Part 32

Hampstead had walked around the desk. He lifted his hand in appeal and sought to lay it upon the shoulder of the Elder to express the sympathy and the need of sympathy which he felt.

But Burbeck deliberately moved out of reach, replying sternly and perhaps vindictively:

"Hampstead! You do not appear to appreciate your position. You will never again stand in the pulpit of All People's. That is one sacrilege which you have committed for the last time. More than that, I hold it to be my duty to God to wring from your own lips the secret of the man whom you are shielding, and I shall find a way to do it! I--"

But the man's feeling had overmastered his speech. His body shook, his face was purple with the vehemence of anger. He lifted his hand as if to call down an imprecation when words had failed him, then abruptly turned, unwilling to trust himself to further speech, and made for the outside door. It closed behind him with a bang that left the key rattling in the lock.

Perhaps this noise and the sound of the Elder's clumping, heavy feet as they went down the steps, prevented the minister from hearing the chugging of a motor-car as it was brought to a stop in front.

Elder Burbeck, hurrying directly across the street to relieve his feelings by getting away quickly from what was now a house of detestation, almost ran into the huge black shape drawn up before the curb. He backed away and lunged around the corner of the car too quickly to notice the figure that emerged from it, or his emotions might have been still more hotly stirred.

Hampstead, sitting at his desk, trying to think calmly of this new danger which threatened him, and to reflect upon the irony of the circumstance by which the father of the man and the husband of the mother he was risking everything to protect, should become the self-appointed Nemesis to hurl him from his pulpit and wrest the secret from his lips, heard faintly the ring at the front door, heard the door close, and an exclamation from his sister in the hall, followed by silence which, while lasting perhaps no more than a few seconds, was quite long enough for him to forget, in the absorption of his own thoughts, that some one had entered the house. Hence he started with surprise when the inner door was opened, and Rose appeared, her white, strained features expressing both fright and hate. She closed the door carefully behind her and whispered hoarsely: "That--that woman is here!"

*CHAPTER XXXVII*

*THE TERMS OF SURRENDER*

"What woman?" asked Hampstead, in disinterested tones, too deeply absorbed in the half cynical reflection which the mission of Elder Burbeck had induced to realize that there was but one woman to whom his sister's manner could refer.

"That--that woman!" replied Rose again, unable to bring herself to mention the name.

"Oh," exclaimed her brother absently, but starting up from his reverie. "Oh, very well; show her in," he directed. His tone and gesture indicated that nothing mattered now.

Rose was evidently surprised at her brother's instruction and for once inclined to protest the supremacy of his will.

"You are not going to see her again?" she argued.

"I know of no one who should be in greater need of seeing me," John rejoined, with sadness and reproach mingled in equal parts.

"But alone? Think of the danger!"

"Seeing her alone has done about all the harm it could do," the brother replied, with a disconsolate toss of his hands, while the drawn look upon his face became more pronounced. "Show her in!"

Rose turned back with a cough eloquent of dissenting judgment and left the door flung wide. John at his distance sensed her feeling of outrage in the fierce rustling of her skirts as she receded down the hall, and presently heard her voice saying icily: "The open door!"

The minister smiled, with half-guilty satisfaction. His sister had refused Miss Dounay the courtesy of her escort to the study. He suspected that Rose had even refused to look at the visitor again, but having indicated the direction in which the open door stood, had whisked indignantly beyond into her own preserves.

The hour was now something after sunset, and the room was half in gloom. The actress paused inside the door, standing stiffly. Hampstead sat before his desk, his elbows on the arms of his chair, his hands hanging limp, his shoulders drooping, his eyes cast down and fixed. He was again thinking. He had a good many things to think about. The coming of the actress brought one more. He was not utterly despondent, but he had been brought to the verge of catastrophe; perhaps beyond the verge. The woman against whom he had done no wrong, and who had brought him to the precipice, now stood in his room, the place of all places in which he could feel the desolation creeping round his soul like rising waters about a man trapped by the tide in some ocean cavern. But the minister was not now thinking of that. Instead his mind recalled wonderingly that fleeting picture of this woman in court, with her eyes gleaming savagely at Searle and crouching like a tigress about to spring.

