Peggy O'Neal

by Alfred Henry Lewis

Then he asked her to read a song from the hymn-book of his wife. “They are always an ease to me,” he said.

Peg's eyes were running tears, and she had her work cut out to smother her sobs. For all that, she bore bravely up.

“You will not die,” cried Peg. “And I shall read you, instead of hymns, how the Vice-President means to pull the country to pieces with his Charleston plots. Will you die and make him president in your stead—endow him with the power for his treasons?”

Peg told me how she had no design in saying this, and that Calhoun was in her mouth no more than an exclamation. And yet had it been the prescription of a whole college of doctors, it could not have exerted a wholesomer effect.

The General had told me he would die; and I had stood in daily terror of it; and yet neither had once fallen to consider—and this smacks of the foolish for both of us—how his death would raise up Calhoun to take his place. The truth is, I could never bring myself to plan or look beyond the General's death; my thought, however fear-spurred, would run no farther than just his death; there it would stop nor budge a pace beyond. The General's death would seem the end of things, as it might be a second deluge. And perhaps he, himself, fell into similar frame; only with him it was but his building on that all-swallowing hope of meeting with his Saint Rachel, never again to be parted. That crowded out all else.

Letting conjecturings go adrift, however, the bald fact remains that it was Peg, after all, who came first to make us take a thought in advance and consider where the General's going would place the country with Calhoun. I remember how the General lay back on his pillow after Peg's outburst of warning; and next how his glance began to collect its old-time fire.

“By the Eternal!”—this in a whisper—“I will not die and leave the people helpless with those traitors. I must either live my term out, or live till I hang Calhoun. The country must be safe before I go.”

From that moment he would not speak of dying, but only of getting well and living; and each day he made visible stages towards a better strength, and would sit up longer, and would demand that we do some work. I can not say I witnessed these efforts without trembling; he might break himself down to death's door with this sudden load of labor. But no, he would go on; and no harm to come of it, but only good, for within the four weeks to follow Peg's inspired exhortation—for I shall ever think of her as one inspired of heaven to call the General back from death—he could be looked on as a hale man, one sound and in a plight of safety.

Also, his old fierceness began again to burn; he would bicker with me viciously—a thing laid aside for months. It comes back to me how, at the tail end of that sickness, his first words of opposition to something I proposed fell on my ears like a concord of sweet sounds. I could thank God in my heart to hear his anger, for now I knew he was surely upon health's own highroad. And so he was.

There came another thing of moment to find its cause in the General's illness, and that death it would threaten. The word had gone about the town that the General was in his last throes, or nearly; and at that, the thought giving a mean courage to the man, in the midst of this bad news our port wine Duff Green came upon us with a long editorial comparison of Calhoun with Van Buren, wherein the latter was lashed and the other uplifted to the blue dome. The article was nothing strong or well considered—a mere black thing of froth and poison!—and served no purpose beyond marking Duff Green's friendship in one quarter and his enmity in another.