A Bloodsmoor Romance (46 page)

 

COUSIN ROWENA KALE
and her two youngest children came to Kidde­master Hall for a fortnight's visit, and so Octavia enjoyed the company of a sisterly young woman not so many years her senior: the evident fact that Cousin Rowena was soon expecting another child, and the apparent fact that there was some difficulty with her husband, not being touched upon, as matters too sensitive to be broached, Octavia and Rowena chatted for the most part about details of the forthcoming marriage, and necessities of Octavia's trousseau. Grandmother Kidde­master's enormous rosewood wardrobe was to be Octavia's—an inheritance of great value, both sentimental and practical—and so the young women set busily to work inscribing the many drawers, and taking out the year-old silver paper, in order to replace it with fresh, and preparing “sweet-bags” of powdered mace, dried leaves of southernwood and dragonwort, extract of ambergris, sweet marjoram, hyssop, roses, Tonquin beans, Florentine orrisroot, musk, and civet: for the magnificent wardrobe
was
quite old, and badly required perfuming.

When, as happened from time to time, the two young women found themselves safely alone, with not even a servant near, it was oft the case that, in an undertone, topics of a somewhat coarse nature were discussed: whether, “in her present condition,” Rowena sometimes craved strange and exotic foods, of a kind not available in Bloodsmoor (for, shyly, Octavia had heard of such cravings, and wondered if she might soon experience them herself); whether details were forthcoming, of the alleged villainy of Delphine Martineau's husband, Mr. Ormond (who was rumored—alas!—to be a secret gambler, and an imbiber of alcoholic spirits); whether Bloodsmoor knew of the “solitary, veiled, broad-shouldered” female who had attended each session of the trial of that infamous assassin Charles Guiteau, and had laughed with raucous enthusiasm at the defendant's frequent outbursts of “wit”; whether—and here Cousin Rowena's voice did appreciably drop—the Zinns ever spoke of “Malvinia Morloch.”

For the most part, however, the young women in their morning dresses and caps busied themselves with the rosewood wardrobe, taking especial care with the inscriptions for the pretty little drawers, for it would not do, as Rowena stressed, for Octavia, as a young bride, to demonstrate to her husband, in however innocent and inconsequential a way, a natural inclination toward
slovenliness.
Stiff sheets of white linen stationery, each measuring two inches by four, were inserted with care beneath the bone and ivory drawer knobs, on them being written in a perfect hand—

 

 

—and, as there were many more of the little drawers, and Octavia and Rowena enjoyed the leisure necessary to accomplish their task, they worked on industriously and companionably for many a happy hour. From time to time Octavia heard her mother's calming words,
This too shall pass;
but she could not stop herself from exclaiming inwardly, rather like a spoiled child, “Ah!—but
must
it!”

THIRTY-ONE

T
he Americans are great hero-worshippers, and always take their heroes from the criminal classes,
the poetaster and immoralist Oscar Wilde observed, on the occasion of his visit to our too-hospitable shores, in 1882:
Their heroines are more ambitiously chosen: criminals and goddesses combined.

By an unsettling fortuity, of the kind that affirms superstitious beliefs in the weak-minded, this foppish Irishman so poked about in our native diversions that, along with visits to Niagara Falls, Salt Lake City, Leadville (Colorado), St. Joseph (Missouri), Camden (New Jersey: where he met with a kindred spirit in the reprobate
Walt Whitman
), and elsewhere, he not only managed to see Malvinia Morloch and Orlando Vandenhoffen in
As You Like It
(“a tediously exhilarating transcription of the Bard at his light-hearted worst”), and the Boston medium “Deirdre of the Shadows” (“a
shadowy
venture in truth—amusing and shivery”), but to comment, in passing, with an air of distracted probity, that the “almost too beauteous” stage actress bore a peculiar family resemblance, about the brow in particular, to the medium Deirdre!

But Wilde was far too busy, preening and boasting and gulling his silly American hosts, and offering himself to publicity, as a living exhibition of God knows what (in his tight plum-colored velvet coat, with flowered sleeves and a cambric ruff, and his infamous bottle-green otter fur overcoat), to make any further comment on either of the young American women, save to note, in a letter to a friend back in England, that “the new American religion being Spiritualism, the Americans might do worse than elect to sainthood the clever little charlatan ‘Deirdre of the Shadows,' ” and to state, upon a number of occasions, until he forgot her name, that “quite the most dazzling thing in the New World, and near to Bernhardt's equal—save in talent—is
Malvinia Morloch.
”

Beyond this, the meretricious young man made no comment upon our great nation or our magnificent geography worth recording; and much that demands censure.

 

QUITE THE MOST
dazzling thing in the New World!
How Malvinia would have gloated, to learn that so sophisticated, and so captious, an observer as Oscar Wilde had fallen under her spell: for the young woman was of that species of creature, female and male alike, who are capable of measuring their soul's
worth,
only by the ostensible adulation of others.

That Malvinia's history of beguilement was a lengthy one, will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with her character and its defects. As a very small child, in the nursery, she continuously usurped her father-tutor's complete attention, to the dismay of her sisters—Constance Philippa in particular, who, as the eldest, felt that
she
should be the brightest. (A sorry thing it is, the spectre of jealousy haunting a girl of seven or eight years of age!) Mr. Zinn was perhaps partly to blame, for, in his ambitious project to educate his children “in accordance with the sagacity and wisdom of the innate Soul,” he was but intermittently enthusiastic, and tho' he could evoke immediate interest in virtually any subject—geometry, poetry, Egyptian history, drawing and painting, elocution—the very immediacy of the appeal, and the necessity for an expeditious response on the part of the pupil, greatly handicapped the slower sisters, and made bright, clever, mercurial little Malvinia the star scholar of the nursery. Mr. Zinn's lengthy Socratic dialogues, seeking Truth through a meticulous examination of the child's mind (or memory), greatly exhausted Constance Philippa, and Octavia, and the very young Samantha (who, even as a child of three or four, took her father's domain of science and wisdom very seriously indeed); yet gave pretty Malvinia an opportunity to perform, as she supplied answers with no evident difficulty at all (as if—as we have speculated earlier—the precocious child were reading her father's mind).

