Now there wasn't any particular obligation on the part of Robert Mitchell to John Hampstead. Hampstead had merely worked for Mitchell through eight years of faithfulness in small things, which was a way that Hampstead had. But as the Vice-President of the Great Southwestern looked back, those eight years of faithfulness bulked rather large, which, again, was a way that Robert Mitchell had.
As to Bessie! But that is a way that women have. The deeper and the more serious her attachment for John Hampstead had grown, the more guilefully she had concealed that fact from even the suspicion of her parents. Yet now her disguise was penetrated, she sobbed it all out on her mother's shoulder and got the finest, tenderest assurances of sympathy and enthusiastic connivance that could be vouchsafed by one woman to another. The Mitchells were that way. Let hearts and happiness be concerned, and all other considerations of life could ride on the brake-beams.
CHAPTER XXXV
ON PRELIMINARY EXAMINATION
But though a very human hope was in his breast, the man who went out to face a public hearing on Saturday morning upon a charge of felony in the city where a week before he had been a popular idol, was not the same man who had stood trembling and bewildered in the vault room.
Rose had noticed first merely a physical change in her brother's appearance, as from day to day the situation became more intense. She saw lines deepen on his face, the knot of pain grow again and again upon his brow, and the whiteness of his skin increase to a point where it ceased to be white and became a parchment yellow, only paler than his tawny hair. But later she became conscious that there was taking place also a spiritual change, a certain rare elevation of the character of the man, giving at times the eerie feeling that this was not her brother, but some transfiguration taking place before her eyes.
When John Hampstead appeared in Judge Brennan's court room, something of this exaltation of character was discernible, even to those who had known the minister casually. Desiring ardently a happy outcome, the man revealed in himself something of a new capacity to endure yet further reverses.
Rose, Dick, and Tayna had been determined to accompany John and to sit beside him as he faced his accusers; but he forbade this, declaring that it would be construed by his enemies as an attempt to create sympathy.
Yet, despite the stoutness of the clergyman's hope for justice, the sight of the court room, of Judge Brennan upon his bench, the clerk and the official reporter at their desks, Searle, Wyatt, the detectives, the massed spectators,—packed, craning, curious,—and the vast crowd that had surged in the streets about the building and in the corridors, through which way had to be made for him, were all such sinister reminders of the position in which he stood, that for the time being they crumpled the very breastwork of innocence itself.
"The case of the People versus John Hampstead," announced the judge in matter-of-fact tones.