A Bloodsmoor Romance (41 page)

Yet such was the anarchy of the decade, who cared to know? Who cared to judge true merit, amidst the swill of meretriciousness?

(“I fear I am really not so good as they claim,” Malvinia said to Orlando Vandenhoffen, skimming her notices for the fourth or fifth time, and laughing in perplexity, yet withal defiant as well; for the vain young woman did not truly doubt that she had it in her, to deserve such acclaim, or even to surpass it. Vandenhoffen did no more than laugh heartily, and kiss her lips, and, sweeping the newspaper clippings to the floor, said: “It is your
fear,
then, dear one, we must overcome.”)

 

JOHN SINGER SARGENT
was to paint her portrait—in an immodest low-cut crimson gown that showed her pale shoulders and much of her milk-white bosom to alarming advantage. Mark Twain, acting the fool, would offer her gifts—tho' never marriage; the shameless epicurean Diamond Jim Brady would do likewise, in defiance of Vandenhoffen's prior claim; the railroad magnate Nicholas Drew applied to be her “guardian,” and begged her to accept from him not only a parlor car rivaling in vulgar splendor that of the soprano Adelina Patti's (for where Miss Patti's bedchamber walls were paneled in satin-wood inlaid with ebony, gold, and amaranth, Miss Morloch's were to be in embossed leather and gold, with leopard fur, in a design promised to be “memorable” to the aesthetic eye), but a marble mausoleum as well, of Moorish design, with a jade and alabaster interior: which mausoleum, a twin to his own in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, was deemed a “fitting future shrine” for the beauteous young actress. Many, and varied, and glittering were the questionable honors heaped upon her—champagne dinners at Delmonico's, a dinner dance at the Plaza, the attention, for a while, of gentlemen so disparate as Jay Gould and Grover Cleveland (that prodigy of immoralism, and sheer animal gluttony), and Mark Twain himself. A reign of some years, with hardened and fickle New York City at her slipper'd feet, all the dazzling spoils of the material world; and her simple girlhood in Bloodsmoor, in the Octagonal House, left far behind. And yet one is inclined—nay, compelled—to inquire: Had
Malvinia Morloch
a day's happiness comparable to that once so freely and innocently enjoyed by
Malvinia Zinn
.
.
.
?

So strangely disheveled, too, were the Eighties, one scarcely knew whether the sun would properly set in the western sky, let alone rise; one scarcely knew whether to be scandalized, or amused, by the prominence of such blasphemous personages as Madame Blavatsky, and the revelations, near-weekly, of the antics of such swindlers as the infamous Ferdinand Ward, whose brokerage firm failed for $16 million, and besmirched the already contaminated name of Ulysses S. Grant. Darwinism and Evolution were making their godless inroads upon American culture, divorce was becoming a commonplace, eight brave policemen were murdered by anarchist dynamite at Haymarket Square, pagan Utopias were discussed by the young with all of the fervor, and none of the restraining moralism, of the old Arcadia Club of a bygone time. Social barriers were so threatened in all but the most distinguished households, one could scarcely be confident, upon entering a drawing room, that a wealthy “prince” of the mercantile-retail trade (in short, a common shopkeeper) might not be present, or even be the guest of honor. There were women so distracted by modern notions of equality, they made fools of themselves by running for public office, when they could not even vote; there were distinguished men of letters who took seriously, and even promoted, the garrulous hedonistic ramblings of Walt Whitman, offered as poesy! That the unseemly decade began with the assassination of President Garfield by none other than Charles Guiteau—alas, a greatly altered Guiteau, and one bearing little resemblance to John Quincy Zinn's old acquaintance—and that outlaws, desperadoes, and common murderers of the ilk of Jesse James were publicized in the papers, suggests but cannot truly describe the feculent airs that assailed the innocent, and that would soon lead, in the prophetic words of the Reverend Tobias Strong, to a “crisis of spiritual Anglo-Saxondom” in this nation—a crisis that continues to be felt in our time.

And surely it is no mystery that, in so disorderly an atmosphere, Constance Philippa simply vanished: or so it was assumed by her grieving family. Whether she met with some species of evil likely to visit itself upon an unprotected woman, or whether she did in fact find protection: no one could know. The deeply insulted Baron von Mainz exposed the deficiencies in his European upbringing, by suing publicly for an annulment to his marriage, on grounds of both
desertion
and
fraud;
and by retaining title to the Rittenhouse Square town house, the magnanimous wedding gift of the Kidde­masters to the young couple. (The family was angered to learn that, not one month after the annulment, the wily Baron sold this desirable piece of Philadelphia property for a handsome price!)

