"It’s something you must _be_, rather than do," explained the physician
to sick souls, once more deeply sympathetic, and leaning forward, he
continued significantly: "I want to help you, not for your mother’s
sake, nor your father’s, but for your own whenever you are ready to
receive help upon proper terms. You have come here seeking a way out.
There is no way out, but there is a _way up_!"
The cowering man shook his head hopelessly. He had not courage enough
even to survey a moral height.
For a moment the minister studied his visitor thoughtfully, wondering
what could make him see his guilt as he ought to see it; then abruptly
he drew close and began to talk in a low, confidential tone. Almost
before the surprised Rollie could understand what was taking place, the
Reverend John Hampstead, to whom he had come to confess, was confessing
to him; this man, whom he had thought so strong, was telling the story
of a young girl’s love for him; of his weak infatuation for another
woman, of the heart-aches that half-unconscious breach of trust had
occasioned him, and worst of all, the pangs it had cost the innocent
girl who loved him and believed in his integrity with all her
impressionable heart.
There was a moisture in the minister’s eye as he concluded his story,
and there was a fresh mist in Rollie’s as he listened.
But the clergyman passed on immediately from this to tell modestly how,
when the death of Langham had imposed the lives of Dick and Tayna on him
like a trust, he had been true to it, although at the cost of his great
ambition; but that afterward this surrender had brought him all the
happiness of his present life as pastor of All People’s, while the hope
of winning that first love back had been given to him again.
"And so," Hampstead concluded, "to be disloyal to a trust has come to
seem to me the worst of all crimes; while to be true to one’s
obligations appears to me as the highest virtue. In fact, the whole
active part of my creed could be summed up pretty well in this little
idea of trust.
"Trust is almost the highest thing in life. It is the cement of
civilization. Trust is the very foundation of banking. You believe in
banking, don’t you? In the principle? The idea that hundreds of people
trust some banker with their surplus funds, and he puts those funds at
the service of the community as a whole through loaning them to persons
who redeposit them, to be reloaned and redeposited again, so that the
bank, a bundle of individual trusts of rich and poor, becomes one of the
fulcrums upon which civilization turns?"
Burbeck listened rather dazed. "I never thought of the principle," he
faltered after a minute, "I thought of it as a job."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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