Peggy O'Neal. Alfred Henry Lewis
he deemed it—of the beautiful Peg who waited my coming below.
As I was going, the door standing open, one in coat of clerical finish presented himself without announcement, and rapped modestly on the door frame. I had had experience of his flock and knew him by his feathers. Plainly, he was a solicitor of subscriptions for some amiable charity. The book in his hand spoke loudly for my surmise.
My doubt, had one been entertained, would have found dissipation by the words of the General, as, harsh and strident, they overtook me on my way.
“No, sir,” I heard him say; “no, sir! Not one splinter!—not one two-bit piece! I shall begin as I mean to end. You people are not to send me out of the White House, a pauper and a beggar, as you sent poor Jim Monroe.”
Doughtily resolved, oh General! hard without and soft within! Doughtily resolved and weakly executed, when eight years later you are made to borrow ten thousand dollars wherewith to pay your White House debts before ever you wend homeward to your Hermitage!
After forty and when youth's suppleness has fled, one's fancy is as prone to lapse into a stiff inertness as one's joints. It came then to pass, as I journeyed parlorward along the old-fashioned corridors and stairways of the Indian Queen, that I in nowise was visited by any glint of the possible beauty of Peg, nor yet of her honest injuries; but rather, in half peevish fashion, I considered her a proposed incumbrance to the General's administration, in which I may be pardoned for saying—I, who had been busy with trowel and plumb-line about the corner stone and subsills of his whole career—I was smitten of an interest. Truly, I had been Eaton's friend; and had used him well, too. Also, I was glad to have him take Peg to wife, since such was his fancy. But why should she and he rise subsequently up to vex folk who were like to own troubles more properly their own? That was the question I held acridly under my tongue as I went onward to my meeting with Peg, and I fear some blush of it showed in my face.
Over six feet and broad as a door, I doubtless towered forbiddingly upon her imaginings when I came up to Peg; these and the cloud on my forehead—for I am sure one darkened it—showed her to be both brave and innocent when, without hesitation or holding back, she put forth her hands to me. I've told somewhere how she gave me her hand; that was wrong; she gave me both, and gave them with a full sweep of frankness, that showed confident at once and sad, as though with the motion of it she offered herself for my protection. She spoke no word; her little hands lay in my great ones, and I felt within them the beat of a sharp, small pulse as of one under strain and stress. Once, long before, I had toiled upward with caitiff secrecy and captured a sleeping mother-pigeon on her nest. The quick flutter of the bird's heart beneath my fingers was as this poor throbbing in Peg's hands. I remember, also, I was melted into the same sudden compassion for the pigeon that seized on me for Peg.
“I came to you because you are the General's old friend,” she said. Her sweet, large eyes were swimming, and her voice began to break. Then she put out an effort and brought herself to bay. “I've nothing to ask; not much to say, neither. I know what the General would do; my husband has told me. I know, too, what it will mean of slander and insult and suffering. And yet—I've prayed upon it; prayed and again prayed!—I must go forward. I can not, nay, I dare not become a bar across the path of my husband; I dare not poison his success.”
All this time I had been holding to her hands, for I felt her great beauty and it made me forget the name of time. Besides, this was no common meeting, but rather the making of a league and covenant between folk who were to be allies throughout a bitter strife. I think she noticed my awkward and scarce polite retention of her fingers, for she withdrew them, while a little flush of color painted itself in her face. Still, she did not do this unkindly; and, I may say, there was nothing of sentiment in my breast which cried for rebuke or tendered her aught but honor.
“Pardon a freedom in one twice your years, but you are wondrous beautiful.” These were my first words to Peg. “Mr. Eaton has come by mighty fortune.”
“My beauty, as you call it,” said she, with just the shadow of a smile that told more of pain than gladness, “has been no good ground to me and borne me nettles for a crop. I had been happier for a wholesome plainness.”
Then we settled to a better conversation; and the while her sweetness was growing on me like a vine and I becoming more and more soundly her partisan with every moment.
“My husband is much honored,” said she at one point, “and deems himself advanced by what the General would offer. Also, he sees nothing of the darkness into which I stare; he sees only the high station and the power of it, and the way shines to his feet. But I know what society will do; I have not been child and girl and woman in Washington without experience of it. Folk will turn from me and ignore me and seek to blot me out. If it were none save myself to be considered, I would abandon the field; I would hunt seclusion, cultivate obscurity as if it were a rose. But am I to become a drag on the man who loves me and gives me his name? Am I to be fetters for his feet—a stumbling-block before him?”
“There is no need of this apprehension,” said I; “you should have a higher spirit, since you are innocent.”
“Innocent, yes!” she cried, and her deep eyes glowed; “innocent, yes! As heaven hears me, innocent!” Her manner dismayed me with what it unveiled of suffering. Then in a lower tone, and with a kindle of that cynicism to come upon folk who, working no evil and doing no wrong, are yet made to find themselves fronted of adverse tides and blown against by winds of cruelty, “Innocent, yes; but what relief comes then? I am young; many are still children with my years. And, thanks to a tavern bringing up,”—here was hardness now—“I have so seen into the world's heart as to know that it is better to be a rogue called honest, than honest and called a rogue. That is true among men; I tell you it is doubly true among women.”
To be open about it, I was shocked; not that what Peg said was either foolish or untrue. But to be capable of such talk, and she with that loving, patient mouth, showed how woeful must have been the lesson. But it gave me none the less a deal of sureness for the level character of her intellect, and I saw she carried within her head the rudiments of sense.
“What is it you would ask of me?” said I, at last. “I can only promise beforehand anything in my power.”
“I would ask nothing,” she replied, “save the assurance that you will be my husband's friend and mine. I see grief on its way as one sees a storm creep up the sky. Oh!” she suddenly cried with a sparkle of tears, “my husband! He must not be made ashamed for me! Rather than that, I would die!”
Peg bowed her flower-like head and wept, I, sitting just across, doing nothing, saying nothing; which conduct was wise on my part, albeit I hadn't the wit to see it at the time, and was simply daunted to silence by a sorrow I knew not how to check. It was a tempest, truly, and swayed and bent her like a willow in a wind. At last she overtook herself; she smiled with all the brightness of nature, or the sun after a flurry of rain.
“It will do me good,” she said; “and when the time comes I will be braver than you now think.”
When Peg smiled she gave me a flash of white behind the full red of her lips. Then I noticed a peculiar matter. She wanted the two teeth that, one on each side of the middle teeth, should grow between the latter and the eye teeth. When I say she wanted these, you are not to understand she once owned them and that they were lost. These teeth had never been; where six should have grown there were but four; and these, set evenly and with dainty spaces between, took up the room, each claiming its just share. The teeth were as white as rice, short and broad and strong, and the eye teeth sharply pointed like those of a leopard. There gleamed, too, a shimmer of ferocity about these teeth which called for all Peg's tenderness of mouth, aye! even that sadness which lurked in plaintive shadows about the corners, to correct. And yet what struck one as a blemish went on to be a source of fascination and grew into the little lady's chiefest charm—these separated sharp white leopard teeth of Peg's.
When I came into the room I was thinking on the hardships to the General's administration; now I regarded nothing save the perils of Peg herself. With that on my soul I started, man-fashion, to talk courageously.