Читать книгу The Lady of Fashion - Eric Wollencott Barnes - Страница 4

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Anna Cora Ogden’s life by the time she was sixteen had already assumed the outlines of one of those melodramatic romances in which she was later to achieve fame. All major elements were there: reversal of fortune, exile in a remote land, disaster at sea, clandestine marriage, lingering illness. And the events were strung together with the same careless disregard for plausibility as in a plot by Bulwer-Lytton or Sheridan Knowles.

Farther in the background there was also action and color. Samuel Gouverneur Ogden, Anna’s father, belonged to a family which had figured in Colonial and Revolutionary history and was allied, by blood or marriage, with half a dozen of the great patrician names of New York and New Jersey. Samuel’s father was that renowned cleric the Reverend Doctor Uzal Ogden, whose career very nearly disrupted the early organization of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America. Early in his ministry the Reverend Uzal developed heretical views in the matter of the sacraments which almost resulted in dismissal from his parish. Yet his popularity was so great that he was elected the first Episcopal Bishop of New Jersey—an election which the General Convention of the Church in its wisdom did not see fit to ratify. Eventually, the highly independent Dr. Ogden left the Episcopal Church to become a Presbyterian, and by the end of his life had become so tolerant as to show sympathy for the Methodists. Anna Cora never saw the Reverend Uzal, but his tendencies toward heterodoxy were transmitted to his granddaughter. She inherited other traits from him, including a compelling manner in argument, a highly critical spirit, a sense of humor, a profound need for faith and a susceptibility to throat infections.

Samuel Gouverneur Ogden, the Reverend Uzal’s eldest son, showed some of the latter’s revolutionary tendencies, but his chief talent was for making money—and occasionally losing it. At fourteen, he was articled as a clerk to the New York mercantile establishment of Gouverneur and Kemble. By the time he was twenty he had set up for himself, and when he was married in 1803 he was the proprietor of a flourishing import-export business and owner of four of the finest ships in the American-European trade. Each of these vessels mounted fifteen guns—a precautionary measure against the Barbary pirates—and when Samuel’s eldest son was born (all four ships being then in New York harbor), the new arrival was greeted with a sixty-gun salute.

Eliza Lewis, Samuel’s first wife and the mother of Anna Cora, was the granddaughter of Francis Lewis, a signer of the Declaration of Independence; so on this side, too, Anna Cora was well-rooted in American history. The first Mrs. Ogden was a gentle creature whose rôle in life was that of most nineteenth-century women. Once married, she devoted herself to the producing and care of children. She was the mother of fourteen, of whom Anna Cora was the ninth. Despite evidences of proper submissiveness to her husband, Mrs. Ogden seems to have exercised some determination as regards her personal affairs. At a fairly early point in her married life she decided that she would live to the age of fifty. For eight years after the birth of her last child she lingered with her family—who adored her—and then, a few days from her fiftieth birthday, she quietly died.

Although the domestic affairs of Samuel Ogden were marked by regular expansion, his business career had its ups and downs. In 1806 he fell in with the South American adventurer-hero, Francisco de Miranda. This romantic character had played a spectacular if unimportant rôle in the French Revolution, and was now in America seeking new outlets for his energy. His specific scheme was to liberate his native Venezuela from Spain. In this project he received some encouragement (or at least he interpreted it as such) from President Jefferson and other high American officials, and accordingly he set about organizing a filibustering expedition into the Spanish Main. Through Colonel William Smith, the son-in-law of John Adams, he met Samuel Ogden. The latter, fired by the idea of liberating an oppressed people from the yoke of a decadent European monarch—and at the same time aware of the possibilities for extending his trade operations to Latin America—joined enthusiastically in Miranda’s plan. He turned over to Miranda his finest ship, the Leander, and the sum of 40,000 pounds, which represented his entire personal fortune and all that he could borrow on his name.

The expedition consisted of the Leander and two smaller ships, with a complement of about 200 men. The assumption that this force would be a match for the Spanish power indicates the low esteem in which Spain was generally held at the time. But the assumption proved rash. The Spanish authorities, supposedly forewarned by Aaron Burr, who had his own designs in Latin America, were waiting for Miranda when he arrived at Caracas. The liberator was defeated; and though he managed to escape with his own life, he lost most of his men and all of Samuel Ogden’s investment, including the ship Leander.

