A Bloodsmoor Romance (65 page)

But Malvinia was staring sightlessly at the gorgeous orchids, which revealed, at their very centers—or did the terrified young woman imagine it?—tiny, almost imperceptible dots of red. For a long moment she was so transfixed, she could not speak; indeed, she could not move.

“I said, Malvinia,” Vandenhoffen repeated, his voice edged with a coolness that had become, alas, all too familiar in recent months, “I said, don't you think it is all most extraordinary? This ‘Deirdre of the Shadows,' and her carnivorous spirits, and the fact that two men were evidently murdered, not very distant from this room?”

Malvinia summoned the false, bright, brave strength of the stage, in giving an answer; and managed even to turn a pale, but quite composed, countenance to the gentleman who so resolutely addressed her. “Extraordinary? Such monstrousness? I might have said,” she murmured, pausing for dramatic effect, “that I expect nothing less, from such low and vulgar quarters.”

VII

“Unsung Americans ...”

FORTY-FOUR

L
oving, unquestioning obedience! Dependence! Cheerful resignation! What can be sweeter? To submit oneself wholly and contentedly into the hand of another; to surrender all appetite for the grossness of Self; to cease taking thought about oneself at all, and rest in safe harbor, at last, content to know that in great things and small we shall be guided and cherished, guarded and helped—ah, how delicious!—how precious! Even the poet Alexander Pope, who in other instances reveals a low, coarse, jesting soul beneath his smooth-tongu'd verse, spoke with rare wisdom when he penned—

She who ne'er answers till a husband cools,

Or, if she rules him, never shows she rules,

Charms by accepting, by submitting, sways,

Yet has her humour most, when she obeys.

Our subject of course is
Christian marriage:
that treasure so ignorantly spurned by three of our young Zinn ladies, in their frenzied quest for their own fortunes in the wide world, and, for a long period, held in contempt by a fourth: but never doubted by the fifth, our dear Octavia.

Octavia Theodora Zinn,
blessèd in her station as
Mrs. Lucius Rumford,
of historic Rumford Hall. Wife and mother and mistress of a household: and as exemplary in all roles, as she had been while dwelling in the Octagonal House, as the loving daughter of excellent parents!

That a devout and dutiful Christian wife accepted with gratitude the vicissitudes of marital life, seeking rather to fulfill herself as her husband's belovèd helpmeet, than to pursue her own vanities, was never doubted by sweet Octavia; and accounts for much of the
placidity
and
industry
and
prayerful contentment
of her nature, during even the perilous years of this chronicle. By intrinsic temperament docile, trusting, and unquestioning, this well-bred young lady did not pine after an unseemly independence, whether of fortune or spirit; nor did she truly require instruction, by her religious mentor Reverend Hewett, or the elder ladies of the family, or such conscientious handbooks as those authored by Miss Edwina Kidde­master, to comprehend the fact that the Husband is the natural head of the household, and that Our Heavenly Father is never more pleased than when His authority is honored, albeit on the humble, earthly plane, in the eager submission of Wife to spouse.
To love, honor, and obey
—never were these sacred words more gravely whispered, than by Octavia, as she knelt trembling at the altar of Trinity Church, beside her God-chosen bridegroom Mr. Rumford.

(If I feel compelled, at this point, to introduce the unhappy fact that, within a scant fourteen years of her marriage, the courageous Octavia was to mourn no less than
three deaths,
it is not with the coarse intention of dismaying the reader, but only to assure, in the very next breath, that these several tragedies merely strengthened Octavia's Christian faith, and compelled the innocent young woman to assume a stoic and matronly dignity all observers were to find most exemplary. “Dear child!” Great-Aunt Edwina herself was to exclaim, with tearful visage, upon the occasion of the third of these unlook'd-for deaths, forcibly clasping her niece's chill hands in her own; “how far you have journeyed, in so brief a span of time!—and with what remarkable bravery, equal, indeed, to any exhibited by any Kidde­master, male or female, throughout our long history!” Whereupon the silently weeping Octavia replied, with dignity, and, it may have been, some slight pity for her agèd relative, who, in these final years, was increasingly susceptible to emotional spasms: “Ah, dear Aunt! It is Our Heavenly Father who guides us, and Jesus Christ who hourly grants me strength! I cannot claim a mortal source for bravery, not even in my precious Kidde­master blood; nor in that fortitude I have some small hope of having inherited, from my belovèd father as well.” The piety of such an answer splendidly revealing, to even the most skeptical of observers, the Christian excellence of which I have been speaking.)

