Peg O' My Heart Part 87

"And where would _I_ be gettin' the manner of a Lord, when me father died the poorest peasant in the village, an' me brought up from hand to mouth since I was a child?"

"I'm sorry I said anythin', father. I wasn't reproachin' ye."

"I know that, Peg."

"I'm so proud of ye that yer manner manes more to me than any man o'

t.i.tle in England."

He drew her gently to him.

"There's the one great danger of two people who have grown near to each other separatin'. When they, meet again, they each think the other has changed. They look at each other with different eyes, Peg. An' that's what yer doin' with me. So long as I was near ye, ye didn't notice the roughness o' me speech an' the lack o' breedin' an' the want o'

knowledge. Ye've seen and listened to others since who have all I never had the chance to get. G.o.d knows I want YOU to have all the advantages that the wurrld can give ye, since you an' me counthry--an' the memory of yer mother--are all I have had in me life these twenty years past.

An' that was why I urged ye to go to England on the bounty of yer uncle. I wanted ye to know there was another kind of a life, where the days flowed along without a care or a sorrow. Where poverty was but a word, an' misery had no place. An' ye've seen it, Peg. An' the whole wurrld has changed for ye, Peg. An' from now you'll sit in judgment on the dead and gone days of yer youth--an' in judgment on me--"

She interrupted him violently:

"What are ye sayin' to me at all! _I_ sit in judgment on YOU! What do ye think I've become? Let me tell ye I've come back to ye a thousand times more yer child than I was when I left ye. What I've gone through has only strengthened me love for ye and me reverence for yer life's work. _I_ MAY have changed. But don't we all change day by day, even as we pa.s.s them close to each other. An' if the change is for the betther, where's the harm? I HAVE changed, father. There's somethin' wakened in me I never knew before. It's a WOMAN I've brought ye back instead o'

the GIRL I left. An' it's the WOMAN'LL stand by ye, father, even as the child did when I depended on ye for every little thing. There's no power in the wurrld'll ever separate us!"

She clung to him hysterically.

Even while she protested the most, he felt the strange new note in her life. He held her firmly and looked into her eyes.

"There's one thing, Peg, that must part us, some day, when it comes to you."

"What's that, father?"

"LOVE, Peg."

She lowered her eyes and said nothing.

"Has it come? Has it, Peg?"

She buried her face on his breast, and though no sound came, he knew by the trembling of her little body that she was crying.

So it HAD come into her life.

The child he had sent away a month ago had come back to him transformed in that little time--into a woman.

The Cry of Youth and the Call of Life had reached her heart.

CHAPTER II

LOOKING BACKWARD

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 friends.h.i.+p 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.