The affair created a big international noise. Since America was technically at peace with Spain, the activities of two American citizens in sponsoring an expedition against that nation’s sovereign power could not be sanctioned without belying our peaceful intentions. Spain demanded that the culprits be punished. Smith and Ogden were therefore brought to trial, an event which raised the feelings of republican and liberty-loving Americans to a high pitch. This undoubtedly had its effects on the final verdict; the defendants were acquitted. Smith and Ogden emerged from the ordeal not only with honor but with something of the aura of heroes. Their effort had been the first spark to the fuse which set off the series of revolutions leading to the independence of the Spanish-American colonies. Bolivar himself recognized the psychological value of the incident and later offered to reimburse Ogden for his losses. The record does not show that this offer was ever fulfilled.

If the Venezuelan fiasco left Samuel Ogden a ruined man, it did not impair his credit. Within a short time his ships were again unloading at New York docks and he had established important business connections abroad. He was the American agent for several large French exporters, and his firm had become the principal channel for the flow of Bordeaux wine into the United States. In fact his interests in France soon assumed such proportions that they could only be handled on the spot. Accordingly, in 1818 Ogden embarked with his family—which had increased without interruption—for Bordeaux. On September 12, 1819, nearly a year after the Ogdens had arrived in France, the brood of eight was augmented by a daughter, Anna Cora. This brought the balance to five boys and four girls—a most convenient division for the casting of plays when, a little later, the family began to indulge its passion for amateur theatricals.

When Anna Cora was a year old, Samuel Ogden, finding the house he had rented in Bordeaux somewhat cramped, purchased a beautiful little estate just outside the gates of the city. La Castagne was a self-contained property, with a small but elegant late Renaissance château of twenty-two rooms, vineyards, gardens, orchards, an aviary, livestock of every variety, and an assortment of picturesque peasant cottages complete with peasants. The whole establishment had great charm. For the young Ogdens it was paradise.

Here the family lived in quiet self-sufficiency. The children spent most of their time out-of-doors in the gardens or meadows, or in the farmyard, which they found endlessly diverting. In the warm evenings they gathered on the long terrace which stretched before the château, on one side of which there was a drop of some twenty feet to the gardens below. Here the family would stroll up and down or sit on the marble benches talking over the events of the day, watching the distant landscape of vineyards and villages fade into the blue-green shadows of the twilight.

Behind the house a meadow sloped down to a grove of trees. In the center of this little wood, a carefully preserved bosquet au naturel, there was a clearing known as Calypso’s Grotto. Here moss-covered marble benches arranged in a semi-circle formed a kind of Druid temple. In this secluded spot, from which one had only an occasional glimpse of blue sky through the interlaced branches above, the children gathered to tell stories and act in impromptu plays.

This early enthusiasm for the drama resulted naturally from the fact that the Ogden children, despite the range in ages, were a closely-knit group happiest when doing things together. Since they had to depend for amusement mainly on their own resources, play-acting formed a logical outlet for their energies. The pastime was enhanced by the taste for literature which all the children shared. They had all begun to read early, and in the well-stocked library of the château was food for the most insatiable literary appetite. In addition to the masterpieces of French literature, there was at hand a splendid collection of the English poets. As so often happened with our ancestors, because of the dearth of juvenile literature the tender mind was brought at once into contact with the classics. At an age when the modern child finds delight in the doings of animated trains and taxicabs, the little Ogdens were thrilling to Phèdre and Macbeth, with a liberal dash of Montaigne to quiet the nerves and develop principles. By the time she was ten, according to her own assertion, Anna Cora had read Shakespeare “many times over”—a statement which, in view of her precocious literary accomplishment, is easily credible.

