Chapter VIII: Part 8

The lady accepted a sitting well to the front. Her head was reverently bowed for an interval and then raised, while the black eyes darted one illuminative glance of recognition at the man in the pulpit, a glance that made the minister start again and confess to himself an error by admitting beneath his breath: "No, not more beautiful--more powerful!"

Lengthened scrutiny confirmed this judgment. Soft contours had yielded, though ever so slightly, to lines of strength. There was greater majesty in her bearing. She was less appealing, but more commanding. John reflected that it was rather impossible it should be otherwise. The man or the woman who fights and conquers always sacrifices lines of beauty to those muscle clamps of strength which seem to sleep but ill-concealed upon the face.

And Marien Dounay had conquered! In five years she had mounted to the top. With the memory of her latest Broadway triumphs still ringing, this very day her name would be mentioned in every dramatic column in every Sunday paper in America. To have uttered that name aloud in this congregation would have caused every neck to crane.

Alone conscious of her presence, John found himself counting the cost of her success. Part of that cost he could see tabulated on her face. Another part of it was the grisly and horrible intimation to the loathsome Litschi, which he had overheard on the unforgetable night in the restaurant. He found himself assuming that she had paid this latter price and experienced a feeling of revulsion at recalling how once this woman's mere presence, the glance of an eye, the touch of a hand, the purring tones of her voice, had been sufficient to melt him with unutterable emotions. This morning, gazing at her through that peculiar mist of apprehension, almost of fear, that had been clouding his mind since before her entry, John knew that she was a more dangerous woman now than then; and yet the same glance showed that she was not dangerous to him, for the dark eyes looked at him hungrily, with something strangely like adoration in them, and there was an expression of longing upon the beautiful face.

When he stood up to preach, she followed his every movement and appeared to drink down his utterance thirstily. Skilled now in spiritual diagnosis, the minister of All People's read her swiftly. She had gained--but she had not gained all. Something was still desired, and, he could not help but believe, desired of him. Having coldly driven him from her with a terrible kind of violence, she had come back humbly, almost beseechingly.

So marked was this suggestion of intense longing that the feeling of horror and revulsion which had come to Hampstead with the entry of the actress gave way entirely to an emotion of pity and a desire to help, and he tried earnestly to make his sermon in some degree a message to the woman's heart.

The position of the Reverend John Hampstead in All People's Church and in the community round about was due to no miracle, but had grown naturally enough out of the strong heart of the man and his experiences.

When, for instance, in the early days at the chapel, John missed the Pedersen children from the Sunday school, and found their mother in tears at home because the children had no shoes, and that they had no shoes because Olaf gambled away his weekly wage in "Beaney" Webster's pool room where race-track bets were made, and poker and other gambling games were played, all in defiance of law,--and when he found the police supine and prosecutors indifferent,--the practical minded young divine sent Deacon Mullin--who, to his frequent discomfiture resembled a "tin can" sport more than a church official--into Beaney's to bet upon a horse. When the Deacon's horse won, and Beaney all unsuspecting paid the winnings over in a sealed envelope, the next Sunday night John took the envelope into the pulpit and shook it till it jingled as he told the story which next morning the newspapers printed widely, while the minister himself was swearing out a warrant for the arrest of Beaney.

That was the beginning, but to John's surprise it was not the end. Beaney did not plead guilty meekly. He fought and desperately, for this meddlesome amateur clergyman had lifted the cover on a sneaking underground system of petty gambling, of illicit liquor selling, and of graver violations of the moral laws, which ramified widely. Attacked in one part, all its members rallied to a defence of the whole that was impudent, determined and astonishingly powerful.

Hampstead was unknown, his church small and wretched and despised. His sole weapon was the newspapers who would not endorse him, but who would print what he said and what he did. What he said was not so much, but what John Hampstead did was presently considerable, for a few public-spirited citizens put money in his hand for detectives and special prosecutors, and he spent more hours that year in police courts than he did in his church.

In the end he won. The lawless element, sore and chastened, acknowledged their defeat, while the forces of good and evil alike recognized thus early the entry into the community of a man whose character and personality were henceforth to be reckoned with.

But while these battlings earned John publicity and high regard, they also won him hate and trouble. The work cost him tremendous expenditure of energy and sleepless nights. It made enemies of men whose friendship he desired. It brought him threats innumerable. A stick of dynamite was found beneath his study window. Yet John's devotion made him careless of personal danger. He trembled for Rose and Dick and Tayna; he trembled for the man who had crept through the shadow of the palms to plant that stick and time that fuse, which mercifully went out; but somehow he did not tremble for himself.

Besides, out of the shadow of danger, there seemed to reach sometimes the flexing muscles of an omnipotent arm. As, for instance, when an arrested gambler, out upon bail, came into his study one night with intent to kill. At first the minister was talking on the telephone, and some chivalric instinct restrained the would-be assassin from shooting his nemesis in the back.

Next John laughed at the preposterous idea of being killed, failing to understand that the threat was earnest or to perceive how much his caller was fired by liquor. Such merriment was unseemly to the man on murder bent; he found himself unable to shoot a bullet into the open mouth of laughter, and fumbled helplessly with his hand behind him and his tongue shamefacedly tied until the minister directed his mind aside with a question about his baby, following quickly with sympathetic talk about the man's wife and mother, until the spirit of vengeance went out of him, and he broke down and cried and went away meekly with a parting handshake from his intended victim.

