Now when the General's toast at that banquet in the Indian Queen had
gone abroad, it would have the effect of a warning, each man taking
it home. A mighty silence fell upon States Rights; the foxes of
Nullification found their dens, and were to be noticed for a sudden
absence from one's eye and ear where but the day before with their
presence and their yelpings they would fill both.
It will have a strange look, but it was the General, himself, who of all
folk fostered a distrust of his course.
It was to Noah and me he one day told this. Noah mentioned the vast
silence of a voiceless conservatism which had fallen upon that movement
of Secession, late so reboant and rampant.
“And yet,” said the General, “the story of the country will at last show
me wrong.”
“Will you say how?” asked Noah. “Surely, you do not doubt the common
need of a union between the States, and one strong enough to defy the
caprice or the ambition of a clique?”
“My sentiment for the Union,” said the General, “has suffered no
modification, and it is because I stand for union and would die for
union, that I am not sure of the wisdom of that toast of mine. It would
have been better to stand aloof, and let Secession go the length of
treason. Had I held to such a course, perhaps as many as one hundred
might have answered for the crime with their lives. But the question
would have been settled; the dispute would have been made _res
adjudicata_ and the future forever freed of that struggle. Now the
serpent is only bruised, not killed; in years to follow yours and mine
it will revive in rebellion and may yet crush the country in its folds.”
“I can not think you are right,” said I, for I was having part in the
conversation with the others; “I am no judge, or you have closed the
door against this Nullification.”
“Ay!” responded the General, “closed but not locked the door. It should
have been barred with a gibbet. Folk are not taught by threats but by
example. Had I stayed myself until the leaders for Secession went so far
they were hanged for it, that would have meant the end. Now the business
is deferred; the country will yet be forced to fight a civil war and
wade knee-deep in blood to save itself.”
“Is it,” asked Noah, curiously, “is it now you first hold these views?”
“They are not new,” returned the General; “I owned them from the
beginning. But I lacked the hardihood to act on them. I grow old; I have
been in my hour the instrument by which so much blood has been shed that
in my grey age I shrink from more. That toast was devised to save myself
from spilling further blood; I was thinking on myself when I framed it
and not of those black ones who would do treason. Its great purpose was
to save me from becoming their executioner.”
“Now your feeling is mine too,” observed Noah, shaking a thoughtful
head. “The seed of the whole trouble is slavery; while that exists, the
certain chance of civil war stands open.”
“And how would one be rid of it?” demanded the General, passionately.
“Washington was against slavery, Jefferson was against it, Franklin was
against it, every great one whose trowel employed itself in laying the
foundations of our government was against it, and yet there to-day it
lives. They could not cope with slavery; how, then, shall we?”
“It existed in the North,” said Noah, “and it was wiped out.”
“The slaves were few in the North,” responded the General; “as chattels
they made but a slim fraction of that region's riches. Moreover, slavery
did not pay a Northern profit. It is easy, when there is money loss,
to abandon the cause of that loss. But conditions within the present
boundaries of slavery show otherwise. The slave's cost of keep is less,
his months of labor more in number, and he is not winter-killed with
maladies of the lungs. Moreover, your slave makes a fairer unit of
labor in rice savannahs and cotton fields, where a plantation carries
thousands of acres, than he did where land was more divided and a farm
of a hundred and sixty acres the common holding of a man. In short, the
slave spins that money profit for the South which was lacking in the
North. That fact of profit--the greed of men--will meet folk who would
free the slave and make you a mighty difference.”
“And still,” said Noah, “slavery should be stricken down.”
“To that I agree,” remarked the General, “but again I ask you, How?
Certain of our New England radicals, when they shout for Abolition, cry
'Down with slavery!' as lightly as one should say: 'Marry! swallow a
strawberry.' When a man is in the upper story of a burning house he does
not hurl himself from a window, he descends by the stair. Let us, when
now we be ablaze over slavery--for it is that, as you say, to lie at the
bottom of this whole movement of States Rights--let us grope cautiously
until we find the safe stairway of escape.”
“It is not so clear to my mind,” said I, for the spirit to lecture,
excited by example, began to move within me, “that slavery is so bad for
the blacks. One must have account for a difference of race. You would
not insist that a deer tear a prey with his teeth and howl on some
hill of midnight like a wolf. It has been the never-flagging mistake of
government to deal with the Indian as though he were white, and enforce
pale-face conditions upon him. It would be as rife of error to proceed
with the negro as though he were white or could work out a white man's
destiny. Make the black man free, and I tell you he will be as helpless
as a ship ashore on the instant.”
