Webster shrugged his big shoulders and went on.
As I gazed at the group—waiting, they were, for the opening of the banquet hall—I met many a great face. Among those about the stair-head and in the rooms beyond were Colonel Johnson of Kentucky, tall of form, grave of eye, he who slew Tecumseh; Benton, big, pompous, wise but with a bottomless conceit; the lean Rufus Choate, eloquent and sound; Corwin, round, humorous, with a face of ruddy fun; White, the dignified, in the Senate from my own state of Tennessee; Hill, gray and lame, the General's friend in New Hampshire; Noah, my Hebrew with red hair; Van Buren, Peg's “good little secretary” of state; Vaughn, the British minister; the quickeyed Amos Kendall, with Blair by his side; the recreant Duff Green, now wholly for Calhoun; Calhoun himself, pale, scholarly and fine; Huygens, that ministerial tubby personage, gin-bleary and dull; Krudener, the Russian; Eaton, easy, florid, urbane; Branch and Berrien and Barry and Ingham and the reckless Marcy.
The dinner was spread. The decorations were studied in their democracy. Hundreds of candles from many-armed iron branches blazed about the plain walls of the room and made the light of day. For the rest, the hall was hung with flags. The stars and stripes, to be a centerpiece, was draped about a portrait of Jefferson just to the rear of the place where Lee of Virginia, who was to preside, would sit. Extending around the four sides of the room were festooned the flags of the several states.
With peculiar ostentation, and next to the national colors, flowed the banner of South Carolina, with its palmetto and rattlesnake—Calhoun's emblem.
“Do you see it?” said the General in a low tone, as we approached our places, “do you see Calhoun's flag? That serpent may rattle but it must not strike.”
“And if it strike?”
“If it strike, it dies.”
Profusion and elegance were displayed in the arrangements, with none of that long-drawn foolishness of courses so dear to Whigs and Federals and other imitators of an English nobility. Black servants came and went to shift one's plate and knife, or to aid in carving at the call of a guest. At hopeful intervals along the tables reposed huge sirloins and smoking rounds of beef; there were quail pies and chickens fried and turkeys roasted; there stood pies of venison and rabbit and pot-pies of squirrels; soups and fishes and vegetables; boiled hams and giant dishes of earthenware holding baked pork and beans; roast suckling pigs and each with a crab-apple in its mouth. There were corn breads and flour breads and pancakes rolled with jellies; sideboards upheld puddings—Indian, rice and plum—quaking custards, and scores of kindred dainties. Everywhere bristled ranks and double ranks of bottles and decanters, and a widest range of drinks, from whisky to wine of the cape, were at one's call. There, too, stood wooden bowls of salads on side tables, supported of weighty cheeses; and to close in the flanks were pies, mince and pumpkin and apple, with final coffee, and slim long pipes with tobacco of Trinidad for folk who would smoke.
Before we were seated, and while we stood to our places, the sentiment was proposed:
“The memory of Thomas Jefferson.” The toast was drunk in silence; all could agree on Jefferson; and then with clatter of knife and fork, the thirsty clink of glasses, and the murmurous hum of conversation over all, the work of the night commenced.
As the moments roved on, Nullification and Secession became so much the open objects of many present, and were withal so loosely in the common air, that sundry gentlemen—more timorous than loyal, perhaps—made excuses and withdrew.
The General's presence was a plain surprise to more than one; they could not construe it. For himself, he carried it off as though his being there were the most expected of possible things. The General sat on the right hand of the presiding Lee. I was, myself, to the General's right hand. Opposite was Calhoun with that Calhoun triangle of the cabinet, Berrien, Branch and Ingham. The quartet got on most beamingly. The General, as we came up, rendered them a sweeping bow which they might share among them.
“Calhoun,” whispered the General, indicating the Vice-President with a nod, “is, you see, openly claiming his half of my cabinet. I'll startle him some day by making him a present of the three.”
An hour passed on; the banquet reached that glass-and-bottle stage which Noah anticipated. There were a round score of regular toasts; each would smell of secession, while the speeches were even more malodorous of that villainy.
I, with a hundred others, was narrowly watching the General, and, well as I knew him, I wondered at the calmness wherewith he maintained himself. This man who had a genius for anger, who went head-free into each debate, who offered you his last thoughts in an unrestricted stream of talk, would now be as impassive as marble. The General, throughout these wordy treasons of speech and toast, showed cold and stern and master of a dignity that became both himself and the exalted character of his station.
The hour was hurrying towards the late. Calhoun glanced across at the General; there was a questioning uneasiness in his look. Evidently the urgent moment was at hand.
Calhoun offered a slip of paper to Lee, presiding, and whispered a word.
“The Vice-President proposes a toast,” cried Lee.
There fell a stillness, laughter died and talk was hushed. The Chairman read:
“'The Federal Union. Next to our liberty, the most dear. May we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the States, and distributing equally the benefits and the burden of the Union.'”
That stillness of death continued, marked and profound. Folk strained and craned at both the General and Calhoun as do ones who would observe the effect of a shot. There were eyes replete of interrogation, and if one must have it truly told, defiance, to be peculiarly turned upon the General.
For his part, the General never wore a loftier look. He scribbled a quick line and gave it to the Chairman.
“The President offers a toast.” Then solemnly, as one who feels its import:
'“The Federal Union: It must be Preserved.'”
The General's glance was on Calhoun, as pointed as a sword. His eye was fierce with a sort of gray fury like the eye of some fighting eagle. Calhoun for a moment gave him look for look; then his glance fell, his face whitened, he would seem to shrink and sear and wither before the man of fire. It was as though he saw the future's danger, or felt some gallows prophecy thereof. In the end he sat like one under a blackness of shadow.
The General it was who broke the spell. Pushing back, he arose, and bowing to the Chairman who still sat with that toast of menace in his hand he began moving towards the door. His head was lifted, and he bore himself as should one who flings a gauntlet to the world. Openly, obviously, defiantly, he set his heel on Secession's head in the midst of Secession's champions.
