And surely it is no mystery that, in so disorderly an atmosphere, Constance Philippa simply vanished: or so it was assumed by her grieving family. Whether she met with some species of evil likely to visit itself upon an unprotected woman, or whether she did in fact find protection: no one could know. The deeply insulted Baron von Mainz exposed the deficiencies in his European upbringing, by suing publicly for an annulment to his marriage, on grounds of both desertion and fraud; and by retaining title to the Rittenhouse Square town house, the magnanimous wedding gift of the Kiddemasters to the young couple. (The family was angered to learn that, not one month after the annulment, the wily Baron sold this desirable piece of Philadelphia property for a handsome price!)
Nor is it a mystery that a society so eager for novelty should divert itself with the excesses of Spiritualism, as with the excesses of tobacco and alcohol—evidenced by the financial successes of such mediums as the van Hoestenberghe twins, the “Mahatma” Lotos Bey, Mrs. Daisy Olcott, and Deirdre of the Shadows herself; and by the controversial renown of Madame Helen Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society. The penny papers thrived on scandal and sensationalism, and hawked interviews with such creatures as the infamous wife-murderer Brockden Smith, who had advanced as his defense, at his trial in Ipswich: “When they are dead, they are done with”—a pronouncement immediately taken up by the multitudes, as if murder were a cause for hilarity, and the deaths of five Christian women of no great significance.
A wide, wide world indeed! One altogether foreign to the tranquillity of Bloodsmoor; and the simplicity, innocence, and natural goodness enjoyed by the five Zinn daughters, in their girlhoods.
“It is as well, perhaps, that she knows so little”—many a grieving family member said, of the declining Mrs. Kiddemaster, who had taken to her bed after Deirdre’s abduction, and never regained her health thereafter. “As well, perhaps, that she may pass from this vale of tears in such serenity”—so the elderly Mr. Kiddemaster himself observed, at his wife’s bedside, when, some five months after the week in November in which Constance Philippa fled her bridegroom, and Malvinia ran off under the protection of Orlando Vandenhoffen, the saintly lady breathed her last.
BLOODSMOOR OBSERVED, WITH some surprise, and not a little murmuring, that Miss Edwina Kiddemaster, after an initial collapse in November, managed not only to rally her spirits, but to so gird her loins that, upon the publication of her new best-seller, 100 Hints for the Christian Young: A Primer of Modern Etiquette, she was able to address a number of religious and civic organizations in the Philadelphia area; and to accept an award, as Authoress of the Year, given by the Christian Protective Association in Baltimore. It was remarked upon by Dr. Moffet, who was fully acquainted with the history of her illnesses, and the capricious nature of her hypersensitivity, that the gallant lady seemed almost to rally in response to certain challenges; unlike poor Sarah Kiddemaster, who had not only turned her face to the wall, in a manner of speaking, after her granddaughters’ outrageous behavior, but who had, alas, turned from medicine itself—falling under the influence (or into the clutches, in Dr. Moffet’s heated words) of the several Bloodsmoor practitioners of the new and controversial doctrine of Christian Science, a religion not yet a decade old (for Mrs. Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures had first appeared in 1875).
Great-Aunt Edwina might almost have been gratified, that the very worst that might befall the young Zinn ladies had occurred, and she might be absolved of grieving over them, and loving them: for she was curiously distant with both Octavia and Samantha, and quite frugal in her condolences to Prudence; and, immediately upon her recovery, she summoned to Kiddemaster Hall her private attorney, evidently to restyle her will, as well as to direct a number of new investments, kept secret from her brother Godfrey, in speculations as disparate as the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad, John Rockefeller’s Standard Oil of Ohio, and Wanamaker’s. “I will not be crushed beneath the wheels of adversity,” Great-Aunt Edwina stated, in a tone of chill composure, “simply because of the bad judgment of others.” She wept, of course, at the death of her sister-in-law, for they had been invalid-companions for many years, and had shared many medicines; but she could not bring herself to feel, as others did, that Sarah Whitton Kiddemaster died a saint and a martyr. That Mrs. Kiddemaster had fallen under the spell of Mary Baker Eddy offended Edwina: for Mrs. Eddy’s prose style, set beside her own, was deficient in both sense and aesthetic power.
