A Bloodsmoor Romance (75 page)

The which, shyly, Octavia described to Mrs. Zinn, when the two women were alone together, save for the exuberantly suckling baby (who tugged and tore at the breast, and flailed his little fists, as greedy a little darling as one could imagine—and a fine ruddy color all over): whereupon Mrs. Zinn spoke for once in some alarm, without composing her thoughts beforehand, and, in fact, fixing her daughter with a gaze of unalloy'd surprise: “Why—Octavia!—it is very strange—it is
very
strange—but so my dear father did with each of
my
babies—with each of
you
—and never once did he explain his mysterious action, and never, of course, did I dare inquire—nor did Mr. Zinn—and—and—why, I can only repeat, tho' I mean no criticism of him—tho' I am
sure
there is a comfortable logic behind it: I can only repeat,
it is very strange.
”

And so indeed it was; but, I am happy to say, the entire incident was soon forgotten, in the general rejoicing amongst the three households, and Judge Kidde­master's fluctuations of temperament, by no means excessive in a gentleman of his advanced years. (Nor can we doubt that the baptism of the infant, as Godfrey Lucius Rumford, and, informally, as “Godfrey II,” did indeed please the kindly old Judge.)

So great-grandfather and great-grandson became friends, and there were innumerable visits back and forth, between Rumford Hall and Kidde­master Hall, to the delight of all concerned. Octavia made every effort, and was frequently successful, to subdue the healthy animal spirits of her firstborn, who, despite his wide cherubic grin, and his bouncing golden curls, did oft deserve the fond epithet bestowed upon him by the several households—
Little Demon.

In truth, as soon as he gained the use of his legs, and could walk unassisted, he was indeed “into everything,” and ran his laughing mother most ragged: tho', stopping him from one little mischief or another, or soothing an alarmed or weeping housemaid, Octavia never failed to hug her boy close, against her warm palpitating heart, and kiss his o'erheated brow, and declare that “little angels ought not to be so naughty—for fear of being mistaken as
little demons”!
—the which teasing gave pleasure to mother and baby alike. As Godfrey grew able to run, and to escape from his cradle at will, oft very early in the morning, before the sun had risen, it happened that he wore out and discarded “as if they were but cheap cotton gloves” (in Samantha's censorious words), one valiant nursemaid after another. On his most jolly days, when he entered his eighteenth month, he eluded all his pursuers, laughing and shouting and jumping, as if life were naught but
play,
and
sheer delight;
and it must be a hard-hearted person indeed, to scold him, or to register displeasure at his antics.

The little imp danced, and sang, and whirled about, and “sounded the alarm” by running Mr. Rumford's hickory cane up and down the rungs of the staircase banister; he rocked so energetically in a zebrawood rocker, with a rush seat, that the seat broke through, and he would have injured himself, had not his vigilant mother run tearfully to his aid. Many a time was the solemn quiet of the old house punctuated by Little Godfrey's shouted laughter, and Octavia's alarmed cries. “My baby! Godfrey! What on earth
are
you doing? Have you hurt yourself? Oh, my dear, my dear—let Momma look—” Octavia fairly wept, wringing her hands. And, suddenly docile, the high-spirited child would allow himself to be snatched to his mother's heaving bosom, and might even share a tear or two with her, until, smiling with an angelic radiance, he assured his affrighted mother that he was not at all injured: “I am quite all right, Momma—
please
leave off crying, or you will break my heart!”

Most of the time the little darling did no genuine mischief, and certainly no deliberate harm, but, as he grew older, and ever more husky and exuberant, it sometimes happened that, quite accidentally, he broke things; or made poor Pip scream in terror, by hugging him too hard about the middle; or, intrigued by the “pretty tiny sounds” that came out of Great-Aunt Edwina's jeweled French music box, could not rest until he had pried the delicate little mechanism open, and quite destroyed it. Tho' forbidden to do so, he could not resist “playing general” with the beautiful old sword in Judge Kidde­master's library, and not only nicked and tore the antique furnishings in the room, but managed to stab a hole in the portrait of his bewigged Kidde­master ancestor!—to the genuine distress of both his great-grandfather, and Great-Aunt Edwina, who declared, taking Octavia aside, that “something
must
be done about him: he will drive us all to our graves otherwise!”

Whereupon Little Godfrey was contrite; and sincere in his contrition. And, with no need to be instructed by Octavia, he knelt before the elder Kidde­masters to tender his apologies, couched in near-formal terms, and lisped in a voice made soft by regret. He acknowledged that “he had been naughty,” but he had not meant to be so: and hoped he might be forgiven.

