Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859

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It was the first play of our heroine, Zelma Burleigh, and of her Cousin
Bessie. The morning before, a fragrant May morning, scores of summers
ago, Roger Burleigh, a stout Northumbrian Squire, had rolled himself,
in his ponderous way, into the snug family-parlor at the Grange, and
addressed his worthy dame with a bluff--

"Well, good wife, wouldn't like to go see the players to-night?"

Ere the good lady could collect herself to reply with the decorous
deliberateness becoming her years and station, an embroidery-frame at
her side was overturned, and there sprang eagerly forward a comely
young damsel of the pure Saxon stock, with eyes like England's
violets,--clear, dewy, and wide-awake,--cheeks and lips like its
rose-bloom, and hair which held tangled in close, golden folds its
fickle and flying sunshine.

"Ay, father!" she cried, "that we would! Zelma and I have never seen any
players, save the tumblers over at the Hall, on Sir Harry's birthday,
and we are in sad need of a little pleasuring."

"Who spoke to you, or of you, Mistress Bessie?" replied the Squire,
playfully. "And what is all your useless, chattering life but
pleasuring? The playhouse is but a perilous place for giddy-brained
lasses like you; but for once, harkee, for _once_, we'll venture on
taking you, if you'll promise to keep your silly head safe under the
mother-hen's wing."

"Not so close but that I can get a peep at the players now and then,"
said Bessie, archly. "They say there are some handsome young men and a
pretty woman or two among them. Eh, Zelma?"

"Handsome young men!--pretty women!" exclaimed the Squire, with an
explosive snort of contempt. "An arrant set of vagabonds and tramps,--of
ranting, strutting, apish creatures, with neither local habitations nor
names of their own. And what does Zelma know about them? Out with it,
girl!"

The person thus addressed, without lifting the folds of a heavy
window-curtain which concealed her, replied in a quiet, though somewhat
haughty tone,--

"I saw them all, yesterday afternoon, on their way to Arden. I found
them near the entrance to our avenue. One of their carts had broken
down, and somebody was hurt. I dismounted to see if I could be of any
assistance. My pony pulled away from me and ran up the road. One of the
young men caught her for me. I told Cousin Bessie I thought him handsome
and proud enough for a lord. I think so still. That is all I know of the
players."

"And, gad, that's enough! Take _you_ to the play, indeed! Why, we shall
have you strolling next, like your"--Here the Squire, for some reason
known to himself, suddenly paused and grew very red in the face. Dame
Margery took the word, and, in a tone meant to be severe, but which was
only dry, remarked,--

"Zelma is quite too young to go to the play."

"Just one week younger than my Cousin Bessie. So, please you, aunt, I
will wait a few days," was the quiet reply from the invisible.

"Right cleverly answered, lass!" said the Squire, with a good-humored
chuckle. "Well, we will try you, too, for once; but mind, if I find you
making eyes at any of the villains, I'll cut you off with a shilling."

"That is more than I look for from you, Uncle Roger," replied the
hitherto hidden speaker, emerging from the window-seat, holding in her
hand the fashionable and interminable novel of "Sir Charles Grandison."
As she spoke, she laughed lightly, but her voice was somewhat cold and
bitter, and there was in her laugh more of defiance than merriment.

"Oh, _don't_, Zella!" exclaimed the Squire, with a look of comic
deprecation,--"don't speak in that way to your old uncle! He's
blunt and rough-spoken, but he means kindly, and does kindly, in his
way,--don't he?"

"Yes, that he does!" said the young girl, frankly; "and I beg his pardon
for my pettishness."

Zelma Burleigh, as she stood thus, a faint, regretful smile softening
the habitual _hauteur_ of her face, was beautiful, and something more;
yet nobody in the country round about the Grange had ever dreamed of
calling her "a beauty." She was a tall, gracefully-formed girl, with
that strong, untamable character of figure and feature, and that
peculiar, sun-tinted, forest-shadowed hue of the skin, which betray the
slightest admixture of gypsy blood. In fact, Zelma Burleigh was the
fruit of a strange _mesalliance_ between the younger brother of the
Squire, a reckless, dissipated soldier of fortune, and a beautiful
Spanish Zineala, whom he met in a foreign campaign, and whom he could
not bind to himself by any tie less honorable than marriage. She was
said to be of Rommany blood-royal, and was actually disowned by her
tribe for _her mesalliance_. She followed the camp for a few years, the
willing, though sad and fast-fading slave of her Ishmaelitish lord,
himself the slave of lawless passions, yet not wholly depraved,
--fitfully tender and tyrannic,--and when, at last, he fell in some
inglorious skirmish, she buried him with her own hands, and wept and
fasted over his shallow grave till she died. There was a child, but she
had no look of the father to charm that poor, broken heart back to life;
she was left in the camp and became a little "Daughter of the Regiment."
At last, however, she was taken to England by a faithful comrade of the
dead soldier, who sought out her uncle and left her in his care, taking
leave of the frightened, clinging little creature with a grim, unspoken
tenderness, and a strange quiver of his gray moustache.

