A Bloodsmoor Romance (70 page)

Upon the liveried servant's arrival, Pip woke crankily from his midmorning nap, and began to chatter and scold, and creep about the workbenches, his jabber increasing, as always, as his human associates failed to give him significant notice. Now he leapt and danced about in spirited merriment, his long slender tail looping over his tiny head, and there may have been an element of mischievous mockery, as well, in the very
gaiety
of his manner: and the frenzy with which he snatched up the fallen telegram, and pretended to read it, with high-pitched staccato cries. He brought it close to his face, as if he were near-sighted; and crumpled it; and might even have eaten it, had not Nahum taken it forcibly from out his fingers.

“Ah, now let me see!—it is so very unexpected, Mr. Zinn—and so deserved—let me see, the remainder of the message—” Young Nahum fairly stammered, his own face flushed, and his eyes behind his schoolmasterish glasses grown round and moist with wonder. “Ah yes, here:
An annual honorarium of $15,000—research pertinent to—and the construction of a working model—for the adoption of all, or most, States—a more humane and more efficient technique of—of—
” And here the excited young man paused, and blinked, and made an effort to smooth out the crumpled sheet of paper, in order to read more clearly.
“A more humane and more efficient technique of—public execution.”

For an astonished moment there was silence in the little workshop: and even sensitive Pip ceased chattering!

At last Samantha broke the spell, by saying in a voice childlike with surprise and dismay: “
Public execution!
Ah, no!”

And Mr. Zinn left off pulling and plucking at his beard, to extend a dazed hand to Nahum, and, adjusting his half-moon glasses, reread the missive in a halting, stumbling voice, which nonetheless gained strength as it proceeded, and partook of his daughter's righteous dismay: “
A more humane and more efficient technique of public execution.
You are correct, Nahum, you have read correctly.”

“Execution!” Samantha exclaimed, now more angrily. “And of course you must refuse!”

“How
dare
they make such a request,” Nahum cried, snatching off his glasses and waving them, in a gesture of impotent defiance, “of
you?
Do they not know to whom they have directed their impious declaration?”

Then, of a sudden, Mr. Zinn's furry little companion leapt to his shoulder, and, in a sympathetic gesture in which natural monkey spirits contended with a heartrending sweetness, brought his small wizened face close to Mr. Zinn's—so that, for a startling moment, the young people could see how both monkey and master had aged, in their long years together.

For a brief spell the haggard, yet still distinctive-appearing, John Quincy Zinn was silent, staring at the offensive paper in his hand, which, we may surmise, only a stoic detachment prevented him from crumpling, and tossing it to his feet. When he did deign to speak, there was very little expression to his face, save an uncharacteristic droop of his nether lip; and his voice was slow and grave and sonorous, with a plangent dignity, that quite prick'd the hearts of Samantha and Nahum, and was to be embedded in their memories forever: “Yes. Of course I shall refuse.”

FORTY-NINE

D
uring these fateful months in the lives of the Zinns something quite miraculous was transpiring, remarked upon only inwardly, and cursorily, by Octavia and Mrs. Zinn, but unbeknownst to John Quincy Zinn: the Zinns' only remaining daughter at home, Samantha, was, at her “advanced” age, growing ever more beauteous by the day!

An improbable development, the skeptical reader may scoff: and yet, I assure you, it was so.
In her late twenties the Zinns' youngest natural daughter, whom Malvinia had once cruelly described as “plain as a spoon,” was growing more beauteous daily!

No single feature appeared to have alter'd and yet, by a bewildering alchemy I cannot hazard to explain, in terms other than the
romantic
and the
sentimental,
the young woman was fast shedding her customary “plainness,” and acquiring a most striking “beauty,” beneath the noses of those who saw her each day: those who, save one, were blind to her, and rarely, in fact, “saw” her at all.

