Frank O'Connell stood on the quay that morning in July, and watched the great ship slowly swing in through the heads, and his heart beat fast as he waited impatiently while they moored her.
His little one had come back to him.
His fears were at rest.
She was on board that floating mass of steel and iron, and the giant queen of the water had gallantly survived storm and wave and was nestling alongside the pier.
Would she be the same Peg? That was the thought beating through him as he strained his eyes to see the familiar and beloved little figure. Was she coming back to him—transformed by the magic wand of association—a great lady? He could scarcely believe that she WOULD, yet he had a half-defined fear in his soul that she might not be the same.
One thing he made up his mind to—never again would he think of separation. Never again would he argue her into agreeing to go away from him. He had learned his lesson and by bitter experience. Never again until SHE wished it.
Amid the throngs swarming down the gangways he suddenly saw his daughter, and he gave a little gasp of surprised pleasure, and a mist swam before his eyes and a great lump came into his throat and his heart beat as a trip-hammer. It was the same Peg that had gone away a month ago. The same little black suit and the hat with the berries and the same bag and "Michael" in her arms.
Their meeting was extraordinary. It was quite unlike what either had supposed it would be. There was a note of strangeness in each. There was—added to the fulness of the heart—an aloofness—a feeling that, in the passage of time, life had not left either quite the same.
How often that happens to two people who have shared the intimacy of years and the affection of a lifetime! After a separation of even a little while, the break in their joint-lives, the influence of strangers, and the quick rush of circumstance during their parting, creates a feeling neither had ever known. The interregnum had created barriers that had to be broken down before the old relationship could be resumed.
O'Connell and Peg made the journey home almost in silence. They sat hand in hand in the conveyance whilst Peg's eyes looked at the tall buildings as they flashed past her, and saw the daring advertisements on the boardings and listened to the ceaseless roar of the traffic.
All was just as she had left it.
Only Peg had changed.
New York seemed a Babel after the quiet of that little north of England home. She shivered as thoughts surged in a jumbled mass through her brain.
They reached O'Connell's apartment.
It had been made brilliant for Peg's return.
There were additions to the meagre furnishings Peg had left behind. Fresh pictures were on the walls. There were flowers everywhere.
O'Connell watched Peg anxiously as she looked around. How would she feel toward her home when she contrasted it with what she had just left?
His heart bounded as he saw Peg's face brighten as she ran from one object to another and commented on them.
"It's the grand furniture we have now, father!"
"Do ye like it, Peg?"
"That I do. And it's the beautiful picture of Edward Fitzgerald ye have on the wall there!"
"Ye mind how I used to rade ye his life?"
"I do indade. It's many's the tear I've shed over him and Robert Emmet."
"Then ye've not forgotten?"
"Forgotten what?"
"All ye learned as a child and we talked of since ye grew to a girl?"
"I have not. Did ye think I would?"
"No, Peg, I didn't. Still, I was wondherin'—"
"What would I be doin' forgettin' the things ye taught me?"
He looked at her and a whimsical note came in his voice and the old look twinkled in his eyes.
"It's English I thought ye'd be by now. Ye've lived so long among the Saxons."
"English! is it?" And her tone rang with disgust and her look was one of disdain. "English ye thought I'd be! Sure, ye ought to know me betther than that!"
"I do, Peg. I was just tasin' ye."
"An' what have ye been doin' all these long days without me?"
He raised the littered sheets of his manuscript and showed them to her.
"This."
She looked over her shoulder and read:
"From 'BUCK-SHOT' to 'AGRICULTURAL ORGANISATION.' "THE HISTORY OF A GENERATION OF ENGLISH MISRULE, by Frank Owen O'Connell."
She looked up proudly at her father.
"It looks wondherful, father."
"I'll rade it to you in the long evenin's now we're together again."
"Do, father."
"And we won't separate any more, Peg, will we?"
"We wouldn't have this time but for you, father."
"Is it sorry ye are that ye went?"
"I don't know. I'm sorry o' coorse, and GLAD, too, in some ways."
"What made yez come back so sudden-like?"
"I only promised to stay a month."
