Next morning I went straight into the midst of my correspondence and
began tossing it on my pen as husbandmen toss hay. There rang no unusual
call for this energy of ink, but the whole truth was that, flying like a
fugitive before pursuing thoughts of Peg--I may tell you they had a fine
dance about my pillow the night before!--I would make a refuge of my
work.
Long ago I had given up the hope of solving Peg in her vagaries. One
would never know where or when or how to lay hold on her, for she
came to one new and new each day. Wayward, erratic, now fierce and now
tender, now in laughter and now in tears, one might not count on her
moods in their direction more than on the flight of birds. The one
only thing one might be sure of concerning Peg was that one was sure of
nothing.
It was the thought of those tears for the home-coming of Eaton which
would storm me down and have me captive for all I might barricade with
pen and ink. What should they proclaim? That Peg was unhappy, truly,
since folk do not weep for mirth. In a way I was daunted of my honor as
I went about these thoughts; it seemed a trustless thing to dwell on Peg
and her wedded life. And I would fight against it; and still it pinned
and held me. In the last of it I was claimed by the conclusion that Peg
found existence grievously dark, for what else should be headwaters for
those tears? Also, I resolved that I would coldly look the question of
her grief in the face; it might turn the better for both of us to lay
hands upon its cause. I was given the more courage for this scrutiny
since I had not forgotten how Peg named me to be her only confidant;
that word put a trust upon me and made my question-asking a kind of
duty.
As thread by thread I lifted up the inquiry of Peg's sorrow, the truth
would begin to make itself plain to me. Eaton was something gross, and
mayhap in his finer senses not unnumbed of the bowl. He could not value
Peg--she, a perfumed spirit thing of music and color and fire and light!
And Peg would feel his lack of appreciation; it would wring her heart,
stab her like a dagger. Verily, I came by a great freshness when now I
was on the right scent of it. This, it was, to lie at the root of her
meaning when she showed me that vine trailing its rich beauties along
the ground, instead of climbing, and said, “I am like that vine.” The
prone and earth-held soul of Eaton offered her no trellis.
And so Peg mourned her lost estate of love! And why should she not
mourn? she, thus swindled of a rightful destiny! Peg shone a thing of
beauty to deck a heaven with; and here was she fated to be the jewel in
the dulled head of a toad! Why should her sorrow find rebuke? Born to be
the reason of admiration and to feed on it as a flower feeds on the sun,
the irony of accident had flung her into this chill corner of neglect.
And her love was dying--starving away its life. Peg did not love Eaton;
the yoke galled her--yoking her as it did to one who, while perhaps
owning the affections, the integrity, the loyalty, owned also the low
unelevation of the brute. And for that, Peg would stay behind when Eaton
went away and weep to see him coming.
While, with some fondness for the argument--since it would make for
Peg's exoneration--I was moving to these conclusions, it ran abruptly
over me how, during our first talk in the parlors of the Indian Queen,
Peg's eyes would seem to swim in love for Eaton. I recalled her cry of
pain when she feared he might be shamed for her, and how she said she
would sooner die than that. Then, surely, Peg must have loved him; nor
had he changed since then.
These memories were sent to baffle me; but with a second thought the
fallacy of such deductions was laid bare. When, in the Indian Queen,
Peg would weep for love of Eaton, she was but the bride of a month.
She stood yet in the haze of the honeymoon, and had been given no frank
outline of her mate. Then he seemed what he should be, not what he was,
and Hope, not Truth, was painter to the picture.
Yes, it would walk before me right enough; Eaton had been a lover of
gold to become a husband of brass. Peg was as much wasted on him as
though one put a love verse from Herrick into the hands of a Seminole of
the Everglades. In his arms she was an error--a solecism--a crime--as it
might be, a lily on a muck-heap!
These thoughts so played the tyrant with me as to take the pen from
between my fingers; I could do no work, but only sit and stare from the
window while my mind ran away to Peg.
Then I resolved to call Peg over; she should adorn her throne at my
desk's end; I would show her how, for all that cloudiness of sensibility
on the part of another, there still lived one on whom her sweet fineness
was not thrown away. I would dispatch her a note by Jim; I would crave
her help for my mails. This should bring her, and be a fair excuse
besides, since it was not the beginning of such requests. Peg had often
aided me to get my letters off.
