GASTON found the Preacher quietly smoking, seated on the rustic under a giant oak that stood in the corner of the square.
Under this tree the speakers’ stand had always been built for joint debates in political campaigns.
Here, when a boy he had heard the great debate between Zebulon B. Vance and Judge Thomas Settle in the fierce campaign which followed the overthrow of Le-gree when the Republican party, under the leadership of Judge Settle made its desperate effort for life. Settle, who was a man of masterful personality, eloquent, and in dead earnest in his appeal for a new South, had made a speech of great power to a crowd that were hostile to every idea for which he stood; and yet he dazzled or stunned them into sullen silence.
And then he recalled with flashes of memory vivid as lightning, the miracle that had followed. He could see Vance now as he slowly lifted his big lion-like head, and calmly looked over the sea of faces with eagle eyes that could flash with resistless humour or blaze with the fury of elemental passion. He reviewed the terrible past in which he had played the tragic role of their war Governor, and tore into tatters with the facts of history the logic of his opponent. And then he opened his batteries of wit and ridicule,—wit that cut to the heart’s red blood, and yet convulsed the hearer with its unexpected turn. Ridicule that withered and scorched what it touched into ashes. Five thousand people now in breathless suspense as he swung them into heaven on the wings of deathless words, now screaming with laughter, and now hushed in tears!
The scene that followed this triumph! Two stalwart mountain men snatched him from the rostrum and bore him on their shoulders through the shouting, weeping crowd. Women pressed close and kissed his hands, and old men reached forward their hands to touch his garments. Ah! if he could inherit the power of this king among men! To-night as Gaston walked under that tree with his heart beating with the ecstasy of a new-found source of life, he felt that he could do, and that he would do, what the master had done before him!
“Charlie, I’ve heard some startling news since you left home, and I can’t sleep nights thinking about it.”
“You’ve heard of McLeod’s scheme.”
“Exactly. And it means the ruin of this state and the ruin of the South unless it can be defeated.”
“How are you going to do it?”
“It’s a puzzle but it’s got to be done. Half the farmers in the strongholds of Democracy are crazy over their fool Sub-Treasury and a hundred other fakir dreams. McLeod has promised them everything—Sub-Treasury, pumpkin leaves for money,—anything they want if they will join forces with his niggers and carry the state. You are the man to begin now a quiet but thorough organisation of the young men, and oust the fools from control of the party.
“When the white race begin to hobnob with the Negro and seek his favour, they must grant him absolute equality. That means ultimately social as well as political equality. You can’t ask a man to vote for you and kick him down your front doorstep and tell him to come around the back way.”
“I think you exaggerate the social danger, but I see the political end of it.”
“I don’t exaggerate in the least. I am looking into the future. This racial instinct is the ordinance of our life. Lose it and we have no future. One drop of Negro blood makes a negro. It kinks the hair, flattens the nose, thickens the lip, puts out the light of intellect, and lights the fires of brutal passions. The beginning of Negro equality as a vital fact is the beginning of the end of this nation’s life. There is enough negro blood here to make mulatto the whole Republic.”
“Such a danger seems too remote for serious alarm to me,” replied the younger man.
“Ah! there’s the tragedy,” passionately cried the Preacher. “You younger men are growing careless and indifferent to this terrible problem. It’s the one unsolved and unsolvable riddle of the coming century. Can you build, in a Democracy, a nation inside a nation of two hostile races? We must do this or become mulatto, and that is death. Every inch in the approach of these races across the barriers that separate them is a movement toward death. You cannot seek the Negro vote without asking him to your home sooner or later. If you ask him to your house, he will break bread with you at last. And if you seat him at your table, he has the right to ask your daughter’s hand in marriage.”
“It seems to me a far cry to that. But I see the political crisis. What is your plan?”
“This,—organise the young Democracy in every township in the state, and put yourself at its head, control the primaries and down the old crowd. They’ve got to follow you. Fight the campaign with the desperation of despair. If you are defeated, God have mercy on us, but you will be ready for the next battle.”
“I ’ll do it,” said Gaston with emphasis.
