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Zelma had abruptly dismissed her maid, that she might read quite unobserved a letter which she suspected brought news from her husband; so she was quite alone throughout that fearful night. What fierce, face-to-face wrestlings with grief and remorse were hers! What sweet, torturing memories of love, of estrangement, of loss!
And infinite good she did poor Zelma. Bessie dear, simple heart! was no diplomatist; she did not creep stealthily toward her object, but dashed at it at once. "I am come, dearest Zelle, to win you home," she said. "You cannot think how lonely it is at the Grange, now that dear mamma is gone; and by-and-by it will be yet more lonely, at least, for poor papa.
As she said this, she placed the flowers in her bosom, but, the little maid noticed, not as an ornament, but quite out of sight, where her close bodice would crush them against her heart. During the first acts of the play, Zelma was languid, absent, and more unequal than usual. A strange sense of evil, a vague foreboding, haunted her.
Bessie dreamed of merry games and quiet rambles and country fêtes with the gay Sir Harry; but Zelma, when at last she slept, dreamed of wandering with her adventurous lover from province to province, then of playing Juliet to his Romeo before a vast metropolitan audience.
In the death-scene, where the full tide of womanly feeling, which has been driven out of Zara's heart by the volcanic shocks of fierce passions, comes pouring back with whelming force, Zelma lost none of her power, but won new laurels, bedewed with tears from "eyes unused to weep." Zara dies by her own hand, clinging to the headless body of King Manuel, believing it to be Osmyn's.
When, obeying the stormy summons of the audience, the lovers arose from the dead, and glided ghost-like before the curtain, Zelma, really pale with the passion and woe of her part, glanced eagerly at the box in which she had beheld her friends; it was empty.
Many were the nights when Zelma returned from the playhouse to her cheerless lodgings, exhausted, dispirited, and alone, to walk her chamber till the morning, wrestling with real terrors and sorrows, the homely distresses of the heart, hard, absolute, unrelieved, to which the tragic agonies she had been representing seemed but child's play.
Here Zelma flushed and drew herself up, while a suspicious glance shot from her eyes; but the stranger seemed not to understand or perceive it, for he went on quite innocently, and with increasing earnestness of tone and manner:
If you feel in any way surprised that I should know these petty and unedifying details, the reason is that I had them from a relative of mine who, later that evening, drove Mlle. Zelma in his carriage from Roulettenberg to Spa.
Once, when she was more than usually earnest in pleading for her plan, not merely on the strength of her own deep, prophetic conviction of her fitness for a dramatic career, but on the ground of an urgent and bitter necessity for exertion on her part, to ward off actual destitution and suffering, he exclaimed, somewhat impatiently, "Why, Zelma, it is an impossibility, almost an absurdity, you urge!
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