Note in hand and ready, I stepped to the rear of the mansion to summon
Jim. I could hear his high, patronizing tones, evidently employed about
the instruction of the cook. The two were close by a rear door that
opened into the kitchen.
“Yassir,” I heard Jim say, “they has black bass in d'Cumberland, shoals
an' shoals of'em. How much you reckon that one weigh?” Apparently they
had a Potomac fish between them to be the basis of discussion. “How much
that weigh? Five pounds? You hyar me, son, we uses that size fish for
bait back in Tennessee. Do Jim ever catch a bigger one? Say; if Jim
don't catch a bass in d'ol' Cumberland that's bigger than a cow, then
Jim'll jine d'church! It was a heap excitin', cotchin' that fish. He
grab d'hook; an' then he jes' nacherally split up an' down d'river like
ol' Satan was arter him for dinner; an' then he done dives. That's whar
he leads d'wrong kyard; for he bump his nose, blim! on d'rock bottom;
an' it hurt him so he jes' turn, an' next he comes lippin' up through
d'top of d'water an' goes soarin' off up into d'air for fifty foot.
That's when Jim sees how big he is. When he gets up into d'atmosphere,
he sort o' shuck himse'f, same as you-all sees a hen waller in d'dust;
an', son, you could hear his scales rattle like shakin' buckshot in a
bottle! An' at d'same time, that bass lams loose a yell folk might
nacherally hear a mile, an' which shorely sounds like d'squall of a soul
in torment. You hyar Jim! that bass--” At this, I broke in on the
revelations of our black Munchausen with my demands. As he turned, I
heard him call back:
“No, I don't get him; he done bruk d'hook.”
Peg and I had been worthily busy with my letters for full ten minutes.
She was, for her, very quiet, almost indeed to the line of a grave
sadness, which after all should be the aftermath of those tears of the
day before.
If Peg were wordless, I, on my side, sat equally without conversation.
We made tongueless company; but for that very reason went with all the
more earnestness to the letters as though they were the seeds of this
silence.
“Well?” said Peg, with a suddenness, her hands in her lap. I stared.
“Well?” she repeated. Then, when I said nothing, she would elaborate a
bit. “Well, watch-dog, what would you have? You know these letters were
the merest pretext for me to come.”
“Why, then,” said I, made desperate because she snatched away my
disguise, “why, then, I was in a fret to look on you.”
“Was it that?”
“Sometimes I fear your husband does not wholly understand you.” It
took courage to go thus far; it marked a point mightily forward of any
attained to in former talks.
Peg gave me one of those fathomless looks, narrowing her brow
whimsically. My bluntness had not dashed her spirit, at any rate;
indeed, it would seem to have raised it.
“You fear my husband does not understand me?” repeated Peg. Now she
paused an endless while, her eyes reading mine like print. I could feel
her searching me for my last promise of expression. “You fear my husband
does not understand me. And is he to be the only one? Is it there the
roll-call ends? If that were true, I might sustain myself.” For all a
shadowy, vague piquancy of brow, Peg got this off wearily enough, and
I still prisoner to her eyes. Now, after a moment, her vivacity
would mount a little. “You are right,” she went on, “I am not much
understood.” A smile peeped from the dimple in her cheek. “What
would you think, watch-dog, were I to give thick folk lessons in
myself--expound myself to dunces as your pedagogue gives lessons in a
book?”
“The lessons you propose should be marvellously sweet,” said I. Then,
with some tincture of my better courage: “By my soul's hope! I should be
sure to go to school for those lessons.”
“Ah! do you challenge me?” cried Peg. Now it would be the old Peg. “From
this hour you begin your studies. Life shall be a never-ending lesson,
and Peg the lesson.”
“And I a student most diligent.”
Peg came and stood close against my shoulder where I sat at the desk.
Her color and her brightness had returned to chase away the shadows.
With her fingers she parted my hair where the frosts of two score years
and four were beginning their blight. She made as though she considered
these ravages of silver.
Finally, she spoke to me in a way tenderly good.
“Watch-dog, watch-dog, you have eyes in your head and none in your wits.
