Peggy O'Neal

by Alfred Henry Lewis

“Noah puts us all in his debt,” said the General. “To me he is the man remarkable; fine, high, yet bold and quick, there will be no one to take his place when he is gone.”

Peg's purpose was to tell the General—for he had asked the question in a little note that morning—how she should like the dinner and that East Room dance he offered, on the next evening but one.

“Is not the time too short?” asked the General. “Forty-eight hours would seem no mighty space for folk to make themselves prepared. They may own other engagements.”

“There will be no engagements,” said Peg. “The season is quite at an end; the Redsticks, as you christened them, closed their defeated doors six weeks ago, and for our own side, we only continued our receptions two weeks longer to show how we remained masters of the field. There will stand nothing in the way; and as for space to be ready in, why, then, folk don't need hours, but only minutes, when the invitation is from the White House.”

“Let us say the day following to-morrow, then,” said the General. “It shall be for your victory, child, and to celebrate it. Also, since the losers as well as the victors have proper place in a triumph, and, again, because it will look like the olive branch and an expression of peace, we will bid both friend and foe to this merrymaking, and mark it with as wide a good feeling as our opponents will accept.”

Peg's dinner, as dinners go, was a creature of magnificence, with Peg, beautiful as a moss-rose, at the General's right, and Dolly Madison's own silver—massy, and, as the women said, “gorgeous,”—to glisten on the white napery. The General's wide-flung invitations were as widely accepted; and not alone the Van Burens and the Krudeners and the Vaughns, but the Calhouns and the Berriens and the Branches, and all of the sept of Nullification, were there, as though to put down any surmise of sulky fear for themselves to be the offshoot of that conflict of the toasts. Even the frivolous Pigeon-breast was with us undismayed; albeit he practiced a forbearance touching Peg, and never once after the first formalities so far forgot his caution as to be near enough to that sparkling lady to court the awful hazard of her glance.

There came but one clash beneath my notice, and that would feed my humor. Houston was just come into town, as rude and tangled a gentleman in every politer technicality as the bears of his native woods. With him for his table-mate he bore away the wife of Ingham of the Treasury. Houston guarded his prize to her place with a ferocious backwoods vigilance as though it were indeed the enemy's country and they in peril of some Indian ambuscade with each new room they entered. The lady, with a tact as crude as Houston's knowledge of the drawing-room, perceiving the savageries of her protector, would be prompt to establish herself as directress' of his manners. Poor Houston suffered more than once the humiliation of the lady's counsel, given in a high, obvious voice, and with the manner of one who corrects a novice dull to the confines of despair.

The rupture befell over fish and when a portion of delicate pompano was placed before the headlong Houston.

“That is not the fish fork,” cautioned the lady in a whisper so loud it bred a smile on thirty faces either side of her; “that is not the fish fork; here, take this.”

“By Satan's hoofs, madam!” exclaimed the wrathful Houston, whose long-stifled resentment would now be in the saddle, at the same time brandishing the huge trident he had somehow gotten hold on; “by Satan's hoofs! keep your fish forks for whom you will. For myself, I'll eat this catfish with my saber if I have the mind.”