Nonetheless, Samantha persisted, knowing it her sisterly, and her Christian, duty, and did as well as she might to comfort the wretched child, who oft hid her warm face in her hands, and wept, all uncontrollably, for long minutes at a time. By judicious inquiry Samantha was able to piece together the substance of the dream: a stranger accosted Deirdre, calling her his daughter, and cursing, and shouting, and insisting that she accompany him, on the back of his horse, to HELL ITSELF.
Most puzzling, this strange gentleman—bearded, and wearing a soiled and torn uniform, of an officer in the Cavalry—was not Mr. Bonner! Nor could Deirdre explain who he might be, and why he was so angry, and why he had fastened upon her, as his daughter, who would accompany him to that unspeakable region, abandoned by God.
On the very eve of that calamitous day, in the autumn of 1879, poor Deirdre was subjected to this remarkable nightmare again: and allowed herself to be comforted by Samantha, who insisted that the “Raging Captain” (for thus he had come to be called) was but a dream-figment, and not to be feared. So distraught was Deirdre she seemed not to hear, however, and continued her weeping, and protesting, in such wise: “He has no right to call me his daughter, and to curse, and to swear, and to make such wicked threats!—for he is no one I know, or have ever chanc’d to gaze upon, in this lifetime. But how piteous, for I saw, for the first time, how badly he was wounded!—tho’ he would hide it from me—the black blood springing forth, from a wound in his chest—and yet he is no one I know—surely he is nothing human, but a very devil out of Hell! Nay,” the near-hysterical girl murmured, her face streaming tears, “I will not go to him: I will not succumb.”
“Of course you will not,” Samantha sensibly concurred, “for, as I have said, he is but a dream; and, in any case, you have Father to protect you.”
“Father?” Deirdre whispered, lifting her head.
Samantha spoke in a consoling voice to her, explaining that she had suffered naught but a mental illusion of some kind; a phantasmagoria, lacking material substance; a mere wisp of thought. “For you know, Deirdre,” Samantha said, “that ghosts do not exist, and that there is nothing to be accurately termed the supernatural, as Father has explained. A dream is but a mental fancy, dimly comprehended by our science: it has the power to frighten, with its seeming authenticity, and yet, as you must understand, it has far less reality than the furnishings in this room; or your own nightcap, which has, I fear, been knocked awry on your head—do allow me to adjust it.”
“You are correct,” Deirdre murmured, shivering in Samantha’s arms, “you are very wise, and very kind, like all of your family: yet, tho’ I understand fully all you have said, and acquiesce to its plausibility, why am I so chill?—so numb?—so apprehensive?—so aware, of his loathsome presence, in this very room?”
“It is but a phantasmagoria,” Samantha said, chiding, “and you are a very silly young lady, to persist in fearing it.”
IT WAS THIS ominous exchange, with its o’erwrought and unwholesome emotions, which Samantha was forced to recall, not eighteen hours afterward: whilst seated thunderstruck in the gazebo, beside her sisters, as the outlaw balloon approached the wayward Deirdre!
Alas, that she could not draw sufficient breath, to cry out a warning: until it was too late, and the crude mechanism had alighted, and the balloonist’s greedy arms had seized hold of Deirdre, to pull her struggling into the basket; and away—to what region of Earth, or Hell, I know not.
EIGHT
Thus it was, that the unnamed and unidentified abductor, clad all in black, and manning a tall black silken balloon, of sinister elegance, came for Miss Deirdre Zinn at approximately the hour of seven o’clock in the evening, on the 23 September 1879: and so swift was his assault upon her, as she stood all unwitting on the riverbank, and so unerring his maneuvers, that he was able to pull her helpless into the balloon’s basket, and escape within scant seconds!—whilst her astounded sisters did naught but stare, and no one in the great Hall chanced to observe.
(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
As 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
None 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.
Then it was that, amidst all the truly advanced Philadelphians of the day, constituting a circle, of a kind, of educators, thinkers, poets, the younger and more rebellious members of the clergy, and certain independent women, no one was more avidly discussed, and quarreled over, than a twenty- six-year-old prodigy named John Quincy Zinn. (Indeed, more than one meeting of the famed Arcadia Club, to which Prudence belonged, had been devoted to a consideration of Mr. Zinn’s educational ideas: and many were the passions arous’d!) This young schoolteacher and philosopher, who had come from a rural community known as Mouth-of-Lebanon, above the Brandywine River, was commonly called a barbarian prince, a native American genius, a revolutionary of the Spirit, and Our Rousseau, amongst other flattering epithets. And, ah! was he not handsome!