“Then I want you to go on a mission to Col. Duke, the President of the National Farmer’s Alliance. He’s a good Baptist. He means well, but he’s crazy. He dreams of the Presidency when he has established the Sub-Treasury for the farmers. He’s afraid of the Negro, and is nervous about using him. He knows I am the most influential Baptist preacher in the state. Tell him I say you will win, and that we will give him the nomination for Governor, and put him in line for the Presidency.”
“When shall I go to see him?”
“Immediately. Get ready to-night.”
The next week McLeod was seated in his office at Hambright receiving reports from his political henchmen at Raleigh.
“I tell you, McLeod, there’s a hitch. Something’s dropped. Duke’s as coy as a maid of sixteen. He says no decision can be made now until he submits a lot of rot to all the lodges of the Alliance and the ‘Referendum’ decides these points. You’d better get hold of him and comb the kinks out of him quick.”
McLeod’s eyes flashed with anger, as he twisted the points of his red moustache.
“It’s that damned Baptist Preacher,” he said. “I ’ll get even with him yet if it’s the only thorough job I do on this earth.”
BEFORE boarding the train he was to take for Raleigh, he lingered with Mrs. Durham talking, talking, talking about the wonder of his love. As he arose to leave he said, “Now, Mother dear”——
“Charlie, you just say that so beautifully to make me your slave.”
“Of course I do. What I was going to say is, I can’t write to her. I don’t dare. You can. Tell her all about me won’t you? Everything that you think will interest and please her, and that will be discreet. Your intuitions will tell you how far to go. Tell her how hard I’m working and what an important mission I’ve undertaken, and the tremendous things that hang on its outcome. And tell her how impatiently I’m waiting for her to come to the Springs. Be sure to tell her that.”
“All right. I ’ll act as your attorney in your absence. But hurry back, she must not get here first. I want you to be on the spot.”
“I ’ll be here if I have to give up politics and go into business—and you know how I hate that word ‘business.’”
“I ’ll telegraph you if she comes.”
“Don’t let her come till I get back. Tell her the hotel isn’t fit to receive guests yet—it never is for that matter—but anything to give me time to get here.”
He worked with indomitable courage for two weeks, visiting the principal towns in the state, and everywhere arousing intense enthusiasm. There was something contagious in his spirit. The young fellows were charmed by his eager intense way of looking at things, they caught the infection and he made hundreds of staunch friends.
“You’re just in time!” cried his mother greeting him with radiant face on his return. “She is coming tomorrow. I’ve a beautiful letter from her. I think one of the sweetest letters a girl ever wrote.”
“Let me see it!”
“No.”
“Why, Mother, I thought you were all on my side!”
“But I’m not. I’m a woman, and you can’t see some things she says.”
“Then it’s something awfully nice about me.”
“Maybe the opposite.”
“Then you’d resent it for me.”
“I love her too, sir.”
“Let me see the tip end of it where she signs her name!”
“You can see that much, there”——
“Doesn’t she write a lovely hand!” He looked long and lovingly. “That pretty name!—Sallie! So old-fashioned, and so homelike. It’s music, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t know you could be so silly, Charlie.”
“It is funny, isn’t it? You know I think after all, we are made out of the same stuff, saint and sinner, philosopher and fool. The differences are only skin deep.”
“You don’t think she is made out of ordinary clay?”
“Oh! Lord, no, I meant the men. Every woman is something divine to me. I think of God as a woman, not a man—a great loving Mother of all Life. If I ever saw the face of God it was in my mother’s face.”
“Hush! you will make me do anything you wish.”
“No, no, I don’t want to see that letter unless you think it best.”
“Well, you will not see any more of it, sir.”
When Gaston met them at the depot with a carriage to take Sallie, her mother, and Helen Lowell, her Boston schoolmate, to the Springs, the first passenger to alight was Bob St. Clare.
“What in the thunder are you doing here! This town is quarantined against you!” said Gaston.
“Hush!” said Bob in a stage whisper. “She’s here. There’s her valise.”
“That’s why you can’t land. Two’s company, three’s a crowd. I like you, Bob. But I won’t stand for this.”
The crowd were pouring off the train and had cut off Sallie’s party in the centre of the car.
