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.
