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.