Part 19

For five days he had not seen her, but hating to give up entirely, and finding himself one evening in the vicinity of the Hotel St. Albans, he ventured to run in upon her for a moment. She was decked as if for an evening party in a dress of gold and spangles, as conspicuous for an excess of materials in the train as for an utter absence of them about the arms and shoulders, which, on this occasion, even the blaze of diamonds did not redeem from a look of nakedness to the eyes of the minister,--a mental reaction which any student of psychology will recognize as ample evidence that John Hampstead, man, had passed entirely beyond the power of Marien Dounay, woman.

Miss Dounay received her caller with that low purr of surprise and gladness which was characteristic, and instantly proposed that they go out for a ride on the foothill boulevard, and a dinner at the Three Points Inn.

While the minister had not planned to give her an evening, this was one of the rare occasions when he had leisure time at his disposal, and since he had resolved to make one last effort to help the woman, he decided to accept the invitation.

The evening, however, was not a success. The dinner was good, the roads were smooth, the night air was balmy and full of a thousand perfumes from field and garden; but Miss Dounay's mood, at first merry, sagged lower and lower into a kind of sullen despair, in which she reproached the minister bitterly for his failure to understand her.

Francois, the chauffeur, had, by command of his mistress, stopped the car on the curve of the hill, at a point where the bright moon made faces as clear as day, and, having climbed down as if to look the car over, they heard his boot heels grow fainter and fainter on the graveled road as he tactfully ambled off out of earshot.

Hampstead was still patient.

"I have been so earnest in my desire to help you," he said, by way of broaching the subject again.

"You cannot help me," Marien snapped. "Something bars you. Your church, your position, all these foolish women who are in love with you, this whole community which has made a 'property' god of you,--they are to blame! They stand between us. They prevent you from seeing what you ought to see. They make you blind. You think you are humble. It is a mock humility. Under its guise you hide a lofty egotism. You think you are a preacher; you are not. You are still an actor, playing your part, and playing it so busily that you have ceased to be genuine. All this sentiment which you display for the suffering and needy and distressed is a worked-up sentiment. It goes with the part you play. It makes you blind, false, hypocritical!"

"Miss Dounay!" exclaimed the minister sharply.

But beside herself with chagrin and disappointment, the woman ran on with growing scorn, as she asked sneeringly: "Do you not see that all this gaping adoration is unreal? That a touch would overthrow you? A single false step, and the newspapers which have made you for the sake of a front-page holiday would have another holiday, and a bigger one, in tearing you down?"

Hampstead gritted his teeth, but he could not have stopped her.

"Can you imagine what would be the biggest news story that could break to-morrow morning in Oakland?" she persisted. "It would be the fall of John Hampstead. Can't you see it?" she laughed derisively. "Headlines a foot tall? Can't you hear the newsboys calling? Can't you see the 'Sisters' whispering? Can't you see the gray heads bobbing? The pulpit of All People's declared vacant! John Hampstead a by-word and worse--a joke! Can't you see it?"

Not unnaturally, the minister was angry.

"No," he said sharply, "and you will never see it, for I shall not take that single false step of which you speak."

"Oh, you really would not need to take it," sneered the actress, with a sinister note in her voice, "a man in your position need not fall. He may only seem to fall."

It seemed to John that the woman was actually menacing him.

"Francois!" he called sharply.

The chauffeur's heels came clicking back from around the turn, and in a silence, which upon Miss Dounay's part might be described as fuming, and upon the minister's as aggressively dignified, the couple were driven back to the hotel, arriving in time for Rollie Burbeck to emerge from the telephone booth, to observe the car, and to avoid its occupants.

With almost an elaboration of scrupulous courtesy, the minister helped Miss Dounay from the automobile, walked with her to the elevator, and ascended to the doorway of her apartment, where, extending his hand, he said sadly, in tones of finality, but without a trace of any other feeling than regretful sympathy: "I still desire to befriend you as I may. But I shall not be able to come to you again."

To his surprise, Marien answered him with something like a threat!

"It is I," she rejoined quickly, "who will come to you. I do not know how it is to happen yet, but I will come, and when I do--if I am not much mistaken--you will be happier to receive my call than you ever were to receive one in all your life before!"

Again there was menace in her tone, and never had she looked more imperiously regal than as she stood holding the loop of her train in the left hand, the right upon the knob of the door, the shimmering evening cloak pushed back to reveal her gold and spangled figure, standing arrow straight, while the dark eyes shot defiance.

Neither had she ever been guilty of a more studied or effective bit of theatricalism than when, immediately following this insinuating speech, the actress noiselessly propelled the door inward, revealing the presence of a group of men in evening dress posed about the room in various attitudes of boredom. As the door swung, these men turned expectantly and with quick eyes photographed the picture of the minister in the hall, his sober, perplexed gaze set upon the figure of the beautiful woman, whose features had instantly changed as she made her entrance upon an entirely different drama.

