A Bloodsmoor Romance (53 page)

Deirdre sat without moving, however, staring at the toe of Madame's boot, and a small thin smile played about her lips, evanescent as a firefly. Perhaps because she and Madame were speaking in the parlor of Mrs. Strong's home, and not in Madame's own parlor, at the Lamasery on Forty-seventh Street, she enjoyed a certain calm, and a certain stubborn strength; perhaps because the decision was not in truth her own, but one guided by Spirit World, she could withstand Madame's avalanche of words, and her still more tempestuous outpouring of emotion. Or was it simply a belated manifestation of Deirdre's
perversity
—observed many pages back in this chronicle, on the very occasion, the reader may recall, of her having been spirited away in the outlaw balloon, to a destiny no one could have foretold? Long ago the Zinns and Kidde­masters whispered amongst themselves, “Deirdre goes her own way,” and “Deirdre is a troubled young lady,” and even—with what unsettling prescience!—“Deirdre is haunted”: yet not even the boldest among them (Malvinia, it may have been, or Great-Aunt Edwina) could have prognosticated to what extremes that perversity might bring her, or to what fugitive company.

Madame had been speaking rapidly for some minutes, her pouched eyes glittering with moisture (engendered rather more by anger than by sorrow), the ashes of her Turkish cigarette liberally scattered across her massive bosom; now she paused, breathing hoarsely, and waited for Deirdre to speak, and to give her answer. It would have taken no acute observer to note how the young lady's stare had turned glassy, and her breathing so greatly reduced, she seemed more a waxworks statue than a warm, living, sentient being.

How bitter it is, your heart!—your heart!
—so a faint silvery voice sounded, from out of the most shadowed corner of the parlor, where a heavy brocade drape quivered just perceptibly, as if in a summer's breeze: but it was not summer, and the windows were fastened tight.

Madame did not hear; or, being a veteran of such phenomena, chose not to be distracted. She continued to stare at her young charge, awaiting an answer.

And the answer was forthcoming, albeit slow, and halting, and grave, and slyly adamant. “It is the spirits' wish, dear Madame,” Deirdre said, her pale lips scarcely moving, and her gaze still glassy and unperturbed, “and not my own. That I submit to Mr. Dodd's proposal—that I go forth, without apprehension, confident of
their
loving protection—and my own honest abilities—that I dedicate myself to bringing the two worlds more closely together: it is not my wish, Madame, but the spirits', and I have no choice, and, indeed, no desire, but to acquiesce.”

THIRTY-SEVEN

W
hen Deirdre Bonner was but four years of age she contracted an especially virulent strain of measles, and was confined to her sickbed with a temperature of 104 degrees. Her distraught parents kept vigil through the night, day upon day, fearing that their little angel would be carried off, for many a child has died of so minor an illness as measles; and poor Deirdre's skin fairly burned to the touch!

One night, as the twelve strokes of midnight were sounded by the ponderous bells of old Trinity Church, not a half-mile distant, it seemed to both Mr. and Mrs. Bonner that something very peculiar fluttered about their little girl's room. Mrs. Bonner, laying aside the Bible (for she and Mr. Bonner had been reading from it in turns, the Gospels primarily), whispered: “Who—or what—is it? Is something present?” Deirdre slumbered fitfully on her pillow, her dark-lashed eyelids trembling, and her tiny fists clenching and unclenching; her fever gave off a faint radiant heat, it seemed, quivering in the air about the bed. “Who is it?” the frightened woman asked. “What do you want?” Mr. Bonner sought to calm her all the while, by gripping her hand, and then both her hands, firmly in his. There was nothing present, he assured her in a low whisper: nothing: she must be calm, else Deirdre would be disturbed.

No matter Mr. Bonner's brave avowal, it soon became apparent that there
was
something in the room with them: a haze, a glow, a flickering or pulsating presence. The great grave bells of old Trinity tolled, and were silent, save for the faint echo of their sonorousness, which seemed retained in the sickroom, as if time had suddenly stopped.

