A Bloodsmoor Romance (68 page)

The bride being modestly arranged, as I have said, on her customary side of the bed, it was the usual procedure that her husband join her without any unnecessary word, let alone vulgar amorous prattle, either slipping over her docile head a hood of sufficient thickness, as to discourage her
witnessing
any incident, or the exposure of any bodily part, or expanse of skin, that would naturally offend her decorous eye; or so totally extinguishing the flame, that this precaution was rendered unnecessary. For which, despite her uneasiness, she could not fail to be grateful: tho' she had never doubted the assertions of her elders, that Mr. Lucius Rumford was a gentleman of the highest quality, and an excellent match for any young lady. (“This too is a great departure from all I had known, as an ignorant young girl,” Octavia murmured inwardly, regarding the hood Mr. Rumford oft drew over her head, with its drawstring, tied sometimes rather tightly about her throat, and presenting problems of inhalation—about which the young wife did not complain, I should hasten to say.)

The actual methodology of the connubial union, so far as I am able to judge (being of maiden status myself, and altogether innocent of experiential knowledge, or any gross sort of speculation), is allowed to vary from husband to husband, within certain delimitations—procreation being, of course, the primary, indeed, the sole, enterprise. Yet in all instances of Christian wedlock it affirms itself as a sacred communion, but dimly understood even by the blessèd participants, who conform to God's prescription; and it does, surely, declare itself as that
true pangenesis,
in which the
epitome and pleroma of life
are rightly celebrated. All this is a mystery, I know, and its secrets are to be forever hidden from one residing in the celibate state, like myself!—yet I fully comprehend the grave obligation, free of the slightest taint of sin, the Christian Man and Wife perform, in the pangenesis of their sacred union.

In the absolute darkness in which she lay, Octavia would commonly hear divers noises: a prolonged, and sometimes quite noisy, rustling of fabric; an accelerated, laborious respiratory activity; the eruption into moaning, grunting, and exclamatory mutterings, in Mr. Rumford's own voice, surely, yet rarely recognizable as his. It was a measure of that gentleman's intrinsic fastidiousness, that he employed all restraint in addressing his wife directly, doubtless sensing that such blunt intimacy would disconcert her, whether in the privacy of their bedchamber, or in the public rooms of the Hall.

It was a measure as well of Mr. Rumford's high breeding that, for all his fussing and fumbling and pawing amidst her petticoats, and the accelerating frenzy of his passion, with its curious and oft-alarming results, Octavia but rarely noted that her things were seriously ripped, nor was her cap dislodged: tho', it should be confessed, the undergarments usually became badly stained, and required immediate laundering upon the morn; and Octavia's stockings were frequently so damaged, as to render mending impractical.

Blindfolded thus, the young wife could but conjecture, over the months, and, eventually, the years, the methodology of her husband's attentions to her, grasping that, from time to time, new accoutrements were employed: she might, as she lay obediently unmoving, be beaten (but lightly!) with wet gloves, presumably her own, or belonging to a previous Mrs. Rumford; she might be rapped about the bosom and nether regions with a fan, or a silk sunshade, or an unidentified object of a lightsome construction, to the accompaniment of Mr. Rumford's stentorian breath, which sometimes dissolved into short, shrill whistles, before the final cataclysmic explosion. Then again, varying according to no logic that she could determine, Mr. Rumford might choose to employ feathers to tickle her (tho', alas, the docile and rather frightened young woman perhaps did not oblige, as her husband might have wished); or he might smear upon her an odoriferous medicine or liniment, or, then again, sweet jam, honey, or marmalade, the which he then greedily lapped up from her, and licked, and sucked, emitting noises of great variety, ranging from gasps and low whimpers, to gargling outcries, of so powerful a volume as to throw Octavia into terror, in apprehension that the servants would surely hear, and in a natural wifely concern for her husband's health—Mr. Rumford being, alas, no longer precisely young.

