PEGGY O'NEAL
By Alfred Henry Lewis
Illustrated By Henry Hutt
A. J. Drexel Biddle
1902
TO
MRS. A. J. DREXEL BIDDLE
THIS VOLUME
IS RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED
CONTENTS
[ CHAPTER I—THE LUSTROUS PEG O'NEAL ]
[ CHAPTER II—PORT WINE DUFF AND PIGEON-BREAST ]
[ CHAPTER III—PEG'S MEETING WITH THE MAJOR ]
[ CHAPTER IV—THE JEW AND HIS SPANISH SWORD ]
[ CHAPTER V—REVEREND CAMPBELL AND THE MAGPIE ]
[ CHAPTER VI—THE STORM GATHERS AGAINST PEG ]
[ CHAPTER VII—THE SECRETARY, SUAVE AS CREAM. ]
[ CHAPTER VIII—THE MAD CAPRICIOUS PEG ]
[ CHAPTER IX—THE GENERAL SELECTS HIS SUCCESSOR. ]
[ CHAPTER X—THE MAJOR AND PEG AT CROSSES ]
[ CHAPTER XI—THE GENERAL MAKES PROVERBS ]
[ CHAPTER XII—HOW PEG WOULD WEAR THE CORAL. ]
[ CHAPTER XIII—THE SON OF THE SPANISH BULL-FIGHTER ]
[ CHAPTER XIV.—THE FEDERAL UNION: IT MUST BE PRESERVED. ]
[ CHAPTER XV—HOW PEG WAS SAVED FROM PEG. ]
[ CHAPTER XVI.—LOVE'S FUNERAL IN THE SNOW. ]
PREFACE
Doubtless I shall tell this tale but poorly, since I have no skill of writing or rhetoric and must, for the most part, proceed by blunt sentences and short one-syllable words to the end that I be understood. This record is worth while, I think, for it exhibits the growth of favor for the Union within the General's breast; and to be corollary thereunto, his wrath against States Rights as a doctrine, together with a hatred of Calhoun, its champion, and what other folk were found to uphold the Vice-President's hands in those ill courses of nullification and separation and secession he laid down for national misguidance. I myself had been with the General, war and peace, for thirty years on end. He was like an elder brother to me, and I apprehended no man better. And knowing him thus well—having his thought and feeling and emotion of politics at my mental finger-ends—it is in my strong belief that not until he came and made oath as chief magistrate, did he conclude his position touching this claim of right on a state's part to nullify general law and strike her name from the roll of our common sisterhood. I was with him, I say, when the seed of the General's determination to stand for a union, one and indivisible, was planted; and I witnessed its quick upgrowing and broadening until it sheltered and shadowed with wide safety the very integrity of the country. We had arrived at a fork in the road; the ways were about to part. Calhoun would have led us to the left where no man could be sure of national continuance over night. But the General ruled; he was for the right hand. By his iron courage, and the brisk, white clearness of his mental lights, the General was to triumph. As descendant of such victory the States were to be unified and secession beaten down. Nor shall that hour find its morning in all time when the mighty excellences of the General's labors are not to have their evidence, and the tree he planted bear into the hands of men its fruits upon the earth. He was a tremendous mechanic of state, was General Jackson; and the world in its construction will wear his hammer-marks with those of Cromwell and Napoleon while the ages keep to their procession.
And yet, as may the Amazon have ultimate well-head in some rivulet as thin as a thread, or a spring so little that a gourd might serve for its exhaustion, so did the General come to select his place in this business of upholding the Union against those who would pull it down, as incident to bucklering a woman—poor and slight and feeble, she was; the beautiful Peg O'Neal!—who for her loveliness was envied and for her goodness was hated and for her origin as a tavern-keeper's daughter was contemned by those proud folk who named themselves the nation's court of fashion.
The General was a sentimentalist; justice and to do right were with him instincts, and came not as grist ground coldly in the mills of calculated selfishness and reason. Scotch-Irish he was in his strain; but more Irish than the Irish and more Scotch than the Scotch, he in a manner wonderful could in the same moment be cool and warm, and cautious and headlong, and prudent and reckless, and close and frank—at once a Fabius and a Scipio. In a glow of sentiment made molten hot by the recent death of his wife—to him the Goddess of his worship—the General would extend the power of his place and name to be a refuge for the tearful, beautiful Peg, whom, as a child, his wife had known and loved, and whom he now found evilly crushed beneath the social wheel. And in a rush of feeling he rescues her and sets her high among the highest. Still, while it owns its hot inception to impulse wholly Irish, this rescue; the carrying out thereof, when now the General goes about it, turns to be all Scotch in the cautious yet indomitable character of its execution.
Also, for that the General is ardent and prone to mix private passion with his public thought, he arrives at a hatred of nullification, finding it a prime principle among those enemies whom he faces for the sake of poor Peg O'Neal. It is the great fire kindled of a small thing, this, the General's war to sustain the Union against ones who already searched for its life. He rides into the lists for a woman's name, and all unknowingly he bears the country's future on the point of his spear. And so comes this story; to the purpose and the hope that what in this good way the General did, and why and how he did it, may not die and disappear upon the memories of men.
PEGGY O'NEAL
CHAPTER I—THE LUSTROUS PEG O'NEAL
It was my fate, I will not say my misfortune—being too proud—to dwell overmuch with camps and caucuses and transact more than stood best for me of politics and war. These were my schools, and they sadly served to make me coarse and turn me hard. Sometimes I think this pity, for I was conceived, you are to notice, with no scanty promise of fineness to my fiber.
Now I am moved to remember, and I might add almost to regret these things, because I would like much at this pinch to color for you a right picture of the fair, innocent, unfortunate Peg O'Neal. Yet how am I to do this?—I, loaded of a sluggish fancy and a genius without touch! I am no Apelles to paint an Aphrodite, no Phidias to carve a Venus; and for that matter, Peg no Phryne to be model for such art. The best I might draw would stand crude and cornerwise, since I own only to talents whereof the graphic character is exhausted when they have laid out a worm fence?
It is within the rim of the possible that you may feel for me, born as I show you with the hands of all good power of description bound close and fast by my sides. Perhaps, too, you yourself on occasion have been stung of high impulse and fain would soar with a poem; and then, when you stretched for flight, found no furnishment of wings. Most folk have been thus crowded upon by exaltations, and were prey to thoughts for the expression of which their lisping natures lacked facility. They had the sinew but not the soul. There was verse in them, but with it no presentation dress of word or ornament of rhyme. They caged a tune of music in their hearts and failed of those notes asked for to announce its melody.
Still, our Peg, for whom we toiled—the General and I—and intrigued and made new friendships and broke old ones, and who was in her fortunes the beginning of policies on the General's part so lasting in importance to the State, shall not go untold. I must make what effort lies in me to give some notion of a beauty that claimed so much of potency in equations of government solved of our times.
For myself, and I take no shame for it, I say freely that of the charges laid against her by common tongue, I was convinced of her innocence by the mere beauty of her face, just as the loveliness of that Greek girl aforetime convinced the judges and wrought a verdict in her favor. There be flowers so purely beautiful as to refuse and refute a stain; and such a blossom was the lustrous Peg O'Neal.
I was first to meet with her at this time; and while I had not condemned her in my thoughts—to condemn a woman is, for a man, the coward part!—if I found myself possessed of views at all, they leaned to her disfavor. I knew the General regarded Peg as a white soul suffering wrong; but I also knew the General to be mercurial, and a blindly passionate recruit when once enlisted. Besides, his own wife had been throughout her life—and she most virtuous!—so lashed of slander, that his blood was ever up and about the defence of any whose wailing wrongs resembled her's. The General's attitudes were never the offshoots of cold wisdom; he was one who believed the worst of a foe so soon as it was told, and the best of a friend before ever it was told at all. Wherefore I would not accept the General's decision touching Peg, more than I would take other conclusions from his hands.
My conservatism and just slowness cut, however, no figure, since, as I tell you, with the moment I clapped eyes upon her, I changed to be her knight—her champion; and thereafter I matched even the torrid General in fire for her cause.
I was in talk with the General when news reached me of Peg waiting in the parlor for a meeting. It was Jim who bore me word; he peered around the corner of the door and with rolling' eye as one who brings bad tidings, beckoned me into the hallway.
“What is it?” I demanded impatiently.
I should tell you, perhaps, that Jim was more than twenty years my senior, and nearing on to three score years and ten. This may explain that attitude of mentor, not to say protector, of my morals which it was his pleasure to hold towards me.
“What is it? Speak up!”
Jim shook his grizzled head, and his look was loaded of reproof.
“See yere, Marse Major,” said Jim; “dish yere aint Tennessee where you-all kin do as you please. What you reckon now Marse Gen'ral would gwine say to sech cat-an'-fiddle doin's?”
“And now what's wrong?” I inquired; humbly enough, for I was much beneath Jim's sway.
“Marse Major, lemme ask you,” said Jim, and with that he fixed me with his old eye like an inquisitor; “lemme ask you: Does you-all send for to meet a young lady?”
“Certainly not,” I replied. “Do you think I've come to Washington to meet young ladies?” This last indignantly.
“How I know what you do?” retorted Jim, sullenly. “Ever see a hoss in a new parstur? Ever see how he r'ar an' pitch an' buck-jump an' kick up? How I know what you do?”
“Get to the point,” I said, and I drew on a fierce expression, for I was running low of patience.
“No use, Marse Major, for you to go dom'neerin' with Jim,” and the scoundrel shook his head admonishingly. “I'll fotch up at d' p'int fas' enough. I tells dese yere niggahs about dis hotel that if any one comes squanderin' 'round to see you-all, an' speshul, if any of them evil-minded women-folks comes 'round, to let me know.”
“What do you mean with your evil-minded women-folks?”
“That's all right, Marse Major; Jim aint heer'n d' Bible read for mighty likely sixty years an' not know of them evil-minded womenfolks. King Solomon, an' him d' wisest man, was mingled up in d' midst of a whole passel of'em. An' so, when a minute back one of d' house niggahs comes up to me an' lets on thar's a young lady in d' parlor who's waitin' for you, I allows I'll take a look, an' try an' rummage out what she wants. With that, I kinder loiters into d' parlor like I'm sent a urrent; an' sho! Marse Major, if thar don't sot a girl who's that beautiful she's plumb reedic'lous.
“'Be you-all wantin' to meet d' Marse Major?' I says.
“She say, 'Yes; I'm d' wife of his friend, Mr. Eaton.'
“'Mr. Eaton,' I says, 'who lives down south of Nashville at Franklin Co't House?'
“She say, 'Yes; I'm Mrs. Eaton.'
“Course I knows dish yere aint so. An' I'm partic'lar skeered about you, besides, since she's so handsome. It's d' beautiful ones makes all d' trouble; a homely woman aint no more harm than squinch owls, that's Jim's sperience. But nacherally, Marse Major, I don't tell dish yere girl she's lyin'; I'm too well brought up. So I says:
“'I've knowed Mr. Eaton since befo' d' las' wah with d' British what Marse Gen'ral done whups at Noo Aw-leans; Mr. Eaton's a kin to my Marse Major. I've been down by his place a hun'red times at Franklin; an' you hyar me, honey! they aint been no mention about you bein' his wife in Tennessee.'
“She smile a bit at this—she's seemin' trifle sad like—an' says: 'Mr. Eaton an' me, we get married only 'bout a month ago in Wash'ton.' An' so she tell me ag'in to go fotch you; an' arter sort o' hesitatin' 'round between a balk an' a break-down for a while, settlin' on d' properest move, I reckons mebbe I'd better come an' tell you arter all.”
“It's as well you did,” I said, turning back to the General's door.
“That's all right, Marse Major.” Jim called this after me in severe tones. “I'm boun' I'm gwine look arter you-all jes' d' same.” Then in a wheedling voice: “Say, Marse Major, would you-all mind if I he'ps myse'f to a dram outen d' demijohn in your closet? What with all dish yere talkin' an' frettin' about you, Jim's mouth is as dry as a kivered bridge.”
“One, mind you; no more.” The General, in converse with a caller, was considering Van Buren, and party lines and issues in New York. I would have told him of Peg, and that I was about to see her, but the presence of his visitor put it out of reach. On the whole, I decided, it would be as well to meet Peg first and tell the General later. I interrupted, and explained that I was going to the parlors for a moment; we would get to his letters on my return.
“No hurry, Major, no hurry,” he replied; “I'm quite content to put them off. I am already seized on by the spirit of laziness that pervades this place, and which caused Randolph to say: 'I never wind my watch whilst in Washington, as I feel that all time spent here is wasted and thrown away.' It's not quite that bad, perhaps; still, we'll willingly put off the letters until to-morrow.”
And now, since I am to tell you of Peg, I would that I possessed somewhat the art of petticoats—a little polite skill for flounce and farthingale—some shadow of a parlor or a boudoir grace.
Peg, then, was the truth itself for height and mould, and her pretty hands and feet told of no tavern in their genesis, even though the lip of envy did. I give you my first impression of her, earned eye to eye and ear to voice. I say the latter because her voice was as honey and wove conviction like a spell. She had your pansy face; a face regular and ineffably good. And how any, even a woman and a rival, might look her deep eyes through and doubt her, masters conjecture! Peg's hair—hanging in long curls about her neck and shoulders—was black; fine as silk or cobwebs; black, yet with the gold-black of the black Saxon. And her skin was snow and peach-blow. There was meditation, too, in her wide brow; and her mouth, with teeth like milk, was both firm and loving. Also, there was that in her atmosphere to bring brave men to her. It was upon one in a moment that Peg, while tender to be hurt, was hard to conquer; sensitive, she would feel her fate; yet she would face it—face it with the faithful courage of an angel. But I'll have done; why furnish the fragments and queer splinters of a portrait I'm too inaptly dull to offer as a whole!
Peg O'Neal came this day, and making herself known, gave me my first sight of her in the drawing room of the Indian Queen. There was a look about her, lonely, bitter and pathetic; a look that should belong with one hunted, and who waits to be made sure of her friends. She gave me her hand; white and soft and small and yielding—it was as though I took hold on a lily. My heart went out to her before she spoke; as I've confessed, I was warm for her cause on the instant.
Peg had read the cabinet list in the paper; I think, too, she foresaw the woe and worry to become the tail of it more clearly than did either the General or myself, or even the port-wine Duff Green. It was of that she desired to talk; she would see the General; but first she would see me.
This preference for myself before the General was a common custom into which Peg readily stepped. All who knew the General, knew me for his other self; and I will say, despite the inference of a boast, knew me for his calmer and more prudent self.
Peg did not come to me until the afternoon, and before I go to the story of our converse it would be as well to sketch a handful of incidents which preceded her advent and which should be understood to teach one the whole truth of this tale.
This Washington day I have on my mind's edge, being the one next before the day Peg came to me, was the fourteenth of February, St. Valentine's Day, albeit the latter has nothing of part herein. We had arrived, the General and myself, on the tenth, and housed at the Indian Queen. This tavern was not the tavern of old, when that O'Neal who was Peg's father prevailed as master, yet even under new control—and with a born conservative like myself, the new is ever the defective—it was a first hostel of the capital.
Our advent discovered a crust of ice and snow to our feet, and a mortal sharpness in the air that was like a tonic. During those three or four days since our coming, a thaw had befallen which left thoroughfares a discouraging swale of mire, and made going about a foulest possible employ. Withal, as though sponsor for the softening temperature, there descended a fog—fairly a hash of misty rain that one might wash one's face in—and the air was as full of water as a sponge.
These were no true conditions for the General, with lungs never the hardiest, and whose health was more than commonly broken by the blow of his wife's death. She was soundly, deeply sleeping in her grave in Tennessee, and the new sods above her counted but twelve weeks for their age, when we rode into Washington. She had heard the guns and the music which told of her hero's triumph; and then, heart-stricken of shafts of slander aimed against her sinlessness by an opposition willing to conquer with black means, she bowed her gentle head and passed. She was not to multiply a White House honor by sharing it, and left her lover-husband to go his presidential way alone unlighted of her eyes.
Those dark scenes at the Hermitage when the General's angel went from us, and storms of grief—so utter, so beyond repair!—fair beat upon him to a point which all but laid him beneath the grass-roots to keep her company, have neither part nor lot in this relation. They may be guessed at, however; and the General came forth of them woe-worn and shaken, and with the thought in his soul that she perished by the venom of his enemies, who had struck at his fortunes by striking at her pure repute.
After his wife died I had been in the grip of sore concern for the General. He was but a frail man at his best; he carried lead in his shoulder and lead in his side—private bullets stopped in private wars, truly, yet no less, perilous for that—and when on these, plus the angry work and wrath of a campaign, was laid this funeral farther load, I say, I trembled for the upcome.
Our way to Washington was to be by the Cumberland and the Ohio to Pittsburg, and then overland through the mountains, and so along the Potomac. All Tennessee seemed come to Nashville when we went aboard; I helping the General—whose weakness was so great he must, despite vanity, lean visibly on my support.
As he sank exhausted into a chair, and the boat backed off the levee, I was in blackness for the gloom I felt. I believed he would not live to see Washington, but fall by the way; I in no sort presupposed those eight tremendous years when the White House would be to the common folk as a temple, with him the idle of their adoration. I could not foresee his marvelous two presidencies, and how, his name brightening with each added sun and followed by every eye, he would retire again to privacy and his Hermitage, the best beloved since the even day of Jefferson.
And now as I talk to you the tears start. He is dead as I write, and gone long ago to join his heart in the grave and lie by the side of his wife; and it comes strangely, even to myself that I, an old man, and held as one hard and practical and cold, should be so moved of retrospection. If it were to remember loss and sadness and decay, such indeed might stand as reason for emotion. But my rearward glances find only the glory of an ever-climbing, sky-kissed high success. Mayhap it is the splendor and white gleam of it to bring the tears, as does the glint of sunshine on the snow.
Yet it half shames my years, these drops of feeling. And for all that, I well recall how Dale and Overton and Houston and Blair—no meek souls, these!—were as much commoved when claimed of thoughts of General Jackson;—such, for his friends, were the soft and softening spells and powers of the man! The wet eyes of these, stern and rock-hewn, may save me from the stain of doting weakness. But I loiter—I lose time when there is none to lose—a wandering delay is the crime common of old age.
Our journey to Washington was disputed by applause at every foot; the double banks of the Cumberland and the Ohio appeared to have become alike the rendezvous of South and West and North. Bands brayed and “committees” came aboard; a dozen times was the boat tied up and the General borne ashore as on a wave to greet and be greeted of roaring thousands who hailed him their Messiah of politics and one come for their redemption. From the first our progress was hedged and canopied of the never-ceasing shout, “Hurrah! for Jackson!” Night and day it was in our ears, and our very sleep gave way and fled before it.
To say that through this I held no alarms for the General would be but an idle picture of my feelings. Verily! I more than once found my heart in my mouth lest the gusty multitude that struggled and fought to touch his hand should kill him for mere kindness.
And yet he would thrive and be fat upon it, if such word by any padding of hyperbole may be made to fit his slim meagerness. His gray eye would light, his lean cheek show a color, his milky bristle of hair turn more stiffly, jauntily spinous with each of these encounters. When I would remonstrate and cite his sick weakness to forbid, he would shake his head and smile—his closest journey to a laugh. Then he would say:
“Major, you don't know me! These shoutings are as medicine in wine. These people love me; I take strength from their hands; their applause is my food and I live and grow heavy by it.”
And so this boisterousness of endorsement went on; and the General reveled while I sat sour with terror lest from it he sicken and die, stricken by the very evidences of his popularity. He was right and I was wrong; he came from this general joy, which with every hour arose and laid actual hands upon him, as one remade.
Some pages back I pitched upon the fourteenth as a day much in my mind, and the fourth since we came upon the capital. I begin narration properly with that day, regarding what has gone before as preliminary and given for a clearer knowledge of that which is to follow as it unfolds.
There were matters to take place upon the fourteenth which served to fix it in my memory. The first was a mishap to the General himself.
For the rain and the mist and the mire, we that day found ourselves much confined to the Indian Queen. This might be called no hardship of loneliness since, despite the mud, all the world would pull on its boots to visit us. The General, whose dyspepsia was dominant, had eaten only a little rice. This he took at short intervals; yet such dwarf spoonfuls were they, that in the end the aggregate was smallish, and he found himself weakly languid as a reward.
The General had been to a casual reception below to meet official folk—they were building hopes for themselves of what should follow inauguration, still eighteen days away—and being done with them, and uneasy with the weariness of their call, was returning to his room. At the stair's head he stumbled; as he fell he griped his side and gave a smothered sob of pain.
I, who walked close behind, was well aware of what had chanced. The old Dickenson wound was imperfectly healed, and a sharp wrench would tear it and set it to inward hemorrhage. Swiftly I raised him, and since it was no vast distance down the hall, nor he a mighty burden, carried him to his chamber.
“Call Augustus,” he said, his voice pain-lowered to a whisper.
Placing a chair I gave him a mouthful of whisky by way of a stimulant. Augustus was the black body-servant who had come with us from the Hermitage. I knew what the summoning of Augustus argued, yet was handless to interfere. The General when stricken—as he had been many times—in the fashion I have named, was used to open a vein, and so bleed himself comfortably till he felt relief. More than once I had denounced such backwoods surgery as not only dangerous but revolting, and wanting foundations of common sense. There was no logic for it, I said; and it stood for the spirit of the preposterous when one bled internally to bleed one's self externally as remedy. As well might I have spoken with the trees. The General made his stubborn laws and lived them.
“There was a Frenchman,” observed the General on some occasion of my remonstrance, “who said that at forty every man was either a fool or a doctor. Now I am more than forty; and I'm no fool.”
Augustus, a tawny, handsome black, arrived in a hurry splendidly promissory of zeal. Being deft of practice, he whipped a bandage sharply tight about the General's arm above the elbow—as starved as a rake-handle, that arm, yet strong as hickory bough! Then the General with his jackknife nicked a vein well down the lower arm, and proceeded to bleed himself most contentedly and liberally, while Augustus held a basin.
Following these horse-leech experiments, for so I scrupled not to brand them, the General, wrapped in a dressing gown, was put to rest upon a sofa. It would have been the bed; but it stood not yet three of the afternoon, and it was a saying of the General's that no man should take to his bed by daylight until he came to die. On the lounge, and, as he declared, much uplifted of health, Augustus and I left him, with the whisky easily at hand in event of over-creeping faintness.
After the lapse of an hour I returned. There lay that upon me which, as I saw the future, it was proper enough should be said to the General. And since he was like to oppose my counsel, as folk commonly do what is patent for their peace, sticking as stoutly for the seeds of trouble as though they were indeed the seeds of righteousness, I reckoned aid perhaps from his present weak, low state. He would lack somewhat his vivacity, and might be drawn with less of struggle to my manner of thought.
Thus abode the coil: It was the evening before when the General told me how he would propose Eaton to be his Secretary of War, and asked my view. I had withheld opinion at the time, my caution evoking a dull flare of that heat-lightning of the General's temper, which last commodity was never deeply in abeyance. I would tell him later, I said; and following a rumble of contempt on his part for the sluggishness of my friendship for Eaton—for that gentleman and I for long had been friends—the subject was for the moment at rest. Now was the time ripe to dispute this question with him; so I bethought, as I wended towards his door.
Coming to his chamber I tapped, and then pushed in without wait, as was my wont. The windows were to the west where at this hour the sun should have been; but such was the veil of fog without that the day seemed already spent and sinking into twilight.
The great fire on the hearth—honest, crackling logs to feed it, since the General would tolerate no less—set the room in a bloom of light that came close to marking the candle that burned at his elbow a profligacy. He had lifted himself from the sofa where Augustus and I placed him, and was seated before a little table. On it, propped against the Vicar of Wakefield, a book whereof he never tired, stood a miniature of his wife. Throughout the day he wore this little painting beneath his garments and hung about his neck by a black cord. His wife had given it him in the old days and when their love was new. Each night, when folk pray and con the Bible, he would have this picture before him; and with it her hymn-book to read her favorite songs. This was his devotion—his worship; it was as though he communed with her, his Saint Rachel, on the work of the day and its duties. To the time of his death he did this; and for whatever was good of his performing he would lay it to these conferences, sweet at once and sad, when in the dusk borderlands of day and night he met and talked with the soft shadow of his heart's own.
As I came into the room the General raised his eyes. They were tear-brimmed and he made no shift to hide them.
“Major,” he said with trembling lip, gazing the while on the miniature, “she strove to make me a Christian. I gave her my promise to become a Christian. And so I shall when once I'm done with office and back again at home. I would become one now, were it within the domain of what might be. But who is he who could unite politics and Christ? I'm no hypocrite, Major; you know that! You know what a politician is; you know what a Christian should be. No man may be both, Major; no man may be both.”
“You are not a politician,” I retorted. “You are a president.”
This I got off with a gruff air of harshness, not, however, because it drew a true distinction. I sought to call him from his present mood. The General was unusual in so far that a best step towards comforting him was to irritate him. In his breast he loved collision, and might even leave mourning for a war.
“I am a president and not a politician!” This with a gather of scorn. “And pray, when is a president not a politician?”
With a deprecatory gesture I dismissed the point.
“Let that remain,” I replied, “as a question wherewith to rack some further moment. I came for another matter.” The General turned a keen eye upon me. “You spoke of Eaton for your portfolio of war,” I continued.
“Have you considered what objection might lodge against such course?”
“Go on,” he said.
“General, I misdoubt the wisdom of the step. I will make my word plain. There is none to be more the friend of Eaton than myself, none to respect him more. But, sir, you are aware of what folk say.”
“And what do folk say?” Anger stood red on the brow of the General as a banner is flung from a battlement. “What do folk say?”
“You should consider coolly, General,” I went on. Ever cool myself, it was for that the General valued my counsel. “You know this tale as well as I. It has been told me more than once within 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 to be the target for every bolt of detraction?”
The General drew over to the fire and sat down. Slowly he poured himself a glass of spirits, and then as slowly drank it off. For some moments he smoked in silence.
“What with this wrong to my side, Major,” he said at last, “and the blood I've let, and all on a pale diet of rice, I fear I'm not strong enough to argue with you. Let us agree, then, that Eaton shall go in as Secretary of War. As for Peg—poor little Peg!—why should she be safer out than in? Moreover, a woman must have her courage as a man has his. She must risk slander as he risks sword, and both must front their enemies.” He had gone on with a mighty mildness; now he began to wave his second pipe, and I looked to have it go into the fireplace with every word. “You say that the Eatons will be assailed. Already they are attacked; not for themselves, but for me. They were married in January; none found fault until, with our coming, Eaton's nearness to me was remembered and the whisper of what I would do with him began to run abroad. The Eatons are the victims of my feuds; it is I, through them, who am stabbed at. Sir,”—smash! went the pipe and the General started up—“sir, it is the work of Henry Clay—that creature of bargain and corruption! You know his methods of the past campaign. What lie was too vile to tell? What calumny too gross? Who so innocent as to escape his malice? Why, sir! such as Clay and his crew would befoul Gehenna, and Satan himself might shrink aside in shame from their companionship! Who was sure from them and the poison of their mendacity? She died by it”—here he pointed to the miniature. “Even the poor lost grave of my mother was not sacred to such jackals. And now it is the Eatons—now it is the pretty, harmless Peg! So let it be; they will find me ready. If I feel joy for a presidency it is because it clothes my hands for their annihilation.”
There was a rap at the door. Augustus opened it and announced: “General Green.”
“Duff Green,” said the General, as though a new thought occurred. “I think now for once, in a way I shall turn our rotund friend to partial use.”
“And how will you compass that miracle?” I spoke rather in scorn than curiosity since I owned to briefest admiration for the General's caller. “It will be a novelty to see your Duff Green of use.”
“Why then,” returned the General, “the benefit I propose from him is one simple enough. I shall have him, in his paper, give this cabinet list to the public. Once in print the thing is ended—the nails for that cabinet building will be clinched.”
