Now fell across us the sultry summer; sometimes with rain, and steamy mud to follow; and then with stretches of a burning dryness when the dust curled aloft on the impertinent lip of the wind to fill folk's eyes and faces. There came, too, the shadow of impending calamity to rest upon us, for the General's health began to flag, and it would look for a while as though he had been marked by death itself. The malady was never understood by me, and I think the doctor lived no better off; but, as near as one might guess, it arose from the bogs and reeking marshes fringing the river on our south, and on which, morning and evening, I've seen the damps and miasmas lying white and thick as a flock of wool—a sight to shake the strongest.
The General was indeed ill, and with face turning to be wan while his haggard eye grew ever more bright and hollow. He lost greatly the use of his legs; those members being swollen to a preposterous size, and his feet dropsical, so that he could not be said to walk but only hobble. He must be supported, leaning commonly on my arm, though sometimes Peg's pretty shoulder was his crutch; for she was with him very constant, reading to him, or passing him a glass, or cheering him with her talk of flippant nothings.
With his usual bitterness of resolution the General would each day be up and dressed, and pass the hours on a lounge which Augustus prepared, and where he might lie and through the open casement command a prospect of the distant Arlington hills.
To such a lowness did the General sink that his death was waited for, and the doctor who attended him—and did no good—felt driven to give him the name of it.
“For one who is in so high a place,” said the doctor, “must needs have weighty concerns to be put in order; and therefore of all folk he should be shown his end in time.”
This was gospel true enough as an abstraction, but in the case of the General that doctor should have known how his business was to cure, and not stand prating of death. Of this I informed him in such wise that he was at once for leaving the house and never coming back. The loss might have been easily measured had he done so.
It was the General himself who told me he was to die; and it stood a marvel, the good patience and sympathy wherewith he went upon the information. One would have supposed it was of my death he talked.
“And in the bottom of it,” said he, in conclusion, “I have the chance of meeting her”—pointing to his wife's picture—“and that chance alone would make twenty deaths worth trying. For when we come to the end of it, Major, the heaven they talk of may be true.” This last with a manner of reverie as when hope upholds conviction leaning to a fall.
As best it could, my nature fought against a belief that the General would die; but his own word overpowered me. The fear of it, when he told the news, went through me like a spear. Or it was as if a stone were rolled upon my heart.
Sick folk, for a rule, are impatient and sharply cross with those about, even with their best beloved. But the General would be the opposite, and was never more tolerant than now when he lay ill; and this kindness made it a privilege and a pleasure to be near him, and not a burden to be borne.
Peg, as I have written, was much with him—fresh and sweet as a cluster of violets, about a sick room she was worth her weight in drugs. And the General and she had never so full a space for acquaintance before, and so each day he came to know Peg better and to love her more.
There existed throughout this summer a kind of truce in the crusade against Peg; the Reverend Ely had turned to be as mute as an oyster, while the Reverend Campbell and those harpies whom Noah so confounded were not only silent but deeply out of sight. There was neither sign nor rumor to come from them.
The books of account which Peg and I brought away from her mother's on the night when we were dogged, showed all Peg claimed. For the June her detractors spoke of in their lyings, and for three years before and well nigh a twelvemonth to follow, Timberlake was in town, and, after his wedding, constantly with Peg until he sailed. There was left no ground for argument, and that tale, as fatuous as it was wicked, fell, knocked on its sinful head.
As for the lurking Reverend Campbell himself, I caught sight of him but once. This was accident, and the pleasure of the shortest, for he dodged around a corner like the wind; and although—through an idleness of mind to see him going—I made speed to be at his point of disappearance, he, so to say, had exhaled. Into what dark crevice he crawled to hide from me I have no hint; but as if that street corner were a corner of the universe and he spilled therefrom into the very abyss of eternity itself, I never afterward caught the picture of his tallow cheeks and festering, munching lips.
This peace for Peg was something due to, a desertion of the town; for everybody—and women-folk especially—not tied by the leg to duties, went seeking cool comfort by the ocean or on the mountains.
Eaton himself made one of those who went away; he would have had Peg for company, but she urged—what was true, since the old lady had grown frail and weakly—that she ought not to leave her mother for so long a space. Eaton agreed with entire good humor to this, and so left Peg behind, and never a qualm or mark of hesitation, while he sought his ease by the sea.
Eaton from his own view-point might well spare Peg from his plans; he was extremely a man's man, and owning, withal, a hand for the bottle and a mighty promptitude for cards, would the better amuse himself with no wife to be a mortgage on his liberty.
Summer is for society what winter is to war; the forces lie all in quarters, and beyond caring for their arms or practicing a drill against the campaign day to dawn, there arises nothing to be called a movement. Indeed, as I've explained, the women—who, as Peg would have it, are the fighting line—for the most part were fled to beach and hill. The town was in its sleep, and society would awaken it only with the advent of the snows.
In the last there were still our three cabinet wives, that is, the ladies Berrien, Branch, and Ingham, to be left about us. These would soon depart; but by this claim or that, they had been brought to lag behind when the great covey of their flounced fellows went whirring away to be cool. Peg never had visited these folk, nor they her, and on those few occasions when official exigency threw them together, the cabinet three, who, like the General's fleeting niece, were utterly beneath the sway of the Vice-President's wife—herself a woman of unquestioned place and breeding, and a natural queen, besides,—took heed to hold aloof from Peg. On her side, Peg passed them by or looked them through as though they had not been, and, if I am to judge, came off from these tiltings with prestige all undimmed.
It would have been as good as the play, were I not prey and spoil to so much soreness in the business, to have watched those tacit joustings of Peg with our old mailed warriors of the drawing rooms. The dauntless Peg crossed glances with the most seasoned of her bad-wishers, and left them ever the worse for those thrustings. If she were wounded, no one learned the bleeding fact; and not even I should know. From the laugh to ring true, and the fine spirit of her, I was fain to conclude that Peg, so far from shrinking, joyed in such silken combats to take place among the flowers and with the music of orchestras stirring the blood; and in the last I am sure she did.
