The Mayor of New York
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Title: The Mayor of New York

A romance of days to come

Author: L. P. Gratacap

Illustrator: Joseph Cummings Chase

Release date: September 9, 2026 [eBook #79541]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: G. W. Dillingham Company, 1910

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79541

Credits: Tim Lindell, Andrew Scott, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAYOR OF NEW YORK ***

Transcriber’s notes

Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.

“IF YOU WILL ARGUE THIS MATTER WITH GUNS, YOU SHALL BE ANSWERED WITH GUNS.”

Frontispiece. Page 440.

THE

Mayor of New York

A Romance of Days to Come

BY

L. P. GRATACAP

Author of “The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars,”

“A Woman of the Ice Age,” “The

Evacuation of England.”

G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

Copyright, 1910, By

G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY

THE MAYOR OF NEW YORK

CONTENTS

CHAPTER | | PAGE
I. | Tom Ratler | 9
II. | Helen Lorimer | 28
III. | A Dinner in Carrara | 48
IV. | The Suicidarium | 65
V. | The Mayor | 88
VI. | The Beehive | 110
VII. | The Mayor’s Visit | 135
VIII. | The Chariot of Flight | 168
IX. | The Cardinal | 195
X. | The Mayor’s Courtship | 225
XI. | Amato’s Courtship | 259
XII. | The Trial | 290
XIII. | The Trial (continued) | 321
XIV. | The Great Riots | 338
XV. | An Up-to-Date Rescue | 377
XVI. | The Mayor’s Death | 409
XVII. | The Pope comes to America | 447

ILLUSTRATIONS.

| | PAGE
“I F YOU WILL ARGUE THIS MATTER WITH GUNS, YOU SHALL BE ANSWERED WITH GUNS” | Frontispiece | 440
“P AIN, PAIN, PAIN; NOTHING BUT PAIN” | | 79
“N O FUNNY BUSINESS, OR UP YOU GO IN SMOKE” | | 120
“H OW WONDERFULLY YOU HAVE INSPIRED ME” | | 240

THE MAYOR OF NEW YORK

CHAPTER I

TOM RATLER

It was a picture of wonderful beauty, with elements strangely transporting. The sky was clear, with vaporous vestiges of a thunder storm, whose dark draperies of lightning stricken depths lay effectively on the southern horizon; the moon was at its full, and its unimpeded rays burnished the waters of the harbor with a silver splendor. A group of men and women on the upper and forward deck of an incoming steamer were the silent spectators of this scene as the steamer lay anchored towards the New Jersey shore of the harbor of New York in the coming year of grace 2000, and as the lingering spring, with an already lost freshness, was passing into the warmer flushes of the summer. The margins of that great bay which once at such a time had been dark with the clustering volumes of leaves upon the arms of encircling forests, was now girdled with a zone of artificial light. It did not encroach upon the domain of the moon’s regnancy, but it seemed to throb nebulous and soft upon all those shores like a titanic wheel of fire. It represented the last triumph of electrical science. It was an electrification of the air above the cities, and that air was palpitating with shooting wreaths of color that gave, for each changing instant, a new festal brilliancy. The gazers were shocked into an admiring astonishment, which only had an audible expression in murmurs of delight, or took the form of appreciative exclamations.

The particular glory of this crown of illumination over the cities about the harbor was its irregular surface or outline. Above the island of New York it rose far up into the outer spaces, burning with an exquisite rosiness; above Staten Island, where it was carried still higher, the color was a strangely mutable blue, and over the lower regions of Long Island and New Jersey it lay in auroral sheets, that every now and then, with a billowy exhalation, shot up phosphorescent projections that seemed actually to detach themselves, and float away like luminous clouds. It gave a spectral splendor to everything and on the deck of the steamer, and at the feet of the mute on-lookers its reflections for an instant shimmered and vanished. But the moon, unchecked by this terrestrial rival, shone on, and its limpid refulgence on the faintly rippling waters lost none of its charm, in contrast with the schemes of artifice around it. In the penumbral glory dark lines appeared, which may have been unilluminated and cavernous streets, while its changing lustres revealed many a towering turret, especially over Staten Island and New York island, and terraces of light marked the arched bridges and their precipitous piers, over the East and North rivers.

The steamer, whose occupants thought they had arrived at some celestial fairy land, was a coast wise “tramp,” and had steamed from Portland, Maine, with a cargo of stone and lumber. Among its passengers was a sturdy youth from the lumber lands of that state—lumber lands which yet, with decreasing resources, strove to supply the markets—who had stolen away from home, and determined to try the tempestuous and stirring arena of the huge metropolis, that now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, expressing the awfully expanded powers of man over material things, expressed too his illimitable luxury, and held within its area an unfathomable possibility of strife and devastating conflict; a city that had become the centre of the world of thought, confining the seething tides of a radicalism that pushed forward a militant atheism against the still struggling standards of the Church; wherein too lay the ripe and bursting seeds of an ambitious artistry that would scale the heavens and reincarnate the flesh of man in an immortal youth, while it lit all the torches of a brazen defiance of the moral law. Tom Ratler had heard of this tremendous city, and his blood boiled to meet its intoxications and his mind delighted in the dream that he might scale its dazzling heights, and linger long beneath the canopies of its indulgences. He possessed those things which go to make the conquering man, pride, courage, an instinctive readiness in danger, a supple mind, a compelling passion dressed in all the allurements of a strong and noble form, his voice had chime and music in it, and a certain spirited demeanor held attention and enforced respect, and all this not unreasonably yoked with judgment and no inconsiderable self-control.

Tom had been born in the Aroostook country of his native state, and had lived the fresh healthful life of the fields. He had availed himself of the advantages of a high school, had read, and, belonging to a farmer family of excellent reputation and commercial prestige, wore the garb of good manners, and listened to the incentives of good taste. His mother was a woman of exceptional purity of heart, and his father a rugged Ajax skilled in extemporaneous prayer, and not unskillful in hammering an opponent to the ground. Tom was a young giant perfectly moulded. His size did not surpass natural limits of comeliness, but it filled with caution its unlucky antagonist. His face was fair, and the rounded bullet-head not strikingly expressive of scholarship—was sheathed in crisply curled hair like a Grecian Apollo, his mouth broad and ingratiating held an armory of ivory teeth—the charm of all mouths—and his eyes of chestnut, were sweet and tempting, by the side of a straight nose and beneath a just obviously receding forehead which however was a little narrow, while at the union of the nose and forehead, a depression gathered a few lines of tension around these formative kernels of flesh and bone, which, to the phrenologist are the signals of observation.

None among those on the deck of the Barrymore had been more astonished with the miracle of science and loveliness before them than Tom, and he thirsted eagerly to reach this prospect of delectation, and plunge into its weaving web of life confusion and intrigue. As he leaned over the rail gloatingly feeding his eyes on this vision of delight, and somewhat apart from the others, he heard, and then he noticed a movement at the stern of the boat, and on the side, which was followed by the swish of oars and the emergent outlines of a row boat. He ran down the rail and whistled softly. The next instant the row boat was alongside revealed from stem to stern in the moonlight, with one figure in it, a Whitehall fisherman or “dockrat,” who was looking for such chance opportunities of profit as a newly arrived ship afforded in passengers, freight, errands, or—less meritoriously—in “smuggle.” His keen ear had caught the sibilant invitation of Tom, and he quickly brought his little boat immediately beneath that interested person’s observation. Tom whispered to him to “wait,” and then hastily disappeared, returning in a few moments with his modest dress suit case, which vanished as quickly as it had come over the side of the ship, and was unceremoniously succeeded by its owner, the latter making use of a loose rope fastened to the taffrail of the steamer. The row boat shot out into clear water, and Tom then became the object of expostulation and entreaty on the part of his former companions, who no less eagerly than himself, wished to reach the planetary wonder before them. Tom paid slight attention to these remonstrances, and urged his guide to renewed efforts, while he seized an unused pair of oars, and added an impetuous speed to the rocking and arrowy motion.

But Tom’s participation did not last longer than was necessary to bring him closer to the docks of the city. Then he drew in his oars, retired to the stern of the boat, and looked around him. And need he had for he was within the scope of the opalescent marvel, and its stupendous loveliness alternately crushed him with amazement, or roused him to enthusiasm. His position may be understood from a few contemporaneous land-marks.

The dancing row boat lay in that criss-crossed and vexed acre near Governor’s Island, where the quarreling tides of the East and Hudson rivers form a patch of troubled waters. On Tom’s right hand was the island, now kept as a military reservation, but one hundred years later forested and mantled with flowers, marked with paths, and surmounted—in the old Fort Hancock—by a conservatory, while the ancient keep of Castle William still remained, embraced in climbing vines, with its roof converted into a garden of roses. On his left the flaming pharos on Bedlow’s Island still burned, but in the hand of the colossal figure there was no longer an electric star, but she held a torch of flaming gas, whose long, wayward threads of fire the winds now hurried upward, now stretched in horizontal films. Near this dramatic station the immigration buildings on Ellis Island were seen framed in light, and thence northward in all directions, along the great rivers and in the median zone of Manhattan, tall structures climbed upward, now dark by reason of the desertion of their human households, but bathed over their summits with the descending rays of that incredible aurora that filled the air above them. It was yet early evening, and immediately in the foreground of this nocturnal spectacle, was the old Battery park twinkling with lamps, in the intervals of a renewed forestation which made it a dark spot on the water’s edge, yet crisply dipt in a silver bath, that came from the moon, mingled with a penumbral halo that came from the electric arc far above it. Tom could now see the reason for the irregular elevation of the luminous ceiling over the city. It was due to the varying heights of the tall buildings that seemed to climb into the skies.

The refulgence was also not everywhere; he could see that over broad spaces of the peopled shores in Brooklyn and New York black lacunae occurred where the shining curtain was absent. The boat had pushed its way through the strife of waters and was nearing the little Whitehall basin which then as now, afforded a retreat and harbor to the battery boatman. Tom overwhelmed his pilot with a generous fare, and jumped quickly to the landing, hurried up the stone stairs, and was in New York, ready for adventure, not disinclined for mischief, and fully committed to the wayward guidance of his fancies and his fortune. His heart glowed with delight, and his mind leaped forward in anticipations of forming a part in that shifting scene, which had drawn to it the eyes of the world, for here again, as in ancient Rome a tumult of social collisions had arisen, mingling with miscellaneous and picturesque confusion with the last expressions of mechanical and architectural daring, with the fevered promotions of every luxurious taste, with erratic dissipations, and with a mental ferment of scientific and literary and philosophic speculation.

Strangely there reverted to Tom’s mind from out of all his desultory but avid reading the picture of Apollonius of Tyana arriving in Rome in the cruel days of Nero. The book of Mr. Tredwell’s he had picked up among a nondescript collection of odds and ends at a country-side library to which gathered the tailings of private scholarship, the chance offerings of missionary enterprises, an occasional presentation copy from an enterprising publisher, and the discarded extras of a newspaper office. Tom in a restless and skipping manner had scoured these books for diversion, for instruction and as youth will, for intimations, palatable but unhealthy, of the currents of life in the channels where life moves most boisterously and least restrained. Apollonius of Tyana quite caught his fancy. That wandering figure, well furnished with the goods of the world, appropriately screened from danger by a half supernatural grace, wearing the garb of a preacher, and well drilled in local customs, gentle with the bravado of spiritual superiority, and not averse to finding out what the world contained, suited his own dreams of action, though the companionable guardians of Tom’s fate in their seclusion among the stars, might have smiled and shed tears over the hazardous attempt to put Tom Ratler and Apollonius of Tyana in the same category. Tom was not Apollonius, nor was New York in the year 2000, the Rome of the year 50, though filled to the brim with seditious, dissolute, serious and aggressively progressive elements. Tom however—in his own thought—was seeing the world, or about to see it. As he gazed upward that on-coming evening at the dark bulwarks of the shrouded city, intermittently bathed on their summits and then down their cliff-like sides by the aerial and diaphanous glows in the skies, Tom felt the thrill of the unknown advancing towards him, and all his eager senses reached out to receive its message and its gifts.

Nor was Tom a Nigel Olifaunt, the young Lord of Glenvarloch whose adventures in London town at the beginning of the seventeenth century Scott so humorously sets before his readers. He had come upon no errand of restitution; and while his handy hand and emulous spirits might engage him in some unlucky business, and his spirited resentment bring him within the limits of a metropolitan Alsatia he was not likely to become the victim of so unscrupulous a knave as Lord Delgarno, nor run any risk of being tried for treason to the state. If any comparison will help the reader to put Tom Ratler in his proper phase of action let him recall Kenelm Chillingly’s justification of his abrupt departure from his father’s home; “I go in quest of adventure like Amadis of Gaul, like Don Quixote, like Gil Blas, like Roderick Random; like, in short, the only people seeking real life, the people who never existed except in books. I go on foot; I go alone. I have provided myself with a larger amount of money than I ought to spend, because every man must buy experience, and the first fees are heavy.” Tom certainly bore little resemblance to that accomplished cynic, and would have heartily derided—if he understood them—most of his paradoxical conclusions, but like Kenelm he had left home to see the world, and see it, where at the beginning of the twentieth century it presented the most contrasted garniture of forms and sentiments.

Tom noticed that while many persons were walking along the sea wall of the Battery Park, and the settees were occupied by many couples deeply interested in their mutual felicities, and a few families were engaged in animated discussion of their household affairs, prospects, and designs, the larger numbers were gathered around a central point, whence the strains of very enlivening music proceeded. By reason of its elevation, the band—evidently of large proportions—succeeded in conveying these strains to the outskirts of its acoustic domain, where Tom found himself. This concentration permitted him to walk unimpeded around the wall, against the beautiful and shining bay, looking towards monstrous beacons of light on the hills of Staten Island, the shimmering walls of the Narrows and the nimbus of rays that played over the populous shores of Bay Ridge, no longer retained as a semi rural contour on the edge of the Harbor.

Scarcely conscious of any definite intentions, where all around him invited him to continue a delighted and aimless ramble, Tom reached the walls of the Aquarium, now occupying the old foundation of Castle Garden, and, at the distant period to which we transport the reader, yet retained, but immensely heightened and most inordinately ornamented.

Tom could not clearly see the chase of zoological detail over the glistening terra-cotta sides, though salient representations of whales and porpoises, dolphins, tunas, tarpons, sword fish, and sharks were descried by our traveller, whose astonished eyes however were not always well enough informed to report their correct identity. His eyes, bright and eager as they were, quite failed to discern the wealth of marine naturalism, in sea urchins, coral groups, medusas, hydroids, sea-cucumbers, molluscs, which encumbered the ornamentation, mingled with the larger motifs, and luxuriantly clustered at every interval between the swelling and pompous immensity of the cetaceans, and the giant fish.

It was at this spot that Tom had reason to recall with gratitude the agricultural training of his muscles, and to be roughly reminded that the splendid city to which he had come was not unqualified in its apparent possession of peace and order. In going round the circular outskirt of this immense pavilion Tom reached its northern walls approaching the confines of a great basin for the accommodation of motor boats and naphtha launches, small pleasure yachts, and a miscellaneous assortment of less definite water vehicles. Here the shadow of the building was less successfully dispelled by the park lamps, and as Tom turned to leave the angle, prompted to do so by the deficiency of light, three figures seemed to spring from the pavements, and with a consecutive movement too rapid to be easily discerned, to fly at his back and front aiming fist blows at his head and neck, and vicious kicks at his shins.

The most listless admirer of self defense, or the least intrepid of its critics, would have rejoiced to have witnessed the lightning-like metamorphosis in our whilome inert wanderer. His valise dropped from his hand, and the motionless arms—so long and powerfully braced with muscle, multiplied themselves with incredible rapidity in a Briarean thicket of appendages before whose centrifugal violence his assailants quickly vanished. The scuffle attracted some notice not divorced from a desire, on the part of many, to see the stranger worsted, and this sentiment was reinforced by the sudden approach of a policeman entrusted with the wardenship of this quarter. A sullen group of men and boys, vaguely referable to the Syrian section of Washington Street, followed Tom, and their inquisition of his appearance grew less and leas favorable, while a few epithets, accompanied by a chance and unsavory missile in the shape of rotten fruit acquainted him with his unpopularity.

Tom experienced a faint sense of disappointment, but his own warlike instincts, readily aroused, permitted no movement of retreat, and his disdain of his cowardly critics finally prompted him to turn and walk with threatening alacrity towards them. This movement served to disperse them, and as Tom remarked their skulking shapes, he was joined by a much older man who had watched with interest and sympathy the shifting relations of Tom and his tormentors. The stranger spoke, and his measured and pleasant tones fell refreshingly on Tom’s ears, to whom, overwhelmed by the immensity of his new surroundings, the incident had seemed painful and unlucky.

“I see you are quite able to take care of yourself. I was ready to take a hand myself against this bunch of loafers. I guess that you are a new-comer, but don’t misjudge us from this little adventure. The city is fairly orderly, as much so as most large towns, and you can safely ramble over it at any hour of the day or night, without much danger of molestation, though”—here the speaker drew a cigar case from his pocket and handed its open end to Tom who with a slight hesitation engendered by unfamiliarity with smoking, took one of the proffered Wizards, as his new friend continued;—“though in some ways we are dangerously near a domestic conflict much more serious than street brawls or the incivility of hoodlums and nocturnal poachers. Come over to the sea wall and sit down. I don’t wish to presume upon the acquaintance my admiration of your strength has given me, but as an older man and one not indifferently acquainted with the conditions and the opportunities of this city, you may welcome some friendly directions and advice.”

“Indeed, sir” answered Tom now thoroughly interested, if not quite assured as to the honorable intention of his interlocutor, “I should feel grateful for that. I am not a baby, and I believe that I can pull through easily enough, but a few pointers at the outset may save one from dangerous or expensive blunders. What is learned without cost can be used without loss, is an old saying with us in Maine.”

As the two men moved towards the edge of the reservation it was easily seen that Tom surpassed his companion in height, and if this were not a sufficient assurance, any incipient suspicion of danger would have been dispelled by the striking visage of Tom’s acquaintance. He was a man of middle life hardly showing any of the usual symptoms of increasing years. His hair, the weakest defence against time’s encroachments, was yet untouched with gray, his face was unmarred by a single wrinkle, his eyes of a peculiar brilliancy, betokened intelligence and frankness, and the broad mouth, firm and rather narrow lips, the chin perhaps a little too massive, confirmed the unmistakable impression that our young adventurer had fallen in with an unusual man—a man of observation and experience and convictions.

Tom had himself quickly noticed these details and his confidence increased, and even a sudden impulse of affection sprang up in his heart as the momentary sense of his extreme isolation deepened into a half reminiscent sadness. They had come up to one of the many seats facing the bay, and the older man motioning to a bench, cut up into separate seats by iron straps, sat down, while the end of his cigar shone vividly as he puffed away, apparently abstracted, and making no further overtures at conversation. Tom himself had become thoughtful and silent, though he fully expected that the dialogue would be resumed without his encouragement, and his mind dreamingly fell into that mixed revery and consciousness, which overcomes us at such restful moments. The waters before them, dark and viscid in their unctuous flow, with scolloped concavities glazed with the moonlight, lapped softly against the stones of the wall, and the band of music, recoiling from some tempestuous climax, was breathing over them an enticing melody.

It was Tom who first broke the silence between them.

“I suppose I can expect good employment in New York, sir,” he said, yet unwilling to expressly declare his purpose. There was no answer; and Tom looked more inquisitively at his neighbor, fearing that his favorable deductions might have been premature. Again he spoke; “I had a fancy that in this city of rich people I might get a good job as motorist; I understand machinery, have used a steamer myself at home, (as indeed he had), and reading of fair pay given capable men in New York came on for employment.”

His companion woke up, or at least alighted from his soaring meditations, turned a little towards Tom, and without the slightest reference to Tom’s inquiry and declaration, began a deliberate sketch of the social conditions of New York, its political dilemmas, and its industrial power, almost as if, in response to some unheard interrogation, he took advantage of the occasion to deliver himself of a carefully prepared disquisition, though he conferred upon Tom the honor of being the subject of that inaudible question.

“Yes, my friend,” he began, “New York has become the microcosm of the whole world. Here are gathered together the nuclei of every school of thought, every phase of social state is here; the abject poor, the fabulously rich, and the industriously competent. Our population is over sixteen millions. We are spreading to the furthest limits of our territorial domain. Every art is practised here, and here each art secures its highest rewards. Architecture has here risen to its most stupendous and impossible tasks. Music finds here its greatest audiences, and its exhibitions take place in the grandest temples. Painting has here displaced the former superiority of France; factories making every article that human ingenuity or human appetite can invent for its satisfaction or its profit, are here in operation.

“We have become the cynosure of the world, and one million of visitors a year has reversed the tide of curiosity from the old world to the new; because our enormous wealth permits us to build marvels and realize dreams. We have become a state, and this city now possesses its own legislature, and frames laws for its own government. Enormous universities furnish us with learning, and under the impetus of an outrageous intellectualism large classes of our population discard old habits of life, old creeds, old morals, struggling with an impossible ardor to compass the meaning of life in the surfeit of enjoyment and the rhapsodies of speculation. The Catholic Church almost alone upholds the dogmas of the past; Protestantism has deteriorated in Agnosticism, and Agnosticism falls a prey to a devouring melancholy, which councils a happy death, whenever life forgets its pleasures, or Age robs the senses of their uses. Euthanasia, although a forbidden crime as the enemy of the state, is secretly practised and from day to day sumptuous Suicidariums are discovered and destroyed by the police.

“Science makes contributions, to our convenience, but is still dumb on the questions of our purpose and origin. The transmutation of metals is said to be almost discovered, and when gold can be made from lead the tocsin of industrial activity will be sounded, and the social machine, no longer able to maintain financial differences, will run down, and, clotted with a metallic lubricant—no longer serving its just ends,—will stop working, and our social state resolve itself into a primordial protoplasm, whence the savage tribe with chief and slaves, will slowly emerge, and the earth begin over again its tiresome political evolution.

“But just now in this city the questions of policy grow daily more complicated and dangerous. We have a gloriously rich class enjoying the highest culture and withal benevolent, but living in undreamed of splendor, and we have an educated class of operatives and middle men with a proletariat of the very poor, who, often by their own misdirection or proclivities, live stunted and desperate lives. These classes form a vast body proclaiming a radical socialism and their organization grows stronger and stronger with increasing population, for family life, except within stringent limits, is discouraged by the rich, and is despised by the emancipated.

“The balance of power will soon fall to the socialist, who lives for breeding, and breeds by living. You have just come to our city (and here the speaker for the first time turned directly to Tom, and involved him directly in his allocution), at the close of a general election for Mayor—the Mayor being the governor of our city-state. It was a hot rancorous contest, and the successful candidate was a compromise, a fusion brought about by the rich classes, the moderately well off, and the Catholic labor vote. The new Mayor’s position is a perilous one. He has hardly a bare majority in the city Legislature. He himself is a dreamer, and over balanced with metaphysical guesses, well trained in psychology, not inexperienced in business, but at best a compromise, chosen to be the tool of the rich, yet constitutionally a believer in some creed about the Brotherhood of Man, and so without absolute direction, and without force; and so also a farce, and a failure. Well—” (here the singular monologue ended, and the speaker, who more and more astounded his absorbed listener, stood up) “Yes—there are good chances for a chauffeur of the right stamp in this city, where over ten per cent. of the accidental deaths occur through motor accidents. Have you any money?”

Tom no longer doubtful as to the integrity of his friend—his rhetorical tirade convinced him that he was some one with reservations of conscience—answered, as he also rose to his feet:

“I have three hundred dollars. Enough?”

The stranger had resumed his musings, looking away in the direction of the Liberty Light whose flaring chords of flame now rose straight into the sky like a contorted and tapering pinnacle of fire;—but he heard; and turning again to Tom he said; “Very good. Go to the Hotel Kohinoor near the Times Square. Get well lodged; Look well; Dress well, and put an advertisement in the New York Times for a position as a chauffeur. Give the hotel address. You will have answers to choose from; mark me! Take my card! I will see you at any time.”

He handed Tom a card, and walked away after cordially shaking his hand, though as he did it, he looked less at Tom, than at the dispersing crowds who, no longer kept together by the band, were dissolving in streams through the Battery grounds.

Tom moved to a lamp and read:

BENTON BRIGGS

(Secretary to the Mayor)

CITY HALL

Tom of course was duly impressed, and thanked his stars that the assault on him had been made. He placed the card carefully in his pocket book, and proceeded forthwith to find out the location of the Hotel Kohinoor. He found the policeman who had aided in interrupting the machinations of his enemies, and from him was directed to the hotel which his informant assured him; “was the all-firedest most expensive house in town.” Tom perhaps quailed a moment, but he partially divined the philosophy of Mr. Briggs’ advice; he wanted a rich employer, his own qualifications were, he knew, unimpeachable, a little spurious distinction given to him by his handsome quarters would not form a prejudice against him; on the other hand it was intended by his adviser to form a direct appeal to the fastidious personal tastes of the rich employer he was after. He intended to be careful about his advertisement, and he had quite enough reliance upon himself and his good looks to improve a favorable impression.

Ruminating over these things Tom found his way to the Subway which in the year 2000 maintained its supremacy as an artery of travel, and was flashed through its blazing conduit, to Forty-Second Street, where he alighted. The hotel Kohinoor occupied the present combined sites of the Metropole and the Saranac and represented the most munificent expenditure of skill and fancy known to the publican world.

It was the marvel of two continents. The most daring mechanical device had been united with the strangest and most defiant artistic conceptions, and a result roundly denounced by the better taste of the day, was also blazoned and paraded as the consummate expression of the New School, a hackneyed phrase devoted at all periods of art, to give distinction to oddity, if not to the vulgarity of empty display.

It was a monstrous pagoda of stone and stucco, ornamented with extraordinary grotesques of great size, and involved a curious use of colored decoration with surprisingly copious development of electrical illumination. At night the tapering structure, prolonged upward to almost two hundred feet became a shimmering and splendid spire of light by reason of chains of lamps swung from tip to tip of its projecting antennae, each chain from top to bottom being swung, as it were, by a mounting line of grinning goblins and laughing nymphs, rendered in terra-cotta and affixed to the ends of the antennae, which, on each story numbered twelve, making a sort of angulation of the whole building, and these polygonal faces were constructed to form as many façades, and a different treatment was allotted to each in ornamentation and color.

This facetted and rather brilliant composition had suggested the name Kohinoor and, as a term descriptive of scintillation and gem-like glory, it applied well enough to the chromatic and photal encrustation of this singular architecture, whose effrontery of design drew to its doors and rooms the richest and the most eccentric patrons.

The interior arrangement was not less striking nor less effective, limiting that term to the range of ideas expressed in surprise and disordered novelty. It consisted, in outline, of a central air space, or well, reaching to the apical skylight—itself a fantastic medley of colored glasses—conical in form. From the contracting areas of the successive floors, encircled at each floor or story by a gallery, whose edge upon the conical well was protected by a rococo railing of brass, hung aprons of English ivy. The ascending floors were designed as radial spaces with diverging corridors producing rhomboidal rooms, and the corridors opened at their outside limit upon a broad balcony, cut up into stalls, for the occupants of the rooms.

The ground floor, entered from the street by ascending steps, was a labyrinth of columns, arranged in stars, and holding between them groined ceilings luxuriously painted with multitudes of enlacing figures, borrowed from all the stages of life, the personages of history, contemporaneous character, the idols of the theatre the legends of poetry, figures of mythology; an intemperate extravaganza of portraiture, in whose chaotic investiture and train the impudence of the artist had placed politicians in compromising union with goddesses, and mingled the decorum of the pulpit with the bacchanalian antics of the chorus hall. Momentarily it was denounced as a scandal and later it was welcomed as a joke, and at all times it crowded the place with sightseers and gathered to it a spendthrift retinue.

Lounging chairs and sofas of a deep cherry red, imitating coral stems and growths, upholstered in a sea green tapestry, filled the space at convenient intervals, and every hour was signalled by soft utterances of music from a mammoth orchestrion. It was all in bad taste relieved by extreme skill, but from top to bottom of the building, and throughout its details the loosened revelry of libidinous fancy was given full play. For want of a method it chased over the known world for the exotic, the bizarre, the beautiful, and brought them together in all phases of contact, producing a colossal maze of features that could only, with trained artists, react in a monstrous and terrifying weariness. It was principally a marvel of decorative ingenuity, picking from the resources of industry every thing rare and costly. What might have been styled a system of house gardening prevailed within, and patches of flowers were installed in ample vases and bowls, themselves richly conceived and executed, kept alive by artifice, and stimulated by electric shades.

Into this unusual hostelry Tom Ratler came with no inconsiderable trepidation, provoked, and naturally enough, by some apprehensions as to the sufficiency of his pocket book to meet financial requirements which might conform to so marvellous a place.

He found that however, in spite of its splendor, it could afford him in its skyward limits a small room at, if not exactly a small price, no ruinous toll. So he was whisked upward in the elevator tube that, as a steel tube in open work, represented a towering and stupendous palm, extended through the central air-space, with bridges at each floor for the escape of its travellers.

The room was tiny but deliciously neat and, to Tom’s eyes, ravishingly beautiful. It was in enamelled white, with a wall paper that began at the bottom with a flush of white blossoms on a dainty pink ground, and ended at the top in pendent boughs bearing yellow—golden yellow—oranges. The furniture was made from a delicately stained green wood, designed in patterns of rustic simplicity; the windows were shaded by crisp chintz-like curtains, whose figures represented various idylls of the country, from chestnutting to May-day frolics. A soft downy red mat or rug covered the floor, and water colors of charming freshness, delineating the undressed pleasure of the seashore, decorated the walls. A little bath room opened off this fascinating boudoir, and Tom standing in the centre of the bewildering beauty and comfort, dropped his hand valise, whistled softly, and for an instant thought of his own plain bed-room at home, in which, were the reader able to follow our friend’s dream, a well stored book-case, rude but serviceable, occupying an entire wall, brimmingly filled with books of all sizes and on all subjects, would have been revealed.

Tom at once attacked the task of preparing his advertisement. The writing escritoire was supplied with pen, paper, and ink, and a few moments only were necessary for the rough outlining of his “ad” which changed a few times finally took this form;

WANTED—A position as a chauffeur by an experienced driver of automobile cars. References furnished. Address Tom Ratler, Hotel Kohinoor.

Tom again descended the elevator shaft; was directed to the Times newspaper office opposite to the hotel itself, entered his application, and, unwilling to yet trust himself to the throbbing and blazing streets, retired to his exquisite aerie to think of his new surroundings, and to gaze over that carpet of light punctuated with brilliant orbs or crossed by sombre shafts of stone, that like an undulous and phosphorescent scarf floated over and through the Capital of the World.

And to Tom’s musing eyes there seemed to be at times speeding meteors in trained or panoramic succession passing in the sky. And there was. For to all other marvels of the growing years Science had added the partial conquest of the air.

CHAPTER II

HELEN LORIMER

On that long and high ridge known to-day as Inwood that extends from about 155th Street and Lafayette Boulevard to the northern edge of Manhattan Island where the rocks with moulded and spherical outline dip into the peaceful currents of the Spuyten Duyvil Creek, in the year 2000, wealth and art had created an encrustation of the most wonderfully beautiful architecture, harmonious in expression and imposingly ornate. It was called—the region—Carrara, a term signalizing the almost unbroken use of marble or limestone in the construction of the palaces that dominated this rocky and precipitous comb of vertical schists, tumbling picturesquely into the waters of the Hudson.

Looked at from the eastward elevations at Fort George, itself at the beginning of the twentieth century a public park, extricated from the present serpentine horrors of scenic railways this Inwood slope presented a splendid façade. It borrowed features wrought in dreams and pictures, it contained delicate and noble effects incorporated in stone, blended together with unerring mastery, and linked with each other throughout its entire length, as if in a tracery of architectural wonders. Imagination, controlled by scholarship, played here its part with subtlety and composure. It dealt with creations, and it dealt with them as the Creator has dealt with the world, through the imposition of Law. A little of that bizarrerie and witchcraft, rampart elsewhere in the stupendous City, had faintly, yet noticeably touched the august and serene construction, but had touched it as the coruscations of golden edges touch the towering clouds at sunset.

It became almost roseate under the spell of some transfiguring sunsets, dark and effective beneath scowling skies, and again shone like alabaster in the zenith sweeping sun. Conceive a long heaped hill of chateaux, built entirely of marble, except at a few telling points relieved with colored stones, their principal pediments crowning the summit of the hill, and their approaches—that on the Kingsbridge road—an ascending terrace of steps, with broad platforms hedged with green thickets, plentifully sprinkled with wide and capacious vases, opulent in flowers and trailing vines—the trumpet creepers sometimes lit up the snowy walls with orange carmine coronas—here and there a noble tree, usually a pine or fir, fitted with artistic precision, cut out, cameo-like, against balustraded loggias. Conceive the crest of this hill, a sky-line of towers, minarets, angulated gables, flat roofs—on which again by a somewhat indecorous fancy flowers were strewn—and clotted ambuscades of spires. Pass beyond the eastern exposures to the westward, and imagine a contrasted aspect over the steep escarpment of the Lafayette Boulevard; see how, limited by the precipitous declivities there, the multiform expansions on the east have changed generally into flat walls, graced indeed by niches and balconies, overhanging extensions, but rising with perpendicular austerity to considerable heights. It was as though a growing and lovely crystal had flattened against an impregnable partition, and, revealing its color, concealed its form. The topography of the region compelled this curtailment, since the villas could not well be built over the ragged and vertical edges of the cliffs, though by an extreme audacity, at points, with great expense, the ornate or diversified architecture had been pushed out over the beetling rocks, by means of iron piers estopped in the gneiss beds, whereon, upon a platform of iron also, the structures had enlarged symmetrically to their formal type.

This partial abbreviation was not necessary in all cases, as where the platform at the summit of the ridge was wide enough to allow the development of the building. The hill side on the east, thus constructed in related and harmonious architectural contours, summoned an enthusiastic admiration. It represented the aristocratic isolation of extreme wealth, in a class born to indulgences, fostered by education, and not devoid of intellectual distinction.

And Carrara represented a wholesome unity of purpose; in an artistic sense its design was consolidated into an expression of the renaissance, and except at a few spots, where the prevalent taste for irregularities and the conceited thirst for strangeness—a strangeness based on kaleidoscopic conglomerations—had impertinently entered its purer and poetic thought, like a hectic weed among chaste flowers, the aggregation was a lovely structural symposium.

Northward, where now the protecting spire of the House of Mercy pierces the ambuscade of trees, towers small and round, large and square, many affixed in corbelled tiers to angled mansions, and some, campanile-like, aspiring upward with tenuous and diminishing lines, filled the sky. Further south on the declining slopes that bend to the Dyckman road an interfering group of flat topped Norman keeps, their walls broached by wide embrasures, with brick chimneys on their sides, picturesquely soaring above the interlaced and somewhat compactly combined trees, brought the eyes of the reviewer to the more stately Italian villas, that decorously encumbered the southern section of this long Inwood elevation.

The harder rugged contours northward, with their architectural austerity, here met an expanded and luxurious invention. Extreme taste and the insinuation of transatlantic memories were apparent. Park-like expanses along the Kings Bridge road, traversed by paths, ascended to the marble stairways whose stately and interrupted ranges led to the marvellous villa palaces irregularly delineated on the crown of the ridge.

Among these was one which by some idiosyncrasy of ornament, some bewitching adjustment of parts, and predominantly by a rare invocation of the graces of plant decoration drew the attention most quickly, and held it by a richness of detail, controlled by refinement and discrimination. It was throughout coherent in style, with such exterior embellishment as to attract notice, without going so far as to disfigure its technical virtue. Its architect would have suited Mrs. Rennselaer’s requirements of being “content with conforming his structure to its function, and modelling the masses thus arrived at, so as to heighten their inherent expression.” Yet he had taken his renaissance quite sincerely, and absorbed with devotion the mainsprings of artistic design it furnished. The mansion was Italian, and by reason of its scholastic fidelity freed itself from the aberration of the treatments which had become rampant in the City elsewhere, and which, to revert to the same authoress’s denunciation of an earlier forerunner of this boisterous school assumed “rather the character of an explosion, than of an evolution.”

The villa was not however a stone fortress, such as guarded the treasures of the Florentine nobles, nor precisely those less simple constructions of Rome. Deprived of the foil and the accompaniment of the water, it yet simulated the style of the Venetian palace, and rose, a tetragonal block of incised and decorated masonry, its stories separated by ribbons of ornamentation in balustrades, their windows arched and spandrelled, their pilasters grouped and salient, with the corniced roof dropping in pendant spindles of cut stones, while still higher rose a low parapet pierced by circular apertures. Sculpture and chiselled delicacy of the brocaded stone surrounded some of the basement windows. These latter continued to the floor, became doors, and these opened upon the highest terrace, itself fenced with columns separated from each other by a low intricately cut wall, while each carried on the flat top of its capital an electric lamp within an opalescent shade.

The obvious incongruity of this pile on the table top of the ridge was successfully masked by the addition of a grove of trees on either side, and by the spreading terraces, that with a medial convexity and deployed edges, melted into lateral coppices of bushes. The terrace formed by this peristyle was the entrance courtyard of the mansion, and the distant observer gazed upon the facade of the house, through a wide interval between the columns themselves, which could be closed when desired, by two richly designed iron gates.

This composition possessed the rational elements of beauty. An intellectual grasp gathered its not over-charged detail into a unit of purposeful expression. We are to enter that beautiful home and within it again the evidences of culture, and the outlays of fortune, would fascinate us, but they will pay tribute, in our minds, to that woman, who, like Hypatia in Alexandria sways the heart no less by her loveliness, than by the strength and depth of her nature, Helen Lorimer. This challenging spirit, clad in feminine allurements, had been called in the socialist paper of the day—The Beehive—“the demoniacal Syren of Injustice.” This abode of cunningly devised beauty is hers.

The few words dropped by the Secretary of the Mayor to Tom Rattler in his fortuitous encounter with that young man, and which may have sounded enigmatical, and certainly ominous to the reader, may now, at this stage of our history, be usefully enlarged upon, as it will bring this unusual woman into intelligible relations with the coming events to be here described.

Movements throughout the twentieth century had reflected that changing molecularity in the social stage, which presaged new and perhaps perilous rearrangements of its political constitution. Their potency was more conspicuous in America, than in Europe, for in America the mobility of the social fluid was more established, and the solvent of opinion worked more rapidly and with less opposition; the organs of publication and propagandism plied their trade utterly unfettered, and not without admirable aplomb and sincerity. Similar movements of course had made themselves felt even more obviously in Europe, and had provoked repression, that was violent, but successful, for in Europe so deeply rooted and inexpugnable are the tradition and the fact of class, that power had only to appeal to the military support to still maintain ancient forms. In fact it had long been felt that the armies of Europe were less necessary to maintain existing states than to curb and extirpate the brooding forces of insurrection and discontent, less necessary to defend frontiers than to establish garrisons as a network of protection against internal foes. Throughout large portions of Europe a certain sloth of mind, the inertia of custom, the niggardliness of choice, and a certain artistry in the common people with an undeveloped culture, attached them to the livery of caste, and created a residue of resistance to radical change.

Still in Europe there had been trouble, and the arguments of socialists and other more unrestrained and dangerous, illicit and quarrelling cults, had kept the social cauldron boiling, and the ci-devant crust, formed over hitherto quiescent and hidden contents, in many places was broken into fragments, rotating and pitching in a turbulent commotion. But that, at the exact moment of this story, had subsided. In America prosperity and education, which had reached deeply down to the lower areas of society, had resulted in contrasted conditions, but in a no less active and indeed more energized demand for some sort of renovated and metamorphosed state. And for this reason. The Trust system had enveloped everything; and quite acceptably to the majority of the people. Established in the nineteenth century, its first status had considerably changed, since, by reason of the regulative legislation inaugurated by Theodore Roosevelt, it had instituted enormous popularizing movements throughout the nation, whereby its stocks of all sorts became distributed, so that separated and numerically large communities were its beneficiaries. The dangers predicted one hundred years before, of its subversive power over justice, and its high handed and conscienceless demolition of competition, seemed to have disappeared, as in the first place the trusts were forcibly regulated from Washington, and in the second their power over trade had practically exterminated the individual merchant, or left him a tributary to the Trust’s needs.

Their avenues of emolument were unimpeded and they were numerous. But however much they had absorbed the savings of the laborers and middle men of all sorts, of course, immense fortunes, rolling up into colossal sums, had accumulated in the hands of a rather vast group of rich men and women, and the tireless development of all the utilities of the state, and the resources of the soil, with an enormous average prosperity, had augmented swollen thrift, and created fortunes which were the marvel and the gossip of two continents.

By the mere fact of their almost superhuman possibilities of indulgences, these rich classes, at several points in the nation’s domain had gathered into brilliant and luxurious colonies, and in New York they had concentrated into a nucleus of really dazzling splendor. Now contrasts work the ruin of states, if interested agitators and the exorbitant envy of malicious men, or even the plausible volubility of self-deceived reformers attack them. Physical conditions in New York were not bad at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Science and a most munificent and extravagant government had given to the populace almost everything they might reasonably expect, but there were poor and poverty, a great deal of it, indeed, and amongst the dreams of the socialistic philosopher was the abolition of both.

New York city had become a state with its governor (the mayor) and a legislature, and it had incorporated the elements of socialism quite momentously, in so far as the street cars and all public utilities were controlled and operated by the city government, the ferries, telephone, telegraph systems within the city’s limits, and it was, at the era we are now studying, contemplating exercising some sort of discretionary power over the disposition of wealth beyond a certain amount in the interest of public improvements, public hospitals, and public entertainments. It had advanced the ideas of public and free education beyond all previous conceptions of convenience or propriety, by maintaining a free theatre, and a free opera, whose primary institution had in view the presentation of classic art in the drama and in music, but which, under a lax administration and the encroaching influences of a deleterious gayety, had declined somewhat from these ideals.

For it must be remembered that socialism had at this time assumed the features of a most frank and to our mind, most repellent naturalism. Without suffering from need and lacking the incentives of acute deprivation, the poorer classes had attached themselves to leaders, some of whom as to-day were rich men whose political ideas involved the utopia of universal competence, individual equality, radically extended to every function and faculty of man, and they mingled with this irrational aim a cloud of violent vagaries, in which age disappeared, sickness, the family, traditional religion; and humanity, by the preposterous hocus-pocus of their blandishments of words, became something different, ineluctable, and divine.

As a matter of fact, in spite of all this vaporing the visitor to New York in the year 2000, from this present year of grace, would have found a prevalent social resemblance to the civism of to-day. The theory of the suffrage remained the same, also its use, courts of law tried cases, the police repressed crime, the streams of people in the streets presented sharp and informing contrasts, papers reported the news and, with art and circumspection, discussed their meanings, occasional correspondents ventilated their nostrums or their wit, the book stores and the publishers still fed the eye and mind with elegant books and sumptuous illustrations; in Wall Street the same fevered haste and nervous throw of guesses; elsewhere the marts of trade plied unremittingly their business of getting money, and dissipation and amusement claimed their votaries, and claimed them with a freshened splendor of apparatus and intoxicants.

He would indeed see churches, cathedrals, though his distinguishing observation would have noted the vast predominance of the catholic houses of worship. One astonishment might be expected for him; it was the larger size of the men and the robust beauty of the women, together with the appearance of a type of face especially pleasing, in which an artistic or poetic fire dwelt, a suggestion that would have been provoked in his mind by a certain depth of coloring, by a suavity of demeanor, a graciousness of address with a predisposition to expressive smiles, a luxuriance of hair, and essentially by dark and luminous eyes.

This type had been projected, through intermarriage and domiciliation, from the Italians, and somewhat, by a remarkable refinement of face, produced in Hebrews who had married Italians. The Italians had developed in America an extraordinary and consuming patriotism, with an incessant and almost belligerent skill in making themselves felt in its art, and its politics. They had eventuated into an important fibre in the national issue, and markedly so in New York. As a rule this type were smaller than the average in height and size, and again this larger type belonged to the Germans, Americans, in stricto sensu, and the English, and this macropodia, as the faculty designated it, had resulted from health and exercise.

But our anticipatory visitor would have quickly noted the physical magnificence of the great city, its inordinate ambitions in building, in design, in contrasts, together with the evidence of a positive mania to erect statues, itself a most illuminative proof that the age had undergone some mental or emotional changes, since that period, one hundred years before, when the claims of art in the streets had either been neglected or awkwardly remembered by limping executions. This change again had been effected by the Italians, in conjunction with the strong American school of art. And among all the marvels of the metropolis, Carrara, in its marble glory would have most acutely raised his marvelling admiration.

This unique precinct, with its amazing glory of architecture blending into an expression of consummate taste and boundless wealth, the reader has already been asked to notice. A more difficult task for the writer is encountered in imposing upon his imagination the character and the temperament and mind of Helen Lorimer whose force and fascination swayed so effectively the people who built and inhabited this region of delight. Here again a retrospective study is necessary, and the reader must inspect the phases of this woman’s ancestry. Helen Lorimer had not been the originator, though she was, at the moment, the most influential and eloquent exponent of a remarkable movement which had elevated the rich into an intellectual distinction, which had made of them a class by themselves, not from the possession of wealth, but from an indisputable eminence of aspiration and achievement. All the rich were not certainly in this class, but the processes of selection and sympathy had separated into a phenomenal isolation and a real prominence those, who, conjoined by a religion of practical ideals, met the requirements of a very exigent and noble standard, wherein also grew a lofty and not altogether prepossessing pride.

As early as the end of the nineteenth century a few rich men had begun a process of self-appraisement and conciliation. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Stanford, Widener, Mills, Morgan, Jesup, and others had signalized their oneness with the great majority, and their personal sense of responsibility, by large gifts to the common weal, both in benevolent and in educational foundations. They established a certain nobility of conduct, as essential to wealth. Such an impulse, elaborated and added to, in the prerogatives of superiority, had developed, in the closing years of the twentieth era, notably by the powers and talent of a group of the rich, who had achieved eminence. Noblesse oblige in them had assumed an expression of high motives, painstaking industry, and deliberate culture. They established a most curious system of self inspection. They insisted upon an aristocracy of talent, and scholarship, and prowess as well. A social congress among them settled the possible career of the younger members of their class, whether in art or literature, or public service, and this settlement was quite rigorously recognized and obeyed. They aimed at a splendid publicity before the people and they won it. At every point—such was their programme—they intended to make their class felt as powerful and as illustrious.

And it was the doctrine and the policy of self protection. The more astute had felt the dangerous—in their eyes—movements of the day and they knew that a high bred and insertively practical and ornamental prestige before the world, would protect and establish their union with the state. The indication of talent among the young of their class was noted with rapture, and the young possessors were pushed along prescribed paths of prescribed duties; so that this wealthy aristocracy were influential at all points in the civic circle, and shone with an enviable brightness before the country. Relentlessly pursuing this plan they even went outside of their class to ally to themselves new blood to engraft upon their own stem the strength of its promise and gifts, wherever it was discovered; and these new recruits, chosen—but with circumspection—anywhere, were caught up into the heavens of culture, and their talent augmented by education and opportunity, while they themselves, body and soul, were incorporated in the caste that became their sponsor and host. It was a really singular phenomenon, the inward growth of a realizing conviction that a rich society should knit its life with the nation’s in a meritorious service, where, ever and anon, the fire of genius lit a resplendent flame.

This movement, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, was at its zenith, and among the most noble, and intellectual of its exponents and actors, was the beautiful woman, Helen Lorimer. It was said of her that she combined the brain of a Harriet Martineau, the soul of a Florence Nightingale, and the bodily glory of the Fornarina. In her conjunction of circumstances and the generosity of nature had united to form a very perfect being. The blood of Italy was in her veins bearing its passion, and the blood of the New World bearing its sense. She was a dreamer but she lived in the field of action. She painted her horizons with pictures, but she fashioned the instruments of her designs with judgment, and made those pictures part of the solid earth. Phraseology with her became a portent of new plans, and the plans vividly recalled the language that depicted them, without losing much of that fidelity, when they became facts.

Miss Helen Lorimer presented to the world the fusion of traits and powers, which, like some admirably contrived fruit in nature, was the result of lineage. Not that her descent involved any reference to distinguished forebears, but that a union of characters had developed in her which heredity had secured from a cross in stocks, whereby, to use a Mendelian phrase, the dominant traits were all good and remained, and the recessive were all bad and had disappeared. Her grandparents had been Italians, who in a love match had come to America, and had quickly won success, so that their children, one of whom was the mother of Miss Lorimer, secured all the advantages of education, with those of travel.

Her grandfather belonged to a good family of Florence and her grandmother was a fashionable belle in the city of Genoa. Their elopement provided romantic incidents, in so far as the parents on either side, united in a frantic effort to separate or intercept the runaways, as they had completely disarranged some prepared alliance, commercially more valuable. The chase ended with the sea-side, and Antonio Ferrara and Francesca Espozito enjoyed their married bliss uninterrupted, and surrounded themselves, in their new home, with a family of five children, the third of whom was a girl of physical perfection, possessing musical talent and a voice of melting contralto richness. This popular addition to her native charm, and the excellent social and business position of her father made the young Julieta a widely popular debutante, and, at some public Ball, she had ensnared the affections of Robert Lorimer a scion of one of the richest of the New York circle of millionaires and a devotee of art, naturally not inattentive to the enchanting sweetness of the young Italo-American girl.

Young Lorimer with the studied gracelessness of artistic and emotional youth failed to inform his family of his desires and designs, and, realizing at rather a late moment, the value of the family recognition of his matrimonial choice, contrived to introduce his fiancée to his family’s notice under the following promising circumstances. He inaugurated a series of impromptu concerts which were given at houses on the Carrara. In one of these Robert arranged a picturesque situation depicting himself as a wandering artist, ravished with the beauty of an Andalusian orange grove, and less impersonally seduced by the maiden, who, lingering behind the other gatherers, at the close of the day, turns on him her inexorable eyes and just as a sentimental and well regulated moon sheds a mellow radiance upon an abundance of Florida Grape fruit heaped up in a New York market basket.

The lingering orange picker of course was the irresistible Julieta of whom the wandering and transfixed artist asks a number of irrelevant questions, and on expressing a surmise that she probably could sing is answered by the sudden outpouring of a melodious Spanish love song, in which Julieta, herself hopelessly entangled in the same silken chords with the handsome Robert Lorimer, exerts her skill to immoderately confess her own predicament. The trick was a complete success, and the young woman rapidly won a technical position, whence her introduction as the daughter-in-law of Algernon Lorimer, the head of the Lorimer establishment, though somewhat disparaged by the timidity and decorous hesitation of the mistress of the same institution, was definitely accomplished.

Robert Lorimer inherited his father’s brain and much of his mother’s consistent delicacy of feeling, and developed what was quite undiscoverable in either, a deep artistic creativeness, less signalized in broad conceptions than in subtlety of composition, and the mysticism of shadows, half lights, and spectral shapes. Julieta magnificently completed her conquest of music. Her vogue was immense, and she and her husband engaged with enthusiasm in that regulation and elevation of the rich classes which we have pointed out which became a consecration and mission in their daughter Helen.

Helen was their only child, and as upon her would develop the trying responsibilities of the Lorimer millions, and as also she revealed precocious gifts of mind, with a startling beauty, Robert and Julieta lavished upon her what might be called a bountiful care. In other words, they took every imaginable means to enrich her mind, to mature her nature, to refine her feelings, without losing sight of the immense opportunism nature had granted them, because of her beauty, to make her glad and buoyant. And the subject of all this care responded with precision.

She grew daily in graciousness not unmixed with roguery; she engaged her time with scrupulous regard to every demand, and fulfilled the promises of her parents in music and art. Her taste became more massive than her father’s and her music more German than was the flavor of her mother’s luscious Italian melodies. She had advanced upon her parent’s standpoints, and they admiringly noted the firmness of her grasp in scholarship, the speculative earnestness of her reflections, and the unexpected depth of her religious feeling. In a sense and way they felt a curious awe of her, as if her thoughtfulness betokened some dreadful reaction of weariness and collapse, and they watched her at times with sincere anxiety, and with whispered comments of mutual confession.

But Helen ripened with absolute normality. She loved friends, she entered the customary diversions of society with a vigorous thirst for all its reasonable pleasures, and she brought to her feet the young men who found her delightful in discussing a regatta, or a lawn tennis tournament, or in the tripping coquetry of winning raillery, and who left her enthralled, without dreaming (except as common talk gave her reputation) that she could narrate the history of the popes, or give them a review of the early systems of American philosophy, or even with less effort, set before them the triumphs of modern music. In one aspect of human learning Helen Lorimer was apathetic. She spurned science; not indeed with self-satisfaction and disdain, but by a quiet repulsion of silence when its vaunted triumphs were rehearsed, and its importance was mentioned. Something in the hard and fast outlines which science gives its topics, something especially in the sodden matter-of-fact dreariness of its professors, and yet more relevantly, in her case, something repellent in its unmistakable rejection of the unproven and the imaginative. Its war with religion jarred her, and she withdrew from it as from a monstrous and fatal thing which would wreck the beauty of the world of poetry and art. At the age of twenty Robert and Julieta went with her to Europe, to its capitals, its galleries, its historic centres, completing an exhilarating survey with a prolonged visit to the city of Rome. The impressions left by Rome upon Helen were critical. They influenced her whole life, and made of her instantly the instrument of accomplishing the most momentous religious change that the modern world has seen. It was at Rome under the seraphic touch of inspired painting, under the thrill and the mystical appeal of antiquity, under the occult fascinations of symbolism in its ritual, that Helen imbibed faith in the Catholic church, and threw herself at once into its arms, without misgivings and with a trembling joy.

This was not wholly unexpected by Robert, who in many conversations with his daughter had been struck with her reactionary tendencies in thought, and her many museful inquiries into the power of the Roman church, while in a natural way the habit of Julieta, brought up a Catholic, reasserted itself with the ardor of resurrection in the younger woman. The matter at first gave her parents some concern, but in so cosmopolitan a temperament and so loving and soothing a nature as her father’s, there could not be long a permanent objection, and in the case of her mother there was just a secret satisfaction.

And so Helen Lorimer became a Catholic, and her profoundest affections turned—at first lightly—to a strange project, one barely to be mentioned aloud, one only to be dreamed over in the darkest hours of the night, or brooded over in the uttermost seclusion of revery and anticipation; Helen Lorimer yearned to bring the Pope to America.

It was a mad thought perhaps, some Catholics might have deemed it iniquitous, and most would have found in such a plan the dissolution of the church from all its temporal and historic verities. But Helen was not thinking of Rome and its associations, perhaps not clearly concerned was she at first with the Catholic church itself.

She was intensely patriotic, she felt a divination of the vast political tendencies of the age, and she saw around her in the states a disintegrating Protestantism, or thought she saw it; with too, a very militant Catholicism, she believed the restitution of religion to the country she so ardently loved could only come through a momentous application of sacramental grace, and that, she also believed, would be brought by the Pope’s removal to America. She had indeed become entirely familiar with the savage dissatisfaction of a large portion of the Italian capital’s population with the Pope, and she knew that the body of Leo XIII yet remained unburied in its selected sepulchre at the St. John Lateran, the beautiful basilica outside the immediate limits of the City, because of this dissatisfaction. She indulged too, in other fancies, as that the Pope, taken away from Rome, and placed in America, would mean a renovation of the church itself, an infusion of the fresh blood of her country, with its unselfish attachment to ideals, in the parched and worn channels of circulation in the church, so that its altars might more worthily carry the weight of that supreme sacrifice which daily fed its votaries. The emotional tides of her being, stirring now with restrained and yet compelling force, swept her on into pageants of speculation, where her susceptibilities received the stimulus of dazzling and painted pictures, pictures of the church’s triumph.

When Robert and Julieta returned to America with their wonderful daughter in whom they began to see the promises of a powerful and creative personality, they encountered the secularistic movement among the rich which we have partially hinted at. Nothing could have better suited the lofty temperament of Helen Lorimer, with its aristocratic isolation as also its sane industrial zeal to add to the beauty and usefulness of things, than just this attempt to give a new and special significance to wealth, building up a group, a class, a caste, eminent by talent, by accomplishments, by public devotion, and so enshrining their heritages of mere money within the protective virtues of character and mentality.

Helen turned to this new thought with all the energy of her temperament, and wrote, talked, missioned, gathered around her coteries both of men and women, who received power at her hands to accomplish the desirable result, and her home—fully surrendered to her for her own best purposes by her parents—became the headquarters of the secularists. Older heads than Helen’s, also saw the usefulness of this. They knew the widening strides of, to them, an unaccountable socialism; they heard its threats; and while nowhere else in the world was there such remarkably distributed competence and household happiness as in these United States of America, at this one point of New York socialism raised an ominous head, showed a spiteful tongue, and at the last election—that referred to by the Mayor’s secretary with Tom Ratler—manifested a most unwelcome and alarming numerical power.

It was well and necessary that socialism should be robbed of its influence, cut loose from the moorings of discontent by the utility, the generous attitude, the fine quality in its acts, the nobility of its sentiments, the individual strength of its members, of the rich. Helen had advanced all previous schedules of action in this particular. She had given public lectures, had entered the enemy’s country, had translated the lessons of history to her popular audiences, and had immensely swayed her listeners by her eloquence, and no less by her conquering beauty, a beauty which came to them dressed in the habiliments of an opulent taste, for Helen Lorimer instinctively rejected that shallow condescension which would palliate differences by false pretences, and the masquerade of imitation.

Her strength had indeed disconcerted the editorial corps of The Beehive, whose younger members became as much reconciled to her views by her face and form, as they might have been by her syllogisms had they taken the time to carefully rehearse them. Helen reiterated the philosophy of regime, and dwelt on the analogies of nature. She contended frankly for the gradations of society, and urged it as a biological law or as a principle of physics. She popularized Hobbs and she disseminated Montesquieu. She christianized Hume and lent a new flavor to the amenities of Talleyrand. She was a success, and The Beehive had retorted by epithet and innuendo.

In time the windows of life darkened to Robert, her father, and he died almost in her arms, a deeply loved parent. He had watched his daughter with a gracious pride, and an almost pathetic obedience to her slightest wish introduced him to her intimacies of thought, and made him the confidant—more than her mother—of her unusual hopes. On her father’s demise the Lorimer family consisted of Robert’s older brother Theodore, her mother Julieta, and Helen herself. Theodore was a childless widower, and although somewhat more severe and practical in type—being a good business man—than his brother, fell too under the fascination of the gifted woman, who now represented the residuary heir to the immense wealth of Algernon Lorimer, her grandfather, a Napoleon of finance with more enduring qualities than this misused appellation usually connoted.

In many ways perhaps Helen Lorimer recalled the image one might form of Margaret Fuller, but it could not be said of her, as Miss Martineau had said of her distinguished contemporary, that she lived and moved in an ideal world, “talking in private and discoursing in public about the most fanciful and shallow conceits which the transcendentalists of Boston took for philosophy.” Helen Lorimer doubtless moved and lived in an ideal world for herself, but she was practical, and this aspect of her nature gave her that humanness that made her delightful to those immensely removed from her intellectual eminence.

And she had the saving grace of humour, wholesome, natural, indisputable fun. She denounced indeed the widespread flippancy of the day which represented the levity of a world which had seriously lost its faith, and restlessly sought a sensuous satisfaction, drinking, to the death of all ennobling feeling, the ready made potations cleverly concocted of mere pleasure; but she knew, none better, that the world was wonderfully ingenious, wonderfully smart, apt, and in the works of construction and convenience wonderfully helpful. Only she felt that the world revelled in too much delight, she felt that it would forget any outward and ulterior destiny in its passionate absorption in its own triumphs, its incessant excitements. Death and old age and infirmity had had sobering and realizing shocks to apply to carelessness in former times, but at the beginning of the twenty-first century, science had marvellously dissipated even these, in conjunction, let it be admitted, with a kind of psychic medicament whereby thought helped to banish worry and ailments.

Miss Lorimer recognized that the world moved, but she would have substituted other motives. She often said that the world must have a motor power and it would always be either pleasure or religion, as the thirst for knowledge actuated too small a numerical number to become a virtual force in its economies or plans, and of these motors she preferred religion. To the poor it had always been the great consolation.

And rich as she was, Helen Lorimer felt that the arbitrament of life’s worth rested at last with those who most sorely tasted its disappointments and yet, with so developed a sympathy with suffering, she clung tenaciously to the hierarchical conception of society’s classification, reverting with a kind of mediaeval intensity to past social states.

About this woman Romance spun its silken and iridescent webs. Youth bowed to her smiles and lost its heart in her favoring glances. Perhaps her cloud of chevaliers was made up of a tested selection of admirers, or those confident and brave enough to match their acquirements with one so loftily endowed, but if so, it was not because of any pedantry in her. A delightful geniality made her always companionable, always winning, and put at ease any soi-disant swain, who indeed might have been thereby captivated with his own eligibility. The blood of Julieta Espozito was in her veins, and nature disdained to release her from the impulses of all her sons and daughters. If this academic review has aroused the reader’s interest, let him now step into the presence of the woman herself, see her charms, hear her voice, and begin with us the history of a short episode of her life.

CHAPTER III

A DINNER IN CARRARA

The entresol of the Lorimer mansion was occupied by the dining hall, a room of magnificent proportions and superbly conceived in decoration, the elegance of its detail being dominated by the size and breadth of a few features.

One wall was breached by a wide entrance, from which descended a series of steps to a lower hall; opposite this entrance the high wall contained an admirable reproduction of the painting of Alma Tadema of the Hunt of Diana, between two high windows, issuing upon balconies overlooking the Hudson; either end of the room held two enormous mirrors framed in Japanese bronze designed in flowers, fruits, and trailing creatures of the field; under these astonishing mirrors were two fire places equipped in monumental brass; on the sides of the entrance the walls were partially concealed by two large Madonnas, one by Perugino, the other by Tintoretto, and under these pictures two sideboards in carved teak wood held a rich assortment of blue India ware grouped around a few high silver vases, whose surfaces in repoussé reviewed the spoils of the hunter; the corners of the room received four large groups of statuary, which separately symbolized the seasons; the ceiling was a massy plane of gold unrelieved by any designs, and from it depended three chandeliers of cut glass in blue aqua-marine like Brazilian stones; the walls were treated with a pale veronica blue, the chairs were of twisted Honduras bay wood, and yellow silken curtains masked the light that poured in at the casements, whose outlook faced the Palisades, and caught the purple banks of the New Jersey hills.

The floor of this apartment was in Pompeian mosaic, and at its centre rose the singular dining table, which was literally nothing else than a huge block of stucco of a pale terra-cotta ivory color, cut out underneath into arches, with a frieze at the edges of the table top representing oak leaves and acorns. This rigid and somewhat unaccommodating erection had a very beautiful effect indeed, and added an entablature to the room that made it more stately and impressive. Heavy rugs invested the floor, and banished its stony coldness, which effort on their part was successfully reinforced by the flickering and homelike light of the candles in the quaint majolica candelabra over the mantels at both ends of the room. This at night, but otherwise and when not animated by the presence of its natural human occupants the great chamber uttered a note shading into an unpleasant solemnity, as of a public hall or a museum foyer.

It was that liquid season of the year as the spring retires from the presence of summer, leaving at the latter’s feet the garlands of her flowers, sweeping away the last fragrant curtains of April’s showers, and inviting the auroras of the sun to rise higher in the skies, while, as she fades away on the white blossoms of May, she already touches the petals of a thousand waking roses, and summons the tides of life, upon whose floods June approaches, to renew the world. It was indeed a little before the opening of June 2000, that, as the shades of night fell, or rather as its shadows grew accentuated beneath the orbed splendor of the moon, a group of six persons were seated around the dining table of the Lorimers, whose physiognomies and demeanors were sufficiently contrasted, though harmonized by a common culture and deportment. The table—the stucco block we have mentioned—was itself a picture of bounty and refined effects. A large golden epergne shaped as a cornucopia borne in the arms of tritons on the back of a silver wave, stood at its centre, holding a tumultuous wealth of roses, the table itself was covered with a delicate sheeny diaper of silver threads, a chef d’oeuvre of eastern workmanship, found by Robert Lorimer in a bazaar on the east side of New York a tantalizing and wonderful mixture of linen and metallic filaments, teazed into a low relief, on which figured peacocks and weeping willows by sweeping streams; and the service was—at the moment when we are called upon to observe it—made up of faintly golden chased Bavarian glass, with old Sevres china.

At the head of the table sat Julieta Lorimer, the mother of Helen, and the singing Andalusian orange gatherer of Robert’s youthful days; on either side of this still beautiful woman were two contrasted figures, one a Catholic clergyman wearing a clerical garb in which the distinction of the wearer among the princes of the church was simply denoted by the red buttons on his vest. Facing this dignitary was a tall and foreign looking man with a high forehead that gained an unnatural prolongation by reason of its retreating lines of hair with rather somnolent and unresponsive eyes, and the relics of a constantly vanishing smile. By his side sat his wife, a flourishing and elderly lady somewhat over dressed and wearing a complexion of surprising brightness and vivacity. Facing this personage and by the side of the cardinal was a handsome man, younger than any of his sex in the room, abundantly supplied with soft flowing chestnut hair, having pleasant and scrutinizing eyes, a mouth of much mobility, a matured moustache, and hands peculiarly well shaped, which, at the moment, were drawn together before him, resting on the table while his half turned head looked, as did all the rest of the company, towards the sixth member of the party who had left her chair at the opposite end of the board, from her mother, and now stood at the foot of the Perugino Madonna, from whose sheenless surface her face was just withdrawn, as she returned the attention of the company and spoke. It was Helen Lorimer herself.

A very inattentive observer of the human face and form would have been arrested by the figure before us, and his interest would have noted the enhancement given to both by dress and action. A gown of blue silk bound with a belt of meshed gold, held by a Chinese buckle framing a carved, apple-green jadeite, the waist fitting loosely and falling away from an uncovered neck encircled by a thrice wound necklace of pearls, with sleeves slightly epanché, trimmed with a gold thread, and covering tightly closed undersleeves of Irish lace, that were kept to the wrists by two hyacinth bracelets, arrayed this unusual person; and, as the observer’s eyes traveled upward to the face his admiration might have passed through various phases of approval, wonder, or delight, according to his years, and the temperamental warmth of his appreciation of a woman’s beauty. The face was moulded in ample lines, it carried the impress of generous impulses, it was full and strong, but in no measure lost thereby the imprint of a delicate and lovely femininity. Soft folds of dark brown hair, gathered at the back of the head in a chignon, and plaited over the forehead in rather high folds, were decorated by two side combs of filagree gold enriched with garnets, between which and over the chignon itself rose a twig of silver, jewelled with red tourmalines. The hair so sumptuously arranged became the lovely visage it framed. The noticeable impression of its shortness was caused by the full cheeks deeply colored and wearing the complexion of the south, but, that observation passed, the mind fastened upon the glowing and tender eyes, that, by some habit of their owner, at moments half shut, as if in reverie, and then opened slowly with ravishing smiles that played around them, and lingered long enough to permit the parted mouth to close, and reveal its rosy cushions, which did not become voluptuously weak, but formed themselves into an organ fitted for speech and for caresses. The nose was straight and firm, not pronounced, not lending to the face the repugnant sense of intellectualism; the ears were small and shell-like, barely detected beneath the encompassing hair; her hands, raised in description, were perhaps characterized by strength, perhaps a little broad, but finely veined, long fingered, facile, and gracious, and wearing, as she stands under the madonna, two rings, on the right hand, a spinel solitaire and a diamond marquise. And her voice?—that most excellent thing—it completes our capitulation! It is the mingled tones of a rich contralto and the lower registers of the soprano, perhaps it was too sweet and only seemed to gain the requisite steadiness of authority, when raised in pitch, and urged by some dominant emotion. The whole composition was one of character and physical charm, with the accompanying color values of artistic dress and a noble environment.

