“And if the Vice-President were taken for treason, what then?” asked Peg in a kind of innocence. “What would you do with him?”
“He shall hang, child,” and the General spoke slowly and with a granite emphasis; “he shall hang as high as Haman! He shall be a lesson to traitors for all time.”
It was then, and for the first time, as the General sank back spent, and in his weakness almost consumed of his own fires, there broke on me the whole peril of Calhoun. I knew the General too well to distrust the execution of his rope-and-gibbet threat. I was the more confirmed when that evening he would have me go about a score of letters ordering the readiness of those ships and arms and men he had outlined. A cordon of power was to be thrown about Calhoun and the ground beneath him mined for his destruction.
Now if the General through this long summer grew to a better acquaintance with Peg, the same also might be told of me. And hardly a day was to dawn and die when in the unique turns and twists of her manifold nature she would not come upon me in a novel light. She was never to be twice the same, and my sluggish apprehension could scarce keep pace with the changes of her.
For a specimen, then, of how she would stand against me over a wrong claim, and her skill in its defence. One morning she had drawn me off to the northward for a walk. The day was by no means sultry, and a breeze was blowing and so induced a temperature which made the exercise a joy. We were rambling through a deep valley—Peg and I—which was the home of a brawling rivulet, and making a slow journey of it, since the way, broken by boulders and sown with thickets in between, was something of the roughest. While about this pleasant toil Peg broke forth:
“Do you see that vine?” Here she pointed to a creeper, luxuriant and rich, which, failing of support to climb by, ran all about on the ground. “That vine is like me. It needs a trellis—asks some tall and strong tree to clasp and love and grow upon. Given a tree to touch the heavens, that loving vine would climb upward to kiss the heavens with her tree. Wanting her tree—poor vine!—she grovels about the ground. That vine and I are the same.”
To this I offered no response, for I could not see how the matter called for debate; and then her fancy was like unto a shooting star, and no one might foresee its flight or prophesy its course. However, Peg did not ask reply. Away she plunged in a new direction.
“Should one control his love, to send it here or there like a dog?”
“Why,” said I, “the thing is out of the question. One's love is not a creature of bit and bridle, to be guided as one guides a horse. I should say that no one controls his love, but is controlled by it.”
“See there, now! A second Daniel!” cried Peg, with a little flicker of derision. For all that, I could tell how she agreed with me. She went on, “Then one is not to blame how one's love wanders, since one has it in no leading-string. Should one marry without love?”