A Bloodsmoor Romance

  So, indeed, Samantha and Nahum fell in love, over a period of many months, in all innocence, and but slenderly grasping the phenomenon that overcame them: for each, I hardly need aver, was virginal in soul as completely as in body, and had never before given a thought to love, let alone surrendered to its spell. Indeed, I would go so far as to declare that each young person would have vociferously scorned the possibility, but a few years before!—that possibility that had, by degrees, become a dizzying reality, bringing a rosy blush to Samantha’s pale cheek, upon the meagerest provocation, and a catch in the throat of the manly Nahum, when he chanc’d to spy upon his belovèd, as she tripped her way, just past dawn, along the graveled pathway to the gorge.

  A lover’s eye, they say, is notorious for what it invents: yet the innocent Nahum, inventor tho’ he was, succumbed to very little self-deception, in his remarking upon, and absorption by, Samantha’s growing beauty. For, warmed by her deepening affection for him, as the vegetation of April is warmed by the e’er-waxing sun, and grows more lush thereby, Miss Samantha Zinn was growing in her beauty, and would surely have caught the eye, and riveted the attention, of many a suitor, had she still acquiesced to her family’s wishes, that she mingle in society, and attend balls, with the hope of attracting a suitable husband. Nahum gazed upon her, in reverent silence, and all virtuous were his thoughts, and wholesomely removed from the grosser masculine emotions: he observed his belovèd in the words of the great Tennyson—

  A maid so smooth, so white, so wonderful,

  They said a light came from her when she moved.

  —and did not dream of uttering his love aloud. For not only was Samantha petite as a fairy sprite, and wondrous to behold, with her clear eyes and pale freckled skin and gleaming red hair, but she was also Nahum’s equal, or even his superior, in intelligence; and she was his master’s most cherished daughter.

  Why, for her part, Samantha should have succumbed to the softer feminine emotions, after so many years of proud—nay, insolent—indifference, I cannot determine: save that Nahum’s manner was so shyly winning, and so unstudied, and unsullied by vanity, even a hardened female heart could not fail to be moved. He did not, it is true, possess striking masculine beauty, nor was he so tall, broad of shoulder, and vigourous of expression as Mr. Zinn had been, in his younger manhood: but his oft-smiling countenance radiated calm, and patience, and a capacity for loyality, that was altogether appealing. Nor did his deference to Mr. Zinn displease Mr. Zinn’s daughter.

  For the first several months, however, after Nahum’s arrival at the workshop, Samantha had, with grim resolution, not allowed herself to observe, and certainly not to speak with, her young comrade: for, I am unhappy to say, she suffered some jealousy of him, and some resentment, that he should so readily be welcomed into the workshop, and entrusted, from the very start, with Mr. Zinn’s most treasured secrets. “He may be a spy of Edison’s,” Samantha said, her green eyes narrowing with malice, “or of Westinghouse’s: you know well, Father, that plans of yours have mysteriously vanished, from out this very place, only to turn up elsewhere, with much vulgar ballyhoo!—and yet you continue to allow strangers into your workshop.” Mr. Zinn, not sensing, perhaps, the true, tremulous motive behind his daughter’s petition, replied in a curt voice that both those gentlemen—Edison and Westinghouse—had, not many months previously, approached him through intermediaries, as to the enlistment of his talents on new projects of their own, involving electrical current: and he had of course declined their offers. (Mr. Zinn did not know that Samantha knew of a shameful episode that had transpired, a twelve-month previously, when, being in such financial distress that he could not buy materials for his aluminum-sided dirigible, save by way of a desperate appeal to Judge Kidde­master, or Great-Aunt Edwina, which Mrs. Zinn angrily opposed, the unhappy John Quincy Zinn had been so “backed into a corner,” as he phrased it, that he had sold a rudimentary, but highly promising, notion of his, dreamt up in an impassioned half-hour, to the Edison workshop in Menlo Park: an elaborate amplification of the processes involved in the cylindrical toy in which Pip, in drawings executed by Samantha, “performed” in motion, of the sort that might one day evolve into a projected and moving view upon a screen—the value of which, for society, Mr. Zinn had not had time to speculate upon, being so harassed, and unquiet of mind.)

