"You have never known what it is," resumed the Secretary, speaking in short, choppy tones so unlike his usual manner that the voice might have belonged to another man, "to belong to the lowest class of our people—a class so low that even the negro slaves sneered at and despised it; to be born to a dirt floor, and a rotten board roof and four log walls! A goodly heritage, is it not? Was not Providence kind to me? And is it not a just and kind Providence?"
He laughed with concentrated bitterness, and a feeling of pity for this man whom he had been dreading so much stole over Prescott.
"We talk of freedom and equality here in the South," continued the Secretary, "and we say we are fighting for it; but not in England itself is class feeling stronger, and that is what we are fighting to perpetuate. I say that you have no such childhood as mine to look back to—the squalour, the ignorance, the sin, the misery, and above all the knowledge that you have a brain in your head and the equal knowledge that you are forbidden to use it—that places and honours are not for you!"
Again he fiercely kicked a clump of snow from his path and gazed absently across the fields toward the wintry horizon, his face full of passionate protestation. Prescott was still silent, his own position forgotten now in the interest aroused by this sudden outburst.
"If you are born a clod it is best to be a clod," continued the Secretary, "but that I was not. As I said, I have a brain in my head, and eyes to see. From the first I despised the squalour and the misery around me, and resolved to rise above it despite all the barriers of a slave-holding aristocracy, the most exclusive aristocracy in the world. I thought of nothing else. You do not know my struggles; you cannot guess them—the years and the years and all the bitter nights. They say that any oppressed and despised race learns and practises craft and cunning. So does a man; he must—he has no other choice.
"I learned craft and cunning and practised them, too, because I had to do so. I did things that you have never done because you were not driven to them, and at last I saw the seed that I had planted begin to grow. Then I felt a joy that you can never feel because you have never worked for an object, and never will work for it, as I have done. I have triumphed. The best in the South obey me because they must. It is not the title or the name, for there are those higher than mine, but it is the power, the feeling that I have the reins in my hand and can guide."
"If you have won your heart's desire why do you rail at fate?" asked Prescott.
"Because I have not won my wish—not all of it. They say there is a weak spot in every man's armour; there is always an Achilles' heel. I am no exception. Well, the gods ordained that I, James Sefton, a man who thought himself made wholly of steel, should fall in love with a piece of pink-and-white girlhood. What a ridiculous bit of nonsense! I suppose it was done to teach me I am a fool just like other men. I had begun to believe that I was exceptional, but I know better now."
"Then you call this a weakness and regret it?"
"Yes, because it interferes with all my plans. The time that I should be devoting to ambition I must sacrifice for a weakness of the heart."