A Bloodsmoor Romance (43 page)

With plenty of onions, and plenty of sage;

She cried, “Come you little wretches, come, and be killed!

—For you shall be stuffed, and my customers filled!”

—before her angry mother hauled her away.

“Was there
ever
such a naughty miss!” Mrs. Zinn muttered. “One might almost think you weren't of our own blood, but were a
changeling!
”

 

HOW DELIGHTFUL THEY
were, and haunting too, the old nursery songs!—whose rollicking melodies and simple rhymes dispelled the gloomy thoughts of many an evening, in those days long past! If I listen closely enough I can hear them again; if I close my eyes I can see the girls again, in the old parlor, grouped about the piano as Mrs. Zinn played. Constance Philippa as a young girl, and Malvinia, and Octavia, and little Samantha—and, shortly, Deirdre herself, who, for all her sorrow,
was
capable of a sunny startl'd smile now and then, and a burst of melody that caused her slender frame to tremble with joy.

Octavia's favorite song was “Mulberry Bush,” for she loved the bouncy rhythm, and the way all kept going round and round and round: so safe and tidy and delightful! She fancied too, in secret, that she might one day resemble the demure miss illustrated at the top of the page, who stood with her hands clasped at her waist and her eyes lowered, as two husky boys danced about her.

Samantha's favorite song had not a whit of sentiment about it, but went so swiftly it was all over (she had counted) in but three breaths: “Tom, Tom the Piper's Son.” Compact as a tiny, perfectly functioning machine, with nothing fussy to impede it; yet what a very
odd
world it must have been, in which a pig—living?—or dead and roasted?—but in the illustration it looked as if it
were
living—was stolen in the street, and eaten at once, as if little Tom were extremely hungry. Samantha did not ponder o'erlong upon the song's mystery, however, but sat on the piano stool, her short legs dangling, and hammered away at the tune, which she had learned by rote, and could play with faultless mechanical skill.

Malvinia loved “Sweet Lavender,” for the innocent promise of its words (“Some to make hay, diddle-diddle! Some to cut corn; Whilst you and I, diddle-diddle! Keep ourselves warm”), and for its pleasant illustration, in which a handsome youth, cap in hand, bows before a pretty young miss. And “Little Bo-Peep,” despite its insipid lyrics, had a most compelling illustration, which made Malvinia's mouth dry as she studied it in secret: a gorgeous Bo-Peep with long curly tumbling red hair, and an aggrieved expression, and a graceful white gown of a Grecian style, all folds and ripples, which showed her lovely figure to great advantage, as if she were naked beneath it—as one could never be, Malvinia knew, in real life.

Constance Philippa admired the crow in that rollicking song, particularly as he was illustrated at the bottom of the page, in high boots and a pirate's jaunty hat, a mean-looking sabre tucked beneath his wing. Better yet was “The Fairy Ship,” which Constance Philippa fancied she would one day sail (no matter that the sailors were mice, and the captain a duck); best of all was “A Fox Went Out,” which Constance Philippa found deliciously naughty, tho' her sisters heartily disliked it. “At last he got home to his snug den, To his seven little foxes, eight, nine, ten; Says he, ‘Just see, what I've brought with me, With its legs all dangling down O!' ” Malvinia clapped her hands over her ears, and cried: “It isn't nice—it's bad to hear—
you're
bad to always want to sing it!” and Constance Philippa said: “It's in the book with the other songs, and I'll sing it all I want!”—her lower lip swollen in an unattractive pout.

The Zinns were poor, but their well-to-do relatives were always taking pity on them, and since the sisters were so winning, and so grateful, they were given a great many presents over the years. By the time Deirdre came to live with them they had acquired the makings of a little orchestra—tiny fiddles, a tiny accordion, a mouth organ, drums and cymbals and even a flute (of a very simple design); and of course they had the spinet piano, which was part of Mrs. Zinn's dowry, and a very fine piano it was, with ivory keys and massive tapering octagon legs, of solid mahogany. Samantha had devised an ingenious method by which a single person could play a half-dozen instruments simultaneously, with the employment of strings, sticks, and wires, attached firmly to the feet. “Isn't she clever!” the family exclaimed, even as they winced at the dreadful noise that ensued. “She takes after her father, doesn't she? What a clever little monkey!”

