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 andaproposof 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.”
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.