A Bloodsmoor Romance (71 page)

The startl'd young man, so accustomed to a frostiness of demeanor on Samantha's part, or, at the very most, a benign indifference, scarcely knew how to reply: and made rather a fool of himself, in his stammering that he had not known—he was grievously sorry, not to have known—that he presented, to others, so ill-kempt a spectacle: and begged his master's daughter to forgive him. So distraught was he, by our lady's inquiry (which was, I do believe, somewhat too arch and “Kidde­master”-like), that the poor young man went away in shame, and neglected to reply, that of course he should be greatly honored—nay, overcome with delight—were she to condescend to sew anything for him—oh, anything at all!

Given this development, it is most plausibly the case that Samantha's love for Nahum, and his for her, would have as naturally blossomed, as the myriad dogwood trees in the surrounding woods, in the spring: for these were two young persons, after all, of extraordinary caliber, as accustomed to ratiocination as other young persons might be to dinner dances, and balls, and riding to hounds. Then too, the repugnance aroused in other young men, by Miss Samantha Zinn's persistent
intelligence,
which she waved about, as Malvinia once observed, like a fringe of the cheapest velvet, evidently did not occur to Nahum: for he was, tho' I hesitate to say so, for fear of alienating the reader, not of a good family: not, so far as anyone could determine, of
any family at all.
His origins were as shrouded in mist as the Bloodsmoor Gorge, on the very day of his arrival, not, it would seem, out of any willful prevarication, but out of sheer forgetfulness; and it was hardly counted amiss by John Quincy Zinn, with
his
charming absentmindedness, that, from time to time, relaxing at tea, or at dinner in the Octagonal House, the youth should speak vaguely of having been a pupil of Mr. Zinn's, as a child: recalling with sporadic vividness certain classroom events, and diagrams on a blackboard, and models of machines. . . . But beyond that Nahum's memory failed; or, to be more accurate, he simply drifted off the subject, as did his host, for both were wonderfully beset by all sorts of random ideas and notions, of a kind that I, attending so reverently, yet at such a mental distance, cannot hope to characterize. And of the question of
origins
—well, as we have seen, Mr. John Quincy Zinn was somewhat loath to speak, sensing himself, still, after a passage of so many years, but
reluctantly
admitted to the wide circle of his wife's distinguished family!

In any case, remarkable as it may strike the ear, Samantha Zinn's superior intelligence seems not to have repulsed her young man, but to have actually
attracted
him! Which is, I suppose, entirely to Nahum's credit; tho' one should remember that his family background was lamentably obscure, and his breeding, in general, very much in question.

I am confident, however, that the dawning of love between Samantha and Nahum would have grown at a natural pace, and the disaster for the Zinns merely forestalled: but two events served to accelerate the natural progress of the powerful emotion, and to force it into a premature, and, it may have been, a somewhat feverish, eruption. The first was the regrettable accident involving Mr. Zinn's heroic dirigible; after so many months of labor, the balloon crashed within ten minutes, when one of the propellers struck a riverbank tree, and cut back into the balloon, not only allowing the hydrogen gas to escape with a furious hiss, but causing at the same time a small explosion, and a terrifying conflagration!—so that poor Samantha was forced to witness her belovèd Nahum, who alone had manned the experimental model, leap all aflame into the Bloodsmoor River. (And, for some wretched minutes, it almost seemed that the youth had disappeared forever . . . sinking beneath the surface of the turbulent waves, and withdrawing from the Zinns' lives, as abruptly as he had entered them.
But it was during those agonizing minutes that Samantha knew her heart.
)

The second event, alas, I am forced to say, was that very article of Adam P. Watkins's, which was greeted with such unstinting enthusiasm, by Samantha's mother, and by all of her mother's relatives. For not every reader of “Unsung Americans . . .” found it completely pleasing, in its details rather more than in its general scope.