Nor is it a mystery that a society so eager for novelty should divert itself with the excesses of Spiritualism, as with the excesses of tobacco and alcohol—evidenced by the financial successes of such mediums as the van Hoestenberghe twins, the “Mahatma” Lotos Bey, Mrs. Daisy Olcott, and Deirdre of the Shadows herself; and by the controversial renown of Madame Helen Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society. The penny papers thrived on scandal and sensationalism, and hawked interviews with such creatures as the infamous wife-murderer Brockden Smith, who had advanced as his defense, at his trial in Ipswich: “When they are dead, they are done with”—a pronouncement immediately taken up by the multitudes, as if murder were a cause for hilarity, and the deaths of five Christian women of no great significance.

A wide, wide world indeed! One altogether foreign to the tranquillity of Bloodsmoor; and the simplicity, innocence, and natural goodness enjoyed by the five Zinn daughters, in their girlhoods.

“It is as well, perhaps, that she knows so little”—many a grieving family member said, of the declining Mrs. Kidde­master, who had taken to her bed after Deirdre's abduction, and never regained her health thereafter. “As well, perhaps, that she may pass from this vale of tears in such serenity”—so the elderly Mr. Kidde­master himself observed, at his wife's bedside, when, some five months after the week in November in which Constance Philippa fled her bridegroom, and Malvinia ran off under the protection of Orlando Vandenhoffen, the saintly lady breathed her last.

 

BLOODSMOOR OBSERVED, WITH
some surprise, and not a little murmuring, that Miss Edwina Kidde­master, after an initial collapse in November, managed not only to rally her spirits, but to so gird her loins that, upon the publication of her new best-seller,
100 Hints for the Christian Young: A Primer of Modern Etiquette,
she was able to address a number of religious and civic organizations in the Philadelphia area; and to accept an award, as Authoress of the Year, given by the Christian Protective Association in Baltimore. It was remarked upon by Dr. Moffet, who was fully acquainted with the history of her illnesses, and the capricious nature of her hypersensitivity, that the gallant lady seemed almost to
rally
in response to certain challenges; unlike poor Sarah Kidde­master, who had not only turned her face to the wall, in a manner of speaking, after her granddaughters' outrageous behavior, but who had, alas, turned from medicine itself—falling under the influence (or into the clutches, in Dr. Moffet's heated words) of the several Bloodsmoor practitioners of the new and controversial doctrine of Christian Science, a religion not yet a decade old (for Mrs. Eddy's
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures
had first appeared in 1875).

Great-Aunt Edwina might almost have been gratified, that the
very worst
that might befall the young Zinn ladies had occurred, and she might be absolved of grieving over them, and loving them: for she was curiously distant with both Octavia and Samantha, and quite frugal in her condolences to Prudence; and, immediately upon her recovery, she summoned to Kidde­master Hall her private attorney, evidently to restyle her will, as well as to direct a number of new investments, kept secret from her brother Godfrey, in speculations as disparate as the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad, John Rockefeller's Standard Oil of Ohio, and Wanamaker's. “I will not be crushed beneath the wheels of adversity,” Great-Aunt Edwina stated, in a tone of chill composure, “simply because of the bad judgment of others.” She wept, of course, at the death of her sister-in-law, for they had been invalid-companions for many years, and had shared many medicines; but she could not bring herself to feel, as others did, that Sarah Whitton Kidde­master died a saint and a martyr. That Mrs. Kidde­master had fallen under the spell of Mary Baker Eddy offended Edwina: for Mrs. Eddy's prose style, set beside her own, was deficient in both
sense
and
aesthetic power.

Apart from Edwina, however, all of Bloodsmoor mourned the ethereal old lady, who was so very clearly a victim of the young generation's want of delicacy, and something coarse and frightening in the very air—which, tho' Mrs. Kidde­master read no newspapers or books, her extreme sensitivity allowed her to gauge. A courageous invalid since the 1820's, when illness first forced her to her bed, she had managed, over the years, to triumph intermittently over a host of maladies that would have, in Dr. Moffet's words, “felled any gentleman”—polyarthritis, discopathia, myositis, among others, and, since the winter of 1879–80, a new and hitherto unexplored disease, just beginning to be prevalent in the mid-Atlantic region, known as “ovarian neuralgia,” in which Dr. Moffet had become something of an expert, before the Christian Science practitioners supplanted him in the old lady's affections.