In addition to a considerable facial beauty, this peculiar girl was also acquiring a somewhat alter'd
character:
for, where she once worked in silence, hour upon hour, and turned but a distracted, and, it may even have been, a crabbèd countenance, upon the world, and indulged herself in no girlish chatter or whims, considering such behavior not only repellent, but, more significantly,
a waste of valuable time,
she now—ah, how delighted I am to note!—found herself singing and humming under her breath, in the very workshop itself, and oft, on the path connecting the workshop and the Octagonal House, skipping along, and smiling for no cause, like a little girl of four or five, instead of a mature woman, of more than two decades older. Nor were grace, lightsome spirits, and frequent laughter unmatched by an assiduous application of Samantha's keen mind in the service of what we might call her “feminine” appearance: for where that young lady once dressed in haste, and allowed the servant girl to fashion her hair in any style, so long as it “went quickly,” and cared not a whit whether her lace be graying, or her ribbons lank and dispirited, or the bow of her sash but meagerly tied, she now spent upward of a half-hour upon her morning toilette alone, and, tho' her weekday dress remained a plain calico, and her apron not altogether fresh, she took small pains with the trim on her bodice and skirt, and wore the prettier of her two morning caps, and oft found herself gazing in rapt but near-mindless contemplation, at the fairy-stranger who regarded her from out her mirror: whom (for such was Samantha's modesty!) she did not dare see as
beautiful,
but, she hoped, as
pretty.

And if I reveal that young Nahum too appeared to be acquiring, as the weeks and months sped, a new attractiveness, and a distinctive maturity of manner, freely mingled, withal, with a boyish exhilaration, and a propensity toward loud and spontaneous laughter—if I reveal that the two young people, far from keeping their jealous distance from each other, as, at the start, they did, were now cooperating on nearly all their labors in John Quincy Zinn's sacred workshop—if I reveal, moreover (and here, doubtless, I expose my hand!), that Samantha Zinn and Nahum Hareton oft found themselves glancing at each other for no purpose, and stammering, and laughing, and blushing, and finding a dozen breathless excuses, daily, to seek each other's counsel, while the oblivious J.Q.Z. continued all absorbed in his work: even the most hardened reader, to whom
romance
be naught but a scarce-recalled, and doubted, relic of youth, will rejoice in the knowledge that love, all unexpected, was blossoming in the famous workshop above the gorge: where, one would have thought, only the most
mechanical
blooms could flourish!

So, indeed, Samantha and Nahum fell in love, over a period of many months, in all innocence, and but slenderly grasping the phenomenon that overcame them: for each, I hardly need aver, was virginal in soul as completely as in body, and had never before given a thought to love, let alone surrendered to its spell. Indeed, I would go so far as to declare that each young person would have vociferously
scorned
the possibility, but a few years before!—that possibility that had, by degrees, become a dizzying reality, bringing a rosy blush to Samantha's pale cheek, upon the meagerest provocation, and a catch in the throat of the manly Nahum, when he chanc'd to spy upon his belovèd, as she tripped her way, just past dawn, along the graveled pathway to the gorge.

A lover's eye, they say, is notorious for what it invents: yet the innocent Nahum, inventor tho' he was, succumbed to very little self-deception, in his remarking upon, and absorption by, Samantha's growing beauty. For, warmed by her deepening affection for him, as the vegetation of April is warmed by the e'er-waxing sun, and grows more lush thereby, Miss Samantha Zinn
was
growing in her beauty, and would surely have caught the eye, and riveted the attention, of many a suitor, had she still acquiesced to her family's wishes, that she mingle in society, and attend balls, with the hope of attracting a suitable husband. Nahum gazed upon her, in reverent silence, and all virtuous were his thoughts, and wholesomely removed from the grosser masculine emotions: he observed his belovèd in the words of the great Tennyson—

A maid so smooth, so white, so wonderful,

They said a light came from her when she moved.

—and did not dream of uttering his love aloud. For not only was Samantha petite as a fairy sprite, and wondrous to behold, with her clear eyes and pale freckled skin and gleaming red hair, but she was also Nahum's equal, or even his superior, in intelligence; and she
was
his master's most cherished daughter.

