Held to Answer/Chapter 22
Both recognized that the time had come to close the interview, and each was extremely pleased with its result. Marien had demonstrated to her complete satisfaction that this minister was still a man; that his flesh was wax and would therefore melt. She believed that to-night she had seen it soften.
As for John: He believed that this evening had witnessed a triumph for his tact and his moral force. His sympathy was wholly with the woman. Convinced afresh that there was something sublime in her character, he determined to give her every opportunity to reveal herself to him, and to spare no effort upon his own account to redeem her life from that ingrowing selfishness which he felt sure was making her unhappy now and might ultimately rob her of all joy in its most splendid achievements.
"I shall save three o'clock to-morrow for you," Miss Dounay proposed, as if reading the minister's purpose in his eye.
But John Hampstead was a man of many duties, whose time was not easy to command.
"At three," he objected, "I am to address a mother's meeting.
"At four then," Marien suggested, with an engaging smile.
"At four I have to go with a sad-hearted man to see his son in the county jail," John explained apologetically, as he scanned his date book.
"At five!" persisted Marien, the smile giving way before a shadow of impatience.
John laughed.
"It must seem funny to you," he declared, "but I have an engagement at five-thirty which makes it impossible to be here at five. The engagement itself would seem funnier still; but to me it is not funny—only one of the tragedies into which my life is continually drawn. At that hour I am to visit a poor woman who lives on a house boat on the canal. Monday is her husband's pay day, and he invariably reaches home on that night inflamed with liquor, and abuses the woman outrageously. I have promised to be with her when he comes in. I may wait an hour, and I may wait half the night."
"Oh," gasped Marien, with a note of apprehension. "And suppose he turns his violence on you?"
"Why, then I shall defend myself," John answered, good-humoredly, "but without hurting Olaf.
"I am likely to spend the night on that canal boat," he added, "and in the morning Olaf will be ashamed and perhaps penitent. He may thank me and ask me to meet him at the factory gate next Monday night and walk home with him to make sure that his pay envelope gets safely past the door of intervening saloons."
"But why so much concern about unimportant people like that?" questioned Marien, her eyes big with curiosity and wonder.
"Any person in need is important to me," confessed John modestly.
"But how can you spare the time from the regular work of the church?"
"That is my regular work."
Marien paused a moment as if baffled.
"But—but I thought a minister's work was to preach—so eloquently that people will not get drunk; to pray, so earnestly that God will make men strong enough to resist temptation."
"But suppose," smiled John, "that I am God's answer to prayer, his means of helping Olaf to resist temptation. That is the mission of my church, at least that is my ideal for it; not a group of heaven-bound joy-riders, but a life-saving crew. There are twenty men in my church who would meet Olaf at a word from me and walk home with him every night till he felt able to get by the swinging doors upon his own will."
Marien's eyes were shining with a new light.
"That is practical religion," she declared.
"Cut out the modifier," amended John. "That is religion! There are," he went on, "even some in my congregation who would take my watch upon the canal boat; but I prefer to go myself because—"
"Because," Marien broke in suddenly, "because it is dangerous." Her glance was full of a new admiration for the quiet-speaking man before her, in whose eyes burned that light of almost fanatical ardor which she and others had marked before.
"More because it is a delicate responsibility," the minister amended once more. "Tact that comes with experience is essential, as well as strength."
"And do you do many things like that?" Marien asked, deeply impressed.
"Each day is like a quilt of crazy patchwork," John laughed, and then added earnestly: "You would hardly believe the insight I get into lives of every sort and at every stage of human experience, divorces, quarrels, feuds, hatreds, crimes, loves, collapses of health or character or finance—crises of one sort or another, that make people lean heavily upon a man who is disinterestedly and sympathetically helpful."
"And your reward for all this busybodying?" the actress finally asked, at the same time forcing a laugh, as if trying to make light of what had compelled her to profound thought.
"A sufficient reward," answered John happily, "is the grateful regard in which hundreds, and I think I may even say thousands, of people throughout the city hold me: this, and the ever-widening doors of opportunity are my reward. These things could lift poorer clay than mine and temper it like steel. The people lean upon me. I could never fail them, and they could never fail me."