 

THUS SMOOTH-BROW'D OCTAVIA;
whilst her wanton sisters plunge ever more distantly outward, in the perilous waters beyond Bloodsmoor.

That Octavia nonetheless harbored a protracted, albeit surreptitious and even outlaw, interest in their fates, and sought news of “Malvinia Morloch” and “Deirdre of the Shadows” whenever she could (usually by laying hands upon Philadelphia papers and magazines thoughtlessly brought to the country, by visiting relatives), and eagerly, tho' futilely, sought news of Constance Philippa, is surely not to be charged against her, but attributed, I insist, to a chronic softness of sentiment in her nature: as well as to her stubborn
sisterliness,
kept wisely hidden from Mr. Rumford (who would have been greatly incensed by it), as it had been hidden, for years, from Mr. and Mrs. Zinn. (Both the elder Zinns continued to forbid all mention of their renegade daughters in the Octagonal House, which sometimes caused confusion in Mr. Zinn's devoted assistant Nahum, who had reason to
guess
that Samantha had other siblings beside Octavia, yet hesitated to inquire, for fear of seeming impertinent, or awakening an old distress. By the time of Octavia's wedding to Mr. Rumford, however, all visible traces of Malvinia, Deirdre, and Constance Philippa had vanished from the household, and even those melodies favored, at the piano, by Malvinia, stood permanently banned. For such was John Quincy Zinn's hurt, and, it may have been, his manly pride as well, that he contented himself with believing his daughters
dead,
as well as
disgraced;
and the obedient Prudence wordlessly concurred in his judgment.)

Nevertheless, the mistress of staid Rumford Hall secretly knew of each of Malvinia Morloch's stage triumphs, and saved such clippings and magazine features as she could, hiding them beneath the silver-tissue in certain of the drawers of Grandmother Kidde­master's wardrobe. She knew, tho' she dared not speak of it to anyone, of Malvinia's early success as a “saucy and mesmerizing” Rosalind, in
As You Like It;
she knew of Malvinia's Broadway fame as an “inspired comedienne” in
Dollars and Sense;
she knew of the relative failure of
Ah Sin,
and of Mark Twain's generous praise of Malvinia before the opening-night audience—as she was to know, to her incredulous dismay, some years later, of the crude gossip that alleged a
liaison
between her sister and that famous man of letters. She knew of a triumphant tour to the West Coast, with the road company of the popular melodrama
She Lov'd Him Dearly,
from which Orlando Vandenhoffen was to withdraw with such surprising abruptness. It goes without saying that Octavia never spoke of Malvinia to her husband or his numerous relatives, no more than she would have voiced a wish to journey to New York City in order to attend a theatrical entertainment!—such meretricious vanities now being excluded forever from her life.

Octavia followed, too, and likewise followed in earnest secret, the parallel career of her sister Deirdre, in which she was aided by the happenstance that the housekeeper of Rumford Hall, an elderly German widow, received in the mail such Spiritualist periodicals as
The Seer, The Far Shore, The Spiritist,
and
The Theosophist,
which regularly took note of “Deirdre of the Shadows,” soon proclaimed as the “unquestioned Seeress of the Age.” Octavia read avidly, albeit with a necessary repugnance, for she knew that Spiritualism was fraudulent, and her sister quite lost to all standards of civilization and decency; she knew that Our Saviour redeems us, and assures us of immortality in His bosom, and that Heaven is presided over by Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and that, according to Episcopal doctrine, mediums could have no role in any of this—the mechanism of the church being one of masculine authority, and beyond all usurpation, as it was beyond all comprehension, by persons of the weaker sex. Nonetheless, Octavia did follow Deirdre's career, and knew of the early accolades bestowed upon her, and of the generally respectable coverage by the Spiritualist “muckraker” Colonel Lynes, for the New York
Daily Graphic;
and, of course, of the infamous investigation by the Society for Psychical Research, which had resulted in the deaths of two—nay, three—gentlemen, from causes never to be satisfactorily explained in the public press. How Octavia would have liked to speak of such things to her housekeeper, how she would have liked to broach the subject of Spirit World in general, and “Deirdre of the Shadows” in particular! But, fortunately, the credulous young mistress of Rumford Hall was saved from such folly, by a sober awareness of the necessary distance between herself and the servant class. “One does not speak
with
servants, but only
to
them”—so Miss Edwina Kidde­master herself had oft counseled, in such manuals as
The Christian House & Home,
and
The Young Wife's Almanac;
and tho' she sometimes felt o'ercome with loneliness (Mr. Rumford being of a taciturn nature), Octavia successfully resisted speaking to her housekeeper, on any matters save those strictly regarding the house.

