CHAPTER XXIV.

When Mrs. Marvyn began to amend, Mary returned to the home cottage, and

resumed the details of her industrious and quiet life.

Between her and her two best friends had fallen a curtain of silence.

The subject that filled all her thoughts could not be named between

them. The Doctor often looked at her pale cheeks and drooping form with

a face of honest sorrow, and heaved deep sighs as she passed; but he did

not find any power within himself by which he could approach her. When

he would speak, and she turned her sad, patient eyes so gently on him,

the words went back again to his heart, and there, taking a second

thought, spread upward wing in prayer.

Mrs. Scudder sometimes came to her room after she was gone to bed, and

found her weeping; and when gently she urged her to sleep, she would

wipe her eyes so patiently and turn her head with such obedient

sweetness, that her mother's heart utterly failed her. For hours Mary

sat in her room with James's last letter spread out before her. How

anxiously had she studied every word and phrase in it, weighing them to

see if the hope of eternal life were in them! How she dwelt on those

last promises! Had he kept them? Ah! to die without one word more! Would

no angel tell her?--would not the loving God, who knew all, just whisper

one word? He must have read the little Bible! What had he thought? What

did he feel in that awful hour when he felt himself drifting on to that

fearful eternity? Perhaps he had been regenerated,--perhaps there had

been a sudden change;--who knows?--she had read of such

things;--_perhaps_--Ah, in that perhaps lies a world of anguish! Love

will not hear of it. Love _dies_ for certainty. Against an uncertainty

who can brace the soul? We put all our forces of faith and prayer

against it, and it goes down just as a buoy sinks in the water, and the

next moment it is up again. The soul fatigues itself with efforts which

come and go in waves; and when with laborious care she has adjusted all

things in the light of hope, back flows the tide, and sweeps all away.

In such struggles life spends itself fast; an inward wound does not

carry one deathward more surely than this worst wound of the soul. God

has made us so mercifully that there is no _certainty_, however

dreadful, to which life-forces do not in time adjust themselves,--but to

uncertainty there is no possible adjustment. Where is he? Oh, question

of questions!--question which we suppress, but which a power of infinite

force still urges on the soul, who feels a part of herself torn away.

Mary sat at her window in evening hours, and watched the slanting

sunbeams through the green blades of grass, and thought one year ago he

stood there, with his well-knit, manly form, his bright eye, his buoyant

hope, his victorious mastery of life! And where was he now? Was his

heart as sick, longing for her, as hers for him? Was he looking back to

earth and its joys with pangs of unutterable regret? or had a divine

power interpenetrated his soul, and lighted there the flame of a

celestial love which bore him far above earth? If he were among the

lost, in what age of eternity could she ever be blessed? Could Christ be

happy, if those who were one with Him were sinful and accursed? and

could Christ's own loved ones be happy, when those with whom they have

exchanged being, in whom they live and feel, are as wandering stars, for

whom is reserved the mist of darkness forever? She had been taught that

the agonies of the lost would be forever in sight of the saints, without

abating in the least their eternal joys; nay, that they would find in it

increasing motives to praise and adoration. Could it be so? Would the

last act of the great Bridegroom of the Church be to strike from the

heart of his purified Bride those yearnings of self-devoting love which

His whole example had taught her, and in which she reflected, as in a

glass, His own nature? If not, is there not some provision by which

those roots of deathless love which Christ's betrothed ones strike into

other hearts shall have a divine, redeeming power? Question vital as

life-blood to ten thousand hearts,--fathers, mothers, wives,

husbands,--to all who feel the infinite sacredness of love!

After the first interview with Mrs. Marvyn, the subject which had so

agitated them was not renewed. She had risen at last from her sick-bed,

as thin and shadowy as a faded moon after sunrise. Candace often shook

her head mournfully, as her eyes followed her about her dally tasks.

Once only, with Mary, she alluded to the conversation which had passed

between them;--it was one day when they were together, spinning, in the

north upper room that looked out upon the sea. It was a glorious day. A

ship was coming in under full sail, with white gleaming wings. Mrs.

Marvyn watched it a few moments,--the gay creature, so full of exultant

life,--and then smothered down an inward groan, and Mary thought she

heard her saying, "Thy will be done!"

"Mary," she said, gently, "I hope you will forget all I said to you that

dreadful day. It had to be said, or I should have died. Mary, I begin to

think that it is not best to stretch our minds with reasonings where we

are so limited, where we can know so little. I am quite sure there must

be dreadful mistakes somewhere.

"It seems to me irreverent and shocking that a child should oppose a

father, or a creature its Creator. I never should have done it, only

that, where direct questions are presented to the judgment, one cannot

help judging. If one is required to praise a being as just and good, one

must judge of his actions by some standard of right,--and we have no

standard but such as our Creator has placed in us. I have been told it

was my duty to attend to these subjects, and I have tried to,--and the

result has been that the facts presented seem wholly irreconcilable with

any notions of justice or mercy that I am able to form. If these be the

facts, I can only say that my nature is made entirely opposed to them.

If I followed the standard of right they present, and acted according to

my small mortal powers on the same principles, I should be a very bad

person. Any father, who should make such use of power over his children

as they say the Deity does with regard to us, would be looked upon as a

monster by our very imperfect moral sense. Yet I cannot say that the

facts are not so. When I heard the Doctor's sermons on 'Sin a Necessary

Means of the Greatest Good,' I could not extricate myself from the

reasoning.

"I have thought, in desperate moments, of giving up the Bible itself.

But what do I gain? Do I not see the same difficulty in Nature? I see

everywhere a Being whose main ends seem to be beneficent, but whose good

purposes are worked out at terrible expense of suffering, and apparently

by the total sacrifice of myriads of sensitive creatures. I see

unflinching order, general good-will, but no sympathy, no mercy. Storms,

earthquakes, volcanoes, sickness, death, go on without regarding us.

Everywhere I see the most hopeless, unrelieved suffering,--and for aught

I see, it may be eternal. Immortality is a dreadful chance, and I would

rather never have been.--The Doctor's dreadful system is, I confess,

much like the laws of Nature,--about what one might reason out from

them.

"There is but just one thing remaining, and that is, as Candace said,

the cross of Christ. If God so loved us,--if He died for us,--greater

love hath no man than this. It seems to me that love is shown here in

the two highest forms possible to our comprehension. We see a Being who

gives himself for us,--and more than that, harder than that, a Being who

consents to the suffering of a dearer than self. Mary, I feel that I

must love more, to give up one of my children to suffer, than to consent

to suffer myself. There is a world of comfort to me in the words, 'He

that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall

he not with him also freely give us all things?' These words speak to my

heart. I can interpret them by my own nature, and I rest on them. If

there is a fathomless mystery of sin and sorrow, there is a deeper

mystery of God's love. So, Mary, I try Candace's way,--I look at

Christ,--I pray to Him. If he that hath seen Him hath seen the Father,

it is enough. I rest there,--I wait. What I know not now I shall know

hereafter."

Mary kept all things and pondered them in her heart. She could speak to

no one,--not to her mother, nor to her spiritual guide; for had she not

passed to a region beyond theirs? As well might those on the hither side

of mortality instruct the souls gone beyond the veil as souls outside a

great affliction guide those who are struggling in it. That is a mighty

baptism, and only Christ can go down with us into those waters.

Mrs. Scudder and the Doctor only marked that she was more than ever

conscientious in every duty, and that she brought to life's daily

realities something of the calmness and disengagedness of one whose soul

has been wrenched by a mighty shock from all moorings here below. Hopes

did not excite, fears did not alarm her; life had no force strong enough

to awaken a thrill within; and the only subjects on which she ever spoke

with any degree of ardor were religious subjects.

One who should have seen moving about the daily ministrations of the

cottage a pale girl, whose steps were firm, whose eye was calm, whose

hands were ever busy, would scarce imagine that through that silent

heart were passing tides of thought that measured a universe; but it was

even so. Through that one gap of sorrow flowed in the whole awful

mystery of existence, and silently, as she spun and sewed, she thought

over and over again all that she had ever been taught, and compared and

revolved it by the light of a dawning inward revelation.

Sorrow is the great birth-agony of immortal powers,--sorrow is the great

searcher and revealer of hearts, the great test of truth; for Plato has

wisely said, sorrow will not endure sophisms,--all shams and unrealities

melt in the fire of that awful furnace. Sorrow reveals forces in

ourselves we never dreamed of. The soul, a bound and sleeping prisoner,

hears her knock on her cell-door, and wakens. Oh, how narrow the walls!

oh, how close and dark the grated window! how the long useless wings

beat against the impassable barriers! Where are we? What is this prison?

What is beyond? Oh for more air, more light! When will the door be

opened? The soul seems to itself to widen and deepen; it trembles at its

own dreadful forces; it gathers up in waves that break with wailing only

to flow back into the everlasting void. The calmest and most centred

natures are sometimes thrown by the shock of a great sorrow into a

tumultuous amazement. All things are changed. The earth no longer seems

solid, the skies no longer secure; a deep abyss seems underlying every

joyous scene of life. The soul, struck with this awful inspiration, is a

mournful Cassandra; she sees blood on every threshold, and shudders in

the midst of mirth and festival with the weight of a terrible wisdom.

Who shall dare be glad any more, that has once seen the frail

foundations on which love and joy are built? Our brighter hours, have

they only been weaving a network of agonizing remembrances for this day

of bereavement? The heart is pierced with every past joy, with every

hope of its ignorant prosperity. Behind every scale in music, the gayest

and cheeriest, the grandest, the most triumphant, lies its dark relative

minor; the notes are the same, but the change of a semitone changes all

to gloom;--all our gayest hours are tunes that have a modulation into

these dreary keys ever possible; at any moment the key-note may be

struck.

The firmest, best-prepared natures are often beside themselves with

astonishment and dismay, when they are called to this dread initiation.

They thought it a very happy world before,--a glorious universe. Now it

is darkened with the shadow of insoluble mysteries. Why this everlasting

tramp of inevitable laws on quivering life? If the wheels must roll, why

must the crushed be so living and sensitive?