The exalted confidence of the man, as he uttered these last words, which were yet without egotism, suggested the tapping of vast reservoirs of spiritual force, and as before, this awed Marien a little; but it also aroused a petty note in her nature, filling her with a jealousy like that she had experienced in the church when she saw John surrounded by all those people who seemed to take possession of him so absolutely and with such disgusting self-assurance.
Manœuvering her features into something like a pout, she asked mockingly:
"And since you would not leave your mother's meeting and your jail-bird and your wife-beater for me, is there any time at all when an all-seeing Providence would send you again to the side of a lonely woman?"
The minister smiled at the irony, while scanning once more the pages of his little date-book. "To look in after prayer meeting about nine-thirty on Wednesday night would be my next opportunity, I should say," he reported presently.
"Wednesday!" complained Marien. "It is three eternities away. However," and her voice grew crisp with decision, "Wednesday night it shall be. In the meantime, do you speak anywhere? I shall attend the mother's meeting, if you will tell me where it is. I shall even come to prayer meeting; and," she concluded vivaciously; "you will be borne away by me triumphantly in my new French car, which was sent out here weeks and weeks ago to be tuned up and ready for my coming."
On Wednesday night Miss Dounay made good her word. When the little prayer-meeting audience emerged from the chapel room of All People's, it gazed wonderingly at a huge black shape on wheels that rested at the curb with two giant, fiery eyes staring into the night.
The old sexton, looking down from the open doorway, saw his pastor shut into this luxurious equipage with two strange women, for Marien was properly accompanied by Julie, and nodded his head with emphatic approval.
"Some errand of mercy," he mumbled with fervency. "Brother Hampstead is the most helpful man in the world."
Nor was this the last appearance of Marien Dounay's shining motor-car before the door of All People's. It was seen also in front of the palm-surrounded cottage on the bay front, where John Hampstead lived with his sister, Rose, and the children, and enjoyed, at times, some brief seclusion from his busy, pottering life of general helpfulness.
Once the car even stopped before the home of the Angel of the Chair, perhaps because Hampstead had told Marien casually that of all women Mrs. Burbeck had alone been consistently able to understand him, and the actress wished to learn her secret. But the Angel of the Chair, while quite unabashed by the glamour of the actress-presence, nevertheless refused entirely to be drawn into talk about Brother Hampstead, who was usually the most enthusiastic subject of her conversation. Instead she spent most of the time searching the depths of Miss Dounay's baffling eyes with a look from her own luminous orbs, half-apprehensive and half-appealing, that made the caller exceedingly uncomfortable; so that Marien would have accounted the visit fruitless and even unpleasant, if she had not, while there, chanced to meet the young man known to fortune and the social registers as Rollo Charles Burbeck.
Rollo was the darling son of the Angel and the pride of the Elder's heart. Tall, blond, handsome, and twenty-eight, endowed with his mother's charm of manner and a certain mixture of the coarse practicality and instinct for leadership which his father possessed, the young man had come to look upon himself as a sort of favorite of the fickle goddess for whom nothing could be expected to fall out otherwise than well. Without money and without prestige, in fact, without much real ability, and more because as a figure of a youth he was good to look upon and possessed of smooth amiability, Rollie, as his friends and his doting mother called him, had risen through the lower rounds of the Amalgamated National to be one of its assistant cashiers and a sort of social handy-man to the president, very much in the sense that this astute executive had political handy-men and business handy-men in the capacity of directors, vice-presidents, and even minor official positions in his bank.
But there were, nevertheless, some grains of sand in the bearings of Rollo's spinning chariot wheels.
In his capacity as an Ambassador to the Courts of Society, he had the privilege of leaving the bank quite early in the afternoon, when his presence at some daylight function might give pleasure to a hostess whose wealth or influence made her favor of advantage to the Amalgamated National. He might sometimes place himself and a motor-car at the disposal of a distinguished visitor from outside the city, might dine this visitor and wine him, might roll him far up the Piedmont Heights, and spread before his eye that wonderful picture of commercial and industrial life below, clasped on all sides by the blue breast and the silvery, horn-like arms of the Bay of San Francisco.