It was only after the man had gone that John felt strangely weak with fright and bewildered by an odd sense of deliverance.

Yet all these battles were only a part of John's activities; nor did they grow out of a fighting spirit, but out of a sympathetic nature, out of his passion for the hurt and helpless, and his brave pity for the defenceless.

His impulsive boldness, his ready tact, and his disposition to follow an obligation or an opportunity through to the end, no matter where it led, had made him father confessor to men and women of every sort and the unofficial priest of a parish that extended widely on the surface and in the underworld of the life about him.

Naturally, All People's was extremely proud of its pastor, of his broad sympathies and his devoted activities. Impressionable ladies felt that there was something romantic in seeing him stand yonder in the pulpit, so grave and priestly; in seeing him come down at the end of the service, so approachable to all; and in taking his hand, not knowing whether some archcriminal had not wrung it an hour before he entered the pulpit, or whether last night those firm fingers might not have smoothed back the hair from the brow of some dying nameless woman in a place about which nice people could scarcely permit themselves to think.

There was even excitement in attending the church, because one never knew who would be sitting next,--some famous personage or some notorious one,--for Doctor Hampstead won his friends and admirers from the strangest sources imaginable.

As to pulpit eloquence, there was admittedly seldom a flash of it at All People's. By an enormous digestive feat, John had assimilated that seminary course of which the Dean had spoken, boasting that he read his Greek Testament entirely through in the three years, upon the street cars that plied between his home and the seat of theological learning. But this did not make of Hampstead a strong preacher, although the impression that he might be, if he chose, was unescapable. His passion, he declared, was not to preach the gospel but to _do_ the gospel. People sat before him spellbound, not by his eloquence, but by a sense of mysterious spiritual forces at work about them. At times, the mere exhalations of the man's sunny personality seemed sufficient to account for all his influence; at others there was that mysterious feeling of the Presence.

But as the membership grew and the sphere of its pastor's influence extended, there began to be less and less of his personality left for expenditure upon that "backbone of the church" which had been there longest and felt it first.

More than once Elder Burbeck took occasion to voice a protest over this. John put these protests aside mildly until one day, when the minister's nerves had been more than usually frazzled by a series of petty annoyances, the Elder blunderingly declared that the church paid the minister his salary and was entitled to have his services.

"Is that the way you look at it?" asked John sharply. "That you pay me my salary? Then don't ever put another coin in the contribution box. I thought you gave the money to God, and God gave it to me. I do not acknowledge to you or to any member of this church one single obligation except to be true in your or their soul's relation. I owe you neither obedience nor coddling nor back-smoothing."

"But you don't realize," urged the Elder. "These things were well enough when our church was small. But now it is big. It occupies a dignified position in the community, and all this riff-raff that you are running after--"

"Riff-raff!" John exploded. "Jesus gathered his disciples from the riff-raff! His message was to the riff-raff! He said: 'Leave the avenues and boulevards and go unto the riff-raff!' What is any church but riff-raff redeemed? What is any sanctimonious, self-satisfied Pharisee but a soul on the way to make riff-raff of himself again? What gave this church its dignified position in the community? Did you, when you nailed the plank across the door?"

Elder Burbeck flushed redder than ever and turned stiffly on his heel, not only inflamed by the crushing sarcasm of this rebuke, but stolidly accepting it as one more evidence that in his heart this minister of All People's was much more human and much less godlike than many gaping people seemed to think. Both the resentment and the inference the Elder stored up carefully against a day which he felt that he could see advancing, while the minister, too intent upon his work to scan the horizon for a cloud, hurried away upon another of his errands to the riff-raff.

With this fanatic ardor of personal service now highly developed, it was inevitable that the appeal in the eyes of Marien Dounay should act like a challenge upon the chivalrous nature of John Hampstead.

*CHAPTER XXI*

*A CRY OF DISTRESS*

At the close of the service, Doctor Hampstead moved freely and affectionately among his people, according to his habit. To the Angel of the Chair, who during all these five years had been his spiritual intimate and practical counselor, until in his regard she stood frankly canonized, went the last hearty handclasp, after which the minister hurried to where the actress still waited in her pew. Save for a dapple-whiskered janitor tactfully busy in the far-off loft of the choir, the two were alone in the large auditorium.

"Miss Dounay," John began in sincere tones, extending his hand cordially, "I congratulate you heartily on the splendid success that you have won."

He felt a sense of real triumph in his heart, that after what had passed between them he was able to greet her like this in all sincerity, although she had helped greatly by receiving him with that odd look of worshipfulness which he had discerned from the distance of the pulpit.

"Thank you, but please do not congratulate me," the actress exclaimed quickly, while a look of pain came undisguised into her eyes, and with a mere shrug of those expressive shoulders she hurled aside all pretense at formal amenities. "Oh, Doctor Hampstead," she began, breathing his name in tones of respect that deepened into reverence, and frankly confessing herself a woman in acute distress by adding impulsively:

"I have gained everything we once talked about, and yet I believe I am the unhappiest woman in the world."