"Ah, my neglected guests!" exclaimed the actress in tones of mild self-reproach. "You will forgive my not being here to receive you, when you know the reason. Doctor Hampstead has been showing me some of the more interesting and unusual phases of that eccentric parish work of his, over which you Oaklanders rave so much. And now, the dear good man was hesitating in the hall at intruding upon our little party. I have insisted that he shall be one of us. Am I not right, gentlemen?"

Several of Miss Dounay's guests were well known to Hampstead personally, and the readiness with which they dragged him within attested to the clergyman's wide popularity among quite different sorts of very much worth-while persons, for, as a matter of fact, Miss Dounay's guests were rather representative. The group included an editor, an associate justice of the Supreme Court, a prominent merchant, a capitalist or two, and other persons, either of achievement or position, to the number of some eight or ten.

Their presence witnessed not only that Miss Dounay, in her liking for a virile type of man, had made quick and careful selection from those she had met during her short stay in the city, but also testified to the readiness with which this type responded to the Dounay personality.

That no other woman was present, and that the actress should assume the entire responsibility of entertaining so many gentlemen at one time, was entirely in keeping with her particular kind of vanity and the situations it was bound to create.

Standing in the center of the room, wearing that expression of happy radiance which admiration invariably brought to her face, her bare shoulders gleaming, her jewels blazing, she rotated upon her heel till her train wound up in a swirling eddy at her feet, out of which she bloomed like some voluptuous flower, while a chorus of "Oh's" and "Ah's" of laughing adulation followed the revolution of her eyes about the circuit; for the guests knew that to their hostess this little gathering was a play, and their part was to enact a vigorously approving audience.

"Gentlemen," she proposed, "you are all in evening dress; but I,"--and she shrugged her bewitching shoulders naively,--"I have been in this gown for ages--until I hate it. Will you indulge me a little longer?" And she inclined her head in the direction of the red portieres through which she had gone that first night to don the diamonds for Hampstead.

Of course the gentlemen excused her, and Miss Dounay achieved another startling theatricalism by reappearing in an astonishingly short time, offering the most surprising contrast to her former self. The yellow and spangles were gone. In their place was the simplest possible gown of soft black velvet, with only a narrow band passing over the shoulders and framing a bust like marble for its whiteness against the black. The dress was entirely without ornament, presenting a supreme achievement of the art of the modiste, in that it appeared not so much to be a gown as a bolt of velvet, suddenly caught up and draped to screen her figure chastely but beautifully, at the same time it revealed and even emphasized those swelling curves and long lines which lost themselves elusively in the baffling pliancy of her remarkable figure. The hair was worn low upon the neck, and the jewels which had blazed in her coiffure like a dazzling crown were no longer in evidence. With them had gone the pendants from her ears, and that coruscating circlet of diamonds from the neck, which was her chief pride and most valuable single possession. There was not even a band of gold upon her arms, nor a ring upon her tapering finger. Hence what the admiring circle seemed to see was not something brilliant because bedizened, but a creature exquisite because genuine, a beauty depending for its power solely upon nature's comeliness.

No woman with less beauty or less art, desiring to be admired as Marien Dounay passionately did, could have dared this contrast successfully. No one who knew men less thoroughly than she would have understood that for a purely professional artist to attain this look of a simple womanly woman was the greatest possible triumph, stirring every instinct of admiration and of chivalry.

And whatever was at the back of the trick Miss Dounay had played--and there was generally something back of her caprices--in thrusting John Hampstead, with whom she had practically quarreled, into this group of guests, she appeared to forget him entirely in the succession of whims, moods, and graces with which she proceeded to their entertainment.

For one thing, she admitted them to the large room which served as her boudoir, into which they had seen her go in gold and spangles to emerge like a miracle in demure black velvet.

Of course, there was an excuse for thus titillating the curiosity of vigorous men with that lure of mysterious enchantment which lurks in the boudoir of a lovely woman, and the excuse was that the room, while half-boudoir, was also half-studio, and held tables on which were displayed the models of the stage sets and the costumer's designs for Miss Dounay's coming London production.

As the actress had divined, the inspection of these fascinating details of stagecraft interested her guests as much as the display of them delighted her.

In the hour which ensued before the supper, a collation that in its variety and substance again proved how well the actress comprehended the appetite of the male, two or three guests arrived tardily. The earliest of these to enter was Rollo Charles Burbeck, who came in ample time to roam about the room of mystery at will with the remainder of the guests. Indeed, he stayed in it so much that its enchantment for him might have been presumed to be greater than for the others.

