CHAPTER XIV--FINIS

HE’S all right; you can look for him here right along now, any day; he

_was_ hurt a leetle, but he’s as peart an’ chipper now as a blue-jay on

a hick’ry limb; yes, he’s a-comin’ right smack home!”

This was the gist of the assurances which Ni vouchsafed to the first

rush of eager questions--to his sister, and M’rye, and Janey Wilcox.

Abner had held a little aloof, to give the weaker sex a chance. Now he

reasserted himself once more: “Stan’ back, now, and give the young man

breathin’ room. Janey, hand a chair for’ard--that’s it. Now set ye down,

Ni, an’ take your own time, an’ tell us all about it. So you reely found

him, eh?”

“Pshaw! there ain’t anything to that,” expostulated Ni, seating himself

with nonchalance, and tilting back his chair. “_That_ was easy as

rollin’ off a log. But what’s the matter _here?_ That’s what knocks me.

We--that is to say, I--come up on a freight train to a ways beyond Juno

Junction, an’ got the conductor to slow up and let me drop off, an’

footed it over the hill. It was jest about broad daylight when I turned

the divide. Then I began lookin’ for your house, an’ I’m lookin’ for it

still. There’s a hole out there, full o’ snow an’ smoke, but nary a

house. How’d it happen?”

“‘Lection bonfire--high wind--woodshed must ‘a’ caught,” replied Abner,

sententiously. “So you reely got down South, eh?”

“An’ Siss here, too,” commented Ni, with provoking disregard for the

farmer’s suggestions; “a reg’lar family party. An’, hello!”

His roving eye had fallen upon the recumbent form on the made-up bed,

under the muffling blankets, and he lifted his sandy wisps of eyebrows

in inquiry.

“Sh! It’s father,” explained Esther. “He isn’t feeling very well. I

think he’s asleep.”

The boy’s freckled, whimsical face melted upon reflection into a

distinct grin. “Why,” he said, “you’ve been havin’ a reg’lar old

love-feast up here. I guess it was _that_ that set the house on fire!

An’ speakin’ o’ feasts, if you’ve got a mouthful o’ somethin’ to eat

handy--”

The women were off like a shot to the impromptu larder at the far end of

the barn.

“Well, thin,” put in Hurley, taking advantage of their absence, “an’ had

ye the luck to see anny rale fightin’?”

“Never mind that,” said Abner; “when he gits around to it he’ll tell us

everything. But, fust of all--why, he knows what I want to hear about.”

“Why, the last time I talked with you, Abner--” Ni began, squinting up

one of his eyes and giving a quaint drawl to his words.

“That’s a good while ago,” said the farmer, quietly.

“Things have took a change, eh?” inquired Ni.

“That’s neither here nor there,” replied Abner, somewhat testily. “You

oughtn’t to need so dummed much explainin’. I’ve told you what I want

specially to hear. An’ that’s what we all want to hear.”

When the women had returned, and Ni, with much deliberation, had filled

both hands with selected eatables, the recital at last got under way.

It progress was blocked from time to time by sheer force of tantalizing

perversity on the part of the narrator, and it suffered steadily from

the incidental hitches of mastication; but such as it was we listened

to it with all our ears, sitting or standing about, and keeping our eyes

intently upon the freckled young hero.

“It wasn’t so much of a job to git down there as I’d figured on,” Ni

said, between mouthfuls. “I got along on freight trains--once worked my

way a while on a hand-car--as far as Albany, an’ on down to New York on

a river-boat, cheap, an’ then, after foolin’ round a few days, I hitched

up with the Sanitary Commission folks, an’ got them to let me sail on

one o’ their boats round to ’Napolis. I thought I was goin’ to die

most o’ the voyage, but I didn’t, you see, an’ when I struck ’Napolis

I hung around Camp Parole there quite a spell, talkin’ with fellers

that’d bin pris’ners down in Richmond an’ got exchanged an’ sent North.

They said there was a whole slew of our fellers down there still that’d

been brought in after Antietam. They didn’t know none o’ their names,

but they said they’d all be sent North in time, in exchange for Johnny

Rebs that we’d captured. An’ so I waited round--”

“You _might_ have written!” interrupted Esther, reproachfully.

“What’d bin the good o’ writin’? I hadn’t anything to tell. Besides

writin’ letters is for girls. Well, one day a man come up from

Libby--that’s the prison at Richmond--an’ he said there _was_ a tall

feller there from York State, a farmer, an’ he died. He thought the name

was Birch, but it might’a’ been Beech--or Body-Maple, for that matter. I

s’pose you’d like to had me write _that_ home!”

“No--oh, no!” murmured Esther, speaking the sense of all the company.

“Well, then I waited some more, an’ kep’ on waitin’, an’ then waited

agin, until bimeby, one fine day, along comes Mr. Blue-jay himself.

There here was, stan’in’ up on the paddle-box with a face on him as

long as your arm, an’ I sung out, ‘Way there, Agrippa Hill!’ an’ he come

mighty nigh failin’ head over heels into the water. So then he come off,

an’ we shook han’s, an’ went up to the commissioners to see about his

exchange, an’--an’ as soon’s that’s fixed, an’ the papers drawn up all

correct, why, he’ll come home. An’ that’s all there is to it.”

“And even _then_ you never wrote!” said Esther, plaintively.

“Hold on a minute,” put in Abner. “You say he’s comin’ home. That

wouldn’t be unless he was disabled. They’d keep him to fight agin, till

his time was up. Come, now, tell the truth--he’s be’n hurt bad!”

Ni shook his unkempt red head. “No, no,” he said. “This is how it was.

Fust he was fightin’ in a cornfield, an’ him an’ Bi Truax, they got

chased out, an’ lost their regiment, an’ got in with some other fellers,

and then they all waded a creek breast-high, an’ had to run up a long

stretch o’ slopin’ ploughed ground to capture a battery they was on top

o’ the knoll. But they didn’t see a regiment of sharp-shooters layin’

hidden behind a rail-fence, an’ these fellers riz up all to once an’

give it to ’em straight, an’ they wilted right there, an’ laid down,

an’ there they was after dusk when the rebs come out an’ started lookin’

round for guns an’ blankets an’ prisoners. Most of ’em was dead, or

badly hurt, but they was a few who’d simply lain there in the hollow

because it’d have bin death to git up. An’ Jeff was one o’ _them_.”

“You said yourself ’t he had been hurt--some,” interposed M’rye, with

snapping eyes.

“Jest a scratch on his arm,” declared Ni. “Well, then they marched the

well ones back to the rear of the reb line, an’ there they jest skinned

’em of everything they had--watch an’ jack-knife an’ wallet an’

everything--an’ put ’em to sleep on the bare ground. Next day they

started ’em out on the march toward Richmond, an’ after four or five

days o’ that, they got to a railroad, and there was cattle cars for

’em to ride the rest o’ the way in. An’ that’s how it was.”

“No,” said Abner, sternly; “you haven’t told us. How badly is he hurt?”

“Well,” replied Ni, “it was only a scratch, as I said, but it got worse

on that march, an’ I s’pose it wasn’t tended to anyways decently, an’

so--an’ so--”

M’rye had sprung to her feet and stood now drawn up to her full height,

with her sharp nose in air as if upon some strange scent, and her eyes

fairly glowing in eager excitement. All at once she made a bound past

us and ran to the doors, furiously digging her fingers in the crevice

between them, then, with a superb sweep of the shoulders, sending them

both rattling back on their wheels with a bang.

“I knew it!” she screamed in triumph.

We who looked out beheld M’rye’s black hair and brown calico dress

suddenly suffer a partial eclipse of pale blue, which for the moment

seemed in some way a part of the bright winter sky beyond. Then we saw

that it was a soldier who had his arm about M’rye, and his cap bent down

tenderly over the head she had laid on his shoulder.

Our Jeff had come home.

A general instinct rooted us to our places and kept us silent, the while

mother and son stood there in the broad open doorway.

Then the two advanced toward us, M’rye breathing hard, and with tears

and smiles struggling together on her face under the shadow of a

wrathful frown. We noted nothing of Jeff’s appearance save that he had

grown a big yellow beard, and seemed to be smiling. It was the mother’s

distraught countenance at which we looked instead.

She halted in front of Abner, and lifted the blue cape from Jeff’s left

shoulder, with an abrupt gesture.

“Look there!” she said, hoarsely. “See what they’ve done to my boy!”

We now saw that the left sleeve of Jeff’s army overcoat was empty and

hung pinned against his breast. On the instant we were all swarming

about him, shaking the hand that remained to him and striving against

one another in a babel of questions, comments, and expressions of

sympathy with his loss, satisfaction at his return. It seemed the most

natural thing in the world that he should kiss Esther Hagadorn, and that

Janey Wilcox should reach up on tiptoes and kiss him. When the Underwood

girl would have done the same, however, M’rye brusquely shouldered her

aside.

