Chapter XVI: Part 16

"You are right!" Marien admitted after a moment of thought. "Once away from the restraining influence of your character, my true nature would reveal itself. I should hate her! I do hate her! No, I could not go!"

"And so, you see,"--John did not finish the sentence but had recourse to a helpless smile and a pathetic shrug of the shoulders.

Marien lowered her veil. The interview was running on and on. It must come to an end.

"It all becomes uncanny," she exclaimed. "There is too much converging upon your heart. There must come a rift in the clouds. I have submitted to your compelling altruism but only for the present. If something does not happen within a reasonable limit of time, I shall positively and dangerously explode!"

John smiled at the vehemence with which she spoke.

"But in the meantime--silence!" he adjured impressively.

"Yes," she assented reluctantly. "But at the same time I shall not know one gleam of happiness, one moment's freedom from mental anguish until your vindication is flung widely to the world."

"But in the meantime, silence!" reiterated John obstinately.

"And in the meantime," she consented more resignedly, "silence!"

"Good night, Marien," said the minister, putting out his hand.

"Good night, Doctor Hampstead," she replied, seizing that hand impulsively, then flinging it from her again as she turned, without another glance, to the door. It closed behind her softly, considerately almost, but with that same decisive snap of the lock which had shut her in three quarters of an hour before.

Hampstead stood a moment in reflection. She had come and she had gone, leaving behind a great sense of relief, of complexities unraveled, of good accomplished and of further danger averted. Of one thing he felt sure now; he would never go to prison. A way would be found to avoid that. Her vindictive malice had spent itself and been turned to an attempt at co-operation.

But he was still under clouds: one the verdict of Judge Brennan, "Held to Answer"; the other less black, but larger and murkier, the cloud of public condemnation; and for the present he must remain under both. Besides which, there was his church and Elder Burbeck to consider.

And to-morrow was Sunday!

*CHAPTER XXXVIII*

*SUNDAY IN ALL PEOPLE'S*

Elder Burbeck did not make good his threat. Hampstead stood again in the pulpit of All People's on Sunday, as his heart had so passionately desired.

But the reality disappointed. The contrast between this day and last Lord's day was pitiful. To be sure, the church was packed; but not to worship. The people--curious and wooden-hearted--had come to be witnesses to a spectacle, to see a man go through the business of a role which his character no longer fitted him to enact. The service and the sermon were one long agony. John spoke upon the duty of being true. His words came back upon him like an echo.

As for Elder Burbeck, he had only halted. The minister, from considerations of delicacy which were promptly misconstrued, having remained away from the called meeting of the Official Board on Saturday night, all things in that session had gone to Burbeck's satisfaction. He held in his pocket the resolution of the Board, recommending that the congregation request the resignation of the pastor of All People's. He might have introduced this at the close of the sermon, thus turning the ordinary congregational meeting into a business session; but the Elder was an expert tactician. He decided to devote the entire day to a final estimate of just what inroads the week had made upon the ascendancy of the minister with his people.

However, the manner in which the sermon was received encouraged him to go forward immediately with his plans. As the congregation was upon the last verse of the last hymn, the Elder ascended to the pulpit beside the minister. He did not look at the minister. He did not whisper that he had an announcement to make, and Hampstead did not say at the end of the hymn: "Elder Burbeck has an announcement to make." This was the usual form. But it was not followed. Instead, Burbeck, unannounced, with coarse self-assertion, made the announcement:

"There will be a business meeting of the church on Monday night to consider matters of grave import to the congregation. Every member is urged to be present."

There was a grave doubt if the Elder had a right of himself to call a meeting of the church. Yet the only man with force enough to voice that doubt was the minister, and he did not voice it. Instead, he stood quietly until the announcement was concluded and then invoked the benediction of God upon all the service, which, of course, included the announcement.

When at the close of the service Doctor Hampstead undertook to mingle among his people, according to custom, he found a minority hysterically hearty in their assurances of confidence, sympathy, and support; but the majority avoided him. Instead of enduring this and withering under it, the minister was roused into something like aggression. By confronting and accosting them, he forced aloof individuals to address him. He made his way into groups that did not open readily to receive him. In all conversations he frankly recognized his position, made it the uppermost topic, and solicited opinion and advice. He even eavesdropped a little. Once people opened their mouths upon the subject, he was astonished at their frankness. When the sum total of the impressions thus gathered was organized and deductions made, he was stunned almost to cynicism by their results. Of course, no one indicated that they believed him guilty of theft, and in the main all accepted his defense as the true defense. But they found him guilty of folly--a folly with a woman. Whether it was merely a folly and not a sin, it appeared was not to greatly alter penalties.