"Didn't they want ye any longer?"
"In one way they did, an' in another they didn't. It's a long history—that's what it is. Let us sit down here as we used in the early days and I'll tell ye the whole o' the happenin's since I left ye."
She made him comfortable as had been her wont before, and, sitting on the little low stool at his feet, she told him the story of her month abroad and the impelling motive of her return.
She softened some things and omitted others—Ethel entirely. That episode should be locked forever in Peg's heart.
Jerry she touched on lightly.
O'Connell asked her many questions about him, remembering the tone of her later letters. And all the time he never took his eyes from her face, and he marked how it shone with a warm glow of pleasure when Jerry's name occurred, and how the gleam died away and settled into one of sadness when she spoke of her discovery that he had a title.
"They're queer people, the English, Peg."
"They are, father."
"They're cool an' cunnin' an' crafty, me darlin'."
"Some o' them are fine an' honourable an' clever too, father."
"Was this fellow that called himself 'Jerry'—an' all the while was a Lord—that same?"
"Ivery bit of it, father."
"And he trated ye dacent-like?"
"Sure, I might have been a LADY, the way he behaved to me."
"Did he iver smile at ye?"
"Many's the time."
"Do ye remember the proverb I taught ye as a child?"
"Which wun, father? I know a hundred, so I do."
"'Beware the head of a bull, the heels of a horse, of the smile of an Englishman!'"
He paused and looked at her keenly.
"Do you remember that, Peg?"
"I do. There are Englishmen AND Englishmen. There are PLENTY o' bad Irish, and by the same token there are SOME good Englishmen. An' he is wun o' them."
"Why didn't he tell ye he was a Lord?"
"He didn't think it necessary. Over there they let ye gather from their manner what they are. They don't think it necessary to be tellin' everyone."
"It's the strange ones they are, Peg, to be rulin' us."
"Some day, father, they'll go over to Ireland and learn what we're really like, and then they'll change everything. Jerry said that."
"They've begun to already. Sure, there's a man named Plunkett has done more in a few years than all the governments have accomplished in all the years they've been blunderin' along tryin' to thrample on us. An' sure, Plunkett has a title, too!"
"I know, father. Jerry knows him and often spoke of him."
"Did he, now?"
"He did. He said that so long as the English government 'ud listen to kindly, honourable men like Plunkett, there was hope of makin' Ireland a happy, contented people, an' Jerry said—"
"It seems Misther Jerry must have said a good deal to yez."
"Oh, he did. Sure, it was HE started me learnin' things, an' I am goin' on learnin' now, father. Let us both learn."
"What?" cried the astonished father.
"O' coorse, I know ye have a lot o' knowledge, but it's the little FINE things we Irish have got to learn. An' they make life seem so much bigger an' grander by bein' considerate an' civil an' soft-spoken to each other. We've let the brutality of all the years that have gone before eat into us, and we have thrown off all the charm and formality of life, and in their place adopted a rough and crude manner to each other that does not come really from our hearts, but from the memory of our wrongs."
Unconsciously Peg had spoken as she had heard Jerry so often speak when he discussed the Irish. She had lowered her voice and concluded with quiet strength and dignity. The contrast to the beginning of the speech was electrical. O'Connell listened amazed.
"Did the same Jerry say that?"
"He did, father. An' much more. He knows Ireland well, an' loves it. Many of his best friends are Irish—an'—"
"Wait a minnit. Have I ever been 'rough an' crude' in me manner to you, Peg?"
"Never, father. But, faith, YOU ought to be a Lord yerself. There isn't one o' them in England looks any betther than you do. It's in their MANNER that they have the advantage of us."
"And where wouldIbe gettin' the manner of a Lord, when me father died the poorest peasant in the village, an' me brought up from hand to mouth since I was a child?"
"I'm sorry I said anythin', father. I wasn't reproachin' ye."
"I know that, Peg."
"I'm so proud of ye that yer manner manes more to me than any man o' title in England."
He drew her gently to him.
