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.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 44633
   :PG.Title: Held to Answer
   :PG.Released: 2014-01-08
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: Peter Clark Macfarlane
   :MARCREL.ill: \W. \B. King
   :DC.Title: Held to Answer
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1916
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

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HELD TO ANSWER
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   .. _`"Follow your star, John," Bessie declared stoutly. FRONTISPIECE.`:

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      :alt: "Follow your star, John," Bessie declared stoutly. FRONTISPIECE.

      "Follow your star, John," Bessie declared stoutly. FRONTISPIECE.  *See page* `82`_.

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      HELD
      TO ANSWER

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      *A NOVEL*

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      BY

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      PETER CLARK MACFARLANE

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      AUTHOR OF
      THOSE WHO HAVE COME BACK, ETC.

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      WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
      \W. \B. KING

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      NEW YORK
      GROSSET & DUNLAP
      PUBLISHERS  

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      *Copyright, 1916,*
      BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.

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      *All rights reserved*

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      Published, February, 1916
      Reprinted, February, 1916 (four times)

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   CONTENTS

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   CHAPTER

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I  `The Face That Did not Fit`_
II  `One Man and Another`_
III  `When the Dark Went Away`_
IV  `Advent and Adventure`_
V  `The Rate Clerk`_
VI  `On Two Fronts`_
VII  `The High Bid`_
VIII  `John Makes Up`_
IX  `A Demonstration from the Gallery`_
X  `A Stage Kiss`_
XI  `Seed to the Wind`_
XII  `A Thing Incalculable`_
XIII  `The Scene Played Out`_
XIV  `The Method of a Dream`_
XV  `The Catastrophe`_
XVI  `The King Still Lives`_
XVII  `When Dreams Come True`_
XVIII  `The House Divided`_
XIX  `His Next Adventure`_
XX  `A Woman with a Want`_
XXI  `A Cry of Distress`_
XXII  `Pursuit Begins`_
XXIII  `Capricious Woman`_
XXIV  `The Day of All Days`_
XXV  `His Bright Idea`_
XXVI  `Unexpectedly Easy`_
XXVII  `The First Alarm`_
XXVIII  `The Arrest`_
XXIX  `The Angel Advises`_
XXX  `The Scene in the Vault`_
XXXI  `A Misadventure`_
XXXII  `The Coward and His Conscience`_
XXXIII  `The Battle of the Headlines`_
XXXIV  `A Way That Women Have`_
XXXV  `On Preliminary Examination`_
XXXVI  `A Promise of Strength`_
XXXVII  `The Terms of Surrender`_
XXXVIII  `Sunday in All People's`_
XXXIX  `The Cup Too Full`_
XL  `The Elder in the Chair`_





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.. _`THE FACE THAT DID NOT FIT`:

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   HELD TO ANSWER

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   CHAPTER I

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   THE FACE THAT DID NOT FIT

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Two well-dressed men waited outside the rail on what
was facetiously denominated the mourners' bench.  One
was a packer of olives, the other the owner of oil wells.
A third, an orange shipper, leaned against the rail,
pulling at his red moustaches and yearning wistfully across
at a wattle-throated person behind the roll-top desk who
was talking impatiently on the telephone.  Just as the
receiver was hung up with an audible click, a buzzer on
the wall croaked harshly,—one long and two short
croaks.

Instantly there was a scuffling of feet upon the
linoleum over in a corner, where mail was being opened by a
huge young fellow with the profile of a mountain and a
gale of tawny hair blown up from his brow.  Undoubling
suddenly, this rangy figure of a man shot upward with
Jack-in-the-box abruptness and a violence which
threatened the stability of both the desk before him and the
absurdly small typewriter stand upon his left.  Seizing
a select portion of the correspondence, he lunged past the
roll-top desk of Heitmuller, the chief clerk, and aimed
toward the double doors of grained oak which loomed
behind.  But his progress was grotesque, for he careened
like a camel when he walked.  In the first stride or two
these careenings only threatened to be dangerous, but in
the third or fourth they made good their promise.  One
lurching hip joint banged the drawn-out leaf of the chief
clerk's desk, sweeping a shower of papers to the floor.

"John—dammit!" snapped Heitmuller irritably.
The other hip caracoled against the unopened half of the
double doors as John yawed through.  The door
complained loudly, rattling upon its hinges and in its brazen
sockets, so that for a moment there was clatter and
disturbance from one end of the office to the other.

The orange shipper started nervously, and the chief
clerk, cocking his head gander-wise, gazed in disgust at
the confusion on the floor, while far within Robert
Mitchell, the General Freight Agent of the California
Consolidated Railway, lifted a massive face from his desk
with a look of mild reproof in his small blue eyes.

Yet when the huge stenographer came back, and with
another scuffling of clumsy feet stooped to retrieve the
litter about Heitmuller's revolving chair, he seemed so
regretful and his features lighted with such a helplessly
apologetic smile that even his awkwardness appeared
commendable, since it was so obviously seasoned with the
grace of perfectly good intent.

Appreciation of this was advertised in the forgiving
chuckle of the chief clerk who, standing now at the rail,
remarked *sotto voce* to the orange shipper: "John is as
good as a vaudeville act!"

At this the red moustaches undulated appreciatively,
while the two "mourners" laughed so audibly that the
awkward man, once more in his chair, darted an embarrassed
glance at them, and the red flush came again to his
face.  He suspected they were laughing at him, and as
if to comfort himself, a finger and thumb went into his
right vest pocket and drew out a clipping from the
advertising columns of the morning paper.  Holding it deep in
his hand, he read furtively:

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*ACTING TAUGHT*.  Charles Kenton, character actor,
temporarily disengaged, will receive a few select pupils
in dramatic expression at his studio in The Albemarle.
Terms reasonable.

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Then John looked across aggressively at the men who
had laughed.  They were not laughing now, but nodding
in his direction, and whispering busily.

What were they saying?  That he was a joke, a failure?
That he had been in this chair seven years?  That
he was a big, snubbed, defeated, over-worked handy-man
about this big, loosely organized office?  That in seven
years he had neither been able to get himself promoted
nor discharged?  No doubt!

As if to get away from the thought, John turned from
his typewriter to the open window and looked out.  There
was the spire of the grand old First Church down there
below him.  Yonder were the sky-notching business
blocks of the pushing city of Los Angeles, as it was in the
early nineteen hundreds.  There, too, were the
villa-crowned heights to the north, shut in at last by the
barren ridges of the Sierra Madre Mountains, some of
which, in this month of January, were snow-capped.

But here were these foolish men still nodding and
whispering.  Good fellows, too, but blind.  What did they
know about him really?

They knew that he was a stenographer, but they did
not know that he was a stenographer to the glory of God!—one
who cleaned his typewriter, dusted his desk, opened
the mail, wrote his letters, ate, walked, slept, all to the
honor of his creator—that the whole of life to him was
a sort of sacrament.

They thought he was beaten and discouraged, an
industrial slave, drawn helplessly into the cogs.  They,
poor, purblind materialists, were without vision.  They
did not know that there were finer things than pickles and
crude oil.  They did not know that he was to soar; that
already his wings were budding, nor that he lived in an
inner state of spiritual exaltation as delicious as it was
unsuspected.  They pitied him; they laughed
commiseratingly.  He did not want their commiseration; he
spurned their laughter and their pity.  He was full of
youth and the exuberance of hope.  He was full of an
expanding strength that made him stronger as his dream
grew brighter.  Only his eyes were tired.  The cross
lights were bad.  For a moment he shaded his brow
tenderly with his hand, reflecting that he must hereafter use
an eye-shade by day as methodically he used one in his
nightly study.

The morning moved along.  The yearning orange
shipper went away.  One mourner rose and passed inside.
The other waited impatiently for his turn to do the same.
Luncheon time came for John, and he ate it in the file
room—ravenously; and while he ate he read—the
Congressional Record; and reading, made notations on the
margin, for John was preparing for what he was
preparing, although he did not quite know what.  The train
of destiny was rumbling along, and when it stopped at his
station, he proposed to swing on board.

His luncheon down swiftly, as much through hunger as
through haste, he swung out of the door, bound for
Charles Kenton, "actor—temporarily disengaged—Hotel
Albemarle—terms reasonable," moving with such
headlong speed that he was soon within that self-important
presence.

"Hampstead is my name," he blurted, with clumsy
directness, "John Hampstead," and the interview with
Destiny was on.

"The first trouble with you," declared the white-haired
actor critically, "is that your face doesn't fit."

John wet a lip and hitched a nervous leg, but sat
awkwardly silent, his eyes boring hungrily, as if waiting for
more.  The actor, however, was slow to add more.
Faces were his enthusiasm, as well as the raw material of
his profession, but this face puzzled him, so that before
committing himself further he paused to survey it again:
the strong nose with its hump of energy, the well
buttressed chin, and then the broad forehead with its
unusually thick, bony ridge encircling the base of the brows
like a bilge keel, proclaiming loudly that here was a man
with racial dynamite in his system, one who, whatever else
he might become, was now and always a first-class animal.

The eyebrows heightened this suggestion by being
thick and yellow, and sweeping off to the temples in a
scroll-like flare.  The forehead itself was broad, but
gathered a high look from that welter of tawny hair
which was roached straight up and back, giving the effect
of one who plunges headlong.

But the eyes completely modified the countenance.
They did not plunge.  They halted and beamed softly.
Gray and deep-seated, they made all that face's force the
force of tenderness, by burning with a light that was
obviously inner and spiritual.  The mouth, again, while
as cleanly chiseled as if cut from marble,—sensitive,
impressionistic, fine, was, alas! weak; or if not weak,
advertising weakness by an habitual expression of lax
amiability; although along with this the actor noted that
the two lips, buttoning so loosely at the corners, could
none the less collaborate in a most engaging smile.

Kenton concluded his second appraisal with a little
gesture of impatience.  The man's features gave each other
the lie direct, and that was all there was to it.  They
said: This man is a beast, a great, roaring lion of a
man; and then they said: No, this lion is a lamb, a mild,
dreamy, sucking dove sort of person.

"That's it," he iterated.  "Your face doesn't fit."

Hampstead did not wince.

"The question is," he proposed, in a voice husky with
a mixture of embarrassment and determination, "how
am I to make it fit?  Or, failing that, how am I to get
somewhere with a face that doesn't fit?"

The actor's reply was half sagacity, half "selling
talk", mixed with some judicious flattery and tinged
with inevitable gallery play, although there was no gallery.

"Elocution?" Kenton observed, with a little grimace
of derision.  "No!  Oratory?  Not at all!"  The
weight of his withering scorn was tremendous.  "There
are no such things.  It is all acting!  A man speaks with
the whole of himself—his eyes, his mouth, his body, his
walk, his pose—everything.  That's what you need to
learn.  Self-expression!  I can make your face fit.
That's simple enough," and Kenton waved his hand as if
the re-stamping of a man's features was the easiest thing
he did.  "I can make your body graceful.  I can take
that voice of yours and make it strong as the roar of a
bull, and as soft as rich, brown velvet.  Yes," and the
actor leaped to his feet in growing enthusiasm, "I can
make 'em all respond to every whim of what's passing
inside.  But," he asked suddenly, with a penetrating
glance, "will that make an orator of you?  Well, that
depends on what's passing inside.  It takes a great soul
to make an orator—great imagination, mind, feelings,
sentiments.  Have you got 'em?  I doubt it!  I doubt it!"

The old man confirmed his dubiousness with the
uncomplimentary emphasis of hesitating silence.  In the
sincerity of his critical analysis, he had forgotten that he was
trying to secure a pupil.  "And yet—and yet—" his
eye began to kindle as he looked, "I tell you I don't know,
boy—there's something—there might be something
behind that face of yours.  It might come out, you know,
*it might come out*!"

Kenton drawled the last words out slowly in a deeply
speculative tone, and then asked abruptly: "How old
are you?"

"Twenty-four," admitted John, feeling suddenly as if
he confessed the years of Methuselah.

But the dark eyes of the old actor sparkled, and his
long, mobile lips parted in the ghost of a sigh which crept
out through teeth stained yellow by years and tobacco,
after which he ejaculated admiringly: "My God, but
you are young!"

This came as an inspiring thought to John.  He did
feel young, all but his eyes.  What was the matter with
them that the lids were so woodeny of late?  Yes; he was
young, despite seven submerged years, and the wings of
his soul were preening.

Back in the General Freight Office, John fell upon his
work with happy vigor.  Spat, spat, spat, and a letter was
on its way from Dear Sir to Yours truly.  But in the
midst of these spattings, he paused to muse.

"Kenton said he could make me graceful," the big
fellow was communing over his typewriter, when abruptly
the outer door opened and, after a single glance, John
appeared to forget both his communings and his work.
Swinging about, he sat transfixed, his odd features turned
eccentrically handsome by a light of adoration which
began to glow upon them, as if an astral presence had
entered.

Yet to the unprejudiced observer the newcomer was no
heavenly being, but a mere schoolgirl, whose dress had
not been long at the shoe-top stage.  With a swish of
skirts and an excited ripple of laughter, she had burst in
like a breeze of youth itself.  But to this breeziness of
youth the young lady added the indefinable thing called
charm, and the promise of greater charm to come.  She
was already tall and would be taller, fair to look upon and
certain to be fairer.  To a dress of some warm red color,
a touch of piquancy was added by a Tam-o'-Shanter cap
of plaid that was itself pushed jauntily to one side by a
wealth of crinkly brown hair; while a bit of soft brown
fur encircled the neck and cuddled affectionately as a
kitten under the smooth, plump chin.  The face was oval
with a tendency to fullness, and the nose, while by no
means *retroussé*, was as distinctively Irish as the sparkle
in the blue of her laughing eyes.  Irish, too, were the
smiling lips, but the delicious dimples that flecked the
white and red of her cheeks were entirely without
nationality.  They were just woman, budding, ravishing
woman; and there is no doubt whatever that they helped
to make the fascination of that merry face complete, when
its spell was cast over the soul of Hampstead.

"Oh, John!" exclaimed the young lady with impulsive
familiarity, bounding through the gate and over to
his side, "I want you to write some invitations for me.
This is my week to entertain the Phrosos.  See!  Isn't
the paper dear?"

There were caresses in the big man's eyes as the girl
drew near, but he replied with less freedom than her own
form of address invited: "Good afternoon, Miss
Bessie."

The restraint in his speech however was much in
contrast to the bold poaching of his eyes.  But Bessie
appeared to notice neither restraint nor the boldness as,
standing by his desk, with the big man looking on
interestedly, she undid the package in her hand.

The picture of frank and simple comradeship so
immediately established proclaimed a certain mutual
unawareness between this pretty, half-developed girl and
this big, unawakened man that was as delightful to
contemplate as it evidently was to enjoy.

"Isn't it darling?" the girl demanded again, having
exposed to view the contents of her box, invitation paper
with envelopes to match, in color as pink as her own
cheeks.

"Yes, Miss Bessie, it is dear," John concurred placidly.

"But you are not looking at it," protested the girl.

"No," the awkward man confessed, but entirely
unabashed, "I am looking at you—devouringly."

"Well, you needn't," Bessie answered spicily.

"Yes, I need," John declared coolly.  "You do not
know how much I need.  You are the only unspoiled
human being I ever see in this office."

"Old Heit does look rather shopworn," Bessie whispered
roguishly.  "But, look here," and she thrust out
her lips in a pout that was at once defiant and tantalizing,
while her eyes rested for a moment upon the closed
double doors: "My father is an unspoiled human being."

"What have you been doing to your hair?" Hampstead
demanded critically, refusing to be diverted.

"Doing it up, of course, as grown women should,"
she vouchsafed with emphasis.  "Don't you like it?"

With a flash of her two hands, one of which snatched
out a pin while the other swept off the plaid cap, she spun
herself rapidly about so that John might view the new
coiffure from all angles.

"Oh, of course, I have to like it," he said, with mock
mournfulness.  "I have to like anything you do,
because I like you, and because you are my boss's boss; but
I am sorry to lose the thick braids down your back, with
that delicious little velvety tuft at the end that I used to
catch up and tickle your ear with in the long, long ago."

"But how long ago was that, Sir Critical?" challenged
Bessie.

"Long, long ago," affirmed Hampstead, with another
of his humorous sighs, "when it was a part of my duty
to take you to the circus and buy you peanuts and
lemonade of a color to match your cheeks."

"And that," dissented the young lady triumphantly,
"was only last September, and the one before that, and,
in fact, almost every circus day since I can remember."

"But now that you are doing your hair up high, you
will not need me to take you to the circus again."

This time the note of sadness in Hampstead's voice was
genuine, whereat all the loyalty in the soul of Bessie
leaped up.

"You shall," she declared, with an impulsive sweetness
of manner, while she leaned close and added in a whisper
that made the assurance deliciously confidential—"as
long as you wish."

"Then I shall do it forever," declared John recklessly.

"However," and Miss Elizabeth Mitchell, with a playful
acquisition of dignity, switched the subject abruptly
by announcing briskly, "business before circuses."

"Phrosos before rhinos, as it were," consented John.

"Yes—now take your pencil and let me dictate."

"But," bantered John, "I allow no woman to dictate
to me.  Besides, I write a perfectly horrible hand."

"Oh," explained Bessie, "but I want them on the
typewriter.  It'll make the other girls wild.  None of
them can command a typewriter."

"Yet," protested Hampstead, "overlooking for the
moment the offensiveness in that word 'command', I
venture to suggest, Miss Mitchell, that things are not done
that way this year.  A typewritten invitation isn't
considered good form in the best circles."

"I don't care; we'll have 'em," declared Bessie.
"We'll set a new fashion."  Her little foot smote the
floor sharply, and she stood bolt upright, so upright that
she leaned back, gazing at John through austere lashes,
her face lengthening till the dimples disappeared, while
the Cupid's bow of her lips became almost a memory.

"Oh, very well," weakened Hampstead, bowing his
head, "I cannot brook that gaze for long.  It shall be
as your Grace commands."

"Tired, aren't you?" commented Bessie, suddenly
mollified, and scanning the big face narrowly, while a
look of soberness came into her eyes.  "I can see it; and
your eyes look bad—very bad, John."  Her voice was
girlishly sympathetic.  "These people do not appreciate
you, either.  But I do!  I know!" and she nodded her
round chin stoutly, while she laid a hand upon the arm
of this man who, seven years her senior, was in some
respects her junior.  "You are a very great man in the
day of his obscurity.  It will come out some time.  You
will be General Manager of the railroad, or something
very, very big.  Won't you?" and she leaned close again
with that delightfully confidential whisper.

"I admit it," confessed John, with a happy chuckle.

But Bessie's restless eye had fallen upon the clock.
"Pickles and artichokes!" she exclaimed, with a sudden
change of mood, "I must flit."

Snatching from her bag a crumpled note, she tossed
it on the desk, calling back: "Here.  This is what I
want to say to 'em."

Hampstead sat for a moment looking after her, his lips
parted, his great hands set upon his knees with fingers
sprawled very widely, until Bessie was out of view behind
the double doors that admitted to her father's presence.





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.. _`ONE MAN AND ANOTHER`:

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   CHAPTER II


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   ONE MAN AND ANOTHER

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In the dusk of the early winter's night in that land
where winter hints its presence but slightly in any other
way, two children dashed out of a rambling shell of a
cottage that sprawled rather hopelessly over an unkempt
lot, screaming: "Uncle John!  Uncle John!"

Roused from castled, starry dreams, the big stenographer,
who had been enjoying the feel of the dark upon
his eyes, and the occasional happy fragrance of orange
blossoms in his nostrils, greeted each with a bear hug,
and the three clattered together up the rickety steps into
a tiny hall.  On the left was an oblong room, and beyond
it, through curtains, appeared a table set for dinner.
Light streaming in from this second room revealed the
first as a sort of parlor-studio, where a piano, a lounge,
easels, malsticks, palettes, and stacks of unframed
canvases jostled each other indifferently.  An inspection
would have shown that these pictures were mostly
landscapes, with now and then a flower study in brilliant
colors; and to the practised eye a distressing atmosphere
of failure would have obtruded from every one.

From somewhere beyond the dining room came the
odor of cooking food, and the sound of energetic but
heavy footsteps.

"Hello, Rose," called John cheerily.

At the moment a woman came into view, bearing a
steaming platter.  She was large of frame, with gray
eyes, with straight light hair, fair wide brow, and
features that showed a general resemblance to Hampstead's
own.  Her face had a weary, disturbed look, but lighted
for a moment at the sight of her brother.

Depositing the platter upon the table, the woman sank
heavily into a chair at the end, where she began
immediately to serve the plates.  The children, a girl and a
boy, sat side by side, with John across from them.  This
left a vacant chair opposite Rose, and before this a plate
was laid.

For a time the family fell upon its food in silence.
The girl was eleven years old perhaps, with eyes of
lustrous hazel, reddish-brown hair massed in curls upon
her shoulders and hanging below, cheeks hopelessly
freckled, mouth large, and nose also without hope through
being waggishly pugged.  The boy, whose sharp, pale
features exhibited traces of a battle with ill health begun
at birth and not yet ended, had eyes that were like his
mother's, clear and gray, and there was a brave turn to
his upper lip that excited pity on a face so pale.  He
looked older but was probably younger than his sister.
Hero-worship, frank and unbounded, was in the glance
with which the two from time to time beamed upon their
uncle.

After a considerable interval, John, glancing first at
the empty chair and then at his sister, asked with
significant constraint in his tone: "Any word?"

His sister's head was shaken disconsolately, and the
angular shoulders seemed to sink a little more wearily as
her face was again bowed toward her plate.

After another interval, Hampstead remarked: "You
seem worried to-night, Rose."

"The rent is due to-morrow," she replied in a wooden
voice.

"Is that all?" exclaimed John, throwing back his head
with a relieved laugh.  At the same time a hand had
stolen into his pocket, and he drew out a twenty-dollar
gold piece and tossed it across the table.

"The rent is $17.50," observed Rose, eyeing the coin
doubtfully.

"Keep the change," chuckled John, "and pass the potatoes."

But the woman's gloom appeared to deepen.

"You pay your board promptly," she protested.
"This is the third month in succession that you have also
paid the rent.  Besides, you are always doing for the
children."

"Who wouldn't, I'd like to know?" challenged John,
surveying them both proudly; whereat Dick, his mouth
being otherwise engaged, darted a look of gratitude from
his great, wise eyes, while Tayna reached over and patted
her uncle's hand affectionately.  "Tayna" was an
Indian name the girl's father had picked up somewhere.

"Besides," went on John, "Charles is having an
uphill fight of it right now.  It's a pleasure to stand by a
gallant fellow like him.  He goes charging after his ideal
like old Sir Galahad."

But the face of his sister refused to kindle.

"Like Don Quixote, you mean," she answered cynically.
"I haven't heard from him in three weeks.  He
has not sent me any money in six.  He sends it less and
less frequently.  He becomes more and more irresponsible.
You are spoiling him to support his family for
him, and," she added, with a choke in her voice, while a
tear appeared in her eye, "he is spoiling us—killing our
love for him."

The boy slipped down from his chair and stood beside
his mother, stroking her arm sympathetically.

"Poppie's all right," he whispered in his peculiar
drawl.  "He'll come home soon and bring a lot of money
with him.  See if he don't!"

"Oh, I know," confessed Rose, while with one hand
she dabbed the corner of her eye with an apron, and with
the other clasped the boy impulsively to her.  "I know I
should not give way before the children.  But—but it
grows worse and worse, John!"

"Nonsense!" rebuked her brother.  "You're only
tired and run down.  You need a rest, by Hokey! that's
what you need.  Charles is liable to sell that Grand
Canyon canvas of his any time, and when he does, you'll
get a month in Catalina, that's what you will!"

The wife was silently busy with her apron and her eyes.

"Do you know, Rose," John continued with forced
enthusiasm, "my admiration for Charles grows all the
time.  He follows his star, that boy does!"

"And forgets his family—leaves it to starve!"
reproached the sister bitterly, while the sag of her cheeks
became still more noticeable.

"Ah, but that's where you do Charles an injustice,"
insisted John.  "He knows I'm here.  We have a sort
of secret understanding; that is," and he gulped a little
at going too far—"that is, we understand each other.
He knows that while he is following his ideal, I won't
see you starve.  He's a genius; I'm the dub.  It's a fair
partnership.  His eye is always on the goal.  He will get
there sure—and soon, now, too."

"He will never get there!" blurted out the dejected
woman, as if with a sudden disregardful loosing of her
real convictions.  "For thirteen years I have hoped and
toiled and believed and waited.  A good while ago I
made up my mind.  He has not the vital spark.  For
five years I have pleaded with him to give it up—to
surrender his ambition, to turn his undoubted talent to
account.  He has had the rarest aptitude for decorating.
We might be having an income of ten thousand a year
now.  Instead he pursues this will-o'-the-wisp ambition
of his.  He is crazy about color, always chasing a foolish
sunset or some wonderful desert panorama of sky and
cloud and mountain—seeing colors no one else can see
but unable to put his vision upon the canvas.  That's the
truth, John!  I have never spoken it before.  Never
hinted it before the children!  Charles Langham is a
failure.  He will never be anything else but a failure!"

The words, concluded by the barely successful suppression
of a sob, fell on unprotesting silence.  Who but
this life-worn woman had so good an opportunity to know
if they were true, so good a right to speak them if she
believed them true?  John looked at his plate, Tayna and
Dick looked at each other.  It required a stout heart to
break the oppressive quiet, and for the moment no one in
this group had that heart.  The break came from the
outside, when some one ran swiftly up the steps and
threw open the front door.  Instant sounds of collision
and confusion issued from the hall, followed immediately
by a masculine voice, thin and injured in tone, calling
excitedly:

"Well, for the love of Michael Angelo!  What do you
keep stuffing the hall so full of furniture for?  Won't
somebody please come and help me with these things?"

The dinner table was abruptly deserted; but quick as
John and the children were, Rose was ahead of them,
and when they reached the hallway, a thin man of
medium height, with an aquiline nose, dark eyes, and long
loose hair, was helplessly in the embrace of the laughing
and crying woman.

"Oh, Charles, you did come home; you did come home,
didn't you?" she was crying.

Charles broke in volubly.  "Well, I should say I did.
What did you expect?  Have I ever impressed you as a
man who would neglect his family?"  After which, with
the look of one who has put his accusers in the wrong,
he rescued himself from his wife's emphatic embraces,
held her off for a moment with a look of real fondness,
and then brushed her with his lips, first on one cheek
and then upon the other.

"Dad-dee!" clamored the children in chorus.  "Daddee!"  Yet
it was noticeable that they did not presume
to rush upon their father, but flung their voices before
them, experimentally, as it were.

"Well, well, *las ninas*" (las ninas being the Spanish
for children), the father exclaimed, his piercing dark
eyes upon them with delight and displeasure mingling.
"Aren't you going to give me a hug?  Your mother
nearly strangles me, and you stand off eyeing me as if
I were a new species."

At the open arms of invitation, both of the children
plunged unhesitatingly; but their reception was brief.

"Run away now, father is tired," the nervous-looking
man proclaimed presently, straightening his shoulders,
while he sniffed the atmosphere.  "Dinner, eh?  Gods
and goats, but I am hungry!"

Rose led the little procession proudly back to the table,
drawing out her husband's chair for him, hovering over
him, smoothing his hair, unfolding his napkin, and stooping
to place a fresh kiss upon his fine, high, but narrow
brow.

"That will do now; that will do now," he chided, with
an air of having indulged a foolishly doting woman long
enough.  "For goodness' sake, Rose, give me something
to eat."

His wife, still upon her feet, carried him the platter
from which the family had been served.  Charles
condemned it with a glance.

"Isn't there something fresh you could give me?
Something that hasn't been—pawed over?"

His tone was eloquent of sensibilities outraged, and his
dark eyes, having first flashed a reproach upon his wife,
swept the circle with a look of expected comprehension
in them, as if he knew that all would understand the
delicacies of the artistic temperament.

"Why, yes," admitted Rose, without a sign of resentment.
"I can get you something fresh if you will wait
a few minutes."

She slipped out to the kitchen from which presently the
odor of broiling meat proceeded, while the artist coolly
rolled his cigarette, and, surveying without touching the
cup of coffee which John had poured for him, raised his
voice to call: "Some fresh coffee, too, Rose, please!"

After this Langham leveled his eye on his brother-in-law
and asked airily, "Well, John, how's everything with
you?"

"Fine as silk, Charles," replied Hampstead.  "How
is it with you?"

"Never better," declared Langham.  "Never saw
such sunsets in your life as they are having up the
Monterey coast.  I tell you there never were such colors.
There was one there in December,"—and he launched
into a detailed description of it, his eyes, his face, his
hands, his whole body laboring to convey the picture
which his animated spirits proclaimed was still upon the
screen of his mind.

As the description was concluded, Rose placed a
platter before him, upon which, garnished with parsley, two
small chops appeared, delicately grilled.

Abruptly ceasing conversation, Charles sank a knife
and fork into one of them and transferred a generous
morsel to his mouth.

"Thanks, old girl; just up to your topmost mark," he
confessed ungrudgingly, after a few moments, during
which, with half-closed eyes, he had been chewing
vigorously and with a singleness of purpose rather rare in
him.

"Sold any pictures lately?" asked John casually.

"No," said Langham abruptly, lowering his voice,
while a look of annoyance shaded his brow.  "I dropped
in at the gallery first thing, but"—and he shrugged his
shoulders—"Nothing doing!  However," and he
became immediately cheerful again, "Mrs. Lawson has been
looking awfully hard at that Grand Canyon canvas.  If
she buys that, my fortune's made."

"And if she doesn't," observed Rose pessimistically.

"And if she doesn't?" her husband exclaimed with
sudden irritation.  "Well—it'll be made just the same.
You see if it isn't!  Oh, say!" and a light broke upon
his face so merry that it immediately dissipated every
sign of annoyance.  "What do you think?  I saw
Owens to-day, the fellow who auctions alleged oil
paintings at a minimum of two dollars each.  You know the
scheme—pictures painted while you wait—roses,
chrysanthemums, landscapes even.  Well, he offered me fifteen
dollars a day to paint pictures for him.  Think of it!
To sit in the window before a gaping crowd painting
those miserable daubs, a dozen or two a day, while he
auctions them off.  His impudence!  If I had been as
big as you are, Jack, I would have punched him."

"Fifteen dollars a day," commented Rose thoughtfully.

"Yes," laughed Langham, his little black eyes a-twinkle,
as he clipped the last morsel from the first of his
chops.  "The idea!"

"Well, I hope you took it," his wife suggested.

"Rose!" exclaimed Langham, rising bolt upright at
the table and looking into her face as if she had
unwarrantably and unexpectedly hurled the blackest insult.
"Rose!  An artist like me!"

"It is the kind of a job for an artist like you," she
rejoined stingingly, with a sarcastic emphasis on just the
right words.

"Oh, my God!  My God!" exclaimed the man
sharply, turning from the table, while he threw his hands
dramatically upward and clutched at the back of his head,
after which he took a turn up and down the room as if
beside himself with unutterable emotions.

John judged that this was the fitting moment for his
withdrawal, but Langham's distress of mind was not too
great for him to observe the movement and to follow.
He overtook his brother-in-law in the studio-parlor, and
his manner was coolly importunate.

"Say, old man!" he whispered, "could you let me
have five?  I'm a little short on carfare, and you'll be
gone in the morning before I get up."

"Sure," exclaimed John, without a moment's hesitation,
delving in the depths of the pocket from which he
had produced the money for the rent, and handing out a
five-dollar piece.

"Thanks, old chap," said Langham, seizing it eagerly
and hastening away, after an affectionate slap on the
shoulder of his bigger and as he thought baser metaled
brother-in-law.  He did not, however, say that he would
repay the loan, and Hampstead did not remark that it
was the last gold coin in his pocket and that he should
have no more till pay day, ten days hence.

John let his admiration for the assurance of Langham
play for a moment, and then turned to the rear of the
studio, opened a door, struck a match, and groped his
way to a naked gas jet.  The sudden flare of light
revealed a lean-to room, meant originally for nobody knew
what, but turned into a bedroom.  The only article of
furniture which piqued curiosity in the least was a table
against the wall, across which a long plank had been
balanced.  Upon it and equilibrated as carefully as the
plank itself, was a row of books of many shapes and
sizes and in various stages of preservation.  This plank
was John's library.

Stuck about upon the walls were several large photogravures,
portraying various stirring scenes in history,
mostly Roman.  They were unframed and fastened
crudely to the wall with pins.  Evidently this was the
living place of an untidy man.

The tiny table, with its balanced over-load of books,
was directly beneath the gas.  John dropped heavily into
the wooden chair before it and drew to him a number
of sheets of paper, upon which, with much labor and
many erasings, he began to fashion a sort of motto or
legend.  Satisfied at length with his work, he printed the
finished legend swiftly in rude capital letters in the center
of a fresh sheet, snatched down the picture of a Christian
martyr which occupied the central space above his library,
and with the same four pins affixed his motto in that
particular spot, where it would greet him instantly upon
opening the door, and where it would be the last thing
upon which his eyes fell as he went to sleep and the first
when he awakened in the morning.

Once it was in position, he stood off and admired it,
reading aloud:

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center

   "ETERNAL HAMMERING IS THE PRICE OF SUCCESS!"

.. vspace:: 2

"That's the stuff," he croaked enthusiastically.

"Eternal hammering!"  And then he paused a moment,
after which his reverie was continued aloud.  "That
actor was telling me to-day about technique.  He said:
'There's a right way to do everything—to pitch a
horseshoe even.'  He's right.  The fellow with the best
technique will knock the highest persimmon.  What
makes me such a good stenographer?  Technique.
What makes me such a bum office flunkey?  The lack of
technique—no voice—no form—no self-confidence.
I am a young-man-afraid-of-himself—that's who I am.
Technique first and then—gravitation!  That's the idea!"

By gravitation, however, Hampstead did not mean
that law which keeps the heavenly bodies from getting
on the wrong side of the street, but that process, which
in his short life he had already observed, by means of
which the man in the crowd who takes advantage of his
opportunities and, by the dig of an elbow here, the insert
of a shoulder there, and the stiff thrust of a foot and leg
yonder, sooner or later arrives opposite the gateway of
his particular desires.

Mere opportunism?  That and a little more; a sort of
conviction that fortune herself is something of an
opportunist, that what a man wants to do, fortune, sooner
or later, will help him to do, if he only wills himself in
the direction of the want early enough and long enough
to give the fickle jade her chance.

By way of proceeding immediately to hammer, Hampstead
reached for a heavy calf-bound volume, bearing
the imprint of the Los Angeles Public Library, and
settled himself to read.

Most people in the railroad office were tired when they
finished their day's work.  They were done with effort.
John, however, was just ready to begin.  They thought
of recreation; John thought only of hammering.

Since his scholastic education had been broken off in
the middle by economic necessities, he had formed the
plan of reading at night the entire written history of the
world, from the first cuneiform inscription down to the
last edition of the last newspaper.  In pursuance of this
plan, he had already traveled far down the centuries, and
it was with eagerness that he adjusted his eye-shade
to-night, because when he lifted the cover of his book he
knew that he would swing open the doors on one of the
greatest centuries in human history, the century in which
the world discovered the individual.  Hampstead was
himself an individual.  This was in some sense the story
of his own discovery.

When John had been reading for perhaps half an hour,
there came a bird-like tap at his door, accompanied by a
suppressed giggle.

"Who comes there?" called the student in sepulchral
tones, stabbing the page at a particular spot with his
thumb, while his eyes were lifted.

The only audible sound was another giggle, but the
door swung open mysteriously, revealing two small,
white-robed figures silhouetted against the shadows in the
studio.

"Enter, ghosts!" John commanded, in the same
sepulchral voice, while his eyes fell again upon his pages.
The ghosts chortled and advanced, but with great
circumspection, to the little table with its dangerously
balanced bookshelf, its miscellaneous litter of papers, and its
silent, absorbed student.

Tayna, her long burnished curls cascading over the
white of her nightgown, and her eyes shining softly,
ducked her head and arose under one arm of her uncle,
where presently she felt herself drawn close with an
affectionate, satisfying sort of squeeze.  The boy,
approaching from the other side, laid an arm upon the
shoulder of the man, and stood watching with fascination
the eyes of his uncle in their steady sweep from side to
side of the printed page.

"Uncle John," asked Tayna shyly, burying her face
in his neck as she put the question, "when will you be
President?"

"When *shall* you be President?" corrected the boy,
looking across at his sister with that same old-mannish
expression which was a part of all he said and did.

Hampstead cuddled the girl closer, and his eye abandoned
the page to look down the bridge of his nose into
distance.

"Why?" he asked presently.

"Oh, because," said Tayna, with a little shiver of
eagerness, "I can hardly wait."

Hampstead's eyes wandered to his motto on the wall.
The eyes of the boy followed and spelled out the letters
wonderingly, but in silence.

"We must be able to wait," said John, squeezing
Tayna again.  "It's a long, long way; but if we just
keep on keeping on, why, after a while we are there, you
know."

Tayna sighed and reached up a round, plump arm till
it encircled Hampstead's neck, as she asked, still more
shyly:

"And when you are President, every one will know
just how good and great you are, and they won't call you
awkward nor—nor homely any more, will they?"

A flush and a chuckle marked John's reception of this
query, after which he observed hastily and a bit
apprehensively:

"Say, you wet little goldfishes!  Remember that you
are never, never, now or any time, howsoever odd I bear
myself, to breathe a word to anybody, not to a single
soul, not to your mamma or your papa or your Sunday-school
teacher or anybody, of all these nice little play
secrets which we have between ourselves."

An instant seriousness came over the children's faces.

"Cross my heart," murmured Tayna, with a twitch
of her slender finger across her breast.

"And hope to die," added Dick, with a funeral solemnity,
as he completed Tayna's cross by a vertical movement
of a stubby thumb in the direction of his own
wishbone of a breast.

Hampstead looked relieved.

"But," affirmed Tayna stoutly, "they are not play
secrets.  They are real secrets.  Aren't they?"

John looked up at his motto again.

"Yes," he said in a low, determined voice.  "They
are real secrets."

"And," half-declared, half-questioned Dick, "if you
aren't President, you are going to be some other kind of
a very great man?

"Aren't you?" the boy persisted, when Hampstead
was silent.

"Tell you to-morrow," laughed John.  "Good night,
ghosts!" and with a swift assault of his lips upon the
cheeks of either, he gently impelled them toward the door.

"Good night, your Excellency!" giggled Tayna.

"Good night, my counselors," responded Hampstead,
reaching for his book.

An hour later Hampstead was still reading.  Another
hour later he was still reading.  But something like a
quarter of an hour beyond that, when it might have been,
say, near half-past eleven, he was not reading.  He was
turning his head strangely from side to side and digging
a knuckle into his eyes.  A surprising thing had
happened.  He could no longer see the lines upon the
page—nor the page itself—nor the book—nor anything!

His first impression was that the gas had gone out; but
this swiftly gave way to the conviction that he had gone
blind—stone blind!—and so suddenly that it happened
right between the beheading of one of the queens of
Henry the Eighth and the marrying of another.  He was
now tardily conscious that for some time his eyes had
been giving him pain, that he had rubbed them
periodically to clear away white opacities that appeared upon the
page; but now there was no pain; they were suffused
with moisture, and the room was dark.

After an interval he could make out the gaslight glowing
feebly like the tiny glare of a candle visible in some
distant pit of darkness, but he could discern no shapes
about the room.  Not one!

A horrible fear stole into his breast and chilled it.
All of him had suddenly come to naught, and just as he
was getting started.  He turned futile, streaming orbs
up to where his new-made motto should loom upon the
wall.  It was there, of course, mocking at him now; but
he could not see it.  He could not see the wall even.
For fully five minutes he sat in darkness, his hands
clasped above his bowed head.  Then he arose and
groped his way along the wall to the door and opened it,
and stood facing out into the grotesque dark of the
studio.  He thought of trying to grope his way across
it—of calling out—but decided to wait a few minutes.

He felt stricken, broken, overwhelmed.  His life, his
career, himself were ruined.  He required time to get
used to the sensation, time to adjust his mind to the
extent of the calamity and to gather some elements of
fortitude wherewith to face the world.  Not even Rose must
see him broken and shattered as he felt right now.

Turning back, he closed the door, felt his way to the
gas, and turned it off.  He had no need of gas now.
Then he lay down, fully clothed, upon the bed, with a
cold cloth upon his eyes, thinking flightily and feeling
very sorry for himself.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`WHEN THE DARK WENT AWAY`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER III


.. class:: center medium bold

   WHEN THE DARK WENT AWAY

.. vspace:: 2

::

   +--------------------------------+
   |              513               |
   |   General Freight Department   |
   |    CALIFORNIA CONSOLIDATED     |
   |        RAILWAY COMPANY         |
   |        ROBERT MITCHELL,        |
   |    General Freight Agent.      |
   |           Walk in!             |
   +--------------------------------+

.. vspace:: 2

This was the sign on the door that John Hampstead
had opened every morning for seven years.  This morning
he did not open it, and there was something like
consternation when as late as nine-thirty the chair of the big,
amiable, stenographic drudge was still vacant.  Old Heitmuller,
the chief clerk, after swearing his way helplessly
from one point of the compass to another, was about to
dispatch the office boy to Hampstead's residence.

Inside, and unaware of all this pother, sat the General
Freight Agent.  Big of body, with the topography of
his father's heath upon his wide face, soft in the heart
and hard in the head, Robert Mitchell was a man of no
airs.  His origin was probably shanty Irish, and he didn't
care who suspected it.  By painful labor, a ready smile,
a hearty laugh, a square deal to his company and as square
a deal to the public as he could give—"consistently"—he
had got to his present modest eminence.  He was
going higher and was not particular who suspected that
either; but was not boastful, had the respect of all men
who knew him well, and the affection of those who knew
him intimately.

He sat just now in a thoroughly characteristic pose,
with the stubby fingers of one fat hand thoughtfully
teasing a wisp of reddish brown hair, while his shrewd
blue eyes were screwing at the exact significance of the
top letter on a pile before him.

Over in a corner was Mitchell's guest and vast superior,
Malden H. Hale, the president of the twelve thousand
miles of shining steel which made up the Great South-western
Railway System, in which Mitchell's little road
nestled like a rabbit in the maw of a python.  Mr. Hale
was signing some letters dictated yesterday to John,
finding them paragraphed and punctuated to his complete
satisfaction, with here and there a word better than his
own looming up in the context.  For a time there was no
sound save the scratching of his pen and the fillip of the
sheets as he turned them over.  Then he chuckled softly,
and presently spoke.

"Bob," he said, "that's an odd genius, that stenographer
out there."

"Yes," replied Mr. Mitchell absently, without looking
up from his work, and then suddenly he stabbed the
atmosphere with a significant rising inflection: "Genius?"

"Well, yes," affirmed Mr. Hale.  "Genius!  He impresses
you first as absurdly incompetent, but his workmanship
is really superior, and later you get a suggestion
of something back of him, something buried that
might come out, you know."

"I used to think so," the General Freight Agent
replied, with a tone which indicated loss of interest in the
subject, but being tardily overtaken in his reading by a
sense that he had not quite done justice to the big
stenographer, he broke the silence to add: "He is a fine
character.  He has very high thoughts,"—vacancy was in
his eye for a moment,—"so high they're cloudy."

And that was all.  Mr. Hale made no further comment.
Mr. Mitchell, a just man, was satisfied that he
had done justice.  Thus in the minds of two arbiters
of the destinies of many men, John Hampstead, loyal,
laborious, who had served faithfully for seven years, was
lifted for a moment until the sun of prospect flashed upon
him,—lifted and then dropped.  And they did not even
know that nature, too, had dropped him,—that he was
blind.

But just then a privileged person knocked and entered
without waiting for an invitation.  The newcomer was
Doctor Gallagher, the "Company" oculist, his fine, dark
eyes aglow with sympathy and importance.

"That boy Hampstead," he began abruptly, "is in bad
shape."

"Hampstead!" ejaculated Mr. Mitchell antagonistically,
as if it were impossible that lumbering mass of bone
and muscle could ever be in bad shape.

"Yes," affirmed the physician, with the air of one who
announces a sensation, "he's likely to go blind!"

"No!" ejaculated Mr. Mitchell, in still more emphatic
tones of disbelief, though his blue eyes opened wide and
grew round with shock and sympathetic apprehension.

"Yes," explained Doctor Gallagher volubly.  "Continual
transcription, the sweep of the eye from the notebook
page to the machine and back, year in and year out,
for so long, has broken down the muscular system of
the eye.  He had a blind spell last night.  He can see
all right this morning.  But to let him go to work would
be criminal.  I have him in the Company Hospital for
two weeks of absolute rest, and then he will be all right.
But the typewriter, never again!  You can put him on
the outside to solicit freight, or something like that."

A broad grin overspread the features of the General
Freight Agent.  "You don't know John," he said.
"That boy would die of nervousness the first day out.
He's afraid of people.  Besides," went on Mitchell, "we
couldn't get along without him.  He knows too much
that nobody else knows."

"Well, anyway, never again the typewriter!"
commanded the doctor from the door, getting out quickly
and hurrying away with the consciousness of duty
extremely well performed.  He knew that he had exaggerated
the extent of John's eye-trouble; but he believed that
it was necessary to exaggerate it, both to Hampstead and
to Mr. Mitchell.

In his darkened room at the hospital, John was feeling
somehow suddenly honored of destiny.  People were
thinking, talking, caring about him.  There was
exaltation just in that.  But also he was fuming.  He wasn't
ill.  He was simply confined.  He could not read.  He
could not write.  He could do nothing but sit in a
darkened room according to prescription, and wait.  But on
the third day Doctor Gallagher said:

"As soon as it is dusk, you may go out for a swift
walk.  That's to get exercise.  Keep off the main
streets; keep away from bright lights, do not try to read
signs, to recognize people, or in fact to look at anything
closely."

John leaped eagerly at this permission, but there was
design in his devotion to the new prescription of which
the doctor knew nothing.  On the fifth day of his
confinement, Tayna and Dick, who had been coming every
afternoon to sit for an hour in the semi-darkness with
their uncle, surprised the interned one doing odd
contortions in the depths of his room: twisting his wrists;
standing on one foot like a stork and twirling his great
heel and toe from the knee in some eccentric imitation of
a ballet dancer; then creeping to and fro across the room
in a silly series of bowings and scrapings and salutings
that threw Dick into irrepressible laughter.  Caught
shamefacedly in the very midst of these absurdities,
John confessed to the two of them what he would at the
moment have confessed to no other living being—last
of all to Bessie.

"I am taking lessons," he said, "from an actor.  He
is going to make me easy and graceful, so people won't
call me awkward any more—nor homely," and he looked
significantly at Tayna.

"Oh," the children both gasped respectfully, and
repeated with a kind of awe in their voices: "From an
actor!"

"Yes.  Every evening the doctor lets me go for a walk.
On every other one of these walks I go to the actor's
hotel, and he teaches me."

"Awh!  An actor-r-r!" breathed Dick again, his
features depicting profoundness both of impression and
speculation.

"Say!" he proposed presently.  "I would rather you
would be an actor than a president, anyway."

John laughed.  "I am not going to be an actor," he
said, "I am only going to be polished till I shine like a
human diamond."  And then he devoted himself to the
entertainment of his callers.

"Remember!  Never again the typewriter!" the
physician adjured sternly, when the fortnight of John's
captivity was done.  For although conveying this
verdict immediately to Mitchell, the doctor had postponed
its announcement to his patient till his discharge from the
hospital.  John was stunned.  The typewriter was his
bread.  At first he rebelled, but with a rush like the swirl
of waters over his head, the memory of that night when
he was blind for an hour came to him and humbled him.

With the trembling courage of a coward, he opened
the door of room 513; saw with sickening heart the
strange face at his desk, shook the flabby hand of
Heitmuller, and inwardly braced himself to enter for the last
time between the double doors, where presently he
confessed his plight as if it had been a crime.

"You don't imagine we would let you go, do you?"
Mr. Mitchell asked, while an expression of amazement
grew upon his face till it became a laugh.  "Why,
Jack"—Mr. Mitchell had never called him Jack before—"we
should have to pay you a salary just to stick around and
keep the rest of us straight."

The stenographer gulped.  It was not the first note of
praise he had ever received from this kindly railroad
man, but it was the first time Mr. Mitchell or any one
else in that whole office had ever acknowledged to John
that he was valuable for what he knew as well as for
what he beat out of his finger-tips.

"You are going to be my private secretary," explained
Mr. Mitchell, still chuckling at the simplicity of John.
"I have few letters to write, and you know enough to do
most of them without dictation.  You keep me reminded
of things; handle my telephone calls and appointments.
Gallagher says your eyes will probably give you no trouble
whatever under these conditions.  The salary will be
fifteen dollars more a month."

The big awkward man was too confusedly grateful
and overwhelmed even to attempt to murmur his thanks.
Instead, he did a thing of unheard-of boldness.  He
reached over and touched the General Freight Agent on
the arm,—just stabbed him in the upper, fleshy part of
the arm with a thrust of his stiff fingers, accompanying
the act with a monosyllabic croak.  It was a clumsy
touch, and it was presuming; but to a man of understanding,
it was eloquent.

After one month in this new position, John found
himself seeing the transportation business through new
glasses.  He had passed from details to principles, and
the change stimulated his mind enormously.

One of his new duties now was to sit at the General
Freight Agent's elbow in conferences, and later to make
summaries of the arguments pro and con.  In transcribing
Mr. Mitchell's part of these talks, it interested John
to elaborate a little.  Soon he ventured to make the
General Freight Agent's points stronger when he felt it
could be done, and then waited, after laying the transcript
on the big man's desk, for some word of reproof.  Reproof
did not come, and yet John thought the changes
must be noticed.

But one day H. B. Anderson, Assistant General Freight
Agent of the San Francisco and El Paso, a rival line,
was in the office.

"Mitchell," Anderson began, "I am compelled to admit
your argument reads a blamed sight stronger than
it sounded to me the other day."

At this the General Freight Agent laughed complacently.

"The point about the demurrage especially," went on
Anderson.  "I didn't remember that somehow."

"Um," said the General Freight Agent in a puzzled
way and picked up the transcript of the argument.  As he
scanned it, his face grew more puzzled; then light broke.
"Yes," he replied emphatically, "that's the strongest
point, in my judgment."

"Well," confessed Anderson, "it knocks me out.  I
am now agreeable to your construction."

The private secretary listened from his little cubby-hole
with mingled exultation and apprehension.  When the
visitor had gone, the General Freight Agent walked in
and tossed the transcript upon the secretary's table.  John
looked up timidly.  The Mitchell brow was ridged and
thoughtful.

"Hampstead," he declared with an air of grave
reluctance, "I guess I'll have to lose you, after all."

"What, sir," gasped John, guilty terror shaking him
somewhere inside.

At the change in John's face, Mitchell threw back his
head and laughed; one of those huge, hearty, bellowing
laughs at his own humor, from which he extracted so
much enjoyment.

"Yes," he specified, "I am going to put you in the rate
department.  You have the making of a great railroad
man in you.  What you need now is the fundamentals.
That's where you get 'em.  Your brains are coming out,
John.  I always thought you had 'em,—but it certainly
took you a long time to get any of them into the show
window."

"It was seven years before you let me get to the window
at all," suggested John, meaning to be a little bit
vengeful.

"Nobody's fault but yours, my boy," said the
G.F.A. brusquely, over his shoulder.  "By the way," he
remarked, turning back again, "you aren't afraid of people
any more, either."

John flushed with pleasure.  This was really the most
desirable compliment Mitchell could bestow.

"I think I am getting a little more confidence in
myself," the big man confessed, glowing modestly.

This was what three months of Kenton and "old
Delsarte", as the actor called the great French apostle
of intelligible anatomy, had done for John.

But Kenton and "old Delsarte" were doing something
else to John that was vastly more serious, but of which
Robert Mitchell received no hint until nearly a year
later, when the knowledge came to him suddenly with a
shock that jarred and almost disconcerted him.  It was
somewhere about noon of a day in February, and he had
just touched the button for John Hampstead, rate clerk.
Instead of John, Heitmuller answered the summons,
laughing softly.

Now in the rate department John had made an amazing
success.  In six months gray-headed clerks were
seeking his opinions earnestly.  At the present moment
he was in charge of all rates west of Ogden, Albuquerque,
and El Paso, and half the department took orders from
him.

"John's away at rehearsal," explained Heitmuller, still
chuckling.

"At rehearsal?"

"Yes,—he's going to play Ursus, the giant, in *Quo
Vadis*, with Mowrey's Stock Company at the Burbank
next week."

"The hell!" ejaculated the General Freight Agent,
while a look of blank astonishment came upon his usually
placid features.  "When did that bug bite him?"

"I can't tell yet whether it's a bite or only an itch,"
grinned Heitmuller.  "For a while he was reciting at
smokers and parties and things, and then I heard he was
teaching elocution at home nights.  Now he's got a small
dramatic company and goes out around giving one-act
plays and scenes from Shakespeare.  Pretty good, too,
they say!"

"Well, I be damned," Mitchell commented, when
Heitmuller had finished.

"He's only away from eleven-thirty to one-thirty,"
explained Heitmuller.  "He was so anxious and does so
much more work than any two men that I couldn't refuse
him."

"Of course not," assented Mitchell.

"Besides," added the chief clerk, "he might have gone,
anyway.  John's getting a little headstrong, I've noticed,
since he's coming out so fast."

"Naturally," observed Mitchell drily, after which he
dismissed Heitmuller and appeared to dismiss the subject
by turning again to his desk.





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.. _`ADVENT AND ADVENTURE`:

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   CHAPTER IV


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   ADVENT AND ADVENTURE

.. vspace:: 2

But the General Freight Agent took care that
Mrs. Mitchell, Bessie, and himself were in a box at the
Burbank on the following Monday night, when the curtain
went up on the Mowrey Stock Company's sumptuous
production of *Quo Vadis*, which for more than nine days
was the talk of the town in the city of angels, oranges,
atmosphere, and oil.  The Mitchells strained their eyes
for a sight of their late-grown protégé, but it appeared he
was not "on."  However, in the midst of a garden scene
with Roman lords, ladies, soldiers in armor and slaves
decking the view, there appeared a huge barbarian, long
of hair and beard, his torso bound round with an immense
bearskin, his sandals tied with thongs, his sinewy limbs
apparently unclad, savage bands of silver upon his massy,
muscled arms, the alpine ruggedness of his countenance
and the light of a fanatical devotion that gleamed in his
eye contributing in their every detail to make the
creature appear the thing the programme proclaimed him,
"Ursus, a Christian Slave."

But the programme claimed something more: that this
Ursus was John Hampstead.

Mitchell gaped and then rocked uneasily.  The thing
was unbelievable.  If the man would only speak,
perhaps some tone of voice—but the man did not speak, not
even move.  He stood half in the background, far up the
center of the stage, while the talk and action of the piece
went on beneath his lofty brow, like some mountain
towering above a lakelet in which ripples sparkle and fish
are leaping.  At length, however, stage attention does
center on Ursus, when the man enacting St. Peter, struck
by the nature-man's appearance of gigantic strength,
observes:

"Thou art strong, my son?"

The rugged human statue moved.  In a voice that was
low at first but broke quickly into reverberating tones
which filled the theater to the rafters, the answer came:

"Holy Father!  I can break iron like wood!"

As the speech was delivered, the eye of Ursus gleamed,
the folded arms unbent, and one mighty muscle flexed
the forearm through a short but significant arc, after
which the figure resumed its pose of respectful but
impressive immobility.

In that single speech and gesture Hampstead had
achieved a personal success and keyed the play as plausible,
for by it he had come to birth before a theater-full
as a character equal to the prodigious feats of strength
upon which the action turned.

"Go to the stable, Ursus!" commanded an authoritative
voice.

The huge head of the hairy man, with its crown of
long, wild locks was inclined humbly, and with an odd,
rolling stride suggestive of enormous animal-like
strength, he swung deliberately across the scene and out
of it.

Robert Mitchell, staring fixedly, suddenly nodded his
head with satisfaction.  At last, in that careening walk,
he had seen something that he recognized.  That was
the walk of Hampstead; but now Mitchell recalled it
was long since he had seen that gait, long since he had
heard the office door reverberate from a bang of one of
those hip joints, long since the big man had made any
conspicuous exhibition of the physical awkwardness that
once had been so characteristic.  And now?  Why now
John was an actor.  Not Nero yonder, harp in hand,
looked more nearly like his part.  Hampstead had put on
the pose, the voice, the walk, as he had put on the
bearskin and the beard.

"Isn't he w-o-n-d-e-r-f-u-l?" breathed Bessie, with a
little squeeze of her father's arm.

Mitchell laughed amiably and reached out for the
curling lock upon his brow which was his mainstay in
time of mental shipwreck and began to twist it, while
he waited impatiently to see more of Ursus.

But the play appeared to have forgotten Ursus.  A
great party was on in the palace of Cæsar.  The stage
was alive with lights and music, and with the movements
of many people—senators in togas, generals in armor,
women with jewels in their hair and golden bands upon
their white, gracefully swelling arms.  There was
drinking and laughter and high carousal.  In right center,
Cæsar upon his throne was singing and pretending to
strike notes from a harp of pasteboard and gilt, notes
which in reality proceeded from the orchestra pit.  At
lower left upon a couch sat Lygia, the Christian maiden,
beautiful beyond imagining and being greatly annoyed
by the love-makings of the half-intoxicated Roman
soldier, Vinicius, who had laid aside his helmet and his
sword, and was pleading with the lovely but embarrassed
girl, at first upon his knees, then standing, with one knee
upon the couch, while he trailed his fingers luxuriously
through the glossy blackness of her hair.

As the love-making proceeded, Lygia's apprehension
grew.  When Vinicius pressed her tresses to his lips, she
shrank from him.  When, after another cup of wine and
just as the whole court was in raptures over the
conclusion of Cæsar's song, Vinicius attempted to place his
kisses yet more daringly, Lygia started up with a cry of
terror.  Instantly there sounded from the wings a
bellowing roar of rage, and like a flying fury, the wild,
hairy figure of Ursus came bounding upon the scene.

Seizing Vinicius by the shoulders, Ursus shook him
till all his harness rattled, then hurled him up stage and
crashing to the floor.  Lygia was swaying dizzily as if
about to faint, but with another leap Ursus had gained
her side and swung her into his arms, after which he
turned and went hurdling across the stage, running in
long, springing strides as lightly as a deer, the fair,
delicious form of the girl balanced buoyantly on his arms,
while her dark hair streamed out and downward over his
shoulder—all of this to the complete consternation of the
half-drunken Court of Cæsar and the vast and tumultuously
expressed delight of the audience, which kept the
curtain frisking up and down repeatedly over this
climactic conclusion of the second act, while the principals
posed and bowed and posed again and bowed again, to
the audience, to themselves, and to the scenery.  Robert
Mitchell even supposed that Ursus was bowing to him,
so being naturally polite and somewhat beside himself,
the General Freight Agent was on the point of bowing
back again when Bessie screamed:

"Oh!  Oh!  He bowed directly at me."

By this time, however, the curtain had recovered from
its frenzy and stayed soberly down while the lights came
up so the people could read the advertisements on the
front.  Immediately the tongues of the audience were all
a-buzz, and industriously passing up and down the lines
of the seats was the information that John Hampstead
was a local character.  "Oh, yes, indeed,—instructor in
public speaking at the Young Men's Christian Association."

In due course, this piece of interesting information
reached the Mitchells in their box.

"I knew it all along," gurgled Bessie proudly.

"I begin to be jealous," announced Mrs. Mitchell,
broad of face, expansive of heart, aggressive of disposition.
"I want all these people to know that Ursus is our
rate clerk."

"And I want them to know," said Mr. Mitchell, by
way of venting his disapproval, "that he is spoiling a
mighty good rate clerk to make a mighty poor actor."

"But," pouted the loyal Bessie, "he is not a poor actor.
He's a w-o-n-d-e-r-f-u-l actor!  You are spoiling the plain
truth to make a poor epigram.  You," and she looked
up pertly at her father, "you are just a bunch of sour
grapes!  You kept my poor Jack's nose on the grindstone
so long that he broke out in a new place, and now
you are afraid you'll lose him."

"Your poor Jack!" sneered Mrs. Mitchell merrily.

"Yes—mine!" answered Bessie stoutly.  "I always
told you Jack Hampstead was a great man in disguise.
I saw him first—before he saw himself, almost.  I'm
going to be his friend for always and for always.  Oh,
look there!"

The curtain had gone up on an odd, out-of-the-way
corner of the imperial city.  There had been some
colloquy over the gate of a small close, participated in by
the vibrant voice of an unseen Ursus and the calmer one
of a visible St. Peter, after which the gate opened and
Ursus entered, bearing the still fainting form of Lygia
in his arms; giving, of course, the desired impression that
this fair figure of a woman had been nestling on his great
bosom ever since the curtain went down some twelve
minutes before, an inference that led some of the clerks
in the General Freight Office and other persons scattered
through the audience, to envy John.  This presumption,
however, was some distance from the truth.  As a matter
of fact, Lygia had but recently resumed her position in
the arms of Ursus, while two stage hands, lying prone,
had plucked open the gate; and various happenings quite
unsuspected of the audience had intervened, at least one
of which had been a severe shock to the Puritan nature
of John Hampstead.

However, there was the dramatic impression already
referred to, and it ate its way like acid into the
consciousness of at least one person in the playhouse.

Ursus, after looking about him for a moment in the
little yard of the Christian's house to make sure he was
entirely surrounded by friends, drew his fair burden
closer and, as if by a protective instinct, bent over it
with a look of tenderness so long and concentrated that
his flaxen beard toyed with the white cheek, and his flaxen
locks gleamed for a moment amid the raven ones.

"Well," commented Bessie, in a tone that mingled
sharp annoyance with that judicially critical note which
is the right of all high-school girls in their last year, "I
do not see any dramatic necessity for prolonging this.
Why doesn't he stick her face under the fountain there
for a moment and then lay her on the grass?"

Mercifully, Bessie was not compelled to contain her
annoyance too long.  Ursus did eventually relinquish his
hold upon the lady, and the piece moved on from scene
to scene to the final holocaust of Rome.

With the news instinct breaking out above the critical,
the dramatic columns of the morning papers gave the
major stickful of type to the performance of that
histrionic athlete, John Hampstead, forgetting to mention
his connection with the Y.M.C.A., but making clear
that in daylight he was a highly respected member of the
staff of Robert Mitchell, the well-known railroad man.

But to John, the process of conversion from rate clerk
to actor had been even more exciting than the
demonstration of the fact proved to his friends.

To begin with, it was an experience quite unforgettable
to the chairman of the Prayer Meeting Committee of the
Christian Endeavor Society of the grand old First Church
when for the first time he found himself upon the stage
of the Burbank at rehearsal time, with twenty-five or
thirty real actors and actresses about him.  He looked
them over curiously, with a puritanic instinct for moral
appraisal, as they stood, lounged, sat, gossiped, smoked,
laughed or did several of these things at once; yet all
keeping a wary eye and ear for the two men who sat at
the little table in the center of the bare, empty stage with
their heads together over a manuscript.

"Just about like other people," confessed Hampstead
to himself, with something of disappointment.

There were some tailor suited women, there were some
smartly dressed young men, there were some very nice
girls, not more than a whit different in look and manner
from the typists in the general office.  There were two
or three gray-haired men who, so far as appearance and
demeanor went, might have served as deacons of the First
Church.  There were a couple of dignified, matronly-looking
elderly ladies with fancy-work or mending in
their laps, as they swayed to and fro in the wicker rockers
that were a part of the furnishings for Act II of the
play then running.  These two ladies, so far as John
could see, might have been respectively President of the
Ladies' Aid and of the Woman's Missionary Society,
instead of what they were, "character old women," as he
later learned.

Totaling his impressions, Mowrey's Stock Company
seemed like a large exclusive family in which he was
suffered but not seen.  Nobody introduced him to
anybody.  Mowrey merely threw him a glance, and that was
not of recognition but of observation that he was present.

"First act!" snapped the manager, with a voice as
sharp as the clatter of the ruler with which he rapped upon
the table.  Stepping forward, prompt book in one hand,
ruler in the other for a pointer, he began to outline the
scene upon the bare stage:

"This chair is a tree—that stage brace is a bench—this
box is a rock," and so forth.

The rehearsal had begun.  It moved swiftly, for
Mowrey was a man with snap to him.  His words were
quick, nervous, few—until angry.  His glance was
imperative.  It was all business, hot, relentless pressure of
human beings into moulds, like hammering damp sand
in a foundry.

"Go there!  Stand here!  Laugh!  Weep!  Look
pleased!  Feign intoxication!"  Each short word was
a blow of Mowrey's upon the wet human sand.

John's name was never mentioned.  Mowrey called
him by the name of his part, Ursus.  Ursus was "on" in
the first act, but with nothing to do, and his eyes were
wide with watching.  One woman in particular attracted
him.  She was tall and shapely, clad in a close-fitting
tailored suit, with hat and veil that seemed to match both
her garments and herself.  She moved through her part
with a kind of distinguished nonchalance, her veil half
raised, and a vagrant fold of it flicking daringly at a rosy
spot on her cheek when she turned suddenly; while in
her gloved hands she held a short pencil with which, from
time to time, additional stage directions were noted upon
the pages of her part.  This accomplished and really
beautiful young actress was Miss Marien Dounay, one of
the two leading women of the company.

Hampstead was inexperienced of women.  He confessed
it now to himself.  But this was to be the day of
his opportunity, and he felt the blood of adventure leaping
in his veins.  In his consciousness, too, floated little
arrows like indicators, and as if by common agreement,
they pointed their heads toward Miss Dounay.

If it were she now who played Lygia?  Yes; it was
she.  They were calling her Lygia.  Hampstead smiled
to himself.  Presently he chuckled softly, and the
chuckle appeared to loose a small avalanche of new-born
emotions that leaped and jumbled somewhere inside.

But the first encounter was disappointing.  Miss
Dounay seized him by the arm, without a glance,—her
eyes being fixed on Mowrey,—and led the big man out
of the scene exactly as if he had been a wooden Indian
on rollers.

"Now," she said, "you have just carried me off."  Her
voice had wonderful tones in it, tones that started
more avalanches inside; but she appeared as unconscious
of the tones and their effect as of him.  She was making
another note in her part.

"Better practice that 'carry off stage' before we try
it at rehearsal," called the sharp voice of Mowrey.  His
eyes and his remark were addressed to Miss Dounay.
Miss Dounay nodded.

"Shall we?" she said, and looked straight at Hampstead,
giving him his first glance into self-confident eyes
which were clear, brownish-black, with liquescent,
unsounded depths.  In form it was a question she had
asked; in effect it was a command from a very cool and
business-like young person.

"I presume we had better," said John, affecting a foolish
little laugh, which did not, however, get very far
because the earnest air of Miss Dounay was inhospitable to
levity.

"See here!" she instructed.  "I throw up my arms in
a faint.  My left arm falls across your right shoulder.
At the same time I give a little spring with my right leg,
and I throw up my left leg like this.  At the same instant
you throw your right arm under my shoulders, your left
arm gathers my legs; I will hold 'em stiff.  There!"

Miss Dounay's arm was on John's shoulder, and she
was preparing to suit the rest; of her action to her words.
"Without any effort to lift me," she continued, talking
now into his ear, "I will be extended in your arms.  All
you have to do is to be taking your running stride as I
come to you, and after that to hold me poised while you
bound off the stage.  Can you do it?"

With this crisp, challenging question on her lips, Miss
Dounay completed the proposed manoeuvre of her lower
limbs, and John found himself with the long, exquisitely
moulded body of a beautiful woman balancing in his arms,
while a foolish quiver passed over him and shook him till
he actually trembled.

.. _`A foolish quiver passed over him and shook him till he actually trembled.`:

.. figure:: images/img-046.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: A foolish quiver passed over him and shook him till he actually trembled.

   A foolish quiver passed over him and shook him till he actually trembled.

"Am I so heavy?" asked a matter-of-fact voice from
his shoulder.

"You are not heavy at all," replied Hampstead, hotly
provoked at himself.

"Run, then," she commanded.

The resultant effort was a few staggering, ungraceful
steps.

"Dounay weighs a hundred and fifty if she weighs an
ounce," said a passing voice.

John, all chagrin as he deposited the lady upon her
feet, saw her lip curl, and her dark eyes flash scornfully
at the leading juvenile man who, with grimacing intent
to tease, had made the remark to the ingenue as both
passed near.

"Insolence!" hissed Miss Dounay after the scoffer,
and turned again to Hampstead, speaking sharply.
"Very bad!  You must be in your running stride when
my weight falls on you.  We must practice."

And practice they did, at every spare moment of the
rehearsal during the entire week.  From these
"practices", Hampstead learned an unusual number of things
about women which, in his limited experience, he had
either not known or which had not been brought home to
him before.  Some of these he presumed applied
generally to all women; others, he had no doubt, were
particular to Miss Dounay.

As, for instance, when he looked down at her face
where it lay in the curve of his arm, he saw that the oval
outline of her cheeks was startlingly perfect; that there
were pools of liquid fire in her eyes; that her lips were
beautifully and naturally red; that they were long, pliable,
sensitive, with fleeting curves that raced like ripples upon
these shores of velvet and ruby, expressing as they ran an
infinite variety of passing moods.  The chin, too, came in
for a great deal of this attention.  It was round and
smooth at the corners, with a delicately chiseled vertical
cleft in it, which at times ran up and met a horizontal cleft
that appeared beneath the lower lip, when any slight
breath of displeasure brought a pout to that ruby, pendant
lobe.  This meeting-place of the two clefts formed a kind
of transitory dimple, a trysting-place of all sorts of
fugitive attractions which exercised a singular fascination for
the big man.

He used to wonder what the sensation would be like
to sink his lips in that precious, delectable valley.  It
would have been physically simple.  A slight lifting of
his right arm and shoulder, a slight declension of his
neck, and the mere instinctive planting of his lips, and
the thing was done.  However, John had no thought
of doing this.  In the first place he wouldn't—without
permission; for he was a man of honor and of self-control.
In the second place, he wouldn't because a woman
was a thing very sacred to him, and a kiss, a deliberate
and flesh-tingling kiss, was a caress to be held as sacred
as the woman herself and for the expression of an
emotion he had not yet felt for any woman; a statement which
to the half-cynical might prove again that John Hampstead
was a very inexperienced and very monk-minded
youth indeed to be abroad in the unromanticism of this
twentieth century.  Yet the fact remains that Hampstead
did not consciously conspire to violate the neutrality of
this tiny, alluring haunt of tantalizing beauty which lurked
bewitchingly between the red lower lip and the white firm
chin of Miss Marien Dounay.

But there were other things that John was learning
swiftly, some of which amounted to positive disillusionment.
One was that a woman's body is not necessarily
so sacred nor so inviolate, after all.  That instead of
inviolate, it may be made inviolable by a sort of desexing
at will.  Miss Dounay could do this and did do it, so
that for instance when her form stiffened in his arms, it
was no more like what he supposed the touch of a
woman's body should be than a post.  In the first place
the body itself, beneath that trim, tailored suit, appeared
to be sheathed in steel from the shoulder almost to the
knee.  John had supposed that corsets were to confine the
waist.  This one, if that were what it was and not some
sort of armor put on for these rehearsals, encased the
whole body.

Another thing that contributed to this desexing of the
female person was Miss Dounay's bearing toward
himself.  He might have been a mere mechanical device for
any regard she showed him at rehearsals.  She pushed
or pulled him about, commanded the bend and adjustment
of his arms as if he had been an artificial man, and
never by any hint indicated that she thought of him as a
person, least of all as a male person.  Undoubtedly this
robbed his new adventure of some of its spice.  But a
change came.  When for five days John was undecided
whether he should admire this manner of hers as supreme
artistic abstraction or resent it as supercilious disdain,
Margaret O'Neil, one of the character old ladies who had
constituted herself a combination of critic and chaperone
of these "carry" practices, turned, after a word with
Miss Dounay, and said:

"We should like to know who it is that is carrying us
about."

"Why, certainly," exclaimed John, all his doubt
disappearing in a toothful smile as he swept off his hat.
"My name is Hampstead, John Hampstead."

"Miss Dounay, allow me to present Mr. Hampstead,"
said Miss O'Neil, without the moulting of an eyelash.

Miss Dounay extended her hand cordially for a lofty,
English handshake, accompanied by an agreeable smile
and a chuckling laugh, understood by John to be in
recognition of the oddness of the situation.

After this, things were somewhat different.  There
was less sense of strain on his part, and he began to
realize that there had been some strain upon hers which
now was relaxed.  Her body was less post-like; and
toward the end of rehearsal, when possibly she was a little
tired, it lay in his arms quite placidly, relaxing until its
curves yielded and conformed to the muscular lines of
his own torso.

Yet Miss Dounay never betrayed the slightest
self-consciousness at such moments.  Whatever the woman
as woman might be, she was, as an actress, so absolutely
devoted to the creation of the character she was rehearsing,
so painstakingly careful to reproduce in every detail
of tone and action the true impression of a pure-minded,
Christian maiden that Hampstead, with his firm religious
backgrounding, unhesitatingly imputed to the woman
herself all the virtues of the chaste and incomparable Lygia.

When dress-rehearsal time came at midnight on
Sunday, just after the regular performance had been
concluded, and John saw Miss Dounay for the first time in the
dress of the character, his soul was enraptured.  The
simple folds of her Grecian robe were furled at the waist
and then swept downward in one billowy leap, unrelieved
in their impressive whiteness by any touch of color, save
that afforded by the jet-bright eyes with their assumed
worshipful look and the wide, flowing stream of her dark,
luxuriant hair, which, loosely bound at the neck, waved
downward to her hips.  The devout curve of her
alabaster neck, the gleaming shoulders, the full, tapering,
ivory arms, her sandaled bare feet—yes, John looked
close to make sure, and they were actually
bare—rounded out the picture.

Marien Dounay stood forth more like an angel vision
than a woman, at once so beautiful and so adorable that
big, sincere, open-eyed John Hampstead worshipped her
where she stood—worshipped her and loved her—as a
man should love an angel.  Yet as he looked, he was
almost guiltily conscious that he knew a secret about this
angelic vision,—that this chiseled flesh with rounded,
shapely contours that would be the despair of any sculptor
was not as marble-like as it looked, was, indeed, soft
to the touch and warm, radiant and magnetic.

And John, blissfully aglow with his spiritual ardor, had
no faint suspicion that his secret might kill his illusion
dead, nor that his devotion would survive that decease,
although something very like this happened on the night
of the first performance.

The great second act was on.  Things were not going
as smoothly as they appeared to from the front.  Even
the inexperienced Hampstead, as he waited for his cue,
could see that his angel was being enormously vexed by
the manner in which Vinicius made love.  Henry
Lester was a brilliant actor, but flighty and erratic.
During rehearsal Mowrey had much trouble in getting him
to memorize accurately the business of his part.  He
would do one thing one way to-day and forget it or
reverse it on the next.  To-night Lester was committing
all these histrionic crimes.  Miss Dounay had continually
to adapt herself to his impulsive erraticisms, to
shift speeches and alter business.  The climax of
exasperation came when one of the wide metal circlets upon
his arm became entangled in the gossamer threads of
Lygia's hair and pulled it painfully.  Yet the actress was
sufficiently accomplished to play her own part irreproachably
and deliver John's cue at the right moment to secure
the startling entrance already described, and thus to be
gracefully and dramatically swept away from the rude
advances of her importunate lover.

It was at the end of this particular scene and off stage,
when the curtain was descending to the accompaniment
of applause from the audience, that the death of John's
illusion came.  For a delicious instant, he was still
holding Lygia from the floor as if instinctively sheltering her
amidst the general confusion of crowding actors and
hurrying stage hands.  Nothing loth, she lay at rest, with
eyes closed and features composed as if in the faint.  To
the raw, impressionable young man, Marien had never
looked so much an angel as at this moment; and now
she was coming to, as if still in character.  Her eyelids
fluttered but did not open, and then her lips moved
slightly, stiffly, under their load of greasy carmine, as if
she would speak.  In self-forgetful ecstasy, Hampstead
bent eagerly to receive the confidence.  Perhaps she was
going to thank him, to whisper a word of congratulation.
Whatever the communication might be, his soul was in
raptures of delightful anticipation as he felt her breath
upon his cheek.

The communication was made promptly and unhesitatingly,
after which Miss Dounay alertly swung her feet
to the floor and walked out upon the stage to receive her
curtain call, leading Ursus by the hand, mentally dazed,
inwardly wabbling, outwardly bowing,—trying, in fact,
to do just as the others did.  But in John's mind now
there was this numbing sense of shock, for he could not
refuse to believe his ears, and what this angelic vision
had breathed into them in tones of cool, emphatic
conviction, was:

"What a damn fool that man Lester is!"

Off the stage again Hampstead stumbled about amid
flying scenery, racing stage hands, and a surging mass of
supernumeraries, like a man recovering consciousness.  He
wanted to get out of sight somewhere.  He had the
feeling of having been stripped naked.  Every vestige of his
religious adoration had been dynamited out of existence.
This was no Christian maiden but an actress playing a
part.  As for the woman herself, she was very blasé and
very modern, who, at this moment, as he could see by a
glance into the open door of her dressing room, was
sitting with crossed knees, head back and enveloped in a
halo of smoke, while her pretty lips were distended in a
yawn, and the spark of a cigarette glowed in her finger
tips.

"And I am another!" Hampstead muttered, with a
sneer that was aimed inward.

Seven minutes later, Lygia walked out of her dressing
room minus the cigarette and looking again that angel
vision, but Hampstead knew better now.  He viewed her
at first critically and then reflectively; but was presently
startled at the gist of his reflections, which was a sort of
self-congratulation because this creature that he was
about to take in his arms was not an angel, but that more
alluring, less elusive thing, a woman.

Two more minutes and the pair of stage hands were
stretched stomach-wise upon the floor ready to swing
open the wings of the gate at the cue from St. Peter, and
Lygia was lying once more in John's arms.  In the
instant of waiting before the curtain rose, he had time to
notice how contentedly and trustfully she appeared to
nestle there.  Her breathing was like his at first, easy
and natural; but gradually, as the moment of suspense
lengthened and the instant of action drew near, the rhythmic
pulse of both bosoms accelerated, as if, heart on heart,
their souls beat in unison.  John was noticing, too, how
soft Marien's body was where the armor did not extend,
how deliciously warm it was, indeed how something like
an ethereal heat radiated from it and filled all his veins
with a strange, electric, impulsive wistfulness.  What was
that giddy perfume?

Involuntarily he drew her closer, with a gentle, steady
pressure.  At this she raised her eyelids and gazed at
him for a moment, contemplatively first and then
passively curious, after which she lowered the lids again,
while her lips half parted in a voiceless sigh.

So far as Hampstead was concerned, illusion had gone.
He knew that he was just a man.  So far as Miss Dounay
was concerned, he suspected that she was just a woman.
But devotion remained.  John did not relax his hold.
Instead there was a momentary tightening of his arms.

"Let 'er go," called the low, tense voice of Mowrey;
and with a rustling sound the great curtain slipped slowly
upward.





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.. _`THE RATE CLERK`:

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   CHAPTER V


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE RATE CLERK

.. vspace:: 2

The week went by like a shot.  On Sunday night the
glory that was a very stagy Rome burned down for the
last time beneath the gridiron of the old Burbank Theater.
On Monday morning no odor of grease paint and no
noxious smell of stewing glue, which proclaims the scene
painter at his work, was in the nostrils of John.  Instead,
the clack of typewriters, the tinkle of telephone bells, the
droning voices of dictators, and the shuffling feet of office
boys filled his ears.

As if to completely re-merge the man in his environment,
Robert Mitchell came walking in, tossed a bundle
of papers upon the desk, fixed the rate clerk with a shaft
of his blue eye, and commanded drily:

"Ursus!  Make a set of tariffs embracing our new
lines to correspond with the commodity tariffs of the San
Francisco and El Paso."

John colored slightly at the thrust of that name Ursus,
but looked Mr. Mitchell fairly and meekly in the eye and
answered:

"Yes, sir."

"Have them effective July 1st," concluded the
General Freight Agent, as he turned away.

Burman, the lordly through rate clerk, lowered his sleek
face behind his books and snickered.  John shot a scowl
at Burman and then for a few minutes hunched his
shoulders over the documents in the case.

The California Consolidated was being consolidated
some more.  Two more roads in the big system had just
been pitchforked into the jurisdiction of Robert Mitchell,
adding twelve hundred additional miles to his responsibility
and pushing him several swift rounds up the ladder
of promotion.

These additions made the California Consolidated
competitive with the San Francisco and El Paso lines at
hundreds of new stations.  John's job was to consolidate
the freight tariffs of the three lines and make sure that
they equalized the rates of the competitor at competing
stations.  It was an enormous task, and the General
Freight Agent had breezily commanded it to be done in
ten weeks.  That was why Burman snickered.  It was
also why Hampstead scowled.

Now a freight tariff starts youthfully out to be the
most scientific thing in the world, but it ends by being
the most utterly unscientific document that ever was put
together.  The longer a tariff lives, the more depraved
it becomes.  The S.F. & E.P. tariffs were very old,
but not, therefore, honorable.

John turned to the shelf that contained them and
scowled again, a double scowl, as black as his blond
Viking brows could manage.  These were to be his
models.  They were yellow—a disagreeable color to
begin with,—each a half inch thick and larger than a
letter page,—abortions, every one of them!  They were
pea-vine growths like the monster system which issued them,
cumbered with the adjustments and easements of the
years.

The flour tariff!  The hay tariff!  The grain tariff!
John took these in his hands one by one and glowered
at them.  The mistakes, the inconsistencies, the
clumsiness of thirty sprawling years were in them.  And he
was asked to duplicate these confusions on his own system.

Should he do it?  No; be hanged if he would!  He felt
big and self-important as he slammed the first of them
face down upon his desk and each thereafter in succession
upon its fellow, until the pile toppled over, after
which, leaving the reckless heap behind him, while
Burman snickered again, John stamped out of the room.

"These S.F. & E.P. tariffs are so old they've got
whiskers on 'em," he began to say to Mr. Mitchell, "and
hairs!  And the hair has never been cut nor even combed.
They have been tagged and fattened and trimmed and
sliced and slewed round till the tariff is issued just to keep
up the basis and the tradition, and then you look in
something else,—an amendment, or a special, or a 'private
special', or sometimes the carbon copy of a letter,—to find
out what the rate actually is.  Sometimes when I call
their office up on the 'phone to get a rate, it takes 'em
twenty-four hours to answer, and maybe a week later
they notify me the answer was wrong.  Our slate is
clean; why not simmer the figures down to what is the
actual basis instead of the assumed one, and publish the
rates as we intend to charge 'em, and as we know they
do charge 'em?"

Mitchell had listened with surprise at first to this rash
proposal.  It sounded youthful and impetuous.  But it
also sounded sensible.  Mitchell hated red tape, and he
knew that John's idea was the right one; but tradition
was god on the S.F. & E.P.  They would fight the
innovation and fight it hard; they might win, too, and
Mr. Mitchell had no stomach for tilting at windmills.
However, it might be a good thing for John, this fight; might
make him forget that foolish stage ambition of his; and
if he won, might crown him so lustrously that of itself
it would save him to a future already assuredly brilliant
in the railroad business.

"Do you think you could whip it out with 'em before
their faces, John, when the scrap comes?" Mr. Mitchell
asked tentatively, but also by way of further firing the
soul of the fighter.

"I believe I could," replied John ardently.

"Then go to it," said Mr. Mitchell tersely.

And John went to it.

But there was another man who had been shocked by
John's theatrical venture, and that was the pastor of the
First Church, who had his virtues, much as other men.
His face was round and like his figure, full of fatness.
He was a merry soul and loved a joke.  He had a heart
as tender as his sense of humor was keen.

But beside his virtues, this man of God had also his
convictions.  His pulpit was no wash-wallowing craft.
He steered her straight.  To Heaven with Scylla!  To
Gehenna with Charybdis!  Indeed, if there was one man
in all Los Angeles who knew where he was going and all
the rest of the world too, it was this same Charles
Thompson Campbell, pastor of the aforesaid grand old First
Church.  Doctor Campbell's hair and eyes were black.
His voice had the ultimate roar in it.  When he stood
up, locks flying, perspiration streaming, and thumped his
pulpit with that fat doubled fist, the palm of which had
been moulded in youth upon the handle of a plow, every
nook and cranny of the auditorium echoed with the force
of his utterance.  But Doctor Campbell's convictions,
like most people's, were only in part based upon knowledge.

Some things in particular he wot not of yet scorned.
One was the modern novel.  Another was the stage!
Shakespeare, Doctor Campbell admitted largely, had shed
some sheen upon the stage and more upon literature; but
he never quoted Shakespeare.  One could almost doubt
if he had read him, and when Shakespeare came to town,
he never went to see him.

On the morning, therefore, when the good Doctor
Campbell read in the papers that the youngest of his
deacons had the night before made his debut as Ursus
in *Quo Vadis*, he was not only pained but moved to
self-reproach.  Grief enveloped him.  It thrust the sharp
cleft of a frown into his smooth brow.  It thrust his chin
down upon his bosom and caused him to heave a
tumultuous sigh.  He bowed his head beside his study
table and then and there put up an earnest petition for
the soul of John Hampstead.  It was a sincere and
natural prayer, because Doctor Campbell was a sincere man
and believed in the efficacy of prayer.

Besides, he loved John Hampstead.  The young man's
impending fate stirred the minister deeply and caused
him to reproach himself.  In this mood, he dug out all
his sermons on the stage, nine years of annual sermons
on the influence of the drama, and read them sketchily
and with disappointment.  Paugh!  Piffle!  How weak
and ineffective they seemed.  He delved into his
concordance for a text and found one.  Then he drove his pen
deep into his inkwell and began to write.

The following Sunday night Doctor Campbell's red,
excited features were seen dimly through dun, sulphurous
clouds of brimstone and fire; but to the preacher's
dismay, John Hampstead was not present for fumigation.
The reverend gentleman, in his unthinking goodness, had
quite overlooked the fact that the play in which John was
performing concluded on Sunday night instead of Saturday
night; and so while his pastor was hurling his fiery
diatribes at that conspicuously assailable institution, the
stage, Deacon Hampstead was blissfully bearing Marien
Dounay about in his arms.

But the next morning John read the sermon published
in the newspaper.  He had already noted that the more
doubtful the sermon, the more likely it is to get into the
headlines, because from the editor's standpoint it thus
becomes news, and late Sunday night, which is the scarcest
hour of the whole week for news, there is more joy in
the "city room" over one sermon that breathes the fiery
spirit of sensation than over ninety and nine which need
no hell and damnation in which to express the tender
gospel of Jesus.  John read it with a sense of wrath, of
outrage, and of humiliation.  That night he launched
himself at the study door of his pastor.

"I was very sorry you did not hear my sermon last
night," began Doctor Campbell blandly, sensing the
advantage of striking first.

"Brother Campbell, I have come to arraign you for
that sermon," retorted John, with an immediate outburst
of feeling.  "I say that you spoke what you did not
know.  I say," and his voice almost broke with the weight
of its own earnestness, "I say that you bore false witness!"

The amazed minister's mouth opened, but John
repressed his utterance with a gesture.

"You will say you preached your convictions.  I say
you preached your prejudice, your ignorance.  I say you
bore false witness against struggling women, against
aspiring men, against those of whose bitter battlings you
know nothing."

The Reverend Charles Thompson Campbell leaned back
aghast.  No man had ever presumed to talk to him like
this, no man of twice his years and spiritual attainments;
yet here was this stripling not only talking to him like
this, but with a fervor of unction in his utterance that
made his upbraiding sound half inspired.

"You are condemning the stage as an institution,"
went on John scornfully.  "You might as well condemn
the printing press as an institution.  You discriminate
with regard to newspapers and books.  Do the same with
the stage.  Taboo the corrupt play and teach your people
to avoid it.  Support the good and teach the managers
that you will.  Taboo the notorious actor or actress if
you wish.  Give the rest of them the benefit of the doubt,
as you do in your personal contact with all humanity.
Oh, Doctor Campbell, you are so charitable in your
personal relations with men and so uncharitable in much of
your preaching!"

This one exclamatory sentence had in it enough of
affectionate regard to enable the minister to contain
himself a little longer, under the impassioned tide which now
flowed again.

"The stage?  The stage as an institution?"  John
appeared to pause and wind himself up.  "Why, listen!
The stage function is a godlike function.  When God
created man out of the dust of the ground and breathed
into him the breath of life he planted in man's breast
also the instinct to create.  That instinct is the
foundation of all art.  Man has always exhibited this passion
to create something in his own image.  It might be a rude
drawing on a rock, or only a manikin sculptured in mud
and set in the sun to dry; or it might be a marble of
Phidias, with the form, the strength, the spirit of life
upon it.  The painter can go farther.  He gets the color
and the very visage of thought and even of emotion.  Yet
each falls short.  There is no God to breathe into their
creations the breath of life."

The minister leaned back a little as if to put his
understanding more at poise.

"But," continued Hampstead, "the playwright and the
actor can go farther.  They breathe into their creations
that very breath of God himself, which he breathed into
man.  They make a character real because he is a living
man.  They put him in the company of other men and
women who are as real for the same reason; they toss
them all into the sea of life together; the winds of life
blow upon them.  Hate and love, virtue and vice, hope
and despair, weakness and strength, birth and death, work
their will upon them."

"That is very beautiful, John," said Doctor Campbell,
"very beautiful."

The tribute was sincere, but John was not to be checked
even by a compliment.

"The stage creates and recreates," he rushed on.  "It
can raise the dead.  It makes men and women live
again—Julius Cæsar and Cleopatra, Napoleon and Dolly
Madison.  It seizes whole segments out of the circles of
past history and sets them down in the midst of to-day,
with the glow of life and the sheen of reality over all, so
that for an afternoon or a night we live in another
continent or another age.  We see the life, the customs, the
petty quarrels, the sublimer passions, the very
pulse-beats of men of other circumstances and other
generations than our own, so that when we come out of the
theater into the times of to-day, we have actually to
wake ourselves up and ask: Which is real, and which is art?"

Doctor Campbell leaned forward now.  His mouth
was round, his eyes were widely open.

"It is that which gives the stage its dignity and power,"
concluded John.  "It is the highest expression of man's
instinct to create a new life in a more ideal Eden than
that in which he finds himself.  When you condemn the
stage you condemn the creative instinct, and," exhorted
John, with the sudden sternness of a hairy prophet on
his desert rock, "you had better pause to think if you do
not condemn Him who planted that instinct in the human
breast."

Hampstead had now finished; but the minister was in
no hurry to speak.  He felt the spell of the picture which
had been painted, but he felt still more the spell of the
young man's ardent enthusiasm.

"You must have thought that out very carefully,
John," he said.

"Brother Campbell!" answered John fervently, "I
have done more than think it out.  I have felt it out.  I
propose to live it out!"

But Doctor Campbell had kept his head amid this swirl
of words, and his return was quietly forceful.

"The stage of to-day," he began, "as I know it from
the newspapers and the billboards, never seemed so
vulgar and damnable as it does now after your glorious
idealization of it.  I, as a preacher of righteousness,
must judge of such an institution externally, by its
effects.  I have weighed the stage in the balance, John, and
I have found it wanting."

This time there was something in the minister's calm
tone, in the cool detachment of his point of view, that
held John silent.

"Isn't it possible," the minister continued, in a kind
of sweet reasonableness, "that there is something
insidiously demoralizing or infectious about it?  Take your
own experience, John.  You are a Christian man.  You
have been soaking yourself in the atmosphere of the stage
for a couple of weeks.  Examine your soul now, and
answer me if you are as fine, as pure a man as you were
before you went there.  Are you?"

"Why, of course I am," ejaculated Hampstead impulsively.

"Think," commanded the minister, in low, compelling
tones; for having controlled his emotions the better, he
was just now the stronger of the two.  "Are you—John?"

Hampstead opened his mouth eagerly, but the minister's
repressing gesture would not let him speak.  The young
man was literally compelled to think, to question his own
soul for a moment, and as he searched, a telltale flush
came upon his cheek, and then his glance fell.  There was
an embarrassing moment of silence, during which this
flush of mortification deepened perceptibly.

The minister was a wise man.  He read the sign and
asked no questions.  He upbraided nothing, cackled no
exultant, "I told you so."

"Let us pray, Brother John," he proposed after the
interval, and knelt by his chair with a hand upon
Hampstead's shoulder.  The prayer was short.

"Oh, Lord," the man of God petitioned, "help us to
know where the right stops and the wrong begins.  Keep
us back from the sin of presumption.  Give thy servants
wisdom to serve thy cause well and work no ill to it by
over-zeal or over-confidence.  Amen!"

Doctor Campbell might have been praying for himself.
But John knew that this was only a part of his tact.

As the two men rose, John felt a sudden impulse to
defend the stage from himself.

"It was my own fault," he urged; "the fault of my
own weakness in unaccustomed surroundings.  It was
not the fault of the surroundings themselves, nor of any
other person.  Besides, it was nothing very grave."

"Deterioration of character is always grave," said the
Reverend Charles Thompson Campbell as he walked to
the door with his caller, and the minister's tone intimated
his conviction that this particular deterioration had been
very grave indeed.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`ON TWO FRONTS`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER VI


.. class:: center medium bold

   ON TWO FRONTS

.. vspace:: 2

There was high commotion in a big front office in
the top floor of a tall, gray building that stood in the
days before the fire on the corner of Kearney and Market
streets in the city of San Francisco.  This gray
structure housed the general offices of the San Francisco and
El Paso Railroad Company, and that big front office
contained the desk of the Freight Traffic Manager.  Before
this desk sat a man with a domed brow and the beak of
an eagle, hair gray, eyes piercing, complexion colorless,
and a mouth that closed so tightly it was discernible only
as a crescent-shaped pucker above his spike-like chin.
His mouth at the moment was not a pucker; it was a
geyser.  The name of this man was William N. Scofield,
and he was obviously in a rage.  He had grown up with
the S.F. & E.P., his brain expanding as it expanded, his
power rising as it had risen.  Long ago, when the one
lone clerk in its little rate department, he had made with
his own hands the first of those yellow commodity tariffs
that John Hampstead had scorned with objurgations.
Now Scofield held in the hand which trembled with his
anger the first of that upstart's own contributions to the
science of tariff making—not yellow, but white, in token
of the clarity it was meant to introduce.

"How did they make it? this—this botch!" he exploded,
repeating his interrogation with other embellishing
phrases not properly reproducible and then slamming
the offending white sheets down hard upon his desk,—much
harder than John had slammed the yellow ones,—this
impudent, white-livered thing that was an assault
upon the customs he, Scofield, had instituted and time
itself had honored!

"Telegram!" he barked to his stenographer.  "Robert
Mitchell, Los Angeles.  Insist immediate withdrawal
your entire line of commodity tariffs, series J.  Basis
carried in our own tariffs is only one we will recognize."

Mitchell answered:

"Decline to withdraw; our tariffs issued on actual
basis on which charges are assessed."

The fight was on.

Arming himself cap-a-pie with tariffs, amendments,
letters, and memoranda, Mitchell two days later followed
his telegram to San Francisco.  Most of his resources,
however, were packed behind the wide, blond brow of
John Hampstead, who accompanied his chief and was
more eager for the fray than Mitchell.  The battle began
on Monday morning about ten of the clock, and was not
finished with the day.  The field of action was a room
of this same gray building, where Howison, General
Freight Agent of the S.F. & E.P., sat at the end of a
long table, flanked right and left by assistant general
freight agents, rate clerks, and even general and district
freight agents called in from the field, all to convince
Robert Mitchell and his lone rate clerk sitting at the other
end of the table that their new tariff was a hodgepodge,
without practical basis or the show of reason to support
it.  Scofield himself did not take a seat in the battle line,
but looked in occasionally, either to walk about nervously
or sit just back of Howison's shoulder.

On the afternoon of the second day, the enemy Traffic
Manager appeared to watch Hampstead intently for half
an hour.  Again and again the keen old fighter saw his
allied forces attack, but invariably this self-confident,
smiling young man with a ready citation, the upflashing
of a yellow "special", the digging out of a letter or a
telegram from his file, or occasionally even of an old
freight bill issued by the S.F. & E.P. showing exactly
what rate had been assessed, triumphantly repelled the
assaults, until reverses began to be the order of the day.

"It strikes me," Scofield remarked sarcastically, "that
this young man has got us all pretty well buffaloed.  The
trouble is, Howison," he glowered, "that your Tariff
Department needs cleaning out.  You've got a lot of old
mush heads in there."

With this warning shot into his own ranks, Scofield
arose, went discontentedly out, and never once came back.
Keener than any of his staff, he had already discerned
that defeat was advancing down the road.

But the battle of the tariffs raged on throughout the
week, and it was not until late on Saturday afternoon
that John, standing in one room of the suite in the Palace
Hotel charged to the name of Robert Mitchell, flung the
pile of papers from his arms into the bottom of a suitcase
with a swish and solid thud of satisfaction.  Victory
from first to last had perched upon his tawny head.  He
had met good men and beaten them; and he had a right
to the wave of exultation that surged for a moment
dizzily through his brain.

Mr. Mitchell, too, was feeling exultant and proud
beyond words, as he stood in the door of John's room.
His hands were deep in his pockets; his large black derby
hat was pushed far back from his bulging brow.  On his
great landscape of a countenance was an oddly significant
expression.

"Well, Jack," he began, after an interval of silence,
"what about the stage?"

John started like a man surprised in a guilty act,
although he had known for months that this was a
question Mr. Mitchell might ask at any moment; but the
decision involved seemed now so big that from day to
day he had hoped the inevitable might be postponed.

"I shall be naming a new chief clerk in a couple of
weeks, now that Heitmuller is to become General Agent,"
Mr. Mitchell went on half-musingly, and as if to forestall
a hasty reply to the question he had asked.  "The new
man will be in line to be appointed Assistant General
Freight Agent very soon, on account of the consolidations."

For a moment John saw himself as Chief Clerk, sitting
in the big swivel chair at the high, roll-top desk, with all
the strings of the business he knew so well how to pull
lying on the table before him; with clerks, stenographers,
men from other departments and that important part of
the shipping public which carried its business to the
general freight office, all running to him.

And from there it was only a short, easy step to the
position of Assistant General Freight Agent.

Only the man who has toiled far down in the ranks of
a railroad organization doing routine work at the same
old desk in the same old way for half a score of years
can know on what a dizzy height sits the Chief Clerk, or
how far beyond that swings the lofty title of Assistant
General Freight Agent.

"Your advancement would be very rapid," suggested
Mr. Mitchell, flicking his flies skilfully upon the whirling
eddies of the young man's thought.

John had achieved enough and glimpsed enough to see
that Mitchell was right.  Advancement would be rapid.
Mitchell would soon go up the line himself; he could
follow him.  General Freight Agent, Assistant Traffic
Manager, Traffic Manager, Vice-president in charge of
traffic—President! with twelve thousand miles of
shining steel flowing from his hand, which he might swing
and whirl and crack like a whip!  The prospect was
dazzling in the extreme, and yet it was only for a
moment that the picture kindled.  In the next it was dead
and sparkless as burned-out fireworks.

"You have a strong vein of traffic in your blood," the
General Freight Agent began adroitly, but John broke in
upon him.

"Mr. Mitchell," he said, and his utterance was grave,
"I am sorry to disappoint you, but it comes too late.  A
year ago such a hint would have thrown me into ecstasies.
To-day it leaves me cold.  I have had another vision."

The face of Mitchell shaded from seriousness almost
to sadness, but he was too wise to increase by argument
an ardor about which, to the railroad man, there was
something not easy to be understood, something, indeed,
almost fanatical.  Instead Mitchell asked with sober,
interested friendliness:

"What is your plan, John?"

"To resign July first," John answered, for the first
time definitely crossing the bridge, "to come to San
Francisco and seek an engagement with some of the
stock companies playing permanently here, even though
I begin the search for an opening without money enough
to last more than a week or two."

"Without money!" exclaimed Mr. Mitchell, in surprise.

"Yes," confessed Hampstead, flushing a little.  "My
salary was not very munificent, you know, and I have
usually contrived to get rid of it, frequently before I got
the pay check in my hands."

Mr. Mitchell's small, prudent eyes looked disfavor at a
spendthrift.

"However," he suggested, "you have only yourself to
think of."

"That's another point against me," confessed
Hampstead.  "I have some one else to look out for.  My
brother-in-law is an artist, you know, and he has not been
very successful yet, so that I hold myself ready to help
with my sister and the children if it should ever become
necessary."

"That's a handicap," declared Mitchell flatly.

"I won't admit it," said John loyally.  "You don't
know those children.  Tayna's the girl, nearly twelve
now, a beauty if her nose is pugged.  Such hair and eyes,
and such a heart!  Dick's the boy, past ten.  He's had
asthma always, and is about a thousand years old, some
ways.  But they—"

Hampstead gulped queerly.

"Those two children," he plunged on, "are dearer to
me than anything in the whole wide world.  You
know," and his tone became still more confidential, while
his eyes grew moist, "it would only be something that
happened to them that would keep me from going on with
my stage career."

Mitchell's respect for John was changing oddly to a
fatherly feeling.  He felt that he was getting acquainted
with his clerk for the first time.  He resolved that he
would not tempt the boy, and that if it became necessary,
he would help him.  However, before he could express
this resolve, if he had intended to express it, the telephone
rang.

Hampstead answered it, stammered, faltered, replied:
"I will see, sir, and call you in five minutes," hung up
the 'phone and turned to confront Mitchell, with a look
almost of fright upon his face.

"It's William N. Scofield," he exclaimed.  "He wants
me to take dinner with him at his club to-night."

A disbelieving smile appeared for a moment on the
wide lips of Mitchell; then understanding broke, and his
smile was swallowed up in a hearty laugh.

"He wants to offer you a position," Mitchell said,
when his exultant cachinnations had ceased.  "Look out
that he doesn't win you.  Scofield is a very persuasive
man.  He nearly got me once.  Besides, he has more to
offer you than I have."

Hampstead pressed his hand to his brow.  Under his
tawny thatch ideas were in a whirl.

"What shall I do?" he asked rather helplessly.

"Stay over," commanded Mitchell unhesitatingly.
"Ring up and tell him you'll be there."

"But there's no use, anyway," replied John suddenly,
getting back to the main point.  "My mind's made up."

"No man's mind is made up when he's going to take
dinner on the proposition with William N. Scofield,"
answered Mitchell oracularly.

"And you?" asked Hampstead, suddenly aware how
good a man at heart was Robert Mitchell, and quite
unaware that he had seized that gentleman's pudgy right
hand and was wringing it in a manner most embarrassing
to Mitchell himself.  "You—"

But the telephone was tingling impatiently.

"Mr. Scofield wants to know," began a voice.

"Yes, yes, I'll be happy to," interrupted John, not
knowing just what tone or form one should take in
expressing the necessary amenities to the secretary of a
great man.

"Very well.  His car will call for you at six-thirty,"
responded the voice.

But before John could pick up the thread of his
unfinished sentence to Mr. Mitchell, a knock sounded at the
door, at first soft and cushioned, as if from a gloved
hand, then louder and more determined, and repeated
with quick impatience.

"Come in," called Mitchell.

The knob turned, and the door swung wide, leaving the
panel of white to frame the picture of a woman.  She
was young, of medium height and appealing roundness,
clad from head to foot in a traveling dress of dark green,
with a small hat of a shade to match, the chief adornment
of which was a red hawk's feather slanting backward at a
jaunty angle.  A veil enveloped both hat brim and face
but was not thick enough to dim the sparkle of bright
eyes or the pink flush of dimpled cheeks, much less to
conceal two rows of gleaming teeth from between which,
after a moment's pause for sensation, burst a ringing
cadence of laughter.

"Miss Bessie!" exclaimed John excitedly.

"The very first guess!" declared that young lady,
advancing and yielding the doorframe to another figure
which filled it so much more completely as to sufficiently
explain a more deliberate arrival.

"Mollie!" ejaculated Mitchell, who by this time had
turned toward the door.  "What in thunder?"

But the General Freight Agent's lines of communication
were just then temporarily disconnected by an assault
upon his features conducted by Miss Bessie in person.
During this interval, Mrs. Mitchell stood placidly
surveying the room, and as she took in its air of preparation
for immediate departure, a tantalizing smile spread
itself on her expansive features.

"Is this an accident or a calamity?" demanded
Mitchell, playfully thrusting Bessie aside and advancing
to greet his wife.

"Both!" declared that lady, submitting her lips with
more of formality than enthusiasm, after which, feeling
that sufficient time had elapsed to make an explanation
of her sudden appearance not undignified, she proceeded:

"Just one of my whims, Bob!  Next week was the
spring vacation; no school, and the poor child was pale
from overstudy and so anxious about her examinations
(Bessie shot a look at Hampstead), that I just made up
my mind I'd bring her up here and let her get a good bite
of fog and a breath from the Golden Gate."

"Fine idea!" declared Mitchell.  "Fine!  Now that
you've had it," he chuckled, "we'll start home.  I'm
leaving at eight."

"You are not!" proclaimed Mrs. Mitchell flatly.
"You will stay right here for at least three days and do
nothing but devote yourself to your child.  And to her
mother!" she subjoined, as if that were an afterthought;
all with a toss of her chin, which, by way of emphasis,
held its advanced position for a moment after the speech
was done.

"And the business of the company?" Mitchell suggested,
with a solicitous air.

"It can wait on me," averred Mrs. Mitchell decisively,
taking a turn up and down the room and surveying once
more the signs of confusion and of hasty packing.
"Many's the time I've waited on it.  You can stay, too,
John," she said, turning to Hampstead.  "I want you
to take Bessie to a lot of places Robert and I have been
and won't care to visit this time."

"Robert!" and while her eyes turned toward the
windows, two of which opened on a view of Market
Street, the new commander began a redisposition of
forces, "I rather like this suite.  Bessie and I will take
the corner room.  You can take this room and
Mr. Hampstead can move across the hall, or anywhere else
they can put him."

As an act of possession, Mrs. Mitchell walked to the
dresser, took off her hat, stabbed the two pins into it
emphatically, and tossed it upon the bed, where it bloomed
like a flower-garden in the midst of a desert of papers
while she, still standing before the mirror, bestowed a
few comfortable pats upon her hair.

"John," Mitchell said jovially, "I know orders from
headquarters when I get 'em.  You were going to stay
over, anyway; but use your own judgment about obeying
the instructions you have just received."

"Never had such agreeable instructions in my life,"
declared Hampstead, turning to Mrs. Mitchell with an
elaborately stagy bow, and the natural quotation from
Hamlet which leaped to his lips:

"'*I shall in all my best obey you, madam.*'"

"See that you do," said that lady, not half liking the
bow and shooting a glance at Hampstead less cordial than
austere.  "And by the way," she added, "see that you
don't let that stage nonsense carry you much further,
young man," with which remark Mrs. Mitchell turned
abruptly and gave Hampstead a most complete view of a
broad and uncompromising back.

In Mrs. Mitchell's mind a man had much better be a
section hand on the Great Southwestern than a fixed star
on the drama's milky way.

"By the way, mother," remarked Mr. Mitchell, with
the air of one who makes an important revelation, "John
is just going out to dine with William N. Scofield."

Mrs. Mitchell turned quickly, and her dark eyes shot a
meaningful glance at her husband, while the line of her
lower lip first grew full and then protruded.  A squeeze
of that lip at the moment, Hampstead reflected, would
extract something at least as sour as very sour lemon
juice.

"Scofield is after him," bragged Mitchell.

"Well, see that he doesn't get him," his wife commanded
sternly, and then shifting her somber glance until
it rested on John with a look that was near to menace,
inquired acridly:

"Young man, you wouldn't be disloyal?  You
wouldn't sell yourself?"  In the second interrogatory
her voice had passed from acridity to bitterness, while the
eyes bored implacably, till Hampstead at first wriggled,
then grew resentful and replied crisply, standing very
straight:

"No, Mrs. Mitchell, I would not sell myself!"

"That's right," exclaimed Bessie, stepping impulsively
toward John's side.  "Do not let her browbeat you.  I
am sorry to say, Mr. Hampstead, that mother is
inclined to be somewhat dictatorial.  You see what she
does to poor papa!"

"And you see what you do to poor me," exclaimed that
worthy lady, turning on her daughter with surprise and
injury in her glance and tone,—"dragging me almost
out of bed last night to make this foolish trip up here
with you.  Next week, of all weeks, too, when I wanted
to do so many other things."

"Ho! ho!" broke in Mitchell, "so that's the way of
it.  This trip up here is a scheme of yours," and he
turned accusingly upon his daughter, but Bessie smiled
and curtseyed, entirely unabashed.  "Well, then, I don't
guess we'll stay," teased Mitchell.  "And I don't
suppose you knew a thing about Hampstead's being here.
That was all an accident."

"It was not," flashed Bessie.  "I did.  I haven't seen
dear old John for a year.  I could go in and have delightful
tête-à-têtes with him when he was a stenographer, but
out in the Rate Department there are forty prying eyes
and men with ears as long as jack-rabbits.  He hasn't
taken me to a circus or anything for nobody knows how
long.  You shall give him money for theater tickets, for
dinners, for auto rides, for everything nice for three
whole days."

Bessie was standing directly in front of her father,
her eyes looking up into his, and her two hands patting
his generous jowls, as her speech was concluded.

John listened rapturously.  This was the old Bessie
talking.  She had entered the room looking a year older,
a year prettier since that day when he wrote the Phroso
invitations for her, and had taken on so easily the lacquer
and dignity of dresses and of years that he was beginning
to feel in awe of her.  This speech was a great relief.

Besides, in the whirl of the hour before she came, he
had found himself strangely wanting to take counsel
with Bessie.  The Mitchells had made of him for all
these years a convenient caretaker of their daughter.
Bessie had made of him a playfellow with whom she
took the same liberties as with any other of her father's
possessions.  This attitude on her part had created the
only atmosphere in which Hampstead could have been at
ease with her.  It had permitted his soul to bask when
she was by, but it had done no more.  But now, he
somehow wanted to confide in Bessie,—not to take her advice
for he wasn't going to take anybody's advice; all advice
was against him,—but to tell her what he was going to
do, because he believed she would listen appreciatingly,
if not sympathetically.  He felt he needed at least the
added support of a neutral mind.  He had rejected
Mr. Mitchell's proposal, but the glitter of it flashed
occasionally.  And now he was going to face the resourceful, the
ingratiating, the dominating William N. Scofield, and he
felt like a man who goes alone to meet his temptation on
the mountain top.





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.. _`THE HIGH BID`:

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   CHAPTER VII


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   THE HIGH BID

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For an hour and a half at dinner, and for another
hour sunk in the depths of a great leather chair in the
lounging room of the Pacific Union Club, William
N. Scofield had searched the soul of Hampstead, who had
not only been led to talk rapturously of his stage
ambition but to reveal the metes and bounds of his interest
in and knowledge upon many subjects.

"Gad, but you know a lot," ejaculated Scofield, with
unfeigned amazement.  "Where'd you get it all?"

"I have read a good deal," confessed John, trying to
appear much more modest than in his heart he felt; for
it was a part of Scofield's whim or of his campaign to
flatter him enormously, and he had succeeded.

But for a time now, the Traffic Manager was silent,
puffing meditatively at his cigar and staring at the ceiling
through loafing rings of smoke in which, as if they were
floating letters, he seemed to read the transcript of his
thought,—the thought that if, beside employing this
enormously able young man, he could also enlist in
behalf of the railroad as an institution his capacity for
fanatical devotion to an ideal, the prize was one worth
bidding high for, high enough to win!

"People like you, Hampstead," Scofield broke out
presently, and in his most ingratiating vein.  "We all
felt that down at the office.  You did a difficult thing
without making an enemy of one of us.  Therefore what
your personality can do interests me even more than what
you know."

The railroad man interrupted his speech to shoot an
exploratory glance from under veiling lids and went on
calculatingly:

"The railroad business is going to change.  Now we
tell the Railroad Commission what to do.  The time is
coming when it will tell us what to do, and we will do it.
But the public attitude toward the railroad has also got
to change."  Scofield's tone had taken on new emphasis.

"You would make the type of executive that could change
it!  The successful transportation man of the future has
got to be a sort of ambassador of the railroad to the
people, and the man who best serves the people tributary
to his road will best serve his stockholders."

"Do you know who gave me that point?" the Traffic
Manager asked, turning from the vision he was contemplating
in the clouds of smoke over his head and looking
sharply at Hampstead.

"Naturally not," admitted the younger man.

"Bob Mitchell," said Scofield, and paused while his
thin lips coaxed persistently at the cigar which appeared
to have gone out.  "Bob Mitchell!  And I reviled him
for his sagacity, told him he was an altruistic fool.  But
after a while I saw he was right.  Then I tried to get
him for us, but I didn't succeed.  He wasn't as sensible
as I hope you will be.  Besides, I am going to offer you
more than I offered him."

More than he offered Mitchell!  There was a sudden
jolt somewhere in John's breast, and he wet a dry, parched
lip, but did not speak.

"Yes," breathed Scofield softly, almost as if he had
been interrupted.  "I am going to offer you more.
Hampstead!" and the voice was raised quickly, "I want
you to be our General Freight Agent!"

If Scofield had leaned over and kissed him, John would
not have been more surprised, nor have known less what
to say.

"General Freight Agent!" he croaked hoarsely.

"Yes," affirmed the other coolly, almost icily, while he
flicked the ashes from his cigar and enjoyed the sensation
his proposal had produced.

"At my age?" stumbled John, still groping, but trying
to see himself in the position.

"Why, yes," reassured Scofield suavely.  "You tell
me you're past twenty-five.  Paul Morton was Assistant
General Freight Agent of the Burlington at twenty-one.
Look where he is to-day—in the cabinet of the President
of the United States.  The salary," Scofield added
casually, by way of finally clinching the argument, "will be
twelve thousand a year."

Hampstead's lips silently formed the words—twelve
thousand!  But he did not utter them.  They dazed him.
They rushed him headlong.  They made rejection
impossible.  No man had a right to throw away such a
fortune as that.  One thousand dollars a month!  He
felt himself yielding, helplessly, irresistibly.

And then, suddenly as the photographer's bomb lights
up every lineament of every face in the darkened room,
for one single moment Hampstead saw things clearly and
in their true proportions.  This Schofield was not a man.
He was a grinning devil, with horns and a barb on his
tail.  He was tempting, trapping, buying him.  He would
not be bought.  "*No, Mrs. Mitchell, I would not sell
myself,*" he had said, not, however, meaning at all what
that lady meant.

Leaning back stubbornly, his fist smiting heavy blows
upon the cushioned arm of the chair, John muttered
through clenched teeth:

"No!  No!  No—I'll never do it.  No, Mr. Scofield,
I cannot accept your offer.  I thank you for it; but
I cannot accept it.  The stage is to be the place of my
achievement.  Why, why, Mr. Scofield, the wonderfully
flattering offer you have made to me to-night has come
because of the training incident to the cultivation of a
stage ambition.  If it can bring me so much with so little
devotion, is it not reasonable to suppose that it will bring
me more—very much more?  I will not be so disloyal
to that which has been so generous with me."

Scofield's countenance had suddenly and impressively
changed.  It became a mask of stone, a sphinx-like thing,
the brow a knot, the nose a beak, the mouth a stitched
scar.  The beady gleam of the eyes from beneath drawn
lids was sinister.  This fanatical young fool was
escaping him, and Scofield did not like any one to escape
him.

But the young man refused to be swerved by frowns.

"Not to manage railroads," he declared enthusiastically,
"but to mould human character is to be my life-work;
to depict the virtues and the vices, the weaknesses
and the strengths of life, to make men laugh and love
and—forget."

Scofield's eyes twinkled, and his mouth became less a
scar, but John thought this was a very fine phrase really,
and he rushed along:

"Life looks like a tangle, like a mess—drudgeries,
disappointments, injustices—the wrong man
prospering—the wrong girl suffering!  The drama composes
life.  It grabs out a few people and follows them,
compressing into the action of two hours the eventualities of
a lifetime and shortening perspectives till men can see the
consequences of their acts, whether for good or for ill.
The stage teaches the doctrine of the conservation of
moral energy—and of immoral energy—that sustained
effort, conserved effort is never cheated; it gets its goal
at last."

"Say!" broke in Scofield; but John would not be
denied what he felt was a final smashing generalization.

"To figure the tariff on human conduct, to grade and
classify the acts of life, to quote the rates on happiness
and misery in trainload lots.  That's what I'm going to
do," he concluded, with a glow upon his face.

But by this time a smile of cynic pity had appeared
upon the face of the railroad man.

"Hampstead," he exclaimed sharply, with a mimic
shudder and a shrug of relief as if he had just escaped
something, "you're not an actor.  You're a preacher!"

John gasped.

"You're a moralist," asserted Scofield accusingly, "a
puritanical, Sunday-school, twaddling moralist.  I have
misjudged you.  I wouldn't want you around at all."

With a look akin to disgust upon his face, the railroad
man made a motion with his fingers in the air as if
ridding them of something sticky, and arose, not abruptly
but decisively, making clear that the interview had proved
disappointingly unprofitable and was therefore at an end.

John also arose, bewildered by the sudden change in
Scofield's attitude—a change which he resented, and
also the ground of it.  He a preacher?  The idea was
ridiculous.

Besides, it makes an astonishing difference when one
has been stubbornly refusing an offer to have the offer
coolly and decisively withdrawn.  Something subtly
psychological made him want the offer back.  The door
of opportunity had been closed behind him with a snap
so vicious that he wanted to turn and kick it open.

But the thin, talon-like hand of Scofield was hooking
the young man's rather flaccid palm for a moment.

"Remember what I tell you," he barked out in parting.
"You're not an actor.  You're not a railroad man.
You're a preacher!"

The last word was flung bitingly, like an epithet.

John, feeling uncomfortable, walked out and along one
side of Union Square, casting a momentary wondering
eye on the stabbing, twin towers of the Hotel St. Francis,
many windowed and many-lighted; then turned on down
Geary into Market and along that wide and cobbled
thoroughfare to the doors of the old Palace Hotel.  By
the time he was in bed, he realized that Scofield had
shaken him terribly.  His decision was all to make over
again.

However, Bessie would be there for three days to help
him, and with this thought he felt comforted.

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   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

.. vspace:: 1



"It's been a great three days," sighed John, on the
following Tuesday.  Bessie also sighed.

They had clambered down from the parapet below the
Cliff House and sat watching the seals at play upon the
rocks a stone's throw out from beneath their feet.  Their
position marked the southern portal of the famous Golden
Gate, through which a mile-wide stream of liquid blue was
running.  Across the Gate rose the sheer gray cliffs of
Marin County and beyond those the rugged greens and
blues of the mountains, spiked in the center by the peak
of Tamalpais.

Before their faces, the ocean, in swells and scoops of
ever grayer gray, ran out to catch the horizon as it fell,
illumined in its lower reaches by the sun, which was
sinking into the haze above the waters like a lustrous orange
ball.

Southward, beyond the green head of Golden Gate
Park, the yellow gray of the sand dunes and the blue gray
of the sea met in a lingering, playful kiss that swept back
and forth in a long shimmering line which ran on sinuously,
growing fainter and fainter, till lost in the shadow
of the distant cliffs.

The hour was five o'clock.  At eight that night John
was to leave for Los Angeles.  His vacation—the only
vacation of his hard-driven life—was to end, and an
epoch in his existence was also nearing its end.  The past
was clear as the land behind him; the future was an area
of tossing uncertainty.  Nothing appeared,—no track,
no wake, no sail, no sun even.  Only far over, beyond the
curve of the horizon, was a kind of strange, unearthly
glow, and on this his eye was set.

For three days his soul had ebbed and flowed like that
lip of foam upon the beach, now stealing far up on the
land,—for him the backward track; now turning and
running far out to sea,—for him the way of adventure
and advance.

But now the ultimate decision was to be made.  Bessie
saw it rising like a tide upon that face which once had
seemed not to fit, a rapt look which snuggled in the hills
and hollows and then began to harden like setting concrete.
No one would call that face homely now.  Interesting,
most likely, would have been the word.

The gray eyes burned brighter, the lips grew tighter.
The chin advanced, moved out to sea a little, as it were.

.. _`82`:

"Follow your star, John," Bessie declared stoutly,
though a look of pain momentarily touched her whitening
lips.  "I shall despise you if you do not."

"The decision is made," John replied solemnly, "and
you, Bessie, have helped to make it."

Bessie did not reply; she only looked.

Silence fell between them.  Silence, too, was in the
heavens; the sun, the waves, the restless wind for the
moment appeared to stand still.  All nature had paused
respectfully.  A man, young, inexperienced, but potential,
had cast the horoscope of life beyond the power of
gods or men to intervene,—and with it had cast some
other horoscopes as well.

Hampstead felt the spell his act of will had wrapped
about them, but he felt also the substance of his
resolution framing like granite in his soul and making him
strong with a new kind of strength.

But soon the sun was descending again, the clouds were
drifting once more, and a gust of wind nipped sharply,
causing the skirts of John's overcoat to flap lustily.
Bessie twitched her fur collar closer about the neck, and
thrust both hands deep into the pockets of her gray ulster.
Hampstead passed his own hand through the curve of the
girl's elbow, gripped her forearm possessively, selfishly,
absently, and drew her toward him.

Indeed Bessie was closer to him than she had ever been
before; and yet she had never felt so far away.

"Oh, but it's great to have a woman by you in a crisis,"
John chuckled happily.

Bessie looked up startled.  John had called her woman.
But she recovered from the start,—he had also called her
*a* woman.

"Come to understand each other pretty well, haven't
we?" John observed, still looking oceanward, but giving
the arm of Bessie what was intended for a meaningful
squeeze.

"Not at all," sighed Bessie, also still looking oceanward.

Hampstead, his thoughts bowling rapidly forward,
continued motionless until a white-winged, curious-eyed gull
sailed between his line of vision and the water.  Then, as
if abruptly conscious that Bessie's answer was not what
it should have been, he turned, and at the same time boldly
swung her body round till they stood facing each other.
Bessie met this gaze unblinkingly for a moment, with her
face set and sober; then something in John's mystified
glance touched her keen sense of humor, and she laughed,—her
old, roguish laugh,—and flirted the stupid in the
face with the end of her boa.

"You great big egoist!" she smiled.  "There, that's
the first chance I've had to use that word.  I only learned
the difference between it and another last week."

"Indeed!" retorted Hampstead.  "And when did you
learn the difference between me and the other word?"

"Well, I'm not sure that there is a difference," she
sparred.  "Being polite, I just concede it."

"Oh," he chuckled.  "But," and he was serious again,
"you say we don't understand each other?"

"Nonsense; I was only joking.  I do understand
you; you great, big, egoistical egotist!  You are just
now absolutely self-centered—and all, all ambition!
And I am secretly—secretly, you understand—proud of
you!"

"And you," said Hampstead, drawing her close again,
"are just the truest, most understanding friend a man
ever, ever had.  You know, Bessie, a fellow can talk to
you just like a sister,—a pretty little sister!" he
subjoined, when Bessie looked less pleased than he thought
she should.

"You've changed a lot, too, in a year," he conceded,
studying her face critically.  "When you came into the
hotel that night, you struck fear into my heart, and then
kind of made it flutter.  I said to myself, 'She's gone—the
old Bessie, that could be played with.  But here's a
young woman, a handsome young woman, taking her
place.'"

"Did you say that?" asked Bessie happily.

"An exceedingly beautiful woman," went on John, as
if stimulated by the interruption.  "By George, a very
corker of a woman—look at those eyes, those lips, those
dimples.  Same old dimples, girl!" he laughed emotionally.
"And I said, 'Now, here's a woman, a ripe, wonderful
woman, to be made love to—'"

"John!"

There was in Bessie's sudden exclamation the surcharged
sense of all the proprieties which their relationship
involved.

"Oh, don't be alarmed," exclaimed Hampstead, suddenly
very earnest and respectful.  "I am not leading up
to anything.  I do not misunderstand the nature of your
goodness to me.  I am not presuming anything.  I am
only telling you what I said to myself."

"Oh," murmured Bessie noncommittally, though
she shivered for a moment as if a gust of wind had come
again.  Hampstead, feeling this, drew her still closer and
hunched his broad shoulder to shelter her more, as he
explained further:

"But it was I, you know, and there was nothing for me
to do but to fly.  I was for jumping out the window.
And then you suddenly made that wonderful speech about
going to the circus with dear old John, and your mother
let it out that you wanted me to run around with you
here, and I saw that toward me you were the same old
Bessie; that for a few days we could be once more just
friendly, only two finer friends, because we're both grown
up now."

"Yes," Bessie sighed, almost contentedly.  "I did
want you, John.  A girl gets tired of society, of clubs
and dances and things, even in High.  You know, I get
weary of the sight of these slim, pompadoured boys
sometimes.  I just wanted somehow to feel the arm of a real
man, to hear him talk, even if he does nothing but talk
about himself, and until this minute in three days has not
confessed that I have dimples, and—and a heart."

"Slow, about some things, am I not?" confessed John.
"Awfully, awfully slow!"

"I will agree with you," said Bessie, with a mournfulness
that literally compelled him to perceive that she was
some way disappointed in him.

"But," he inquired reproachfully, "aside from my
usefulness as a social escort and a sort of masculine tonic,
you do admire me a little, don't you?"

"Oh, yes," she answered frankly.  "I admire you a lot."

"But you're disappointed about something?"

"Apprehension is the better word," she confessed
soberly.

"Apprehension?  Of what?"  John was looking at
her almost accusingly.  Bessie avoided his glance.  She
could not tell him what she feared nor why she feared it.

"You think I'll fail?" John demanded.

"No," disclaimed Bessie seriously.  "I think you will
succeed!"

"You think so?" and Hampstead's face lighted
brilliantly.  "Oh, God bless you for that!" and again he
shook her, this time tenderly and drew her closer till her
breast was touching his, and she leaned her head far back
to look up into his face.

"Yes," she breathed softly, "I think so!"

"And you do not think me silly for turning my back
upon solid realities to follow my ideal?"

"No!  No!" and she shook her head emphatically, "I
honor you for it, John.  You have inspired me, John, and
thrilled me.  I used to think—how good you are!  Now
I think—how noble you are!  You have made my
feeling for you one of worshipfulness almost."

The look in her face did express that, and Hampstead
noticed it now.

"Ah," he murmured, pressing her arms against her
sides, "you dear, impressionable little girl!"

Quite thoughtless of how unnecessarily close he was
drawing Bessie, either to shelter her from the wind or for
the purpose of conversation, or especially in the fulfillment
of his duty to his charge as guide and protector, John was
finding a pleasurable sensation in this position of
intimacy, and was indeed, just upon the threshold of one
very great discovery when he made another, perhaps
equally surprising, but vastly less important.  Looking
into the upturned eyes, which after the canons of Delsarte,
he was thinking expressed "devotion" perfectly, a
shadow was seen to project itself downward from the
upper lids across the iris, as if a storm were gathering on
a placid lake.  John watched the shadow curiously as it
deepened, until it became clear that a mist was congealing
in those swimming violet depths.

"Why, Bessie," he exclaimed, amazed, "you are going
to cry!"

On the instant two tears trickled from the dark lashes
and gleamed for a moment like solitaire diamonds in the
setting of two ruby spots that had gathered unaccountably
upon her upturned cheeks.

"You are crying," he charged straightly.

Bessie's expression never changed, but her smooth,
round chin nodded a trembling and unabashed assent.  A
sudden impulse seized John.  The position of his arms
shifted.

"Bessie!" he murmured feelingly, "I am going to
kiss you!"

Bessie did not appear half as surprised at this announcement
as Hampstead at himself for making it.

"May I?" he persisted.

The expression of devotion in Bessie's swimming orbs
remained unstartled, her pose unaltered.  Only her lips
moved while she breathed a single word: "Yes."

Instantly their ruby and velvet softness yielded to the
pressure of John's, planted as tenderly and chastely as
was his thought of her,—for that other discovery that he
was on the verge of making had been fended off by the
coming of the tear.


.. vspace:: 4

.. _`JOHN MAKES UP`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER VIII


.. class:: center medium bold

   JOHN MAKES UP

.. vspace:: 2

That night, according to programme, John went back
to Los Angeles; and a few weeks later, also according to
programme, he was again in San Francisco, no longer a
railroad man, but—in his thought—an actor.

Now calling oneself an actor and being one are quite
different; but it took an experience to prove this to John.
Even the opportunity for this experience was itself hard
to get.  It was days before he even saw a theatrical
manager, weeks before he met one personally, and a month
before he got his first engagement.

When he talked of the drama to actors the way he had
talked of it to the Reverend Charles Thompson Campbell,
they did not comprehend him; when he talked to them as
he had to Scofield, they smiled cynically; when he admitted
to one manager that he was without professional experience,
the admission drew a sneer which froze the stream
of hope in his breast.

John thereafter told no other manager this, but learned
instead the value of a "front", and inserted in the
professional columns of the *San Francisco Dramatic Review* a
card which read:

.. vspace:: 2

::

   +------------------+
   |                  |
   |  JOHN HAMPSTEAD  |
   |       HEAVY      |
   |    AT LIBERTY    |
   |                  |
   +------------------+

.. vspace:: 2

"Heavy" in theatrical parlance means the villain.
Modestly confessing himself not quite equal to "leads",
though in his heart John scorned to believe his own
confession, he had announced himself as a "heavy."

This card appeared for three succeeding weeks, but on
the fourth week there was a significant change.  It read:

.. vspace:: 2

::

   +-----------------------------------+
   |                                   |
   |          JOHN HAMPSTEAD           |
   |               HEAVY               |
   |  With the People's Stock Company  |
   |                                   |
   +-----------------------------------+

The People's Stock Company was new, a "ten-twenty-thirty"
organization, got together in a day for a season of
doubtful length, in a huge barn of a house that once had
been the home of bucket-of-blood melodramas, but for a
long time had been given over to cobwebs and prize fights.
The promoters had little money.  They spent most of it
on new paint and gorgeous, twelve-sheet posters.  Everything
was cheap and gaudy, but the cheapest thing was the
company—and the least gaudy.

The opening play was a blood-spiller with thrills
guaranteed; the scene was laid in Cuba at a period just
preceding the Spanish-American War.  Hampstead's part
was a Spanish colonel, Delaro by name.  Delaro was no
ordinary double-dyed villain.  He was triple-dyed at the
least, and would kick up all the deviltry in the piece from
the beginning to the end; he would steal the fair Yankee
maiden who had strayed ashore from her father's yacht;
he would imprison her in an out-of-the-way fortress; court
her, taunt her, threaten her—and then when the audience
was wrought to the highest pitch of excitement and the
last throb of pity for her impending fate at the hands of
this fiend in yellow uniform and brass buttons, the
galloping of horses would herald the appearance of
Lieutenant Bangster, U.S.N., lover of the maiden and hero
of the play.  (The Navy on horseback!)  A pitched
battle would result, pistols, rifles, cannon would be fired,
the fortifications would be blown away, and Old Glory
go fluttering up the staff to the thundering applause of
the gods of the gallery.

Delaro was an enormous opportunity; but it was also
an enormous responsibility.  John went into rehearsal
haunted by fear that the carefully guarded secret of his
inexperience would be discovered, knowing that instant
humiliation and discharge would follow.  He had
trudged, hoped, brazened, starved, prayed to get this part.
He must not lose it, and he must make good.  The sweat
of desperation oozed daily from his pores.

Halson, the stage manager, was a tall, tubercular
person, with a husk in his throat and a cloudy eye.  This eye
seemed always to John to be cloudier still when turned on
him.  On the fourth day of rehearsal, these clouded looks
broke out in lightning.

"Stop that preaching!" Halson commanded impatiently.
"You are intoning those speeches like a parrot
in a pulpit.  Colonel Delaro is not a bishop.  He is a
villain—a damned, detestable, outrageous villain!  Play
it faster; read those speeches more naturally.  My God,
you must have been playing—  By the way, Hampstead,
what were you playing last?"

The shot was a bull's-eye.  John felt himself suddenly
a monstrous fraud and had a sickening sense of
predestined failure.  In his soul he suddenly saw the truth.
Acting was not bluffing.  Acting was an art!  The poorest,
dullest of these people, bad as they appeared to be,
knew how to read their lines more naturally than he.  He
was not an actor.  He never had been an actor.  He was
only a recitationist.

"What were you playing last, I say?" bullied Halson,
as if suddenly suspicious.

But John had rallied.  "If I don't get the experience,
how will I ever become an actor," was what he said to
himself.

"My last season was in Shakespeare," was what he
observed to Halson, with deliberate dignity.

"Oh," exclaimed the stage manager, much relieved.
"That explains it.  I was beginning to think somebody
had sawed off a blooming amateur on me."

John had not deemed it prudential to add that this
season in Shakespeare lasted one whole evening and
consisted of some slices from the Merchant of Venice
presented in the parlor of the Hotel Green in Pasadena; and
the scorn with which Halson had immediately pronounced
the word "amateur" sent a shiver to Hampstead's
marrow, while he congratulated himself on his discretion.
Nevertheless, he suffered this day many interruptions
and much kindergarten coaching from Halson and felt
himself humiliated by certain overt glances from the cast.

"The boobs!" thought John.  "The pin-heads!
They don't know half as much as I do.  They never
taught a Y.M.C.A. class in public speaking; they never
gave a lesson in elocution in all their lives, and here they
are staring at me, because I have a little trouble mastering
the mere mechanics of stage delivery.  It's simple.  I'll
have it by to-morrow."

But at the end of the rehearsal, John felt weak.  Instead
of leaving the theater, he slipped behind a curtain
into one of the boxes and sank down in the gloom to be
alone and think.  But he was not so much alone as he
thought.  A voice came up out of the shadows in the
orchestra circle.  It was the voice of Neumeyer, the
'angel' of the enterprise, who was even more
inexperienced in things dramatic than his "heavy" man.

"How do you think it'll go?" Neumeyer had asked
anxiously.

"Oh, it'll go all right," barked the whiskey-throat of
Halson.  "It'll go.  All that's worrying me is this blamed
fool Hampstead.  How in time I sawed him off on myself
is more than I can tell.  However, I've engaged a new
heavy for next week."

John groped dumbly out into the day.  But in the
sunshine his spirits rallied.  "They can't take this part away
from me," he exulted and then croaked resolutely: "I'll
show 'em; I'll show 'em yet.  They're bound to like me
when they see my finished work."

And that was what he kept saying to himself up to the
very night of the first performance.  But that significant
occasion brought him face to face with another
problem,—his make-up.

The matter of costume was simple.  It had been rented
for a week from Goldstein's.  It was fearsomely
contrived.  The trousers were red.  Varnished oilcloth
leggings, made to slip on over his shoes, were relied upon to
give the effect of top boots.  The coat was of yellow, with
spiked tails, with huge, leaf-like chevrons, with rows of
large, superfluous buttons, and coils on coils of cord of
gold.

But make-up could not be hired from a costumer and
put on like a mask.  It was a matter of experience, of
individuality, and of skill upon the part of the actor.  All
John knew of make-up he had read in the books and
learned from those experimental daubs in which his
features had been presented in his own barn-storming
productions.  The make-up of Ursus had been almost
entirely a matter of excess of hair, acquired by a beard and
a wig rented for the occasion.  This, therefore, was
really to be his first professional make-up, and Hampstead
was blissfully determined that it should be a stunning
achievement.

In order that he might have plenty of time for
experiment, the heavy man entered the dressing rooms at six
o'clock, almost an hour and a half before any other actor
felt it necessary to appear, and went gravely about his
important task.

First treating the pores of his face to a filling of cold
cream,—all the books agreed in this,—John chose a dark
flesh color from among his grease paints and proceeded to
give himself a swarthy Spanish complexion.  Judging
that this swarthiness was too somber, he proceeded next
to mollify it by the over-laying of a lighter flesh tint; but
later, in an effort to redden the cheeks, he got on too much
color and was under the necessity of darkening it again.
Thus alternately lightening and darkening, experimenting
and re-experimenting, seven o'clock found him with a
layer of grease paint, somewhere about an eighth of an
inch thick masking his features into almost complete
immobility.

Next he turned attention to the eyes, blackening the
lashes and edging the lids themselves with heavy mourning.
At the outer corners of the eyes he put on a smear
of white to drive the eye in toward the nose; between the
corner of the eye and the nose, he was careful to deepen
the shadow.  This was to make his eyes appear close
together.  Down the bridge of the nose he drew a straight
white stripe to make that organ high and thin and
narrow; while in the corner between the cheek and nostril
went another smear of white, to drive the nose up still
higher and sharper.

In the midst of this artistry, Jarvis Parks, the character
man, who had been assigned to dress with Hampstead,
entered.

"Hello," said John, with an attempt at unconcern.

"Hard at it," commented Parks, and began with the
ease of long practice to arrange his make-up materials
about him, after which deftly, and almost without looking
at what he was doing, he transformed himself into a
youthful, rosy-cheeked, navy chaplain.

"Half hour!" sang the voice of the call boy from below
stairs.

John was busy now adjusting a pirate moustache to his
upper lip by means of liberal swabbings of spirit gum.
As he worked, he hummed a little tune just to show
Parks how much at ease and with what satisfied indifference
he performed the feat of transposing his fair Saxon
features into the cruel scowls of a villainous Spanish
colonel.

But catching the eye of Parks upon him for a moment,
Hampstead was puzzled by the expression, although he
reflected that it was probably admiration, since he
certainly had got on ever so much better than he expected.
It surely was a fine make-up—a brilliant make-up.

"Fifteen minutes," sang the voice of the call boy.

Hampstead could really contain his self-complacency
no longer.

"Well," he exclaimed, turning squarely on Parks,
"what do you think of it?"

Now if John had only known, he disclosed his whole
amateurish soul to wise old Parks in that single question,
for a professional actor never asks another professional
what he thinks of his make-up.

"Great!" responded Parks drily, but again there was
that look upon his face which Hampstead could not quite
interpret.

"Five minutes!" was bellowed up the stairway.

Hampstead drew on his coat of brilliant yellow, buckled
on his sword, and had opportunity to survey himself again
in the glass and bestow a few more touches to the face
before the word "overture", the call boy's final scream of
exultation, echoed through the dressing rooms.

The corridor outside John's door was immediately filled
with the sound of trampling feet, of voices male and
female, some talking excitedly, some laughing nervously,
every soul aquiver with that brooding sense of the ominous
which sheds itself over the spirits of a theatrical company
upon a first night.

Parks, with a final touch to his hair and a sidewise
squint at himself, turned and went out.  The footsteps
and voices in the corridor grew fainter and then came
trailing back from the stairway like a chatterbox
recessional.

It was quiet in the dressing rooms, except for a droning
from across the way, and John knew what that was; for
the sweet little ingenue had told him in a moment of
confidence: "On first nights I always go down on my knees
before I leave my dressing room."  There she was now,
telling her beads.

"Shall I pray, too?" he asked, and then answered
resolutely, "No!  Let's wait and see what God'll do to me."

His throat was arid.  His lips, from the drying spirit
gum and the excess of grease paint, were stiff and
unresponsive.

"*Eternal Hammering is the Price of Success*" he muttered
thickly, trying to brace himself.  "Now for a great
big swing with the hammer."  But his spirits sagged
unaccountably, and he turned out into the corridor as if for a
death march.

At this moment the area between the foot of the stairs
and the wings of the stage was a weaving mass of idling
scene-shifters, hurrying, nervous, property men, and a
horde of supernumeraries made up as American sailors,
Spanish soldiers, and Cuban natives.  All was movement
and confusion.

The principals had drifted to their entrances and taken
position in the order in which they would appear; but they
too were restless; nobody stood quite still; at every
movement, at every loud word, everybody turned or looked or
started.  The hoarse voice of Halson and his assistant,
Page, repeatedly resounded.

As Hampstead descended the stairs upon this strange,
moving picture, it appeared to him to organize into a
ferocious, misshapen monster that meant him harm; or a
python coiling and uncoiling its gigantic, menacing folds.
The thing was argus-eyed, too, and every eye stabbed him
like a lance.

Emerging upon the floor, John paused uncertainly
before this hostile wall of prying scrutiny.  Somebody
snickered.  A woman's voice groaned "My Gawd!" and
followed it with a hysterical giggle.

Could it be that they were laughing at him?  John felt
that this was possible; but he stoutly assured himself that
it was not probable.

However, just as his features passed under the rays of a
bunch light standing where it was to illumine with the
rays of the afternoon sun the watery perspective of a
jungle scene, he came face to face with the stage manager.
Halson darted one quick glance, and then a look of horror
congealed upon his face.

"In the name of God!" he hissed huskily.  "Hampstead,
what have you been doing to yourself?"

"Doing to myself?" exclaimed John, trying for one
final minute to fend off fate.  "Why?  What do you mean?"

Halson's voice floated up in a half humorous wail of
despair, as he rolled his eyes sickly toward the flies.

"What do I mean?" he whined.  "The man comes
down here with his face daubed up like an Esquimaux
totem pole, and he asks me what do I mean?"

But Halson was interrupted by a sudden silence from
the front.  The orchestra had stopped.  The curtain was
about to rise.

"Page!  Page!" groaned Halson in a frantic whisper,
"Hold that curtain!  Signal a repeat to the orchestra!
Here, you!" to the call boy.  "Run for my make-up box.
Quick!"

John's knees were trembling, and he felt his cheeks
scalding in a sweat of humiliation beneath their blanket of
lurid grease, as Halson turned again upon him with:

"You poor, miserable, God-forsaken amateur!"

Amateur!  There, the word was out at last, and it was
terrible.  No language can express the volume of
opprobrium which Halson was able to convey in it.  To
Hampstead it could never henceforth be anything but the most
profane of epithets.  As a matter of fact, he was never
after able to hate any man sufficiently to justify calling
him an amateur.

While the orchestra dawdled, while the company of
"supers" crowded close, and the principals looked sneeringly
on from all distances, Halson made up the heavy's
face for the part he was to play, thereby submitting John
Hampstead to the bitterest humiliation of his dramatic
career.

Yet once engaged upon this work of artistry, the stage
manager's wrath appeared to soften.  Half cajoling and
half pleading, he whined over and over again, "If you
had only told me, Mr. Hampstead!  If you had only told
me, I would have helped you."

"If I only had told him," reflected John, beginning all
at once to like Halson, and never suspecting that the man
in his heart was hating him like a fiend, and that his fear
that the amateur would go absolutely to pieces under the
strain of the night was the sole reason for soothing and
encouraging and commiserating him by turns.

But now the orchestra grew still again.

"Aw-right," husked Halson, and Hampstead heard that
ominous, sliding, rustling sound which to the actor is like
no other in all the world.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`A DEMONSTRATION FROM THE GALLERY`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER IX


.. class:: center medium bold

   A DEMONSTRATION FROM THE GALLERY

.. vspace:: 2

Every chair in the orchestra of the People's Theater
was taken; the boxes were occupied, and as for the odd
rectangular horseshoe of a gallery, with its advancing
arms reaching forward almost to the proscenium arch,
while its rearward tiers rose and faded into distance like
some vast enclosed bleachers, it seemed a solid mass of
humanity.  The curtain rose on critical silence.  The
repetition of the overture had given a hint that all was not
running smoothly, and at the first spoken word a jeer came
from the gallery.  The actor stammered and made the
foolish attempt to repeat his words, but the attempt was
lost in a clamor of voices.  Feet were stamped, hats were
waved, peanuts and popcorn balls were thrown.  The
actors braced themselves and went on doggedly, but so did
the balconies, and it presently appeared that something
like a demonstration was in progress.  Swiftly an
explanation of the great masses in the gallery and their
behavior was passed from mouth to mouth behind the
scenes.  It said they were six hundred south-of-Market-Street
hoodlums who had been hired by a rival theatrical
manager to come and break up the performance.
Whether this was true, or whether the outbreak in the
gallery was merely the unsuppressible spirit of turbulent
youth, it stormed on like a simoon, gaining in volume as
it proceeded.

For a while the people down-stairs, having paid their
thirty cents to witness a theatrical performance, protested;
but they appeared soon to conclude that the show in the
gallery was the more worth while.  Ceasing to protest,
they began to applaud the trouble-makers and even to abet
them.

Behind the scenes panic reigned.  The actors at their
exits bounded off, panting in terror, as if pelted by bullets.
Those whose cues for entrance came, snatched at them
excitedly, and like gladiators rushing into the arena,
plunged desperately upon the stage.  The face of the
leading lady was white beneath her make-up as she almost
tottered upon the scene.  Some instinct of chivalry led
the mob to desist for a minute while she delivered her
opening lines.  But the demonstration broke out afresh
as the leading man entered, though he wore the uniform
of a lieutenant in the navy.  His every speech was jeered.
The excitement grew wilder; not a word spoken upon the
stage was heard, even by the leader of the orchestra.

"My God, what they will do to you, Hampstead!" exclaimed
Halson fiercely, as a detachment in the gallery
began to march up and down the aisle, the rhythm of their
heavy steps making the old house shiver like a ship in a
storm.

Yet of all the actors trembling behind the scenes, it is
possible that Hampstead was the very coolest.  He had
been the most perturbed, the most distraught; but this
counter-disturbance made his own distressing situation
forgotten.  No eyes were riveted on him now.  No
thoughts were on him and the terrible humiliation he had
publicly endured or the wretched failure he was going to
make.  The best, the most experienced, were in the most
complete distress—clear out of themselves.  The leading
man had become angry, had lost his lines, and did not
know what he was saying.

"Stanley's lost; he's ad-libbing to beat the band," John
heard Page remark.

*Ad-libbing*!  It was a new word.  In the midst of all
this confusion, John took note of it and next day learned
of Parks that it was a stage-participle made from *ad
libitum*.  An actor ad-libbing was an actor talking on and
on to fill space in some kind of a stage wait or because, as
with Stanley, he had forgotten his lines.

Neumeyer, the "angel", came in from the front and
added his white, agitated face to the awed groups standing
about the wings.

"They've lost half the first act," he groaned, through
chattering teeth.  "Even when they wear 'emselves out,
the piece is ruined because the people down-stairs have
missed the key to the plot."

"Your cue is coming," bawled Page to John.

"Don't worry, though," croaked Halson in Hampstead's
ear, still fearful that his man would collapse.
"The piece is going so rotten you can't make it any worse.
Cut in!"

But to his surprise, Hampstead's eye glinted with the
light of battle.

"Worry?" he exclaimed excitedly.  "Watch me.
I'm going to get 'em!"

Halson gazed in pure pity.

"Get 'em," he gutturaled.  "You poor, God-forsaken
amateur!"

But the cue had come.  Colonel Delaro, his sword clattering,
his buttons flashing, his tall figure aglow with color,
leaped through the entrance and took the center of the
stage—so clumsily that he trod on Stanley's favorite corn
and hooked a spur in the mantilla trailing from the arm of
Miss Constance Beverly, the mislaid daughter of a
millionaire yachtsman; but nevertheless, Hampstead was on.
He had seized the center of the stage and he filled it full,
as with an ostentatious gesture, he swept off his gold lace
cap before Miss Beverly.

"What star's this?" shrieked a voice on one side the
gallery.

"No star at all.  It's a comet!" bawled a man from the
other side, cupping his hands to carry his second-hand wit
around the auditorium.

The Spanish War was not then so far back in memory
that the sight of the uniform did not speedily kindle a
little popular wrath upon its own account, and the
demonstration began again and rose higher, but Hampstead
became neither flustered nor angry.  He maintained his
character and his dignity.  He remembered his speeches,
and delivered them in stentorian tones that sounded
vibrantly above the general clamor.  When the gallery
discovered to its surprise that here was a voice it could not
entirely drown, it stopped out of sheer curiosity to see
what the voice was like and found it as attractive as it was
forceful.  Moreover, there was a kind of special appeal
in it.  It was the voice of a real man; if they had only
known it,—of a man at bay.  He was not Colonel Delaro,
plotting against the liberty and affections of a lady.  He
was John Hampstead, fighting,—with his back to the
wall,—fighting for his opportunity, for an accredited position
in this poor, cheap misfit company,—a position which
seemed to him just now the most desired thing in all the
world.  Furthermore, he was fighting to justify his own
faith in himself and the faith of Dick and Tayna; yes,
and the faith of Bessie.

Hampstead was, moreover, used to rough houses.  He
had faced them more than once on his own barn-storming
one-night appearances.

The way to get an audience like this he knew was to
play it like a fish, to get the first nibble of interest and
then hold it motionless with the lure of some kind of
dramatic story.  The situation called for a skilled,
dramatic *raconteur*, and in truth that was what
Hampstead was,—not an actor but a recitationist.  Also his
talks in church circles had given him skill in extemporaneous
speaking.  It happened that his speeches in this first
act completed the introduction of the plot, but they were
meaningless without a clear knowledge of what already
had been said.  Now Hampstead began, at first instinctively
and then deliberately, as he played, to gather up
these lost lines of half a dozen actors and weave them into
his own.  The fever of composition seized him.  He used
the people on the stage like puppets.  He made them help
him re-lay the plot while he struggled to grasp the
attention of the mass child-mind out there in front and enthrall
it with a story.

No better way could have been devised of making
Hampstead overcome his terrible faults of action and
delivery.  With marvelous intensity came more repose.
His eyes had been changed by the deft hand of Halson till
they no longer looked like holes in a blanket; and he shot
out his speeches, never once in that rhythmic, preaching
tone, but rapidly, jerkily, plausible or menacing by turns,
but all the while convincingly.

Within a few minutes the audience was captured.  It
lost its enthusiasm for riot and sat silent, following first
the story as Hampstead had retold it and then the action
which thereafter began to unfold.  It was the sheer
strength of the personality of the man which made this
possible.  In his strength, too, the other players took
courage; and soon the action was tightly keyed and
moving forward to a better conclusion of the act than any
rehearsal had ever promised.

At the fall of the curtain, an avalanche leaped upon
Hampstead, an avalanche which consisted solely of
Halson.  He seemed to have a thousand hands.  He was
slapping John on the back with all of them, in fierce,
congratulatory blows.

"Man!" he exclaimed.  "Man!  You saved it!  You
saved it!"

