Part 33

Again her features whitened, and she fell back, pressing her brow with a gesture of pain and bewilderment, a suggestion of one who wakes to find one's self in chaos. It seemed a very long time that she was silent, but with lines of thought upon her brow and the signs of strengthening purpose gradually again appearing about her mouth and chin. When she spoke it was to say with determination:

"Yes; and I, too, am strong enough to build again. In these silent minutes I have been thinking worlds and worlds of things. I have lost everything--yet everything remains--and more. My art shall be my husband; and I will be a greater actress than ever. I shall play with a greater power, inspired and informed by the love which I have lost. I was never tender enough before. The critics charged me with hardness; I hated them for it. I could not understand them. Now I know. I could never play but half a woman's heart. I was too selfish, too proud, too imperious. I regarded love too lightly. That mistake will be impossible now. I know that love is all and all. There is no ecstasy of love's delight of which my imagination cannot conceive; there is no despair which the loss of love may produce that my experience will not have fathomed before this poignant ache in my heart is done."

At first John recoiled a little at this talk of a utilitarian extraction from her bitter experience and his; yet he reflected that it was like the woman. It was but the outcrop of the dominant passion. Since girlhood she had seen herself solely in terms of relation to her art; therefore this attitude now indicated, not a lack of fineness, but her almost noble capacity for converting everything to the ultimate object of the artist. Without such capacity for abandon, there was, he reflected, no supreme artist; and, he reasoned further, no supreme minister--or man, even. To this extent and in this moment, Marien's bearing in defeat was a lesson and a spur to him.

"I shall go widowed to my work," she went on to say, "but it will be a greater work than I could have done before. Then I had an ambition. Now I have a mission! To show women--and men too--the worth and weight and height and depth and paramount value of love."

Hampstead was again deeply impressed with her enormous resiliency of spirit. The woman's heart had been torn to pieces; yet while each nerve and fiber of it was a pulse of pain, she was purposing to bind the thing together and let its every throb be a word of warning to womankind.

"I learned it from you," she explained, almost as if she had read his thoughts. "I understand now the exalted mood in which you spoke a few minutes ago. I am sorry that I have lost you; but I am not sorry that I have hurled you down, since it leaves revealed a nobler figure of a man than I had thought existed."

Hampstead shuddered, in part at his own pain, in part at the ease with which she uttered the sentiment, because this woman could really never know how much his fall had cost him.

"Each of us in life I fear must be held to answer for his own obtuseness," he suggested.

"But that is not all we are held to answer for," Miss Dounay replied with sudden perception. "We must pay the penalty of the obtuseness of others."

"Ah!" exclaimed the minister quickly. "There you stumbled upon one of the greatest truths in religion, the law of vicarious suffering. We are each compelled, whether we will or not, to suffer for the sins of others. If we, you or I, mere humanity that we are, can so manage such suffering that it becomes a redemptive influence over the life of the one who caused it, we have done in a small and distant way the thing which the Son of Man did so perfectly for all the world."

"I see," she exclaimed eagerly, pressing her hands together in a sort of rapture. "It is that which you have done for me. You have suffered for my sin, and you have so managed the suffering that you have taken away some of my selfishness and will send me out of here, as I said before, not with an ambition, but with a mission."

She had risen, and though her manner was still subdued, it was again the manner of self-possession. Yet the new mood into which she had passed, and the new light of spiritual enthusiasm which had come upon her face, in no wise wiped out the impression that in the hour past she had tasted the bitterest disappointment that a woman can know, had plunged to the very depths of despair, and was still under its somber cloud. Indeed it was the fierceness of the conflagration within her which had burned out so swiftly at least a part of that dross of selfishness of which she had spoken, and clarified her vision, so that their two minds had leaped quickly from one peak of thought to another, to come suddenly on embarrassed silence just because all words, all deeds even, seemed suddenly futile to express what each had felt and was now feeling.

As the conversation lapsed momentarily, both appeared to find relief in trivial interests. The minister straightened the books in the rack upon his desk, then looked at his watch and noted that it was fifteen minutes to seven and reflected that seven was his dinner hour.

The actress gave her hair a few touches with her hands, and stood adjusting her hat before the mirror above the mantel. But the veil was still raised. Hampstead watched these operations silently, moved by evidences of the change in the woman.

"You have forgiven me," she began again, noticing in the mirror that his eye was upon her; "but I do not forgive myself. My first mission is to repair the damage which I have done to you. I will go immediately to Searle and tell him the truth."

Hampstead's mouth fell open, and a single step carried him half way across the room.

"But you must not tell Searle nor any one else the truth!" he affirmed vehemently.

It was Marian's turn to be surprised.

"You mean that I am not to undo the wrong that I have done you?"' she asked in amazement.

