Held to Answer/Chapter 24
Next morning Doctor Hampstead was up bright and early, clad in his long study gown and walking, according to custom, beneath his palm trees, while he reflected on the duties of the day before him. This was really the day of all days for him, but he did not know it.
An unpleasant thought of Marien Dounay came impertinently into mind, but he repressed it. He had failed with her. A pity! Yes; but his work was too big, too, important, for him to permit it to be interfered with longer by any individual.
Besides, there were with him this morning thoughts of a totally different woman, whose life was as fresh and beautiful as the dew-kissed flowers about him. Five years of unswerving devotion on his part had all but wiped from her memory the admission of her lover which had so hurt the trusting heart of Bessie. That confiding trust, the loss of which her pen had so eloquently lamented, had grown again. The very day was set. In four months John Hampstead would hold Bessie Mitchell in his arms, and this time it seemed to him, more surely than it had that day in the little summer house by the tiny painted park in Los Angeles, that he would never, never let her out of them.
In the midst of these reflections, a thud sounded on the graveled walk at the minister's feet. It was the morning paper tightly rolled and whirled from the unerring hand of a boy upon a flying bicycle. The minister waved his hand in response to a similar salute from the grinning urchin, then turned and looked at the roll of ink and paper speculatively. That paper was the world coming to sit down at breakfast with him, and tell him what it had been doing in the past twenty-four hours. It had been doing some desperate things. The wide strip of mourning at the end of the bent cylinder, indicating tall headlines, showed this. The paper had come to him to make confession of the world's sins. This was right, for he was one of the world's confessors.
But with this thought came another which had occurred to him before. This was that he had won his confessor's gaberdine too cheaply. He had gained his position as a deputy saviour of mankind at too small a cost. Sometimes he questioned if he were not yet to be made to suffer—excruciatingly—supremely—if, for instance, Bessie were not to be taken from him. Yet he knew, as he reflected somewhat morbidly to this effect, that such a suffering would hardly be efficient. It must be something within himself, something volitional, a cup which he might drink or refuse to drink. The world's saviour was not Simon of Cyrene, whom they compelled to bear the cross, but the man from the north, who took up his own cross. True, Hampstead had thought on several occasions that he was taking up a cross, but it proved light each time, and turned into a crown either of public or of private approbation. Yet the cross was there, if he had only known it, in the tall black headlines on the paper rolled up and bent tightly and lying like a bomb at his feet.
However, instead of picking up the paper, he strolled out upon the sidewalk and down for a turn upon the sea-wall. The lately risen sun shot a ray across the eastern hills, and the dancing waters played elfishly with its beams, as if they had been ten thousand tiny mirrors. A fresh breeze was blowing, and as the minister filled his lungs again and again with the wave-washed air, it seemed as if a great access of strength were flowing into his veins. It flowed in and in until he felt himself stronger than he had ever been before in his life.
With this feeling of strength, which was spiritual as well as physical, came the desire to test it against something big, bigger than he had ever faced before. All unconscious how weak his puny strength would be against its demands, he lifted his arms towards the sky like a sun-worshiper and prayed that the day before him might be a great day.
Then leaving the sea-wall, the minister walked with swinging, quite un-gownly strides up the sidewalk and turned in between the green patches of lawn before his own door, picking up the paper and unrolling it as he mounted the porch. On the step before the top one he paused. The black headline was before his eye.
"DOUNAY DIAMONDS STOLEN" was its screaming message.
The minister was quickly gutting the column of its meaning, when a step upon the graveled walk behind startled him into turning suddenly toward the street, where between the polished red trunks of the palms and under their spreading leaves which met overhead, he saw framed the figure of Rollie Burbeck, halting uncertainly, with pale, excited face. This expression, indeed, was a mere exaggeration of the very look Doctor Hampstead had last seen upon it; but he did not immediately connect the two.
"Your mother!" exclaimed the clergyman apprehensively, for that precious life, always hanging by a thread which any sudden shock might snap, was a constant source of anxiety to those who loved the Angel of the Chair. "Something has happened to her?"
"No! To me!" groaned the young man hoarsely, hurrying forward as the minister stepped down to meet him.
"Something awful! Can I see you absolutely alone?"
"Why, certainly, Rollie," replied the minister with ready sympathy. "Come this way."
Hastily the minister led his caller around the side of the wide, low-lying cottage to the outside entrance of his study.
