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.