“Gaston, I just came up for your sake. I’m looking after Miss Lowell. I’m lost, ruined. Scared to say a word. I thought maybe, you’d help me out. We ’ll pool chances. I ’ll talk for you and you talk for me.”
“It’s a bargain, St. Clare.”
“I want a separate carriage,—get me one quick.”
In a few moments, the brief introduction over, Gaston was seated in the carriage facing Sallie and her mother whirling along the road, over the long hills toward the Campbell Sulphur Springs in the woods, two miles from the town.
How beautiful and fresh she looked to him even in a dusty travelling dress! He was drinking the nectar from the depths of her eyes.
“Now don’t you think Helen the prettiest girl you ever saw, Mr. Gaston?” she asked.
“I hadn’t noticed it.”
“Where were your eyes?”
“Elsewhere. I’m so glad you are going to spend a month at the Springs, Miss Sallie. I used to go to school there when a little boy. They had a girl’s school there in the winter and boys under twelve were admitted. I know every nook and corner of the big forest back of the hotel. I ’ll see that you don’t get lost.”
“That will be fine. But you must bring every goodlooking boy in the county and make him bow down and worship Helen. She is not used to it, but she is tickled to death over these Southern boys, and I’m going to give her the best time she ever had in her life.”
“I ’ll do everything you command—except bow down myself. Bob’s agreed to do that.”
She smiled in spite of her effort to look serious, and her mother pinched her arm. She laughed.
“So you and Bob St. Clare were out there plotting before we could get out of the train?”
“Nothing unlawful, I assure you.”
The first day she allowed Gaston to monopolise, and then began his torture. She declared there were others with whom she must be friendly. She determined to give a ball to Helen the next week, and began preparations.
It was a new business for Gaston, but he did his best to please her, in a pathetic half-hearted sort of way. He ran all sorts of errands, and executed her orders with tact.
“Oh! Sallie let the ball go. I don’t care for it. I can do nothing to ever repay you for the good time I’ve been having,” said Helen as they sat in her room one night.
“We are going to have it, I tell you. I don’t care how much Mr. Gaston sulks. I’m not taking orders from him.”
“No, but you’d like to—you know it.”
“What an idea!”
“You know you like him better than all the others put together.”
“Nonsense. I’m as free as a bird.”
“Then what are you blushing for?”
“I’m not.” But her face was scarlet.
“You Southern girls are so queer. The moment you like a man you’re as sly as a cat, and deny that you even know him. When I find the man I love I don’t care who knows it, if he loves me.”
“What do you think of Bob St. Clare?”
“I like him.”
“Hasn’t he made love to you yet?”
“No, and the only one of the crowd who hasn’t. I don’t mind confessing that I never had love made to me before this visit. In Boston it’s a serious thing for a young man to call once. The second call, means a family council, and at the third he must make a declaration of his intentions or face consequences. Down here, the boys don’t seem to have anything to do except to make their girl friends happy, and feel they are the queens of the earth, and that their only mission is to minister to them. And some of your girls are engaged to six boys at the same time.”
“Don’t you like it?”
“It’s glorious. I feel that if I hadn’t come down here to see you I’d have missed the meaning of life.”
“Don’t our boys make love beautifully?”
“I never dreamed of anything like it. They make it so seriously, so dead in earnest, you can’t help believing them.”
“And Bob hasn’t said a word?”
“Hasn’t breathed a hint.”
“Then you have him sure. They are hit hard when they are silent like that. Bob made love to me the second day he ever saw me.”
“Don’t tease me, dear,” said Helen as she put her pretty rosy cheek against the dark beauty of the South. “Do you really think he likes me seriously?”
“He’s crazy about you, goose!”
There was the sound of a kiss.
“I can’t tell stories about it like you, Sallie, I’m afraid I’m in love with him,” she whispered.
“Well, I ’ll make him court you to-morrow or have him thrashed, if you say so.”
“Don’t you dare!”
“Then do just as I tell you about this ball and get yourself up regardless.”
On the night of the ball, Gaston, sitting out on the porch, felt nervous and fidgety, like a fish out of water. He knew he had no business there, and yet he couldn’t go away. They had a quarrel about the ball. Sallie had insisted that Gaston honour her by coming in evening dress whether he danced or not.