Berrien and Branch, and for that matter the clumsy Ingham, would with an invariable politeness, nicely measured to a hair, greet Peg whenever they met with her; and she would accept their courtesy in a cold way of elevation and as though our cabinet gentlemen came of the general press about whose very names she did not know and never would. On such lofty terms a fair peace was maintained, and nothing to rancorously rise above the majesty of a ripple to beat upon any one's shore.
The General might have preferred a better cordiality, but he could make no interference.
“If to step between a man and his enemy,” he would say, “is to invoke a risk, how much more is he in danger who tampers with the feuds of women?”
For one, I much agreed with him, and we both looked on, idle of hand and tongue, while Peg met and foiled the “Redsticks,” as the General named them.
Nor would Peg need our aid. I've seen no prouder, braver woman walk across a room, or one of a more nimble faculty or fortitude more broadly planted, than our Peg. My admiration spent its days to weave new wreaths for her.
It was the doting Ingham—he of our Treasury—to be witless enough to broach this business of feminine ice with Eaton. Ingham was a girthy person, and one's briefest consideration disclosed him for the vulgar Pennsylvania paper-maker he was. Short and thick of body, with thick legs, thick neck; even his tongue was thick, and his slow wits thickest of all. Of Ingham I shall not forget Jim's estimate.
“It aint for Jim,” said that worthy, “to go talkin' sassy about no white gentleman; but as for dish yere Mr. Ingham, thar's a notion ag'in him which goes gropin' about through Jim like d'grace of heaven through a camp meetin'. That Mr. Ingham is mean; he's that mean if he owned a lake he wouldn't give a duck a drink. He's jes' about as pop'lar with Jim as a wet dawg; an' that's d'mortual fac'.”
“You don't appear to carry a high estimate of our Secretary of the Treasury,” said I.
“'Deed Jim don't, Marse Major,” he replied. “An' jes' let Jim warn you-all. You don't want to disrecollect, Marse Major, that Jim's a heap sight older man than you be, an' while Jim don't deny he's been gettin' duller an' duller ever since you locks up that demijohn, still it's mighty likely Jim's wise an' wary to a p'int where you-all oughter listen.”
“Go on,” said I, “I'm listening.”
“Course you-all is listenin',” agreed Jim; “of course you listens, 'cause you has got listenin' sense. That's what Jim likes about you. Now let Jim tell you, Marse Major; that Mr. Ingham's plumb selfish. Jim can see it in his eye. He's all right whilst he's haulin' fodder for his own stack, but you let your intrusrun ag'in his, an' you hyar Jim! that Mr. Ingham 'ud burn your barn to boil his egg quicker than a mule can kick.”
Ingham took up the subject of their wives' coldness with Eaton in an unexpected fashion. I have heard that he was thus set in foolish motion by a fear of trouble at ten paces with the war secretary, and would have placated him and missed a bullet. He stood under no cloud of peril, but that dove-like truth was yet to claim him. The General would have been his shield; but Ingham, who regarded the General as chief among the fire-eaters, would be the last to suspect the news.
It was on the kibes of a cabinet meeting when Ingham approached Eaton.
“Sir,” said Ingham, tugging nervously at his lapels, “sir, there is something of strain between our ladies, about which, if you'll permit, I should like word with you.”
“Why, sir,” returned Eaton, seizing the initiative, “I perhaps should tell you that I can not, in her social obligations, control my wife. That, sir, let me say, is work beyond a gentleman. My wife must be her own mistress; and while I know of no just cause why she should refuse to receive or recognize Mrs. Ingham, I must still insist how the right to do both lies wholly in her hands. Personally, I may deplore my wife's refusal of the acquaintance of Mrs. Ingham; however, I stand none the less ready to give you any satisfaction you require.”
With this speech, Eaton bent his brows upon the other in such way of iron menace that without a word our timid treasury gentleman clapped on his hat and went pantingly in quest of safer company.
“Was it not a master-stroke?” exulted the General, when he related the flurry. “Eaton had the hill of him in an instant; Napoleon himself could not have exhibited a more military genius.”
The General, in his glee, would talk of nothing else throughout the evening; but since I left him at an early hour I was not bored too much. Eaton replied in a manner to his credit when one considers the fact of a surprise; but there dwelt therein no reason for that long-drawn delight in which the General indulged. I was so far fortunate, however, as to soon quit him on that particular night, having work to look after, and so escaped his enthusiasm. Any childishness of satisfaction for little reason, by the General, obtruded offensively on my ideal of him, and I would experience no more of it than I might; wherefore I went about my affairs, leaving him in full song, celebrating the gallant cleverness of Eaton, who, to my notion, instead of his smart speeches should have pulled the Ingham nose.
While the General was sick on his lounge, and when Peg tired of reading, she would fall to a review of the unremitting politeness bestowed upon her by the suave Van Buren. One might read the pleasure of the General over these tidings in his relaxed face and the heed he offered to each detail. The word of how Van Buren had brought Vaughn of the English and Krudener of the Russians—for these ministers were joint despots among the legation folk and led them to what social fields they would—gave the General peculiar satisfaction; and if there remained a door in his affections which had not yet opened to the little Knickerbocker, Peg's recitals of the secretary's steady yet delicately balanced goodness threw it wide.
When the General and I were alone with our nightly pipes—albeit he at the time would be in his bed for sickness—he made his little premier the great burden of his conversation and was wont to find in him new excellencies. Time and again he would quote Peg to me for virtues owned of Van Buren and which he feared might otherwise elude my notice. It was clear “the good little secretary”—Peg's name—was become a first favorite of the General; and to be frank, and for identical reasons, as much should be said of me. I loved any who was good to Peg, and made no bones of showing it. Wherefore, you are to conceive, there arose no dispute between us; instead, we took turn and turn about in exalting our secretary and teaching each other a higher account of the man.