All these things, of course, involved expenditures of money as well as time. The bills for such expenditures Rollo might take to the president of the bank, who wrote upon them with his fat hand and a gold pencil, "O. K.—J. M." after which they were paid and charged to a certain account in the bank entitled: "Miscellaneous." This, not unnaturally, got Rollie, in the course of a couple of years, into luxurious habits. After eating a seven-dollar dinner with the financial man of a Chicago firm of bond dealers, it was not the easiest thing in the world to content himself the next day with the fifty-cent luncheon which his own salary permitted. Furthermore, Rollo, because of his standing at the bank and his social gifts, was drawn into clubs, played at golf, or dawdled in launches, yachts, or automobiles with young men of idle mind who were able to toss out money like confetti. It was inevitable that circumstances should arise under which Rollo also had to toss, or look to himself like the contemptible thing called "piker." Consequently, he frequently tossed more than he could afford, and eventually more than he had.
To meet this drain upon resources the debonair youth did not possess, Rollie resorted to undue fattening of his expense accounts, but, when the amounts became too large to be safely concealed by this means from the scrutiny of J. M., he had dangerous recourse to misuse of checks upon a certain trust fund of which he was the custodian. He did this reluctantly, it must be understood, and was always appalled by the increasing size of the deficit he was making. He knew too that some day there must come a reckoning, but against that inevitable day several hopes were cherished.
One was that old J. M., brooding genius of the Amalgamated National, might become appreciative and double Rollie's salary. Yet the heart of J. M. was traditionally so hard that this hope was comparatively feeble. In fact, Rollie would have confessed himself that the lottery ticket which he bought every week, and whereby he stood to win fifteen thousand dollars, was a more solid one. Besides this, hope had other resources. There were, for instance, the "ponies" which part of the year were galloping at Emeryville, only a few miles away, and there were other race tracks throughout the country, and pool rooms conveniently at hand. While Rollie was too timid to lose any great sum at these, nevertheless they proved a constant drain, and the only real asset of his almost daily venturing was the doubtful one of the friendship of "Spider" Welsh, the bookmaker.
Rollie's first test of this friendship was made necessary by the receipt of a letter notifying him that the executors of the estate which included the trust fund he had been looting would call the next day at eleven for a formal examination of the account. Rollie at the moment was more than fifteen hundred dollars short, and getting shorter. That night he went furtively through an alley to the back room of the bookmaker.
"Let me have seventeen hundred, Spider, for three days, and I'll give you my note for two thousand," he whispered nervously.
"What security?" asked the Spider, craft and money-lust swimming in his small, greenish-yellow eye.
"My signature's enough," said Rollie, bluffing weakly.
"Nothin' doin'," quoth the Spider decisively.
Cold sweat broke out on Rollie's brow faster than He could wipe it off.
"I'll make it twenty-five hundred," the young man said hoarsely.
Spider looked interested. He leaned across the table, his darting, peculiar glance shifting searchingly from first one of Rollie's eyes to the other, his form half crouching, his whole body alert, cruelty depicted on his face and suggesting that his nickname was no accident but a sure bit of underworld characterization.
"Make it three thousand, and I'll lay the money in your hand," said the Spider coldly.
Rollie's case was desperate. He drew a blank note from his pocket, filled it, and signed it; then passed it across the table. But with the Spider's seventeen hundred deep in his trousers pockets, the feeling that he had been grossly taken advantage of seemed to demand of Rollie that his manhood should assert itself.
"Spider, you are a thief!" he proclaimed truculently.
"I guess you must be one yourself, or you wouldn't want seventeen hundred in such a hell of a hurry," was Spider's cool rejoinder, as he practically shoved Rollie out of his back door.
