A Bloodsmoor Romance by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

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.
    Â 
    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.
    â€œNay, 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