CHAPTER VII
Miss Mildred Fisher was one of the happiest of women, and this was the result of her own peculiar temperament, although she enjoyed the endowments of a kind fate, for she came of a good family and had a fine fortune in expectation. Her resolute intention was to make the best of everything. With a strong, fresh, buoyant physique and an indomitable spirit it became evident to her in the early stages of this effort that the world is a fairly pleasant planet to live on. Her red hair—a capital defect in those days, when Titian's name was never associated with anything so unfashionable, and which bowed to the earth the soul of many an otherwise deserving damsel—was most skilfully manipulated, and dressed in fleecy billows, usually surmounted with an elaborate comb of carved tortoise-shell, but on special occasions with a cordon of very fine pearls, as if to attract the attention that other flame-haired people avoided by the humblest coiffure. By reason of this management it was described sometimes as auburn, and even golden, but this last was the aberration usually of youths who had lost their own heads, red and otherwise, for Mildred was a bewildering coquette. She had singularly fine hazel eyes, which she used rather less for the purpose of vision than for the destruction of the peace of man. Her complexion of that delicate fairness so often concomitant of red hair did not present the usual freckles. In fact it was the subject of much solicitous care. She wore so many veils and mufflers that her identity often might well be a matter of doubt as far as her features could be discerned, and Seymour, being a very glib young lieutenant, once facetiously threatened her with arrest for going masked and presumably entertaining designs pernicious to the welfare of the army. That she did entertain such designs, in a different sense, was indeed obvious, for with her determination to make the best of everything, Miss Fisher had resolved to harass the heart of the invader the moment a personable man with a creditable letter of introduction presented himself. For she "received the Yankees," as the phrase went, while others closed their doors and steeled their hearts in bitterness.
"We all receive the Yankees," she was wont to say smilingly. "It is a family failing with us. My father and five brothers in the Confederate vanguard are waiting now to receive Yankees—as many Yankees as care to come to Bear-grass Creek."
"Oh, Miss Fisher!" remonstrated the gay young lieutenant, perceiving her drift; "how can you consign me so heartlessly to six red-handed Rebels!"
"Only red-headed as yet, fiery,—all of them! They'll be red-handed enough after you and they come to blows!"
This mimic warfare had a certain zest, and many were the youths among the officers of the garrison who liked to "talk politics" in this vein with "Sister Millie," as she was often designated in jocose allusion to the five fiery-haired brothers. And indeed, as the Fisher family was so numerously represented in the Confederate army, she considered that her Southern partisanship was thus comprehensively demonstrated, and she felt peculiarly at liberty to make merry with the enemy if the enemy would be merry in turn.
Very merry and good-natured the enemy was pleased to be as far as she was concerned. They wrote home for social credentials. They secured introductions from brother-officers who had the entrée, and especially courted for this purpose were two elderly colonels who had been classmates of her father's at West Point, where he was educated, although he had resigned from the army many years ago. The two had sought and naturally had found a cordial welcome at the home of his wife, sister, and mother. It was natural, too, that they should feel and exert a sort of prudential care of the household, in the midst of inimical soldiers, and although their ancient companion-in-arms was in an adverse force hardly fifty miles away, they regarded this as merely the political aspect of the situation, which did not diminish their amity and bore no relation to their personal sentiment, as they came and went in his house on the footing of friends of the family. Now and again the incongruity was brought home to them by some audacity of Mildred Fisher's.
"If you should meet papa, Colonel Monette," she said one day as one of these elderly officers was going out to command a scouting expedition—"if you should meet papa, don't fail to reintroduce yourself, and give him our prettiest compliments."