Held to Answer/Chapter 29
Because locomotion was not easy for her, it was to have been expected that the conferences between John Hampstead and Mrs. Burbeck, which, especially in the early days of his pastorate, had been so many, would take place in that lady's home; and they usually did. But as time went on, her own independence of spirit and increased consideration for the minister led Mrs. Burbeck frequently to prefer to come to him. To make this easy, two planks had been laid to form a simple runway to the stoop at the study door. When, therefore, the minister entered his library to-night, closely followed by Wyatt, he found that good woman waiting in the wheel chair beside his desk. The object of her call showed instantly in an expression of boundless and tender solicitude; and yet the clergyman immediately forgot himself in a conscience-stricken concern for his visitor.
"You should not have come," he exclaimed quickly, sympathy and mild reproach mingling, while a devotion like that of a son for a mother was conveyed in his tone and glance.
Truly, Mrs. Burbeck had never looked so frail. All but the faintest glow of color had gone from her cheeks; her eyes were bright, but with a luster that seemed unearthly, and her skin had a transparent, wax-like look that to the clergyman was alarmingly suggestive, as if the pale bloom of another world were upon her cheeks, which a single breath must wither.
Making these observations swiftly as his stride carried him to her, the minister, speaking in that rich baritone of melting tenderness which was one of Hampstead's most charming personal assets, concluded with: "You are not well. You are not at all well."
"Oh, yes," the Angel answered, "I am well."
Although she spoke in a voice that appeared to be thin to the point of breaking, her tone was even, and her senses proclaimed their alertness by allowing her eyes to wander from the face of the minister and fix themselves inquiringly over his shoulder on the unembarrassed, stolid man at the door.
"Tell her not to mind me, Doc," interjected Wyatt in a stuffy voice. At the same time an exploratory thumb brought up a quill from a vest pocket, and the deputy began with entire assurance the after-dinner toilet of his teeth, while his eyes roamed the ceiling and the tops of the bookcases as if suddenly oblivious of the presence of other persons in the room.
"Yes," said the minister reassuringly, "we will not be disturbed by Mr. Wyatt's presence. He is merely doing his duty."
"You are—?" Mrs. Burbeck hesitated with an upward inflection, and the disagreeable word unuttered.
"Yes," replied the minister gravely, his inflection falling where hers had risen. "I am."
"Oh, that woman! That woman!" murmured Mrs. Burbeck, "I have mistrusted her and been sorry for her all at once. But it was Rollie that I feared for."
There was a sigh of relief that was as near to an exhibition of selfishness as Mrs. Burbeck had ever approached; after which, mother-like, she lapsed into a rhapsody over her son.
"Rollie," she began, in doting accents, "is so young, so handsome, so responsive to beauty of any sort; so ready to believe the best of every one. I feared that he would fall in love with her and ruin his business career—you know how these theatrical marriages always turn out—or that she would jilt him and break his heart. Rollie has such a sensitive, expansive nature. He has always been trusted so widely by so many people. Since that boy has grown up, I have lived my whole life in him. Do you know," and she leaned forward and lowered her voice to an impressive and exceedingly intimate note; "it seems to me that if anything should happen to Rollie, it would crush me, that I should not care to live,—in fact should not be able to live."
Tears came readily to the limpid pools of her eyes, and the delicately chiseled lips trembled, though they bravely tried to smile.
Hampstead sat regarding her thoughtfully, love and apprehension mingling upon his face. It suddenly reoccurred to him with compelling force that the most awful cruelty that could be inflicted would be for this delicate and fragile woman, who to-night looked more like an ambassadress from some other existence than a thing of flesh and blood, to know the truth about her son. Seeing her thus smiling trustfully through her mother-tears, thinking of all that her sweet, saint-like confidences had meant to him, Hampstead felt a mighty resolve growing stronger and stronger within him.
But for once Mrs. Burbeck's intuitions were not sure, and she misconstrued the meaning of her pastor's silence.
"Forgive me," she pleaded in tones of self-reproach. "Here I am in the midst of your trouble babbling of myself and my son. Yet that is like a mother. She never sees a young man's career blighted but she grows suddenly apprehensive for the child of her own bosom. Now that feeling comes to me with double force. I love you almost as a son. Consequently, when I see my boy out there in the sun of life mounting so buoyantly, and you, so worthy to mount, but struggling in mid-flight under a cloud, I feel a mingling of two painful emotions. I suffer as if struck upon the heart. My spirit of sympathy and apprehension rushes me to you, yet when I get to you, my doting mother's heart makes me babble first of my boy. And so," she concluded, with an apologetic smile, "you see how weak and frail and egotistic I am, after all."