"There's the one great danger of two people who have grown near to each other separatin'. When they, meet again, they each think the other has changed. They look at each other with different eyes, Peg. An' that's what yer doin' with me. So long as I was near ye, ye didn't notice the roughness o' me speech an' the lack o' breedin' an' the want o' knowledge. Ye've seen and listened to others since who have all I never had the chance to get. God knows I want YOU to have all the advantages that the wurrld can give ye, since you an' me counthry—an' the memory of yer mother—are all I have had in me life these twenty years past. An' that was why I urged ye to go to England on the bounty of yer uncle. I wanted ye to know there was another kind of a life, where the days flowed along without a care or a sorrow. Where poverty was but a word, an' misery had no place. An' ye've seen it, Peg. An' the whole wurrld has changed for ye, Peg. An' from now you'll sit in judgment on the dead and gone days of yer youth—an' in judgment on me—"
She interrupted him violently:
"What are ye sayin' to me at all!Isit in judgment on YOU! What do ye think I've become? Let me tell ye I've come back to ye a thousand times more yer child than I was when I left ye. What I've gone through has only strengthened me love for ye and me reverence for yer life's work.IMAY have changed. But don't we all change day by day, even as we pass them close to each other. An' if the change is for the betther, where's the harm? I HAVE changed, father. There's somethin' wakened in me I never knew before. It's a WOMAN I've brought ye back instead o' the GIRL I left. An' it's the WOMAN'LL stand by ye, father, even as the child did when I depended on ye for every little thing. There's no power in the wurrld'll ever separate us!"
She clung to him hysterically.
Even while she protested the most, he felt the strange new note in her life. He held her firmly and looked into her eyes.
"There's one thing, Peg, that must part us, some day, when it comes to you."
"What's that, father?"
"LOVE, Peg."
She lowered her eyes and said nothing.
"Has it come? Has it, Peg?"
She buried her face on his breast, and though no sound came, he knew by the trembling of her little body that she was crying.
So it HAD come into her life.
The child he had sent away a month ago had come back to him transformed in that little time—into a woman.
The Cry of Youth and the Call of Life had reached her heart.
That night Peg and her father faced the future. They argued out all it might mean. They would fight it together. It was a pathetic, wistful little Peg that came back to him, and O'Connell set himself the task of lifting something of the load that lay on his child's heart.
After all, he reasoned with her, with all his gentility and his advantages to have allowed Peg to like him and then to deliberately hurt her at the end, just as she was leaving, for a fancied insult, did not augur well for the character of Jerry.
He tried to laugh her out of her mood.
He chided her for joking with an Englishman at a critical moment such as their leave-taking.
"And it WAS a joke, Peg, wasn't it?"
"Sure, it was, father."
"You ought to have known betther than that. During all that long month ye were there did ye meet one Englishman that ever saw a joke?"
"Not many, father. Cousin Alaric couldn't."
"Did ye meet ONE?"
"I did, father."
"Ye did?"
"I did."
"THERE was a man whose friendship ye might treasure."
"I do treasure it, father."
"Ye do?"
"Yes, father."
"Who was it?"
"Jerry, father."
O'Connell took a long breath and sighed.
Jerry! Always Jerry!
"I thried several jokes on him, an' he saw most of 'em."
"I'd like to see this paragon, faith."
"I wish ye could, father. Indade I do. Ye'd be such good friends."
"WE'D be friends? Didn't ye say he was a GINTLEMAN?"
"He sez a GENTLEMAN is a man who wouldn't willingly hurt anybody else. And he sez, as well, that it doesn't matther what anybody was born, if they have that quality in them they're just as much gintleman as the people with ancestors an' breedin'. An' he said that the finest gintleman he ever met was a CABMAN."
"A cabman, Peg?"
"Yes, faith—that's what he said. The cabman couldn't hurt anybody, and so he was a gintlemaa."
"Did he mane it?"
"He meant everything he said—to ME."
"There isn't much the matther with him, I'm thinkin'."
"There's nothin' the matther with him, father."
"Mebbe he is Irish way back. It's just what an Irishman would say—a RALE Irishman."