Peg would set forth to the General—it amused him and he would question her concerning such matters—how in this sort or in that, and always in some way of trifles too small for the mind of a man to seize on, the women who followed the social banner of the Vice-President's wife would strive to drive her into obscurity. And this was not wanting of stern effect on the General. The name Calhoun found constant repetition in these tales, and never to give the General delight. And there is this to observe: while Peg spoke of Mrs. Calhoun, the General, for his side, would be thinking only on the Vice-President, and at the end he held even more hateful views of the Carolinian than of Henry Clay himself. Surely, he came finally to be strung like a bow against him.
This vivacity of disfavor for Calhoun, however, may have had its story. Clay was a foe beaten beyond question, powerless for further war. Calhoun, on the other hand, was increasing in power; and, active in design and searching for the future, stood forth as an enemy yet to be conquered.
“The man is a would-be traitor,” said the General one day when speaking with me of Calhoun and his lines of political resolve. “He should consider, however; I may yet teach him a better patriotism.”
“He is for your destruction,” said I, “and has been since the Seminole days.”
“Nothing is more plain than that,” said the General. “And yet, were he or his people fibered of any decency, they would not, as an element of assault on me, seek to make tatters of poor Peg. I can not see how they bring themselves to that; for myself, I would not give hand to so vile a ploy for all the world.”
“They would plunge you in for Peg's defence,” I said, recalling Noah's explanation. “They hope to set the women of the land upon you as he who gives countenance to one flagrant of her sins. That is their precious intrigue; they, with their lies of Peg, would shake your power with private home-loving folk whose firesides are clean and who base themselves on chastity. There you have the whole crow-colored scheme of them, with the black impulse which turns them against Peg.”
“If they shake me with the people,” said the General, “they should call it the thirteenth labor of Hercules.”
“They should have punishment for all that,” cried I.
“Sir, they shall be punished,” retorted the General. “And as for Calhoun, he most of all shall suffer. Mark you this: That man shall never be president. More, he may yet win Gilderoy's elevation at a rope's end.” This last in wrathful whisper like a warning of death.
There was spreading reason to talk on Calhoun and his policies. South Carolina, ever arrogant, was moving to snap rebellious thumb and finger in the National face. The legislature of that insolent commonwealth had done its treason part; Nullification and its counterpart, Secession, were already agreed on; men were being enrolled and arms collected, while medals found Charleston coinage bearing the words, “John C. Calhoun, First President of the Southern Confederacy.”
And the restless spirit to animate it all was no other than Calhoun himself. He was then among his henchmen of the Palmettoes, directing even the very phrases wherewith to deck their traitorous fulminations. So much the General knew, not alone from what Peg read daily in the papers, but by the weeded word of ones whom, safe and prudent, we dispatched to find the truth.
And yet, in the last, I was sure Calhoun would never mean rebellion and a severance of his state from the common bonds. On such terms he could not succeed the General for the presidency, which was his invincible ambition. What Calhoun hoped was, by a deafening din of threat on his people's part of secession and rebellion, and every whatnot of stark treason besides, to browbeat the General to his will of Nullification; and thus by the one stroke to so fix himself in the van of victorious sentiment that no one might stay his march of White House conquest. And in good truth, thus argued the General.
“But he should beware,” said the General. “Calhoun and his cohorts shall not steal a march on the old soldier. They must not go too far. A conspiracy to do treason exists, and Calhoun is at its head. But the mere conspiracy is not enough. Marshall lays it down how folk can not think treason, can not talk treason, and that treason to be treason must be acted. There must be the overt act; and though it be but the act of one, it attaches to every member of the conspiracy and becomes the treason of all. If one man so much as snap a South Carolina flint, that is an act to fall within the law, and the treason is the treason of Calhoun. I say, he should take heed for himself; whether he know it or no, the man walks among pitfalls.”
“But you should be prepared,” I said.
“We will go upon the work at once,” returned the General. “Winfield Scott shall proceed to Charleston; the fleet shall convene in the bay; Castle Pinckney shall have a hundred thousand stand of arms; and we will write to our old Indian fighters, Crockett and Coffee and Houston and Dale and Overton and the rest, to lie ready with one hundred thousand riflemen in Tennessee and North Carolina to overwhelm these rebellionists at the dropping of a handkerchief.”
This converse, I recall, came off one afternoon when the General was in more healthful fettle than stood common during those days of fear for his life. Peg sat with us; indeed, it was news she gave us from a Charleston paper to bring down all this talk.
Peg, silent yet interested, listened while the General laid out his purposes.
“And if the Vice-President were taken for treason, what then?” asked Peg in a kind of innocence. “What would you do with him?”
“He shall hang, child,” and the General spoke slowly and with a granite emphasis; “he shall hang as high as Haman! He shall be a lesson to traitors for all time.”
It was then, and for the first time, as the General sank back spent, and in his weakness almost consumed of his own fires, there broke on me the whole peril of Calhoun. I knew the General too well to distrust the execution of his rope-and-gibbet threat. I was the more confirmed when that evening he would have me go about a score of letters ordering the readiness of those ships and arms and men he had outlined. A cordon of power was to be thrown about Calhoun and the ground beneath him mined for his destruction.
Now if the General through this long summer grew to a better acquaintance with Peg, the same also might be told of me. And hardly a day was to dawn and die when in the unique turns and twists of her manifold nature she would not come upon me in a novel light. She was never to be twice the same, and my sluggish apprehension could scarce keep pace with the changes of her.
For a specimen, then, of how she would stand against me over a wrong claim, and her skill in its defence. One morning she had drawn me off to the northward for a walk. The day was by no means sultry, and a breeze was blowing and so induced a temperature which made the exercise a joy. We were rambling through a deep valley—Peg and I—which was the home of a brawling rivulet, and making a slow journey of it, since the way, broken by boulders and sown with thickets in between, was something of the roughest. While about this pleasant toil Peg broke forth:
“Do you see that vine?” Here she pointed to a creeper, luxuriant and rich, which, failing of support to climb by, ran all about on the ground. “That vine is like me. It needs a trellis—asks some tall and strong tree to clasp and love and grow upon. Given a tree to touch the heavens, that loving vine would climb upward to kiss the heavens with her tree. Wanting her tree—poor vine!—she grovels about the ground. That vine and I are the same.”