And yet sorrow is godlike, sorrow is grand and great, sorrow is wise and

farseeing. Our own instinctive valuations, the intense sympathy which we

give to the tragedy which God has inwoven into the laws of Nature, show

us that it is with no slavish dread, no cowardly shrinking, that we

should approach her divine mysteries. What are the natures that cannot

suffer? Who values them? From the fat oyster, over which the silver

tide rises and falls without one pulse upon its fleshy ear, to the hero

who stands with quivering nerve parting with wife and child and home for

country and God, all the way up is an ascending scale, marked by

increasing power to suffer; and when we look to the Head of all being,

up through principalities and powers and princedoms, with dazzling

orders and celestial blazonry, to behold by what emblem the Infinite

Sovereign chooses to reveal himself, we behold, in the midst of the

throne, "a lamb as it had been slain."

Sorrow is divine. Sorrow is reigning on the throne of the universe, and

the crown of all crowns has been one of thorns. There have been many

books that treat of the mystery of sorrow, but only one that bids us

glory in tribulation, and count it all joy when we fall into divers

afflictions, that so we may be associated with that great fellowship of

suffering of which the Incarnate God is the head, and through which He

is carrying a redemptive conflict to a glorious victory over evil. If we

suffer with Him, we shall also reign with Him.

Even in the very making up of our physical nature, God puts suggestions

of such a result. "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the

morning." There are victorious powers in our nature which are all the

while working for us in our deepest pain. It is said, that, after the

sufferings of the rack, there ensues a period in which the simple repose

from torture produces a beatific trance; it is the reaction of Nature,

asserting the benignant intentions of her Creator. So, after great

mental conflicts and agonies must come a reaction, and the Divine

Spirit, co-working with our spirit, seizes the favorable moment, and,

interpenetrating natural laws with a celestial vitality, carries up the

soul to joys beyond the ordinary possibilities of mortality.

It is said that gardeners, sometimes, when they would bring a rose to

richer flowering, deprive it, for a season, of light and moisture.

Silent and dark it stands, dropping one fading leaf after another, and

seeming to go down patiently to death. But when every leaf is dropped,

and the plant stands stripped to the uttermost, a new life is even then

working in the buds, from which shall spring a tender foliage and a

brighter wealth of flowers. So, often in celestial gardening, every leaf

of earthly joy must drop, before a new and divine bloom visits the soul.

Gradually, as months passed away, the floods grew still; the mighty

rushes of the inner tides ceased to dash. There came first a delicious

calmness, and then a celestial inner clearness, in which the soul seemed

to lie quiet as an untroubled ocean, reflecting heaven. Then came the

fulness of mysterious communion given to the pure in heart,--that advent

of the Comforter in the soul, teaching all things and bringing all

things to remembrance; and Mary moved in a world transfigured by a

celestial radiance. Her face, so long mournfully calm, like some

chiselled statue of Patience, now wore a radiance, as when one places a

light behind some alabaster screen sculptured with mysterious and holy

emblems, and words of strange sweetness broke from her, as if one should

hear snatches of music from a door suddenly opened in heaven. Something

wise and strong and sacred gave an involuntary impression of awe in her

looks and words;--it was not the childlike loveliness of early days,

looking with dovelike, ignorant eyes on sin and sorrow; but the

victorious sweetness of that great multitude who have come out of great

tribulation, having washed their robes and made them white in the blood

of the Lamb. In her eyes there was that nameless depth that one sees

with awe in the Sistine Madonna,--eyes that have measured infinite

sorrow and looked through it to an infinite peace.

"My dear Madam," said the Doctor to Mrs. Scudder, "I cannot but think

that there must be some uncommonly gracious exercises passing in the

mind of your daughter; for I observe, that, though she is not inclined

to conversation, she seems to be much in prayer; and I have, of late,

felt the sense of a Divine Presence with her in a most unusual degree.

Has she opened her mind to you?"

"Mary was always a silent girl," said Mrs. Scudder, "and not given to

speaking of her own feelings; indeed, until she gave you an account of

her spiritual state, on joining the church, I never knew what her

exercises were. Hers is a most singular case. I never knew the time when

she did not seem to love God more than anything else. It has disturbed

me sometimes,--because I did not know but it might be mere natural

sensibility, instead of gracious affection."

"Do not disturb yourself, Madam," said the Doctor. "The Spirit worketh

when, where, and how He will; and, undoubtedly, there have been cases

where His operations commence exceedingly early. Mr. Edwards relates a

case of a young person who experienced a marked conversion when three

years of age; and Jeremiah was called from the womb. (Jeremiah, i. 5.)

In all cases we must test the quality of the evidence without relation

to the time of its commencement. I do not generally lay much stress on

our impressions, which are often uncertain and delusive; yet I have had

an impression that the Lord would be pleased to make some singular

manifestations of His grace through this young person. In the economy of

grace there is neither male nor female; and Peter says (Acts, ii. 17)

that the Spirit of the Lord shall be poured out and your sons and your

daughters shall prophesy. Yet if we consider that the Son of God, as to

his human nature, was made of a woman, it leads us to see that in

matters of grace God sets a special value on woman's nature and designs

to put special honor upon it. Accordingly, there have been in the

Church, in all ages, holy women who have received the Spirit and been

called to a ministration in the things of God,--such as Deborah, Huldah,

and Anna, the prophetess. In our own days, most uncommon manifestations

of divine grace have been given to holy women. It was my privilege to be

in the family of President Edwards at a time when Northampton was

specially visited, and his wife seemed and spoke more like a glorified

spirit than a mortal woman,--and multitudes flocked to the house to hear

her wonderful words. She seemed to have such a sense of the Divine love

as was almost beyond the powers of nature to endure. Just to speak the

words, 'Our Father who art in heaven,' would overcome her with such a

manifestation that she would become cold and almost faint; and though

she uttered much, yet she told us that the divinest things she saw could

not be spoken. These things could not be fanaticism, for she was a

person of a singular evenness of nature, and of great skill and

discretion in temporal matters, and of an exceeding humility, sweetness,

and quietness of disposition."

"I have observed of late," said Mrs. Scudder, "that, in our praying

circles, Mary seemed much carried out of herself, and often as if she

would speak, and with difficulty holding herself back. I have not urged

her, because I thought it best to wait till she should feel full

liberty."

"Therein you do rightly, Madam," said the Doctor; "but I am persuaded

you will hear from her yet."

It came at length, the hour of utterance. And one day, in a praying

circle of the women of the church, all were startled by the clear silver

tones of one who sat among them and spoke with the unconscious

simplicity of an angel child, calling God her Father, and speaking of an

ineffable union in Christ, binding all things together in one, and

making all complete in Him. She spoke of a love passing

knowledge,--passing all love of lovers or of mothers,--a love forever

spending, yet never spent,--a love ever pierced and bleeding, yet ever

constant and triumphant, rejoicing with infinite joy to bear in its own

body the sins and sorrows of a universe,--conquering, victorious love,

rejoicing to endure, panting to give, and offering its whole self with

an infinite joyfulness for our salvation. And when, kneeling, she

poured out her soul in prayer, her words seemed so many winged angels,

musical with unearthly harpings of an untold blessedness. They who heard

her had the sensation of rising in the air, of feeling a celestial light

and warmth, descending into their souls; and when, rising, she stood

silent and with downcast drooping eyelids, there were tears in all eyes,

and a hush in all movements as she passed, as if something celestial

were passing out.

Miss Prissy came rushing homeward, to hold a private congratulatory talk

with the Doctor and Mrs. Scudder, while Mary was tranquilly setting the

tea-table and cutting bread for supper.

"To see her now, certainly," said Miss Prissy, "moving round so

thoughtful, not forgetting anything, and doing everything so calm, you

wouldn't 'a' thought it could be her that spoke those blessed words and

made that prayer! Well, certainly, that prayer seemed to take us all

right up and put us down in heaven! and when I opened my eyes, and saw

the roses and asparagus-bushes on the manteltree-piece, I had to ask

myself, 'Where have I been?' Oh, Miss Scudder, her afflictions have been

sanctified to her!--and really, when I see her going on so, I feel she

can't be long for us. They say, dying grace is for dying hours; and I'm

sure this seems more like dying grace than anything that I ever yet

saw."

"She is a precious gift," said the Doctor; "let us thank the Lord for

his grace through her. She has evidently had a manifestation of the

Beloved, and feedeth among the lilies (Canticles, vi. 3); and we will

not question the Lord's further dispensations concerning her."

"Certainly," said Miss Prissy, briskly, "it's never best to borrow

trouble; 'sufficient unto the day' is enough, to be sure.--And now, Miss

Scudder, I thought I'd just take a look at that dove-colored silk of

yours to-night, to see what would have to be done with it, because I

must make every minute tell; and you know I lose half a day every week

for the prayer-meeting. Though I ought not to say I lose it, either; for

I was telling Miss General Wilcox I wouldn't give up that meeting for

bags and bags of gold. She wanted me to come and sew for her one

Wednesday, and says I, 'Miss Wilcox, I'm poor and have to live by my

work, but I a'n't so poor but what I have some comforts, and I can't

give up my prayer-meeting for any money,--for you see, if one gets a

little lift there, it makes all the work go lighter,--but then I have to

be particular to save up every scrap and end of time."

Mrs. Scudder and Miss Prissy crossed the kitchen and entered the

bedroom, and soon had the dove-colored silk under consideration.

"Well, Miss Scudder," said Miss Prissy, after mature investigation,

"here's a broad hem, not cut at all on the edge, as I see, and that

might be turned down, and so cut off the worn spot up by the waist,--and

then, if it is turned, it will look every bit and grain as well as a new

silk;--I'll sit right down now and go to ripping. I put my ripping-knife

into my pocket when I put on this dress to go to prayer-meeting,

because, says I to myself, there'll be something to do at Miss Scudder's

to-night. You just get an iron to the fire, and we'll have it all ripped

and pressed out before dark."

Miss Prissy seated herself at the open window, as cheery as a fresh

apple-blossom, and began busily plying her knife, looking at the garment

she was ripping with an astute air, as if she were about to circumvent

it into being a new dress by some surprising act of legerdemain. Mrs.

Scudder walked to the looking-glass and began changing her bonnet cap

for a tea-table one.

Miss Prissy, after a while, commenced in a mysterious tone.