Neumeyer was capering about deliriously, while tears
of joy were trickling from his eyes.  Others crowded
round: Stanley, who had the lead, amiable old Parks,
Lindsay, Bordwell, Miss Harlan, and the rest.

The audience, too, was excitedly expressing itself with
hand-clappings and foot-stampings.

"Scatter!" bawled Page.

The stage swiftly cleared of people as the curtain began
to rise.

"Miss Harlan!" Page was shouting.  "Mr. Stanley!
Mr. Hampstead!"

In the order named, the three emerged and took their
calls, but the heartiest applause was for the big man in
yellow and red, who, quite ignoring the orchestra circle,
showed all his teeth in a cordial and understanding grin
to the galleries, which thereupon broke out in that
hurricane of hisses which is the heavy's hoped-for tribute.

Throughout the remainder of the performance, the yellow
and scarlet figure of Delaro, with his great, sweeping
gestures and his vast, bellowing voice, moved, a unique and
dominating figure; no doubt the first and last time in
which a villain who as a character was without one
redeeming quality was made the hero of the gallery gods.

With the final fall of the curtain, Hampstead climbed
to his dressing room, tired but gloriously happy.  All the
company knew his shame, the shame of being an amateur;
but all, too, knew his power, the power of a man who
could rise to emergency, who had commanding presence
and constructive force.

The dressing rooms were mere partitions open at the
top, so that everybody could hear what everybody else was
saying, or could have heard, if only they had stopped to
listen.  But apparently nobody listened.  The strain was
over, and everybody talked as if the joy were in the
talking and not in being heard.  Yet after the first few
minutes of excited blowing-off of steam, there came a lull,
as if all had stopped for breath at once.

Into this lull, Dick Bordwell, the juvenile man, as he
wiped the grease paint from his face, lifted his fine tenor
voice in the first half of a queer antiphonal chant, by
inquiring loudly above his four wooden walls toward the
common ceiling over all:

"*Who is the greatest leading woman on the American
stage?*"

"Louise Harlan!" chanted every voice on the floor,
their tones mingling merrily, as if they were playing a
familiar game.

"Right-o," sang Dick, and chanted next: "*Who is
the greatest leading man on the American stage?*"

"Billie Stanley!" chorused the voices, with shrieks of
laughter.

"And who," inquired Dick, with an insinuating change
in his voice, "*who is the greatest juvenile man in
America?*"

"Rich-a-r-r-r-d Bordwell!" screamed the magpies.

"Right-o-right!" echoed Dick, with a grunt of
immense satisfaction; and then he went on piping his
interrogatories, as to the rest of the company, desiring to be
informed who was the greatest character old man,
character old lady, soubrette, light comedian and stage
manager, concluding yet more loudly with:

"*And who is the greatest amateur heavy on the American
stage?*"

As if they had been waiting for it, the voices burst out
like a college yell:

"*John Hampstead!  John Hampstead, is the greatest
amateur heavy on the American stage!*"

The spirit of fun and hearty good will with which this
initiation ceremony had been performed was salve to the
bruised, excited soul of John.  Besides an ever present
sense of meanness and hypocrisy from the concealment he
had practiced, John had suffered a feeling of extreme
loneliness that had at no time been so great as now, when,
the strain of the play over, all these children of the stage
were romping joyously together.  Now they had included
him in the circle of their magic fellowship.  True, they
had used the hateful word amateur, but that was in play,
and he was sure they would never use it again.

And he was right—from that hour some of them who
liked him showed it; some who disliked him showed that;
some merely revealed themselves as cool toward him or
appeared ill at ease in his presence; but never one of them,
by word or act, failed from that moment to recognize his
standing as a man entitled to all the free masonry of
their unique and fascinating profession.

But the climax of this climactic night for John was
reached when, descending the stairway, Halson honored
him with an astounding confidence.

"Marien Dounay joins the People's to-morrow," he
whispered excitedly.

"Fact!" he affirmed in response to John's look of sheer
incredulity.  "She's a spitfire and a genius.  She can do
what she likes.  She's quarreled with Mowrey.  She's
coming here to spite him.  Pie for us while it lasts, huh?
She opens as Isabel in *East Lynne*."

John knew that Mowrey had come up from Los Angeles
and was just opening a long season at the Grand Opera
House; but Marien Dounay—almost a star!—in that
thread-bare play, *East Lynne*, in this out-at-elbows
company, and in this old barn of a house!  Impossible!

This was what John was thinking, but he was too weak
to give it utterance.  He wanted Halson's information to
be true whether it was or not.  Yet in the midst of the
elation which began to kindle swiftly, he remembered what
Halson had said to Neumeyer on Saturday in the dark of
the orchestra: that a new man had been engaged to play
the heavies.

A wave of bitterness surged over him; and yet, he
reflected, things must be changed.  They would scarcely
let him go after to-night, so he mustered courage to
inquire:

"By the way, Halson, what do I play in *East Lynne*?"

"You play the lead," affirmed Halson, with dramatic
emphasis.

"The lead?" John gulped, struggling as if a cobblestone
had just been tossed into his throat.

"Sure!  You'll get away with it, too," declared the
stage manager with over-enthusiasm, slapping John
heavily upon the back as the big man turned away quickly,
utterly unwilling that any save two or three not there to
look should see into his face.

It would scarcely have diminished his joy to know that
he was getting the lead simply because Archibald Carlyle
was such an unredeemed mollycoddle that the leading man
usually chose to enact the villain, Levison.





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.. _`A STAGE KISS`:

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   CHAPTER X


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   A STAGE KISS

.. vspace:: 2

For the strange freak of Miss Marien Dounay in joining
The People's Stock Company, the papers found ready
explanation in artistic temperament.  The brilliant young
actress, so the story ran, taking umbrage because Miss
Elsie McCloskey, twin star of the Mowrey cast, was
chosen to play a part for which Miss Dounay deemed herself
specially fitted, had resigned in a huff; and thereupon,
to spite Mowrey, had signed with this obscure stock
company playing a dozen blocks away, where it was believed
her popularity would be sufficient to punish the well-known
manager in his one vulnerable spot, the box-office.

But there was one person interested who did not care a
rap why Marien Dounay was playing Isabel Carlyle, the
wife of Archibald Carlyle at the People's Stock this week,
in the time-frazzled drama of *East Lynne*, and that was
the man to play Archibald.  She was there, and that was
enough for him, swimming into his ken at the first
rehearsal like a vision of some glory too entrancing to belong
to anything but a dream.

Had she changed much in the four months since he
had held her in his arms?  Not at all, unless to grow more
beautiful.

Yet if that crude actor fancied himself on terms of more
than bare acquaintance with this exquisite creature, his
imagination presumed too far.  Miss Dounay's bearing
made it instantly apparent that she gave herself airs.  One
comprehensive glance was bestowed upon the semicircle
of the company.  Hampstead's portion was more and less,
a look and a nod.  The nod said: "I know you, puppet."  The
look warned: "But do not presume.  Stand."

John stood, wondering.  As rehearsals progressed, his
wonder grew into bewilderment.  Miss Dounay treated
the whole company cavalierly, but she treated him disdainfully.
Her feeling for the others was simply negative;
for him it appeared to be positive.

As an actress, it developed that she was "up" in the
part of Isabel, having played it many times.  She had,
moreover, ideas of how every other part should be played
and was pleased to express them.  Nobody protested,
Halson least of all.  She was a "find" for the People's.  As
a director, too, Miss Dounay was masterful.  A languid
glance, a single word, a very slight intonation, had more
force than one of Halson's ranting commands.  And she
was instinctively competent.

Hampstead, despite his own sad experience, watched
her open-mouthed.  This young woman, it appeared, was
an intellectual force as well as a magnetic one.  She cut
speeches or interpolated them, altered business, and in one
instance rearranged an entire scene, while in another she
boldly reconstructed the conclusion of an act.  The storm
center round which much of this cutting, slicing, and
fattening took place was Hampstead.  She heckled him
unmercifully about the reading of his lines, ridiculed his
gestures, and badgered him to madness.

On the fourth day of this, John moped out of the
theater, head down, reflecting bitterly upon the illusory
character of woman, of which he knew so little,—moped
so slowly that Parks overtook him on the first
corner.

"This woman is a friend of yours," Parks proposed
tentatively.

"I thought she was," sighed Hampstead weakly, "but
she keeps cutting my speeches.  By the end of the week, I
won't have any part left at all."

Parks indulged a self-satisfied chuckle at the keenness of
his own discernment.

"Don't you see," he explained, "she's cutting the stuff
you do badly.  She took away from you a situation in
which you were awkward and unreal.  She changed that
scene around and left you with a climax in which you are
positively graceful as well as forceful.  You'll get a big
hand in it.  She studies you.  I've watched her."

"Old man," blurted Hampstead, with sudden fervor,
"it would make me the happiest man in the world if I
thought that you were right.  But you are wrong, and
her badgering has begun to get on my nerves.  Say!" and
he interrupted himself to ask a question not yet answered
to his satisfaction.  "Why is she here?—with the
People's, I mean?"

"You've heard the stories," answered Parks, with a
shrug.  "However, I doubt if it's any mere whim.  She
appears to me to have a cool, good reason for anything
she does."

Parks turns off at Ninth Street, and John moved on
down Market.  "A cold good reason for what she does,"
he murmured.  "What's the answer, I wonder, to what
she does to me?"

As the days went on, John's wonder grew.

Now it is according to the method of dramatists that
when a husband is to be abandoned by his wife in the
second act there shall be certain tender passages between
the two in the first act, and this ancient drama was no
exception.  There were contacts, handclasps, embraces,
kisses.  Through all of these at rehearsal time the two
went mechanically.  Miss Dounay apparently treated
Hampstead with mere indifference, but actually she found
a thousand little ways to show utter repugnance.  After
the first shock, John's combative instinct and his pride led
him to face this situation, so difficult for a gentleman,
unflinchingly.  Taking her hands, pressing her to him,
patting her cheek, playing with the wisps of hair upon her
temple, he conscientiously rehearsed the part of the
affectionate, doting husband.  His very sincerity, it would
seem, must have been a rebuke to the woman.  She must
have seen that his heart was stirred by an unexplained
feeling toward her, and might have observed in his
determined bearing under the galling fire of her man-baiting
something noble.

Here, if she could only perceive it, was a man who had
turned his back on at least one of the kingdoms of this
world to become an actor; a man who would endure
anything, suffer anything to add to his knowledge and skill in
that difficult and all demanding art; which, indeed, was
why he laid himself open to her polished ridicule by
over-playing every scene, overemphasizing every word,
over-expressing every gesture and emotion.

But she never relented, not even on the night of the first
performance.  Instead she became more aggressive in her
antagonism, her method changing from subtle scorn to
open derision.

Now among experienced actors there are a great many
things which may take place upon the stage unsuspected of
the audience.  On this night, all through the tender
exchanges of that first act, Miss Dounay seized upon
intervals when her back was to the front to throw a grimace at
John,—to do, or *sotto voce* to say, something irritating or
ludicrous that would throw him out of character, or, as
the profession puts it, "break him up."  John steeled
himself against all of this and went on playing with that
dignity of earnestness which seemed to characterize all
his life, until it would appear the climax of malice was
reached when, as Miss Dounay hung about his neck, she
laughed in the midst of one of his tenderest speeches, and
whispered:

"There is a daub of smut on the end of your nose."

To John this communication was an arrow poisoned by
the subtle power of suggestion.  Was there smut upon his
nose?  If there were and he touched it with a finger, it
would smear and ruin his make-up.  If he did not remove
it, the audience would observe it the first time he came
down stage and laugh.  On the other hand, he did not
believe that there was smut upon his nose.  How could it
get there?  In no way unless some joker had doctored the
peephole in the curtain just before he peered out at the
audience.

Smutted or not smutted?  To touch his nose or let it
alone?  That was the maddening question.  The puzzle
and the doubt disconcerted him.  His memory faltered,
his tongue stumbled, and a feeling of awful helplessness
came over him.  He *was* breaking up!  He *was* out of
character!  This devilish woman had succeeded.  She
saw it, too.  John read the exultation in her eyes, and it
filled him with indignation until a wave of wrath surged
over his great frame like a storm.  Miss Dounay saw his
eyes grow suddenly stern with a light she had never noticed
in them.  One arm was encircling her in a caress, the
other hand rested upon her shoulders.  For one instant
she felt this embrace tighten into a python grip that was
terrifying.  The man's position had not changed.  To the
audience it was still a mere pose, an expression of endearment.

But to Marien Dounay it was an ominous hint that this
great amiable child had in him the primal elements of a
brutal strength.  A look of alarm shot into her face, and
she whispered:

"Don't, John!  Don't."

The tone of her voice was pleading.  She, the proud,
had cringed.  She had called him John.  She had surrendered.

"It was just a mean little fib," she whispered, and for
a moment clung to him helplessly.

John, greatly surprised, was not too much surprised to
feel the exultant surge of victory.  For one moment he
had lost control of himself, but in that moment he appeared
to have gained control of Marien.

The strangest thing was that Miss Dounay seemed
rather happy about it herself; and the wide range of the
woman's capacity was revealed by her swift transition to a
mood of purring contentment and a spirit of affectionate
camaraderie that presently reached a surprising climax.

The act ended in the garden, with Isabel seated on a
rustic bench, and Archibald bending over her.  As the
curtain descended, he was to stoop and print a kiss of
tenderest respect upon her forehead.  But now, as the
curtain trembled, Miss Dounay lifted not her forehead but her
lips, and held them, warm and clinging, to his for an
instant that to Hampstead seemed a delicious, thrilling
eternity, from which he emerged like a man newborn.

But the male instinct to gloat was the first clear thought.

"You do like me, don't you?" he breathed exultantly,
while the curtain was down for an instant.  Marien
answered with her eyes and a quick affirmative nod,
before the curtain bounded upward again for a last picture
of husband and wife gazing into each other's eyes with a
look expressing an infinitude of fondness.  But John had
ceased to be Archibald.  What his look expressed was an
infinitude of mystery and joy.

"And they say there is no satisfaction in a stage kiss!"
he whispered to himself as he leaped up the stairs to his
dressing room.





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.. _`SEED TO THE WIND`:

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   CHAPTER XI


.. class:: center medium bold

   SEED TO THE WIND

.. vspace:: 2

The next night Miss Dounay gave John her forehead
instead of her lips to kiss, but she heckled him no more,
and it was perfectly obvious to him, as to Parks, that she
helped him deliberately and had been helping him all along
by her stage direction.

"If you've got her interested in you, you're fixed for
life," grumbled Parks wistfully.  "That girl's going up
the line, and she's got stuff enough to take somebody else
with her."

There was a suggestion in this which John resented.

"I'm going up, too," he rejoined with the defiant
exuberance of youth, "but on my own steam."

Parks looked at John up and down, and laughed,—just
that and nothing more.  The old man's frankness
was comforting at times; at others disagreeable.  John
moved away irritated, and his head went up into the clouds
of his dreams.  But there was something in what Parks
had suggested that kept coming back to his mind.  True,
Miss Dounay never exchanged more than the merest
words of courtesy with John off the stage.  But on the
stage and at rehearsal it really did seem as if there was a
very nice little understanding growing up between them.

Off stage John dreamed of going to call upon her.  In
his little room he thought of her much and hungrily.
That he should think hungrily was not strange, since he
was hungry.  His salary was twenty dollars a week.  To
send half to Rose, and save money to meet his wardrobe
bills, he lived on two meals a day.  The morning meal,
taken at half-past nine, consisted of coffee and cakes, and
cost ten cents.  The evening meal was taken at half-past
five.  It was a grand course dinner that went from soup
to pie, and its cost was fifteen cents.  The tip to the
waitress was a smile.

When one goes supperless to bed, dreams come lightly
and are fantastic.  John's dreams were of banqueting
after the play with Marien Dounay.  Greenroom gossip
had it that Marien lived royally but in modest thrift;
that her French maid, Julie, was also cook and
housekeeper; that Marian's disposition was domestic and yet
convivial.  That instead of a supper down town in one
of the brilliant cafés, she preferred the seclusion of her
small but cozy apartment, and the triumphs of Julie at a
tiny gas grill, supplemented and glorified by her own
skill with the chafing dish.  That there were nights when
she supped alone, but others when a lady or two, or much
more likely a gentleman, or mayhap two gentlemen were
honored with invitations to this feast of goddesses; for
tiny, efficient, ambidextrous Julie was in her way as much
of an aristocrat as her mistress, and as skillful in
imparting the suggestion that she was herself of some
superior clay.  Subject to the whims of her mistress, she,
too, had whims, and made men—and women—not only
respect but admire them.  Rumor said that if an invitation
to one of these midnight revels with toothsome food
under the personal direction of this flashing beauty ever
came, it was on no account to be despised, especially if a
man were hungry either for beauty or for food.

John Hampstead was hungry for food, and now he
began to feel hungry also for beauty.  This last was
really a new appetite.  John, through all his struggling
years, had of course his thoughts of woman as all men
have, but vaguely, as something a long way off,
indefinitely postponed.  Yet ever since he carried Lygia
in his arms, these thoughts of woman had been recurring
as something nearer, more tangible, and more necessary
even.  As for that kiss in the garden scene of *East
Lynne*!  Well, there was something wonderfully
awakening in that kiss.  It was worlds different from that
brotherly, sympathetic little kiss he had given Bessie
yonder upon the rocks.

By the way,—why did Bessie cry?  He used to
wonder sometimes why she did!  And why did Marien
Dounay taunt him till he was angry enough to beat
her,—and then kiss him?

Women were hard to understand.  They seemed to
do things that had no meaning; to use words not to
convey but to conceal thought; and they spoke half their
speeches in riddles.  However, John reflected that when
he had been with women more, he would know them
better.  And in the meantime he supplemented his
professional contacts with Marien by thinking of her
constantly, even to the point where his absorbing interest
led him to follow her home at night after the play,—keeping
always at a safe distance behind,—and to stand
across the street and watch till the light went on in that
third-story bay-window on Turk Street near Mason; and
then still to stand, trying to interpret the meaning of
shadows moving across the window for uncounted hours,
till the light went out, sometimes at two and sometimes
later, or until a policeman bade him move on.  If any
one had told John that he was falling in love with Marien
Dounay, he would have indignantly rejected the idea.
She held a fascinating interest for him,—that was all.
Something basic in him was attracted by something basic
in her, and he yielded to it wonderingly, experimentally
almost, and that was all it amounted to.

But on the night that Miss Dounay completed her
engagement at the People's, for her tiff with Mowrey was
over in just four weeks, the opportunity came to John to
submit his feelings to more searching experimentation.

It had been his custom to wait in the shadowy wings
each night to see the object of his solicitous interest
depart, supposing himself always to be unobserved.  But
on this last night Marien surprised him into nervous thrills
by walking over into the shadow with the cool assurance
of an autocrat, and saying:

"Come home to supper with me, John."

At the same time Miss Dounay took the big man's arm
as comfortably as if the matter had been arranged the
week before last, and John walked out as if on air, but
hurriedly.  That soft touch upon his arm made him
hungry with indescribable anticipations.  Moreover, he
was stirred by an itching curiosity concerning the whole
of the intimate personal life of Marien Dounay.  Who
was she?  What was she?  *How* was she?

Yet on the very threshold of the little apartment, his
sense of what was conventional in the world out of which
he had come halted him.

"Should I?" he asked huskily, as the door stood
open.  "Would it be—proper?"

"Most particularly proper, innocent!" laughed Marien.
"At the theater Julie is my maid; at home she is my
housekeeper, my social secretary, my companion, and
chaperone."

While the light of reassurance kindled on John's face,
Marien gently drew him inside.

"Behold!" she exclaimed with a stage gesture, when
the door was closed behind him.  "My temporary home;
my balcony window overlooking the street, my alcove
wherein I sleep, the kitchenette in which we cook;
behind that the bath, and back of that Julie's own room.
Isn't it dear?"

"Dear!"  That was a woman's word.  Bessie said
that about her invitation paper for the Phrosos.

"Dear?" he breathed, comparing it in one swift estimating
glance to his own barren cell.  "It's a paradise!"

"So much more seclusion than in hotels," declared
Marien, and then went on to say in that sort of tone
which belongs to an air of frank and simple
comradeship: "So much less expensive, too.  Do you know
what saves a girl in this business?  Money!  Ready
money.  And do you know what ruins her?
Extravagance—debt.  We are very economical, Julie and I.
We have what crooks call 'fall money', laid by for any
emergency.  That's what you'll need to do.  Save half
your salary every week.  There'll be weeks you don't
play, weeks when you have to go to expense.  You may
be ill or have an accident, or your company will close
unexpectedly.  Save.  Save your money!"

Marien uttered these bits of practical wisdom, which
were to John the revelation of an unthought-of side of
this exquisite young woman's character while she was
conducting him toward the window.

"Sit here," she commanded.  "Look straight down
Turk.  See the lights battling with the fog.  Listen to
the waning music of the night in this noisy, cobbly, clangy
city.  Don't turn your head till I say!"

The lights were indeed beautiful, each with its halo
of mist.  The clanging bells of cars, and even the horrible
squeak of the wheels as they turned a curve, with the
low singing of the cables that drew them, did rise up
like the orchestration of some strange new motif of the
night that lulled him till he was only faintly conscious
of the opening and closing of doors and a rustling at the
other end of the room.

"Now!" called the voice of Marien cheerily,
awakening him with a sudden thrill to the realization of her
presence.

She stood at the far end of the room, surveying
herself in a long mirror.  Her figure was draped rather
than dressed in a silken, shimmering texture of black,
splashed with great red conventional flowers.  The
garment flowed loosely at neck, sleeves, and waist, and the
fabric was corrugated by a succession of narrow,
vertical, unstitched pleats, which gave an illusory effect of
yielding to every movement of the sinuous body and yet
clinging the closer while it yielded.  As John gazed,
Marien belted this flowing drapery at the waist with a
knot of tiny crimson cord, and then released her coils
of rich dark hair so that they fell to her hips in a
fluttering cascade as silky as the texture of her robe.

When she advanced to him, the shimmering, billowy
movements of the gown matched the rhythmic sway of her
limbs as completely as the red splashes upon it matched
the color of her cheeks.  She came laughing softly, and
bearing in her hand a pair of tiny red and gold slippers.

A low divan ran along one side of the room, piled
high with gay cushions.  Near the foot of it was a Roman
chair.

"Sit here," said Marien, indicating the chair; and
John, as if obeying stage directions, complied, while his
hostess sank back luxuriously amid the cushions and by
the same movement presented a slim, neatly booted foot
upon the edge of the divan, so very near to the big man's
hand as to embarrass him.  At the same time she held
up the slippers to his notice and observed with a nod
toward the boot:

"As a mark of special favor."

For a moment John's face reddened, and he looked the
awkwardness of his state of mind, his eyes shifting from
the boot to Marien's face and back again.

Her face took on an amused smile, and the boot wiggled
suggestively.

"Oh," exclaimed John, blushing with fresh confusion
at his own dullness as he bent forward and began to
struggle with the buttons of the boot.

"You see," he explained presently, still worrying with
the combination of the first button, "you see—well, I
guess I don't know women very well."

Marien laughed happily.

"Stage women!" John added, as if by an afterthought.

"Stage women," affirmed Marien loyally, "are no
different from other women—only wiser."  Then she
tagged her speech sententiously with, "They have to be.
Careful!  You will tear the buttons off.  And
you—you are pinching me!"

"I beg your pardon," stammered John.  "But there
are so very many of these buttons."

After an interval during which Marien had appeared
to watch his labors with amused interest, she asked, with
mocking humor:

"Are you hurrying or delaying?  I can't quite make out."

But John was by this time enjoying the to him novel
situation, and merely chuckled happily in reply to this
thrust.  When the shoes were off, by a mystifying
movement Marien snuggled first one stockinged foot and then
the other into the gold embroidered slippers and with a
sigh of contentment appeared to float among her pillows,
while she contemplated with smiling attention the face of
Hampstead.  Presently she asked smiling:

"Are you a man or a boy, I wonder?"

Feeling himself drifting farther and farther under the
personal spell of this magnetic woman, and entirely willing
to be enthralled, John answered her only with his eyes.

"That's the Ursus look," she laughed softly, as if it
pleased her.

A silver cigarette case was on a tabaret within reach of
her hand.

"Have a cigarette!" she proposed.

John declined, a trifle embarrassed by the proffer.  Miss
Dounay lighted one and puffed a small halo above her
head before she looked across at him again and asked
quizzically:

"You do not smoke?"

"And I do not think women should," Hampstead
replied, with level eyes.

"It is a horrid habit," she confessed, "but this
business will drive women to do horrid things.  Listen,
Hampstead.  It's hard for a man; you've found that out,
and you're only beginning.  It's harder for a woman;
the despairs, the disappointments, the bitter
lonelinesses,—the beasts of men one meets!  But—"  With a shrug
of her shoulders she suddenly broke off her train of
thought, and turning an inquiring glance on Hampstead
asked:

"You never smoked?"

"Oh, yes," confessed John, "but I quit it.  I decided
it would not be good for me."

She regarded him narrowly, and asked:

"You would not do a thing which did not appear good
for you?"

There was just a little accent on the "good."

"I have tried to calculate my resources," John
confessed, resenting that accent.

Again Miss Dounay contemplated him in silence.

"You are a singularly calculating young man, I should
say," she decreed finally.  "And how long, may I ask,
have you been living this calculating life?"

Marien was making a play upon his word "calculate."

"Seven years, I should say," replied John, thinking
back.

"Seven years?" she mused.  "Seven!  And you feel
that it has paid?"

"Immensely," replied John aggressively.

"By the way, how old are you, Ursus?"

This was what the old actor had asked.  People were
always asking John how old he was.

"Twenty-five," John answered a trifle apologetically.
"I got started late.  And you?"

The question was put without hesitation, as if it were
the next thing to say.

"A man does not ask a woman her age in polite
conversation," suggested Marien tentatively.

"He does not," replied John quickly, "if he thinks the
answer is likely to be embarrassing."

Marien's face flushed with pleasure.

"Oh, hear him!" she laughed.  "This heavy man is
not so heavy, after all; but," she added, with another
insinuating inflection, "he is always calculating."  Then
she went on, "You are right.  The confession to you at
least is not embarrassing.  I am twenty-four years old,
and I, too, have been living a calculating life for seven
years."

"For seven years.  How odd!" remarked John, rather
excited at discovering even a slight parallel between
himself and this brilliant creature.

"Yes," Marien replied.  "I ran away from home at
sixteen.  I have been on the stage eight years.  The
first year was a careless one.  The other seven have
been—*calculating* years."

John could think of no words in which to describe the
sinister significance which Marien now managed to get
into her drawling utterance of that word "calculating."  She
made it express somehow the plotting villainies of an
Iago, of a Richard the Third and a Lady Macbeth, and
then overlaid the sinister note with something else, an
impression of lofty abandon, of immolation, as if, in
calculating her life, she had laid upon the altar all there was
of herself—everything—in order to attain some supreme end.

John, staring at her, got a sudden intuitive gleam of
a woman who was not only ambitious as he was ambitious,
but wildly, dangerously ambitious, with a danger that
was not to herself alone, but to any who stood near
enough to be trampled on as she climbed upward,—dangerous
to one who might love her, for example!

He got the thought clearly in his mind, too; yet only
for a moment, and to be crowded out immediately by
another thought, or indeed, a succession of thoughts, all
induced by the picture she made amid her cushions.

How beautiful she was!  How very, very beautiful!
And how magnetic!  How she had made the blood run
in his veins when she lay upon his breast as Lygia, their
hearts beating, their souls stirring together!

And now she had resigned herself for an hour to his
company, had given him her confidence, was awaiting, as
it seemed, his pleasure,—while the color came and went
in her cheeks, while subdued lights danced in the dark
pools beneath lazily drooping lashes, and the filmy gown
which sheathed her body stirred with every breath as if a
part of her very self.

Lying there like this, her presence ceased soon to
induce thoughts and began to stimulate impulses.
Hampstead longed to reach out and lay a hand upon her.  She
was so alluring and so, so helpless.

For weeks now he had allowed himself to dream of
her as possibly the woman of his destiny,—not admitting
it, but still dreaming it.  Here in his presence, she
suddenly ceased to be even a woman.  She was just Woman;
and the primal attraction of the elemental man is not for
the woman.  Fundamentally, it is just for woman.  And
here was Woman, the whole race of woman, beautiful,
bewitching, compulsive.

An odor began to float in from the kitchenette, an odor
that was not of coffee and cakes, nor of grease upon the
top of a range in a dirty little restaurant.  It was savory
and fragrant, and it filled his nostrils.  It reminded him
of all the appetizing meals he had ever eaten.  It made
him hungry with all the hungers he had ever known; his
brain was reeling; he was going to faint,—and with mere
appetite.  Yet the appetite was not for food.

With a kind of shock he recognized the nature of his
appetite.  The shock passed; but the hunger remained.
John felt that he himself was somehow changed.  He
was not the Chairman of the Prayer Meeting Committee
of the Christian Endeavor Society, not a Deacon of the
grand old First Church.  He was instead the man that
the Reverend Charles Thompson Campbell feared for and
prayed for.  He was the man whose heavy ridged brows
had indicated to the shrewd old actor a nature packed full
of racial dynamite.

And Woman was fulminating the dynamite.  Deliberately—or
recklessly—or innocently; but none the less
surely.  Her lips were pliant.  Her form was plastic.  The
smouldering light in the eyes, the lashes drooping lazily,
the witchery of a dark tress which coiled upon the white
soft shoulder, all combined in the appeal of physical
charm.  To this, Woman added the subtle, maddening
witchery of silence,—breathing, watchful, waiting quiet.

This silence continued until it became oppressive,
explosive even.

Would she not speak?  He could not.  Would she not
move?  He dared not.

As if in response to this frenzy of thought, the ripe lips
parted in a smile that added one more lovely detail to the
picture by revealing rows of pearly, even teeth, and her
hand began to move toward him.

"Don't touch me—don't," he found himself pleading
suddenly.

But already the hand was laid tenderly upon his own,
and Hampstead returned the clasp like one who holds the
poles of a battery and cannot let go.

Laughing softly, Woman drew Man gently to her, his
eyes gazing fascinated into the depths of hers, his body
bending weakly, nearer and nearer.

"John!" she breathed softly, "John!"

But at the first warmth of breath upon his cheek, the
explosion came.  He snatched her in his arms as if she
had been a child, and pressed her to his heart rapturously,
but violently.  And then his lips found hers, vehemently,
almost brutally, as if he would take revenge upon them
for the passion their sight and touch had roused in him.
She struggled, but he pressed her tighter and tighter, till
at length she gave up, and he felt only the rhythmic
pulsing of her body.

When at length he released the lips and held the face
from him to gaze into it fondly, her eyes were closed, and
the head fell limply over his arm with the long tresses
sweeping to the floor.

In sudden compunction he placed her tenderly upon
the divan.

"I have hurt you, Marien; I have hurt you.  Forgive
me; oh, forgive me!" he implored in tones of deep feeling.

When she remained quite motionless, he asked, foolishly,
"Marien, have you fainted?"

Slowly her bosom rose with a respiration so deep and
long that it seemed to stir every fold of her pleated gown
and every cushion on the divan, while with the eyes still
closed the face moved gently from side to side to convey
the negative.

"Thank God!" he groaned, dropping to his knees beside
her, where, seizing her hand, he began to press his
kisses upon it.

Presently disengaging the hand, Marien lifted it, felt
her way over his face and began to push back the towsled
mop of hair from his brow, and to stroke it affectionately.

"I thought I had hurt you," he crooned.

"You did," she murmured.

"Oh, I am so, so sorry," he breathed, seizing her hand
once more and pressing it against his heart.

"I do not think I am sorry," she sighed contentedly,
and was still again, the lashes lying flat upon her cheeks,
the long tresses in disarray about her head.

Lying there so white and motionless, she looked to John
like a crushed flower.  Her very beauty was broken.  As
he gazed, remorse and contrition overcoming him, her lips
parted in a half smile while she whispered:

"The—the calculated life cannot always be depended
upon, can it?"

Innocently spoken, the words came to John with the
force of a reproach, which hurt all the more because he
was sure no reproach had been meant.  She had trusted
him, and he had failed.  His sense of guilt was already
strong.  At the words he leaped up and rushed toward
the hat-tree upon which his hat and coat had been
disposed.  Yet before he could seize them and start for the
door, Marien was before him, barring his way, looking
pale but majestic, like a disheveled queen.

"Let me go," he said stubbornly.  "I am unworthy to
be here."

"Stay," she whispered, in a tone sweeter, tenderer,
than he had ever heard her use before.  "It is my wish.  I
do not," and she hesitated for a word, "I do not
misunderstand you—poor, lonely, hungry man!"

"Supper, Madame!" piped the voice of Julie.





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.. _`A THING INCALCULABLE`:

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   CHAPTER XII


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   A THING INCALCULABLE

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One whole month passed before John sat again at
midnight in the Roman chair with Marien *vis-à-vis* upon her
heaped-up cushions.  Many things may happen in a
month.  Many did in this.  For John it was a month of
progress in his art.  Though the People's Stock Company
had passed out of existence within two weeks after Marien
Dounay's departure from it, John had done so well that
he found no difficulty in securing an engagement as heavy
man across the bay in Oakland with the Sampson Stock,
the grade of which was higher and its permanency well
established.

It was also a month of progress in his passion for
Marien Dounay, although during all those thirty days
he did not see her once.  In the meantime imagination
fed him.  Every memory of that night and every deduction
from those memories fanned the flame of his infatuation.
Each in itself was slight, but they were like a
thousand gossamer webs.  Once spun, their combined holding
power was as the strength of many cables.

Take, for instance, the environment in which he found
her.  It spoke gratifyingly to him of a genuinely good,
modest nature to see that she shrank away from the garish
theatrical hotels to this quiet nest with Julie.  It revealed
a true woman's instinct for domesticity not only surviving
but flourishing in this vagabond life to which her
profession compelled her.

And yet how unlike the life of the fine women he had
known in the old First Church.  It would have so shocked
them,—this roving, Bohemian life that turned the night
into day, the deep-sleep time from twelve to three into
the leisure, happy, carefree hours that were like the sun
at noon instead of the dark of midnight.  How
unbecoming it would have been in those coddled home-keeping
women of the First Church, this reversal of life,—how
immoral even!  Yet to her it was natural.  In her
it was moral.  It did pay a proper respect to those
conventions which protect the character and happiness of
woman.  It was not prudish.  It was better than prudish,
it was good.  Her virtue was not forced.  It was hardy,
indigenous, self-enveloping.  Yes, this whole mode of
life became her in her profession.

And the thought that he was of her profession threw
him into raptures.  Hers was a life into which he could
enter,—had entered already, by reason of the favor she
had shown him.  What could that favor mean?  Nothing
else but love.  She had given him too much, forgiven him
too much in that one evening for him to question that at all.

And he loved her!  Doubt on that score had vanished
so many days ago that he could not remember he had ever
doubted it.

That the partnership could not at first be equal, he was
humiliatingly aware; but the development of his own
powers would soon balance the inequality.  However, it was
something else that for the moment wiped out of mind the
enormity of his presumption, and this was that memory
of unpleasant experiences at which she had hinted.  The
thought of this beautiful, ambitious, devoted creature
battling her way alone among selfish, brutal, designing
men was maddening to him.  The chivalrous impulse to
be with her, to protect her, to battle for her, made him
forget entirely considerations of inequality, and he
prepared to offer himself boldly.  If she did not invite him
again soon, he meant to seek her out; but the invitation
came before his processes had reached that stage.

John was impatiently prompt.  His eyes leaped upon
her eagerly as if to make sure she was still real, still the
flesh and blood confirmation of his passion.  She was,—not
a doubt of it.  Her eye was bright; the clasp of her
hand was warm.  Her personal power was never more
evident, its whimsical manifestations never more varied,
interesting, or captivating than now.

To John, no longer quite so hungry, for his salary was
larger now, that supper was not so much a meal as a series
of delightful additions to his impressions of the finer
side of the character of Marien.  But with the supper
despatched, and his beautiful hostess again lolling in
luxurious relaxation, it was her personality once more rather
than her character which began to play upon him like an
instrument with strings.  Lazily she brooded and mused,
talked and was silent, drifting from momentary vivacities
to periods of depressed abstraction.  Again and again
John felt her eyes upon him scrutinizingly, estimatingly
almost, it seemed to him.  Because it was a supremely
blissful experience to submit himself thus to the play of
her moods, John postponed the declaration he felt
impelled to make until it burst from him irresistibly, like a
geyser.

"Listen!" he broke out excitedly, and began to pour
out impetuously the tale of his swiftly ripened infatuation.

Marien did listen at first as if surprised, and then with
a flush of pleasure that steadily deepened on her cheeks.
Even when he had concluded she sat for a moment with
lips half parted, eyes half closed, and an expression of
enchantment upon her face as if listening to music that she
wished might flow on forever.

"Do not speak!" John protested suddenly, as her
expression appeared to change.  "The picture is too beautiful
to spoil.  Let me take from your lips in silence the
kiss that seals our betrothal."

But Marien held him off with sudden strength.

"Marien, I love you.  I love you," he protested vehemently.

"No," Marien replied, lifting herself higher amid the
pillows and speaking alertly as if she had just been given
words to answer.  "You do not love me.  You love the
thing you think I am."

John's blond brows were lifted in mute protest.

"Listen!" she exclaimed.  "You compelled me to
listen.  Now I must compel you to listen—mad, impetuous
man!" and she seemed almost resentful.  "In what you
have just been saying, you have written a part for me.
You have given me a character.  If I could play that part
always, I should be what you are in love with, and you
would love me always; but I cannot play it always; I can
play it seldom.  I play it now for an hour and then
perhaps never again."

"Never again?" Hampstead gasped, something in the
finality of her tone thrilling him through with a hollow,
sickening note.

Her eyelids narrowed as she replied: "You forget
that I, too, live the calculating life."

There was again that mysteriously sinister meaning in
her utterance of the word "calculating."

"The key to my life is not love; it cannot be love," she
went on.  "I am not the purring kitten you have
described.  It angers me to have you think so.  I am not
a thing to love and fondle.  I am a tigress tearing at one
object.  I am," and in the vehement force of her
utterance she seemed to grow tall and terrible, "I am an
ambitious woman!  An unscrupulous, designing, clambering,
ambitious woman!"

"But I love you, Marien," John iterated weakly.

"There is no place for love in the calculating life," she
rejoined unhesitatingly.  "Love is a thing incalculable."  Yet
as she uttered this sentence, her tone softened, and
her eyes had a look of awe and hunger oddly mixed in
them; but immediately the expression of resolute
ambition succeeded to her features.

"When I am at the top," she proposed loftily.

"But the better part of life may be gone then," John
protested bitterly.  "The top!  When shall we reach the top?"

"I shall reach it in a bound when my opportunity
comes," Marien answered with cool assurance.  "Nobody,
not even myself, knows how good I am.  Any night
some man may sit in front who has both the judgment
to see and the money to command playwrights, theaters,
New York appearances to order.  When they come, I
shall conquer.  Oh," and her eyes sparkled while she
shivered with a thrill of self-gratulation, "it is wonderful
to feel the great potential thing inside of you, to know
that your wings are strong enough to fly and you only
wait the coming of the breeze.  It is dazzling, intoxicating,
to think that within three months I may be a Broadway
star; that within a year the whole English-speaking
world may recognize that a new queen of the emotional
drama and of tragedy has been crowned.  Until that
hour," and she lowered her voice as she checked the
exaltation of her mood, "until that hour a lover would be a
millstone."

"But," exulted John, "you are not at the top yet.  I
may arrive first!"

Marien looked him up and down and laughed, just
laughed,—about the look and laugh that Parks had given him.

Hampstead's eager face flushed.

"You do not think that possible," he challenged aggressively.

"No, dear boy," replied the woman, her tone and
manner swiftly sympathetic, "I know it is not possible.
You do not realize how far you have to go.  If you
have genius, you do not show it.  You have talent,
temperament, intelligence, application; these may win for
you, but the way will be long and the compensation
uncertain.  If you persist for ten, fifteen, maybe twenty
years, till some of your exuberance has died, till
experience has rounded you off, till you have learned from
that great big compelling teacher out there in front, the
audience, what is art and what is not; while you may
not be accounted a great star, yet the world will
recognize your craftsmanship and concede you a place of
eminence upon the stage, a position well worth occupying,
but one for which you will pay long years before you get it."

"But our love," John protested helplessly.

"Who said 'our love,'" Marien declaimed almost
petulantly.  "I have not confessed to any love."

"But—but," and John's eyes opened widely, "you
would not permit—"

"I did not permit," she flashed.  "You took, and I
forgave because I told you I could understand.  Can you
not, blind man, also understand?  If man is sometimes
man, will not woman also sometimes be woman?"

"Did it mean—no more than that?"

John's eyes searched hers accusingly.

Her answer was to scorn to answer.  She made it
seem that she was dismissing him, exactly as any
heartless woman might dismiss a favorite who had amused
her for an hour, but whose antics and cajoleries had now
begun to pall.

Dazed and dumb, Hampstead seemed to feel his way
backward toward the door, where Julie came mysteriously,
unsummoned, to help him on with his coat and
thrust his hat into his hand.  When John turned for a
last look, Marien's back was turned, and though the head
was bowed and the side of the face half concealed, he
thought he saw a look of agony upon it.

"Marien," he murmured hoarsely, with sudden emotion.
"Marien!"

But on the instant she raised her face to him, and it
was the old face, wonderful and witching, beaming with
a happy, cordial smile as she laid her hand in his without
a sign of restraint of any sort.  The very heartlessness
of it completed his bewilderment.  Did the woman not
know that she was breaking his heart?  It killed his
hope; it cowed him and threw him into a sullen mood.

"Good-by, Miss Dounay," he said huskily.

Her eloquent eyes shot him a look in which reproach
and tenderness mingled, while her hand pulsed quickly
like a heart beating in his palm.  What mood of sullenness
could withstand that look?  Not his.  He smiled,
as if a ray of sunshine played upon his face, and amended
with:

"Good night, Marien."

"Good-by, John," she answered sweetly.

The door was closed behind him before John realized
that with all her sweetness, she had said good-by, and
the emphasis was on the "by."

At the corner the bewildered man turned and looked
up.  He could see the lace curtain at the window, but he
could not see the pillows on the divan quivering with
sobs from a soft burden that had flung itself among
them when the door was closed.





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.. _`THE SCENE PLAYED OUT`:

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   CHAPTER XIII


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE SCENE PLAYED OUT

.. vspace:: 2

Marien Dounay loved him, but for the sake of her
own ambition was trying to kill that love.  This was
the explanation which the sleepless, tossing hours fed
again and again into John Hampstead's mind until he
accepted it as the demonstrated truth.

As for himself, he could no more have killed his love
for Marien than he could have killed a child.  He
determined deliberately to match his will against hers and
break it; to see her again immediately, to meet her
arguments with better arguments, her firm rejections with
firmer affirmations; to melt her resolution with an appeal
to her heart; in short, and by some means not now
clear, to overmaster her purpose for the sake of her own
happiness as well as his.

But a thought of Bessie Mitchell came crowding in.
Now this was not altogether strange, since John had
half-consciously cherished the notion that he would some
day love Bessie, and he reflected now that she must have
had a feeling of the same sort toward himself.  Perhaps
this was why she cried that day upon the rocks; perhaps,
too, that was why he kissed her, for he was beginning
now to understand some things better than he
had before.  Conscience demanded therefore that he
write Bessie a tactful letter which, while vague and
general, would yet somehow reveal the tremendous change
in the drift of his affections.

Just that much, however, was going to be hard—a
brutal piece of work—to merely hint that some other
woman might be coming more intimately into his life
than this trustful, jolly-hearted companion.  But it was
honest and it must, therefore, be done.

Hampstead summoned grimly all his resolution and
dipped his pen in ink.

"Dear Bessie," he wrote, and then his pen stopped,
and an itching sensation came into the corners of his
eyes and a lump into his throat.

Presently he laid the pen down as resolutely as he had
taken it up.  He could not write Bessie out of his life,
after all; at least not like that.  Instead he wrote a letter
that was a lie, or that started out to be a lie; but the
surprising thing to Hampstead was that while he wrote,
visioning Bessie at home in Los Angeles, rose-embowered,
or walking to school beneath rows of palms, he was
himself transported to Los Angeles, and the letter was not
false.  He was back again in the old life, and Bessie was
an interesting and necessary part of it.

Yet he found he could not seal himself into the old
life when he closed the flap of the envelope.  The
moment the letter was mailed, his mind went irresistibly
back to Marien, whom it was a part of his plan to see
that very day.  This was possible because Mowrey
rehearsals were long and somewhat painful affairs.

Hurrying from the Sampson Stock, at the end of his
own rehearsal, John was able to cross the bay and reach
the Grand Opera House while Mowrey's people were
still wearily at work, and to make his way apparently
unseen through the huge, gloomy auditorium to a box
which was deep in shadow, as boxes usually are at
rehearsal time.

Marien was "on", and the big fellow's heart leaped
at the sound of her voice; yet presently it stood still
again, for his jealous ear had detected a disquieting note
in her utterance, a sort of cajoling purr which the lover
recognized instantly.  It was not Marien Dounay in
rehearsal, nor yet in "character"; it was Marien herself
when in her most ingratiating mood, and was meant
neither for the rehearsal nor for the character, but for
the actor who played the opposing rôle.

Who, by the way, was this handsome man, with the
rare, low voice that combined refinement and carrying
power, so absolutely sure of himself, whose every move
betokened the seasoned, accomplished actor, and who
displayed to perfection those very graces which John
himself hoped some day to exhibit?

In the box in front of Hampstead was another ghostly
figure, also watching the rehearsal.  John reached
forward and touched him on the shoulder, whispering
hollowly: "Who is the new leading man?"

"Charles Manning of New York," was the reply;
"specially engaged for this and three other rôles."

"Thank you," said John, swallowing hard, for now
he understood perfectly the disagreeable meaning of those
cajoleries.  They represented just one more element in
Marien Dounay's calculating life.  This New York
actor might go back and drop the word that would bring
her opportunity, the thing her vaulting ambition coveted
more than it coveted love.  Therefore she was taking
deliberate advantage of these situations to kindle a
personal interest in herself, for which, once her object was
gained, she would refuse responsibility as heartlessly as
she had tried to reject the big man who just now started
so violently as he watched her.

Look at that now!  The stage direction had required
Manning to take Marien in his arms for a minute.
Hampstead ground his teeth.

Well, why didn't they separate?  What was she clinging
to him so long for?  Why, indeed, if it were not
for this same reason that to John, stewing in jealous
rage, seemed despicable and base.  This was not nice;
it was not womanly; it was not a true reflection of
Marien's character.  It was, he assured himself hotly,
one of the things from which he must save her.

But he had no opportunity to begin his work of salvation
that afternoon, for rehearsal ended, Marien walked
out with Charles Manning so closely in her company
that Hampstead could not so much as catch her eye, and
his emotions were in such a riot that he dared not trust
himself to accost her.

When John had walked the streets for an hour, with
the storm of his feelings rising instead of settling, he
resolved upon a note to Marien and went to the office
of the *Dramatic Review* to dispatch it.

.. vspace:: 2

"Dear Marien," he wrote.  "I must see you to-night.
I will call at twelve.  JOHN."

.. vspace:: 2

The brevity of this communication was deliberately
calculated to express his headlong mood and the depths
of his determination.  He had not asked an answer, but
waited for one, assuring himself that if none came he
would call just the same.  Yet the answer was ominously
prompt.  John tore it open with brutal strength and saw
Marien's handwriting for the first time.  It was vigorous
and rectangular, but unmistakably feminine, and there
was neither salutation nor signature.

.. vspace:: 2

"Stupid!" the note began abruptly.  "I saw you in
the box to-day.  I will not have you spying upon me.
You must not call.  I have tried to make you understand.
Why can you not accept the situation?  Or are
you mad enough to compel me to stage the scene and play
it out for you?"

.. vspace:: 2

John read the note twice, crumpled it in his hand,
and walked slowly down Geary Street to Market and
down Market Street to the ferry.

In the second act that night he forgot to take on the
knife with which he was to stab his victim, and nearly
spoiled the scene, through having to strangle him
instead.

"*Stage the scene and play it out for you?*"  What
could she mean by that.

Determined to find out, John hurried from the theater
at the close of the performance, with his lips pursed
stubbornly, and at exactly twelve o'clock Julie was answering
his ring at the door of the little apartment on Turk
Street.

"Ah!" she exclaimed, smiling cordially.  "It is the
big man again.  No, Madame is not in.  She is having
supper out to-night.  With whom?  La! la!  I should
not tell you that," and Julie shrugged one shoulder only,
after a way of hers, and made a movement to close the
door; but something in John's eyes induced her to add,
with both sympathy and chiding in her tone: "You
must not come to see Madame when Madame does not
want you."

"But I must see her, Julie!" John pleaded huskily,
rather throwing himself upon the mercy of the little
French woman.

Julie gazed at him doubtfully.  She had fended off
the attentions of many an importunate suitor from her
beautiful mistress but never one who engaged at once
so much of her sympathy and respect as he.  In her
mind she was weighing something; reflecting perhaps
whether it was not kindness to this big, earnest man to
let his own eyes serve him.  Her decision was evidently
in the affirmative.

"If you go quickly to the entrance of Antone's," she
suggested hurriedly, "you will see Madame arriving
presently in an automobile."

Stubborn as John was in his purpose, he nevertheless
flushed that even Julie could think him capable of
standing at the door of a French restaurant at midnight
waiting to catch a glimpse of the woman he loved in the
company of another man.  Yet pride was so completely
swallowed up in jealousy and passion that another five
minutes found him loitering before the entrance to
Antone's, resolving to go, to stay; to look and not to look;
feeling now weakly ashamed of himself and now meanly
resolute.

The place was half underground, with a gilded and
illumined entrance that yawned like the mouth of a
monster.  John was sure from its outward look that
Antone's was no more than half respectable.  The fragrance
of the food which assailed his nostrils was, he felt equally
sure, an expensive fragrance.  A meal there would cost
as much as a week of meals where he was accustomed
to take his food.  Manning, of course, had a fine
salary.  He could afford to take Marien for an
automobile ride and to Antone's for supper.

Hampstead's envious rage flamed again at this thought,
but at the moment the flash of a headlight in his eyes
called attention to an automobile just then sweeping in
toward the curb.  However, instead of the stalwart,
graceful figure of Manning, there emerged from the car
a squat, oily-faced man, huge of paunch, with thick lips,
a heavy nose, pouched cheeks, and small, pig-like eyes,
upon whose broad countenance hung an expression of
bland self-complaisance.  By an odd coincidence, this
man was also connected with the stage.  John knew
him by sight as Gustav Litschi, and by reputation as a
very swine among men, utterly without scruple, although
endowed with an uncanny business sense; a man who
had money and whose theatrical ventures always made
money, though often their character was as doubtful as
himself.

Disappointed, Hampstead nevertheless experienced a
feeling of curiosity as to Litschi's companion, and before
drawing back, followed the gross glance of the gimlet
eyes within the car to where they rested gloatingly upon
a woman in evening clothes, who was gathering her train
and cloak about her preparatory to being helped from
the car.  To John's utter amazement the woman was
Marien.

For a moment he stared as if confronted with a
specter, then felt his great hands itching while he wavered
between a desire to leap upon this coarse creature and
tear him to pieces, and the impulse to accost Marien with
reproaches and a warning.  But the swift reflection that
she probably knew the man's character perfectly well
prompted John instead to the despicable expedient of
deliberately spying upon her.  Turning impetuously, he ran
quickly down the steps in advance of the couple.

"One?" queried the headwaiter, with a keen estimating
glance under which John ordinarily would have
felt himself to shrivel; but now a frenzy of jealousy and
a sense of outrage had made him bold.

"Yes," he replied brusquely; "that seat yonder in the
corner where I can see the whole show."

It was a lonely and undesirable table, smack against
the side of the wall, along which ran a row of curtained,
box-like alcoves that served as tiny private dining rooms.
John could have it and welcome.  He got it, and as he
turned to sit down, his eye scanned the interior swiftly
for Marien and Litschi.  To his surprise they were
coming straight at him, Marien leading.  Certain that she
had seen him and was going to address him, John
nevertheless determined to await a look of recognition before
arising.  To his further surprise, no such look came.
Coldly, icily beautiful to-night, the glitter in her eyes
was hard and desperate, with a suggestion of menace in
it, reminding John of that momentary intuition he had
once experienced, that this woman could be dangerous.
Her note had warned him not to spy upon her, he recalled.
It must be that her discovery of his presence had
roused a devil in her now.  So strong did this feeling
become that he felt a relief as great as his surprise
when she brushed by as if oblivious of his presence and
passed from view into the nearest box, the curtain of
which a waiter was holding aside obsequiously.

When the screening curtain dropped, swinging so near
that John could have reached across his table and touched
it with a hand, he had a sense of sudden escape, as if
a tigress, sleekly beautiful and powerfully cruel, had
over-leaped him to tear a richer prey beyond.  The swine-like
Litschi, waddling after her into the box, was the chosen
victim.  Yonder by the curb John had feared for Marien;
now, repulsive as the creature was, he felt a kind of pity
for Litschi.

Yet with the curtain drawn, Hampstead's emotion
passed swiftly back to love and anxiety for her.  She
had not seen him, that was all.  The supposed look of
menace was the product of his imagination and his jealousy.

As the minutes passed unnoted, this anxiety grew again
into sympathy and consideration.  Marien had complained
to him of the hard things she had to do.  This
supper with Litschi was merely one of them.  That scene
with Manning was another.  He reflected triumphantly
that she had not welcomed Litschi to her apartment; but
compelled him to bring her to this public place.  Poor,
brave girl!  She had to play with all these men; to warm
them without herself getting burnt; to woo them
desperately upon the chance: Manning that he might
somewhere speak the fortunate word, Litschi that in some
greedy hope of gain he might be induced to risk his
money on the venture that would give Marien the
opportunity for which she had been calculating indomitably
for seven years.

But what was that?

John's hand reached out and clutched the table violently,
while his body leaned forward as if to rise.  What
was that she had said so loudly he could hear, and so
astonishing that he could not believe his ears?

He had been sitting there such a long, long time, thinking
thoughts like these, stirred, soothed, and stirred again
by the sound of her voice, heard intermittently between
the numbers of the orchestra.  He had ordered food and
eaten, then ordered more and eaten that,—anything to
think and wait, he did not know for what.

Waiters bearing trays had come and gone unceasingly
from behind the curtain four feet from his eyes, and he
knew that they had borne more bottles than food.
Several times he had heard a sound like "shots off-stage."  This
sound always succeeded the entry of a gold sealed
bottle.  Evidently they were drinking heavily behind the
curtain, Litschi's voice growing lower and less coherent,
and Marien's louder and less reserved, till for some time
he had been catching little snatches of her conversation.
She had been talking about her future, painting a picture
of the success she would make when her opportunity
came; but now she had said the thing that staggered him.

"What?" he came near to saying aloud; and at the
same time he heard the drink-smothered voice of Litschi
also with interrogative inflection.  Litschi, too, wanted
to be sure that he had heard aright.

"I say," iterated the voice of Marien deliberately, as
if with calculated carrying power, "that a woman who
is ambitious must be prepared to pay the price
demanded—her heart, her soul—if need be—*herself*!"

She plumped out the last word ruthlessly, and broke
into a half-tipsy laugh that had in it a suggestion
unmistakable as much as to say:

"You understand now, don't you, Gustav Litschi?
You realize what I am offering to the man who buys me
opportunity?"

Her heart—her soul—herself!  Hampstead, having
started up, sat down again weakly, the cold sweat of
horror standing out upon his brow.

So this was what she had meant all the time in her
speech about the calculating life.  She could not give
herself up to love him or any one, because she was
dangling herself as a final lure to the man who would give her
opportunity.

"Why, this woman was spiritually—morally—potentially,
a—" he could barely let himself think the hateful
word.  To utter it was impossible.

Perhaps she was worse!  A choking, burning sensation
was in his throat.  He tore at it with his hands, gasping
for breath.  He wanted to tear at the curtain—at the
woman!  How he hated her!  She had no longer any
fineness.  She was a coarse, designing, reckless—*prostitute*!
There!  In his agony, the word was out.  He sent
it hurtling across the stage of his own brain.  It flew
straight.  It found its mark upon the face of his love and
stuck there blotched and quivering, biting into the picture
like acid.  It ate out the eyes of Marien Dounay from
his mind; it ate away her pliant ruby lips, her cheeks and
her soft round chin, and it left of that face only a
grinning hideousness from which John Hampstead shrank
with a horrible sickness in his heart.

At this moment the curtain rings clicked sharply under
the sweep of an impetuous arm, and with the suddenness
of an apparition, Marien stood just across the table from
him.  Her face was highly colored, but the preternatural
brightness of the eyes had begun to dull, and there was a
loose look, too, about the mouth, the lips of which were
curled by a mocking smile.

"Well, John Hampstead!" she sneered, with a vindictive
look in her eyes, insinuating scorn in her tones.
"Now that I have played out the scene, do you think you
understand?"

John had risen stiffly, every fiber of him in riot at the
horror he had heard and was now seeing; but his
self-control was perfect, and a kind of dignity invested him
for the moment.

"Yes," he said, meeting her gaze unflinchingly, "I
understand!"

The tone of finality that went into this latter word was
unescapable.  As it was uttered, Marien attempted one of
her lightning changes of manner but failed, breaking
instead into a fit of hysterical laughter, during which,
with head thrown back, her body swayed, and she
disappeared behind the curtain, where the laughter ended
abruptly in something like a choke, or a fit of coughing.

But John's indignation and disgust were so great that
he did not concern himself as to whether Miss Dounay's
laughter might be choking her or not.  Embarrassed, too,
by the number of eyes turned curiously upon him from
the nearer tables where the diners had observed the
incident without gathering any of its purport, his only
impulse was to pay his bill and escape, before the building
and the world came clattering down upon him.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE METHOD OF A DREAM`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XIV


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE METHOD OF A DREAM

.. vspace:: 2

So paralyzing to a man of Hampstead's sensitive nature
was the effect of Marien Dounay's startling disclosure
that he experienced a partial arrest of consciousness, the
symptoms of which hung on surprisingly.

Somehow that night he got back to Oakland, and the
next morning was again about his work; but the days went
by mechanically—days of risings and retirings, eatings
and sleepings, memorizing of lines, mumbling of speeches,
sliding into clothes, slipping into grease paint, walkings
on and walkings off.  Through all of these daily
obligations the man moved with a certain absent-minded
precision, like a person with a split consciousness, who does
not let his right lobe know what his left lobe is thinking.

He knew, for instance, that a telegram came to him one
day with the charges collect, and that he paid the charges
and signed for the message, but he did not know that the
message lay unopened on his dresser while he spent all
his unoccupied time sunk in a stupor of meditation upon
the thing which had befallen him.

Most astonishing to John was the fact that while he
felt rage and humiliation at having so duped himself over
Marien Dounay, he had no sense of pain.  He was like a
man run over by a railroad train who experiences no throb
of anguish but only a sickish, numbing sensation in his
mangled limbs.

Recognizing that his condition was not normal,
Hampstead wondered if he could be going insane.  He was
eating little; he was taking no interest in his work.  He
went and came from the theater automatically, impatient
of company, impatient of noise, of newspaper headlines,
of interruptions of any sort, anxious only to get to his
room, to throw himself into a chair or upon a bed, and
relapse into a state of mental drooling.  After several
days he roused from one of these reveries with the clear
impression that some presence had been there in the room,
had breathed upon him, had touched his lips, and spoken
to him.  He leaped up and looked about him.  He opened
the door and scanned the corridor.  No one was there,—no
echo of corporeal footsteps resounded.

Realizing that it must have been his own dream that
waked him, he came back sheepishly and tried again to
induce that state of mental dusk in which the odd
sensation had been experienced.  Soon he roused again with
the knowledge that the presence had been with him and
had departed; but this time a clear picture of the vision
remained.  It was a woman,—it was like Marien.  It
was, he told himself, the image of his Love.  He entertained
it sadly, like an apparition from the grave.  The
vision came again, but with repeated visits, its form began
to change, until it no longer resembled the form of Marien.

This was exciting; the image might change still further
till it definitely resembled some one else.

This surmise proved correct.  It did change more and
more until identity was for a time completely lost, but as
days passed, the features ceased to blur and jumble.  The
eyes were now constantly blue; the complexion was
consistently pink and white; the hair was brown and began
to appear crinkly; the lips grew shorter, and of a more
youthful red; the chin broadened and appeared fuller and
softer.  One morning these rosier lips smiled with a
rarer spontaneity than the vision had ever shown before,
and with the smile came two dimples into the peach-blow
cheeks.

"Bessie!" John cried, with a welcoming shout of
incoherent joy.  "Bessie!"

But his joy was speedily swallowed up in the gloom of
mortifying reflections.  Could it be that his love was so
inconstant as to transfer itself in a few days from Marien
Dounay to Bessie Mitchell, and if it did, what was such
love worth?  Besides, how could he love Bessie as he
had loved Marien.  There was no fire in her.  As yet,
she was only a girl.  But at this juncture a memory came
floating in of that day on the Cliff House rocks, when
some vague impulse, which he thought to be sympathy,
had made him draw Bessie's face up to his and kiss it.
Now, as he recalled it, the touch of her lips was the touch
of a woman; and her look that puzzled him then,—why,
it was the look of love!

Hampstead leaped up excitedly.  Bessie was a woman,
and she loved him!  And he loved her!  But how could
he have been such a fool as to think that he loved Marien?

"Passion," he told himself scornfully, "mere passion."

"She was the first ripe woman I ever touched, and I
fell for her!  That's all," he muttered.  "But, how
could I ever, ever, ever have done it?"

Heaping bitter self-reproaches, he took his bewildered
head in his hands, while he wrestled with the humiliating
chain of ruminations.  Naturally enough, it was the
memory of a speech of Marien's which afforded him his
first clue.

"In what you have just been saying, you have given me
a character," she had replied to one of his advances. "If
I could play that part always, I should be what you are in
love with, and you would love me always; but I cannot
play it always; I can play it seldom.  I play it now for an
hour and then perhaps never again."

This speech, vexatiously enigmatic then, sounded
suddenly rational now.  It meant that he had unconsciously
bestowed upon her his idealized conception of womanhood.
This was made comparatively easy because in the
plays Marien almost invariably enacted the heroines,
always sweet, always gentle, and almost always good; or,
if erring, they were more sinned against than sinning.
Most of these piled-up virtues of her rôles John dotingly
had ascribed to her, and his professional contacts
afforded few glimpses of the real Marien by which his
drawing could be corrected.

Atop of this had come those few hours of delicious
intimacy in her apartment, when she had deliberately played
the part she saw that he would like.  This had sufficed
to make his illusion complete.

Still John had no reproaches for the actress.  Instead,
he found within him a renascence of respect for her,
particularly for her frankness.  Most women—most men,
too, for that matter, he thought—play the hypocrite with
themselves and with others.  He must do her full credit.
She had not done so.  She might have ruined him.  He
owed his escape to no discernment of his own.  When
he had not understood, she had resolutely played the
scene out for him—to the uttermost.  It must have cost
a woman, any woman, something to do that, he reasoned.
Under this interpretation, Marien was no longer repulsive
to him.  Instead, he found in her something to admire.
Her courage was sublime.  Her devotion to her god,
ambition, if terrible, was also magnificent.

"Yet, why," he asked himself, "did she let me take her
in my arms?  Sympathy," he answered at last.  "She
never loved me.  A woman who loved a man could not
do what she did in the restaurant.  She was very sorry
for me, that was all.  She let me kiss her as she would let
a dog lick her hand."  And then he remembered another
speech of hers: "If a man is sometimes man, may not
woman be also sometimes woman?"

This helped him finally and completely, as he thought, to
understand; but it left him with a still deeper sense of his
own weakness and humiliation.

Marien Dounay had roused the woman want in him
and while she was near, her personality had been strong
enough to center that want upon herself.  But when she
shook his passion free of her, it turned, after circling like
a homing pigeon, due upon its course to Bessie.  John
saw that this was all logical and psychological.  Patently,
it was also biological.

But it was mortifying beyond words.  He felt that he
had dishonored himself and dishonored Bessie.  He had
supposed himself strong; he found himself weak.  He
had been swept off his feet and out of his head.  He was
ashamed of himself, heartily.  Bessie, the good, the pure,
the noble!  Why, he could not think of her at all in the
terms in which he thought of Marien Dounay.  His
instinct for Marien had been to possess.  For Bessie it was
to revere, to worship—and yet—and yet—he wanted
her now with an urge that was stronger than ever he had
felt for Marien.

Still, he had no impulse to rush to Bessie.  He felt
unworthy.  He could not see himself taking her hand,
touching her lips, declaring his love to her now.  It
seemed to him that he must test his love for Bessie before
he declared it, and purify it by months—years, perhaps,—of
waiting, as if to expiate the sin of his weakness.

But in the meantime, Bessie loved him, and would be
loving him all the time.  And he could write to her!  Ah,
what letters he would write, letters that would not only
keep her love alive but fan it, while he punished himself
for his insane disloyalty.

Disloyalty!  Yes, that was the very word.  He knew
as he reflected that he had been disloyal ever to yield to
the spell of Marien Dounay.  He had been disloyal to
Bessie, to his ideals, and to himself.

He turned to where a few days before he had pinned
his old Los Angeles motto on the wall of his Oakland
room: "Eternal Hammering is the Price of Success."

Hammering, he decided, was the wrong word.  It was
not high enough.  He stepped over to the wall and
changed it to the new word so that it read:

"Eternal *Loyalty* is the Price of Success."

He liked that better; so well, in fact, that he lifted his
hand dramatically and swore his life anew, not to hammering
but to Loyalty,—loyalty to himself, to Bessie, to
Dick and Tayna, and to God!

This gave him a feeling of new courage.  He turned
away as from a disagreeable experience now forever
past.  His eyes wandered about the room exactly as if he
had returned from an absence, taking in detail by detail
the familiar, scanty furniture, the hateful spring rocker,
the washstand, the bed, the torn, smoke-soiled curtains at
the window, the picture of Washington at Valley Forge
upon the wall, and the dresser with its cheap speckled
mirror.

His glance had just paused mystified at the sight of the
unopened telegram upon the dresser when there was a
knock at the door.

With a stride, John turned the key and swung open
the door.

Bud, the fourteen-year-old call boy of the Sampson
Theater, entered; a breathless, self-important youngster
with freckles and a stubby pompadour.

"Mr. Cohen's says yer better write a letter ter yer
sister," the lad blurted, while his eyes scanned the room
and the actor, where he stood reaching in a dazed sort of
way for the telegram.

"Hey," exclaimed Hampstead, looking up sharply,
"my sister?"

"Ye-uh," affirmed Bud stoutly.  "Mr. Cohen's got a
letter from her, and she wants to know if yer sick 'r
anything."

"By jove, that's right, Bud," confessed John with
sudden conviction.  "I've had my mind on something of
late, and guess I've rather overlooked the folks at home.
I'll write to-day.  Awfully kind of you, old chap, to come
over.  Here!"

And Hampstead, now with the telegram in his hand,
attempted to cover a feeling of confusion before these
bright, peering eyes by a pilgrimage to the closet, from
which he tossed Bud a quarter.  The lad accepted the
quarter thankfully.

"Say, Mr. Hampstead," he broke out impulsively, with
an embarrassed note in his voice, "I'm sorry you got your
notice!"

"Got my notice?" asked John a bit sharply.

"Yes.  Yer let out," announced Bud, with unfeeling
directness, though consideration was in his heart.  "You
been good to me, Mr. Hampstead, and I'm sorry you're
goin'.  Some of the others is, too."

But John was roused now, thoroughly.

"Why, Bud, what are you talking about?" he demanded,
turning accusingly to the boy.

"For the love of Mike," exclaimed Bud, advancing a
little fearsomely and studying the face of Hampstead
with new curiosity, "Yer let out and don't know it!
What'd I tell 'em?  Why, there it is," and he snatched
up a blue, thin-looking envelope from the dresser.  "Y'
got it a week ago when you got yer pay.  Y' ain't opened
it even."

Hampstead took the blue envelope from Bud's hand,
an awful sense of weakness running through him as he
read that his services would not be required after the
customary two weeks.

"What did I get this for, Bud?" he asked, sensing the
uselessness of dissimulation before this impertinent child.

"Y' got it fer bein' dopey," answered Bud reproachfully.
"Y' ain't had no more sense than a wooden man
fer ten days.  Say, Mr. Hampstead," he ventured
further with sympathetic friendliness, "yer a good actor
when you let the hop alone.  Why don't you cut it?
You're young yet.  You got a future, Mr. Cohen says,
if you'll let the dope alone."

Hampstead's face took on a queer, half-amused look.

"Is that what he said?"

"That's what he said," affirmed Bud aggressively.

"Well, then, all right, Bud.  I will cut it out.  Here's
my hand on it."

Bud took the hand, a trifle surprised and feeling a little
more important than usual.  "Say," he added confidentially,
"wise me, will y'; what kind have you been takin'?
Mr. Cohen says he's never seen nothin' like it, and he
thought he'd seen 'em all."

"Oh, it's a little brand I mixed myself," confessed
John.  "But I'm done with it.  Run along now, Bud.
You've been a good pal," and he gave the lad a pat on
the shoulder and a significant shove toward the door.

"Glad I came over," reflected Bud at the door, jingling
the quarter in his pocket.  "Better write yer sister, or
she'll be comin' up here.  Say," and Bud returned as if
for a further confidence, "y' never know what a woman's
goin' to do, do y'?  Las' fall a woman shot our leadin'
juvenile in the leg—because she loved him.  Get that?
Because she loved him!"

Bud's drawling scorn was inimitable.

"Y' can't figger 'em, can yuh?  Some of 'em wants to
be called, and some of 'em don't.  Some of 'em wants
their letters before the show, and some of 'em after.
Some of 'em is one way one day and the other way the
next day.  If I ever get my notice,—if I ever lose my
job it'll be about a woman.  I never seen a man yet that
I couldn't get his nannie.  I never seen a woman yet that
couldn't get mine and get it fresh every time I run a step
fer her.  Say!  Mr. Hampstead—honest—ain't they
the jinx?"

Bud had got his hand on the door, but getting no
answer to this very direct and to him very important
question, he turned and scrutinized the face of the big
man curiously at first and then with amazement, as he
exclaimed: "Fer the love of Mike!  He ain't heard
me.  Say, Mr. Hampstead!  Say!"  Bud went back
and shook the big man's arm, with a look of apprehension
on his face, and shouted very loud, as if to the deaf:
"Say!  Come out of it, will y'?  Don't write.  Telegraph
her.  Gosh!  She might blame me!"

After which parting gun in behalf of duty and of
prudence, with a sigh and the air of having done a man's
best, the lad got hastily through the door and slammed
it after him very loudly.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE CATASTROPHE`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XV


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE CATASTROPHE

.. vspace:: 2

Bud was right.  John had not heard him.  He stood
with the telegram torn open in his hand.

.. vspace:: 2

"Charles fell from El Capitan," it ran. "Body
brought here.  ROSE."

.. vspace:: 2

For a moment the man gazed fixedly, deliberately but
absently crushing the envelope in one hand, while the
other held the open message before him.  Then his lips
moved slowly and without uttering a sound, they framed
the words of his thought: "Charles!—Dead!—Merciful God!"

For a reflective interval the gray, startled eyes set
themselves on distance and then turned again to the message.
It was dated April 4.

April 4?  What day was this?

On the dresser was an unopened newspaper.  John
remembered now he had bought it yesterday, or rather he
assumed it was yesterday.  The date upon the paper was
April 14.  If it were yesterday he bought that paper,
to-day was the 15th, and Charles had been dead eleven days!
What had they thought—what had they done without a
word from him in this crisis?  What had become of them?

And there were unopened letters on the dresser, three of
them, all from Rose.  John tore them open, lapping up
their contents with his eyes.

"Poor, poor Rose!" he groaned.  "What must she
think of me?"

The first letter told of the death of Charles and the
lucky sale of "Dawn in the Grand Canyon" which afforded
money for the recovery of the body and its decent
interment, but little more.

The second letter was briefer and expressed surprise at
not hearing from him in response to her message, which
the telegraph company assured her had been delivered to
him in person.  This letter showed Rose bearing up
under her grief and stoutly making plans for taking up
the support of her children.

The third letter was addressed by the hand of Rose,
but the brief note enclosed was penned by the kind-hearted
Doctor Morrison, the railroad's "company" physician,
to whom, as a part of his outside practice, Rose would
have applied in case of illness.

"Your sister," Doctor Morrison wrote, "has suffered
a complete nervous breakdown.  Long rest with complete
relief from financial care is imperative."

This letter stirred John to immediate action.  He
rushed to the long-distance telephone.  The telegraph was
not quick enough.

"Please reassure my sister immediately," John
telephoned to Doctor Morrison.  "Every provision will be
made for her care and that of the children."  Not satisfied
with this, John sent a telegram to his sister direct and
to the same effect.

These messages were dispatched as the first and most
natural impulses of the brother's heart, without pause to
consider the responsibilities involved; and then, having no
appetite for breakfast, John returned to his room to write
to Rose.

Poor Rose!  And poor old Charles!  Such an end for
him.  No great pictures painted; no roseate successes
gathered; just to follow his vision on and on until in
absent-minded admiration of a sunset glow he stepped off
the brow of El Capitan in Yosemite and fell hundreds of
feet to death.  Yet John's grief was strangely tempered
by the thought that somehow this death was fitting.  It
was like the man's life.  In art he had tried to walk the
heights with no solid ground of ability beneath, and he
had fallen into the bottomless abyss of failure.

For a moment John pitied Charles greatly; yet when
he thought of Rose, prostrated, as he was sure, not by
grief, but by long anxieties, his feeling turned to one of
reproach.  When he thought of the children left fatherless,
with no provision for their future or that of Rose,
the reproach turned to bitterness.  He found himself
judging Charles very sternly, and a verse from scripture
came into his mind,—something about the man who
provides not for his own being worse than a murderer.

But in the midst of this condemnation, Hampstead's
jaw dropped, and he sat staring at the pen with which he
was preparing to write.  The expression on the man's
face had changed from concern to one of agony.  When
the pain passed, his features were gray and tenantless,
almost the look of the dead; for John Hampstead had
suddenly perceived that *his stage career was ended*!

Rose, Dick and Tayna were now "his own."  To give
Rose the best of care, upon which his heart had instantly
determined, he must have what were to him large sums
of money weekly and monthly; money for nurses, money
for doctors, for sanitariums possibly; and perhaps Dick
and Tayna must be sent to boarding-school or some place
like that for the present, while their higher education must
also be considered and provided for.

John knew he could never do these things and follow
the stage.  He could succeed upon the stage; he had
proven that, to his own satisfaction at least; but he could
not make money there yet, not for years and years.  Marien
was right.  If he persisted, rewards would come and
affluence.  But they would come at the other end of life.
He must have them now.