Pausing, the General swept those present, letting his look of challenge rest on each one in his turn. It was as though he questioned them: “Where, now, is your courage?”
There was none to retort to him. Folk scented peril on him as cattle smell in the wind the unborn storm.
“The Federal Union. It must be preserved.” The General, as though to call a last attention, repeated his toast. Then, with burning eye laid full upon Calhoun, and thinking, doubtless, on Overton and Crockett and Houston and Dale and Coffee and those riflemen in hunting shirts and leggings, and on the ships and Scott and Castle Pinckney, he added: “And it shall be preserved.”
It was the moment pregnant and mighty; the moment when one man foiled a plot to stampede history itself, and calmed and turned and drove the herd of events in a right national direction for the Union and to fields of quiet peace. Treason's heart and Treason's hand were palsied with a toast of seven words, when now the words came wedded with the grim, relentless courage that would die or make them true.
The galleries about the big room were filled with women looking on, Peg among the others. When the General and I were again at the White House, late as stood the hour, we found Peg waiting. I never saw a being more given over to fire than was our Peg.
“Was he not noble?” cried Peg, when she would have me alone for a moment. “Was he not grand? I would give my life if for one hour I might be a man, and be a man like that.”
And yet for all the plain sureness of that toast, and the General's looks of decision which were sent to be its escort, the rebellionists would ask a further sign. They sent the insinuating Rhetz to call upon the General. That was the next morning.
The politic Rhetz presented himself, and the General met him with a manner of studied distance. He would have the visitor to know how he held him for no friend. This was meant to give the General's words more weight-, since the other would understand that he stood upon guard and spoke nothing he did not intend to carry out.
“Mr. President,” said Rhetz, suavely deferential, “I go back to my home to-morrow. Have you any message for your South Carolina friends?”
“Yes,” returned the General, with his cold eye on the questioner, “yes, I have a message for my friends of South Carolina.” The words were coming with a slow emphasis like a sentence of death. “Their state is a part of the Union, and a part of the Union it shall remain. You may tell them, if one South Carolina finger be raised in defiance of this government, that I shall come down there; and once I'm there, I'll hang the first man I lay hands on to the first tree I can reach.”
Now when the General's toast at that banquet in the Indian Queen had gone abroad, it would have the effect of a warning, each man taking it home. A mighty silence fell upon States Rights; the foxes of Nullification found their dens, and were to be noticed for a sudden absence from one's eye and ear where but the day before with their presence and their yelpings they would fill both.
It will have a strange look, but it was the General, himself, who of all folk fostered a distrust of his course.
It was to Noah and me he one day told this. Noah mentioned the vast silence of a voiceless conservatism which had fallen upon that movement of Secession, late so reboant and rampant.
“And yet,” said the General, “the story of the country will at last show me wrong.”
“Will you say how?” asked Noah. “Surely, you do not doubt the common need of a union between the States, and one strong enough to defy the caprice or the ambition of a clique?”
“My sentiment for the Union,” said the General, “has suffered no modification, and it is because I stand for union and would die for union, that I am not sure of the wisdom of that toast of mine. It would have been better to stand aloof, and let Secession go the length of treason. Had I held to such a course, perhaps as many as one hundred might have answered for the crime with their lives. But the question would have been settled; the dispute would have been maderes adjudicataand the future forever freed of that struggle. Now the serpent is only bruised, not killed; in years to follow yours and mine it will revive in rebellion and may yet crush the country in its folds.”
“I can not think you are right,” said I, for I was having part in the conversation with the others; “I am no judge, or you have closed the door against this Nullification.”
“Ay!” responded the General, “closed but not locked the door. It should have been barred with a gibbet. Folk are not taught by threats but by example. Had I stayed myself until the leaders for Secession went so far they were hanged for it, that would have meant the end. Now the business is deferred; the country will yet be forced to fight a civil war and wade knee-deep in blood to save itself.”
“Is it,” asked Noah, curiously, “is it now you first hold these views?”
“They are not new,” returned the General; “I owned them from the beginning. But I lacked the hardihood to act on them. I grow old; I have been in my hour the instrument by which so much blood has been shed that in my grey age I shrink from more. That toast was devised to save myself from spilling further blood; I was thinking on myself when I framed it and not of those black ones who would do treason. Its great purpose was to save me from becoming their executioner.”
“Now your feeling is mine too,” observed Noah, shaking a thoughtful head. “The seed of the whole trouble is slavery; while that exists, the certain chance of civil war stands open.”
“And how would one be rid of it?” demanded the General, passionately. “Washington was against slavery, Jefferson was against it, Franklin was against it, every great one whose trowel employed itself in laying the foundations of our government was against it, and yet there to-day it lives. They could not cope with slavery; how, then, shall we?”
“It existed in the North,” said Noah, “and it was wiped out.”
“The slaves were few in the North,” responded the General; “as chattels they made but a slim fraction of that region's riches. Moreover, slavery did not pay a Northern profit. It is easy, when there is money loss, to abandon the cause of that loss. But conditions within the present boundaries of slavery show otherwise. The slave's cost of keep is less, his months of labor more in number, and he is not winter-killed with maladies of the lungs. Moreover, your slave makes a fairer unit of labor in rice savannahs and cotton fields, where a plantation carries thousands of acres, than he did where land was more divided and a farm of a hundred and sixty acres the common holding of a man. In short, the slave spins that money profit for the South which was lacking in the North. That fact of profit—the greed of men—will meet folk who would free the slave and make you a mighty difference.”
“And still,” said Noah, “slavery should be stricken down.”
“To that I agree,” remarked the General, “but again I ask you, How? Certain of our New England radicals, when they shout for Abolition, cry 'Down with slavery!' as lightly as one should say: 'Marry! swallow a strawberry.' When a man is in the upper story of a burning house he does not hurl himself from a window, he descends by the stair. Let us, when now we be ablaze over slavery—for it is that, as you say, to lie at the bottom of this whole movement of States Rights—let us grope cautiously until we find the safe stairway of escape.”