To this I offered no response, for I could not see how the matter called for debate; and then her fancy was like unto a shooting star, and no one might foresee its flight or prophesy its course. However, Peg did not ask reply. Away she plunged in a new direction.
“Should one control his love, to send it here or there like a dog?”
“Why,” said I, “the thing is out of the question. One's love is not a creature of bit and bridle, to be guided as one guides a horse. I should say that no one controls his love, but is controlled by it.”
“See there, now! A second Daniel!” cried Peg, with a little flicker of derision. For all that, I could tell how she agreed with me. She went on, “Then one is not to blame how one's love wanders, since one has it in no leading-string. Should one marry without love?”
“Of a verity! no,” I retorted. “It would be to cheat the other of every chance of happiness.”
“If one be not to blame,” said Peg, in a wandering way of talk, “if one be not to blame for the birth of one's love, neither should one be blamed for its death. And if one is not to marry without love, one should not continue, the wife with the husband nor he with her, when love has met its end. You yourself have shown me the wrong of that. Ah, watch-dog! am I not right?”
“Now, in all my days,” said I, “I have not been made to talk so much on love. The question is above me.”
“You said folk should not wed wanting love.” Peg paused to stamp her foot at me in saucy vehemence. “If that be true, then folk should not remain wedded wanting love. Do you not think, if a wife were to cease to love her husband, she should leave him? Does she not owe him that duty? And you have said, watch-dog, as you shall not forget, that her love, too, is not her fault.”
“Still, I should deem it great pity,” said I, “were a wife to leave her husband.”
“And that is mighty loyal to your friend,” cried Peg, in a hot spurt of indignation. “Did not the General's wife leave a husband for him? It was well for both her and him they did not consult with you. She might have been unhappy yet, and he never happy at all.” Then, gravely, following a pause: “watch-dog, you are dull beyond description.”
When I reflected on my blind inference of criticism against the General, and his wife in her grave, I was willing to concede as much. However, I took refuge in saying nothing, waiting for my blunder to blow by.
After a moment, and as we walked in a wide grassy place side by side, Peg took up my hand. Finding the round, white mark where the wound of her leopard tooth had healed, she gazed on it a moment and sighed. Then, before I could stay her, she kissed it.
“Peg's mark!” she exclaimed, as though she conversed with her thoughts; “Peg's mark for her slave!” Then lifting up her eyes to mine: “I love that mark; so much of you I love.” Then hiding a rogue of a smile which began to creep about the corners of her mouth, for she would be amused, it would seem, over the confusion into which her caress had thrown me—“Tell me, slave, do you not wish now it were a great hideous scar to overwhelm you?”
“And wherefore?” I asked. I could see how she meant to tease me with her mockeries, and would give her no answer to go upon. “I regard that as a very excellent scar as it is,” said I. “I would not have it larger for a good deal.”
“Oh, believe me,” cried Peg, her nose to the sky in a moment: “I would not make it larger for the world.”
With that, and wearing a mighty air of insult, she went about swiftly, and never a syllable for good or ill could I bring from her until we reached her house. At the gate she paused and offered me her old, teasing look.
“Do you pray, watch-dog?” said she.
“I cannot make that boast,” I replied.
“You should begin at once,” she retorted. “You should pray for quickness and a little wit.” Then, seeing me to rummage about in my thoughts for a clue to this: “But have no fear, watch-dog; I shall never let the General know how you condemned his wife.”
This gave me ease again, for then I caught her meaning. However, I needed no such assurance, since I knew of none to own Peg's tact, or one less likely to go upon that error with the General she would pledge me her word to avoid.
The summer was running into autumn and the General no better. There had been good days and bad days, and for weeks on end we were made to swing between hope and fear like a pendulum. And I believe he would have died, too, if it had not been for Peg to tend upon his pillow like a daughter. What a joy I had of the girl! My soul would fair reach out to take her in its arms for that tireless affection wherewith she surrounded him. While she could help, she was about him like an angel; when he turned his head for a little rest, she would be with me in her big chair by my desk.
And yet, when the days drew on themselves the coolness of October, and one should have looked for him to mend, the General fell suddenly away to the last flicker of his strength like a candle burning out. It was then the doctor gave him that warning how his time was near, and put us upon our guard to meet the worst. I may tell you my heart was as so much wood under my ribs, and gloom dwelt in the house like a ghost.
It will have somewhat a foolish sound, but, as I live by bread I think it was our Peg to save the General out from between the paws of death. Not by her care, though that was above description, but rather with a thought she one day laid upon him.
“Child, I shall surely die,” the General was saying. “I have thought so more than once during my rough life; but this time is my first to really know. Now I see that I shall die.”
Then he asked her to read a song from the hymn-book of his wife. “They are always an ease to me,” he said.
Peg's eyes were running tears, and she had her work cut out to smother her sobs. For all that, she bore bravely up.
“You will not die,” cried Peg. “And I shall read you, instead of hymns, how the Vice-President means to pull the country to pieces with his Charleston plots. Will you die and make him president in your stead—endow him with the power for his treasons?”
Peg told me how she had no design in saying this, and that Calhoun was in her mouth no more than an exclamation. And yet had it been the prescription of a whole college of doctors, it could not have exerted a wholesomer effect.
The General had told me he would die; and I had stood in daily terror of it; and yet neither had once fallen to consider—and this smacks of the foolish for both of us—how his death would raise up Calhoun to take his place. The truth is, I could never bring myself to plan or look beyond the General's death; my thought, however fear-spurred, would run no farther than just his death; there it would stop nor budge a pace beyond. The General's death would seem the end of things, as it might be a second deluge. And perhaps he, himself, fell into similar frame; only with him it was but his building on that all-swallowing hope of meeting with his Saint Rachel, never again to be parted. That crowded out all else.
