"But quickly," urged John, "just a mad impulse, just a romantic impulse;
the feeling that I want to get you out of doors. You are like a flower
to me, just bursting into beautiful bloom. Better still, a wonderful
fruit, which in some sheltered spot has grown unplucked to a rich tinted
ripeness. You are so much a part of nature, so utterly unartificial,
that it seems I must see you and enjoy you first in a setting of
nature's own."
This was the frankest acknowledgment of her beauty and its appeal to him
that John had ever made. It seemed to Bessie that he made it now rather
unconsciously; but she saw that he felt it and was moved by it. To see
this gave her another delicious thrill of happiness. Indeed her girlish
breast was all a-tremble with joys, with curiosities, with expectancies.
She, too, felt something wonderful and intoxicating in this slight
physical contact of her lover's fingers. She felt herself upon the
verge of new and mysterious discoveries and recognized the naturalness
of the instinct to meet them under the vaulted blue with the warm sun
shining and the tonic breezes blowing past.
"Your impulse is right, John," Bessie answered, with quick assent and an
energetic double shake of the hands that held her own, and they went out
into the sunny street.
Not far from the Mitchell residence, on the western hills of Los
Angeles, is a little, painted park, with a maple-leaf sheet of water
embanked by closely shaved terraces of green, and once or twice a clump
of shrubbery crouching so close over graveled walks as to suggest the
thrill of something wild. From one of these man-made thickets a toy
promontory juts into the lake. Upon this point, as if it were a
lighthouse, is a rustic house, octagonal in shape, with benches upon its
inner circumference. Embowered at the back, screened half way on the
sides, and with the open lake before, this snug structure affords a
delicious sense of privacy and elfin-like seclusion, provided there be
no oarsmen pulling lazily or tiny sailboat loafing across the watery
foreground.
This day there was none. The stretch of lake in front stared vacantly.
The birds twittered in the boughs behind, unguardedly. The perfume of
jasmine or orange blossoms or honeysuckle or of love was wafted through
the rustic lattices; and here John and Bessie, seated side by side, were
able to feel themselves alone in the universe.
But it was so delightful just to have each other thus alone and know
that at any moment the great words so long preparing might be spoken,
that instinctively they postponed the blissful moment of avowal, with
vagrant talk on widely scattered subjects. Indeed, it seemed to each
that any word the other spoke was music, and anything was blissful that
engaged their minds in mutual contemplation. But nearer and nearer to
themselves the subjects of conversation drew until they talked of their
careers.
John, they agreed, was going to be something big,--very, very big;
though he still did not know what, and in the meantime he was going to
make money, yet not for money's sake.
As for Bessie, she, too, had developed an ambition and surprised John
into delightful little raptures with her statement of it.
"This country has been keeping bachelor's hall long enough," she
dogmatized, placing one slim finger affirmatively in the center of one
white palm. "Women are going to have more to do with government. Here
in California we'll be voting in a few years. When it comes, John, I'm
going to be ready for it."
The idea seemed so strange at first,--this dimpled creature
voting,--that John could not repress a smile. But Bessie, her blue eyes
round and sober, was too earnest to protest the smile.
"Father's going up the line; you know that, of course," she affirmed.
"He'll be a big man and rich almost before we know it; but they're not
going to make any social buzz-buzz out of little Bessie. That's why I'm
aiming at Stanford. I'm going in for political economy. When woman's
opportunity comes, there are lots of women that will be ready for it.
I'm going to be one of them."
Bessie nodded her head so emphatically that some crinkly brown locks
fell roguishly about her ears, and John was obliged to smile again; but
for all that the big man was very proud of the purpose so seriously
announced. Besides, with Bessie's manner more than her words there went
an impression of the growing depth and dignity of her character that was
to John as delightful as some other things his eyes were boldly busy in
observing. But presently these busy observations and reflections kindled
in him again an overwhelming sense of the wealth of woman in this
aspiring, dimpled girl. With this went an exciting vision of the bliss
which life holds in store for any mutually adapted man and woman where
each is consumed with desire for the other.
"Bessie!" he broke out impulsively, arising quickly and looking down
into her upturned, intent face. "Doesn't everything we've just been
talking about seem unimportant?"
Bessie's features expressed wonder and delightful anticipation.
"Beside ourselves, I mean," John went on, and then added impetuously:
"To me, this afternoon, there is just one fact in the universe, Bessie,
and that fact is YOU!"
The light of a shining happiness kindled like a flash on the girl's
face, and she threw out her hands to him in the old impulsive way.
"Just one thing I feel," John rushed along, seizing the outstretched
hands and playfully but tenderly lifting her until she stood before him,
"just one thing that I want to do in the world above everything else,
and that is to love you, Bessie, to love you!"
The words as he breathed them seemed to come up out of the deeps of a
nature rich in knowledge of what such love could mean.
Bessie, her face enraptured, did not speak, but her dimples behaved
skittishly, and there was a sharp little catch of her breath.
"Just one ambition stands out above every other," continued the man with
a noble earnestness--"the ambition to make you happy--to protect you, to
worship you, and to help you do the things you want to do in the world.
For marriage isn't a selfish thing! It doesn't mean the extinction of a
woman's career in order that a man may have his. It is the surrender of
each to the other for the greater happiness and the higher power of
both."
Suddenly a choke came in the big man's voice.
"That's what I feel, my dear girl," he concluded abruptly, with an
excess of reverence in his tones, "and that's what I want to do!"
As he spoke, John had lifted her hands higher and higher till one rested
on each of his shoulders. Man and woman, they looked straight into each
other's eyes, as they had that day upon the cliff, but this time it was
his lip that quivered and his eyes that misted over.
Bessie, sobered for a moment almost to a sense of unworthiness, as she
felt all at once what it meant for a great-hearted man to so declare
himself to a woman, saw something in that growing mist which impelled
her to immediately reward the tenderness of such devotion with a frank
confession of her own.
"Well," she breathed naively, "you have my permission to do all those
things. I'm sure, John, the biggest fact, the biggest love, the biggest
career in the world for me is just you!"
Bessie accompanied the words with an ecstatic little shrug of the
shoulders and a self-abandoning toss of the head.
Reverently John pressed his lips upon hers and held her close for a
very, very long time; while a thrill of indescribable bliss surged over
and engulfed him. His embrace was gentle, even reverent; but it seemed
he could not let her out of his arms. Here at last was one treasure he
could never surrender; one renunciation he could never make.
"And to think," sighed Bessie, after a long and blissful silence,
finding such rapture in nestling in those strong arms that she was still
unwilling to lift her head from where she could feel the beating of his
happy heart, "to think how long we have loved each other without
expressing it; how loyal we have been to each other's love even before
we had grown to recognize it for what it truly was."
Bessie looked up suddenly. It seemed to her that John's heart had done
a funny thing; that it staggered and missed a beat.
But John ignored her look. His face was set and stubborn. He changed
his position slightly and gathered her yet more determinedly in his
arms, so that Bessie felt again how strong he was, and how much it means
to woman's life to add a strength like that.
"Do you know, John," she prattled presently, out of the deepening bliss
which this enormous sense of security inspired, "do you know that I used
to fear for you? For me rather! To fear," she exclaimed with a happily
apologetic little laugh, "that you might fall in love with Marien
Dounay!"
But the laugh ended in a choke of surprise, when Bessie felt the body of
the big man shiver like a tree in a blast.
"Why? Why? What is the matter, John?" she asked in helpless
bewilderment, for the odd face with a profile like a mountain had taken
on a look of pain, and while she questioned him, he put her from him and
with a low groan sank down upon the bench.
* * * * *
The little summer house was still undisturbed by the rude, annoying
outer world; but its atmosphere had subtly changed. A chill wind blew
through the shrubbery and the fragrance of bush and flower was gone.
Even the sun, as if he could not bear to look, had dropped behind the
hill; for something had edged between the lovers.
Bessie's artless words made John remember as very, very near, what,
during this delicious hour in her presence, had seemed to be worlds and
worlds behind him, in fact made him feel his shame and guilt so deeply
that he could no longer hold her in his arms. Then the story of his
infatuation for Marien Dounay came out, as he had always felt it must,
sometime, for the purging of his own soul, even if it were she who would
suffer most,--the old, old law of vicarious suffering again!
Bessie listened with white, set face, while John resolutely spared
himself nothing in the telling, but when the look of hurt and pain took
up its abode permanently in those mild blue eyes, a feeling of yet more
terrible misgiving overtook him and he would have checked the story if
he could. But once started, his natural shrinking from hypocrisy
compelled him to tell the truth.
"You can never know how I have reproached myself for it," he concluded.
"I have suffered agonies of remorse. Wild with love of you, and the
impulse to declare that love, I have stayed away six months. It seemed
to me at first that I could hardly get my own consent to come at all
from her to you; that I must doom myself to perpetual loneliness to
expiate my sin. And yet, Bessie," John made the mistake of trying to
extenuate, "it was probably not altogether unnatural, knowing man as I
begin to know him."
To the young girl, facing the first bitter disillusionment of love, it
came like a flash of intuition that this last was true; that men were
like that--all men! They were mere brutes! This intuition maddened the
girl, and her disturbed emotions expressed themselves in a burst of
flaming anger.
"You may go back to Marien Dounay," she exclaimed hotly. "I do not want
her left-overs."
"But," protested John, with something of that sense of injury which a
man is apt to feel if forgiveness does not follow soon upon confession,
"you do not understand!"
"I understand," retorted Bessie with blazing sarcasm, "that you fell
hopelessly in love with this woman; that you embraced her, kissed her,
worshipped the ground she trod on; that you proposed to marry her almost
upon the spot; that she refused you and drove you from her; that for a
month you wrote me letters of hypocritical pretense; that when she
finally not only repulsed you but revealed herself to you as a woman
without character, you considerately revived your affections for me."
John felt that in this storm of words some injustice was being done him;
yet he could not deny that such an outburst of wrath upon Bessie's part
was natural, and he humbled himself before the blast.
In the vehemence of her demonstration, Bessie had arisen, and after the
final word stood with her back to her lover, looking out upon the little
lake which suddenly seemed a frozen sheet of ice.
"Bessie!" John murmured huskily, after an interval.
"Don't speak to me, don't!" she commanded hoarsely, without turning her
head.
John obeyed her so humbly and so completely that she began to wonder if
he were still there, or if he had sunk through the ground in the shame
and mortification which she knew well enough possessed him.
When she had wondered long enough, she turned and found him not only
there but in a pose so abject and utterly remorseful that her heart
softened until she felt the need of self-justification.
