As though in a dream I took Peg in under my great cloak, and having my
arm about her would now hold her close and warm to my side. Her ear was
over my heart as her face lay pressed against me, and I only hope she
could understand the story of that throbbing.
For myself I was in a mid-swirl of mere confusion, with my wits all
upside down, and no clear notion of what I did or why. The General's
word of that Florida business, the cabinet to break and Peg to go away
from me, made it for the moment as though the floor of the world had
given way beneath my feet. It would provoke chaos and seem the end of
things.
It was never said of me, even by the least informed, that I would be
swayed in any kind or made to pause in what I went about by the counsel
of conventionality. I had lived a life half-bitted, and for the main
with bridle on my neck; the last I cared for were the frowns or the
smiles of folk. If it were a woman to talk against the teeth of my
fancy, I would turn my back on her; if a man, I had a way to gag his
tongue if it should be no better than the butt of my pistol. And yet,
however loose my habit or dull my knowledge of those matters, I did not
go without a fashion of cold shock on Peg's behalf when I was so far my
own man again as to dwell on our position--we, plodding through the snow
and the darkness, locked in that carriage.
This mood of apprehension was so much in the upper-hand with me that
it came to be the impulse, and would suggest the topic I laid tongue to
when first I found my words. It was not without a mighty effort of the
will that I obliged myself to some steadiness of utterance. Then, and
not very craftily, I might observe, I, in the manner of one who
thinks aloud, and surely as much to myself as to Peg, gave vent to an
exclamation under my breath. Indeed, I would not have looked for Peg
to hear me, since her head--pretty ears and all--was buried beneath the
thick folds of my cloak.
“What if folk were to know!” I said.
Then came Peg's voice like a half stifled murmur of despair.
“What should I care who knows?” cried she. “It is my heart's funeral! My
heart is dead and we go upon its funeral in this snow!”
At that, without well heeding what I was about, and doubtless drawn to
it by the note of woe in Peg's tones, I held her to my side even more
closely than before. Thus we remained for a long space in utter silence,
neither speaking a word, while the quiet storm stole down upon us and
the slow wheels forced their passage through the white cold levels of
the snow.
After a bit, Peg's head, curls in a tangle and hood removed, was thrust
outside my cloak, which garment, however, she would continue to wrap
about her and hold with her hand.
“I would still be near to you,” she said, as though in explanation of
the cloak, “though I am no longer cold.”
The mere truth was, the night, while a choke and smother of snow, was
nothing chill, being bare freezing for a temperature and never a breath
of air to stir, and the inside of the big carriage as warm as many a
library. And yet, when I would first get in, I found Peg shivering as
with an ague. That was gone now and she more in control.
Peg would now be more mistress of herself and speak with a measure of
firmness.
“You have heard?” she asked.
“The General,” I returned, “has told me you are to go to Florida. But
how should you have been told? Or was it known to you for long?”
This latter I put a little viciously, for it struck me on the moment how
Peg might have been aware of this new destiny for days, and hidden it
from me. But no; she had come to her information but an hour before.
Even while the General with his hand on my rebellious shoulder gave me
the story of it, the letter which told the news to Peg was put within
her hands.
“It was to have been a secret,” said she, “and my husband would have
kept it until his return. But he will be detained beyond his plans; he
wrote me because of preparations I must make.”
While Peg said this, her face was held up towards mine, and even in the
vague lights, which were rather the ghosts of lights than any radiance
however dim, I could catch some whiteness of it.
Suddenly her head was in its old resting place over my heart, with the
cloak to again become its cover.
“Watch-dog,” whispered Peg, and I might tell how deeply she was stricken
by the quaver of her voice, as much as by a trembling that swept her as
a gust rumples the surface of a tarn; “watch-dog, I felt that I would
not live unless I saw you. Do you contemn me? Do you own shame for your
little friend? I could not help it; I sent for Rivera, and made him
fetch this carriage. We are alone--hidden from the world's eyes. I have
torn a night from the hands of Time to be no one's night save ours. I
waited by the lamp; my soul called to you and I knew you would come. I
would not send; I was sure you would be with me without that. I should
have died if I had not found you. Say that I did right, watch-dog. Say
that it was right! I only cry for your one word; what others will think
or say I care not, but I could not bear up against your anger! Say that
I did right; say it!--say that you are glad.”
“I will say it all and intend it all, my little one!” Here I stroked
Peg's tangle of curls as one would pet a child.
My whole being was wrapped in a storm and my bosom caged a whirlwind.
