A Bloodsmoor Romance (24 page)

“Indeed, dear Aunt,” Malvinia said with the utmost civility, “I pray you are not proved greatly mistaken.”

 

“I SHALL NOT,
Father,” Samantha cried. “Not again! Not so soon!
I cannot.
”

“My dear child,” Mr. Zinn said, peering at her over his wire-rimmed eyeglasses, and smiling his gentlest, most delicately ironic smile, “none of us
can;
but most of us
shall.
”

And so she acquiesced.

(In any case, as Octavia kindly pointed out, not sensing the barb her innocent words contained, it was hardly as if Great-Aunt Edwina troubled her very often—many days might pass before a message came for
Samantha;
whereas
Octavia
and
Malvinia
were expected to visit at least twice weekly.)

“Father, I am in the midst of—” Samantha began in a whining voice.

“Daughter, we are always, I hope,
in the midst of—!
” Mr. Zinn said in a tone both gruff and jocular, turning back to the raised pine board upon which he was working.

Samantha's small plain prim face hardened, but already, swiftly, she had snatched off her filthy apron, and was tidying up her end of the long workbench, putting her diagrams and papers and pencils and calibrating instruments and logarithmical tables safely in her drawer. The Zinn workshop, like the workshop of any industrious inventor, was hardly a model of neatness: but Samantha knew from past experience that mischievous Pip, rousing himself from his nap by the stove, might scurry over to see what his youngest mistress had been doing all morning, and, Mr. Zinn's presence notwithstanding, manage to do some playful bit of damage to her drawings. (The remarkable—and, indeed, ingenious—little spider monkey had years ago acquired the habit of tinkering with Samantha's work, sometimes altering it so subtly that hours might pass before the bewildered girl discovered his trick! He possessed by instinct an uncanny ability to mimic those mysterious squiggles and shapes human beings employ as mathematical calculations; but he could, of course, do no more than mimic, and he never dared interfere with his master's cluttered workbench, to anyone's knowledge.)

Samantha alone of the sisters dared to appear in Great-Aunt Edwina's bedchamber in an everyday walking dress, of plain cotton, without a train, trimmed only by horizontal bands of pleating and ruching, and a few limp ribbons of an indefinable hue. Sometimes she even kept on her workshop costume, a loose-fitting flannel dress, long in the sleeves, that had once belonged to Malvinia and had, through repeated launderings with soapwort, borax, and even tincture of benzoin, become quite threadbare. Summoned to her great-aunt, she impatiently tied on her plain woollen bonnet, rarely troubled to bring along her pretty little purse of rabbit fur and beads, though it had been a gift from Edwina Kidde­master herself, did not scruple to change her shoes; and kept on her everyday plush mittens until she was about to alight from the carriage, when, frantically, she forced her good white gloves on her hands (which, alas, tho' scrubbed with Castile soap, were rarely free of stains), grumbling and complaining to herself in a voice mercifully too low to be heard by the young Irish driver. (Tho' impetuous little Samantha would have preferred to walk through the woods to her grandparents' house, on sunny, mild winter days, Mrs. Zinn necessarily forbade such folly, and their disagreements frequently provoked both to angry tears. “You are hardly a boy,” Mrs. Zinn charged her, “and you must not behave as if you were one.”)

She sighed loudly, and gnawed at her lower lip, and cast her eyes about blindly as if seeking an improbable escape, led upstairs by the mute servant girl past oval blackwood-and-gilt-framed portraits of her Kidde­master ancestors—a solemn portly gouty lot, she judged them, who had, despite the acuity with which they stared at her, very little to do with
her.
(And what of her Zinn ancestors, who were represented by no portraits, not even daguerreotypes? What sort of men and women had
they
been? Alas, Samantha knew nothing about them save for the meager fact that a young man named Rudolph Zinn, Austrian-born, a soldier under General Benjamin Lincoln, had been badly injured in a skirmish on the Bloodsmoor River, left behind by the retreating Continental Army, and gradually nursed back to health by a Quaker farm family—Quakers in the region being neutral so far as the Revolution went, and generally unmolested by both the rebels and the British. This solitary Zinn found himself in the Bloodsmoor Valley in approximately the year 1777; he might have been as young as twenty years of age; and beyond that Zinn history was tantalizingly blank since John Quincy Zinn, faithful to his Transcendental beliefs, considered the history of his family, as well as his own history, simply too “personal” to be of significance. . . . And yet Samantha fancied herself a Zinn rather than a Kidde­master, and liked to think that, generations back, there was a young woman not unlike herself, impatient with housekeeping and women's work, and eager to fuss with numbers and gadgets and schemes to change the world. Deluded child! Had she paid a more scrupulous attention to the examples of her elders, and not allowed her frivolous mind to wander hither and yon, like clouds blown by a capricious breeze, her own history would have been less unruly; and she would not have broken her parents' hearts.)

