A Bloodsmoor Romance (15 page)

(Tho' it was to be the case that many in the vicinity, including the elder Kidde­masters, and Mr. Zinn in his workshop, would report having heard something most uncanny: this being the throaty, low, chilling hiss of the balloon's flame, which was quite unlike anything experienced in Bloodsmoor, before or since. “The intake of breath, of a monstrous giant!”—thus Malvinia described it, in a quavering voice, afterward.)

 

BUT WHY HAD
they not called to Deirdre, to warn her of the great danger? Thus the sisters were asked, by numerous interrogators.

Yet it was altogether natural, that the four young ladies were so surprised by the unlikely apparition, that they could not utter a word: and even Constance Philippa, the most ordinarily level-headed, was so shocked, in her own words, “my throat closed at once—and not a cry could escape.”

Octavia, still very pale, and in danger of fainting yet again, murmured that the black balloon was so very
hideous,
and yet so very
graceful,
she could do no more than stare at it: all the while doubting, in her innermost heart, that it was
real.

And Malvinia testified that the horror was so enormous, she fainted almost immediately: her affrighted senses took their leave, and left her quite helpless.

And Samantha, with benumbed lips, spoke thusly: “I saw—yet did not see; I cried out to Deirdre—yet sat transfixed, and mute. And then, within a minute, the act was completed, and the balloon was lifting—and it was too late.”

“Too late, too late.” Thus the sisters murmured, dabbing at their eyes, in which copious tears brimm'd. “May God have mercy upon us!—
too late.
”

NINE

A
s the reader may sympathize, it was to be several days before the sisters recovered sufficiently from the shock to their delicate nerves to provide information concerning the heinous abduction, Samantha being the first to summon forth the necessary strength to attempt an account of the kidnapping, and even to attempt, with some small success, a pencil sketch of the balloon.

Though the balloon appeared enormous, as a consequence of the surprise and terror it engendered, Samantha supposed it to be fairly modest in scale, not a dirigible or passenger ship, of the kind she had seen in certain journals owned by Mr. Zinn: not above seventy feet in height, and considerably less than that in diameter. The wicker basket appeared small, by contrast, below six feet in diameter; and of course the balloon displayed no American flag, or any identifying feature.

Ah, the horror of the apparition! The spectral calm, with which it drifted across the river, to the unheeding girl at the shore! Its sleek plump panels might have been made of varnished cotton, or silk: by no means rubber, Samantha declared, since she had seen rubber balloons, filled with illuminating gas, at the Exposition in Philadelphia, several years back: and this balloon was—she felt herself forced to testify—far more beautiful.

Nay, Samantha said, with some reluctance, the balloon was
very beautiful indeed:
and doubtless made of silk, with a sort of French look about it, she could not explain why, save perhaps that she had in mind certain handsome, but wantonly frivolous dirigibles, created by the French, in the early years of the century.

(Her sisters joined her in this judgment, albeit with a similar show of reluctance. Malvinia allowed that the thing was
beauteous
indeed, to the layman's eye, but might, for all she knew, be deemed
ugly
as well; Constance Philippa murmured, with amaz'd awe, that she had never seen anything so
brutal,
and so
comely;
Octavia faintingly said that the vision it had seared into her very soul could not bear close examination—for how could silken beauty be so wed with unspeakable malevolence?)

At the very first, Samantha said, this extraordinary apparition had appeared to be uniformly black, as to the coloring of its panels; but her eye succeeded in absorbing the curious fact that each of the panels differed from the others, in texture, and in shade, and depth, of that hue. One was iridescent, giving off the hard, brilliant, silky sheen of a raven's wing; one somewhat lacy in texture; another composed of imbricated scales, like a pinecone; yet another, a dull, dead, lifeless black, that absorbed the sun's waning rays, and did not reflect them. The effect, Samantha all haltingly said, was necessarily
mesmerizing
for, as the balloon so swiftly skimmed the tops of the trees at the water's edge, and made its silent descent, the panels caught, and refracted, and mirrored, the sunshine, in a most compelling way.

