it was my fate, i will not say my misfortune—being too proud—to dwell overmuch with camps and caucuses and transact more than stood best for me of politics and war. these were my schools, and they sadly served to make me coarse and turn me hard. sometimes i think this pity, for i was conceived, you are to notice, with no scanty promise of fineness to my fiber.
now i am moved to remember, and i might add almost to regret these things, because i would like much at this pinch to color for you a right picture of the fair, innocent, unfortunate peg o'neal. yet how am i to do this?—i, loaded of a sluggish fancy and a genius without touch! i am no apelles to paint an aphrodite, no phidias to carve a venus; and for that matter, peg no phryne to be model for such art. the best i might draw would stand crude and cornerwise, since i own only to talents whereof the graphic character is exhausted when they have laid out a worm fence?
it is within the rim of the possible that you may feel for me, born as i show you with the hands of all good power of description bound close and fast by my sides. perhaps, too, you yourself on occasion have been stung of high impulse and fain would soar with a poem; and then, when you stretched for flight, found no furnishment of wings. most folk have been thus crowded upon by exaltations, and were prey to thoughts for the expression of which their lisping natures lacked facility. they had the sinew but not the soul. there was verse in them, but with it no presentation dress of word or ornament of rhyme. they caged a tune of music in their hearts and failed of those notes asked for to announce its melody.
still, our peg, for whom we toiled—the general and i—and intrigued and made new friendships and broke old ones, and who was in her fortunes the beginning of policies on the general's part so lasting in importance to the state, shall not go untold. i must make what effort lies in me to give some notion of a beauty that claimed so much of potency in equations of government solved of our times.
for myself, and i take no shame for it, i say freely that of the charges laid against her by common tongue, i was convinced of her innocence by the mere beauty of her face, just as the loveliness of that greek girl aforetime convinced the judges and wrought a verdict in her favor. there be flowers so purely beautiful as to refuse and refute a stain; and such a blossom was the lustrous peg o'neal.
i was first to meet with her at this time; and while i had not condemned her in my thoughts—to condemn a woman is, for a man, the coward part!—if i found myself possessed of views at all, they leaned to her disfavor. i knew the general regarded peg as a white soul suffering wrong; but i also knew the general to be mercurial, and a blindly passionate recruit when once enlisted. besides, his own wife had been throughout her life—and she most virtuous!—so lashed of slander, that his blood was ever up and about the defence of any whose wailing wrongs resembled her's. the general's attitudes were never the offshoots of cold wisdom; he was one who believed the worst of a foe so soon as it was told, and the best of a friend before ever it was told at all. wherefore i would not accept the general's decision touching peg, more than i would take other conclusions from his hands.
my conservatism and just slowness cut, however, no figure, since, as i tell you, with the moment i clapped eyes upon her, i changed to be her knight—her champion; and thereafter i matched even the torrid general in fire for her cause.
i was in talk with the general when news reached me of peg waiting in the parlor for a meeting. it was jim who bore me word; he peered around the corner of the door and with rolling' eye as one who brings bad tidings, beckoned me into the hallway.
“what is it?” i demanded impatiently.
i should tell you, perhaps, that jim was more than twenty years my senior, and nearing on to three score years and ten. this may explain that attitude of mentor, not to say protector, of my morals which it was his pleasure to hold towards me.
“what is it? speak up!”
jim shook his grizzled head, and his look was loaded of reproof.
“see yere, marse major,” said jim; “dish yere aint tennessee where you-all kin do as you please. what you reckon now marse gen'ral would gwine say to sech cat-an'-fiddle doin's?”
“and now what's wrong?” i inquired; humbly enough, for i was much beneath jim's sway.
“marse major, lemme ask you,” said jim, and with that he fixed me with his old eye like an inquisitor; “lemme ask you: does you-all send for to meet a young lady?”
“certainly not,” i replied. “do you think i've come to washington to meet young ladies?” this last indignantly.