So beside ourselves with excitement were we all, each in turn seeking to

get in a word edgewise, that no one noticed the approach and entrance of

a stranger, who paused just over the threshold of the barn and coughed

in a loud perfunctory way to attract our attention. I had to nudge Abner

twice before he turned from where he stood at Jeff’s side, with his hand

on the luckless shoulder, and surveyed the newcomer.

The sun was shining so brightly on the snow outside, that it was not for

the moment easy to make out the identity of this shadowed figure. Abner

took a forward step or two before he recognized his visitor. It was

Squire Avery, the rich man of the Corners, and justice of the peace, who

had once even run for Congress.

“How d’ do?” said Abner, shading his eyes with a massive hand. “Won’t

you step in?”

The Squire moved forward a little and held forth his hand, which the

farmer took and shook doubtfully. We others were as silent now as the

grave, feeling this visit to be even stranger than all that had gone

before.

“I drove up right after breakfast, Mr. Beech,” said the Squire, making

his accustomed slow delivery a trifle more pompous and circumspect than

usual, “to express to you the feeling of such neighbors as I have, in

this limited space of time, being able to foregather with. I believe,

sir, that I may speak for them all when I say that we regret, deplore,

and contemplate with indignation the outrage and injury to which certain

thoughtless elements of the community last night, sir, subjected you and

your household.”

“It’s right neighborly of you, Square, to come an’ say so,” remarked

Abner. “Won’t you set down? You see, my son Jeff’s jest come home from

the war, an’ the house bein’ burnt, an’ so on, we’re rather upset for

the minute.”

The Squire put on his spectacles and smiled with surprise at seeing

Jeff. He shook hands with him warmly, and spoke with what we felt to be

the right feeling about that missing arm; but he could not sit down, he

said. The cutter was waiting for him, and he must hurry back.

“I am glad, however,” he added, “to have been the first, Mr. Beech, to

welcome your brave son back, and to express to you the hope, sir, that

with this additional link of sympathy between us, sir, bygones may be

allowed to become bygones.”

“I don’t bear no ill will,” said Abner, guardedly. “I s’pose in the long

run folks act pooty close to about what they think is right. I’m willin’

to give ’em that credit--the same as I take to myself. They ain’t been

much disposition to give _me_ that credit, but then, as our school-ma’am

here was a-sayin’ last night, people ’ve been a good deal worked up about

the war--havin’ them that’s close to ’em right down in the thick of

it--an’ I dessay it was natural enough they should git hot in the collar

about it. As I said afore, I don’t bear no ill will--though prob’ly I’m

entitled to.”

The Squire shook hands with Abner again. “Your sentiments, Mr. Beech,”

he said, in his stateliest manner, “do credit alike to your heart and

your head. There is a feeling, sir, that this would be an auspicious

occasion for you to resume sending your milk to the cheese-factory.”

Abner pondered the suggestion for a moment. “It would be handier,” he

said, slowly; “but, you know, I ain’t goin’ to eat no humble pie. That

Rod Bidwell was downright insultin’ to my man, an’ me too--”

“It was all, I assure you, sir, an unfortunate misunderstanding,”

pursued the Squire, “and is now buried deep in oblivion. And it is

further suggested, that, when you have reached that stage of preparation

for your new house, if you will communicate with me, the neighbors

will be glad to come up and extend their assistance to you in what is

commonly known as a raising-bee. They will desire, I believe, to bring

with them their own provisions. And, moreover, Mr. Beech”--here the

Squire dropped his oratorical voice and stepped close to the

farmer--“if this thing has cramped you any, that is to say, if you find

yourself in need of--of--any accommodation--”

“No, nothin’ o’ that sort,” said Abner. He stopped at that, and kept

silence for a little, with his head down and his gaze meditatively fixed

on the barn floor. At last he raised his face and spoke again, his deep

voice shaking a little in spite of itself.

“What you’ve said, Square, an’ your comin’ here, has done me a lot o’

good. It’s pooty nigh wuth bein’ burnt out for--to have this sort o’

thing come \ on behind as an after-clap. Sometimes, I tell you, sir,

I’ve despaired o’ the republic. I admit it, though it’s to my shame.

I’ve said to myself that when American citizens, born an’ raised

right on the same hill-side, got to behavin’ to each other in such an

all-fired mean an’ cantankerous way, why, the hull blamed thing wasn’t

worth tryin’ to save. But you see I was wrong--I admit I was wrong. It

was jest a passin’ flurry--a kind o’ snow-squall in hayin’ time. All the

while, right down ’t the bottom, their hearts was sound an’ sweet as a

butternut. It fetches me--that does--it makes me prouder than ever I was

before in all my born days to be an American--yes, sir--that’s the way

I--I feel about it.”

There were actually tears in the big farmer’s eyes, and he got out those

finishing words of his in fragmentary gulps. None of us had ever seen

him so affected before.

After the Squire had shaken hands again and started off, Abner stood at

the open door, looking after him, then gazing in a contemplative general

way upon all out-doors. The vivid sunlight reflected up from the melting

snow made his face to shine as if from an inner radiance. He stood still

and looked across the yards with their piles of wet straw smoking in the

forenoon heat, and the black puddles eating into the snow as the thaw

went on; over the further prospect, made weirdly unfamiliar by the

disappearance of the big old farm-house; down the long broad sloping

hill-side with its winding road, its checkered irregular patches of

yellow stubble and stacked fodder, of deep umber ploughed land and warm

gray woodland, all pushing aside their premature mantle of sparkling

white, and the scattered homesteads and red barns beyond--and there was

in his eyes the far-away look of one who saw still other things.

He turned at last and came in, walking over to where Jeff and Esther

stood hand in hand beside the bed on the floor. Old Jee Hagadorn was

sitting up now, and had exchanged some words with the couple.

“Well, Brother Hagadorn,” said the farmer, “I hope you’re feelin’

better.”

“Yes, a good deal--B--Brother Beech, thank’ee,” replied the cooper,

slowly and with hesitation.

Abner laid a fatherly hand on Esther’s shoulder and another on Jeff’s. A

smile began to steal over his big face, broadening the square which his

mouth cut down into his beard, and deepening the pleasant wrinkles about

his eyes. He called M’rye over to the group with beckoning nod of the

head.

“It’s jest occurred to me, mother,” he said, with the mock gravity of

tone we once had known so well and of late had heard so little--“I

jest be’n thinkin’ we might’a’ killed two birds with one stun while the

Square was up here. He’s justice o’ the peace, you know--an’ they say

them kind o’ marriages turn out better ’n all the others.”

“Go ’long with yeh!” said Ma’rye, vivaciously. But she too put a hand on

Esther’s other shoulder.

The school-teacher nestled against M’rye’s side. “I tell you what,” she

said, softly, “if Jeff ever turns out to be half the man his father is,

I’ll just be prouder than my skin can hold.”

MARSENA

I

Marsena Pulford, what time the village of Octavius knew him, was

a slender and tall man, apparently skirting upon the thirties, with

sloping shoulders and a romantic aspect.

It was not alone his flowing black hair, and his broad shirt-collars

turned down after the ascertained manner of the British poets, which

stamped him in our humble minds as a living brother to “The Corsair,”

“The Last of the Suliotes,” and other heroic personages engraved in the

albums and keepsakes of the period. His face, with its darkling eyes

and distinguished features, conveyed wherever it went an impression

of proudly silent melancholy. In those days--that is, just before the

war--one could not look so convincingly and uniformly sad as Marsena did

without raising the general presumption of having been crossed in love.

We had a respectful feeling, in his case, that the lady ought to have

been named Iñez, or at the very least Oriana.

Although he went to the Presbyterian Church with entire regularity, was

never seen in public save in a long-tailed black coat, and in the winter

wore gloves instead of mittens, the local conscience had always, I

think, sundry reservations about the moral character of his past. It

would not have been reckoned against him, then, that he was obviously

poor. We had not learned in those primitive times to measure people by

dollar-mark standards. Under ordinary conditions, too, the fact that

he came from New England--had indeed lived in Boston--must have counted

rather in his favor than otherwise. But it was known that he had been

an artist, a professional painter of pictures and portraits, and we

understood in Octavius that this involved acquaintanceship, if not even

familiarity, with all sorts of occult and deleterious phases of city

life.

Our village held all vice, and especially the vice of other and larger

places, in stern reprobation. Yet, though it turned this matter of the

newcomer’s previous occupation over a good deal in its mind, Marsena

carried himself with such a gentle picturesqueness of subdued sorrow

that these suspicions were disarmed, or, at the worst, only added to the

fascinated interest with which Octavius watched his spare and solitary

figure upon its streets, and noted the progress of his efforts to find a

footing for himself in its social economy.

