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.