Peggy O'Neal

by Alfred Henry Lewis

I have told how dumb and dead lay vilification on the masculine lip, and that no man so much as breathed against the fame of Peg. There was notice on its way to show the women were unquelled.

It was the day before the General's inauguration, and he over ears with his address, reading and re-reading it, so as to give the periods a best volume and voice, and endow them with that strutting majesty of utterance his vanity conceived belonged in justice to their merit. He would be by himself while thus rehearsing, for he took shame to vapor up and down, and toss about before me, and swore that my presence, glowering from a chair, would have daunted Cicero. I was glad enough to leave him to himself, it being but poor sport to play at audience for a bad orator; moreover, since the speech was written in my Nashville home and wrangled over, as it proceeded, by the General and myself like dogs over a bone, it would come to me as nothing new. And so the General was left to plod about in his paragraphs much like a cow in a morass, difficult and slow, and sinking to the hocks with every step. I could catch the humming roar of him in my parlor, while he swaggered about his rooms, singing out shrill and high in declamation, and reveling in the figure he would cut.

While I was idly turning this weakness of the General to think himself a Patrick Henry, when he had no more of eloquence or music than any midnight owl, a nervous tap came on my panels. I was instantly on my feet; the tap quite drove the General and his rhetoric out of my head. By some instinct, or, mayhap, the tap itself was marked of agitation, I not only recognized it for Peg, but knew she was in grief. I threw open the door.

Peg stepped in; she was white to the lips; and this paleness of ivory showed the more on her because of the great dark eyes and those midnight shadows to dwell within her hair. Save for this pallor, however, she seemed steady as a rock.

It was on the outside, though, for no sooner was I seated again than she drifted down before my feet on the floor, and, with her head on my knee, broke into a passion of sobbing. I let my hand, for sympathy, rest a moment on her poor head, and when I thought she would have cried enough, lifted her up and placed her in a chair.

“What is it?” I said. “I thought I was to see no more tears from you.” This I threw off in half sprightly tones to rally Peg.

“Nor shall you,” cried she, “but I was fair spent and beaten for want of a good cry. And you should know”—she was giving me a trace of brightness now—“that crying is so much like conversation, to cry alone is like talking to one's self. I can not go to my husband; and the General, good and kind, is with it all too old and too great, and, therefore, too much out of my reach. I've just you; and that's how rich I am for confidants. I've not a woman to be friend to me in all the world; nor would I trust her if I had. I've just you; and so you are like to see a deal of worry.”

“All that is mighty sweet,” I returned, “and every word a flower. And yet, what is the wrong?”

“And simply nothing, after all,” she replied. “Only it's so much more horrible to see it with your eyes than hear it with your ears.” Peg put a note into my hands. “It came through the post; and doubtless means no more than the malevolence which was author to it.”

The note had no name; nothing to indicate its parentage. It read: