Part 34

"They tell me that I have stood for the last time in the pulpit of _All People's_; that on Monday night I shall be unfrocked by the hands that ordained me; for my ministerial standing was created by this church which now proposes to take it away. This act, more than a court conviction, will seem my ruin. I write to say I cannot call that ruin to which a man goes willingly.

"It is not my soul that hangs in the balance, but another's. While this man struggles, I declare again that I will not break in upon him. I can reach out and touch him; but I will not. He will read this. I say to him: 'Brother, wait! Do not hurry. I can hold your load a while until you get the grapple on your spirit.'

"But for saying this, I am cast out.

"Men observe to me: 'What a pity!' I say to you: 'No pity at all!'

"Is a minister who would not thus suffer worthy to be a minister? The conception can be broadened. Is any man? Is an editor worthy to be an editor, a merchant, a teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, standing as each must at sometime where the issue is sharply drawn between loyalty and disloyalty to truth or trust,--is any of them truly worthy or truly true, who would not willingly suffer all that is demanded of me?

"It does not require a great man to be true to the clasp of his hand: nor a minister. I know policemen and motormen who are that. To be that, upon the human side, has been almost the sum of my religious practice--not my profession, but my _practice_. By that habit I have gained what I have gained--_and lost what I have lost_. Humbled to the dust, I dare yet to make one boast: I have not failed in these small human loyalties, except as my capacities have failed.

"This last act of mine, which will be regarded as the consummation of failure, is the greatest opportunity to be true that I have ever had.

"To go forth on foot before this community, held to answer for my convictions, fills me with a sense of abandon to immolation upon high altars that is almost intoxicating.

"I can almost wish it might never be known whether I spoke the truth or not about the Dounay diamonds; that in my death, unvindicated, I might lie yonder on the hills of Piedmont; that on a simple slab just large enough to bear it, might be written no name but only this:

"'_He believed something hard enough to live for it._'

"I wish even that you might crucify me, take me out on Broadway here and nail me to a trolley pole. But you will not do this. I am not so worthy. You are not so brave. Those men had the courage of their convictions who nailed up the Galilean and hurled down with stones the first martyr. You have not. Courage to-day survives; but it is reserved for ignoble struggles. Men are more ready to die for their appetites than to live for their convictions. Men fear to be uncomfortable, to be sneered at, to be defeated. Paugh! Defeat is not a thing to fear. To be untrue is the blackest terror! To become involved for the sake of one's convictions should not be regarded as calamity. Yet it is,--in these soft days.

"The hope that the fall, even of one so humble and unimportant as I, may be some slight protest against this spirit of weakness, takes out the sting and gives me a delirious kind of joy.

"I would like to have been a great preacher. I am not. I would I had a tongue of eloquence to fire men to this passion of mine. I have not. That is the pity! I was proud and jealous of my position. I have lost it.

"Yet I do not doubt that I shall find a field of usefulness. Deep as you hurl me down, I do not doubt but that there are some to whom even if condemned, spurned, unfrocked--oh, the eternal silliness of that! as if any decrees of men could affect the standing or potentiality of a soul--I can come as a welcome messenger of helpfulness. To them I shall go! They may be found here. If so, I shall remain here--go in and out--pointed at as the man who failed.

"Perhaps I can even make failure popular. It ought to be. There is a great need of failures just now, for men who will fail for their true success's sake.

"The world needs a new standard of appraisal. It honors the man whose success bulks to the eye. It needs to be a little more discriminating; to find out why some men failed, and to honor them because they are failures. Some of the greatest men in America and in history were failures. Socrates with his cup was a failure. Jesus was a failure. It was written on his back in lines of blistering welts. It was nailed into his palms, stabbed into his brow, hissed into his ear as he died.

"Re-reading at this midnight hour what I have written, I perceive that it sounds slightly frenzied. But my soul just now is slightly frenzied. If I wrote calmly, unegoistically, it would be a lie. What is written is what I feel.

"Here and there some will approve this document. More will sneer at it. But it is mine. It is I. I sign it. It is my last will and testament in this community where once--daring to boast again--I have been a power.

"Friends--and enemies alike!--this final word.

"I have not grasped much, but this: To be true. When somebody trusts you worthily, make good. Be true, children, to the plans and to the hopes of parents. Be true, lad, to the impetuous girl who has trusted you with more than she should have trusted you. Be true, women, to your lovers and your husbands; men to your wives, your partners, your fellow men, your patrons; to your talents, your opportunities, your country, your age, your world! Be true to God! If you have no God, be true to your highest conception of what God ought to be.

"It sounds like a homily. It is a principle. You can multiply it indefinitely. It runs like a scarlet thread through religion, and it will go all around the borders of life.

"Eternal Loyalty is the Price of true Success.

"To this conviction I subscribe my name, myself and everything that still remains to me.