Perhaps hardest of all to John was the hurt to his pride,
to his self-confidence, the reflection that, having set his
eye upon a shining goal, he must abandon the march
toward it unbeaten, with his strength untested, or with the
tests so far made distinctly in his favor.  It was hard to
think himself a "quitter."  And yet he could feel the
stir of a noble satisfaction in being a "quitter" for duty's
sake.  He remembered with a certain sad pleasure how
almost prophetically he had told Mr. Mitchell that it would
only be something that would happen to Dick and Tayna
that could keep him from going on with his ambition.
Now exactly that had come to pass; yet to make immediate
surrender of the ambition to which he had devoted
himself with such enthusiasm seemed impossible.  He
knew what he should do—what he intended to do—but
he lacked the resolution for the moment.

If Bessie were only here!

And yet if she were, he would shrink from her
presence.  He felt just now unworthy to look into those
trusting eyes of blue.  This time he must face his destiny
alone.

His head sank low.  His hands were clasped above it,
as they had been that night when he was stricken blind.
The world was dark before him.  Now, as then, he felt
sorry for himself.  In a very few months a great many
things had happened to him that had wrenched him
violently.  He had been racked by doubts and inflamed
by mysterious emotions.  He had hoped and he had
dared; he had struggled; he had gained some things and
lost some; but he had survived, and on the whole was
conquering.  Now came the heaviest blow, as it seemed,
that could possibly fall upon his head,—and just in the
very hour when the upward way was clearing!

His face was flat upon the page he had meant to fill with
words of love and help to Rose.  Above him, on the wall,
was the sheet of faded yellow paper that bore his just
amended motto.  Two pins, loosened no doubt when he
changed the word on the legend, had been whipped out
by the breeze which swept in through the open window,
and this breeze now fluttered the free end of the yellow
sheet insistently like a pennant, so that the distracted man
lifted his clouded eyes and read once again, as if to make
sure:

"Eternal Loyalty is the Price of Success."

"Loyalty to what?" he demanded fiercely of himself.
To his ambition?  Or to two little growing lives that
trusted and believed in him?

To put the question like that was to answer it.  John
rose abruptly, snatched the legend from the wall, crumpled
it as he had the envelope, and cast it on the floor.  He
didn't need it any more.

"And yet," he reflected after a moment, "why not?"

"Uncle John, when will you be president?" Tayna
had asked him that one night, and he smiled as in fancy
he felt her arms again about his neck, her bare feet
cuddling in his lap.  The thought roused him.  He was not
surrendering all ambition when he surrendered a stage
ambition.  He was a man of greatly increased ability now
as compared with then.  Surely a man was pretty poor
stuff if, having been defeated in one desire through no
fault of his own, he could not carve out another niche for
himself somewhere in the wide hall of achievement.
John stooped and recovered the crumpled square of
yellow, smoothed its wrinkles reverently, and fastened it
again and more securely upon the wall above him.

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   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

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That night John Hampstead went to the theater as
usual, but entered the dressing room like a man going
into the presence of his dead.  Throughout the
performance he made his entrances and exits solemnly.

The play for this, his final week, was *Hamlet*, and
John's part was the King.  Every night as the Prince of
Denmark killed him with a rapier thrust, John enacted
that spectacular and traditional fall by which, since time
forgotten, all Kings in *Hamlet* go toppling to the floor,
where they die with one foot upraised upon the bottom-most
step of the throne, as if reluctant even in death to
give up the perquisites and preeminence of royalty.  So
hour by hour John felt that he was killing the King in
his soul, but the King died reluctantly, always with one
foot on the throne.

The last night came, and the last hour.  Methodically
the man assembled his make-up materials, his grease
paints, his hare's feet, and the beard he had himself
fashioned for the King to wear, and put them away, with
their sweetish, unmistakable odor, in the old cigar box,
to be treasured henceforth like sacred things, symbols of
a great ambition which had stirred a young man's breast,
and remembrances of the greatest sacrifice it seemed
possible aspiring youth could be called upon to make.

But no one was to know that it was a sacrifice; not
Rose, not Dick nor Tayna even.  They were to think he
did it happily and because "The stage—the stage life,
you know!  Well, probably there are better ways for a
man to spend his energies."

But, really, in his heart of hearts, Hampstead knew he
would love the drama always.  He owed it a debt that
he could never repay, and some day when he had achieved
a brilliant success in another walk of life—when Dick
and Tayna were grown and far away perhaps—he would
take out the old cigar box and gather his children around
him, if he should have children, and tell them the story
of his first divinest ambition as one tells the story of one's
first love; and of the great sacrifice he had made in the
cause of duty, fingering the while these crumbling things
as one caresses a lock of hair of the long departed.

"Look, Bud, here's a box of cold cream—nearly full.
You can get a quarter for it from somewhere along the
line," suggested John, nodding toward the row of
dressing rooms as he walked away, his overcoat over his
shoulder, a suitcase in his hand.





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.. _`THE KING STILL LIVES`:

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   CHAPTER XVI


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   THE KING STILL LIVES

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To make money quickly and steadily and in considerable
amounts, was his immediate necessity.  He remembered,
naturally, that only seven months ago William
N. Scofield had offered him a salary of twelve thousand
dollars a year, and he went to see that gentleman promptly.
But while the Traffic Manager's eye lighted at sight of
him, the light faded.  Scofield did not refer to the offer
he had made or the things he had talked about that night
in the Pacific Union Club.  He only said absently: "I
will speak to Parsons."  The next day Parsons offered
Hampstead a position in the rate department at one
hundred dollars per month.  John was not greatly surprised.
He knew the world was like that.

Of course, he might have gone next to Mr. Mitchell,
but did not.  In the first place John knew that no
position which that kind-hearted gentleman might offer could
pay as much money as he must have.  In the second
place, he felt himself big with a sense of new-grown
powers, of personality that he wanted to capitalize, not for
some employer, but for himself.

"Seems to me," he communed, as he walked down
Market Street, "that I could sell real estate, or stocks, or
bonds; that I could promote enterprises, work with big
men, put through their deals, and make a lot of money.
I believe I will try it."

An advertisement which seemed to promise something
like this was answered by him in person, but it proved
instead a proposition to sell books.  John revolted at the
idea, but the books interested him greatly.  The set was
designed for self-improvement, and the price was thirty
dollars.

"Every time you sell a young man or woman a set of
these, you do them good," he suggested to the manager,
with a glow upon his face.

"Exactly," assented that suave gentleman, sighting two
prime essentials of a salesman, faith in his article and a
missionary enthusiasm.  "You could make a hundred a
week selling 'em!"

One hundred dollars a week!  John looked his incredulity.

"What were you doing before?" inquired the manager.

"Acting!"

"Selling books is like acting," mused the manager.
"If you are a good actor, you could make a hundred a
week easy."

Because John needed one hundred dollars a week, and
reflected that the experience would be good training for
that higher form of salesmanship upon which he meant
to embark, he took his prospectus and started out.  The
first week his commissions were $7.50.  He had made one
sale.  But he needed one hundred dollars worse the
second week, and set forth with greater determination.
That week he made two sales.  "I've almost got it," he
assured himself, gritting his teeth desperately.  And the
third week he did get it.  His commissions for six days
were $74.50, for the next week $112.50, for the fifth week
$145.00.  John Hampstead was successfully launched
upon an enterprise that would care for all his money wants.

And the work itself was happy work.  It was no
foot-in-the-door, house-to-house campaign on which he had
entered.  Ways were found of gathering lists of persons
likely to be interested.  He called upon these people like
a gentleman; he was received and entertained like one.
His self-respecting manner, his stage-trained presence,
his growing store of personal magnetism, his strong,
interesting face, with the odd light of spiritual ardor in his
eyes, and the little choke of enthusiasm that came into his
voice, all helped to make his presence welcome and his
canvass entertaining.  He became an adept in reading
character and in playing upon the springs of desire and
resolution.

He discovered, too, something to interest and admire in
nearly every one upon whom he called.  He was surprised
to find how nice people were generally.  He had before
known people mainly in the mass, as publics, as audiences,
or congregations.  Now he began to know them as
individuals, and to like them, to conceive a sort of social
passion for them, and to desire fervently to do all men good.
With this went the knowledge that he was becoming
socially very skillful, and a sense of still increasing
personal power peppered his veins with the sparkle of new
hopes.  Ambition flamed once more.  The king in his
soul was alive again.  He could not only meet people, but
handle them.  He felt that as a politician he could win
votes, as a lawyer he could sway juries.

He might even turn again to the stage, with the
prospect of swifter and surer success; but he had begun to
discover that one cannot go back, that no life ever flows
up-stream.

Yet the thing which really made the stage career no
longer possible was this sense of new powers grown up
within him that were not mimetic, but creative and
constructive, and which would insistently demand some other
form of expression.

Besides, the perspective of his life was now long enough
for him to look back and see how all his experiences had
enriched him.  His very awkwardness, his temporary
blindness, his dramatic ambition, the calamity which
shattered that career and made him a seller of books, each
had been a step into power.  His passion for Marien even,
while it was a fall, was a fall into knowledge, which
taught him self-control and made his love for Bessie a
tenderer and, as he fancied, a stauncher devotion than it
could otherwise have been.

This gave him a feeling, half-superstitious and
half-religious, that his existence was being ordered for him by
a power above his own.  The effect of this was to
increase his eager zest for life itself.  He lived excitedly,
hurrying continually, to see what would leap out at him
from behind the next corner.

Meantime, he was making money.  Within six months
all the bills were paid and he had more than a thousand
dollars in the bank.  Rose was out of the sanitarium and,
with Dick and Tayna, was housed in a cottage on the
slope of a hill in western San Francisco, where the setting
sun flashed its farewell upon the windows, and the wide
ocean rolled always in the distance.

John was beginning, too, to feel that the time had come
when he could go back to Bessie and tell her of his love.
The past seemed very far past indeed.  The memory of
those whirlwind hours of passionate attachment to Marien
Dounay was like a distorted dream of some drug-induced
slumber into which he had sunk but once, and from which
he had awakened forever.

Letters had passed frequently between himself and
Bessie.  On his part, these were carefully studied and
almost devoutly restrained in expression; but none the
less freighted in every line with the fervor of his growing
devotion to her.

On her part, the letters were as frankly and impulsively
rich with the essence of her own happy, effervescent self
as they had always been.  She had expressed a loyal
sympathy with him in the shattering of his stage career, but
had commended him for his renunciation, while through
the letter had run a note of relief, which led John to
discover for the first time that Bessie's concurrence in his
dramatic ambitions was never without misgivings.  True,
she had told him this once, but it was when he had been
too deaf to hear.  What pleased John most in this
correspondence was a pulse of happiness, quickening almost
from letter to letter, which the big man felt revealed her
perception of his growing love for her.

Perhaps it was this that put the past so far behind, that
made it seem as though his love for Bessie had always
been a part of his life, and the impulse to declare it a
legitimate ripening of fruit that had grown slowly towards
perfection.

In this mood a day was set when John would go to
Los Angeles to visit Bessie.  As the time approached, he
could think of nothing else.  On the morning of that
day, the evening of which was to mark his departure, he
was canvassing in Encina, a beautiful section of that urban
population of several hundred thousand people across the
Bay from San Francisco, the largest municipal unit of
which is the City of Oakland.  But thoughts of Bessie
crowding in, so filled the lover's mind with rosy clouds
that he had not enough of what salesmen call "closing
power."

As it happened, a tiny park was just at hand, two blocks
long and half a block wide, curved at the ends, dotted with
graceful palms, with tall, shapely, shiny-leaved acacias,
and covered with a thick sod of grass, laced at intervals by
curving walks.

Upon a bench in the very center of this park
Hampstead dropped down and gave himself up to blissful
meditations.  Across the street from him was a block of
happy-looking cottage homes, the homes of the great
middle-class folk of America, the one class that John knew well
and sympathetically, for he himself was of it.

On the corner directly before him was a grass-sodded
lot, larger than the others, holding in its center, not a
cottage, but a structure of the country schoolhouse type,
painted white, and with a small hooded vestibule out in
front.  Over the wide doors admitting to this vestibule
was a transom of glass, on which was painted in very plain
letters the words: CHRISTIAN CHAPEL.

"The house of God does not look so happy as the
homes of men hereabout," Hampstead remarked, and
just then was surprised out of his own thoughts by seeing
the door of the deserted looking chapel open and two men
come out.  One was tall and heavy, gray of moustache
and red of face, wearing a silk hat, a white necktie, and
a full frock coat.

"An ex-clergyman," voted Hampstead shrewdly, because,
aside from his dress, the man looked aggressively
unclerical.

The other was slender, with a black, dejected moustache
and also frock-coated, but the material of the garment was
gray instead of black, and the suit rubbed at the elbows
and bagged at the knees.  This man carried a small
satchel.

"Some sort of a missionary secretary, I'll bet you,"
was John's second venture at identification.

Another incongruous thing about the man with the
clerical dress was that he had a carpenter's hammer in his
hand.  Dropping this tool upon the wooden landing,
where it clattered loudly, he drew a key from his pocket
and locked the door, shaking it viciously to make sure that
it was fast.  Then, descending the steps, with the claw of
the hammer he pried loose a plank, some six or eight feet
long, from the wooden walk that ran across the sod to
the concrete pavement in front.  The missionary secretary
took one end of this, and the two raised it across the door,
where the ex-clergyman disclosed the fact that his bulging
left hand contained nails, as with swinging blows, he began
to cleat the door fast.

"Nailing up God!" commented John, whose mood had
become sardonic.

"What's the story, I wonder," he remarked next, and
rising, sauntered across the narrow street and up the
wooden walk, till he stopped with one foot on the lower
step, gazing casually, with mild curiosity expressed upon
his face.

The missionary secretary had noted John's advance and
appeared to recognize that his chance interest was
legitimate.

"A miserable, squabbling little church," the man
remarked, an expression of pain upon his face.  "A
disgrace to the communion.  I'm the District Evangelist.
I've had to step in from the outside and close it up, in
the interest of peace.  Brother Burbeck, here, is a leader
of one of the wings.  He has tried to bring peace in
vain."

"I have stood up for the Lord against the disturber,"
announced Brother Burbeck over his shoulder, while he
dealt a vicious blow, as if the head of the nail were instead
the head of the malefactor.

"And who was the disturber?" queried John.  "A
man of bad character, I suppose."

"No, you couldn't call him that, could you, Brother
Burbeck?" ventured the District Evangelist.  "Just a
young man from the Seminary, with his head overflowing
with undigested facts."

"Near facts, they was—*only*," interjected Brother
Burbeck sententiously, as he held another nail between a
hard thumb and a knotted finger, and tapped the head
gently to start it.

"Rather undermining the faith of the people in the old
Gospel," went on the Evangelist.

"Takin' away what he couldn't never put back,"
amended Brother Burbeck, between blows, and then added
accusingly: "He had no respect for the Elders, not
a bit."

Brother Burbeck's tones, as he contributed this
additional detail, were as sharp as his blows.

"You were one of the Elders?" inquired John, in an
even voice that might have been construed to mean
respect for the eldership.

"I am one of 'em," corrected the driver of nails.  "I
preached the old Jerusalem Gospel myself for twenty
years," he affirmed proudly, "until my health failed, and
I went into undertaking."

"You appear to have got your health back," observed
John dryly, noting marks of the hammer upon the plank
where the nail heads had been beaten almost out of sight
by his slashing blows.

"Yep," admitted that gentleman, just as dryly.

Looking at Elder Burbeck's large head, with its iron-gray
hair, at the silk hat, which stuck perilously, but
persistently, to the back of it; noticing the folds of oily flesh
on his bullock neck, the working of his broad, fat shoulders,
and the sweat standing out on his heavy jowls, as if
protesting mutely this unusual activity discharged with
such vehemence, John made up his mind that he could
never like Elder Burbeck.  In his heart he took the part
of the disturber.

"You know what this reminds me of, somehow?" he
asked, with just a minor note of accusation in his tone.

"Not being a mind reader, I don't," replied Elder
Burbeck, turning on John a look which showed as plainly as
his speech that in the same interval of time when John
was deciding he didn't like Burbeck, Burbeck was
deciding he didn't like John.  "What does it?" and the
Elder-undertaker stared fiercely at the book agent.

"Nailing Jesus to the Cross," replied John, shooting a
glance at Burbeck that was hard and beamlike.

"Hey!" exclaimed Burbeck, his red face reddening more.

"But," explained the Secretary, interjecting himself
anxiously, as a man not too proud of his duty that day,
"it is in the interests of peace.  We expect to give time a
chance to heal the wounds.  In six months the disturbing
element will have gone away or given up, and then we can
open the doors to peace and the old faith."

"Oh, I see," said John, as instinctively liking the
Missionary Secretary as he instinctively disliked Brother
Burbeck, "it is a movement in behalf of the *status quo*?"

"Yes," replied the Secretary, smiling faintly, as he
noticed the shaft of humor in John's eye.

"And Brother Burbeck?"  John twitched his chin in
the direction of the tipsy silk hat and the vehemently
swinging hammer.  "He is the apostle of the *status quo*?"

"Yes," assented the Missionary, smiling yet more
faintly, after which he countered with: "Are you a
Christian, my brother?"

"I was a Deacon in the First Church, Los Angeles,"
answered John, "but I've been traveling round for a year
or so.  Hampstead's my name."

The Secretary's face lighted with unexpected pleasure.

"How do you do, Brother Hampstead," he exclaimed,
putting out his hand quickly.  "My name's Harding."

"Glad to meet you, Brother Harding," said John; "I've
seen your name in the church papers."

"Brother Burbeck, this is Brother Hampstead, of the
First Church, Los Angeles," announced Harding, when
that gentleman, having driven his last nail and smashed
the plank a parting blow with his hammer, turned to them
again.

Elder Burbeck's manner instantly changed.  "Oh, one
of our brethren, eh, Hampstead?  Why, say, I remember
hearing you talk one night down there in Christian
Endeavor when I was down at the Undertakers' Convention.
They told me you were going on the stage.  That's how I
remember you so well, I guess."

"I got over that nonsense," said John easily.  "Sorry
to hear you've been having trouble in your little church."

"It's been a mighty sad case," sighed the Elder,
heaving his ponderous bosom and mopping his red brow and
scalp, for the removal of his hat revealed that his
iron-gray hair was only a fringe.

"By the way," asked John, who was contemplating the
bulletin board, "what about the Sunday school?  I see
it's down for nine forty-five."

"Dwindled to a handful of children," declared Burbeck,
as if a handful of children was something entirely
negligible.

John had a reason for feeling especially tender where
the feelings of children were concerned.

"But they'll come next Sunday, and they'll be terribly
disappointed," he urged.  "It will shake their faith in
God himself.  They won't understand at all, will they?"

"I reckon they will when they see the church nailed
up," answered Burbeck grimly, quite too triumphant over
spiking an enemy's guns to consider the mystified,
wondering soul of childhood as it might stand before that
nailed door four mornings forward from this, for the day
of the crucifixion of the door was Wednesday.

Their task completed, the Elder and the Evangelist
were turning toward the street.  "Good-by, Brother,"
said Harding, again shaking hands.

"Oh, good-by, Brother Hampstead," exclaimed Burbeck,
turning as if he had forgotten something, and offering
his stout, once sinewy palm.

John gave it a grip that shook the huge frame of Elder
Burbeck, and made him feel, as he seldom felt about any
man, that here was a personality and a physical force at
least as vigorous as his own.

"Good-by, Brother Burbeck," John responded, with an
open smile; and then while the two men took themselves
down the street in the direction of the car line, the
book-agent went back and sat contemplatively in the park.

It was a marvelously pleasant day.  A few fleecy clouds
were drifting overhead, revealing patches of the unrivaled
blue of California's sky above them.  The sun shone
warmly when the clouds were not in the way, and when
they were, the lazy breeze made its breath seem cooler
and more bracing, as if to compensate for the absence.
Down the street two or three blocks Hampstead could see
the Bay waters dancing in the sunlight.  The cottages on
both sides of the park were embowered with vines, roses
mostly, white roses and red, with here and there a giant
bougainvillea, some of its lavender, clusterlike flowers
abloom, and some of them still sealed in their transparent
pods that looked like envelopes of isinglass.

High in the blue an occasional pigeon circled; off to the
left a kite appeared, sailing high, and bounding vigorously
when the upper air currents freshened.

On John's own level, the world was faring onward
very happily.

About every cottage there was an air of nature's cheer
and a suggestion of blooming activity.  Only the little
church looked hopeless and abandoned of men, the letters
of its name staring out big-eyed and lonely from above the
glass transom, while the plank of the *status quo*, nailed
rudely across its front, was a brutal advertisement of its
dishonored state.

"Some day," mused John, "I think I'll build a church,
and I believe I'll build it to look like a cottage, with roses
round it and bougainvilleas and palms, with broad verandas,
inviting lawns, and bowering vines.  I'll make it the
most homey looking place in the whole neighborhood, with
a rustic sign stuck up somewhere that says 'The Home
of God', or something like that."

Still musing, the scornful words spoken to John by
Scofield more than a year ago on the steps of the Pacific
Union Club, came idling into his mind: "Remember!
You're not an actor!  You're a preacher."  He smiled
as he recalled Scofield's irritation at the idea, and his
own.  How ridiculously impossible it had seemed then
and seemed to-day!  And it was still so irritating as to
stir him into getting up and walking away from the little
chapel in the direction of the street car.  Yet his mind
reverted to the closed door.

"Won't they be disappointed, though?  Those children!"

At the corner he turned and looked back as if to make
sure.  Yes, there was the weather-worn streak upon the
door, at that reckless angle which proclaimed the mood of
the man who placed it there.

"And they nailed up God!" Hampstead commented
grimly, swinging upon his car.

That afternoon at five o'clock he left for Los Angeles.





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.. _`WHEN DREAMS COME TRUE`:

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   CHAPTER XVII


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   WHEN DREAMS COME TRUE

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It was three o'clock on Thursday afternoon, and John
was sitting happily in the Mitchell living-room in Los
Angeles, waiting for Bessie to come from school.  Mrs. Mitchell
stood on the threshold, dressed for the street save
for her gloves, at one of which she was tugging.

"I have always felt, Mr. Hampstead, that you were a
very good influence for Bessie," she was saying guilefully,
"and I do wish you would talk her out of that university
idea.  She graduates from High in June, you know; and
she talks nothing, thinks nothing, dreams nothing but
university, university, uni-v-e-r-s-i-t-y!"  Mrs. Mitchell's
elocutionary climax was calculated to convey a very fine
impression of utter weariness with the word and with the
idea; but John, who had flushed with gratification at the
crafty compliment, would not be swerved by either guile
or scorn from an instinctive loyalty to Bessie and her
ideals.

"I'm afraid I couldn't do that," he said soberly.  "My
heart wouldn't be in it.  Bessie has a wonderful mind.
You should give her every advantage."

"Well, talk her out of Stanford, then," compromised
Mrs. Mitchell, as if in her mind she had already
surrendered, as she knew she must.  "She's determined to go
there.  Stanford is a kind of man's school, from what I
hear.  Lots of the Phrosos are going to U.C."

"But if I rather favor Stanford myself?" suggested
Hampstead, feeling his way carefully.

The front door opened and closed, and John's heart
leaped at the sound of a light footstep in the hall.  As
if hearing voices, the owner of the footsteps turned them
towards the living room.

Book strap in hand, wearing a white shirt waist and
skirt of blue, with the brown crinkly hair breaking out
from under a small straw hat worn jauntily askew, Bessie
paused upon the threshold, her eyes a-sparkle with expectancy.

"John!" she exclaimed, with a little shriek of joy.
"You—you old dear!" and she came literally bounding
across the room to greet him as he rose and advanced
eagerly.

Hampstead thought he had never seen such a glowing
picture of animal health and exuberance of life.

"Well!" exclaimed Mrs. Mitchell, addressing her
daughter with chiding in her tones.  "Why don't you
throw your arms around him and be done with it?"

Bessie blushed, but John covered her confusion by
exclaiming:

"I almost did that myself, Mrs. Mitchell, I was so glad
to see her!"  Whereupon he laughed hilariously, it was
such a good joke; and Bessie laughed, turning her face
well away from her mother, while Mrs. Mitchell laughed
most heartily of all at the thought of John Hampstead
putting his arms around any woman, except, of course,
as he might have done in the practice of his late profession.

"And now," declared Mrs. Mitchell, as she managed
the last button of her glove, "I must abandon you to
yourselves; but don't sit here paying compliments.  Get out
into the air somewhere."

"Oh, let's," assented Bessie, with animation.  "Only
wait till I change my hat!"

"Don't," pleaded John.  "I like that one."

"But I have another you'll like better," called Bessie
over her shoulder, for already she was racing out of the
room past her mother.

"Good-by.  Have a good time!"  Mrs. Mitchell lifted
her voice toward her daughter racing up the stairs, and
then turning, waved her ridiculous folding sunshade at
John as she adjured: "Give her your very best advice!"

"Never doubt it," echoed John, with the sudden feeling
of a man who is left alone in a house to guard great
riches.

.. vspace:: 2

"How do you like it?"

Bessie had taken a whole half-hour to change her hat,
but her dress had been changed as well, to something white
and filmy that reached below the shoe-tops and by those
few inches of extra length added a surprising look of
maturity to the pliant youthfulness of her figure.  This
was heightened by a surplice effect in the bodice forming
a V, which accentuated the rounded fullness of the bosom
and gave a hint of the charm and power of a most
bewitching woman, ripening swiftly underneath the artless
beauty of the girl.

"Wonderful!" John exclaimed rapturously, rising as
she entered.

Bessie's mood was lightly happy.  His was deeply
reverent, and there was a world of devotion and tenderness
in the look he gave her, which thrilled through the
girl like an ecstasy.

All the past was coming up to John's mind, all the long
past of their friendship with its gradual ripening into
normal, all-comprehending love, but still he was searching
her uplifted face as if for a final confirmation of the
oneness of the vision of his love with this materialization of
youth and woman mingling; for he must make no mistake
this time.

Yes, the confirmation was complete.  It was the true
face of his dream.  In it was everything which he had
hoped to find there.  Marien Dounay had made woman
mean more to him than woman had ever meant before.
But here in the upturned, trusting face of Bessie, with
its sparkle in the eyes and its sunny witchery in the
dimples, there was something infinitely richer and more
satisfying than experience or imagination had been able
to suggest.

Here, he told himself reverently, was every blessing
that God had compounded for the happiness of man.  And
it was his,—modestly, trustfully his.  Every detail of
her expression and her beauty, every subtly playing
current of her personality, made him know it.  He had but
to declare himself and reach out and take her like a
lover.

But, strangely, he could do neither.  An awe was on
him.  He felt like falling down upon his knees and
thanking God, but not like taking her; not like touching her
even, though he could not resist that when Bessie extended
frankly both her hands, quite in the old manner of cordial,
happy comradeship.  John took them in his, and as she
returned his touch with the warm frank clasp that was
characteristic of her hearty nature, he got anew the sense
of the woman in her.  It swept over him like an intoxication
that was rare and wonderful, like no rapture he had
ever known before—half-spiritual but half wholly
human—therefore with something in it that frightened him.

"Bessie," he asked, abruptly, "could we get away from
here quickly—in a very few minutes—away from men
and houses and things?"

Bessie looked surprised.  "Of course; we're going out,
aren't we?"

"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 naïvely, "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.

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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.





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.. _`THE HOUSE DIVIDED`:

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   CHAPTER XVIII


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   THE HOUSE DIVIDED

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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.

.. _`"You nailed it up," rebutted John flatly.`:

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   :alt: "You nailed it up," rebutted John flatly.

   "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.





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.. _`HIS NEXT ADVENTURE`:

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   CHAPTER XIX


.. class:: center medium bold

   HIS NEXT ADVENTURE

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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!

.. vspace:: 2

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.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`A WOMAN WITH A WANT`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XX


.. class:: center medium bold

   A WOMAN WITH A WANT

.. vspace:: 2

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.

.. vspace:: 2

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.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`A CRY OF DISTRESS`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXI


.. class:: center medium bold

   A CRY OF DISTRESS

.. vspace:: 2

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 portières 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 portières, 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."

And there she stopped.  Her tone was as dry as ashes.
This man had surprised her by revealing a startling
amount of moral force, which had quickly and easily
broken down her coolly conceived purpose to make him
believe that his sense of hearing had played him false that
night in the restaurant.  She had, however, confessed
only to what she knew he knew; but the roused conscience
of the preacher of righteousness detected this and was not
to be evaded.  He proposed to confront this woman with
her sin.

"You confess only to the purpose?" John demanded
accusingly.

The glance of the woman fell before his blazing eye.
She had meant to answer boldly, triumphantly; but the
sudden fear that she might not be believed made her a
coward, and forced the realization that she must not
attempt to deceive this man in anything.

"Sometimes one says more than one is able to
perform," she whispered weakly.  "Sometimes a woman
names a price, and does not know what the price means,
and when the time of settlement comes, will not pay
it—cannot pay it—because there is something in her deeper,
more overruling than her own conscious will, something
that refuses to be betrayed!"  The last words were torn
out of her throat with desperate emphasis.

John sat watching the woman critically, with an all but
unfriendly eye, while she struggled over this utterance,
yet the very manner of it compelled him to believe in her
absolute sincerity at the moment.  Her revelation was
truthful, no doubt, but just what was she revealing?  The
substance was so contrary to his presumption that his
comprehension was slow.

"You mean," he began doubtfully—

Marien took instant courage in his doubt; he was
almost convinced.

"I mean," she exclaimed, leaping up with an expansive
gesture of her arms, while the jewels, like her eyes, blazed
with the intensity of her emotion: "*I mean that I never
paid the price!*"  Her voice broke into a wild crescendo
of laughter that was half delirious in its mingled triumph
and joy.  Hampstead himself arose involuntarily and
stood with a look first of amazement, and then almost of
anger, as he suddenly seized her wrists, holding them close
in his powerful grasp, while he demanded in tones hoarse
with a pleading that was in contrast to his manner:

"Marien, are you telling me the truth?"

The woman faced his searching gaze doubtfully for an
instant; then seeing that the man was actually anxious to
believe her, she swayed toward him, weakened by relief
and joy, as she cried impulsively:

"It is the truth!  It is the truth!  Oh, God knows it is
the truth!"

The fierceness of the minister's grip upon her wrists
instantly relaxed, and he lowered her gently to the cushions,
where she sat overcome by her emotions while he stood
gazing at her as on one brought back from the dead,
expressions of wonder and thanksgiving mingled upon his
face.

But presently a reminiscent look came into Marien's
eyes, and she began to speak rapidly, as if eager to confirm
her vindication by the summary of her experiences.

"It was hard, very hard," she began.  "It commenced
in that first careless, ignorant year I told you about.  I
was fighting it all the time; fighting it when you were with
me.  That was really why I broke out of Mowrey's
Company.  Men—such beasts of men!—proffered their
help continually, but not upon terms that I could accept.
It seemed, eventually, that I must surrender.  I taught
myself to think that some day, perhaps when I stood at
last upon the very threshold—" she paused and looked
over her shoulder at some unseen terror.  "But the time
never came.  I burst through the barriers ahead of my
pursuing fears."

The actress ceased to speak and sat breathing quickly,
as if from the effects of an exhausting chase.

Hampstead turned and walked to the window, where,
throwing up the sash, he stood filling his lungs deeply with
delicious, refreshing draughts of the outside air.  Coming
back, he halted before her to say in tones of earnest
conviction:

"Marien"—he had called her Marien!—"I feel as if
the burden of years had been removed.  Few things have
ever lain upon my heart with a more oppressive sense of
the awful than this vision of you, so beautiful and so
possessed of genius, consecrating yourself with such noble
devotion to a lofty, artistic aim, and yet prepared
to—to—"  His words faded to a horrified whisper, and
finding himself unable to conclude the sentence, he reached
down and took her hand in both of his, shaking it
emotionally while he was able presently to say reverently and
with unction:

"God has preserved you, Marien.  You owe Him
everything."

"It was you who preserved me," she amended, with
jealous emphasis and that look again of hungry devotion
which he had seen first in the church.  "It is you to whom
I owe everything."

"I preserved you?" Hampstead asked, now completely
mystified, as he remembered with what scornful words
and looks she had whipped him from her presence.  "I
do not understand.  We pass from mystery to mystery.
Is it that which you said you must tell me?"

"No.  I have told you what I wanted to tell you."

The woman was again entirely at her ease, shrugging
her beautiful shoulders and yawning lazily,—a carefully-staged
and cat-like yawn, in which she appeared for an
instant to show sharp teeth and claws, and then as
suddenly to bury them in velvet.

The minister stood gazing at her doubtfully.





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.. _`PURSUIT BEGINS`:

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   CHAPTER XXII


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   PURSUIT BEGINS

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Both recognized that the time had come to close the
interview, and each was extremely pleased with its
result.  Marien had demonstrated to her complete
satisfaction that this minister was still a man; that his flesh
was wax and would therefore melt.  She believed that
to-night she had seen it soften.

As for John: He believed that this evening had
witnessed a triumph for his tact and his moral force.  His
sympathy was wholly with the woman.  Convinced
afresh that there was something sublime in her
character, he determined to give her every opportunity to
reveal herself to him, and to spare no effort upon his
own account to redeem her life from that ingrowing
selfishness which he felt sure was making her unhappy now
and might ultimately rob her of all joy in its most
splendid achievements.

"I shall save three o'clock to-morrow for you," Miss
Dounay proposed, as if reading the minister's purpose
in his eye.

But John Hampstead was a man of many duties, whose
time was not easy to command.

"At three," he objected, "I am to address a mother's
meeting.

"At four then," Marien suggested, with an engaging
smile.

"At four I have to go with a sad-hearted man to see
his son in the county jail," John explained apologetically,
as he scanned his date book.

"At five!" persisted Marien, the smile giving way
before a shadow of impatience.

John laughed.

"It must seem funny to you," he declared, "but I
have an engagement at five-thirty which makes it
impossible to be here at five.  The engagement itself would
seem funnier still; but to me it is not funny—only one
of the tragedies into which my life is continually drawn.
At that hour I am to visit a poor woman who lives on a
house boat on the canal.  Monday is her husband's pay
day, and he invariably reaches home on that night
inflamed with liquor, and abuses the woman outrageously.
I have promised to be with her when he comes in.  I
may wait an hour, and I may wait half the night."

"Oh," gasped Marien, with a note of apprehension.
"And suppose he turns his violence on you?"

"Why, then I shall defend myself," John answered,
good-humoredly, "but without hurting Olaf."

"I am likely to spend the night on that canal boat,"
he added, "and in the morning Olaf will be ashamed
and perhaps penitent.  He may thank me and ask me
to meet him at the factory gate next Monday night and
walk home with him to make sure that his pay envelope
gets safely past the door of intervening saloons."

"But why so much concern about unimportant people
like that?" questioned Marien, her eyes big with
curiosity and wonder.

"Any person in need is important to me," confessed
John modestly.

"But how can you spare the time from the regular
work of the church?"

"That is my regular work."

Marien paused a moment as if baffled.

"But—but I thought a minister's work was to preach—so
eloquently that people will not get drunk; to pray,
so earnestly that God will make men strong enough to
resist temptation."

"But suppose," smiled John, "that I am God's
answer to prayer, his means of helping Olaf to resist
temptation.  That is the mission of my church, at least
that is my ideal for it; not a group of heaven-bound
joy-riders, but a life-saving crew.  There are twenty men
in my church who would meet Olaf at a word from me
and walk home with him every night till he felt able to
get by the swinging doors upon his own will."

Marien's eyes were shining with a new light.

"That is practical religion," she declared.

"Cut out the modifier," amended John.  "That *is*
religion!  There are," he went on, "even some in my
congregation who would take my watch upon the canal
boat; but I prefer to go myself because—"

"Because," Marien broke in suddenly, "because it
is dangerous."  Her glance was full of a new admiration
for the quiet-speaking man before her, in whose eyes
burned that light of almost fanatical ardor which she
and others had marked before.

"More because it is a delicate responsibility," the
minister amended once more.  "Tact that comes with
experience is essential, as well as strength."

"And do you do many things like that?" Marien
asked, deeply impressed.

"Each day is like a quilt of crazy patchwork," John
laughed, and then added earnestly: "You would
hardly believe the insight I get into lives of every sort
and at every stage of human experience, divorces,
quarrels, feuds, hatreds, crimes, loves, collapses of health or
character or finance—crises of one sort or another, that
make people lean heavily upon a man who is disinterestedly
and sympathetically helpful."

"And your reward for all this busybodying?" the
actress finally asked, at the same time forcing a laugh,
as if trying to make light of what had compelled her to
profound thought.

"A sufficient reward," answered John happily, "is
the grateful regard in which hundreds, and I think I may
even say thousands, of people throughout the city hold
me: this, and the ever-widening doors of opportunity
are my reward.  These things could lift poorer clay
than mine and temper it like steel.  The people lean upon
me.  I could never fail them, and they could never fail me."

The exalted confidence of the man, as he uttered these
last words, which were yet without egotism, suggested
the tapping of vast reservoirs of spiritual force, and as
before, this awed Marien a little; but it also aroused a
petty note in her nature, filling her with a jealousy like
that she had experienced in the church when she saw
John surrounded by all those people who seemed to take
possession of him so absolutely and with such disgusting
self-assurance.

Manoeuvering her features into something like a pout,
she asked mockingly:

"And since you would not leave your mother's
meeting and your jail-bird and your wife-beater for me, is
there any time at all when an all-seeing Providence
would send you again to the side of a lonely woman?"

The minister smiled at the irony, while scanning once
more the pages of his little date-book.  "To look in after
prayer meeting about nine-thirty on Wednesday night
would be my next opportunity, I should say," he reported
presently.

"Wednesday!" complained Marien.  "It is three
eternities away.  However," and her voice grew crisp
with decision, "Wednesday night it shall be.  In the
meantime, do you speak anywhere?  I shall attend the
mother's meeting, if you will tell me where it is.  I
shall even come to prayer meeting; and," she concluded
vivaciously; "you will be borne away by me triumphantly
in my new French car, which was sent out here
weeks and weeks ago to be tuned up and ready for my
coming."

On Wednesday night Miss Dounay made good her
word.  When the little prayer-meeting audience emerged
from the chapel room of All People's, it gazed
wonderingly at a huge black shape on wheels that rested at
the curb with two giant, fiery eyes staring into the night.

The old sexton, looking down from the open doorway,
saw his pastor shut into this luxurious equipage
with two strange women, for Marien was properly
accompanied by Julie, and nodded his head with emphatic
approval.

"Some errand of mercy," he mumbled with fervency.
"Brother Hampstead is the most helpful man in the
world."

Nor was this the last appearance of Marien Dounay's
shining motor-car before the door of All People's.  It
was seen also in front of the palm-surrounded cottage
on the bay front, where John Hampstead lived with his
sister, Rose, and the children, and enjoyed, at times,
some brief seclusion from his busy, pottering life of
general helpfulness.

Once the car even stopped before the home of the
Angel of the Chair, perhaps because Hampstead had told
Marien casually that of all women Mrs. Burbeck had
alone been consistently able to understand him, and the
actress wished to learn her secret.  But the Angel of the
Chair, while quite unabashed by the glamour of the
actress-presence, nevertheless refused entirely to be drawn
into talk about Brother Hampstead, who was usually the
most enthusiastic subject of her conversation.  Instead
she spent most of the time searching the depths of Miss
Dounay's baffling eyes with a look from her own
luminous orbs, half-apprehensive and half-appealing, that
made the caller exceedingly uncomfortable; so that
Marien would have accounted the visit fruitless and even
unpleasant, if she had not, while there, chanced to meet
the young man known to fortune and the social registers
as Rollo Charles Burbeck.

Rollo was the darling son of the Angel and the pride
of the Elder's heart.  Tall, blond, handsome, and
twenty-eight, endowed with his mother's charm of manner and
a certain mixture of the coarse practicality and instinct
for leadership which his father possessed, the young man
had come to look upon himself as a sort of favorite of
the fickle goddess for whom nothing could be expected
to fall out otherwise than well.  Without money and
without prestige, in fact, without much real ability, and
more because as a figure of a youth he was good to look
upon and possessed of smooth amiability, Rollie, as his
friends and his doting mother called him, had risen
through the lower rounds of the Amalgamated National
to be one of its assistant cashiers and a sort of social
handy-man to the president, very much in the sense that
this astute executive had political handy-men and
business handy-men in the capacity of directors,
vice-presidents, and even minor official positions in his bank.

But there were, nevertheless, some grains of sand in
the bearings of Rollo's spinning chariot wheels.

In his capacity as an Ambassador to the Courts of
Society, he had the privilege of leaving the bank quite
early in the afternoon, when his presence at some
daylight function might give pleasure to a hostess whose
wealth or influence made her favor of advantage to the
Amalgamated National.  He might sometimes place
himself and a motor-car at the disposal of a distinguished
visitor from outside the city, might dine this visitor and
wine him, might roll him far up the Piedmont Heights,
and spread before his eye that wonderful picture of
commercial and industrial life below, clasped on all sides by
the blue breast and the silvery, horn-like arms of the Bay
of San Francisco.

All these things, of course, involved expenditures of
money as well as time.  The bills for such expenditures
Rollo might take to the president of the bank, who wrote
upon them with his fat hand and a gold pencil,
"O.K.—J.M." after which they were paid and charged to a
certain account in the bank entitled: "Miscellaneous."  This,
not unnaturally, got Rollie, in the course of a
couple of years, into luxurious habits.  After eating a
seven-dollar dinner with the financial man of a Chicago
firm of bond dealers, it was not the easiest thing in the
world to content himself the next day with the fifty-cent
luncheon which his own salary permitted.  Furthermore,
Rollo, because of his standing at the bank and his social
gifts, was drawn into clubs, played at golf, or dawdled
in launches, yachts, or automobiles with young men of
idle mind who were able to toss out money like confetti.
It was inevitable that circumstances should arise under
which Rollo also had to toss, or look to himself like the
contemptible thing called "piker."  Consequently, he
frequently tossed more than he could afford, and
eventually more than he had.

To meet this drain upon resources the debonair youth
did not possess, Rollie resorted to undue fattening of his
expense accounts, but, when the amounts became too
large to be safely concealed by this means from the
scrutiny of J.M., he had dangerous recourse to misuse
of checks upon a certain trust fund of which he was the
custodian.  He did this reluctantly, it must be understood,
and was always appalled by the increasing size of
the deficit he was making.  He knew too that some day
there must come a reckoning, but against that inevitable
day several hopes were cherished.

One was that old J.M., brooding genius of the Amalgamated
National, might become appreciative and double
Rollie's salary.  Yet the heart of J.M. was traditionally
so hard that this hope was comparatively feeble.  In fact,
Rollie would have confessed himself that the lottery
ticket which he bought every week, and whereby he stood
to win fifteen thousand dollars, was a more solid one.
Besides this, hope had other resources.  There were, for
instance, the "ponies" which part of the year were
galloping at Emeryville, only a few miles away, and there
were other race tracks throughout the country, and pool
rooms conveniently at hand.  While Rollie was too timid
to lose any great sum at these, nevertheless they proved
a constant drain, and the only real asset of his almost
daily venturing was the doubtful one of the friendship
of "Spider" Welsh, the bookmaker.

Rollie's first test of this friendship was made
necessary by the receipt of a letter notifying him that the
executors of the estate which included the trust fund
he had been looting would call the next day at eleven for
a formal examination of the account.  Rollie at the
moment was more than fifteen hundred dollars short, and
getting shorter.  That night he went furtively through
an alley to the back room of the bookmaker.

"Let me have seventeen hundred, Spider, for three
days, and I'll give you my note for two thousand," he
whispered nervously.

"What security?" asked the Spider, craft and money-lust
swimming in his small, greenish-yellow eye.

"My signature's enough," said Rollie, bluffing weakly.

"Nothin' doin'," quoth the Spider decisively.

Cold sweat broke out on Rollie's brow faster than He
could wipe it off.

"I'll make it twenty-five hundred," the young man
said hoarsely.

Spider looked interested.  He leaned across the table,
his darting, peculiar glance shifting searchingly from
first one of Rollie's eyes to the other, his form half
crouching, his whole body alert, cruelty depicted on his
face and suggesting that his nickname was no accident
but a sure bit of underworld characterization.

"Make it three thousand, and I'll lay the money in
your hand," said the Spider coldly.

Rollie's case was desperate.  He drew a blank note
from his pocket, filled it, and signed it; then passed it
across the table.  But with the Spider's seventeen
hundred deep in his trousers pockets, the feeling that he had
been grossly taken advantage of seemed to demand of
Rollie that his manhood should assert itself.

"Spider, you are a thief!" he proclaimed truculently.

"I guess you must be one yourself, or you wouldn't
want seventeen hundred in such a hell of a hurry," was
Spider's cool rejoinder, as he practically shoved Rollie
out of his back door.

Now this retort of Spider's was quite a shock to
Rollie; but there are shocks and shocks.  Moreover, when
the executors upon their scheduled hour came to Rollo
Charles Burbeck, trustee, and found his accounts and
cash balancing to a cent, which was exactly as they
expected to find them, why this in itself was some
compensation for taking the back-talk even of a bookmaker.

But the next day Spider Welsh's roll was the fatter by
three thousand dollars, and the trust account was short
the same amount.

Thereafter, and despite good resolutions, the size of
the defalcation began immediately to grow again,
although Rollo, if he suffered much anxiety on that
account, concealed it admirably.  He knew that under the
system he was safe for the present, and outwardly he
moulted no single feather, but wore his well tailored
clothes with the same sleek distinction, and laughed,
chatted, and danced his way farther and farther into the
good graces of clambering society, partly sustained by
the hope that even though lotteries and horse races failed
him, and the "Old Man's" heart proved adamant, some
rich woman's tender fancy might fasten itself upon him,
and a wealthy marriage become the savior of his
imperiled fortunes.

It was while still in this state of being, but with that
semi-annual turning over of dead papers again only a
few weeks distant, Rollo was greatly amazed to blunder
into the presence of Marien Dounay in his mother's
sun-room at four o'clock one afternoon, when chance had
sent him home to don a yachting costume.  A little out
of touch with things at All People's, the young man's
surprise at finding Miss Dounay tête-à-tête with his own
mother was the greater by the fact that he knew a score
of ambitious matrons who were at the very time pulling
every string within their reach to get the actress on
exhibition as one of their social possessions.

Because young Burbeck's interest in women was by
the nature of his association with them largely
mercenary, and just now peculiarly so on account of his own
haunting embarrassment, he was rather impervious to the
physical charms of Miss Dounay herself.  He only saw
something brilliant, dazzling, convertible, and exerted
himself to impress her favorably, postponing the
departure upon his yachting trip dangerously it would seem,
had not the two got on so well together that the actress
offered to take him in her car to shorten his tardiness at
the yacht pier.

After this, acquaintance between the two young
people ripened swiftly.  Because John Hampstead was so
busy, Marien had an abundance of idle time upon her
hands.  Agitated continually by a cat-like restlessness,
seeking a satiety she was unable to find, the actress had
no objections to spending a great deal of this idle time
upon Rollo.  He rode with her in that swift-scudding,
smooth-spinning foreign car.  She sailed with him upon
the bay in a tiny cruising sloop that courtesy dubbed a
yacht.  More than once she entertained Rollie with one
of these delightful Bohemian suppers served in her hotel
suite, sometimes with other guests and sometimes
flatteringly alone.

Rollie enjoyed all of this, but without succumbing
seriously.  His spread of canvas was too small, he
carried too much of the lead of deep anxiety upon his
centerboard to keel far over under the breeze of her stiffest
blandishments; but all the while he held her acquaintance
as a treasured asset, introducing her to about-the-Bay
society with such calculating discrimination as to put
under lasting obligations to himself not only Mrs. von
Studdeford, his friend and patron, but certain other
carefully chosen mistresses of money.

As for Marien, her triumphs were still too recent, her
vanity was still too childish, not to extract considerable
enjoyment from being Exhibit "A" at the most
important social gatherings the community offered; but her
complacence was at all times modified by moods and
caprices.  She would disappoint Rollie's society friends
for the most unsubstantial reasons and appeared to think
her own whimsical change of purpose an entirely
sufficient explanation.  Sometimes she did not even bother
about an explanation, and her manner was haughty in
the extreme.

Her most vexatious trick of the kind was to disappear
one night five minutes before she was to have gone with
Rollie to be guest of honor at a dinner given by
Mrs. Ellsworth Harrington.  The hostess raged inconsolably,
taking her revenge on Rollie in words and looks which,
in her quarter, proclaimed thumbs down for long upon
that unfortunate, adventuring youth.

"Take me about nine hundred and ninety-nine years
to square myself with that double-chinned queen,"
muttered Rollie, standing at eleven o'clock of the same
night upon the corner opposite the Hotel St. Albans
and looking up inquisitively at the suite of Miss
Dounay, which was on the floor immediately beneath
the roof.

The young man's hat was pushed back so that his
forehead seemed almost high and, in addition to its
seeming, the brow wore a disconsolate frown.

"Looks as if I'd kind of lost my rabbit's foot," he
murmured, relaxing into a vernacular that neither
Mrs. Harrington, Mrs. von Studdeford, nor other ladies of
their class would have deemed it possible to flow from
the irreproachable lips of Rollo Charles Burbeck.  Yet
his friends should have been very indulgent with Rollie
to-night!  The world had grown suddenly hard for him.
The executors were due again to-morrow; and his deficit
had passed four thousand dollars.

So desperate was his plight that for an hour that
afternoon Rollie had actually thought of throwing himself
upon the mercy of Mrs. Ellsworth Harrington, who had
hundreds of thousands in her own right, and who might
have saved him with a scratch of the pen.  Her heart
had been really soft toward Rollie, too, but Marien's
caprice to-night had spoiled all chance of that.  Nothing
remained but the Spider.  Rollie had an appointment
with him in fifteen minutes.

But in the meantime he indulged a somber, irritated
curiosity concerning Miss Dounay.  Since staring
upward at her windows brought no satisfaction he had
recourse to the telephone booth in the hotel lobby, and got
the information that Miss Dounay was out but had left
word that if Mr. Burbeck called he was to be told he
was expected at ten-thirty and there would be other guests.

That meant supper, and a lively little time.  No doubt
the actress would try to make amends.  Well, Rollie
would most surely let her.  He had no intention of
quarreling with an asset, even though occasionally it turned
itself into a liability.  But it was now past ten-thirty,
ten forty-seven, to be exact, and his engagement with the
Spider was at eleven.  However, since his hostess was
still out, and therefore would be late at her own party,
his prospective tardiness gave the young man no concern.

But, on leaving the telephone booth and advancing
through the wide lobby of the hotel, young Burbeck was
surprised to see Miss Dounay's car driven up to the curb.
There she was, the beautiful devil!  Where could she
have been?  Yet, since Rollie's curiosity and his wish
for an explanation of her conduct were nothing like
so great as his desire to avoid meeting her until this
business with the Spider was off his mind, he executed an
oblique movement in the direction of the side exit; but
not until a shoulder-wise glance had revealed to him the
stalwart form of the Reverend John Hampstead emerging
first from the Dounay limousine.

"The preacher!" he muttered in disgusted tones, "I
thought so.  She's nuts on him; or he is on her, or
something.  Say!" and the young man came to an abrupt
stop, while his eyes opened widely, and his nostrils
sniffed the air as if he scented scandal.  "I wonder if
she tried the same line of stuff on the parson, and he's
falling for it?  It certainly would be tough on mother
if anything went wrong with her sky pilot."

However, Rollie's own exigencies were too great for
him to forget them long, even in contemplating the
prospective downfall of a popular idol, and he made his way
to his engagement.

Rollie was a long time with Spider.  Part of this
delay was due to the fact that the Spider was broke.  He
did not have forty-two hundred dollars, nor any
appreciable portion thereof.  Another part of the delay was
due to the fact that Spider took some time in elaborating
a plan to put both Rollie and himself in possession of
abundant funds.  The plan was grasped upon quickly,
but, being a detestable coward, Rollie halted long before
undertaking an enterprise that required the display of
nerve and daring under circumstances where failure
meant instant ruin.

However, there was at least a gambler's chance, while
with the executors to-morrow there was no chance.
Inevitably, therefore, the young man, white of face, with a
lump in his throat and a flutter in his breast, gripped
with his cold, nerveless hand the avaricious palm of
Spider, and the bargain was made.  Even then, however,
there was a stage wait while an emissary of the Spider's
went on a dive-scouring tour that in twenty minutes
turned up a short-haired, scar-nosed shadow of a man
who answered to the name of the "Red Lizard", a
designation which the fiery hue of his skin and the slimy
manner of the creature amply justified.

Once out of Spider's place, Rollie lingered in the alley
long enough to screw his scant courage to the place where
it would stick for a few hours at least; and at precisely
half-past eleven, looking his handsome, debonair self,
his open overcoat revealing him still in evening dress, and
with his silk hat self-confidently a-tilt, he sauntered
nonchalantly through the lobby of the Hotel St. Albans to
an elevator which bore him skyward.

The pride of the Elder and the son of the Angel, the
social ambassador of the Amalgamated National, was
prepared once more to do his duty by his fortune.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CAPRICIOUS WOMAN`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXIII


.. class:: center medium bold

   CAPRICIOUS WOMAN

.. vspace:: 2

With more than a month of odd hours invested upon
Marien Dounay, the Reverend John Hampstead had
reluctantly made up his mind that failure must be written
over his efforts in her behalf.

She had never told him the secret want which was
making her unhappy.  Her manner and her mood varied
from flights of ecstasy, bordering on intoxication of
spirit, to depths of depression which suggested that the
gifted woman was suffering from some sort of mania.
She was always eager to see him, always clamoring for
more of his time, and yet after the first week or so he
never left her presence without being made to feel that
her hours with him had been a disappointment.

To tell the truth, he had himself been greatly
disappointed in her.  She appeared to him altogether
frivolous, altogether worldly.  He was completely convinced
that she had not only toyed with him years ago, but was
toying with him now, although of course, in an entirely
different way.

For five days he had not seen her, but hating to give
up entirely, and finding himself one evening in the
vicinity of the Hotel St. Albans, he ventured to run in
upon her for a moment.  She was decked as if for an
evening party in a dress of gold and spangles, as
conspicuous for an excess of materials in the train as for an
utter absence of them about the arms and shoulders,
which, on this occasion, even the blaze of diamonds did
not redeem from a look of nakedness to the eyes of the
minister,—a mental reaction which any student of
psychology will recognize as ample evidence that John
Hampstead, man, had passed entirely beyond the power
of Marien Dounay, woman.

Miss Dounay received her caller with that low purr of
surprise and gladness which was characteristic, and
instantly proposed that they go out for a ride on the
foothill boulevard, and a dinner at the Three Points Inn.

While the minister had not planned to give her an
evening, this was one of the rare occasions when he had
leisure time at his disposal, and since he had resolved
to make one last effort to help the woman, he decided to
accept the invitation.

The evening, however, was not a success.  The
dinner was good, the roads were smooth, the night air was
balmy and full of a thousand perfumes from field and
garden; but Miss Dounay's mood, at first merry, sagged
lower and lower into a kind of sullen despair, in which
she reproached the minister bitterly for his failure to
understand her.

François, the chauffeur, had, by command of his mistress,
stopped the car on the curve of the hill, at a point
where the bright moon made faces as clear as day, and,
having climbed down as if to look the car over, they
heard his boot heels grow fainter and fainter on the
graveled road as he tactfully ambled off out of earshot.

Hampstead was still patient.

"I have been so earnest in my desire to help you," he
said, by way of broaching the subject again.

"You cannot help me," Marien snapped.  "Something
bars you.  Your church, your position, all these
foolish women who are in love with you, this whole
community which has made a 'property' god of you,—they
are to blame!  They stand between us.  They prevent
you from seeing what you ought to see.  They make you
blind.  You think you are humble.  It is a mock
humility.  Under its guise you hide a lofty egotism.
You think you are a preacher; you are not.  You are
still an actor, playing your part, and playing it so busily
that you have ceased to be genuine.  All this sentiment
which you display for the suffering and needy and
distressed is a worked-up sentiment.  It goes with the part
you play.  It makes you blind, false, hypocritical!"

"Miss Dounay!" exclaimed the minister sharply.

But beside herself with chagrin and disappointment,
the woman ran on with growing scorn, as she asked
sneeringly: "Do you not see that all this gaping
adoration is unreal?  That a touch would overthrow you?  A
single false step, and the newspapers which have made
you for the sake of a front-page holiday would have
another holiday, and a bigger one, in tearing you down?"

Hampstead gritted his teeth, but he could not have
stopped her.

"Can you imagine what would be the biggest news
story that could break to-morrow morning in Oakland?"
she persisted.  "It would be the fall of John
Hampstead.  Can't you see it?" she laughed derisively.
"Headlines a foot tall?  Can't you hear the newsboys
calling?  Can't you see the 'Sisters' whispering?  Can't
you see the gray heads bobbing?  The pulpit of All
People's declared vacant!  John Hampstead a by-word and
worse—a joke!  Can't you see it?"

Not unnaturally, the minister was angry.

"No," he said sharply, "and you will never see it,
for I shall not take that single false step of which you
speak."

"Oh, you really would not need to take it," sneered
the actress, with a sinister note in her voice, "a man in
your position need not fall.  He may only seem to fall."

It seemed to John that the woman was actually menacing him.

"François!" he called sharply.

The chauffeur's heels came clicking back from around
the turn, and in a silence, which upon Miss Dounay's
part might be described as fuming, and upon the minister's
as aggressively dignified, the couple were driven
back to the hotel, arriving in time for Rollie Burbeck to
emerge from the telephone booth, to observe the car,
and to avoid its occupants.

With almost an elaboration of scrupulous courtesy,
the minister helped Miss Dounay from the automobile,
walked with her to the elevator, and ascended to the
doorway of her apartment, where, extending his hand,
he said sadly, in tones of finality, but without a trace of
any other feeling than regretful sympathy: "I still
desire to befriend you as I may.  But I shall not be able
to come to you again."

To his surprise, Marien answered him with something
like a threat!

"It is I," she rejoined quickly, "who will come to
you.  I do not know how it is to happen yet, but I will
come, and when I do—if I am not much mistaken—you
will be happier to receive my call than you ever were to
receive one in all your life before!"

Again there was menace in her tone, and never had
she looked more imperiously regal than as she stood
holding the loop of her train in the left hand, the right
upon the knob of the door, the shimmering evening cloak
pushed back to reveal her gold and spangled figure,
standing arrow straight, while the dark eyes shot defiance.

Neither had she ever been guilty of a more studied
or effective bit of theatricalism than when, immediately
following this insinuating speech, the actress noiselessly
propelled the door inward, revealing the presence of a
group of men in evening dress posed about the room in
various attitudes of boredom.  As the door swung, these
men turned expectantly and with quick eyes photographed
the picture of the minister in the hall, his sober,
perplexed gaze set upon the figure of the beautiful woman,
whose features had instantly changed as she made her
entrance upon an entirely different drama.

"Ah, my neglected guests!" exclaimed the actress in
tones of mild self-reproach.  "You will forgive my not
being here to receive you, when you know the reason.
Doctor Hampstead has been showing me some of the
more interesting and unusual phases of that eccentric
parish work of his, over which you Oaklanders rave so
much.  And now, the dear good man was hesitating in
the hall at intruding upon our little party.  I have
insisted that he shall be one of us.  Am I not right,
gentlemen?"

Several of Miss Dounay's guests were well known to
Hampstead personally, and the readiness with which they
dragged him within attested to the clergyman's wide
popularity among quite different sorts of very much
worth-while persons, for, as a matter of fact, Miss
Dounay's guests were rather representative.  The group
included an editor, an associate justice of the Supreme
Court, a prominent merchant, a capitalist or two, and
other persons, either of achievement or position, to the
number of some eight or ten.

Their presence witnessed not only that Miss Dounay,
in her liking for a virile type of man, had made quick
and careful selection from those she had met during her
short stay in the city, but also testified to the readiness
with which this type responded to the Dounay personality.

That no other woman was present, and that the actress
should assume the entire responsibility of entertaining
so many gentlemen at one time, was entirely in
keeping with her particular kind of vanity and the situations
it was bound to create.

Standing in the center of the room, wearing that
expression of happy radiance which admiration invariably
brought to her face, her bare shoulders gleaming, her
jewels blazing, she rotated upon her heel till her train
wound up in a swirling eddy at her feet, out of which
she bloomed like some voluptuous flower, while a chorus
of "Oh's" and "Ah's" of laughing adulation followed
the revolution of her eyes about the circuit; for the guests
knew that to their hostess this little gathering was a play,
and their part was to enact a vigorously approving audience.

"Gentlemen," she proposed, "you are all in evening
dress; but I,"—and she shrugged her bewitching
shoulders naïvely,—"I have been in this gown for
ages—until I hate it.  Will you indulge me a little
longer?"  And she inclined her head in the direction of the red
portières through which she had gone that first night
to don the diamonds for Hampstead.

Of course the gentlemen excused her, and Miss Dounay
achieved another startling theatricalism by reappearing
in an astonishingly short time, offering the most
surprising contrast to her former self.  The yellow and
spangles were gone.  In their place was the simplest possible
gown of soft black velvet, with only a narrow band
passing over the shoulders and framing a bust like marble
for its whiteness against the black.  The dress was
entirely without ornament, presenting a supreme achievement
of the art of the modiste, in that it appeared not so
much to be a gown as a bolt of velvet, suddenly caught
up and draped to screen her figure chastely but
beautifully, at the same time it revealed and even emphasized
those swelling curves and long lines which lost themselves
elusively in the baffling pliancy of her remarkable
figure.  The hair was worn low upon the neck, and the
jewels which had blazed in her coiffure like a dazzling
crown were no longer in evidence.  With them had gone
the pendants from her ears, and that coruscating circlet
of diamonds from the neck, which was her chief pride
and most valuable single possession.  There was not even
a band of gold upon her arms, nor a ring upon her
tapering finger.  Hence what the admiring circle seemed to
see was not something brilliant because bedizened, but a
creature exquisite because genuine, a beauty depending
for its power solely upon nature's comeliness.

No woman with less beauty or less art, desiring to be
admired as Marien Dounay passionately did, could have
dared this contrast successfully.  No one who knew men
less thoroughly than she would have understood that for
a purely professional artist to attain this look of a
simple womanly woman was the greatest possible triumph,
stirring every instinct of admiration and of chivalry.

And whatever was at the back of the trick Miss Dounay
had played—and there was generally something back
of her caprices—in thrusting John Hampstead, with
whom she had practically quarreled, into this group of
guests, she appeared to forget him entirely in the
succession of whims, moods, and graces with which she
proceeded to their entertainment.

For one thing, she admitted them to the large room
which served as her boudoir, into which they had seen
her go in gold and spangles to emerge like a miracle in
demure black velvet.

Of course, there was an excuse for thus titillating the
curiosity of vigorous men with that lure of mysterious
enchantment which lurks in the boudoir of a lovely
woman, and the excuse was that the room, while
half-boudoir, was also half-studio, and held tables on which
were displayed the models of the stage sets and the
costumer's designs for Miss Dounay's coming London production.

As the actress had divined, the inspection of these
fascinating details of stagecraft interested her guests as
much as the display of them delighted her.

In the hour which ensued before the supper, a collation
that in its variety and substance again proved how
well the actress comprehended the appetite of the male,
two or three guests arrived tardily.  The earliest of these
to enter was Rollo Charles Burbeck, who came in ample
time to roam about the room of mystery at will with the
remainder of the guests.  Indeed, he stayed in it so much
that its enchantment for him might have been presumed
to be greater than for the others.

Before the supper, too, one of the guests craved the
liberty of departing.  This was the Reverend John
Hampstead.  The farewell of his hostess was gracious
and without the slightest reminiscence of anything
unpleasant, but he was prevented from more than
mentally congratulating himself upon the change in her
manner toward him by the fact that in walking some ten feet
from where he touched the fingers of his hostess to where
a butler-sort of person, borrowed from the hotel staff,
stood waiting with his overcoat, Doctor Hampstead came
face to face with Rollie Burbeck, who was just emerging
from the boudoir-studio with a disturbed look upon his
usually placid face, as if, for instance, he had seen a
ghost.

In consequence, the minister moved down the corridor
to the elevator, not pondering upon his own perplexities,
but thinking to himself, "I wonder now if that young
man is in any serious trouble.  It would break his
mother's heart—it would kill her if he were."





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.. _`THE DAY OF ALL DAYS`:

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   CHAPTER XXIV.


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE DAY OF ALL DAYS

.. vspace:: 2

Next morning Doctor Hampstead was up bright and
early, clad in his long study gown and walking, according
to custom, beneath his palm trees, while he reflected on
the duties of the day before him.  This was really the
day of all days for him, but he did not know it.

An unpleasant thought of Marien Dounay came impertinently
into mind, but he repressed it.  He had failed
with her.  A pity!  Yes; but his work was too big, too,
important, for him to permit it to be interfered with
longer by any individual.

Besides, there were with him this morning thoughts of
a totally different woman, whose life was as fresh and
beautiful as the dew-kissed flowers about him.  Five
years of unswerving devotion on his part had all but
wiped from her memory the admission of her lover which
had so hurt the trusting heart of Bessie.  That confiding
trust, the loss of which her pen had so eloquently
lamented, had grown again.  The very day was set.  In
four months John Hampstead would hold Bessie Mitchell
in his arms, and this time it seemed to him, more surely
than it had that day in the little summer house by the
tiny painted park in Los Angeles, that he would never,
never let her out of them.

In the midst of these reflections, a thud sounded on
the graveled walk at the minister's feet.  It was the
morning paper tightly rolled and whirled from the
unerring hand of a boy upon a flying bicycle.  The minister
waved his hand in response to a similar salute from the
grinning urchin, then turned and looked at the roll of
ink and paper speculatively.  That paper was the world
coming to sit down at breakfast with him, and tell him
what it had been doing in the past twenty-four hours.  It
had been doing some desperate things.  The wide strip
of mourning at the end of the bent cylinder, indicating
tall headlines, showed this.  The paper had come to him
to make confession of the world's sins.  This was right,
for he was one of the world's confessors.

But with this thought came another which had occurred
to him before.  This was that he had won his
confessor's gaberdine too cheaply.  He had gained his
position as a deputy saviour of mankind at too small a cost.
Sometimes he questioned if he were not yet to be made to
suffer—excruciatingly—supremely—if, for instance,
Bessie were not to be taken from him.  Yet he knew, as
he reflected somewhat morbidly to this effect, that such a
suffering would hardly be efficient.  It must be
something within himself, something volitional, a cup which
he might drink or refuse to drink.  The world's saviour
was not Simon of Cyrene, whom they compelled to bear
the cross, but the man from the north, who took up his
own cross.  True, Hampstead had thought on several
occasions that he was taking up a cross, but it proved
light each time, and turned into a crown either of public
or of private approbation.  Yet the cross was there, if
he had only known it, in the tall black headlines on the
paper rolled up and bent tightly and lying like a bomb at
his feet.

However, instead of picking up the paper, he strolled
out upon the sidewalk and down for a turn upon the
sea-wall.  The lately risen sun shot a ray across the eastern
hills, and the dancing waters played elfishly with its
beams, as if they had been ten thousand tiny mirrors.  A
fresh breeze was blowing, and as the minister filled his
lungs again and again with the wave-washed air, it
seemed as if a great access of strength were flowing into
his veins.  It flowed in and in until he felt himself
stronger than he had ever been before in his life.

With this feeling of strength, which was spiritual as
well as physical, came the desire to test it against
something big, bigger than he had ever faced before.  All
unconscious how weak his puny strength would be against
its demands, he lifted his arms towards the sky like a
sun-worshiper and prayed that the day before him might be
a great day.

Then leaving the sea-wall, the minister walked with
swinging, quite un-gownly strides up the sidewalk and
turned in between the green patches of lawn before his
own door, picking up the paper and unrolling it as he
mounted the porch.  On the step before the top one he
paused.  The black headline was before his eye.

"DOUNAY DIAMONDS STOLEN" was its screaming message.

The minister was quickly gutting the column of its
meaning, when a step upon the graveled walk behind
startled him into turning suddenly toward the street,
where between the polished red trunks of the palms and
under their spreading leaves which met overhead, he saw
framed the figure of Rollie Burbeck, halting uncertainly,
with pale, excited face.  This expression, indeed, was a
mere exaggeration of the very look Doctor Hampstead
had last seen upon it; but he did not immediately
connect the two.

"Your mother!" exclaimed the clergyman apprehensively,
for that precious life, always hanging by a thread
which any sudden shock might snap, was a constant
source of anxiety to those who loved the Angel of the
Chair.  "Something has happened to her?"

"No!  To me!" groaned the young man hoarsely,
hurrying forward as the minister stepped down to meet
him.

"Something awful!  Can I see you absolutely alone?"

"Why, certainly, Rollie," replied the minister with
ready sympathy.  "Come this way."

Hastily the minister led his caller around the side of
the wide, low-lying cottage to the outside entrance of his
study.

"Is that door locked?" asked Rollie, as, once inside
the room, he darted a frightened glance at the doorway
connecting with the rest of the house.

Although knowing himself to be safe from interruption,
the minister tactfully walked over and turned the
key.  He then locked the outer door as well, lowered the
long shade at the wide side window, and snapped on the
electric light.

"No eye and no ear can see or hear us now, save one,"
he said with sympathetic gravity.  "Sit down."

Rollie sat on the very edge of the Morris chair, his
elbows on the ends of its arms, while his head hung
forward with an expression of ghastliness upon the weakly
handsome features.

"You saw the paper?" he began.

The minister nodded.

"Here they are!" the young man gulped, the words
breaking out of him abruptly.  At the same time there
was a quick motion of his hand, and a rainbow flash from
his coat pocket to the blotter upon the desk, where the
circlet of diamonds coiled like a blazing serpent that
appeared to sway and writhe as each stone trembled from
the force with which Burbeck had rid himself of the
hateful touch.  The minister started back with shock and a
sudden sense of recollection.

"Oh, Rollie," he groaned, and then asked, as if
not quite able to believe his eyes: "You took them?"

"I—I stole them," the excited man half-whispered.

"Why?" questioned Hampstead, still wrestling with
his astonishment.

"Because I am short in my accounts," Rollie shuddered,
passing a despairing hand across his eyes.  "I
have to have money to-day, or I am ruined."

"But you could not turn these into money.  You must
have been beside yourself."

"No!" replied the excited man, with husky, explosive
utterance; "the scheme was all right.  Spider Welsh
was going to handle 'em for me.  We were to split four
ways.  But the Red Lizard fell down."

"The Red Lizard?" interrupted the minister; for he
knew the man who bore the suggestive title.

"Yes.  He was to hang a rope down from the cornice
on the roof of the hotel, opposite her window, so it would
look like an outside job, and he didn't do it.  I got the
diamonds easy enough—easier than I expected—you
know how that was, with all those people coming and
going in that room.  But I went to bed and couldn't sleep
for thinking about the rope.  I got up before daylight
and went down to see if it was there.  So help me
God, there's no rope swinging.  That makes it an inside
job; it puts it up to the guests.  By a process of
elimination, they'll come down to me.  I am ruined any way you
look at it, and the shock will kill mother!"

The minister studied the face of his caller critically.
Did he love his mother enough to greatly care on her
account, or was this merely an afterthought?

"What am I going to do?" the shaken Rollie gasped
hoarsely, his eyes fixing themselves in helpless appeal
upon the clergyman.

"The thing to do is clear," announced the minister
bluntly.  "Take these diamonds straight back to Miss
Dounay.  Tell her you stole them.  Throw yourself on
her mercy."

A sickly smile curled upon the young man's lip.

"Her mercy?" he repeated.  "Do you think that
woman has any mercy in her?  She has got the worst
disposition God ever gave a woman.  She would tear me
to pieces."

The young fellow again lifted a hand before his eyes,
shuddering and reeling as though he might faint.

With a feeling almost of contempt, Hampstead gripped
him by the shoulder and shook him sternly.

"Your situation calls for the exercise of some
manhood—if you have it," he said sharply.  "Tell me.
Why did you come here?"

"To get you to help me out!" the broken man murmured
helplessly, twisting his hat in his hands.  "That
was all.  I won't lie to you.  You've never turned
anybody down.  Don't turn me down!"

"It was on your mother's account?"

"No, I'm not as unselfish as that.  It's just myself.
I don't know what's the matter with me.  I've lost my
nerve.  I had it all right enough when I took 'em,
except for just a minute after; that's when I met you
going away, and with that damned uncanny way of yours
you dropped on that something was wrong.  But I had
my nerve all right; I had it till I got out there on the
street this morning and that rope wasn't swinging there
over the cornice.  Damn the Red Lizard!  All I ask is
to get out of this, and then to get him by the throat!"

Surely the man had recovered a portion of his nerve,
for at the thought of the failure of his partner in crime,
his face was suffused with rage, and his weak, writhing
hands became twisting talons that groped for the throat
of an imaginary Red Lizard.

At sight of this demonstration, Hampstead leaned back
in his chair, with the air of one whose interest is merely
pathological, observing the phenomena of a soul in the
throes of incurable illness.  His face was not even
sympathetic.

"You have come to the wrong place," he said briefly.

"You won't help me out?"

"Not in your state of mind—which is a mere
cowardice in defeat—mere rage at the failure of an
accomplice.  I should be accessory after the crime."

"Not even to save my mother?" whined the wilted man.

"I should be doing your mother no kindness to
confirm her son in crime."

Young Burbeck sat silent and baffled, yet somehow
shocked into vigorous thought by the notion that he had
encountered something hard, a man with a substratum
of moral principle that was like immovable rock.

For a moment the culprit's eyes wandered helplessly
about the room and then returned to the rugged face of
the minister, with so much of gentleness and so much of
strength upon it.  Looking at the man thus, Rollie had a
sudden, envious wish for his power.  This man had a
strength of character that was enormous and Gibraltar-like.

"You can help me if you will!" he broke out wretchedly,
straining and twisting his neck like a man battling
with suffocation.

"Yes," said the minister quietly, his eyes searching to
the fellow's very soul, "I can—if you will let me."

"Let you?" and a hysterical smile framed itself on
the young man's face.  "My God, I will do anything."

"It's something you must *be*, rather than do," explained
the physician to sick souls, once more deeply
sympathetic, and leaning forward, he continued significantly:
"I want to help you, not for your mother's sake, nor
your father's, but for your own whenever you are ready
to receive help upon proper terms.  You have come here
seeking a way out.  There is no way out, but there is a
*way up*!"

The cowering man shook his head hopelessly.  He
had not courage enough even to survey a moral height.

For a moment the minister studied his visitor thoughtfully,
wondering what could make him see his guilt as he
ought to see it; then abruptly he drew close and began to
talk in a low, confidential tone.  Almost before the
surprised Rollie could understand what was taking place,
the Reverend John Hampstead, to whom he had come
to confess, was confessing to him; this man, whom he
had thought so strong, was telling the story of a young
girl's love for him; of his weak infatuation for another
woman, of the heart-aches that half-unconscious breach
of trust had occasioned him, and worst of all, the pangs
it had cost the innocent girl who loved him and believed
in his integrity with all her impressionable heart.

There was a moisture in the minister's eye as he
concluded his story, and there was a fresh mist in Rollie's
as he listened.