There was almost a sob in her voice as she uttered the words, and the minister looked at her intently, with his face more gravely sympathetic than usual.

"I am trying to revive something," she hurried on, as if there was relief in thus hastily declaring herself, "trying to get back something. You alone can help me. My happiness, my very life, it seems to me, depends upon you. Will you come to see me this afternoon at the Hotel St. Albans, say at four?"

"I should like to," responded the minister frankly, his desire to help her growing rapidly; "but I have a funeral this afternoon."

"Then to-night," the actress urged, "after your sermon is done?"

As if anxious to forestall refusal, she gave him no chance to reply, but continued with some display of her old vivacity of spirit: "We will have a supper, as we did that night you came in after the play. Julie is still with me, and another maid, and a secretary, and sometimes my 'personal representative.' Oh, I have quite a retinue now! Do say you will come, even though it is an unseemly hour for a ministerial call," she pleaded, and again her eyes were eloquent.

But it was not the hour that made John hesitate. He felt himself immune from charges of indiscretion. He knew that despite his youthful thirty years, he seemed ages older than the oldest of his congregation, a man removed from every possibility of error; one whose simple, open life of day-by-day devotion to the good of all who sought him seemed in itself a sufficient armor-proof against mischance.

He came and went, in the upper and in the underworld, almost as he would; saw whom he would and where he would. Jails, theaters, hotels, questionable side entrances, boulevards and alleys were accustomed to the sight of his comings and goings. If the stalwart figure of the man loomed at midnight in a dance hall on the Barbary Coast of San Francisco or in the darkest alleys of an Oakland water-front saloon, his presence was remarked, but his purpose was never doubted. He was there for the good of some one, to save some girl, to haul back some mother's boy, to fight side by side with some man against his besetting sin, whether it be wine or woman, or the gaming table. Therefore he could go to call on Marien Dounay at ten o'clock at night at the Hotel St. Albans as freely as on a brother minister at noon.

What had made him suddenly withhold his acceptance of the invitation was the entry of something of the old lightness of spirit into her tones for a moment, accompanied by the suggestion of a supper. He knew enough of the whimsical obliquities of Marien Dounay's nature to appreciate that he must meet her socially in order to minister to her spiritually; but he did not propose that the solemn purposes of his call should be made an opportunity for entertainment or personal display.

However, Marien had instantly divined her mistake. "Doctor Hampstead!" she began afresh, and this time her voice was low and her utterance rapid. "My season closed in New York last Saturday night. I was compelled to wait over three days to sign the contract for my London engagement. The moment that was out of the way, I rushed entirely across this country to see you! I arrived this morning. I came here at once. Oh, I must talk to you immediately and disabuse your mind of something--something terrible that I have waited five years to wipe out."

She clasped her hands nervously, and her luminous eyes grew misty, while she seemed in danger of losing her composure entirely, an unheard-of thing for Marien Dounay.

Her imploring looks and the impetuous earnestness of her appeal were already leading John to self-reproach for the sudden hardening of his judgment upon her; but it was the last sentence that decided him. He knew well enough what she meant, and something in him deeper than the minister leaped at it. If she could wipe out that grisly memory, the earliest opportunity was due her, and it would relieve him exactly as if a smirch had been wiped from the brow of womanhood itself. Besides, there had always been to him something puzzling and incomprehensible about that scene in the restaurant, which, as the years went by, was more and more like a horrible dream than an actual experience.

"I will come, Miss Dounay," he assured her gravely.

"Oh, I am so glad!" the woman exclaimed with a little outstretching of her hand, which would have fallen upon John's on the back of the pew, if it had not been raised at the moment in a gesture of negation as he said:

"But please omit the supper. I am coming at your call--eagerly--happily--but not even as an old friend; solely as a minister!"

This speech was so subtly modulated as to make its meaning clear, without the shadow of offense, and Marien's humbly grateful manner of receiving it indicated tacit acknowledgment of the exact nature of the visit.

Nevertheless, the minister found that in thus specifying he had written for himself a prescription larger than he could fill. Between the whiles of his busy afternoon and evening he was conscious of growing feelings of curiosity and personal interest that threatened to engulf the loftier object of his intended call. Old memories would revive themselves; old emotions would surge again. The spirit of adventure and the spice of expectancy thrust themselves into his thought, so that it was with a half-guilty feeling that he found himself at the hour appointed in the hotel corridor outside her room. He was minded to go back, but stood still instead, reproaching himself for cowardice. His very uncertainty gave him a feeling of littleness.

Eternal Loyalty was still and forever to be his guiding principle; and should he not be as true to this actress who had appealed to, him, who perhaps was to tell him something that would prove she had a right to appeal to him, as to any other needy one? Should he shrink because of the irresistible feeling that it was more as a man interested in a woman than as a priest to confess a soul, that he found himself before her door? Should all of his experience go for nothing, and was his character, strengthened by years and chastened by some bitter lessons, still so undependable that he dared not put himself to the test of this woman, even though her mysterious power was so great that she could command a man's love and deserve his hate, yet send him away from her without a hurt and feeling admiration mingled with his horror!

