PEGGY O'NEAL
By Alfred Henry Lewis
Illustrated By Henry Hutt
A. J. Drexel Biddle
1902
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TO
MRS. A. J. DREXEL BIDDLE
THIS VOLUME
IS RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED
PREFACE
Doubtless I shall tell this tale but poorly, since I have no skill
of writing or rhetoric and must, for the most part, proceed by blunt
sentences and short one-syllable words to the end that I be understood.
This record is worth while, I think, for it exhibits the growth of
favor for the Union within the General's breast; and to be corollary
thereunto, his wrath against States Rights as a doctrine, together with
a hatred of Calhoun, its champion, and what other folk were found to
uphold the Vice-President's hands in those ill courses of nullification
and separation and secession he laid down for national misguidance. I
myself had been with the General, war and peace, for thirty years
on end. He was like an elder brother to me, and I apprehended no man
better. And knowing him thus well--having his thought and feeling and
emotion of politics at my mental finger-ends--it is in my strong belief
that not until he came and made oath as chief magistrate, did he
conclude his position touching this claim of right on a state's part
to nullify general law and strike her name from the roll of our common
sisterhood. I was with him, I say, when the seed of the General's
determination to stand for a union, one and indivisible, was planted;
and I witnessed its quick upgrowing and broadening until it sheltered
and shadowed with wide safety the very integrity of the country. We
had arrived at a fork in the road; the ways were about to part. Calhoun
would have led us to the left where no man could be sure of national
continuance over night. But the General ruled; he was for the right
hand. By his iron courage, and the brisk, white clearness of his mental
lights, the General was to triumph. As descendant of such victory the
States were to be unified and secession beaten down. Nor shall that
hour find its morning in all time when the mighty excellences of the
General's labors are not to have their evidence, and the tree he
planted bear into the hands of men its fruits upon the earth. He was a
tremendous mechanic of state, was General Jackson; and the world in
its construction will wear his hammer-marks with those of Cromwell and
Napoleon while the ages keep to their procession.
And yet, as may the Amazon have ultimate well-head in some rivulet as
thin as a thread, or a spring so little that a gourd might serve for its
exhaustion, so did the General come to select his place in this business
of upholding the Union against those who would pull it down, as
incident to bucklering a woman--poor and slight and feeble, she was;
the beautiful Peg O'Neal!--who for her loveliness was envied and for her
goodness was hated and for her origin as a tavern-keeper's daughter was
contemned by those proud folk who named themselves the nation's court of
fashion.
The General was a sentimentalist; justice and to do right were with
him instincts, and came not as grist ground coldly in the mills of
calculated selfishness and reason. Scotch-Irish he was in his strain;
but more Irish than the Irish and more Scotch than the Scotch, he in a
manner wonderful could in the same moment be cool and warm, and cautious
and headlong, and prudent and reckless, and close and frank--at once
a Fabius and a Scipio. In a glow of sentiment made molten hot by the
recent death of his wife--to him the Goddess of his worship--the General
would extend the power of his place and name to be a refuge for the
tearful, beautiful Peg, whom, as a child, his wife had known and loved,
and whom he now found evilly crushed beneath the social wheel. And in
a rush of feeling he rescues her and sets her high among the highest.
Still, while it owns its hot inception to impulse wholly Irish, this
rescue; the carrying out thereof, when now the General goes about it,
turns to be all Scotch in the cautious yet indomitable character of its
execution.
Also, for that the General is ardent and prone to mix private passion
with his public thought, he arrives at a hatred of nullification,
finding it a prime principle among those enemies whom he faces for the
sake of poor Peg O'Neal. It is the great fire kindled of a small thing,
this, the General's war to sustain the Union against ones who already
searched for its life. He rides into the lists for a woman's name, and
all unknowingly he bears the country's future on the point of his spear.
And so comes this story; to the purpose and the hope that what in this
good way the General did, and why and how he did it, may not die and
disappear upon the memories of men.
PEGGY O'NEAL
CHAPTER I--THE LUSTROUS PEG O'NEAL
It was my fate, I will not say my misfortune--being too proud--to dwell
overmuch with camps and caucuses and transact more than stood best for
me of politics and war. These were my schools, and they sadly served to
make me coarse and turn me hard. Sometimes I think this pity, for I was
conceived, you are to notice, with no scanty promise of fineness to my
fiber.
Now I am moved to remember, and I might add almost to regret these
things, because I would like much at this pinch to color for you a right
picture of the fair, innocent, unfortunate Peg O'Neal. Yet how am I to
do this?--I, loaded of a sluggish fancy and a genius without touch! I am
no Apelles to paint an Aphrodite, no Phidias to carve a Venus; and for
that matter, Peg no Phryne to be model for such art. The best I might
draw would stand crude and cornerwise, since I own only to talents
whereof the graphic character is exhausted when they have laid out a
worm fence?
