"Yes," she answered with that simple directness which showed that she
was blinking no phase of the question. "Is the issue big enough to
require such a sacrifice?"
"Oh, I think it is too improbable it could go to that length," Hampstead
answered thoughtfully.
"But it might! Is it worth it?" Mrs. Burbeck persisted.
The calm sincerity of her manner poised the question like a lance aimed
at his heart.
Hampstead hesitated. He really had not thought as far as this, any
farther in fact than the hateful smudge of the thumb print and the
picture in the Gallery of Rogues. But now, with her considerately
calculating glances upon him, he did think that far, weighing all his
hopes, his work, his position at the head of All People's, his priceless
liberty, his fathomless love for Bessie, against the pledged word of a
priest to a weak and penitent thief, whose soul at this moment trembled
on the brink, suspended alone by the spectacle of the integrity of the
confessor to his vow.
He weighed his duty to this thief now somewhat as five years before he
had weighed his duty to Dick and Tayna against the supreme ambition of
his life. The stakes then, on both sides, large as they had seemed,
were infinitely smaller than the values at issue now. Looking back,
John knew that then he had not only made the right decision, but the
best decision for himself. He thought that he was humbling himself; but
instead he had exalted himself.
But now the lines were not so sharply drawn. He was renouncing his very
position and power to do his duty.
"Is it?"
Mrs. Burbeck half-looked and half-breathed this gentle reminder that she
had asked her pastor a question.
"I believe," said the minister, revealing frankly the trend of his
thought, "that the nearest duty is the greatest duty; that the man who
spares himself for some great task will never come to a great task. I
hold that a man ought to be true in any relation of life; and when the
issue is drawn between one duty and another, he should try to determine
calmly which is the highest duty and be true to that. I shall try to be
that in this case--even to conviction!"
The sheen upon the face of the woman as she listened was as great as the
glow upon the face of the man as he spoke.
"That is a very simple religion," Mrs. Burbeck concurred happily, "and
it contains the larger fact of all religion. That is why Jesus went to
the cross; because he was true. That was why the grave couldn't hold
him; because he was true. You cannot bury truth, nor brand it, nor
photograph it, nor put its thumb prints in a book, nor put stripes upon
it."
Hampstead arose suddenly, enthusiasm kindling like the glow of
inspiration upon his face. "That is why I still feel free--unscathed by
what has happened," he exclaimed. "In a small and comparatively
unimportant way it has been given to me to be true. Yes," he said,
sitting down again and speaking very soberly, "I shall be true to the
end--conviction, imprisonment even. Prison terms do not last forever;
and every day spent there will be a witness to the fact that I am true."
Exalted enthusiasm had passed on for a moment to a strained note that
sounded like fanatical egotism.
As if to check this Mrs. Burbeck asked quietly but with a significance
that was arresting:
"Are you strong enough, do you think?"
For a moment the minister was thoughtful and something like a shudder of
apprehension swept over him.
"No," he replied humbly. "I begin to confess it to myself. The fear
that I will weaken begins to come to me at times."
"That is good," the Angel of the Chair commented surprisingly, gathering
her scarf about her shoulders as she spoke. "It is better to be too
weak than to be too strong. But strength will be given you. That is
what I came to say. I feel strangely weak myself, to-day, and must be
going now."
"You should not have come," reproached the minister, as he helped Mori,
the Japanese, to wheel her to the door; "and yet I am so glad you did
come, for you have made me feel like some chivalrous champion of eternal
right jousting in the lists against an impious Lucifer."
For this the Angel gave him back a smile over the top of her chair, and
the minister watched her out of sight, reflecting that in the few days
since this strain upon them all began she had failed perceptibly, and
recalling that never before had he heard her allude to her weakness or
make her physical condition the excuse for anything she did or did not
do.
Within a quarter of an hour, so soon almost that it seemed as if he had
been waiting for his wife to depart, Elder Burbeck was announced as the
second caller at Doctor Hampstead's door.
For the five years of his eldership before the advent of Hampstead,
Elder Burbeck had a record in the official board of never permitting any
subject to be passed upon without a word from him, nor ever having
allowed any question to be considered settled until it was settled
according to the dictates of the thing he supposed to be his conscience.
At their first momentary clash on the day when Hampstead, the book
agent, had broken open the church which Burbeck had nailed up, the older
man thought he sensed in the younger the presence of a spiritual
endowment greater than his own. To this the ruling Elder had bowed
within himself. Externally, his manner was not changed, nor his
leadership affected. To the congregation his submission to the final
judgment of the minister was accounted as a virtue. Instead of
weakening him, it strengthened his own standing with the membership.
While Burbeck had at times voiced his protests to the pastor at what he
felt to be mistaken sentimentalism, and while the protests had been
dismissed at times with an unchristian impatience, there was no one to
whom the events and disclosures of this terrible week of headlines had
been more surprising or more shocking than to the meticulous apostle of
the _status quo_. Upon the Elder's metallic cast of mind each
revelation impacted with the shattering effect of a solid shot. Through
a thousand crevices thus created, suspicion, rumor, and the stream of
truths, half-truths, and lies percolated to the bed of reason. His mind
was without elasticity. The school of logic in which he had been
trained reasoned coldly, by straight lines to rectangular conclusions.
There was no place for allowances or adjustments. Once a stitch was
dropped, there was no picking it up, and the blemish was in the garment.
So he reasoned now about Hampstead. The minister, having been weak
once, must have also been wicked; being brittle, he must have been
broken; frail, he must have been fractured. Having been wicked, broken,
fractured, this explained his immense sympathy for and capacity to reach
other frail, weak, brittle men and women; but it did not justify his
pose as a pillar unscathed by fire. Loving All People's as he loved
himself, his wife, his brilliant son,--with pride and
self-complacence,--Burbeck felt hot resentment at the disgrace which the
disclosures and the flood of scandal brought upon the church.
Searle himself had not believed many of the charges he hurled against
Hampstead in his concluding speech. Elder Burbeck, who heard that speech
from behind the rail, believed it all. Believing it, and believing in
his mission to purge the church of this impostor, his zeal roused him to
the point where he forgot to be logical. He believed the preacher was a
thief, a liar and a hypocrite; and at the same time believed that he had
told the truth upon the witness stand in his own defense. But this only
made his sin more heinous. He was harboring some crook--some other man,
weak, frail, brittle, wicked as himself. That man was necessarily a
hypocrite, a whited sepulcher, posing before the community as a pillar
of virtue. It would be an act of righteousness to find and expose that
man. But who could it be? Somebody at that supper, of course. Now it
might be Haggard, managing editor of _The Sentinel_; newspaper men were
always suspicious characters, anyway; and surely Hampstead was under
obligations to Haggard. Haggard, with all his publicity, had given the
minister his first fame, and for years supported him upon his pedestal
as a public idol. Yes, it probably was Haggard. But whoever it was,
Burbeck undertook in his mind a second mission; to find and expose and
brand the thief whom the minister was protecting.
