Held to Answer: A Novel

by Peter Clark MacFarlane

"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.