It is within the rim of the possible that you may feel for me, born as I
show you with the hands of all good power of description bound close and
fast by my sides. Perhaps, too, you yourself on occasion have been stung
of high impulse and fain would soar with a poem; and then, when you
stretched for flight, found no furnishment of wings. Most folk have
been thus crowded upon by exaltations, and were prey to thoughts for the
expression of which their lisping natures lacked facility. They had
the sinew but not the soul. There was verse in them, but with it no
presentation dress of word or ornament of rhyme. They caged a tune of
music in their hearts and failed of those notes asked for to announce
its melody.
Still, our Peg, for whom we toiled--the General and I--and intrigued and
made new friendships and broke old ones, and who was in her fortunes the
beginning of policies on the General's part so lasting in importance to
the State, shall not go untold. I must make what effort lies in me
to give some notion of a beauty that claimed so much of potency in
equations of government solved of our times.
For myself, and I take no shame for it, I say freely that of the charges
laid against her by common tongue, I was convinced of her innocence by
the mere beauty of her face, just as the loveliness of that Greek girl
aforetime convinced the judges and wrought a verdict in her favor. There
be flowers so purely beautiful as to refuse and refute a stain; and such
a blossom was the lustrous Peg O'Neal.
I was first to meet with her at this time; and while I had not condemned
her in my thoughts--to condemn a woman is, for a man, the coward
part!--if I found myself possessed of views at all, they leaned to her
disfavor. I knew the General regarded Peg as a white soul suffering
wrong; but I also knew the General to be mercurial, and a blindly
passionate recruit when once enlisted. Besides, his own wife had been
throughout her life--and she most virtuous!--so lashed of slander, that
his blood was ever up and about the defence of any whose wailing wrongs
resembled her's. The General's attitudes were never the offshoots of
cold wisdom; he was one who believed the worst of a foe so soon as
it was told, and the best of a friend before ever it was told at all.
Wherefore I would not accept the General's decision touching Peg, more
than I would take other conclusions from his hands.
My conservatism and just slowness cut, however, no figure, since, as I
tell you, with the moment I clapped eyes upon her, I changed to be her
knight--her champion; and thereafter I matched even the torrid General
in fire for her cause.
I was in talk with the General when news reached me of Peg waiting in
the parlor for a meeting. It was Jim who bore me word; he peered around
the corner of the door and with rolling' eye as one who brings bad
tidings, beckoned me into the hallway.
“What is it?” I demanded impatiently.
I should tell you, perhaps, that Jim was more than twenty years my
senior, and nearing on to three score years and ten. This may explain
that attitude of mentor, not to say protector, of my morals which it was
his pleasure to hold towards me.
“What is it? Speak up!”
Jim shook his grizzled head, and his look was loaded of reproof.
“See yere, Marse Major,” said Jim; “dish yere aint Tennessee where
you-all kin do as you please. What you reckon now Marse Gen'ral would
gwine say to sech cat-an'-fiddle doin's?”
“And now what's wrong?” I inquired; humbly enough, for I was much
beneath Jim's sway.
“Marse Major, lemme ask you,” said Jim, and with that he fixed me with
his old eye like an inquisitor; “lemme ask you: Does you-all send for to
meet a young lady?”
“Certainly not,” I replied. “Do you think I've come to Washington to
meet young ladies?” This last indignantly.
“How I know what you do?” retorted Jim, sullenly. “Ever see a hoss in a
new parstur? Ever see how he r'ar an' pitch an' buck-jump an' kick up?
How I know what you do?”
“Get to the point,” I said, and I drew on a fierce expression, for I was
running low of patience.
“No use, Marse Major, for you to go dom'neerin' with Jim,” and the
scoundrel shook his head admonishingly. “I'll fotch up at d' p'int fas'
enough. I tells dese yere niggahs about dis hotel that if any one
comes squanderin' 'round to see you-all, an' speshul, if any of them
evil-minded women-folks comes 'round, to let me know.”
“What do you mean with your evil-minded women-folks?”
“That's all right, Marse Major; Jim aint heer'n d' Bible read for mighty
likely sixty years an' not know of them evil-minded womenfolks. King
Solomon, an' him d' wisest man, was mingled up in d' midst of a whole
passel of'em. An' so, when a minute back one of d' house niggahs comes
up to me an' lets on thar's a young lady in d' parlor who's waitin' for
you, I allows I'll take a look, an' try an' rummage out what she wants.
