Part 16

The long, skeleton hand of Elder Lukenbill was sprawled over John's bowed head, overlapped aggressively by the stout, red fingers of Elder Burbeck, while the dapper digits of the Dean of the Seminary capped and clasped the two hands and tangled nervously in the tawny locks themselves.

"With this laying on of hands," the Dean was saying, still in that high lecture-room cackle, although his tone was deeply impressive, "I ordain thee to the ministry of Jesus Christ!"

When, succeeding this, the voice of the District Evangelist had been heard in prayer, there followed an impressive waiting silence, in which no one seemed to know quite what to do, except to gaze fixedly at the face of John Hampstead, which continued as bloodless and as motionless as chiseled marble; until, bowed in her chair, as if she brooded like a real angel over the kneeling congregation, the rich contralto voice of Mrs. Burbeck began to sing:

"Take my life and let it be Consecrated, Lord, to Thee, Take my hands and let them move At the impulse of Thy love."

Presently her voice changed to "Nearer My God to Thee", while other voices joined until the whole church was filled with the sound, and when the last note had died, the very air of the little chapel seemed tear-washed and clear.

In this atmosphere John Hampstead arose, and when one hand swept back the yellow mass of hair, a kind of glory appeared upon his brow. Once an actor, once a man of ambition, he was now consecrated to the service of humanity.

But he had not surrendered his love for Bessie Mitchell, and Marien Dounay was still in the world, mounting higher and higher toward the goal she had imperiously set for herself.

*CHAPTER XX*

*A WOMAN WITH A WANT*

Five years walked along, and great events took place. The earthquake seized the San Francisco Bay district and shook it as a dog shakes a rat. Fire swept the great city on the peninsula almost out of existence; it made rich men poor, and hard hearts soft--for a few days at least--and by shifting populations and business centers, affected the east side of the Bay almost as much as the west, so that in all that water-circling population there was no business and no society, no man or woman or child even, that was thereafter quite as it or he or she had been.

In this seething ferment of change nothing altered more than the circumstances of John Hampstead. He had buried himself and found himself. He had sought relief in a self-abandoning plunge into obscurity, yet never had a minister so humble gained such burning prominence. The town hung on him. Men who never went to church at all leaned upon him and upon the things they read about him from day to day.

He had gone upon a thousand missions of mercy; he had fought for his lambs like a lion; he had faced calumny; he had dared personal assault. He had triumphed in all his conflicts and stood out before this sprawling, half metropolitan, half-suburban community of half a million people as a man whom it trusted--too much almost.

Under his ministry in these five years, the wretched little chapel had grown into the great All People's Church. To attend All People's was a fad; to belong to it almost a fashion. The newspapers daily made its pastor into a hero, and the moral element in the population looked upon him as its most fearless champion and aggressive leader.

But into this situation and into All People's one morning a woman came walking, with power to shake it more violently than an earthquake could have done.

The choir was just disposing of the anthem. The Reverend John Hampstead sat, but not at ease, in his high pulpit chair, which, somehow, this morning reminded him of the throne chair of Denmark upon its stage in that barn of a theater which at this very instant was only five years--and five miles--distant; the chair from which he used to arise suddenly to receive the rapier thrust of his nephew, Hamlet. This morning a vague uneasiness filled him, as if he were about to receive a real rapier thrust.

The minister's sermon outline was in his hand, but his eye roamed the congregation. It took note of who was there and who was absent; it took note of who came in; but suddenly the eye ceased to rove and started forward in its socket.

Deacon Morris was escorting a lady down the right-center aisle. To distinction of dress and bearing the newcomer added a striking type of beauty. Her figure was tall, combining rounded curves and willowy grace. In the regularity of its smooth chiseling, her profile was purely Greek. The eyes were dark and lustrous, the cheeks had a soft bloom upon them, the lips were ripely red; and if art had helped to achieve these contrasts with a skin that was satiny smooth and of ivory creaminess, it was an art contributory and not an art subversive.

"More beautiful than ever!" murmured the minister with the emphasis of deep conviction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.