With no more fiery fanaticism did the followers of Mohammed set out with
the sword to purge the world of infidels than did Elder Burbeck purpose
to purge All People's of its pastor and wring from the lips of Hampstead
the secret of another's crime.
He entered the minister's study with a pompous dignity that was ominous.
His face was as red, the bony protuberances on his boxlike and hairless
skull were as prominent, as ever. His shaggy eyebrows lent their usual
fierceness to the steel gleam of his blue eye. His close-cropped gray
mustache clung perilously above lips that were straight and unsmiling.
"Good evening, Hampstead," he said, with a falling inflection.
This was the first time he had ever failed to say "Brother" Hampstead.
The minister had risen to greet his visitor, but subtly discerning in
the first appearance of the man the mood in which he came, had not
advanced, but stood with his desk between them, waiting.
"How are you, Burbeck!" the minister replied evenly. This was also the
first time he had failed to address the Elder as "Brother." He was
rather surprised at himself for omitting it now and took warning
therefrom that his feelings were poised upon hair triggers.
The Elder saw in the minister's manner instant confirmation of his
conclusions. The man had not the spirit of Christ. He met hard looks
with hard looks. This was well. It made the Elder's task the easier.
He could proceed at once to business.
In his hand he held a copy of the last edition of _The Sentinel_, and
now he spread the paper across the desk before the clergyman's eye. The
same old headline was there, "HELD TO ANSWER," but in the center of the
page was a frame or box which contained a half-tone, a smear, and a
short column of black-face type, both words and figures.
Hampstead saw at a glance that it was a printed copy of his Bertillon
record. The smear was his thumb print; the picture was his picture, a
half-tone of the bald, unretouched photograph of himself which had been
made for the Gallery of Rogues, and across the bottom of the picture was
a suggestive space, in which was printed: "No.----?" The inference
sought to be conveyed was clear. So great was the sense of pain which
Hampstead felt that it was reflected in the glance he turned upon the
Elder, a glance that came as near to an appeal for pity as any that had
yet been in the clergyman's eye. But it met no response from the stern
old Puritan.
"Be seated!" the minister said, a trifle sadly.
"I can say what I've got to say better if I stand," replied the Elder
tersely. "Of course you'll resign!"
A look of intense surprise crossed the face of Hampstead.
"Resign what?" he asked, with raised brows.
"Why, the pulpit of All People's!"
The minister stared in amazement. Burbeck also stared, but in
impatience, during an interval of silence in which Hampstead had full
opportunity to weigh again the manner of his visitor and appraise its
meaning.
"No," the young man replied within a minute, firmly but almost without
inflection, "I shall not resign."
"Then," declared Burbeck aggressively, "the pulpit of All People's will
be declared vacant." The Elder's chin was raised, and implacable
resolution was photographed upon his features.
Again Hampstead paused, and weighed and sounded the really sterling
character of this honest old man, whose pride was as inflexible and
undeviating as the rule of his moral life. He saw him not as a
fanatical vengeance, but as a father. He thought of Rollie, of the
man's pride in his son, and of what a crushing blow it would be to him
to know the plight in which that son really stood to-day. It brought to
him the memory of something he had read somewhere: "The more you do for
a man, the easier it is to love him and to forgive him." His feeling
now was not of resentment, but of sympathy. He felt very sorry for the
Elder and for the position in which he stood.
"Why, Brother Burbeck," he reproached softly, "All People's would not do
that. You would not let them do that. When you have stopped to think,
you would not let me resign even. If I am convicted by a jury, I should
have to resign; but a jury would not convict, I think. Besides, many
things can happen before that. My accuser, who knows I am innocent,
might relent. It is even more conceivable that a condition might arise
under which the thief could speak out, and I should be vindicated."
The upper lip of Burbeck curled till it showed a tooth and then
straightened out again. The minister continued to speak:
"To resign now would amount to a confession of guilt. To force me to
resign would be an act of treachery. I am guilty of nothing, proven
guilty of nothing. I am assailed because of the whimsical caprice of a
half-crazed woman. I am temporarily helpless before that assault
because I am faithful to my vows as a minister of All People's, vows
which I took kneeling, with your hand upon my head. In spirit I am
unscathed, as your own observations must show you. If my reputation is
wounded, it is a wound sustained in the course of my duty, and it is the
part of All People's and every member of it to rally valiantly to my
support. If I were not persuaded that they would do this, I should be
gravely disheartened."
The manner in which Hampstead spoke was clearly disconcerting to the
Elder. He felt again that consciousness of moral superiority before
which he had bowed until bowing had become a habit. But now he had more
information. Reason stiffened the back of prejudice. He knew that this
assumption of the minister was a pose. His conviction was this time
strong enough to avert its spell; and he answered unmoved, except to
deeper feeling, with still harsher utterance:
"Then Hampstead, you will be disheartened! All People's shall never
support you again. I have called a meeting of the official board for
to-night. I shall present a resolution declaring the pulpit vacant. If
they recommend it, it will be acted upon to-morrow morning by the
congregation. If they do not receive it, I shall myself bring it before
the congregation."
A look of deepening pain crossed the features of the minister.
"Not to-morrow," he pleaded, his voice choking strangely; "not
to-morrow. I have been counting greatly on to-morrow. It has been a
hard week. Man!" and Hampstead suddenly arose, "man, have you not heart
enough to realize what this has been to me. I long passionately for the
privilege of standing again in the pulpit of All People's. I want them
to see how undaunted in spirit I am. I want them to judge for
themselves the mark of conscious innocence upon my face. I want to feel
myself once more under the gaze of a thousand pairs of eyes, every one
of which I know is friendly. I want the whole of Oakland to know that
my church is solidly behind me; that though in a Court of Justice I am
'Held to Answer', in the Court of the Lord and before the jury of my own
church, I stand approved, with the very stigma of official shame
recognized as a decoration of honor."
Hampstead had walked around the desk. He lifted his hand in appeal and
sought to lay it upon the shoulder of the Elder to express the sympathy
and the need of sympathy which he felt.