For a man with John Hampstead's chivalrous nature to put a question like this to himself was to answer it in the affirmative. Temptation comes to the minister as to other men, and it had come to John. But had not Marien Dounay herself taught him of what weakness to beware? That flesh is flesh? That juxtaposition is danger? Besides, should not the disastrous consequences which had followed from his contacts with the woman have made him forever immune from the effect of her presence?

John approached and knocked upon the door.

His knock was greeted with a sound like the purr of an expectant kitten, and the knob was turned by Marien herself, with a sudden vigor which indicated that she had bounded instantly to admit him.

Her manner, in most startling contrast to that which she had displayed at the church, was sparklingly vivacious; but her dress was more disconcerting than her manner; in fact, to the minister, it seemed that very same negligee gown whose pleats of shimmering black with their splotches of red, had clung so closely to her form in those never-to-be-forgotten hours in the little apartment on Turk Street in San Francisco. Her hair, too, flowed unconfined as then. The picture called up overwhelming memories, against which the minister in the man struggled valiantly.

"I have not worn it since, until to-night," the woman purred softly, happy as a child over his glance of recognition; but when Hampstead, in uncompromising silence, stood surveying her critically, she asked archly and a bit anxiously, "Are you shocked?"

"Well," he replied a trifle severely, "you must admit that this is not sackcloth and ashes."

"It is my soul, not my body, that is in mourning," Marien urged apologetically, trying the effect of a melting glance, after which, walking half the length of the room she turned again and invited him to lay off his overcoat and be seated. John could not resist the playful calculation of her manner without seeming heartless; and yet he did resist it, standing noncommittally while his eyes sought the circumference of the room inquiringly.

"And look!" went on Marien enthusiastically, for she was trying pitifully by sheer force of personality to recreate the atmosphere of their old relationship in its happiest moments. "See, here is the Roman chair, or at least one like it; and there the divan, piled high with cushions; I am as fond of cushions as ever. You shall sit where you sat; I shall recline where I reclined. We will stage the old scene again."

"Not the old scene," replied the minister, with quiet emphasis, feeling just a little as if he had been trapped.

Still his strength was always sapped on Sunday night; and no doubt in utter weariness, one's power of resistance is somewhat lowered. Besides, Marien was so beautiful and so winning in manner; her arms gleamed so softly in their circle of silk and filmy lace, and there was in the atmosphere of the room an abundance of an indefinable something which was like a rare perfume and yet was not a perfume at all, but that effect of lure and challenge which her mere presence always had upon the senses of this man.

Moreover, it seemed so fitting to see this exquisite creature happy instead of sad that it would have taken a coarser nature than John Hampstead's to break in brutally upon her whimsical happiness of mood. He judged it therefore the mere part of tact to remove his overcoat.

"Julie!" called Marien, and there was a not entirely suppressed note of triumph in her tone.

The little French maid appeared with suspicious promptness from behind swinging portieres to receive the coat and to give the big man, whom she had always liked, shy welcome upon her own account.

True to her nature, Miss Dounay's every movement was theatric. She stood complacently by until the maid had done her service and withdrawn. Then pointing to the Roman chair, she said to Hampstead:

"Sit there and wait. I have something to show you, something beautiful--wonderful--overwhelming almost!"

Hesitating only long enough to see that the minister, although a bit suspicious, complied politely with her request, Marien, with dramatic directness, and humming the while a teasing little tune, followed Julie out through the portieres, but in passing swung the curtains wide as an invitation to her caller's eyes to pursue her to where she stopped before a chiffonier which was turned obliquely across the corner of the large inner room.

Marien's shoulder was toward John, but the mirror beyond framed her face exquisitely, with its hood of flowing hair and the expansive whiteness of her bosom to the corsage, while the long dark lashes painted a feathery shadow upon her cheeks as her eyes looked downward to something before her on the chiffonier. For a moment she stood motionless, as if charmed by the sight on which their glance rested. Then, using both hands, she lifted the object, and instantly the mirror flashed to the watching man the picture of a swaying rope of diamonds. They seemed to him an aurora-borealis of jewels, sparkling more brilliantly than the light of Marien's eyes, as she held them before her face for an instant, and then, with a graceful movement which magnified the beauty of her rounded arms and the smoothly-chiseled column of her throat, threw back the close-lying strands of her hair to fasten the chain behind her neck.

For another second the mirror showed her patting her bosom complacently, as if her white fingers were loving the diamonds into the form of a perfect crescent, which, presently attained, she surveyed with evident satisfaction. Turning, she advanced toward her guest with hands at first uplifted and then clasped before her in an ecstasy of delight, while she laughed musically, like a child intoxicated by the joy of some long anticipated pleasure.

Upon a man whose love of beauty was as great as John Hampstead's, the effect was shrewdly calculated and the result all that heaven had intended.

"Wonderful!" he exclaimed, leaping up to meet her as she advanced. "Splendid! Magnificent!"

Each adjective was more emphatically uttered than the last.

Satisfied beyond measure with the effect of her diversion, the calculating woman drew close with a complete return of all her old assurance and stood like a radiant statue, a happy flush heightening on her cheeks, while the minister, entirely unabashed, feasted his eyes frankly on the beauty of the jewels and the snowy softness of their setting. When, after a moment, Marien made use of his hand as a support on which to pivot gracefully about and let herself down with dainty elegance into the midst of her throne of cushions, Hampstead stood, a little lost, gazing downward at the vision as though spellbound by its loveliness.

