“Revenge is sweet! I have you in my power; and I shall burn you as savages burn their victim at the stake. I pray that you live long to extend my pleasure. Think not that you can escape me. I would not that death nor any evil thing should take you out of my hand for half the world.”
“The nameless devil!” I cried. “It is a woman's hand of writ, though the letters are made purposely big and sprawling. Have you any thought at who she should be?”
“No,” returned Peg; “I can not so much as guess.”
Peg and I talked the question up and down, I asking and she answering, and with the end we were where we started, that was nowhere at all. The Reverend Campbell came into my conjecturings, he and his magpie mate; but I did not mention them, for what would have been the use of feathering Peg's imagination with a surmise?
“But, in good truth, I came to you,” said Peg at the end, “not for any hope of solving this. That would be frankly impossible. Rather I am here to get a drink of your courage; for, faith! though I wear as brave a face as I may, my own betimes runs something low. And now,”—Peg stood up and gave me her dainty hand, mimicking the manner of a man—“and now, my big comrade, having had my cry, and got my draught of courage, I shall go back to the President's Square; and there I shall forget the whole story of this miserable letter. That is”—she had gone into the hall and was closing the door now, with only a strip of her sweet face looking in to me—“forget all except how I cried at your knee and was very, very happy because you were good and kind and—let me cry.”
When the door was shut, I picked up the note which Peg had left and placed it in the private locker of my desk. Then I sate me down and thought revengefully on Peg's wrongs, and the hatefulness of him who should think her harm. But her dark, deep eyes were forever coming in to look on me, and at the last I had a memory for nothing but her beauty; and, elaborating thereon, I considered how beauty was in itself a benediction implied of Providence, and a sermon; and then I got to reading Burns; and I confess—however often I had spoken of them as so much sweetened oatmeal—there arose in me a delight from those verses as though they were the songs of birds. And throughout the whole, from Peg's crying at my feet until I'd put Burns away in his place, the drone of the General, thundering on tariff, and finance, and standing armies, and sinking funds, was in the air; and all futile, so I thought, and dreary and workaday and commonplace.
Somehow, for all of Burns and my meditations, after Peg had left me, my heart felt poor and robbed. Also, I turned less and less patient with the General, humming at his coming speech like a great bee in a bottle. At last I went in to him and gave him my tart opinion of his doings, for all the world like an actor with a part to study, or some girl primping and preparing for conquest before a glass.
“Have you so forgotten English,” I cried, “that you can not tell your views to the people without first telling and re-telling them a score of times to yourself?”
But the General was in a high mood and no more to be dealt with than a tempest.
“Take your irritation out for a walk, sir,” said he. “Take a walk for your nerves. Something has combed your fur wrong-wise; and I don't think it could have been politics. You prodigiously remind me of one in love, and who has ear-patience for naught save the voice of his mistress.”