Held to Answer/Chapter 37
"What woman?" asked Hampstead, in disinterested tones, too deeply absorbed in the half cynical reflection which the mission of Elder Burbeck had induced to realize that there was but one woman to whom his sister's manner could refer.
"That—that woman!" replied Rose again, unable to bring herself to mention the name.
"Oh," exclaimed her brother absently, but starting up from his reverie. "Oh, very well; show her in," he directed. His tone and gesture indicated that nothing mattered now.
Rose was evidently surprised at her brother's instruction and for once inclined to protest the supremacy of his will.
"You are not going to see her again?" she argued.
"I know of no one who should be in greater need of seeing me," John rejoined, with sadness and reproach mingled in equal parts.
"But alone? Think of the danger!"
"Seeing her alone has done about all the harm it could do," the brother replied, with a disconsolate toss of his hands, while the drawn look upon his face became more pronounced. "Show her in!"
Rose turned back with a cough eloquent of dissenting judgment and left the door flung wide. John at his distance sensed her feeling of outrage in the fierce rustling of her skirts as she receded down the hall, and presently heard her voice saying icily: "The open door!"
The minister smiled, with half-guilty satisfaction. His sister had refused Miss Dounay the courtesy of her escort to the study. He suspected that Rose had even refused to look at the visitor again, but having indicated the direction in which the open door stood, had whisked indignantly beyond into her own preserves.
The hour was now something after sunset, and the room was half in gloom. The actress paused inside the door, standing stiffly. Hampstead sat before his desk, his elbows on the arms of his chair, his hands hanging limp, his shoulders drooping, his eyes cast down and fixed. He was again thinking. He had a good many things to think about. The coming of the actress brought one more. He was not utterly despondent, but he had been brought to the verge of catastrophe; perhaps beyond the verge. The woman against whom he had done no wrong, and who had brought him to the precipice, now stood in his room, the place of all places in which he could feel the desolation creeping round his soul like rising waters about a man trapped by the tide in some ocean cavern. But the minister was not now thinking of that. Instead his mind recalled wonderingly that fleeting picture of this woman in court, with her eyes gleaming savagely at Searle and crouching like a tigress about to spring.
As if to call attention to her presence, the actress swung the door noiselessly toward the jamb, until the lock caught it with an audible and decisive snap. The minister reached out a hand and touched a button that flooded the room with light.
Miss Dounay was clad exactly as she had appeared in court, except that she was more heavily veiled, so that the prying light revealed no more of her features than the sparkle of an eye. Hampstead had not risen.
"Well!" he said, quietly but emotionlessly.
"Yes," she replied, in a low, affirmative voice, exactly as if in answer to a question.
"Why did you do it?"
Hampstead asked the question abruptly, but very quietly, and accompanied it with a gravity of expression and a gesture slight but so inclusive that it comprehended the entire avalanche which had been released upon him during the six days which had passed since he had talked with this woman in the limousine upon the moonlit point above the city.
Before replying, the actress raised both hands and lifted her veil. The disclosure was something of a revelation. The features were those of Marien Dounay, but they were changed. There had been always something royal in Marien's glances, but the royal air was gone now: something dominant in her personality, but the dominance had departed. The suggestion, too, of smouldering fire in her eyes was absent; instead there appeared a liquescent, quivering light, in which suffering and the comprehension that comes with suffering combined to suggest helpless appeal rather than the old, imperial air.
This softening of expression had extended to her mouth as well. The lips, as red, as full of invitation as ever, were more pliant; they trembled and formed themselves into tiny undulating curves which suggested and then reinforced the imploring light of the eyes. Her beauty was more appealing because it was no longer commanding, but entreating.
"Why did you do it?" the minister repeated, when his eyes had completed his appraisal, and the woman was still eloquently silent.
"Because I loved you," she answered briefly.
Her declaration was accompanied by an attempt at a smile that was so brave and yet so faltering that it was rather pitiful. But Hampstead, looking at the beautiful shell of this woman who had so vindictively hurled him down, was not in a mood to feel pity. Instead he was merely incredulous.
"Love?" he asked cynically, rising from his seat.
"Yes," exclaimed the woman with convulsive eagerness, as if her voice choked over speaking what her lips, by the traditional modesty of her sex and the mountain of her pride and self-will, had been too long forbidden to utter. "Yes, I have always loved you!"
