MRS. WORTH had arrived in Boston a few days after Sallie, coming direct by rail. She was still very weak from her recent attack, and it cut her to the heart to watch Sallie write those letters faithfully, and never mail them out of deference to her wishes.
One night she drew her daughter down and kissed her.
“Sallie, dear, you don’t know how it hurts me to see you suffer this way, and write, and write these letters your lover never sees. You may send him one letter a week, I don’t care what the General says.”
There was a sob and another kiss and, Sallie was crying on her breast.
In answer to her first letter, Gaston was thrilled with a new inspiration. He sat down that night and answered it in verse. All the deep longings of his soul, his hopes and fears, his pain and dreams he set in rhythmic music. Her mother read all his letters after Sallie. And she cried with sorrow and pride over this poem.
“Sallie, I don’t blame you for being proud of such a lover. Your life is rich hallowed by the love of such a man. Your father is wrong in his position. If I were a girl and held the love of such a man, I’d cherish it as I would my soul’s salvation. Be patient and faithful.”
“Sweet mother heart!” she whispered as she smoothed the grey hair tenderly.
Allan McLeod had arrived in Boston the day before and the morning’s papers were full of an interview with him on his brilliant achievement in breaking the ranks of the Bourbon Democracy in North Carolina, and the certainty of the success of his ticket at the approaching election.
McLeod sent the paper to Mrs. Worth by a special messenger, lest she might not see it, and that evening called. He asked Sallie to accompany him to the theatre, and when she refused spent the evening.
When her mother had retired McLeod drew his seat near her and again told her in burning words his love.
“Miss ‘Sallie, I have won the battle of life at its very threshold. I shall be a United States Senator in a few months. I want to lead you, my bride, into the gallery of the Senate before I walk down its aisles to take the oath. I have loved you faithfully for years. I have your father’s consent to my suit. I asked him before leaving on this trip. Surely you will not say no?”
“Allan McLeod, I do not love you. I do love another. I hate the sight of you and the sound of your voice.”
“If you do not marry Gaston, will you give me a chance?”
“If I do not marry the man of my choice, I will never marry. Now go.”
McLeod returned to the hotel with the fury of the devil seething in his soul. He determined to return to Ham-bright, and if possible entrap Gaston in dissipation and destroy his faith in Sallie’s loyalty.
He wrote to the General that he had been rejected by his daughter who still corresponded with Gaston. When General Worth received this letter he wrote in wrath to his wife, peremptorily forbidding Sallie to write another line to Gaston and closed saying, “I had trusted this matter to you, my dear, now I take it out of your hands. I forbid another line or word to this man.”
Gaston watched and waited in vain for the letter he was to receive next week. Again his soul sank with doubt and fear. What fiend was striking him with an unseen hand? He felt he should choke with rage as he thought of the infamy of such a warfare.
His mother said to him shortly after McLeod’s arrival, “Charlie, I have some bad news for you.”
“It can’t be any worse than I have, the misery of an unexplained silence of two weeks.”
“I feel that I ought to tell you. It is the explanation of that silence, I fear.”
“What is it, Mother?” he asked soberly.
“I hear that Sallie has plunged into frivolous society, is dancing every night at the hotel at Narragansett Pier where they are stopping now, and flirting with a halfdozen young men.”
“I don’t believe it,” growled Gaston.
“I’m afraid it’s true, Charlie, and I’m furious with her for treating you like this. I thought she had more character.”
“I ’ll love and trust her to the end!” he declared as he went moodily to his office. But the poison of suspicion rankled in his thoughts. Why had she ceased to write? Was not this mask of society a habit with those who had learned to wear it? Was not habit, after all, life? Could one ever escape it? It seemed to him more than probable that the old habits should re-assert themselves in such a crisis, a thousand miles removed from him or his personal influence. He held a very exaggerated idea of the corruption of modern society. And his heart grew heavier from day to day with the feeling that she was slipping away from him.
McLEOD returned home to find his plans of political success in perfect order. The programme went through without a hitch. In spite of the most desperate efforts of the Democrats, he carried the state by a large majority and made, for the Republican party and its strange allies, the first breach in the solid phalanx of Democratic supremacy since Le-gree left his legacy of corruption and terror.
The Legislature elected two Senators. To the amazement of the world, the day before the caucus of the Republicans met, McLeod withdrew. He had no opposition so far as anybody knew, but a curious thing had happened. The Rev. John Durham discovered the fact that McLeod kept a still and had established his mother as an illicit distiller years before. One of his deputies who had become an inebriate, confessed this to the doctor who had informed the Preacher.
The Preacher put this important piece of information into the hands of a daring young Republican who had always been one from principle. He went to Raleigh and interviewed McLeod. At first McLeod denied, and blustered, and swore. When he produced the proofs, he gave up, and asked sullenly, “What do you want?”