For a moment the actress was supremely confident. Breathing softly, her dark eyes swimming like pools of liquid light, into which her long lashes cast a fringe of foliate shadows, she contemplated John Hampstead, tall, strong, clean, healthful looking, his yellow hair, his high-arched viking brows, the look of kindliness and the cast of nobility into which the years had moulded his features, until it seemed to her that she must spring up and drag him down to her lair of cushions like a prize.

But she made no impulsive move. Instead, she breathed softly: "Doctor Hampstead, will you touch that button, please?"

John complied courteously, but mechanically, as if charmed. The more brilliant lights in the room were instantly extinguished. What remained flowed from the shrouding red silk of the table lamp so softly that while all objects in the room remained clearly distinguishable even to their detail, there was not a garish beam anywhere.

It was a fitting atmosphere for confession, and even the diamonds in this smothered light seemed suddenly to grow communicative, to multiply their luster, and to break more readily into the prismatic elements of color.

"More and more beautiful," Hampstead murmured, passing a hand across his brow.

"Sit down!" Marien breathed softly, motioning toward the Roman chair.

Hampstead was surprised to find how near the divan the inanimate chair appeared to have removed itself. Had he pushed it absently with his leg, as he made place for her, or had she, or had the thing itself--insensate wood and leather and plush--felt, too, the irresistible thrall of this magnetic, beauty-dowered creature who snuggled amid these silken panniers?

"I do not know diamonds very well," the minister confessed, sinking down into the chair.

"Look at them," Marien said, with a delightful note of intimacy in her voice, at the same time lowering her chin close, in order to survey the jewels as they lay upon her breast.

In John's eyes, this downcast glance gave Marien an expression that was Madonna-like and holy, and this again deepened his feeling of pity for her heartaches, and his anxiety to help her in what it was her whim to mask from him for the moment with all this childish play of interest in her jewels and in her own beauty. But it also disposed him to humor her the more, removing all sense of restraint when he followed the glance of her eye to where the more brilliant stones of the pendant lay in the snowy vale of her bosom, or when, leaning closer still, he could see that their intermittent flashing facets were responding to the pulsing of her heart.

"And what is the amber stone?" he asked innocently.

"Amber!" Marien laughed. "It is a canary diamond, the finest stone of all. It alone cost four thousand dollars."

"Four thousand dollars!" The minister drew in his breath slowly. "It had not occurred to me that there were such jewels outside of royal crowns and detective stories," he stammered. "Four thousand dollars! What did the whole necklace cost?"

"Twenty-two," the actress answered almost boastfully, again bending to survey the blazing inverted arch of jewels.

"Thousand?" The minister's inflection expressed his incredulousness.

"Thousand," Marien iterated with a complacent drop of the voice, and then, while the fingers of one hand toyed with the pendant, went on: "I have a perfect passion for diamonds! That canary stone has temperament, life almost. Perhaps it is a whim of mine, but it seems to me that it reflects my moods. When I am downcast, it is dull and lusterless; when I am happy, it flashes brilliantly, like a blazing sun.

"It is influenced by those whom I am with. It never burned so brilliantly as now. Your presence has an effect upon it. Cup your fingers and hold it for a moment, and see, after an interval, if its luster does not change."

Astonished at the feeling of easy intimacy which had been established between them so completely that he saw no reason at all why he should refuse, Hampstead did as he was bidden, although to hold the brilliant stone it was necessary for the heads of the two to be drawn very close, so that the tawny, wavy, loose-lying locks of the minister and the dark glistening mass of the woman's hair were all but intertwined, while the four eyes converged upon the diamond, and the two bodies were breathless and poised with watching.

Presently the man felt his vision swimming. He saw no single jewel, but a myriad of lights. He ceased to feel the gem in his hollowed fingers, and was conscious instead of a soft, magnetic glow upon the under side of his hand.

In the same instant, he became aware that Marien's eyes no longer watched the stone, but were bent upon his face, and he felt a breath upon his cheek as her lips parted, and she murmured softly:

"John."

This word and touch together gave instant warning to the Reverend Doctor Hampstead of the spell under which he was passing,--a spell mixed in equal parts from the responsiveness of his own nature to all beauty of form, animate or inanimate, and from the subtle sympathy which the rich, seductive personality of Marien Dounay had swiftly conjured. The shock of this discovery was entirely sufficient to break the potency of the charm.

"It did seem to change, I thought," the minister said casually, at the same time slipping his hand gently from beneath the jewel.

By the slightly altered tone in his speech and the easy resumption of his pose in the chair, Marien perceived that the minister and his purpose was again uppermost in her caller.

As for John, slightly irritated with himself, and yet feeling it still the part of tact to show no irritation with Marien, he guided the situation safely past its moment of restraint.

"You said there was something you wished to tell me," he reminded her gently; then added gravely: "That is why I came to-night. I was to be your father-confessor."

The considerateness of Hampstead's tone and manner was as impressive as it was compelling. Marien's face became instantly sober, and she fidgeted for a time in silence as if it were increasingly difficult to broach the subject, but finally she labored out:

"You misunderstood me horribly once--horribly!"

With this much communicated, she stopped as abruptly as she had begun, while a frightened look invaded her liquid eyes.