"Miss Scudder, I know folks like me shouldn't have their eyes open too

wide, but then I can't help noticing some things. Did you see the

Doctor's face when we was talking to him about Mary? Why, he colored all

up and the tears came into his eyes. It's my belief that that blessed

man worships the ground she treads on. I don't mean _worships_,

either,--'cause that would be wicked, and he's too good a man to make a

graven image of anything,--but it's clear to see that there a'n't

anybody in the world like Mary to him. I always did think so; but I used

to think Mary was such a little poppet--that she'd do better for--Well,

you know, I thought about some younger man;--but, laws, now I see how

she rises up to be ahead of everybody, and is so kind of solemn-like. I

can't but see the leadings of Providence. What a minister's wife she'd

be, Miss Scudder!--why, all the ladies coming out of prayer-meeting were

speaking of it. You see, they want the Doctor to get married;--it seems

more comfortable-like to have ministers married; one feels more free to

open their exercises of mind; and as Miss Deacon Twitchel said to

me,--'If the Lord had made a woman o' purpose, as he did for Adam, he

wouldn't have made her a bit different from Mary Scudder.' Why, the

oldest of us would follow her lead,--'cause she goes before us without

knowing it."

"I feel that the Lord has greatly blessed me in such a child," said Mrs.

Scudder, "and I feel disposed to wait the leadings of Providence."

"Just exactly," said Miss Prissy, giving a shake to her silk; "and as

Miss Twitchel said, in this case every providence seems to p'int. I felt

dreadfully for her along six months back; but now I see how she's been

brought out, I begin to see that things are for the best, perhaps, after

all. I can't help feeling that Jim Marvyn is gone to heaven, poor

fellow! His father is a deacon,--and such a good man!--and Jim, though

he did make a great laugh wherever he went, and sometimes laughed where

he hadn't ought to, was a noble-hearted fellow. Now, to be sure, as the

Doctor says, 'amiable instincts a'n't true holiness'; but then they are

better than unamiable ones, like Simeon Brown's. I do think, if that man

is a Christian, he is a dreadful ugly one; he snapped me short up about

my change, when he settled with me last Tuesday; and if I hadn't felt

that it was a sinful rising, I should have told him I'd never put foot

in his house again; I'm glad, for my part, he's gone out of our church.

Now Jim Marvyn was like a prince to poor people; and I remember once his

mother told him to settle with me, and he gave me 'most double, and

wouldn't let me make change. 'Confound it all, Miss Prissy,' says he, 'I

wouldn't stitch as you do from morning to night for double that money.'

Now I know we can't do anything to recommend ourselves to the Lord, but

then I can't help feeling some sorts of folks must be by nature more

pleasing to Him than others. David was a man after God's own heart, and

he was a generous, whole-souled fellow, like Jim Marvyn, though he did

get carried away by his spirits sometimes and do wrong things; and so I

hope the Lord saw fit to make Jim one of the elect. We don't ever know

what God's grace has done for folks. I think a great many are converted

when we know nothing about it, as Miss Twitchel told poor old Miss

Tyrel, who was mourning about her son, a dreadful wild boy, who was

killed falling from mast-head; she says, that from the mast-head to the

deck was time enough for divine grace to do the work."

"I have always had a trembling hope for poor James," said Mrs.

Scudder,--"not on account of any of his good deeds or amiable traits,

because election is without foresight of any good works,--but I felt he

was a child of the covenant, at least by the father's side, and I hope

the Lord has heard his prayer. These are dark providences; the world is

full of them; and all we can do is to have faith that the Lord will

bring infinite good out of finite evil, and make everything better than

if the evil had not happened. That's what our good Doctor is always

repeating; and we must try to rejoice, in view of the happiness of the

universe, without considering whether we or our friends are to be

included in it or not."

"Well, dear me!" said Miss Prissy, "I hope, if that is necessary, it

will please the Lord to give it to me; for I don't seem to find any

powers in me to get up to it. But all's for the best, at any rate,--and

that's a comfort."

Just at this moment Mary's clear voice at the door announced that tea

was on the table.

"Coming, this very minute," said Miss Prissy, bustling up and pulling

off her spectacles. Then, running across the room, she shut the door

mysteriously, and turned to Mrs. Scudder with the air of an impending

secret. Miss Prissy was subject to sudden impulses of confidence, in

which she was so very cautious that not the thickest oak-plank door

seemed secure enough, and her voice dropped to its lowest key. The most

important and critical words were entirely omitted, or supplied by a

knowing wink and a slight stamp of the foot.

In this mood she now approached Mrs. Scudder, and, holding up her hand

on the door-side to prevent consequences, if, after all she should be

betrayed into a loud word, she said, "I thought I'd just say, Miss

Scudder, that, in case Mary should ---- the Doctor,--in case, you know,

there should be a ---- in the house, you _must_ just contrive it so as

to give me a month's notice, so that I could give you a whole fortnight

to fix her up as such a good man's ---- ought to be. Now I know how

spiritually-minded our blessed Doctor is; but, bless you, Ma'am, he's

got eyes. I tell you, Miss Scudder, these men, the best of 'em, _feel_

what's what, though they don't _know_ much. I saw the Doctor look at

Mary that night I dressed her for the wedding-party. I tell you he'd

like to have his wife look pretty well, and he'll get up some blessed

text or other about it, just as he did that night about being brought

unto the king in raiment of needle-work. That is an encouraging thought

to us sewing-women.

"But this thing was spoken of after the meeting. Miss Twitchel and Miss

Jones were talking about it; and they all say that there would be the

best setting-out got for her that was ever seen in Newport, if it should

happen. Why, there's reason in it. She ought to have at least two real

good India silks that will stand alone,--and you'll see she'll have 'em,

too; you let me alone for that; and I was thinking, as I lay awake last

night, of a new way of making up, that you will say is just the sweetest

that ever you did see. And Miss Jones was saying that she hoped there

wouldn't anything happen without her knowing it, because her husband's

sister in Philadelphia has sent her a new receipt for cake, and she has

tried it and it came out beautifully, and she says she'll send some in."

All the time that this stream was flowing, Mrs. Scudder stood with the

properly reserved air of a discreet matron, who leaves all such matters

to Providence, and is not supposed unduly to anticipate the future; and,

in reply, she warmly pressed Miss Prissy's hand, and remarked, that no

one could tell what a day might bring forth,--and other general

observations on the uncertainty of mortal prospects, which form a

becoming shield when people do not wish to say more exactly what they

are thinking of.

[To be continued.]

ONCE AND NOW.

The Mourner lies in the solemn room

Where his Dead hath lately lain;

And in the drear, oppressive gloom,

Death-pallid with the dying moon,

There pass before his brain,

In blended visions manifold,

The present and the days of old.

Fair falls the snow on her grave to-day,

Shrouding her sleep sublime;

But he sees in the sunny far-away

None among maidens so fair and gay

As she in her sweet spring-time:

Where the song and the sport and the revel be,

None among maidens so fair as she.

He marks where the perfect crescent dips

Above the heaven of her eyes,

Her beamy hair in soft eclipse,

The red enchantment of her lips,

And all the grace that lies

Dreaming in her neck's pure curve,

With its regal lift and its swanlike swerve.

In pictures which are forever joys,

She cometh to him once more:

Once, with her dainty foot a-poise,

She drives the bird with a merry noise

From her lifted battledoor,

And tosses back, with impatient air,

The ruffled glory of her hair;--

Then gayly draping a painted doll,

To please an eager child;

Or pacing athwart a stately hall;

Or kneeling at dewy evenfall,

When clouds are crimson-piled,

And all the hushed and scented air

Is tremulous with the voice of prayer;--

Or standing mute and rapture-bound

The while her sisters sing;

From voice and lute there floats around

A golden confluence of sound,

Spreading in fairy ring;

And with a beautiful grace and glow

Her head sways to the music's flow.

One night of nights in lustrous June,

She walks with him alone;

Through silver glidings of the moon

The runnels purl a dreamy tune;

His arm is round her thrown:

But looks and sounds far lovelier

Thrill on his trancéd soul from her.

And then that rounded bliss, increased

To one consummate hour!

The marriage-robe, the stoléd priest,

The kisses when the rite hath ceased,

And with her heart's rich dower

She standeth by his shielding side,

His wedded wife and his own bright bride!

And then the sacred influence

That flushed her flower to prime!

Through Love's divine omnipotence

She ripened to a mother once,

But once, and for all time:

No higher heaven on him smiled

Than that young mother and her child.

Then all the pleasant household scenes

Through all the latter years!

No murky shadow intervenes,--

Her gentle aspect only leans

Through the soft mist of tears;

Her sweet, warm smile, her welkin glance,--

There is no speech nor utterance.

O angel form, O darling face,

Slow fading from the shore!

O brave, true heart, whose warmest place

Was his alone by Love's sweet grace,

Still, still, forevermore!

And now he lonely lieth, broken-hearted;

For all the grace and glory have departed.

Snow-cold in sculptured calm she lies,

Apparelled saintly white;

On her sealed lips no sweet replies,

And the blue splendor of her eyes

Gone down in dreamless night;

All empery of Death expressed

In that inexorable rest!

Now leave this fair and holy Thing

Alone with God's dear grace!

Her grave is but the entering

Beneath the shadow of His wing,

Her trusty hiding-place,

Till, in the grand, sweet Dawn, at last,

This tyranny be overpast.

A TRIP TO CUBA.

CAN GRANDE'S DEPARTURE.--THE DOMINICA.--LOTTERY-TICKETS.

I have not told you how Can Grande took leave of the Isle of Rogues, as

one of our party christened the fair Queen of the Antilles. I could not

tell you how he loathed the goings on at Havana, how hateful he found

the Spaniards, and how villainous the American hotel-keepers. His

superlatives of censure were in such constant employment that they began

to have a threadbare sound before he left us; and as he has it in

prospective to run the gantlet of all the inn-keepers on the continent

of Europe, to say nothing of farther lands, where inn-keepers would be a

relief, there is no knowing what exhaustion his powers in this sort may

undergo before he reaches us again. He may break down into weak,

compliant good-nature, and never be able to abuse anybody again, as long

as he lives. In that case, his past life and his future, taken together,

will make a very respectable average. But the climate really did not

suit him, the company did not satisfy him, and there came a moment when

he said, "I can bear it no longer!" and we answered, "Go in peace!"

It now becomes me to speak of Sobrina, who has long been on a temperance

footing, and who forgets even to blush when the former toddy is

mentioned, though she still shudders at the remembrance of sour-sop. She

is the business-man of the party; and while philosophy and highest

considerations occupy the others, with an occasional squabble over

virtue and the rights of man, she changes lodgings, hires carts,

transports baggage, and, knowing half-a-dozen words of Spanish, makes

herself clearly comprehensible to everybody. We have found a Spanish

steamer for Can Grande; but she rows thither in a boat and secures his

passage and state-room. The noontide sun is hot upon the waters, but her

zeal is hotter still. Now she has made a curious bargain with her

boatmen, by which they are to convey the whole party to the steamer on

the fourth day.