"You were my god," she urged. "You inspired me! I worshipped you! I
thought you were as fine a man as my own father--and finer because you
had a finer ambition. I thought you were grand, noble, strong!" Bessie
stopped with her emphasis heavy upon the final word.
"Is not the strong man the one who has found in what his weakness lies?"
John pleaded humbly.
But as before, his attempt at palliation seemed to anger her
unaccountably, and she turned away again with feelings too intense for
utterance--with, in fact, a dismal sense of the futility of utterance.
She wanted to get away from John. She wished he would not stand there
barring the door. She wished he would go while her back was turned. A
sense of humiliation greater than had possessed him, she was sure, had
come over her. If the lake in front had been sixty feet deep instead of
six inches, she might have flung herself into it.
"But you love me!" pleaded John from behind her, his voice coming up out
of depths.
"Do you think I would care how many actresses you lost your dizzy head
over if I didn't?" retorted Bessie petulantly, and instantly would have
given several worlds to recall the speech.
"No! No!" she continued, stamping her foot angrily, "I don't love you,
I love the man I thought you were."
"All the same, I love you," groaned John, rising up to proclaim his
passion hoarsely and then flinging himself again upon the bench, where
with head hanging despondently, he continued: "I love you, and I don't
blame you for hating me, and you can punish me as long as you want and
in any way you want. You can even try to fall in love with some one
else if you like. Marry him if you want to. I love you, and I'll keep
on loving you. No punishment is too great for the thing I've done."
The effect of this speech on the outraged Bessie was rather alarming to
that indignant young lady. When John began to heap the reproaches
higher upon himself, she felt a return to sympathetic consideration for
him that was so great she dared not trust herself to hear more of them.
"Take me home!" she commanded hurriedly, walking swiftly by him, but
with scrupulous care that the swish of her white skirts should not touch
the bowed head as she passed, and no more trusting herself to a second
glance at that dejected tawny mop of hair than to hear more of his
self-indictment.
*CHAPTER XVIII*
*THE HOUSE DIVIDED*
After parting from Bessie at her father's door, John spent twenty-four
hours in dumb agony at his hotel, devoting much time to uncounted
attempts to frame a letter to her. But the one which finally went by
the hands of a messenger was a mere cry that broke out of his heart. All
it brought back was an answering cry,--four pages with impetuous words
rioting over them. There were splotches of ink where the pen had been
urged too recklessly, and as John held it up to the electric light, he
tried to imagine there were watery stains upon it.
That night Hampstead left Los Angeles for San Francisco and spent an
aimless Saturday brooding upon the ocean beach, needing no sight of the
jutting Cliff House rocks upon which his lips had first touched Bessie's
to embitter his reflections. Sunday morning, however, as early as nine
o'clock, found him threading the graveled paths of the little park in
Encina, and taking his place upon the rustic bench across from the dingy
chapel. The cleat remained on the door. God was still nailed up!
John could not help thinking that he, too, was rather nailed up.
Drawing Bessie's last letter from his pocket, he held it very tenderly
for a time in his hand, then opened it to the final paragraph, which his
eyes read dimly through a mist that overspread his vision like a curtain
of fog.
"I shall always love you, John," her pen had sobbed, "--always; or at
least, it seems so now. But you have hurt me in what touches a woman
nearest. I have tried to understand--I think I have forgiven--but that
full confiding trust!--Oh, John!"
The letter didn't cut off hope exactly; but it didn't kindle any
bonfires, either. As John read it, he felt forlorn and helpless, and
perceived that he had made rather a mess of things generally.
And, in the meantime, there was absolutely nothing more important for
him to do than to sit on the park bench before this wretched-looking,
dishonored little church and watch to see whether any children came to
Sunday school.
Yes,--two were coming now. One was a little girl of six or seven, in a
smock immaculately white. She was bareheaded, but her flaxen locks were
bound with a bright blue ribbon that just matched the blue of her eyes.
Her stockings were white, and her shoes were patent leather and very
shiny. She walked with precise, proud steps, and looked down
occasionally at the glinting tips of her toes to make sure that they
were still unspotted. Once she stopped and touched them daintily with
the handkerchief she carried in her hand, and then glanced up and around
swiftly with a guilty look.
By her side walked little brother. He might have been four. He might
have been wearing his first pants; his feet might have been
uncomfortable; the elastic cord on his hat might have been pinching his
throat most irritatingly, and probably was; but for all of that he
trudged along sturdily, as careful of his four-year-old dignity as his
sister obviously was of her motherly office.
He stretched his legs, too, to take as long steps as she, which was not
so difficult, because his sister minced her gait a little.
Together they swung around the corner, and their feet pattered on the
board walk leading across the sod to the chapel. Involuntarily they
stopped a moment where Elder Burbeck had borrowed the plank, then
stepped over the hole and mounted with confident, straining steps to the
platform. The sister was now a little in advance, one hand holding her
brother's and lifting stoutly as he struggled to surmount the unnatural
height.
But the door of the church was closed. This nonplussed the little lady
for just a second, after which she thrust up her chubby hand and gave
the knob a turn. The door did not respond. She rattled the knob
protestingly, and then, looking higher, saw the plank nailed across.
At this the small miss stepped back confounded, to the accompaniment of
childish murmurings. Little brother did not understand. He clamored to
be admitted to his "Sunny Kool." The little woman tried again, but the
door baffled her most indifferently. However, after a moment of
wondering dismay, this tiny edition of the feminine retreated no farther
than to turn and sit down upon the steps, first dusting them carefully,
and inducing little brother to sit beside her. Strength had been
baffled, but faith was still strong.
"The eternal woman!" commented John reverently. "So Mary waited at the
tomb."
But other children were coming, and soon a fringe of little bodies was
sitting around the platform, and soon a border of little feet decorated
the second step, the girls' feet neatly, daintily composed; the boys'
feet restless, clumsier, beating an insistent tattoo as they awaited the
appearance of some grown-up who could admit them or explain.
"Teacher! Teacher!"
One little girl set up the shout, and like a bevy the smaller children
swarmed across the street and into the park to meet a very slender girl,
perhaps sixteen years of age, with her light brown hair in half a dozen
long, rolling curls that, snared at the neck by a wide ribbon, hung half
way down her back.
Attended eagerly by this childish court, the babble of their voices
rising about her, the girl mounted the steps, stood a moment in
confusion before the locked and barred door, then looked about her
helplessly, almost as the children had done.
"This is my cue," John declared with decision, rising from his seat and
crossing to the chapel.
"My name's Hampstead," he began, taking off his hat to the girl. "I
belong to the First Church, Los Angeles."
"How do you do, Brother Hampstead," she responded, in a voice that
expressed instant confidence, while her large eyes, blue as the sky,
lighted with pleasure and relief. "I am Helen Plummer, teacher of the
infant class."
"You seem to be embarrassed," John proceeded.
"Whatever shall I do?" confessed the young lady, looking at the barred
door, at her charges about her, and at John.
John laid his hand upon the plank at the end where it projected beyond
the edge of the little, coop-like vestibule, and gave it a tentative
pull. It did not spring much. Burbeck's nails had been long, and he had
driven them deep. But John was strong. He swung his weight upon the
end of the plank and it gave a little. He swung harder, and it yielded
more. Presently he heard a squeaking, protesting sound from the
straining nails, and increased his efforts till the veins knotted on his
forehead.
"Bet y' he can't," speculated an urchin whose chubby toes were frankly
barefoot and energetically digging into the sod of the lawn.
"Bet yuh he will," instantly countered another, shifting his gum.
"Oh, I do hope you can!" sighed the fairy thing with the curls down her
back and the eyes like the sky.
That settled it for John. This plank was coming off. Nevertheless,
there was a pause while he mopped his brow and considered. The result
of these considerations was to fall back for reinforcement on two
cobbles of unequal size chosen from the gutter, the larger of which he
used as a hammer while the smaller served as a wedge, till, with a final
wrench, the plank came free.
But Elder Burbeck had locked the door.
"A hairpin?" queried John of the sky blue eyes.
"I have not come to hairpins yet," blushed the teacher of the infant
class.
John remembered the buttonhook on his key ring, and after a few moments
of vigorous attack with that humble instrument the bolt shot
accommodatingly to one side and the door swung open.
"Thank you so much!" exclaimed the blue eyes, though the red lips of
pliant sixteen said never a word, but framed themselves in a very pretty
smile.
John acknowledged the smile with one of his broadest. At the same time,
he reflected that Miss Helen's failure to regard as seriously unusual
either the barred door or its violent opening was significant of the
state to which affairs in the little church had come; and it was with a
grim sense of duty well performed that the big man followed the trooping
children into the chapel and looked about him.
The building was small, yet somehow it appeared larger inside than out.
The utmost simplicity marked its furnishings. The seats were divided by
two aisles into a central block of sittings and two side blocks. The
pulpit was a mere elevated platform at one side, flanked by lower
platforms, one of which supported a cabinet organ. The dull red carpet
upon the floor was dreary looking; but the walls and ceilings were
neatly white, giving a suggestion of lightness and cheer quite out of
harmony with the circumstances under which John had entered it.
The twenty or more children massed themselves, as if by habit, upon the
front seats, and presently, with Helen at the organ, Hampstead had them
singing lustily one song after another, while the size of the audience
increased by occasional stragglers until, during the fourth song, two
women appeared, each rather breathless, and one with unmistakable
evidences of having got hurriedly into her clothes. John felt the eyes
of the women upon him suspiciously, and noticed that neither spoke to
the other, and that they took seats on opposite sides of the church.
At the end of the song, he walked over to the older of the two ladies,
who somehow had the look of a wife and mother in Israel, and said:
"My name's Hampstead,--First Church, Los Angeles."
"I'm Sister Nelson," replied the lady, a trifle stiffly. "I teach a
class of boys. But I thought the church was closed till I heard the
organ. Are you a minister?"
"Me? No!" And John smiled at the thought, but he also smiled
engagingly. Mrs. Nelson instantly liked and accepted him and allowed
her stiffness to melt somewhat.
"I just happened in," John explained, as he turned to cross toward the
young lady on the other side, who appeared, he thought, to eye him
rather more suspiciously after such cordial exchange with Mrs. Nelson.
"My name's Hampstead," he began. "First Church, Los Angeles. I just
happened in."
"I'm Miss Armstrong," replied the lady, with conviction, as if it were
something important to be Miss Armstrong. "I was teaching a class of
girls before Brother Aleshire left; or rather, was driven away!" and the
lady darted a look that ran across the little auditorium like a silver
wire straight at the uncompromising figure of Sister Nelson. "I thought
there wasn't to be any Sunday school until I heard the organ."