Apart from Edwina, however, all of Bloodsmoor mourned the ethereal old lady, who was so very clearly a victim of the young generation’s want of delicacy, and something coarse and frightening in the very air—which, tho’ Mrs. Kiddemaster read no newspapers or books, her extreme sensitivity allowed her to gauge. A courageous invalid since the 1820’s, when illness first forced her to her bed, she had managed, over the years, to triumph intermittently over a host of maladies that would have, in Dr. Moffet’s words, “felled any gentleman”—polyarthritis, discopathia, myositis, among others, and, since the winter of 1879–80, a new and hitherto unexplored disease, just beginning to be prevalent in the mid-Atlantic region, known as “ovarian neuralgia,” in which Dr. Moffet had become something of an expert, before the Christian Science practitioners supplanted him in the old lady’s affections.
It would have been very difficult for Octavia and Samantha to believe, had they not the testimony of their elders, and that of an oil portrait painted at the time of their grandmother’s wedding—so very long ago, Monroe had been President, and Daniel Webster a handsome young man, and the women’s fashions quaint indeed!—that Sarah Kiddemaster had been, in her youth, one of the loveliest girls in the region; and that she had “had her pick,” as the saying went, of all the eligible young men. Over the years her more spiritual qualities had strengthened, as her physical qualities waned, and, even as a woman of middle age, she had been admired for the extraordinary slenderness of her waist (a mere seventeen inches, rivaling any girl’s), and for the delicate pallor of her complexion, which unseemly blushes never despoiled. Perhaps as a consequence of religious devotion, or a natural constitutional inclination, this good lady had gradually conquered appetite in all its insidious forms. She allowed no more than two meals to be set before her, of a day; and each was a repast of agreeable lightness, fish and fowl rather than red meat, with no rich French sauces, or unnecessary spices, to stimulate the blood to needless agitation. It hardly needs to be said that Sarah Kiddemaster was a resolute teetotaler, as impatient as Edwina herself with those who regularly succumbed to the weakness of imbibing. (Alas, this included her husband, Godfrey, and many a time did he slam out of the room, when they dined alone together, before Sarah’s invalidism confined her to her quarters! The family thought it quite a pity, too, that Great-Uncle Vaughan, who had been so attached to Sarah in their youth, was one of that number of menfolk in the family whom the good lady had banned from her bedchamber, in her last illness, for, as she claimed with incontestable accuracy, the men fairly reeked of alcohol without being conscious of it, for the poisonous substance had gradually permeated their bloodstreams; and a teetotaler of Sarah’s sensitivity could not bear it.)
That Sarah Kiddemaster was a saint, no one in the household could doubt; not even the servants, who oft felt the power of her diminutive will, and responded with alacrity to her frequent calls. Before illness overtook her she was active in numerous church functions, both in Philadelphia and Bloodsmoor; and, in Bloodsmoor, as “first lady,” so to speak, she had assumed her social obligations with a resigned grace, and condescended to visit the five or six homes in the village which tradition had deemed worthy of Kiddemaster attention. “Utterly good”—“utterly selfless”—“angelic”—“the epitome of Christian womanhood”—“unperturbed by inordinate thought”; so whispered praise for Mrs. Kiddemaster sounded, well before her death at the age of seventy-nine. Her activities were a thrice-daily reading of the Bible, kept at all times on her bedside tab
le; and her crocheting, to which she applied her flagging energies, with piteous industry, on the very eve of her passing; and near-constant prayer, in which Miss Narcissa Gilpin, as a new convert to Christian Science, guided her. Wickedness, sin, and ill-health do not exist: and the soul beset by demonic confusions of “ill-health” has only to pray with doubled intensity, to regain God’s blessing of perfect health. (For some excited days it was thought that Mrs. Eddy herself might journey to Bloodsmoor, to more expertly guide the sickroom prayers; but the distance between Lynn, Massachusetts, and Bloodsmoor, being discouraging, and Mrs. Eddy’s own health uncertain, nothing came of these plans. Alas, how overjoyed poor Sarah would have been, to see the great Mary Baker Eddy in the flesh!—perchance to shake her hand, and to witness her apply herself to prayer, that wickedness, sin, and ill-health might be banished as the delusions they are!)