All this the new Mrs. Rumford bore with saintly diligence, and sweet acquiescence, and not once, in the many years of their wedlock, did a murmur of complaint escape from her tight-pursed lips: not even in the extremities of fright, or pain, or childish bafflement; or the delirium of illness. She understood that a married woman's duty is solely to her husband, who is her rightful
lord
and
master,
and to have sworn to
love, honor,
and
obey
such a chosen person, at God's own altar, is no burden, but a privilege of the highest type. She understood too the fact that, in Mrs. Zinn's frequent words, the married state “is not one to be explained, nor yet doubted”: and we must forgive her an occasional expression of pride, in the midst of sisterly affection, in addressing poor unmarried Samantha. (Alas! unmarried at the age of twenty-six, and with no prospects whatsoever, amongst socially acceptable gentlemen—the fault not of her family and relatives, but solely her own.)

That Mr. Rumford's intrepid fulfillment of his connubial obligations was to result in sacred issue—Godfrey II, Sarah, and Lucius Quincy, among those who survived beyond infanthood—is an outward manifestation of Our Heavenly Father's satisfaction in him, and in his belovèd wife; nor had Octavia suffered any doubt in this undertaking, proving as excellent a mother as she had a wife, to the delight of all observers, and to what we must assume to have been Mr. Rumford's gratification and pride. His early and generous prediction of her capabilities as mistress of Rumford Hall, made upon the very day of their wedding (“My dear Mrs. Rumford, I do not doubt you: I do not doubt that you will fulfill your duties more than satisfactorily”), possessed a startling prescience, and quite affirmed, what many had surmised, that Mr. Lucius Rumford was an individual of exceptional, if modestly hidden, resources.

And yet, alas!—the sorrow that lies ahead, for both husband and wife!—a tragedy of so astonishing a scope, that I cannot continue in this vein at the present time, but must withdraw, wishing to leave the reader with these gentle words of our poet Pinkney, who might almost have been penning his thoughts in regard to Mr. Rumford and his loyal Octavia—

     Intent to blend with his her lot,

Fate formed her all that he was not;

And as, by mere unlikeness, thought

Associate we see,

Their hearts from very difference caught

A perfect sympathy.

FORTY-SEVEN

O
ne sun-warm'd April morn a near-catastrophic accident involving Mr. Zinn's experimentations with his hydrogen-filled balloon occurred (which accident, occurring above the Bloodsmoor River, resulted in a fiery plummet of young Nahum into the waters—thereby saving his life): in a season in which the respective notorieties of both Malvinia Morloch and Deirdre of the Shadows were waxing to their short-liv'd zeniths, and old Judge Kidde­master fired off daily—nay, hourly—missives to Washington, couched in the most atrabilious of vocabularies, in protest of the new Interstate Commerce Commission, which, if “given its leash,” would “strangulate” free enterprise in the nation forever, thereby decimating the Judge's own railroad investments: at a time, ah! so ironically! when the heroic John Quincy Zinn was beginning at last to doubt, not his own genius, still less his own good spirits, but the hospitality, in a manner of speaking, of the great democracy in which he resided—it was then that the cheerily ebullient Mr. Watkins of the
Atlantic Monthly
appeared, unannounced, at the Octagonal House, with a request for an
interview in depth
with Mr. John Quincy Zinn, the inventor “of probable genius,” said to dwell so “reclusively” in Bloodsmoor, a “legend” amongst his more prosperous fellow-inventors, yet “gravely unknown” amongst the masses, who wanted only helpful instruction, in order that they might honor him as a “near-avatar” of the great Benjamin Franklin himself!

Since it was the stern-brow'd mistress of the Octagonal House who greeted Mr. Watkins upon that momentous day, accepting from his hand a gilt-engraved calling card, and listening in silence to the flood of loquacity that issued from his smiling lips, one might have supposed that the journalist's boldness would have been matched by an equivalent boldness, on the part of Mrs. Zinn (who had been surprised, moreover, in the midst of supervising the monthly wash, done by the servants in the cramped, ill-lit, and steamy cellar): one would have supposed that that excellent lady, who did not deign to suffer fools gladly, would have sent him on his way with dispatch, and forgotten him entirely.

Such was not the case at all, however,
but rather the reverse!

For, tho' Mrs. Zinn remained unsmiling, and offered the brash gentleman no seat, she nevertheless allowed that he might return again, past teatime, perhaps, of the subsequent day, where, by her arrangements, he might speak, tho' briefly, with John Quincy Zinn himself.