But the clergyman passed on immediately from this to
tell modestly how, when the death of Langham had
imposed the lives of Dick and Tayna on him like a trust, he
had been true to it, although at the cost of his great
ambition; but that afterward this surrender had brought
him all the happiness of his present life as pastor of
All People's, while the hope of winning that first love
back had been given to him again.

"And so," Hampstead concluded, "to be disloyal to
a trust has come to seem to me the worst of all crimes;
while to be true to one's obligations appears to me as
the highest virtue.  In fact, the whole active part of my
creed could be summed up pretty well in this little idea
of trust.

"Trust is almost the highest thing in life.  It is the
cement of civilization.  Trust is the very foundation of
banking.  You believe in banking, don't you?  In the
principle?  The idea that hundreds of people trust some
banker with their surplus funds, and he puts those funds
at the service of the community as a whole through
loaning them to persons who redeposit them, to be reloaned
and redeposited again, so that the bank, a bundle of
individual trusts of rich and poor, becomes one of the
fulcrums upon which civilization turns?"

Burbeck listened rather dazed.  "I never thought of
the principle," he faltered after a minute, "I thought of
it as a job."

"Well, you see the point, don't you?  It's rather a
high calling to be a banker.  Now in this case the dead
man whose fund you have looted trusted the bank; the
bank has trusted you, and you have stolen from the
bank.  Miss Dounay has trusted you, and you have
stolen her diamonds.  You see at what I am getting?"

Hampstead paused and glanced penetratingly into the
face of Rollie, who had been a little swept out of
himself, as much in wonder at the new insight into the life
of the minister as at the convincing clarity of the lesson
conveyed.

"Yes," he replied thoughtfully and with an air of
conviction, "that I am not to think of myself as merely
a thief, but as something worse,—as a traitor to many
sacred trusts."

"Exactly," exclaimed the minister with satisfaction
at the sign of moral perception growing.  "To shield a
thief from exposure is possibly criminal.  To help a man
repair the breaches of his trust, to put him in the way of
never breaking another trust as long as he lives, that is
the true work of the ministry.  If it is for that you want
help, Rollie, you have come to the right place."

"I did not come for that," admitted the young fellow,
strangely able to view himself objectively as a sadly
dispiriting spectacle.  "I came, as you said, in
cowardice, because I didn't know which way to turn,
desiring only to find a way out.  Somehow, I felt myself a
victim.  You make me see myself a crook.  I came
here feeling sorry for myself.  You make me hate
myself.  You make me want to be worthy of trust.  You
give me hope.  I have a feeling I never had before, that
I am not much of a man, that I am not equal to a man's
job.  But tell me what I must do to repair the breaches
in my trust, and let me see if I think I can do them."

Burbeck's manner had become calmer, and something
of the grayness of despair had left his face, but now at
the recurrence of all his perplexities, he presented again
the picture of a man cowering beneath a mountain that
threatened to fall upon him.

"First of all, you must go back to Miss Dounay with
her diamonds," prescribed the minister seriously.  "If
you have not manhood enough to face her with your
confession, I do not see the slightest hope for your
character's rehabilitation."

"But the executors!" exclaimed Rollie, with the sense
of danger still greater than his sense of guilt.  "They
will be checking me up at eleven.  I've got to cover the
shortage, or I'm lost.  J.M. would be more terrible than
Miss Dounay.  It would not be vengeance with him.
He'd send me to San Quentin, entirely without feeling,
just as a matter of cold duty.  He'd shake hands and
tell me to look in when I got out.  That's J.M."

"Yes, I think it is," said the minister, pausing for a
moment of thought.  His body was balanced and rocking
gently in the swivel chair, his hands were held before
him, the tips of the thumb and fingers of the right hand
just touching the tips of the thumb and fingers of the
left hand and making a rudely elliptical basket into which
he was looking as if for inspiration.

Rollie, waiting,—hoping, without knowing what to
hope,—had begun to study Hampstead's face with a
respectful interest he had never felt before.  He noticed
the dark shadows beneath the gray eyes, and that lines
were beginning to seam the brow, while just now the
broad shoulders had a bent look.  For the first time it
occurred to him that Hampstead's work might be hard
work, and he began to feel a kind of reverence for a
man who would work so hard for other people, and to
reflect that it was noble thus to expend one's energies,—noble
to be true to trusts of any sort.  It was admirable.
It was worthy of emulation.  A sudden envy of Hampstead's
character seized him, and he began, in the midst
of his own distress, to think how one proceeded to get
such a character.  By the simple process of being true to
trusts, the minister had suggested.  But this seemed rather
hopeless for Rollie.  His chance had gone—unless!
His mind halted and fastened its hope desperately to this
grave, silent, meditative face.

The minister was considering very delicate questions:
trying to decide how much weight the slender
moral backbone of this softling could carry, asking
whether by leaning upon the side of mercy, by taking
some very serious responsibility upon himself, he might
not shelter him from the consequences of his crime while
a new character was grown.

But such questions are not definitely answerable in
advance, and it was neither Hampstead's usual
magnanimity nor his leaning toward mercy, but his moral
enthusiasm for the rehabilitation of lost character that
impelled him to take a chance in his decision.

"When do you say they will be upon your books?"
he asked abruptly.

"Before twelve, sure; by eleven, probably," was
Rollie's quick, nervous answer.

"And how much is your defalcation?"

"Forty-two hundred," sighed Rollie.

"The expedient is almost doubtful," announced the
minister solemnly, and with evident reluctance; "and I
do not say that the time will not come—when you are
stronger, perhaps—when you must tell Mr. Manton that
you were once a defaulter; but that bridge we will not
cross this morning, and in the meantime, I will let you
have the money to cover your shortage."

"Brother Hampstead!" gulped Rollie, reaching out
both hands, while his soul leaped in gratitude.  It was
also the first time he had ever called Hampstead
"Brother" except in derision.

The minister waved away this demonstration with a
gesture of self-deprecation, and a smile that was almost
as sweet as a woman's lighted up his face, while he took
from a drawer of his desk a small, flat key, familiar to
Rollie because he had seen it before, and many others
resembling it.

"Here," said Hampstead, "is the key to my safe
deposit box in the Amalgamated National vault.  In that
box is eleven hundred dollars.  It is not my money, but
was provided by a friend for use in a contingency which
has not arisen.  I feel at perfect liberty to use it for this
emergency.  As you will remember, there is already on
file with the vault-room custodian my signed authorization
for you to visit the box, because you have served as
my messenger before.  You will be able, therefore, to
gain unquestioned access to it the minute the vaults are
open, which as you know is nine o'clock.  Take the
envelope marked 'Wadham currency.'  In the meantime I
will go to a friend or two, and within thirty minutes after
the bank's doors open, I will bring you another envelope
containing thirty-one hundred dollars."

Rollie listened as a condemned man upon a scaffold
listens to the reading of his reprieve.

"How can I thank you?" he croaked finally, clutching
at the minister's hand.

"You don't thank me," adjured Hampstead, towering
and strong, while he gripped the pulseless palm of
Burbeck.  "Don't thank me!  Do your part; that's all."

Rollie clung to the strong hand uncertainly for a few
seconds until he himself felt stronger, when his face
seemed to lighten somewhat.

"You have a wonderful way with you, Doctor Hampstead,"
he exclaimed.  "You have put conscience into me
this morning—and courage."

"Both are important," smiled the minister.

At this moment, Rollie, who was beginning to recover
his presence of mind, did one of those innocent things
which thereafter played so important a part in the
tragical chain of complications which followed from this
interview.  The act itself was no more than to select from
a small tray of rubber bands upon the study desk, the only
red one which happened to be there, and to snap it with
several twists about the neck of the vault-box key,
remarking as he did so:

"For ready identification.  There are sometimes
several of these keys in my possession at once."

The minister nodded approvingly.  "I suppose," he
commented, "other people make use of you as a
messenger to their boxes."

"Half a dozen of the women have that habit," the
young man observed.

"Trusted!" exclaimed the minister impulsively, laying
a cordial hand upon the young man's shoulder.
"You have been greatly trusted.  It is a rare privilege,
isn't it?"

Rollie nodded thoughtfully.

"And these?" questioned Doctor Hampstead, motioning
to where the diamond necklace curled, appearing to
Rollie less like a serpent now and more like a strangler's
knot.

"I'm afraid of them," said the young man with a
shudder.  "Couldn't—couldn't you take them back to
her and tell the story?"

The clergyman shook his head solemnly.

"I cannot confess your sins for you," he averred.  "If
you are not man enough for that, we might as well stop
before we begin."

Hampstead's tone was final.

"You are right," admitted Burbeck, in tones of
conviction; "you are right."

But still he could not bring himself to touch the
diamonds, and stood gazing as if charmed by the evil spell
they wrought.  Sensing this, the minister took up from
his desk a long envelope which bore his name and address
in the corner, opened it, lifted the sparkling string
by one end, dropped it inside, moistened the flap, sealed
it, and handed it to Burbeck.

"There," he exclaimed, "you don't even have to touch
them again.  Go straight to her hotel."

"Oh, but I cannot," exclaimed Rollie, apprehension
trembling in his tones.  "I shall not dare to leave the
bank until the shortage is covered.  The executors might
come in ahead of time, and I must be there to stall them
off, if necessary.  But I might telephone to Miss Dounay."

"Telephones are leaky instruments," objected Hampstead,
with a shake of his head.

"Or send her a note," suggested Burbeck.

"Notes miscarry," controverted the minister sagaciously,
"and they do not always die when their mission
is accomplished.  Since you are taking my advice, I
would say summon all your self-control, contain your
secret in patience during the hours you must wait until
your shortage is made good, and you can leave the bank
to see Miss Dounay in person.  You must do your part
entirely alone, for my lips are sealed."

"Sealed?" questioned Rollie, not quite comprehending.

"Yes, the secret is your own.  Think of your
confession as made to God!"

"You mean that you would never tell on me, no matter
what happened?"

"Just that.  The liberty is not mine.  I can only expect
you to be true to your trust as I am true as a minister
to mine."

This was an idea Rollie could not grasp readily.  It
was taking away a prop upon which he had meant to
lean.

"But," he argued, "you make it possible for me to
take your money and that of your friends and keep it,
if you don't have some kind of a club over me."

"Exactly," replied the minister.  "I want no club
over you, Rollie.  You must be a free agent, or else I
have not really trusted you.  Your right action would
mean nothing if compulsory.  You must be true to your
trust from some inner spiritual motive."

But Rollie was still groping.  "And if I should, for
instance, steal the money you give me?"

"You would know it, and I, and one other," replied
the minister, raising his eyes devoutly.

Rollie swept his hand across his face slowly, with a
gesture of bewilderment.  This minister was taking him
to higher and higher ground.  He began to feel as if
he had been led up to some transfiguring mountain peak
of moral eminence.

"It is the highest appeal which could be made to the
honor of another," he breathed in tones approaching awe.

"Exactly," declared Hampstead again with that air
of finality, "and if I should fail to be true to my part
of the trust, what has passed between us this morning
has been the mere compounding of a felony and not the
act of a priest of God looking to the regeneration of a
soul."

In a wordless interval, Rollie Burbeck pressed the
minister's hand once more and departed, his face still
wearing a veiled expression as if he had not quite caught
the import of all that had been said.

But neither, for that matter, had the minister;
although he was never surer of himself than now, when he
ushered his guest out of the side door with a cheery,
courage-giving smile, and hastened in to his greatly
delayed breakfast.

With a thoughtful air and a feeling of intense satisfaction
in his breast, he unfolded his napkin, broke his
egg, and sipped his coffee, still with no suspicion that this
was the day of all days for him, or that he had just sawed
and hammered the cross which might make his title clear
to saviourhood.





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.. _`HIS BRIGHT IDEA`:

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   CHAPTER XXV


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   HIS BRIGHT IDEA

.. vspace:: 2

Young Burbeck's desk at the Amalgamated National
was in an open space behind a marble counter.  About
him in the same open space were desks of two other
assistant cashiers.  Back of these were the private offices
of the cashier, the president and the vice-president, as
well as one or two reception rooms.  Beyond the marble
counter was a broad public aisle, on the farther side of
which the tellers and bookkeepers worked, screened by
the usual wire and glass.  The safe deposit vaults were
in the basement and reached by a stairway from the open
lobby on the first floor.

Hurrying from the minister's house, Burbeck reached
his desk at ten minutes before the hour of nine.  This
left him ten minutes of waiting before he could get the
eleven hundred dollars of the Wadham currency; and
waiting was the very hardest thing he could do under the
circumstances.  He was the first of the assistant cashiers
to arrive, but the cashier, Parma, heavy-jowled, with
dark wall eyes, was visible through the open door of his
office, checking over some of the auditor's sheets with a
gold pencil in his pudgy hand.  His thick shoulders and
broad, unresponsive back somehow threw a chill of
apprehension into Rollie.  What brought that old owl
down here at this time of the morning, he wondered.

The colored porter, resplendent in his uniform of gray
and brass, advanced with obsequious courtesy and
proffered a copy of the morning paper.  Rollie snatched at
it with a sense of relief, but the relief was only
momentary.  There was the hateful headline again.  It
had been hours, days, weeks since he saw that headline
first, while standing on the street and looking up for the
rope that was to be swinging over the cornice of the
Hotel St. Albans.  Couldn't they get something else for
a headline?  Why, of course not.  The paper had been
on the street but three hours.  That headline must hold
sway till the noon edition.  Besides, it was a good headline.

Rollie grasped the paper firmly with both hands, threw
his head back, and pretended to read; but he was not
reading.  He was looking to see if his hands trembled.
Unmistakably they did.  They trembled so the paper
rattled as if it were having a chill.  But pshaw!  There
was really little to read anyway, beyond the headline.
The news had come in too late to make a story for the
morning papers.  It only said that Miss Dounay had
been entertaining some friends and on retiring at
half-past two had chanced to notice that her diamond
necklace was missing.  A search failed to reveal it in the
apartment.  She at once notified the police.  That was
all.  No word as to who was present, who was
suspected, whether a guest, or a servant, or a burglar, or
whether any clue had been discovered.  There had been
no time for that.  That would be the story for the
afternoon papers.  They would find out all about Miss
Dounay's movements the night before, and all about her
party, and who was present.  They would interview each
guest, and get a statement from him.  They would be
sure to interview John Hampstead.  Rollie had a sudden
feeling of security as he thought of their investigating
Hampstead.  It was amazing what a rocklike confidence
a man could feel in Hampstead.

But they would also interview him—Rollie Burbeck.
Because he was so readily accessible, they would
interview him first.  What would he tell them?  How would
he bear himself?  Would his voice tremble when he tried
to talk, as now his hands trembled when he tried to hold
the newspaper?

At this very moment the diamonds were in his inside
coat pocket.  Could he receive the reporters with his
usual urbanity, sit smiling nonchalantly, and recite the
incidents of the evening, suggest theories and clues,
express his righteous indignation at the crime,—all with
that envelope and its contents rustling under every
movement of his arm?  Could he?

To the young man's tortured imagination, the necklace
became again a serpent.  He could feel it crawling
there over his heart, could hear it hissing and rattling
as if about to strike.  Then it ceased to be a serpent, and
was a nest of birds.  He knew that every time a
reporter asked a question, one of those birds would stretch
its wings and call "Cuckoo."

There!  It said "Cuckoo" just then.  Was the bank
haunted?  Rollie looked up frightened.  Cold sweat was
on his brow.  Not his hands alone but his whole body
trembled.  He was really in a very bad way.  Could
a man have delirium tremens, just from fright?  Rollie
didn't know, but if a reporter came in just then, he was
sure that he would take out the diamonds and hurl them
at the news gatherer.

Speaking of delirium tremens, he wished he had a good
stiff highball.  He must slip out presently long enough
to get one.  Worse than reporters would be coming
round, too.  Detectives would come.  Chief of detectives
Benson might come in person.  Rollie disliked Benson
and mistrusted him.  Benson went on the theory that
it takes a crook to catch a crook!  When it came to
inducing a crook to talk, he was a very handy man with a
club.  Benson would at once scour the pool rooms and
hop joints.  Suppose he got the Red Lizard in the
dragnet.  Suppose he hit the Red Lizard a clip or two with
that small, ugly billy that was generally in Benson's
pocket when he went to the sweat room; or suppose he
kept Red's 'hop' away from him for a few hours?
Or suppose Benson happened to know in that uncanny
way of his that he, Rollie, had done business with Spider
Welsh?  He might just walk into the bank and search
Rollie on suspicion.  And Rollie would have to submit,
would have to seem to invite him, almost.  His teeth
were chattering at the thought.

Discovery—disgrace—conviction—ruin—that was
the sequence of the ideas.  Stripes!  Ugh!  Just when
the way out, "the way up," was opening to him, too.
Discovery, now that a moral hope was gleaming, would
be infinitely more terrible than an hour ago, when he was
only a rat burrowing from a terrier.

He tried to shake himself together.  He must brace
up and play the game with a cool head, or he could not
play it at all.  One thing was clear.  The diamonds must
be got out of his possession temporarily.  But where
should he put them?  In his desk?  Anywhere about the
bank?  Benson would find them if he started a search,
and if Benson didn't search, some one in the bank might
stumble upon them accidentally, and then the cat would
be out of the bag for fair.

There was a police whistle now!  The agitated young
man looked about, startled, and then laughed at himself.
It was not a police whistle at all.  It was the first clear,
bell-like note of the bank clock, beginning the stroke of
nine.

With a sensation of relief that for a few minutes
waiting was over and there was occupation for mind and
body, Rollie took the minister's key and strolled in the
most casual manner he could command down to the vault
room.

"Doctor Hampstead's box," he announced, exhibiting
his key.  The vault clerk turned to his card index as a
mere matter of form, for he remembered well enough
Rollie's authorization, and read upon the card of the
Reverend John Hampstead his signed permission for
Rollo Charles Burbeck to do with his box "as I might or
could do if personally present."  The clerk stepped inside
the vault, scanned the numbers and tiers, and thrust his
master-key into the proper lock.  Rollie slipped the
minister's key into its own place, turned it, and the door
flew open.  The vault clerk returned to his stand outside
the door.  Rollie took the box and walked into one of
the private rooms provided for the safe deposit patrons.
In a moment he was ripping open the envelope marked
"Wadham Currency", which he found exactly as the
minister had described it.

At sight and feeling of the money in his fingers, a
great wave of hope surged over Rollie.  It was a solid
assurance of escape.  With this assurance, there came
to the young man a sharp, definite impulse to begin at
once the work of character building.  As an initial step,
he wrote upon one of his personal cards: "I.O.U. $1,100,"
and signed it, not with his initials, but boldly
in vigorous chirography, to express the stoutness of his
purpose, with the whole of his name, "Rollo Charles
Burbeck."  When putting this card carefully back in the
envelope from which he had extracted the currency, and
placing the envelope on the top of the papers in the box,
the young man experienced a fine glow of satisfaction.
He had done a good and honorable act in this bold
assumption of his debt and in thus leaving the written
record there behind him.

But when Rollie took up the currency from the table
and slipped the long, thin package into his inside pocket,
his fingers came in contact with that other envelope, the
presence of which, under the strain of what he must go
through this morning, threatened to break down his nerve
completely.

With the preacher's box lying there open before him,
came a sudden inspiration.  What safer place for the
Dounay jewels than in it?  Doctor Hampstead's
character put him absolutely above suspicion.  He was the
one guest at the supper before whose door no process
of elimination would ever halt to point the finger of
suspicion.  His box, at the moment, was the safest place in
the world for the Dounay diamonds.

Rollie was all alone in the closed room.  No glance
could possibly rest on him; yet, as furtively as if a
thousand eyes were peering, he slipped the envelope containing
the diamonds from his pocket into the box and heaved
a sigh of relief when he saw the lid cover the package
from his sight.  Returning to the vault room, he locked
the box in its chamber and went upstairs to his desk in
quite his usual debonair manner.

With a new feeling of confidence which made him bold
and precise in all his movements, Rollie laid the safe
deposit key, with its innocent little red rubber band about
it, exactly in the center of the blotter upon his desk, where
it might be every moment under his eye.  Then, in the
most casual way in the world, he pinned a penciled note
to the stack of bills representing the "Wadham
currency" and sent it by one of the bank messengers across
the wide aisle to a receiving teller's cage.  When it
arrived, the gap in his financial fences had narrowed to
thirty-one hundred dollars.  This lessening of the breach
increased his self-control and strengthened his resolution.
He had only to wait now until the minister appeared with
the additional currency, and then at the first opportunity
he would slip down to the vault, get the diamonds, and
go straight to Miss Dounay.

And in the meantime his premonition that reporters
would lean heavily upon him for information about the
actress's supper party proved correct.  When he talked
to these reporters, Rollie noticed that it gave him a fresh
sense of security to let his eye turn occasionally to where
the little flat key with the red band about it lay upon his
desk, lay, and almost laughed.  It was really such a
good joke to think where the diamonds were.

What made this joke better was that each reporter
shrewdly inquired whether Rollie thought the diamonds
had actually been stolen, or whether this might not be
the familiar device of dramatic press agents.  Begging
in each instance that he be not quoted, Rollie admitted
that of course the whole affair might be no more than the
latter.

Yet after the reporters had gone, Rollie wished he had
not done this.  It was clever, but it was not just to the
woman to whom he was going to make his first exhibition
of new character by returning her jewels and making a
plea for mercy.  That was not going to be an easy
job—that confession?  Besides, everything depended on
whether she would grant his plea or not.  Ruin stared
again at this angle; for Miss Dounay might hand him
over to Benson.  Once more he had that distasteful
vision of a chalky head and a suit of stripes.  The
thought produced a physical sensation as if his whole
body were being stung by nettles.

But here came a big man down the aisle, his features
expressing grave consideration, and his gray eyes
twinkling with evident satisfaction.  It was Doctor
Hampstead.  Courage and increase of confidence seemed
to come into the office with the minister, and more was
imparted by his cordial hand-clasp, as he leaned close and
asked in a low voice:

"You got the Wadham currency?"

"Yes," Rollie answered eagerly and in an excited
whisper told how he had laid the foundation stone of his
new character by his I.O.U. left in the place of the
currency.

"That is good," agreed the minister, his face beaming.
"The right start, my boy, exactly."

Then, with a replica of that smile, sweet as a woman's,
with which he had two hours before passed over his
vault key to Rollie, he now placed in his hands an
envelope like that which had contained the Wadham
currency, only thicker.  The young man seized it gratefully,
but with fingers trembling so he could hardly get
behind the flap of the envelope.

"It is there," said the minister, a little gurgle of
emotion in his own throat.

"It is here," mumbled Rollie woodenly, a surge of
relief and gratitude rising so high in his breast that it
felt like a tense hard pain, and for a moment stifled the
power of speech so that for want of words he reached
out and touched the hand of the minister caressingly
with his clammy fingers.

Hampstead, happier, if possible, than Rollie,
understood his emotion.

"It's all right," he whispered.  "Courage, boy,
courage!"  At the same time he laid a hand upon the young
man's arm, with a pressure almost of affection.  With the
word and touch came clarity both of thought and feeling.

"Will you excuse me three or four minutes, Brother
Hampstead?" Rollie inquired, the sudden leap of joy in
his heart that the embezzlement was now to be legitimately
wiped out so great that he could not this time stop to
send the money across by a messenger.

The minister smiled understandingly, and Rollie
stepped out of the little gate and across to the teller's
window.

When he returned, old J.M. himself had come out of
his office and was chatting with the minister.  There was
nothing unusual about this, since wherever Hampstead
went persons of every sort were anxious to get a word
with him.  Presently Parma too joined the group at
Rollie's desk.  Of course the topic of conversation was
Miss Dounay and her diamonds, for both the president
and the cashier had learned that the minister and their
own social ambassador were present at the supper, which
every hour became more famous.  In the midst of this
conversation, a telephone call for Mr. Manton was
switched to Rollie's desk.

"Yes," said the president, talking into the 'phone.
"We will send a man over to represent us.  Are you
ready now?"

The bank president hung up the telephone and turned
to Rollie.  "Step right over to the Central Trust,
Burbeck, and see us through on those transfers, will you?
They are waiting now."

There was nothing for Rollie to do but to go
immediately, much as he desired to whisper one more word
of gratitude to the minister, and to receive the
additional installment of moral strength which he felt sure
would follow from a few quiet minutes with this man
on whom his soul had begun to lean so heavily.

"Certainly, Mr. Manton," he answered, and then as
he reached for his hat, he turned to the minister, saying:
"Shall I find you here when I return?"

"That depends on how long before you return,"
laughed the minister, but the blandness of his expression
indicated that he was in no hurry, and Rollie went out
expecting to see him again in a few minutes.

But the matter of the transfers was not so easily
dispatched.  Over one detail and another the young man
was held for nearly forty minutes.  The delays, too, were
of that vexatious sort which detained him without
employing him; so that most of the irritating interval could
be and was devoted to a consideration of his own very
private and very pressing affairs.

Giving up hope of finding the minister in the bank upon
his return, he addressed both his thoughts and his fears
to the subject of Miss Dounay and her diamonds.  The
prospective interview with this passionate, self-willed,
and no doubt wildly excited woman loomed before him
oppressively, and the nearer it drew, the more ominous it
seemed.  A man going unarmed to return a stolen cub
to a tigress in a jungle lair would be going upon a mission
of peace and safety compared to his.  He feared that in
her passionate vehemence she would never permit him to
get the full truth before her.  How was he to turn aside
the impact of her sudden burst of rage?  She would
assault him—tear him!  If that curious Morocco dagger
he had seen some of the guests fumbling with last night
were at hand, she might even kill him.

The idea occurred to him that he had best lie to her,
or at least begin by lying to her; that he might play the
rôle of restorer of her diamonds, and put her under a
debt of gratitude, explaining that the thief had brought
them to him to borrow money on them; then, in the softer
mood that would come through joy over their prospective
recovery, he might elaborate the story, touch her
sympathies, and make his full confession.  She might even
be happy enough over their recovery to cease the hunt for
the criminal, and thus make confession unnecessary.
That in itself would be a great relief.

Yet the common sense, if not the moral sense, of the
young man rejected a proposal to lay the bricks of
new-found honesty in the mortar of a lie.  If he were true
to the trust which Hampstead had reposed in him, he
would walk straight into Miss Dounay's apartments and
say, "Here are your diamonds.  I am the thief.  I throw
myself upon your mercy!"  This was what he resolved
to do.

Reentering the bank, young Burbeck walked first to
the open door of Mr. Manton's office.  That gentleman
was engaged with a caller, but the shadow at the door
caused his eye to rove in that direction.  Rollie waved
his hand; J.M. nodded.  The transfers had been accomplished;
the president had taken note of that fact, and
the assistant cashier's mission was discharged.

Rollie went immediately to his desk.  There was a
litter of papers representing matters of greater or less
importance which had required attention during the
interval of his absence from the office.  He sifted them
quickly.  Some received his penciled O.K. and went
into a basket for the messenger; two or three took him
on errands to other desks about, or to the windows
opposite; the rest went into a drawer.  He had not
removed his hat from his head, for he proposed to go
immediately to Miss Dounay before the remnants of his
fast oozing resolution could entirely trickle away.

But when he turned to pick up the vault key which his
eye had seen so many times this morning, it was not at
hand.  He removed everything from the desk, he
searched every nook and cranny of it.  He took up the
waste-basket, dumped the contents upon his desk, and
examined every scrap and fold of envelope or paper.
He even got down upon his knees and made sure the key
was not upon the carpet, going so far as to move the
desk.  The key had disappeared.  He searched his own
pockets, realizing that when he left the bank that was
where the key should have been placed.

In the excitement of the moment when Hampstead
had brought in the money that saved him from being a
defaulter, and in the disconcerting presence of
J.M. and Parma, when he wanted to be alone with his
benefactor, and especially with the more disconcerting
instruction to go out and look after the transfers, he had,
for the time being, forgotten the key.  Now it was not
to be found.

Rollie stood nonplussed first, and then aghast.  His
guilty conscience instantly suggested that some one had
seen or suspected his visit to the vault and what had
occurred there.  This idea brought a rush of blood to the
head.  He was dizzy and had almost an attack of vertigo.
Yet with a few clearing minutes of thought, the
explanation leaped plainly into mind.  Doctor Hampstead had
taken the key.  In the interval while Rollie was at the
teller's window, he must have seen it lying there upon
the desk, recognized it by the red rubber band, and
having been assured that the key had served its purpose, had
done the perfectly natural thing of dropping it in his
pocket, and thinking no more of it.

Where was the minister now?  Until Rollie could find
him and get the key, he could make no confession to
Miss Dounay.





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.. _`UNEXPECTEDLY EASY`:

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   CHAPTER XXVI


.. class:: center medium bold

   UNEXPECTEDLY EASY

.. vspace:: 2

Following his instincts rather than any rule of sense,
Rollie hurried out upon the street, posted himself upon
a conspicuous corner, and for several minutes indulged
the wildly improbable hope that he might spy the minister
passing in the throng.  When a little reflection had
convinced him that this was time wasted, he made a hasty
inventory of near-by places where his benefactor might
have gone, and even went so far as to hurriedly visit two
of them, threading the tables of the Forum Café, where
sometimes Hampstead ate his luncheon, and scanning the
chairs in the St. Albans barber shop, where from time to
time the dominie's tawny fleece was shorn.

But by this time a new probability forced itself into the
distracted young man's consciousness.  This was that
the minister had gone to pay his sympathetic respects to
Miss Dounay and condole with her over her loss.  Rollie
was so near the Dounay apartment that to go upstairs
and inquire if the minister were there would have been
easy, but the peculiar circumstances made it difficult.
Indeed only to recall how near he was to that fearsome
lair of the tigress threw him into cold shivers and made
him fly to the safer vantage ground of the telephone upon
his own desk at the bank.  But even merely to inquire
for the Reverend John Hampstead from there was hard.
In his nervous state, depleted by gloomy forebodings and
now unfortified by the possession of the diamonds, Rollie
felt utterly unequal to even a long-distance contact with
that high-powered personality.  All the morning he had
been in terror lest she herself should call him up.  All
the morning he had known that in his character as an
interested friend he should have telephoned to her.
Now, the moment she recognized his voice, he would be
taxed with this breach!  What was he to say?  Why,
that he had not telephoned because he was intending to
call in at the first moment he could get away from the
bank, and that he would be up very soon now.  She
would be sarcastic, but the explanation would positively
have to do.  Besides, he had to locate the minister! and
so, struggling to command a tone of indifference, he
gave the St. Albans number.

Of course Julie or the secretary would answer, anyway.
But evidently Miss Dounay, in her highly aroused
mental state, was keeping an ear upon the telephone bell,
for it was her own animated note that rasped at him
through the instrument.  It appeared, mercifully, that
she did not recognize his voice,—a fact which at first
relieved him, but on later reflection, at the conclusion of
the incident, shook his remaining self-confidence still
further to pieces, for it showed how completely out of hand
he had allowed himself to get.

When, moreover, Rollie launched his timid inquiry if
the Reverend John Hampstead was there, he got a negative
so sharp that the receiver seemed to bite his ear.  He
broke the connection hastily and sat eyeing the telephone
apprehensively, expecting the mouthpiece to open like
a solemn eye, scan him inquiringly, and report to Miss
Dounay.  When it did not, he shrugged his shoulders
and elongated his neck to get rid of that noose-like
feeling which had just come upon him from nowhere.  He
had not killed anybody.  What was the noose for, then?
But this reflection got a most disagreeable answer: "It
would kill your mother to know you are an embezzler
and a thief.  You would then be her murderer."  Again
he shrugged himself free of the distasteful sensation.
"Buck up, Burbeck," he commanded himself, "or you
are done for."  Once more he grabbed the telephone,
and this time more determinedly, for in the midst of his
misery one really first-class inspiration had come to him:
this was to communicate with the county jail.  The
minister was really much more likely to have friends in
the county jail than in the St. Albans; and it was a safe
wager that he went there more frequently.  Rollie knew
the jailer well.

"Hello—Sam," he called.  "This is Rollie.  Has
Doctor Hampstead been there this morning?"

"Yeh!"

"There now?"

"Nope."

"Know where he went?"

Evidently Sam turned to some one else in the room for
information.  Rollie heard a voice answering him and
caught the words "San Francisco" and "Red Lizard."

"Did you get that?" called Sam into the 'phone.
"He's gone to San Francisco."

"Yes,—but what's that got to do with the Red Lizard?"

"He came down to see the Red Lizard."

"The Red Lizard!"  Rollie could not restrain a gasp,
and then wondered if gasps are transmitted over the
telephone—but went on to ask: "Is the Red Lizard in?"

"Yeh!"

"What for?"

Rollie was clinging to the telephone now like a
drowning man to a rope's end.

"He got in some kind of a row with a service elevator
man at the St. Albans last night and landed on him with
the brass knucks.  This morning the judge gave him
three months in the county."

Rollie clenched his teeth, and his shoulders rocked for
a moment.  So that was what happened to the Red
Lizard!  What a long time ago last night was!  How
many things had happened!  Last night he was a crook
and a defaulter.  To-day he was an honest man, and his
accounts would bear the scrutiny of an X-ray.  Now if
only those diamonds—

But Sam had gone right on talking.

"We think Doctor Hampstead went to San Francisco
on some sort of errand for the Lizard—Red's got a
woman sick over there or something.  But, say, the parson
telephoned his house before he left here, and they can
tell you sure."

"All right, thanks."

"So long, Rollie!"

Gone to San Francisco!  Worse and worse.  Rollie
huddled in his chair.  But there was still a grain of hope.
Sam might be mistaken, or the trip might be a short one,
or the minister might have left a telephone number that
would reach him.

But the voice of Rose Langham dashed these hopes
one by one.  Her brother had gone to San Francisco on
an uncertain quest; he would not be back until very late
at night, and he had no idea himself where in the city his
search would lead him.

For the second time that day Rollie found himself in
a state bordering on physical collapse.  The very stars
were fighting against him.  After the strain of a year
in which the fear of detection, however masked, had
always been present, his nerves were in none too good
condition, anyway.  The events of the last twenty-four
hours had racked them to the limit of self-control.  And
yet, when safely past the danger of discovery of his
defalcation, the growing sense of the enormity of the
crime of theft had brought him to a point where in sheer
self-defense he felt he must seize the jewels and literally
fling them at their owner.  Now, goaded, tricked,
tantalized, defeated—everything was in a conspiracy
against him!  It was enough to drive a man insane.
Burbeck felt himself very near the maniacal point.
Again he was seeing things.  One moment the street
outside was full of patrol wagons, all ringing their gongs at
once, while platoons of police were marching and
surrounding the bank.  Another moment he had decided to
anticipate the police by rushing out to the corner by the
plaza, tossing his hat high in the air, and shouting and
shrieking until a crowd had gathered, when he would
exhibit the diamonds and proclaim himself the thief.

But he was spared the possibility of this insane freak
by the fact that he could not exhibit the diamonds.  They
were in the vault.  Damn the vault!  To hell with them!
To hell with everything!  To hell with himself!  That
was where he was going!

Suddenly he looked up, trembling.  Mercer, the
assistant cashier whose desk was next to his own, must
have overheard him.  But no, Mercer was calmly
writing.  He had heard nothing, because nothing had been
spoken.  Rollie had been thinking in shouts, not
speaking.  And yet he looked about him wonderingly, like a
man coming out of a temporary aberration.

"I will be shouting it next," he said to himself.  "I
am getting dotty; I'll burst if I have to hold this much
longer.  I'll burst and give the whole thing away."

His hat had been pushed back from his brow; he drew
it forward and down until it shaded his face, and then
with his jaws set in the most determined mood he could
muster, he walked out of the bank and piloted his steps,
with knees that were sometimes stiff and sometimes
tottering, in the direction of the Hotel St. Albans.

Without waiting to be announced, he went up and
knocked at the door of Miss Dounay's apartment.  It
was opened a mere crack to reveal a nose and a bit of
an eyebrow.  This facial fragment belonged to Julie,
and with it she managed to convey an expression at once
forbidding and inquisitorial.

"Oh, la la!" she exclaimed, after her survey.  "It is
the handsome man.  Come in," and the door swung wide.
"Madame will be glad to see you.  Perhaps you bring
the diamonds."

Julie said all this in her slight but charming accent
with an attempt at good-humored vivacity, but that last
was a very embarrassing remark to a caller in young
Mr. Burbeck's delicate position.  It caused one of his
knees to knock sharply against the other as he manoeuvered
to a position where he could lean against a heavy
William-and-Mary chair, and thus remain standing until
Miss Dounay should enter the room; since to sit down
and then rise again suddenly was a feat that promised
to be entirely beyond him.

Moreover, light as had been Julie's manner, Rollie
saw that her appearance belied it.  Her eyes were red,
her sharp little nose was also highly colored, and in her
hand was a tight ball of a handkerchief that had been
wetted to such compactness by tears.

Mercifully Miss Dounay did not leave time for the
young man's apprehensions to increase.  She entered
almost as Julie disappeared, wearing something black and
oddly cut, a baggy thing, like a gown he remembered
once seeing upon a sculptress when at work in her studio.
It was the nearest to an unbecoming garb that he had
ever known Marien to wear, and yet unbecoming was
hardly the word.  It did become her mood, which was
somber.  Her face was pale, and there were shadows
beneath her eyes.  She looked subdued, defeated even;
but by no means broken.  There were hard lines about
her mouth, lines which Rollie had never seen there before.
She wore a sullen expression, and a passion that was
volcanic appeared to smoulder in her eyes.  She greeted
him rather perfunctorily, as if her mind had been brooding
and, after bidding him be seated and sinking herself
upon a couch, cushion-piled as usual, shrouded herself
again in a state of aloofness which reminded him of the
weather when a storm is brooding.

Rollie had expected her to be raging like a wild
woman,—alternately hurling anathemas at the thief for having
stolen her gems and heaping denunciations upon the
police because they had not already captured the criminal
and recovered the necklace.

Her apparent indifference to that subject only
emphasized to Rollie what he had before observed,—that it
was impossible ever to forecast the mind of this woman
upon any subject, or under any circumstances.  At the
same time, the young man was extremely grateful for
this abstraction, because it made what he had to do vastly
easier.

"I suppose," he ventured huskily, "you are worried to
death about your diamonds."

The sentence drew one lightning flash from her eyes,
and that was all.

"To tell you the truth, I have hardly thought of them,"
she snapped.

Rollie sat with open mouth, totally unable to comprehend,
staring until his stare annoyed her.

"I say I have hardly thought of them," she repeated,
with an asperity entirely sufficient to recall the young
man from his amazement at her manner to the real object
of his visit.

"But wouldn't you like to get your diamonds back?"
he asked perspiringly.

"Of course, silly!" the actress replied, not bothering
to conceal the fact that she regarded Burbeck as a child,
sometimes useful and sometimes a nuisance.  Apparently,
she had hailed his advent because her ill humor
required a fresh butt, Julie's face having indicated
clearly that she had been made to suffer to the breaking
point.

But Rollie was in no position to insist upon niceties of
speech or manner.  He had a trouble compared to which
all other troubles of which he had ever conceived were
nothing at all.  He was haunted by a terrible fear, and
to escape its torture he plumped full in the face of it by
blurting:

"I have come to tell you that you are going to get
your diamonds back."

If Marien's demeanor were a pose, it must have
proved that she really was what her press agents
claimed,—the greatest actress on the English speaking stage.
She did not start, or speak.  For a few seconds not even
the direction of her glance was changed.  Then her face
did shift sufficiently for the black piercing eyes to stab
straight into Rollie's, while her brows were lifted
inquiringly.  The glance said, "Well, go on!"

The young man obeyed desperately: "I am an ambassador
for the—"

Still Miss Dounay did not speak; she did not move
nor change an expression even; and yet Rollie felt
himself interrupted.  He could not tell how this was done,
but he was sure that this woman had detected him in the
first note of insincerity and by a thought-wave had
emphatically said, "Don't lie to me!"

All at once, too, he realized that this motionless,
marble-lipped creature sitting there before him was more
implacable, more potential for evil than the raging tigress
he had expected to confront.  He felt somehow that she
was not a woman, but a super-devil into whose clutches
he was being drawn.  He even had a sense that he was
not going to be allowed any increased issue of moral
stock on the ground of telling this woman the truth.  He
was going to tell her the truth because he had to, because
she hypnotized it out of him.

"I say," he began, and stopped to wet his lips, but
found his tongue so furred that it could not function in
that behalf.  "I say," he went on again, croaking
hoarsely, "that I am the thief."

"You?  The banker?"

Rollie fell to wondering how blue vitriol bites.
Certainly it could not be more biting than the sarcasm in
look and tone with which the woman had asked this
question.

"Yes, I—"

The young man was going to prepare the soil for
throwing himself upon her mercy—this woman whom
he was now positive knew no such thing as mercy—by
telling her about his defalcation; but in the wooden state
of his mind, one quivering gleam of intelligence
suggested that it was quite unnecessary to tell her anything
about his defalcation; that it might give her an added
set of pincers for the torture she might choose to inflict.

"Yes, I stole them," he affirmed doggedly.  "And I
am going to bring them back."

"Going to?" she asked, again making the fine shade
of her meaning clear with the slightest expenditure of
sound.

"Yes, a little accident happened."

"An accident!"  The woman's eyes blazed, her cheeks
were aflame, and her whole attitude expressive of menace.
"You didn't lose them?"

"I only lost control of them for a few hours through
a bit of stupidity," he confessed, and hurried on to
explain: "For safe keeping this morning I locked them
in John Hampstead's safe deposit box, and he went off
with the key.  He's wandering around the tenderloin of
San Francisco now on an errand for a man in the county
jail, and they don't even expect him home before
to-morrow morning.  We can get them—"

Again Rollie felt himself mentally interrupted,
although Miss Dounay had not spoken.

This time, however, her features did change
unmistakably.  She had been listening with a cynical
expression that somehow suggested the manner of a cat about
to pounce; and suddenly this manner had departed.  It
was succeeded by a look of surprise and then of thoughtful
interest, followed by that indefinable something which
bade him cease to speak.  He paused abruptly with his
tongue in air, as it were; yet she neither spoke nor
looked at him.  Her features were a sort of moving
picture of complex and swift-flying mental processes
which succeeded one another with astonishing rapidity
and ended in a queer expression of glory and triumph,
while she stiffened her body and drew a full breath so
quickly that the air whistled in her narrowing nostrils.

Then, as if becoming suddenly aware of the visitor's
presence, Miss Dounay turned her eyes directly upon him
and exclaimed, with a manner quite the most pleasant
she had yet displayed:

"Oh, I beg your pardon, Mr. Burbeck.  Something
you said started such an interesting train of thought."

Her cordiality extended to the point of reaching out
a hand and laying it reassuringly upon Rollie's arm, while
she asked, and this time with a tone of real consideration:

"Will you be kind enough to tell me again, very carefully,
and a little more in detail, just why you couldn't
bring the diamonds to-day?"

Rollie, greatly relieved at this softening in Marien's
mood at the very point where he had feared she might
actually leap on him and throttle him, retold the story,
only being careful to omit all reference as to why he
chanced to be visiting Doctor Hampstead's box, and why
Doctor Hampstead happened to come into his office so
that he might pick up the key, as he did.

"What an odd coincidence!" commented Marien,
when the recital was finished.  Actually, she was laughing.
Rollie's heart went out to her completely.  He felt
a sting of self-reproach at the harshness of his judgment
of her, and was sensible of a new charity growing in his
life for all mankind.  It was really going to be made
easy for him to take "the way up."  He felt like
singing a little psalm of thanksgiving.

"And the minister has no idea that the diamonds are
in his vault?" that mercurial lady inquired, with a
chuckle.

"Not the least in the world," assured Rollie, anxious
to relieve his benefactor of any slightest odium of
indiscretion.

"And when did you say Doctor Hampstead was
expected home from San Francisco?"

Miss Dounay had stopped laughing and had an intent
look, as if desiring to understand something very clearly.

"Perhaps the last boat to-night—possibly not till
to-morrow morning."

"Then there is no way of getting the jewels until
to-morrow morning?"

"None at all," confessed Rollie.  "But as a matter of
fact, they are perfectly safe there—safer than they are
in your own apartment."

"So I should say," Miss Dounay observed dryly, "unless
I revise my guest list."

Rollie flushed.

"That was coming to me," he confessed, frowning at
himself.  "That and much more."

His tone was serious and full of bitter self-reproach.
Miss Dounay's surprisingly indulgent attitude emboldened
him to pursue the disagreeable subject farther.

"I have not told you," he went on, "that I came to
ask you for mercy."

"Do you not perceive that you are getting it without
asking?" the actress replied, with a liquid glance that
was really full of gentleness and sympathy.

"Of course," Rollie averred.  "But I am so grateful
that I did not want you to think I could take it for
granted.  I was in a terrible position, Miss Dounay.
The crime was not accidental, but deliberate; that it
miscarried was the accident.  But that your diamonds are
to be restored to you, and that I myself am on my way
to a sort of character restoration, if I ever had any,
which I begin to doubt, is all due to one good friend
whom I saw to-day, and who is also a good friend of
yours."

Again Rollie was interrupted; but this time there was
nothing intangible about it.

Miss Dounay's face grew suddenly hard; cruel lines
that were tense and threatening appeared about her
mouth, while her eyes bored straight into his, as she
exclaimed: "Never mind about that now.  As for the
theft: you need never hear from me one word about
what you have done.  The only injunction that I lay
upon you is to keep absolute silence about it yourself.
Remember, no matter what comes to pass, you know
nothing and have nothing to say.  So long as you are
silent, I will protect you absolutely.  Break the silence,
and you will go where you belong!"

Of all the hard glances Miss Dounay had given young
Burbeck, the look which accompanied this last menacing
sentence was positively the hardest.  A spasm of mortal
terror wrung the young man's heart, as he saw how
deliberately implacable this woman could be, and how
completely he was in her power.

But presently, Miss Dounay, as if suddenly ashamed
of her outburst of feeling over so slight an occasion,
broke into radiant smiles, took Rollie by the arm, and
led him a few steps in the direction of the door.  Her
manner was gracious and almost affectionate, proclaiming
that at least as long as all went well with her moods,
the whole wretched incident was past and forgotten
absolutely.

As if to make this emphatically clear, she inquired:

"And when is it that you go out with Mrs. Ellsworth
Harrington upon her launch party?"

"With Mrs. Harrington's launch party?" Rollie
asked, in a dazed voice, his mind groping as at some
elusive memory.

"Yes," the actress replied crisply.  "You told me
yesterday you were going out to-day with her party for
a cruise on the Bay."

"Yesterday!" confessed Rollie dreamily.  "By Jove,
so I did.  But," and as though it made all the
difference in the world, "that was yesterday!"

"And isn't to-day to-day?" Miss Dounay asked
significantly.  "Going to buck up, aren't you?" she
continued with intimate friendliness of tone.  "You are
still to continue as the Amalgamated's social ambassador?"

"Why, of course," the young man replied, although
weakly, for after what he had passed through of hope
and fear in the past few hours and even the past few
minutes, he felt quite unequal to any such prospect as
the immediate resumption of his social duties.

But it was a part of the swiftly forming plans of the
strong willed woman that he should take them up
immediately, and she cleverly recalled his mind to the
necessity of special attention to Mrs. Harrington's
projects by inquiring tentatively: "I suppose
Mrs. Harrington was very much put out because I did not
attend her dinner last night?"

"I should say!" confessed Rollie, turning a wry face
at the memory.

"Suppose," suggested Miss Dounay in calculating
tones, "that I went with you upon her launch party this
afternoon."

"You?  Oh!  Miss Dounay!" Rollo exclaimed, with
another of his looks of dog-like gratefulness.  "Could
you be as good as that?  Why, say!" and the young
man's enthusiasm actually began to kindle.  "You'd
undo the damage of last night and fix me with her for
life.  Positively for life; because," and he hesitated
while an expression half ludicrous and half painful
crossed his face; "because you are ten times as big a
social asset now that—that—" he could not bring
himself to finish the sentence.

But Miss Dounay relieved him of his embarrassment
by appearing not to notice and broke in with a practical
question:

"What time does the launch leave the pier?"

"At four.  It is now one-thirty."

For a moment Miss Dounay's brow was threaded with
lines of thought, as if she were making calculations and
tying the loose ends of some project together in her
mind.

"Yes," she said, her face clearing and a look of impish
happiness coming into her eyes, "I can go.  It will be
a delightful relief.  I have been bored beyond measure
by my own company to-day.  Come here at three-thirty
and François will take us to the pier."





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.. _`THE FIRST ALARM`:

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   CHAPTER XXVII


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE FIRST ALARM

.. vspace:: 2

Doctor Hampstead was more successful than he had
dared to hope in his quest for the woman of the
underworld to whom the Red Lizard, from his position in the
county jail, acknowledged a tardy obligation.  By five
o'clock the sufferer was located, her condition inquired
into, and the services of a nurse from the Social
Settlement near by arranged for, with instructions that
the minister be notified of any serious change in the
patient's condition.

His breast warmed comfortably with the sense of duty
done, the clergyman made his way toward the water
front, congratulating himself that he would get the six
o'clock boat and be at home in time for dinner; but as he
walked through the ferry building, his eye was caught
by a headline in one of the evening papers.  "MINISTER
TO BE ARRESTED" it proclaimed in tall
characters of glaring black; and he reflected cynically
at the eagerness with which the headline makers seize
upon that word "minister" or any of its synonyms.  It
made the black letters blacker when they spelled
minister, priest, or clergyman.

Wondering what preacher could have got himself in
trouble, and feeling a slight sense of resentment at the
creature, whoever he might be, to have thus brought
notoriety and possible dishonor upon the calling, Doctor
Hampstead bought a copy of the paper from fat
Hermann of the crutch and red face, who has stood so
many years at the ferry gate; but reading no farther
than the headline, he doubled the paper in his hand and
elbowed his way through the crowd to a seat on the
exposed upper deck of the ferryboat.  Wearied from the
exertions of his day, the minister found temporary
diversion in watching the fountains of humanity gushing up
the stairways.  Many of the people he knew, and those
who saw him nodded as they passed.  Once or twice it
struck him that there was something peculiar in these
glances of recognition, a startled look of surprise or
wonder that he could not quite understand.  Occasionally
the bold look of a man he did not know but who
apparently recognized him had in it a quality of cynicism
or of gloating.

With a disagreeable feeling of embarrassment which
he did not undertake to explain, the minister turned away
from the crowd and fell to watching the sweep of bay
and the plowing craft upon it.  The fresh salt breeze
was very grateful to his face and lungs after the noisome
alleys through which his mission had taken him.  The
water this evening was amethyst blue, and under the
prows of the passing boats broke into foam of marble
whiteness.  The sky above was a pure turquoise, except
towards the west, where the descending sun kindled a
conflagration of glory in the low-lying clouds.  All this
wealth of refreshing color and the tonic in the stiffening
breeze made the world not only seem fresh and pure, but
full of power; as if to give assurance that the ocean and
the coming night were big enough and strong enough
to swallow all the unpleasantness and all the weakness
and wickedness of men, and send the sun up to-morrow
morning upon a new day that was fresh and pristine,
like the day of creation itself.

Hampstead remembered his prayer of the morning that
this particular day might be a great one, and felt a
trifle disappointed.  In a kind of a way it had been big.
Rollie Burbeck had come to him, broken and cowering.
He had helped him; he believed he had saved him.
Surely, for the time being, he had saved that gifted
mother of his from the awful shock of knowing that her
son was a defaulter and a thief.  True, he had plunged
heavily in rescuing that boy; yet the money came from
people who believed in Hampstead sufficiently to give
him of their surplus wealth for just such ventures.  If
the effort failed, they would regret the loss of the man
more than the loss of the money.

Yet the minister really believed that Rollie was going
to take the "way up", and assuring himself once more
of this, fell to wondering how Miss Dounay received the
penitent when he brought back the diamonds, and
whether she had acted generously or spitefully.
Speculating next whether the story of the return of the
diamonds had been given to the newspapers yet, and
anxious to know how they had handled it, if it had,
Hampstead bethought him of the paper in his hand and
unfolded it for inspection.

But the make-up of the front page forced his attention
back upon the matter of the minister who was to be
arrested.  The sub-head startled him, for it contained
his own name, while the opening sentence revealed that
it was himself who was to be arrested, and that the
occasion of the arrest was the charge that he had stolen
the Dounay diamonds.

At the first impact of this astounding piece of news, an
exclamation of amazement broke from the minister's
lips; but immediately his teeth were set hard as his eye
dived down the column, lapping up the words of the
story by sentences and almost by paragraphs.

Miss Dounay, it appeared, had gone to the office of
District Attorney Miller at three o'clock that afternoon
by appointment, and had there sworn to a complaint,
charging him, the Reverend John Hampstead, with the
theft of her diamond necklace, valued at twenty-two
thousand dollars.  There were a few lines of an
interview with District Attorney Miller, in which that
official stated that at first he had not regarded Miss Dounay's
charges seriously, but that the actress was so emphatic
in her demand for the warrant of arrest that he had not
felt himself justified in refusing it.  At the same time,
the District Attorney expressed his personal belief in the
innocence of the minister.

An attempt to serve the warrant immediately, the story
said, had been frustrated by the temporary absence of the
Reverend Hampstead in San Francisco upon one of his
accustomed missions of mercy.

The article concluded with the statement that while it
was generally known that Doctor Hampstead was one
of Miss Dounay's guests on the night before, the report
that he had been charged with the theft of the diamonds
was everywhere received with a smile, and there was
some harsh criticism of the District Attorney for issuing
a complaint, the only effect of which must be to gratify
the enemies of the clergyman, and to lessen his influence,
thus hampering him in the good work he was doing in
the community.  This would be all to no purpose, since
even a preliminary hearing must be sufficient to show
that there was no evidence against him, and that the
complaint itself was due to the extravagant suspicion of
a highly nervous woman, laboring under great emotional
strain.

That the actress herself, a woman of moods and caprices,
had no adequate appreciation of the seriousness of
her act in thus attacking the character of Doctor
Hampstead was made evident to the reporters, when a
telephone call to her apartments revealed that in the very
hour when an endeavor to serve the warrant of arrest
was being made, the actress was leaving her hotel in the
company of a well-known young business man for a
pleasure cruise upon the Bay.

The minister saw with satisfaction how completely the
facts as developed had been edited into a story, the
assumptions of which were entirely favorable to him.
That was good.  It was also right.  That in itself would
show this reckless woman that the people would refuse
to believe ill of him upon the word of any mere stranger.

Nevertheless, reflection on the sheer impudence of the
woman's attack made Hampstead angry, and with a
quick, nervous movement he crushed the paper into a
ball and hurled it over the side.

Was there ever a story of blacker ingratitude?  Was
there ever a weaker, more craven specimen of a man?
Was there ever a more clever, more devilish woman?

So this was the way she made good her threat.  She
had set this trap, had persuaded Rollie to pretend to steal
the diamonds and to make a false confession to him,
during which the minister had actually sealed the
diamonds in one of his own envelopes.  John wished he
could be sure whether the young rascal actually took
the diamonds away with him, as he appeared to do, or
whether he didn't drop them in a drawer of the desk
or about the study, where a search would reveal them.

With facial expression quite unministerial Hampstead's
mind raced on to the question whether the story
of the defalcation was also trumped up?  But at this
point his excited mental processes halted, puzzled for a
moment; and then abruptly his face cleared, as he saw
the untenableness of his suddenly conceived theory.  No;
it would not do.  Rollie had undoubtedly been perfectly
sincere, and this scheming Jezebel of a woman had merely
taken advantage of him in the moment of confession,
and made him either consciously or unconsciously, and
perhaps helplessly, a tool of her desperate vengeance.

And vengeance for what?  Hampstead kept asking
himself that, and never got farther with an answer than
the rage of a self-centered, heartless woman at his failure
to pay the supreme tribute to vanity by making love to
her as once he had done, and giving her the gloating
satisfaction of spurning him as she had spurned him
before.  This was the extent of his crime against her,
and this bold, bald attempt to destroy him was the
punishment she had devised.  Heavens!  Had the woman no
sense of responsibility at all?  No consciousness of all
the terrible harm she would be doing to so many others
besides himself if she succeeded in ruining him?  Think
of the men and women who trusted him, the young boys
and girls to whom he was pointed out as a shining
example, the struggling people who found inspiration and
courage in the spectacle of his own dauntless battlings
for the right.

John felt that it was not egotism to think of himself
in this way.  He knew it as a fact because he had to
know it, because men told him so continually, and
because it was a supremely steadying influence upon his
own life.  He dared not swerve.  Rollie Burbeck was
not the only man in the community who owed him for
escape from a fall, or who was toiling laboriously
upward, with an eye on the minister climbing far above
and turning cheerfully to beckon or lower an Alpine
rope for part of the weakened climber's load.

And the Dounay woman knew all of this.  Some of
it he had shown to her in the hope that it would be an
inspiration.  Some of it she had seen for herself.  But
now, in her malice and hatred, she took no account of all
that.  Unable to make him swerve, she was wickedly
determined to hurl him down.  And having used Rollo
Burbeck this far, John had no doubt at all that her
genius would be entirely equal to using him still further,
by binding him to absolute secrecy as to his knowledge
of the minister's innocence.

But this thought brought home another with shocking
force,—the realization that Rollie, the one man who
could vindicate him of this charge must not vindicate
him!  For Rollie to speak and ruin himself seemed only
fair, rather than for the minister to be ruined; yet
for the young man to confess would be a terrible blow to
the mother,—would in fact most likely kill her.  That
was unthinkable.  That blow must be prevented at all
hazards.

But even eliminating the mother, and supposing the
young man too craven to speak out for himself, Hampstead
knew, thinking back a few hours, that on his honor
as a minister he had sealed his own lips concerning the
young man's confession; he had hinged his appeal to the
moral consciousness of that misguided youth upon his
own fealty as a priest of God to the sacred trust of
confession.  How presumptuous this afternoon sounded
that speech which he had made to the wretched penitent
this morning with such easy assurance.

Yet, presumptuous or not, Hampstead's reasonings
had led him quickly to the one outstanding fact: His
knowledge of who did steal the diamonds could never
be used in his defense.  His vindication must depend
solely on the inability of Miss Dounay to prove her case.
This in itself put him in a negative and an unnatural
position, an all but helpless position.  His nature was
aggressive.  He was a fighter, not a "stander."  Instead
of vindication, he could never get more than a Scotch
verdict of "not proven."  He would have to face the
community with that.  Well, thank God, he was strong
enough for that; strong enough to simply stand and
endure!  Yes, testing his moral fiber by the best judgment
he could form of what the strain would be like, he felt
equal to the load.  In the consciousness of this strength,
his shoulders stiffened with pride and a sort of eagerness
to take up their burden.  A sense of triumph even came
to him.  This self-deluding woman should see how
strong he was, and how unshakable was the faith of the
community in the integrity of his character.

But when the minister, rather calmed by having
hardened himself thus against what appeared to be coming
upon him, lifted his eyes suddenly from the deck, he
was disconcerted to observe a group of people eyeing
him curiously at a distance of some dozen or twenty feet.
These were people whom he did not recognize, but some
one of them evidently knew him and had pointed him out
to the rest.  He reflected that they must have been
watching him for some time.  No doubt they had
observed his demeanor as he read the paper, and
afterwards when he tossed it away in anger.  He must have
made quite an exhibition of himself, and it gave him a
creepy sensation to catch these curious, unfeeling eyes
upon him as if they viewed the struggles of a fly in a
spider's web.  It made him feel that he was entangled,
and he began to realize what a diversion his entanglement
would afford this whole metropolitan community, and
that to-night, through the headlines in the papers,
everybody was watching him just as these people were.  He
reflected, too, that there is a fascination about watching
the fall of a tall tree, of a tall flagpole, or of a tall human
being.  At the moment Hampstead did not feel so very
tall; yet he knew that deservedly or undeservedly, he
was upon a position of eminence, and his fall would
afford an interesting spectacle.

However, he did not intend to fall.  Rising vigorously
from his seat, the minister confronted with a smile the
group who had been gazing at him.  "Good evening,
gentlemen," he said pleasantly, and walked toward the
front of the boat.

"Some nerve, what!" was a comment that broke out
of the group as he passed it.  Whether the words were
meant for his ears or not, they reached them and caused
another smile.

"I'll show them nerve!" he mused, with foolish but
very human pride.

Mingling in the crowd which trampled and elbowed its
way off the boat, the minister was careful to bear himself
with open-eyed good cheer.  He kept his chin up, a
self-confident smile upon his face, and his eyes roving for a
sight of familiar faces.  Whenever he caught the eye
of an acquaintance, the greeting he bestowed was hearty
and betokened a man without the slightest cause for
anxiety of any sort.

Nevertheless, it was disturbing to perceive that people
rather avoided his eye.  Generally quite the reverse was
true, and it was rare upon the boat that some one did not
approach him and fall into conversation.  Yet so subtle
is that mysterious psychology of the social impulse that
now a mere publication of the fact that he was to be
arrested, even accompanied, as it was, by the statement
that nobody believed him guilty, had yet sufficient
influence to make him shunned.  What a silly world it was,
after all!

But in making the transfer from the ferry to the
suburban train, there was a walk of two hundred feet, with
a news stand on the way, and then fresh disillusionment
lay in wait for Doctor Hampstead, in the form of a later
edition of another Oakland paper.

"CLERIC FLIES ARREST," bawled this headline
stridently.

The minister's lip curled sarcastically at sight of this,
but he bought the paper, reading as he walked to the
car steps.  But the sub-head was more disturbing.
"Hampstead's Premises Searched," it declared, the types
seeming to scream the words exultantly.

Searched—and in his absence!  This was outrageous!
More; it was alarming, for there were papers in his
study which he had good reason for keeping from the
eyes of the police.  Fortunately, however, the most
important of these were in the safe deposit box.  He felt
deeply grateful now for this box, the key to which was
in his pocket; and after a sympathetic thought for Rose,
Dick, and Tayna, and the excited, bewildered state in
which they must have received the officers, the clergyman
turned his mind to a contemplation of this new account
in detail, and thereby got his first real taste of what an
unfriendly attitude on the part of a newspaper can make
of the most innocent circumstances.

Up to now, the minister, his utterances, his denunciations,
even his moral crusades, had been popular.  The
papers had put the most favorable construction upon all
his acts.  Their columns and their headlines had done
him respect and honor.  But now this paper had put
every circumstance in the worst possible light.  It
cleverly touched up those scenes in the picture which
looked incriminating and left the others unillumined, until
one would never gather from the story that there was any
reason to doubt the guilt or the guilty flight of the
minister.

Hampstead attributed this to mere unfriendliness, never
suspecting that in one hour between editions an editor
could have subtly sensed a popular readiness to accept
the worst view of his case, and deliberately pandered
to it as a mere matter of commercial newsmongering;
nor that this unfavorable account was to be accepted as
the first straw blown up in a hurricane of adverse
criticism which would rise and sweep over the city and
blow its very hardest in the aisles of All People's Church
itself.

The effect of this narrative upon Hampstead's mind
was unspeakably oppressive, and he looked up from its
perusal with relief and pleasure at finding a well-known
physician in the seat beside him.  The doctor was
prominent in the work of one of the Encina churches, and
had been particularly sympathetic with Hampstead in
campaigns against petty crime.  The minister had a
right, therefore, to feel that this man was one of his
friends; yet the physician greeted him with a self-conscious
air and immediately relapsed into silence.  Hampstead
endured this until the humor of the situation forced
itself upon him.

"Oh, cheer up," he laughed, poking the physician with
an elbow.  "You probably know worse people than
diamond thieves."

The doctor also laughed and disclaimed any sense of
gloom, but his was an embarrassed merriment, and he
refrained from meeting the eye of the minister.  However,
after another interval of silence, as if feeling that
he should at any rate say something, he reached over and
laid a patronizing hand upon the minister's knee.

"Of course, Doctor Hampstead," he suggested, "every
one is confident you will be able to prove your innocence."

The minister made an ejaculation that was short and
sharp.

The doctor looked at him with surprise, as if
questioning whether he heard aright.

"Under the law, I thought a man was presumed to be
innocent, and that his accusers had to prove his guilt,"
went on Hampstead.

The doctor flushed slightly, and while his eyes roved
through the car window, declared:

"Well, I am afraid, Doctor Hampstead, you will find
that a public man against whom a charge like this is
hurled is presumed to be guilty until he proves himself
innocent."

"That is your attitude?" inquired Hampstead coldly.

"Oh, by no means," protested the physician.

"It is his attitude all the same," commented the minister
to himself, somewhat bitterly, as he descended from
the train at the station nearest his home.

"How does he take it?" asked one sage citizen, crowding
into the vacant seat beside the physician, while a
second leaned over from behind to hear the answer.

"Very much worried," replied the doctor, as gravely
and as oracularly as he would have pronounced upon
another man's patient.  "Very much worried!"

"Would you believe," the physician inquired presently
of the first citizen, with a hesitating and extremely
confidential air, "would you believe that Doctor
Hampstead would say 'hell'—outside of a sermon, I mean?"

"No," answered the man addressed, "I would not,"
and his eyebrows were lifted, while his whole face
expressed surprise, shock, and a desire for confirmation.

"Well," concluded the doctor enigmatically, "neither
would I."  And that was all Doctor Mann did say upon
the subject, yet citizen number one, while casting the dice
with citizen number two at the Tobacco Emporium on the
corner next the railroad station to see which should pay
for their after-dinner smoke, communicated in confidence
that the Reverend Hampstead had, in the stress of his
emotion, uttered an oath; in fact, and to be specific, had
said that his persecutors, all and singular, and this actress
woman in particular, could go to hell!

This conference between citizen one and two may have
been overheard.  An inference that it was so overheard
might have been drawn from the columns of *The
Sentinel*, which next morning concluded its story of the
remarkable developments of the night with the observation
that the character of the minister was evidently cracking
under the strain, since last night upon the suburban train,
when a friend addressed him with a solicitous inquiry,
the accused clergyman had broken into a stream of
profane objurgations loud enough to be heard above the roar
of the train in several seats around.  It was added that
the reverend gentleman quickly regained control of his
feelings and apologized for his form of expression by
saying that he had been overworked for a long time and
the developments of the day had seriously upset him.

John Hampstead read this particular paragraph in *The
Sentinel* with a sense of utter amazement at the wicked
mendacity of public rumor, since what he had said to
Doctor Mann was merely "Humph!" uttered with sharp
and scornful emphasis.

But there was a far bigger story than that in the
morning *Sentinel*.  It had to do with those things which
happened between the hour when John Hampstead dropped
from his train, a little irritated with Doctor Mann, and
the hour when he went to bed, but not to sleep.





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.. _`THE ARREST`:

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   CHAPTER XXVIII


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   THE ARREST

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As the perturbed minister, hurrying from the train,
turned into the short street leading toward his home
upon the Bay-side, he was charged upon by Dick and
Tayna, both of whom, in the state of their emotion,
forgot High School dignity and came rushing upon their
uncle with feet thudding like running ostriches.  Tayna's
cheeks were red as her Titian hair with flaming indignation,
and her eyes burned like lights, while her full red
lips pouted out: "Isn't it a shame?"

"It's a darn piece of blackmail, that's what it is, and
it's actionable, too!"

This oracular verdict, of course, came panting from
the lips of Dick, who, over-exerted by his run, stood with
arms akimbo, hands holding his sides, and his too heavy
head tipping backward on his shoulders, while with
scrutinizing eye he studied the face of his uncle.

As for Hampstead, in the devoted loyalty of these
fatherless children and the distress of mind which each
exhibited, he entirely forgot the sense of hot injustice
and wrong burning in his own breast.  All the emotion
he was then capable of turned itself into sympathy for
them and solicitous anticipations as to the effect of the
whole wretched business upon his sister Rose.  With a
sweep of his strong arms, he gathered the two young
people to his breast, printing a kiss on Tayna's cheek,
which he found burning hot, and squeezing Dick until
the stripling gasped and struggled for release as he used
to do when a squirming youngster.  With his arms still
affectionately about the shoulders of the two, Hampstead
walked on down the street, palm-studded, with flower-bordered
skirts of green on either side and the blue vista
of the Bay showing dimly in the growing dusk.

Rose was waiting on the piazza.  Her face was very
calm, yet to John's keen eye, it bore a look of desperately
mustered self-control.  With the ready intuition of her
sex, she had divined far more completely than her brother
how desperate and dangerous was the struggle upon
which he was entering, and she was determined to give
him every advantage that sympathy, poise, and unwavering
loyalty could supply.

"It's all right, Rose, all right," he hastened to assure
her, as the steps were mounted.  "A mere extravagance
of an excited woman that the papers have made into a
great sensation.  It will melt away like fog.  We are
helpless for a few days until I can demand and receive
a hearing upon preliminary trial.  That will show that
they have no case at all.  Until then, we must simply
stand and be strong."

Rose was already in her brother's arms, yet his speech,
instead of reassuring her, made the tears flow.

"It is so—so humiliating to think of you defending
yourself," she protested, "to hear you talk of their
inability to make out a case.  It seems so—so lowering,
as if you were going to be put on trial just like a criminal."

"Why," replied John, "that's just what it all means.
*Just like a criminal!*"

He said the thing strongly enough, but after it came a
choke in the throat.  He had not really comprehended
this before.  He had thought of making his defense
from the standpoint of the popular idol that he was.  As
a matter of fact, he was going to trial like any criminal.
His vantage ground was merely that of the prisoner at
the bar.  This prepared him for what Rose had to say
next; for subtly perceiving that her brother had
sustained an additional shock, her own self-control revived.
Wiping her eyes, she turned to lead the way within.

"They," she said solemnly, "are waiting in the study."

"They?" inquired Hampstead.

"There are four men in there," Rose replied.  "They
want," and her voice threatened to break, "they want you!"

At this bald putting of the horrible fact, Tayna burst
into a wail of woe and flung her arms about her uncle,
whom she had followed into the hall.

"There, there, girl, don't cry," urged her uncle
soothingly.  "There is no occasion for it; this is annoying
but not necessarily distressing.  It is a mere formality
of the law which must be complied with.  Run along
now, all of you, and wash the tears out of your eyes.  I
will be with you in five minutes.  Let us sit down to a
happy, cheerful dinner.  I confess I am a little upset
myself, but not too disturbed to be hungry," and with a
weak attempt at grimacing humor, the big man laid a
hand upon the region of his diaphragm.

In his study, as Rose had forewarned him, the
minister found four men: Searle, Assistant District
Attorney; Wyatt, Deputy Sheriff; and two city detectives.

Searle was a suave, resourceful man and the one
assistant in the District Attorney's office whom
Hampstead had found himself unable to trust; and that rather
because of his personal and political associations than
for any overt act of which the minister was cognizant.

Wyatt was a bloated person, amiable in disposition,
whose excess of egotism was coupled with a paucity of
intelligence, yet wholly incorruptible and with an
exaggerated sense of duty that made him a capable
officer,—a thing with which his breeding, which was obtrusively
low, did not interfere.

Hampstead was able to master his feelings sufficiently
to greet the quartet urbanely, if not cordially.

"A disagreeable duty, I assure you," conceded Searle.

"A disagreeable experience," laughed Hampstead, but
with no great suggestion of levity.

"I guess I don't need to read this to you, Doc," said
the Deputy Sheriff, as he opened to Hampstead a document
drawn from his pocket.  "It is a warrant for your
arrest."

The minister took the document and glanced it
through, his eyes hesitating for a moment at the name of
the complaining witness.

"Alice Higgins?" he asked, with an inquiring glance.

"The true name of the complaining witness and accuser,"
replied Searle.

"Oh, I see," assented John.

It had never occurred to him that Marien Dounay was
only a stage name.  Was there anything at all about this
woman that was not false, he wondered.

John returned the warrant to Wyatt and caught the
look in that officer's eye.  A sense of the horrible
indignity of arrest came over the minister, a perception of
what it meant: this yielding of one's liberty, of one's
body to the possession of another, who might be a coarser
and more inferior person than one's self.  With a guilty
flush, John thought how many times in his crusades
against the gamblers and small law-breakers he had
procured the swearing out of complaints that led to the
arrest of scores of men.  He had marveled at the
venomous hatred which those men later displayed toward
himself, regarding him as the author of a public disgrace
put upon them, and not upon them alone but upon their
families also.  Now he understood.

"The bail is fixed at ten thousand dollars," explained
Searle smoothly.  "When we got your telephone message
that you would be home at seven o'clock, I took the
liberty of arranging for Judge Brennan to be in his
chambers at nine to-night so that you could be there
with your bondsmen and not have to spend the night in
jail."

"That was very considerate of you," assented the
minister, a huskiness in his tone despite himself.

The night in jail!  The very idea.  And ten thousand
dollars bail!  He had expected to be released upon his
own recognizance.  Again that disagreeable intimation
of being treated like a common criminal came crowding
in with a suffocating effect upon his spirit.  But he
rallied, exclaiming with another effort at easy urbanity:
"Very well, I acknowledge my arrest, and it will be
unnecessary to detain you gentlemen further.  I shall be
glad to meet you with my bondsmen in the judge's
chambers."

The Deputy Sheriff coughed in an embarrassed way,
but stood stolidly before his prisoner.

"I am sorry, Doctor Hampstead," explained Searle,
"but we shall have to search you.  Benson's men here
will do that."

"Search me?" exclaimed Hampstead, with a sudden
sense of insult.  "By the appearance of things," he
added, while casting a sarcastic look at the signs of
disorder about, "I should think this farce had been carried
far enough.  You did not find the diamonds here.  You
do not expect to find them upon my person, do you?"

The speaker's tones witnessed a natural indignation
and considerable irritability.

"I got to do my duty," replied Wyatt stubbornly, making
a sign to the two detectives, who immediately arose
and advanced upon the minister.

For an instant the situation was exceedingly tense.
Hampstead was a very strong man, and his resentment
at what seemed an insult put upon him with malice, was
very hot.  But good sense triumphed in the interval of
thought which the officers diplomatically allowed.

"Oh, of course," he exclaimed with a gesture of
submission, "you men are only cogs.  Once the machinery
of the law is put in motion, you must turn with the
other wheels.  Pardon my irritation, gentlemen, but the
situation is unusual for me and rather hard.  I feel the
injustice and indignity of it very keenly."

"We appreciate your situation perfectly," said Assistant
District Attorney Searle smoothly.  "As you say,
we are all of us cogs."

Yet the actual search of his person, once entered on,
seemed to Hampstead to proceed rather perfunctorily,
although at the same time he got from the faces and
manner of all four an impression of something they were
holding in reserve.

"What is this?" asked one of the detectives dramatically,
holding up a long, narrow key with a red rubber
band doubled and looped about the neck, which he had
just extracted from the minister's pocket.

"That is the key to my safe deposit box at the
Amalgamated National," replied Hampstead, naturally enough.

"Then," said Wyatt bluntly, "we've got to search that box."

The minister was instantly on his guard.

Some play of eyes between the four men, accompanied
by a subtle change in the expression of their faces,
warned him that they must have been apprised of the
existence of this box and that the key was the real
object of their personal search.  Hampstead resolved
hastily to defeat them.

"I decline to permit it," he declared shortly.  "There
are very private papers in that box, things which have
been communicated to me in the utmost confidence, and
I would not be justified in permitting you—or any one
else—to handle them.  Under the rules of the bank,
without my consent or an order of court, you could not
reach the box."

