Part 27

A secluded room of this very hotel suggested the surest isolation. He got up-stairs to the writing room, where a hastily scrawled note to Parma, the cashier, made the night upon the Bay the excuse for his absence from the bank for the day. Another to his mother,--he dared not hear her voice telling him of what had befallen her beloved pastor,--that he was too weary even to come home and would sleep the day out in Oakland, leaving his exact whereabouts unknown to avoid the possibility of disturbance.

Mustering one final rally of his volitional powers, Rollo approached the desk and registered as some one not himself before the very eyes of the clerk, who knew him well and laughingly became accessory to the subterfuge.

Once within the privacy of his room, the impulse to telephone to John Hampstead and tell that distracted man a thing which he would be greatly desiring to know, came again to the young man; but in part exhaustion and in part cowardice led him to postpone that simple act till he had slept, rested, thought.

A few minutes later, with shades darkened and clothing half removed, he buried his feverish head among the pillows and sought to bury consciousness as well. But the latter attempt was a failure, for the young man found himself prodded into the extreme of wakefulness,--thinking, thinking, thinking, until he was all but mad. Out of all this thinking gradually emerged one solid, unshifting fact. This was the character of John Hampstead. He, Rollo Burbeck, might be a shriveling, paltering coward; Marien Dounay might be only a beautiful fiend; but John Hampstead was a strong, unwavering man. John Hampstead would stand firm!

Buoying his soul on this idea, Rollie dropped off to feverish slumber. But the sleeper awoke suddenly with one question hooking at his vitals. Was any man physically equal to such a strain? Was John Hampstead still standing firm like the huge human bulwark he had begun to seem?

Shrill cries floated upward from the street, sounding above the persistent whang of car wheels upon the rails. These were the voices of the newsboys crying the noon edition.

Rollie rose uncertainly and tottered to the telephone, where he asked that the latest papers be sent up to him, and awaited their coming in an ague of suspense and fear.

When they were received, he found little upon the front of either but the story of the minister's arrest for the theft of the diamonds and the finding of the jewels in his box, coupled with fresh emphasis upon his exhibition of the demeanor of a guilty man. It flowed up and down the chopped-off and sawed-out columns, liberally besprinkled with photographs of the chief actors in the drama, then turned upon the second page and spread itself riotously, in various types.

Through these paragraphs the mind of young Burbeck scrambled like a terrier digging for a rat, pawing his way desperately to make sure of the answer to his one, all-consuming question: Was the preacher still standing? The first paper declared accusingly that he was; that, like a guilty man taking advantage of technicalities, he refused to speak. The second paper affirmed the same, but with even greater emphasis, though without the meaner implication.

In the spread-out story there were set forth details and conjectures innumerable that would have interested and amazed Rollie, if his mind had been able to grasp them at all; but it was not. It fastened upon the one thing of ultimate significance in his present water-logged state. Hugging in his arms the papers which conveyed this supreme assurance to him, as if they had been the spar to which his soul was clinging, he rolled over upon the bed with a sigh of intense relief and sank instantly into long and unbroken sleep.

Hunger wakened him at eight in the evening; but instead of ringing for food, he asked for the evening papers. Again their message was reassuring. His nerves were stronger now; his soul was gaining the respite which it needed. He dispatched a messenger to his home for fresh linen and a business suit, turned on the water in the bath, arranged for the presence of a barber in his room in fifteen minutes, and the service of a hearty dinner in the same place in thirty.

The refreshment of invigorating sleep, plus the spectacle of John Hampstead, that Atlas of a man, standing rock-like beneath the world of another's burden, had inspired Rollie sufficiently to enable him to resume once more the pose of his presumed position in life. To be sure, he was still under the spell of his fear,--and could not see himself as yet doing one thing to weaken the pressure upon his benefactor.

For this dastardly inactivity he suffered a flood of self-reproaches, but stemmed them with reflections upon the irreproachable character of the minister, and his impregnable position in the community. He reflected how futile and puerile all the endeavors of the newspapers to involve this good man in scandal must prove. How ridiculous the idea that he could be a common thief! How suddenly the wide, sane public, after a day or two's debauch of excitement, would turn and bestow again their unwavering confidence upon this man and laurel his brow with fresh and more permanent expressions of their regard for his high character. Reflections like this, winged by his own inside knowledge of the true greatness of the victim, together with the soothing influence of a bath, the ministrations of a skilled barber, and the sedative effects of a good dinner, sent young Burbeck to his home somewhere about ten o'clock in the evening, to all appearances quite his usual, happy-looking self.

The telephone had apprised his mother of his coming, and she had remained up to meet him.

"Oh, my son!" she murmured happily, as he laid his smooth cheek against hers and mingled his wavy brown hair with the silvering threads of her own dark tresses.