"Guess I'm responsible for that," replied John. "I just kind of butted
in."
Miss Armstrong did not ask John if he were a minister. She knew it was
unnecessary after he said "butted in." But she also felt the warmth of
his engaging smile and yielded to it after a searching moment, for he
really did look like a well-meaning young man.
Before the pulpit, and in front of the central block of chairs where the
children were gathered, was a huge irregular patch in the carpet. This
patch was about mid-way between the two outer plots of chair-backs, in
the midst of one of which, like a solitary outpost, sat the watchful
Mrs. Nelson, while Miss Armstrong performed grim sentinel duty in the
other.
To this patch in the carpet, as to the security of neutral ground, John
returned after establishing his identity and status with the two ladies,
and from that safely aloof position, after a moment of hesitancy,
ventured to announce:
"Since we seem somewhat disorganized this morning, I suggest that Sister
Nelson take all the boys, and Sister Armstrong take all the girls, while
Miss Helen will take the little folks, as usual."
It was evident from their respective expressions that Mrs. Nelson did
not know about this idea, and that Miss Armstrong also had her doubts;
but the children settled it. The tots rushed for the small platform on
the left of the pulpit which had some kindergarten paraphernalia upon
it, while the larger boys charged for Sister Nelson and began to arrange
the loose chairs in a circle about her. The larger girls made the same
sort of an advance upon Miss Armstrong.
Within five minutes, preliminaries were got out of the way, heads were
ducked toward a common center, and there rose in the little church that
low buzz of intense interest, possibly more apparent than real, which an
old-fashioned Sunday school gives off at recitation period, and which is
like no other sound in the world in its capacity to suggest the
peaceful, bee-like hum of industry and contentment.
Standing meditatively in the center of the open space before the pulpit,
thrilling with pleasure at the situation, feeling somehow that he had
created it, John heard with apprehension a quick heavy step in the
little entry, saw the swinging inside doors give back, and observed the
stern, red face of Elder Burbeck confronting him across the backs of the
middle bank of chairs.
The Elder had a fighting set to his jaw; he had his undertaker hat upon
his head; and he glared at John accusingly as if he instantly connected
him with the policy of the open door. But as if to make sure first just
what mischief had resulted, Elder Burbeck's glance swept the room,
taking in by turns Miss Armstrong with her girls, Sister Nelson with her
boys, and Miss Helen with her kindergarteners.
As the Elder gazed, his expression changed perceptibly, and he reached
up and took off his high hat, lowering it slowly, but reverently.
John, who had been standing perfectly still upon the patch, meek but
unabashed, experienced an odd sensation as he witnessed this manoeuvre.
It was dramatic and as if some presence were in the room which the Elder
had not expected to find there. Yet, notwithstanding this, the apostle
of the _status quo_ turned level, accusing eyes upon John across the
tiers of chairs, and began to advance down the aisle upon the right
where Sister Nelson had seated herself. John, at the same moment, began
a strategic forward movement upon his own account, so that the two met
midway.
"You broke open the house of the Lord," charged Elder Burbeck sternly.
"You nailed it up," rebutted John flatly, his features grave and his
whole face clothed in a kind of dignity that to Elder Burbeck was as
disconcerting as it was impressive.
[Illustration: "You nailed it up," rebutted John flatly.]
The Elder opened his mouth to speak but closed it again without doing
so. Something in the very atmosphere was a rebuke to him. Perhaps it
was the presence of the Presence! He had indeed nailed up the house of
the Lord! He thought he had done a righteous thing, but under this young
man's eyes, burning with an odd spiritual light, before his calm, strong
face, and in the presence of these children, the accusation smote the
Elder deep. He began to suspect that he had done a doubtful act.
"Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins," piped a high voice
sharply at his elbow, and Elder Burbeck started guiltily, as if his
conscience had shouted the sentiment aloud. It was only one of Sister
Nelson's boys singing out the text; nevertheless, the Elder was as
shaken as if he had heard a voice from on high.
But at this juncture John Hampstead put out his hand cordially. Elder
Burbeck took it--tentatively, almost grudgingly,--and was again dismayed
to feel how strong that hand was and to observe how, without apparent
effort, it shook him all over, as it had shaken him that day upon the
walk outside. Yet the Elder mustered once more the spirit of protest.
"The church was closed by order of the District Evangelist," he urged,
but his urging, even to himself, sounded strangely lacking in force.
"It was opened in the name of Him who said 'Suffer little children to
come unto me and forbid them not,'" replied the interloper, quietly and
emphatically, but not offensively.
In the meanwhile the subtle cordiality of John's manner did not abate
but seemed rather to grow, for, still clinging to the Elder's hand,
Hampstead walked with him back down the aisle to the open space before
the pulpit. Burbeck felt himself strangely subdued. He was minded to
rebel, to flame up; but somehow he couldn't. Yet Sister Nelson's eye
was upon him, and it would imperil his own leadership to appear beaten
by this mild-mannered young man who assumed so much so coolly and
executed his assumptions so masterfully. The alternative strategy which
suggested itself to the mind of the Elder was to take the lead in
showing that he recognized the intrusion of Hampstead as somehow an
intervention from which good might come. To make this strategy
effective, however, action must be immediate; but the shrewd Elder was
easily equal to that. Sniffing the air critically for a moment, he
announced, loudly enough to be heard by all, even by Sister Nelson, busy
with her boys:
"You need some windows open, Brother Hampstead! You go on with your
superintending; I'll attend to that myself."
Immediately the Elder laid his tall hat upon the pulpit steps and busied
himself with opening the windows at the top.
John watched him with carefully concealed amazement, until an
unmistakable awe settled in upon him; for here was obviously the
exhibition of a mystery,--the demonstration of a power within him not
his own. Here was something he had not done; yet which had been done
through him, through the presence of the Presence.
As the lesson hour proceeded, a trickling stream of adults began to
filter in. Their attitude, any more than Burbeck's had been, was not
that of people who enter a house of worship. Surprise, excitement,
conflict was written on their faces. They took seats in one side
section with Elder Burbeck and Miss Nelson, or upon the other side with
Miss Armstrong; and then, between fierce looks across the abyss of
chair-backs at the "disturbing element,"--the other side in a church
quarrel is always that,--they bent a curious watchful eye on Hampstead.
At first the notes of the organ had notified those in the immediate
neighborhood that the house of God was no longer nailed up. Members of
each party, fearful that the other might gain an advantage, began at
once to spread the news in person and by telephone, so that now all over
Encina women were struggling with hooks and eyes and curling irons, and
men were abandoning Sunday papers and slippers on shady porches,
shaving, dressing, and rushing in hot haste to the battle line.
When the children filed out, the opposing groups of adults remained
buzzing among themselves like angry hornets, but with no more
communication between the two ranks than bitter looks afforded.
John, extremely desirous of getting well out of the zone of hostilities,
was actually afraid to leave these belligerent Christians alone
together. He thought they might break into pitched battle; the women
might pull hair, the men swing chairs upon each other's heads. His
fears were abruptly heightened by a series of violent bumps on the steps
outside, followed by a trundling sound in the vestibule as if a cannon
were being unlimbered. Instantly, too, every face in the little chapel
turned at the ominous sounds, but John was puzzled to observe that the
expression of even the bitterest was softened at the prospect.
This was explained in part when there appeared through the swinging
inner doors not the muzzle of a fieldpiece, but a lady in a wheel chair,
who, though her dark hair had begun to silver, was dressed in youthful
white and had about her the air of one who refused to allow mere
invalidism to triumph over the stoutness of her spirit.
Her vehicle was propelled by a solemn looking Japanese, and as if by
long understanding, one man slipped forward immediately from each
faction, and the two made a way among the chairs for the Oriental to
roll his charge to the exact center of the unoccupied middle bank of
sittings.
Bestowing on each helper a look of gratitude from her dark eyes, which
were large and luminous, the lady sent a benignant smile before her
round the church like one whose presence sweetens all about it.
Evidently she was one member of the congregation who observed a
scrupulous neutrality while holding the affection and regard of all.
"The Angel of the Chair!" murmured Miss Plummer in John's ear, as she
passed to a seat with Miss Armstrong.
John looked again at the form in the chair, so frail and orchid-like,
with its delicately chiseled face and its expression of courageous
spirituality. Remembering how the features of all had softened at the
sound of the wheels, he felt that she well deserved the title. This
impression of her saintly character was somehow heightened by a chain of
large jet beads ending in a cross of the same material, which the
whiteness of the gown outlined sharply upon her breast; so that John
found himself instinctively leaning upon her as a possible source of
inspiration and relief.
From her position of carefully chosen neutrality, the Angel of the Chair
immediately beckoned Miss Armstrong to her from one side and Elder
Burbeck from the other. Each approached, without in any way recognizing
the presence of the other; and Miss Armstrong was apparently asked to
detail what had happened, Burbeck's part, it would seem, being to amend
if the narrative did his faction less than justice.
The story finished, and the Elder nodding his assent to it, the Angel of
the Chair dismissed her informants and turned a welcoming glance on
John, who advanced with extended hand, but judging that his formula of
introduction was now unnecessary.
"I am Mrs. Burbeck," the lady said pleasantly in a rich contralto voice.
Hampstead all but gasped. This delicate, spirituelle creature that
hard, red-faced partisan's wife! It seemed impossible.
But Mrs. Burbeck was composedly taking from her lap a twist of tissue
paper from which she unrolled a simple boutonniere, consisting of one
very large, very corrugated and very fragrant rose geranium leaf, upon
which a perfect white carnation had been laid.
"Do you know, Mr. Hampstead," she went on placidly, "what I am going to
do?" and then, as John looked his disclaimer, continued: "I have always
been allowed the privilege of bringing a flower for the minister's
button-hole. Brother Ingram would never take his flower from any one
else. When the rain kept me away, he would not wear a flower at all.
Brother Aleshire also took his flower from me."
"But," protested John, in sudden alarm, "I am not a minister at all, you
know. I just happened in, and I assure you that all I am thinking of
now is a way to happen out."
The Angel, it appeared, was a woman with deeps of calm strength in her.
"You have been a real minister in what you have done this morning," she
said contentedly, entirely undisturbed by John's embarrassed frankness.
"But how am I going to get out from under?" gasped the young man,
feeling more and more that he could trust this woman.
The Angel of the Chair smiled inspiringly.
"The Scripture has no rule for getting out from under," she suggested
quietly, "but there is something about not letting go of the plow once
you have grasped the handles."
The Angel was looking straight up at John now, searching his eyes for a
moment, then adding significantly:
"I do not think you are a quitting sort of person."