I could be calm enough, apparently, and yet I was growing aware of that
tempest of spirit which shook me like an aspen. I had been dull--dull
to the point of crime; but now my wisdom would begin to sharpen and
brighten itself.
Still, I had so much coolness to call my own that I was glad of the fact
of Rivera. I remember thinking on that; for, with no more words than the
dumb, he was as secret as a mole and as honest, withal, and
single-hearted as a hound. There would be none to know; as Peg said, she
had torn a night from eternity to be ours and ours alone.
While these thoughts went tumbling down the steeps of my conjecturings,
I continued mechanically to caress Peg's hair, and it felt like a web of
gossamer in my coarse fingers.
“Contemn you, child!” said I, and my voice was not much louder than had
been hers, and I bent down my head so that she might hear; “contemn
you! I would as soon impeach the snow outside, new given from the sky,
denouncing it for soot.”
Peg began to weep, and I could hear the sharp catching of her sobs.
Suddenly the moan came sighing up to me:
“Oh, if there were no such word as right or justice or duty, but only
love--just love!” Then with a quick backward twist of her form that was
like an impulse, and as replete of a swift grace as any suppleness of
that long ago leopard whereof she would so often make me think, Peg
turned herself in my arms, and with her own encircling my neck lay
crying on my bosom. I held her close--closer. I could tell the beating
of her heart, count the footfalls of her nature as though she were
parcel of myself. How I loved her! adored her!--my prone spirit would
fall on its knees to her for its Deity.
The while, too, and with my soul at these prayers, my candor would
arrest me for the traitor I was. Where should be that conscience the
General spoke on? Or where that honor which was to have been as a sentry
to check my strayings? That honor was recreant where love would take the
field against it; that conscience was so much apostate of the right
it would frame an argument of equity and claim superior liberty for
superior love, and be all for carrying Peg away. My boasted manhood was
a rope of sand!
Even now, as weary-white with years I tell this tale of dead and other
days, I yet wonder upon that discovery of myself. This was what I beheld:
I had loved Peg from the start; the General's jest was sober truth. I
would worship her, and then cheat myself with lie and sophistry to hide
my villainy against my own detection. And now when the mask was fallen
and I stood face to face with the true image of my infamy, would I still
press forward to my sins? Or would I think on the good General, and the
pain and the foul stain for each of us which I was about to compass?
It was this to run in my mind, but all in a dimmest way to be imagined,
and as though it were a dream and nothing true. As bonds to stay me,
these thoughts came to be no more than packthreads; as props to uphold
me, trembling to a fall, they proved the merest, reeds to lean on. With
Peg cradled in my arms, her heart beating on my own, she filled out the
world for me and thrust all else beyond the frontier of my outmost hope
or fear. I wanted only Peg, would heed no other call, and whether it
were right or wrong or black or white I cared not. Caught fast in the
mills, I was wholly ground between Peg and my mighty love for her. In
a supreme egotism and the selfishness that goes wanting heart or
conscience, I would set torch to the skies before I gave her up.
It is the fair wellhead of amazement how a man is thus strange to
himself; how he will defeat his own best prophecy and be as opposite as
night and day to all he promised. Folk have never accounted me weak, and
I myself would have said I was a man of stone. I have been described for
one of resolution. I have spurred my horse across the front of beaten
troops, terror-whipped and in retreat. I've ridden against them, and
with word and point of sword forced them to a halt. I've wheeled them,
and, since they would not go without, driven them back like sheep; and
then, when they would be of a braver hope, taken their lead and whirled
them like lions upon the foe they lately fled from, and won a battle
with them. And now I, who was granite in the face of men, had only a
will of water for this girl who wept across my heart.
“Take me away!” she cried; “oh, take me away!”
Then it was my love swept down upon her like a strong wind. I take shame
to repeat what I said. Bluntly I would disregard all claims, forfeit
honor, forget the General and defy the rest; we would wander to new
regions, she and I, and set up our idol of blind love. Carried by my
soul's wish, I would leave her nothing untold; I would bow down at her
feet and beg of her to come with me.
As I spoke, Peg would seem to turn more calm and comforted. She did not
withdraw from my arms, but rested in them like a child. And yet there
arose a sad steadfastness to wrap her about that was a check and a bar
to me.
“Watch-dog,” said Peg at last, and her manner was the manner of one who
grieves, “watch-dog, I am a wicked woman. I live my life backward, and
it would be as though I could not help or save myself. My feet take hold
on baseness, and my hands spin evil for those who do me good. My touch
is a darkness--a palsy--a death. Oh, why was I born!” Peg wailed; “why
was I sent to destroy the ones I love!”
