A Bloodsmoor Romance

  Mrs. Zinn having delivered herself of this speech, which, conveyed thusly, in cold print, cannot suggest the maternal warmth which emanated from it, she then drew herself up to her full height, so as to best confront her red-haired daughter’s response: and was greatly surprised, and not a little disconcerted, by Samantha’s slow, hesitant, benumbed voice, and the just faintly perceptible trembling of her lips.

  “I know you are right, Mother,” Samantha said, “tho’ my heart wishes it were otherwise: for, in truth—in truth—” she murmured, faltering, “I had hoped not to marry at all, but to remain here at home, with you, and dearest Father, and—and—simply to continue as I have been: your daughter Samantha, and Father’s most trusted associate. I had hoped,” the moist-eyed girl continued, a becoming blush spreading across her cheeks, “I had hoped to remain a maiden, all the days of my life.”

  Mrs. Zinn was so moved by this speech that, forgetting her usual composure, and the whalebone armor that restrained her bosom, she reached out to embrace her daughter: and folded her in her arms, all the while comforting her, and half weeping, and then, indeed, truly weeping, for Samantha’s meek words had quite penetrated her heart, and for a brief poignant moment she realized all that it imported: she should lose forever not only sweet Samantha, but her last daughter.

  So mother and daughter embraced, and exchanged tearful words of endearment, and Mrs. Zinn surrendered Samantha to Cheyney Du Pont, and to Christian charity; and Samantha, her cheeks streaming with tears, espied little Pip over her mother’s shoulder, there in the doorway, in the midst of scrambling nimbly upward against gravity—and spider monkey and young lady exchanged a long, level, unblinking, uncanny stare, the nature of which I am no more able to define, than to countenance.

  IT MAY HAVE been that Mrs. Zinn, thinking more calmly, and with more native suspicion, upon Samantha’s unlook’d-for acquiescence, believed that another step must be taken; or, it may have been that the good woman, succumbing to a pang of regret, that someone—that is, poor Nahum Hareton—must be injured, in these new developments, came to a sudden decision that he should be addressed: in any case, not three days after this heartrending scene, a manservant brought a letter to Nahum, as he sat dallying in the sunshine above the gorge, attended by a subdued Samantha (surprised in the act of pouring tea into his cup, as the servant approached): and, tearing the envelope open, with shaking fingers, the youth announced that it was a summons from Mrs. Zinn.

  The young lovers’ eyes snatched guiltily at each other, and for a long terrible moment neither could speak.

  Then Nahum said: “Your mother wishes an audience with me, Samantha; and I must go.”

  Samantha pressed a small pale hand against her forehead, half shutting her eyes, yet did not allow herself to stagger, or to exhibit any further sign of weakness. In a low calm voice she said: “Yes. You must go. But do not allow the dragon to devour you alive.”

  “Samantha!” Nahum exclaimed. “She is your mother, after all—how can you speak of her thusly?”

  “She is not my mother, but a dragon,” Samantha said slowly, “tho’ I shall not contest the point, at the present time: indeed, I have no great interest in debating the issue. You must go, and you shall: and, I implore you, do not allow her to devour you. And all will be well.”

  “Alas—will it?” Nahum asked. He looked from the face of his belovèd, which, from having gone deathly pale a scant moment before, was now regaining its color, to the stiff importunate missive in his fingers; and back to Samantha’s face again, with a most piteous expression upon his own, the which might well rend my heart, were this guilty couple not acting both in defiance of the elder Zinns, and of propriety in general. (Indeed, I am not in full possession of the knowledge—and have no desire to be so—of when, precisely, and in what outlaw circumstances, these two confessed their feeling for each other: but such is the startling intimacy of this scene, that I am led to conclude that a confession of sorts must have occurred, however “innocent,” in a carnal sense, the two remain.) “Samantha, my dear, will it?” Nahum whispered.