“To better the black,” said the General, “is not my argument; I am
against slavery to better the white man. When I seek to destroy slavery,
it is the master I would free, and not the slave.”
Just what the General would intend by this last I had no opportunity
to discover, for the zealous Jim was heard at the door, ushering in our
Peg.
“Never mind, Miss Peg,” I could hear Jim say, in a way of patronizing
reassurance, and evidently in combat of some suggestion of Peg's that
she would defer her appearance among us, “never mind about d'Marse Major
an' d'Marse Gen'ral an' that red-head Jew gentleman argufyin'. That
don't count for nothin'; they're allers at it, night an' day, argufyin'
away like they aint got a minute to live, and nothin' to never come of
it. Never mind 'em, Miss Peg; you-all jes' trapse right along in an'
declar' your urrent.”
With Peg's coming, Noah made polite expedition to retire; nothing one
might do or say would serve to keep him. He who could look a man in the
eye and stand knee to knee with him for life or death, feared a woman as
though she were a ghost and fled from the mere sight of her.
“I am somewhat abashed,” said Peg, “to think of the disturbance I have
caused, and that I drive away your visitor.” This to the General. “Why
did you not make him stay? I shall never forget my debt to him; and I'm
glad, too, he is so much your favorite.”
“Noah puts us all in his debt,” said the General. “To me he is the man
remarkable; fine, high, yet bold and quick, there will be no one to take
his place when he is gone.”
Peg's purpose was to tell the General--for he had asked the question in
a little note that morning--how she should like the dinner and that East
Room dance he offered, on the next evening but one.
“Is not the time too short?” asked the General. “Forty-eight hours would
seem no mighty space for folk to make themselves prepared. They may own
other engagements.”
“There will be no engagements,” said Peg. “The season is quite at an
end; the Redsticks, as you christened them, closed their defeated doors
six weeks ago, and for our own side, we only continued our receptions
two weeks longer to show how we remained masters of the field. There
will stand nothing in the way; and as for space to be ready in, why,
then, folk don't need hours, but only minutes, when the invitation is
from the White House.”
“Let us say the day following to-morrow, then,” said the General. “It
shall be for your victory, child, and to celebrate it. Also, since
the losers as well as the victors have proper place in a triumph, and,
again, because it will look like the olive branch and an expression of
peace, we will bid both friend and foe to this merrymaking, and mark it
with as wide a good feeling as our opponents will accept.”
Peg's dinner, as dinners go, was a creature of magnificence, with Peg,
beautiful as a moss-rose, at the General's right, and Dolly Madison's
own silver--massy, and, as the women said, “gorgeous,”--to glisten on
the white napery. The General's wide-flung invitations were as widely
accepted; and not alone the Van Burens and the Krudeners and the
Vaughns, but the Calhouns and the Berriens and the Branches, and all of
the sept of Nullification, were there, as though to put down any surmise
of sulky fear for themselves to be the offshoot of that conflict of the
toasts. Even the frivolous Pigeon-breast was with us undismayed; albeit
he practiced a forbearance touching Peg, and never once after the first
formalities so far forgot his caution as to be near enough to that
sparkling lady to court the awful hazard of her glance.
There came but one clash beneath my notice, and that would feed my
humor. Houston was just come into town, as rude and tangled a gentleman
in every politer technicality as the bears of his native woods. With
him for his table-mate he bore away the wife of Ingham of the Treasury.
Houston guarded his prize to her place with a ferocious backwoods
vigilance as though it were indeed the enemy's country and they in peril
of some Indian ambuscade with each new room they entered. The lady, with
a tact as crude as Houston's knowledge of the drawing-room, perceiving
the savageries of her protector, would be prompt to establish herself
as directress' of his manners. Poor Houston suffered more than once the
humiliation of the lady's counsel, given in a high, obvious voice, and
with the manner of one who corrects a novice dull to the confines of
despair.
The rupture befell over fish and when a portion of delicate pompano was
placed before the headlong Houston.
“That is not the fish fork,” cautioned the lady in a whisper so loud it
bred a smile on thirty faces either side of her; “that is not the fish
fork; here, take this.”
“By Satan's hoofs, madam!” exclaimed the wrathful Houston, whose
long-stifled resentment would now be in the saddle, at the same time
brandishing the huge trident he had somehow gotten hold on; “by Satan's
hoofs! keep your fish forks for whom you will. For myself, I'll eat this
catfish with my saber if I have the mind.”
