A Bloodsmoor Romance (26 page)

Yet Baron von Mainz had not changed his mind, and preparations for the wedding continued, gaining momentum as the season warmed. Constance Philippa now spent all her time being driven about in the Kidde­masters' handsome brougham, sipping tea at one or another relative's home, attending dinners, luncheons, and balls (at which she and her fiancé danced with a most agreeable marionette grace); or, at home, being fitted for her wedding dress, or perusing, with an increasing fanaticism, the dozen or more books—including Dr. Naphey's
The Physical Life of Women
—pressed upon her. She oscillated between frenetic activity, and bone-weary indolence; between a lighthearted, rather shrill merriment and saturnine despondency. She read aloud, in private, these powerful words of the poet Shelley—

Rough wind, that moanest loud

Grief too sad for song;

Wild wind, when sullen cloud

Knells all the night long;

Sad storm, whose tears are vain,

Bare woods, whose branches strain,

Deep caves and dreary main,—

Wail, for the world's wrong!

—Eliza Leslie North's
Maiden, Wife, and Mother;
Mary Manderly Ogden's
The Christian Mother;
Dr. Elias Riddle's
Counsels on the Nature and Hygiene of Womanhood;
Alice C. Dodds's
A Letter of Advice to a Young Bride;
and, of course, Great-Aunt Edwina's volumes, which the heedless Constance Philippa had neglected to study in the past—
The Young Lady's Friend: A Compendium of Correct Forms,
and
A Guide to Proper Christian Behavior Amongst Young Persons,
and, most valuable of all, as she approached the threshold of matrimony, and prepared to exchange Maidenhood for Wifehood, the best-selling
The Christian House & Home,
which elucidated, in a tone much like that of Edwina Kidde­master's speaking voice, such priceless advice—

The young bride crosses the threshold, not into a mere
house,
but into a
home,
which it is her obligation to make blossom as if 'twere a
garden.
How sacred the mission, to be the warmth about which hearts gather; to strengthen, brighten, and beautify existence; to be the light of others' souls, and the good angel of others' paths! And, a mission even more holy, to be a Mother: to give birth to infant immortals!

She read; she gorged herself; and yet was left famished, and susceptible to childish bad moods, that quite astonished the household. Her high-handedness with Octavia became inexcusable; her sarcasm with Samantha shocking; the
pettiness
and transparent
jealousy
of her relations with Malvinia infuriating—though oft amusing, as Malvinia mockingly observed. (“She fears her dwarf-bridegroom will look upon his sister-in-law with more affection than he looks upon his bride,” Malvinia told the scandalized Octavia, “and, if she transforms herself into a veritable dragonness, who, pray, would blame him? The Baron
is
human—or, at any rate, one is encouraged to believe so.”)

One afternoon, while being fitted for her wedding dress, Constance Philippa read aloud from Dr. Riddle's volume, and quite distressed Madame Blanchet and her young assistant, who scarcely knew how to respond. In a dry, droll, sardonic tone unbecoming in one of her station, and certainly in one being fitted in a lovely China silk dress, with fagoting, handmade lace, latticework, and lace epaulettes, Constance Philippa read: “ ‘In our most unitary of acts, which is the epitome and pleroma of life, we have the most intense of all affirmations of God's love for us as creatures, and His will that husband and wife participate in a true pangenesis. The supreme holiness of the wedding bond, symbolized in the solemn exchange of rings, is a measure of the holiness of God's bond with His creation. . . .' ”

At this very moment Mrs. Zinn happened to enter the room and, blushing an angry beet-red, snatched the volume out of her daughter's hand. But, surprisingly, she said very little about the incident (tho' her grown daughter fairly cowered in fear—Constance Philippa was
most
frightened of her mother's wrath), other than to observe that it was unfortunate, knowing the propensity of Madame Blanchet to carry tales from one house to another, that Constance Philippa had behaved as she had. “I am very sorry, Mother,” Constance Philippa said, biting her lips. “I am
very
sorry for everything.”