As to the pilot himself, Samantha was less certain, tho' adamant in her belief that there was but one: unless an assistant crouched hidden in the basket. She had a confus'd impression—in which her sisters later concurred—that the balloonist, clad in black, exhibited an agreeable
formality,
as to the style and cut of his costume; and that he wore a hat, of an unobtrusive size, with a narrow brim. His age could not be estimated, and might have been anything, from that of a mere boy, to that of a very mature man: but he did possess a noticeable
agility,
in the swiftness and certainty of his movements; and some evident
strength,
in the feat of pulling the struggling Deirdre into the basket, with no great expenditure of effort. (Tho' Malvinia was of the opinion, but softly voiced, that Deirdre had sunk into a swoon, and, being limp and helpless, had not been capable of putting up a struggle—or so it appeared, to her affrighted eye.)

Sketching being one of Samantha's especial skills, for which, in the workshop, she received much praise from Mr. Zinn, she busied herself with a pencil drawing of the malefic vessel, to aid in the police investigation; and the conical-shaped balloon that emerged, with its compact basket, and numerous ropes (Samantha was assiduous in indicating some
thirty-five
of these), possessed so lifelike a quality, that her sisters visibly shuddered in gazing upon it, and Octavia went deathly pale, and came very close to fainting once again. “Nay, I cannot bear it,” the distraught young lady murmured; “the devil's very own device! And our poor lost sister, borne away in it, into the sky—”

“She will be recovered, and returned to us unharmed,” Mr. Zinn emphatically declared, his own face warmly flushed, so that the birthmark on his temple acquired prominence; and a fine film of perspiration glowed on his manly forehead. “And yet, Samantha, if only you had seen the villain's face clearly!—if only you might offer us a representation of
that.
”

“Indeed, Father,” Samantha stammered, her eyes brimming with tears of shame, “I too wish that were the case: but, alas, it is
not:
for I was at too great a distance, and, like my sisters, too agitated and confused to absorb such details.”

“The balloon, after all, might easily be abandoned,” Mr. Zinn murmured aloud, plucking distractedly at his beard, “and how should we then know to whom it had belonged, and where he might have fled? And no ransom demand yet made! Ah, it is very, very strange; very strange. You have no recollection, Samantha,” the unhappy man again inquired, “of the pilot's features? No grasp of his coloring, or height, or approximate age, or ancestry?”

“None, Father,” Samantha humbly replied. “I am greatly aggrieved to say—none.”

“I cannot think it an
accident,
” Mr. Zinn ravingly murmured, the while staring at the pencil sketch, with a piercing gaze in which consternation, loss, befuddlement, and virile anger, were irregularly mix'd, “for, in the universe as we comprehend it, there are no accidents: and yet, I am bound to say, I cannot think it a
deliberate act,
for why should my little Deirdre be thus outraged? The aerial balloonist did, as you have said, make his way unfalteringly to the child, that he might abduct her—but how can we rest assured, in assuming that he came for Deirdre herself; for he might very well have kidnapped any one of my daughters who was in a position of vulnerability.”

At this remark, the four sisters glanced up at one another, and exchanged solemn, tear-bright looks, not amenable to interpretation, not, in any case, by this chronicler.

“Ah, it is most tragic, it is most outrageous,” Mr. Zinn continued, scarce knowing what he said, or how his distraught manner upset his daughters, who were not accustomed to seeing him thus, or to witnessing such extremes of emotion, in their elders, “it is gravely insulting, and
not to be borne.
A rivalrous inventor, it may be, one whose intention is to so disrupt the harmony of my life, that I will not be able to proceed. One who is, perhaps, consumed with jealousy, of my progress—nay, I know not: I know not, why this horror has transpired; or what may come of it.”