Why, for her part, Samantha should have succumbed to the softer feminine emotions, after so many years of proud—nay, insolent—indifference, I cannot determine: save that Nahum's manner was so shyly winning, and so unstudied, and unsullied by vanity, even a hardened female heart could not fail to be moved. He did not, it is true, possess striking masculine beauty, nor was he so tall, broad of shoulder, and vigourous of expression as Mr. Zinn had been, in his younger manhood: but his oft-smiling countenance radiated calm, and patience, and a capacity for loyality, that was altogether appealing. Nor did his deference to Mr. Zinn displease Mr. Zinn's daughter.

For the first several months, however, after Nahum's arrival at the workshop, Samantha had, with grim resolution,
not
allowed herself to observe, and certainly not to speak with, her young comrade: for, I am unhappy to say, she suffered some jealousy of him, and some resentment, that he should so readily be welcomed into the workshop, and entrusted, from the very start, with Mr. Zinn's most treasured secrets. “He may be a spy of Edison's,” Samantha said, her green eyes narrowing with malice, “or of Westinghouse's: you know well, Father, that plans of yours have mysteriously vanished, from out this very place, only to turn up elsewhere, with much vulgar ballyhoo!—and yet you continue to allow strangers into your workshop.” Mr. Zinn, not sensing, perhaps, the true, tremulous motive behind his daughter's petition, replied in a curt voice that both those gentlemen—Edison and Westinghouse—had, not many months previously, approached him through intermediaries, as to the enlistment of his talents on new projects of their own, involving electrical current: and he had of course declined their offers. (Mr. Zinn did not know that Samantha knew of a shameful episode that had transpired, a twelve-month previously, when, being in such financial distress that he could not buy materials for his aluminum-sided dirigible, save by way of a desperate appeal to Judge Kidde­master, or Great-Aunt Edwina, which Mrs. Zinn angrily opposed, the unhappy John Quincy Zinn had been so “backed into a corner,” as he phrased it, that he had sold a rudimentary, but highly promising, notion of his, dreamt up in an impassioned half-hour, to the Edison workshop in Menlo Park: an elaborate amplification of the processes involved in the cylindrical toy in which Pip, in drawings executed by Samantha, “performed” in motion, of the sort that might one day evolve into a
projected
and
moving
view upon a
screen
—the value of which, for society, Mr. Zinn had not had time to speculate upon, being so harassed, and unquiet of mind.)

“It does not do you proud, Samantha,” Mr. Zinn said, knitting his brows, and absentmindedly stroking his ragged beard, “and is hardly a beneficent reflection upon your mother and myself, that you should harbor low suspicions of a young man in possession of such sterling qualities, whose loyalty, I, for one, cannot question.”

A most uncharacteristic speech for John Quincy Zinn to deliver himself of: and the abash'd Samantha had no recourse, but to blush fiercely, and murmur a daughterly apology, and retreat.

And yet: it may be that Mr. Zinn's warm words, and his depiction of young Nahum as
loyal,
and in the possession of
sterling qualities,
sank deep within the contumacious heart of his daughter: there to stir much mischief, and cause much distress, over a passage of time.

 

THE WONDERMENTS OF
love!—its soft-petal'd and unexpected blooming!

Many years were to pass, during which time Samantha came gradually to warm to her father's apprentice, gauging him first as a rival; and then as a working associate; and then as a brotherly presence; and then—ah, her heart scarcely knew, what designation to choose! She found herself one day taking note of each motion made by the lank-limbed young man: each word that dropped all artless from his lips, and each smile that illuminated his angular, boyish face. Why, of a sudden, his unexceptional brown eyes should be
of interest;
why his habit of polishing the lenses of his spectacles, with a chamois cloth stained with grease, should be
appealing,
she could not have explained. With a prick of amusement she watched as, staring off into space, Nahum allowed his tea to go cold, and devilish Pip to gobble down his toast. With a prick of affection she noted his threadbare gloves, his mud-spattered boots, the shabby oilcloth cape he continued to wear in wet weather. One day—in a voice so stern it might have passed for Mrs. Zinn's—she inquired of Nahum (whom at that time she still called “Mr. Hareton,” or addressed by no name at all) whether he would give her the pleasure of allowing her to mend his shirt collar, which was so badly frayed, it had actually torn behind: or whether he wished it to remain as it was, out of some “purposive eccentricity” of his own.