The young man gave his mother a gentle pressure of his hands upon her shoulders, then turned his face and kissed her cheek, but ventured no word. A sense of blood guiltiness had come upon him at the contact of her presence.

"Of course you have seen what that woman and the papers are doing to Brother Hampstead," his mother observed sadly.

"Yes," replied the young man, in a tone as dejected as hers.

"They are tearing his reputation to pieces," the mother went on. "There is hardly a shred of it left now. Like vultures they are digging over every detail of his life and putting a sinister interpretation upon the most innocent things. The worst of it is that even our own people begin to turn against him. Some of the people for whom he has done the most and suffered the most are readiest with their tongues to blast his character. It is a sad commentary upon the way of the world."

"Still," urged Rollie, "the man is strong; his character is so upright; his purposes are so high and so unselfish that no permanent harm can come to him. His enemies must sooner or later be confuted, and he will emerge from all this pother--" Pother: it took great resolution for Rollie to force so large a fact into so small a word--"a bigger and a more influential man in the community, even a more useful one than before."

Mrs. Burbeck listened to this tribute from her beloved son to her beloved minister with a joy that was pathetic. She had never known him to speak so heartily, with such unreserved admiration before. It told her things about the character of her son she had hoped but had not known. Yet she felt herself compelled to disagree with her son's conclusions.

"That is where you are wrong, my boy," she said, again in tones of sadness. "The public mind is a strange consciousness. If it once gets a view of a man through the smoked glasses of prejudice, it seldom consents to look at him any other way. Remove to-morrow every vestige of evidence against Brother Hampstead, and, mark my words! the fickle public will begin to discover or invent new reasons why, once having hurled its idol down, it will not put him up again."

"You take it too seriously, mother," suggested Rollie half-heartedly, after a moment of silence.

"No, I do not," Mrs. Burbeck replied, shaking her head gravely. "The worst of it is the man's absolute silence. If he would only say something. There must be some sort of explanation. If he took the diamonds, there must have been some laudable reason. This morning there were literally tens of thousands of people hoping for such an explanation and ready to give to him the benefit of every doubt. There are fewer such to-night. There will be fewer still to-morrow.

"If somebody else stole them, and Brother Hampstead, to protect the thief, planned to hold them temporarily while immunity was gained for the coward, he must see now that he made a terrible mistake, that for once he has carried his extravagant leniency entirely too far. If this theory is correct, the thief must have fled beyond the very reach of the newspapers, or be insane, or a drug fiend, or something like that. I cannot conceive of any human being so base, or in a position so delicate that he would not instantly make a public confession to spare his benefactor."

Rollie had turned and was looking straight at his mother, almost reproachfully, certainly protestingly, at the torture she was causing him. She saw this strange look and stopped.

"Oh, my boy," she exclaimed. "You are so sympathetic. How proud, how selfishly happy it makes me to feel that nothing like this can ever come upon my son!"

But Rollie's eyes had shifted quickly to a picture on the opposite wall, and he braced himself desperately against these bomb-like assaults of his mother upon his position.

"Yes," he said after an interval, "it must be pretty hard on Hampstead." But though he made this remark seem natural, his brain was again reeling. With mighty effort he forced himself to give the conversation another turn by a question which had been fascinating him during the whole day.

"Tell me," he asked, "how is father taking it?"

"Very hardly," Mrs. Burbeck confessed. "You know your father: so proud, so exact and scrupulous in all his dealings, with his word better than the average man's bond, yet not lenient toward the man who errs. He thinks everybody good or bad, every soul white or black. When Brother Hampstead was prosecuting law-breakers in court, father was proud of him; but when he goes off helping jail-birds and fallen women, father is harsh and utterly unsympathetic.

"Last night when the first charge appeared, father was greatly incensed, because at last, he said, Brother Hampstead had done the thing he always feared, brought the church into a notoriety that was unpleasant. This morning, at the story of the diamonds in the vault, he was dumbfounded. To-night he talks of nothing but that, whatever the outcome, All People's shall clear its skirts of the unpleasantness by requesting Brother Hampstead's resignation."

"Resignation!" Rollie gasped. "Resignation--simply for doing his duty! Why," he burst out excitedly, "that would be treachery! It would be the act of Judas. Don't let father do it, mother," he pleaded. "Don't let him put me in that position!"

A wild look had come into the young man's face as he spoke.

"You? In what position?"

Mrs. Burbeck was surprised at the expression on her son's face.

For a moment Rollie floundered wildly.

"Why, you see--I--I believe in Hampstead. I--I have told the bank that he is all right, no matter what happens. I don't want my own father reading him out of the church, do I?"

