Held to Answer/Chapter 15
Bud was right. John had not heard him. He stood with the telegram torn open in his hand.
"Charles fell from El Capitan," it ran. "Body brought here. Rose."
For a moment the man gazed fixedly, deliberately but absently crushing the envelope in one hand, while the other held the open message before him. Then his lips moved slowly and without uttering a sound, they framed the words of his thought: "Charles!—Dead!—Merciful God!"
For a reflective interval the gray, startled eyes set themselves on distance and then turned again to the message. It was dated April 4.
April 4? What day was this?
On the dresser was an unopened newspaper. John remembered now he had bought it yesterday, or rather he assumed it was yesterday. The date upon the paper was April 14. If it were yesterday he bought that paper, to-day was the 15th, and Charles had been dead eleven days! What had they thought—what had they done without a word from him in this crisis? What had become of them?
And there were unopened letters on the dresser, three of them, all from Rose. John tore them open, lapping up their contents with his eyes.
"Poor, poor Rose!" he groaned. "What must she think of me?"
The first letter told of the death of Charles and the lucky sale of "Dawn in the Grand Canyon" which afforded money for the recovery of the body and its decent interment, but little more.
The second letter was briefer and expressed surprise at not hearing from him in response to her message, which the telegraph company assured her had been delivered to him in person. This letter showed Rose bearing up under her grief and stoutly making plans for taking up the support of her children.
The third letter was addressed by the hand of Rose, but the brief note enclosed was penned by the kind-hearted Doctor Morrison, the railroad's "company" physician, to whom, as a part of his outside practice, Rose would have applied in case of illness.
"Your sister," Doctor Morrison wrote, "has suffered a complete nervous breakdown. Long rest with complete relief from financial care is imperative."
This letter stirred John to immediate action. He rushed to the long-distance telephone. The telegraph was not quick enough.
"Please reassure my sister immediately," John telephoned to Doctor Morrison. "Every provision will be made for her care and that of the children." Not satisfied with this, John sent a telegram to his sister direct and to the same effect.
These messages were dispatched as the first and most natural impulses of the brother's heart, without pause to consider the responsibilities involved; and then, having no appetite for breakfast, John returned to his room to write to Rose.
Poor Rose! And poor old Charles! Such an end for him. No great pictures painted; no roseate successes gathered; just to follow his vision on and on until in absent-minded admiration of a sunset glow he stepped off the brow of El Capitan in Yosemite and fell hundreds of feet to death. Yet John's grief was strangely tempered by the thought that somehow this death was fitting. It was like the man's life. In art he had tried to walk the heights with no solid ground of ability beneath, and he had fallen into the bottomless abyss of failure.
For a moment John pitied Charles greatly; yet when he thought of Rose, prostrated, as he was sure, not by grief, but by long anxieties, his feeling turned to one of reproach. When he thought of the children left fatherless, with no provision for their future or that of Rose, the reproach turned to bitterness. He found himself judging Charles very sternly, and a verse from scripture came into his mind,—something about the man who provides not for his own being worse than a murderer.
But in the midst of this condemnation, Hampstead's jaw dropped, and he sat staring at the pen with which he was preparing to write. The expression on the man's face had changed from concern to one of agony. When the pain passed, his features were gray and tenantless, almost the look of the dead; for John Hampstead had suddenly perceived that his stage career was ended!
Rose, Dick and Tayna were now "his own." To give Rose the best of care, upon which his heart had instantly determined, he must have what were to him large sums of money weekly and monthly; money for nurses, money for doctors, for sanitariums possibly; and perhaps Dick and Tayna must be sent to boarding-school or some place like that for the present, while their higher education must also be considered and provided for.
John knew he could never do these things and follow the stage. He could succeed upon the stage; he had proven that, to his own satisfaction at least; but he could not make money there yet, not for years and years. Marien was right. If he persisted, rewards would come and affluence. But they would come at the other end of life. He must have them now.