 

A TRUE PANGENESIS
. . . the epitome and pleroma of life . . . the supreme holiness of the wedding bond:
what,
Constance Philippa tortured herself, did it mean? What did the words mean? She was canny enough at the age of twenty-three to have determined, on her own, that the wedding bond led in most instances to babies; and that the babies (as dimly she recalled from Mrs. Zinn's numerous confinements, for of course Mrs. Zinn had had several stillborn infants, in addition to having given birth successfully to her four daughters) evidently had something to do with the mother's body; and that this phenomenon was a
mystery,
a
blessing,
a
sacred duty,
and at the same time a
cross
all women must bear, as part of God's commandment. What the masculine sex had to do with all this Constance Philippa had yet to determine, but she supposed, vaguely and optimistically, as she supposed she would come to love the Baron after they were married, that she would learn: perhaps he would tell her.

Perhaps, she thought with a wild spurt of hope, Dr. Riddle's promise of
pangenesis
is nothing more and nothing less than the revelation of this profound secret, to be entrusted to the female sex only
after
the wedding vows have been taken?

 

IN ADDITION TO
the marriage and etiquette manuals, Constance Philippa had also been given, by Narcissa Gilpin, a pretty little volume by Mrs. Katharine Lee Bates called
The Wedding-Day Book; or, The Congratulations of the Poets,
in which she read after her other, more serious reading fatigued her, or after she returned from an afternoon of fifteen or twenty teas, her head ringing with exhaustion, and that sly old tune
A fox went out
tripping and lilting through her very being.
The Wedding-Day Book
was a sort of day-book with a poem for each and every day of the year, all the poems having reference to love, weddings, and marital bliss.
This
volume, attractively covered in crimson papier-mâché sprinkled with tiny gold roses, Mrs. Zinn did not at all mind being read aloud: in fact, on many an evening in those months before the Zinn family was to be irrevocably shattered, and never, indeed, altogether a “family” again, all the Zinns gathered in the cozy firelit parlor after supper, to read aloud from
The Wedding-Day Book:
even Mr. Zinn himself, who had always an especial love of reading and reciting poetry, and who knew well that the domestic hour, close by the hearth, was one of the blessèd features of our American life, rivaling for him the attractions of the workshop and its lonely, exhilarating toil.

Mrs. Bates's
The Wedding-Day Book!
I remember that compact little volume well, its square-cut pages, its gilt edges, its floral endpapers and smart crimson cover! A gift for many a young engaged lady of our time, and one which, it must be imagined, is prized throughout the years as both a keepsake, and a continuing memorial to the power of love—hardly spurned and cast aside as it was in the case of Constance Philippa. (The volume was to be found in the trash by one of the Zinn servants, who promptly rescued it, and, being of so sentimental and loving a nature herself, and so attached to the Zinn family, the distraught girl attempted to clean the stained cover with petroleum naphtha—a grease solvent employed by the servants in laundering Mr. Zinn's workclothes—and badly damaged it. But
The Wedding-Day Book
did survive; it survives still.)

The Zinns passed the book from one to the other, and read aloud, sometimes with pride, oft with a brimming eye, for the impending wedding was a great event in their lives, in which regret, and relief, and joy, and melancholy warred. Mrs. Zinn opened the volume to a favorite poem, and read these moving lines from Langhorne—

Should erring nature casual faults disclose,

Wound not the breast that harbors your repose;

For every grief that breast from you shall prove,

Is one link broken in the chain of love.

Octavia, her plump cheeks flushed with pleasure, her voice trembling with the
privilege
of good poetry, found it difficult to make a selection, and often paged through the book for many minutes, while her mother and sisters chided her lovingly, even as they continued with their sewing; and Mr. Zinn, stroking Pip, who climbed lazily about his knees, or perched atop his shoulder, said in his kindly voice: “I am sure, dear Octavia, that any selection of yours and Mrs. Bates will prove edifying to us.”

