Held to Answer: A Novel

by Peter Clark MacFarlane

For the five years of his eldership before the advent of Hampstead, Elder Burbeck had a record in the official board of never permitting any subject to be passed upon without a word from him, nor ever having allowed any question to be considered settled until it was settled according to the dictates of the thing he supposed to be his conscience.

At their first momentary clash on the day when Hampstead, the book agent, had broken open the church which Burbeck had nailed up, the older man thought he sensed in the younger the presence of a spiritual endowment greater than his own. To this the ruling Elder had bowed within himself. Externally, his manner was not changed, nor his leadership affected. To the congregation his submission to the final judgment of the minister was accounted as a virtue. Instead of weakening him, it strengthened his own standing with the membership.

While Burbeck had at times voiced his protests to the pastor at what he felt to be mistaken sentimentalism, and while the protests had been dismissed at times with an unchristian impatience, there was no one to whom the events and disclosures of this terrible week of headlines had been more surprising or more shocking than to the meticulous apostle of the status quo. Upon the Elder's metallic cast of mind each revelation impacted with the shattering effect of a solid shot. Through a thousand crevices thus created, suspicion, rumor, and the stream of truths, half-truths, and lies percolated to the bed of reason. His mind was without elasticity. The school of logic in which he had been trained reasoned coldly, by straight lines to rectangular conclusions. There was no place for allowances or adjustments. Once a stitch was dropped, there was no picking it up, and the blemish was in the garment.

So he reasoned now about Hampstead. The minister, having been weak once, must have also been wicked; being brittle, he must have been broken; frail, he must have been fractured. Having been wicked, broken, fractured, this explained his immense sympathy for and capacity to reach other frail, weak, brittle men and women; but it did not justify his pose as a pillar unscathed by fire. Loving All People's as he loved himself, his wife, his brilliant son,—with pride and self-complacence,—Burbeck felt hot resentment at the disgrace which the disclosures and the flood of scandal brought upon the church.

Searle himself had not believed many of the charges he hurled against Hampstead in his concluding speech. Elder Burbeck, who heard that speech from behind the rail, believed it all. Believing it, and believing in his mission to purge the church of this impostor, his zeal roused him to the point where he forgot to be logical. He believed the preacher was a thief, a liar and a hypocrite; and at the same time believed that he had told the truth upon the witness stand in his own defense. But this only made his sin more heinous. He was harboring some crook—some other man, weak, frail, brittle, wicked as himself. That man was necessarily a hypocrite, a whited sepulcher, posing before the community as a pillar of virtue. It would be an act of righteousness to find and expose that man. But who could it be? Somebody at that supper, of course. Now it might be Haggard, managing editor of The Sentinel; newspaper men were always suspicious characters, anyway; and surely Hampstead was under obligations to Haggard. Haggard, with all his publicity, had given the minister his first fame, and for years supported him upon his pedestal as a public idol. Yes, it probably was Haggard. But whoever it was, Burbeck undertook in his mind a second mission; to find and expose and brand the thief whom the minister was protecting.

With no more fiery fanaticism did the followers of Mohammed set out with the sword to purge the world of infidels than did Elder Burbeck purpose to purge All People's of its pastor and wring from the lips of Hampstead the secret of another's crime.

He entered the minister's study with a pompous dignity that was ominous. His face was as red, the bony protuberances on his boxlike and hairless skull were as prominent, as ever. His shaggy eyebrows lent their usual fierceness to the steel gleam of his blue eye. His close-cropped gray mustache clung perilously above lips that were straight and unsmiling.

"Good evening, Hampstead," he said, with a falling inflection.

This was the first time he had ever failed to say "Brother" Hampstead.

The minister had risen to greet his visitor, but subtly discerning in the first appearance of the man the mood in which he came, had not advanced, but stood with his desk between them, waiting.