Constance Philippa had, some years ago, strongly sued for her own private bedchamber, on the second floor of the Octagonal House; but Octavia shared a cozy, and very prettily appointed, bedchamber with Malvinia, who was wondrously affectionate when the sisters were alone together, and loved nothing better than to confide her secrets to Octavia, and ask advice of divers kinds. (I hope it will not offend the reader, to learn that Malvinia, whilst still a very young and innocent girl, had all unwittingly attracted the attentions of certain gentlemen: these attentions being, to her giddy mind, both flattering and disconcerting, for she did not comprehend their grave import.) There were rain-lash’d nights when the sisters would cuddle in their canopied “sleigh” bed, beneath their warm blankets and goosedown quilt, whispering together, and giggling, and, upon occasion, dissolving into heartfelt tears; and, upon more than one tempestuous night, the mercurial Malvinia cried herself to sleep in “the little mother’s” accommodating arms. (For Malvinia “adored” her suitor Cheyney Du Pont de Nemours, and “dearly craved” to be wed: and yet, at the very same time, the fickle young lady declared she “wanted never to marry” because she “couldn’t abide the thought of a mustach’d kiss”!)
Samantha, too, oft appealed to Octavia, in private, despite her proudly stated lack of interest in “female” matters, and her pose of independence within the household. The Octagonal House being modestly compact, rather than o’erlarge, it was the case that Samantha and Deirdre shared a bedchamber: and, I am sorry to say, the experience was a somewhat uneven one, on Samantha’s part, though she refrained from outright complaint to her mother. (For Deirdre’s behavior was, alas, willful and unpredictable, and had been so, since the first day she was brought to the Octagonal House, as an orphan badly in need of the love of a Christian family. If, upon the morn, she was melancholy of spirit, and leaden of brow, she was sure to be o’erly gay by noon; and sullen by teatime; and irritable by bedtime; and insomniac by night—fearful, or restive, or susceptible to childish fits of giggling, or inexplicable spasms of tears. She was insincere whilst giving every impression of being utterly faithful, to the words she spoke; she was ill-mannered when no adult was near, and then mockingly gracious; she could not, the sisters complained amongst themselves, be trusted as to her occasional displays of affection, and of sisterly solicitude. For several years, commencing in 1875, when Deirdre was twelve, the Octagonal House and, in particular, the bedchamber shared by Deirdre and Samantha, was visited by fearsome and ne’er-explained ghost phenomena, consisting of bodiless voices, knocks, raps, and other intrusions, and during this tumultuous time the unhappy child also suffered an intensification of those troublesome dreams she routinely endured: the which, as the reader may infer, placed a considerable burden upon poor Samantha, who, chastised for complaining against Deirdre by Mrs. Zinn, sought solace with Octavia. “Alas, I fear that I cannot love her!—that I cannot succeed in liking, or even in enduring her!”—thus Samantha wept angry tears, to be answered by Octavia’s warm embrace, and these heartfelt words: “Nay, but in time you will come to love her: if you are patient, and diligent, and pray to Lord Jesus, for the aid He so freely offers us, in combating our sinful natures.”)
Abandoning her own bedchamber, and her adopted sister, Samantha spent many an hour in the company of Octavia and Malvinia, and oft secreted herself in their congenial room, when no one was near. There, she greedily read books from Mr. Zinn’s library, with an emphasis less on the Transcendental utterings Mr. Zinn so prized, than on the books and periodicals Mr. Zinn had accumulated, pertaining to scientific discoveries through the ages, and inventions. The girls’ educations being irresolute, and subject to some controversy within the family, it was the case that Mr. Zinn assigned “themes” and “problems” to them, for their perusal, and Samantha naturally excelled in such matters, and minded not at all sharing her findings with the others.
