So it is fully to Octavia’s credit, that she submitted to Mr. Rumford’s divers requests, and did not demur, even when she suffered some physical discomfort, and attacks of irrational panic, as a consequence of the tightening of the noose about her tender throat: nay, she did not allow her mind to roam that freely, that complaint might be an option. Nor did she object, when, after a passage of some weeks, Mr. Rumford of a sudden requested that she, whilst still blinded by the comely hood, lower the noose about his head, and tighten it about his neck.
I cannot say how frequently this divergence from custom occurr’d, through that long drear winter, when the frigid winds from Canada howl’d, and the solar orb shone but faintly, and Little Godfrey made the servants sigh with fond exasperation, wanting now to be dressed for the chill out-of-doors, and now to be undressed, that he might remain indoors: nor can I say, with any degree of certitude, why it was that Mr. Rumford fell into the habit of requesting, from his complaisant mate, a gradual increase in the degree of tension, which the noose exerted upon his throat. Yet it was so; and to his sorrow, and her grief!
“Tighter,” Mr. Rumford would ofttimes pant, in the midst of his strenuous labors, “—and yet tighter—and yet tighter, Mrs. Rumford—” until his words were garbled, and his breath turned shrill and wheezing, and not even his fond wife might determine what he said, but only divine, by intuition’s aid, his desire. If, out of exhaustion, or a fear for Mr. Rumford’s safety, Octavia allowed the noose to slacken, before the crucial moment, she earned a sharp rebuke, and, not infrequently, a chastising pinch or twist of her flesh, which would betray a considerable redness, by the morn’s light. “Tighter—tighter—and yet tighter, Mrs. Rumford—else I shall be displeased!”—so Mr. Rumford commanded; and Octavia grew habituated in her obedience, sometimes pulling both ends of the silken cord, in a simple fashion, and sometimes, by Mr. Rumford’s express desire, evidently “choking” him by a kind of twisting, and tightening, procedure, the which, of course, she could not see, her vision being annihilated, by the hood.
And so it came about, upon that Palm Sunday eve, that, Mr. Rumford’s exhortations to his wife being to tighten, and yet further tighten, the noose, she unthinkingly obeyed: her thoughts drifting free, it might have been, to glance in upon the slumbering Little Godfrey, in the nursery; or to shed a quiet tear o’er the elfin grave of Baby Sarah; or to ponder upon those mysteries of Free Will, Determinism, and Grace, as expounded by the Reverend Silas Hewett from out the pulpit of Trinity Church: this gentleman of the Protestant cloth now well into his tenth decade, and sadly deaf, yet, for all that, as vigorous and clear-minded an orator, as might be found anywhere in the land. Or, her fond thoughts might circle about Mr. Zinn, the proud inventor of the “electric chair”; and, more recently, a toothbrush operated by a small crank, for remarkable efficiency, in removing tartar from the teeth. (Mr. Zinn was now deeply immers’d in a project, of a secret nature, in conjunction with a branch of the Du Pont organization, whereby the demands of Captain Alfred Mahan of the United States Navy for more efficient torpedoes might be satisfied—Captain Mahan being that eloquent warrior who, in his numerous books, argued for the forcible extension of the American nation, not only to those small, troubled countries, Cuba and Hawaii, but throughout the hemisphere, and, God willing, throughout the world.) Or, her thoughts might touch upon the pathos of her lost sisters, which a harsher judgment might have called damn’d: yet, withal, such was her sweetly affectionate nature, she could not resist suffering a pang of remorse, that Malvinia was not still her bedmate; or that Samantha had so cruelly betrayed the parental hearth, with no word of farewell, and no express’d concern, that she might ever glimpse her belovèd nephew again, in this world. . . .
So, the while her adoring spouse toiled manfully, in the unitary act, urging her, by mutterings, grunts, and impatient groans, to tighten the noose, and yet still further tighten it, Octavia’s thoughts, in all maiden innocence, drifted hither and yon: and it is perhaps not altogether surprising that, habituated as she was to these marital customs, she should have too vigorously complied with his command—or, it may have been, a simple misinterpretation ensued, as a consequence of which Mr. Rumford of a sudden ceased his toil: and, alas!—ceased his breathing!
