A Bloodsmoor Romance (30 page)

There was talk of the Missionaries Alliance; and Mark Twain; and the
All-Blackface Jim Crow Revue
then playing at the Varieties Theatre, direct from the Bowery in New York, with Septimis George in the lead—an absolutely hilarious entertainment. Perhaps it was not exactly genteel; perhaps it was rather rowdy and boisterous; but, as Baron von Mainz insisted, it was surely the most lively, the most ingenious, one might say the most
American
of entertainments, and hence of especial interest to a foreign visitor.

It was then that Mr. Hambleton Woodruff surprised his guests, and his niece Constance Philippa in particular, by doing a spirited imitation of the celebrated Septimis George as
he
imitated Jim Crow. Remaining in his place at the far end of the table, Mr. Woodruff clapped his hands lightly (for it would not do, of course, to summon the servants), and rolled his eyes and made his mouth go slack, and grinned, and grimaced, and wriggled his fat shoulders, and sang in a “negro” falsetto—

Come listen all you gals and boys,

I'm just from Tuckyhoe;

I'm going to sing a leetle song,

My name's
JIM—CROW
.

Weel about and turn about

And do jis so;

Eb'ry time I weel about,

I jump
JIM—CROW
.

I'm a rorer on de fiddle,

An down in ole Virginny;

Dey say I play de skientific,

Like massa Pagganninny.

De way dey bake de hoe cake,

Virginny nebber tire;

Dey put de doe upon de foot,

An stick im in de fire.

—which quite astonished everyone at the table, and moved even the reticent Constance Philippa to laughing appreciation. One might have worried that Baron von Mainz would think Mr. Woodruff's performance vulgar (for it was so often the case, to our bewilderment, that foreign visitors who had enjoyed themselves heartily here, returned home and published vicious satires of American life); but, on the contrary, the vastly amused little German led the applause at the conclusion of Mr. Woodruff's song, and repeated his praise of the blackface music as lively and ingenious and, indeed, marvelously
American.

It was soon the case that Baron von Mainz had settled, at least temporarily, in a luxurious suite at the Hotel de la Paix (so that he might, he said, repay his American hosts with dinners of his own), and that he had had shipped his stallion, his falcon, and other possessions, to the great country estate of Vaughan Kidde­master, in Bucks County, where he had been invited to spend weekends riding and hunting: all of which, Constance Philippa was told, might be seen to be “immensely promising.” Indeed, within a fortnight she and all of the Zinns were invited to dine with the Baron in his suite and to visit him at Highlands, where, on his proud steed Lucifer, with his hooded falcon Adonis on his upraised arm, he was so arresting a sight—and so
unusual
a sight—that Constance Philippa drew in her breath sharply, and was visited with the thought:
O enviable man!

Her sisters shrank away from the spectacle of Adonis hunting his small prey (sparrows, mourning doves, and mocking birds primarily), and the elder women of the party, Mrs. Zinn, Grandmother Kidde­master, and Great-Aunt Edwina, declined even to watch from the terrace of the great house, hundreds of feet away; but Constance Philippa did find the sport fascinating. She was sorry of course that the small birds were snatched out of the air by Adonis's cruel hooked beak, but, after all, they were killed at once (so the Baron assured her), and it was “only Nature”—“only Nature fulfilling herself, as she must.” Judge Kidde­master's grumbling distrust of “foreigners” and “disenfranchised noblemen” was somewhat assuaged, and John Quincy Zinn, tho' disturbed by the bloodiness of the sport, did express some admiration for Baron von Mainz's mastery of his creatures, and was even stimulated to sketch an idea or two afterward—might there be a
machine
bird of prey, a mechanical
golem
of some kind?—attracted to its moving target by magnetism?—a variation upon the military rockets developed by Sir William Congreve at the turn of the century, and fancifully envisioned by Jules Verne?

Constance Philippa stood erect beneath her sunshade as the Baron rode up, and dismounted, keeping his wrist high and steady so that the falcon (now hooded) should not be unbalanced; she gazed shyly at him through her tulle veil, and murmured, as if involuntarily: “How remarkable!—your Adonis!—your Lucifer!” The Baron bowed, yet even then did not disturb his fierce bird of prey, whose burnished feathers rippled in the breeze, and whose blood-stained beak opened and closed spasmodically. Constance Philippa drew a quick wild breath, feeling suddenly faint, and she saw, or seemed to see, an almost imperceptible sensual quiver of the little man's mustache. “My dear Miss Zinn,” the Baron murmured, in a near-inaudible voice, wiping his mouth with his gloved hand, and bowing again, as smartly as before, “I am at your service.”

