. Darby took alarm at the situation. Few occupations were open to women ; neither her own bringing up nor the subsequent luxuries which she had enjoyed in the early years of her married life had tended to cultivate in her a capacity for earning a livelihood. But necessity stared her in the face, and, encouraged by the advice of her friends, she started a boarding-school of her own. A house at Little Chelsea was hired and suitably furnished, assistants were engaged, and at the age of fourteen Mary passed from the subserviency of a pupil into the commanding consequence of a teacher. Her literary skill was now directed to the choice of suitable passages in prose and verse for the study of her pupils. She also superintended their wardrobes, and read sacred and moral lessons to them on Saints' days and Sunday evenings.

Soon after the establishment of the new school, a dramatic rencounter with her former mistress both excited a genuine compassion and heightened her sense of the new importance with which the inequalities of life had invested her. Drunk, dishevelled, her dress torn and filthy, an old bonnet lurching forward so as almost to conceal her features, Mrs. Lorrington appeared one summer evening at the gate of the school-house. Her groans attracted the attention of Mary, who was seated at the window. Without knowing whom she was befriending, she hastened to the forlorn creature's aid. Meribah burst into tears. " Don't you know me ^ " she cried. Mary never forgot the look of misery and wounded pride which came into those familiar eyes as they met hers. Mrs. Darby was out, and the girl took her old teacher into the house, dressed her, comforted her as best she could, and entreated her to say how she had come into so piteous a plight and where she might be found in the future in case of need. But Mrs. Lorrington was either too much ashamed or too much intoxicated to provide any information. Perhaps she thought she was once more the mistress of her own seminary, and regarded Mary's solicitude as presumption in a pupil. She promised to call again in a few days, and with sorrow Mary watched the melancholy attempt at self-possession with which she took her exit.