“What!” I exclaimed, for here was a thing without a precedent.
“My cabinet is to dissolve. I have arranged for it. Van Buren will tender his resignation as of his own desire; Eaton and Barry will follow suit. If Calhoun's three do not take the hint and act on so good an example, then I will bring them to book with a demand. I will say that, half of my cabinet being gone, I desire to sweep clean the site and rear up in its place a new edifice of counsel.”
My thoughts were in a tumult, and the blood in me seemed seized of riot. It was a strange thing, that from the moment the General's hand fell upon my shoulder it seemed to hold Peg before my eyes. And when he talked it was as though he spoke her name with every word.
“Yes,” he went on, “Van Buren's resignation will be in my hands to-morrow; Eaton's so soon as he returns from Baltimore, say in a week; then Barry's will come along in the wake of Eaton's. I shall send Van Buren Minister to England. He shall be Vice-President for my second term, as you and I have planned, and President after that.”
“But Peg,” cried I, at last; “what will you do with Peg?”
The General would try to smile at this, but the effort was as futile as had been my own. But he did not fence at me with any jesting reminder of how Peg was no part of his cabinet; he met my thought squarely and would make allowance for my feeling.
“It is most natural,” he returned, “that you should ask of Peg. We have guarded our little girl too long—you and I—not to own her first in our concern. Peg, then, shall go to Florida and be a queen. I shall give Eaton that Governorship; we may yet need a firm hand in St. Augustine. Is it not a good thought? Our Peg shall rule among those Spaniards; it will almost be to have a throne and wear a crown. Does not that please you, when now her station under kinder skies is to be so splendid and so notably enhanced?”
From him I turned and paced the room; then from sadness my anger began to swell, for I am one whose grief runs with the end of it into wrath.
“Tell me one thing,” cried I at last, pausing before the General. “Why do you dissolve your cabinet?”
“Will it not lop off three arms of Calhoun's power?” he asked. “Does it not palsy Branch and Ingham and Berrien?”