Before the supper, too, one of the guests craved the liberty of departing. This was the Reverend John Hampstead. The farewell of his hostess was gracious and without the slightest reminiscence of anything unpleasant, but he was prevented from more than mentally congratulating himself upon the change in her manner toward him by the fact that in walking some ten feet from where he touched the fingers of his hostess to where a butler-sort of person, borrowed from the hotel staff, stood waiting with his overcoat, Doctor Hampstead came face to face with Rollie Burbeck, who was just emerging from the boudoir-studio with a disturbed look upon his usually placid face, as if, for instance, he had seen a ghost.

In consequence, the minister moved down the corridor to the elevator, not pondering upon his own perplexities, but thinking to himself, "I wonder now if that young man is in any serious trouble. It would break his mother's heart--it would kill her if he were."

*CHAPTER XXIV.*

*THE DAY OF ALL DAYS*

Next morning Doctor Hampstead was up bright and early, clad in his long study gown and walking, according to custom, beneath his palm trees, while he reflected on the duties of the day before him. This was really the day of all days for him, but he did not know it.

An unpleasant thought of Marien Dounay came impertinently into mind, but he repressed it. He had failed with her. A pity! Yes; but his work was too big, too, important, for him to permit it to be interfered with longer by any individual.

Besides, there were with him this morning thoughts of a totally different woman, whose life was as fresh and beautiful as the dew-kissed flowers about him. Five years of unswerving devotion on his part had all but wiped from her memory the admission of her lover which had so hurt the trusting heart of Bessie. That confiding trust, the loss of which her pen had so eloquently lamented, had grown again. The very day was set. In four months John Hampstead would hold Bessie Mitchell in his arms, and this time it seemed to him, more surely than it had that day in the little summer house by the tiny painted park in Los Angeles, that he would never, never let her out of them.

In the midst of these reflections, a thud sounded on the graveled walk at the minister's feet. It was the morning paper tightly rolled and whirled from the unerring hand of a boy upon a flying bicycle. The minister waved his hand in response to a similar salute from the grinning urchin, then turned and looked at the roll of ink and paper speculatively. That paper was the world coming to sit down at breakfast with him, and tell him what it had been doing in the past twenty-four hours. It had been doing some desperate things. The wide strip of mourning at the end of the bent cylinder, indicating tall headlines, showed this. The paper had come to him to make confession of the world's sins. This was right, for he was one of the world's confessors.

But with this thought came another which had occurred to him before. This was that he had won his confessor's gaberdine too cheaply. He had gained his position as a deputy saviour of mankind at too small a cost. Sometimes he questioned if he were not yet to be made to suffer--excruciatingly--supremely--if, for instance, Bessie were not to be taken from him. Yet he knew, as he reflected somewhat morbidly to this effect, that such a suffering would hardly be efficient. It must be something within himself, something volitional, a cup which he might drink or refuse to drink. The world's saviour was not Simon of Cyrene, whom they compelled to bear the cross, but the man from the north, who took up his own cross. True, Hampstead had thought on several occasions that he was taking up a cross, but it proved light each time, and turned into a crown either of public or of private approbation. Yet the cross was there, if he had only known it, in the tall black headlines on the paper rolled up and bent tightly and lying like a bomb at his feet.

However, instead of picking up the paper, he strolled out upon the sidewalk and down for a turn upon the sea-wall. The lately risen sun shot a ray across the eastern hills, and the dancing waters played elfishly with its beams, as if they had been ten thousand tiny mirrors. A fresh breeze was blowing, and as the minister filled his lungs again and again with the wave-washed air, it seemed as if a great access of strength were flowing into his veins. It flowed in and in until he felt himself stronger than he had ever been before in his life.

With this feeling of strength, which was spiritual as well as physical, came the desire to test it against something big, bigger than he had ever faced before. All unconscious how weak his puny strength would be against its demands, he lifted his arms towards the sky like a sun-worshiper and prayed that the day before him might be a great day.

Then leaving the sea-wall, the minister walked with swinging, quite un-gownly strides up the sidewalk and turned in between the green patches of lawn before his own door, picking up the paper and unrolling it as he mounted the porch. On the step before the top one he paused. The black headline was before his eye.

"DOUNAY DIAMONDS STOLEN" was its screaming message.

The minister was quickly gutting the column of its meaning, when a step upon the graveled walk behind startled him into turning suddenly toward the street, where between the polished red trunks of the palms and under their spreading leaves which met overhead, he saw framed the figure of Rollie Burbeck, halting uncertainly, with pale, excited face. This expression, indeed, was a mere exaggeration of the very look Doctor Hampstead had last seen upon it; but he did not immediately connect the two.

"Your mother!" exclaimed the clergyman apprehensively, for that precious life, always hanging by a thread which any sudden shock might snap, was a constant source of anxiety to those who loved the Angel of the Chair. "Something has happened to her?"

"No! To me!" groaned the young man hoarsely, hurrying forward as the minister stepped down to meet him.