But Burbeck deliberately moved out of reach, replying sternly and
perhaps vindictively:
"Hampstead! You do not appear to appreciate your position. You will
never again stand in the pulpit of All People's. That is one sacrilege
which you have committed for the last time. More than that, I hold it
to be my duty to God to wring from your own lips the secret of the man
whom you are shielding, and I shall find a way to do it! I--"
But the man's feeling had overmastered his speech. His body shook, his
face was purple with the vehemence of anger. He lifted his hand as if
to call down an imprecation when words had failed him, then abruptly
turned, unwilling to trust himself to further speech, and made for the
outside door. It closed behind him with a bang that left the key
rattling in the lock.
Perhaps this noise and the sound of the Elder's clumping, heavy feet as
they went down the steps, prevented the minister from hearing the
chugging of a motor-car as it was brought to a stop in front.
Elder Burbeck, hurrying directly across the street to relieve his
feelings by getting away quickly from what was now a house of
detestation, almost ran into the huge black shape drawn up before the
curb. He backed away and lunged around the corner of the car too
quickly to notice the figure that emerged from it, or his emotions might
have been still more hotly stirred.
Hampstead, sitting at his desk, trying to think calmly of this new
danger which threatened him, and to reflect upon the irony of the
circumstance by which the father of the man and the husband of the
mother he was risking everything to protect, should become the
self-appointed Nemesis to hurl him from his pulpit and wrest the secret
from his lips, heard faintly the ring at the front door, heard the door
close, and an exclamation from his sister in the hall, followed by
silence which, while lasting perhaps no more than a few seconds, was
quite long enough for him to forget, in the absorption of his own
thoughts, that some one had entered the house. Hence he started with
surprise when the inner door was opened, and Rose appeared, her white,
strained features expressing both fright and hate. She closed the door
carefully behind her and whispered hoarsely: "That--that woman is here!"
*CHAPTER XXXVII*
*THE TERMS OF SURRENDER*
"What woman?" asked Hampstead, in disinterested tones, too deeply
absorbed in the half cynical reflection which the mission of Elder
Burbeck had induced to realize that there was but one woman to whom his
sister's manner could refer.
"That--that woman!" replied Rose again, unable to bring herself to
mention the name.
"Oh," exclaimed her brother absently, but starting up from his reverie.
"Oh, very well; show her in," he directed. His tone and gesture
indicated that nothing mattered now.
Rose was evidently surprised at her brother's instruction and for once
inclined to protest the supremacy of his will.
"You are not going to see her again?" she argued.
"I know of no one who should be in greater need of seeing me," John
rejoined, with sadness and reproach mingled in equal parts.
"But alone? Think of the danger!"
"Seeing her alone has done about all the harm it could do," the brother
replied, with a disconsolate toss of his hands, while the drawn look
upon his face became more pronounced. "Show her in!"
Rose turned back with a cough eloquent of dissenting judgment and left
the door flung wide. John at his distance sensed her feeling of outrage
in the fierce rustling of her skirts as she receded down the hall, and
presently heard her voice saying icily: "The open door!"
The minister smiled, with half-guilty satisfaction. His sister had
refused Miss Dounay the courtesy of her escort to the study. He
suspected that Rose had even refused to look at the visitor again, but
having indicated the direction in which the open door stood, had whisked
indignantly beyond into her own preserves.
The hour was now something after sunset, and the room was half in gloom.
The actress paused inside the door, standing stiffly. Hampstead sat
before his desk, his elbows on the arms of his chair, his hands hanging
limp, his shoulders drooping, his eyes cast down and fixed. He was
again thinking. He had a good many things to think about. The coming
of the actress brought one more. He was not utterly despondent, but he
had been brought to the verge of catastrophe; perhaps beyond the verge.
The woman against whom he had done no wrong, and who had brought him to
the precipice, now stood in his room, the place of all places in which
he could feel the desolation creeping round his soul like rising waters
about a man trapped by the tide in some ocean cavern. But the minister
was not now thinking of that. Instead his mind recalled wonderingly
that fleeting picture of this woman in court, with her eyes gleaming
savagely at Searle and crouching like a tigress about to spring.
As if to call attention to her presence, the actress swung the door
noiselessly toward the jamb, until the lock caught it with an audible
and decisive snap. The minister reached out a hand and touched a button
that flooded the room with light.
Miss Dounay was clad exactly as she had appeared in court, except that
she was more heavily veiled, so that the prying light revealed no more
of her features than the sparkle of an eye. Hampstead had not risen.
"Well!" he said, quietly but emotionlessly.
"Yes," she replied, in a low, affirmative voice, exactly as if in answer
to a question.
"Why did you do it?"
Hampstead asked the question abruptly, but very quietly, and accompanied
it with a gravity of expression and a gesture slight but so inclusive
that it comprehended the entire avalanche which had been released upon
him during the six days which had passed since he had talked with this
woman in the limousine upon the moonlit point above the city.
Before replying, the actress raised both hands and lifted her veil. The
disclosure was something of a revelation. The features were those of
Marien Dounay, but they were changed. There had been always something
royal in Marien's glances, but the royal air was gone now: something
dominant in her personality, but the dominance had departed. The
suggestion, too, of smouldering fire in her eyes was absent; instead
there appeared a liquescent, quivering light, in which suffering and the
comprehension that comes with suffering combined to suggest helpless
appeal rather than the old, imperial air.
This softening of expression had extended to her mouth as well. The
lips, as red, as full of invitation as ever, were more pliant; they
trembled and formed themselves into tiny undulating curves which
suggested and then reinforced the imploring light of the eyes. Her
beauty was more appealing because it was no longer commanding, but
entreating.
"Why did you do it?" the minister repeated, when his eyes had completed
his appraisal, and the woman was still eloquently silent.
"Because I loved you," she answered briefly.
Her declaration was accompanied by an attempt at a smile that was so
brave and yet so faltering that it was rather pitiful. But Hampstead,
looking at the beautiful shell of this woman who had so vindictively
hurled him down, was not in a mood to feel pity. Instead he was merely
incredulous.
"Love?" he asked cynically, rising from his seat.
"Yes," exclaimed the woman with convulsive eagerness, as if her voice
choked over speaking what her lips, by the traditional modesty of her
sex and the mountain of her pride and self-will, had been too long
forbidden to utter. "Yes, I have always loved you!"