Letting conjecturings go adrift, however, the bald fact remains that it was Peg, after all, who came first to make us take a thought in advance and consider where the General's going would place the country with Calhoun. I remember how the General lay back on his pillow after Peg's outburst of warning; and next how his glance began to collect its old-time fire.
“By the Eternal!”—this in a whisper—“I will not die and leave the people helpless with those traitors. I must either live my term out, or live till I hang Calhoun. The country must be safe before I go.”
From that moment he would not speak of dying, but only of getting well and living; and each day he made visible stages towards a better strength, and would sit up longer, and would demand that we do some work. I can not say I witnessed these efforts without trembling; he might break himself down to death's door with this sudden load of labor. But no, he would go on; and no harm to come of it, but only good, for within the four weeks to follow Peg's inspired exhortation—for I shall ever think of her as one inspired of heaven to call the General back from death—he could be looked on as a hale man, one sound and in a plight of safety.
Also, his old fierceness began again to burn; he would bicker with me viciously—a thing laid aside for months. It comes back to me how, at the tail end of that sickness, his first words of opposition to something I proposed fell on my ears like a concord of sweet sounds. I could thank God in my heart to hear his anger, for now I knew he was surely upon health's own highroad. And so he was.
There came another thing of moment to find its cause in the General's illness, and that death it would threaten. The word had gone about the town that the General was in his last throes, or nearly; and at that, the thought giving a mean courage to the man, in the midst of this bad news our port wine Duff Green came upon us with a long editorial comparison of Calhoun with Van Buren, wherein the latter was lashed and the other uplifted to the blue dome. The article was nothing strong or well considered—a mere black thing of froth and poison!—and served no purpose beyond marking Duff Green's friendship in one quarter and his enmity in another.
It was Peg, who had taken charge of our newspapers, to call our eyes to the business.
Peg's indignation ran high, for she was a tireless adherent of her “good little secretary,” who would be her ally against Mrs. Calhoun.
“Listen to this wretch!” cried Peg, as with the paper in her little claw she burst upon the General and me.
Thereupon she gave us the English of it, and being strung with anger, flourished it off with much spirit and effect.
While the General bent quiet ear, his brow lowered and his own anger began to run with Peg's.
“The scoundrel speaks of Van Buren,” said the General, when Peg was done; “but he means me. And so he applauds Calhoun! Then let him follow his applause for his support.” Then, to me directly: “Did you not in the beginning speak of calling Blair to found a paper? Write to him; bid him come at once. This Duff Green has done enough for punishment, and we will go about his destinies in ways not soon to be forgot.”
Within the hour, a word was on the road to Blair in Frankfort; a word to become at once the death-warrant of Duff Green'sTelegraphand the reason of Blair'sGlobe, which last, as the General once said, grew up in a night like any Jonah's gourd, to cast a long, important shadow in affairs.
Duff Green, as if to observe the effect of his Calhoun-Van Buren shot, would call upon the General. It was my guardian Jim who told me of that visit.
“I was sort o' knockin' 'round,” said Jim, “like a blind dog in a meat shop, when dish yere Duff Green gentleman tells me to give you 'Howdy!' an' say he's waitin' to see you-all.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
“He's pervadin' about d'big Eas' Room,” returned Jim, “when I 'bandons him.”
Duff Green extended his fishy hand; but I did not see it, my eyes being employed upon his face; and that with so cold an industry it served to turn the violin red of it to apoplectic purple for uneasiness and rage.
“I offer you my hand, sir,” cried Duff.
“Sir,” said I, “in requital, I offer you a sentence of counsel. Be out of that door, and do not enter it again until your friend Calhoun is master in this house. But stay; I have another order for your ear. Do not, by word or look or act, whether to me or to any man, make claim on my acquaintance. I will not agree as to the measure of my resentment in case you do.”
“Sir, is this an insult?”
“Sir, you will please yourself for a term.”
“And, sir,”—Duff Green's voice quavered a trifle—“am I to consider this the action of the president?”
“I think it would be wise to do so,” I retorted, “since you would seem to stand even lower in his graces than you do in mine. I argue this from a comparison of our remarks upon you.” I was enough the savage to delight in harassing the pursy Duff and in diminishing his brow of consequence. “I did but casually describe you—being idle at the time—as a bloated spider, sucking patronage, and with a newspaper to be your web, when he would correct me. 'You do the dog a compliment,' said he. 'Now, one might conceive of a spider that should be of some moment. He whom we call Duff Green is no such thing. He is nothing; or at most a vacuum, which is nothingness given a name—as it were, an im-ponderous absence of overpowering unimportance.'”
“Them's mighty fine words, Marse Major, you-all flings loose,” said Jim, when Duff Green quit the field. Jim, whose care concerning me was only equaled by his curiosity, stood, of course, in close attendance upon the colloquy. “Yas-sir,” he continued, “them's what Jim calls langwidge of d'good ol' Cumberland kind. That Duff Green gentleman shore misses it a mile when he comes pawin' 'round for to 'spute with you. Yes, indeed, Marse Major, that's whar he drap his water-million!”
When I repeated my interview with Duff to the General, together with Jim's comments of admiration, and we had had our laugh, the General turned serious:
“Major,” said he, “I've been thinking. I may yet die, and the rule we made that no one of my cabinet shall succeed me when my term is done turns now to be no good rule. It strengthens Calhoun. Also, it is he to set his dog of a Duff against Van Buren because the latter would buckler Peg. I'm too much broken and too weak for talk, and I need not repeat the reasons for such step. It's on my heart, however, to set the ball in motion for Van Buren to have this place when my term is done.”
“And how would you proceed?” said I. “For myself, nothing could be better to my taste.”
“This is my notion,” said the General. “Let us write to Overton, setting forth—with a cloud of other matter to be a cover—the presidential fitness of Van Buren in his every line. This shall be a secret between Overton and us. The letter will be wanted only in event of my death, for while I live Calhoun shall never have the White House. If I die, why there's my name to it for Van Buren against the world. And let me tell you, sir, I much mistake my place with the people if my dead word be not of greater weight with them, aye! if it do not move them far beyond any potency to be latent in the living name Calhoun.”
