Marsena, and Other Stories of the Wartime

by Harold Frederic

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 new-comers 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 anyone 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.