Marriage a la mode Part 7

"Miss Floyd's party is put off till next week."

"Daphne is just coming in," said Miss Boyson.

The General turned again. The watchful Cecilia was certain that _he_ was not in love with Daphne. But the nephew--the inordinately handsome, and by now much-courted young man--what was the real truth about him?

Cecilia recognized--with Mrs. Verrier--that merely to put the question involved a certain tribute to young Barnes. He had at any rate done his fortune-hunting, if fortune-hunting it were, with decorum.

"Miss Floyd is looking well to-night," remarked the General.

Cecilia did not reply. She and a great part of the room were engaged in watching Roger Barnes and Miss Maddison walking together through a s.p.a.ce which seemed to have been cleared on purpose for them, but was really the result of a move towards the supper-room.

"Was there ever such a pair?" said an enthusiastic voice behind the General. "Athene and Apollo take the floor!" A gray-haired journalist with a small, bewrinkled face, buried in whiskers, and beard, laid a hand on the General's arm as he spoke.

The General smiled vaguely. "Do you know Mrs. and Miss Maddison?"

"Rather!" said the little man. "Miss Elsie's a wonder! As pretty and soft as they make them, and a Greek scholar besides--took all sorts of honours at Radcliffe last year. I've known her from her cradle."

"What a number of your girls go to college!" said the General, but ungraciously, in the tones of one who no sooner saw an American custom emerging than his instinct was to hit it.

"Yes; it's a feature of our modern life--the life of our women. But not the most significant one, by a long way."

The General could not help a look of inquiry.

The journalist's face changed from gay to grave. "The most significant thing in American life just now----"

"I know!" interrupted the General. "Your divorce laws!"

The journalist shook his head. "It goes deeper than that. What we're looking on at is a complete transformation of the idea of marriage----"

A movement in the crowd bore the speaker away. The General was left watching the beautiful pair in the distance. They were apparently quite unconscious that they roused any special attention. Laughing and chatting like two children, they pa.s.sed into the supper-room and disappeared.

Ten minutes later, in the supper-room, Barnes deserted the two ladies with whom he had entered, and went in pursuit of a girl in white, whose necklace of star sapphires, set in a Spanish setting of the seventeenth century, had at once caught the eye of the judicious. Roger, however, knew nothing of jewels, and was only conscious as he approached Miss Floyd, first of the mingling in his own mind of something like embarra.s.sment with something like defiance, and then, of the glitter in the girl's dark eyes.

"I hope you had an interesting debate," he said. "Mrs. Phillips tells me you went to the Senate."

Daphne looked him up and down. "Did I?" she said slowly. "I've forgotten. Will you move, please? There's someone bringing me an ice."

And turning her back on Roger, she smiled and beckoned to the Under-Secretary, who with a triumphant face was making his way to her through the crowd.

Roger coloured hotly. "May I bring Mrs. Maddison?" he said, pa.s.sing her; "she would like to talk to you about a party for next week----"

"Thank you. I am just going home." And with an energetic movement she freed herself from him, and was soon in the gayest of talk with the Under-Secretary.

The reception broke up some time after midnight, and on the way home General Hobson attempted a raid upon his nephew's intentions.

"I don't wish to seem an intrusive person, my dear Roger, but may I ask how much longer you mean to stay in Washington?"

The tone was short and the look which accompanied the words not without sarcasm. Roger, who had been walking beside his companion, still deeply flushed, in complete silence, gave an awkward laugh.

"And as for you, Uncle Archie, I thought you meant to sail a fortnight ago. If you've been staying on like this on my account----"

"Don't make a fool either of me or yourself, Roger!" said the General hastily, roused at last to speech by the annoyance of the situation. "Of course it was on your account that I have stayed on. But what on earth it all means, and where your affairs are--I'm hanged if I have the glimmer of an idea!"

Roger's smile was perfectly good-humoured.

"I haven't much myself," he said quietly.

"Do you--or do you not--mean to propose to Miss Floyd?" cried the General, pausing in the centre of Lafayette Square, now all but deserted, and apostrophizing with his umbrella--for the night was soft and rainy--the presidential statue above his head.

"Have I given you reason to suppose that I was going to do so?" said Roger slowly.

"Given me?--given everybody reason?--of course you have!--a dozen times over. I don't like interfering with your affairs, Roger--with any young man's affairs--but you must know that you have set Washington talking, and it's not fair to a girl--by George it isn't!--when she has given you encouragement and you have made her conspicuous, to begin the same story, in the same place, immediately, with someone else! As you say, I ought to have taken myself off long ago."