“how i know what you do?” retorted jim, sullenly. “ever see a hoss in a new parstur? ever see how he r'ar an' pitch an' buck-jump an' kick up? how i know what you do?”
“get to the point,” i said, and i drew on a fierce expression, for i was running low of patience.
“no use, marse major, for you to go dom'neerin' with jim,” and the scoundrel shook his head admonishingly. “i'll fotch up at d' p'int fas' enough. i tells dese yere niggahs about dis hotel that if any one comes squanderin' 'round to see you-all, an' speshul, if any of them evil-minded women-folks comes 'round, to let me know.”
“what do you mean with your evil-minded women-folks?”
“that's all right, marse major; jim aint heer'n d' bible read for mighty likely sixty years an' not know of them evil-minded womenfolks. king solomon, an' him d' wisest man, was mingled up in d' midst of a whole passel of'em. an' so, when a minute back one of d' house niggahs comes up to me an' lets on thar's a young lady in d' parlor who's waitin' for you, i allows i'll take a look, an' try an' rummage out what she wants. with that, i kinder loiters into d' parlor like i'm sent a urrent; an' sho! marse major, if thar don't sot a girl who's that beautiful she's plumb reedic'lous.
“'be you-all wantin' to meet d' marse major?' i says.
“she say, 'yes; i'm d' wife of his friend, mr. eaton.'
“'mr. eaton,' i says, 'who lives down south of nashville at franklin co't house?'
“she say, 'yes; i'm mrs. eaton.'
“course i knows dish yere aint so. an' i'm partic'lar skeered about you, besides, since she's so handsome. it's d' beautiful ones makes all d' trouble; a homely woman aint no more harm than squinch owls, that's jim's sperience. but nacherally, marse major, i don't tell dish yere girl she's lyin'; i'm too well brought up. so i says:
“'i've knowed mr. eaton since befo' d' las' wah with d' british what marse gen'ral done whups at noo aw-leans; mr. eaton's a kin to my marse major. i've been down by his place a hun'red times at franklin; an' you hyar me, honey! they aint been no mention about you bein' his wife in tennessee.'
“she smile a bit at this—she's seemin' trifle sad like—an' says: 'mr. eaton an' me, we get married only 'bout a month ago in wash'ton.' an' so she tell me ag'in to go fotch you; an' arter sort o' hesitatin' 'round between a balk an' a break-down for a while, settlin' on d' properest move, i reckons mebbe i'd better come an' tell you arter all.”
“it's as well you did,” i said, turning back to the general's door.
“that's all right, marse major.” jim called this after me in severe tones. “i'm boun' i'm gwine look arter you-all jes' d' same.” then in a wheedling voice: “say, marse major, would you-all mind if i he'ps myse'f to a dram outen d' demijohn in your closet? what with all dish yere talkin' an' frettin' about you, jim's mouth is as dry as a kivered bridge.”
“one, mind you; no more.” the general, in converse with a caller, was considering van buren, and party lines and issues in new york. i would have told him of peg, and that i was about to see her, but the presence of his visitor put it out of reach. on the whole, i decided, it would be as well to meet peg first and tell the general later. i interrupted, and explained that i was going to the parlors for a moment; we would get to his letters on my return.
“no hurry, major, no hurry,” he replied; “i'm quite content to put them off. i am already seized on by the spirit of laziness that pervades this place, and which caused randolph to say: 'i never wind my watch whilst in washington, as i feel that all time spent here is wasted and thrown away.' it's not quite that bad, perhaps; still, we'll willingly put off the letters until to-morrow.”
and now, since i am to tell you of peg, i would that i possessed somewhat the art of petticoats—a little polite skill for flounce and farthingale—some shadow of a parlor or a boudoir grace.
