For here, exposed to the public’s condemning gaze, and, doubtless, to its merry scorn, were some half-dozen women—not wishing to be termed ladies—who declared themselves campaigners for Dress Reform, and Woman Suffrage, and Equal Rights, and something most baffling, to Prudence’s mind, a Single Moral Standard. Egregious enough, such a blatant display of folly—and, in their midst, none other than Parthenope Brownrrigg, of old!
Inwardly quaking, Prudence adjusted her reading glasses, and hurried to a window, that she might, with the aid of daylight, the better to read the extraordinary article: only to be the more gravely shaken, yet moved to childish jeering laughter, by the discovery that one of Parthenope Brownrrigg’s younger companions, a woman by the name of Miss Elaine Cottler, had stepped forth publicly, with the support of the others, to place herself as a candidate, for the Presidency of the United States!
Prudence closely studied the countenances of the women, and was disturbed, in the case of old Miss Brownrrigg in particular, to find them not greatly differing from her own—from her own, that is, and those of her numerous female relatives. One or two of the women were most aggressively plain; one was erect of carriage, and remarkably attractive—this being, Prudence gathered, the bold Miss Cottler; all were smiling—brash and arrogant smiles, indeed, considering the circumstances of their being photographed: for, to their collective shame, these women were under arrest as common offenders, in Hartford, Connecticut.
“It should not—it must not—it cannot be allowed!” Prudence declared, thrusting the page of offensive newsprint from her, and feeling herself so o’ercome (for she was now in her seventy-sixth year, and frequently short of breath), she had need to be seated, and to calm herself in repose, for upward of ten minutes.
“It will be the end,” Prudence murmured, scarce knowing what her words meant, “the end, of everything.”
YET, AS HER aunt’s lengthy confession drew to its close, Prudence saw again that coarse photograph, and, far from being inclined to join with the others, who were now freely weeping (old Narcissa Gilpin sobbing loudest of all), she was struck with a curious wonderment, that she could recall not merely the outline of the picture, but the actual faces of the women: she could recall, with amazing clarity, certain of the statements of the Dress Reform Movement, and those of the National Women’s Suffrage Association, and Mrs. Abba Goold Woolson, and Miss Elaine Cottler, and one or two more.
This extraordinary recollection flooded upon her, and for a very long time she ceased to hear her nephew’s strained voice; or, indeed, the voice of old Edwina, straining through it. How many minutes passed, I cannot say, nor could Prudence have said: but, as Basil concluded the document, and the assemblage in the room murmured aloud, and the more liberally wept, Prudence Zinn spoke to herself in a startl’d voice, in which some reproach sounded: “But, I suppose, I am too old now, to run for President!”
EIGHTY-THREE
Tho’ it is but an accident of Fate, and of time, I am inclined to think it emblematic, that my chronicle draws to a close on the night of January 31, 1899: and that it concludes, not in the Octagonal House, nor in the austere splendor of old Kiddemaster Hall, but in the homely and cluttered cabin above the gorge, the famed workshop of J.Q.Z.!
For here, as a snow-driven midnight approaches, we find a solitary figure; and witness the caprices of her shadow, alternately shrinking and looming against the walls, in the eerie light cast by a kerosene lamp.
A thief, an intruder, a spy of Edison’s? An idolatrous disciple?
Or one of Mr. Zinn’s helpmeets?
Not Samantha, who once loved her father so dearly, and so gratefully subordinated her will to his—for Samantha, alas, is a loyal wife, and a doting mother, many times over, who is, at this very moment, keeping a merry vigil with her husband, by the fireside, in their home in Guilford, Delaware: kissing, and laughing, and holding hands, and preparing to drink an alcoholic toast, to the New Year.
Nor Mrs. Zinn, who has, by this date, virtually abandoned her household, to take up residence, with her girlhood companion Miss Brownrrigg, in a ladies’ hotel on Beacon Hill, but a block from the brownstone headquarters for the Dress Reform Movement: so brutally severing herself from her former life, that the telegram, containing the news of Mr. Zinn’s rapid decline, will go astray, having been addressed to Mrs. John Quincy Zinn, and not to Miss Prudence Kiddemaster! (Indeed, the callous woman will barely return to Bloodsmoor in time for the funeral.)