In those early years Mr. Zinn not only divided his time more equitably between his workshop and the Octagonal House, feeling a deep responsibility for his daughters' education, but consented, upon two separate occasions (of seven months and three months each), to accept an untitled position at one of the family-owned factories downriver: for the Zinns were already in debt, producing a worrisome strain in their domestic life. (John Quincy naturally despised the factory, both in itself and for what it represented of the crass materialism of the new post-War era, and his position—one that combined the duties of a manager with the technical skills of an engineer—did not afford him the autonomy he so badly required, in order that his spirit might flourish.) He was, then, necessarily absent from home for long hours, or even for an entire day, which worried his family, little Samantha in particular. (It was amusing, and touching, that both Samantha and Pip languished when Mr. Zinn was away—mooning about his chair in the parlor, glancing through his papers and journals, running every five minutes to the window, to see if he had returned.) These prolonged absences were, however, coupled with exhaustive sessions in the nursery-classroom, for Mr. Zinn felt always that he must compensate for lost time, and he had vague plans, which never altogether materialized, for transcribing his question-and-answer lessons along the lines of
Out of the Mouths of Babes,
which might bring some modest financial reward. It was the case, then, that while his daughters tortured themselves with the silly terror that he should not return home, they also feared that he
would
return, too abruptly, before they had mastered their assignments! Their love for him was so gratifyingly strong, the merest flicker of disappointment in his face greatly upset them. He had no need to punish—ever. He had no need to exclaim: “Your ignorance has wounded me”—for they could read it in his expression: nay, in the calm hurt and bafflement of his eyes.

In this rather feverish atmosphere Malvinia naturally shone, and was her father's darling: and it cannot greatly surprise us that, a scant decade later, upon being presented to the renowned Orlando Vandenhoffen, in the Philadelphia drawing room of a lady of less than admirable reputation (Mrs. Horatio Broome being the handsome widow of a once-upstanding gentleman who, succumbing to madness of some kind, in his late middle years, chose, after his wife's death, not only to marry an artist's model whom he had been supporting in secret, for years, but to live abroad with her, in Paris, Rome, and Venice!), she should skillfully suppress her awe, smile boldly, and reach out to shake his hand: as if she were not a young American lady at all, but a European courtesan. And she gave the air, too, which naturally aroused the actor's curiosity, of being in a way already acquainted with him, and knowing quite instinctively how to best please and flatter and beguile him, and win his heart.

 

THAT MALVINIA MORLOCH
should possess, and so cruelly exercise, a certain fatal power over the masculine sex in general (tho' not over
every
member of that sex, as we shall see), is perhaps more readily understood if we learn that she was the inheritor of a
disposition toward wickedness,
in her blood; and had half-consciously cultivated such power, from the nursery onward, tho' always in the most innocent manner. She
did not know,
and yet she fully
knew,
what she did; and how her attractions cast their net over others.

For instance, in the case of young Malcolm Kennicott, Reverend Hewett's assistant in the late Sixties, when Malvinia was scarcely eight years old, and, to all eyes, a normal child: albeit uncommonly pretty, and given to spirited tantrums . . .

Mr. Kennicott must have been in his very early twenties, when he came down to Trinity Church, from the Theological Seminary at Princeton. Tho' he declared himself a Christian, and was certainly believed to be such, by the Reverend Hewett, who entrusted him with many churchly responsibilities, the moony, dreamy, lank-limbed youth was rather more of a poet, and spent hours scribbling verses in French, in which religious and romantic sentiments were confusedly rendered. Because he dwelled alone in Bloodsmoor, and was a bachelor of good family, he was naturally taken up by many local families, including the Kidde­masters and the Zinns: and many an hour he spent at the Octagonal House, happily discussing with John Quincy one or another scheme for Utopianism, or his own plans for “America's greatest hymn” (a massive three-part epic poem to deal with the discovery of the New World by Columbus; Pizarro's conquest of Peru; and Cortez's expedition to Mexico), or the very newest and most radical notions of education, social reform, and the dismantling of the “peculiar institution” of the South. He dined frequently with the Zinns, not minding the little girls' presence but rather rejoicing in it: for Constance Philippa, as a grave young lady of ten or eleven, sought to engage in real conversation with him, oft declaring that she wanted him for her older brother, it being so lonely amidst all the girls!—and vivacious little Malvinia won his heart, with her cheerful prattling and teasing.

The lamentable tale of how this congenial if somewhat preoccupied young man seems to have fallen in love, not with a woman of his own age and capabilities, but with the eight-year-old Malvinia, must necessarily be truncated, for it is, at best, an unnatural story, reflecting ill upon both sexes, and calling into question the theological institution that sent Mr. Kennicott out to Bloodsmoor with such excellent recommendations. Suffice it to state that the young man's hazel eyes dwelt too obsessively upon little Malvinia, and his behavior in playing with her and her sisters and Pip, at shuttlecock or croquet, or even at cards, soon attracted attention to itself. “He is a lonely boy, and we must be his second family,” Mr. Zinn observed, stroking his beard, to which Mrs. Zinn replied evenly: “He is perhaps
too
lonely—and he is not a boy.”