With this much of a beginning, excitedly and with the air of one whose
course was predetermined, the actress plucked off her hat, stabbed the
pin into it, and tossed it upon the window seat; then nervously stripped
the gloves from her hands; all the while hurrying on with a sort of
defensive vehemence to aver:
"I have loved you from the first moment when you held me in your arms
long enough for me to feel the electric warmth of your personality. You
roused, kindled, and enflamed me! The sensation was delicious; but I
resented it. It offended my pride. I had never been overmastered. You
overmastered me without knowing it. I hated you for it. You were
so--so unsophisticated; so good, so simple, so ready to worship, to
admire, to ascribe the beauties of my body to the beauties of my soul.
I hated you for that, for my soul was less beautiful than my body, and I
knew it. I resisted you and yielded to you; I hated you and loved you;
I spurned you and wanted you.
"You were so awkward, so impossible; you had so much of talent and knew
so little how to use it. It seemed to me the very mockery of fate that
my heart should fasten its affection upon you. I tried to break the
spell, and could not. I yielded to my heart. I had to love you, to let
myself adore you.
"I thought of taking you with me, but the way was too long; yours was
more than talent--far more; it was genius, but buried deep and scattered
wide. It would have taken a lifetime to chisel it out and assemble it
in the perfect whole of successful art. I shrank before the treadmill
task.
"And something else--I was jealous of you!"
Hampstead, who despite his incredulity had been listening attentively,
raised his eyebrows.
"Jealous of the artist you might become. Your genius when it flowered
would overtop mine as your character overtops mine."
The speaker paused, as if to mark the effect of her words.
"Go on," urged Hampstead impatiently, and for the first time betraying
feeling. "In the name of God, woman, if you have one word of
justification to speak, let me hear it!"
"I have it," Miss Dounay rejoined, yet more impetuously, "in that one
word which I have already spoken--love!" She paused, passed her hand
across her brow, and again resumed the thread of her story, still
speaking rapidly but with an increase of dramatic emphasis.
"Then came the final ecstasy of pain. You loved me. You demanded me.
You charged me with loving you. You told me it was like the murder of a
beautiful child to kill a love like ours. You argued, persuaded,
demanded--compelled--almost possessed me!"
The woman's face whitened, her eyes closed, and she reeled dizzily under
the spell of a memory that swept her into transports.
"But," replied the minister quietly, "you killed our beautiful child."
"No! No!!" she exclaimed, thrusting out her hands to him. "Do not say
that! I only exposed it--to the vicissitudes of years, to absence and
to a foul slander which my own lips breathed against myself! But I did
not kill it! I did not kill it!"
"At any rate, it is dead," replied the man, his voice as sadly
sympathetic as it was coolly decisive.
"But I will make it live again," the woman exclaimed desperately. "I
love you, John! Oh, God, how I love you!"
She endeavored to reach his neck with her arms, but the minister stepped
back, and she stood wringing them emptily, a look in her eyes as if she
implored him to understand.
But the minister was still unresponsive.
"It was a queer way for love to act," he protested, and again with that
comprehensive gesture which called accusing notice to the ruin pulled
down upon him.
"But will you not understand?" she pleaded. "It was the last desperate
resource of love. I could not reach the real you. I tried for weeks.
I endured insufferable associations. I assumed distasteful
interests--all to put myself in your company; to keep you in mine; to
create those proximities, those environments and situations in which
love grows naturally. Again and again I thought that love was springing
up. But I was disappointed. You did not respond. What I thought at
first was response was only sympathy. To you I was no longer a woman.
I was a subject in spiritual pathology.
"When I saw this, first it irritated, then maddened me. I knew that you
were not yourself, that your environment had insulated you. That you
were so interested in the part which you were playing,--so absorbed by
the duty of being a public idol, that you could not be yourself, the
man, the flesh, the heart, I know you are.
"In desperation I resolved to strip you, to hurl you down, to rob you of
the public regard, of your church, of everything; to strip you until you
were nothing but the man who once held me in his arms, his whole body
quivering, and demanding with all his nature to possess me."
As the woman spoke, her voice had risen, and a half-insane enthusiasm
was gleaming on her face, while her fingers reached restlessly after the
minister who, as unconsciously as she advanced, receded until he stood
cornered against the door.
"Now," she continued, in her frenzied exaltation of mood, "it is done!
You see how easily it was accomplished. Nothing should be so
disillusioning, so reawakening to you as to observe how light is your
hold upon this community, how selfish and insincere was all this public
adulation. I, a stranger almost, of whom these people knew nothing, was
able, with a ridiculously impossible charge, to brush you from your
eminence like a fly.
"Of what worth has it all been? Of what worth all that you can do for
people like these? Your very church is turning against you. It will
cast you out."
A shade had crossed the brow of Hampstead.
"You think that?" he asked defiantly.
"I know it," Marien replied aggressively. "That square-headed old Elder
came to see me this afternoon. Shaking his hand was like taking hold of
a toad. Ugh! He wanted to pry into your past through me, the old
reprobate!"
"Hush! I will not hear him defamed. He is an honorable and a
well-meaning man, against whose character not one word can be breathed."
Marien's eyes flashed. Impatient and regardless of interruption, she
continued as though Hampstead had not spoken.
"And he, the father of the man you are suffering to shield, is to be the
first to take advantage of your misfortune. The old Pharisee! I nearly
told him who the real thief was."
"Miss Dounay!"
The minister's exclamation was short and sharp, like a bark of rage.
His face was drawn until his mouth was a seam, and his eyes had shrunk
to two shafts of light, "Miss Dounay! That is God's secret. If you had
spoken, I should have--" He ceased to speak but held up hands that
clenched and unclenched.
The actress was feeling confident now. She had goaded this man to rage.
Beyond rage might lie weakness and surrender. She threw back her head
and laughed.
"Yes, I will finish it for you. You would have been inclined to
strangle me; but I did not tell him. Yet not for your reason, but for
mine. So long as you rest under the charge, your enemies gnash; your
friends turn from you. Instead of being insulated from me by all, you
are insulated from all by me. There is no one left but me. I love you.
I am beautiful, rich, with the glamour of success upon me. I can
override anything; defy anything. I can be yours--altogether yours. You
can be mine--altogether mine. You can leave these shallow, ungrateful
gossips and scandalmongers to prey upon each other, while you and I go
away to an Eden of our own."
The actress paused, breathless and again to mark effects. The
minister's face had resumed its normal benignity of expression. He was
gazing at her thoughtfully, contemplatively. Marien took fresh hope,
knowing upon second thought now, as she had known all along, that she
could not successfully tempt this man by a life of mere luxurious
emptiness. Falling into tones of yet more confiding intimacy, she
continued:
"Besides, John, I am not jealous of your genius any more. My love has
surged even over that. You have still a great dramatic career before
you. You shall come into my company. You shall have every opportunity.