Later I heard the distempered lady confide to a neighbor how Houston was
“an untaught brute,” while that hurt hero told me on his word as a man
that for those several hours he was in her company, he had less of ease
than at the Horseshoe where he was given four wounds.
The East Room, when agile ones would dance was brilliant in white and
gold and crystal chandeliers, with floor of water-soaked oak so polished
it reflected the gay dresses like a looking-glass, and so slippery that
clumsy ones, like myself, went gingerly about it in terror for their
bones.
Peg was as glorious as a star, and to me never more lovely, albeit my
coral on her bosom may have had somewhat to do with that. And to see her
so bowed to and flattered was like a perfume; for it looked as though
the foe would forego those old-time tactics of distance and averted
gaze, and that a new word was abroad in Peg's behalf. There came no one
to more emphasize his courtesy or show more attentive in what might do
Peg honor than the Vice-President himself, and with him were the members
of that cabinet triumvirate who had cast in their narrow lots with him.
Even the stately Mrs. Calhoun would be gracious in a far-off sort, while
the ladies Berrien and Branch relaxed from a former frigidity, and if
not torrid, were at all events of the temperate zone when the etiquette
of the floor would bring Peg and them in contact. As for the vigorous
Madam Ingham, she was so overcome of her labors in elevation of Houston
that following dinner she could do nothing but repose herself. However,
for so much as she remained in the picture, she beamed affably in a fat,
vermilion way, and her red face was like the setting sun.
The male Ingham, being in prodigious fettle, would fain waddle onto
the treacherous floor with Peg in his hand for a dance; for Ingham was
sensibly exalted of his valor since Eaton, whom he held in fear, was
not present, but off in Baltimore on some long-drawn duty about new
rifles--meant, I fear me, for Nullifiers, should their pot of treason
over-boil. I will say this of Ingham, however: for all his rotund
uncouthness, he went through that dance without falling down; a no small
feat I should call it, and one to give me relief, since for the while
it lasted I was held on tenter-hooks over Peg's safety, and would hover
about ready to rush in and save her should affairs go badly between
Ingham and the glass-like floor.
There occurred one incident of harshness I could have wished left out.
It was when that Frau Huygens drew up to Peg and would greet her as
though there were no such name as Krudener and no such story as the
slight she cast on Peg in the Russian's dining room. The gross Frau
Huygens was arrayed in her one garish frock of many colors, and which
her prudence to save money and buy no more frocks had made so well
known.
Frau Huygens, trained to the venture, doubtless, by her husband, who
still dwelt in fear of Van Buren and those passports which should
return him to the Hague, swept before Peg with the grace of a cabbage on
parade. When Peg, in response to her greeting, was silent and would only
look on her in a baffled manner, as though her memory were at bay, Frau
Huygens exclaimed, with a Dutch thickness of reproach which no one might
imitate with a pen:
“Madam, don't you remember me?”
“Well, then,” said Peg, as one who makes every polite effort and yet
fails, “I remember your dress very well, but your face is strange to
me.”
With that I swooped on Peg and whisked her away, for I had a horror of
what might follow.
“And there,” cried Peg, with an unctuous gurgle, “was it not a best of
fortunes, watchdog, that she should give me that opportunity? Now we are
quits; and I think, too, I have her in my debt.”
There was nothing to be said to this, and
I made myself content with thoughts of how we were no worse off.
Late one afternoon when the hour was drawing towards the close of the
day, I had planted myself at a window and was looking across to the
President's Square, and, since her gables were of necessity in the
corner of my eye, carrying Peg vaguely on my meditations. It had been a
still, windless day of the early spring, but, for all it stood so late
of the season, with a heaviness in the air that smelled of snow.
Now I am not one readily to be borne upon by imps in blue, and would
commonly give you the reason of my gloomy mood, if gloom I were a spoil
to. But this was the day odd for me, since I was pressed hard with a
sense of disaster and the feeling as of some threat in the air like a
knife, that I liked not at all and understood still less. What was it to
so hang upon me like a millstone or a sibyl-spoken prophecy of death? I
would try to laugh it down; but the smile I wrung from my unwilling lips
owned so much of bitterness that in mere defence I surrendered myself to
a pensive resignation instead, as being of two evils the lesser one, and
so paused for what blow might descend upon me. Some disaster pended, of
that my spirit went convinced; and I folded my hands and waited for the
future to announce its name.