“Get out of the race.”
“All right. Is that all? You’re on top.”
“No, give me the nomination.”
“Never!” he yelled with an oath.
“Then I ’ll expose you in to-morrow morning’s paper, and that’s the end of you.”
McLeod hesitated a moment, and then said, “I ’ll agree. You’ve got me. But I ’ll make one little condition. You must give me the name of your informant.”
“The Rev. John Durham.”
“I thought as much.”
To the amazement of everyone McLeod waived the crown aside and placed it on the head of one of his lieutenants. He returned to Hambright from this dramatic event with an unruffled front. To his cronies he said, “Bah! I was joking. Never had any idea of taking the office for myself. I’m playing for larger stakes. I make these puppets, and pull the strings.”
He devoted himself assiduously in the leisure which followed to Mrs. Durham. He never intimated to Durham that he knew anything about the part he had taken in his withdrawal from the Senatorship. Nor had the Preacher told his wife of his discovery. They had quarrelled several times about McLeod. His wife seemed determined to remain loyal to the boy she had taught.
McLeod in his talk with her intimated that he had withdrawn from a desire vaguely forming in his mind to get out of the filth of politics altogether, sooner or later, influenced by her voice alone.
With subtle skill he played upon her vanity and jealousy, and at last felt that he had entangled her so far he could dare a declaration of his feelings. There was one element only in her mental make-up he feared. She held tenaciously the old-fashioned romantic ideals of love. To her it seemed a divine mystery linking the souls that felt it to the infinite. If he could only destroy this divine mystery idea, he felt sure that her sense of isolation, and her proud rebellion against the disappointments of life would make her an easy prey to his blandishments.
He searched his library over for a book that could scientifically demonstrate the purely physical basis of love. He knew that somewhere in his studies at a medical college in New York he had read it.
At last he discovered it among a lot of old magazines. It was a brief study by a great physician of Paris, entitled “The Natural History of Love.” He gave it to her, and asked her to read it and give him her candid opinion of its philosophy.
He waited a week and on a Saturday when the Preacher was absent at one of his county mission stations he called at the hotel for a long afternoon’s talk. He determined to press his suit.
“Do you know, Mrs. Durham, what gives a preacher his boasted power of the spirit over his audiences?” he inquired with a curious laugh in the midst of which he changed his tone of voice.
“No, you are an expert on the diseases of preachers, what is it?”
“Very simple. Religion is founded on love, there never was a magnetic preacher who was not a resistless magnet for scores of magnetic women. If you don’t believe it, watch how resistless is the impulse of all these good-looking women to shake hands with their preacher, and how fondly they look at him across the pews if the crowd is too dense to reach his hand.”
A frown passed over her face, and she winced at the thrust, yet her answer was a surprising question to him.
“Do you really believe in anything, Allan?”
“You ask that?” he said leaning closer. “You whose great dark eyes look through a man’s very soul?”
“I begin to think I have never seen yours. I doubt if you have a soul.”
“Well, what’s the use of a soul? I can’t satisfy the wants of my body.”
“Answer my question. Do you believe in anything?”
“Yes,” he replied, his voice sinking to a tense whisper, “I believe in Woman,—in love.”
“In Woman?”
“Yes, Woman.”
“You mean women,” she sneered.
He started at her answer, looked intently at her, and said deliberately, “I mean you, the One Woman, the only woman in the world to me.”
“I do not believe one word you have uttered, yet, I confess with shame, you have always fascinated me.”
“Why with shame? You have but one life to live. The years pass. Even beauty so rare as yours fades at last. The end is the grave and worms. Why dash from your beautiful lips the cup of life when it is full to the brim?”
“How skillfully you echo the dark thoughts that flit on devil wings through the soul, when we feel the bitterness of life’s failure, its contradictions and mysteries!” she exclaimed, closing her eyes for a moment and leaning back in her chair.
“You’ve often talked to me about the necessity of some sort of slavery for the Negro if he remain in America. I begin to believe that slavery is a necessity for all women.”
“I fail to see it, sir.”
“All women are born slaves and choose to remain so through life. It is curious to see you, a proud imperious woman, born of a race of unconquerable men, staggering to-day under the chains of four thousand years of conventional laws made by the brute strength of men. And you, if you struggle at all, beat your wings against the bars that the slaveholding male brute has built about your soul, fall back at last and give up to the will of your master. This too, when you hold in your simple will the key that would unlock your prison door and make you free. It’s a pitiful sight.”
“How shrewd a tempter!”
“There you are again. He who dares to tell you that you are of yourself a living human being, divinely free, is a tempter from the devil. You are thinking about eternity. Well, now is eternity. Live, stand erect, take a deep breath, and dare to be yourself and do what you please. That is what I do. The future is a myth.”