Roger Burleigh, after having made himself sure of the legitimacy of
the child, adopted the poor, wild thing, made her the companion of his
daughter, and honestly strove to treat her, at all times, with parental
care and affection.

Here, in the hospitable circle of an English home, the orphan alien
had grown up with her kinsfolk, but not of them,--proud, reticent,
ambitious, secretly hating the monotonous duties and pursuits, the
decorous forms and prescribed pleasures of the social and domestic life
around her. Nomadic and lawless instincts stirred in her blood; vague
longings for freedom and change, though in wandering, peril, and want,
sometimes filled her soul with the spirit of revolt and unrest.

In her bluff uncle's house all were kind, and one, at least, was fond.
Her Cousin Bessie, gay and tender heart, had found the southern exposure
of her nature, and had crept up it, and clambered over it, and clasped
it, and bloomed against it, and ripened on it, till nothing cold, hard,
or defiant could be seen on that side. And Zelma seemed well content to
be the sombre background and strong support of so much bloom, sweetness,
and graceful dependence.

Nothing could be more unlike than the two cousins. Bessie was small,
her form inclining to fulness, her face childlike in dimpled smiles and
innocent blushes,--betraying no lack of intellect, but most expressive
of a quiet, almost indolent amiability. Zelma was large, but lithe,
supple, and vigorous, with a pard-like freedom and elasticity of
movement,--dark, with a subdued and changing color,--the fluttering
signal of sudden emotion, not the stationary sign of robust health. She
had hair of a glistening blackness, which she wore turned back from a
strong, compact forehead, in the somewhat severe style which imperial
beauty has rendered classic in our time. Her eyes were of the Oriental
type,--full, heavy-lidded, ambushed in thick, black lashes,--themselves
dark and unfathomable as the long night of mystery which hangs over the
history of her wild and wandering race, those unsubduable, unseducible
children of Nature,--the voluntary Pariahs of the world. Sad were those
eyes always, but with a vague, uncommunicable sadness; soft they were in
times of quiet; beautiful and terrible they could be, with live gleams
of suddenly awakened passion.

With but one affection not poisoned by a sense of obligation and
condescension, and that a sentiment in which her intellect had little
share, a gentle, protective, household love, which quickened no daring
fancy, inspired no dream of freedom or power, Zelma's mind was driven
in upon itself, and out of the seclusion and triteness of her life
fashioned a fairy world of romance and beauty. With the high-wrought,
sentimental fictions of the day for her mental aliment, she grew more
and more distinct and apart from the actual, prosaic existences around
her; the smouldering fires of genius and ambition glowed out almost
fiercely at times, through the dark dream of her eyes, startling the
dullest apprehension, as she moved amid a narrow circle of country
gentry, the fox-hunting guests of her uncle, the prim gossips of her
aunt, the gay lovers and companions of her cousin, an unrecognized
heroine, an uncrowned tragedy-queen.

The small provincial town of Arden possessed no playhouse proper, but,
after a good deal of hesitation and discussion, the venerable Hall
of St. George, the glory of all Ardenites, had been accorded to the
players, "for a few nights only."

On the night of the first performance, Squire Burleigh and his family
arrived betimes, and took their places with some bustle and ceremony.

The master of Burleigh Grange appeared in the almost forgotten glory of
his court suit,--a coat of crimson velvet, a flowered waistcoat, satin
knee-breeches, and a sword at his side. The mistress wore an equally
memorable brocade, enormous bouquets thrown upon a silvery ground, so
stiff and shiny that it seemed a texture of ice and frozen flowers. Her
hair was cushioned and powdered; she looked comely and stately, and
wore her lustres well. The pretty Bessie was attired in maidenly
white muslin, an India fabric of marvellous fineness, with a sash and
streamers of blue, and the light fleecy curls of her hair unadorned save
by a slight pendent spray of jasmines. Her cousin's dress, though in
reality less costly, was more striking, being composed of materials and
colors which admirably harmonized with the darkness and richness of her
beauty. Her lustrous black hair was arranged as usual; but a wreath,
formed of some delicate vine hung thick with drooping scarlet blossoms,
ran like flowering flame around her head. Like the sumptuous exotic of
Zenobia, it was an ornament which seemed to bloom out of the character
of the woman.

