Chapter XIII: Part 13

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.

*CHAPTER XXXIII*

*THE BATTLE OF THE HEADLINES*

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.

*CHAPTER XXXIV*

*A WAY THAT WOMEN HAVE*

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.

*CHAPTER XXXV*

*ON PRELIMINARY EXAMINATION*

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.