A Bloodsmoor Romance (95 page)

And one morn she woke to the thought: I
shall
do as Dr. Stoughton counsels, and return to Bloodsmoor; and perhaps, by so doing, I will give the wheel of my own fortune a helpful turn—and be awakened from this paralysis, to know whether I dare marry, or no; and whom it might be.

Thus, her arrival at Kidde­master Hall, some twenty minutes past the hour: breathless, and stricken to the heart by the assault of so many eyes upon her, and, ah! by the ravages of time, so harshly evident in the faces of the elder Zinns. (For, in truth, poor Deirdre scarce recognized the once-handsome John Quincy Zinn: for a confus'd instant she wondered if that sallow-skinned bearded old gentleman might have been
Grandfather Kidde­master!
)

Startl'd silence greeting her, she heard her own voice—graceless, and throaty, and rushed—offering a feeble apology. “I am sorry—I am very sorry—it seems that I am late—it is an inexcusable tardiness, which might be accounted for, yet cannot be excused—”

So her words nervously rattled; and Mr. Basil Miller, with his practiced social instinct, advanced upon her, to welcome her with kindly reassurance that she was not seriously late, for they were also awaiting Constance Philippa. And, after a moment's hesitation (doubtless fearing a rebuff), Octavia, too, advanced upon her, and folded her in a solemn embrace, the while murmuring: “Ah, my poor Deirdre! My little sister! It has been incalculably long! It has been piteously long! We are sisters, yet we are strangers—
yet we are sisters, still!
”

Dear effusive Octavia! Deirdre weakly offered to embrace her in turn, yet felt o'ercome by the sentiment of the moment. She would not have recognized this full-bodied matronly woman with her handsome, high-colored countenance, so liberally glistening with tears: nor would she, in other circumstances, have recognized Malvinia—was it truly Malvinia?—suddenly before her, who offered a gloved hand, and a droll searching smile. Malvinia, so changed! A mature woman! Striking, still, but ah!—no longer young!

And there arose Samantha—might this woman be Samantha?—her bedmate of childhood,
Samantha?
—with her cool green eyes and quizzical expression, yet wondrously alter'd, and now radiantly lovely: the once-plain and graceless girl who had offered, against the grain of her own heart, some small measure of patience, and affection, and sisterly concern, to the ungrateful Deirdre. Now they grasped hands, and managed a ceremonial embrace, not affectionate, and surely not sisterly, but adequate to the flurried circumstances.

Dazed, wiping a stray tear from her eye, Deirdre next found herself meekly standing before Mr. and Mrs. Zinn. Ah, how she had dreaded this moment! How she had deluded herself, in never seeking to precisely envision it, but always shrinking back from the prospect! She had fled them—had injured them—had rejected them, in her heart: because they had failed to love her sufficiently: the which adolescent fancy struck her now as merely absurd, for why, in truth, should anyone have loved the orphan Deirdre
at all?

Only twenty years had passed since the afternoon of the black silken balloon, no extraordinary span of time, perhaps, yet, to Deirdre's shocked eye, Mr. and Mrs. Zinn were so alarmingly agèd, they seemed rather of the sculptor's fancy of Matriarch and Patriarch, of another generation entirely. Finely creased skin—dry reproachful eyes—Mrs. Zinn's mouth so grim it would seem a stoic chore to smile—Mr. Zinn's gaze fixed and impersonal and, alas!—unloving.

Forced murmured greetings were exchanged, and stinging salt-tears so invaded Deirdre's vision, she could scarce continue to discern the unresponsive countenances of her adoptive mother and father. Yet she bravely spoke: “Dear Mother, and dear Father, I know you cannot—indeed, you
should
not—forgive me, and I have not come to ask your forgiveness, at this unhappy time. I assure you, I will not further upset you, by remaining any longer in Bloodsmoor than is absolutely required, for I suspect that the mere sight of me, the
ingrate orphan,
is repulsive. Nay, do not mind,” she said, seeing that Mrs. Zinn felt compelled to issue a faint protest, “for you are entirely in the right, and God has judged me harshly, these past twenty years.”

This speech having been most spiritedly uttered, the gathering received it in hushed quiet; and it was a long moment before Mrs. Zinn bestirred herself to reply, with but a weak stretching of her lips, and a markedly cool gray gaze. “Our Lord judges not harshly,” she said, “but justly. As our family has always known.”

