Held to Answer/Chapter 33
Hampstead was determined not to show the white feather. The morning after the discovery of the diamonds in his box, he made the effort to go about his daily duties unconcernedly and even happily, with a smile of confidence upon his face. His bearing was to proclaim his innocence. But it would not work. Crowds gaped. Individuals stared. Reporters hounded. The very people who needed his help and had been accustomed to receive it gratefully, appeared to shrink from his presence. At the homes where he called, an atmosphere of restraint and artificiality was created. He tried to thaw this and failed dismally; it was evident that the recipients of his attentions also tried, but also failed, for all the while their doubts peeped out at him.
After half a day the minister gave up and sat at home—immured, besieged, impounded. He was like a man upon a rock isolated by a deluge, the waters rolling horizon-wide and surging higher with every edition of the newspapers.
Oh, those newspapers! John Hampstead had not realized before how much of modern existence is lived in the newspapers. So amazingly skillful were they in sweeping away his public standing that the process was actually interesting. He found himself absorbed by it, viewing it almost impersonally, like a mere spectator, moved by it, swayed to one side or the other, as the record seemed to run. The description of the scene in the vault room, even as it appeared unembellished in Haggard's paper, overwhelmed him.
"It is the manner of a thief hopelessly guilty," he confessed.
On the other hand, when Haggard's paper in an editorial asked argumentatively: "Why should this man steal? What need had he for money in large sums?" John's judgment approved the soundness of such a defense. "There were a score," affirmed the editorial, "perhaps a hundred men who had and would freely supply Doctor Hampstead with all the money necessary for the exigencies of the work to which he notoriously devoted all his time. As for his personal needs, the man lived simply. He had no wants beyond his income."
"True—perfectly true. A good point that," conceded Hampstead to himself.
But that evening one of the San Francisco papers reported that at about the time the diamonds were stolen, the Reverend Hampstead had approached various persons in Oakland with a view to borrowing a large sum of money without stating for what the money was required. The paper volunteered the conjecture that the minister, through speculation in stocks, had overdrawn some fund of which he was a trustee, and of which he was presently to be called upon to give an accounting; hence the desperate resort to the theft of the diamonds and the temporary holding of them in his vault, boldly counting on his own immunity from suspicion.
This conjecture was extremely damaging. It skillfully suggested a logical hypothesis upon which the minister could be assumed to be a thief; and so high had been the man's standing that some such hypothesis was necessary.
As Hampstead read this, he felt the viciousness of the thrust. It was false, but it had the color of an actual incident behind it. Some clerk, bookkeeper, or secretary to one of the men who had so promptly enabled him to meet Rollie's defalcation, seeing the comparatively large sum in cash passed to the hand of the minister, had done a little thinking at the time and when the arrest came had done a little talking.
Yet the morning papers of the next day had apparently forgotten this incident. They were off in full cry upon a much more dangerous trail by digging deeper into the relations between the minister and the actress. As if from hotel employees, or some one in Miss Dounay's service, one of them had elicited and put together a story of all the calls that Hampstead had made upon Miss Dounay in her hotel during the five weeks she had been at the St. Albans. This story made it appear that the minister had become infatuated with the actress, and that he had sought every means of spending time in her company.
It was skillfully revealed that Miss Dounay at first had been greatly attracted by the personality and the apparent sincerity of the clergyman; but as her social acquaintance in the city rapidly extended and the work upon her London production became more engrossing, she had less and less time for him, and was finally compelled to deny herself almost entirely to the divine's unwelcome attentions, notwithstanding which the clergyman still found means of forcing himself upon the actress. One such occasion, it appeared, had prevented the appearance of Miss Dounay at a dinner given by a very prominent society lady of the town, where the brilliant woman was to have been the guest of honor. Some one had even recalled that the minister was not an invited guest at the dinner during which the diamonds were stolen. He had presented himself, it seemed, after the affair was in progress and departed before its conclusion.
But it was left to one of the evening papers of this day to explode the climactic story of the series. The writers of the morning story had been careful to protect the conduct of Miss Dounay from injurious inference; but now the Evening Messenger went upon the streets with a story that left Miss Dounay's character to take care of itself, and purported boldly to defend the minister.
Preacher not Thief, boldly ventured the headlines. The report declared that an intimacy of long standing had existed between the minister and the actress. The public was reminded of what part of it had forgotten and the rest never knew, that John Hampstead had himself been an actor. The narrative told how the minister had made his professional début in Los Angeles by carrying this same Marien Dounay in his arms in Quo Vadis, night after night, in scene after scene, during the run of the play; and hinted broadly of an attachment beginning then which had ripened quickly into something very powerful, so powerful, in fact, that when Hampstead was playing with the "People's", an obscure stock company in San Francisco, Miss Dounay had broken with Mowrey at the Grand Opera House, because he refused to have the awkward amateur in his company, and had herself gone out to the little theater in Hayes Valley and lent to its performance the glamour of her name and personality, merely to be near the idol upon whom her affections had fixed themselves so fiercely.
Actors now playing in San Francisco who had been members of the People's Stock at the time remembered that the couple succeeded but poorly in suppressing signs of their devotion to each other, and the stage manager, now retired, was able to recall how in the garden scene of East Lynne, Miss Dounay had deliberately changed the "business" between Hampstead and herself in order that she might receive a kiss upon the lips instead of upon the forehead as the script required.
This mosaic of truth and falsehood related with gustatory detail a violent quarrel between the two which occurred one night in a restaurant prominent in the night life of the old city, the result of which was that Miss Dounay cast off her domineering and self-willed lover entirely.
"After a few weeks," the article observed soberly, "the broken-hearted lover surprised his friends by renouncing the stage and entering upon the life of the ministry as a solace to his wounded affections."
In support of this, it was pointed out that the minister had never married nor been known to show the slightest tendency toward gallantries in his necessarily wide association with women.
The glittering achievement of vindication was next attempted by the Messenger's story. This admittedly was theory, but it was set forth with confidence and particularity, as follows:
"The return of the actress, in the prime of her beauty and at the very zenith of her career, upon a visit to California, which had been her childhood home, not unnaturally led to a revival of the old passion. For a time the two were running about together as happy as cooing doves. Then a clash came. This was over the question of the harmonizing of the two careers. Obviously, Miss Dounay could not be expected to give up hers, and the minister was now so devoted to his own work that he found himself unwilling to make the required concession upon his part.
"A serious disagreement resulted. The actress was a woman of high temper. It had been the custom to deposit her diamonds in the minister's box as a matter of protection. On the night of the party, she had committed them to him, as usual. But the next morning, angered over the clergyman's failure to keep an appointment with her, the actress, in a moment of reckless passion, had charged him with stealing them. Under the circumstances, Hampstead, as a chivalrous man, declined to speak, knowing full well that sooner or later the woman's passion would relent, and she would release him from the awkward position in which he stood."
There were holes in this story. At places it did not fit the facts; as for instance, the minor fact that by common agreement the minister did not leave the dinner party until considerably after twelve, consequently at a time when the bank vault was inaccessible. There was also the major fact that the theft of the diamonds was discovered and reported at two o'clock in the morning, and not the next day "after the minister's failure to keep an appointment with the actress had angered her."
But these trifling discrepancies were disregarded by the eager rewrite man, who threw this story together from the harvesting of half a dozen leg-weary reporters.
Nor did they matter greatly to Hampstead. He read the story with whitening lips. He recognized it as the sort of vindication that would ruin him. It made his position a thousand times more difficult. It was infinitely harder to keep silence when the very truth itself was blunderingly mixed to malign him.
Nor did the public mind the discrepancies greatly. The Messenger's story was a triumph of journalism. It was the most eagerly read, the most convincingly detailed explanation of what had occurred. The public absorbed it with a sense of relief that at last it had learned how such a man as John Hampstead could have fallen as he had. The story even excited a little sympathy for the minister by revealing the unexpected element of romance in his life. Nevertheless, its publication upon the evening of the third day after the minister's arrest battered away the last pretense of any considerable section of the popular mind that, whatever the outcome of his trial, Hampstead was any longer a man entitled to public confidence.
Flying rumor, published gossip, and vociferous assault upon one side, combined with guilty silence upon the other, had absolutely completed the work of destruction. The reputation of the pastor of All People's was hopelessly blasted. Even to the minister, sitting alone like a convict in his cell, this effect was clearly apparent. The question of whether he was a thief or not a thief had faded into the background of triviality. The issue was whether he, a trusted minister, while occupying his pulpit and bearing himself as a chaste and irreproachable servant of mankind, had yielded to an intrigue of the flesh. The indictment did not lie in definite specifications that could be refuted, but in inferences that were unescapable.