A quitting sort! John could have blessed this woman. In two sentences
she had felt her way to the principle he had tried to make the very
center of his character,--loyalty to duty and everlasting persistence.
Some people rather thought he was a quitting sort. John knew he was
not, and to prove it bent till his buttonhole was in easy reach of the
hands uplifted with the flower.
"And what," he asked, "does the minister do when he has received this
decoration from the Angel of the Chair?"
It was Mrs. Burbeck's turn to feel a flush of pleasure at this
appellation from a stranger.
"Why," she smiled, her large eyes lighting persuasively, "he goes into
the pulpit and announces a hymn."
"Which I am not going to do," declared John, "because I should not know
what to do next."
"In that hour it shall be given you," quoted the lady.
Now it was very strange, but when Mrs. Burbeck quoted this, it did not
seem like an appeal to faith at all, but the simple statement of a fact.
It chimed in, too, with that odd suggestion of the presence of the
Presence, which had come to John a while ago.
Feeling thereby unaccountably stronger, and endued with a sort of moral
authority as if he had just taken Holy Orders because of the carnation
which bloomed so chastely white upon his breast, John squared his
shoulders and mounted into the pulpit. There was something that God
wanted to say to these people, and he accepted the situation as an
obvious call to him to say it, but when he essayed to speak, awe came
upon him, as it had a while before.
"Brethren," he confessed humbly, in a voice barely audible to all, "I am
not a preacher. I haven't got any text, and I don't know what to say,
except just perhaps to tell you how I happened to be here this morning."
Then he told them simply and unaffectedly but with unconscious eloquence
how he happened to see the church nailed up and how it sounded like the
echo of the blows upon the cross; how, this morning, with a sad ache in
his own heart, the thought of the faith of little children disturbed by
that brutal plank upon the door had brought him all the way over here
from his home in San Francisco and led him to do what he had done. He
even told them of his meditative comparison between the houses of people
that looked so happy and the house of God that looked so unhappy.
But while John was relating this modestly, yet with some of the fervor
of unction and some comfortable degree of self-forgetfulness, he was
interrupted by a sound like a sob, and looking down beyond Elder Burbeck
to where Sister Nelson sat, he was surprised to see a handkerchief
before her eyes and her shoulders trembling. Over on the other side,
too, handkerchiefs were out, so that John suddenly realized that he or
somebody had touched something.
Who had done it? What had caused it? Once more there came to the young
man that eerie consciousness of a power within him not himself, and the
feeling frightened him.
"That's all I have to say, brethren," he declared abruptly, his voice
growing suddenly hollow. "I am terrified. I want to get away!"
Without even the singing of a hymn, John lifted his hand, bowed his
head, and murmured something that was to pass for a benediction.
*CHAPTER XIX*
*HIS NEXT ADVENTURE*
Yet once out of the pulpit, John's sense of terror seemed to leave him.
With some of the people coming forward to press his hand and even to
wring it; with the Angel of the Chair giving him a wonderful look from
her luminous eyes, he began to feel strangely, happily satisfied with
himself,--as though adrift upon an unknown sea but without fear and
joyously eager for the next adventure.
That adventure came when blue-eyed Helen of the Infant Class said
pleadingly:
"Oh, Brother Hampstead! Will you call on Sister Showalter this
afternoon and read a chapter? She is very ill and lonely."
"Yes," assented John recklessly. "But explain who it is that's
coming--a book agent--to read to her."
John had no idea who Mrs. Showalter was; but they gave him a number. He
had no idea what a professional clergyman reads to a sick woman; but
that afternoon he pushed his little New Testament in his hip pocket
somewhat as Brother Charles Thompson Campbell used to do, and went out
upon his errand.
A faded, hollow-eyed, middle-aged woman met him at the door, with a face
so somber that in his instant thought and ever after, John dubbed her
the Gloom Woman.
"My name is Hampstead," he explained. "I called to see the sick lady."
"My mother!" answered the woman, in tones as somber as her countenance.
"She has been asking for you for an hour. She is very low to-day. The
doctor is with her and he is apprehensive."
Through air that was close with a sickish, sweetish smell, accounted for
by large vases of flowers and by a small Chinese censer with incense
burning in it, past furnishings, that were meager, stuffy, and
old-fashioned, John was conducted to a large square room with the blinds
drawn low. In the center of this room was a huge black walnut bedstead,
with the head rising pompously high. By the far side of the bed sat a
professional looking man in the fifties, with his chin buried in his
hand and his eyes meditatively fixed upon a very old and dreary face
amid the banked-up pillows,--a face of purplish hue that seemed without
expression except for a lipless, sunken mouth, and eyes that glowed
dully under sagging heavy lids.
"Mother!" said the woman, speaking loudly, as if to waken a soul from
the depths, "this is Brother Hampstead!"
The aged eyes roamed the shadows anxiously for a moment, while a
withered purple hand felt its way about upon the coverlet till John
touched it timidly with his. Instantly and convulsively the old fingers
gripped the young, with a pressure that to the caller was damp and
deathly.
The woman appeared to John almost lifeless. He felt embarrassment and
resentment. Why didn't they tell him she was like this?
The hand was tugging at him, too, like a sort of undertow, pulling him
down and over. The watery old eyes were fixed upon him. John's
embarrassment increased. What did the poor creature want? To kiss him?
What does a minister do in such a case, he wondered, sweat breaking out
on his brow.
"I think she wants to say something; bend low so you can hear her,"
suggested the mournful voice of the Gloom Woman. John bent over till he
felt the patient's hectic breath upon his cheek, and shrank from it.
"The minister of God!" croaked the voice so faintly that the words
barely traveled the necessary six inches to his ear.
No man ever felt less like the minister of God. Hampstead was hot,
flustered, self-conscious, almost irritated.
But again he felt the hand like an undertow, tugging him down.
"Read to me!" croaked the ghost of a voice.
This was something to do. A curtain was raised slightly so that the
visitor could see, and he read the twenty-third Psalm and the
twenty-fourth.
As Hampstead read, his embarrassment departed. He began to find a joy
in what he was doing. He let his rich voice play upon the lines
sympathetically and had a suspicion that he could feel the strength of
the sick woman reviving as he read.
"She likes to have the minister pray with her," said the voice of the
Gloom Woman from the background, when the reading was concluded.
Again John stood gazing helplessly, till the old hand dragged him down,
and sinking upon his knees beside the bed, he found that words came to
him, and he lost himself in them. His sympathy, his faith, his own sore
heart and its needs, all poured themselves into that prayer.
Once or twice as words flowed on, Hampstead felt the old hand tugging,
as though the undertow were pulling at it, and then he noticed after a
time that he did not feel these tuggings any more; but when the prayer
was finished and he rose from his knees, the grip of the hand did not
release itself. Instead, the fingers hung on, rather like hooks, so
that John darted a look of inquiry at the purplish face upon the
pillows. To his surprise, the chin had dropped and the eyes had closed
sleepily.
The doctor, who had been sitting with his hand upon the pulse, gently
placed the wrist which he had held across the aged breast and stood
erect, with an expression of decision which no one could misread.
"Oh!" sobbed a voice from the gloom.
Hampstead felt a sudden sense of shock, and his knees swayed under him
sickeningly. That was death there upon the pillow; and that was death
with its bony hooks about his palm. Sister Showalter had gone out with
the undertow that pulled at her while he was praying.
John lifted his hand helplessly.
"It--it doesn't let go," he whispered.
The doctor glanced at the embarrassed Hampstead searchingly, then
reached over and straightened the aged fingers.
"Young man," said the physician earnestly and even reverently. "She
clung to you as she went down into the waters. For a time I felt your
young strength actually holding her back, and then your words seemed to
make her strong enough to push off boldly of her own accord. It is a
great thing, my friend," and the doctor seemed deeply affected, "to have
strength enough and sympathy and faith enough to rob death of its terror
for a feeble soul like that--a very great thing!"
The earnestness of the doctor brought a lump into John's throat.
"Thank you, sir," he murmured, but immediately was lost in looking
curiously at the thing upon the pillows.
"You have another duty," said the physician, nodding toward the shadows
at the back, where a single heart-broken wail had been followed by a
convulsive sobbing.
John went and stood beside the Gloom Woman.
"Mother is go--h-h-gone!" she sobbed.
"Yes," said Hampstead simply.
And somehow he didn't feel embarrassed at all now by the presence of
death. He did not hesitate as to what to do. He just put out his hand
and laid it in a brotherly way on the woman's shoulder, noticing as he
did so that it was a frail, bony shoulder, and that it trembled as much
from weakness as with emotion.
"Let the tears flow, sister," he suggested, "it is good for you."
And the tears did flow, like rivers, and all the while John's speech was
flowing in much the same way, and with tears in it, until presently the
woman looked up at him, surprised both at the manner and the matter of
his speech. Was it he who had spoken,--this man who said he was only a
book agent?
John too was surprised at his words, at their tone, at the superior
faith and wisdom which they expressed. He really did not know he was
going to say them. When spoken, it did not seem as if it could have
been he that had uttered them, and he had again that awesome sense of a
power within him not himself.
"You _are_ a minister of God!" declared the Gloom Woman with sudden
conviction.
Hampstead trembled. This was what the dead had whispered to him. It
frightened him then, it frightened him now. He was not a minister of
God. He was a man misplaced. He wanted to get out and fly. Yet before
he could check her, the Gloom Woman had raised his hand and kissed it.
This made him want to fly more than ever; but he managed first to ask:
"Is there anything more that I can do?"
There was, it seemed, and he did it; and then, getting into the outside
as expeditiously as possible, he filled his lungs with long, refreshing
drafts of the sun-filtered ozone and found his footsteps leading him, as
if by a kind of instinct of their own, down one of the short side
streets to where the waters of the Bay lapped soothingly against the
sea-wall.
But the Bay zephyrs could not wash that series of vivid experiences,
half-ghastly and half-inspiring, out of mind.
He had blundered, all unprepared, into the presence of death. His sense
of the fitness of things revolted. He was unworthy--unable--unclean.
He--a book agent! a rate clerk! an actor! who had held Marien Dounay in
his arms and felt his body thrill at the beating of her heart!
Yet this old woman had called him a minister of God! This Gloom Woman
too had called him the same. Minister! Minister! What was it?
Minister meant to serve. A servant of God! But he had not served God!
At least not consciously. He had only served humanity a little. He had
served the old woman as a prop to her fears, like an anchor to her soul
when she drifted out into the deeper running tide that ebbs but never
floods. He had served the Gloom Woman when he stood beside her while
she opened the tear-gates of her grief.