“Yes, I know the freedom of which you boast,” she quietly observed, “it is the freedom of lust. The return to nature you dream of is simply the fall downward into the dirt out of which a rational and spiritual manhood has grown. I feel and know this in spite of your handsome face and the fine ring of your voice.”
“Dirt. Dirt!” he mused. “Yes, I was in the dirt once, was born in it, the dirt of poverty and superstition and fears of laws here and hereafter. But I awoke at last, and shook it off, washed myself in knowledge and stood erect. I am a man now, with the eye of a king, conscious of my power. I look a lying hypocritical world in the face. I have made up my mind to live my own life in spite of fools, and in spite of the laws and conventions of fools.”
“And yet I believe you carry a horse-chestnut in your pocket, and will not undertake an important work on Friday?” she returned.
“But I never strangle a normal impulse of my nature that I can satisfy. I am not that big a fool, at least.”
She was silent, and then said, “I can never thank you enough for the book you sent me.”
McLeod sighed in relief at her change of tone. After all she was just tantalising him!
“Then you liked it?” he cried with glittering eyes.
“I devoured every word of it with a greed you can not understand. A great man wrote it.”
“Then we can understand each other better from today,” he interrupted smilingly.
“Yes, far better. You gave me this book hoping that it might influence my character by destroying my ideal of love, didn’t you, now frankly?”
“Honestly, I did hope it would emancipate you from superstitions.”
“It has,” she declared, but with a curious curve of her lip that chilled him.
“What are you driving at?” he asked suspiciously.
“This book has given me the key that unlocked for me, for the first time, the riddle of my physical being. It has shown me the physical basis of love, just as I knew before there was a physical basis of the soul.”
“What did you understand the book to teach?” he asked.
“Simply that love is based in its material life, on the lobe of the brain which develops at the base of a child’s head near the age of thirteen. That this lobe of the brain is the sex centre, and love is impossible until it develops. That this centre of new powers at the base of the skull is a physical magnet. That when a man and woman approach each other, who are by nature mates, these magnetic centres are disturbed by action and reaction, and that this disturbance develops the second elemental passion called love. The first elemental passion, hunger, has for its end the preservation of the individual; while love finds its fulfillment in the preservation of the species. Love finds its satisfaction in the child, its ardour cools, and it dies, unless kept alive by the social conventions of the family, which are not based merely on this violent emotion, but also on unity of tastes, which produce the sense of comradeship. For these reasons it is possible to fall violently in love more than once, and there are dozens of people who possess this magnetic power over us and would respond to it violently if we only came in social contact with them. That the romantic bombast about the possibility of but one love in life, and that of supernatural origin, is twaddle, and leads to false ideals. Have I given the argument?”
“Exactly. But what do you deduce from it?”
“Freedom!”
“Good!” he cried, licking his lips.
“Freedom from superstitions about love,” she answered, “and positive knowledge of its elemental beauty which Nature reveals. In short, I no longer wonder and brood over your charm for me. I know exactly what it means, and how it might occur again and again with another and another. I have simply throttled it in a moment by an act of my will, based on this knowledge.”
“You amaze me.”
“No doubt. One’s character centres in the soul, or the appetites. Mine is in the soul, yours in the appetites. I see you to-day as you really are, and I loathe you with an unspeakable loathing. You have opened my eyes with this beautiful little book of Nature. I thank you. Your scientist has convinced me that there are possibly a hundred men in the world who would affect me as you do, were we to meet. And when I looked back into the sweet face of my dead boy, I learned another truth, that in the union of my first great love I was bound in marriage, not simply by a social convention, or a state contract, but for life by Nature’s eternal law. The period of infancy of one child extends over twenty-one years, covering the whole maternal life of the woman who marries at the proper age of twenty-four. This union of one man and one woman never seemed so sacred to me as now. It is Nature’s law, it is God’s law.”
McLeod’s anger was fast rising.
“Don’t fool yourself,” he sneered, “You may overwork your maternal intuitions. You remember the kiss you gave me when a boy just fifteen? Well, you fooled yourself then about its maternal quality. The magnet of my red head drew your coal black one down to it with irresistible power.”
“Perhaps so, Allan. Your work is done. There is the door. I say a last good-bye, with pity for your shallow nature, and the bitter revelation you have given me of your worthlessness.”
Without another word he left, but with a dark resolution of slander with which he would tarnish her name, and wring the Preacher’s heart with anguish.
WHILE Mrs. Worth and Sallie were still in the North, the Rev. John Durham received a unanimous call to the pastorate of one of the most powerful Baptist churches in Boston, with a salary of five thousand dollars a year. He was receiving a salary of nine hundred dollars at Hambright, which could boast at most a population of two thousand. He declined the call by return mail.