It was taken for granted among us that he possessed a fine and

well-cultivated mind, to match that thoughtful countenance and that

dignified deportment.

This assumption continued to hold its own in the face of a long series

of failures in the attempt to draw him out. Almost everybody who

was anybody at one time or another tried to tap Marsena’s mental

reservoirs--and all in vain. Beyond the barest commonplaces of

civil conversation he could, never be tempted. Once, indeed, he had

volunteered to the Rev. Mr. Bunce the statement that he regarded

Washington Allston as in several respects superior to Copley; but as

no one in Octavius knew who these men were, the remark did not help us

much. It was quoted frequently, however, as indicating the lofty and

recondite nature of the thoughts with which Mr. Pulford occupied his

intellect. As it became more apparent, too, that his reserve must be

the outgrowth of some crushing and incurable heart grief, people grew to

defer to it and to avoid vexing his silent moods with talk.

Thus, when he had been a resident and neighbor for over two years,

though no one knew him at all well, the whole community regarded him

with kindly and even respectful emotions, and the girls in particular

felt that he was a distinct acquisition to the place.

I have said that Marsena Pulford was poor. Hardly anybody in Octavius

ever knew to what pathetic depths his poverty during the second winter

descended. There was a period of several months, in sober truth, during

which he fed himself upon six or seven cents a day. As he was too proud

to dream of asking credit at the grocer’s and butcher’s, and walked

about more primly erect than ever, meantime, in his frock-coat and

gloves, no idea of these privations got abroad. And at the end of this

long evil winter there came a remarkable spring, which altered in a

violent way the fortunes of millions of people--among them Marsena. We

have to do with events somewhat subsequent to that even, and with the

period of Mr. Pulford’s prosperity.

*****

The last discredited strips of snow up in the ravines on the hill-sides

were melting away; the robins had come again, and were bustling busily

across between the willows, already in the leaf, and the budded elms;

men were going about the village streets without their overcoats, and

boys were telling exciting tales about the suckers in the creek; our old

friend Homer Sage had returned from his winter’s sojourn in the county

poorhouse at Thessaly, and could be seen daily sitting in the sunshine

on the broad stoop of the Excelsior Hotel. It was April of 1862.

A whole year had gone by since that sudden and memorable turn in Marsena

Pulford’s luck. So far from there being signs now of a possible adverse

change, this new springtide brought such an increase of good fortune,

with its attendant responsibilities, that Marsena was unable to bear

the halcyon burden alone. He took in a partner to help him, and then the

firm jointly hired a boy. The partner painted a signboard to mark this

double event, in bold red letters of independent form upon a yellow

ground:

PULFORD & SHULL.

Empire State Portrait Athenæum and

Studio.

War Likenesses at Peace Prices.

Marsena discouraged the idea of hanging this out on the street; and, as

a compromise, it was finally placed at the end of the operating-room,

where for years thereafter it served for the sitters to stare at when

their skulls had been clasped in the iron headrest and they had been

adjured to look pleasant. A more modest and conventional announcement

of the new firm’s existence was put outside, and Octavius accepted it as

proof that the liberal arts were at last established within its borders

on a firm and lucrative basis.

The head of the firm was not much altered by this great wave of

prosperity. He had been drilled by adversity into such careful ways with

his wardrobe that he did not need to get any new clothes. Although the

villagers, always kindly, sought now with cordial effusiveness to

make him feel one of themselves, and although he accepted all their

invitations and showed himself at every public meeting in his capacity

as a representative and even prominent citizen, yet the heart of his

mystery remained unplucked. Marsena was too busy in these days to be

much upon the streets. When he did appear he still walked alone, slowly

and with an air of settled gloom. He saluted such passers-by as he knew

in stately silence. If they stopped him or joined him in his progress,

at the most he would talk sparingly of the weather and the roads.

Neither at the fortnightly sociables of the Ladies’ Church Mite Society,

given in turn at the more important members’ homes, nor in the more

casual social assemblages of the place, did Marsena ever unbend. It

was not that he held himself aloof, as some others did, from the simple

amusements of the evening. He never shrank from bearing his part in

“pillow,” “clap in and clap out,” “post-office,” or in whatever other

game was to be played, and he went through the kissing penalties and

rewards involved without apparent aversion. It was also to be noted, in

fairness, that, if any one smiled at him full in the face, he instantly

smiled in response. But neither smile nor chaste salute served to lift

for even the fleeting instant that veil of reserve which hung over him.

Those who thought that by having Marsena Pul-ford take their pictures

they would get on more intimate terms with him fell into grievous error.

He was more sententious and unapproachable in his studio, as he called

it, than anywhere else. In the old days, before the partnership, when

he did everything himself, his manner in the reception-room downstairs,

where he showed samples, gave the prices of frames, and took orders,

had no equal for formal frigidity--except his subsequent demeanor in

the operating-room upstairs. The girls used to declare that they always

emerged from the gallery with “cold shivers all over them.” This,

however, did not deter them from going again, repeatedly, after the

outbreak of the war had started up the universal notion of being

photographed.

When the new partner came in, in this April of 1862, Marsena was able to

devote himself exclusively to the technical business of the camera and

the dark-room, on the second floor. He signalled this change by wearing

now every day an old russet-colored velveteen jacket, which we had never

seen before. This made him look even more romantically melancholy

and picturesque than ever, and revived something of the fascinating

curiosity as to his hidden past; but it did nothing toward thawing the

icebound shell which somehow came at every point between him and the

good-fellowship of the community.

The partnership was scarcely a week old when something happened. The

new partner, standing behind the little show-case in the reception-room,

transacted some preliminary business with two customers who had come in.

Then, while the sound of their ascending footsteps was still to be heard

on the stairs, he hastily left his post and entered the little work-room

at the back of the counter.

“You couldn’t guess in a baker’s dozen of tries who’s gone upstairs,”

he said to the boy. Without waiting for even one effort, he added:

“It’s the Parmalee girl, and Dwight Ransom’s with her, and he’s got a

Lootenant’s uniform on, and they’re goin’ to be took together!”

“What of it?” asked the unimaginative boy. He was bending over a crock

of nitric acid, transferring from it one by one to a tub of water a lot

of spoiled glass plates. The sickening fumes from the jar, and the sting

of the acid on his cracked skin, still further diminished his interest

in contemporary sociology. “Well, what of it?” he repeated, sulkily.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said the new partner, in a listless, disappointed

way. “It seemed kind o’ curious, that’s all. Holdin’ her head up as high

in the air as she does, you wouldn’t think she’d so much as look at an

ordinary fellow like Dwight Ransom.”

“I suppose this is a free country,” remarked the boy, rising to rest his

back.

“Oh, my, yes,” returned the other; “if she’s pleased, I’m quite

agreeable. And--I don’t know, too--I dare say she’s gettin’ pretty well

along. Maybe she thinks they ain’t any too much time to lose, and is

making a grab at what comes handiest. Still, I should ’a’ thought she

could ’a’ done better than Dwight. I worked with him for a spell once,

you know.”

There seemed to be very few people with whom Newton Shull had not at one

time or another worked. Apparently there was no craft or calling which

he did not know something about. The old phrase, “Jack of all trades,”

must surely have been coined in prophecy for him. He had turned up in

Octavius originally, some years before, as the general manager of a

“Whaler’s Life on the Rolling Deep” show, which was specially adapted

for moral exhibitions in connection with church fairs. Calamity,

however, had long marked this enterprise for its own, and at our village

its career culminated under the auspices of a sheriff’s officer. The

boat, the harpoons, the panorama sheet and rollers, the whale’s jaw, the

music-box with its nautical tunes--these were sold and dispersed. Newton

Shull remained, and began work as a mender of clocks. Incidentally, he

cut out stencil-plates for farmers to label their cheese-boxes with, and

painted or gilded ornamental designs on chair-backs through perforated

paper patterns. For a time he was a maker of children’s sleds. In slack

seasons he got jobs to help the druggist, the tinsmith, the dentist,

or the Town Clerk, and was equally at home with each. He was one of

the founders of the Octavius Philharmonics, and offered to play any

instrument they liked, though his preference was for what he called the

bull fiddle. He spoke often of having travelled as a bandsman with a

circus. We boys believed that he was quite capable of riding a horse

bareback as well.

When Marsena Pulford, then, decided that he must have some help, Newton

Shull was obviously the man. How the arrangement came to take the form

of a partnership was never explained, save on the conservative village

theory that Marsena must have reasoned that a partner would be safer

with the cash-box downstairs, while he was taking pictures upstairs,

than a mere hired man. More likely it grew out of their temperamental

affinity. Shull was also a man of grave and depressed moods (as, indeed,

is the case with all who play the bass viol), only his melancholy

differed from Marsena’s in being of a tirelessly garrulous character.