“It is not so clear to my mind,” said I, for the spirit to lecture, excited by example, began to move within me, “that slavery is so bad for the blacks. One must have account for a difference of race. You would not insist that a deer tear a prey with his teeth and howl on some hill of midnight like a wolf. It has been the never-flagging mistake of government to deal with the Indian as though he were white, and enforce pale-face conditions upon him. It would be as rife of error to proceed with the negro as though he were white or could work out a white man's destiny. Make the black man free, and I tell you he will be as helpless as a ship ashore on the instant.”
“To better the black,” said the General, “is not my argument; I am against slavery to better the white man. When I seek to destroy slavery, it is the master I would free, and not the slave.”
Just what the General would intend by this last I had no opportunity to discover, for the zealous Jim was heard at the door, ushering in our Peg.
“Never mind, Miss Peg,” I could hear Jim say, in a way of patronizing reassurance, and evidently in combat of some suggestion of Peg's that she would defer her appearance among us, “never mind about d'Marse Major an' d'Marse Gen'ral an' that red-head Jew gentleman argufyin'. That don't count for nothin'; they're allers at it, night an' day, argufyin' away like they aint got a minute to live, and nothin' to never come of it. Never mind 'em, Miss Peg; you-all jes' trapse right along in an' declar' your urrent.”
With Peg's coming, Noah made polite expedition to retire; nothing one might do or say would serve to keep him. He who could look a man in the eye and stand knee to knee with him for life or death, feared a woman as though she were a ghost and fled from the mere sight of her.
“I am somewhat abashed,” said Peg, “to think of the disturbance I have caused, and that I drive away your visitor.” This to the General. “Why did you not make him stay? I shall never forget my debt to him; and I'm glad, too, he is so much your favorite.”
“Noah puts us all in his debt,” said the General. “To me he is the man remarkable; fine, high, yet bold and quick, there will be no one to take his place when he is gone.”
Peg's purpose was to tell the General—for he had asked the question in a little note that morning—how she should like the dinner and that East Room dance he offered, on the next evening but one.
“Is not the time too short?” asked the General. “Forty-eight hours would seem no mighty space for folk to make themselves prepared. They may own other engagements.”
“There will be no engagements,” said Peg. “The season is quite at an end; the Redsticks, as you christened them, closed their defeated doors six weeks ago, and for our own side, we only continued our receptions two weeks longer to show how we remained masters of the field. There will stand nothing in the way; and as for space to be ready in, why, then, folk don't need hours, but only minutes, when the invitation is from the White House.”
“Let us say the day following to-morrow, then,” said the General. “It shall be for your victory, child, and to celebrate it. Also, since the losers as well as the victors have proper place in a triumph, and, again, because it will look like the olive branch and an expression of peace, we will bid both friend and foe to this merrymaking, and mark it with as wide a good feeling as our opponents will accept.”
Peg's dinner, as dinners go, was a creature of magnificence, with Peg, beautiful as a moss-rose, at the General's right, and Dolly Madison's own silver—massy, and, as the women said, “gorgeous,”—to glisten on the white napery. The General's wide-flung invitations were as widely accepted; and not alone the Van Burens and the Krudeners and the Vaughns, but the Calhouns and the Berriens and the Branches, and all of the sept of Nullification, were there, as though to put down any surmise of sulky fear for themselves to be the offshoot of that conflict of the toasts. Even the frivolous Pigeon-breast was with us undismayed; albeit he practiced a forbearance touching Peg, and never once after the first formalities so far forgot his caution as to be near enough to that sparkling lady to court the awful hazard of her glance.
There came but one clash beneath my notice, and that would feed my humor. Houston was just come into town, as rude and tangled a gentleman in every politer technicality as the bears of his native woods. With him for his table-mate he bore away the wife of Ingham of the Treasury. Houston guarded his prize to her place with a ferocious backwoods vigilance as though it were indeed the enemy's country and they in peril of some Indian ambuscade with each new room they entered. The lady, with a tact as crude as Houston's knowledge of the drawing-room, perceiving the savageries of her protector, would be prompt to establish herself as directress' of his manners. Poor Houston suffered more than once the humiliation of the lady's counsel, given in a high, obvious voice, and with the manner of one who corrects a novice dull to the confines of despair.
The rupture befell over fish and when a portion of delicate pompano was placed before the headlong Houston.
“That is not the fish fork,” cautioned the lady in a whisper so loud it bred a smile on thirty faces either side of her; “that is not the fish fork; here, take this.”
“By Satan's hoofs, madam!” exclaimed the wrathful Houston, whose long-stifled resentment would now be in the saddle, at the same time brandishing the huge trident he had somehow gotten hold on; “by Satan's hoofs! keep your fish forks for whom you will. For myself, I'll eat this catfish with my saber if I have the mind.”
Later I heard the distempered lady confide to a neighbor how Houston was “an untaught brute,” while that hurt hero told me on his word as a man that for those several hours he was in her company, he had less of ease than at the Horseshoe where he was given four wounds.
The East Room, when agile ones would dance was brilliant in white and gold and crystal chandeliers, with floor of water-soaked oak so polished it reflected the gay dresses like a looking-glass, and so slippery that clumsy ones, like myself, went gingerly about it in terror for their bones.
Peg was as glorious as a star, and to me never more lovely, albeit my coral on her bosom may have had somewhat to do with that. And to see her so bowed to and flattered was like a perfume; for it looked as though the foe would forego those old-time tactics of distance and averted gaze, and that a new word was abroad in Peg's behalf. There came no one to more emphasize his courtesy or show more attentive in what might do Peg honor than the Vice-President himself, and with him were the members of that cabinet triumvirate who had cast in their narrow lots with him. Even the stately Mrs. Calhoun would be gracious in a far-off sort, while the ladies Berrien and Branch relaxed from a former frigidity, and if not torrid, were at all events of the temperate zone when the etiquette of the floor would bring Peg and them in contact. As for the vigorous Madam Ingham, she was so overcome of her labors in elevation of Houston that following dinner she could do nothing but repose herself. However, for so much as she remained in the picture, she beamed affably in a fat, vermilion way, and her red face was like the setting sun.