“But, Miss Sallie, I ’ll feel like a fool. Everybody in the country knows that I never entered a ball-room.”
“Do you care so much what everybody thinks about you?”
“No, but I care what I think of myself.”
“Well, if you don’t come in full dress suit, I won’t speak to you.”
He turned pale in spite of his effort at self control. Then a queer steel-like look came into his eyes.
“I shall be more than sorry to fail to please you, but I have no dress suit. I have never had time for social frivolities. I can’t afford to buy one for this occasion. I couldn’t be nigger enough to hire one, so that’s the end of it. I ’ll have to come dressed in my own fashion or stay at home.”
“Then you can stay at home,” she snapped.
“I ’ll not do it,” he coolly replied.
“Well, I like your insolence.”
“I’m glad you do. I ’ll come as I come to all such functions, an outsider. I ’ll sit out here on the porch in the shadows and see it from afar. If I could only dance, I assure you I’d try to fill every number of your card. Not being able to do so, I simply decline to make a fool of myself.”
“For that compliment, I ’ll compromise with you. Wear that big pompous Prince Albert suit you spoke in at Independence, and I ’ll come out on the porch and chat with you a while.”
He sat there now in the shadows waiting for this ball to begin. It was a clear night the first week in June. The new moon was hanging just over the tree tops. His heart was full to bursting with the thought that the girl he loved would, in a few minutes, be whirling over that polished floor to the strains of a waltz, with another man’s arm around her. He never knew how deeply he hated dancing before—that rhythmic touch of the human body, set to the melody of motion, and voiced in the passionate cry of music. He felt its challenge to his love to mortal combat,—his love that claimed this one woman as his own, body and soul!
The music from the Italian band was in full swing, its plaintive notes instinct with the passion of sunny Italy, a music all Southern people love.
He felt that he should choke. A sudden thought came to him. Tearing a sheet of paper from a note book he scrawled this line upon it.
“Dear Miss Sallie:—Please let me see you a moment in the parlour before you enter the ball-room. Gaston.”
At least he would see her in her ball costume first. Yes, and if she should hate him for it, he would beg her not to dance that night. He saw McLeod, bowing and scraping in the ball-room arrayed in faultless full dress, and glancing toward the door. He knew lie was waiting for her to ask her to dance. How he would like to wring his handsome neck!
The boy returned immediately and said the lady was waiting in the parlour. He entered with a sense of fear and confusion.
She came to him with her bare arm extended, a dazzling vision of beauty. She was dressed in a creamy white crêpe ball gown, cut modestly decollete over her full bust and gleaming shoulders, sleeveless, and held with tiny straps across the curve of the upper arm.
He was stunned. She smiled in triumph, conscious of her resistless power.
“Forgive me for my selfishness in keeping you here just a moment from the rest. I wished to see you first.”
“What? to inspect like Mama, to see if I look all right?”
“No, with a mad desire to keep you as long as possible from the others.”
Then she looked up at him and said slowly and softly, “Would it please you very much if I were not to dance to-night?”
“I wouldn’t dare ask so selfish a thing of you. It is with you a simple habit of polite society, and you enjoy it as a child does play. I understand that, and yet if you do not dance to-night, I feel as though I would crawl round this world on my hands and knees for you if you would ask it. There are men waiting for you in that ball room whom I hate.”
She looked at him timidly as though she were afraid he was about to say too much and replied, “Then I will not dance to-night. I ’ll just preside over the ball and let Helen be the queen.”
“Words have no power to convey my gratitude. I count all my little triumphs in life nothing to this. You promised to join me on the porch. Don’t change that part of the programme. I will talk to your mother until you come.”
Gaston went down stairs treading on air. He sought her mother and devoted himself to her with supreme tact. He discovered her tastes and prejudices and paid her that knightly deference some young men express easily and naturally to their elders. He had always been a favourite with old people. He prided himself on it. This faculty he regarded as a badge of honour. As he sat there and talked with this frail little woman, his heart went out to her in a great yearning love. She was the mother of the bride of his soul. He would love her forever for that. No matter whether she loved him or hated him. He would love the mother who gave to his thirsty lips the water of Life.