“And that is it,” cried I, in opposition. “Now to my notion it is ever best to hold a question of this sort in abeyance until the latest moment. Thereby you preserve for yourself room wherein to change your plan.”
“One's first aim is the surest,” responded the General. “Now I've never known much good to come from this plan-changing of which you talk. Nor do I believe in secrets. One should tell the people their business so soon as ever that business is transacted. More folk are trapped and slain with their own secrets than are saved by them. Besides one has no right to lock a door between the people and their affairs. There go but two keys with government, one for the treasury and the other for the gaol, and every officer from path-master to President should be made to study this lesson of the keys until he can repeat it.”
To this lecture I made no retort whether of comment, denial or agreement. These abstractions delighted him; and in this instance I too listened with pleasure, not so much because of the deep-sea wisdom disclosed as for that tranquility of spirit after his tossing anger against Clay, which their utterance would seem to bring him. As it stood the General's high temper had faded and his heat was much cooled away when Duff Green appeared.
CHAPTER II—PORT WINE DUFF AND PIGEON-BREAST
Duff Green was a round, insincere, self-seeking, suave, smooth, porpoise-body of a personage, small of eye, hair age-streaked, a port wine voice, wide mouth, and nose of friendly hue. He had come to town the year before, poor and modest, and bartered himself into possession of the Telegraph, a leading journal of the capital. He prospered, and prosperity had swollen him. Nor was he without some tincture of shrewdness; for he owned the wit in the late elections to support the General, and now would wax pompous and come forward because of it. I did not like him, holding him selfish and withal weak; besides, his affable complacency offended me.
The General would defend Duff Green, although I am sure he had his measure from the start. The General, retorting to my charge of selfishness and vanity, would say: “Of course, Duff's selfish; that's why I enjoy him. I like selfish folk; they are easy to understand, easy to start or stop. One has but to bait his trap with their interest and, presto! there they are in the morning caught sharp and fast for his use. And again, your selfish folk are content with much less than will suffice your disinterested folk who truly love you.” This was one of the General's efforts at sarcasm, and delivered with the sly flicker of a smile.
“But the smug vanity of Duff Green!” I would urge. “I could wish you half so tremendous as he deems himself.”
“Fie! Major, fie!” would be the reply; “vanity is the powder in the gun, the impulse that sends the bullet home. It is the sails of the ship and the reason of motion to that hull of merit which might make no voyage without. Vanity has won more battles than patriotism; wanting vanity, Caesar would have crossed no Rubicon, and Napoleon would have begun, not ended, with Waterloo.”
This fashion of bicker fell often forth between the General and myself; indeed, we were in frequent disagreement, he being one who, while holding notions of his own wisdom, was withal much imposed against by pretences on the false parts of men whom I saw through as through a ladder; and so I told him.
“Ah! excellent evening, Mr. President! excellent evening, Major—ah!” exclaimed Duff Green, his friendly nose aflame, and port wine tones, satisfied and unctuous. Coming forward, he took first the General's hand and then mine. For all the warmth of his countenance, his hand had the cold feel of a fish, and I did not, myself, insist on its retention beyond the plain limits of politeness. “Excellent evening, Mr. President,” he repeated, glowing the while, in anticipation doubtless of public printing to come.
“You are not hard to suit for your evening, Duff,” returned the General, whose fault it was to be on terms too common with many unworthy of the honor. “Now, I call this the scandalous evening of a scandalous day. I say 'scandalous' because muddy,” explained the General.
In the talk to follow it developed that the purpose of Duff Green's visit was no more noble than to just wring future patronage from the General. Especially did our caller have his watery eye on the governorship of Florida, a post, for its palms and orange groves and flowers and summer seas, and mayhap the social life of St. Augustine—aristocratic, and still on Spanish stilts—much quested; and the reason of a deal of court paid the General by rich ones who, having money, hungered for an opening to its display. Duff Green even suggested, tentatively, the name of a certain wealthy thick-skull. He said the notable in hand was a prime friend of Calhoun; that his selection would be held vastly a compliment—a flower to his nose, indeed!—by the Vice-President.
“Why, sir!” observed the General, whose familiarity diminished as the place-hunting eagerness of the worthy Duff Green began to gain expression; “why, sir, the man you tell of lacks brains. It cannot be; say no more. We'll find some safer way to flatter the Vice-President than by periling public service in the hands of a weakling.”
“Weakling!” repeated Duff Green, while the friendly nose began to bleach; “weakling! Mr. President, this gentleman—this friend of Calhoun—is one of our richest people.”
“Why, I believe he did inherit a fortune,” responded the General carelessly; “or perhaps a more proper phrasing would make the fortune inherit him. But that is scant reason why he should mismanage a gravely important trust. The governorship of Florida is not all citron groves and mocking birds; there is responsible work to do; and the territory, I tell you, shall not be wasted by a fool. But cheer up, Duff,”—the visitor was looking blue and the hue of friendship had quite departed his nose—“cheer thou up! Perchance we may yet discover some office wherein your ambitious wittol of wealth—whom the Vice-President loves!—may be great without being dangerous.”
Duff Green was no more urgent on the point of a Florida governorship. He was not so dim but he saw his failure and accepted it with what grace he might.
“I don't know how the Vice-President may take it!” he murmured at the close.
“As to that,” said the General, and his words fell with a suspicious sharpness, as from one smelling to a threat; “as to that, the Vice-President must sustain himself very patiently. I know those who would hold other conduct on the Vice-President's part as excessively misplaced. They might even teach the Vice-President a similar conclusion. You should tell him that; since I see you act by his request and as his agent.”
Here the General looked hard at Duff Green. Already I caught a shadow of those jealous differences to come between the General and Calhoun—differences that would seem, for the separation of the White House and the Vice-Presidency, constructed of the Constitution. These offices never have agreed—never have been true friends in any administration. It was the less important in this instance, since, secretly and unknown to him, Calhoun for over a decade had been the General's enemy. On that February evening which Duff Green so distinguished as “excellent” the General was by no means distant from the fact's discovery.
“You do wrong, Mr. President,” faltered Duff Green, his affable nose as pale as paper now, “when you say I am Calhoun's agent. The Vice-President knows nothing of this. It was by accident I became aware of his anxiety touching the Florida governorship. I give you my honor, Mr. President; I give you my honor!”
“Let it pass; it's of no mighty consequence.” Then impatiently, “Don't call me 'Mr. President' until I'm President. It will be bad enough after inauguration, I take it.”
Here poor Duff Green was visibly disturbed. I said nothing to relieve him. Indeed, I didn't utter a dozen words while he remained; as I've told you, I misliked Duff Green, with his face the color of a violin and his airs of fussy consequence.
“But here, Duff,” resumed the General, coming himself to the rescue of our visitor, who might be described as sinking for the third and last time in the deep waters of his own confusion, “here, Duff, is something I much desire you to do. It is a list of the cabinet as I intend its construction on the hocks of my inaugural. There are reasons why it should be printed; the Major”—here he indicated me, and with a dry note in his voice which I understood—“approves the names and thinks they should be given to the public. Get them in the next Telegraph. Here, I'll read them.” And the General reached for his horn-framed glasses and began from a paper he'd taken from his pocket. “Van Buren, Secretary of State; Ingham, the Treasury; Eaton, for the War Office.” I saw Duff Green look sharply up. Somehow, while I found protest in his glance, I could not believe the promised cabinet selection of Eaton unpleasant to him. From that moment I knew him for no well-wisher of the General—to be thus pleased with a prospect of hot water! The General drove ahead: “Branch for the Navy; Berrien for the Department of Justice; and lastly, Barry, Postmaster General. There you have it. New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and Kentucky; the North, the West, and the South—two each; and none for the Yankee East, since to that hard region where men, to make them smart, are raised on foxes' ears and thistle tops, I owe no debts. There is the list. Let me see it in print.” And the General placed the paper in Duff Green's hands.
The General turned to fill his infallible pipe; he would have it ready to shatter into smithereens should provocation come. Duff Green fingered the folded paper with timid air while the General fished for a coal with the little table tongs. For myself, I said nothing; since it was to be done, it might as well see ink—that cabinet list. As the General straightened his tall, slight form, his tobacco-lighting accomplished, Duff Green, breathing pursily from a dash of trepidation, could not forbear comment.
“I suppose you would like my thoughts on this list?” Duff Green took care to give his supposition the rising turn of query.
“And why do you suppose so?” said the General, his tone something grim.
“Only because I supposed you'd like the thoughts of everybody.” Duff Green fawned with his voice in a half-fright. It is ill to pester a lion, being no lion-tamer. “I supposed you'd like the thoughts of everybody,” he repeated.
“Quite right!” said the General, pretending return of sunshine. “And what are your thoughts?”
“The list will be welcome,” he answered, gaining confidence from the General's mollified features; “the list will be welcome save in one particular. The selection for your Secretary of War, Mr. President—”
Here Duff Green came to a stop, utterance wholly at a halt. Nor did I blame him, for now the General gloomed in truly savage sort. The General waved his pipe; but he did not break it. Probably he did not think Duff Green worth a pipe.
“And what of Mr. Eaton?” demanded the General at last.
“It's Mrs. Eaton,” gasped the other, while his fear shook him until he quaked like a custard; “it's Mrs. Eaton. Our society will not receive her; that is, our ladies won't. Mr. President, she's a tavern-keeper's daughter—he kept this identical Indian Queen, as you must know. Mrs. Eaton's origin is too low for such station; and besides they say—and—and—Mr. President, really, our ladies won't receive her into society.” Duff Green ran visibly aground and could go no further.
“Mark you this, Duff Green,” and the General's eyes sparkled, while he kept his voice in hand; “mark you this! If a 'low origin' be the social argument, then I am minded of no palace as the habitat of my own bringing up. But here I tell you: I've not come to the White House to be ruled. Once I was set to the defence of New Orleans. The society of that great city was against me, and I put society under martial law; a society legislature was thereby shocked, and I dissolved it; a society Frenchman murmured against this, and I marched him out of town with two bayonets at his back; a society American denounced the expulsion, and I clapped him in irons; a society judge issued a writ of release, and I arrested him. Incidentally, I beat Pakenham and his English, and did what I was sent to do. Now I've been ordered to Washington by the public and given duties to perform. I look to find here conditions of sympathy and friendship and support. If they be not here, I'll construct them; if, being here, they fail me, I'll supply their places. Notably, should I get up some morning to discover myself without a newspaper”—Duff Green sweats now and pricks up his ears—“there shall one grow instantly from the ground like any Jonah's gourd. Your ladies will not receive Mrs. Eaton whose 'origin is low!' And for that cogent reason Mr. Eaton must not be Secretary of War! Man, have I been lifted to a presidency to consult wives and gossips in picking my constitutional advisers? Go; print that list—print it as I give it you;—go!”
The breath of the General's indignation carried Duff Green into the hall; and even when the door was closed behind him, I could follow by ear as he fled towards the stair with a fat shuffle that told of terror.
“The man exhausts me,” said the General, as he refilled his pipe.
“I think I'll write to Frank Blair.”
“Why?” and the General looked up.
“We should have him ready to start a Jackson paper in Washington when Duff Green deserts.”
When I turned out on the next morning I found the fogs and mists of the day before departed and blown aside, and a bright sky overhead. There was no frost; but on the contrary a fine spring promise in the air that smelled in one's nostril like the breath of budding trees. The roads, too, were more in the way of reform, and here and there a dry spot showed in profert of what would be. Altogether it was quite an April rather than a February morning. I finished shaving and dressing and called Jim to brush my coat. A hostler before he became a valet, Jim was used to accompany these brush-labors with an aspiration like unto the escape of steam; a sound held sovereign by him for giving a horse's coat a gloss, and therefore good for mine. I had gone forth in an earlier day to break Jim of these stable tricks, but, making no headway, wisely gave it up, and Jim hissed on unchecked. There be things your African won't learn; there be things he will learn; and effort to suppress in the one direction or excite enterprise in the other, is thrown away. Aware on these points, I had taken years before the bridle of restraint off Jim, and to give him his due he went the better with his head free.
When brushed to fit Jim's notion of the spic and span, I settled my chin in my black stock and went to call upon the General. I would know how he held himself on the back of his bleedings and his wraths against Duff Green.
I found him over a bowl of coffee and with a pipe going; he had been up and breakfasted an hour before. Also, he had gotten letters to please him and was in top spirits.
I recall looking at him as I entered his chamber, and thinking, as I noted his quick, game-cock air, full of life and resolution, how little he seemed that invalid who but the evening before was opening veins and lying ill with old wounds. The difference would have amazed any save myself, who had seen too much of him to be now astonished. The General could pull himself together like a watch-spring. Moreover, he fed on sensation, and a glow at his heart's roots was better for him than a meal of victuals. I've borne witness as he rode into the wilderness to conquer Weatherford and his Creeks, with a month-old bullet in his shoulder and its fellow in his arm. He was so feeble and nigh death that he must be handed to his saddle like a sack of bran, and each hour the surgeons must bathe him over with sugar-of-lead water to keep life in his body. And yet, from the outset, and on bad food and with the ground for his bed, he began to mend. The man lived on sensation, I say, like a babe on milk. He would walk up and down a line of battle and be as drunk on rifle smoke as any other on brandy.
When I came into his room I found the General—pipe and coffee for the moment in retirement—to his own evident satisfaction, but in a rusty raven voice I fear, humming The Star Spangled Banner. His eyes were closed. He was sitting by the fire, beating out the time of the music with pipe held like a baton in his claw-like hand, wearing meanwhile much the air of your critic at an opera. His notes slipped frequently into quavers, and there was constant struggle to keep from lapsing into the savage minor key.
“You make grewsome music for a bright morning, General,” said I; “it sounds dolefully like a wail.”
“That's a majestic tune, Major,” he replied, opening his eyes. “It never fails to stir me, and would bear comparison with Old Hundred, albeit one tells of religion and the other of patriotism. After all, what should be the separation between true patriotism and true religion?”
“Last evening,” I retorted, “you fell upon me hip and thigh because I said you were not a politician but a president; you would have it that the two were synonyms for each other. Also, you declared that no one might be both a politician and a Christian. Now you talk of no separation between patriotism and religion. General, you go to bed in one frame and get, up in another; you are not consistent.”
“I'll not quarrel with you,” said he, “though to say, as you would seem to, that a president and a patriot are ever the same, is begging the question and a far shot from the truth. I still stick for it, however, that The Star Spangled Banner comes close to religion in its influence; I've heard it given while the big guns were speaking at the front, and I may tell you, sir, it brought water to my eyes.”
I could well believe this, for the General was as soon to shed tears as a woman; and withal so readily excited that on least occasion his hand would shake like a leaf in a ripple of wind. He said the latter was from coffee and tobacco and not from natural nervousness. He was half right and half wrong. This tremble of the hands was the vibration of that mighty machinery of the man when the belts were thrown on for utter action. However, this is all aside the story.
The promulgation in Duff Green's valued imprint of the General's designs had made a stir, I warrant you. The capital community seized on the list of coming cabineteers with wondrous relish. Delighted day by day over the tattle of office, the local public sat up, one and all, and chattered of the printed names like unto a coop of catbirds. Particularly, I might add, were the Eatons tossed from tongue to tongue; folk took sides, and some assailed while others defended, and no little heat found generation. The General admired the buzz and clash—for his ears were open and he heard of it—being as fond of storms as a petrel; and for myself, I was well enough pleased. It was prior to my interview with Peg, you are to remember, and I not yet her partisan; I half hoped those resentful clamors against the Eatons would stay the General at the eleventh hour.
“It's not yet too late,” said I, “to have White for the war portfolio and leave Eaton in his Senate seat. I repeat, there's the country to think of.”
The General was blandly immovable. Said he, “I have told you how it's a war on me as much as a war on Peg. They fight really against me; they attack her good name in their criminal strategy. Besides, Major, you do the country insult.” Here he gave me a smile. “The country is larger than you would admit and not to be easily shaken or over-set. Nor are you and I of such import as we think. The worst that both of us might do of public evil would hardly serve to rock the boat. And though the common interest should dip gunwale a trifle, to this side or to that, are we to throw overboard a girl on an argument of trimming ship? I say to you for the last time, I'm no such mariner.”
The latter sentences were vivid of spirit, and it was clear the General had given the Eatons a deal of consideration since the night before, with the result of stiffening his first determination.
“You'll find more folk than myself,” I observed at last, “to differ with concerning this business. I do not believe the town is like to sit down quietly with the arrangement.”
“We will cross that river,” said he, “when we come to it. But why, Major, should you and I continue whirling flails over this old straw? It was between us most thoroughly threshed last evening. I think you are right about the town, however, and that's why I'm waiting now in my apartment. Mud or no mud, I would else be in the saddle for a morning ride. I'm in momentary hope of visitation by a delegation of society Redsticks, who, I understand, connive a descent upon me. They propose at the coming pow-wow to demand my Eaton intentions, and to make protest against them should their most worshipful fancy disapprove.” The term “Redsticks,” which the General employed, was a kind of border slang and the name given to the Creek hostiles in Weatherford's war. “You must stand to my back, Major, when the enemy arrives.” This, with a glance of humor which showed the General as not attaching vast emphasis to the invasion or what might grow from it.
“I will abide the shock of your Redsticks' charge,” I said, smiling with him, “unless they bring a reserve of women to the field. With the first dire swish of warlike crinoline I shall abandon you to the fate you've invited. I have stood to odds; but my courage is not proof against an angry woman.”
The General beamed in his droll fashion and, shifting our ground of talk, said he had letters to write and needed my help. It may as well be known, for soon or late it is bound to escape into notice, that I wrote most of the General's letters. He was a perilous hand with a pen, and no more a speller than a poet.
But there would be no letters written that day; for when we were in the very act and article of beginning, Augustus came in with a card.
“Ah! Colonel Towson, U. S. A.,” read the General. “Show him up.” This last to Augustus. “The Redsticks would seem to have dwindled to one,” observed the General, turning to me. “This Colonel Towson was to be their spokesman. Now he comes alone. He is a very brave or a very ignorant man.” And the General sniffed dangerously, and yet in manner comic, as recognizing the elements of a farce.
Colonel Towson, I must needs say, was a poor feature of a man, with a trivial face in which the great expression was a noble opinion of himself. He was of the cavalry, as I judged by the facings on his regimentals, for our visitor appeared in full uniform, and for part of his regalia dragged a clattering saber and wore fierce spurs to his heels. Plainly he was one of your egregious fops; and his breast was trussed outward and upward with the fullness of a pigeon's by dint of some vain contrivance inside his garments. As he brought his heels together, and stood with a deal of splendor just inside the door, the General ran him over with questioning eye that took in everything from the wax on his moustache to the gilt on his spurs.
“What do you want, sir?” demanded the General, as blunt as a hammer.
“I am Colonel Towson, Mr. President; the paymaster of the forces.”
Pigeon-breast spoke in high, affected tones, and would clip his words and slur his “r's” in a mincing fashion beyond imitation.
“Of what forces?”
The voice was calculated to plant dismay in the other's youthful ears. I was aware how the General's ferocity was assumed, and that deep in his throat he was laughing. I should have laughed myself, but managed instead to establish a firm gravity.
“Of the army, Mr. President.”
The high tone began to squeak from agitation. And no marvel! The General's frown was enough to abash a lion.
“Are you come to me on duty?”
“No, sir, Mr. President, I—”
“Then why do you wear your side arms?” The General could throw an expression into his face before which a hostile council of red Indians had been known to shrink and turn gray beneath the paints wherewith they were tallowed. The hapless Pigeon-breast was shaking in the shadow of one of the General's most hateful looks. When the other made no response, the General resumed:
“Note this, sir; I am not in the habit of being terrorized by the military forces of the nation. Never again presume to come into my presence armed and spurred, unless required by the regulations.”
“I'll retire, Mr. President, and change my apparel.”
This was feebly piped, and poor Pigeon-breast came nigh to wrinkling his coat in attempts to bow conciliation and apology.
“State your errand, sir, now you are here,” commanded the General. “I've no time for two visits from you.”
Pigeon-breast took what confidence he might from the General's brusque permission, and drew from his cuff a memorandum; as it were, the heads of a speech. Clearing his throat and collecting himself, he began what may have been a most lucid and eloquent discourse. Its effect was lost in the delivery, however; for what with the high thin tones, and what with the orator's lady-like affectations, neither the General nor myself could make more of it than of the laughter of a loon. For his own careless part, I don't think the General paid even slight attention. If Pigeon-breast were uttering thunder, then it was summer thunder and high and harmless, far above his head; he minded it no more than the scraping of a fiddle at a tavern dance. In the midst, Pigeon-breast was made to halt. The General waved his hand as demanding silence..
“We will shorten this. For whom do you come to me?”
“I was asked to see you on behalf of Mrs. Calhoun and the ladies of Washington.”
The General glanced in my direction. Of course we well understood that the mighty purpose of Pigeon-breast was to protest against Eaton's selection. Indeed, we had caught enough of his oratory to teach us that much. Moreover, Pigeon-breast had at one stage read aloud the article from Duff Green's paper as the reason of his coming, and received the General's word that the list therein set forth was authorized.
But we had caught no word of Mrs. Calhoun, and her name, when it did fall, came as a surprise. The Vice-President's wife was the head of capital fashion—the stately queen of the little court. Both she and her husband, however, had called on the Eatons just following their wedding; and now to discover the lady in the enemy's van owned a sinister as well as unexpected side. It looked like a change of front, and much sustained the General's surmise that this was to be a war on him rather than the Eatons; that its purpose was politics while its source was a plot.
“Did I not tell you that here was an intrigue?” asked the General. I continued blowing my tobacco smoke in silence by the fire. Then, with utter suavity, the General returned to Pigeon-breast. “I must treat the messenger with politeness because of his fair principals. Let me understand: You come from 'Mrs. Calhoun and the ladies of Washington'?”
Pigeon-breast bowed as profoundly as he might with his armor on and gasped assent.
“And their objections are to Mr. Eaton in the cabinet—really to Mrs. Eaton?”
Another bow and gasp from the bold Pigeon-breast.
“Sir, give my compliments to 'Mrs. Calhoun and the ladies of Washington.' Say I much regret that I must disregard their wishes. Say, also, they do grave wrong, a wrong greater than mere injustice, to one who in all that stands best is their equal. Being ladies, they should receive her as one of themselves; being women, they should feel for her as an innocent maligned; being Christians, they should come to her succor as one borne upon by troubles. These would be graceful courses, and make for the glory of 'Mrs. Calhoun and the ladies of Washington.' On the point of their protest, however, describe me as saying that Mr. Eaton will be of my cabinet; I shall tender him the portfolio of war and he has signified his readiness to accept. I do not know what this may imply socially; I do not decide that, but leave it to the better and more experienced tastes of 'Mrs. Calhoun and the ladies of Washington.' Also, you are to do me this favor, sir.”
Pigeon-breast, who was flattered by the General's long harangue, and inclined to congratulate himself over a polite finale to what as an interview at one moment was stricken of a storm, here aroused himself smartly.
“Believe me, Mr. President, any favor in my power.”
Pigeon-breast touched his brow with prodigious military eclat, and then slapped his leg with his hand like cracking off a pistol.
“Why, then, the favor is simple. Tell every enemy of mine, and especially every friend of Henry Clay, my decision touching Mr. Eaton. I want the news to travel fast and far. My friends will sustain Mr. Eaton; and as for my foes, it shall go hard but I discover ways to deal with them. You may depart, sir.” |
Pigeon-breast saluted with flattered chin in air, and went his way, and presently we heard his saber on its jingling journey down the stair.
“I do not understand that word about the Calhouns,” observed the General, when we were alone. “The Calhouns have already visited the Eatons and professed friendship. As for myself, I've supposed Calhoun my supporter. And why should he be otherwise?” The General shook his head as one puzzled. “We must, I fear, count as against us more than Henry Clay and his rogues of Bargain and Corruption. Well, so be it; a fight is like a frolic in so far that 'the more, the merrier,' as a proverb, applies with equal force to both.”.
Now that Pigeon-breast was gone, and we being alone, I remonstrated with the General for that he had entertained our caller and submitted to his anti-Eaton speech. I said it disparaged his dignity; that he had already listened to Duff Green, which was bad enough, but now he must stand with half-patient ear while yon clanking popinjay reeled off his high-pitched opposition and that of those befeathered dames whom he professed to represent. It was a poor beginning for a president.
“Why, sir,” retorted the General, “you, yourself, are wont to hector me at will; I may not buy a coat without you finding fault. Major, I fear me you are the proud one. To be sure, I stoop when I listen to such as Duff and our martial visitor just here. But you must know what Franklin said of stooping: 'The world is like a tunnel, dark and low of roof. He who stoops a little as he passes through will save himself many a thump.'”
“Oh, if it were to be,” said I, “an argument of saw and proverb and slips of dried wisdom, I might quote you not a few and redden your ears. What I say is, you sacrifice dignity; you know it full well at that.”
The General laughed. “But I had my reasons, Major. I sent him whom you term 'Pigeon-breast' forth to be a poultice to this Eaton inflammation. I want to draw it to a head. Duff Green wouldn't do; he'd keep our talk to himself, since my harshness hurt his self-love, and he's too vain to tell a tale against himself. And again, he would be made silent with thoughts of my possible resentment. With Pigeon-breast the cards fall differently. Did you not remark how well I flattered? At the outset he was afraid of me. In the end I packed his timidity in cotton-batting and sang it to sleep; I rocked his cradle and warmed his milk for him. I called up his pride and made him my messenger. He will tell the Eaton story to all, and give me as his authority; that is what I seek. It is a business that will be the sooner over by setting folk's mouths to the quarrel at once. And we should make it short for Peg's sake. Poor Peg; it's her tavern origin that kindles patrician wrath, and it is their aristocratic method to blow calumny upon her. Slander, Major,”—here the General donned his manner of philosopher—“slander, Major, is as much the resource of your true aristocrat as poison of your Turk.”
CHAPTER III—PEG'S MEETING WITH THE MAJOR
Before, in this relation, I go to that meeting with Peg whereof I made account in the commencement of my story, it would be proper, I think, to notice a singular personality; one who, in intermittent fashion, will run in and out of my history like a needle through cloth. His sewing, however, will be of the friendliest, for he was as loyal to the General as any soul who breathed.
Mordecai Noah, was the man's name. The General possessed a good previous acquaintance with him, although, as in the gentle instance of Peg, I was now to meet him for the earliest time.
Noah was a writer of plays, and an editor; moreover, he was a gentleman of substance and celebration in New York City, where his paper did stout service for the General the hot autumn before. Noah also had been America's envoy to the Barbary States during the years of Madison. A Hebrew of purest strain, Noah was of the Tribe of Judah and the House of David, and the wiseacres of his race told his lineage, and that he was descended of David in a right line, and would be a present King of the Jews were it not that the latter owned neither country nor throne. However this may have been—and indeed a true accuracy for such ancestral cliff-climbing seems incredible, when any little slip would spoil the whole—Noah was of culture and quiet penetration; withal cunning and fertile to a degree. Also, I found his courage to be the steadiest; he would fight with slight reason, and had in a duel some twenty years before, with the first fire, killed one Cantor, a flamboyant person—the world might well spare him—on the Charleston racetrack, respectably at ten paces. I incline to grant space favorable to Noah; for he played his part with an integrity as fine as his intelligence, while his own modesty, coupled with that vulgar dislike of Jews by ones who otherwise might have named him in the annals of that day, has operated to obscure his name.
The General told me of Noah somewhat at length on this morning, and just following the marching away of Pigeon-breast. He said he had sent for him, and that any moment might bring his footfall to the door.
As he dwelt on Noah and his characteristics, I was struck by a word. It is worth record as a sidelight on his own nature.
The General showed gusto and a lipsmacking interest in Noah's duel with the man Cantor, and ran out every detail as one runs out a trail. I could not forbear comment.