It would have been very difficult for Octavia and Samantha to believe, had they not the testimony of their elders, and that of an oil portrait painted at the time of their grandmother's wedding—so very long ago, Monroe had been President, and Daniel Webster a handsome young man, and the women's fashions quaint indeed!—that Sarah Kidde­master had been, in her youth, one of the loveliest girls in the region; and that she had “had her pick,” as the saying went, of all the eligible young men. Over the years her more spiritual qualities had strengthened, as her physical qualities waned, and, even as a woman of middle age, she had been admired for the extraordinary slenderness of her waist (a mere seventeen inches, rivaling any girl's), and for the delicate pallor of her complexion, which unseemly blushes never despoiled. Perhaps as a consequence of religious devotion, or a natural constitutional inclination, this good lady had gradually conquered
appetite
in all its insidious forms. She allowed no more than two meals to be set before her, of a day; and each was a repast of agreeable lightness, fish and fowl rather than red meat, with no rich French sauces, or unnecessary spices, to stimulate the blood to needless agitation. It hardly needs to be said that Sarah Kidde­master was a resolute teetotaler, as impatient as Edwina herself with those who regularly succumbed to the weakness of
imbibing.
(Alas, this included her husband, Godfrey, and many a time did he slam out of the room, when they dined alone together, before Sarah's invalidism confined her to her quarters! The family thought it quite a pity, too, that Great-Uncle Vaughan, who had been so attached to Sarah in their youth, was one of that number of menfolk in the family whom the good lady had banned from her bedchamber, in her last illness, for, as she claimed with incontestable accuracy, the men fairly
reeked
of alcohol without being conscious of it, for the poisonous substance had gradually permeated their bloodstreams; and a teetotaler of Sarah's sensitivity could not bear it.)

That Sarah Kidde­master was a saint, no one in the household could doubt; not even the servants, who oft felt the power of her diminutive will, and responded with alacrity to her frequent calls. Before illness overtook her she was active in numerous church functions, both in Philadelphia and Bloodsmoor; and, in Bloodsmoor, as “first lady,” so to speak, she had assumed her social obligations with a resigned grace, and condescended to visit the five or six homes in the village which tradition had deemed worthy of Kidde­master attention. “Utterly good”—“utterly selfless”—“angelic”—“the epitome of Christian womanhood”—“unperturbed by inordinate thought”; so whispered praise for Mrs. Kidde­master sounded, well before her death at the age of seventy-nine. Her activities were a thrice-daily reading of the Bible, kept at all times on her bedside table; and her crocheting, to which she applied her flagging energies, with piteous industry, on the very eve of her passing; and near-constant prayer, in which Miss Narcissa Gilpin, as a new convert to Christian Science, guided her. Wickedness, sin, and ill-health
do not exist:
and the soul beset by demonic confusions of “ill-health” has only to pray with doubled intensity, to regain God's blessing of perfect health. (For some excited days it was thought that Mrs. Eddy herself might journey to Bloodsmoor, to more expertly guide the sickroom prayers; but the distance between Lynn, Massachusetts, and Bloodsmoor, being discouraging, and Mrs. Eddy's own health uncertain, nothing came of these plans. Alas, how overjoyed poor Sarah would have been, to see the great Mary Baker Eddy in the flesh!—perchance to shake her hand, and to witness her apply herself to prayer, that wickedness, sin, and ill-health might be banished as the delusions they are!)

For many years Mrs. Kidde­master had devoted herself to the female arts, with agreeable results: china-painting, egg-decorating, the construction of beautiful papier-mâché flowers, and music of all kinds. In her confinement she restricted herself to needlepoint, knitting, embroidering, and crocheting, sometimes for the poor of the village—who badly needed, as one might imagine, warm clothing for our severe winter months—and sometimes for the trousseaus of her young nieces and granddaughters. Quilts, afghans, coverlets, towels, napkins, handkerchiefs, doilies, antimacassars. . . . Even on her deathbed she was hurrying to complete an antimacassar begun many months previously, for Octavia's trousseau, insisting in her gentle voice that she must make haste, she had not long on this earth, and this pretty little trifle was for her sweetest granddaughter Octavia; the granddaughter she loved above all the rest. No one had told her, of course, of Malvinia's and Constance Philippa's defections; yet that astute lady had seemed to know, and to have resigned herself. She spoke ill of no one on earth, but, it was noted by all, she
did
reiterate her grandmotherly love for Octavia, as the sweetest, most docile, and most worthy of the girls; it may have been that, in the drowsiness of her gradual decline, she forgot about poor Samantha entirely—a possibility that disturbed the child more than I might have anticipated. In any case Grandmother Kidde­master was crocheting for Octavia's trousseau on her deathbed, no matter that the blushing young lady felt obliged to tell her that, at the present time, she was
not
engaged, and had very few prospects. “Nonsense,” Grandmother Kidde­master said softly, her ivory-pale, curiously unlined, and ethereally lovely face turned for a moment to her granddaughter, “we all marry; you will see.”