Nor does the lone figure belong to a simple servant girl, commanded by the weakening Mr. Zinn, to rummage through the great disorder of papers on his workbench, and locate the sheet of paper containing his most recent calculations, and bring it to him; that, on his sickbed (in truth, his deathbed), he might feverishly complete the formula, of the invention to save the world!
Nay, it is none of these personages, but Deirdre herself: our brave and beauteous heroine of old, Deirdre Kiddemaster (for such she is now called—with a sentimental, if not a legal, authority), the new mistress of Kiddemaster Hall!
THAT OUR SENSITIVE young lady has yet to resolve the veritable tempest in her heart (as to whether she will accept the honorable proposal of Dr. Lionel Stoughton, or the coarse entreaty of Hassan Agha), and that, indeed, much remains unresolved, in her soul, cannot concern us here: for our concern is solely with her mission, in Mr. Zinn’s service, and with its puzzling outcome. (Tho’ this brief chapter, of tenebrous shadows, and a kerosene lamp’s feeble glow, surely contains the clue, as to which man she will marry.)
The waxen-skinned John Quincy Zinn, lying abed with the chill dignity of a tomb effigy, and wondrously alert, in his quick-darting thoughts and suspicions, had, not an hour ago, summoned his adopted daughter to the Octagonal House, and to his side: that, in a low, hoarse, methodical voice, he might bid her go at once to his workshop, despite the late hour, and the growing blizzard, to seek out a certain sheet of paper, covered in scrawled calculations, and bring it to him: for, he feared, he would not live out the night, and, in any case, he would not be strong enough, upon the morn, to journey out there, and complete his great work.
“I shall never finish it,” he said, in his reproachful voice, gazing at the frightened Deirdre from out his sepulchral eyes, “I shall never finish it there. But, perhaps, in the comfort and sanctity of my bed, and with your assistance—”
Deirdre acquiesced at once, giving no thought to the howling wind, or to her own premonition, that something tragic would occur, before dawn: on the contrary, the young heiress stooped to kiss her father on his gaunt, fevered brow, and to prop up the goose-feather pillows behind him, that he might be more comfortable. (Alas, J.Q.Z. rarely slept any longer!—but spent the interminable nights sitting, rather than lying, abed, entertaining dreams with his eyes open, the which, in his own words, proved paltry and disappointing, set beside the work that awaited him in the cabin: the final calculations pertaining to the perpetual-motion machine, and its principle, as applied to the phenomenon of atom-expansion, or detonation—a concept so foreign to my feeble woman’s brain, I cannot pretend to describe it.)
“The victory is close at hand, and will be so sweet!—ah, so very sweet, I halfway think it might prolong my life!” the poor man murmured, for the moment so agitated, he grasped Deirdre’s slender wrist in his chill fingers, and smiled upward at her. “For, do you see, it is an invention to save the world—to save our world—from all harm—from wickedness—from the Devil’s camp—which will have no defense against us, once the explosive mechanism is perfected. My dear daughter—do you see?”
“I am not certain, Father, that I see,” Deirdre said, covertly wiping a tear from out her eye, “for your inventions, like your genius, have long been beyond my ability to grasp. But perhaps it is not necessary for me, as your daughter, and, should you wish, your loving nurse, to see, or to comprehend: perhaps it is only necessary for me to obey.”
“The device, once triggered, will explode effortlessly—and endlessly—and cannot, i
n fact, be halted,” Mr. Zinn said dreamily, “and that is its beauty, that neither we, nor our diabolical enemies, might halt it. I fully realize, how the ignorant scoffers joke—how they prattle of crude sorcery, and black magic, and mere wishes!—for it is incomprehensible to them, that the invisible air cushioning the earth is, in fact, a dense element, and that its unique molecular constitution may be known to us, and, by our wizardry, unlocked—unlocked, I say, in perpetual motion, once the device be tripped. The spectacle is so vast, it cannot be contemplated: an endless series of detonations. And, once begun, not to be halted; for tho’ our enemies see their predicament, and the tragedy of their lot, tho’ they beg for mercy, tho’ we should even wish to extend them mercy—it will not be possible: nay, it will not! it will not! And now, my dear daughter, do you see?”
Deirdre stooped to kiss the old gentleman’s fever’d brow, not shying away from the dagger-shaped birthmark, which, in sharp contrast to his waxen skin, glowed a fiery red, and appeared to throb, with an especial vehemence, at this juncture in time: the dutiful daughter stooped, and kissed his brow, and whispered consolingly: “I begin to see, dear Father.”
