Peggy O'Neal

by Alfred Henry Lewis

“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.”