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Transcriber's Note

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  Marsena
  and Other Stories of the Wartime




               Marsena
  and Other Stories of the Wartime

                 BY
           HAROLD FREDERIC

              NEW YORK
       CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
                1894




         Copyright, 1894, by
       Charles Scribner's Sons

           TROW DIRECTORY
  PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
              NEW YORK




  TO MY FRIEND
  EDMUND JUDSON MOFFAT




CONTENTS


                                     PAGE

  _Marsena_,                            1

  _The War Widow_,                     97

  _The Eve of the Fourth_,            149

  _My Aunt Susan_,                    185




Marsena




MARSENA


I.

Marsena Pulford, what time the village of Octavius knew him, was a
slender and tall man, apparently skirting upon the thirties, with
sloping shoulders and a romantic aspect.

It was not alone his flowing black hair, and his broad shirt-collars
turned down after the ascertained manner of the British poets, which
stamped him in our humble minds as a living brother to "The Corsair,"
"The Last of the Suliotes," and other heroic personages engraved in the
albums and keepsakes of the period. His face, with its darkling eyes
and distinguished features, conveyed wherever it went an impression
of proudly silent melancholy. In those days—that is, just before the
war—one could not look so convincingly and uniformly sad as Marsena
did without raising the general presumption of having been crossed in
love. We had a respectful feeling, in his case, that the lady ought to
have been named Iñez, or at the very least Oriana.

Although he went to the Presbyterian Church with entire regularity,
was never seen in public save in a long-tailed black coat, and in the
winter wore gloves instead of mittens, the local conscience had always,
I think, sundry reservations about the moral character of his past. It
would not have been reckoned against him, then, that he was obviously
poor. We had not learned in those primitive times to measure people by
dollar-mark standards. Under ordinary conditions, too, the fact that he
came from New England—had indeed lived in Boston—must have counted
rather in his favor than otherwise. But it was known that he had been
an artist, a professional painter of pictures and portraits, and we
understood in Octavius that this involved acquaintanceship, if not even
familiarity, with all sorts of occult and deleterious phases of city
life.

Our village held all vice, and especially the vice of other and larger
places, in stern reprobation. Yet, though it turned this matter of the
newcomer's previous occupation over a good deal in its mind, Marsena
carried himself with such a gentle picturesqueness of subdued sorrow
that these suspicions were disarmed, or, at the worst, only added
to the fascinated interest with which Octavius watched his spare and
solitary figure upon its streets, and noted the progress of his efforts
to find a footing for himself in its social economy.

It was taken for granted among us that he possessed a fine and
well-cultivated mind, to match that thoughtful countenance and that
dignified deportment. This assumption continued to hold its own in
the face of a long series of failures in the attempt to draw him out.
Almost everybody who was anybody at one time or another tried to
tap Marsena's mental reservoirs—and all in vain. Beyond the barest
commonplaces of civil conversation he could never be tempted. Once,
indeed, he had volunteered to the Rev. Mr. Bunce the statement that
he regarded Washington Allston as in several respects superior to
Copley; but as no one in Octavius knew who these men were, the remark
did not help us much. It was quoted frequently, however, as