While I was thus by the window it began to snow. It was of your
left-over storms which have been held captive in caverns of the clouds,
to at last escape and overtake the world a month or more behind the
proper time. There was no stir to the air, and the day went still and
moderate; and yet I never looked on such a fall of snow, with flakes big
and soft as a baby's hands. Even as I gazed, the ground under my eyes
turned from a new spring green to white, while the trees across were
snow from roots to very finger-tips, and showed in milky fretwork
against the low dullness of the sky.
As I stood watching these white changes in the face of things--for
the spectacle would charm me like mesmerism and made me forget my
forebodes--the General laid a gentle hand upon my shoulder. This, too,
had its side to startle, for the General, while as tender as a woman,
was in nowise demonstrative, and not one to be patting your shoulder or
slapping your back.
In dim fashion those thin fingers would add themselves to that threat of
sadness, and stir a new alarm inside my bosom.
“What is it?” I asked, as though he solicited my notice to something
urgent or unusual; “what should it be now?”--my voice not firm but
tremulous.
The General looked on me with an affectionate, consolatory eye, and yet,
somehow, his glance would fit in ominously with my feeling. I could tell
how I stood at the point of bad tidings.
And at that he began far enough away, for his first words were of the
long ago.
“I was thinking,” said he, “of that time my horse was shot and pinned me
by the leg in the fight on the Tombigbee. Do you recall how you sprang
from your saddle and flung the dying horse aside as though you but
hefted a rabbit?”
“When it comes to that,” I returned, “I supposed that you as well as
your horse were shot down, and the fear gave me a flash of strength.”
The General was silent, his hand still on my shoulder. Then he began
again, musingly.
“We must ever be together, Major,” said he; “we must stay together to
the last. I shall die first; I am eighteen years nearer the grave than
you and shall go on ahead. It is you--I look to you for this--it is
you who must be by my side to close my eyes. We must never part; we are
lonely men and lonesome men, and shall make no new friends. We must be
for that the closer to each other.”
Now, even through my clouds, these words would strike me as lacking
object or coherency. What should be the matter? Was there some wrong
with him or with me? He had not spoken in this vein even when he lay in
the vale of death.
“Why,” said I, “there is no present need to talk on death, thank God!
Why should you talk on death?”
“It was not death but you, I had on my mind,” he replied. “I would never
be parted from you.”
“Nor shall you,” I declared; “although I should count the absence of
myself no loss to you or any one.”
This was not it; what would he be about?
“Well, let us put aside dole,” cried he, cheering himself with an
effort; “now folk would call us two fortunate, I warrant you, to be
looking from a White House window upon a world all ours. Come, we will
have a brisker view; I have great news for you, and news to make you
stare. Nor will I beat about the bush, but go to the heart at once. I am
about to dissolve my cabinet.”
“What!” I exclaimed, for here was a thing without a precedent.
“My cabinet is to dissolve. I have arranged for it. Van Buren will
tender his resignation as of his own desire; Eaton and Barry will follow
suit. If Calhoun's three do not take the hint and act on so good an
example, then I will bring them to book with a demand. I will say that,
half of my cabinet being gone, I desire to sweep clean the site and rear
up in its place a new edifice of counsel.”
My thoughts were in a tumult, and the blood in me seemed seized of riot.
It was a strange thing, that from the moment the General's hand fell
upon my shoulder it seemed to hold Peg before my eyes. And when he
talked it was as though he spoke her name with every word.
“Yes,” he went on, “Van Buren's resignation will be in my hands
to-morrow; Eaton's so soon as he returns from Baltimore, say in a week;
then Barry's will come along in the wake of Eaton's. I shall send
Van Buren Minister to England. He shall be Vice-President for my second
term, as you and I have planned, and President after that.”
“But Peg,” cried I, at last; “what will you do with Peg?”
The General would try to smile at this, but the effort was as futile as
had been my own. But he did not fence at me with any jesting reminder of
how Peg was no part of his cabinet; he met my thought squarely and would
make allowance for my feeling.
“It is most natural,” he returned, “that you should ask of Peg. We have
guarded our little girl too long--you and I--not to own her first in
our concern. Peg, then, shall go to Florida and be a queen. I shall give
Eaton that Governorship; we may yet need a firm hand in St. Augustine.
Is it not a good thought? Our Peg shall rule among those Spaniards; it
will almost be to have a throne and wear a crown. Does not that please
you, when now her station under kinder skies is to be so splendid and so
notably enhanced?”
From him I turned and paced the room; then from sadness my anger began
to swell, for I am one whose grief runs with the end of it into wrath.
“Tell me one thing,” cried I at last, pausing before the General. “Why
do you dissolve your cabinet?”