The male Ingham, being in prodigious fettle, would fain waddle onto the treacherous floor with Peg in his hand for a dance; for Ingham was sensibly exalted of his valor since Eaton, whom he held in fear, was not present, but off in Baltimore on some long-drawn duty about new rifles—meant, I fear me, for Nullifiers, should their pot of treason over-boil. I will say this of Ingham, however: for all his rotund uncouthness, he went through that dance without falling down; a no small feat I should call it, and one to give me relief, since for the while it lasted I was held on tenter-hooks over Peg's safety, and would hover about ready to rush in and save her should affairs go badly between Ingham and the glass-like floor.
There occurred one incident of harshness I could have wished left out. It was when that Frau Huygens drew up to Peg and would greet her as though there were no such name as Krudener and no such story as the slight she cast on Peg in the Russian's dining room. The gross Frau Huygens was arrayed in her one garish frock of many colors, and which her prudence to save money and buy no more frocks had made so well known.
Frau Huygens, trained to the venture, doubtless, by her husband, who still dwelt in fear of Van Buren and those passports which should return him to the Hague, swept before Peg with the grace of a cabbage on parade. When Peg, in response to her greeting, was silent and would only look on her in a baffled manner, as though her memory were at bay, Frau Huygens exclaimed, with a Dutch thickness of reproach which no one might imitate with a pen:
“Madam, don't you remember me?”
“Well, then,” said Peg, as one who makes every polite effort and yet fails, “I remember your dress very well, but your face is strange to me.”
With that I swooped on Peg and whisked her away, for I had a horror of what might follow.
“And there,” cried Peg, with an unctuous gurgle, “was it not a best of fortunes, watchdog, that she should give me that opportunity? Now we are quits; and I think, too, I have her in my debt.”
There was nothing to be said to this, and
I made myself content with thoughts of how we were no worse off.
Late one afternoon when the hour was drawing towards the close of the day, I had planted myself at a window and was looking across to the President's Square, and, since her gables were of necessity in the corner of my eye, carrying Peg vaguely on my meditations. It had been a still, windless day of the early spring, but, for all it stood so late of the season, with a heaviness in the air that smelled of snow.
Now I am not one readily to be borne upon by imps in blue, and would commonly give you the reason of my gloomy mood, if gloom I were a spoil to. But this was the day odd for me, since I was pressed hard with a sense of disaster and the feeling as of some threat in the air like a knife, that I liked not at all and understood still less. What was it to so hang upon me like a millstone or a sibyl-spoken prophecy of death? I would try to laugh it down; but the smile I wrung from my unwilling lips owned so much of bitterness that in mere defence I surrendered myself to a pensive resignation instead, as being of two evils the lesser one, and so paused for what blow might descend upon me. Some disaster pended, of that my spirit went convinced; and I folded my hands and waited for the future to announce its name.
While I was thus by the window it began to snow. It was of your left-over storms which have been held captive in caverns of the clouds, to at last escape and overtake the world a month or more behind the proper time. There was no stir to the air, and the day went still and moderate; and yet I never looked on such a fall of snow, with flakes big and soft as a baby's hands. Even as I gazed, the ground under my eyes turned from a new spring green to white, while the trees across were snow from roots to very finger-tips, and showed in milky fretwork against the low dullness of the sky.
As I stood watching these white changes in the face of things—for the spectacle would charm me like mesmerism and made me forget my forebodes—the General laid a gentle hand upon my shoulder. This, too, had its side to startle, for the General, while as tender as a woman, was in nowise demonstrative, and not one to be patting your shoulder or slapping your back.
In dim fashion those thin fingers would add themselves to that threat of sadness, and stir a new alarm inside my bosom.
“What is it?” I asked, as though he solicited my notice to something urgent or unusual; “what should it be now?”—my voice not firm but tremulous.
The General looked on me with an affectionate, consolatory eye, and yet, somehow, his glance would fit in ominously with my feeling. I could tell how I stood at the point of bad tidings.
And at that he began far enough away, for his first words were of the long ago.
“I was thinking,” said he, “of that time my horse was shot and pinned me by the leg in the fight on the Tombigbee. Do you recall how you sprang from your saddle and flung the dying horse aside as though you but hefted a rabbit?”
“When it comes to that,” I returned, “I supposed that you as well as your horse were shot down, and the fear gave me a flash of strength.”
The General was silent, his hand still on my shoulder. Then he began again, musingly.
“We must ever be together, Major,” said he; “we must stay together to the last. I shall die first; I am eighteen years nearer the grave than you and shall go on ahead. It is you—I look to you for this—it is you who must be by my side to close my eyes. We must never part; we are lonely men and lonesome men, and shall make no new friends. We must be for that the closer to each other.”
Now, even through my clouds, these words would strike me as lacking object or coherency. What should be the matter? Was there some wrong with him or with me? He had not spoken in this vein even when he lay in the vale of death.
“Why,” said I, “there is no present need to talk on death, thank God! Why should you talk on death?”
“It was not death but you, I had on my mind,” he replied. “I would never be parted from you.”
“Nor shall you,” I declared; “although I should count the absence of myself no loss to you or any one.”
This was not it; what would he be about?
“Well, let us put aside dole,” cried he, cheering himself with an effort; “now folk would call us two fortunate, I warrant you, to be looking from a White House window upon a world all ours. Come, we will have a brisker view; I have great news for you, and news to make you stare. Nor will I beat about the bush, but go to the heart at once. I am about to dissolve my cabinet.”
“What!” I exclaimed, for here was a thing without a precedent.