At this juncture Mrs. Zinn, with ruddy countenance, and red-rimmed eyes, in whose depths some measure of choler, as well as maternal grief, shone, ventured to say: “Mr. Zinn, we none of us know what will come of this horror, nor how, precisely, it came about; but, I believe, we do know
why
it occurred, as it did.” She then paused, being stout, and easily made scant of breath, before continuing, in the selfsame adamant voice: “I mean only that the tragedy might have been prevented—nay,
would
have been prevented—had you, Mr. Zinn, chosen to remain in the midst of your family, in order to protect us,
in comformity with your duty.
”

 

HOW THE ANGUISH'D
John Quincy Zinn replied to this grave accusation, and with what divers shocks his daughters o'erheard it, I cannot bring myself to say; for the subject is a painful one, and not even the passage of time can altogether alleviate it. Unhappy mortals! Unhappy Deirdre! It is a sign of that
cosmic irony,
of which, in another context, I earlier spoke, that the innocent girl was borne away in the silken balloon, by the phantom pilot, into an autumn sky as serene, as elysian, and as soberly a slate-blue, as those graceful Limoges teacups, belonging to Kidde­master Hall, that Grandmother Sarah had, with such fastidious art, painted, in her girlhood, long past.

II

The Passionate Courtship

TEN

N
one of the Zinn daughters was to know—tho' shrewd Constance Philippa did suspect—that their parents, known to them as Mr. and Mrs. Zinn merely, had once been
young lovers,
indeed: and that Prudence Zinn, née Prudence Kidde­master, had succumbed to the ravages of guilty ecstasy in her youth from which, to her shame and confusion, she was never to be entirely free.

No poet, this forthright and outspoken Miss Kidde­master, assistant headmistress of the Cobbett School for Girls by the age of twenty-nine, no tinkerer with words and loose sentiments, and yet, under the influence of her tempestuous passion for John Quincy Zinn, she did recite, under her breath, certain lines from Margaret Fuller's lush “Dryad Song” as if they were a secret prayer, a dozen times daily:

I am immortal! I know it! I feel it!

Hope floods my heart with delight!

Running on air, mad with life, dizzy, reeling,

Upward I mount—faith is sight, life is feeling,

Hope is the day-star of night!

Come, let us mount on the wings of the morning,

Flying for joy of the flight,

Wild with all longing, now soaring, now staying,

Mingling like day and dawn, swinging and swaying,

Hung like a cloud in the light:

I am immortal! I feel it! I feel it!

Love bears me up, love is might!

—but only if she was safely alone, out of earshot of her young charges or her parents.

Can it truly be,
Prudence Kidde­master queried herself in her diary, writing by candlelight, secretly, feverishly, in the drear hours of the night when all the house slumbered,
can it truly be that I, who have sworn myself a daughter of Athene, who have spurned so many hopeful suitors—I, Prudence Kidde­master, a daughter too of Artemis, in whom a love of Independence is as pridefully bred, as in any Man—I, for some 30 years as Maiden in Spirit, as in the Flesh, have succumbed to that giddiness so abhorred in the young females of my acquaintance!—which is to say, have I fallen in love?

All breathless, she paused; and felt her heart beat solidly in her heated breast; and, as a strand of hair slipped free of its confinement, in her white lawn nightcap, she wrote still further:
And have I fallen in love against all hope?

Some tumultuous minutes passed, and, it may have been, the distraught young lady bethought herself, whether she should at once destroy the guilty page before her, or allow it to stand, and continue with her astonishing outcry. How Prudence's sternly maiden heart was torn, you may well imagine: for this daughter of the great house of Kidde­master prided herself on being very different from her numerous female cousins, who thought of little else save balls, and fashions, and engagements, and weddings. Indeed, Prudence scarcely thought of herself as a
female,
so caught up was she in divers activities of an intellectual nature: she was an honors graduate of the excellent Cobbett School, and the Philadelphia Academy for Girls; and, at the time of her fortuitous meeting with the young Mr. Zinn, on October 20, 1853, she was one of the most successful of the women teachers, in the Philadelphia of her day.

John Quincy Zinn,
her trembling hand wrote. And, further, to her own mortification, and, I am bound to say,
my
considerable surprise:
John Quincy Zinn:
I WILL HAVE HIS SONS, OR THOSE OF NO MAN.

 

READER, IMAGINE THAT
Time has backward fled, some quarter-century before the unhappy September day, on which our narrative has begun: the hapless Deirdre not yet kidnapped, the Zinn sisters not yet born, and, indeed, their parents not yet acquainted.