Within two years you shall be my leading man; within five, co-star with
me. Think of it. Your heart is still in the actor's art. Acting is
religion. After God, the actor is the greatest creator. He alone can
simulate life. The stage is the most powerful pulpit. Come. We will
write your life's story into a play. We will play the faith and
fortitude which you have shown into the very soul of America, like a bed
of moral concrete! Are you not moved at that?"
She paused, standing with head upon one side, and the old, alluring,
coaxing glances stealing up from beneath the coquettish droop of her
lids.
"No," Hampstead replied seriously. "I am not moved by it at all. Had
you made this speech to me five years ago, I should have been in
transports. To-day the art of living appeals to me beyond the art of
acting. I have no doubt I feel as great a zest, as great a creative
thrill in standing true in the position in which you have placed me as
you ever can in the most ecstatic raptures of the mimetic art. No,
Marien," and his tone was conclusive, "it makes no appeal to me."
The beautiful creature, perplexity and disappointment mingling on her
face, stood for a moment nonplussed. The expression of alert and
confident resourcefulness had departed. Her intelligence had failed
her. Yet once more the old smile mounted bravely.
"But there still remains one thing," she breathed softly, leaning toward
him. "That is I. Everything you have got is gone, or going. I have
taken it away from you that I might give you instead myself. You had no
room for me last week. You have nothing else but me now. It hurt me to
give you pain. I hate Searle. I could have torn his tongue out
yesterday. But you will forgive me, John. I did it for love."
Her utterance was indescribably pathetic--indescribably appealing.
"I am not to blame that I love you. You are to blame. No, the God that
constituted us is to blame."
Her tones grew lower and lower. The spirit of humbled pride, of
chastened submission, of helpless want entered more and more into the
expression of her face and the timbre of her soft voice, while the very
outlines of her figure seemed to melt and quiver with the intensity of
yearning.
"It has been hard to humble myself in this way to you," she confessed.
"I tried to win you as once I won you, as women like to win their
lovers. But I am not quite as other women. I have to have you! My
nature is imperious. It will shatter itself or have its will. I
shattered your love to gain my ambition's goal. And now I have shattered
your career to gain your love again."
Hampstead, though his consideration was growing for the woman, could not
resist a shaft of irony.
"That was a sacrifice you took the liberty of making for me," he
suggested.
"But, don't you see, it made me possible for you again," and the actress
smiled with that obtuseness which was pitiful because it would not see
defeat. She drew closer to him now, well within reach of his arm, and
stood perfectly still, her hands clasped, her bosom heaving gently, a
thing of rounded curves and wistful eyes, the figure of passionate,
submissive, appealing love, hoping--desiring--waiting--to be taken.
Yet the minister did not take her.
But whatever agonies of lingering suspense, of dying hope, and rising
despair may have passed through the indomitable woman as she stood in
this pose of vain and helpless waiting, there was yet a spirit in her
that would not surrender because it could not.
With eyes mournfully searching the depths of the face before her, she
began her last appeal.
"And yet, John, there is a sacrifice that I am willing to make that is
all my own and none of yours. I will renounce my own ambition, abandon
the stage, cancel my engagements, give up that for which I have bartered
everything a woman has to give but one thing. I have kept that one
thing for you alone. The name of Marien Dounay shall disappear. I will
be Alice Higgins again. I will be not an artist but a wife. I will be
the associate of your work. You must go from here, of course. I have
made your remaining impossible. But we will find some place where men
and women need the kind of thing that you can do. It is a great need.
There is a sort of glory in your work which I have not been too blind to
see. My bridal flowers shall be the weeds of humble service. I will
employ my art to bring cheer into homes of poverty, freshness and
brightness to the sick. I will try to be God's replica of all that you
yourself are. I say I will try!"
She had raised her face now and was searching his eyes again.
"I will do all of this, eagerly, joyously, fanatically, John Hampstead,
if it will make it possible for you to love me--as once you loved me,"
she concluded, with the last words barely audible and sounding more like
heart throbs than human speech.
Hampstead, looking levelly into her face, saw that the woman spoke the
truth, that she was absolutely sincere.
She saw that he saw it, and with a gesture of mute appeal threw out her
hands to him. But they gathered only air and fell limply to her side.
The minister, although his manner expressed a world of sympathy, shook
his head sadly. Marien's face grew white, and the red of her lips
almost disappeared. A look of blank terror came into her eyes, while
one hand, with fingers half-closed, stole upward to the blanched cheek,
and the other was pressed convulsively against her breast.
"I have my answer--John!" she whispered hoarsely, after an interval. "I
have my answer!"
"Yes, Marien," he replied, sorrowfully but decisively, "you have your
answer."
Her eyes, always eloquent, and now with a look of terrible hurt in them,
suffused quickly, and it seemed that she would burst into tears and
fling herself weakly upon the man she loved so hopelessly. Instead,
however, only a shiny drop or two coursed down the cheeks which
continued as white as marble; and she held herself resolutely aloof, but
balancing uncertainly until all at once her rounded figure seemed to
wilt and she would have fallen, had not the minister thrown an arm about
the tottering form and with gentle brotherliness of manner helped her to
a seat in the Morris chair.
For a considerable time she sat with her face in her hands, silent but
for an occasional dry, eruptive sob.
Hampstead, standing back with arms folded and one hand making a rest for
his chin, looked on helplessly, realizing that for the first time he was
studying this complex personality with something like real
comprehension.
While he gazed a purpose appeared to stir again in the disconsolate
figure. The dry sobs ceased, and the body straightened till her head
found its rest upon the back of the chair; but there the woman relaxed
again in seeming total exhaustion with eyes closed and lips slightly
parted. Hampstead drew a little closer, as if in tribute to this
determined nature which now obviously fought with its grief as it had
fought to gain the object of its attachment--indomitably. He had again
the feeling which had come to him before, that she was greater, was
worthier than he.
"How I have made you suffer!" Marien exclaimed abruptly, at the same
time opening her eyes.
"Yes," the minister confessed frankly, while the lines of pain seemed to
chisel themselves deeper upon his face with the admission, "you have
indeed made me suffer."
"Can you ever, ever forgive me?" she asked, lifting her hand
appealingly.
It was a small hand and lily white, with slim and tapering fingers. The
minister took it in his and found it as soft as before,--but chilled.
"Yes," he said, gravely and calculatingly, "I do forgive you. The ruin
has been almost complete; but I am strong enough to build again!"