This was not always an advantage. When customers came in, in the

afternoon, it was his friendly impulse to engage them in conversation at

such length that frequently the light would fail altogether before

they got upstairs. He recognized this tendency as a fault, and manfully

combated it--leaving the reception-room with abruptness at the earliest

possible moment, and talking to the boy in the work-room instead.

Mr. Shull was a short, round man, with a beard which was beginning to

show gray under the lip. His reception-room manners were urbane and

persuasive to a degree, and he particularly excelled in convincing

people that the portraits of themselves, which Marsena had sent down

to him in the dummy to be dried and varnished, and which they hated

vehemently at first sight, were really unique and precious works of art.

He had also much success in inducing country folks to despise the cheap

ferrotype which they had intended to have made, and to venture upon the

costlier ambrotype, daguerreotype, or even photograph instead. If they

did not go away with a family album or an assortment of frames that

would come in handy as well, it was no fault of his.

He made these frames himself, on a bench which he had fitted up in the

work-room. Here he constructed show-cases, too, cut out mats and mounts,

and did many other things as adjuncts to the business, which honest

Marsena had never dreamed of.

“Yes,” he went on now, “I carried a chain for Dwight the best part o’

one whole summer, when he was layin’ levels for that Nedahma Valley

Railroad they were figurin’ on buildin’. Guess they ruther let him

in over that job--though he paid me fair enough. It ain’t much of a

business, that surveyin’. You spend about half your time in findin’ out

for people the way they could do things if they only had the money to do

’em, and the other half in settlin’ miserable farmers’ squabbles about

the boundaries of their land. You’ve got to pay a man day’s wages for

totin’ round your chain and axe and stakes--and, as like as not, you

never get even that money back, let alone any pay for yourself. I know

something about a good many trades, and I say surveyin’ is pretty nigh

the poorest of ’em all.”

“George Washington was a surveyor,” commented the boy, stooping down to

his task once more.

“Yes,” admitted Mr. Shull; “so he was, for a fact. But then he had

influence enough to get government jobs. I don’t say there ain’t money

in that. If Dwight, now, could get a berth on the canal, say, it ’ud

be a horse of another color. They say, there’s some places there that

pay as much as $3 a day. That’s how George Washington got his start,

and, besides, he owned his own house and lot to begin with. But you’ll

take notice that he dropped surveyin’ like a hot potato the minute there

was any soldierin’ to do. He knew which side _his_ bread was buttered

on!”

“Well,” said the boy, slapping the last plates sharply into the tub,

“that’s just what Dwight’s doin’ too, ain’t it?”

“Yes,” Mr. Shull conceded; “but it ain’t the same thing. You won’t find

Dwight Ransom get-tin’ to be general, or much of anything else. He’s a

nice fellow enough, in his way, of course; but, somehow, after it’s all

said and done, there ain’t much to him. I always sort o’ felt, when I

was out with him, that by good rights I ought to be working the level

and him hammerin’ in the stakes.”

The boy sniffed audibly as he bore away the acid-jar.

Mr. Shull went over to the bench, and took up a chisel with a meditative

air. After a moment he lifted his head and listened, with aroused

interest written all over his face.

There had been audible from the floor above, at intervals, the customary

noises of the camera being wheeled about to different points under

the skylight. There came echoing downward now quite other and most

unfamiliar sounds--the clatter of animated, even gay, conversation,

punctuated by frank outbursts of laughter. Newton Shull could hardly

believe his ears: but they certainly did tell him that there were three

parties to that merriment overhead. It was so strange that he laid aside

the chisel, and tiptoed out into the reception-room, with a notion of

listening at the stair door. Then he even more hurriedly ran back again.

They were coming downstairs.

It might have been a whole wedding-party that trooped down the

resounding stairway, the voices rising above the clump of Dwight’s

artillery boots and sword on step after step, and overflowed into the

stuffy little reception-room with a cheerful tumult of babble. The new

partner and the boy looked at each other, then directed a joint stare of

bewilderment toward the door.

Julia Parmalee had pushed her way behind the show-case, and stood in

the entrance to the workroom, peering about her with an affectation of

excited curiosity which she may have thought pretty and playful, but

which the boy, at least, held to be absurd.

She had been talking thirteen to the dozen all the time. “Oh, I really

must see everything!” she rattled on now. “If I could be trusted alone

in the dark-room with you, Mr. Pulford, I surely may be allowed to

explore all these minor mysteries. Oh, I see,” she added, glancing

round, and incidentally looking quite through Mr. Shull and the boy, as

if they had been transparent: “here’s where the frames and the washing

are done. How interesting!”

What really was interesting was the face of Marsena Pulford, discernible

in the shadow over her shoulder. No one in Octavius had ever seen such a

beaming smile on his saturnine countenance before.

II

Next to the War, the chief topic of interest and conversation in

Octavius at this time was easily Miss Julia Parmalee.

To begin with, her family had for two generations or more been the most

important family in the village. When Lafayette stopped here to receive

an address of welcome, on his tour through the State in 1825, it was a

Parmalee who read that address, and who also, as tradition runs, made on

his own account several remarks to the hero in the French language, all

of which were understood. The elder son of this man has a secure place

in history. He is the Judge Parmalee whose portrait hangs in the Court

House, and whose learned work on “The Treaties of the Tuscarora Nation,”

handsomely bound in morocco, used to have a place of honor on the parlor

table of every well-to-do and cultured Octavius home.

This Judge was a banker, too, and did pretty well for himself in a

number of other commercial paths. He it was who built the big Parmalee

house, with a stone wall in front and the great garden and orchard

stretching back to the next street, and the buff-colored statues on

either side of the gravelled walk, where the Second National Dearborn

County Bank now stands. The Judge had no children, and, on his widow’s

death, the property went to his much younger brother Charles, who, from

having been as a stripling on some forgotten Governor’s staff, bore

through life the title of Colonel in the local speech.

This Colonel Parmalee had a certain distinction, too, though not of a

martial character. His home was in New York, and for many years Octavius

never laid eyes on him. He was understood to occupy a respected place

among American men of letters, though exactly what he wrote did not come

to our knowledge. It was said that he had been at Brook Farm. I have not

been able to find any one who remembers him there, but the report is of

use as showing the impression of superior intellectual force which he

created, even by hearsay, in his native village. When he finally came

back to us, to play his part as the head of the Parmalee house, we saw

at intervals, when the sun was warm and the sidewalks were dry, the lean

and bent figure of an old man, with a very yellow face and a sharp-edged

brown wig, moving feebly about with a thick gray shawl over his

shoulders. His housekeeper was an elderly maiden cousin, who seemed

never to come out at all, whether the sun was shining or not.

There were three or four of the Colonel’s daughters--all tall, well-made

girls, with strikingly dark skins, and what we took to be gypsyish

faces. Their appearance certainly bore out the rumor that their mother

had been an opera-singer--some said an Italian, others a lady of

Louisiana Creole extraction. No information, except that she was dead,

ever came to hand about this person. Her daughters, however, were very

much in evidence. They seemed always to wear white dresses, and they

were always to be seen somewhere, either on their lawn playing croquet,

or in the streets, or at the windows of their house. The consciousness

of their existence pervaded the whole village from morning till night.

To watch their goings and comings, and to speculate upon the identity

and business of the friends from strange parts who were continually

arriving to visit them, grew to be quite the standing occupation of the

idler portion of the community.

Before such of our young people as naturally took the lead in these

matters had had time to decide how best to utilize for the general good

this influx of beauty, wealth, and ancestral dignity, the village was

startled by an unlooked-for occurrence. A red carpet was spread one

forenoon from the curb to the doorway of the Episcopal church: the

old-fashioned Parmalee carriage turned out, with its driver clasping

white reins in white cotton gloves; we had a confused glimpse of the

dark Parmalee girls with bouquets in their hands, and dressed rather

more in white than usual: and then astonished Octavius learned that

two of them had been married, right there under its very eyes, and had

departed with their husbands. It gave an angry twist to the discovery to

find that the bridegrooms were both strangers, presumably from New York.

This episode had the figurative effect of doubling or trebling the

height of that stone wall which stood between the Parmalee place and the

public. Such budding hopes and projects of intimacy as our villagers

may have entertained toward these polished newcomers fell nipped and

lifeless on the stroke. Shortly afterward--that is to say, in the autumn

of 1860--the family went away, and the big house was shut up. News came

in time that the Colonel was dead: something was said about another

daughter’s marriage; then the war broke out, and gave us other things to

think of. We forgot all about the Parmalees.

It must have been in the last weeks of 1861 that our vagrant attention

was recalled to the subject by the appearance in the village of an

elderly married couple of servants, who took up their quarters in the

long empty mansion, and began fitting it once more for habitation. They

set all the chimneys smoking, shovelled the garden paths clear of snow,

laid in huge supplies of firewood, vegetables, and the like, and turned

the whole place inside out in a vigorous convulsion of housecleaning.

