Chapter VII: Front Matter (7)

There was something so magnetic and contagious in this frank, confiding manner, that Zelma, ere she was aware, grew unrestrained and communicative in turn. One by one, the icicles of pride and reserve, which a strange and ungenial atmosphere had hung around her affluent and spontaneous nature, melted in the unwanted sunshine, dropped away from her, and the quick bloom of a Southern heart revealed itself in smiles and blushes. The divine poet whose volume she now held clasped caressingly in both hands had prepared the way for this, by sending through every vein and fibre of her being the sweet, subtile essence of passionate thought,--the spring-tide of youth and love, which makes the story of Romeo and Juliet glow and throb with immortal freshness and vitality.

So, at length, those two talked freely and pleasantly together. They discussed the quiet rural scenery around them, the deep green valley of Arden, shut in by an almost unbroken circle of hills, and Zelma told of a peculiar silvery mist which sometimes floated over it, like the ghost of the lake which, it was said, once filled it; they spoke of wood, stream, moor, and waterfall, sunsets and moonlight and stars, poetry and--love; floating slowly, and almost unconsciously, down the smooth current of summer talk and youthful fancies, toward the ocean of all their thoughts, whose mysterious murmurs already filled one heart at least with a tender awe and a vague longing, which was yet half fear.

The next day, and the next, and every day while the players remained at Arden, the two friends met by tacit agreement in the lane of Burleigh Grange, and, gradually, Lawrence Bury became less the actor and more the man, in the presence of a genuine woman, without affectation or artifice, stage-rant or art-cant,--one from whose face the glare of the foot-lights had not stricken the natural bloom, whose heart had never burned with the feverish excitement of the stage, its insatiable ambition, its animosities and exceeding fierce jealousies. For Zelma, she grew more humble and simple and less exacting, the more she bestowed from a "bounty boundless as the sea."

It was but a brief while, scarcely the lifetime of a rose,--the fragrant snow of the hawthorn blossoms had not melted from the hedges since they met,--and yet, in that little season, the deepest, divinest mystery of human life had grown clear and familiar to their hearts, and was conned as the simplest lesson of Nature.

To Zelma the romance and secrecy of this love had an inexpressible charm. The Zincala in her nature revelled in its wildness and adventure, in its crime against the respectable conventionalities she despised. She had a keen pleasure in the very management and concealment to which she was compelled;--her imagination, even more than her heart, was engaged in hiding and guarding this charming mystery.

On the day succeeding her first interview with the young actor in the lane, she had tried to beguile her _ennui_, while lingering in her lonely bower, by curiously peering into the nest of a blackbird, deeply hidden in the long grass at the foot of the hedge, and which she had before discovered by the prophetic murmurs of the mother-bird. She found five eggs in the nest. She took the little blue wonders in her hand, and thought what lives of sinless joy, what raptures and loves, what exultations of song and soaring slept in those tiny shells! Suddenly, there was an alarmed cry and an anxious flutter of wings in the hedge above her! She turned, and saw the mother-bird eyeing her askance. From that day the lowly nest with its profaned treasures was forsaken, and the world was the poorer in gladness and melody by five bird-lives of joy and song that might have been.

So, had any luckless intruder chanced to discover Zelma's trysting-place, thrown open to the world the hidden romance in which she took such shy and secret delight, and handled in idle gossip the delicate joys and fragile hopes of young love, it is more than likely that she would have been frightened away from bower and lane, shocked and disenchanted. But the preoccupation of her cousin and her own eccentric and solitary habits prevented suspicion and inquiry,--no unfriendly spy, no rude, untoward event, disturbed the quiet and seclusion of this charmed scene of her wooing, where Nature, Romance, and Poetry were in league with Love.

The players played out their engagement at Arden, with the usual supplement, "A few nights only by special request," and were off to a neighboring town. On their last night, after the play, Zelma met her lover by moonlight, at the trysting-place in the lane, for a parting interview.

It was there that the actor, doffing the jaunty hat which usually crowned his "comely head," and, flinging himself on his knees before his fair mistress, entreated her to rule his wayward heart, share his precarious fortunes, and bear his humble name.

Poor Zelma, when in imagination she had rehearsed her betrothal scene, had made her part something like this:--"And then will I extend my hand with stately grace, and say to my kneeling knight, 'Arise!'--and after, in such brief, gracious words as queens may use, (for is not every woman beloved a queen?) pronounce his happy doom."

But when that scene in her life-drama came on, it was the woman, not the tragedy-queen, that acted. Naturally and tenderly, like any simple girl, she bent over her lover, laid her hand upon his head, and caressingly smoothed back from his brow the straggling curls, damp with night-dew. As she did so, every lock seemed to thrill to her touch, and to wake in her soft, timorous fingers a thousand exquisite nerves that had never stirred before. And then, with broken words and tears, and probing questions and solemn adjurations, she plighted her vows, and sought to bind to her heart forever a faith to which she trusted herself, alas! too tremblingly.