"I have that order of court here," said Searle, speaking
up quickly, but with cold precision of utterance, "in
a search warrant directed particularly to your safe
deposit box."

Like a flash, Hampstead thought that he understood.

"So that is what you are here for, Searle?" he
snapped sarcastically, turning and confronting the
Assistant District Attorney.  "I never have trusted you.
I couldn't understand your presence here or your
interest in this silly charge; but now I comprehend fully.
You have taken advantage of it to get your eyes on the
perjury case I have against your bosom friend, Jack
Roche.  Well, I warn you!  This is where I stop and
fight!"

But Searle refused to get angry at this bald impugnment
of his integrity and motives.  No doubt it was his
confidence in an ultimate and complete humiliation of
the minister that enabled him to maintain an unruffled
demeanor while he suggested blandly:

"Perhaps you ought not to proceed further, Doctor
Hampstead, without the advice of a lawyer."

The proposal touched the minister in his pride.

"A lawyer?" he objected scornfully.  "Thank you,
no!  My cause requires no expert advocacy.  In my
experience of the past four years, I have learned quite
enough about court practice to cope with this ridiculous
burlesque without professional assistance."

Searle, playing his cards deliberately, took advantage
of the minister's assumed acquaintance with legal lore to
suggest with alacrity:

"You know then, Doctor, that it is useless to fight a
court order of this sort, as you spoke of doing in your
excitement a moment ago.  I think, with the attorneys
of your Civic League, you have gone through a safe
deposit box or two upon your own account, by means of
just such a search warrant as I now exhibit to you."

Again Hampstead's second thought assured him that
he was powerless to resist.

"Yes," he confessed resignedly to Searle's speech,
after the necessary interval for consideration, "I
suppose I must admit it.  When I spoke of fighting, I spoke
in heat; partly because I feel the gross injustice and
bitter wrong this senseless charge is doing to innocent
people other than myself, who am also innocent, and partly
because, as I have already told you, I utterly distrust
your motive in making the whole of this search.  You
must be as well aware as I that this charge is the work of
a woman who, to speak most charitably, is beside herself
with excitement."

But Searle only smiled, and observed with urbanity
unruffled.

"I am sorry, Doctor, that you distrust me.  You
may have the privilege, of course, of being present when
we examine the contents of the box."

"Naturally I shall insist upon that," said the minister.

"In that case," Searle added with significant emphasis,
"I think your observations will convince you that
we are solely concerned in a search for the diamonds."

"As I like to believe well of all men, I shall hope so,"
countered the minister; and then, since the demeanor of
the officers made it clear there was no more searching to
be done, he continued, after a glance at his watch: "If
I am to meet Judge Brennan and yourself with my
bondsmen at nine o'clock, I suggest that we go from there
direct to the bank vaults.  They are accessible until
midnight, as you doubtless know."

"Very good, Doctor," replied Searle in that oily voice
which indicated how completely to his satisfaction affairs
were progressing.

"And now," suggested the minister, with a nod toward
the street door, "as the hour is late, I will ask you
gentlemen to excuse me."

Searle darted a look at Wyatt.

"Very sorry, Doc, but I got to stay with you," volunteered
the deputy, "and hand you over to the judge."

Once more the flush of offense mounted to the cheek
of Hampstead.  Hand him over to the judge!  How
galling such language was when used of him!  Again
he recalled with compunction how many arrests he had
caused without an emotion beyond the satisfaction of an
angler when he hooks a fish.  But he—John Hampstead—minister,
preacher, pastor of All People's; a shining
light in a vast metropolitan community!  Surely it was
something different and infinitely more degrading for
him to be arrested than for a mere plasterer, or mayhap
a councilman?  He had a greater right than they to be
wrathful and resentful.  Besides, they were guilty.
Judges, juries, or their own confessions, had unfailingly
so declared.  He was innocent, spotlessly innocent of the
charge against him.  His defenselessness proceeded
from relations of comparative intimacy with the actress,
and his priestly knowledge of the guilty person.  Yet the
thought of this helped humor and good sense to triumph
again, over his rising choler.

"Oh, very well," he exclaimed, half-jocularly,
half-derisively.  "Make yourself at home; all of you make
yourselves at home.  We are accustomed to an unexpected
guest or two at the table.  Be prepared to come
out to dinner.  Listen, if you like, while an arrested
felon telephones to his friends, seeking bondsmen.  You
may hear secret codes and signals passing over the wire.
You may even wish to put under surveillance the
gentlemen with whom I communicate."

"Doctor!  Doctor!" protested Searle, with hands
uplifted comically.  "Your hospitality and your irony both
embarrass us.  The detectives and I will be on our way.
Wyatt will have to do his duty."

"As you please," exclaimed Hampstead, who was fast
recovering his poise; "quite as you please."

With this speech he held open the outside door and
bade the three departing guests good evening; and then,
while the Deputy waited in the room, the clergyman was
busy at the telephone until he had the promise of three
different gentlemen of his acquaintance to meet him at
Judge Brennan's chambers at nine that night and qualify
as his bondsmen in the sum of ten thousand dollars.

This much attended to, dinner became the next order;
but it was not a very happy affair.  There had never
been a time when the little family group, bound together
by ties that were unusually tender, wished more to be
alone at a meal.  Now, when the superfluous presence
was the official representative of the very thing that had
plunged them into gloom, the situation became one of
torture.  Food stuck to palates.  Scraps of conversation
were dropped at rare intervals and upon entirely
extraneous subjects in which nobody, not even the speakers,
had the slightest interest.  At times there was no sound
save the audible enjoyment of his food by their guest,
for the Deputy Sheriff, accustomed to the ruthless thrust
of his official self into the personal and sometimes the
domestic life of individuals, was quite too crass to sense
the embarrassment and positive pain his presence caused
and was also exceedingly hungry.

In this general silence, the grating of wheels on the
graveled walk outside the study door sounded loudly.

"Mrs. Burbeck!" exclaimed Hampstead in some surprise.
"She never came to me at night before.  Finish
your dinner, Deputy.  If you will excuse me, I must
receive one of my parishioners in the study."

"Sorry, but I can't excuse you, Doc," replied Wyatt
jocularly; "but if you'll excuse me for just a minute,
while I get away with this second piece of loganberry pie,
I'll be with you."

"Be with me?" asked the minister, color rising.  "Do
you mean that you will intrude upon the privacy of an
interview with a helpless lady in a wheel chair who
comes to see me alone?"

Wyatt's fat cheek was bulging, and there were tiny
streams of crimson juice at the corners of the lips; but
he interrupted himself long enough to reply bluntly:
"I ain't agoin' to let you out of my sight.  Orders is
orders, that's all I got to say."

"But tell me, Wyatt, who gave you such orders?"
queried the minister, with no effort to conceal his
irritation.

"Searle.  And they were give to him," answered the
Deputy phlegmatically, his fat-imbedded eyes intent upon
the white and crimson segment of pastry on his plate.

"And who gave such orders to him?" persisted Hampstead.

"If you ask me—" began the Deputy, and then exasperatingly
blotted out the possibility of further speech
by the transfer of the dripping triangle to his mouth.

"Well, I do ask you," declared the minister curtly.

"He got 'em from Miss Dounay."

"And is that woman running the District Attorney's
office?" questioned the minister scornfully.

"Search me!" gulped Wyatt, with a shrug of his
shoulders.  "I had one look at her.  She's got eyes like
a pair of automatics.  You take it from me, Doc," and
Wyatt laid his unoccupied hand upon the sleeve of the
minister, "if she's got anything on you, compromise and
do it quick; if she ain't, fight, and fight like h——."  Wyatt
stopped and shot an apologetic glance around the
table.  "'Scuse my French," he blurted, "but you know
what I mean."

"Yes," said the minister, holding his head very
straight, "I realize that you do not mean to insult me."

"Insult you?" argued the Deputy, overflowing with
satisfied amiability.  "After coming over here to arrest
you, and you givin' me a dinner like this?  Pie like this?
Well, I guess not.  I'm bribed, Doc, that's what I am.
I got to go in that room with you when you see the old
lady; but I'll hold my thumbs in my ears, and I won't
see a d—— there I go again."  Once more Wyatt's
apologetic look swept around the table.

"Mrs. Burbeck is in the study," announced the maid.





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.. _`THE ANGEL ADVISES`:

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   CHAPTER XXIX


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   THE ANGEL ADVISES

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Because locomotion was not easy for her, it was to
have been expected that the conferences between John
Hampstead and Mrs. Burbeck, which, especially in the
early days of his pastorate, had been so many, would take
place in that lady's home; and they usually did.  But as
time went on, her own independence of spirit and
increased consideration for the minister led Mrs. Burbeck
frequently to prefer to come to him.  To make this easy,
two planks had been laid to form a simple runway to the
stoop at the study door.  When, therefore, the minister
entered his library to-night, closely followed by Wyatt, he
found that good woman waiting in the wheel chair beside
his desk.  The object of her call showed instantly in an
expression of boundless and tender solicitude; and yet the
clergyman immediately forgot himself in a
conscience-stricken concern for his visitor.

"You should not have come," he exclaimed quickly,
sympathy and mild reproach mingling, while a devotion
like that of a son for a mother was conveyed in his tone
and glance.

Truly, Mrs. Burbeck had never looked so frail.  All
but the faintest glow of color had gone from her cheeks;
her eyes were bright, but with a luster that seemed
unearthly, and her skin had a transparent, wax-like look that
to the clergyman was alarmingly suggestive, as if the pale
bloom of another world were upon her cheeks, which a
single breath must wither.

Making these observations swiftly as his stride carried
him to her, the minister, speaking in that rich baritone of
melting tenderness which was one of Hampstead's most
charming personal assets, concluded with: "You are not
well.  You are not at all well."

"Oh, yes," the Angel answered, "I am well."

Although she spoke in a voice that appeared to be thin
to the point of breaking, her tone was even, and her senses
proclaimed their alertness by allowing her eyes to wander
from the face of the minister and fix themselves inquiringly
over his shoulder on the unembarrassed, stolid man
at the door.

"Tell her not to mind me, Doc," interjected Wyatt in a
stuffy voice.  At the same time an exploratory thumb
brought up a quill from a vest pocket, and the deputy
began with entire assurance the after-dinner toilet of his
teeth, while his eyes roamed the ceiling and the tops of
the bookcases as if suddenly oblivious of the presence of
other persons in the room.

"Yes," said the minister reassuringly, "we will not be
disturbed by Mr. Wyatt's presence.  He is merely doing
his duty."

"You are—?"  Mrs. Burbeck hesitated with an upward
inflection, and the disagreeable word unuttered.

"Yes," replied the minister gravely, his inflection
falling where hers had risen.  "I am."

"Oh, that woman!  That woman!" murmured Mrs. Burbeck,
"I have mistrusted her and been sorry for her
all at once.  But it was Rollie that I feared for."

There was a sigh of relief that was as near to an exhibition
of selfishness as Mrs. Burbeck had ever approached;
after which, mother-like, she lapsed into a rhapsody over
her son.

"Rollie," she began, in doting accents, "is so young, so
handsome, so responsive to beauty of any sort; so ready to
believe the best of every one.  I feared that he would fall
in love with her and ruin his business career—you know
how these theatrical marriages always turn out—or that
she would jilt him and break his heart.  Rollie has such a
sensitive, expansive nature.  He has always been trusted
so widely by so many people.  Since that boy has grown
up, I have lived my whole life in him.  Do you know,"
and she leaned forward and lowered her voice to an
impressive and exceedingly intimate note; "it seems to me
that if anything should happen to Rollie, it would crush
me, that I should not care to live,—in fact should not be
able to live."

Tears came readily to the limpid pools of her eyes, and
the delicately chiseled lips trembled, though they bravely
tried to smile.

Hampstead sat regarding her thoughtfully, love and
apprehension mingling upon his face.  It suddenly
reoccurred to him with compelling force that the most awful
cruelty that could be inflicted would be for this delicate
and fragile woman, who to-night looked more like an
ambassadress from some other existence than a thing of
flesh and blood, to know the truth about her son.  Seeing
her thus smiling trustfully through her mother-tears,
thinking of all that her sweet, saint-like confidences had
meant to him, Hampstead felt a mighty resolve growing
stronger and stronger within him.

But for once Mrs. Burbeck's intuitions were not sure,
and she misconstrued the meaning of her pastor's silence.

"Forgive me," she pleaded in tones of self-reproach.
"Here I am in the midst of your trouble babbling of
myself and my son.  Yet that is like a mother.  She never
sees a young man's career blighted but she grows
suddenly apprehensive for the child of her own bosom.
Now that feeling comes to me with double force.  I love
you almost as a son.  Consequently, when I see my boy
out there in the sun of life mounting so buoyantly, and
you, so worthy to mount, but struggling in mid-flight
under a cloud, I feel a mingling of two painful emotions.
I suffer as if struck upon the heart.  My spirit of
sympathy and apprehension rushes me to you, yet when I get
to you, my doting mother's heart makes me babble first of
my boy.  And so," she concluded, with an apologetic
smile, "you see how weak and frail and egotistic I am,
after all."

"But," protested Hampstead, who had been eager to
break in, "my career is not blighted.  I am not under a
cloud.  It annoyed me to-night upon the boat and train
to discover how suddenly I was pilloried by my enemies
and avoided by my friends.  They seem to take it for
granted that I am already smirched; that to me the subject
must be painful, and as there is no other subject to be
thought of at the moment, hence conversation will also be
painful.  Because of this I am a pariah, to be shunned
like any leper."

With rising feeling, the young minister snatched a
breath and hurried on.

"Now, Mrs. Burbeck, I do not feel like that at all.  I
have put myself in the way of sustaining this attack
through following the course of duty, as I conceived it.
I need not assure you that I am innocent of a vulgar thing
like burglary.  I need not assure the public.  It is
impossible that they should believe it.  Nevertheless, I have
seen enough in the papers to-night to show how they will
revel at seeing me enmeshed in the toils of circumstance.
To them it is a rare spectacle.  Very well, let it be a
spectacle.  It is one in which I shall triumph.  I propose
to fight.  I feel like fighting."  His fist was clenched and
came down upon the arm of his chair, and his voice,
though still low, was full of vibrant power.

"I feel that I have the right to call upon every friend,
upon every member of All People's, upon every believer in
those things for which I have fought in this community,
to rally to my side to fight shoulder to shoulder in the
battle to repel what in effect is an assault not upon me,
but upon the things for which I stand."

Mrs. Burbeck's expressive eyes were floating full with a
look that verged from sympathy toward pity.

"You will have to be a very expert tactician," she said
soberly, drawing on those fountains of ripe wisdom, so
full at times that they seemed to mount toward
inspiration; "if you are to make the public think of your
embarrassment in that way.  It is going to look at this as a
disgraceful personal entanglement of a minister with an
actress!"

Hampstead writhed in his chair.  Nothing but the
depth of his consideration for Mrs. Burbeck kept him
from exclaiming vehemently against what he deemed the
enormous injustice of this assumption.

"She's right, Doc; right's your left leg," sounded a
throaty voice, which startled the two of them into
remembering that they were not alone.

"Why, Wyatt!" exclaimed the minister reprovingly,
turning sharply on the deputy.

"Excuse me, Doc," Wyatt mumbled abjectly.  "I just
thought that out loud.  All the same, she's wisin' you up
to somethin' if you'll let 'er.  Some of these old dames
that ain't got nothin' to do but just set and think gets hep
to a lot of things that a hustlin' man overlooks."

Hampstead was disgusted.

"Don't interrupt us again, please, Wyatt," he observed,
combining dignity and rebuke in his utterance.

But Wyatt, influenced no doubt by the look almost of
fright on Mrs. Burbeck's face, was already in apologetic
mood.

"Say," he mumbled contritely, "you're right, Doc.
I'm so sorry for the break that, orders or no orders, I'll
just step out in the hall while you finish.  But all the
same, you listen to her," and he indicated the disturbed
and slightly offended Mrs. Burbeck with a stab of a
toothpick in the air, "and she'll tell you somethin' that's
useful."

"Thank you very much, Wyatt," replied the minister
in noncommittal tones, but with a sigh of relief as the
deputy withdrew from the room.

Yet he had a growing sense of depression.  Wyatt's
boorish, croaking interruption had thrown him out of
poise.  Mrs. Burbeck's exaggerated sense of the gravity
of the matter weighed him down like lead, and the more
because an inner voice, sounding faintly and from far
away, but with significance unmistakable, seemed to tell
him her view was right.  Nevertheless, his whole soul
rose in protest.  It ought not to be right.  It was a gross
travesty on justice and on popular good sense.

Mrs. Burbeck, looking at him fixedly, noted this
change in spirit and the conflict of emotions which
resulted.  Reaching out impulsively, she touched the large
hand of the man where it lay upon the desk.

"I feared you would take it too lightly," she reflected.
"Youth always does that.  For this world about you to
turn and gnash you is mere human nature, which it is your
business to understand.  Has it never occurred to you
that the same voices who upon Sunday cried out:
'Hosannah, Hosannah to the son of David!' upon Friday
shouted: 'Away with him!  Crucify him!  Crucify him!'"

"But I am innocent," Hampstead protested, though weakly.

"And so was He," Mrs. Burbeck replied simply.

"But He was worthy to suffer.  I am not," murmured
Hampstead humbly.

"Sometimes," suggested the sweet-voiced woman,
"suffering makes us worthy."

"But," affirmed the minister, his fighting spirit coming
back to him, "I can prove my innocence!"

The face of Mrs. Burbeck lighted.  "Then you must,"
she said decisively.  "You give me hope when you say
that.  It was to tell you that I came, fearful that you
would rely upon the public to assume your innocence until
your guilt was proven.  Alas, they are more likely to
assume the contrary, to hold you guilty until you prove
yourself innocent."

"I have been made to see that already," replied
Hampstead.  "At first, no doubt, I did underestimate the
gravity of the situation.  You have helped me to appraise
its dangers more accurately."

But Mrs. Burbeck had more important advice to give.

"Yes," she went on half-musingly, because tactfulness
appeared to suggest that form of utterance, "you will
have to vindicate yourself absolutely.  It is a practical
situation.  The danger is not that you will be convicted
and sent to jail.  Nobody believes that, I should say.
The danger is that a question-mark will be permanently
attached to your name and character.  The Reverend
John Hampstead, interrogation point!  Is he a thief, or
not?  Did he compromise himself, or not?  Is he weak,
or not?  This is the thing to fear, the thing that would
condemn you and brand you as stripes brand a convict."

For a tense, reflective moment the minister's lips had
grown dry and bloodless; and then he confessed grudgingly:
"I begin to see that you are right."

"You should begin your defense by a counter-attack,"
Mrs. Burbeck continued, feeling that the man was
sufficiently aroused now to appreciate the importance of
vigorous defensive actions.  "Declare your disbelief that the
diamonds have actually been stolen.  Get out a warrant of
search, and you will probably find them now concealed
among her effects.  At any rate this counter-search would
hold the public verdict in suspense; and it would be like
your well-known aggressive personality.  If the search
fails to reveal them, if her diamonds really are stolen,
your complete vindication must depend upon the capture
and exposure of the real thief."

Hampstead wiped his moist brow nervously.  It was
uncannily terrible that this woman of all persons in the
world should say this to him.  However, he had
sufficient presence of mind to urge:

"But how unjust to force a contract like that upon me."

"It is unjust," admitted the Angel of the Chair.
"Yet the innocent often suffer injustice, and you must
realize that you are not immune.  That is your only
course, and I came specifically to warn you of it.  Prove
there was no theft, or get the thief!"

There was snap and sparkle in Mrs. Burbeck's eyes.
Despite her physical frailty, her spirit was stout, and her
conviction so forcefully conveyed that the minister
delivered himself of a gesture of utter helplessness.

"I cannot do either," he said, half-whispering his
desperation.  "Yet I think I appreciate better than you
how sound your advice has been.  But there are reasons
that I cannot give you, that I cannot give to any one, why
the course which you suggest cannot be followed.  I must
go another way to vindication; but," and his voice rose
buoyantly, "I will go and I will get it."

Mrs. Burbeck received with misgivings her pastor's
complete rejection of the advice she had offered, yet some
unconscious force in the young minister's manner swept
her on quickly against her judgment and her will to an
enormous increase of faith, both in the strength and the
judgment of the man.  As for Hampstead, he concluded
his rejection by doing something he had never done
before.  That was to lean low, his face chiseled in lines of
gravity and devotion, and taking the delicate hand of
Mrs. Burbeck, that in its weakness was like a drooping flower,
lift it to his lips and kiss it.

"Conserve all your spirit," he said solemnly, still clinging
tenderly to the hand.  "It may be that I shall have to
lean heavily upon you."

"You may have my life to the uttermost," she breathed
trustfully, never dreaming the thought unthinkable which
the words suggested to her pastor and friend.  But an
extraneous idea came pressing in, and Mrs. Burbeck
raised toward the minister, in a gesture of appeal, the
hand his lips had just been pressing, as she pleaded:
"And do not think too hardly of the woman.  She loves you."

"Loves me!" protested Hampstead, with a ghastly
hoarseness.  "The woman is incapable of love—of
passion even.  She is all fire, but without heat—though
once she had it.  She is a mere blaze of ambition.  All
she cared for was to bring me to my knees, to dangle me
like a scalp at her waist."

Mrs. Burbeck steadied him with a glance from a mind
unimpressed.

"Be sorry, very sorry for her!" she insisted gravely.
"Acquit yourself of no impatience—not even a reproachful
look, if you can help it.  She is to be pitied.  Only
the malice of unsated love could do what she has done.
Show yourself noble enough, Christ-like enough, to be
very, very sorry for her!"

"*We got to go if we get there by nine!*"

It was the smothered voice of Wyatt, calling through
the door.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE SCENE IN THE VAULT`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXX


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE SCENE IN THE VAULT

.. vspace:: 2

Silas Wadham, mine-owner; William Hayes, merchant,
and E. H. Wilson, capitalist, subscribed to Hampstead's
bond.  Each was a big man in his way; each had
unbounded faith in the integrity and good sense of the
minister.  They were not men to be swept off their feet
by mere surface currents.  They laughed a little and
rallied John upon his plight, yet he knew somehow by the
bend of the jaw when they dipped their pens in ink and
with clamped lips subscribed their signatures, that these
men were his unshakably.

One circumstance might have seemed strange.  None
of them were members of All People's.  Yet this was not
because there were not men in All People's who would
have qualified as unhesitatingly; but because John had a
feeling that he was being assailed as a community
character rather than as a clerical one.

Within ten minutes the formalities in Judge Brennan's
chamber were concluded, Hampstead was free, but as he
turned to Searle waiting suavely, backed by the suggestive
presence of the two detectives, there came suddenly into
his mind the memory that Rollie Burbeck's I.O.U. for
eleven hundred dollars was in his safe deposit box in the
envelope marked "Wadham Currency."  This was a
chaos-producing thought.  If Searle once got an eye on
that card, it would start innumerable trains of suspicion,
each of which must center on the young bank cashier.  In
his present state, that boy was too weak to resist
pressure of any sort.  He would crumble and go to pieces,
And yet, it was not the thought of the exposure and ruin
of this spoiled young man that moved Hampstead to
another of those acts which only riveted the chains of
suspicion more tightly upon himself.  It was the vision of
the mother who only an hour before had murmured
tremulously: "If anything should happen to him, I
should not be able to live."

"Searle!" exclaimed the minister passionately.  "You
must not proceed with this.  If you are a man of any
heart, you will not persist against my pleadings.  I tell
you frankly there are secrets in that box which, while they
would do you no good, could be used to ruin innocent
men—guilty ones, too, perhaps; but the innocent with the
guilty."

Hampstead was speaking hoarsely, his voice raised and
trembling with an excitement and lack of nerve control
he had never exhibited before in public.

The prosecutor's face pictured surprise and even
gloating, but his eyes expressed a purpose unshaken.

"Confidences in my possession must be respected,"
Hampstead went on, arguing vehemently.  "The confidences
of a patient to his physician, of a penitent to his
priest, are respected by the law.  Because some of these
confidences happen to be in writing, you have no right to
violate them."

"And I tell you I have no intention to violate them,"
Searle returned testily.  "My order is a warrant of
search for a diamond necklace."

"And I tell you I will not respect the order of the
court," blazed the minister.  "You shall not examine the
box!"

Judge Mortimer was startled; the bondsmen, although
surprised by the minister's show of feeling, were
sympathetic.

"I do not care whether you consent or not," Searle
rejoined sarcastically.  "I have the key, and I have the
order of court, which the vault custodian must respect.  I
have done you the courtesy to meet you here so that you
might be present when the box was examined.  You must
be beside yourself to suppose that I can be swayed from
my duty, even temporarily, by an appeal like this."

"I think, Doctor, you should have the advice of your
attorney on this," suggested Mr. Wilson considerately;
and then turning to the Assistant District Attorney,
observed sharply: "It seems to me, Searle, that this is
rather a high-handed procedure."

But this remark of the practical Mr. Wilson had an
instantly calming effect upon the minister.

"No, no," Hampstead exclaimed, turning to his friend;
"I do not want an attorney.  I do not need an attorney.
I should only be misunderstood.  It is the thought of
what might result to innocent people through an
examination of this box that stirs me so deeply."

"All the same, I think we had better have an attorney
immediately," declared Wilson.  "I can send my car for
Bowen and have him here in fifteen minutes."

"An attorney," commented Searle brusquely, "could do
nothing except to get an order from a Superior Court
judge enjoining the bank from obeying the search warrant
of this court.  He would be lucky if, at this time of
night, he caught a judge and got that under two or three
hours.  I will be in that box in five minutes.  Come
along, if you want to."

Searle moved toward the door, followed by the two
detectives, his purpose perfectly plain; yet the minister hung
back, for the first time so confused by entangling
developments that he could not see where to put his foot down
next.

"I think, Doctor Hampstead," advised Mr. Wadham
kindly, "that since the District Attorney has matters in
his own hands, you had better go with him and witness the
search.  If you do not object, we shall be glad to
accompany you.  Our presence may prove helpful later."

Because his mind ran forward in an absorbed attempt to
forecast and forestall the probable developments from the
impending discovery of the clue against Rollie, the minister
still paused, until his silence became as conspicuous as
his inaction.

"Oh, yes, yes," he exclaimed, suddenly aware of the
waiting group about him.  "Yes, by all means, go with
me.  What we must face, we must face," he concluded
desperately, with an uneasy inner intimation that he was
saying perhaps the wrong thing.  Yet with the vision of
Mrs. Burbeck's saintly, smiling face before him, Hampstead,
usually so calm and self-controlled, had little care
what he said or how he said it so long as his mind was
busy with some plan to fend off this frightful blow from
her.

Mr. Wadham was a man of mature years and fatherly
ways.  He took the young minister's arm affectionately in
his, and urged him forward in the wake of Searle, who
had already moved out into the wide hall accompanied
by the two plain-clothes men.  Hayes and Wilson, still
sympathetic, but no longer quite comprehending the undue
excitement of the young divine in whose integrity their
confidence was so great, fell in behind.

Once before the custodian of the vault, another evidence
of the thoughtfulness of Searle appeared.  John R. Costello,
attorney of the bank, was conveniently on hand to
read the warrant of the court and to instruct the custodian
of the vault upon whom it was served that it was in proper
form and must be obeyed.

Because the number of witnesses was too large to be
accommodated in the rooms provided for customers, the
inspection of the minister's box was made upon a table in
the vault room itself.  In the group of onlookers,
Hampstead, because of his commanding figure, his remarkable
face, and his very natural interest in the proceedings, was
the most conspicuous presence.  As naturally as all eyes
centered on the box, just so they kept breaking away at
intervals to scan the face of the big man who stood before
them in an attitude of embarrassed helplessness.  He was
obviously making a considerable effort to control himself.
Only Searle was sure that he understood this.  But at the
same moment, two of the bondsmen, the kind-hearted
Wadham and the shrewd, practical Wilson, appeared to
observe this attitude and to detect its significance.  They
exchanged questioning glances, and were further mystified
when for a single moment a look of confident reassurance
flickered like the play of a sunbeam upon the face of the
minister.

That was in his one selfish moment, when he recalled
how the search of the box, after all these excessive
precautions of the District Attorney's office, could only recoil
upon their case like a boomerang; but his countenance
shaded again to an expression of anxious helplessness as
Searle paused dramatically a moment with his hand upon
the box.  Then the hand lifted the hinged cover,
revealing the contents.

As if from a nervous eagerness to come quickly at the
object of his search, the Assistant District Attorney turned
the box upside down and emptied its contents on the table;
and yet, when this was done, nothing appeared but papers.

Searle attempted to open none of them.  Proceeding
with deliberate care, as if to vindicate himself in the eyes
of the bondsmen from the suspicion of the minister that he
might be on a "fishing expedition", he merely took up
each piece singly and precisely, felt it over with his long,
thin fingers and laid it by, until at length but two envelopes
remained.  The first of these was long and empty looking
and gave evidence that the flap had been rudely, if not
hastily, torn open.  Searle held it in his hand now.

Hampstead's heart stood still; he knew that this must
be the envelope which had contained the Wadham currency,
hence between this attorney's thumb and forefinger,
screened by one thickness of paper, lay the card that was
the clue to Rollie Burbeck's crime.  But the moment of
suspense passed.

Submitting it to the same inquisitive finger manipulation
as the others, yet not looking within it nor turning it
over to read what might be written on the face, Searle
laid the Wadham envelope on the pile of discards.

"Thank God," gulped Hampstead, yet with utterance
so inchoate that Hayes, the third bondsman, standing
nearest, did not catch the words, but a few minutes later,
discussing the matter with Wilson, said: "I heard the
apprehensive rattle in his throat just before Searle came
to that last envelope."

But in the meantime, Hampstead was asking himself
suspiciously what was this last envelope?  He thought
he knew by heart every separate document that was in the
box, and he could not recall what this might be.

"You must be convinced by now," argued Searle, as if
deliberately heightening the suspense, while he turned a
straight glance upon the minister, "that I had no object
in inspecting the contents of this box except to search for
the diamonds."

"And you have not found them!"

This was obviously the remark which should have come
in triumphant, challenging tones from the minister.  As
a matter of fact, it came quietly, and with a sigh of relief,
from Silas Wadham.

The minister did not speak at all, did not even raise his
eyes to meet the glance of Searle.  His gaze was fixed as
his mind was fascinated by the mystery of the last lone
envelope.

"Not yet," replied Searle significantly to Wadham's
interjection, but instead of disappointment there was that
quality in his tones which heightens and intensifies
expectancy.  At the same time he took up the envelope by
one end, but, under the weight of something within, the
paper bent surprisingly in the middle and the lower end
swung pendant and baglike, accompanied by the slightest
perceptible metallic sound.  Every member of the group
of witnesses leaned forward with an involuntary start.
Triumph flooded the face of Searle.  With his left hand
he seized the heavy, bag-like end and raised it while the
envelope was turned in his fingers bringing into view the
printing in the corner.

"This envelope bears the name and address of the
Reverend John Hampstead," he announced in formal
tones.  "I now open it in your presence."

Nervously the Assistant District Attorney tore off the
end of the envelope, squinted within, and exclaimed: "It
contains—"  His voice halted for an instant while he
dramatically tipped the envelope toward the table and a
string of fire flowed out and lay quivering before the eyes
of all—"the Dounay diamonds!"

The jewels, trembling under the impulse of the
movement by which they had been deposited upon the table,
sparkled as if with resentful brilliance at having been thus
darkly immured, and for an appreciable interval they
compelled the attention of all; then every eye was turned upon
the accused minister.

But these inquisitorial glances came too late.  Amazement,
bewilderment, a sense of outrage, and hot indignation,
had been reeled across the screen of his features;
but that was in the ticking seconds while the gaze of all
was on the envelope and then upon the diamonds and their
aggressive scintillations.  Now the curious eyes rested
upon a man who, after a moment in which to think, had
visioned himself surrounded and overwhelmed by
circumstances that were absolutely damning,—his own conduct
of the last few minutes the most damning of all.  His
face was as white as the paper of the envelope which
contained the irrefutable evidence.  His eyes revolved
uncertainly and then went questioningly from face to face in
the circle round him as if for confirmation of the
conclusion to which the logic of his own mind forced him
irresistibly.  In not one was that confirmation wanting.

"But," he protested wildly, and then his glance broke
down.  "It has come," he murmured hoarsely, covering
his face with his hands.  "It has come!"

His cross had come!

Some odd, disastrous chain of sequences which he had
not yet had time to reason out had fixed this crime on
him.  By another equally disastrous chain of sequences,
he must bear its guilt or be false to his confessor's vow.
Especially must he bear it, if he would shield that doting
mother who trusted him and loved him.

As if to hold himself together, he clasped his arms
before him, and his chin sunk forward on his breast.  As if
to accustom his mind to the new view from which he must
look out upon the world, he closed his eyes.  The heaving
chest, the tense jaws, the quivering lips, and the mop of
hair that fell disheveled round his temples, all combined to
make up the convincing picture of a strong man breaking.

Not one of those present, crass or sympathetic, but felt
himself the witness to a tragedy in which a man of noble
aspirations had been overtaken and hopelessly crushed by
an ingrained weakness which had expressed itself in sordid
crime.

Even the hard face of Searle softened.  With the
diamonds gleaming where they lay, he began mechanically to
replace the contents of the box.  But at the first sound of
rustling papers, the minister appeared to rouse again.  He
had stood all alone.  No one had touched him.  No one
had addressed him.  The most indifferent in this circle
were stricken dumb by the spectacle of his fall, while his
friends were almost as much appalled and dazed as he
himself appeared to be.

"I suppose," he said with melancholy interest, at the
same time moving round the table to the box, "that I may
take it now."

"Certainly, Doctor," replied Searle suavely, yielding
his place.  Nevertheless, there was a slight expression of
surprise upon his face, as upon those of the others, at the
minister's sudden revival of concern in what must now
be an utterly trifling detail so far as his own future went.
Hampstead appeared to perceive this.

"There are sacred responsibilities here," he explained
gravely, with a halting utterance that proclaimed the deeps
that heaved within him; "which, strange as it may seem to
you gentlemen, even at such an hour I would not like to
forget."

Taking up a handful of the papers, he ran them through
his fingers, his eye pausing for a moment to scan each one
of them, and his expression kindling with first one memory
and then another, as if he found a mournful satisfaction
in recalling past days when many a man and woman had
found peace for their souls in making him the sharer in
their heart-burdens,—days which every member of that
little circle felt instinctively were now gone forever.

Last of all his eye checked itself upon the envelope
marked "Wadham Currency."  Allowing the other
papers to slip back to their place in the box the minister
turned his glance into the open side of this remaining
envelope.  It was empty, save for a card tucked in the
corner.

"This thing appears to have served its purpose," he
commented absently, as if talking to himself.  Then
casually he tore the envelope across, and then again and again;
finer and finer; yet not so fine as to excite suspicion.
Looking for a wastebasket and finding none, he was about
to drop the fragments in his coat pocket.

"I will take them," said the vault custodian, holding out
his hand.  To it the minister unhesitatingly committed the
shredded envelope and card which contained the only
documentary clue to any other person than himself as the
thief of the Dounay diamonds.  A few minutes later, this
clue was in the wastebasket outside.  The next morning it
was in the furnace.

The group in the vault room broke away with dispirited
slowness, as mourners turn from the freshly heaped
earth.  Behind all the minister lingered, as if unwilling to
leave the presence of his dead reputation.

But the man's appearance somewhat belied his mood.
He was thinking swiftly.  This was no uncommon plot
which had overtaken him.  It was conceived in craft and
laid with power to kill.  The diabolical cunning of the
scheme was that it forced him to be silent or to be a traitor.
The indications were that he had been betrayed outrageously;
but he did not know this positively, therefore
he could venture no defense at all against this black array
of circumstances.  It might be only some terrible mistake,
and for him to venture more now than the most general
denial might bring about the very calamities he was trying
to avert.  He dared not even tell the truth: that he did
not know the diamonds were in the box.  Especially, he
dared not say that he did not put them there.

For the first time an emotion like fear entered his soul,
but it passed the moment the priestly ardor in him saw
which way his duty lay.  If Rollie had grossly sold him
into the power of the actress at the price of his own
escape, he felt more sorry for the poor wretch than before.
He was glad that he had destroyed the I.O.U., discovery
of which might have incriminated the young man helplessly,
and he resolved to continue upon his mission as a
saviour, even though he himself were lost.  It suddenly
occurred to him with doubling force that this was what it
meant to be a saviour.

With this conviction firmly in his mind, Hampstead
turned to Wilson, Wadham, and Hayes, who had been
waiting in considerate silence, and led the way upward to
the dimly lighted lobby of the bank, feeling himself grow
stronger with every step he mounted; for the maze of
complexities in which he found himself had quickly reduced
itself to the simple duty of being true to trust.  Eternal
Loyalty was again to be the price of success.

As his friends gathered about him on the upper floor for
a word of conference, they were astonished at the change
in his expression.  It was calm and even confident; while
a kind of spiritual radiance suffused his features.

"My friends," the minister began in an even voice, that
nevertheless was full of the echo of deep feeling, "I can
offer you no explanation of the scene to which you have
just been witnesses.  It is almost inevitable that you
should think me guilty or criminally culpable.  I am
neither!"  The affirmation was made as if to acquit his
conscience, rather than as if to be expected to be believed.

"But," and his utterance became incisive, "there is
nothing to that effect which can be said now."

"Something had better be said now," blurted out the
practical Wilson flatly, "or this story in the morning
papers will damn you as black as tar."

"Not one word," declared the minister with quiet
emphasis, "can be spoken now!"

In Hampstead's bearing there was a notable return of
that subtle power of man mastery which had been so
important an element in his success.  Before this even the
aggressive, outspoken Wilson was silent; but the three
men stood regarding John with an air at once sympathetic
and doubtful.  They were also expectant, for it was
evident from the minister's manner that he was deliberating
whether he might not take them at least a little way into
his confidence.

"Only this much I can indicate," he volunteered
presently.  "A part of what has happened I understand very
clearly.  A part I do not understand at all.  In the
meantime, some one, but not myself, is in jeopardy.  Until the
confusion is cleared, or until I can see better what to do
than I see now, I can do nothing but rest under the
circumstances which you have seen enmesh me to-night.  Of
course, it is impossible that such a monstrous injustice
can long continue.  I hold the power to clear myself
instantly, but it is a power I cannot use without
violating the most sacred obligation a minister can assume.
I will not violate it.  I must insist that not one single word
which I have just hinted to you be given to the public.
Silence, absolute and unwavering silence, is the course
which is forced upon me and upon every friend who would
be true to me, as I shall seek to be true to my duty."

The three friends heard this declaration rather
helplessly.  In the presence of such a lofty spirit of
self-immolation, what were mere men like themselves to say,
or do?  Obviously nothing, except to look the reverence
and wonder which they felt and to bow tacitly to his will.
Hampstead knew instinctively and without one word of
assurance that these men, at first overwhelmingly
convinced of his guilt by what they had seen, and then
bewildered by his manner, now believed in him absolutely.
It put him at ease with them and gave him assurance to add:

"I know that not one of you is a man to desert a friend
in the hour of his extremity, and no matter what happens
I believe your faith in me will not falter.  You will
understand my wish to thank you for what you have done and
may do, and to say good-by for to-night.  My burning
desire now is to get by myself and try to comprehend what
has happened and what may yet happen before this
miserable business is concluded."

Cordially taking the hand of each, while the men one
after another responded with fervent expressions of faith
and confidence, the minister turned quickly upon his heel,
crossed the street, and leaped lightly upon a passing car.

Silence!  Silence!  Unwavering silence!  The car
wheels seemed to beat this injunction up to him with every
revolution.  Silence for the sake of others, some of whom
were supremely worthy, one at least of whom might be
wretchedly unworthy!  Above all, silence for the sake of
his vow as a vicar of Christ on earth.  What was it to be a
Christian if not to be a miniature Christ,—a poor,
stumbling, tottering, stained and far-off pattern of the mighty
archetype of human goodness and perfection?  According
to his strength, he, John Hampstead, was to be
permitted to suffer as a saviour of a very small part of
mankind and in a very temporary and no doubt in a very
inadequate way, the virtue of which should lie in the fact
that it pointed beyond himself to the one saviour who was
supremely able.  He, too, must be "dumb before his
shearers", not stubbornly, not guiltily, and not spectacularly,
but faithfully and for a worth-while purpose,—the
saving of a man.

For a change had come swiftly in the relative
importance of the motives which determined his course.  With
the actual coming of his cross, he had caught a loftier
vision.  It was not to save the few remaining weeks or
months or years of the life of a saintly and beautiful
woman that he was to stand silent even to trial,
conviction, and disgrace.  It was to save the soul of a man, a
wretched, vain, ornamental and unutilitarian sort of
person, but none the less unusually gifted in many of his
faculties, perhaps wanting only an experience like this to
precipitate the better elements in his nature into the
foundation of such a character as his mother believed him
to possess.

This change of emphasis strengthened Hampstead
enormously.  It gave him calm and resolution, increasing
self-control and fortitude, a dignity of bearing that
promised at least to remain unbroken, and a sense of the
presence of the Presence which it seemed could not depart
from him.

When John reached home, he found Rose, Dick, and
Tayna waiting anxiously.  A sight of his face, with the
new strength and dignity upon it, allayed their apprehension,
but the solemnity of manner in which he gathered
them about him in the study roused their fears again.
Briefly he related how the diamonds had been discovered
in his safe deposit vault.  Sternly but kindly he repressed
the hot outburst of Dick; sympathetically he tried to stem
the tears of Tayna, but before the pale face and the dry,
fixed eyes of Rose he stood a moment, mute and hesitant,
then said with tender brotherliness:

"Old girl, in the silence of waiting for my vindication,
it is going to be easier for you and the children to trust
me than for others.  But even for you it will be hard.
Others can withdraw from me, can wash their hands of
me; and they may do it.  You cannot, and would not if
you could."

Rose clasped her brother's hand in silent assurance; but
Hampstead went on with saddened voice to portray what
was to be expected.

"You will all have to bear the shame with me.  In fact,
my shame will be yours.  You, Rose, will be pointed out
upon the street as my sister.  Tayna, at school
to-morrow, may encounter fewer smiles and some eyes that
refuse to meet hers.  Dick will have some hurts to bear
among his fellows, for he has been loyally and perhaps
boastfully proud of me.  I have only this to ask, that you
will each walk with head up and unafraid, with no attempt
at apology nor justification, and with no unkind word for
those who in act or judgment seem unkind to me."

The feeling that they were to be honored with bearing
a part of the burden of the big man whom they loved so
deeply stirred the emotions of the little group almost
beyond control.  Dick moved first, clutching his uncle's
hand.

"You bet your life!" he blurted, then turned and bolted
from the room.  Tayna next flung her arms about her
uncle's neck and wet his cheek with scalding tears, then
dashed away after Dick.  Last of all, Rose stood with her
hands upon his shoulders.  She was taller for a woman
than he for a man, and could look almost level into his
eyes.

"My brother!" she said significantly.  "My strong,
noble, innocent"—and then a gleam of light shot into her
eyes as she added—"my triumphant brother!"

"My bravest, truest of sisters!"  The big man
breathed softly, and drawing the woman to him imprinted
that kiss upon the forehead which, seldom bestowed,
marked when given his genuine tribute of respect and
affection to the woman who, older than himself by ten
years, had been the mother to his orphaned youth and had
created the obligation which, uncharged, he none the less
acknowledged and had striven to repay by a life of
conscientious devotion to her and to her children.

The door closed after her "Good night", and John
stood alone glancing reflectively about the long, book-lined
room.  Here many of his greatest experiences had come
to him.  Here he had caught the far-off kindling visions
of that rarely human Galilean, with his rarely human
group about him, trudging over the hills, sitting by the
side of the sea, teaching, healing, helping.  Here he had
caught the vision of himself following, afar off, two
thousand years behind, but following—teaching, healing,
helping—in His name.

The telephone rang, its sharp, metallic jingle shocking
the very atmosphere into apprehensive tremors.  Yet
instantly recalled to himself and to the new height on which
he stood, Hampstead lifted the receiver with a firm hand
and replied in an even, measured voice: "*The
Sentinel*?—Yes—Yes—No—There is nothing to
say—Absolutely!—I do."

The receiver was hung up.  The only change in
Hampstead's voice from the beginning to the end of this
conversation, the larger part of which had taken place upon
the other end of the line, was a deepening gravity of
utterance.  In a few moments the 'phone rang again.  It was
*The Press*.  The papers all had the story now.  The
Oakland offices of the San Francisco papers were also
clamoring.  Each wanted to know what the minister had to say
to the damning discovery of the diamonds in his box.

For them all Hampstead had the same answer: "I
have nothing to say—yet."  Some of the inquisitors
cleverly attempted to draw the clergyman out by suggesting
that there was plenty of opportunity for a countercharge
that the diamonds had been planted in his box,
since it was improbable in the last degree that a man of
ordinary intelligence would conceal stolen diamonds in a
safe deposit box held in his own name, the key to which he
carried in his own pocket; but the self-controlled man at
the other end of the telephone fell into no such trap.  To
direct attention to an inquiry as to who had visited his
vault, or might have visited it, during the time since the
diamonds were stolen was the last thing the minister would
do.  Already he had reasoned that the vault custodian on
duty in the morning, knowing that Hampstead had not
been to the vault during the day, but that Assistant Cashier
Burbeck had, would do some excogitating upon his own
account; but the minister reflected that this would not
be dangerous, since the custodian, sharing in the very
great confidence which Rollie enjoyed, would conclude
that this young man had been made the innocent messenger
for depositing the diamonds in the vault, and for the sake
of unpleasant consequences which might result to the
bank, would no doubt keep his mouth tightly shut.

The last call of all came from Haggard, whose city
editor had just told him that the minister declined any
sort of an explanation.  Haggard was managing editor
of *The Press* and Hampstead's true friend.

"Do you know what this does to your friends?"
demanded Haggard passionately.  "It makes them as dumb
as you are.  I know you; you've got something up your
sleeve.  But this case isn't going to be tried in the courts.
It's being tried in the newspapers right now.  Once the
court of public opinion goes against you, it's hard to get
a reversal.  And it's going against you from the minute
this story gets before the public—our version of it
even—for we have got to print the news, you know.  We've
never had bigger."

Some sort of a protest gurgled from Hampstead's lips.

"Oh," broke out Haggard still more impatiently, "I
think the majority have too much sense to believe you're
a common thief; but they're going to be convinced you're
a damned fool.  A public man had better be found guilty
of being a thief than an ass, any day.  Now, what can I say?"

"I am very sorry," replied Hampstead in a patient
voice, "but you can say nothing—absolutely nothing."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`A MISADVENTURE`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXXI


.. class:: center medium bold

   A MISADVENTURE

.. vspace:: 2

Counting back from the scene in the vault room of
the Amalgamated National, which took place at about
nine-thirty, it was five and one-half hours to the time
when Marien Dounay and Rollie Burbeck had steamed
out with Mrs. Harrington upon her luxurious launch, the
*Black Swan*, which was so commodious and powerful that
it just escaped being a sea-going yacht.

But now, after the lapse of this five and one-half
hours, neither Marien nor Rollie had returned, and only
one of them had an inkling of what might have been
happening in their absence.  Information from the
Harrington residence that the *Black Swan* would return to the
pier about ten-thirty, caused a group of hopeful young
men from the newspaper offices to take up their station
on the yacht pier slightly in advance of that hour.  But
their wait was long, so long in fact that one by one they
gave up their vigil and returned to their respective offices
with no answer as yet to the burning question of what
had led Miss Dounay to suspect that her diamonds were
in the minister's safe deposit vault.  But the distress and
disappointment of the reporters was nothing like so great
as the distress and disappointment upon the *Black Swan*,
although for a very different reason.

The evening with Mrs. Harrington and her guests had
begun pleasantly enough.  The party itself was a jolly
one, and so far as might be judged from outward
appearances, Miss Marien Dounay was quite the jolliest of
all; excepting perhaps Mrs. Harrington herself who was
elated over the unexpected appearance of the actress; and
Rollie, over its effect in immediately restoring him to the
lost favor of his hostess.  As many times as it was
demanded, Miss Dounay told and retold the story of the
loss of her jewels.  She was the recipient of much
sympathy and of many compliments because of the admirable
fortitude with which she endured her loss.

Rollie thought Miss Dounay appeared able to dispense
with the sympathy, but perceived that she greatly enjoyed
the compliments.  That she should keep the company in
ignorance that her diamonds were to be recovered and
continue to enact the rôle of the heroine who had been
cruelly robbed of her chief possession, did not even
surprise him.  It was her affair entirely since she had bound
him to secrecy, and whatever the motive, in the present
state of his nerves, he was exceedingly grateful for it;
having meantime not a doubt that the disclosure would
be made ultimately in a manner which would permit the
actress to gratify to the full her childish love of theatrical
sensation.

The cruise began with a run far up San Pablo Bay
toward Carquinez Straits, followed by a straightaway drive
out through the Golden Gate to watch the sun sink
between the horns of the Farallones; but here the heavy
swells made the ladies gasp and clamor for a return to
the shelter of the Bay.  Re-entering the Gate as night
fell, there was good fun in playing hide-and-seek from
searchlight practice of the forts on either side the famous
tideway, and some mischievous satisfaction in lounging
in the track of the floundering, pounding ferryboats, and
getting vigorously whistled out of the way.  It was even
enjoyable to grow sentimental over the phosphorescent
glow of the waves in the wake or the play of the
moonbeams on the bone-white crest at the bow.  But after an
hour or so of this, when it would seem that all of these
things together with the tonic of the fresh salt breeze had
made everybody wolfishly hungry, Mrs. Harrington's
butler, expertly assisted, opened great hampers of eatables
and drinkables, and began to serve them in the cabin which
would have been rather spacious if the crowd had not
been so large.

"Calmer water, James, while supper is being served!"
Mrs. Harrington had ordered with a peace-be-still air.

James communicated the order to the captain, who
understood very well that Mrs. Harrington was a lady to be
obeyed.  But it happened that there was a very fresh
breeze on the Bay that night, and that a swell which was a
kind of left-over from a gale outside two days before was
still sloshing about inside, so that "calmer water" was
not just the easiest thing to find, though the captain looked
for it hard.

"Calmer water, James, I said!" Mrs. Harrington
directed reprovingly, after an interval of watchful
impatience, accompanying the observation by a look that shot
barbs into the eye of the butler.  A close observer would
have noticed—and James was a close observer of his
mistress—that Mrs. Harrington's neck swelled slightly,
and that a flush began to mount upon her cheeks.

James knew this pouter-pigeon swelling well and its
significance.  Mrs. Harrington *must* now be obeyed.
Calmer water had to be had, if it had to be made.

"Back of Yerba Buena, it is calmer," the lady
concluded, with an increase of acerbity.

James lost no time in conveying this second command
and a description of its accompanying signal, to the captain.

"'Behind the Goat,' she said," James concluded.

Now this island which humps like a camel in the middle
of the San Francisco Bay is known to the esthetics as
Yerba Buena, but to folks and to mariners it is Goat
Island.  James was folks; the captain was a mariner.
Mrs. Harrington might have been esthetic.

"She draws too much to go nosin' round in there,"
replied the captain reluctantly, and explained his reluctance
with a mixture of emphasis and the picturesque, by
adding, "Behind the Goat it's shoal from hell to breakfast."

"She said it," replied James truculently; and stood by
to see the helm shift.

"In she goes then, dod gast her!" muttered the captain.

"So much calmer in here under the sheltering lee of
Yerba Buena," chirped Miss Gwendolyn Briggs, another
quarter of an hour later.

"Why, to be sure," assented the hostess, as with a
provident air she surveyed her contented and consuming
guests who were ranged like a circling frieze upon the
seat of Pullman plush which ran round the luxurious
cabin, with James and his two assistants serving from
the long table in the center.

It has been hinted that Mrs. Harrington was inclined to
stoutness.  She was also inclined to Russian caviar.
Having seen her guests abundantly supplied, she lifted to her
lips a triangle of toast, thickly spread with the Romanof
confection.  James stood before her, supporting a plate
upon which were more triangles of toast and more caviar
in a frilled and corrugated carton.

But quite abruptly Mrs. Harrington, who was proper
as well as expert in all her food-taking manners, did an
unaccountable thing.  She turned the toast sidewise and
smeared the caviar across her wide cheek almost from
the corner of her mouth to her ear.  At the same
moment James himself did an even more unaccountable
thing.  He lurched forward, decorated his mistress's
shoulders with the triangles of toast, like a new form of
epaulette and upset the carton of caviar upon her
expansive bosom, where the dark, oleaginous mass clung
helplessly, quivered hesitantly, and then began to roll
away in tiny, black spheres and to send out trickling
exploratory streams, the general tendency of which was
downward.

Nor was Mrs. Harrington alone in this sudden eccentricity
of deportment.  Over on the right Major Hassler,
florid of person and extremely dignified of manner, was
filling the wine glass of Mrs. Marston Conant, when
abruptly he moved the mouth of the bottle a full twelve
inches and began to pour its contents in a frothy gurgling
stream down the back of the withered neck of John
Ray, a rich, irascible, slightly deaf, and sinfully rich
bachelor, who at the moment had leaned very low and
forward to catch a remark that the lady next beyond
was making.  As if not content with the ruin thus
wrought, Major Hassler next swept the bottle in a dizzy,
cascading circle round him, sprinkling every toilet within
a radius of three yards, and after dropping the bottle and
flourishing his arms wildly, ended by plunging both hands
to the bottom of the huge bowl of punch on the end of the
table nearest him.

The only palliating feature of these amazing performances
of Major Hassler, of James, and of Mrs. Harrington,
was that nearly everybody else was executing
the same sort of scrambling, lurching, colliding, capsizing,
and smearing manoeuvres upon their own account.  For
a moment everybody glared at everybody else accusingly,
and then Ernest Cartwright, sitting on the floor where
he had been hurled, offered an interpretation of the
phenomena.

"We struck something!" he suggested brightly.

"By Gad!" declared Major Hassler with sudden conviction,
as he straightened up and viewed his dripping
hands and cuffs with an expression quite indescribable.
"By Gad!  That's just what I think!"

"James!" murmured a voice almost entirely smothered
by rage.

James, despite the horrible fear in his soul, dared to
turn his gaze upon his mistress, when suddenly a spasm of
pain crossed the lady's face.

"Oh!" she gasped.  "Oh, my heart!"  Wrath had
given way to fright, and the hue of wrath to pallor.

In the meantime, the *Black Swan* was standing very
still, as still as if on land,—which to be exact was where
she was.  From without came the sound of waves slapping
idly against her sides, and then she shivered while
the screws were reversed and churned desperately.  From
end to end of the cabin there were "Ohs" and "Ahs,"
and shrieks of dismay, with short ejaculations, as the
guests struggled to their feet and stood to view the ruin
which the sudden stoppage of the craft had wrought upon
toilets, dispositions, and the atmosphere of Mrs. Harrington's
happy party.

The next half hour, to employ a marine phrase, was
devoted to salvage of one sort and another.  One thing
became speedily clear.  The *Black Swan* had her nose
fast in most tenacious clay.  No amount of churning of
the screw could drag her off.  And no amount of tooting
of whistles brought any sort of craft to her assistance.
She was stuck there till the tide should take her off.
The tide was running out.  By rough calculation, it
would be eight hours till it came back strong enough to
lift up her stern and rock her nose loose.

It was an unpleasant prospect.

With Mrs. Harrington sitting propped and pale in the
end of the cabin, her guests tried to cheer her by making
light of their plight and the prospect; but as the waters
slipped out and out from under the *Black Swan*, till she
lay on the bottom with a drunken list, and the hours crept
along with dreary slowness through the tiresome night,
one disposition after another succumbed to the inevitable
and became cattish or bearish, according to sex.  But
the very first disposition of all to go permanently bad
was that of Marien Dounay.  Young Burbeck thought he
understood to the full her capacity to be disagreeable, but
learned in the first hour that this was a ridiculously
mistaken assumption.

Nor could any mere petulance on account of weariness
or cramped quarters among people who under these
circumstances speedily became a bore to themselves and to
each other, account for her behavior.  Never had Rollie
seen so many manifestations of her feline restlessness,
or her wiry endurance.  When other women had sunk
exhausted to sleep upon a cushion in a corner, or upon
the shoulders of an escort who obligingly supported the
fair head with his own weary body, Miss Dounay sat
bolt and desperate, staring at the myriad shoreward lights
as if they held some secret her wilful eyes would yet
bore out of them.

Though Rollie loyally tried, as endurance would
permit, to watch with Marien through the night, sustaining
snubs and shafts with humble patience and venturing an
occasional dismal attempt at cheer, the first sign of
relaxation in Miss Dounay's mood was vouchsafed not to
him but to François.

This was when at eight o'clock the next morning, after
toiling painfully up the steps at the landing pier, her
eyes fell upon the huge black limousine, with the faithful
chauffeur, his arms folded upon the wheel, his head
leaning forward upon them, sound asleep.  He had been
there since ten-thirty of the night before.  Other
chauffeurs had waited and fumed, had sputtered to and fro
in joy-riding intervals, and had gone home; but not
François.  A smile of pride and satisfaction played across
Miss Dounay's face at this exhibition of faithfulness,—and
especially in the presence of this jaded, dispirited crowd.

"François," Miss Dounay exclaimed, prodding his elbow
until his head rolled sleepily into wakefulness, "I
could kiss you!"

However, she did not.  Rollie opened the door, Miss
Dounay stepped back, motioned into the comfortable
depths Mrs. Harrington and as many other of the ladies
as the car would accommodate, and was whirled away.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE COWARD AND HIS CONSCIENCE`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXXII


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE COWARD AND HIS CONSCIENCE

.. vspace:: 2

On the theory that his duty as an escort still survived,
Rollie was given a seat upon the limousine beside
François; but at the door of the St. Albans Miss Dounay
dismissed him as curtly as if she had quite forgotten that he
was now or ever of any importance to her.

While to escape a breakfast with that thistle-tempered
lady on such a morning would, under ordinary conditions,
have been a distinct relief, this morning it appealed
to Rollie as merely palliative.  It was a mercy, but
no more.  He did not expect to know one single sensation
of real relief until he saw Miss Dounay holding her
precious diamonds once more in her hands.  It was his
intention, after a hasty breakfast, to make the swiftest
possible transit to the residence of the Reverend John
Hampstead and there secure the loan of a certain key
and rush back to the bank.  Within, say, seven minutes
thereafter, he anticipated that this taste of true relief
would come to him.

It was twenty minutes past eight as he crossed the wide
lobby of the hotel.  His physical condition was far from
enviable.  He was clad in a baggy-elbowed, wretchedly
wrinkled, and somewhat stained yachting suit.  He had
not slept since the night before, in which, he now recalled,
he had not slept at all.  During this extended period of
wakefulness he had been upset and out of his orbit.  Yet
all this while the world had been rocking along,
provokingly undisturbed by his troubles, and right now a big
new day was hurrying on.  The cars were banging outside,
and the newsboys were making a devil of a racket
about something, their cries filling the street and ringing
vibrantly into the lobby from without.  Everything was
strident and noisy, jarring upon his nerves.  His first
instinct was a dive for the bar, but he stopped before the
door was reached.  He was on a new tack.  He resolved
not to drink to-day.  He had signed no pledges; but he
felt that a highball was not in keeping with what he
proposed to do.

Instead he veered toward the grillroom and ordered a
pot of hot, hot coffee with rolls.  To fill the impatient
interval between the order and the service, he snatched
eagerly at the morning paper in the extended hand of a
waiter.  At the first glance his eyes dilated, and his lips
parted.

When the coffee came, he was still absorbed.  The
dark liquid was cold before he swallowed it, mechanically,
in great gulps.  It was well the chair had arms, or his
body might have fallen from it.  His mind was reeling
like a drunken thing as he tried to grasp the process by
which a woman's malice had used him for a vicious
assault upon the man who had saved him when he stood
eye to eye with ruin.

Slowly Burbeck's muddled intelligence groped
backward over the events of yesterday.  What a fool, he!
How clever, she!  How demoniacally clever!  No
wonder she forgave him so lightly; no wonder she cooed so
ecstatically once she found the diamonds were in the
preacher's vault!  No wonder she had made sure that
he went upon the yachting party, even to the point of
going herself.  It was to keep him out of reach until her
diabolical plot against Hampstead could take effect.  And
no wonder she sat bolt and staring at the shore lights all
the long night through.

But why did she plot against Hampstead?  What was
between the clergyman and herself?  Why did Hampstead
not strike out boldly and clear himself at one stroke,
by the mere opening of his lips?  He not only had not
defended himself, but the papers declared he had a guilty
air, that he fought against the opening of the box, and
bore himself in a manner that convinced even his
bondsmen he was guilty.

But the newspaper chanced to relate as an interesting
detail how the minister had quickly recovered his
self-possession, to the extent of rearranging the contents of
his box after their handling by Assistant District
Attorney Searle, and that he had even casually destroyed one
paper with the remark that it was something no longer to
be preserved.

This almost accidental sentence gave Rollie the
strangest feeling of all.  He knew what it must have been
that was destroyed,—the evidence of his own indebtedness,
to explain which would inevitably lead to his exposure.
This, too, accounted for the preacher's protest
and his apparent guilty fear.  He could not know the
diamonds were in the box; he did know the I.O.U. was
there.  He had destroyed it at the very moment when
the discovery of the diamonds must surely have convinced
him that the culprit he was shielding had betrayed him
like a Judas.

"And yet he stands pat!" breathed Rollie huskily,
while the greatest emotion of human gratitude that his
heart could hold swelled his breast almost to bursting.

"I didn't know they made a man that would stand the
gaff like that," he confessed after a further reflective
interval.

Burbeck's first instinct was to rush to the telephone
and acquit himself in the minister's mind of all complicity
in the plot; for inevitably Rollie thought first of himself.
But thought for himself recalled the threat of Marien
Dounay.  How fiercely she had warned him that his
secret was not his own, but hers!  He grasped the
significance of her threat now as she had shrewdly calculated
that he would.  Let him murmur a word, let him attempt,
no matter how subtly or adroitly, to set in motion any
plan that would loosen the tightening coils about John
Hampstead, and this woman would turn her crazy
vengeance on him, would fasten his crime upon him, would
do a baser thing than that,—would make it appear that
he had deliberately placed the diamonds in the minister's
vault, thus causing her innocently to do him this grave
injustice.  Thus in his exposure he would not be
contemplated with indulgent sadness as a gentleman weakling
who had descended to vulgar crime to make good
another crime as heinous; but, on the contrary, would be
regarded hatefully, repulsively, with loathsome scorn and
withering contempt, as a despicable ingrate base enough
to shift his guilt to the shoulders of the one who had
rescued him.

Before this prospect, fear paralyzed every other
impulse of his heart, every faculty of his brain.  His head
was aching violently.  He pressed his hands against his
temples, and wondered how he could get quietly out of
here and where he could fly.

A secluded room of this very hotel suggested the surest
isolation.  He got up-stairs to the writing room, where
a hastily scrawled note to Parma, the cashier, made the
night upon the Bay the excuse for his absence from the
bank for the day.  Another to his mother,—he dared
not hear her voice telling him of what had befallen her
beloved pastor,—that he was too weary even to come
home and would sleep the day out in Oakland, leaving
his exact whereabouts unknown to avoid the possibility
of disturbance.

Mustering one final rally of his volitional powers,
Rollo approached the desk and registered as some one
not himself before the very eyes of the clerk, who knew
him well and laughingly became accessory to the subterfuge.

Once within the privacy of his room, the impulse to
telephone to John Hampstead and tell that distracted man
a thing which he would be greatly desiring to know,
came again to the young man; but in part exhaustion and
in part cowardice led him to postpone that simple act till
he had slept, rested, thought.

A few minutes later, with shades darkened and clothing
half removed, he buried his feverish head among the
pillows and sought to bury consciousness as well.  But
the latter attempt was a failure, for the young man found
himself prodded into the extreme of wakefulness,—thinking,
thinking, thinking, until he was all but mad.
Out of all this thinking gradually emerged one solid,
unshifting fact.  This was the character of John
Hampstead.  He, Rollo Burbeck, might be a shriveling,
paltering coward; Marien Dounay might be only a beautiful
fiend; but John Hampstead was a strong, unwavering
man.  John Hampstead would stand firm!

Buoying his soul on this idea, Rollie dropped off to
feverish slumber.  But the sleeper awoke suddenly with
one question hooking at his vitals.  Was any man
physically equal to such a strain?  Was John Hampstead
still standing firm like the huge human bulwark he had
begun to seem?

Shrill cries floated upward from the street, sounding
above the persistent whang of car wheels upon the rails.
These were the voices of the newsboys crying the noon
edition.

Rollie rose uncertainly and tottered to the telephone,
where he asked that the latest papers be sent up to him,
and awaited their coming in an ague of suspense and fear.

When they were received, he found little upon the
front of either but the story of the minister's arrest for
the theft of the diamonds and the finding of the jewels
in his box, coupled with fresh emphasis upon his
exhibition of the demeanor of a guilty man.  It flowed up and
down the chopped-off and sawed-out columns, liberally
besprinkled with photographs of the chief actors in the
drama, then turned upon the second page and spread
itself riotously, in various types.

Through these paragraphs the mind of young Burbeck
scrambled like a terrier digging for a rat, pawing
his way desperately to make sure of the answer to his
one, all-consuming question: Was the preacher still
standing?  The first paper declared accusingly that he
was; that, like a guilty man taking advantage of
technicalities, he refused to speak.  The second paper affirmed
the same, but with even greater emphasis, though without
the meaner implication.

In the spread-out story there were set forth details and
conjectures innumerable that would have interested and
amazed Rollie, if his mind had been able to grasp them
at all; but it was not.  It fastened upon the one thing of
ultimate significance in his present water-logged state.
Hugging in his arms the papers which conveyed this
supreme assurance to him, as if they had been the spar to
which his soul was clinging, he rolled over upon the bed
with a sigh of intense relief and sank instantly into long
and unbroken sleep.

Hunger wakened him at eight in the evening; but
instead of ringing for food, he asked for the evening
papers.  Again their message was reassuring.  His nerves
were stronger now; his soul was gaining the respite which
it needed.  He dispatched a messenger to his home for
fresh linen and a business suit, turned on the water in
the bath, arranged for the presence of a barber in his
room in fifteen minutes, and the service of a hearty
dinner in the same place in thirty.

The refreshment of invigorating sleep, plus the
spectacle of John Hampstead, that Atlas of a man, standing
rock-like beneath the world of another's burden, had
inspired Rollie sufficiently to enable him to resume once
more the pose of his presumed position in life.  To be
sure, he was still under the spell of his fear,—and could
not see himself as yet doing one thing to weaken the
pressure upon his benefactor.

For this dastardly inactivity he suffered a flood of
self-reproaches, but stemmed them with reflections upon
the irreproachable character of the minister, and his
impregnable position in the community.  He reflected how
futile and puerile all the endeavors of the newspapers to
involve this good man in scandal must prove.  How
ridiculous the idea that he could be a common thief!
How suddenly the wide, sane public, after a day or two's
debauch of excitement, would turn and bestow again their
unwavering confidence upon this man and laurel his brow
with fresh and more permanent expressions of their
regard for his high character.  Reflections like this, winged
by his own inside knowledge of the true greatness of
the victim, together with the soothing influence of a bath,
the ministrations of a skilled barber, and the sedative
effects of a good dinner, sent young Burbeck to his
home somewhere about ten o'clock in the evening, to all
appearances quite his usual, happy-looking self.

The telephone had apprised his mother of his coming,
and she had remained up to meet him.

"Oh, my son!" she murmured happily, as he laid his
smooth cheek against hers and mingled his wavy brown
hair with the silvering threads of her own dark tresses.

The young man gave his mother a gentle pressure of
his hands upon her shoulders, then turned his face and
kissed her cheek, but ventured no word.  A sense of
blood guiltiness had come upon him at the contact of her
presence.

"Of course you have seen what that woman and the
papers are doing to Brother Hampstead," his mother observed sadly.

"Yes," replied the young man, in a tone as dejected as hers.

"They are tearing his reputation to pieces," the mother
went on.  "There is hardly a shred of it left now.  Like
vultures they are digging over every detail of his life and
putting a sinister interpretation upon the most innocent
things.  The worst of it is that even our own people begin
to turn against him.  Some of the people for whom he
has done the most and suffered the most are readiest
with their tongues to blast his character.  It is a sad
commentary upon the way of the world."

"Still," urged Rollie, "the man is strong; his
character is so upright; his purposes are so high and so
unselfish that no permanent harm can come to him.  His
enemies must sooner or later be confuted, and he will
emerge from all this pother—"  Pother: it took great
resolution for Rollie to force so large a fact into so small
a word—"a bigger and a more influential man in the
community, even a more useful one than before."

Mrs. Burbeck listened to this tribute from her beloved
son to her beloved minister with a joy that was pathetic.
She had never known him to speak so heartily, with such
unreserved admiration before.  It told her things about
the character of her son she had hoped but had not known.
Yet she felt herself compelled to disagree with her son's
conclusions.

"That is where you are wrong, my boy," she said,
again in tones of sadness.  "The public mind is a strange
consciousness.  If it once gets a view of a man through
the smoked glasses of prejudice, it seldom consents to
look at him any other way.  Remove to-morrow every
vestige of evidence against Brother Hampstead, and,
mark my words! the fickle public will begin to discover
or invent new reasons why, once having hurled its idol
down, it will not put him up again."

"You take it too seriously, mother," suggested Rollie
half-heartedly, after a moment of silence.

"No, I do not," Mrs. Burbeck replied, shaking her
head gravely.  "The worst of it is the man's absolute
silence.  If he would only say something.  There must
be some sort of explanation.  If he took the diamonds,
there must have been some laudable reason.  This
morning there were literally tens of thousands of people
hoping for such an explanation and ready to give to him
the benefit of every doubt.  There are fewer such
to-night.  There will be fewer still to-morrow.

"If somebody else stole them, and Brother Hampstead,
to protect the thief, planned to hold them
temporarily while immunity was gained for the coward, he
must see now that he made a terrible mistake, that for
once he has carried his extravagant leniency entirely too
far.  If this theory is correct, the thief must have fled
beyond the very reach of the newspapers, or be insane,
or a drug fiend, or something like that.  I cannot
conceive of any human being so base, or in a position so
delicate that he would not instantly make a public
confession to spare his benefactor."

Rollie had turned and was looking straight at his
mother, almost reproachfully, certainly protestingly, at
the torture she was causing him.  She saw this strange
look and stopped.

"Oh, my boy," she exclaimed.  "You are so sympathetic.
How proud, how selfishly happy it makes me
to feel that nothing like this can ever come upon my
son!"

But Rollie's eyes had shifted quickly to a picture on
the opposite wall, and he braced himself desperately
against these bomb-like assaults of his mother upon his
position.

"Yes," he said after an interval, "it must be pretty
hard on Hampstead."  But though he made this remark
seem natural, his brain was again reeling.  With mighty
effort he forced himself to give the conversation another
turn by a question which had been fascinating him during
the whole day.

"Tell me," he asked, "how is father taking it?"

"Very hardly," Mrs. Burbeck confessed.  "You
know your father: so proud, so exact and scrupulous in
all his dealings, with his word better than the average
man's bond, yet not lenient toward the man who errs.
He thinks everybody good or bad, every soul white or
black.  When Brother Hampstead was prosecuting law-breakers
in court, father was proud of him; but when he
goes off helping jail-birds and fallen women, father is
harsh and utterly unsympathetic.

"Last night when the first charge appeared, father was
greatly incensed, because at last, he said, Brother
Hampstead had done the thing he always feared, brought the
church into a notoriety that was unpleasant.  This
morning, at the story of the diamonds in the vault, he was
dumbfounded.  To-night he talks of nothing but that,
whatever the outcome, All People's shall clear its skirts
of the unpleasantness by requesting Brother Hampstead's
resignation."

"Resignation!" Rollie gasped.  "Resignation—simply
for doing his duty!  Why," he burst out excitedly,
"that would be treachery!  It would be the act of Judas.
Don't let father do it, mother," he pleaded.  "Don't let
him put me in that position!"

A wild look had come into the young man's face as he
spoke.

"You?  In what position?"

Mrs. Burbeck was surprised at the expression on her
son's face.

For a moment Rollie floundered wildly.

"Why, you see—I—I believe in Hampstead.  I—I
have told the bank that he is all right, no matter what
happens.  I don't want my own father reading him out
of the church, do I?"

Mrs. Burbeck's perplexity gave way to smiling
comprehension, which was met by relief and some approach
to composure upon the features of her son, who felt that
he had escaped the eddy of an appalling danger.

"Naturally," replied Mrs. Burbeck soothingly.  "What
a loyal nature yours is!  By the way, Rollie," and the
force of a new idea energized her glance and tone; "it
is only half-past ten.  Wouldn't it be fine of you to just
run over and give Brother Hampstead a pressure of the
hand to-night, and tell him how loyally your heart is
with him in this trying situation?  It would mean so
much to him coming from a strong, successful, young
man of the world like you, whose position he must
admire so much!"

Rollie's face went white, and his eyes roved despairingly.
It must have been well for the mother's peace of
mind, as it certainly was for his, that, having asked her
question, instead of studying his face while she waited
for the answer, she let her eyes fall to the seal ring she
had given him upon his twenty-first birthday, and busied
herself with studying out again the complexities of the
monogram and holding off the hand itself to see how
handsomely the ring adorned it.

"I think I'd rather not to-night, mother," Rollie
replied, as if after a moment of deliberation.  "This thing
works me up terribly—you can see that—and I'm a
bit short on sleep yet.  If I went to see Brother
Hampstead to-night, I'm sure I shouldn't sleep a wink
afterward.  Besides, my coming might alarm him.  It might
make him think his plight is worse than it is; it would be
so unusual."

Again the mother-love surged above any other
emotion.  "You are right," she admitted, caressing his
hand.  "It was only an impulse of mine, anyway.  You
must be tired, poor boy."

"Pretty tired, mother," he confessed truthfully; then
stooped and kissed her upon the cheek and seemed to
leave the room naturally enough, although in his soul he
knew that he fled from her presence like a criminal from
his conscience.





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.. _`THE BATTLE OF THE HEADLINES`:

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   CHAPTER XXXIII


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   THE BATTLE OF THE HEADLINES

.. vspace:: 2

Hampstead was determined not to show the white
feather.  The morning after the discovery of the
diamonds in his box, he made the effort to go about his
daily duties unconcernedly and even happily, with a smile
of confidence upon his face.  His bearing was to
proclaim his innocence.  But it would not work.  Crowds
gaped.  Individuals stared.  Reporters hounded.  The
very people who needed his help and had been accustomed
to receive it gratefully, appeared to shrink from his
presence.  At the homes where he called, an atmosphere of
restraint and artificiality was created.  He tried to thaw
this and failed dismally; it was evident that the recipients
of his attentions also tried, but also failed, for all the
while their doubts peeped out at him.

After half a day the minister gave up and sat at
home—immured, besieged, impounded.  He was like a man
upon a rock isolated by a deluge, the waters rolling
horizon-wide and surging higher with every edition of the
newspapers.