And not long afterward he made his appeal to Judge Kidde­master; and then to Mr. and Mrs. Zinn; and at last to Constance Philippa herself, who, stony-cold with fear, unable to quite grasp what was happening, accepted his proposal of marriage with numbed lips, and had to restrain herself from drawing away when the overjoyed suitor, still on his knees, sought her hand to kiss it. She could not help glancing over his head, to the doorway of the parlor: for surely her sisters were hiding there, and would burst into laughter in another moment? And wasn't naughty little Pip crouched behind the settee?

 

SINCE THEIR DOWAGER
chaperons were always nearby, and conscientiously attentive, the affianced couple conversed of little save very general subjects, and, indeed, oft strolled or sat in total silence, absorbed (so I assume) by each other's presence, and basking in the anticipation of wedded harmony to come. Upon one unusual occasion, hardly a fortnight before the wedding, Miss Zinn and Baron von Mainz were strolling along the path above the river, accompanied at a discreet distance by Great-Aunt Edwina and Miss Narcissa Gilpin, when, of a sudden, the Baron evidently took a misstep, and brushed against Constance Philippa, so startling her that she released her silky white sunshade, which was carried off by the breeze, unfortunately in the direction of the river. It was lifted, and fell, not in the river itself but on a rock some yards below, an awkward climb to be sure, and perhaps even dangerous for any but a servant. Constance Philippa's cheeks blushed with chagrin, for she
did
hate any sort of fuss, and the frail white sunshade with its lilac ribbons looked so very silly, caught on the rocks. To her relief, tho' to her surprise as well, Baron von Mainz, in whom gallantry had evidently not o'erwhelmed common sense, did not offer to retrieve it, as an eager American youth might have done. Instead he told her, in his dry dignified voice: “We will acquire another pretty little parasol for you, Miss Kidde­master—there is a plethora of such female appurtenances in your country, I daresay.”

 

IT WAS SHORTLY
before this that Mrs. Zinn and Octavia, accompanied by a trusted manservant (Mr. Zinn having declined vociferously to come along), made their futile journey to Boston to attend a séance given by the new trance medium, “Deirdre of the Shadows.”

Alas—“Deirdre of the Shadows” was surely not
their
Deirdre, as they clearly grasped in the first minutes of her introduction: yet they hid their disappointment, and remained for the séance, heavy of heart, and only superficially engaged in the peculiar phenomena that followed.

The séance was dismayingly large, attended by some forty people, as a consequence of the new fame of “Deirdre of the Shadows” in the Boston area. Arrangements had been made beforehand for Mrs. Zinn and her daughter by Aunt Geraldine Miller, who, since the death of a favorite niece two years previously, had made an informal (some would say desperate) exploration of Spiritualist activities in the East, bravely defying family scorn and censure. (The men in particular were doubtful of this new “religion,” and had naught but contempt for such sensationalists and charlatans as the infamous Fox sisters of upstate New York, and Colonel McKenzie—many times exposed in the public press, yet continuing to draw zealots withal, and to accumulate sizable fortunes.) That Mrs. Zinn made the long journey not to participate in Spiritualist phenomena, but to seek out her lost daughter, perhaps added to the poignancy of the situation; but it must be admitted that Mrs. Zinn, being of a somewhat stoic nature, and inclined even to cynicism of a kind, had not truly expected to find her own Deirdre. “
Is
it—?” Octavia whispered, clearly frightened, and gripping her mother's arm as if she were a little girl, at the first appearance of “Deirdre of the Shadows,” when a tall, slender, alarmingly pale girl with heavy-lidded eyes was led out, in a black silk cloak with ivory lining—but Mrs. Zinn, seeing at once the unhappy truth, said simply: “No. It is not.”

Guests that evening consisted of two sorts, those who were seated around a large oak dining table, and others who were of the class of observers, seated in straight-backed chairs lined against the walls. Mrs. Zinn and her daughter, heavily veiled, and rather embarrassed to find themselves in this company, were of the latter class, for Mrs. Zinn had emphatically declined Aunt Geraldine's offer to assure them—through payment so high as to constitute a bribe, made to the gentleman manager of “Deirdre of the Shadows”—a place at the table, and a place, consequently, in the evening's occult proceedings. “My interest in this very odd young woman has nothing to do with her alleged Spiritualist abilities,” Mrs. Zinn said, with dignity, “but only with her identity—that, and nothing more. If she is Deirdre I shall bring her back home to Bloodsmoor with me. If she is not—I shall go away again, as I have come.”

