Marsena, and Other Stories of the Wartime

by Harold Frederic

Julia Parmalee had pushed her way behind the show-case, and stood in the entrance to the work-room, 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.