Oh, those newspapers!  John Hampstead had not
realized before how much of modern existence is lived in
the newspapers.  So amazingly skillful were they in
sweeping away his public standing that the process was
actually interesting.  He found himself absorbed by it,
viewing it almost impersonally, like a mere spectator,
moved by it, swayed to one side or the other, as the record
seemed to run.  The description of the scene in the vault
room, even as it appeared unembellished in Haggard's
paper, overwhelmed him.

"It is the manner of a thief hopelessly guilty," he
confessed.

On the other hand, when Haggard's paper in an
editorial asked argumentatively: "Why should this man
steal?  What need had he for money in large sums?"  John's
judgment approved the soundness of such a
defense.  "There were a score," affirmed the editorial,
"perhaps a hundred men who had and would freely
supply Doctor Hampstead with all the money necessary for
the exigencies of the work to which he notoriously
devoted all his time.  As for his personal needs, the man
lived simply.  He had no wants beyond his income."

"True—perfectly true.  A good point that," conceded
Hampstead to himself.

But that evening one of the San Francisco papers
reported that at about the time the diamonds were stolen, the
Reverend Hampstead had approached various persons in
Oakland with a view to borrowing a large sum of money
without stating for what the money was required.  The
paper volunteered the conjecture that the minister,
through speculation in stocks, had overdrawn some fund
of which he was a trustee, and of which he was presently
to be called upon to give an accounting; hence the
desperate resort to the theft of the diamonds and the temporary
holding of them in his vault, boldly counting on his own
immunity from suspicion.

This conjecture was extremely damaging.  It skillfully
suggested a logical hypothesis upon which the minister
could be assumed to be a thief; and so high had been
the man's standing that some such hypothesis was necessary.

As Hampstead read this, he felt the viciousness of the
thrust.  It was false, but it had the color of an actual
incident behind it.  Some clerk, bookkeeper, or secretary to
one of the men who had so promptly enabled him to meet
Rollie's defalcation, seeing the comparatively large sum in
cash passed to the hand of the minister, had done a little
thinking at the time and when the arrest came had done a
little talking.

Yet the morning papers of the next day had apparently
forgotten this incident.  They were off in full cry upon a
much more dangerous trail by digging deeper into the
relations between the minister and the actress.  As if from
hotel employees, or some one in Miss Dounay's service,
one of them had elicited and put together a story of all
the calls that Hampstead had made upon Miss Dounay in
her hotel during the five weeks she had been at the
St. Albans.  This story made it appear that the minister had
become infatuated with the actress, and that he had sought
every means of spending time in her company.

It was skillfully revealed that Miss Dounay at first had
been greatly attracted by the personality and the apparent
sincerity of the clergyman; but as her social acquaintance
in the city rapidly extended and the work upon her
London production became more engrossing, she had less and
less time for him, and was finally compelled to deny
herself almost entirely to the divine's unwelcome attentions,
notwithstanding which the clergyman still found means of
forcing himself upon the actress.  One such occasion, it
appeared, had prevented the appearance of Miss Dounay
at a dinner given by a very prominent society lady of the
town, where the brilliant woman was to have been the
guest of honor.  Some one had even recalled that the
minister was not an invited guest at the dinner during
which the diamonds were stolen.  He had presented
himself, it seemed, after the affair was in progress and
departed before its conclusion.

But it was left to one of the evening papers of this day
to explode the climactic story of the series.  The writers
of the morning story had been careful to protect the
conduct of Miss Dounay from injurious inference; but now
the *Evening Messenger* went upon the streets with a story
that left Miss Dounay's character to take care of itself,
and purported boldly to defend the minister.

PREACHER NOT THIEF, boldly ventured the headlines.
The report declared that an intimacy of long standing had
existed between the minister and the actress.  The public
was reminded of what part of it had forgotten and the
rest never knew, that John Hampstead had himself been
an actor.  The narrative told how the minister had made
his professional debut in Los Angeles by carrying this
same Marien Dounay in his arms in *Quo Vadis*, night
after night, in scene after scene, during the run of the
play; and hinted broadly of an attachment beginning then
which had ripened quickly into something very powerful,
so powerful, in fact, that when Hampstead was playing
with the "People's", an obscure stock company in San
Francisco, Miss Dounay had broken with Mowrey at the
Grand Opera House, because he refused to have the
awkward amateur in his company, and had herself gone out to
the little theater in Hayes Valley and lent to its
performance the glamour of her name and personality, merely to
be near the idol upon whom her affections had fixed
themselves so fiercely.

Actors now playing in San Francisco who had been
members of the People's Stock at the time remembered
that the couple succeeded but poorly in suppressing signs
of their devotion to each other, and the stage manager,
now retired, was able to recall how in the garden scene of
*East Lynne*, Miss Dounay had deliberately changed the
"business" between Hampstead and herself in order that
she might receive a kiss upon the lips instead of upon the
forehead as the script required.

This mosaic of truth and falsehood related with
gustatory detail a violent quarrel between the two which
occurred one night in a restaurant prominent in the night
life of the old city, the result of which was that Miss
Dounay cast off her domineering and self-willed lover entirely.

"After a few weeks," the article observed soberly,
"the broken-hearted lover surprised his friends by
renouncing the stage and entering upon the life of the
ministry as a solace to his wounded affections."

In support of this, it was pointed out that the minister
had never married nor been known to show the slightest
tendency toward gallantries in his necessarily wide
association with women.

The glittering achievement of vindication was next
attempted by the *Messenger's* story.  This admittedly was
theory, but it was set forth with confidence and
particularity, as follows:

"The return of the actress, in the prime of her beauty
and at the very zenith of her career, upon a visit to
California, which had been her childhood home, not
unnaturally led to a revival of the old passion.  For a time the
two were running about together as happy as cooing doves.
Then a clash came.  This was over the question of the
harmonizing of the two careers.  Obviously, Miss
Dounay could not be expected to give up hers, and the
minister was now so devoted to his own work that he
found himself unwilling to make the required concession
upon his part.

"A serious disagreement resulted.  The actress was a
woman of high temper.  It had been the custom to
deposit her diamonds in the minister's box as a matter of
protection.  On the night of the party, she had
committed them to him, as usual.  But the next morning,
angered over the clergyman's failure to keep an appointment
with her, the actress, in a moment of reckless passion,
had charged him with stealing them.  Under the
circumstances, Hampstead, as a chivalrous man, declined to
speak, knowing full well that sooner or later the woman's
passion would relent, and she would release him from the
awkward position in which he stood."

There were holes in this story.  At places it did not
fit the facts; as for instance, the minor fact that by
common agreement the minister did not leave the dinner party
until considerably after twelve, consequently at a time
when the bank vault was inaccessible.  There was also the
major fact that the theft of the diamonds was discovered
and reported at two o'clock in the morning, and not the
next day "after the minister's failure to keep an
appointment with the actress had angered her."

But these trifling discrepancies were disregarded by the
eager rewrite man, who threw this story together from the
harvesting of half a dozen leg-weary reporters.

Nor did they matter greatly to Hampstead.  He read
the story with whitening lips.  He recognized it as the
sort of vindication that would ruin him.  It made his
position a thousand times more difficult.  It was infinitely
harder to keep silence when the very truth itself was
blunderingly mixed to malign him.

Nor did the public mind the discrepancies greatly.  The
*Messenger's* story was a triumph of journalism.  It was
the most eagerly read, the most convincingly detailed
explanation of what had occurred.  The public absorbed it
with a sense of relief that at last it had learned how such
a man as John Hampstead could have fallen as he had.
The story even excited a little sympathy for the minister
by revealing the unexpected element of romance in his life.
Nevertheless, its publication upon the evening of the third
day after the minister's arrest battered away the last
pretense of any considerable section of the popular mind
that, whatever the outcome of his trial, Hampstead was
any longer a man entitled to public confidence.

Flying rumor, published gossip, and vociferous assault
upon one side, combined with guilty silence upon the
other, had absolutely completed the work of destruction.
The reputation of the pastor of All People's was hopelessly
blasted.  Even to the minister, sitting alone like a
convict in his cell, this effect was clearly apparent.  The
question of whether he was a thief or not a thief had
faded into the background of triviality.  The issue was
whether he, a trusted minister, while occupying his pulpit
and bearing himself as a chaste and irreproachable servant
of mankind, had yielded to an intrigue of the flesh.
The indictment did not lie in definite specifications that
could be refuted, but in inferences that were unescapable.

The riot of reckless gossip had made the preacher's
honor common.  Anything was believable.  Each single
incident became a convincing link in the chain of evidence
that John Hampstead was an apostate to the creed and
character he espoused.

The minister in his study, his desk and chair an island
surrounded by a sea of rumpled newspapers, harried on
every side by doubt and suspicion so aggressive that it
almost forced him to doubt and suspect himself, laid his
face upon his desk.

This was more than he had prayed for.  This was no
honored cross that he was asked to bear.  It was a robe of
shame to be put upon him publicly.  To be sure, it was
loose, ill-fitting, diaphanous, but none the less it was
enveloping.  It did not blot out, yet it ate like a splotch of acid.

But suddenly the man sat up, and for the first time since
the startling disclosure in the vault room, a look of terror
shot into his eyes, terror mixed with pain that was
indescribable.  It was a thought of the effect of this last story
upon the mind of Bessie that had stabbed him.  Bessie
had grown wonderfully during these five years.  She had
completed four years at Stanford and one year of
post-graduate work in the University of Chicago.  To-morrow,
if he had the date right, she would be receiving her
degree.  The beauty of her character and the beauty of
her person had ripened together, until John's imagination
could think of nothing so exquisite in all the universe as
Bessie Mitchell.  And after the degree and a summer in
Europe, she was coming back to California and to him!
Together they were going to enter upon a life and the
making of a home that was to be rich in happiness for both
of them, and as they fondly hoped, rich in happiness for
all with whom they came in contact.

Reflecting that in this last week Bessie would be too
busy to read the newspapers, John had chivalrously
thought to tell her nothing of what was befalling him,
that she might set out happily upon her European journey.
But now had come this alleged vindication, which was the
most terrible assault of all, with its disgusting
insinuations.  He felt instinctively that Bessie would see that
story, because it was the one of all which she ought not
to see.  Seeing it, he assured himself, she would believe
it, more fully than any one else would believe it.  John
knew that despite his own years of steadfast devotion and
despite her own constant effort to do so, she had never
quite wiped out the horrible suspicions engendered by his
confession of the brief attachment for Miss Dounay.  He
suspected it was a thing no woman ever successfully wipes
out.  This damnable story would revive that suspicion
convincingly.  It was inevitable that Bessie should believe
that Marien Dounay's presence had revived the old
infatuation, and that he had yielded to its power.

This reflection left Hampstead with his lips pursed, his
cheeks drawn, sitting bolt and rigid like a frozen man.

In this polar atmosphere the telephone tinkled.  The
minister answered it with wooden movements and a
wooden voice:

"No, nothing to say—yet."

Always the "yet" was added.  "Yet" meant the
minister's hope for deliverance.  The reporters who had
heard that "yet" so many times in the three days began
to find in it something pathetic and almost convincing.
But though the minister had added it this last time from
sheer force of habit, the hope had just departed from
him.  With his love-hope gone, there was nothing
personally for which John Hampstead cared to ask the future.
Time, for him, was at an end.  He was not a being.  He
was an instrument.

But as if to remind him for what purpose he was an
instrument, he had barely hung up the 'phone when there
was a faint tap at the outer entrance of his study,
followed at his word of invitation by the figure of a man
who, with a furtive, backward glance as if afraid of the
shadows beneath the palm trees, slipped quickly through
the narrowest possible opening, closed the door and halted
uncertainly, his eyes blinking at the light, his hands
rubbing nervously one upon the other.  The man was
carefully dressed and tonsured.  There was every evidence
that to the world he was trying to be his old debonair self,
but before the minister he stood abject and pitiable.

"Rollie!" exclaimed Doctor Hampstead, leaping up.

"She haunted me!" the conscience-stricken man faltered
helplessly, sinking into a chair.  "She threatened to
denounce me right there in the bank, if I dared to
communicate with you."  Again there was that frightened
look backward to the door.

An hour before, when the minister had not yet reasoned
out the effect upon Bessie of this awful story of his alleged
relations with the actress, he would have leaped upon
Rollie vehemently, so anxious to know how the diamonds
got into his safe-deposit box as almost to tear the story
from the young man's throat.

But now he had the feeling that there was no longer
anything at stake worth while.  All in him that quickened
at the sight of his visitor was a sort of clinical interest
in the state of a soul.

As Rollie told his story, the minister gasped with relief
to learn that his own plight was due to no Judas-like
betrayal, but that the young man was, like himself, a victim
of this scheming, devilish woman, and he listened with
sympathetic eagerness while the narrator depicted
brokenly the frightful conflict between fear and duty
through which he had passed during the two days gone.

But with the narrative concluded, the duty of each was
still plain.  The silence must be kept.  Moreover, in this
revulsion of feeling from doubt to active sympathy, the
minister perceived that things were going very hardly
with the young man.  Knowing Miss Dounay now rather
well, he was able to understand, even without explanation,
the paralyzing fear which had kept Rollie dumb for these
three days, and to realize that his coming even tardily was
a sign of some renascence of moral courage.  This
perception quickened both the minister's sympathy and his
interest in his duty.  He was able to interrogate the young
man considerately and to put him gradually somewhat at
his ease, and this so tactfully as to make it seem to Rollie
that, his delay in coming was half a virtue and that the act
of coming itself was a supreme moral victory which gave
promise of greater victories to come.

But it did not require this exhibition of magnanimity to
bring young Burbeck to finish his story with an outpouring
of the bitter self-reproaches he had for two days been
heaping upon himself.

"I never realized before what a despicable coward sin
or crime can make of a man," he concluded.  "This
spectacle of you bearing uncomplainingly upon your back the
burden of my guilt before this whole community sets
something burning in me like a fire.  It has given me
courage to come here.  Sometimes in the last few hours
I have almost had the courage to come out and tell the
truth, to denounce this devilish woman for what she is,
and to take my guilt upon myself."

For a moment Rollie's eyes opened till a ring of white
appeared about the iris, and he shifted his position dizzily.

"But," exclaimed the minister with sudden apprehension
and an outburst of great earnestness, "you must not.
You must consider your mother.  I command you to
consider her above everything else!  I should forbid you to
speak for her sake, if nothing else were involved.  I do
want you to become brave enough to take this guilt upon
yourself, if circumstances permit it; but, they do not
permit.  Besides," and the minister shook his head sadly,
"even that would now be powerless to relieve me from
these awful consequences.  I might be proved spotlessly
innocent of the charge of theft, and yet my reputation
would still be hopelessly ruined.  It has cost me all,
Rollie—all!"

The minister and the penitent, the innocent and the
guilty, drew together for the moment linked by that bond
of sympathy which invariably exists when one man suffers
willingly in the cause of another, and is heightened
when the sufferer winces under the pain.

"Even," the minister labored on, "even that hope of
Her, of which I told you the other day, has been torn
from me."

Rollie's face turned a more ghastly white.

"That?" he murmured huskily.

"That!" assented the minister, with a grave, downward
bend of the head.

"It is too much," groaned the young man in real agony
of spirit.  "Nothing, nothing that is at stake is worth
that—can be worth that."

For a moment Hampstead was silent.

"To be loyal, Rollie, to be true to the highest duty is
worth everything."

This was what he would have liked to say; it was what
he believed; it was what he meant to demonstrate by his
course of action; but for the moment he could not say it.
Instead, he swallowed hard and looked downward, toying
with a paper-knife upon his desk.  But his visitor was
going now.  There was no reason why he should stay,
and the minister, as he held open the door, was able to say
warningly: "Remember!  Not one word for the sake
of your mother's life."

"But you," protested the young man, his eyes again
staring wildly.

"You are to try not to think of me," declared Hampstead,
with low emphasis, "except as my own steadfastness
in my duty—if I am able to be steadfast—may
help you to be steadfast in yours.  Rollie!  We
understand each other?"

But the young fellow only shook his head negatively
with a growing look of awe and wonder in his eyes,
then turned and slipped hastily away.  He did not
understand this man—the bigness of him—at all; but he
found himself leaning on him more and more heavily and
felt some spiritual cleansing process digging at the inside
of himself like the scrape and bite of a steam shovel.

As for the minister, once he was free to think of
himself alone, he perceived that Rollie's story had set him
free of silence.  It supplied the gap in his knowledge
which had made him dumb.  There was a real defense
which could now be offered.  Now, too, that there was
again some prospect of vindication, he felt his desire for
vindication grow.

Up to the present he had waived arraignment on the
charge, and had twice secured the customary two days'
postponement of the hearing upon preliminary
examination.  But immediate action should now be taken.
Accordingly he located Judge Brennan at his club by
telephone and the Assistant District Attorney Searle at his
residence, and without explanation asked that the time for
his arraignment and preliminary hearing be set as soon as
possible.

Next morning the papers presented as the most startling
development of the Hampstead Case the fact that the
minister had announced himself prepared to go to trial,
and the preliminary hearing had been set for Saturday at
ten o'clock in Judge Brennan's court room.

Public interest centered, of course, upon the nature of
the minister's defense.  There was even observable
something like a turn of the tide in his favor.  Rumor,
suspicion, and innuendo for the time had played themselves
out.  Shrewd managing editors—keen students of mass
psychology that they were—discerned signs that these
ebbing cross-currents of doubt and uncertainty might
sweep suddenly in the opposite direction, and they were
alertly prepared to switch the handling of the news if the
popular appetite changed.





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.. _`A WAY THAT WOMEN HAVE`:

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   CHAPTER XXXIV


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   A WAY THAT WOMEN HAVE

.. vspace:: 2

Friday for John was a day of impatience, its tedious
hours consumed in turning over and over in his mind the
story he would tell upon the witness stand and the plea he
would make to the court for a dismissal of the complaint
against him; when the day was finished, John found
his mind in a rather chaotic state, and it seemed to him
that little had been accomplished.

But if little happened that day in Encina which was of
moment to his cause, there was an interesting sequence of
events transpiring in Chicago, which had at least some
relation to the matter; for this was the day upon which the
degrees were being conferred.

The assembly hall of the great university was large, and
every seat was taken.  The huge platform was decked,
studded, draped and upholstered with professors, assistant
professors and presidents, all in mortar boards and gowns,
the somber black of the latter relieved by the rich colors
of the insignia indicating the rank or character of their
respective degrees.

The presence of all this banked and massed doctorial
dignity made the atmosphere of the hall to reek with
erudition.  The vast number of individuals in front felt
their puny intellects dwarfed to pigeon's brains.  Hitherto
some of them had rather congratulated themselves that
they knew the multiplication table and the rule of three.
Now their instinct was to grovel.

Yet not all of that assemblage were so impressed.
Robert Mitchell was not.  Huge of chest, thick-fingered,
heavy-shouldered, amiable of his broad countenance,
shrewd of eye, and growing thin of that curly brown
thatch which had been one of Hibernia's gifts to his
ensemble, he surveyed the scene with a critic's air.

Not that Mitchell scorned the pundits of learning.  Being
the vice-president of a transcontinental line of railroad
and therefore necessarily a man of wide acquaintance and
of wide employment of the talents of mankind, he knew
there were occasions when even he must wait upon the
pronouncements of some spectacled creature of the
laboratory.  Still, he could not help reflecting that he would
like to see that pale, gangling pundit on the end try to
calculate the exact instant in which to throw the lever to
make a flying switch.  He would like further to see that
fellow with a dome that loomed like a water-tank on the
desert try to pick up a string of car numbers as they ran
by him on the track, and see how many he could carry in
his head and carry right.

In fact, everything about the function expressed itself
to Mitchell in terms of traffic.  Quite a hall, this.  The
seats in it came from Grand Rapids, no doubt; or perhaps
from Manitowoc.  The rate from Grand Rapids was
nineteen cents a hundred or thereabouts; from Manitowoc
it was twenty,—practically an even basis.  But on a
trans-continental haul now, to San Francisco for instance,
common point rates applied, and Manitowoc had an
advantage of five cents a hundred unless—unless the Michigan
roads rebated the Michigan manufacturers something of
their share in the division of the through rate.  Of course,
rebates were illegal; but you never could exactly tell what
an originating line might not do to keep a sufficient
amount of business originating.  Take his own line, now,
for instance, and borax shipments from the Mojave
Desert as against the Union Pacific with borax shipments
from Death Valley.

Thus the mind of the great master of transportation
roved on while professors rose and droned and presented
round rolls to never-ending strings of candidates; but at
length there appeared in the serpentine line going up for
Master's degrees one presence which took the glaze of
speculation from the eye of Mitchell.

The world at large has often noted the anomalous fact
that a Doctor's cap and gown does not appear to detract
greatly from the masculinity of a man.  If anything, it
makes a beard, a brow, or the pale, unprosperous furze
upon a lip look more virile than otherwise; but that
same cap and gown will deceitfully rob a woman of
something of the indefinable air of her femininity.  It
gives her an ascetic cast, and asceticism is unwomanly.
But there are exceptions.  Some types of women's faces
look just a little more fetchingly feminine and bewitchingly
alluring under a mortar-board cap than beneath any
other form of headdress.

The eye of the railroad man rested now with benevolence
and satisfaction upon the shapely, ripened figure of
such a woman.  Glowing upon her features was a youth
and a feminism so vital as to seem that nothing could
overcome them.  Her eyes were blue and bright; her hair
was brown and crinkly; while dimples that refused to be
subdued by the dignity of the occasion kept continually
upon her features the suggestion of a smile about to
break.

But with these evidences of sunny personality, there
went stout hints of substantial character.  The forehead
was good and finely arched to stand for brains.  The chin
was perhaps a trifle wide to permit the finest oval to the
countenance, but it suggested balance and power, and
proclaimed that what the mind of this young lady planned,
her will might be expected to accomplish.  In fact, the
young lady stood at this moment face to face with the
consummation of a five years' programme, and five years is
long for youth to hold a purpose.

With swelling satisfaction the railroad man saw the
president of the university now addressing his daughter.
It was the same Latin formula that had been repeated
scores of times already this morning; but now Mitchell
made his first effort to grasp it, to reason out its meaning,
all the while greatly admiring his daughter's unfaltering
courage under the fire of these unintelligible phrases.

The somewhat irrepressible Miss Bessie was, indeed,
doing very well.  For a moment the dimples had actually
composed themselves, and there was a light of high dignity
in the eye, as the candidate extended her hand for the
diploma and stood meekly while the silken collar was
placed about her neck.

"That is a very able man, that Doctor Winton,"
remarked Mitchell to his wife.  "He has got the same way
as the rest of them when he talks; but what he says is
sense."

Since Mitchell did not know at all what the university
president had said, this remark showed that he had fallen
back upon his intuitive judgment of men and had swiftly
perceived in the university president something of the
same practical qualities that go to the making of a
business executive in any other walk.

But an excited whisper was just now coming from
behind the white-gloved hand of Mrs. Mitchell.  "Oh! look!"
that lady exclaimed, "she's got her box lid on
crooked!"

It was true that Miss Bessie by some restless twitch of
her head or some rebellious outburst of a knot of that
crinkly hair, had got her mortar board rakishly atilt.  Of
course, there were other mortar boards askew, but Bessie's
was individualistically and pronouncedly listed far to port.
And she didn't care.  Bessie was so brimming and beaming
with the happiness of life that her whole being was
this morning recklessly atilt.

But that afternoon, at about the hour of three, in the
ample suite of rooms high up on the lake side of the
Annex, which had been occupied by the Mitchells for a week,
there was nothing atilt at all about the soul of Bessie.
Her spirits were all a-droop.  One single glance around
showed that the busy preparation for the European trip
had been suspended.  Wardrobe trunks stood about on
end, their contents gaping, while dresses were draped over
screens and chairs and laid out upon beds; but the packers
had ceased their work.  Mrs. Mitchell, distracted between
parental love and the fulfillment of long cherished plans,
as well as distressed at the exhibition of petulant and even
tearful temper which her daughter had been displaying for
an hour, walked restlessly from room to room.

"I tell you, it's California for mine!" that young lady
affirmed in school-girlish vernacular, while an impatient
foot stamped the floor, a dimpled hand smote wilfully
upon the arm of a huge, brocaded satin chair, and the blue
swimming eyes burned with a rebellious light.

Neither the language nor the mood would seem to become
the beautiful Mistress of Arts; but each testified to
the survival of the humanness of the young woman.  In
justice to her, however, it must be explained that she had
not begun this upsetting of father's and mother's and her
own cherished plan with impetuous defiances.  She had
begun gently, with sighs, with remarks about longing for
California.  She felt so tired; she wished she didn't have
to travel now.  If she could just go back and walk under
the palms and orange trees in dear old Los Angeles; if she
could get one great big bite of San Francisco fog, and see
a little desert and a mountain or two, before starting out
for this junky old Europe, she would be reconciled.

Otherwise, she would not be reconciled.  Of course,
she would go,—since they had planned it for so long, and
since mamma's heart was set upon it;—but she would go
unreconciled.

Reconciled!  Mrs. Mitchell knew perfectly well what
reconciled meant, but she did not know just what Bessie
meant by dinging on that word.

After fifteen minutes it appeared that Bessie was
through with hints.  She had begun to boldly propose,
and then earnestly to plead, and finally tearfully to
demand that the European trip be postponed two weeks.

"But my child!  The trip is all planned.  The passages
are paid for, everything is ready," protested Mrs. Mitchell.

"But what's the good of being the slave of your plans?
You don't have to do a thing you don't want to just
because you've planned."

Bessie's lip was full and ripe when she pouted and her
voice was freighted heavily with protest and appeal.
How pretty her eyelids were when there was a tear
quivering on the lashes like a ball of quicksilver.  And how
really enchanting she looked, as with hair a bit disheveled
and color heightening, she went on to argue impetuously:

"What's the good of having a private car?  What's
the good of being a vice-president's wife and daughter,
if you can't change your mind and go galloping out to
California when you feel like it?  Back to your own
home!  Back to your own people!  Back where the
scenery is the grandest in the world!  Back where the
sky is high enough that you don't have to shoulder the
zenith out of the way in the morning so that you can
stand up straight and take a full breath."

"Bessie Mitchell!" exclaimed her mother at this juncture,
turning on her offspring accusingly.  "What has
got into you?  Something has!  You're up to something.
What is it?"

Bessie brooked her mother's discerning glance and then
dodged it, very much as if that lady had hurled at her the
silver-backed hair brush she held in her hand.

"Why," she exclaimed with an air of injured innocence;
"nothing has got into me.  I was just taking one
last look at the California papers, and it made me homesick."

She made a gesture toward a pile of papers that
surrounded her chair.  Mrs. Mitchell paused and cerebrated.
Somewhere about two o'clock of the afternoon, Bessie had
stepped to the telephone.

"Send me up the last week of San Francisco and Los
Angeles papers," she ordered.

The papers came.  She went through the Los Angeles
papers first, turning their pages casually, with occasional
comments to her mother.  And then she started the San
Francisco file, scanning this time more swiftly and more
casually until upon the very last of them she became
suddenly absorbed in uncommunicative silence; after which
the musings and the sighings had begun, followed by this
absurd proposal, this passionate outburst, and this
deadlock of the two women behind entrenchments of
newspapers on the one hand and barricades of trunks upon the
other.

As between her strong-willed daughter and her strong-willed
self, Mrs. Mitchell knew that she generally emerged
defeated.  So far now she had been defeated—at least to
the extent of an armistice.  The packers had been stopped,
while the argument went on.

But in the meantime Mrs. Mitchell was violating the
rules of war by bringing up reinforcements.  Mr. Mitchell
was on his way over from the Monadnock Building.  He
would soon settle Miss Bessie; that is, if he did not make
a cowardly and instant surrender, because Mrs. Mitchell
knew well enough he would rather sit on the rear platform
of his private car and watch the miles of steel and
cinder stream from under him for ten hours a day for the
rest of his life than visit his native sod for five minutes.

When Mrs. Mitchell heard her husband's voice in the
next room, she hurried out to fortify him.

Bessie also heard the voice and hurried to the bathroom
to remove traces of tears; for tears were not powerful
arguments with her father.  Smiles went farther and
faster.  Kisses were the deciding artillery.

Father and mother, advancing cautiously upon daughter's
position, found it unoccupied.  But the papers were
strewn about.  Mitchell picked up the one which lay in the
chair.  His glance was entirely casual, but suddenly his
blue eye started and then blazed.

"The hell!" he ejaculated, and read eagerly down the column.

"Well, I be damned!" was his next contribution to the
silence.

Mrs. Mitchell stared at her husband in amazement.
Then, seizing her reading glass, for a reading glass was so
much better form than spectacles, she glanced over her
husband's shoulder, read the headline and a few words
following.

"The deceitfulness of that child!" she ejaculated, an
expression of indignant amazement on her face, while the
hand with the reading glass dropped to her hip, and her
eyes were turned upon her husband.

"I always knew that boy's good-heartedness would get
him into trouble some day," the good woman averred after
a moment.

"Well," rejoined her husband, in tones sharp with
emphasis, "I'd back up on a freight clear round the
world to get him out.  Our trip to Europe is off.  We go
west on nine to-night."

Mr. Mitchell started for the telephone, and
Mrs. Mitchell's eye followed him approvingly, a look of
sympathy and motherliness triumphing over every other
expression upon her face.

Now there wasn't any particular obligation on the part
of Robert Mitchell to John Hampstead.  Hampstead had
merely worked for Mitchell through eight years of
faithfulness in small things, which was a way that Hampstead
had.  But as the Vice-President of the Great Southwestern
looked back, those eight years of faithfulness
bulked rather large, which, again, was a way that Robert
Mitchell had.

As to Bessie!  But that is a way that women have.
The deeper and the more serious her attachment for John
Hampstead had grown, the more guilefully she had
concealed that fact from even the suspicion of her parents.
Yet now her disguise was penetrated, she sobbed it all out
on her mother's shoulder and got the finest, tenderest
assurances of sympathy and enthusiastic connivance that
could be vouchsafed by one woman to another.  The
Mitchells were that way.  Let hearts and happiness be
concerned, and all other considerations of life could ride
on the brake-beams.





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.. _`ON PRELIMINARY EXAMINATION`:

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   CHAPTER XXXV


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   ON PRELIMINARY EXAMINATION

.. vspace:: 2

But though a very human hope was in his breast, the
man who went out to face a public hearing on Saturday
morning upon a charge of felony in the city where a
week before he had been a popular idol, was not the
same man who had stood trembling and bewildered in the
vault room.

Rose had noticed first merely a physical change in her
brother's appearance, as from day to day the situation
became more intense.  She saw lines deepen on his face,
the knot of pain grow again and again upon his brow,
and the whiteness of his skin increase to a point where
it ceased to be white and became a parchment yellow,
only paler than his tawny hair.  But later she became
conscious that there was taking place also a spiritual
change, a certain rare elevation of the character of the
man, giving at times the eerie feeling that this was not
her brother, but some transfiguration taking place before
her eyes.

When John Hampstead appeared in Judge Brennan's
court room, something of this exaltation of character was
discernible, even to those who had known the minister
casually.  Desiring ardently a happy outcome, the man
revealed in himself something of a new capacity to
endure yet further reverses.

Rose, Dick, and Tayna had been determined to
accompany John and to sit beside him as he faced his
accusers; but he forbade this, declaring that it would be
construed by his enemies as an attempt to create sympathy.

Yet, despite the stoutness of the clergyman's hope for
justice, the sight of the court room, of Judge Brennan
upon his bench, the clerk and the official reporter at
their desks, Searle, Wyatt, the detectives, the massed
spectators,—packed, craning, curious,—and the vast
crowd that had surged in the streets about the building
and in the corridors, through which way had to be made
for him, were all such sinister reminders of the position
in which he stood, that for the time being they crumpled
the very breastwork of innocence itself.

"The case of the People versus John Hampstead,"
announced the judge in matter-of-fact tones.

There was a slight movement among the group of attorneys,
principals, officers, and witnesses within the rail
and before the long table, as they either hitched chairs,
or leaned forward with eyes and ears attentive.  Outside,
the closely packed onlookers breathed short in
hushed expectancy.

"Prisoner at the bar, stand up!"

It was the monotonous, unfeeling voice of the clerk
who said this, himself arising.

Hampstead, accustomed as his own legal battlings had
made him to court formalities and to seeing men
arraigned in just this language, failed to comprehend its
significance when addressed to him.  For an appreciable
instant of time he sat unheeding, until every eye in the
throng and the glance of every officer of the court
stabbing into his face with inquiring wonder, recalled
him to his position.  Then he arose hastily, with traces
of confusion which were so instantly repressed that when
necks already craned stretched a little farther, and eyes
already staring set their gaze yet more intently on the
tall figure of the man, they saw his strongly moulded
features as gravely impassive as some weather-blasted
granite face upon a mountain.

But for all its massy strength, it was seen again to be
a gentle face.  The lips were firmly set, but the
expression of the mouth was kindly.  The eyes were fixed upon
the clerk who read the charge against him, while the
prisoner listened with a look at once solemn and dutiful,
for it seemed that again John Hampstead had risen
equal to the height on which he stood.

The tableau was an impressive one.  It revealed the
majesty of man bowing before the majesty of the law.
It seemed to portray at once the ponderousness and the
power fulness of organized government.  A woman who
was almost a stranger had touched a tiny lever and set
the machinery of the law in operation against the most
shining mark in all the community; and here was the
man, with the guillotine of judgment poised above his
head, answerable for his acts with his liberty and his
reputation.

In feelingless monotones that galloped and hurdled
through the maze of technical phrasings, the clerk read
the complaint which charged the minister with the crime
of burglary; then, pausing for breath, he asked the formal
question:

"Is this your true name?"

"It is," the minister replied quietly, but in a voice of
vibrant, carrying quality that must have penetrated to
the outward corridor, and seemed to sweep a sense of
moral power to every listener's ear.

The voice was answered by a sigh, involuntary and
composite, that broke from somewhere beyond the rail.
The hearing was on.  The unbelievable had come to pass:
John Hampstead, pastor of All People's Church, was
actually standing trial like a common felon.

Briefly and casually the Court instructed Hampstead
to his rights and that he was entitled to be represented
by counsel of his own choosing, or to have counsel
appointed for him by the Court.

The minister, still standing and speaking with deliberate
composure, thanked the Court for its consideration,
but stated that without disrespect to the legal profession
which he greatly honored, he did not feel that his cause
required expert defense; that in his experience he had
acquired a considerable knowledge of court practice and
would depend upon that, trusting his Honor to put him
right if he stumbled into wrong.

The judge nodded comprehension and assent, and the
defendant sat down.

"Are the People ready?" inquired the Court.

"We are," answered the crisp, crackly voice of Searle.

"And the defense?"

Hampstead, his arms folded passively, responded with
a slight affirmative bow.

"We will call Miss Alice Higgins," announced Searle,
his voice this time reflecting that sense of the dramatic
which hung over the court room like a cloud, impregnating
its atmosphere as if with an electric charge.

The woman known as Marien Dounay had been sitting
at the right of Searle, gowned in tailored black, her
person stripped of everything that looked like ornament.
The wide, flat brim of her hat was carefully horizontal
and valanced by a curtain of veiling, which, while black
and large of cord, was wide meshed enough to show that
the very colors of her cheeks were subdued, as if her
whole person were in mourning over the somber duty to
which she regretfully found herself compelled.  And yet
the beauty of her features, adorned by the black and
sweeping eyebrows and lighted by the smouldering jet
of her eyes, was never more striking than now, when,
after standing for a moment, tall and graceful on the
raised platform of the witness chair, she sat down, and
leaning back composedly, swung about to where her
glance could alternate between the eye of the Court who
would hear her and that of Searle who would interrogate.

But though her composure appeared complete, and
never upon any stage had her magnetic presence more
completely centered all attention upon itself than in this
melodrama of real life, it was none the less noticeable to
the discerning that she had not glanced at Hampstead,
whose sleeve her arm must have brushed in passing to
the witness chair; and that she still avoided looking where
he sat, but six feet distant, his own eyes resting upon her
face with an odd, speculative light in them.

"Please state your name, business occupation or
profession, and place of residence," began Searle, putting
the opening interrogatory in the usual form through
sheer force of habit.

"I am an actress by profession.  My name is Alice
Higgins; my place of residence is New York City."

"In your profession as an actress and to the public
generally you are known as Marien Dounay?"

"Yes," replied the witness.

"You are the complainant in this action?"

"Yes."

"I will ask you," began Searle, "if you have ever seen
this necklace before?"

He drew from a crumpled envelope that familiar tiny
string of fire and offered it to the witness.  Miss Dounay
took it, passed it affectionately through her fingers,
during which the brilliance of the gems appeared to be
magnified, and then, holding the necklace by the two ends,
dropped it for a moment upon her bosom,—a touch of
naturalness that was either the height of art or the
supreme of femininity.

"They are my diamonds," she replied.

"And what is their value?"

"Twenty-two thousand dollars."

"Lawful money of the United States?"

"Yes."

"Now, Miss Dounay," continued Searle, "will you
be kind enough to relate to the Court when and under
what circumstances you first missed your diamonds."

Miss Dounay told her story briefly and skillfully, with
an appearance of reluctance when she came to relate the
circumstances and facts which pointed to the minister
as the thief.  She stated that Hampstead had always
shown curiosity regarding the diamonds and had
especially questioned her concerning their value.  As a
trusted friend, whom she had known for years, and who
during the last several weeks had visited her frequently
and become rather frankly acquainted with her personal
habits and mode of life, he knew where she kept the
diamonds.  That so far as she knew, he was the only one
of her acquaintances who possessed this knowledge; that
she had worn the diamonds in company with him during
the evening preceding the supper party, at which she
appeared without them; that no one but her guests were
in this room in which the diamonds were kept temporarily,
and that no one but him, so far as she remembered
observing, was in that room alone; that it was her
custom to keep the box containing these and other jewels in
the hotel safe, and when, after the departure of her
guests, she went to the casket to send it down-stairs, it
was gone.

Her story done, and to the attorney's complete satisfaction,
Searle then put the final formal questions:

"This property was taken against your will and without
your consent?"

"Yes."

"This all happened in the City of Oakland, County of
Alameda and the State of California?"

"Yes."

"That is all," concluded the prosecutor.

"Cross-examine," directed the Court, turning to the
defendant.

"I have no desire to cross-examine," replied the minister
quietly, but again with that vibrant, far-carrying note
in his utterance.

"You are excused," said the judge to the actress.

With an expression of relief, Miss Dounay left the
stand, still without once having directed her gaze at the
accused, although he continued from time to time to
regard her fixedly with a curious, doubtful look.

"Miss Julie Moncrief," announced the prosecutor.

Red-eyed and frightened, the French maid took the
stand.  In a trembling voice, and with at least one
appealing glance at the minister, who appeared to regard
her more sympathetically than her own mistress, the little
woman gave her testimony.  It told of finding the
defendant alone in this room where the guests had been
inspecting the models for the London production of the
play.  He was not near the table upon which the models
were displayed, but standing by the chiffonier, with his
arm absently thrown across the corner of it, and the hand
within a few inches of the small drawer in which the
diamonds reposed temporarily.

"What part of his body was toward the chiffonier?"
asked the prosecutor.

"His back and side."

"Where was he looking?"

"Out toward the room to which the guests had withdrawn."

"As if watching for an opportunity of some sort?"
suggested Searle.

Hampstead started, and his eyes kindled, but he did
not speak.  The Court, however, did.

"In view of the fact," interposed his Honor, "that
Doctor Hampstead is unrepresented by counsel and
taking no advantage of a technical defense, I will remind
you, Mr. Searle, that your last question calls for a
conclusion of the witness.  She may testify where he was
looking, but she cannot tell what she thinks his actions
implied."

"Of course, your Honor, that is right," confessed
Searle quickly.  "The witness is somewhat hesitant and
embarrassed, and the form of my question was inadvertent.
Under the circumstances," he added suavely,
"I am being especially careful not to take advantage of
the defendant."

"That must be apparent to all, Mr. Searle," the judge
palavered in return.

"Where was he looking?" queried Searle.

Having been properly coached by the attorney's question
and his reply to the judge, the half frightened girl
faltered:

"He was looking out, *as if watching for an opportunity*."

Color mounted to the cheeks of the judge.  Searle
looked properly surprised.  The defendant smiled
cynically.

"Strike out that portion of the answer which involves
the conclusion as to why he was looking out," instructed
the judge solemnly to the reporter.

"Certainly," exclaimed Searle apologetically.  None
the less, he was satisfied with his manoeuvre.  He knew
the effect of the little French girl's conclusion could not
be stricken out of the mind of the judge who had heard
it expressed, nor out of the mind of the public before
whom he was in reality trying his case.

"State what further you observed," directed the
attorney.  "Did you see him move, or anything?"

"He did not move; he only smiled at me and was still
there in the same position when I went out.  A few
minutes later, I was surprised to see him bidding Miss
Dounay good night."

"Strike out that the witness was surprised," commanded
the Court sternly, while Julie shivered at the
sharpness of Judge Brennan's tone.

"That is all," continued Searle.

"Do you wish to cross-examine?" inquired the judge,
directing his glance to Hampstead.

"I do not," replied the minister.

This time the judge looked surprised, and there were
slight murmurings, rustlings, and whisperings beyond the
rail.  The faltering testimony of the little maid had
driven another nail deeply in the circumstantial case
against the minister, and he had not made the slightest
effort to draw it out by the few words of cross-examination
that might have broken its hold entirely.  He might,
for instance, have asked if she saw any one else alone in
this room.  But the minister did not ask it.

Searle went on piling up his case.  The detectives
testified to the arrest of the minister, to the search of his
person and house, and to the finding of the diamonds in
the vault box, after which the jewels themselves were
introduced in evidence and marked: People's Exhibit
"A", while the envelope which had contained them and
bore the minister's name and address upon the corner,
became People's Exhibit "B."

Each detective and Wyatt was asked to describe
minutely the actions of the minister from the time when
the personal search ending in the discovery of the safe
deposit key was proposed until the time when the
diamonds were exposed to view upon the table in the vault
room.  By this means, Searle got before the Court the
demeanor of the minister as indicating a consciousness
of guilt.

Relentless in pursuing this line, Searle put on the
defendant's own bondsmen, Wilson, Wadham, and Hayes,
compelling them to describe, although with evident
reluctance, the impetuous outburst against the opening of
the box when the bond was being arranged, and the
scene in the vault to which they had been witnesses.

Wilson, chafing at the position into which he was
forced, was further roused when Searle exclaimed
suddenly:

"I will ask you if the defendant, on or about the day
that these diamonds were stolen, did not approach you
for the urgent loan of a considerable sum of money."

Wilson glared and was silent.

"Did he, or did he not?" persisted Searle sharply.

"He did," snapped Wilson.

"How did he want it, cash or checks?"

"He wanted cash, but I do not see, Mr. Searle—" he
began.

"Excuse me, Mr. Wilson, but I think you do see,"
replied Searle.  "Did you give it to him?"

"I did," replied Wilson, "and I would have given
him more—"

"I ask that a part of this answer be stricken out, your
Honor, as volunteered by the witness, and not in response
to the question," demanded Searle brusquely.

"I think we should not let ourselves become too technical,"
replied the Court, with a chiding glance at Searle,
for Mr. Wilson was a person of some importance in the
community.

Searle, slightly huffed, again addressed the witness.

"Did the defendant tell you what he wanted this large
sum of money for?"

"No.  Furthermore—" began the witness.

"That will do!  That will do!" exclaimed Searle
rising, and motioning with his hand as if to stop the
witness's mouth.  "That is all," he added quickly.
"Cross-examine."

Wilson turned expectantly to Hampstead.  He was
aching to be permitted to say more, to offer testimony
that would break the force of that which he had just
given.  But the minister, comprehending fully the
generous desire of his friend, merely looked him in the eye
and shook his head; for this was one of the trails neither
he nor any one else must be permitted to pursue.

Having asked this series of questions of Wilson about
the money, apparently as an afterthought, which it was
not, Searle then recalled Hayes and Wadham, and put
the same questions to them.  Each made the same
attempt to qualify and enlarge, but each was carefully held
to a statement which pictured John Hampstead making
desperate efforts among his friends to raise quickly what
must have been a very large sum of money, for an
unexplained purpose.

Searle felt this to be the climax of his case.

"The People rest," he exclaimed with dramatic suddenness,
sitting down and inserting a thumb in his arm-hole,
while after a defiant glance at the minister, he turned
and scanned the spectators outside the rail for signs of
approval of the skillful handling of their cause by him,
their oath-bound servant.

But the eyes of the spectators were on the defendant,
who now stepped to the platform and stood with upraised
right hand before the clerk to be sworn.  As he composed
himself in the witness chair, his manner was cool and even
meditative.  The central figure in this tense, emotional
drama, which had every significance for himself, he
seemed scarcely more than aware of his surroundings.

"My name," he began deliberately, "is John Hampstead.
I am thirty-one years old, and a minister of the
gospel.  I reside in the County of Alameda.  I am the
person named in this complaint.  I was at Miss Dounay's
supper party, although I did not stay to supper.  I was
probably in the exact position described by the maid, for
I believe her to be truthful.  However, I do not
remember the incident, beyond the fact that the group
gradually withdrew from this room, and I remained there in
reflective mood for a short interval.  I saw Miss
Dounay's diamonds last that evening when she excused
herself from the company to change her costume.  I saw
them next the morning after, upon the desk in my study."

The minister paused.  The massed audience leaned
forward, intent and breathless.  Now his real defense
was beginning.  His manner, balanced and impersonal,
was carrying conviction with it.  The man was the
defendant—the prisoner at the bar—yet he spoke
deliberately, as if not himself but the truth were at issue.

"They were brought there," the witness was saying,
"by a man who told me that he had stolen them.  He
appeared to be excited.  Indeed, his condition was
pitiable.  I advised him to immediately return the diamonds
to Miss Dounay, confess his crime to her, and throw
himself upon her mercy; but there were circumstances which
made it impossible for him to act immediately.  That is all."

The minister turned from the Court, whom he had
been addressing, and faced Searle, as if awaiting
cross-examination.  The audience had listened with painful
interest to the minister's story.  The manner of it had
unquestionably carried conviction, but its very
unbolstered simplicity had in it something of the shock
which provokes doubt.  This effect was heightened by
its extreme brevity and a suggestion of reticence in the
narrative.

"Have you concluded?" asked the Court, reflecting
the general surprise.

"I have," replied the minister, with the same quiet
voice in which he had given his testimony.

"Begin your cross-examination," instructed Judge
Brennan.

"Who is the man who brought these diamonds to
you?" asked Searle, hurling the question swiftly.

"I cannot tell you," answered the minister gravely.

"Why can you not tell?"  The voice of Searle was
harshly insistent.  "Don't you know who the man was?"

"I do, most assuredly."

"Why can you not tell it?"

"Because the secret is not mine."

"Not yours?"  A sneer appeared on the lips of Searle.

"It came to me by way of the Protestant confessional,"
explained the minister.

"The Protestant confessional!  What do you mean
by that?" barked the prosecutor.

"Simply," replied the minister, "that the instinct of
confession is very strong in every nature moved to
penitence and a hope of reform; so that every minister and
priest of whatever faith becomes the repository of a vast
number of confessions of fault and failure, some trivial
and some grave.  I used the term 'Protestant confessional'
because the Roman Catholic Church erects the
confessional to a place of established and formal
importance.  In most other communions it is merely
incidental to pastoral experience, but none the less it is a
factor in all effort at rehabilitation of character."

"And you will not give the name, even to protect yourself?"

"It is not," replied the witness, "a matter in which
I feel that I have any choice.  The confession was not
made to me as an individual, but to me as a minister of
God.  I will hold that confidence sacred and inviolate at
whatever cost until the Day of Judgment."

Dramatically, though unconsciously, the witness lifted
his right hand, as though he renewed an oath to God.

For the first time, too, the utterance of the defendant
had betrayed personal feeling, and for a moment there
was a sheen upon his features, as of a man who had
toiled upward through shadows to where the light from
above broke radiantly upon his brow.

"And you take advantage of the fact that such a confession
as you allege is privileged under the law and need
not be testified to by you?"

"As I said before," reiterated the minister, with a
calm dignity that refused to be ruffled by the sneer in the
cross-examiner's question, "I do not feel that the secret
is mine."

The impression that at this point the witness was
retiring behind intrenchments that were very strong was
no more lost upon Searle than upon the spectators, and
he immediately attacked from another quarter.

"We are to understand, then, Doctor, that your guilty
demeanor which has been testified to by your friends as
well as the officers was entirely because you knew the
discovery of the diamonds in your box would lend color
to the charge made against you?"

This was another trail that Hampstead must not allow
to be pursued.

"You are at liberty to make whatever interpretation
of my demeanor you wish, Mr. Searle," he replied, a
trifle tartly.

"Yes, Doctor Hampstead; we are agreed upon that,"
rejoined the prosecutor dryly, at the same time making
a gallery play with his eyes.  "You say," Searle
continued presently, "it was temporarily impossible for the
man who brought these diamonds to you to return them
to Miss Dounay.  Why did you not return them yourself
instead of placing them in your vault to await the
convenience of the thief?"

The insulting scorn of the latter part of this question
was meant to be diverting to the audience as well as
highly disconcerting to the witness, but the minister
smothered the sneer by replying sincerely and
courteously:

"I felt, Mr. Searle, that my problem was to rebuild in
the man a sense of responsibility to a trust and the
courage to act upon a moral impulse.  Wisely, or
unwisely, I insisted that the entire procedure of restoration
should devolve upon the penitent himself.  His first
spiritual battle was to nerve himself to face the owner of
the diamonds."

"Precisely," observed Mr. Searle smoothly, abandoning
the jury rail, against which he had been leaning, to
balance himself upon the balls of the feet and rub his
palms blandly.  "And in the meantime, while this thief
was gathering his courage, did your consideration for
your friend, Miss Dounay, impel you to notify her that the
diamonds were in your custody and would be returned
to her very soon?"

"Not alone was I impelled to do that," replied the
minister; "but the unfortunate man urged such a step
upon me.  I declined for the same reason.  My entire
course of action was dictated by a desire to make this
man morally stronger by compelling him to assume and
discharge his own responsibilities.  I was willing to
point out the course; but he must walk the way alone.  I
will forestall your next question by saying that for the
same reason I did not notify the police."

Searle was nettled by the easy compactness with which
the minister cemented the walls of his defense more
closely by each reply to the questions in cross-examination.

"You are aware, Mr. Hampstead," he thundered with
a sudden change of tactics, "that the act which you have
just set forth, so far from setting up a defense to this
charge, proves you guilty under the law as an accessory
after the fact."

"I am not aware of it," replied the minister, with
distinct emphasis.  "My impression was that the law
considers not only an act but the intent of the act.  The
intent of my act was not to conceal a crime, but to
reconstruct the character of a man."

Searle darted a hasty and apprehensive glance at the
massed faces behind the rail.

"That is all," he exclaimed dramatically, with a cynical
smile and an uptoss of his hands, calculated cleverly
to portray his opinion of the utter lack of standing such
replies as those of the minister could gain him in a court
of justice.

Judge Brennan looked at Hampstead.  "Have you
anything in rebuttal?" he asked.

"Nothing," replied the minister, arising and stepping
down to his chair at the long table, where he remained
standing while the attentive expression of Court and
spectators indicated appreciation that the climax of the
defendant's effort was at hand.

The very bigness of the thing the man was trying to
do was in some sense an attest of character, and here and
there among the onlookers ran little currents of reviving
sympathy for the clergyman, who stood waiting quietly
for the moment in which to begin his final effort as an
attorney in his own behalf.

Keenly sensitive to the subtlest emotions of the crowd,
he understood perfectly well that the effect of his
testimony had been at least sufficient to secure a verdict of
suspended judgment from the spectators; and he
expected far more from the balanced mind of the judge;
so that it was with a feeling of renewed confidence,
almost an anticipation of triumph, that he prepared to
make the final move.

"If the Court please," he began dispassionately, as if
pleading for a cause that had no more than an abstract
meaning for himself, "I desire to move at this time the
dismissal of the complaint, upon the ground that the
evidence is insufficient to warrant the holding of the
defendant for trial before the Superior Court."

The minister stopped for breath, and there was another
of those strange, composite sighs from beyond the rail.

"In support of that motion," and a note of growing
significance appeared in the speaker's tone, "I argue
nothing, except to ask this Court to accept as true every
word of testimony spoken by every witness heard upon
the stand this morning."

The Court looked puzzled, but the ministerial defendant
went on:

"I believe the truth has been spoken by Miss
Dounay—by the maid—by the officers—and by my own
friends.  Yet the facts testified to may be true,"—the
minister's voice rose,—"and the inference to which they
point be wickedly and damnably false!  It is so with this
case; for be it noted that I ask your Honor to consider
also that my testimony is true.  It denies no statement;
it controverts no fact in the case of the prosecution.  On
the contrary, it confirms them; but it also explains
them."  Again the defendant's voice was rising.  "It confirms
the facts, but it utterly refutes the inference that this
defendant at the bar is guilty.  Consider the entire fabric
of evidence as a seamless garment of truth, and you can
dismiss the complaint with an untroubled brow.  Reason
is satisfied!  Justice is done!"

Hampstead paused, and a shade of apprehension came
to his face, for his eye had traveled for a moment to that
massed expectancy without the rail.

"The verdict of your Honor is to *me*"—Hampstead
in his growing earnestness had abandoned the fictional
distinction between the pleader and his client,—"of more
than usual importance, for by it hangs the verdict of the
people whose interest is attested by those packed benches
yonder.  Without disrespect to your Honor, I can say
that I care more for their verdict than for that of any
twelve men in any jury box or any judge upon any bench.

"But under the circumstances the whole people cannot
actually judge—they can only be my executioners.
They have not heard me speak.  They can not look me
in the eye, nor observe by my demeanor whether I speak
like an honest man or a contemptible fraud.  They see
me only through a cloud of skillfully engendered
suspicion.  They hear my voice only faintly amid a clamorous
confusion of poisoned tongues.  Your Honor must see
for them, and speak for them.  Your Honor's verdict
will be their verdict.  I tremble for that verdict.  I plead
for it!

"I ask your Honor to take account of the difficulty
of my position, presuming, as the law instructs the Court
to presume, that it is the position of an innocent person.
Bound by the most inviolable vow which a man can take,
I am unable to offer to you a conclusive defense by
presenting the man who committed the crime.  He may
be in this court room now, cowering with a consciousness
of his guilt and in awe at beholding its consequences to
the one who has helped him.  He may be an officer of
this Court; he might be your Honor, sitting upon the
bench, which, of course, is unthinkable—yet no more
unthinkable to me than that I should be charged with
this crime.  But though he be here at my very side, I
cannot reach out my hand and say: 'That is the man.'  I
will not touch him nor look at him.  Unless he
speaks—and I confess that there is an outside reason why I
should absolutely forbid him to speak—there is no
defense that can be offered, beyond the simple story I have
told you.

"May I not, also, without being accused of egotism,
remind your Honor that if it is decided that I appear
sufficiently guilty to warrant a criminal trial in the
Superior Court, my work in this community will be at an end."

The minister was speaking for the first time with a
show of deep feeling, and an indulgent sneer appeared
upon the lips of Searle.  This was not legitimate
argument.  Yet a mere preacher might not be supposed to
know it, and therefore he, Searle, would magnanimously
allow the man to talk himself out, if his Honor did not
stop him.

But the Court was also complaisant, and the minister
went on with passionate earnestness to plead:

"Regardless of the ultimate verdict of a jury, the
stigma of a felony trial will be upon me for life.  From
this very court room I shall be taken to your identification
bureau.  I shall be weighed, stripped, measured—my
thumb prints taken—my features photographed like
those of any criminal!"

As Hampstead proceeded, his speech began to be
punctuated with spasmodic breaks, as if the prospective
humiliation was one at which his sensitive nature revolted
violently.

"And those finger prints," he labored—"those
measurements—and that photograph—will become a
part—of the criminal records—of the State of
California—for as long as the paper upon which they are made
shall last!"

"No!  No!!  No!!!" shrilled a hysterical voice that
burst out suddenly and ended as abruptly as it began.

Strangely enough it was the complaining witness who
had cried out.  She had risen and stood with hands
outstretched protestingly to the minister, while whispering
hoarsely: "It cannot be!  It cannot be!"

"Madam!" thundered the minister, viewing the
woman sternly, his own emotion of self-sympathy
disappearing at this unexpected sign of softness in her,
while his eyes blazed indignantly: "That is a police
regulation which by long custom has come to have all
the force of law.  If you doubt it, your accomplice there
will so inform you!"

Hampstead, as he uttered the last words, had shifted
his blazing glance to Searle, who at first disconcerted and
endeavoring to pull Miss Dounay back into her seat, now
rose and turned toward the defendant, his own face
aflame, and hot words poised upon his tongue.

But Judge Brennan was rapping for silence.

"Compose yourself, madam!" he ordered sternly.

But before the minister's accusing glance, Miss Dounay
was already dropping back into her chair, and as if in
dismay at her outbreak, buried her face in her hands,
while Searle, quivering with fury, snarled out:

"I resent, your Honor, with all my manhood, the
epithet which this defendant has gratuitously and
insultingly flung at me."

"Be seated, Mr. Searle," commanded the judge.
"Doctor Hampstead's position is very distressing.  He
will withdraw the objectionable epithet."

"I withdraw it," acknowledged the minister, recovering
his poise; yet he said it doggedly and
uncompromisingly, qualifying his withdrawal with: "But your Honor
will take into account that the manner of the
representative of the District Attorney has been offensive to
me, though some of the time veiled by an exaggerated
pretense of courtesy.  It has seemed to me the manner of
an accomplice of the complaining witness, and I withdraw
the statement more out of respect to this Court than out
of consideration for him."

Searle glared, but resumed his seat, giving vent to his
temper in a violent jerk of his chair as he dropped into it.

"You may conclude your remarks," observed the Court
to Hampstead.

"There is nothing to add," replied the minister, after
a reflective interval, "except to urge again that your
Honor consider the grave consequences of yielding to a
one-sided view of the case.  I ask only that truth be
honored and justice done!"

With this the defendant sat down.

Miss Dounay appeared to have regained her composure,
but, white and still, her glance was now fixed as
noticeably upon the face of the defendant as before she
had markedly avoided it.

With a hitch to his vest and a forward thrust of the
chin, Searle rose to attack the plea of the defendant.

"Your Honor may well ask with Pilate: 'What is
truth?'" he began, the manner of his speech showing
that while his self-control was admirable, his mood was
that vindictive one into which many a prosecutor appears
to work himself when arising to assail the cause of a
defendant.

"However," he prefaced, "I must first apologize to
your Honor for the momentary loss of control on the part
of the complaining witness.  Your Honor will realize
that her emotions were wantonly and deliberately played
upon by the defendant in a skillful endeavor to create
sympathy for himself.  The fact that he succeeded so
readily is an eloquent bit of testimony to the sympathetic
nature of this estimable and brilliant woman, to the ease
with which her confidence is gained, and the painful
reluctance with which she performs her duty in this sad
case: for any way we view it, it is a sad case, your Honor,
and no one regrets more than I the harsh words which
must be spoken in the course of my own duty to the
people of this county.

"However," and Searle paused for a moment as if
both gathering breath and steeling himself for the vicious
assault he proposed to make: "Addressing myself to
the plea of the defendant for a dismissal of this case, I
must say flatly that the motion itself, the argument to
support it, and the testimony upon which it is based,
constitute the most audacious combination of effrontery
and offensive egotism to which a court was ever asked to
listen.  I congratulate your Honor upon the patience and
self-control with which you have contained yourself while
permitting this defendant to go on from statement to
statement, involving himself deeper in this dastardly
crime with every word.

"If, your Honor, in all my days at the bar as a
prosecutor, I have ever looked into the face of a guilty
man, it is the face of this man!—this egotist!—this
boastful braggart!—"  As Searle hurled each epithet,
he worked his passion higher and shook an offensively,
impudently accusing finger at the defendant; "this
hypocrite!—this paddler of the palms of neurasthenic
women!—this associate of criminals!—this shepherd
of black sheep, who now sits here with a sneer upon his
lips—lips which have just committed the most appalling
sacrilege by seeking to cloak the guilt of a dastardly act
with the sacred gown of a priest of God!"

As a matter of fact, there was no sneer discernible to
any one else upon the lips of the defendant.  At first
smiling at the mock-fury into which Searle was lashing
himself, they had become white and bloodless under the
sting of these heaped-up insults.  But this last was more
than the man could stand in silence.

"Is my position so defenseless, I ask your Honor,"
Hampstead interrupted, "that I am compelled to endure
this?"

The judge bestowed a chiding glance upon the attorney,
but replied to the minister:

"A certain liberty is allowed the prosecutor."

"But that liberty should not be a license to defame!"
protested the defendant.

"Am I to be permitted to proceed with my argument
or not?" bawled Searle in his most bullying manner,
while he glared at the audacious minister.

"You may proceed," replied the Court, affecting not
to notice the disrespect with which it had been addressed.

Searle continued, lapsing now into an argumentative
strain.

"The defendant himself has said that the case against
him is without a flaw.  He has had the effrontery to
urge that your Honor accept the testimony against him
as true testimony.  He has only argued that if we are
to believe the witnesses for the prosecution, we are also
to believe him.  I say—I affirm with all the force at my
command—that we are not to believe him at all!

"I ask your Honor to consider first the motive for his
testimony.  The man is hopelessly involved.  The charge
of burglary is a simple one, compared with the broader
indictment of moral profligacy which the whole
community is at this moment prepared to find against him.
Ruin stares him in the face.  His pose is shattered.  His
disguise is penetrated.  If he goes from this court room
to the identification bureau of which he has spoken in
his mawkish plea for sympathy, as I believe he will go,
he goes to be catalogued with criminals, and to be damned
forever in the esteem of his neighbors.

"To avert that, would not your Honor expect this
defendant to be willing to perjure himself without a qualm?
Will a man who has lived a lie before a whole community
for five years hesitate to add another in an endeavor to
avert his impending fate?  Will a man who has stolen
the jewels of his trusted friend hesitate to swear falsely
in denial of such an act?  Will a man who has worked
upon the sympathy of his friends to secure large sums
of money for a purpose so doubtful that it is
undisclosed—  Will he hesitate to work upon the sympathies
here by words and implications, by innuendoes that are as
false to religion as to fact?

"Your Honor knows that he would not so hesitate.
Your Honor knows, through long familiarity with the
law of evidence, that the testimony of a defendant in his
own behalf, because of his intense interest in the outcome
of his case, is always to be weighed with extreme care.

"I believe under such circumstances not only the
motives, the springs of action, but the probable mental
processes of the witness are to be taken into account.  I
ask your Honor what a defendant involved in the mesh
of circumstantial evidence here presented would probably
do under these circumstances.  Your own judgment
answers with mine that he would probably lie, and exactly
as this defendant has lied!"

Again Searle turned and shook his long arm with
insulting undulations in the direction of the defendant,
after which he continued:

"Turning from probabilities to experience, I ask your
Honor out of his memory of years of service upon the
bench, what does the arrested thief—taken like this one,
with the loot in his possession—what does he do?
Why, he either confesses his crime, or he tells you that
he is not the thief but an innocent third party, who
unwittingly received the loot from the man of straw, whom
his imagination and his necessities have created.  That
latter alternative is the defense of this alleged minister of
the Gospel!  He had not the honesty to confess, but tells
instead that same old lie which criminals and felons have
been telling in that same witness chair since this Court
was first established.

"Yet this defendant's story has not even the merit of a
pretense to ignorance that the goods he held were stolen
goods.  He boldly admits that he knew they were stolen;
that he was personally acquainted with the owner; that
he knew the distress of her mind; knew the police
departments of half a dozen cities were searching for the
jewels, and that the newspapers were giving the widest
publicity to the facts and thus joining in the chase for
loot and looter.  And yet he calmly permits these
diamonds to repose in his vault with never a word or hint
to calm the distress of his friend or relieve the peace
officers of burdensome labors in which they were
engaging and the unnecessary expense which they were thus
putting upon the taxpayers who support them!

"Why, your Honor, if the witness's own story is true,
he has given this Court an abundant ground for holding
him to answer to the Superior Court, not indeed upon the
exact charge named in that complaint, but as an
accessory after the fact to said charge.

"But it is not true.  To use his own phrase, it is
wickedly and damnably false!  So palpably false that it
collapses upon the mere examination of your Honor's mind
without argument from me.

"Yet I cannot close without calling attention to the
sheer recklessness with which this thief and perjurer has
heightened the infamy of his position by an act of brazen
sacrilege.  He has sought to make plausible his weak,
unimaginative lie that he received these goods instead of
stealing them, by pretending that he received them in his
capacity as a religious confessor, under conditions that
bound him to a silence which the voice of God alone
could break.

"That, in itself, is a claim that should bring the blush
of shame to the cheek and rouse the hot resentment of
every honest minister and of every honest priest, and
make them join with the outraged feelings of honest
laymen and of citizens generally in demanding that justice
descend upon this man and strike him from the pedestal
of self-righteous egotism upon which he stands.

"Turning again for a moment to the question of
probabilities: I ask your Honor if it is probable, even
thinkable, that any minister, standing in the position of regard
in which this minister stood last Sunday morning before
the eyes of his people, would deem a crisis like this
insufficient to unseal his lips and absolve him from his
confessional vows?  His very duty to his God and to his
congregation, to the poor dupes of his hypocrisy, to say
nothing of his duty to himself, would compel him to go
upon the witness stand voluntarily and reveal the name
of the alleged thief!

"Such a consideration again forces upon any unbiased
mind the conviction that this man is not speaking the
truth.  View him as a thief, and you suspect that his
story is a lie.  Try to view him as a minister, acting
honestly and in good faith, and you no longer suspect,
but you deeply and unalterably know that his story is a lie!"

Searle, now at the height of his self-induced passion,
as well as at the climax of his argument, stood bent over,
his eyes blazing at the judge, his face red, his neck
swollen, his features working in rage, and his voice deepening
to a bull-like roar, while with an upper-cut gesture of his
clenched fist and right arm, he appeared to lift the words
to some mighty height and hurl them like a thunder bolt
of doom.

The minister, sitting with every muscle taut, as he
strained under the viciousness of this assault, felt just
before its climax some insensible cause directing his gaze
from the face of his official accuser to that of his real
Nemesis, the actress, and was surprised to see her
crouching like a tigress for a spring, with eyes fixed upon the
prosecutor, and a look of unutterable malice, hate, and
loathing in their savage beams.

But with this scene thrown for a moment on the screen
of his mind, the suddenly sobering utterance of Searle
indicated that he was concluding his argument, and the
defendant's eyes returned quickly to the attorney's face.

"For these reasons, your Honor," the man was saying,
"so patent and bristling from the testimony that I
need not even have spoken of them in order to bring
them to your attention, I ask you to find that the offense
as charged in the complaint has been committed, and that
there is sufficient cause to believe the defendant guilty
thereof, and to order that he be held to answer before
the Honorable, the Superior Court of the County of
Alameda and the State of California."

Searle sat down and wiped his brow,—confident that
he had added greatly to his reputation by a masterly
argument which had sealed the fate of a man, against
whom, despite the minister's suspicions, he really had
nothing in the world but that instinct for the chase to
which, once a strong nature gives up, it may find itself
led on to excesses that are the extreme of injustice.

The audience moved restlessly yet silently, shifting
cramped muscles tenderly and rubbing strained eyes; but
still alert for the issue of the scene which in one hour
and fifty minutes had been played from one climax to
another.

"You have the opportunity to reply," said the Court,
addressing Hampstead.

"The spirit and the manner of this address is its own
reply," answered the defendant quickly, believing
hopefully that it was.

But the audience, more discerning than the defendant,
issued the last of its long-drawn collective sighs,
foreseeing that the drama was now at its inevitable end.

In sharp, machine-like tones, the verdict of Judge
Brennan was pronounced:

"*Held to answer!  Bail doubled!  Adjourned!*"

The gavel fell sharply, and the eyes of the Court
darted a warning glance beyond the rail as if to forestall
a possible demonstration of any sort.  But there was
none.  A kind of restraint appeared to hold the court
and spectators in thrall.  Then the official reporter closed
his notebook with an audible whisk; the clerk, gathering
his papers, snapped them loudly with rubber bands; and
the judge arose and started toward his chambers, while
Wyatt moved over and took his place significantly by the
side of Hampstead.  As if this broke the spell, there was
a shuffling of many feet, while the minister was
immediately surrounded by his bondsmen and a few friends.
The friends pressed his hand and stepped away into the
outgoing crowd; but the bondsmen went with him into
the judge's chambers, where the new surety was quickly
executed.  After this, wringing the hand of each of the
three men feelingly, Hampstead asked to be excused.

"I have an humiliating experience to undergo," he
explained, with a meaningful glance at Detective Larsen
who, representing the Bureau of Identification, stood
waiting.  "I prefer to face that humiliation alone."

"I understand," exclaimed Wilson, his face flushing.
"It is a damned outrage!  I didn't know such a thing
could be done.  I thought every man was presumed
innocent until proven guilty!  Instead of that, they put
him in the Rogues' Gallery!"

"You are as innocent as an angel from heaven,"
averred the white-bearded Wadham extravagantly, as
he laid an affectionate hand upon the shoulder of the
younger man.

"You are, indeed," echoed Hayes, his voice hoarse
with emotion.  "I confess again that we doubted for a
time, but your character rises triumphant to the test."

The minister was unwilling to trust himself to further
speech; for his disappointment with the verdict had been
great, and the sympathetic loyalty of these trusted friends
made self-control difficult, so with only a nod of
comprehension, he turned quickly to where Detective Larsen
waited.

It was nearly one hour later when the minister,
clothed again, stepped out upon the street.  Behind him
was his record in the criminal history of the State of
California.  He had seen his name go into the card
index with a wife murderer on one side of him and the
author of an unmentionable crime upon the other.  With
the sickening memory of his loathsome ordeal searing his
brain he was only half-conscious of the clatter and bang
of the busy city life about him.  Mercifully the gaping
crowd had dispersed.  Hurrying people went this way and
that, intent upon their own concerns.  But a newsboy,
intent, too, on his concerns, thrust the noon edition of
*The Sentinel* before the minister's eyes.  Seeking the
headline by habit, as the eyes of the victim turn to the
torturing irons, he read in letters as black and bold as
any he had seen that week, the verdict of Judge Brennan.

"HELD TO ANSWER!"

Instinctively Hampstead paused, like a man in a daze,
then passed his hand before his eyes to blot the black
letters from his sight.  In the identification bureau, the
meaning of those three words had just been defined to the
most sensitive part of his nature in abhorrent and
revolting terms.  The sight of that headline to be flaunted
on every street corner was like seeing these words, with
their loathsome connotation, spread upon a banner that
arched over the whole sky of life for him.  It
overwhelmed him with a sense of the public obloquy to which
he was now to be subjected.

On the street car, as he rode homeward, the minister
felt the eyes of the people upon him,—curiously he
knew, derisively he imagined; yet some were in reality
sympathetic.  The conductor, as he took the clergyman's
nickel, touched his hat respectfully, thus subtly indicating
that there was some vestige of religious character still
outwardly attaching to his person.  And a workman,
his tools in his hand and the stain of his craft upon his
clothes, leaned over and touched the minister upon the arm.

"My boy was playing the ponies in Beany Webster's
place," he said.  "You saved him for me.  I don't care
what else you done; if they ever got me on the jury,
there's one would never convict you of anything."

The minister recognized the friendliness of the remark
with a cordial smile, and put out his hand to grasp
gratefully the soiled one of the toiler.  That handclasp was
immensely strengthening to him.  He felt as if he had
taken hold of the great, steadying hand of God.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`A PROMISE OF STRENGTH`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXXVI


.. class:: center medium bold

   A PROMISE OF STRENGTH

.. vspace:: 2

Late in the afternoon of this day, which, it will be
remembered, was Saturday, the minister had three
callers in tolerably prompt succession.  The first to
appear was the Angel of the Chair, hailing the minister
with a smile as if, instead of disgrace, he had achieved
a triumph.

Hampstead's sad face lighted with sheer joy at her
manner.  It was such a relief that she had not come to
commiserate him.  His mood was extremely subtle.  It
irritated him to be pitied; it stung him to be doubted.
He only wanted to be believed and to be encouraged by
those who did believe him.  This fragile blossom of a
woman who, with all her gentleness and weakness, had
yet in her breast the battling spirit of the martyrs of old,
touched just the right note, as after an interval of
sympathetic silence, she asked gently, with a voice full of
the tenderest consideration, "Can you—can you see it
to the end?"

"To the end?"

Hampstead lifted his brows gravely.  "You mean—conviction?"

"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!"





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.. _`THE TERMS OF SURRENDER`:

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   CHAPTER XXXVII


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   THE TERMS OF SURRENDER

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"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!





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.. _`SUNDAY IN ALL PEOPLE'S`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXXVIII


.. class:: center medium bold

   SUNDAY IN ALL PEOPLE'S

.. vspace:: 2

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
rôle 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:

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: center

AN ADDRESS TO THE PEOPLE

.. vspace:: 1

"They tell me that I have stood for the last time in the
pulpit of *All People's*; that on Monday night I shall be
unfrocked by the hands that ordained me; for my
ministerial standing was created by this church which now
proposes to take it away.  This act, more than a court
conviction, will seem my ruin.  I write to say I cannot
call that ruin to which a man goes willingly.

"It is not my soul that hangs in the balance, but
another's.  While this man struggles, I declare again that
I will not break in upon him.  I can reach out and touch
him; but I will not.  He will read this.  I say to him:
'Brother, wait!  Do not hurry.  I can hold your load a
while until you get the grapple on your spirit.'

"But for saying this, I am cast out.

"Men observe to me: 'What a pity!'  I say to you:
'No pity at all!'

"Is a minister who would not thus suffer worthy to be
a minister?  The conception can be broadened.  Is any
man?  Is an editor worthy to be an editor, a merchant,
a teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, standing as each must at
sometime where the issue is sharply drawn between
loyalty and disloyalty to truth or trust,—is any of them
truly worthy or truly true, who would not willingly
suffer all that is demanded of me?

"It does not require a great man to be true to the clasp
of his hand: nor a minister.  I know policemen and
motormen who are that.  To be that, upon the human side,
has been almost the sum of my religious practice—not
my profession, but my *practice*.  By that habit I have
gained what I have gained—*and lost what I have lost*.
Humbled to the dust, I dare yet to make one boast: I
have not failed in these small human loyalties, except as
my capacities have failed.

"This last act of mine, which will be regarded as the
consummation of failure, is the greatest opportunity to
be true that I have ever had.

"To go forth on foot before this community, held to
answer for my convictions, fills me with a sense of
abandon to immolation upon high altars that is almost
intoxicating.