"Not that way," he answered, with deliberate shakings of the head.

"You mean that you are to stand under the stigma which now rests upon you?" she insisted, with a gleam of the old imperious manner. "Certainly not! I have done wrong enough! It cannot be undone too quickly. I shall tell the truth to Searle. I shall gather the reporters about me and spare myself nothing. I will reveal the whole horrible plot; I will confess that Searle was duped, and that you were grossly conspired against by me!"

Again Hampstead, meeting that level glance, knew that the woman spoke in absolute sincerity. She was entirely capable of doing it. Once a course commended itself to her judgment, she had already shown that she would spare nothing to follow it.

"But you forget young Burbeck," he exclaimed. "Your exposure would mean his exposure."

"Well?"

Marien's eyes and tone both expressed her meaning, though she added incisively: "He is no reason why you should linger under this cloud."

Hampstead gazed at the woman doubtfully, speculating as to what argument would make the strongest appeal to her.

"His mother," he began gravely, "is my dearest friend. She is the most saintly woman I have ever known. One year of her life to this community is worth more than a score of years of mine--than all of mine. Let her know in private that her son is the thief, and she would grieve to death in a week. Let her know suddenly, with the force of public exposure, and it would kill her instantly, like an electric shock."

But this note proved the wrong one. Marien instantly took higher ground.

"I know that woman," she replied. "I have sensed her spirit. You do her injustice. If she knew the facts, she would speak, though it killed her and ruined her son, rather than see you endure for a single day what you are suffering now."

Hampstead knew better than the speaker how true this was.

"But there is another reason, a higher reason," he began slowly, with a grave significance that caught Marian's attention instantly, "the soul of Rollie Burbeck!"

The minister had breathed rather than spoken these last words. They had in them a sense of the awe he felt at what hung upon his actions now.

For an instant, the keen eyes of the woman searched the depths of Hampstead's own, as if she was making sure that what she heard and understood with this new and spiritual intuition which had come so swiftly out of her experience, was confirmed by what she saw.

"You mean," she asked, only half credulous, "that you will suffer for his sake as you have suffered for mine, until new character begins to grow in him just as a new objective begins to stir in me? You mean that?"

Hampstead nodded. "That is my hope," he said solemnly.

"Oh!" Marien sighed, with a prolonged aspirate note which expressed reverence, awe, and astonishment. "But the charges? They will be pressed. You will be held--convicted--imprisoned!"

"I cannot think it," argued John soberly. "A way will appear to avoid that. Yet we must contemplate the worst. One thing is sure," and his voice appeared to increase in volume without an increase of tone, "one thing is sure: In the position in which you have placed me I must remain until the thing for which I am standing has been accomplished--however long that takes--and if the wrong you have done to me confers any obligation upon you, it is to keep your lips sealed till I give you leave to open them."

Miss Dounay, more humbled by this steadfast magnanimity of soul which could refuse vindication when it was offered than awed by the sudden force of self-assertion which Hampstead manifested, looked her submission.

"Man!" she exclaimed impulsively, seizing both his hands for an instant. "I revere you. You are not the flesh I thought. You have altered greatly. Yours was not a pose. It is genuine. I am reconciled a little to my loss. You are not mine because I was not worthy to be yours!"

Hampstead made a deprecating, repressive gesture.

"Let me finish," she protested. "I am even less humiliated. The thing required to charm you was a thing I did not possess!"

"Beauty is a great possession," Hampstead smiled. "I have been and am sensible to it. I was sensible to your beauty to the last. The woman I love is beautiful."

"The woman you love!" Marien's whole manner changed. Her face took on the tigerish look. "There is some one else then? At least," she added reproachfully, "you might have spared me this."

"It was necessary," the minister replied quietly, "if we were really to understand each other."

The gravity of the man's tone, as well as some subtle recovery within herself, checked the tigerish impulse. Swiftly it gave way to pain and humility again.

"You--you are to marry?" she faltered weakly.

"No," he replied, with ineffable sadness. "This--" and again that comprehensive gesture which he had used so frequently to indicate the catastrophe which had come upon him, "this has dashed that hope entirely!"

The actress stood completely confounded. Within herself she wondered why she did not fly into a jealous passion. Surely she was changing; she felt half bewildered, half distrustful of her own moods in which she had believed so surely before. She was also completely staggered by this crowning revelation of the capacity of the man for sacrifice. Instead of the jealous passion, she felt a sisterly kind of sympathy; but it was only after a very considerable interval that Marien trusted herself to ask with trembling voice:

"She is very--very beautiful--this--this woman whom you love?"

The question was put very softly, meditatively almost.

"To me, yes," replied the minister with emphasis. "I think you would say so too."