“My cabinet is to dissolve. I have arranged for it. Van Buren will tender his resignation as of his own desire; Eaton and Barry will follow suit. If Calhoun's three do not take the hint and act on so good an example, then I will bring them to book with a demand. I will say that, half of my cabinet being gone, I desire to sweep clean the site and rear up in its place a new edifice of counsel.”
My thoughts were in a tumult, and the blood in me seemed seized of riot. It was a strange thing, that from the moment the General's hand fell upon my shoulder it seemed to hold Peg before my eyes. And when he talked it was as though he spoke her name with every word.
“Yes,” he went on, “Van Buren's resignation will be in my hands to-morrow; Eaton's so soon as he returns from Baltimore, say in a week; then Barry's will come along in the wake of Eaton's. I shall send Van Buren Minister to England. He shall be Vice-President for my second term, as you and I have planned, and President after that.”
“But Peg,” cried I, at last; “what will you do with Peg?”
The General would try to smile at this, but the effort was as futile as had been my own. But he did not fence at me with any jesting reminder of how Peg was no part of his cabinet; he met my thought squarely and would make allowance for my feeling.
“It is most natural,” he returned, “that you should ask of Peg. We have guarded our little girl too long—you and I—not to own her first in our concern. Peg, then, shall go to Florida and be a queen. I shall give Eaton that Governorship; we may yet need a firm hand in St. Augustine. Is it not a good thought? Our Peg shall rule among those Spaniards; it will almost be to have a throne and wear a crown. Does not that please you, when now her station under kinder skies is to be so splendid and so notably enhanced?”
From him I turned and paced the room; then from sadness my anger began to swell, for I am one whose grief runs with the end of it into wrath.
“Tell me one thing,” cried I at last, pausing before the General. “Why do you dissolve your cabinet?”
“Will it not lop off three arms of Calhoun's power?” he asked. “Does it not palsy Branch and Ingham and Berrien?”
“But is that the true reason?” I demanded.
“It is the one I shall let the world believe, it any rate.”
“That should be no answer,” I retorted, my heart like a furnace with the rage that was coming over me. “Why do you palter? I have the right to know. You have made your dozen poor jests upon me, and said I was in love with Peg. Perhaps you would mean those jests. I tell you I do not believe your word when you say it is a move against Calhoun. That is mere glamour and fallacy and meant for blindness. It is no tale to tell me as though I were some common gull. Give me your reason, then—the true one. Does Eaton know he is to go?”
All this I reeled off, and gave the General no opening for an answer, asking a dozen questions at once. But he sat quiet and with a friendly patience, and his face spoke to me only of nearness and sympathy, and never a shade of hurt for the rudeness I visited upon him. What a heart of gold was his! He, who bore nothing from an enemy, would bear all at the hands of a friend.
When I was run out of queries he began to take me up, beginning at the end.
“Eaton knows,” said he; “he knew before he left for Baltimore. For him the change will be a relief; his has been no bed of flowers, and in St. Augustine his place and power, and last, not least, his peace, will gain promotion.”
“Doubtless,” said I, in a high pitch of scorn, “he can there flaunt his riches in the faces of the Dons, and show Peg's beauty, and make a vast display.”
“You interrupt me,” remarked the General. “However let me ask a question: Why do you remind me how I've jested and mayhap made some idle laugh between us, and as innocent as idle, over your feeling for the little girl? Why do you put that to me?”
“Because,” said I, in a fury, “I think you break up your cabinet for that. You will have it how Peg is in some peril of me; you would send Peg to Florida on a pretense to make her safe from me. There you have it. You see I can be the honester and the franker man. I pass you my heart on a spear.”
The General arose from the chair into which he had flung himself, and taking me by the two shoulders, would look on me squarely, while I in my turn must gaze into his gray depths. I could see the tears stand in his fine eyes.
“Let me tell you one thing,” said he. “I but repeat what you know as well as I, when I say that should you harbor thought of Peg, or look on her in lights other than as the wife of a friend, it would be black disgrace to yourself and to me, and most of all to Peg. And do you think I would not trust you? Man, I need no sentry over you save the sentry of your own conscience, no guard other than the guard your honor sets. You would do no wrong to Peg. It is not you I fear; on your faith I would stake my soul's hope of a meeting I look and long for after death. Will you have my reason now for what I do? It is not to save Peg from you; it is to save Peg from Peg, she goes to Florida. And to save our Peg I'd break a dozen cabinets.”
It was now grown dark, and the silent storm swept down more whitely dense than before. I threw a heavy military cloak about me and stepped out into the night. I had no set purpose, no destination; but some sure influence tugged at me, and then the house would seem to choke and its heat to smother me; I wanted the darkness and the coolness and to be alone. Was it some sweet power beckoning my heart, or merely a plain instinct to save and recover myself, one that any hard-struck animal might have had, to thus take me forth into the midst of the blinding storm?
My journey through the gathering drifts was not pushed far when, under one of the oil lamps that flanked the road and shed a sickly flare through the thick-falling snow, I beheld a closed carriage drawn up. It was one of those vehicles of hire common of the place, and beyond being better than most, and with two powerful horses that would have looked well hauling a gun in a battery, nothing to mark it. At first glance I thought it had come by some mishap to running gear or axle-tree.
As I was for pushing by, quite heedless of the stalled carriage and thinking only on my own broken heart, some one plucked me by the cloak. Wheeling sharply, I saw it was the coachman who had leaped from his box to interrupt me.
There would be no mistaking the massive shoulders and easy pose; it was Rivera.
“What's this?” said I. “When did you turn whip?”
Rivera gave me no words, but motioning towards the carriage, swung again to his place with the reins. As he did so, there came a tap on the glass.
Somewhat in a maze, I approached and flung open the door. In the dark depths I made out the vague outlines of a woman.
“Get in.” It was Peg's voice.
Without demur or question I took my place beside her and shut the door; with that, Rivera cracking a thong over the sleepy horses to rouse them, the carriage at a slow pace began moving Georgetown way.
