Held to Answer/Chapter 32
On the theory that his duty as an escort still survived, Rollie was given a seat upon the limousine beside François; but at the door of the St. Albans Miss Dounay dismissed him as curtly as if she had quite forgotten that he was now or ever of any importance to her.
While to escape a breakfast with that thistle-tempered lady on such a morning would, under ordinary conditions, have been a distinct relief, this morning it appealed to Rollie as merely palliative. It was a mercy, but no more. He did not expect to know one single sensation of real relief until he saw Miss Dounay holding her precious diamonds once more in her hands. It was his intention, after a hasty breakfast, to make the swiftest possible transit to the residence of the Reverend John Hampstead and there secure the loan of a certain key and rush back to the bank. Within, say, seven minutes thereafter, he anticipated that this taste of true relief would come to him.
It was twenty minutes past eight as he crossed the wide lobby of the hotel. His physical condition was far from enviable. He was clad in a baggy-elbowed, wretchedly wrinkled, and somewhat stained yachting suit. He had not slept since the night before, in which, he now recalled, he had not slept at all. During this extended period of wakefulness he had been upset and out of his orbit. Yet all this while the world had been rocking along, provokingly undisturbed by his troubles, and right now a big new day was hurrying on. The cars were banging outside, and the newsboys were making a devil of a racket about something, their cries filling the street and ringing vibrantly into the lobby from without. Everything was strident and noisy, jarring upon his nerves. His first instinct was a dive for the bar, but he stopped before the door was reached. He was on a new tack. He resolved not to drink to-day. He had signed no pledges; but he felt that a highball was not in keeping with what he proposed to do.
Instead he veered toward the grillroom and ordered a pot of hot, hot coffee with rolls. To fill the impatient interval between the order and the service, he snatched eagerly at the morning paper in the extended hand of a waiter. At the first glance his eyes dilated, and his lips parted.
When the coffee came, he was still absorbed. The dark liquid was cold before he swallowed it, mechanically, in great gulps. It was well the chair had arms, or his body might have fallen from it. His mind was reeling like a drunken thing as he tried to grasp the process by which a woman's malice had used him for a vicious assault upon the man who had saved him when he stood eye to eye with ruin.
Slowly Burbeck's muddled intelligence groped backward over the events of yesterday. What a fool, he! How clever, she! How demoniacally clever! No wonder she forgave him so lightly; no wonder she cooed so ecstatically once she found the diamonds were in the preacher's vault! No wonder she had made sure that he went upon the yachting party, even to the point of going herself. It was to keep him out of reach until her diabolical plot against Hampstead could take effect. And no wonder she sat bolt and staring at the shore lights all the long night through.
But why did she plot against Hampstead? What was between the clergyman and herself? Why did Hampstead not strike out boldly and clear himself at one stroke, by the mere opening of his lips? He not only had not defended himself, but the papers declared he had a guilty air, that he fought against the opening of the box, and bore himself in a manner that convinced even his bondsmen he was guilty.
But the newspaper chanced to relate as an interesting detail how the minister had quickly recovered his self-possession, to the extent of rearranging the contents of his box after their handling by Assistant District Attorney Searle, and that he had even casually destroyed one paper with the remark that it was something no longer to be preserved.
This almost accidental sentence gave Rollie the strangest feeling of all. He knew what it must have been that was destroyed,—the evidence of his own indebtedness, to explain which would inevitably lead to his exposure. This, too, accounted for the preacher's protest and his apparent guilty fear. He could not know the diamonds were in the box; he did know the I. O. U. was there. He had destroyed it at the very moment when the discovery of the diamonds must surely have convinced him that the culprit he was shielding had betrayed him like a Judas.
"And yet he stands pat!" breathed Rollie huskily, while the greatest emotion of human gratitude that his heart could hold swelled his breast almost to bursting.
"I didn't know they made a man that would stand the gaff like that," he confessed after a further reflective interval.
