Chapter VI: Part 6

Poor Rose! And poor old Charles! Such an end for him. No great pictures painted; no roseate successes gathered; just to follow his vision on and on until in absent-minded admiration of a sunset glow he stepped off the brow of El Capitan in Yosemite and fell hundreds of feet to death. Yet John's grief was strangely tempered by the thought that somehow this death was fitting. It was like the man's life. In art he had tried to walk the heights with no solid ground of ability beneath, and he had fallen into the bottomless abyss of failure.

For a moment John pitied Charles greatly; yet when he thought of Rose, prostrated, as he was sure, not by grief, but by long anxieties, his feeling turned to one of reproach. When he thought of the children left fatherless, with no provision for their future or that of Rose, the reproach turned to bitterness. He found himself judging Charles very sternly, and a verse from scripture came into his mind,--something about the man who provides not for his own being worse than a murderer.

But in the midst of this condemnation, Hampstead's jaw dropped, and he sat staring at the pen with which he was preparing to write. The expression on the man's face had changed from concern to one of agony. When the pain passed, his features were gray and tenantless, almost the look of the dead; for John Hampstead had suddenly perceived that _his stage career was ended_!

Rose, Dick and Tayna were now "his own." To give Rose the best of care, upon which his heart had instantly determined, he must have what were to him large sums of money weekly and monthly; money for nurses, money for doctors, for sanitariums possibly; and perhaps Dick and Tayna must be sent to boarding-school or some place like that for the present, while their higher education must also be considered and provided for.

John knew he could never do these things and follow the stage. He could succeed upon the stage; he had proven that, to his own satisfaction at least; but he could not make money there yet, not for years and years. Marien was right. If he persisted, rewards would come and affluence. But they would come at the other end of life. He must have them now.

Perhaps hardest of all to John was the hurt to his pride, to his self-confidence, the reflection that, having set his eye upon a shining goal, he must abandon the march toward it unbeaten, with his strength untested, or with the tests so far made distinctly in his favor. It was hard to think himself a "quitter." And yet he could feel the stir of a noble satisfaction in being a "quitter" for duty's sake. He remembered with a certain sad pleasure how almost prophetically he had told Mr. Mitchell that it would only be something that would happen to Dick and Tayna that could keep him from going on with his ambition. Now exactly that had come to pass; yet to make immediate surrender of the ambition to which he had devoted himself with such enthusiasm seemed impossible. He knew what he should do--what he intended to do--but he lacked the resolution for the moment.

If Bessie were only here!

And yet if she were, he would shrink from her presence. He felt just now unworthy to look into those trusting eyes of blue. This time he must face his destiny alone.

His head sank low. His hands were clasped above it, as they had been that night when he was stricken blind. The world was dark before him. Now, as then, he felt sorry for himself. In a very few months a great many things had happened to him that had wrenched him violently. He had been racked by doubts and inflamed by mysterious emotions. He had hoped and he had dared; he had struggled; he had gained some things and lost some; but he had survived, and on the whole was conquering. Now came the heaviest blow, as it seemed, that could possibly fall upon his head,--and just in the very hour when the upward way was clearing!

His face was flat upon the page he had meant to fill with words of love and help to Rose. Above him, on the wall, was the sheet of faded yellow paper that bore his just amended motto. Two pins, loosened no doubt when he changed the word on the legend, had been whipped out by the breeze which swept in through the open window, and this breeze now fluttered the free end of the yellow sheet insistently like a pennant, so that the distracted man lifted his clouded eyes and read once again, as if to make sure:

"Eternal Loyalty is the Price of Success."

"Loyalty to what?" he demanded fiercely of himself. To his ambition? Or to two little growing lives that trusted and believed in him?

To put the question like that was to answer it. John rose abruptly, snatched the legend from the wall, crumpled it as he had the envelope, and cast it on the floor. He didn't need it any more.

"And yet," he reflected after a moment, "why not?"

"Uncle John, when will you be president?" Tayna had asked him that one night, and he smiled as in fancy he felt her arms again about his neck, her bare feet cuddling in his lap. The thought roused him. He was not surrendering all ambition when he surrendered a stage ambition. He was a man of greatly increased ability now as compared with then. Surely a man was pretty poor stuff if, having been defeated in one desire through no fault of his own, he could not carve out another niche for himself somewhere in the wide hall of achievement. John stooped and recovered the crumpled square of yellow, smoothed its wrinkles reverently, and fastened it again and more securely upon the wall above him.

* * * * *

That night John Hampstead went to the theater as usual, but entered the dressing room like a man going into the presence of his dead. Throughout the performance he made his entrances and exits solemnly.

The play for this, his final week, was _Hamlet_, and John's part was the King. Every night as the Prince of Denmark killed him with a rapier thrust, John enacted that spectacular and traditional fall by which, since time forgotten, all Kings in _Hamlet_ go toppling to the floor, where they die with one foot upraised upon the bottom-most step of the throne, as if reluctant even in death to give up the perquisites and preeminence of royalty. So hour by hour John felt that he was killing the King in his soul, but the King died reluctantly, always with one foot on the throne.