"What did you tell them?" we asked.

"I said, _tres noches_ (three nights) and _un dia_, (one day,) and then

took out my watch and showed them five o'clock on it, and pointed to the

boat and to myself. They understood, perfectly."

And so, in truth, they did; for, going to the wharf on the day and at

the hour appointed, we found the boatmen in waiting, with eager faces.

But here a new difficulty presented itself;--the runner of our hotel, a

rascal German, whose Cuban life has sharpened his wits and blunted his

conscience, insisted that the hiring of boats for the lodgers was one of

his (many) perquisites, and that before his sovereign prerogative all

other agreements were null and void.--N.B. There was always something

experimentative about this man's wickedness. He felt that he did not

know how far men might be gulled, or the point where they would be

likely to resist. This was a fault of youth. With increasing years and

experience he will become bolder and more skilful, and bids fair, we

should say, to become one of the most dexterous operators known in his

peculiar line. On the present occasion, he did not heed the piteous

pleadings of the disappointed boatmen, nor Sobrina's explanations, nor

Can Grande's arguments. But when the whole five of us fixed upon him our

mild and scornful eyes, something within him gave way. He felt a little

bit of the moral pressure of Boston, and feebly broke down, saying, "You

better do as you like, then," and so the point was carried.

A pleasant run brought us to the side of the steamer. It was dusk

already as we ascended her steep gangway, and from that to darkness

there is, at this season, but the interval of a breath. Dusk, too, were

our thoughts, at parting from Can Grande, the mighty, the vehement, the

great fighter. How were we to miss his deep music, here and at home!

With his assistance we had made a very respectable band; now we were to

be only a wandering drum and fife,--the fife particularly shrill, and

the drum particularly solemn. Well, we went below, and examined the

little den where Can Grande was to pass the other seven days of his

tropical voyaging. The berths were arranged the wrong way,--across, not

along, the vessel,--and we foresaw that his head would go up and his

feet down, and _vice versâ_, with every movement of the steamer, and our

weak brains reeled at the bare thought of what he was to suffer. He,

good soul, meanwhile, was thinking of his supper, and wondering if he

could get tea, coffee, and chocolate, a toasted roll, and the touch of

cold ham which an invalid loves. And we beheld, and they were bringing

up the side of the vessel trays of delicious pastry, and festoons of

fowls, with more literal butcher's meat. And we said, "There will be no

famine on board. Make the most of your supper, Can Grande; for it will

be the last of earth to you, for some time to come." And now came

silence, and tears, and last embraces; we slipped down the gangway into

our little craft, and, looking up, saw, bending above us, between the

slouched hat and the silver beard, the eyes that we can never forget,

that seemed to drop back in the darkness with the solemnity of a last

farewell. We went home, and the drum hung himself gloomily on his peg,

and the little fife _shut up_ for the remainder of the evening.

Has Mr. Dana described the Dominica, I wonder? Well, if he has, I cannot

help it. He never can have eaten so many ices there as I have, nor

passed so many patient hours amid the screeching, chattering, and

devouring, which make it most like a cage of strange birds, or the

monkey department in the Jardin des Plantes.--_Mem._ I always observed

that the monkeys just mentioned seemed far more mirthful than their

brethren in the London Zoölogical Gardens. They form themselves, so to

speak, on a livelier model, and feel themselves more at home with their

hosts.

But the Dominica. You know, probably, that it is the great _café_ of

Havana. All the day long it is full of people of all nations, sipping

ices, chocolate, and so on; and all night long, also, up to the to me

very questionable hour when its patrons go home and its _garçons_ go to

bed. We often found it a welcome refuge at noon, when the _douche_ of

sunlight on one's _cervix_ bewilders the faculties, and confuses one's

principles of gravitation, toleration, etc., etc. You enter from the

Tophet of the street, and the intolerable glare is at once softened to a

sort of golden shadow. The floor is of stone; in the midst trickles a

tiny fountain with golden network; all other available space is crowded

with marble tables, square or round; and they, in turn, are scarcely

visible for the swarm of black-coats that gather round them. The smoke

of innumerable cigars gives a Rembrandtic tinge to the depths of the

picture, and the rows and groups of nodding Panama hats are like very

dull flower-beds. In the company, of course, the Spanish-Cuban element

largely predominates; yet here and there the sharper English breaks upon

the ear.

"Yes, I went to that plantation; but they have only one thousand boxes

of sugar, and we want three thousand for our operation."

A Yankee, you say. Yes, certainly; and turning, you see the tall, strong

Philadelphian from our hotel, who calls for everything by its right

name, and always says, "_Mas! mas!_" when the waiter helps him to ice.

Some one near us is speaking a fuller English, with a richer "_r_" and

deeper intonation. See there! that is our own jolly captain, Brownless

of ours, the King of the "Karnak"; and going up to the British lion, we

shake the noble beast heartily by the paw.

The people about us are imbibing a variety of cooling liquids. Our turn

comes at last. The _garçon_ who says, "I speke Aingliss," brings us

each a delicious orange _granizada_, a sort of half-frozen water-ice,

familiar to Italy, but unknown in America. It is ice in the first

enthusiasm of freezing,--condensed, not hardened. Promoting its

liquefaction with the spoon, you enjoy it through the mediation of a

straw. The unskilful make strange noises and gurglings through this

_tenuis avena_; but to those who have not forgotten the accomplishment

of suction, as acquired at an early period of existence, the _modus in

quo_ is easy and agreeable.

You will hardly weary of watching the groups that come and go and sit

and talk in this dreamy place. If you are a lady, every black eye

directs its full, tiresome stare at your face, no matter how plain that

face may be. But you have learned before this to consider those eyes as

so many black dots, so many marks of wonder with no sentence attached;

and so you coolly pursue your philosophizing in your corner, strong in

the support of a companion, who, though deeply humanitarian and

peaceful, would not hesitate to punch any number of Spanish heads that

should be necessary for the maintenance of your comfort and his dignity.

The scene is occasionally varied by the appearance of a beggar-woman,

got up in great decency, and with a wonderful air of pinched and faded

gentility. She wears an old shawl upon her head, but it is as nicely

folded as an aristocratic mantilla; her feet are cased in the linen

slippers worn by the poorer classes, but there are no unsavory rags and

dirt about her. "That good walk of yours, friend," I thought, "does not

look like starvation." Yet, if over there were a moment when one's heart

should soften towards an imposing fellow-creature, it is when one is in

the midst of the orange _granizada_. The beggar circles slowly and

mournfully round all the marble tables in turn, holding out her hand to

each, as the plate is offered at a church collection. She is not

importunate; but, looking in each one's face, seems to divine whether he

will give or no. A Yankee, sitting with a Spaniard, offers her his

cigar. The Spaniard gravely pushes the cigar away, and gives her a

_medio_.

More pertinacious is the seller of lottery-tickets, male or female, who

has more at stake, and must run the risk of your displeasure for the

chance of your custom. Even in your bed you are hardly safe from the

ticket-vender. You stand at your window, and he, waiting in the street,

perceives you, and with nods, winks, and showing of his wares endeavors

to establish a communication with you. Or you stop and wait somewhere in

your _volante_, and in the twinkling of an eye the wretch is at your

side to bear you company till you drive off again. At the Dominica he is

especially persevering, and stands and waits with as much zeal as if he

knew the saintly line of Milton. Like the beggar, however, he is

discriminative in the choice of his victims, and persecutes the stony

Yankee less than the oily Spaniard, whose inbred superstitions force him

to believe in luck.

Very strange stories do they tell about the trade in

lottery-tickets,--strange, at least, to us, who consider them the folly

of follies. Here, as in Italy, the lotteries are under the care of the

State, and their administration is as careful and important as that of

any other branch of finance. They are a regular and even reputable mode

of investment. The wealthy commercial houses all own tickets, sometimes

keeping the same number for years, but more frequently changing after

each unsuccessful experiment. A French gentleman in Havana assured me

that his tickets had already cost him seven thousand dollars. "And now,"

said he, "I cannot withdraw, for I cannot lose what I have already paid.

The number has not been up once in eight years; its turn must come soon.

If I were to sell my ticket, some one would be sure to draw the great

prize with it the week after." This, perhaps, is not very unlike the

calculations of business risks most in vogue in our great cities. A

single ticket costs an ounce (seventeen dollars); but you are constantly

offered fractions, to an eighth or a sixteenth. There are ticket-brokers

who accommodate the poorer classes with interests to the amount of ten

cents, and so on. Thus, for them, the lottery replaces the savings-bank,

with entire uncertainty of any return, and the demoralizing process of

expectation thrown into the bargain. The negroes invest a good deal of

money in this way, and we heard in Matanzas a curious anecdote on this

head. A number of negroes, putting their means together, had

commissioned a ticket-broker to purchase and hold for them a certain

ticket. After long waiting and paying up, news came to Matanzas that the

ticket had drawn the $100,000 prize. The owners of the negroes were in

despair at this intelligence. "Now my cook will buy himself," says one;

"my _calesero_ will be free," says another; and so on. The poor slaves

ran, of course, in great agitation, to get their money. But, lo! the

office was shut up. The rascal broker had absconded. He had never run

the risk of purchasing the ticket; but had coolly appropriated this and

similar investments to his own use, preferring the bird in the hand to

the whole aviary of possibilities. He was never heard of more; but

should he ever turn up anywhere, I commend him as the fittest subject

for Lynch-law on record.

Well, as I have told you, all these golden chances wait for you at the

Dominica, and many Americans buy, and look very foolish when they

acknowledge it. The Nassauese all bought largely during their short

stay; and even their little children held up with exultation their

fragments of tickets, all good for something, and bad for something,

too.

If you visit the Dominica in the evening, you find the same crowd, only

with a sprinkling of women, oftenest of your own country, in audacious

bonnets, and with voices and laughter which bring the black eyes upon

them for a time. If it be Sunday evening, you will see here and there

groups of ladies in full ball-dress, fresh from the Paseo, the _volante_

waiting for them outside. All is then at its gayest and busiest; but

your favorite waiter, with disappointment in his eyes, will tell you

that there is "_no mas_" of your favorite _granizada_, and will persuade

you to take, I know not what nauseous substitute in its place; for all

ices are not good at the Dominica, and some are (excuse the word) nasty.