With this much of a beginning, excitedly and with the air of one whose course was predetermined, the actress plucked off her hat, stabbed the pin into it, and tossed it upon the window seat; then nervously stripped the gloves from her hands; all the while hurrying on with a sort of defensive vehemence to aver:
"I have loved you from the first moment when you held me in your arms long enough for me to feel the electric warmth of your personality. You roused, kindled, and enflamed me! The sensation was delicious; but I resented it. It offended my pride. I had never been overmastered. You overmastered me without knowing it. I hated you for it. You were so—so unsophisticated; so good, so simple, so ready to worship, to admire, to ascribe the beauties of my body to the beauties of my soul. I hated you for that, for my soul was less beautiful than my body, and I knew it. I resisted you and yielded to you; I hated you and loved you; I spurned you and wanted you.
"You were so awkward, so impossible; you had so much of talent and knew so little how to use it. It seemed to me the very mockery of fate that my heart should fasten its affection upon you. I tried to break the spell, and could not. I yielded to my heart. I had to love you, to let myself adore you.
"I thought of taking you with me, but the way was too long; yours was more than talent—far more; it was genius, but buried deep and scattered wide. It would have taken a lifetime to chisel it out and assemble it in the perfect whole of successful art. I shrank before the treadmill task.
"And something else—I was jealous of you!"
Hampstead, who despite his incredulity had been listening attentively, raised his eyebrows.
"Jealous of the artist you might become. Your genius when it flowered would overtop mine as your character overtops mine."
The speaker paused, as if to mark the effect of her words.
"Go on," urged Hampstead impatiently, and for the first time betraying feeling. "In the name of God, woman, if you have one word of justification to speak, let me hear it!"
"I have it," Miss Dounay rejoined, yet more impetuously, "in that one word which I have already spoken—love!" She paused, passed her hand across her brow, and again resumed the thread of her story, still speaking rapidly but with an increase of dramatic emphasis.
"Then came the final ecstasy of pain. You loved me. You demanded me. You charged me with loving you. You told me it was like the murder of a beautiful child to kill a love like ours. You argued, persuaded, demanded—compelled—almost possessed me!"
The woman's face whitened, her eyes closed, and she reeled dizzily under the spell of a memory that swept her into transports.
"But," replied the minister quietly, "you killed our beautiful child."
"No! No!!" she exclaimed, thrusting out her hands to him. "Do not say that! I only exposed it—to the vicissitudes of years, to absence and to a foul slander which my own lips breathed against myself! But I did not kill it! I did not kill it!"
"At any rate, it is dead," replied the man, his voice as sadly sympathetic as it was coolly decisive.
"But I will make it live again," the woman exclaimed desperately. "I love you, John! Oh, God, how I love you!"
She endeavored to reach his neck with her arms, but the minister stepped back, and she stood wringing them emptily, a look in her eyes as if she implored him to understand.
But the minister was still unresponsive.
"It was a queer way for love to act," he protested, and again with that comprehensive gesture which called accusing notice to the ruin pulled down upon him.
"But will you not understand?" she pleaded. "It was the last desperate resource of love. I could not reach the real you. I tried for weeks. I endured insufferable associations. I assumed distasteful interests—all to put myself in your company; to keep you in mine; to create those proximities, those environments and situations in which love grows naturally. Again and again I thought that love was springing up. But I was disappointed. You did not respond. What I thought at first was response was only sympathy. To you I was no longer a woman. I was a subject in spiritual pathology.
"When I saw this, first it irritated, then maddened me. I knew that you were not yourself, that your environment had insulated you. That you were so interested in the part which you were playing,—so absorbed by the duty of being a public idol, that you could not be yourself, the man, the flesh, the heart, I know you are.
"In desperation I resolved to strip you, to hurl you down, to rob you of the public regard, of your church, of everything; to strip you until you were nothing but the man who once held me in his arms, his whole body quivering, and demanding with all his nature to possess me."
As the woman spoke, her voice had risen, and a half-insane enthusiasm was gleaming on her face, while her fingers reached restlessly after the minister who, as unconsciously as she advanced, receded until he stood cornered against the door.