“Yes,” said the voice in which was vibrant a reminiscent joy, “it was at Florence that father saw the advertisement of the sale of this picture. I remember the evening that, as the sun embrowned the Palazzo Vecchio, in a gorgeous sunset over the distant Piedmont hills, we drove to the auction room in the Via Brunelleschi, and found the room crowded with a discordant mixture of English, French, Italians, and a few rather timid Americans upon whom however, the discrete auctioneer placed his hopes of establishing a profitable standard of value for his pictures. It was amusing enough. Father was determined to have the picture because I told him I liked it,” and here the eyes drooped, and then the play of smiles, “but he ran against an equally determined Englishman. I think he must have had a daughter who liked it too. Well the auctioneer was in a frenzy of happiness trailing his bait before two such promising prizes—when suddenly there were no more bids,” the laugh again, “and then I saw that the Englishman and father had recognized each other; they made some signal and declined of be used against each other for the auctioneer’s advantage. And the last bid was not from either father or the Englishman. The owner of the picture had made it himself. The picture was not sold that evening; in reality, the owner was its purchaser, but the next day the auctioneer came to father and said something about the ‘regrettable incident’ and offered it to father at his own terms. And so it came to America.”

Miss Lorimer had returned to her seat and the company again readjusted themselves to their former positions. We may pause a moment to make the individuals of this company better known. The cardinal was the recently elected prelate Monsignor Fenton of Newark, N. J., the tall man with his wife, Count and Countess Schinazi of Hungary, and the handsome young American, Professor Dale of the New York City college, a philosopher in his own behalf, and the instructor of metaphysical youth.

“An entertaining and serviceable story indeed,” said the cardinal as he touched his lips with the Chartreuse in a sparkling thimble of red and gold, “but I expected you would let us know what reference that had to the subject nearest to my own heart—the subjection of the Church in Italy, which my daughter,” and the speaker half oblivious of the rest turned to Helen Lorimer with a paternal gesture of affection, “is a subject not lightly considered by yourself.”

Miss Lorimer leaned back in her chair, a tide of color deepened in her face, an interior light added a stranger power of beauty to her face, seeming to issue from her eyes, and she assumed such an ardor of expectancy that the young professor gazed at her with a deliberate and not altogether courteous absorption. Her seriousness quickly disappeared, she moved forward, and raising the cordial to her lips invited the group in a tone of raillery to drink in a bond of secrecy.

“Yes, I have a secret and you shall know it, but what the Cardinal, I think, wishes you all to hear is something that happened after father bought the picture.”

The cardinal demurred, just a trifle, saying that “he had not had the story so much in mind, as some discussion of the savage intolerance of the enemies of the Church, a topic of some interest to Miss Lorimer and himself, and not distantly connected with the secret Miss Lorimer referred to,” and the prelate again turned to the Chartreuse appreciatively, and smiled at the matron at his side.

Julieta interrupted, “Tell the story, Helen; I remember it faintly, but I do recall the excitement it threw your father in, and how quickly it ended our visit in Florence. That was ten years ago; how time flies!” and a shadow of pain, that all noticed, crossed the speaker’s face, vanishing almost before seen, as she with a gesture of encouragement looked up again at her daughter.

The Countess Schinazi raised her glasses inquiringly, and then touched the arm of her husband who had been subjected to the same entrancement which kept the young American speechless, and wondering; “Alfred, ten years ago we were at the baths at Carlsbad, and don’t you remember,” she dropped the glasses and tapped her dreaming spouse a little more sharply on the shoulder, who turned to her with the vanishing smile undergoing a peculiar expansion that threw the lower portion of his physiognomy into an ocean of creases; “we were at dinner with the young Misses Tarbox, when their brother came in and said there was a report that Robert Lorimer had been killed in Florence? Can’t you recall that?” and the tap became so sharp a punctuation in his side, that Count Schinazi exploded volubly; “Veree vell, my dear, veree vell. It was an occasion of some interest to me. I svallowed a peach pit.” The laugh was general, the count’s chronic risibility developed to his eyebrows, and the countess oscillated with pleasure.

“It is evident that the story must be disposed of,” continued Miss Lorimer, and her eyes moved pleasantly from the professor to the cardinal, and back again lingering, it might have been observed, a little longer on the former, “You see father, after he had finished with the auctioneer, went back to the sales-room to give some directions as to the packing and address, and to be quite sure that the picture he had really bought, would be the one which would be shipped. Pardon,” turning with a deprecatory smile to her Hungarian guests, “the intimation, but these mistakes have occurred. Next to the sales-room there had been a meeting of anarchists the night previous, and somehow one of the speakers had alluded to the fact that a rich American, an oppressor of the poor in his own country, had bought at the auction then going on, an expensive painting of the Pope, which in his opinion should be destroyed, and not be permitted to go to a new land, to spread the seeds of superstition. Those were his very words, as reported in the Florentine papers;” the cardinal flushed, and he reviewed the company with a hasty and indignant glance; “Father identified the painting, and later in the day watched its removal. A little remnant of the anarchistic meeting was present as the picture came out from the house, and as it was put on the wagon to be taken away these men, as if by prearrangement rushed on the men carrying it, and driving them off, began to hammer and hack at the box, shouting, ‘death to the enemy of our country,’” the cardinal’s eyes were now riveted on the fair woman, who was herself conscious of his inspection, “Father saw the melee, and ran among them, denouncing the outrage. Incensed at the interruption the marauders attacked him, and he was knocked down and kicked, and then the gendarmes flew to the spot, and the demonstration was over, with the culprits in the hands of the police. Father appeared against them and they were fined. That is the story.”

“Ignorance inflamed by malice, flattering itself with the empty nostrums of a shallow and conceited pedantry, torments—and will torment—the church,” was the sententious reflection of the cardinal.

“And yet,” broke in the Professor, whose voice while very clear, with the best enunciation of an American scholar, had a most musical quality, a peculiar fluty cadence that caught the ear quickly; it was not lost on the cardinal, and it brought a stare on the countess’s face that meant worlds; “and yet, is not the church much to blame for the enmity it provokes; has it wisely construed its responsibility to the advance of human knowledge? Was it sagacious, or, less obsequiously, was it just, to excommunicate Father Alfred Loisy at the instigation of the superior of the Jesuits, at the beginning of the last century, when the conflict raged over the attitude of the church towards what was contemptuously termed modernism? The vulgar tirades of street agitators, and the taunts of mere worldlings are indeed despicable, but must the church remain impregnable to thought?”

“The church,” answered the cardinal, who was now thoroughly aroused, and who, as he spoke, kept his eyes fastened on Helen Lorimer, “is impregnable to guesses which pass for thought. It never forgets its mission or its commission, one is to save the world—as far as it can—the other is a divine consecration which keeps it imperturbably within its office amid the turmoil and the tempests of contemporary arguments. What is modernism? It has been a texture of speculations, and practically, as far as the church antagonizes it, it has meant the dethronement of God, so far as his creative functions are involved, and its exculpation is what it is pleased to call the testimony of the rocks. Nothing in physics or chemistry is alien to religious feeling, but the process of detraction and subtraction which reads Evolution for God is intolerable. Against a determinate evolution the church may have little objection; it is itself an example of determinate evolution. Newman showed that.”

“Pardon me, but I tink,” interjected the Count, while the countess viewed him with an irrepressible pride, “I tink that the church is as you say here in America all right. But I tink it is veery old and just a leetle sick. It might, I tink, as you say in America ‘get a fresh hold’ if the Pope came right here, here in these states, vere he might be, as you say in America, a leetle more chesty, more independent, more free, more, what you say, ‘on the job.’”

Julieta smiled, the countess frankly laughed, Helen looked musingly at her plate, the professor was mystified, the cardinal glanced an instant at the speaker with a fleeting expression of scorn, and the count himself, plainly a comedian, kept the vestiges of his smile forcibly confined to the corners of his mouth.

Again the cardinal spoke and again he directed his remarks to the professor, while his eyes sought those of Helen Lorimer.

“As a metaphysician are you quite sure that the reports of your senses are real, that the so-called phenomena of the world are indubitably, profoundly, essentially true. Is a cartload of bones in the Cretaceous as really as much of a fact as the thirst and asking of your own soul, as the hunger after righteousness, for which there can be no permanent assuagement outside of the postulate of God, and some sort of authorized convention between him and man?”

The professor turned to his critic, and said with a smile that was urbanity itself, “My dear cardinal, as a metaphysician I am not averse to regarding the world and the reports of our senses from several points of view, but as a natural human being I unquestionably bow to the requirements of my environment and have no more doubt as to the reality of all that geology tells us than I have of the desirable existence of our hostess,” bowing to Julieta, “or the charm of her daughter, or the necessary functions of your own zealous service to those of your faith, and I think that the church misjudges her prerogatives if she regards the cartload of bones from the Cretaceous with anything else than the gravest interest, and is prepared to accept their witness to something, as sacredly as she now ascribes meaning to the words of revelation.”

The cardinal fidgetted a little, fingering his chartreuse, and audibly murmured, “Philosophy inside a classroom and common sense outside of it, are, it seems, to be irreconcilable aspects of life to the end of the chapter.”

It was then that the voice of Miss Lorimer rich and full, captured the ears of the disputants as she leaned over towards the professor with a smile of reconciliation; “My friends, while the fruit is being served to you, let me monopolize your attention to the confession of a secret of mine own, which the cardinal knows about, and which curiously the count has most recklessly invaded, though I bear him no ill will on that account,” and she extended her hand deprecatingly towards that pleased personage.

“I am sure ze company vill be much in my debt Mees Lorimer, if I haf ze honor to have forced you, as you say in the politic, to, to disgorge,” and the count with an ineffable grin of amusement and satisfaction over his verbal conquest leaned back in his chair, while the countess in a tone of petulant cajolery, waved at him with her glasses, saying, “Really, Schinazi, you are too ridiculous,” a reproach which developed the count’s smile as far as the ends of his twisted moustache.

The chairs were drawn somewhat closer to the table and Miss Lorimer continued, “Doesn’t it seem true to you all that occasions are created to be used, and that those who use them make history. An opportunity missed means a disfigured, or abortive, at least, record perhaps for an individual, perhaps for a nation. Now, perhaps I will offend you, Count, it seems to me that Europe is growing very old, that its interest is in its memories; its energy is traditional only. A breath would destroy it. The chastening power of revolution has been felt there, but since 1790 no strong and lasting currents of feeling have done much to change its political surface. Russia is hopelessly inert, stiffened into inaction after its anxieties at the beginning of the last century. Life there is a routine, death a release. Faith has vanished because faith in living, in thinking, in being, in doing has vanished too. It is a tomb of ruins, peopled by sacristans, threaded by tourists: is it not a rubbish heap, in which by dint of digging one can find mementoes of greatness, but where any splendors of the spirit no longer can be described, much less felt? Is it not wrong to leave the fountain head of our religion—yours and mine, Cardinal—in a choked up and littered field, where its waters of healing and life run the serious risk of being hidden in the dust of neglect and the refuse of abuse? My secret, friends, is to bring the Pope to this land of ours where life, movement, action, progress, ideals, thought, play over every thing and where even the things we hate or oppose have color and look alive?”

The silence that followed this announcement was a tribute to its novelty, and the listeners appeared to be taking note of their sensations, as if wondering to what extent they either cared for it, or approved it. A slightly whimsical smile of interrogation rested on Miss Lorimer’s face, as she looked at the Count, and perhaps it was in response to that which made that person first break the silence, just a little disconcerting to the last speaker.

“I tink, Mees Lorimer, that Europe iz not a charnel house as you suggest nor edzactly a grave. It iz old, it iz a leetle, as you say, played out. It iz tired. A good many peoples haf lived and died there, and it iz monotinous to go on doing ze same thing so long. I tink the trouble just now in Europe iz that she go to sleep and haf nightmares.” The Countess glowing abundantly as she watched with transparent happiness her husband move along the slippery path of his elocution, led the laugh, “But it vill vake up; it iz imposs—ible dot someting not happen—and soon veery quvick. Dere vill be what you call a ‘meex-up,’ and den de Europe spring up, and shout, and jump up, and cry Allons; I tink so.”

Professor Dale who had eagerly watched the count with not a trace of amusement, answered across the table with his eyes still seeking the count’s,

“Few things could be stranger than the present stupor of Europe. It is asleep; it has the sleeping sickness. Fifty years ago in 1950 it looked as if its toy game of kings and queens, and the rattle of its tin soldiers was coming near an end and the people were responsively rising to new opportunities. But it passed as a shower passes in the night, and then deeper, deeper, the spell of a hypnotic apathy falls, and we hear only its snores, unless as the Count Schinazi intimates it occasionally screams at a bad dream.”

“Theodore, just the other day,” it was the pleasantly modulated voice of Julieta, “read me a strange impeachment of Europe. It said that Europe had become paralyzed; music and painting and literature had come to America, and it pictured an ancient hearthstone in an artist’s studio with chairs and instruments and easels exquisitely made, and with a fire burning with a comforting invitation, but with no artists, no hands to guide the strings or the brushes, and only an old janitress looking curiously in at the half open door, while her cat strayed forward and slept at the fire’s edge.”

“I don’t pretend to be able to talk about such things,” alertly interjected the Countess, “but really, you know, I feel that Europe is a play ground, a big show, an expensive continental museum with regimentals and dressed things walking up and down and rattling their spurs and saluting, amid splendid old palaces, and lakes with charmed boats and rivers, fixed up with castles, and all kept going you see, as long as America pays for the machinery and the orchestra; Bless me! I shouldn’t say such things in the Count’s hearing, except that as a breeder of Game Cocks in America he still honors a line of warriors;” the malignant sally, that practically put the entire company in a quandary, was not resented by the Count, whose smile escaping its seclusion behind his curled moustache, as if with the levity of an unusual freedom, spread to the roots of his hair and the back of his ears. This benignity kept every thing in place, and it was the intellectual accent of the Cardinal that next solicited attention.

“Europe to-day at the beginning of the twenty-first century has the rigor mortis. Its genius and talent follows the incentive of gain. They come here and they thrive. One hundred years have administered to us an enormously enlarged culture and it insatiably pulls from Europe every promising blade of creative power. The stimulus of applause, of an augmented audience, and in no vulgar sense is here also. The battle ground of opinion is here. Our hard and boisterous crudities are passed, we are no longer menaced with alien segregations, the ethnic problem has vanished, not altogether by solution, but in nature, like some mythic tree, we bear many kinds and many colors of flowers, as it were; a modified Italian—but still Italian—rose here, a changed French—but still French—lily there, a new Hebraic artichoke—but still Jewish—on this bough, and a less redolent German hibiscus—but still German—on that, and all fed, and rejoicingly fed, from the same national root. We have become cosmic, and in our land the final clash of the conflict of opinions approaches, unless indeed this fagged out earth is doomed to an eternal struggle with the battle grounds changed from continent to continent. Science and Religion offer their clues to the central mysteries. The measure of their values is determined here. I think Miss Lorimer’s plea should be respected. Let the Pope—the Head of the Church—come to close quarters with his antagonist, the Apollyon of material Lust, and of intellectual denial.”

“Thank you, Cardinal,” it was again the voice of the first speaker, “I almost thought that my audacious fancy, bold as it was, had been covered up, and thereby just a little abashed, by reflections that were intended to keep us from considering it at all. Every one was jumping the traces, and running a field. Yes! shall we bring the Pope to America?”

“Quevstion! quevstion!” murmured the Count, like the impatient voters at a primary, while the cardinal with an exorbitant curiosity painting itself upon his expressive countenance, looked around the table, the goal of his scrutiny evidently being the Professor, and the unrebuked silence continued, until, as if answering the voiceless implication that it was he who should break it, the Professor said; “Yes! the challenge has been often given; Let it be accepted, where the swords of both duellists are near enough to each other to not only strike fire, but to give the coup de grace.”

This truculence was perhaps a little harsh for the occasion, and Professor Dale felt its awkwardness; he turned blushing to his neighbor; “Pardon, Miss Lorimer, but the Cardinal is an uncompromising foe, and I suppose,” leaning to the Cardinal, “the Church would prefer death to sufferance?”

“Hardly,” answered the prelate, “the Church has often prospered upon little more than toleration, but on the other hand if it came to Science, asking for sufferance, it would be told to close its doors.”

“But vy! vy!” and the Count’s voice rose with a compromising seriousness, “dere is room for every ting, dis and dis, and dat and dat, and so ve grow a beeg, beeg, rug, vith a tousand colors and tousand threads, and on it the centuries come and go, and eet nefer, nefer wear out,” the ardent Hungarian had an inspired look, and his wife who apparently compensated him for her snubs, by an unimpaired adulation whenever he opened his mouth, became visibly grave, and dispensed a glance around the table, as if in admonition of his captivating simile.

“Well! Speaking of rugs,” said the Cardinal dryly “they are associated in my mind with Turks, and Turks are not the most desirable citizens; they certainly are not members of the Church, and a national rug of a thousand threads and colors is only another metaphor for chaos.”

“You mean Cardinal,” said the Professor, “that the Count’s promiscuous carpet, would never harmonize in color or design with the tapestries of the Church?”

“Perhaps,” gaily rejoined Miss Lorimer, “I can twist the Count’s rug into an image that suits the Cardinal and myself better. It shall have a thousand colors and a thousand threads—ten thousand for that matter—but they will not make a miscellaneous and inconsequent woof; they will form a beautiful and gracious figure,” and the lady smiled as if there then floated before her mind’s eye something that fled from the profanation of a name.

The company rose with probably a different conclusion as to the value and meaning of Miss Lorimer’s disclosure, resting in the mind of each. But it dwelt with a singular poignancy of interest with two, and one of these, at least, lavished upon it a wealth of improving comment.

Scarcely had the group with gliding step reached the entrance of the grand chamber, and the attendant had drawn aside the curtains which revealed as they parted the noble stairway descending to a lower plane, constituted by a wide hall now enveloped in a golden glow, that descended from an electric corona, almost two stories above it; from which again suites of rooms extended to the right and to the left,—scarcely, had this moment arrived, when a resounding rap smote the front door of the hall, and, as a servant darted towards this entrance, the door itself was pushed from the outside, and the tall figure of a handsome elderly man entered. The face of the stranger was disturbed, and he flung down his walking stick with a gesture of despair. The next moment he raised his eyes to the arrested guests, and repressing his impatience moved to the foot of the stairway and spoke;

“Ah! my friends you must pardon my absence. It was not intentional. I see too well what pleasures I have missed. Of course Helen explained to you that I was called away down town to attend a meeting of directors of the bank, who are negotiating with the city for the latter’s accommodation of a loan. The meeting was interrupted by an alarm, that proved only too true, that the socialists had started a tremendous riot on the East side, and that fire, incendiary in origin, and attributed to them, had broken out in several quarters. Your lecture hall, Helen, where you have attempted your propaganda of the Divine Mission of Wealth, is burned down, and those scoundrels of The Beehive have doubtless had a hand in it. It was a compliment gratuitously offered to yourself, but I think it has in it the darker meaning of a menace. Come to the porch and see the signs of the Future.”

It was Theodore Lorimer, Helen’s uncle, who spoke, and the company, quickly assenting to this invitation hastened down the steps, and moved out upon the front terrace, lit by the electric globes upon their pillars. From this point an actual fire could not be descried, but the skies south and east beyond the intervening ridges were plainly illuminated, the light rising and falling, and at its highest intensity, as it scored the low lying banks of clouds with reflected flashes, it revealed the summits of high buildings that momentarily spanned the firelight beyond them with black columns.

Theodore Lorimer led the company to the railing of the enclosure, and it so happened that the Professor found himself standing beside Miss Lorimer, between two of the marble pillars. Her face was discernible and it bore the marks of a kind of subdued anguish. She looked at him and pointed to the horizon growing more and more lurid; “Are these lights indeed signs of the Future as my uncle has said?”

Something intensely tender burned in the Professor’s eyes as he answered softly; “Miss Lorimer I do not know—but when the Pope comes we shall see whether they go out or whether they burn higher.”

“Ah!” answered Miss Lorimer, “You mock us,” and she came closer to him with her hands clasped.

“Mockery!” he rejoined, “Mockery! Surely mockery ill suits one who may become a supplicant, perhaps a penitant,” and the professor’s voice had a rueful accent, and his face looked at hers with ever so slight a glance of passion, from which she turned away with the faintest possible sigh of disappointment.

CHAPTER IV

THE SUICIDARIUM

Tom Ratler had been almost a week at the Kohinoor, and as yet no intimation had come to him that he was wanted in the vast gregarious city, that grew to him more and more monstrous, and rapidly put on the form and functions of a maelstrom; a maelstrom where life, property, reputation, were engulfed, again momentarily to reappear, as if the regurgitation of the whirlpool shot its human victims back to the surface, to enjoy a new glimpse of respectability before they finally were sucked under, forever carried away in underground sluices to the merciful and impersonal ocean of oblivion.

Or else at other instants the city seemed to him a kaleidoscope with its human occupants, its myriad fancies of design and architecture, its dissipations, its gluttonies, even its piety and all the agencies of its philanthropic life thrown round in a spinning circle, confusedly glimmering and changing color, from which too arose an accompanying roar of voices, not unfrequently punctured with cries of pain, not always without passages of music.

Tom had made friends cautiously, from a sense of danger, and with some agitated memories of what he had read in books. At first the number of social advances to him were suspiciously numerous, and he somewhat indiscriminately classed them as a concerted conspiracy upon his pocket book. That indispensable support had already considerably shrunken, vanquished into a sort of querulous obedience to the gestures of necessity in the glittering Kohinoor and to the no less unavoidable gestures of its dazzling occupants. He later recognized that his own personality, with a good face and the evidences of a trained and equipped body, had much to do with these social advances. Among the friends or acquaintances whom he, by a companionable sense of mere liking, had chosen as more exactly intimates was a young man, who confided to him at a moment of especial expansion, that he was connected, in a business way, with the most extraordinary of the many features of the multivarious city. It was nothing less than a suicidarium of which Tom had heard something from the Mayor’s secretary, and which he knew was one of the forbidden extravagances in New York. The information given to him by his young friend, was to the effect, that enough people who wished to die for diverse reasons, connected with all sorts of experiences could be found in the City to assure the maintenance of this grewsome institution. The young man was himself engaged in the work of making a peculiar heavy and lethal gas or vapor, which was used in accomplishing the appalling end. Tom naturally recoiled from the horrible idea of ending life, and could hardly believe the story of his friend that these outfits variously designed, and of varying degrees of elegance and size, had proven to be profitable enterprises, because of the exorbitant prices paid for so abhorrent and hideous a purpose. It required considerable persuasion on the man’s part to bring Tom to an acceptance of an invitation to visit the scene of this unnatural conduct.

He went with some misgivings, but he went at last actually fascinated by the incredible weirdness of thought, so unspeakable and strange. His friend—Edward Links, or Ned—took him by the subway far up to the end of the Island of Manhattan, at the old Kingsbridge, where the place, disguised as a shabby tenement on the outside, was situated. And as Tom approached it, somewhat separated from the other houses around it, and on the edge of the Spuyten Duyvil creek—offering, as Ned explained, a convenient way for the conveyance of the dead to their sepulture, or to the cremator—on the opposite bank—it unmistakably presented the familiar aspects of a dilapidated and almost abandoned tenement. It was a little too long, and some of its dilapidation looked made up for the occasion; displaced clapboards, perforations and disfiguring splashes of mud applied to its sides, the forcibly wrenched doors, the broken windows, broken beyond any possible reconcilement with their human uses, all gave it a rather contrived appearance. This might not have been obtruded upon the casual passer-by, though men and women were moving in and out of it, but it was detected by Tom quite quickly, and he asked his friend if people couldn’t see it was a “blind,” especially the trained and unsympathetic optics of the police.

“Well yes and no! You see it’s this way. There is a good deal of swagger in the business, and joining the majority this way means a clean spill of a thousand, or anyhow five hundred spielers. Now you wouldn’t believe it, but the applications are thicker than they can accommodate, sometimes. It all depends. Epidemics, failures, panics, love-matters, all work in spells, and when they happen to come together why they just run over each other to get the quietus they talk about in the playhouse. Not here. Oh no. The game is on the Q. T., and the proposals and assignments come in at the office down town. Well as I was saying it pays, and it pays the police to have a kind of blind eye for the hock shop; that’s the name for the outfit here, though it goes among the squad as The Oblivion, a pretty name, but nothing to the point.

“I don’t so much care for the job, but it pays good, and I don’t have to see things, but just switch on gas and wait. It’s risky. Every mother’s son of us would be pinched and run to jail, if they nabbed us. What helps the whole affair is a kind of talk that goes on now in certain papers and journals about the emptiness of life, and a funny fancy that they all come back and get better places. It isn’t a bit bad how they do it. You’ll see, and I guess that some kinds of men and women, who have just about squeezed all they know how to get out of life, get a sort of faint heartedness and sickness, and kinder fetch up here with a jerk, bunch it together, and let ’er go. Horrible ain’t it? But it’s slick, slicker than a wet rat. You just see. It’s a kind of a dream.”

They came to the piazza that extended along the front of the slovenly domicile, its floor rent and gaping, and some of the pillars supporting its roof weakened by decay, while the windows and blinds broken, torn, and dismantled completed the rather overwrought imitation of poverty and disorder. As Ned Links approached the place, his companion noticed his nervous inspection of the neighborhood, and when with a whistle he turned to the tenement, and stepped within one of its open hallways, Tom saw to his astonishment a slight unevenness in its floor move upward, exposing a trap door, and beneath it descending steps. Tom felt indeed he had embarked upon an adventure appropriately theatrical and strange, enough so to satisfy his romantic fancies, and even the mingled odors reaching his nostrils from the aperture, in which a kind of fragrance was not unnoticed, added a peculiar zest of danger.

Ned caught the door of the opening and held it up as he motioned to Tom to descend. Tom, with no misgivings of danger, but with a slightly sickened heart obeyed, and observed a female figure rather carelessly dressed, or less equivocally, rather immodestly undressed, going before him. It was her hands that had lifted the door for their entrance. The female did not turn her head but she held above it a small glass lamp, which vouchsafed sufficient light to enable her visitors to follow, and it was not too dim for Tom’s observation, that the woman before him was comely and unabashed. Her occasional backward glances were lighted by very becoming smiles, and Tom, under their ravishment, failed to notice that they were treading a very narrow and damp passage, and that it was leading downward upon a rather steep grade. The opportunity for such observations was suddenly checked by their reaching the end of the defile, and stopping abruptly at a door. The door opened, and Tom, with Ned upon his heels, and with some unmannerly pressure upon the giggling maiden, whose dishevelment became more and more pronounced, shot into a room or an enclosure before whose strange features at first dimly descried, but in an instant later revealed in a dazzlement of light, as the bacchante touched a button which sent an electric thrill into thousands of little lamps, Tom fairly gasped in astonishment.

He seemed to have walked into a bower of shrubs, flowers, and low trees, under whose protecting shade couches were carelessly distributed, while everywhere a rosy light cast its softening illumination, enchanting the eye with tinted fantasies as where he saw a stream of water lisping among rocks, just perceptibly stained with the pink sheen, or where a marble grotto, opening at the end of a gravel walk, bordered with tulips, caught on its flaring white lips the same delicate blush. Ned and the girl withdrew a little, while they watched the bewildered stranger, turning with new wonder to the points of this sunken garden, and Ned was not loth to intimate his irrepressible satisfaction by facetious antics behind Tom’s back, some of which could only be described as evidences of his personal infatuation for his companion.

But Tom was not long intimidated by his strange surroundings, and had already begun to walk forward over a yellow gravelled path that wound through a sward magically gleaming with a light that appeared to radiate from its innumerable blades of grass. He had hardly gone four steps forward, when a blast of air struck him, and sent his hat whirling off among the branches of a flowering almond tree, while his discomfiture was hailed with hearty approval by the shouting Ned and the indulgent and favoring maiden. Tom received another surprise. He sprang to the flowering almond shrub that looked gracefully real, and on whose crowded flowers the rosy light fell, imparting a fairy glamour to its petals. His hat was caught in the slender limbs, and Tom raised his hand to recover it, clasping the tree trunk for that purpose. The tree trunk under the pressure of his body swayed forward and broke, while Tom rolled over in the confusion of boughs, and the tumbling counterfeit entrapped him in wire, strips of painted linen, paper corollas, wax leaves, in short the paraphernalia of a clever imitation, put up consummately, and only one part of the wondrous mimicry about him. This last incident was greeted with more boisterous shouts by Ned and the young woman, who not loth to increase the stranger’s dismay pelted him with theatrical pebbles picked up from the banks of the theatrical rivulet where indeed the sibilant water belonged to nature, but where everything else was an artful disguise of paper, plaster, and pigment.

Tom extricated himself and in great good humour rejoined his friends. He realized now that he had entered a subterranean theatre which as he gazed around him assumed the proportions of a beautiful picture. Its deceptive nature disappeared in the sickly radiance, while the artifice of invention had been exhausted in completing a fascinating illusion. And the picture had been skillfully composed. It represented a blending of features whose mixture, unified under the strange purpose of arresting life, lulled the spirit, through the senses, into a dreamy languor. By means of the hushed and crowded visions thus summoned or inwardly created, the surrender of the will was gently accomplished. The opiate of a luxurious feeling, swayed ever so discretely into an anticipation of delights just dawning in the Life to Come, dwelt with increasing pressure on the swooning and dying clients of this strange hostelry. For the means and the methods were ruthlessly explained to Tom by his new friend, and Tom responding intuitively to the more poetic suggestions around him, almost resented Ned’s commonplace coarseness, and rude matter-of-fact indifference. To Ned the Suicidarium was a business episode, and the awful ghastliness of its work, a detail of commercial manipulation, so hardened had he become to its tragic consequences. To Tom’s less sodden nature, while he shrank with healthy repulsion from its meaning, yet as the scene grew into a congruous whole—artificial as it was—the mystery of its work somehow reflected a wonderfulness upon it all, as the exhalation of a perfume sometimes makes a poisoned air salubrious.

The deep pit lay in the dolomitic limestone of the north end of Manhattan Island, at a point not far removed from the splendid encrustation of Carrara upon the Inwood Ridge. It had been deeply dug, and its lateral extensions stretched far beyond the limits of the sordid tenement that, like a rag upon a jewelled shawl, covered its entrance from the upper streets. It combined the features of a Japanese garden and a Grecian theatre, and it was enclosed by the rising walls of stone, up which its numerous lamps sent streaks and fluttering bands of light, lost at last somewhere above in a canopying sky, wherein the implanted and clustering spots of light simulated a waiting Heaven. The Japanese garden, with bridges, dwarfed cedars, clambering wistarias, painted hedges, yellow walks, and white buddhas perched upon iron trellises, was carefully developed. Stone seats under overhanging peach and plum trees were draped with a green gauze that invited the rueful guests to await there their sepulchral summons, closing their eyes delightedly upon a picture of shimmering loveliness. Further towards one side, the floor of the apartment abruptly fell a few feet, and here was a marble amphitheatre almost bare of vegetation, lustrous in its polished whiteness, holding banks of gray stone seats, and descending to an arena of colored pebbles, beyond which again a stage inclosed in glass was seen, now empty and dark.

Tom and Ned, the latter encircling the lascive lass who leaned upon him with an embracing arm about his neck, stood at the back of the highest tier of seats, and here Ned poured out the torrent of his explanations.

“You see Tom these quitters come here at night, and they have a banquet just below there on those colored sands and they eat and drink, about as they like, and a good many take the booze pretty straight, and aren’t half more than all there when the gas hits ’em. Others just sit around and listen to the music, and then the fans are slowly turned on—that was a fan that blew your roof off—and the gas flows in, and they get softened like, while the girls do the angel act on that stage, there behind the winders,” and Ned took a more convincing hold of the assenting lady, who presumably had something to do with the “angel act,” though there was little in her generous outlines that comported seriously with the conventional frail figures of the disembodied; “the girls come in there, and swim around with gauzy flippers on their shoulders, and there is a lot of singing, and then colored lights, and the gas keeps on, and the people grow delirious, just as though they had eaten hasheesh, and sing and talk and dance, and then they fall down any where, and they ‘pass over’ just like that,” and Ned snapped his fingers, kissed the girl, and jerked Tom to one side, and hurried him down a central corridor which led through the stone steps of the amphitheatre, and all, just as a heavy and sweetened bell slowly tolled the hour of six.

The girl ran before them and turned into the stage at a side door, which she pushed open, while Ned with gestures of despair hurried Tom away in another direction up a good copy of a ragged defile, leading to the diminutive cliff that sheltered the ineffective grotto, from which issued the rippling waters of the more effective brook. At the top of this alpine ascent, Ned shoved Tom into a cavity which proved to be a kind of trap door leading into a laboratory which was the work shop of the chemist and where the lethal gas was made, whose poisonous vapors inundated the spaces they had both passed through, carrying its occupants away on the waves of a vision-making, sense deadening ecstacy. For Ned explained as he moved between the big bell-jars, and the stills, and the huge beakers, heaped to their brims with green and yellow chemicals, that an obscure man had dreamed long on the problem of manufacturing a gas that would be both fatal to life when inhaled, and intoxicating to the senses. This gloomy plodding man buried in his experiments and living upon almost nothing, often an object of pity to his neighbors, who would force him from his crucibles and furnaces to take nourishment, had at last achieved the grand result. He had formed a new organic vapor which had all these properties, and yielded a pleasant fragrance as well. It soothed as a narcotic, it stimulated as an intoxicant, it killed with unswerving certainty, and as its victims inhaled it it roused a fierce hunger for its subtle influence. “And” concluded Ned, “this hock-shop is not the only one in the city that uses it. It just cost a million of dollars to get it from the old man. Funny. He dropped his chemistry and lives like a lord on Fifth Avenue to-day. He ain’t much to see, but he certainly has the boodle,” and the reflective youth sighed with unconcealed envy.

He was loading the green and yellow chemicals from the beakers into the stills and lighting the bunsen burners beneath them, which slowly heating the mixture, evolved the colorless gas or vapor which was then conducted into large chambers, where at first mixed with air it entered the suicidarium, and was gradually increased in strength by cutting off the air supply, until the unadulterated flood of its flow filled the chamber, and the unfortunates who had become tired of their lives, passed away, drowned in its invisible bath.

Tom asked Ned if the suicidarium was about to be used and Ned, absorbed in his task, nodded his head affirmatively, and pointing to a little recess at the end of the narrow and lengthened room, at length spoke; “Yes it’s off to-night. You can see the whole shindig. You won’t forget it in a hurry either. Come in back here, have a snack, and then you just squeeze up in that corner, and flatten your nose on the window pane and the whole show is yours.”

Tom shuddered at the idea of this abhorrent spectacle, but he felt too the fascination of the unique experience, and at the moment nothing would have induced him to relinquish the opportunity.

The snack proved to be a very substantial meal of steak, potatoes, beer and pie, and when Tom and Ned had done full justice to it under the repeated admonitions of the latter, that they would be there some time, and Tom might need a little extra strength for the ordeal, they both returned to the laboratory, where now one additional helper had taken his place, and Tom was put at the small aperture covered with glass, from which at a most advantageous height he commanded the whole Garden of Death.

It was now about eight o’clock, just the time in the upper sun-lit world, when, as Tom thought, the twilight was settling down over the city, and the blaze of the electric arcs were spanning the streets, and the crowds were pressing in eager haste to enjoy the dissipations of the night, while his hotel, the magnificent Kohinoor, rose towering on the sky like a colossal coruscation. As these reminders chased through his mind he noticed the door at which a few hours ago Ned and himself had entered the place, open, and a group of men and women—the latter young and pleasing—came in. The men set about the work of examining the garden, adjusting here and there disturbed spots, repairing breaks, smoothing the scarfs over the benches, testing the lights, opening and shutting the fan doors, until Tom saw them come to the broken almond tree of his amusing surprise. Here there was an obvious astonishment and disgust, and then their movements quickened, and bringing in new material and working with zeal, the reorganized almond tree again swayed life-like before the breeze of the fan, and its pink petals again fell softly on the green turf, or floated upon the ludicrous little brook. Somehow now too a change in relation to the whole trick came over Tom’s mind, and the prettiness of the scene changed into something hollow and horrible, so that he almost was inclined to leave his place and escape if he could. The confined and excavated garden which at first, under the shock of discovery, had filled him with a childish delight, and had actually, so adroitly were its characteristic proportions arranged, given him an impression of size, now became shrunken, almost contemptible in the light of its unnatural uses. It was a scintillating painted harlequinade of deceits, a little theatre of diseased emotions, in which the morbid emaciated victims of self-inflicted despair sought a foolish and wicked relief.

He felt like rushing away, and moved back to ask Ned how he might get out of the horrible hole. But Ned was there at his side. He opened a window and told Tom to look out:

“The gas doesn’t go in yet. First they have a banquet. You can see and hear them from here. Then when they have got through, the dances of the angels begin on that stage, behind the glasses, and then the gas creeps in; they get intoxicated, and slowly as it grows denser and thicker they faint and die. They’re coming in now.”

Tom leaned out of the little casement, and as the light glowed again in full power over the garden, from the pink shades, while all the glinting lights within the garden shone, he noticed about ten people passing down the gravel walk among the counterfeit trees and plants towards the petty amphitheatre. They went down the steps of its central corridor, and sat on the benches waiting for the banquet. A table had been placed upon the colored pebbles, in the space before the stage, and it was rapidly being covered with cold meats, fruits, and wines. The decorations and service partook of the theatrical bravado of the rest of the place. There were silver cornucopias, spilling grapes, oranges, figs, and nuts; silver urns filled with wine, silver goblets, platters carrying cold meats, savory pickles, olives, cheeses, jellies and pastes and small tureens of cordials. White bread was heaped upon silver bowls and flowers were thrown over everything, covering even the floor upon which the table stood. The chairs were placed, and the ten strange creatures, who thus prepared their own doom, took them in silence. Tom could have almost screamed in his desperation of horror, but he simply clutched Ned, and the two young men, to whom life seemed so good and desirable, watched the little group in a stupor of attention. There were indeed just ten. Tom noted them very distinctly. First at one end of the table sat a withered sickly old man who was helped to this place by a young woman, on whose face Tom thought he detected a choreal twitching, and a moody stare that betokened madness; next to this young woman sat two masculine wrecks—both men of middle age, their anaemic faces pallid beneath the lights, and their heads turning bald, and their listless hands moving fitfully from their faces to their legs, as they slapped and rubbed the latter, and grimacing between themselves provoked each other to a dreary sort of smiling, by jokes that failed to reach the two young men.

Beyond this precious pair who seemed hardly to belong to the grim company, was a heavy browed, thick haired young man, who kept his eyes down, his head resting on his hands, and who seemed buried in his own somber thoughts. He showed a handsome face to his two attentive watchers, at such times as he lifted his eyes from the table and looked backward over the amphitheatre and the artificial garden. Then he seemed to smile, and he turned to his neighbor at the head of the table, opposite the sickly old man, and spoke, which caused his acquaintance to rise, and scan the spot with a very evident interest. This last guest at the feast was a shorter man with a round head, almost deprived of hair except such persistent wisps as remained over his ears, or formed a fringe above the nape of his neck. He had a curiously soured and grim face, and he squinted and seemed to feel sudden pains in his chest, if the pressure of that part of his body with both hands might be interpreted as a confession of suffering. On the opposite side of the table four more figures completed the assemblage. Of these one was a woman who seemed ludicrously misplaced in such a group. She was a fat, not uncomely person, that under less sinister auspices would have been set down by most people for a prosperous and happy mother of a family, typically bourgeoise in looks, typically commonplace, contented and impersonal. Yet there she was, and Tom shuddered to think of it. Next to her was a rather stout hard faced man who noticed no one but the little glum man at the head of the table and with whom he was evidently exchanging remarks. The glum man was short, the hard faced man tall. The two remaining members of this suicidal gathering were a couple of young people apparently in love with each other, a young man and a young woman, and whose desires to leave a world already beginning to grant them felicity struck Tom as almost more intolerably shocking than anything else in the dreadful picture.

Some of the young women who later would present their celestial evolutions on the stage to these tired souls, simulating, Tom knew not what, of the future states of spirits, were now engaged—arrayed as nymphs and who did not hesitate to accept the kisses of the men they plied with wines—in serving the table. The drinking was more conspicuous than the eating, and some—the young woman and the heavy browed young man—abstained from both. But the rest were insatiable, and even as he felt the chill of repulsion over the approaching tragedy Tom could not repress a shifting smile as he saw the fat comely woman, the glum philosopher and the hard faced hypochondriac eat and drink with a gluttonous avidity, that suggested the grotesque fancy in their minds of feeding well for a long fast. At length the spirits of the company brightened, and songs and loud talking betokened their animated condition. Even the sickly old man waved his arms and his falsetto ululations sounded a forlorn mockery of gayety. The lovers embraced each other with rapturous excitement, the glum man stood up and orated, and his broken adjurations were interrupted by the hard faced man, who smote the table with his fists, and pushed away the decanters, the goblets, and the vessels near him, in a vast effort to expand some notion of science or philosophy. The fat woman sighed, and continued to drink and the two anaemics alternately fell upon each other’s necks, or struggled to catch the flitting coryphaei as they passed about the table, adding new delicacies, or filling the empty wine jars. Only the twitching young woman, and the deep browed youth maintained any decorum, and it was the latter who at last rose, and in a deep musical voice commanded silence. Whether he was known, or whether something stirred the bacchanalian rout to think a moment, before they plunged into the dark uncertainly of Death, or whether it was the relapse of satiety and sleepiness, that caused it, the company became still, and only the voice of the speaker, sounding with a fullness, that gave to every word that escaped his lips, a peculiar resonance, was heard.

“PAIN, PAIN, PAIN; NOTHING BUT PAIN.”

Page 79.

“My friends,” he began “do you realize that to-night we shall be together for the last time in this world, and do you care to go out of it without one word to your companions, on the same journey, telling them why you leave the world at all in this suicidal way? With your permission let me at least tell you why I have come here, what motive stronger than life, places me here with you at this wretched mockery of a banquet, waiting for the death gas which we have heard kills while it intoxicates;” the voice became compellingly sweet and urgent, and the crew before him had turned their eyes up to his face, apparently really listening with interest.

The speaker continued: “To me at one time nothing seemed so shocking as death, nothing so unnatural, so hideous. To me this minute nothing seems more welcome. I hoped in success, in love, to win the bright things of the earth, as the bright things of the earth go, and I missed all. Then I turned to friendship, and my friends wounded and deserted me. I fled to religion, no voice answered my prayers, the eternal blankness of silence, of disappointment; and nightly around my couch rose only the spectres of want and desire, unsatisfied and unappeasable. The sky was as hard as brass, the earth an iron floor, the air around me without sound, I myself a puzzle or better, I think, a bubble. I could not endure the stupid drag of monotony, the abject meanness of life, its tread-mill duties, its sickening flatness, its vulgarity. I fainted at the thought of a life led in these tiresome and dusty thoroughfares of commonness, with food wrenched from the toil of the repeating days; a chain of identical dumbness from the beginning of the year to the end of it, and then on and on without alleviation, without interest, without meaning. I end it, and I end it here to-night.”

He sat down. His example moved the rest, and one by one as far as they were able or understood their purpose they told their separate stories. The sickly old man at one end of the table staggered to his feet, and by dint of support from the waiters, and incessant catching at the cloth of the table, managed to remain upright while he half screamed what he had to say: “Yes I want to go too. It’s all pain, all pain to me; aches all over me; red hot irons go through me; my feet are blazing with sores; my sides are racked with misery. I can’t walk; I can’t breathe; I can’t think. Pain, pain, pain; nothing but pain.” And he sank down doubled up, and almost dropped to the ground with a shriek.

The glum short man jumped to his feet, and stared around him with ominous scowls, that set the two anaemics off, roaring with drunken laughter. But he was not disconcerted; no one so tipsy could have been. He waved his hands, and then folded them, and stiffly leaning over the table, began: “I am a philosopher;” this, brought out with an unmistakable hiccough, gave immense amusement to the two wrecks. He continued: “I was educated to be a philosopher,” more laughter “and I know all there is to know about philosophy; but it’s a farce, it’s a damn lie, the whole of it,” a whack on the table, and a shout from the wrecks, “philosophy is a fraud, it tells nothing, it’s a patch work of guesses. I want to know, and I am going to know, and the only way to know is to go and see. See! See! See!” and the ruffled philosopher fell over on the loving couple beside him, and, hotly rejected by the boy, gathered himself together, and stumbled outward to the gray benches of the amphitheatre.

The turn came next to the hard faced man, who was less enfeebled by his potations, being in that respect a man of some endurance; he proclaimed that he was a scientific man, an explorer, an experimentalist, that he was there in that capacity then, and that he had a commission to find out the fact of another life; “For,” he went on, “I am convinced that there is a conservation of forces in the living matter of the world, just as there is in its energy, and that if the energy of life is not wearing down, we must come back to it to keep up the store of life force. That’s clear, and the chances are that when a man or a woman find out they’re not well placed, the only way to possibly improve, is to go back to the primal energy, and be projected again in some other form or place, on this earth, or anywhere else, where conditions are more acceptable. I have seen that for a long time, and I am permitted now to give it a demonstration. When I come back I announce it, and I shall be the one man—the one man” he was shouting vociferously, “the one man who has carried an experiment outside of this earth, and made a research in the world beyond the grave.”

His excitement communicated itself to the group, and even the heavy browed youth and the twitching woman accorded him a serious attention.

“That’s so, that’s so;” reiterated the anaemics, who roused themselves from a sort of connubial collapse, and standing, sang in quavering trebles a remnant of some song belonging to their most convivial days on the earth.

The effort to sing taxed the nerves and the strength of the two gilded ones, and their raucous wavering tones threw a vulgar expression into the affair which had won a weird or mournful or grotesque interest from the other participants. This contribution made it all wearisomely coarse. Dreadful as its intention was, somehow it took on to Tom a theatrical imbecility as if he were looking at the acting of puppets, who were going through some grewsome mimicry of a bad play. He had hardly thought so, when the woman with the twitching face arose and spoke in a soft voice just audible to Tom, for she turned round facing the cage where Tom and Ned were concealed, and looked at the painted picture behind her.

“You have all known trouble or sadness, but have any of you been told to die? I have. My father, dead these seven years, came to me last week, and told me he wanted me. He came with the big eyes I knew he had, and he came in my sleep, in a dream, and woke me, and as I woke I saw him standing at the foot of my bed, and he said, ‘Come! Come! You will be happier. The Other Side is a blissful sleep a long never-ending joy. Leave the world any way, but COME!’” She stepped forward and moved up the corridor of the amphitheatre into the garden and sat wearily down, on one of the benches not far from the very spot where Tom had lost his hat up the illusive almond bush.

Then there was silence, when the sickly old man poked the comely fat woman and she struggled to her feet, and said: “Vell, I go to my childer. Dot’s all.” The young couple that Tom watched with a frightful feeling that here was some mistake, and that he ought to stop it, were expected to finish this extemporaneous confession and the others stared at them questioningly.

The man stood up and became instantly dramatic. Tom riveted his eyes on him, and could scarcely believe his ears. He waved his arms in gestures, turned around to the company with ease and self-satisfaction, declaimed, postured, and ran through a cheap rhodomontade about the emptiness of life, the folly of prolonging the fight, the ease of dying under the new helps of science, and the necessity of bringing the world to a standstill by leaving it. His wife nodded her head with concurrence to all this astonishing rhapsody. And then while the attendants waited impatiently to begin the final act of this fantastic drama the egotist recited the Plaint of the Captive; it was his own title.

The insipid and hollow verses—and Ned whispered to Tom that they were taken out of a circular printed by the management of the Suicidarium—were no sooner over, than the attendants rushed in, seized the table, and removed it, preparatory to the final stage of the sinister business. The occupants of the table walked away, most of them remaining together in the amphitheatre, the heavy browed youth and the spirit-visited woman entering the garden above it alone. Then the lamps paled, music and singing apparently from the side, from a concealed organ began to softly sweep through the dimming spot, and as Ned nudged Tom in their eerie he muttered, “Pull that window, seal it up, the gas comes now,” and disappeared.

Despite the horror of his feelings Tom moved even closer to the little pane peering through to see more plainly. Suddenly the glass fronted stage glowed, and then grew startlingly bright with a purple radiance, and Tom discerned a shifting slowly emerging swarm of ballet girls, with gauzy wings oscillating and hovering from top to bottom of the scene. Among them, he felt quite certain, were a number of dolls or puppets worked in some way into a semblance of soaring angels. The picture made, with the lights thrown upon it, a curious illusion. The motion soft, sinuous, and constant, blended with the music as, in a way, its material or physical embodiment. The swaying bodies, the winding lines, the ordered movements forward and back, the clustering wings, brought into juxtaposition in shimmering canopies, the dissolving figures, sudden crushes to the front of the stage, and then precipitate flights in retreat, single graceful forms gliding in and out, all through the set phrases of a formal evolution yielded an ocular impression, that harmonized with the swelling and pulsating melodies and harmonies. This, as the exhilarating gas began to fill the garden, acted as a delicate and irresistible narcotic, bringing on the drowsy sleep, the haunted sense of coming bliss, the wild delirious, forecasts of eventful happenings, a delectation and revelry of dreams.

Tom watched intently. He could see the people moving, jumping to their feet, extending their arms, then relaxing and apparently falling down; he thought he heard cries and songs, certainly he saw the heavy browed young man, skipping absurdly along one of the gravel paths, while the woman near him flung her arms about in a strange excitement, and then rolled off, as if lifeless, in the little brook, whose petty current was dammed thereby, and the water, rising, flowed over the pasteboard scene, and trickled away to the amphitheatre. Tom’s eyes were not the only ones that observed this accident, for the water soon ceased to run, its very prosaic source in a croton pipe being at some unseen point intercepted.

The others on the amphitheatre were not all so easily observed, but it developed that the scientist—he who went to prove his commission—and the philosopher—he who went to “See”—had embraced each other and fallen, while the sickly old man sat in the comely German woman’s lap, and the young couple had remained seated and in each other’s arms. The lights faded, the gas rushed in with such overpowering force that it penetrated the secret cell where Tom stood, and the last flickering pulses of life in the suicides were brought to a standstill, and the awful act was closed.

Ned told Tom that the gas would remain in the garden for an hour or so more. Then the fans were turned on for the rest of the night, so as to thoroughly ventilate the place. Towards morning the bodies were taken away, across the creek, and there delivered to friends—if such had been designated—or cremated or buried according to the direction received beforehand by the suicidarium.

Tom and Ned got back to the upper earth by means of a ladder stretched upward through a narrow shaft. They emerged not far from the Kingsbridge road, and the first flutter of the balmy June air upon their cheeks, the fresh floating odors of the flowers wafted from the gardens of Carrara, the paling stars seen vaguely through that polarized and mystic light that shone from the city, the glad couples laughing with the gayety of the life that surged through all things, the glowing lamps on the shaded slopes of Fort George, the occasional sliding noiseless splendor of an illuminated automobile—at that remote period the automobile becomes a spectacle of garlanded electric lights—with the terraced mansions beyond the river on the east, the smell of the earth, the swishing rattle of the subway trains over their viaduct, all the many moods and signs of glorious vitality, of aspiring and incessant joy, made Tom’s heart leap with thankfulness.

The remembrance of the hidden hollow pageant he had just witnessed, the distorted mental emotionalism and effrontery of its victims, their gluttony, their last convulsions, and the sombre misery of the picture of the dead bodies, distributed over the pink garden, and along the gray benches of the white amphitheatre, in that recess of abominations, nauseated him. He felt a secret distrust and repulsion for his companion; he was silent, and while Ned, with eager garrulity attempted to allay and avert what he felt was a rising antipathy, Tom seemed sullen and brooding, hurrying on with ravenous strides, as if running from a pestilence.

He did indeed hear Ned’s communications, and they were startling enough to his corporeal vision yet hunting for the blossoms of existence, and fully satisfied with the radiant panorama around him. Ned told him of the growing apathy of men to the duties and burdens of life, the rapid spread of a relentless scorn for the promises of religion, and the propaganda of a remorseless flouting cynicism for the realities of society. He made it very clear that the impulses to suicide were increasing, and that over the city the concealed establishments such as Tom had seen were spreading; that it was commonly believed that the escape from pain, sickness, poverty—although in such cases as they had just witnessed the expenses were heavy—was legitimately sought in a violent death; that the marvellous properties of the gas used in these suicidariums—conveying to those inhaling it a sensuous delirium, accompanied, it was said, by an exaltation strange and transporting—had made suicide even a desirable indulgence. Things had gone so far as that the difficulties of the labor markets had been viewed as offering to labor the advantageous opportunity of settling them by wholesale withdrawals, or at least a selected and progressive system of immolation, by which the supply of workers might be kept exactly regulated to their demand, so that good or extreme wages might always be paid.

Tom listened to these revelations with an appalled attention, though he still kept his mouth shut, and still covered the ground with violent and angry steps. They had turned from the Kingsbridge road eastward over Dyckman Street, and had ascended the Fort George Hill, whence the whole expanse of Carrara was seen palpitating in the velvet night with a dreamy phosphorescence, that hung over it like an arching tapestry pendent from the electrified air above it. Tom turned back and gazed at it with renewed wonder. It seemed so incredible. He turned to Ned and spoke for the first time. “Where does the electricity come from that fills that air?”

Ned scarcely moved his head to notice the marvellous glory of it, and answered, “That comes from the pits in the earth.”

“Pits?” ejaculated Tom. “Yes, pits,” retorted his pleased companion, “pits bored down in the earth for thousands of feet They draw on the storage batteries of the earth for that, as I understand it. But I can’t explain it to you.”

Tom rumimated for a time. He ran back over those memories of his which were associated with the reading of the wonders of the wizards of the past—Edison, Marconi, Tesla, Ramsay, Lord Kelvin, Perkins—and later names, whose achievements had so often led him on to the small hours of the night, reading in his little room at home, the books, magazines, and papers, that came to his hand, and which had contributed to make him so zestful to reach the outer world of designs and marvels. There was silence between the two men while their footsteps rang out on the pavements, and they approached the dazzling arch of the Washington Bridge. Instinctively they turned by one impulse, to the left and walked out upon the steel span from which the city beyond and below them, and the defile of the Harlem river, formed together a magical and almost bewildering picture.

They leaned over the railing at the side, and then Tom spoke: “Perhaps it’s this way, I mean those pits. There is electricity in the earth, great currents of it, and lesser streams, and it disappears by becoming neutralized with itself, as it were. Now if insulated wires or rods could be sunk for great depths, and these rods and wires spread out in the earth in finer threads, these fine threads would pick up a good many small unneutralized currents of electricity, and they would run together like little streams of water, and they would rise on the insulated rods just as accumulating water rises in a hole or well, when it runs in it. That was done with the electricity of the air. The currents run up to the receivers, and when these are over-charged, they play out in the air. It seems queer that nobody is hurt, or that there are not lightning flashes instead of the quiet glow!”

Ravishingly strange was the scene before them from the bridge. The walls of the Harlem River cañon were surmounted with lofty houses, the edge of the stream was defined with an unbroken path of light, the houses shone with interior lamps, the streets around them were ablaze, and the nebulous crown of light added its ghostly glare. The shadows were intense, and the picture was not unlike some deeply bitten etching, with monstrous opacities in it, skillfully curtained in high lights, that lent it an unearthly exaggeration.

The two young men stopped a long time, buried each in his own thoughts, which with Ned had probably slight reference to lofty feelings, but which with Tom, by the indefinable but very real repulsion he experienced for the part he had played at the suicidarium, moved pleasantly forward into deeper hopes for his coming life and sterner resolves to make it worth living.

Finally Ned spoke: “Well, it’s getting late and perhaps we’d both be the better for a good sleep.”

“True enough,” answered Tom, “I’m ready,” and they crossed to the subway on Amsterdam Avenue as to-day, and quickly found themselves at the resplendent porticoes of the Pillar of Light. Tom hastened to his delightful little eerie, and found a letter pushed under his door sill. He tore it open and a card dropped out. It read:

BENTON BRIGGS

Secretary to the Mayor, City Hall.

(and scribbled along the bottom) “Come to the Mayor’s Office to-morrow at 11 A.M.” Tom felt in his bones that it meant occupation for him, and his heart leaped with thankfulness. He would deserve it, indeed he would, and so he fell asleep.

CHAPTER V

THE MAYOR

The Mayor’s office had been temporarily removed to the Governor’s room in the City Hall. The lately elected incumbent of the mayorality was seated there, looking out of the window which commanded the view of a restored park area. From this window a fountain spouting its silver drops high in the air could be seen, reviving, with a leap backward of over a century and a half, memories of Old New York, as it was known to pedestrians passing the City Hall Park in 1850. The colossal ugliness of the present post office had been removed, and the curving tip of the park, green and shaded and wet with drifting spray from the resurrected fountain pushed its verdant tongue into the human currents, moving in black throngs along Broadway and Park Place.

And from these currents occasional individuals dropped out, halted, entered the park, and caught the fresh sky over this tiny interval in the clustering cliffs of titanic towers around it. The sky often seemed like a vivid sapphire jewel set between alabaster walls. Everywhere else the soaring babels rose, largely built of marble, shadowing the crevices below them where the compressed tides of business swept and surged almost noiselessly, but intense and continuous.

The Mayor turned from the pleasant picture which lay so completely framed within the limits of the window as to form a unique episode of green trees, flowering beds, the lounging inhabitants of the park, the bristling fountain, bathed in sunshine, and beyond the still and solemn and peaceful walls of Old St. Paul’s Church. He turned to his secretary, standing at the side of the table, with some loose sheets of paper thickly covered with writing, and who seemed to be studying his superior with an interest that could only be detected in his eyes, and in the posture of his head, for his body was slightly turned aside, almost as if he had been stopped in the act of walking away.

“Yes,” the voice had a singular clearness, the articulation of the syllables seemed almost strained, “it is a revolt; it is insurrection. The law is paramount; Sulla repressed the democratic revolution in Rome. And it was necessary. A state must survive. And yet the state is nothing but its members. A state has no generalized expression. It means nothing but a group of people trying to harmonize their ideas into a government, with some hereditary conventions of plans and laws handed down to them as valuable safeguards of society. But experience counts, and experience proves one thing; clearly that chaos, even a chaos that breaks chains and turns slaves free, is practically a worse condition than Order, even if order means tyranny.”

“But, Sir,” it was the voice of the man who met Tom Ratler in Battery Park, “these unbridled excesses cannot be permitted to go unpunished. There is no tyranny in repressing murder, in putting behind lock and key unruly and desperate men, who set no bounds to their savage and incendiary lusts, who would overturn our order and make living impossible. You cannot have sympathy with the growling curs of the street, even if they are hungry when you know their fangs may bring disease and death to the best man that happens to walk past them.”

“All right, Briggs,” it was the first voice, and it was the Mayor’s, accompanied with laughter, “have no fear, that I intend to play Cataline or degrade our city by any subserviency to riot and rioters. No! I will meet your expectations on that score fast enough. I will remit nothing. The law takes its course. And yet—” he looked up with a surprisingly youthful countenance into the staring and disturbed face of his secretary; “these poor fellows are misled. They are a sad hearted lot, and life is a stern and empty ordeal, bringing them nothing that you and I call life. And I can see how they get enraged and reckless. What do you make out of a society which lives in the light, the gayest brightest sunlight, at the top, and is held up to that sunlight, by those who never see it; who stand on a pedestal so high that all the world seems theirs, or at least is seen by them, and that pedestal is the thronged column of human crowds who bend their backs, one over the other, immovable in the rigidity of patience, resignation, deprivation, so that the little groups at the top may feel no motion beneath their feet, and may keep their eyes fixed upon the stars, or for that matter,” the voice sank a note or two, “upon themselves, unmolested by any terror beneath them, not even concerned as to why and how they keep their place at all?”

“But, Sir,” the secretary laid the papers he carried down on the Mayor’s desk, he leaned with both hands upon it, and his voice betrayed his impatience; “pardon me, but I take exception to your image. We often deceive ourselves by a false metaphor, and act wrongly, at least in thought, by illusions rising like mirages from a foolish prepossession. Your image is not exact, certainly not in this country. Society is not a pillar with a few disengaged hands at the top, and all the way down to the ground underneath them a hunger-driven, duty-compressed mass. Society is a variously arranged surface, hill and vale, wilderness and cultivated land. People are where they find themselves in one or the other for many reasons—inheritance, accident, self-will, stubbornness, imprudence, stupidity—but they can move sideways, or in any way. They can fill up the valley, drain the swamp, cut down the wilderness. If they start fires and burn out the civilization, the culture, the comfort they envy, will they not only make a devastation more terrible than their previous destitution? Do you recommend plunder, as a remedy for poverty? Do you believe rapine, arson, murder, are the educational means for the elevation of the poor or the ignorant or the vicious? I know well enough Sir, you do not, and you should not raise a finger to help these culprits, convicted by every honest man’s conscience.”

The Mayor’s expression was a study. There could be no doubt that he admired his secretary, but a reserve crept into his eyes, that seemed to say—“very well, very well, my fine Sir, but perhaps if you were looking at the matter from the other end of the social field glass some infirmities of temper that now loom, under the circumstances, to you, as very large, might appear very small;” still he made no motion of vexation. He listened, and when Mr. Briggs stopped, he simply said, leaning back in his chair, and folding his arms; “What were all the circumstances exactly?”

The secretary moved to a map of the city that was laid upon a table, and which he raised in his hands pointing to the spots, which illustrated his narrative, as he referred to them.

“It began in Grand Street, in that den and sink of infamy, the office of The Beehive. The whole plot was hatched there. The paper should be suppressed. Longtinsky has made himself an enemy of decency. He is a Jacobite; an anarchist, a ruthless demon, who recognizes no rule, but the same bloody and murderous acts that he thinks can be used to stifle industry.

“The first known about the fire was the flames shooting from the stairway of Helen Lorimer’s Settlement Hall on Pitt Street. A dozen men started out from the basement, and six of them were nabbed; among them Polinck, Longtinsky’s right hand man. He had paper and matches in his pocket and a smell of oil and smoke was in his clothes. The wind was blowing and before the firemen reached the place the building was seething with flames. Then came an explosion. It was that which killed the people in the streets. There was a stampede, and again another explosion sent burning timbers over the streets and started two other fires. Almost a block was destroyed and there were ten deaths. Let these men alone, let them stay here, and they will send their accomplices over the city: they will make outbreaks at a dozen points; and they will make us a laughing stock to the whole world. Immunity will encourage them to believe that they are feared. They will breed a pestilence of disorder that nothing can quell. The electric chair for each of them is mercy.”

Mr. Briggs had, long before this climax, dropped the map, and again stood at the side of the Mayor’s desk. The latter arose, and as he stood there he measured fully the height of his secretary; but he was thin, with a remarkably well shaped and evenly balanced body, and his face, without a distinct claim to beauty, possessed a singular interest, from its expression, its paleness and a winning look, of grace and sympathy in the full blue eyes. His brow was rather too high for the finest facial effectiveness, but this was in a measure corrected by the chestnut hair which richly covered his head and floated downward over the brow; his hands were noticeably long fingered, his mouth wide and too narrow, the ears bent backward to the skull and the nose straight, handsomely formed, but not intellectual. His eyes caught the eye of an observer and held them. They were unaffectedly delightful to see. Many things looked out from them, and not the least inviting was candor and affection whilst in other moods they expressed a keen enjoyment of fun and no inconsiderable delight in living. And then again they became introspective and sad and perhaps their beauty was thus most conspicuous. The face certainly did not produce an impression of force or great mental acumen, but it was a face that men would trust and women might love.

If the attraction it exerted might be safely referred to any one physical feature, it could be ascribed to the delicately pencilled eyebrows, which possessed a coloring slightly more accentuated—deeper—than his hair, and which gave his face an artistic form, the suggestion of aesthetics, or literary or even poetic aptitude.

The Mayor had placed his hand on the shoulder of his secretary; “My friend you are too severe, but you are right as to the theory at least of my conduct in this case. There will be no suspense of the judgment, and the men must die. Ah! how hard it is to say that word,” and the man, who had evidently gone through a storm of conflicting feelings sighed, and again turned with grave eyes to the picture seen through the window at his side. At that moment the shivering arrest of an automobile drew the attention of both men to the outside, and it was Briggs who announced, with a breath of vexation in his voice; “Your Honor will now have the supreme pleasure of meeting the superb Helen Lorimer. She approaches with all her charms. If I am not greatly mistaken she comes to plead the cause of these condemned criminals. She has suffered herself in property and in personal abuse, but she belongs to the ‘progressives,’ she belongs to those who think that ‘the quality of mercy is not strained.’ She has an incurable fund of optimism, and some of her aphorisms sound better than they work. May I earnestly,” he had stepped close to the Mayor, and his demeanor showed his extreme anxiety, “beg your Honor not to be too susceptible to her eloquence.”

“You stay here,” replied the Mayor, smiling, “with such a Cerberus of denial and refutation though she brought Apollo’s lute I should be safe. Besides I feel some timidity about entertaining so great a woman. From all accounts she is the Hypatia of our Alexandrian New York.”

The page at the door approached, and handed the Mayor a card. It bore the name Helen Lorimer. The Mayor moved to the door and disappeared. In the next instant he returned, preceded by the woman we have already seen, and who met the apprehensive greeting of Mr. Briggs with a cordial and reassuring friendliness.

The Mayor occupied temporarily the great room, formerly called the Governor’s Room, during the period when the city of New York was part of the State of that name. The sacred relic of the Revolutionary days—Washington’s Desk—was opposite his own at the west end of the apartment, and he sat facing the heroic portrait of Washington above the mantel on the west wall; behind him still remained the portrait of George Clinton, to his right hand those of Governors Tompkins and Lewis, and on his left through the unchanged green lambrequins he saw the extended park. The fine distinction of the room, with its east and west chambers as well, the delicate repression and formal simplicity in its ornament, delighted him. Often in his few unoccupied moments he would review the storied walls, standing long before the painting of Hamilton and Jay, lost in reveries over the splendid past, recalling the daring skill, the patriotic fervor, the almost prophetic insight of the great Jamaican. He felt the spur of the renowned example, and in his heart—hardly known to himself—stirred the promptings of a magnanimous envy.

