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 halftones!” said Madeleine to Lord Skye: “are there not halftones 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 bedroom. 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 homesick Virginia planter than as General or President. I forgive him his inordinate dullness, 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 homesick country squires. I am a homesick 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 today 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