Mrs. Burbeck's perplexity gave way to smiling comprehension, which was met by relief and some approach to composure upon the features of her son, who felt that he had escaped the eddy of an appalling danger.

"Naturally," replied Mrs. Burbeck soothingly. "What a loyal nature yours is! By the way, Rollie," and the force of a new idea energized her glance and tone; "it is only half-past ten. Wouldn't it be fine of you to just run over and give Brother Hampstead a pressure of the hand to-night, and tell him how loyally your heart is with him in this trying situation? It would mean so much to him coming from a strong, successful, young man of the world like you, whose position he must admire so much!"

Rollie's face went white, and his eyes roved despairingly. It must have been well for the mother's peace of mind, as it certainly was for his, that, having asked her question, instead of studying his face while she waited for the answer, she let her eyes fall to the seal ring she had given him upon his twenty-first birthday, and busied herself with studying out again the complexities of the monogram and holding off the hand itself to see how handsomely the ring adorned it.

"I think I'd rather not to-night, mother," Rollie replied, as if after a moment of deliberation. "This thing works me up terribly--you can see that--and I'm a bit short on sleep yet. If I went to see Brother Hampstead to-night, I'm sure I shouldn't sleep a wink afterward. Besides, my coming might alarm him. It might make him think his plight is worse than it is; it would be so unusual."

Again the mother-love surged above any other emotion. "You are right," she admitted, caressing his hand. "It was only an impulse of mine, anyway. You must be tired, poor boy."

"Pretty tired, mother," he confessed truthfully; then stooped and kissed her upon the cheek and seemed to leave the room naturally enough, although in his soul he knew that he fled from her presence like a criminal from his conscience.

*CHAPTER XXXIII*

*THE BATTLE OF THE HEADLINES*

Hampstead was determined not to show the white feather. The morning after the discovery of the diamonds in his box, he made the effort to go about his daily duties unconcernedly and even happily, with a smile of confidence upon his face. His bearing was to proclaim his innocence. But it would not work. Crowds gaped. Individuals stared. Reporters hounded. The very people who needed his help and had been accustomed to receive it gratefully, appeared to shrink from his presence. At the homes where he called, an atmosphere of restraint and artificiality was created. He tried to thaw this and failed dismally; it was evident that the recipients of his attentions also tried, but also failed, for all the while their doubts peeped out at him.

After half a day the minister gave up and sat at home--immured, besieged, impounded. He was like a man upon a rock isolated by a deluge, the waters rolling horizon-wide and surging higher with every edition of the newspapers.

Oh, those newspapers! John Hampstead had not realized before how much of modern existence is lived in the newspapers. So amazingly skillful were they in sweeping away his public standing that the process was actually interesting. He found himself absorbed by it, viewing it almost impersonally, like a mere spectator, moved by it, swayed to one side or the other, as the record seemed to run. The description of the scene in the vault room, even as it appeared unembellished in Haggard's paper, overwhelmed him.

"It is the manner of a thief hopelessly guilty," he confessed.

On the other hand, when Haggard's paper in an editorial asked argumentatively: "Why should this man steal? What need had he for money in large sums?" John's judgment approved the soundness of such a defense. "There were a score," affirmed the editorial, "perhaps a hundred men who had and would freely supply Doctor Hampstead with all the money necessary for the exigencies of the work to which he notoriously devoted all his time. As for his personal needs, the man lived simply. He had no wants beyond his income."

"True--perfectly true. A good point that," conceded Hampstead to himself.

But that evening one of the San Francisco papers reported that at about the time the diamonds were stolen, the Reverend Hampstead had approached various persons in Oakland with a view to borrowing a large sum of money without stating for what the money was required. The paper volunteered the conjecture that the minister, through speculation in stocks, had overdrawn some fund of which he was a trustee, and of which he was presently to be called upon to give an accounting; hence the desperate resort to the theft of the diamonds and the temporary holding of them in his vault, boldly counting on his own immunity from suspicion.

This conjecture was extremely damaging. It skillfully suggested a logical hypothesis upon which the minister could be assumed to be a thief; and so high had been the man's standing that some such hypothesis was necessary.

As Hampstead read this, he felt the viciousness of the thrust. It was false, but it had the color of an actual incident behind it. Some clerk, bookkeeper, or secretary to one of the men who had so promptly enabled him to meet Rollie's defalcation, seeing the comparatively large sum in cash passed to the hand of the minister, had done a little thinking at the time and when the arrest came had done a little talking.

Yet the morning papers of the next day had apparently forgotten this incident. They were off in full cry upon a much more dangerous trail by digging deeper into the relations between the minister and the actress. As if from hotel employees, or some one in Miss Dounay's service, one of them had elicited and put together a story of all the calls that Hampstead had made upon Miss Dounay in her hotel during the five weeks she had been at the St. Albans. This story made it appear that the minister had become infatuated with the actress, and that he had sought every means of spending time in her company.