Upon one tearful occasion, when it looked as if Samantha would be barred from assisting Mr. Zinn at his work (for Great-Aunt Edwina thought it peculiar, and decidedly indelicate, that, after Samantha’s coming-out in Bloodsmoor and Philadelphia society, on the day of her eighteenth birthday, she should continue to spend so many hours in the laboratory in the woods “like a common apprentice-boy”), Octavia soothed the distraught Samantha, and kissed her fever’d brow, and counseled her to do nothing rash—the weeping girl having said she scarcely knew what desperate things: that she would “make a heap of Great-Aunt’s execrable books beneath her window, and burn them all in one great bonfire,” that she would “run off, in boy’s attire, to Mr. Edison’s workshop, and beg to be taken in,” that she would “throw herself into the ravine—and plunge, if God so willed it, into Hell itself.”
Shocking words, to be uttered by a young lady of high station, and considerable intelligence! Yet, such was Octavia’s magnanimity of character, she allowed the unseemly outburst to run its course, and advised her sister, with shrewd prescience, that, if she but held her tongue, and did not protest, their aunt would shortly forget; and, Mrs. Zinn rarely being in agreement with Great-Aunt Edwina, she would not care to enforce the elder lady’s injunction, so that, within a few weeks, Samantha might all unobtrusively return to her father’s side, with no one the wiser.
When this counsel emerged as faultless, and Samantha did return to the workshop, and to the much-lov’d company of her father and Pip, away off in the woods, it was a joyful sight to see how Samantha embraced the wise Octavia, and declared, with passionate affection, that Octavia had “saved her life,” and that she would be “forever indebted to her.”
Octavia laughed, and kissed Samantha’s brow, and allowed that it was but a small thing, for one sister to demonstrate loving concern for another.
THUS OCTAVIA WAS greatly cherished by her three natural sisters; but, it gives me pain to say, not by her adopted sister.
From the very first, when, brought to the Octagonal House at the age of ten, Deirdre had exhibited a considerable mournfulness of spirit, it was Octavia’s intrinsic response to lavish affection upon her: the which was crudely rejected, as the orphan shrank from both embraces and kisses, and grew sullen at the slightest provocation. It was only after a considerable passage of time that she made some pretense of returning Octavia’s affection, and then she was so little consistent, that Octavia frequently turned away in tears, quite rebuffed, and bewildered, and querying of herself, how she had done wrong.
“Nay, pay no attention to Deirdre,” Malvinia whispered, stroking and soothing the weeping Octavia, not many weeks before the very day of the abduction, “for, tho’ Mother and Father will have it otherwise, the little hussy is not one of us!—and will, if we are fortunate, one day grasp this unalterable fact, and shrink away of her own volition, and save us all great sorrow.”
“That is cruel,” Octavia feebly objected, “that is not in the spirit of the Zinns, Malvinia—”
“It is, then, in the spirit of Malvinia,” that forthright young miss proclaimed, “and that will have to suffice, for all.”
Thus Octavia struggled to o’ercome her natural repugnance for the orphan, and, with grim resolution, to continue to return good for evil, the while years passed, and the sisters grew out of careless childhood, and began to take their places in society: the situation being, at the time of the abduction, that Deirdre alone had yet to make her début, the other sisters having successfully come out, in both Bloodsmoor and Philadelphia, under the generous sponsorship of the Kiddemasters. As she matured, Deirdre was less demonstrably ill-natured; yet it could not be argued that she exhibited much warmth for anyone save Mr. Zinn, whom, in any case, all the sisters adored.
But a fortnight previous to the September afternoon, on which our history begins, Octavia had been standing, lost in reverie, at the top of the staircase, in the Octagonal House, so distracted by the troubled thoughts that assailed her, as to her probable spinsterhood, that she failed to hear footsteps behind her, and turned with a startl’d gasp, to see the mournful-countenance
d Deirdre, who, showing no agitation herself, calmly reached out to take Octavia’s hands in her own, as if to comfort her. That this spontaneous gesture betwixt the sisters, issuing with unprecedented compassion from Deirdre, was most remarkable, and quite astonished Octavia, I hardly need state; and it was all the more disconcerting, in that, for a long moment, the younger sister gazed with a queer avidity into Octavia’s eyes, her own being somewhat o’erlarge, and possessing no color in themselves, save perhaps an unnatural silvery-gray, the pupil inordinately dilated. Octavia summoned forth all the strength of which she was capable, to resist snatching her plump warm hands from out the grasp of her sister, whose hands were chill and clammy, and so thin, as to suggest a skeleton’s: as she afterward confided in Malvinia, it was all she could do, to refrain from crying aloud, in sheer, thoughtless fright.
