Chapter XIV: Finis (2)

“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.”

In another minute we were sitting once again in the broad glare of the gaslight, blinking confusedly at one another, and with a dazed consciousness that something rather embarrassing had happened. The boldest of us began to steal glances across to where Miss Parmalee and Marsena sat, just in front of the steps to the bench.

What Miss Julia felt was beyond guessing, but there she was, at any rate, bending over and talking vivaciously, all smiles and collected nerves, to a lady two seats removed. But Marsena displayed no such presence of mind. He sat bolt upright, with an extraordinarily white face and a drooping jaw, staring fixedly at the empty canvas on the wall before him. Such absolute astonishment was never depicted on human visage before.

Perhaps from native inability to mind his own business, perhaps with a kindly view of saving an anxious situation, the Baptist minister rose now to his feet, coughed loudly to secure attention, and began some florid remarks about the success of the fair, the especial beauty of the lantern exhibition they had just witnessed, and the felicitous way in which it had terminated with a portrait of the beautiful and distinguished young lady to whose genius and unwearying efforts they were all so deeply indebted. In these times of national travail and distress, he said, there was a peculiar satisfaction in seeing her portrait accompanied by that of one of the courageous and noble young men who had sprung to the defence of their country. The poet had averred, he continued, that none but the brave deserved the fair, and so on, and so on.

Miss Julia listened to it all with her head on one side and a modestly deprecatory half-smile on her face. At its finish she rose, turned to face everybody, made a pert, laughing little bow, and sat down again, apparently all happiness. But it was noted that Marsena did not take his pained and fascinated gaze from that mocking white screen on the wall straight in front.

*****

They walked in silence that evening to almost the gate of the Parmalee mansion. Julia had taken his arm, as usual; but Marsena could not but feel that the touch was different. It was in the nature of a relief to him that for once she did not talk. His heart was too sore, his brain too bewildered, for the task of even a one-sided conversation, such as theirs was wont to be. Then all at once the silence grew terrible to him--a weight to be lifted at all hazards on the instant.

“Shull must have made that last slide himself,” he blurted out. “I never dreamt of its being made.”

“I thought it came out very well indeed,” remarked Miss Parmalee, “especially his uniform. You could quite see the eagles on the buttons. You must thank Mr. Shull for me.”

“I’ll speak to him in the morning about it,” said Marsena, with gloomy emphasis. He sighed, bit his lip, fixed an intent gaze upon the big dark bulk of the Parmalee house looming before them, and spoke again. “There’s something that I want to say to _you_, though, that won’t keep till morning.” A tiny movement of the hand on his arm was the only response. “I see now,” Marsena went on, “that I ain’t been making any real headway with you at all. I thought--well--I don’t know as I know just what I did think--but I guess now that it was a mistake.” Yes--there was a distinct flutter of the little gloved hand. It put a wild thought into Marsena’s head.

“Would you,” he began boldly--“I never spoke of it before--but would you--that is, if I was to enlist and go to the war--would that make any difference?--you know what I mean.”

She looked up at him with magnetic sweetness in her dusky, shadowed glance. “How can any ablebodied young patriot hesitate at such a time as this?” she made answer, and pressed his arm.

V

It was in this same May, not more than a week after the momentous episode of the Field Hospital and Nurse Fund Fair, that Marsena Pulford went off to the war.

There was no ostentation about his departure. He had indeed been gone for a day or two before it became known in Octavius that his absence from town meant that he had enlisted down at Tecumseh. We learned that he had started as a common private, but everybody made sure that a man of his distinguished appearance and deportment would speedily get a commission. Everybody, too, had a theory of some sort as to the motives for this sudden and strange behavior of his. These theories agreed in linking Miss Parmalee with the affair, but there were hopeless divergencies as to the exact part she played in it. One party held that Marsena had been driven to seek death on the tented field by despair at having been given the “mitten.” Others insisted that he had not been given the “mitten” at all, but had gone because her well-known martial ardor made the sacrifice of her betrothed necessary to her peace of mind. A minority took the view which Homer Sage promulgated from his tilted-back chair on the stoop of the Excelsior Hotel.

