The Leopard's Spots (1902)/Book 3/Chapter 15
McLEOD knew from the day of that outburst which followed Gaston's speech in the Democratic convention that no power on earth could save his ticket. To the world he put on a bold face and made his fight to the last ditch, predicting victory.
His secret anger against the Preacher and Gaston, his pet, knew no bounds. Chagrined at his repulse by Mrs. Durham and the attitude of contempt she had maintained toward him, his tongue began to wag her name in slander to the crowd of young satellites loafing around his office in Hambright.
"Yes, boys," he said, "the Preacher is a great man, but his wife is greater. She's the handsomest woman in the state in spite of a grey thread or two in her rich chestnut hair. She has the most beautiful mouth that ever tempted the soul of a man—and boys, my lips know what it means to touch it."
And when they stared with open eyes at this statement, McLeod shook his head, laughed and whispered,
"Say nothing about it—but facts are facts!"
McLeod chuckled over the certainty of the shame and suffering that would wring the Preacher's heart when dirty gossips of a village had magnified these words into a complete drama of scandal. For all preachers McLeod had profound contempt, and he felt secure now from personal harm.
The day the Preacher first heard of these rumours was the occasion of Gaston's campaign address under the old oak in the square. He had looked forward to this day with boyish pride mingled with a great fatherly love. It would be his triumph. He had stirred this boy's imagination and moulded his character in the pliant hours of his childhood. He had told himself that day he spent with him in the woods fishing, that he had kindled a fire in his soul that would not go out till it blazed on the altar of a redeemed country. And he was living to see that day.
The streets and square were thronged with such a multitude as the village had never seen since it was built. But the Preacher was not among them at the hour the speaking began.
A simple old friend from the country asked him about these rumours. He turned pale as death, made no answer, and walked rapidly toward his study in the church where his library was now arranged. He was dazed with horror. It was the first he had heard of it. One thing in his estimate of life had always been as securely fixed and sheltered in his thought as his faith in God, and that was his love for his wife, and his perfect faith in her honour.
He closed his door and locked it and sat down trying to think.
Had he not grown careless in the certainty of his wife's devotion, and his own quiet but intense love? Had he not forgotten the yearning of a woman's heart for the eternal repetition of love's language of sign and word?
The tears were in his eyes now, and he felt that his heart would beat to death and break within him!
He saw that his enemy had struck at his weakest spot, and struck to kill.
He lifted his face toward the walls in a vague unseeing look and his eyes rested on a pair of crossed swords over a bookcase. They had been handed down to him from a long line of fighting ancestors. He arose, took them down mechanically, and drew one from its scabbard. How snugly its rough hilt fitted his nervous hand grip! He felt a curious throbbing in this hilt like a pulse, it was alive, and its spirit stirred deep waters in his soul that had never been ruffled before.
He recalled vaguely in memory things he knew had never happened to him and yet were part of his inmost life.
"Damn him!" he involuntarily hissed as he gripped the sword hilt with the instinctive power of the fighting animal that sleeps beneath the skin of all our culture and religion.
And then his eyes rested on a quaint little daguerreotype picture of his wife in her bridal dress, her sweet girlish face full of innocent pride and warm with his love. By its side he saw the portrait of their dead boy. How he recalled now every hour of that wonderful period preceding his birth—the unspeakable pride and tenderness with which he watched over his young wife! He recalled the morning of his birth, and the heart rending, piteous cries of young motherhood that tore his heart until the nails of his own fingers cut the flesh and drew the blood. How the minutes seemed long hours, and how at last he bent over her, softly kissed the drawn white lips, and gazed with tearful wonder and awe on the little red bundle resting on her breast! He recalled the tremor of weariness in her voice when she drew his head down close and whispered,
"I didn't mind the pain, John, though I couldn't help the cries. He's yours and mine—I am as proud as a queen. Now our souls are one in him—I am tired—I must sleep."
Every movement of his past life seemed to stand out in this crisis with fiery clearness. He seemed to live in an instant whole years in every detail of that closeness of personal life that makes marriage a part of every stroke of the heart.
At last he set his lips firmly and said,
"Yes, damn him, I will kill him as I would a snake!"
He sat down and wrote his resignation as pastor of the church, left it on his desk, and strode hurriedly from the study leaving his door open. He purchased a revolver and a box of cartridges and walked straight to McLeod's office.
The speaking was over, and McLeod was alone writing letters. He looked up with scant politeness as the Preacher entered and motioned him to a seat.
Instead of seating himself, he closed the door, and standing erect in front of it, said,
"Allan McLeod, you are the author of an infamous slander reflecting on the honour of my wife!"
"Indeed!" McLeod sneered, wheeling in his chair.
"I always knew that you were a moral leper"—
"Of course, Doctor, of course, but don't get excited," laughed McLeod enjoying the marks of anguish on his face.
"But that your lecherous body should dream of invading the sanctity of my home, and your tongue attempt to smirch its honour, was beyond my wildest dream of your effrontery. How dare you?"—
"Dare? Dare, Preacher?" interrupted McLeod still sneering. "Why, by 'The Higher Law,' of course. You have been teaching all your life that there are higher laws than paper-made statutes. You have trained this county in crime under this beautiful ideal. Surely I may follow the teachings of a master in Israel?"
"What do you mean, you red-headed devil?"
"Softly, Preacher," smiled McLeod. "Simply this.
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You expound 'The Higher Law,' for political consumption. I apply it to all life.