  “It does not do you proud, Samantha,” Mr. Zinn said, knitting his brows, and absentmindedly stroking his ragged beard, “and is hardly a beneficent reflection upon your mother and myself, that you should harbor low suspicions of a young man in possession of such sterling qualities, whose loyalty, I, for one, cannot question.”

  A most uncharacteristic speech for John Quincy Zinn to deliver himself of: and the abash’d Samantha had no recourse, but to blush fiercely, and murmur a daughterly apology, and retreat.

  And yet: it may be that Mr. Zinn’s warm words, and his depiction of young Nahum as loyal, and in the possession of sterling qualities, sank deep within the contumacious heart of his daughter: there to stir much mischief, and cause much distress, over a passage of time.

  THE WONDERMENTS OF love!—its soft-petal’d and unexpected blooming!

  Many years were to pass, during which time Samantha came gradually to warm to her father’s apprentice, gauging him first as a rival; and then as a working associate; and then as a brotherly presence; and then—ah, her heart scarcely knew, what designation to choose! She found herself one day taking note of each motion made by the lank-limbed young man: each word that dropped all artless from his lips, and each smile that illuminated his angular, boyish face. Why, of a sudden, his unexceptional brown eyes should be of interest; why his habit of polishing the lenses of his spectacles, with a chamois cloth stained with grease, should be appealing, she could not have explained. With a prick of amusement she watched as, staring off into space, Nahum allowed his tea to go cold, and devilish Pip to gobble down his toast. With a prick of affection she noted his threadbare gloves, his mud-spattered boots, the shabby oilcloth cape he continued to wear in wet weather. One day—in a voice so stern it might have passed for Mrs. Zinn’s—she inquired of Nahum (whom at that time she still called “Mr. Hareton,” or addressed by no name at all) whether he would give her the pleasure of allowing her to mend his shirt collar, which was so badly frayed, it had actually torn behind: or whether he wished it to remain as it was, out of some “purposive eccentricity” of his own.

  The startl’d young man, so accustomed to a frostiness of demeanor on Samantha’s part, or, at the very most, a benign indifference, scarcely knew how to reply: and made rather a fool of himself, in his stammering that he had not known—he was grievously sorry, not to have known—that he presented, to others, so ill-kempt a spectacle: and begged his master’s daughter to forgive him. So distraught was he, by our lady’s inquiry (which was, I do believe, somewhat too arch and “Kidde­master”-like), that the poor young man went away in shame, and neglected to reply, that of course he should be greatly honored—nay, overcome with delight—were she to condescend to sew anything for him—oh, anything at all!

  Given this development, it is most plausibly the case that Samantha’s love for Nahum, and his for her, would have as naturally blossomed, as the myriad dogwood trees in the surrounding woods, in the spring: for these were two young persons, after all, of extraordinary caliber, as accustomed to ratiocination as other young persons might be to dinner dances, and balls, and riding to hounds. Then too, the repugnance aroused in other young men, by Miss Samantha Zinn’s persistent intelligence, which she waved about, as Malvinia once observed, like a fringe of the cheapest velvet, evidently did not occur to Nahum: for he was, tho’ I hesitate to say so, for fear of alienating the reader, not of a good family: not, so far as anyone could determine, of any family at all. His origins were as shrouded in mist as the Bloodsmoor Gorge, on the very day of his arrival, not, it would seem, out of any willful prevarication, but out of sheer forgetfulness; and it was hardly counted amiss by John Quincy Zinn
, with his charming absentmindedness, that, from time to time, relaxing at tea, or at dinner in the Octagonal House, the youth should speak vaguely of having been a pupil of Mr. Zinn’s, as a child: recalling with sporadic vividness certain classroom events, and diagrams on a blackboard, and models of machines. . . . But beyond that Nahum’s memory failed; or, to be more accurate, he simply drifted off the subject, as did his host, for both were wonderfully beset by all sorts of random ideas and notions, of a kind that I, attending so reverently, yet at such a mental distance, cannot hope to characterize. And of the question of origins—well, as we have seen, Mr. John Quincy Zinn was somewhat loath to speak, sensing himself, still, after a passage of so many years, but reluctantly admitted to the wide circle of his wife’s distinguished family!