“Oh, dear God!—what is it, who are you, what do you want?” the terrified Mrs. Bonner queried, looking wildly about, and seeing naught but undulating shadows, that leapt to the very ceiling, and melded dancerlike with one another, cast by the several candles that burned, and the kerosene wick-lamp on the bedside table. “You have not—
have
you?—come for my little girl?”

For long suspended moments the pulsating glow ranged about the room, now hovering in a corner, above an old walnut wardrobe; now snaking indolently across the ceiling; now quivering at the foot of the sick child's bed. Mr. Bonner, as terrified as his wife, continued to clutch her hands in his, but said not a word: afterward, he would claim that he had been
incapable
of speaking had he wished: for his very throat was closed, and his teeth held together with an enormous pressure. (Alas, how might one address a prayer to our Heavenly Father, in such a circumstance!—for, it seems, the approach of spirits, whether blessed by God, or frankly damn'd, so disorients even the good, steadfast Christian, and unlooses all manner of infantile terrors, that one cannot
act;
and only in retrospect might one say, Ah, yes, I should have done thusly, why was I so paralyzed, and so impotent?) Mrs. Bonner's voiced queries faded, too, out of very terror, perhaps, and she froze into silence, afterward concurring in her husband's description of his state of immobility: she seemed to understand, as if instructed by a silent voice that arose, as it were, out of
memory,
that her agitation would communicate itself to little Deirdre, and interfere with the healing process.

And so some minutes passed, between fifteen and twenty, as Mr. Bonner calculated afterward, and the shadowy quivering haze hovered about the bed, and Deirdre's troubled sleep became calmer, and the movement of her eyes behind her feverish eyelids ceased, and her breathing grew soft and rhythmic, and the faint but distinct odor of
fever
and
sickness
lightened; and, Mr. and Mrs. Bonner still fiercely clasping hands, their daughter suddenly opened her eyes wide, and smilingly assured them in a bell-like, limpid voice: “Dear Mother and Father, retire to your bed, and be assured—
I will not die.
”

And the child sank back onto her goose-feather pillow, into an altogether peaceful sleep.

 

(“WHO WAS IT
came to visit you, Deirdre, during the night?” Mrs. Bonner asked, with caution, in the morning, as she sponged the child's face with tepid water. “Do you recall anyone, or anything, visiting you while you were asleep?”

Deirdre blinked, and smiled at her mother, and yawned, with more energy than she had demonstrated in many days; and her cheeks dimpled with something very much—ah, how welcome!—like simple mischief. “You and Father were with me all the night,” she said. “
You
would have seen, would you not, if someone else had been here?”

Mrs. Bonner paused, and bethought herself for a moment (for she was, it must be said, not a very complex soul), and could only reiterate her question—whether Deirdre recalled anyone, or anything, visiting her while she slept.

Deirdre giggled, and squirmed beneath the quilt like a silly little eel, and said, with exactly the spirit of naughtiness one expects from, and hopes for, in a healthy four-year-old: “If I was asleep, Momma, how could I
see!
If I had my eyes closed all the while!” And she giggled, and hid beneath the pillow, and was so altogether darling, that Mrs. Bonner's heart swelled to bursting with love of her, and simple gratitude, and she embraced her daughter's warm lively body, and rained kisses upon her still-flushed cheeks; and the matter was closed.)

 

HOW THE GOD-FEARING
Bonners, simple folks as they were, would have been astounded to see into the future, and to learn that their child would mature into one of the most celebrated trance mediums of the Eighties!—compared by Spiritualist aficionados (whether devout believers, or objective observers), to the incontestably greatest medium of all time, Daniel Dunglas Home; and greatly preferred to her rivals Mrs. Whittaker, Mrs. Guilford, and Ambrose Tollers. For tho' little Deirdre did exhibit in childhood a number of queer talents, and appeared to be the center, and perhaps even the occasion, of inexplicable phenomena, she was never so disturbing a presence as the boy Home (who so upset the household in which he resided, he was accused of bringing the Devil into it, and expelled), or the infant Mrs. Guilford (née Parshall, who, in her beribboned cradle, was said to have been sung to sleep by a veritable choir of angel voices, and rocked by invisible hands, and even given suck by invisible means); nor did legends accrue to her, as to the child Helena Petrovna Hahn (who was said to have caused the death of a fourteen-year-old serf when only four years old herself: she called down
russalkas,
or Russian fairy-nymphs, upon him, and he was drowned in a river).