"Now," she continued, in her frenzied exaltation of mood, "it is done! You see how easily it was accomplished. Nothing should be so disillusioning, so reawakening to you as to observe how light is your hold upon this community, how selfish and insincere was all this public adulation. I, a stranger almost, of whom these people knew nothing, was able, with a ridiculously impossible charge, to brush you from your eminence like a fly.
"Of what worth has it all been? Of what worth all that you can do for people like these? Your very church is turning against you. It will cast you out."
A shade had crossed the brow of Hampstead.
"You think that?" he asked defiantly.
"I know it," Marien replied aggressively. "That square-headed old Elder came to see me this afternoon. Shaking his hand was like taking hold of a toad. Ugh! He wanted to pry into your past through me, the old reprobate!"
"Hush! I will not hear him defamed. He is an honorable and a well-meaning man, against whose character not one word can be breathed."
Marien's eyes flashed. Impatient and regardless of interruption, she continued as though Hampstead had not spoken.
"And he, the father of the man you are suffering to shield, is to be the first to take advantage of your misfortune. The old Pharisee! I nearly told him who the real thief was."
"Miss Dounay!"
The minister's exclamation was short and sharp, like a bark of rage. His face was drawn until his mouth was a seam, and his eyes had shrunk to two shafts of light, "Miss Dounay! That is God's secret. If you had spoken, I should have—" He ceased to speak but held up hands that clenched and unclenched.
The actress was feeling confident now. She had goaded this man to rage. Beyond rage might lie weakness and surrender. She threw back her head and laughed.
"Yes, I will finish it for you. You would have been inclined to strangle me; but I did not tell him. Yet not for your reason, but for mine. So long as you rest under the charge, your enemies gnash; your friends turn from you. Instead of being insulated from me by all, you are insulated from all by me. There is no one left but me. I love you. I am beautiful, rich, with the glamour of success upon me. I can override anything; defy anything. I can be yours—altogether yours. You can be mine—altogether mine. You can leave these shallow, ungrateful gossips and scandalmongers to prey upon each other, while you and I go away to an Eden of our own."
The actress paused, breathless and again to mark effects. The minister's face had resumed its normal benignity of expression. He was gazing at her thoughtfully, contemplatively. Marien took fresh hope, knowing upon second thought now, as she had known all along, that she could not successfully tempt this man by a life of mere luxurious emptiness. Falling into tones of yet more confiding intimacy, she continued:
"Besides, John, I am not jealous of your genius any more. My love has surged even over that. You have still a great dramatic career before you. You shall come into my company. You shall have every opportunity. Within two years you shall be my leading man; within five, co-star with me. Think of it. Your heart is still in the actor's art. Acting is religion. After God, the actor is the greatest creator. He alone can simulate life. The stage is the most powerful pulpit. Come. We will write your life's story into a play. We will play the faith and fortitude which you have shown into the very soul of America, like a bed of moral concrete! Are you not moved at that?"
She paused, standing with head upon one side, and the old, alluring, coaxing glances stealing up from beneath the coquettish droop of her lids.
"No," Hampstead replied seriously. "I am not moved by it at all. Had you made this speech to me five years ago, I should have been in transports. To-day the art of living appeals to me beyond the art of acting. I have no doubt I feel as great a zest, as great a creative thrill in standing true in the position in which you have placed me as you ever can in the most ecstatic raptures of the mimetic art. No, Marien," and his tone was conclusive, "it makes no appeal to me."
The beautiful creature, perplexity and disappointment mingling on her face, stood for a moment nonplussed. The expression of alert and confident resourcefulness had departed. Her intelligence had failed her. Yet once more the old smile mounted bravely.
"But there still remains one thing," she breathed softly, leaning toward him. "That is I. Everything you have got is gone, or going. I have taken it away from you that I might give you instead myself. You had no room for me last week. You have nothing else but me now. It hurt me to give you pain. I hate Searle. I could have torn his tongue out yesterday. But you will forgive me, John. I did it for love."
Her utterance was indescribably pathetic—indescribably appealing.
"I am not to blame that I love you. You are to blame. No, the God that constituted us is to blame."
Her tones grew lower and lower. The spirit of humbled pride, of chastened submission, of helpless want entered more and more into the expression of her face and the timbre of her soft voice, while the very outlines of her figure seemed to melt and quiver with the intensity of yearning.
