It may have been an accident of the vibrant light, or a consequence of the Bonners’ frayed nerves, but the stranger looming over their daughter appeared to be unnaturally tall—perhaps ten feet, or more—and his broad smiling countenance was too smiling, having the effect, very nearly, of a beam or beacon. The blond locks, too, as they rippled in an imperceptible breeze, did glow with an extraordinary ferocity. Was this creature a wizard of some sort?—a sorcerer—a male witch—the very embodiment, it seemed, of the gorge’s ominous atmosphere? Yet so sturdy and broad-shouldered was the man, and so generously did his deep laughter sound, that he could not, certainly, have been anything so insubstantial, so pitifully meager, as a ghost!
Drawing bravely near, however, the trembling Bonners saw, in the next instant, to what we can only characterize as their enormous relief, that the man was not in truth a stranger: and, indeed, he was a gentleman of the first rank: none other than John Quincy Zinn.
A HAPPY CONCLUSION, then, to an episode fraught with more than a little alarm: one’s heart swells with joy, to see again Mr. and Mrs. Bonner hurrying to their naughty child’s side, and sweeping her up in an embrace, all the while exclaiming, and admonishing, and fairly gasping with relief, and simple gratitude, and protestations of apology uttered to Mr. Zinn!—for the moment was an emotional one, verging upon the inchoate, and the Bonners are to be forgiven if their hearts pounded most wildly, and tears sprang into their eyes, with an admixture of joy, relief, and parental reprehension.
In an instant, however, all was clear. All was explained, and quite straightforward. Deirdre had wandered onto the plateau of flat rocks, and Mr. Zinn, enraptured by the silence, and completely caught up, as he phrased it, in the “solitude of the Divine Eye,” turned to see her—with some surprise at first (for naturally he did not expect to see a child in that wild place, or any human figure at all), and then with delight, and amusement. For what a charming little miss Deirdre was, in her lambswool bonnet, and her smart calfskin boots, new that past Christmas!
The Bonners, conscious of their intrusion into Mr. Zinn’s reverie (it being obvious to them that the renowned inventor had been startl’d out of a deep meditation, and no mere idle daydream), and conscious even more painfully of their gravely disparate social status, would have hastened back home immediately, their little girl firmly in tow, had not the handsome Mr. Zinn, with the aristocratic charity of his in-law Kiddemasters, and the yet more impressive spontaneity of friendliness, of his own sunny nature, invited them all to his workshop: there to partake of tea and a light repast, and a few minutes’ much-needed rest, before they began their hike home.
The Bonners declined this gracious invitation, with many a blush and genteel protestation; but Mr. Zinn so insisted, and Deirdre grew so lively in her insistence, that, after some minutes, the Bonners acquiesced, and, Mr. Bonner carrying the somwhat o’erwrought child in his arms, they repaired to the cabin, not one hundred yards distant, on a sturdy granite promontory overlooking the gorge’s deepest chasm.
The cabin was trim and foursquare, made of plain, stolid, ordinary birch logs, in the weathertight fashion first demonstrated, in the New World of the mid-1600’s, by the Swedish and Finnish pioneers, and quite unknown—if legendary history tells truth—to both English and German, and even Dutch, settlers. Mr. and Mrs. Bonner, greatly pleased with Mr. Zinn’s hospitality, enjoyed the visit less demonstrably than did little Deirdre: but were pleased nonetheless, to be offered fresh Ceylon tea, and delicious date-nut squares baked (as Mr. Zinn but casually mentioned) by Mrs. Zinn herself—Mrs. Zinn being of course Miss Prudence Kiddemaster, the daughter of the famous Judge, and Mrs. Sarah Whitton Kiddemaster, the wealthy Wilmington heiress.