The riot of reckless gossip had made the preacher's honor common. Anything was believable. Each single incident became a convincing link in the chain of evidence that John Hampstead was an apostate to the creed and character he espoused.
The minister in his study, his desk and chair an island surrounded by a sea of rumpled newspapers, harried on every side by doubt and suspicion so aggressive that it almost forced him to doubt and suspect himself, laid his face upon his desk.
This was more than he had prayed for. This was no honored cross that he was asked to bear. It was a robe of shame to be put upon him publicly. To be sure, it was loose, ill-fitting, diaphanous, but none the less it was enveloping. It did not blot out, yet it ate like a splotch of acid.
But suddenly the man sat up, and for the first time since the startling disclosure in the vault room, a look of terror shot into his eyes, terror mixed with pain that was indescribable. It was a thought of the effect of this last story upon the mind of Bessie that had stabbed him. Bessie had grown wonderfully during these five years. She had completed four years at Stanford and one year of post-graduate work in the University of Chicago. To-morrow, if he had the date right, she would be receiving her degree. The beauty of her character and the beauty of her person had ripened together, until John's imagination could think of nothing so exquisite in all the universe as Bessie Mitchell. And after the degree and a summer in Europe, she was coming back to California and to him! Together they were going to enter upon a life and the making of a home that was to be rich in happiness for both of them, and as they fondly hoped, rich in happiness for all with whom they came in contact.
Reflecting that in this last week Bessie would be too busy to read the newspapers, John had chivalrously thought to tell her nothing of what was befalling him, that she might set out happily upon her European journey. But now had come this alleged vindication, which was the most terrible assault of all, with its disgusting insinuations. He felt instinctively that Bessie would see that story, because it was the one of all which she ought not to see. Seeing it, he assured himself, she would believe it, more fully than any one else would believe it. John knew that despite his own years of steadfast devotion and despite her own constant effort to do so, she had never quite wiped out the horrible suspicions engendered by his confession of the brief attachment for Miss Dounay. He suspected it was a thing no woman ever successfully wipes out. This damnable story would revive that suspicion convincingly. It was inevitable that Bessie should believe that Marien Dounay's presence had revived the old infatuation, and that he had yielded to its power.
This reflection left Hampstead with his lips pursed, his cheeks drawn, sitting bolt and rigid like a frozen man.
In this polar atmosphere the telephone tinkled. The minister answered it with wooden movements and a wooden voice:
"No, nothing to say—yet."
Always the "yet" was added. "Yet" meant the minister's hope for deliverance. The reporters who had heard that "yet" so many times in the three days began to find in it something pathetic and almost convincing. But though the minister had added it this last time from sheer force of habit, the hope had just departed from him. With his love-hope gone, there was nothing personally for which John Hampstead cared to ask the future. Time, for him, was at an end. He was not a being. He was an instrument.
But as if to remind him for what purpose he was an instrument, he had barely hung up the 'phone when there was a faint tap at the outer entrance of his study, followed at his word of invitation by the figure of a man who, with a furtive, backward glance as if afraid of the shadows beneath the palm trees, slipped quickly through the narrowest possible opening, closed the door and halted uncertainly, his eyes blinking at the light, his hands rubbing nervously one upon the other. The man was carefully dressed and tonsured. There was every evidence that to the world he was trying to be his old debonair self, but before the minister he stood abject and pitiable.
"Rollie!" exclaimed Doctor Hampstead, leaping up.
"She haunted me!" the conscience-stricken man faltered helplessly, sinking into a chair. "She threatened to denounce me right there in the bank, if I dared to communicate with you." Again there was that frightened look backward to the door.
An hour before, when the minister had not yet reasoned out the effect upon Bessie of this awful story of his alleged relations with the actress, he would have leaped upon Rollie vehemently, so anxious to know how the diamonds got into his safe-deposit box as almost to tear the story from the young man's throat.
But now he had the feeling that there was no longer anything at stake worth while. All in him that quickened at the sight of his visitor was a sort of clinical interest in the state of a soul.
As Rollie told his story, the minister gasped with relief to learn that his own plight was due to no Judas-like betrayal, but that the young man was, like himself, a victim of this scheming, devilish woman, and he listened with sympathetic eagerness while the narrator depicted brokenly the frightful conflict between fear and duty through which he had passed during the two days gone.
