“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 debut, 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.