"JOHN HAMPSTEAD, "Pastor of All People's Church."

John felt that he wrote this and that he signed it in the presence of the Presence. The address and not the sermon was his valedictory.

*CHAPTER XXXIX*

*THE CUP TOO FULL*

While the Monday morning papers played up the "Address to the People", in the evening John noticed that his name had slipped off the front page. This was at once a relief and a bitterness. It told him that he was done for; that, as a matter of news, he was only a corpse waiting for the funeral pyre. That pyre was a matter to which Elder Burbeck was attending, assisted by a committee of fellow zealots--male and female--who were industriously conducting a house-to-house canvass of the entire membership of All People's during the hours between Sunday at one and Monday night at eight. Despite the lofty mood of self-sacrifice into which the man had worked himself, the knowledge of all this busy bell-ringing and its sinister purpose operated irritatingly on the skin of Hampstead. It made his flesh creep with annoyance that grew toward anger.

But in the midst of these creepings, a significant thing happened. The Reverend William Dudley Rohan, pastor of the largest, the richest, and by material standards the most influential protestant congregation in the city, came in person to call on Hampstead, to shake him by the hand and say: "Your address had an apostolic ring to it. I believe in you sincerely."

In John's mail that afternoon there came from Father Ansley, an influential priest of the Roman Catholic communion, a letter to similar effect.

Moreover, as the activity of Elder Burbeck developed, John began to hear more and more from members of his own congregation who either refused to believe the charges against him, or, if not so ready to acquit, none the less refused to desert him now.

All of these things seemed definitely to testify that a wave of reaction was upon its way. They almost gave the man hope. Yet by the end of an hour of calculation, John saw that after all it was a small wave. All People's church had more than eleven hundred members. He had not heard from one fifth of them. Those who had communicated or come to press his hand were very frequently the weak, obscure, and least influential. They were the "riff-raff", as Burbeck would have called them, of the congregation. The pastor did not disesteem their support on this account. Instead he valued it a little more; yet gave himself no illusions as to its value in a battle-line.

At the same time his friends urged him to organize against the assaults of Elder Burbeck; to send out bell-ringing committees upon his own account. Yet he would not do this. He would not make himself an issue. But the minister's negatives were not so stout as they had been. It was one thing to write in a frenzy at midnight how bravely he would endure his fate. It was another to wait the creeping hours in passive fortitude until the blow should fall.

By noon he confessed to himself that he was feeling rather broken. For a week he had eaten little, and that little nervously, absently, and without enjoyment. His sleep had been restless and unrefreshing. Strong, vigorous as he was, reckless as were the draughts that could be made upon his work-hardened constitution, a fear that it would fail him now began to agitate the man. He must be strong--physically. He must bear himself unyielding as Atlas. His shoulders, instead of sinking, must stiffen as the still heavier load rolled upon them. But his mind also must be strong.

He was almost mad with thinking on his course, with trying to reason out some Northwest Passage for his conscience. Every eventuality had been considered, every resulting good or injury taken into account. When he did sleep, dreams had come to him--horrible, portending dreams that lingered into wakefulness and filled the hours with vague, tissue-weakening dread. He knew the meaning of this. His brain was so wearied with thinking of the perplexities which bristled round him that the very processes of thought had begun to operate less surely. Conclusions that should have stood out sharp and clear became blurred. Doubts and indecisions clamored round him. Things settled and settled right came trooping back to demand realignment. This alarmed him more than anything else,--the fear that the course he had chosen and which he knew to be right, might seem, in some moment when his mind passed into a fog, the wrong course; and he would falter not for lack of will but because of the maiming of his judgment.

He longed for counsel, to talk intimately with some one, but was afraid, afraid he might get the wrong advice and follow it. The loyalty of Rose, the judgment of the Angel of the Chair, he trusted; but himself he began to mistrust. Mistrusting himself, he dared not talk at all, lest he either exhibit signs of weakness that would frighten Rose, or lest, in that weakness, he confess too much to Mrs. Burbeck.

One fear like this and one alarm acted to produce another until something like panic grew up in his soul. A small onyx clock was on the mantel. The hands pointed to one--and then to two--and to three. At eight he must go to the church and see himself accused by those whom he loved, and for whom he had labored.

But at half-past three he saw clearly that his intended course was wrong, that he should defend himself and speak the truth: that his silence was working greater ill than good.

The clock tinkled four with this decision still clear in his mind. But the tinkling sound appeared to ring another bell deep inside him--a bell that boomed from far, far away and made him think of some one's definition of religion, "as a power within us not ourselves that makes for godliness." That power had spoken out. It revived the decision of half-past three. His former course was right. He must not swerve. With a gesture of pain and terror he flung up his hands to his brow. The calamity had fallen. His mind was passing under a fog. Defiantly he tried auto-suggestion to school his will against a possible reversal in the hour of trial, saying to himself over and over again: "I will stand! I will stand! I will stand!" He quoted frequently the words of Paul: "And having done all, to stand!"

