Balaam and His Master, and Other Sketches and Stories

by Joel Chandler Harris

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.

X.

Those were pleasant days and nights at the old Bascom Place, in spite of the malady with which the Judge was afflicted. They were particularly pleasant when he seemed to be brighter and stronger. But one day, when he seemed to be at his best, the beginning of the end came. He was sitting on the piazza, talking with his daughter and with Francis Underwood. Some reference was made to the Place, when the old Judge suddenly rose from his chair, and, shaking his thin white hand at the young man, cried out:

“I tell you it is mine! The Place always has been mine and it always will be mine.”

He tottered forward and would have fallen, but Underwood caught him and placed him in his chair. The old man’s nerves had lost their tension, his eyes their brightness. He could only murmur indistinctly, “Mine, mine, mine.” He seemed suddenly to have shrunk and shriveled away. His head fell to one side, his face was deadly pale, his lips were blue, and his thin hands clutched convulsively at his clothes and at the chair. Mildred was at his side instantly, but he seemed to be beyond the reach of her voice and beyond the limits of her grief, which was distressful to behold. He tried indeed to stroke the beautiful hair that fell loosely over him as his daughter seized him in her despairing arms, but it was in a vague and wandering way.

Judge Bascom’s condition was so alarming that Francis Underwood lifted him in his arms and placed him on the nearest bed, where he lay gazing at the ceiling, sometimes smiling and at other times frowning and crying, “Mine, mine, mine!”

He sank slowly but surely. At the last he smiled and whispered “Home,” and so passed away.

He was indeed at home. He had come to the end of his long and tiresome journey. He smiled as he lay sleeping, and his rest was pleasant; for there was that in his dead face, white and pinched as it was, that bore witness to the infinite gentleness and mercy of Christ, who is the Lord.