Their preparations were on such a bold, large scale that we assumed the

property must have passed to some voluminous collateral branch of the

family, hitherto unknown to us. It came indeed to be stated among us,

with an air of certainty, that a remote relation named Amos or Erasmus

Parmalee, with eight or more children and a numerous adult household,

was coming to live there. The legend of this wholly mythical personage

had nearly a fortnight’s vogue, and reached a point of distinctness

where we clearly understood that the coming stranger was a violent

secessionist. This seemed to open up a troubled and sinister prospect

before loyal Octavius, and there was a good deal of plain talk in the

barroom of the Excelsior Hotel as to how this impending crisis should be

met.

It was just after New Year’s that our suspense was ended. The new

Parmalees came, and Octavius noted with a sort of disappointed surprise

that they turned out to be merely a shorn and trivial remnant of the old

Parmalees. They were in fact only a couple of women--the elderly maiden

cousin who had presided before over the Colonel’s household, and the

youngest of his daughters, by name Miss Julia. What was more, word

was now passed round upon authority that these were the sole remaining

members of the family--that there never had been any Amos or Erasmus

Parmalee at all.

The discovery cast the more heroic of our village home-guards into a

temporary depression. It could hardly have been otherwise, for here were

all their fine and strong resolves, their publicly registered vows

about scowling at the odious Southern sympathizer in the street, about

a “horning” party outside his house at night, about, perhaps, actually

riding him on a rail--all brought to nothing. A less earnest body of men

might have suspected in the situation some elements of the ridiculous.

They let themselves down gently, however, and with a certain dignified

sense of consolation that they had, at all events, shown unmistakably

how they would have dealt with Amos or Erasmus Parmalee if there had

been such a man, and he had moved to Octavius and had ventured to flaunt

his rebel sentiments in their outraged faces.

The village, as a whole, consoled itself on more tangible grounds. It

has been stated that Miss Julia Parmalee arrived at the family homestead

in early January. Before April had brought the buds and birds, this

young woman had become President of the St. Mark’s Episcopal Ladies’ Aid

Society; had organized a local branch of the Sanitary Commission, and

assumed active control of all its executive and clerical functions;

had committed the principal people of the community to holding a grand

festival and fair in May for the Field Hospital and Nurse Fund; had

exhibited in the chief store window on Main Street a crayon portrait of

her late father, and four water-color drawings of European scenery, all

her own handiwork; had published over her signature, in the Thessaly

_Banner of Liberty_, an original and spirited poem on “Pale Columbia,

Shriek to Arms!” which no one could read without patriotic thrills; and

had been reported, on more or less warrant of appearances, to be engaged

to four different young men of the place. Truly a remarkable young

woman!

We were only able in a dim kind of way to identify her with one of

the group of girls in white dresses whom the village had stared at and

studied from a distance two years before. There was no mystery about

it, however: she was the youngest of them. They had all looked so much

alike, with their precocious growth, their olive skins and foreign

features, that we were quite surprised to find now that this one,

regarded by herself, must be a great deal younger than the others.

Perhaps it was only our rustic shyness which had imputed to the

sisterhood, in that earlier experience, the hauteur and icy reserve of

the rich and exclusive. We recognized now that if the others were at all

like Julia, we had made an absurd mistake. It was impossible that any

one could be freer from arrogance or pretence than Octavius found her

to be. There were some, indeed, who deemed her emancipation almost too

complete.

Some there were, too, who denied that she was beautiful, or even very

good-looking. There is an old daguerreotype of her as she was in those

days--or rather as she seemed to be to the unskilled sunbeams of the

sixties--which gives these censorious people the lie direct. It is true

that her hair is confined in a net at the sides and drawn stiffly across

her temples from the parting. The full throat rises sheer from a flat

horizon of striped dress goods, and is offered no relief whatever by the

wide falling-away collar of coarse lace. And oh! the strangeness of that

frock! The shoulder seams are to be looked for half-way down the upper

arm, the sleeves swell themselves out into shapeless bags, the waist

front might be the cover of a chair, of a guitar, of the documents in

a corporation suit--of anything under the sun rather than the form of

a charming girl. Yet, when you look at this thin old picture, all the

same, you feel that you understand how it was that Julia Parmalee took

the shine out of all the other girls in Octavius.

This is the likeness of her which always seemed to me the best, but

Marsena Pulford made a great many others as well. When you reflect,

indeed, that his output of portraits of Julia Parmalee was limited in

time to the two months of April and May, their number suggests that he

could hardly have done anything else the while.

The first of this large series of pictures was the one which Marsena

liked least. It is true that Julia looked well in it, standing erect,

with a proud, fine backward tilt to her dark face and a delicately

formed white hand resting gracefully on the back of a chair. But it

happened that in that chair was seated Lieut. Dwight Ransom, all spick

and span in his new uniform, with his big gauntlets and sword hilt

brought prominently forward, and with a kind of fatuous smile on his

ruddy face, as if he felt the presence of those fair fingers on the

chair-back, so teasingly close to his shoulder-strap.

Marsena, in truth, had a strong impulse to run a destroying thumbnail

over the seated figure on this plate, when the action of the developer

began to reveal its outlines under the faint yellow light in the

dark-room. Of all the myriad pictures he had washed and drained and

nursed in their wet growth over this tank, no other had ever stirred up

in his breast such a swift and sharp hostility. He lavished the deadly

cyanide upon that portion of the plate, too, with grim unction, and

noted the results with a scornful curl on his lip. Like his partner

downstairs, he was wondering what on earth possessed Miss Parmalee to

take up with a Dwight Ransom.

The frown was still on his brow when he opened the dark-room door. Then

he started back, flushed red, and labored at an embarrassed smile. Miss

Parmalee had left her place, and stood right in front of him, so near

that he almost ran against her. She beamed confidently and reassuringly

upon him.

“Oh, I want to come in and see you do all that,” she exclaimed, with

vivacity. “It didn’t occur to me till after you’d shut the door, or I’d

have asked to come in with you. I have the greatest curiosity about

all these matters. Oh, it is all done? That’s too bad! But you can

make another one--and that I can see from the beginning. You know, I’m

something of an artist myself; I’ve taken lessons for years--and this

all interests me so much! No, Lieutenant!”--she called out from where

she was standing just inside the open door, at sound of her companion’s

rising--“you stay where you are! There’s going to be another, and it’s

such trouble to get you posed properly. Try and keep exactly as you

were!”

Thus it happened that she stood very close to Marsena, as he took out

another plate, flooded it with the sweet-smelling, pungent collodion,

and, with furtive precautions against the light, lowered it down into

the silver bath. Then he had to shut the door, and she was still there

just beside him. He heard himself pretending to explain the processes

of the films to her, but his mind was concentrated instead upon a

suggestion of perfume which she had brought into the reeking little

cupboard of a room, and which mingled languorously with the scents

of ether and creosote in the air. He had known her by sight for but a

couple of months; he had been introduced to her only a week or so ago,

and that in the most casual way; yet, strange enough, he could feel his

hand trembling as it perfunctorily moved the plate dipper up and down in

the bath.

A gentle voice fell upon the darkness. “Do you know, Mr. Pulford,” it

murmured, “I felt sure that you were an artist, the very first time I

saw you.”

Marsena heaved a long sigh--a sigh with a tremulous catch in it, as

where sorrow and sweet solace should meet. “I did start out to be one,”

he answered, “but I--I never amounted to anything at it. I tried for

years, but I wasn’t any good. I had to give it up--at last--and take to

this instead.”

He lifted the plate with caution, bent to look obliquely across its

surface, and lowered it again. Then all at once he turned abruptly and

faced her. They were so close to each other that even in the obscure

gloom she caught the sudden flash of resolution in his eyes.

“I’ll tell you what I never told any other living soul,” he said,

beginning with husky eagerness, but lapsing now into grave deliberation

of emphasis: “I hate--this--like pizen!”

In the silence which followed, Marsena mechanically took the plate from

the bath, fastened it in the holder, and stepped to the door. Then he

halted, to prolong for one little instant this tender spell of magic

which had stolen over him. Here, in the close darkness beside him, was

a sorceress, a siren, who had at a glance read his sore heart’s deepest

secret--at a word drawn the confession of his maimed and embittered

pride. It was like being shut up with an angel, who was also a beautiful

woman. Oh, the wonder of it! Broad sunlit landscapes with Italian skies

seemed to be forming themselves before his mind’s eye; his soul sang

songs within him. He very nearly dropped the plate-holder.

The soft, hovering, half touch of a hand upon his arm, the cool, restful

tones of the voice in the darkness, came to complete the witchery.

“I know,” she said, “I can sympathize with you. I also had my dreams, my

aspirations. But you are wrong to think that you have failed. Why, this

beautiful work of yours, it all is Art--pure Art. No person who really

knows could look at it and not see that. No, Mr. Pulford, you do

yourself an injustice; believe me, you do. Why, you couldn’t help being

an artist if you tried; it’s born in you. It shows in everything you do.

I saw it from the very first.”

The unmistakable sound of Dwight Ransom’s large artillery boots moving

on the floor outside intervened here, and Marsena hurriedly opened the

door. The Lieutenant glanced with good-natured raillery at the couple

who stood revealed, blinking in the sharp light.

“One of my legs got asleep,” he remarked, by way of explanation, “so I

had to get up and stamp around. I began to think,” he added, “that you

folks were going to set up housekeeping in there, and not come out any

more at all.”

“Don’t be vulgar, if you please,” said Julia Par-malee, with a dash of

asperity in what purported to be a bantering tone. “We were talking of

matters quite beyond you--of Art, if you desire to know. Mr. Pulford and

I discover that we have a great many opinions and sentiments about Art

in common. It is a feeling that no one can understand unless they have

it.”

“It’s the same with getting one’s leg asleep,” said Dwight, “quite the

same, I assure you;” and then came the laughter which Newton Shull heard

downstairs.

III

A DAY or two later Battery G left Octavius for the seat of war.

It was not nearly so imposing an event as a good many others which had

stirred the community during the previous twelve months. There were

already two regiments in the field recruited from our end of Dearborn

County, and in these at least six or seven companies were made up wholly

of Octavius men. There had been big crowds, with speeches and music by

the band, to see them off at the old depot.

When they returned, their short term of service having expired, there

were still more fervent demonstrations, to which zest was added by

the knowledge that they were all to enlist again, and then we shortly

celebrated their second departure. Some there were who returned in mute

and cold finality--term of enlistment and life alike cut short--and

these were borne through our streets with sombre martial pageantry, the

long wail of the funeral march reaching out to include the whole valley

side in its note of lamentation. Besides all this, hardly a week passed

that those of us who hung about the station could not see a train full

of troops on their way to or from the South. A year of these experiences

had left us seasoned veterans in sightseeing, by no means to be

fluttered by trifles.

As a matter of fact, the village did not take Battery G very seriously.

To begin with, it mustered only some dozen men, at least so far as our

local contribution went, and there was a feeling that we couldn’t be

expected to go much out of our way for such a paltry number. Then,

again, an artillery force was somehow out of joint with our notion of

what Octavius should do to help suppress the Rebellion. Infantrymen with

muskets we could all understand--could all be, if necessary. Many of the

farmer boys round about, too, made good cavalrymen, because they knew

both how to ride and how to groom a horse. But in the name of all that

was mysterious, why artillerymen? There had never been a cannon within

fifty miles of Octavius; that is, since the Revolution. Certainly none

of our citizens had the least idea how to fire one off. These enlisted

men of Battery G were no better posted than the rest; it would take them

a three days’ journey to reach the point where, for the first time, they

were to see their strange weapon of warfare. This seemed to us rather

foolish.

Moreover, there was a government proclamation just out, it was said,

discontinuing further enlistments and disbanding the recruiting offices

scattered over the North. This appeared to imply that the war was about

over, or at least that they had more soldiers already than they knew

what to do with. There were some who questioned whether, under these

circumstances, it was worth while for Battery G to go at all.

But go it did, and at the last moment quite a throng of people found

themselves gathered at the station to say good-by. A good many of these

were the relations and friends of the dozen ordinary recruits, who would

not even get their uniforms and swords till they reached Tecumseh. But

the larger portion, I should think, had come on account of Lieutenant

Ransom.

Dwight was hail-fellow-well-met with more people within a radius of

twenty miles or so, probably, than any other man in the district. He was

a goodlooking young man, rather stocky in build and deeply sunburned.

Through the decent months of the year he was always out of doors, either

tramping over the country with a level over his shoulder, or improving

the days with a shotgun or fishpole. At these seasons he was generally

to be found of an evening at the barber’s shop, where he told more new

stories than any one else. When winter came his chief work was in his

office, drawing maps and plans. He let his beard grow then, and spent

his leisure for the most part playing checkers at the Excelsior Hotel.

His habitual free-and-easy dress and amiable laxity of manners tended to

obscure in the village mind the facts that he came from one of the best

families of the section, that he had been through college, and that he

had some means of his own. His mother and sisters were very respectable

people indeed, and had one of the most expensive pews in the Episcopal

church. It was not observed, however, that Dwight ever accompanied them

thither or that he devoted much of his time to their society at home.

It began to be remarked, here and there, that it was getting to be about

time for Dwight Ransom to steady down, if he was ever going to. Although

everybody liked him and was glad to see him about, an impression was

gradually shaping itself that he never would amount to much.

All at once Dwight staggered the public consciousness by putting on his

best clothes one Sunday and going with his folks to church. Those who

saw him on the way there could not make it out at all, except on

the hypothesis that there had been a death in the family. Those who

encountered him upon his return from the sacred edifice, however,

found a clue to the mystery ready made. He was walking home with Julia

Parmalee.

There were others whose passionate desire it was to walk home with

Julia. They had been enlivening Octavius with public displays of their

rivalry for something like two months when Dwight appeared on the scene

as a competitor. Easy-going as he was in ordinary matters, he revealed

himself now to be a hustler in the Courts of love. It took him but a

single day to drive the teller of the bank from the field. The Principal

of the Seminary, a rising young lawyer, and the head bookkeeper at the

freight-house, severally went by the board within a fortnight.

There remained old Dr. Conger’s son Emory, who was of a tougher fibre

and gave Dwight several added weeks of combat. He enjoyed the advantage

of having nothing whatever to do. He possessed, moreover, a remarkably

varied wardrobe and white hands, and loomed unique among the males of

our town in his ability to play on the piano. With such aids a young

man may go far in a quiet neighborhood, and for a time Emory Conger

certainly seemed to be holding his own, if not more. His discomfiture,

when it came, was dramatic in its swift completeness. One forenoon we

saw Dwight on the street in a new and resplendent officer’s uniform,

and learned that he had been commissioned to raise a battery. That

very evening the doctor’s son left town, and the news went round that

Lieutenant Ransom was engaged to Miss Parmalee.

An impression prevailed that Dwight would not have objected to let the

matter rest there. He had gained his point, and might well regard the

battery and the war itself as things which had served their purpose

and could now be dispensed with. No one would have blamed him much for

feeling that way about it.

But this was not Julia’s view. She adopted the battery for her own while

it was still little more than a name, and swept it forward with such

a swirling rush of enthusiasm that the men were all enlisted, the

organization settled, and the date of departure for the front sternly

fastened, before anybody could lay a hand to the brakes. Her St. Mark’s

Ladies’ Aid Society presented Dwight with a sword. Her branch of the

Sanitary Commission voted to entertain the battery with a hot meal in

the depot yard before it took the train. We have seen how she went and

had herself photographed standing proudly behind the belted and martial

Dwight. After these things it was impossible for Battery G to back out.

The artillerymen had a bright blue sky and a warm sunlit noontide for

their departure. Even the most cynical of those who had come to see them

off yielded toward the end to the genial influence of the weather and

the impulse of good-fellowship, and joined in the handshaking at the car

windows, and in the volley of cheers which were raised as the train drew

slowly out of the yard.

At this moment the ladies of the Sanitary Commission had to bestir

themselves to save the remnant of oranges and sandwiches on their

tables from the swooping raid of the youth of Octavius, and, what with

administering cuffs and shakings, and keeping their garments out of

the way of coffee-cups overturned in the scramble, had no time to watch

Julia Parmalee.

The men gathered in the yard kept her steadily in view, however, as she

stood prominently in front of the throng, on the top of a baggage truck,

and waved her handkerchief until the train had dwindled into nothingness

down the valley. These observers had an eye also on three young men

who had got as near this truck as possible. Interest in Dwight and

his battery was already giving place to curiosity as to which of these

three--the bank-teller, the freight-house clerk, or the rising young

lawyer--would win the chance of helping Julia down off her perch.

No one was prepared for what really happened.

Miss Parmalee turned and looked thoughtfully, one might say

abstractedly, about her. Somehow she seemed not to see any of the hands

which were eagerly uplifted toward her. Instead, her musing gaze roved

lightly over the predatory scuffle among the tables, over the ancient

depot building, over the assembled throng of citizens in the background,

then wandered nearer, with the pretty inconsequence of a butterfly’s

flight. Of course it was the farewell to Dwight which had left that

soft, rosy flush in her dark, round cheeks. The glance that she was

sending idly fluttering here and there did not seem so obviously

connected with the Lieutenant. Of a sudden it halted and went into a

smile.

“Oh, Mr. Pulford! May I trouble you?” she said in very distinct tones,

bending forward over the edge of the truck, and holding forth two white

and most shapely hands.