Tho' she had been urgently summoned to her great-aunt's chamber, she was nevertheless made to wait in an anteroom, and again she sighed loudly, and retied the bow of her bonnet, and calculated how long she would have to remain in Edwina's presence, before she might make a discreet escape. Upon one occasion, back in January, Edwina had been too nerve-sick and fatigued to really converse with her, and had sent her away within a merciful half-hour; upon another occasion, Grandmother Kidde­master had been visiting, reclining on a block-footed Empire chaise longue beneath a quilted satin robe, too weak to do much more than murmur a gentle greeting to the startled Samantha—for both women had been bled that afternoon by Dr. Moffet, and gave off an air, as they fussed with their crocheting, of virtuous anemia.

When, upon this occasion, Samantha was ushered inside, she was relieved to see that Great-Aunt Edwina was out of bed, seated in a chair, with a brocaded Japanese shawl about her plump shoulders, and a gold cashmere blanket tucked in about her legs. A single lamp burned on the rosewood table for, tho' it was early afternoon, the midwinter day was already dark; the Tiffany shade glowed a rich warm cornucopia of greens, blues, and oranges. Agreeable as the scene was, however, Samantha smiled but thinly, and gave her aunt a stiff, perfunctory curtsy. She was immediately asked to pour two cups of tea and to cut two pieces of fruitcake and butter them as lavishly as possible—for it was necessary, Great-Aunt Edwina said, for one to keep one's strength up, through this everlasting winter.

As Samantha nervously poured the tea, and sliced the cake, her aunt continued in a tone of characteristic irony: “I have dragged you away from your father's side, my dear girl, only because I suspect it would never occur to you to visit me, otherwise; and an old invalid like myself can become very, very lonely for her flesh-and-blood nieces.”

Samantha stammered a reply, handing Edwina her cup of tea, and her thickly buttered slice of fruitcake; and in the silence she heard a clock calmly tick. She said, stupidly: “
Flesh-and-blood
nieces?”

Great-Aunt Edwina gestured for her to sit. “As one ages,” the old woman said, smiling coldly, “one feels a certain passionate tenderness for one's younger relatives—children in whom, so to speak, one's youthful blood flows. But I hardly expect
you
to understand, my dear; there is no need to look so anxious.”

Samantha stared at the carpet, and could not think of a coherent reply. Alas, the clever old lady might well have been speaking in code, and Samantha lacked the wit, at this precise moment, to interpret it. “I am sorry, dear Aunt,” she murmured, “if I impress you as looking anxious.”

“Anxiety, restiveness, and, indeed, any form of undue mental exertion, are very disfiguring, in our sex; and have been, as Dr. Moffet has said, sadly deleterious to the health—my own, I mean,” Edwina said, with a placid frown that yielded to a melancholy smile, “—pertaining to my work: which does, as you may well imagine (tho' I rarely speak of it), demand a considerable expenditure of spirit.” Pausing, she then proceeded to make her usual formal inquiries about Samantha's health, and sleep, and digestive faculties; and the states of health, so far as Samantha might know, of the other inhabitants of the Octagonal House. With infinite tact and courtesy Samantha made her replies, and, I hope I will not prejudice the reader against this young lady, if I confide that her mind,
the while she spoke,
fled back to the gorge, and the snug little workshop, and the vision of her belovèd father, who, at the moment, might have paused in his work, to stare out the window at the snowy ravine, of picturesque rocks, and stunted trees, and the fleet darting of birds—all unseen by him: for, tho' John Quincy Zinn oft
stared
out the window, his extraordinary mind was such, that he
saw
not a thing. But ah! how Samantha loved the workshop! How she yearned to be freed from her great-aunt's presence, and back at her father's side, where dear little Pip might even now be perched upon Mr. Zinn's shoulder, gnawing on a sugar cube, unbeknownst to Mr. Zinn himself.