"I didn't say anything of the kind," said Roger hotly; "you shouldn't put words into my mouth, Uncle Archie. And I really don't see why you attack me like this. My tutor particularly asked me, if I came across them, to be civil to Mrs. Maddison and her daughter, and I have done nothing but pay them the most ordinary attentions."

"When a man is in love he pays no ordinary attentions. He has eyes for no one but the lady." The General's umbrella, as it descended from the face of Andrew Jackson and rattled on the flagged path, supplied each word with emphasis. "However, it is no good talking, and I don't exactly know why I should put my old oar in. But the fact is I feel a certain responsibility. People here have been uncommonly civil. Well, well!--I've wired to-day to ask if there is a berth left in the _Venetia_ for Sat.u.r.day. And you, I suppose"--the inquiry was somewhat peremptory--"will be going back to New York?"

"I have no intention of leaving Washington just yet," said Roger, with decision.

"And may I ask what you intend to do here?"

Roger laughed. "I really think that's my business. However, you've been an awful brick, Uncle Archie, to stay on like this. I a.s.sure you, if I don't say much, I think it."

By this time they had reached the hotel, the steps and hall of which were full of people.

"That's how you put me off." The General's tone was resentful. "And you won't give me any idea of the line I am to take with your mother?"

The young man smiled again and waved an evasive hand.

"If you'll only be patient a little longer, Uncle Archie----"

At this point an acquaintance of the General's who was smoking in the hall came forward to greet him, and Roger made his escape.

"Well, what the deuce _do_ I mean to do?" Barnes asked himself the question deliberately. He was hanging out of the window, in his bedroom, smoking and pondering.

It was a mild and rainy night. Washington was full of the earth and leaf odours of the spring, which rose in gusts from its trees and gardens; and rugged, swiftly moving clouds disclosed every now and then what looked like hurrying stars.

The young man was excited and on edge. Daphne Floyd--and the thought of Daphne Floyd--had set his pulses hammering; they challenged in him the aggressive, self-a.s.sertive, masculine force. The history of the preceding three weeks was far from simple. He had first paid a determined court to her, conducting it in an orthodox, English, conspicuous way. His mother, and her necessities--his own also--imposed it on him; and he flung himself into it, setting his teeth. Then, to his astonishment, one may almost say to his disconcerting, he found the prey all at once, and, as it were, without a struggle, fluttering to his lure, and practically within his grasp. There was an evening when Daphne's sudden softness, the look in her eyes, the inflection in her voice had fairly thrown him off his balance. For the first time he had shown a lack of self-command and self-possession. Whereupon, in a flash, a new and strange Daphne had developed--imperious, difficult, incalculable. The more he gave, the more she claimed. Nor was it mere girlish caprice. The young Englishman, invited to a game that he had never yet played, felt in it something sinister and bewildering.

Gropingly, he divined in front of him a future of tyranny on her side, of expected submission on his. The Northern character in him, with its reserve, its phlegm, its general sanity, began to shrink from the Southern elements in her. He became aware of the depths in her nature, of things volcanic and primitive, and the English stuff in him recoiled.

So he was to be bitted and bridled, it seemed, in the future. Daphne Floyd would have bought him with her dollars, and he would have to pay the price.

Something natural and wild in him said No! If he married this girl he would be master, in spite of her money. He realized vaguely, at any rate, the strength of her will, and the way in which it had been tempered and steeled by circ.u.mstance. But the perception only roused in himself some slumbering tenacities and vehemences of which he had been scarcely aware. So that, almost immediately--since there was no glamour of pa.s.sion on his side--he began to resent her small tyrannies, to draw in, and draw back. A few quarrels--not ordinary lovers' quarrels, but representing a true grapple of personalities--sprang up behind a screen of trifles. Daphne was once more rude and provoking, Roger cool and apparently indifferent. This was the stage when Mrs. Verrier had become an admiring observer of what she supposed to be his "tactics." But she knew nothing of the curious little crisis which had preceded them.

Then the Maddisons, mother and daughter, "my tutor's friends," had appeared upon the scene--charming people! Of course civilities were due to them, and had to be paid them. Next to his mother--and to the girl of the orchard--the affections of this youth, who was morally backward and immature, but neither callous nor fundamentally selfish, had been chiefly given to a certain Eton master, of a type happily not uncommon in English public schools. Herbert French had been Roger's earliest and best friend. What Roger had owed him at school, only he knew. Since school-days they had been constant correspondents, and French's influence on his pupil's early manhood had done much, for all Roger's laziness and self-indulgence, to keep him from serious lapses.