As if to call attention to her presence, the actress swung the door noiselessly toward the jamb, until the lock caught it with an audible and decisive snap. The minister reached out a hand and touched a button that flooded the room with light.

Miss Dounay was clad exactly as she had appeared in court, except that she was more heavily veiled, so that the prying light revealed no more of her features than the sparkle of an eye. Hampstead had not risen.

"Well!" he said, quietly but emotionlessly.

"Yes," she replied, in a low, affirmative voice, exactly as if in answer to a question.

"Why did you do it?"

Hampstead asked the question abruptly, but very quietly, and accompanied it with a gravity of expression and a gesture slight but so inclusive that it comprehended the entire avalanche which had been released upon him during the six days which had passed since he had talked with this woman in the limousine upon the moonlit point above the city.

Before replying, the actress raised both hands and lifted her veil. The disclosure was something of a revelation. The features were those of Marien Dounay, but they were changed. There had been always something royal in Marien's glances, but the royal air was gone now: something dominant in her personality, but the dominance had departed. The suggestion, too, of smouldering fire in her eyes was absent; instead there appeared a liquescent, quivering light, in which suffering and the comprehension that comes with suffering combined to suggest helpless appeal rather than the old, imperial air.

This softening of expression had extended to her mouth as well. The lips, as red, as full of invitation as ever, were more pliant; they trembled and formed themselves into tiny undulating curves which suggested and then reinforced the imploring light of the eyes. Her beauty was more appealing because it was no longer commanding, but entreating.

"Why did you do it?" the minister repeated, when his eyes had completed his appraisal, and the woman was still eloquently silent.

"Because I loved you," she answered briefly.

Her declaration was accompanied by an attempt at a smile that was so brave and yet so faltering that it was rather pitiful. But Hampstead, looking at the beautiful shell of this woman who had so vindictively hurled him down, was not in a mood to feel pity. Instead he was merely incredulous.

"Love?" he asked cynically, rising from his seat.

"Yes," exclaimed the woman with convulsive eagerness, as if her voice choked over speaking what her lips, by the traditional modesty of her sex and the mountain of her pride and self-will, had been too long forbidden to utter. "Yes, I have always loved you!"

With this much of a beginning, excitedly and with the air of one whose course was predetermined, the actress plucked off her hat, stabbed the pin into it, and tossed it upon the window seat; then nervously stripped the gloves from her hands; all the while hurrying on with a sort of defensive vehemence to aver:

"I have loved you from the first moment when you held me in your arms long enough for me to feel the electric warmth of your personality. You roused, kindled, and enflamed me! The sensation was delicious; but I resented it. It offended my pride. I had never been overmastered. You overmastered me without knowing it. I hated you for it. You were so--so unsophisticated; so good, so simple, so ready to worship, to admire, to ascribe the beauties of my body to the beauties of my soul. I hated you for that, for my soul was less beautiful than my body, and I knew it. I resisted you and yielded to you; I hated you and loved you; I spurned you and wanted you.

"You were so awkward, so impossible; you had so much of talent and knew so little how to use it. It seemed to me the very mockery of fate that my heart should fasten its affection upon you. I tried to break the spell, and could not. I yielded to my heart. I had to love you, to let myself adore you.

"I thought of taking you with me, but the way was too long; yours was more than talent--far more; it was genius, but buried deep and scattered wide. It would have taken a lifetime to chisel it out and assemble it in the perfect whole of successful art. I shrank before the treadmill task.

"And something else--I was jealous of you!"

Hampstead, who despite his incredulity had been listening attentively, raised his eyebrows.

"Jealous of the artist you might become. Your genius when it flowered would overtop mine as your character overtops mine."