The Bonners were given chairs by the small but cozy fire, and introduced to Mr. Zinn’s pet monkey, Pip, that “naughty little furry-souled devil,” as Mr. Zinn fondly called him, and made to feel quite at home, despite their nervousness; and their apprehension, for which they were perhaps justified, that Deirdre would upset something in the crowded workshop, as she prowled and pranced about, Mr. Zinn sunnily ignoring her, or implicitly, as it were, encouraging her. Ah, a lovely teatime visit!—memorable, indeed historic, in the Bonners’ lives!—for they would hardly have dared imagine, at the outset of their Sabbath walk, so astounding a conclusion. Yet here was the son-in-law of Judge Kiddemaster speaking warmly to them, as if they were all equals, offering them more tea, and not minding that Deirdre teased and romped with Pip (who had taken to her immediately with all the vivacity of a puppy, and some of the intelligent reserve of a human adult), and even chatting with them about various highly intriguing subjects quite beyond their scope of knowledge: the likelihood of there being, within a generation, an “auto-wagen” to replace the horsedrawn carriage; the possibility of there being, in the next century at least, a revolutionary source of energy, whether solar, lunar, or prised out of the atom by main force; and the pity of it (tho’ why it should be a pity, the Bonners did not grasp), that oil-drilling in the Titusville mountain range was proceeding with such rapidity, and commercial success, under the guidance of one Edwin L. Drake of the Seneca Oil Company—about whom, Mr. Zinn confessed, he knew very little, save that he felt envy for the man’s achievement!
(The Bonners would have exchanged a glance of surprise, that the renowned John Quincy Zinn, who was surely a wealthy gentleman in his own right, should express envy of anyone living; but of course they were too courteous to do so, in Mr. Zinn’s presence.)
John Quincy Zinn then showed Deirdre a remarkable toy of his own invention—a Zinnoscope, as he playfully called it. It was a cylinder made of some substance akin to papier-mâché, which, when held to the eye, afforded a marvelous fluid kaleidoscopic story: the winsome monkey Pip himself, cavorting and frolicking and leaping about. (The elder Bonners, as well as Deirdre, were fascinated by this creation, and could not guess how it worked. Tiny mirrors that turned and circled; pastel sketches of Pip allegedly executed by one of Mr. Zinn’s daughters—and how gloriously talented she must be!—it quite beggared the imagination.) Mr. Zinn’s generosity was such, that he tried to press this extraordinary toy upon the Bonners, claiming that his own daughters were “fatigued” by it, and no longer had the slightest interest in it; but the Bonners were well-bred enough to decline this offer, with many expressions of gratitude.
“Please do take it with you,” Mr. Zinn exclaimed. “Deirdre, my dear, will you accept it? As a token of—well, shall we say—an ordinary Sunday?—an ordinary Sunday in March, wondrously interrupted by a magical visitation?” But, despite the child’s loudly vociferated wishes, the Bonners did decline, with finality.
Mr. Zinn begged them, however, to accept from him, as a “mere commonplace of a toy,” an ingenious jack-in-the-box he had made, out of hickory wood, with his fretsaw: and this the Bonners were pressed into accepting, for Deirdre, who was naturally o’erjoyed, and expressed her excited gratitude by seizing the gentleman’s strong, sturdy fingers, in a somewhat uncharacteristic gesture of childish exuberance, and pumping them up and down as if in an adult handshake.
In all, for Herman and Catherine Bonner, an unforgettable episode in their foreshortened lives—a memorable Sabbath, to be cherished in both this world, and in the next.
IT WAS THAT very evening, as Deirdre was being tucked into bed, that she murmured, sleepily, with but a modicum of apprehension, that she saw “a big dark cloud, a flaming cloud,” approaching the house: but Mrs. Bonner assured her there was nothing amiss, save that the hour was late for little girls to be awake.
Deirdre shifted restlessly beneath her blankets, and groped for her mother’s warm hand, and, half asleep, said that “a little girl” would run out the door, and the door would slam behind her, and the “Momma and Poppa” would be caught inside; and the great dark fiery cloud would o’ertake the house, and cause it to explode into flames.
These remarks would have disturbed Mrs. Bonner had they been uttered with more alarm, but Deirdre was so slee
py from her long hike, and so sweetly composed in her bed, with her dark-gleaming hair against the embroidered pillowcase, and her eyelids too heavy to remain open, that only an individual sadly acquainted with occult prophecy, or predisposed to alarm, would have taken note: and Mrs. Bonner, who placed her faith in our Heavenly Father, was neither.
So Deirdre was tucked into bed, and her mother leaned over her, and visited a kiss or two upon her warm cheek, and whispered, in the tremulous voice of loving maternal solicitude: “God bless you and keep you, my child.”