With that, I kinder loiters into d' parlor like I'm sent a urrent; an'
sho! Marse Major, if thar don't sot a girl who's that beautiful she's
plumb reedic'lous.
“'Be you-all wantin' to meet d' Marse Major?' I says.
“She say, 'Yes; I'm d' wife of his friend, Mr. Eaton.'
“'Mr. Eaton,' I says, 'who lives down south of Nashville at Franklin
Co't House?'
“She say, 'Yes; I'm Mrs. Eaton.'
“Course I knows dish yere aint so. An' I'm partic'lar skeered about you,
besides, since she's so handsome. It's d' beautiful ones makes all d'
trouble; a homely woman aint no more harm than squinch owls, that's
Jim's sperience. But nacherally, Marse Major, I don't tell dish yere
girl she's lyin'; I'm too well brought up. So I says:
“'I've knowed Mr. Eaton since befo' d' las' wah with d' British what
Marse Gen'ral done whups at Noo Aw-leans; Mr. Eaton's a kin to my Marse
Major. I've been down by his place a hun'red times at Franklin; an' you
hyar me, honey! they aint been no mention about you bein' his wife in
Tennessee.'
“She smile a bit at this--she's seemin' trifle sad like--an' says: 'Mr.
Eaton an' me, we get married only 'bout a month ago in Wash'ton.' An' so
she tell me ag'in to go fotch you; an' arter sort o' hesitatin' 'round
between a balk an' a break-down for a while, settlin' on d' properest
move, I reckons mebbe I'd better come an' tell you arter all.”
“It's as well you did,” I said, turning back to the General's door.
“That's all right, Marse Major.” Jim called this after me in severe
tones. “I'm boun' I'm gwine look arter you-all jes' d' same.” Then in a
wheedling voice: “Say, Marse Major, would you-all mind if I he'ps myse'f
to a dram outen d' demijohn in your closet? What with all dish yere
talkin' an' frettin' about you, Jim's mouth is as dry as a kivered
bridge.”
“One, mind you; no more.” The General, in converse with a caller, was
considering Van Buren, and party lines and issues in New York. I would
have told him of Peg, and that I was about to see her, but the presence
of his visitor put it out of reach. On the whole, I decided, it would be
as well to meet Peg first and tell the General later. I interrupted, and
explained that I was going to the parlors for a moment; we would get to
his letters on my return.
“No hurry, Major, no hurry,” he replied; “I'm quite content to put them
off. I am already seized on by the spirit of laziness that pervades this
place, and which caused Randolph to say: 'I never wind my watch whilst
in Washington, as I feel that all time spent here is wasted and thrown
away.' It's not quite that bad, perhaps; still, we'll willingly put off
the letters until to-morrow.”
And now, since I am to tell you of Peg, I would that I possessed
somewhat the art of petticoats--a little polite skill for flounce and
farthingale--some shadow of a parlor or a boudoir grace.
Peg, then, was the truth itself for height and mould, and her pretty
hands and feet told of no tavern in their genesis, even though the lip
of envy did. I give you my first impression of her, earned eye to eye
and ear to voice. I say the latter because her voice was as honey and
wove conviction like a spell. She had your pansy face; a face regular
and ineffably good. And how any, even a woman and a rival, might
look her deep eyes through and doubt her, masters conjecture! Peg's
hair--hanging in long curls about her neck and shoulders--was black;
fine as silk or cobwebs; black, yet with the gold-black of the black
Saxon. And her skin was snow and peach-blow. There was meditation, too,
in her wide brow; and her mouth, with teeth like milk, was both firm
and loving. Also, there was that in her atmosphere to bring brave men to
her. It was upon one in a moment that Peg, while tender to be hurt, was
hard to conquer; sensitive, she would feel her fate; yet she would face
it--face it with the faithful courage of an angel. But I'll have done;
why furnish the fragments and queer splinters of a portrait I'm too
inaptly dull to offer as a whole!
Peg O'Neal came this day, and making herself known, gave me my first
sight of her in the drawing room of the Indian Queen. There was a look
about her, lonely, bitter and pathetic; a look that should belong with
one hunted, and who waits to be made sure of her friends. She gave me
her hand; white and soft and small and yielding--it was as though I
took hold on a lily. My heart went out to her before she spoke; as I've
confessed, I was warm for her cause on the instant.
Peg had read the cabinet list in the paper; I think, too, she foresaw
the woe and worry to become the tail of it more clearly than did either
the General or myself, or even the port-wine Duff Green. It was of that
she desired to talk; she would see the General; but first she would see
me.
This preference for myself before the General was a common custom into
which Peg readily stepped. All who knew the General, knew me for his
other self; and I will say, despite the inference of a boast, knew me
for his calmer and more prudent self.