Drawn irresistibly by the magnetism of his mind and manner Mrs. Worth forgot the flight of time and thought but a moment had past when an hour after the ball had opened, Sallie came out leaning on McLeod’s arm.
“Mama, have you been monopolising Mr. Gaston for a whole hour?”
“He hasn’t been here a half hour, Miss!” cried her mother.
“He’s been here an hour and ten minutes. I’m going to tell Papa on you just as soon as I get home.”
“Go back to your dancing.”
“No, thank you, I have an engagement to take a walk with your beau. Come Mr. Gaston.”
They walked to the spring and along the winding path by the brook at the foot of the hill, and found a rustic seat. They were both silent for several moments.
“I saw you were charming Mama, or I would have come sooner.”
“I hope she likes me.”
“She has been praising you ever since your visit to Independence. I never saw her talk so long to a young man in my life before. You must have hypnotised her.”
“I hope so.”
A strange happiness filled her heart. She was afraid to look it in the face; and yet she dared to play with the thought.
“Are you enjoying your triumph to-night? I’ve had war inside.”
“I feel like I am the Emperor of the World and that the Evening Star is smiling on my court!”
She smiled, tossed her head, leaned against the tree and said, “I wonder if you are in the habit of saying things like that to girls?”
“Upon my soul and honour, no.”
“Then thanks. I ’ll dream about that, maybe.”
They returned to the hotel and McLeod claimed her. They went back the same walk, and by a freak of fate he chose the same seat she had just vacated with Gaston.
“Miss Sallie, you are of age now. You know that I have loved you passionately since you were a child. I have made my way in life, I am hungry for a home and your love to glorify it. Why will you keep me waiting?”
“Simply because I know now I do not love you, Allan, and I never will. Once and forever, here, to-night I give you my last answer, I will not be your wife.”
“Then don’t give the answer to-night. I can wait,” he interrupted. “I am just on the threshold of a great career. Success is sure. I can offer you a dazzling position. Don’t give me such an answer. Leave the old answer—to wait.”
“No, I will not. I do not love you. If you were to become the President, it would not change this fact, and it is everything.”
“Then you love another.”
“That is none of your business, sir. I have known you since childhood. I have had ample time to know my own mind.”
“All right, we will say good-bye for the present. You have made me a laughing stock of young fools, but I can stand it. I’ll not give you up, and if I can’t have you, no other man shall.”
“If you leave my will out of the calculation, you will make a fatal mistake.”
“Women have been known to change their wills.”
Before leaving her that night Gaston held her hand for an instant as he bade her good-bye and said, “Miss Sallie, I thank you with inexpressible gratitude for the honour you have done me.”
“I’ve just been wondering what you have done to deserve it?”
“Absolutely nothing,—that’s why it is so sweet. This has been the happiest day I ever lived. I cannot see you again before you go. I leave to-morrow on urgent business. May I come to Independence to see you?”
“Yes, I ’ll be delighted to see you. Good-night.”
Gaston was the last to return to Hambright. He walked the two miles through the silent starlit woods. He took a short cut his bare feet had travelled as a boy, and with uncovered head walked slowly through the dim aisles of great trees. It was good, this cool silence and the soft mantle of the night about his soul! The stars whispered love. The wind sighed it through the leaves.
He had withdrawn from the church in his college days because he had grown to doubt everything—God, heaven, hell, and immortality. To-night as he walked slowly home he heard that wonderful sentence of the old Bible ringing down the ages, wet with tears and winged with hope, “God is love!”
He said it now softly and reverently, and the tears came unbidden from his soul. He felt close to the heart of things. He knew he was close to the heart of nature. What if nature was only another name for God? And he whispered it again, “God is love!”
“Ah! If I only knew it I would bow down and worship Him forever!” he cried.
When Sallie reached her mother’s room that night, Mrs. Worth was seated by her window.
“Why didn’t you dance?”
“Didn’t care to.”
“Sly Miss, you can’t fool me. You didn’t dance because Mr. Gaston couldn’t. That was a dangerously loud way to talk to him.”
“How did you like him, Mama?”
