They were in the North, when one morning Zelma was startled by hearing the manager say that the next night they should play at Walton. It was there that Lawrence Bury died; it was there he slept, in the stranger's unvisited grave. She would seek out that grave and sink on it, as on the breast of one beloved, though long estranged. It would cool the dull, ceaseless fever of her heart to press it against the cold mound, and to whisper into the rank grass her faithful remembrance, her forgiveness, her unconquerable love.
But it was late when the players reached Walton; and, after the necessary arrangements for the evening were concluded, Zelma found that she had no time for a pilgrimage to the parish churchyard. She could see it from a window of her lodgings;—it was high-walled, dark and damp, crowded with quaint, mossy tomb-stones, and brooded over by immemorial yews. In the deepening, misty twilight, there was something awful in the spot. It was easy to fancy unquiet spectres lurking in its gloomy shadows, waiting for the night Yet Zelma's heart yearned toward it, and she murmured softly, as she turned away, "Wait for me, love!"
The play, on this night, was "The Fair Penitent." In the character of Calista Mrs. Bury had always been accounted great, though it was distasteful to her. Indeed, for the entire play she expressed only contempt and aversion; yet she played her part in it faithfully and carefully, as she performed all professional tasks.
In reading this tragedy now, one is at a loss to understand how such trash could have been tolerated at the very time of the revival of a pure dramatic literature,—how such an unsavored broth of sentiment, such a meagre hash of heroics, could have been relished, even when served by Kembles, after the rich, varied, Olympian banquets of Shakspeare.
The argument is briefly this:—
Calista, daughter of Sciolto, is betrothed to Altamount, a young lord, favored by Sciolto. Altamount has a friend, Horatio, and an enemy, Lothario, secretly the lover and seducer of Calista, whose dishonor is discovered by Horatio, shortly after her marriage with Altamount, to whom he reveals it. Calista denies the charge, with fierce indignation and scorn; and the young husband believes her and discredits his friend. But the fourth act brings the guilt of Calista and the villany of Lothario fully to light. Lothario is killed by the injured husband, Sciolto goes mad with shame and rage, and Calista falls into a state of despair and penitence.
The fifth act opens with Sciolto's elaborate preparations for vengeance on his daughter. The stage directions for this scene are,—
["A room hung with black: on one side Lothario's body on a bier; on the other a table, with a skull and other bones, a book, and a lamp on it. Calista is discovered on a couch, in black, her hair hanging loose and disordered. After soft music, she rises and comes forward.">[
She takes the book from the table, but, finding it the pious prosing of some "lazy, dull, luxurious gownsman," flings it aside. She examines the cross-bones curiously, lays her hand on the skull, soliloquizing upon mortality, somewhat in the strain of Hamlet; then peers into the coffin of Lothario, beholds his pale visage, "grim with clotted blood," and the stern, unwinking stare of his dead eyes. Sciolto enters and bids her prepare to die; but while she stands meek and unresisting before him, his heart fails him; he rushes out, and is shortly after killed by Lothario's faction. Calista then dies by her own hand, leaving Altamount desperate and despairing.
Poor Calista is neither a lovely nor a lofty character; but there is something almost grand in her fierce pride, in her defiant hauteur, in her mighty struggle with shame. Mrs. Siddons made the part terribly impressive. Mrs. Bury softened it somewhat, giving it a womanly dignity and pathos that would seem foreign and almost impossible to the character.