Held to Answer: A Novel

by Peter Clark MacFarlane

His voice, half-delirious, died out in a final withering sob, as if the last atom of his strength had gone with this passionate, hoarse, uttermost plea of his soul. His great fingers stretching out again to the limit of his arm, knotted and unknotted themselves and then grew still. The shoulders, too, were motionless. The face was turned on one side; the profile of the ridged forehead and the thrust of nose and chin, so strongly carved, appeared against the grotesque pattern of the rug as features delicately chiseled. The eyes were open, tearless now and staring. They had expression, but it was the expression of the beaten man. The mouth was parted, and the firm lines were gone from it. It was the old, loose, flabby mouth that had once marked the weak spot in the character of the man. Again the man was weak. He lay so still that life itself seemed to have gone. The wandering afternoon breeze that stole in through one gable window and went romping out at the other played with the mass of hair upon his brow as indifferently as if it had been a tuft of grass.

Even the man's enemies must have pitied him had they seen him now. Searle, standing over him, would have felt a twinge of conscience. Elder Burbeck, before that spectacle, would at least have paused long enough to murmur, sincerely, with upturned eyes and a grave shake of the head, "God be merciful to him, a sinner." But neither Searle nor Burbeck, nor any other eye was there to see how he lay nor how long. Perhaps not even Tayna, crouching on the stairs outside, hearing his sobbings and venting tear for tear, could have computed the time.

Surely the man knew nothing himself except that he fell asleep and dreamed, this time not horribly, but felicitously,—a dream of Bessie; that she was coming to him; that she was there. It was such a beautiful dream. It took all the strain out of the muscles of his face. It tickled the flabby mouth into smiles of happiness. It triumphed over everything else. It made every experience through which he had gone seem a high and beautiful experience because it brought him Bessie.

A knock at the door awoke him. It was such a cruel awakening. Bessie was not there. His cheeks were hard and stiff where tears had dried upon them. His shoulders and neck ached from the position in which he had slept. The rug was rumpled. The room was bleak and desolate. The breeze was chill and gloomy. The situation in which he stood came to him again with appealing acuteness and stung his memory like scourging whips. He rose with pain in his mind, pain in his heart, pain in every tissue of his body.

But there are worse things than pain. John was appalled to realize that he had risen a quaking coward.

The knock had sounded again. It was a soft knock, but it echoed loud, like the crack of doom. It stood for the outside world; it stood for the accusing finger; it stood for the felon's brand; it stood for the great monster, Ruin, which threatened him, which terrorized him, which he had faced courageously, but which at last through the workings of his own morbid imagination and the tentacles of a great love, torn blood-dripping from his heart, had over-awed him. Before this monster he now shrank, cowering as only six days before he had seen Rollie Burbeck cower. He said to himself that he, John Hampstead, was the greater coward. Rollie had faltered in the face of his crime. He, the priest of God, was faltering in the face of his duty. He retreated from his own presence aghast at the thought. He looked about him wildly, and saw his features in the glass. It was a coward's face. He felt something stagger in his breast. It was his coward's heart!

Again the knock sounded. Not because he had grown brave again, but because he had grown too weak to resist even a knock upon a door, he gave the rug a kick that half straightened it, and in the tone of one who, despairing help, bids his torturers advance, he called: "Come in."

But instead of waiting to see who entered, he turned his back and walked off down the room with slow, disconsolate stride, head hanging, shoulders drooping, knees trembling, feet dragging, utterly unmindful to preserve longer the pose of strength even before the dear ones whom he wished above all to see him brave and strong.

It was the silence of the one who entered that made him turn slowly, staring, his form lifting itself to its full height, and a hand rising to sweep the hanging hair from his eyes as he gazed for a moment in unbelieving bewilderment and then hoarsely shouted:

"Bessie! Bessie! Is it you?"