People sit and sip, prolonging their pleasures with dilatory spoon and

indefatigable tongue. Group follows group; but the Spaniards are what I

should call heavy sitters, and tarry long over their ice or chocolate.

The waiter invariably brings to every table a chafing-dish with a

burning coal, which will light a cigar long after its outer glow has

subsided into ashy white. Some humans retain this kindling

power;--_vide_ Ninon and the ancient Goethe;--it is the heart of fire,

not the flame of beauty, that does it. When one goes home, tired, at ten

or eleven, the company shows no sign of thinning, nor does one imagine

how the ground is ever cleared, so as to allow an interval of sleep

between the last ice at night and the first coffee in the morning. It is

the universal _siesta_ which makes the Cubans so bright and fresh in the

evening. With all this, their habits are sober, and the evening

refreshment always light. No suppers are eaten here; and it is even held

dangerous to take fruit as late as eight o'clock, P.M.

The Dominica has still another aspect to you, when you go there in the

character of a citizen and head of family to order West India sweetmeats

for home-consumption. You utter the magic word _dulces_, and are shown

with respect into the establishment across the way, where a neat

steam-engine is in full operation, tended by blacks and whites, stripped

above the waist, and with no superfluous clothing below it. Here they

grind the chocolate, and make the famous preserves, of which a list is

shown you, with prices affixed. As you will probably lose some minutes

in perplexity as to which are best for you to order, let me tell you

that the guava jelly and marmalade are first among them, and there is no

second. You may throw in a little pine-apple, mamey, lime, and

cocoa-plum; but the guava is the thing, and, in case of a long run on

the tea-table, will give the most effectual support. The limes used to

be famous in our youth; but in these days they make them hard and tough.

The marmalade of bitter oranges is one of the most useful of Southern

preserves; but I do not remember it on the list of the Dominica. Having

given your order, let me further advise you to remain, if practicable,

and see it fulfilled; as you will find, otherwise, divers trifling

discrepancies between the bill and the goods as delivered, which, though

of course purely accidental, will all be, somehow, to the Dominica's

advantage, and not to yours. If you are in moderate circumstances, order

eight or ten dollars' worth; if affluent, twenty or thirty dollars'

worth; if rash and extravagant, you may rise even to sixty dollars; but

you will find in such an outlay food for repentance. One word in your

ear: do not buy the syrups, for they are made with very bad sugar, and

have no savor of the fruits they represent.

And this is all I can tell about the Dominica, which I recommend to all

of you for refreshment and amusement. We have nothing like it in New

York or Boston,--our _salons_ of the same description having in them

much more to eat and much less to see. As I look back upon it, the place

assumes a deeply Moorish aspect. I see the fountain, the golden light,

the dark faces, and intense black eyes, a little softened by the

comforting distance. Oh! to sit there for one hour, and help the

garçon's bad English, and be pestered by the beggar, and tormented by

the ticket-vender, and support the battery of the wondering looks, which

make it sin for you, a woman, to be abroad by day! Is there any

purgatory which does not grow lovely as you remember it? Would not a man

be hanged twice, if he could?

[To be continued.]

ZELMA'S VOW.

[Continued from the July Number.]

PART SECOND.

HOW IT WAS KEPT.

It was late when Zelma Burleigh returned to the Grange. As she stole

softly into the hall, she startled an Italian greyhound, which was lying

asleep on a mat near the door. As he sprang up, the little silver bells

on his collar tinkled out his master's secret;--Sir Harry Willerton was

still in the drawing-room with Bessie.

As Zelma passed up to her chamber, she said to herself bitterly,--"Thus

openly and fearlessly can the rich and well-born woo and be wooed, while

such as we must steal away to happiness as to crime, and plight our vows

under the chill and shadow of night!" But the next moment she felt that

there was about her love a piquant sense of peril and lawlessness, a

wild flavor infinitely more to her taste than would be any prudent,

commendable affection grown in drawing-rooms, nourished by

conventionalism, and propped by social fitness; and remembering the

manly beauty and brilliant parts of her lover, she felt that she would

not exchange him for the proudest noble of the realm.

After a time Bessie came stealing up from the drawing-room, and lay

down by her cousin's side, softly, for fear of waking her; and all night

long Bessie's secret curled about her smiling mouth, and quivered

through the lids of her shut eyes, and overran her red lips in murmurs

of happy dreams; but Zelma's secret burned like slow fire in her deepest

heart. 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.

Days went on, and Bessie's pure, transparent nature, a lily-bud of

sweetest womanhood, seemed unconsciously revealing itself, leaf by leaf,

to all the world, and blooming out its beautiful innermost life; but

Zelma's secret still smouldered in her shut heart, never by any chance

flaming up to her lips in words. Her month assumed a look of rigid

resolution, almost of desperation; and her eyes shone with a hard,

diamond-like brilliancy, fitful, but never soft or tearful. Her manner

grew more and more moody and constrained, till even her matter-of-fact

uncle and aunt, good easy souls, and her absorbed cousin, became curious

and anxious. The little elfish black pony was in more frequent request

than ever; for his mistress now went out at any hour that suited her

whim, in any weather, chose the loneliest by-ways, and rode furiously.

Often, at evening, she ascended a dark gorge of the western hills and

plunged down on the other side, as though in hot pursuit of the setting

sun; and at length there came a report from the gossiping post-mistress

of a little village over there, that she came for letters, which she

duly received, addressed in a dashing, manly hand. 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!

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. Bury, the strolling

player"; and saying that she had taken this step of her own free will,

knowing it to be a fatal, unpardonable sin against caste, and that it

would set a great gulf between her and her respectable relatives. Yet,

she asked, had not a gulf of _feeling_, as deep and wide, ever separated

their hearts from the gypsy's daughter? and was it not better and more

honest to break the weak social ties of protection and dependence which

had stretched like wild vines across the chasm to hide it from the

world? She then bade them all an abrupt and final farewell It was a

letter brief, cold, and curt, almost to insolence; but beneath her new

name, which was dashed off with somewhat of a dramatic flourish, there

appeared hurriedly scrawled in pencil a woman's postscript, containing

the real soul of the letter, a passionate burst of feeling, a bitter cry

of long-repressed, sorrowful tenderness. It implored forgiveness for any

pain she might ever have given them, for any disgrace she might ever

bring upon them,--it thanked and blessed them for past kindness, and

humbly prayed for them the choicest gifts and the most loving protection

of Heaven. 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. The village

gossips declared that they had always foreseen some such fate for "that

strange girl," and sagely prophesied that the master of Willerton Hall

would abandon all thought of an alliance with a family whose escutcheon

had suffered so severely. But they counted on the baronet, not on the

man,--and so, for once, were mistaken.

As for honest Roger Burleigh, he was beside himself with amazement and

indignation at the folly and ingratitude of his niece and the

measureless presumption of "that infernal puppy of a play-actor," as he

denominated Zelma's clever husband.

As he was one day talking over the sad affair with his friend Sir Harry,

who best succeeded in soothing him down, he inveighed against all actors

and actresses in the strongest terms of aversion and contempt, giving

free expression to the violent provincial prejudice of his time against

players of all degrees.

"But, my dear Sir," interrupted the young Baronet, "your niece has not

become an actress,--only the wife of a promising actor."

"No,--but she will be one yet. She's stage-struck now, more than

anything else; and mark my words,--that villain will have her on the

boards before the year's end, and live by her ranting. Why, you see, Sir

Harry, strolling is in the blood, and must out, I suppose. The girl, as

you may have heard, is half gypsy. My brother, Captain Burleigh, was a

sad scamp, and actually married a Spanish Zincala! He was drunk at the

time, we have the consolation to believe, or he could never have so far

belied his good old English blood, dissipated dog as he was. 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!"

Mrs. Burleigh was but a dutiful echo of her husband's prejudices, and

gave up her hapless niece as lost beyond redemption; but Bessie, though

she grieved more than either, suffered from no sense of humiliation, and

allowed no virtuous anger, no injurious doubts, to enter her blessed

little heart. Yet she missed her lost companion, her strong friend, and,

still vine-like in her instincts, turned wholly to the new support,--to

one who submitted himself gladly to the sweet inthralment, and felt all

the grander for the luscious weight and tendril-like clasp. And so Love

came to pretty Bessie's heart "with healing in his wings."

* * * * *

Unspeakable was the dismay of Mr. Bury at finding that a very modest

amount of personal property was all that his runaway wife could hope to

receive from her relatives,--that she was utterly portionless, her

father having more than exhausted the patrimony of a younger son. He had

supposed, from Zelma's apparently honorable position in the household of

her uncle, that she was, if not an heiress, at least respectably

dowered. 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. Then

both manly shame and manly passion (for the actor loved her in his way,

which was by no means her way, or the way of any large, loyal nature)

restrained all unbecoming expression of chagrin and disappointment,--

which yet sunk into his heart, and prepared the not uncongenial coil for

a goodly crop of suspicion, jealousy, alienation, aversion, and all

manner of domestic infelicities.

We cannot follow Zelma step by step, in her precarious and wandering

life, for the six months succeeding her marriage. It was a life not

altogether distasteful to her. She was not enough of a fine lady to be

dismayed or humiliated by its straits and shifts of poverty, by its

isolation and ostracism; while there was something in its alternations

of want and profusion, in its piquant contrasts of real and mimic life,

in its excitement, action, and change, which had a peculiar charm for

her wild and restless spirit. But from many of the associations of the

stage, from nearly all actors and actresses, and from all green-room

loungers, she instinctively recoiled, and held herself haughtily aloof

from the motley little world behind the scenes,--apparently by no

effort, but as sphered apart by the atmosphere of refinement and

superiority which enveloped her. Yet she almost constantly accompanied

her husband to rehearsal and play, where, for a time, her presence was

grateful both to the pride and a more amiable passion of her mercurial

lord. But the sight of that shy, shadowy figure haunting the wings, of

those keen, critical eyes ever following the business of the stage, at

last grew irksome to him, and he would fain have persuaded her to remain

quietly at their lodgings, whilst he was attending to his professional

duties. But no, she would go with him,--not for pleasure, or even

affection, but, as she always avowed, for artistic purposes. That she

had cherished, ever since her marriage, the plan of adopting her

husband's profession, she had never concealed from him. He usually

laughed, in his gay, supercilious way, when she spoke of this purpose,

or lightly patted her grand head and declared her to be a wilful,

unpractical enthusiast,--too much a child of Nature to attempt an art of

any kind,--born to _live_ and _be_ poetry, not to declaim it,--to

inspire genius, not to embody it,--a Muse, not a Sibyl.

