Peggy O'Neal

by Alfred Henry Lewis

“And in the bottom of it,” said he, in conclusion, “I have the chance of meeting her”—pointing to his wife's picture—“and that chance alone would make twenty deaths worth trying. For when we come to the end of it, Major, the heaven they talk of may be true.” This last with a manner of reverie as when hope upholds conviction leaning to a fall.

As best it could, my nature fought against a belief that the General would die; but his own word overpowered me. The fear of it, when he told the news, went through me like a spear. Or it was as if a stone were rolled upon my heart.

Sick folk, for a rule, are impatient and sharply cross with those about, even with their best beloved. But the General would be the opposite, and was never more tolerant than now when he lay ill; and this kindness made it a privilege and a pleasure to be near him, and not a burden to be borne.

Peg, as I have written, was much with him—fresh and sweet as a cluster of violets, about a sick room she was worth her weight in drugs. And the General and she had never so full a space for acquaintance before, and so each day he came to know Peg better and to love her more.

There existed throughout this summer a kind of truce in the crusade against Peg; the Reverend Ely had turned to be as mute as an oyster, while the Reverend Campbell and those harpies whom Noah so confounded were not only silent but deeply out of sight. There was neither sign nor rumor to come from them.

The books of account which Peg and I brought away from her mother's on the night when we were dogged, showed all Peg claimed. For the June her detractors spoke of in their lyings, and for three years before and well nigh a twelvemonth to follow, Timberlake was in town, and, after his wedding, constantly with Peg until he sailed. There was left no ground for argument, and that tale, as fatuous as it was wicked, fell, knocked on its sinful head.

As for the lurking Reverend Campbell himself, I caught sight of him but once. This was accident, and the pleasure of the shortest, for he dodged around a corner like the wind; and although—through an idleness of mind to see him going—I made speed to be at his point of disappearance, he, so to say, had exhaled. Into what dark crevice he crawled to hide from me I have no hint; but as if that street corner were a corner of the universe and he spilled therefrom into the very abyss of eternity itself, I never afterward caught the picture of his tallow cheeks and festering, munching lips.

This peace for Peg was something due to, a desertion of the town; for everybody—and women-folk especially—not tied by the leg to duties, went seeking cool comfort by the ocean or on the mountains.

Eaton himself made one of those who went away; he would have had Peg for company, but she urged—what was true, since the old lady had grown frail and weakly—that she ought not to leave her mother for so long a space. Eaton agreed with entire good humor to this, and so left Peg behind, and never a qualm or mark of hesitation, while he sought his ease by the sea.

Eaton from his own view-point might well spare Peg from his plans; he was extremely a man's man, and owning, withal, a hand for the bottle and a mighty promptitude for cards, would the better amuse himself with no wife to be a mortgage on his liberty.