"It has been hard to humble myself in this way to you," she confessed. "I tried to win you as once I won you, as women like to win their lovers. But I am not quite as other women. I have to have you! My nature is imperious. It will shatter itself or have its will. I shattered your love to gain my ambition's goal. And now I have shattered your career to gain your love again."
Hampstead, though his consideration was growing for the woman, could not resist a shaft of irony.
"That was a sacrifice you took the liberty of making for me," he suggested.
"But, don't you see, it made me possible for you again," and the actress smiled with that obtuseness which was pitiful because it would not see defeat. She drew closer to him now, well within reach of his arm, and stood perfectly still, her hands clasped, her bosom heaving gently, a thing of rounded curves and wistful eyes, the figure of passionate, submissive, appealing love, hoping—desiring—waiting—to be taken.
Yet the minister did not take her.
But whatever agonies of lingering suspense, of dying hope, and rising despair may have passed through the indomitable woman as she stood in this pose of vain and helpless waiting, there was yet a spirit in her that would not surrender because it could not.
With eyes mournfully searching the depths of the face before her, she began her last appeal.
"And yet, John, there is a sacrifice that I am willing to make that is all my own and none of yours. I will renounce my own ambition, abandon the stage, cancel my engagements, give up that for which I have bartered everything a woman has to give but one thing. I have kept that one thing for you alone. The name of Marien Dounay shall disappear. I will be Alice Higgins again. I will be not an artist but a wife. I will be the associate of your work. You must go from here, of course. I have made your remaining impossible. But we will find some place where men and women need the kind of thing that you can do. It is a great need. There is a sort of glory in your work which I have not been too blind to see. My bridal flowers shall be the weeds of humble service. I will employ my art to bring cheer into homes of poverty, freshness and brightness to the sick. I will try to be God's replica of all that you yourself are. I say I will try!"
She had raised her face now and was searching his eyes again.
"I will do all of this, eagerly, joyously, fanatically, John Hampstead, if it will make it possible for you to love me—as once you loved me," she concluded, with the last words barely audible and sounding more like heart throbs than human speech.
Hampstead, looking levelly into her face, saw that the woman spoke the truth, that she was absolutely sincere.
She saw that he saw it, and with a gesture of mute appeal threw out her hands to him. But they gathered only air and fell limply to her side.
The minister, although his manner expressed a world of sympathy, shook his head sadly. Marien's face grew white, and the red of her lips almost disappeared. A look of blank terror came into her eyes, while one hand, with fingers half-closed, stole upward to the blanched cheek, and the other was pressed convulsively against her breast.
"I have my answer—John!" she whispered hoarsely, after an interval. "I have my answer!"
"Yes, Marien," he replied, sorrowfully but decisively, "you have your answer."
Her eyes, always eloquent, and now with a look of terrible hurt in them, suffused quickly, and it seemed that she would burst into tears and fling herself weakly upon the man she loved so hopelessly. Instead, however, only a shiny drop or two coursed down the cheeks which continued as white as marble; and she held herself resolutely aloof, but balancing uncertainly until all at once her rounded figure seemed to wilt and she would have fallen, had not the minister thrown an arm about the tottering form and with gentle brotherliness of manner helped her to a seat in the Morris chair.
For a considerable time she sat with her face in her hands, silent but for an occasional dry, eruptive sob.
Hampstead, standing back with arms folded and one hand making a rest for his chin, looked on helplessly, realizing that for the first time he was studying this complex personality with something like real comprehension.
While he gazed a purpose appeared to stir again in the disconsolate figure. The dry sobs ceased, and the body straightened till her head found its rest upon the back of the chair; but there the woman relaxed again in seeming total exhaustion with eyes closed and lips slightly parted. Hampstead drew a little closer, as if in tribute to this determined nature which now obviously fought with its grief as it had fought to gain the object of its attachment—indomitably. He had again the feeling which had come to him before, that she was greater, was worthier than he.
"How I have made you suffer!" Marien exclaimed abruptly, at the same time opening her eyes.
"Yes," the minister confessed frankly, while the lines of pain seemed to chisel themselves deeper upon his face with the admission, "you have indeed made me suffer."
"Can you ever, ever forgive me?" she asked, lifting her hand appealingly.