"Is that door locked?" asked Rollie, as, once inside the room, he darted a frightened glance at the doorway connecting with the rest of the house.
Although knowing himself to be safe from interruption, the minister tactfully walked over and turned the key. He then locked the outer door as well, lowered the long shade at the wide side window, and snapped on the electric light.
"No eye and no ear can see or hear us now, save one," he said with sympathetic gravity. "Sit down."
Rollie sat on the very edge of the Morris chair, his elbows on the ends of its arms, while his head hung forward with an expression of ghastliness upon the weakly handsome features.
"You saw the paper?" he began.
The minister nodded.
"Here they are!" the young man gulped, the words breaking out of him abruptly. At the same time there was a quick motion of his hand, and a rainbow flash from his coat pocket to the blotter upon the desk, where the circlet of diamonds coiled like a blazing serpent that appeared to sway and writhe as each stone trembled from the force with which Burbeck had rid himself of the hateful touch. The minister started back with shock and a sudden sense of recollection.
"Oh, Rollie," he groaned, and then asked, as if not quite able to believe his eyes: "You took them?"
"I—I stole them," the excited man half-whispered.
"Why?" questioned Hampstead, still wrestling with his astonishment.
"Because I am short in my accounts," Rollie shuddered, passing a despairing hand across his eyes. "I have to have money to-day, or I am ruined."
"But you could not turn these into money. You must have been beside yourself."
"No!" replied the excited man, with husky, explosive utterance; "the scheme was all right. Spider Welsh was going to handle 'em for me. We were to split four ways. But the Red Lizard fell down."
"The Red Lizard?" interrupted the minister; for he knew the man who bore the suggestive title.
"Yes. He was to hang a rope down from the cornice on the roof of the hotel, opposite her window, so it would look like an outside job, and he didn't do it. I got the diamonds easy enough—easier than I expected—you know how that was, with all those people coming and going in that room. But I went to bed and couldn't sleep for thinking about the rope. I got up before daylight and went down to see if it was there. So help me God, there's no rope swinging. That makes it an inside job; it puts it up to the guests. By a process of elimination, they'll come down to me. I am ruined any way you look at it, and the shock will kill mother!"
The minister studied the face of his caller critically. Did he love his mother enough to greatly care on her account, or was this merely an afterthought?
"What am I going to do?" the shaken Rollie gasped hoarsely, his eyes fixing themselves in helpless appeal upon the clergyman.
"The thing to do is clear," announced the minister bluntly. "Take these diamonds straight back to Miss Dounay. Tell her you stole them. Throw yourself on her mercy."
A sickly smile curled upon the young man's lip.
"Her mercy?" he repeated. "Do you think that woman has any mercy in her? She has got the worst disposition God ever gave a woman. She would tear me to pieces."
The young fellow again lifted a hand before his eyes, shuddering and reeling as though he might faint.
With a feeling almost of contempt, Hampstead gripped him by the shoulder and shook him sternly.
"Your situation calls for the exercise of some manhood—if you have it," he said sharply. "Tell me. Why did you come here?"
"To get you to help me out!" the broken man murmured helplessly, twisting his hat in his hands. "That was all. I won't lie to you. You've never turned anybody down. Don't turn me down!"
"It was on your mother's account?"
"No, I'm not as unselfish as that. It's just myself. I don't know what's the matter with me. I've lost my nerve. I had it all right enough when I took 'em, except for just a minute after; that's when I met you going away, and with that damned uncanny way of yours you dropped on that something was wrong. But I had my nerve all right; I had it till I got out there on the street this morning and that rope wasn't swinging there over the cornice. Damn the Red Lizard! All I ask is to get out of this, and then to get him by the throat!"
Surely the man had recovered a portion of his nerve, for at the thought of the failure of his partner in crime, his face was suffused with rage, and his weak, writhing hands became twisting talons that groped for the throat of an imaginary Red Lizard.
At sight of this demonstration, Hampstead leaned back in his chair, with the air of one whose interest is merely pathological, observing the phenomena of a soul in the throes of incurable illness. His face was not even sympathetic.
"You have come to the wrong place," he said briefly.
"You won't help me out?"
"Not in your state of mind—which is a mere cowardice in defeat—mere rage at the failure of an accomplice. I should be accessory after the crime."
"Not even to save my mother?" whined the wilted man.