“Come here, dear, and sit on the edge of my chair. I wish I knew when you were in earnest about a man. I like him more than I can tell you. He talked to me so beautifully about his mother, I wanted to kiss him. He is charming.”
“Why, Mama!”
“I’d like him for a son. There’s a wealth of deep tenderness and manly power in him.”
“Mama, you’re getting giddy!”
But she kissed her mother twice when she said good night.
McLEOD had developed into a man of undoubted power. He was but thirty-two years old, and the dictator of his party in the state.
He had the fighting temperament which Southern people demand in their leaders. With this temperament he combined the skill of subtle diplomatic tact. He had no moral scruples of any kind. The problem of expediency alone interested him in ethics.
McLeod’s pet aversion was a preacher, especially a Baptist or a Methodist. His choicest oaths he reserved for them. He made a study of their weaknesses, and could tell dozens of stories to their discredit, many of them true. He had an instinct for finding their weak spots and holding them up to ridicule. He bought every book of militant infidelity he could find and memorised the bitterest of it. He took special pride in scoffing at religion before the young converts of Durham’s church.
He was endowed with a personal magnetism that fascinated the young as the hiss of a snake holds a bird. His serious work was politics and sensualism. In politics he was at his best. Here he was cunning, plausible, careful, brilliant and daring. He never lost his head in defeat or victory. He never forgot a friend, or forgave an enemy. Of his foe he asked no quarter and gave none.
His ambitions were purely selfish. He meant to climb to the top. As to the means, the end would justify them. He preferred to associate with white people. But when it was necessary to win a negro, he never hesitated to go any length. The centre of the universe to his mind was A. McLeod.
He was fond of saying to a crowd of youngsters whom he taught to play poker and drink whiskey, “Boys, I know the world. The great man is the man who gets there.”
He was generous with his money, and the boys called him a jolly good fellow. He used to say in explanation of this careless habit, “It won’t do for an ordinary fool to throw away money as I do. I play for big stakes. I’m not a spendthrift. I’m simply sowing seed. I can wait for the harvest.” And when they would admire this overmuch he would warn them, As a rule my advice is, “Get money. Get it fairly and squarely if you can, but whatever you do,—get it. When you come right down to it, money’s your first, last, best and only friend. Others promise well but when the scratch comes, they fail. Money never fails.”
A boy of fifteen asked him one day when he was mellow with liquor, “McLeod, which would you rather be, President of the United States or a big millionaire?”
“Boys,” he replied, smacking his lips, and running his tongue around his cheeks inside and softly caressing them with one hand, while he half closed his eyes, “They say old Simon Legree is worth fifty millions of dollars, and that his actual income is twenty per cent on that. They say he stole most of it, and that every dollar represents a broken life, and every cent of it could be painted red with the blood of his victims. Even so, I would rather be in Legree’s shoes and have those millions a year than to be Almighty God with hosts of angels singing psalms to me through all eternity.”
And the shallow-pated satellites cheered this blasphemy with open-eyed wonder.
The weakest side of his nature was that turned toward women. He was vain as a peacock, and the darling wish of his soul was to be a successful libertine. This was the secret of the cruelty back of his desire of boundless wealth.
He had the intellectual forehead of his Scotch father, large, handsomely modelled features, nostrils that dilated and contracted widely, and the thick sensuous lips of his mother. His eyebrows were straight, thick, and suggested undoubted force of intellect. His hair was a deep red, thick and coarse, but his moustache was finer and it was his special pride to point its delicately curved tips.
His vanity was being stimulated just now by two opposite forces. He was in love, as deeply as such a nature could love, with Sallie Worth. Her continued rejection of his suit had wounded his vanity, but had roused all the pugnacity of his nature to strengthen this apparent weakness.
He had discovered recently that he exercised a potent influence over Mrs. Durham. The moment he was repulsed, his vanity turned for renewed strength toward her. He saw instantly the immense power even the slightest indiscretion on her part would give him over the Preacher’s life. He knew that while he was not a demonstrative man, he loved his wife with intense devotion. He knew, too, that here was the Preacher’s weakest spot. In his tireless devotion to his work, he had starved his wife’s heart. He had noticed that she always called him “Dr. Durham” now, and that he had gradually fallen into the habit of calling her “Mrs. Durham.”
