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.