“How is it,” said I, “you so dote on strife?”
“I don't dote on strife. But when it comes to that, Major, war is as natural as peace.”
“If it were so,” I returned, “still your admiration is entirely for war. You do not love peace.”
“I don't love war so much as warriors,” he contended. “I understand your war man; and I do not fear him. Besides, your honest soul of battles may be made a best friend. I feel the rankle of a Benton bullet in my shoulder as we talk together; and yet to-day a Benton faces my detractors on the floor of the Senate. I say again, I love the natural warrior; I comprehend him and he gives me no feeling of fear.”
“Do you tell me you can be a prey to fear?” I put the query as an element of dispute. His reply was the word that surprised me.
“Fear?” and the General repeated the word with a sight of earnestness. “Sir, I fear folk who won't fight; I fear preachers, Quakers. They are a most dangerous gentry to run crosswise with.”
When Noah arrived, I was still sitting with the General. Noah was a sharp, nimble man of middle size and years, and physically as deft and sure of movement as a mountain goat. He took hold of my hand on being presented by the General, and I observed how he had an iron steadiness of grip. I liked that; I am, myself, of prodigious thews and as strong of arm as any canebrake bear, and when folk shake hands with me, a blush of emphasis is to my humor. I like to know that I've hold on somebody and that somebody has hold on me. As I looked in Noah's face, I was struck with the contradiction of his black eyes, and hair red as the fur of a fox. On the whole, I felt pleased to know that Noah was the General's true friend; no one would have cared for his enmity.
“I feel as though you were an old acquaintance,” said Noah, and his face lighted as I've observed a sudden splash of sunshine to light a deep wood. “The General has named you so often in his letters, and spoken of you so much in what interviews I've enjoyed with him, that you are to me no stranger.”
“And I've heard frequently and much of you,” I replied.
We from that moment were as thoroughly near to one another as though neighbors for a decade. It was a strange concession of my nature, for men come slowly upon terms of confidence with me, and my suspicions are known for their restlessness.
“This is my thought, Noah,” said the General; “this is why I summoned you. Blessed is he to whom one is not driven with explanations, and who intuitively comprehends. You are that man, Noah.” The General's vivid manner was a delight to me. “There's the Eaton affair—you read my scheme of a cabinet in the paper. There's to be a war upon the Eatons—upon me. Already I hear a dull rumble as the opposition takes its artillery into position. I would know what this means. Is it a frill-and-ruffle wrath alone and confined to our ladies? Or does it go deeper and plant its tap-root in a plot? You know what I should say. Four years pass as swiftly as four clouds; and Henry Clay would still hanker for a presidency. These Bargain and Corruption wolves will hunt my administration for every foot of the way, and strive to drag it down. You gather my notion, Noah. Discover all you can; back-track this Eaton trouble—it's but just started and the trail is short—and bring me sure word, not only of those who foment it, but of the position held towards it by both Clay and Calhoun. Of the hatred of the former I'm certain, and that he'll strike at me with foulest blow. Calhoun, elected to the vice-presidency by my side, I would have leaned on confidently; but a word has been said—the Major heard it—that nurtures doubt. Let me learn all there is of this tangle with what dispatch you may. My own belief goes to it that, when all is said, search will discover Clay to be the sole, lone bug under the chip, and Calhoun—and put it the worst way—but an indifferent looker-on.”
Noah paid wordless attention until the General was through. Then he spoke. “General,” said Noah, “I had already heard much when you sent for me. Your portfolio purposes have not been a secret well kept. Also, it has been abroad as gossip for almost a week, this ill talk of the Eatons; this morning's publication simply served to give it volume. Thus far, and personally, Henry Clay has had naught to do with it; his friends, however, have been prompt to lift up the cry. You are right, too, when you regard the rage of these wolves as threatening you. They would, as you declare, tear down your administration. They will leave nothing untried. They will hang on your flanks through the defiles and in the thickets of society; and it is thus they will seek to harass you by means of the Eatons. They reckon no slight help to their plans, General, through your high temper; I say this for no end of irritation, but to put you on guard with yourself.”
Noah would have gone forth at once, but the General held him in speech about Van Buren, who as present Governor of New York must resign his Albany position to assume place as the General's premier.
Noah, who lived Van Buren's right hand of power in his own region, was full to the brim with him, and I, who had yet to be introduced to the little Knickerbocker, sat absorbed of his description. The General had met Van Buren a dozen times or more; but in any sense of intimacy he was as ignorant of his future secretary as was I myself. We therefore gave fullest heed to Noah, who talked well, being one able to take you a man to pieces as though he were a clock, and show in detail his wheels and particular springs, and point you to the pendulum of motive for every hour he struck.
We were in mid-swing of talk when I was called. It was none other than Jim, to bring me that information—threatening, 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.
“After all, what is there to cower from?” said I. “You know society, you say; doubtless that is true. I confess I do not, since this is almost my first visit to the town. But I know men, and of what else is society compounded? Their heaviest frown, if one but think coolly and be sure of one's self, should not weigh down a feather.”
“Why, yes,” she cried, “you know men. But do you know women? Men are as so many camp followers of society; it is the women who make the fighting line. And oh! their shafts are tipped with venom!”
“It cannot be so bad,” I insisted. “So-called society, which must take on somewhat the character of come-and-go with the ebb and flow of administrations, begins with the White House, does it not?”
“We will do our best,” smiled Peg, without replying to my question.
Probably she comprehended the hopeless sort of my ignorance and the uselessness of efforts to set forth to me the “Cabinet Circle,” the “Senate Circle,” the “Supreme Court Circle,” and those dozen other mysterious rings within rings, wheels within wheels, which the complicated perfection of capital social life offers for the confusion of folk.
“Unquestionably, the White House,” Peg went on, “is the citadel, the great tower, and we can always retreat to that. We will do well enough; but oh!”—here Peg laid her hand like a rose leaf on my arm—“you do not understand, a man can not understand, what we shall go through.”
“Let us have stout hearts for all that,” said I. “It behooveth us to be bold, since no victory, even over weakness, was ever constructed of timidity. Besides, the foe may offer us its defeat by its own errors. I recall, how once upon a time, certain Creeks whom the General was to attack entrenched themselves, and all about felled trees and sharpened the branches into points, the whole as defensive as any bristle of bayonets. You, as thought these red engineers, would have deemed the place impregnable, for no one might force his way through this chevaux de-frise. But the General's military eye unlocked the situation. The sun-dried leaves and twigs were lying where they fell. An arrow, with blazing tow tied to its shaft and shot from a safe two hundred yards away, solved the problem. In a moment that precious defence was on fire; and the enemy, driven forth by the heat and flame and smoke of it, were met in the open and destroyed to a man. We may yet smoke these society savages into a surrender by setting an honest torch to their surroundings. One thing we can promise ourselves.” I remarked this in conclusion. “Whatever else may fail, at the worst, you shall not go wanting a revenge.”
“And that thought is sweet, too,” said she in return.
Peg's leopard teeth were not without significance; that much I saw. After all, her speech was to have been expected; for who will go further afield for revenge than your flesh and blood true woman, still of earth's fires and not ready for the skies?
Peg told me a portion of her story; partly because it was natural she should think that I, who had been a stranger to her, might justly want such knowledge; but mostly, I believe, for that she had an instinct to defend herself against what I might have preconceived to her disaster. Dear child, she had small cause to fret herself on that score! I remember she gave herself no little blame as the self-willed gardener of those thorny sorrows among which she had walked and was still sorrowfully to find her path. She would run on like this, as I recall:
“The first fault belonged with this tavern of an Indian Queen. I could have been no older than eight when I knew how folk who came here, Congressmen and officers of state and their ladies, looked upon us who kept the place as but servants over servants, and took care not to meet us on an equal footing with themselves. My father and mother were disrated as mere tavern-keepers who sold their entertainment to any and to all; and I, so soon as I came to discretion and an ability to apprehend, found myself included in the ban thus set upon my people. I've seen nurses skurry to carry their charges off from childish games with me and the contamination of my baby contact. Later, in girlhood, I've overheard mothers while they warned their daughters to avoid me, and experienced the tilt-nosed airs of those same daughters who with superior arts of insolence stung me like wasps. More often than once, I've crept away to tears of shame because I was the daughter of a tavern.
“But in the end it hardened me. I had a perverse, retaliatory temper. I grew up beautiful, so folk told me; moreover, I knew it but too well by the merest glance in a glass. With my beauty,”—Peg spoke of it in mixed simplicity and sadness as though she recounted deformity—“I was wont to fashion my revenge. My father—not a poor man, for while taverns may be vulgar they maybe profitable—was ever ready to spend money on me; and I had only to hint at a comb or a ribbon or a ring, to find the gewgaw an hour after on my table. Good, poor man! my father, calm and careless enough under his condition so far as it rested on himself, felt for my humiliations, which now and again he could not fail to see, and sought with trinketry and luxury of dress to repair the injury. Neither he nor my mother spoke of what they both must have felt, that is our nosocial condition, if one may so describe it; and for myself, I was too proud, and too tenderly in love with them for their thousand kindnesses, to bring it upon their notice.
“As I've said, I made my beauty the method of my revenge. I owned taste as well as looks, and my wits were as deep and as quick and as bright as my eyes. I've set many a wrinkle on many a fair brow by defeating it to second place in that woman's rivalry of looks.
“For these wars, where loveliness tilts against loveliness, my allies were the men. Compliment for me was never silent on their lips. I was the town's toast as I grew up. This put the women to an opposite course. As the men spoke of my beauty, the women shrugged their pure shoulders and told of my boldness; and I must confess that in a native vivacity, together with that rebellion of the spirit born of their attitude towards me, I gave them endless evidence to go upon. I have lived my life without an immorality or the shadow of one; I have done no wrong wherewith to shame myself; but, reckless, careless, and with the frank ignorance of innocence—and then, to be sure, because it made those others angry—I was greedy of men's praise, withal too free of speech and eye, and thereby offered tongues eager to assail me the argument required as material for their ill work. They, the women, wove for me as bad a story as they might, and then wrapped it about me for a reputation. How I loathed and hated them! those who, worsted of my beauty, would tear me with calumny by way of reprisal!
“Now I must tell you, it was I who wearied first of that game where it was beauty on the one side against icy stare, arched brow, and covert innuendo on the other. No; my tongue would not have spared them—it was never a patient member, that tongue!—but for such artillery, as you would call it, my persecutors were out of reach. There is a gravity of words; they descend and never climb; they must, like a stone, come tumbling from above to do an injury. Wherefore these folk high up were safe from me—safe from everything except my beauty; and since I maintained myself without a stain upon my virtue, even my beauty wore for them and theirs no real peril. Above, on the cliffs of society, they rolled down tale and whisper against me like so many black stones; in retort, though I might be beautiful and so madden them with the possession of what they lacked, I from below could harm them nothing. I think, too, some in pain of their own ugliness, envied and would have changed places with me. They would not, had they known what I knew and felt what I felt. My soul was in torment, and I grew never so callous but the darts of their forked malignancy would pierce and pain.
“It was to avoid conditions which grew at last intolerable—for I brooded when alone and magnified the evils of my position, turning morbid the while—that I wedded Mr. Timberlake. I never loved him; I took him to be a refuge rather than a husband, and my little life with him was not a happy one. By no fault of his, however; I think he loved me, and I know he did his best. I had nothing from him save kindness, and when he died in the Mediterranean I doubt not he carried into the other world a sincere regard for me.
“And I would have loved him if I could.” Peg waved her hand with an accent of despair, and as one who had striven and failed beyond recall. “But I could not—could not; strive as I might, love would not come. I felt guilt to live with him; I was glad when he sailed away; and, God help me! my sighs over his death were the sighs of one released from bonds.”
Peg broke and cried like any child. You should understand, however, that she was unjust to herself. What she said of her brooding aforetime to the frontier of the morbid was over-true. And, supersensitive, proud, her hope had wasted as her gloom grew; her griefs of girlhood, enlarged many fold doubtless, as she herself suspected, by stress of her own fancy sorrowing with a wound, had left solemn stamp upon her; and this took far too often and unjustly the shape of self-blame. Beneath all, and hidden deep within her breast, Peg carried small opinion of herself; thought herself selfish, hard, shallow, and of no rich depth of heart. She was wrong to the core; for her inner self was as beautiful as her face. And yet, despite knowledge on her own part, and her friends' assurances, in the ultimate recesses of her thoughts there existed a torture-chamber; and therein she ever racked herself as the one wrongdoer in what she had passed through. There was no driving her from this; she was merciless against herself; and while none not the closest might know, for in the presence of non-friends and strangers she showed the iron fortitude of an Indian or a soldier, to myself and those with whom she practiced no reserve these self-flagellations were much too painfully plain.
I say, folk near to Peg were aware of this morbid lack of soul-vanity and good regard for herself. There should be one exception counted, and that, curious to tell, her own husband. Peg, for all he might be double her age, and I think no very handsome man at that, I could see, when I talked with her, loved Eaton as she loved her eyes or mothers love their children. And yet, never to him did she show her true feeling; in his presence she was the brave, gay, bright, strong, brilliant Peg, asking in the fight which followed no quarter and granting none, she seemed to the common world. It is curious, and presents a problem too involved for my solution, that Peg should have guarded against the one she most loved and shut the door upon discovery by him of her own wondrous self. Yet so it was; it stood patent to me from the beginning that Eaton knew no more of Peg than of her whom he never met.
In her morbid estimates of her worth it is possible she feared to grant him too clear a view. She may have thought she would lose by it. The reason, however, for this great secrecy coupled with great love—this hiding from him for whom she would have died—I shall leave to be searched for by those scientists of souls who are pleased to explain the inexplicable. For myself, I confess I was baffled by it.
This, however, I will say; the fact that Peg could so practice upon Eaton to his blindness gave me no high opinion of that gentleman. He should have groped for her and grasped her, and found her out for the loving, loyal, sorrowing heart she was; and that he did not, but went in placid darkness of the treasure he held in his hands, content to have it so, marked him for a lack of insight and want of sympathy which I'm bound to say do not distinguish me. Such stolidity on the part of folk has caused me more often than once to consider whether the angels, by mere possession, may not at last find even heaven commonplace.
Still, it is none the less infuriating to witness so much beauty so much thrown away! Indubitably, the economy of existence asks for pigs as loudly as it asks for pearls, and to blame Eaton for failing in appreciation of Peg is as apart from equity as would be the flogging of a horse who sees no beauty in a moss-rose—and less, perhaps—not present in a musty lock of hay. However, it is none the less infuriating for that.
Mark you though, I would be guilty of no wrong to Eaton, nor establish him on too low a level in your esteem. He was in the Senate from Tennessee at the time, and of solid repute among his fellows. He was a brave, dull, good-humored sort, who thought better, perhaps, of a bottle than of a book—not to excess, you are to notice—and as a statesman, if he put out no fires, he kindled none; though he did no good, at worst he did no harm; and that, let me tell you, is a record somewhat better than the average. I have been attacked and charged with a distaste of Eaton. There are two words to go with that, and no one—and I challenge those who knew us both—can put his finger on any ill of word or deed or thought I ever aimed against him. Truly, I hunted not his company with horn and horse and hound; but what then? I take it, I'm as free to pick and choose for my intimates as any other. And I still declare what was in my thoughts in those hours I tell of, that Eaton, sluggish and something of a clod-head, and with a blurred, gray tone of fancy, was unworthy such a woman, whose love for him, be it said, was when I met her as boundless as the difficulty of accounting for its first existence. I say again, and the last time, I hold no dislike for Eaton, and more than once have done him good favors in days gone. That I shall grant him no extensive mention in these pages means no more than that he was but a supernumerary in the drama where of the General and Peg carried the great parts. Eaton came on and off; but his lines were few and brief and burned with no interest. There is little reason for prodigious clamor over Eaton, and little there will be. But I am not to be accused of unfairness to the man for that he dwelt with an angel and was too thick to find it out.
Peg at last recalled herself from the dead Timberlake. She brushed away her tears.
“These are all of them you are to see,” laughed Peg, stoutly, referring to her tears. “I promise to shed no more. However, you may quiet alarm; a woman's tears are no such mighty matter.” I showed perturbation, I suppose, and she would dissipate it.
Peg told me of her wedding with Eaton. She dwelt a deal on her love for him; but since one consents to it as a sentiment, even though its cause defy one's search, there comes no call to extend the details in this place.
It stood open to my eyes, however, as Peg talked, how no man was more loved than Eaton. And when I looked upon the ardent girl and considered, withal, the dull stolidity of the other, there would rise up pictures from my roving past to be as allegories of Peg's love. I would recall how once I saw a vine, blossom-flecked and beautiful, flinging its green tenderness across a hard insensate wall; and that was like Peg's love. Or it would come before me how I had known a mountain, sterile, seamed, unlovely, where it heaved itself against the heavens, a repellant harsh shoulder of stone. The June day, fresh and new and beautiful, would blush in the east, and her first kiss was for that cold gray, rude, old rock. That day at noon in her warm ripeness would rest upon it. Her latest glance, as our day died in the west, was for it; and when the valley and all about were dark, her last rays crowned it. And the vivid day, with her love for that unregardful mountain, the rich day wasting herself on the desert peak that would neither respond nor understand, was as the marvel of Peg's love.
It is all the mystery that never ends; woman in her love-reasons is not to be fathomed nor made plain. The cry of her soul is to love rather than to be loved; her happiness lives in what she gives, not what she gets. This turns for the good fortunes of men; also, it offers the frequent spectacle of a woman squandering herself—for squandering it is—on one so unworthy that only the sorrow of it may serve to smother the laughter that else might be evoked. However, I am not one to discuss these things, being no analyst, but only a creature of bluff wits, too clumsy for theories as subtle, not to say as brittle, as spun glass. Wherefore, let us put aside Peg's love and break off prosing. The more, since I may otherwise give some value to a jest of the General's—made on that same day—who would have it I was at first sight half in love with Peg myself. This was the General's conception of humor ard owned no other currency—I, being twice Peg's age, and in the middle forties, and not a trifle battered of feature by my years in the field. I was old enough to be Peg's father;—but when it comes to that, Eaton was quite as old.
It was time to seek the General, I said. Peg and I had arrived at a frank acquaintance, and we went together to the General's room in good opinion of ourselves, she the better by a new staunch friend, and I prosperous with thoughts for her of a coming elevation consistent with her graces of mind and person, and which should atone as much as might be for what she had suffered heretofore. We decided that Peg should wear a gay look, and harrow the General with no tears.
As we went along I was given to quite a novel enthusiasm, I recollect; and it was the more strange since, while no pessimist, I never had found celebration as one whose hope was wont to wander with the stars. I could see the white days ahead for Peg; and albeit I fear their glory shone not to her apprehension as it did to mine, and while they came slowly as days shod with lead, dawn they did, as he shall witness who goes with this history to the end.
My servant Jim was sent with a message to the General to give him the word of Peg's coming. During our talk in the parlor, Jim, be it said, was never far to call. Obviously, Jim proposed for me no dangers of bright eyes so far as remained with him to be my shield. He dodged in and out of the room, now with this pretext and now with that, and when I bade him repair to the General to say that Peg and I would visit him, the gray old rogue was fair irresolute, and hung in the wind as though he had but to turn his back on us and bring down every evil. I drove him forth at last, and when Peg and I would tap on the General's door our black courier was just coming away.
While the General was greeting Peg—rather effusively for him, so I thought—Jim, detaining me at the door, took the liberty of a private word.
“Now you-all is yere, Marse Major,” observed Jim, and his manner was of complaint and weariness, “an' where Marse Gen'ral kin keep a eye on you, I feels free an' safe to go projectin' 'round about my own consarns. I was boun' I wouldn't leave you alone, Marse Major, in d' parlors; I shore tells you it makes Jim draw long brefs an' puts him to fear an' tremblin' lest every minute's gwine to be his nex', while any woman as han'some as dish yere Missis Eaton is pesterin' nigh. You-all can't tell what dey'll do, or what you'll do! Which Jim has knowed Love to up an' prounce on a man like a mink on a settin' hen; an' him jes' merely lookin' at one of them sirens, as d' good book calls'em. That's d' shore enough fac', Marse Major; an' you-all oughter be mighty keerful an' keep Jim hoverin' about d' lan'scape at all sech meetin's. It's a heap safer, that a-way; you hyar Jim!” At this point of warning Jim stopped like a clock that has run down.
“You asked me if you might have one drink from the demijohn in my closet,” I said. “Yassir, Marse Major, I does.”
“You took four, you scoundrel; you took at least four, as I can tell by the mill-wheel clatter of your tongue.”
“On'y three, Marse Major; on'y three. An' you don't want to disrecollect Marse Major, pore old Jim's got a heap on his mind to make him thirsty.”
“I shall not disrecollect, as you call it, to lock my closet door. I don't propose, sir, to furnish you forty-year-old whisky to become the inspiration of such crazy harangues as I've just listened to.”
My voice was stern, and the awful threat of locking the closet door took vastly the heart out of Jim.
“Why, Marse Major,” he began apologetically, “Jim warn't aimin' to say nothin' to cumfusticate you; Jim was talkin' for your good. I wouldn't go for to lock up that closet, Marse Major; how's Jim gwine to get your clothes to bresh? Besides, Jim's done said his say, an' arter this he'll nacherally go about as cat-foot an' as wary an' as quiet as a coon at noon, that's what Jim will. You has heard d' las' word from Jim, Marse Major; d' very las' word. On'y don't go for to lock that closet door; if you does, most likely we'll lose d' key an' it's gwine to get in our way.”
“Well, sir, we shall see,” I replied, severely. “One thing is certain; I'm not to have my servant, at the age of seventy, make a drunken show of himself. I'll send you back to Tennessee, first.”
Jim departed, sensibly subdued.
With Peg and the General I found Eaton, who arrived while I was receiving my lecture from the sapient Jim. We greeted each other with warmth, and I could see that Peg felt this warmth and took a glow from it. Dear girl! he was her all; she had friendship for those who were his friends, love for those who loved him; and, twisting a commandment, Peg would do unto others as they did unto him.
Eaton was a blond, ruddy man. As we released each other's hands, he said:
“I'm here to offer my thanks to the General. I was speaking of this cabinet matter to my colleague, White. He is greatly pleased. By the way, General,”—here Eaton wheeled on the General—“my senate seat will want an occupant. Why not prevail on our friend, the Major, to take it?”
“No, no!” responded the General, quickly and with a gay energy; “that would never match my plans. The Major, or I much mistake, must go with me to the White House. I could not carry on my administration unless I found him quarreling at my elbow whenever I turned my head.”
“And if 'carry on' be the name of it, who is to carry on my farms?” I asked.
This I put seriously; it stood much to the left hand of any programme of mine, this making one of the General's White House family.
“Who will carry on your farms?” repeated the General. “Why, then, who is to carry on mine? Do you mean that you, who have put me here, are about to desert me? Nonsense, man; there is no room in your body, big as it is, for so gross a treason. If I stay, you stay; and that's nailed down.”
“And surely you wouldn't abandon me?” said Peg, bringing her pretty face something near to my shoulder. Then, low and pleading: “Me; with trouble frowning?”
Who was there to stand up against both Peg and the General? I made no breathless battle of it, you may guess.
“Major, I've been telling this child,” said the General, laying his thin hand on Peg's curly mop of hair, “how at our receptions she'll light up that great East Room with the bright face of her. We shall require all the beauty we can muster, since the administration is like to go limping in the business of looks. Van Buren and Barry are wifeless; and I'm told Mrs. Ingham is forbiddingly hideous, with the voice of a henhawk. You see, my child,” turning to Peg, “we build on you to save our day from the sin of ugliness.”
Peg's eyes danced, and she seemed to bask in prospects naught save sunshine. She was far from that broken one of sobs and sorrows whose hand I held a short half hour before. A great woman is ever a great actress; Peg was proving it now; for with a face all light, her heart was a heart of shadows, and heavy with the forebode of dark days coming down. What a paradox is woman! Here was Peg, brave at once, and fearful—afraid for her husband, while quick with courage for him, finding her peril where she found her strength.
“We are living,” remarked Eaton, as he tucked Peg under his arm preparatory to their departure, “we are living on the Georgetown side of the President's Square. General, we won't, while you are in the White House, have a far journey when we visit you. Major, you must call on us.”
“Indeed, you must!” echoed Peg.
As the two took their leave, and the General, having bowed the little lady to the door, sought his never-failing pipe, Jim reappeared, and with a caution that bordered upon mystery put a penciled note in my hand. It read:
“Mr. Noah presents his compliments to the Major; and will the Major do Mr. Noah the honor to meet him immediately in the card room? It is considered advisable by Mr. Noah to say nothing to the General concerning this message.”
The note went into my pocket, the General, luckily involved with his pipe, which for some stubbornness concealed within the stem refused to draw, failing to notice. This was as should be, for the General was as inquisitive and prompt with query as a girl. Even now he asked where I was bound.
“I've had nothing to eat as yet,” I returned.
“That's true; I had forgotten. Come back when you are finished; there's a deal to talk about. I shall need you to help me make up my mind.”
“Help you unmake it, you mean,” I replied.
There was an exchange of grins. I had exactly stated the case; and, as a grave truth will on occasion, it struck our sense of the ridiculous. It had been my work for years; it would be my work for the eight years yet to come; this unmaking of the General's mind.
On my way to the card room I asked Jim,
Peggy
O'Neal who was close behind, where he got the message.
“Marse Major, Jim done obtains it from that red-head Jew gentleman I sees romancin' 'round yere this mornin'. An' say, Marse Major; don't you-all reckon Jim better skuffle for your room an' fotch your box of pistols?”
“Pistols!” I exclaimed, stopping short; “what in the name of General Jackson do I. want of pistols?”
“Oh, nothin', Marse Major, jest nothin',” said Jim, shifting uneasily on his feet. “It's simply one of them old-time Cumberland idees of Jim's. D' fac' is, Marse Major, Jim sort o' allows from d' signs how dish yere red-head Jew gentleman's gwine to have a fight.”
CHAPTER IV—THE JEW AND HIS SPANISH SWORD
Jim's surmise of trouble on the brew set fire to my feet. At the door of the card room I met Duff Green coming out—Duff of the Oporto nose. I barely nodded; I could taste of insincerity and a suave false slyness on the man as one smells secret fire in a house.
As I pushed into the card room, while it was well filled of folk, my first glance revealed nothing to justify Jim's fears. There was Noah, truly; and sitting with him that Kentucky Yankee, the anxious Amos Kendall. Isaac Hill, gray and thin, and limping with his club-foot, was also about. These were the General's friends; there was naught to anticipate of a misunderstanding with Noah from them.
And for all that, Jim was right; calm as showed the surface, there ran an undertow of conversation which flowed for storm. Jim, who lived long among fighting men on fighting ground, had attained perhaps some sharpened sense for the sign or sound of approaching strife, and could foretell it while yet a mile away, Kendall was by Noah's side, and Hill had paused at his elbow; yet it was with neither of these he was engaged. Against the corner of a mantelpiece, and two paces from Noah, leaned a young man of dissolute look. His name, I learned, was Catron, and he came from Port Tobacco, a small hamlet in the southern toe of Maryland. Evidently, Catron was of an upper class in his country, as his dress, and fine hands, smallish and unmarred of toil, would give a signal. He had been drinking, but seemed more vicious than drunk.
Catron was doing the talking, and with a manner of itself an insult seemed bent for altercation.
“Don't cross the run of things,” warned Noah, in a whisper, as I marked my advent by dropping a hand upon his shoulder; “I am glad you are come; but don't interfere. Affairs go famously.”
Willing to gain some insight of the trend of traffic, I paused behind Noah's chair.
“That I should cross words,” Catron was saying, “with a Jackson Jew does not tell in favor of my respectability. It is what one must look for, however, when the beggars of politics are promoted to the saddle.”