Helen Lorimer entered the room, and her brilliancy gave to the sedate place a moderate radiance, which somehow startled both the Mayor and his secretary. Her beauty was more revealed than usual, from the freshness of color in her cheeks, and the animation and interest in her eyes, while a considerable grace in her approach united with simplicity of dress, made her charming as a mere object of inspection. The knowledge both these men possessed of her qualities of mind and heart evoked in their faces—and for different reasons—a visible response of excitement.

The Mayor received his visitor with admirable ease, though a faint tide of color flushing his pale countenance betrayed an interior emotion which did not escape the observation of Mr. Briggs, who subjected the new comer to a scrutiny which suggested his personal reluctance to leave his superior officer alone with her. Mr. Briggs felt too surely the vacillating attitude of his chief, in the affairs of state then pressing for solution to look with complacency upon any influence less uncompromising and severe than his own.

Helen Lorimer extended her hand, which was grasped by the younger man. She looked at the mayor for a moment quite steadily and to his secretary with a noticeable repression of the first smile of friendly salutation. The Mayor motioned her to a chair conveniently placed at the front of his desk, and, as she sat down, was the first to speak,

“I appreciate the honor of your visit, Miss Lorimer, and I beg to make you acquainted with my secretary Mr. Briggs.”

Mr. Briggs bowed a little stiffly, and evidently convinced that his presence was essential, or at least, up to this point, not explicitly discouraged, took a chair somewhat near the side-table carrying the maps he had been examining. The Mayor returned behind his desk, but remained still standing, his gaze fixed with expectancy upon Miss Lorimer, who for a moment turned her eyes to the floor, and then, raising them towards the Mayor, with a resumption of her graciousness and her inviting confidence disclosed her mission.

“I presume I should avoid all mere feminine circumlocution and be very prompt and business-like, Mr. Mayor, in telling you the purpose of my visit. It is about the men who have been so quickly convicted of manslaughter, in the affair of the fire and explosion in Pitt Street which destroyed my Settlement Hall. This condemnation to death seems to me harsh, unnecessary, perhaps I should say cruel, and I believe that vindictiveness in this case will breed still greater mischief.”

Mr. Briggs was now decidedly aroused. He turned his eyes upon the lady with the faintest intimation of scorn, and seemed almost unable to repress his desire to speak. But it was the Mayor who answered——and the peculiar clearness of enunciation and the substance of his words as well, evidently impressed his hearer. She leaned towards his desk and looking upward watched him with an eagerness which might have been readily mistaken for personal admiration of the speaker. With alert minds such as hers sympathetic response involves interior subjective harmonies that may be felt, but are not at first understood. Something very personal shone in her eyes, and whether it was art or reason or taste, or goodness in what he said or how he said it, Helen Lorimer perceived, or better, felt, the element of nobility in the young governor of the City of New York before her. Nor was Mr. Briggs less impressed. He congratulated himself upon the result of his assiduous tuition; at least he put it that way to himself.

“No! Miss Lorimer there can be no review of that decision. You are moved by an admirable compassion. But you have for once at least forgotten to yield to your better judgment. These men were atrocious criminals. The fact that they have been condemned to death makes them no less so. Punishment is the defense of order. There is no other. Moral suasion has its precautionary value in their case, death or imprisonment removes the agent and the disease. It is a kind of segregation that stops infection. I do not wish to appear cynical, but government on this earth will never escape the requirements of the penal code. The hearts of governors may bleed—mine does—but rulers must act outside of the indulgent motives of sentiment, and have a fixed and even stern eye for the interests of order. The constitution of states may be irreparable blunders: those chosen to execute their commands cannot permit themselves to criticise their operation. This is not tyranny or a stupid conformity, or simply an irrational servility. It is duty.

“Are you invoking a higher ministration? Do you believe that your pity or the State’s commiseration and forgiveness will change these men? Convince yourself that they desire an overthrow of our present social relations that that desire is, with them, conviction, and if you believe in the existing order, what possible alternative of action can you recommend, referable to that order’s continuance, but their suppression?”

“Ah! Yes! your Honor I know all this is appealingly clear—in a way—but is the evidence so clear against the men themselves? And should the State be vengeful? Does not hatred breed hatred and are not the victories of Mercy more secure, more enduring?”

Helen Lorimer leaned forward on the Mayor’s desk and her face startled the young executive by its beauty, its beauty of form and of expression, and he sank into his chair, impatiently warring within himself with a strange willingness to surrender to any petition which came in so lovely a guise. Had he been repeating stock phrases? Could anything so tenderly so ravishingly beautiful as this woman be resisted? Was she not more? Her voice was a penetrating music that delighted him. And of praise of her mind was not the City full? He felt a hopeless inability to repel an approach so enthralling. His words had been stately enough, his voice in its best form,—but somehow he felt it was a mask, and his heart, his live heart—not the executive organ encrusted with traditions—rejected his own words, and craved the very thing his fair visitor intimated. Still there was a regnant sense left in him of position, of authority, of responsibility. He remembered Briggs. He cast a fugitive glance at his secretary, who had drawn closer to him, indeed stood directly at his side, as if he understood his ordeal, and would invigorate his strength, with his own uncompromising hostility to any temporising with the ends of justice.

Again the young Mayor spoke, and no trace of indecision, not even the respectful condescension of courtesy sounded in his voice which would have carried, to the critical ear, a note a little too severe, as if uttered under the constraint of a misgiving which, for appearance’s sake, gave it harshness.

“Pity is a tender virtue in woman, Miss Lorimer. It has its beneficent uses but it can enter too carelessly into the considerations of policy which determine the existence of society. The State, in which are gathered for safety thousands—in our community millions—of souls, becomes inviolate, as an entity, the moment they engage to live together for mutual security and progress.

“These men would take your pity at a value which degrades it. They would consider it fear. And they would only rage more ferociously against the social state. They are frankly anarchists, they assert the solidarity of chaos, the unity of discord, the prosperity of idleness, the stability of disorder. Their philosophy is a jumble of contradictions. But worse, they are self-elected criminals, or else they are hopelessly mad. They are your personal enemies, Miss Lorimer. Their detestable organ incites the vicious to mischief against yourself.

“I should be recreant to my own oath of office, and I should insult the public intelligence if I changed the sentence of these men. Have you any proof that the sentiment of this city asks for commutation. I have heard something of a petition in their favor, but I have not yet seen it. Miss Lorimer I cannot consider for one instant your intercession. The quickness and rigor of the sentence upon these men is no slight testimony to both the enormity of their crime, and the sureness of their guilt.”

“Mr. Mayor,” again the appealing voice, the eloquent motion of importunity as Helen Lorimer moved her hand almost supplicatingly towards the speaker, and above all the flushed beautiful face, “You must know I have no reason to find fault with your position. You are held rather tightly I know within the limitations of your oath of office. But is it quite certain that these men—I mean the very men condemned—were guilty? Are you quite sure they are such red-throated curse-breathing, death-dealing fiends as the papers paint them and the preachers say? Are the mass meetings of the smug and self satisfied and well-to-do oracles of wisdom or sense or even moderation? Let us be very candid indeed. But let us also be careful about our self-respect. Are you willing to send these men to death, convicted as they have been in a two days’ trial not on the evidence, which the State admitted was open to doubt, but convicted by the feverish hostility of a populace, frightened out of its wits?

“Can you forget the devastation that is wrought in the moral sense of a community when it gratifies the gluttony of its rage over those who have half scared it to death? These men were not murderers at heart. They were victims of their own credulity, tools, swinish tools let us say, of cleverer and deeper brains. Kill them, Mr. Mayor, and those cleverer and deeper brains will have new formulas to repeat and in the repetition they will win a perilous plausibility that will give socialism a martyr’s crown, not the ignominy of a felon’s grave.”

“But,” the young Mayor had also stretched out his hand and held it for an instant rested upon the back of the gloved fingers of Helen Lorimer, “do you forget the innocent who have suffered, those who have actually been killed, those who have been wounded? Are we coolly to recommend patience to them, while they sit unsatisfied and bitter about the graves of their dead? Are you quite sure that neglect here might not start a reactionary outcry, against the heartlessness of Society, against its laxity, its inefficiency? Are you willing to place us between two fires, the torch of an incendiary anarchy, and the bullets of a Vigilance Committee?”

“I forget nothing, your Honor:” Miss Lorimer arose, and, as if to a gesture of command, the Mayor also arose, “I have seen the families of all the wounded, of all the dead. They need nothing, and their mouths are not filled with threats of vengeance; they speak of the timeliness of clemency. They actually fear the anger of society, as that it may blindly outrage the groveling thousands who will see in it a Juggernaut of selfish fear, not the sword of Justice. They live among these classes and they know. Neither are they convinced that this hunger for punishment is in their behalf. It is the self preservative spasm of respectability.”

Again the Mayor glanced at Mr. Briggs as if he faltered in his thoughts, but a sudden surge of blood mantled in his cheeks. Even to Helen Lorimer he became handsome, and it was this strange new beauty, in a man, that brought for an instant, the color in her own face, and challenged her heart with a question of incredulity.

“Odd, Miss Lorimer,” he said, “that I should place myself in opposition to yourself as the guardian of your own class. I can understand your feelings, their magnanimity; indeed I see more than that. Your purpose might be termed an esoteric patriotism.

“Apparently condoning a wrong, apparently forgiving an outrage you intend to turn into legitimate channels the angry tides of unrest which you think mount higher and more dangerously as they were resisted or overborne. You mean to win back to allegiance by kindnesses the unruly spirits that may grow, as you think, more turbulent by repression. I understand, of course, but is it wise?”

The Mayor’s question was addressed to two listeners, for, as he asked it, he turned half away from the absorbed, lovely figure before him—more beautiful than ever—to his inward sense for the nobility of the soul that dwelt in it—to his rigid and observant secretary.

The invitation to speak was accepted, almost precipitately by that individual, who directed every word to the person of Miss Lorimer. He seemed to have forgotten his superior, although his first word answered the latter’s query.

“It is not wise; it is not sane; it is frivolous and it is cruel. Cruel because it will lead to greater disasters, to more loss of life and property. I know these people too, the men who read, who believe the creed of The Beehive. They are maniacs of unrest. They are demented with illusions; the distortion of their minds distorts their feelings, and they are social outlaws. They have become ravenous with impious hopes. In them the jackal and the hyena are united; the lust of their hearts is murder and rapine, though they do not always care to put their own hands to the job. They have ambition. It is formless, inconsiderate, of colossal selfishness and preposterous egotism. But they are without true courage. The leaders at heart are a pack of besotted braggadocios, empty of all daring, furiously vindictive, meanly cunning, and skulkers behind the bodies of braver, more robust men. They can be terrified into inaction. They can be prostrated by one overwhelming act of condign punishment. They will shrink into nothingness before the retribution of summary annihilation. The paralysis of terror will kill their will and their energies and they will vanish.

“Parley with them and they will devour you, for they are as ruthless as wolves, and, judging others by their own degraded instincts, the first intimation from your lips of clemency will form a new incentive for their insulting malice to propose more preposterous concessions. They are a class engendered by vicious exaggerations of the ills of society. They were originally formed in the prison houses, the miasmatic swamps, the pest houses of European tyrannies. They exult in the supremacy of their shameless dreams. If there are exaltations of speech or even of ideas among them, they are baseless lunacies built up on tricky words and on ignorance of their supine victims. No, Sir,” turning to the Mayor, “Society as we understand it is incompatible with these people, except as under the coercion of fear they remain inert and helpless.”

The Mayor had not taken his eyes from the face of Helen Lorimer, and the gleam of a flitting smile crossed his lips as he noted the concentrated attention she gave his secretary. But her attention changed visibly to anger. The liquid depth of her eyes grew firm with a light of repudiation and denial; her lips straightened just a little with disdain and impatience her posture was more erect as if courting the blow that seemed aimed at her mistaken benevolence, and then all this changed again, into a sad look which gave her—in the Mayor’s mind—an even loftier loveliness as of a seraph mourning over some carnal contumacy that he could not help or bless.

That quickly passed, and Miss Lorimer gave at last a wondering glance at the Mayor, as Mr. Briggs concluded his fiery exhortation, and then withdrew a little, almost as if meditating an abrupt exit. But she, in this way, put herself just perceptibly in opposition, she secured a physical separation which adroitly emphasized her complete dissent. Both the anger and the momentary graveness had left her face. She was smiling. It was a smile of deprecation, an unspoken reproach in which pity dwelt. She spoke with a hurried earnestness that betrayed her suspense.

“You wrong these people, Sir, indeed you do. I have not been slow to learn a great deal about them from their own lips. I have not busied myself solely in a lecturing propaganda. I have indeed striven to make less hostile their resentment against the rich, to overcome their ingrained sense of separation and repudiation, but I have also been a listener and a pupil. I know some of the very men condemned. It is not possible that they are murderers at heart. Their families have fallen at my feet in weeping agonies of protest that they were misled, whipped into a blind rage by artifice, by drink, by bribes, by threats. If you thrust these men into Eternity you are doing a bitterly cruel thing and making a grave mistake. I ask you, Sir,” she came forward and addressed the Mayor, “only the slight favor of a delay—let it be that—let me present new evidence to the courts to show that these men—some of them—are the victims of perjury, that they were absolutely free of guilt—that the bombs were put in the building by other hands—miscreants who fled and left them—and then forced or persuaded these unfortunates to enter the building. I have a curious suspicion that my own class are not innocent in a big plot—favored, for money by the creatures of The Beehive—to bring about an ignominious triumph over the enemies of their order. There is something to be learned on that score.

“You speak of Society and its indignation. I too run risks and encounter forfeits. But an injustice will more grievously wreck your career than the transient rage of ignorance. Prove rather the greatness of your office by defending these speechless victims of a popular fury. More, Sir, I will accept the challenge of the people, I will establish their innocence by proof—the innocence of some. It can be done. My lawyers have been successful in gathering fresh evidence at many points. I can prove perjury. There have been paid witnesses commissioned to destroy these lives. If the State trembles at the thought of an assault upon its life, how much more deeply it will grieve, if, in its own defense, it has struck down innocent men. What will it say to the assassins of its honor? Be at least rational. It is common talk; the precipitate action of the State; the apparently prejudiced and frightened decision of the judge; the hasty verdict. Shall the blot of an equivocal judgment send six men to death, five of whom I believe can be proven innocent, and can either a State or an individual survive such a miscarriage of justice? Listen to me, Sir:” the Mayor was indeed listening, he hung upon her words, he had pushed past his secretary, he bent himself forward, keenly searching the beautiful face before him, which itself by some prompting had come closer and closer to his own, and which, in the hurrying current of words made its very breath fan the parted lips of the young governor.

The Mayor spoke. Mr. Briggs would have stopped him, he even touched his arm in an admonition more strenuous than respectful—but the Mayor paid no attention; he shook his arm free of the detention, his voice rose somewhat, and he held out his hand to Miss Lorimer who took it, and even pressed her disengaged hand upon it, and thus in the chancery of the touch of a woman, who made his heart beat strangely, the Mayor forget the rhetoric of his office and spake frankly.

“You shall be heard, Miss Lorimer, you shall have the reprieve. Let me see your evidence, let the courts see it. Time and place shall be allotted to you to put this all in order; but why have you withheld it, why urge abstraction when you had the concrete facts to support your claim. God forbid that this State or I, shall commit judicial murder. An order goes from this office now, and by the hands of my secretary,” he turned with a slight almost indifferent gesture towards Mr. Briggs, who stood flushed and angry behind him, “to delay the execution, and, on the showing of new evidence and the suspected treachery of witnesses, to recommend the re-trial of the whole matter.”

Miss Lorimer withdrew her hands and said; “It may seem to you peculiar that I did not come to the point of the new proof I have, to establish the innocence of some of these men, at the outset. But, Sir, I did indeed wish to withhold it at this moment, unless less convincing arguments failed. And they did. You may have been right in forcing my hand; I do not regret it, except that, so much known it may too quickly reach the ears of the prosecutors, and help them to overcome or avoid it. I hope, Sir, that this confession, may, for the present, be considered sacred. From the bottom of my heart I thank you. You will have no regrets.”

She bowed and, extending her hand again, shook heartily the Mayor’s; she stepped past him, and advanced to the recalcitrant Briggs. That non-plussed and utterly disgusted person was not to be outdone, and he received the lady’s proffered advance with a discretion and civility that was entirely courteous but also significantly formal.

The Mayor passed out of the room with Miss Lorimer, and, as they moved down the serpentine stairway of the rotunda, he told her that the reprieve would be officially published, the lawyers she retained should then apply for a new trial to the courts, and that she would personally grant him a favor, essential for his own defence, if she would permit him to know more definitely the nature and the details of her action and case.

Miss Lorimer assented to everything gladly, was profuse in her thanks, and, as they descended the outside steps of the City Hall, intimated the honor and the enjoyment it would give herself, her mother, and her uncle to have the distinction of a visit from his Honor. Almost exultantly the Mayor accepted this invitation—he felt within himself nothing had ever seemed so desirable, so inviting, so valued—and only a little hesitatingly stipulated that she would allow him to make the appointment. And that favor was politely granted. Miss Lorimer entered her motor car and the Mayor watched her depart, and was himself invested with other watchers, attracted to the spot by so unusual occurrence; but among the many eyes rivetted upon the distinguished couple, two only, from the room they had both but an instant vacated, bestowed upon them an inspection, a hard reflective scrutiny, that meant neither satisfaction nor approval.

As the Mayor returned up the steps of the Hall he passed a young man whose fine proportions and handsome face, at the very moment when another face filled his thoughts with a singular tenacity, caught his eye and extorted from him an involuntary notice of admiration. It was our young friend Tom Ratler. Mr. Briggs had also seen him from the Governor’s room, and was moved to an ejaculation thereby, that opened his lips, but was not embodied in any articulate sounds.

Tom felt that he was following the Mayor, and he turned backwards a few steps to delay his entrance in the Hall from a modest and becoming sense of the propriety of respect. He looked at the disappearing automobile with its precious freight of beauty, and a pleasant smile—that smile that always accompanies the subjective sense in any one of having discovered a love affair—lit up his face, and it was with its lingering grace still in his young eyes, that he entered the Mayor’s office.

Mr. Briggs had expected him, and left the room as the Mayor returned by another door; he met Tom and ushered him in. He was introduced to the Mayor as the “young man Mr. Briggs had suggested for his chauffeur, and whom his Honor may have remembered he (Mr. Briggs) had told him of, as having defended himself with so much spirit at the Battery Park.”

The Mayor was delighted. He very soon satisfied himself that Tom understood the nature of the avocation he intended him for, engaged him, and sent him to his home, in one of the most charming sections of the city, the revived, renovated, restored area of the Ninth Ward, in the old precincts of Greenwich Village. Tom was provided with a letter of endorsement and identification and with an elation that invigorated him, started for his new place. He left the Mayor and his secretary standing in the embrasure of a window, and heard their voices distinctly rising in a discussion that showed—if he was not greatly mistaken—that both were angry.

The changes of the centuries have their compensations. They seem to old fashioned folk the more memorable and pleasing when they accomplish graceful restorations of the past. Such a wonderful thing had happened in the old section of the city which one hundred or more years before this happy revival, had formed the Ninth Ward of New York. It had boasted of the sweetness of its past, but at that time (1900, or thereabouts) found itself slowly slipping into the squalor of a miscellaneous and mongrel existence with increasing tenements, “flats,” and slowly multiplying miseries of dirt and dilapidation, where once had been (away back in 1850) lovely homes, thrifty, American, and enticing, shaded with beauty of trees, and linked with a still more remote and romantic period, when the village of Greenwich caught the reflected rays of the setting suns from the broad waters of the Hudson, and its lanes ran down to the water’s edge.

A marvellous revival had again covered this district, (anywhere from Canal Street northward to Fourteenth Street and between Broadway and the Hudson) inserting a finer phrase of expression and feeling than it had ever known, actually transfigured into a joyful ostentation of gardened homes and spacious houses, enclosing streets of cleanliness and all knit together into a texture of deliberate and calculated comfort. Here was the Mayor’s home.

The movement which brought so pleasantly and improvingly this ancient reserve of the city into prominence was the creation of a Governor’s House within the city limits, and the selection of this region, by the fortunate suggestion of an adroitly reminiscent artist. The city had taken six houses along the present St. Luke’s Place, just north of the little renaissance park, and made there—moving some back from the sidewalk, and taking others away, and adjusting garden spaces around them—a central house, in white and red, with creamy white shutters, an iron fence about it all, and a few white mulberry trees in front. It formed such a pretty picture, and revived so keenly an old time veneration for the historic site of the ancient village, that others copied the city’s example, and from point to point, houses were bought, torn down, or moved, and changed; and slowly, but with a well sanctioned enthusiasm, the blocks, now so dull and unresponsive, blossomed and grew warm, with sunny and shadowed homes. The extent and outlines of this urban restoration, just mellow enough, just delicate and grave enough, embraced the spaces from St. Luke’s Place to Christopher Street, with meandering threads of extension up Greenwich Avenue to Seventh Avenue through Hudson Street, across to Washington Square, in Waverley Place and Gay Street, even at last undauntedly attacking the mercenary interests of Bleecker and Bedford Streets, until a polite and literary or artistic fever thrilled the city, and gathered together groups of such models, filling place after place, till the oasis became charming and entertaining and restful. Like a green and spreading plant that pushes its way over ash heaps, and up dry and ugly walls, so did the stupidity of vulgarized and threadbare neighborhoods become decent, and pure, and lovely, before the tasteful invasion.

This alteration meant a goodly expense. In some instances it meant the appropriation of whole blocks which became under the treatment, delicious gardens, blending delightful affectations of antiquity—with box rows and oleander bushes—with smart contrivances of the day in horticulture. These inter-urban ruralities sent meandering fingers into Seventh Avenue and stretched along Hudson Street as far as the present St. Luke’s while most curiously an outlyer was created in Varick Street near the rescued St. John’s Church where its altheas bloomed against the background of the railroad freight depot. The extension of the movement was then—in the year 2000—well afoot and pressing for more extension.

Tom reached the Mayor’s house in St. Luke’s Place, and presented the Mayor’s card. He was received by a quiet faced old lady who sweetly explained to him she was the mother of the Mayor. He was led through the broad corridors of the house to a back yard, where he found a sizeable garage, and a well equipped vehicle. He was told his own room would be above the ground floor. He felt some curiosity about that, and went up the stairs for its inspection. Perhaps it was not so bristlingly pretty as the room in the Kohinoor, but it suited him much better. It was large, and a book-case on one side filled with the overflows from the house gave it a home like air. The little yard lay under his windows and he just heard the occasional murmur of the city life.

Tom thanked his stars and set about an overhauling of the Mayor’s handsome motor car, in which, that evening, he was to bring the Mayor home from the City Hall.

The day had waned, but for an hour Helen Lorimer had sat dreamily resting her head in her hands, as her arms leaned up on the sill of the broad window, looking straight to the still talus-encumbered slope of the Palisades. It was a strange idleness. She had loosened her hair until it flowed down tumultuously over her shoulders, and she had gazed at her own reflection and even approached the mirror with a smile of satisfaction. As she mused, or planned, or slept,—it was a trifle hard to say what she was doing—at the window,—the door opened softly, and her mother, the dark Julieta entered, and came almost unheard to her side. There was a start, and as the uplifted face met her Mother’s, Helen rose, and said; “the Mayor is coming to see us. I like him immensely.” She kissed Julieta and the two women—both so beautiful and so contrasted—stood for an instant, silent, together. What impulse suddenly raised Helen’s arms and made her fling them about her mother’s neck, and kiss her again with an ineffable tenderness?

Tom had brought the ruminating Mayor to his home, and that alert official had bounded up the front steps pushed open the door, sprang in the drawing room, where his mother sat knitting, and had also put his arms around her with sudden eagerness, and kissed her. It was apparently an unprecedented performance, at least in that way and at that time, for the old lady pushed him back and asked with candid wonder, “Why Marston! what’s the matter?”

Now it is an inexplicable coincidence, which may or may not interest the reader, that both these exquisite coquetries happened at very near the same hour and minute of the day.

CHAPTER VI

THE BEEHIVE

In the year Two Thousand the tides of human travel through Grand Street had grown beyond all measure. They surged from morn to night in swaying multitudes in which the admixture of all the races of the great city were seen and heard. The babel of sound recalled the thoroughfares of a dozen cities of the world. The East Side, problem and despair of the twentieth century, remained the enigma of the twenty-first. Its congestion, at least, had met an approximate solution. Enormous high tenements had been built there, whose clustering stories became microcosms of national amalgamation, wherein were born diverse and blended groups who were endowed with remarkable pugnacity and a sort of fierce ability to engage in political argument and metaphysical civics.

They were not devoid of business sense and an inordinate thirst for money. On the whole they had made a most reputable element in the public life of the city, but they were prone to excitement, and they were not American. They responded with Celtic avidity to rhetoric and poetry, but they were not Irish. They were composed of a mixture that had outrun the mere boundaries of religious prescription, and Catholics and Jews in the close companionship of the Russians and the Italians, Hungarians and Turks had intermarried. These unions had grown more common, and there was a corresponding drift away from the orthodox formulas of each church. Socialism as a theory had taken a remarkable hold upon their imaginations but, though they were poor, there was no immediate justification for discontent in their lives. Pauperism was uncommon.

To the resident populations of the East Side, at this point (Grand Street), and north and south, there were commingled the steady streams of commerce and industry that crossed the Williamsburgh bridge at Delancey Street. These converging currents had produced a vortex of business along Grand Street, and so huge department stores, a few big and second class theatres, and tailor or clothing shops with the adventitious association of gregarious restaurants had grown into a solid wall of many hued occupations. At night the streets, especially in holiday time, and on the hot nights of summer swarmed and seethed with the jocund, good natured, and somewhat highly dressed throngs. The little parkway of the bridge’s approach on Delancey Street was set with tables and here gathered companies of friends and fun makers, who were supplied with wine and lager from the restaurants, while at the entrance of the smaller shops or stores similar tables had been instituted. The street then assumed the complexion and the purpose of a great and lengthened caravansary, or, on such nights when the stores were open, and the side walks accommodated the warring peddlers, an open air bazaar, or a Kalmuk fair grounds. The street then blazed with electric lights, and in front of the theatres and the department stores, the restaurants, and indeed at every hand, coronas, arches, and surcingles of lamps, contributed a chaotic confusion of haloes, and reflections and illuminations, that dispersed the darkness beyond the highest buildings, and eclipsed the discomforted and neglected moon.

It was in the midst of this multivarious human maelstrom and complex, that Longtinsky, the Russian, had made his abode, and established his paper, The Beehive, with which he furthered his insidious agitations and furnished a not unskillful compound of threats and grievances with the truth half dressed in fiction, and fiction wearing, a little stupidly, the mask of truth. The man had ability, and being unscrupulous, with a tenacious memory and an almost morbid alacrity in hunting out the peccadilloes of the rich (none of them worse than his own and his companions) he had gained a clientele, his paper a sort of subterranean circulation, and himself a modest fortune, though quite incommensurate with his ambition. Some fancied insults to him by the organ of the better classes had rankled in his mind, and he had exceeded propriety and prudence by recent utterances which were seditious and revolutionary; much more so than usual.

He had been goaded into a blind rage also by the unexpected and most unwelcome invasion of the district that he thought was peculiarly fitted for the ripening of his theories of social reform by the successful propaganda of Helen Lorimer. This had been phenomenally effective. Its courage fascinated a spirited people, and Miss Lorimer’s address and personal power, with a well established and practical commission of mercy was making havoc with Longtinsky’s reputation and prestige. It drove him to madness, and the fact that some of his young men-reporters, hired to dog and spy upon the less wary and more undeserving of the class he hated and plotted against, had, in their nefarious work encountered the beneficent agencies set in operation by Helen Lorimer, and having also met that engaging lady at her own settlement, had been flattered or actually been enslaved into a sort of devotion, which made of them furious mutineers against their soi-disant master loosened the last restraint of decency and caution.

Longtinsky understood well enough his danger. He did not propose to hang himself for any crime, but he had no hesitation in getting others into a noose that would have better become his own neck. He had become depraved to the point of murder, and his selfish and inflated egotism, provoked beyond endurance into resentment, slowly degenerated and assumed the worse complexion of brooding, sullen, hatred, the precursor of the worser incentives to atrocity and revenge.

The office of The Beehive was behind a clothier’s store not far from the corner of Pitt Street and Grand. It was entered by a narrow alley which debouched into Grand Street by a covered shed, and might have been easily overlooked by any one not accustomed to use it. The alley threaded, a door, entrenched in the brick wall of a back extension opened upon a small irregular room which served as the editorial sanctum, and the council chamber of Longtinsky, and his sympathizers. Behind this again a small projection shielded the archives and the printing press of the incendiary sheet.

It was the day after Miss Lorimer had entered her plea for the reconsideration of the sentence of the convicted Socialists, and which the Mayor had deferred to with such unction, that a rough and shaggy looking man, with a slouched hat, half covering features that might have reasonably craved some such concealment, walked into the open alley that led to the penetralia of the Longtinsky establishment. The man showed no hesitation in making his way, and a shrewd suspicion, that he had been there often before, would have occurred to any observer who noticed his nonchalant ease, the half dissimulated scowl with which he turned towards the street, and scrutinized the passing and oblivious crowds, his slow ingress through the crooked corridor, and the questioning and companionable rap that he gave to the inner door which the next instant he pushed in, and within which he disappeared.

In the furtherance of the ends of this tale we must follow this figure. The room that the man thus invaded was dark, the few windows that were intended to help out its interior illumination being extremely dirty, and in a measure curtained by ragged curtains, that rivalled in their disarray the neglected panes they partially covered. A few gas burners had been frequently used to dissipate the gloom, and the effects of their imperfect combustion were discernible above them, in sooty patches on the low ceiling. At this particular moment, although it was almost mid summer, the jets were alight, and by their helpful aid the visitor, if the matter interested him, could recognize the two pictures which decorated—or were expected to serve such a purpose—the walls. One stared him in the face, as he entered the room. It was a colored chromo of the great Russian novelist and humanitarian—Tolstoy—depicted in his peasant costume, amid his ancestral acres, his hat in his hand, and his crumpled and benign face looking out upon the world he repudiated and failed to save. The other possessed a less perceptible congruity with the room and the purposes of its usual occupants. It represented a most commonplace scene of rurality and domestic peace, and was called Rest at Home. This pleasing pictorial note in an atmosphere that quite generally was filled with threats against all such chimerical fancies, portrayed a farmer’s family, gathered around a hospitably covered board, in which the artist by a series of conventional imitations showed the products of the farm, with the ostensible father of the prosperous and numerous group, standing at one end of the table, his face upraised, and his hand, in the posture of a blessing, stretched out over the abundant food; while his sons and daughters in attitudes of respect or reverence, formed before him a most irreprehensible assemblage of duty and devotion. The alert mind might have thought that this unexpected illustration was intended, as an eloquent reminder, to those assembled below it, of the very thing and things they were commissioned to upset and prevent.

The remainder of the room’s furnishings requires but a few words. There was a long narrow table—so narrow as to comfortably allow those who sat at it to attack their opponents or critics across it—in the centre of the room, a few chairs, an additional oil lamp on the table, and in one corner a wooden box of the sturdiest construction, armed at its corners and along its sides with iron. The door leading to the editorial precincts beyond was open, and the few operatives there, could be seen leaning over their tasks or engaged in conversation which seemed curiously low and timid.

The man whom we thus persistently have followed, overturned a chair at his entrance, and then striking the table with his fist, proceeded to reveal his lineaments more completely, by removing his hat which he threw on the table. He was a short thin man of a Sicilian type, with black hair which would have abundantly screened his small head, if it had not been so suspiciously shaven into a crop of bristling points. His deep set eyes, rather high cheek bones, prominent nose, regular mouth, shaded by a restrained moustache, a handsomely chiselled chin, united into a facial whole of properly noticeable contour and expression. Craft was marked in his face, and a physiognomist might have been readily led to prognosticate a sum of evil possibilities in the Italian visage, which again in less questionable environment might have been mistaken for that of a star of the opera. So easily do the reflexions of our surroundings lend a deleterious, or responsible air to our physical personalities!

He wore the clothes of a workingman, somewhat refined by a little more careful preservation, and by more expensive texture. One surprising and noticeable feature of his dress was the small shoes which clothed his feet, made from patent leather, and a scarf and pin, the former of a brilliant scarlet, and the latter of emerald, expensive items which shone all the more conspicuously in their plain and discordant associations. As he rapped the table he flung himself into a chair, and waited for the response which apparently he fully understood would quickly follow.

He was not disappointed. A heavy movement of chairs in the neighboring apartment announced the approach of his host, and the next instant the broad squat figure of a man filled the doorway, between the rooms, and the visitor looked lazily up and accosted his friend.

“Well, Tinsky, have you heard the latest? The Old Man has given a reprieve and the thing’s to be done over again, and I don’t feel sure that the nippers won’t get a twist on your wrists this time. There are some squealers about, and perhaps they are as little anxious to get the ‘tickler’ as you.”

A curious smile covered the speaker’s face, and at length he raised his eyes, previously dropped to the floor, and gazed at the editor of The Beehive with a queer suppressed grin of malice, that was distinctly irritating.

The man thus accosted was a teuton in type, blond haired, thickly whiskered, with blue eyes, inconspicuous eyebrows, a short and heavy frame and a disproportionately developed mouth, and—his most striking feature—immense ears that protruded from the side of his head with an unquestionably porcine saliency. For an instant this aberrant arrangement caught the eye of his observers before they fully scanned his face. The face itself had a mean look, and this arose in part from the lowness of the brow and the smallness of the eyes, but particularly from a misshapen nose, full and drooping cheeks, and from the formless gap across his face, which served as a mouth. Had any one unexpectedly encountered him under circumstances of possible danger they would have instinctively shunned his company and suspected his intentions. His eyes squinted slightly, and this added to the sinister and depraved expression of his face. In some lights, and under the influences of conviviality the editor of The Beehive might have appeared more reassuring. At this moment pricked into a momentary aggravation by his remorseless friends, his looks were disappointing. His eyebrows drew together, his little eyes shone vindictively, his great mouth twitched with anger, and his malformed nose, set between them like a red proboscis, displayed its cavernous nostrils. Longtinsky was distinctively unpleasant to see at that moment.

“Oh, the jig is not up yet, Pony. I am not afraid of the tyrants. My arm can wither at my side before I’ll stop the crusade of justice and liberation I have begun. What about squealers? Do you think I have anything to fear? Can you or anybody else put any crime at my door. I don’t want to hear any nonsense and I won’t listen to any threats. Am I the man to be chased to death by a mad rotten pack of smooth faced, slick tongued, wine-fed vampires of wealth, men who do the bidding of that besotted purse-proud boasting wench, Helen Lorimer? I’ll pull destruction down about their ears. I’ll make this city Hell-hot for them. If they dare to touch me I’ll burn their roofs over their heads. Let us see how far the arrogant slaves of money and gluttonous indulgence dare lift their hands against the sons of toil and suffering!—”

The speaker had risen in his imprecatory rage, and his body, not visibly afflicted with any signs of want, pressed against the table, while the voluble spirit that possessed it glared through the shrunken blue eyes at the stranger. That person quite imperturbably waited for the exhaustion of the Socialist leader, and even ventured to raise an impatient hand as if to check his speech, while at the few moments when he condescended to look at him at all, something like a masked grin covered his features. This was not unnoticed by Longtinsky, upon whom it had an unexpected influence, for, as it finally forced a loud laugh from his auditor, he stopped and sank back in his chair with a cowed motion, as if of fear.

“Say!” it was Pony who was talking, “what do you think I am. Perhaps you had better keep your mouth shut and the tongue in your head tucked a little closer to your lamb-chops. I don’t want any oratory. Get that off on your scrubs. I know you, Tinsky, and you know me, or if you don’t by God, perhaps the time has come for me to show you who I am. I’ll do it damn quick.

“Now get down to business. Where’s the swag I’m to have for playing your spy. Don’t you get behind my back and rip me. I know you for a mean spirited swaggering coward, and I know, Tinsky, as well as you do, that you did the business for the Settlement House. YOU,” the man stood up, “put the bombs there YOURSELF; YOU hired the poor wretches to go in there after you and your fellow—and, damn you, you haven’t had soul enough to try and save him—Polinck, had started the fuses. What did you care if they got blown to Hell, as long as you kept your mouse haired body safe? Well, there’s been a leak somewhere, and that woman Lorimer has got on to it. She’s wise. Now Tinsky, keep your soft soap jabber for those who relish it, I want none of it. I’m here to do you a service. Get out of this. Scuttle the shop and move. The Mayor and that woman have get their heads together and they’re after you. The case comes up again next fall and you’re in for it. I want my money, I want it now, and I want to see the little girl. If it wasn’t for her I might not have come back. See! Let me see her now, and let’s start. Get your word twisters off their perches, pull down your winders, pick up your snacks, tuck some boodle in your breeches, and get out of this. Canada for us.”

The effect of those adjurations and reproaches upon Tinsky was remarkable. It only offered another tribute to the force of truthful words, forcibly uttered. The editor had lost some of his color, some of which was temper and much of which was beer. His hands nervously plucked his beard, and he looked at his stormy interlocutor with real dismay. His bravado had suddenly vanished, and in its place a sullen discomforting sense of danger overwhelmed him, but it was resisted by the man’s refractory egotism, and his stolid apathy to advice. Flight meant surrender, impotence, loss of prestige, it might mean detection, conviction, and punishment. He could not reconcile himself to an abject retreat. The danger pictured by his picturesque and implacable friend was a real one, and yet he shrank from an absolute disclosure of ineffectiveness and alarm. Under the smarting sense of guilt his mind, not unfamiliar with labyrinthine devices and coarse subterfuge, worked fast.

There emerged before him a desperate project, which if successful would establish his fame, might help him to rid himself of his embarrassing assistants—such for instance as the man before him—and, blackened as it was with the aims of murder, might finally light those fires of insurrection which he fondly thought were latently glowing in the hearts of the people, would clear the way for his assumption of power, and—so vividly did the picture work itself out—lift him into a position of eminence. Once there he might hold the balance of power and dictate the terms of his own acceptance and the shape of a future socialist plebiscite. The outlines of this plan—if plan it could be called which involved many elements of crime—had been vaguely worked out before in his audacious and credulous mind, but now at the storming point, when the enemy was forcing him to bay, when the incredible play of chance seemed to stretch out to his waiting hand the implement to strike the blow which would bring him immunity and place, they grew more distinct.

The cerebral convolutions behind that low forehead were intricate; thought of some inventive force hurried through them with an easy flow, and designs, pictures, dreams, rose before him with imaginative poignancy. His fear of danger—a danger which seemed literally heralded by its messenger before him—his hatred of Helen Lorimer, the stupid vindictiveness of his nature, which urged him on upon a course of rapine and disorder, his thirst for wealth, the sudden inner consciousness that he had been playing false to his own people—though bribes which he had taken from the “Aristocracy of Wealth” had only been accepted with hypocrisy and rage—his powerlessness hitherto before the inertia of the masses, who had failed to raise any standard of revolt, already broken hearted as they were over the conviction and condemnation of their companions, his perception that he had played into the hands of his enemies in doing as he had done, the residual force of a conviction that he was really working out, besides his own fortune, a greater destiny for society; all these considerations drove him to an ultimate step which he often vaguely realized might be useful.

It now became to his mind a necessity. It was desperate, and like some tempting demon, it rose before his eyes with beckoning gesture, though in his hands it carried the weapons of destruction, and its face was darkened with the shadow of assassination. Longtinsky was not averse to involving in his plan some steps looking towards the forcible removal of the unwelcomely candid man who had just entered his retreat.

Longtinsky had been thinking fast. As his visitor paused Longtinsky got up, shut the door leading to the inner room more carefully, and locked it. He moved to the windows and drew down their shades, then he passed around the head of the table, walked past Pony who had become a little restive, though he eyed these preparations with no apparent disturbance, unless a fumbling motion towards his hip meant anything. Longtinsky closed the outer door—that leading to the alley—and also locked it. Then he returned to his first seat, leaned over the table and with a warning finger resting on the corner of his slovenly lips, looked over curiously to Pony and motioned for him to come and sit beside him.

“NO FUNNY BUSINESS, OR UP YOU GO IN SMOKE.”

Page 120.

That character, hitherto quite indifferent and evidently influenced by very contemptuous feelings for his friend, whose nature he knew, as well as some of his subterranean contrivance and plots, had become by this time aroused into curiosity. He looked at Longtinsky a moment with a very disagreeable leer, and then he laughed, picked up his chair and lurched around the table, and put himself at Longtinsky’s side;

“See here, Whiskers,” Pony’s voice sank to a guttural croak, “what’s your game now. No funny business, or up you go in smoke,” and a relevant movement of his right hand brought a six-shooter in proximity with Longtinsky’s ribs, with such painful effectiveness that that person’s color vanished, and his deprecatory retreat backward all but failed to overturn his chair, and deliver him on his back on the floor of the room. Something humorous shone in Pony’s eyes, and the next instant after a circular flourish of his weapon at a variety of objects around the room, he laid it on the table before him.

“Come Pony,” said Longtinsky, with jocular familiarity, “put it away. There’s no harm here for you. You’ve known me a long day and there never was a time when I haven’t been a good friend to you. Put it away. Jessie might come in here too. It would do you no good with her to have that iron out.”

The effect of this apostrophe was remarkable. The man grabbed his revolver, shoved it back in the holster at his hip beneath his coat, a smile entered his cynical face, as a beam of light might illumine into seemly grace a patch of darkness; he looked at Longtinsky with almost a beseeching motion, as he laid his hand caressingly on his arm:

“Tinsky, is Jessie here? Ah! Tinsky, you’re the father of that girl, and I do love her! Blast the folly of it, but I’m a child in her fingers; I’m putty with her. I guess it’s the only thing that makes me run your errands, and hang at your elbow, like a dangling bell to a hound’s neck. Come Old Man, what’s your game? Jessie is the prize. I’m oyster for anything.”

This sudden mollification and surrender was more than gratifying to the plotting Tinsky. He showed no signs of immediate reassurance, but he felt the unmistakable power he possessed through the charm of his daughter for this blackguard’s eyes. Longtinsky laid his hand on Pony’s shoulders, shrugged his own lightly, and half closing his little eyes, watching shrewdly his confidant, spoke slowly, in a low voice, revealing bluntly his nefarious scheme.

“Pony, I’m not going to admit or deny what you’ve said. The high ends of popular liberation are served by all means the agencies of freedom find convenient to their hands”—a hostile imprecation, or something like it intimated to the apostle of the people that that line of adjustment would hardly be accepted. He continued:

“But we’ll drop that. There is danger for us all in this new move. That arch contriver Helen Lorimer intends to undermine us by the hypocrisy of clemency. She is the spring of action behind the Mayor. She expects to make us suspected by our own people. She is a whited sepulchre. For her own ends, for her class, for the greed of the debauched tribe of money-changers she is playing a double part to catch us in the net of her selfish ends, to thrust down the Eagle of Liberty—”

“Cut it out! Cut it out! Don’t for God’s sake, don’t cram any more of that lingo down my throat. What’s your game? Ecco! Out with it. Give it to me straight. Murder, arson, riot, poison, anything but your damn rot of fine words and humbug, Tinsky. You’re in this for keeps, and I’m with you—at least,” and the speaker shoved himself away from the anxious editor,—“as long as you play fair and game.”

Longtinsky smiled faintly: he knew he must go on. The risk was considerable, but concealment meant delay—delay, danger, and if this tool before him turned on him—now that his most faithful henchman Polinck was languishing in a public jail—there was a slim likelihood of his accomplishing anything. He was silent for one moment, and then trying to draw nearer to Pony whose robust criminality always antagonized his tortuous and deceitful projects, he whispered: “Pony, Helen Lorimer must die.”

This announcement veritably startled his hearer. Pony jumped to his feet, seized Longtinsky by the shoulders with both hands, and looked down on him with a ravenous surprise in his eyes, that made Longtinsky half regret his audacity. But the surprise passed. Pony had killed his men before. He fell back in his chair, and a kind of sanguinary unction sounded to Tinsky in his hoarse whisper;

“Good Tinsky—you’re a handsome guy to be plotting murder to save your own skin, and get a poor devil’s neck, like mine, kinked in a noose. Work a little quicker, old cut-throat. You know I like corpses, but just now I’d hate to get into a cold grave myself.”

Encouraged, Longtinsky continued. He dropped the gilded sophistry of his professional cant, and assumed the prerogatives of an initiated criminal. His own hatred for the class which constantly embodied to his eyes his personal enemies, his particular animosity for Helen Lorimer, whose virtues, goodness, and lofty altruism were incomprehensible to his sodden nature, except as the mask of an ulterior ambition, the wretched mess of deception into which circumstances—largely precipitated by his own waning prestige—had forced him, his consequent urgent danger, the sudden glimpse afforded him of a forcible egress into a field of new opportunities, and the pushing constraint of a kind of feverish despair made him suddenly truculent, unabashed and reckless.

“Pony,” he began again, “I’ll make a clean breast of it. I blew up the Settlement House. Polinck and I put the bombs there; Dalzell, Vinta, Ishpy, Charles Bingo, Fabrizio, Spesca, Rinker, and the rest were hired to go in, one hour after we lit the fuses. The janitor was bribed—and—” the speaker grinned diabolically— “it was money from the Silk Stockings that did it. They sent an agent to him. It was a plot; that witch Helen Lorimer wanted her House blown up. She meant it to bring ruin on us. I was fooled. The janitor came to me and promised to open the place if I wanted him to. He left, the house open, and went away—and I dropped into the trap. I meant no harm to the men. Some one had to do it—for the effect—don’t you see—the effect. I thought the East Side would rise,—but the police got wind of it too soon. The men might have got away, and none the wiser but some one peached, and that very night when the house burned, and I had started the revolution—” Longtinsky for an instant looked self-deceived, as if his aspirations for a New Dispensation, with himself as its protagonist was a sacred hope, “—that night every reserve in the city had been doubled, and—you know the rest—six of my men were nabbed with Polinck; the uprising nipped; locust clubs killed the new republic.”

By this time Pony was fully interested; he no longer shrank from the portentous confession. His indolent attention had been replaced by a very alert ear and eye, and not a word was missed, not a reflexion of the utterance, in the face of the narrator, escaped him. He had suspected much of this, some of it he almost could have sworn to. He felt repugnance for the perfidy of the man who could thus coolly rehearse all of this with a callous and untouched heart. But it stimulated his own thoughts, to run rebelliously along a chain of images, in which he saw Longtinsky dead, and himself with Jessie in his arms fleeing the country, the demolition of The Beehive, and his own comfortable existence elsewhere, with a sack of plunder torn from its vindictive and over credulous editor. The dream pleased him, and Longtinsky for once shone to him with an interior and native light of reasonableness, that made him—Pony—urbane and receptive, a transformation not concealed from Longtinsky, whose perception of it only made him more communicative and less cautions.

“You see,” continued Longtinsky, “the reprieve will act as a stay to the execution, of course, and the new trial will not come off until the fall. That is sure. There is time for me to undo the mischief we have suffered. I’ll fill The Beehive with storming articles. Careful you know Pony. I’ll rouse the men we need and I will be bold too; I’ll let out at that woman again, and she can come back at me. I can tell her plans to a dot. She will be down on the East Side again; she will put up some shack and start in with her talks. I’ll bait her all right, and get her in some sort of an argument and then—with our men ready—armed, Pony—we do it. The bomb, Pony, that blows her to perdition will win you Jessie.”

The speaker paused, watching with a flicker of madness in his eyes, as he fed by anticipation upon the ruthless sweetness of his vengeance, and the intoxicating prizes of success, the ardent countenance of Pony, to whom the offer glittered with all the radiance of happiness, complete and inexhaustible.

There was a moment’s silence between the men; Longtinsky never lifted his eyes from the face before him, which responded to an inner elation, and grew good and wholesome under the gentle influence of the exultant and comforting thoughts that Jessie’s name aroused. Longtinsky himself felt the benign touch somehow of his daughter’s name, and there poured into his lowering glance the restful smile of a father’s love. Surely Love—thinking of the abused word in the loftiest sense, as the guerdon of unselfish sacrifice, and devotion—can work, and it alone, the miracle of Redemption!

Pony extended his hand, and Longtinsky was not slow to grasp it. “Done. I’m game for the throw, hit or miss. But a bargain’s a bargain, and you Longtinsky either stick to it, or QUIT BREATHING.” Again the baleful lights in the eyes of both, and the evanescent ray of Heaven’s sunshine on their faces faded away with the harvest of suspicions springing anew in their plotting brains.

There was a light tap on the inner door, which led to the printing and composing room of the paper, and Longtinsky recognized it; “Here is Jessie now,” he said, and before he could extricate himself from the table and chair in whose legs his own had become wound, Pony leaped to his feet, and opened the door.

How strange are the contrasts of Nature’s works; with what necromantic art she weaves the dreadful and the harmless, the lovely, together! How perfectly she contrives—though there is no contrivance, only the mastery of metempsychosis—to mix her materials, the same material it would appear, and form from them now a demon, and now an angel. Or is it in this wise; that a little, Oh! so very little of some transforming juice of virtue can sway the ferment of a mass of rougher ruder stuff, making its effect at last beautiful, choice, and even more exquisite, because forsooth it has risen from its very opposites. Chemistry in our human arts does such things. Heredity is a fact, and yet Jessie was Longtinsky’s daughter. There she stood like some wild and winsome flower, flourishing in the midst of harshness and commonplaceness and reptilian motives. And so fresh and lovely! The arch play of her smile like a golden beam falling on ragged walls and blanched careworn faces, fell on the two men and their lifted heads bathed in it as if in a benediction.

Jessie Longtinsky—her mother was dead—was Longtinsky’s only child, and he lavished on her an unselfish care. She had learnt the most excellent rudiments of an English, German and French education; she spoke all these tongues; she had musical talent, and she developed taste and talent. But best of all the graces of an unsullied nature, a nature so vital and womanly, so confiding, earnest, and hopeful, so searchingly sincere, so buoyant, and yet very brave, dressed, God knows how, in the nobility of goodness.

Such graces were hers, and Jessie became them. They became her; it was an ideality of character and beauty, more piquant and entrancing because unexpected at first sight. It might have seemed almost impossible.

Jessie Longtinsky was fair, her hair literally golden, her features regular and perfectly harmonized, each formed so that it, by the most delightful collusion with the rest, added to the total witchery and charm. If hunting for some particular culprit among them all, that made her win from every one the meed of praise, it might best be attributed to her eyes, as indeed why not, seeing how joyous and soulful eyes can be. Jessie’s eyes were indeed most pretty, and they were not blue, as became convention, in the matter of eyes, with a fair skin, and the story teller’s golden hair. They were the faintest green, though that color craved no prominence in them, and often surrendered its claim, to be considered there at all, to a soft pearly grayness. And they were such honest eyes! Soft and reminiscent sometimes they were, and filling unbiddenly with tears, and then the home of mirth, but perhaps more usually they were tender and grave.

Longtinsky had had great luck in keeping his workmen, because they were young, and because they could frequently feast their amazed eyes on Jessie. Some had been ambitious in her regard but none had been successful, though Jessie managed to make the wound endurable, being calm and sensible and considerate. Among the habituées of the Longtinsky establishment—and they were many—Pony, or exactly Poniatowsky, had proved to be the most formidable suitor. Perhaps Jessie did not care much for him, but she humored him, she may have been a little afraid of him, and then her father favored him, or seemed to, and Jessie was a dutiful daughter. Longtinsky, as men will, even of the roughest, or the worst types, had guarded Jessie from contact with his own world of men; he did not converse about the social aims he had, he even kept his own paper out of his house, not because it was dirty or vile—which it was not—but because it was violent, sanguinary, maledictory and abusive. Longtinsky knew that, but these ways were his weapons. Mrs. Longtinsky probably was an amiable sweet woman, Jessie may have been like her, and so her father wanted to keep her, feeling too some masculine aversion to a femininity becoming raucous with debate and policies and doctrines.

As the door opened, Jessie glided past Pony who failed to catch her, and stood apart from the men turning from one to the other as if questioning their purpose to be locked up there. Then she looked around the room, which she seldom entered, in which no trace of that clean housewifery she practised in the story above the press room, and where Longtinsky dwelt, was visible. Her glance was furtive and shrinking, the place was distasteful; its staleness and meanness oppressed her, there lurked in it an unavoidable meaning of crime. She somehow felt that.

“Father, do let me change all this. I can. You won’t know it. With clean windows and curtains, fresh paper, lamps, a new ceiling, scrubbed floor, and that pretty old furniture in the attic; why it will be so different, so pleasant!”

“Now Jessie that wouldn’t do at all, not down here. If you made everything spick and span, we couldn’t think as well. It is hard enough sometimes to say what we want to say in the style we want, but because we don’t have to think where we are, and what’s about us, we do better. Come my girl, leave us. Pony and I have some things to talk about, which you aren’t interested in. Go up stairs.”

The voice of the speaker had lost its querulous murmur, and was soothing and even affectionate, with a plausible earnestness that discovered to the listener a father’s heart. And indeed there flickered up in Longtinsky, when Jessie was near him, a tenderness that would have saved him from many unruly and wicked impulses. It was the psychic radiance of her own excellence that brightened the dusky souls that came near her, and warmed their sensibilities, such as they had, into a responsive vigor. Jessie sat down, and a cloud of some sort of sadness passed over her face. Pony had been intently watching her, with now and then a perturbed glance at his rumpled clothes, which were not the habiliments he usually wore when anxious to move Jessie’s reluctant heart.

Pony considered himself the recognized swain of Jessie, though it would have been regarded as a mere piece of self flattery, a quite unsupported assumption, by any one permitted to study Jessie’s attitude towards him. She frankly did not like him, though Pony was at his best with her, and really loved her, and because he did, and was quite willing to go any lengths in supporting his claims, against all rivals, he, by a rustic and aboriginal force of argument, concluded she belonged to him, a conclusion not always agreeable to Longtinsky, and certainly not approved by Jessie herself.

Pony started towards her, with a smile of pleasure in his face, that intimated the probable intention of an osculatory salute, when Jessie moved quickly away to the further end of the table. A frown troubled Pony’s features, and threatened to break out in a stormy expostulation, when Jessie unexpectedly fixed the attention of the two men by a raised warning finger.

“Father, there are men outside in the yard watching the house. They came in through the alley a minute ago. I think they may be there yet. They may be your enemies!” Jessie of course knew her father was engaged in a propaganda of a civic nature, and the best sides of a humanitarian socialism appealed to her quite naturally. These she heard, and was honestly led to feel that the rich were the enemies of her class, of her father, of progress. She was cognizant of the higher types of socialism, as she had become acquainted with it in the books of Hilquitt, Marx, and others.

The recent riot, deaths, and the arrest of the conspirators, had been viewed by her with terror, and yet with an exalted conviction of its necessity. Through the sacrifice of the martyrs, she had been told, Liberty came into the world, and always would so come. She saw the sufferings of the very poor, and she exerted a beneficent influence among them, working with an eager sympathy for their good and improvement. She had in this wise done much to strengthen her father’s power, and the affection bestowed on the daughter was an effectual aid in assisting the projects of the father. But lately Jessie, unsuspected by Longtinsky, had come under the spell of Miss Lorimer, and the result threatened to bring about a little alienation for his schemes. However her love for him was true, and when that day, looking from the upper windows of the rear tenement, in which they lived, she saw the usually empty yard invaded by the strangers, and noticed their equivocal actions, she became alarmed, and had, for this reason, interrupted the unhealthy machinations of the two friends.

The two listeners to this startling news, jumped to their feet, and tiptoed to the window, on the yard side, and cautiously raising the corner of the shade, peered into the little yard which had been made into a grass plot, worn irregularly into bare patches, by the feet of those who frequented it, when, on summer nights, Longtinsky gathered there his sympathizers and co-workers, to smoke, and drink, and reform the crooked and nodding earth.

The view obtained under the lifted curtain was a very imperfect and partial one, but there indeed were the intruders walking towards the door of the room, where the watchers crouched. Neither Pony nor Longtinsky stirred, and Jessie behind them, trying to reassure herself over their shoulders, was quite still. Their common apprehension that the men would next instant present themselves for admission, at the door, was relieved when, with a last glance above them, and a review of the few features of the yard, the new comers turned into the alley and vanished. Pony stole to the door, opened it, and creeping outward, saw them disappear into the street, and the next instant an automobile puffed, shirred, tooted, and moved away through the throbbing thoroughfare, and in it sat—our former acquaintances—Mr. Benton Briggs, the mayor’s secretary, and Tom Ratler.

Now it happened, naturally that Jessie had not detailed the circumstances of her discovery, but that incident had consequences that later developed into pleasing importance. When Jessie discovered Mr. Briggs and his companion in the yard, she was at an open window engaged in watering some of her flower charges, and her particular bent attitude or position, had shot a tide of color into her face, so that when she raised herself and gazed down on the men, the eyes of Tom Ratler met a vision of beauty, which the rapidly working appreciation of that susceptible youth, approved as being the sweetest thing they had ever seen. And—happily let us say—this was not unreciprocated for, in the nascent powers of her own healthy observation, Jessie felt aware that the young man underneath her windows was particularly good-looking.

The immediate consequences of an encounter, fraught with such mutual pleasure, vary greatly, according to circumstances and temperament, but with Tom Ratler it produced a strong hope—not shared by Mr. Briggs—that he might have confided to him further work in the capture of the Longtinsky household. It seemed to him that his intervention was necessary, for the security of the defenceless and innocent maiden connected as he discovered,—from Mr. Briggs—by a filial relation to the obnoxious Longtinsky. As to the effect of the same encounter with Jessie herself, it deepened her repugnance for Pony, and made a fluttering sensation discernible in the neighborhood of her heart, that, with more sophisticated girls, would have been indubitably assigned to recondite and tender sympathies.

There was some natural confusion of mind, a little trepidation perhaps, caused by this interruption, and when Pony had returned, Longtinsky and he exchanged irresolute glances which finally adjusted themselves into a settled stare of wonder, while through all this mute interchange of ocular interrogation Jessie stood apart, with her own eyes questioning each of the conspirators. At length Pony broke out;

“I tell you Longtinsky: it’s cut for you. That young chap is the Mayor’s shover, and the old dog is his secretary. They’re on a spying trip; looking the ground over, and before you can say Jack Robinson they’ll have the service men down here, and the whole outfit under lock and key.”

While he was speaking Longtinsky’s head was, metaphorically, whirring with the soundless revolutions of all its interior clockwork, wheels, cogs, and pins. He saw too, that there was a suggestion, in this sudden visit of inspection on the part of the Mayor’s forces of just such a predicament and complication as would allow him to reanimate and reestablish his prestige.

He could now, if the attack was made, the suppression of his paper attempted, raise an outcry against the tyranny of such suppression, the danger of Star Chamber proceedings against the freedom of the press and, sounding the tocsin of alarm over the encroachments of government upon the Palladium of liberty. He might add recruits to his cause, drawn from a class usually out of sympathy with him, while his own followers could be roused into an acute resentment. This latter fanned into a blaze, might create the kind of conflagration he needed for his own escape from censure, and for the completion and execution of his felonious designs. These possibilities rapidly formed themselves in his mind into a logical chain of events, which expeditiously utilized, would immensely further his plans.

He turned sharply to his daughter and said: “Jessie go up stairs, and leave us. You were right to tell us about these spies, and now Pony and I must talk over the matter. Do go!” He approached his daughter whom he truly loved, and putting his hand around her neck kissed her with an ardor that reacted dangerously on Pony’s self-control. That envious gentleman hurried also to Jessie’s side, and was in the act of throwing both his arms around her, when she sprang sideways, escaped him and fled.

Pony’s pursuit was unsuccessful, and he fell over a chair which sent him sprawling against the wall. He was up in an instant, and furious with disgust and disappointment. He would have renewed the chase, had not Longtinsky shut the door past which Jessie had fled, through the press room to her own quarters, and placed himself in the way of the infuriated lover.

Pony stopped; it was not Longtinsky’s formidable frame that caused him to pause; a sudden thought of the handsome Tom Ratler, whom he had seen before, connected itself with the flight and reluctance of Jessie to submit to his embraces. The idea suffocated him. It made him fall back into a chair with a groan and a curse and then his hands clutched the table, he shook it, as if the desperation of his jealousy would reek itself upon this insensate object.

“Damn him,” he cried, “let him come between me and Jessie, and I’ll tear his liver out of his black body. No I’ll do better than that. I’ll mark him for life; I’ll slash his pretty face into strips, and break his legs. A monkey on crutches. Ha! Ha! A fine figure he’ll cut then,” and the fiend gloating over his imaginary revenge drew his knife and struck the table before him with repeated blows.

Longtinsky watched this outbreak with some satisfaction. His acrobatic mind saw that through the incentives of this jealousy on the part of Pony, he could engage that desperate man to do his bidding. He could involve all his enemies—the antagonists of his propaganda—in this man’s hate, and when the moment arrived and the blow was to be struck he could inflame his exasperation to the point where Helen Lorimer—Longtinsky’s rage against this woman partook of the nature of a mania—would become confused or identified with his personal rival, and, relying on his furious love for his daughter, through Pony’s arm, he might strike her down. At present he must decamp, but so arrange things that the police should seize the place—which he would make an empty trophy by its evacuation—and then he would elsewhere publish his grievances and ring the changes upon an outraged liberty.

“Listen to me, Pony,” said Longtinsky to the glowering lover, “all that in time, but now we must get out of this, and save the plant. To-night you must help me to move. There’s a house up Pitt Street that I can get into and there we will go, Jessie and all. In spite of them all we’ll print The Beehive, and we’ll make it hotter than ever. Understand! Come! there’s no time to lose. Remember you stay with us and—” it was his decisive stake “—play the game right, and Jessie is yours.”

Pony leaped to his feet and seized Longtinsky’s hand and the two men disappeared into the inner sanctum.

That night and for some succeeding nights there was much smothered activity in the region of the office of The Beehive. Pony and Longtinsky now banded together in a confirmed partnership wherein the motives of the second outstripped the merely egotistic designs of the first, were busy with the removal of the various archives of the socialistic paper, and engaged too in a wholesale destruction of the more compromising issues of the past year. They worked efficiently and Pony derived a gratification from the occasional help of Jessie who had learned from her father of the impending removal. The old office was left intact with its signs and furniture but the presses were taken to a new retreat in Pitt Street, not far from the site of the ruined Settlement House, and the preparations made for the continuous printing of the paper, but, under the fear of some impending blow, their distribution was secretly arranged, and at the same time the bitterness of their editorials increased. They instilled insidiously a poisonous venom against society, and they craftily wove into all their allusions the name of Helen Lorimer as the embodiment of the wrongs the deluded readers were convinced they suffered. Yet all this was not unopposed; the contingent which Miss Lorimer had gathered around her at the Settlement was very faithful, and Longtinsky regarded with alarm the preparations for rebuilding the Settlement House. The moment must be soon improvised for his blow, wherein the purpose of outright murder steadily and grimly deepened.

CHAPTER VII

THE MAYOR’S VISIT

The Mayor had been very punctual in keeping his engagement with Miss Lorimer. He was standing in the wide parlor of the Lorimer mansion into which he had been ushered by a servant apparently already apprized of his expected visit, so felicitously suave was that person’s reception of him, and so unhesitatingly was he conducted over the hallway to the great parlors.

The room or succession of rooms, in which he found himself was a superb example of architecture and decoration. The effect of a kind of compromise between colonial spaciousness and simplicity in the proportions of the room, and a Louis Quinze elaboration in its furniture, was not as disquieting as might have been anticipated, seeing too that the villa in many aspects was an Italian creation. The ceilings were high, the windows broad, and almost destitute of the framed arrangement of heavy mouldings; the cornice of the room was scarcely emphasized, the windows descended to the floor.

The decorative features were a treatment in gold and pink with the chairs and sofas upholstered in Du Barry satin, garlands of painted roses delicately imprinted the flat ceiling, high mirrors framed in gilt surmounted marble mantels overhanging generous hearths, and the august dignity reached an intellectual note and emphasis in the few large and many smaller paintings which were, with one or two exceptions, the works of American artists, and were, for the most part, landscapes. The three exceptions were religious subjects, being carefully executed copies of The Assumption of Murillo, The Flight by Correggio, and a Holy Family by Domenichino.

Great rugs were spread over the marqueterie floor, Du Barry pink satin curtains, overspreading lace portieres, hung at the windows, a grand piano was accommodated in a swelling niche on one side, and the chandeliers intricately composed, and thrown into a sort of bizarre relief by white enamel threads upon them, supported a galaxy of opalescent globes lit with electric lamps.

It was evening and in summer. The Mayor entered the brilliant and glowing room, walked admiringly towards an Inness which hung almost opposite the entrance of the parlors, and then sat down in a convenient chair, his eyes eagerly inspecting the delicate opulence about him. Near him was a remarkable table—a creation in ivory and ebony—and he noticed a few book-cases holding books bound in white, a few marble sculptures were revealed, and a snowy owl, upon an ivory bracket loomed upon him as at least, if not tasteless, an indiscreet note in the beautiful rooms.

A moment later and his eyes encountered, approaching him from the distant end of the room two female figures, one of whom he quickly recognized, though now Miss Lorimer came to him in a sort of aureole of summer emanations—her dark hair unadorned—and wearing a faintly blue ashen gown, the sleeves caught thrice about her arms with black velvet loops. A brooch of blood red Mexican opal set with emeralds was at her neck, catching the lapels of a frilled white collar which rose upon her neck, while around her waist a quaint armorial belt, fastened with an old and lustrous Chinese buckle, holding a purple fluorite and a green jadeite, added a note of exotic culture. She was radiant, and as the young man rose to his feet his face brightened into an appreciation which spoke almost too plainly his own admiration. Julieta was with her daughter, and her matronly outline and the dark color of her garb was a foil to the latter’s interesting loveliness.

“Your Honor, my Mother,” was the salutation of Miss Lorimer, who seemed eager to begin the serious work before them. The gentleman bowed and expressed his pleasure, and then as Mrs. Lorimer spoke of her daughter’s mission in connection with the new trial of the prisoners seized at the time of the destruction of the Settlement House, Helen Lorimer herself pushed a table forward, drew three chairs up to it and rang a bell.

Answering the summons a servant appeared with a number of portfolios, and almost at the same moment the parlor doors swung apart, and Mr. Theodore Lorimer accompanied by a broad featured gentleman entered. Introductions followed, and the Mayor learned that Mr. Lorimer’s companion was the clever and industrious lawyer who had discovered a mass of new evidence, and was willing to stake his reputation upon his complete ability to prove that five of the men under sentence, had nothing to do with the disastrous explosion and fire, leaving the guilt weighing heavily on the sixth, Polinck, Longtinsky’s confidant, and with a preponderant disposition of the facts pointing to the central and animating spirit of mischief as residing in Longtinsky himself.