"There's no nationality in character or art, or sport or letthers or music. They're all of one great commonwealth. They're all one brotherhood, whether they're white or yellow or red or black. There's no nationality about them. The wurrld wants the best, an' they don't care what colour the best man is, so long as he's GREAT."
O'Connell listened amazed.
"An' where might ye have heard that?"
"Jerry towld me. An' it's thrue. I believe it."
They talked far into the night.
He unfolded his plans.
If his book was a success and he made some little money out of it, they would go back to Ireland and live out their lives there. And it was going to be a wonderful Ireland, too, with the best of the old and ceaseless energy of the new.
An Ireland worth living in.
They would make their home there again, and this time they would not leave it.
"But some day we might go to England, father, eh?"
"What for?"
"Just to see it, father."
"I was only there once. It was there yer mother an' me were married. It was there she gave her life into me care."
He became suddenly silent, and the light of memory shone in his eyes, and the sigh of heart-ache broke through his lips.
And his thoughts stretched back through the years, and once again Angela was beside him.
Peg saw the look and knew it. She kept quite still. Then, as of old, when her father was in trouble, she did as she was wont in those old-young days—she slipped her little hand into his and waited for him to break the silence.
After a while he stood up.
"Ye'd betther be goin' to bed, Peg."
"All right, father."
She went to the door. Then she stopped.
"Ye're glad I'm home, father?"
He pressed her closely to him for answer.
"I'll never lave ye again," she whispered.
All through the night Peg lay awake, searching through the past and trying to pierce through the future.
Toward morning she slept and, in a whirling dream she saw a body floating down a stream. She stretched out her hand to grasp it when the eyes met hers, and the eyes were those of a dead man—and the man was Jerry.
She woke trembling with fear and she turned on the light and huddled into a chair and sat chattering with terror until she heard her father moving in his room. She went to the door and asked him to let her go in to him. He opened the door and saw his little Peg wild eyed, pale and terror-stricken, standing on the threshold. The look in her eyes terrified him.
"What is it, Peg, me darlin'? What is it?"
She crept in, and looked up into his face with her startling gaze, and she grasped him with both of her small hands, and in a voice dull and hopeless, cried despairingly:
"I dreamt he was dead! Dead! and I couldn't rache him. An' he went on past me—down the stream—with his face up-turned—" The grasp loosened, and just as she slipped from him, O'Connell caught her in his strong arms and placed her gently on the sofa and tended her until her eyes opened again and looked up at him.
It was the first time his Peg had fainted.
She had indeed come back to him changed.
He reproached himself bitterly.
Why had he insisted on her going?
She had a sorrow at her heart, now, that no hand could heal—not even his.
Time only could soften her grief—time—and—
Those first days following Peg's return found father and child nearer each other than they had been since that famous trip through Ireland, when he lectured from the back of his historical cart.
She became O'Connell's amanuensis. During the day she would go from library to library in New York, verifying data for her father's monumental work. At night he would dictate and she would write. O'Connell took a newer and more vital interest in the book, and it advanced rapidly toward completion.
It was a significant moment to introduce it, since the eyes of the world were turned on the outcome of the new measure for Home Rule for Ireland, that Mr. Asquith's government were introducing, and that appeared to have every chance of becoming law.
The dream of so many Irishmen seemed to be within the bounds of possibility of becoming a forceful reality.
Accordingly O'Connell strained every nerve to complete it. He reviewed the past; he dwelt on the present: he attempted to forecast the future. And with every new page that he completed he felt it was one more step nearer home—the home he was hoping for and building on for Peg—in Ireland.
There the colour would come back to her cheeks, the light to her eyes and the flash of merriment to her tongue. She rarely smiled now, and the pallor was always in her cheeks, and wan circles pencilled around her eyes spoke of hard working days and restless nights.
She no longer spoke of England.
He, wise in his generation, never referred to it. All her interest seemed to be centred in his book.
It was a strange metamorphosis for Peg—this writing at dictation: correcting her orthography; becoming familiar with historical facts and hunting through bookshelves for the actual occurrences during a certain period.
And she found a certain happiness in doing it.
Was it not for her father?
And was she not improving herself?