Peg did not come to me until the afternoon, and before I go to the story
of our converse it would be as well to sketch a handful of incidents
which preceded her advent and which should be understood to teach one
the whole truth of this tale.
This Washington day I have on my mind's edge, being the one next before
the day Peg came to me, was the fourteenth of February, St. Valentine's
Day, albeit the latter has nothing of part herein. We had arrived, the
General and myself, on the tenth, and housed at the Indian Queen. This
tavern was not the tavern of old, when that O'Neal who was Peg's
father prevailed as master, yet even under new control--and with a born
conservative like myself, the new is ever the defective--it was a first
hostel of the capital.
Our advent discovered a crust of ice and snow to our feet, and a mortal
sharpness in the air that was like a tonic. During those three or four
days since our coming, a thaw had befallen which left thoroughfares
a discouraging swale of mire, and made going about a foulest possible
employ. Withal, as though sponsor for the softening temperature, there
descended a fog--fairly a hash of misty rain that one might wash one's
face in--and the air was as full of water as a sponge.
These were no true conditions for the General, with lungs never the
hardiest, and whose health was more than commonly broken by the blow
of his wife's death. She was soundly, deeply sleeping in her grave in
Tennessee, and the new sods above her counted but twelve weeks for their
age, when we rode into Washington. She had heard the guns and the music
which told of her hero's triumph; and then, heart-stricken of shafts
of slander aimed against her sinlessness by an opposition willing to
conquer with black means, she bowed her gentle head and passed. She
was not to multiply a White House honor by sharing it, and left her
lover-husband to go his presidential way alone unlighted of her eyes.
Those dark scenes at the Hermitage when the General's angel went from
us, and storms of grief--so utter, so beyond repair!--fair beat upon him
to a point which all but laid him beneath the grass-roots to keep her
company, have neither part nor lot in this relation. They may be guessed
at, however; and the General came forth of them woe-worn and shaken,
and with the thought in his soul that she perished by the venom of his
enemies, who had struck at his fortunes by striking at her pure repute.
After his wife died I had been in the grip of sore concern for the
General. He was but a frail man at his best; he carried lead in his
shoulder and lead in his side--private bullets stopped in private wars,
truly, yet no less, perilous for that--and when on these, plus the angry
work and wrath of a campaign, was laid this funeral farther load, I say,
I trembled for the upcome.
Our way to Washington was to be by the Cumberland and the Ohio to
Pittsburg, and then overland through the mountains, and so along the
Potomac. All Tennessee seemed come to Nashville when we went aboard;
I helping the General--whose weakness was so great he must, despite
vanity, lean visibly on my support.
As he sank exhausted into a chair, and the boat backed off the levee, I
was in blackness for the gloom I felt. I believed he would not live
to see Washington, but fall by the way; I in no sort presupposed those
eight tremendous years when the White House would be to the common folk
as a temple, with him the idle of their adoration. I could not foresee
his marvelous two presidencies, and how, his name brightening with each
added sun and followed by every eye, he would retire again to privacy
and his Hermitage, the best beloved since the even day of Jefferson.
And now as I talk to you the tears start. He is dead as I write, and
gone long ago to join his heart in the grave and lie by the side of his
wife; and it comes strangely, even to myself that I, an old man,
and held as one hard and practical and cold, should be so moved of
retrospection. If it were to remember loss and sadness and decay, such
indeed might stand as reason for emotion. But my rearward glances find
only the glory of an ever-climbing, sky-kissed high success. Mayhap it
is the splendor and white gleam of it to bring the tears, as does the
glint of sunshine on the snow.
Yet it half shames my years, these drops of feeling. And for all that,
I well recall how Dale and Overton and Houston and Blair--no meek
souls, these!--were as much commoved when claimed of thoughts of General
Jackson;--such, for his friends, were the soft and softening spells and
powers of the man! The wet eyes of these, stern and rock-hewn, may save
me from the stain of doting weakness. But I loiter--I lose time when
there is none to lose--a wandering delay is the crime common of old age.
Our journey to Washington was disputed by applause at every foot; the
double banks of the Cumberland and the Ohio appeared to have become
alike the rendezvous of South and West and North. Bands brayed and
“committees” came aboard; a dozen times was the boat tied up and the
General borne ashore as on a wave to greet and be greeted of roaring
thousands who hailed him their Messiah of politics and one come for
their redemption. From the first our progress was hedged and canopied of
the never-ceasing shout, “Hurrah! for Jackson!” Night and day it was in
our ears, and our very sleep gave way and fled before it.
