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Updated: June 17, 2025
It was but a brief while, scarcely the lifetime of a rose, the fragrant snow of the hawthorn blossoms had not melted from the hedges since they met, and yet, in that little season, the deepest, divinest mystery of human life had grown clear and familiar to their hearts, and was conned as the simplest lesson of Nature. To Zelma the romance and secrecy of this love had an inexpressible charm.
Why, we shall have you strolling next, like your" Here the Squire, for some reason known to himself, suddenly paused and grew very red in the face. Dame Margery took the word, and, in a tone meant to be severe, but which was only dry, remarked, "Zelma is quite too young to go to the play." "Just one week younger than my Cousin Bessie.
At this point Zelma threw herself back in utter weariness and disgust, exclaiming, audibly, "Miserable! most miserable." When, looking round, she saw the traces of her cousin's innocent emotion, the flush and tearfulness which bespoke her uncritical sympathy with passions so unskilfully represented, she could not suppress a smile at such childish simplicity. And yet this was also her first play.
He liked the bluff Squire heartily, as who did not? Then his eye a laughing blue eye it was rested and lingered, not on the dark, dramatic face of Zelma, but on the pretty, girlish head of her cousin. Bessie sat with her face partly averted from the baronet's gay party, and her gaze fixed intently upon the stage.
They discussed the quiet rural scenery around them, the deep green valley of Arden, shut in by an almost unbroken circle of hills, and Zelma told of a peculiar silvery mist which sometimes floated over it, like the ghost of the lake which, it was said, once filled it; they spoke of wood, stream, moor, and waterfall, sunsets and moonlight and stars, poetry and love; floating slowly, and almost unconsciously, down the smooth current of summer talk and youthful fancies, toward the ocean of all their thoughts, whose mysterious murmurs already filled one heart at least with a tender awe and a vague longing, which was yet half fear.
But it was late when the players reached Walton; and, after the necessary arrangements for the evening were concluded, Zelma found that she had no time for a pilgrimage to the parish churchyard. She could see it from a window of her lodgings; it was high-walled, dark and damp, crowded with quaint, mossy tomb-stones, and brooded over by immemorial yews.
The leading actor looked annoyed, and sought to change the subject of conversation; but as the wife's dreamy eyes flashed with sudden splendor, revealing the true dramatic fire, the manager returned upon him with his artistic convictions and practical arguments, and at length wrung from him most reluctant consent that Zelma, after the necessary study, should make a trial of her powers.
For Zelma, she grew more humble and simple and less exacting, the more she bestowed from a "bounty boundless as the sea."
Zelma chose for her début the part of Zara in "The Mourning Bride," not out of any love for the character, which was too stormy, vicious, and revengeful to engage her sympathies, but because it was rapid, vehement, sharply defined, and, if realized at all, she said, would put her, by its very fierceness and wickedness, too far out of herself for failure, sweep her through the play like a whirlwind, and give her no time to droop.
Zelma gave the concluding lines of her part brokenly, in a tone of almost childlike lamenting, with piteous murmurs and penitent caresses: "Cold, cold! my veins are icicles and frost! Cover us close, or I shall chill his breast, And fright him from my arms! See! see! he slides Still farther from me! Look! he hides his face! I cannot feel it! quite beyond my reach!
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