  “We must trust in God,” Samantha said, a faint line appearing betwixt her delicate eyebrows, “and in our own ratiocinative powers, which are, I do believe, at least the equal of poor Mother’s: for she is, you know, poor, impoverished, in both heart and in spirit, and cannot do us a great deal of harm, once we elude her. The sole danger, dear Nahum,” the brazen miss said softly, laying her hand upon his, in an extraordinary gesture of comradeship, and blatant public intimacy, “the sole danger is that Mother will so mercilessly interrogate you, as to cause you to reveal our situation—not in actual words, for you are too clever for that, but in emotion, for you are too honest, and know nothing of prevarication.”

  “I shall do my best to compose myself,” Nahum said, and, with a stealthy glance toward the doorway of the workshop, a distance of some fifteen or twenty yards thither, dared to squeeze Samantha’s fingers in his; and then abruptly released them. A dazed frightened smile warmed his sober countenance. “To compose myself, and to reveal nothing: tho’, I must confess, your mother does in fact terrify me, as your father could never.”

  “Nay, you are too generous,” Samantha said, with a bitter little laugh, “for surely you have noted the apparent reluctance, and the actual fervor, with which Father has capitulated to that offer from Congress? She is terrifying, yes—but so is he—in the alacrity of his surrender—in the very ingenuity with which he has approached the project: considering and discarding, early on, all the ‘humane’ measures of execution that would involve no mechanism, and hence no genius. Nay, hush,” the half-angered girl commanded, “do not defend my father to me. I was his first human experiment, and shall not have been his last. An electric bed, indeed! And the miserable felon to be strapped to it, in full consciousness, no doubt, and high-voltage A.C. to be directed through his being! And Father murmurs of Justice, and Law, and Sacrifice, and Patriotism, and all that he owes to this great nation, and the remarkable kindness of the Senators—nay, my dear, do not interrupt, you are not obliged to defend any Zinns or Kidde­masters to me—and it is only his current want of materials, and the delay in the honorarium, that keep us from witnessing God alone knows what ‘necessary’ experiments, here in this sacred place! No, each is terrifying, Nahum, in his own way: indeed, all of Bloodsmoor terrifies me. So you must approach Mother with caution, my dear, or not at all.”

  Nahum was staring most intently at his young lady, during this wild, indeed incoherent, speech; but I know not whether her demented words most absorbed him, or the ruddy blush on her cheeks. All transfixed he was, for an uncanny moment, as if—God help us!—he were about to utter the crudest words of outright love, or move to fold the impetuous girl in his arms, and place a searing kiss upon her audacious lips. But at this moment the sunshine was eclipsed, and then quite obscured, by a massive rain cloud; and the lovers stood staring at each other, as if locked invisibly together, with no notion of what had happened, or what was to come.

  Silence brimmed between them. Minutes sped past, with the weight of hours, or days. And finally Nahum bestirred himself: “Or not at all?” he echoed.

  Samantha, clad in her weekday calico, an old woollen shawl about her shoulders, could not prevent herself from shivering, with anticipation, or with the damp chill that eased upward from the depths of the gorge: and smiled queerly at her lover. “Or not at all,” she said. “For, you know, there is no power on earth that forces you to obey her summons—just as there is no power on earth that forces me to remain here, as the last of the Zinn daughters.”

  “And yet,” Nahum said quickly, “you would break their hearts if—if you left with no warning.”

  “How else is there to leave,” Samantha said as quickly, with a brave, nervous little smile, “except with no warning?”

  Nahum solemnly folded the missive from the Octagonal House, and would have slipped it into his breast pocket, had not wicked Samantha snatched it out of his fingers, and torn it
swiftly in two, and let the pieces flutter over the cliff’s edge, and down into the mist-obscured depths of the gorge.

  “Samantha!” Nahum exclaimed. He adjusted his wire-framed glasses, as if to peer sternly at her; but his gaze eased away, guiltily, and slyly. No one stood in the doorway of the cabin-workshop, and no one observed from out the window: the lovers were alone. John Quincy Zinn, immersed in his work, was oblivious to them as always; and the aging Pip, coiled asleep near his master, had not the faintest notion of the sin that blossomed in the lovers’ hearts.