Perhaps hardest of all to John was the hurt to his pride, to his self-confidence, the reflection that, having set his eye upon a shining goal, he must abandon the march toward it unbeaten, with his strength untested, or with the tests so far made distinctly in his favor. It was hard to think himself a "quitter." And yet he could feel the stir of a noble satisfaction in being a "quitter" for duty's sake. He remembered with a certain sad pleasure how almost prophetically he had told Mr. Mitchell that it would only be something that would happen to Dick and Tayna that could keep him from going on with his ambition. Now exactly that had come to pass; yet to make immediate surrender of the ambition to which he had devoted himself with such enthusiasm seemed impossible. He knew what he should do—what he intended to do—but he lacked the resolution for the moment.
If Bessie were only here!
And yet if she were, he would shrink from her presence. He felt just now unworthy to look into those trusting eyes of blue. This time he must face his destiny alone.
His head sank low. His hands were clasped above it, as they had been that night when he was stricken blind. The world was dark before him. Now, as then, he felt sorry for himself. In a very few months a great many things had happened to him that had wrenched him violently. He had been racked by doubts and inflamed by mysterious emotions. He had hoped and he had dared; he had struggled; he had gained some things and lost some; but he had survived, and on the whole was conquering. Now came the heaviest blow, as it seemed, that could possibly fall upon his head,—and just in the very hour when the upward way was clearing!
His face was flat upon the page he had meant to fill with words of love and help to Rose. Above him, on the wall, was the sheet of faded yellow paper that bore his just amended motto. Two pins, loosened no doubt when he changed the word on the legend, had been whipped out by the breeze which swept in through the open window, and this breeze now fluttered the free end of the yellow sheet insistently like a pennant, so that the distracted man lifted his clouded eyes and read once again, as if to make sure:
"Eternal Loyalty is the Price of Success."
"Loyalty to what?" he demanded fiercely of himself. To his ambition? Or to two little growing lives that trusted and believed in him?
To put the question like that was to answer it. John rose abruptly, snatched the legend from the wall, crumpled it as he had the envelope, and cast it on the floor. He didn't need it any more.
"And yet," he reflected after a moment, "why not?"
"Uncle John, when will you be president?" Tayna had asked him that one night, and he smiled as in fancy he felt her arms again about his neck, her bare feet cuddling in his lap. The thought roused him. He was not surrendering all ambition when he surrendered a stage ambition. He was a man of greatly increased ability now as compared with then. Surely a man was pretty poor stuff if, having been defeated in one desire through no fault of his own, he could not carve out another niche for himself somewhere in the wide hall of achievement. John stooped and recovered the crumpled square of yellow, smoothed its wrinkles reverently, and fastened it again and more securely upon the wall above him.
········ That night John Hampstead went to the theater as usual, but entered the dressing room like a man going into the presence of his dead. Throughout the performance he made his entrances and exits solemnly.
The play for this, his final week, was Hamlet, and John's part was the King. Every night as the Prince of Denmark killed him with a rapier thrust, John enacted that spectacular and traditional fall by which, since time forgotten, all Kings in Hamlet go toppling to the floor, where they die with one foot upraised upon the bottom-most step of the throne, as if reluctant even in death to give up the perquisites and preeminence of royalty. So hour by hour John felt that he was killing the King in his soul, but the King died reluctantly, always with one foot on the throne.
The last night came, and the last hour. Methodically the man assembled his make-up materials, his grease paints, his hare's feet, and the beard he had himself fashioned for the King to wear, and put them away, with their sweetish, unmistakable odor, in the old cigar box, to be treasured henceforth like sacred things, symbols of a great ambition which had stirred a young man's breast, and remembrances of the greatest sacrifice it seemed possible aspiring youth could be called upon to make.
But no one was to know that it was a sacrifice; not Rose, not Dick nor Tayna even. They were to think he did it happily and because "The stage—the stage life, you know! Well, probably there are better ways for a man to spend his energies."
But, really, in his heart of hearts, Hampstead knew he would love the drama always. He owed it a debt that he could never repay, and some day when he had achieved a brilliant success in another walk of life—when Dick and Tayna were grown and far away perhaps—he would take out the old cigar box and gather his children around him, if he should have children, and tell them the story of his first divinest ambition as one tells the story of one's first love; and of the great sacrifice he had made in the cause of duty, fingering the while these crumbling things as one caresses a lock of hair of the long departed.
"Look, Bud, here's a box of cold cream—nearly full. You can get a quarter for it from somewhere along the line," suggested John, nodding toward the row of dressing rooms as he walked away, his overcoat over his shoulder, a suitcase in his hand.