“Hold me close to you,” whispered Peg, her low tones falling on my ears like a cry of pain, “hold me close to you; I am cold.”
As though in a dream I took Peg in under my great cloak, and having my arm about her would now hold her close and warm to my side. Her ear was over my heart as her face lay pressed against me, and I only hope she could understand the story of that throbbing.
For myself I was in a mid-swirl of mere confusion, with my wits all upside down, and no clear notion of what I did or why. The General's word of that Florida business, the cabinet to break and Peg to go away from me, made it for the moment as though the floor of the world had given way beneath my feet. It would provoke chaos and seem the end of things.
It was never said of me, even by the least informed, that I would be swayed in any kind or made to pause in what I went about by the counsel of conventionality. I had lived a life half-bitted, and for the main with bridle on my neck; the last I cared for were the frowns or the smiles of folk. If it were a woman to talk against the teeth of my fancy, I would turn my back on her; if a man, I had a way to gag his tongue if it should be no better than the butt of my pistol. And yet, however loose my habit or dull my knowledge of those matters, I did not go without a fashion of cold shock on Peg's behalf when I was so far my own man again as to dwell on our position—we, plodding through the snow and the darkness, locked in that carriage.
This mood of apprehension was so much in the upper-hand with me that it came to be the impulse, and would suggest the topic I laid tongue to when first I found my words. It was not without a mighty effort of the will that I obliged myself to some steadiness of utterance. Then, and not very craftily, I might observe, I, in the manner of one who thinks aloud, and surely as much to myself as to Peg, gave vent to an exclamation under my breath. Indeed, I would not have looked for Peg to hear me, since her head—pretty ears and all—was buried beneath the thick folds of my cloak.
“What if folk were to know!” I said.
Then came Peg's voice like a half stifled murmur of despair.
“What should I care who knows?” cried she. “It is my heart's funeral! My heart is dead and we go upon its funeral in this snow!”
At that, without well heeding what I was about, and doubtless drawn to it by the note of woe in Peg's tones, I held her to my side even more closely than before. Thus we remained for a long space in utter silence, neither speaking a word, while the quiet storm stole down upon us and the slow wheels forced their passage through the white cold levels of the snow.
After a bit, Peg's head, curls in a tangle and hood removed, was thrust outside my cloak, which garment, however, she would continue to wrap about her and hold with her hand.
“I would still be near to you,” she said, as though in explanation of the cloak, “though I am no longer cold.”
The mere truth was, the night, while a choke and smother of snow, was nothing chill, being bare freezing for a temperature and never a breath of air to stir, and the inside of the big carriage as warm as many a library. And yet, when I would first get in, I found Peg shivering as with an ague. That was gone now and she more in control.
Peg would now be more mistress of herself and speak with a measure of firmness.
“You have heard?” she asked.
“The General,” I returned, “has told me you are to go to Florida. But how should you have been told? Or was it known to you for long?”
This latter I put a little viciously, for it struck me on the moment how Peg might have been aware of this new destiny for days, and hidden it from me. But no; she had come to her information but an hour before. Even while the General with his hand on my rebellious shoulder gave me the story of it, the letter which told the news to Peg was put within her hands.
“It was to have been a secret,” said she, “and my husband would have kept it until his return. But he will be detained beyond his plans; he wrote me because of preparations I must make.”
While Peg said this, her face was held up towards mine, and even in the vague lights, which were rather the ghosts of lights than any radiance however dim, I could catch some whiteness of it.
Suddenly her head was in its old resting place over my heart, with the cloak to again become its cover.
“Watch-dog,” whispered Peg, and I might tell how deeply she was stricken by the quaver of her voice, as much as by a trembling that swept her as a gust rumples the surface of a tarn; “watch-dog, I felt that I would not live unless I saw you. Do you contemn me? Do you own shame for your little friend? I could not help it; I sent for Rivera, and made him fetch this carriage. We are alone—hidden from the world's eyes. I have torn a night from the hands of Time to be no one's night save ours. I waited by the lamp; my soul called to you and I knew you would come. I would not send; I was sure you would be with me without that. I should have died if I had not found you. Say that I did right, watch-dog. Say that it was right! I only cry for your one word; what others will think or say I care not, but I could not bear up against your anger! Say that I did right; say it!—say that you are glad.”
“I will say it all and intend it all, my little one!” Here I stroked Peg's tangle of curls as one would pet a child.
My whole being was wrapped in a storm and my bosom caged a whirlwind. I could be calm enough, apparently, and yet I was growing aware of that tempest of spirit which shook me like an aspen. I had been dull—dull to the point of crime; but now my wisdom would begin to sharpen and brighten itself.
Still, I had so much coolness to call my own that I was glad of the fact of Rivera. I remember thinking on that; for, with no more words than the dumb, he was as secret as a mole and as honest, withal, and single-hearted as a hound. There would be none to know; as Peg said, she had torn a night from eternity to be ours and ours alone.
While these thoughts went tumbling down the steeps of my conjecturings, I continued mechanically to caress Peg's hair, and it felt like a web of gossamer in my coarse fingers.
“Contemn you, child!” said I, and my voice was not much louder than had been hers, and I bent down my head so that she might hear; “contemn you! I would as soon impeach the snow outside, new given from the sky, denouncing it for soot.”
Peg began to weep, and I could hear the sharp catching of her sobs. Suddenly the moan came sighing up to me:
“Oh, if there were no such word as right or justice or duty, but only love—just love!” Then with a quick backward twist of her form that was like an impulse, and as replete of a swift grace as any suppleness of that long ago leopard whereof she would so often make me think, Peg turned herself in my arms, and with her own encircling my neck lay crying on my bosom. I held her close—closer. I could tell the beating of her heart, count the footfalls of her nature as though she were parcel of myself. How I loved her! adored her!—my prone spirit would fall on its knees to her for its Deity.