“They ain’t nothin’ settled betwixt ’em,” this student of human nature declared. “She jest dared him to go, and he went. And if you only give her time, she’ll have the whole male unmarried population of Octavius, between the ages of sixteen and sixty, down there wallerin’ around in the Virginny swamps, feedin’ the muskeeters and makin’ a bid for glory.”

But in a few days there came the terribly exciting news of Seven Pines and Fair Oaks--that first great combat of the revived war in the East--and we ceased to bother our heads about the photographer and his love. The enlisting fever sprang up again, and our young men began to make their way by dozens and scores to the recruiting office at Tecumseh. There were more farewells, more tears and prayers, not to mention several funerals of soldiers killed at Hanover Court House, where that Fifth Corps, which contained most of our volunteers, had its first spring smell of blood. And soon thereafter burst upon us the awful sustained carnage of the Seven Days’ fighting, which drove out of our minds even the recollection that Miss Julia Parmalee herself had volunteered for active service in the Sanitary Commission, and gone South to take up her work.

And so July 3d came, bringing with it the bare tidings of that closing desperate battle of the week at Malvern Hill, and the movement of what was left of the Army of the Potomac to a safe resting place on the James River. We were beginning to get the details of local interest by the slow single wire from Thessaly, and sickening enough they were. The village streets were filled with silent, horror-stricken crowds. The whole community seemed to have but a single face, repeated upon the mental vision at every step--a terrible face with distended, empty eyes, riven brows, and an open drawn mouth like the old Greek mask of tragedy.

“I swan! I don’t know whether to keep open to-morrow or not,” said Mr. Newton Shull, for perhaps the twentieth time, as he wandered once again from the reception-room into the little workshop behind. “In some ways it’s kind of agin my principles to work on Independence Day--but, then again, if I thought there was likely to be a good many farmers comin’ into town--”

“They’ll be plenty of ’em cornin’ in,” said the boy, over his shoulder, “but they’ll steer clear of here.”

“I’m ’fraid so,” sighed Mr. Shull. He advanced a listless step or two and gazed with dejected apathy at the newspaper map tacked to the wall, on which the boy was making red and blue crosses with a colored pencil. “I don’t see much good o’ that,” he said. “Still, of course, if it eases your mind any--”

“That’s where the fightin’ finished,” observed the boy, pointing to a big mark on the map. “That’s Malvern Hill there, and here--down where the river takes the big bend--that’s Harrison’s Landing, where the army’s movin’ to. See them seven rings? Them are the battles, one each day, as our men forced their way down through the Chickahominy swamps, beginnin’ up in the corner with Beaver Dam Creek. If the map was a little higher it ’ud show the Pamunkey, where they started from. My uncle says that the whole mistake was in ever abandoning the Pamunkey.”

“Pa-monkey or Ma-monkey,” said Newton Shull, gloomily, “it wouldn’t be no comfort to me to see it, even on a map. It’s jest taken and busted me and my business here clean as a whistle. We ain’t paid expenses two days in a week sence Marseny went. Here I’ve got now so ’t I kin take a plain, everyday sort o’ picture jest about as well as he did--a little streakid sometimes, perhaps, and more or less pinholes--but still pretty middlin’ fair on an average, and then, darn my buttons if they don’t all stop comin’. It positively don’t seem to me as if there was a single human bein’ in Dearborn County that ’ud have his picture took as a gift. All they want now is to have enlargements thrown up from little likenesses of their men folks that have been killed, and them I don’t know how to do no more’n a babe unborn.”

“You knew well enough how to make that stere-opticon slide,” remarked the boy with severity.

“Yes,” mused Mr. Shull, “that darned thing--that made a peck o’ trouble, didn’t it? I dunno what on earth possessed me; I kind o’ seemed to git the notion o’ doin’ it into my head all to once ’t, and somehow I never dreamt of its rilin’ Marseny so; you couldn’t tell that a man ’ud be so blamed touchy as all that, could you?--and I dunno, like as not he’d ’a’ enlisted anyhow. But I do wish he’d showed me how to make them pesky enlargements afore he went. If I’d only seen him do one, even once, I could ’a’ picked the thing up, but I never did. It’s just my luck!”