Bessie cast about her bright, innocent looks of girlish curiosity, which
yet shrank from any chance encounter with the furtive glance or cool
stare of admiration. Zelma sat motionless and impassive. Her eyes
wandered naturally, but coldly, over the audience, seeming to take no
cognizance of any face, strange or familiar; but when they were lifted
above the crowd, to the old carved ceiling of the hall, or dropped upon
the beautiful hands which lay listlessly folded in her lap, the cold,
blank look she had set against the world went out of them. Then, in
their mystic depths of brooding, introverted thought, new spheres of
life, rarer, brighter, fairer, seemed rounding into form and dawning
like stars.

Mrs. Margery Burleigh sat with her face turned from the stage, to
dissemble the secret impatience with which she awaited the uprolling of
the curtain, and slowly waved to and fro a huge, flowered fan, which
charged the air with a heavy Indian perfume.

At length, soft, mournful music arose from the orchestra, and every
heart stirred to the premonitory waver and lift of the curtain. Slowly
it rose, and discovered a mourning apartment, with a lady in mourning,
sitting in a mourning chair, and attended by a mourning maid. The play
was Congreve's tragedy of "The Mourning Bride," one of the best of a
class of sentimental and stiltified dramatic productions which the
public of our great-grandfathers meekly accepted,--quaffing the frothy
small-beer of rant and affectation, in lieu of deep draughts of Nature
and passion, the rich, red wine of human life, poured generously
forth by the dramatists of a better era. The excesses of fashion then
prevailing, hoops, high heels, powder, and patches, were not more
essentially absurd and artificial than such representations of high-life
and high-tragedy.

"The Mourning Bride" contains a few situations in which real passion can
have play, some fine points and poetic passages, and its moral tone is
at least respectable,--not great things to say of a famous tragedy,
certainly, but they give it an honorable distinction over many plays of
its time. There figure in it one or two characters which can be made
interesting, and even impressive, by uncommon power in the actor; though
they were usually given, at the period of which I write, in a manner
sufficiently tame to suit the dullest of courts,--likely to disturb
neither my lord in his napping nor my lady in her prim flirting.

Zara, the Captive Queen, is beyond comparison the strong character of
this play. There is a spice and fire even in her wickedness, which
make her terribly attractive, and give her a more powerful hold on the
sympathies than the decorous and dolorous Almeria, for all her virtuous
sorrows and perplexities. Zara's passion is of the true Oriental type,
leaping from the extremes of love and hate with the fierceness and
rapidity of lightning.

It is a character in which several great actresses have distinguished
themselves,--chief among them Siddons. On the memorable night at Arden,
however, it was but wretchedly rendered by a tall, small-voiced,
flaxen-haired young woman, who stalked about the stage in high-heeled
shoes and prodigious hoops, and declaimed the most fiery passages with
an execrable drawl. The remainder of the company were barely passable as
strolling players, with the exception of the actor who personated Osmyn.
This was a young man named Bury, of respectable parentage and education,
it was said, and considerable reputation, though his aspiring buskin had
never yet trod the London boards. He was a handsome, shapely person,
with an assured, dashing manner, and a great amount of spirit and fire,
which usually passed with his audience, and always with himself, for
genius.

His voice was powerful and resonant, his elocution effective, if not
faultless, and his physical energy inexhaustible. Understanding and
managing perfectly his own resources, he produced upon most provincial
critics the impression of extraordinary power and promise, few
perceiving that he had already come into full possession of his dramatic
gifts.

Only finely-trained ears could discover in this sounding, shining metal
the lack of the sharp, musical ring of the genuine coin. Young men grew
frantic in applause of his bold action, his stormy declamation,
his startling _tours de force_; while young women wondered, wept,
languished, and swooned. It was said, that, whenever he died in Romeo,
Pierre, or Zanga, numbers of his fair slain were borne out of the
playhouse, to be revived with difficulty by the application of salts and
the severing of stay-lacings.

But his effects, though so positive, were superficial and
evanescent,--audible, visible, and, as it were, physical. There was
always wanting that fine shock of genuine passion, striking home to
kindred passions in the breasts of his auditors, and sending through
every nerve a magnetic shiver of delight,--that subtile, mysterious
element of genius, playing like quick flame along the dullest lines of
the poet and charging them with its own life and fire.