"Misunderstood you," Hampstead iterated gently, but with firmness, "I understood you so well that except through an impersonal desire to be helpful, I should never have come here."

The very dignity and measured self-restraint of the minister's utterance robbed the woman of her usual admirable self-mastery. She cowered with timid face amid her pillows, as her mind leaped back to that night in the restaurant with Litschi, and the terrible lengths to which she had gone to shock this same big, dynamic, ardent Hampstead from his pursuit of her.

As if it were compromising himself to sit silent while he read her thoughts and heard again in his own ears that terrible speech, the minister went on to say sternly:

"You know that I shrank then, as from a loathsome thing, at the price you were willing to pay for your success. I must forewarn you that the memory does not seem less abhorrent now than the fact did then."

When Hampstead bit out these sentences with a fire of moral intensity burning in his eyes, the quivering figure upon the cushions shuddered and shrank.

"Oh, John!" a broken voice pleaded. "Did I ever, ever say those hateful words? Can you not conceive that they were false? That they were spoken with intent to deceive you, to drive you from me, to leave me free to make my way alone, unhampered, as I knew I must?"

The minister, his face still white and stern, his gray eyes beaming straight through widening lids, declared hotly: "No! I cannot conceive that a good woman would voluntarily smirch herself like that in the eyes of a man who loved her for any other single purpose than the one which she confessed, an ambition that was inordinate and--immoral. That thought was in your speech, and by Heaven"--he shook an accusing finger at her--"I believe it was in your purpose!"

The woman cowered for a moment longer before Hampstead's gaze, then a single dry sob broke from her, while one hand covered her eyes, and the other stretched gropingly to him, across the pillows.

"I had the purpose," she admitted haltingly. "I confess it. Is it not pitiful?" and the lily hand which had felt its way so pleadingly across the embroidered cushions opened and closed its fingers on nothing, with a movement that was convulsive and appealing beyond words.

"Pitiful," the minister groaned. "My God, it is tragic!"

"Yes," she went on presently, in a calmer voice that was more resigned and sadly reminiscent: "I purposed it."

And there she stopped. Her tone was as dry as ashes. This man had surprised her by revealing a startling amount of moral force, which had quickly and easily broken down her coolly conceived purpose to make him believe that his sense of hearing had played him false that night in the restaurant. She had, however, confessed only to what she knew he knew; but the roused conscience of the preacher of righteousness detected this and was not to be evaded. He proposed to confront this woman with her sin.

"You confess only to the purpose?" John demanded accusingly.

The glance of the woman fell before his blazing eye. She had meant to answer boldly, triumphantly; but the sudden fear that she might not be believed made her a coward, and forced the realization that she must not attempt to deceive this man in anything.

"Sometimes one says more than one is able to perform," she whispered weakly. "Sometimes a woman names a price, and does not know what the price means, and when the time of settlement comes, will not pay it--cannot pay it--because there is something in her deeper, more overruling than her own conscious will, something that refuses to be betrayed!" The last words were torn out of her throat with desperate emphasis.

John sat watching the woman critically, with an all but unfriendly eye, while she struggled over this utterance, yet the very manner of it compelled him to believe in her absolute sincerity at the moment. Her revelation was truthful, no doubt, but just what was she revealing? The substance was so contrary to his presumption that his comprehension was slow.

"You mean," he began doubtfully--

Marien took instant courage in his doubt; he was almost convinced.

"I mean," she exclaimed, leaping up with an expansive gesture of her arms, while the jewels, like her eyes, blazed with the intensity of her emotion: "_I mean that I never paid the price!_" Her voice broke into a wild crescendo of laughter that was half delirious in its mingled triumph and joy. Hampstead himself arose involuntarily and stood with a look first of amazement, and then almost of anger, as he suddenly seized her wrists, holding them close in his powerful grasp, while he demanded in tones hoarse with a pleading that was in contrast to his manner:

"Marien, are you telling me the truth?"

The woman faced his searching gaze doubtfully for an instant; then seeing that the man was actually anxious to believe her, she swayed toward him, weakened by relief and joy, as she cried impulsively:

"It is the truth! It is the truth! Oh, God knows it is the truth!"

The fierceness of the minister's grip upon her wrists instantly relaxed, and he lowered her gently to the cushions, where she sat overcome by her emotions while he stood gazing at her as on one brought back from the dead, expressions of wonder and thanksgiving mingled upon his face.

But presently a reminiscent look came into Marien's eyes, and she began to speak rapidly, as if eager to confirm her vindication by the summary of her experiences.

"It was hard, very hard," she began. "It commenced in that first careless, ignorant year I told you about. I was fighting it all the time; fighting it when you were with me. That was really why I broke out of Mowrey's Company. Men--such beasts of men!--proffered their help continually, but not upon terms that I could accept. It seemed, eventually, that I must surrender. I taught myself to think that some day, perhaps when I stood at last upon the very threshold--" she paused and looked over her shoulder at some unseen terror. "But the time never came. I burst through the barriers ahead of my pursuing fears."

The actress ceased to speak and sat breathing quickly, as if from the effects of an exhausting chase.

