Myra

by Ann S. Stephens

It was spring-time in the South—that rich, bright season more luxurious in foliage and profuse in fragrance than our warm and mellow summers ever are. The orange-trees were all in flower; carnations blushed warm and glowing upon the garden banks; the grass was mottled with tiny blossoms, gorgeous and sweet as the air they breathed. All around the house which Zulima occupied was hedged in with honeysuckles and prairie-roses, that sheltered the grounds and leaped up here and there among the magnolia-trees, lacing them together in festoons and arcades of fantastic beauty.

Poor, poor Zulima! With this beautiful paradise to wander in, with the sweet air, the warm sky, and all that world of flowers, how unhappy she was! Alone—utterly alone!—her child slept in the bosom of another; her husband had been months away in the far North; an unacknowledged wife, a bereaved parent, how could she choose but weep? Weeks had gone by and no letter reached her; at first her husband had written every day; and with his letters, eloquent of love, lying against her heart, she could not be wholly miserable; thinking of him she sometimes forgot to mourn for her child. At first she had been greatly distressed by the impediments which the flight of De Grainges had multiplied against the acknowledgment of her marriage, but this event had in no degree shaken the holy trust which that young heart placed in the object of its love. Singularly unambitious in her desires, but impetuous in feeling, she only felt the continued secrecy maintained regarding her marriage, because it separated her from the babe she had learned to love so intensely. True, it served as a restraint upon her husband, and frequently deprived her of his presence, but with her imaginative nature, the slight romance of this privacy only served to keep her affections more vivid and her fancy more restless. She was all impulse, all feeling, and sometimes, like a caged bird, she grew wild and restive under the restraints that necessity had placed upon her.

Weeks went by, one after another, and now Zulima grew wild with vague fears. Why was he silent? where could he be wandering thus to forget her so completely? Her nights were sleepless; her eyes grew bright and wild with feverish anxiety. That young heart was in every way prepared for the poison which was to be poured into it drop by drop, till jealousy, that most fierce and bitter of all the passions, should break forth in its might and change her whole being.

Zulima had gone forth alone, not into the garden to sigh among its wilderness of blossoms, but away, with an aching heart and pale forehead, to suffer among the wild nooks of the neighboring hollows. Here nature started to life in harsher beauty, and sent forth her sweets with a sort of rude waywardness, forming a contrast to the voluptuous air and over cultivation that closed in her home, as it were, from the rough and true things of the world.

Another day was to be passed in that agony of impatience which none but those of a highly imaginative nature can ever dream of—a weary night had been spent, the morning had come—surely, surely that day must bring a letter from the absent one.

The air of her chamber—that chamber where her child had slept in her bosom, where he had been so often—she would not wait there; all the associations were so vivid, they goaded her on to keener impatience. She could not draw a deep breath in that room, thinking of him and it.

So, as I have said, Zulima stole forth and wandered away where all was wild as her own feelings, and a thousand times more tranquil. Ross had promised her to return very early from the city that day, when he hoped—the villain could not look into her eyes as he said it—when he hoped to bring a letter that would make his sweet guest smile again.

Zulima knew a place near the highway which led to the city, and yet sheltered from any traveler that might pass, by the broken banks of a rivulet. Thick trees fell over it, and in some places the water was completely embowered by their branches. She could hear the tread of a horse from the spot, should one pass up from the city; and so, with a cheek that kindled and a heart that leaped to each sound, the young creature sat down to wait. To wait! oh, how hard a task for her untamed spirit, her eager wishes! Never till her marriage with Mr. Clark had Zulima’s vivid nature been fully aroused; never before had she been capable of the exquisite joy, the intense suffering that marked every stage of her attachment to that lofty and singular man. As she sat then by the lonely brook, the young creature gave herself up to a reverie that embraced all her life, for life with her seemed to have commenced only since she had met him. She drew forth his letters and read them again and again; tears blinded her sometimes, but she swept them away with her fingers, and read on, kissing here and there a line that spoke most eloquently to her heart. She came to the last letter; that was more ardent in its language, and warmer in its expression of love, than any of the others had been. Why was this the last? What had happened to check a pen so eloquent, to chill a heart so warm? Was he dead? This was Zulima’s thought; she never doubted his faith or distrusted his honor for a single moment. When the serpent jealousy reaches a heart like hers, it comes with a fling, striking his fang suddenly and at once. Zulima was not jealous, but that fierce pain lay coiled close by her heart, ready to make a leap that should envenom her whole being. More than once Zulima had started from her seat at some slight sound, which proved to be only a bird rising from the overhanging bank, or a rabbit leaping across the thick sward, and thus, between hope and despondency, dreams and thoughts of the stern real, the time crept by till noon. A wooden bridge scarcely lifted above the water, spanned the brook only a few yards from where Zulima was sitting. Here the bank fell abruptly, giving descent to a pretty cascade half swept by a sheet of pendant willow-branches. Their delicate shadows, broken with long gleams of sunshine falling aslant the water, told Zulima that the time of Ross’s return was fast drawing near. Now she became cruelly restless. Like some bright spirit sent down to trouble the waters at her feet, she wandered along the broken bank, gathered quantities of wild-flowers but to cast them away at the least noise, and frightening the ground-birds from their nests with reckless inattention to their cries, always listening, and half the time holding her breath with impatient longing for something to break the entire solitude that encompassed her.

It came at last—the distant tread of a horse—more than one—Zulima’s quick ear detected that in an instant. Still she could not be mistaken in the hoof-tread; she had heard it a hundred times when her heart was beating tumultuously as then, but without the sharp anxiety that now sent the blood from her cheek and lips while she listened. Ross had ridden her husband’s horse to the city that day, and she would have been sure of his approach though a troop of cavalry had blended its tramp with the well-known tread.

Zulima started from her motionless attitude, and springing up the bank, stood sheltered by the willow-branches, waiting for Ross to pass the bridge, when she would demand her letter. There she stood, trembling with keen impatience, eager and yet afraid of the sharp disappointment that might follow.