Immediately upon Mr. Watkins's departure, she sent one of the servants to fetch her husband; who, arriving in his shirt sleeves, breathless, with wild staring eyes, had to be assured with repeated emphasis that nothing was amiss in his household (for rarely was Mr. Zinn summoned from his workshop, and never for anything less than an emergency); but that, in fact, something wondrous had occurred, with profound significance for the future.

Whereupon she seated her perspiring husband, and forced him to listen, and showed him Mr. Watkins's handsome little card, and, when he tried to interrupt, continued speaking, in so knowing and maternal a tone, that he soon surrendered.

“The tentative title of the piece is, I believe, ‘Unsung American Geniuses,' or ‘Unsung Americans of Genius,' ” Mrs. Zinn said, with satisfaction. “If all goes well—if you cooperate—and if it appears, as the young man has promised, in the
Atlantic Monthly:
why, then, you see, my dear John Quincy, they will no longer be able to deny you your due! They will be forced to kneel at your feet, as they should have done all along.”

“They?” Mr. Zinn asked doubtfully.

“Now, at last, after so very, very long,” Mrs. Zinn said, more vehemently, her cheeks grown ruddy and her eyes unusually bright, “they shall be forced to grant you justice.”

Mr. Zinn stared absently at the calling card, turning it over in his grease-stained fingers. His untidy beard had grown so yellowish, in recent years, and his hair so ferociously stood out in tufts, that we must count it a blessing, that Mr. Watkins had not glimpsed him that day. For a very long time Mr. Zinn said nothing, but only sighed noisily, and blew out his lips, as if he were alone, and unobserved.

“Now we shall reap our reward,” Mrs. Zinn said, quite surprising her husband by the
crooning
and
gloating
rhythm of her voice, “oh yes we shall, Mr. Z., oh yes, now we shall reap our mutual reward, oh yes, yes indeed, and fly in the faces of our enemies, and grind them underfoot, and hold our heads as high, oh yes, as high, as any of them, and as any Kidde­masters should, by rights!—
oh yes!
”

To her startl'd husband's protestations that she “surely exaggerated,” and that in any case he hadn't time for “rambling conversations with amateurs—no matter their good will,” Mrs. Zinn, shaking off the last jot of the cozy lethargy, usually induced in her, in the mornings, by Miss Emmeline's Remedy, simply unpris'd the calling card from Mr. Zinn's vague fingers, and held it triumphantly aloft, for both to see—

—and murmured once again, with bright-glittering eyes, and a heaving bosom, and a warmth Mr. Zinn had not observed in her, for many decades:
“Oh yes!”

 

AND WAS PRUDENCE
Zinn correct, in envisioning that their lives would be permanently alter'd, by the industrious Mr. Watkins, and that
justice
would at last be granted, by way of the much-heralded essay that appeared, after some delay, in the
Atlantic Monthly,
in February of 1888? Was that excellent lady correct, in prophesying that “they” (by which she meant, I believe, not only the entire nation, and the prosperous inventors who had thieved from John Quincy Zinn, but her very own relatives, in Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore, New York, and Boston, above all else) should at last be moved—nay,
forced
—to acknowledge the rare worth of her belovèd husband, and her own fortitude, loyalty, and devotion, in standing by him for more than three decades of supreme sacrifice: should be forced to “kneel” at his feet, in a manner of speaking, by the appearance of a single essay, with the grandiloquent title “Unsung Americans of Genius Living Now Unknown”?

I am not so cruel, as to keep the reader in suspense, and am eager to share my delight with all: for the answer to the above questions is a resounding and joyful
Yes
—precisely in Prudence Zinn's gratified tone!

FORTY-EIGHT

I
n this troubled age to which the censorious (yet richly deserved!) appellation “Gilded” has been given, by Mr. Mark Twain, when our indwelling American optimism has been cut to the quick by such national scandals as the exploits of the Tammany Ring, and Jay Cooke & Company, and the Big Business Republicans, and the “Noble” Order of the Knights of Labor, the heart thrills to learn that there reside, still, in the bosom of our land, those selfless, devoted, and courageous individuals—how few, alas, might they now number?—who embody the great ideals of Jefferson and Franklin: the “Unsung Americans,” as I have seen fit to designate them: “Unsung,” it may be, O America, but not unheralded!