This had been fixed in their habits, perhaps by the change from housekeeping to living at the hotel. Since old Aunt Mary’s death, Mrs. Durham had given up her struggle with the modern negro servants, closed her house, and they had boarded for several years.
He saw that if he could entangle her name with his in the dirty gossip of village society, he could strike his enemy a mortal blow. He knew that she had grown more and more jealous of the crowds of silly women that always dog the heels of a powerful minister with flattery and open admiration. He determined to make the experiment.
Mrs. Durham, while nine years his senior, did not look a day over thirty. Her face was as smooth and soft and round as a girl’s, her figure as straight and full, and her every movement instinct with stored vital powers that had never been drawn upon.
She was in a dangerous period of her mental development. She had been bitterly disappointed in life. Her loss of slaves and the ancestral prestige of great wealth had sent the steel shaft of a poisoned dagger into her soul. She was unreconciled to it. While she was passing through the anarchy of Legree’s régime which followed the war, her unsatisfied maternal instincts absorbed her in the work of relieving the poor and the broken. But when the white race rose in its might and shook off this nightmare and order and a measure of prosperity had come, she had fallen back into brooding pessimism.
She had reached the hour of that soul crisis when she felt life would almost in a moment slip from her grasp, and she asked herself the question, “Have I lived?” And she could not answer.
She found herself asking the reasons for things long accepted as fixed and eternal. What was good, right, truth? And what made it good, right, or true?
And she beat the wings of her proud woman’s heart against the bars that held her, until tired, and bleeding she was exhausted but unconquered.
She was furious with McLeod for his open association with negro politicians.
“Allan, in my soul, I am ashamed for you when I see you thus degrade your manhood.”
“Nonsense, Mrs. Durham,” he replied, “the most beautiful flower grows in dirt, but the flower is not dirt.”
“Well, I knew you were vain, but that caps the climax!”
“Isn’t my figure true, whether you say I’m dog-fennel or a pink?”
“No, you are not a flower. Will is the soul of man. The flower is ruled by laws outside itself. A man’s will is creative. You can make law. You can walk with your head among the stars, and you choose to crawl in a ditch. I am out of patience with you.”
“But only for a purpose. You must judge by the end in view.”
“There’s no need to stoop so low.”
“I assure you it is absolutely necessary to my aims in life. And they are high enough. I appreciate your interest in me, more than I dare to tell you. You have always been kind to me since I was a wild red-headed brute of a boy. And you have always been my supreme inspiration in work. While others have cursed and scoffed you smiled at me and your smile has warmed my heart in its blackest nights.”
She looked at him with a mother-like tenderness.
“What ends could be high enough to justify such methods?”
“I hate poverty and squalour. It’s been my fate. I’ve sworn to climb out of it, if I have to fight or buy my way through hell to do it. I dream of a palatial home, of soft white beds, grand banquet halls, and music and wine, and the faces of those I love near me. Besides, the work I am doing is the best for the state and the nation.”
“But how can you walk arm in arm with a big black negro, as they say you do, to get his vote?”
“Simply because they represent 120,000 votes I need. You can’t tell their colour when they get in the box. I use these fools as so many worms. My political creed is for public consumption only. I never allow anybody to impose on me. I don’t allow even Allan McLeod to deceive me with a paper platform, or a lot of articulated wind. I’m not a preacher.”
She winced at that shot, blushed and looked at him curiously for a moment.
“No, you are not a preacher. I wish you were a better man.”
“So do I, when I am with you,” he answered in a low serious voice.
“But I can’t get over the sense of personal degradation involved in your association with negroes as your equal,” she persisted.
“The trouble is you’re an unreconstructed rebel. Women never really forgive a social wrong.”
“I am unreconstructed,” she snapped with pride.
“And you thank God daily for it, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do. Human nature can’t be reconstructed by the fiat of fools who tinker with laws,” she cried.
“These thousands of black votes are here. They’ve got to be controlled. I’m doing the job.”
“You don’t try to get rid of them.”