It was very little! Yet that much he had really served. To reflect upon
it now gave him a sense of elation greater than when he had beaten
Scofield and his tariff department; greater than when he had quelled the
mob at the People's; greater than when he had crushed Marien in his arms
like a flower; greater even than when Bessie had looked her love into
his eyes.
He began to perceive that his life was surely mounting from one plane to
another and reflected that he had reached the highest plane of all
to-day when the Angel of the Chair had pinned upon his coat the badge of
Holy Orders; when this other saint, sinking into the dark tide, had
hailed him a minister of God! Highest of all, when this Gloom Woman,
out of her soul's Gethsemane, had wrung his hand and kissed it so purely
and also hailed him as Minister of God!
For some weeks the little chapel in Encina, its troubles and its
troubled members, continued to exercise a strange fascination over John.
Each Sunday he shepherded the Sunday school and talked a blundering
quarter of an hour to the older folk who gathered; while between Sundays
he devoted an astonishing portion of his time to visiting these
wrangling Christians in their homes, for the ambition to heal this
disgraceful quarrel had taken hold on him like some knightly passion.
And in the midst of all these busy comings and goings, odd,
half-humorous reflections upon his own status used to break in upon
John's mind. Not a self-respecting church in the communion, he knew,
but would have eyed him askance because he had been an actor. Only this
little helpless church, whose condition was so miserable it could not
reject any real help, accepted him; and that merely in a relation that
was entirely unofficial and undefined. Still a sense of his fitness for
this particular task grew upon him continually; and it was really
astonishing how every experience through which he had passed had
equipped him for his peacemaker task: most of all those pangs endured
because of his break with Bessie, which, although eating into his heart
like an acid, yielded a kind of ascetic joy in the pain as if some sort
of character bleaching and expiation were at work within him.
In the meantime, an arbitration committee consisting of the District
Evangelist, Brother Harding, and Professor Hamilton, the Dean of the
Seminary, was at work upon the affairs of the little church. Both wings
consented to this, but with misgivings, since the one man they were
really coming to trust was Hampstead himself; and when the night for the
report of the arbitration committee arrived, each faction turned out in
full strength, with suspicions freshly roused, and all a-buzz with angry
conversation as if the church were a nest of wasps.
"Things are pretty hot," remarked the Dean under his breath, coming up
to read the report.
"They are awful," groaned the District Evangelist.
John presided, standing carefully on his neutral patch in the carpet,
and was dismayed and sickened by this new and terrible display of
feeling. He had come to know a very great deal about these people in
the last few weeks; he had seen how some of these men struggled to make
a living; how some of these women bore awful crosses in their hearts;
how sickness was in some houses, cold despair in others; how much each
needed the strength, the joy, the consolation of religion, and how large
a mission there was for this church and for its minister.
But the Dean was reading his report now, in a high, lecture-room voice.
It was very brief.
"As for the matters at issue," it confessed, "your committee finds it
humanly impossible to place the responsibility for this regretful
division. It believes the only future for the congregation is in a
wise, constructive, forward-moving leadership which can forget the past
entirely.
"It finds that such a leadership now exists in one thoroughly familiar
with the difficulties of the situation and enjoying the confidence of
both factions; and it recommends that this congregation make sure the
future by calling to its pastorate the one man whom the committee
believes supremely fitted for the task, our wise and faithful brother,
John Hampstead."
The congregation had not thought of Hampstead as a minister. He had not
permitted them to do so. To them this recommendation was a surprise.
But to John it was a shock! His face turned a faded yellow. His eyes
wandered in a hunted way from the face of the Dean to that of the
Evangelist, and then slowly they swept the congregation to meet
everywhere looks of approval at the Dean's words.
"But," he protested breathlessly, like a man fighting for air, "I am not
a minister. I am a book agent. I have been an actor. I am unfit to
stand before the table of the Lord, to hold the hand of the dying, to
speak consolation to the living beside the open grave! I am
unfit--unfit--for any holy office!"
But his desperate protestation sounded unconvincing even to himself. He
had been doing some of these things already and with a measure at least
of acceptation. All at once it seemed as if there was no resisting, as
if a trap had been laid for him and for his liberties; and he struck out
more vehemently:
"Think what it means, you young men! I ask you especially--" and John
held out his hands towards them, scattered through the audience--"What
it means to abandon life and the world by donning the uniform of the
professional clergyman! Wherever you go, in a train, in a restaurant,
upon a street, you are no longer free, but a slave--to forms and to
conventions. You must live up, not to your ideal of what a minister is,
but to the popular ideal of how a minister should appear. It is a vow
to hypocrisy!
"It is a vow also to loneliness. The minister is cut off from the life
of other men. No man thereafter feels quite at ease in his presence,
but puts on something or puts off something, and the minister never sees
or feels the real man except by accident.
"For a few weeks," and John lowered his voice to a more tempered note,
"I have been happy to do some service among you; but I was free! As I
walked down the street I wore the uniform of business. No man could
say: 'There goes a priest; watch him!'
"Listen!" In the silence John himself appeared to be listening to some
debate that went on within himself, and when he began to speak once more
it was with the chastened utterance of one who takes his hearers into a
sacred confidence.
"I have had ambitions, brethren, and I have given them up. I have had a
great love and all but lost it. Failures have humbled me.
Disappointment and surrenders have taught me some of the true values of
life. I have tried to gain things for myself and lost them. When I
think of seeking anything for myself again, after my experiences, I feel
very weak and can command no resolution; but when I think of seeking
happiness for others, for little children in particular, for wives and
mothers, for all women, in fact, with their capacity to love and trust;
for striving, up-climbing men--yes, and the weak ones too, for I have
learned that the flesh is very weak--when I think of seeking the good of
humanity at large, I feel immensely strong and immensely determined.
For that I am ready to bury my life in the soil of sacrifice, but not
professionally!
"I hate sham. I hate professionalism. I am done with part-playing. I
will not do it. I cannot be your minister!"
John's last words rang out sharply, and the audience, seeing that the
heart of a man with an experience had been shown to them, sat breathless
and still expectant.
In the silence, the voice of the District Evangelist was presently
audible.
"Brother Hampstead," he was saying quietly, "is a man I don't exactly
understand, but I think in his very words of protest he has given us the
reasons why he should be a minister, and he has revealed to us why he
has gained your confidence. Because of his humility and his sincerity,
I feel that I can trust him. You feel that you can."
"But," protested John, with a gesture of desperation, "I am not educated
for the ministry."
"You have something more needed here than education," interjected the
Dean of the Seminary, still in his lecture-room voice. "Besides, the
seminary is but ten miles away, by street car. You may complete the
full three years' course at the same time you are making this little
church into a big one!"
Something in John's breast leaped at the prospect of a college course,
and the idea of making a little church into a big one appealed to his
inborn passion for definite achievement; yet with it all came once more
the feeling that he was being hopelessly and helplessly entangled.
"But," he struggled, looking with moist, appealing eyes, first at
Hamilton and then at Harding, "I have not been ordained, and I have no
call!"
"No call?" queried Dean Hamilton, laughing nervously, as was his way of
modifying the intensity of the situation. "Your capacity to do is your
call."
"Being honest with yourself, do you not believe that you can save this
church?" argued Brother Harding.
John felt that he could, but his soul still strained within him, and his
eyes roved over the audience, the corners of the room and the very beams
in the ceiling, as if seeking a way of escape.
Suddenly a man stood up in the back of the church.
"Will he take a side?" this man demanded excitedly, with hoarse
impatience. "What side is he on?"
The very crassness of this partisan creature, so seething with personal
feeling that he understood nothing of the young man's agony of soul,
lashed the tender sensibilities of Hampstead like a scourge, so that all
his nature rose in protest. From a figure of cowering doubt, he
suddenly stood forth bold and challenging.
"No!" he thundered. "I will not take a side! The curse of God is upon
sides, and every man and every woman who takes a side in His church! I
will take the Lord's side. I challenge every one of you who is willing
to leave his or her petty personal feeling in this controversy, for
to-night and forever, to come out here and stand beside me. I place my
life career upon the issue. I will let your coming be my call. If you
call me, I will answer. If you do not, God has set me free from any
responsibility to you."
The questioning partisan sank down abashed before such prophetic fervor.
John stood waiting. No eye looked at any other eye but his. The
silence was electric and pregnant, but brief, broken almost immediately
by a low, rumbling sound and the rattle of wheels against chairs. The
Angel of the Chair, propelling her vehicle herself, was coming to take
her place beside John.
She had barely reached the front when the tall form of Elder Burbeck was
seen to advance stiffly and offer his hand to Hampstead.
The venerable Elder Lukenbill, goat-whiskered and doddering, leader of
the Aleshire faction, hesitated only long enough to gloat a little at
this spectacle of his rival, Burbeck, eating humble pie, and then,
prodded from behind, arose and careened on weak knees down the aisle.
Others began to follow, till presently it seemed that the whole church
was moving; everybody stood up, everybody slipped forward, or tried to.
Failing that, they spoke, or laughed, or sobbed, or shook hands with
themselves or some one near; then craned on tiptoe to see what was
happening down where half the church was massed about the two elders,
about the Dean and the Evangelist and John.
Abruptly the tall forms of these men sank from view; then the front
ranks of people, crowding around, also began to sink, almost as ripe
grain bows before a breeze, until even the people at the back could see
that Brother Hampstead was kneeling, with the yellow crest of his hair
falling in abandon about his face.
The long, skeleton hand of Elder Lukenbill was sprawled over John's
bowed head, overlapped aggressively by the stout, red fingers of Elder
Burbeck, while the dapper digits of the Dean of the Seminary capped and
clasped the two hands and tangled nervously in the tawny locks
themselves.
"With this laying on of hands," the Dean was saying, still in that high
lecture-room cackle, although his tone was deeply impressive, "I ordain
thee to the ministry of Jesus Christ!"
When, succeeding this, the voice of the District Evangelist had been
heard in prayer, there followed an impressive waiting silence, in which
no one seemed to know quite what to do, except to gaze fixedly at the
face of John Hampstead, which continued as bloodless and as motionless
as chiseled marble; until, bowed in her chair, as if she brooded like a
real angel over the kneeling congregation, the rich contralto voice of
Mrs. Burbeck began to sing:
"Take my life and let it be
Consecrated, Lord, to Thee,
Take my hands and let them move
At the impulse of Thy love."
Presently her voice changed to "Nearer My God to Thee", while other
voices joined until the whole church was filled with the sound, and when
the last note had died, the very air of the little chapel seemed
tear-washed and clear.