The children’s fondness for the drama was encouraged by their father, a great admirer of Talma who was then at the height of his fame, and a devotee of the Théâtre Français. In the grande salle of the Château de la Chastagne Mr. Ogden had a small stage constructed, and throughout the winter this was the center of the children’s life. Plays were constantly in process of preparation or performance. The senior Ogdens entertained frequently, and the parties invariably included a play by the children. We have no record of the guests’ reactions to these exhibitions. For the children themselves they were an endless source of excitement.

In later life Anna Cora could recall only one of these occasions: that on which she made her début. “The play represented was Othello translated into French. My eldest sister enacted Desdemona; my eldest brother Othello; the second sister Emilia; the second brother Cassio, doubling the part with that of the uncle; the third brother Iago, doubling the part with that of the judge. The other brothers and sisters filled in the remaining characters.... A difficulty occurred about the judges in the trial scene. Our dramatic corps proved insufficient to furnish judges. To supply this vacancy, the four younger children were summoned, dressed in red gowns and white wigs, made to sit on high benches, and instructed to pay great attention and not to laugh. Of these children I was the youngest; and at four years old in the sedate and solemn character of a judge, upon a mimic stage, I made my first appearance in that profession of which it was the permission of divine Providence that I should one day in reality become a member.”

When Anna Cora was six, the family returned to America. Samuel Ogden’s affairs had prospered greatly, and he had gained a practical monopoly as representative of the great Bordeaux wine firms. He now felt that he must make America the center of his operations, a motive strengthened by his desire to bring up his children in his native country, to which he was ardently attached. However, most of the children looked forward to the return with misgivings; for even those who had not been born in France had become thoroughly Gallicized. As for Anna Cora and her two younger sisters May and Emma (the latest additions to the throng), America was regarded as a foreign country. They did not even speak English, and the idea of exchanging their beautiful La Castagne for a wilderness infested by savage Indians—a notion acquired from their French neighbors—reduced them to tears.

For a few months after leaving La Castagne the family stayed in Bordeaux while final arrangements for the journey were completed. On September 17, 1826, they sailed for New York. Their ship, the Brandt, was a solid German craft and her master, Captain Steinauer, an experienced seaman. But in those days the Bay of Biscay was still a match for both ships and men. The vessel had scarcely moved out of the Gironde when she ran into nasty weather. Violent, contrary winds and high seas slowed her progress, so that at the end of two weeks she was still in the treacherous Bay. Suddenly, on September 30th, a violent gale descended on her. What happened was later set down by Charles, Anna Cora’s eldest brother:

“At about half past six there was a terrible, deafening crash; the sound of which, breaking upon drowsy ears, still reverberates in my mind. The vessel had been struck on the larboard bow by a tremendous wave, which, crossing her from stem to stern, rent up everything, and completely swept our decks, whilst it threw the ship with her beam ends in the sea. The caboose, longboat, and water casks, cables and everything amidships, her bulwarks, and every particle of the saloon, were violently shattered and washed away, and the deck around the companionway and forecastle hatch completely torn up, making the whole ship a wreck indeed. The masts alone were uninjured. Fortunately she soon righted.

“My first thought was, of course, for my brothers, knowing that they had gone on deck; and as soon as possible, I rushed, half clad, up the companionway. Here a scene of desolation presented itself that I should in vain attempt to describe. The naked decks, with nothing but the masts standing, the rigging flying in every direction, the bulwarks destroyed, and presenting no barrier to the sea, which, with every roll of the vessel, washed over the deck and down into the cabin; then the waves, mountain high, and foaming with fury, that seemed every moment to threaten destruction; whilst the gusty blasts, howling through the rigging, were a fit dirge for the impending fate.”

Reaching the top of the companionway, Charles looked about for some sign of the two younger boys. He dared not step on deck, for the wind would have swept him into the sea. Presently he saw, clinging with one hand to the rigging amidships and with the other drawing a line from the sea, the second mate of the vessel. In a moment he saw his brother Thomas, the younger of the missing boys, being hauled over the side of the ship. Seizing the youngster, the mate struggled with him across the deck towards Charles. As the latter grasped the almost lifeless form of the child, the mate pointed astern and shouted, “The other one is lost!” And indeed as Charles looked, he saw a faint speck on the crest of a receding billow, and a small hand clutching at the air. In a moment it was gone. That was the last glimpse of Gabriel.