“Get rid of them? Ye gods, that would be a task! The Negro is the sentimental pet of the nation. Put him on a continent alone, and he will sink like an iron wedge to the bottomless pit of barbarism. But he is the ward of the Republic—our only orphan, chronic, incapable. That wardship is a grip of steel on the throat of the South. Back of it is an ocean of maudlin sentimental fools. I am simply making the most of the situation. I didn’t make it to order. I’m just doing the best I can with the material in hand.”
“Why don’t you come out like a man and defy this horde of fools?”
“Martyrdom has become too cheap. The preachers have a hundred thousand missionaries now we are trying to support.”
“Allan, I thought you held below the rough surface of your nature high ideals,—you don’t mean this.”
“What could one man do against these millions?”
“Do!” she cried, her face ablaze. “The history of the world is made up of the individuality of a few men. A little Yankee woman wrote a crude book. The single act of that woman’s will caused the war, killed a million men, desolated and ruined the South, and changed the history of the world. The single dauntless personality of George Washington three times saved the colonies from surrender and created the Republic. I am surprised to hear a man of your brain and reading talk like that!”
“When I am with you and hear your voice I have heroic impulses. You are the only human being with whom I would take the time to discuss this question. But the current is too strong. The other way is easier, and it serves my ends better. Besides, I am not sure it isn’t better from every point of view. We’ve got the Negro here, and must educate him.”
“Hush! Tell that to somebody that hates you, not to me,” she cried.
“Don’t you think we must educate them?”
“No, I think it is a crime.”
“Would you leave them in ignorance, a threat to society?”
“Yes, until they can be moved. When I see these young negro men and women coming out of their schools and colleges well dressed, with their shallow veneer of an imitation culture, I feel like crying over the farce.”
“Surely, Mrs. Durham, you believe they are better fitted for life?”
“They are not. They are lifted out of their only possible sphere of menial service, and denied any career. It is simply inhuman. They are led to certain slaughter of soul and body at last. It is a horrible tragedy.”
Allan looked at her, smiled, and replied, “I knew you were a bitter and brilliant woman but I didn’t think you would go to such lengths even with your pet aversions.”
“It’s not an aversion, or a prejudice, sir. It’s a simple fact of history. Education increases the power of the human brain to think and the heart to suffer. Sooner or later these educated negroes feel the clutch of the iron hand of the white man’s unwritten laws on their throat. They have their choice between a suicide’s grave or a prison cell. And the numbers who dare the grave and the prison cell daily increase. The South is kinder to the Negro when he is kept in his place.”
“You are a quarter of a century behind the times.”
“Am I so old?” she laughed.
“The sentiment, not the woman. You are the most beautiful woman I ever saw.”
“I like all my boys to feel that way about me.”
“You don’t class me quite with the rest, do you?” She blushed the slightest bit. “No, I’ve always taken a peculiar interest in you. I have quarrelled with everybody who has hated and spoken evil of you. I have always believed you were capable of a high and noble life of great achievement.”
“And your faith in me has been my highest incentive to give the lie to my enemies and succeed. And I will. I will be the master of this state within two years. And I want you to remember that I lay it all at your feet. The world need not know it,—you know it.” He spoke with intense earnestness.
“But I don’t want you to make such a success at the price of Negro equality. I feel a sense of unspeakable degradation for you when I hear your name hissed. At least I was your teacher once. Come Allan, give up Negro politics and devote yourself to an honourable career in law!”
He shook his head with calm persistence.
“No, this is my calling.”
“Then take a nobler one.”
“To succeed grandly is the only title to nobility here.”
“Is the Doctor on speaking terms with you now?”
“Oh! yes, I joke him about his hide-bound Bourbonism, and he tells me I am all sorts of a villain. But we have made an agreement to hate one another in a polite sort of way as becomes a teacher in Israel and a statesman with responsibilities. By the way, I saw him driving to the Springs with a bevy of pretty girls a few hours ago.”
“Indeed, I didn’t know it!”
“Yes, he seemed to be having a royal time and to have renewed his youth.”
An angry flush came to her face and she made no reply. McLeod glanced at her furtively and smiled at this evidence that his shot had gone home.
“Would you drive with me to the Springs? We will get there before this party starts back.” She hesitated, and answered, “yes.”