To say that through this I held no alarms for the General would be but
an idle picture of my feelings. Verily! I more than once found my heart
in my mouth lest the gusty multitude that struggled and fought to touch
his hand should kill him for mere kindness.
And yet he would thrive and be fat upon it, if such word by any padding
of hyperbole may be made to fit his slim meagerness. His gray eye would
light, his lean cheek show a color, his milky bristle of hair turn more
stiffly, jauntily spinous with each of these encounters. When I would
remonstrate and cite his sick weakness to forbid, he would shake his
head and smile--his closest journey to a laugh. Then he would say:
“Major, you don't know me! These shoutings are as medicine in wine.
These people love me; I take strength from their hands; their applause
is my food and I live and grow heavy by it.”
And so this boisterousness of endorsement went on; and the General
reveled while I sat sour with terror lest from it he sicken and die,
stricken by the very evidences of his popularity. He was right and I was
wrong; he came from this general joy, which with every hour arose and
laid actual hands upon him, as one remade.
Some pages back I pitched upon the fourteenth as a day much in my mind,
and the fourth since we came upon the capital. I begin narration
properly with that day, regarding what has gone before as preliminary
and given for a clearer knowledge of that which is to follow as it
unfolds.
There were matters to take place upon the fourteenth which served to fix
it in my memory. The first was a mishap to the General himself.
For the rain and the mist and the mire, we that day found ourselves
much confined to the Indian Queen. This might be called no hardship of
loneliness since, despite the mud, all the world would pull on its boots
to visit us. The General, whose dyspepsia was dominant, had eaten only
a little rice. This he took at short intervals; yet such dwarf spoonfuls
were they, that in the end the aggregate was smallish, and he found
himself weakly languid as a reward.
The General had been to a casual reception below to meet official
folk--they were building hopes for themselves of what should follow
inauguration, still eighteen days away--and being done with them, and
uneasy with the weariness of their call, was returning to his room. At
the stair's head he stumbled; as he fell he griped his side and gave a
smothered sob of pain.
I, who walked close behind, was well aware of what had chanced. The old
Dickenson wound was imperfectly healed, and a sharp wrench would tear it
and set it to inward hemorrhage. Swiftly I raised him, and since it was
no vast distance down the hall, nor he a mighty burden, carried him to
his chamber.
“Call Augustus,” he said, his voice pain-lowered to a whisper.
Placing a chair I gave him a mouthful of whisky by way of a stimulant.
Augustus was the black body-servant who had come with us from the
Hermitage. I knew what the summoning of Augustus argued, yet was
handless to interfere. The General when stricken--as he had been many
times--in the fashion I have named, was used to open a vein, and so
bleed himself comfortably till he felt relief. More than once I had
denounced such backwoods surgery as not only dangerous but revolting,
and wanting foundations of common sense. There was no logic for it,
I said; and it stood for the spirit of the preposterous when one bled
internally to bleed one's self externally as remedy. As well might I
have spoken with the trees. The General made his stubborn laws and lived
them.
“There was a Frenchman,” observed the General on some occasion of my
remonstrance, “who said that at forty every man was either a fool or a
doctor. Now I am more than forty; and I'm no fool.”
Augustus, a tawny, handsome black, arrived in a hurry splendidly
promissory of zeal. Being deft of practice, he whipped a bandage
sharply tight about the General's arm above the elbow--as starved as
a rake-handle, that arm, yet strong as hickory bough! Then the General
with his jackknife nicked a vein well down the lower arm, and proceeded
to bleed himself most contentedly and liberally, while Augustus held a
basin.
Following these horse-leech experiments, for so I scrupled not to brand
them, the General, wrapped in a dressing gown, was put to rest upon
a sofa. It would have been the bed; but it stood not yet three of the
afternoon, and it was a saying of the General's that no man should take
to his bed by daylight until he came to die. On the lounge, and, as he
declared, much uplifted of health, Augustus and I left him, with the
whisky easily at hand in event of over-creeping faintness.
After the lapse of an hour I returned. There lay that upon me which, as
I saw the future, it was proper enough should be said to the General.
And since he was like to oppose my counsel, as folk commonly do what is
patent for their peace, sticking as stoutly for the seeds of trouble
as though they were indeed the seeds of righteousness, I reckoned aid
perhaps from his present weak, low state. He would lack somewhat his
vivacity, and might be drawn with less of struggle to my manner of
thought.
Thus abode the coil: It was the evening before when the General told
me how he would propose Eaton to be his Secretary of War, and asked
my view. I had withheld opinion at the time, my caution evoking a
dull flare of that heat-lightning of the General's temper, which last
commodity was never deeply in abeyance. I would tell him later, I said;
and following a rumble of contempt on his part for the sluggishness
of my friendship for Eaton--for that gentleman and I for long had been
friends--the subject was for the moment at rest. Now was the time ripe
to dispute this question with him; so I bethought, as I wended towards
his door.
