IN February the weather became warmer and summer-like. In Virginia there
comes often at this season a deceptive gleam of summer, slipping in
between heavy storm-clouds of sleet and snow; days and sometimes weeks
when the temperature is like June; when the earliest plants begin to
show their hardy flowers, and when the bare branches of the forest trees
alone protest against the conduct of the seasons. Then men and women are
languid; life seems, as in Italy, sensuous and glowing with colour; one
is conscious of walking in an atmosphere that is warm, palpable, radiant
with possibilities; a delicate haze hangs over Arlington, and softens
even the harsh white glare of the Capitol; the struggle of existence
seems to abate; Lent throws its calm shadow over society; and youthful
diplomatists, unconscious of their danger, are lured into asking foolish
girls to marry them; the blood thaws in the heart and flows out into the
veins, like the rills of sparkling water that trickle from every lump
of ice or snow, as though all the ice and snow on earth, and all the
hardness of heart, all the heresy and schism, all the works of the
devil, had yielded to the force of love and to the fresh warmth of
innocent, lamb-like, confiding virtue. In such a world there should be
no guile--but there is a great deal of it notwithstanding. Indeed, at
no other season is there so much. This is the moment when the two whited
sepulchres at either end of the Avenue reek with the thick atmosphere of
bargain and sale. The old is going; the new is coming. Wealth, office,
power are at auction. Who bids highest? who hates with most venom? who
intrigues with most skill? who has done the dirtiest, the meanest, the
darkest, and the most, political work? He shall have his reward.
Senator Ratcliffe was absorbed and ill at ease. A swarm of applicants
for office dogged his steps and beleaguered his rooms in quest of his
endorsement of their paper characters. The new President was to arrive
on Monday. Intrigues and combinations, of which the Senator was the
soul, were all alive, awaiting this arrival. Newspaper correspondents
pestered him with questions. Brother senators called him to conferences.
His mind was pre-occupied with his own interests. One might have
supposed that, at this instant, nothing could have drawn him away from
the political gaming-table, and yet when Mrs. Lee remarked that she was
going to Mount Vernon on Saturday with a little party, including the
British Minister and an Irish gentleman staying as a guest at the
British Legation, the Senator surprised her by expressing a strong wish
to join them. He explained that, as the political lead was no longer
in his hands, the chances were nine in ten that if he stirred at all
he should make a blunder; that his friends expected him to do something
when, in fact, nothing could be done; that every preparation had already
been made, and that for him to go on an excursion to Mount Vernon, at
this moment, with the British Minister, was, on the whole, about the
best use he could make of his time, since it would hide him for one day
at least.
Lord Skye had fallen into the habit of consulting Mrs. Lee when his own
social resources were low, and it was she who had suggested this party
to Mount Vernon, with Carrington for a guide and Mr. Gore for variety,
to occupy the time of the Irish friend whom Lord Skye was bravely
entertaining.
This gentleman, who bore the title of Dunbeg, was a dilapidated peer,
neither wealthy nor famous. Lord Skye brought him to call on Mrs. Lee,
and in some sort put him under her care. He was young, not ill-looking,
quite intelligent, rather too fond of facts, and not quick at humour.
He was given to smiling in a deprecatory way, and when he talked, he
was either absent or excited; he made vague blunders, and then smiled
in deprecation of offence, or his words blocked their own path in their
rush. Perhaps his manner was a little ridiculous, but he had a good
heart, a good head, and a title. He found favour in the eyes of Sybil
and Victoria Dare, who declined to admit other women to the party,
although they offered no objection to Mr.
Ratcliffe's admission. As for Lord Dunbeg, he was an enthusiastic
admirer of General Washington, and, as he privately intimated, eager to
study phases of American society. He was delighted to go with a small
party, and Miss Dare secretly promised herself that she would show him a
phase.
The morning was warm, the sky soft, the little steamer lay at the quiet
wharf with a few negroes lazily watching her preparations for departure.
Carrington, with Mrs. Lee and the young ladies, arrived first, and stood
leaning against the rail, waiting the arrival of their companions. Then
came Mr. Gore, neatly attired and gloved, with a light spring overcoat;
for Mr.