It was clear what had happened. The two boys who were on deck at the instant when the ship had nearly capsized had been hurled into the water. When the vessel righted herself Gabriel was seen holding to a fragment of the jolly boat. The mate then tossed him a rope. The boy had let go of the boat to swim toward the line, which sank before he could seize it. When he turned back to the bit of wreckage, this too had been carried beyond his reach, while the ship herself, driven by the furious gale, was already far away.

Thomas, fortunately, had managed to seize a piece of the torn rigging as he was swept overboard. To this he had clung with a frantic grip and was eventually pulled back on deck by the mate. When he was placed in his older brother’s arms, the boy’s fingers were still cramped in a paroxysm of terror about the bit of line that had saved his life.

Staggering down the companionway with his burden, Charles at last reached the saloon where the rest of the family had collected. Anna Cora and her younger sister were clinging to their mother who held the youngest of all, four-year-old May, in her arms. Thrusting her at one of the older girls, the horrified mother seized the dripping form of the half-drowned Thomas. Then Charles told what had happened. Though every wave sent a stream of water into the cabin, and the violent pitching of the ship made it seem that the others would at any moment join little Gabriel, Mrs. Ogden gave one loud cry, and then subsided into speechless grief. The children’s reaction was the same. The blow of their loss numbed the family to the sense of their own danger, which was steadily increasing.

At nightfall the ship was struck astern by another gigantic wave which stove in the deadlights and again deluged the cabin. Several men were injured and the helmsman nearly killed at the wheel. There seemed no likelihood that the ship could survive. Yet miraculously she did. Forty-eight hours later the storm had abated and the sun shone again. The Brandt was a shambles, but somehow temporary repairs were made and she put about for the nearest European port.

On October 9th the Brandt limped into Le Havre. There the Ogdens were met by the oldest boy, Samuel, who was at the time located in Havre where he had a position in the office of one of Mr. Ogden’s business associates. Samuel came anxiously on board, eager to learn what had happened. When he saw further the state of the ship, his mother’s grief-stricken expression, and noted the gap in the family group—no explanation was necessary.

Six days later they embarked once more, this time on the Queen Mab. Again it seemed as though the sea had some special grudge against the family of Americans. The ship encountered violent weather the whole voyage across, and it was forty days before she made New York harbor.

At La Castagne the Ogden children had had unbounded freedom and an endless variety of amusements. During the last months when the family had lived again in Bordeaux itself, there had been the jardins publiques where they had romped with other children who spoke their own language, and boulevards lined with fascinating shops to provide diversion on long walks in the winter sunshine. But New York, with its straight streets and monotonous rows of low red-brick or frame houses—where carriages jolted over rough pavement, or splashed through deep mud where there was no paving at all—offered only the most dismal prospect. The children had no friends outside the family circle and only the older ones could even speak the language. Besides, there was so much crudeness and confusion everywhere. People jostled one on the street without so much as a “pardon,” and everyone was wrapped up in his own personal affairs. There were few trees at best: almost none in the lower part of the town, except a row of scraggly elms along the Battery. Now, of course, it was the dead of winter and not a sprig of green was visible anywhere. With faces pressed against cold window-panes, the children looked out at the snow and endlessly asked: “Shall we never return?”—“Must we stay here always?”

Presently they were all in school. Matilda and Anna Cora were sent to Mrs. Okill’s select academy for young ladies. For Anna Cora the curriculum was a mixture of misery and delight. In grammar, arithmetic and algebra she stood always near the foot of the class. She never mastered the multiplication table; and though French was her native language, when it came to conjugating verbs it might as well have been Greek. But in “reading, recitation of poetry, mythology, history, mental philosophy [sic]” she took top honors. In general, though, her schooling was irregular. The terrible voyage, during hours of which the children had been in damp cabins—sometimes soaked to the skin—had started a bronchial condition which was to remain throughout life. For days at a time Anna Cora was confined to bed with no resources except books; and she read anything and everything she could find. Poetry was her favorite reading, and besides her old friends Shakespeare and Racine, anything else that came her way she soaked up like a sponge. When she was not reading she was scribbling verses of her own. Any occasion—a marriage, a birth, a death—supplied a subject. For hours at a time she would string together lines of doggerel, and then dream that somebody would find and proclaim them masterpieces. She would even invent strategies to insure that they would be found. Copies were dropped on the floor of her brothers’ rooms; they appeared propped up on the nursery mantelpiece. When the weather was fair and she could go out-of-doors, she scribbled verses on the garden walls. One day she was rewarded by seeing one of her brothers with one of the familiar sheets of paper in his hand. Anna Cora followed him downstairs and watched him enter the drawing-room where she knew her father at that moment to be. Cautiously she crept to the door to listen.