"There are but two real laws of man's nature, hunger and love—all others change with time and progress. These are the higher laws, in fact they are the highest laws. The stupid conventions that superstition has built around them may hold back the weak, but the powerful have always defied them. Your brilliant exposition of the higher law in politics first set my mind to work, and led me to a complete emancipation from the slavery of conventionalism in which fools have held society for centuries. There are conventional laws and superstitions about the little ceremony called marriage cherished by the weak-minded. There is a higher law of nature. The brave live this life of daring freedom, while cowards cling to forms. Do I make myself clear?"
"Perfectly so, you mottled leper. You think that because I am a preacher, I am a poltroon, and that you can play with me without danger to your skin. Well, I was a man before I was a preacher. There are some things deeper than the forms of religion, if you wish to push the higher law to its last application. You have found that quick in my soul, mine enemy! I have resigned my church—to kill you. There is not room for you and me on this earth"—
McLeod sprang to his feet, his soul chilled by the tone in which the threat was uttered. He started to call for help, and looked down the gleaming barrel of a revolver.
"Move now or open your mouth, and I kill you instantly. Sit down. I give you five minutes to write your last message to this world."
McLeod sank into his seat trembling like a leaf, with the perspiration standing out on his forehead in cold beads. Now and then he glanced furtively at the stem face of blind fury towering over his crouching form.
Unable to endure the terrible strain, he sank to the floor whining, slobbering, begging in abject cowardice for his life. He crawled toward the Preacher, reached out his hand and touched his foot.
"My God, Doctor, you are mad. You will not commit murder. You are a minister of Jesus Christ. Have mercy. I am at your feet. Your wife is as pure as an angel. I only said what I did to torture you"—
"Get up you snake!" hissed the Preacher, stamping his body with all his might until McLeod screamed with pain and scrambled to his feet cowering and whining like a cur.
"Finish your letter. You will never leave this room alive."
A long pitiful sob broke the stillness, and McLeod was looking into the Preacher's face in vain for a ray of hope.
Suddenly Gaston burst into the room trembling with excitement. "My God, Doctor, what does this mean?" he cried seizing the revolver.
McLeod sprang toward Gaston, groaning and crawling toward his feet. "Save me Gaston,—the Doctor's gone mad—he is about to kill me!"
"Charlie, I must!" pleaded the Preacher.
"No, no, this is madness. I thank God I am in time. I missed you at the speaking, and hearing a rumour of this slander I hurried to find you. I saw your study open and read your letter. I knew I'd find you here. I'll manage McLeod."
The Preacher sat down crying. McLeod had crawled back to his desk and was mopping his face. Gaston walked over to him and said with slow trembling emphasis,
"I give you twelve hours to close this office, wind up your business, and leave. In the meantime you will write a denial of this slander satisfactory to me for publication. If you ever open your mouth again about my foster-mother or put your foot in this county, I will kill you. I expect your letter ready in two hours."
Gaston took the Preacher by the arm and led him down the stairs and back to his study. In the reaction, there was a pitiable breakdown.
"Oh! Charlie, you've saved me from an unspeakable horror. Yes, I was mad. I was proud and wilful. I thought I knew myself. To-day, I have looked into the bottom of hell. I have seen the depths of my own heart. Yes, I have in me the germs of all sin and crime. I am the brother of every thief, of every murderer, of every scarlet woman of the streets, that ever stood in the stocks, or climbed the steps of a gallows"—
"Hush, I will not listen to such talk. You are a man, that's all," interrupted Gaston.
"But God's mercy is great," he went on. "I have tried to live for my people and my country, not for myself. If I have failed to be a faithful husband, this is my plea to God, I have not thought of myself, or of my own, but of others."
After an hour he was quiet, and turning to Gaston he said,
"Charlie, go tell your mother to come here, I want to see her."
When she came, and sat down beside him with quiet dignity, she said, "Now Doctor, say what you wish, Charlie has told me much, but not all. Let us look into each other's souls to-day."
"I only want to ask you, dear," he said tenderly, "just how far your friendship for this villain may have led you. I know you are innocent of any crime. I only want to know the measure of my own guilt."
"You know, John," she said, using his first name, as she had not for years, "he has always interested me from a boy, and in the darkest hour of my heart's life, when I felt your love growing cold and slipping away from me, and my faith in all things fading, he attempted to make vulgar love to me. I repulsed him with scorn, and have since treated him with contempt. You know that I kissed him once when he was a boy. I have told you all. What do you propose to do?"
"What will I do, my darling?" he softly asked, taking her hand. "Begin anew from this moment to love and cherish, honour and protect you unto death. You are my wife. I took you a beautiful child, innocent of the world. If you have failed in the least, I have failed. If you have stumbled in the dark even in your thought, I will lift you up in my arms and soothe you as a mother would her babe. If you should fall into the bottomless pit, into the pit and down to the lowest depths of hell I would go, and lift you in the arms of my love. To break the tie that binds us is unthinkable. It has passed into the infinite. Not only are our souls one in a little boy's grave, but there is something so absorbing, so interwoven with the hidden things of nature in our union that I defy all the fiends in perdition to break it. Love is eternal. And your love for me was the great fixed thing in my life like my faith in the living God!"
"Oh, John, you are breaking my heart now, when I think that I doubted your love! I could have brooked your anger, but this overwhelms me!"
"It has always been my character," he gravely said.
"Then I have never known you until now,"—and in a moment she was sobbing on his breast, the years had rolled back, and they were in the sweet springtime of life again.