In the virtuous, but negative character of Osmyn there was little room
for effective declamation; our actor was fain to content himself with
being interesting, through the misfortunes of the Prince of Valentia,
his woful lawful love, and the besettings of an unreturned passion. In
this he succeeded so well, that the feminine portion of his audience
grew tender with Almeria, and despairing with Zara.

In the first scene with Almeria, who was a shade worse than the Zara of
the night, the young actor indulged himself in a cool, comprehensive
glance at the house, over her fair shoulders. As his keen gaze swept
round the small aristocratic circle, it encountered and seemed
to recognize the face of Zelma Burleigh, now kindling with a new
enthusiasm, which was never wholly to die out of her breast. There was
something in the watchful, absorbed gaze of her great dark eyes so
unlike the wondering or languishing looks usually bent by women upon
the rising actor, that on the instant he was struck, pierced, by those
subtile shafts of light, to the heart he had believed till then vowed
alone to the love of his art and the schemes of a sleepless ambition.

Reluctantly he withdrew his regard from a face which bespoke a character
of singular originality and force, not wanting either in womanly pride
or tenderness,--a face in which beauty itself was so subordinate to
something higher, more ineffable, that one could scarcely define feature
or color through the illuminated and changeful atmosphere of soul which
hung about it,--the shadows of great thoughts, the light mists of dreamy
and evanescent fancy.

It was toward the close of the second act, when Sir Harry Willerton, of
Willerton Hall, entered his box, accompanied by three or four dashing
companions, who, it was soon whispered about, were titled young bloods
from London.

Sir Harry Willerton was a fresh, frank-looking young gallant,--fast,
from the fiery impulses of youth and a high spirit,--not pricked on by
vanity, nor goaded by low passions,--not heartless, not _blase_,--the
only kind of a rake for whom reformation is possible or reclamation
worth the while.

Sir Harry was not fond of tragedy; and after five minutes' strained
attention to the players, he turned his eyes from the stage, and began
casting easy, good-humored glances of curiosity or recognition over
the audience. He bowed to all his neighbors with a kindly familiarity,
untainted by condescension, but most courteously, perhaps, to the party
from the Grange. He liked the bluff Squire heartily,--as who did not?
Then his eye--a laughing blue eye it was--rested and lingered, not on
the dark, dramatic face of Zelma, but on the pretty, girlish head of her
cousin.

Bessie sat with her face partly averted from the baronet's gay party,
and her gaze fixed intently upon the stage. Sir Harry could only see
half the rose of one cheek, and the soft sweep of golden hair which
lightly shaded it; and feasting his fancy on that bit of fluctuating
color, entangled in the meshes of a tremulous screen of curls, he
settled himself to await the close of the act.

It was with a child's eager interest and pliant imagination that Bessie
looked and listened,--susceptible, credulous, unfastidious. To her,
the Osmyn of the night was radiant with all heroic qualities and manly
graces, the weakly simulated sorrow of Almeria brought real tears to her
eyes, and she drew her white shoulders forward with a shudder when
the wooden Zara kindled into cursing and jealous rage. Illusions most
transparent to others hoodwinked her senses; her willing fancy supplied
feeling, and even made up for deficiencies of art in the players, till
the mimic world before her became more real than reality.

Not so with Zelma. She was satisfied, even charmed, with the personation
of Osmyn; but, from the first, she could not abide either of the
heroines, who, each in her part, strove to outdo the other in mincing,
mouthing, attitudinizing, and all imaginable small sins against Nature
and Art. She saw at once, by the sure intuitions of genius, how
everything they did could be done better, and burned to do it. The part
of Almeria she soon dismissed from her thoughts, as mere milk-and-water;
but she saw that in that of Zara there was a stream of lava, though
dulled and crusted over by the coldness of the actress, which might
be made to sweep all before it. Her critical dissatisfaction with the
personation became, at last, little short of torture; there was an
involuntary lowering of her dark brows, a scornful quiver of her
spirited nostril, she bit her lip with angry impatience, and shrugged
her shoulders with irrepressible contempt.

In the great scene where Zara surprises Almeria in the cell of Osmyn,
it was astonishing how the flaxen-haired representative of the Captive
Queen managed to turn her fiery rain of curses into a little pattering
shower of womanish reproaches. It was really a masterly performance, in
its way.