When Deirdre was adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Zinn she was nearly ten years of age; and the year was 1873. Mr. Zinn having been persuaded by his wife to submit to the nuisance of
applying for a patent,
to secure the rights to certain waterproofing discoveries he had made (which, tho' crude by our contemporary standards, and soon overtaken by others' improvements, were nonetheless valuable), and having been persuaded as well by his vigorous Kidde­master relatives, to allow them to “talk up” his invention to those manufacturers of boots and raincoats among their acquaintance, the Zinns basked in the delightful if temporary warmth of affluence—and the child might have seemed a sign of that affluence, or one of its literal manifestations. If she aroused their pitying affection with her downcast mourner's gaze, and the tears that seemed forever brimming in her eyes, she nevertheless surprised them with her spontaneous talent for the piano: which was to alter the nature of the music-making evenings entirely, and to embarrass the other girls, Malvinia in particular, who had fancied herself musical.

It came about quite by accident one evening, five or six months after Deirdre's arrival, when all were gathered in the parlor, including Mr. Zinn, who had had an agitated day in the workshop—revising diagrams for his “sun-furnace,” which would, he felt confident, entirely revolutionize the heating of America, if only he could get it right; and little Pip, sleepy after his supper, who lay in his master's lap. Mrs. Zinn went to the spinet and played a few songs at the girls' requests—“Woodman! Spare That Tree!” was a favorite, and “Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair,” which Malvinia sang in a breathy dreamy voice; and then Malvinia played, for perhaps a half-hour; and then Octavia, settling herself in her billowing skirts on the stool, with many apologies; and then Samantha hammered fiercely through one or two familiar pieces. Little Deirdre was then encouraged to come forward, and to sit with Mrs. Zinn at the piano, simply for the pleasure of it, to explore the sounds, and to feel the exquisite smoothness of the ivory keys. Which the child did, reluctantly: for she was naturally shy, and at the same time failed to grasp the sincerity of her new family's affection for her.

“This is the way the hand is stretched,” Mrs. Zinn instructed, taking Deirdre's small chill hand in her own, and encouraging her to depress the keys; which she did, tho' very faintly. Malvinia, crowding near, could not resist a demonstration: galloping up and down the treble keys in dissonant chords.

Mrs. Zinn shooed her away, and continued to give Deirdre instructions, of the elementary sort one might give to a very young child, and gradually Deirdre took heart, and depressed the keys more firmly, producing a sound of crystalline clarity, and startling beauty—as if a peculiar strength were surging through her fingers, to her own amazement. She played with her right hand; then with her left; then both hands together, feebly, hesitantly, then with sudden strength, which immediately ebbed; and returned again, to the astonishment of everyone in the parlor, including little Pip.

“Why, she knows how to play!—she knew all along!” Malvinia cried, with an air of reproach.

“She does
not
know how to play,” Mrs. Zinn said sternly, “it is—it is simply
coming
to her.”

And so indeed it seemed: for the frail little girl, her dark gray eyes huge in her face, formed chords and did abrupt sparkling runs, and “played” melodies for a minute or two at a time, before losing the thread, and stopping. Samantha recognized an echo—a queer echo—of “Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair,” and Octavia believed she could hear, inside the cascade of unfamiliar notes, the simple tune of “Hey Diddle Diddle.” Mr. Zinn claimed, with some excitement, that
he
could hear musical sense in all the pieces, albeit he was very much an amateur, and was certain he had a tin ear; and Constance Philippa voiced an emphatic agreement, adding, however, that she could not believe Deirdre had never had lessons, or had not been instructed, however informally, by the Bonners. Which statement, tactlessly put, caused the little girl to cease playing at once, and to sit with her hands frozen on the keys, staring ahead, as if seeing nothing.

Whether it was the vociferated doubt of her musical innocence, or the mere mention of the name
Bonner,
the girls' new sister went mute; and would not reply to anyone; and after some distressed moments, Mrs. Zinn noting the degree of her agitation, she was carried off to the nursery, to bed, and settled in with many hugs and kisses, and the promise that she should have piano lessons if she wished.

The child clung to Mrs. Zinn's neck, and whispered into her ear, in a plaintive voice, that she had
not
had lessons before: she was
not
a liar. And Mrs. Zinn comforted her, and stayed with her until she drifted off to sleep. Poor strange disturbing little girl!—the very vision, one is forced to observe, of the orphaned child.