Already she would not be at such a disadvantage, as a month ago, with people.
The thought gratified her.
She had two letters from Ethel: the first a simple, direct one of gratitude and of regret; gratitude for Peg's kindness and loyalty to her, and regret that Peg had left them. The second told of a trip she was about to make to Norway with some friends.
They were going to close the house in Scarboro and return to London early in September.
Alaric had decided to follow his father's vocation and go to the bar. The following Autumn they would settle permanently in London while Alaric ate his qualifying dinners and addressed himself to making his career!
Of Brent she wrote nothing. That incident was apparently closed. She ended her letter with the warmest expressions of regard and affection for Peg, and the hope that some day they would meet again and renew their too-brief intimacy. The arrival of these letters and her daily 'deviling' for her father were the only incidents in her even life.
One evening some few weeks after her return, she was in her room preparing to begin her night's work with her father when she heard the bell ring. That was unusual. Their callers were few. She heard the outer door open—then the sound of a distant voice mingling with her father's.
Then came a knock at her door.
"There's somebody outside here to see ye, Peg," said her father.
"Who is it, father?"
"A perfect sthranger—to me. Be quick now."
She heard her father's footsteps go into the little sitting-room and then the hum of voices.
Without any apparent reason she suddenly felt a tenseness and nervousness. She walked out of her room and paused a moment outside the closed door of the sitting-room and listened.
Her father was talking. She opened the door and walked in. A tall, bronzed man came forward to greet her. Her heart almost stopped. She trembled violently. The next moment Jerry had clasped her hand in both of his.
"How are you, Peg?"
He smiled down at her as he used to in Regal Villa: and behind the smile there was a grave look in his dark eyes, and the old tone of tenderness in his voice.
"How are you, Peg?" he repeated.
"I'm fine, Mr. Jerry," she replied in a daze. Then she looked at O'Connell and she hurried on to say:
"This is my father—Sir Gerald Adair."
"We'd inthroduced ourselves already," said O'Connell, good-naturedly, eyeing the unexpected visitor all the while. "And what might ye be doin' in New York?" he asked.
"I have never seen America. I take an Englishman's interest in what we once owned—"
"—And lost thro' misgovernment—"
"—Well, we'll say MISUNDERSTANDING—"
"—As they'll one day lose Ireland—"
"—I hope not. The two countries understand each other better every day."
"It's taken centuries to do it."
"The more lasting will be the union."
As Peg watched Jerry she was wondering all the time why he was there. This quiet, undemonstrative, unemotional man. Why?
The bell rang again. Peg started to go, but O'Connell stopped her.
"It's McGinnis. This is his night to call and tell me the politics of the town. I'll take him into the next room, Peg, until yer visitor is gone."
"Oh, please—" said Jerry hurriedly and taking a step toward the door. "Allow me to call some other time."
"Stay where ye are!" cried O'Connell, hurrying out as the bell rang again.
Peg and Jerry looked at each other a moment, then she lowered her eyes.
"I want to ask ye something, Sir Gerald," she began.
"Jerry!" he corrected.
"Please forgive me for what I said to ye that day. It was wrong of me to say it. Yet it was just what ye might have expected from me. But ye'd been so fine to me—a little nobody—all that wonderful month that it's hurt me ever since. And I didn't dare write to ye—it would have looked like presumption from me. But now that ye've come here—ye've found me out and I want to ask yer pardon—an' I want to ask ye not to be angry with me."
"I couldn't be angry with you, Peg."
He paused, and, as he looked at her, the reserve of the held-in, self-contained man was broken. He bent over her and said softly:
"Peg, I love you!"
A cry welled up from Peg's heart to her lips, and was stifled. The room swam around her.
Was all her misery to end?
Did this man come back from the mists of memory BECAUSE he loved her?
She tried to speak but nothing came from her parched lips and tightened throat.
Then she became conscious that he was speaking again, and she listened to him with all her senses, with all her heart, and from her soul.
"I knew you would never write to me, and somehow I wondered just how much you cared for me—if at all. So I came here. I love you, Peg. I want you to be my wife. I want to care for you, and tend you, and make you happy. I love you!"