Mr. Moser was a short man with a relentless intimation of power in his expression. Somehow it rested in his broad shoulders, clean shaven and pugnacious jaw, his small deep set and musing eyes, the crisply moving thin fingers and particularly in his thin lips that closed against each other in a vise-like way that suggested an interior mental grasp as tight as this physical analogue.

When the portfolios had been opened and the entire party was seated at the table, Mr. Moser rose up, and developed his position. It was admirably done. It was clear; it seemed unmistakably certain that Mr. Moser could prove the points which came out with bristling alacrity. He made them in a matter-of-fact way, quite devoid of parade, and in a conversational undertone, with a relieving gesture, and now and then, especially aiming them at the Mayor, a convincing puckering of his tense eyebrows:

“Longtinsky has a serpent’s tongue and the brain of a demon. The men about him are his dupes. He plays them as you might play cards. He holds them in his hand and no scruples interfere with his using them for his own profit and their ruin. And yet he is a clumsy contriver. The simple confound the wise. A child steps in, and his fabric of deceit tumbles into pieces. It is a play-loving child, with a dash of curiosity, just a trace of the sleuth strangely developing—a fine prophetic instance of tendency Sir. This child drawn by some peculiarity in Longtinsky’s looks follows him; shows an old age interest in the man. And why? Because Longtinsky gave him a picture book. This inflamed the child’s imagination. It exerted some hypnotic influence. By a queer coincidence the book contained an illustrated story of a Russian nihilist, and the boy identified him with Longtinsky. He follows him, shadows him, if you will, a very mania of pictorial identification seized him. In Longtinsky he saw the hero of his story. In every incident he caught a reflexion of the episodes of his tale. Longtinsky either mistook his devotion or it was unobserved, or the tender years of this boy deceived him. The boy hung round his printing office; he was amused by Longtinsky who gave him blocks and toy type to play with. Longtinsky may have dreamed that the child would grow up into a keen edged accomplice in his games. At any rate he took little notice of the boy’s incessant observation, and he never suspected his sensitive memory.

“Every impression remained there, and they remained marvellously distinct. There are no shadows among them. The child’s mind is a photographic plate. The child was also attracted by Miss Lorimer. He was one of the visitors at the Settlement House, and made good use of its advantages. But it was a different sort of attraction. He had absorbed Longtinsky’s hatred for this excellent benefactor and mixing up the impressions of his hero in the Russian story he made out for himself that Longtinsky was the victim of persecution directed by Miss Lorimer.

“This boy was at the very centre of the operations that turned the Settlement House into ashes. He saw the bombs taken from Longtinsky’s office of The Beehive at night to the Settlement House. It was a night when the House was watched, the Janitor was away: there was collusion somewhere. Four men brought those implements of destruction there. TWO OF THEM WERE LONGTINSKY AND POLINCK. This boy although obsessed by an incredible devotion to Longtinsky never revealed his feeling but like some parasitic thread of life clung to him, slipped on behind him unknown, stood in the shadow of the doorways, slunk from retreat to retreat along the streets. He too was vitally active as if driven by a flame of madness. He saw everything and, what was more astonishing, he understood. He lived through it all, the life of his hero in the Russian tale. He slunk among the conspirators as their unseen or unnoticed Nemesis. His parched and contracted nature became monomaniacal with a detective precocity. His mind like wax took impressions that were retained as if in steel.

“This strange object I met—after Miss Lorimer had engaged me to look into this case—I saw him at the ruins of the Settlement House, and something—as he stood on the brink of the smoking excavation—piqued my curiosity—not averse Sir, to finding evidence in the smallest scraps—and I spoke to him. I found out that he had been in the House a few minutes before the explosion, that he knew Longtinsky. His warped precocity of observation had not changed a natural childlike simplicity for he was easily led on into the startling admission that showed that Longtinsky and Polinck had placed the bombs in the House themselves, had afterwards taken into the House the men who have been accused and convicted of the crime at the moment when the bombs were lit. This dodging boy had followed Longtinsky and Polinck in, when they placed the fuses. Afterwards Longtinsky escaped to his home, and left it to Polinck to inveigle and desert the victims of their mutual treachery. Polinck would have gotten away too except for the time lost in making the oil and rag fires that consumed the place. The boy has no parents but lived with some family who pitied his lonely condition and he wandered about the streets almost unobserved and uncared for. His peculiar temperament developed into a queer intensity of moroseness wherein the seeds of his unnatural attachment to Longtinsky grew and flourished.

“After the catastrophe this boy seemed stunned, and I met him at a psychological moment, when he needed a confessor. He craved the opportunity to tell all he knew and by some reversion as strange as his former hallucination, he now believes it necessary to do something for the men whom he saw taken by the police. Some of these men have protested their innocence of the exact crime, but the circumstances of their apparent participation were too strong against them. This boy your Honor will exculpate them, and I believe that he will keep the rigid immobile steadiness of his story under the fiercest cross-examination. He is of course uncorroborated by others, and it remains to be seen how his narrative will effect a jury. On him Sir, we pin with certainty our conviction that the men now under judgment of death will be freed.”

“Where is this boy?” said the Mayor.

Miss Lorimer rose and in a few moments returned with the singular being, whose abnormal and subtle watchfulness had put so complete a reversal upon the course of events with the suspects.

As the boy came up to the table the Mayor rose, and his example was followed by all present. The boy stood in the centre of a wondering group. He was a creature likely to attract attention among those accustomed to interest themselves in a face as the symbol and expression of the nature beneath it. Extremely thin, with a stunted effect produced by the drooping of one shoulder, and his cross-eyed vision, his arms would excite wonder at once. They were so long. His hands were flat and bony, and by some sort of interior nervousness they seemed to be constantly in motion, twitching or seizing his clothes as if worried by their fit or arrangement. His face would have attracted attention any where, but it would also have been the attention of sympathy and commiseration. It was at every point almost disfigured and misshapen. The eyes were not on a level and the ears were curiously small and shrivelled, his forehead, as in hydrocephalics, was swollen and protuberant, his nose was a sharp ridge and his cheeks were sunken. Only his mouth bore the traces of an infantile charm, and it was perfectly formed and opened over perfect teeth. This latter feature conjoined with the deep clustering and raven darkness—lustrous too as a raven’s wing—of his abundant hair, redeemed his physiognomy and imparted a singular elfin weirdness to it, at least it raised the baffling surmise that his face was made in two parts, a worser and a better half, and their discord reflected some temperamental confusion, some alternating balance of moral or mental tendency. His eyes seemed to dread the light, and he kept them cast down, which further imparted a dead and expressionless vacancy to the rather blighted and uninteresting face.

This blankness remained only when his eyes were averted. Raised and opened, they became partially corrected in their alignment, by the frequent flashes of excitement they betrayed, and then intelligence entering his expression, his vexed and ill treated features gained something in orderliness, or the more repugnant hid themselves, and were forgotten, under this exaltation. He was short for his years, and pale, with flushes of color coming at the moments of excitement.

He was a small boy with excellent proportions of body other than in the simian arms and the defect of the drooping shoulder. In him again Miss Lorimer had turned the tables upon her antagonist. Angelo Shimura was an idolator. He craved objects of worship; they remained with him in his waking moments as supernatural incentives to his devotion. The subtlety and strength of his attachment had been tested with Longtinsky, as a mere objective personality, upon which he must lavish his imaginative attributes. But in reality his heart had not been warmed, and in that heart lay the unappeasable fires of the most slavish self-sacrifice.

The shock of the terrific incident which he had watched in its growth into a tragic issue had perhaps shattered that first extreme and provisional adherence; and now, brought under the power of a lofty nature, and fed with the nutriment of sympathy, his little passionate soul became steeped in love for his benefactress. In that company, whenever he raised his eyes, they sought the face of Miss Lorimer, as a dumb wistful yearning animal follows with unquestioning faithfulness and service its master’s. Its pathos touched the young Mayor, and his own heart followed the boy’s to the same goal.

When Mr. Moser had finished his short story after adding a few other more emphatic affirmations of his complete confidence to bring about a reversal of the conviction of five of the six men—Polinck always should be excepted—the company again took their places around the table, with the boy sitting alongside of Miss Lorimer and catching in a queer studious way the drift of the dialogue though his attention was more shown by the movement of his head than by the glances of his eyes.

The Mayor had become thoroughly aroused and felt deeply his indebtedness to Miss Lorimer for her interference. It had probably saved him and the community from a serious weight of remorse and opprobrium. Already the stay of the execution had been ordered by the Mayor, and the further steps to secure a new order for a trial were agreed upon. The case could not be now considered before the fall, and in the meanwhile it was hoped that the Mayor’s action would not meet censure. The diagrams and drawings in the portfolios were inspected. Many of them showed the stages in the construction of the old Settlement House, one was a photograph of the fire, another was of the prisoners and a third, of the most significant interest in their present hunt, was a chance photograph of Pitt Street, made by some wandering tourist engaged in a dilettante search for reminders of “the slums,” in which appeared two figures recognizable as Longtinsky and Polinck standing upon the opposite side of the street, and looking upward to the walls of the Settlement House, while far from them crouching in a doorway was the odd figure of the haunting Angelo Shimura.

The Mayor was surprised to see among these sketches, a series of perfected drawings for a new Settlement House, larger and more ornate than its predecessor and designed to comprise a Museum. On this point Miss Lorimer became eloquent. Her animation was intense and the charmed young man listened to her with delight. The nobility of her design heightened the fires burning brightly in his own heart, of sympathy with the “submerged,” and those to whom the chances of recreation and distraction are denied, the strangely forgotten units of life, who somehow must be masoned into the structure we call “The Nation,” and from whom, in the lottery of Fortune’s choice, great destinies may arise, or more practically, immense acquisitions of sane sentiment be won.

“The large museums” said Miss Lorimer, “are a long way off from the people I intend to help in this way. A museum, like a library, should be constantly used. Repetition tells, and memory makes a permanent record when it is deeply graven by iteration. Then it seems to me no museum, as I find them, does the work that can be done for these people in the most helpful way. Everything is remote and difficult in its presentation, or else simply pictorial. And my museum will be composite, and it will be national. I mean that there will be history and art and science in it, but all these will be concerned with America and its interests and objects.”

“I don’t imagine,” said the Mayor laughing, “that you intend to nationalize astronomy, for instance. We can hardly pretend to any monopoly of the stars.”

“You must not ridicule my project, Sir. Let me show you what I mean, in a way at least. Come and see my own museum. I have one in this house.”

“Indeed may I see it?” said the Mayor eagerly, “I may not know what you mean to do, but I can understand what you have done.”

“Yes, that would please me,” Miss Lorimer answered, as she rose and explained to the company her intention of giving the Mayor an object lesson in her “improvised museum at the top of the house.” She invited the others to accompany them, but Mr. Moser and Mr. Theodore Lorimer had a discussion under way, which they could not afford to interrupt, and Julieta excused herself. Thus the Mayor and Miss Lorimer went together through rooms and corridors, up staircases where niches rose imposingly on either side, adorned with sculptures, and at last entered the high attic, into a broad and long room set around with cases, occupied with tables, and somewhat divided into alcoves, while the windows were breaches in the walls, opening out upon the topmost balcony, which overlooked the trees, and now at night commanded a far-spread network of twinkling lights.

The place was singularly pleasant, and the feeling of physical elevation, as now and then the eye caught a moving barge of lights upon the Hudson or the halloo of shouts rose from the velvety darkness beneath, seemed grateful. The Mayor noticed that the objects promiscuously heaped around and in almost unrestrained confusion were for the most part pictures, prints, etchings, woodcuts, framed and loose, with pottery, porcelains, statuettes, and furniture. There were few of the usual accessories of the Natural History museum; a few shells in a case, a specimen, of large size, of quartz or feldspar or calcite, some gorgeous bird, a stuffed small animal, and a rather amusing collection of fossils. The Mayor had some scientific proclivities and a well developed appreciation of the objects of nature.

Miss Lorimer observed his surprise. “No,” she said, a slight blush mounting in her cheeks “I have not been very anxious for the regulation display of a scientific museum, and that is not quite what I intend to make mine in the Settlement House. I must confess art and history appeal so much more to me. It would be very foolish for anyone to complain of Science but—Well, I will be frank and disparage myself in your eyes—I do not love Science. IT TRIES TO EXPLAIN TOO MUCH. I can’t help but think of it,” Miss Lorimer was laughing now, “as a near sighted and precise middle aged gentleman, who sees everything through his glasses which must be brought at short range with the things he is looking at. They are very clear to his eye, but they have no atmosphere, and the poetic—might I say—the religious lights, and the broad vistas escape him altogether. Labels and names, nomenclature and theories make up his life. He stumbles a good deal because he does not see very far beyond his nose, and yet I will say his intentions are excellent, and he does much good, but because he is near sighted he breaks beautiful vases filled with flowers, and puts his defacing hand on many a fresh picture.”

“Well,” retorted the Mayor, “you must admit that science has made our everyday life more healthful and convenient; that it has taught us a great deal, and influenced us to think more of just those unfortunates whom you desire to help. Would you really care to see science less powerful in this wonderful modern world?”

“Why, no,” answered the lady as the two sat down upon a bench placed in the recess of a window, “I think of science as a handmaid to the arts of life, as a purveyor of the necessities, making us comfortable and keeping us healthful. It is quite irreproachable but, can you love it?”

The Mayor’s pale face flushed, and the beautiful look returned to it which had for an instant enthralled Helen Lorimer when she met him in the City Hall. She looked at him intently. He rose as if confused or pained, and walked a few steps away. A fine Barbazon bronze stood upon a table at his elbow, and he answered, looking at this, as if finding his text somewhere in its graven lines.

“Science does keep us sane and real. Romanticism, the sort the Germans encouraged two centuries ago, can hardly live in the world of science. As to loving it, those who follow science seem to surrender themselves to it with a feeling as deep, or deeper, than even Love would ask of men. It possesses them like an inspiring demon. Perhaps that abnegation of all interests to the one great call of Wisdom is only realized in the more profound and zealous, but it is there, with them. Why! to add one little scrap to the pages of knowledge, just to put there a new unobserved fact, imparts a curious elation. But as to Love—Ah! well love is something different.”

“Yes,” Miss Lorimer’s voice was low, as if she too had surrendered to a train of interior reflections, “love is more human than Science. It cherishes old faiths, old things, its rays are not the concentrated radiance from patent reflectors, but the old sweet sort of light that you see in a woman’s eyes.”

“Why not a man’s, also?” softly whispered the Mayor, who left his absorbed contemplation of the bronze, and stood near Miss Lorimer.

“Well—” she answered, “I suppose so too, but—it is a concession which must not be made too much of. There is good authority for believing women monopolize that kind of illumination. Do you recall Shakespeare’s adage?”

“Yes, but” retorted the young man “the same poet has put in the mouths of men the deepest and the truest things about love.”

“Of course,” laughed his companion, “men are great soothsayers. I think a very wise jester in Shakespeare averred that.

“Let me show you my meaning, the hope I have of putting in the new House, over there on the east side, something more useful to the people than labelled insects and shells and fossils. I want to have a series of rooms each one of which will be a page of history as it were, that is, a section of historic time, and, as the visitor passes from one to the next, he will feel the changing atmosphere of the rolling ages. It will be the paleontology of culture. Instead of fossils arranged to show the evolution of animals you shall here see the evolution of the human idea of living.”

“It’s a grand thought, but perhaps it is larger than the space you have to put it in,” said the Mayor.

“I think, Sir,” and the speaker moved closer to him and looked almost inquiringly into his face, “you intend to jest with me. But I will have your submission. Let me show you how well even in a small way this all can be done. I intend to do it with pictures, a few small replicas of buildings, and some figures, with just enough archeology to make the pictures and the figures real. Be patient with my good intentions and remember I have chosen you for my ally.”

“There are some reserved rights of criticism for an ally,” said the Mayor, taking up the border of a tapestry which hung near them. “But I should be, I fear, a poor critic. My allegiance is too unquestioning.”

“Well you shall have privileges. In my scheme there are aspects of civics to be considered. That will be your affair.”

“Perhaps,” the Mayor whispered in serio-comic tone, “We ought really to consult Briggs?”

Helen laughed outright; “OH! that Cerberus. No, indeed. He would discover some means to ruin all my plans. He is implacable. He will not forgive me his discomfiture at the Hall. He sees in me the embodiment of a rabid useless philanthropy which is about as bad in his eyes as the red Jacobinism he fears in the sans culottes. But you approve of me don’t you?”

The speaker turned upon the young man the appealing beauty of her face and the gesture was too significant not to escape the jealous attention of her hearer, who never felt so happy.

“Miss Lorimer, my admiration of what you are attempting is a good deal deeper than approval. I think I am not careless in using words, when I say that I love you for what you are doing and have done.”

A red tide of color flushed Helen Lorimer’s face, her eyes sought the floor, and the Mayor looked at her with a wondering smile, which was an excellent index of his feeling that his words were not resented. There was a short silence and then Miss Lorimer rose, and moved towards the opposite end of the long room, while she half turned and invited the Mayor to follow.

“I have indeed made a step forward in my plan. Come and see the Egyptian phase. I call these phases of civilization—chapters. It is the great book of life I wish to show these people, as if the human mind advanced in cycles of development, and each of these cycles was a chapter in a continuous history. There will be rooms, each room a chapter, each chapter successional to the others that precede it. But that is not all—not all—I have so much to show you.”

They stopped a moment at the door of a room, which when opened, revealed a half arranged assortment of maps, pictures, models, apparel, with a number of stereoscopic cameras, and relievos, all illustrating scenes, customs, and the ruins of Egypt. There were here great portfolios filled with drawings, photographs, and colored sketches. A number of well made relief maps showed the configuration of the ancient country, while small but exquisitely executed restorations of temples, propylons, sphinxes, obelisks, occupied a table in the middle of the apartment. There was the usual miscellaneous assortment of scarabaei, glass vessels, vases, mortuary images, ises, and one sarcophagus.

Miss Lorimer viewed them all with pride, though she was silent for an instant as if estimating the forlorn confusion among these crowded reminders of the past; but her embarrassment quickly vanished.

“I shall try,” she said, contemplating with a little perplexity the disarray of objects, “with these types, and with books and labels—yes with poetry and epigrams—to set before the people a picture, a restoration of Old Egypt. If they can be made to realize its awful distance from our modern variegation, its monolithic cryptic strangeness, if they can feel the breath of its exaggerated egotism, and the weird pantheistic aspirations of its religions, or catch in an imaginative picture its stolid immensity of architectural violence, will that not be an education? Suppose I can draw them along from room or hall to other rooms and halls, each one the concentration of the idea of a peculiar culture, as the Greeks, the Romans, the Mediaeval, the Mahommetan, the Indian and, expanding as they move upward to our modern day, into treatment of nations or races, as cultural units what a breadth of well defined impressions I can make!

“I can invite them into beautiful avenues of thought, recreating by the spell of portraiture and language these obliterated complexes of ideation; the Egyptian aridity and monumental titanism, the art and limpidity of Greece, the strength and legal emphasis of Rome, and then may I not attempt somehow to show the warming power of Christianity by which our hearts become susceptible to all beauty, for Christianity Sir, unlocked the treasury of Sympathies we possess with all life.”

There was something very lovely in Helen Lorimer when her enthusiasm—always easily evoked—kindled, and the young Mayor thought nothing in the form of lovely woman could be more captivating. He was less attentive to her plans as he watched her, than he was thoughtfully wondering with himself how impossible it was for him to control his own feelings, and then again how far away from him seemed the radiant gifted and noble woman whose voice rose to him with a penetrating sweetness, and whose eyes met his with challenging sincerity. Curiously he found himself retracing the steps of his own life, so that while he listened, while he watched—and watching loved—some hidden operative power of thought reviewed the toiling days he had gone through, and his divided attention, like a rider on two horses, noticed Miss Lorimer’s ideals—probably a little vaguely—and his own struggles amid deprivations and against obstacles—perhaps a little acutely.

He saw himself the child of humble parents—his father being a bookkeeper and his mother a lady of simple birth—who had grown rapidly and was devoured by a passion for place. At school he fought with his schoolmates for the best position in the school base-ball team, in the class room he engaged every power he possessed of self-control to seize and hold the first place. He admitted this superiority came easily, his lessons were quickly and well learned, and his physical skill, the celerity of his movement, were ungrudgingly acknowledged by less successful rivals. His disposition—he was not embarrassed in making the confession—was genial and loving, with traces of irritability, and though his worsted opponents might regret their failures, somehow—if the individual was not too cross grained and unforgiving—he could coax them back into good humor and even make his own victory serviceable to their needs.

But he must be on top; the rage for conquest burned fiercely in his boyish heart, and this ambition kept him restlessly aggressive. He bounded through the grammar school, he leaped over the grades in the High School, as if, figuratively, he was an acrobat bursting paper rings. Then he flashed through the City College, and his coruscating transit remained a vivid bewilderment to the faculty and his class mates. But he was always poor. He came home after the day’s exciting experiences to a very simple home life, wherein the delicate and sweet figure of his patiently toiling Mother, like a consecration, deepened his love, and brought feverish resolves in his mind to lift her, his father, and himself into affluence.

He had not indeed gained riches, but he had won place, the highest in the city-state, and before him opened untrodden vistas of ascending power, social and financial. After graduating from college he studied law. His wit and energy, the tireless practice of self imposed tasks, his utter absorption in the thing at hand, bore the customary fruit. He won out easily, and before a bench of jurists delivered an oration—argumentative, speculative, and didactic—on the claims of socialism that almost brought that deliberative body to its feet, and for an instant endangered its dignity by an irruption of hand-clapping. His subsequent course had been persistently upward. Prestige, reputation, employment were naturally gained. And finally as he wished it, the offer of the nomination for governor was tendered to him, and art and opportunity combined to seat him in the governor’s chair.

He had done well, the rewards were not undeservingly allotted; no man exerted more relentlessly his ability to work, or aimed higher in the standards of excellence his ambition proposed to his skill. Yet—the opposition is unusual—with this incessant application for success, under the good of his own unappeasable thirst for place, he displayed a most irrelevant modesty. It was an almost unsupportable personal enigma. A man ruthlessly overcoming opposition, battling like a maniac for position, and yet at the surcease of effort declining into self-effacement. It seemed to his friends a neurological accident; it was nervous exhaustion and they looked upon it as a dangerous symptom of a physical decay.

As the Mayor thus mused, still retaining in his ears and mind the lavish picture that Miss Lorimer was drawing, he felt again the challenge to a new sort of conquest. Could he capture the heart, the hand, of this famous woman, the soul of an aristocratic coterie—a Hypatia indeed, upon whose shoulders dwelt the prestige of wealth and talent, and yet one mingling her daily life with the currents of the people’s lives in the ministrations of mercy, of education.

How amazingly acceptable to him—a man eager to disenthrall the commonality from the sordid commonplaces of their lives, and bring to them the assets of an intellectual endowment—was this condescension. And yet he secretly but acutely augured that he and Miss Lorimer were separated by a deep moral hostility. Helen Lorimer dwelt wholly within the borders of a severe and ecstatic religious faith, and he—Ah! how should he reconcile to her his repudiation of all creed, the complete erasure from his heart of all faith and the bleak hardihood of his reiterated negations before the fabric and the vouchers of the Church?

The Mayor was enrolled among those who accept the scientific conduct of life, who look along the years ahead of them as periods of duration to be used discreetly, but who spurned the illusion of any forbearance from above, any posture of agreement with a God, any dream of perpetuation beyond the pit and doom of death. Perhaps he felt the authority and corrective uses of the Church, but like Napoleon who saw in the Concordat a political compact and nothing more, he appreciated its invincible excellence as a police guarantee for ORDER.

He could not have said with Napoleon, “I do not believe in religions, but in the idea of a God;” he believed in neither. To the world about him, to the men of daily intercourse he was reticent. He respected the rights of conviction, and he knew their value. But with this new aspect of life delightfully developing before him, with the ingratiating companionship of a woman’s heart and soul, leading him into untraversed joys—and such a woman—could there safely be long concealment? He saw how immensely earnest she was, that perhaps she in a measure lived for invisible realities; should he hesitate to be frank?

Well at any rate there was now no need for brutal, disconcerting, confessions; let Love have her perfect way at first, and let reconcilement follow later. His present happiness was too great to be disturbed by shocks of disagreement. He was quite ready to fight hard for the splendid prize, and strategy—though he despised mean motives—was a legitimate resource.

There was a short silence which might have left an unpleasant impression upon the lady had it been continued, when the Mayor spoke; “It is a splendid thought, but can you realize it, as you wish; can you make these people understand? I suppose too, there is an ulterior aim, something outside of the mere literary or poetic image of these superseded cultures. What is that?”

“Oh, there will be much more than my museum. There will be instructions, lectures and these must all conform to a definite progressive training in the idea of the improved modern state over all these decadent and vanished social states. I wish to show the rise of the conception and the realization under our modern forms of government of property; I want to accentuate the individualistic idea, the definite personal progression, by which the whole community rises to higher things, and I want to give that all a christian imprint, because I believe that the christian formula is the only one that fits the requirements of our day, as I believe that they have always fitted the requirements of every day.

“The vagaries and the perplexities of men would vanish if they could all feel—rich and poor alike—the dissolving efficacy of Love, mutual toleration, mutual forbearance, and if too in accordance with the hierarchical type of the Church they could feel the necessary relations of higher and lower in the social scale. The socialists are levellers: they would crop all men short to one height and that the shortest; the wonderful picture of our world with its atmosphere and relief would all become like a Chinese drawing, all foreground, out of proportion and distorted.”

The Mayor was hearing very carefully now, and he was looking at the speaker with a flushed face—the index of some sudden resolution—his hands folded before him and his lips just slightly tightened—a further assurance of a forming determination.

“It will surprise you, Miss Lorimer, but I am a socialist in a way, and perhaps you will remonstrate with me if I say that I would invoke the traditions and the teachings of Christianity to convince you, that you ought to be one too—in a way.”

The speaker was now smiling with a deferential suggestion of not wishing to be misunderstood or rebuked. When he looked that way he was at his best, and Helen Lorimer forsook her dogmatism and answered back with a strange girlish sweetness and yearning; “Ah! please: You wish to confuse me. Tell me just what you mean, and tell me too how you can be a socialist and say the things you said to me at the City Hall when I came to you to crave mercy for socialists. I think I can undeceive you as to Christianity being socialistic—in your sense.”

The Mayor sat down and leaning on the arm of his chair spoke slowly, softly, without ostentation, and with an earnestness that was the outpouring of his deepest convictions.

“Christianity must, I think, be socialistic in all senses. What does it pretend to be, to do? Surely it is not solely a Gospel of Preparation, it is also a Gospel of Life; this life, this weary work-a-day world, with its inequalities, its disrupting accidents, its amazing wildernesses of need, of sickness, of despair, of the manifold disorganizing vagaries of temper, and of the vast Upas Tree of evil.

“Is it not meant to meet all that and help it? How can it be done? I think in one way only. By preaching the essential community of all the productive powers of the state, by helping to make society a vast machine, if you will, running smoothly like a perfect machine, with all its parts coordinated, adjusted, registered, inter-active, reciprocating. Christianity should denounce the tyranny of the individual and the individualistic conceit. Society organized upon individualization is organized upon Greed. The principle of individualism is the feral type, the manner of wild nature, of preying and carnivorous appetite; it is the struggle, internecine, sanguinary, continuing, wherein the strongest survives and it alone.

“Christianity I take you mean to assert, is a superinduced order at war with nature, intended to overcome nature even to the extent of exterminating its normal instincts,” the voice speaking became as it were stealthily murmurous for an instant, and then it rose again sonorous and persuasive.

“Can I care, can you care, can anyone care, whether an industrial metamorphosis like this strikes at the roots of literature and art, so long as it means redemption, elevation, and happiness for Humanity? The main fact about life is living. Should we not be more interested in making the world absolutely habitable for the millions that are in it, than in furnishing subjects to art and letters, because it is tragic and disappointing; full now of dark shadows and high lights too sharply contrasted conditions, too dangerous abysses and too risky peaks?

“Art of the kind we have known, and literature of the kind we have read, might be discouraged in an earth absolutely at peace, absolutely happy, absolutely comfortable, absolutely bourgeoise, if you will. But perhaps some other sorts of art and writing might appear. It is not easy to stagnate the human mind, but if its activity depends on the misery of the human heart then let it stagnate.

“And your Christianity, why is it not socialistic? It began so. Your Christ, observe Miss Lorimer I will be abjectly honest, not mine—your Christ told the rich man to give all he had to the poor and to follow him;” at these words Helen Lorimer seemed to quiver as if with a sort of terror, still her eyes never left the speaker’s face, and because they dwelt so courageously upon his own the speaker surrendered himself to the sway of his impulse, without reservation, driven on by the novel inspiration of imposing upon the splendid being in front of him by his own indomitable frankness.

“Why can not the civilized minds of the world get together and establish some sort of a vast homogeneity, some standards of co-operative living, an international fusion, a set of rules governing every aspect of life, at least so far as rules will. Let it be a machine made society, machine run, but like a perfect machine running smoothly with oiled parts, with certainty, and exquisitely effective, from top to bottom clean and happy.”

The Mayor ended but Miss Lorimer continued her fixed gaze at least for a moment longer; that ended too as she rose, withdrew a little, passing her hands over a cleverly reconstructed mimic sphinx. The young man’s face had resumed its paleness, but his eyes shone; their eagerness was not unnoticed, and when Helen Lorimer after a minute’s indecision returned, and stood near him, his expression changed from its challenging confidence, and grew quietly grave, and then he looked at her with a queer questioning humility:

“Do I offend you? You will not think less of me, will you, if I have been sincere? As to your visit to the City Hall in the interest of these unfortunate men, and my stubbornness there, that has nothing to do with my convictions. Perhaps I have not much sympathy with the Longtinsky type, and at any rate his ideals, if he has any, are not mine, and Order, Security, Law must be continued at all hazards. I do not think that chaos will form a desirable introduction to a perfect state.”

“No indeed, Mr. Mayor,” returned Miss Lorimer, a smile struggling upward in features that had become a little daunted and astonished with his unexpected ardor and confession; “No. I could feel no offense—but somehow I cannot think you are right. Society is not mechanical; you cannot make it so. In my mind christian society is an organization, whose life—I mean its spiritual vitality—is religion, and let me too be frank—the religion of the Catholic Church; an organism with parts, functions, and these of high and low degree though all serviceable to one end—and bearing the blossom and fruit of character.

“Perhaps you will say an organism is socialistic—that our own bodies with their various parts are socialistic. Well—perhaps—and yet—” the speaker reflectively looked at the Mayor with a puzzled honest glance, which brought the pleasantest of smiles into his face, and with a little gentle laugh he hastened to increase her confusion:

“Of course—if any living thing were not a socialistic compound, it would fall to pieces. All of its organs must become fraternally united, fraternally active, fraternally sound: if they compete with each other, if they engage in self assertions of independence, and begin a war upon each other, they are no longer fraternal but fratricidal. Has not most society, as we read of it in history, been just that?”

Miss Lorimer did not seem to be convinced. The problem “gave her pause,” and the half pained, half amused indecision in her face served naturally to make the Mayor and herself better acquainted. Indeed it pushed them forward to a very close mental companionship. Miss Lorimer’s brow cleared, her eyes lost their humorous dismay, she felt the grip of argument and flung back her answer with almost a vindictive taunt.

“But society can be social without being socialistic; individual initiative does not forbid mutual toleration, help, recognition. Will you kill the principle of property that it has taken so long to form, formed too by bloodshed, heroism of all sorts, invention and patience? The savage is a socialist, the despot is one too, and tyrannies are socialistic. The goad to effort is the prospect of possible possession. Your socialistic society will be a sponge, made of innumerable identical monads, not a Ship of State moving on to new lands, new hopes, new treasures.”

“No simile will help you,” retorted the Mayor, who was enjoying himself, who felt the thrills of a deepening friendship with the woman before him, deepened too by just such an amiable and thoughtful contest, “the Ship is itself a socialistic State. Each man who is on it has his work, his pay, and lives on the winnings of the voyage. Socialism does not preclude promotion, nor to my mind, property, but it greatly equalizes the chances of having anything at all for those who to-day have nothing.

“As a child without liberty, a man, supported by his family, lives, the imprudences or accidents of his life deprive him of support when he becomes of age and is given liberty. Liberty to five or six men out of ten means destruction. Let the State once become a family, and all of its children live, for it will be a family rich enough to support them. The best, the smartest, if you will, the most able will control, but not altogether for themselves. They will no longer use their wits to get the best of those around them—as I have, as others do—for selfish reasons. They will be saved from themselves. Greatness of character, that I know Miss Lorimer you adore, will not be diminished because struggle—that is the hard, sordid, internecine—conflict sort—ceases; greatness of character will be apportioned more liberally to many. And there will be struggle enough. No ideal state can escape it; struggle against sin, sickness, disease, ignorance, waste, revolt, prejudice, against storm, earthquake the viciousness of nature. Only by a process of unification, consolidation, can the race burst its bonds, and reach Utopia. You say, it is a dream—perhaps—but dreams have lifted men to Heaven.”

Miss Lorimer hesitated for one instant, but a new light of appreciation entered her face; the Mayor had won—something—and perhaps much.

“Well, Mr. Mayor, you press it strongly, and because it now comes to me under a different guise, let me suspend judgment. You may teach me more—but surely individual responsibility cannot carelessly be forgotten, and with me, back of everything is the Church. Bonald has written that society does not consist of the walls of our houses or the ramparts of our towns but that wherever a human being is found there is a father, a mother, a child, a language, heaven, earth, God and a religion.”

A shadow of pain crossed the face of the young man. He rose from his chair, stooped towards Miss Lorimer, who had sat down and in a voice that vibrated with a distinct suggestion of sorrow, said: “You may teach me what you can about the Church, but to me it seems unlikely that the Church stands so stubbornly for things as they are.”

“The Church revolutionized the world. It brought into action all the unselfish sentiments you appeal to. The culture in sympathy it has given to the world makes your Socialism possible. Besides” Miss Lorimer grew more beautiful before his face, as some transfiguring grace of Hope and Faith rested on her, and gave her an indefinable sweetness, “the Church gazes beyond the rim of this earth. Its feet stand on the earth but its head is above the clouds. You remember Virgil’s image:

Ingreditur que solo, et caput inter nubila condit?”

The Mayor laughed, “Ah, yes, Miss Lorimer, but for most practical purposes it is best to keep our eyes fastened on the ground. Really star gazing seldom helps us to walk straight. But do not rebuke me, I understand. I do indeed, and I would not do myself such harm in your eyes as to appear to be cynical.”

A swinging window frame pushed by a softly rising breeze borne to them from the river, swung back, and the delicious summer air, fragrant and warm, blew in upon them, breathing its delicate febrile sensuousness, and almost—as if a voice, by some disembodiment only present to their interior sense, had spoken—summoning them to come out into the night The window opened upon one of the broad balconies which encircled the mansion at this attic story, and as they both looked to the portal caught by a common sense of interest in the pleasant draught of air, the moonlight also smote the floor, though barely seen in the lighted room. It came from the full moon that now had floated upward over Long Island, and inundated the outspread city with a golden glow, whose burnish only rested here and there where it was not repelled by the electric aureole below it, withdrawing timidly from the spaces bathed in the nether glow of its terrestrial rival.

As it happened the room in which they were, was at the north end of the villa, and at that point occurred one of the gaps in the artificial illumination of the city upon which, as if by its own preemption, the disheartened moonlight still presumingly remained unchallenged. The invitation met their wishes. This personal collision of opinion was out of place that glorious night. The Mayor dearly wished to have done with it, earnest as he was, and just then his heart rebelled against this intellectual coercion. And why was it that Helen Lorimer wistfully gazed at the shrinking intrusion of the wisps of moonlight, and rose obediently to the same unuttered welcome to the outer night? It was a quaint incident that they both rose and walked toward the open window, and they both laughed a little. It seemed to help. Louder laughter came to their ears from the river, where flaming barges sailed with bursts of music, and waifs of song, bewitched—however crude they were—into delightsome sound by the melting amiable night. They could see the opposite banks of the noble stream where the Palisades, formed then into a reservation, showed their columnar masses weirdly glistening, for on them fell the moonlight with the peccant light of the wavering electrical auroras.

“May we sit here?” said the Mayor.

“The night is too lovely to be missed, and this view of the valley and those far distant Van Cortlandt towers is wonderful; it always is. Ah, and the air boats are abroad to-night,” and the speaker pointed upward to the arrowy trails of light, and the Mayor listened to the hum of the aeroplanes.

The chairs were brought out by the Mayor, and the two sat down silent for an instant, startled by the strangeness of their abandonment to the scarcely felt intuition of a mutual recognition.

Below them shone the lamps in an oval courtyard, where sanded paths wound about slender marble pillars, amid stunted and clipped fig trees, where clambering eglantine masked the stone pedestals on which the electric lights glowed, all caught in the embrace of a peristyle whose seats also looked off to the glinting waters of the river. They could see the outstretched roofs of the many mansions of Carrara and flaring on the horizon many steeply rising flames of light, issuing from the monuments in Van Cortlandt Park, like sentinels, along the ridgy back of the Mosholu.

“The world is a task master that it is hard to please.” It was the Mayor’s voice, and the accusing tone seemed sad with some ulterior meaning; he continued: “I mean in all our vocations we fail to meet expectations.”

“Because the world expects too much; it is always looking for an idol and an ideal. We all do. It is better to be disappointed in what we do than to be destitute of ambitions. But the end of the matter is that this world is insufficient. It is provisional, probational, and the prelude of completer states.

“The flower that smiles to-day

To-morrow dies

All that we wish to stay

Tempts and then flies.

What is this world’s delight?

Lightning that mocks the night,

Brief even as bright.”

“Those are Shelley’s words,” answered the Mayor, “I know them; but they are vitiated by an obliquity of thought. The flower that fades, the fleeting pleasure, the thought—quick lightning, are beautiful, because they vanish, because they are the transports of a moment, because they are figures in the shimmering flying weave of things. It is the marvel of change that helps us to live, and it is a progressive change, too, an eternally upward march. The vanished delights are only replaced by better ones.”

“So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,

A power more strong in beauty, born of us

And fated to excel us, as we pass

In glory that old darkness.

“And with us, as eternal souls, the fresh perfection is Paradise or Heaven.” Again there was a silence, and the Mayor’s face was turned to the speaker gazing so intently with perhaps, could it have been narrowly determined, a haunting wonder and amused delight, as if he prized in her the power of faith, so dead in his own heart. But he intended to concede nothing:

“The thought is pleasant, but is it true? Is it not wiser to submit to our limitations, to bow the neck to the necessitous hardship of our place and not too fondly dwell in dreams?”

“Our limitations are made by ourselves. There can be no necessary limit to belief, if we will but listen.”

“Listen—listen to what?” the voice trembled a little.

“Well I will not say the Church—the Revelation—but listen to the desires within us. Surely it is as legitimate to believe our hopes as to set up our Despair, and worship that.”

“No,” answered the Mayor, “not Despair but Negation—and not set up as an idol, but like an inner controlling voice—like our conscience, if you will—whispering warnings against intoxicating fancies, against too warm and vaporous delusions, that will make us incapable and foolish. Let the Promethean age come, but it can only come by effort, work, thought, not by submission to veiled and luxurious promises.”

The voice was not hard or strained, nor was there any suspicion of defiance in it; if anything, there was in it, to the ears of the listener—and the listener was alert, eager, yearning even—an admonition of gentle remonstrance only.

“If Christianity does not mean effort, work, thought, I do not know what it means; and the Promethean age, will it come on this earth, and as we are? Can it? Does it help to murmur with the Cenci:

“If there should be

No God, no heaven, no earth, in the void world,

The wide grey lampless deep unpeopled world?

And are dreams so useless? In what harbor of refuge do we crave to enter when we sleep, if it is not pleasant dreams. And is not even sleep itself necessary? If doubt and angry questionings are to fill our lives with turmoil, can we work at all? There must be a foothold somewhere, somehow, a ground level where our new ambitions rise.”

“Hardly,” the Mayor answered quickly, and his voice rose with that peculiar sweetness of tone that fell on Helen Lorimer’s ears like music, “Work for work’s sake is ground enough; bettering conditions, giving beauty to the world, hastening the conquest of nature, mastering power, dispelling disease, winning knowledge, conquering the silence and oppression of things, rising eternally to far off dispensations of greater and greater power. Man’s ultimatum is the world and what he can make of it, and himself.

“The lightning is his slave; heavens utmost deep

Gives up her stars, and like a flock of sheep

They pass before his eye, are numbered, and roll on!

The tempest is his steed, he strides the air;

And the abyss shouts from her depth laid bare,

Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me; I have none.”

“And yet—there remains Death. Will you conquer Him? And Age and Sorrow? Does Knowledge and Power mean everything, do they mean anything without companionship and Love?” Miss Lorimer stopped, checked by a sudden embarrassment, her words carried meanings which stirred her blood, and her instinct told her too acutely it was for both of them dangerous going—just there; the word she had uttered seemed even then to her like some torch which, inconsiderately dropped, lights the eager dry prairies when the wind is rising. Perhaps it was such; her own heart leaped strangely, an unwonted warmth flowed stealthily yet urgently through her body, and the whispering summer night bore to her ears its undulous distant sounds, as if they were faintly calling to her to follow the new summons of a new joy, opening before her, rich, splendid, and fathomless. She leaned on the balustrade of the balcony, and watched the sky, shamed by some untoward concussion of her being, unknown before, discovered in this last instant, as when a man walking in the night enters a disk of illumination which reveals himself and his position, and startled, he finds another step reaches a brink of peril.

And what were these serious words that came now to her ears, moving faster and faster, breathed, she seemed to feel, almost upon her cheeks, eloquent with conviction; prayers they were—and such prayers!—not as she knew them in her Church—tapers of devotion—but prayers from an adoring man’s heart, that smote her own as caresses; how willingly she let them enter there, where she stored all her aspirations, secret treasures of affection, and her own best resolves!

And now when they were in, how proud they grew, holding that inner citadel of her own as theirs and staunchly possessing the whole place! But this was surrender—she must eject them, push them out from those uninvaded precincts, and close the doors again, or else—Oh how desolating it was to have those wicked prayers within, believing themselves welcome, and acting so importunately the parts of welcomed guests. Oh for some stalwart hand to rid her of them, to send them backward, stumbling backward, unrewarded, repelled, killed—No! No! not killed; that were inhuman; just ordered off and out Forever?

Ah, well, let them stand off awhile. This haste is insolence, worse, ingratitude; let these clustering rampant prayers become more formal, more respectful, less rapacious with their stormy signals and provocations. There must be decorum, a slow approach, the signs of parley and convention. These prayers are blatant, blustering, overbearing; they have entered an open door and—now—once in, they will not out. Oh, God!—they are indeed too cruel!

Her Pride, that glorious mistress of her heart tells them to leave, and they do not stir. They taunt her, they seize her, tie her chaste hands—Merciful Heavens must it be so!—and throw her out, and then—these perfidious demons!—smile at their conquest, dry their beseeching eyes, and inhabit unmoved that dear shrine of her soul wherein she thought no steps should ever tread but those of Memory and Faith. Has it been made so rare and lovely for this profanation—Oh, Mother of Sorrows hear;—and Helen Lorimer’s head sank upon her arms, on the stone railing, and she sobbed, and in her sobs the prayers still repeated themselves, and now stood like pitiful supplicants—no longer bold or careless—and she put her hands forward to them, and pressed them to her breast. Suddenly they all were dear to her; she would not have lost one! No, they should not go; the place was theirs; her heart received them, and kept them. And these were the prayers.

“Yes, Love and Companionship, those accompany the best effort. They are the linked comrades who hold up the arms while the battle rages, who press to our lips the chalice which feeds our strength, who fold us in their arms when the victory is won and who bring sleep to our wearied brain. Oh, have I not yearned for that shelter and encouragement! But neither Church nor Religion could bring to me that aid. Pardon me Miss Lorimer, but the empty voices of a Church, or the old reiterations of a creed are not the Love nor the Companionship a man craves; Oh, something much nearer the inmost inscrutable needs of his nature. Surely your own heart tells you and if—no restraint can withhold this confession Miss Lorimer—I tell you now that I love you, that I have with a fixed unswerving, tireless determination, meant to say this all to you. It is an effrontery for me to speak now, but you touched the overflowing stream of feeling, and it has burst its bounds. Do not disdain me for it; do not let this error, this rashness, foil or hurt me in your approval.

“I beg you to listen, to let the open chance be mine to win you, to forgive this advantage of opportunity I have taken. Hear my promises. I will not molest you; I will prove my love; I will be patient if you can be. You turn away. Are you astonished? Do you feel resentment? Oh say that you do not. Say that I am forgiven, that you will let me see you often. It is a priceless boon for me to know you. The thought of you has grown daily in my mind, until it has become an overmastering desire and adoration. I have lived a barren and struggling life among men, cut off by the relentless pressure of work from the priceless joys of womanly culture. And yet I do not know that matters now. I rejoice that it has been so, for as you have entered my life you come with all the more abounding blessedness of promises, I have until this moment, never dreamed of.

“Speak to me one word—just this—that this sudden loss of restraint is forgiven. I do not know, I did not dream—that I would be so hopelessly swept off my feet. I meant no harm, by every throb of my poor bewildered heart I meant none. Miss Lorimer, I love you, and though that love were born but yesterday, a century would not make it greater. Do you despise me because I cannot believe as you believe? I know that you honor candor, just common honesty—no soul so upright as yours could do otherwise—and I have been candid. Does that seem wrong? I am willing to learn all things. Let me learn from you.”

The head of the sobbing woman before him was raised, its tears were wiped away and the figure that bore it rose, and then the eyes—those wondrous, burning, searching, welcoming eyes—were turned to his, and on that face was born—as if from the enchantment of his own words—a smile, and somehow the young man knew that it was the gesture of permission, and he bowed before the splendor of that beauty, while his heart stood still, engulfed in its own unutterable hopes.

CHAPTER VIII

THE CHARIOT OF FLIGHT

Tom Ratler had prospered. He was in favor with God and man. The Mayor liked him. Mr. Briggs, the Mayor’s secretary liked him, especially well, he was so attentive to that gentleman’s social monologues, and his graphic pictures of coming crises. His uninterrupted assent to all Mr. Briggs predicted gave him an enviable preferment, and Mr. Briggs’ own pugnacious instincts, and his muscular prowess made him a natural admirer of Tom’s fine physique, and his manly courage and aplomb. Tom understood most of Mr. Briggs’ discourses, but his apparent acquiescence sprang less from endorsement, than indifference, and his sense of obligation. He was indeed impressed favorably by much of Mr. Briggs’ talk, lately, since his ravished eyes had fallen on the pleasant face and alluring form of Jessie Longtinsky, whose enforced—as he fondly was pleased to think—imprisonment, amid the murky, cloudy and black walls of a murder-breathing, dark, conniving, and impious nihilism, made him more and more anxious for the opportunity of freeing her, and placing her more conveniently near himself.

And among Tom’s friends and patrons none exceeded in admiration the Mayor’s mother. Her benignant eyes shone upon him through her bright spectacles, almost with the fondness of his own dear mother’s, and he became so assiduous, painstaking, and thoughtful, over her comfort and safety in the big family auto, that the old lady experienced a wonderful happiness in seeing him, and being with him; his cheerful ringing voice brought gladness to her heart, and amid the growing evils of the day—for Mrs. Benziger was one of Mr. Briggs’ sympathetic listeners—she felt that her son had a good strong bulwark of defense in Tom, when the dark hour came, when, as Mr. Briggs had often told her, “the streets of the city would be filled with the cries and shot of an intestinal conflict.”

Tom Ratler had frankly admitted to his friend, Ned Links, that he was mortally wounded, that he was in love with a “fairy” on the East Side, and that happiness for him could only be attained by the undivided possession of the beautiful darling, whom he must and would capture. He did not tell his companion that he had met her—this disturbing vision—quite frequently, that the passion had been mutual, and that the accidental glance up to her at the window of her home and her own appreciative view of himself, had conspired into a complete reciprocity, and that the heart struggles of the two partners to the contract, had been of the most excruciating and distinctively exciting sort. To be sure, Tom was hilariously certain that Jessie Longtinsky would be his; his mind leaped over obstacles and his heart thoroughly approved its confidence, but to the tender and filial soul of Jessie, the way ahead of them was dark with parental objections, and the more deadly and hideous shadow of the ravening jealousy of her lover Poniatowsky.

Tom had been made, by the exigencies of his own love, the most alert and subtle sort of a detective, and when he and Mr. Briggs left off their surveillance of the editorial chambers of The Beehive, Tom nightly watched it, and thus discovered the new retreat of the paper, and his idol. Love’s ingenuity had not lost any of its skill in eluding detection or detention in the year 2000, and Jessica was not more willing to meet Lorenzo, than Jessie, in spite of all her maidenly terrors and shrinkings, was happy over the thought of seeing Tom. For she truly loved him. He suddenly seemed to her the impersonation of all the bright and happy things a man may be to a woman, and she was, without any doubt, to Tom, the “best ever.”

So their meetings had been as numerous as they could make them, and Tom was rapidly forming plans for doing away with them altogether by marrying Jessie. These hopes Jessie deprecated because of Poniatowsky. She hoped that Poniatowsky would be called away on some errand of her father’s, or in some way disappear. And yet she admitted to herself, that the man was fiercely enamored of her. She trembled to think of his rage should he find out the true state of things between her and Tom. He had apparently forgotten his first suspicions in that regard, and although he fretted and grew moody over Jessie’s coldness, he was successfully deceived by the lovers as to their meetings. Jessie in her household duties found it necessary to market for the house on the west side of the city, and here, away from observation of her own people, her neighbors, and the prowling steps of her father’s confederates, she saw Tom, and as they agreed to meet very early in the mornings, nothing happened as yet either in Tom’s work, or the meddlesome gossip of her friends, to interfere with these sweet engagements.

Now it had come to pass that Ned Links had deserted his employment—lucrative at it was—in the Suicidarium, and the buxom and languorous lady whom Tom had first met there as one of the visualized angels of the future world, to which the suicides were directed, had deserted her employment at the same place. Ned had done this, through Tom’s own disgust with the business, and because Tom had discovered for him an extraordinary opportunity as the motorist of a dirigible balloon. It had become in New York, at that distant time, a summer sport to traverse the skies at night with illuminated balloons. On the most auspicious evenings the spectacle thus created in the air was extraordinary, and the elements of a new expensive entertainment added another wonderment to the extravagance and exhilaration of the city’s tempestuous life. Many of these balloons were used by the public, and what were termed “aeronauticals,” were popular excursions through the atmospheric regions over the city, and the surrounding country. The balloons could be hired, carrying parties of not more than six, and they were taken at stations called “levitories.” These were large—usually square—enclosures, in which the balloons were stalled. Here they were inflated, repaired, and prepared for use. They were known also as Zeppelins, from the count of that name who had in Germany, at the beginning of the twentieth century, made his excursion in the air in this manner. An attached car suspended behind the operator of the balloon (himself in the elevated “pilot”) accommodated the travellers, an apparatus of revolving fans propelled it, and a steering gear of simple efficacy turned and wheeled it through the invisible thoroughfares of the air.

The happy chance came when Ned was able to invite his friend Tom to take one of these aerial trips and to both the young men the thought came instantly that the trip would be of incomparable charm if the ladies of their hearts accompanied them. Thus alone, in the circling heights of the star covered sky, their loves would take new delights. It certainly was a pretty thought, and Tom pronounced it “stunning,” which gave Ned much pleasure as he had an immeasurable estimate of Tom’s opinion, and he knew that Tom had repulsed him after that dreadful night at the Suicidarium. So it was done. Ned got the permission to use one of the balloons at the “Zeppelin” to which he was attached, and the time was settled, and Tom, after much timorous reproaches from Jessie, and a sinking in her heart that it would somehow turn out badly made the appointment. Miss Delia Mutchler was a bit frightened at the thought, but quite incompetent to think of anything else for weeks, and uttered such ecstatic tributes to Ned’s generosity and goodness that that overjoyed gentleman found it necessary to relieve his feelings by pointing out the fact that his wages would permit them to be married sooner than had seemed reasonable. And then he surrendered himself to such a masterful exhibition of osculation as to extort from the usually insatiable Delia the remark;

“Neddy you’re just a kissing machine, and it’s not me that’s going to have my mouth blistered with your smacks;” and then, as the wrathful Neddy started to his feet: “Well, a dozen more Neddy for good measure, and I’ll not miss them, dearest.”

The party made their rendez-vous at a Zeppelin in the Bronx, not far from the edge of the Zoological Park. The little group stared a few moments at the brick walls of the balloon-house. Gas jets, stuck out of its walls, vaguely illuminated its leviathan size, but some three stories above they descried the huge iron and wooden doors which sloped together like a roof, when closed, opening by counter weights, running on steel columns outside, a curious grim construction which made Jessie shudder a little, as she drew Tom’s arm closer to her side, and gave the nonchalant Delia a squeamish feeling of a difficult adventure. As they came round to the front entrance of the “barn,” a swirling humming noise, a throbbing methodical rhythm, as of beating fans, struck their ears, and the light from within flamed through the crevices of the doorway, and through the two windows in front, and the peering visitors saw the inner rooms filled with moving figures, while a voice giving orders, elicited various responses among them as they here and there adjusted ropes, wires, and rods.

The light within the enclosure came from hissing flaring gas flames, and this light, almost all placed below, threw upward a pale penumbral illumination over the enormous shape above, swaying heavily with an imminent expression of suddenly losing patience, and freeing itself with a monstrous spasm to leap to its wide home in the skies. It was an enormous bulk; depending cables of rope and rods of steel held two platforms, one arranged like a cushioned box, the other holding the chair of the operator. Its monstrous size resembled some colossal cigar, and around it, clasping it like giant bracelets were five rings of electric lamps. Above and below the slopes which defined its forward and backwards ends, were also placed four strong lamps with reflectors. All of these lamps were fed from an electric battery on the operator’s platform, and could be turned off and on, with the lever of a switch. Thus designed the aerial boat swam in the atmosphere like a shooting column of light, some translated phosphorescent ascidian from the deep, and, when the lights on some fabrics were variegated in colors, the strange shimmering and scudding object, in the night, became a fantastic whisking prism.

None of these lamps were illuminated as the friends entered the doorway, and the whole mass over their heads, inertly slumberous and yet stirring with wheezing oscillations, looked dark and dangerous. Ned had made arrangements for the service of an operator so that he and Tom and their companions might enjoy uninterruptedly the pleasant frolic. Everything was in readiness, the balloon filled, the fans in working order, while the dead still night auspiciously augured a successful trip. The balloon was released, slightly slipping upward along steel guides with a rasping groan, and the passenger car was attached, the operator took his place, and the party of merry-makers, with little shrieks from Delia, and subdued exclamations of wonder from Jessie gathered quickly in the comfortable roofless car with its windowed sides, while almost at the same moment with a few gaspy creaks the whole monster rose softly, and like a cloud was lifted above the barn, through the wide open roof, and floated like a gigantic thistle down into the amazing beauty of the night.

How wonderful it was; Suddenly the lamps upon the great drum over their heads flashed upon the eyes of the voyagers, a shrill piping whistle announced the flight, and upward with broad curves, swinging right and left, the machine accomplished its magic circuit through the sky. Higher and higher, the delicious warm air fanning their cheeks, the infinite delicate splendor of the city beneath them, and far and far away the veiled country-sides sprinkled and pricked with lights. It was like passing into a world of unearthly things, and the charmed Jessie and stunned Delia with Tom—the affair was not so uncommon to Ned—were silenced into admiration of the strange experience.

And, as they turned from side to side, watching the shifting features below them, darts of moving lights swept from the same earth, announcing the arrival into the fields of the air of new phantoms like themselves. These increased in numbers. The time was propitious, and ascending from the nether shades, like immense glowing insects the luminous bodies stole in from all quarters crossing and recrossing, dipping and bending, swooping here with awful speed, and there as if becalmed, swept by the mild currents of the atmosphere, alone, when, as it often happened, songs and music issued from the balancing cars until—it seemed so to Jessie and Tom—they had become a part of some heavenly realm.

For some time they kept in with the sporting crowd of vessels, sailing up and down over the spread chromosphere of the great city so far below. They slid upward upon invisible runners far aloft, then turned and launched backward, and down, with such impetuosity as to draw from the girls faint cries, and a whistling wonder from the lips of Tom.

It had grown to be July since Tom had reached New York, and the nights were warm, though in the serene upper airs with salty emanations from the sea sweeping over them the temperature was soft and cooling, and—here was the wonder of it—it was the glorious Fourth. It was amazing to note the city like a curdled pond of light with disks, streams, undulations, spots, and dark clots in it. If they approached it nearer a faint hum came to their ears; when they rose high the antennae of lights stretched indefinitely off in skeins of lines and braids. Now and then they caught the roar of an earth train of cars, sometimes the chirp of a bird passed them in the sky, and sometimes they ran through a cloud of insects. The wonderful instrument obeyed every whim of its pilot, and followed the aerial heights and depths as a ship rises and falls on the liquid hills of the ocean.

The new moon blinked at them when they first started out, and it somehow seemed a companion in the clouds, its golden crescent leaving them at last over the vaporous edge of the swinging earth. They mounted higher, and they shivered with a strange cosmic cold, the tiny pavement of cirrus dipped cloudlets seemed just above them, and the weirdness kept them still with amazement.

They all laughed when Jessie whispered; “Don’t let us leave the earth yet,” and Tom swept her a little closer to himself and told her, “It wouldn’t matter where they went as long as SHE was with them, and he guessed it might be a little safer for both of them, if he and she started out for another star,” which allusion to Poniatowsky brought Jessie’s cheeks nearer to Tom, and then their lips touched, in which mutual consolation they both attained a philosophic indifference to Fate.

“Lor! But this is dandy,” exclaimed the suppressed Delia at length, “Those scoops at Coney, and the Ferris Wheel aren’t in it. It sorter makes my head go round and it’s just shivering cold,” to which complaint Ned resorted to such readjustments of his arms as might correct this inconvenience.

Again they fled from these heights to the warmer zones, and again skimmed over the broad city, that bubbled below, and now, in the darkening night began its wondrous celebration of the nation’s birth day. Along the lines of increasing splendor, in all its functions, the great city in the year 2000, had developed a regard for the spectacular possibilities of the Fourth that made that day the climax of the year’s shows. A southern temperament had stolen into the city’s blood. It was hard to say exactly how it happened, unless the settlement of French, and the expanding influence of the Italian fusions, had effected it, but in all things artistic and ceremonial, this American city attained vaster designs of beauty. Even the Mardi Gras had started its grotesque and glittering processions within New York. Some affirmed that the milder climate had aided the aesthetic regeneration, and others ruefully regretted a change, which began to put on the city the semblance of an extravagant dissipation.

The exaltation of the Fourth began about the middle of the century, about 1950, when it was proposed to give it a new official dignity in the calendar of the city’s holidays. It was felt by some agitated patriots that the great anniversary grew clouded in its meaning, that the sense of it could be supremely accentuated by taking advantage of the growing instincts for display, and making of the day a memorable splash of splendor in the year. Subscriptions were opened, throughout the year, and the money thus given with a liberal largess from the city’s treasury, was devoted to the placement of marvellous firework exhibitions. The occasion was really remarkable. Night and day were given over to its celebration. A gorgeous procession filled up the forenoon of the day; at noon the bands of the city played at all available points for two hours; then succeeded a free performance at the theatres of a play, usually patriotic, or quite as frequently classic and elevating, some Shakespearean drama being performed at the enormous auditorium built by the city for free educational drama. And at night, after a furious cannonading, at nine o’clock the pyrotechnic ebullition began.

The growing habit of “ballooning” made the precautions necessary, to regulate, on the night of the Fourth of July, these aerial revellers, and so a certain time was instituted for the beginning of the show. All private pyrotechnics were discouraged or forbidden, and the city turned out at night, the crowds threading their ways to the point of display. The regulations for the balloons were for them to remain at the elevation of one thousand feet, or to congregate over the centre of the city, for the firework stands were placed around the city, further towards its confines, and here they were set off from tall towers. This permitted the air voyagers the advantage of centering their barks over the centre of the city from which view point the splendor of the spectacle grew enormously. The picture above, below, was one of festal power. The city was illuminated, the bells of the churches were rung in chimes at seven, the shining balloons congregated over the central parts of the city, or far above the range of rockets and starry exploding bombs, and at nine of the evening, began the stupendous assault upon the skies, of the ascending battalions of terrestrial meteors. The affair became noteworthy throughout the country, and although imitated in many of the larger cities, the New York outburst easily excelled the rest. Strangers poured into the city, and the bonifaces of the metropolis found it profitable for them to swell with liberal donations the public funds for this dazzling function.

Ned Link’s party, in the midst of congregated equipages, was floating, immobile, over the great middle districts of the city, waiting for the imminent splendors that would soon terminate the inordinate and ambitious day. A shout from the aerial sightseers announced the first glimmerings of blue stars, rising into the skies about the edges of the huge town. They sprouted up around the cliffy congeries of buildings. For once the electric fervor in the air died out, and the propitious suppression allowed the power of the fireworks full sway. The blue stars crept higher, higher; they fenced the horizon with spouting, azure, soaring, and eclipsing flashes. It seemed as if the voyagers were enclosed in some enchanted and deepening circle of light. Then suddenly above these first reconnaissances of fire, rose swiftly, and with firm gushes of spreading flakes of color, the sheaves of sky-rockets. They made a higher fence than the first blue stars, and set in the dark sky a tiara of thickly sprinkled jewels, borne like a crown by the imposing and noble city. These flaming messengers dashed upon the blackness of the night, the faint hiss of their ascent just heard, while, with wayward and ever graceful vagaries of motion the speeding sparks shot outward, mingling in chains of dropping, glowing, ashes.

The rocking flotilla in the summer air was encircled by the spouting fires. Ever and anon some audacious blade of light seemed to hover over them, and the descending sparks of the wooden bolt which had risen with the rocket fell among them. Then there was a little fright, and scared cries came from here and there to be succeeded the next moments by shouts and exclamations of wonder, as fresh climbing ladders of flame rose in the air. The third and most marvellous stage of the show was reached when the enchanted margins of the wide circle below them sent up the whizzing, whistling, bursting bombs. The zenith seemed to rain stars, the pale orbs of the heavens were extinguished, and a carpet of mixed lights was spread through the sky, into which with sudden coruscations, at regular intervals, sprang a sun-like meteor which scattered far and wide golden jets, shafts of fiery fury that sped hither and thither eclipsing all their colored companions, and looking like improvised suns, or perhaps monstrous unfolding chrysanthemums of light, their sinuous petals ejected from their centres, in writhing lines, each ended with a ball of intenser gold.

Cheers broke from the hitherto stilled audience in the air, and it was reechoed from the earth, where thousands stood in the blackness far underneath; it seemed as if some elemental stage of creation was going on around them, or as if the ruptured earth was vomiting its interior fires upward from its burning depths, and they stayed within the centre of its belching energy. It was indeed altogether wonderful, and Tom and Jessie felt its scenic majesty, while the less responsible Delia and the idle-hearted Ned, spent themselves in gurgles and exclamations. Suddenly again it was inky black about them; not a spark lingered in the tired air. It was the theatrical prelude to the last astonishment. The dead silence accorded with the emptiness of sky, and then without announcement, without sound, there stole upward from the towers, the shrubby Bengal lights, blue, green, and red, like funeral pyres on the horizon. They sprouted and fumed, and cast a strange reverberant patchwork of colors on the black background, and then behind them, so it seemed, a higher erection of pale purple lights strove outward like quickening ghosts, speeding high, quivering and falling down, towering at this point, and anon declining into fringes of light simply. Then came a wizard mixture of bombs and rockets, and weird shrieking sticks of flame, the whole medley in flowery confusion embroidering the sky with arabesques and patterns, and then the hastened climax ended all. The bridges of the city crossing the enclosing channels of the Hudson and the East river flashed into sight as pendulous girdles of flickering, dancing, mobile gold. It was most superb. The transporting beauty of it, the sudden elation of it, the compelling splendor and the fairy opulence! Beneath its radiance the city shone, its multiplied structure rose startlingly, its serrations along the edges looked like huge saw teeth, and the reflecting roofs glistened liquidly, while, as the illumination died away, with hiss and smoke and the wafted smells of powder filled the air, the electric lights slowly raised their heads, as it were, again, and the penumbral glows succeeded, and the great display was a memory.

The aerial equipages moved away this way and that, their resuscitated lamps gleaming as they scattered off like gigantic fire-flies, most of them descending to the earth, and some bent on a night’s sport, soaring up, while numbers from surrounding towns shot hither and thither, back to their resting places in New Jersey, Connecticut, and the north. A few distant lightning flashes shown on the gathered clouds, and faint low rumbles told of thickening thunder storms.

“What do you say to a run to the end of the island—I mean Long Island—then a dip out to sea, and back again by the Narrows. It’s a good night and our lunch baskets are full?” It was Ned’s voice that made the proposal and there was an instant’s silence. It appeared too risky. The man at the motor yelled something back to them that he would take them home if they wanted to return, or would he turn the ship and give them a longer sail?

“Come,” reiterated Ned, “it’s a splendid night and so still and then—the girls;” but it was just the girls who were driven into sharp spasms over the novelty of doing it. Jessie was really anxious about going back, and Delia was frankly frightened. Ned had telephoned back to the man, and the balloon was headed for the Sound. It sailed low and the steamers could be made out as streaks of light on the sooty waters. The motion was delightful, the spread world, over which their winnowing way like a bird’s flight led, was specked with villages and towns and—well the expostulations were overcome; Tom promised it would be “all right,” and Ned soothed Delia into a charmed consent.

Away they went, the churning fans shot them on, and the sea air soon blew in their faces. The outlying edges of Brooklyn were being left, and the spangled ground, diapered with lamps, caught up into clots and then spilled over the flat plane in twinkling lines, came into view indistinctly, for they were flying low. A moan and the machine with a half sickening dip swept upward, and the air grew chillier, the stars came nearer, and far away on the dark rim of the world sheet lightnings played again, and a rattle in the rigging of the boat, was premonitory of a coming squall, perhaps, though Ned said; “Humbug! no storm to-night. Anyhow we can beat round the island, and win out at the start, before the wind stirs a ripple on the ocean.”

He called again to the sky skipper, and the scudding fans took on a swifter motion, as a slight droning hum broke out from them, and with a start the ship scudded like some fleeing bird over the land, past Hempstead plains, a little web of light, past the wrinkled shores of Northport, on—, on—, over the spark dotted outlines of Lake Ronkonkoma, and swerving again to the hoarse shores over Patchogue, to domiciled Moriches, over Eastport and West Hampton, with midnight ringing out from its tall steeples; closer to the ground by the Shinnecock Hills, where the roosters sent up to them their morning cheer; again across the island to Orient, sleeping in the dark with a returning dash on the wings of the wind to Riverhead, where Chalmers lived and died; again with a turn that made their heads spin across Peconic Bay, over Shelter Island and Sag Harbor to East Hampton, and Amagansett, yet dreaming on its watery hills, the rest and haven of artists, and then, with a tearing gait that made the machinery rip and whistle, and shook them as they dashed against the inrushing winds, to Montauk Point, where wharves, lined in lights, told the sharp story of change, for now the steamers from Europe made this their “touchdown,” and the emigrant and tourist was whisked across Long Island to New York.