But with the narrative concluded, the duty of each was still plain. The silence must be kept. Moreover, in this revulsion of feeling from doubt to active sympathy, the minister perceived that things were going very hardly with the young man. Knowing Miss Dounay now rather well, he was able to understand, even without explanation, the paralyzing fear which had kept Rollie dumb for these three days, and to realize that his coming even tardily was a sign of some renascence of moral courage. This perception quickened both the minister's sympathy and his interest in his duty. He was able to interrogate the young man considerately and to put him gradually somewhat at his ease, and this so tactfully as to make it seem to Rollie that, his delay in coming was half a virtue and that the act of coming itself was a supreme moral victory which gave promise of greater victories to come.
But it did not require this exhibition of magnanimity to bring young Burbeck to finish his story with an outpouring of the bitter self-reproaches he had for two days been heaping upon himself.
"I never realized before what a despicable coward sin or crime can make of a man," he concluded. "This spectacle of you bearing uncomplainingly upon your back the burden of my guilt before this whole community sets something burning in me like a fire. It has given me courage to come here. Sometimes in the last few hours I have almost had the courage to come out and tell the truth, to denounce this devilish woman for what she is, and to take my guilt upon myself."
For a moment Rollie's eyes opened till a ring of white appeared about the iris, and he shifted his position dizzily.
"But," exclaimed the minister with sudden apprehension and an outburst of great earnestness, "you must not. You must consider your mother. I command you to consider her above everything else! I should forbid you to speak for her sake, if nothing else were involved. I do want you to become brave enough to take this guilt upon yourself, if circumstances permit it; but, they do not permit. Besides," and the minister shook his head sadly, "even that would now be powerless to relieve me from these awful consequences. I might be proved spotlessly innocent of the charge of theft, and yet my reputation would still be hopelessly ruined. It has cost me all, Rollie—all!"
The minister and the penitent, the innocent and the guilty, drew together for the moment linked by that bond of sympathy which invariably exists when one man suffers willingly in the cause of another, and is heightened when the sufferer winces under the pain.
"Even," the minister labored on, "even that hope of Her, of which I told you the other day, has been torn from me."
Rollie's face turned a more ghastly white.
"That?" he murmured huskily.
"That!" assented the minister, with a grave, downward bend of the head.
"It is too much," groaned the young man in real agony of spirit. "Nothing, nothing that is at stake is worth that—can be worth that."
For a moment Hampstead was silent.
"To be loyal, Rollie, to be true to the highest duty is worth everything."
This was what he would have liked to say; it was what he believed; it was what he meant to demonstrate by his course of action; but for the moment he could not say it. Instead, he swallowed hard and looked downward, toying with a paper-knife upon his desk. But his visitor was going now. There was no reason why he should stay, and the minister, as he held open the door, was able to say warningly: "Remember! Not one word for the sake of your mother's life."
"But you," protested the young man, his eyes again staring wildly.
"You are to try not to think of me," declared Hampstead, with low emphasis, "except as my own steadfastness in my duty—if I am able to be steadfast—may help you to be steadfast in yours. Rollie! We understand each other?"
But the young fellow only shook his head negatively with a growing look of awe and wonder in his eyes, then turned and slipped hastily away. He did not understand this man—the bigness of him—at all; but he found himself leaning on him more and more heavily and felt some spiritual cleansing process digging at the inside of himself like the scrape and bite of a steam shovel.
As for the minister, once he was free to think of himself alone, he perceived that Rollie's story had set him free of silence. It supplied the gap in his knowledge which had made him dumb. There was a real defense which could now be offered. Now, too, that there was again some prospect of vindication, he felt his desire for vindication grow.
Up to the present he had waived arraignment on the charge, and had twice secured the customary two days' postponement of the hearing upon preliminary examination. But immediate action should now be taken. Accordingly he located Judge Brennan at his club by telephone and the Assistant District Attorney Searle at his residence, and without explanation asked that the time for his arraignment and preliminary hearing be set as soon as possible.
Next morning the papers presented as the most startling development of the Hampstead Case the fact that the minister had announced himself prepared to go to trial, and the preliminary hearing had been set for Saturday at ten o'clock in Judge Brennan's court room.
Public interest centered, of course, upon the nature of the minister's defense. There was even observable something like a turn of the tide in his favor. Rumor, suspicion, and innuendo for the time had played themselves out. Shrewd managing editors—keen students of mass psychology that they were—discerned signs that these ebbing cross-currents of doubt and uncertainty might sweep suddenly in the opposite direction, and they were alertly prepared to switch the handling of the news if the popular appetite changed.