In this atmosphere John Hampstead arose, and when one hand swept back
the yellow mass of hair, a kind of glory appeared upon his brow. Once
an actor, once a man of ambition, he was now consecrated to the service
of humanity.
But he had not surrendered his love for Bessie Mitchell, and Marien
Dounay was still in the world, mounting higher and higher toward the
goal she had imperiously set for herself.
*CHAPTER XX*
*A WOMAN WITH A WANT*
Five years walked along, and great events took place. The earthquake
seized the San Francisco Bay district and shook it as a dog shakes a
rat. Fire swept the great city on the peninsula almost out of
existence; it made rich men poor, and hard hearts soft--for a few days
at least--and by shifting populations and business centers, affected the
east side of the Bay almost as much as the west, so that in all that
water-circling population there was no business and no society, no man
or woman or child even, that was thereafter quite as it or he or she had
been.
In this seething ferment of change nothing altered more than the
circumstances of John Hampstead. He had buried himself and found
himself. He had sought relief in a self-abandoning plunge into
obscurity, yet never had a minister so humble gained such burning
prominence. The town hung on him. Men who never went to church at all
leaned upon him and upon the things they read about him from day to day.
He had gone upon a thousand missions of mercy; he had fought for his
lambs like a lion; he had faced calumny; he had dared personal assault.
He had triumphed in all his conflicts and stood out before this
sprawling, half metropolitan, half-suburban community of half a million
people as a man whom it trusted--too much almost.
Under his ministry in these five years, the wretched little chapel had
grown into the great All People's Church. To attend All People's was a
fad; to belong to it almost a fashion. The newspapers daily made its
pastor into a hero, and the moral element in the population looked upon
him as its most fearless champion and aggressive leader.
But into this situation and into All People's one morning a woman came
walking, with power to shake it more violently than an earthquake could
have done.
The choir was just disposing of the anthem. The Reverend John Hampstead
sat, but not at ease, in his high pulpit chair, which, somehow, this
morning reminded him of the throne chair of Denmark upon its stage in
that barn of a theater which at this very instant was only five
years--and five miles--distant; the chair from which he used to arise
suddenly to receive the rapier thrust of his nephew, Hamlet. This
morning a vague uneasiness filled him, as if he were about to receive a
real rapier thrust.
The minister's sermon outline was in his hand, but his eye roamed the
congregation. It took note of who was there and who was absent; it took
note of who came in; but suddenly the eye ceased to rove and started
forward in its socket.
Deacon Morris was escorting a lady down the right-center aisle. To
distinction of dress and bearing the newcomer added a striking type of
beauty. Her figure was tall, combining rounded curves and willowy
grace. In the regularity of its smooth chiseling, her profile was purely
Greek. The eyes were dark and lustrous, the cheeks had a soft bloom
upon them, the lips were ripely red; and if art had helped to achieve
these contrasts with a skin that was satiny smooth and of ivory
creaminess, it was an art contributory and not an art subversive.
"More beautiful than ever!" murmured the minister with the emphasis of
deep conviction.
The lady accepted a sitting well to the front. Her head was reverently
bowed for an interval and then raised, while the black eyes darted one
illuminative glance of recognition at the man in the pulpit, a glance
that made the minister start again and confess to himself an error by
admitting beneath his breath: "No, not more beautiful--more powerful!"
Lengthened scrutiny confirmed this judgment. Soft contours had yielded,
though ever so slightly, to lines of strength. There was greater
majesty in her bearing. She was less appealing, but more commanding.
John reflected that it was rather impossible it should be otherwise.
The man or the woman who fights and conquers always sacrifices lines of
beauty to those muscle clamps of strength which seem to sleep but
ill-concealed upon the face.
And Marien Dounay had conquered! In five years she had mounted to the
top. With the memory of her latest Broadway triumphs still ringing,
this very day her name would be mentioned in every dramatic column in
every Sunday paper in America. To have uttered that name aloud in this
congregation would have caused every neck to crane.
Alone conscious of her presence, John found himself counting the cost of
her success. Part of that cost he could see tabulated on her face.
Another part of it was the grisly and horrible intimation to the
loathsome Litschi, which he had overheard on the unforgetable night in
the restaurant. He found himself assuming that she had paid this latter
price and experienced a feeling of revulsion at recalling how once this
woman's mere presence, the glance of an eye, the touch of a hand, the
purring tones of her voice, had been sufficient to melt him with
unutterable emotions. This morning, gazing at her through that peculiar
mist of apprehension, almost of fear, that had been clouding his mind
since before her entry, John knew that she was a more dangerous woman
now than then; and yet the same glance showed that she was not dangerous
to him, for the dark eyes looked at him hungrily, with something
strangely like adoration in them, and there was an expression of longing
upon the beautiful face.
When he stood up to preach, she followed his every movement and appeared
to drink down his utterance thirstily. Skilled now in spiritual
diagnosis, the minister of All People's read her swiftly. She had
gained--but she had not gained all. Something was still desired, and,
he could not help but believe, desired of him. Having coldly driven him
from her with a terrible kind of violence, she had come back humbly,
almost beseechingly.
So marked was this suggestion of intense longing that the feeling of
horror and revulsion which had come to Hampstead with the entry of the
actress gave way entirely to an emotion of pity and a desire to help,
and he tried earnestly to make his sermon in some degree a message to
the woman's heart.
The position of the Reverend John Hampstead in All People's Church and
in the community round about was due to no miracle, but had grown
naturally enough out of the strong heart of the man and his experiences.
When, for instance, in the early days at the chapel, John missed the
Pedersen children from the Sunday school, and found their mother in
tears at home because the children had no shoes, and that they had no
shoes because Olaf gambled away his weekly wage in "Beaney" Webster's
pool room where race-track bets were made, and poker and other gambling
games were played, all in defiance of law,--and when he found the police
supine and prosecutors indifferent,--the practical minded young divine
sent Deacon Mullin--who, to his frequent discomfiture resembled a "tin
can" sport more than a church official--into Beaney's to bet upon a
horse. When the Deacon's horse won, and Beaney all unsuspecting paid
the winnings over in a sealed envelope, the next Sunday night John took
the envelope into the pulpit and shook it till it jingled as he told the
story which next morning the newspapers printed widely, while the
minister himself was swearing out a warrant for the arrest of Beaney.
That was the beginning, but to John's surprise it was not the end.
Beaney did not plead guilty meekly. He fought and desperately, for this
meddlesome amateur clergyman had lifted the cover on a sneaking
underground system of petty gambling, of illicit liquor selling, and of
graver violations of the moral laws, which ramified widely. Attacked in
one part, all its members rallied to a defence of the whole that was
impudent, determined and astonishingly powerful.
Hampstead was unknown, his church small and wretched and despised. His
sole weapon was the newspapers who would not endorse him, but who would
print what he said and what he did. What he said was not so much, but
what John Hampstead did was presently considerable, for a few
public-spirited citizens put money in his hand for detectives and
special prosecutors, and he spent more hours that year in police courts
than he did in his church.
In the end he won. The lawless element, sore and chastened,
acknowledged their defeat, while the forces of good and evil alike
recognized thus early the entry into the community of a man whose
character and personality were henceforth to be reckoned with.
But while these battlings earned John publicity and high regard, they
also won him hate and trouble. The work cost him tremendous expenditure
of energy and sleepless nights. It made enemies of men whose friendship
he desired. It brought him threats innumerable. A stick of dynamite
was found beneath his study window. Yet John's devotion made him
careless of personal danger. He trembled for Rose and Dick and Tayna; he
trembled for the man who had crept through the shadow of the palms to
plant that stick and time that fuse, which mercifully went out; but
somehow he did not tremble for himself.
Besides, out of the shadow of danger, there seemed to reach sometimes
the flexing muscles of an omnipotent arm. As, for instance, when an
arrested gambler, out upon bail, came into his study one night with
intent to kill. At first the minister was talking on the telephone, and
some chivalric instinct restrained the would-be assassin from shooting
his nemesis in the back.
Next John laughed at the preposterous idea of being killed, failing to
understand that the threat was earnest or to perceive how much his
caller was fired by liquor. Such merriment was unseemly to the man on
murder bent; he found himself unable to shoot a bullet into the open
mouth of laughter, and fumbled helplessly with his hand behind him and
his tongue shamefacedly tied until the minister directed his mind aside
with a question about his baby, following quickly with sympathetic talk
about the man's wife and mother, until the spirit of vengeance went out
of him, and he broke down and cried and went away meekly with a parting
handshake from his intended victim.
It was only after the man had gone that John felt strangely weak with
fright and bewildered by an odd sense of deliverance.
Yet all these battles were only a part of John's activities; nor did
they grow out of a fighting spirit, but out of a sympathetic nature, out
of his passion for the hurt and helpless, and his brave pity for the
defenceless.
His impulsive boldness, his ready tact, and his disposition to follow an
obligation or an opportunity through to the end, no matter where it led,
had made him father confessor to men and women of every sort and the
unofficial priest of a parish that extended widely on the surface and in
the underworld of the life about him.
Naturally, All People's was extremely proud of its pastor, of his broad
sympathies and his devoted activities. Impressionable ladies felt that
there was something romantic in seeing him stand yonder in the pulpit,
so grave and priestly; in seeing him come down at the end of the
service, so approachable to all; and in taking his hand, not knowing
whether some archcriminal had not wrung it an hour before he entered the
pulpit, or whether last night those firm fingers might not have smoothed
back the hair from the brow of some dying nameless woman in a place
about which nice people could scarcely permit themselves to think.
There was even excitement in attending the church, because one never
knew who would be sitting next,--some famous personage or some notorious
one,--for Doctor Hampstead won his friends and admirers from the
strangest sources imaginable.
As to pulpit eloquence, there was admittedly seldom a flash of it at All
People's. By an enormous digestive feat, John had assimilated that
seminary course of which the Dean had spoken, boasting that he read his
Greek Testament entirely through in the three years, upon the street
cars that plied between his home and the seat of theological learning.
But this did not make of Hampstead a strong preacher, although the
impression that he might be, if he chose, was unescapable. His passion,
he declared, was not to preach the gospel but to _do_ the gospel. People
sat before him spellbound, not by his eloquence, but by a sense of
mysterious spiritual forces at work about them. At times, the mere
exhalations of the man's sunny personality seemed sufficient to account
for all his influence; at others there was that mysterious feeling of
the Presence.
But as the membership grew and the sphere of its pastor's influence
extended, there began to be less and less of his personality left for
expenditure upon that "backbone of the church" which had been there
longest and felt it first.
More than once Elder Burbeck took occasion to voice a protest over this.