The while, too, and with my soul at these prayers, my candor would arrest me for the traitor I was. Where should be that conscience the General spoke on? Or where that honor which was to have been as a sentry to check my strayings? That honor was recreant where love would take the field against it; that conscience was so much apostate of the right it would frame an argument of equity and claim superior liberty for superior love, and be all for carrying Peg away. My boasted manhood was a rope of sand!
Even now, as weary-white with years I tell this tale of dead and other days, I yet wonder upon that discovery of myself. This was what I beheld: I had loved Peg from the start; the General's jest was sober truth. I would worship her, and then cheat myself with lie and sophistry to hide my villainy against my own detection. And now when the mask was fallen and I stood face to face with the true image of my infamy, would I still press forward to my sins? Or would I think on the good General, and the pain and the foul stain for each of us which I was about to compass?
It was this to run in my mind, but all in a dimmest way to be imagined, and as though it were a dream and nothing true. As bonds to stay me, these thoughts came to be no more than packthreads; as props to uphold me, trembling to a fall, they proved the merest, reeds to lean on. With Peg cradled in my arms, her heart beating on my own, she filled out the world for me and thrust all else beyond the frontier of my outmost hope or fear. I wanted only Peg, would heed no other call, and whether it were right or wrong or black or white I cared not. Caught fast in the mills, I was wholly ground between Peg and my mighty love for her. In a supreme egotism and the selfishness that goes wanting heart or conscience, I would set torch to the skies before I gave her up.
It is the fair wellhead of amazement how a man is thus strange to himself; how he will defeat his own best prophecy and be as opposite as night and day to all he promised. Folk have never accounted me weak, and I myself would have said I was a man of stone. I have been described for one of resolution. I have spurred my horse across the front of beaten troops, terror-whipped and in retreat. I've ridden against them, and with word and point of sword forced them to a halt. I've wheeled them, and, since they would not go without, driven them back like sheep; and then, when they would be of a braver hope, taken their lead and whirled them like lions upon the foe they lately fled from, and won a battle with them. And now I, who was granite in the face of men, had only a will of water for this girl who wept across my heart.
“Take me away!” she cried; “oh, take me away!”
Then it was my love swept down upon her like a strong wind. I take shame to repeat what I said. Bluntly I would disregard all claims, forfeit honor, forget the General and defy the rest; we would wander to new regions, she and I, and set up our idol of blind love. Carried by my soul's wish, I would leave her nothing untold; I would bow down at her feet and beg of her to come with me.
As I spoke, Peg would seem to turn more calm and comforted. She did not withdraw from my arms, but rested in them like a child. And yet there arose a sad steadfastness to wrap her about that was a check and a bar to me.
“Watch-dog,” said Peg at last, and her manner was the manner of one who grieves, “watch-dog, I am a wicked woman. I live my life backward, and it would be as though I could not help or save myself. My feet take hold on baseness, and my hands spin evil for those who do me good. My touch is a darkness—a palsy—a death. Oh, why was I born!” Peg wailed; “why was I sent to destroy the ones I love!”
Not a word would now come to me. I was silenced and sat like one convicted, waiting sentence. But that cold thought still crept about my heart like a snake. I would—I must have Peg; I would give my share in God to make her mine!
“What should be the wrong in me?” Peg went on. “Knowing the right from the left, I take ever the left hand turning; seeing good and evil, I choose the bad, and there rises a black glory in my heart like a cloud of pleasant sin to swallow up repentance. Oh, if I might only tame myself to an appearance of right and be a hypocrite when I may not be a saint!”
Peg was presently better restored to herself. In the very moment when the gates of my soul would open to let it forth to her and I gave myself into her hands to be fashioned by her as she would, Peg began to gather steadiness. It was she to now think and speak and decide for both of us; for myself, I was clean swept away. I was not to know this new strength of Peg's from her tones alone, or the trend of what she uttered; I could feel her heart-throbs become firmer and more slow as she lay in my arms, and it was in them I read the truth of her resolve.
“Watch-dog,” said Peg in a way most sweetly solemn, “I think nothing of myself. If it were I alone to be unmade, I'd never leave your arms again. Come weal, come woe, here would I bide, and while your arms were round me the worst would change to be the best. But I will not see you under the mire of men's tongues. Dear one, you would die! You are one whose life grows on his honor like a flower on its stem; disgrace would cut you down and you would die. And yet, I am glad I love you; I am glad I care nothing for myself. Let my fate be woven to me coarse as sackcloth, harsh as nettles, yet will I exult while I draw its folds about me. I will go on as a world would say I should; and if the way of life lie steep, I'll still climb on and think I toil for you; and if it be stony and if it bruise my feet, I'll say I suffer that to keep you safe; I'll make my grief my Eden and find in the endless woe of your surrender a nobler, higher, more immortal transport than would have owned me in your arms. And there will be another world!” Peg's tones swung low to my ear, and mystical. “Watch-dog, there he lives after this.”
Peg was silent for a space, and would turn even and cool and in a way of content. I, on my part, might neither say her yea nor nay, for I was in the hollow of her hand like a pebble to be retained or cast by her into the sea as she should conclude.
And somehow I was no longer in the dark. I loved her; and yet I knew Peg was not to be for me; she had said the word; she would go and I would stay; for all her soft beauty and that love for me which spoke in every fiber of her being, the truth flowed in on me like a tide that in no way might I change her or shape her or move her from her will. Against my prayer and in the front of protest, I would be saved to myself and I would lose her; she would do it all. What was it the General said? He would save Peg from Peg? It was she who now would save me from both herself and me when my love-sown madness was hot to make a wreck of all.
“Yes, watch-dog,” Peg continued dreamily, “there will come another life.” Then of the suddenest twining her arms about my neck more tightly still and until she clung there like a part of me, she cried out as though her soul spoke: “Kiss me, sweetheart; kiss me, if it be but once. This night at least is ours.”