Gore was very careful of his personal appearance, and not a little vain
of his good looks. Then a pretty woman, with blue eyes and blonde hair,
dressed in black, and leading a little girl by the hand, came on board,
and Carrington went to shake hands with her. On his return to Mrs. Lee's
side, she asked about his new acquaintance, and he replied with a
half-laugh, as though he were not proud of her, that she was a client,
a pretty widow, well known in Washington. “Any one at the Capitol would
tell you all about her. She was the wife of a noted lobbyist, who died
about two years ago. Congressmen can refuse nothing to a pretty face,
and she was their idea of feminine perfection. Yet she is a silly little
woman, too. Her husband died after a very short illness, and, to my
great surprise, made me executor under his will. I think he had an idea
that he could trust me with his papers, which were important and
compromising, for he seems to have had no time to go over them and
destroy what were best out of the way. So, you see, I am left with his
widow and child to look after. Luckily, they are well provided for.”
“Still you have not told me her name.”
“Her name is Baker--Mrs. Sam Baker. But they are casting off, and Mr.
Ratcliffe will be left behind. I'll ask the captain to wait.” About a
dozen passengers had arrived, among them the two Earls, with a footman
carrying a promising lunch-basket, and the planks were actually hauled
in when a carriage dashed up to the wharf, and Mr. Ratcliffe leaped out
and hurried on board. “Off with you as quick as you can!” said he to
the negro-hands, and in another moment the little steamer had begun her
journey, pounding the muddy waters of the Potomac and sending up its
small column of smoke as though it were a newly invented incense-burner
approaching the temple of the national deity. Ratcliffe explained in
great glee how he had barely managed to escape his visitors by telling
them that the British Minister was waiting for him, and that he would
be back again presently. “If they had known where I was going,” said
he, “you would have seen the boat swamped with office-seekers. Illinois
alone would have brought you to a watery grave.” He was in high spirits,
bent upon enjoying his holiday, and as they passed the arsenal with
its solitary sentry, and the navy-yard, with its one unseaworthy wooden
war-steamer, he pointed out these evidences of national grandeur to Lord
Skye, threatening, as the last terror of diplomacy, to send him home in
an American frigate. They were thus indulging in senatorial humour on
one side of the boat, while Sybil and Victoria, with the aid of Mr. Gore
and Carrington, were improving Lord Dunbeg's mind on the other.
Miss Dare, finding for herself at last a convenient seat where she could
repose and be mistress of the situation, put on a more than usually
demure expression and waited with gravity until her noble neighbour
should give her an opportunity to show those powers which, as she
believed, would supply a phase in his existence. Miss Dare was one of
those young persons, sometimes to be found in America, who seem to have
no object in life, and while apparently devoted to men, care nothing
about them, but find happiness only in violating rules; she made no
parade of whatever virtues she had, and her chief pleasure was to make
fun of all the world and herself.
“What a noble river!” remarked Lord Dunbeg, as the boat passed out upon
the wide stream; “I suppose you often sail on it?”
“I never was here in my life till now,” replied the untruthful Miss
Dare; “we don't think much of it; it s too small; we're used to so much
larger rivers.”
“I am afraid you would not like our English rivers then; they are mere
brooks compared with this.”
“Are they indeed?” said Victoria, with an appearance of vague surprise;
“how curious! I don't think I care to be an Englishwoman then. I could
not live without big rivers.”
Lord Dunbeg stared, and hinted that this was almost unreasonable.
“Unless I were a Countess!” continued Victoria, meditatively, looking
at Alexandria, and paying no attention to his lordship; “I think I could
manage if I were a C-c-countess. It is such a pretty title!”
“Duchess is commonly thought a prettier one,” stammered Dunbeg, much
embarrassed. The young man was not used to chaff from women.
“I should be satisfied with Countess. It sounds well. I am surprised
that you don't like it.” Dunbeg looked about him uneasily for some means
of escape but he was barred in. “I should think you would feel an awful
responsibility in selecting a Countess. How do you do it?”
Lord Dunbeg nervously joined in the general laughter as Sybil
ejaculated:
“Oh, Victoria!” but Miss Dare continued without a smile or any elevation
of her monotonous voice:
“Now, Sybil, don't interrupt me, please. I am deeply interested in Lord
Dunbeg's conversation. He understands that my interest is purely
scientific, but my happiness requires that I should know how Countesses
are selected. Lord Dunbeg, how would you recommend a friend to choose a
Countess?”