After some awkward moments, during which the pale Deirdre continued to gaze into Octavia’s eyes, and to squeeze her unresisting hands, the younger sister ventured, in her low, whispery voice, this decidedly peculiar statement: that she had comprehended, of a sudden, the worry that so darkly abided in Octavia’s heart, and “felt compelled” to hurry to her, to comfort her with the wisdom that, much great suffering being in store for her, in the years to come, it would be well for her, and surely practical, to rejoice now, and to leave sorrow for later.
“A cruel—nay, a hideous—comfort!” Octavia proclaimed, afterward, to the sympathetic Malvinia; “and the malevolent chill of the creature’s hands! Though I suppose she meant well; and acted out of a compulsion of generosity, unskill’d in her.”
“Generosity!” Malvinia laughed, with infinite scorn. “Nay, I should term it the reverse; and only pray that she should not undertake such a pretense with me, and seek to squeeze my hands!”
SIX
Since memory’s birth, no year but took
Something the heart held dear;
Each page of life on which we look,
Is blotted with a tear.
—MRS. S. T. MARTYN
Alas, impetuous Malvinia!—“The Rose of the Kiddemaster Garden,” as all of Bloodsmoor was wont to call her, to the silent dismay of her less comely sisters—for it was a careless attitude of her own, pertaining to Deirdre, that helped precipitate the tragic mischance to come.
Bitter is this ironical fact; yet is it not profound, and instructive, as well?—partaking of that cosmic scope of the tragic, that so guided the hands of the ancient tragedians, as to temper their rude heathen energies with genius, and to provide us with immortal portraits of self-delusion, and self-ruin: the principle being that, unbeknownst to the protagonist, his actions, and his very attitude, necessitate his calamitous fall.
Yet, I submit, nothing could have seemed more innocent, and more sisterly, than Malvinia’s behavior on the morn of the abduction: the which, rudely spurned by Deirdre, must have had much to do with the mocking words we have recently heard uttered, in the Kiddemaster gazebo.
For, taking pity on her adopted sister’s plainness, and the particular misfortune of her hair style, the beauteous Malvinia had offered to make repairs—with what consequences, we shall see.
MUCH ADMIRED, AND, indeed, much envied, Miss Malvinia Zinn was a young lady of lithe and aristocratic height, always fastidiously groomed, and attired in impeccable taste, within the financial limitations set by her father’s modest income. She possessed a graceful carriage, with sloping shoulders, and slender arms, and perfectly proportion’d hands; her waist required very little forcible cinching, to be marvelously slim; her foot was agreeably small, though she oft succumbed to some small gesture of vanity, in insisting to the cobbler that her shoes were a perfect fit, when in fact they were tight, and caused her some secret agony, the more so when she danced.
Her rich dark hair was voluptuously threaded with lightsome shades of brown, and auburn, and red; and there were some stray hairs of a mysterious hue of silver, or silver-blond. Her eyes were of that regal blue of the flower known as Greek Valerian—a bountiful cluster of which, in fact, the adoring Cheyney Du Pont de Nemours had surreptitiously pressed upon her, not many days previous to the tea. These eyes sparkled, and glowed, and were capable of darkening, with the onset of tempestuous ill-humor; they were almond-shaped, wondrously bright, with fine thick lashes; oft dancing; covert, and sly, and teasing; childlike in innocence; angelic; and then, alas!—of a sudden, narrowed, and flashing, and demonic; yet no less captivating, as her numerous admirers would attest.