“Your epithet of 'Jackson Jew,'” responded Noah, quietly, “I take for myself, and am much flattered thereby. And you are also to remember there are weapons other than words which one may cross with me whenever one's valor arouses to that pitch. Jew, yes! my ancestors were poets, lawgivers—they read the stars, and collected the wisdom and the learning of the world, when the slant-skulled fore-fathers of upstairs I might indicate went clothed of sheepskin and club, ate their meat raw, and saved their fire to pray to.”
All this flowed from Noah in tones modulate and sweet. I began to wonder at my fair-haired friend; not unskilled in colloquy of this sort, it beat upon me that Noah, himself, was wanting an encounter.
“If I were to own my way,” said Catron, paying no heed to Noah's intimation of a stone-age savagery as the state of his forebears. “If I might have my way, I'd exclude every shoe-lace Jew from the country.”
“Doubtless; if you were to have but your own way,” purred Noah. “And yet, observe the injustice you propose. The Jew is as much the American as you. My father fought for this country; I have fought for it; the Jews found and gave one-third of that money which won the Revolution. The Jews wasted their treasure and their blood like water for independence, while folk one wots of were filling the roles of Royalists and upholding the hands of the King.”
There now fell out a deal of talk to little purpose, I thought, and I was on the tip of telling Noah so, when someone from over my shoulder flung a remark.
“You are he,” said this man—his name was Witherspoon, and he a Clay Kentuckian—“you are he,” addressing Noah, “who had this country stricken from the muster of Christian nations. You caused the Bey of Tunis to make the decision.”
“I but caused the Bey to expound our constitution,” said Noah, looking carelessly back at Witherspoon.
While I was turning these last remarks in my mind, and gnawing the enigma they offered, Catron broke forth with a cataract of malediction upon the General, and Noah and any and all who stood the former's supporters. It was a flood of abuse that told strongly for the ruffian's muddy powers.
“And now this precious Jackson of yours,”—these were Catron's closing words—“this murderer! this thief of other men's wives! would insult the decency of our capitol with a courtesan in his cabinet.”
“Meaning whom?” asked Noah, half rising.
Noah's words had the fiber of triumph; he put his question as might he who had trapped that result which he went seeking from the start.
“Who?” retorted the other; “who, save that Peg O'Neal who was as common as the streets she walked.”
“You lie; you rogue and dog of Henry Clay, you lie!”
Noah fair spat out the words; it was as though they came freighted with the venom of the viper.
Catron growled an oath and leaped towards Noah. He was met flush in the face with a glass of whiskey which Noah in most casual fashion had just poured. I had foreseen Noah's purpose; I'd heard him say he drank no spirits.
For the moment Catron was stopped, the bite and anguish of the alcohol in his eyes making him as a blind man. As Noah threw the liquor, I seized him by the wrist; so far it had been gentleman's work; I did not want him to spoil his position by throwing the glass.
“Don't grip so hard,” warned Noah, making not the least of struggle; “don't grip so hard. I shall anon need this hand for what is in store; that grasp like a hand-vise will weaken it for a sword, or shake it for a pistol.”
Never was I more played upon and pleased than by the coolness of Noah, who showed as steady, not to say indifferent, as he who acts a part in a theater.
“I shall have your life for this!” screamed Catron, who, in the hands of friends and still blind of the whiskey, was carried to another room.
When something like peace fell, I asked Noah to explain. I would understand this violence; the more since it looked to be half-plan on Noah's part. Kendall and Hill were with us and made four for our conversation.
“What is the riddle, then?” I said. “I got your note; what was it you desired?”
“Nothing, save your presence,” he replied. “As you observe, I was provoking a fight—not a most amiable attitude, I confess. But you will hear my reasons. Since I saw you, I have found how there exists a clique of bloods—they are of both the Clay and Calhoun parties—who go about grossly assailing Mrs. Eaton. There is concert in their villainy; and they relax themselves at intervals with threats of violence against any who shall take Mrs. Eaton's part. A duel—a prompt, sharp duel, with a wound or two—is the best, in truth! the only way to stifle them. There is nothing like steel or lead to teach such gentry mildness and a Christian spirit.”
Noah laughed over the adjective.
“And have you put yourself forward,” I demanded, “as that master who is to give these lessons of lead and steel?”
“What could be better?” returned Noah. “I am cold and steady, and not apt for error. Again, I am of no such overt and particular emphasis in the General's designs as to link his name too much with this ruffle. Since it is to be, I think I am excellently the hand for the work; and I hold it fortunate I am here when I so dovetail with events.”
“And what is to come?” said I.
“Indubitably, a challenge,” broke in Kendall. “The Maryland Catrons are of touchwood stock. They duel for their pleasure.” Then with an inflection of warning. “This Catron will ask for swords!”
“Swords should do exceeding well,” remarked Noah. “It should go through sharply, this affair, for the best moral effect on others of his ill-tongued clan. With swords we might fight in a room, since they make no noise. Let us meet at once. In an hour this Catron's eyes will cease to burn, and he'll see the better for it.”
“But, mind you, Catron is a master of the sword,” said Kendall. “He had the best teachers in Florence.”
“Should he show you my blood,” returned Noah, coldly, “I will avouch him the best fencer of America.”
There would be a duel, so much I could tell. And yet the situation put me to deepest thought. I was sorry for Peg's name in it, too; that would mean no end of talk.
“There is no end of talk as it stands,” argued Noah. “It were best to make Mrs. Eaton's fame the issue. I could have forced a quarrel on his insults for that I was a Jew. But I hold it better as it is. Mrs. Eaton was the one question worth duelling with such a bully about; but for the duel to be of suppressive virtue, it is required to have the casus belli surely shown.”
Noah was profoundly right in these arguments; the next day's sequel of silence on the cautious parts of our anti-Eaton swashbucklers remarked as much.
“You speak of this Catron as a bully,” commented Hill. “I know nothing of your code, for it does not obtain in New Hampshire. But is a gentleman bound to take notice of the vaporings of a bully—a mere blackguard?”
“One may be a bully,” returned the steady Noah, “and none the less patrician for that. Indeed, your prince oft takes his purple blood for license. Who was Alcibiades but a bully-boy of Athens? Who have been the bullies of London town, with their Mohocks and Hell Fire Clubs, but the nobility and royal princes? No, believe me, sir;” and Noah's lip twitched sarcastically, “the bully's blood is sometimes blue.”
It was settled that I should second the interests of Noah. At a first blink, this arrangement might have the look of the General's fat in the fire, since we professed anxiety to keep his name clear of the muddle. But there are two ends to a lane; our purpose was attained when the General's want of personal knowledge found demonstration. That plain, it was next good to have it understood how the Jackson interest was at the Noah shoulder. These reasons, and because I owned experience of such arbitraments—for I had lived where pistols, barking at ten paces, were rife enough—taught Noah his preference for me over Kendall and Hill, who had seen fewer of these bickers, the latter none at all.
“They will be the challenging party,” I observed to Noah; “that gives us the choice of arms.”
“Should Kendall be right,” said Noah, “as to the Florentine studies of our friend, he will prefer swords. Suppose you concede swords on condition he fight at once.”
Even while we conferred, there came Pigeon-breast, my friend of the clanking saber and gold heels, to wait upon us. The sight of me as sponsor for Noah caused Pigeon-breast a dubious start; possibly he feared lest the General resent his presence as the avowed ally of the enemy. Indeed poor Pigeon-breast expressed his thought.
“It is to be hoped,” faltered Pigeon-breast, in his high-pitched tenor, “you will represent me, sir, in certain quarters you know of, as acting solely for the honor of my friend. My personal position as to the subject matter of the quarrel must not be deduced from that.”
I maintained myself with gravity, as folk about a litigation of honor should; also, I set Pigeon-breast easy on risks and perils for himself. In the matter of weapons Pigeon-breast fair fell upon my neck.
“It is for you to name weapons,” quoth Pigeon-breast. Then, with hesitation: “If it meet your view, however, we for our side would welcome swords.”
“And that is a highly improper remark, permit me to say.” My attitude was purposely severe. It would throw Pigeon-breast into confusion. “Since the choice is with us, it is neither graceful nor safe for you to try to lead it.”
“Surely,” protested Pigeon-breast, “I meant no unfairness, no offence. But with swords, sir, this might come quietly off in town. Should you say pistols, it will mean Bladensburg; and the mud is girth deep.”
At the word “mud,” poor Pigeon-breast gazed upon his varnished boots and bandbox regimentals with round eyes of apprehension. I took advantage of Pigeon-breast's solicitude and feminine terror of Bladensburg mire to say that if we might have our men up at once, it would tell strongly in favor of swords. Of course, my haste was to have the thing finished before some waifword of it reached the General's ear.
“Why, I believe an hour from now,” said Pigeon-breast, hopefully, “might suit us extremely well. That would make it sharp noon. Shall we say noon?”
“And the ball room at Gadsby's?” I returned. Having considered, I deemed it best to be out of the Indian Queen with this clash.
Gadsby's was to the taste of Pigeon-breast; it would serve admirably. Also, Pigeon-breast would bring a brace of rapiers.
Thus was it adjusted between the militant Pigeon-breast and myself. Pigeon-breast withdrew, giving me a most sweeping bow; but carefully keeping his hand to himself, by which I saw that he was not unversed in the etiquette of the field.
Returning to Noah, I laid before him our arrangements; incidentally, I would get a morsel of food, since I had had none that morning, and my stomach was much inclined to take this neglect in dudgeon.
Having a private parlor to ourselves, for Kendall and Hill would lunch with me, I sent for what we craved and urged dispatch. The repast was brought, and while we did it honor with knife and fork, Noah sipped a thimbleful of sherry, saying he accepted it to quicken the eye and give vigor and pliancy to the wrist.
As we lunched, Noah called for a messenger.
“Find Mr. Rivera,” said Noah; “bring him to me here.”
There was a question on my tongue; it covered the charge tossed over my shoulder by the man, Witherspoon, that Noah had fixed the country's status as a nation of heathen among the powers of the earth.
“The statement is true,” said Noah; “the story is brief. It was during the last war, and while I represented the country in Tunis. A Yankee privateer, little but valiant, came into port towing a hulking English merchantman, whereof, cutlass in hand, he had made prize. The Yankee would have the merchantman condemned in the courts of Tunis, and sold. The British minister objected; he recalled the Bey, before whom we both appeared, to his treaty made with England. One clause precluded the use of Tunis as a port of condemnation for English ships made prize in wars between England and any other 'Christian nation.' The phrase was 'Christian nation.' There was no going about the treaty; it stood in ink and sheepskin. Whereupon I read the learned Bey—himself a darkened pagan—our constitution. I showed him we were not a 'Christian nation,' but admitted every creed or sect or sept or faith of men, Gentile or Jew or Musselman, and all on common terms. It was impossible we should be a 'Christian nation;' the treaty with England did not in this instance tie his hands. The Bey held with me; America was not a 'Christian nation;' the prize was condemned and sold. The Bey would receive one-fifth of the proceeds of that sale; which may or may not have aided his wisdom to the decision I've described. Still, it was a decision; and since it never has been quarreled with or overturned, a heathen country we remain to this day in the eye of international law.”
As Noah ended his scrap of history, a tall young man, square and heavy of shoulders, and with every movement of his body as smoothly sure and sinuous as the movements of a cat, appeared. He was that Rivera for whom Noah had sent.
“Go to my rooms and bring me a pair of swords,” said Noah.
“The smallswords?” asked Rivera, with just a thought of interest.
“No; the Spanish swords.”
“Who is your armorer?” I asked of Noah when Rivera was gone.
This boy I had come across before. He had drawn himself upon my attention by the panther grace and strength told of in his motions. Large, long of limb, and heavy, there was yet a brisk lightness with him to hold one like a spell.
“His name,” responded Noah, “is Rivera—Michael Rivera—and his blood flows a fantastic, almost a formidable mixture. His mother was a maid of my mother; an Irish lass she was, and came out of Tipperary. The father, on the far other hand, was a Spanish Jew; by trade a bull-fighter, the foremost toreador of Seville, where, when my family was visiting in Spain, the impressionable Tipperary maiden lost her heart to him as he flourished bloodily about the arena. They were married by the padre, for Rivera senior, while pure Jew, was none the less pure Catholic; under Spanish law he could have had no place among the bull-fighters else, since in Spain it is not permitted to be cruel unless one first be Christian. My protege, who goes for the swords, is the fruit of that union; now, his parents being dead, and because he was born among my people, he abides with me. He has a drowsy, honest soul—though hot enough when moved—and he loves me. He would accept death for me like a dog.”
“And what is his part with you?” asked Kendall. The tale of Rivera interested us.
“No part,” responded Noah, “more than to go where I go, and come where I come; to fetch and to carry and to do my word. He is well taught of books; but owns ideas not at all, for he has no width nor current of conjecture. Yet you are not to believe him a fool. He is silent, but blithe to obey, and true as blade to hilt. I keep him for he would have otherwise no support. If I turned him on the world, he could not make a dollar—nor guard it if he should. In that fiscal particular, the Jew in him has balked and broken down.” Noah laughed lightly. “The faithful Rivera,” he went on, “has, however, certain advantages. There is a compensation, an equilibrium, in nature. Rivera, slow of brain, possesses the muscle-power of a Hercules; moreover, in those twin arts of boxing and wrestling, it's to be doubted if his over-lord exists. Some day, in some moment of brutality—being now and again overtaken of such—I shall have Rivera to England to beat Bendigo and Ward. The prize-ring is his one opening for eminence. And I—as does the immortal Byron, who has more pride of fisticuffs than verse—applaud the ring.”
While Noah talked, I was yielding him my meed of tacit admiration. Here was a man, a creature of quills and ink, too, within minutes of meeting, edge to edge, with one keen of his weapon, and a declared adept among sword fighters. And clearly, the business was no more upon his spirit than if the day bore no grim promise, but only smiles. It was more than courage, it was the absolute absence of fear; he leaned back with his sherry, and the little story of his young Spanish Irish-Jew, as though hate were not at that same moment of time whetting a rapier with hope against his life. His foreclaim of being cold and steady was not a boast which wanted feet to stand upon.
Rivera came back, bearing the swords wrapped from casual eye in the folds of a cloak. I drew one—a plain rapier or Spanish sword—and of as superb temper as any to come from its birth-forge of Toledo.
“They are brothers, those swords,” said Noah; “there is none better. I had them from the hands of that Bey who branded us as heathen, and so fretted the friend of Henry Clay. And since, in a pastime such as we go about, a fullest confidence in one's weapon is important, you will prefer these for me if the choice be given you.” This was spoken to me.
Rivera knelt down, and taking off his patron's shoes, replaced them with light fencing slippers, whereof the soles crackled with a fresh coat of resin. Then came loose overshoes, meant to protect the others on the road to Gads-by's from intervening mud. Having done this, and saying not a word whether of question or remark, the boy stood back as waiting the next command. I was ever reckoned a judge of anything on two legs or four, as became the best quartermaster the General ever had, and I've yet to glimpse so perfect—so splendidly, so accurately perfect—an example of the physical man as showed in this youth, with his brown hair, brown eyes, dark skin, and round thick neck like the carved column of some sculptor.
It was time to be off for Gadsby's, no mighty journey, being just across the street. As we were about departing, Noah called to Rivera, who exhibited no more distrust of a finale than was present with the other, and observed: “I shall be hungry on my return. Have a fowl and a flask of wine set out for me in my own rooms.”
Rivera bowed as one who understands; and giving me the cloak to be still a refuge for the Toledoes, watched us, as by a side door we got onto the walk and headed for Gadsby's over the way.
There were the four of us, Noah, Kendall, Hill, and myself, when we came into that great room of Gadsby's which was reserved for routs and dancing. It was a large and lofty room with a gallery all about. We had the place to ourselves for the moment; Pigeon-breast and his principal were yet to arrive upon the scene.
Noah kicked off the overshoes, and stepped and scrubbed his feet against the flooring boards. The experiment ended to his taste.
“The resin holds,” he remarked. Then glancing about the vast apartment, he came back to me with a smile: “It's like fighting in a 10-acre field,” said he.
Pigeon-breast appeared by a far door. Besides his bully principal, there were two others, for I had named the propriety of witnesses and suggested the number. I crossed over and greeted Pigeon-breast, and then led him aside.
“Is either of the gentlemen with you,” said I, “a surgeon?”
“Why, no,” returned Pigeon-breast, “the thing clean slipped my mind.”
“It might be well to send, then,” I said, “for I think he will be wanted.”
Pigeon-breast spoke to the others, who, with Catron between them, had continued near the door. Pigeon-breast, after a word, returned to me.
“There is a surgeon below,” he reported; “he will be with us like winking, for he loves this kind of thing.”
“And now the swords,” I said. “We may as well transact preliminaries as far as we can go while waiting.”
Pigeon-breast suggested we spin a coin, their weapons or ours. It fell for ours; a good omen, I thought, albeit a look at Noah, where he gazed carelessly from a window, face immovable as granite, gave encouragement enough to declare war for a crown. I went over to tell him we had won the use of our Toledoes.
“That sounds well,” he said. “I like good tools, especially when the work demanded leans upon the fine.”
“You will not slay the man?” I asked.
“For the one matter of his life,” returned Noah, “he's as safe as though this dancing room were a church. Beyond that, however, I shall take such measures with him that, for months, who sees him shall know what reward is waiting on cowards who vilify a pure girl.”
Pigeon-breast signaled for a word. Taking me to a remote corner, he argued that our duties required we discuss the possibility of apology.
“They must fight a little first,” I retorted. “There is no room between epithets such as 'rogue' and 'liar' to squeeze in an explanation. These folk must fight while both can hold out swords.”
This was not butcher's taste; but I began to see with Noah, that the mouths against us must be silenced,—at least the men. We would begin with Catron; we would duel our way through the social register, if need beckoned, to purchase that justice of silence for our Peg.
Poor Peg! she was not to lie helpless in every cur's mouth, to be torn at as most pleased his cruelty or best fattened his interest. The more the situation ran before me, the more my breast took fire; I sustained a strict face, however, engaged as I was upon the parade ground of honor and in the service of a gentleman. Still, I said enough, and said it in such fashion that Pigeon-breast, now a little nervous when the actual steel was about to be drawn, saw nothing for it but to bring forward his fellow. This, I admit, he managed in a genteel way; nor did Catron either whiten or lag backward, but stepped to his place as might he who is warm for vengeance. I did not like this Catron's looks; surely the creature was a blackguard with no right to name himself among gentlefolk, only so far as one might lie within the accident of decent birth. But he seemed stout enough of kidney, though that may have grown with a belief in his infallible craft of the sword.
We gave our men their arms; and as, stripped to their shirts, they stood apart, awaiting signal to engage, Noah put point to floor, and bearing hard upon the hilt, bent his blade double. Abruptly lifting his hand, the honest steel sprang straight, and the sword was tossed high in the air. As it fell, with the clear, sureness of legerdemain, Noah caught it by the hilt. It was no more than a flourish of the fencing school, perhaps; but it served to hearten me mightily and to put me confident of victory. Neither was it wanting in effect, I may suppose, on the volatile Pigeon-breast and his man, Catron; I thought on their side it made somewhat for a certain seriousness of face.
Speaking now of the battle, I must warn you of my inability to tell the tale in nice and hair-line strokes. It was a notable fight, valorously sustained and fairly made; but indubitably it did not remain in one like myself—wholly ignorant of that fencing which pushes or stabs, and admirable with a saber no farther than striking a downright blow with the edge—to catch close work, and taste the merit of it. I have no more of fencing than of Sanscrit, and remember no work, of my own of that character beyond splitting an Indian's head like a pumpkin in a skirmish on the Tombigbee. I am strong of arm, and having the day before come across the long hair of seven white women, murdered at Fort Mimms, smoke-drying in the wigwams of a Creek village we sacked, I doubtless smote upon that savage with uncommon violence.
When the pair engaged, there were preliminary moments employed in feeling one another's strength. The swords kept up an incessant thin rasping, with an occasional singing note as they parted company for thrust or parry. Even my uneducated vision observed from the commencement how Noah held the better of it. His address was superior; and I should say that, with a stiffer wrist, he was withal the more falcon-like in assault, and readier of recovery.
Catron, by his brow of fury, meant death if he might only clothe his point for it. That was not to be. On the heels of a desperate stroke—it was fellow to a dozen that preceded it—which Noah foiled with blade describing a circle no bigger than a curtain-ring, Catron's flushed cheek faded to ghastly gray. For the moment I thought him touched; but no, it was but the sudden daunting conviction that he had met his master. This, breaking on him like the boom of a death-bell, and how his life stood now naked before one whom he had so provoked, ate the yolk from his courage like a weasel.
Catron foresaw his downfall before we who looked on might tell. And if I am to understand a gray, drawn face, then the news taught him the bitterness of death itself.
In the opening exchanges, Catron attacked. He was in and out with a hateful ferocity, thrusting and pressing, as one whose merest wish is murder. Noah gave backward not at all, but stood like a wall, risking all on eye and wrist. I could not catch the sleight of it, but again and again, as Catron thrust, I could see the lead-colored blade glimmer by Noah's side with not an open inch to give away. As Noah told me later, however, an inch in fencing is a wide margin.
Catron felt his strength slip from him; it was like the sands running from an hour-glass. But the rogue's heart summoned stoutness. Finding himself going, Catron must crowd the strife to an end before it ended him. He leaped back to get his distance; then without pause, and giving a sort of bellowing, roaring cry that may have been a scheme for terror, he sprang forward, sending on his point as straight as the stroke of a serpent.
What befell was like the lightning's flash; and no man's gaze, however trained to the trick of it, might follow. Noah did not parry, but stood aside from the other's point, which, passing, grazed his garments. Noah's point, in retort, entered Catron's sword arm just above the guard. I saw Noah hold his own hand high, and with point a bit lowered. Noah ripped up his foe's arm—split it like a mackerel!—from wrist to shoulder.
It was a gaping furrow of a wound; and the horrid shock of it, when Noah's steel caught in the shoulder bones, brought the wretched Catron to the floor. The blood ran away in a crimson rivulet from the prostrate one; and to tell the best and the worst of me, I've yet to look on blood, or anything besides, which brought me so much of comfort and of the sweetness of peace.
While the surgeon, needle and lint going, dealt with Catron, I conveyed Noah to the end of the room. We must await the report of yon fellow's condition; we could not leave the field without consent of Pigeon-breast—quite pale and stricken now, was Pigeon-breast, as he stood watching while the bandages were wound.
Following a nod of the surgeon's, Pigeon-breast came towards me. I met him on his way.
“The thing is ended,” said Pigeon-breast; his voice came huskily, and in a fashion faint. “The thing is at an end. My friend can not hold sword.”
“That is enough,” said I.
“One word, sir,” said Noah, coming forward, handkerchief all red where he had been cleaning his blade; “you are to take notice: I from this day shall seek out with challenge each man who speaks evil of Mrs. Eaton. That creature who lies there, and whom, maugre his wound, I still contemn for the rogue and fetch-dog of Henry Clay I painted him, may be for warning.”
“But has Mrs. Eaton no husband to fight for her?” sputtered Pigeon-breast, not relishing Noah's attitude.
“Let that go by,” retorted Noah, sternly. “Your diplomacy shall not reach. Again I tell you, he who shall assail Mrs. Eaton with word or look, or who fails to please that lady with his conduct, replies to me. I wounded this one; I shall slay the next.”
“What is this to be?” cried Pigeon-breast, appealing to me in a flutter of spiteful fright. “Is it that we have a bravo?”
“A bravo whom you are like to encounter, sir,” I said, “unless you teach your tongue some prudence—you and your tribe.”
“Sir, I would refuse to meet a bravo.”
“Sir, you would meet the bravo or meet me.” Then came a rush of temper about my heart. I thought on poor Peg; and a great anger began to flame in me. I glowered on the tinsel Pigeon-breast; then I thrust towards him my huge bear-paw hands. Pigeon-breast considered them, and the hairy wrists like pistons, with a kind of interest of dismay. “Sir,” said I, “the first foul dog among you who shall so much as take the name of that innocent one upon his lips, I'll find him out, and with the ruth one grants to rattlesnakes, I'll kill him with these fingers.”
And so ended that blood letting which was meant to tie the tongue of slander and in a measure did.
“I shall leave it to you,” observed Noah as we came away, “to place this affair before the President in a right light. His is the only judgment whose favor I would seek, and that, particularly, for that his name is certain to figure in the story of this bicker whenever it is told. I would not have him think I had rashly put him in peril of criticism.”
“There should be no alarm on that score,” I replied. “My word for it, the General will endorse with his full name every step we have taken.”
On our return to the Indian Queen we found Rivera waiting, and a table spread in Noah's apartment as he had commanded. Rivera received the Spanish swords, still wrapped in the concealing cloak. He drew forth of its scabbard the blade which had armed Noah's hand; it still carried a stain or two of that Catron's blood, and Rivera's eye seemed to fire with a sleepy satisfaction while he looked on it. Then he turned his gaze on his patron in a manner of inquiry.
“No, he will live,” said Noah, as though in reply to a query put by his protege; “it was not to kill him that we went across the way.”
At this news, Rivera took the Spanish swords and withdrew; and all with the evident purpose of putting them in order against a next campaign.
“I think,” said I, as Noah drew up to the table—for it would seem that his work had given his appetite an edge, not dulled it—“I think I shall hunt up our friend the General. There is slight chance of any being before me; and yet I would make sure to bring him the earliest word of what has chanced.”
Both Hill and Kendall would be for leaving, also, and as we three arose to go Noah filled a quartet of glasses with Burgundy. Offering one to each, he said: “Let us drink to the defeat, ay! even to the death of ones who would bear false witness against the innocent. May their best fate be no better than the fate of him whom we met to-day.”
CHAPTER V—REVEREND CAMPBELL AND THE MAGPIE
It was as good as a study of character, the varying fashions wherein those interested received the story of Noah's clash with Catron. There was nothing told of it in the paper, for the port wine Duff was wise withal, and suppressed whatever of hunger may have possessed him to print a palatable piece of news. The General might not approve such type-freedoms; Eaton would doubtless distaste a notoriety of this hue for Peg; indeed, there might be others of consequence whom it would disturb. The port wine Duff carried a gulping appetite for public printing; it might befall that to offend would get between the legs of his anticipations and trip them up. Wherefore, neither Noah, Catron, Pigeon-breast, nor myself, was granted the contemplation of his valor by the pleasing light of ink; I, myself, did not consider this a deprivation; nor did Noah; nor Catron, so far as one might hear. But the chagrined Pigeon-breast bewailed it. He was quite crestfallen, and among intimates talked of the call for a court journal which should, like a similar imprint of St. James, delicately set forth the surprising deeds of our nobility.
It was I who gave the tale of that ballroom fight at Gadsby's to the General. He took it coolly; granted it, in sooth, a more quiet reception than I had hoped. The fair truth is, I was prepared for an explosion. I was pleasantly fooled; the General could not have displayed less temper had I related the breaking of a horse. And yet he made claim for slimmest detail; question after question on his part prolonged narration for an hour.
“It was the best that could be,” said the General, revolving the tangle in his mind. “The great thing is to stop folk's mouths; and a duel well fought, and with the right individual, is, as Noah says, the way to construct such condition. I've known the killing in proper form of one man to remove a slander from the conversation of a whole county. Folk let it fall of themselves and never took it up again.”
“This Catron,” said I, “was a noted fighter and had been out before.”
“Which is precisely,” responded the General, “what makes the work worth while. Here was a berserk, celebrated as one most frothingly prompt for blood. Now he is disposed of, it will tame your minor war-hawks. They'll not be half so ready; they may even surprise themselves with what they will hereafter forbear in favor of keeping the peace.”
Eaton, strange to tell, was moved of anger against Peg's champion.
