Peggy O'Neal

by Alfred Henry Lewis

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.