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Updated: June 17, 2025
It was the first play of our heroine, Zelma Burleigh, and of her Cousin Bessie. The morning before, a fragrant May morning, scores of summers ago, Roger Burleigh, a stout Northumbrian Squire, had rolled himself, in his ponderous way, into the snug family-parlor at the Grange, and addressed his worthy dame with a bluff "Well, good wife, wouldn't like to go see the players to-night?"
When Zelma entered her dressing-room, on that first night at Walton, she found on her table a small spray of hawthorn-blossoms. "How came these flowers here?" she asked, in a hurried, startled tone. "I placed them there," replied her little maid, Susan, half-frightened by the strange agitation of her mistress.
Zelma's youthful charms, heightened by her sumptuous dress, took her audience by surprise, and, while voice and action delayed, made for her friends and favor, and bribed judgment with beauty. King Manuel receives his captives with a courteous speech, only a few lines; but, during their reading, through what a lifetime of fear, of pain, of unimaginable horrors passed Zelma!
But Zelma, whose sad, searching eyes saw deeper than the eyes of critics, recognized from the first her grand, long-sought ideal in the fair unknown, whose name had appeared on the play-bills in small, deprecating type, under the overwhelming capitals of "MR. GARRICK" "Mrs. Siddons."
From that time Zelma went her own ways, calm and self-reliant outwardly, but inwardly tortured with a host of womanly griefs and regrets, a helpless sense of wrong and desolation. She flew to her beautiful art for consolation, flinging herself, with a sort of desperate abandonment, out of her own life of monotonous misery into the varied sorrows of the characters she personated.
Her Cousin Bessie, gay and tender heart, had found the southern exposure of her nature, and had crept up it, and clambered over it, and clasped it, and bloomed against it, and ripened on it, till nothing cold, hard, or defiant could be seen on that side. And Zelma seemed well content to be the sombre background and strong support of so much bloom, sweetness, and graceful dependence.
For several days there were anxious inquiries and vain searches in every direction, storming, weeping, and sleeplessness in the Squire's usually happy household; and then came a letter, whose Scottish post-mark revealed much of the mystery. It was from Zelma, telling that she had left the Grange forever, and become the wife of "Mr.
"See that you do it, man, if you value the repose of your own soul!" said Zelma, with an awful impressiveness, raising herself on one elbow and looking him out of the room. When he was gone, she sunk back and murmured, partly to herself, partly to her little maid, who wept through all, the more that she did not understand, "I knew it was so; it was needless to ask.
All these lonely horrors, these wild griefs, unrelieved by human sympathy or companionship, by even the unconscious comfort which flows in the breathing of a near sleeper, crowded and pressed upon her brain, and seemed to touch her veins with frost and fire. For long weeks, Zelma lay ill, with a slow, baffling fever.
Like the sumptuous exotic of Zenobia, it was an ornament which seemed to bloom out of the character of the woman. Bessie cast about her bright, innocent looks of girlish curiosity, which yet shrank from any chance encounter with the furtive glance or cool stare of admiration. Zelma sat motionless and impassive.
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