“Sir,” said Eaton, bearing himself stiffly to Noah, “it is far to the wrong side of the regular that you should defend my wife. That is my privilege, sir; it does not rest with others.”
“And that is true,” returned Noah, politely; “but the situation was unusual. It was of crying importance to get the thing off before the President knew. Folk would criticise him sharply if he did not interfere for peace. Besides, had you been brought into the business, your foes would have torn your prospects to pieces with it. You must see, sir, that however just your quarrel, you could not ride into the cabinet on the back of a duel.”
“Sir, I can better be out of a cabinet,” said Eaton grimly, “than leave my honor to the swords of other men.”
“You and I,” returned Noah, turning distant, “disagree extremely. I can not charge myself with wrong. I should act my part again were occasion to rise. You, however, are the judge of your own injuries. And I shall be in town some time.”
“Sir, I am glad to be told so,” responded Eaton. “When I have more considered, I may send a word to you.”
This wrong discourse I was ear-witness of, but in it bore no part. I was so stung with anger against Eaton, for that he would act the boor, and talk of calling folk out when he should be thanking them, I dared not trust myself with a syllable. I would have spoken nothing pleasant for Eaton, and that would be a wide flight from wise, and draw his horns my way. We were both too near the General to talk of a difference that would have broken everybody's dish. Moreover, Noah owned the wit and the wrist to very well care for his own fortunes.
“Why, the man is clean beside himself!” exclaimed the General, when he learned of Eaton's high heels. “What franchise could he pretend to for a quarrel with Noah? Noah's right to fight with whom he will, and for any reason good to his own eyes and those of his adversary, is not to be impeached. Eaton has surprised me out of bounds! For myself, I'd as soon think of stepping between a man and his wife, as a man and his enemy. Sir, there are relations which are sacred! Eaton's great love for Peg has blurred him; a husband is ever a bad judge of either his rights or his wrongs. I'll set Eaton to the properest view in this when we meet.”
The General was scandalized in the face of Eaton's pose. But I did not go with his theory of its being love for Peg. It was offspring rather of a March-hare vanity that resented a good office for which it lacked the generosity to be grateful.
It would seem, however, that the General read Eaton a right lesson, for he made amends. He came blandly to Noah.
“I am told,” he said, “by one whose friendship and whose judgment I never doubt, that I have behaved badly towards you. Permit me to offer my apologies. Also, I am to thank you for your service against that scoundrel.”
Noah took Eaton's explanation in courtly spirit, and so the wrinkles were made smooth. I was relieved, though not pleased; I would have found no fault with Noah had he gone a ruder course.
“Where is this Catron?” asked Noah.
“As to that,” replied Eaton, “I think myself qualified to answer. I sent to learn his condition, and with some purpose, so soon as he was able, of taking him up where you let go of him. The word came back that he had quit the town.”
It was Peg, however, who minded her debt to Noah. She went to him with wet eyes, and, without word, took his sword hand in both of hers and kissed it. Noah started back.
“That is too much,” he cried. “It is I who will be now in arrears to you for the balance of my days.”
It stood the day but one following the affair of Gadsby's, and I was comfortably in my own room engaged about my letters. If I were to bide with the General, and not immediately to see Nashville, then I must name a manager and put my plantations in some kind of command. There were to be missives from the General, also, and we had arranged to send them west on the next day by hand of a special express. It would take him six weeks, that horseman and his saddle-bags, with roads as they were, to win to Tennessee; we were then at some fever, you will understand, to have our mails concluded and riding on their way.
As I drove my quill rapidly across the pages, Jim was busy in the adjoining bedroom, giving a polish to my boots. Jim cheered himself over his labors with snatches of song.
As I wrote hard at my desk, I could hear him, in a most lugubrious refrain:=
``Thar's a word to be uttered to d'rich man an' his pride;
``(Which a man is frequent richest when it's jest befo' he died.)
``Thar's a word to be uttered to d'hawg a-eatin' truck;
``(Which a hawg is frequent fattest when it's jest befo' he's stuck.)=
“Cease that outlandish howling,” I commanded furiously.
“Shore, Marse Major!” said Jim, coming into the room where I sat, and bringing one of my high horseman boots on his arm, polishing it the while with unabated ardor; “shore, Marse Major! An' yet, that's a mighty well liked song up an' down d'Cumberland. Hit's been made, that song is, by Miss Polly Hines; little Miss Polly who lives over on d'Possom Trot. She makes it all about a villyun who comes fo'closin' 'round her paw's betterments for what he owes that Dudleyville bank, an' sellin' 'em off at public vandoo. Marse Major, you-all oughter listen to d'res' of that roundelay; if you'd only hear it plumb through, Jim sort o' reckons you'd like it.”
I made no response, but kept on with my work. I was not to be moved of ballads as Jim rendered them, even though vouched to be the offput of that Sappho of the 'Possom Trot.
Ten minutes went racing by and Jim reappeared in the door.
“Say, Marse Major, do you-all recollects that gentleman who comes pesterin' about for them subscriptions, an' who d'Marse Gen'ral done skeers off d' time you an' me is goin' down to d'parlor to meet dish yere Missis Eaton?”
“Well, what about him?”
“He's been 'round ag'in to-day. It's this mornin' whiles you is sleepin', an' I runs up on him outside in d'hall, kind o' ha'ntin' about our door. I say: 'What you-all want?' He say: 'I want to see d'Marse Major.' With that I ups an' admonishes him that you-all is soun' asleep. 'An',' I says, 'it don't do to go keerlessly wakin' d'Marse Major up. He's got a monstrous high temper, that a-way, d' Marse Major has, an' all you has to do is rap on that door jes' once, an' he'll nacherally come boilin' outen bed, an' be down on you like a failin' star; that's what he will.' Then I tells him he can't get no subscriptions from you no how; that you is a heap sight worse than d' Marse Gen'ral 'bout 'em. 'You hyar me!' I expostulates; 'you-all is simply barkin' at a knot; thar aint no sign of a raccoon up that tree at all. You-all might jes' as well try to get sugar-sap outen a swamp-beech as subscriptions outen d'Marse Major!' Shore, that's what Jim tell 'um.”
“And for that, you miscreant, I'll give him a hundred dollars when he does come, to show him how little truth you tell.”
“Don't go blazin' off into a fandad, Marse Major,” said Jim, reprovingly, “throwin' your money away. Dish yere gentleman 'sponds to Jim, an' allows he aint aimin' at no subscriptions. But he do say he want to see you; an' so I tell him to be back ag'in in five hours. He's liable to come buttin' in yere any minute now, as d' time Jim sots is done arriv'.”
As if for endorsement, a knock was heard at the door.
There were two to enter, a man and a woman. The man was huge of frame, shambling, uncouth, with knobby joints and large uncertain feet; his face flabby, sickly, with little greedy, shifty eyes, like the eyes of swine; gross mouth, full lipped and coarse, and working and munching in a full-fed way, engaging itself upon imaginary mouthfuls. The hands of this individual were puffy, warty members, with palms as hot and wet and soft as an August swamp, and, save for their temperature, much like the belly of a toad to the feel. These hands were commonly in motion, making plausible and deprecatory gestures. It was as though the world were a cat and they would stroke its back by way of conciliation. Over all was obsequiousness like a veil—my visitor seemed to sweat subserviency, exhale abasement as an atmosphere. The woman, thin, and bird-faced, and with beaky nose that looked as though the frost had pinched the neb, was of the chattering, empty, magpie flock; she appeared as vulgar as the man; albeit, not with his obsequiousness, since she affected the girlish, and stood ready with giggle and gurgle and arch look, all of which but poorly fitted with her sober fifty years. From an odor of pulpits observable, I thought him a preacher; also, I took the woman to be his wife.
The man—I will thus far defend him—was not, however, that subscription person whom Jim remembered with the General.
“Dish yere's d'gentleman who is done been teeterin' 'round our door this mornin',” said Jim, as he ushered the visitors.
“It is not the gentleman who called on the General,” I remarked.
“Well, what's d'diffrunce, anyhow?” asked Jim with mighty unconcern. “He's a preacher, so it's all d'same.”
“No difference, perhaps,” I returned, “except to make plain how little you are to be relied on.”
“I s'ppose Jim's as cap'ble of mistakes as anybody.” Here Jim lapsed into the abused tone of one virtuous, and driven to the desperate by ill-usage. “But I tells you-all, Marse Major; since you done locks up that demijohn, Jim aint been d'same niggah. His mem'ry has sort o' begun to bog down. No wonder Jim gets folks swapped 'round foolish in his mind.”
While these reproofs were going, my callers stood by the door, inviting consideration with much bending of the body and bowing of the head.
“I am the Reverend Campbell,” began the man; “I am pastor of a precious flock in this town. And this is Deborah, my beloved consort. I trust I find all well and holy here, and the blessing of the Spirit upon this place?”
Then the Reverend Campbell re-began his abject bowing, while his magpie wife smirked and giggled sociably.
It had been long since I met folk who more repelled me. For the sake of his cloth, however, and the real respect I bore it, I required myself to assume a manner of cordiality. I asked the purpose of the visit.
“It was my privilege,” responded the Reverend Campbell, with a meeting-house snuffle that certain divines adopt as a professional manner of articulation, “I may say it was my inestimable privilege some years back, to behold in the body of the church, during many of my preachments, that mighty man of war, our coming president, and his sweet lady; although she—for flesh is as grass—has since perished and passed over to dwell among the blest.”
“Mrs. Jackson was my nearest, dearest friend,” simpered the awful magpie wife, interrupting. “It was when General Jackson had a seat in the senate. We were like loving sisters, Mrs. Jackson and I.”
This last I distrusted, but I did not say so.
“You are the General's old preacher?” I said; the Reverend Campbell meanwhile seesawing and bowing, and locking and unlocking his warty fingers. “Have you been in to meet the General?”
“Not yet, good sir, not yet,” replied the Reverend Campbell. “That shall be in good time. Since you abide on terms of intimacy with our coming president, I deemed it prudent to first make myself known to you. Knowing David, I would know Jonathan. There is a business—a piece of sinful, worldly business—I would inquire of, a boon I would ask, and ere I went to the transaction thereof, I held it sapient to call upon you who will be so strong to bind or loose—so potent, as one might say, in the coming dispensation of preferments.”
The Reverend Campbell—who should have been a mandarin for his repulsiveness and talents to bow—kept up his bending, while the magpie wife in vacuous vanity, beamed on like a tarnished sun. To put a stop to the bowing, which began to grow on me nervously, I bade the pair be seated. They would remain the longer, but I would save myself with less of irritation.
“I do not come for myself,” observed the Reverend Campbell, snuffling, and balancing uneasily on his chair's edge. His wife had taken her seat with more of confidence; spreading her skirts to advantage, and leaning back as one certain of results. “No, it is by request of a beloved brother in Christ, the Reverend Doctor Ely of Philadelphia. Our great Chief Magistrate knows him and loves him well.”
Then the Reverend Campbell went on in pulpit tones to elaborate his mission. It soon declared itself to be the old Duff Green errand of office angling. Also, it was a coincidence something strange, I thought, when the Reverend Campbell, following in the very footprints of the wine colored Duff, spoke of the Florida Governorship, and named the same wealthy zany for its occupation.
“He is a Pennsylvania Westfall,” concluded the Reverend Campbell, his breath bated and his air impressed, “he is a Pennsylvania Westfall, and extremely rich of this world's goods. Doctor Ely desires this post for him with all his heart; he believes, moreover, that his old friend, our excellent president, who—and heaven be thanked!—is less than a scant two weeks away from his inauguration, will be glad to pleasure him in this regard. You might, sir, hint to that eminent statesman and soldier how his friend, Doctor Ely, would profit by this selection, going, as in that event he will, to St. Augustine, to be chaplain for the then Governor Westfall.”
“And my husband, too, would be called to Dr. Ely's place in Philadelphia,” gurgled the magpie wife; “it's a much richer church than the one here.”
There, then, was the cat out of the bag; I had been guessing for some moments in the dark, as to why the Reverend Campbell should so zealously be fishing for office when he ought to be fishing for souls. The magpie wife granted me a glint of his secret. It did not swell my fund of respect for the Reverend Campbell, a fund nothing rotund as things stood.
“You should see the General,” I said at last. “These are not my affairs; I would not presume, wanting his invitation, to advise with him concerning them. You should see him; or, if you will, you might wait until Van Buren arrives.”
“Ah, yes; the coming Secretary of State,” remarked the Reverend Campbell, while his thick lips munched unpleasantly. “Will Mr. Van Buren make the Florida selection?”
I was driven to say I thought not; the General himself had been once Governor of Florida; therefore, he might believe he was the one better qualified to make such appointment.
Beholding the Reverend Campbell in the throes of doubt, tipping on his chair, and looking with his black clothes not a little like a crow hesitating on a fence-rail as to whether or no he will plump down among the sprouting corn, I suggested,—to relieve myself, I fear—that now he was come, he might better go in to the General and offer his request. I entertained no thought of success for him; I had not forgotten the fate in that connection of the pursy Duff—Duff of the ripe, ripe nose. But I aimed at a riddance of the Reverend Campbell and his leering, bubbling helpmeet; and I was not so loyal to the General as to prevent me from earning my own release by betraying him into their talons.
“Do you deem it the part of sagacity,” said the Reverend Campbell, following a thoughtful pause, “to crave this boon at once?”
“Sagacious? surely!” I would have given my word for anything to work free of the Reverend Campbell and that magpie wife, the latter gentlewoman being rusty of plume, strident, and of but a sorry favor of face; to say nothing about her gigglings and chuck-lings; for that vacant dame was like a parrot, with a running rattle of vocalisms, going from gurgle to chirp, as an accompaniment to whatever was said by her lord and master.
“Then let us repair to him,” said the Reverend Campbell, raising his hands as if asking a benediction on me and my belongings; “let us hie to him and unbosom ourselves, and may we find him in grace of spirit and well of this mortal body.”
We discovered the General in his rooms. We found him in a rather merry spirit for him. He was sitting by his fire, with Peg on a footstool at a corner of the fireplace.
Hearing of the General's diet of rice, Peg's mother—she lived over to the south, across that wooded strip, the Mall—holding herself to excel in certain elixirs and cordials and draughts marvelous for maladies stomachic, had sent to the General's relief a bottle of medicine warranted of transcendent merit, and in which dandelion flourished a dominant element. The good lady would trust her drugs to none save Peg; there she was, then, the fairest foot and hand ever to be sent on porter's work or to run an errand with a message.
The unexpected sight of Peg sent over me a wave of pleasure. I love the beautiful, have an inborn joy of it, and who or what could be more lovely than our Peg—Peg with her wildrose face?
The General glanced up through the tobacco smoke wherewith the rooms were cloudy. Peg had said she loved smoke, and could stand to it like a side of bacon. His look was of half-recognition as it settled upon my company.
“The Reverend Campbell, is it not?” said he.
“The same, Mr. President,” returned the other, commencing again those bowing motions which had so tortured my soul, his flabby cheeks the while exuding a beady dew; “the same. And here is Deborah, my well-beloved wife, Mr. President.”
The magpie one of rumpled feather gained indication by the Reverend Campbell pointing to her with a bulbous forefinger that was somewhat suffering about the nail for lack of care. The magpie one gave the usual proof of her satisfaction with chirp and giggle.
“The last time I beheld you, Mr. President,” said the Reverend Campbell, “you and your dear wife sat beneath my words.” The General flinched as though a rude hand touched a wound. He gathered himself, however. “That dear one, Mr. President, has gone from our midst. It is a chastening, Mr. President. Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth. It is a loss, Mr. President, but we must summon meekness of spirit. Blessed are the meek in spirit, saith the singer, and they shall inherit the earth. Mr. President, let us pray.”
The Reverend Campbell rolled forth the foregoing, and never halt or pause; with the last word he was down upon his knees, expanding into a gale of prayer.
It is not for me to pass upon such sacred petitions, but the Reverend Campbell's effort grated on my conscience as crude, and, if the term be not improper, vulgar. The General, who was still in his chair, bowed head in hand and sat silent throughout. He made neither sign nor sound; and yet it must have galled him like musketry, that prayer.
It was when the Reverend Campbell stood again on his feet, and the magpie one had rearranged her feathers, that their glances took in Peg where she now stood near the fire. She was silent, collected, and her calm look rested upon the Reverend Campbell and the magpie one. It was a steady glance of unseeing indifference and unacquaintance, and as though the pair were strangers to her.
Their actions, however, would smack of something nearer. No sooner did they behold Peg, than with one impulse they started towards her, faces a garden of smiles.
“Why, my dear Mrs. Eaton!” cried the magpie one.
“My dear, recovered lamb!” exclaimed the Reverend Campbell.
The two made for Peg with exuberant hands extended. Peg waved them off.
“You make a mistake,” said Peg. Her words took flight evenly and with nothing of disturbance. “I do not know you.” Then, as the Reverend Campbell and his magpie love seemed but half checked: “And I will not know you.”
These closing words were vibrant of a nipping vigor, and Peg's leopard teeth came together with a click, and, as it were, for emphasis. Peg turned to me:
“Will you take me to my carriage?”
With that, the General arose and cavaliered Peg to the door.
“Give my thanks to your good mother, child,” said the General, his fond eye pleasant with the reflection of Peg's pretty face; “tell her I shall profit by her kindness. I feel half restored with merely having the Dandelion Water on my shelf.”
Closing the door after us, the General returned to the Reverend Campbell and his magpie love.
“There is no story with it.” Peg replied, when I put those queries the situation suggested. “They are folk of treachery; that is it. They have been my persecutors as much as any. And with more shame for them, since they have pretended friendship for my family, and had support from my father for year piled upon year.”
“And is that the whole of it?” I asked.
“Truly, it is, my best dear friend.” Peg held up her pansy face, and offered me a cheerful look by way of proof. “Nor am I even a trifle provoked. For all that, I would not permit them because they found me with the good General, and with you”—she gave my arm a little pressure—“and doubtless would offer some request, to put on a false face, and so use me for their interest. I owe them no such tenderness. Besides, since I've found real friends,”—Peg crowded to my side more closely, and bent upon me her kind, unfathomed eyes, as though admitting my protection,—“since I've found real friends, I've no room in my heart for mocking imitations.” Peg laughed her witch-laugh now, and stepped on more quickly. “Don't let us talk of them,” she said, “don't let us talk of such hollow folk!”
Peg's carriage stood at the curb. Indeed, she had but just arrived when, as I piloted the Reverend Campbell and the magpie, I found her by the General's fire.
“Some day you must go with me to meet my mother,” said Peg; “I've promised her.” Then, as I lifted her into the carriage, “Mercy! you should practice for a lighter hand. I feel as one in the paws of a bear.”
With a wave of her hand, she was off for the President's Square where her home stood; I, on my part, turned back to the General, walking slowly, and seeing Peg's gentle eyes before me all the way to his door. Sweet Peg! had it been I, no tawdry ambition of politics would have divided my heart with you; you would have reigned over it alone; we would have left Washington to the vermin who devoured it, and made our kingdom in lands of peace and truth!
It was not without relief I discovered that the Reverend Campbell, with his magpie mate, was gone.
“Assuredly, no!” exclaimed the General, when I inquired whether the name of Doctor Ely, and the petition preferred of the Reverend Campbell, had re-colored his thoughts touching St. Augustine and the Florida Governorship; “assuredly, no! He who has that place from me must be emphatically two things—a man and a friend. The creature, Westfall, is emphatically neither. I can not guess, however, in what this sudden office-hunting excitement of our ghostly fathers finds its source. I asked the Reverend Campbell, was this Westfall known to him. He said, only by repute; that he urged the case at the request of Doctor Ely.”
Clearing him on that question of purpose, I told the General of Doctor Ely's arrangement to be a Governor's chaplain in St. Augustine; and how, in a moment of gurgling exaltation concerning what might be, that unguarded magpie exposed the scheme of “calling” our Reverend Campbell to Doctor Ely's fat present pulpit, should it become vacant in favor of palms and orange groves.
“And in that way runs the road!” exclaimed the General, full of leniency and amusement. “The preachers are becoming better politicians every day. Major, you and I must look to our lines, or some dominie may yet turn our flanks.”
Then I gave the General what Peg had told of her attitude, like a diminutive iceberg, towards the Reverend Campbell and his magpie partner.
“They have done Peg no actual harm,” I said. “They passed her by one day, like the Levites they were and are; and now she revenges herself.”
“One can always hear the savage stirring about in Peg,” commented the General; “and I like her the better for it. I love your re-vegeful soul—he who has a long knife, a long memory, and will go a long trail to his feud.”
“And that is an excellent observe,” I said, teasing him a bit, “and you a Christian and a president!”
“The observe, as you phrase it,” retorted the General, “is not only excellent but earnest. Revenge is the fair counterpart of gratitude. They are off the same bolt of cloth. Find me a soul for revenge, and I'll find you a soul to be grateful. What are revenge and gratitude, when one goes to the final word, but just a man paying his debts?”
“Who is this Doctor Ely?” I asked. “The Reverend Campbell described him as your friend.”
“Doctor Ely is no more than an acquaintance, and hardly that. I met him years ago in Philadelphia; and I've heard him preach. He is a showy, fashionable figure of man; not deep, yet musical and fluent. The women, I remember, liked his discourses right well. There were a beat and a march to his periods; and albeit, while he talked, the wise ones went to sleep, others with music-boxes for minds, and who mistook sensation for sense, sat bolt upright, feeling the liveliest delight.”
“I've met the latter sort,” I assented; “the gentry who prefer rhyme to reason.”
“Somehow,” observed the General, following an interval of silence, “I ever fear I'll be unfair to your preachers. My inclination is to judge them too harshly—estimate them below their worth. It has been ever the fault of military men to do this, and, for myself, I would guard against it.”
“And now will you explain what you are talking about?” I was in cold earnest, for the General's remorse over an injustice to preachers was clean beyond me and apropos of nothing.
My own thought galloped to it—for his wife taught him that softness, being as devout as an abbess, herself—that for the dominies, as an order or trade among men, he carried more of charity than any whom I knew. More by far than I could boast, or cared to. “Why do you reproach yourself about the preachers?”
“It was this Doctor Ely,” returned the General, “of whom I was thinking. I was remembering certain severities of judgment towards him long ago. I heard him preach, yet could give him no credit for sincerity. He impressed me as one who looked often in the glass and seldom from the window. He was friendly, affable, and, I think, honest; and yet I liked him no more than I like that reverend cringer who was just now here. I well recall saying to this Doctor Ely—probably I had him in my mind's eye at the time, and it hurt him, too—that he who was professionally good would never be very good, nor he who was excellent for a salary offer an example of the best excellence. It may be that my natural distrust of preachers is, after all, nothing save my natural fear of them. You have not forgotten how I told you I feared men of peace. That is true; I fear folk who profess peace as a principle—your Quaker and your preacher—as I fear and fall back before the inhuman, or as children fear a ghost. It is all to be accounted for perhaps, in the differing natures of folk. One man has a genius for peaceful while another's bent is for war, and each will misunderstand the other's motives. There can be little in common and less of trust between them, since they will live as far apart as black and white. It is, I say, quite natural—war and peace—wolf and sheep. I've no doubt, now,” concluded the General, a smile beginning to show, “that to your wolf on the hill, your grazing sheep down in the valley is a mighty suspicious character.”
CHAPTER VI—THE STORM GATHERS AGAINST PEG
Those next few weeks went by in a tumbling procession that was more like mob violence than aught orderly or sequential. The town was overrun of folk. It was a climbing case of everybody under foot—everybody stepped on one, and, in compensation, one stepped on everybody.
Jim was driven to remark concerning the collecting tangle of humanity, and the crush and crowd and jostle of it. The sage Jim was speaking to his own defence, being indicted for some neglect of me.
“'Pears like, Marse Major,” said Jim, soothingly, “you-all must jes' wrastle along somehow until dish yere pop'lace begins to abrogate. I'm doin' d' bes' I knows how; but she shorely is a time for every 'possum to learn to hang by his own tail.”
“What do you mean by 'abrogate?'” I was willing to be amused at the expense of the erroneous Jim.
“You don't tell me, Marse Major, that you-all don't know what 'abrogate' means?”
Jim imitated astonishment. “Why, a thing abrogates when it beds itse'f down—kind o' quiles itse'f up like a moccasin snake.”
It was impressive, the throng in the streets—a multitude hungry for office—a multitude it would ask a miracle to feed and fill. The whole country was come to town, the place blazed with Jackson badges, every face shone with victory. It was a pretorian band, and had borne its beloved captain into power on its shields. It was present now for jubilation and for spoil.
For myself, I surveyed the surging, shouting, unkempt thousands with disfavor; the General liked and applauded them.
“They are as rightfully here,” said he, “as the smuggest, slyest rascal of riches of them all. We are done with Adams and his Federal dogma, 'The best dressed citizen is the best citizen.' The day is the day of democracy.”
“And very well,” said I; “democracy is my creed, too. But may it not scrape its face with a razor? Would soap destroy it? I grow sick of a democracy which finds no outlet for expression save cowhide boots all mud, and standing on a damask chair in them.” The General snorted; next to his dead Saint Rachel, he loved the herd.
Noah, who was much in my company these days, gave one of his cynic shrugs.
“Major, doubtless you are a democrat,” observed Noah with a comic face. “But you have been too much solitary, and you've forgotten the tenets of our faith. You should recall yourself to that inscription on the cornerstone of our temple: 'The Mob giveth, the Mob taketh away, blessed be the name of the Mob.'”
The weather was fine, and clear as a bell in the sky; but the frost coming up from the ground made underfoot another sonnet altogether. With bright air, and sun shining, still the roads weltered mere swamps, and all so set and puddled of soft ooze they would have bogged a saddle blanket. Carriages were out of the possible; but, save for crowds on the sidewalks, folk a-foot did well enough.
The pretty Peg was each day to the Indian Queen to chat with us. I saw so much of her, she grew on me like a habit.
Eaton for the war desk was known now to all, and, verbally at least, acquiesced in. Noah's slicing work with his Spanish sword had been whispered industriously; scores went up to gaze on the broad blotches of dull red where the rogue Catron's blood had spread like paint; the arm wide open from wrist to should der-joint—a very gutter of a wound!—was dilated upon; and the result appeared in a wholesome caution on the conversational parts of our enemies. Noah was still in town; and no male at least came reckless enough to court the fate of Catron. Besides, the buzz and talk of a new administration scraping its feet at the door and lifting the latch of events would occupy the public mouth, and mention of Peg, whether for good or bad, was crowded out of it. The future would have been the better for peace had these conditions secured a longer maintenance.
Among others, that Reverend Doctor Ely, for whom the equally Reverend Campbell and the magpie one aforetime came upon the carpet, broke rapturously into town. I say “broke,” since as a term it may best depict the effusiveness of that descent upon the General. Twenty years before, this Ely had met the General; their acquaintance had been as attenuated as it might be and still bear up the name; and with that slender capital the hopeful Doctor was present to make the most it.
Surely, I met the reverend man. He was a bald, brisk, worldly personage, with a most noble appetite for the flesh-pots. He carefully sustained himself the hypocrite in that last behalf, however, and to folk casual he offered nothing beyond an appearance fervently religious. While with us, he held forth in sundry local pulpits, and although I heard him not myself, he was warmly eulogized by pious critics who knew what sermons should be.
The worthy Doctor with a view to Florida dangled about the General. The Reverend Campbell, and the magpie one, dangled about the worthy Doctor. They were made to see, with the very finish of it, however, that by no accident of concession would the General place their man, Westfall, in the van of Florida affairs to set up mimic thrones in the Governor's Palace of St. Augustine.
The news was a blow to them; and the urgent trio were no Stoics to be capable of excluding from their brows the chagrin they felt. They no longer harrassed the General, however, which, when now a score of duties pulled at him like horses, was no small desideratum.
