But Mr. Grissom’s curiosity would not have been satisfied. Judge Bascom
was sitting in a large rocking-chair, enjoying the pleasant evening air,
and the others were sitting near, talking on the most ordinary topics.
This situation was one of the doctor’s prescriptions, as Miss Sophie
said. Those around were to wear a cheerful air, and the Judge was to be
humored in the belief that he was once more the proprietor of the Bascom
Place. He seemed to respond to this treatment in the most natural way.
The old instinct of hospitality rose in him and had its way. He grew
garrulous indeed, and sat on the piazza, or walked up and down and talked
by the hour. He was full of plans and projects, and some of them were
so suggestive that Francis Underwood made a note of them for further
consideration. The Judge was the genial host, and while his daughter was
full of grief and humiliation at the position in which she was placed, he
appeared to draw new life and inspiration from his surroundings. He took
a great fancy to Miss Sophie: her observations, which were practical in
the extreme, and often unflattering, were highly relished by him. The
Judge himself was a good talker, and he gave Miss Sophie an opportunity
to vent some of her pet opinions, the most of which were very pronounced.
As for Mildred, in spite of her grief and anxiety, she found her
surroundings vastly more pleasant than she had at first imagined they
could be. Some instinct or prepossession made her feel at home in the old
house, and as she grew more cheerful and more contented she grew more
beautiful and more engaging. At least, this was the opinion of Francis
Underwood.
“Brother,” said Miss Sophie one day when they were together, “you are in
love.”
“I don’t know whether to say yes or no,” he replied. “What is it to be in
love?”
“How should I know?” exclaimed Miss Sophie, reddening a little. “I see
you mooning around, and moping. Something has come over you, and if it
isn’t love, what is it?”
He held up his hands, white and muscular, and looked at them. Then he
took off his hat and tousled his hair in an effort to smooth it with his
fingers.
“It is something,” he said after a while “but I don’t know what. Is love
such an everyday affair that it can be called by name as soon as it
arrives?”
“Don’t be absurd, brother,” said Miss Sophie, with a gesture of protest.
“You talk as if you were trying to take a census of the affair.”
“No,” said he; “I am trying to get a special report. I saw Dr. Bynum
looking at you over his spectacles yesterday.”
Miss Sophie tried to show that this suggestion was an irritating one, but
she failed, and then fell to laughing.
“I never knew I was so full of humor before,” said Francis Underwood, by
way of comment.
“And I never knew you could be so foolish—to me,” said Miss Sophie, still
laughing. “What is Dr. Bynum to me?”
“Not having his spectacles to look over, how do I know?”
“But,” persisted Miss Sophie, “you need no spectacles to look at Mildred.
I have seen you looking at her through your fingers.”
“And what was she doing?” inquired Underwood, coloring in the most
surprising way.
“Oh,” said Miss Sophie, “she was pretending not to notice it; but I can
sit with my back to you both and tell by the tone of her voice when this
and that thing is going on.”
“This, then, is courtship,” said Underwood.
“Why, brother, how provoking you are!” exclaimed Miss Sophie. “It is
nothing of the sort. It is child’s play; it is the way the youngsters
do at school. I feel as if I never knew you before; you are full of
surprises.”
“I surprise myself,” he said, with something like a sigh, “and that is
the trouble; I don’t want to be too surprising.”
“But in war,” said his sister, “the successful general cannot be too full
of surprises.”
“In war!” he cried. “Why, I was in hopes the war was over.”
“I was thinking about the old saying,” she explained—“the old saying that
all is fair in love and war.”
“Well,” said Francis Underwood, “it would be hard to say whether you
and Dr. Bynum are engaged in war or not. You are both very sly, but I
have seen a good deal of skirmishing going on. Will it end in a serious
engagement, with casualties on both sides? The doctor is something of a
surgeon, and he can attend to his own wounds, but who is going to look
after yours?”
“How can you go on so!” cried Miss Sophie, laughing. “Are we to have an
epidemic of delusions?”
“Yes, and illusions too,” said her brother. “The atmosphere seems to be
full of them. Everything is in a tangle.”
And yet it was not long after this conversation that Miss Sophie observed
her brother and Mildred Bascom sauntering together under the great
cedars, and she concluded that he was trying to untangle the tangle.
There were many such walks, and the old Judge, sitting on the piazza
in bright weather, would watch the handsome pair, apparently with a
contented air. There was something about this busy and practical young
man that filled Mildred’s imagination. His individuality was prominent
enough to be tantalizing. It was of the dominant variety. In him the
instinct of control and command, so pleasing to the feminine mind, was
thoroughly developed, and he disposed of his affairs with a promptness
and decisiveness that left nothing to be desired. Everything seemed to
be arranged in his mind beforehand.
Everything, that is to say, except his relations with Mildred Bascom.
There was not the slightest detail of his various enterprises, from
the simplest to the most complicated, with which he was not thoroughly
familiar, but this young girl, simple and unaffected as she was, puzzled
him sorely. She presented to Francis Underwood’s mind the old problem
that is always new, and that has as many phases as there are stars in
the sky. Here, before his eyes, was a combination for which there was no
warrant in his experience—the wit and tenderness of Rosalind, blended
with the self-sacrificing devotion of Cordelia. Here was a combination—a
complication—of a nature to attract the young man’s attention. Problem,
puzzle, what you will, it was a very attractive one for him, and he lost
no favorable opportunity of studying it.
So the pleasant days came and went. If there were any love-passages
between the young people, only the stately cedars or the restless poplars
were in the secret, and these told it only to the vagrant west winds that
crept over the hills when the silence of night fell over all things.