Samantha was roused from her pleasant daydream, by an inquiry of Edwina's, as to the progress of Mr. Zinn's present invention; and so she replied, as best she could, knowing how her mother's family, in secret, valued her father's great effort—how they lightly jested, and laughed, and shook their heads, behind his back! Thus, did Edwina truly wish to know; and how should Samantha most diplomatically reply?

The other day, an inventor named Hannibal Goodwin had come to call, unexpectedly; he and Mr. Zinn had talked together for some time, with animation; Mr. Zinn had spoken quite freely of his work-in-progress (“Alas,
work-in-stasis
might be a more accurate term!” the modest man exclaimed), and he had shown Mr. Goodwin other, interrupted projects, some of them mere sketches, some fairly complete drawings, one or two scale models. . . . Mr. Goodwin, whose own obsession, as he expressed it, had to do with photography—photographic film—and motion—the motion of the eye, and the motion that exceeds that of the eye—was particularly interested in an old toy Mr. Zinn had been working on, for the entertainment of his daughters primarily, in his convalescent years in the mid-Sixties. The toy would have been called the “Zinnoscope,” had it been completed, patented, manufactured, and sold. (“An unlikely sequence,” Mr. Zinn observed.) Samantha had drawn a half-dozen sketches of Pip in pastel chalk, on the inside of a cylinder of some two and a half feet in length, and Mr. Zinn had set a polygon of small mirrors within the cylinder, to be illuminated by a light from above. As each mirror came before the observer's eye, it reflected the drawing opposite it, and as the cylinder and the polygon turned, more and more rapidly, the successive images of Pip gradually and miraculously merged into one another—so that, blinking and staring, the observer might very easily imagine that he was peeking through a hole of some kind at a
living and motile reality!
Mr. Zinn had also experimented with the notion of projecting these mirror images somehow, perhaps with a magic lanter, tho' he would probably have required more than one, but nothing had come of it: as usual, he had abruptly lost interest in the project since an astounding idea for a new project had suggested itself to him, in a moment of reverie, and he had thought it best not to resist. “And then, of course, as you can see, Mr. Goodwin,” Mr. Zinn said apologetically, stooping to blow dust off the model (for the girls had naturally lost interest in it after a few excited evenings, and even Pip, initially fascinated by his own image in motion, was soon bored by its simplicity and repetitiveness), “as you can see, the thing is only a
toy;
and a man cannot content himself with
toys
while the great mass of our fellow Americans pass their days in useful labor.”

Great-Aunt Edwina professed very little interest in the forgotten Zinnoscope, other than to observe that it might be a marvelous pastime indeed—for a monkey; she was more concerned with the experimentation Mr. Zinn had been doing with the icebox in the basement, since that large, squat, odoriferous, and dismayingly ineffectual thing caused the household much grief, particularly in the summer months. (A veritable crescendo of odors flew forth as humid August advanced!—and upon more than one ghastly occasion the smells of what might be called “sewer gas” had somehow backed up the drainpipe and into the icebox,
permeating the food.
) But, unfortunately, after a few weeks' puttering and tinkering, Mr. Zinn had come up with the absurd notion that the entire concept of the “icebox” would have to be revised, and that, rather than rely upon the icehouse ice stored in the bottom of the compartment, which inevitably melted and drained away into a pan, in a most inefficient manner, one should work out some sort of method by which the cold of the icebox
creates
the ice!—which would utterly reverse the present procedure, and constitute, in Mr. Zinn's words, another “transmogrification” of reality. When the household greeted this fanciful notion blankly, and even Samantha stared in embarrassed bewilderment, Mr. Zinn quickly lost interest in the project.

Samantha spoke haltingly, fearing that she was betraying her dear father, for the condescending smile with which Great-Aunt Edwina greeted her report of his “progress” only very thinly disguised a more characteristic irony; and she was loath to touch upon the guilt she naturally felt, regarding her unfortunate youngest sister.