The speaker paused, as if to mark the effect of her words.

"Go on," urged Hampstead impatiently, and for the first time betraying feeling. "In the name of God, woman, if you have one word of justification to speak, let me hear it!"

"I have it," Miss Dounay rejoined, yet more impetuously, "in that one word which I have already spoken--love!" She paused, passed her hand across her brow, and again resumed the thread of her story, still speaking rapidly but with an increase of dramatic emphasis.

"Then came the final ecstasy of pain. You loved me. You demanded me. You charged me with loving you. You told me it was like the murder of a beautiful child to kill a love like ours. You argued, persuaded, demanded--compelled--almost possessed me!"

The woman's face whitened, her eyes closed, and she reeled dizzily under the spell of a memory that swept her into transports.

"But," replied the minister quietly, "you killed our beautiful child."

"No! No!!" she exclaimed, thrusting out her hands to him. "Do not say that! I only exposed it--to the vicissitudes of years, to absence and to a foul slander which my own lips breathed against myself! But I did not kill it! I did not kill it!"

"At any rate, it is dead," replied the man, his voice as sadly sympathetic as it was coolly decisive.

"But I will make it live again," the woman exclaimed desperately. "I love you, John! Oh, God, how I love you!"

She endeavored to reach his neck with her arms, but the minister stepped back, and she stood wringing them emptily, a look in her eyes as if she implored him to understand.

But the minister was still unresponsive.

"It was a queer way for love to act," he protested, and again with that comprehensive gesture which called accusing notice to the ruin pulled down upon him.

"But will you not understand?" she pleaded. "It was the last desperate resource of love. I could not reach the real you. I tried for weeks. I endured insufferable associations. I assumed distasteful interests--all to put myself in your company; to keep you in mine; to create those proximities, those environments and situations in which love grows naturally. Again and again I thought that love was springing up. But I was disappointed. You did not respond. What I thought at first was response was only sympathy. To you I was no longer a woman. I was a subject in spiritual pathology.

"When I saw this, first it irritated, then maddened me. I knew that you were not yourself, that your environment had insulated you. That you were so interested in the part which you were playing,--so absorbed by the duty of being a public idol, that you could not be yourself, the man, the flesh, the heart, I know you are.

"In desperation I resolved to strip you, to hurl you down, to rob you of the public regard, of your church, of everything; to strip you until you were nothing but the man who once held me in his arms, his whole body quivering, and demanding with all his nature to possess me."

As the woman spoke, her voice had risen, and a half-insane enthusiasm was gleaming on her face, while her fingers reached restlessly after the minister who, as unconsciously as she advanced, receded until he stood cornered against the door.

"Now," she continued, in her frenzied exaltation of mood, "it is done! You see how easily it was accomplished. Nothing should be so disillusioning, so reawakening to you as to observe how light is your hold upon this community, how selfish and insincere was all this public adulation. I, a stranger almost, of whom these people knew nothing, was able, with a ridiculously impossible charge, to brush you from your eminence like a fly.

"Of what worth has it all been? Of what worth all that you can do for people like these? Your very church is turning against you. It will cast you out."

A shade had crossed the brow of Hampstead.

"You think that?" he asked defiantly.

"I know it," Marien replied aggressively. "That square-headed old Elder came to see me this afternoon. Shaking his hand was like taking hold of a toad. Ugh! He wanted to pry into your past through me, the old reprobate!"

"Hush! I will not hear him defamed. He is an honorable and a well-meaning man, against whose character not one word can be breathed."

Marien's eyes flashed. Impatient and regardless of interruption, she continued as though Hampstead had not spoken.

"And he, the father of the man you are suffering to shield, is to be the first to take advantage of your misfortune. The old Pharisee! I nearly told him who the real thief was."

"Miss Dounay!"