Her neck was long and slender, of that graceful beauty associated with the swan; her ears, somewhat elongated, possessed an exquisite shell-like translucence. An almost imperceptible widow’s peak, the which faintly adumbrated that of her noble grandfather, Judge Kiddemaster, gave to her lovely face a heart-shaped poignancy that many gentlemen (not excluding her own dear father) found remarkable, and infinitely pleasurable to gaze upon. Yet, withal, and unbeknownst to her, Malvinia Zinn, like many individuals of extreme beauty, possessed an aura of something uncanny—less definite, and less distracting, than that of Deirdre; but tangible nonetheless. In all her girlish, and therefore innocent, labors, to make herself the more beautiful, and the more fascinating, to society, the young woman had no clear understanding of how fascinating—nay, how disturbing—she was in truth.
“Am I pretty?” she had demanded, as a very young child, of a nursemaid, or tutor, or one of her sisters, or Mrs. Zinn, or, upon occasion, Mr. Zinn himself. “Am I pretty enough? Shall I be beautiful when I grow up?”—the while peering into the glass, and sighing, and crinkling her smooth little forehead in an expression of doubt.
“You are pretty now,” she would be told, with a kiss, “and you shall be even prettier, when you grow up.”
“But shall I be pretty enough? Shall I be beautiful enough?” Thus the charming little miss refused to be placated.
At the age of twenty, Malvinia, like most of her circle, talked and worried ceaselessly about her complexion, the which was subjected to methodical treatments with such creams, oils, and washes, as Esprit de Cédrat, Sirop de Boubie, Bouquet de Victoria, honey amber, and Micheaux’s Freckle Wash; and protected from the fearsome rays of the sun, by gauzelike veils of a therapeutic thickness, and wide-brimmed hats, and silken sunshades, required in all but the most gloomy weather. Such cautions did not invariably produce dewy-moist and luminous skin, it hardly needs to be said, but Malvinia’s was indeed flawless; and her high-boned cheeks were touched with the most subtle of rosy blushes, by natural art. (Alas, in later years, to her shame, Malvinia would more and more employ cosmetics, including even lipstick, rouge, and black mascara, that she might succeed in counterfeiting that very naturalness of beauty, so confidently, and proudly, hers, in youth.)
Even in the cradle, Malvinia was her father’s favorite; though that gentleman, possessed of absolute good sense, did his best to disguise the fact, in order not to upset the other girls. Yet Malvinia surprised all by being the brightest, or, at any rate, the most clever, of the sisters, during those sporadic periods when Mr. Zinn, impatient with tutors, governesses, and formal school, undertook to educate his daughters himself, in the schoolroom-nursery of the Octagonal House. (For Mr. Zinn, as I believe I have mentioned, enjoyed an early and very successful career as an educator, of radical principles, before his marriage to Prudence, and his embarkment upon a career of invention.)
Throughout his life, John Quincy Zinn attested to the belief that the child’s soul, pristine and unblemish’d, is a fathomless reservoir of wisdom; and that the skillful teacher is one who, rather than imposing knowledge from without, seeks instead to draw—by artful persuasion, by “Socratic” interrogation, or any wholesome means—this very wisdom from within. Thus the little Zinn girls took instruction simply by answering questions put to them, as methodically and patiently as possible, by their devoted father, making an effort to deduce, or even to remember, truths which resided intrinsically within them: and it was Malvinia, mercurial, bright, indefatigable in her father’s pres
ence, who shone above the others, though one might have thought both Constance Philippa and Samantha superior to her, in intelligence.
(Let us picture Malvinia at the age of seven, sitting pert, erect, and unfidgeting, at the little hickory desk with the spool-turned legs, which Mr. Zinn himself had lovingly fashioned, in his spare time: let us picture her with small hands clasped eagerly in her apron’d lap, and wide blue eyes solemnly fixed upon her father’s handsome countenance, as, for long as an hour at a time, he conscientiously interrogated her, in such wise:
MR. ZINN: Do you think, Malvinia, there is one Soul, or many?
MALVINIA: One, Father.
MR. ZINN: And why is that, Malvinia?
MALVINIA: Because the one that came first would then make the other ones—it would be the strongest of all—it would be the Father.
MR. ZINN: And how would you characterize this Soul, Malvinia?