"I should be doing your mother no kindness to confirm her son in crime."
Young Burbeck sat silent and baffled, yet somehow shocked into vigorous thought by the notion that he had encountered something hard, a man with a substratum of moral principle that was like immovable rock.
For a moment the culprit's eyes wandered helplessly about the room and then returned to the rugged face of the minister, with so much of gentleness and so much of strength upon it. Looking at the man thus, Rollie had a sudden, envious wish for his power. This man had a strength of character that was enormous and Gibraltar-like.
"You can help me if you will!" he broke out wretchedly, straining and twisting his neck like a man battling with suffocation.
"Yes," said the minister quietly, his eyes searching to the fellow's very soul, "I can—if you will let me."
"Let you?" and a hysterical smile framed itself on the young man's face. "My God, I will do anything."
"It's something you must be, rather than do," explained the physician to sick souls, once more deeply sympathetic, and leaning forward, he continued significantly: "I want to help you, not for your mother's sake, nor your father's, but for your own whenever you are ready to receive help upon proper terms. You have come here seeking a way out. There is no way out, but there is a way up."
The cowering man shook his head hopelessly. He had not courage enough even to survey a moral height.
For a moment the minister studied his visitor thoughtfully, wondering what could make him see his guilt as he ought to see it; then abruptly he drew close and began to talk in a low, confidential tone. Almost before the surprised Rollie could understand what was taking place, the Reverend John Hampstead, to whom he had come to confess, was confessing to him; this man, whom he had thought so strong, was telling the story of a young girl's love for him; of his weak infatuation for another woman, of the heart-aches that half-unconscious breach of trust had occasioned him, and worst of all, the pangs it had cost the innocent girl who loved him and believed in his integrity with all her impressionable heart.
There was a moisture in the minister's eye as he concluded his story, and there was a fresh mist in Rollie's as he listened.
But the clergyman passed on immediately from this to tell modestly how, when the death of Langham had imposed the lives of Dick and Tayna on him like a trust, he had been true to it, although at the cost of his great ambition; but that afterward this surrender had brought him all the happiness of his present life as pastor of All People's, while the hope of winning that first love back had been given to him again.
"And so," Hampstead concluded, "to be disloyal to a trust has come to seem to me the worst of all crimes; while to be true to one's obligations appears to me as the highest virtue. In fact, the whole active part of my creed could be summed up pretty well in this little idea of trust.
"Trust is almost the highest thing in life. It is the cement of civilization. Trust is the very foundation of banking. You believe in banking, don't you? In the principle? The idea that hundreds of people trust some banker with their surplus funds, and he puts those funds at the service of the community as a whole through loaning them to persons who redeposit them, to be reloaned and redeposited again, so that the bank, a bundle of individual trusts of rich and poor, becomes one of the fulcrums upon which civilization turns?"
Burbeck listened rather dazed. "I never thought of the principle," he faltered after a minute, "I thought of it as a job."
"Well, you see the point, don't you? It's rather a high calling to be a banker. Now in this case the dead man whose fund you have looted trusted the bank; the bank has trusted you, and you have stolen from the bank. Miss Dounay has trusted you, and you have stolen her diamonds. You see at what I am getting?"
Hampstead paused and glanced penetratingly into the face of Rollie, who had been a little swept out of himself, as much in wonder at the new insight into the life of the minister as at the convincing clarity of the lesson conveyed.
"Yes," he replied thoughtfully and with an air of conviction, "that I am not to think of myself as merely a thief, but as something worse,—as a traitor to many sacred trusts."
"Exactly," exclaimed the minister with satisfaction at the sign of moral perception growing. "To shield a thief from exposure is possibly criminal. To help a man repair the breaches of his trust, to put him in the way of never breaking another trust as long as he lives, that is the true work of the ministry. If it is for that you want help, Rollie, you have come to the right place."
"I did not come for that," admitted the young fellow, strangely able to view himself objectively as a sadly dispiriting spectacle. "I came, as you said, in cowardice, because I didn't know which way to turn, desiring only to find a way out. Somehow, I felt myself a victim. You make me see myself a crook. I came here feeling sorry for myself. You make me hate myself. You make me want to be worthy of trust. You give me hope. I have a feeling I never had before, that I am not much of a man, that I am not equal to a man's job. But tell me what I must do to repair the breaches in my trust, and let me see if I think I can do them."