And Mr. Zinn—John Quincy Zinn—the acclaimed inventor-genius J.Q.Z. of Bloodsmoor—that very gentleman, so tall! so handsome! so robust! so kindly! who had, in another lifetime, it seemed, merrily stooped from his great height, that he might befriend a scampering fairy-child, a naughty little miss who had run into the woods above the gorge, and quite frightened her parents, with the possibility of her being
lost:
this gentleman, now so mysteriously aged beyond his seventy-one years, raised his eyes to sternly regard his renegade “daughter,” and plucked absently at his beard, and opened his mouth to speak, and—and spoke not at all: but remained silent, and immobile, save for the scarce-perceptible trembling of his frame.

SEVENTY-FOUR

M
ay I escort you, Miss Zinn, to a comfortable chair?” murmured the solicitous Basil Miller, gauging the depth of Deirdre's distraction; and wishing to remove the young woman from her stepparents' propinquity, out of consideration for all three personages.

Thus Basil palliated, by his adroit action, the stridency of emotion of the scene; and the others, still somewhat flurried, and wiping tears from out their eyes, regained their seats.

Ah!—the morn was fast elapsing! And where was Constance Philippa?

Even before the audacious entrance of the problematic “Philippe Fox,” it must be said that the atmosphere of the Golden Oak room, despite the elegance of its decor and furnishings, and the pleasing eurythmy of its high windows, pilasters, and stained-glass inserts, was exceedingly strange; and taxes my limited verbal resources, in seeking to describe it. An agitated quiet: a paralyzed tension: an air in which dread, and euphoric anticipation, and resentment, and even some small bitterness, were wildly commingled!—the very constraint of the principals, in their formal attire, and seated in such wise as to face the front of the room (where Basil Miller had arranged a graceful escritoire, of rosewood and gilt, for his own use), contributing to this strained sensation.

For, only consider: there were those present who, by dint of their age, and station, had every right to resent the theatricality of the scene: and the whimsy by which, from out the marbl'd mausoleum in which her corporeal being now slept, old Edwina manipulated the living, as if they were mere puppets, for her diversion. Many a time Mrs. Zinn had burst into tears of helpless fury, both before her sympathetic spouse, and in the privacy of her locked room, that, by all the laws of God and the Devil (these being her angry words, I should explain, and hardly my own), it was
monstrously unfair
that, in his dotage, her father should decide to leave his fortune to his elderly, and notoriously eccentric, sister, rather than to his devoted daughter and son-in-law!—and cruel beyond measurement, that the tyrannical old man should state, in his official will and testament, that the mere
erasing of debt
should prove, in their case, an unlook'd-for boon. “That Father disapproved of our marriage, out of a cynical rejection of all that is pure, and spontaneous, and romantic,” poor Prudence stormed, pressing both hands against her heaving bosom, “I have never doubted. That he had failed to forgive me, all these many years, and had, moreover, failed to measure the exceptional worth of my husband, I find remarkable—nay, insupportable. And then, and then—!” she raged, her ruddy cheeks pulsing crimson; “—and then, that Aunt Edwina should so wantonly refuse to correct the injustice, the effrontery of which she well knew, and restore the lost fortune to
me,
the rightful heiress!”

“And yet,” J.Q.Z. observed, upon more than one occasion, in a voice somewhat hollow, and chilled, “and yet, my dear, we must not be small-minded. It does not do us proud, at our ages.”

“Uncle Vaughan dies, and leaves Father an incalculable fortune. Why, consider his shipbuilding business alone; or his properties in Philadelphia. Mother having died earlier, and a substantial portion of the old Whitton-Steuben fortune being hers, it resides all untouched with Father: who surely knew that Mother would have wished, nay, would have
commanded,
that a goodly proportion fall to
me,
her sole offspring, and her devoted daughter. Now, consider, Uncle Vaughan's fortune; and Mother's; and the great Kidde­master fortune here in Bloodsmoor; and, added to
this,
old Edwina's cache, the details of which she was fierce to keep secret: and do you grasp, Mr. Zinn, the monumental nature of what is at stake? Yet you bid me not to be
small-minded,
” Prudence all but wept, in scornful frenzy, “as if one could succeed in being
small-minded,
about a fortune of such celestial proportions!” She paused, to draw a labored breath; and to steady her quivering bulk. And then proceeded, in a calmer, and lower, voice: “Why, if we heaped Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt, and Hanna, and one or two others, together, and assessed their collective worth, do you think it would be greatly
in excess
of this fortune, the which my greedy aunt accepted as her due? Not many years ago our national wealth was boasted of as sixty-five billion dollars: and, I daresay, we Kidde­masters have, of that, some five or ten billion at the very least!”