Marsena was standing fully six feet away. Like the others, he had been

looking at Miss Parmalee, but with no hint of expectation in his eyes.

This abrupt summons seemed to surprise him even more than it did the

crowd. He started, changed color, fixed a wistful, almost pleading stare

upon the sunlit vacancy just above the head of the enchantress, and

confusedly fumbled with his glove tips, as if to make bare his hands for

this great function. Then, straightening himself, he slowly moved toward

her like one in a trance.

The rivals edged out of Marsena’s way in dum-founded silence, as if he

had been walking in his sleep, and waking were dangerous. He came up,

made a formal bow, and lifted his gloved hands in chivalrous pretence

of guiding the graceful little jump which brought Miss Parmalee to

the ground--all with a pale, motionless face upon which shone a solemn

ecstasy.

It was Marsena’s habit, when out of doors, to carry his right hand in

the breast of his frock-coat. As he made an angle of his elbow now, from

sheer force of custom, Julia promptly took the movement as a proffer

of physical support, and availed herself of it. Marsena felt himself

thrilling from top to toe at the touch of her hand upon his sleeve. If

there rose in his mind an awkward consciousness that this sort of

thing was unusual in Octavius by daylight, the embarrassment was only

momentary. He held himself proudly erect, and marched out of the depot

yard with Miss Parmalee on his arm.

As Homer Sage remarked that evening on the stoop of the Excelsior Hotel,

this event made the departure of Battery G seem by comparison very small

potatoes indeed.

It was impossible for the twain not to realize that everybody was

looking at them, as they made their way up the shady side of the main

street. But there is another language of the hands than that taught

in deaf-mute schools, and Julia’s hand seemed to tell Marsena’s arm

distinctly that she didn’t care a bit. As for him, after that first

nervous minute or two, the experience was all joy--joy so profound and

overwhelming that he could only ponder it in dazzled silence. It is true

that Julia was talking--rattling on with sprightly volubility about all

sorts of things--but to Marsena her remarks no more invited answers

than does so much enthralling music. When she stopped for a breath he

did not remember what she had been saying. He only knew how he felt.

“I wish you’d come straight to the gallery with me,” he said; “I’d like

first-rate to make a real picture of you--by yourself.”

*****

“Well, I swow!” remarked Mr. Newton Shull, along in the later afternoon;

“I didn’t expect we’d make our salt to-day, with Marsena away pretty

near the whole forenoon, and all the folks down to the depot, and here

it turns out way the best day we’ve had yet. Actually had to send people

away!”

“Guess that didn’t worry him much,” commented the boy, from where he sat

on the work-bench swinging his legs in idleness.

Mr. Shull nodded his head suggestively. “No, I dare say not,” he said.

“I kind o’ begrudge not bein’ an operator myself, when such setters as

that come in. She must have been up there a full two hours--them two

all by themselves--and the countrymen loafin’ around out in the

reception-room there, stompin’ their feet and grindin’ their teeth, jest

tired to death o’ waitin’. It went agin my grain to tell them last two

lots they’d have to come some other day; but--I dunno--perhaps it’s

jest as well. They’ll go and tell it around that we’ve got more’n we can

do--and that’s good for business. But, all the same, it seemed to me as

if he took considerable more time than was really needful. He can turn

out four farmers in fifteen minutes, if he puts on a spurt; and here he

was a full two hours, and only five pictures of her to show for it.”

“Six,” said the boy.

“Yes, so it was--countin’ the one with her hair let down,” Mr. Shull

admitted. “I dunno whether that one oughtn’t to be a little extry. I

thought o’ tellin’ her that it would be, on account of so much hair

consumin’ more chemicals; but--I dunno--somehow--she sort o’ looked as

if she knew better. Did you ever notice them eyes o’ hern, how they look

as if they could see straight through you, and out on the other side?”

The boy shook his head. “I don’t bother my head about women,” he said.

“Got somethin’ better to do.”

“Guess that’s a pretty good plan too,” mused Mr. Shull. “Somehow you

can’t seem to make ’em out at all. Now, I’ve been around a good deal,

and yet somehow I don’t feel as if I knew much about women. I’m bound

to say, though,” he added upon reflection, “they know considerable about

me.”

“I suppose the first thing we know now,” remarked the boy, impatiently

changing the subject, “McClellan ’ll be in Richmond. They say it’s liable

to happen now any day.”

Newton Shull was but a lukewarm patriot. “They needn’t hurry on my

account,” he said. “It would be kind o’ mean to have the whole thing

fizzle out now, jest when the picture business has begun to amount to

something. Why, we must have took in up’ards of $11 to-day--frames

and all--and two years ago we’d ’a’ been lucky to get in $3. Let’s see:

there’s two fifties and five thirty-fives, that’s $2.75, and the Dutch

boy with the drum, that’s $3.40, counting the mat, and then there’s Miss

Parmalee--four daguerreotypes, and two negatives, and small frames for

each, and two large frames for crayons she’s going to do herself, and

cord and nails--I suppose she’ll think them ought to be thrown in--”

“What! didn’t you make her pay in advance?” asked the boy. “I thought

everybody had to.”

“You got to humor some folks,” explained Mr. Shull, with a note of

regret in his voice. “These big bugs with plenty o’ money always have to

be waited on. It ain’t right, but it has to be. Besides, you can always

slide on an extra quarter or so when you send in the bill. That sort o’

evens the thing up. Now, in her case, for instance, where we’d charge

ordinary folks a dollar for two daguerreotypes, we can send her in a

bill for--”

Neither Mr. Shull nor the boy had heard Mar-sena’s descending steps on

the staircase, yet at this moment he entered the little work-room and

walked across it to the bay window, where the printing was done. There

was an unusual degree of abstraction in his face and mien--unusual even

for him--and he drummed absent-mindedly on the panes as he stood looking

out at the street or the sky, or ‘whatever it was his listless gaze

beheld.

“How much do you think it ’ud be safe to stick Miss Parmalee apiece

for them daguerreotypes?” asked Newton Shull of his partner.

Marsena turned and stared for a moment as if he doubted having heard

aright. Then he made curt answer: “She is not to be charged anything at

all. They were made for her as presents.”

It was the other partner’s turn to stare.

“Well, of course--if you say it’s all right,” he managed to get out,

“but I suppose on the frames we can--”

“The frames are presents, too,” said Marsena, with decision.

IV

During the fortnight or three weeks following the departure of Battery

G it became clear to every one that the war was as good as over. It had

lasted already a whole year, but now the end was obviously at hand. The

Union army had the Rebels cooped up in Yorktown--the identical place

where the British had been compelled to surrender at the close of the

Revolution--and it was impossible that they should get away. The very

coincidence of locality was enough in itself to convince the most

skeptical.

We read that Fitz John Porter had a balloon fastened by a rope, in

which he daily went up and took a look through his field-glasses at the

Rebels, all miserably huddled together in their trap, awaiting their

doom. Our soldiers wrote home now that final victory could only be a

matter of a few weeks, or months at the most. Some of them said they

would surely be home by haying time. Their letters no longer dwelt upon

battles, or the prospect of battles, but gossiped about the jealousies

and quarrels among our generals, who seemed to dislike one another

much more than they did the common enemy, and told us long and quite

incredible tales about the mud in Virginia. No soldier’s letter that

spring was complete without a chapter on the mud. There were many

stories about mules and their contraband drivers being bodily sunk out

of sight in these weltering seas of mire, and of new boots being made

for the officers to come up to their armpits, which we hardly knew

whether to believe or not. But about the fact that peace was practically

within view there could be no doubt.

Under the influence of this mood, Miss Parma-lee’s ambitious project for

a grand fair and festival in aid of the Field Hospital and Nurse Fund

naturally languished. If the war was coming to a close so soon, there

could be no use in going to so much worry and trouble, to say nothing of

the expense.

Miss Julia seemed to take this view of it herself. She ceased active

preparations for the fair, and printed in the Thessaly _Banner of

Liberty_ a beautiful poem over her own name entitled “The Dovelike

Dawn of White-winged Peace.” She also got herself some new and summery

dresses, of gay tints and very fashionable form, and went to be

photographed in each. Her almost daily presence at the gallery came,

indeed, to be a leading topic of conversation in Octavius. Some

said that she was taking lessons of Marsena--learning to make

photographs--but others put a different construction on the matter and

winked as they did so.

As for Marsena, he moved about the streets these days with his head

among the stars, in a state of rapt and reverent exaltation. He had

never been what might be called a talker, but now it was as much as the

best of us could do to get any kind of word from him. He did not seem to

talk to Julia any more than to the general public, but just luxuriated

with a dumb solemnity of joy in her company, sitting sometimes for hours

beside her on the piazza of the Parmalee house, or focusing her pretty

image with silent delight on the ground glass of his best camera day

after day, or walking with her, arm in arm, to the Episcopal church

on Sundays. He had always been a Presbyterian before, but now he

bore himself in the prominent Parmalee pew at St. Mark’s with stately

correctness, rising, kneeling, seating himself, just as the others did,

and helping Miss Julia hold her Prayer Book with an air of having known

the ritual from childhood.