"But," protested Hampstead, who had been eager to break in, "my career is not blighted. I am not under a cloud. It annoyed me to-night upon the boat and train to discover how suddenly I was pilloried by my enemies and avoided by my friends. They seem to take it for granted that I am already smirched; that to me the subject must be painful, and as there is no other subject to be thought of at the moment, hence conversation will also be painful. Because of this I am a pariah, to be shunned like any leper."
With rising feeling, the young minister snatched a breath and hurried on.
"Now, Mrs. Burbeck, I do not feel like that at all. I have put myself in the way of sustaining this attack through following the course of duty, as I conceived it. I need not assure you that I am innocent of a vulgar thing like burglary. I need not assure the public. It is impossible that they should believe it. Nevertheless, I have seen enough in the papers to-night to show how they will revel at seeing me enmeshed in the toils of circumstance. To them it is a rare spectacle. Very well, let it be a spectacle. It is one in which I shall triumph. I propose to fight. I feel like fighting." His fist was clenched and came down upon the arm of his chair, and his voice, though still low, was full of vibrant power.
"I feel that I have the right to call upon every friend, upon every member of All People's, upon every believer in those things for which I have fought in this community, to rally to my side to fight shoulder to shoulder in the battle to repel what in effect is an assault not upon me, but upon the things for which I stand."
Mrs. Burbeck's expressive eyes were floating full with a look that verged from sympathy toward pity.
"You will have to be a very expert tactician," she said soberly, drawing on those fountains of ripe wisdom, so full at times that they seemed to mount toward inspiration; "if you are to make the public think of your embarrassment in that way. It is going to look at this as a disgraceful personal entanglement of a minister with an actress!"
Hampstead writhed in his chair. Nothing but the depth of his consideration for Mrs. Burbeck kept him from exclaiming vehemently against what he deemed the enormous injustice of this assumption.
"She's right, Doc; right's your left leg," sounded a throaty voice, which startled the two of them into remembering that they were not alone.
"Why, Wyatt!" exclaimed the minister reprovingly, turning sharply on the deputy.
"Excuse me, Doc," Wyatt mumbled abjectly. "I just thought that out loud. All the same, she's wisin' you up to somethin' if you'll let 'er. Some of these old dames that ain't got nothin' to do but just set and think gets hep to a lot of things that a hustlin' man overlooks."
Hampstead was disgusted.
"Don't interrupt us again, please, Wyatt," he observed, combining dignity and rebuke in his utterance.
But Wyatt, influenced no doubt by the look almost of fright on Mrs. Burbeck's face, was already in apologetic mood.
"Say," he mumbled contritely, "you're right, Doc. I'm so sorry for the break that, orders or no orders, I'll just step out in the hall while you finish. But all the same, you listen to her," and he indicated the disturbed and slightly offended Mrs. Burbeck with a stab of a toothpick in the air, "and she'll tell you somethin' that's useful."
"Thank you very much, Wyatt," replied the minister in noncommittal tones, but with a sigh of relief as the deputy withdrew from the room.
Yet he had a growing sense of depression. Wyatt's boorish, croaking interruption had thrown him out of poise. Mrs. Burbeck's exaggerated sense of the gravity of the matter weighed him down like lead, and the more because an inner voice, sounding faintly and from far away, but with significance unmistakable, seemed to tell him her view was right. Nevertheless, his whole soul rose in protest. It ought not to be right. It was a gross travesty on justice and on popular good sense.
Mrs. Burbeck, looking at him fixedly, noted this change in spirit and the conflict of emotions which resulted. Reaching out impulsively, she touched the large hand of the man where it lay upon the desk.
"I feared you would take it too lightly," she reflected. "Youth always does that. For this world about you to turn and gnash you is mere human nature, which it is your business to understand. Has it never occurred to you that the same voices who upon Sunday cried out: 'Hosannah, Hosannah to the son of David!' upon Friday shouted: 'Away with him! Crucify him! Crucify him!'"
"But I am innocent," Hampstead protested, though weakly.
"And so was He," Mrs. Burbeck replied simply.
"But He was worthy to suffer. I am not," murmured Hampstead humbly.