It was a small hand and lily white, with slim and tapering fingers. The minister took it in his and found it as soft as before,—but chilled.
"Yes," he said, gravely and calculatingly, "I do forgive you. The ruin has been almost complete; but I am strong enough to build again!"
"Oh," she exclaimed eagerly, starting up, "do you think you can?"
"Yes," he assured her stoutly, "I know it." He was beginning to feel sorrier for her than for himself. "You, too," he suggested gently, "must begin to build again."
Again her features whitened, and she fell back, pressing her brow with a gesture of pain and bewilderment, a suggestion of one who wakes to find one's self in chaos. It seemed a very long time that she was silent, but with lines of thought upon her brow and the signs of strengthening purpose gradually again appearing about her mouth and chin. When she spoke it was to say with determination:
"Yes; and I, too, am strong enough to build again. In these silent minutes I have been thinking worlds and worlds of things. I have lost everything—yet everything remains—and more. My art shall be my husband; and I will be a greater actress than ever. I shall play with a greater power, inspired and informed by the love which I have lost. I was never tender enough before. The critics charged me with hardness; I hated them for it. I could not understand them. Now I know. I could never play but half a woman's heart. I was too selfish, too proud, too imperious. I regarded love too lightly. That mistake will be impossible now. I know that love is all and all. There is no ecstasy of love's delight of which my imagination cannot conceive; there is no despair which the loss of love may produce that my experience will not have fathomed before this poignant ache in my heart is done."
At first John recoiled a little at this talk of a utilitarian extraction from her bitter experience and his; yet he reflected that it was like the woman. It was but the outcrop of the dominant passion. Since girlhood she had seen herself solely in terms of relation to her art; therefore this attitude now indicated, not a lack of fineness, but her almost noble capacity for converting everything to the ultimate object of the artist. Without such capacity for abandon, there was, he reflected, no supreme artist; and, he reasoned further, no supreme minister—or man, even. To this extent and in this moment, Marien's bearing in defeat was a lesson and a spur to him.
"I shall go widowed to my work," she went on to say, "but it will be a greater work than I could have done before. Then I had an ambition. Now I have a mission! To show women—and men too—the worth and weight and height and depth and paramount value of love."
Hampstead was again deeply impressed with her enormous resiliency of spirit. The woman's heart had been torn to pieces; yet while each nerve and fiber of it was a pulse of pain, she was purposing to bind the thing together and let its every throb be a word of warning to womankind.
"I learned it from you," she explained, almost as if she had read his thoughts. "I understand now the exalted mood in which you spoke a few minutes ago. I am sorry that I have lost you; but I am not sorry that I have hurled you down, since it leaves revealed a nobler figure of a man than I had thought existed."
Hampstead shuddered, in part at his own pain, in part at the ease with which she uttered the sentiment, because this woman could really never know how much his fall had cost him.
"Each of us in life I fear must be held to answer for his own obtuseness," he suggested.
"But that is not all we are held to answer for," Miss Dounay replied with sudden perception. "We must pay the penalty of the obtuseness of others."
"Ah!" exclaimed the minister quickly. "There you stumbled upon one of the greatest truths in religion, the law of vicarious suffering. We are each compelled, whether we will or not, to suffer for the sins of others. If we, you or I, mere humanity that we are, can so manage such suffering that it becomes a redemptive influence over the life of the one who caused it, we have done in a small and distant way the thing which the Son of Man did so perfectly for all the world."
"I see," she exclaimed eagerly, pressing her hands together in a sort of rapture. "It is that which you have done for me. You have suffered for my sin, and you have so managed the suffering that you have taken away some of my selfishness and will send me out of here, as I said before, not with an ambition, but with a mission."
She had risen, and though her manner was still subdued, it was again the manner of self-possession. Yet the new mood into which she had passed, and the new light of spiritual enthusiasm which had come upon her face, in no wise wiped out the impression that in the hour past she had tasted the bitterest disappointment that a woman can know, had plunged to the very depths of despair, and was still under its somber cloud. Indeed it was the fierceness of the conflagration within her which had burned out so swiftly at least a part of that dross of selfishness of which she had spoken, and clarified her vision, so that their two minds had leaped quickly from one peak of thought to another, to come suddenly on embarrassed silence just because all words, all deeds even, seemed suddenly futile to express what each had felt and was now feeling.
