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Then there strode in upon her a form of beauty and terror, and held her by the passion and gloom of his eye, and with him crept in a chill and heavy air, like an exhalation from the rank turf of neglected graves. Zelma recovered from this illness, if it could be called a recovery, to a state of only tolerable physical health, and a condition of pitiable mental apathy and languor.
To be sure, she saved his life once, and really was a beautiful, devoted creature, by all accounts; and if Zelma had done no worse than she, run away with any poor devil, provided only he were a gentleman, or if she had gone off vagabondizing with one of her mother's people, it would not have been so infamous an affair as it is; she might still have been accounted an honest woman; but, my God, Sir Harry, a strolling player!"
Zelma continued to change notes of this kind, but her play grew more and more unsuccessful, despite the fact that such ladies' luck is frequently good, for they have a surprising amount of cash at their disposal. Suddenly, the Count too disappeared, even as the Prince had done, and that same evening Mlle. Zelma was forced to appear in the Casino alone.
This story was brought to Zelma; but her bitter cup was full without it. With a noble blindness, the fanaticism of wifely faith, she rejected it utterly. "He is weak, misguided, mad," she said, "but not so basely false as that.
After the first shock of her desertion was past, Zelma was conscious of a sense of relief from a weight of daily recurring care and humiliation, the torture of an unloving presence, chill and ungenial as arctic sunlight. Even in the cold blank of his absence there was something grateful to her bruised heart, like the balm of darkness to suffering eyes.
The players played out their engagement at Arden, with the usual supplement, "A few nights only by special request," and were off to a neighboring town. On their last night, after the play, Zelma met her lover by moonlight, at the trysting-place in the lane, for a parting interview.
Happily, with the actor's fame rose his salary; and as both rose, the actor and his wife descended from their lofty attic-room into whose one window the stars looked with, it seemed to Zelma, a startling nearness to respectable lodgings on the second floor.
As Zelma bent and smiled in modest acknowledgment of renewed applause, led by royalty itself, her aspirations so speedily fulfilled, her genius so early crowned, even at that supreme moment, the grief of the woman would have outweighed the triumph of the artist, and saddened all those plaudits into knell-like sounds, could she have known that the miserable fiends of envy and jealousy had grasped her husband's heart and torn it out of her possession forever.
It is the stillest, loneliest place in all the house now. Even your pet hound refuses to enter it." "Now, my Cousin, you are really cruel," said Zelma, the tears at last forcing their way through her reluctant eyelids. "When I left Burleigh Grange, I went like Eve from Paradise, forever."
The awful night of the début arrived, as doomsday will come at last; and after having been elaborately arrayed for her part by a gossiping tire-woman, who would chatter incessantly, relating, for the encouragement of the débutante, tale after tale of stage-fright, swoons, and failure, after having been plumed, powdered, and most reluctantly rouged, the rose of nineteen summers having suddenly paled on her cheek, Zelma was silently conducted from her dressing-room by her husband, who, as Osmyn, took his stand with her, the guards, and attendants at the left wing, awaiting the summons to the presence of King Manuel.
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