We made no pause about it, the General and I, and as soon as saddle-bags might carry, Overton received the missive which the General had described. It was never wanted, for the General did not die; but there it lay in the hands of Overton, and the word-for-word blood brother to it in my own, ready like a grim reserve to take his place in battle against Calhoun should the General be stricken down.
And thus, during our first summer and autumn, did the General and I, with caution and wise concern, coil down and clear our political decks for the great wars we knew were at hand. Defeat for our enemies; triumph for our friends; those were our watchwords.
You may believe I went into November and looked winterward with a load off my soul, when now the General's health was come back; and with it his temper to wrangle and clash with me; also his mighty heart was restored, hot as Hecla and as volcanic, against those who, mongering Nullification, would forge a Calhoun treason down among the rice fields.
As for Peg, there stood no limit to her satisfaction when the fight for the General's life was won, and he in fairer health than at any hour since we came.
“And, child, it was you who saved me,” said the General, lifting up Peg's chin with his thin hand. “Do you think I shall forget that?”
Now the town began to regain its own, and folk came straggling in from beach and hill and dale. Noah, too, was down from New York, he and his graceful Hercules, Rivera; and, as the town filled, Peg's spirits would put on spurs, and she never was more blithe and high than now when we drew close to that struggle of the drawing rooms wherein she so planned to have a leading portion.
One day, however, she would seem not quite so gay as common, but with a haze of thought about those eyes, which of late—with the General strong and above the need of drugs—had danced and sparkled. Peg had brought me a posy of flowers for my desk.
“Are they not beautiful?” she asked. “I love the flowers; so sweet, so contented on their stems among the leaves! Are they not beautiful?”
“And how will I see flowers while you are in the place?” said I.
This was to cure her out of her sadness, which, for all her words about the flowers, hung over her face like a mist.
“Now, see how well you said that!” cried Peg, brightening a little and turning me her droll look. “Was it prepared? Was it spontaneous? Really, slave, were you to go on like that for a year, or say for two, my hope might revive over you.” This lightly, and to step off her tongue with foot of air. Then, for my bewilderment beyond hope, she without warning breaks into tears. And next, to be a cap-sheaf on my shocked amazement, she gives me this at the door, to which she cries her way blindly: “My husband will be home to-night!” And with that she leaves me helplessly to wonder was there ever born upon this earth, to be a beautiful woman and turn folk mad, such another confusing tangle as this Peg of ours!
Next morning I went straight into the midst of my correspondence and began tossing it on my pen as husbandmen toss hay. There rang no unusual call for this energy of ink, but the whole truth was that, flying like a fugitive before pursuing thoughts of Peg—I may tell you they had a fine dance about my pillow the night before!—I would make a refuge of my work.
Long ago I had given up the hope of solving Peg in her vagaries. One would never know where or when or how to lay hold on her, for she came to one new and new each day. Wayward, erratic, now fierce and now tender, now in laughter and now in tears, one might not count on her moods in their direction more than on the flight of birds. The one only thing one might be sure of concerning Peg was that one was sure of nothing.
It was the thought of those tears for the home-coming of Eaton which would storm me down and have me captive for all I might barricade with pen and ink. What should they proclaim? That Peg was unhappy, truly, since folk do not weep for mirth. In a way I was daunted of my honor as I went about these thoughts; it seemed a trustless thing to dwell on Peg and her wedded life. And I would fight against it; and still it pinned and held me. In the last of it I was claimed by the conclusion that Peg found existence grievously dark, for what else should be headwaters for those tears? Also, I resolved that I would coldly look the question of her grief in the face; it might turn the better for both of us to lay hands upon its cause. I was given the more courage for this scrutiny since I had not forgotten how Peg named me to be her only confidant; that word put a trust upon me and made my question-asking a kind of duty.
As thread by thread I lifted up the inquiry of Peg's sorrow, the truth would begin to make itself plain to me. Eaton was something gross, and mayhap in his finer senses not unnumbed of the bowl. He could not value Peg—she, a perfumed spirit thing of music and color and fire and light! And Peg would feel his lack of appreciation; it would wring her heart, stab her like a dagger. Verily, I came by a great freshness when now I was on the right scent of it. This, it was, to lie at the root of her meaning when she showed me that vine trailing its rich beauties along the ground, instead of climbing, and said, “I am like that vine.” The prone and earth-held soul of Eaton offered her no trellis.
And so Peg mourned her lost estate of love! And why should she not mourn? she, thus swindled of a rightful destiny! Peg shone a thing of beauty to deck a heaven with; and here was she fated to be the jewel in the dulled head of a toad! Why should her sorrow find rebuke? Born to be the reason of admiration and to feed on it as a flower feeds on the sun, the irony of accident had flung her into this chill corner of neglect. And her love was dying—starving away its life. Peg did not love Eaton; the yoke galled her—yoking her as it did to one who, while perhaps owning the affections, the integrity, the loyalty, owned also the low unelevation of the brute. And for that, Peg would stay behind when Eaton went away and weep to see him coming.
While, with some fondness for the argument—since it would make for Peg's exoneration—I was moving to these conclusions, it ran abruptly over me how, during our first talk in the parlors of the Indian Queen, Peg's eyes would seem to swim in love for Eaton. I recalled her cry of pain when she feared he might be shamed for her, and how she said she would sooner die than that. Then, surely, Peg must have loved him; nor had he changed since then.
These memories were sent to baffle me; but with a second thought the fallacy of such deductions was laid bare. When, in the Indian Queen, Peg would weep for love of Eaton, she was but the bride of a month. She stood yet in the haze of the honeymoon, and had been given no frank outline of her mate. Then he seemed what he should be, not what he was, and Hope, not Truth, was painter to the picture.