“You exaggerate, Prudence,” Mr. Zinn said shakily. “Why, I cannot quite grasp such a notion: five or ten billion
dollars,
you are saying?”

“Enough to fill a pedlar's sack many times over, you will agree,” Mrs. Zinn said curtly.

 

THUS THE ELDER
Zinns, with whom it would be difficult, indeed, not to be in sympathy.

And there were present, too, at the gathering, some personages not yet mentioned: the kindly old Miss Narcissa Gilpin, who had told intimates, in her unassuming manner, that Edwina had promised a high percentage of the fortune to
her,
in return for her lifetime of friendship, and critical suggestions; and Miss Flora Kale, a cousin of Edwina's, and a girlhood friend, upon whom Mrs. Zinn looked with especial resentment, and some apprehension; and some Philadelphia Kidde­masters, of advanced years; and the Reverend Silas Hewett and his wife, also greatly agèd, but in full possession of their faculties, and serenely confident as to
their
figuring handsomely in the will—for, according to their somewhat promiscuous testimony, old Edwina, on her very deathbed, had so promised them. And the zealous Dr. Moffet too was in attendance, no matter that he was badly wanted at another household in the village, where a troublesome young woman lay in labor for upward of twelve hours, with no end in sight. (Dr. Moffet had quite offended Prudence Zinn, by his reiterated boasts, that his “most esteemed patient” Edwina, had broadly hinted that he was to be remembered bountifully in her will, in proportion to the medical skill he possessed.)

As for the sisters, of them all only Malvinia harbored some small hope that Edwina might have remembered her; but Malvinia was, at the same time, too skeptical, both of her great-aunt's generosity, and her own deserts, to seriously expect any inheritance. Octavia had sighed, and dabbed at her tear-streaked face, and flatly declared to Mr. McInnes (with whom she spoke almost daily, on matters of financial and legal significance), that she expected not a penny: for the vindictive old lady had never forgiven
her,
that Little Godfrey had crawled beneath Edwina's skirts so long ago, as a mere prank. Samantha had so little expectation, she and her husband had worried betwixt themselves, as to whether they might dare ask Mr. Miller for some recompense, for their journey by rail from Guilford to Bloodsmoor: a mere $28 for both tickets, round-trip, but a dismayingly high price in their eyes. (They decided they must
not
ask. “I would not want anyone in my family,” Samantha declared, “to know how poor we are: and to pity us.”) As for Deirdre—she was too o'ercome with mortification, at the coldness with which the elder Zinns had greeted her, to give any clear thought to the purpose of the meeting: nor might her tear-beclouded eye have discerned the weighty parchments on the escritoire, at Basil Miller's elbow, which contained the Last Will and Testament of Miss Edwina Kidde­master.
I must leave this accursèd place,
she silently wept,
for it is not my home, and never was; and Dr. Stoughton did me a singular disservice, to direct me here.

Still the gold-and-ebony French Empire clock on the mantel continued its solemn ticking; and the minute hand advanced, now moving upward to noon; and the missing sister failed to appear.

Exhibiting some disappointment, in which vexation was mixed, Basil Miller at last cleared his throat to speak, and was rather petulantly declaring that the meeting might require postponement, for, according to Miss Kidde­master's express wishes,
all
the sisters must be present, when, of a sudden, the door was opened, and a gentleman strode in, unannounced—a stranger with dark hair, graying at the temples; and fierce heavy brows; and a brisk, impertinent manner, enhanced by the tight-fitting frock coat he wore, and the broad-brimmed white Western hat he carried rakishly in his hand, and the strident hammering of his high-heeled leather boots!

Doubtless this strange gentleman felt some natural anxiety, to intrude upon a private gathering; yet he took care, to exhibit little apprehension; and maintained a practic'd poker face, as, curtly bowing to the amazed assemblage, he spoke: “I believe you are expecting Miss Constance Philippa Zinn, who, unfortunately, cannot be here today. She has designated me her sole agent in this matter, and has given me power of attorney: I am Philippe Fox, of the Rock Bluff Mining and Milling Company, of San Pedro, Arizona; I am, as well, a former Assistant Deputy to the United States Marshal, for Southeast Arizona. Please accept my heartfelt apologies for my tardiness—but I have come a very long way.”