The committee were thunderstruck at this quick adverse decision, refused to consider it final, and wrote him a long urgent letter of protest against such ill-considered treatment. They urged that he must come to Boston, and preach one Sunday, at least, in answer to their generous offer, before rendering a final decision. He consented to do so, and went to Boston. He sought Sallie the day after his arrival.
“Ah, my beautiful daughter of the South, it’s good to see you shining here in the midst of the splendours of the Hub, the fairest of them all!” he said shaking her hand feelingly.
“You mean pining, not shining,” she protested.
“That’s better still. I knew your heart was in the right place!”
“How is he, Doctor?” she asked.
“He’s trying to pull himself together with his work, and succeeding. The shock of a great sorrow has steadied his nerves, broadened his sympathies, and it will make him a man.”
A look of longing came over her face. “I don’t want him to be too strong without me,” she faltered.
“Never fear. He’s so despondent at times I have to try to laugh him out of countenance.”
She smiled and pressed his hand for answer as he rose to go.
“How do you like these Yankees, Miss Sallie?”
“I’ve been surprised and charmed beyond measure with everything I’ve seen!”
“You don’t say so! How?”
“Well, I thought they were cold-blooded and inhospitable. I never made a more foolish mistake. I have never been more at home, or been treated more graciously in the South. To tell you the truth, they seem like our most cultured people at home, warm-hearted, cordial, sensible and neighbourly. Mama is so pleased she’s trying to claim kin with the Puritans, through her Scotch Covenanter ancestry.”
“After all, I believe you are right. I never preached in my life to so sensitive an audience. There’s an atmosphere of solid comfort, good sense, and intelligence that holds me in a spell here. This is the place in which I’ve dreamed I’d like to live and work.”
“Then you will accept, Doctor?”
“Now listen to you, child! Don’t you think I’ve a heart too? My brain and body longs for such a home, but my heart’s down South with mine own people who love and need me.”
The committee did their best to bring the Preacher to a favourable decision at once, but he smiled a firm refusal. They refused to report it to the church, and sent Deacon Crane, now a venerable man of seventy-six, the warmest admirer of the Preacher among them all to Hambright. They authorised him to make an amazing offer of salary, if that would be any inducement, and they felt sure it would.
When the Deacon reached Hambright and saw its poverty and general air of unimportance he felt encouraged.
“A man of such power stay a lifetime in this little hole! Impossible!” he exclaimed under his breath, when he looked out of the bus along the wide deserted looking streets with a straggling cottage here and there on either side.
He stopped at the same hotel with the Preacher and became his shadow for a week. He was seated with him under the oak in the square, threshing over his argument for the hundredth time, in the most good-natured, but everlastingly persistent way.
“Doctor, it’s perfect nonsense for a man of your magnificent talents, of your culture and power over an audience, to think of living always in a little village like this!”
“No, deacon, my work is here for the South.”
“But, my dear man, in Boston, it would be for the whole nation, North and South. I ’ll tell you what we will do. Say you will come, and we will make your salary eight thousand a year. That’s the largest salary ever offered a Baptist preacher in America. You will pack our church with people, give us new life, and we can afford it. You will be a power in Boston, and a power in the world.”
The Preacher smiled and was silent. At length he said, “I appreciate your offer, deacon. You pay me the highest compliment you know how to express. But you prosperous Yankees can’t get into your heads the idea that there are many things which money can’t measure.”
“But we know a good thing when we see it, and we go for it!” interrupted the deacon.
“Believe me,” continued the Preacher, “I appreciate the sacrifice, the generosity, and breadth of sympathy this offer shows in your hearts. But it is not for me. My work is here. I don’t mind confessing to you that you have vastly pleased me with that offer. I ’ll brag about it to myself the rest of my life.”
“But Doctor, think how much greater power a generous salary will give you in furnishing your equipment for work, and in ministering to any cause you may have at heart,” pleaded the deacon.
“I don’t know. I have a salary of nine hundred dollars. With five hundred I buy books,—food, clothes, shelter, the companionship for the soul. The balance suffices for the body. I haven’t time to bother with money. The man who receives a big salary must live up to its social obligations, and he must pay for it with his life.”
“Doctor, there must be some tremendous force that holds you to such a decision in a village. It seems to me you are throwing your life away.”
“There is a tremendous force, deacon. It is the overwhelming sense of obligation I feel to my own people who have suffered so much, and are still in the grip of poverty, and threatened with greater trials. I can’t leave my own people while they are struggling yet with this unsolved Negro problem. Two great questions shadow the future of the American people, the conflict between Labor and Capital, and the conflict between the African and the Anglo-Saxon race. The greatest, most dangerous, and most hopeless of these, is the latter. My place is here.”