Yes, it would walk before me right enough; Eaton had been a lover of gold to become a husband of brass. Peg was as much wasted on him as though one put a love verse from Herrick into the hands of a Seminole of the Everglades. In his arms she was an error—a solecism—a crime—as it might be, a lily on a muck-heap!
These thoughts so played the tyrant with me as to take the pen from between my fingers; I could do no work, but only sit and stare from the window while my mind ran away to Peg.
Then I resolved to call Peg over; she should adorn her throne at my desk's end; I would show her how, for all that cloudiness of sensibility on the part of another, there still lived one on whom her sweet fineness was not thrown away. I would dispatch her a note by Jim; I would crave her help for my mails. This should bring her, and be a fair excuse besides, since it was not the beginning of such requests. Peg had often aided me to get my letters off.
Note in hand and ready, I stepped to the rear of the mansion to summon Jim. I could hear his high, patronizing tones, evidently employed about the instruction of the cook. The two were close by a rear door that opened into the kitchen.
“Yassir,” I heard Jim say, “they has black bass in d'Cumberland, shoals an' shoals of'em. How much you reckon that one weigh?” Apparently they had a Potomac fish between them to be the basis of discussion. “How much that weigh? Five pounds? You hyar me, son, we uses that size fish for bait back in Tennessee. Do Jim ever catch a bigger one? Say; if Jim don't catch a bass in d'ol' Cumberland that's bigger than a cow, then Jim'll jine d'church! It was a heap excitin', cotchin' that fish. He grab d'hook; an' then he jes' nacherally split up an' down d'river like ol' Satan was arter him for dinner; an' then he done dives. That's whar he leads d'wrong kyard; for he bump his nose, blim! on d'rock bottom; an' it hurt him so he jes' turn, an' next he comes lippin' up through d'top of d'water an' goes soarin' off up into d'air for fifty foot. That's when Jim sees how big he is. When he gets up into d'atmosphere, he sort o' shuck himse'f, same as you-all sees a hen waller in d'dust; an', son, you could hear his scales rattle like shakin' buckshot in a bottle! An' at d'same time, that bass lams loose a yell folk might nacherally hear a mile, an' which shorely sounds like d'squall of a soul in torment. You hyar Jim! that bass—” At this, I broke in on the revelations of our black Munchausen with my demands. As he turned, I heard him call back:
“No, I don't get him; he done bruk d'hook.”
Peg and I had been worthily busy with my letters for full ten minutes. She was, for her, very quiet, almost indeed to the line of a grave sadness, which after all should be the aftermath of those tears of the day before.
If Peg were wordless, I, on my side, sat equally without conversation. We made tongueless company; but for that very reason went with all the more earnestness to the letters as though they were the seeds of this silence.
“Well?” said Peg, with a suddenness, her hands in her lap. I stared. “Well?” she repeated. Then, when I said nothing, she would elaborate a bit. “Well, watch-dog, what would you have? You know these letters were the merest pretext for me to come.”
“Why, then,” said I, made desperate because she snatched away my disguise, “why, then, I was in a fret to look on you.”
“Was it that?”
“Sometimes I fear your husband does not wholly understand you.” It took courage to go thus far; it marked a point mightily forward of any attained to in former talks.
Peg gave me one of those fathomless looks, narrowing her brow whimsically. My bluntness had not dashed her spirit, at any rate; indeed, it would seem to have raised it.
“You fear my husband does not understand me?” repeated Peg. Now she paused an endless while, her eyes reading mine like print. I could feel her searching me for my last promise of expression. “You fear my husband does not understand me. And is he to be the only one? Is it there the roll-call ends? If that were true, I might sustain myself.” For all a shadowy, vague piquancy of brow, Peg got this off wearily enough, and I still prisoner to her eyes. Now, after a moment, her vivacity would mount a little. “You are right,” she went on, “I am not much understood.” A smile peeped from the dimple in her cheek. “What would you think, watch-dog, were I to give thick folk lessons in myself—expound myself to dunces as your pedagogue gives lessons in a book?”
“The lessons you propose should be marvellously sweet,” said I. Then, with some tincture of my better courage: “By my soul's hope! I should be sure to go to school for those lessons.”
“Ah! do you challenge me?” cried Peg. Now it would be the old Peg. “From this hour you begin your studies. Life shall be a never-ending lesson, and Peg the lesson.”
“And I a student most diligent.”
Peg came and stood close against my shoulder where I sat at the desk. Her color and her brightness had returned to chase away the shadows. With her fingers she parted my hair where the frosts of two score years and four were beginning their blight. She made as though she considered these ravages of silver.
Finally, she spoke to me in a way tenderly good.
“Watch-dog, watch-dog, you have eyes in your head and none in your wits. You are a blind-wit, watch-dog, a blind-wit of no hope. And you would study Peg? Teach I never so lucidly, study thou never so long, yet shouldst thou never know Peg, but die in darkness of her.” Peg said this with a kind of murmur of regret. Then, collecting direction: “How many times has Peg been with you? And yet you have never seen her—never once seen Peg. You do not see Peg now while she stands at your shoulder. You are a blind-wit.”
“If I have not seen Peg,” said I, “and if I do not now see Peg, then at the least my eyes have tasted visions above report.”
“Now you speak well,” quoth Peg, with an archness of pretended approval.
Here, surely, should be the old, true Peg. It was a delight to listen to the bantering yet soft tones of her, like walking in the May woods with their new green and the new blossoms painting the ground about one's feet.
“What have I seen, then?” I asked, going back a pace.
“What have you seen? A mirage, the mere mirage of Peg—her picture, sketched on the skies of your ideal.” Then in a playful manner of correction, as when a girl refuses a compliment: “You have looked upward, watchdog, when you should have looked down. And now for your first lesson. This is the text of it: Would you find a woman, keep your eyes on the ground.”
For all Peg's humor of gaiety, I could tell how she was under greatest strain. Also, there ran an odd current of reproach throughout her words. It was as though she saw faults in me.
“And now,” said I, seeking to focus complaint, “and now, what have I done or said to hurt?”