peg, then, was the truth itself for height and mould, and her pretty hands and feet told of no tavern in their genesis, even though the lip of envy did. i give you my first impression of her, earned eye to eye and ear to voice. i say the latter because her voice was as honey and wove conviction like a spell. she had your pansy face; a face regular and ineffably good. and how any, even a woman and a rival, might look her deep eyes through and doubt her, masters conjecture! peg's hair—hanging in long curls about her neck and shoulders—was black; fine as silk or cobwebs; black, yet with the gold-black of the black saxon. and her skin was snow and peach-blow. there was meditation, too, in her wide brow; and her mouth, with teeth like milk, was both firm and loving. also, there was that in her atmosphere to bring brave men to her. it was upon one in a moment that peg, while tender to be hurt, was hard to conquer; sensitive, she would feel her fate; yet she would face it—face it with the faithful courage of an angel. but i'll have done; why furnish the fragments and queer splinters of a portrait i'm too inaptly dull to offer as a whole!
peg o'neal came this day, and making herself known, gave me my first sight of her in the drawing room of the indian queen. there was a look about her, lonely, bitter and pathetic; a look that should belong with one hunted, and who waits to be made sure of her friends. she gave me her hand; white and soft and small and yielding—it was as though i took hold on a lily. my heart went out to her before she spoke; as i've confessed, i was warm for her cause on the instant.
peg had read the cabinet list in the paper; i think, too, she foresaw the woe and worry to become the tail of it more clearly than did either the general or myself, or even the port-wine duff green. it was of that she desired to talk; she would see the general; but first she would see me.
this preference for myself before the general was a common custom into which peg readily stepped. all who knew the general, knew me for his other self; and i will say, despite the inference of a boast, knew me for his calmer and more prudent self.
peg did not come to me until the afternoon, and before i go to the story of our converse it would be as well to sketch a handful of incidents which preceded her advent and which should be understood to teach one the whole truth of this tale.
this washington day i have on my mind's edge, being the one next before the day peg came to me, was the fourteenth of february, st. valentine's day, albeit the latter has nothing of part herein. we had arrived, the general and myself, on the tenth, and housed at the indian queen. this tavern was not the tavern of old, when that o'neal who was peg's father prevailed as master, yet even under new control—and with a born conservative like myself, the new is ever the defective—it was a first hostel of the capital.
our advent discovered a crust of ice and snow to our feet, and a mortal sharpness in the air that was like a tonic. during those three or four days since our coming, a thaw had befallen which left thoroughfares a discouraging swale of mire, and made going about a foulest possible employ. withal, as though sponsor for the softening temperature, there descended a fog—fairly a hash of misty rain that one might wash one's face in—and the air was as full of water as a sponge.
these were no true conditions for the general, with lungs never the hardiest, and whose health was more than commonly broken by the blow of his wife's death. she was soundly, deeply sleeping in her grave in tennessee, and the new sods above her counted but twelve weeks for their age, when we rode into washington. she had heard the guns and the music which told of her hero's triumph; and then, heart-stricken of shafts of slander aimed against her sinlessness by an opposition willing to conquer with black means, she bowed her gentle head and passed. she was not to multiply a white house honor by sharing it, and left her lover-husband to go his presidential way alone unlighted of her eyes.
those dark scenes at the hermitage when the general's angel went from us, and storms of grief—so utter, so beyond repair!—fair beat upon him to a point which all but laid him beneath the grass-roots to keep her company, have neither part nor lot in this relation. they may be guessed at, however; and the general came forth of them woe-worn and shaken, and with the thought in his soul that she perished by the venom of his enemies, who had struck at his fortunes by striking at her pure repute.
after his wife died i had been in the grip of sore concern for the general. he was but a frail man at his best; he carried lead in his shoulder and lead in his side—private bullets stopped in private wars, truly, yet no less, perilous for that—and when on these, plus the angry work and wrath of a campaign, was laid this funeral farther load, i say, i trembled for the upcome.
our way to washington was to be by the cumberland and the ohio to pittsburg, and then overland through the mountains, and so along the potomac. all tennessee seemed come to nashville when we went aboard; i helping the general—whose weakness was so great he must, despite vanity, lean visibly on my support.