You are a blind-wit, watch-dog, a blind-wit of no hope. And you would
study Peg? Teach I never so lucidly, study thou never so long, yet
shouldst thou never know Peg, but die in darkness of her.” Peg said this
with a kind of murmur of regret. Then, collecting direction: “How many
times has Peg been with you? And yet you have never seen her--never once
seen Peg. You do not see Peg now while she stands at your shoulder. You
are a blind-wit.”
“If I have not seen Peg,” said I, “and if I do not now see Peg, then at
the least my eyes have tasted visions above report.”
“Now you speak well,” quoth Peg, with an archness of pretended approval.
Here, surely, should be the old, true Peg. It was a delight to listen to
the bantering yet soft tones of her, like walking in the May woods with
their new green and the new blossoms painting the ground about one's
feet.
“What have I seen, then?” I asked, going back a pace.
“What have you seen? A mirage, the mere mirage of Peg--her picture,
sketched on the skies of your ideal.” Then in a playful manner of
correction, as when a girl refuses a compliment: “You have looked
upward, watchdog, when you should have looked down. And now for your
first lesson. This is the text of it: Would you find a woman, keep your
eyes on the ground.”
For all Peg's humor of gaiety, I could tell how she was under greatest
strain. Also, there ran an odd current of reproach throughout her words.
It was as though she saw faults in me.
“And now,” said I, seeking to focus complaint, “and now, what have I
done or said to hurt?”
Peg drew away from my shoulder. I could not see her face, but I felt her
spirit changing from cool to hot in the furnace of some thought. There
was silence for a moment.
“What have you done to hurt?” cried Peg, suddenly, breaking into a
wondrous wrath. “Oh, I could die with such a dullard! What have you
done? What is this just-now complaint you conceive against my husband?
He does not understand me, forsooth! You should consider yourself! What
have you done to hurt? You place me too high! You put me out of reach!
Oh, I know of no more dreadful fate than to be forever mistaken for
an angel!” That last came like the cry of a heart in torture. The next
moment Peg was gone and I left gasping.
Of what avail to think? As she had said, I was a blundering blind-wit,
and, by me at least, Peg would not be made out. I had declared how
Eaton owned a footless fancy which could not raise itself to realize a
goddess. And now, in my own high superiority, I had come bravely off!
I had been properly paid as one who is churl enough to give a woman a
compliment at the expense of her husband. Was I to suppose my goddess
would accept flattery at the cost of her self-respect? The goddess
from her furious pedestal had denounced me as one who planned for her
dishonor.
Congress was now come down upon us like a high wind. The town began to
rub its eyes free of those cobwebs of vacation slumbers; the taverns
took on a buzzing life, while the streets, lately so still and lonesome,
showed thickly sown of folk going here and there, for this reason of
legislation or that hunger of office, and with faces gay or sombre as
success was given or denied.
Noah was one to be denied. He had come to town somewhat in advance of
Congress. The General brought him quickly to the White House and made
him unpack his budget of gossip. How was Burr? How was Swartout? How
fared Hoyt? Thus ran off the General's curiosity.
“All well, all prosperous,” responded Noah, “and the town itself growing
up to weeds of riches. The New York cry is, Money! They revise your
friend Crockett, and, for an aphorism, say, 'Be sure you're rich, then
go ahead.'”
The General would have it that Noah must take an office--a collectorship
or some such gear.
“The Senate would defeat my confirmation,” said Noah; “first for that
I'm a Jew; and next because of Catron.”
“And even so,” returned the General; “it is still worth while to
discover who would do that.”
Noah was right, and his name came up to be refused by one vote. Calhoun
from his place as president of the Senate proved as flint against Noah,
while his mouthpiece, Hayne, led the war on the floor. I have yet to
look on more anger than was the General's when the news arrived.
“Heed it not,” said Noah, snapping his fingers. “I have still my
laughter, my newspaper, and my Spanish swords.”
“But the insult of it!” cried the General.
“To the cynic,” said Noah, lightly, “there can come no insult. Your
philosopher who laughs is safe against such whimsies. I shall long
remain both fat of pride and fat of purse for all a Senate may do. You
do not know me; I should have been a Diogenes and insulted Alexanders
from my tub.”