As the conversation lapsed momentarily, both appeared to find relief in trivial interests. The minister straightened the books in the rack upon his desk, then looked at his watch and noted that it was fifteen minutes to seven and reflected that seven was his dinner hour.
The actress gave her hair a few touches with her hands, and stood adjusting her hat before the mirror above the mantel. But the veil was still raised. Hampstead watched these operations silently, moved by evidences of the change in the woman.
"You have forgiven me," she began again, noticing in the mirror that his eye was upon her; "but I do not forgive myself. My first mission is to repair the damage which I have done to you. I will go immediately to Searle and tell him the truth."
Hampstead's mouth fell open, and a single step carried him half way across the room.
"But you must not tell Searle nor any one else the truth!" he affirmed vehemently.
It was Marien's turn to be surprised.
"You mean that I am not to undo the wrong that I have done you?" she asked in amazement.
"Not that way," he answered, with deliberate shakings of the head.
"You mean that you are to stand under the stigma which now rests upon you?" she insisted, with a gleam of the old imperious manner. "Certainly not! I have done wrong enough! It cannot be undone too quickly. I shall tell the truth to Searle. I shall gather the reporters about me and spare myself nothing. I will reveal the whole horrible plot; I will confess that Searle was duped, and that you were grossly conspired against by me!"
Again Hampstead, meeting that level glance, knew that the woman spoke in absolute sincerity. She was entirely capable of doing it. Once a course commended itself to her judgment, she had already shown that she would spare nothing to follow it.
"But you forget young Burbeck," he exclaimed. "Your exposure would mean his exposure."
"Well?"
Marien's eyes and tone both expressed her meaning, though she added incisively: "He is no reason why you should linger under this cloud."
Hampstead gazed at the woman doubtfully, speculating as to what argument would make the strongest appeal to her.
"His mother," he began gravely, "is my dearest friend. She is the most saintly woman I have ever known. One year of her life to this community is worth more than a score of years of mine—than all of mine. Let her know in private that her son is the thief, and she would grieve to death in a week. Let her know suddenly, with the force of public exposure, and it would kill her instantly, like an electric shock."
But this note proved the wrong one. Marien instantly took higher ground.
"I know that woman," she replied. "I have sensed her spirit. You do her injustice. If she knew the facts, she would speak, though it killed her and ruined her son, rather than see you endure for a single day what you are suffering now."
Hampstead knew better than the speaker how true this was.
"But there is another reason, a higher reason," he began slowly, with a grave significance that caught Marien's attention instantly, "the soul of Rollie Burbeck!"
The minister had breathed rather than spoken these last words. They had in them a sense of the awe he felt at what hung upon his actions now.
For an instant, the keen eyes of the woman searched the depths of Hampstead's own, as if she was making sure that what she heard and understood with this new and spiritual intuition which had come so swiftly out of her experience, was confirmed by what she saw.
"You mean," she asked, only half credulous, "that you will suffer for his sake as you have suffered for mine, until new character begins to grow in him just as a new objective begins to stir in me? You mean that?"
Hampstead nodded. "That is my hope," he said solemnly.
"Oh!" Marien sighed, with a prolonged aspirate note which expressed reverence, awe, and astonishment. "But the charges? They will be pressed. You will be held—convicted—imprisoned!"
"I cannot think it," argued John soberly. "A way will appear to avoid that. Yet we must contemplate the worst. One thing is sure," and his voice appeared to increase in volume without an increase of tone, "one thing is sure: In the position in which you have placed me I must remain until the thing for which I am standing has been accomplished—however long that takes—and if the wrong you have done to me confers any obligation upon you, it is to keep your lips sealed till I give you leave to open them."
Miss Dounay, more humbled by this steadfast magnanimity of soul which could refuse vindication when it was offered than awed by the sudden force of self-assertion which Hampstead manifested, looked her submission.
"Man!" she exclaimed impulsively, seizing both his hands for an instant. "I revere you. You are not the flesh I thought. You have altered greatly. Yours was not a pose. It is genuine. I am reconciled a little to my loss. You are not mine because I was not worthy to be yours!"
Hampstead made a deprecating, repressive gesture.
"Let me finish," she protested. "I am even less humiliated. The thing required to charm you was a thing I did not possess!"