Coming to his chamber I tapped, and then pushed in without wait, as was
my wont. The windows were to the west where at this hour the sun should
have been; but such was the veil of fog without that the day seemed
already spent and sinking into twilight.
The great fire on the hearth--honest, crackling logs to feed it, since
the General would tolerate no less--set the room in a bloom of light
that came close to marking the candle that burned at his elbow a
profligacy. He had lifted himself from the sofa where Augustus and I
placed him, and was seated before a little table. On it, propped
against the _Vicar of Wakefield_, a book whereof he never tired, stood
a miniature of his wife. Throughout the day he wore this little painting
beneath his garments and hung about his neck by a black cord. His wife
had given it him in the old days and when their love was new. Each
night, when folk pray and con the Bible, he would have this picture
before him; and with it her hymn-book to read her favorite songs. This
was his devotion--his worship; it was as though he communed with her,
his Saint Rachel, on the work of the day and its duties. To the time of
his death he did this; and for whatever was good of his performing he
would lay it to these conferences, sweet at once and sad, when in the
dusk borderlands of day and night he met and talked with the soft shadow
of his heart's own.
As I came into the room the General raised his eyes. They were
tear-brimmed and he made no shift to hide them.
“Major,” he said with trembling lip, gazing the while on the miniature,
“she strove to make me a Christian. I gave her my promise to become a
Christian. And so I shall when once I'm done with office and back again
at home. I would become one now, were it within the domain of what might
be. But who is he who could unite politics and Christ? I'm no hypocrite,
Major; you know that! You know what a politician is; you know what a
Christian should be. No man may be both, Major; no man may be both.”
“You are not a politician,” I retorted. “You are a president.”
This I got off with a gruff air of harshness, not, however, because it
drew a true distinction. I sought to call him from his present mood. The
General was unusual in so far that a best step towards comforting him
was to irritate him. In his breast he loved collision, and might even
leave mourning for a war.
“I am a president and not a politician!” This with a gather of scorn.
“And pray, when is a president not a politician?”
With a deprecatory gesture I dismissed the point.
“Let that remain,” I replied, “as a question wherewith to rack some
further moment. I came for another matter.” The General turned a
keen eye upon me. “You spoke of Eaton for your portfolio of war,” I
continued.
“Have you considered what objection might lodge against such course?”
“Go on,” he said.
“General, I misdoubt the wisdom of the step. I will make my word plain.
There is none to be more the friend of Eaton than myself, none to
respect him more. But, sir, you are aware of what folk say.”
“And what do folk say?” Anger stood red on the brow of the General as a
banner is flung from a battlement. “What do folk say?”
“You should consider coolly, General,” I went on. Ever cool myself, it
was for that the General valued my counsel. “You know this tale as well
as I. It has been told me more than once within four days. Light and
laughter-loving, the beautiful Peg O'Neal grows up, the daughter of this
very tavern that shelters us. She weds Timberlake, the purser. He is
here; then he is at sea. The girlish Peg is still a girl. She goes to
rout and ball; she is gay and high and does not mope and wear demure
half-weeds as good opinion holds one should whose love is on the sea
among the storms. There come whisper and nod and innuendo--the pot of
Washington scandal, they tell me, is made easily to boil. Then in the
Mediterranean Timberlake cuts his throat; and next, as one who makes
sure work, leaps overboard into fifty fathoms. The beautiful Peg does
not become distinguished for her grief. This, and the throat-cutting,
augment talk, and tongues wag doubly. Within the year thereafter, and
not two months ago, she and our friend Eaton are wed. Gossip gains a new
impulse; heads nod and there are wise leers. I put this to you, General,
with a rude coarseness almost ferocious; I do so for a purpose. I put it
as your enemies will put it when, should you call Eaton to your cabinet,
they seize on the story to your injury. It is not what you and I say or
believe; that is not the question. It is what will your enemies tell and
the world accept.”
While I was talking, the General filled a clay pipe; in tobacco he found
calm. Holding the pipe by its long reed stem he strode up and down,
puffing cloudily. The red faded on his forehead, but his eyes were
agate-hard. I saw it would be Eaton against argument. The General's will
was set as hard and fast and cold as arctic ice.
Nor, to be fully honest, was I over-surprised or sensibly cast down;
I had fairly foreseen it all. You may question why, then, I made this
vigorous head; and Eaton my friend.
It is a proper curiosity. Freely, I am constrained, as I review the
past, to regard myself as sometimes the victim of self-foolery. On this
February evening with the General, I make no doubt but I thought I acted
wholly for his weal and peace. And yet I was clear before I spoke, how
my words would win to no effect, and Eaton for the cabinet it would be.