At this point Zelma threw herself back in utter weariness and disgust,
exclaiming, audibly,--"Miserable!--most miserable." When, looking round,
she saw the traces of her cousin's innocent emotion, the flush and
tearfulness which bespoke her uncritical sympathy with passions so
unskilfully represented, she could not suppress a smile at such childish
simplicity. And yet this was also her first play.

The tragedy was succeeded by a farce, at which Bessie laughed as
heartily as she had wept a little while before, but which was utterly
distasteful to Zelma; and at an alarmingly late hour, for that quiet
community, the green curtain came heavily plunging down on the final
scene of all, and the audience dispersed to their homes.

On the day following, Sir Harry Willerton's guests returned to town,
but, to their surprise, unaccompanied by their host, who seemed to have
suddenly discovered that his presence was needed on his estate. So he
remained. Soon it was remarked that a singular intimacy had sprung
up between him and Squire Burleigh, with whom, at length, the larger
portion of his time was passed, either in following the hounds or dining
at the Grange. There were rumors and surmises that the attractions which
drew the young baronet to his bluff neighbor's hospitable hall were not
the Squire's hearty cheer, old wine, and older stories, but a pair of
shy, yet tender eyes,--red lips, that smiled a wordless welcome, and
sometimes pouted at a late coming,--cheeks whose blushes daily grew
warmer in love's ripening glow,--a voice whose tones daily grew deeper,
and seemed freighted with more delicious meanings.

There was little discussion as to which of the young ladies of the
Grange was the enchantress and the elect Lady Willerton.

"Surely," said the gossips, "it cannot be that gypsy niece of the
Squire, that odd, black-browed girl, who scours over the country in all
weathers, on that elfish black pony, with her hair flying,--for all the
world as though in search of her wild relations. No, the blood of the
Willertons would never run so low as that;--it must be sweet Miss
Bessie, and she is a match for a lord."

For once the gossips were right. But it is with the poor "Rommany girl,"
not with the heiress of Burleigh Grange, that we have to do.

On the morning succeeding the play, Zelma Burleigh, taking in her hand
an odd volume of Shakspeare, one of the few specimens of dramatic
literature which her uncle's scant library afforded, strolled down a
lonely lane, running back from the house, toward the high pasture-lands,
on which grazed and basked the wealthy Squire's goodly flocks and
herds. This was her favorite walk, as it was the most quiet, shaded,
out-of-the-way by-path on the estate. She now directed her steps to a
little rustic seat, almost hidden from view by the pendent branches
of an old willow-tree, and close under a hawthorn-hedge, now in full,
fragrant bloom. Here she seated herself, or rather flung herself down,
half languidly, half petulantly, an expression of _ennui_ and unrest
darkening her face,--the dusky traces of a sleepless night hanging
heavily about her eyes. She opened her book at the play of "Romeo and
Juliet," and began to read, not silently, nor yet aloud, but in a low,
dreamy tone, in which the sounds of Nature about her, the gurgle of a
brook behind the hedge, the sighing of the winds among the pendulous
branches of the willow, the silver shiver of the lance-like leaves, the
murmurous coming and going of bees, the loving duets of nest-building
birds, all seemed to mingle and merge. As she read, a new light seemed
to illumine the page, caught from her recent experience of dramatic
personation and scenic effects, limited and unsatisfactory though that
experience had been. In fancy, she floated over the stage, as the gay
young Juliet at the masquerade; then she caught sight of young Romeo,
and, lo! his face was that of the sentimental hero of the last night's
tragedy, but ennobled by the glow and dignity of genuine passion. In
fancy, she sat on the balcony, communing with night and the stars,--the
newly-risen star of love silvering all life for her. Then, leaning her
cheek upon her hand, she poured forth Juliet's impassioned apostrophe.
When she came to the passage,--

"O Romeo, Romeo!--wherefore art thou Romeo?"

she was startled by a rustling of the leaves behind her. She paused and
looked round fearfully. A blackbird darted out of the hedge and away
over the fields. Zelma smiled at her own alarm, and read on, till she
reached the tender adjuration,--

"Romeo, doff thy name;
And for thy name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself!"

when,--suddenly, a fragrant shower of hawthorn-blossoms fell upon the
page before her, and the next instant there lightly vaulted over the
hedge at her side the hero of her secret thoughts, the young player,
Lawrence Bury! He stood before her, flushed and smiling, with his head
uncovered, and in an attitude of respectful homage; yet, with a look and
tone of tender, unmistakable meaning, took up the words of the play,--

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