The last night came, and the last hour. Methodically the man assembled his make-up materials, his grease paints, his hare's feet, and the beard he had himself fashioned for the King to wear, and put them away, with their sweetish, unmistakable odor, in the old cigar box, to be treasured henceforth like sacred things, symbols of a great ambition which had stirred a young man's breast, and remembrances of the greatest sacrifice it seemed possible aspiring youth could be called upon to make.

But no one was to know that it was a sacrifice; not Rose, not Dick nor Tayna even. They were to think he did it happily and because "The stage--the stage life, you know! Well, probably there are better ways for a man to spend his energies."

But, really, in his heart of hearts, Hampstead knew he would love the drama always. He owed it a debt that he could never repay, and some day when he had achieved a brilliant success in another walk of life--when Dick and Tayna were grown and far away perhaps--he would take out the old cigar box and gather his children around him, if he should have children, and tell them the story of his first divinest ambition as one tells the story of one's first love; and of the great sacrifice he had made in the cause of duty, fingering the while these crumbling things as one caresses a lock of hair of the long departed.

"Look, Bud, here's a box of cold cream--nearly full. You can get a quarter for it from somewhere along the line," suggested John, nodding toward the row of dressing rooms as he walked away, his overcoat over his shoulder, a suitcase in his hand.

*CHAPTER XVI*

*THE KING STILL LIVES*

To make money quickly and steadily and in considerable amounts, was his immediate necessity. He remembered, naturally, that only seven months ago William N. Scofield had offered him a salary of twelve thousand dollars a year, and he went to see that gentleman promptly. But while the Traffic Manager's eye lighted at sight of him, the light faded. Scofield did not refer to the offer he had made or the things he had talked about that night in the Pacific Union Club. He only said absently: "I will speak to Parsons." The next day Parsons offered Hampstead a position in the rate department at one hundred dollars per month. John was not greatly surprised. He knew the world was like that.

Of course, he might have gone next to Mr. Mitchell, but did not. In the first place John knew that no position which that kind-hearted gentleman might offer could pay as much money as he must have. In the second place, he felt himself big with a sense of new-grown powers, of personality that he wanted to capitalize, not for some employer, but for himself.

"Seems to me," he communed, as he walked down Market Street, "that I could sell real estate, or stocks, or bonds; that I could promote enterprises, work with big men, put through their deals, and make a lot of money. I believe I will try it."

An advertisement which seemed to promise something like this was answered by him in person, but it proved instead a proposition to sell books. John revolted at the idea, but the books interested him greatly. The set was designed for self-improvement, and the price was thirty dollars.

"Every time you sell a young man or woman a set of these, you do them good," he suggested to the manager, with a glow upon his face.

"Exactly," assented that suave gentleman, sighting two prime essentials of a salesman, faith in his article and a missionary enthusiasm. "You could make a hundred a week selling 'em!"

One hundred dollars a week! John looked his incredulity.

"What were you doing before?" inquired the manager.

"Acting!"

"Selling books is like acting," mused the manager. "If you are a good actor, you could make a hundred a week easy."

Because John needed one hundred dollars a week, and reflected that the experience would be good training for that higher form of salesmanship upon which he meant to embark, he took his prospectus and started out. The first week his commissions were $7.50. He had made one sale. But he needed one hundred dollars worse the second week, and set forth with greater determination. That week he made two sales. "I've almost got it," he assured himself, gritting his teeth desperately. And the third week he did get it. His commissions for six days were $74.50, for the next week $112.50, for the fifth week $145.00. John Hampstead was successfully launched upon an enterprise that would care for all his money wants.

And the work itself was happy work. It was no foot-in-the-door, house-to-house campaign on which he had entered. Ways were found of gathering lists of persons likely to be interested. He called upon these people like a gentleman; he was received and entertained like one. His self-respecting manner, his stage-trained presence, his growing store of personal magnetism, his strong, interesting face, with the odd light of spiritual ardor in his eyes, and the little choke of enthusiasm that came into his voice, all helped to make his presence welcome and his canvass entertaining. He became an adept in reading character and in playing upon the springs of desire and resolution.

He discovered, too, something to interest and admire in nearly every one upon whom he called. He was surprised to find how nice people were generally. He had before known people mainly in the mass, as publics, as audiences, or congregations. Now he began to know them as individuals, and to like them, to conceive a sort of social passion for them, and to desire fervently to do all men good. With this went the knowledge that he was becoming socially very skillful, and a sense of still increasing personal power peppered his veins with the sparkle of new hopes. Ambition flamed once more. The king in his soul was alive again. He could not only meet people, but handle them. He felt that as a politician he could win votes, as a lawyer he could sway juries.

He might even turn again to the stage, with the prospect of swifter and surer success; but he had begun to discover that one cannot go back, that no life ever flows up-stream.

Yet the thing which really made the stage career no longer possible was this sense of new powers grown up within him that were not mimetic, but creative and constructive, and which would insistently demand some other form of expression.

Besides, the perspective of his life was now long enough for him to look back and see how all his experiences had enriched him. His very awkwardness, his temporary blindness, his dramatic ambition, the calamity which shattered that career and made him a seller of books, each had been a step into power. His passion for Marien even, while it was a fall, was a fall into knowledge, which taught him self-control and made his love for Bessie a tenderer and, as he fancied, a stauncher devotion than it could otherwise have been.

This gave him a feeling, half-superstitious and half-religious, that his existence was being ordered for him by a power above his own. The effect of this was to increase his eager zest for life itself. He lived excitedly, hurrying continually, to see what would leap out at him from behind the next corner.

Meantime, he was making money. Within six months all the bills were paid and he had more than a thousand dollars in the bank. Rose was out of the sanitarium and, with Dick and Tayna, was housed in a cottage on the slope of a hill in western San Francisco, where the setting sun flashed its farewell upon the windows, and the wide ocean rolled always in the distance.

John was beginning, too, to feel that the time had come when he could go back to Bessie and tell her of his love. The past seemed very far past indeed. The memory of those whirlwind hours of passionate attachment to Marien Dounay was like a distorted dream of some drug-induced slumber into which he had sunk but once, and from which he had awakened forever.

Letters had passed frequently between himself and Bessie. On his part, these were carefully studied and almost devoutly restrained in expression; but none the less freighted in every line with the fervor of his growing devotion to her.

On her part, the letters were as frankly and impulsively rich with the essence of her own happy, effervescent self as they had always been. She had expressed a loyal sympathy with him in the shattering of his stage career, but had commended him for his renunciation, while through the letter had run a note of relief, which led John to discover for the first time that Bessie's concurrence in his dramatic ambitions was never without misgivings. True, she had told him this once, but it was when he had been too deaf to hear. What pleased John most in this correspondence was a pulse of happiness, quickening almost from letter to letter, which the big man felt revealed her perception of his growing love for her.

Perhaps it was this that put the past so far behind, that made it seem as though his love for Bessie had always been a part of his life, and the impulse to declare it a legitimate ripening of fruit that had grown slowly towards perfection.

In this mood a day was set when John would go to Los Angeles to visit Bessie. As the time approached, he could think of nothing else. On the morning of that day, the evening of which was to mark his departure, he was canvassing in Encina, a beautiful section of that urban population of several hundred thousand people across the Bay from San Francisco, the largest municipal unit of which is the City of Oakland. But thoughts of Bessie crowding in, so filled the lover's mind with rosy clouds that he had not enough of what salesmen call "closing power."

As it happened, a tiny park was just at hand, two blocks long and half a block wide, curved at the ends, dotted with graceful palms, with tall, shapely, shiny-leaved acacias, and covered with a thick sod of grass, laced at intervals by curving walks.

Upon a bench in the very center of this park Hampstead dropped down and gave himself up to blissful meditations. Across the street from him was a block of happy-looking cottage homes, the homes of the great middle-class folk of America, the one class that John knew well and sympathetically, for he himself was of it.

On the corner directly before him was a grass-sodded lot, larger than the others, holding in its center, not a cottage, but a structure of the country schoolhouse type, painted white, and with a small hooded vestibule out in front. Over the wide doors admitting to this vestibule was a transom of glass, on which was painted in very plain letters the words: CHRISTIAN CHAPEL.

"The house of God does not look so happy as the homes of men hereabout," Hampstead remarked, and just then was surprised out of his own thoughts by seeing the door of the deserted looking chapel open and two men come out. One was tall and heavy, gray of moustache and red of face, wearing a silk hat, a white necktie, and a full frock coat.

"An ex-clergyman," voted Hampstead shrewdly, because, aside from his dress, the man looked aggressively unclerical.

The other was slender, with a black, dejected moustache and also frock-coated, but the material of the garment was gray instead of black, and the suit rubbed at the elbows and bagged at the knees. This man carried a small satchel.

"Some sort of a missionary secretary, I'll bet you," was John's second venture at identification.

Another incongruous thing about the man with the clerical dress was that he had a carpenter's hammer in his hand. Dropping this tool upon the wooden landing, where it clattered loudly, he drew a key from his pocket and locked the door, shaking it viciously to make sure that it was fast. Then, descending the steps, with the claw of the hammer he pried loose a plank, some six or eight feet long, from the wooden walk that ran across the sod to the concrete pavement in front. The missionary secretary took one end of this, and the two raised it across the door, where the ex-clergyman disclosed the fact that his bulging left hand contained nails, as with swinging blows, he began to cleat the door fast.

"Nailing up God!" commented John, whose mood had become sardonic.

"What's the story, I wonder," he remarked next, and rising, sauntered across the narrow street and up the wooden walk, till he stopped with one foot on the lower step, gazing casually, with mild curiosity expressed upon his face.

The missionary secretary had noted John's advance and appeared to recognize that his chance interest was legitimate.

"A miserable, squabbling little church," the man remarked, an expression of pain upon his face. "A disgrace to the communion. I'm the District Evangelist. I've had to step in from the outside and close it up, in the interest of peace. Brother Burbeck, here, is a leader of one of the wings. He has tried to bring peace in vain."

"I have stood up for the Lord against the disturber," announced Brother Burbeck over his shoulder, while he dealt a vicious blow, as if the head of the nail were instead the head of the malefactor.

"And who was the disturber?" queried John. "A man of bad character, I suppose."

"No, you couldn't call him that, could you, Brother Burbeck?" ventured the District Evangelist. "Just a young man from the Seminary, with his head overflowing with undigested facts."

"Near facts, they was--_only_," interjected Brother Burbeck sententiously, as he held another nail between a hard thumb and a knotted finger, and tapped the head gently to start it.

"Rather undermining the faith of the people in the old Gospel," went on the Evangelist.

"Takin' away what he couldn't never put back," amended Brother Burbeck, between blows, and then added accusingly: "He had no respect for the Elders, not a bit."

Brother Burbeck's tones, as he contributed this additional detail, were as sharp as his blows.

"You were one of the Elders?" inquired John, in an even voice that might have been construed to mean respect for the eldership.

"I am one of 'em," corrected the driver of nails. "I preached the old Jerusalem Gospel myself for twenty years," he affirmed proudly, "until my health failed, and I went into undertaking."

"You appear to have got your health back," observed John dryly, noting marks of the hammer upon the plank where the nail heads had been beaten almost out of sight by his slashing blows.

"Yep," admitted that gentleman, just as dryly.

Looking at Elder Burbeck's large head, with its iron-gray hair, at the silk hat, which stuck perilously, but persistently, to the back of it; noticing the folds of oily flesh on his bullock neck, the working of his broad, fat shoulders, and the sweat standing out on his heavy jowls, as if protesting mutely this unusual activity discharged with such vehemence, John made up his mind that he could never like Elder Burbeck. In his heart he took the part of the disturber.

"You know what this reminds me of, somehow?" he asked, with just a minor note of accusation in his tone.

"Not being a mind reader, I don't," replied Elder Burbeck, turning on John a look which showed as plainly as his speech that in the same interval of time when John was deciding he didn't like Burbeck, Burbeck was deciding he didn't like John. "What does it?" and the Elder-undertaker stared fiercely at the book agent.

"Nailing Jesus to the Cross," replied John, shooting a glance at Burbeck that was hard and beamlike.

"Hey!" exclaimed Burbeck, his red face reddening more.

"But," explained the Secretary, interjecting himself anxiously, as a man not too proud of his duty that day, "it is in the interests of peace. We expect to give time a chance to heal the wounds. In six months the disturbing element will have gone away or given up, and then we can open the doors to peace and the old faith."

"Oh, I see," said John, as instinctively liking the Missionary Secretary as he instinctively disliked Brother Burbeck, "it is a movement in behalf of the _status quo_?"

"Yes," replied the Secretary, smiling faintly, as he noticed the shaft of humor in John's eye.

"And Brother Burbeck?" John twitched his chin in the direction of the tipsy silk hat and the vehemently swinging hammer. "He is the apostle of the _status quo_?"

"Yes," assented the Missionary, smiling yet more faintly, after which he countered with: "Are you a Christian, my brother?"

"I was a Deacon in the First Church, Los Angeles," answered John, "but I've been traveling round for a year or so. Hampstead's my name."

The Secretary's face lighted with unexpected pleasure.

"How do you do, Brother Hampstead," he exclaimed, putting out his hand quickly. "My name's Harding."

"Glad to meet you, Brother Harding," said John; "I've seen your name in the church papers."

"Brother Burbeck, this is Brother Hampstead, of the First Church, Los Angeles," announced Harding, when that gentleman, having driven his last nail and smashed the plank a parting blow with his hammer, turned to them again.

Elder Burbeck's manner instantly changed. "Oh, one of our brethren, eh, Hampstead? Why, say, I remember hearing you talk one night down there in Christian Endeavor when I was down at the Undertakers' Convention. They told me you were going on the stage. That's how I remember you so well, I guess."

"I got over that nonsense," said John easily. "Sorry to hear you've been having trouble in your little church."

"It's been a mighty sad case," sighed the Elder, heaving his ponderous bosom and mopping his red brow and scalp, for the removal of his hat revealed that his iron-gray hair was only a fringe.

"By the way," asked John, who was contemplating the bulletin board, "what about the Sunday school? I see it's down for nine forty-five."

"Dwindled to a handful of children," declared Burbeck, as if a handful of children was something entirely negligible.

John had a reason for feeling especially tender where the feelings of children were concerned.

"But they'll come next Sunday, and they'll be terribly disappointed," he urged. "It will shake their faith in God himself. They won't understand at all, will they?"

"I reckon they will when they see the church nailed up," answered Burbeck grimly, quite too triumphant over spiking an enemy's guns to consider the mystified, wondering soul of childhood as it might stand before that nailed door four mornings forward from this, for the day of the crucifixion of the door was Wednesday.

Their task completed, the Elder and the Evangelist were turning toward the street. "Good-by, Brother," said Harding, again shaking hands.

"Oh, good-by, Brother Hampstead," exclaimed Burbeck, turning as if he had forgotten something, and offering his stout, once sinewy palm.

John gave it a grip that shook the huge frame of Elder Burbeck, and made him feel, as he seldom felt about any man, that here was a personality and a physical force at least as vigorous as his own.

"Good-by, Brother Burbeck," John responded, with an open smile; and then while the two men took themselves down the street in the direction of the car line, the book-agent went back and sat contemplatively in the park.

It was a marvelously pleasant day. A few fleecy clouds were drifting overhead, revealing patches of the unrivaled blue of California's sky above them. The sun shone warmly when the clouds were not in the way, and when they were, the lazy breeze made its breath seem cooler and more bracing, as if to compensate for the absence. Down the street two or three blocks Hampstead could see the Bay waters dancing in the sunlight. The cottages on both sides of the park were embowered with vines, roses mostly, white roses and red, with here and there a giant bougainvillea, some of its lavender, clusterlike flowers abloom, and some of them still sealed in their transparent pods that looked like envelopes of isinglass.

High in the blue an occasional pigeon circled; off to the left a kite appeared, sailing high, and bounding vigorously when the upper air currents freshened.

On John's own level, the world was faring onward very happily.

About every cottage there was an air of nature's cheer and a suggestion of blooming activity. Only the little church looked hopeless and abandoned of men, the letters of its name staring out big-eyed and lonely from above the glass transom, while the plank of the _status quo_, nailed rudely across its front, was a brutal advertisement of its dishonored state.

"Some day," mused John, "I think I'll build a church, and I believe I'll build it to look like a cottage, with roses round it and bougainvilleas and palms, with broad verandas, inviting lawns, and bowering vines. I'll make it the most homey looking place in the whole neighborhood, with a rustic sign stuck up somewhere that says 'The Home of God', or something like that."

Still musing, the scornful words spoken to John by Scofield more than a year ago on the steps of the Pacific Union Club, came idling into his mind: "Remember! You're not an actor! You're a preacher." He smiled as he recalled Scofield's irritation at the idea, and his own. How ridiculously impossible it had seemed then and seemed to-day! And it was still so irritating as to stir him into getting up and walking away from the little chapel in the direction of the street car. Yet his mind reverted to the closed door.

"Won't they be disappointed, though? Those children!"

At the corner he turned and looked back as if to make sure. Yes, there was the weather-worn streak upon the door, at that reckless angle which proclaimed the mood of the man who placed it there.

"And they nailed up God!" Hampstead commented grimly, swinging upon his car.

That afternoon at five o'clock he left for Los Angeles.

*CHAPTER XVII*

*WHEN DREAMS COME TRUE*

It was three o'clock on Thursday afternoon, and John was sitting happily in the Mitchell living-room in Los Angeles, waiting for Bessie to come from school. Mrs. Mitchell stood on the threshold, dressed for the street save for her gloves, at one of which she was tugging.

"I have always felt, Mr. Hampstead, that you were a very good influence for Bessie," she was saying guilefully, "and I do wish you would talk her out of that university idea. She graduates from High in June, you know; and she talks nothing, thinks nothing, dreams nothing but university, university, uni-v-e-r-s-i-t-y!" Mrs. Mitchell's elocutionary climax was calculated to convey a very fine impression of utter weariness with the word and with the idea; but John, who had flushed with gratification at the crafty compliment, would not be swerved by either guile or scorn from an instinctive loyalty to Bessie and her ideals.

"I'm afraid I couldn't do that," he said soberly. "My heart wouldn't be in it. Bessie has a wonderful mind. You should give her every advantage."

"Well, talk her out of Stanford, then," compromised Mrs. Mitchell, as if in her mind she had already surrendered, as she knew she must. "She's determined to go there. Stanford is a kind of man's school, from what I hear. Lots of the Phrosos are going to U.C."

"But if I rather favor Stanford myself?" suggested Hampstead, feeling his way carefully.

The front door opened and closed, and John's heart leaped at the sound of a light footstep in the hall. As if hearing voices, the owner of the footsteps turned them towards the living room.

Book strap in hand, wearing a white shirt waist and skirt of blue, with the brown crinkly hair breaking out from under a small straw hat worn jauntily askew, Bessie paused upon the threshold, her eyes a-sparkle with expectancy.

"John!" she exclaimed, with a little shriek of joy. "You--you old dear!" and she came literally bounding across the room to greet him as he rose and advanced eagerly.

Hampstead thought he had never seen such a glowing picture of animal health and exuberance of life.

"Well!" exclaimed Mrs. Mitchell, addressing her daughter with chiding in her tones. "Why don't you throw your arms around him and be done with it?"

Bessie blushed, but John covered her confusion by exclaiming:

"I almost did that myself, Mrs. Mitchell, I was so glad to see her!" Whereupon he laughed hilariously, it was such a good joke; and Bessie laughed, turning her face well away from her mother, while Mrs. Mitchell laughed most heartily of all at the thought of John Hampstead putting his arms around any woman, except, of course, as he might have done in the practice of his late profession.

"And now," declared Mrs. Mitchell, as she managed the last button of her glove, "I must abandon you to yourselves; but don't sit here paying compliments. Get out into the air somewhere."

"Oh, let's," assented Bessie, with animation. "Only wait till I change my hat!"

"Don't," pleaded John. "I like that one."

"But I have another you'll like better," called Bessie over her shoulder, for already she was racing out of the room past her mother.

"Good-by. Have a good time!" Mrs. Mitchell lifted her voice toward her daughter racing up the stairs, and then turning, waved her ridiculous folding sunshade at John as she adjured: "Give her your very best advice!"

"Never doubt it," echoed John, with the sudden feeling of a man who is left alone in a house to guard great riches.

