Held to Answer/Chapter 23
With more than a month of odd hours invested upon Marien Dounay, the Reverend John Hampstead had reluctantly made up his mind that failure must be written over his efforts in her behalf.
She had never told him the secret want which was making her unhappy. Her manner and her mood varied from flights of ecstasy, bordering on intoxication of spirit, to depths of depression which suggested that the gifted woman was suffering from some sort of mania. She was always eager to see him, always clamoring for more of his time, and yet after the first week or so he never left her presence without being made to feel that her hours with him had been a disappointment.
To tell the truth, he had himself been greatly disappointed in her. She appeared to him altogether frivolous, altogether worldly. He was completely convinced that she had not only toyed with him years ago, but was toying with him now, although of course, in an entirely different way.
For five days he had not seen her, but hating to give up entirely, and finding himself one evening in the vicinity of the Hotel St. Albans, he ventured to run in upon her for a moment. She was decked as if for an evening party in a dress of gold and spangles, as conspicuous for an excess of materials in the train as for an utter absence of them about the arms and shoulders, which, on this occasion, even the blaze of diamonds did not redeem from a look of nakedness to the eyes of the minister,—a mental reaction which any student of psychology will recognize as ample evidence that John Hampstead, man, had passed entirely beyond the power of Marien Dounay, woman.
Miss Dounay received her caller with that low purr of surprise and gladness which was characteristic, and instantly proposed that they go out for a ride on the foothill boulevard, and a dinner at the Three Points Inn.
While the minister had not planned to give her an evening, this was one of the rare occasions when he had leisure time at his disposal, and since he had resolved to make one last effort to help the woman, he decided to accept the invitation.
The evening, however, was not a success. The dinner was good, the roads were smooth, the night air was balmy and full of a thousand perfumes from field and garden; but Miss Dounay's mood, at first merry, sagged lower and lower into a kind of sullen despair, in which she reproached the minister bitterly for his failure to understand her.
François, the chauffeur, had, by command of his mistress, stopped the car on the curve of the hill, at a point where the bright moon made faces as clear as day, and, having climbed down as if to look the car over, they heard his boot heels grow fainter and fainter on the graveled road as he tactfully ambled off out of earshot.
Hampstead was still patient.
"I have been so earnest in my desire to help you," he said, by way of broaching the subject again.
"You cannot help me," Marien snapped. "Something bars you. Your church, your position, all these foolish women who are in love with you, this whole community which has made a 'property' god of you,—they are to blame! They stand between us. They prevent you from seeing what you ought to see. They make you blind. You think you are humble. It is a mock humility. Under its guise you hide a lofty egotism. You think you are a preacher; you are not. You are still an actor, playing your part, and playing it so busily that you have ceased to be genuine. All this sentiment which you display for the suffering and needy and distressed is a worked-up sentiment. It goes with the part you play. It makes you blind, false, hypocritical!"
"Miss Dounay!" exclaimed the minister sharply.
But beside herself with chagrin and disappointment, the woman ran on with growing scorn, as she asked sneeringly: "Do you not see that all this gaping adoration is unreal? That a touch would overthrow you? A single false step, and the newspapers which have made you for the sake of a front-page holiday would have another holiday, and a bigger one, in tearing you down?"
Hampstead gritted his teeth, but he could not have stopped her.
"Can you imagine what would be the biggest news story that could break to-morrow morning in Oakland?" she persisted. "It would be the fall of John Hampstead. Can't you see it?" she laughed derisively. "Headlines a foot tall? Can't you hear the newsboys calling? Can't you see the 'Sisters' whispering? Can't you see the gray heads bobbing? The pulpit of All People's declared vacant! John Hampstead a by-word and worse—a joke! Can't you see it?"
Not unnaturally, the minister was angry.
"No," he said sharply, "and you will never see it, for I shall not take that single false step of which you speak."
"Oh, you really would not need to take it," sneered the actress, with a sinister note in her voice, "a man in your position need not fall. He may only seem to fall."
It seemed to John that the woman was actually menacing him.
"François!" he called sharply.
The chauffeur's heels came clicking back from around the turn, and in a silence, which upon Miss Dounay's part might be described as fuming, and upon the minister's as aggressively dignified, the couple were driven back to the hotel, arriving in time for Rollie Burbeck to emerge from the telephone booth, to observe the car, and to avoid its occupants.
With almost an elaboration of scrupulous courtesy, the minister helped Miss Dounay from the automobile, walked with her to the elevator, and ascended to the doorway of her apartment, where, extending his hand, he said sadly, in tones of finality, but without a trace of any other feeling than regretful sympathy: "I still desire to befriend you as I may. But I shall not be able to come to you again."
To his surprise, Marien answered him with something like a threat!
"It is I," she rejoined quickly, "who will come to you. I do not know how it is to happen yet, but I will come, and when I do—if I am not much mistaken—you will be happier to receive my call than you ever were to receive one in all your life before!"
Again there was menace in her tone, and never had she looked more imperiously regal than as she stood holding the loop of her train in the left hand, the right upon the knob of the door, the shimmering evening cloak pushed back to reveal her gold and spangled figure, standing arrow straight, while the dark eyes shot defiance.
Neither had she ever been guilty of a more studied or effective bit of theatricalism than when, immediately following this insinuating speech, the actress noiselessly propelled the door inward, revealing the presence of a group of men in evening dress posed about the room in various attitudes of boredom. As the door swung, these men turned expectantly and with quick eyes photographed the picture of the minister in the hall, his sober, perplexed gaze set upon the figure of the beautiful woman, whose features had instantly changed as she made her entrance upon an entirely different drama.