It was she who would command. I grew drunken on her lips while my thoughts would stray and stagger. I could know nothing, act nothing, be nothing save as she would have me. Her hot arms were as the arms of summer torrents to hurry me along; her lips were like the lips of a whirlpool! It was a kiss—a kiss of the infinite—and would lay its velvet touch upon the ultimate reason of existence.
And so Peg went away; and for my portion I took up my old life, which now was as dark and chill and hollow as a cave.
Now what should there be more to tell? What matters it how secession hid its head? or how Calhoun resigned his Vice-Presidency to later creep back to a seat in that Senate where he had sat on high and ruled? or how the General fought and slew the Bank? Who is there to care for the story of the General's re-election, when Van Buren came with him for the second place? Who, I say, would bend the ear of interest to such tales as those when now our Peg was gone?
The General never again took up with me that matter of his Cabinet and its dissolution, and how he scattered it to save Peg from herself. One evening, however, as he smoked and I sat bitter and listless, I plumped a question at him.
“If it were to save Peg from Peg,” said I, “why did you defer so long? Why did not you disperse your Cabinet months before? Or was it that you failed to note Peg's peril of herself till just before you acted?” This last with a great sneer.
“It was plain to me from the beginning how Peg was won to you,” said he.
“Then, in the beginning why did not you act?”
“How could I? Peg was under fire for her fair repute. Had I broken up my Cabinet, it would have been Peg's death blow. Folk would have told how it was for the war upon her and because she could not be defended. No, I must give her time for triumph; that achieved, the rest might happen and she be made secure in Florida. It was the one trail, and I followed it.” The General came over to my chair. “Old comrade,” said he with a world of goodness in his manner, “if I have thrust a thorn in your heart, forgive me. If friendship can cure, that thorn will be plucked away.”
On another day the General was in a temper for abstract philosophies. It lay in a hot time of summer and his moods flowed lazily. His fancy would run away to the topic of woman and her helplessness.
“Beautiful and sweet, she is,” he was saying, “and a blessing, too; but the man must ever bear upon his mind her weakness, and be her buckler even from herself. He must be on guard for both. For she is as a child, and nowise deep nor fortified of any rooted strength. Your man, on the other hand, while wanting those traits of beauty which shine forth in woman like the stars at night, is withal safe enough. He is cold like an iceberg, and like an iceberg he rides steadily throughout every gale with nine-tenths of him beneath the sea. Your tempest can go no deeper than the surface; it cannot search the ocean's depths, and so the man swims safely.”
Where the General would have brought up in these tongue-wanderings one may only guess. He was never to finish, for in a flurry of irritation I interrupted him.
“Now let me tell you one thing,” said I, wheeling on him with a sort of venom; “to my mind, your man is a dullish fool of neither bones nor brains, and your woman has nothing to fear from him.”
“What's that?” cried the General, startled into letting fall his pipe; “what do I hear you say?”
“And more,” I went on; “your man will do whatever your woman commands. He will go or stay, or fetch or carry, or weep or laugh, or live or die by the least breath of her lips. Your man is mere clay; your woman is the potter to mould him and bake him and break him in form and fashion and fragment as shall best flatter her caprice or most nicely match the color of her fancy. For virtue, your man is a toad and your woman that blossom by which he crouches. For power, your woman is the wind, while your man is that poor scrap of nothing to be tossed thereon.”
“You are a cynic,” retorted the General with a snort, and after surveying me for a moment with a warlike eye he sauntered away for another pipe.
“Your woman must save herself,” cried I, as he went through the door. “At all events, if she have nothing stronger than your man to lean on, her case is lost and desolate indeed.”
“You-all is plumb kerrect, Marse Major,” said Jim, who as usual had been listening with flattering interest while the General and I discussed; “you-all is plumb right. Man an' woman is jes' like a candle; he's d'taller, she's d'wick. D'Marse General is a pow'ful fine soger an' all that, but he shore don't know enough 'bout women folks to wad a gun.”
One day I got a little note from Peg. It was as though I held a sunbeam in my fingers; I kissed it while my heart put up a prayer. Thus it ran:
“So, Watch-dog:—They have taken me and left you, and there be miles between. Wherefore I feel very safe and very sad. It is all birds and blossoms and trees and sunshine and bright days and sorrow here. I came away in such a tumult of hurry I left many things behind. Most of them I can do without, but I mislaid my love, and that grows to be a sore distress. Here where I should need it I'm without it; there, where mayhap it lies unregarded and uncared for, it can give me no good but only pain. You may find it—my poor love!—since it should be something close to you. It may be lying at your feet while you read this. Should you come across it, even though you be in the art and press of president making, don't forget to lift it up and save it and keep it warm upon your heart for sake of little Peg. But I must cure me of this abject strain; I too much beg where I should give commands. For are you not my slave? Look if the small white mark of vassalage be not upon your hand! Do you find it? Yes? Read it, then, and re-read it with your heart! Do you know the promise it would tell you? By the sign of that white mark my tooth made, it is given that now or then, or here or there, or in this life or in that, your Peg will yet lay hands of love upon her slave.”
That was the last letter as it was the first—the last word from my lost and vanished Peg. I have that letter by me as I write; it is yellow and worn and stained and blistered as though with tears. That was my last word from her, I say. And now when the winter of my days lies thick and white and cold upon me, and those whom I loved are gone, while those to come and go before me are strangers whose very names are strange, I wend often to Peg's grave. There where the great stone fits down above her, and resting myself upon that stone—there, by the door of death, I muse upon the past. I kiss the stone above Peg—cold it is, cold as my age-chilled lips! And I think on the time that was, with its hot lights to dazzle and blind and make drunk the heart with the red splendors of them; and on the time that will be—a shadow-land of unformed wonders! Then will my old eyes come to search among the wrinkles for that small white mark on my hand which Peg's loving leopard teeth ordained, and I feel again that snowstorm kiss, while my hope, for a prayer, recites Peg's bond to yet lay hands of love upon her slave.