Burbeck's manner had become calmer, and something of the grayness of despair had left his face, but now at the recurrence of all his perplexities, he presented again the picture of a man cowering beneath a mountain that threatened to fall upon him.
"First of all, you must go back to Miss Dounay with her diamonds," prescribed the minister seriously. "If you have not manhood enough to face her with your confession, I do not see the slightest hope for your character's rehabilitation."
"But the executors!" exclaimed Rollie, with the sense of danger still greater than his sense of guilt. "They will be checking me up at eleven. I've got to cover the shortage, or I'm lost. J. M. would be more terrible than Miss Dounay. It would not be vengeance with him. He'd send me to San Quentin, entirely without feeling, just as a matter of cold duty. He'd shake hands and tell me to look in when I got out. That's J. M."
"Yes, I think it is," said the minister, pausing for a moment of thought. His body was balanced and rocking gently in the swivel chair, his hands were held before him, the tips of the thumb and fingers of the right hand just touching the tips of the thumb and fingers of the left hand and making a rudely elliptical basket into which he was looking as if for inspiration.
Rollie, waiting,—hoping, without knowing what to hope,—had begun to study Hampstead's face with a respectful interest he had never felt before. He noticed the dark shadows beneath the gray eyes, and that lines were beginning to seam the brow, while just now the broad shoulders had a bent look. For the first time it occurred to him that Hampstead's work might be hard work, and he began to feel a kind of reverence for a man who would work so hard for other people, and to reflect that it was noble thus to expend one's energies,—noble to be true to trusts of any sort. It was admirable. It was worthy of emulation. A sudden envy of Hampstead's character seized him, and he began, in the midst of his own distress, to think how one proceeded to get such a character. By the simple process of being true to trusts, the minister had suggested. But this seemed rather hopeless for Rollie. His chance had gone—unless! His mind halted and fastened its hope desperately to this grave, silent, meditative face.
The minister was considering very delicate questions: trying to decide how much weight the slender moral backbone of this softling could carry, asking whether by leaning upon the side of mercy, by taking some very serious responsibility upon himself, he might not shelter him from the consequences of his crime while a new character was grown.
But such questions are not definitely answerable in advance, and it was neither Hampstead's usual magnanimity nor his leaning toward mercy, but his moral enthusiasm for the rehabilitation of lost character that impelled him to take a chance in his decision.
"When do you say they will be upon your books?" he asked abruptly.
"Before twelve, sure; by eleven, probably," was Rollie's quick, nervous answer.
"And how much is your defalcation?"
"Forty-two hundred," sighed Rollie.
"The expedient is almost doubtful," announced the minister solemnly, and with evident reluctance; "and I do not say that the time will not come—when you are stronger, perhaps—when you must tell Mr. Manton that you were once a defaulter; but that bridge we will not cross this morning, and in the meantime, I will let you have the money to cover your shortage."
"Brother Hampstead!" gulped Rollie, reaching out both hands, while his soul leaped in gratitude. It was also the first time he had ever called Hampstead "Brother" except in derision.
The minister waved away this demonstration with a gesture of self-deprecation, and a smile that was almost as sweet as a woman's lighted up his face, while he took from a drawer of his desk a small, flat key, familiar to Rollie because he had seen it before, and many others resembling it.
"Here," said Hampstead, "is the key to my safe deposit box in the Amalgamated National vault. In that box is eleven hundred dollars. It is not my money, but was provided by a friend for use in a contingency which has not arisen. I feel at perfect liberty to use it for this emergency. As you will remember, there is already on file with the vault-room custodian my signed authorization for you to visit the box, because you have served as my messenger before. You will be able, therefore, to gain unquestioned access to it the minute the vaults are open, which as you know is nine o'clock. Take the envelope marked 'Wadham currency.' In the meantime I will go to a friend or two, and within thirty minutes after the bank's doors open, I will bring you another envelope containing thirty-one hundred dollars."
Rollie listened as a condemned man upon a scaffold listens to the reading of his reprieve.
"How can I thank you?" he croaked finally, clutching at the minister's hand.
"You don't thank me," adjured Hampstead, towering and strong, while he gripped the pulseless palm of Burbeck. "Don't thank me! Do your part; that's all."
Rollie clung to the strong hand uncertainly for a few seconds until he himself felt stronger, when his face seemed to lighten somewhat.
