IX.
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.