Calhoun and his coterie brought with them to town their great question
of Nullification. They worked on it incessantly and made a deal of
hubbub. Calhoun set forward his man, Hayne, to the exposition of this
policy of national disintegration. Hayne was met in that debate and
overthrown by the mighty Webster. The country echoed with the strife of
these Titans.
For himself, the General followed the argument, North against South,
word by word and step by step. He had the debate of each day written
off, and Peg would come over and read it to him while he smoked and
pondered and resolved.
About this time I must write down how I was made to feel rebuked and
neglected. Following that unguided reference to her husband, Peg would
seem to have deserted me. My eyes had little of her, and I heard her
voice still less; for while she was often in to gossip with the General,
or read those Senate speeches to him, she gave me only stray, cold
glances and monosyllables. She came no more to my workshop; and day
after day I sat alone while melancholy crept upon me like mosses over
stone. I was not so dense but I could tell how I had offended. Peg was
proud; she resented my suggestion that Eaton lacked appreciation; that
was why she flew upon me, beak and talon, and said it was I who lived in
darkness of her. I had been the wiser had I forgotten those tears of
hers so soon as they were dry, and withstood myself from meddling
opinions concerning her lot in life. Peg's coldness was the proper
retort for my impertinence, and I must bear it even while it broke my
heart.
It would be the expected thing that I should turn cheerless and be cast
down when now Peg left me with my thoughts alone. I had grown so used
to her about me, and to hear the sweet laugh of her, that it was to miss
something out of my life when she took herself away. And yet it would
be egotism. Folk miss and for a while deplore what has become a piece of
their days--even chains and dungeons, so I've heard. Nor is this due to
any love save self-love. I have often considered, as folk shed tears on
a grave, how they wept for themselves and not for him who slept at their
feet. It was the merest selfishness of habit, this dejection because Peg
would desert me. Her absence would become custom in time, and then,
should' she return, that coming doubtless would irk me just as much.
For all my wisdom, however, when now my starved eyes came only by stray,
sparse glimpses of Peg, as I beheld her now and again across in the
President's Square, or when she went by my door on her visits to the
General, my spirit fell to be jaded and vastly lowered.
Had I known my way to go about it, I would have sought Peg out and
talked with her freely and in full of what had fallen to be our
differences. I would have acknowledged my error. But I saw no open gate
through which to come by such converse, and I feared with an attempt
to plunge bad into worse.
Once, indeed, my resolve was half hatched to gain some plain speech of
her. I lay in wait until, the day being fine, I had sight of her on a
rustic seat over across in the square. She was wrapped in a fur of some
sort--martin, I think--and, with this drawn high about the throat, it so
framed her face as to make her beautiful to the verge of witchcraft.
Seeing how she was near a path, I lounged out of door, and crossing the
road, would make as though to walk by her, casually, and for exercise
and air. It was my plan to greet Peg, and next drift into word with her
as in the old time. The old time! It was not days away, and yet it
seemed as distant as my cradle! I would drift into speech of her, I say,
and trust to fortune and my wit to bring down the explanation I believed
might solve a reconciliation for us. It was a stratagem sagacious
enough, but Peg granted me no chance of its test.
Before I could get to Peg, indeed, before I journeyed half the distance,
she arose, careless and contained, as though she had not observed
me--albeit I am sure she had--and would be moving for her own gate. At
this I half halted; and Peg, striking out into a rapid walk, was in a
moment the other side of her door. A little later I saw her standing by
a window.
[Illustration: 0323]
With Peg's flight I was abashed; it was so sure she wished to dodge me.
Then a kind of anger took me in hand and I started towards her house. I
do not know what was my precise thought in this, or whether I would have
gone forward to lift the great knocker on the panel. As it fell forth,
however, Peg, on seeing me coming, whipped away from the window; with
that my heart would turn all to water and I faced sadly about.
Being abroad in the streets, I now went on to walk, and to clear my
bosom of that unhappiness which lay so heavy on it. I walked on and on,
with no clear purpose until the thing to strike my notice was how here
before me sprawled that vine which, on a summer day, Peg characterized
for its wanderings and said it was like her.