It was time to turn back, it was no longer certain that the night would remain clear; the rumblings had increased, and from the caverns of the east and south sprang forks of lightning. The girls were now a little appalled, and Tom felt that they must make a run for it. Ned told the driver to keep out to sea, and along the shore, and with the wind behind them they went forward furiously.

But, quicker than they, came the hurrying storm, and the piled clouds seemed to stand in their way like black buttresses, spitting fire. The gloom encircled them; they suddenly tossed and spun like a top in a whirlpool of currents. There was consternation, and, for a moment only, indecision, then Ned roared through the “phone” to lighten up and ascend, and the next instant with wheeze and crack, the gray hulk pushed upward through what seemed a sort of atmospheric funnel, while buffeting winds slapped the voyagers in the face, and the rocking balloon, pitched hither and thither, sometimes actually whirled around in circles, that threatened to rupture and destroy her. But with a sort of obstinate energy it pushed its way through seething clouds, amid a crashing report of thunder and the tracery gleamings of lightning.

The rain splashed upon them in bucketfulls, and plugs on the floor of the basket were removed to let the deluge escape; but the ascent continued, while the little party crouched and clung together in a very real terror. At a moment when deliverance seemed impossible, and the darkness closed in upon them closer, while the billows of air spun their craft around and jerked it here and there, and the ominous chafing of the cables promised some sudden separation of the wheeling and shivering carriage in which they rode, and a stern chilling frost made itself felt in the rattling hail—at that very moment, when Tom’s stout heart quailed, and the girls had fainted, and Ned clung to the reeling seats, the nose of the ship issued into ether above all the disturbance, and the staunch vehicle floated again on even keel in a splendid radiance of stars. It was a miracle of change. They looked down upon a surface like the surges of an angry ocean, a vortex of colliding vapors, rent with seams of light, and belching thunders.

The stunned travellers aroused themselves, and Tom and Ned set about resuscitating their frightened friends, when suddenly a heavy dark object shot to their feet, and on the floor of the cage they saw with horror, the crimped and curled form of the stricken pilot of the balloon. They had almost forgotten him in their own excitement, although Ned had noticed that he was swaying at his post. He might indeed have missed falling on the lower compartment, and dropped instead plump to the earth, had not a tilted position of the balloon actually brought him above the under car. There he lay unconscious. It was a desperate position, the soaring machine unguided, forcing its way on undirected, and the man at their feet who had controlled its wheel, tossed from his seat, overcome and possibly dying. A cry broke from the terror stricken group.

Ned cast a sharp glance overhead, and saw that the platform of the pilot was unharmed. But it was empty. Could he reach it? Tom bent over the unconscious motorist and found him injured, but alive. He moaned in pain and cried out as his limp form was moved. It was too evident that some bones were broken, and Tom seized some of the blankets and rugs, made an improvised bed, and then gave the sinking man some of the wine they had fortunately provided themselves with, as Ned knew the cold they might encounter.

All were now startled into attention by their singular predicament and all looked to Ned for the next move. They were not long left in doubt as to his intentions. He told them he must ascend to the deserted platform. It was a hard, it seemed an impossible attempt, but there was nothing else for it. As it was, they were drifting on a pathless ocean, and actually headed away from the mainland. Tom and Ned both knew the situation meant their eventual destruction, and both grew pale with dread, and the poor women strained every nerve to keep their consciousness.

Could he climb to the deserted seat by the cables and attachments of the car? The conditions were favorable. The air was quiet, and the unjostled framework permitted perhaps the dangerous enterprise. And yet—there appeared to be one chance. The travelling car was swung on chains from the central body of the balloon, and quite detached from the platform of the pilot, that occupied a forward place, and was itself fastened by iron rods to the gas-tank. There was but one connection from the car to the steering platform, and that hardly promised assistance. It was the chain that carried the telephone wire from one to the other. The chain was moderately stout. It looked serviceable; but was it? It could be tested. Then one other thought suggested itself to the anxious scrutiny of Ned, standing stiffly there in the strange exigency of a peril that was to him much more like death than the painted shows which he had watched, wherein indeed so many foolish hearts had quit the world.

This other way of possible rescue was to creep up along the heavier cables holding the car, to the body of the equipage, insert himself among the binding cordage around the cylinder of the balloon, twist somehow through them to the part of the body immediately over the platform, and drop there to the pilot. There was his own strength and skill to be considered, and the measure of both required by the two methods. This gave him pause, and Tom quickly realized the dilemma, and estimated the balancing possibilities.

Both men strained their eyes to follow the chain up to its fastenings on the platform, but into the darkness the links of steel slipped away, and they could not see their continuity more than a few feet.

“Let’s pull it, and find out how it holds,” whispered Tom, and the women stood up behind them listening too, and watching with blanched faces. For them the ordeal was breaking, but while Delia moaned, Jessie was silent. Tom and Ned pulled, at first easily, and then more strongly, until they pressed almost their full strength on the chain. It held. Ned was the first to speak;

“Yes. This is the way. I’ll try it Tom. It’s this or nothing. All the control is up on that platform, and we can do nothing here. Give me a drink and up I go and—Goodbye.”

The whisky flask was produced, and Ned took a fillip, but he had scarcely handed the glass back to Tom, when the motionless figure of the man at their feet stirred, and a voice spoke;

“Play out the chain its whole length, and slip off the edge of the car; let one man hold the slack, and then you’ll get a straight pull and go up hand over hand to the pilot. The chain will stand it. I know,” and with a groan the voice ceased, and Tom and Ned without looking at the sufferer, prepared to obey his instructions. First Tom rubbed Ned’s hands until they burned; Ned in spite of the cold, stripped off his coat, but underneath was a cardigan, which might suffice to keep out the creeping chill. Tom told the girls to take their seats, and then he opened the door of one side of the enclosing framework of the car, and Ned seized the coiled chain at a sufficient distance to allow him to drop about vertically underneath the pilot while Tom caught the links beyond him, and they approached to the dreadful edge of the softly swaying car. No word was spoken, and Ned hung his legs off into space, slowly moving outward while Tom firmly held the chain, and so lowered him. It was well done, and Ned hanging in mid-air seemed like a long plumb-bob, just faintly visible. Then the voice spoke again, the voice of the maimed man on the floor;

“You can touch up those lights from the car. There’s a wire at this end of the car, that is tied to the lever of the switch. That will give you more light. I turned them off when the squall struck us.” But Tom was afraid to move to do this. The sudden afflux of light where all had been previously half dark might so startle the suspended man, that he would lose his steadfastness and fall. And yet Tom felt the value of the suggestion, as the light flowing down from the lamps above, would give Ned courage, and make the task less awful, besides the material benefit of showing him better what he was doing. Wavering for an instant as to what he should do, his ears heard Ned’s voice calling him to him; “Pull me back! back! quick!”

Tom caught the chain, and gently, without any shock, hauled Ned back to the car, on which the brave boy scrambled.

“What was it?” asked the wondering Tom.

“It’s too cold for my fingers. They’ll stiffen and drop me. The chain is like ice. You’ve got some gloves here, cut off the fingers, and put them on mine. All I want is the tips. My hand is good for the job.”

Tom had a pair of old kid gloves in his pocket, and these were quickly cut and fixed upon the ends of Ned’s fingers, and once again the two approached to the edge of the car, and Ned prepared to launch himself into the darkling air. But before this Tom had told him of the communication of the wire to the lever of the lamps, and Ned assented to have it pulled. The test was made, and indeed the circle of lights above, on the lower sides of the great body of the balloon, flashed into action, and the descending light softly bathed the anxious group, and glinted on the hanging chain, and lost itself in the dark abysses below, where yet the reverberations of the storm lingered, and the shattered clouds pulsated with occasional strokes of lightning.

Ned slid off, slowly allowed by Tom to reach a straight position under the pilot and when this was done, the pull up began, and hand over hand he ascended. Tom watched him with his heart in his mouth, but with such a glow of delight in his splendid courage! Up—up—he went. He was nearing the pilot and Tom could scarcely keep his voice, it seemed so certain he would reach it, and succeed. But, no! he stopped, and Tom could see that Ned had raised his head, Oh! so very slowly—and peeked over to the platform, almost on the level of his face; Tom thought he heard a cry, and then—my God!—the chain fell, past him, its end dangling in the fathomless atmosphere, while its weight dragging on the unspent portion in the car rattled the links about Tom’s feet.

Tom’s eyes had followed the chain in its fall, but though he peered over the sickening side below him, in the cones of light thrown by the electric lamps, he caught no sight of the hurled body of his companion. Had Ned been able to have held on to the chain, the flight downward and the sharp arrest at its end would have wrenched him away and shot him pitilessly to the earth. Tom dreaded to raise his head, for one moment he pressed his hands over his face, and a queer tearing shiver passed through his body, and then—

In that moment the girls had gathered about Tom. They had understood the attempt Ned was to make, and instead now of crouching against each other in a sort of swooning, convulsed embrace, they had watched with eager strained eyes the whole effort. They had seen the loosened chain, the cautiously disappearing body of their friend over the boarded margin of the car, they had even held their gaze fixed upon Ned there in the cold boundless air, and had followed him inch by inch as he rose above them towards that haven of safely—the pilot.

Nor were they the only watchers. The poor fellow who had felt the slip, as of a push to eternity, from his high perch, he too had lifted his eyes, and forgot his broken leg as he noted each instant of the perilous, blood curdling creep, up the glistening links of the chain. He had even drawn himself up to Tom, and so the little population of that speck of earth, winging its way through the infinite void, caught there with one shuddering hope of returning to the dear sunlight and the fair plains of the world, fixed upon Ned their hopes and prayers, and Ned—!

Tom pulled himself together, the horrible fancy of Ned falling, falling, falling, through that hideous depth, and plunging a dashed mass of bones on the hard earth, had almost turned him into a faint—slowly he too raised his eyes again upward, to where a second—it seemed to him an age—before, he had caught the scared stare of dear Ned. He looked and there—was Ned scrambling on the pilot; without a word Tom hauled in the hanging chain, and when its end appeared, he saw a BROKEN LINK. Ned had seen it too—seen it before its treacherous sundering had come, and it was in that awful glance that Tom caught his stare, and the sudden stoppage of his ascent. But quicker than Tom could watch, quicker than the fickle iron could part, Ned had snatched with one hand a stanchion on the pilot and, as the chain left him, twitching and rustling against his body, he hung to the support, and for one minute swayed in the vast gulf, unable to rise.

The next, with all the terrified impulse of his good strength, he hauled himself up, and with the disengaged hand seized another rod on the pilot and thus anchored, managed to pull his body up on the floor. He was pretty well done up. The strain had been awful. He felt the cold too, though the exertion had done something to rouse the currents of his blood and, luckily enough, the party had been well provided with food. Once on the pilot Ned felt the danger of succumbing to the reaction. His senses were dizzy, and it was hard for him to think. A mental effort as powerful in its way as the muscular one which had brought him there was necessary, and Ned made it. And then things came easier. He knew the work, and seized the levers.

But where were they? Was New York to the north, south, east or west. In their wild ascent from the storm clouds and the drifting of the ship, direction had been lost, and at the height it was impossible to make out the configuration of the surfaces beneath them. Here was a new perplexity. The propellers kept up their interminable beating, and the aerial boat still fanned its way amid the stars. Ned stopped the machinery, and made some preparations for his own comfort. His friends who had glued their ravished eyes upon him were hailing him faintly, and he could hear Tom’s voice above them;

“Ned throw us a line, and we’ll pack a few things together and your coat, and—Simpson says, turn the ship around—and beat north.”

Ned had already consulted the Barometer and found out their elevation—2500 feet. They must drop. He looked around him in the pilot and found an assortment of lines, tools, and fortunately the compass stand, which had been knocked down, with its dial unbroken. The telephone connexion with the car had been ruptured by the fall of the carrying chain, and Ned wondered if he could get a line to the car. It was less easy to call to his companions than it was for them to speak to him. He concluded to spare his breath. Rummaging about he found an air-line-thrower, a small affair modeled after the life saving machines. It did not take long for him to rig this in position and fire a line over the car; Tom caught it, tied it fast, and he and the girls set about making up a parcel of comforting things, among which wine and whisky were not forgotten. It was soon got ready, and waving to Ned—the parties on either side of the air gulf could see each other by reason of the electric lamps—the burden of delights was launched into the space, and Ned pulled it in. Ned got his coat, and after a replenishment that gave him strength and courage, again turned to the serious matter of getting back to New York.

The balloon had fallen some thousand feet, but beneath them nothing but darkness reigned, even the glasses showed nothing, and Ned peered through them a long time. It was warmer and altogether the marooned party felt greatly encouraged. Tom turned his attention to Simpson again, and succeeded in making the poor fellow more comfortable while he got from him his idea as to where they might then be, and how he came to fall out of the pilot. Simpson said that when the squall struck them, he had been blinded by the lightning, and in the flight up through the fitful howling tempest, he had been seized with a chill; after that he knew nothing, till he found himself stunned on the floor of the car; as to where they were he was certain that the balloon had been sheered to sea, and that every minute was taking them over the ocean and away from the city. Ned had turned the vehicle, and was running slowly, watching intently, for the manifestations of life below them, the compass pointed north, and in that direction they were now sailing.

“Oh, I see lights way down;” it was the soft voice of Jessie, and the eyes of her companions followed hers, and there indeed a long string of pin point lights emerged in the night, and they grew stronger, larger, steadier. It was one of the enormous steamers that brought Europe to New York in three days. Ned had already detected the leviathan, and he found out the balloon was sinking. Was it falling in the track of the steamer? Was it falling on it? A second later and the hoarse whistle of the huge barge below them sounded excitedly, then they all could hear voices, orders, cries, a confused tumult of sound, while the hoarse whistle swelled into a fierce revolting protest; its harsh, straining, shivering huskiness seemed to hit the very side of their car, and then more voices rose, volleys of calls; the voyagers could hear the sough of the engines, they caught the smells of smoke and habitation, and then the whole colossus sprang into sight, a wavy broken terrace and pyramid of lights.

It was evident that the apparition of the descending aeronauts had started all the activities of the great steamer, while it also became clear that the cabins and berths were being emptied, and that the rumor of the falling balloon had penetrated throughout the vessel, for the storm of exclamations and outcries, not free from shouts of alarm, showed that the floating population below them was all aroused. Then through the commotion and buzz came the heavy calls of the megaphone;

“Hold hard there. Keep on the centre. Fall abaft the stacks. Mind all,” and then succeeded a sound of terrific scrambling, then crash upon crash as the great mass of the balloon bodily drifted and fell on the deck of the steamer. The occupants of the disabled “Chariot of Flight” had not been without danger. As the balloon came down to the deck of the steamer, which had ceased its motion, the car struck the upper works of the vessel first, and, with a slow settling oscillation, rubbed along the decks and finally hung fast. Before this Tom had extricated his charges easily, leaping out of the car first himself, and helping them. Then he succeeded in dragging Simpson over the edge, and with help from the crowding crew of the steamer got him away. Ned had soon jumped to the deck, and none too soon, as the overhanging bulk then descended, thudding the deck, splintering rods, pins, rails, seats, nettings, and cracking with a few subsiding thumps the deck itself. When Ned saw the inevitable collision he had opened the valves, and thus hastened the descent. It also robbed the balloon of all possibility of motion, and so, at last, the long cylinder lay on the upper decks of the steamer, its axis parallel with that of the big liner. Taken altogether the outcome of the affair was a matter of congratulation.

The captain took Ned and Tom to his cabin, and heard their story. He was very grave at first, and muttered some remarks about “a piece of damned hoodlumism,” but he softened at length, after learning no extensive damage had been done, and seeing the forlorn state of mind of the poor fellows, who now looked forward to some rasping rebukes, and no little loss of prestige. Tom was a little moody over it, but Ned more philosophically resigned himself, and began calculating the damages. They turned out to be considerable, and this was depressing, and then to Tom the outcome was in a measure disgraceful, and the whole aspect of the diversion might seem reprehensible. They should have returned after the fireworks, and not attempted the long unnecessary trip. It was altogether disagreeable and discomforting. Jessie and Delia felt shamefaced about it, and their position on the steamer was unpleasant. It turned out that the balloonists had gotten far out to seaward, in the line of the incoming steamers, and that they were, when the balloon gave out, heading for Sandy Hook. That morning the steamer entered the harbor, and the strange outlines of the recumbent balloon on its decks was hailed with wonder by the ships, tugs and ferry boats of the bay.

But the early morning breakfasters in the restaurants, and later the sober faced citizens, at their morning meal, found the entertaining tale in the papers, all served up hot and racy, sent before the strangely loaded steamer, by “wireless” to the eager journals. None perused the strange story more wonderingly than the Mayor and Mr. Briggs, and none with the rage and threatening menaces of Poniatowsky and Longtinsky. Some settlements and readjustments were inevitable.

“Damnation! I knew it,” howled Poniatowsky into the dismayed face of Longtinsky, “that poodled-faced Ratler has been playing his tricks here. That’s plain. And you’ve been fooled, led by the ear like a stuck pig. Damn it, I’ll kill both of them. Why—”

“Pony you’re crazy. I tell you that the girl has been led into this naturally enough. They went up on the Fourth to see the show, and then they went off for a lark. Not her fault, I know Jessie has been overpersuaded. Don’t lose your wits. Kill Tom Ratler;—yes to—with him—kill the Mayor, kill Helen Lorimer,” and the disfigured face darkened with hate, “they’re all your enemies—mine too—but Jessie is yours, all yours then. Can’t you put two and two together. We’re in this for keeps. The trial comes off in a little more than three months. Don’t spill the mill now. Things are working our way. The Beehive is at work. If we can make our strike before Helen Lorimer gets the turn on us, and stands for more to our people than we do—all a damned bluff, a game of hoodwink—why then—then—we’ll get out of this.”

“Mean it?” and the furious deceived lover seized Longtinsky at his burly neck and gave that discomforted gentleman another sharp fright, after his frequent fashion.

“Mean it; of course I do. You know that. We’re swimming together, Pony, for the same shore, we neither of us can go on alone”—and yet while he said it, the soothing speaker felt that the time must soon come when he could disentangle himself from this tiresome and dangerous alliance; an alliance good enough for his purposes now, but later, FORCIBLY to be dissolved.

Longtinsky persuaded—with difficulty—Pony to let him talk alone with Jessie, promising to put a better guard on her goings and comings and this time he was hard and bitter with his daughter. Jessie was genuinely contrite, and her marketings on the west side were summarily stopped, but the love she felt for Tom was as bright as ever, as strong, as sure, and so, with Juliet’s, “as boundless as the sea.”

Tom was himself in some dispraise, and worried with misgivings. Of course there were explanations, and they were accepted, though Tom felt himself resting in a shadow, and it tormented him. He looked eagerly for the time to come when he might redeem himself.

Ned’s employers found a most unexpected source of profit in the misadventure, more than enough to compensate for the damages incurred. This came about through the merited publicity given to Ned’s heroism. The exploit was well told in a dozen different ways, and it so enhanced Ned’s reputation that he became a lion, and the crowds that now resorted to the Zeppelin, whence the unhappy experience began, were almost emulous to take the excursions with so famous and brave an aeronaut. The receipts climbed up, and the happy owners of the balloon and of Ned, forgave him all, made him a feature, and pocketed their swelling revenues, without disparagement, even with many secret self felicitations that it happened as it did.

Delia’s admiration for her beau—the comely Ned—became almost delirious, and as she basked in his reflected glory, she assumed new airs, and, as they too became her, Ned was himself more inextricably entangled in his love, his reputation, and the assured bliss of a hastened marriage.

From it all Tom and Jessie had the most to regret. Jessie’s reprimands had been harsh, and she was now effectively guarded, for the infuriated Poniatowsky took upon himself a careful watch, his moody and sullen spirit hovering with a murderous menace over the least effort of Jessie’s to see her lover. Not indeed that they did not hear from each other, nor that they did not see each other. Their loves became more indomitable and absorbing, it became that “madness most discreet,” which found ways and means that even a Poniatowsky and a Longtinsky could not circumvent or challenge. And as for the man who suffered the only physical injury, poor Simpson mended and got well.

CHAPTER IX

THE CARDINAL

It was a delightful room. One of those happy and artificial conjunctions of architecture and decoration sufficiently chaste to invite repose, sufficiently curious to awaken inquiry, which a scholar enjoys, and a man of taste envies. It was an elliptical apartment, illuminated from a shaded skylight, with low book-cases on two curving sides, their tops or mantels holding marble busts, and above them on the walls, faintly creamed with rose, oddly framed wood engravings of Albert Durer’s. At one extremity of the room an imposing full length portrait of Pope Sextus X, then reigning, with a priedieu before it, and an enormous candlestick holding a giant taper of red wax; at the other end a remarkable gothic tapestry of the 15th century, enclosed in a gothic frame. It represented “The Visit of the Magi,” its background was a deep peacock blue, sown with tiny crescents. The offering to the Holy Child was made by a venerable man with a long beard, wearing a sleeveless tunic of magnificent old-rose velvet, finished at the arms, neck, and around the edge with pearls and garnets, on white silk. The other attires in the woven picture were rich and the Virgin’s Mother’s of wonderful beauty.

There were six chairs in the room, all different in design, archaic and ponderous, cushioned with embossed leather and bearing the singular decoration of a spread eagle.

A square heavily carved center table, on four stout mahogany legs formed of clambering boys on slips of trees whose branches supported the table top, and ended in twigs and leaves, which ran profusely around the sides of the table in a kind of frieze below its scarcely jutting edges, filled the centre of the room. It was in scrupulous order—the files of books upon it being carefully arranged in book racks, and so placed with reference to a leathern framed blotter, at one side of the table, as to suggest their convenient use by any one sitting there.

This place was indeed occupied by Cardinal Fenton—whom we have seen before—and, in his red cassock, with a pectoral cross, a beretta margining his black hair and that observant gaze, leaning back in a chair that surrounded him with griffins and perching imps, and with the brass emblem over him, half suggesting a bird’s flapping consternation, he gave to the room the desirable finish of personal dignity. And before him at the opposite side of the table stood a young man of remarkable beauty.

He was indeed rather beautiful than handsome. His oval face, not too weakly drawn, was crowned with curling jetty hair, his lips closed in a perfect bow, his eyes liquidly glowing, indicated tenderness, and the straight Grecian nose, with the white temples, the delicate modelling of the ears, and the suavity of posture in the lithe, and, a little undersized, figure imparted a half boyish, half feminine impression. Still there were reasons for thinking he was not under puberty and not possessed of power. A moustache covered his upper lip, and as the Cardinal spoke, or when he himself spoke, at moments, the color rose steadily in his cheeks, and his eyes flashed—and then the voice itself was also fully conditioned in age; it was a barytone, eloquent and sustained, with a tendency to deeper notes, not often used but obviously there, if a stronger emphasis was needed.

His scrupulous dress was excellent in its perfect fit, and it was noticeably quiet in color. Indeed in color there was in this interesting figure just one note, a scarf of red silk and a garnet pin.

“Yes,” it was the Cardinal’s voice, “we have reached a period of forcible religious contraction. The Church seems strong, is strong, but only because she is the surviving refuge. The world has decorously repudiated faith.”

“Decorously?” interrogated his listener.

“Yes, I think that suits,” answered the Cardinal gravely, “There is not hatred, though that exists; there is an amused toleration, more pernicious in its effects, more detestable, but absolutely indifferent. De Maistre, who believed in an auto-da-fe and defended the Inquisition, would be curiously confounded to-day. Rather than be burned at the stake, the present up-to-date philosopher would assent, and, under compulsion do all the things the Church asked him to do, and—without a semblance of immodesty—continue to do so with gayety in his heart and a lie on his lips. Not, believe me—” this in remonstrance to an attempted interruption—“that the same philosopher would feel as comfortable doing it as not doing it—not that he would not anathematize the authority, that commanded it—but, doing it to save his skin, feel it was about as important as wiping his feet or lifting his hat, equally a deference to custom. The modern philosopher is pusillanimous under durance; he has not the iron courage of the heretic of six centuries ago.”

“But why bring the Pope to the United States, Father?”

“Why? Look about you. These are the latter days of scripture. I believe the chosen number approaches completion, and religion will soon become abridged to a vanishing quantity and—left with its Science, its Philosophy, and with its Ribaldries of Sense—this old world will be let to go on its way, whither it will, unchecked and uncared for. Religion—I mean the Church—to-day has disappeared in Europe—let it entrench itself, for the short time remaining to it, in this virile country, yet responsive to the ordinances and formulas. Let the Head of the Church be with his church, and not continue the idle function of repeating a stale falsehood in a traditional position, no longer honored, but openly scorned. Reclamation is impossible—The Church can see but one finality, its own speedy departure, lifted up, as it were, as its Sacrament is daily lifted up, into the clouds, into the invisible realm of ideality, to be suddenly returned again with a tyrannous power—with burning fulminations—with sectionizing and filtering tests—with its Christ, to judge and to ordain.”

The Cardinal sat erect, and the pale face flushed and the rebuking eyes—those singular and noticeably inquisitive features in the countenances of confessors—flamed, as if with inspiration. His auditor was not however averse to argument, and after a short silence which seemed a respectful acknowledgment of admiration—he spoke in an accent which showed his Italian extraction, but it was pleasing to hear, and detracted in no wise from his polished poise of language and utterance.

“The world is not yet burnt out. Neither as a physical fact nor as a spiritual being. It remains both ways. Is it not a better place to live in? Do we not live better each year? If wickedness thrives so does goodness thrive. I am a Catholic churchman. Yes. But I have common sense, appreciation, sympathy. Because men are not catholic churchmen—let us admit, because they are less and less catholic churchmen, must the world be considered a futility, must it end? If the Church is catholic indeed, I think, it must provide ways and means for those who are not catholic. Will you, Father and Prince of the Church, annihilate the blameless because they do not believe?”

The Cardinal leaned forward with both hands clenched on the blotter in front of him; he seemed to stretch out his neck and the words came, as if deliberately weighed, before they were allowed to pass his lips, they came so slowly.

“Yes; that is the condition; it is hard—but not merciless. Annihilation cannot be regretted, it might be feared. But this civilization does not fear it, therefore to it, annihilation is no penalty. Perhaps catholic theology has passed the point where every human soul must be accounted for. The Church is larval in this world, imaginal elsewhere—and as it grows together the constituents of another transfigured existence in the hurly-burly of a world disowning it, catching, as it can, the materials for its ultimate perfectibility, it must obey at all times its LAW of FORM, the index of its crystallographic symmetry. It knows no compromise, it does not even know what compromise means. IT REMAINS ITSELF.

“Let the world be wise; let Science and Philosophy keep their votaries busy, let it grow more comfortable and more self indulgent, let it banish pain and prolong life—what of it? It means nothing; for such progress is a superficial gloss, the impermanent fashioning of perishable things. Utility is one thing; Immortality is another. The world improves one, the Church absolutely safeguards the other.

“The Church has no quarrel with human improvement, ease of living, bettered political conditions. It knows to-day it has itself been stultified by its own human ignorance—but its fraility, or its meanness, or its cruelty, inhered in its human elements. Its stains cannot obscure its prerogative. Let these ameliorations grow, multiply, and glory and gratitude be to those who bring them, but after all, are they more than the shuffling materialities of the crust? The Church moulds into immaterial permanence the human essence. It has its PROCESS. If the great workman Feil intended to make a lens so gigantic that its light gathering power would bring the Planet Mars to our feet, that lens could be made in but one way. The patented right to make an everlasting soul is the Church’s—let that be the challenge.”

There was again a pause—the young man sank into a chair, his eyes half strangely—almost with astonishment—perusing the Cardinal, who had lost the tense attitude, and looked sorrowfully, and yet smiled at him.

“Father I am not enforced to subscribe to all this—or am I? I cannot. It would be treason to reason to put into nothingness the greatness, sweetness, patience, virtue, that has died outside of the Church doors. That is the madness of conceit. This doctrine Sir,

“Conjures the wandering stars and makes them stand

Like wonder-wounded hearers.”

Cardinal Fenton stood and his voice losing its defiance became sweet, and sad. He stood—looking at the pectoral cross which he had raised above him; it might almost have seemed that he spoke to himself, and IT, and, as the listener himself arose, he leaned over the table between them as if catching a whispered confidence.

“The hardship of thy service is in being misunderstood! To proclaim salvation and charity, but to proclaim them under limitations, that is the test of conviction, and it is often bitter toil—yet, in hoc signo—” he kissed the symbol, and sat down. He turned to the youth again, and his voice resumed its former authority but more quietly “I too have wrestled with this myself, but the stoic stage approaches when I feel no more compunction; indeed I now stamp assertion with the harshest lineaments of what appears to be an illiberal exclusiveness. Why not! This emblem appertains to a body of irreversible dogma. Why adulterate or dilute their meaning by subterfuge or concession? And what if there has been goodness, and patience, and virtue, and devotion, outside of the Church?—they have been useful, they have made dark places bright and illuminated misery, but they are corpora divagua et principia ambigua et speciosa, because unattached to a primordial propaganda.

“Protestantism is a correction. It protects the Church from the poison of Success, and the abuse of power—and because these United States have practically been a protestant country, here the Church has borne a regal front, has watched and worked; yes, has most nearly touched her best ideals.

“But, my son pardon me—I mean now to engage in no futile arguments with you. You are at liberty, within the purview of the Church’s correction to see these things differently. Let me return to our beginning—the translation of the Papal See, to New York—”

“Yes, yes,” was the ardent answer, “that is what I visited you at your own invitation to hear about. But—”

He was interrupted, a servant entered, bearing on a silver card-receiver the card of a visitor. The Cardinal looked up with pleasure; “How opportune. It is Miss Lorimer. She is an accomplice with me in bringing this project to pass, if indeed it is ever realized. She is beautiful and good, a wonderful woman, as effective in doing as in thinking. Her resolves have a masculine energy, and she strains to her ends with an opulent hand.”

At that instant Miss Lorimer entered the room. She was indeed radiantly beautiful. Her grace, the dignity that she easily gave her bearing, was not more marked than the heartiness of address, and the cordiality which it accompanied;

“Ah Father, I surprise you perhaps. Is this an intrusion?”

“A most fortunate encounter. This,” turning to the young man, “is a kinsman of mine, a true son of the Church—Daughter, and, though born here in our own country, having a lineage like your own that spreads its many branches in the tree of an intricate Italian genealogy—Rudolph Amato, Miss Lorimer.”

The young man had been busy with his eyes. How could he help it—anything so gloriously vivid and capturing he thought he had never seen; her voice, her eyes, the witchery of her manner, and the easily detected ardor of her heart, seized him as with the force of a physical impact. His own tell-tale eyes betrayed this sudden impression, and Helen Lorimer, in whose heart Love had taken up its home—at whose feet too so many eloquent offers had been supplicatingly placed—was able to read those same tell-tale eyes. Perhaps she could not altogether restrain the happy feeling of power they revealed to herself—a power every beautiful woman cherishes for its own sake.

Nor was the handsome masculine creature before her unnoticed in this light challenge of observation—an American in whose veins, as in her own, coursed the liquid fires of Italy—and a Catholic; his admiration gave his own beauty a heightened color, and by the instinctive training of nature, whose art, in her best made creature, rests in an equalization of parts, his voice, his manner, his words met the requirements of her attention. She felt instantly friendly to him. Helen Lorimer placed herself opposite to the Cardinal, with the young Amato—indeed their chairs almost touched. It seemed so familiar and pleasant to the Cardinal, that he framed them together in his speech,

“My children, I have made you my confidants in this singular design because, from you at least, Miss Lorimer, the idea itself first came. Since you spoke of it I have been most earnestly canvassing its possibilities, and yesterday received from Rome a batch of letters, which will certainly interest you, though but a few can now be alluded to. Amato has just returned from Rome and Europe, and all he tells me shows that our plan coincides well with conditions that have grown insupportable. The Church like some sea bathed island is now inundated with the rising tides of infidelity, and the swift changes of thought threaten to exterminate her shrinking borders. What can be done?—Well, in answer to my carefully guarded question as to the concentration of the Church forces here in America, raising here some stronger bulwark against the seditions of the age—which I did not conceal flourished everywhere among us—this is the reply of the Archbishop of Ferrate;

Dearly Beloved Brother,

Your inquiry came not amiss. We are to-day like the prisoners of Ice in Dante’s canto. We are encased in repudiation and enmity, and cannot move. On all sides the pressing repression seals and disables us. It is beating the air to preach or exort or prophesy. I look over a deserted realm, and as it were see the meadows and gardens of religion empty, perhaps a solitary man, or some ancient lady, here and there still plucking their flowers, resting in their leafy refuges, or walking by their affluent streams, and beyond these delicious walls of safety I see too the vast populations of the nations, tumultuous, unrestrained, forgetful, chasing whims and fantoms, gaudy butterflies of ornament, the delusions of sense, the pragmatisms of science, lulled to sleep by the worn out iterations of philosophy, or simply stretched over the sun-baked flats of Common Sense, without motion, helpless, destitute, naked, forlorn, hopeless.

Perhaps there is a tide in our affairs which leads on to fortune, and it is this call of yours to come to America, to lift there again the Holy State. I know not; who can? I have importuned several, and they all think seriously of it. But it is a great matter. The Consistory will discuss it and it will be laid before the Holy Father. But will it be better in your new world? Let us not uproot an ancient heritage only to plant upon some shifting sands:

Nil agit exemplum litem quod lite resolvit.

Write your explicit purpose, and all things will be considered.

Your Brother and servant in Christ,

Alonzo of Ferrate.

“My purpose Children would be this; you Amato return to Italy and explain the essential unity and solidity of the Church in these United States, its wealth, the formal splendor of its possessions, and ceremonies, its liberal spirit, yet conserving too the faith once delivered to the Saints, its honored estate in the eyes of men, its numerical majority. Accentuate the sharp contrast with Europe. Let the Church publish its repudiation of Europe, and with august dignity leave it, surrendering it to the perversions of its own reason, while its trailing banners cross the ocean, and in the New World its recreated cradle be found, amid a vast service of song and prayer, and, thus fixed again upon the earth, in this wondrous nation lift its standards under fairer skies, waiting for its redemption from the bondage of a longer stay upon the earth.

“And you dear Daughter, I hoped to join with me in preparing for this sublime event; in making ready in this very city the future seat of the Vicar of Christ. Your own council in this has been my guide and hope. No one can whisper against me that I have used a prelatical influence with you,—the common housewife’s abuse of priestly craft——No! this was your own thought. Hardly the dream of it had entered my mind, when you spoke to me of this strange and glorious——for such I now regard it——project. It will crown our days. It will be the signet of a new era; like some titanic convulsion

When all the sway of earth

Shakes like a thing unfirm,
but it may also be the harbinger of fairer skies.”

Helen Lorimer looked a moment at Amato, who remained silent, and a blush rose to her cheeks, as she found his eyes fixed on her. It almost seemed to her that perhaps he had not heard the words of the Cardinal. The embarrassment was unnoticed, and Miss Lorimer spoke. It was then curious to observe how the young man listened, and had the Cardinal watched him he might have been impelled to rebuke his too evident pleasure. He even turned his chair slightly that he might more easily see the speaker and, or was it especially for the pleasure of hearing her? Doubtless he heard, but no one would have guessed he cared much for the things she said; any one might have told he was falling in love with the speaker.

“Father” said Miss Lorimer “it has been my thought and I am proud of it. There is a spot that can be made into a beautiful home for the Pope. It is the summit of Staten Island. Here is a glorious outspread view of the ocean, and of the city. The place has a scenic perfection, and it would also seem to have a kind of symbolic beauty in it too. The incoming ships and steamers are seen from the high top; yet

The murmuring surge

That on the unnumbered idle pebbles chafes,

Cannot be heard so high—

“Yes it can be made supremely fit. The world’s clamor cannot come there and yet the world’s voice can come. It can all be secured, for there are few houses on it as yet, it being an old estate or reservation. It has been called Todt Hill meaning the Dead Hill, from some far off legend of their having been a massacre there of the early Dutch, by the first Indians. We shall make it the Hill of Life. And my idea would be to keep it very simple and unostentatious, full of trees with the wide glimpses below, and a simple serviceable home, some jewel of a church on the highest point, and the home of the Pope, also very simple. I would drop all the abundant pomp of Rome. That would be pernicious here. The utmost severity of living, a kind of homely husbandry. Nothing to tempt the criticism of our democracy. Just the furnishment of the Pope’s court and that bare as it can be made. What else is necessary? Nothing I think. Let the sublimity be moral rather than physical; a few well selected treasures, the impress of culture but all the larger corporeal grandeur cut off.”

The Cardinal smiled approvingly, and then Amato spoke. “Why Father should you not go. I would be a poor embassador to Europe. I have no authority. It is true I brought these letters, and I have seen the fathers of the Church, and Father, perhaps, in that greater matter that concerned me—well—I think that I must pause a while.”

The Cardinal started, and a shadow of wonder passed over his face, the young man reddened to his fine white temples, and Helen Lorimer felt the slight shock of some misunderstanding between the two men; somehow she felt that she was its cause.

“I am sorry my son,” said the Cardinal, “we can talk of that another time. I do not think that I could do as well as you in showing just what is expected here, and what are the chances here, and for my own part—well—there are several reasons that would make the mission, in my hands, impertinent.” He looked earnestly at Amato, and his serious countenance took on the expression of pained abstraction, almost as if he had forgotten his visitors and his own intentions, while he rested those scrutinizing eyes of his upon the young man with an increasing severity.

Miss Lorimer felt the unseen obstruction, and rose.

“One moment,” began the Cardinal who also stood up, “one moment Miss Lorimer. Just a few words will show you how far we have got along in this difficult scheme. Nothing very definite has as yet been effected abroad, but I am sending out communications to all the bishops, over the names of a council of American bishops who you know have discussed this subject. This council has told you of its gratitude for your proffered help. It has been fairly unanimous in considering the many aspects of the plan—and I had hoped that Amato would assist us in reaching, in a personal way, certain influential members of the papal household, before we came more out in the open——as it were—in placing the whole subject upon a public basis of discussion. But—” here a glance of mute reproach at the beautiful youth, who with crimsoned cheeks, and an evidently rising temper, stood near Miss Lorimer, “perhaps something more will develop shortly, and it will be my pleasure to let you know everything. I agree with your views exactly as to the delicacy of the innovation. Nothing must jar or irritate the spirit of our countrymen. It involves for the Church a new procedure, a new vista, a new apprehension of its tasks. It is pregnant with the strangest possibilities of good. It is likely to land us too in new vicissitudes. It is a challenge to the age in one sense, and again IT IS RETREAT. Perhaps a clerical habit of thought makes me dull, but I foresee a new warfare, and the Church Militant deserving its name in a fiercer struggle. For the Pope to leave Rome and confound the traditions of over two thousand years, to reestablish his theological supremacy in this newer world, means a violation of prestige whose consequences we can scarcely measure.”

Miss Lorimer turned to the young and yet silent man at her side, and invited him to visit her, and handed him her card, and then to the Cardinal, yet watching with an alert suspicion, she gave her hand, bade him farewell, and protesting that they had not seen him lately left the room, and, escorted by an attendant, the residence.

The two men were facing each other in the room that, to the younger, had suddenly grown distasteful, after the glorious woman that had been near him there, had left it.

“Rudolph,” it was the Cardinal speaking, “you have been entranced, perverted by beauty. You renounce a mission you were anxious to undertake. But more grievously you will deny the Church your consecrated service. Is it so?”

“Father” answered the Amato, but without a tremor of hesitation, “I do. I never will be a priest. You say I am perverted by beauty. It is no perversion. I love that woman who left us. I care nothing for promise, advowson, nor expectation. I have not been sure that I was right to engage myself so closely in your plans. I do love life. My visit in Europe stirred the fires of my emotion. It suddenly painted the skies and put flowers on the earth. The hidden, separated, cloistered, existence grew hideous to my eyes—impossible. I am not traitorous to my ideals, to my service to the Church. No, no, they remain, but all the beckoning truthful loveliness of life overwhelms me now. It seems embodied in that superb woman, who has just left us. Call it what you will, revile me, despise me, but I break with the past. It has now no meaning; it was a mistake, a mad design made thoughtlessly, in obedience to one strong feeling, which now turns to weakness before a stronger—Oh—an irresistible compelling impulse.”

There was good reason for the Cardinal to trust his ears, though he was angry enough to be compelled to; to his eyes the Passion in Rudolph Amato’s face was palpable enough. The Mayor would have felt some distrust of his fancied security in Helen Lorimer’s opening affections—and perhaps Helen Lorimer herself—susceptible to beauty, carrying in her breast the yet but half awakened power of love, would have bowed before a storm that came so suddenly, a storm like some onrushing freshet of the spring, bearing all before it in its tumultuous rending strength.

The Cardinal gazed at the young man with interest. He was breathing heavily, his arched lips parted, his eyes became intensely dark and brilliant, and, through some impatient movement of his head, his raven black hair, hanging almost artfully, shading the pale brow and brushing the burning cheeks; and the Cardinal’s interest turned to admiration.

Cardinal Fenton was a connoisseur, and he responded intuitively to every glimpse and form of beauty; he was indeed a bon vivant, and a man of subtlety, faculties conjoined in him with intellectualism, administrative resources, and an almost inerrant judgment, within which too ran the current of an optimistic policy. But he knew Cleopatra’s maxim, “wishers were ever fools,” and, one expedient dashed, it was not lamented, but itself trodden upon by a quick successor.

He understood Rudolph Amato, and he knew that instant that he was lost as a priest to the Holy Roman Catholic Church, but his flashing instinct told him he was yet useful, a tool rejected in one service can be brought to an infinite test of usefulness in another.

And so this bundle of unfixed desires must not be too loosely pardoned, too carelessly freed from his own sense of obligation. He stood yet in the place of service, of friendship, of fealty—much value remained. The quickly coining Cardinal knew that, and just now when his own ambition—for Cardinal Fenton was ambitious—had launched a tremendous undertaking, an instrument so skillful—he knew Amato’s talent—must be kept husbanded, not rejected, because wandering from its first design.

The Cardinal kept his appreciation of Amato’s beauty to himself, and when he answered, “wait,” he motioned the young man to his seat, sat down himself, rang a bell, and told the servant, who attended, to bring them wine and cordials and cigars—the latter for Amato—the Cardinal never smoked, and, though he relished the qualities of good wines, he was abstemious: he yielded to a perverse appetite for cordials. When these were brought, and the two had regained a composure mutually lost for an instant, the Cardinal without at once raising his eyes from the liqueur glass before him—a delicate affair of cut glass and gold—spoke;

“Rudolph Amato you must remember some things. Your dying Mother entrusted you to me when her husband deserted her—and, when your Father was brought home dead, killed in some brawl in Constantinople, I secured for you his wealth, guarded it, increased it. You must realize that your education—certainly better than is usually allotted to young plutocrats—since you were protected, by me against the indulgences your fortune made possible—was under my charge;” there was a motion of expostulation from Rudolph—“Yes; I remember too some things—I recall them with sorrow now. I did indeed hope you would enter holy orders; I recognized your poetic power of language, your unadulterated idealistic fancies, your spiritual grace; I knew the needs of the Church; I hoped—alas; how vainly—that you would become a priest, and I was not placing too great a sanction in my faith in your powers and virtue to promise these eyes the pleasure of seeing you exalted to the bishopric, and hearing your voice raised in aid, in the desperate approaching crises of the Church. Nothing else I can recall, ever disappointed these expectations until this moment. You were obedient, grateful, indefatigable and devout, apparently contented with this prescription, even accepting it with enthusiasm. Are you quite sure you do not owe me a greater effort at self-control than you have shown; is it fair to me; is it fair to the Church?”

Again there was a short silence. Amato—so quickly swayed by any sympathetic appeal—had walked around the table and was kneeling before the Cardinal; his upturned face told his contrition—if it were contrition—or at the worst his honest regret for the Cardinal’s disappointment; but it told nothing of a changed mind. The Cardinal placed his hand on the handsome youth—he really loved him as a son—and the severity melted from his face, though he yet withheld his pardoning smile, reserving a little the new purposes he intended Amato to undertake.

Amato regained his feet apparently satisfied with the relenting gesture of the Cardinal. He spoke less impetuously, but the Cardinal noted—and he was a keen listener—only a deeper settled determination to banish the past, uproot its incentives, and its aims, to—forget it, to

Wipe away all trivial fond records,

All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,

That youth and observation copied there.

The Cardinal saw the logic in nature of this sudden change; a growth leaping to the light, and brought into instant blossom by the beauty of Helen Lorimer. At least, he should guide it in its further advances there,—and keep it too. Here were two great talents, two great fortunes; they should be forged into a great implement of protection against the adversities of the Church.

“There could be no greater injustice to you Sir, nor to the Church, if I covered myself with the confusion of a bitter renunciation, which I rebelled against. I should have made myself into a distracted fool, perhaps worse—a fool and an apostate;

Velut silvis, ubi passim

Palantes error certo de tramite pellit,

Ille sinistrorsum, his dextrorusm abit; unus utrique

Error, sed variis illudit partibus.

“What lay undiscovered has been, as with a lightning’s flash, revealed. This moment has been providential. If, as you once taught me, God stirs the wind, that stirs the leaf, that drops its tiny pellet of dew upon the thirsting flower, at the foot of the tree, that becomes the adornment of the altar whereon the Sacrament shall lie, then I feel that I have been saved by the same interposition from a blunder, and you from a disgrace.

“If service is wanted I am still yours to use, but a fire now bums so brightly in my soul, that all the waters of abnegation could not put it out.”

The Cardinal was now looking very earnestly at the speaker, who returned his gaze unabashed, and strangely enough there dawned on both faces a smile. On the elder man it appeared as an imperceptible admission of defeat, on the younger as the harbinger of happiness. Perhaps in neither case was it justified, for the issues for either of them were yet undecided.

“Well,” said the Cardinal, “I must still remain your confessor. I confess if I must withdraw those hopes, that you, to this day, have consistently strengthened, the unions of your name with that of Helen Lorimer would also give me pleasure, and—let us believe it is God’s better way;” he paused, turned again in his hand the fragile glass, and then continued, “Miss Lorimer is a beautiful woman indeed; she is a remarkable one too, and much admired, and her hand has been sought by distinguished suitors—some of them those hungry bankrupts from Europe. I know she has been dismayed and angry with them; she is a year or two older than you my son—but—Ah, well, she is indeed very beautiful, and—perhaps—you may succeed—but, if you fail; how then, how then; have you thought of that ambitious boy?”

“I shall not fail,” was the unexpected answer, an answer that made the Cardinal turn quickly. His glance assured him that the ardent youth felt no misgivings, and as he saw him there, knowing too the trained and gentle power of the boy, his intensity of tastes, and his winning spirit, raised now by this manly daring into something knightly, the Cardinal silently accorded him his acquiescence.

A few minutes later Rudolph Amato passed down the steps of the episcopal residence—then as now upon Madison Avenue—and walked to Fifth Avenue, and again he went on into the famous thoroughfare, which still resisted, above that point, the ingression of the sky climbing stores. Had the Cardinal been able to have followed his protégée he would have felt some astonishment, for this ci-devant postulant for the priesthood, walked briskly, with no little assertive grace of motion, to Forty-Second Street, and, stopping for an instant to watch the boiling tumult of that Four-corners, turned west, and a second after entered the massive entrance of the glorious successor of the Fleischman Baths, which, expanded far beyond the corners of Sixth Avenue, and no longer restricted to the attic of a building, filled a magnificent structure opposite Bryant Park, itself changed into a brilliant bed of flowering plants.

The place was famous. It was called The Agonistarch, and roofed every sort of athletic diversion and comfort. Huge swimming tanks, mimic race tracks, boxing tiers, gymnasia, offices of rest and relaxation, whimsical levities, like curious tilting stairs that went up and down jolting into dizziness their walkers, queer rippling falls of carpet upon which the shouting players rolled and tumbled, whirling tables that shot the tranced occupants off into surrounding piles of cushions, pulsating rugs that threw their human loads up into the air, and strange downy sheaves that passed a man over and under, twisting him into a curling line, health lifts, and precipices of painted wood, from which the players jumped into a sea of satiny leaves, a vast medley of conceits, where the youth of the city resorted for repair and exercise.

It was crowned by a luxurious garden with swings and captive balloons hedged in with coppiced fig trees, with sprinkling fountains, perfumed winds, a theatre, big aquaria, with cages of animals, singing birds, with mossy banks, glistening with tiny lizards, little canals of water on which floated huge nut shells, their capsules opening and admitting couples into the silken lined cups within them, with clay pipes or funnels playing in great bowls of glycerized soapsuds and blowing up iridescent bubbles, that came off in dancing streams rising and falling and exploding, and in the midst of this garden rose a pair of the steel antennae which emitted that wonderful mysterious light which at night bathed the air above the city with a wizard sheen. At night too the garden itself thrilled with a delicately tinted illumination brought from a host of lamps.

Adjoining the Agonistarch was a hotel called the Anchorite, where Rudolph Amato had his chambers. This hotel connected on every story with Agonistarch, and its name was a palpable cynicism. But Amato’s residence there need not be misconstrued. The Cardinal had brought up his charge with the keenest sense of the enormous value of physical perfection. It was a pet theory of the Cardinal’s, that the demand of the flesh had two issues, one in lust, the other in exercise; that these excluded each other. He acted on that principle with Amato, and in him he had virtually trained a splendid athlete.

When Amato returned from his visit to Europe—sent there by the Cardinal for the purposes hinted at in their interview—Amato had reached his conclusion to slowly extricate himself from the implied obligation to his spiritual guardian to enter the Church. He had begun by assuming the control of his own fortune which, now as he was of age, came under his own guidance, though he had allied with himself in its direction, a business man, a lawyer of the city, and a friend of Cardinal Fenton’s. This opening to a more independent existence successfully accomplished, Amato began to consider the serious problem—yet unsolved—of his life, for with him the mere position of wealth could not abrogate the value and meaning of occupation. His well balanced nature forbade it, and the consciousness of availability in himself for some good ends forbade it even more imperiously. The incidents attending these silently working changes had kept him from the Cardinal, and that perspicacious observer had not failed to note his absence, together with the greater freedom of his charge in choosing his own way. It was indeed in response to a remonstrance, that he had been at the Cardinal’s on that day, when—as he felt—the meeting with Miss Lorimer suddenly illumined his future with purpose and decision.

He had been attracted to the conveniences of the Anchorite from its nearness to the excellent gymnasia of the Agonistarch and perhaps too in an awakened desire of dalliance with the world. Its brilliancy and the raging life around it, inwoven with the swirling activities of commerce on all sides of it attracted him. His visit to Europe had administered many shocks to his opening nature, and the reaction from study and seclusion, playing in a system appropriated by its psychology and make-up to the uses of a social life, gave him momentarily a sense of conflict.

He knew but few persons in the city; the Cardinal had been his confidant and friend, filling almost entirely the relations of a father to him, and so successfully had the Cardinal kept him from the usual intercourse of life, that the young man was practically a stranger in the city of his birth. He had been a fairly good student, excelling in language and in art, with no inconsiderable power of memory, showing a predilection for history, which he most appreciated on its poetic and artistic sides. Carefully guarded by the Cardinal in his religious feelings his fidelity and admiration for the Catholic Church were most sincere, and his observances of his religious duties, onerous and constant. The plan of making him a priest of the Church had been the Cardinal’s, with the delighted approval of his Mother, and he had himself felt a pleasant predisposition for this end.

And now returning to the customary anticipations of life, his youth and nature thirsting for their satisfaction he felt a sort of mental confusion. He had taken a rather sumptuous suite of rooms at the Anchorite, consisting of a larger sitting room, used as a library, and study, a smaller inner room devoted to his meals, which were individually served to him, and a third room—his bed-room. This group of chambers was pleasingly furnished, and, as he had chosen his position near the top of the building, their outlook commanded the city to the south. The comfort of it, was very real, and, bordering as it did upon luxuriousness, Amato realized its pleasure, but experienced a slight inner impatience and self rebuke for enjoying them.

Of course he had been well observed by his neighbors in the establishment, and particularly admired, in his gymnastic exercises, for his physique and abundant skill, and his good looks. Many had made overtures to him in a friendly way, and while Amato received these advances with perfect courtesy, he seemed to repel familiarity, and he offered no encouragement to that servile and indecent facetia which marred the conversations around him; he was conscious of it and despised it. This attitude was not long in developing a natural anger among the habituées of the place, and Amato, feeling this, had about determined to go elsewhere, though the charm and perfection of the material side of this popular caravansary still held him. Among these fault-finding and petulant critics of Amato, was a particularly large and gross fellow who took occasion again and again to make himself obnoxious, and by a silent effrontery caused Amato’s resentment. A mean sneer disfigured the face of his unpleasant physiognomy when Amato appeared in the dressing rooms, or in the baths, or in the gymnasium, and it was too evident that he waited for some opportune moment to openly fall foul of the young man. Amato remarked to himself, with a little trepidation, that the man wanted to disable or injure him, and sought some occasion for a quarrel.

It was only a day before Amato’s interview with the Cardinal that this man’s—his name was Gynt—sullenness and envy, if it was envy, came to a conclusion of open violence. It was customary after the exercise in the gymnasium for the athletes and young executants to go to the splendid bathing room, and plunge in the broad and deep bath or pool, after enjoying perhaps a shower, in one of the many adjoining closets. At one end of this pool, and raised somewhat above its surface, was a jumping platform not accommodating easily more than three, to which the men in turns ascended, leaving it as quickly as they reached it, and so that a line of plunging figures followed each other in an almost continuous parade into the boiling waters of the tank.

The man Gynt was on this platform, and Amato came up behind him for his own turn, and the big occupant of the board noticing this, planted himself squarely on the end of the jump, and with evidently no intention of using the board for its usual purposes, enjoyed emitting a few stupid and vulgar railleries at his friends in the water.

Amato waited a reasonable time, and then saw that the moment of a collision had come. Moving up on the board he quietly asked the man to move. The giant turned contemptuously, grinned at Amato, and with unconcealed malice said “He guessed his young nibs could wait for his betters,” and winking at the men in the water—, many of whom saw the trouble brewing—, resumed his fixed and dogged attitude, with spread legs and folded arms.

Amato then requested him to make way for himself, if he was not going to leap, and pushed against him. In a flash, as if expecting and coveting this very attempt to pass him, the bully seized Amato, and before Amato could resist effectually hurled him off sideways in the tank with an oath. Amato fell fortunately upon his head in the water, and suffered no shock, but there was a half stilled cry of “shame,” as he rose and swam to the egress from the water. The ruffian still kept his place on the board, and was laughing, though not perhaps with the best confidence, the unfairness of the trick appealing to the settled code of honor among the men. He was looking at Amato with a strained attention, and his eyes were joined by those of every other man in the room, in the same scrutiny.

Amato was soon out of the water, scrambling up at one of the stairways, and he was angry all through. His rage mounted to his face, and he felt that this fierce rebellious temper surging now in him formed another suddenly new break with the placid and regulated past. He ran through the bathers around the tank, and came back to the steps leading up to the platform, where his assailant, now less mirthful from a sense of the general disapproval, and some sharp reminders of the prowess of Amato, stood grimly waiting the next move of the young man, and apparently expecting an assault, for he turned towards the front of the stage.

The next instant Amato had passed up the steps and confronted him. Gynt did not take advantage of his superior position to resist Amato’s return, but remained at the end of the platform. He wore his provoking sneer, and though evidently a little inclined to make a joke of it, his attitude suggested his readiness for a fray. His expectations were not to be disappointed. Amato sprang quickly in front of him, and in a low voice said; “Mr. Gynt you’re a loafer. Defend yourself.”

The words had scarcely passed his lips before he countered and struck Gynt such a smart blow that the big fellow staggered and almost fell backward into the tank. He recovered, however, and then with his massive body plunged into the smaller but much quicker man in front of him. The stage was too narrow for successful evolutions of the sparring type. Amato saw this, and as Gynt rushed at him he cowered, bent, and steadying himself with all his might and main, caught Gynt’s body around the middle, stopping its impetus with a drive forward. He overpowered Gynt’s motion, and the next moment with his arms wrapped around the bulky form of the man, who had lost in part his balance, by this sudden arrest, and was sprawling over Amato’s back, he rose, and lifting the fighter off his feet, flung him helplessly writhing, and dazed with astonishment, on his back into the water.

He fell heavily and sank. The walls of the tank bristled with crowding forms as the men watched the foaming indentation on the surface. Gynt appeared and lamely swam to the stairway, evidently hurt. He was breathing heavily and in pain. Then Amato did something that, in the turn of a hand, won him the admiration of most of the men there. He jumped from the platform swam swiftly to the point where Gynt was being assisted, and coming behind him supported him up. Gynt was in a faint; he had fallen in the water too violently and suffered from an impacted side. As he came to the floor of the room he sank into the arms of his helpers and among these was Amato. Rudolph looked sorrowfully at the man, and then gazing around him said; “My friends, I believe you can bear me witness that this act of mine was not unprovoked. I am sincerely sorry that it has turned out so badly. But would any of you have done differently? I was incensed, and I forgot myself—but my resentment was surely not unnatural. I had been insulted and I had never done this man any wrong. Do you exonerate me?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” came loudly from many sides; “it was Gynt’s fault. He was peevish and ugly. You’re all right. He isn’t hurt much. Help him out of this, and get him some brandy,” were the various comments, and Amato taking almost bodily the limp shape assisted the men to carry their comrade into a dressing room, where restoratives brought him to his senses.

He came to slowly, and when fully conscious roamed the room weariedly with his eyes until they fell upon the watching Amato; his face contracted and an impulsive shudder shook him. He seemed to dread Amato, and turned his face aside. Amato leaned over him and said, “I am very sorry. Will you give me your hand?”; but the man remained silent, and then Amato slowly moved off and walked away.

The incident gave the habituées of the Agonistarch a very salutary impression of Amato’s great strength, and during the rest of his stay there, he was a momentary favorite. His exclusiveness and repression were forgiven, and many good words came to his ears, unsolicited, praising his magnanimity, while he learned that Gynt had already won some enmities among the weaker men by his overbearing and bullying style. He left the Anchorite a few days later, with a good reputation, and a moderate popularity.

Amato was indeed now an example of a discovered temperament. Brought up with a carefully inculcated confidence in the Church, with an assiduously perfected environment of religious considerations, with the cultured superintendence of affectionate and learned tutors, and imbued himself with the dawning powers of a Rossettian taste for the mysterious and moonish, he, at first, in his younger years put on all the aspects of a recondite and spiritual nature. These appearances really covered a strongly human and virile sense, in which all the appetencies of the man had grown into rounded and perfect size. Like a rolling away of a cloth concealing some hidden growth which at the first touch of the generous sun spawns again into a vivid flourish of flowers, Amato’s movement out upon the scene of the world’s powerful appeals, its pictures, and its wreathing invitations, had torn from his eyes the sapient tapestry of his artful schooling, and he leaped like an actor from the dark flies of the stage into the pageant of the play’s procession.

But he came upon that stage “with modest eyes and still conclusions,” though his heart panted with desire. The skill of his education kept him restrained, and the serviceable disposition bred in him, stiffened his senses with admonitory cautions. And thus by an almost heavenly opportunity—the form, face, and character, of Helen Lorimer came before him. That “psychological moment,” so much maligned and misnamed, was here a potent fact and deep reality. Limited by training, and habit, and ingrained teaching, from catching, as it were, the world in his arms—arms that ached to embrace and enjoy—there walked right into the focus of his raised eyes this beautiful and noble woman.

That explained in a sort of way his sudden passion, his convinced determination. And here again there was a paradox. To a man, whose intercourse with women had always been on the decorous extremes of civility, strengthened by what had been assumed as a foregone abnegation, Amato’s fervor and unhesitating self-confidence seemed abnormal, if not grotesque. It was so. It arose exactly from his inexperience. His love flamed upward like a discharging igneous flood. It knew no barriers; it cared for none. Circumspection was ridiculous, apprehension impossible. The wind blew, his sail was fixed, he knew his port.

So that when Hope’s deep source in fullest flow,

Like earthquake did uplift the stagnant ocean

Of human thoughts—his shook beneath the wide emotion.

It would have amused the travelled courtier of the world, this unquestioning certainty; Amato’s mind fled even beyond the hour of possession, and he had begun to lay his plans for the mutual service he and Helen Lorimer might render the world. He exulted in these reveries. In them his love, his religious earnestness, his ambition, his feeling of accountability, blended delightfully. The young man walked in clouds, but he was not so far above the earth, the hard ground of day life, as to neglect beginning his suit. Contiguity was important.

He deserted the Anchorite, leaving it, yet unreconciled with his enemy Gynt, and established himself at the southern boundary of Carrara, in the Arrowhead Inn. To-day that half metamorphosed villa, turned to the uses of entertainment, under old oaks, and glimpsing the river at 168th Street, and the Lafayette Boulevard, down a creased hillside, is a promising eerie for dreams and good dinners. In the year 2000 it would still retain its summery charm, under yet greater shadowing oaks, but much changed, expanded into a red tiled mansion of three stories, with a bulging skirt of balconies at every story, and fitted for the seclusion of all those who required or cared for retirement, and divested of its present day publican features.

It was a delightful nook, and Amato found it most convenient and inviting. A pale of trees hid the crowning glory of New York—Carrara—to the north; there was not much to wish to see in the east, another wall of umbrage shut off the south, but westward through artificially prepared arches of boughs, the noble river, with its cargoes, cargasons, and excursions, fed the eyes with interest.

The night that Amato left him, the Cardinal passed into the cathedral, for his evening devotion. The late twilight of a bright day bathed the interior—walls, clerestory, pavements, and flaming windows—with a vanishing light; the shadows crept upward against the pale illumination, that shrank more and more into the higher recesses, or spun itself in ropes of mote deluged rays from the apertures in the roof. A few supplicants knelt here and there in the darkened pews, the vestal light burned before the high altar, while guttering tapers in front of the shrine of the Holy Mother, gave forth an unsteady radiance.

The Cardinal advanced through the gates of the chancel rails, and, prostrating himself at the very foot of the sanctuary, stayed, thus bowed in a prayer, that was half meditation, half uttered petitions. His heart was indeed heavy. He had regarded Amato as a spiritual son and he had wished to embrace him as one with himself in the transcendental service of the altar, and now—this precious offering to God had turned away his face, regained the world, released himself from that immaterial bondage of the spirit, which meant the eternal liberty of Heaven, and would no longer be his companion in the mystical company of the Priesthood.

Ah! he too—the great Cardinal—had his affections, his heart yearned with the human implanted hunger for love, thirsting perhaps with a grievous loneliness for that metaphysical union of soul with soul, which, in its dim and spectral way, stands for those—involved in self immolation to the world—for the material partnership of the earth. The Cardinal prayed for Amato’s joy, his success, his usefulness; he struggled with himself to give those prayers true potency, and he fought off the complaining regrets that he really felt. He prayed for Helen Lorimer, he prayed that this union of two whom he had watched and guided, who represented to him a very virtual excellence, might redound to the glory of the Church, might form a new and blessed nucleus for the spreading of truth.

And, even as he prayed, his heart rebelled. He knew that. But before he left that throne of grace, though the night was spent in the vast effort he would subdue the warring flesh—if flesh it was—and, devoutly, humbly, yield up his life-long hope to the ordained purposes of his God.

The twilight faded, the poor wanderers from the street who had entered to grasp some crumbs of comfort in the still holiness of the place, had, one by one, wonderingly left. A desperate woman came to the chancel rails and sobbed her heartbreak there, and she, with a muttered ejaculation of surprise, had gone away, the sexton snuffed out the tapers, and observing the Cardinal yet motionless on the altar grades, had crept off in a keen bewilderment; darkness muffled nave and apse and transept in the black gloom, save as a penumbral light smeared the colored windows, and broke disheartenedly through their red and purple shades; the whispering noises of a deserted habitation were heard, and with them came anon cries, or rumblings, or beats of trotting horses, or uncertain whizzes, impossible to understand, and yet—the unmoved figure of the Cardinal like a blacker clot stained the lightness of the altar steps.

But now he rises; the victory is won; he has surrendered his heart’s fondest desire, and his soul in contentment, with submission, bows to the new change. But were the darkness less deep, one standing near his stumbling path out of the sanctuary, would have detected tears on the grave face, and lines beneath the tired eyes.

Still later in the night, as when the dawn was first preparing the eastern skies, a reeling man leaning against the wall of the Bishop’s house stared upward and saw a light in a lower window, and he saw into the room, and saw there too a man dressed and reading; it was the Cardinal, and the page he so steadfastly perused held these words; they may be found in De Imitatione Christi;

“My son renounce thyself and thou shalt find Me. Give up all choice, all personal inclination, and thou shalt even be the gainer. For greater grace shall be given thee as soon as thou resignest thyself unalterably.

“‘O Lord how often shall I resign myself, and in what respects am I to renounce myself?’

“Always every hour: in small things as well as greater ones. I except nothing; but wish to find thee in every respect naked. How otherwise will thou be able to be Mine, and I thine, unless thou have been deprived of every personal inclination, respecting either external things or internal feelings? The sooner thou dost accomplish this the better it will be with thee, and the more completely and thoroughly thou doest this, the more wilt thou please Me, and the greater will be thy gain?”

The drunken man fearful a little of the apparelled priest, and not unobservant of the approaching steps of a policeman, stole away in the deserted street, where the fading light of the lamps yet struggled with the misty lightening of the sky.

And just at that same hour, the luxurious Amato pushing his feet out of the sheet upon the rugged floor, and seeing the same dawn paint with its dewy rays the opposite wall, rubbing his winking eyes straightened himself, and staring at the colored picture of a full sailing ship upon the rolling green waves of an interminable sea, suddenly leaped to his feet and cried;

“It was the same. Yes, the lady in the box at the Mayor’s speech in the Carnegie Hall, was Helen Lorimer.”

CHAPTER X

THE MAYOR’S COURTSHIP

Admiration throughout the City-State had been growing over the administration of the Mayor, its Governor, and it had not been confined to any class. He had exhibited exacting industry, careful judgment and unexpectedly evinced the qualities of poise and decision, virtues which the observant Mr. Briggs had so hugely doubted he possessed. Nor did he appear less advantageously on the dress occasions of the city’s public ceremonies. He had made a really remarkable public speech in which he discussed many of the coming questions of the day and century, emphasized the absolute supremacy of Law and Order and, by an adroit mixture of rhetoric and facts, succeeded in holding an audience composed of every grade and circumstance, and which departed uttering golden opinions over his sense and his eloquence.