  Fingers of mist rose silently from the ravine, and where innocent sunlight had rayed, but a brief while ago, now the bare flat rocks stretched bleak and expectant.

  “It is true, I confess, that your mother intimidates me,” Nahum said quietly, “and your father as well. They are giants, Samantha!—giants in a child’s dream.”

  “Yes,” Samantha said. “But we must wake from that dream.”

  “Am I a coward, Samantha, to fear her?” Nahum asked. “And to fear him? Tho’ I love him as well.”

  “You are no coward,” Samantha said, wrapping her shawl tightly about her shoulders, as if in preparation for a journey. “You are brave, and wise, and gentle.”

  “Shall we marry, then?” Nahum asked in a quavering voice. “When we are out of here?—when we are free?”

  “I know not about marriage,” Samantha said, her pert upper lip curling, as if the word gave her no pleasure. “I have all I can manage, to contemplate love.”

  And, so exclaiming, the bold young woman seized both her lover’s hands, and urged him forward, to stand at the very edge of the ravine, where the damp chill mist grew thicker with every minute. They may have exchanged further words—I do not doubt that they did—but the words were lost to me, and, stricken with revulsion as I am, I cannot wish to retrieve them.

  AND SO, ON that day, without warning, Miss Samantha Zinn and Mr. Nahum Hareton disappeared: descended into the mist, as into the bowels of Hell: with every step drawing farther from me, and from Bloodsmoor, until at last the fog closed over their frail figures, and swallowed them up entirely.

  Ungrateful children! Shameless sinners! But my words cannot touch them, for they have escaped utterly; and none but the lewdest fiends in Hell might guess where they have gone.

  FIFTY-TWO

  It was unjust of Samantha, and certainly intemperate, to accuse her father of having been casual or self-serving, in his consideration of various “humane” measures of execution: for the good man taxed himself greatly over this problem, internally debating the morality of the entire procedure, and many a time ready to give up in dismay, save that, as Mrs. Zinn so wisely said, the project, and the generous honorarium, would then be awarded to another man, possessed of inferior moral fibre.

  “You are right, Prudence,” Mr. Zinn said, sighing. “And then, too, I am but a tinkerer, and must leave the administration of justice—and, indeed, the entire legal profession—to other men, who have made it their lives’ work.”

  Many a sleepless night John Quincy Zinn spent, perusing dusty old volumes, and causing his eyes to ache, and his stomach betimes to heave, in his diligent search through the centuries, and through many cultures, for a means of capital punishment that would satisfy Congress’s demand for both humanity and efficiency! Not scholarly by nature, and restive away from his belovèd workbench, he nevertheless devoted himself to the preparation of a formal report for Congress, in which numerous traditional methods of execution were considered, and analyzed, and their suitability weighed. Flogging, whipping, knouting, slow strangulation, burning at the stake, starvation in prisons, cages, stocks, etc., mutilation of the body, being torn apart by wild carnivores, and other such heinous means were, in John Quincy’s eyes, automatically rejected, as being both inhumane and inefficient, and unworthy of a Christian nation. Nor did death by firing squad, or hanging, altogether strike his fancy, despite their popularity in most of the states. Garroting by way of “slave collars,” a favorite device of the old slaveholding South, was also rejected, even for Negroes: tho’ Mrs. Zinn cautioned her idealistic husband against speaking too bluntly on this issue, and offending the Southern gentlemen in Congress. (“It is not, after all, as if slaveholding were unknown in the Kidde­master family,” Mrs. Zinn said. “I mean amongst relatives who lived farther South—and with whom, of course, we Philadelphians did not sympathize.”)