“Say,” said the boy, looking up with a sudden thought, “do you know what my mother heard yesterday? It’s all over the place that before Marseny left he went to Squire Schermerhorn’s and made his will, and left everything he’s got to the Parmalee girl, in case he gits killed. So, if anything happens she’d be your partner, wouldn’t she?”

Newton Shull stared with surprise. “Well, now, that beats creation,” he said, after a little. “Somehow you know that never occurred to me, and yet, of course, that ’ud be jest his style.”

“Yes, sir,” repeated the other, “they say he’s left her every identical thing.”

“It’s allus that way in this world,” reflected Mr. Shull, sadly. “Them that don’t need it one solitary atom, they’re eternally gettin’ every mortal thing left to ’em. Why, that girl’s so rich already she don’t know what to do with her money. If I was her, I bet a cooky I wouldn’t go pikin’ off to the battlefield, doin’ nursin’ and tyin’ on bandages, and fannin’ men while they were gittin’ their legs cut off. No, sirree; I’d let the Sanitary Commission scuffle along without me, I can tell you! A hoss and buggy and a fust-class two-dollar-a-day hotel, and goin’ to the theatre jest when I took the notion--that’d be good enough for me.”

“I suppose the sign then ’ud be ‘Shull & Parmalee,’ wouldn’t it?” queried the boy.

“Well, now, I ain’t so sure about that,” said Mr. Shull, thoughtfully. “It might be that, bein’ a woman, her name ’ud come first, out o’ politeness. But then, of course, most prob’ly she’d want to sell out instid, and then I’d make the valuation, and she could give me time. Or she might want to stay in, only on the quiet, you know--what they call a silent partner.”

“Nobody’d ever call her a silent partner,” observed the boy. “She couldn’t keep still if she tried.”

“I wouldn’t care how much she talked,” said Mr. Shull, “if she only put enough more money into the business. I didn’t take much to her, somehow, along at fust, but the more I’ve seen of her the more I like the cut of her jib. She’s got ‘go’ in her, that gal has; she jest figures out what she wants, and then she sails in and gits it. It don’t matter who the man is, she jest takes and winds him round her little finger. Why, Marseny, here, he wasn’t no more than so much putty in her hands. I lost all patience with him. You wouldn’t catch me being run by a woman that way.”

“So far’s I could see,” suggested the other, “she seemed to git pretty much all she wanted out of you, too. You were dancin’ round, helpin’ her at the fair there, like a hen on a hot griddle.”

“It was all on his account,” put in the partner, with emphasis. “Jest to please him; he seemed so much sot on her bein’ humored in everything. I did feel kind o’ foolish about it at the time--I never somehow believed much in doin’ work for nothin’--but maybe it was all for the best. If what they say about his makin’ a will is true, why it won’t do me no harm to be on good terms with her--in case--in case--”

Mr. Shull was standing at the window, and his idle gaze had been vaguely taking in the general; prospect of the street below the while he spoke. At this moment he discovered that some one on the opposite sidewalk was making vehement gestures to attract his attention. He lifted the sash and put his head out to listen, but the message came across loud enough for even the boy inside to hear.

“You’d better hurry round to the telegraph office!” this hoarse, anonymous voice cried. “Malvern Hill list is a-comin’ in--and they say your pardner’s been shot--shot bad, too!”

Newton Shull drew in his head and stood for some moments staring blankly at the map on the wall. “Well, I swan!” he began, with confused hesitation, “I dunno--it seems to me--well, yes, I guess prob’ly the best thing ’ll be for her to put more money into the business--yes, that’s the plan--and we kin hire an operator up from Tecumseh.”

But there was no one to pass an opinion on his project. The boy had snatched his hat, and could be heard even now dashing his way furiously down the outer stairs.