He had not hesitated to explain his action in allowing a reprieve to the convicted anarchists—an action which for a time brought down upon his head the fulminations of the better papers, and exposed him to the scurrilous abuse of his enemies—and defended their complete right to obtain a new trial. Without divulging the nature of the new evidence in their behalf, he boldly declared an injustice had been done and that, if judgment was suspended, his course would be universally endorsed. He talked straight to the hearts of his hearers, in this matter, and appealed to their American sense of fairness. He had consulted Helen Lorimer about this address, and almost with rapture he had inserted in it many of her suggestions, jealously preserving their exact language.

Her cheeks flushed as she recognized her own words, and she perceptibly leaned forward a little to catch the well adjusted sentences, joining with proud elation in the tribute of applause as he ended.

The speech had been given in the Carnegie Hall—still after so many years, the chosen forum for public discussions—and all through it the young speaker turned his eyes constantly to the box in which the Lorimers were sitting, not with too puerile an attention, but just so much as would enable him to see the face of the lovely woman, and catch from her approval, inspiration, for his task. His eyes were not the only ones which sought that place, for Helen Lorimer never seemed more beautiful. Her presence gave the occasion distinction, though it was conjoined with the gratified recognition of the aristocracy of Carrara. The new Mayor pleased them. He had been seen often at the Lorimers, and the impression he made was admirable. His intentions were suspected, and that very fact threw into his public appearances—to them—a fresh interest. Not indeed that much was said about it, and nothing was known.

It was understood in some indirect way, that the Mayor and Helen Lorimer were together interested in the forthcoming trial, and while Miss Lorimer’s social movements were rigorously watched, the dispensations of good taste were not at any time forgotten. Her splendid public activity belonged to the history of the times, and the frequent presence of the Governor in her house, could be readily explained in other obvious ways, than by the gratuitous assumption of any more delicate relation, than the calls of the state. A group of malcontents—those whose machinations with Longtinsky were suspected by Helen Lorimer herself—and who belonged to the rich classes, were very envious of the Mayor’s popularity with their own friends, and viewed with positive hatred his assured entrance within the confines of their social prestige and privileges.

Many men among them, and some women, convinced themselves that the Mayor was a masked demagogue, at heart desirous of a political revolution, that his clemency to the anarchists was a cheap trick, and that his popularity was a menace and also his talents. To these people Helen Lorimer, though the most distinguished member of their order, was a dreamer and a dilletante. But some of them felt again their own danger, from the probable exposure of their tricks and conspiracies. The Mayor was not popular with Theodore Lorimer.

Helen Lorimer sat in a box between her uncle and her mother at the front, and a group of neighbors, in which a few handsome men appeared, assembled behind her. Hats were not removed, and the purple velvet Gainsborough exquisitely formed, and becoming her dark abundant hair gave her a most charming effectiveness. As the Mayor gazed at her from his seat on the platform, she became an Aurora, this minute his own dawn, and the rushing years, full of work, of usefulness, of conquests, the glorious endless day of Life. Never before had he felt such gratitude for what powers he knew he owned, and he fairly grew impatient to begin, that the tide of his powers thus awakened might flow unimpeded—flow, as it were, to her feet.

His heart sprang to his lips, and the words as if attuned to some inner harmony of love, were rich with gracious melody, and strong with manly thought. Mr. Briggs stood near the stage in a side aisle with Tom Ratler, and it was amusing to note his slowly gathering astonishment. His old doubts as to the character of the new Mayor were surely giving way before the man’s manifest power, but Mr. Briggs had still obstinately—perhaps a little vainly—clung to the conviction, that it was he—BRIGGS—that shaped his ends, and lest the Mayor should fail to understand this, Mr. Briggs plied him more vigorously than ever with long winded speeches, and animated apostrophes, and educational diversions. All of which the Mayor with grace and good nature accepted heartily, though behind his secretary’s back his smile prolonged itself into a wearied grimace of forbearance.

The Mayor’s heart was not the only one stirred, not the only one which beat with quickened pulses. Never did Helen Lorimer think so well of him as then; she made the confession to herself, and she made it with blushes bending, by one knows not what spell, to the witchery and command of words—mere words—And yet—the Mayor was not deprived of the charm of physical interest, though in his case it was subtly wrought in with intellectual expression. His winning play of features, the earnestness and beauty of his eyes, a peculiar and native grace of motion in the tall lithe frame, and the constant attractiveness of the ingratiating mouth, framed for speech, told effectively upon his audience, and it was even fondly noted in its details by one, whose lightest thought for him was priceless.

And in that sea of faces, on the occasion of this memorable address of the Mayor, was a face belonging to one, who by the magic of the destiny ruling the ways of men was drawn—not by accident, for there are no accidents in the uses of fate—into his audience. It was Amato.

He was then still an occupant of the Anchorite, and had not yet had the interview with the Cardinal, that we have just witnessed. He was placed far up against the ceiling of the enclosure, having walked through Fifty-sixth Street, and lingering for a minute on the opposite side of the way, noticed the broad signs announcing the speech of the Mayor. There was no room anywhere else in the packed and eager house. Amato had heard of the new Mayor, and the fame of his successful combination of warring policies in the last election, winning the choice of the great city by his naïve but skillful appeal to hostile parties. It had been commented on in the papers both of Europe and the States. He felt curious to see this rising political Cicero or young Alcibiades—as he musingly remarked—and so fought his way up to the top gallery of the hall. And none listened with more open and delighted ears than Amato.

Emancipating himself from the narrow seclusion of his student’s life, responding intuitively to the power of personality and of talent, the Mayor’s eloquence, the fine modulation and grasping insistency of his voice, and the breadth and culture of his views, allied with a certain artfulness of phrase, carried the young ascetic off his feet. His applause was not very apparent, and one observing him might have thought that he was not pleased, but the conclusion would have been a stupid misunderstanding.

Amato became so interested, and so instinctively endorsed the Mayor’s attitude that he forgot the customary tribute, and while others were clapping, was himself revolving the Mayor’s weighty conclusions. And it was just then, in one of the outbursts of applause, that his wandering eye caught sight of Helen Lorimer, for she too joined in the enthusiasm. She was far away from his lofty perch, but Amato, awakening to the attributes of beauty, feeling the flourishing power of his senses, and innately luxurious and tasteful, saw her, and noted her charm. It was only after his interview with the Cardinal that—as he arose from his slumbers the next morning—he consciously identified the face he had seen at Carnegie Hall, with the visitor of the Cardinal’s.

The industry of the Mayor was remarkable; he had begun a splendid effort to reform the clerical service of the city, and to bring into operation a new system of accounting. The enormous growth of the city during the first half of the twentieth century had quadrupled its debt, and made its yearly budget formidable. The outcry against extravagance had been gaining in strength, and there seemed some reason for it, though it was in a measure exaggerated by a popular subserviency to the sensational mongerings of newspapers, and rabid articles in the monthlies. The great city with its almost unexampled generosity towards all sorts of public enterprises, its stupendous educational system, and the vastness of its improvements, had indeed assumed heavy burdens, reflected in a mounting tax levy. The century had developed a strong tendency towards a hidden sort of socialism, and while the organization of society was unchanged, heavy taxes imposed upon the property of the rich and upon corporations, lent a semblance of reality to the claim that the city government—and it was symptomatic of municipal conditions throughout the world—had become socialistic.

The Mayor confronted a discontented public when he assumed office as the governor of the little municipal state. Capable and experienced, and gifted with invention, inclined himself to view in a new light the dawning tendencies of the time, which really urged a greater participation of the many in the aggregate returns of the state, he met upon his inauguration a double problem. He was expected to give a business administration, curbing excess, limiting expenditures, where they were foolish or unnecessary, diminishing waste, and also, by some process of education, making the entire city realize that it must succumb to the refreshing influences of an increasing desire to advance the weal and general happiness, introducing—not recklessly or with demagogic aims—an idealism of sympathy between all classes.

Helen Lorimer had herself engaged in the latter problem, approaching it from the side of Class, with the strongest instincts of Individualism, forming—if she could—an aristocracy of Worth, which should assume a guiding hand in the control of affairs, and involve itself in a perennial ministration of mercy and helpfulness. Unseen to her there lay in all her thoughts the latent socialistic image; to the Mayor that image was clearly seen, and attacking the problem more from the side of the Commoner, he was never deceived or misled.

This community of serious interest had greatly heightened the flavor of the Mayor’s acquaintanceship with Helen Lorimer. Their most significant qualities of mind, had been mutually seen, and while they very earnestly differed, there was no loss of admiration on either side. More secretly and more profoundly they felt the collision in themselves of two irreconcilable entities, the religious idea, and the scientific idea. On that ground their tempers were inclined to take fire, but the Mayor’s constraining love corrected his impulse, and Helen’s slowly increasing surrender and engrossment oftentimes closed her lips.

The evening of the fourteenth of July was spent by the Mayor at the villa of the Lorimers’. The company—not a large party—ate in the salon the reader has already visited, and perhaps for the first time—or almost the first—some whispered conjectures were hazarded, that the Mayor was decidedly interested in Helen Lorimer, while eloquent glances told the same story. None of those present at the dinner—with one exception, the count and his wife—at which Miss Lorimer so boldly threw down the gauntlet of her convictions as to the transplantation of the Pope, were this evening among the little throng. It was most variously composed, though the young people predominated; the few elders being well preserved old ladies, whose composure it would have been dangerous for the younger set to have disturbed by any frivolity. These old ladies were solid exemplars of propriety, well dressed and effectively garrulous. The banquet was an informal collation, the usual service of the young men to the ladies prevailing, the latter sitting about the room, or, in many cases, out of it, in such inviting nooks and retreats as offered less surveillance for their coquetry and the interchange of vows.

In this confusion, amid the decorous collision of flying Ganymedes, replenishing emptied plates from the overburdened table, the suave exit and entrance of servants, the noisy expostulations of the avid dowagers, and the murmurous tumult of comment, pleasure, and platitudes, the Mayor and Helen talked alone at one end of the room. Here they were soon joined by a shaking but emphatic old gentleman—a Livingston—and a middle aged banker—a Gunther—whose cushioned perfection of deportment, finish of address, and scrupulous attention to the removal of crumbs from his attire, contrasted amusingly with the older man’s carelessness, nervousness, and vituperation.

“You spoke well Mr. Mayor at Carnegie Hall,” it was the nervous old gentleman speaking, “but you don’t use the meat axe—the meat axe—as you should. I tell you Sir, that fine words never buttered parsnips, and if you try pretty words on these socialistic renegades you’ll get them back in your ears charged with curses. Hound them out—out. You had no justification for interference. Let ’em hang!”

“But surely,” Miss Lorimer began, “Mr. Livingston you don’t wish to be so unjust as to slay the innocent. I cannot think you aspire to the detestable distinction of being a murderer.”

“A murderer, Miss Lorimer? The term can be given some meanings that take away its reproach. War is not murder although we kill innocent and guilty alike. Intimidation is worth more than just flat justice in this matter. Besides in the case of pestilence those exposed to the plague must be quarantined along with those who are sick. That’s plain—very plain—and it’s furthermore plain to me that a new trial means procrastination—compromise—escape.

“It’s futile—futile—Yes! it’s knavery to think of it!”

“Ah now,” this time the intercessory banker, “really Mr. Livingston I think you mistake the nature of the evidence. Let us be judicial—strictly judicial—the judicial course is the safest course. It is sanctioned by authority and reason.”

“What! the Law’s way!” cried the irate representative of a family which had given its members to the State and the Bench, “I tell you Sir, the Law is the enemy of sense. It plunders our pocket-books, and what does it give back?—demurrers and writs, and bills, and motions. Martial Law, Sir I believe in, and martial law is the cure-all just now. But your ordinary law, your court law—why! it’s a mouse in a gally-pot—a buzz-fly in a pounding barrel! Surgery, no medicine!”

The Mayor had not spoken; he was still seated watching with a curious semblance of avoidance of debate, the face of Helen—he was beginning to be audacious enough, softly to whisper to himself “his Helen”—but now he stood, and turning to Mr. Livingston who was likely to fly into a rage at his exasperating silence spoke, while at the same moment Count Schinazi and his approving and inseparable wife approached the group.

“Mr. Livingston you are afraid of the peace and permanency of our State, because of these socialists, to whom you, on that account, deny justice. Do you recall this fable of La Fontaine? A ruler of a realm was told by the messenger of a hostile country that his master could summon an army from all his dependencies whereupon a wise courtier told the trembling monarch that it recalled to him a vision that he had dreamt; he had seen a dragon with many heads and only one tail on the other side of a hedge, and, thus affrighted, he had stood dumb, and powerless with fear, when he saw that because it had many heads it could not pierce the hedge between them; but, thus recovered from his dread, the next instant he saw a dragon with ONE head and MANY tails approach the hedge; this last easily passed the hedge with all his tails, one making a path for the next. Mercy and Justice to these misguided men Mr. Livingston will multiply the heads of the movement, because it will certainly throw them into discord, but Cruelty and Injustice will consolidate their councils into a unanimity that can readily cause us apprehension. The Dragon with many heads is harmless.”

The rejoinder was a little unexpected, and the irascible critic was non-plussed, to recover however with the muttered ejaculation that he knew a fable worth two of that, “the mouse who gnawed the nets of the lion and let him loose”; at which the Mayor laughed, and Mr. Livingston, shaking his head ominously, retired.

“Veery vell put your Honor,” it was the voice and grinning phiz of the Count, “bit I tink de gentlemans who vas so, as you say, peevish, might have, as you say, got you von better; vas it not a leetle like dis, you haf de bone in de mouf like de leetle dog in de storie, and ven you look in de vater you drop de bone to geet de shadow and you loose bofe. Ees it not day vay?”

“I hardly think so Count Schinazi,” the mayor had made the acquaintance of the eccentric foreigner and the two men rather liked each other, “at any rate the bone is not yet out of my mouth, and if I am chasing shadows, we sometimes say rainbows, I am not likely to disappoint any one but myself—or am I?” The last words were directed to Miss Lorimer, and the smile and reproach that dawned on her face again told the Mayor that he was something more to her than a name and a friend simply.

Just then the voice of Theodore Lorimer was heard requesting silence; there was an instant suppression of the social hubbub, and the same voice told the company that if they would follow him they would be led to the roof of the northern towers, where there would be music, and a view of some few fireworks, and where there was also furnished, upon one of the broader spaces a carpet covered square for the dancers. This announcement was received with unconcealed admiration, and the chorus of applause from the many couples, summoned hither and thither from their coverts and hiding spots was overwhelming, causing Mr. Lorimer to remark to a business neighbor “that Terpsichore was probably a more popular deity than Columbia.”

The path taken by the guests led through a remarkable series of halls and up many broad stairways graced with niches, holding bronzes and marble figures, with walls decorated—not lavishly—with paintings, and at the end of the ranges led into a spiral stairs, from which eyelet windows covered the adjacent valleys. The hilarious company emerged out upon a roof flanked by four towers, in a sort of uncovered room, over which a trellis hung, carrying pendent vines, a summery pergola. The towers flanking this space were pierced by doorways, and these opened within upon narrower ascents, to the tops of the towers themselves. In the centre of the room was the dancing carpet, and the musicians, set to one side, already welcomed the guests with pleasant melodies.

Almost the last to reach the outlook was Miss Lorimer and the Mayor, and when they came, the place was in a surge of enjoyment; the musicians breathed the enchanted measures of a Waldteufel waltz, the dancers were noiselessly circling over the middle area, while in all sorts of ways the rest of the group was engaged, in talking, in rapturous comments upon the beauty of the night and the scene, or taking restricted walks about the parapets. Helen Lorimer had pressed forward, and, with the Mayor following, both with an unusual eagerness, quite oblivious of the others, who for their part were equally indifferent advanced to one of the tower doors, entered, and disappeared.

An instant later Helen Lorimer came to the top—a round enclosure with a low wall—and after her the Mayor. How was it that the woman put back her hand, as if to assist him, and how was it that it was so smoothly taken, and then—Oh you artful deities who watch such things and watching smile—how was it that the man kissed it and kept it? That kiss Helen felt, not alone upon her hand but very mightily upon her heart; yes the confession rose to her, as with the sudden spring of a concealed conviction, that, rushing in all the tides of her being, she had hitherto shunned and repudiated.

The mounting color told the abject fact, though in the softly illumined night, that was hid from the man at her side, her pulsating heart told the same story, though those rapid beats none could hear but herself, certainly not he who seemed indeed dazed with some dizzying emotion, for he left her side and gazed upward silent. Nor was it alone the color in her cheeks, or the tumult at her heart that thus miserably proclaimed her conquest; her limbs proved traitorous, and the brave, strong woman sank upon a narrow stone seating, that surrounded the wall, suffocated with her own intolerable defeat. Defeat—yes in one way as women feel it—but after the shock of surrender has passed, then the pent up tide inundates the whole being,

till strange love grown bold,

Think true love, acted, simple modesty.

The Mayor came back to her side and standing there, leaned nearer and whispered; “Have I offended you Helen?”

He had never spoken her name before, and the sound of it from his lips startled her, with even a keener realization of the sudden change in herself. And yet not sudden. The blossom that to-day blushes on the branches of the rose bush means an inevitable process of formation, a graduated range of growth from the tiniest bud to its challenging beauty, the mute unfolding of an invisible yet discreet nourishment that built up its silken petals, gave to it its subtle fragrance, and painted it with colors blended from the earth and sky. These steps in nature are not sudden, and yet when the bush, that yesterday was but a wealth of buds, to-day is seen laden with flowers, the change seems sudden—but it is SEEMS only; the process unmarked by the eye, has taken time and if, with favoring circumstances, with greater heat and light, it has advanced more quickly, not a single step in its adventurous course has been missed or skipped.

After his first declaration on the night of their conference in the museum, the Mayor had withdrawn into a modest silence, though his affections were clearly understood by Helen, and this diffidence itself charmed her. His excellent mind, the powers of thought that he showed, a peculiar earnestness, together with a reticence, delighted her. He took pains to understand her projects and even to criticise them. He did no longer conceal his own prejudices but clothed in his ingenuous speech they seemed less dreadful to her. He had a boyish way, blent with an extreme elegance of manner, a certain distinction of address, and this favored in him a personal brightness of appearance, hard to describe, but easily recognized. And then their quarrels—why they so often dissolved in laughter!

It was on her side, Helen’s, a preposterous antipathy to the scientific dryness and rigor of exact conclusions, on his, a humorous enmity of too much belief in the unknown, a quiet skepticism that showed itself unabashed before her intense appeals, and yet was always unobtrusive. At times they did discover how far apart lay their ultimate goals of tendency, and then Helen mourned that it was so, and for that very reason loved him better. Her steadfast heart, bathed in a deep catholic spirituality, wanted dearly to bring him to her own standpoint of view, and in her prayers his name was not omitted.

There were indeed moments when they rebelled against each other, when they felt the chasm of a deep difference lying between them, and yet why was it that even then they felt their arms stretched above it, towards each other, as if to bridge and close it? In both there was an inherent honesty that forbade compromise, and yet they were not reluctant to hide their feud. Often it came to this, that the Mayor said, he thought better now than he ever could have believed that he would think, of religion, because of her its precepts gained an unexpected beauty. And they would both grow serious or perhaps both smile, and in those smiles lurked the honey of an increasing love between them.

And as for the Mayor the rich tide of life into which he entered when with Helen Lorimer, her personal glory united with her elevation of mind which his nature adored, her goodness, and the fine touches of her delicate fancy almost swept him from his feet. He loved passionately, and in spite of that he kept his footing, strained to the last effort of exertion by his will, his dominant sense of fitness, and by the call of his duties. He felt somehow that he even maintained a supremacy in mind, and this helped him to abstain from violence and entreaty. He felt too, with intoxication that the end must come as he willed it, and as he felt that, the surges of desire rising about him almost overwhelmed him.

They had seen a great deal of each other. There was the trial to rehearse, upon which depended so much for the reputation of the Mayor, and the overthrow of the enemies of order and the enemies of justice. There were conferences with Mr. Moser the lawyer, who was to open the new trial. There was Helen’s museum projects, and her new plans of the Settlement House. There were broader, grander imaginings of the Mayor himself, for the great city, to whose service he bent all his powers, wedding it with the love that now controlled him to the last fibres of his being. These plans were also revealed to Miss Lorimer and discussed with her—how eloquently!—and her views sought!

And yet by the strangest of collusions there had been no gossip among the news mongers, no whisperings in the public prints, no express admissions in SOCIETY, nowhere any concurrent wonderings and guesses and intimations. And all because both the Mayor and Helen had, in their intercourse, admonished suspicion by their own discretions. Both were eminent, and withdrawn somewhat in that fame, were less carelessly discussed. Observation too passed beyond them to the great trial of which now the general mind was full.

There was unrest in the city over the socialistic propaganda on the east side, for though the office of The Beehive had been seized—Mr. Briggs had attended to that, and Tom Ratler had been his good agent in finding out the new location of the dangerous paper—no further move towards its suppression had been made, and it was realized that the turbulent organ yet maintained itself, and that an underground circulation of its inflammatory appeals was going on, “making surer” as Mr. Briggs said, “every day the eventual explosion and with rapine and conflagration.”

There was some national alarm besides over threatened war, and it seemed as if, for the last time, the convulsed earth stood on the brink of a terrific combat, its elements shaking into compact orbs of allies, whose circling collision would remake the civilized world.

But three persons in the huge city knew of this growing love. Helen’s mother, Julieta, knew it and the Mayor’s mother knew it, and Tom Ratler knew it. But not one of these could tell the others, Julieta knew it, less by any visible witness, than by the safe conclusion of her mother’s heart, and her woman’s instinct; the Mayor’s mother knew it because her son had told her; and Tom Ratler knew it from the moment he had seen the Mayor accompany Miss Lorimer down the City Hall’s steps, and caught the Mayor’s eye following her vanishing vehicle. With such as Tom, love is everywhere, in the daily air, in each turn of the head, and a man not in love is a man not alive. Tom was himself so dreadfully fettered, that his aching soul was only at peace when he could see others in the same predicament, while his mind, with a ferret’s ease, caught the faintest whiff, as it were, of love stirring in the air.

And now Helen and the Mayor knew it themselves. It filled their hearts, as a wine the chalice, but it could not stay there, for it was a rising torrent and dauntless, sped to their lips and spoke.

“Offense? How can there be offense, if I could have wished it?” it was Helen’s answer.

“Oh Helen, I have waited for this; I have prayed for it; it has come to me in dreams, and when I awoke the dream, and the dear thing I dreamt, seemed hopelessly far off and impossible. But no images and riddles—let me tell you my whole heart, and now give to you my life—all of it Helen; it is all yours, keep it, enrich it, make it priceless, for with you in it, it will grow into something splendid.

“How wonderfully you have stimulated and inspired me during this last month, I can hardly tell you. When I wrote, you were at my elbow like a good deity, dictating, when I thought, you were before my eyes lifting and sharpening my thoughts, giving them wings, and surely a better grace. You know that my life has needed just this, and Oh! so deeply!”

“Marston;” the words were softly uttered, but they were an invitation, and the Mayor knelt quickly, caught the head of the beautiful woman in front of him tenderly with his spread hands, and drew it to his own, and their lips sealed again their vows, yet unspoken, but now so acutely revealed and understood.

There was tumult enough in the Mayor’s breast, he felt delirious with this sudden draught of joy, this burst of blazoning sunlight amid the gray arduous fields of daily duty, and toil, and rivalry. The poetic nature was strong within him; it had been sagaciously apprehended by Mr. Briggs and that sage observer felt in it a danger to the state and an inscrutable foe to his own complete possession of his superior. In books, in stolen contemplations, the Mayor had secretly fed his cravings, though the hard aspects of life, and the unflinching tyranny of events had robbed poetry to him of much of its meanings. And now like a flower revived by light, which had been stricken into paleness and languor in gloom and neglect, this ardent poesy raised in him its dropped head, and the new life pouring through his veins brought to him an ecstacy that overpowered him, like a gigantic wave of misery.

“HOW WONDERFULLY YOU HAVE INSPIRED ME.”

Page 240.

How strange it was, that here in the very garden of fruition he felt the darkening blight of storm! was it his own timidity, or was it the inversion of his own happiness, inverted by its own excess:

dark with excessive light?

The man seemed bewildered, and withdrew from Helen Lorimer, as if shrinking from his own surrender or was it the doubt of his own senses? But Helen Lorimer followed him, she put her arms about his neck, she admitted her capitulation, and that same bright intelligence, conjoined in her with a cheerful heartiness of admiration, offered to him ingenuously her abounding love, for with a nature so copious in feelings, so generous in givings, and so spiritual, Love opened a landscape of delight:

where the river of bliss through midst of heaven

Rolls o’er Elysian flowers her amber stream;
and into that scene she walked, without misgivings and without fear. “Let me confess too,” she said, “my life needs you. A woman naturally shudders at the thought of loneliness in the world, though I think God leaves no one quite alone, who will seek Him. But then—ah then—it is something different; the meaning here with us is part of the Great Plan,—and I have grown proud of you,—and—and—Oh indeed I cannot live without you. I am yours—all yours.”

The Mayor’s arms caught her, their breaths and kisses mingled, and amid the merriment below them, with the pulsing music keeping time to their own heart beats, oblivious to the growing wonders of the skies above them, they became married in thought and heart, while the senses sent:

A soul dissolving odour, to invite

To some more lovely mystery.

The lights had become more numerous in the heavens, and the dancing fires of the wavering or shooting aeronauts added a stranger splendor to the air. And as yet no one came to interrupt them, no one indeed missed them, so rapturous had all become over their entertainment, while the singing violins and the sonorous cornets kept the dancers busy. The young men were assiduous, and the ladies retentive, the elders lost their reserve and attempted to revive their lost art of charm and repartee, the dowagers were lenient, and in the swirling gayety, though some anxious faces sought for Helen, none attempted the pursuit, and the rumor gained ground that the Mayor had departed. The Count Schinazi was in his glory. His witticisms were laughed at, the girls declared his dancing “heavenly,” and as he glided hither and thither, watched by his approving wife, the ripples of enjoyment or hilarious shouts attested his success as a social card. A sudden spit of fire above them, the swish of a rocket’s stick among the trees below them, startled the spectators into a little cry of alarm, and immediately the voice of the count brought them back into composure and mirth:

“I tinks dat vas a fire-fly—von big American fire-fly. It vas as you say, an up-to-date fire-fly, it vas a johnny-on-the-spot fire-fly—und it vas a fine ting, ven the bugs, as you say, know their bizziness und celebrat mit de peoples.”

An instant later a sharp crack emitted somewhere from the highest southernward tower accompanied by a sputtering line of sparks, surprised the gathering, and the huddled crowd watched with amazement a shooting winding sheet of flame surround the pinnacle, rise, and light a set piece of pyrotechnics at the top. It blazed, and the whole pediment was brilliant with reflections while the space between the towers became as bright as day. It banished the shades in which the Mayor and Helen Lorimer had remained, and they were easily seen standing together, and because higher up than the guests glaringly lit up by the illumination.

There was no concealment now and they could even see the amusement on the faces beneath, while to many there, and notably to Theodore Lorimer, the picture of the two lovers standing unchanged, though a little apart, was more interesting, more unexpected than the fizzing showering eruptions of the feu-de-joie. With the safe execution of this feature, the music was resumed and the dancers returned to their evolutions, but something had thrown the comfortable festivity into disarray.

There had been some fear about the fireworks, there was considerable agitation over the discovery of the interesting relation of Helen Lorimer and the Governor of New York. A good many “I told you soes” cautiously gained a hearing, and some masculine hearts felt grieved and injured. Theodore was a trifle vexed, Julieta smiled over the accuracy of her premonitions. The night had advanced, the balloons over the city had vanished into darkness, a storm seemed at hand, and one by one, and in groups, the guests departed. Among them the courteous bowing count, and his wife, and as the former pressed the hand of Julieta his perennial grin contracted into an amusing pout, and he said, casting a look of forlorn expostulation at Mr. Lorimer; “Vell, vell it mek me, as you say a leetle tired; et vas most onexpected und I tink it pit me—as you say—on de blink. I vas reddy, ven Madame Schinazi tink she—as you say—fly de coop—to mek Mees Lorimer veery happy meeself;” and so under a shower of reproving taps of the countess’ fan the egregiously satisfied pair took their leave.

Long before this Helen Lorimer had descended to the roof parlor, and with grace and confidence, though perhaps with a heightened color had moved among the guests, while the Mayor who had descended with her exhibited his own social skill, and though he found no Livingston or Gunther to dispute or applaud his public actions, he found little difficulty in securing attention, and, mastering his own impulse to fly from the place, by pure desperation achieved wonders, engaging old and young in animated conversation, testing his varied eloquence to the best advantage, with much literary discretion and aptness.

To Miss Retruve, celebrated for short sonnets and addicted to melancholy epitaphs upon her deceased pets, he pointed out the starry firmament, where there lingered a few sky-rockets quoting:

The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks,

They are all fire and every one doth shine,
from Julius Caesar. To Miss Ballinger, well known for her amateur theatricals, and a tripping desire to appear unalterably young, and whom he found seated upon the parapet slightly above his head, he quoted Romeo:

for thou art

As glorious to this night, being o’er my head

As is a winged messenger of Heaven

Unto the white up-turned wond’ring eyes

Of mortal, that fall back to gaze on him,

When he bestrides the lazy-pacing clouds,

And sails upon the bosom of the air.

To young Prentice, a youth who had won a Columbian medal for a dramatic composition, he remarked, as both watched the speeding aeronauts:

through the purple night

I see cars drawn by rainbow-winged steeds

Which trample the dim winds: in each there stands

A wild-eyed charioteer urging their flight.

Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there,

And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars:

Others with burning eyes, lean forth, and drink

With eager lips the wind of their own speed,

As if the thing they loved fled on before,

And now, even now, they clasped it. Their bright locks

Stream like a comet’s flashing hair: they all

Sweep onward.

And to Theodore Lorimer whom he found at the end of his touring interviews he said, firmly gazing into his eyes equally sincere and solemn:

“Mr. Lorimer, perhaps I owe you an apology, though, on my soul, I cannot perceive that I have done any wrong. Miss Lorimer has given me her troth, not I believe unadvisedly. I love her with my whole being. All honor I have attained to, all I can gain, became immensely enriched by her alliance. The denouement was sudden. I admit it. Am I to blame? Do you blame me?”

Mr. Theodore Lorimer was a business man; he was also a widower, and though no doubt he had had his love affairs, his demeanor to the tenderness of life was a little austere and unbendingly practical. He fully appreciated his niece’s talent and beauty; had a rather vainglorious pride in the Lorimer family, and he estimated with the keenest pleasure their exact wealth. His hopes with regard to Helen were certainly indefinite, but he felt the Mayor’s humble origin, as the phrase goes, and while he knew his ability, and his possibilities of progression and promotion, he somehow yet stuck to that invincible theory of caste, of class, the inbred feeling of separation. He was loyal to American ideas, he was patriotic, but he treasured the aristocratic formula—as indeed Helen herself did, but with a difference—and he believed in making that aristocratic ideal a very influential and beneficial factor in American public life, under just those incentives reviewed in the earlier pages of this story. He was not—to be really truthful—satisfied with the Mayor.

His family too was a Catholic one, and though creed offered no rifts among the rich associates of Carrara it did sensibly suggest an antagonism to a man like the Mayor, who was not of them, and who had, in his earlier life, actually written a book upon the needlessness of religion in the current meaning of the word. Then he suspected the Mayor of socialism, which he thought already tinctured unfavorably his own niece’s views, and socialism was to Theodore Lorimer a monstrous sin. The very word brought a frown to a face uniformly serene. He stood in a very close relation to his niece since her father’s death, and with her mother constituted a strict guardianship, which Helen respected, and, after the Catholic fashion, filially honored. Besides, and in addition, he experienced a vague resentment against the Mayor for the, to him, unnoticed insinuation of himself in the favor of his niece. There was a suggestion in it to Theodore Lorimer of something surreptitious and vulgar, it contravened the dignity of the method he should have preferred. Somehow it seemed to him that under the guise of conferences—conferences which he had regarded askance, as in his heart he had small sympathy with the end in view—about a public question, the Mayor had succeeded in injecting a love mission which was neither creditable nor desirable.

During the hour between the letting off of the feu-de-joie when the speaking isolation of the Mayor with Miss Lorimer was discovered, and the departure of the guests, and the Mayor’s personal appeal, Theodore had been working himself into a state of mind. This became more bitter as he reviewed the chances—the matrimonial chances—his niece could hope for. That extravagant and stupid idolatry, which rich American girls suffered from, for foreign placards and names, had greatly disappeared, at the beginning of the twentieth-first century, although the ludicrous hunt on the part of impecunious and wasted and morally unfit scions of noble houses for American money still persisted. But the gloss dazzled, and the lure of name yet exerted its malign and fallacious attractions. The malady had taken a more aesthetic and reputable form. The offers from Europe were more carefully scrutinized, and they were themselves less mercenary though seldom could the taint of a money thirst be utterly excluded.

The Lorimers had been much in Europe, and Helen’s charm had gathered about her many shining lights, handsome and striking figures in its public and social circles, and none among these had to the observant eyes of Julieta and Theodore seemed more acceptable than the young Count of Monte Ferrato who had also shown his immediate interest in Helen. Some such marriage would have frankly pleased Mr. Lorimer, and while the matter to Julieta properly remained, as it should in a woman’s thought, in the realm of ideation and emotion, she too regarded the young foreign notable with partiality. As for domestic unions, as Theodore said to Julieta, Helen “had the world to choose from.”

The insoluble element was Helen herself; she neither leaned with prestige or property, as might have easily been discerned. Her Americanism was of the just type and she lived in ideals political and religious, and the former sprang from the latter. Certainly she had responded with appreciation perhaps to the admiration she excited, but none of her adorers had touched these springs of feeling which open a woman’s heart and win her. This was the bothersome part of it to Theodore Lorimer, and while Julieta was amused, noticing her brother-in-law’s vexation, she felt too the responsible task of guiding Helen in her final choice, if she made it, and yet was bewildered by the unusual nature of her daughter, which rather defied coercion. She had endeavored in talking with Helen to get some inkling of her feelings, but she only disconsolately admitted that it was impossible, as Helen felt as yet no overpowering choice. With that she dropped it, believing that Helen would take care of herself in the great concern of her marriage, and having no inconsiderable admixture of romantic sympathy in her own nature was content to leave things to the God of Love, who indeed, while not infallible, does adjust things of this sort fairly well.

So when the Mayor addressed Theodore Lorimer and corroborated the shrewd suspicions which Lorimer had felt when he saw his niece and the Mayor together on the tower, he simply said:

“I would like to talk this matter over with you Mr. Mayor. It is a subject upon which I feel strongly and perhaps my views may not fully coincide with yours. Will you please follow me to a room down stairs where we may discuss it;” and whispering a word to his sister-in-law left the roof followed by the Mayor, whose flushed face and bowed head afforded some indication of his humiliation and disappointment.

While the two men, not moving together, but behind each other, thus made their way through the scattered and departing friends, Helen had resumed her neglected duties. She had been as active as the Mayor, passing from person to person with greetings and caressing banter. To Miss Retruve, whom she found in a giggling condition of pleased vanity over the Mayor’s attention, she admitted that his Excellency was “an admirable Crichton, really too dangerous for unprotected hearts,” which caused that lady to contract her elongated physiognomy into a map of smiles, and to remark, pointing her mittened finger at Helen, “that men were deceivers ever,” which seemed to receive Miss Lorimer’s assent, for she seized the probationary forefinger and shook it desperately. To Miss Ballinger whose intense face was fixed as it were, upon the upturned features of an elderly aspiring suitor, and to whom she was recommending the Mayor’s gallantry for his emulation, she said, while her voice shook with amusement;

winter sunshine!

Beware of opening out thy bosom to it.

Lest thou myself, and all thy flock should catch

An after ague—fit to trembling.

And to the dazzled Prentice who met her with adjurations as to “the charming evening he had enjoyed, and the wonderfulness of their Mayor, who was quite a literary paragon,” she said, passing abruptly her handkerchief over her eyes, almost as if tired:

“Why yes—he is excellent in many ways, and I seem to be treading his tracks among you all, reversing the old fable of The Hares and Hounds.”

She left the budding dramatist, nursing his moustache, just as his sapient fancy was about to remark—with bold originality—something about the “observed of all observers,” and flew again further in the thinning throng.

Mr. Lorimer led the Mayor to a room in the villa used by him as a private office whose one window looked out upon the Kingsbridge road. There was not much furniture in it, a large table littered with papers, with a glass of roses decorating the centre, and filling the air with fragrance, which to the Mayor seemed an imprisoned effluence warning him. A painting covered the wall above the mantelpiece, and this was the only important object in the place. It was a painting of Robert Lorimer, Julieta, and the young Helen between them. The grouping was conventional, but the art was unmistakable and the drawing perfect. It was small wonder, thought the Mayor as his eyes eagerly perused the big picture, that Helen was beautiful; the ordinary course of heredity would have been strangely perverted if from such parents beauty had not sprung.

It had been painted at the time (about the middle last of the twentieth century) when there had been a temporary, but most improving, return to the fashions of the beginning of the nineteenth, when high collars with spreading tips and stocks, erect coat collars, constricted waists, and voluminous scarfs, conferred an ancient dignity to the imperial dudes. And with it, at least in this picture, accorded the rich and flowing gown of the lady, like the dress of Juliet in the play. The girl nestled upon the lap of her mother with head pressed close to her mother’s knee, and with her face just perceptibly turned upward. She was dressed in a light blue tunic-like gown, and with a girl’s cap of a deeper blue in her dropped hand. She perhaps had reached the age of thirteen, and her well moulded features already showed a budding charm.

The eyes of the Mayor rested there a short instant only; a strange tumult was rising in his breast; he knew that the man before him would assail his pride, and that if a break came it would spell the ruin of his happiness. Of that there could be no doubt, for he also knew full well the sinewy resistance of his own nature, and how quickly the fires of his heart kindled into resentment, when insult, or rebuke, or any form of immoderate opposition stumbled in his path. Not that he was unreasonable, but that he also was proud, with the pride that was first born in him, and with some natural increase from his life’s material success. Nor could he be altogether unconscious that Nature had given him great gifts, that he had used them well, and that office held its just respects.

Mr. Lorimer drew forward a chair and motioning to his visitor, sat down himself upon the opposite side of the table which thus was between them. The Mayor took the proffered chair slowly, and was seated somewhat after his host. There was an awkward silence, and then Mr. Lorimer who appeared flushed and a little disconcerted, spoke:

“Your Honor, I think that I appreciate the compliment of your notice of my niece, but I will bluntly say that I think that it is a matter that should have been more deliberately planned. I knew nothing about it until this moment and I believe that my sister, Miss Lorimer’s Mother has not received any announcement of your intentions—or has she?”

The Mayor answered readily and not without some sense of amusement:

“Why, no Sir—there has been none. In the nature of the case there could hardly be any. I did indeed fall in love—as the phrase goes—with your niece almost from the first moment I saw her, and I confessed that feeling on the first visit I paid to this mansion—but Sir, it has never passed my lips since, until this evening, when the accidents which no one can surely foresee or prevent—even if it were desirable to do so—accidents of voice, word, action—any thing—told me that Miss Lorimer yielded to a similar feeling;” the Mayor paused, and leaning forward continued: “Please do not mistake this for a stupid, a ridiculous vanity; no one realized better than I do my unworthiness of such a love, but I am not ashamed to claim it, not afraid to assume all the responsibilities it means.”

“I fear Mr. Mayor,” returned Theodore Lorimer, who had not failed to notice the flitting smile crossing the Mayor’s pale face, “that this is not a subject for innuendoes, and certainly not for pleasantries.”

The Mayor felt his blood surging a little, and the evident intention of his questioner became to his mind more clearly inquisitorial. He looked up at the painting, and realizing the narrow formalism of the man before him, and the wretched chances of loss now threatening his joy, he mastered his impatience, and spoke more carefully, not indeed without the accent of entreaty in his voice:

“I beg you, Sir, not to misunderstand or wrong me. No one could feel more deeply than I do that innuendoes and pleasantries are out of place in such a matter, and if you could see into my own heart, you too would keenly feel how solemn and serious it all is to me. Before you too hastily blame me will you not consult your niece, and learn from her my exoneration, if you harbor any suspicion of my candor?”

Mr. Lorimer had hardly up to this moment kept his gaze fixed upon the Mayor. He seemed to be talking to his hands, crossed on his lap, though he did see by sidelong glances the Mayor’s expression, and it had suddenly dawned upon him that the way to a rupture—and a rupture was what he wanted—was through the Mayor’s pride, and he was pitiless enough to try it.

“What do you mean, Sir, by accidents of voice, word, action; that appears to me very much like innuendo, and if I was not mistaken the smile on your face indicated your amusement.” As he said this he raised his eyes and turned them unflinchingly on the Mayor.

The Mayor looked at Mr. Lorimer, and through his mind ran the involuntary thought whether this man, who had become so closely related to his happiness, had any humour, or experience, or poetry in him. His scrutiny and his hesitation appeared to vex the banker, and again he spoke with an acerbity that whipped the blood into the cheeks of the Mayor, and brought him to his feet.

“My niece is romantic, idealistic, not, to my thinking, altogether wise, in her plans or ambitions, and she readily can be influenced by any suavity of word or ingenuity of speech.”

He could not go farther; the Mayor raised his hand, and with authority interrupted him; “You wrong her, you wrong me, you wrong yourself, you impute, at least by implication, Sir, that I have used unmanly methods to win the good will of your niece. How unfair this is until you know, until you have heard my story, and such tenders of her confidence as Miss Lorimer might give you or, I think, more naturally, her mother! There has been no trick of speech, no flattery of voice, which is what I suppose you mean, but, what I fear is not intelligible to you, a slow growth of affection between us, nurtured no doubt by some identity of feeling, and common interests, as indeed what love must not be?

“I must believe that you fail to feel that all love-making,” the Mayor smiled perhaps bitterly, “is not the same, and that a formal measure of the ways of love-making would make it all absurd. Pardon me, Sir, but I believe this all should be left to Miss Lorimer.”

Mr. Lorimer resented the interruption, which began this speech, he felt himself overruled, and he hazarded the inference that the Mayor intended to have his own way, without much respect for him. He also started to his feet. His voice was harsh and trembling, and a vein in his neck, which was the danger signal of his excitement, had seriously swollen;

“Mr. Mayor,” he said, “you are conscious that Miss Lorimer’s father was my brother, and that he charged me at his death to watch over all the interests of his daughter, my niece. I intend to do so, and I have no reason to believe that Helen will care to set up her wishes against mine. Miss Lorimer, as you too fully understand, could not be a beggar on the matrimonial world;” the Mayor raised again his hand, in protest, but it was not to enforce his desire to speak, but in repugnance to the commercial words which had been used, and which hurt him with their coarse meanings; Mr. Lorimer disregarded the sign, wrongly thinking that the Mayor ordered him to desist; he lost control of himself, and continued more violently, rashly, heedlessly, cruelly:

“Please permit me to proceed; I say that Miss Lorimer has no misgivings or need have none as to her matrimonial prospects, and I consider it to be a duty I owe at least to her family, to tell you that her hand has already been sought by representatives of distinguished families abroad and in this country. Miss Lorimer’s position is one which I think demands some consideration, and that proposals for her hand should follow a less common, a less precipitate course. You forget Sir that in such a case some etiquette is imperative. Neither Mrs. Lorimer nor myself have been acquainted with your intentions, and perhaps neither of us would altogether approve of them. Of course—”

The Mayor’s voice broke in, he would brook no more, he was not there to be rapped like a school boy, and that native repudiation of ceremonial stupidity and artificial systems, the fires of his strong radicalism, which often made him blind to the importance of conventions, awoke in him, and put him in a rage. His voice, always persuasive, sounded with an unusual vehemence:

“There appears to me no longer any cause for the continuance of this conversation, as I find no excuse either in manners or reasons for your observations. I love your niece; any and all things that a man may or can do for a great love I am prepared to do, but Sir I am not prepared to endure the intimations of a callous and a superfluous Pride. Direct your servant to escort me to your entrance. I am not likely to disturb you again. You may explain your position to Miss Lorimer and—for my—own part—” the words fell slowly and with a deeper hushed voice, “I will not invade her liberty, or stand in the way of her social promotion.”

The sarcasm was not unfelt by Theodore Lorimer, and for an instant he was irresolute. The next he recovered his calmness, and easy politeness, and moved to the door of the room. He opened it, and the Mayor passed through. Mr. Lorimer followed him, and the two men without a word, threaded the stairways and corridors, from which now the guests had departed, made their way to the entrance, and with a still unbroken mask of toleration bowed to each other and separated. The Mayor passed down the broad terraces of steps, and took his seat in the automobile guided by Tom Ratler, and sped away. He never turned his head to the stately palace from which he felt himself driven, leaving behind him an incalculable happiness; but at length he leaned forward on the back before him, and buried his head in his hands, and when he reached his home he hurried to his chamber and sank heavily on the bed. Something in him yielded and he had fainted.

The next morning Miss Lorimer received—handed into her at her bed-room door—a letter which she quickly tore open and read; she had begun to read standing near her mirror, and she had not read it far, when she sank upon a couch, and even while she continued to read, the color faded from her cheeks, and then returned with a mantling power that made her look more beautiful. The words she read were these:

Dear Miss Lorimer:

I fear that I have made a serious mistake. I have mistaken my own feelings. Forget everything, and let us be as strangers. Our mutual interest in the trial will be now fully cared for by counsel, and our further interviews become unnecessary.

Yours faithfully,

——Mayor of New York.

Miss Lorimer crushed the little paper in her clenched hands: her eyes strayed forlornly about the large bedchamber filled with artistic treasures and touched everywhere with feminine taste, and then she arose. An embroidered night tunic covered her, and her unconfined hair poured its floods over her shoulders, and it rose and fell upon her breast with sudden quickness. Again she unfolded the disfigured note, and reread it, and again she sat upon the couch, and her hands dropped between her knees that pressed themselves together over them, and the disconsolate stunned look came again, and again the color came and went. Curiously her face turned to an etching hanging on the wall near her, which showed the Duke Orsino of Twelfth Night, lying on a couch, listening to a trio of musicians playing from a balcony above him, and her lips seemed to repeat the inscription, under it:

O spirit of love: how quick and fresh art thou,

That notwithstanding thy capacity

Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,

Of what validity and pitch soe’er

But falls into abatement and low price,

Even in a minute! so full of shapes is fancy,

That it alone is high fantastical

A hollow smile passed over her face, and the bewildered glance at the torn sheet told of the conflicting thoughts racing in her brain. And then with a sigh that made her for a moment steady herself at the side of the cheval glass, where her form and deshabille made a picture which would have charmed the brush of a Bouguereau, she resumed her toilet, and that finished, she went to the breakfast table. She found her mother and uncle awaiting her. As she greeted them she suddenly recalled that the Mayor had not taken leave of her the night before; she had seen him leave the roof and had for the instant attributed it to some necessary despatch of business or the confusion into which they had both fallen over their mutual confessions. But she made no inquiry.

Mr. Lorimer also had received a letter from the Mayor. It was the soul of brevity; it ran:

Dear Sir,

Miss Lorimer understands my disinclination to continue my suit. There need be no reference to our late interview.

Your etc. etc.

——Mayor of New York.

Mr. Lorimer had retired after his talk with the Mayor in a very ruffled frame of mind, and, as it made him nervous and sleepless, he charged his disorder and discomfort upon that unfortunate official. The waking hours of the night only fortified in him a resolve to prevent the union of his niece and the Mayor, and he determined to hasten—were he successful in diverting his niece from this unwelcome infatuation—Helen’s nuptials with some one to his mind more suitable, and more agreeable to himself. The gentleman however understood the strength of will in his niece, though with that was conjoined, as he also knew, a tenderness of love and obedience, that he had often put to the test.

But he felt uneasy over any discussion of the subject with Helen, and he too keenly realized that his own discretion in the matter needed her mother’s assistance, and this he prepared himself to obtain. Her mother seldom, he knew, disturbed Helen’s “visionary schemes,” but in some ways her influence upon her daughter was decisive, and if—working upon these ideas of caste benefit, and the public protection of an aristocratic superiority, which she preached—her mother could make her see the importance of her reserving the union of her family within a class restriction, his point might be gained.

The Mayor was an excellent man (even then Mr. Lorimer made reservations)—Yes—an able man—Yes—a man with a future—Yes—but he was a self-made man, a man of the people, and he was bourgeoise, and that to the pinched apprehension of Mr. Theodore Lorimer was an incredible predicament. As Mr. Lorimer had known very little about any sort of Love, that ingredient in the problem gave him no anxiety, though as a cultivated man he recognized certain poetic obstinacies connected with a lover’s prepossessions.

When he opened the Mayor’s letter he could not repress a motion of gratitude towards the writer; “Amazingly sensible,” he repeated; “I will assure him of our political support,” and with a renewed cheerfulness in his admiration of his own astuteness, the stilted gentleman stepped into the dining-room, and after saluting his sister-in-law watched for Helen’s appearance with undisguised impatience. And, when she came, she seemed the same divine and happy being he had always known; perhaps he noticed that she ate but little, and seemed preoccupied, but that was mere physical weariness. Surely this calm and serene being suffered from no insurmountable disappointment. He had noticed that a letter directed to his niece, had come in the morning’s mail, and doubtless that was the communication alluded to by the Mayor, and the matter was now settled, and after a little unavoidable regret—he concurred in the popular superstition that there might be a little—everything would be as before, and lest more dangers should arise, he would actively prosecute his matrimonial intrigues.

As the three arose from the table—Mrs. Lorimer thought it had been an unusually quiet breakfast, and detected the unaccustomed reticence of her daughter—a servant entered, and handed Mr. Lorimer a letter which he took with surprise observing, “Something from the Cardinal.” The word caught the instant attention of Miss Lorimer and her mother, and the two women paused as they rose from the table expecting the announcements of its contents. It came with a delightful alacrity from Mr. Lorimer’s lips:

“Cardinal Fenton sends me a good word for a young friend of his, whom he wishes us to know. His name is Rudolph Amato. It seems he had hoped to make him a priest, but the young protegée changed his mind. He comes of a good Italian stock, originally, has great wealth, and the Cardinal has expended much attention upon his education. He solicits our consideration for the young man.” Stopping to read further, Mr. Lorimer looked at his niece, and said, “The Cardinal says you know the gentleman, Helen, that you met him at his residence, and that Mr. Amato’s enthusiasm for the Church’s prosperity is as great as yours, and that you should both make a splendid combination for the sublime project—now resting in the minds of progressive Catholics—of IMPORTING—those are his very words—the Pope.”

To the questioning glance of both her mother and uncle, and with a little renewed animation Helen Lorimer said:

“Yes. I met Mr. Amato at the Cardinal’s—a very handsome young man; he has recently come from Europe. He was there in the interests of the IMPORTATION question, and—Ah—” she ended, and clasping her hands over her face she sank into a chair and broke into stifling sobs.

Mr. Lorimer left the room—this nervous agitation, he said to himself, will end it,—while Julieta with tearful sympathy embraced her child, and kneeled at her side pressing her own loving warm cheeks against the face of the stricken woman, and yet, with a wise sympathy, asking no questions.

CHAPTER XI

AMATO’S COURTSHIP

The summer was passing along and the hot days began their painful visitations to the self-indulgent residents of Carrara. They fled from the heat with varying speed, and, strangely, few fled to Europe. The fashion of emptying New York, for the benefit of Europe, had changed into a domiciliary fever for summer homes in the remote and enticing counties of New England. The young, to see the world, as the saying is, made their pilgrimage abroad, but even with them the delights of the noble homes perched upon the Yankee hills, or embosomed in their green vales, proved effectively more attractive, and kept them in America. Many of the descendants of those who in previous centuries had exiled themselves to European cities, had deserted their foreign houses, and encamped again upon the domestic soil, bringing with them accumulations of art and a somewhat unamericanized habit of thought, expression and manners.

Living in the United States had indeed, in the year of grace, 2000, reached among the rich much of that exquisite comfort, which had distinguished it in Europe, enhanced by the many luxurious pleasures, and expensive delicacies created by American ingenuity, wealth, and fastidiousness.

The Lorimers were almost the last to leave the city. They had a fine estate on the hills overlooking the sweet valley of Stowe, at the foot of Mount Mansfield in Vermont, a place occupied a hundred years before by the Tabers of New York. The wandering and comfortable house hung on the edge of Cobb’s Hill, a broad large spacious villa on the brow, looking directly against Mansfield, and over the wonderfully varied and beautiful intervale of farms and woodland, hardly in any way changed from its present aspect. The atmospheric charm was scarcely less delightful than the rich abundant picture of physical features, with the Hogback ranges to the east, and the sculptured colossus of Mansfield in front, to the west.

Helen had expected some further word from the Mayor, and his utter silence wounded, and abused her. She was left with no explanation of his sudden change of will, no word of that reversal which she, in her heart, believed was accompanied in him with pain and suffering. It seemed to her so strange and indefinable, that she was willing to attribute it to some psychological eccentricity, to a kind of mental diversion, that she perhaps could not begin to understand, but which she, by guessing a little wildly, saw, with certain nervous and imaginative temperaments—and she knew the Mayor belonged to these—might be an extravagant accompaniment (and outside of their control) of their emotional make-up.

And yet——those words of love which sounded so sweet to her, which seemed so sincere and fetched from an inward need, past doubt or misgivings, how was it possible that they could be gainsaid? To so quick an intelligence as Helen Lorimer’s the thought had not failed to come, that her uncle might have interfered; that he might have wounded her lover by some repulse,—and yet, though she saw this possibility, by an interior conflicting pride, and desert too, she would not mention it to Theodore Lorimer. Nor did that plotting guardian say anything to her. He noticed the absence of the Mayor, the abstraction and nervous reticence of his niece, and he safely concluded that the best way out of this dilemma was for him, until directly appealed to, to let things smooth their way as they would, and the end would justify the means. For it was now clear to him that the young protegée of the Cardinal more nearly met his wishes and expectations for his niece, and he felt also, in his floundering and stubborn way that Amato appeared at exactly the right moment to administer consolation.

He felt that there was a necessity for that, and, without much intuition in the matter—rejecting indeed any appeals to think about it,—Amato’s various gifts, his cultured sympathy, his adroit and incessant courtesies, his even gravity, not unmixed also with mirth, and above all his splendid physical perfection, would, he felt, increasingly banish the Mayor from Helen’s mind, all the more as that obliging individual kept out of sight.

And though his dull perceptions cruelly deceived him at many points, yet as nature is so made in us all, there was a practical and real efficacy in the companionship of the young man for Miss Lorimer; and, for the aspirations of the young man himself, her inward craving for help—which at such crises grows very strong with vivacious and intellectual natures——were favorable. And so it came about that while the Mayor remained hid and silent, suffering his great hurt and sickened in heart, the judicious spirits ruling over human affairs advanced Amato’s suit.

And in the Mayor’s behalf there had been adjustments. A curious succession of turbulence had startled the state. There had been strikes and mass meetings of denunciation, on the part of tax-payers, and the risings of a new party and an unexpected recrudescence of Socialism involving a great number of discontented or unemployed people, while beneath this again was the slowly seething leaven of the anarchistic revolt, nurtured and spread by The Beehive.

The Mayor’s precocious mind grappled with these problems, his spirits were brightened by just such conflicts, and he felt the renovating ardor of combat. He saw—as Mr. Briggs already had seen, but with a different spirit—the insurmountable tendencies of the times approaching a broad cleavage in society between the well-to-do, the generally contented, and a mass of workers, to whom indeed the world did not deny the usual concomitants of satisfied existence, but who, brought in sight of an overwhelming luxury and undreamed of self-indulgence, experienced the pangs of envy, had begun to question the reasonableness of the present social status. And joined with these were a large body of men, holding the franchise, who were inoperative and unproductive, largely weak and sensual, whose natures craved immense satisfactions, to whom wealth had but one purpose, just such satisfaction and who would welcome any change that might bring within their uses the boundless aptitudes of money.

The aristocratic leaders saw the same thing, and some among them, as Helen Lorimer, attempted to stem its progress by assimilating the vast army of workmen, artisans, small shop keepers, merchants, peddlers and street sellers into a group of admiring and enlightened dependents upon the richer classes. It was meant that they should realize the practical importance of the rich element in society and becoming attached to it by ties of gratitude surround it with a measurable force of protection, in case of its political attack.

With Miss Lorimer this movement was divested of selfish motives entirely, and she worked under the inspiration of a true idealistic altruism, conjoined with certain theoretical conceptions of a graded and classified social state. Other aristocratic leaders actively entered the service of the state, and proposed to use to its uttermost the advantages of the franchise, assuming the adherence of the conservative middle classes. This latter constituted the third class—a class to which the Mayor belonged or at least from which he had sprung—and which, by its instincts and the promptings of its cool common sense and unimaginative acceptance of the substantial limitations of life resented interference with its satisfied pursuit of money, and its pleasant enjoyment of customary and legitimate pleasures.

The Mayor had not lost his poise of judgment on account of his disappointment, and the gnawing sense of humiliation, at the hands of Mr. Lorimer, but, while he estimated the real value of a rich society justly, and felt that the aesthetic and cultured aspects of the city won an immense support from the rich classes, conscious of their educational relations to the rest of society—as indeed the aristocratic nuclei of the twenty-first century were themselves—yet he relied upon the stubborn fixity of the bourgeoise for the stability of the state. To this latter element he addressed his attentions, and he employed all the strategy and skill of a practised politician, as well as an astute lawyer, and an eloquent advocate, to strengthen his administration among them. He very narrowly watched the proceedings of the legislature, and analyzed pitilessly all their measures, exposing those which had the socialistic taint, and often went to the extreme precaution of justifying his action in public addresses. This was unusual but it proved immensely popular.

In the meanwhile all eyes were fixed upon the coming trial—set for the beginning of November—of the incendiaries. It was generally understood that there had been new evidence discovered, that would liberate the accused and convicted men; intimations prevailed that the Mayor himself had assisted in procuring this evidence, and that he had been convinced of its existence by the famous philanthropist, humanitarian, and scholar, Miss Helen Lorimer, herself a representative aristocrat. Of course, this action displeased many of the richer class, especially those who were themselves implicated in the treacherous plot to destroy Longtinsky, by creating for him an opportunity for mischief.

The conservatives among the middle class were about equally divided as to its merits, and sagacity, but the socialists were immensely pleased, and the more candid did not conceal their approval of the Mayor. For the instant the Mayor attracted the attention of the whole city in a very supreme way, and to a heart and mind responding eagerly to the incentives of ambition, this popularity and intellectual domination gave him satisfaction. For the moment, and happily, these distractions served the purpose of repressing the poetic, emotional, and dreaming proclivities of the Mayor, though again too often he felt their intolerable cravings, and his smarting heart kept him sleepless and despairing.

The repulse of the Mayor by Mr. Lorimer had defeated another scheme, the murderous intrigue of Longtinsky and Poniatowsky. Longtinsky had calculated that Miss Lorimer at the closing in of the foundations of the new Settlement House, the plans of which had been published, enclosing the novel idea of the Museum, would attempt some public ceremony, and distinguish the occasion with an address. It was then that he hoped to precipitate a riot, and in the melee actually attempt her life, while at the same time a concerted rising might add to the confusion, and—it was his deliberate conviction—lead to an overthrow of the government.

This Clodian madness had been temporarily delayed by the indisposition of Helen Lorimer herself, who ordered the continuance of the building, but desisted from the especial corner-stone services which had been at first contemplated. She longed to escape the city, and the recurrent pictures of the gentle valley of Stowe, the morning and evening face of Mansfield with its strong lineaments like a sermon in philosophy and—unlike most sermons—made poetic by cloud and sunshine, mist, rain and starlight, these, rising in her memory, filled her with an insatiable longing; everything was hastened, and at the beginning of August the Lorimers had set out for Stowe.

Young Amato had been well received at the Lorimers. It could not have been otherwise; his introduction was influential, his own talent prepossessing, his manner charming, and the essential earnestness and a kind of dignified naïveté in the man, delightful. Helen acknowledged his admirable address, and his style of liberal Catholicism pleased her. A Catholic’s religion is an actual part of his or her life; it is not placed outside of the daily transactions of business or pleasure; in the devout it holds a lucid sway over the motions of the heart and mind, and its admonitions neither discourage happiness nor check speculation. Amato and Helen discussed together very often the project of the Pope’s coming to America, and for the instant this plan, looming larger and larger to her mind, suggesting—it may be foolishly and vainly—immense moral consequences, became a veritable comfort. She wrought it in her plans of social betterment, into her designs for the religious awakening of the state, into her dream of an established formulary for society, and with true Catholic ambition—often incontinent and fatalistic—a reorganized Catholic realm in the New World, free and triumphant, bringing to earth new treasures of devotion and character, swam temptingly before her mind.

And with all these blissful imaginings Amato was associated. Nor was the association insincere. The same enthusiasm kindled in Amato’s heart, and, with him, it mingled with his love. And both desires added to one another their especial quality, which improved each. Amato’s love became idealized, his religion gathered from the earth the intensity and colorings of passion.

It was the last evening before the Lorimers, Helen and her mother—Theodore Lorimer had already left the city—went away, that Helen and Amato sat upon the tower’s roof, where the Mayor scarcely three weeks past, had received her surrender. Helen Lorimer was pale and silent. She remembered the very accents, and the voice and words returned, as if syllabled by haunting spirits. How dismal this desertion seemed. She stood up and moved about the little circle along the edge of the parapet, and looked over upon the lights beneath. The fire-flies sprang hither and thither in the trees and gloom, shouts came up from the Kingsbridge road, and out over the Hudson, somewhere beyond the dark wall of the Palisades, a shot was heard. She swayed perceptibly, leaning on the stone railing and Amato caught her tenderly.

In an instant the weakness passed, and she thanked him. His love sprang to his lips. In the half darkness, for the young moon, trembling in a vaporous sky, afforded only a transient light, she appeared to him more beautiful than ever, and his own burning heart beat impetuously. It seemed an enormity of carelessness not now to say one little word! Hitherto he had been utterly impassive, in speech at least, and his restraint had done him service in the estimation of the proud girl. She had found him helpful, necessary, and companionable. And he wondered—was this faintness in Helen Lorimer, some feminine tell-tale yielding? He drew back almost giddy with the sharp joy of the intoxicating thought. Ah! he knew so little about women; that clouded past, its isolation, amid books and students with a perverted intention! It thrilled him with wonder that he had escaped it; he knew now, past peradventure, that if he had surrendered to the Cardinal’s design, and this woman had crossed his path, the war within him would have slain him. Did she wish him to speak?

“Are you ill Miss Lorimer? Perhaps a little wine—?”

“Oh no,” she answered, “it is the heat of the day. It is high time we were away!”

“Where is Stowe?” he queried, as they sat down upon the stone bench, while over their heads whisking strips of light, from some searchlight in the harbor, flitted right and left, and made her more visible to him. Her hands were clasped to her throat and tears were in her eyes.

“Oh I beg you Miss Lorimer, tell me if I can help you. To see you unhappy hurts me so deeply,” he whispered.

“Ah Stowe,” she looked away, and her hands fell, and she turned to him with a smile that made her tears more touching to the young student; “Stowe is the loveliest spot! How much you will enjoy it; at least I hope so for your own good reputation as an admirer of beauty. From our porch a wide bowl of farmland and fields sweeps to the foot of the western mountain—a singular rocky summit that seems a reclined head staring immovably into the sky,—and when the sunset colors flame and burn above it and the bowl of fields and farmhouses, begins to grow purple and russet, in the fading day, and behind in the east, almost as if above our house a reflected sunset repeats the west with tenderer and chaster tints—then it is glorious. Not that exactly either—then the place makes you strong and happy,” and the poor woman bowed her head upon the stone and wept.

The worried embarrassed youth knelt at her side; he could have seized her, held her face to his own with gentle and unyielding hands, and kissed away the drops of her misery, that made his heart ache, and yet brought to him—so his thought ran—assurance of her fondness for him. The handsome man had no foolish vanity, no spoiled self-esteem, and yet he was not unconscious of some merit in a woman’s eye, not altogether unwise as to his power to entertain and help. His visits to the mansion had been encouraged, he had talked with Miss Lorimer upon so many things, which mutually interested them, had become so familiar, even in the short three weeks, or slightly more, of their acquaintance, with some of her fondest hopes, that he felt himself somehow established as her admirer, and he had met no one else—as he recalled—that might dispute that title.

Even as he knelt there, not touching her, indeed with no thought of such a profanation, how odd it was that there suddenly ran in his head Malvolio’s stupid conceit, and the words of the confessed fool:

“Why every thing adheres together, that no drachm of a scruple, no scruple of a scruple, no obstacle, no incredulous or unsafe circumstance—What can be said? Nothing that can be can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.”

Amato sprang to his feet. He felt disgraced with this fulsome self flattery; could it be possible that he followed this new master Love with so ignoble a confidence?

“Pardon me Miss Lorimer,” he said, “if you will let me bring you something; perhaps—”

“No thank you—a little nerves, that’s all. You do not know American women well Mr. Amato. Our cruel climate makes us less stalwart and invariable than your European ladies.”

“It amuses me Miss Lorimer;” Amato cheerfully replied, “that you assume I know anything about European ladies, and the disadvantageous comparison you make, seems to me unfair. Are not ladies much the same everywhere?—I mean as regards sensibility?”

“How very unflattering!” Miss Lorimer was smiling again, and she rose too; “You should not make the mistake to regard us as all cast in the same mould. Would you care to be confounded with all your fellow men by an indistinguishable sameness?”

“Don’t be so hard with me. The question was whether American ladies are more susceptible—more sensitive, I mean—than European ladies. I have rather been led to think that while American women are more sympathetic, they are quite as self-possessed.”

“Well we won’t quarrel now about ladies and that life-long difficulty of telling just how much we are superior to our European sisters. You know we intend to keep you at Stowe, and I shall put to the test your strength and patience. I must be out and walk; and your assistance will be much insisted on.

“I shall be surprised if you are not disappointed with our small mountain. Don’t look for a Matterhorn and glaciers. Our pretty country side is hardly dramatic, and the people are not costumed guides, nor are there any titled tourists.”

“Why Miss Lorimer,” answered Amato laughing heartily himself, “one would think that you take me for a foreigner. Have I not been all my life in this country? Is it not mine? Please remember that I was born here. Europe is more strange and unknown to me than it is to you.”

“Well there is the continental air about you somehow. After all it is the blood rather than the atmosphere that makes race. When we say blood what do you mean really?”

“Everything that goes to the making of this body and with it the mind. It cannot be the red corpuscles alone. Blood means temperament and temperament means after all just so much nerve and muscle and flesh and bone, and because all flesh and bone is the same the differences come in the putting of it all together, as you make different patterns with the same thread.”