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! You could

never make an actress. You are too hopelessly natural, erratic, and

impulsive. You would follow no teaching implicitly, but, when you saw

fit, would trample on conventionalities and venerable stage-traditions.

You would set up the standard of revolt against the ancient canons of

Art, and flout it in the faces of the critics, and--_fail_,--ay, fail,

in spite of your great, staring eyes, the tragic weight of your brows,

and the fiery swell of your nostril."

"I should certainly tread my own ways on the boards, as elsewhere,"

replied Zelma, quietly,--"move and act from the central force, the

instinct and inspiration of Nature,--letting the passion of my part work

itself out in its own gestures, postures, looks, and tones,--falling

short of, or going beyond, mere stage-traditions. With all due deference

for authorities, this would be my art, as it has been the art of all

truly great actors. I shall certainly not adopt my husband's profession

without his consent,--but I shall never cease importuning him for that

consent."

Lawrence "laughed a laugh of merry scorn," and left her to her solitary

studies and the patient nursing of her purpose.

It was finally, for Zelma's sake, through the unsolicited influence of

Sir Harry Willerton, that "Mr. Lawrence Bury, Tragedian," attained to a

high point in a provincial actor's ambition,--a London engagement.

After a disheartening period of waiting and idleness, during which he

and his wife made actual face-to-face acquaintance with want, and both

came near playing their parts in the high-tragedy of starvation in a

garret, he made his first appearance before the audience of Covent

Garden, in the part of Mercutio. He was young, shapely, handsome, and

clever,--full of flash and dash, and, above all, _new_. He had chosen

well his part,--Mercutio,--that graceful frolic of fancy, which less

requires sustained intellectual power than the exaltation of animal

spirits,--that brief sunburst of life, that brilliant bubble of

character, which reflects, for a moment, a world of beauty and sparkle,

and dies in a flash of wit, yet leaves on the mind a want, a tender

regret, which follow one through all the storm and woe of the tragedy.

So it was little wonder, perhaps, that he achieved a decided success,

though incomparably greater artists had failed where he triumphed, and

that, in spite of the doubtful looks and faint praise of the critics, he

became at once a public favorite,--the fashion, the rage. Ladies of the

highest _ton_ condescended to admire and applaud, and hailed as a

benefactor the creator of a new sensation.

Very soon the young actor's aspiring soul rose above all secondary

parts, dropped Mercutio and Horatio for Romeo and Hamlet, and had not

the sense to see that he was getting utterly out of his element, dashing

with silken sails into the tempest of tragedy, soaring on Icarian wings

over its profoundest deeps and into the height and heat of its intensest

passion.

Yet with the young, the unthinking, the eager, the curious, it was then

as it is now and ever shall be,--confidence easily passed for genius,

and presumption for power. Tributes of admiration and envy poured in

upon him,--anonymous missives, tender and daring, odorous with the

atmosphere of luxurious boudoirs, and coarse scrawls, scented with

orange-peel and lamp-smoke, and seeming to hiss with the sibilant

whisper of green-room spite; and the young actor, valuing alike the

sentiments, kindly or malign, which ministered to his egoism,

intoxicated with the first foamy draught of fame, grew careless,

freakish, and arrogant, as all suddenly adopted pets of the public are

likely to do.

At length Mr. Bury played before Royalty, and Royalty was heard to say

to Nobility in attendance,--"What!--Who is he? Where did he come from?

How old is he? Not quite equal to Garrick yet, but clever,--eh, my

Lord?"

This gracious royal criticism, being duly reported and printed, removed

the last let to aristocratic favor; fast young bloods of the highest

nobility did not acorn to shake off their perfumes and air their profane

vocabulary in the green-room, offering snuff and the incense of flattery

together to the Tamerlane, the Romeo, or the Lord Hamlet of the night.

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.

It was during this first London season that the manager of Covent

Garden, himself an actor, remarked the rare capabilities of Zelma's

face, voice, and figure for the stage, and in a matter-of-fact business

way spoke of them to her husband. 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.

Though well over the first summer-warmth of his romantic passion,

Lawrence Bury had not yet grown so utterly cold toward his beautiful

wife that he could see that trial approach without some slight

sympathetic dread; but his miserable egoism forbade him to wish her

success; in his secret heart he even hoped that an utter, irretrievable

failure would wither at once and forever her pretty artistic

aspirations.

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. It had for her heart, moreover, a peculiar

charm of association, as her first play,--as that in which she had first

beheld the hero of her dreams, "the god of her idolatry," before whom

she yet bowed, but as with eyes cast down or veiled, not in reverence,

but from a chill, unavowed fear of beholding the very common clay of

which he was fashioned.

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. As they were listening to the last tender bleating of

Almeria, the same pretty actress whom Zelma had seen as Zara at Arden,

and the gruff responses of her sire, an eager whisper ran through the

group;--the King and Queen had entered the royal box! This was quite

unexpected, and Zelma was aghast. Involuntarily, she stretched out her

hand and grasped that of her husband;--as she did so, the rattle of the

chains on her wrist betrayed her. The attendants looked round and

smiled;--Lawrence frowned and turned away, with a boy's pettishness. He

had been more than usually moody that day; but Zelma had believed him

troubled for her sake, and even now interpreted his unkindness as

nervous anxiety.

The next moment, everything, even he, was forgotten; for she stood, she

hardly knew how, upon the stage, receiving and mechanically

acknowledging a great burst of generous British applause.

It was a greeting less complaisant and patronizing than is usually given

to _débutantes_. 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! Stage-fright, that waking

nightmare of _débutantes_, clutched her at once, petrifying, while it

tortured her. The house seemed to surge around her, the stage to rock

under her feet. She fancied she heard low, elfish laughter behind the

scenes, and already the hiss of the critics seemed to sing in her

reeling brain. A thousand eyes pierced her through and through,--seemed

to see how the frightened blood had shrunk away from its mask of rouge

and hidden in her heart,--how that poor childish heart fluttered and

palpitated,--how near the hot tears were to the glazed eyeballs,--how

fast the black, obliterating shadows were creeping over the records of

memory,--how the first instinct of fear, a blind impulse to flight, was

maddening her.

She raised her eyes to the royal box, where sat a stout, middle-aged

man, with a dull, good-humored face, a star and ribbon on his breast,

and by his side a woman, ample and motherly, with an ugly tuft of

feathers on her head, and a diamond tiara, which lit up her heavy Dutch

features like a torch. The King, the Queen!

Just at this moment, his Majesty was in gracious converse with a lady on

his right, a foreign princess, of an ancient, unpronounceable title,--a

thin, colorless head and form, overloaded with immemorial

family-jewels,--a mere frame of a woman, to hang brilliants upon. She

was one shine and shiver of diamonds, from head to foot;--she palpitated

light, like a glow-worm. Her Majesty, meanwhile, was regaling herself

from a jewelled snuff-box, and talking affably over her shoulder to her

favorite mistress of the robes, the fearful Schwellenberg.

But Zelma, looking through the transfiguring atmosphere of loyalty,

beheld the royal group encompassed by all the ideal splendor and

sacredness of majesty;--over their very commonplace heads towered the

airy crowns of a hundred regal ancestors, piled round on round, and

glimmering away into the clouds.

Ere she turned her fascinated eyes away from the august sight, her cue

was given. She started, and struggled to speak, but her lips clung

together. There was a dull roar and whirl in her brain, as of a vortex

of waters. In piteous appealing she looked into the face of her husband,

and caught on his lips a strange, faint smile of mingled pity and

exultation. It stung her like a lash! Instantly she was herself, or

rather Zara, a captive, but every inch a queen, and delivered herself

calmly and proudly, though with a little tremble of her past agitation

in her voice,--a thrill of womanly feeling, which felt its way at once

to the hearts of her audience.

The first act, however, afforded her so little scope for acting, that

she left the stage unassured of her own success. There was doubt before

and behind the curtain. The critics had given no certain sign,--the

general applause might have been merely an involuntary tribute to youth

and beauty. Actors and actresses hung back,--even the friendly manager

was guarded in his congratulations. But in the second act the

_débutante_ put an end to this dubious state of things,--at least, so

far as her audience was concerned. "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. She dashed into the crude and sketchy character bold strokes of

Nature and illuminative gleams of genius, all her own.

Mr. Bury, as Osmyn, was cold and unsympathetic, avoided the eye of Zara,

and was even more tender than was "set down in the book" to Almeria.

"How well he acts his part!" said to herself the generous Zelma.

"How anxiety for his wife dashes his spirit!" said the charitable

audience.

At the close of this act the manager grasped Zelma's hand, and spoke of

her success as certain. She thanked him with an absent air, and gazed

about her wistfully. Surely her husband should have been the first to

give her joy. But he did not come forward. She shrank away to her

dressing-room, and waited for him vainly till she knew he was on the

stage, where she next met him in the great prison-scene.

In this scene, some bitterness of feeling--the first sharp pangs of

jealousy--gave, unconsciously to herself, a terrible vitality and

reality to her acting. She filled the stage with the electrical

atmosphere of her genius. Waxen Almeria, who was to have gone out as she

entered, received a shock of it, and stood for a moment transfixed. Even

Osmyn kindled out of his stony coldness, and gazed with awe and

irrepressible admiration at this new revelation of that strange,

profound creature he had called "wife." She, so late a shy woodland

nymph, stealing to his embrace,--now an angered goddess, blazing before

him, calling down upon him the lightnings of Olympus, with all the world

to see him shrink and shrivel into nothingness! And all this power and

passion, overtopping his utmost reach of art, outsoaring his wildest

aspirations, he had wooed, fondled, and protected! At first he was

overwhelmed with amazement; he could hardly have been more so, had a

volcano broken out through his hearth-stone; but soon, under the fierce

storm of Zara's taunts and reproaches, a sullen rage took possession of

him. He could not separate the actress from the wife,--and the wife

seemed in open, disloyal revolt. Every burst of applause from the

audience was an insult to him; and he felt a mad desire to oppose, to

defy them all, to assert a master's right over that frenzied woman, to

grasp her by the arm and drag her from the stage before their eyes!

This scene closes with a memorable speech:--

"Vile and ingrate! too late thou shalt repent

The base injustice thou hast done my love!