ALAS, HOW STRANGELY brooding J.Q.Z. has become, in recent years; how given to long silences, and secretive ruminations, and sudden outbursts of savage, mirthless laughter! The gratifying success of certain of his inventions (submarines, missiles, and e’er-more powerful bombs, of inestimable value in the war against the Spanish enemy), seems to have made very little impression upon him: a matter for pride, and gloating, rather more on the part of his manufacturer associates and investors, than on his own. (For, having been gifted with one-seventh of the famed Kiddemaster fortune, what possible need has this elderly gentleman for additional wealth? What energy, even, to calculate it?)
Most surprising of all, in his family’s eyes, and, I am bound to say, in my own, was his irritable rejection of membership to the American Philosophical Society!—those gentlemen having thought, in their ignorance, that this long-delayed honor would be eagerly seized, by the Bloodsmoor genius. Mr. Zinn’s relatives, not excluding his daughters, had supposed that the announcement of his election, at long last, would cheer him, in the midst of his preoccupations: but, quite the contrary, he had deemed the news, in his own words, contemptible!—and would not have had the elementary courtesy, to trouble to reply to the telegram, had not the new mistress of Kiddemaster Hall, conscious of the obligations rank and station confer, insisted. “I am deeply saddened, Father, that you take this pleasant news so indifferently,” Deirdre said, daring to lightly chide the old man, who had torn the offending yellow paper in two, “but I must beg you, to at least allow me, to decline the honor as courteously as possible.”
Whereupon Mr. Zinn paused, and, his skeletal face for a moment illuminated with a rare smile, said: “Ask them—demand of them—the fools!—ask them how they fancy, they have the right, to confer honors upon me!”
“Why, Father,” Deirdre exclaimed, in genuine surprise, “you must know, the gentlemen mean only well—they mean only to please. If they have been somewhat tardy in their action, if, being but human, they have not until now adequately grasped the magnitude of your genius—”
“If, if! If, indeed!” Mr. Zinn laughed softly. “My dear daughter, I know not if, and have no interest in if—not my own, and certainly not another’s.”
So, her cheeks blushing, Deirdre left the bedchamber, to compose a message for the Society, declining the great honor, with regret—“with infinite regret,” as her telegram read, “as a consequence of my extreme and continued immersion in my work,” and signed it with her father’s name.
OTHER HONORS WERE flung at J.Q.Z.—a “permanent” place in the Hall of Distinction, in Washington; an election to the Royal Society, and to the International Association of Scientists and Humanists—but Deirdre was prudent enough, not to trouble her irascible father: for his energies were swiftly waning, and he oft voiced the doubt, that he would be allowed to live long enough, to perfect his atom-expansion device.
In a mournful yet dignified voice Mr. Zinn spoke thusly: “I would not be so troubled, Deirdre, if I believed that another inventor, or man of science, might follow, to peruse my scribbled calculations: but, alas, I am obliged to be realistic. I am in my seventy-second year, and have labored in the service of my country, and of humankind, for upward of five decades; as Mr. Emerson solemnly bade us, to live not in ourselves, but in the greater World-Soul, which toils to perfect itself through us. Yet I have no disciple to follow me; nor even an apprentice. And my belovèd wife— But, no: I shall not speak of her, at this time.” And the agèd man sighed, and closed his tear-dimmed eyes, his long thin fingers interlocked in a gesture suggestive of prayer.
“So far as I might help you, Father,” Deirdre said hesitantly, “tho’ I am painfully aware of my lack of scientific and mechanical knowledge—”
“Ah, to be so close, so very close!” Mr. Zinn interrupted. “So very close, to consummation!—and yet, so far. For it is all the difference between the Hell of our uncompleted labors, and the Heaven of our perfected discoveries—a mere scribbled formula, on a piece of foolscap!”
“I do not think you will fail, Father,” Deirdre said softly. “You must have hope. Our Lord would not have drawn you hither, do you think, only to allow you to fail, so near triumph?”
Mr. Zinn opened his eyes, and blinked, and stared at his soft-featur’d daughter. “You speak of Our Lord? But do you, in truth, believe?”
Deirdre’s cheeks heated, and, turning aside, she preoccupied herself, with an ordering of the bottles and vials on the bedside table, that took some minutes. “I believe,” Deirdre murmured, “what it is, that I am obliged to believe.”