It was skillfully revealed that Miss Dounay at first had been greatly attracted by the personality and the apparent sincerity of the clergyman; but as her social acquaintance in the city rapidly extended and the work upon her London production became more engrossing, she had less and less time for him, and was finally compelled to deny herself almost entirely to the divine's unwelcome attentions, notwithstanding which the clergyman still found means of forcing himself upon the actress. One such occasion, it appeared, had prevented the appearance of Miss Dounay at a dinner given by a very prominent society lady of the town, where the brilliant woman was to have been the guest of honor. Some one had even recalled that the minister was not an invited guest at the dinner during which the diamonds were stolen. He had presented himself, it seemed, after the affair was in progress and departed before its conclusion.

But it was left to one of the evening papers of this day to explode the climactic story of the series. The writers of the morning story had been careful to protect the conduct of Miss Dounay from injurious inference; but now the _Evening Messenger_ went upon the streets with a story that left Miss Dounay's character to take care of itself, and purported boldly to defend the minister.

PREACHER NOT THIEF, boldly ventured the headlines. The report declared that an intimacy of long standing had existed between the minister and the actress. The public was reminded of what part of it had forgotten and the rest never knew, that John Hampstead had himself been an actor. The narrative told how the minister had made his professional debut in Los Angeles by carrying this same Marien Dounay in his arms in _Quo Vadis_, night after night, in scene after scene, during the run of the play; and hinted broadly of an attachment beginning then which had ripened quickly into something very powerful, so powerful, in fact, that when Hampstead was playing with the "People's", an obscure stock company in San Francisco, Miss Dounay had broken with Mowrey at the Grand Opera House, because he refused to have the awkward amateur in his company, and had herself gone out to the little theater in Hayes Valley and lent to its performance the glamour of her name and personality, merely to be near the idol upon whom her affections had fixed themselves so fiercely.

Actors now playing in San Francisco who had been members of the People's Stock at the time remembered that the couple succeeded but poorly in suppressing signs of their devotion to each other, and the stage manager, now retired, was able to recall how in the garden scene of _East Lynne_, Miss Dounay had deliberately changed the "business" between Hampstead and herself in order that she might receive a kiss upon the lips instead of upon the forehead as the script required.

This mosaic of truth and falsehood related with gustatory detail a violent quarrel between the two which occurred one night in a restaurant prominent in the night life of the old city, the result of which was that Miss Dounay cast off her domineering and self-willed lover entirely.

"After a few weeks," the article observed soberly, "the broken-hearted lover surprised his friends by renouncing the stage and entering upon the life of the ministry as a solace to his wounded affections."

In support of this, it was pointed out that the minister had never married nor been known to show the slightest tendency toward gallantries in his necessarily wide association with women.

The glittering achievement of vindication was next attempted by the _Messenger's_ story. This admittedly was theory, but it was set forth with confidence and particularity, as follows:

"The return of the actress, in the prime of her beauty and at the very zenith of her career, upon a visit to California, which had been her childhood home, not unnaturally led to a revival of the old passion. For a time the two were running about together as happy as cooing doves. Then a clash came. This was over the question of the harmonizing of the two careers. Obviously, Miss Dounay could not be expected to give up hers, and the minister was now so devoted to his own work that he found himself unwilling to make the required concession upon his part.

"A serious disagreement resulted. The actress was a woman of high temper. It had been the custom to deposit her diamonds in the minister's box as a matter of protection. On the night of the party, she had committed them to him, as usual. But the next morning, angered over the clergyman's failure to keep an appointment with her, the actress, in a moment of reckless passion, had charged him with stealing them. Under the circumstances, Hampstead, as a chivalrous man, declined to speak, knowing full well that sooner or later the woman's passion would relent, and she would release him from the awkward position in which he stood."

There were holes in this story. At places it did not fit the facts; as for instance, the minor fact that by common agreement the minister did not leave the dinner party until considerably after twelve, consequently at a time when the bank vault was inaccessible. There was also the major fact that the theft of the diamonds was discovered and reported at two o'clock in the morning, and not the next day "after the minister's failure to keep an appointment with the actress had angered her."

But these trifling discrepancies were disregarded by the eager rewrite man, who threw this story together from the harvesting of half a dozen leg-weary reporters.

Nor did they matter greatly to Hampstead. He read the story with whitening lips. He recognized it as the sort of vindication that would ruin him. It made his position a thousand times more difficult. It was infinitely harder to keep silence when the very truth itself was blunderingly mixed to malign him.