Ay, thou shalt know, spite of thy past distress,

And all the evils thou so long hast mourned,

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,

Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned!"

Zelma gave these lines as no pre-Siddonian actress had ever given

them,--with a certain _sublimity_ of rage, the ire of an immortal,--and

swept off the scene before a wild tumult of applause, led by the

vanquished critics. It followed her, surge on surge, to her

dressing-room, whither she hastily retreated through a crowd of players

and green-room _habitués_.

That sudden tempest shook even the royal box. The King, who a short time

before had been observed to nod, not shaking his "ambrosial locks" in

Jove-like approval, but somnolently, started up, exclaiming, "What!

what! what's that?"--and the Queen--took snuff.

In her dressing-room Zelma waited for her husband. "Surely he will come

now," she said.

She had already put off the tragedy-queen; she was again the loving

wife, yearning for one proud smile, one tender word, one straining

embrace. The tempest outside the curtain still rolled in upon her, as

she sat alone, drooping and sad, a spent thunder-cloud. The sound

brought her no sense of triumph; she only looked around her drearily,

like a frightened child, and called, "Lawrence!"

Instead of him came the manager. She must go before the curtain; the

audience would not be denied.

Lawrence led her out,--holding her hot, trembling fingers in his cold,

nerveless hand, a moody frown on his brow, and his lips writhing with a

forced smile.

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.

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. 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!--Ah,

now he's gone, and all is dark!"

With that last desolate moan of a proud and stormy spirit, sobbing

itself into the death-quiet, a visible shudder crept through the house.

Even the King threw himself back in his royal chair with an

uncomfortable sort of "ahem!" as though choking with an emotion of

common humanity; and the Queen--forgot to take snuff.

* * * * *

From the night of her triumphant _début_, the life of the actress ran in

the full sunlight of public favor; but the life of the woman crept away

into the shadow,--not of that quiet and repose so grateful to the true

artist, but of domestic discomfort and jealous estrangement.

Nobly self-forgetful always, Zelma, in the first hour of success,

feeling, in spite of herself, the pettiness and egoism of her husband's

nature, with a sense of humiliation in which it seemed her very soul

blushed, offered to renounce forever the career on which she had just

entered. Mr. Bury, however, angrily refused to accept the sacrifice,

though she pressed it upon him, at last, as a "peace-offering," on her

knees, and weeping like a penitent. "It is too late," he said, bitterly.

"The deed is done. You are mine no longer,--you belong to the public;--I

wish you joy of your fickle master."

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. For her the cup of fame was not mantling with

the wine of delight which reddens the lips and "maketh glad the heart."

The costly pearl she had dissolved in it had not sweetened the draught;

but it was intoxicating, and she drank it with feverish avidity.

But for Lawrence Bury, his powers flagged and failed in the unnatural

rivalship; his acting grew more and more cold and mechanical. He became

more than ever subject to moods and caprices, and rapidly lost favor

with the public, till at last he was regarded only as the husband of the

popular actress,--then, merely tolerated for her sake. He fell, or

rather flung himself, into a life of reckless dissipation and

profligacy, and sunk so low that he scrupled not to accept from his

wife, and squander on base pleasures, money won by the genius for which

he hated her. 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.

At length, finding himself at the lowest ebb of theatrical favor, and

hating horribly the scene of his humiliating defeat, Mr. Bury resolved

to return to his old strolling life in the provinces. Making at the same

moment the first announcement of his going and his hurried adieux to

Zelma, who heard his last cold words in dumb dismay, with little show of

emotion, but with heavy grief and dread presentiments at her heart, he

departed. He was accompanied by the fair actress with whom he played

first parts at Arden,--but now, green-room gossip said, not in a merely

professional association. 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. He must run his wild,

wretched course awhile longer,--it seems necessary for him; but he will

return at last,--surely he will,--sorrowful, repentant, 'in his right

mind,' himself and mine once more. He cannot weary out God's patience

and my love."

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. Her art was now all in all to her,--the strong-winged passion,

which lifted her out of herself and her sorrows. She was studying Juliet

for the first time. She had been playing for more than a year before she

could be prevailed upon to attempt a Shakspearian character, restrained

by a profound modesty from exercising her crude powers upon one of those

grand creations.

When, at length, she made choice of Juliet, what study was hers!--how

reverent! how loving! how glad!--the perfect service of the spirit! She

shut out the world of London from her sight, from her thoughts, till it

seemed lost in one of its own fogs. The air, the sky, the passion, the

poetry of Italy were above and around her. Again she revelled in that

wondrous garden of love and poesy, with a background of graves,

solemnizing joy. Now her fancy flitted, on swift, unresting wing, from

beauty to beauty,--now settled, bee-like, on some rich, half-hidden

thought, and hung upon it, sucking out its most sweet and secret heart

of meaning. She steeped her soul in the delicious romance, the summer

warmth, the moonlight, the sighs and tears of the play. She went from

the closet to the stage, not brain-weary and pale with thought, but

fresh, tender, and virginal,--not like one who had committed the _part_

of Juliet, but one whom Juliet possessed in every part. She seemed to

bear about her an atmosphere of poetry and love, the subtile spirit of

that marvellous play. There was no air of study, not the faintest taint

of the midnight oil;--like a gatherer of roses from some garden of

Cashmere, or a peasant-girl from the vintage, she brought only odors

from her toil,--the sweets of the fancy, a flavor of the passion she had

made her own.

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.

Squire Burleigh had been entrapped by his daughter and her lover into

coming to the play,--he being in utter ignorance as to whom he was to

see in the part of Juliet. When he recognized his niece in the ball-room

scene, he was shocked, and even angry. He started up, impetuously, to

leave the house; and it was only by the united entreaties of Bessie and

Sir Harry that he was persuaded to stay. As the play went on, however,

his sympathies became enlisted, in spite of his prejudices. Gradually

his heart melted toward the fair offender, and irrepressible tears of

admiration and pity welled up to his kindly blue eyes. He watched the

progress of the drama with an almost breathless interest while she was

before him, but grew listless and indifferent whenever she left the

stage. The passion of Romeo, the philosophy of the Friar, the quaint

garrulousness of the Nurse, the trenchant wit of Mercutio were alike

without charm for him.

But though thus lost in the fortunes and sorrows of the heroine of the

play, the dramatic illusion was far from complete for him. It was not

Juliet,--it was Zelma, the wild, misguided, lost, but still beloved

child of his poor brother; and in his bewildered brain her sad story was

strangely complicated with that of the hapless girl of Verona. When she

swallowed the sleeping-draught, he shrank and shuddered at the horrible

pictures conjured up by her frenzied fancy; and in the last woful scene,

he forgot himself, the play, the audience, everything but her, the

forlorn gypsy child, the shy and lonely little girl whom long years ago

he had taken on his knee, and smoothed down her tangled black hair, as

he might have smoothed the plumage of an eaglet, struggling and

palpitating under his hand, and glancing up sideways, with fierce and

frightened eyes,--and now, when he saw her about to plunge the cruel

blade into her breast, he leaped to his feet and electrified the house

by calling out, in a tone of agonized entreaty,--"Don't, Zelle! for

God's sake, don't! Leave this, and come home with us,--home to the

Grange!"

It was a great proof of Mrs. Bury's presence of mind and command over

her emotions, that she was not visibly discomposed by this strange and

touching appeal, or by the laughter and applause it called forth, but

finished her sad part, and was Juliet to the last.

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. The worthy Squire,

overcome with confusion at the exposure he had made of his weakness and

simplicity, had hurried from the theatre, willingly accompanied by his

daughter and Sir Harry.

On the following day, sweet Bessie Burleigh, with the consent, at the

request even, of her father, sought out her famous cousin, bearing terms

of reconciliation and proffers of renewed affection.

The actress was alone. She had just risen from her late breakfast, and

was in a morning costume,--careless, but not untidy. She looked languid

and jaded; the beautiful light of young love, which the night before had

shone with a soft, lambent flame in every glance, seemed to have burned

itself out in her hollow eyes, or to have been quenched in tears.

She flung herself on her cousin's breast with a laugh of pure joy and a

child's quick impulse of lovingness; but almost immediately drew herself

back, as with a sudden sense of having leaned across a chasm in the

embrace. But Bessie, guessing her feeling, clung about her very

tenderly, calling her pet names, smoothing her hair and kissing her wan

cheek till she almost kissed back its faded roses. 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. He loves

you still, though he was angry with you at first,--and he longs to have

you come back, and to make it all up with you. Oh, I am sure, you must

be weary of this life,--or rather, this mockery of life, this prolonged

fever dream, this playing with passion and pain! It is killing you! Why,

you look worn and anxious and sad as death by daylight, though you do

bloom out strangely bright and beautiful on the stage. So, dear, come

into the country, and rest and renew your life."

Zelma opened her superb eyes in amazement, and her cheek kindled with a

little flush of displeasure; yet she answered playfully,--"What! would

you resolve 'the new star of the drama' into nebulousness and

nothingness again? Remember my art, sweet Coz; I am a priestess sworn to

its altar."

"But, surely," replied Bessie, ingenuously, "you will not live on thus

alone, unprotected, a mark for suspicion and calumny; for they say--they

say that your husband has deserted you."

"Mr. Bury is absent, fulfilling a professional engagement. I shall await

his return here," replied Zelma, haughtily.

Bessie blushed deeply and was silent. So, too, was the actress, for some

moments; then, softened almost to tears, half closing her eyes, and

letting her fancy float away like thistle-down over town and country,

upland, valley, and moor, she said softly,--"Dear Burleigh Grange, how

lovely it must be now! What a verdurous twilight reigns under the old

elms of the avenue!--in what a passion of bloom the roses are unfolding

to the sun, these warm May-days! How the honeysuckles drip with sweet

dews! how thickly the shed hawthorn-blossoms lie on the grass of the

long lane, rolling in little drifts before the wind! And the birds,--do

the same birds come back to nest in their old places about the Grange, I

wonder?"

"Yes," answered Bessie, smiling; "I think all the birds have come back,

save one, the dearest of them all, who fled away in the night-time. Her

nest is empty still. Oh, Zelle, do you remember our pleasant little

chamber in the turret? I could not stay there when you were gone. 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_."

"Ah, but Cousin dear, there is no terrible angel with a flaming sword

guarding the gates of the Grange against you."

"Yes, the angel of its peace and ancient honor," said the actress; then

added, pleasantly, "and he is backed by a mighty ogre, _Respectability_.