At length he fell back limply in his chair. A vast irksomeness had taken possession of him. He was tired--tired of thinking of It--tired of waiting for It to come. Why didn't the clock hurry? The coming of Tayna to the study alone brought a welcome to his eye. Tayna! So full of buoyant, blooming youth; so quickly moved to tears of sympathy; so lightly kindled to smiling, happy laughter! Tayna, her melting eyes, her red cheeks, her one intermittent dimple, who flung her long arms about her uncle and held him close and silently as if he had been a lover!

But it was only a moment until Tayna too irked the tortured man. The touch of her cheek upon his cheek and the aggressive mingling of her thick braids with his own disheveled locks, once brushed so neat and high, now so apt to loop disconsolate upon his temples, reminded him of something quite unbearable but quite unbanishable,--a vision, and a vision which must be entertained alone.

"Stay here and keep shop," her uncle said with sudden brusqueness, forcing her down into his own chair at the desk. "I can see no one; talk to no one; hear from no one. I am going up-stairs!"

"Up-stairs" meant the long, half-attic room in which Hampstead slept. It ran the length of the cottage. There were windows in the gables, and dormers were chopped in upon the side toward the Bay. At one end, pushed back toward the eaves, was a bed, fenced from the eye by a folding screen. Far at the other end was a table, a student-lamp and a few books. Between lay a long, rug-strewn space which Hampstead called his "tramping ground."

Here, when he wished to retire most completely from the public reach, he made his lair. Upon that rug-strewn space he had tramped out many of the problems of his ministry. In the past week he had walked miles between one gable window and the other, and stopped as many times to gaze out through the dormer windows over the crested tops of palms to the dancing waters on the Bay.

But now he had retreated there, not to be alone, but because he felt a sudden longing for companionship; and for a certain and particular companionship. That touch of Tayna's soft cheek upon his own had brought with stinging poignancy the recollection of what the presence of Bessie would be now,--Bessie as she once had been, dear, loyal, sympathetic, wise; as she had begun to be again before that last trip east; as she would have been when she returned and found him still strong and faithful.

Yet now she would never come. She was in Chicago to-day--no, upon the Atlantic. Last week was her final week. She had been getting her degree there while his unfrocking was beginning here. She was attaining her high hope as he was losing his. He had meant to telegraph her his congratulations, but he had forgotten it. That was just as well now. All this hissing of the poisoned tongues must have poured into her ears. The old doubts would be revived. She would feel herself shamed, humiliated, all but compromised by these disclosures, and she would never see--never communicate with him again. No letter had come in that last week, no telegram from the ship's side. That proved it clearly. She was lost to him.

Yet now his church--his liberty--his reputation--nothing else that he had lost or might lose seemed worth while. He wanted only her, cared only about her. His duty had melted into mist. He could not see its outlines. But there was a face in the mist, her face; and a form, her form. And he would never see her in any other way but this way--a vision to haunt and mock and torture him.

Thinking these thoughts over and over again, the man walked steadily from gable's end to gable's end and back again, until his legs lost all sense of feeling; but still he walked, and occasionally his fists were clenched and beat upon his chest, while an expression of agony looked out of his eyes.

The Reverend John Hampstead, pastor of All People's, a man of some victories and of some defeats, a man of some strength and of some weaknesses, was fighting his most important and his hardest battle, and he knew it. And he was no longer fit. The preliminary days of battling in the lower spurs and ranges had exhausted him. The summit was still above. The higher he toiled, the weaker he grew; the greater need for strength, the less he had to offer. He felt his purpose sag, his courage breaking. He had faced too much, and faced it too long and too solitarily. Others had sympathetically tried to get into his heart, and he had shut them out. It was a place which only one could enter, and she was not there. Now he knew that she would never be there.

That was the final mockery of his fate. At the time when he loved her most, when he needed her most, when before God, he deserved her most, she was most irretrievably lost. The pang of this, the awful inevitableness of it, broke him like a reed. From time to time he had sighed heavily, but now a dry sob shivered in his broad breast. His shoulders shook, and then his legs crumpled under him; he was on his knees and sinking lower and lower, like a man beaten down, blow upon blow, until at length he lies prostrate before his foes.

"Not that, O God," he sobbed; "not that! I cannot--I cannot lose her. Leave me, oh, leave me this one thing! I ask nothing more! Nothing more."

There was silence for an interval and then the pleadings began more earnestly, more piteously. "O God, give me her! Give me love! Give me completeness! Give me that without which no man is strong, the undoubting love of an unwavering woman! Give me that and I can face anything--endure anything!"

