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 debutante 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!