Presumably as a last ditch wherein to perish, the Reverend Doctor Ely came to me. I was no favorite of his, nor he of mine. To me he was not a precious metal. Polished? yes—and yet only to remind one of brass. He was, as I have said, of fashionable model; fond of his burgundy, and his canvas-back; garbed fastidiously and in the mode; precisely that character the General so accurately read those years before when he suspected him as one less concerned for the fit of his conscience than the fit of his coat.
When the Reverend Doctor encountered me, I cut him short. To do this, let me tell you, I took my courage in my hands, for it is no child's play to thwart a dominie.
“You are one who holds fast for the doctrine of foreordination?” I asked this like a catechist at his questions.
“I am,” returned the Reverend Doctor.
“And you believe that many are called while few are chosen?”
“I do.”
“And in original sin; and infant damnation; and how hell is paved with children's skulls?”
“I do. To what, however, does this move?”
“And the love of gold to be the root of evil?” I went on, disregarding the question thrust at me; “and that it would be easier to pass a camel through the needle's eye than a rich man into heaven?”
“Sir, I insist on hearing the purpose of your surprising curiosity.”
“Why, then, it should all be huddled into this. Your Westfall, rich and sinful, by what you say may be presumed to dwell in multiplied peril of immortal shipwreck. And since such be your craft, and the trade you pick up bread by, would it not come more seemly for yourself, and be for this Westfall an effort more of grace, were you, instead of storming the General with pleas for a Governorship which might prove but a worm to gnaw him, to employ your self in bringing about the eternal safe advantage of his soul?”
The Reverend Doctor withdrew, his dander much on furious end, and shortly thereafter the tail of my eye caught a picture of him, as—heads close together—he conferred whisperingly with the Reverend Campbell in a corner of the longroom of the Indian Queen.
Since I could not think well, I was careful to think nothing at all of these reverend office seekers. In that latter I dropped into error; they were worthy serious respect. I should have borne it more upon my memory how easy comes destruction, and that he who is incapable of building one brick upon another may yet tear down the most stubborn best masonry of man. I should have kept before me those powers for ill which arm the meanest, and not have forgotten how the veriest vermin of a rat might gnaw the canvas of a Rubens.
Remembering those ignoble ones that evening, I foolishly burst into disparagement of the clergy as a class. The General was smart for defence.
“Humbug!” quoth the General. “Because you have seen the inside of two, you would have it you know them all. It were as wise if you declared Washington to be a traitor for that Arnold would have sold West Point. Every tub, even a pulpit tub, must stand upon its own bottom.”
I have told how dumb and dead lay vilification on the masculine lip, and that no man so much as breathed against the fame of Peg. There was notice on its way to show the women were unquelled.
It was the day before the General's inauguration, and he over ears with his address, reading and re-reading it, so as to give the periods a best volume and voice, and endow them with that strutting majesty of utterance his vanity conceived belonged in justice to their merit. He would be by himself while thus rehearsing, for he took shame to vapor up and down, and toss about before me, and swore that my presence, glowering from a chair, would have daunted Cicero. I was glad enough to leave him to himself, it being but poor sport to play at audience for a bad orator; moreover, since the speech was written in my Nashville home and wrangled over, as it proceeded, by the General and myself like dogs over a bone, it would come to me as nothing new. And so the General was left to plod about in his paragraphs much like a cow in a morass, difficult and slow, and sinking to the hocks with every step. I could catch the humming roar of him in my parlor, while he swaggered about his rooms, singing out shrill and high in declamation, and reveling in the figure he would cut.
While I was idly turning this weakness of the General to think himself a Patrick Henry, when he had no more of eloquence or music than any midnight owl, a nervous tap came on my panels. I was instantly on my feet; the tap quite drove the General and his rhetoric out of my head. By some instinct, or, mayhap, the tap itself was marked of agitation, I not only recognized it for Peg, but knew she was in grief. I threw open the door.
Peg stepped in; she was white to the lips; and this paleness of ivory showed the more on her because of the great dark eyes and those midnight shadows to dwell within her hair. Save for this pallor, however, she seemed steady as a rock.
It was on the outside, though, for no sooner was I seated again than she drifted down before my feet on the floor, and, with her head on my knee, broke into a passion of sobbing. I let my hand, for sympathy, rest a moment on her poor head, and when I thought she would have cried enough, lifted her up and placed her in a chair.
“What is it?” I said. “I thought I was to see no more tears from you.” This I threw off in half sprightly tones to rally Peg.
“Nor shall you,” cried she, “but I was fair spent and beaten for want of a good cry. And you should know”—she was giving me a trace of brightness now—“that crying is so much like conversation, to cry alone is like talking to one's self. I can not go to my husband; and the General, good and kind, is with it all too old and too great, and, therefore, too much out of my reach. I've just you; and that's how rich I am for confidants. I've not a woman to be friend to me in all the world; nor would I trust her if I had. I've just you; and so you are like to see a deal of worry.”
“All that is mighty sweet,” I returned, “and every word a flower. And yet, what is the wrong?”
“And simply nothing, after all,” she replied. “Only it's so much more horrible to see it with your eyes than hear it with your ears.” Peg put a note into my hands. “It came through the post; and doubtless means no more than the malevolence which was author to it.”
The note had no name; nothing to indicate its parentage. It read:
“Revenge is sweet! I have you in my power; and I shall burn you as savages burn their victim at the stake. I pray that you live long to extend my pleasure. Think not that you can escape me. I would not that death nor any evil thing should take you out of my hand for half the world.”
“The nameless devil!” I cried. “It is a woman's hand of writ, though the letters are made purposely big and sprawling. Have you any thought at who she should be?”
“No,” returned Peg; “I can not so much as guess.”
Peg and I talked the question up and down, I asking and she answering, and with the end we were where we started, that was nowhere at all. The Reverend Campbell came into my conjecturings, he and his magpie mate; but I did not mention them, for what would have been the use of feathering Peg's imagination with a surmise?
“But, in good truth, I came to you,” said Peg at the end, “not for any hope of solving this. That would be frankly impossible. Rather I am here to get a drink of your courage; for, faith! though I wear as brave a face as I may, my own betimes runs something low. And now,”—Peg stood up and gave me her dainty hand, mimicking the manner of a man—“and now, my big comrade, having had my cry, and got my draught of courage, I shall go back to the President's Square; and there I shall forget the whole story of this miserable letter. That is”—she had gone into the hall and was closing the door now, with only a strip of her sweet face looking in to me—“forget all except how I cried at your knee and was very, very happy because you were good and kind and—let me cry.”
When the door was shut, I picked up the note which Peg had left and placed it in the private locker of my desk. Then I sate me down and thought revengefully on Peg's wrongs, and the hatefulness of him who should think her harm. But her dark, deep eyes were forever coming in to look on me, and at the last I had a memory for nothing but her beauty; and, elaborating thereon, I considered how beauty was in itself a benediction implied of Providence, and a sermon; and then I got to reading Burns; and I confess—however often I had spoken of them as so much sweetened oatmeal—there arose in me a delight from those verses as though they were the songs of birds. And throughout the whole, from Peg's crying at my feet until I'd put Burns away in his place, the drone of the General, thundering on tariff, and finance, and standing armies, and sinking funds, was in the air; and all futile, so I thought, and dreary and workaday and commonplace.
Somehow, for all of Burns and my meditations, after Peg had left me, my heart felt poor and robbed. Also, I turned less and less patient with the General, humming at his coming speech like a great bee in a bottle. At last I went in to him and gave him my tart opinion of his doings, for all the world like an actor with a part to study, or some girl primping and preparing for conquest before a glass.
“Have you so forgotten English,” I cried, “that you can not tell your views to the people without first telling and re-telling them a score of times to yourself?”
But the General was in a high mood and no more to be dealt with than a tempest.
“Take your irritation out for a walk, sir,” said he. “Take a walk for your nerves. Something has combed your fur wrong-wise; and I don't think it could have been politics. You prodigiously remind me of one in love, and who has ear-patience for naught save the voice of his mistress.”
Out to walk I went; I did not think the General worth a retort. You are not, however, to follow his hint, and lose and leave the plain footprints of the fact. I was no more in love with Peg than was he; I examined myself on that head and made myself particularly clear. Like all men who are physically big and strong, and, moreover, like all men border-born and taught that duty from the ground up of protecting ones weaker than themselves, particularly women-folk and babes, I went as naturally to Peg's side in her troubles as ever went deer to drink. It was in my nature and my lesson to do this. Sympathy is a plant to grow most quickly on roughest soil; and folk of my shag-bark sort are ever soonest on the ground, and stay the longest, when the cause is the weeping cause of woman.
And there you have the explanation of my interest for Peg. The General, himself, was just as headlong; his sympathies fair went about on tiptoe in a constant search for weak ones in distress. Not humanity alone, but animals; and I've seen him go forth into midnight sleet and ice—and Death tearing at his lungs with a cough—to bring in a bleating lamb. It was, then, but partisan sympathy, and not love in the bud, which I felt for Peg; and I turned much fortified and quieter in my own thoughts, when, following a rigid search of my breast, I made it out.
Noah, whom I ran across in the corridor, went with me for the walk. We broke away northward across the city to be free of the crowds which came and went about Gadsby's and the Indian Queen. When we were more alone and with the roads to ourselves, I told Noah of the nameless letter to Peg.
“And that is a fine feather in the cap of Henry Clay,” I cried; “this employment of nameless villains to write threats to a girl!”
“Now let me set you straight,” said Noah. “I've gone to the ends of this foul work. It is not the Clay so much as the Calhoun interest which furnishes the venom. The General is turned round; he believes it to be Clay. I assure you, the enemy is a Calhoun coterie from South Carolina.”
“But what is their purpose?” I asked. “Calhoun is Vice-President; he will preside over the Senate and be part of the administration. Why should he seek to mar it?”
“Mark you, I do not say,” replied Noah, “that Calhoun, personally, so much as hears of these wrongs done in his name. Your friends will sometimes go farther in your cause than you will go for yourself. Let me briefly tell you what I know. Calhoun would succeed the General for the Presidency. He spins a web as fine as any spun of spiders. So curiously has he brought his forces to bear, that of the six he will own three of the General's cabinet—Berrien, Branch, and Ingham. He wanted the war office, and was craftily urging Hayne, of his own state, when the General unconsciously brushed his plan aside with Eaton. Now the Calhoun thought is to drive Eaton from the place; and to mock at Mrs. Eaton and stain her with slanders is the Palmetto idea of a method. The more cruel it is, the more likely to succeed; and the latter condones the ignobility. These folk play for a White House; and the greater the stake the less of scruple on the part of the players. Remember, too, these children of evil have just begun; the attacks, as they proceed, will mobilize a force. The women will be brought to their aid. We gagged the men's mouths with a duel; but who is to gag the women's, and how will he go upon the work?”
This news about Calhoun was nothing by way of surprise. I knew him to be as ambitious as Lucifer; more, I was aware of him for no friend of the General; I had learned that much two years before.
While it was within my knowledge, this enmity, I had not set it forth to the General; the truth of it would have done him no good, and gotten in the way. It would have served only to fire his wrath, and he was one most unmanageable when angry.
Wherefore throughout the campaign, while the General and Calhoun were running mates, I said no word of the latter's secret feeling of envious jealousy and hate, and the General went to the election in the dark, believing the Vice-President to be among his staunchest friends. Thinking now of Peg, I began to glimpse a day when the Calhoun rancors would be worth the General's knowledge.
“Assuming that Calhoun languishes to be President,” said I, “and intrigues for that object, what do you say to the radical sort of his States Rights position—going in for the right to nullify a general law, and secede at will from the national circle, and all that? Would you call Calhoun either politic or right to occupy those positions?
“And now for the 'politic and right,'” responded Noah, “Calhoun must go with the current. A statesman is a scientist of circumstances; he must not fight wind and tide, but use them. In South Carolina, Nullification and Secession are doctrines of a first respectability. One meets folk daily who would sooner be respectable than right; and Calhoun may well be one of these. No,” observed Noah in conclusion, speaking with emphasis, “Calhoun must adopt his state, or his state will not adopt him. He can not build himself for anything without his state; that is the keystone, wanting which his arch of the future comes tumbling to the ground.”
“Then you regard Calhoun as helpless, and that he could not, if he would, rescue himself on a question of Nullification or Secession?”
“No; he's as helpless as a fly in amber; he must go with his state or be lost.”
“Do these proposals of a right to nullify and a right to secede, then, strike so deep with their roots? I had not thought men cared so much for tariff.”
“Sir,” replied Noah, “while present States Rights discussion circles about tariff as argument most convenient, behind it, and as the grand motive, lurks black slavery. A protest against tariff links many rich merchants, not alone in Charleston, but in every great seaboard city from Baltimore to Boston, to this doctrine. They would bring in goods free. There be many among these, tugged upon by their pockets, who can be brought to States Rights for a tariff argument, and who would turn off in horror were the true black slavery reason advanced. There you have the cunning of Calhoun.”
“Then you hold slavery to be the mainspring of States Rights as a movement?”
“Absolutely,” and Noah's tones left no doubt of his conviction. “Slavery overshadows all. It is a question to yet shake the country in its soul.”
There was silence between us; we walked on, I, for my side, ruminating the words of Noah. The more I considered them, the more they looked the truth. Calhoun's enmity I made no mouth about believing; indeed, as I've set forth, it already had dwelt in my knowledge for long.
Getting back to what was presently being acted, I spoke of that cabinet trio whom my companion had marked as of the clan and same family of politics with Calhoun.
“Branch, Berrien, and Ingham,” repeated Noah, “are blood and bone with Calhoun. If they drive out Eaton, there may come a fourth to strengthen them. Four of a cabinet six! That would make a mighty beginning in any hunting of the White House.”
“And what,” said I, remembering Peg, and my rage swelling, “what are we to think of ones who would hunt a White House across the naked honor of a woman?”
“What we are to think,” said Noah, with a toss of the hand, “will be the least of their worry when once they succeed.”
“And that will never happen,” I returned. “I hold it between my palms to defeat their best laid plan—their most darling chicane, as you shall witness.”
“And so I hope,” said he. “Also, now you know as much as I, it is left with you to warn the General and make bare to him Calhoun. You are the right one to speak with him on that skittish topic.”
Inauguration as a ceremony came and departed, and I looked on the going thereof as its most superlative feature. There were twenty thousand people to hear the General's address; and when he advanced to the platform reared for him on the eastern front of the Capitol, the multitude doffed hats and stood a most remarkable spectacle, the like of which I'd never gazed on.
But the later horde in the White House defies expression! It was simple loot and pillage, wanting bloodshed, and nothing carried away. The cowhide throng, mud and mire to the boot-ears, climbed on sofas and stood on chairs; they would catch a glimpse of their god at whatever damask cost. When punch would have been brought for their entertainment, they rushed upon the servants like red barbarians, struggling, wrestling, the pails spilled out upon the floors. It was I who settled the disorder, and I claim credit as for a stratagem which on other fields might have saved a battle. I caused the drinkables to be quietly withdrawn to the lawn, beyond the first hill and far to the south. Then from a corner of the East Room I announced the fact with a loud voice.
It was as though my words bore a charm; in a twinkling the White House proper approached desertion. Folk decent and civilized might again move about, and quiet ones have peace. The mob never came back, for I made it my duty that no lack of punch should occur on the lawn; there the uproarious remained and drank, and at last—those who could walk—they drifted away, each deviously to his habitat, and something akin to quiet settled again about the eaves and rafters of the mansion.
The General put in most of the next day on a lounge, in nurse to Augustus, recovering from the ordeal. It all but swept his life away as in a freshet. However, he pulled through; and when in the evening I went to ask about his condition, I found him with that little miniature of his wife I've spoken of, and her hymn-book, wherewith he made his daily church and said his prayers. What a soul would have been his for cross-handles and chain-mail!—what a knight! so dauntless among men, and withal so loyal with all his love to the dear lady of his heart. She might die to others, but she would never die to him. His love would each night search her out among the stars.
And now we settled down to our strange life. But since I use the word, let me tell you in how short a period the strange becomes the common; for I had not been a week in the White House, and in and out of its great rooms, when all was as familiar and friendly to me as though I had passed my days from boyhood within the four walls of it.
The General's family, beyond himself and me, was made up of his nephew Donalson, the latter's wife, and the portrait-maker, Earl; not an extensive circle, truly, and one to be soon contracted by the desertion of two, as you shall presently hear.
We were still in process of that mild wrangle with our new abode which must ever precede a last adjustment, when, like a clap of thunder from a sky without a cloud, the General's niece—she who was our Lady of the White House—came upon him. There lowered something formidable and gloomy in the mien of the young woman as she entered the room, and because no towering force of character had distinguished her theretofore, this cloudy something was the more to be observed. I should have said, too, the social lines were already being set for and against our pretty Peg, and this visit of the General's niece was somewhat in the nature of a blow from the enemy's side.
“What is it, my dear?” asked the General, glancing up from his conversation with me.
“Uncle,” she said, much in the manner of a starling which whistles a tune that has been taught it, “Uncle, I am here to tell you that I can not call upon Mrs. Eaton. I will receive her, since this is your house, and you its master. But call on her in return, I can not.”
“Hoity toity!” quoth the General, “and now where did you learn these bad manners?'
“It is my duty to myself, Uncle; there is not a lady in Washington, beginning with Mrs. Calhoun and going down to the least among us, who will call on Mrs. Eaton; therefore, I can not call on her.”
“Then you might better go back to Tennessee, my dear,” said the General.
And the niece and her husband went.
The word “Calhoun,” had not, however, escaped the General. It was forever cropping up in manner and form most sinister, that word Calhoun; and in the entire crusade of venom waged upon our Peg, it seemed on the lips of everyone with whom the exigencies of the hour threw us into speech, from the immortal Pigeon-breast to the General's very niece.
“The Calhoun interest,” remarked the General, when his young relative had retired in wrath to pack her trunks, “would appear to be headquarters for the foe.”
The General said “foe” and meant it; for he was one whose eyes were in his heart and saw ever his enemy in the enemy of his friend.
It was then I took occasion to lay out to the General in particular, not alone the plan of Calhoun to seize a presidency; not alone his leadership in that war of politics then mustering forces over Nullification and a state's right to secede, and which in the next Congress gave birth to the debates between Webster and Hayne; but I went a step beyond, and exhibited the hidden enmity of Calhoun which was leveled at himself, and had hunted his destruction as far away as the Seminole campaign, when Calhoun was in Monroe's cabinet as Secretary of War.
“It is true,” I declared; “at that time your only friend was Monroe. Calhoun in the secret councils of the cabinet was warm to break your sword.”
“How do you know that?” demanded the General, his eye making for heat.
“I read it in a letter from Governor Forsythe to Colonel Hamilton. If that be not enough, I heard it from ex-President Monroe himself, when last evening he was with us here to dinner. Moreover, I was made aware of it two years ago on my trip to the Mississippi.”
“And why did I not hear of it before?”
“You have learned it in ample time for every interest you carry, whether of your own or Peg's.”
“That is true,” said the General, “that is quite true.” Then he mused with bended brow. At last he burst forth: “I begin to see into the Calhoun thoughts. He knows my rule, which we agreed on before we left Nashville, that no member of my cabinet shall succeed me. That leaves him but two rivals, Clay and Adams, for Crawford can never run again. He has three adherents in my cabinet through whose aid he hopes to feather the nest of his ambitions with patronage. He would destroy Eaton with the thought of gaining a fourth. Meanwhile he will preside over the Senate, and control legislation in favor of low tariff, if not a flat level of free trade. Thus he trusts to break down Clay and Adams, who are wedded to protection. Verily, a most noble, a most delicate bit of chicane!” Here the General brooded for a long space. “I might admire it,” he went on, “nay, I might even aid it on its high-stepping way, were it not that he includes in his intrigue the destruction of a girl. It is like a play, Major, and we must foil the villain and save our beautiful Peg. Her name shall not be blown upon, though all the presidencies for ten centuries to come depend upon it! Peg came spotless among us; and from among us, spotless she shall depart; and that in the teeth of all the Calhouns that ever came out of Carolina.”
The General smashed his clay pipe at this crisis, and by that token I knew the thing to be already done. It was a way he had, this pipe-breaking, of signing his bonds.
Peg lived catty-cornered across the President's Square, and ran in and out of the White House like one of the inmates. She liked the flowers, and she liked the pictures, and was never tired of gazing at the latter and smelling to the former. She was so much sunshine about the mansion, not the lightest nor yet the least gloomy house in nature, but quite the contrary.
One day a little scene occurred about which nothing of import clambered, and yet I would give it here; for it pleases me when now I'm fallen in the vale of years, and the General and Peg and those others who were my friends are dead and gone from out my hands, to remember such frail matters for their sweetness rather than their consequence; and truth to say, they stay by me, too, with gentle clearness when events that were of moment are clean faded from my mind.
Peg, then, was dragging me about by the hand—for she was as much the romp as any child—and we journeyed from room to room, and from picture to picture. We were standing in front of that portrait of Washington which Dolly Madison once slashed from its frame to save from vandal British.
“Come,” said Peg, tugging at my wrist with the two hands of her, “I'm weary of these. Doubtless he was a wondrous fine gentleman”—pointing to the painted figure of our first president—“and lived well aware of it, himself, as one may know by the satisfied smirk of him. But show me some other picture, one more beautiful and less grand—and not so satisfied with itself, and respectable. All the folk I hate are respectable, and I begin to loathe the word!”
“I can show you the most beautiful picture in the world,” I retorted; and, whirling her by the shoulders, I stood her before a mirror.
Peg looked upon her kindly reflection for long in silence; then her eyes filled up.
“It isn't your compliments I cry for,” said Peg, breaking into a catchy laugh; “but your tone is so queer with the sheer kindness of it, that I am taken by the heart. You dear, true friend; you at least think good of little Peg!” And with that, she came quite close, and turned her face in wistful yet trusting fashion up to mine.
An hour later—and it was growth of this—I did a foolish action; and yet no harm turned of it, but only a better friendship between myself and the coxcomb Pigeon-breast. It fell forth when Peg was gone home, and I alone near the north door of the big East Room, and none save myself in the broad expanse of that mighty apartment. My soul was somewhat in arms over Peg, for the wintry moan in her tones when she spoke of my faith in her goodness was still working on me, and I would have bartered ten years of my life to have had set before me some specific male of my species who should avow himself Peg's evil-thinker. My vengeance was starving and wolfish, and I would have fed it with him.
While in this vein of fret and tumult, I caught the voice of Jim in the hallway outside the door.
“Do I know d'Marse Major?” I heard Jim say, apparently in answer to the question; “does Jim know d'Marse Major? Well, Jim should say likely; for, you hyar me! Jim's been all through him with a lantern. You-all may tell them gambler-gentlemen somethin' new about a ace of clubs; an 'mebby you could post Jim of somethin' he aint heerd about corn whiskey; but I don't allow thar's anythin' mo' for Jim to learn about d'Marse Major. 'Cause why; 'cause he's Jim's Marse Major, an' I jes' nacherally raise him, I does, from a colt.”
When I stepped into the vestibule to answer to my own name, and put a stop to the extravagances of Jim, I saw, to my astonishment, that the caller was no less a personage than Pigeon-breast. Without pausing to hear his mission, I took him by the arm and led him out upon the lawn.
Once there, however, I was sore put to it to show reason for my conduct, of the rather extraordinary character of which one caught some glint in the expression of amazement that made wide the eyes of Pigeon-breast and all but set his mouth ajar.
Now the truth was, that anonymous letter to Peg, and which lay safe locked in my desk, had ever stuck in my craw. I said it was a woman's hand of writing, but I was by no means sure. Knowing hardly a baker's dozen of folk in town, there were not many for my thoughts to run upon in this scurvy business; and I had had it now and then on my mind—the more since Pigeon-breast had broken into the trouble at an early hour as the open ill-wisher of Peg—to call this fine gentleman's attention to the missive with a view to asking him was he its architect. In my present frame of hunger to lay hands on a flesh and blood enemy of Peg's—one of my own rude sex—and I suppose because Pigeon-breast was a foppish creature of scents and ribbons who might lean to feminine methods of attack, I put the question to him. Fairly, I blurted it out, and I fear with nothing of fineness or diplomacy.
“Me?” cried the outraged Pigeon-breast in a shrill treble through a sense of injustice; “me?” he cried again, starting back a pace, perhaps from savageries which looked out upon him from my eye, “never! On my soul! to think of such a thing! Me write an anonymous letter! Why, sir,” and poor Pigeon-breast chirped forth the words like a mouse that has been wronged, “why, sir, should a man say so, I'd have him to the field, sir, and cut his throat.”
There was no doubt of it; the insulted Pigeon-breast was not the author of that letter. No man might simulate his indignant excitement. I made amends handsomely, and for the first time Pigeon-breast and I shook hands. There was no harm in the creature save that he was a bandbox fool.
It ran well towards evening when I went about in the conservatory culling a basket of flowers for Peg. This I was wont to do each day, since the blossoms went otherwise to waste; for the place was a mere lair and nest of masculinity, with the General's niece gone home, and none about save the General and myself—and I might add Earl, but he had no wit save for canvas and colors, and no thought except from morning till night to paint the General's portrait. The General and I were no mighty consumers of nosegays; wherefore, as I've said, and to save the flowers from loss, I was used each day to cut an armful of the best and bravest and send them across to Peg's, where they would give her smile for smile and dare their beauties against her own from every corner.
While I was roving right and left among the blossoms, the General came in with long strides. There was a kind of angry hurry to him, and he carried a letter in his hand.
“Here is something to make you curse your kind,” cried he. Then, seeing my flowers: “How now! how now! and when was Mars a gardener and has the world turned girl! These should be thin days and bloodless, when the starkest saber that ever rode on my bridle hand—he whom the Creeks called the 'Big Death'—loiters with woman's wares and learns to twine a posy.”
“They are for Peg,” said I, more nettled than I showed, for it struck me he talked a deal about nothing at all.
“Oh, they are for Peg,” he repeated, his glance whimsical, yet narrow and intent; “they are for Peg!” Then just as I was warming to the brink of knowing what he would mean by that, he harked back suddenly to the letter in his clutch. “Come with me. Here is a word from that very Reverend Doctor Ely about your Peg, and we must concert steps to prove him the false defamer that he is.”
CHAPTER VII—THE SECRETARY, SUAVE AS CREAM.
And now there comes beneath my hand the hard portion of this history, the part which I most mislike and bear with least of patience. It is the record written by the smug, false Doctor Ely to the General, wherein with a particular past bearing, he piled up his scarlet charges. There came a dozen counts, and as if it were an indictment; and in them no slackness, but, instead, an evil confidence of statement plain and clear, as one after another he cast those stones at Peg. Nor shall his communication be set forth; I would not so offend against the whiteness of Peg's name, nor yet harass my own soul's roots by giving a line of it to types and presses. The more, since it was all a web of lies which sly rogues wove for the shallow hand of this Ely; and not enough of truth in it from top to bottom as should serve to make it respectable falsehood. Sufficient that there were stories with Washington and again New York as the theatres, and on these was based a brazen demand that Eaton be dismissed the cabinet and Peg whipped from among women wherever virtue had a name.
As the General read these things aloud I sat biting my nail in the flaming impatience of my rage.
“And now what think you?” said he, when he was done.
“I think,” cried I, “that I shall ride at once for the caitiff ears of him.”
The General, seeing my anger, turned to be mighty calm. It was a manner of ours that when I was for a rage he would go the other way; I, on my side and by way of requital, showed never so busy about methods for peace as when the General was for sounding Boots and Saddles. So, beholding me eating my fingers in a sort of blood-eagerness to come at the throat of that Ely, the General would be for craft; and to demand proof; and to go upon a litigation of the business among ourselves.
“And now you know,” said the General, with a bitterness in his mouth like aloes, “why I fear preachers and your peace folk. Here is a false tissue against a girl as white as an angel.”
“My soul for that!” I interjected.