The minister's exclamation was short and sharp, like a bark of rage. His face was drawn until his mouth was a seam, and his eyes had shrunk to two shafts of light, "Miss Dounay! That is God's secret. If you had spoken, I should have--" He ceased to speak but held up hands that clenched and unclenched.

The actress was feeling confident now. She had goaded this man to rage. Beyond rage might lie weakness and surrender. She threw back her head and laughed.

"Yes, I will finish it for you. You would have been inclined to strangle me; but I did not tell him. Yet not for your reason, but for mine. So long as you rest under the charge, your enemies gnash; your friends turn from you. Instead of being insulated from me by all, you are insulated from all by me. There is no one left but me. I love you. I am beautiful, rich, with the glamour of success upon me. I can override anything; defy anything. I can be yours--altogether yours. You can be mine--altogether mine. You can leave these shallow, ungrateful gossips and scandalmongers to prey upon each other, while you and I go away to an Eden of our own."

The actress paused, breathless and again to mark effects. The minister's face had resumed its normal benignity of expression. He was gazing at her thoughtfully, contemplatively. Marien took fresh hope, knowing upon second thought now, as she had known all along, that she could not successfully tempt this man by a life of mere luxurious emptiness. Falling into tones of yet more confiding intimacy, she continued:

"Besides, John, I am not jealous of your genius any more. My love has surged even over that. You have still a great dramatic career before you. You shall come into my company. You shall have every opportunity. Within two years you shall be my leading man; within five, co-star with me. Think of it. Your heart is still in the actor's art. Acting is religion. After God, the actor is the greatest creator. He alone can simulate life. The stage is the most powerful pulpit. Come. We will write your life's story into a play. We will play the faith and fortitude which you have shown into the very soul of America, like a bed of moral concrete! Are you not moved at that?"

She paused, standing with head upon one side, and the old, alluring, coaxing glances stealing up from beneath the coquettish droop of her lids.

"No," Hampstead replied seriously. "I am not moved by it at all. Had you made this speech to me five years ago, I should have been in transports. To-day the art of living appeals to me beyond the art of acting. I have no doubt I feel as great a zest, as great a creative thrill in standing true in the position in which you have placed me as you ever can in the most ecstatic raptures of the mimetic art. No, Marien," and his tone was conclusive, "it makes no appeal to me."

The beautiful creature, perplexity and disappointment mingling on her face, stood for a moment nonplussed. The expression of alert and confident resourcefulness had departed. Her intelligence had failed her. Yet once more the old smile mounted bravely.

"But there still remains one thing," she breathed softly, leaning toward him. "That is I. Everything you have got is gone, or going. I have taken it away from you that I might give you instead myself. You had no room for me last week. You have nothing else but me now. It hurt me to give you pain. I hate Searle. I could have torn his tongue out yesterday. But you will forgive me, John. I did it for love."

Her utterance was indescribably pathetic--indescribably appealing.

"I am not to blame that I love you. You are to blame. No, the God that constituted us is to blame."

Her tones grew lower and lower. The spirit of humbled pride, of chastened submission, of helpless want entered more and more into the expression of her face and the timbre of her soft voice, while the very outlines of her figure seemed to melt and quiver with the intensity of yearning.

"It has been hard to humble myself in this way to you," she confessed. "I tried to win you as once I won you, as women like to win their lovers. But I am not quite as other women. I have to have you! My nature is imperious. It will shatter itself or have its will. I shattered your love to gain my ambition's goal. And now I have shattered your career to gain your love again."

Hampstead, though his consideration was growing for the woman, could not resist a shaft of irony.

"That was a sacrifice you took the liberty of making for me," he suggested.

"But, don't you see, it made me possible for you again," and the actress smiled with that obtuseness which was pitiful because it would not see defeat. She drew closer to him now, well within reach of his arm, and stood perfectly still, her hands clasped, her bosom heaving gently, a thing of rounded curves and wistful eyes, the figure of passionate, submissive, appealing love, hoping--desiring--waiting--to be taken.