Lord Dunbeg began to be amused by her impudence, and he even tried to
lay down for her satisfaction one or two rules for selecting Countesses,
but long before he had invented his first rule, Victoria had darted off
to a new subject.
“Which would you rather be, Lord Dunbeg? an Earl or George Washington?”
“George Washington, certainly,” was the Earl's courteous though rather
bewildered reply.
“Really?” she asked with a languid affectation of surprise; “it is
awfully kind of you to say so, but of course you can't mean it.
“Indeed I do mean it.”
“Is it possible? I never should have thought it.”
“Why not, Miss Dare?”
“You have not the air of wishing to be George Washington.”
“May I again ask, why not?”
“Certainly. Did you ever see George Washington?”
“Of course not. He died fifty years before I was born.”
“I thought so. You see you don't know him. Now, will you give us an idea
of what you imagine General Washington to have looked like?”
Dunbeg gave accordingly a flattering description of General Washington,
compounded of Stuart's portrait and Greenough's statue of Olympian Jove
with Washington's features, in the Capitol Square. Miss Dare listened
with an expression of superiority not unmixed with patience, and then
she enlightened him as follows:
“All you have been saying is perfect stuff--excuse the vulgarity of the
expression. When I am a Countess I will correct my language. The
truth is that General Washington was a raw-boned country farmer, very
hard-featured, very awkward, very illiterate and very dull; very bad
tempered, very profane, and generally tipsy after dinner.”
“You shock me, Miss Dare!” exclaimed Dunbeg.
“Oh! I know all about General Washington. My grandfather knew him
intimately, and often stayed at Mount Vernon for weeks together. You
must not believe what you read, and not a word of what Mr. Carrington
will say. He is a Virginian and will tell you no end of fine stories and
not a syllable of truth in one of them. We are all patriotic about
Washington and like to hide his faults. If I weren't quite sure you
would never repeat it, I would not tell you this. The truth is that even
when George Washington was a small boy, his temper was so violent that
no one could do anything with him. He once cut down all his father's
fruit-trees in a fit of passion, and then, just because they wanted to
flog him, he threatened to brain his father with the hatchet. His aged
wife suffered agonies from him. My grandfather often told me how he had
seen the General pinch and swear at her till the poor creature left the
room in tears; and how once at Mount Vernon he saw Washington, when
quite an old man, suddenly rush at an unoffending visitor, and chase him
off the place, beating him all the time over the head with a great stick
with knots in it, and all just because he heard the poor man stammer; he
never could abide s-s-stammering.”
Carrington and Gore burst into shouts of laughter over this description
of the Father of his country, but Victoria continued in her gentle drawl
to enlighten Lord Dunbeg in regard to other subjects with information
equally mendacious, until he decided that she was quite the most
eccentric person he had ever met. The boat arrived at Mount Vernon while
she was still engaged in a description of the society and manners of
America, and especially of the rules which made an offer of marriage
necessary. According to her, Lord Dunbeg was in imminent peril;
gentlemen, and especially foreigners, were expected, in all the States
south of the Potomac, to offer themselves to at least one young lady in
every city: “and I had only yesterday,” said Victoria, “a letter from a
lovely girl in North Carolina, a dear friend of mine, who wrote me that
she was right put out because her brothers had called on a young English
visitor with shot guns, and she was afraid he wouldn't recover, and,
after all, she says she should have refused him.”
Meanwhile Madeleine, on the other side of the boat, undisturbed by the
laughter that surrounded Miss Dare, chatted soberly and seriously with
Lord Skye and Senator Ratcliffe. Lord Skye, too, a little intoxicated
by the brilliancy of the morning, broke out into admiration of the noble
river, and accused Americans of not appreciating the beauties of their
own country.
“Your national mind,” said he, “has no eyelids. It requires a broad
glare and a beaten road. It prefers shadows which you can cut out with a
knife. It doesn't know the beauty of this Virginia winter softness.”
Mrs. Lee resented the charge. America, she maintained, had not worn her
feelings threadbare like Europe. She had still her story to tell; she
was waiting for her Burns and Scott, her Wordsworth and Byron, her
Hogarth and Turner. “You want peaches in spring,” said she. “Give us
our thousand years of summer, and then complain, if you please, that our
peach is not as mellow as yours. Even our voices may be soft then,” she
added, with a significant look at Lord Skye.