No doubt a good many people felt that all this was rough on the absent

Dwight Ransom, and probably some of them talked openly about it; but

interest in this aspect of the case was swallowed up in the larger

attention now given to Marsena Pulford himself. It began to be reported

that he really came of an extraordinarily good family in New England,

and that an uncle of his had been in Congress. The legend that he had

means of his own did not take much root, but it was admitted that he

must now be simply coining money. Some went so far as to estimate his

annual profits as high as $1,500, which sounded to the average Octavian

like a dream. It was commonly understood that he had abandoned an

earlier intention to buy a house and lot of his own, and this clearly

seemed to show that he counted upon going presently to live in the

Parmalee mansion. People speculated with idle curiosity as to the

likelihood of this coming to pass before the war ended and Battery G

returned home.

Suddenly great and stirring news fell upon the startled North and set

Octavius thrilling with excitement, along with every other community far

and near. It was in the first week or so of May that the surprise came;

the Rebels, whom we had supposed to be securely locked up in Yorktown,

with no alternative save starvation or surrender, decided not to

remain there any longer, and accordingly marched comfortably off in the

direction of Richmond!

Quick upon the heels of this came tidings that the Union army was in

pursuit, and that there had been savage fighting with the Confederate

rear-guard at Williamsburg. The papers said that the war, so far from

ending, must now be fought all over again. The marvellous story of

the Monitor and Merrimac sent our men folks into a frenzy of patriotic

fervor. Our women learned with sinking hearts that the new corps which

included our Dearborn County regiments was to bear the brunt of the

conflict in this changed order of things. We were all off again in a

hysterical whirl of emotions--now pride, now horror, now bitter wrath on

top.

In the middle of all this the famous Field Hospital and Nurse Fund Fair

was held. The project had slumbered the while people thought peace so

near. It sprang up with renewed and vigorous life the moment the echo of

those guns at Williamsburg reached our ears. And of course at its head

was Julia Parmalee.

It would take a long time and a powerful ransacking of memory to

catalogue the remarkable things which this active young woman did toward

making that fair the success it undoubtedly was. Even more notable were

the things which she coaxed, argued, or shamed other folks into doing

for it. Years afterward there were old people who would tell you that

Octavius had never been quite the same place since.

For one thing, instead of the Fireman’s Hall, with its dingy aspect and

somewhat rowdyish associations, the fair was held in the Court House,

and we all understood that Miss Julia had been able to secure this favor

on account of her late uncle, the Judge, when any one else would have

been refused. It was under her tireless and ubiquitous supervision that

this solemn old interior now took on a gay and festal face. Under the

inspiration of her glance the members of the Fire Company and the Alert

Baseball Club vied with each other in borrowing flags and hanging them

from the most inaccessible and adventurous points. The rivalry between

the local Freemasons and Odd Fellows was utilized to build contemporary

booths at the sides and down the centre--on a floor laid over the

benches by the Carpenters’ Benevolent Association. The ladies’

organizations of the various churches, out of devotion to the Union and

jealousy of one another, did all the rest.

At the sides were the stalls for the sale of useful household articles,

and sedate and elderly matrons found themselves now dragged from the

mild obscurity of homes where they did their own work, and thrust

forward to preside over the sales in these booths, while thrifty, not

to say penurious, merchants came and stood around and regarded with

amazement the merchandise which they had been wheedled into contributing

gratis out of their own stores. The suggestion that they should now

buy it back again paralyzed their faculties, and imparted a distinct

restraint to the festivities at the sides of the big court-room.

In the centre was a double row of booths for the sale of articles not so

strictly useful, and here the young people congregated. All the girls

of Octavius seemed to have been gathered here--the pretty ones and the

plain ones, the saucy ones and the shy, the maidens who were “getting

along” and the damsels not yet out of their teens. Stiff, spreading

crinolines brushed juvenile pantalettes, and the dark head of long,

shaving-like ringlets contrasted itself with the bold waterfall of

blonde hair. These girls did not know one another very well, save by

little groups formed around the nucleus of a church association, and

very few of them knew Miss Par-malee at all, except, of course, by

sight. But now, astonishing to relate, she recognized them by name as

old friends, shook hands warmly right and left, and blithely set them

all to work and at their ease. The idea of selling things to young men

abashed them by its weird and unmaidenly novelty. She showed them how it

should be done--bringing forward for the purpose a sheepishly obstinate

drugstore clerk, and publicly dragooning him into paying eighty cents

for a leather dog-collar, despite his protests that he had no dog and

hated the whole canine species, and could get such a strap as that

anywhere for fifteen cents--all amid the greatest merriment. Her

influence was so pervasive, indeed, that even the nicest girls soon got

into a state of giggling familiarity with comparative strangers, which

gave their elders concern, and which in some cases it took many months

to straighten out again. But for the time all was sparkling gaiety. On

the second and final evening, after the oyster supper, the Philharmonics

played and a choir of girls sang patriotic songs. Then the gas was

turned down and the stereopticon show began.

As the last concerted achievement of the firm of Pulford & Shull,

this magic-lantern performance is still remembered. The idea of it,

of course, was Julia’s. She suggested it to Marsena, and he gladly

volunteered to make any number of positive plates from appropriate

pictures and portraits for the purpose. Then she pressed Newton Shull

into the service to get a stereopticon on hire, to rig up the platform

and canvas for it, and finally to consent to quit his post among the

Philharmonics when the music ceased, and to go off up into the gallery

to work the slides. He also, during Marsena’s absence one day, made a

slide on his own account.

Mr. Shull had not taken very kindly to the idea when Miss Julia first

broached it to him.

“No, I don’t know as I ever worked a stereopticon,” he said, striving to

look with cold placidity into the winsome and beaming smile with which

she confronted him one day out in the reception-room. She had never

smiled at him before or pretended even to know his name. “I guess you’d

better hire a man up from Tecumseh to bring the machine and run it

himself.”

“But you can do it so much better, my dear Mr. Shull!” she urged. “You

do everything so much better! Mr. Pulford often says that he never

knew such a handyman in all his life. It seems that there is literally

nothing that you can’t do--except--perhaps--refuse a lady a great

personal favor.”

Miss Julia put this last so delicately, and with such a pretty little

arch nod of the head and turn of the eyes, that Newton Shull surrendered

at discretion. He promised everything on the spot, and he kept his word.

In fact, he more than kept it.

The great evening came, as I have said, and when the lights were turned

down to extinction’s verge those who were nearest the front could

distinguish the vacant chair which Mr. Shull had been occupying, with

his bass viol leaning against it. They whispered from one to another

that he had gone up in the gallery to work this new-fangled contrivance.

Then came a flashing broad disk of light on the screen above the judges’

bench, a spreading sibilant murmur of interest, and the show began.

It was an oddly limited collection of pictures--mainly thin and feeble

copies of newspaper engravings, photographic portraits, and ideal heads

from the magazines. Winfield Scott followed in the wake of Kossuth, and

Garibaldi led the way for John C. Frémont and Lola Montez. There was

applause for the long, homely, familiar face of Lincoln, and a derisive

snicker for the likeness of Jeff Davis turned upside down. Then came

local heroes from the district round about--Gen. Boyce, Col. McIntyre,

and young Adjt. Heron, who had died so bravely at Ball’s Bluff--mixed

with some landscapes and statuary, and a comic caricature or two. The

rapt assemblage murmured its recognitions, sighed its deeper emotions,

chuckled over the funny plates--deeming it all a most delightful

entertainment. From time to time there were long hitches, marked by a

curious spluttering noise above, and the abortive flashes of meaningless

light on the screen, and the explanation was passed about in undertones

that Mr. Shull was having difficulties with the machine.

It was after the longest of these delays that, all at once, an extremely

vivid picture was jerked suddenly upon the canvas, and, after a few

preliminary twitches, settled in place to stare us out of countenance.

There was no room for mistake. It was the portrait of Miss Julia

Parmalee standing proudly erect in statuesque posture, with one hand

resting on the back of a chair, and seated in this chair was Lieut.

Dwight Ransom, smiling amiably.

There was a moment’s deadly hush, while we gazed at this unlooked-for

apparition. It seemed, upon examination, as if there was a certain irony

in the Lieutenant’s grin. Some one in the darkness emitted an abrupt

snort of amusement, and a general titter arose, hung in the air for an

awkward instant, and then was drowned by a generous burst of applause.

While the people were still clapping their hands the picture was

withdrawn from the screen, and we heard Newton Shull call down from his

perch in the gallery:

“You kin turn up the lights now. They ain’t no more to this.”