The melodramatic lover was not content with a simple promise, though wrung from the heart with sobs. "_Swear_ it to me!" he said, in a hoarse stage-whisper; and Zelma, again laying her hand upon his head, and looking starward, swore to be his, to command, to call, to hold,--in life, in death, here, hereafter, evermore.

[To be continued.]

* * * * *

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

ATTORNEY AT LAW AND SOLICITOR IN CHANCERY.

Somewhat more than three-quarters of a century ago, George Steevens, the acutest, and, perhaps, the most accomplished, but certainly the most perverse and unreliable of Shakespeare's commentators and critics, wrote thus of Shakespeare's life: "All that is known, with any degree of certainty, concerning Shakespeare, is, that he was born at Stratford-upon-Avon; married and had children there; went to London, where he commenced actor,[A] and wrote poems and plays; returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried." From 1780, when this was written, to the present day, the search after well-authenticated particulars of Shakespeare's life has been kept up with a faithfulness equal to that of Sir Palomides after the beast glatisaunt, and by as many devotees and with as much hope of glory as in the quest for the Sangreal. But the fortune of the paynim, rather than the virgin knight, has fallen to all the members of the self-devoted band, and we know little more of the man Shakespeare than was known by our great-grandfathers. For, although there have been issued to us of the present generation pamphlets professing to give new particulars of the life of Shakespeare, and tomes with even more pretentious titles, from all these there has been small satisfaction, save to those who can persuade themselves, that, by knowing what Shakespeare might have done, they know what he did, or that the reflex of his daily life is to be found in documents inscribed on parchment, and beginning, "This indenture made," etc., or "_Noverint universi per presentes_." It is with no disrespect for the enthusiasm of Mr. Knight, and as little disposition to underrate the laborious researches of Mr. Collier and Mr. Halliwell, that we thus reiterate the assertion of the world's ignorance of Shakespeare's life: nay, it is with a mingled thankfulness and sorrowful sympathy that we contemplate them wasting the light of the blessed sun (when it shines in England) and wearing out good eyes (or better barnacles) in poring over sentences as musty as the parchments on which they are written and as dry as the dust that covers them. But although we gladly concede that these labors have resulted in the diffusion of a knowledge of the times and the circumstances in which Shakespeare lived, and in the unearthing of much interesting illustration of his works from the mould of antiquity, we cannot accept the documents which have been so plentifully produced and so pitilessly printed,--the extracts from parish-registers and old account-books,--not Shakespeare's,--the inventories, the last wills and testaments, the leases, the deeds, the bonds, the declarations, pleas, replications, rejoinders, surrejoinders, rebutters, and surrebutters,--as having aught to do with the life of such a man as William Shakespeare. We hunger, and we receive these husks; we open our months for bread, and break our teeth against these stones. As to the law-pleadings, what have their discords, in linked harshness long drawn out, to do with the life of him whom his friends delighted to call Sweet Will? We wish that they at least had been allowed to rest. Those who were parties to them have been more than two centuries in their graves,--

"Secure from worldly chances and mishaps.
_There_ lurks no treason, _there_ no envy swells,
_There_ grow no damned grudges; _there_ no storms,
No noise, but silence and eternal sleep."

Why awaken the slumbering echoes of their living strife?

[Footnote A: _Commenced actor, commenced author, commenced tinker, commenced tailor, commenced candlestick-maker:_--Elegant phraseology, though we venture to think, hardly idiomatic or logical, which came into vogue in England in the early part of the last century, and which, as it is never uttered here by cultivated people, it may be proper to remark, is there used by the best writers. Akin to it is another mode of expression as commonly met with in English books and periodicals, e.g., "immediately he arrived at London he went upon the stage," meaning, as soon as he arrived, etc., or, when he arrived at London, he immediately went upon the stage. As far as our observation extends, Lord Macaulay, alone of all Great-Britons, has neglected to add the latter lucid construction to the graces of his style.]

Yet these very law-papers, in the reduplicated folds of which dead quarrels lie embalmed in hideous and grotesque semblance of their living shapes, their lifeblood dried that lent them all their little dignity, their action and their glow, and exhaling only a faint, sickening odor of the venom that has kept them from crumbling into forgetfulness,--these law-papers are now held by some to have special interest Shakespeare-ward, as having to do with a profession for which he made preparatory studies, even if he did not enter upon its practice. Yes, in spite of our alleged ignorance of Shakespeare's life, and especially of the utter darkness which has been thought to rest upon the years which intervened between his marriage in Stratford and his joining the Lord Chamberlain's company of players in London, the question is, now, whether the next historical novel may not begin in this wise:--