A Bloodsmoor Romance Read Free

one; less enviable still was his position as head of a household of limited financial resources—for John Quincy was, and oft was made to feel, but the son-in-law of the wealthy Godfrey Kidde­master. Being of a private, and even hermetic, turn of mind, he shrank from frequent public appearances, yet, when he did appear, how admiringly all eyes were drawn to him, and to his striking family!—Mr. Zinn tall, wide-shouldered, and abash’dly handsome; Mrs. Zinn of Junoesque stature, formidably clad in lavender, with an immense lavender and cream-colored hat; and the daughters!—self-conscious, yet resplendent, in their finest Sunday clothes, radiant as walking candles, fully cognizant of admiring—nay, examining —eyes on all sides. “How they stare!” Octavia murmured to Malvinia, so excited, she had begun to breathe swiftly and shallowly, and could not constrain herself from grasping her sister’s arm. “And is it we whom they stare at, so frankly?”—whereupon Malvinia laughingly murmured, in reply, “Nay, I think it is Father’s live daughters; or Grandfather’s five aspiring heiresses.”
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    UPON THAT HISTORIC day, guests arrived at Kidde­master Hall in vehicles of greatly varying species, ranging from the bronze coach of the house of Du Pont de Nemours, to the more tasteful, yet still splendid, coaches of the Whittons, and the Gilpins, and the Millers—these excellent old families of the Valley, and of Philadelphia, being intricately related by both blood and marriage to the Kidde­masters. And there were innumerable modest, yet, withal, entirely respectable, victorias and surreys owned by local residents. And the Baron von Mainz, that dashing figure! What commentary he stimulated, by choosing to ride out from Philadelphia, on horseback: on his wide-nostril’d black English Thoroughbred stallion, some seventeen hands high, with its deep-set, glaring, crafty eyes, that seemed, in playful manner, not unlike the Baron’s own. “Your fiancé, and his handsome mount, are altogether striking,” Malvinia whispered to Constance Philippa, behind her part-opened fan. “Alas, my dear, are you not gravely intimidated by both?” Whereupon the flush-cheek’d Constance Philippa lowered her gaze to the ground, and somewhat sullenly replied, “I am intimidated by no one, and nothing; and I must beg you to make no further unwelcome speculation on the nature of my feelings.”
    Mr. and Mrs. Zinn, and their five daughters, were fetched to the Hall from their home, a short distance away, by the Kidde­masters’ own coach for, unfortunately, they could afford no carriage of their own, save a “country” surrey of distinctly outmoded style, which would hardly be appropriate for this important occasion; and so they were driven through the park, and up the quarter-mile gravel drive, to Mrs. Zinn’s parents’ home, in a vehicle of such tasteful splendor as to gratify Mrs. Zinn, even as it deeply embarrassed her husband. “I take no more account than you do, Mr. Zinn, of the vagaries and vanities of the material world,” Prudence declared, “yet, upon certain emblematic occasions, I feel that it is not only apt, but obligatory, that we align ourselves with my father’s house: that the coarse-minded gossipers of Bloodsmoor may be constrained, from speculation as to my father’s favoring, or disfavoring, of any one of our daughters, or of you; or the entire Zinn family.”
    It was surely a touching indication of John Quincy’s democratic temperament, and the simple, rural, and unadorn’d nature of his background, that he felt some small revulsion for the display of wealth the Kidde­master brougham—with its glaring coppery finish, and its smart ebony trim, and its handsome fringed hammercloth—represented to the world; and, it may be, for his own reluctant acquiescence to it,