as he sank exhausted into a chair, and the boat backed off the levee, i was in blackness for the gloom i felt. i believed he would not live to see washington, but fall by the way; i in no sort presupposed those eight tremendous years when the white house would be to the common folk as a temple, with him the idle of their adoration. i could not foresee his marvelous two presidencies, and how, his name brightening with each added sun and followed by every eye, he would retire again to privacy and his hermitage, the best beloved since the even day of jefferson.
and now as i talk to you the tears start. he is dead as i write, and gone long ago to join his heart in the grave and lie by the side of his wife; and it comes strangely, even to myself that i, an old man, and held as one hard and practical and cold, should be so moved of retrospection. if it were to remember loss and sadness and decay, such indeed might stand as reason for emotion. but my rearward glances find only the glory of an ever-climbing, sky-kissed high success. mayhap it is the splendor and white gleam of it to bring the tears, as does the glint of sunshine on the snow.
yet it half shames my years, these drops of feeling. and for all that, i well recall how dale and overton and houston and blair—no meek souls, these!—were as much commoved when claimed of thoughts of general jackson;—such, for his friends, were the soft and softening spells and powers of the man! the wet eyes of these, stern and rock-hewn, may save me from the stain of doting weakness. but i loiter—i lose time when there is none to lose—a wandering delay is the crime common of old age.
our journey to washington was disputed by applause at every foot; the double banks of the cumberland and the ohio appeared to have become alike the rendezvous of south and west and north. bands brayed and “committees” came aboard; a dozen times was the boat tied up and the general borne ashore as on a wave to greet and be greeted of roaring thousands who hailed him their messiah of politics and one come for their redemption. from the first our progress was hedged and canopied of the never-ceasing shout, “hurrah! for jackson!” night and day it was in our ears, and our very sleep gave way and fled before it.
to say that through this i held no alarms for the general would be but an idle picture of my feelings. verily! i more than once found my heart in my mouth lest the gusty multitude that struggled and fought to touch his hand should kill him for mere kindness.
and yet he would thrive and be fat upon it, if such word by any padding of hyperbole may be made to fit his slim meagerness. his gray eye would light, his lean cheek show a color, his milky bristle of hair turn more stiffly, jauntily spinous with each of these encounters. when i would remonstrate and cite his sick weakness to forbid, he would shake his head and smile—his closest journey to a laugh. then he would say:
“major, you don't know me! these shoutings are as medicine in wine. these people love me; i take strength from their hands; their applause is my food and i live and grow heavy by it.”
and so this boisterousness of endorsement went on; and the general reveled while i sat sour with terror lest from it he sicken and die, stricken by the very evidences of his popularity. he was right and i was wrong; he came from this general joy, which with every hour arose and laid actual hands upon him, as one remade.
some pages back i pitched upon the fourteenth as a day much in my mind, and the fourth since we came upon the capital. i begin narration properly with that day, regarding what has gone before as preliminary and given for a clearer knowledge of that which is to follow as it unfolds.
there were matters to take place upon the fourteenth which served to fix it in my memory. the first was a mishap to the general himself.
for the rain and the mist and the mire, we that day found ourselves much confined to the indian queen. this might be called no hardship of loneliness since, despite the mud, all the world would pull on its boots to visit us. the general, whose dyspepsia was dominant, had eaten only a little rice. this he took at short intervals; yet such dwarf spoonfuls were they, that in the end the aggregate was smallish, and he found himself weakly languid as a reward.
the general had been to a casual reception below to meet official folk—they were building hopes for themselves of what should follow inauguration, still eighteen days away—and being done with them, and uneasy with the weariness of their call, was returning to his room. at the stair's head he stumbled; as he fell he griped his side and gave a smothered sob of pain.
i, who walked close behind, was well aware of what had chanced. the old dickenson wound was imperfectly healed, and a sharp wrench would tear it and set it to inward hemorrhage. swiftly i raised him, and since it was no vast distance down the hall, nor he a mighty burden, carried him to his chamber.