And his shy, hopeful, abash'd smile was such, who among mortals could deny him?

 

BETIMES, IT IS
true, particularly after the birth (so unexpected to him) of his baby sister Sarah, he did fly into a temper, and bang at anything within reach of his hard little fists, and smash his teacup against the wall, and throw himself hard upon the floor, where, flailing his arms wildly, and kicking like a veritable dervish, he pounded with his heels so powerfully against the carpet that, to the consternation of the servants, a fine cloud of pale dust arose! In play become overly rough, the precocious three-year-old came near to injuring the five-year-old son of one of the servants, himself a husky lad with a freckled Irish face. Little Godfrey in all innocence struck the child with a flat rock from out the kitchen garden, having mistaken it, as he tearfully explained, for a cushion. And there were pranks, or mishaps, most of them too inconsequential to record, involving puppies, and cats, and baby chicks, and other small creatures, which, it may be, Little Godfrey
loved
too energetically, or was o'ercurious, as to the workings of their delicate inner mechanisms.

One day, after the servants had accused their little master of torturing, stabbing to death, and partly dissecting, a young mongrel dog belonging to one of the groundsmen, Octavia took her son aside, and bade him be still: for she had something solemn to tell him.

And he gazed at her with his thick-lashed baby-blue eyes, somewhat moistened with tears of contrition and defiance, and whispered: “Yes, Momma?”

Octavia began her lecture sternly, telling her son that it was a sin to hurt the little creatures—
any
creatures, no matter how ugly, or inconsequential—whether belonging to a servant, or otherwise—because these creatures were part of God's creation, just as he was: all had their place in God's love.

“Yes, Momma,” Little Godfrey said meekly.

And so it was very wrong of him, and very naughty, to injure that mongrel dog, even in innocent play. Did he understand?

“Yes, Momma,” Little Godfrey whispered.

And the cherubic little gentleman did look so contrite, and so chastened, that his mother could not resist kneeling before him, and hugging him; and in this wise continued her solemn little lecture, which had such an immediate effect upon the boy, that he remained altogether still in her embrace, and did not struggle to escape. “You should not have injured that nasty old dog, my dear, or any creature of God's, because they are all God's creation, just as we are; and, by injuring a one of them, you are injuring God as well. And should you, my sweet, wish to injure Our Heavenly Father?”—so the fond mother queried, all the while holding her firstborn close against her beating heart. Little Godfrey fought to hold back his tears, but could not withstand the waves of contrition in his heart, and at last began to sob; and so mother and son were locked in an embrace of such love, and such sombre understanding, that my eyes fill with tears merely to record the scene.

“I am very, very sorry, Momma,” the weeping cherub said, “but, you know, Our Heavenly Father was watching, and did not seem to care: and did not, in any case, stop me: and so I was much confus'd.”

Little Godfrey adored his baby sister, however, and, in her presence (no matter that she was but an infant, and could hardly know him), oft danced, and sang his little songs, and scampered about the room in imitation of Pip, seeking merely to delight her. He was, it is true, somewhat distressed by the baby's evident inability to recognize him, and to respond with appropriate laughter, and admiration; but Octavia explained to him that “Baby Sarah was too little to understand, but would, in time, grow to love him”—and that he must love her, and be patient with her, for he was a strapping big boy, and she but a tiny thing.

All of which Little Godfrey appeared to understand: but he continued his energetic frolics nonetheless, and begged a dozen times a day to be allowed to hold Baby Sarah, or to push her in her perambulator; and was never more lively and mischievous than when “showing off” for her—racing about the lawn, somersaulting, and tumbling, and rolling, with his high-pitched chuckle; and, upon one summery occasion, on the terrace of Kidde­master Hall, the little imp “played mousie” and crawled across the flagstone to poke his head beneath Great-Aunt Edwina's voluminous skirts, and to lunge beneath them, and
disappear from view!