“No one not of the cloth, and saved from men's vengeance by his coat and ruffle, would so dare. But now this Ely throws these lies in our laps, and we must sit tied.”
“Yes,” I cried, “I see your meaning right well, and I would give my left hand at the wrist joint could any gate be opened through which in honor I might win to the miscreant's heart.” Now the General read the letter to himself; now he knitted his forehead into a snarl and brooded while over against him I sat fury-stung.
“Two matters we are to agree on,” said the General at last. “We are not to tell Peg.”
“No,” said I.
“Nor Eaton.”
Now, somehow, I in no fashion, not even the most shadowy, had had Eaton on my slope of thought. It had seemed, in the confusion of wrath into which this charge laid on poor Peg had stirred me, as though there were just three folk in interest for our own side, being the General and Peg and myself. The mention of Eaton struck on me in a strange, blistering way, and was as much an iron in my soul as the slanders of that infamous Ely himself. This came to be no more than a blur of my wits, however it departed in a blink, and then a feeling somewhat of pleasure succeeded to think Eaton would not be engaged in Peg's defence.
“Peg shall not know,” repeated the General, as he who goes over a manouvre in his mind, “Eaton shall not know. You and I will be enough; and Noah; and mayhap Henry Lee, since I think, Major, you are not the man to be trusted with a reply. You—like myself.—would overflow too much, since you own a feeling too deep.”
There was sense in what the General advanced; I was in an ill frame for cunning, and to be cool of quill with any specious or refutatory letter-writing. I could have indited nothing that would not run into a challenge with the first line; and, with the pulpit character of the foe to be our answer, that would have been as so much raving madness.
“Let us” said the General, again taking up the scrawl, “examine this precious scorpion's nest in detail, and then we may know best how it should be torn to pieces. This Ely does not make these charges by his own knowledge, but declares how he believes in their truth on the word of some 'extremely honest individual' of this town. This person would be so much the viper he must needs hide and crawl under cover; for this Ely also says 'who asks his name withheld.'”
By this time I had myself in recovery and began to take a part in the thinking.
“First, then,” said I, “is there any accusation carried which you, yourself, should contradict?”
“There are two,” returned the General. “This Ely has it that my dear wife knew Peg's bad conduct and condemned her for it. That is false; my wife spoke of Peg within a six-month; she loved her like her own child; and, I well recall, she kissed Peg when last we left this place. Then, too, Ely asserts how Timberlake was jealous of Eaton before he sailed for the Mediterranean, hated him as Peg's tempter, and would have slain him. That, also, I should know to be a lie; for here,” and the General crossed to a shelf and took down a rich Turkish tobacco pouch, “is a tobacco pocket which Timberlake sent to Eaton with a letter asking him to give it me when I arrived; and the letter bore date not ten days before Timberlake died. There remain but two great delinquencies alleged; the one here and the other in New York; and both are capable of proof for either their truth or falsity.”
“And how shall we go about that proof?” I asked.
“As a primary step, then, let us have Noah with us.”
Noah came, and the General put the Ely letter into his dark, nervous hands.
“The gentleman seems marvelously prompt,” said Noah, “to decide a woman's fame away on barest hearsay. Doubtless he is a good Christian, but he would make a bad judge.”
“This is what you will do, Noah, if you love me,” said the General: “Go to Philadelphia. Squeeze from this Ely the name of that reptile on whose word he starts about this crime against innocence. Then press to New York for the evidence needed to display the falsehood he tells concerning Peg in that place.”
When Noah had gone forth, the General called in Henry Lee, who was a secret, truthworthy man, and, dictating while Lee did the pen work, proceeded to beat the Reverend Ely and his lies as folk beat carpets. The General, when it was done, dismissing Lee, read to me his answer; and I could not so much as add one word. It was as complete a retort, and withal as slashing an arraignment of this Ely for his own cruel part, as might be compassed with paper and ink. I listened; and I never loved the General half so well before.
“And yet,” observed the General, when he had closed the reading and the letter lay ready for the post, “this Ely is but the mask for some rogue who hides behind him.”
There was no more to do now, save wait for Noah's return. I had one ordeal of the spirit, however; that was when Peg came next day. I so yearned over her in pity, it marked itself in my face and she took some dim account of it. She went away wrong in her hunting for a cause, however.
“What has been the mischance?” said Peg, getting up and standing behind my chair with a soft hand on each of my shoulders. “You've had poor news from your farms?”
“A horse dead,” I replied. This was so far true as a word that the letter telling me thereof had but just arrived, and lay open on my table. “Only that a favorite horse has died,” I replied. “But he was one of the General's Truxton colts, and I but loth to lose him.”
It was a soon day thereafter, and we yet waiting for word of Noah, when the General re-opened the affair of the Ely letter.
“The man Ely,” said he, thoughtfully, “has been practiced upon. The Calhoun interest it was which stirred him to this. He would be clay easily moulded for such a purpose, and peculiarly when the potters employed upon him might promise somewhat for his ambition. As against Eaton and Peg, the fellow would needs lack personal motive, since he knows them not at all. He might find in his bosom, truly, a part willingness to disturb me, because I broke the heart of his hope for a Florida exaltation. Yet even with that to train his malignancy upon the Eatons, it is clear he must be loaded, primed, and aimed by other hands. Thus do I make the story of it: if Clay be out, as you declare, who is there save Calhoun to put this Ely forward? Then, too, there is the coincidence of method. Ely does there what the Calhoun folk do here.”
“Still,” I returned, for I believed in justice though to an enemy, and would not condemn the Vice-President without some open sureness of proof; “still, as Noah explained, these villainies might find act and parcel in Calhoun's interests, and that gentleman be as innocent of personal part as next year's babes.”
“Be that as it may,” retorted the General, “a man is responsible for his dogs. Besides, it is too much to believe that Calhoun has no notice of this war on the Eatons.”
“Oh, as to that,” I replied, “I think there is scant doubt. An important movement in his destinies is not to continue for long in the dark, to a keen sight like Calhoun's. However, he might miss details.”
“He knows of these tales against Peg,” declared the General firmly, and as though the question were solved and settled. “Also, by lifting his finger he could end them in the mouths that give them words. When one can do a thing and doesn't do it, that is because one doesn't want to do it, but prefers things as they are. And there you have it. In the mean courses against Peg your Vice-President is accessory. By the Eternal!” swore the General abruptly, beginning to walk about the floor, “but such perfidy makes me to loathe the man! I should hate all that comes from him, whether of policy or plan. For where a source is foul, the stream will be unclean.”
There was now to enter upon the stage one who wrought strongly for Peg's defence. But he toiled better for himself, for at last he took the White House by it; the General in a gust of kindness for what he did in Peg's pure favor making him his heir of politics and laying the presidency in his hands with the death of his own second term. This personage, to be so much the ally of Peg, and so fortunate for his own future, was none other than that Van Buren who resigned his Governorship and traveled the long way from Albany to become the General's Secretary of State.
Heretofore I've made suggestion that the General's knowledge of Van Buren was nothing deep, but only narrow and of a surface sort. More; the truth was that now when the General stood in the midst of this Eaton trouble and saw a long strife ahead, he was by no sense secure for the coming attitude of his premier, and went doubt-pricked as to whether or no it would turn to be a friendly one. I could discern some feather of these misgivings when one evening over our pipes we dwelt on Marcy and Van Buren, these two being topmost spirits of our party in their state.
Marcy was a bold man, and strong with a burly force; as frank and without fear too, as a soldier, and less the hypocrite than any of his day. He had yet to say, from his seat in the Senate, “The politicians of my state wear no masks of superior goodness and make no pretences. They are content to preach what they practice. If they be defeated, they expect to step down and out; if they triumph, they look to enjoy the fruits of their victory. They see no harm in the aphorism, 'To the victor belongs the spoil of the enemy.'” Marcy, I say, had not yet uttered these words in the Senate; but they dwelt with him as a sentiment; he had given them expression in Duff Green's paper; and, since the General said nothing in negation, they were held to declare the feelings of the administration.
Before this, I have written somewhere, have I not?—for old age can not hold a memory, nor tell a lucid story step by step, but forever must wander to the garrulous this-side-or-that, with topics alien to the task in hand—how I caught some flash of the General's uncertainty of Van Buren and the pose that gentleman would take on? It fell in this kind. I had asked then a question about Van Buren, and how he compared with his fellow captain, Marcy. The General shook uncertain head.
“Van Buren may surprise us,” said he, “and show me wrong besides; but this is what I think. You are to bear in mind, also, that his selection to be at my cabinet right hand was not personal but political. Here is how I hold him.” Now the General spoke with a thoughtful, measured flow of speech, as though his eye were turned to introspection, and he read, as one reads a page of print, his estimate of him whom he sought to weigh. “Van Buren is essentially furtive, lurking, cat-like. He delights in moonlight politics and follows the byways. He avoids the eye, is seldom in the show ring, and, in making his excursions, sticks to the lanes and keeps off the highways. Few men see, and fewer know, Van Buren. He is sly rather than bold; chicanes rather than assails; and when attacked he does not fight in that strifish sense of hard knocks. He poisons the springs and streams and standing water; and then he falls back into the hills. Van Buren does with snares what others do by blows; traps while others hunt. And yet, in a feline way, he likes trouble. Set out a bowl of milk and a bowl of blood, and turn your back. If sure of unobservation, he will lap the blood. But if you stare at him, he dissembles with the milk, purring with fervor sedulous. Ever secret, Van Buren knows of no harder fate than mere discovery. His points of power are his egotism, his skill for sly effort, his talent as a trader of politics. Marcy is of another sort. Marcy is vigorous where Van Buren is fine. If a band of music were to go by, Marcy would regard the bass drum as the great instrument. Van Buren would prefer the piccolo. Marcy does his war work with an axe. When any homicide of politics enforces itself upon Van Buren he moves with sack and bowstring. He waits until midnight, and then, with victim gagged and bagged and bound, drowns him in the Bosphorus of party.”
Even as the General spoke, Van Buren was trudging up the street; for it would appear that he had come into town the hour before, and now made speed to pay his respects to the General.
While Van Buren was in talk with the General, our first greetings being done, I strove to come by some true account of one who was like to make for much weight in the scales. He was round, short, and by no means superb or imposing. Standing between the General and myself, and both of us above six feet, he seemed something stunted. There was a quiet twinkle in his gray, intelligent eye that he drew from his tavern-keeping sire of Kinderhook; the latter being of shrewd Dutch stock, born to count pennies and to save them, and whose profits with his inn found partial coinage in an education above bottles and taprooms for his son. There hovered an oily peace about Van Buren; it showed on him like painted color. I was not tremendously impressed of him, I grant you; albeit, before all was done, I came to better learn him. The man, for a best simile, was like so much quicksilver. Bright and of surprising weight, he rolled away from a touch and never failed to fit himself scrupulously and plausibly into every inequality which the surface he rested on presented. He came to be, as you may think, precisely the man for the General; since, while the one was as apt for heat as Sahara, and as much the home of hurricanes, the other under no stress was ever known to give or take offence. He would be without quills, this Van Buren, and yet no porcupine in his rattling armor went about more perfect to his own defence or so equal for the problem of his own security.
Van Buren made no lengthy stay with us; there was a hand-shake, a talk of a moment, a bow, and he was back to his quarters in the Indian Queen.
“And what do you say of him?” asked the General, when now his new secretary was gone.
“Why, sir,” I replied, “I should call your story of the man a good one. But he does not look so strong as you would make him.”
“Why, then,” returned the General, “neither does any other thing of silk.” Then, after a pause: “Just as an insinuation is stronger than a direct charge, so is Van Buren stronger than other men. I warrant you, as we stand here with all our wisdom, he holds our measures more nearly than we hold his.”
The General, you are to observe, and whether early or late, never said a word to Van Buren of Peg and the villain forays against her fame; the General was too proud for that. The defence of Peg seemed a thing personal to his heart; with him it owned no place in politics or the business of the state. Therefore, he would ask no man's aid, and folk on that quarrel might be neutral or pick their sides and go what ways they would.
The General, I say, beheld nothing of politics in the question of his defence of Peg; it was wholly the thing personal. He never realized, what is clear to you and me, that everything was the thing personal with him, and politics a thing most personal of all. Even now, since he had found the Palmetto coterie to be among his enemies, and within short weeks of the birth of his first rancor against Calhoun as one who had sought to do him hidden harm while apeing friendship and aiming at his betrayal with a kiss, he had commenced to nourish a steady wrath against that statesman's policies of Secession and States Rights. This latter he was cultivating and feeding in all possible fashion.
One day I came upon him deep within Marshall's definitions of treason as declared in the trial of Aaron Burr.
“There's the law for you,” he cried, with a note of exultation in his tone, and thrusting the book at me with one hand while with the other he marked the place; “there's the law of treason so laid down that a wayfaring man though a fool should not err therein. I shall get it pat to my tongue; I may yet teach it to our Secessionists with a gibbet.”
I put this down to show the climbing of the General's anger against Calhoun; and how it began to spread and feel about to assail the Vice-President in his acts and plans and sentiments and hopes. It was, as he said aforetime, “We would foil the villain and save our pretty Peg.”
You may rest sure I made no argument against his law studies; indeed, I think treason a crime which the White House can not understand too well nor hate too thoroughly, and I never thought so more than in those far days when the General read Marshall and we carried forward our fight for lovely Peg.
While the General spoke no word of the Eatons and their injuries to Van Buren, the latter for a certainty was not long in town before he thereon held converse with himself. I would be made wise of this by his coming to me—it was our second encounter—and, with a manner suave as cream, asking what to my thought would be a time fitting, and to the lady convenient, for him to call upon our Peg.
“For you must know,” said he, spreading out his smooth hands and regarding the backs of them, being, I think, a trick of his to cover an inability to look one between the eyes, “for you must know, sir, since my wife died, and with no daughter in my house to teach me, my society learning has gone excessively to seed.”
It became my turn to say that society, I was told—for I carried no personal knowledge thereof, having little genius for it—ran now to broken ends and fragments, and would continue so throughout the year. The social season, by word of such experienced parlor scouts as Pigeon-breast, would not begin until New Year's Day.
“However,” said I, in finale, “you may take it from me that the Eatons will be blithe to receive you on any evening you should care to call. There need be no formality; you may pull their latch-string at any hour with every assurance of a welcome.”
“Can not you take me there this evening?” he asked, with a kind of enthusiasm.
“I am only too pleased to be of service.”
The fair truth is I could have hugged the little secretary from gladness for Peg.
That same night, when later I paid my usual visit to the General for a friendly pipe and to finish the day in smoke before we went to bed, I told him of Van Buren's waiting on Peg. The pleasure the news gave him fell across his face like sunlight. But he carried himself in ordinary fashion.
“Why, sir,” said he, “I'm glad that he has been to see the Eatons. Still, no less could have been looked for from a gentleman.”
“But he did better,” I said. “Never have I heard more delicate compliment than he offered to Peg. He says she shall preside at his house for those functions which belong with his position.”
“And that, since he has no wife, will be a vast convenience for him,” responded the General; “this pouring of his guests' tea by our beautiful Peg.”
The General would accept it as a matter of course, but I tell you the tidings of that tea-pouring warmed the cockles of his heart. For myself, I made no effort to hide my satisfaction.
“Is it not a strange thing,” said the General, after a bit, “how one's first impression will go astray? Who could be more true, or more wise, or better bred or founded in whatever makes for the best in a man, than our Van Buren? And yet I thought him sly, and with a hand for selfish design. The man's as simple as a child!”
“He tells me,” I remarked, “that your friend Hoyt of this region warned him you did not like him, and how your great favorite was Calhoun.”
“Hoyt is a presumptuous fool,” returned the General, hotly. “I would not give Van Buren's finger for Calhoun. Why should he be favorite of mine who foments treason, and schemes to split the nation like a billet of wood!”
Peg was with me betimes next morning to jubilate with dancing pulses over Van Buren to her house the night before.
“For can't you see,” she cried, her cheeks red with the excitement that crowed in her breast, “what a strategic point, as you sons of war would term it,”—Peg was laughing here—“is your little, round, smooth Secretary of State? He carries the grand legation folk in his wake. With them, all ribbons and orders, and the army—for the latter will be bound to us since we are the war department—our receptions should be a blaze of glory and gold braid.”
Here Peg clapped her hands with the glee of it. It was an inspiration to see her so gay.
“I am overcome of delight,” I said, mocking gravity, “to know that we are like to gain so much of ornamentation.” Then, changing my tone: “But of a truth, my little one, I shall forever love our State Secretary for your sweet sake.”
“You brought him,” cried Peg. “What a watch-dog you are to me!” This with sudden warmth. “That is the word, a watch-dog—a faithful watch-dog with a great sleepless heart guarding its Peg! And you shall have a collar.”
With that, since I was sitting in my chair and so within her reach, the minx crept up and threw her arms about my neck. It was simply play—the exuberance of a born tomboy. And yet I was glad we were alone and no General about, else I would have lived long ere I had heard the last of it. The situation would have fitted like a glove with the General's bent of humor, and I should not have cared for his raillery.
Peg clung to my neck like a rose to an oak while I tried softly to loosen her arms. I could not make head against her for fear of hurting her.
“How do you like your collar, watchdog?” she cried, with a chuckle. “And now the buckle—how do you like that?” Here she laid her velvet cheek against my face. “So, watch-dog, you would slip your collar?” This, banteringly. “There; you are free.” And Peg unlocked her arms and stood back smiling, her small, white leopard teeth just showing, and her eyes like diamonds. Then donning a satiric air: “Sir, you call yourself a gentleman and a politician. You should know, then, there be two honors no man may decline; the one is a presidency and the other is a—lady.”
With this smartness on her lips Peg broke into downright merriment. The little witch was never so charming!
That evening I was sitting alone with the General; each of us silent and within himself, wrapping his own fancies about him like a cloak. I know not on what uplands of conjecture the General's thoughts were grazing; for myself, I was dwelling on Peg, for I could still feel that soft, warm collar of her two arms clasping my neck.
It is trenching on the wondrous, too, how the sweet image of a woman will train one's soul for war. No sooner would I take Peg upon the back of my meditations, than they straightway went plunging off to her enemies, and to tire themselves with vain circlings of how best to refute the malice of her foes and return upon their wicked heads the most of cruelty. Commonly I might be held as one not beyond touch of mercy, and indeed I have spared a painted Creek when he stood helpless. But I doubt me if Peg's foes, when by some sleight of fate they had fallen within my power, would have found a least loophole of relief. Of a verity! I think I might have looked long on their writhings ere my heart was touched or my hands raised to stay their tortures.
While I sat in this blood-mood, and shedding in imagination the lives of ones who would persecute our innocent, my glance was caught by the General's pistols lying near by on a table. They were of that long, duelling breed belonging with the times, and the General kept them as bright and new as he kept his honor.
“And why are those on parade?” I asked, pointing to the weapons.
“It is the day of the year,” said the General, and his steady voice was low, “whereon I killed Dickenson. This is the one I used,” and he stretched his long arm and offered it for my inspection. It had a ribbon of black about the butt. “That is not for Dickenson,” he explained; “it is for her.” Here he indicated that miniature of his wife from which he would never be parted, where it rested on the mantel and looked down upon us with the painted eyes.
“You speak in a queer way,” I said; “do you regret killing the man?”
“No,” he returned, half sadly; “I do not regret killing him.”
“Tell me of it,” I urged. “I was not about, and Overton went with you to the field.”
The General never named his fight with Dickenson to others, but I was sure he would tell the tale to me. In good truth, I had not asked for it, save that, knowing him far better than I knew myself, I saw what was in his manner to make me believe he would be the lighter after the relation.
“Dickenson,” said the General, making no flourish of talk in explanation of a readiness to describe adventures which some folk for the red ending might have shrunk from; “Dickenson was the tool of a conspiracy made against my life, and politics was at the bottom of it. I was too popular; I was in the way; the grave was a place for me; thus argued my enemies. And then they went about to draw in Dickenson to be their cat's-paw.
“Dickenson was young and vain, and withal willingly cruel enough to act as my murderer for the illustration it would bring. He counted himself safe, since he was reckoned the surest, quickest hand in all the world. The man could shoot from the hip like a flash, and as accurately as one might put one's finger.
“Once the plan was laid, Dickenson took a sure course; he spoke evil of my wife.” Here the General picked up the two pistols, a butt in either hand, and looked first upon the one and then upon its fellow. “Following my marriage, with every dollar I owned, I bought these pistols. They are hair-triggers and a breath unhooks them. Also, they are sighted to shoot as fine and as true as the moral law. I gave to their purchase my last dollar, and devoted them to the destruction of what scoundrels should vilify my wife. They have done their work and never failed me.
“Overton was to act my second, and we would fight in Kentucky, sixty miles away. All day we traveled; the Dickenson party preceded us over the same trail. At every squatter's cabin the inmates would call us to the wizard work of Dickenson. Here he shot the head from a fowl; there he cut the string by which a gourd was hanging; now he drove a nail at twenty paces. It was a trick to shake my nerve.
“We would fight in the early morning, each standing to a peg twelve paces apart. Overton won the word and the pistols. I was dressed in a black coat, loose and long, and with no white to show at the throat and coax a bullet. We were given our places, I to my joy with my favorite pistol.
“It was conceded by Overton and myself, as we went up and down the business in advance, that Dickenson would kill me. Our hope was that I'd last long enough to kill him—he, the defamer of my wife!
“The thought on our side was for me to brace myself and take Dickenson's fire. I could not rival him for quickness or for sureness. And the haste of an attempt would waste and throw away my aim.
“We were put up, I say; the words were to be 'Fire—one—two—three—stop!' We might fire at any moment between 'Fire!' and 'Stop!' And Overton had the word. As I took my place I slipped a bullet into my mouth. I would set my teeth on it to steady my hand.
“Overton cried the word and began the count. With the word 'Fire!' Dickenson's weapon flashed. I heard the roar of it, and felt the numb, dull shock as the lead crashed into my side. But I sustained myself. I was held on my feet by hate. I thought he had slain me, but with him out of hell I would not rest in my grave.
“When I did not fall, but stood firm, Dickenson started back.
“'My God, I have missed him!' he cried.
“'Step to your peg, sir,' roared Overton, pausing in his count and cocking a pistol; 'step to your peg, or I'll blow your head from your body!'
“Dickenson stood again to his peg and turned his eyes from me; his face was the color of tobacco ashes.
“Overton resumed his count. 'One!' 'Click!'” My pistol caught at half-cock. Overton paused and I re-cocked my pistol; Dickenson white and firm to his peg—a man who had played his life away.
“'Two!' cried Overton.
“My pistol responded; the lead tore its way through the midst of Dickenson's body. He crippled slowly down on one knee; and then he fell along on his face, and next turned over on his back with a sort of twitching jerk. I never took my eyes from him.”
“And your wound,” said I, “was a serious one, I well know that.”
“My ribs were broken, while my boot was clogged with the blood which ran down beneath my garments. The bullet I placed between my teeth was crushed as flat as a two-bit piece.”
“It was hardy work,” said I, “bearing up and firing on the heels of such a wound.”
“Sir, I was thinking on her”—glancing at the miniature. “I should have killed that man though he had put his bullet through my heart.”
Here the General turned his face towards me; his eyes were shining with the lambent orange glow one sees in the panther's eyes at night.
There was silence, I still looking on the General. His nervous face was twitching. Then the frown on his forehead gave way to quiet sadness. Rising, he stood by the mantel and gazed for long, and tenderly, on the miniature of his dead dear one.
“I have had many titles,” said he, and he spoke whisperingly and as though talking with the picture; “I have had many titles, and the greatest was the one 'her husband.' I have had honors;—I stand the chief of the greatest nation in the greatest age the world has witnessed; and I would give all to hold her hand one moment. They say there is a heaven above us. It will be no heaven unless I meet her there.”
Now while I was in warmest sympathy with the General, his talk would seem to fill me up with darkness. Also, I could feel the two hot arms of Peg burning my neck. That story, too, of the Dickenson fight may be supposed to have set in my nature that animal which lairs within each of us, somewhat on truculent edge. Abruptly I burst forth:
“And it is a surprising thing,” cried I—ripping out an oath, the last not common with me—“how Eaton abides Peg's wrongs. He should have killed a man or two by now.”
“Sir,” returned the General, coming from his reverie with a kind of snap, “sir, no man since Catron has been known to speak a word. Besides, my cabinet men can not go trooping off for Blandensburg at any price. It is one of the drawbacks to a high position of state that it chops one's hands off at the elbow; duels are no longer a question.”
“I do not see it thus,” I retorted viciously. “You do not? Look on Aaron Burr—deserted and old and poor, and dying in New York. He came down from his vice-presidency to slay one who had maligned him for years. And there is his reward.”
“What do I care for that?” cried I. “If it were for Peg, I should leave a throne and perish poor, despised and all alone, but I would strangle the throat that spoke her wrong.”
“Ah! if it were Peg!” And the General, now alert and wholly of this world, gave me that narrow intent glance I resented among the flowers.
What might have been uttered next was cut short by a messenger on the door. He brought word from Noah; he had just come to town, and since it was turned late he would defer his call until the morning.
“Let's have him with us now,” cried the General, briskly. “I shall not sleep for hours; and you, I take it, will stay awake in such a cause?”
“I would stand sleepless guard for weeks if it were to defend Peg,” said I.
“Think now and then, my friend, for your own defence.” The General said this with a look both quizzical and grave. Then, without pausing: “Write Noah a note in my name.” While I scribbled he walked to and fro. “I must ever ask you to write for me, since I am so unfortunate as to deny a proverb and be one whose sword was ever mightier than his pen.”
In the hall I discovered Jim, and told him to depart with our message to the Indian Queen.
“'Course I'll nacherally go, Marse Major,” said Jim, “but I was jes' waitin' to see you-all, an' ask how soon you reckons we'll go caperin' back to Tennessee.”
“Why,” I demanded, “what has made you so soon homesick?”
“It aint that, Marse Major,” and Jim gave to his words a melancholy whine, “but we-all can't stand d'pace yere. For a week Jim was as happy an' chirpy as a drunkard at a barbecue. But since you locks that closet do', Jim's sort o' been obleeged to buy whiskey for himse'f; an' what you think? They charge Jim five cents a drink for whiskey that don't cost two bits a gallon all along d'Cumberland! They's shorely robbers; an' they jes' nacherally takes Jim's money off him so fas' he cotch cold.”
“Go on, you rogue!” said I. “Here is a Mexican dollar to bolster your finances. We're not yet bankrupt, Jim.”
Noah came to us spattered of travel, and with the high riding-boots he wore on the road. I took a deal of pleasure for a buoyancy I observed in him, since I read it as a sign of whitest promise. Nor was I to be cast down from that hope.
“You are to know,” said Noah, turning to the General, “that I was two days before your letter with the Reverend Ely. In the first of our conversations he held his head loftily; in the end, he came something under control. Your letter much dismayed him, and after that his courage ran very thin indeed. Now he quite agrees he knew nothing, and was wrong and false in all he wrote. I dragged him to New York with me. I have Mrs. Eaton's innocence here, in these papers.” Noah laid a sealed package by the General's elbow. They were from the Reverend Ely, as well as from the folk of the hotel wherein that Ely said Peg lodged. “They are oath-made; they prove Mrs. Eaton chaste as snow.”
“And how did you make conquest of this Ely?” questioned the General, his eye gratified and spirit a mate for Noah's.
“The power of the press, I should call it,” laughed Noah. “The ignoble Ely hath a mighty distaste of unfriendly ink. And I'm an editor. That was it,” went on Noah; “I showed him what might be done. He should stand in the pillory of my types for the reasonless defamer he was. Then the dog trembled and came my way with meekness, asking what he should do. I answered much like the monks with the wild Clovis, 'Bend thy neck, proud Sicambrian; adore what thou hast burned, burn what thou hast adored!' In short, I demanded a letter of retractory amends to the President; and also that he name his fellow reptile, whose infamous word he claimed for the truth of his scurrility.”