Peg drew away from my shoulder. I could not see her face, but I felt her spirit changing from cool to hot in the furnace of some thought. There was silence for a moment.
“What have you done to hurt?” cried Peg, suddenly, breaking into a wondrous wrath. “Oh, I could die with such a dullard! What have you done? What is this just-now complaint you conceive against my husband? He does not understand me, forsooth! You should consider yourself! What have you done to hurt? You place me too high! You put me out of reach! Oh, I know of no more dreadful fate than to be forever mistaken for an angel!” That last came like the cry of a heart in torture. The next moment Peg was gone and I left gasping.
Of what avail to think? As she had said, I was a blundering blind-wit, and, by me at least, Peg would not be made out. I had declared how Eaton owned a footless fancy which could not raise itself to realize a goddess. And now, in my own high superiority, I had come bravely off! I had been properly paid as one who is churl enough to give a woman a compliment at the expense of her husband. Was I to suppose my goddess would accept flattery at the cost of her self-respect? The goddess from her furious pedestal had denounced me as one who planned for her dishonor.
Congress was now come down upon us like a high wind. The town began to rub its eyes free of those cobwebs of vacation slumbers; the taverns took on a buzzing life, while the streets, lately so still and lonesome, showed thickly sown of folk going here and there, for this reason of legislation or that hunger of office, and with faces gay or sombre as success was given or denied.
Noah was one to be denied. He had come to town somewhat in advance of Congress. The General brought him quickly to the White House and made him unpack his budget of gossip. How was Burr? How was Swartout? How fared Hoyt? Thus ran off the General's curiosity.
“All well, all prosperous,” responded Noah, “and the town itself growing up to weeds of riches. The New York cry is, Money! They revise your friend Crockett, and, for an aphorism, say, 'Be sure you're rich, then go ahead.'”
The General would have it that Noah must take an office—a collectorship or some such gear.
“The Senate would defeat my confirmation,” said Noah; “first for that I'm a Jew; and next because of Catron.”
“And even so,” returned the General; “it is still worth while to discover who would do that.”
Noah was right, and his name came up to be refused by one vote. Calhoun from his place as president of the Senate proved as flint against Noah, while his mouthpiece, Hayne, led the war on the floor. I have yet to look on more anger than was the General's when the news arrived.
“Heed it not,” said Noah, snapping his fingers. “I have still my laughter, my newspaper, and my Spanish swords.”
“But the insult of it!” cried the General.
“To the cynic,” said Noah, lightly, “there can come no insult. Your philosopher who laughs is safe against such whimsies. I shall long remain both fat of pride and fat of purse for all a Senate may do. You do not know me; I should have been a Diogenes and insulted Alexanders from my tub.”
Calhoun and his coterie brought with them to town their great question of Nullification. They worked on it incessantly and made a deal of hubbub. Calhoun set forward his man, Hayne, to the exposition of this policy of national disintegration. Hayne was met in that debate and overthrown by the mighty Webster. The country echoed with the strife of these Titans.
For himself, the General followed the argument, North against South, word by word and step by step. He had the debate of each day written off, and Peg would come over and read it to him while he smoked and pondered and resolved.
About this time I must write down how I was made to feel rebuked and neglected. Following that unguided reference to her husband, Peg would seem to have deserted me. My eyes had little of her, and I heard her voice still less; for while she was often in to gossip with the General, or read those Senate speeches to him, she gave me only stray, cold glances and monosyllables. She came no more to my workshop; and day after day I sat alone while melancholy crept upon me like mosses over stone. I was not so dense but I could tell how I had offended. Peg was proud; she resented my suggestion that Eaton lacked appreciation; that was why she flew upon me, beak and talon, and said it was I who lived in darkness of her. I had been the wiser had I forgotten those tears of hers so soon as they were dry, and withstood myself from meddling opinions concerning her lot in life. Peg's coldness was the proper retort for my impertinence, and I must bear it even while it broke my heart.
It would be the expected thing that I should turn cheerless and be cast down when now Peg left me with my thoughts alone. I had grown so used to her about me, and to hear the sweet laugh of her, that it was to miss something out of my life when she took herself away. And yet it would be egotism. Folk miss and for a while deplore what has become a piece of their days—even chains and dungeons, so I've heard. Nor is this due to any love save self-love. I have often considered, as folk shed tears on a grave, how they wept for themselves and not for him who slept at their feet. It was the merest selfishness of habit, this dejection because Peg would desert me. Her absence would become custom in time, and then, should' she return, that coming doubtless would irk me just as much.
For all my wisdom, however, when now my starved eyes came only by stray, sparse glimpses of Peg, as I beheld her now and again across in the President's Square, or when she went by my door on her visits to the General, my spirit fell to be jaded and vastly lowered.
Had I known my way to go about it, I would have sought Peg out and talked with her freely and in full of what had fallen to be our differences. I would have acknowledged my error. But I saw no open gate through which to come by such converse, and I feared with an attempt to plunge bad into worse.
Once, indeed, my resolve was half hatched to gain some plain speech of her. I lay in wait until, the day being fine, I had sight of her on a rustic seat over across in the square. She was wrapped in a fur of some sort—martin, I think—and, with this drawn high about the throat, it so framed her face as to make her beautiful to the verge of witchcraft.
Seeing how she was near a path, I lounged out of door, and crossing the road, would make as though to walk by her, casually, and for exercise and air. It was my plan to greet Peg, and next drift into word with her as in the old time. The old time! It was not days away, and yet it seemed as distant as my cradle! I would drift into speech of her, I say, and trust to fortune and my wit to bring down the explanation I believed might solve a reconciliation for us. It was a stratagem sagacious enough, but Peg granted me no chance of its test.
Before I could get to Peg, indeed, before I journeyed half the distance, she arose, careless and contained, as though she had not observed me—albeit I am sure she had—and would be moving for her own gate. At this I half halted; and Peg, striking out into a rapid walk, was in a moment the other side of her door. A little later I saw her standing by a window.