Samantha could not have liked it, that her name went unmentioned; as if, being of the female gender, she
had
no name, and was merely her father's daughter—his “daughter-assistant,” in Mr. Watkins's perfunctory words. (Her feeling for Nahum, however, was so strongly developed by now, that she experienced not the smallest pang of jealousy, that
his
name should be revealed, to the
Atlantic
readers—on the contrary, she took a happy pride in it, and read that passage aloud many a time, to her blushing companion. “Now, you see, Nahum, you have become famous!” the high-spirited girl teased. “Now you shall desert the Octagonal House, for Menlo Park!”) What distressed Samantha in Mr. Watkins's essay, was the account of the
birthmark removal,
which had allegedly transpired during her infancy—and of which she retained but the cloudiest recollection. Or did she not remember, at all; had she been
told?
All dimly, and uneasily, her memory yielded a most puzzling episode in Great-Aunt Edwina's bedchamber, some years previous: the which episode had proved so peculiar, and so obdurate, as to its secret meaning, Samantha had cast it out of her thoughts altogether, and addressed herself to more useful activities.

Now she studied her smooth forehead in a mirror, and satisfied herself, that she could detect not the slightest trace of the old blemish. How difficult it would be, to imagine a birthmark there, on her left temple! A small galaxy of freckles had been sprinkled across her face, and altogether charming they were, tho' I am fully conscious of a fashionable repugnance for freckles, and a predilection for lily-pale skin: but these freckles were, for the most part, quite unobtrusive, and not even the thickest cluster resembled a birthmark, let alone an actual blemish. If the child had been afflicted with a birthmark resembling her father's, she should certainly have wept with gratitude, that he labored to remove it; for no young lady, not even one who had, for so many years, haughtily scorned prettiness and all its trappings, could have failed to regret so disfiguring a mark. Yes, Samantha
should
have felt naught but gratitude, and might even have been expected to grasp her father's hands, and thank him, so many years after the event: and yet, for some reason, she did not.

For some reason—the distraught young lady could scarcely have said
why,
even to herself—she did not. She felt no gratitude for having been relieved, in her infancy, of an ugly blemish; she felt, on the contrary, a most childish resentment.

An odd, a very odd sort of reaction! the reader thinks. As, indeed, the writer thinks as well. For, any normal young woman would have been not simply grateful for her father's concern, that she enter life
unblemish'd;
she would have been profuse with daughterly thanks—and tears, and hugs, and kisses, and declarations of lifelong devotion.

Yet Samantha, that perverse child, was not. No, she simply, and stubbornly, was
not.

Of course she breathed not a word of her resentment to Mr. Zinn—for they were not in the habit, father and daughter, of discussing personal matters of any kind; and Mrs. Zinn's pride in the article, and her repeated perusals of it, and memorized quotations from it, did not inspire confidence in Samantha, that she would be sympathetic with any criticism. Were Octavia still residing in the Octagonal House, it is possible that Samantha would have unburdened her heart to her: for Octavia had always been the sweetest of all the sisters, and truly attentive to the others' needs. But Octavia now lived some distance away, and was now, most conspicuously,
Mrs. Lucius Rumford;
and cruel Samantha did not stint, in her inward contempt for that worthy gentleman—whom she persisted in seeing as a pompous old dullard, a bewhiskered fool, a dry-as-dust hypocrite, with all the worst trappings of a Calvinist man of the cloth, and none of the virtues: and far less wealthy, moreover, than the Zinns had believed.

So there was no one, at this time, with whom Samantha could speak; no one to whom she could unburden her heart, and release the poison festering the rein.

Unhappy daughter!
—and, alas, soon to be
unhappy father!

FIFTY

M
r. Zinn,” Mrs. Zinn addressed her husband, one wintry eve when the two of them sat alone in the parlor, with only the sleeping Pip as a companion (Samantha having early retired to her bedchamber upstairs), “may I disturb you from your book? I have something troublesome to discuss, and have put off broaching the subject to you, not wishing to worry you unnecessarily, or deflect your energies from your new project.”

Mr. Zinn glanced up blinking from his book, which was a crudely-illustrated history of the Spanish Empire, sent out to him, at his request, by a Philadelphia bookseller; and, in deference to a certain gravity in his wife's tone, which always presaged issues of no light moment, he even laid aside a little sketch he was doing, in pencil, in his notebook. “Yes, Prudence?” he said, with a tentative smile, beginning already to stroke his beard, and peering, in utmost attentiveness, over the tops of his half-moon glasses. (For John Quincy Zinn had remained, lo, these many years, the most respectful of husbands: even when, it may be, his wondrously fertile mind was attuned to its own interests, and did not altogether concentrate upon those given utterance by his wife.) “I hope it is not something
gravely
troublesome?”