“We are at a disadvantage in arguing with Mrs. Lee,” said he to
Ratcliffe; “when she ends as counsel, she begins as witness. The famous
Duchess of Devonshire's lips were not half as convincing as Mrs. Lee's
voice.”
Ratcliffe listened carefully, assenting whenever he saw that Mrs. Lee
wished it. He wished he understood precisely what tones and half-tones,
colours and harmonies, were.
They arrived and strolled up the sunny path. At the tomb they halted,
as all good Americans do, and Mr. Gore, in a tone of subdued sorrow,
delivered a short address--
“It might be much worse if they improved it,” he said, surveying its
proportions with the æsthetic eye of a cultured Bostonian. “As it
stands, this tomb is a simple misfortune which might befall any of us;
we should not grieve over it too much. What would our feelings be if
a Congressional committee reconstructed it of white marble with Gothic
pepper-pots, and gilded it inside on machine-moulded stucco!”
Madeleine, however, insisted that the tomb, as it stood, was the only
restless spot about the quiet landscape, and that it contradicted all
her ideas about repose in the grave. Ratcliffe wondered what she meant.
They passed on, wandering across the lawn, and through the house. Their
eyes, weary of the harsh colours and forms of the city, took pleasure in
the worn wainscots and the stained walls. Some of the rooms were still
occupied; fires were burning in the wide fire-places. All were tolerably
furnished, and there was no uncomfortable sense of repair or newness.
They mounted the stairs, and Mrs. Lee fairly laughed when she was shown
the room in which General Washington slept, and where he died.
Carrington smiled too. “Our old Virginia houses were mostly like this,”
said he; “suites of great halls below, and these gaunt barracks above.
The Virginia house was a sort of hotel. When there was a race or a
wedding, or a dance, and the house was full, they thought nothing of
packing half a dozen people in one room, and if the room was large, they
stretched a sheet a cross to separate the men from the women. As for
toilet, those were not the mornings of cold baths. With our ancestors a
little washing went a long way.”
“Do you still live so in Virginia?” asked Madeleine.
“Oh no, it is quite gone. We live now like other country people, and try
to pay our debts, which that generation never did. They lived from hand
to mouth. They kept a stable-full of horses. The young men were always
riding about the country, betting on horse-races, gambling, drinking,
fighting, and making love. No one knew exactly what he was worth until
the crash came about fifty years ago, and the whole thing ran out.”
“Just what happened in Ireland!” said Lord Dunbeg, much interested and
full of his article in the Quarterly; “the resemblance is perfect, even
down to the houses.”
Mrs. Lee asked Carrington bluntly whether he regretted the destruction
of this old social arrangement.
“One can't help regretting,” said he, “whatever it was that produced
George Washington, and a crowd of other men like him. But I think we
might produce the men still if we had the same field for them.”
“And would you bring the old society back again if you could?” asked
she.
“What for? It could not hold itself up. General Washington himself could
not save it. Before he died he had lost his hold on Virginia, and his
power was gone.”
The party for a while separated, and Mrs. Lee found herself alone in the
great drawing-room. Presently the blonde Mrs. Baker entered, with her
child, who ran about making more noise than Mrs. Washington would have
permitted.
Madeleine, who had the usual feminine love of children, called the girl
to her and pointed out the shepherds and shepherdesses carved on the
white Italian marble of the fireplace; she invented a little story
about them to amuse the child, while the mother stood by and at the end
thanked the story-teller with more enthusiasm than seemed called for.
Mrs. Lee did not fancy her effusive manner, or her complexion, and was
glad when Dunbeg appeared at the doorway.
“How do you like General Washington at home?” asked she.
“Really, I assure you I feel quite at home myself,” replied Dunbeg, with
a more beaming smile than ever. “I am sure General Washington was an
Irishman. I know it from the look of the place. I mean to look it up and
write an article about it.”
“Then if you have disposed of him,” said Madeleine, “I think we will
have luncheon, and I have taken the liberty to order it to be served
outside.”
There a table had been improvised, and Miss Dare was inspecting the
lunch, and making comments upon Lord Skye's cuisine and cellar.
“I hope it is very dry champagne,” said she, “the taste for sweet
champagne is quite awfully shocking.”