John put these protests aside mildly until one day, when the minister's
nerves had been more than usually frazzled by a series of petty
annoyances, the Elder blunderingly declared that the church paid the
minister his salary and was entitled to have his services.
"Is that the way you look at it?" asked John sharply. "That you pay me
my salary? Then don't ever put another coin in the contribution box. I
thought you gave the money to God, and God gave it to me. I do not
acknowledge to you or to any member of this church one single obligation
except to be true in your or their soul's relation. I owe you neither
obedience nor coddling nor back-smoothing."
"But you don't realize," urged the Elder. "These things were well
enough when our church was small. But now it is big. It occupies a
dignified position in the community, and all this riff-raff that you are
running after--"
"Riff-raff!" John exploded. "Jesus gathered his disciples from the
riff-raff! His message was to the riff-raff! He said: 'Leave the
avenues and boulevards and go unto the riff-raff!' What is any church
but riff-raff redeemed? What is any sanctimonious, self-satisfied
Pharisee but a soul on the way to make riff-raff of himself again? What
gave this church its dignified position in the community? Did you, when
you nailed the plank across the door?"
Elder Burbeck flushed redder than ever and turned stiffly on his heel,
not only inflamed by the crushing sarcasm of this rebuke, but stolidly
accepting it as one more evidence that in his heart this minister of All
People's was much more human and much less godlike than many gaping
people seemed to think. Both the resentment and the inference the Elder
stored up carefully against a day which he felt that he could see
advancing, while the minister, too intent upon his work to scan the
horizon for a cloud, hurried away upon another of his errands to the
riff-raff.
With this fanatic ardor of personal service now highly developed, it was
inevitable that the appeal in the eyes of Marien Dounay should act like
a challenge upon the chivalrous nature of John Hampstead.
*CHAPTER XXI*
*A CRY OF DISTRESS*
At the close of the service, Doctor Hampstead moved freely and
affectionately among his people, according to his habit. To the Angel
of the Chair, who during all these five years had been his spiritual
intimate and practical counselor, until in his regard she stood frankly
canonized, went the last hearty handclasp, after which the minister
hurried to where the actress still waited in her pew. Save for a
dapple-whiskered janitor tactfully busy in the far-off loft of the
choir, the two were alone in the large auditorium.
"Miss Dounay," John began in sincere tones, extending his hand
cordially, "I congratulate you heartily on the splendid success that you
have won."
He felt a sense of real triumph in his heart, that after what had passed
between them he was able to greet her like this in all sincerity,
although she had helped greatly by receiving him with that odd look of
worshipfulness which he had discerned from the distance of the pulpit.
"Thank you, but please do not congratulate me," the actress exclaimed
quickly, while a look of pain came undisguised into her eyes, and with a
mere shrug of those expressive shoulders she hurled aside all pretense
at formal amenities. "Oh, Doctor Hampstead," she began, breathing his
name in tones of respect that deepened into reverence, and frankly
confessing herself a woman in acute distress by adding impulsively:
"I have gained everything we once talked about, and yet I believe I am
the unhappiest woman in the world."
There was almost a sob in her voice as she uttered the words, and the
minister looked at her intently, with his face more gravely sympathetic
than usual.
"I am trying to revive something," she hurried on, as if there was
relief in thus hastily declaring herself, "trying to get back something.
You alone can help me. My happiness, my very life, it seems to me,
depends upon you. Will you come to see me this afternoon at the Hotel
St. Albans, say at four?"
"I should like to," responded the minister frankly, his desire to help
her growing rapidly; "but I have a funeral this afternoon."
"Then to-night," the actress urged, "after your sermon is done?"
As if anxious to forestall refusal, she gave him no chance to reply, but
continued with some display of her old vivacity of spirit: "We will have
a supper, as we did that night you came in after the play. Julie is
still with me, and another maid, and a secretary, and sometimes my
'personal representative.' Oh, I have quite a retinue now! Do say you
will come, even though it is an unseemly hour for a ministerial call,"
she pleaded, and again her eyes were eloquent.
But it was not the hour that made John hesitate. He felt himself immune
from charges of indiscretion. He knew that despite his youthful thirty
years, he seemed ages older than the oldest of his congregation, a man
removed from every possibility of error; one whose simple, open life of
day-by-day devotion to the good of all who sought him seemed in itself a
sufficient armor-proof against mischance.
He came and went, in the upper and in the underworld, almost as he
would; saw whom he would and where he would. Jails, theaters, hotels,
questionable side entrances, boulevards and alleys were accustomed to
the sight of his comings and goings. If the stalwart figure of the man
loomed at midnight in a dance hall on the Barbary Coast of San Francisco
or in the darkest alleys of an Oakland water-front saloon, his presence
was remarked, but his purpose was never doubted. He was there for the
good of some one, to save some girl, to haul back some mother's boy, to
fight side by side with some man against his besetting sin, whether it
be wine or woman, or the gaming table. Therefore he could go to call on
Marien Dounay at ten o'clock at night at the Hotel St. Albans as freely
as on a brother minister at noon.
What had made him suddenly withhold his acceptance of the invitation was
the entry of something of the old lightness of spirit into her tones for
a moment, accompanied by the suggestion of a supper. He knew enough of
the whimsical obliquities of Marien Dounay's nature to appreciate that
he must meet her socially in order to minister to her spiritually; but
he did not propose that the solemn purposes of his call should be made
an opportunity for entertainment or personal display.
However, Marien had instantly divined her mistake. "Doctor Hampstead!"
she began afresh, and this time her voice was low and her utterance
rapid. "My season closed in New York last Saturday night. I was
compelled to wait over three days to sign the contract for my London
engagement. The moment that was out of the way, I rushed entirely
across this country to see you! I arrived this morning. I came here at
once. Oh, I must talk to you immediately and disabuse your mind of
something--something terrible that I have waited five years to wipe
out."
She clasped her hands nervously, and her luminous eyes grew misty, while
she seemed in danger of losing her composure entirely, an unheard-of
thing for Marien Dounay.
Her imploring looks and the impetuous earnestness of her appeal were
already leading John to self-reproach for the sudden hardening of his
judgment upon her; but it was the last sentence that decided him. He
knew well enough what she meant, and something in him deeper than the
minister leaped at it. If she could wipe out that grisly memory, the
earliest opportunity was due her, and it would relieve him exactly as if
a smirch had been wiped from the brow of womanhood itself. Besides,
there had always been to him something puzzling and incomprehensible
about that scene in the restaurant, which, as the years went by, was
more and more like a horrible dream than an actual experience.
"I will come, Miss Dounay," he assured her gravely.
"Oh, I am so glad!" the woman exclaimed with a little outstretching of
her hand, which would have fallen upon John's on the back of the pew, if
it had not been raised at the moment in a gesture of negation as he
said:
"But please omit the supper. I am coming at your
call--eagerly--happily--but not even as an old friend; solely as a
minister!"
This speech was so subtly modulated as to make its meaning clear,
without the shadow of offense, and Marien's humbly grateful manner of
receiving it indicated tacit acknowledgment of the exact nature of the
visit.
Nevertheless, the minister found that in thus specifying he had written
for himself a prescription larger than he could fill. Between the
whiles of his busy afternoon and evening he was conscious of growing
feelings of curiosity and personal interest that threatened to engulf
the loftier object of his intended call. Old memories would revive
themselves; old emotions would surge again. The spirit of adventure and
the spice of expectancy thrust themselves into his thought, so that it
was with a half-guilty feeling that he found himself at the hour
appointed in the hotel corridor outside her room. He was minded to go
back, but stood still instead, reproaching himself for cowardice. His
very uncertainty gave him a feeling of littleness.
Eternal Loyalty was still and forever to be his guiding principle; and
should he not be as true to this actress who had appealed to, him, who
perhaps was to tell him something that would prove she had a right to
appeal to him, as to any other needy one? Should he shrink because of
the irresistible feeling that it was more as a man interested in a woman
than as a priest to confess a soul, that he found himself before her
door? Should all of his experience go for nothing, and was his
character, strengthened by years and chastened by some bitter lessons,
still so undependable that he dared not put himself to the test of this
woman, even though her mysterious power was so great that she could
command a man's love and deserve his hate, yet send him away from her
without a hurt and feeling admiration mingled with his horror!
For a man with John Hampstead's chivalrous nature to put a question like
this to himself was to answer it in the affirmative. Temptation comes
to the minister as to other men, and it had come to John. But had not
Marien Dounay herself taught him of what weakness to beware? That flesh
is flesh? That juxtaposition is danger? Besides, should not the
disastrous consequences which had followed from his contacts with the
woman have made him forever immune from the effect of her presence?
John approached and knocked upon the door.
His knock was greeted with a sound like the purr of an expectant kitten,
and the knob was turned by Marien herself, with a sudden vigor which
indicated that she had bounded instantly to admit him.
Her manner, in most startling contrast to that which she had displayed
at the church, was sparklingly vivacious; but her dress was more
disconcerting than her manner; in fact, to the minister, it seemed that
very same negligee gown whose pleats of shimmering black with their
splotches of red, had clung so closely to her form in those
never-to-be-forgotten hours in the little apartment on Turk Street in
San Francisco. Her hair, too, flowed unconfined as then. The picture
called up overwhelming memories, against which the minister in the man
struggled valiantly.
"I have not worn it since, until to-night," the woman purred softly,
happy as a child over his glance of recognition; but when Hampstead, in
uncompromising silence, stood surveying her critically, she asked archly
and a bit anxiously, "Are you shocked?"
"Well," he replied a trifle severely, "you must admit that this is not
sackcloth and ashes."
"It is my soul, not my body, that is in mourning," Marien urged
apologetically, trying the effect of a melting glance, after which,
walking half the length of the room she turned again and invited him to
lay off his overcoat and be seated. John could not resist the playful
calculation of her manner without seeming heartless; and yet he did
resist it, standing noncommittally while his eyes sought the
circumference of the room inquiringly.
"And look!" went on Marien enthusiastically, for she was trying
pitifully by sheer force of personality to recreate the atmosphere of
their old relationship in its happiest moments. "See, here is the Roman
chair, or at least one like it; and there the divan, piled high with
cushions; I am as fond of cushions as ever. You shall sit where you
sat; I shall recline where I reclined. We will stage the old scene
again."
"Not the old scene," replied the minister, with quiet emphasis, feeling
just a little as if he had been trapped.
Still his strength was always sapped on Sunday night; and no doubt in
utter weariness, one's power of resistance is somewhat lowered.