The deacon laughed. “You’re a crank on that subject. Come to Boston and you will see with a better perspective that the question is settling itself. In fact the war absolutely settled it.”
“Deacon,” said the Preacher with a quizzical expression about his eyes, “Do you believe in the doctrine of Election?”
“Yes, I do.”
“I thought so. You know, I never saw a man who believed in the doctrine of Election who didn’t believe he was elected. I never saw a man in my life, except a lying politician, who declared the Negro problem was settled, unless he had removed his family to a place of fancied safety where he would never come in contact with it. And they all believe that the Negro’s place is in the South.”
The deacon laughed good-naturedly.
“Come with us, and we will show you greater problems. For one, the life and death struggle of Christianity itself with modern materialism. I tell you the Negro problem was settled when slavery was destroyed.”
“You never made a sadder mistake. The South did not fight to hold slaves. Our Confederate government at Richmond offered to guarantee to Europe, the freedom of every slave for the recognition of our independence. Slavery was bound of its own weight to fall. Virginia came within one vote in her assembly of freeing her slaves years before the war. But for the frenzy of your Abolition fanatics who first sought to destroy the Union by Secession, and then forced Secession on the South, we would have freed the slaves before this without a war, from the very necessities of the progress of the material world, to say nothing of its moral progress. We fought for the rights we held under the old constitution, made by a slave-holding aristocracy. But we collided with the resistless movement of humanity from the idea of local sovereignty toward nationalism, centralisation, solidarity.”
“That’s why I say,” interrupted the deacon, “your Negro question has already been settled. The nation has become a reality not a name.”
“And that is why I know, deacon,” insisted the Preacher, “that we have not only not settled this question,—we haven’t even faced the issues. Nationality demands solidarity. And you can never get solidarity in a nation of equal rights out of two hostile races that do not intermarry. In a Democracy you can not build a nation inside of a nation of two antagonistic races, and therefore the future American must be either an Anglo Saxon or a Mulatto. And if a Mulatto, will the future be worth discussing?”
“I never thought of it in just that way,” answered the deacon.
“It is my work to maintain the racial absolutism of the Anglo-Saxon in the South, politically, socially, economically.”
“But can it be done? I see many evidences of a mixture of blood already,” said the deacon seriously.
“Yes, we are doing it. This mixture you observe has no social significance, for a simple reason. It is all the result of the surviving polygamous and lawless instincts of the white male. Unless by the gradual encroachments of time, culture, wealth and political exigencies, the time comes that a negro shall be allowed freely to choose a white woman for his wife, the racial integrity remains intact. The right to choose one’s mate is the foundation of racial life and of civilisation. The South must guard with flaming sword every avenue of approach to this holy of holies. And there are many subtle forces at work to obscure these possible approaches.”
“Well, no matter,” broke in the deacon, “come with us, and you will have more power to touch with your ideas the wealth and virtue of the whole nation.”
The Preacher was silent a moment and seemed to be musing in a sort of half dream. The deacon looked at him with a growing sense of the hopelessness of his task, but of surprise at this revelation of the secrets of his inner life.
“The South has been voiceless in these later years,” he went on, “her voice has been drowned in a din of cat-calls from an army of cheap scribblers and demagogues. But when these children we are rearing down here grow, rocked in their cradles of poverty, nurtured in the fierce struggle to save the life of a mighty race, they will find speech, and their songs will fill the world with pathos and power.
“I’ve studied your great cities. Believe me the South is worth saving. Against the possible day when a flood of foreign anarchy threatens the foundations of the Republic and men shall laugh at the faiths of your fathers, and undigested wealth beyond the dreams of avarice rots your society, until it mocks at honour, love and God—against that day we will preserve the South!”
The Preacher’s voice was now vibrating with deep feeling, and the deacon listened with breathless interest.
“Believe me, deacon, the ark of the covenant of American ideals rests to-day on the Appalachian Mountain range of the South. When your metropolitan mobs shall knock at the doors of your life and demand the reason of your existence, from these poverty-stricken homes, with their old-fashioned, perhaps mediaeval ideas, will come forth the fierce athletic sons and sweet-voiced daughters in whom the nation will find a new birth!” The Preacher’s eyes had filled with tears and his voice dropped into a low dream-like prophecy.
“You can not understand,” he resumed, in a clear voice, “why I feel so profoundly depressed just now because the Republican party, which, with you stands for the virtue, wealth and intelligence of the community, is now in charge of this state. I will tell you why. A Republican administration in North Carolina simply means a Negro oligarchy. The state is now being debauched and degraded by this fact in the innermost depths of its character and life. My place is here in this fight.”
“But, Doctor, will not your industrial training of the Negro gradually minimise any danger to your society?”