"How do you like it?"

Bessie had taken a whole half-hour to change her hat, but her dress had been changed as well, to something white and filmy that reached below the shoe-tops and by those few inches of extra length added a surprising look of maturity to the pliant youthfulness of her figure. This was heightened by a surplice effect in the bodice forming a V, which accentuated the rounded fullness of the bosom and gave a hint of the charm and power of a most bewitching woman, ripening swiftly underneath the artless beauty of the girl.

"Wonderful!" John exclaimed rapturously, rising as she entered.

Bessie's mood was lightly happy. His was deeply reverent, and there was a world of devotion and tenderness in the look he gave her, which thrilled through the girl like an ecstasy.

All the past was coming up to John's mind, all the long past of their friendship with its gradual ripening into normal, all-comprehending love, but still he was searching her uplifted face as if for a final confirmation of the oneness of the vision of his love with this materialization of youth and woman mingling; for he must make no mistake this time.

Yes, the confirmation was complete. It was the true face of his dream. In it was everything which he had hoped to find there. Marien Dounay had made woman mean more to him than woman had ever meant before. But here in the upturned, trusting face of Bessie, with its sparkle in the eyes and its sunny witchery in the dimples, there was something infinitely richer and more satisfying than experience or imagination had been able to suggest.

Here, he told himself reverently, was every blessing that God had compounded for the happiness of man. And it was his,--modestly, trustfully his. Every detail of her expression and her beauty, every subtly playing current of her personality, made him know it. He had but to declare himself and reach out and take her like a lover.

But, strangely, he could do neither. An awe was on him. He felt like falling down upon his knees and thanking God, but not like taking her; not like touching her even, though he could not resist that when Bessie extended frankly both her hands, quite in the old manner of cordial, happy comradeship. John took them in his, and as she returned his touch with the warm frank clasp that was characteristic of her hearty nature, he got anew the sense of the woman in her. It swept over him like an intoxication that was rare and wonderful, like no rapture he had ever known before--half-spiritual but half wholly human--therefore with something in it that frightened him.

"Bessie," he asked, abruptly, "could we get away from here quickly--in a very few minutes--away from men and houses and things?"

Bessie looked surprised. "Of course; we're going out, aren't we?"

"But quickly," urged John, "just a mad impulse, just a romantic impulse; the feeling that I want to get you out of doors. You are like a flower to me, just bursting into beautiful bloom. Better still, a wonderful fruit, which in some sheltered spot has grown unplucked to a rich tinted ripeness. You are so much a part of nature, so utterly unartificial, that it seems I must see you and enjoy you first in a setting of nature's own."

This was the frankest acknowledgment of her beauty and its appeal to him that John had ever made. It seemed to Bessie that he made it now rather unconsciously; but she saw that he felt it and was moved by it. To see this gave her another delicious thrill of happiness. Indeed her girlish breast was all a-tremble with joys, with curiosities, with expectancies. She, too, felt something wonderful and intoxicating in this slight physical contact of her lover's fingers. She felt herself upon the verge of new and mysterious discoveries and recognized the naturalness of the instinct to meet them under the vaulted blue with the warm sun shining and the tonic breezes blowing past.

"Your impulse is right, John," Bessie answered, with quick assent and an energetic double shake of the hands that held her own, and they went out into the sunny street.

Not far from the Mitchell residence, on the western hills of Los Angeles, is a little, painted park, with a maple-leaf sheet of water embanked by closely shaved terraces of green, and once or twice a clump of shrubbery crouching so close over graveled walks as to suggest the thrill of something wild. From one of these man-made thickets a toy promontory juts into the lake. Upon this point, as if it were a lighthouse, is a rustic house, octagonal in shape, with benches upon its inner circumference. Embowered at the back, screened half way on the sides, and with the open lake before, this snug structure affords a delicious sense of privacy and elfin-like seclusion, provided there be no oarsmen pulling lazily or tiny sailboat loafing across the watery foreground.

This day there was none. The stretch of lake in front stared vacantly. The birds twittered in the boughs behind, unguardedly. The perfume of jasmine or orange blossoms or honeysuckle or of love was wafted through the rustic lattices; and here John and Bessie, seated side by side, were able to feel themselves alone in the universe.

But it was so delightful just to have each other thus alone and know that at any moment the great words so long preparing might be spoken, that instinctively they postponed the blissful moment of avowal, with vagrant talk on widely scattered subjects. Indeed, it seemed to each that any word the other spoke was music, and anything was blissful that engaged their minds in mutual contemplation. But nearer and nearer to themselves the subjects of conversation drew until they talked of their careers.

John, they agreed, was going to be something big,--very, very big; though he still did not know what, and in the meantime he was going to make money, yet not for money's sake.

As for Bessie, she, too, had developed an ambition and surprised John into delightful little raptures with her statement of it.

"This country has been keeping bachelor's hall long enough," she dogmatized, placing one slim finger affirmatively in the center of one white palm. "Women are going to have more to do with government. Here in California we'll be voting in a few years. When it comes, John, I'm going to be ready for it."

The idea seemed so strange at first,--this dimpled creature voting,--that John could not repress a smile. But Bessie, her blue eyes round and sober, was too earnest to protest the smile.