Burbeck's first instinct was to rush to the telephone and acquit himself in the minister's mind of all complicity in the plot; for inevitably Rollie thought first of himself. But thought for himself recalled the threat of Marien Dounay. How fiercely she had warned him that his secret was not his own, but hers! He grasped the significance of her threat now as she had shrewdly calculated that he would. Let him murmur a word, let him attempt, no matter how subtly or adroitly, to set in motion any plan that would loosen the tightening coils about John Hampstead, and this woman would turn her crazy vengeance on him, would fasten his crime upon him, would do a baser thing than that,—would make it appear that he had deliberately placed the diamonds in the minister's vault, thus causing her innocently to do him this grave injustice. Thus in his exposure he would not be contemplated with indulgent sadness as a gentleman weakling who had descended to vulgar crime to make good another crime as heinous; but, on the contrary, would be regarded hatefully, repulsively, with loathsome scorn and withering contempt, as a despicable ingrate base enough to shift his guilt to the shoulders of the one who had rescued him.
Before this prospect, fear paralyzed every other impulse of his heart, every faculty of his brain. His head was aching violently. He pressed his hands against his temples, and wondered how he could get quietly out of here and where he could fly.
A secluded room of this very hotel suggested the surest isolation. He got up-stairs to the writing room, where a hastily scrawled note to Parma, the cashier, made the night upon the Bay the excuse for his absence from the bank for the day. Another to his mother,—he dared not hear her voice telling him of what had befallen her beloved pastor,—that he was too weary even to come home and would sleep the day out in Oakland, leaving his exact whereabouts unknown to avoid the possibility of disturbance.
Mustering one final rally of his volitional powers, Rollo approached the desk and registered as some one not himself before the very eyes of the clerk, who knew him well and laughingly became accessory to the subterfuge.
Once within the privacy of his room, the impulse to telephone to John Hampstead and tell that distracted man a thing which he would be greatly desiring to know, came again to the young man; but in part exhaustion and in part cowardice led him to postpone that simple act till he had slept, rested, thought.
A few minutes later, with shades darkened and clothing half removed, he buried his feverish head among the pillows and sought to bury consciousness as well. But the latter attempt was a failure, for the young man found himself prodded into the extreme of wakefulness,—thinking, thinking, thinking, until he was all but mad. Out of all this thinking gradually emerged one solid, unshifting fact. This was the character of John Hampstead. He, Rollo Burbeck, might be a shriveling, paltering coward; Marien Dounay might be only a beautiful fiend; but John Hampstead was a strong, unwavering man. John Hampstead would stand firm!
Buoying his soul on this idea, Rollie dropped off to feverish slumber. But the sleeper awoke suddenly with one question hooking at his vitals. Was any man physically equal to such a strain? Was John Hampstead still standing firm like the huge human bulwark he had begun to seem?
Shrill cries floated upward from the street, sounding above the persistent whang of car wheels upon the rails. These were the voices of the newsboys crying the noon edition.
Rollie rose uncertainly and tottered to the telephone, where he asked that the latest papers be sent up to him, and awaited their coming in an ague of suspense and fear.
When they were received, he found little upon the front of either but the story of the minister's arrest for the theft of the diamonds and the finding of the jewels in his box, coupled with fresh emphasis upon his exhibition of the demeanor of a guilty man. It flowed up and down the chopped-off and sawed-out columns, liberally besprinkled with photographs of the chief actors in the drama, then turned upon the second page and spread itself riotously, in various types.
Through these paragraphs the mind of young Burbeck scrambled like a terrier digging for a rat, pawing his way desperately to make sure of the answer to his one, all-consuming question: Was the preacher still standing? The first paper declared accusingly that he was; that, like a guilty man taking advantage of technicalities, he refused to speak. The second paper affirmed the same, but with even greater emphasis, though without the meaner implication.
In the spread-out story there were set forth details and conjectures innumerable that would have interested and amazed Rollie, if his mind had been able to grasp them at all; but it was not. It fastened upon the one thing of ultimate significance in his present water-logged state. Hugging in his arms the papers which conveyed this supreme assurance to him, as if they had been the spar to which his soul was clinging, he rolled over upon the bed with a sigh of intense relief and sank instantly into long and unbroken sleep.