Thus, I now see that my impulse, indubitably, was one wholly of vanity;
as the friend privileged to frankness and who--as he said many times and
until I consented to the fact myself--more than any other had builded
him up to be a president, I would tell my mind, air my gifts of
prophecy, and arrange myself for a future wherein the General might say,
when the winds blew high, “You saw the tempest coming and you told me.”
That, as I now see, was the very conceited, small, cheap reason of my
interference; although at the time I in no sort beheld it by that light,
but felt somewhat noble and high and as might a loyal friend.
The General for ten full minutes smoked up and down, I silent, and the
room otherwise still save for the tick-ticking of the clock. At last he
spoke smilingly and off to one side.
“You remember that sagacious doctor who was yesterday called from
Baltimore to amend me after my journey? 'I'll do anything you say,'
I told him, 'save give up coffee and tobacco.' 'Then you'll die,' he
retorted, 'since it is coffee and tobacco which are killing you.' 'Then
I'll die,' I replied, 'since coffee and tobacco are all that are
left worth living for.' He quit the place in a fury of heat, did that
doctor.”
The General grinned. There was another pause; then he swung back to my
Eaton warning, while his face again showed grave and firm.
“Sir, Mrs. Eaton--Peg, as we call her--is as spotless as a star. My wife
knew her, loved her.” His tone was tender, while his glance sought the
miniature where from the table it followed him up and down with its
eyes. “Timberlake's habits were unfortunate; his suicide was due to
that. There was never a doubt of Peg in his soul; never a question of
her conduct. I know this; I do not guess. What!”--here his voice began
to rise with choler--“what! are we to guide by nameless slanders? Eaton
is my friend, honorable, high of mind, honorably married to the woman
he loves! I will not, by anything I do or fail to do, arm villification.
Into my cabinet he goes though every bow in hell be bent against it.”
Smash! went the General's pipe upon the hearth. It was the manner of the
man when driven of anger. First and last he smashed pipes by the gross.
“That is not the song of it!” I stubbornly protested.
Then I put out what was true; that he should look at this thing from the
point of his presidency. There was the public interest; his faith to the
public must be dwelt on.
“If there be a faith to the public,” he retorted, “there is also a faith
to a friend. It is a widest rumor that Eaton is to be of my cabinet.
Folk are morally sure of it as much as folk may be of what sits in the
antechamber of time. Should he not be named, that fact will be held as
an endorsement of these slanders. It will destroy Eaton; worse, it
will destroy Peg. Do you counsel that? Must that be done in the name of
Public Good?” The General now was speaking in a cold, contained way for
all his late pipe-smashing, and you are not to infer, from any verbal
force displayed, a shouting anger. Wroth he was; but, nathe-less,
low-voiced and steady as with a kind of tranquility of fury. “Must my
friend be abased, insulted--must a sweet, true woman suffer harm for
that you say a public interest asks it? Sir, you speak folly and propose
disgrace. There can be no public good to come from private wrong. And if
it were so, still I should stand the same. I've suffered many tests for
the public you prate of; I've abode the death-chances of a hundred
battles; I've marched to the public's wars when, spent and weak, I must
be lifted to the saddle; in no way have I spared or saved myself. But I
will spare my friend; I'll save a woman's honor; aye! spare and save
them though your public interest perish in their steads. You could name
no altar whereon I would make such sacrifices. The honor of a woman--to
safeguard her good fame--is the first duty of a man. It is before
friendship, before patriotism; it has precedence over things public or
private. What you offer spells ruin for a woman--ruin for Peg whom my
wife has loved and kissed! I will not do it. I say it again: Eaton for
the cabinet it should be though it were the last act of my life. More;
if I were capable of beginning my administration with treason to a
friend, I might surely look to conclude it with treason to the people.”
You are to know that the General made these long orations walking the
floor, and in a manner jerky and declamatory, though not loud. There
might be spaces of silence between sentences measured by two and three
steps; and much of the time his eye left me and he was like one who
debates with himself.
I ramble off his utterances somewhat in full; for I not only regard
the sentiments expressed as creditable to the General himself, but am
disposed to give you the truth of him as one who, while right oftener
than most men, and as set for justice as a pair of scales, on this as on
every other strong occasion did his thinking with his heart. Also, while
he never said the word, it ran in him like a torrent that his wife,
were she with him, would shield poor Peg at whatever vital cost; and of
itself that was equal to the sweeping down of reasons strong as oak or
adamant.