"Ah, my neglected guests!" exclaimed the actress in tones of mild self-reproach. "You will forgive my not being here to receive you, when you know the reason. Doctor Hampstead has been showing me some of the more interesting and unusual phases of that eccentric parish work of his, over which you Oaklanders rave so much. And now, the dear good man was hesitating in the hall at intruding upon our little party. I have insisted that he shall be one of us. Am I not right, gentlemen?"
Several of Miss Dounay's guests were well known to Hampstead personally, and the readiness with which they dragged him within attested to the clergyman's wide popularity among quite different sorts of very much worth-while persons, for, as a matter of fact, Miss Dounay's guests were rather representative. The group included an editor, an associate justice of the Supreme Court, a prominent merchant, a capitalist or two, and other persons, either of achievement or position, to the number of some eight or ten.
Their presence witnessed not only that Miss Dounay, in her liking for a virile type of man, had made quick and careful selection from those she had met during her short stay in the city, but also testified to the readiness with which this type responded to the Dounay personality.
That no other woman was present, and that the actress should assume the entire responsibility of entertaining so many gentlemen at one time, was entirely in keeping with her particular kind of vanity and the situations it was bound to create.
Standing in the center of the room, wearing that expression of happy radiance which admiration invariably brought to her face, her bare shoulders gleaming, her jewels blazing, she rotated upon her heel till her train wound up in a swirling eddy at her feet, out of which she bloomed like some voluptuous flower, while a chorus of "Oh's" and "Ah's" of laughing adulation followed the revolution of her eyes about the circuit; for the guests knew that to their hostess this little gathering was a play, and their part was to enact a vigorously approving audience.
"Gentlemen," she proposed, "you are all in evening dress; but I,"—and she shrugged her bewitching shoulders naïvely,—"I have been in this gown for ages—until I hate it. Will you indulge me a little longer?" And she inclined her head in the direction of the red portières through which she had gone that first night to don the diamonds for Hampstead.
Of course the gentlemen excused her, and Miss Dounay achieved another startling theatricalism by reappearing in an astonishingly short time, offering the most surprising contrast to her former self. The yellow and spangles were gone. In their place was the simplest possible gown of soft black velvet, with only a narrow band passing over the shoulders and framing a bust like marble for its whiteness against the black. The dress was entirely without ornament, presenting a supreme achievement of the art of the modiste, in that it appeared not so much to be a gown as a bolt of velvet, suddenly caught up and draped to screen her figure chastely but beautifully, at the same time it revealed and even emphasized those swelling curves and long lines which lost themselves elusively in the baffling pliancy of her remarkable figure. The hair was worn low upon the neck, and the jewels which had blazed in her coiffure like a dazzling crown were no longer in evidence. With them had gone the pendants from her ears, and that coruscating circlet of diamonds from the neck, which was her chief pride and most valuable single possession. There was not even a band of gold upon her arms, nor a ring upon her tapering finger. Hence what the admiring circle seemed to see was not something brilliant because bedizened, but a creature exquisite because genuine, a beauty depending for its power solely upon nature's comeliness.
No woman with less beauty or less art, desiring to be admired as Marien Dounay passionately did, could have dared this contrast successfully. No one who knew men less thoroughly than she would have understood that for a purely professional artist to attain this look of a simple womanly woman was the greatest possible triumph, stirring every instinct of admiration and of chivalry.
And whatever was at the back of the trick Miss Dounay had played—and there was generally something back of her caprices—in thrusting John Hampstead, with whom she had practically quarreled, into this group of guests, she appeared to forget him entirely in the succession of whims, moods, and graces with which she proceeded to their entertainment.
For one thing, she admitted them to the large room which served as her boudoir, into which they had seen her go in gold and spangles to emerge like a miracle in demure black velvet.
Of course, there was an excuse for thus titillating the curiosity of vigorous men with that lure of mysterious enchantment which lurks in the boudoir of a lovely woman, and the excuse was that the room, while half-boudoir, was also half-studio, and held tables on which were displayed the models of the stage sets and the costumer's designs for Miss Dounay's coming London production.
As the actress had divined, the inspection of these fascinating details of stagecraft interested her guests as much as the display of them delighted her.
In the hour which ensued before the supper, a collation that in its variety and substance again proved how well the actress comprehended the appetite of the male, two or three guests arrived tardily. The earliest of these to enter was Rollo Charles Burbeck, who came in ample time to roam about the room of mystery at will with the remainder of the guests. Indeed, he stayed in it so much that its enchantment for him might have been presumed to be greater than for the others.
Before the supper, too, one of the guests craved the liberty of departing. This was the Reverend John Hampstead. The farewell of his hostess was gracious and without the slightest reminiscence of anything unpleasant, but he was prevented from more than mentally congratulating himself upon the change in her manner toward him by the fact that in walking some ten feet from where he touched the fingers of his hostess to where a butler-sort of person, borrowed from the hotel staff, stood waiting with his overcoat, Doctor Hampstead came face to face with Rollie Burbeck, who was just emerging from the boudoir-studio with a disturbed look upon his usually placid face, as if, for instance, he had seen a ghost.
In consequence, the minister moved down the corridor to the elevator, not pondering upon his own perplexities, but thinking to himself, "I wonder now if that young man is in any serious trouble. It would break his mother's heart—it would kill her if he were."