“No, it will gradually increase it. Industrial training gives power. If the Negro ever becomes a serious competitor of the white labourer in the industries of the South, the white man will kill him, just as your labour Unions do in the North now where the conditions of life are hard, and men fight with tooth and nail for bread. If you train the negroes to be scientific farmers they will become a race of aristocrats, and when five generations removed from the memory of slavery, a war of races will be inevitable, unless the Anglo-Saxon grant this trained and wealthy African equal social rights. The Anglo-Saxon can not do this without suicide. One drop of Negro blood makes a negro.”
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am, Doctor, that I can’t persuade you to become our pastor. But I can understand since this talk something of the larger views of your duty.”
The deacon sought Mrs. Durham that evening and laid siege to her resolutely.
“Ah! deacon, you’re shrewd—you are going to flatter me, but I can’t let you. I’m an old fogy and out of date. I’m not orthodox on the Negro from Boston’s point of view.”
“Nonsense!” growled the deacon. “We don’t care what you or the Doctor either thinks about the Negro, or the Jap, or the Chinaman. We want a preacher imbued with the power of the Holy Ghost to preach the Gospel of Christ.”
“Well, you have quite captured me since you have been here. You are a revelation to me of what a deacon might be to a pastor and his wife. To be frank with you, I am on your side. I am tired of the Negro. I don’t want to solve him. He is an impossible job from my point of view. I should be delighted to go to Boston now and begin life over again. But I do not figure in the decision. Dr. Durham settles such questions for himself. And I respect him more for it.”
Encouraged by this decision of his wife the deacon renewed his efforts to change the Preacher’s mind next day in vain. He stayed over Sunday, heard him preach two sermons, and sorrowfully bade him good-bye on Monday. He carried back to Boston his final word declining this call.
As the deacon stepped on the train, he warmly pressed his hand and said, “God bless you, Doctor. If you ever need a friend, you know my name and address.”
GASTON tried to wait in patience another week for a word from the woman he loved, and when the last mail came and brought no letter for him, he found himself face to face with the deepest soul crisis of his life.
After all, thoughts are things. The report of her social frivolities at first made little impression on him. But the thought had fallen in his heart, and it was growing a poisoned weed.
It is possible to kill the human body with an idea. The fairest day the spring ever sent can be blackened and turned from sunshine into storm by the flitting of a little cloud of thought no bigger than a man’s hand.
So Gaston found this report of dancing and flirting in a gay society by the woman whom he had enthroned in the holy of holies of his soul to be destroying his strength of character, and like a deadly cancer eating his heart out.
He sat down by his window that night, unable to work, and tried to reconcile such a life with his ideal.
“Why should I be so provincial!” he mused. “The thing only shocks me because I am unused to it. She has grown up in this atmosphere. To her it is a harmless pastime.”
Then he took out of his desk her picture, lit his lamp and looked long and tenderly at it, until his soul was drunk again with the memory of her beauty, the warm touch of her hand, and the thrill of her full soft lips in the only two kisses he had ever received from the heart of a woman.
Then, the vision of a ball-room came to torture him. He could see her dressed in that delicate creation of French genius he had seen her wear the memorable night at the Springs. The French know so deeply the subtle art of draping a woman’s body to tempt the souls of men. How he cursed them to-night! He could see her bare arms, white gleaming shoulders, neck, and back, and round full bosom softly rising and falling with her breathing, as she swept through a brilliant ball-room to the strains of entrancing music.
He knew the dance was a social convention, of course. But its deep Nature significance he knew also. He knew that it was as old as human society, and full of a thousand subtle suggestions,—that it was the actual touch of the human body, with rhythmic movement, set to the passionate music of love. This music spoke in quivering melody what the lips did not dare to say. This he knew was the deep secret of the fascination of the dance for the boy and the girl, the man and the woman. How he cursed it to-night!
His imagination leaped the centuries that separate us from the great races of the past who scorned humbug and hypocrisy, and held their dances in the deep shadows of great forests, without the draperies of tailors. These men and women looked Nature in the face and were not afraid, and did not try to apologise or lie about it. He felt humiliated and betrayed.
He thought too of her wealth with a feeling of resentment and isolation. Taken with this social nightmare it seemed to raise an impossible barrier between them. He knew that in the terrible quarrel she had with her father on their first clash, he had sworn if she disobeyed him to disinherit her. She had answered him in bitter defiance. And yet time often changes these noble visions of poverty and strenuous faith in high ideals. Wealth and all its good things becomes with us at last habit. And habit is life.
Could it be possible she had weakened in resolution of loyalty when brought face to face with the actual breaking of the habits of a lifetime? Might not the three forces combined, the habit of social conventions, the habit of luxury, and the habit of obedience to a masterful and lovable father, be sufficient to crush her love at last? It seemed to him to-night, not only a possibility, but almost an accomplished fact.