  In any case, remarkable as it may strike the ear, Samantha Zinn’s superior intelligence seems not to have repulsed her young man, but to have actually attracted him! Which is, I suppose, entirely to Nahum’s credit; tho’ one should remember that his family background was lamentably obscure, and his breeding, in general, very much in question.

  I am confident, however, that the dawning of love between Samantha and Nahum would have grown at a natural pace, and the disaster for the Zinns merely forestalled: but two events served to accelerate the natural progress of the powerful emotion, and to force it into a premature, and, it may have been, a somewhat feverish, eruption. The first was the regrettable accident involving Mr. Zinn’s heroic dirigible; after so many months of labor, the balloon crashed within ten minutes, when one of the propellers struck a riverbank tree, and cut back into the balloon, not only allowing the hydrogen gas to escape with a furious hiss, but causing at the same time a small explosion, and a terrifying conflagration!—so that poor Samantha was forced to witness her belovèd Nahum, who alone had manned the experimental model, leap all aflame into the Bloodsmoor River. (And, for some wretched minutes, it almost seemed that the youth had disappeared forever . . . sinking beneath the surface of the turbulent waves, and withdrawing from the Zinns’ lives, as abruptly as he had entered them. But it was during those agonizing minutes that Samantha knew her heart.)

  The second event, alas, I am forced to say, was that very article of Adam P. Watkins’s, which was greeted with such unstinting enthusiasm, by Samantha’s mother, and by all of her mother’s relatives. For not every reader of “Unsung Americans . . .” found it completely pleasing, in its details rather more than in its general scope.

  Samantha could not have liked it, that her name went unmentioned; as if, being of the female gender, she had no name, and was merely her father’s daughter—his “daughter-assistant,” in Mr. Watkins’s perfunctory words. (Her feeling for Nahum, however, was so strongly developed by now, that she experienced not the smallest pang of jealousy, that his name should be revealed, to the Atlantic readers—on the contrary, she took a happy pride in it, and read that passage aloud many a time, to her blushing companion. “Now, you see, Nahum, you have become famous!” the high-spirited girl teased. “Now you shall desert the Octagonal House, for Menlo Park!”) What distressed Samantha in Mr. Watkins’s essay, was the account of the birthmark removal, which had allegedly transpired during her infancy—and of which she retained but the cloudiest recollection. Or did she not remember, at all; had she been told? All dimly, and uneasily, her memory yielded a most puzzling episode in Great-Aunt Edwina’s bedchamber, some years previous: the which episode had proved so peculiar, and so obdurate, as to its secret meaning, Samantha had cast it out of her thoughts altogether, and addressed herself to more useful activities.

  Now she studied her smooth forehead in a mirror, and satisfied herself, that she could detect not the slightest trace of the old blemish. How difficult it would be, to imagine a birthmark there, on her left temple! A small galaxy of freckles had been sprinkled across her face, and altogether charming they were, tho’ I am fully conscious of a fashionable repugnance for freckles, and a predilection for lily-pale skin: but these freckles were, for the most part, quite unobtrusive, and not even the thickest cluster resembled a birthmark, let alone an actual blemish. If the child had been afflicted with a birthmark resembling her father’s, she should certainly have wept with gratitude, that he labored to remove it; for no young lady, not even one who had, for so many years, haughtily scorned prettiness and all its trappings, could have failed to regret so disfiguring a mark. Yes, Samantha should have felt naught but gratitude, and might even have been expected to grasp her father’s hands, and thank him, so many years after the event: and yet, for some reason, she did not.

  For some reason—the distraught young lady could scarcely have said why, even to herself—she did not. She felt no gratitude for having been relieved, in her infancy, of an ugly blemish; she felt, on the contrary, a most childish resentment.

