“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 halftones, 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 aesthetic 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 fireplaces. 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 storyteller 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