At one o’clock he went to bed and tried to sleep. He tossed for an hour. His brain was on fire, and his imagination lit with its glare. He could sweep the world with his vision in the silence and the darkness. Yes, the world that is, and that which was, and is to come!
He arose and dressed. It was half-past two o’clock. He knew that this was to be the first night in all his life when he could not sleep. He was shocked and sobered by the tremendous import of such an event in the development of his character. He had never been swept off his feet before. He knew now that before the sun rose he would fight with the powers and princes of the air for the mastery of life.
He left his room and walked out on the road to the Springs over which he had gone so many times in childhood. The moon was obscured by fleeting clouds, and the air had the sharp touch of autumn in its breath. He walked slowly past the darkened silent houses and felt his brain begin to cool in the sweet air.
The last note he had received from her weeks ago was the brief one announcing the new break in the poor little correspondence she had promised him. The last paragraph of that note now took on a sinister meaning. He recalled it word by word:
“I feel like I can not trifle with you in this way again. It is humiliating to me and to you. I can see no light in our future. I release you from any tie I may have imposed on your life. I feel I have fallen short of what you deserve, but I am so situated between my mother’s failing health and my father’s will, and my love for them both, I can not help it. I will love you always, but you are free.”
Was not this a kindly and final breaking of their pledge to one another? Yet she had not returned the little medal he had given her with that exchange of eternal love and faith. Could she keep this and really mean to break with him finally? He could not believe it.
His whole life had been dominated by this dream of an ideal love. For it he had denied himself the indulgences that his college mates and young associates had taken as a matter of course. He had never touched wine. He had never smoked. He had never learned the difference between a queen and jack in cards. He had kept away from women. He had given his body and soul to the service of his Ideal, and bent every energy to the development of his mind that he might grasp with more power its sweetness and beauty when realised.
Did it pay? The Flesh was shrieking this question now into the face of the Spirit?
He had met the One Woman his soul had desired above all others. There could be no mistake about that. And now she was failing him when he had laid at her feet his life. It made him sick to recall how utter had been his surrender.
Why should he longer deny the flesh, when the soul’s dream failed the test of pain and struggle?
Was it possible that he had been a fool and was missing the full expression of life, which is both flesh and spirit?
The world was full of sweet odours. He had delicate and powerful nostrils. Why not enjoy them? The world was full of beauty ravishing to the eye. He had keen eyes trained to see. Why should he not open his eyes and gaze on it all? The world was full of entrancing music. He had ears trained to hear. Why should he stuff them with dreams of a doubtful future, and not hear it all? The world was full of things soft and good to the touch. Why should he not grasp them? His hands were cunning, and every finger tingled with sensitive nerve tips. The world was full of good things sweet to the taste, why should he not eat and drink as others, as old and wise perhaps?
Was a man full-grown until he had seen, felt, smelled, tasted, and heard all life? Was there anything after all, in good or bad? Were these things not names? If not, how could we know unless we tried them? What was the good of good things?
“Am I not a narrow-minded fool, instead of a wise man, to throttle my impulses and deny the flesh for an imaginary gain?” he asked himself aloud.
She had written he was free.
“Well, by the eternal, I will be free!” he exclaimed, “I will sweep the whole gamut of human passion and human emotion. I will drink life to the deepest dregs of its red wine. I will taste, feel, see, touch, hear all! I will not be cheated. I will know for myself what it is to live.”
When he woke to the consciousness of time and place, he found he was seated at the Sulphur Spring where it gushed from the foot of the hill, and that the eastern horizon was grey with the dawn.
A sense of new-found power welled up in him. He had regained control of himself.
“Good! I will no longer be a moping love-sick fool. I am a man. To will is to live, to cease to will is to die. I have regained my will,—I live!”
He walked rapidly back to town with vigourous step. His mind was clear.
“I will never write her another line until she writes to me. I will not be a dog and whine at any rich man’s door or any woman’s feet. The world is large, and I am large. I will be sought as well as seek. Besides, my country needs me. If I am to give myself it will be for larger ends than for the smiles of one woman!”
And then for two weeks he entered deliberately on a series of dissipations. He left Hambright and sought convivial friends on the sea coast. He amazed them by asking to be taught cards.
He swept the gamut of all the senses without reserve, day after day, and night after night.
At the end of two weeks he found himself haunting the post-office oftener, with a vague sense of impending calamity.
“The thing’s all over I tell you!” he said to himself again and again. And then he would hurry to the next mail as eagerly as ever. As the excitement began to tire him, the sense of longing for her face, and voice, and the touch of her hand became intolerable.