Mrs. Zinn's reply was admirably succinct: “Not
gravely,
at this very moment; but in time—in time.”

The which, failing to enlighten Mr. Zinn, gave him cause to knit up his brows: and to widen his already perplex'd uxorious smile. “You intrigue me greatly, Prudence; but I must beg you—for I am feeling less than zestful this evening, having passed a workday of no demonstrable value—I must beg you, not to stir me to anxiety, at this late hour.”

Mrs. Zinn did not break the rhythm of her knitting, as she cast upon her husband the briefest, and the most mildly remonstrative, of glances. “Your daughter, sir,” she said curtly. “And your assistant.”

Mr. Zinn stared, and was so bewildered, that, for a moment, he left off stroking his beard. “My daughter, you say?—and my assistant?”

“Your daughter Samantha,” said the grim-visagèd Mrs. Zinn, allowing a forciful caesura to punctuate her words, and even, by way of further punctuation, raising the strip of knitting to eye level, in order to examine it, before returning to her rapid work, “
and
your assistant Nahum.”

“I see,” Mr. Zinn said, most readily, “and yet,” the good gentleman laughed, now drawing a befuddled hand roughly through his hair, “and yet I fail to see.”

“That you fail to
see,
Mr. Zinn, more than a twelve-inch past your nose,” Mrs. Zinn said, resuming her knitting, which was so mechanically adroit that the needless flashed, and, to Mr. Zinn's vague eye, appeared at times to fairly blur together, into a single glowering image, “is not a characteristic your loved ones have missed in you; but it is one, for all that, not invariably helpful.”

Mr. Zinn sat in silence for some moments, gazing now toward the fire, which, no longer giving off annoying sparks and crackles, had subsided into a warm, near-phosphorescent glow. It may be that he was puzzling out his wife's words, or it may have been that, vexed of late by the myriad technical problems his new project was causing him, he had drifted back into a contemplation of
that:
the which Mrs. Zinn seemed to sense, in that she gave her knitting an impatient shake, and caused the needles to click smartly together, and said: “Mr. Zinn, I am referring to the unfortunate, indeed, the outlaw, romance that is breeding in your very workshop, beneath your abstracted gaze: a romance of which I have hesitated to speak these many weeks, not wishing to distress you—for I know full well, my dear husband, how deeply immersed you are in your new project, and how important that project is, not only for the Zinns, but for the welfare of the nation.”

“Romance?” Mr. Zinn whispered, slowly taking off his glasses, to stare with myopic alarm at his wife. “Breeding in my workshop?”

“Perhaps, in a mother's fond foolishness,” Mrs. Zinn continued, in a nobly controlled voice, “I
had
placed some small hope on Samantha, that she would one day contract a satisfactory marriage, despite her contumacious heart. My father is in the midst of renegotiating his old friendship with René Du Pont, for what reasons I cannot discern, but he has let drop the fact that, some miles west of the village of Hope Ferry, a considerable property of his adjoins a considerable property belonging to the Du Ponts, and, given that
we
have a daughter left over, so to speak, and the elderly Du Pont has a grandson similarly unaccounted for—I refer of course to poor Cheyney, about whom such troubling things have been said—it had crossed Father's mind, and it hardly seems, to
my
mind, an unreasonable proposition, that—”

But Mr. Zinn did not appear to follow. He turned his eyeglasses slowly about in his large, blunt, stained fingers, and continued to stare at Mrs. Zinn's stolid countenance. “A romance? In
my
workshop?” he murmured with numb lips.

“Unless, of course, I am simply imagining it all, in my morbid state of mind,” Mrs. Zinn said. Here the good woman sighed heavily, and again lifted her knitting, and quietly contemplated it, with an expression in which habitual resignation, and habitual impatience subtly contended. Mr. Zinn remaining silent, she said: “And yet I believe—I
fear
—that I am imagining nothing at all: that I am (God help me!) altogether too keen-sighted.”