Yet justice must be done these people. They felt sorry for their minister and showed it; and they only shrank from him to avoid showing something else that would hurt him. They still acknowledged their debts of personal gratitude to him, but now they experienced a feeling of superiority. Their weaknesses had overtaken them in private; his had caught up with him under the spotlight's glare. They looked upon him with commiseration, pityingly, but from a lofty height. Besides which, they accused him of an overt offense. He had brought shame on All People's. He had preached to them this morning upon the duty of being true; but he had himself not been true--to the proud self-interest of All People's.

This indignant concern for the reputation of All People's was rather a surprising revelation to Hampstead. He had fallen into the way of thinking that he had made All People's; that he and All People's were one. That the congregation could have any purpose that did not include his purpose was not thinkable. He had never conceived of it as a social organism, with self-consciousness, with pride, with a head to be held up and a reputation to be sustained. To him All People's was not a society of persons with a pose. It was an association of individuals, each more or less weak, more or less dependent in their spiritual nature upon each other and upon him; the whole banded together to help each other and to help others like themselves. He had thought of himself as the instrument of All People's in its work of human salvage. But he now discovered that in these four years All People's had suffered from an over extension of the ego. It had been spoiled by prosperity and public approbation, just as other congregations, or individuals, might be or have been. The admiration of the members for him as their pastor, their humble obedience to his will, was in part due, not to his spiritual ascendancy, not to his conspicuously successful labors as a helper of humankind in so many different ways, but to the fact that these activities of the minister won him that public admiration and approval which shed a glamour also upon the congregation and upon the individual members of the congregation. Because of this, they worshipped him, honored him, and palavered over him to a point where Hampstead, no doubt as unconsciously as the congregation and as dangerously, had suffered an over-extension of his own ego.

But deflation of spirit had come to him swiftly. Now his own pride and his own self-sufficiency had all been shot away. If any remained, the effect of this Sunday morning service was quite sufficient to perform the final operation of removal.

He was to preach that night from the text: "If God is for us, who is against us." He gave up the idea. It sounded egotistical. He preached instead his farewell sermon, though without a word of farewell in it, from the text:

"Brethren, even if a man be overtaken in any trespass, ye who are spiritual restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness; looking to thyself lest thou also be tempted."

That was what the pastor of All People's was trying to do,--to restore a man. In preaching this sermon, he forgot that this was his valedictory, forgot himself, forgot everything but the great mission of spiritual reconstruction upon which he had labored and proposed to labor as long as life was in him, no matter what yokes and scars were put upon him. In it he reached the oratorical height of his career, which was not necessarily lofty.

But people listened--and with understanding. Some of them cried a little. It made them reminiscent. The man himself, now slipping, had once restored them with great gentleness. All said, "What a pity!"

But Hampstead, while he spoke, was steeling himself against the probable desertion of his congregation. He had a feeling that he could win them back if he tried hard enough, but he began to doubt that they were worth winning back. He had really never sought to win them to himself personally; he would not begin now.

Instead, he saw himself cast out. The verdict of the church on Monday night would also be "Held to Answer."

He saw it coming almost gloatingly, and with a fierce up-flaming of that fanatic ardor which was always in him. The desire came to him to seize upon the position in which he stood as a pulpit from which to deliver a message to the world that greatly needed to be delivered, to say something that his fate and his life thereafter might illustrate, and thus make his public shame a greater witness to the truth than ever his popularity had been. In one of the loftiest of his moods of exaltation, he strode homeward from the church.

At ten o'clock, he telephoned the morning papers that at midnight he would have a statement to give out. It contained some rather extravagant expressions, was couched throughout in an exalted strain, and ran as follows:

AN ADDRESS TO THE PEOPLE

"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.

"JOHN HAMPSTEAD,
"Pastor of All People's Church."

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.

*CHAPTER XXXIX*

*THE CUP TOO FULL*

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."

*CHAPTER XL*

*THE ELDER IN THE CHAIR*

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.