The young woman knew no more about dry and sweet champagne than of the
wine of Ulysses, except that she drank both with equal satisfaction, but
she was mimicking a Secretary of the British Legation who had provided
her with supper at her last evening party. Lord Skye begged her to try
it, which she did, and with great gravity remarked that it was about
five per cent. she presumed. This, too, was caught from her Secretary,
though she knew no more what it meant than if she had been a parrot.
The luncheon was very lively and very good. When it was over, the
gentlemen were allowed to smoke, and conversation fell into a sober
strain, which at last threatened to become serious.
“You want half-tones!” said Madeleine to Lord Skye: “are there not
half-tones enough to suit you on the walls of this house?”
Lord Skye suggested that this was probably owing to the fact that
Washington, belonging, as he did, to the universe, was in his taste an
exception to local rules.
“Is not the sense of rest here captivating?” she continued. “Look at
that quaint garden, and this ragged lawn, and the great river in front,
and the superannuated fort beyond the river! Everything is peaceful,
even down to the poor old General's little bed-room. One would like to
lie down in it and sleep a century or two. And yet that dreadful Capitol
and its office-seekers are only ten miles off.”
“No! that is more than I can bear!” broke in Miss Victoria in a stage
whisper, “that dreadful Capitol! Why, not one of us would be here
without that dreadful Capitol! except, perhaps, myself.”
“You would appear very well as Mrs. Washington, Victoria.”
“Miss Dare has been so very obliging as to give us her views of General
Washington's character this morning,” said Dunbeg, “but I have not yet
had time to ask Mr. Carrington for his.”
“Whatever Miss Dare says is valuable,” replied Carrington, “but her
strong point is facts.”
“Never flatter! Mr. Carrington,” drawled Miss Dare; “I do not need it,
and it does not become your style. Tell me, Lord Dunbeg, is not Mr.
Carrington a little your idea of General Washington restored to us in
his prime?”
“After your account of General Washington, Miss Dare, how can I agree
with you?”
“After all,” said Lord Skye, “I think we must agree that Miss Dare is in
the main right about the charms of Mount Vernon. Even Mrs. Lee, on the
way up, agreed that the General, who is the only permanent resident
here, has the air of being confoundedly bored in his tomb. I don't
myself love your dreadful Capitol yonder, but I prefer it to a bucolic
life here. And I account in this way for my want of enthusiasm for your
great General. He liked no kind of life but this. He seems to have been
greater in the character of a home-sick Virginia planter than as General
or President. I forgive him his inordinate dulness, for he was not a
diplomatist and it was not his business to lie, but he might once in a
way have forgotten Mount Vernon.”
Dunbeg here burst in with an excited protest; all his words seemed to
shove each other aside in their haste to escape first. “All our greatest
Englishmen have been home-sick country squires. I am a home-sick country
squire myself.”
“How interesting!” said Miss Dare under her breath.
Mr. Gore here joined in: “It is all very well for you gentlemen to
measure General Washington according to your own private twelve-inch
carpenter's rule. But what will you say to us New Englanders who never
were country gentlemen at all, and never had any liking for Virginia?
What did Washington ever do for us? He never even pretended to like us.
He never was more than barely civil to us. I'm not finding fault with
him; everybody knows that he never cared for anything but Mount Vernon.
For all that, we idolize him. To us he is Morality, Justice, Duty,
Truth; half a dozen Roman gods with capital letters. He is austere,
solitary, grand; he ought to be deified. I hardly feel easy, eating,
drinking, smoking here on his portico without his permission, taking
liberties with his house, criticising his bedrooms in his absence.
Suppose I heard his horse now trotting up on the other side, and he
suddenly appeared at this door and looked at us. I should abandon you to
his indignation. I should run away and hide myself on the steamer. The
mere thought unmans me.”
Ratcliffe seemed amused at Gore's half-serious notions. “You recall
to me,” said he, “my own feelings when I was a boy and was made by my
father to learn the Farewell Address by heart. In those days General
Washington was a sort of American Jehovah. But the West is a poor
school for Reverence. Since coming to Congress I have learned more about
General Washington, and have been surprised to find what a narrow
base his reputation rests on. A fair military officer, who made many
blunders, and who never had more men than would make a full army-corps
under his command, he got an enormous reputation in Europe because he
did not make himself king, as though he ever had a chance of doing it.