"I can almost wish it might never be known whether
I spoke the truth or not about the Dounay diamonds;
that in my death, unvindicated, I might lie yonder on the
hills of Piedmont; that on a simple slab just large enough
to bear it, might be written no name but only this:

"'*He believed something hard enough to live for it.*'

"I wish even that you might crucify me, take me out
on Broadway here and nail me to a trolley pole.  But
you will not do this.  I am not so worthy.  You are not
so brave.  Those men had the courage of their
convictions who nailed up the Galilean and hurled down with
stones the first martyr.  You have not.  Courage
to-day survives; but it is reserved for ignoble struggles.
Men are more ready to die for their appetites than to
live for their convictions.  Men fear to be uncomfortable,
to be sneered at, to be defeated.  Paugh!  Defeat is not
a thing to fear.  To be untrue is the blackest terror!  To
become involved for the sake of one's convictions should
not be regarded as calamity.  Yet it is,—in these soft days.

"The hope that the fall, even of one so humble and
unimportant as I, may be some slight protest against this
spirit of weakness, takes out the sting and gives me a
delirious kind of joy.

"I would like to have been a great preacher.  I am
not.  I would I had a tongue of eloquence to fire men
to this passion of mine.  I have not.  That is the pity!
I was proud and jealous of my position.  I have lost it.

"Yet I do not doubt that I shall find a field of usefulness.
Deep as you hurl me down, I do not doubt but that
there are some to whom even if condemned, spurned,
unfrocked—oh, the eternal silliness of that! as if any
decrees of men could affect the standing or potentiality of
a soul—I can come as a welcome messenger of helpfulness.
To them I shall go!  They may be found here.
If so, I shall remain here—go in and out—pointed at
as the man who failed.

"Perhaps I can even make failure popular.  It ought
to be.  There is a great need of failures just now, for
men who will fail for their true success's sake.

"The world needs a new standard of appraisal.  It
honors the man whose success bulks to the eye.  It needs
to be a little more discriminating; to find out why some
men failed, and to honor them because they are failures.
Some of the greatest men in America and in history were
failures.  Socrates with his cup was a failure.  Jesus
was a failure.  It was written on his back in lines of
blistering welts.  It was nailed into his palms, stabbed into
his brow, hissed into his ear as he died.

"Re-reading at this midnight hour what I have written,
I perceive that it sounds slightly frenzied.  But my soul
just now is slightly frenzied.  If I wrote calmly,
unegoistically, it would be a lie.  What is written is what I
feel.

"Here and there some will approve this document.
More will sneer at it.  But it is mine.  It is I.  I sign it.
It is my last will and testament in this community where
once—daring to boast again—I have been a power.

"Friends—and enemies alike!—this final word.

"I have not grasped much, but this: To be true.
When somebody trusts you worthily, make good.  Be
true, children, to the plans and to the hopes of parents.
Be true, lad, to the impetuous girl who has trusted you
with more than she should have trusted you.  Be true,
women, to your lovers and your husbands; men to your
wives, your partners, your fellow men, your patrons; to
your talents, your opportunities, your country, your age,
your world!  Be true to God!  If you have no God, be
true to your highest conception of what God ought to be.

"It sounds like a homily.  It is a principle.  You can
multiply it indefinitely.  It runs like a scarlet thread
through religion, and it will go all around the borders of
life.

"Eternal Loyalty is the Price of true Success.

"To this conviction I subscribe my name, myself and
everything that still remains to me.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

"JOHN HAMPSTEAD,
   "Pastor of All People's Church."

.. vspace:: 2

John felt that he wrote this and that he signed it in
the presence of the Presence.  The address and not the
sermon was his valedictory.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE CUP TOO FULL`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXXIX


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE CUP TOO FULL

.. vspace:: 2

While the Monday morning papers played up the
"Address to the People", in the evening John noticed that
his name had slipped off the front page.  This was at once
a relief and a bitterness.  It told him that he was done
for; that, as a matter of news, he was only a corpse
waiting for the funeral pyre.  That pyre was a matter to
which Elder Burbeck was attending, assisted by a
committee of fellow zealots—male and female—who were
industriously conducting a house-to-house canvass of the
entire membership of All People's during the hours
between Sunday at one and Monday night at eight.
Despite the lofty mood of self-sacrifice into which the man
had worked himself, the knowledge of all this busy
bell-ringing and its sinister purpose operated irritatingly on
the skin of Hampstead.  It made his flesh creep with
annoyance that grew toward anger.

But in the midst of these creepings, a significant thing
happened.  The Reverend William Dudley Rohan, pastor
of the largest, the richest, and by material standards the
most influential protestant congregation in the city, came
in person to call on Hampstead, to shake him by the hand
and say: "Your address had an apostolic ring to it.  I
believe in you sincerely."

In John's mail that afternoon there came from Father
Ansley, an influential priest of the Roman Catholic
communion, a letter to similar effect.

Moreover, as the activity of Elder Burbeck developed,
John began to hear more and more from members of his
own congregation who either refused to believe the
charges against him, or, if not so ready to acquit, none
the less refused to desert him now.

All of these things seemed definitely to testify that a
wave of reaction was upon its way.  They almost gave the
man hope.  Yet by the end of an hour of calculation,
John saw that after all it was a small wave.  All
People's church had more than eleven hundred members.  He
had not heard from one fifth of them.  Those who had
communicated or come to press his hand were very
frequently the weak, obscure, and least influential.  They
were the "riff-raff", as Burbeck would have called them,
of the congregation.  The pastor did not disesteem their
support on this account.  Instead he valued it a little
more; yet gave himself no illusions as to its value in a
battle-line.

At the same time his friends urged him to organize
against the assaults of Elder Burbeck; to send out
bell-ringing committees upon his own account.  Yet he would
not do this.  He would not make himself an issue.  But
the minister's negatives were not so stout as they had been.
It was one thing to write in a frenzy at midnight how
bravely he would endure his fate.  It was another to wait
the creeping hours in passive fortitude until the blow
should fall.

By noon he confessed to himself that he was feeling
rather broken.  For a week he had eaten little, and that
little nervously, absently, and without enjoyment.  His
sleep had been restless and unrefreshing.  Strong,
vigorous as he was, reckless as were the draughts that could be
made upon his work-hardened constitution, a fear that it
would fail him now began to agitate the man.  He must
be strong—physically.  He must bear himself unyielding
as Atlas.  His shoulders, instead of sinking, must
stiffen as the still heavier load rolled upon them.  But his
mind also must be strong.

He was almost mad with thinking on his course, with
trying to reason out some Northwest Passage for his
conscience.  Every eventuality had been considered, every
resulting good or injury taken into account.  When he
did sleep, dreams had come to him—horrible, portending
dreams that lingered into wakefulness and filled the hours
with vague, tissue-weakening dread.  He knew the
meaning of this.  His brain was so wearied with thinking of
the perplexities which bristled round him that the very
processes of thought had begun to operate less surely.
Conclusions that should have stood out sharp and clear
became blurred.  Doubts and indecisions clamored round
him.  Things settled and settled right came trooping
back to demand realignment.  This alarmed him more
than anything else,—the fear that the course he had
chosen and which he knew to be right, might seem, in
some moment when his mind passed into a fog, the
wrong course; and he would falter not for lack of will but
because of the maiming of his judgment.

He longed for counsel, to talk intimately with some
one, but was afraid, afraid he might get the wrong
advice and follow it.  The loyalty of Rose, the judgment
of the Angel of the Chair, he trusted; but himself he
began to mistrust.  Mistrusting himself, he dared not talk
at all, lest he either exhibit signs of weakness that would
frighten Rose, or lest, in that weakness, he confess too
much to Mrs. Burbeck.

One fear like this and one alarm acted to produce
another until something like panic grew up in his soul.  A
small onyx clock was on the mantel.  The hands pointed
to one—and then to two—and to three.  At eight he
must go to the church and see himself accused by those
whom he loved, and for whom he had labored.

But at half-past three he saw clearly that his intended
course was wrong, that he should defend himself and
speak the truth: that his silence was working greater ill
than good.

The clock tinkled four with this decision still clear in
his mind.  But the tinkling sound appeared to ring
another bell deep inside him—a bell that boomed from far,
far away and made him think of some one's definition of
religion, "as a power within us not ourselves that makes
for godliness."  That power had spoken out.  It revived
the decision of half-past three.  His former course was
right.  He must not swerve.  With a gesture of pain
and terror he flung up his hands to his brow.  The
calamity had fallen.  His mind was passing under a fog.
Defiantly he tried auto-suggestion to school his will
against a possible reversal in the hour of trial, saying to
himself over and over again: "I will stand!  I will
stand!  I will stand!"  He quoted frequently the words
of Paul: "And having done all, to stand!"

At length he fell back limply in his chair.  A vast
irksomeness had taken possession of him.  He was
tired—tired of thinking of It—tired of waiting for It to come.
Why didn't the clock hurry?  The coming of Tayna to
the study alone brought a welcome to his eye.  Tayna!
So full of buoyant, blooming youth; so quickly moved to
tears of sympathy; so lightly kindled to smiling, happy
laughter!  Tayna, her melting eyes, her red cheeks, her
one intermittent dimple, who flung her long arms about
her uncle and held him close and silently as if he had been
a lover!

But it was only a moment until Tayna too irked the
tortured man.  The touch of her cheek upon his cheek and
the aggressive mingling of her thick braids with his own
disheveled locks, once brushed so neat and high, now so
apt to loop disconsolate upon his temples, reminded him
of something quite unbearable but quite unbanishable,—a
vision, and a vision which must be entertained alone.

"Stay here and keep shop," her uncle said with sudden
brusqueness, forcing her down into his own chair at
the desk.  "I can see no one; talk to no one; hear from
no one.  I am going up-stairs!"

"Up-stairs" meant the long, half-attic room in which
Hampstead slept.  It ran the length of the cottage.
There were windows in the gables, and dormers were
chopped in upon the side toward the Bay.  At one end,
pushed back toward the eaves, was a bed, fenced from the
eye by a folding screen.  Far at the other end was a table,
a student-lamp and a few books.  Between lay a long,
rug-strewn space which Hampstead called his "tramping
ground."

Here, when he wished to retire most completely from
the public reach, he made his lair.  Upon that rug-strewn
space he had tramped out many of the problems of his
ministry.  In the past week he had walked miles between
one gable window and the other, and stopped as many
times to gaze out through the dormer windows over
the crested tops of palms to the dancing waters on the Bay.

But now he had retreated there, not to be alone, but
because he felt a sudden longing for companionship; and for
a certain and particular companionship.  That touch of
Tayna's soft cheek upon his own had brought with
stinging poignancy the recollection of what the presence of
Bessie would be now,—Bessie as she once had been, dear,
loyal, sympathetic, wise; as she had begun to be again
before that last trip east; as she would have been when she
returned and found him still strong and faithful.

Yet now she would never come.  She was in Chicago
to-day—no, upon the Atlantic.  Last week was her final
week.  She had been getting her degree there while his
unfrocking was beginning here.  She was attaining her
high hope as he was losing his.  He had meant to
telegraph her his congratulations, but he had forgotten it.
That was just as well now.  All this hissing of the
poisoned tongues must have poured into her ears.  The old
doubts would be revived.  She would feel herself shamed,
humiliated, all but compromised by these disclosures, and
she would never see—never communicate with him
again.  No letter had come in that last week, no telegram
from the ship's side.  That proved it clearly.  She was
lost to him.

Yet now his church—his liberty—his reputation—nothing
else that he had lost or might lose seemed worth
while.  He wanted only her, cared only about her.  His
duty had melted into mist.  He could not see its
outlines.  But there was a face in the mist, her face; and a
form, her form.  And he would never see her in any
other way but this way—a vision to haunt and mock
and torture him.

Thinking these thoughts over and over again, the man
walked steadily from gable's end to gable's end and back
again, until his legs lost all sense of feeling; but still he
walked, and occasionally his fists were clenched and beat
upon his chest, while an expression of agony looked out of
his eyes.

The Reverend John Hampstead, pastor of All People's,
a man of some victories and of some defeats, a man of
some strength and of some weaknesses, was fighting his
most important and his hardest battle, and he knew it.
And he was no longer fit.  The preliminary days of
battling in the lower spurs and ranges had exhausted him.
The summit was still above.  The higher he toiled, the
weaker he grew; the greater need for strength, the less he
had to offer.  He felt his purpose sag, his courage
breaking.  He had faced too much, and faced it too long and
too solitarily.  Others had sympathetically tried to get
into his heart, and he had shut them out.  It was a place
which only one could enter, and she was not there.  Now
he knew that she would never be there.

That was the final mockery of his fate.  At the time
when he loved her most, when he needed her most, when
before God, he deserved her most, she was most irretrievably
lost.  The pang of this, the awful inevitableness of
it, broke him like a reed.  From time to time he had
sighed heavily, but now a dry sob shivered in his broad
breast.  His shoulders shook, and then his legs crumpled
under him; he was on his knees and sinking lower and
lower, like a man beaten down, blow upon blow, until at
length he lies prostrate before his foes.

"Not that, O God," he sobbed; "not that!  I cannot—I
cannot lose her.  Leave me, oh, leave me this one
thing!  I ask nothing more!  Nothing more."

There was silence for an interval and then the pleadings
began more earnestly, more piteously.  "O God, give
me her!  Give me love!  Give me completeness!  Give
me that without which no man is strong, the undoubting
love of an unwavering woman!  Give me that and I can
face anything—endure anything!"

For a moment his hands, virile and outstretched,
grasped convulsively the far edges of the Indian rug on
which he had fallen, and thrust themselves through the
stoutly woven fabric as if it had been wet paper.  Scalding
drops had begun to flow from his eyes like rivers.  He
seized the fabric of the rug in his teeth and bit it.  He
forced the thick folds against his eyes as if to dam the
flooding tears.

"It is too much!  It is too much!" he moaned.  "O
God," he reproached, "you have left me; you have left me
alone and far.  I have stood, but I am tottering."  He
dropped into a sort of vernacular in his blind pleadings.
"I can go, I can go the route, but I cannot go it alone.
Give me her, O God, give me her!"

His voice, half-delirious, died out in a final withering
sob, as if the last atom of his strength had gone with this
passionate, hoarse, uttermost plea of his soul.  His great
fingers stretching out again to the limit of his arm,
knotted and unknotted themselves and then grew still.
The shoulders, too, were motionless.  The face was
turned on one side; the profile of the ridged forehead and
the thrust of nose and chin, so strongly carved, appeared
against the grotesque pattern of the rug as features
delicately chiseled.  The eyes were open, tearless now and
staring.  They had expression, but it was the expression
of the beaten man.  The mouth was parted, and the firm
lines were gone from it.  It was the old, loose, flabby
mouth that had once marked the weak spot in the
character of the man.  Again the man was weak.  He lay so
still that life itself seemed to have gone.  The wandering
afternoon breeze that stole in through one gable window
and went romping out at the other played with the mass
of hair upon his brow as indifferently as if it had been a
tuft of grass.

Even the man's enemies must have pitied him had they
seen him now.  Searle, standing over him, would have
felt a twinge of conscience.  Elder Burbeck, before that
spectacle, would at least have paused long enough to
murmur, sincerely, with upturned eyes and a grave shake of
the head, "God be merciful to him, a sinner."  But
neither Searle nor Burbeck, nor any other eye was there
to see how he lay nor how long.  Perhaps not even Tayna,
crouching on the stairs outside, hearing his sobbings
and venting tear for tear, could have computed the time.

Surely the man knew nothing himself except that he
fell asleep and dreamed, this time not horribly, but
felicitously,—a dream of Bessie; that she was coming to him;
that she was there.  It was such a beautiful dream.  It
took all the strain out of the muscles of his face.
It tickled the flabby mouth into smiles of happiness.  It
triumphed over everything else.  It made every experience
through which he had gone seem a high and beautiful
experience because it brought him Bessie.

A knock at the door awoke him.  It was such a cruel
awakening.  Bessie was not there.  His cheeks were hard
and stiff where tears had dried upon them.  His shoulders
and neck ached from the position in which he had slept.
The rug was rumpled.  The room was bleak and desolate.
The breeze was chill and gloomy.  The situation in which
he stood came to him again with appealing acuteness and
stung his memory like scourging whips.  He rose with
pain in his mind, pain in his heart, pain in every tissue
of his body.

But there are worse things than pain.  John was
appalled to realize that he had risen a quaking coward.

The knock had sounded again.  It was a soft knock, but
it echoed loud, like the crack of doom.  It stood for the
outside world; it stood for the accusing finger; it stood for
the felon's brand; it stood for the great monster, Ruin,
which threatened him, which terrorized him, which he had
faced courageously, but which at last through the
workings of his own morbid imagination and the tentacles of a
great love, torn blood-dripping from his heart, had
over-awed him.  Before this monster he now shrank, cowering
as only six days before he had seen Rollie Burbeck cower.
He said to himself that he, John Hampstead, was the
greater coward.  Rollie had faltered in the face of his
crime.  He, the priest of God, was faltering in the face
of his duty.  He retreated from his own presence aghast
at the thought.  He looked about him wildly, and saw his
features in the glass.  It was a coward's face.  He felt
something stagger in his breast.  It was his coward's
heart!

Again the knock sounded.  Not because he had grown
brave again, but because he had grown too weak to
resist even a knock upon a door, he gave the rug a kick
that half straightened it, and in the tone of one who,
despairing help, bids his torturers advance, he called:
"Come in."

But instead of waiting to see who entered, he turned
his back and walked off down the room with slow,
disconsolate stride, head hanging, shoulders drooping, knees
trembling, feet dragging, utterly unmindful to preserve
longer the pose of strength even before the dear
ones whom he wished above all to see him brave and
strong.

It was the silence of the one who entered that made him
turn slowly, staring, his form lifting itself to its full
height, and a hand rising to sweep the hanging hair from
his eyes as he gazed for a moment in unbelieving
bewilderment and then hoarsely shouted:

"Bessie!  Bessie!  Is it you?"

Before the broken, paralyzed man could leap to meet
her, the young woman had flung herself into his arms,
with a cry almost of pain: "John!  Oh, John!"

He clasped her hysterically, half laughing and half
sobbing: "Thank God!  Thank God!" and then, murmuring
incoherently, "It is the answer of the Father!  It
is the answer of the Father!"

Bessie, the first surge of her emotions over, stood
looking up into John's storm-stressed face, with glistening,
happy eyes.

It was evident that all the vapor of her doubt and
misunderstanding had been burned away.  She was again the
old Bessie.  She had started to him by an instinct of
loyalty, spurred by a love that had refused to die, yet,
womanlike, was still doubting.  But the moving picture
which the papers of succeeding days had reeled before her
eyes as her train sped westward; the solemn face of Rose,
the teary eyes of Tayna, whom she had found sitting at
the foot of the stairs outside; and now this glimpse of that
stooping, passionately despairing, hopelessly broken figure
were enough to banish doubt forever.  They testified that
John Hampstead, in the soul of him, was true—to love
as to duty—that he had burned out the scar of his first
disloyalty to her in the fires of intense suffering.

Her radiant beauty, the soft, trusting blue of her eyes,
the wonderful witchery of smiling lips and dimpling
cheeks, the proud, happy, worshipful look upon her face,
all proclaimed the bounding joy with which she hurled
herself again into his life.

John perceived this in ecstasy.  Bessie was not lost to
him, but won to him by what had happened.  The mere
perception threw him into a frenzy of joy, and yet it was a
reversal of probabilities so sudden and so overwhelming
that he dared not accept it unattested.

"But, Bessie," he protested.  "But, Bessie?"

"But nothing!" she answered stoutly, flinging her
arms once more about his neck and drawing his lips down
to hers, while she passionately stamped them again and
again with the seal of her love and faith.

With the submission of a child, and under the stimulus
of such convincing, such deliciously thrilling demonstration
as this, the strong-weak man surrendered unconditionally
to an acceptance of facts at once so undeniable and
so excitingly happy.

But the articles of surrender could not be signed in
words.  He drew her close to him and held her there
long and silently, feeling his heart beat violently against
her own, and at the same time his tissues filling with new
and glowing strength.  A sigh from Bessie, softly
audible and blissfully long-drawn, broke the silence and the
pose.

John held her at arm's length—his eyes a-dance with
the emotional riot of an experience so foreign to the
ascetic life which his character had forced upon him that
he felt the wish for anchorage at which to moor himself
and his joys.  Such a mooring was offered by the long,
wide window seat before the dormer which looked over
palms and acacias to the Bay.

Taking Bessie by the hand, he led her to this tiny haven.

"Oh, John," she murmured, with a flutter in her voice
and a sudden gust of happy tears, as she cuddled down
against his shoulder, "it has been such a long, cruel wait,
hasn't it?  Such a hilly, roundabout way that we have
traveled to know and get to each other at last."

"But now it's over," he breathed contentedly, swaying
her body gently with his own.

As if a tide had taken them, they drifted out; two
argonauts upon the sea of love with the window seat for
a bark, and soon were cruising far out of sight of land.
There was little talk.  Words were so unnecessary.  To
feel the presence of each other was quite enough.  For
the time being, degrees and careers and private cars,
courts and newspapers, actresses and diamonds, elders
and church trials, were sunk entirely below the horizon.

Bessie was first to come back from this nebulous state
of bliss to the more tangible realities of the situation.
With her lover so close and so secure, she experienced
a stirring of possessive instincts accompanied by an
impulse to caretaking.  John was hers now, and he
required attention.  With a soft hand she smoothed the
yellow locks backward from his brow.  With pliant
fingers she sought to iron out the lines of care from his
face, and with lingering, affectionate lips to kiss the
tear-stiffness from his eyelids.

To the man of loneliness, these attentions were
exquisitely delightful.  They soothed and fortified him.
They calmed his nerves and ministered to clarity of
thought.  This was well, for there were things that
needed to be said as well as those which needed to be done.

Dusk was falling.  John arose, lighted a pendant bulb
in the center of the long attic, and sat down again, taking
Bessie's hand in his while he told her the story of the
diamonds as he had told it in court—told her so much
and no more; then stopped.  The cessation was abrupt,
decisive, but also interrogatory.  John could not tell
Bessie more than he could tell any one else and be true to his
vow.  Would she appreciate this and acquiesce?  Or
would she resent it?

Bessie understood the question in the silence.  Her
answer was to snuggle closer and after allowing time for
this action to interpret itself, to say:

"That must be the bravest, hardest thing you have
done, John dear; to stop just there, when telling me."

"It was," he answered softly.

"It makes me trust you further than ever," she assured
him, passing her hand under his chin and pulling
his cheek to hers, again with that instinct of possession.
"You must not be less true but more, because of me," she
breathed softly.

"But there is one thing I can tell you," he continued,
"which no one else knows nor can know now."

And then he told her of Marien's visit.  The girl
listened at first with cheeks flaming hot and her blue eyes
fixed and sternly hard.  Yet as the narrative proceeded,
she grew thoughtful and then considerate, breaking in
finally with:

"But she did it so wantonly, so irresponsibly; what
reparation does she propose?"

"To immediately make a public confession that her
charge against me was utterly false," replied John,
strangely moved to speak defensively for Marien.

"She will do that?" exclaimed Bessie, her face alive
with excitement and intense relief.

"She would have done it," answered John, "but I
forbade her."

"Forbade her?  Oh, John!"  The soft eyes looked
amazement and reproach.

"Yes," acknowledged John in a steady voice.  "You
see, her word would become instantly worthless.  To be
believed, her confession would have to be supported by
the naming of the real thief."

"And is the saving of a thief worth more to you than
your church—your good name—your—your everything?"

"In my conception, yes," John answered seriously.
"That is what I have a church, a name, everything, for;
to use it all in saving people—or in helping them, if the
other is too strong a word."

As her lover spoke in this lofty, detached, meditative
tone, Bessie held him off and studied him.  This was the
new John Hampstead speaking; the man she did not
know; the man who, up to the hour when cruel scandal
smirched it, had stirred this community with the example
of his life.  Before this new man she felt her very soul
bowing.  She had loved the old John.  She adored the new.

"Oh, John!  How brave!  How strong!  How right
you are!" she exclaimed, with a note of adoration in her
voice.

A pang of self-reproach shot through the big man.

"Not so brave—not so strong as I must—as I ought
to be," he hastened to explain.  "In fact, I have been
doubting even if I were right, after all."

Bessie's startled look brought out of him like a
confession the story of the last hours before her coming;
the full meaning of the state in which she found him;
how the burden of it all had overtoppled him; how she
had come to find him not brave and certain, but doubting.

"But now," she affirmed buoyantly, "you are strong,
you are certain again."

The very radiance, the fresh youthful happiness on the
face of Bessie, checked the assent to this which was on
his lips.  He suddenly thought of what this action would
mean to her, this beautiful, loving, aspiring young woman.
She was his wife now in spirit.  By some miracle of God
their lives had in a moment been fused unalterably.  He
might bear a stigma for himself, but had he a right to
assume a stigma for her?

"Why, John," she murmured, wonder mingling with
mild reproach, as she saw him hesitate.

"Listen, my girl," began her lover, with infinite
sympathy and tenderness in his manner, and gravely he
re-sketched the elements in the situation as they would apply
to her.

Bessie did listen, and as gravely as John spoke to
her,—listened until her eyes were first perplexed and then
downcast.  Sitting thus, seeing nothing, she saw everything;
all that it might mean to her to become the partner of
this public shame.  She thought of her college friends,
of her mother with her social aspirations, of her strong
and high-standing father and the circle of his business
and personal associates; of the part she hoped herself to
play in the new political life that was coming to her sex.
She saw it and for a moment was afraid, cowering
before it as her lover had cowered.  John, in an agony of
suspense, watched this conflict staging itself graphically
upon the features he loved so deeply, gleaning as he waited
another two-edged truth, and that truth this: *The love of
a woman may make a man surpassingly stronger; it may
also make him immeasurably weaker*.  It depends on the
woman.  He was weaker now.  He had accepted her,
demanded her of God, and God had given her.  She
was part of him now.  It must no longer be his judgment
but their judgment which ruled.  She was forming their
judgment now.  He leaned forward apprehensively, like
a criminal awaiting his fate.  He had surrendered his
independence of action.  Had he gained or lost thereby?

Bessie stood up suddenly.  Her face was still white,
but her square little chin with its softly rounded corners
was firmly set.

"Your decision," she affirmed stoutly, "was the right
decision.  Your course has been the right course.  You
must not waver now.  I command—I compel you to
go straight forward.  And I will stand with you—go out
with you.  From this moment on, your duty is my duty;
your lot shall be my lot."

A smile of heavenly happiness broke like a sunset on the
face of Hampstead.

"Thank God!" he murmured reverently; "thank God!"

And then as a surging Niagara of new strength rushed
over him, he clasped her tightly, exclaiming enthusiastically:
"I feel strong enough now, strong enough for everything!"

Standing thus, smiling blissfully into each other's faces,
the lovers became again the two argonauts upon a shoreless,
timeless sea.  As they came back, Bessie, a look
half mischievous and half bashful upon her face, pleaded
softly:

"John!  Ask me something, please?"

"Ask you something," her lover murmured, with a
look of dutiful affection, "why, there is nothing more
that I can ask."  He sighed contentedly.

"But put it into words.  Something to which I can
answer Yes," she said, a happy blush stealing across her
cheeks.

The big man gazed at her with a puzzled expression.

"So—so that our engagement can be announced in
the papers to-morrow morning."

John asked her, grimacing delight in his sudden
comprehension, and took her answer in a kiss.  But
immediately after he became serious.

"To-morrow morning?" he queried apprehensively;
and then answered the interrogation himself.  "No, not
to-morrow, Bessie.  Not soon.  Later.  When the issues
are decided.  When we know the worst that is to fall.
Not now.  You must protect yourself as well as your
father and your mother from such notoriety!"

But Bessie's own uncompromising spirit flashed.

"No," she exclaimed with a stamp of her foot that
was characteristic.  "Now!  This is when you need me!
Now you are my affianced husband; I want the world to
know that he is not as friendless as he seems.  That we
who know him best believe him most.  Do you know, big
man, that my parents cancelled their European trip and
have been rushing across the continent with me in a special
train faster than anybody ever crossed before, just to
come and stand by you.  Mother had a headache and is
resting at the St. Albans, but father and I—why, father
is down-stairs in the study waiting.  He must have been
there hours and hours.  Father!"

Bessie had rushed across the room and flung open the
door leading downward.

"Father," she cried.  "Father!  We are coming."

"What's the hurry?" boomed back a big, ironic voice
that proceeded from the round moon of an amiable face
in the open door of the study near the foot of the stairs.
The face, of course, belonged to Mr. Mitchell, and he
enlarged upon his first gentle sarcasm by adding: "I
bought a thousand freight cars the other day in less time
than it has taken you people to come to terms."

Nevertheless, he greeted his former employee with cordial
and sincere affection, while Bessie, radiantly happy
but a little confused, asked:

"What must have you been thinking all this time?"

"Mostly I was thinking what a superfluous person a
father comes to be all at once," laughed Mr. Mitchell.
"Isn't there anything I can do at all?" he asked, with
mock seriousness.

"Yes," rejoined Bessie in the same spirit.  "Telephone
the papers to announce the engagement of your
daughter to the Reverend John Hampstead, pastor of All
People's Church."

"Oh, I did that after the first hour and a half,"
exclaimed the railroad man, laughing heartily.

But the situation was too grave, the feelings of all were
too tense, to sustain this spirit of badinage for long.
Bessie and Tayna fell upon each other with instant liking.
Even Dick and Rose seemed able to forget the crisis which
overhung them in the sudden advent of this beautiful
young woman who had come into their ken again so
suddenly and so mysteriously, and seemed to represent in
herself and her father such a sudden and vast access of
prestige and power to the cause of their uncle and
brother.

John and his old employer sat down in the study for a
quiet talk in which the minister related what he had told
Bessie, the circumstances in which he stood, and finally
and especially, his new compunction and Bessie's firm
decision.

"She was right!"  The heavy jaws of Mitchell snapped
decisively.  "The whole thing is a community brain
storm.  It will pass."

"The criminal charge," began John, feeling relieved and
yet looking serious.

"Nothing to that at all," answered the practical
Mitchell, with quick decision.  "Ridiculous!  You're morbid
from brooding over all this.  From the minute this
woman comes to you with her admission, you must have
just ordinary horse sense enough to see that between
us all we can find a way to stop that prosecution without
making it necessary to expose anybody at all."

Mitchell, observing Hampstead closely, saw that he was
rather careless of this; that in fact he only thought of
it when he thought of Bessie; that the one thing gnawing
into him now was the action of the church.  That was
something outside of Mitchell's experience.  Whether a
church more or less unfrocked his future son-in-law was
small concern.  He was a man who thought in thousands
of miles and millions of people.

"Come, Bessie," he called, "we must be getting back
to the hotel."

"You will stay for dinner, Mr. Mitchell?" suggested John.

"No, I'll be getting back to mother.  I just came to
tell you that I am with you.  My attorneys will be your
attorneys.  My friends and my influence will be your
influence.  Some of these newspapers may bark out of
the other corner of their mouths after they've heard from
me.  Come on, Bessie!"

"But," demurred Bessie, "I'm not coming.  I am
going to the church to-night to sit beside John."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE ELDER IN THE CHAIR`:

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   CHAPTER XL


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE ELDER IN THE CHAIR

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The auditorium of All People's was cunningly
contrived to bring a very large number of people close to
each other and to the minister.  Roughly semicircular,
with bowled main floor and rimmed around by a gallery
that edged nearer and nearer at the sides, it was possible
to seat fifteen hundred persons where a man in the pulpit
could look each individual in the eye, and except where
the screen of the gallery broke in, each auditor could see
every other auditor.

The special meeting for an object unannounced but
clearly understood was, of course, an assemblage of the
church itself; yet so great was the general interest in
what was to transpire, and so willing were the moving
spirits to play out their act in public, that no one was
turned away.  By an instruction from Elder Burbeck,
the ushers merely sifted people, sending the members to
the main floor, and the non-members up-stairs into the
gallery.

Hampstead entered the church at precisely eight o'clock.

The auditorium was filled with the buzz of many voices,
but as the pastor of All People's advanced down the aisle,
this hum gradually ceased, and every eye was turned upon
the man, who tall and grave, with features slightly wasted,
nevertheless wore a look serenely confident and even
happy.

This expression in itself was instant occasion for
wonder and surprise.  Was this man really unbreakable?
Knowing nothing of what had happened in the day to
encourage its pastor and make him strong, his congregation
was much better prepared to see him as Bessie had found
him three hours before than as he now appeared.

There were glances also for the faithful Rose, pale and
worn, but bearing herself with true Hampstead dignity;
for aggressive, wizened Dick, and for Tayna, emotional
and ready, as usual, for tears or laughter.  But there
were more than glances for the lady who walked at the
pastor's side proudly, with a possessive air as if she owned
him and were glad to own him.  There was searching
scrutiny and attempt at appraisal.

All People's had never seen this woman before.  She
looked young; yet bore herself like a person of consequence.
She was beautiful, but the dignity of her beauty
was detracted from by dimples.  Yet with the dimples
went a masterful self-possession and a chin that was a
trifle square and to-night just a trifle thrust out, while her
head was a little tilted back and her blue eyes were a little
aglint with shafts of a light something like defiance, as if
to say: "Hurt him at your peril.  Take him from me if
you can!"

Who was she?  No one knew.  Everybody asked; but
no one answered.

After standing in the aisle before his family pew, while
Rose, Dick, Tayna, and Bessie filed in before him, the
minister stood for a moment surveying the scene.  As he
looked, the serenity upon his features gave way to pain.
The situation saddened him inexpressibly.  He was like
a refugee who returns to find his home ruined by the
ravages of war.  How peaceful and how helpful had
been the atmosphere of All People's!  How happily he
had seen its walls rise and its pews fill!  How many good
impulses had been started there!  What a pity that the
note of inquisition and of persecution should now be
sounded.  How sad that strife should come!  And over
him of all beings!  He had often looked upon a congregation
torn by dissensions concerning its pastor, and he had
said that no church should ever undo itself over him.
When his time came to go, he would go quietly.

Yet now he was not going quietly, but that was
because he felt it was not himself that was involved;
instead it was a principle.  Either this congregation
existed to mediate love, helpfulness, and a charitable spirit
to the world, or it had no reason for existence at all.  It
had better be disrupted, this gallery fall, this altar
crumble, these walls collapse, these people be scattered to the
winds, than All People's become a society for the
advancement of pharisaism.

He noted that the gallery was packed, but on the main
floor empty spaces stared at him from the central tier of
pews.  Half of All People's members must have remained
away.  John realized with new emotion what this meant:
that there were men and women in his congregation who
could not see their pastor arraigned like this, who could
not bear to witness the rising waves of bitterness, the
charges and the counter-charges, the incriminations, the
malicious spirit of partisanship which invariably breaks
out in times like these.  But it meant too that these same
soft-hearted folk were also soft in the spine; unwilling
to take a stand with him; unwilling to be recorded pro
or con upon a great issue like this; people for whom he
had done a service so great that they could not now turn
down their thumbs against him, yet lacking in the
strength of character either to sit as his judges or to cast
a vote in his favor.

From this thought of jelly-fish the minister turned,
almost with relief to where, stretching widely behind the
Burbeck pew, was a mass of close-packed faces, with
super-heated resolution depicted upon their features.
The bearing of these partisans in itself reflected how they
had been solicited, inflamed, and organized.  They were
there like an army to follow their leader.

Good people, too, some of them!  Doctor Hampstead's
very best people.  Yet to recognize them and their mood
gave him a sense of personal power.  He believed that he
could walk over there and talk to these people ten minutes,
and they would break like sheep from the leadership of
Brother Burbeck.  They would come pressing around
him with tears and expressions of confidence.  But it was
not in John's purpose to do that.  He was on trial.  If
on the record of his life among them, these people could
condemn and oust him, his work had been a failure.  It
was as well to know it.

One thing more the minister took into account.  The
number of persons who, half in an attitude of aggressive
loyalty and half in tearful sympathy had gathered in the
tiers behind his own pew was less by half than that
massed behind the Burbeck leadership.  The issue was
not in doubt.  It had been decided already,—in the
newspapers, in the court room, and in all this busy bell-ringing
of the last two days.

And now, having seen as much and reflected as much
as has been recorded, Hampstead sat down and slipped a
furtive lover's hand along the seat until it found the hand
of Bessie, and took it into his with a gentle pressure that
was affectionately reciprocated.

But if to the congregation the entry of the minister and
the woman of mystery by his side was sensation number
one in this evening of sensations, the entry of the Angel
of the Chair was sensation number two.  Mrs. Burbeck,
propelled as usual by Mori, the Japanese, was just
appearing at the side door; and this time there was no trundling
to the center between two factions.  Instead, with
Japanese intentness of purpose, and as if he had his
instructions beforehand, Mori drove the chair straight across the
neutral ground to the end of the Hampstead pew.

The church, seeing this act, grasped instantly its solemn
meaning.  The house of Burbeck was divided against
itself.  Mrs. Burbeck had often disapproved of her
husband's course in church leadership, but she had never taken
sides against him.  To-night she did so.  The issue was
too great, too fundamental, to do otherwise.  That it hurt
her painfully was evident.  Her face had lost its smile.
The pallor of her cheeks was more wax-like than ever,
and there was a droop in the corners of her mouth that no
physical suffering had effected.  But the lips were tightly
compressed, and the valiant spirit of the woman looked
resolutely out of her eyes.  Those near and watching
the face of her husband saw that this look affected him;
saw him start as if he had hardly expected such action,
hardly realized what it would be to find her thus opposing
him.  They even noted that a fleeting expression of doubt,
of sudden loss of faith in his own course, came into the
eyes of the man.

Nevertheless, although with a sigh at the burdens his
faithfulness to the Lord so often compelled him to bear,
Elder Burbeck set his spirit sternly upon its task.  He was
the Nemesis of God.  He would not shrink though the
flame scorched him, the innocent, while it consumed the
guilty.

Yet from the moment that this glance had passed between
the husband and the wife, it appeared that a gloom
of tragedy settled upon the gathering.  Again the
congregation sank of itself to awed silence, so intense that a
cough, the clearing of a throat, the dropping of a
hymn-book into a rack, echoed hollowly.  Slight movements
took on augmented significance.  Thoughts boomed out
like words, and looks had all the force of blows.

The polity of All People's was ultra-congregational.
The proceedings had the form of order, but were primitive
and practical; yet every step, voice, motion, detail,
took on an exaggerated sense of the ominous, as if a man's
body were on trial instead of merely his soul.

Nor was Elder Burbeck at all approving of Hampstead's
manner to-night.  The minister had shown again
his utter incapacity to appreciate a situation.  He was too
cool, too unmoved.  He had taken a full minute to stand
there posing in pretended serenity while he looked the
congregation over.  From Burbeck's point of view, this
manoeuvre was dangerous tactics.  There was always some
indefinable power in that deep-searching look of
Hampstead's.  If the man should stand up there and look at
these people for ten minutes longer, he might have them
all over there palavering about him.  He was looking in
the gallery now.  Well, let him look there as long as he
liked.  The gallery couldn't vote.  Burbeck's own eye
wandered into the gallery.  On the other side from him,
just where the horseshoe curve began to draw in toward
the choir loft, sat his son, Rollie.

"Rollie should not be up there," the Elder instructed,
turning to an usher.  "Go and tell him to come down."

"He says he is with a lady who is not a member,"
reported the usher on returning.

"Huh?" ejaculated Burbeck, turning a surprised gaze
upon the figure of a woman heavily veiled who sat beside
his son.

That woman!  What sacrilege had impelled his son to
bring her here?  Had she not wrought ruin enough
already?  Must she gloat over the shame she had brought
upon this congregation and upon the church of the living
God?  And must his son be the means of her coming?
What was that boy thinking of, anyway?

And yet, since Rollie had grown into so fine a figure
of a man, his father had come to regard his son and what
he chose to do with an indulgence he granted to no one
else.  He wished the boy would come to church more; he
wished he would give more attention to those things to
which his father had devoted his life; and yet he could
make allowance for him.  The young man's environment,
his social gifts, his business prospects, all inclined him to
another set of associations.  Besides, the boy's own
character seemed so fine and strong, the sentiments of his
heart so truly noble, that the father's iron judgment
softened even in the matter of an indiscretion so flagrant
as this.  He reflected too that for business reasons it was
doubtless just as well if Rollie were brought into no
prominence in this unpleasant affair.  In fact, Elder Burbeck
would have been as well satisfied if his son had stayed
away altogether.

"It is time to call the meeting to order," suggested
Elder Brooks, a pale, nervous man whose eyes were
continually consulting the typewritten sheet which he held in
his hand.

"Yes, Brother Brooks," agreed Elder Burbeck, advancing
to the table below and in front of the pulpit.  He was
almost directly in front of where Doctor Hampstead sat in
his pew.

John noticed that the Elder looked worried and
over-anxious.  His pouchy cheeks sagged; there were huge
wattles of red skin beneath his chin, and his whole
countenance had a more than usually apoplectic look.

"Brother Anderson will lead in prayer," announced the
Elder in unctuous tones.  "Let us stand, please!"

The congregation stood.  But Brother Anderson's
leadership in prayer could not be deemed very successful.
He led as if he himself were lost.  His prayer appeared
to partake of the nature of an apology to God for what
the petitioner hoped was about to be done.

During the length of these whining orisons, the
congregation grew impatient.  The gallery in spots sat down.
The effect of the prayer was in total no more than a
dismal thickening of the gloom of tragedy that hung
lower and lower over the meeting.  Yet once the prayer
was ended, Elder Burbeck baldly declared the object of
the meeting.

His manner was strained, his voice was harsh and
halting, but he began stubbornly and plodded forward
doggedly, gradually laboring himself into the hectic fervor of
his assumed position as the instrument of God to purge All
People's of its pastor.

Yet it was in keeping with the tenseness of the situation
that as the emotions of the vehement apostle of the *status
quo* reached their height, his words became rather less
florid, and he concluded in sentences of sycophantic calm
and tones of solicitous consideration for the feelings of
the piece of riff-raff he was about to brush aside with a
sweep of his fiery fan.

"There is before us," he assured his audience finally,
"no question of the pastor's guilt or innocence of the
charges made.  The question is one of expediency; as to
what is best to do for the good name and the future
usefulness of All People's.  The Board of Elders, after
serious and prayerful consideration," Brother Burbeck's
voice whined a little as he said this, "has felt that it was
best for the pastor and best for the interest of the church
to ask him to resign quietly and immediately.  That
request has been emphatically declined.  It has become our
duty, painful as it is," the Elder sighed and twitched
his red neck regretfully in his white collar, "to present
to the congregation a resolution covering the situation.
That resolution the clerk of the church will now read."

But instead of looking at the clerk, the chairman looked
at Elder Brooks.

Those typewritten lines, the mere holding of which had
given Elder Brooks that sense of importance which it was
necessary for him to feel in order to be able to act
decisively in a matter like this which went gravely against
some of the instincts of his soft nature, were, by him now,
with a final and supreme sense of this importance, passed
to the clerk of the church, a fat, ageless, colorless looking
man who read stolidly that:

.. vspace:: 2

Whereas, the pastor of this congregation, John
Hampstead, has been held to answer to the Superior
Court of this County upon a charge of burglary and has
been otherwise involved in public scandal in such manner
that he appears either unable or unwilling to establish his
innocence; and

Whereas, it is the judgment of this Board that such a
situation is one highly detrimental to the causes for which
this church exists, and one calculated to bring reproach
upon the church and the sacred cause of Christ;

Therefore, be it resolved that the pastoral relation
existing between All People's Church and the said John
Hampstead be, and now is, immediately dissolved.

.. vspace:: 2

"This, brethren," announced Elder Burbeck, with an
air of pain that was no doubt real, and a fresh summoning
of divine resolution to his aid, "is the recommendation of
your official Board.  What is your pleasure concerning it?"

"I move its adoption," quavered Elder Brooks.

"I second the motion," Brother Anderson suggested faintly.

"Are you ready for the question?" hinted the ruling Elder.

But a man stood up somewhere over behind Hampstead.
"I should like to ask, Brother Burbeck," he
inquired, "if that was the unanimous resolution of the
Board."

"It was not unanimous," replied the Elder, slightly
nettled, "as you know, Brother Hinton.  It is a majority
resolution.  The question is now upon its adoption."

Elder Burbeck swept a suggestive eye over his carefully
organized majority, and this time his hint was taken.
Calls of "question" arose.

But Hinton remained uncompromisingly upon his feet.
He was a tall man and pale, with a high, bone-like brow,
a long spiked chin, and gray moustaches that drooped
placidly over a balanced mouth.

"I understand that the chair will not attempt to railroad
this resolution," he ventured with mild sarcasm.

Elder Burbeck's habitual flush heightened as, after a
premonitory rumble in his throat and an enormous
effort at self-control, he replied emphatically: "Brother
Hinton, the resolution will not be railroaded;" and then
added warningly: "To avoid stirring up strife, however,
I hope we may vote upon it with as little discussion
as possible."

"Yes," admitted Brother Hinton dryly, but still standing
his ground.  "I think it is perfectly understood that
debate where its outcome is pre-determined, is useless.
Yet without having consulted the pastor of this church as
to my course, I voice the sentiment of many around me in
urging him to stand up here as its pastor, as he has a right
to do, and as the congregation has a right to ask him to do,
and tell us what he thinks should be our course in the
premises."

Brother Hinton's was a well balanced mind, and it
seemed for a moment that his own manner might inject
some coolness into the situation.  Indeed, the good Elder
Burbeck trembled lest it might, for the fires of purification
being up, he wished them to burn, undampened.

Certainly for John Hampstead to stand up there and
tell that congregation what to do was the last thing the
Elder wanted.  Besides, he resented some of Brother
Hinton's imputations as disagreeable.

The chairman answered curtly:

"If the pastor did not respect the eldership sufficiently
to advise it, I think it can hardly be expected of him to
advise the congregation; or that the congregation would take
his advice if he gave it."

The face of Hampstead whitened, and his muscles
strained in his body.

This was really a mean speech of Elder Burbeck, yet
he did not wish to be mean.  He meant only to be
just—to All People's church.  His zeal on the one hand, his
prejudgment upon the other, had led him to consider no
procedure as proper that did not look immediately to the
hurling down of the usurper.

"The pastor is not at issue," he concluded with heat
almost unholy.  "It is the good name of All People's that is
at issue."

The face of Hampstead whitened a little more.

"But," persisted Brother Hinton; "let our pastor make
his answer to the charges, that we may determine for
ourselves what is the issue."

Enough had been said.  John Hampstead stood tall and
statue-like in the aisle, with the manner of a man about to
speak the very soul out of himself, if need be.  Before
this manner, Elder Burbeck recoiled a little, as he knew he
must, if this man asserted himself.  For one despairing
moment the good man felt that the cause of righteousness
was lost.  But something in the manner of the minister
himself reassured the Elder.  The man's soul went back
a little from his eyes,—receded, as it were, like a tide,
while he turned toward the congregation and in kindly,
patient tones began:

"I cannot speak to charges, Brother Hinton!  None
are presented against me.  It was for this reason that I
refused to appear before the eldership.  This resolution is
not a charge.  It is an assault.  There is no proposal on
the part of this Board to find out if I am guilty of
anything.  They propose a course which assumes my guilt to
be of no importance.  I tell you that it is of all importance.

"Perhaps, brethren, I have been too reticent.  Perhaps
the peculiar circumstances out of which this congregation
has grown during the five years of my ministry have made
it difficult for all of us to see aright or to act aright in this
trying situation.  I stand before you to some extent a
victim of misplaced confidence in you.  I was surprised
that the newspapers should inflame public opinion against
me.  I was surprised that a Court of Justice should hold
me to answer for this improbable crime.  Yet, during all
these, to me, cataclysmic, happenings of the past week,
I have looked to the loyalty of this church with an
assurance that never wavered; an assurance that in the light of
what is happening to-night seems more tragic than
anything else.  I never had a thought that you would not
stand by me, at least until I was found to be guilty."

A note of pathos had crept into the minister's voice.
The gallery listened intent and breathless.  Elder
Burbeck felt an irritation in his throat.

But the minister was continuing:

"Indulging this faith in you, entirely occupied with the
many perplexing circumstances of this lamentable affair, I
am made now to feel that I neglected you too long.

"I perceive now that your minds, too, were inflamed
with suspicion; that well-meaning but mistaken zealots
among you have felt called upon to take advantage of the
situation to purge the church of my presence.

"Once I saw this movement under way, I felt too hurt
to oppose it.  It seems to me that it has been done
cunningly and calculatingly.  No charges have been presented
against me; therefore I cannot defend myself; and I will
not defend myself.  I am only analyzing the situation for
you, that what you do may be with open eyes.  It is urged
that I am not on trial; therefore as a popular tribunal, you
cannot go into the details and ascertain the truth for
yourselves.

"A hasty decision is demanded; therefore there is no
time for the situation to clear and for calm counsel to
prevail.  Bear in mind that you are called upon to take action
quickly, not for my sake as a minister; not for your sake
as individuals; but because the good name of this church is
alleged to be suffering.  Is it not in reality because the
vanity of some of the members of this church is suffering?

"If that is so, it is not a reason, my brethren, for hasty
action against any man.  Surely it is not a reason for
hasty action against me.  I ask those of you who can
remember, to go back, to recall the circumstances under
which I became your pastor.  You were humble enough
then.  There was small thought of the good name of this
congregation when I sat in the park out there and saw this
man nailing a plank across the door.  I did not question
his good intentions then.  I do not question them now.
But he is proposing to do the same thing in effect that he
did then; to nail God out of His house.

"Oh, not because I am nailed out.  You may cast me
out, and this church will go on.  But if you cast out any
brother, even the humblest, wrongfully or for
self-righteous reasons, you depart from the spirit of Christ.
You should be helping that man instead of hurting him.
How much less would you cast out your pastor for the
same reason."

"Brother Hampstead!"  It was the voice of Elder
Burbeck, grating harshly by the forced element of
self-restraint in his tones.  "You are misapprehending the
issue.  There is no proposal to cast you out of the
congregation.  The proposal is merely that you retire from the
position of eminence which you occupy, exactly as I might
be asked to retire if my own name had been smirched."

"There you are!" ejaculated Hampstead.  "'Had
been smirched.'  Your chairman's phraseology shows that
he assumes that my name has been smirched.  I deny it.
I indignantly reject the specious argument that the action
of this church to-night does not amount to a trial.
Before the eyes of the world you are finding me guilty.  You
place upon me a stigma as a minister that will follow
wherever I go, the inference of which is unescapable.
From the hour when I became the minister of this
congregation until now, I have gone about as a servant of the
One Master, according to my judgment and my capacity.
The point of view of the authors of this resolution seems
to be that I have been the servant of this congregation;
that I may be hired or discharged, that I am theirs, that I
have been working for them.  That was a mistake!  It is
a mistake.  I know you have paid me a salary, but I have
never felt that it conferred upon me any obligation to you.
I thought you gave the money to God, and that he gave it
to me, and that with it I was to serve Him and not you.
That service was rendered in all good conscience to this
hour.  Are you now presuming to oust me because I can
no longer serve God?  Or because you are unwilling for
me longer to serve you?

"Your Board has asked me to resign.  To resign
would be a confession of guilt.  I do not feel guilty.  I
am not guilty.  My conscience is clear.  Personally, I was
never so satisfied that I was doing right as now.

"Sometimes I must have done the wrong thing.  Looking
back, it seems to me now that sometimes when you
approved most heartily, when the public ovations were the
loudest, the thing achieved was either of doubtful worth
or very transitory.  The present case touches fundamental
issues.  It has to do with one of the most sacred
duties of the minister.

"The resolution to which I am entitled from this
congregation is a resolution of absolute confidence.  There is
but one other resolution that could adequately express the
situation, and that is the one which is proposed by the
Board.  If you cannot pass the resolution of confidence,
I think that you should pass the one that has been
proposed.  That is the advice which I have to offer.  That is
the answer which I make to this unjust, this unchristian
assault upon your pastor in the moment when, tried as he
has never been tried before, he needs your loyalty and
confidence more than he can ever need it again."

Hampstead sat down.  He had spoken with far more
feeling than he had intended, but he had exhibited much
less than he experienced.

Yet the total effect of his words was less happy than
his friends had hoped.  Instead of appealing to his
auditors, he appeared to arraign them.  Elder Burbeck was
greatly relieved.  He saw that this arraignment had
antagonized and solidified his own cohorts.

But the tall man with the lofty brow was on his feet
again.

"I wish to move," said Brother Hinton, "a resolution
such as Doctor Hampstead has suggested; a resolution of
sympathy and absolute confidence, and I now do move that
this church put itself upon record as sympathizing fully
with our pastor in his unpleasant position, and assuring
him of our confidence in the unswerving integrity of his
character and of our prayers that he may be true to his
duty as he sees it.  I offer that as a substitute for the
resolution before the house."

The resolution was seconded.  There was an interval
of silence, a feeling that the crucial moment had been
reached.  Question was called.  The substitute was put.

"All in favor of this resolution which you have heard
made and with the formal reading of which we will
dispense, please stand," proclaimed Elder Burbeck.

There was an uncertain movement.  By ones and twos,
and then in groups the persons sitting on the Hampstead
side of the church rose to their feet, until with few
exceptions all were standing.

"The clerk will count."

There was an awkward silence.

"One hundred and sixty-three," the colorless man
announced presently.

"All opposed, same sign."  Burbeck's adherents arose
*en masse* at the motion of the Elder's arm, which was as
involuntary as it was injudicial.

The clerk did not count.  It was unnecessary.  "The
motion is lost," he said to the presiding officer.

"The resolution is lost," announced Elder Burbeck
loudly, in tones that quickened with eagerness.  "The
question now recurs upon the original resolution."

Erect, poised, feeling a sense of elation that he was
now to let loose the wrath of God upon a recreant
shepherd of the flock, the Elder stood for a moment with his
eyes sweeping over the whole congregation, and taking
in every detail of the picture; the disheartened, defeated
group behind Hampstead, the flushed, determined face of
the minister, the defiant blaze in the eyes of the rosy-faced
young person by his side,—who was this strange woman,
anyway?—and then his own well-marshalled loyal forces,
who to-night played the part of the avenging hosts of
Jehovah!

Up even into the gallery the Elder's eyes wandered
with satisfaction.  These galleries should see that All
People's would not suffer itself to be put to shame before
the world.  Something centered his eye for a moment
upon Rollie.  His son was gazing intently, leaning
forward with a hand reached out until it rested on the balcony
rail.  Then the Elder's eye returned to the lower floor and
to the mission now about to be accomplished.

"Are you ready for the question?" he inquired, with
forced deliberation, enjoying the suspense before its
inevitable outcome of satisfied justice.

"Question!  Question!" came the insistent calls.

But now there was something like a movement in the
gallery.  The old Elder's eye, noting everything, noted
that; looking up, he saw that Rollie's seat was empty;
but higher up the gallery aisle the young man was visible,
making his way quickly toward the stairs.  That was
right, he was coming down to vote; but he would be too late.

"All in favor of the resolution severing the pastoral
relation between All People's Church and John
Hampstead will signify by standing."

The Elder rolled the words out sonorously.  In his
mind they stood for the thunder of divine judgment!

The solid phalanxes upon his left arose as one man and
stood while their impressive numbers were this time
carefully counted by the clerk.  The tally took some time.

"Opposed, the same sign!"  The Elder barked out the
words like a challenge.  Again the straggling group
behind Hampstead arose.  The minister himself stood up.
As a member of the congregation, he had a right to vote,
and he would protest to the last this injustice to him, this
slander of All People's upon itself.

Mrs. Burbeck could not stand, but raised her hand, so
thin and shell-like that it trembled while she held the white
palm up to view.

Elder Burbeck saw this and noted with a slight additional
sense of shock that Rollie was now beside his mother
and standing also to be counted with the Hampstead adherents.

"The resolution is carried," said the clerk to the Elder.

"The resolution—" echoed Burbeck, his voice beginning
to gather enormous volume.  But when he had got
this far, his utterance was arrested by the sudden action
of his son, who remained standing in the aisle, with one
hand grasping his mother's, and the other outstretched in
some sort of appeal to him.

"Father!" the boy whispered hoarsely; "don't announce
that vote!  Don't announce it!"

This startling interruption appeared to freeze the whole
scene fast.  The throaty, excited tones of the young man
floated to the far corners of the auditorium, and again the
sense of some impending terror forced itself deeper into
the crowd-consciousness.

"Don't announce it?  What do you mean?" ejaculated
the father in an irritated and widely audible whisper.

The suddenness of this outbreak and the astounding
fact that it should come from his own flesh, had thrown
the Elder completely off his stride.

"Because," the young man faltered, his face white, his
eyes wild and staring, "because it's wrong!"

The huge dominating figure of a man stood for a
moment nonplussed, wondering what hysteria could have
overtaken his son; but annoyance and stubborn determination
to proceed quickly manifested themselves upon his face.

"Don't, father!" pleaded the young man, advancing
down the aisle, "Don't!  I've got something I must say!"

By this time, Hampstead, quickly apprehensive, had
stepped out from his pew and was seeking to grasp Rollie's
arm; but the excited young man avoided him, and standing
with one hand still appealing toward his father, and
with the other pointing backward toward the minister, he
announced with a sudden access of vocal force: "That
man is innocent."

.. _`"That man is innocent."`:

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   :alt: "That man is innocent."

   "That man is innocent."

The words had a triumphant ring in them that echoed
through the auditorium.

"Innocent?"

The tone of the senior Burbeck was scornful in the
extreme.  Increasing anger at being thus interfered with,
especially by Rollie had turned the Elder's face almost
purple.  "Young man," he commanded harshly, "you
stand aside and let this church declare its will."

"I will not stand aside," protested the son.  "I will
not let you, my father, do this great wrong.  He forbade
me to speak; but I will speak.  Yes, no matter what
happens, I must speak."

The young man turned a frightened glance upon his
mother.  Mrs. Burbeck was gazing intently at her son, a
look of shock giving way to one of comprehension and
then a pitiful half-smile of encouragement, as if she urged
him to go on and do his duty, whatever that involved.

"That man," Rollie began afresh, his neck thrust
forward desperately, while he pointed to the minister, who
had stepped back once more as though he felt the purposes
of God in operation and no longer dared to interfere;
"that man is innocent.  I am the thief.  I stole the
diamonds.  I did it to get the money to cover a defalcation at
the bank.  Fearful of the consequences, I turned to him in
my distress.  He got the money to restore what I had
stolen.  I put the diamonds in his box for an hour, and by
a mistake he went off with the key.  That explains all.
When I returned from the cruise on the Bay and learned
what had happened, I was paralyzed with fear.  At first I
did not even have the manhood to go and tell him how the
diamonds got into his box.  When I did, he made me keep
the silence for fear the blow would kill my mother.  It
seemed to me that this was not a sufficient reason.  But
I was weak; I was a coward.  Yet the spectacle of seeing
this man stand here day after day while his reputation was
torn to pieces, unwavering and unyielding whether for the
sake of my mother or such a worthless wretch as I am, or
for the sake of his priestly vow, made me stronger and
stronger.  Yet I was not strong enough to speak.  Not
until to-night.  Not until I saw my mother's hand tremble
when she held it up to vote for him.  I only came down
here to stand beside her.  But one touch of hers compelled
me to speak.  I am prepared to assume my guilt before
this church and before the world.  I was a defaulter, and
John Hampstead saved me.  I was a thief, and he saved
me.  I was a coward, and he made me brave enough at
least for this.  I tell you, the man is innocent, absolutely
innocent.  He is so good that you should fall down and
worship him."

Rollie's confession in detail was addressed to the
congregation as a whole, and he finished with his arms
extended and chest thrown forward like a man who had
bared his soul.

After standing for a moment motionless, his eyes
turned to his mother, and with a low cry he dashed to
where Hampstead was bending over her.  She lay chalk-white
and motionless, one hand in her lap, the other swinging
pendant, the hand that had just been raised to vote.
The eyes were closed; the lips half parted; the expression
of her face, if expression it might be termed, one of utter
exhaustion of vital forces.

For a moment the young man stood transfixed by the
spectacle of what he had done.  How shadow thin she
looked!  This was not the figure of a woman, but some
exquisite pattern of the spiritual draped limply in this
chair.

And yet, as if affected by his appealing gaze, the
features moved, some of the looseness departed from the
corners of the mouth, the eye-lashes fluttered and a
delicate tint showed upon the cheek, disappeared, came again,
and went away again; but with each appearance lingered
longer.  The lips moved too as if a breath were passing
through them; almost indistinguishably and yet surely, the
bosom of her dress stirred, collapsed, and stirred again.
The young man had rather unconsciously seized both
wilted hands, forcing the minister somewhat away in
order to do so.  It was his mother.  He had struck her
defenseless head this blow.  Unmindful of the sudden awe
of silence about him, followed by murmurings, ejaculations,
and then a universal stir of feet, the blank looks,
the questionings, the staring wonder with which neighbor
looked to neighbor, the young man watched intently that
stirring of the mother breast until it became regular and
rhythmical.

The lips were moving now again; but this time as if in
the formation of words.  Rollie bent low, until his ear
was close.

"Let me think, let me think," the lips murmured
wearily.  "My son—was a defaulter and a thief—John
Hampstead knew.  John Hampstead showed him the better
way."  She turned her head weakly and eased her
body in the chair, as if to make even this slight effort at
conversation less laborious, and then began to speak once
more:

"But he was not strong enough to walk that better way,
so John Hampstead took the burden upon his own shoulders
and carried it until my boy was strong enough to bear
it for himself."

Sufficient strength had returned for one of her hands to
exert a pressure on the hand that held it.

"Yes, mother," Rollie breathed fervently into her ear.

"But now," and the voice gained more volume, "but
now he is strong enough.  He has done a brave and noble
thing at last.  I forget my shame in pride and gratitude to
God for my son that was lost and is alive again—forever
more."

The last tone flowed out upon the current of a long,
wavering sigh, which seemed to take the final breath from
her body.

"Yes, mother!" the young man urged anxiously, putting
an instinctive pressure upon the hands he held, as if to
call the spirit back into her again.  There was an instant
in which he felt that it was gone.  She had left him.  But
the next instant he felt it coming back again like a tide
and stronger, much stronger, so that there was real color
in her cheeks, and then the eyes opened and looked at him
with a clear and steady light, with the glow of love and
admiration in them.

"Thank God!" murmured the voice of Hampstead
hoarsely.  "She is back.  She will stay."

"Yes," Mrs. Burbeck affirmed, faintly but valiantly,
turning from the face of her son to that of the minister
with a look of inexpressible gratitude and devotion.
"Yes, I am back," she smiled reassuringly, "and to stay.
I never had so much reason—so much to live for as now."

The enactment of this scene at the chair, so intense and
so significant, could have consumed no more than two
minutes of time.  The congregation, keenly alive to the
effect the disclosure must have upon the life of the mother,
was in a state to witness with the most perfect understanding
every detail of the action about the invalid's chair.
While the issue was in doubt, the audience remained in an
agony of suspense and apprehension.

With the sudden look of relief upon the face of the
minister, followed presently by a luminous smile of pure
joy while his shoulders straightened to indicate the rolling
off of the burden of his fears, the suspense for the
congregation was completely ended.  Reactions began
immediately to occur.

Far up in the gallery a woman laughed, an excited,
hysterical, brainless laugh, and every eye darted upon her in
reproach.  Then down in front somewhere near the first
line of the Burbeck adherents, a man began to sob,
hoarsely and with a wailing note, as if in utter despair.
Again every eye swung from the woman who had laughed
to the man who was crying.  As they fell on him, he stood
up.  It was Elder Brooks, the man who had written the
resolution declaring the pastoral relation severed.  With
streaming eyes he was hurrying toward Hampstead.  But
now other women were laughing hysterically, other men
were sobbing.  Everywhere was exclamation, movement,
and a sudden impulse toward the minister.  The people in
the gallery came down, crowding dangerously, to the rail.
On the main floor little rivulets of excited human beings
trickled out from the pews and streamed down the aisles.
The first to reach Hampstead was a woman.  She caught
his hand and kissed it.  Elder Brooks came next.  He
flung an arm about the minister's neck, but instead of
looking at him or addressing him, covered his face in shame.

But it was no longer possible to describe what any one
individual was doing.  The entire audience had become a
sea which at first rolled toward Hampstead and then
swirled and tossed its individual waves laughing,
cheering or applauding frothily.  In mutual congratulation
men shook each other's hands and some appeared even
to shake their own hands.  Women kissed or flung their
arms about one another.  Two thirds of the main floor
was devoid entirely of people.  The other third was a
struggling eddy in which the tall form of the ex-pastor,—for
they had just voted him out of the pulpit,—stood
receiving every one who reached him with a sad kind of
graciousness.

Songs broke out.  For a time the people in the gallery
were singing: "Blessed be the tie that binds."  Those
below sobbed through "My faith looks up to Thee", and
presently all were singing "Nearer my God to Thee,
nearer to Thee."  This continued until the gathering
seemed to sing itself somewhat out of its hysteria; and
then, weaving to and fro, the tide began to ebb back up the
aisles and into the pews again.

At first the people thought they had done this of their
own accord, but later it appeared that it was Hampstead
who was making them do it.  He was a leader.  In the
temporary chaos, his will alone retained its poise, and it
was the suggestion in the glance of his eye and finally in
the gestures of his hands that sent them back to their
seats.

When the singing stopped, and the audience sat
somewhat composed and considering what should happen next,
the minister remained master of the situation.

To protect himself somewhat from the surging waves of
humanity, Hampstead had stepped upon the platform.
He stood now with one hand resting easily upon the back
of the chair beside the communion table.  The chair was
not empty, for it contained the huge, collapsed bulk of the
Elder, the upper half of whose body had sunk sideways
upon the end of the table, with his huge red face fenced off
from view by one arm, as if to shroud the shame of his
features.  He was inert and still.  The fragile human
orchid in the chair had not been more motionless than he.
The tip of an ear, one bald knob of his head, were all that
showed to those in front; and the other arm was extended
across the table, the fingers overhanging the edge of it.

The spectacle of the man lying crushed and broken upon
the very table from which so often he had administered
the communion, cast a deepening spell over all.  But it
also forced on all a thought of sympathy for this rashly
misguided man, who as a spiritual leader of this church
had shown himself so utterly lacking in spiritual
discernment.  This was quite in keeping with John Hampstead's
mood.

"Our very first emotion," the minister began, "must
be one of sympathy for this well-meaning brother of ours
who has been the unfortunate victim of a series of
mistakes in which his has been by no means the greatest.
While he sits before us overcome with humiliation and
remorse, Elder Burbeck will pardon me if I speak for a
moment as if he were not here.  I wish to urge upon you all
that no one—least of all myself—should reproach him
for the thing which he has done.  I have never doubted
that he was acting in all good conscience.  The succession
of events, once it had begun to march, has been so
remarkable that now, looking back, we must each and all of us
feel how puny are men and women to resist the winds of
circumstance which blow upon them.

"To me, granting the beginning of this strange series
of events for which I am at least in part to blame, it seems
now that all the rest has been inevitable.  I think we
should reproach no one.  Certainly I shall not.  Instead,
I am thinking that it is a time for great rejoicing.  That
mother who has so many times shown us the better way,
has shown it to-night.  Looking up to her son whose act
of moral courage, witnessing to the new character that he
has been building, has made possible the happy climax of
this tragic hour—looking up to him she has said: 'I
never had so much to live for as now.'  That should be
the feeling of each one of us.

"The events of to-night must have been graven deeply
into all our hearts.  None of us can ever be quite the
same.  Each must start afresh, with our lives enriched by
the lesson and by the experiences of this hour.

"It has brought to me the keenest suffering, the
bitterest disappointment, that I have ever known.  It has
brought to me also a deepening faith in the marvelous
power of God to overrule the most untoward incidents to
His glory.  It has brought to me also the greatest gift that
any man can have upon the side of his earthly relations,—a
joy so great, so supreme, so ineffable that I cannot speak
farther than to say to you that it is mine to-night; and that
you look into my eyes at the happiest moment I have ever
known."

There was a movement in the gallery.  A tall woman,
heavily veiled, with an air of unmistakable distinction
about her, arose and mounted the aisle step by step to the
stairway leading downward.

Desiring with all the violent impetuosity of her nature
to break out with the truth that would vindicate the man
she loved so hopelessly and had involved so terribly,
Marien had nevertheless been true to her vow of silence.
But she had brought Rollie Burbeck to this meeting, and
she had kept him there.  At the critical moment she had
sent him down to stand beside his mother, until the young
man's clay-like soul at last had fluxed and fused into the
moulding of a man.  Having seen the mischief she had
wrought undone, so far as anything done ever is undone,
she was leaving now, when the minister had begun to
speak of what she could not bear to hear.

Hampstead's gaze watched the receding figure, and a
poignant regret for her smote in upon him in the midst of
all his joy.

Desperately, with that enormous resolution of which
she was capable, Marien Dounay was stepping undemonstratively
out of his life.  But as she went, he knew that
the verdict pronounced upon him by the court was one
now pronounced upon her.  All through life she would be
held to answer for the love she had slain for the sake of
her ambition.

Of those who followed the eye of the minister as it
marked the departure of the woman from the gallery,
some, of course, recognized her, and for a moment they
may have been puzzled over the mystery of the part she
had played in that moving drama, the last act of which
was now drawing to its end before them; but the minister
was speaking again:

"It seems to me best for us all," he was saying, "to
disperse quietly, to go each to his or her own home, to our
own families, into the deeper recesses of our own hearts,
to ponder that through which we have passed and plan for
each the future duty.

"Upon one point I am inclined to break into homily.
The great lesson which I myself have learned can be best
expressed in the verdict of the court at my preliminary
hearing: 'Held to Answer.'  It seems to me there is a
great philosophy of life in that.  In the crowding events
of the week past, I have been 'Held to Answer' for many
mistakes of mine.  Some of you must find yourselves held
to answer now for the manner in which you have borne
yourselves.  Our young brother, Rollie Burbeck, for
whom we feel so deeply and whose courage to-night we
have so greatly admired, will be held to answer to-morrow
before his associates and the world for his past mistakes
and for his proposals for the future.  But we shall be held
to answer also for our blessings and our opportunities.  A
great joy has come to me.  The woman I have loved
devotedly, but perhaps undeservingly, for years, has come
thundering half way across the continent to stand beside
me here to-night.  She brings me great happiness, an
increasing opportunity to do good.  For that also I shall be
held to answer, since joys are not given to us for selfish
use, but that we may enlarge and give them back again.

"And now, though I am no longer your pastor, you
will permit me, I am sure, to lift my hand above you for
this last time and invoke the benediction of God which is
eternal upon the life of every man and woman here to-night."

"But," faltered Elder Brooks, starting up, his voice
trembling, "that was our great mistake, our great sin.
You are to be our pastor again!"

The minister shook his head slowly and decisively.
The Elder stared in dumb, helpless amazement, while a
murmur of dissent rose from the congregation, but
quieted before the upraised hand of the minister.

"It seems to me," said Hampstead, speaking in tones
of deep conviction and yet with humility, "that God has
declared the pulpit of All People's vacant; that both you
and I are to be held to answer for our mutual failure by a
stern decree of separation.  For there is another lesson
which has been graven deeply in my life.  It is this: No
man can go back.  No life ever flows up stream.  The
tomb of yesterday is sealed.  The decision of this congregation
is irrevocable.  Less than a quarter of an hour has
passed; but you are not the same, and I am not the same."

In the minister's solemn utterance, the message of the
inevitable consequence of what had happened was carried
into every consciousness.  There was no longer any
protest.  The congregation bowed, mutely submissive, while
John Hampstead pronounced the benediction of St. Jude:

"Now unto him that is able to guard you from stumbling,
and to set you before the presence of his glory without
blemish in exceeding joy, to the only God our Saviour,
through Jesus Christ, our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion
and power before all time, and now, and forever more.
Amen."

The meeting was over.  But the audience sat uncertainly
in the pews, with expectant glances at Elder Burbeck.
It seemed as if he should rouse and say something.
John, in recognition of the naturalness of this impulse,
turned and laid his hand upon the shoulder of the man.

"My brother," he began, and applied a gentle pressure.
But something in the unyielding bulk of the man made
him stop with a puzzled look, after which he turned and
glanced toward Mrs. Burbeck.  Already Rollie was pushing
her chair forward, her face expressing both anxiety
and love.  She had been eager to go to her husband
before, but consideration for his own pride, which would
resent a demonstration, had withheld her.  She touched
first the outstretched drooping finger.

"Hiram!" she breathed softly, coaxingly, "Hiram!"

Receiving no response, Mrs. Burbeck drew the obscuring
hand gently from before the face.  Her own features
were a study.  It was curious of Hiram to act this way.
He was a man of stern purpose.  Having been
overwhelmingly shamed by his error, it would have been like
him to stand bravely and confess his wrong.  But his
parted lips had no purpose in their form at all.  The
redness of his skin had changed to a purple.  She laid her
fingers on his cheek and held them there, for a moment,
curiously and apprehensively.  Then a startled expression
crossed her face, and a little exclamation broke from her
lips.  Instead of leaning forward, she drew back and
lifted her eyes helplessly to the minister.

Hampstead met her questioning, pitiful glance with a
sad shake of the head and affirmation in his own
tear-filling eyes.  He had sensed the solemn truth from the
moment of that first touch upon the huge, unresponsive
shoulder.

For an appreciable interval the face of the woman was
white and set and unbelieving, and then she folded her
hands and bowed her head in mute acknowledgment of the
widowhood which had come upon her.

With the audience aghast and breathless in sympathetic
understanding, Hampstead looked down upon the silent
figures where they posed like a sculptured group, the upper
bulk of the man unmoving upon the table, the woman
unmoving in the chair, and behind the chair, the son, also
bowed and motionless.

Hiram Burbeck was dead.  He, too, had been held to
answer, but before the highest court,—for his harsh
legalism, for his unsympathetic heart, for his blind
leadership of the blind.

How strange were the issues of life!  This leaflike
shadow of a woman, her mortal existence hanging by a
thread, had withstood the shock for which the minister
had feared and risen strong above it.  She still had
strength to bear and strength to give.  But the proud,
stern father had crumpled and died.

Again there was the sound of sobbing in the church;
but the intimates of Mrs. Burbeck quickly gathered round
and screened the group of mourners from the eyes of the
people who filed quietly out of the building.  For a time
the steady tramp of feet upon the gallery stairs, with the
snort and cough of motor-cars outside, resounded harshly,
and then the church was emptied.  Rollie had taken his
mother away.  Rose, Dick, and Tayna were gone.  The
huge chair by the end of the communion table was emptied
of its burden.  That, too, was gone.  All the wreckage,
all the past, was gone.

The old sexton stood sadly by the vestibule door, his
hand upon the light switch, waiting the pleasure of his
pastor for the last time.

Absently, John Hampstead climbed the pulpit stairs and
stood leaning on the pulpit itself, surveying in farewell the
empty pews and the empty, groined arches.  They had
stood for something that he had tried to do and failed;
but he would try again more humbly, more in the fear of
God, more in the spirit of one who had turned failure into
victory.

Standing thus, looking thus, reflecting thus, John heard
a soft step upon the pulpit stair.  It was Bessie, who had
lingered in appreciative silence, the faithful, indulgent
companion of her lover's mood.  As she approached, the
rapt man swung out his arm to enfold her, and they stood
together, both leaning upon the pulpit.

"To-night one ministry has ended," John said presently;
"to-morrow another shall begin."

"And it will be a better ministry," breathed Bessie
softly, "because there are two of us."

"*And they twain shall become one flesh!*"

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   THE END

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