Why I should go seeking this vine is by no means plain; and yet I must
have owned to some hope of its succor, since I stood long to consider
it, and cast about with my eyes if, by any luck of nature, a stout true
tree stood at hand which might be given it for support. There was none;
the poor vine must live and die unwedded on the loveless ground.
Somehow it magnified my sorrow when I could learn no way to help Peg's
vine. But so it abode; there it should lie until the end. And the vine
would seem to realize this, too; for it looked desolate, with leaves
frost-seared and discolored like perished hopes.
It can not be said that I was uplifted of my walk, and I returned home,
if the fact must out, more unhappy than on any day since I last looked
on the Cumberland. It is curious, also, that this woe of Peg's coldness
towards me should precipitate itself in wrath upon the General. But thus
it did; for that innocent soldier had but to breathe Peg's name as we
sat with our pipes that night, and all in a setting of conversation most
commonplace, when I was upon him like a panther, snarling demands and
clawing for replies, as to how much more time he expected me to steal
from my plantations to waste upon him and his affairs.
To give credit where credit is due, the General kept himself quite
steady under this unexpected fire, and refilled his pipe in confident,
unshaken peace.
“My explosive friend,” said the General, “I need make no better answer
than just to turn your question on yourself. You know full well you
would no more leave me than I would leave you. Those growls you give us
arise from a dyspepsia of the imagination. You'll be as right as gold
after a night's sleep.”
It was upon me a bit later, as I sat trying to do some letters, that
one secret of my gloom reposed in Peg's great chair, spreading its
empty arms to my eyes each time I raised them from the page. It was that
mocking empty chair to stare my heart out of countenance and give accent
to its dreary emptiness.
On the impulse, I swooped as on an enemy and bore it to another room.
Then I felt better; and indeed it was a relief not to be longer taunted
of that chair, which would exult in being vacant and find a triumph by
flinging at me the absence of my Peg.
Now the General, while commonly as frank for talk as a cataract, could
be, when he preferred, as inscrutable as the tomb. It pleased him to
lock up his tongue over Nullification; and while I understood his pose,
and both Peg and Noah had heard him tell his thought on that pregnant
topic of state, together with his feeling for Calhoun, folk for a widest
part remained much in the dark. And it was often put and never answered,
this query of what the General's course would be when the last grapple
came to hand. The agitators for Secession were no folk to put to sea
wanting chart, however crude, to display the shores and waters about
them. They resolved to arrive by some knowledge of the General's temper
on this dogma of danger so near the Calhoun heart.
In quest of such news, a spy, or perhaps he should be called a
scout--the title is the more honorable--was dispatched to find and mark
the General's position. The General and I were given a foreword by Noah
of our gentleman who would be thus upon a recon-noiter. He came in sight
one day, and fell upon our flank in this fashion.
It was an afternoon, crisp and clear; altogether a day proper for middle
autumn rather than the winter of any honest year. I had been out with
Noah and was about my return. As I came up the walk, the
General's ramrod form--tall hat, dark garb, swinging his tasseled
walking-stick--emerged from the mansion's front door.
“Turn with me for a short jaunt,” said he. “But first step down to the
stables. I must have a look to my horses. That clumsy rascal, Charlie,
let them run away, and aside from a strain to the horses and a hand's
breadth of hide knocked off the nigh one's shoulder, he broke the wheel
of the coach--my wife's coach, Major; I wouldn't have had it injured for
a world of coaches.”
This coach was one of the General's treasures. Well I recall how it
was first brought up the Cumberland years before and rolled ashore at
Nashville.
“But it's for her,” observed the General, as I suggested the slimness of
his purse in contrast with the cost of the vehicle; “it's for her. She
shall have a proper carriage to ride in.”
“I am more concerned for the coach,” remarked the General, as we went
about the western corner of the mansion on our way towards the stables,
“then for the horses. If she were here now, her whole tender thought
would be of the latter.”
The injuries to the carriage were not grievous, and a look of pleased
relief filled the General's eyes. The horses, too, had come well through
their unauthorized dash along the road, and a hostler, skillful of
horse-drugs, gave his word to cure them of every ill received with a
quart of wormwood and vinegar, and a spoonful of tar for the cuts.
“Beauties, eh?” said the General, as he admired the sleek gray-dappled
coats with hand and eye. “Beauties, they are indeed! And descended in
direct line from my great horse Truxton. You remember Truxton; that
never-beaten King of the Clover Bottom Course?”