Deirdre stayed away from the spinet for some days, and then returned, and much the same sounds ensued, tho' a pleasant rendition of “Ah! May the Red Rose Live Alway” was interrupted by a sudden crashing of chords, and a run up and down the keyboard, with both hands, that struck all ears as diabolical; and that quite frightened the girl herself. It was a measure of the sisters' sensitivity, to Deirdre's feelings, that they suppressed the remarks they would naturally have made, and the snorts of derision, had one of
them
been responsible for such a noise: tho' Malvinia could not resist a sly chuckle, and the murmured inquiry, as to whether “Father should discern musical sense in
that.
”

Sometimes she played feebly, like any ten-year-old, stumbling through simple Mother Goose tunes; at other times, with a most disconcerting brilliance—snatches and fragments of pieces that, to Mrs. Zinn's moderately sophisticated ear, belonged to the classical repertoire, and might indeed have been written by Mozart or Bach! At such times the child's pale skin appeared to glower, and her eyes grew even darker, and more intense; and Octavia, sitting with her on the piano stool, claimed that she grew
cold
—an emanation issued from her, subtle as a breath, but decidedly cold; and her body temperature dropped so alarmingly, her little fingernails showed bluish-purple. She might play these bits of “serious” music for a minute or two, but then another music would interfere, usually a simple, stumbling, American sort of tune (there was a period of some weeks when “I Wish I Was in Dixie's Land” emerged rather too often, given Mr. Zinn's sentiments about the War; and “Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! or, The Prisoner's Hope,” which stirred, with its pounding chords, memories Mr. Zinn had hoped to bury); but sometimes the mad half-angry runs and trills and crashing chords would diabolically assert themselves, to the distress of all the household, including the servants, and the poor child was unable to stop the agitated motion of her hands, until such time as one of her sisters stilled them. She protested that it was not her fault: the keys simply banged down, and her fingers had to follow.

“That's never a little girl playing up there,” the maid Vanda once remarked in the kitchen, in Octavia's presence, “that's a grown-up
man:
a
spirit.
”

Indeed, it often seemed that Deirdre did not
possess
the gift, in herself, but that it
possessed her;
streaming through her arms and fingers at the most unpredictable times. It exhausted her, alarmed her, and, less frequently, made her laugh sharply aloud, but it was not
hers,
and was not under her
control.
Tho' Mr. Zinn forbade all manner of superstitious talk, as ill-befitting a household of the mid-nineteenth century, in which rational and scientific evolutionary principles were honored, the sisters whispered amongst themselves that Deirdre's piano playing very likely did issue from another world. (“But where is this
other world
located,” Samantha asked skeptically, “and why cannot Deirdre speak of it? She has no more sense of herself, at such times, than Pip!”)

That such eerie spells of “music” were deleterious to the child's equilibrium, and to the natural harmony of the Octagonal House, was soon evident, and she was discouraged from exhausting herself at the piano, or to approach it only with Mrs. Zinn nearby; but the natural curiosity of the phenomenon was such, and the intermittent passages of real music so genuinely enchanting, that the child was frequently urged by one or another of her sisters to play—“just for a minute, while Mother is out!” And, sensing that this was a way of pleasing them, Deirdre rarely refused.

(She did, it seems, wish to be liked—perhaps even loved—by her sisters, tho' their affectionate advances to her were frequently rebuffed, out of ignorance, or embarrassment, or an unreasonable terror that they
would
like her, and she should be compelled to like them in return. Unhappy child! One day warm and the next day cold; one day hanging about Malvinia like a puppy, the next day resolutely looking aside when Malvinia addressed her; one day weeping and cuddling in Octavia's arms, because “something bad” had tried to get her in the night, “a great big black bird” like the bird in one of the Mother Goose songs, and her arms and legs were stuck, in something like mud, and tho' she screamed and screamed, no one came to help—another day, wrenching free when poor Octavia sought to comfort her, after a wicked bee had stung her arm. Of course she was younger than her sisters, at an age when every year is crucial: ten years old, to Constance Philippa's
sixteen,
and Octavia's
fifteen,
and Malvinia's
fourteen,
and Samantha's
eleven.
Tho' she shared Samantha's bedchamber, and tho' Samantha made every effort, or nearly, to befriend her, it was still the case that her heaviness of heart, her great, dark, tear-bright eyes, and her habit of going mute for hours at a time, hardly endeared her to the sister closest in age to her; and the sister she most admired—pretty flighty Malvinia—would have none of
her.
)