"You were engaged?"

"Not when I met you first; but there had been a bond of very close sympathy between us. After you were gone, I felt that I had never really loved you; and my heart fastened itself on her. I loved her and told her so. But I felt it my duty to tell her the truth about you. Manlike, I thought she would comprehend. Woman-like, she comprehended more than I thought. She believed me weak and uncertain. She loved me still, but with a pain of disappointment in her heart. She put my love upon a kind of probation. The probation has lasted five years. It was almost finished. After what the papers have published in the past few days, you can imagine that now all is over."

"But you will write to her? You will see her? You will explain?" Marien questioned in self-forgetful eagerness.

"Explain," he smiled sadly. "What a futility! What explanation could there be after what I had told her? You know a woman's heart. More firmly than any other, she would be forced to an implicit belief in what the newspapers have falsely intimated concerning our relations in the past few weeks."

"But I will go to her myself!" Marien exclaimed impetuously. "I will tell her the truth."

"Do you think she would believe you?" he asked frankly. "Could you expect any woman to believe in your sincerity under such circumstances, upon such a mission? You would not be able to believe it yourself."

"You are right!" Marien admitted after a moment of thought. "Once away from the restraining influence of your character, my true nature would reveal itself. I should hate her! I do hate her! No, I could not go!"

"And so, you see,"--John did not finish the sentence but had recourse to a helpless smile and a pathetic shrug of the shoulders.

Marien lowered her veil. The interview was running on and on. It must come to an end.

"It all becomes uncanny," she exclaimed. "There is too much converging upon your heart. There must come a rift in the clouds. I have submitted to your compelling altruism but only for the present. If something does not happen within a reasonable limit of time, I shall positively and dangerously explode!"

John smiled at the vehemence with which she spoke.

"But in the meantime--silence!" he adjured impressively.

"Yes," she assented reluctantly. "But at the same time I shall not know one gleam of happiness, one moment's freedom from mental anguish until your vindication is flung widely to the world."

"But in the meantime, silence!" reiterated John obstinately.

"And in the meantime," she consented more resignedly, "silence!"

"Good night, Marien," said the minister, putting out his hand.

"Good night, Doctor Hampstead," she replied, seizing that hand impulsively, then flinging it from her again as she turned, without another glance, to the door. It closed behind her softly, considerately almost, but with that same decisive snap of the lock which had shut her in three quarters of an hour before.

Hampstead stood a moment in reflection. She had come and she had gone, leaving behind a great sense of relief, of complexities unraveled, of good accomplished and of further danger averted. Of one thing he felt sure now; he would never go to prison. A way would be found to avoid that. Her vindictive malice had spent itself and been turned to an attempt at co-operation.

But he was still under clouds: one the verdict of Judge Brennan, "Held to Answer"; the other less black, but larger and murkier, the cloud of public condemnation; and for the present he must remain under both. Besides which, there was his church and Elder Burbeck to consider.

And to-morrow was Sunday!

*CHAPTER XXXVIII*

*SUNDAY IN ALL PEOPLE'S*

Elder Burbeck did not make good his threat. Hampstead stood again in the pulpit of All People's on Sunday, as his heart had so passionately desired.

But the reality disappointed. The contrast between this day and last Lord's day was pitiful. To be sure, the church was packed; but not to worship. The people--curious and wooden-hearted--had come to be witnesses to a spectacle, to see a man go through the business of a role which his character no longer fitted him to enact. The service and the sermon were one long agony. John spoke upon the duty of being true. His words came back upon him like an echo.

As for Elder Burbeck, he had only halted. The minister, from considerations of delicacy which were promptly misconstrued, having remained away from the called meeting of the Official Board on Saturday night, all things in that session had gone to Burbeck's satisfaction. He held in his pocket the resolution of the Board, recommending that the congregation request the resignation of the pastor of All People's. He might have introduced this at the close of the sermon, thus turning the ordinary congregational meeting into a business session; but the Elder was an expert tactician. He decided to devote the entire day to a final estimate of just what inroads the week had made upon the ascendancy of the minister with his people.

However, the manner in which the sermon was received encouraged him to go forward immediately with his plans. As the congregation was upon the last verse of the last hymn, the Elder ascended to the pulpit beside the minister. He did not look at the minister. He did not whisper that he had an announcement to make, and Hampstead did not say at the end of the hymn: "Elder Burbeck has an announcement to make." This was the usual form. But it was not followed. Instead, Burbeck, unannounced, with coarse self-assertion, made the announcement:

"There will be a business meeting of the church on Monday night to consider matters of grave import to the congregation. Every member is urged to be present."