"You have a wonderful way with you, Doctor Hampstead," he exclaimed. "You have put conscience into me this morning—and courage."
"Both are important," smiled the minister.
At this moment, Rollie, who was beginning to recover his presence of mind, did one of those innocent things which thereafter played so important a part in the tragical chain of complications which followed from this interview. The act itself was no more than to select from a small tray of rubber bands upon the study desk, the only red one which happened to be there, and to snap it with several twists about the neck of the vault-box key, remarking as he did so:
"For ready identification. There are sometimes several of these keys in my possession at once."
The minister nodded approvingly. "I suppose," he commented, "other people make use of you as a messenger to their boxes."
"Half a dozen of the women have that habit," the young man observed.
"Trusted!" exclaimed the minister impulsively, laying a cordial hand upon the young man's shoulder. "You have been greatly trusted. It is a rare privilege, isn't it?"
Rollie nodded thoughtfully.
"And these?" questioned Doctor Hampstead, motioning to where the diamond necklace curled, appearing to Rollie less like a serpent now and more like a strangler's knot.
"I'm afraid of them," said the young man with a shudder. "Couldn't—couldn't you take them back to her and tell the story?"
The clergyman shook his head solemnly.
"I cannot confess your sins for you," he averred. "If you are not man enough for that, we might as well stop before we begin."
Hampstead's tone was final.
"You are right," admitted Burbeck, in tones of conviction; "you are right."
But still he could not bring himself to touch the diamonds, and stood gazing as if charmed by the evil spell they wrought. Sensing this, the minister took up from his desk a long envelope which bore his name and address in the corner, opened it, lifted the sparkling string by one end, dropped it inside, moistened the flap, sealed it, and handed it to Burbeck.
"There," he exclaimed, "you don't even have to touch them again. Go straight to her hotel."
"Oh, but I cannot," exclaimed Rollie, apprehension trembling in his tones. "I shall not dare to leave the bank until the shortage is covered. The executors might come in ahead of time, and I must be there to stall them off, if necessary. But I might telephone to Miss Dounay."
"Telephones are leaky instruments," objected Hampstead, with a shake of his head.
"Or send her a note," suggested Burbeck.
"Notes miscarry," controverted the minister sagaciously, "and they do not always die when their mission is accomplished. Since you are taking my advice, I would say summon all your self-control, contain your secret in patience during the hours you must wait until your shortage is made good, and you can leave the bank to see Miss Dounay in person. You must do your part entirely alone, for my lips are sealed."
"Sealed?" questioned Rollie, not quite comprehending.
"Yes, the secret is your own. Think of your confession as made to God!"
"You mean that you would never tell on me, no matter what happened?"
"Just that. The liberty is not mine. I can only expect you to be true to your trust as I am true as a minister to mine."
This was an idea Rollie could not grasp readily. It was taking away a prop upon which he had meant to lean.
"But," he argued, "you make it possible for me to take your money and that of your friends and keep it, if you don't have some kind of a club over me."
"Exactly," replied the minister. "I want no club over you, Rollie. You must be a free agent, or else I have not really trusted you. Your right action would mean nothing if compulsory. You must be true to your trust from some inner spiritual motive."
But Rollie was still groping. "And if I should, for instance, steal the money you give me?"
"You would know it, and I, and one other," replied the minister, raising his eyes devoutly.
Rollie swept his hand across his face slowly, with a gesture of bewilderment. This minister was taking him to higher and higher ground. He began to feel as if he had been led up to some transfiguring mountain peak of moral eminence.
"It is the highest appeal which could be made to the honor of another," he breathed in tones approaching awe.
"Exactly," declared Hampstead again with that air of finality, "and if I should fail to be true to my part of the trust, what has passed between us this morning has been the mere compounding of a felony and not the act of a priest of God looking to the regeneration of a soul."
In a wordless interval, Rollie Burbeck pressed the minister's hand once more and departed, his face still wearing a veiled expression as if he had not quite caught the import of all that had been said.
But neither, for that matter, had the minister; although he was never surer of himself than now, when he ushered his guest out of the side door with a cheery, courage-giving smile, and hastened in to his greatly delayed breakfast.
With a thoughtful air and a feeling of intense satisfaction in his breast, he unfolded his napkin, broke his egg, and sipped his coffee, still with no suspicion that this was the day of all days for him, or that he had just sawed and hammered the cross which might make his title clear to saviourhood.