“And who is he?” demanded the General, as warm as ever I saw him.
By some virtue of telepathic sort, I read the answer before Noah uttered it. And why had I not guessed before! The secret one so falsely in the ear of the shallow Ely was none other than the unctious Reverend Campbell.
CHAPTER VIII—THE MAD CAPRICIOUS PEG
Next morning the sun had not climbed over-high when the Reverend Campbell, head down and secret eye aslant, came shuffling to call upon the General. I caught the black shadow of him—for all the world like the shadow of some vulture to sail between one and the sun—as the drooping, furtive creature sidled through the hall. The General had sent for him, for the General was not one to let the grass grow deep between resolve and action.
“I will see the man alone, Major,” observed the General; “he might complain, were you present, of a situation offering two against one and planned to over-ride him.”
Such management was much to my appetite, since it would but serve to boil my anger—this listening while the Reverend Rogue laid out his pack of calumnies upon Peg. In good truth! I much misdoubt if I had withstood my hands from him when under such honest provocation; and that, maugre his black surtout and pulpit snuffle.
And yet it did not miss me as a feature hard to be read for its significance, that now was the earliest time when the General had shown himself so equitable as to think on “two against one” and fail to ask my presence for his conferences. He had met folk for war and peace, and they had come alone; I had been there, and no one spoke of over-riding. However, the subject was not worth quizzing one's self concerning; the Reverend Campbell was come, the best thing about it being that the General lived ample and to spare to arrest whatever of slander he should bring us in his mouth, and put it to the death. The General could track a lie as surely as ever he tracked Creek, and lived even more inveterately its enemy.
Peg met the Reverend Campbell almost in the great front door, for she was on her usual journey to consult with me about some trifling nothing. When his sidelong glance encountered Peg's, the rascal cowered and seemed to turn more mean, if that were possible, than by nature belonged with him. But he said no word; he did not so much as muster against her one square look, but sinuously, and as a snake might, writhed himself out of her path Peg, for herself, swept him with a chill, errant eye as if he were some gutter-being, offensive though unknown.
“And what brings that bird of mal-omen to flutter about one's door?—so bright a morning, too!” This was Peg's question on the Reverend Campbell as she walked in to me and climbed to her customary chair at the left hand of my desk. “What should you say, watch-dog, was his bad mission? Is he a threat? Does he drag a danger after him? You must be alert if you would make safe your little Peg.”
The tone of raillery which Peg adopted secured me; she had no surmise, then, to the purpose of the Reverend Campbell.
“It's quite sure,” I returned, evasively, “that our swart visitor would be much uplifted were the General to relent and dispose of Florida according to his wish.”
And now while Peg sits before the mirror of my memory with her sweet face, as she on that far morning sat in the great leathern chair, let me please my fond pencil with a word of her. There were so many expressions of the unexpected to our Peg—for so I had grown to call her—one must needs be describing and redescribing her with each new page one turns. A born enchantress and a witch full-blown besides! it is the mere truth that Peg bore upon me like a spell.
There was never woman to be Peg's marrow for flash and spirit, and beyond all to creep so tenderly near to one. And for a crown to that, she was as wise as the serpent. There were moments when Socrates himself might have listened to her and not lost his time.
And she could shift color like a chameleon. Behold her on some day of social parade, or where she meets strangers or half acquaintances, and she will be older by fifteen years than now when she plants her small self in that armchair, and makes me turn my writing downward to talk with her. Tender, wilful, pliant, wise, patient, petulant, true, uncertain, sure, confiding and confusing, she offered contradictions equal with the General. I would exhaust the roll-call of the adjectives were I wholly to set forth this child-woman in the last of her frank arts and sage simplicities.
Peg wore as many moods as a lake on a flawy day and where skies are scud-swept. Now, with a cloud across the sun, she would be dull and sad as lead. Then, with a gust of wind, she would wrinkle into waves of temper. And next there would dawn a tranquil moment when, calm and clear and deep and sweet, she shone on one like burnished silver.
Once, I recall, she sat in her big chair, steeped in a way of pensive wordlessness. I had not heard her voice for an hour; nor she mine, for I was fallen behind in my letters, and politics and president-making are mighty gluttons of ink. Suddenly she broke in:
“Why are you so good to me—so much more than any other?”
“How should one fail of sympathy,” said I, giving my manner a light turn, “for another so innocent and so ill-used?”
“And it's just sympathy—all sympathy?” demanded Peg, resting her round chin in her little shell of a palm. “Nothing but sympathy?”
“What else should it be?”
“I don't know,” said Peg, shortly. Then she walked slowly across the room and studied a picture. In a moment she gave a word to me over her shoulder: “I may tell you this, Mr. Questioner. There is but one question a man should put to a woman.”
Smiling on her jaunty petulances, I went forward with my writing; she to pulling out the slides of a cabinet. This apartment, I should tell you, was my private workshop of politics wherein I repaired and extended the destinies of the General, and transacted his fame for him. There were a world of history and one president—and say the least of it—constructed in that room.
Peg came presently to my elbow, bringing a trinket of coral. It had been my sister's, and was my mother's before that.
“Is it worth much money?” asked Peg.
“Nothing at all,” I returned.
“And yet you value it highly?”
“Very highly.”
“May I have it?”
It seemed shame to hesitate, and yet I did, while Peg stood with wistful face.
“Why,” said I at last, “I meant it for the one I should love.”
“Oh, you meant it for her whom you would love! And do you look to see it again after that? The coral is mine from this moment.”
With a swish of her skirts Peg was gone; and with her went the coral.
Peg betimes would lay out her campaign for the coming winter. It was then she talked of Van Buren, “the good little secretary,” as Peg named him. Van Buren went often to the Eatons; and on each of those kind excursions he climbed ever higher with the General and with me.
“Not only,” said Peg, assuming a wise pucker of the brow as she recounted how she should wage and win her social war, “not only shall I preside for our good little secretary at dinners and receptions, but he has brought to me the Viscount Vaughn, who is minister for the English, and Baron Krudener, who is here, as you know, for the Russians; and they, since they own no wives to help them, also have besought me to be at the head of their legation functions. And with the White House back of all, what then will Mrs. Calhoun and her followers do! Watch-dog we have them routed!” Here Peg's rich laugh would ring out for victory on its way.
Peg, on another day, would shake her head with soft solemnity.
“I do so wish some one watched over me.” Peg spoke in contemplative earnestness. “If I could find a fault in a best of husbands, it must be that he doesn't watch over me.”
“What idleness now claims your tongue?” said I, impatiently. “Was ever such nonsense uttered! And the wives should all turn ospreys, too, I take it, and haunt the upper air to watch their husbands?”
“No,” returned Peg, demurely reading the carpet, “no; a wife should never watch her husband. What should you think of her who, dwelling in a garden—a measureless garden of roses—went ever about with petticoats tucked up, stick in hand, questing for some serpent? Who is she, to be so daft as to refuse the fragrance of a thousand blossoms to find one serpent and be stung by it?” Peg crowed high and long, deeming herself a princess of chop-logic. “But a man should watch a woman,” she concluded; “the woman wants him to.”
“And why?” said I, becoming curious.
“Because she likes to feel herself tethered by his vigilance.”
“But why?” I insisted. “Is not freedom dear to a woman?”
“Yes, but love is more dear. See what she gains when she barters only a little freedom for a world of love.”
“I had not thought a woman set such store by jealousy—the green eye turned against herself.”
“Jealousy—a man's jealousy is but the counterpart of his love.” Peg lifted her clever head oracularly. “And, watch-dog, that reminds me”—here she admonished me with upraised finger—“you are jealous of me! Yes you are; you are jealous of my husband.”
“You are a confusing form of little girl!” I said, laughing in my turn; “and most confusing when you jest.”
“Yes; when I jest.” This in a way of funny dryness. “Especially, when I jest. Still, you are jealous; you watch me all the time. Do not look frightened; I do not object to jealousy.” Peg finished in a mirthful ripple.
“I would not see you walk into harm,” said I, meekly.
Perhaps I was thus meek because the small hectorer would stir up confusion in my bosom; and she, cool, assured, mistress of situations it was her merry humor to create.
“You would not see me walk into harm,” she repeated. “But you are jealous of my husband. Is my husband 'harm?'”
“Do you not complain for that he does not watch you?”
This I said desperately. It is not a hand's-breadth behind a miracle how a girl—and you a steady man of years, and twice her age—will wrap you in perplexities like a parcel. It was so with me; the witch would wind and unwind me as though I were a ball of knitting-yarn! She would darn and patch her laughter with me!
“Watch-dog,” said Peg, severely, “watchdog, you know you are jealous! And how long do you count it since I told you that jealously was but love turned upside down?” This came off trippingly, and with superior wave of wrist, as settling a thing beyond debate. Then with a tinge of tenderness: “Watch-dog, being so trusted, what would you do for me?”
“I would be a slave for you,” said I, simply enough, “if it were to do you good.”
“Qualification,” cried she, with a vicious stamp of her foot, “always qualification!” Then mimicking me: “'If it were to do me good.' Good!—good!—what a desert of weariness in four letters! If I were to discover some unnamed desolation, some barren waste, one arid, gray, dry, dead—especially dead—I'd turn geographer and call it 'Good.'”
Peg was quiet after this upheaval, which was with it all but a surface impatience and nothing deep, and uttering never a word, gazed over against the wall. On my side, I made no return; for I was grown used to her whims, and knew they were not to be argued with. And most fatal of all was agreement. A best course would be to reply nothing, whether of denial or comment or endorsement, but let Peg talk her talk out unrestrained.
However, catching the fashion of her with the fringe of my eye as I went for more ink on my pen, and observing her face to seem over sad and considerate, I spoke up to cheer her.
“And now what are your thoughts?” said I.
“I was just wanting to be a man, that's all.” And Peg stared straight ahead as though in a muse. Then starting up, and with a rush of vivacity: “Heigh ho! and now if I were, I'll wager I'd be as dull as the others—as dull as you, watch-dog.” Then, changing the tune of it, but keeping to her dash and fling: “So you would be my slave! Come, let me mark you for my slave!”
Without warning, she seized my hand, and with her sharp leopard teeth bit until the blood flowed. Then surveying her work, she kissed the pin-prick of a wound with unction. When she raised her face, there was a trickle of blood on her lip and chin.
Walking to a mirror with a careless, flinging step, Peg glanced her face over, and I thought with relish.
“See if there do not come a pretty white mark when it heals.” This she told me in an arch manner, and with chin on shoulder, and the fleck of blood on her chin. “Now if I but dared,” she went on, returning to the glass, “I would wear that blood always and never wash it away. But the world! the world!—ah, the world! One must wash one's face for the world although one owes the world nothing.”
Peg, now in a climax of bubbling spirits, and pouring a spoonful of water on her handkerchief, washed off the spots of red, transferring them to her tiny square of cambric. This she contemplated with a sort of surprised delight, as tendering a new idea.
“I need never wash that, at any rate,” said she. Then with her glancing eyes on me: “You will wear my mark now;—Peg's mark for her slave!—who would do her good.”
The next moment she went singing across the lawn for her home, leaving me to think on the caprices of our radiant, reckless, blooming, madcap Peg. All this by the way, however; now to return to our day of the Reverend Campbell's call upon the General.
Peg was still curled in her big armchair when, following his interview with the General, the Reverend Campbell left the mansion. It was she who told his departure to me where I wrought at my desk. Peg caught a flutter of him through the large window.
“Oh!” cried Peg, “there goes our Reverend Raven.”
Looking up from where I worked, I beheld the Reverend Campbell making speed out of the grounds. In such hurry was he that he left the walk of gravel, and to save a corner would cut across the grass. The black-foot creature slouched away for all mankind like unto some henroost fox of the night whom daylight had surprised and who now went skulking for the comforting safe darkness of his burrow.
“It is wonder,” said Peg, “what could induce the good General to tolerate the presence of our Reverend Raven for so long. What should be the interest in his croakings?”
As Peg spoke, the General's gaunt form appeared in the door. He was more than half warm with an angry excitement. Without pause or first words of greeting, he addressed himself to Peg.
“Child, where was Timberlake two years ago this summer?—where was he in June?”
“Here in Washington,” returned Peg, her eyes full of wonder, as she scanned the face of the General in quest of a clue to his sharp, unusual curiosity. “He stayed here idle for four years before he last sailed. He was seeking to adjust his accounts as purser for the frigate President. His books were lost when the English captured the ship. It was that to make all the trouble; the red-tape of the navy office detained him here four years before it would accept his accounts. It was during that period we were wed.” Peg's voice, brisk at the start, fell sorrowfully away towards the end.
“Then he was here in June two summers ago,” said the General, “and for three years prior and almost one year after that time?”
“Yes,” said Peg.
“Now there!” cried the General, with a mixture of wrath and disgust; “see what bald and easily confuted falsehood a fool moved of low malice will tell! I could believe at times, when I'm brought face to face with such mendacious simplicity, that liars are denied powers of reflection.”
“What is it all about?” asked Peg.
“Nothing, child, nothing,” returned the General. “Now run away home; I want a word with your big playmate here.” Then in a softer manner: “No, child, the Major and I are trying to do you a service, and please God! I think we shall accomplish it.”
The whole kind attitude of the General towards Peg seemed ever that of a father, and he was used to call her to him or dismiss her with no shade of rudeness, truly, and yet with no more of ceremonies than an affectionate parent might adopt. Peg never grudged obedience, and received the General's word as readily, and was withal as free of affront at any suddenness, as should be a daughter who feels her place assured.
When Peg was off for home, the General came and sat in the chair she had vacated.
With the white thick brush of his end-wise hair, and the fierce eyes of him, he made a portrait wide apart from that tender one the great chair so lately framed.
“You are not to know,” quoth the General, without halting for my question, “the whole foul story this creature has told me. It is bad enough that I was made to give ear to it. The point lies here: If Timberlake were with Peg in June two years ago, and for a year before, this miserable tale falls to the ground as false. He makes its main element to depend upon Timberlake's absence—his charge of iniquity against Peg holds only by that. The Reverend Serpent's hinge to swing his vilification on is the absence of Timberlake. And you heard her declare how Timberlake was here.”
“Does this snake, as you rightly term him, give you his story as of a knowledge of his own?”
“No; he hides behind the words of two women; a mother and daughter, named Craven. They pretend to base their slanders on what they allege was told them by the husband and father, a Doctor Craven—dead, he is, these ten months.”
“And that is mighty convenient,” said I, “for the Reverend Campbell and his fellow ophidians—this retreat to the word of one who dwells dead and dumb beneath six feet of earth.”
“That is their coward strategy,” commented the General, furiously. “However, my thought is to ask Noah to visit these women and question them before the Reverend Campbell collects the wit to tell of his talk with me. I may have alarmed the man, for I was now and then not altogether calm.”
I was driven to smile at this; so much concession of a want of calmness on the General's part would mean that he had fumed up and down like a tiger. The scuttling eagerness of the Reverend Campbell to be clear of the place was not without a cause. There beat some reason in his heels.
“I asked him,” said the General, “why he did not tell this story in the beginning. He explained that he hesitated to approach me with it; he related it to Doctor Ely, who pretended to close terms with me. Then I demanded why this Ely had not told me by word of mouth? Why should he leave with that lie in his stomach, and then write it and send it by post? He said that when it came to the test, Doctor Ely was afraid of me. Fear, fear, that was the assassin excuse of him, and the reason for striking at a woman in the dark! Why, I would not believe the sun was shining on the words of such coward rogues!”
It was settled that I should make company for Noah when he saw the Cravens.
“But don't interfere for a word, Major,” exhorted the General, with a world of earnestness. “You do right well when the quarry is a bear or the enemy no more subtile than an Indian. But now the foe is a woman, you might better fall to the rear and leave leadership to Noah. You are monstrous ignorant of woman.”
The Cravens lived no breathless distance up Georgetown way. Not far from their doorstep, Noah and I encountered the Reverend Campbell, who seemed shaken by the meeting.
“Nothing could be better,” cried Noah, cheerfully, claiming the Reverend Campbell's arm. “You shall present the Major and myself to the ladies. And please permit me to do the talking; you may have your turn at the conversation when we leave.”
The two women were bilious, lime-faced folk, and the daughter notably ugly. I was something stiff, I fear; but Noah, when introduced by the Reverend Campbell, showed as balmy as a day in May. He swept the pair with rapid glance and then turned to the daughter.
“I shall pitch upon the one I deem the more manageable,” said Noah, on our journey to the house, “and when I commence to talk with her, you engage with the other.”
Having this hint in my mind, when Noah began to address the daughter I favored the mother with a word or two on safe topics, principally the weather and the condition of the roads. For all that, I could tell how the mother, like myself, had her ears laid back to catch the words of the others. Her suspicions were upon us from the start, even with the guaranty of the Reverend Campbell's company. As for that perturbed animal, he looked only upon the floor, saying never a syllable, and rubbing one warty hand with the other in a composite of doubt and trepidation. The tragic wrath of the General still sang in the hare-hearted creature's head.
“We are being shown about by our reverend friend,” I heard Noah say; “we were asked to make a few calls with him and meet the better folk. We were too glad, I assure you; I grow vastly weary of nobody save the politicians and nothing better to talk of than politics.”
To say that I was startled at these gay, glib fictions on the lips of my companion would fall behind the fact; I was amazed. But I also had the General's command to leave leadership to Noah, and so stood mute. I let my gaze go for a moment to the Reverend Campbell to come by some thought of how he took the trend of Noah's surprising discourse. I saw naught beyond the top of his head, as, bowed forward in his chair, he appeared to study his toes, meanwhile twiddling and rubbing his nobby fingers.
As for the women, they knew no argument of fact or otherwise for distrusting Noah's statements. I should have before explained that neither possessed the least of glimmer as to our identity or nearness to the General. Indeed, they lived ignorant, we found later, of the letters of that Ely ill-using Peg's name, and of the Reverend Campbell's visit to the General paid that morning. Thus, it fell about that the daughter sailed off with Noah on a current of conversation in the dark, and the mother just as blind.
“And so,” Noah went on, “you are a copyist in the Department of Justice.” This from her explanation and his notice of a stain of ink near her finger-nail, for this daughter was an untidy slut. “The Department of Justice!” repeated Noah. “And there is something consistent in your employment in such a field, since Justice is a woman—and blind.” This last quip under his breath. “I am a close friend with Judge Berrien, the Attorney General, who heads your department. The great tie to unite us is our love for Calhoun.”
“Are you a friend of the Vice-President?” asked the daughter, her interest a little kindled.
“Perhaps partisan would be the truer word,” replied Noah. “I trust a good day will come when we are to drop the 'Vice' to his title and find him at home in the White House. And you, I suppose, meet many of Calhoun's adherents in your Department of Justice?”
“Numbers, indeed,” assented the daughter, while the mother bent an intent ear, trying to discover the drift.
By this time I could well make out how neither of these women was of vigorous intelligence. A malignant spirit, and a ripe aptness for evil to others. I could read in their vinegar faces and the fault-finding gather to their brows; but no power of thought, nor yet much cunning. I leaned back now, inquisitive as to Noah's methods and to note their results.
Noah led the talk up and down the town. He made it cover several years, for the Cravens were not newcomers in the place. At last he considered the navy and mentioned Timberlake. Had the young lady known the handsome purser Timberlake? The young lady had known the handsome purser Timberlake. A forbidding scowl contorted her features as she said this.
“Oh, I beg a thousand pardons!” cried Noah. He had caught the scowl. “I fear the mention of the handsome Timberlake is not agreeable. But he cut his throat, and there's the proper villain end of him.”
The butt-end cruelty of Noah's manner I was sure possessed a purpose, for commonly he was one of your most guarded of folk. While I had this in thought, it did not lessen my dismay when the daughter fell to weeping with her face in her hands, and all in frantic kind. Sobbing, she left the room.
“An affair of the heart?” cooed Noah, sympathetically, to the mother, while the Reverend Campbell fidgeted visibly.
“Sir,” said the mother, loftily, “you touched her rudely. Mr. Timberlake was paying my daughter marked attentions, and ones not to be misunderstood, when he was stolen from her side and trapped to the altar by that wanton, Peg O'Neal.”
“Sorry, I assure you,” murmured Noah, apologetically. “Sorry I so blundered against your daughter's sensibilities. Please recall her, madam, if only to hear me ask forgiveness.”
The daughter, whose emotion was of the briefest, returned, with nose reddened and look more bilious than before. Noah became profuse in his regrets, and severely characterized his own awkwardness.
“Nor are you to have blame for your feeling,” said he, addressing the daughter and as a finish to his self-reproaches. “Your mother has done us the honor to confide the once nearness of the handsome purser Timberlake to you. And that hideous woman who stole him away! I do not marvel you hate her. I could teach you to write her such a letter as should be a revenge; for I know one of her secrets, the very name of which would crush her like a falling tree.”
It was to me a thing astounding how neither of these women resented the raw freedom of Noah's words. On the contrary, they went with him, making no question of the propriety of such talk on the tongue of a stranger. They would appear not to have been crossed by such a thought, for, so to phrase it, they fell in with Noah, and, as if it were, hand in hand.
At the word “secrets,” both women sat bolt upright and questioned Noah with tongue and eye. What was this hidden sin of that siren, Peg O'Neal? They panted for a fullest tale of it.
“Nay, then,” remonstrated Noah, “it was but a slip. I said I could teach you how to write a letter that should strike her to the soul. But of what avail? Timberlake is dead; his grave is the Mediterranean.”
“But she lives,” hissed the daughter. “Tell me that secret concerning her, and I shall call you my best friend.” Truly, the bilious maiden had a taste for vengeance as pointed as a thorn.
“Why, then,” returned Noah, hesitating with invented reluctance, “there is no reason why I should not humor your wishes. Take your pen, and I'll dictate that letter I have in my mind.”
The bilious one wheeled about to a writing table which stood by her side, and while the rest of us sat silent—for the mother and myself had long before surrendered our semblance of conversation, and the unhappy dominie still pored upon the floor—Noah began with finger on forehead as one who cudgels memory.
“Write her this,” said Noah. “Revenge is sweet! I have you in my power; and I shall burn you as savages burn their victim at the stake. Think not that you can escape me. I would not that death nor any evil thing should take you out of my hand for half the world.” When Noah began this evil dictation, the lime-faced one took down his opening words with greedy pen. As he proceeded, she first hesitated, and then with blanched, scared face, whirled herself upon him. Her pen fell to the floor, while her hands shook in a gust of fear. At the close she gasped:
“You have read my letter!”
“I have, indeed,” returned Noah. “I have repeated word for word your atrocious threats to a lady whom we will not name.” It was verity; with a memory like unto wax, Noah had recalled with every faithfulness of word and mark that menacing epistle Peg brought to me, and which was then under my private lock and key. “Yes, you wrote that letter,” repeated Noah. “And you,” coming round on the Reverend Campbell, who writhed as one in the jaws of wretchedness, unable to make a plan or frame a sentence; “and you, sir, were privy to it.”
“Our dear sister”—he could not lay aside his snuffle even now—“our dear sister did indeed tell me she had sent such a note.”
“You mix your tenses, sir,” retorted Noah, savagely. “She told you before it was dispatched, and you read it.”
* “My dear gentlemen,” broke in the mother, in mighty agitation, “he put that letter in the post himself. Oh, gentlemen, spare my poor daughter!” With that the mother put her arm about the-younger harpy, where, like some frightened thing of sin that can escape no farther, she waited as one frozen.
“Your daughter, madam,” replied Noah, quietly enough, “lies in no peril, although by the law there be punishments for ones who thus misuse the post. But there remains another question. You have put a lie against that lady of the letter into the mouth of our reverend friend. He has retold it to many; this morning he told it to the President. The tale proves itself untrue upon its face, and that is the one merit of it. It was a dangerous falsehood to tell, and”—here Noah looked towards the unhappy Reverend Campbell, who, as though fascinated by the other's baleful eye, lifted up his visage,' with its ugly array of munching mouth and flabby unhealthfulness—“and a still more dangerous falsehood to repeat.”
“What do you require of us, gentlemen?” asked the frightened mother-harpy.
“Nothing, save tongues of peace,” cried Noah. “It is too much to suppose that her friends will rest quiet while you foully tear a good woman to shreds. Tie up your tongues, you three, and the thing rests. Let another word escape, and a torch shall be found to burn you out like any other nest of adders.” The Reverend Campbell made no return to this warning thrown to him with the others. The scoundrel had the wisdom of silence when words would work no benefit. Still, I could trace a hunger for retaliation writhing beneath the coarse snake's skin of him.
“I think we have locked three evil mouths to-day,” observed Noah, as we were about our return. “It is the less important, perhaps, since already a whole flock of these lies has been uncaged in the town.”
“It is never unimportant,” I returned, “to identify an enemy. I am the more relieved, too, since you cleared up the mystery of that written menace. And yet I do not make out how you supposed it gained emanation among these people.”
“I had no such thought in the beginning,” replied Noah. “I knew, as did you, and with a glance, how our entertainers were nothing fine nor deep, but of a harshest clay and of least intelligence. No more delicacy was required than might do for driving pigs. At first I sought to develop their whereabouts, and stormed the woods with my remarks. In that, and on the sheer chance of it, I employed the name of Timberlake. The daughter's disturbed features were a cue. And you know the rest. The digging up of the authorship of the letter was but the birth of a bold guess. However, we've paralyzed that trio of tongues, which is excellent as far as it goes. And we must beat out these fires wherever we find them. Else they will spread, and may come to mean a conflagration that shall burn some one to a cinder.”
“And going back for cause,” I said, my thought recurring to Peg, “I still can not tell the hound purpose of this incessant, malignant pursuit of our little girl.”
“Sir, they reason in this guise,” returned Noah. “As I've told you, the great impulse springs from the adherents of Calhoun. They desire the destruction of the President as a method of their man's advancement. They fear that the President will seek to succeed himself—there has been illustrious example—or, in default of that, insist on selecting his successor. They attack Mrs. Eaton in hope of its reaction against the administration. Suppose, sir, they make her out to be vile, suppose they show the administration as condoning and defending her vileness, will they not have organized the women against us? Give Calhoun the women of the country to be his allies, and he will go over the administration like an avalanche.”
“But you”—now I spoke gingerly, for I would not hurt so true a friend nor ruffle him with himself—“in your pretense of friendship for Calhoun, and as well in other particulars, misled our harpy folk.”
“I but fought the devil with fire and snared liars with lies,” said he. “These she-villains were not entitled to the truth. Only truthful folk have a right to truth.”
When the General and I were together, I laid before him those ethics or word-morals of Noah; he stoutly agreed with that diplomat.
“One is not always bound to tell the truth,” asserted the General. “Would you tell a footpad whose gun was at your breast where you lodged your money? In war, would you disclose your strengths or your plans to the foe because he asked? Sir, truth is a property—a goods; to have right to it one must possess title to it. The casual man, and the more if he would work me harm, has as scant a right to search my head with his questions as to search my pockets with his fingers. Take my word for it, Major,”—this in high Delphic vein, for the General was growing pleased with his argument—“take my word, sir; the right in the one is the right in the other, and he who may lock a door may lie.”
“These harpies,” said I, commenting on what had befallen, “and the Reverend Campbell have fair admitted their guilt.”
“Why, as to that, sir,” returned the General, “the falsity of the story was never in doubt. But the prime thing is to smother out these calumnies. It is not hard to see how this day has been well spent.”
In concord with what we had long before agreed, neither the General nor I, by lisp or the lifting of an eyebrow, gave Peg a least intimation of what had gone forward about her name and fame. And yet, she must have divined her close interest, for in the early hours of the twilight she came again to the General, saying she remembered books of account kept by Timberlake's own hand, which would demonstrate his whereabouts for those four years. Her mother, Peg said, had these books in her house.