Hunger wakened him at eight in the evening; but instead of ringing for food, he asked for the evening papers. Again their message was reassuring. His nerves were stronger now; his soul was gaining the respite which it needed. He dispatched a messenger to his home for fresh linen and a business suit, turned on the water in the bath, arranged for the presence of a barber in his room in fifteen minutes, and the service of a hearty dinner in the same place in thirty.
The refreshment of invigorating sleep, plus the spectacle of John Hampstead, that Atlas of a man, standing rock-like beneath the world of another's burden, had inspired Rollie sufficiently to enable him to resume once more the pose of his presumed position in life. To be sure, he was still under the spell of his fear,—and could not see himself as yet doing one thing to weaken the pressure upon his benefactor.
For this dastardly inactivity he suffered a flood of self-reproaches, but stemmed them with reflections upon the irreproachable character of the minister, and his impregnable position in the community. He reflected how futile and puerile all the endeavors of the newspapers to involve this good man in scandal must prove. How ridiculous the idea that he could be a common thief! How suddenly the wide, sane public, after a day or two's debauch of excitement, would turn and bestow again their unwavering confidence upon this man and laurel his brow with fresh and more permanent expressions of their regard for his high character. Reflections like this, winged by his own inside knowledge of the true greatness of the victim, together with the soothing influence of a bath, the ministrations of a skilled barber, and the sedative effects of a good dinner, sent young Burbeck to his home somewhere about ten o'clock in the evening, to all appearances quite his usual, happy-looking self.
The telephone had apprised his mother of his coming, and she had remained up to meet him.
"Oh, my son!" she murmured happily, as he laid his smooth cheek against hers and mingled his wavy brown hair with the silvering threads of her own dark tresses.
The young man gave his mother a gentle pressure of his hands upon her shoulders, then turned his face and kissed her cheek, but ventured no word. A sense of blood guiltiness had come upon him at the contact of her presence.
"Of course you have seen what that woman and the papers are doing to Brother Hampstead," his mother observed sadly.
"Yes," replied the young man, in a tone as dejected as hers.
"They are tearing his reputation to pieces," the mother went on. "There is hardly a shred of it left now. Like vultures they are digging over every detail of his life and putting a sinister interpretation upon the most innocent things. The worst of it is that even our own people begin to turn against him. Some of the people for whom he has done the most and suffered the most are readiest with their tongues to blast his character. It is a sad commentary upon the way of the world."
"Still," urged Rollie, "the man is strong; his character is so upright; his purposes are so high and so unselfish that no permanent harm can come to him. His enemies must sooner or later be confuted, and he will emerge from all this pother—" Pother: it took great resolution for Rollie to force so large a fact into so small a word—"a bigger and a more influential man in the community, even a more useful one than before."
Mrs. Burbeck listened to this tribute from her beloved son to her beloved minister with a joy that was pathetic. She had never known him to speak so heartily, with such unreserved admiration before. It told her things about the character of her son she had hoped but had not known. Yet she felt herself compelled to disagree with her son's conclusions.
"That is where you are wrong, my boy," she said, again in tones of sadness. "The public mind is a strange consciousness. If it once gets a view of a man through the smoked glasses of prejudice, it seldom consents to look at him any other way. Remove to-morrow every vestige of evidence against Brother Hampstead, and, mark my words! the fickle public will begin to discover or invent new reasons why, once having hurled its idol down, it will not put him up again."
"You take it too seriously, mother," suggested Rollie half-heartedly, after a moment of silence.
"No, I do not," Mrs. Burbeck replied, shaking her head gravely. "The worst of it is the man's absolute silence. If he would only say something. There must be some sort of explanation. If he took the diamonds, there must have been some laudable reason. This morning there were literally tens of thousands of people hoping for such an explanation and ready to give to him the benefit of every doubt. There are fewer such to-night. There will be fewer still to-morrow.