The sleep-befuddled child was unable to return her mother’s kiss, but managed to caress her cheek, with a vague little hand, and to take hold, for a moment, of the gold locket Mrs. Bonner wore about her neck: a legacy that would one day be hers, and oh! so far sooner than anyone might have known.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Tho’ the years of Deirdre’s sojourn at the Octagonal House, as one of the Zinn sisters—so renowned, and so envied, in the village!—were illuminated by moments, and, indeed, episodes of some duration, of contentment, and even of happiness (deriving most forcefully from Deirdre’s adoration of her stepfather), it must be said that her sisters were not unfairly severe, in judging her heavy of heart, and perpetually mourning, and scandalously ungrateful—this last utterance being Malvinia’s.
The great dark cloud envisioned by the nine-year-old, in her innocence, ballooned to encompass the entire sky, it seemed: nor did she escape its shadow, tho’ her new sisters petted her, and spoiled her, and loved her dearly—for a time. The exiguity of her feeling for them, and, it may be, for life itself, soon discouraged all but Octavia. (For is it not our Christian duty, Octavia inquired, to love where no love was deserved, or even desired?)
For a spell of some months, well into the summer of her first year with the Zinns, Deirdre was mute: not out of any physiological malady Dr. Moffet could determine, but out of sheer grief or, it may be, out of willful stubbornness, tho’ the good doctor naturally did not like to make this diagnosis. Shrinking from the Zinns’ warmest greetings—holding herself preternaturally still when hugged—composing a face of the gravest sorrow, even when delightful Pip cavorted with a black squirrel, on a fine summer’s day, and the Zinns all heartily laughed, and the world was a place of serenity and beauty: so the child resisted love, as if the activity of loving, of her own, were a treacherous possibility, to be anxiously resisted.
“Momma,” she sometimes whispered, “Poppa—are you close by?”
She acquired the extraordinary ability—so her sisters jested, out of the elder Zinns’ hearing—to make her cheeks go clammy and cold, when she was being kissed; she had too the ability—hardly an enviable one!—of altering the fragrance of sweet lavender, or powdered roses, or ambergris (sewn up in “sweet bags” for wardrobe drawers), to a dull cold flat must-odor, redolent of the cobwebbed recesses of the cellar, or the grave itself. She was observed as smiling almost with pain, and with a nearly imperceptible brightening of her countenance, when Mr. Zinn addressed her, or squatted before her, to converse; she might respond timidly, to Mrs. Zinn’s hearty embrace; or to one of plucky Octavia’s overtures. Constance Philippa’s height, and rather brusque manner, and unconvincing interest in her, were distinctly unsettling as was Malvinia’s unpredictable manner—now vivacious and warm and inviting, now petulant and haughty, and cruel. Samantha, nearest her age, a “young-old” child not unlike herself, tried much harder to love her stepsister than the family appreciated, tho’ the nervous burden of sharing a bedchamber with a virtual stranger, affected her greatly, and roused her to some resentment, of her parents’ fanciful notions of family life, and of Christian charity in general. (Many years later, as an elderly woman, reflecting upon her years as the favorite daughter of John Quincy Zinn—for so, with the passage of decades, assisting quite innocently waxed into favorite—Samantha was to speak tersely of such domestic trials, observing only that her genius-father did not stint, in introducing the experimental method, with its ambiguous consequences, into familial life. But that his intentions were good—surpassingly good, and exemplary—was never in question.)
That Deirdre was a “wizened little cuckoo bird plopped down in our nest,” as Malvinia wickedly observed, was surely unfair to Deirdre: for the heart-stricken orphan had hardly wished to be an orphan: and would not have wished Death to o’ertake anyone, let alone her belovèd parents, could she have grasped the nature of it, and the immeasurable losses for the living.
“MOMMA,” SHE WHISPERED, “Poppa?—are you close by? Do you hear, do you see? Have you abandoned me forever?”
But Spirit World for many years was distant from her, operating by some logic of constraint we know not of: and the Bonners inaccessible: lost in tenebrous confusion, of the kind that attends spirits crossing over in the midst of extreme emotional agitation, or physical distress. And when Spirit World did manifest itself, after Deirdre’s twelfth year, it was with such a cacophonous air, and so diffused into raps, knocks, creaks, frissons of every conceivable kind, and frequently vulgar pranks, that the wretched child could hardly have been expected to discern, in such chaos, any personal or human direction; nor did she, being quite untrained at that time, in matters of a psychic nature, seek to exert any control upon this chaos.
Of the numerous chilling manifestations of ghost phenomena the Octagonal House suffered, over a period of many months, and of the household’s varying responses to them (ranging from the frightened servants’ immediate recognition of spirits, to John Quincy Zinn’s firm denunciation of all things supernatural), I am reluctant to speak in any detail, for fear of drawing upon sensationalist, if not frankly crude, or even obscene, material. The reader will recall Deirdre’s capricious musical ability at the piano, which so frequently erupted into sheer ringing noise, said ability at first intriguing, and then evidently disgusting, Great-Aunt Edwina (who closed a door emphatically upon a rendition of Schubert’s lovely “Adieu . . .”); but it has not been revealed, that, in Great-Aunt Edwina’s presence, the child was invariably o’ercome with an attack of shivering, and a veritable barrage of spirit-voices, including those of her deceased parents, who insisted upon the fact that Edwina Kiddemaster loathed her, and rejected her as a bastard child, and secreted away in her heart the baffling wish that she should die! (Naturally Deirdre could not determine whether these voices were in fact spirit-voices, or whether she simply imagined them; or whether, in some inexplicable way, she was able, at times, to read her great-aunt’s thoughts. That she was incapable of determining the actual sense of the whisperings—why, for instance, she should be considered a bastard, and why Miss Kiddemaster should wish her dead—goes without saying, nor did the o’erwrought child make much effort to interpret such things, abandoning all sense and all logic, and even her peace of mind: wishing merely to be safely out of Edwina’s presence, in her bed, perhaps, beneath her warm quilts, where she might sob herself to sleep, or pretend to sleep, in order to elude Samantha’s shy ministrations of concern. “Momma,” she might whisper to herself, or “Poppa,” or even “Heavenly Father,” or “Dear Jesus,” she might utter beneath her breath, “help me please, oh please, do not let me go mad!”)
Her relations with other members of the family, while less dismaying, were equally bewildering, and oft caused the beleaguered girl to question whether what appeared to be, in fact was; or whether, in all helplessness, she dreamt everything. Perspicacious enough, in the first month of her residence with the Zinns, to recognize that she must express the gratitude she felt, to her new family (for had they not saved her from an orphanage?—from certain misery in some charitable institution, in Philadelphia?), Deirdre nonetheless observed that her words, sincerely uttered, were not heard!—as if, by some inexplicable freak, all the Zinns were deaf to her alone.
She quietly thanked Mrs. Zinn for some small, special favor (an extra dollop of cream on her porridge, a cashmere shawl draped about her thin shoulders, an impulsive hug when no one else was near), yet received no response, as
if she had not spoken at all: and saw only a hurt, perplexed smile on the elder woman’s face, and a further crinkling of her brow. She murmured a few words to Mr. Zinn, who occasionally tucked her into bed, along with Samantha, leading the girls in their night prayers, and jesting fondly with them, before he extinguished the lamp: yet he seemed not to hear: tho’ he heard Samantha perfectly well! “Mr. Zinn,” she said (for it was to be many months, before she could call him “Father,” and she never called him “Poppa”), “Mr. Zinn, thank you so much you are a good man thank you oh thank you”—but the heartfelt words were not received; and it was quite as if she had never spoken.
“I love you,” she tried to say. “I am so grateful. I am so happy here. Please do not send me away, oh please, please!”
But she might as well have remained silent, for all the effect her words had; she might as well have been mute.
AS TIME PASSED, fortunately, her communications with the Zinns were somewhat more successful: they at least heard that she spoke, tho’ her meaning was frequently distorted.
One balmy midsummer afternoon Constance Philippa asked her, of a sudden, wouldn’t she like to romp down to the river?—toss down her cap, and take off her shoes and stockings, and run barefoot across the grass? (Mrs. Zinn being away on an errand with the maid Vanda, and the younger servants entrusted not to tell tales.) “We could wade in the shallow water—scare up the ducks, and cause them to fly away—what a wonderful squawking and quacking that will be!—and it will be so cool down there—and no one need know—” the tomboyish girl said, with an inviting grin, already untying her beribboned muslin cap: but Deirdre must have communicated both surprise and disapproval (which, indeed, she did not feel—her heart swelled with gratitude for the suggestion), for Constance Philippa colored at once, as if hurt, and angered: and turned aside with a muttered comment about “fancy little misses with their precious skirts, and patent leather shoes, and delicate ladylike airs!”