"Beauty is a great possession," Hampstead smiled. "I have been and am sensible to it. I was sensible to your beauty to the last. The woman I love is beautiful."
"The woman you love!" Marien's whole manner changed. Her face took on the tigerish look. "There is some one else then? At least," she added reproachfully, "you might have spared me this."
"It was necessary," the minister replied quietly, "if we were really to understand each other."
The gravity of the man's tone, as well as some subtle recovery within herself, checked the tigerish impulse. Swiftly it gave way to pain and humility again.
"You—you are to marry?" she faltered weakly.
"No," he replied, with ineffable sadness. "This—" and again that comprehensive gesture which he had used so frequently to indicate the catastrophe which had come upon him, "this has dashed that hope entirely!"
The actress stood completely confounded. Within herself she wondered why she did not fly into a jealous passion. Surely she was changing; she felt half bewildered, half distrustful of her own moods in which she had believed so surely before. She was also completely staggered by this crowning revelation of the capacity of the man for sacrifice. Instead of the jealous passion, she felt a sisterly kind of sympathy; but it was only after a very considerable interval that Marien trusted herself to ask with trembling voice:
"She is very—very beautiful—this—this woman whom you love?"
The question was put very softly, meditatively almost.
"To me, yes," replied the minister with emphasis. "I think you would say so too."
"You were engaged?"
"Not when I met you first; but there had been a bond of very close sympathy between us. After you were gone, I felt that I had never really loved you; and my heart fastened itself on her. I loved her and told her so. But I felt it my duty to tell her the truth about you. Manlike, I thought she would comprehend. Womanlike, she comprehended more than I thought. She believed me weak and uncertain. She loved me still, but with a pain of disappointment in her heart. She put my love upon a kind of probation. The probation has lasted five years. It was almost finished. After what the papers have published in the past few days, you can imagine that now all is over."
"But you will write to her? You will see her? You will explain?" Marien questioned in self-forgetful eagerness.
"Explain," he smiled sadly. "What a futility! What explanation could there be after what I had told her? You know a woman's heart. More firmly than any other, she would be forced to an implicit belief in what the newspapers have falsely intimated concerning our relations in the past few weeks."
"But I will go to her myself!" Marien exclaimed impetuously. "I will tell her the truth."
"Do you think she would believe you?" he asked frankly. "Could you expect any woman to believe in your sincerity under such circumstances, upon such a mission? You would not be able to believe it yourself."
"You are right!" Marien admitted after a moment of thought. "Once away from the restraining influence of your character, my true nature would reveal itself. I should hate her! I do hate her! No, I could not go!"
"And so, you see,"—John did not finish the sentence but had recourse to a helpless smile and a pathetic shrug of the shoulders.
Marien lowered her veil. The interview was running on and on. It must come to an end.
"It all becomes uncanny," she exclaimed. "There is too much converging upon your heart. There must come a rift in the clouds. I have submitted to your compelling altruism but only for the present. If something does not happen within a reasonable limit of time, I shall positively and dangerously explode!"
John smiled at the vehemence with which she spoke.
"But in the meantime—silence!" he adjured impressively.
"Yes," she assented reluctantly. "But at the same time I shall not know one gleam of happiness, one moment's freedom from mental anguish until your vindication is flung widely to the world."
"But in the meantime, silence!" reiterated John obstinately.
"And in the meantime," she consented more resignedly, "silence!"
"Good night, Marien," said the minister, putting out his hand.
"Good night, Doctor Hampstead," she replied, seizing that hand impulsively, then flinging it from her again as she turned, without another glance, to the door. It closed behind her softly, considerately almost, but with that same decisive snap of the lock which had shut her in three quarters of an hour before.
Hampstead stood a moment in reflection. She had come and she had gone, leaving behind a great sense of relief, of complexities unraveled, of good accomplished and of further danger averted. Of one thing he felt sure now; he would never go to prison. A way would be found to avoid that. Her vindictive malice had spent itself and been turned to an attempt at co-operation.
But he was still under clouds: one the verdict of Judge Brennan, "Held to Answer"; the other less black, but larger and murkier, the cloud of public condemnation; and for the present he must remain under both. Besides which, there was his church and Elder Burbeck to consider.
And to-morrow was Sunday!