Reader, you may well imagine the affrighted wife’s response, when, sensing something amiss, or, in any case, irregular, in the proceedings, she dared—shyly, and hesitantly—to draw off the hood from her head, in order to investigate the situation (Mr. Rumford having not only ceased his exertions, but fallen ominously silent, upon her breast), she saw, with amazed eyes, the countenance of her husband so empurpled, and contorted, and the eyes so hideously bulging, that she gave a shriek of horror, as if not recognizing him!—and, a scant moment later, yet another shriek, in her comprehension of the poor man’s expiration!
For, indeed, in this wise Mr. Lucius Rumford came to his end: and I count it a sign of God’s especial mercy, toward His most cherished children, that Octavia, in her grief, and the precariousness of her health, sank at once into a swoon—and was never to clearly recall the precise circumstances of Mr. Rumford’s death.
SIXTY-SEVEN
Of the death by hideous drowning, of that golden-tress’d child Little Godfrey, upon a mellifluous midsummer’s day, at Kiddemaster Hall, ah!—I have neither the words, nor the corporeal strength, to speak.
Nay—I have not the heart.
Know only that the dread event occurred but a scant year after the demise of Mr. Rumford, the grieving widow persisting in her mourning attire, but prepared to bend, I believe, to the admonitions of her mother, and her great-aunt, and divers other ladies of the neighborhood, that she set aside her widow’s raiment, and wear again the colorful hues of life, and of joy: bearing in mind (as, doubtless, any young widow must bear in mind, who is also a mother) that it is now her children for whom she must live; and not her spouse.
Too cruel—too bitter!
The loss of any minikin innocent: but the loss of this innocent!
Nay, I cannot speak, for the task is too oppressive, the sorrow too great. In transcribing my Romance, I had certainly known that Pathos and Heartbreak could not be skirted: but, O Reader, I had not known that the chronicle would swerve so pitilessly toward the Tragic, and tax my heart so enormously. Tho’ we are told by the eminent poetess Miss Jane Woolsey that “Stars are the angels’ alphabet,/ Who write in light above,/ Full many a pure and gentle thought/ Of holiness and love”—it is far, far different here below, with those of us who aspire to the patient and fearless recording of an Earthly truth!—ah, how greatly, how cruelly different!
For, in this instance, I am obliged to speak of an event so charg’d with horror, it can scarce be contemplated by the sane mind, let alone given adequate voice: the loss of a child.
My feeble energies being so drained, and my aging eyes so brimmed with tears, I can scarce see this page, or the slow sad halting motions of my quill pen, I must turn to the enduring wisdom of poesy, in order that the reader might comprehend, even dimly, the loss which poor Octavia must endure. In the words of the Reverend Hargreave Tupper, from out of his popular collection, Proverbial Philosophy—
A babe in a house is a well-spring of pleasure, a messenger
of peace, and love;
A resting-place for innocence on earth; a link between
angels and men.
And how much truer this declaration must be seen to be, pertaining to the robust, tireless, bright-countenanc’d, and gloriously high-spirited Little Godfrey!
Nay, I cannot force myself to speak, save in the most circuitous of ways: the reader being obliged to envision for himself a scene very much similar to that with which this history began, back in September of 1879 (ah, that ill-omen’d day!), on the beauteous grassy lawn that sloped so gracefully from the rear terrace of Kiddemaster Hall, to the peaceable river some hundreds of yards below. You will recall the gazebo, in which the sisters sat, in their pretty Sunday dresses: that very gazebo (a
lter’d not a whit) from which the uncouth Deirdre fled—to her shame, and her destruction! You will recall, so picturesquely in the near-distance, a most elegant rose garden, and a wisteria garden, and fields of natural sere grasses and ornamental rushes: you will recall, perhaps, the old stone wishing well.
Alas, indeed: the old stone wishing well.
For it was in these dank, lightless, sepulchral waters, that, trapped in the embrace of the crazed Pip, our dear Little Godfrey met his end.
But how to articulate, how to record, the elements of that flailing, choking, sputtering, furious death!