"Father's going up the line; you know that, of course," she affirmed. "He'll be a big man and rich almost before we know it; but they're not going to make any social buzz-buzz out of little Bessie. That's why I'm aiming at Stanford. I'm going in for political economy. When woman's opportunity comes, there are lots of women that will be ready for it. I'm going to be one of them."

Bessie nodded her head so emphatically that some crinkly brown locks fell roguishly about her ears, and John was obliged to smile again; but for all that the big man was very proud of the purpose so seriously announced. Besides, with Bessie's manner more than her words there went an impression of the growing depth and dignity of her character that was to John as delightful as some other things his eyes were boldly busy in observing. But presently these busy observations and reflections kindled in him again an overwhelming sense of the wealth of woman in this aspiring, dimpled girl. With this went an exciting vision of the bliss which life holds in store for any mutually adapted man and woman where each is consumed with desire for the other.

"Bessie!" he broke out impulsively, arising quickly and looking down into her upturned, intent face. "Doesn't everything we've just been talking about seem unimportant?"

Bessie's features expressed wonder and delightful anticipation.

"Beside ourselves, I mean," John went on, and then added impetuously: "To me, this afternoon, there is just one fact in the universe, Bessie, and that fact is YOU!"

The light of a shining happiness kindled like a flash on the girl's face, and she threw out her hands to him in the old impulsive way.

"Just one thing I feel," John rushed along, seizing the outstretched hands and playfully but tenderly lifting her until she stood before him, "just one thing that I want to do in the world above everything else, and that is to love you, Bessie, to love you!"

The words as he breathed them seemed to come up out of the deeps of a nature rich in knowledge of what such love could mean.

Bessie, her face enraptured, did not speak, but her dimples behaved skittishly, and there was a sharp little catch of her breath.

"Just one ambition stands out above every other," continued the man with a noble earnestness--"the ambition to make you happy--to protect you, to worship you, and to help you do the things you want to do in the world. For marriage isn't a selfish thing! It doesn't mean the extinction of a woman's career in order that a man may have his. It is the surrender of each to the other for the greater happiness and the higher power of both."

Suddenly a choke came in the big man's voice.

"That's what I feel, my dear girl," he concluded abruptly, with an excess of reverence in his tones, "and that's what I want to do!"

As he spoke, John had lifted her hands higher and higher till one rested on each of his shoulders. Man and woman, they looked straight into each other's eyes, as they had that day upon the cliff, but this time it was his lip that quivered and his eyes that misted over.

Bessie, sobered for a moment almost to a sense of unworthiness, as she felt all at once what it meant for a great-hearted man to so declare himself to a woman, saw something in that growing mist which impelled her to immediately reward the tenderness of such devotion with a frank confession of her own.

"Well," she breathed naively, "you have my permission to do all those things. I'm sure, John, the biggest fact, the biggest love, the biggest career in the world for me is just you!"

Bessie accompanied the words with an ecstatic little shrug of the shoulders and a self-abandoning toss of the head.

Reverently John pressed his lips upon hers and held her close for a very, very long time; while a thrill of indescribable bliss surged over and engulfed him. His embrace was gentle, even reverent; but it seemed he could not let her out of his arms. Here at last was one treasure he could never surrender; one renunciation he could never make.

"And to think," sighed Bessie, after a long and blissful silence, finding such rapture in nestling in those strong arms that she was still unwilling to lift her head from where she could feel the beating of his happy heart, "to think how long we have loved each other without expressing it; how loyal we have been to each other's love even before we had grown to recognize it for what it truly was."

Bessie looked up suddenly. It seemed to her that John's heart had done a funny thing; that it staggered and missed a beat.

But John ignored her look. His face was set and stubborn. He changed his position slightly and gathered her yet more determinedly in his arms, so that Bessie felt again how strong he was, and how much it means to woman's life to add a strength like that.

"Do you know, John," she prattled presently, out of the deepening bliss which this enormous sense of security inspired, "do you know that I used to fear for you? For me rather! To fear," she exclaimed with a happily apologetic little laugh, "that you might fall in love with Marien Dounay!"

But the laugh ended in a choke of surprise, when Bessie felt the body of the big man shiver like a tree in a blast.

"Why? Why? What is the matter, John?" she asked in helpless bewilderment, for the odd face with a profile like a mountain had taken on a look of pain, and while she questioned him, he put her from him and with a low groan sank down upon the bench.

* * * * *

The little summer house was still undisturbed by the rude, annoying outer world; but its atmosphere had subtly changed. A chill wind blew through the shrubbery and the fragrance of bush and flower was gone. Even the sun, as if he could not bear to look, had dropped behind the hill; for something had edged between the lovers.

Bessie's artless words made John remember as very, very near, what, during this delicious hour in her presence, had seemed to be worlds and worlds behind him, in fact made him feel his shame and guilt so deeply that he could no longer hold her in his arms. Then the story of his infatuation for Marien Dounay came out, as he had always felt it must, sometime, for the purging of his own soul, even if it were she who would suffer most,--the old, old law of vicarious suffering again!