No, no, Bessie, I can never go back to my old home, or my old self; it

is quite impossible. But you and my uncle are very good to ask me.

Heaven bless you for that! And, dear, when you are Lady Willerton, a

proud wife, and, if God please, a happy mother, put me away from your

thoughts, if I trouble you. Rest in the safe haven of home, anchored in

content, and do not vex yourself about the poor waif afloat on wild,

unknown seas. It is not worth while."

So Bessie Burleigh was obliged to abandon her dear, impracticable plan;

and the cousins parted forever, though neither thought or meant it then.

Bessie returned to Arden, married the master of Willerton Hall, and slid

into the easy grooves of a happy, luxurious country-life; while Zelma

rode for a few proud years on the topmost swell of popular favor,--then

suddenly passed away beyond the horizon of London life, and so, as it

were, out of the world.

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. Lawrence Bury had died

suddenly at that place of a violent, inflammatory disease, brought on,

it was to be feared, by some excesses to which he had been addicted. The

theatrical wardrobe of the deceased (of small value) had been retained

in payment for expenses of illness and burial; his private papers were

at the disposal of the widow. Deceased had been buried in the parish

church-yard of Walton. This was all.

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! What visions of

_him_, torn with the agonies, wild with the terrors of death, calling

her name in vain imploring or with angry imprecations!--of him, so

young, so sinful, dragged struggling toward the abyss of mystery and

night, wrenched, as it were, out of life, with all its passions hot at

his heart!

Hour after hour she sat at her table, grasping the fatal letter, still

as death, and all but as cold. She yet wore the last dress of Belvedera,

and was half enveloped by the black cloud of her dishevelled hair; but

the simulated frenzy, which so late had drawn shuddering sighs from a

thousand hearts, was succeeded by a silent, stony despair, infinitely

more terrible. A sense of hopeless desolation and abandonment settled

upon her soul; the distances of universes seemed to separate her from

the dead. But to this suddenly succeeded a chill, awful sense of a

presence, wrapped in silence and mystery, melting through all material

barriers, treading on the impalpable air, not "looking ancient kindness

on her pain," but lowering amid the shadows of her chamber, stern,

perturbed, unreconciled. 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. Her mind,

torn from its moorings, went wandering, wandering, over a vast sea of

troubled dreams,--now creeping on through weary stretches of calm, now

plunging into the heart of tempests and tossed upon mountainous surges,

now touching momently at islands of light, now wrecked upon black,

desert shores.

All was strange, vague, and terrible, at first; but gradually there

stole back upon her her own life of womanhood and Art,--its scenes and

changes, its struggles, temptations, and triumphs, its brief joy and

long sorrow, all shaken and confused together, but still familiar. Now

the faces of her audiences seemed to throng upon her, packing her room

from floor to ceiling, darkening the light, sucking up all the air, and

again piercing her through and through with their cold, merciless gaze.

Now the characters she had personated grouped themselves around her bed,

all distinct, yet duplicates and multiplications of herself, mocking her

with her own voice, and glaring at her with her own eyes. Now pleasant

summer-scenes at Burleigh Grange brightened the dull walls, and a memory

of the long lane in the white prime of its hawthorn bloom flowed like a

river of fragrance through her chamber. 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. She turned with a half-weary, half-petulant

distaste from her former pursuits and pleasures, and abandoned her

profession with a sort of terror,--feeling that its mockery of sorrows,

such as had fallen so crushingly on her unchastened heart, would madden

her utterly. But neither could she endure again the constraint and

conventionalities of English private life; she had died to her art, and

she glided, like a phantom, out of her country, and out of the thoughts

of the public, in whose breath she had lived, for whose pleasure she had

toiled, often from the hidden force of her own sorrows, the elements of

all tragedy seething in her secret heart.

Year after year she lived a wandering, out-of-the-way life on the

Continent. It was said that she went to Spain, sought out her mother's

wild kindred, and dwelt with them, making their life her life, their

ways her ways, shrinking neither from sun-glare nor tempest, privation

nor peril. But, at length, tired of wandering and satiated with

adventure, she flung off the Zincala, returned to England, and even

returned, forsworn, to her art, as all do, or long to do, who have once

embraced it from a genuine passion.

She made no effort to obtain an engagement at Covent Garden; for her,

that stage was haunted by a presence more gloomy than Hamlet, more

dreadful than the Ghost. Nor did she seek to tread, with her free,

unpractised step, the classic boards of Drury Lane,--where Garrick, the

_Grand Monarque_ of the Drama, though now toward the end of his reign,

ruled with jealous, despotic sway,--but modestly and quietly appeared at

a minor theatre, seeming, to such play-goers as remembered her brief,

brilliant career and sudden disappearance, like the Muse of Tragedy

returned from the shades.

She was kindly received, both for her own sake, and because of the

pleasant memories which the sight of her, pale, slender, and sad-eyed,

yet beautiful still, revived. Those who had once sworn by her swore by

her still, and were loath to admit even to themselves that her early

style of acting--easy, flowing, impulsive, the natural translation in

action of a strong and imaginative nature--must remain what, in the long

absence of the actress, it had become, a beautiful tradition of the

stage,--that her present personations were wanting in force and

spontaneity,--that they were efforts, rather than inspirations,--were

marked by a weary tension of thought,--were careful, but not composed,

roughened by unsteady strokes of genius, freshly furrowed with labor.

Mrs. Bury made a grave mistake in choosing for her second _début_ her

great part of Juliet; for she had outlived the possibility of playing it

as she played it at that period of her life when her soul readily melted

in the divine glow of youthful passion and flowed into the character,

taking its perfect shape, rounded and smooth and fair. Through long

years of sorrow and unrest, she had now to toil back to that golden

time,--and there was a sort of sharpness and haggardness about her

acting, a singular tone of weariness, broken by starts and bursts of

almost preternatural power. Except in scenes and sentiments of pathos,

where she had lost nothing, the last, fine, evanishing tints, the

delicate aroma of the character, were wanting in her personation. It was

touched with autumnal shadows,--it was comparatively hard and dry, not

from any inartistic misapprehension of the poet's ideal, but because the

fountain of youth in Zelma's own soul ran low, and was choked by the

dead violets which once sweetened its waters.

She felt all this bitterly that night, ere the play was over; and though

her audience generously applauded and old friends congratulated her, she

never played Juliet again.

Yet, even in the darker and sterner parts, in which she was once so

famous, she was hardly more successful now. In losing her bloom and

youthful fulness of form, she had not gained that statuesque repose, or

that refined essence of physical power and energy, which sometimes

belongs to slenderness and pallor. She was often strangely agitated and

unnerved when the occasion called most for calm, sustained power,--at

times, glancing around wildly and piteously, like a haunted creature.

Her passion was fitful and strained,--the fire of rage flickered in her

eye, her relaxed lips quivered out curses, her hand shook with the

dagger and spilled the poison. Her sorrows, real and imaginary, seemed

to have broken her spirit with her heart.

But in anything weird and supernatural, awful with vague, unearthly

terrors, she was greater than ever. Whenever, in her part of Lady

Macbeth, she came to the sleep-walking scene, that shadowy neutral

ground between death and life, where the perturbed, burdened spirit

moans out its secret agony, she gave startling token of the genius which

had electrified and awed her audiences of old. A solemn stillness

pervaded the house; every eye followed the ghost-like gliding of her

form, every ear hung upon the voice whose tones could sound the most

mysterious and awful depths of human grief and despair.

* * * * *

It was during the first season of her reappearance that Mrs. Bury went

to Drury Lane, on an off-night, to witness one of the latest efforts of

Garrick as Richard the Third. He was, as usual, terribly great in the

part; but, in spite of his overwhelming power, Zelma found herself

watching the Lady Anne of the night with a strange, fascinated interest.

This part, of too secondary and negative a character for the display of

high dramatic powers, even in an actress who should be perfect mistress

of herself, was borne by a young and beautiful woman, new to the London

stage, though of some provincial reputation, who on this occasion was

distressingly nervous and ill-assured. She had to contend not only with

stage-fright, but Garrick-fright. "She met Roscius in all his terrors,"

and shrank from the encounter. The fierce lightnings of his dreadful

eyes seemed to shrivel and paralyze her; even his demoniac cunning and

persuasiveness filled her with mortal fear. Her voice shook with a

pathetic tremor, became hoarse and almost inaudible; her eyes sank, or

wandered wildly; her brow was bathed with the sweat of a secret agony;

she might have given way utterly under the paralyzing spell, had not

some sudden inspiration of genius or love, a prophetic thrill of power,

or a memory of her unwearied babe, come to nerve, to upbear her. She

roused, and went through her part with some flickering flashes of

spirit, and through all her painful embarrassment was stately and

graceful by the regal necessity of her beauty. The event was not

success,--was but a shade better than utter failure; and when, soon

after, that beautiful woman dropped out of London dramatic life, few

were they who missed her enough to ask whither she had gone.

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_." She looked upon that frightened and fragile

woman with prophetic reverence and noble admiration: and as she walked

her lonely chamber that night, she said to herself, somewhat sadly, but

not bitterly,--"The true light of the English drama has arisen at last.

'Out, out, brief candle!'"

* * * * *

Season after season, year after year, Zelma continued to play in London,

but never again with the fame, the homage, the flatteries and triumphs

of a great actress. All these she saw at last accorded to her noble

rival. Mrs. Bury had shone very acceptably in a doubtful dramatic

period,--first as an inspired, impassioned enthusiast, and after as a

conscientious artist, subdued and saddened, yet always careful and

earnest; but, like many another lesser light, she was destined to be

lost sight of in the long, splendid day of the Kembles.

Yet once again the spirit of unrest, the nomadic instinct, came back

upon Zelma Bury,--haunted her heart and stirred in her blood till she

could resist no longer, but, joining a company for a provincial tour,

left London.

The health of the actress had been long declining, under the almost

unsuspected attacks of a slow, insidious disease. She was more weak and

ill than she would confess, even to herself; she wanted change, she

said, only change. She never dreamed of rest. Week after week she

travelled,--never tarrying long enough In one place to weary of it,--the

peaceful sights and sounds of rural life tranquillizing and refreshing

her soul, as the clear expanse of its sky, the green of its woods and

parks, the daisied swell of its downs refreshed and soothed her eye,

tired of striking forever against dull brick walls and struggling with

smoke and fog.

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.