“call augustus,” he said, his voice pain-lowered to a whisper.
placing a chair i gave him a mouthful of whisky by way of a stimulant. augustus was the black body-servant who had come with us from the hermitage. i knew what the summoning of augustus argued, yet was handless to interfere. the general when stricken—as he had been many times—in the fashion i have named, was used to open a vein, and so bleed himself comfortably till he felt relief. more than once i had denounced such backwoods surgery as not only dangerous but revolting, and wanting foundations of common sense. there was no logic for it, i said; and it stood for the spirit of the preposterous when one bled internally to bleed one's self externally as remedy. as well might i have spoken with the trees. the general made his stubborn laws and lived them.
“there was a frenchman,” observed the general on some occasion of my remonstrance, “who said that at forty every man was either a fool or a doctor. now i am more than forty; and i'm no fool.”
augustus, a tawny, handsome black, arrived in a hurry splendidly promissory of zeal. being deft of practice, he whipped a bandage sharply tight about the general's arm above the elbow—as starved as a rake-handle, that arm, yet strong as hickory bough! then the general with his jackknife nicked a vein well down the lower arm, and proceeded to bleed himself most contentedly and liberally, while augustus held a basin.
following these horse-leech experiments, for so i scrupled not to brand them, the general, wrapped in a dressing gown, was put to rest upon a sofa. it would have been the bed; but it stood not yet three of the afternoon, and it was a saying of the general's that no man should take to his bed by daylight until he came to die. on the lounge, and, as he declared, much uplifted of health, augustus and i left him, with the whisky easily at hand in event of over-creeping faintness.
after the lapse of an hour i returned. there lay that upon me which, as i saw the future, it was proper enough should be said to the general. and since he was like to oppose my counsel, as folk commonly do what is patent for their peace, sticking as stoutly for the seeds of trouble as though they were indeed the seeds of righteousness, i reckoned aid perhaps from his present weak, low state. he would lack somewhat his vivacity, and might be drawn with less of struggle to my manner of thought.
thus abode the coil: it was the evening before when the general told me how he would propose eaton to be his secretary of war, and asked my view. i had withheld opinion at the time, my caution evoking a dull flare of that heat-lightning of the general's temper, which last commodity was never deeply in abeyance. i would tell him later, i said; and following a rumble of contempt on his part for the sluggishness of my friendship for eaton—for that gentleman and i for long had been friends—the subject was for the moment at rest. now was the time ripe to dispute this question with him; so i bethought, as i wended towards his door.
coming to his chamber i tapped, and then pushed in without wait, as was my wont. the windows were to the west where at this hour the sun should have been; but such was the veil of fog without that the day seemed already spent and sinking into twilight.
the great fire on the hearth—honest, crackling logs to feed it, since the general would tolerate no less—set the room in a bloom of light that came close to marking the candle that burned at his elbow a profligacy. he had lifted himself from the sofa where augustus and i placed him, and was seated before a little table. on it, propped against the vicar of wakefield, a book whereof he never tired, stood a miniature of his wife. throughout the day he wore this little painting beneath his garments and hung about his neck by a black cord. his wife had given it him in the old days and when their love was new. each night, when folk pray and con the bible, he would have this picture before him; and with it her hymn-book to read her favorite songs. this was his devotion—his worship; it was as though he communed with her, his saint rachel, on the work of the day and its duties. to the time of his death he did this; and for whatever was good of his performing he would lay it to these conferences, sweet at once and sad, when in the dusk borderlands of day and night he met and talked with the soft shadow of his heart's own.
as i came into the room the general raised his eyes. they were tear-brimmed and he made no shift to hide them.