*****

The summer dusk had begun to gather before Octavius heard all that was to be learned of the frightful calamity which had befallen its absent sons. The local roll of death and disaster from Gaines’s Mill earlier in the week had seemed incredibly awful. This new budget of horrors from Malvern was far worse.

“Wa’n’t the rest of the North doin’ anything at all?” a wild-eyed, dishevelled old farmer cried out in a shaking, half-frenzied shriek from the press of the crowd round the telegraph office. “Do they think Dearborn County’s got to suppress this whole damned rebellion single-handed?”

It seemed to the dazed and horrified throng as if some such idea must be in the minds of the rest of the Union. Surely no other little community--or big community, either--could have had such a hideous blow dealt to it as this under which Octavius reeled. The list of the week for the county, including Gaines’s Mill, showed one hundred and eight dead outright, and very nearly five hundred more wounded in battle. It was too shocking for comprehension.

As evening drew on, men gathered the nerve to say to one another that there was something very glorious in the way the two regiments had been thrust into the front, and had shown themselves heroically fit for that grim honor. They tried, too, to extract solace from the news that the regiments in question had been mentioned by name in the general despatches as having distinguished themselves and their county above all the rest--but it was an empty and heart-sickened pretence at best, and when, about dark, the women folks, who had waited in vain for them to come home to supper, began to appear on the skirts of the crowd, it was given up altogether. In after years Octavius got so that it could cheer those sinister names of Gaines’s Mill and Malvern Hill, and swell with pride at the memories they evoked. But that evening no one cheered. It was too terrible.

There was, indeed, a single partial exception to this rule. The regular service of news had ceased--in those days, before the duplex invention, the single wire had most melancholy limitations--but the throng still lingered; and when, in the failing light, the postmaster was seen to step up again on the chair by the door with a bit of paper in his hand, a solemn hush ran over the assemblage.

“It is a private telegram sent to me personally,” he explained, in the loud clear tones of one who had earned his office by years of stump speaking; “but it is intended for you all, I should presume.”

The silent crowd pushed nearer, and listened with strained attention as this despatch was read:

Headquarters Sanitary Commission,

Harrison’s Landing, Va., Wednesday Morning.

_To Postmaster Octavius, N. Y.:_

_No words can describe magnificent record soldiers of Dearborn County, especially Starbuck, made past week. I bless fate which identified my poor services with such superb heroism. After second sleepless night, Col. Starbuck now reposing peacefully; doctor says crisis past; he surely recover, though process be slow. You will learn with pride he been brevetted Brigadier, fact which it was my privilege to announce to him last evening. He feebly thanked me, murmuring, “Tell them at home.”_

_Julia Parmalee._

In the silence which ensued the postmaster held the paper up and scanned it narrowly by the waning light. “There is something else,” he said--“Oh, yes, I see; ‘Franked despatch Sanitary Commission.’ That’s all.”

Another figure was seen suddenly clambering upon the chair, with an arm around the postmaster for support. It was the teller of the bank. He waved his free arm excitedly, as he faced the crowd, and cried:

“Our women are as brave as our men! Three cheers for Miss Julia Parmalee! Hip-hip!”

The loyal teller’s first “Hurrah!” fell upon the air quite by itself. Perhaps a dozen voices helped him half-heartedly with the second. The third died off again miserably, and he stepped down off the chair amid a general consciousness of failure.

“Who the hell is Starbuck?” was to be heard in whispered interrogatory passed along through the throng. Hardly anybody could answer. Boyce we knew, and McIntyre, and many others, but Star-buck was a mystery. Then it was explained that it must be the son of old Alanson Starbuck, of Juno Mills, who had gone away to Philadelphia seven or eight years before. He had not enlisted with any Dearborn County regiment, but held a staff appointment of some kind, presumably in a Pennsylvania command. We were quite unable to work up any emotion over him.

In fact, the more we thought it over, the more we were disposed to resent this planting of Starbuck upon us, in the very van of Dearborn County’s heroes. His father was a rich old curmudgeon, whom no one liked. The son was nothing to us whatever.