Truxton would be recalled easily enough. The more, since it was that
fleet champion's match with the renowned Ploughboy which in part opened
way to the savage duel with Dickenson.
Made sure of the safety of his carriage, the General and I turned
westward for a stroll. When we were gone no desperate distance, I was
all of a sudden shouted after in high-pitched tones, though amiable.
We faced about to settle the riddle of the interruption. The calls
were from one Rhetz, a member of the Calhoun inner circle. Being of a
friendly diplomacy, this Rhetz had maintained good relations with the
General and myself.
“Ah! here we have our friend Rhetz,” exclaimed the General. Rhetz was
yet some distance. While we waited the General made his comment. “He is
the one who should come from Calhoun; my silence on Nullification, as
Noah warned us, has made the Vice-President nervous, and he would feel
me out. I think, Major, and by your leave, I shall clear the business
up for them. Come, now, what say you? Let us run up our Union flag like
gallant, hearty fellows, you and me, and call on the fray. I think, too,
I'll give them my views on Calhoun.”
“Would it be wise to declare open war on Calhoun?”
“He has for long waged secret war on me,” retorted the General. “No;
let us unmask ourselves and thereby unmask him. It will cripple him and
strengthen us, since the sole chance he has to harm me is to pretend to
be my friend. Moreover, a fierce openness now should serve somewhat to
hamstring the enemy's campaign against Peg.”
“I was about to call on you,” said Rhetz, greetings over “and was told
at the door how you were somewhere for a stroll about the grounds.”
“What was your concern with me?” asked the General, his manner most
urbane.
“No concern at all,” responded the affable Rhetz, “no concern beyond
a friendly regard, Mr. President. I would call only to exhibit my
friendship.”
“And that should give me great pleasure,” said the General, casting a
comic side-look towards me. Then, with a plain purpose of helping the
scout to his discoveries: “And what of Congress? I suppose both House
and Senate still heave with the ground-swells of the Webster-Hayne
debate.”
“There is no end of cloakroom talk,” said Rhetz. “And, by the way, Mr.
President,”--here was a feeler--“there be folk, and your friends at
that, who wonder you are not openly with Calhoun and against Webster and
his Yankees for this principle of States Rights.” Rhetz followed
this last observe with a setting forth of argument bearing for the
Calhoun-Hayne contention.
“Beware of metaphysics,” observed the General dryly, turning his gray
look against Rhetz, as that rice-land sophist laid down one by one those
various refinements and abstractions wherewith the Palmetto gentry--the
Cal houns and the Butlers and the Pinckneys and the Haynes--were
blazing the path for Secession; “beware of metaphysics! No good comes of
splitting hairs. A rough-hewn honesty--a turgid frankness--should be the
better road.” The General walked on in silence fora brief space, Rhetz
also silent, feeling himself on the brink of some precipice of the
General's temper, and in no sort eager for a fall. “Sir,” resumed the
General, “let me now set you an example; let me be most open with you,
not only for Nullification, but for your friend, Calhoun. First, then,
Calhoun is not trustworthy. Did he not for years teach me to believe he
was my friend with Monroe, when it was he of all that cabinet who
urged my court-martial for taking Florida and hanging Ambristie and
Arbuth-not? Calhoun was my enemy, sir; he is my enemy now. He would hide
the fact, but it is too late. When I tell you how Calhoun is my enemy,
would you still urge on me this prince of duplicity for a statesman
whose word is worth a following? Calhoun, for a plan or a principle, can
not be relied on. He is congenitally bad, and will propose nothing that
is true or high.” Here, as the General's anger began to tower, he would
strike viciously at old weeds, dead and winter-bitten, which ranked the
path we traversed, cutting them down with his hickory stick as with
a saber; Rhetz still silent, without voice. “There lives but one more
trustless than Calhoun--that arch-rogue Clay. And my friends would show
amazement at my failure to be openly with Calhoun! Also, you say they
fear I may follow Webster and his Yankees. Sir, I know the Yankees; they
are a dour, hard brood, who to aid their interests might not scruple to
over-reach. I have yet to hear, however, they betray their friends, as
did Calhoun; I have still to know they would bargain the downfall of
their party, as did Clay. Judas would have done a no more ebon deed than
did that Kentucky renegade when he sold his soul to Adams for a place.