For many years Mrs. Kiddemaster had devoted herself to the female arts, with agreeable results: china-painting, egg-decorating, the construction of beautiful papier-mâché flowers, and music of all kinds. In her confinement she restricted herself to needlepoint, knitting, embroidering, and crocheting, sometimes for the poor of the village—who badly needed, as one might imagine, warm clothing for our severe winter months—and sometimes for the trousseaus of her young nieces and granddaughters. Quilts, afghans, coverlets, towels, napkins, handkerchiefs, doilies, antimacassars. . . . Even on her deathbed she was hurrying to complete an antimacassar begun many months previously, for Octavia’s trousseau, insisting in her gentle voice that she must make haste, she had not long on this earth, and this pretty little trifle was for her sweetest granddaughter Octavia; the granddaughter she loved above all the rest. No one had told her, of course, of Malvinia’s and Constance Philippa’s defections; yet that astute lady had seemed to know, and to have resigned herself. She spoke ill of no one on earth, but, it was noted by all, she did reiterate her grandmotherly love for Octavia, as the sweetest, most docile, and most worthy of the girls; it may have been that, in the drowsiness of her gradual decline, she forgot about poor Samantha entirely—a possibility that disturbed the child more than I might have anticipated. In any case Grandmother Kiddemaster was crocheting for Octavia’s trousseau on her deathbed, no matter that the blushing young lady felt obliged to tell her that, at the present time, she was not engaged, and had very few prospects. “Nonsense,” Grandmother Kiddemaster said softly, her ivory-pale, curiously unlined, and ethereally lovely face turned for a moment to her granddaughter, “we all marry; you will see.”
Death so gently stole into the bedchamber, and gathered her in his merciful embrace, that even Narcissa Gilpin, rapt in prayer not three feet from the expiring lady, took no note of the actual moment of her surcease. That her death was beautiful, befitting her life, none could contest: not even the surly Dr. Moffet, lingering for weeks downstairs, who had insisted to all who would listen that, had he permission to bleed Mrs. Kiddemaster, and to give her medicines for the ovarian neuralgia above all else, he “would have her on her feet in no time.”
The elderly judge wept passionately for her, hiding his face in his hands. For a spell the family thought him inconsolable: again and again he moaned, “My belovèd, my angel, my dear girl,” and not even his daughter Prudence could calm him. “My Sarah, my perfect one, we will never see your likes again in Bloodsmoor—” until the poor old gentleman collapsed himself, and had to be carried to his own bedchamber, to be tended by Dr. Moffet.
After a brief consultation it was decided that an autopsy might be beneficial, in the interests of medical science, for Mrs. Kiddemaster had died, after all, of no discernible disease—her numerous ailments being of a minor nature, vexing and debilitating, but not fatal. And so the dread but necessary operation was performed, with what astonishing results I can scarcely bring myself to record: it was discovered that Mrs. Kiddemaster had possessed very few inner organs, and those of a miniature, or atrophied, nature. The torso, stomach, abdominal, and genital regions were largely hollow; and in these cavities, amidst the pools of pale pink watery blood, were some four or five organs of a size and quality that even the mortician, with his expert eye, experienced some difficulty in identifying. A tiny heart; a tiny liver, of a perplexing grayish-white hue; pebble-sized kidneys; a stomach sac of perhaps three inches in diameter; no bowels at all; a papery-thin conglobate envelope that might have been the uterus, or a genito-urinary canal of some sort, its function too coarse to explore. Having been the enviable possessor, throughout her life, of a skeleton of the most refined delicacy, Mrs. Kiddemaster was found to weigh after her death only forty-three pounds: which figure, the mortician thought most extraordinary, a tribute as much to the lady’s ascetic Christian practices of diet, as to her God-given anatomy.