What consternation followed, what amaz'd exclamations—the reader can imagine, with no assistance from me. And how Great-Aunt Edwina gasped, and shouted, and struck at her frothy skirts with her rolled sunshade: and how Mrs. Zinn, ever-vigilant in the presence of her adored grandson, acted with surprising alacrity, to grasp the young rascal by the ankles, and haul him out. That Master Godfrey was roundly scolded on all sides, and severely disciplined by Mr. Rumford (who grew fearsomely red-faced during the interim), and, at last, was allowed to retreat in tears from the scene, attended by his blushing mother, and the new nursemaid—I scarcely need to remark: for it was indeed a scene that repeated itself, with great variation, of course, as to its particulars, over a period of years . . . until that tragic culmination of his young life, at the scant age of seven, of which, alas, I must one day speak, for not even the truly execrable events of our history will be excluded from this narrative.

 

“WAS I NAUGHTY
again, Momma?” the little dear would inquire, lifting his angelic, tho' tear-stained, face to Octavia, in order to receive her fond scolding, and her exasperated kiss: and to feel her sometimes tremulous, but at all times reassuring, fingers on his warm forehead, as she brushed away his golden locks. “I do not mean to be naughty, Momma; or to make you cry,” the diminutive gentleman said stoutly, “and I
shall
be good from now on: to please you.”

“Ah, I know, I know, my dear,” Octavia exclaimed, her fond mother's heart near-swollen to bursting, “I
know,
my dear—and in fact you can do only good, and God, Who sees into your heart, can understand, as I do: for the pure of heart are pure in their every action, and cannot sin, but only, it may be,
disturb,
as a consequence of spirits tuned rather too high, for the staid elders of Kidde­master Hall.”

FIFTY-FOUR

T
he morn of that day of unprognosticated sorrow, when nine-month-old Baby Sarah was discovered no longer breathing, in her pretty white wicker crib, carried with it no omens that might be feared by those in whom Christian piety and intellectual enlightenment have agreeably mated: for, in our advanced epoch, we cannot take serious note of the fact that, throughout the midsummer night, one of those cacophonous members of the owl family, the screech-owl, disturbed the tranquil darkness with his heinous calls; and poor Octavia woke from a distressing dream, most puzzlingly familiar to her, in which her belovèd son Godfrey appeared monstrously transform'd, into I scarcely know what—a creature of some six feet or more in height, with burning lewd eyes; and greatly protruding, and glistening, incisors; and tufts of thick dark hair, or fur, on the backs of his hands; and the inverted V of his widow's peak grown down savagely into his forehead, so that it nearly met his eyebrows, which had, in turn, grown bushy and shaggy. (How the alarmed mother recognized her son, in so grossly alter'd a state, I cannot guess: save that, even in her sleep, Octavia had wit enough to comprehend the Devil's agentry here, in his slanderous masquerade of the innocent child.
Get thee gone!
was the dreaming mother's hissed prayer, even as her bloodstream raced with ice, and each hair on her head rigidly defined itself.)

Immediately upon waking, however, Octavia cast off the insipid distractions of the night, and, retiring to her dressing room, spent upward of an hour upon her knees, giving thanks to God as she customarily did, and begging especial grace for her lost sisters (whom she could not believe beyond the largess of God's forgiveness, tho' she knew she had not the right to forgive them, of her own), and enumerating, as always, those amongst her family, her relatives, and her wide circle of acquaintances, whom, she hoped, God would deign to bless. The satanic disturbances of the night, those vaporous profane fittings known as
dreams,
Octavia did not honor by considering weightily: for, like all who are of robust, normal spirits, and have naught in their hearts to hide from God, she knew that it is the
daylight
that beckons, with its joyous, simple clarity, and its unwavering designations as to our task here on earth, and not the
night,
that abode of empty chimeras!

There followed, then, no uncommon routine, but, rather, the happy pursuance of Mrs. Lucius Rumford's daily regimen, involving a half-hour's blissful nursing of Baby Sarah (the dimpled dear!—so very gentle in her suckling at the maternal breast, she oft fell asleep in the midst of her nourishment); and an hour busily occupied with ablutions, and dressing, and the tidy and practical arrangement of her hair (these three activities assisted by Octavia's personal maid, a reticent but amply competent Irish woman of indeterminate years); and some forty-five minutes devoted to the Bible, which Octavia was compelled to read aloud to the female members of the household staff (compelled, that is, by Mr. Rumford, who, in another room, generally read the Scriptures aloud to the male servants); and then breakfast, sometimes in the company of Mr. Rumford, and sometimes alone; and then a gladsome reunion with Little Godfrey, and with Baby Sarah, characterized by many joyful kisses, and exclamations, and those visible displays of mother love, as are too commonplace to require explanation: and so the day properly began: and one did not greatly differ from the next, in the paradisical confines of old Rumford Hall.