Peggy O'Neal

by Alfred Henry Lewis

“Westfall's success for the place would have linked to the Vice-President the richest, strongest elements in Pennsylvania. Then there is Florida itself—two-thirds Spanish and by no means in love with the balance of this country. With a weak governor in St. Augustine, and one who owed his crown to our Vice-President, what should be simpler, in the event of secession in South Carolina, than to count on Floridian men and money for the venture?”

“They will do as well without their Westfall,” commented the General. “Mayhap they will do better, since had they succeeded for him, it might hereafter have given their rashness inspiration, and turned them gallows-ripe. One thing sure: let them once rebel against the law—let them but rise in Calhoun's state to the law's defiance—and I will burn them from the earth. They shall be destroyed root and stalk and standing grass, with the reptiles that crawl between. Their leaders shall swing for it so surely as my name is Jackson or there's such a word as 'President' in the land.”

Here I come near to the first true social test to be put upon our Peg, and that, you will know, was the reception which she would give as a cabinet lady at her own home on the Georgetown side of the President's Square. And now, when I am driven by stress of this tale to furnish you with a handful of hints or little twigs of description concerning the business, I write as though with fetters on my wrists. It is because I have no salon learning, and was never taught your lessons of chandeliers and wax-lights and orchestras and tables spread with elegance and palms and flowers and folk brilliant on evening parade, formidably engaged, each with a part like people in a play, in bringing off one of those encounters where well dressed men and women meet to crowd each other and call the trial a function. If it were to be a battle or even some quiet-lying landscape with its stretch of river, and a forest to fringe the banks, and mayhap a mountain chain with its plushy dress of pines to the background, I might not come on so haltingly. But this, as it were, is to lay a fence of stone—and that, you are to witness, means a journey full of backaches—to be here piling one word upon another for the story of a drawing-room three hours.

Van Buren was himself Peg's partner for this reception—his own doors closed, as Peg explains in rearward pages when she talks with the General. It would be then, a double reception, and both the State and the War Departments to stand thereof the social sponsors.

Word had crept abroad how the General himself planned a place among the callers, and at the grave tidings Duff Green, in his paper, was driven to extremes of frantic ink over the proposed lowering of the presidency to cabinet levels, which latter the disturbed Duff would seem to think were common, even if they were not bad.

“The White House,” cried Duff, in his shocked columns, “should not be taken down from that high place of elevation in which our late president was pleased to leave it.”

“Truly, an excellent thought!” observed the General, “to set Adams before me for a model! Why, man! from his purchase of the rogue Clay down to the last measure to meet the flourish of his pen and be made a law thereby, I call it patriotism to turn my back on every position Adams occupied, and the very essence of right to undo all he did. Me to follow Adams! I should as soon think of emulating Billy Weatherford and his Creeks.”

“But why stand over me,” said I, “with all this arm tossing and threatening declamation? It is your Duff Green and not I who would thus drive you to an Adams example.”

“Well,” said the General, somewhat subdued by this thought, “you at least are here and I must vent myself on some one.”

While both the General and I lived in a deal of fog concerning such coils, neither of us was torn of doubt as to the certainty of Peg's triumph. Vaughn and Krudener, for the favor of Van Buren, would lead up the legation folk as bell-sheep lead a flock; the military element was bound to Peg's chariot-wheel by merest war department bonds; withal, the General's presence alone would mean a multitude, and that of gaudiest feather, for it asked no skill of society to know how that same impulse of self-interest was ever at work to move it, as much as might be said of any conspiracy of roughest politics. The General as the present source of things temporal would be courted; and to that sycophantish end your swarming brood of courtiers would be found tagging at his back though he were to make a sulphurous pilgrimage and seek the pit itself.