“major,” he said with trembling lip, gazing the while on the miniature, “she strove to make me a christian. i gave her my promise to become a christian. and so i shall when once i'm done with office and back again at home. i would become one now, were it within the domain of what might be. but who is he who could unite politics and christ? i'm no hypocrite, major; you know that! you know what a politician is; you know what a christian should be. no man may be both, major; no man may be both.”
“you are not a politician,” i retorted. “you are a president.”
this i got off with a gruff air of harshness, not, however, because it drew a true distinction. i sought to call him from his present mood. the general was unusual in so far that a best step towards comforting him was to irritate him. in his breast he loved collision, and might even leave mourning for a war.
“i am a president and not a politician!” this with a gather of scorn. “and pray, when is a president not a politician?”
with a deprecatory gesture i dismissed the point.
“let that remain,” i replied, “as a question wherewith to rack some further moment. i came for another matter.” the general turned a keen eye upon me. “you spoke of eaton for your portfolio of war,” i continued.
“have you considered what objection might lodge against such course?”
“go on,” he said.
“general, i misdoubt the wisdom of the step. i will make my word plain. there is none to be more the friend of eaton than myself, none to respect him more. but, sir, you are aware of what folk say.”
“and what do folk say?” anger stood red on the brow of the general as a banner is flung from a battlement. “what do folk say?”
“you should consider coolly, general,” i went on. ever cool myself, it was for that the general valued my counsel. “you know this tale as well as i. it has been told me more than once within four days. light and laughter-loving, the beautiful peg o'neal grows up, the daughter of this very tavern that shelters us. she weds timberlake, the purser. he is here; then he is at sea. the girlish peg is still a girl. she goes to rout and ball; she is gay and high and does not mope and wear demure half-weeds as good opinion holds one should whose love is on the sea among the storms. there come whisper and nod and innuendo—the pot of washington scandal, they tell me, is made easily to boil. then in the mediterranean timberlake cuts his throat; and next, as one who makes sure work, leaps overboard into fifty fathoms. the beautiful peg does not become distinguished for her grief. this, and the throat-cutting, augment talk, and tongues wag doubly. within the year thereafter, and not two months ago, she and our friend eaton are wed. gossip gains a new impulse; heads nod and there are wise leers. i put this to you, general, with a rude coarseness almost ferocious; i do so for a purpose. i put it as your enemies will put it when, should you call eaton to your cabinet, they seize on the story to your injury. it is not what you and i say or believe; that is not the question. it is what will your enemies tell and the world accept.”
while i was talking, the general filled a clay pipe; in tobacco he found calm. holding the pipe by its long reed stem he strode up and down, puffing cloudily. the red faded on his forehead, but his eyes were agate-hard. i saw it would be eaton against argument. the general's will was set as hard and fast and cold as arctic ice.
nor, to be fully honest, was i over-surprised or sensibly cast down; i had fairly foreseen it all. you may question why, then, i made this vigorous head; and eaton my friend.
it is a proper curiosity. freely, i am constrained, as i review the past, to regard myself as sometimes the victim of self-foolery. on this february evening with the general, i make no doubt but i thought i acted wholly for his weal and peace. and yet i was clear before i spoke, how my words would win to no effect, and eaton for the cabinet it would be. thus, i now see that my impulse, indubitably, was one wholly of vanity; as the friend privileged to frankness and who—as he said many times and until i consented to the fact myself—more than any other had builded him up to be a president, i would tell my mind, air my gifts of prophecy, and arrange myself for a future wherein the general might say, when the winds blew high, “you saw the tempest coming and you told me.” that, as i now see, was the very conceited, small, cheap reason of my interference; although at the time i in no sort beheld it by that light, but felt somewhat noble and high and as might a loyal friend.
the general for ten full minutes smoked up and down, i silent, and the room otherwise still save for the tick-ticking of the clock. at last he spoke smilingly and off to one side.