Bessie listened with white, set face, while John resolutely spared himself nothing in the telling, but when the look of hurt and pain took up its abode permanently in those mild blue eyes, a feeling of yet more terrible misgiving overtook him and he would have checked the story if he could. But once started, his natural shrinking from hypocrisy compelled him to tell the truth.

"You can never know how I have reproached myself for it," he concluded. "I have suffered agonies of remorse. Wild with love of you, and the impulse to declare that love, I have stayed away six months. It seemed to me at first that I could hardly get my own consent to come at all from her to you; that I must doom myself to perpetual loneliness to expiate my sin. And yet, Bessie," John made the mistake of trying to extenuate, "it was probably not altogether unnatural, knowing man as I begin to know him."

To the young girl, facing the first bitter disillusionment of love, it came like a flash of intuition that this last was true; that men were like that--all men! They were mere brutes! This intuition maddened the girl, and her disturbed emotions expressed themselves in a burst of flaming anger.

"You may go back to Marien Dounay," she exclaimed hotly. "I do not want her left-overs."

"But," protested John, with something of that sense of injury which a man is apt to feel if forgiveness does not follow soon upon confession, "you do not understand!"

"I understand," retorted Bessie with blazing sarcasm, "that you fell hopelessly in love with this woman; that you embraced her, kissed her, worshipped the ground she trod on; that you proposed to marry her almost upon the spot; that she refused you and drove you from her; that for a month you wrote me letters of hypocritical pretense; that when she finally not only repulsed you but revealed herself to you as a woman without character, you considerately revived your affections for me."

John felt that in this storm of words some injustice was being done him; yet he could not deny that such an outburst of wrath upon Bessie's part was natural, and he humbled himself before the blast.

In the vehemence of her demonstration, Bessie had arisen, and after the final word stood with her back to her lover, looking out upon the little lake which suddenly seemed a frozen sheet of ice.

"Bessie!" John murmured huskily, after an interval.

"Don't speak to me, don't!" she commanded hoarsely, without turning her head.

John obeyed her so humbly and so completely that she began to wonder if he were still there, or if he had sunk through the ground in the shame and mortification which she knew well enough possessed him.

When she had wondered long enough, she turned and found him not only there but in a pose so abject and utterly remorseful that her heart softened until she felt the need of self-justification.

"You were my god," she urged. "You inspired me! I worshipped you! I thought you were as fine a man as my own father--and finer because you had a finer ambition. I thought you were grand, noble, strong!" Bessie stopped with her emphasis heavy upon the final word.

"Is not the strong man the one who has found in what his weakness lies?" John pleaded humbly.

But as before, his attempt at palliation seemed to anger her unaccountably, and she turned away again with feelings too intense for utterance--with, in fact, a dismal sense of the futility of utterance. She wanted to get away from John. She wished he would not stand there barring the door. She wished he would go while her back was turned. A sense of humiliation greater than had possessed him, she was sure, had come over her. If the lake in front had been sixty feet deep instead of six inches, she might have flung herself into it.

"But you love me!" pleaded John from behind her, his voice coming up out of depths.

"Do you think I would care how many actresses you lost your dizzy head over if I didn't?" retorted Bessie petulantly, and instantly would have given several worlds to recall the speech.

"No! No!" she continued, stamping her foot angrily, "I don't love you, I love the man I thought you were."

"All the same, I love you," groaned John, rising up to proclaim his passion hoarsely and then flinging himself again upon the bench, where with head hanging despondently, he continued: "I love you, and I don't blame you for hating me, and you can punish me as long as you want and in any way you want. You can even try to fall in love with some one else if you like. Marry him if you want to. I love you, and I'll keep on loving you. No punishment is too great for the thing I've done."

The effect of this speech on the outraged Bessie was rather alarming to that indignant young lady. When John began to heap the reproaches higher upon himself, she felt a return to sympathetic consideration for him that was so great she dared not trust herself to hear more of them.

"Take me home!" she commanded hurriedly, walking swiftly by him, but with scrupulous care that the swish of her white skirts should not touch the bowed head as she passed, and no more trusting herself to a second glance at that dejected tawny mop of hair than to hear more of his self-indictment.

*CHAPTER XVIII*

*THE HOUSE DIVIDED*

After parting from Bessie at her father's door, John spent twenty-four hours in dumb agony at his hotel, devoting much time to uncounted attempts to frame a letter to her. But the one which finally went by the hands of a messenger was a mere cry that broke out of his heart. All it brought back was an answering cry,--four pages with impetuous words rioting over them. There were splotches of ink where the pen had been urged too recklessly, and as John held it up to the electric light, he tried to imagine there were watery stains upon it.

That night Hampstead left Los Angeles for San Francisco and spent an aimless Saturday brooding upon the ocean beach, needing no sight of the jutting Cliff House rocks upon which his lips had first touched Bessie's to embitter his reflections. Sunday morning, however, as early as nine o'clock, found him threading the graveled paths of the little park in Encina, and taking his place upon the rustic bench across from the dingy chapel. The cleat remained on the door. God was still nailed up!

John could not help thinking that he, too, was rather nailed up. Drawing Bessie's last letter from his pocket, he held it very tenderly for a time in his hand, then opened it to the final paragraph, which his eyes read dimly through a mist that overspread his vision like a curtain of fog.