Her heart leaped and strained. The blood surged to her temples.
"Do you love me?" she whispered, and her voice trembled and broke.
"I do. Indeed I do. Be my wife."
"But you have a title," she pleaded
"Share it with me!" he replied.
"Ye'd be so ashamed o' me, ye would!"
"No, Peg, I'd be proud of you. I love you!"
Peg, unable to argue or plead, or strive against what her heart yearned for the most, broke down and sobbed as she murmured:
"I love you, too, Mister Jerry."
In a moment she was in his arms.
It was the first time anyone had touched her tenderly besides her father. All her sturdy, boyish ruggedness shrank from any display of affection. Just for a moment it did now. Then she slowly yielded herself.
But Jerry stroked her hair, and looked into her eyes and smiled down at her lovingly, as he asked:
"What will your father say?"
She looked happily up at him and answered:
"Do you know one of the first things me father taught me when I was just a little child?"
"Tell me!"
"It was from Tom Moore: 'Oh, there's nothin' half so sweet in life As Love's young dream.'"
When O'Connell came into the room later he realised that the great summons had come to his little girl.
He felt a dull pain at his heart.
But only for a moment.
The thought came to him that he was about to give to England his daughter in marriage! Well, had he not taken from the English one of her fairest daughters as his wife?
And a silent prayer went up from his heart that happiness would abide with his Peg and her 'Jerry' and that their romance would last longer than had Angela's and his.
And now the moment has come to take leave of the people I have lived with for so long. Yet, though I say "Adieu!" I feel it is only a temporary leave-taking. Their lives are so linked with mine that some day in the future I may be tempted to draw back the curtain and show the passage of years in their various lives.
Simultaneously with the Second-Reading of the Home Rule Bill passing through the English House of Commons, O'Connell published his book.
Setting down clearly, without passion or prejudice, the actual facts of the ancient and modern struggle for Ireland's freedom, and foreshadowing the coming of the New Era of prosperity and enlightenment and education and business integrity—O'Connell found himself hailed, as a modern prophet.
He appealed to them to BEG no longer but to cooperate, to organize—above all to WORK and to work consistently and intelligently. He appealed to the Irish working in factories and work-shops and in civil appointments in the great cities of the world, to come back to Ireland, and, once again to worship at the shrine of the beauty of God's Country! To open their eyes and their hearts to all the light and glory and wonder which God gives to the marvellous world He has made for humanity. To see the Dawn o'er mountain and lake; scent the grass and the incense of the flowers, and the sweet breath of the land. To grasp the real and tumultuous magnificence of their native country.
He appealed to all true Irishmen to take up their lives again in the land from which, they were driven, and to be themselves the progenitors of Ireland's New Nation.
It will not be long before his appeal will be answered and his prophecy fulfilled.
The Dawn of the New Ireland has begun to shed its light over the country, and the call of Patriotism will bring Irishmen from the farthest limits of the world, as it drove them away in the bitter time of blood and strife and ignorance and despotism.
Those days have passed. O'Connell was in the thick o the battle in his youth; in his manhood he now sees the fruit of the conflict.
Some day, with him, we will visit Peg in her English home, and see the marvels time and love have wrought upon her. But to those who knew her in the old days she is still the same Peg O' my Heart—resolute, loyal, unflinching, mingling the laugh with the tear—truth and honesty her bed-rock.
And whilst we are in London we will drop into the Law-Courts and hear Alaric Chichester, now Barrister-at-Law, argue his first case and show the possibility of following in his famous father's footsteps.
We will also visit Mrs. Chichester and hear of her little grand-child, born in Berlin, where her daughter, Ethel, met and married an attache at the Embassy, and has formed a salon in which the illustrious in the Diplomatic world foregather.
It will be a grateful task to revive old memories of those who formed the foreground of the life-story of one whose radiant presence shall always live in my memory: whose steadfastness and courage endeared her to all; whose influence on those who met her and watched her and listened to her was far-reaching, since she epitomized in her small body all that makes woman loveable and man supreme: honour, faith and Love!
Adieu! Peg O' my Heart!