"Something awful! Can I see you absolutely alone?"

"Why, certainly, Rollie," replied the minister with ready sympathy. "Come this way."

Hastily the minister led his caller around the side of the wide, low-lying cottage to the outside entrance of his study.

"Is that door locked?" asked Rollie, as, once inside the room, he darted a frightened glance at the doorway connecting with the rest of the house.

Although knowing himself to be safe from interruption, the minister tactfully walked over and turned the key. He then locked the outer door as well, lowered the long shade at the wide side window, and snapped on the electric light.

"No eye and no ear can see or hear us now, save one," he said with sympathetic gravity. "Sit down."

Rollie sat on the very edge of the Morris chair, his elbows on the ends of its arms, while his head hung forward with an expression of ghastliness upon the weakly handsome features.

"You saw the paper?" he began.

The minister nodded.

"Here they are!" the young man gulped, the words breaking out of him abruptly. At the same time there was a quick motion of his hand, and a rainbow flash from his coat pocket to the blotter upon the desk, where the circlet of diamonds coiled like a blazing serpent that appeared to sway and writhe as each stone trembled from the force with which Burbeck had rid himself of the hateful touch. The minister started back with shock and a sudden sense of recollection.

"Oh, Rollie," he groaned, and then asked, as if not quite able to believe his eyes: "You took them?"

"I--I stole them," the excited man half-whispered.

"Why?" questioned Hampstead, still wrestling with his astonishment.

"Because I am short in my accounts," Rollie shuddered, passing a despairing hand across his eyes. "I have to have money to-day, or I am ruined."

"But you could not turn these into money. You must have been beside yourself."

"No!" replied the excited man, with husky, explosive utterance; "the scheme was all right. Spider Welsh was going to handle 'em for me. We were to split four ways. But the Red Lizard fell down."

"The Red Lizard?" interrupted the minister; for he knew the man who bore the suggestive title.

"Yes. He was to hang a rope down from the cornice on the roof of the hotel, opposite her window, so it would look like an outside job, and he didn't do it. I got the diamonds easy enough--easier than I expected--you know how that was, with all those people coming and going in that room. But I went to bed and couldn't sleep for thinking about the rope. I got up before daylight and went down to see if it was there. So help me God, there's no rope swinging. That makes it an inside job; it puts it up to the guests. By a process of elimination, they'll come down to me. I am ruined any way you look at it, and the shock will kill mother!"

The minister studied the face of his caller critically. Did he love his mother enough to greatly care on her account, or was this merely an afterthought?

"What am I going to do?" the shaken Rollie gasped hoarsely, his eyes fixing themselves in helpless appeal upon the clergyman.

"The thing to do is clear," announced the minister bluntly. "Take these diamonds straight back to Miss Dounay. Tell her you stole them. Throw yourself on her mercy."

A sickly smile curled upon the young man's lip.

"Her mercy?" he repeated. "Do you think that woman has any mercy in her? She has got the worst disposition God ever gave a woman. She would tear me to pieces."

The young fellow again lifted a hand before his eyes, shuddering and reeling as though he might faint.

With a feeling almost of contempt, Hampstead gripped him by the shoulder and shook him sternly.

"Your situation calls for the exercise of some manhood--if you have it," he said sharply. "Tell me. Why did you come here?"

"To get you to help me out!" the broken man murmured helplessly, twisting his hat in his hands. "That was all. I won't lie to you. You've never turned anybody down. Don't turn me down!"

"It was on your mother's account?"

"No, I'm not as unselfish as that. It's just myself. I don't know what's the matter with me. I've lost my nerve. I had it all right enough when I took 'em, except for just a minute after; that's when I met you going away, and with that damned uncanny way of yours you dropped on that something was wrong. But I had my nerve all right; I had it till I got out there on the street this morning and that rope wasn't swinging there over the cornice. Damn the Red Lizard! All I ask is to get out of this, and then to get him by the throat!"

Surely the man had recovered a portion of his nerve, for at the thought of the failure of his partner in crime, his face was suffused with rage, and his weak, writhing hands became twisting talons that groped for the throat of an imaginary Red Lizard.

At sight of this demonstration, Hampstead leaned back in his chair, with the air of one whose interest is merely pathological, observing the phenomena of a soul in the throes of incurable illness. His face was not even sympathetic.

"You have come to the wrong place," he said briefly.

"You won't help me out?"

"Not in your state of mind--which is a mere cowardice in defeat--mere rage at the failure of an accomplice. I should be accessory after the crime."

"Not even to save my mother?" whined the wilted man.

"I should be doing your mother no kindness to confirm her son in crime."

Young Burbeck sat silent and baffled, yet somehow shocked into vigorous thought by the notion that he had encountered something hard, a man with a substratum of moral principle that was like immovable rock.