Marriage à la mode | Page 3

General, with energy. "She takes it uncommonly hard."
Roger, with face still averted, showed no inclination to discuss his mother's character on these lines.
"However, she'll get along all right, if you do your duty by her," added the General, not without a certain severity.
"I mean to do it, sir." Barnes rose as he spoke. "I should think we're getting near Mount Vernon by this time. I'll go and look."
He made his way to the outer deck, the General following. The old soldier, as he moved through the crowd of chairs in the wake of his nephew, was well aware of the attention excited by the young man. The eyes of many damsels were upon him; and, while the girls looked and said nothing, their mothers laughed and whispered to each other as the young Apollo passed.
Standing at the side of the steamer, the uncle and nephew perceived that the river had widened to a still more stately breadth, and that, on the southern bank, a white building, high placed, had come into view. The excursionists crowded to look, expressing their admiration for the natural scene and their sense of its patriotic meaning in a frank, enthusiastic chatter, which presently enveloped the General, standing in a silent endurance like a rock among the waves.
"Isn't it fine to think of his coming back here to die, so simply, when he'd made a nation?" said a young girl--perhaps from Omaha--to her companion. "Wasn't it just lovely?"
Her voice, restrained, yet warm with feeling, annoyed General Hobson. He moved away, and as they hung over the taffrail he said, with suppressed venom to his companion: "Much good it did them to be 'made a nation'! Look at their press--look at their corruption--their divorce scandals!"
Barnes laughed, and threw his cigarette-end into the swift brown water.
"Upon my word, Uncle Archie, I can't play up to you. As far as I've gone, I like America and the Americans."
"Which means, I suppose, that your mother gave you some introductions to rich people in New York, and they entertained you?" said the General drily.
"Well, is there any crime in that? I met a lot of uncommonly nice people."
"And didn't particularly bless me when I wired to you to come here?"
The young man laughed again and paused a moment before replying.
"I'm always very glad to come and keep you company, Uncle Archie."
The old General reddened a little. Privately, he knew very well that his telegram summoning young Barnes from New York had been an act of tyranny--mild, elderly tyranny. He was not amusing himself in Washington, where he was paying a second visit after an absence of twenty years. His English soul was disturbed and affronted by a wholly new realization of the strength of America, by the giant forces of the young nation, as they are to be felt pulsing in the Federal City. He was up in arms for the Old World, wondering sorely and secretly what the New might do with her in the times to come, and foreseeing an ever-increasing deluge of unlovely things--ideals, principles, manners--flowing from this western civilization, under which his own gods were already half buried, and would soon be hidden beyond recovery. And in this despondency which possessed him, in spite of the attentions of Embassies, and luncheons at the White House, he had heard that Roger was in New York, and could not resist the temptation to send for him. After all, Roger was his heir. Unless the boy flagrantly misbehaved himself, he would inherit General Hobson's money and small estate in Northamptonshire. Before the death of Roger's father this prospective inheritance, indeed, had not counted for very much in the family calculations. The General had even felt a shyness in alluding to a matter so insignificant in comparison with the general scale on which the Barnes family lived. But since the death of Barnes père, and the complete pecuniary ruin revealed by that event, Roger's expectations from his uncle had assumed a new importance. The General was quite aware of it. A year before this date he would never have dreamed of summoning Roger to attend him at a moment's notice. That he had done so, and that Roger had obeyed him, showed how closely even the family relation may depend on pecuniary circumstance.
The steamer swung round to the landing-place under the hill of Mount Vernon. Again, in disembarkation, there was a crowd and rush which set the General's temper on edge. He emerged from it, hot and breathless, after haranguing the functionary at the gates on the inadequacy of the arrangements and the likelihood of an accident. Then he and Roger strode up the steep path, beside beds of blue periwinkles, and under old trees just bursting into leaf. A spring sunshine was in the air and on the grass, which