For a moment his hands, virile and outstretched, grasped convulsively the far edges of the Indian rug on which he had fallen, and thrust themselves through the stoutly woven fabric as if it had been wet paper. Scalding drops had begun to flow from his eyes like rivers. He seized the fabric of the rug in his teeth and bit it. He forced the thick folds against his eyes as if to dam the flooding tears.

"It is too much! It is too much!" he moaned. "O God," he reproached, "you have left me; you have left me alone and far. I have stood, but I am tottering." He dropped into a sort of vernacular in his blind pleadings. "I can go, I can go the route, but I cannot go it alone. Give me her, O God, give me her!"

His voice, half-delirious, died out in a final withering sob, as if the last atom of his strength had gone with this passionate, hoarse, uttermost plea of his soul. His great fingers stretching out again to the limit of his arm, knotted and unknotted themselves and then grew still. The shoulders, too, were motionless. The face was turned on one side; the profile of the ridged forehead and the thrust of nose and chin, so strongly carved, appeared against the grotesque pattern of the rug as features delicately chiseled. The eyes were open, tearless now and staring. They had expression, but it was the expression of the beaten man. The mouth was parted, and the firm lines were gone from it. It was the old, loose, flabby mouth that had once marked the weak spot in the character of the man. Again the man was weak. He lay so still that life itself seemed to have gone. The wandering afternoon breeze that stole in through one gable window and went romping out at the other played with the mass of hair upon his brow as indifferently as if it had been a tuft of grass.

Even the man's enemies must have pitied him had they seen him now. Searle, standing over him, would have felt a twinge of conscience. Elder Burbeck, before that spectacle, would at least have paused long enough to murmur, sincerely, with upturned eyes and a grave shake of the head, "God be merciful to him, a sinner." But neither Searle nor Burbeck, nor any other eye was there to see how he lay nor how long. Perhaps not even Tayna, crouching on the stairs outside, hearing his sobbings and venting tear for tear, could have computed the time.

Surely the man knew nothing himself except that he fell asleep and dreamed, this time not horribly, but felicitously,--a dream of Bessie; that she was coming to him; that she was there. It was such a beautiful dream. It took all the strain out of the muscles of his face. It tickled the flabby mouth into smiles of happiness. It triumphed over everything else. It made every experience through which he had gone seem a high and beautiful experience because it brought him Bessie.

A knock at the door awoke him. It was such a cruel awakening. Bessie was not there. His cheeks were hard and stiff where tears had dried upon them. His shoulders and neck ached from the position in which he had slept. The rug was rumpled. The room was bleak and desolate. The breeze was chill and gloomy. The situation in which he stood came to him again with appealing acuteness and stung his memory like scourging whips. He rose with pain in his mind, pain in his heart, pain in every tissue of his body.

But there are worse things than pain. John was appalled to realize that he had risen a quaking coward.

The knock had sounded again. It was a soft knock, but it echoed loud, like the crack of doom. It stood for the outside world; it stood for the accusing finger; it stood for the felon's brand; it stood for the great monster, Ruin, which threatened him, which terrorized him, which he had faced courageously, but which at last through the workings of his own morbid imagination and the tentacles of a great love, torn blood-dripping from his heart, had over-awed him. Before this monster he now shrank, cowering as only six days before he had seen Rollie Burbeck cower. He said to himself that he, John Hampstead, was the greater coward. Rollie had faltered in the face of his crime. He, the priest of God, was faltering in the face of his duty. He retreated from his own presence aghast at the thought. He looked about him wildly, and saw his features in the glass. It was a coward's face. He felt something stagger in his breast. It was his coward's heart!

Again the knock sounded. Not because he had grown brave again, but because he had grown too weak to resist even a knock upon a door, he gave the rug a kick that half straightened it, and in the tone of one who, despairing help, bids his torturers advance, he called: "Come in."

But instead of waiting to see who entered, he turned his back and walked off down the room with slow, disconsolate stride, head hanging, shoulders drooping, knees trembling, feet dragging, utterly unmindful to preserve longer the pose of strength even before the dear ones whom he wished above all to see him brave and strong.

It was the silence of the one who entered that made him turn slowly, staring, his form lifting itself to its full height, and a hand rising to sweep the hanging hair from his eyes as he gazed for a moment in unbelieving bewilderment and then hoarsely shouted:

"Bessie! Bessie! Is it you?"

Before the broken, paralyzed man could leap to meet her, the young woman had flung herself into his arms, with a cry almost of pain: "John! Oh, John!"

He clasped her hysterically, half laughing and half sobbing: "Thank God! Thank God!" and then, murmuring incoherently, "It is the answer of the Father! It is the answer of the Father!"

Bessie, the first surge of her emotions over, stood looking up into John's storm-stressed face, with glistening, happy eyes.