Pegeen carried a sore heart for many a day after Michael O’Neill’s funeral.
“He wasn’t a very good father,” she said pitifully to Archibald, “and he wasn’t very good to Mother, but ’twas the drink that did it; and I think the drink’s just a sickness, don’t you? Mother had a picture of him, a little picture that she wore in a locket. He was young in it; and he looked so brave and glad and lovery. I like to think of him that way—but I loved him, even after he was—sick. It’s a poor time to stop loving folks when they’re bad, isn’t it? That’s when they need it the very most, and Daddy loved back real hard when he was sober.”
In comforting her, Archibald dulled the edge of his own heartache; and the two neighbored faithfully, even enthusiastically. Sometimes they drove. More often they rode; and, though Pegeen was not quite her old gay self, the visits were usually high-hearted adventures. Everything one did with Peg was more or less of an adventure. There was something about her that lent spice to the most prosaic of expeditions and Archibald found himself looking at the Valley through her eyes and loving it. He had laughed skeptically when the Smiling Lady had said that there were no uninteresting people, that there were only people one didn’t get at; but he began to believe that she had been right. There were delightful folk in the Valley and there were queer folk; but, delightful or queer, none of them bored him; and, when he remembered how often and how intolerably he had been bored in the old days, he was forced to believe that the difference was in him, not in the people around him. After all, types were much the same. He could cap every character in the Valley with a corresponding one in New York. Externals were different; but the inner men and women were the same. So the change must be in himself; but he doubted whether, thrown on his own resources, he could walk the new road even now.
“It’s Pegeen,” he said to himself. “She’s a universal solvent. If I had neighbored without her, I’d never have known these people as I know them now. She coaxes the best of every one out into the open where I can see it; and, after that the worst of him can’t fool me. Even the worst of him doesn’t look bad to me when I see it through Peg’s eyes. Funny, perhaps, or pitiful, or sad, but not bad. Yes; it’s Pegeen. She’s made me free of her Valley.”
All of which was modest and, in a degree, true; but, as a matter of fact, the Valley, having first accepted him on Pegeen’s recommendation, and looked him over with the tolerance she inspired, liked him for himself and showed him its friendly side.
“Thee has a pleasant way with thee, Son,” Eldress Martha of the Shakers said to him when he had sat on one of the straight-backed, rush-bottomed chairs in her stiff, spotless sitting-room, for an hour one summer afternoon, holding high converse with the little old lady whose spirit was so much bigger and stronger than her body.
“I could wish thee were with us and at peace.”
“I’ve been thinking lately that perhaps I’m on the road to peace, Eldress Martha,” he said gently.
She smiled. When she smiled, the great gray eyes that glowed so wonderfully in her thin white face melted into sweetness and the hint of fanaticism died out of her look.
“The roads are many, Son, but there are sign posts along all,” she said. “It is easy to know whether one is traveling toward the right goal.”