“My belief,” Mr. Zinn said, in a bemused voice, as he lifted his hands to contemplate—the knuckles so enlarged, the fingers hooked like talons!—“has naught to do with Our Lord, and only to do with myself: and, I fear, it is myself that weakens, not the Lord. For could He grasp a pen? Could He calculate a formula? Is it His wish, to detonate the atom, and release its miraculous powers of destruction? I have seen no evidence, my dear!—and, meaning no blasphemy, I do not think that the sovereign government of these United States, in its militant vigil against evil, can have o’ermuch faith in Him—or in that benevolent World-Spirit, of which Mr. Emerson so warmly spoke.”
“It is unlike you, Father,” Deirdre said slowly, “to speak in such a way. Indeed, it is very unlike you.”
Mr. Zinn turned his pale gaze upon her, and stretched his lips, in a thin forgiving smile. His once-luxuriant hair had sadly thinned; and his once-bountiful beard now consisted of but a few silvery wisps, straggling to his bony chest. The ravaging disease had so greatly aged him, it would not have seemed unlikely, to be told that he was upward of ninety years of age, or nearing one hundred: alas, how tragically alter’d, from that husky young giant, who had strode with such bucolic confidence, in the drawing rooms of fashionable Philadelphia, so very long ago!
Yet the intrinsic wisdom of the soul remained, and spoke its own language, from out the dying man’s eyes; and the gentle smile remained, forgiving Deirdre her ignorance, or her impertinence. When, at last, Mr. Zinn did deign to speak, it was in a voice subdued by melancholy, and by paternal disapprobation: “Unlike me! You fancy that it is unlike me! But, my girl, you do not know me; and cannot presume to speak.”
YET, LACKING A true disciple, or an apprentice familiar with his work, or, it may be, even a genuine scion, born of his own blood, Mr. Zinn in his extremity was forced to summon Deirdre, late on the eve of the New Year, of 1900, and to bid her seek out, for him, certain sheets of foolscap in the cabin; and, you will be pleased to learn, the young heiress obeyed with alacrity, not minding the hour, or the freezing winds that swept up from the river, or the sickly man’s importunate manner.
Alone, ah! alone!—thus Deirdre thought herself, with some bemusement, and, I am afraid, some self-pity, as, in the disorder’d workshop, she sought Mr. Zinn’s
papers with increasing desperation; the while the flame of the kerosene lamp flickered, and her distended shadow leapt and frolicked on the walls, as antic as Pip of old; and she could not prevent herself from shivering most convulsively.
She snatched up one sheet of paper, to examine it, and let it fall; and another; and yet another. It would be, Mr. Zinn had patiently explained, but an ordinary sheet of foolscap, with some nervous doodlings in the margin: simple and childlike representations of suns, and moons, and exploding planets, and perhaps multipetal’d flowers, and molecular structures freely imagined, and he knew not what else!—for his pen was oft playful, even as his brain feverishly worked. “Ah, here!—here it is,” Deirdre murmured aloud, only to examine the paper closer to the flame, and find herself mistaken. “Or here!—but no—no—again I am wrong.”
Even by the uncertain light of a kerosene lamp, the famed cabin bore mute but eloquent witness to the heterogeneity of mind, of its presiding genius: what a miscellany was displayed, of coils of metal, and wire, and glass tubing; and part-completed machines, both small and large; and scatter’d sheets of paper, aswirl on the workbench and floor both, in veritable waves! There was the domestic still J.Q.Z. had invented, but had never troubled to patent, for the desalinating of water; there was the modestly proportioned steam engine, which had not worked for years; there, on all sides, the numerous “automatic” devices J.Q.Z. had tinkered with, in the years before Congress bestowed such grants, and such prestige, upon him—what a welter of springs, knobs, cranks, pipes, chains, weights, and pulleys!
Doubtless Deirdre would have greatly enjoyed perusing her father’s laboratory, had she more leisure, and were the circumstances more congenial: but, at the moment, as the minutes pitilessly sped past, and the hours of the old century waned, she continued to shiver despite the warmth of her fur-lined scarlet cloak, and felt the weight, and the great variety, of the things surrounding her, to be somewhat disorienting. Alas, that she could not locate the wretched scrap of paper, and bring it triumphantly back!—and betake herself to bed, and to some semblance of tranquillity! But she could not seem to find the desired item, and it struck her as an ironical note, that, as her father’s helpmeet, she was at once his favorite, now; and, indeed, the last of the Zinn daughters.