CHAPTER X—THE HEART OF A VILLAIN

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 r茅gime 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.”