Peggy O'Neal

by Alfred Henry Lewis

The whole kind attitude of the General towards Peg seemed ever that of a father, and he was used to call her to him or dismiss her with no shade of rudeness, truly, and yet with no more of ceremonies than an affectionate parent might adopt. Peg never grudged obedience, and received the General's word as readily, and was withal as free of affront at any suddenness, as should be a daughter who feels her place assured.

When Peg was off for home, the General came and sat in the chair she had vacated.

With the white thick brush of his end-wise hair, and the fierce eyes of him, he made a portrait wide apart from that tender one the great chair so lately framed.

“You are not to know,” quoth the General, without halting for my question, “the whole foul story this creature has told me. It is bad enough that I was made to give ear to it. The point lies here: If Timberlake were with Peg in June two years ago, and for a year before, this miserable tale falls to the ground as false. He makes its main element to depend upon Timberlake's absence—his charge of iniquity against Peg holds only by that. The Reverend Serpent's hinge to swing his vilification on is the absence of Timberlake. And you heard her declare how Timberlake was here.”

“Does this snake, as you rightly term him, give you his story as of a knowledge of his own?”

“No; he hides behind the words of two women; a mother and daughter, named Craven. They pretend to base their slanders on what they allege was told them by the husband and father, a Doctor Craven—dead, he is, these ten months.”

“And that is mighty convenient,” said I, “for the Reverend Campbell and his fellow ophidians—this retreat to the word of one who dwells dead and dumb beneath six feet of earth.”

“That is their coward strategy,” commented the General, furiously. “However, my thought is to ask Noah to visit these women and question them before the Reverend Campbell collects the wit to tell of his talk with me. I may have alarmed the man, for I was now and then not altogether calm.”

I was driven to smile at this; so much concession of a want of calmness on the General's part would mean that he had fumed up and down like a tiger. The scuttling eagerness of the Reverend Campbell to be clear of the place was not without a cause. There beat some reason in his heels.

“I asked him,” said the General, “why he did not tell this story in the beginning. He explained that he hesitated to approach me with it; he related it to Doctor Ely, who pretended to close terms with me. Then I demanded why this Ely had not told me by word of mouth? Why should he leave with that lie in his stomach, and then write it and send it by post? He said that when it came to the test, Doctor Ely was afraid of me. Fear, fear, that was the assassin excuse of him, and the reason for striking at a woman in the dark! Why, I would not believe the sun was shining on the words of such coward rogues!”