And the incalculable ironies of the death: in that, the worrisome monkey having mistaken Little Godfrey’s playfulness, for something more severe, he reached out with his surprisingly long, and surprisingly muscular, arms, to seize the smiling child, and pull him into the well with himself.
All this being, as the reader can grasp, naught but a misunderstanding on Pip’s part, if we allow that the furry little creature might have been capable of “understanding,” in any case. For such was his nervous temperament, and the superficiality of his animal shrewdness, that he mistook Little Godfrey’s prank, in snatching him from the terrace (where, beggar that he was, by preening and cajoling, he had succeeded in winning from Octavia, and Miss Narcissa Gilpin, and one or another of the ladies, some dainty morsels of Bavarian cream cake), and bearing him to the wishing well, and gaily tossing him o’er the rough-stoned rim, for an act of cruel mischief, rather than the simple, high-spirited, innocent act of child’s play, that it was.
Alas, I am scarce able to continue!
For, quite apart from the obscene, unspeakable, piteous spectacle, of angel-child and mere beast, drowning in an embrace, in those waters of the Kiddemasters’ wishing well which, by tradition, had no practicable function, other than that of the ornamental, and the diversionary, and (may God save us!), the whimsical: quite apart from the horror in itself, which was witnessed not only by the ladies at their tea, but by tiny Lucius Quincy as well, on his mother’s lap (that dear child being now almost twelve months of age, and, apart from some small respiratory weakness, and an exaggerated timidity in the presence of his boisterous, but adoring, elder brother, grown to a reasonable size—the recipient of his mother’s bountiful love, as the puniest weed-flower partakes, with as much glory as the rose, of the solar beneficence): quite apart from the deleterious effect the event was to have, upon the already weakening constitution of Great-Aunt Edwina—we have, alas, the hideous irony, that Mrs. Rumford was being admonished, up to the very moment of Little Godfrey’s prank, by the elder ladies, for her excessive grief, and her prolongation of mourning, which, they averred, “Mr. Rumford himself must surely have become uneasy with, in his Heavenly abode”! Gently, with infinite tact and compassion, and regard for the sanctity of Christian grief, the young widow was being admonished: but admonished she was: and urged not only to leave off mourning, and to partake more wholesomely in the pleasures of this earth (amongst which must surely be included, the delicious Bavarian cream cake, and the walnut tortes, and the Swiss chocolate almond ladyfingers, being served at the tea), but to rejoice in her two beautiful babes!
Nay, the irony is too bitter: I am enfeebl’d, and can continue but for another scant page.
To say only that, despite the smiling, laughing, and chattering congeniality of the scene, and the ambrosiacal taste of the cakes, tortes, and ladyfingers, which, with reluctant appetite, she had acquiesced in nibbling; despite the idyllic beauty of the midsummer day, and that dreamlike indescribable serenity, of the Kiddemaster estate—indeed, of all that great family possessed; despite the gradually increasing strength, which hours of daily prayer, and immersion in the Holy Book, were allotting her—despite all this, Reader, Octavia’s maternal intuition was such that, she seemed to know, before the crazed monkey had pulled her son into the well with him, before, even, Little Godfrey had toss’d the creature over the side!—whilst, in fact, the exuberant imp was still gladdening the afternoon with his shouting laughter, and not a thing appeared to be amiss, the monkey’s terrified screeches being but a commonplace, when Little Godfrey chose to play with him: yet her mother’s quickened instinct was such, she knew something terrible was going to happen: and, tho’ she willed herself to set the warm weight of little Lucius Quincy on his grandmother’s ample lap, that she might, gathering her skirts, run to the well, and divert the catastrophe, she found that she was paralyzed, and could not move—nay, not a muscle!—not an eyelid!—nor could she call out, that one of the servants might be alerted, and save her son, from his watery fate!
SIXTY-EIGHT
Tho’ the career of the genius-inventor John Quincy Zinn had at last begun to flourish, in the closing years of our glorious century, it is no secret to us, his intimates, that, in his injur’d father’s heart, he had to contend with the memories of his treacherous daughters, the which haunted him nightly; nor were the cruel wounds soothed, even by Mrs. Zinn’s scrupulous action, in casting unopened into the fire, immediately upon receipt, those two or three letters sent by Samantha—from some commonplace address in the “wide world,” of little significance here.