“Just read this, Papa,” she heard her brother say. “It’s some of Anna’s nonsense.”

There was a silence which meant that her father was reading the manuscript. Then her heart skipped a beat when she heard Mr. Ogden say, “I wish you would call her.”

Anna Cora’s impulse was to flee; but before she could get to the stairs the door opened and her brother seized her. She was led back into the drawing-room, feeling like “a culprit who had been guilty of some heavier crime than that of mutilating English and writing bad poetry.”

But her father’s face was kindly. “Did you write these lines yourself?” he asked.

“Yes,” was the faltering reply.

“Are you sure that nobody helped you? Are you sure that you did not get them out of some book?”

Anna Cora was indignant; not at the imputation of plagiarism but at the idea that her unique creation could possibly be attributed to anyone else. At the same time a feeling of elation came over her. She had given tangible form to something which had been inside her, and through the little poem this vague something had been shared by someone else! For the first time she experienced the thrill of communication, and it was like nothing she had ever known before.

“They are not very good grammar,” continued Mr. Ogden glancing down at the small sheet of paper. “But they are quite pretty for all that. Who knows what my little chicken may turn out one of these days?”

It was slight praise, but coming from her father it was enough. From that moment she was satisfied that she could do something, she was not quite sure what. Perhaps write poetry; perhaps something else. There was only one thing she was suddenly quite aware of, as her father began to point out the flaws in her masterpiece. She must work very hard. If she wished others to share all the wonderful excitements which she was beginning to feel inside her, she must strive endlessly to perfect the means which would enable others to see, hear, feel as she did. And from this moment on, Anna Cora became a worker. Except for a brief and wholly normal period of juvenile egotism, she never had more than a modest regard for her own talents. But somewhere along the way she had picked up the old French saying, “le génie est une longue patience,” and she knew that when patience was combined with effort something was bound to happen. Her consistent formula for rebuffing Fate was simply to work a little harder at whatever task was uppermost.

After two years at Mrs. Okill’s, the girls went to another boarding-establishment at New Rochelle. Here the régime was harsh and inflexible, with no opportunity to develop one’s personal thoughts on any subject. The school considered itself an efficient mold, into which the fluid personalities of little girls might be poured with the expectation that they would emerge in the one and only form proper to their station in life. Anna was thoroughly miserable. Her own nature refused to set in the mold, and the price of her rebellion was a long series of punishments. Her one source of consolation was a tiny garden which she was permitted to plant and care for as her own. By the 1830’s, the return to Nature which had caught the fancy of philosophers in the eighteenth century had assumed the form of a popular movement. Gardening, which former ages had regarded as the pursuit of peasants, had now acquired the status of a social grace. Little girls were instructed in not only embroidery, dancing, and sketching in water-colors, but the rudiments of horticulture. One could now exhibit a perfect tea-rose of one’s own cultivation with as much propriety as one’s mother had displayed her samplers. To quote one guide in such matters, “The exchange of rose-cuttings, particularly in rural districts, is a suitable adjunct to morning calls and may, in the absence of more elevated themes, form an acceptable topic of polite conversation.”

Aside from this one accomplishment, which she was always to pursue with delight when circumstances permitted, Anna Cora got little from the New Rochelle school except a deep sense of the meaning of Freedom. When at last the girls were summoned home—Anna Cora was now twelve—their father’s house was indeed like heaven. They once more became day scholars in good schools and “were as merry as uncaged linnets.”