  It was certainly the case that Mr. Zinn, with his Transcendentalist soul, felt grave reservations about this project, at the start; but his native Yankee ingenuity soon came to the rescue, and he was able to apply himself to it as a problem of technique, or technology, thereby releasing his greatest energies. The old Roman method of suicide, by opening a vein, struck him as a distinct possibility: particularly if the condemned man were to be allowed the privilege of administering the execution himself. And there was the guillotine, which, his reading on the subject soon convinced him, was a wondrously humane and efficient procedure; tho’ he doubted that the American public would take to it, as the French so greedily did, being less eager to see blood spilt, and, in general, less desirous of actually mutilating the human body. The employment of powerful poisons—hemlock, cyanide, arsenic, etc.—struck him as reasonable, tho’ no poison that induced agonizing convulsions could be considered. Sleeping draughts in excess would be as merciful a means of death as one might hope for, Mr. Zinn thought, after the sudden death, in her crib, of his nine-month-old granddaughter Sarah Rumford. (How untimely, and how tragic, that infant death! Poor Octavia simply discovered Baby Sarah no longer breathing, one day, in her white wicker crib, as peaceful as if she were merely asleep, with her brother Godfrey close by, quite unaware of the disaster, and innocently asking “if Baby would wake soon, and wish to be pushed in her perambulator”—for little Godfrey, a husky high-spirited lad of three, had enjoyed nothing more than helping Octavia push his baby sister along the estate’s tree-lined paths.)

  Yes, Mr. Zinn concluded, transcending his private grandfatherly sorrow, and seizing upon the idea of sleep-death: for could anything be more humane, more peaceful, more gentle, more—inviting? And if the condemned criminal were allowed to administer the overdose himself, within, of course, a delimited period of time, the entire procedure could not fail to be eminently civilized, and exemplarily Christian.

  AND SO HE drafted a proposal for Congress, enumerating all of the above, and concluding that the method of sleep-death seemed to him most viable: and you may well imagine his consternation, when, after much delay (indeed, weeks and months), he was informed that the proposal had been vigorously rejected, with not one vote—Republican or Democrat—in its favor.

  “I am quite bewildered by this, Prudence,” Mr. Zinn said, plucking nervously at his beard, and examining the official missive yet another time. “I am quite demoralized, and cannot comprehend why they have rejected me so vehemently.”

  Mrs. Zinn allowed that she was not greatly surprised: for, after all, self-administered death was tantamount to suicide, and suicide was a sin against God, and the United States government could hardly countenance, let alone provide the means for, such an egregious act.

  “But think of how merciful such a procedure would be!” Mr. Zinn protested. “No bloodshed—no agony—no writhing at the end of a rope—no damage to the physical being! My dear Prudence, what could be more Christian—more humane?”

  “Humane it may be,” Mrs. Zinn said, “but Christian it is not.”

  FORTUNATELY FOR MR. ZINN’S prospects, it happened that one of Prudence’s cousins was a Congressman, from a Philadelphia district, and when he journeyed out to Bloodsmoor to spend a few days hunting, he sought out the perplex’d J.Q.Z. in order to inform him that his notions of the humane, the peaceful, and the gentle, were all very good, but totally unacceptable. For, it seems, the legislators wanted a means of capital punishment that was uniquely “American”—even, if you will, “showy”—a means that would “do us proud as a billion-dollar country.”


  “Something new, and flashy, and bright, and inventive,” Heywood Kidde­master said, clapping Mr. Zinn robustly on the back. “Something, you know, ingenious. And tho’ the ‘humane,’ business is important, it needn’t be the prime consideration: for, tho’ my gentleman colleagues did not expressly say so, in their debate, I do believe it would be politic, my friend, to make death hurt a little.”

  “Ah! I see,” Mr. Zinn said slowly, gazing at Heywood Kidde­master, and blinking, with so vague an expression as to quite belie his words, “I see: death should be showy, and flashy, and ingenious, and—what was the other?—ah yes, American.”

  “And it should hurt,” Heywood said, snapping his fingers for emphasis. “Yes, indeed, if we are paying for it: it should hurt at least a little.”