There was a grave doubt if the Elder had a right of himself to call a meeting of the church. Yet the only man with force enough to voice that doubt was the minister, and he did not voice it. Instead, he stood quietly until the announcement was concluded and then invoked the benediction of God upon all the service, which, of course, included the announcement.

When at the close of the service Doctor Hampstead undertook to mingle among his people, according to custom, he found a minority hysterically hearty in their assurances of confidence, sympathy, and support; but the majority avoided him. Instead of enduring this and withering under it, the minister was roused into something like aggression. By confronting and accosting them, he forced aloof individuals to address him. He made his way into groups that did not open readily to receive him. In all conversations he frankly recognized his position, made it the uppermost topic, and solicited opinion and advice. He even eavesdropped a little. Once people opened their mouths upon the subject, he was astonished at their frankness. When the sum total of the impressions thus gathered was organized and deductions made, he was stunned almost to cynicism by their results. Of course, no one indicated that they believed him guilty of theft, and in the main all accepted his defense as the true defense. But they found him guilty of folly--a folly with a woman. Whether it was merely a folly and not a sin, it appeared was not to greatly alter penalties.

Yet justice must be done these people. They felt sorry for their minister and showed it; and they only shrank from him to avoid showing something else that would hurt him. They still acknowledged their debts of personal gratitude to him, but now they experienced a feeling of superiority. Their weaknesses had overtaken them in private; his had caught up with him under the spotlight's glare. They looked upon him with commiseration, pityingly, but from a lofty height. Besides which, they accused him of an overt offense. He had brought shame on All People's. He had preached to them this morning upon the duty of being true; but he had himself not been true--to the proud self-interest of All People's.

This indignant concern for the reputation of All People's was rather a surprising revelation to Hampstead. He had fallen into the way of thinking that he had made All People's; that he and All People's were one. That the congregation could have any purpose that did not include his purpose was not thinkable. He had never conceived of it as a social organism, with self-consciousness, with pride, with a head to be held up and a reputation to be sustained. To him All People's was not a society of persons with a pose. It was an association of individuals, each more or less weak, more or less dependent in their spiritual nature upon each other and upon him; the whole banded together to help each other and to help others like themselves. He had thought of himself as the instrument of All People's in its work of human salvage. But he now discovered that in these four years All People's had suffered from an over extension of the ego. It had been spoiled by prosperity and public approbation, just as other congregations, or individuals, might be or have been. The admiration of the members for him as their pastor, their humble obedience to his will, was in part due, not to his spiritual ascendancy, not to his conspicuously successful labors as a helper of humankind in so many different ways, but to the fact that these activities of the minister won him that public admiration and approval which shed a glamour also upon the congregation and upon the individual members of the congregation. Because of this, they worshipped him, honored him, and palavered over him to a point where Hampstead, no doubt as unconsciously as the congregation and as dangerously, had suffered an over-extension of his own ego.

But deflation of spirit had come to him swiftly. Now his own pride and his own self-sufficiency had all been shot away. If any remained, the effect of this Sunday morning service was quite sufficient to perform the final operation of removal.

He was to preach that night from the text: "If God is for us, who is against us." He gave up the idea. It sounded egotistical. He preached instead his farewell sermon, though without a word of farewell in it, from the text:

"Brethren, even if a man be overtaken in any trespass, ye who are spiritual restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness; looking to thyself lest thou also be tempted."

That was what the pastor of All People's was trying to do,--to restore a man. In preaching this sermon, he forgot that this was his valedictory, forgot himself, forgot everything but the great mission of spiritual reconstruction upon which he had labored and proposed to labor as long as life was in him, no matter what yokes and scars were put upon him. In it he reached the oratorical height of his career, which was not necessarily lofty.

But people listened--and with understanding. Some of them cried a little. It made them reminiscent. The man himself, now slipping, had once restored them with great gentleness. All said, "What a pity!"

But Hampstead, while he spoke, was steeling himself against the probable desertion of his congregation. He had a feeling that he could win them back if he tried hard enough, but he began to doubt that they were worth winning back. He had really never sought to win them to himself personally; he would not begin now.

Instead, he saw himself cast out. The verdict of the church on Monday night would also be "Held to Answer."

He saw it coming almost gloatingly, and with a fierce up-flaming of that fanatic ardor which was always in him. The desire came to him to seize upon the position in which he stood as a pulpit from which to deliver a message to the world that greatly needed to be delivered, to say something that his fate and his life thereafter might illustrate, and thus make his public shame a greater witness to the truth than ever his popularity had been. In one of the loftiest of his moods of exaltation, he strode homeward from the church.

At ten o'clock, he telephoned the morning papers that at midnight he would have a statement to give out. It contained some rather extravagant expressions, was couched throughout in an exalted strain, and ran as follows:

AN ADDRESS TO THE PEOPLE