And she would have as readily raised the subject of
Spiritualism
to Mr. Rumford, as she would have the subject of
theatrical entertainments!
—knowing with what astonished scorn, and choler, that sombre Christian gentleman would have greeted it. (For, despite his husbandly concern for her physical enfeeblement, upon the occasion of her first miscarriage, Mr. Rumford had been incensed at Octavia's delirious assertion that she had had a
premonition
of the catastrophe—for such bespoke pagan superstition in his eyes, and “the crudest sort of women's prattle.”)

So the years passed, and the new mistress of Rumford Hall shared her secrets with no one: having become estranged from Samantha (who, fanatically engrossed in Mr. Zinn's numerous projects, had simply no interest in Octavia's married life, or in her children—and made no pretense of it); and seeing but rarely her younger cousins from Philadelphia, who frequently visited Bloodsmoor, but found Rumford Hall “too distant,” and Mr. Rumford possibly too forbidding. Of course Octavia often visited with Mrs. Zinn, and enjoyed visits from her, but naturally she could not speak of Malvinia and Deirdre to her mother—she dared not even allude to them. (Save to say, with a sigh, that she sometimes missed her old bedchamber!—her dear cozy old room, and the cozy double bed!—but knew it was mere foolishness, so childish a sentiment.)

Yet, a most peculiar incident occurred one dark wintry afternoon, when Mrs. Zinn and Octavia were companionably knitting together, in the drafty parlor at Rumford Hall, and Octavia's eye chanced to fall upon a copy of the Philadelphia
Ledger
which she had perused at some length, and which was about to be discarded, and her tongue got the better of her, as it ofttimes did: and she thoughtlessly blurted out, that she should very much like Mrs. Zinn to look at a photograph in the paper, and deliver her opinion.

In silence Mrs. Zinn took the much-folded newspaper from her daughter, and in silence she adjusted her reading glasses, while Octavia bent over her knitting, her face flushed with excitement, and some little apprehension. (The dear child! How impetuous, how ill considered her whims might be! It was a custom in these days for mother and married daughter to knit and sew baby things, month upon month, and, indeed, year upon year, in anticipation of an imminent birth, without once descending to the coarseness of mind that would feel the need to
state their mutual purpose:
such indelicacies as “pregnant,” “going to have a baby,” and “expecting” being quite out of place in genteel surroundings. Yet such had been Octavia's childish excitement, upon the occasion of her first pregnancy, in the first year of her marriage to Mr. Rumford, that she had, of a sudden, as soon as she and Mrs. Zinn were alone together, blurted out: “Oh, Momma! I think it has happened! I mean—I think it will happen! Mr. Rumford shall have another son!”—these words uttered with such incredulity, Mrs. Zinn had hardly the heart to chastise Octavia, for the unseemliness of her diction and deportment.)

Now Mrs. Zinn frowned at the
Ledger,
and the bracketing creases beside her mouth deepened. What had this photograph of a stranger to do with her? A gentleman not yet thirty, with emphatic dark eyebrows, and calmly gazing eyes in which some measure of irony might be noted: smooth-shaven, angular of face, the lines of the jaw bespeaking stubbornness, the thin-lipped mouth set firm. He was, perhaps, with difficulty,
handsome
—yet a certain arrogance of demeanor quite offended the eye. “Philippe Fox” of the Rock Bluff Mining and Milling Company, of the San Pedro Valley in Arizona, recently appointed Deputy Assistant to the United States Marshal for southeastern Arizona. The singularity of this appointment, the
Ledger
noted, was that the telegram was received not five minutes before Fox was to be hanged, by local authorities, in Tombstone—“a happenstance not greatly irregular in the West,” the
Ledger
continued, “though the precision of the timing must surely be noted.”