"Oh," she exclaimed eagerly, starting up, "do you think you can?"
"Yes," he assured her stoutly, "I know it." He was beginning to feel
sorrier for her than for himself. "You, too," he suggested gently, "must
begin to build again."
Again her features whitened, and she fell back, pressing her brow with a
gesture of pain and bewilderment, a suggestion of one who wakes to find
one's self in chaos. It seemed a very long time that she was silent, but
with lines of thought upon her brow and the signs of strengthening
purpose gradually again appearing about her mouth and chin. When she
spoke it was to say with determination:
"Yes; and I, too, am strong enough to build again. In these silent
minutes I have been thinking worlds and worlds of things. I have lost
everything--yet everything remains--and more. My art shall be my
husband; and I will be a greater actress than ever. I shall play with a
greater power, inspired and informed by the love which I have lost. I
was never tender enough before. The critics charged me with hardness; I
hated them for it. I could not understand them. Now I know. I could
never play but half a woman's heart. I was too selfish, too proud, too
imperious. I regarded love too lightly. That mistake will be
impossible now. I know that love is all and all. There is no ecstasy of
love's delight of which my imagination cannot conceive; there is no
despair which the loss of love may produce that my experience will not
have fathomed before this poignant ache in my heart is done."
At first John recoiled a little at this talk of a utilitarian extraction
from her bitter experience and his; yet he reflected that it was like
the woman. It was but the outcrop of the dominant passion. Since
girlhood she had seen herself solely in terms of relation to her art;
therefore this attitude now indicated, not a lack of fineness, but her
almost noble capacity for converting everything to the ultimate object
of the artist. Without such capacity for abandon, there was, he
reflected, no supreme artist; and, he reasoned further, no supreme
minister--or man, even. To this extent and in this moment, Marien's
bearing in defeat was a lesson and a spur to him.
"I shall go widowed to my work," she went on to say, "but it will be a
greater work than I could have done before. Then I had an ambition.
Now I have a mission! To show women--and men too--the worth and weight
and height and depth and paramount value of love."
Hampstead was again deeply impressed with her enormous resiliency of
spirit. The woman's heart had been torn to pieces; yet while each nerve
and fiber of it was a pulse of pain, she was purposing to bind the thing
together and let its every throb be a word of warning to womankind.
"I learned it from you," she explained, almost as if she had read his
thoughts. "I understand now the exalted mood in which you spoke a few
minutes ago. I am sorry that I have lost you; but I am not sorry that I
have hurled you down, since it leaves revealed a nobler figure of a man
than I had thought existed."
Hampstead shuddered, in part at his own pain, in part at the ease with
which she uttered the sentiment, because this woman could really never
know how much his fall had cost him.
"Each of us in life I fear must be held to answer for his own
obtuseness," he suggested.
"But that is not all we are held to answer for," Miss Dounay replied
with sudden perception. "We must pay the penalty of the obtuseness of
others."
"Ah!" exclaimed the minister quickly. "There you stumbled upon one of
the greatest truths in religion, the law of vicarious suffering. We are
each compelled, whether we will or not, to suffer for the sins of
others. If we, you or I, mere humanity that we are, can so manage such
suffering that it becomes a redemptive influence over the life of the
one who caused it, we have done in a small and distant way the thing
which the Son of Man did so perfectly for all the world."
"I see," she exclaimed eagerly, pressing her hands together in a sort of
rapture. "It is that which you have done for me. You have suffered for
my sin, and you have so managed the suffering that you have taken away
some of my selfishness and will send me out of here, as I said before,
not with an ambition, but with a mission."
She had risen, and though her manner was still subdued, it was again the
manner of self-possession. Yet the new mood into which she had passed,
and the new light of spiritual enthusiasm which had come upon her face,
in no wise wiped out the impression that in the hour past she had tasted
the bitterest disappointment that a woman can know, had plunged to the
very depths of despair, and was still under its somber cloud. Indeed it
was the fierceness of the conflagration within her which had burned out
so swiftly at least a part of that dross of selfishness of which she had
spoken, and clarified her vision, so that their two minds had leaped
quickly from one peak of thought to another, to come suddenly on
embarrassed silence just because all words, all deeds even, seemed
suddenly futile to express what each had felt and was now feeling.
As the conversation lapsed momentarily, both appeared to find relief in
trivial interests. The minister straightened the books in the rack upon
his desk, then looked at his watch and noted that it was fifteen minutes
to seven and reflected that seven was his dinner hour.
The actress gave her hair a few touches with her hands, and stood
adjusting her hat before the mirror above the mantel. But the veil was
still raised. Hampstead watched these operations silently, moved by
evidences of the change in the woman.
"You have forgiven me," she began again, noticing in the mirror that his
eye was upon her; "but I do not forgive myself. My first mission is to
repair the damage which I have done to you. I will go immediately to
Searle and tell him the truth."
Hampstead's mouth fell open, and a single step carried him half way
across the room.
"But you must not tell Searle nor any one else the truth!" he affirmed
vehemently.
It was Marian's turn to be surprised.
"You mean that I am not to undo the wrong that I have done you?"' she
asked in amazement.
"Not that way," he answered, with deliberate shakings of the head.
"You mean that you are to stand under the stigma which now rests upon
you?" she insisted, with a gleam of the old imperious manner.
"Certainly not! I have done wrong enough! It cannot be undone too
quickly. I shall tell the truth to Searle. I shall gather the reporters
about me and spare myself nothing. I will reveal the whole horrible
plot; I will confess that Searle was duped, and that you were grossly
conspired against by me!"
Again Hampstead, meeting that level glance, knew that the woman spoke in
absolute sincerity. She was entirely capable of doing it. Once a
course commended itself to her judgment, she had already shown that she
would spare nothing to follow it.
"But you forget young Burbeck," he exclaimed. "Your exposure would mean
his exposure."
"Well?"
Marien's eyes and tone both expressed her meaning, though she added
incisively: "He is no reason why you should linger under this cloud."
Hampstead gazed at the woman doubtfully, speculating as to what argument
would make the strongest appeal to her.
"His mother," he began gravely, "is my dearest friend. She is the most
saintly woman I have ever known. One year of her life to this community
is worth more than a score of years of mine--than all of mine. Let her
know in private that her son is the thief, and she would grieve to death
in a week. Let her know suddenly, with the force of public exposure,
and it would kill her instantly, like an electric shock."
But this note proved the wrong one. Marien instantly took higher
ground.