Hampstead turned and walked to the window, where, throwing up the sash, he stood filling his lungs deeply with delicious, refreshing draughts of the outside air. Coming back, he halted before her to say in tones of earnest conviction:

"Marien"--he had called her Marien!--"I feel as if the burden of years had been removed. Few things have ever lain upon my heart with a more oppressive sense of the awful than this vision of you, so beautiful and so possessed of genius, consecrating yourself with such noble devotion to a lofty, artistic aim, and yet prepared to--to--" His words faded to a horrified whisper, and finding himself unable to conclude the sentence, he reached down and took her hand in both of his, shaking it emotionally while he was able presently to say reverently and with unction:

"God has preserved you, Marien. You owe Him everything."

"It was you who preserved me," she amended, with jealous emphasis and that look again of hungry devotion which he had seen first in the church. "It is you to whom I owe everything."

"I preserved you?" Hampstead asked, now completely mystified, as he remembered with what scornful words and looks she had whipped him from her presence. "I do not understand. We pass from mystery to mystery. Is it that which you said you must tell me?"

"No. I have told you what I wanted to tell you."

The woman was again entirely at her ease, shrugging her beautiful shoulders and yawning lazily,--a carefully-staged and cat-like yawn, in which she appeared for an instant to show sharp teeth and claws, and then as suddenly to bury them in velvet.

The minister stood gazing at her doubtfully.

*CHAPTER XXII*

*PURSUIT BEGINS*

Both recognized that the time had come to close the interview, and each was extremely pleased with its result. Marien had demonstrated to her complete satisfaction that this minister was still a man; that his flesh was wax and would therefore melt. She believed that to-night she had seen it soften.

As for John: He believed that this evening had witnessed a triumph for his tact and his moral force. His sympathy was wholly with the woman. Convinced afresh that there was something sublime in her character, he determined to give her every opportunity to reveal herself to him, and to spare no effort upon his own account to redeem her life from that ingrowing selfishness which he felt sure was making her unhappy now and might ultimately rob her of all joy in its most splendid achievements.

"I shall save three o'clock to-morrow for you," Miss Dounay proposed, as if reading the minister's purpose in his eye.

But John Hampstead was a man of many duties, whose time was not easy to command.

"At three," he objected, "I am to address a mother's meeting.

"At four then," Marien suggested, with an engaging smile.

"At four I have to go with a sad-hearted man to see his son in the county jail," John explained apologetically, as he scanned his date book.

"At five!" persisted Marien, the smile giving way before a shadow of impatience.

John laughed.

"It must seem funny to you," he declared, "but I have an engagement at five-thirty which makes it impossible to be here at five. The engagement itself would seem funnier still; but to me it is not funny--only one of the tragedies into which my life is continually drawn. At that hour I am to visit a poor woman who lives on a house boat on the canal. Monday is her husband's pay day, and he invariably reaches home on that night inflamed with liquor, and abuses the woman outrageously. I have promised to be with her when he comes in. I may wait an hour, and I may wait half the night."

"Oh," gasped Marien, with a note of apprehension. "And suppose he turns his violence on you?"

"Why, then I shall defend myself," John answered, good-humoredly, "but without hurting Olaf."

"I am likely to spend the night on that canal boat," he added, "and in the morning Olaf will be ashamed and perhaps penitent. He may thank me and ask me to meet him at the factory gate next Monday night and walk home with him to make sure that his pay envelope gets safely past the door of intervening saloons."

"But why so much concern about unimportant people like that?" questioned Marien, her eyes big with curiosity and wonder.

"Any person in need is important to me," confessed John modestly.

"But how can you spare the time from the regular work of the church?"

"That is my regular work."

Marien paused a moment as if baffled.

"But--but I thought a minister's work was to preach--so eloquently that people will not get drunk; to pray, so earnestly that God will make men strong enough to resist temptation."

"But suppose," smiled John, "that I am God's answer to prayer, his means of helping Olaf to resist temptation. That is the mission of my church, at least that is my ideal for it; not a group of heaven-bound joy-riders, but a life-saving crew. There are twenty men in my church who would meet Olaf at a word from me and walk home with him every night till he felt able to get by the swinging doors upon his own will."

Marien's eyes were shining with a new light.

"That is practical religion," she declared.

"Cut out the modifier," amended John. "That _is_ religion! There are," he went on, "even some in my congregation who would take my watch upon the canal boat; but I prefer to go myself because--"

"Because," Marien broke in suddenly, "because it is dangerous." Her glance was full of a new admiration for the quiet-speaking man before her, in whose eyes burned that light of almost fanatical ardor which she and others had marked before.

"More because it is a delicate responsibility," the minister amended once more. "Tact that comes with experience is essential, as well as strength."

"And do you do many things like that?" Marien asked, deeply impressed.

"Each day is like a quilt of crazy patchwork," John laughed, and then added earnestly: "You would hardly believe the insight I get into lives of every sort and at every stage of human experience, divorces, quarrels, feuds, hatreds, crimes, loves, collapses of health or character or finance--crises of one sort or another, that make people lean heavily upon a man who is disinterestedly and sympathetically helpful."

"And your reward for all this busybodying?" the actress finally asked, at the same time forcing a laugh, as if trying to make light of what had compelled her to profound thought.