A respectable, painstaking President, he was treated by the Opposition
with an amount of deference that would have made government easy to a
baby, but it worried him to death. His official papers are fairly done,
and contain good average sense such as a hundred thousand men in the
United States would now write. I suspect that half of his attachment to
this spot rose from his consciousness of inferior powers and his dread
of responsibility. This government can show to-day a dozen men of equal
abilities, but we don't deify them. What I most wonder at in him is
not his military or political genius at all, for I doubt whether he
had much, but a curious Yankee shrewdness in money matters. He thought
himself a very rich man, yet he never spent a dollar foolishly. He was
almost the only Virginian I ever heard of, in public life, who did not
die insolvent.”
During this long speech, Carrington glanced across at Madeleine, and
caught her eye. Ratcliffe's criticism was not to her taste. Carrington
could see that she thought it unworthy of him, and he knew that it would
irritate her.
“I will lay a little trap for Mr. Ratcliffe,” thought he to himself;
“we will see whether he gets out of it.” So Carrington began, and all
listened closely, for, as a Virginian, he was supposed to know much
about the subject, and his family had been deep in the confidence of
Washington himself.
“The neighbours hereabout had for many years, and may have still, some
curious stories about General Washington's closeness in money matters.
They said he never bought anything by weight but he had it weighed over
again, nor by tale but he had it counted, and if the weight or number
were not exact, he sent it back. Once, during his absence, his steward
had a room plastered, and paid the plasterer's bill. On the General's
return, he measured the room, and found that the plasterer had charged
fifteen shillings too much. Meanwhile the man had died, and the General
made a claim of fifteen shillings on his estate, which was paid. Again,
one of his tenants brought him the rent. The exact change of fourpence
was required. The man tendered a dollar, and asked the General to credit
him with the balance against the next year's rent. The General refused
and made him ride nine miles to Alexandria and back for the fourpence.
On the other hand, he sent to a shoemaker in Alexandria to come and
measure him for shoes. The man returned word that he did not go to any
one's house to take measures, and the General mounted his horse and rode
the nine miles to him. One of his rules was to pay at taverns the same
sum for his servants' meals as for his own. An inn-keeper brought him a
bill of three-and-ninepence for his own breakfast, and three shillings
for his servant. He insisted upon adding the extra ninepence, as he did
not doubt that the servant had eaten as much as he. What do you say to
these anecdotes? Was this meanness or not?”
Ratcliffe was amused. “The stories are new to me,” he said. “It is just
as I thought. These are signs of a man who thinks much of trifles; one
who fusses over small matters. We don't do things in that way now that
we no longer have to get crops from granite, as they used to do in New
Hampshire when I was a boy.”
Carrington replied that it was unlucky for Virginians that they had not
done things in that way then: if they had, they would not have gone to
the dogs.
Gore shook his head seriously; “Did I not tell you so?” said he. “Was
not this man an abstract virtue? I give you my word I stand in awe
before him, and I feel ashamed to pry into these details of his life.
What is it to us how he thought proper to apply his principles to
nightcaps and feather dusters? We are not his body servants, and we
care nothing about his infirmities. It is enough for us to know that he
carried his rules of virtue down to a pin's point, and that we ought,
one and all, to be on our knees before his tomb.”
Dunbeg, pondering deeply, at length asked Carrington whether all this
did not make rather a clumsy politician of the father of his country.
“Mr. Ratcliffe knows more about politics than I. Ask him,” said
Carrington.
“Washington was no politician at all, as we understand the word,”
replied Ratcliffe abruptly. “He stood outside of politics. The thing
couldn't be done to-day. The people don't like that sort of royal airs.”
“I don't understand!” said Mrs. Lee. “Why could you not do it now?”
“Because I should make a fool of myself;” replied Ratcliffe, pleased to
think that Mrs. Lee should put him on a level with Washington. She had
only meant to ask why the thing could not be done, and this little touch
of Ratcliffe's vanity was inimitable.
“Mr. Ratcliffe means that Washington was too respectable for our time,”
interposed Carrington.
This was deliberately meant to irritate Ratcliffe, and it did so all
the more because Mrs. Lee turned to Carrington, and said, with some
bitterness:
“Was he then the only honest public man we ever had?”
“Oh no!” replied Carrington cheerfully; “there have been one or two
others.”
“If the rest of our Presidents had been like him,” said Gore, “we should
have had fewer ugly blots on our short history.”
