Peggy O'Neal

by Alfred Henry Lewis

Peg was presently better restored to herself. In the very moment when the gates of my soul would open to let it forth to her and I gave myself into her hands to be fashioned by her as she would, Peg began to gather steadiness. It was she to now think and speak and decide for both of us; for myself, I was clean swept away. I was not to know this new strength of Peg's from her tones alone, or the trend of what she uttered; I could feel her heart-throbs become firmer and more slow as she lay in my arms, and it was in them I read the truth of her resolve.

“Watch-dog,” said Peg in a way most sweetly solemn, “I think nothing of myself. If it were I alone to be unmade, I'd never leave your arms again. Come weal, come woe, here would I bide, and while your arms were round me the worst would change to be the best. But I will not see you under the mire of men's tongues. Dear one, you would die! You are one whose life grows on his honor like a flower on its stem; disgrace would cut you down and you would die. And yet, I am glad I love you; I am glad I care nothing for myself. Let my fate be woven to me coarse as sackcloth, harsh as nettles, yet will I exult while I draw its folds about me. I will go on as a world would say I should; and if the way of life lie steep, I'll still climb on and think I toil for you; and if it be stony and if it bruise my feet, I'll say I suffer that to keep you safe; I'll make my grief my Eden and find in the endless woe of your surrender a nobler, higher, more immortal transport than would have owned me in your arms. And there will be another world!” Peg's tones swung low to my ear, and mystical. “Watch-dog, there he lives after this.”

Peg was silent for a space, and would turn even and cool and in a way of content. I, on my part, might neither say her yea nor nay, for I was in the hollow of her hand like a pebble to be retained or cast by her into the sea as she should conclude.

And somehow I was no longer in the dark. I loved her; and yet I knew Peg was not to be for me; she had said the word; she would go and I would stay; for all her soft beauty and that love for me which spoke in every fiber of her being, the truth flowed in on me like a tide that in no way might I change her or shape her or move her from her will. Against my prayer and in the front of protest, I would be saved to myself and I would lose her; she would do it all. What was it the General said? He would save Peg from Peg? It was she who now would save me from both herself and me when my love-sown madness was hot to make a wreck of all.

“Yes, watch-dog,” Peg continued dreamily, “there will come another life.” Then of the suddenest twining her arms about my neck more tightly still and until she clung there like a part of me, she cried out as though her soul spoke: “Kiss me, sweetheart; kiss me, if it be but once. This night at least is ours.”

It was she who would command. I grew drunken on her lips while my thoughts would stray and stagger. I could know nothing, act nothing, be nothing save as she would have me. Her hot arms were as the arms of summer torrents to hurry me along; her lips were like the lips of a whirlpool! It was a kiss—a kiss of the infinite—and would lay its velvet touch upon the ultimate reason of existence.

And so Peg went away; and for my portion I took up my old life, which now was as dark and chill and hollow as a cave.

Now what should there be more to tell? What matters it how secession hid its head? or how Calhoun resigned his Vice-Presidency to later creep back to a seat in that Senate where he had sat on high and ruled? or how the General fought and slew the Bank? Who is there to care for the story of the General's re-election, when Van Buren came with him for the second place? Who, I say, would bend the ear of interest to such tales as those when now our Peg was gone?

The General never again took up with me that matter of his Cabinet and its dissolution, and how he scattered it to save Peg from herself. One evening, however, as he smoked and I sat bitter and listless, I plumped a question at him.

“If it were to save Peg from Peg,” said I, “why did you defer so long? Why did not you disperse your Cabinet months before? Or was it that you failed to note Peg's peril of herself till just before you acted?” This last with a great sneer.