Since Deirdre's disappearance, now nearly a twelve-month past, Mrs. Zinn had lapsed gradually into a state of mind that might be best described as “inexpressive”—even the Zinns' financial worries (Mr. Zinn was now in debt $25,000 to his father-in-law), even the excitement of Constance Philippa's imminent betrothal could not seem to rouse her to the natural and spontaneous expression of genuine feeling. Her frequent explosions of anger came and went so abruptly as to suggest a curious superficiality, as if the troubled lady lost interest at once in the very spasm of temper that o'ertook her. Whether she exhibited a laudable
stoicism
of a Christian sort, or whether it was a chilling
apathy.
I cannot judge, save to say that Prudence Zinn, after the birth of her third daughter Malvinia, in 1859, involving as it did a forty-two-hour labor of excruciating difficulty, attended by such a loss of blood as to raise the spectre, in her frightened husband's heart, of her death, had never been quite the same Prudence Zinn again—not the forthright, outspoken, boldly assertive young woman, who had been raised to the rank of assistant headmistress of the Cobbett School for Girls by the age of twenty-nine, and who quite held her own, as we have seen, in the drawing rooms of intellectual Philadelphia of the Fifties. It might be said that her spirit was broken: less by the agony of the long labor, perhaps, for that ordeal did result in blessèd life (and from the first Malvinia was a beautiful baby, admired by all), than by the repetition of pregnancies, miscarriages, labors, births, and occasional deaths (for not all of Mrs. Zinn's pregnancies resulted in life, but it would be morbid of me, and distracting from the main narrative, to enumerate these failures). Her love for Mr. Zinn, I hasten to say, remained steadfast, as did his love for her; the
unitary nature
of their wedded bliss could not be shaken, as indeed it cannot be shaken, once God has administered His blessing. And yet—Mrs. Zinn of 1859, still less Mrs. Zinn of 1880, was very distant from Miss Kidde­master of 1853, and bore her, alas, only a vague family resemblance!

“Who is that, Mamma?” Samantha once asked, pointing at a tinted daguerreotype of Mrs. Zinn in her bridal gown, in the family scrapbook, and Mrs. Zinn, brushing the little girl's hand aside in order to close the book, said: “A creature of vanity.”

Yet she loved her daughters, hardly a whit less than she loved her husband; and tho' her love for Deirdre was perhaps not
quite
so fervent as her love for the other girls (such is my assumption: I cannot after all pierce the inviolable mystery of the human heart), she did cherish the unhappy child, and suffered intermittent grief on her account, and dreamt frequently of her—troubled, chaotic dreams in which Deirdre, again a ten-year-old, held her thin arms out to Mrs. Zinn in vain. “Momma! Momma!” the child cried, as she had so rarely cried in real life: but Mrs. Zinn, paralyzed, could not move to her; and woke much disturbed, hardly knowing where she was, except that, with Mr. Zinn slumbering and snoring peacefully beside her, she was much alone.

“Deirdre, my lost Deirdre,” she murmured, “how we have wronged you! Yet how can we make amends?”

In addition to Aunt Geraldine Miller, now a somewhat giddy widow in her late sixties, there were a number of female relatives who dabbled, it might be said, in Spiritualism; and even in her girlhood Prudence Zinn and several female companions had experimented with a Ouija board (which they claimed to find intensely boring, far less interesting than a book, say, by Mr. Emerson); but that very new and very American branch of science or religion was vehemently rejected by most of the family, who were after all nominally Episcopalian, or comfortably agnostic, and scornful of religious enthusiasm of a primitive kind. The usually tolerant John Quincy Zinn himself considered Spiritualism “a shameful deception of the credulous, and a still more shameful expenditure of
Time.
”

After the tragic death of nineteen-year-old Annie Miller in Rome, as a consequence of malaria (or so it was given out: the family whispered that Annie might have been murdered by Italians, perhaps poisoned; others whispered cruelly that she might have died as a result of “illicit” behavior with Italians, of an indeterminate nature), Aunt Geraldine and Annie's mother and one or two other ladies sought to make contact with her, by way of mediums in New York City, Schenectady, and Boston; but to little avail. A fair amount of money was spent, and rumor had it that Aunt Geraldine had pressed upon the
chela
-companion of the celebrated Madame Blavatsky, the young Indian Hassan Agha, a costly pearl-and-sapphire brooch that had come down through the family from the reign of William and Mary, yet to no avail: the brooch being accepted as an honorable contribution to the cause of Theosophy, and the erection, in particular, of a new Lamasery in Adyar, Madras; but no contact with the dead girl was promised, or, indeed, was forthcoming. Rather more hurt than discouraged, the grieving Mrs. Miller next applied to the popular trance medium Johnette Whittaker, a former innkeeper's wife of Pike's Falls, New York; and then to the ubiquitous Mrs. Theodora Guilford, whose séances were always characterized by what some observers called an excess of Christian piety (the anxious Mrs. Guilford fearing, not altogether unreasonably, that she might be damned as a witch in some quarters—in Roman Catholic Boston, for instance), alas, to no avail: the deceased Annie, or Daisy, as she was ofttimes called, being as queerly reticent in death, as she was loquacious in life.