“Perhaps,” said Miss Lorimer, “it’s something like a difference in air. The chemist tells us the air all over the globe, top and bottom airs, yields to his analysis the same proportion of oxygen and nitrogen, and yet how to our finer sense they vary, and how one air kills, and another revives us,

like the sweet south

That breathes upon a bank of violets

Stealing and giving odour.”

“Heredity stamps differences in us, and occupation or custom strengthens them,” said Amato.

“Science, if this is science,” answered Helen, “explains very little. You know Amato,” the young man started with this gentle familiarity, “I scorn science. In a bad sense it is the great deodorizer; it expels the perfume of every thing. In its grand role of making things plain, it makes them common. It labels, and classifies, and sticking names on all creation converts this mysterious and lovely world into a huge encyclopædic catalogue. Oh, it is an old quarrel with me;” she bent her head once more, for the thought of her serious arguments with the Mayor returned and grieved her.

“It is pretty certain,” said Amato, “that science utterly fails to explain anything fundamentally. Its Laws, so much boasted of, are superficial rules which never go the smallest fraction’s depth into the meaning and nature of things. We are less frightened than once, but we are not the least bit less amazed.”

“That suits me, that suits me,” cried Miss Lorimer, “Ah Mr. Amato for you and me, is it not permitted through our Faith to feel

that the spirit

Clothed in its changeless purity, may know

How soonest to accomplish the great end

For which it has its being, and may taste

That peace which in the end all life will share?”

“Well! the vision grows in these later days, and I believe that Science must be thanked for much. Lucretius said that as boys fear many things in the dark so men in broad daylight have been afraid of the future, and their lives, but that reason will dispel these foolish fears as the sun or the lamp the darkness that scared the boys. It is so.

“We must be duly thankful for the emancipation of this day from mere stupidity.”

Miss Lorimer watched young Amato with an increased interest. She certainly felt that she was admitting his friendship to a more valued place in her esteem.

“Oh yes—stupidity is always hateful, when it blots and disfigures thinking. But science in another way is stupid too. Its style of knowing it all, its preposterous agnosticism, the patronizing air of its professors, its denuded common senseness, the literal manner of its assertions, and the blank stare it offers to all poetic meanings—its absorption in names and guesses!

“And indeed what of it? If we think we know the way the world was made are we any better off? We rejoice in some interesting propositions and some men derive a few worldly honors for their sagacity. It employs time and research and indefatigable brains, but suppose it weakens our quality of aspiration, of religious hopes, of contented living, of wondering joy in the mysteries of things, are we the gainers?”

“I believe that science as a whole saturates our present life quite favorably” said Amato, leaning with arms crossed against the parapet and looking towards the southern city. “It advances along so many lines of sane living, and marvellous conveniences! It is not only that we have perhaps a new way of thinking—which you and I may deplore—but with these new ways comes in a flood of inventions which make living safer, longer, more delightful, and give us, for instance, that miraculous light that to-night seems almost a message from Heaven.

“The old latin and grecian philosophers guessed and wondered, and we are told learning was much a littering of thought with systems of whys and wherefores. But nothing certain. To-day if we are as far off as ever from knowing the Altogether, perfectly, we are infinitely nearer seeing the complexity of things, and the adjustments, the checks, the rearrangements, the vast economy, the deliberate purpose, the balance of creation, and so, without guessing, we have an absolute gain in knowledge, and, like visitors to some beautiful garden are IN it, and no longer OUTSIDE of it.”

“But all this increase of knowing does not change your Faith?” queried Helen with animation.

“No,” said Amato “it does not. The habit of belief has been fixed in me. But somehow I think that the area of faith grows less and less. Lake a vanishing surface in a flood it is inundated on all sides. The rock of resistance is our Church, and to that as to a very citadel of safety, those, to whom religion is life, must flee.”

“They must,” rejoined Miss Lorimer. “And Amato” again the young man resisted the impulse to seize the speaker’s hand, and confess his soul to her, there in the quiet night; it almost seemed to him as if she paused, waiting for him to take the offered chance—she continued; “if this vanishing is a fact, is it not the part of wisdom, is it not a supreme duty, to concentrate the army of believers here in this country, where Catholicism wears the cleanest face, is the most pure and radiant, lives up, I think, to the highest standards, and nourishes a brighter flame of devotion?”

“I know what you refer to Miss—Lorimer,” said Amato “the bringing of the Pope to this country. Well are we not both agreed about this? The Cardinal told me but the other day that the plan broadens, and grows, that the fathers of the Church are turning their eyes to this country, and believe that in the slow subjection of the Church in Europe, its losing hold upon influential thought, that the Pope should come to America.

“The Cardinal says it would mean a new chapter in the Church’s history—he calls it the Church’s DEMOCRATIZATION, for the Pope in America would simply be a ruling Bishop, though yet the reigning semblance of Christ on earth. Instead of a throned monarch he would here become a citizen, and, while screened within the decent guards of privacy, he would put on the expression of our common equality before the Law. In this country, says the Cardinal, must come the final apotheosis of the Church, from these shores it must rise into the opening firmament of the WORLD TO COME.”

“As if” continued Helen, seizing his thought and finishing it, “the Beatific Vision should culminate on these shores, before

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherits shall dissolve.”

Helen Lorimer’s face glowed with a strange beauty. Amato could see in the half light—he was so near to her—that her eyes half filled with tears, and the long dreaming gaze taught him the religious depth of her nature, and, as she rose, and offered him her hand, and she came close to him her loveliness shone in his eyes like some transfiguration. She said; “Yes we all shall work for this. What a triumvirate of plotters we shall make. Ah!—Well to-morrow even at about this same hour, you shall see the HEAD at Mansfield watching the skies, waiting like some bound and wearied Prometheus for the day-star of perfect Truth to set him,—and all free.”

“Miss Lorimer,” it was Amato speaking, and as he spoke he slowly dropped her hand, “There are fetters besides Ignorance, and they are bonds which I would not exchange for Liberty.”

Helen Lorimer had passed to the top of the stairs, leading from the tower, and she turned to him, and on her face there rested he thought a smile, as if she understood and wished him well. And now it came to his mind, with an alacrity he wondered at, that through all the time he had enjoyed her acquaintance she had been so grave, at times a great vividness of speech, a rapid interest in things, almost as if seeking a distraction—but always grave, perhaps sad—and now—this keen smile as if joy came to her! It made his own heart leap, and the blushes of delight flamed his cheeks. He felt his pulses quicken, and something choking his throat stopped his voice. He almost ran to the top of the stairway,—but she had vanished. He heard her calling from below:

“Come! Come! We must start early to-morrow. Good-night, good-night!”

The next day Julieta, Helen, and Amato, took the White Mountain Express for Vermont. The party attracted some attention at the splendid Grand Central Depot, for Miss Lorimer was known, her mother was yet a most beautiful lady, and the handsome beaming face of Amato set tongues wagging, and did not fail to draw the eyes of ingenuous maidens.

The trip was a new one for Amato, and he noted with studious interest the changing rushing picture, which indeed Helen had commanded him to observe, saying: “See! if we are not almost as good-looking as you in Europe,” a reproach to which the young man vigorously protested. But he obeyed devoutly, and let nothing escape him.

From New Haven the country grew increasingly interesting; the wide fluviatile valley of the Connecticut River, with here and there separated and towering meridional ridges of Triassic sandstone, was very striking, while the testimony of enormous erosion and decay was seen in the clay pits, all the way to Hartford, and beyond to Springfield, and further. From Springfield they shot, on an arrow’s wing, past Holyoke, and Mt. Tom, with its lonely surmounting hotel (still maintained), past Northfield, with Moody’s ancient camp, and then to Bellows Falls, which makes such a bright picture!

From Brattleboro, Windsor, to White River Junction, the charm of the Connecticut was always with them; hundreds of the loveliest scenes were encountered, and the varying phases of the river kept his attention brimming over with pleasure. Charming homes appeared from time to time, opposite pleasing or noble stretches of the river, and Tobacco was a noticeable product, growing with great luxuriance in the river farms.

From White River Junction they travelled to Waterbury. This ride through a long turning and returning valley, quite closely hedged with hills, lanes, and old beaches, was also delightful. The day grew gray and rainy, and much of the beauty of this ride through the lonely cold vales, with the compact little villages was lost, but the wild and frugal life of the people, the keen set look of the country, and the ever present strolling or rapid river were well seen. It was the same as to-day, for that prevalent desertion of the country for the city still prevailed at the beginning of the twenty-first century, indeed the cities grew with startling ease, and the country put on a new forestation, which renewed its ancient woods, and brought back, with strange quickness, its wild animals. One thing alone counteracted this tendency, and that was the increasing pride of the rich in the country. They scoured it over for beautiful sites, and revelled in giving to the broad acres they bought, a ravishing pastoral charm. It was not unnaturally allied to that aristocratic effort of establishment which we have referred to, and which Helen Lorimer so much delighted in. She said herself; “if the rich, the cultured, those who know the arts of living, will root themselves in our country-sides, and spread beauty and elegance of rural grace about, benefitting little communities with the application of their wealth, ennobling natural views and places with expressive architecture, weaving everywhere, like scarfs up hill and down dale, good roads, that will throughout make living safer, easier, and more delightful—if they will do this, they would justify their existence, and they would surely become better Americans. They would truly love their country.”

The movement had grown and distended itself, actuated by a new sudden contagion of enthusiasm and the growth of emulation. It had made whole sections of New England, and parts of the rural New York counties marvels of loveliness. It ransomed from commonplaceness many spots which needed only the touch of an artificial embellishment to become pretty. It created the most fascinating surprises, where ingeniously designed villas on hill top and spur, in valley and by lake side, gave to the landscape a borrowed European air while at a thousand points the nestling colonial homes, like the most delicate visions, sprang to view with positive enchantment.

The most fortunate rivalry had arisen between states, and the rich entered upon the most profitable sort—for the public’s benefit—of competition. They strove to make their states attractive, to give them an unusual beauty, and in this friendly and delightful contest added new incentives to all the occupants of the state to support them. Schools of Artifice—as they were called—came into being, each having for its aim the development of a spirit of aesthetic ambition, and the peculiar use of the features of the state, so as to produce the best picturesque effects. So there had grown up a stronger demand for beauty, and it began an almost despotic sway in the living of men. It influenced the most humble and chastened the most vulgar. In the cities it assumed such grandiose forms as the monumental splendor of Carrara in New York.

It had touched the South, where it was indeed most needed, and the old time slovenliness and dreary hopelessness of board and brick, flatness and indifference, succumbed to a sprightlier fancy. The South had become rich also, and this allowed its owners to resume the old time princeliness of the Virginia colonial style, and so through the devious changing beauty of the Appalachians, from the Potomac to Tallulah, art swept its redeeming hand, and blent its best effects with nature’s unharmed loveliness.

Mr. Theodore Lorimer had everything in readiness, and being something of a manager, besides an almost acrimonious critic of conveniences, the house and grounds of the Lorimers at Stowe were in perfect shape, and the place wore its most fascinating guise.

Mr. Lorimer had suffered, though a selfish arrogant and narrow man, some qualms of self-reproach over his treatment of the Mayor, and his own obstinate concealment of their interview. He really feared his niece, and any explanation to her of his conduct would he knew precipitate a difficult situation. He avoided that. He realized Amato’s helpful influence, and while his dull and sluggish spirit lamented, in a torpid way, Miss Lorimer’s evident suffering, he believed too much in the remedial and—as he thought—easy application of the young man’s gifts.

But his gnawing sense of self-dissatisfaction—an unusual feeling with Mr. Lorimer—sought relief in his own stricter efforts to please and divert her. So he had taken great pains to have all things at the Stowe villa in apple-pie order, and long before the family had expected to leave New York, he had come up to the place, and made the elaborate preparation in flower beds, trimmed outlooks, and cleaned and painted rooms, with a few added pictures, a few new rugs, some jardinieres, a set of new curtains, a dainty new setting of a little veranda tea room, polished floors, some exquisite china for the bed rooms, and a pergola with seats, where the sitters could see the wide vale, dimpled with farm houses, and the peaked ridge of Mount Mansfield. All these things betokened the man’s tenderness for his niece, and the injurious sense of his own perfidy towards her.

He had exerted himself to be agreeable to Amato, and he showed his personal pleasure in the young man’s visits. His encouragement had been pleasantly assisted by Julieta’s address and winning welcome. Amato had been careful not to overstep the bounds of an admiring attention. He had been reticent and simply friendly, but in a hundred ways his love expressed itself less obviously and, because Miss Lorimer herself had shown the restraint of some pre-occupation, he allowed himself only the formal privileges of a friend. His conduct was adroit and delicate in its union of respect and the warmer qualities of devotion. All this had its sensible effect upon Miss Lorimer, yet she remembered the Mayor with an almost unshaken attachment. The first harsh wound had healed, and her pride—perhaps not so truculent and preservative as with less gentle and less distinguished characters—had come to the rescue, as it always does with women who possess it, as a gift from the armory of nature’s prudent kindnesses. In this expectant and refined relation of hope and preparation, of withdrawal and insistence, of sympathy and regret, the matter stood when the Lorimers came to Stowe.

At length an auspicious day late in August dawned, after a throng of thunder showers had swept over the country side, when the ascent of Mount Mansfield could be made, and the clear lucent atmosphere enjoyed, for a perfect view from its rugged summit.

The party which left the villa consisted of Julieta, Helen Lorimer, Theodore Lorimer and Amato. Mr. Lorimer and Amato had at first stipulated to go on horseback, but were overruled, and the party left Stowe in a large carry-all in which Mr. Lorimer stowed away some viands and liquids which he said “would do well enough to help out the resources of the Summit House.”

The carriage bowled along the hard road, over the barricaded bridge above the little stream that crosses the valley, and on across the smiling vale, while Mr. Lorimer detailed the past history of the place, and pointed out the expanding lineaments of the mountain. Stowe, he told them, a hundred and more years ago had been a great resort with a handsome hotel, burned down somewhere about 1895, how it had been deserted and sidetracked by more ambitious places, how a Mrs. Taber had come to the valley enchanted with its beauty, and how her talented son, whose life had been actually prolonged in these salubrious airs, had designed the house the Lorimers then occupied,—so that the house was something more than a hundred years old,—how that the returning sense of the delicious beauty of the spot had brought back to it its old time prestige, and that now to the left and right of them were farms owned by rich proprietors whose houses he pointed out with much assiduity, as they could be discerned rising among groves of trees, or were momentarily seen through openings in the woods.

At last they began, under the very shadow of the range, the long ascent and steadily rose, with many glimpses backwards over the country, the village of Stowe—like a toy hamlet on the horizon—and the far eastern range of Worcester. Finally after many turns they came directly under the lee of the high rocky cliff, which is the nose of the great face of rock, which fancy has formed from the regular upraised pinnacles along this steep and elevated ridge. A last long pull and they were at the doors of the Summit House.

Some of the day yet remained and after a slight refreshment Helen and Amato—the work involved seemed too strenuous for Mr. Lorimer, and Julieta absolutely refused—started up the Nose in a stiff gale that made mutual assistance imperative. Helen likened it to climbing the Pyramids, for the schistose rock was hewed out in terraced steps. From the whistling peak of the Nose they could see the mimic configuration that, in the distance, as seen from the valley looked so much like a countenance. First to the south, the Forehead, and then this beetling perpendicular mass of rock forming the Nose, then the long Upper Lip northward, the Lower Lip—both made by projections of rock somewhat superficially broken up into irregular heaps of fragments—and finally the high upthrown Chin, and the receding throat with an Adam’s Apple, made by a conical elevation.

The day was shutting down, a flying scud of mist speeding over the Chin, and the outlook was discouraging for the morrow. The excited visitors did indeed return to the level of the Summit House, and then, in a rising gale, struggle on to the towering eminence of the Chin, but the clouds closed down, and the dragging tails of mist flung their moist wreaths around them, and effectually drew the curtains of concealment all about them, and so they hurried back over the tilting and pebble strewn upland path.

The next day opened ominously, and Helen, who was awake early to catch the first glimpse of the sun rising over the Worcester hills, was disappointed. She met Amato wandering over the mountain top. They both stopped a little while to talk, commenting on the strangeness of the silence.

“Just silence itself imparts a feeling of grandeur to places,” said Amato, “The banishment of all sound affects one strangely, as if we were no longer in the world.”

“I think it is not the silence alone that does so, but that lift from the world that the mountain gives,” answered Helen.

“How unusual the voice sounds too here, as if its lightest tone was megaphoned into a shout.”

“There is a great echo up here further north, where the sounds are redoubled. It is weird enough when a cornet is played softly and the slowly emitted notes chase each other, with others rising to the call, as if a troop of invisible spirits sprang tiptoe from their hidings, and flung themselves upon the man-made note to destroy it, or else, one might think that they were freed voices, liberated by the human call, to rush on forever and forever round the world.”

“You remember Wordsworth’s beautiful lines?” queried Amato.

“And they would shout

Across the watery vale, and shout again,

Responsive to his call—with quivering peals,

And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud

Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild

Of mirth and jocund din.”

“Hardly so, though that is indeed most enchanting. Something more idyllic and classic came to my mind about them. As if these echoes were silenced voices waiting in the crannies and crevices of the rocks for their resurrection, an aerial life to be given them by the human call they were fitted to answer. How harshly science robs us of all such fantasies!”

“And yet science delivers to us too a delightful image,” said Amato “for it permits us to imagine the invisible waves of sound dashed upon these hard rocks to be returned in reduplicated billows just as we watch the refluent crest thrown back from the headland on the sea.”

Helen had risen from the stone boulder, from which she scanned the circling fog wreaths around, and as she turned towards the Summit House a splinter of light seemed to fall at her feet;

“The sun” she cried, “it will break away! We shall have our ramble!” They returned to the House for the breakfast, which the consideration of their host and the watchfulness of Mr. Lorimer had made inviting. The table was set with early asters picked up lower on the mountain side, and scrambling stems of the Bitter-Sweet with the orange cups and red coral arils twined about the centre of the table. The temper of the place was happy and exhilarating, and the company partook of the infectious gayety which seemed to be a part of the pure and sparkling air. For the morning, after the preliminary period of distrust and uncertainty, had cleared, the mist rolled up into clouds, the blue sky appeared, and the direct sunshine struck sharply down, and from the windows the whole ridge, from the Nose to the Chin, appeared in its unbroken extent.

Mr. Theodore Lorimer and Julieta were both in a happy vein, and the isolation of the summit, inwrought with the singular power of mountain tops to elicit a healthy hunger, made the morning meal delightful.

“I almost feel as if we ought to hire this Summit House, indemnify the landlord for losses through our monopoly, and make a stay here,” said Mr. Lorimer, “it seems so interesting and unusual, and it is so far away from worry.”

“It feels almost as if we were off the earth in a balloon,” said Julieta.

“Perhaps loose on a whirling Meteor, would suit the case better,” said Amato laughing.

“Yes,” responded Helen with animation. “We are. Just a bit of a world all to ourselves, and near enough to the old one to still see it.”

“A satellite so close to the earth as that Helen will surely return, we shall not be able to keep off long,” said Mr. Lorimer, looking curiously at Amato and his niece, as they sat together on one side of the table.

“But if we do,” continued Amato with a smile on his bright and handsome face, “the thump we make when we come back will furnish the newspapers with some terrible headlines, not to speak of the astonishment Miss Lorimer’s admirers among the reporters will experience to find her on the whisking asteroid.”

“If we should strike New York the Mayor would have no more problems to consider,” said Julieta, and the speech was unfortunate. Even Theodore Lorimer sent a glance of mute protest and rebuke to his sister-in-law. Julieta meant it most innocently; she was one who had realized Helen’s love for the Mayor, and she had noticed with astonishment his absence and Helen’s pre-occupation. But she rather favored Mr. Lorimer’s view, and she had thought the affair—as the phrase goes—was a mistake. Then she was attracted by Amato who had won all by his frankness, and ardor, and gentle reserve, and then—well she had been forgetful.

Amato noticed the sudden shudder that ran over Miss Lorimer, her pained eyes as she raised them to her mother, and in an instant he too discovered the truth. It was an unwelcome discovery, and it may have caused him some anxiety, but he was full of pity, and, with a gay air, the melody of his voice penetrating her ears, and with his eyes turned upon her with admiration, Helen heard him say:

“No, our little ball of rocks and stones and trees with its little population will keep its own course,

Far into silent regions blue and pale
and we shall all become very happy in each other’s company, and finally by some pleasant accident land lightly on some lovely sphere, inhabited by wondrous creatures who will give us their services and show us the beauties of their planet, and make us forget the cruel world, by their fairness and goodness and powers. Would you like that Miss Lorimer?”

The image did please Helen, as if, in some such way, she might enter Heaven, and she smiled, but the next moment she looked grave again, and said:

“No—there can be no escape—just now; no running away from our duties. There is so much to be done! Can you think Amato, of any greater recreancy than leaving the Museum?”

“Or our incomes,” muttered Mr. Lorimer.

Julieta felt that she had been inadvertent; it pained her deeply, and she turned their attention to the streaming sunlight: “Show Mr. Amato the Smugglers’ Notch Helen. The day is really beautiful. We might arrange for a luncheon near the Lips where those caves are, while you explore the Chin. The views to-day will be glorious! The Lake and the Adirondacks will be superb!”

“Yes, let us do that. All day in the air, and the splendid pictures—!” exclaimed Helen.

So it was fixed that Helen and Amato should go on ahead to the Chin, while Julieta and Mr. Lorimer would follow more leisurely and prepare with the Host’s assistance a luncheon at the elevations called the Lips, just above two natural caverns that pierced the mountain side lower down. In a few moments Helen and Amato had started on their way over the stony foot-path, broken by rough projections of rock, and showing everywhere small patches of white pebbles dislodged or broken from the thickly crowded veins of quartz, which seamed the micaceous schist. The companions could not restrain their delight, as on the right hand and on the left, their eyes traced the lowlands to the distant mountains, the purpling Adirondacks in the west, the hazy White Mountains in the far east, with the Hogback range just beyond the vale of Stowe. And Lake Champlain!—how incomparable it appeared, rifted with islands. The light flooding this vast domain was broken by shifting shadows of clouds, and the effects of the sheer deep escarpments of rock were bold and strong. The abruptness of the verticality on either side of their tortuous path brought the eyes of the climbers quickly to the lowlands, giving a delightful visual sensation as if suspended above the caparisoned farmlands, the woods, the sinuous waters; and ever and anon lifting their gaze to the Adirondacks they saw the serrated peaks disappearing in a golden rush of sun-haze.

Amato was busy in his mind with the suggestion of the breakfast table, and he wondered as he helped the beautiful woman at his side over the rougher passage of the path, whether it was wise of him to think of speaking his heart to her. He felt the intangible obstacle, and his confidence sank a little as he recalled the mental strength of his rival—a sort of quality that would appeal well to Miss Lorimer. But then many things had encouraged him, and the apparent absence of the Mayor hinted at some disagreement which had come about before he entered the scene, and which had perhaps severed all intercourse between the Mayor and Helen Lorimer. That some rankling hurt remained behind was natural, but his own devotion might justly now, as at an appointed time, rise to allay that pain.

Miss Lorimer was debonair and happy, her spirits rose with the broadening and divine day. She accepted Amato’s assistance with laughing reproaches at his humiliating doubts over her own strength. These had been especially offered, and thankfully used, when, for an instant, they diverted their way down the rocks at the Lips to look into the crevice that was called a cave, and Amato felt his own heart beat faster as he pressed her hands or his face, by the accidents of the scramble, came near her own. They hurried on over the lichen crusted stones, slipping gaily, and feeling the intoxication of the alpine air.

It was bliss to Amato, it certainly was pleasure to Helen Lorimer. They had reached the extreme end of the Chin, and gazed down a precipitous descent to a lower level, where rested a small lake, while beyond rose again another eminence—the Adam’s Apple of this titanic visage. Below them a forest covered amphitheatrical bowl denoted the Smugglers’ Notch, where trees covered the whole lower land, in unbroken expanses—spruce, birch, beech, and oak—and now were tossing their arms in leafy confusion as some nether current of air rushed through them. It almost seemed as if they raised their multitudinous arms in salutation to the high perched humans who wonderingly watched their violent agitation.

When a cloud swept across the sun, and the pinnacled cumuli were beginning to float upward from the horizons, then the sylvan solitude beneath them became dark, and with its foreground of the chased mountain side, and the rough uninhabited rocks, put on an ominous and romantic air. It suggested night prowling expeditions, and hidden dens of the old smugglers. Amato asked about them, and why the name was used for the place. And Helen told him about the early days of the Embargo under Jefferson, when commerce with foreign countries—France and England—was prohibited, in retaliation for the depredations made by both countries upon American ships; and then how business languished, and the desperate citizens crossed the borders along the Canada line, fetching there their products, and how they used the Great Lakes and the long waterway and the wooded shores of Lake Champlain, with its many islands for retreat and harborage.

It was a new and pleasant story for her listener, to whom the woods, they then looked down upon, became silvered in the moonlight, and threaded by dark figures of the border smugglers in their nocturnal trades.

Helen told him that the products of the Champlain region were lumber, pork, brandy, and potash. These found a ready market at Albany and the thriving towns of Fort Edward and Whitehall. But when the Embargo came, the merchants turned to Canada; out of the lumber they made rafts, on the rafts they crowded their liquor, potash, and pork, hoisted the sails, and with the drifting wind floated down over the whole lake, across the line to Canada. Windmill Bay was a favorite place of shipment; sometimes twenty-five rafts went out, taking advantage of the darkness and the south wind. Wagons traversed the old roads to Canada, and these were sometimes closed by the militia; the rafts were stopped or seized, but the trade kept on. A revenue cutter came up the Onion river, southward toward Burlington, and fired on the smugglers but in the encounters the militia were usually unsuccessful. If a raft was captured, the captors were almost sure to be surprised and the raft cut out a few nights later. One night forty men, armed and painted as Indians, surrounded some troops near the boundary, and frightened them into a profound sleep, while a raft with thirty sails and measuring ten acres in surface, floated slowly by into Canadian waters.

“In this notch below us,” said Helen, “the traders hid their stores, and gathered in the nights to begin their smuggling march to Canada, with wheels tied up in rags, and muskets on their shoulders, or else they slipped away from here to the Champlain shores to embark upon the tardy rafts.”

The thought of this early time, with its wildness and aboriginal tinct, pleased Amato. He mused a little over it, and then, almost unbidden by any preparatory thought, he uttered the deep motive that ruled him.

“Perhaps Miss Lorimer,” he began “I can choose no better place than this to tell you”—Helen Lorimer was looking at him with a startled half puzzled stare—“that I love you from the bottom of my heart. I loved you the first day I ever saw you. I need not conceal it, for I am not going to be a nuisance. Let me be your friend at least—but—I shall not long be content with that alone—it would be impossible if my case is hopeless—I will fight my battle somewhere else. Does this grieve you?”

Helen was looking strangely away from him and something drawn and sad filled her face; the eyes were downcast, and she had pressed back her hair from her cheeks, whither it had blown, and in this disarray with a steamer cap in her other hand she became to Amato more bewitching and irresistible. He could not stop.

“Oh please Miss Lorimer, let me stay—let me hope. Such speeches as this you have heard before, but perhaps they have not been conjoined with so much patience—for I will wait, and wait—wait to prove to you how uttermost is my love—wait till you know yourself that my love can be unselfish, strange as that sounds. Think well of me and keep me here.”

“Ah—I do think well of you Rudolph”—Amato leaned towards her, he felt like falling at her feet; most grotesquely he thought that if she had asked him to jump down the ragged splintered cliff at their side he would have, then and there, done it, for her sake. His name from her lips sounded like music; he would prize that name henceforth, because SHE had spoken it.

“—but” she was speaking, “you must not speak of this again—not now—not till I say you may. I will try you. I have had my—pains:” she caught her flushed cheeks in her two hands, as if she would crush back to its hiding the tell-tale blood, “—but you are indeed my friend—you can help me. Yes, Rudolph,” again that sweet familiarity that seemed to close round the young man like a sensible embrace, “I do think well of you—”

And then a queer thing happened. It was one of those sympathetic responses in Nature that appear almost as if an intelligent compositor—or better a composer—set upon the physical face of things the seal of a spiritual and poetic beauty. A twittering cloud of birds surrounded them; they were the chaste little black-poll warblers, beating up from the forest, and, with an impulse of friendliness fearlessly settling on the angular rocks, so that they spread a confused surface of movement about them, and then—even as the two friends forgot their surprise—they rose without sound into the sky like a puff of smoke and went southward.

“The winter comes,” said Helen; she rose and began the slight descent from the cairn-like pinnacle whose escarpment on the north ended in the little tarn. In an instant Amato was at her side, helping her, and when he released her hand upon the flat path homewards he raised it and kissed it, and it was not withdrawn.

The lunch at the Lips was a great success. Amato was in ecstasies. Mr. Lorimer and his sister observed that Helen had brightened, and Helen herself launched out into brave railleries over the foolish exuberance of the feast. It was a handsome and incongruous array. A table cloth pulled over a flat rock made the table, and here garnished with pickles and olives, curries and salted nuts, was spread delicate cuts of cold beef and chicken, with interspersed salads, and potted lobster, with fresh rolls and crisp biscuit, iced tea and lemonade, and then, as a climax of the culinary bravado, the waiters disappeared into the rocks and emerged with an ice-cream freezer and a basket of champagne.

“Oh!” exclaimed Helen, “this is outrageous, monstrous, Uncle! It is pure desecration. Convention against nature! The Oreads will become our besetting Furies. Dew, roots, herbs, and wild honey should form our repast—and all this omnivorous hunger at the very mouth of the sleeping Giant!”

“Let us hope,” said Mr. Lorimer, “that the dear fellow will not wake. He might prefer us to this gastronomic medley. As for honey, here Helen, is some of the best—straight from Condits—and I think the dew, roots, and herbs can be dispensed with; you will certainly forget all about them when you have tasted this dry Mouquin.”

“And I,” spoke up Amato with mock gravity, “will take care of the Oreads; if they venture to disturb us I will exorcise them with a fine latin anathema that the Fathers recommended for Devils.”

It was a festival moment, and the savagery of the isolated ridge blended with the comic contradiction of a Fifth Avenue banquet amused and entertained them all. To Amato it was quite clear that good food—the best—acquired a new charm when the farthest removed from its origins. But their hopes for a continuance of the bright day were doomed to disappointment; the sky became filmed with clouds, that darkened into rain, and beating a retreat the merry company followed by the little retinue of caterers, scampered back to the refuge at the hotel.

Amato did wonders in entertainment. There was an old piano hammered out of all semblance to a musical instrument by the ambitious banging of innumerable strollers, lady performers and sledge fingered bucolics, “who played by ear,” in the parlor of the hotel; and from this Amato extorted enough becoming sound for the accompaniment of his really excellent singing. So the day passed. To Amato it had been one of victory, and when the night shut them in, and after a few games, all had retired, Amato alone sprang out upon the porch and walked up and down in the intervals of the showers, smoking, and thinking, and planning. Life had never seemed so desirable, so promising, and after midnight a stray fox, engaged in a reconnaissance of the chicken fold, stopped a moment outside in the wet boulders, to notice the perambulating spark that ceaselessly moved to and fro against the dripping-clapboards of the Summit House. To Amato his mission of love had become deepened with a new meaning; he cherished it more than ever, since he knew it might mean a Mission of Mercy too.

CHAPTER XII

THE TRIAL

November had come and the day for the great Trial had come with it. Events had been moving rapidly, and political and social forces concurred to gather the citizens of the City-State into two opposing parties. Within one of them resided the aristocratic principles taught by Helen Lorimer, and within the other—though far more obscurely—the disorganizing tendencies of The Beehive. Between these formidable elements of political disturbance and political prestige the Mayor directed his course with consummate skill. The man’s enormous power of concentration, his impetuous activity, became the marvel of the commonwealth. This ambitious scholar and orator, touched with a utopian idealism, which Briggs had thought betokened at the outset simply weakness, and mental inertia—a view which the Mayor’s conduct at first quite appropriately justified—had amazed the politicians, with his swift recoil from all their shifty opportunism.

He had introduced important reforms, he had established new standards of proficiency in the city’s business, he had deliberately approached his constituents of all shades of opinion, and he had not hesitated to declare himself the exponent of a vast utilitarianism, which aimed at the perfect government of the City, and the realization within its borders of universal happiness. He had been referred to by some wag as the City’s Augustus, who was engaged in the Sisyphean task of reconciling irreconcilable elements, and building a permanent commonwealth upon the treacherous sands of caprice, selfishness, pride, extravagance, and envy.

They said the Mayor was trying to maintain the traditional State—a well ordered union of all forces, conditions, and occupations—whereas the State oscillated between two opposite inclinations, one making for an oligarchical rule of wealth, and family, the other for a proletariat of a levelling demagoguery. They pointed to the fact that the Mayor encouraged the ceremonials of the Holidays, that he officiated at the laying of corner stones, he affected a public ostentation; his frequent allocutions to the people were in the nature of lectures, and his endorsement of all plans of public improvement, his familiar frequentation of the poorer section of the City, his undisguised appeal to the rich for support, all these things pointed to his realization of a conflict which only his multifarious sympathies for the present concealed. And they were right.

The Mayor was the visible bond of a provisional peace. His method, as these ingenious and learned critics pointed out, was the Augustinian pax Romana, by which he attempted as far as possible to reconcile divergent interests, and, in a process of universal stimulation, ministering to the municipal pride, to hide the increasing mobilization of the forces of conservatism and radicalism in opposite camps. But these forces daily grew more compact, and busily engaged their respective resources—in papers, magazine writers, public speakers—to illustrate and defend their theories. It was felt by the more thoughtful that society stood upon the verge of conflict, which might mean several things. Two prominently emerged. A civil state on the one hand constituted upon a stricter enforcement of the individual rights of property, and on the other some yet indefinable new social organism which subjected individual rights to legislative revision, and in all probability to legislative annulment. The situation had become interesting, and below the mere academic surface of affairs burned the fires of a temperamental hostility, that would not be content with a peaceful solution.

The Mayor—smarting with an inner pain he confessed to no one, as indeed he had no one to confess it to—became involved in a propaganda of mutual toleration, and worked upon an Aristotelian basis of a state utilizing all tendencies in the preservation of a fabric of checks and balances, with mutual toleration. The sting of his unmerited repulse by Mr. Lorimer, might have easily led him into reprisals and retaliation. It might naturally have turned his thoughts towards the creation of conditions bearing more heavily upon the rich—the Carrara group of proud conservatives but it did nothing of the sort. The man preserved a perfect mental serenity, and weighed with even more scrupulous care the exact proportions of his sympathies with either faction, hoping to develop a third and balancing power, which would control the electorate.

His public acts were marked with a fine regard for justice, his innovations in the financial government of the city were well considered, and his appointments critically excellent. Not a trace of selfishness could be detected in his work, not the slightest yielding to corrupt influences, not the most tenuous showing of political craft. And this in no wise jeopardized his reputation among the very classes who suffered rebuff at his hands. For it was too well understood, as Mr. Briggs told Tom Ratler, that the Mayor was a compromise candidate at the last election, and had himself emphasized the independent attitude he was entitled to bear towards all parties. All this had won him praise from the moderates and sensible, but it had also brought him into a less enviable estimate with the rancorous and radical of both sides.

Had he been a weak man, intellectually, this even course might have assumed the expression of timidity, or simply a puritanical notionalism that, by some kind of exact partition of its smiles to either quarter, hoped to conciliate all. Not so with the Mayor. His strength was unmistakable, and his language tremendously forcible and correct. No one knew that his ingenious and convincing language, his incessant anxiety and explanatory emphasis, the vigorous novelty of his addresses and Bulletins, had their source of power in the smarting and bruised heart of the man, for, as will occur with such temperaments, where a pride of despotic power, and at the same time a pride of jealous apprehension, the pride of an unusual mind associated with a personal history of struggle and self-denial, has been deeply wounded, the energies of the mind storm some new citadel of difficulty, and minister distraction. Such consolation is indeed temporary, but it suffices to allay the worst aches, and if the effort brings praise and distinction, smothers the fires of fever and desire.

In an article of much length which had appeared in the numbers of one of the best magazines, the Mayor had anonymously discussed the situation. The article attracted attention, and was made the text of editorials and sermons, of conversation and drawing room talk, and every one knew that its author was the Mayor. In it the Mayor had aired his studies of Roman History—a favorite topic with him—relying as he did upon such pictures of the first days of the Empire as Ferrero has given us. In a pregnant paragraph he depicted the whole dilemma.

“The predicament of the ancient Roman State at the time of Augustus, if we accept the delineation of Ferrero, was the supineness of the governing classes, their reluctance to exercise the functions of Rule, their intolerable surrender to indulgence, to the depravity of a sensual and oriental luxuriance, and the dilettantism of literary tastes. With Rome at that time engaged in a hopeless task to revive an ancient decorum, and the stolidity of an antique moral forcefulness, the problem of Augustus seems to have been how to distribute the burdens of government, and save himself from the arduous responsibility of “running the machine” alone.

“At the top was a nobility dissipated, selfish, and forgetful, which had lost the manhood of its former state, and now revelled in glorious depravities which an eastern civilization had introduced, and made irresistible; next to it was a knighthood class interested in attaining wealth, in successful business enterprises, in the exploitation of the resources of the vast empire, and also too willing to surrender the burden of government to any one—and Augustus had grown in their eyes semi-divine—who would conduct it, so as to least disturb their enterprises of thrift and emolument. Below them came the masses of retainers, freemen, slaves, veterans, small merchants, and artificers, professional loafers, and impecunious litigants, who looked to the government and the richer guilds for entertainment and support, for gladiatorial shows and bread.

“Our present condition is rather one of Social War, because all wish to govern, and the political prowess of individuals was never more imposing. There is here no disintegration of Ambition. Our danger is not one from surrendered rights, but rather from the clamorous claim for more rights, from the importunity of too many doctors.

“Society sensibly oscillates between two possible extremes, and the old adage that government is Compromise, forms, with this City-State, the ideal programme, under the control of sense, toleration, and accommodation. Our vitality is enormous. Our talent unlimited, our wealth boundless, the freshness and vigor of enterprise unimpaired, our mental activity exaggeratedly quick and responsive. There is no general lethargy here, though we enlist every element of pleasure. The elective franchise was never more greedily enjoyed, never more desperately believed in and used. We have become doctrinaire, but the philosopher carries his shillalah and his gun. Theories have become creeds, and there are martyrs to die for them. THE STATE MIGHT BECOME DISRUPTED THROUGH WAR, IT WILL NEVER DISAPPEAR THROUGH INANITION.”

The crystallizing process continued, and the two parties confronted each other, the Conservatives—called The Plum-Puddings—and the Radicals—called The Levellers—and the event of some determined strikes had more sharply defined them. Force had been vigorously used to suppress the disorders, that had arisen in their wake and The Beehive, anxious to breed a deeper feeling of distrust, willing to start into action the most wicked and dangerous characters upon some crusade of retaliation and violence, had seized the chance to sow the seed of discontent and Revolution.

The Mayor had been thoroughly straightforward and insistent He had made it clear that street disorder must cease, he had denounced The Beehive, and threatened it with suppression; he had summoned a mass meeting of the temperate people and in a great speech had reiterated his control over the best elements, and effected a complete suspension of criticism. The Mayor loomed larger. His hand worked with masterly precision, and he was found at every point able and alert. The bigots—and Mr. Lorimer was one of them—remained silent in company, when his praises were sounded, through behind closed doors, and in each others’ company, they denounced him. The radicals feared him, and Longtinsky and his gang cursed him.

Mr. Briggs and Tom Ratler longed for the exile and forcible expulsion of Longtinsky. They kept up a close watch over The Beehive, and Briggs, in private, gave Tom long winded bodings of disaster, if the sheet was not soon stifled. He indulged—so far as the Mayor would let him—in ornamented appeals, but the Mayor discerned the mistake of interference just at the moment, and The Beehive continued its polluting course, though hidden from public view. The Mayor was right. The Beehive frenzied a few, and made them murderers at heart—as it turned out murderers in fact—but it had not extended influence, and its vicious constituency only seemed formidable, because it was hypothetically involved with a much less violent Socialism.

The trial of the incendiaries, or the suspects, in some way focused the attention of all parties and factions. What with the applause of the Socialists over the re-trial, and the promised liberation of innocent men, the cries of protest put up by such extremists as Mr. Livingston, the intervention of the Mayor, and the known interest of Miss Lorimer in the matter, the trial attained a magnified importance.

It acted as a call for truce, and all agreed to watch its developments before they organized for a further campaign of assault and abuse. It became a strategic point, and might have been construed as a pivotal opportunity for one or the other side to score a victory. In reality it had no important relation to the political embarrassment. And this the Mayor knew. But it was distinctly distracting. It was an exhibition of magnanimity on the part of a representative aristocratic family—the Lorimers—and it was at the same time denounced by many of the Plum-Pudding complexion as a ridiculous tampering with the proper course of the Law, and a sop to discontent.

As a matter of fact its influence was favorable to the Plum-Puddings, and Miss Lorimer became a popular illustration of goodness. It disconcerted Longtinsky and Poniatowsky, and made them rave with hate. It gave Longtinsky some anxiety for the preservation of his own neck, and as his designs upon Helen Lorimer had suffered discomfiture, he was beside himself with fear lest the unjustly condemned men—professedly his confederates—would, in the case of their liberation, turn upon him and rend him.

He consulted much with Poniatowsky who had become involved more closely with him, and voluntarily—for Jessie’s sake—embarked in his perilous ventures. Longtinsky had foreseen Poni’s capitulation, and he used him unscrupulously, as a tool, which he fully intended to reject and destroy at the right moment.

Longtinsky was terribly deceived as to the strength of his sympathizers, but in his delusion he concocted the outrageous and impossible scheme of a Massacre of the Rich. He planned it for the day or week after the completion of the trial. Then two things might happen. If it succeeded he would rush forward and forcibly establish a government, or somehow, in the tumult, secure a place in the new order of things; if it did not succeed he would flee, and—if Poniatowsky followed him—he would KILL him. So too in the subterranean camp of The Beehive and in the contorted depths of Longtinsky’s brain the trial became a datum point and a cause of action.

Helen Lorimer had interested Amato in the trial, and in the small child, Shimura, who was to upset the state’s contention. During the summer Shimura had been kept at the secluded and beautiful home of Mr. Moser in Maine, on the shores of Penobscot Bay. Here the deformed and strange waif, with his precocious sympathies, and his eager mind grew stronger, and his meagre and weird inconsistent body assumed a better aspect. Amato loved to talk with this boy and seemed to enjoy the curious psychological problem he presented. It was a most genuine interest and it affected Helen deeply; she recognized it and felt grateful for it.

The trial court was in the New Court and Government Building upon Centre and Chatham Street, in a room of princely proportions, and handsomely decorated, after the style then prevalent of mural embellishments. The selection of the jury had been a long and wearisome process, for it was difficult to find twelve men sufficiently free of prepossessions to serve the purposes of the trial.

At last that preliminary was completed, and the trial began. Helen Lorimer had at first hesitated to attend the sessions of the court, for she believed that the Mayor might be also an occasional or even frequent visitor to the trial, and, as no word had passed between them since his letter of rejection, she dreaded to again meet him. She had indeed not been unobservant of his actions and words, and she secretly admired them, but his continued silence had angered her, and slowly—very slowly—she effaced the dear impression he had made, turning more and more willingly to the handsome creature at her side, who attached himself to her daily life by innumerable attentions, with a modest unwearying devotion, where too she saw the visible notes of passion.

Her apprehensions were suddenly removed by a public announcement in the public prints that the Mayor during the weeks or days of the trial would take a vacation in the far West, where, it was also reported he would be engaged in preparing his annual message to the Legislature—a report currently believed to be a personal vindication of his views as to the value of a purely material and utilitarian interpretation of government—an anonymous writer in one of the dailies had said that the Mayor believed in Euthanasia for all incurables, and death for the hopelessly insane.

This retirement of the Mayor permitted Helen to attend the trial, and with her went Amato. The scene presented by the court was picturesque in the extreme and the movement of the trial dramatic. A marble canopy covered the chair of the presiding judge, a marble platform supported the desk of dark wood before him, on either side along the walls extended paintings of the course of Justice, from the delivery of the Ten Commandments, to the ratification of the Constitution of the United States, meeting at length, as they encompassed the sides of the great room, in a symbolic alto relievo statue of Justice herself, holding her balanced scales, with bandaged eyes, and her symmetrical sword directly opposite to the seat of the Judge, who thus might be constantly reminded of his duty and his power.

A fence of bronze enclosed the customary area in front of the judge, for the actors in the judicial play, filled with tables and chairs, and a raised marble and cushioned seat to the right formed the unusual rostrum for the witnesses. Behind all these details of necessary formal construction the court room held an amphitheatrical arrangement of perfectly white chairs, upon which the spectators were permitted to arrange themselves in still further contributory scenic groups. The color effect as might be imagined, was at least extraordinary; the illuminated walls, the white throne of the judge, the black wood of the desks and tables before him and the clustered white seats of the auditorium, with the carelessly composed but effective groups of the lawyers and clerks, and the crowded audience, in which mingled upon terms, at least, of physical contact, the elements and representatives of the divided political cohorts, a heterogeneous assemblage of faces and costumes, instilled throughout with expectancy and excitement. Among them all were not a few of the very poor, friends of the prisoners, and not a few dark and scowling faces, emissaries of The Beehive. Longtinsky was never seen at the trial, though Poniatowsky was.

One of the opening dramatic moments was the entering of the prisoners, the six men previously condemned to death; Dalzell, Vinta, Bingo, Fabrizio, Polinck, Rinker. Dalzell was an Englishman, Vinta, Fabrizio, and Polinck Italians, Bingo and Rinker born in America of Swedish parents. The six men filed in under a heavy guard, and took their seats within a railing to the left of the court room. Every face in the crushed space looked at them, and this stare they met in very different ways. Dalzell, Rinker, and Bingo smiled feebly, but appeared unconcerned; the Italians were less assured, and shrank together almost as if they resented the effrontery of this exposure. The moment passed, the names of the prisoners were called, and responded to, and the gavel of the judge fell as the prosecution promptly rose to open the case.

Among those who had secured the privilege to a seat within the rail were Mr. Briggs and Tom Ratler, the former as a quasi representative of the Mayor, and the latter as his companion. The eyes of these two searched the prisoners eagerly for Polinck. Although to Mr. Briggs the re-trial was nonsense, yet at least he felt that Polinck was the arch conspirator, next to Longtinsky, and the ring leader of the men captured. Polinck was perhaps the largest and strongest of all the prisoners. For an Italian he was of unusual height and stoutly composed. His dark face punctured by two flashing eyes and further intensified in its unpromising expression of villainy by a heavy and curled black moustache would have readily attracted attention, and almost the most indifferent scrutiny would have recoiled from its hard favored and sinister glance. Singularly for an Italian the hair was not profuse or abundant, and actually carried a few white threads among its black excess of rather thin locks, which, seen from the back, confessed an incipient baldness. This scantiness of hair gave the dreaded Polinck a curiously incongruous mien, which might have at first provoked amusement, had not any such inclination been quickly suppressed when he raised his malignant eyes. Tom Ratler studied his face with interest, and besides Tom in the back of the court room another student of physiognomy was engaged in the same duty. It was Poniatowsky. He regarded Polinck as a rival for the favor of Jessie, and indeed Polinck—in better days for both of them—had told him he intended to marry Jessie. It was not altogether to Poni’s liking that the huge Italian should return to the pursuit of his courtship, though Poni grimly smiled at the unlikelihood of his meeting with much encouragement, smiled even more grimly at the likelihood of his leaving this world altogether.

Even more interesting to Mr. Briggs than the prisoners were the members of the Jury.

On account of the political antagonism among men in the great city, and the assumed importance of the trial in strengthening their affiliations with one or the other parties, as there should be an acquittal or another conviction, the counsel for the prosecution and for the defense had strained every effort to exclude from the jury those who sympathized with the conservatives, as well as those who confessed their radical prejudices. The result had been only to fill the box with twelve men, who professed complete impartiality, and a satisfactory confidence to judge the evidence uninfluenced by any political sympathies. Mr. Briggs studied their faces with anxious scrutiny, and secured for his pains a general impression of intelligence, unrelieved by any distinction, and absolutely free of personal idiosyncrasies, which was a point in their favor. Helen Lorimer on the front row of the white chairs, reserved for the auditors, was no less interested, and her examination produced a similar impression of safety, though her wishes in regard to the trial were the reverse of those of the irreconcilable secretary.

Miss Lorimer and her companion attracted much attention, and their good looks won for them approving comments. A good many women and not a few men rejoiced to see the famous patroness of the poor, and of some of the culprits now being tried, and the no less famous propagandist of the philosophy of caste. It was naturally assumed that the handsome man who accompanied her was to be her future husband, though on that score the suspicions were rather whispered than spoken aloud. The excitement of the occasion and her own deep confession of solicitude gave to Miss Lorimer great animation, and added not a little to her radiance and beauty.

Indeed the lawyers for the prosecution would have willingly excluded her, for they felt her influence prejudicial to their case. They knew that it was largely through her efforts that the new testimony had been procured, and they acknowledged the power she exerted throughout the community by her unquestioned talent, goodness, and activity. They dreaded the effect upon the admiring and forgetful jurors. They had struggled with some legal subterfuges to secure her expulsion, but it was a forlorn attempt, and doomed to failure. The trial began, and Miss Lorimer remained an observant listener. And Amato was no less interested. The trial was a novelty for both, and its details with their dramatic touches, the skilled conflict of the lawyers, the dignity and impassiveness of the judge, and the manifold coloring of humanity in it all, even its dull processes and wearisome tracts of routine, attracted them. From first to last they remained absorbed auditors and listeners.

Mr. Meldexter, the District attorney for New York County, made the opening address to the Jury. He depicted in words of courteous rebuke the fresh attempt to release the condemned after a fair trial by their equals, and then, warming up to the subject, with withering scorn foretold its failure, affirming, in an eloquent conclusion, that the course of Justice could not be swerved by any subterfuges of interest, or any inventions of pity. His address gave Mr. Briggs the keenest satisfaction, and his nudges of Tom Ratler punctuated the telling points of the oration. Miss Lorimer heard it with incredulity and admiration. She knew Mr. Meldexter was quite unprepared for the sort of evidence Mr. Moser would offer, and his soaring tirade gave her no alarm.

The evidence against the accused followed. It consisted for the most part, as far as it was vital, of the testimony of the police, with some additional proofs of the criminal character of the prisoners. The principal point made, was the arrest of the prisoners among a crowd of others, who escaped, rushing from the burning building at the very moment when the explosions occurred which destroyed life, and wrecked the Settlement House, that quickly caught fire and disappeared in smoke and flames. This was followed by various identifications of the prisoners by witnesses, who offered their opinions and experiences with them (the prisoners) as raising a presumption that they (the prisoners) were undesirable citizens. The examination of one of these, unexpectedly furnished amusement to the court room, and threw even a shade of diversion over the sombre faces of the accused men.

The witness was an old woman who carried on her physiognomy the most complicated record of time’s effects, in a wilderness of wrinkles, and who kept one—it was apparently all she possessed—elongated incisor always in view, overlapping her lower lip, like the fang of a dog constantly on guard. She spoke in a voice which if not seriously damaged by time in its loudness, had been entirely robbed of any of its former sweetness. Her little eyes retired into dull browned and stained sockets, and from those hiding places kept a weirdly incessant stare at the examiner, twitching now and then convulsively, or closing completely as if they sought a moment’s respite from so much publicity. Her skinny and pallid fingers were clasped together over the top of an umbrella, whose distended sides and numerous patches betokened a contemporaneous age with its owner.

When asked her name and age she confessed to the appellation of Emily Pint, and with reference to her age snapped out that; “it didn’t consarn ennyone, and enny how was something she knowed nuthin’ about.”

The examiner then directed her to raise her eyes and inspect the prisoners, and tell such things as she veraciously might affirm of their antecedents, and reputation.

The old woman turned round slowly and fixed her unwinking eyes upon the men. She remained this way silent and observing for a few minutes much to the astonishment of the lawyer who exhibited some annoyance, not unaccompanied with perplexity and who finally allowed his impatience to frame the indiscreet question, “whether she was ready to answer?”

“Why—yees—I am, purviding you don’t ask me too much.” “Madame I intend to ask you all that is required for the proper instruction of the Jury,” retorted the lawyer with dignity.

“Well—well—don’t git peevish. I’ll tell ye whativer I know but I suppose you don’t want me to tell you what I don’t know.”

An audible titter met this sally, and was rebuked by the court, who warned the witness that frivolity would be sternly punished; an allocution which brought the lean visage of the old woman sharply round in the direction of the judge and put on it an expression of such whimsical perturbation, that the previous titter threatened to become outright laughter.

“Tell the Jury if you know the prisoners or any one of them.”

“I know ’em all, and a bad bunch too Mister,” almost shouted the witness, whose excitement carried her along in a torrent of abuse; “They come one night inter my store and slammed round outrageous; they pit me inter an empty barrel, and tied me ’ands and ’elped ’emselves to tobbaccy and pipes and amost enny thing they could lay their ’ands on; they is a good-fer nuthin’ loafin’, thievin’, snickerin’ lot of bums—and thet’s the gospel truth.”

“And they left no recompense to you for their abstractions?” asked the cross examiner.

“I’m a leetle deef” squealed the old woman with a disengaged hand to her ear. “Bit ef you mean by tractions the stuff they took off why—No—they jist robbed pure and simple, and I niver got out ef thet barrel till the nex day—the dirty trash dey are—and me a respectable ooman as must earn her way in the warld—Ah, Ha!” in her excitement she had risen from the marble witness bench, and was shaking her umbrella above her head at the amazed prisoners, while the amusement in the audience developed dangerously, and the judge was rapping for quiet, and the assistant sheriffs were hurrying in the direction of the irate female, who still shouted; “Ah-Ha! I’s got yees now mee honey-birds, and old Emily Pint will mek yees holler as ye did me, ye black skinned unrighteous varmints. Wen ye pit me in the barrel ye askt me ef I could preach a sarmon. Weel—I just guess ye don’t care for this sart of a sarmon—do ye—me jolly chucks. Is it more ye want me to say?—” and the frenzied woman, quite beside herself with the malice of revenge turned to the astounded judge, flourishing her umbrella in the air, while the energy of her action tumbled the ancient head-gear which shielded her frowzy locks down her back, and left her gasping with her minute eyes shining with the baleful flicker of a crazy joy.

Order was restored, and the exhausted witness sank back in the seat; the judge sternly inquired if the witness was necessary, and, being assured that the prosecution regretted the episode, turned to Mr. Moser, and requested him to cross-examine if he thought it expedient. Mr. Moser rose and approached the still panting woman and quietly—as if from some casual curiosity—asked her if she could say how many men were in the party that perpetrated this outrage.

“How many?” queried Emily Pint, “dere was tree of dem, one as stopped the door, another held me in de barrel—de slab-faced scab—and the ither swiped mee trade—” her excitement returned, and Mr. Moser waved to the clerks who led her away, while he audibly remarked that there happened to be six prisoners—a fact already impressed on the audience, who in various states of fluttering comment, had again leaned back in their chairs, and waited, with renewed animation, for the further progress of the case.

The prosecution without calling Longtinsky, had at the instigation of Mr. Briggs, undertaken to show the acquaintance of the prisoners with him, and the influence upon them of his paper, The Beehive. This was done by a number of witnesses, whose testimony was not even questioned by the defence. At last the prosecution rested, and Mr. Moser addressing the court, opened the defence.

He admitted the heinous nature of the outrage committed, its dangerous effects, the necessity for its summary punishment, but he insisted that there could be but one opinion as to the further necessity of punishing the real miscreants, and that Justice would only fail in her mission if the innocent suffered, and the guilty escaped; that Society could not afford to blindly look for victims for her revenge—much as Emily Pint had done—without discriminating between its real foes and superstitious culprits. He alluded to the fact that the previous trial had been held under the immediate influence of great excitement, when the startled city, blinded by its apprehension of some menacing convulsion sought too quickly the condemnation of any one that might satisfy its natural but unreasonable thirst for retaliation. The defence, he said, engaged itself to show that three of the prisoners were absolutely innocent, two doubtfully concerned in the outrage, while it freed itself absolutely from any contract to limit the amount of guilt properly to be affixed to Lorenzo Albertino Marchesa Polinck.

This announcement was heard with very different sensations in all parts of the court room, and it was received everywhere with interest, and for the most part, among those not personally concerned in the outcome of the trial, with approval. Popular sentiment had already changed, and the new aspect put upon the case received deliberate and rational attention throughout the city. It was not acceptable to Mr. Briggs, it left Tom Ratler dubious. The sudden concentration of guilt upon Polinck brought the strangest sort of grin to the face of Poniatowsky, while to the excepted man himself it summoned a tide of color that darkened his swarthy cheeks, and spread in encircling rings about his bull-sinewed neck. Helen Lorimer and Amato lost no word of the address, and to Miss Lorimer the hope of saving the unfortunate men—deluded, deceived, duped, and misused, grew stronger. Mr. Moser continued.

He said he would introduce a new name in the register of the accused, the name of a man whom it would be necessary to subpoena to the trial, one whom—after he had finished his work—he believed the industrious and learned District Attorney would find it incumbent upon him to place where he now saw the six prisoners at the bar, and that man was Peter Tolstoy Longtinsky. There was a perceptible stir in the audience. It began at a number of points, and it consisted of a variety of movements. Some people suddenly looked up, others shifted their positions, and whispered to their neighbors, some glared and seemed uneasy, many smiled and shook their heads, with a “I told you so,” expression, and two men got up and left the court house. One of these was Mr. Briggs, the other was Poniatowsky. Mr. Briggs went out to take precautions that Longtinsky should be placed under surveillance at once, and that his chance of escaping from the city should be prevented; Poniatowsky went out to tell Longtinsky of the new threat and to make new plans.

Longtinsky had kept his eye and ear—so to speak—on the trial. Poni had told him of every move, and many others too. He knew the danger that filled the air for him, and yet he did not stir. Riveted by a strange infatuation that his destiny was upon the eve of blossoming into the powers of control that he dreamed of, and which seethed through his dusky brain, and ran before him in beckoning panoramas of riches and eminence, he refused to flee the city, though each day was to make it more and more clear that his safety was elsewhere. And now this deliberate assault by name; the certainty of his arrest, and possible trial, if not as a principal as an instigator, a conspirator, would almost surely follow.

No one suspected the new evidence, and it might be too damaging. Longtinsky and Poni knew the real state of the case, and to Poni it was a fixed fact that Longtinsky would be tried for the crime. He knew his guilt, Longtinsky had confessed that. Poni held Longtinsky in no great esteem, but they had become intertwined in a plot for gain, for revenge. Poni would have liked to come into close quarters with Tom Ratler, and Longtinsky thirsted for the death of Helen Lorimer. Poni felt no too great confidence in Longtinsky’s loyalty, but at the minute he felt his life was essential for his own plans. So he hurried from the court room with the announcement of Mr. Moser in his ears, just as Mr. Briggs made his way to the police headquarters to direct the close watch of the editor of The Beehive preliminary to his subpoena and arrest.

Mr. Moser had finished his speech, and deferred the offering of his evidence, just as Poniatowsky entered the small room—editorial chambers and bed-room—where the ponderous editor was buried deep in the composition of a great leader. He burst impatiently into the room; “Come put up your ink and pens—the long road for you. Tinsky you’re a pinched man, Moser says you did it,” he cried. Longtinsky raised his head and a terrified look covered his face, but he overcame it, and twisting his chair around, he faced the excited Italian, and told him to take a seat and tell all he knew.

Poni not only told all he knew, but he added much more he did not know. He drew in the most alarming outlines the probable course of events, stopping at nothing that might unsettle the—to him—inexplicable inertia of the man before him. And yet in spite of his horrible forebodings, in which with sundry realistic gestures he tried to make the anarchist understand the unpleasant aspects of hanging, Longtinsky remained unmoved. His face did show momentary terror, but it vanished the instant he let his imagination dwell on the magnificent insurrection his irresistible appeals would bring about.

Suddenly he jumped to his feet, his ungainly figure making the effort more surprising; his misshapen mouth shaped itself into a strange smile, his little eyes glittered and his portentous ears seemed almost to extend themselves, as he seized the astonished informer by the shoulders, looked straight down upon him, and exclaimed;

“Poni, I will not leave. Never. Let them take me. It will be the sign for the great revolt. Already three bands of the faithful are ready to rise. One word and the new Era starts. Be ready. They can prove nothing. I will add this to the appeal here,” and he slapped his broad hand down upon the loose leaves of paper which bore his weekly message of discontent and upbraidings and exhortation, “Let it come, the Torch, the Dagger—but finally Victory.”

Poniatowsky stormed to his feet, maddened beyond endurance by this folly; the obsession of the man stupified him at times, he had been growing worse, Poni wondered if he was entirely sane;

“Damnation,” he cried, “Tinsky you’re a doomed fool. If you can’t see the way out of this I can. I’ll not pull a rope tighter. Jessie and I get out of this. Where’s the girl?”

Again the plotting mood returned to the editor, and his stalking craft seized the opportunity to fasten the brigand before him to his purpose and plots. A deep malevolence beguiled him; neither he nor Poni nor Jessie nor any one should leave the city. The hate he bore Helen Lorimer rose and stifled sense. At any rate, first her death, and—then—perhaps—perhaps—Flight!

He motioned to Poni to take the chair he had thrown against the wall in disgust. The man reluctantly obeyed. Longtinsky stood in front of him, and his words were spoken in a lower tone, with more hesitation and with brief pauses; “Poniatowsky,” it was seldom his listener had been addressed with so much ceremony, and he resented it, but remained silent, “I want you to take my place here—right here with Jessie—see everything is fixing for the outbreak; we have ammunition, dynamite, and the men are all drilled for the uprising. Let them take me, let them imprison me, convict me,” his voice was rising with a sort of wail that fairly disconcerted his hearer, “and then I give the word—our plans are laid, and you lead an assault on the courthouse—see—there will be Tom Ratler,” a curse passed from the lips of Poni, “and there will be Briggs, and—there will be—I know it—I know it—there will be Helen Lorimer. Remember your promise—she is dead and Jessie is all yours—Yes all yours. Let Bomber strike the houses at Carrara, and Putkof light the torches at the river sides—and then our men will gather—the men that lost the strikes—They have forgotten nothing—nothing—they will march on the armories—on the City Hall—there are two thousand ready. I have strong husky men and—I can arm them—I have two barges on the East River full of guns—full—You start!—Yes, they are there: they look like dirt scows, but their holds are full of guns. Madder is on one, Felix on the other; they hate the Mayor; he threw them over after the elections—Bomber has a cache of guns and powder at High Bridge and Putkof enough kerosene to burn a navy. We have a friend in the janitor of the armory at Thirty-fourth street. We can make that our headquarters; we can sweep the city—the start made, the rest is easy. You must stay—you must take my directions, keep things together and—remember Jessie is yours—and—wealth, money, pleasure—power,” he was speaking louder, faster, and Poni, dazed with the revelation of the underground, unsuspected combinations, the immensity of the plot, was dumb; “Here are the keys to this desk,” he handed Poni a bunch of keys, “in there are directions—the whole plan—work it out for me, Poni, for Jessie; I see their cursed scheme—arrest me and all is nipped—Ah! ha! they think so—but Poni—give them the lie—the slip. Come let me finish this,” pointing to the unfinished editorial “and to-night, we will go over everything and get all ready, and then let them take me—”

There was something almost maniacal in the man’s fever of desperation, as he revealed things he had never whispered before. In a moment he laid bare his big intrigues, and subterranean conspiracies. Poni was dumfounded; for once his nerve deserted him, he felt Longtinsky’s mental strength and silently he left the room, after a promise to return in the night, when Longtinsky would assemble also the others, and the plotters for the destruction of the City would complete their plans. Everything had been leading to this; the danger had been lowering; now with this new trial of the convicted men, with whose execution his—Longtinsky’s—preparations might have been further prolonged—with this new trial, and his dreaded Summons—his probable arrest—the cloud had broken, and nothing but resistance and the Power of Riot remained to be tried.

While Longtinsky thus shattered Poni’s dreams of escape from the spinning and tightening coil of circumstances, with a new bond of ambition, six plain clothes men—detectives—gathered in the street, and six more in the street beyond, and six upon Delancey and Grand streets, waiting for orders, to produce Longtinsky in court.

And that night the plotters came. There were Madder, a strong thick and undersized man, Felix a dark handsome Greek, Bomber a perverted American, tall and slender with a curling moustache which he kept waxed to the ends of its line-like length, and Putkof a Russian, glowering, silent, and dangerous. Longtinsky pulled out his papers from the drawer to which he had given Poni the keys, and sat among them, and went over everything. Poni of course was there too. The tough brigand was stupified with it all. His contempt for Longtinsky began to change into a devotional admiration and wonder. The man’s careful campaign, its parts and detail and the—monstrous audacity of it all!

Longtinsky talked and talked, his apathy of manner had vanished, the bulky frame shook with rage, and then the harsh voice ran on accentuating point after point. At times he lost command of the practical side of his Revolution, and he mounted into flights of empty and floundering eloquence. This was the old Longtinsky as Poni had known him, but the next minute he was outlining means and ways with the skill of a born commander. Every thing was rehearsed, suggestion from all sides heard; the reports were favorable, his confederates were sure of their men. They had blinded their eyes with promises, and infuriated them with denunciations. They would act together, and the distracted city would surrender. Besides the moment was auspicious; the military were for the most part away at some annual military practice in Chicago. When Longtinsky heard this he jumped to his feet, but instead of some voluble exclamation of pleasure, he just turned to Poni, and spoke swiftly and softly.

“Here is the man I leave to represent myself; if I am to be imprisoned consult with him. But Act, Act; leave nothing undone, and strike together, Poni at the Court House—Remember Poniatowsky to be THOROUGH—Bomber at Carrara, Putkof at the shipping, Madder and Felix where they are wanted.”

He sat down, and there was silence—and yet—had their ears not been deadened by the awful project that held them for the instant speechless, and Poni amongst them, enthralled with the, to him, utterly unaccountable magnitude of Longtinsky’s daring—had they not been so enthralled, they might have heard a faint groan somewhere above them as if in the ceiling itself. It came from Jessie. She had heard everything; she had heard her father’s threat during the day against Helen Lorimer, and she had heard Poni’s curse of her lover, and she had heard that her father was about to be arrested, and she had again seen the figures of the assembling officers of the law, from her attic porch.

Her mind had been excited and restless for weeks. Things she felt were drawing to a dreadful crisis. There had been goings and comings; silently at night; long in the depths of the night. She knew that men had slept in the little room which her father used for his work, and had left in the mornings, she knew that in the cellar where The Beehive was printed, there had been secreted strangers for days.

There was a sombre restlessness about Longtinsky; he had forgotten often to speak to her in the mornings as customary, and she heard him at night moaning—sometimes cursing—in his sleep, then shouting orders. Jessie became terrified; about her was a thickening mystery of anticipated terrors. And now;—she knew all—; in the crazy tenement where the walls were not so thick that patient and acute ears could not hear through them, there were also rents, and openings, and it was through one of these directly over their supposed concealment that Jessie, by removing a carelessly inserted block of wood, could see and hear the conspirators.