Ratcliffe was exasperated at Carrington's habit of drawing discussion to
this point. He felt the remark as a personal insult, and he knew it to
be intended. “Public men,” he broke out, “cannot be dressing themselves
to-day in Washington's old clothes. If Washington were President now, he
would have to learn our ways or lose his next election. Only fools and
theorists imagine that our society can be handled with gloves or long
poles. One must make one's self a part of it. If virtue won't answer our
purpose, we must use vice, or our opponents will put us out of office,
and this was as true in Washington's day as it is now, and always will
be.”
“Come,” said Lord Skye, who was beginning to fear an open quarrel; “the
conversation verges on treason, and I am accredited to this government.
Why not examine the grounds?”
A kind of natural sympathy led Lord Dunbeg to wander by the side of Miss
Dare through the quaint old garden. His mind being much occupied by the
effort of stowing away the impressions he had just received, he was more
than usually absent in his manner, and this want of attention irritated
the young lady. She made some comments on flowers; she invented some
new species with startling names; she asked whether these were known in
Ireland; but Lord Dunbeg was for the moment so vague in his answers that
she saw her case was perilous.
“Here is an old sun-dial. Do you have sun-dials in Ireland, Lord
Dunbeg?”
“Yes; oh, certainly! What! sun-dials? Oh, yes! I assure you there are a
great many sun-dials in Ireland, Miss Dare.”
“I am so glad. But I suppose they are only for ornament. Here it is just
the other way. Look at this one! they all behave like that. The wear and
tear of our sun is too much for them; they don't last. My uncle, who has
a place at Long Branch, had five sun-dials in ten years.”
“How very odd! But really now, Miss Dare, I don't see how a sun--dial
could wear out.”
“Don't you? How strange! Don't you see, they get soaked with sunshine so
that they can't hold shadow. It's like me, you know. I have such a
good time all the time that I can't be unhappy. Do you ever read the
Burlington Hawkeye, Lord Dunbeg?”
“I don't remember; I think not. Is it an American serial?” gasped
Dunbeg, trying hard to keep pace with Miss Dare in her reckless dashes
across country.
“No, not serial at all!” replied Virginia; “but I am afraid you would
find it very hard reading. I shouldn't try.”
“Do you read it much, Miss Dare?”
“Oh, always! I am not really as light as I seem. But then I have an
advantage over you because I know the language.”
By this time Dunbeg was awake again, and Miss Dare, satisfied with her
success, allowed herself to become more reasonable, until a slight shade
of sentiment began to flicker about their path.
The scattered party, however, soon had to unite again. The boat rang
its bell for return, they filed down the paths and settled themselves
in their old places. As they steamed away, Mrs. Lee watched the sunny
hill-side and the peaceful house above, until she could see them no
more, and the longer she looked, the less she was pleased with herself.
Was it true, as Victoria Dare said, that she could not live in so pure
an air? Did she really need the denser fumes of the city? Was she,
unknown to herself; gradually becoming tainted with the life about her?
or was Ratcliffe right in accepting the good and the bad together, and
in being of his time since he was in it? Why was it, she said bitterly
to herself; that everything Washington touched, he purified, even down
to the associations of his house? and why is it that everything we touch
seems soiled? Why do I feel unclean when I look at Mount Vernon? In
spite of Mr. Ratcliffe, is it not better to be a child and to cry for
the moon and stars?
The little Baker girl came up to her where she stood, and began playing
with her parasol.
“Who is your little friend?” asked Ratcliffe.
Mrs. Lee rather vaguely replied that she was the daughter of that pretty
woman in black; she believed her name was Baker.
“Baker, did you say?” repeated Ratcliffe.
“Baker--Mrs. Sam Baker; at least so Mr. Carrington told me; he said she
was a client of his.”
In fact Ratcliffe soon saw Carrington go up to her and remain by her
side during the rest of the trip. Ratcliffe watched them sharply and
grew more and more absorbed in his own thoughts as the boat drew nearer
and nearer the shore.
Carrington was in high spirits. He thought he had played his cards with
unusual success. Even Miss Dare deigned to acknowledge his charms that
day.
She declared herself to be the moral image of Martha Washington, and she
started a discussion whether Carrington or Lord Dunbeg would best suit
her in the rôle of the General.
“Mr. Carrington is exemplary,” she said, “but oh, what joy to be Martha
Washington and a Countess too!”