Yet the minister did not take her.

But whatever agonies of lingering suspense, of dying hope, and rising despair may have passed through the indomitable woman as she stood in this pose of vain and helpless waiting, there was yet a spirit in her that would not surrender because it could not.

With eyes mournfully searching the depths of the face before her, she began her last appeal.

"And yet, John, there is a sacrifice that I am willing to make that is all my own and none of yours. I will renounce my own ambition, abandon the stage, cancel my engagements, give up that for which I have bartered everything a woman has to give but one thing. I have kept that one thing for you alone. The name of Marien Dounay shall disappear. I will be Alice Higgins again. I will be not an artist but a wife. I will be the associate of your work. You must go from here, of course. I have made your remaining impossible. But we will find some place where men and women need the kind of thing that you can do. It is a great need. There is a sort of glory in your work which I have not been too blind to see. My bridal flowers shall be the weeds of humble service. I will employ my art to bring cheer into homes of poverty, freshness and brightness to the sick. I will try to be God's replica of all that you yourself are. I say I will try!"

She had raised her face now and was searching his eyes again.

"I will do all of this, eagerly, joyously, fanatically, John Hampstead, if it will make it possible for you to love me--as once you loved me," she concluded, with the last words barely audible and sounding more like heart throbs than human speech.

Hampstead, looking levelly into her face, saw that the woman spoke the truth, that she was absolutely sincere.

She saw that he saw it, and with a gesture of mute appeal threw out her hands to him. But they gathered only air and fell limply to her side.

The minister, although his manner expressed a world of sympathy, shook his head sadly. Marien's face grew white, and the red of her lips almost disappeared. A look of blank terror came into her eyes, while one hand, with fingers half-closed, stole upward to the blanched cheek, and the other was pressed convulsively against her breast.

"I have my answer--John!" she whispered hoarsely, after an interval. "I have my answer!"

"Yes, Marien," he replied, sorrowfully but decisively, "you have your answer."

Her eyes, always eloquent, and now with a look of terrible hurt in them, suffused quickly, and it seemed that she would burst into tears and fling herself weakly upon the man she loved so hopelessly. Instead, however, only a shiny drop or two coursed down the cheeks which continued as white as marble; and she held herself resolutely aloof, but balancing uncertainly until all at once her rounded figure seemed to wilt and she would have fallen, had not the minister thrown an arm about the tottering form and with gentle brotherliness of manner helped her to a seat in the Morris chair.

For a considerable time she sat with her face in her hands, silent but for an occasional dry, eruptive sob.

Hampstead, standing back with arms folded and one hand making a rest for his chin, looked on helplessly, realizing that for the first time he was studying this complex personality with something like real comprehension.

While he gazed a purpose appeared to stir again in the disconsolate figure. The dry sobs ceased, and the body straightened till her head found its rest upon the back of the chair; but there the woman relaxed again in seeming total exhaustion with eyes closed and lips slightly parted. Hampstead drew a little closer, as if in tribute to this determined nature which now obviously fought with its grief as it had fought to gain the object of its attachment--indomitably. He had again the feeling which had come to him before, that she was greater, was worthier than he.

"How I have made you suffer!" Marien exclaimed abruptly, at the same time opening her eyes.

"Yes," the minister confessed frankly, while the lines of pain seemed to chisel themselves deeper upon his face with the admission, "you have indeed made me suffer."

"Can you ever, ever forgive me?" she asked, lifting her hand appealingly.

It was a small hand and lily white, with slim and tapering fingers. The minister took it in his and found it as soft as before,--but chilled.

"Yes," he said, gravely and calculatingly, "I do forgive you. The ruin has been almost complete; but I am strong enough to build again!"

"Oh," she exclaimed eagerly, starting up, "do you think you can?"

"Yes," he assured her stoutly, "I know it." He was beginning to feel sorrier for her than for himself. "You, too," he suggested gently, "must begin to build again."