Upon being given Grandmother Kiddemaster’s crocheted antimacassar, poor Octavia succumbed to fresh fits of sobbing; for she had loved her grandmother dearly, and had never felt worthy of the lady’s especial affection. “Samantha, what shall I do; how shall I deal with such grief?” Octavia cried. “Perhaps I am guilty of having allowed Grandmother to deceive herself, as to the nature of my marital prospects!” Samantha comforted her, as best she could, and together both girls examined the crocheting: a wonderfully delicate work, giving no evidence of the lady’s ebbing powers, save in its exceptional length. For, Mr. Zinn having measured it with his tape, the antimacassar was somewhat above the conventional in length, being 1,358 yards, or some three-quarters of a mile, and would present problems of practicability.
“I fear that I am not worthy of Grandmother’s love, or of her final blessing,” Octavia said, dashing fresh tears from her eyes.
Pert little Samantha, staring at the crocheting, and fingering its delicate texture, sighed, and said: “You are worthier than I.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
The meteoric rise to fame of “Malvinia Morloch” on the New York City stage, as one of the chief attractions of the popular Fanshawe Theatre troupe, was never commented on by her Bloodsmoor kin—for Mrs. Zinn wisely banned all mention of the renegade daughter’s name in the Octagonal House, since the mere uttering of “Malvinia” would disturb Mr. Zinn, and seriously interfere with his work; and elderly Judge Kiddemaster, embittered and weary, and given to sardonicism, deemed it a more useful occupation of his twilight years, to keep a close eye on the follies of his time—the Republican “Stalwarts” who wanted Grant back in the Presidency, the Democratic machinery with its boastful crooks, the idiocies of barbarians like William Henry Vanderbilt, “the richest man in the world”—and dictate his memoirs to an amanuensis, and concentrate his grandfatherly love (the meager quantity that remained) on Octavia and Samantha, the virtuous sisters. With a measured smile, and in a voice lightly tinged with gentlemanly irony, he allowed that he “anticipated with subdued hope” the next generation: and that he was prepared to enjoy his great-grandchildren, when they appeared.
Photographs of both Malvinia and Constance Philippa were carefully packed away in silver tissue, along with most of their clothes and personal possessions, for it was better so, that their betrayals be felt as deaths; and an appropriate period of mourning undertaken, and completed. (Mrs. Zinn, leading the servants in a flurry of housecleaning one fine day, disposed of the dressmaker’s dummies that had once belonged to Malvinia and Deirdre—the one having belonged to Constance Philippa being already disposed of. Certain items of clothing that had belonged to Malvinia—handkerchiefs, sashes, veils, gloves, lace collars were given to Octavia, provided they did not upset Mr. Zinn when he happened to glance at them; Samantha having rejected them, with a contemptuous twist of her lip. And a fan or two, and a lacy morning cap, and a crimson silk sunshade, and a Turkey Morocco case with the golden clasps which—alas, so long ago!—the handsome Cheyney Du Pont de Nemours had surreptitiously given Malvinia: these pretty items Octavia kept, less for their value in themselves than as mementos of the heartless Malvinia. She tied the morning cap’s strings beneath her chin, and studied hers
elf in her mirror, and wondered: Would Malvinia laugh cruelly, to see her thus?
At the very rear of one of Malvinia’s wardrobe drawers, hidden beneath a sheet of silver paper, was a small yellowed Valentine—pinks and crimsons and creamy-white adorned with strips of lace (badly yellowed as well)—not a homemade card, but charming nonetheless: the signature M.K. in tall playful letters, and quite a puzzle to Octavia: M.K.? But who was M.K.? A young man, a girl?—an older relative? The Valentine, Octavia judged, was very old; Malvinia must have received it many years ago; and either treasured it greatly, or had simply forgotten about it.
This too Octavia kept, in secret, hiding it beneath the tissue in one of her wardrobe drawers.