Peggy O'Neal. Alfred Henry Lewis
four days. Light and laughter-loving, the beautiful Peg O'Neal grows up, the daughter of this very tavern that shelters us. She weds Timberlake, the purser. He is here; then he is at sea. The girlish Peg is still a girl. She goes to rout and ball; she is gay and high and does not mope and wear demure half-weeds as good opinion holds one should whose love is on the sea among the storms. There come whisper and nod and innuendo—the pot of Washington scandal, they tell me, is made easily to boil. Then in the Mediterranean Timberlake cuts his throat; and next, as one who makes sure work, leaps overboard into fifty fathoms. The beautiful Peg does not become distinguished for her grief. This, and the throat-cutting, augment talk, and tongues wag doubly. Within the year thereafter, and not two months ago, she and our friend Eaton are wed. Gossip gains a new impulse; heads nod and there are wise leers. I put this to you, General, with a rude coarseness almost ferocious; I do so for a purpose. I put it as your enemies will put it when, should you call Eaton to your cabinet, they seize on the story to your injury. It is not what you and I say or believe; that is not the question. It is what will your enemies tell and the world accept.”
While I was talking, the General filled a clay pipe; in tobacco he found calm. Holding the pipe by its long reed stem he strode up and down, puffing cloudily. The red faded on his forehead, but his eyes were agate-hard. I saw it would be Eaton against argument. The General's will was set as hard and fast and cold as arctic ice.
Nor, to be fully honest, was I over-surprised or sensibly cast down; I had fairly foreseen it all. You may question why, then, I made this vigorous head; and Eaton my friend.
It is a proper curiosity. Freely, I am constrained, as I review the past, to regard myself as sometimes the victim of self-foolery. On this February evening with the General, I make no doubt but I thought I acted wholly for his weal and peace. And yet I was clear before I spoke, how my words would win to no effect, and Eaton for the cabinet it would be. Thus, I now see that my impulse, indubitably, was one wholly of vanity; as the friend privileged to frankness and who—as he said many times and until I consented to the fact myself—more than any other had builded him up to be a president, I would tell my mind, air my gifts of prophecy, and arrange myself for a future wherein the General might say, when the winds blew high, “You saw the tempest coming and you told me.” That, as I now see, was the very conceited, small, cheap reason of my interference; although at the time I in no sort beheld it by that light, but felt somewhat noble and high and as might a loyal friend.
The General for ten full minutes smoked up and down, I silent, and the room otherwise still save for the tick-ticking of the clock. At last he spoke smilingly and off to one side.
“You remember that sagacious doctor who was yesterday called from Baltimore to amend me after my journey? 'I'll do anything you say,' I told him, 'save give up coffee and tobacco.' 'Then you'll die,' he retorted, 'since it is coffee and tobacco which are killing you.' 'Then I'll die,' I replied, 'since coffee and tobacco are all that are left worth living for.' He quit the place in a fury of heat, did that doctor.”
The General grinned. There was another pause; then he swung back to my Eaton warning, while his face again showed grave and firm.
“Sir, Mrs. Eaton—Peg, as we call her—is as spotless as a star. My wife knew her, loved her.” His tone was tender, while his glance sought the miniature where from the table it followed him up and down with its eyes. “Timberlake's habits were unfortunate; his suicide was due to that. There was never a doubt of Peg in his soul; never a question of her conduct. I know this; I do not guess. What!”—here his voice began to rise with choler—“what! are we to guide by nameless slanders? Eaton is my friend, honorable, high of mind, honorably married to the woman he loves! I will not, by anything I do or fail to do, arm villification. Into my cabinet he goes though every bow in hell be bent against it.”
Smash! went the General's pipe upon the hearth. It was the manner of the man when driven of anger. First and last he smashed pipes by the gross.
“That is not the song of it!” I stubbornly protested.
Then I put out what was true; that he should look at this thing from the point of his presidency. There was the public interest; his faith to the public must be dwelt on.
“If there be a faith to the public,” he retorted, “there is also a faith to a friend. It is a widest rumor that Eaton is to be of my cabinet. Folk are morally sure of it as much as folk may be of what sits in the antechamber of time. Should he not be named, that fact will be held as an endorsement of these slanders. It will destroy Eaton; worse, it will destroy Peg. Do you counsel that? Must that be done in the name of Public Good?” The General now was speaking in a cold, contained way for all his late pipe-smashing, and you are not to infer, from any verbal force displayed, a shouting anger. Wroth he was; but, nathe-less, low-voiced and steady as with a kind of tranquility of fury. “Must my friend be abased, insulted—must a sweet, true woman suffer harm for that you say a public interest asks it? Sir, you speak folly and propose disgrace. There can be no public good to come from private wrong. And if it were so, still I should stand the same. I've suffered many tests for the public you prate of; I've abode the death-chances of a hundred battles; I've marched to the public's wars when, spent and weak, I must be lifted to the saddle; in no way have I spared or saved myself. But I will spare my friend; I'll save a woman's honor; aye! spare and save them though your public interest perish in their steads. You could name no altar whereon I would make such sacrifices. The honor of a woman—to safeguard her good fame—is the first duty of a man. It is before friendship, before patriotism; it has precedence over things public or private. What you offer spells ruin for a woman—ruin for Peg whom my wife has loved and kissed! I will not do it. I say it again: Eaton for the cabinet it should be though it were the last act of my life. More; if I were capable of beginning my administration with treason to a friend, I might surely look to conclude it with treason to the people.”
You are to know that the General made these long orations walking the floor, and in a manner jerky and declamatory, though not loud. There might be spaces of silence between sentences measured by two and three steps; and much of the time his eye left me and he was like one who debates with himself.
I ramble off his utterances somewhat in full; for I not only regard the sentiments expressed as creditable to the General himself, but am disposed to give you the truth of him as one who, while right oftener than most men, and as set for justice as a pair of scales, on this as on every other strong occasion did his thinking with his heart. Also, while he never said the word, it ran in him like a torrent that his wife, were she with him, would shield poor Peg at whatever vital cost; and of itself that was equal to the sweeping down of reasons strong as oak or adamant.
Who was the un-observer to say that familiarity breeds contempt? He went wide of the truth; he should have said that familiarity breeds self-confidence. Now I knew the General—I knew the windings of his thought as one knows his way about a house. Folk called him a hero; he was never so to me. And yet, more than any, I knew him to be even better and braver and broader than was his fame in the worshiping mouths of ones who uplifted him to be a god. No, the General and I neither looked up nor looked down when we dealt with one another; we met ever on level terms. He was president, or shortly would be; but what then? As he himself said, “The presidency is a condition, not an attribute, as it might be a malady or a fortune, an evil or a good. And if I am King are you not Warwick?” This last was his way of phrasing it when, a year or so later, I told him of some overheard amazement concerning the easy, old-shoe terms on which I lived with him.
Such being our attitudes one to the other, the General's oral exaltations—while I identified them for honest and as from his soul's soul—struck on me as more florid than was called for by an interview, private and commonplace, between us two. But it was the nature of him; his surface could be made to toss like some tempest-bitten ocean, while his steady depths were calm. This may explain, if it does not excuse, that while he thus walked about, raging and eloquent, I listened with a bit of impatience, helping myself meanwhile to a mouthful of whisky and filling a pipe of my own.
“Say no more,” I observed, having advantage of a pause; “say no more. Eaton you will have it, and Eaton it shall be. But, on the whole, do you call it good to your Peg? Do you call it wise or friendly to put her forth