  An odd, a very odd sort of reaction! the reader thinks. As, indeed, the writer thinks as well. For, any normal young woman would have been not simply grateful for her father’s concern, that she enter life unblemish’d; she would have been profuse with daughterly thanks—and tears, and hugs, and kisses, and declarations of lifelong devotion.

  Yet Samantha, that perverse child, was not. No, she simply, and stubbornly, was not.

  Of course she breathed not a word of her resentment to Mr. Zinn—for they were not in the habit, father and daughter, of discussing personal matters of any kind; and Mrs. Zinn’s pride in the article, and her repeated perusals of it, and memorized quotations from it, did not inspire confidence in Samantha, that she would be sympathetic with any criticism. Were Octavia still residing in the Octagonal House, it is possible that Samantha would have unburdened her heart to her: for Octavia had always been the sweetest of all the sisters, and truly attentive to the others’ needs. But Octavia now lived some distance away, and was now, most conspicuously, Mrs. Lucius Rumford; and cruel Samantha did not stint, in her inward contempt for that worthy gentleman—whom she persisted in seeing as a pompous old dullard, a bewhiskered fool, a dry-as-dust hypocrite, with all the worst trappings of a Calvinist man of the cloth, and none of the virtues: and far less wealthy, moreover, than the Zinns had believed.

  So there was no one, at this time, with whom Samantha could speak; no one to whom she could unburden her heart, and release the poison festering the rein.

  Unhappy daughter!—and, alas, soon to be unhappy father!

  FIFTY

  Mr. Zinn,” Mrs. Zinn addressed her husband, one wintry eve when the two of them sat alone in the parlor, with only the sleeping Pip as a companion (Samantha having early retired to her bedchamber upstairs), “may I disturb you from your book? I have something troublesome to discuss, and have put off broaching the subject to you, not wishing to worry you unnecessarily, or deflect your energies from your new project.”

  Mr. Zinn glanced up blinking from his book, which was a crudely-illustrated history of the Spanish Empire, sent out to him, at his request, by a Philadelphia bookseller; and, in deference to a certain gravity in his wife’s tone, which always presaged issues of no light moment, he even laid aside a little sketch he was doing, in pencil, in his notebook. “Yes, Prudence?” he said, with a tentative smile, beginning already to stroke his beard, and peering, in utmost attentiveness, over the tops of his half-moon glasses. (For John Quincy Zinn had remained, lo, these many years, the most respectful of husbands: even when, it may be, his wondrously fertile mind was attuned to its own interests, and did not altogether concentrate upon those given utterance by his wife.) “I hope it is not something gravely troublesome?”

  Mrs. Zinn’s reply was admirably succinct: “Not gravely, at this very moment; but in time—in time.”

  The which, failing to enlighten Mr. Zinn, gave him cause to knit up his brows: and to widen his already perplex’d uxorious smile. “You intrigue me greatly, Prudence; but I must beg you—for I am feeling less than zestful this evening, having passed a workday of no demonstrable value—I must beg you, not to stir me to anxiety, at this late hour.”

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; Mrs. Zinn did not break the rhythm of her knitting, as she cast upon her husband the briefest, and the most mildly remonstrative, of glances. “Your daughter, sir,” she said curtly. “And your assistant.”

  Mr. Zinn stared, and was so bewildered, that, for a moment, he left off stroking his beard. “My daughter, you say?—and my assistant?”

  “Your daughter Samantha,” said the grim-visagèd Mrs. Zinn, allowing a forciful caesura to punctuate her words, and even, by way of further punctuation, raising the strip of knitting to eye level, in order to examine it, before returning to her rapid work, “and your assistant Nahum.”

  “I see,” Mr. Zinn said, most readily, “and yet,” the good gentleman laughed, now drawing a befuddled hand roughly through his hair, “and yet I fail to see.”

  “That you fail to see, Mr. Zinn, more than a twelve-inch past your nose,” Mrs. Zinn said, resuming her knitting, which was so mechanically adroit that the needless flashed, and, to Mr. Zinn’s vague eye, appeared at times to fairly blur together, into a single glowering image, “is not a characteristic your loved ones have missed in you; but it is one, for all that, not invariably helpful.”