And now am I to take a great doctrine from such children of deceit?
Webster and his Yankees may be centered on themselves and selfish;
doubtless they are. But you may tell Calhoun that I prefer them as
companions of policy before such cozeners as himself and Clay.” The
General's voice here rose like the far high scream of an osprey.
“Calm yourself, General,” I said, in tones which never failed to bring
him to himself. “There is scant need of informing all Washington City of
our opinions.”
The General had paused in his walk and taken off that high white
hat, deep girdled of a mourning-band. As he talked he beat this stiff
headgear with his cane until I quite trembled for its integrity.
“Calhoun,” went on the General, but with temper more in hand, “claims
for his state the right to annul the law--the right to secede from the
Union. Sir, if we were to walk by this doctrine of Nullification, the
Union would be like a bag open at both ends. No matter where or how you
picked it up the meal would all run out. Tell Calhoun that I shall tie
the bag and save the country.”
The General's lean jaws at this last mention of Calhoun closed hard and
iron-fast like a trap, while his nose seemed more beaky and predatory.
Evidently he half scented Calhoun as a prey to come, and would be ready
to swoop on him.
“You would seem deeply to hate both Clay and Calhoun, Mr. President,”
Rhetz suggested. Rhetz was somewhat feeble of voice; the General's
outburst had taken his breath.
“And it is they rather than their doctrines I loathe,” said the General.
“They creep and crawl and sprawl in ambush, and strike at midnight. They
pretend friendship while plotting one's destruction. I was born to make
war upon their tribe--war to the death.”
Rhetz made no protracted stay in such warm company. We did not hinder
his escape, and presently had the advantage of his back.
“I should like to see the Calhoun face,” said I, “when Rhetz lays out
his discoveries.”
“You observe how they try me,” cried the General, passionately, gazing
after the disappearing Rhetz. “You will witness it! But by the heavens
above us! I'll uphold the law!”
“And now,” continued the General, when Rhetz was quite gone away,
“having been so vigorously free with the envoy, I must at once write
Calhoun a letter and say it all over again. I would have talked this to
Calhoun first of all, were I accurately the gentleman of honor; but then
he should not have stirred me with his spy.”
The General's letter declaratory of the duplicity of Calhoun was written
and went to the Vice-President the next day. It repeated his words
to Rhetz so far as they were personal to Calhoun, and made a deal of
commotion, I warrant you. The missive exploded in the very heart of
Secession like a hand-grenade.
The General and I had turned now; we aimed to be home before dark, and
your midwinter day is not the longest of the year. The sun was still
an hour over the western trees, however, when we found ourselves in the
President's Square. Supper would only come with sundown, since we still
adhered to our Tennessee customs.
Having moments to spare, we rested ourselves upon a bench which owned
a thick pine tree at its back. I was the more willing, for we were in
close view from Peg's windows, and I half hoped the sight of the General
would lure her out to us. I was pining for a look into her face, and to
hear the voice of her, sweet as the full note of a harp.
“Do you know,” remarked my companion, “I never walk in this square but I
think on the day when the British burned the White House. They halted
in this very park and told off the squad of incendiaries and sent them
across. Mrs. Madison was about to give a dinner, and was fair driven
from the table by the bayonets of the English. I would I'd been here,”
he concluded; “I'd have made it for those visitors another New Orleans.
The lady should have had her dinner if I'd been here.”
“The English are good soldiers,” I urged, paying little heed to him, for
my eyes were roving after some flutter of Peg's skirts.
“They are marvellously puissant,” he retorted, “when they number two for
one of the enemy.” The General's antipathy for the English was so great
he could never do them justice. “I carry some record of their gallantry
myself,” he continued, as he took off his hat and parted the bristling
hair where the rough welt of a saber-slash proved a refusal to blacken
English boots in the storm-torn years of the Revolution, when the
General was a boy of twelve. “That fixed my opinion of the English,” he
said, as he replaced his hat. “And can you believe it, that scar burned
like fire the day at New Orleans. Also, it has felt better ever since.”