"Sometimes," suggested the sweet-voiced woman, "suffering makes us worthy."
"But," affirmed the minister, his fighting spirit coming back to him, "I can prove my innocence!"
The face of Mrs. Burbeck lighted. "Then you must," she said decisively. "You give me hope when you say that. It was to tell you that I came, fearful that you would rely upon the public to assume your innocence until your guilt was proven. Alas, they are more likely to assume the contrary, to hold you guilty until you prove yourself innocent."
"I have been made to see that already," replied Hampstead. "At first, no doubt, I did underestimate the gravity of the situation. You have helped me to appraise its dangers more accurately."
But Mrs. Burbeck had more important advice to give.
"Yes," she went on half-musingly, because tactfulness appeared to suggest that form of utterance, "you will have to vindicate yourself absolutely. It is a practical situation. The danger is not that you will be convicted and sent to jail. Nobody believes that, I should say. The danger is that a question-mark will be permanently attached to your name and character. The Reverend John Hampstead, interrogation point! Is he a thief, or not? Did he compromise himself, or not? Is he weak, or not? This is the thing to fear, the thing that would condemn you and brand you as stripes brand a convict."
For a tense, reflective moment the minister's lips had grown dry and bloodless; and then he confessed grudgingly: "I begin to see that you are right."
"You should begin your defense by a counter-attack," Mrs. Burbeck continued, feeling that the man was sufficiently aroused now to appreciate the importance of vigorous defensive actions. "Declare your disbelief that the diamonds have actually been stolen. Get out a warrant of search, and you will probably find them now concealed among her effects. At any rate this counter-search would hold the public verdict in suspense; and it would be like your well-known aggressive personality. If the search fails to reveal them, if her diamonds really are stolen, your complete vindication must depend upon the capture and exposure of the real thief."
Hampstead wiped his moist brow nervously. It was uncannily terrible that this woman of all persons in the world should say this to him. However, he had sufficient presence of mind to urge:
"But how unjust to force a contract like that upon me."
"It is unjust," admitted the Angel of the Chair. "Yet the innocent often suffer injustice, and you must realize that you are not immune. That is your only course, and I came specifically to warn you of it. Prove there was no theft, or get the thief!"
There was snap and sparkle in Mrs. Burbeck's eyes. Despite her physical frailty, her spirit was stout, and her conviction so forcefully conveyed that the minister delivered himself of a gesture of utter helplessness.
"I cannot do either," he said, half-whispering his desperation. "Yet I think I appreciate better than you how sound your advice has been. But there are reasons that I cannot give you, that I cannot give to any one, why the course which you suggest cannot be followed. I must go another way to vindication; but," and his voice rose buoyantly, "I will go and I will get it."
Mrs. Burbeck received with misgivings her pastor's complete rejection of the advice she had offered, yet some unconscious force in the young minister's manner swept her on quickly against her judgment and her will to an enormous increase of faith, both in the strength and the judgment of the man. As for Hampstead, he concluded his rejection by doing something he had never done before. That was to lean low, his face chiseled in lines of gravity and devotion, and taking the delicate hand of Mrs. Burbeck, that in its weakness was like a drooping flower, lift it to his lips and kiss it.
"Conserve all your spirit," he said solemnly, still clinging tenderly to the hand. "It may be that I shall have to lean heavily upon you."
"You may have my life to the uttermost," she breathed trustfully, never dreaming the thought unthinkable which the words suggested to her pastor and friend. But an extraneous idea came pressing in, and Mrs. Burbeck raised toward the minister, in a gesture of appeal, the hand his lips had just been pressing, as she pleaded: "And do not think too hardly of the woman. She loves you."
"Loves me!" protested Hampstead, with a ghastly hoarseness. "The woman is incapable of love—of passion even. She is all fire, but without heat—though once she had it. She is a mere blaze of ambition. All she cared for was to bring me to my knees, to dangle me like a scalp at her waist."
Mrs. Burbeck steadied him with a glance from a mind unimpressed.
"Be sorry, very sorry for her!" she insisted gravely. "Acquit yourself of no impatience—not even a reproachful look, if you can help it. She is to be pitied. Only the malice of unsated love could do what she has done. Show yourself noble enough, Christ-like enough, to be very, very sorry for her!"
"We got to go if we get there by nine!"
It was the smothered voice of Wyatt, calling through the door.