“My God, I’d give all the world holds of sin to see her and hear one word from her lips!” he exclaimed as he locked himself in his room one night.
“Why didn’t she answer my last letter?” he continued. “Ah, that was the best letter I ever wrote her. I put my soul in every word. I didn’t believe the woman lived who could read such confessions and such worship without reply; Surely she has a heart!”
When he went to the post-office next day he got a letter forwarded from Hambright by the Preacher. It was postmarked Narragansett Pier, and addressed in a bold masculine hand he had never seen before.
He tore it open, and inside found his last letter to Sallie Worth, returned with the seal unbroken. He sprang to his feet with flashing eyes, trembling from head to foot.
“Ah! they did not dare to let her receive another of my letters! So a clerk returns it unopened,” he cried.
And a great lump rose in his throat as he thought of the scenes of the past two weeks. The old fever and the old longing came rushing over his prostrate soul now in resistless torrents: “How dare a strange hand touch a message to her! I could strangle him. We will see now who wins the fight.” He set his lips with determination, packed his valise, and took the train for home without a word of farewell to the companions of his revels.
When he reached Hambright he felt sure of a letter from her. A strange joy filled his heart.
“I have either got a letter or she’s writing one to me this minute!” he exclaimed.
He went to the post-office in a state of exhilaration. The letter was not there. But it did not depress him.
“It is on the way,” he quickly said.
For two days, he remained in that condition of tense nervous excitement and expectation, and on the following day he opened his box and found his letter.
“I knew it!” he said with a thrill of joy that was half awe at the remarkable confirmation he had received of their sympathy.
He hurried to his office and read the big precious message.
How its words burned into his soul! Every line seemed alive with her spirit. How beautiful the sight of her handwriting! He kissed it again and again. He read with bated breath. The address was double expressive, because it contained the first words of abandoned tenderness with which she had ever written to him, except in the concealed message dotted in the note that broke their earlier correspondence.
“My Precious Darling:—I have gone through deep waters within the last three weeks. I became so depressed and hungry to see you, I felt some awful calamity was hanging over you and over me, and that it was my fault. I could scarcely eat or sleep.
“I felt I should go mad if I did not speak and so I told Mama. She sympathised tenderly with me but insisted I should not write. She is so feeble I could not cross her. But Oh! the agony of it! Sometimes I saw you drowning and stretching out your hands to me for help.
“Sometimes in my dreams I saw you fighting against overwhelming odds with strong brutal men, whose faces were full of hate, and I could not reach you.
“I was nervous and unstrung, but you can never know how real the horror of it all was upon me.
“I made up my mind one night to telegraph you. I heard some one talking inside Mama’s room. I gently opened the door between our rooms, and she was praying aloud for me. I stood spellbound. I never knew how she loved me before. When at last she prayed that in the end I might have the desire of my heart, and my life be crowned with the joy of a noble man’s love, and that it might be yours, and that she should be permitted to see and rejoice with me, I could endure it no longer.
“Choking with sobs I ran to her kneeling figure, threw my arms around her neck and covered her dear face with kisses.
“I could not send the message I had written after that scene.
“The next day Papa came, and she told him in my presence, ‘Now, General I have carried out your wishes with Sallie against my judgment. The strain has been more than you can understand. I give up the task. You can manage her now to suit yourself.’
“There was a firmness in her voice I had never heard before. He noted it, and was startled into silence by it. He had a long talk with me and repeated his orders with increasing emphasis.
“The next day I was unusually depressed. I did not get out of bed all day. At night I went down to supper. The clerk at the desk of the hotel called me and said, ‘Miss Worth, I have a terrible sin to confess to you. I’m a lover myself, and I’ve done you a wrong. I returned to a young man yesterday a letter to you by request of the General. Forgive me for it, and don’t tell him I told you.’
“That night Papa and I had a fearful scene. I will not attempt to describe it. But the end was, I said to him with all the courage of despair: I am twenty-one years old. I am a free woman. I will write to whom I please and when I please and I will not ask you again. It is your right to turn me out of your house, but you shall not murder my soul!
“Then for the first time in his life Papa broke down and sobbed like a child. We kissed and made up, and I am to write to you when I like.
“Forgive my long silence. Write and tell me you love me. My heart is sick with the thought that I have been cowardly and failed you. Write me a long letter, and you can not say things extravagant enough for my hungry heart.
“I feel utterly helpless when I think how completely you have come to rule my life. I wish you to rule it. It is all yours”——
And then she said many little foolish things that only the eyes of the one lover should ever see, for only to him could they have meaning.
When he finished reading this letter, and had devoured with eagerness these foolish extravagances with which she closed it, he buried his face in his arms across his desk.
A big strong boastful man whose will had defied the world! Now he was crying like a whipped child.