Thus, it may have been as a consequence of private brooding, upon these losses, or, the inevitable effects of overwork, which, more frequently than ever in his life, left him unclear in his mind, when engaged in conversational intercourse of a lightsome social nature: or, it may even have been as a confus’d consequence of his grandfatherly grief, for the tragic loss of Little Godfrey: or (for who can plumb the depths of another’s heart!) it may have been an expression of simple thoughtless nostalgia, for all the furry little creature had represented, reaching back to that wedding morn of 1855, when every songbird seemed to cry Romance! and every flowery countenance seemed to smile Romance! and, indeed, all the world thrilled, and wept, and lifted a gladsome choral voice Romance!—the wedding morn, that is, of the maiden Prudence Kiddemaster, and the blushing young gentleman John Quincy Zinn. Ah!—we cannot know; we cannot say.
Only that, some five or six days after the funeral of Little Godfrey, J.Q.Z., distracted, and stroking at his long beard, glanced up from his uneaten midday meal, to fix upon Mrs. Zinn a brooding and half-reproachful gaze, and to murmur, all but inaudibly: “Yet Pip too must be mourned.”
IX
“Adieu! ’Tis Love’s Last Greeting”
SIXTY-NINE
And years flew by, and the tale at last
Was told as a joyful one, long past.
—S. L. SEABRIGHT-BOUGH
Through these many difficult months, in transcribing so labyrinthine a chronicle, it has been my task, and my modest hope, to both allow the reader some small sense of its contours, clear, forthright, and, it is to be hoped, unconfus’d; and to allow him to savor, out of the generous bounty of the Zinns’ and Kiddemasters’ family histories, a sense of its profusion of detail—the which, numerous as the blooms in flowery Bloodsmoor, have, I confess, quite enthralled me, and have given me many hours of meditative—nay, brooding—puzzlement: as to whether our mortal lives here on earth most candidly reveal themselves from a distance, discernible only to the objective, or Godly, eye; or whether they reveal themselves solely as they are experienced, which is to say, in finite parcels of time, weeks, days, hours, and minutes!
Oft have I ponder’d: ah, and would I not have greatly rejoiced, if, for a scant hour, I might have sat at the knee of Mr. Zinn, to put these questions to him, who dedicated his life to such philosophical puzzles! Tho’, doubtless, my frail female capabilities, in such areas of mental wizardry, might have taxed his patience; and excited some pity; and bafflement. (For, in the final years of this distinguished man’s life, waning, as it did, with the century, he was frequently in so remote a world of ratiocination, as to return but reluctantly to this world: where even his workshop came to seem to him, as he expressed it, “insubstantial”—and unreal, and lonely as well, the irksome little spider monkey being gone forever, and no assistants being
desired, after the treachery of Samantha and Nahum.)
Alas—this is not a privilege allowed me: nor am I entirely able to grasp, after many perusals, J.Q.Z.’s intricately worded response to that curious work by Mr. H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, Mr. Zinn’s monograph being entitled, “On the Probability (And Impossibility) of Time-Travel,” and appearing in a philosophical journal, in March of 1896.
In any case, the authoress’s solemn task being, then, to mediate between contour, and detail, I am bound to confess that, as my Bloodsmoor history draws to its appoint’d close (not many seconds before the initial stroke of midnight, of December 31, 1899), I find myself the more beleaguered, by all that, for purposes of brevity, I must omit: by all that enthralling multitudinousness, of weeks, days, hours, and minutes, which the Zinns experienced as their lives. Ah, to omit—to be forced to omit!—so very much: to awake in the midst of the night, my poor head ringing, and clattering, and clamoring, with the vociferous demands of a dream-double, of Samantha, or Mrs. Zinn, or Charles Guiteau, or the Baron, or Pip, or “Mark Twain,” or Little Godfrey, or “Malvinia Morloch” that was, or “Deirdre of the Shadows” that was!—to the effect that, I have not done the complexities of their souls justice, and, in shaping them to the contours suggested, by a labyrinthine profusion of others’ lives, I have, in fact, betrayed them, who entrusted their beings to me.