Who was the un-observer to say that familiarity breeds contempt? He
went wide of the truth; he should have said that familiarity breeds
self-confidence. Now I knew the General--I knew the windings of his
thought as one knows his way about a house. Folk called him a hero; he
was never so to me. And yet, more than any, I knew him to be even better
and braver and broader than was his fame in the worshiping mouths of
ones who uplifted him to be a god. No, the General and I neither looked
up nor looked down when we dealt with one another; we met ever on level
terms. He was president, or shortly would be; but what then? As he
himself said, “The presidency is a condition, not an attribute, as it
might be a malady or a fortune, an evil or a good. And if I am King are
you not Warwick?” This last was his way of phrasing it when, a year or
so later, I told him of some overheard amazement concerning the easy,
old-shoe terms on which I lived with him.
Such being our attitudes one to the other, the General's oral
exaltations--while I identified them for honest and as from his soul's
soul--struck on me as more florid than was called for by an interview,
private and commonplace, between us two. But it was the nature of him;
his surface could be made to toss like some tempest-bitten ocean, while
his steady depths were calm. This may explain, if it does not excuse,
that while he thus walked about, raging and eloquent, I listened with a
bit of impatience, helping myself meanwhile to a mouthful of whisky and
filling a pipe of my own.
“Say no more,” I observed, having advantage of a pause; “say no more.
Eaton you will have it, and Eaton it shall be. But, on the whole, do
you call it good to your Peg? Do you call it wise or friendly to put her
forth to be the target for every bolt of detraction?”
The General drew over to the fire and sat down. Slowly he poured himself
a glass of spirits, and then as slowly drank it off. For some moments he
smoked in silence.
“What with this wrong to my side, Major,” he said at last, “and the
blood I've let, and all on a pale diet of rice, I fear I'm not strong
enough to argue with you. Let us agree, then, that Eaton shall go in as
Secretary of War. As for Peg--poor little Peg!--why should she be safer
out than in? Moreover, a woman must have her courage as a man has his.
She must risk slander as he risks sword, and both must front their
enemies.” He had gone on with a mighty mildness; now he began to wave
his second pipe, and I looked to have it go into the fireplace with
every word. “You say that the Eatons will be assailed. Already they are
attacked; not for themselves, but for me. They were married in January;
none found fault until, with our coming, Eaton's nearness to me was
remembered and the whisper of what I would do with him began to run
abroad. The Eatons are the victims of my feuds; it is I, through them,
who am stabbed at. Sir,”--smash! went the pipe and the General started
up--“sir, it is the work of Henry Clay--that creature of bargain and
corruption! You know his methods of the past campaign. What lie was too
vile to tell? What calumny too gross? Who so innocent as to escape his
malice? Why, sir! such as Clay and his crew would befoul Gehenna, and
Satan himself might shrink aside in shame from their companionship! Who
was sure from them and the poison of their mendacity? She died by
it”--here he pointed to the miniature. “Even the poor lost grave of my
mother was not sacred to such jackals. And now it is the Eatons--now it
is the pretty, harmless Peg! So let it be; they will find me ready. If I
feel joy for a presidency it is because it clothes my hands for their
annihilation.”
There was a rap at the door. Augustus opened it and announced: “General
Green.”
“Duff Green,” said the General, as though a new thought occurred. “I
think now for once, in a way I shall turn our rotund friend to partial
use.”
“And how will you compass that miracle?” I spoke rather in scorn than
curiosity since I owned to briefest admiration for the General's caller.
“It will be a novelty to see your Duff Green of use.”
“Why then,” returned the General, “the benefit I propose from him is one
simple enough. I shall have him, in his paper, give this cabinet list to
the public. Once in print the thing is ended--the nails for that cabinet
building will be clinched.”
“And that is it,” cried I, in opposition. “Now to my notion it is
ever best to hold a question of this sort in abeyance until the latest
moment. Thereby you preserve for yourself room wherein to change your
plan.”
“One's first aim is the surest,” responded the General. “Now I've never
known much good to come from this plan-changing of which you talk. Nor
do I believe in secrets. One should tell the people their business so
soon as ever that business is transacted. More folk are trapped and
slain with their own secrets than are saved by them. Besides one has no
right to lock a door between the people and their affairs. There go but
two keys with government, one for the treasury and the other for the
gaol, and every officer from path-master to President should be made to
study this lesson of the keys until he can repeat it.”
To this lecture I made no retort whether of comment, denial or
agreement. These abstractions delighted him; and in this instance I
too listened with pleasure, not so much because of the deep-sea wisdom
disclosed as for that tranquility of spirit after his tossing anger
against Clay, which their utterance would seem to bring him. As it stood
the General's high temper had faded and his heat was much cooled away
when Duff Green appeared.