“And here all the time you was only lonesome,” Mrs. Neal went on, in her fat, friendly voice. “Well, Pegeen surely is quite a kid. Now, ain’t she?”
“She is,” agreed the man emphatically. “Tell me about her.”
The woman draped her bulk more comfortably over the fence, as one who settles herself for a long social session. She always had time to visit, and next to the sound of her own voice, she loved best the sound of another person’s voice, yet she managed to accomplish an astonishing amount of work between talks.
“Well,” she began, her eyes looking past the listening man and down the winding road, “Peggy wasn’t born here. She came along one day on a broken-down cart behind a broken-down horse. A baby thing she was, only five years old, but she was taking care of folks already. I saw ’em as they went by here and the youngster was pulling a shawl up tight around her mother’s throat and shoulders. Broken down worse’n the cart and horse, the woman was. I never saw anybody more peaked and sad. Why, say, that woman’s eyes made you ache—except when they looked at Peggy. I don’t know but what they made you ache worse than ever then. The little smile that came into them looked so sort of pitiful in that face of hers. You know the kind of face—the kind that’s been pretty once and fine, but has had the youth and prettiness and fineness all killed out of it. A face that’s sort of a tombstone telling where everything worth while in a life has been buried. She’d been clear outside her husband’s class. It was easy to tell that. Land knows how she ever came to marry him. Common, drunken brute he was. Might have been handsome in a beefy sort of a way once, but drink had knocked that out of him, along with any other decency he might have had. Honest to God, if I’d ’a’ been a man I’d ’a’ started every day by going down the road and licking that man O’Neill, just for luck; but his wife wouldn’t have thanked me for it—nor Peg either. The woman didn’t love him, but she had some queer idea of duty or pluck or something hidden away in her, and she never complained and never let any one say hard things about him to her.—Just hid what she could, and endured what she couldn’t hide.
“I figured it that she’d run away and married a handsome, blarneying, good-for-nothing Irishman against her family’s wishes and in the face of all sorts of prophecies about the evil that’d come of it, and seeing as she’d made her bed she was going to lie on it without whining. I’ll bet her folks never knew how things went with her.
“She tried to teach Peggy what she could and the youngster was a good deal like her in some ways—tidy, little mite with pretty ideas about things and lots of pluck. She ain’t a whiner, no more ’n her mother, but it ain’t all plain pluck with Peg. She’s got just the one good thing that her father had to give her, ’n’ that’s cheerfulness. She’s got a disposition like one of them toy balloons, Peg has, and it’s a good thing. If it hadn’t been for that she’d ’a’ been dead, with all the responsibility and want and abuse she’s had to stand.
“She’s too old for her years, of course, and she’s got serious ways and some awfully grown-up thoughts, but she’ll never die of broken heart and broken spirit like her mother did. No, sir. You can’t down Peg. That’s the Irish in her. She’d see something cheerful and encouraging in a smallpox epidemic—’n’ she’d be out nursing the sick ones too. Well, there’s no telling what the man was himself before the drink got him. He was something a fine-souled, big-hearted woman fell in love with, and maybe a better father might have given Peggy something that wasn’t as handy to have around as her cheerfulness.”
“What became of the mother?” Archibald asked. There was a very friendly light in his eyes as he looked into the face beside him. He was going to like this neighbor.
“Oh, she dragged around, getting weaker and weaker and thinner and thinner and whiter and whiter. I’ll say one thing for O’Neill. He never beat her—not even when he was drunk. He didn’t make a living for her and he didn’t raise a hand to help her, the lazy whelp. Chopped her own wood, she did, when Peggy didn’t pick it up in the woods. The neighbors would have helped but they couldn’t do much—didn’t dare. She was so proud she’d rather starve than take charity. You couldn’t even offer it—just had to do what you could in a round-about, happen-so way.
“By and by she took to her bed and then Peggy had to do everything that got done. She surely was a wonder too—waited on her mother hand and foot, and kept things clean and cooked whenever there was anything to cook, and got wood to keep them all warm, and looked after O’Neill as if he was a bad child that she loved even if he was bad.