“you remember that sagacious doctor who was yesterday called from baltimore to amend me after my journey? 'i'll do anything you say,' i told him, 'save give up coffee and tobacco.' 'then you'll die,' he retorted, 'since it is coffee and tobacco which are killing you.' 'then i'll die,' i replied, 'since coffee and tobacco are all that are left worth living for.' he quit the place in a fury of heat, did that doctor.”
the general grinned. there was another pause; then he swung back to my eaton warning, while his face again showed grave and firm.
“sir, mrs. eaton—peg, as we call her—is as spotless as a star. my wife knew her, loved her.” his tone was tender, while his glance sought the miniature where from the table it followed him up and down with its eyes. “timberlake's habits were unfortunate; his suicide was due to that. there was never a doubt of peg in his soul; never a question of her conduct. i know this; i do not guess. what!”—here his voice began to rise with choler—“what! are we to guide by nameless slanders? eaton is my friend, honorable, high of mind, honorably married to the woman he loves! i will not, by anything i do or fail to do, arm villification. into my cabinet he goes though every bow in hell be bent against it.”
smash! went the general's pipe upon the hearth. it was the manner of the man when driven of anger. first and last he smashed pipes by the gross.
“that is not the song of it!” i stubbornly protested.
then i put out what was true; that he should look at this thing from the point of his presidency. there was the public interest; his faith to the public must be dwelt on.
“if there be a faith to the public,” he retorted, “there is also a faith to a friend. it is a widest rumor that eaton is to be of my cabinet. folk are morally sure of it as much as folk may be of what sits in the antechamber of time. should he not be named, that fact will be held as an endorsement of these slanders. it will destroy eaton; worse, it will destroy peg. do you counsel that? must that be done in the name of public good?” the general now was speaking in a cold, contained way for all his late pipe-smashing, and you are not to infer, from any verbal force displayed, a shouting anger. wroth he was; but, nathe-less, low-voiced and steady as with a kind of tranquility of fury. “must my friend be abased, insulted—must a sweet, true woman suffer harm for that you say a public interest asks it? sir, you speak folly and propose disgrace. there can be no public good to come from private wrong. and if it were so, still i should stand the same. i've suffered many tests for the public you prate of; i've abode the death-chances of a hundred battles; i've marched to the public's wars when, spent and weak, i must be lifted to the saddle; in no way have i spared or saved myself. but i will spare my friend; i'll save a woman's honor; aye! spare and save them though your public interest perish in their steads. you could name no altar whereon i would make such sacrifices. the honor of a woman—to safeguard her good fame—is the first duty of a man. it is before friendship, before patriotism; it has precedence over things public or private. what you offer spells ruin for a woman—ruin for peg whom my wife has loved and kissed! i will not do it. i say it again: eaton for the cabinet it should be though it were the last act of my life. more; if i were capable of beginning my administration with treason to a friend, i might surely look to conclude it with treason to the people.”
you are to know that the general made these long orations walking the floor, and in a manner jerky and declamatory, though not loud. there might be spaces of silence between sentences measured by two and three steps; and much of the time his eye left me and he was like one who debates with himself.
i ramble off his utterances somewhat in full; for i not only regard the sentiments expressed as creditable to the general himself, but am disposed to give you the truth of him as one who, while right oftener than most men, and as set for justice as a pair of scales, on this as on every other strong occasion did his thinking with his heart. also, while he never said the word, it ran in him like a torrent that his wife, were she with him, would shield poor peg at whatever vital cost; and of itself that was equal to the sweeping down of reasons strong as oak or adamant.
who was the un-observer to say that familiarity breeds contempt? he went wide of the truth; he should have said that familiarity breeds self-confidence. now i knew the general—i knew the windings of his thought as one knows his way about a house. folk called him a hero; he was never so to me. and yet, more than any, i knew him to be even better and braver and broader than was his fame in the worshiping mouths of ones who uplifted him to be a god. no, the general and i neither looked up nor looked down when we dealt with one another; we met ever on level terms. he was president, or shortly would be; but what then? as he himself said, “the presidency is a condition, not an attribute, as it might be a malady or a fortune, an evil or a good. and if i am king are you not warwick?” this last was his way of phrasing it when, a year or so later, i told him of some overheard amazement concerning the easy, old-shoe terms on which i lived with him.
