That night Peg and her father faced the future. They argued out all it might mean. They would fight it together. It was a pathetic, wistful little Peg that came back to him, and O'Connell set himself the task of lifting something of the load that lay on his child's heart.
After all, he reasoned with her, with all his gentility and his advantages to have allowed Peg to like him and then to deliberately hurt her at the end, just as she was leaving, for a fancied insult, did not augur well for the character of Jerry.
He tried to laugh her out of her mood.
He chided her for joking with an Englishman at a critical moment such as their leave-taking.
"And it WAS a joke, Peg, wasn't it?"
"Sure, it was, father."
"You ought to have known betther than that. During all that long month ye were there did ye meet one Englishman that ever saw a joke?"
"Not many, father. Cousin Alaric couldn't."
"Did ye meet ONE?"
"I did, father."
"Ye did?"
"I did."
"THERE was a man whose friendship ye might treasure."
"I do treasure it, father."
"Ye do?"
"Yes, father."
"Who was it?"
"Jerry, father."
O'Connell took a long breath and sighed.
Jerry! Always Jerry!
"I thried several jokes on him, an' he saw most of 'em."
"I'd like to see this paragon, faith."
"I wish ye could, father. Indade I do. Ye'd be such good friends."
"WE'D be friends? Didn't ye say he was a GINTLEMAN?"
"He sez a GENTLEMAN is a man who wouldn't willingly hurt anybody else. And he sez, as well, that it doesn't matther what anybody was born, if they have that quality in them they're just as much gintleman as the people with ancestors an' breedin'. An' he said that the finest gintleman he ever met was a CABMAN."
"A cabman, Peg?"
"Yes, faith—that's what he said. The cabman couldn't hurt anybody, and so he was a gintlemaa."
"Did he mane it?"
"He meant everything he said—to ME."
"There isn't much the matther with him, I'm thinkin'."
"There's nothin' the matther with him, father."
"Mebbe he is Irish way back. It's just what an Irishman would say—a RALE Irishman."
"There's no nationality in character or art, or sport or letthers or music. They're all of one great commonwealth. They're all one brotherhood, whether they're white or yellow or red or black. There's no nationality about them. The wurrld wants the best, an' they don't care what colour the best man is, so long as he's GREAT."
O'Connell listened amazed.
"An' where might ye have heard that?"
"Jerry towld me. An' it's thrue. I believe it."
They talked far into the night.
He unfolded his plans.
If his book was a success and he made some little money out of it, they would go back to Ireland and live out their lives there. And it was going to be a wonderful Ireland, too, with the best of the old and ceaseless energy of the new.
An Ireland worth living in.
They would make their home there again, and this time they would not leave it.
"But some day we might go to England, father, eh?"
"What for?"
"Just to see it, father."
"I was only there once. It was there yer mother an' me were married. It was there she gave her life into me care."
He became suddenly silent, and the light of memory shone in his eyes, and the sigh of heart-ache broke through his lips.
And his thoughts stretched back through the years, and once again Angela was beside him.
Peg saw the look and knew it. She kept quite still. Then, as of old, when her father was in trouble, she did as she was wont in those old-young days—she slipped her little hand into his and waited for him to break the silence.
After a while he stood up.
"Ye'd betther be goin' to bed, Peg."
"All right, father."
She went to the door. Then she stopped.
"Ye're glad I'm home, father?"
He pressed her closely to him for answer.
"I'll never lave ye again," she whispered.
All through the night Peg lay awake, searching through the past and trying to pierce through the future.
Toward morning she slept and, in a whirling dream she saw a body floating down a stream. She stretched out her hand to grasp it when the eyes met hers, and the eyes were those of a dead man—and the man was Jerry.
She woke trembling with fear and she turned on the light and huddled into a chair and sat chattering with terror until she heard her father moving in his room. She went to the door and asked him to let her go in to him. He opened the door and saw his little Peg wild eyed, pale and terror-stricken, standing on the threshold. The look in her eyes terrified him.
"What is it, Peg, me darlin'? What is it?"
She crept in, and looked up into his face with her startling gaze, and she grasped him with both of her small hands, and in a voice dull and hopeless, cried despairingly:
"I dreamt he was dead! Dead! and I couldn't rache him. An' he went on past me—down the stream—with his face up-turned—" The grasp loosened, and just as she slipped from him, O'Connell caught her in his strong arms and placed her gently on the sofa and tended her until her eyes opened again and looked up at him.
It was the first time his Peg had fainted.
She had indeed come back to him changed.
He reproached himself bitterly.
Why had he insisted on her going?
She had a sorrow at her heart, now, that no hand could heal—not even his.
Time only could soften her grief—time—and—
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