Deirdre was a shy, excitable, sensitive child, of the type called “high-strung”; clearly above average in intelligence; fairylike, wistful, and grave; at times remarkably mature, and at other times babyish and prankish. The schoolmaster of the Bloodsmoor common school praised her as his best scholar, and even worried that she spent so much time buried in books, and compiling long lists of spelling and vocabulary words (for the little girl dearly loved words—their sounds as much as their meanings); but he did report to the Bonners that she could be, upon occasion “devilishly” naughty. She told lies, for instance. She made up elaborate and utterly fraudulent stories. And while she did not steal things, she hid them; and would never admit what she had done.

Mr. and Mrs. Bonner so cherished Deirdre, they were loath to punish her, or even to discipline her harshly. She was susceptible to turbulent dreams and nightmares, and sudden frightening thoughts (or actual visions); and, for a time, the Bonners feared she might be consumptive. (It is interesting to recall that D. D. Home
was
consumptive, stating openly that his spirits came to him most readily, when the physical side of his nature was diminished.) She saw things, she heard things, she even appeared to smell and touch and taste things, not evident to anyone else; and yet it was problematic, whether she understood that these things inhabited only an invisible or internal world—for children are so trusting of experience, they rarely question themselves, as to the
reality
about them. And many are the normal children, after all, who engage in spirited dialogue with invisible playmates, and romp, and disport themselves, in imaginary kingdoms.

Once, at the age of seven, Deirdre ran to Mrs. Bonner and babbled to her, in great excitement, about a “shining” figure in a long white robe, with a “circle of light” about his head, and “wings crookèd like a hawk's”: an archangel, by the sound of him, and taller than Mr. Bonner by far. Not long afterward she astounded a Bloodsmoor neighbor by remarking casually that her son was on a “boat all in flames”: which, it turned out, referred to the fact that the young man, a sailor in the Navy, en route to Russian America (Alaska), lay abed with a high fever, but subsequently recovered. Upon more than one unsettling occasion the child, always speaking in a spontaneous, lucid voice, said matter-of-factly that someone would be “crossing over” before long: which is to say, dying. (And she was never mistaken—tho' the Bonners deliberately made little of it, not wanting to excite Deirdre, or to call attention to her ostensible powers amongst the villagers, who might misunderstand.)

She could find lost objects around the house; and if an object was brought to her, that had been found (a woman's ring, for instance, discovered in the road), she could describe its owner, and even stammer out a probable name. Once, turning the tattered pages of an old copy of
The Pilgrim's Progress,
which had been in Mr. Bonner's possession for as long as he could remember, she closed her eyes and described, with a cherubic little smile, the white-haired man with the gnarled cane and the strange red speck in his left eye, who had been Mr. Bonner's grandfather—and who had died twenty years before. She astonished her parents by telling them, one winter afternoon, that she had met “the nicest old man” down by the river: proceeding to describe a personage in what must have been a Dutch costume, dating back to no later than the 1660's, when the Kidde­masters had conquered the area, for the British Crown; upon another, more disturbing occasion, she ran to them in tears, and told of a “Raging Captain” whose uniform was soaked in blood, and who shouted at her from atop a hill to come to him at once, else he would punish her and the Bonners. “Little Deirdre,” he called her, “little daughter—come to me at once!” Unlike the other presences this “Raging Captain” was horrific, and Deirdre ran in tears from him, tho' she did not seem to recognize that he had no substance: that he was, in short, what is vulgarly called a
ghost.

“You must not come home from school that way ever again,” Mrs. Bonner cautioned, calming her; “you must walk with the others, and not wander off alone.”

“Will he get me, then?” the trembling child asked; “if I go off alone?”

“He won't get you,” Mrs. Bonner replied, “no one will get you, for your Heavenly Father watches over you; but it is most prudent to stay with the other children, and not to take a shortcut through the fields, or through the cemetery.”

“Does he live in the cemetery?” the child asked doubtfully. “I see him atop a hill. His horse is dead beside him.”