"A sufficient reward," answered John happily, "is the grateful regard in which hundreds, and I think I may even say thousands, of people throughout the city hold me: this, and the ever-widening doors of opportunity are my reward. These things could lift poorer clay than mine and temper it like steel. The people lean upon me. I could never fail them, and they could never fail me."

The exalted confidence of the man, as he uttered these last words, which were yet without egotism, suggested the tapping of vast reservoirs of spiritual force, and as before, this awed Marien a little; but it also aroused a petty note in her nature, filling her with a jealousy like that she had experienced in the church when she saw John surrounded by all those people who seemed to take possession of him so absolutely and with such disgusting self-assurance.

Manoeuvering her features into something like a pout, she asked mockingly:

"And since you would not leave your mother's meeting and your jail-bird and your wife-beater for me, is there any time at all when an all-seeing Providence would send you again to the side of a lonely woman?"

The minister smiled at the irony, while scanning once more the pages of his little date-book. "To look in after prayer meeting about nine-thirty on Wednesday night would be my next opportunity, I should say," he reported presently.

"Wednesday!" complained Marien. "It is three eternities away. However," and her voice grew crisp with decision, "Wednesday night it shall be. In the meantime, do you speak anywhere? I shall attend the mother's meeting, if you will tell me where it is. I shall even come to prayer meeting; and," she concluded vivaciously; "you will be borne away by me triumphantly in my new French car, which was sent out here weeks and weeks ago to be tuned up and ready for my coming."

On Wednesday night Miss Dounay made good her word. When the little prayer-meeting audience emerged from the chapel room of All People's, it gazed wonderingly at a huge black shape on wheels that rested at the curb with two giant, fiery eyes staring into the night.

The old sexton, looking down from the open doorway, saw his pastor shut into this luxurious equipage with two strange women, for Marien was properly accompanied by Julie, and nodded his head with emphatic approval.

"Some errand of mercy," he mumbled with fervency. "Brother Hampstead is the most helpful man in the world."

Nor was this the last appearance of Marien Dounay's shining motor-car before the door of All People's. It was seen also in front of the palm-surrounded cottage on the bay front, where John Hampstead lived with his sister, Rose, and the children, and enjoyed, at times, some brief seclusion from his busy, pottering life of general helpfulness.

Once the car even stopped before the home of the Angel of the Chair, perhaps because Hampstead had told Marien casually that of all women Mrs. Burbeck had alone been consistently able to understand him, and the actress wished to learn her secret. But the Angel of the Chair, while quite unabashed by the glamour of the actress-presence, nevertheless refused entirely to be drawn into talk about Brother Hampstead, who was usually the most enthusiastic subject of her conversation. Instead she spent most of the time searching the depths of Miss Dounay's baffling eyes with a look from her own luminous orbs, half-apprehensive and half-appealing, that made the caller exceedingly uncomfortable; so that Marien would have accounted the visit fruitless and even unpleasant, if she had not, while there, chanced to meet the young man known to fortune and the social registers as Rollo Charles Burbeck.

Rollo was the darling son of the Angel and the pride of the Elder's heart. Tall, blond, handsome, and twenty-eight, endowed with his mother's charm of manner and a certain mixture of the coarse practicality and instinct for leadership which his father possessed, the young man had come to look upon himself as a sort of favorite of the fickle goddess for whom nothing could be expected to fall out otherwise than well. Without money and without prestige, in fact, without much real ability, and more because as a figure of a youth he was good to look upon and possessed of smooth amiability, Rollie, as his friends and his doting mother called him, had risen through the lower rounds of the Amalgamated National to be one of its assistant cashiers and a sort of social handy-man to the president, very much in the sense that this astute executive had political handy-men and business handy-men in the capacity of directors, vice-presidents, and even minor official positions in his bank.

But there were, nevertheless, some grains of sand in the bearings of Rollo's spinning chariot wheels.

In his capacity as an Ambassador to the Courts of Society, he had the privilege of leaving the bank quite early in the afternoon, when his presence at some daylight function might give pleasure to a hostess whose wealth or influence made her favor of advantage to the Amalgamated National. He might sometimes place himself and a motor-car at the disposal of a distinguished visitor from outside the city, might dine this visitor and wine him, might roll him far up the Piedmont Heights, and spread before his eye that wonderful picture of commercial and industrial life below, clasped on all sides by the blue breast and the silvery, horn-like arms of the Bay of San Francisco.

All these things, of course, involved expenditures of money as well as time. The bills for such expenditures Rollo might take to the president of the bank, who wrote upon them with his fat hand and a gold pencil, "O.K.--J.M." after which they were paid and charged to a certain account in the bank entitled: "Miscellaneous." This, not unnaturally, got Rollie, in the course of a couple of years, into luxurious habits. After eating a seven-dollar dinner with the financial man of a Chicago firm of bond dealers, it was not the easiest thing in the world to content himself the next day with the fifty-cent luncheon which his own salary permitted. Furthermore, Rollo, because of his standing at the bank and his social gifts, was drawn into clubs, played at golf, or dawdled in launches, yachts, or automobiles with young men of idle mind who were able to toss out money like confetti. It was inevitable that circumstances should arise under which Rollo also had to toss, or look to himself like the contemptible thing called "piker." Consequently, he frequently tossed more than he could afford, and eventually more than he had.