Octavia then chose a poem by Mrs. Craik, or Phoebe Cary, or the great Longfellow—

Sail forth into the sea of life,

O gentle, loving, trusting wife.

And safe from all adversity

Upon the bosom of that sea

Thy comings and thy goings be!

this recited, with a shy, moist-eyed glance at Constance Philippa.

Malvinia usually made her selections beforehand, choosing two or three poems in place of one, for that young lady read splendidly, and had even, at about this time, begun elocution and acting lessons in the city; so that all the Zinns—even Constance Philippa—found her performances wonderfully gratifying, and excused her rudeness in fidgeting through Octavia's. She always sought out the fragments from Shakespeare which Mrs. Bates had wisely included in her anthology, glowing gems of sagacity of a quality not generally associated with the great Bard (a genius, as all attest, but of an erratic and even slovenly temperament, and betraying at times a disposition quite irreligious—nay, atheistic); she read these lines in as passionate and ringing a voice as if she were on the stage of the Varieties Theatre, portraying the doomed Ophelia, or the still more grievously doomed Desdemona—

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments: love is not love

Which alters when it alternation finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no! it is an ever-fixèd mark,

That looks on tempests and is never shaken.

And again, upon another occasion, with a frank fond declamatory voice, and a sisterly smile beamed in Constance Philippa's direction—

I am ashamed that women are so simple

To seek for rule, supremacy, and sway,

When they are bound to love, serve, and obey.

Many an evening the engaged girl, out of shyness, sullenness, or exhaustion, simply refused to read; and so Malvinia read the more, and spurred her listeners to outright applause. (All took note of the magical way in which Malvinia came to life at such times: as if drawing a powerful energy from the
attentiveness
of her listeners, who were as absorbed by her beauty and her manner, as by the words she uttered.)

Samantha read with some enthusiasm, yet withal an air of vague bewilderment, as if, despite her effort to please her family, she could not seem to comprehend the subtleties of poesy. Her voice was clear enough, yet hurried and flat—

My heart is like a singing bird

Whose nest is in a watered shoot,

My heart is like an apple-tree

Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;

My heart is like a rainbow shell,

That paddles in the halcyon sea;

My heart is gladder than all these,

Because my love has come to me.

—as if Mrs. Rossetti's immortal words possessed no meaning to her at all!

As one might expect, Mr. Zinn read beautifully; to be precise, he did not read but
recited,
needing nothing more than to glance through the poem on the page before him, in order to commit it to memory! (A feat that quite beggars my understanding; and yet Mr. Zinn accomplished it time and again, without effort.) His voice was subtly modulated, almost too rich for the confined quarters of the parlor, and, as in the old days of his lyceum career, mesmerizing. He recited Browning, he recited Tennyson, he recited his belovèd Emerson, and, upon one curious occasion, these lush lines of Margaret Fuller's—

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

—when, for no visible reason, Mrs. Zinn suddenly rose from her comfortable seat, her sewing forgotten (she was working a complex cross-stitch on a white linen tablecloth for Constance Philippa), her manner distracted and confused and, for some moments, quite alarming to her family—for the poor woman
did
look apoplectic, emotion seized her so suddenly. She stared at Mr. Zinn as if he were a stranger; she steadied herself by grasping hold of the proffered arm of Octavia, who had reacted instinctively to aid her mother; she seemed, as the seconds passed with great pain, unaware of all save Mr. Zinn, whose recitation had naturally trailed off into silence—not even Pip, scuttling in terror behind the ottoman on which Mr. Zinn sat, drew her attention.

Then, at last, as if rousing herself with great difficulty from a kind of dream or trance, she repeated, softly and searchingly: “
‘I am immortal—I know it—I feel it—I am immortal—'
”

The moment passed, mercifully; and Mrs. Zinn recovered herself; and resumed her seat by the fire. Mr. Zinn asked if she might like a little lavender and ammonia, mixed with water, to stimulate her spirits, but she assured him no, not at all: she was altogether well, and eager to hear the poem.