“Say what you will of the British,” I insisted--I was turned obstinate
now, seeing no sign of Peg--“they make stubborn soldiers. Note what they
did with Napoleon.”
“It was not the English,” responded the General, with heat, “who
defeated Napoleon; it was Paris. He should have done with Paris what the
Russian did with Moscow--burned it, sir; burned it to the ground, and
thrown himself for his support upon the country. So I should have done,
and my country would have sustained me.”
The General had been a partisan of the Corsican a score of years before;
in the energy of his present defence, he arose from the seat and started
again for home. I more slowly followed, still hoping the possible
appearance of Peg.
As the General rounded a clump of bushes set near the path, he paused
abruptly.
“What's this!” he exclaimed. The look of defiance for everything
English, which still made hard his face, changed to one of tenderness
and regard. “What's this!” he repeated.
There lay a little negro child, well coated and warm, sound and fast
asleep for all the frost. The General thought no more on Napoleon, the
English, the treachery of Paris, or the disaster of Waterloo. He stooped
and gathered up the sleeping pickaninny in his arms.
“He is Augustus' little boy,” he said. “He has tired himself with play.
Augustus should have better watch of the child such weather as this.
I'll put a flea in his careless ear to that effect.”
Loaded with the small burden of the sleeping boy, the General led the
way across the grounds.
Now when I had ceased to hope for her, a light foot on the sod told me
how Peg was at hand. I verily believe the perverse witch to have been
behind a tree, or hidden of a shrub, and not a score of yards from us
during our whole halt in the square. I would have accosted her, but she
brushed by with a curt bending of the head and not a word, and joined
the General where that chieftain marched ahead with the pickaninny.
My heart sank, and I fell still farther to the rear, more lonely than
before Peg came.
It was ten minutes later, and when Peg, leaving the General, was on the
turn of setting forth for her own house. I was in my workshop, idle at
my desk, thoughtful with no thoughts, and my heart inexpressibly sad.
As Peg would have crossed my door, her glance swept the interior of the
room. With that, she came to a full stop. I looked up with an eagerness
to hear her speak; and thinking, too, that now she would come in, and we
two be the old kind friends again.
But instead of kindness, my glance gave me her face, cloudy and
threatening. Also, there were lamps of danger lighted in her eyes. What
new crime had I done? It was clear I stood guilty of some baseness;
I read that much in Peg's frown, and the last poor spark of my hope
pinched out. Never again, whatever the temptation, would I condemn a
husband to his wife.
Peg swept into the room while I gazed on her without speaking. If for no
reason save one of politeness, I should have greeted her; but my manners
were quite driven out of my head with wondering what new eggs would here
be toasting on the spit for me.
“Where is my chair?” cried Peg, and with a voice as full of wrath as a
coal of fire. Then pointing to where her leathern chair was not: “Where
is my chair, I say?”
Stupidly, I looked over beyond my desk where her throne had been in
happy times; but I kept my teeth on my tongue, not willing to have the
risk of a word.
“I will have it back!” Peg went on, eye as vicious as a kestrel's, “I
will have it instantly back!”
With every headlong dispatch I went after the chair, while Peg walked up
and down as might that leopard who should own those two sharp teeth,
the gleam of which just showed beneath the upper redness of her lip like
points of pearl. When the chair was restored, I turned to her and called
my courage to my shoulder.
“And now will you sit down?” said I.
“I will not sit there until I choose,” stormed Peg, still up and down.
Her cheek was flame, but with no laughing roguishness of fun; her eyes
shone like mirrors, but not from any interest of amusement. As she
went to and fro, leopard-like, she would have those eyes on me with a
questioning indignation.
“So you would thrust my chair out of your room?” said she.
Then, as I made no words on it, Peg after a space would for the second
time be about her departure, and I confess, for all my late thirst for
her presence, not a trifle to my relief. A leopard--even a leopard named
Peg--is no good company.
When Peg was by the door, she swung round on me. “I will not sit there
until I choose,” she cried again. “But you shall not touch my chair!
I will not have it banished!” With this, she went quite away, while I
stayed to look on the chair which had made the trouble, and now from
its old place would leer victoriously upon me, and mock with a more
insulting emptiness than ever, that doubly vacant heart of mine.