"If somebody else stole them, and Brother Hampstead, to protect the thief, planned to hold them temporarily while immunity was gained for the coward, he must see now that he made a terrible mistake, that for once he has carried his extravagant leniency entirely too far. If this theory is correct, the thief must have fled beyond the very reach of the newspapers, or be insane, or a drug fiend, or something like that. I cannot conceive of any human being so base, or in a position so delicate that he would not instantly make a public confession to spare his benefactor."
Rollie had turned and was looking straight at his mother, almost reproachfully, certainly protestingly, at the torture she was causing him. She saw this strange look and stopped.
"Oh, my boy," she exclaimed. "You are so sympathetic. How proud, how selfishly happy it makes me to feel that nothing like this can ever come upon my son!"
But Rollie's eyes had shifted quickly to a picture on the opposite wall, and he braced himself desperately against these bomb-like assaults of his mother upon his position.
"Yes," he said after an interval, "it must be pretty hard on Hampstead." But though he made this remark seem natural, his brain was again reeling. With mighty effort he forced himself to give the conversation another turn by a question which had been fascinating him during the whole day.
"Tell me," he asked, "how is father taking it?"
"Very hardly," Mrs. Burbeck confessed. "You know your father: so proud, so exact and scrupulous in all his dealings, with his word better than the average man's bond, yet not lenient toward the man who errs. He thinks everybody good or bad, every soul white or black. When Brother Hampstead was prosecuting law-breakers in court, father was proud of him; but when he goes off helping jail-birds and fallen women, father is harsh and utterly unsympathetic.
"Last night when the first charge appeared, father was greatly incensed, because at last, he said, Brother Hampstead had done the thing he always feared, brought the church into a notoriety that was unpleasant. This morning, at the story of the diamonds in the vault, he was dumbfounded. To-night he talks of nothing but that, whatever the outcome, All People's shall clear its skirts of the unpleasantness by requesting Brother Hampstead's resignation."
"Resignation!" Rollie gasped. "Resignation—simply for doing his duty! Why," he burst out excitedly, "that would be treachery! It would be the act of Judas. Don't let father do it, mother," he pleaded. "Don't let him put me in that position!"
A wild look had come into the young man's face as he spoke.
"You? In what position?"
Mrs. Burbeck was surprised at the expression on her son's face.
For a moment Rollie floundered wildly.
"Why, you see—I—I believe in Hampstead. I—I have told the bank that he is all right, no matter what happens. I don't want my own father reading him out of the church, do I?"
Mrs. Burbeck's perplexity gave way to smiling comprehension, which was met by relief and some approach to composure upon the features of her son, who felt that he had escaped the eddy of an appalling danger.
"Naturally," replied Mrs. Burbeck soothingly. "What a loyal nature yours is! By the way, Rollie," and the force of a new idea energized her glance and tone; "it is only half-past ten. Wouldn't it be fine of you to just run over and give Brother Hampstead a pressure of the hand to-night, and tell him how loyally your heart is with him in this trying situation? It would mean so much to him coming from a strong, successful, young man of the world like you, whose position he must admire so much!"
Rollie's face went white, and his eyes roved despairingly. It must have been well for the mother's peace of mind, as it certainly was for his, that, having asked her question, instead of studying his face while she waited for the answer, she let her eyes fall to the seal ring she had given him upon his twenty-first birthday, and busied herself with studying out again the complexities of the monogram and holding off the hand itself to see how handsomely the ring adorned it.
"I think I'd rather not to-night, mother," Rollie replied, as if after a moment of deliberation. "This thing works me up terribly—you can see that—and I'm a bit short on sleep yet. If I went to see Brother Hampstead to-night, I'm sure I shouldn't sleep a wink afterward. Besides, my coming might alarm him. It might make him think his plight is worse than it is; it would be so unusual."
Again the mother-love surged above any other emotion. "You are right," she admitted, caressing his hand. "It was only an impulse of mine, anyway. You must be tired, poor boy."
"Pretty tired, mother," he confessed truthfully; then stooped and kissed her upon the cheek and seemed to leave the room naturally enough, although in his soul he knew that he fled from her presence like a criminal from his conscience.