Not a word would now come to me. I was silenced and sat like one
convicted, waiting sentence. But that cold thought still crept about my
heart like a snake. I would--I must have Peg; I would give my share in
God to make her mine!
“What should be the wrong in me?” Peg went on. “Knowing the right from
the left, I take ever the left hand turning; seeing good and evil, I
choose the bad, and there rises a black glory in my heart like a cloud
of pleasant sin to swallow up repentance. Oh, if I might only tame
myself to an appearance of right and be a hypocrite when I may not be a
saint!”
Peg was presently better restored to herself. In the very moment when
the gates of my soul would open to let it forth to her and I gave myself
into her hands to be fashioned by her as she would, Peg began to gather
steadiness. It was she to now think and speak and decide for both of
us; for myself, I was clean swept away. I was not to know this new
strength of Peg's from her tones alone, or the trend of what she uttered;
I could feel her heart-throbs become firmer and more slow as she lay
in my arms, and it was in them I read the truth of her resolve.
“Watch-dog,” said Peg in a way most sweetly solemn, “I think nothing
of myself. If it were I alone to be unmade, I'd never leave your arms
again. Come weal, come woe, here would I bide, and while your arms were
round me the worst would change to be the best. But I will not see you
under the mire of men's tongues. Dear one, you would die! You are one
whose life grows on his honor like a flower on its stem; disgrace would
cut you down and you would die. And yet, I am glad I love you; I am
glad I care nothing for myself. Let my fate be woven to me coarse as
sackcloth, harsh as nettles, yet will I exult while I draw its folds
about me. I will go on as a world would say I should; and if the way of
life lie steep, I'll still climb on and think I toil for you; and if it
be stony and if it bruise my feet, I'll say I suffer that to keep you
safe; I'll make my grief my Eden and find in the endless woe of your
surrender a nobler, higher, more immortal transport than would have
owned me in your arms. And there will be another world!” Peg's tones
swung low to my ear, and mystical. “Watch-dog, there he lives after
this.”
Peg was silent for a space, and would turn even and cool and in a way of
content. I, on my part, might neither say her yea nor nay, for I was in
the hollow of her hand like a pebble to be retained or cast by her into
the sea as she should conclude.
And somehow I was no longer in the dark. I loved her; and yet I knew Peg
was not to be for me; she had said the word; she would go and I would
stay; for all her soft beauty and that love for me which spoke in every
fiber of her being, the truth flowed in on me like a tide that in no way
might I change her or shape her or move her from her will. Against my
prayer and in the front of protest, I would be saved to myself and I
would lose her; she would do it all. What was it the General said? He
would save Peg from Peg? It was she who now would save me from both
herself and me when my love-sown madness was hot to make a wreck of all.
“Yes, watch-dog,” Peg continued dreamily, “there will come another
life.” Then of the suddenest twining her arms about my neck more tightly
still and until she clung there like a part of me, she cried out as
though her soul spoke: “Kiss me, sweetheart; kiss me, if it be but once.
This night at least is ours.”
It was she who would command. I grew drunken on her lips while my
thoughts would stray and stagger. I could know nothing, act nothing,
be nothing save as she would have me. Her hot arms were as the arms
of summer torrents to hurry me along; her lips were like the lips of
a whirlpool! It was a kiss--a kiss of the infinite--and would lay its
velvet touch upon the ultimate reason of existence.
And so Peg went away; and for my portion I took up my old life, which
now was as dark and chill and hollow as a cave.
Now what should there be more to tell? What matters it how secession
hid its head? or how Calhoun resigned his Vice-Presidency to later creep
back to a seat in that Senate where he had sat on high and ruled? or how
the General fought and slew the Bank? Who is there to care for the
story of the General's re-election, when Van Buren came with him for the
second place? Who, I say, would bend the ear of interest to such tales
as those when now our Peg was gone?
The General never again took up with me that matter of his Cabinet and
its dissolution, and how he scattered it to save Peg from herself. One
evening, however, as he smoked and I sat bitter and listless, I plumped
a question at him.
“If it were to save Peg from Peg,” said I, “why did you defer so long?
Why did not you disperse your Cabinet months before? Or was it that you
failed to note Peg's peril of herself till just before you acted?” This
last with a great sneer.
“It was plain to me from the beginning how Peg was won to you,” said he.
“Then, in the beginning why did not you act?”
“How could I? Peg was under fire for her fair repute. Had I broken up my
Cabinet, it would have been Peg's death blow. Folk would have told how
it was for the war upon her and because she could not be defended. No, I
must give her time for triumph; that achieved, the rest might happen and
she be made secure in Florida. It was the one trail, and I followed it.”