Now this retort of Spider's was quite a shock to Rollie; but there are shocks and shocks. Moreover, when the executors upon their scheduled hour came to Rollo Charles Burbeck, trustee, and found his accounts and cash balancing to a cent, which was exactly as they expected to find them, why this in itself was some compensation for taking the back-talk even of a bookmaker.
But the next day Spider Welsh's roll was the fatter by three thousand dollars, and the trust account was short the same amount.
Thereafter, and despite good resolutions, the size of the defalcation began immediately to grow again, although Rollo, if he suffered much anxiety on that account, concealed it admirably. He knew that under the system he was safe for the present, and outwardly he moulted no single feather, but wore his well tailored clothes with the same sleek distinction, and laughed, chatted, and danced his way farther and farther into the good graces of clambering society, partly sustained by the hope that even though lotteries and horse races failed him, and the "Old Man's" heart proved adamant, some rich woman's tender fancy might fasten itself upon him, and a wealthy marriage become the savior of his imperiled fortunes.
It was while still in this state of being, but with that semi-annual turning over of dead papers again only a few weeks distant, Rollo was greatly amazed to blunder into the presence of Marien Dounay in his mother's sun-room at four o'clock one afternoon, when chance had sent him home to don a yachting costume. A little out of touch with things at All People's, the young man's surprise at finding Miss Dounay tête-à-tête with his own mother was the greater by the fact that he knew a score of ambitious matrons who were at the very time pulling every string within their reach to get the actress on exhibition as one of their social possessions.
Because young Burbeck's interest in women was by the nature of his association with them largely mercenary, and just now peculiarly so on account of his own haunting embarrassment, he was rather impervious to the physical charms of Miss Dounay herself. He only saw something brilliant, dazzling, convertible, and exerted himself to impress her favorably, postponing the departure upon his yachting trip dangerously it would seem, had not the two got on so well together that the actress offered to take him in her car to shorten his tardiness at the yacht pier.
After this, acquaintance between the two young people ripened swiftly. Because John Hampstead was so busy, Marien had an abundance of idle time upon her hands. Agitated continually by a cat-like restlessness, seeking a satiety she was unable to find, the actress had no objections to spending a great deal of this idle time upon Rollo. He rode with her in that swift-scudding, smooth-spinning foreign car. She sailed with him upon the bay in a tiny cruising sloop that courtesy dubbed a yacht. More than once she entertained Rollie with one of these delightful Bohemian suppers served in her hotel suite, sometimes with other guests and sometimes flatteringly alone.
Rollie enjoyed all of this, but without succumbing seriously. His spread of canvas was too small, he carried too much of the lead of deep anxiety upon his centerboard to keel far over under the breeze of her stiffest blandishments; but all the while he held her acquaintance as a treasured asset, introducing her to about-the-Bay society with such calculating discrimination as to put under lasting obligations to himself not only Mrs. von Studdeford, his friend and patron, but certain other carefully chosen mistresses of money.
As for Marien, her triumphs were still too recent, her vanity was still too childish, not to extract considerable enjoyment from being Exhibit "A" at the most important social gatherings the community offered; but her complacence was at all times modified by moods and caprices. She would disappoint Rollie's society friends for the most unsubstantial reasons and appeared to think her own whimsical change of purpose an entirely sufficient explanation. Sometimes she did not even bother about an explanation, and her manner was haughty in the extreme.
Her most vexatious trick of the kind was to disappear one night five minutes before she was to have gone with Rollie to be guest of honor at a dinner given by Mrs. Ellsworth Harrington. The hostess raged inconsolably, taking her revenge on Rollie in words and looks which, in her quarter, proclaimed thumbs down for long upon that unfortunate, adventuring youth.
"Take me about nine hundred and ninety-nine years to square myself with that double-chinned queen," muttered Rollie, standing at eleven o'clock of the same night upon the corner opposite the Hotel St. Albans and looking up inquisitively at the suite of Miss Dounay, which was on the floor immediately beneath the roof.
The young man's hat was pushed back so that his forehead seemed almost high and, in addition to its seeming, the brow wore a disconsolate frown.