Besides, Marien was so beautiful and so winning in manner; her arms
gleamed so softly in their circle of silk and filmy lace, and there was
in the atmosphere of the room an abundance of an indefinable something
which was like a rare perfume and yet was not a perfume at all, but that
effect of lure and challenge which her mere presence always had upon the
senses of this man.
Moreover, it seemed so fitting to see this exquisite creature happy
instead of sad that it would have taken a coarser nature than John
Hampstead's to break in brutally upon her whimsical happiness of mood.
He judged it therefore the mere part of tact to remove his overcoat.
"Julie!" called Marien, and there was a not entirely suppressed note of
triumph in her tone.
The little French maid appeared with suspicious promptness from behind
swinging portieres to receive the coat and to give the big man, whom she
had always liked, shy welcome upon her own account.
True to her nature, Miss Dounay's every movement was theatric. She
stood complacently by until the maid had done her service and withdrawn.
Then pointing to the Roman chair, she said to Hampstead:
"Sit there and wait. I have something to show you, something
beautiful--wonderful--overwhelming almost!"
Hesitating only long enough to see that the minister, although a bit
suspicious, complied politely with her request, Marien, with dramatic
directness, and humming the while a teasing little tune, followed Julie
out through the portieres, but in passing swung the curtains wide as an
invitation to her caller's eyes to pursue her to where she stopped
before a chiffonier which was turned obliquely across the corner of the
large inner room.
Marien's shoulder was toward John, but the mirror beyond framed her face
exquisitely, with its hood of flowing hair and the expansive whiteness
of her bosom to the corsage, while the long dark lashes painted a
feathery shadow upon her cheeks as her eyes looked downward to something
before her on the chiffonier. For a moment she stood motionless, as if
charmed by the sight on which their glance rested. Then, using both
hands, she lifted the object, and instantly the mirror flashed to the
watching man the picture of a swaying rope of diamonds. They seemed to
him an aurora-borealis of jewels, sparkling more brilliantly than the
light of Marien's eyes, as she held them before her face for an instant,
and then, with a graceful movement which magnified the beauty of her
rounded arms and the smoothly-chiseled column of her throat, threw back
the close-lying strands of her hair to fasten the chain behind her neck.
For another second the mirror showed her patting her bosom complacently,
as if her white fingers were loving the diamonds into the form of a
perfect crescent, which, presently attained, she surveyed with evident
satisfaction. Turning, she advanced toward her guest with hands at first
uplifted and then clasped before her in an ecstasy of delight, while she
laughed musically, like a child intoxicated by the joy of some long
anticipated pleasure.
Upon a man whose love of beauty was as great as John Hampstead's, the
effect was shrewdly calculated and the result all that heaven had
intended.
"Wonderful!" he exclaimed, leaping up to meet her as she advanced.
"Splendid! Magnificent!"
Each adjective was more emphatically uttered than the last.
Satisfied beyond measure with the effect of her diversion, the
calculating woman drew close with a complete return of all her old
assurance and stood like a radiant statue, a happy flush heightening on
her cheeks, while the minister, entirely unabashed, feasted his eyes
frankly on the beauty of the jewels and the snowy softness of their
setting. When, after a moment, Marien made use of his hand as a support
on which to pivot gracefully about and let herself down with dainty
elegance into the midst of her throne of cushions, Hampstead stood, a
little lost, gazing downward at the vision as though spellbound by its
loveliness.
For a moment the actress was supremely confident. Breathing softly, her
dark eyes swimming like pools of liquid light, into which her long
lashes cast a fringe of foliate shadows, she contemplated John
Hampstead, tall, strong, clean, healthful looking, his yellow hair, his
high-arched viking brows, the look of kindliness and the cast of
nobility into which the years had moulded his features, until it seemed
to her that she must spring up and drag him down to her lair of cushions
like a prize.
But she made no impulsive move. Instead, she breathed softly: "Doctor
Hampstead, will you touch that button, please?"
John complied courteously, but mechanically, as if charmed. The more
brilliant lights in the room were instantly extinguished. What remained
flowed from the shrouding red silk of the table lamp so softly that
while all objects in the room remained clearly distinguishable even to
their detail, there was not a garish beam anywhere.
It was a fitting atmosphere for confession, and even the diamonds in
this smothered light seemed suddenly to grow communicative, to multiply
their luster, and to break more readily into the prismatic elements of
color.
"More and more beautiful," Hampstead murmured, passing a hand across his
brow.
"Sit down!" Marien breathed softly, motioning toward the Roman chair.
Hampstead was surprised to find how near the divan the inanimate chair
appeared to have removed itself. Had he pushed it absently with his
leg, as he made place for her, or had she, or had the thing
itself--insensate wood and leather and plush--felt, too, the
irresistible thrall of this magnetic, beauty-dowered creature who
snuggled amid these silken panniers?
"I do not know diamonds very well," the minister confessed, sinking down
into the chair.
"Look at them," Marien said, with a delightful note of intimacy in her
voice, at the same time lowering her chin close, in order to survey the
jewels as they lay upon her breast.
In John's eyes, this downcast glance gave Marien an expression that was
Madonna-like and holy, and this again deepened his feeling of pity for
her heartaches, and his anxiety to help her in what it was her whim to
mask from him for the moment with all this childish play of interest in
her jewels and in her own beauty. But it also disposed him to humor her
the more, removing all sense of restraint when he followed the glance of
her eye to where the more brilliant stones of the pendant lay in the
snowy vale of her bosom, or when, leaning closer still, he could see
that their intermittent flashing facets were responding to the pulsing
of her heart.
"And what is the amber stone?" he asked innocently.
"Amber!" Marien laughed. "It is a canary diamond, the finest stone of
all. It alone cost four thousand dollars."
"Four thousand dollars!" The minister drew in his breath slowly. "It
had not occurred to me that there were such jewels outside of royal
crowns and detective stories," he stammered. "Four thousand dollars!
What did the whole necklace cost?"
"Twenty-two," the actress answered almost boastfully, again bending to
survey the blazing inverted arch of jewels.
"Thousand?" The minister's inflection expressed his incredulousness.
"Thousand," Marien iterated with a complacent drop of the voice, and
then, while the fingers of one hand toyed with the pendant, went on: "I
have a perfect passion for diamonds! That canary stone has temperament,
life almost. Perhaps it is a whim of mine, but it seems to me that it
reflects my moods. When I am downcast, it is dull and lusterless; when
I am happy, it flashes brilliantly, like a blazing sun.
"It is influenced by those whom I am with. It never burned so
brilliantly as now. Your presence has an effect upon it. Cup your
fingers and hold it for a moment, and see, after an interval, if its
luster does not change."
Astonished at the feeling of easy intimacy which had been established
between them so completely that he saw no reason at all why he should
refuse, Hampstead did as he was bidden, although to hold the brilliant
stone it was necessary for the heads of the two to be drawn very close,
so that the tawny, wavy, loose-lying locks of the minister and the dark
glistening mass of the woman's hair were all but intertwined, while the
four eyes converged upon the diamond, and the two bodies were breathless
and poised with watching.
Presently the man felt his vision swimming. He saw no single jewel, but
a myriad of lights. He ceased to feel the gem in his hollowed fingers,
and was conscious instead of a soft, magnetic glow upon the under side
of his hand.
In the same instant, he became aware that Marien's eyes no longer
watched the stone, but were bent upon his face, and he felt a breath
upon his cheek as her lips parted, and she murmured softly:
"John."
This word and touch together gave instant warning to the Reverend Doctor
Hampstead of the spell under which he was passing,--a spell mixed in
equal parts from the responsiveness of his own nature to all beauty of
form, animate or inanimate, and from the subtle sympathy which the rich,
seductive personality of Marien Dounay had swiftly conjured. The shock
of this discovery was entirely sufficient to break the potency of the
charm.
"It did seem to change, I thought," the minister said casually, at the
same time slipping his hand gently from beneath the jewel.
By the slightly altered tone in his speech and the easy resumption of
his pose in the chair, Marien perceived that the minister and his
purpose was again uppermost in her caller.
As for John, slightly irritated with himself, and yet feeling it still
the part of tact to show no irritation with Marien, he guided the
situation safely past its moment of restraint.
"You said there was something you wished to tell me," he reminded her
gently; then added gravely: "That is why I came to-night. I was to be
your father-confessor."
The considerateness of Hampstead's tone and manner was as impressive as
it was compelling. Marien's face became instantly sober, and she
fidgeted for a time in silence as if it were increasingly difficult to
broach the subject, but finally she labored out:
"You misunderstood me horribly once--horribly!"
With this much communicated, she stopped as abruptly as she had begun,
while a frightened look invaded her liquid eyes.
"Misunderstood you," Hampstead iterated gently, but with firmness, "I
understood you so well that except through an impersonal desire to be
helpful, I should never have come here."
The very dignity and measured self-restraint of the minister's utterance
robbed the woman of her usual admirable self-mastery. She cowered with
timid face amid her pillows, as her mind leaped back to that night in
the restaurant with Litschi, and the terrible lengths to which she had
gone to shock this same big, dynamic, ardent Hampstead from his pursuit
of her.
As if it were compromising himself to sit silent while he read her
thoughts and heard again in his own ears that terrible speech, the
minister went on to say sternly:
"You know that I shrank then, as from a loathsome thing, at the price
you were willing to pay for your success. I must forewarn you that the
memory does not seem less abhorrent now than the fact did then."
When Hampstead bit out these sentences with a fire of moral intensity
burning in his eyes, the quivering figure upon the cushions shuddered
and shrank.
"Oh, John!" a broken voice pleaded. "Did I ever, ever say those hateful
words? Can you not conceive that they were false? That they were
spoken with intent to deceive you, to drive you from me, to leave me
free to make my way alone, unhampered, as I knew I must?"
The minister, his face still white and stern, his gray eyes beaming
straight through widening lids, declared hotly: "No! I cannot conceive
that a good woman would voluntarily smirch herself like that in the eyes
of a man who loved her for any other single purpose than the one which
she confessed, an ambition that was inordinate and--immoral. That
thought was in your speech, and by Heaven"--he shook an accusing finger
at her--"I believe it was in your purpose!"
The woman cowered for a moment longer before Hampstead's gaze, then a
single dry sob broke from her, while one hand covered her eyes, and the
other stretched gropingly to him, across the pillows.
"I had the purpose," she admitted haltingly. "I confess it. Is it not
pitiful?" and the lily hand which had felt its way so pleadingly across
the embroidered cushions opened and closed its fingers on nothing, with
a movement that was convulsive and appealing beyond words.
"Pitiful," the minister groaned. "My God, it is tragic!"
"Yes," she went on presently, in a calmer voice that was more resigned
and sadly reminiscent: "I purposed it."