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Underwood grew more and more abstracted, the mandolin ceased, and Darrell, soothed by his surroundings to a temporary forgetfulness of his troubles, swung gently back and forth in a sort of dreamy content. After a while, Kate Underwood appeared, dressed for a walk, and, accompanied by Duke, the two set forth for their mountain ramble, for the time as light-hearted as two children.
With so large a family, and such straitened means, the part of the active clergyman's wife was impossible to her; she had shrunk from society, and most people knew nothing more of her than that the faded lady-like figure they used to see among her little flock at church, was Mrs. Underwood.
At first the ground was sufficiently even to allow us to continue at full speed; but in a short time it became so rough that we had to make our way with more caution, and finally we were compelled to dismount and lead our horses over the rocks amid thick underwood.
After ascending the range, we passed principally over stony hills, and valleys heavily timbered, and with brush or underwood, filling up the interstices of the trees. Ten miles from our last night's camp we crossed the tracks of horses, apparently of no very old date, this being the first symptom we had yet observed of our approach towards the haunts of civilised man.
The Bois itself, from being the most beautiful park in the world, has become a jungle of underwood. In the roads there are large barricades formed of the trees which used to line them, which have been cut down. Between the ramparts and the lake the wood is swept clean away, and the stumps of the trees have been sharpened to a point.
Shortly after leaving Titimutty we drove through coffee on both sides of the road, and, though I spent four days in the district, and was constantly on the move, I was never once out of sight of coffee, as the plantations lie in a continuous block, and, as they are all thoroughly shaded, sometimes by the original forest trees, and sometimes by trees planted for shade, the general effect is that you are travelling through a forest of which coffee is the underwood a forest lying on gently undulating ground from which nothing can be seen of the surrounding country.
She would not refer to it again. One thing puzzled me, something to which she had not referred why had she married Harry Underwood? Why, after the terrible experience of her first marriage, had she risked linking her life with an unstable creature like the man who was now her husband? I put all questionings aside, however, and tried to meet her brave, gay mood.
Graham had so far gotten over her prejudices as to bid Lillian a reluctant farewell and express a sincere wish that she might soon see her again. Toward Harry Underwood my mother-in-law's demeanor remained rigid. She treated him with formal, icy politeness which irritated Dicky, but appeared greatly to amuse Mr. Underwood.
My fingers itched to astonish each of the smirking men with a sound box on the ear. But my fiercest anger was against Dicky. If he had been properly attentive to me, Mr. Underwood and Dr. Pettit would have had no opportunity, indeed would not have dared, to pay me the idiotic compliments, or to offer the silly attentions they had given me.
What progress Helen and her forces, a shatter-brain boy who did not know a violet from a nettle, and a London-bred girl who had hardly seen a rose-bush in her life, would have made in clearing this forest of underwood, might easily be foretold. Accident, however, that frequent favourer of bold projects, came to her aid in the shape of a more efficient coadjutor.
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