such being our attitudes one to the other, the general's oral exaltations—while i identified them for honest and as from his soul's soul—struck on me as more florid than was called for by an interview, private and commonplace, between us two. but it was the nature of him; his surface could be made to toss like some tempest-bitten ocean, while his steady depths were calm. this may explain, if it does not excuse, that while he thus walked about, raging and eloquent, i listened with a bit of impatience, helping myself meanwhile to a mouthful of whisky and filling a pipe of my own.
“say no more,” i observed, having advantage of a pause; “say no more. eaton you will have it, and eaton it shall be. but, on the whole, do you call it good to your peg? do you call it wise or friendly to put her forth to be the target for every bolt of detraction?”
the general drew over to the fire and sat down. slowly he poured himself a glass of spirits, and then as slowly drank it off. for some moments he smoked in silence.
“what with this wrong to my side, major,” he said at last, “and the blood i've let, and all on a pale diet of rice, i fear i'm not strong enough to argue with you. let us agree, then, that eaton shall go in as secretary of war. as for peg—poor little peg!—why should she be safer out than in? moreover, a woman must have her courage as a man has his. she must risk slander as he risks sword, and both must front their enemies.” he had gone on with a mighty mildness; now he began to wave his second pipe, and i looked to have it go into the fireplace with every word. “you say that the eatons will be assailed. already they are attacked; not for themselves, but for me. they were married in january; none found fault until, with our coming, eaton's nearness to me was remembered and the whisper of what i would do with him began to run abroad. the eatons are the victims of my feuds; it is i, through them, who am stabbed at. sir,”—smash! went the pipe and the general started up—“sir, it is the work of henry clay—that creature of bargain and corruption! you know his methods of the past campaign. what lie was too vile to tell? what calumny too gross? who so innocent as to escape his malice? why, sir! such as clay and his crew would befoul gehenna, and satan himself might shrink aside in shame from their companionship! who was sure from them and the poison of their mendacity? she died by it”—here he pointed to the miniature. “even the poor lost grave of my mother was not sacred to such jackals. and now it is the eatons—now it is the pretty, harmless peg! so let it be; they will find me ready. if i feel joy for a presidency it is because it clothes my hands for their annihilation.”
there was a rap at the door. augustus opened it and announced: “general green.”
“duff green,” said the general, as though a new thought occurred. “i think now for once, in a way i shall turn our rotund friend to partial use.”
“and how will you compass that miracle?” i spoke rather in scorn than curiosity since i owned to briefest admiration for the general's caller. “it will be a novelty to see your duff green of use.”
“why then,” returned the general, “the benefit i propose from him is one simple enough. i shall have him, in his paper, give this cabinet list to the public. once in print the thing is ended—the nails for that cabinet building will be clinched.”
“and that is it,” cried i, in opposition. “now to my notion it is ever best to hold a question of this sort in abeyance until the latest moment. thereby you preserve for yourself room wherein to change your plan.”
“one's first aim is the surest,” responded the general. “now i've never known much good to come from this plan-changing of which you talk. nor do i believe in secrets. one should tell the people their business so soon as ever that business is transacted. more folk are trapped and slain with their own secrets than are saved by them. besides one has no right to lock a door between the people and their affairs. there go but two keys with government, one for the treasury and the other for the gaol, and every officer from path-master to president should be made to study this lesson of the keys until he can repeat it.”
to this lecture i made no retort whether of comment, denial or agreement. these abstractions delighted him; and in this instance i too listened with pleasure, not so much because of the deep-sea wisdom disclosed as for that tranquility of spirit after his tossing anger against clay, which their utterance would seem to bring him. as it stood the general's high temper had faded and his heat was much cooled away when duff green appeared.