"I know that woman," she replied. "I have sensed her spirit. You do
her injustice. If she knew the facts, she would speak, though it killed
her and ruined her son, rather than see you endure for a single day what
you are suffering now."
Hampstead knew better than the speaker how true this was.
"But there is another reason, a higher reason," he began slowly, with a
grave significance that caught Marian's attention instantly, "the soul
of Rollie Burbeck!"
The minister had breathed rather than spoken these last words. They had
in them a sense of the awe he felt at what hung upon his actions now.
For an instant, the keen eyes of the woman searched the depths of
Hampstead's own, as if she was making sure that what she heard and
understood with this new and spiritual intuition which had come so
swiftly out of her experience, was confirmed by what she saw.
"You mean," she asked, only half credulous, "that you will suffer for
his sake as you have suffered for mine, until new character begins to
grow in him just as a new objective begins to stir in me? You mean
that?"
Hampstead nodded. "That is my hope," he said solemnly.
"Oh!" Marien sighed, with a prolonged aspirate note which expressed
reverence, awe, and astonishment. "But the charges? They will be
pressed. You will be held--convicted--imprisoned!"
"I cannot think it," argued John soberly. "A way will appear to avoid
that. Yet we must contemplate the worst. One thing is sure," and his
voice appeared to increase in volume without an increase of tone, "one
thing is sure: In the position in which you have placed me I must remain
until the thing for which I am standing has been accomplished--however
long that takes--and if the wrong you have done to me confers any
obligation upon you, it is to keep your lips sealed till I give you
leave to open them."
Miss Dounay, more humbled by this steadfast magnanimity of soul which
could refuse vindication when it was offered than awed by the sudden
force of self-assertion which Hampstead manifested, looked her
submission.
"Man!" she exclaimed impulsively, seizing both his hands for an instant.
"I revere you. You are not the flesh I thought. You have altered
greatly. Yours was not a pose. It is genuine. I am reconciled a
little to my loss. You are not mine because I was not worthy to be
yours!"
Hampstead made a deprecating, repressive gesture.
"Let me finish," she protested. "I am even less humiliated. The thing
required to charm you was a thing I did not possess!"
"Beauty is a great possession," Hampstead smiled. "I have been and am
sensible to it. I was sensible to your beauty to the last. The woman I
love is beautiful."
"The woman you love!" Marien's whole manner changed. Her face took on
the tigerish look. "There is some one else then? At least," she added
reproachfully, "you might have spared me this."
"It was necessary," the minister replied quietly, "if we were really to
understand each other."
The gravity of the man's tone, as well as some subtle recovery within
herself, checked the tigerish impulse. Swiftly it gave way to pain and
humility again.
"You--you are to marry?" she faltered weakly.
"No," he replied, with ineffable sadness. "This--" and again that
comprehensive gesture which he had used so frequently to indicate the
catastrophe which had come upon him, "this has dashed that hope
entirely!"
The actress stood completely confounded. Within herself she wondered
why she did not fly into a jealous passion. Surely she was changing;
she felt half bewildered, half distrustful of her own moods in which she
had believed so surely before. She was also completely staggered by
this crowning revelation of the capacity of the man for sacrifice.
Instead of the jealous passion, she felt a sisterly kind of sympathy;
but it was only after a very considerable interval that Marien trusted
herself to ask with trembling voice:
"She is very--very beautiful--this--this woman whom you love?"
The question was put very softly, meditatively almost.
"To me, yes," replied the minister with emphasis. "I think you would
say so too."
"You were engaged?"
"Not when I met you first; but there had been a bond of very close
sympathy between us. After you were gone, I felt that I had never
really loved you; and my heart fastened itself on her. I loved her and
told her so. But I felt it my duty to tell her the truth about you.
Manlike, I thought she would comprehend. Woman-like, she comprehended
more than I thought. She believed me weak and uncertain. She loved me
still, but with a pain of disappointment in her heart. She put my love
upon a kind of probation. The probation has lasted five years. It was
almost finished. After what the papers have published in the past few
days, you can imagine that now all is over."
"But you will write to her? You will see her? You will explain?"
Marien questioned in self-forgetful eagerness.
"Explain," he smiled sadly. "What a futility! What explanation could
there be after what I had told her? You know a woman's heart. More
firmly than any other, she would be forced to an implicit belief in what
the newspapers have falsely intimated concerning our relations in the
past few weeks."
"But I will go to her myself!" Marien exclaimed impetuously. "I will
tell her the truth."
"Do you think she would believe you?" he asked frankly. "Could you
expect any woman to believe in your sincerity under such circumstances,
upon such a mission? You would not be able to believe it yourself."
"You are right!" Marien admitted after a moment of thought. "Once away
from the restraining influence of your character, my true nature would
reveal itself. I should hate her! I do hate her! No, I could not go!"
"And so, you see,"--John did not finish the sentence but had recourse to
a helpless smile and a pathetic shrug of the shoulders.
Marien lowered her veil. The interview was running on and on. It must
come to an end.
"It all becomes uncanny," she exclaimed. "There is too much converging
upon your heart. There must come a rift in the clouds. I have
submitted to your compelling altruism but only for the present. If
something does not happen within a reasonable limit of time, I shall
positively and dangerously explode!"
John smiled at the vehemence with which she spoke.
"But in the meantime--silence!" he adjured impressively.
"Yes," she assented reluctantly. "But at the same time I shall not know
one gleam of happiness, one moment's freedom from mental anguish until
your vindication is flung widely to the world."
"But in the meantime, silence!" reiterated John obstinately.
"And in the meantime," she consented more resignedly, "silence!"
"Good night, Marien," said the minister, putting out his hand.
"Good night, Doctor Hampstead," she replied, seizing that hand
impulsively, then flinging it from her again as she turned, without
another glance, to the door. It closed behind her softly, considerately
almost, but with that same decisive snap of the lock which had shut her
in three quarters of an hour before.
Hampstead stood a moment in reflection. She had come and she had gone,
leaving behind a great sense of relief, of complexities unraveled, of
good accomplished and of further danger averted. Of one thing he felt
sure now; he would never go to prison. A way would be found to avoid
that. Her vindictive malice had spent itself and been turned to an
attempt at co-operation.
But he was still under clouds: one the verdict of Judge Brennan, "Held
to Answer"; the other less black, but larger and murkier, the cloud of
public condemnation; and for the present he must remain under both.
Besides which, there was his church and Elder Burbeck to consider.
And to-morrow was Sunday!
*CHAPTER XXXVIII*
*SUNDAY IN ALL PEOPLE'S*
Elder Burbeck did not make good his threat. Hampstead stood again in the
pulpit of All People's on Sunday, as his heart had so passionately
desired.