Home meant among other things unlimited opportunity to indulge once more the favorite Ogden pastime of theatricals. Anna Cora soon became the impresario (as well as stage manager and director) of these productions. Furthermore, she now had to exercise her ingenuity to provide suitable works for performance. Due to alterations in the corps dramatique (some of the older children were now married, others away at school), the standard pieces of the family repertory had to be tailored to fit the changes in personnel. Old characters—particularly if they were too old—sometimes had to be eliminated, new characters had to be added. Often plots had to be changed, and this meant writing new scenes or altering dénouements. From play-doctoring to play-writing was a natural transition. Presently Anna Cora was dramatizing episodes from history, especially American history; for the little Ogdens—surrounded by their multitude of connections, with constant reminders of the family’s past, and living in the rabidly republican atmosphere of the Jacksonian era—had abandoned their allegiance to France and were now ardently American.

Sometimes the children merely took the framework of a plot and improvised scenes and dialogue as they went along. “We did not care particularly for audiences,” Anna Cora recorded later; “they generally consisted of our schoolmates or any accidental visitors, and very often we had no audience at all. These plays merely took the place of other childish games, and afforded an intellectual excitement as well as amusement.”

When she was fourteen, Anna Cora decided that the time was ripe for a first-class production. The occasion was her father’s birthday and the piece selected was Voltaire’s Alzire translated into English. There would be a large audience, mainly adults, friends of their parents and older sisters. This meant that there must be no improvisation, but absolute finish in every detail. Voltaire’s play had been chosen because it involved a minimum of scenery and only such characters as the children, with the aid of a few friends, could fill. All the male characters were taken by young girls, for by this time the brothers had passed beyond the stage when they could take part in such frivolity. To have invited other boys of their own age, but outside the family, would have so violated their parents’ sense of propriety as to be unthinkable.

“A great difficulty arose in procuring costumes for the Spanish and Moorish heroes—a difficulty which came near ruining our project. Mr. Simpson, the excellent and gentlemanlike manager of the Park Theatre, with his delightful family, lived opposite. We had no acquaintance with them beyond bowing to the children when we met in the street. It was proposed, however, that three or four of the most confident of our number should pay a visit to Mrs. Simpson, and beg her to use her influence with her husband to lend us certain costumes from the wardrobe of the theatre. Mrs. Simpson received us very kindly. I was made spokesman on the occasion, and, but for her sweet face and gentle manners, should have found some difficulty in making known the wishes of our youthful committee. Evidently much amused at our enthusiasm, she promised that we should have the dresses. In return, we invited her children to be present at the performance.”

Alzire was a grand success. A special feature was a prologue written for the occasion by a friend, Miss Anna L. Putnam (sister of the publisher), and recited by little Julia, aged four. Julia had joined the family after its arrival in America, preceded by another Gabriel who had lived only a year. She was the fourteenth and last child of Eliza Lewis Ogden, who in another four years passed to her well-earned rest.

Alzire not only won general acclaim for its artistic merits; in it, Anna Cora demonstrated as never before her own talents as an actress. As Alzire, the heroine of the piece, she succeeded in completely losing her “own identity in that of the heroine.” And the connection with the Simpsons, who had so generously supplied the costumes for the play, was to have consequences in her later life. Whether Mr. Simpson was one of the Ogden’s invited guests we do not know. But he may well have been; for though he did not move in the same circle as they—the circle of Astors and Fishes, of Stuyvesants and Duyckincks—he was after all a neighbor and “gentlemanlike,” although as the term implies not actually a gentleman. At any rate it was from this moment that his acquaintanceship with Anna Cora began: an acquaintanceship that was to lead Samuel Ogden’s fifth daughter in time to the stage of the Park Theatre itself. But that was all in the future, and destiny would provide many stops along the way.

Up to this time Anna Cora, though constantly engaged in acting or writing or managing plays, had never been inside a real theatre. This was not because of any parental restriction; indeed the Ogdens and their older daughters, like other cultivated New Yorkers, were frequent attendants at the Park or the National. But with Anna Cora it was otherwise. The Ogdens were parishioners at Grace Church, whose rector at the time was the Reverend Doctor Manton Eastburn. Anna, who seems not to have been an unduly religious child, had nevertheless developed a passion for Dr. Eastburn which readily extended itself to a complete acceptance of all his views. Dr. Eastburn disapproved of theatres. In fact he preached long sermons against them, describing them with sulphurous flourishes as “abodes of sin and wickedness.” His words apparently had little effect on his congregation in general. It was composed in the main of prosperous and fashionable New Yorkers, who even by the 1830’s had moved far from the simple unworldly ways of their fathers. But to little Anna Ogden, the exhortations of the distinguished cleric, whose very glance sent strange thrills up and down her spine, were at least a temporary deterrent to theatre-going.

But now her passion for the Rev. Dr. Eastburn was to be put to the test. Fanny Kemble, whose name—for a number of reasons apart from her talents as an actress—was on everybody’s lips, was about to make her farewell appearance on the stage. Anna Cora had followed her career avidly (Dr. Eastburn had said nothing against reading dramatic criticism); and the rumors of her charms, of her spell-binding beauty and histrionic gifts had worked themselves insidiously into Anna Cora’s consciousness. Besides, was it not said that Miss Kemble was exemplary in her private life, a model of filial devotion and a scrupulous observer of the proprieties? And would she not take her place soon in the best society of Philadelphia, when she married Mr. Pierce Butler to whom she was engaged and for whom she was abandoning the stage? The more Anna Cora reasoned along these lines, the more she listened to her sisters’ rapturous reports of Miss Kemble’s acting—for they had seen her again and again in this last engagement—the more she weakened.

Yet she could not easily withdraw from a position she had stated to one and all. She was becoming quite desperate. On the last morning of Miss Kemble’s engagement, as she and her sister Matilda were walking to school, they were overtaken by Mr. Ogden.

“I am going to take seats to see Fanny Kemble tonight in the Hunchback. Would you like to go?” The remark was pointedly addressed to Matilda who immediately accepted the invitation with delight. Then Mr. Ogden turned to Anna Cora and said casually, “And so you, Anna, are never going?”

The direct question was the last straw to her weakening resistance. In a faltering voice she replied, “I should like to see Fanny Kemble just once.”

Her father smiled and promised to see what he could do about getting an extra seat.

That day Anna Cora was more than ever distracted from algebra and French verbs. She could do nothing but think of the theatre and long for evening to come. When at last the day came to an end and the girls, in their most elegant frocks, were ushered into the box which their father had taken, Anna was trembling with expectancy. Then suddenly she was bewildered. The crowd, the dazzling gas-lights from the great chandelier overhead, the music, the sea of waiting faces down in the pit, rising in waves in balcony and galleries about them, was like nothing in her experience. And then she became fearful. It was all so overpowering. She remembered again the Rev. Dr. Eastburn’s warning about “sin and wickedness”. Yet she could not quite see where the harm lay in this great hall with all these hundreds of people whose eyes were now focused on the brilliant painted curtain. Shyly she took her father’s arm and asked him to point out what it was that made it so wrong. Before Mr. Ogden could reply the curtain began to rise, and Anna Cora’s misgivings vanished in the spell of the lighted stage.

Fanny Kemble did not appear until the second scene of the play; but the moment she stepped onto the stage Anna Cora was completely hypnotized. “I thought I had never beheld any creature so perfectly bewitching. The tones of her voice were richest music, and her dark, flashing eyes seemed to penetrate my very soul. Her ‘Clifford, why don’t you speak to me?’ made me start from my very seat; and her ‘Do it!’ to Master Walter, electrified me, as indeed it did the whole audience.”

Fourteen years later in this same theatre, in this very scene, little Anna Ogden—in the dignity of her married name, Mrs. Mowatt—was to electrify many in this same audience, and in a way to defy comparison even with the great Fanny Kemble. But there was nothing in the circumstances of this present evening to suggest this moment in the future. All Anna Cora knew as she sat on the edge of her chair, clutching the velvet rail of the box, was that no one, not even the Rev. Dr. Eastburn, could weave a spell like this.