“Will it not lop off three arms of Calhoun's power?” he asked. “Does it
not palsy Branch and Ingham and Berrien?”
“But is that the true reason?” I demanded.
“It is the one I shall let the world believe, it any rate.”
“That should be no answer,” I retorted, my heart like a furnace with the
rage that was coming over me. “Why do you palter? I have the right to
know. You have made your dozen poor jests upon me, and said I was in
love with Peg. Perhaps you would mean those jests. I tell you I do not
believe your word when you say it is a move against Calhoun. That is
mere glamour and fallacy and meant for blindness. It is no tale to tell
me as though I were some common gull. Give me your reason, then--the
true one. Does Eaton know he is to go?”
All this I reeled off, and gave the General no opening for an answer,
asking a dozen questions at once. But he sat quiet and with a friendly
patience, and his face spoke to me only of nearness and sympathy, and
never a shade of hurt for the rudeness I visited upon him. What a heart
of gold was his! He, who bore nothing from an enemy, would bear all at
the hands of a friend.
When I was run out of queries he began to take me up, beginning at the
end.
“Eaton knows,” said he; “he knew before he left for Baltimore. For him
the change will be a relief; his has been no bed of flowers, and in St.
Augustine his place and power, and last, not least, his peace, will gain
promotion.”
“Doubtless,” said I, in a high pitch of scorn, “he can there flaunt his
riches in the faces of the Dons, and show Peg's beauty, and make a vast
display.”
“You interrupt me,” remarked the General. “However let me ask a
question: Why do you remind me how I've jested and mayhap made some idle
laugh between us, and as innocent as idle, over your feeling for the
little girl? Why do you put that to me?”
“Because,” said I, in a fury, “I think you break up your cabinet for
that. You will have it how Peg is in some peril of me; you would send
Peg to Florida on a pretense to make her safe from me. There you have
it. You see I can be the honester and the franker man. I pass you my
heart on a spear.”
The General arose from the chair into which he had flung himself, and
taking me by the two shoulders, would look on me squarely, while I in my
turn must gaze into his gray depths. I could see the tears stand in his
fine eyes.
“Let me tell you one thing,” said he. “I but repeat what you know as
well as I, when I say that should you harbor thought of Peg, or look
on her in lights other than as the wife of a friend, it would be black
disgrace to yourself and to me, and most of all to Peg. And do you think
I would not trust you? Man, I need no sentry over you save the sentry of
your own conscience, no guard other than the guard your honor sets. You
would do no wrong to Peg. It is not you I fear; on your faith I would
stake my soul's hope of a meeting I look and long for after death. Will
you have my reason now for what I do? It is not to save Peg from you;
it is to save Peg from Peg, she goes to Florida. And to save our Peg I'd
break a dozen cabinets.”
It was now grown dark, and the silent storm swept down more whitely
dense than before. I threw a heavy military cloak about me and stepped
out into the night. I had no set purpose, no destination; but some sure
influence tugged at me, and then the house would seem to choke and its
heat to smother me; I wanted the darkness and the coolness and to be
alone. Was it some sweet power beckoning my heart, or merely a plain
instinct to save and recover myself, one that any hard-struck animal
might have had, to thus take me forth into the midst of the blinding
storm?
My journey through the gathering drifts was not pushed far when, under
one of the oil lamps that flanked the road and shed a sickly flare
through the thick-falling snow, I beheld a closed carriage drawn up. It
was one of those vehicles of hire common of the place, and beyond being
better than most, and with two powerful horses that would have looked
well hauling a gun in a battery, nothing to mark it. At first glance I
thought it had come by some mishap to running gear or axle-tree.
As I was for pushing by, quite heedless of the stalled carriage and
thinking only on my own broken heart, some one plucked me by the cloak.
Wheeling sharply, I saw it was the coachman who had leaped from his box
to interrupt me.
There would be no mistaking the massive shoulders and easy pose; it was
Rivera.
“What's this?” said I. “When did you turn whip?”
Rivera gave me no words, but motioning towards the carriage, swung
again to his place with the reins. As he did so, there came a tap on the
glass.
Somewhat in a maze, I approached and flung open the door. In the dark
depths I made out the vague outlines of a woman.
“Get in.” It was Peg's voice.
Without demur or question I took my place beside her and shut the door;
with that, Rivera cracking a thong over the sleepy horses to rouse them,
the carriage at a slow pace began moving Georgetown way.
“Hold me close to you,” whispered Peg, her low tones falling on my ears
like a cry of pain, “hold me close to you; I am cold.”