But the reality disappointed. The contrast between this day and last
Lord's day was pitiful. To be sure, the church was packed; but not to
worship. The people--curious and wooden-hearted--had come to be
witnesses to a spectacle, to see a man go through the business of a role
which his character no longer fitted him to enact. The service and the
sermon were one long agony. John spoke upon the duty of being true.
His words came back upon him like an echo.
As for Elder Burbeck, he had only halted. The minister, from
considerations of delicacy which were promptly misconstrued, having
remained away from the called meeting of the Official Board on Saturday
night, all things in that session had gone to Burbeck's satisfaction. He
held in his pocket the resolution of the Board, recommending that the
congregation request the resignation of the pastor of All People's. He
might have introduced this at the close of the sermon, thus turning the
ordinary congregational meeting into a business session; but the Elder
was an expert tactician. He decided to devote the entire day to a final
estimate of just what inroads the week had made upon the ascendancy of
the minister with his people.
However, the manner in which the sermon was received encouraged him to
go forward immediately with his plans. As the congregation was upon the
last verse of the last hymn, the Elder ascended to the pulpit beside the
minister. He did not look at the minister. He did not whisper that he
had an announcement to make, and Hampstead did not say at the end of the
hymn: "Elder Burbeck has an announcement to make." This was the usual
form. But it was not followed. Instead, Burbeck, unannounced, with
coarse self-assertion, made the announcement:
"There will be a business meeting of the church on Monday night to
consider matters of grave import to the congregation. Every member is
urged to be present."
There was a grave doubt if the Elder had a right of himself to call a
meeting of the church. Yet the only man with force enough to voice that
doubt was the minister, and he did not voice it. Instead, he stood
quietly until the announcement was concluded and then invoked the
benediction of God upon all the service, which, of course, included the
announcement.
When at the close of the service Doctor Hampstead undertook to mingle
among his people, according to custom, he found a minority hysterically
hearty in their assurances of confidence, sympathy, and support; but the
majority avoided him. Instead of enduring this and withering under it,
the minister was roused into something like aggression. By confronting
and accosting them, he forced aloof individuals to address him. He made
his way into groups that did not open readily to receive him. In all
conversations he frankly recognized his position, made it the uppermost
topic, and solicited opinion and advice. He even eavesdropped a little.
Once people opened their mouths upon the subject, he was astonished at
their frankness. When the sum total of the impressions thus gathered
was organized and deductions made, he was stunned almost to cynicism by
their results. Of course, no one indicated that they believed him
guilty of theft, and in the main all accepted his defense as the true
defense. But they found him guilty of folly--a folly with a woman.
Whether it was merely a folly and not a sin, it appeared was not to
greatly alter penalties.
Yet justice must be done these people. They felt sorry for their
minister and showed it; and they only shrank from him to avoid showing
something else that would hurt him. They still acknowledged their debts
of personal gratitude to him, but now they experienced a feeling of
superiority. Their weaknesses had overtaken them in private; his had
caught up with him under the spotlight's glare. They looked upon him
with commiseration, pityingly, but from a lofty height. Besides which,
they accused him of an overt offense. He had brought shame on All
People's. He had preached to them this morning upon the duty of being
true; but he had himself not been true--to the proud self-interest of
All People's.
This indignant concern for the reputation of All People's was rather a
surprising revelation to Hampstead. He had fallen into the way of
thinking that he had made All People's; that he and All People's were
one. That the congregation could have any purpose that did not include
his purpose was not thinkable. He had never conceived of it as a social
organism, with self-consciousness, with pride, with a head to be held up
and a reputation to be sustained. To him All People's was not a society
of persons with a pose. It was an association of individuals, each more
or less weak, more or less dependent in their spiritual nature upon each
other and upon him; the whole banded together to help each other and to
help others like themselves. He had thought of himself as the
instrument of All People's in its work of human salvage. But he now
discovered that in these four years All People's had suffered from an
over extension of the ego. It had been spoiled by prosperity and public
approbation, just as other congregations, or individuals, might be or
have been. The admiration of the members for him as their pastor, their
humble obedience to his will, was in part due, not to his spiritual
ascendancy, not to his conspicuously successful labors as a helper of
humankind in so many different ways, but to the fact that these
activities of the minister won him that public admiration and approval
which shed a glamour also upon the congregation and upon the individual
members of the congregation. Because of this, they worshipped him,
honored him, and palavered over him to a point where Hampstead, no doubt
as unconsciously as the congregation and as dangerously, had suffered an
over-extension of his own ego.
But deflation of spirit had come to him swiftly. Now his own pride and
his own self-sufficiency had all been shot away. If any remained, the
effect of this Sunday morning service was quite sufficient to perform
the final operation of removal.
He was to preach that night from the text: "If God is for us, who is
against us." He gave up the idea. It sounded egotistical. He preached
instead his farewell sermon, though without a word of farewell in it,
from the text:
"Brethren, even if a man be overtaken in any trespass, ye who are
spiritual restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness; looking to
thyself lest thou also be tempted."
That was what the pastor of All People's was trying to do,--to restore a
man. In preaching this sermon, he forgot that this was his valedictory,
forgot himself, forgot everything but the great mission of spiritual
reconstruction upon which he had labored and proposed to labor as long
as life was in him, no matter what yokes and scars were put upon him.
In it he reached the oratorical height of his career, which was not
necessarily lofty.
But people listened--and with understanding. Some of them cried a
little. It made them reminiscent. The man himself, now slipping, had
once restored them with great gentleness. All said, "What a pity!"
But Hampstead, while he spoke, was steeling himself against the probable
desertion of his congregation. He had a feeling that he could win them
back if he tried hard enough, but he began to doubt that they were worth
winning back. He had really never sought to win them to himself
personally; he would not begin now.
Instead, he saw himself cast out. The verdict of the church on Monday
night would also be "Held to Answer."
He saw it coming almost gloatingly, and with a fierce up-flaming of that
fanatic ardor which was always in him. The desire came to him to seize
upon the position in which he stood as a pulpit from which to deliver a
message to the world that greatly needed to be delivered, to say
something that his fate and his life thereafter might illustrate, and
thus make his public shame a greater witness to the truth than ever his
popularity had been. In one of the loftiest of his moods of exaltation,
he strode homeward from the church.
At ten o'clock, he telephoned the morning papers that at midnight he
would have a statement to give out. It contained some rather extravagant
expressions, was couched throughout in an exalted strain, and ran as
follows: