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Updated: June 17, 2025
This story, coming to the ears of Roger Burleigh, quickened his dull suspicions that "something was wrong with that poor girl"; and just as he was getting positive and peremptory, and Bessie perplexed and alarmed, Zelma disappeared!
He approached the couch of the actress, and looked down upon her with a curious, professional look, as though he were peering into a face newly coffined or freshly exhumed; but when Zelma fixed her live eyes upon him, angry and threatening, and asked, in abrupt, yet solemn tones, "Whose was that skull you brought for me last night?" he fell back with an exclamation of surprise and terror.
Then May came round, the haunted month of all the year for her. The hawthorn-hedges burst into flower, the high-ways and by-paths and lanes became Milky Ways of bloom, and all England was once more veined with fragrance. They were in the North, when one morning Zelma was startled by hearing the manager say that the next night they should play at Walton.
"The Captive Queen" took captive all, save that stern row of critics, the indomitable, the incorruptible. Their awful judgment still hung suspended over her head. In a scene with Osmyn Zelma first revealed her tragic power. In her fitful tenderness, in the passionate reproaches which she stormed upon him, in her entreaties and imprecations, she was the poet's ideal, and more.
On the morning succeeding the play, Zelma Burleigh, taking in her hand an odd volume of Shakspeare, one of the few specimens of dramatic literature which her uncle's scant library afforded, strolled down a lonely lane, running back from the house, toward the high pasture-lands, on which grazed and basked the wealthy Squire's goodly flocks and herds.
On her first night in this play, Zelma was startled by recognizing among the audience the once familiar faces of her uncle Roger, her cousin Bessie, and Sir Harry Willerton. They had all come up to London to draw up the papers and purchase the trousseau for the wedding, which would have taken place a year sooner, but for the death of Bessie's mother.
This postscript was signed "Zelle," the orphan's childish and pet name at the Grange, which she now put off with the peace and purity of maidenhood and domestic life. When it was known how Zelma Burleigh had fled, and with whom, the neighboring gentry were duly shocked and scandalized.
Had he been better informed, it is doubtful whether, improvident and enamored as he was, he would have ruralized and practicalized Romeo in the lane of Burleigh Grange. Zelma herself, too unworldly to suspect that self-interest had anything to do with her conquest, never alluded to her lack of dowry till it was too late.
One dreary November night, after having revealed new powers and won new honors by her first personation of Belvedera, Zelma went home to find on her table a brief, business-like letter from the manager of a theatre at Walton, a town in the North, stating that Mr.
Zelma remained for some hours convulsed and delirious; but toward morning she sank into a deep, swoon-like sleep of utter exhaustion. She awoke from this, quite sane and calm, but marble-white and cold, the work of death all done, it seemed, save the dashing out of the sad, wild light yet burning in her sunken eyes.
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