The General came over to my chair. “Old comrade,” said he with a world
of goodness in his manner, “if I have thrust a thorn in your heart,
forgive me. If friendship can cure, that thorn will be plucked away.”
On another day the General was in a temper for abstract philosophies. It
lay in a hot time of summer and his moods flowed lazily. His fancy would
run away to the topic of woman and her helplessness.
“Beautiful and sweet, she is,” he was saying, “and a blessing, too; but
the man must ever bear upon his mind her weakness, and be her buckler
even from herself. He must be on guard for both. For she is as a child,
and nowise deep nor fortified of any rooted strength. Your man, on the
other hand, while wanting those traits of beauty which shine forth in
woman like the stars at night, is withal safe enough. He is cold like
an iceberg, and like an iceberg he rides steadily throughout every gale
with nine-tenths of him beneath the sea. Your tempest can go no deeper
than the surface; it cannot search the ocean's depths, and so the man
swims safely.”
Where the General would have brought up in these tongue-wanderings one
may only guess. He was never to finish, for in a flurry of irritation I
interrupted him.
“Now let me tell you one thing,” said I, wheeling on him with a sort
of venom; “to my mind, your man is a dullish fool of neither bones nor
brains, and your woman has nothing to fear from him.”
“What's that?” cried the General, startled into letting fall his pipe;
“what do I hear you say?”
“And more,” I went on; “your man will do whatever your woman commands.
He will go or stay, or fetch or carry, or weep or laugh, or live or die
by the least breath of her lips. Your man is mere clay; your woman is
the potter to mould him and bake him and break him in form and fashion
and fragment as shall best flatter her caprice or most nicely match the
color of her fancy. For virtue, your man is a toad and your woman that
blossom by which he crouches. For power, your woman is the wind, while
your man is that poor scrap of nothing to be tossed thereon.”
“You are a cynic,” retorted the General with a snort, and after
surveying me for a moment with a warlike eye he sauntered away for
another pipe.
“Your woman must save herself,” cried I, as he went through the door.
“At all events, if she have nothing stronger than your man to lean on,
her case is lost and desolate indeed.”
“You-all is plumb kerrect, Marse Major,” said Jim, who as usual had been
listening with flattering interest while the General and I discussed;
“you-all is plumb right. Man an' woman is jes' like a candle; he's
d'taller, she's d'wick. D'Marse General is a pow'ful fine soger an' all
that, but he shore don't know enough 'bout women folks to wad a gun.”
One day I got a little note from Peg. It was as though I held a sunbeam
in my fingers; I kissed it while my heart put up a prayer. Thus it ran:
“So, Watch-dog:--They have taken me and left you, and there be miles
between. Wherefore I feel very safe and very sad. It is all birds and
blossoms and trees and sunshine and bright days and sorrow here. I came
away in such a tumult of hurry I left many things behind. Most of them
I can do without, but I mislaid my love, and that grows to be a sore
distress. Here where I should need it I'm without it; there, where
mayhap it lies unregarded and uncared for, it can give me no good but
only pain. You may find it--my poor love!--since it should be something
close to you. It may be lying at your feet while you read this. Should
you come across it, even though you be in the art and press of president
making, don't forget to lift it up and save it and keep it warm upon
your heart for sake of little Peg. But I must cure me of this abject
strain; I too much beg where I should give commands. For are you not my
slave? Look if the small white mark of vassalage be not upon your hand!
Do you find it? Yes? Read it, then, and re-read it with your heart! Do
you know the promise it would tell you? By the sign of that white mark
my tooth made, it is given that now or then, or here or there, or in
this life or in that, your Peg will yet lay hands of love upon her
slave.”
That was the last letter as it was the first--the last word from my lost
and vanished Peg. I have that letter by me as I write; it is yellow and
worn and stained and blistered as though with tears. That was my last
word from her, I say. And now when the winter of my days lies thick and
white and cold upon me, and those whom I loved are gone, while those to
come and go before me are strangers whose very names are strange, I wend
often to Peg's grave. There where the great stone fits down above her,
and resting myself upon that stone--there, by the door of death, I
muse upon the past. I kiss the stone above Peg--cold it is, cold as my
age-chilled lips! And I think on the time that was, with its hot lights
to dazzle and blind and make drunk the heart with the red splendors of
them; and on the time that will be--a shadow-land of unformed wonders!
Then will my old eyes come to search among the wrinkles for that small
white mark on my hand which Peg's loving leopard teeth ordained, and
I feel again that snowstorm kiss, while my hope, for a prayer, recites
Peg's bond to yet lay hands of love upon her slave.
THE END.