“Then do not take my sorrows on your shoulders, dear lady; I can bear them myself, or die under their weight uncomplainingly. Do not take my troubles to heart!” said Zuleime, gently.
The actress looked up with a sharp, rebuking glance, saying—
“As if I could help it! You are not sincere when you ask me to do so! No, the only way I can get your griefs off my heart is to get them off your own. I must get you into living circumstances. I must persuade you to go on the stage with me. It is not a pleasant profession for a lady, I grant you—neither is freezing or starving, and getting into debt and being dunned and rebuffed, pleasant—but—” she added, with a look of almost fierce self-assertion and self-defence—“neither is it actually sinful, that I know of. It necessarily transgresses no command of God with which I am acquainted. One need not be a heathen because she is an actress. Mrs. Siddons was a member in full communion with the Church of England. The stage has its dangers, I grant you, but you may safely pass through them, if you please. I have done so! I was not born or brought up to that life, my dear; I was the daughter of an English country curate—then a nursery governess—then a traveling companion to an earl’s daughter—then I accidentally met with my husband, and we married from mutual affection. He was a tragedian—that is the way in which I became an actress. Now I follow the histrionic profession as the only means of living left open to me. I have seen the dangers—nay, I have felt them. But nightly—no matter how utterly wearied out with toil I may have been, I have uttered two lines of sincere prayer, that God would keep me from falling into deeper sin. And He has kept me! Does that surprise you? God is the God of the publican as well as of the Pharisee. Who dares excommunicate me? What child of the Universal Father shall dare to say that another is excluded from His love and care and protection? Verily, the day of Judgment will be a day of startling revelations. And many that are first shall be last, and the last shall be first.” And then the actress fell into silence, and her fine countenance lost that look of captious self-defence, and settled into meditative earnestness.
Zuleime arose to go. Mrs. Knight took her hand, and said, gently—
“My dear, think over what I have proposed to you. If you decide to accept my proposition, I will take every possible care of you. You shall be as my own daughter. I will shield you from all dangers. I will instruct you in your art. And I will give you the freedom of my wardrobe. Good-night. Will you kiss me?”
And she drew Zuleime to her bosom. The poor girl pressed her lips to those of the actress, and slipping through the door, passed up in the dark and cold to her own room.
Ida went to bed, but the poor, generous, irritable woman could not sleep for sympathy, for anxiety, and for the sound of Zuleime’s racking cough. “She will never be able to sing much, I am really afraid. But she shall be paid well for dressing, and for making her beautiful face and form a part of the pageantry—that I am determined upon, if I have any influence with the management,” thought Ida, as she sank to sleep.
Rusty and threadbare clothing, broken shoes, cold, hunger, and a suffering child, are forcible arguments, and they seconded the persuasions of Ida with tremendous power.
Zuleime yielded, and was carried down the current of fate as easily, with as little resistance as the sapling beaten down by the rain, uprooted by the wind, and carried off by the flood, is whirled down the stream.
It was the fatal night of the 26th of December, 1811, the night of the burning of the Richmond Theatre, a night ever to be remembered in the annals of that city, and ever to be mourned in the hearts of her citizens. That evening more than six hundred lovers of pleasure were gayly preparing for the theatre; not dreaming, alas! that they also were doomed to take fearful part in an awful tragedy—a tragedy unprecedented in the history of the stage. Before eight o’clock, more than six hundred persons, from pleasant city homes all around, assembled in the fated building; before twelve o’clock, more than one hundred had perished horribly in the flames! and the scarcely surviving five hundred, many wounded, maimed, or burned, all despairingly mourning the awful fate of nearest relatives and friends, returned or were borne back to their desolate homes!