"Looks as if I'd kind of lost my rabbit's foot," he murmured, relaxing into a vernacular that neither Mrs. Harrington, Mrs. von Studdeford, nor other ladies of their class would have deemed it possible to flow from the irreproachable lips of Rollo Charles Burbeck. Yet his friends should have been very indulgent with Rollie to-night! The world had grown suddenly hard for him. The executors were due again to-morrow; and his deficit had passed four thousand dollars.
So desperate was his plight that for an hour that afternoon Rollie had actually thought of throwing himself upon the mercy of Mrs. Ellsworth Harrington, who had hundreds of thousands in her own right, and who might have saved him with a scratch of the pen. Her heart had been really soft toward Rollie, too, but Marien's caprice to-night had spoiled all chance of that. Nothing remained but the Spider. Rollie had an appointment with him in fifteen minutes.
But in the meantime he indulged a somber, irritated curiosity concerning Miss Dounay. Since staring upward at her windows brought no satisfaction he had recourse to the telephone booth in the hotel lobby, and got the information that Miss Dounay was out but had left word that if Mr. Burbeck called he was to be told he was expected at ten-thirty and there would be other guests.
That meant supper, and a lively little time. No doubt the actress would try to make amends. Well, Rollie would most surely let her. He had no intention of quarreling with an asset, even though occasionally it turned itself into a liability. But it was now past ten-thirty, ten forty-seven, to be exact, and his engagement with the Spider was at eleven. However, since his hostess was still out, and therefore would be late at her own party, his prospective tardiness gave the young man no concern.
But, on leaving the telephone booth and advancing through the wide lobby of the hotel, young Burbeck was surprised to see Miss Dounay's car driven up to the curb. There she was, the beautiful devil! Where could she have been? Yet, since Rollie's curiosity and his wish for an explanation of her conduct were nothing like so great as his desire to avoid meeting her until this business with the Spider was off his mind, he executed an oblique movement in the direction of the side exit; but not until a shoulder-wise glance had revealed to him the stalwart form of the Reverend John Hampstead emerging first from the Dounay limousine.
"The preacher!" he muttered in disgusted tones, "I thought so. She's nuts on him; or he is on her, or something. Say!" and the young man came to an abrupt stop, while his eyes opened widely, and his nostrils sniffed the air as if he scented scandal. "I wonder if she tried the same line of stuff on the parson, and he's falling for it? It certainly would be tough on mother if anything went wrong with her sky pilot."
However, Rollie's own exigencies were too great for him to forget them long, even in contemplating the prospective downfall of a popular idol, and he made his way to his engagement.
Rollie was a long time with Spider. Part of this delay was due to the fact that the Spider was broke. He did not have forty-two hundred dollars, nor any appreciable portion thereof. Another part of the delay was due to the fact that Spider took some time in elaborating a plan to put both Rollie and himself in possession of abundant funds. The plan was grasped upon quickly, but, being a detestable coward, Rollie halted long before undertaking an enterprise that required the display of nerve and daring under circumstances where failure meant instant ruin.
However, there was at least a gambler's chance, while with the executors to-morrow there was no chance. Inevitably, therefore, the young man, white of face, with a lump in his throat and a flutter in his breast, gripped with his cold, nerveless hand the avaricious palm of Spider, and the bargain was made. Even then, however, there was a stage wait while an emissary of the Spider's went on a dive-scouring tour that in twenty minutes turned up a short-haired, scar-nosed shadow of a man who answered to the name of the "Red Lizard", a designation which the fiery hue of his skin and the slimy manner of the creature amply justified.
Once out of Spider's place, Rollie lingered in the alley long enough to screw his scant courage to the place where it would stick for a few hours at least; and at precisely half-past eleven, looking his handsome, debonair self, his open overcoat revealing him still in evening dress, and with his silk hat self-confidently a-tilt, he sauntered nonchalantly through the lobby of the Hotel St. Albans to an elevator which bore him skyward.
The pride of the Elder and the son of the Angel, the social ambassador of the Amalgamated National, was prepared once more to do his duty by his fortune.