The next day Mr. Moser resumed his case. The court room was packed; the news that Longtinsky would be summoned, the probability of new sensational evidence, the increasing half-realized conviction that the case would go against the State; the comment—generally favorable, often enthusiastic, sometimes, and in some editorial quarters, sarcastic—upon the presence of Helen Lorimer; the sensation created by her handsome companion, the unknown quantity of the new evidence; all contributed to draw the people, and to add to the surprise that the Mayor was not in the city. For it was currently understood that he had interested himself in securing a new trial, and that this again had been accomplished through the intermediation of Miss Lorimer.

Everybody was on hand as the clock announced the hour for the court sitting, and as the judge took his seat, and the court attendants scanned the multitude for any infractions of the dignity of the place, and the crier shouted his unintelligible formula, time-honored and venerable, and always declaimed with the frantic impatience of indifference to its immemorial usage. The eyes of the constant visitors saw two new features in the court room; they were quickly noted by every one; the big shapeless figure of Longtinsky, and the singular elfin body of the boy Angelo Shimura. And curiously they were seen in juxtaposition. Longtinsky, in charge of the Sheriff sat to the left within the railing enclosure, not far from Mr. Moser, and the child sat at the left side of the lawyer. Thus brought into proximity the sombre, sullen, and disfigured face of the Anarchist, surmounting a short, thick, and sprawling form, appeared more conspicuously in the contrast furnished by the weird, long and somewhat cadaverous boy with his copious black hair, his strained eyes, and a pale face, on which glowed the suspicious carnation of ill health in its pallid cheeks.

None watched this strange waif, thrown upward in the waves of confusion and mischief, to rescue the innocent, with more love and solicitude than the noble hearted woman who felt the danger of the boy’s inexperience and his strangeness, and his alarm, in the midst of this multitude, and in the glaring light of the public action. Her heart truly grieved for him, and she trembled at the probable chance that his story would not be believed, and that the relentless process of cross-examination might confuse and intimidate him, and beneath its pitiless exactions his tale—vouched for in her moral certitude that he told the whole truth—would crumble away, and vanish, fruitless and unfulfilled.

“Angelo Shimura take the chair,” called out the clerk, and the hitherto immobile and inconspicuous body stirred quickly, and, admonished by Mr. Moser, who followed him to his ordeal, walked to the chair, or bench, was sworn and, concentrating his eyes upon Mr. Moser, awaited his examination. To Miss Lorimer’s and Amato’s surprise and great relief, the child seemed indifferent to his surroundings. He scarcely noticed them; a glance at the observant judge alone showed his realization of a singular position, while for one instant he raised his face and looked towards Helen Lorimer and Amato, who both encouraged him with a smile, and Amato pressed his hands together as if clasping the boy’s own. That passed in a flash, and the precocious child leaned forward as if really anxious for the beginning of his testimony, his big head with its pale brow seeming exaggerated in size, by the abundant hair covering it.

“Angelo,” said Mr. Moser in a low tone, “where were you born?”

“In New York,” the voice was astonishingly clear, and the words spoken almost without a foreign accent.

“Where are your parents?”

“Dead,” without a quiver of feeling.

“How then were you brought up? Where have you lived?”

“Andrea Bocaglia and Michiela Bocaglia took me home and fed me.”

“You lived with them?”

“Yes Sir.”

Mr. Moser turned to two figures at his side, and said; “Andrea and Michiela Bocaglia stand up,” and then to Angelo “Are these the persons you mean?”

Angelo laughed softly, “Yes; they are.” The disconcerted and perplexed couple looked at the boy with smiling faces, and took their seats.

“Angelo” continued Mr. Moser “How did you live with Andrea and Michiela Bocaglia?”

“I lived in the streets. They gave me food and I slept in a corner of the room.”

“Did you go to school while you lived in this way?”

“Sometimes Sir.”

Then followed question after question, showing the vagrant life of the child, his occasional weeks of attending school, his hours of wandering through the streets, selling papers, or matches, or shoe strings, his honest return of all the money he received to his foster parents, his own frequent hunger, his obedience, his longing for a better life—this told with a humble pathos that brought tears to the eyes of Helen Lorimer, and many others, in the huge audience—his meeting with a big man who gave him a book with pictures, and invited him to his home, where he did a little work about the house, and was paid for it, the good food he received in this house, from the man, and his daughter, who was very kind to him, and then with an almost preternatural grace and simplicity he told how his heart had grown to this man and he loved him, how he followed him, watched him, listened to him, and read—for he was precocious in this—his paper, which he said the man printed, and how he learned there—in the paper—that this man was going to free the people from slavery, and how he had one great enemy—here the boy became confused, and the blood surged to his cheeks, his eyes fell, and the tears ran down, and he wiped them away shamefacedly, as he turned his head aside, and covered his eyes with his arm. He refused to answer.

“What was the name of the great enemy of this man?” asked Mr. Moser coaxingly.

The boy was sobbing, and there was a murmur of sympathy in the crowd before him. Mr. Moser approached nearer, and only the prosecutor interfered to intercept his actual touching of the child, with his hand; “Angelo answer,” suddenly thundered the hitherto mildly persuasive questioner.

The boy uncovered his shrinking face, and whispered, “Miss Helen Lorimer.”

There was a wide spread motion in the audience, and some who were attending to Longtinsky saw his frame shiver, and his brows contract, and his fingers clench. His head fell forward on his chest.

“Is this man here in this room to-day?” continued Mr. Moser, his voice still high and resonant.

The boy looked at Longtinsky, and his face assumed the strangest expression; there was contrition there, and self-reproach one might have said, and then there followed it anger and contempt, and with it, flaring up in the same glow of temper a kind of pity. It was the face of an actor, the face of a fully developed human, of a man; something foreign in its complexity to the face of any child. The next instant Angelo had leaped to his feet, and pointing to Longtinsky shouted; “There he is.”

It was one of the crucial moments in the trial, and, as if with one impulse a tide of wondering and astonishment swept the people off their feet, and hundreds rose in their seats, craning forward in the direction of the pointed finger of the boy. And then something even more unexpected happened. The dramatic pitch was given its finishing intensity, for Longtinsky roused into some consciousness of the possibility of creating a sensation, and always inflated with the delusion of his importance, his mission, and his power, sprang to his feet, slapped himself on the breast, and swinging round from the judge, the lawyers, and the witnesses, to the audience also shouted; “Yes I am Longtinsky;” and in the voice, not ill adapted for oratorical effects, sounded his imposing, ungovernable, conceit.

It was all so unusual, and unlooked for, that a stupefaction seemed to seize the court officers, and even the judge, but with the reaction in the audience of a wave of applause, sense returned; the judge pounded his gavel, the attendants crushed Longtinsky into his chair, and Angelo falling back in his bench sat silent and excited.

From this point onward the interest and power of the trial deepened, developments followed fast, the picture of the operations of Longtinsky and his accomplices came back to the boy, and with a fierce restlessness and eagerness, and with unwonted skill, with picturesque words, he drew the successive scenes of the plot, and the plotters, and the impending dawn of the catastrophe, and the catastrophe itself, forgetting nothing, recalling names, dates, attitudes, incidents, until the seasoned judge gazed at him with admiration, and Helen Lorimer absorbed and almost breathless fastened her eyes upon him with a feeling of terror. It appeared to her too exact, too remarkable, too, so to speak, theatrical.

He rehearsed meetings of Longtinsky and Polinck and other men in the office of The Beehive. Inscrutable as it appeared this boy had been present at many of them. He had secreted himself in some instances behind boxes, trunks, and under tables. He confessed to a distracting dread that somehow he would lose the man whom he strangely loved—Longtinsky, and this arch plotter regarded him without suspicion. He had even invited him in to the room when the means of destroying the Settlement House were talked over.

He followed Longtinsky in the streets at night; followed him to many conferences and meetings elsewhere, though he made it clear that Longtinsky was unwilling to leave his office, and, like a spider in a web, feeling all the threads of his snare, living at its very centre, concealed, himself, and lived a subterranean life. He passed from point to point, drawing nearer and nearer to the last arrangements for the destruction of the House, and the placing of the bombs.

Here Mr. Moser proceeded with caution, getting all he could from the boy, and retracing his steps, as if to confuse the young witness, but never succeeding. The boy’s memory never flagged. His nervous force maintained his strength, and it was evident to Amato, how wisely Mr. Moser had acted in adding all the physical strength possible to the frail frame, by his summering him in the exhilarating north.

Helen Lorimer thought she detected a kind of overweening pride, almost a boastfulness in Angelo, as he felt the scenic pressure so to speak of the crowd’s attention, the absorption of the lawyers, the intentness of the prisoners, leaning over to catch his every word, and the growing dissatisfaction of the prosecutors, as he cleared the ground for the denouement of the last incendiarism of Longtinsky and his friend Polinck. For his narrative concerned them alone, and the men tried for their lives seemed almost absent in the repeated scenes he described of Longtinsky’s preparations.

The story had reached the point where the bombs were brought to Longtinsky’s office, and where a strange man whom Angelo said was not among the prisoners explained their make, and the method of their explosion. On that critical night the boy had been thrown out of Longtinsky’s house by Polinck, and had returned, creeping on all fours to the door of the editorial room—the apartment in Grand Street. It was a warmer night than customary, and a beating stream of rain flooded the city. Crouching at the door which was left unfastened, the boy, crazed with a diseased curiosity, and hungering for the safety of his patron, had slowly pushed it in, and, half protected against the rain, had overheard the last council.

The session of the court was drawing to a close for the day. Electric lights were beginning to flash in the streets, and the judge called the attention of Mr. Moser to the fact of the near adjournment. It was not unnoticed by that gentleman who desired to rest his witness, and begin on the next day the tremendous disclosure he had prepared. He bowed to the court and said;

“Your Honor I will take the witness from the stand, after asking him one more question,” and then advancing to Angelo, whose strained excited visage became with each added memory more and more enthusiastic and eager, he asked him;

“Angelo Shimura do you recognize the prisoners at the bar?” and addressing the judge “may I ask that the prisoners rise for the witness’ better inspection.” It was the first time that Mr. Moser had called attention to the prisoners at all.

The men were ordered to rise, and the six with alacrity stood up; Angelo also stood at the witness stand, and looked at them. Still exalted with his sense of eminence, the boy called off their names, in a clear musical voice, a voice that many had already noted as peculiarly distinct and pure;

“John Dalzell, Pedro Vinta, Alonzo Fabrizio, Charles Bingo, Fred Rinker, Lorenzo Polinck.”

“Angelo have you seen these men, the prisoners now before you, at the house of Longtinsky at any time?”

“No Sir, only Polinck.” There was some half smothered exclamations and the audience understood that the effective stroke was near at hand. The order of the day was however over. There was one more sensation to be recorded. The District Attorney and Mr. Moser conferred a minute, and then Mr. Meldexter stepped forward, and asked the court for the arrest and committal to jail, without bail, of the person of Peter Tolstoy Longtinsky. There was a short debate, and the judge assented to the retention. Longtinsky was a prisoner. The clerk announced the adjournment the people rose while the judge left the bench, and then the surge outward to the doors began, and then too Longtinsky turned to the white chairs of the empty benches, and saw there one figure watching him with a blanched face. It was Poniatowsky. Longtinsky raised his hand and spread the broad fingers over his head; the next instant he was roughly hustled away by guards, and Poni hurried away to tell Jessie her father was a prisoner. It gave him a singular elation. He was now Jessie’s protector. But the next instant he remembered the compact, and that night too he must meet Bomber, Putkof, Felix, and Madder, and the rest. Longtinsky had given the signal. Should they risk the awful adventure?

CHAPTER XIII

THE TRIAL (continued)

It had indeed been a curious study to the many watchers, the demeanor of Longtinsky under the ordeal of the day, and the astounding revelations thus taken from the mouth of a child. Many smiled at his complete blindness, some doubted it, others simply watched the man’s changing expression. There were times when Longtinsky gazed at the boy—who for his part seldom looked at him—with an absolute stupor of amazement; then he became scornful, and attempted cheap tricks of inattention and weariness, and less frequently he leaned forward fixing his blue eyes on the child, his face red with a tempest of rage, as if to disconcert and intimidate the inflexible inexorable little witness. Comments were numerous, and the gossiping groups of men, the lowering glances of many in the streets as they heard of Longtinsky’s arrest, the prodigious headlines of the evening papers, the covert allusions to it in the plays at the theatres and the manifest disturbance on the East Side where the police reported many brawls and muttered threats, betokened the excited and ominous train of interest.

It had been a matter of surprise to Helen Lorimer that her uncle seemed to avoid the trial, and made few references to it at their meetings. But on the day after Angelo Shimura had begun his testimony his interest was aroused, and something, peculiarly, almost anxious in his manner, amused Miss Lorimer and Amato as well. He wished to know how the evidence went and while he interrupted his informants with impatient comments upon the entire uselessness of the trial, he took some pains to find out exactly the drift of Mr. Moser’s examination of Angelo and what other witnesses might be called on the side of the defense.

The day succeeding the first day of Angelo’s testimony promised important developments. The boy had made an extraordinary witness, the tenacity of his memory astonished the oldest court attendants, and his impassive way, lightened up now and then with some burst of excitement, kept his hearers in a pleasant state of expectation that conduced to his popularity. His picture appeared in the papers and he was the talk of the moment. Already it was half discerned that Longtinsky and Polinck had endeavored to cover their tracks by complete secrecy and that the men apparently involved with them were ignorant accomplices. The doors of the court room were early besieged, and as different actors in the trial passed in, a rush forward of the multitude occurred, animated by a wild curiosity to see the boy Angelo, for his name passed from mouth to mouth, and, as crowds will, every arrival was hailed as the object of their interest. At last he did come with Mr. Moser, and his ineffective childish appearance, his slight malformation, and his oblique eyes proved disappointing.

“Looks like a simpleton,” was the remark of a big man who almost seized the boy, as Mr. Moser pushed him aside and shoved Angelo ahead of him.

“Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings God has ordained wisdom” was the quick and loud retort of Mr. Moser, whose sally was cheered.

Within the court room every one seemed in nervous suspense. Animation prevailed among the attendants, and the streaming and crushing crowds were nervously excited. This tension became contagious. It was felt as an atmospheric disorder, and Helen Lorimer and Amato no less than the most sensational news monger acknowledged its disconcerting influence. The judge was early on the bench, the jurors were unusually prompt, the lawyers in their place, and the prisoners as they marched in, stolidly looking neither to the right nor to the left, when seated, bore an expression of expectation, indeed among most of them it revealed itself in smiles of confidence. They had not failed to note the overwhelming importance of the boy, Angelo’s testimony, and with them too the increasing fear was the boy’s power to withstand the cross-examination, and to vindicate his own credibility.

Slowly the great doors were shoved together and the clamorous and pressing throng without were shut off. The clerk stood up and repeated his formula, the judge rapped impatiently and summoned Mr. Moser to renew his case. One figure was not there; Longtinsky was in prison, and Poniatowsky, again among the crowd felt that the moment of action was upon him, and his conspirators.

“Angelo Shimura take the stand,” called out the clerk, who again swore the strange waif, thus suddenly thrown upward to confound the state and the law.

The examination had reached the stage where the witness was expected to detail the incidents of the night when the fire and explosions occurred. Everything had been carefully leading up to that; the repeated conferences between Longtinsky and the bomb maker and Polinck, and the final assignment of a date for the destruction of the Settlement House, and the breaking out of the Revolution.

Pitilessly Mr. Moser gathered the evidence together from the lips of the extraordinary boy as to the treasonable plots of Longtinsky, and still in it all the persons of the prisoners, excepting Polinck, never appeared. There were other men at the conferences and many others unrevealed somewhere on the outskirts of the grand project, but those men who had actually received their condemnation to death for murder and arson were never named. It stupified the hearers; the amazement grew. And Mr. Moser skillfully accented and accentuated it dwelling again, in his examination, upon the possibility of the boy’s mistake, calling his attention to the prisoners, pointing them out, calling them by name and each time gaining from the alert child a fresh denial of their complicity. Mr. Meldexter and his assistant were visibly non-plussed. Their case seemed to vanish under the breath of this boy into a veriest skein of smoke; their fabric of proof tumbled to pieces before their eyes.

And Mr. Moser standing close to Angelo asked him to tell all he knew about the night of the disaster. There was a breathless silence. Almost a thousand eyes were fixed upon the immobile child who for a moment closed his own as if to recall the vivid scene. Perhaps he purposed too to make his story more telling. He began slowly opening his eyes and staring at Mr. Moser.

“It was a eveening, veery—that Mr. Polinck and Mr. Longtinsky came with the man—who put up the bombs. They came in the long room behind the press. It was dark and they sat at a table with—one light. They spoke low—Oh so low! but I back of a board on the side—and I could hear Mr. Longtinsky say—‘To-night—To-night. Get Alonzo Fabrizio, and Charles Bingo—They will carry these—to the Settlement House. Wrap them up like a long roll—and tell them they are ROLLS of PAPER.’”

People stretched forward their heads to hear the words; one of the lawyers for the state rose from his chair, and watched the boy; the judge turned towards him more directly, and the jurymen leaned forward with pale grave faces.

“Go on,” urged Mr. Moser as Angelo looked at him as if for encouragement, “What next.”

“So Mr. Polinck—he go away and come back with Alonzo Fabrizio and Charles Bingo. Mr. Longtinsky—he say—they take the ROLLS of PAPER to the Settlement House for Mees Lorimer, and they go out with them. Then they come a-back and say—How to get in the House?—and Mr. Longtinsky say it was open—all open—all unlocked and they go out again.

“Then Mr. Polinck veery much astonished; he ask how the House could be open and Mr. Longtinsky speak so veery low and soft that I put my head out of the board and hear heem say—the Janitor leave it open—and then I could not hear what Mr. Longtinsky say—but Mr. Polinck—he laugh, and Mr. Longtinsky laugh, and by an by—they go out, and then I go out, and come behind running along on the other side of the street.” Again a pause. “Well what next? Is that all?” and Mr. Moser addressing the child looked about him, and back of him at the sea of eager faces.

“Then come everything Sir. Mr. Polinck and Mr. Longtinsky—they come to the men—out of the House—”

“What men?” interrupted the lawyer.

“Why Sir, Alonzo Fabrizio and Charles Bingo.”

“The men who had carried the rolls there as you said?” questioned the lawyer, his face turned away from the boy and fixed upon the District Attorney, who sprang to his feet and objected, but was overruled.

“Yes Sir, those men,” answered Angelo.

“Go on.”

“Mr. Longtinsky say to the men—the men who put the ROLLS in the House to go away, and come back with other men and he give them some names, that I could not hear—and then Sir, Mr. Longtinsky and Mr. Polinck go in the HOUSE TOGETHER.”

“Now Angelo where were you?”

“I was behind a pillar at the door of the House and when they go in, I go in too.”

“Then what?”

“Mr. Longtinsky and Mr. Polinck take the ROLLS, and carry them into the cellar, and then Mr. Longtinsky fix-a-a-a-long a-a cord—strin-like—to the ROLLS, and Mr. Polinck, he make a piles of paper and things, and then Mr. Longtinsky say he go away for bizness.”

“Did you stay in the cellar or go away with Mr. Longtinsky?”

“I follow Mr. Longtinsky—always follow heem.”

“Did Mr. Longtinsky or Mr. Polinck see you there?”

“No Sir! it was always dark, and I mek no noise, and keep-a-out of sight. I Sir like a leetle mouse.”

A titter swept over the crowd, as a breeze might ripple the dark face of an engulfing wave—it was the wave of a darkening rage, the fierce threat of revenge and contempt. Poniatowsky—still there—felt it—there would be short shrift for Longtinsky, he knew, unless he and his men struck surely, quickly, relentlessly. Could they do it? The titter vanished with the sound of the judge’s gavel.

“Well what then?” murmured Mr. Moser gazing at the boy with a curious earnestness.

“We stand—Mr. Longtinsky and mee—mee out of sight—some time outside, and then the men come-a-back with other men—”

“What men?” broke in Mr. Moser.

“Why Sir, the men who carry the ROLLS.”

“You mean Alonzo Fabrizio and Charles Bingo?”

“Objected to,” shouted Mr. Meldexter.

“Sustained,” ponderously sighed the judge.

“Angelo,” again said Mr. Moser, “Tell us what men came when you and Mr. Longtinsky stood at the doors of the Settlement House, and had left Mr. Polinck inside.”

“Why Sir, Fabrizio and Bingo came with other men, and they saw Mr. Longtinsky there and he say—to them, to go inside the House and to stay there—that Mr. Polinck wanted them, and to come out when Mr. Polinck say-a so—”

“Among those men were there—”

Mr. Meldexter was on his feet in a second. Mr. Moser recognized the danger. Turning to the little Japanese, he spoke again; “What men did you see among those other men who came with Alonzo Fabrizio and Charles Bingo?” and his side glance at his opponent, after the usual manner of a lawyer’s smiling effrontery, seemed to say “does that suit you?”

“There was a-a-many men and there was,” the boy looked at the prisoners which gesture made the district attorney and his men laugh a little, just a little, enough to show their disgust; “there was a John Dalzell, Pedro Vinta, and Fred Rinker. I see them—all Sir.”

“Now Angelo Shimura, tell all that followed that night.” And Mr. Moser closed his eyes, folded his arms in front of him, and swayed gently as if he expected to enjoy the recitation.

“Mr. Longtinsky hurry home—he almost run—and I follow heem. He get in the door and slam it behind heem and lock it-and-a-a-I could not geet in too. I seet outside and I there a leetle while, and I hear big noise, I run out and many—many men and women run out too, and then another big noise, and we run to the noise, and it came from the Settlement House, and then we run faster and big crowds—all aroun—I push thro, and see flames bursting up—shooting away up Sir, many men scrambling out of the—holes—at the windows below—”

“Stop,” Mr. Moser opened his eyes, and appearing much confused said, “Holes!—Holes! Do you mean the area ways in the basement?”

“Yes Sir—I mean that” no response, and the boy hurried on. “And then came the police and they slam away and push back the crowd, and then another bigger noise—Oh! so big! and it blow out the side of the house, and the people get off—quick—and then come the engines—and then more noise and the fire geet in another house, and then more police and—I run back to Mr. Longtinsky—”

“Did you find Mr. Longtinsky?”

“No Sir—he shet up house—I no get in and so stay all night in the streets, and the next day I see you at the House and you tek me away and I tol you all.”

There were a few more questions, but only one that particularly attracted the attention of the audience, and of the court; it was the last Mr. Moser asked;

“Angelo Shimura, you are a Japanese boy?”

“Yes sir.”

“How did you understand these men—Longtinsky, Polinck and the others; did they speak in English?”

“No Sir, they speak a most in Yeeddish.”

“Do you speak Yiddish?”

“No Sir,” the attorney and his men were on their feet, “but I understan’ it.”

“Let us see,” said Mr. Moser reflectively, “Is the court interpreter here?”

A dull looking short man appeared and said he was the court interpreter and was so identified by the clerk. He was requested to say something in Yiddish in the boy’s hearing and Angelo was told to translate it. The experiment was made and the little Japanese quickly gave the right meaning. After some more illustrations the judge said he thought the fact of the boy’s understanding Yiddish was fully proven. Then Angelo was excused by Mr. Moser, and handed over to the district attorney. There was a stir through the great assemblage and many feared for the little fellow. The apprehension was unnecessary. The boy’s tenacity was like that of a vise. He forgot nothing.

He did not fence with the smart lawyer but he confounded him by his sincerity, and the ordeal served the remarkable purpose of proving the boy’s precocity and self-assurance, so that he could not be regarded as a dressed and drilled instrument of the defence. It was not long before Mr. Meldexter excused him; he was making things worse for the state. There was a certainty in Shimura’s remembrance like the inevitable action of a machine. It was observed by the district attorney, who intended to impeach the boy’s evidence on the ground that he had learned his lesson too well. The plea would hardly do.

There could be no gainsaying that the boy made an almost unimpeachable impression. Many were the glances of satisfaction exchanged between Helen Lorimer and Amato as Angelo showed his nerve and steady frankness.

As Shimura stepped from the bench Mr. Meldexter suddenly, as his face brightened with some unexpected suggestion, asked him to resume the chair for a minute. The boy wonderingly returned, and as if expecting some difficult ordeal prepared for him by the lawyer. Mr. Meldexter was smiling, and this hypocrisy roused the boy’s friends to a greater fear of danger.

“You say Angelo Shimura that the Settlement House was open that night, that the rolls of paper were carried there by Bingo and Fabrizio, and in your direct examination by Mr. Moser you said that Mr. Longtinsky told Mr. Polinck that the House would be open. Did you see the House open when the men carried away the Rolls there?”

“No Sir I deed not. I was at Mr. Longtinsky bit when I come there-a-a-wit Mr. Longtinsky the door was open, and the Mr. Bingo and Mr. Fabrizio come-a-a out.”

“You did not know that the door was not broken open?”

“The door was not broken Sir but—open like-a-a—” the boy raised his eyes and looked around the huge chamber, searching for an illustration, “—like a that door open now Sir,” and he pointed down the corridor before him to the court room doors, one of which then swung inward and admitted—Theodore Lorimer! His gesture was followed both by Mr. Meldexter and Mr. Moser. Their glance caught Mr. Lorimer’s attention, and those near at hand afterwards said Theodore Lorimer’s face paled. Both of the lawyers turned again to the witness.

“You said something about hearing Mr. Longtinsky say to Mr. Polinck that the janitor would leave the House open. Did you not?”

“Yes Sir—he say-a-so—he—Mr. Longtinsky.”

“Do you know the janitor of the Settlement House or the man who was the janitor?”

“Yes Sir—veery well. He-a-sit-a-ther now” and the boy standing pointed to a man concealed behind Mr. Meldexter. Mr. Meldexter shuffled impatiently, and then after a moment’s silence told Angelo to leave the bench. The boy took refuge at the side of Mr. Moser who received him with great approval.

“John Bunn to the chair,” called out the clerk after prompting by Mr. Meldexter. The man whom Angelo had pointed out as the janitor of the ill fated Settlement House, rose and took the seat of the witness, and also the oath. He was an ordinary type of serving man, perhaps a German, stolid, unmoved by his surroundings and uncompromisingly serene.

“John Bunn you are, or were, the janitor of the lately destroyed Settlement House were you not?”

“Yees Sir I vas.”

“How was it that the house over which you had charge was left open on the night of its destruction—or Sir—please be careful in answering—” Mr. Moser had risen partly to object, “or was it open that night at all?”

The man folded his arms, leaned back, and stared at the lawyer, as if to assure him that he was ready and able to answer the question, and in no way disturbed at the consequences—and, as he began his answer, the figure of Theodore Lorimer stepped forward in the aisle, and something straining and anxious came into his eyes. Few failed to recognize that the question might prove critical, and Mr. Moser stood at his chair as if to intercept some unexpected blow.

“It vas offen.”

“Were you there on the night of the burning?”

“I vas not.”

“How Sir, if the Settlement House was in your custody was it left open and you not there?”

John Bunn was silent for a moment. He too had caught sight of Mr. Lorimer standing now much farther down the aisle, so far indeed that persons afterwards averred he raised his hand slightly, and as if to catch the attention of the witness, and opened and closed it slowly. The witness hesitated; he began to speak, and looking from the lawyers to Mr. Lorimer and back again at the lawyers seemed in deep perplexity. At that instant a court attendant touched Mr. Lorimer on the shoulder motioning him to a seat. But that gentleman passed again to the rear of the court room, and, with his withdrawal John Bunn recovered his voice.

“Eet vas dees vay. I leef de House offen because I vas a—told to leef it offen.”

“Who told you to leave it open?” came the remorseless question. Amato and Miss Lorimer leaned forward; here was the suspected play of the element in her own ranks that had helped—or wished to help, for its own purposes—the revolutionary agitators. It had never been understood why the House was unprotected the night of its assault. The janitor—this same John Bunn—had refused to explain his absence, and he had been summarily discharged—in fact he had soon absented himself from the city; he could not be found, and his appearance here was a surprise to Miss Lorimer, to Mr. Moser. To the question of Mr. Meldexter the man returned a fixed stare almost as if he did not understand him. Mr. Meldexter repeated the question, and added “Miss Lorimer gave you no such order?” Again no answer, only the stare and a stubborn shrugging of the shoulders. The District Attorney approached the witness, and raised his finger threateningly; “Do you refuse to answer this question?”

The man turned to the judge who had wheeled round in his chair to notice him, and said “Must I answer?” The judge nodded. The man recovered his equanimity; he had made up his mind. “No Mees Lorimer gif me no such ordee. Mr. Theodore—he gif it to me—”

Amato turned to look at his companion. She was pale, so very pale that the young man thought he should ask her to leave the room. But she refused to go; her clenched hands were pressed to her bosom, her wan look told her distress, and her lips compressed, as if almost to stifle a cry of misery, were also pale. Quickly she released one hand and laid it upon Amato’s, and half moaned; “Wait.”

The answer of John Bunn was a bomb that shattered some theories and raised many questions. The answer incidentally was accompanied by the scarcely apparent opening and closure of the court room door and the disappearance of Mr. Lorimer himself. Perhaps but one pair of eyes noticed his inaudible exit, those eyes were in the head of John Bunn. Mr. Moser had his turn of astonishment, and Mr. Meldexter observed his confusion with satisfaction. It half looked if this evidence was to be trusted that Mr. Theodore Lorimer—a leader in the rich and aristocratic circles of the city, a notable in Carrara—was himself an accomplice, and the thought imparted to Mr. Moser a momentary shock. What revelations might be expected from Longtinsky, where was the trail leading?

“Mr. Bunn” it was the sharp voice of the district attorney, “did you receive an order from Mr. Lorimer by word of mouth or in writing?”

“Mister Lorimer come to mee and say so.”

“Did Mr. Lorimer offer you any inducements for this betrayal of your trust?”

“Vat you meen? Money?”

Mr. Moser had recovered his senses, he was on his feet shouting “Objected to, immaterial, incompetent, and irrelevant.”

“Sustained,” hesitated the judge, adding, “at least at present.”

Again Mr. Meldexter; “Did you see the prisoners at the bar enter the Settlement House on the night when it was burned down?”

“No Sir I deed not. I vas not there,” almost shouted the witness.

“Did you know why the House was to be left open; did Mr. Lorimer say why you should leave it unprotected?”

An objection was made and sustained; Mr. Lorimer at present was not on trial. Mr. Meldexter handed the witness over to Mr. Moser who, after a moment’s inspection of the man, declined to cross-examine. The evidence had no bearing on the guilt or innocence of the men at the bar. But to Mr. Meldexter it served the vital purpose of revenge; if Miss Lorimer, through her attorney secured the release of the men previously condemned, he—Mr. Meldexter—had fastened a dangerous suspicion upon her family, as collusive in the desperate act for which they were tried. Would Miss Lorimer care to see the matter through to its bitterest results? Already a court summons had been made out for the appearance of Mr. Theodore Lorimer as witness; Mr. Meldexter wanted him.

More policemen were called and a renewed effort made to show that the prisoners were caught red-handed—as it were—coming out of the burning House, but this evidence was somewhat shaken by Mr. Moser’s cross-examination, whereby he showed a great difference in the opinions of the witnesses as to where exactly they had seen the men. It gave the impression of great confusion at the time, and made it clear that of the many men who had been seen running from the House many might have been in the place for purposes of rescue and assistance. The boy Shimura had made it pretty plain that Longtinsky and Polinck were the perpetrators of the deed and the others the merest stool pigeons.

Finally came the time for the summing up, and the day closed with the promise of both sides that they would complete their pleas the next day in time for the judge to make his charge and for the surrender of the case to the jury. Slowly with much whispering and open comment, the great throng dispersed. Five left the court room with strange conflicting thoughts. They were Helen Lorimer, Mr. Moser, Mr. Briggs, Tom Ratler, and Poniatowsky. Helen Lorimer thought she saw the treacherous hand of her uncle in another matter perhaps dearer to her than the safety of the Settlement House; Mr. Briggs was dumbfounded with a new sensation of danger to the commonwealth; Tom was thinking of making away with Jessie now that her father was so desperately involved in the thickening perils; and Poniatowsky saw the moment near at hand when his ripened plans must be put in motion. Mr. Moser felt the pressure of an ominous dread.

Surely of these five Miss Lorimer was to be pitied. The stunning disclosure—although she could scarcely believe it—had wounded her beyond all estimate. The revolting meanness of it, the shameless perfidy, the cruel forgetfulness and wickedness of it, the harsh sense of betrayal and desertion—Oh! how it made her value the earnest love of her friend; she turned to him now as a protector, as something golden and true, loyal and unswerving—these things stung and wearied her.

She was silent almost all through their return to Carrara, and when her home was reached she asked if her uncle was there. The servant told her Mr. Lorimer had left in the morning and had returned an hour before. Amato waited at her side and she turned and said, “You will take dinner with us?” and then, as if in an impulse of affection, “Please do.” Amato felt her grief. His own heart bled for her, and his indignation rose steadily as he contemplated the heartlessness that had wounded her—and yet it seemed all so incredible—perhaps a mistake. He told her so. She thanked him and together they went up the marble stairway, leading to the stately dining-room, and there—coming towards them with a hand valise in his hand, a summer overcoat thrown over his arm was—Theodore Lorimer.

For one instant Helen Lorimer surveyed him, not with entreaty on her lips, not with expostulation, not with protesting confidence. She KNEW, that moment when their eyes encountered, and he shrank like a cowering animal from her searching inquiry, that he was GUILTY, that he knew moreover that he had been revealed, that his name had been published before the world as a culprit and a traitor—the Brother of her Father. SHE KNEW IT. Nay; she knew more; he contemplated flight; he was about to become a fugitive. It was best so. That house, that city, would be too small now for him and her. Let him be forgotten. Oh!—but her divination ran further, deeper—it was he that separated from her the man she had loved; his pride, his arrogance, his love of caste, and now how abject he seemed! It was amazing how much she understood that moment, as if the fire of some supernatural revelation had flashed upon him, and laid him bare to her. There are such psychologic moments. Every one has experienced them.

Amato watched her. It was wonderful to see the muteness of her pain. No word, only that fixed gaze, with a rising color in her cheeks. And Mr. Lorimer said nothing. He fled before that stern silent indignation. He was eager to get away, eager to escape a public ordeal, that would have strangely humiliated him before his own niece, before the man whom he had expelled from that house, because he felt his own blood was—a better sort!

And yet there might have been explanations. Theodore Lorimer had acted according to a principle. He was not a bad man in the moral sense. His business instincts and his career in business had been unimpeachable. His kindness to his sister and niece had been perfect. He was the victim of a conservative and class pride. He had thought to destroy the vicious activity of the radicals, to save his family from any further pernicious—as he deemed it—sympathy with the Abyss, to kill for once and all his niece’s infatuation to regenerate the slums. It was a foolish deed; but not incomprehensible. He had played a dangerous game and lost.

The destruction of the Settlement House had not disturbed Helen Lorimer’s determination to keep on at her work, and the men—to be dealt with summarily, innocent or guilty, as Lorimer thought, for an example—were to escape. The whole fabric of his weak, unstable, and cruel plan had failed. He had not been alone; he had confederates, abettors, men of the same stamp of feeling; men with the same egoistic idea. One shred of honor remained to him. He would not expose them. He would take the burden of his dishonor and bare the execrable shame of it, alone.

The man hurried down the broad stairway followed by Helen who stepped rapidly forward to the top of the broad descent. At the bottom he turned and looked back at her—and yet no word between them. His face was convulsed with misery. For one moment a tide of compassion swept over the woman gazing there at him, and seeing through him the ulterior ruin of a life. Amato crept forward too, catching the epic intensity of this wordless interview.

The next instant he was gone; an automobile already waited at the foot of the terraces of steps, and in another minute the hoarse creak of the chauffeur’s horn sounded drearily and—as it seemed to Helen—like a human cry distorted into an unintelligible and animal wail. The next she stood at Amato’s side and he lifted her face and saw that it had blanched to the pallor of death. She leaned heavily upon him; she would have fallen; he caught her and led her to a sofa. She smiled at his solicitude, but her great eyes looked at him despairingly—their bitterness of woe made his heart bleed. He felt so helpless! But the strong heart conquered, the buoyant spirit rose from its humiliation, the challenging splendor of her beauty returned, and slowly—slowly—the intrepid resolve to bear all things well, to suffer without murmur, and still to pursue her own noble purposes unchanged, also returned.

She rose and held Amato’s hands a moment in her own; he felt their pressure. A few escaped tresses of hair hung upon her forehead, and the breath from her parted lips came quickly. Her voice was low, and as she spoke she looked upward, so that the white column of the neck revealed its softly blue venations, and the eyelids drooped over beseeching eyes;

“Amato it was Christ’s words ‘In your patience possess ye your Souls.’” She wavered an instant, then she dropped his hands, and now with bowed head, the spread white fingers of her hands pressed upon her breast she left him stunned and sorrowing. He followed her a few steps, but she swept from him noiselessly and quickly. He stood irresolute a few moments, turned, descended the stairway, and left the house.

Later he returned. Helen came to the dinner, and though she was more silent she evinced her usual graciousness; her paleness faintly touched with color added to her strange beauty. She talked with less animation: she seemed to invite his confidences, and tempted him to tell them of his sojourn in Europe.

Julieta remarking the absence of her uncle asked; “Where is Theodore?”

The deep eyes gazed a little wearily, Amato thought, at his vacant place and the answer, uttered without a tremor, came from her lips; “Mother, Uncle has left the City.”

CHAPTER XIV

THE GREAT RIOTS

It was impossible to admit the crushing mob that besieged the court room the next day. Forensic skill has always appealed to the American mind, and the duel of eloquence and argument, which was expected, would have awakened the curiosity of a far less apathetic public. As it was, the court officers, the lawyers, witnesses, principals, and a few favored auditors—among them Helen Lorimer, Amato, Mr. Briggs—were admitted quietly at another entrance, one leading into halls and exits upon Centre Street, removed from the approaches from Chatham Street and the City Hall.

When the doors at last swung open, a stormy crowd rushed in, and filled to overflowing, in a short time, the large accommodations, and yet beyond the doors clamored and struggled an even larger impatient, unsatisfied and vociferating throng. It required some rude force to eject a section of this crowd which had unadvisedly forced its way into the court room. Amid adjurations, entreaties, threats, and cries of derision, the surplus was expelled; the doors were then closed, and the multitude awaited the approach of the judge. He was announced by a toll upon a bell, and the immense assemblage rose together with the sound of a rising wind, with all those within the rail, standing until the Clerk had repeated his form of words—uttered perhaps at this thrilling moment with more expressive intonations—and the judge had gravely sunk into his chair. A few minutes’ consultation, an uneasy flitting to and fro of clerks and messengers, the bending together of legal heads in conference, the shuffling of papers, momentary short announcements, rulings by the judge, and then Mr. Meldexter arose, and facing the judge, told of his inability to serve a summons upon Mr. Theodore Lorimer, as that gentleman had suddenly absented himself from the city.

The evidence of John Bunn the previous day, as to Mr. Lorimer’s apparent intrigue with the anarchistic demagogues had been fully understood. It created a new, terrible, sensation. To the dangerous plans of Poniatowsky and his associates it proved helpful. It engendered a deeper hatred of the class, which these men said, thus attempted to lure them into a trap and actually prompted them to crime—in order to secure the vindictive denunciation and revenge of society which this same class was supposed to be so adorably devoted to, which it so righteously defended, of which it was the great moral ornament. And to Longtinsky’s views of Miss Lorimer it seemed to add particular force. Was not this Mr. Lorimer her uncle? It was all of a piece. Her pretentious benevolence was a still darker scheme for the extermination of the radicals. Of course such a perversion of meaning became current only among the irreconcilables, but it even shook the confidence of her humble friends.

And among the conservatives this exposure produced an effect bordering upon panic. It placed them in a ridiculous position. It allied them with the worst enemies of decency. It overwhelmed them with contempt. The repudiation of Mr. Lorimer’s act and an almost fierce anger for it, appeared in the organs of the conservatives, and Miss Lorimer’s instigation to this was not wanting. The night after her uncle’s flight she had sat up writing and preparing a statement, communicated to the papers for the next day’s issues, disclaiming the act of Mr. Lorimer, and displaying her own sorrow and humiliation that the shameless deed had proceeded from her household. It was a quick, skillful move. It cleared her in the eyes of all honest, right judging men. It met the eyes of the Mayor who had heard of the whole episode in the trial, and heard too later, of Mr. Lorimer’s escape. He held the paper a long time in his hands reading and rereading the statement of Helen Lorimer. He wondered if he might return. HE, TOO, HAD BLUNDERED. On the day of the summing up of the case the Mayor had come back to New York. He was in the City Hall when Mr. Meldexter addressed the court.

It was impossible that some trace of elation should not color his feelings that morning, mingling with a real sympathy for Miss Lorimer and, mingling too with the flaming upward of his love and a better hope.

When Mr. Meldexter made the announcement of Mr. Lorimer’s disappearance there was a considerable straining of necks, and focussing of eyes upon Miss Lorimer and her friend. Amato seemed more conscious of this inspection than Helen. She did not resent the inquisition. She was grave and undisturbed. Many thoughts, far removed from all the occurrences about her kept her mind busy, and perhaps quickened the pulsations of her heart. At any rate the ferreting eyes were not rewarded with any display of confusion, and soon their repulse sought a compensation in the proceedings before them, after a warrant for Mr. Lorimer’s arrest had been signed by the judge.

Then began the struggle. Mr. Moser rose for the defense. His manner was suave, insinuating, and deferential, at first. He pointed out the disadvantage of his position, the inevitable prejudices he confronted, his solicitude for the State’s welfare, and his fixed desire to be just. The word stirred him to a broader flight of rhetoric, and he drew a picture of Justice in a great Commonwealth. The theme offered many advantages of elaboration; it particularly helped him to disarm criticism, when he affirmed the rights of the poorest as well as of the highest before the majesty of the blindfolded Genius that made no distinctions between the master and his servant, in her solemn and righteous adjudication.

Mr. Moser dropped his demeanor of apology. He began to become assertive, a little defiant, and finally scornful. Were these unfortunate men to be hurled into eternity to satisfy the Juggernaut of a remorseless public vengeance? Then came analysis and description; he was merciless in his derision of the police who must find scapegoats for their satisfaction; he poured forth the vials of his wrath upon Longtinsky, dwelling with effective emphasis on his secrecy, his turpitude, his impenetrable selfishness, his preposterous vanity—and then, moving softly from point to point, weaving his allusions with facts, coloring his facts with emotion, he came—as if stupefied by his own discovery—upon the boy—the little Japanese wonder—Angelo Shimura.

Ever cautious and apprehensive he drew a wonderful picture of Japanese mentality, the precocity of their children, the steadiness of their nervous temperament, and then in an entertaining narrative style described his meeting with the marvellous child whose evidence he begged now to rehearse. He had been excellent throughout. Here he surpassed himself. The note of pathos was not overstrained, and the claims of indignation not ignored. He dwelt in corroboration of his belief in the boy upon his absolute consistency—and he was not loth to express his wonder at the singular reticence, so to speak, of the district attorney’s cross-examination of this witness. He depicted in picturesque terms the boy’s strange yet beautiful devotion to his benefactor, and how still more strangely his devotion became the instrument of justice. All depended upon him. Believe him and the innocence of three of the prisoners was proven, the contributory guilt of two others revealed, the absolute conviction of one—the vile instrument of Longtinsky—only possible.

He ran over this state of things several times, throwing a softened light upon the unhappy men who had been dragged into the toils and nets of an arch-villain but, turning the glare of his exposure upon the unspeakable Longtinsky. And then when he had thus left on the minds of the jury only the overwhelming impression of this man’s guilt, he swept into a higher region of reflection—and he went there guided by Helen Lorimer, whose own words fell upon her ears with an unexpected freshness. He drew a picture of the State rocking between the struggles of two parties, he dwelt on the dangers of mistakes, the immitigable contest in the advancing process of political change, between a dangerous demagoguery, insane, violent, ruthless, and the preservative principles of property, a stage of civilization attained only through centuries of persistent effort against the confiscatory violence of kings, barons, and conquerors; and now again endangered by a reckless appeal to prejudice and passion, luring on into revolt, the blind forgetful populace, whose own rights and opportunities would disappear in the seething ocean of unrest, anarchism, and spoliation.

Mistakes in justice, the condemnation of the innocent, the surrender to popular clamor of the guiltless, a careless control of our own resentment, would only jeopardize order and bring on a blind mutiny, in which the institutions of society would disappear—destroyed by its own imprudence. The lawyer made his point well, and, advancing to the jury forcibly challenged their own sense of security, if, in this case, they failed to do justice.

Mr. Moser was listened to with wonder and delight—he was amazingly successful with the audience. Mr. Meldexter congratulated him as he closed, and as he opened his own case for the people, continued his congratulations with a more formal tribute to the greatness of his rival’s effort. He warned the jury against the blandishments of rhetoric, and asked for their sober unbiassed judgment of the evidence—reiterating slowly their solemn pledges to abide by that for the Truth’s sake! Mr. Meldexter was not an orator, nor did he possess the art of limpid and entertaining discourse, but he was shrewd, raspingly cynical, and bright in argument. He saw of course the point of attack,—the Japanese boy’s story—and on that he expended his skill, against that he launched his batteries of sarcasm; had this remarkably well-drilled child told the truth? Did he care whether he told the truth or not? How did he know that the prisoners had not assisted in setting the House afire? He had left the place with Longtinsky before the explosion. In that time what had happened? Bingo and Fabrizio certainly carried the instruments of destruction to the House, the other men had been sent for, Polinck and they were there together engaged—perhaps with different degrees of intelligence—in the work of destruction. They had been caught by the police red-handed. That they had never been seen by the boy at Longtinsky’s conferences—assuming that he told the truth, assuming even that he was at these conferences at all—proved nothing, least of all their innocence.

The facts must be reasonably interpreted, they must be interpreted by Common Sense—no distortion springing from a neurotic fancy, lodged in the deformed body of a Japanese infant should be allowed to distract their—the jury’s—mind. These men were known to Longtinsky, they were birds of one feather; this precious sneak of a boy knew their names and recognized them as members of the plotting fraternity, in which his own improbable romance placed himself. They had been found guilty by the condemnation of one jury of honest and devoted men—let not the sophistry of eloquence nor the depraved insinuations of a diseased and treacherous puerile human freak disturb that conviction, and subject the State to the ridicule and danger of caprice and inconsistency.

Remember this boy so beautifully extolled by the defense; what confidence would honest men put in the story of a self-convicted ingrate. Were Longtinsky and his confederates such assured idiots as to allow this creature full access to their deliberations? Could anything be imagined more improbable? Regard the whole tale in the light of their own experiences as men of the world and see its utter futility!

This destructive criticism fell upon attentive ears also, and was given its due weight, so that when the pleas were finished and the day—which had grown dark and rainy—had well advanced into the afternoon, the audience felt itself uncomfortably incompetent to make up its mind. The same puzzling uncertainty doubtless would afflict the jury, and a disagreement was promptly predicted. Helen Lorimer and Amato felt the singular sway of the adroit counsel, and, except for their anxiety, would have acknowledged it as a new proof of the futility of history. It would have, under other circumstances, amused them. Now they scanned the impassive faces of the jury for some intimation of their secret thoughts.

The next instant the Judge arose and the Jury—rising for a moment from their chairs, which they resumed upon a motion of the Judge’s hand—turned their eyes upon their legal monitor with an expression of profound, almost appealing interest. From his lips they expected the advice and direction that might lead them to a right decision. It seemed almost as if the entire assemblage shared their expectancy. Not a person left the hall, and in a deep silence the solemn utterances of the judge sounded almost weirdly distinct. It was noticed that the prisoners—all except Polinck—evinced an animated attention. Their hearts were not beating with more nervousness than did the heart of the woman who had made herself their champion, and who also realized the critical moment, and to whom the whole episode had its political philosophical consequences, written in large characters before her eyes.

It seemed so evident that the weight the judge would assign to the testimony of the boy Angelo Shimura, would be the pivotal point of the trial that every ear was strained to hear his word at this part of the review. A silence of portentous significance fell upon the great throng as the dull November afternoon darkened, and heavy gusts of wind carrying rain splashed the windows, whence the trickling currents just audibly mingled their murmur with the slowly and almost sternly uttered sentences of the charge.

Helen Lorimer’s whole enthusiastic temperament was now aroused. She had taken up the cause of these men with ardor; the trial full of color and situations had excited her imagination, and her heart anxiously—hungrily—yearning for alleviation through her mind’s interests, found in the dramatic progress of the trial a wonderful assistance. She had staked so much upon it; it was in a real way her own splendid effort to avert injustice, and there was a propagandist’s zeal in her industrious interest. She had followed the trial with intellectual fidelity too, and her conferences with Mr. Moser were always helpful to that adroit lawyer.

And—there was something more—there was the faithful sympathy of a friend, the loyal agreement of her handsome companion. This was not an inconsiderable joy. Amato was winning his way, and his patience, his quick insight, his endless ingenuity, above all his sincerity, and the really delicate culture of his mind impressed her, and the impression grew warm with a friendship that it would have really made her sad to break or lose. Amato on his behalf plunged into the trial with zeal. He knew the evidence, argued the points, felt his eagerness increasing day by day to see the end, and responded instantly to all the diversions and evasions of the lawyers.

This mutual enthusiasm brought on an inevitable approach to confidence with Helen Lorimer, and both—one with anticipation, the other without suspicion, at least without analysis—continued it to deeper and deeper consequences. Both had been present each day at the trial, and they had been welcomed by the great crowd as a social feature that added to the trial’s importance. Representatives of all shades of opinion and standing were present, and the trial began somehow to be regarded as a political crisis.

A sudden increase in the rising storm outside, made the judge’s words almost inaudible to those against the wall of the court room, and they engaged themselves in the corridors pressing forward down the aisles until, almost unobserved, each was filled, and curiously the attendants desisted from any effort to clear them. Helen and Amato, the lawyers, the few witnesses within the rail, the jury and prisoners, the multitude, heard these solemn words:

“And the evidence of the Japanese boy Angelo Shimura is crucial. Your verdict must be almost solely determined by the credence you are willing to concede to that testimony. The boy is qualified by age, by evident mental qualifications, to give testimony. Its value is to be determined by its consistency, its resistance to the demolishing attacks of the cross-examination, and by such support as the other evidence in this trial afforded it, or by such contradictions as it has suffered from the same. This evidence is peculiar—” and then carefully, with impartial acumen, the judge took up Angelo’s story piece by piece, pointing out with cold indifference—so Helen Lorimer thought as she felt her heart rise and sink again—that “the circumstance was almost unprecedented of a boy’s precocious constancy, and his secretive habit, binding him to such a patron as Longtinsky, being known—and an inference prejudicial to his veracity might on that account be entertained. And yet again, looked at as evidence, the story had borne examination, it had not been actually contradicted, and remained a substantial factor—indeed the one overpowering feature of the trial. The jury’s duty was to carefully examine this testimony, to absolutely place it in the foreground of their deliberations, and if they believed it their verdict was to be unmistakably one of acquittal at least as far as it exonerated some of the prisoners. But there should be no extension of its application to others.” A few less relevant directions and the grave judge bowed to the jury, and dismissed them—just as the storm outside with sudden fury smote again upon the windows and the startled audience rose to their feet to leave.

And now there was a crush to the doors, and the crowd with oscillations to and fro, began their tumultuous exit. Helen and Amato remained seated. Mr. Moser was with them and invited them to seats within the rail, where other persons had gathered, hoping that perhaps a verdict would be soon reached. This anxiety was shared by a number, and while, for different reasons, they all regarded a decision as probable within an hour or so, it was Helen Lorimer’s intense personal interest that kept her there, persuaded too by Mr. Moser to see the denouement of the great trial.

And while they sat together, talking in low tones, events were happening outside of the Court House which would soon precipitate the greatest social crisis the huge city had ever known. The Mayor had returned to the city as we have recorded. He had followed the daily reports of the progress of the trial, and had timed his return almost to the moment when the opposite counsel began their pleas. It was indeed a little before that, as Mr. Meldexter asked for the arrest of the absent Mr. Lorimer, that Tom Ratler was whirling—the second time that day—the Mayor to the City Hall, where Mr. Briggs awaited him—impatiently walking up and down the historic Governor’s room—staring out of the windows, and muttering words of disgust and anger. His eyes eagerly perused again and again a paper which he rapidly folded and unfolded, and which had the effect of eliciting a running comment:

“Yes, of course—just as I supposed—the blow is well timed—and the troops away!—but it can’t be so serious—a little contraption—a small eruption—and yet, damn it—if the Mayor hadn’t run away—impracticable—head-strong—visionary—we may be in for it now. Ha, here he is!”

The last words were directed to the figure of the Mayor passing up the steps of the Hall, while a portion of the escaping throng from the Municipal Building standing in the slashing rain with outspread umbrellas, watched him for an instant, and then turned and mingled in the running, stooping, dodging lines of people hurrying against the vicious wind and water that slanted the trees, and whirled and spun in silvery threads about Printing House Square, and the tall façades along Park Row, and over the towered structures between Broadway and the Hudson River.

Tom Ratler rushed his machine into a garage on Chamber Street, after being told to be instantly ready for the Mayor’s return. The Mayor burst into the Governor’s room. He met his Secretary, shook his hand and pushed into it a paper which he pulled from his pocket, saying: “I received that this afternoon. What do you think it means? Anything?”

As he thrust the unsigned paper into his secretary’s hand the latter saw in a second that the Mayor was the recipient of a warning identical with that he himself had just received and read. The writer of both was undoubtedly the same person; he had addressed one letter to the Mayor at his home, the other had been sent to the Mayor’s secretary. The identical letter was calm in language, and possessed a certain internal stamp of sincerity and veracity from its very calmness. It ran:

“On ... an attempt to overthrow the government of this City will be seriously made. It is not a trivial outburst. It has been well planned, will be well supported, and unless you meet it with force and severity will effect enormous damage to the city. It will begin by an open insurrection and by an attack upon three points of the city—the Municipal Building, Carrara, and the Shipping along the river fronts. The conspirators are well armed. Treachery has supplied them with arms from an armory in this city. It is the trump card-play of Socialism. Red placards throughout the city will announce and defend it. Remember! it begins on the afternoon of....”

And while they thus read the warning, throughout the city in the veil of the storm, the placards were indeed posted, as though sown upon the fences and the sides of building and on the pavements by that tempest that now began ominously to rise and roar around them. Those placards, the effrontery of Longtinsky had already planned, they were printed in the office of The Beehive, they were the frothings of his bittermost hatred and envy, and the malign fury of their denunciations summoned the nether tides of discontent, and the great silent columns of the despairing to break forth into RED REBELLION.

The Mayor and Briggs looked at each other for one moment. Something in the face of his secretary convinced the Mayor. Briggs mechanically held up for the examination of his superior the paper he had received. Then the Mayor hurried to his table, saying as he stood there, “At any rate action must be quick. Send all police reserves here. These blind hints must be our guide.

“Telephone the police. Summon out the Fire Department and let them patrol the water front; every man armed; raise the two remaining regiments of militia now in the city—the 69th and the 22d; rush them to Carrara.”

Mr. Briggs jumped to the phone. In another instant the police army would be marshalled. The Fire Department was ordered out pell-mell by the same voice, and it shouted commands to the Colonels of the 69th and 22d regiments to assemble their men within the shortest possible time at their armories. The orders were understood to come from the Mayor—explanation would follow—instant obedience was imperative.

In the meanwhile the Mayor dictated to an assistant a short statement—one was sent on the wings of the wind to the Chief of the Police, another to the Fire Department, and a third and fourth were despatched with lightning speed to the colonels of the regiments. The forces of defence were already acquainted with the nearness of an unknown danger—the machinery of the city worked with instantaneous swiftness—but though summoned the battalions of Order could not instantly be mobilized, nor was the mere notice of danger sufficient to give intelligence to its leaders.

The plans of action were unformed. Resistance to an attack was the only clear notion entertained—but attack, Where? How? and When?—; the unsigned paper in his hand was the only clue the Mayor possessed. Had he been recreant, careless, had he suffered his suspicions—frequently appealed to—to sleep, and now was his great charge, the beautiful city of the centuries to undergo disparagement and disaster? The Mayor clenched his hands and sprung to the windows where the raging elements seemed to gather to protect the mysterious treason about them. Tears almost forced themselves to his eyes, and through the tears—somehow palely seen—came the face of Helen Lorimer.

Gazing blindly before him the Mayor suddenly saw the flying figure of a woman mount the City Hall steps, and he divined her mission. Almost the next moment she stood before the Mayor, streaming with the rain, breathless, with pale cheeks framed in the folds of a shawl thrown around her head. It was Jessie Longtinsky. Mr. Briggs recognized her. He knew her message before her lips opened.

“Sir—Mr. Mayor,” she cried, “to-day, this evening—now—your city will be in flames. Poni, Putkof, Felix, Madder, Bomber—will do it! Five thousand men are ready. They say so. Oh, Sir—I am Jessie Longtinsky, I have heard all. Do something or you are lost.”

Her stumbling words had scarcely been heard before the sudden thud of an explosion sounded in their ears—it seemed crashingly near them—but while their ears thus recorded the actual impact—something blindingly bright shot through the window at their side. The group fell apart while the sinister missile sizzled and expired at their feet, put out by the rain that followed through the riven glass.

Indeed things beyond the Mayor’s or his strenuous secretary’s observation had been hastening to desperate conclusions. With Longtinsky’s arrest the conspirators developed a singular alacrity of action, and a much more wonderful unanimity of plan. Longtinsky had been right in one thing. The work of his organ had been effective, and the conspirators found a serious state of discontent pervading large masses. Poni discovered to his increasing wonderment that a small army of enrolled men had been formed by the arrested editor, who, suddenly, to Poni himself, loomed up as a real general. He found also that Longtinsky’s choice of his assistants—Putkof, Felix, Madder, and Bomber, had been excellent. They were desperate characters with brains, and a fierce determination to wreck their revenge for fancied wrongs—wrongs which Longtinsky’s subtle tongue and pen kept ever before their eyes. It was a prearranged plan that before the possible arrival at a verdict by the jury, which all the plotters, and principally Longtinsky himself thought would liberate the prisoners, all—except Polinck, and thus concentrate the State’s punishment upon him and Longtinsky—before this verdict was reached the outbreak should be begun. And it was. The fact was most significant of the helplessness of even the most perfect system of police supervision when craft and secrecy unite into a perfect machine for the propagation of revolt.

The armies of disorder for once were trained, and their discipline was dangerous. They came together from their hiding places in groups and individuals, gathering silently like personal accidents in the crowds of the city. From the cellars, the tenements, the outlying districts in Long Island, and in the Bronx, from factory, and street, from the corners, and the wharves, the yards, and the saloons; almost as if by some poignant magnetism of motive and fore-knowledge, they gathered. There were three hosts; assembled with instantaneous precision like those investing and ragged tides that surrounded the Constitutional Assembly in Paris far back in the days of the Revolution. It was indeed a lesser sort of Revolution. Riot perhaps more than Revolution, but yet stirring deeply in it was the essence of Revolt. Briggs had long ago seen that, but as Carlyle wrote, Revolution “is a thing nowhere to be laid hands on, to be clapt under lock and key: where is it? what is it? It is the madness that dwells in the hearts of men. In this man it is, and in that man; as a rage or as a terror it is in all men. Invisible, impalpable; and yet no black Azreal, with wings spread over half a continent, with sword sweeping from sea to sea, could be a truer Reality.”

Its materialization was so rapid and forceful that it succeeded, and the City was unprotected. What the Mayor had done was a measure of safety, but a measure necessarily tardy and confused. The police hurried their platoons together, and from station to station the recruits came to the Headquarters, where they were despatched in regiments to the City Hall. Already the Municipal Court Building on Center and Chatham was surrounded by the mob, and in the black and maddened multitude in the stormy afternoon were Felix and Madder with explosives, with firearms and with the torch, and with them too was Poni, who had discovered that Jessie had left the Longtinsky home.

He knew well why. She had discovered the plans of the conspirators, and would betray them and—why?—why?—it turned Poni’s face into the savagest snarl of hatred—because of Tom Ratler! The thought made a madman of him, and the thirst of murder swept over him. He cursed his luck; “let him meet that white cur, and he would butcher him like a rat—Ay—he would do worse; he’d strangle him to death by inches; Damn him.”

It was from a spur of the thickening force around the Municipal Building that the rocket, that fell at the feet of the Mayor and Jessie Longtinsky had been projected. And now—upon the deafened ears of the little group in the Governor’s Room, the loud thunder of explosions fell. The attack had begun. The imprisoned men and women, who were yet waiting for the verdict of the trial, had suddenly realized their danger when an attendant came running into the court room, telling of the strange appearance of the square around the building, and telling too their fears, that some attempt at rescue was intended. Some escaped at once, while the heavy doors were closed, and despatches were sent out for help and the rest—among them Helen Lorimer and Amato—remained. The judge was himself among those thus at siege. The prisoners were in cells in the basement of the building, and Longtinsky among them heard the detonations which promised him release. His friends had understood, the effort was already on way. His face lit up with a fanatic joy, and again those painted dreams of power and success and dominion swept him into a furious delight.

Felix, Madder, and Poni had organized a mass of strong men, who were their immediate supporters, and these had forced back the surge of silent beings about them, while the leaders themselves shot the bombs against the doors of the building. The explosions were terrific, yet somehow their violence was wasted upon the doorways alone and the clouds of broken stone and splintered bricks fell upon the heads of the crowd. The huge iron doors yet stood.

The frightened and blanched group in the court room were standing together when the sound of a bursting bomb crashed, and then it seemed as if a shout of exultation arose, and with it the fall of some heavy object announced the breached defense. And at that desperate moment Helen just noticed that the storm was abating and the rain beat no longer upon the panes of the court room windows, the next a sharp command struck her ear: “To the elevators; the top of the building. Wire for a balloon. Up! Quick! the mob is breaking in! For God’s sake, hurry.”

It was true. After the first ineffective attempt the men grown bolder crept a little closer and threw the bombs at closer range. Their effect was tremendous; the great ornamented doors with their metal knobs and grinning escutcheons shuddered and fell in. The mob broke out in cheers, and rushed forward—but not far. The herculean men chosen by the leaders still held them back, waiting for the orders from Felix and Madder and Poni to advance. Some of those inside noticed this with terror. A disciplined mob was a thing of dreadful import. But on the inside there was still resistance. The marshals and wardens, guards, and keeper, had hastily armed themselves with such weapons as the place afforded, and they were not ineffective. But one door had actually yielded, and this had so fallen as to make a parapet across the entrance itself. It was a danger zone of real extremity. Behind it the crouching defenders stretched themselves with the muzzles of their guns over the harsh edge of the prostrate parapet.

And in the meanwhile radiating intentions of skill and discernment had become apparent in the ordered mob. Madder ordered a band to seize the subway station at the bridge, and the City Hall, and to break up all traffic, coming either way. His purpose was obvious. He desired to keep back the chance of any relief, and to divert the crowds for the upper city to other lines of service. Nor was this all. He derailed a train on the Elevated and effectually blocked that avenue of movement. Then came the shout that the police were advancing down Centre Street in military form spreading across the street from curb to curb. In an instant, a small company tugging at some dragging object in the swaying mass pushed their way to the head of that street, and confronted the new arrivals with a small rapid firing gun. It was the only piece of ordnance the rioters possessed—and it was not revealed to the hurrying police as they came solidly up the low hill, until they were within the circle of its deadly fire. Even here precision prevailed. A stern hard faced man, a deserter from the army directed the gun’s use, and the timing of its discharge was chosen with deadly coolness. The police were not really aware of the hidden weapon, until, uncovered, it poured its deadly fire upon them, and almost instantly it was followed by a discharge of riflery from the hands of a long front of rioters, who with complete composure ranged themselves along the street, and aimed their rifles at the disordered and flying police. Many of these latter took refuge in doorways, and under porches, and darted into the side streets. They had drawn their revolvers and a sharp rattling volley of bullets, punctured the crowd before them, but with no serious effect. This repulse of the police delighted the mob, and almost as soon as it was accomplished, Felix, Madder, and Poni, had demolished the protection of the iron door, behind which the defenders of the Municipal Building had screened themselves.

Two well directed bombs had overthrown the door, and had scattered its little garrison, who dragged with them two dead men, and one, badly wounded, while the rioters rushed forward after a minute’s hesitation, with yells and cries of victory, chasing the guards through the halls, swarming into the court room, and entering the stairways that led to the prison cells below.

When the police advanced up Centre Street a detachment had passed from Centre to Chatham, and another from Centre through Pearl to Broadway. The former was intended to enclose the rioters, as the Centre Street phalanx had engaged them, while the Broadway squad was sent to the protection of the City Hall. The first failed entirely in its object, as the singular foresight and preparedness of the rioters was again evinced in the stationing of a body of men in the street, and along the elevated railroad tracks in Chatham Street, who used once more the guns, rifled from a city armory, upon the guardians of the city’s order. The little prominence at Chatham Square was well held. Drilled men, and fairly armed, seemed suddenly all over it. The hillside on Centre Street was clear, not a figure stirring in it, and only far away at Grand or Canal thick moving bodies of people, and the daunted policemen, while the grim spectacle of a few lifeless bodies caught the eye on the street near at hand, where the murderous volley met the approaching officers. The detachment of policemen intended for the City Hall had already been intercepted by an order to wait and receive guns.

The surprise in Centre Street cautioned the captains not to lead the men helpless against the armed mob. The City Hall remained undefended and the mob leaders had not yet thought of its capture. The Mayor yet stayed with the clerical force, some aldermen, and the heads of a few city departments. All there was consternation and panic. The night was now fast settling down on the city, the electric lights sprung into activity, and the pale aurora above the city sent its illuminating and spectral radiance over the streets. The rain had ceased, but a dull clouded sky prevailed, and the raw wind began to rise chilling and dispiriting, in which a few forlorn and unaccompanied snow flakes made their appearance. With the Mayor was Jessie Longtinsky, and Mr. Briggs. Tom Ratler was not yet summoned from the garage. The Mayor expected protection from the police, and he would not leave the Hall. Through the open windows came the frightening sound of the repeated explosions, and afterwards the more awful notification that the rioters were engaged in battle.

Already throughout the city confusion reigned. The news of the desperate uprising spread from mouth to mouth, the wires burned with their message, and from post to post the startling rumors gathered terror and exaggeration as they flew. The vagrants of the city, the unemployed, and the mischief makers of all brands and inclinations, flocked to the scene of the disorders, and gave a deceptive appearance of strength to the mutiny. Longtinsky had planned an attack on the city at three points, so that the composure of the citizens might be the most tried and the forces of defence more divided. It was a bold plot and it was successfully accomplished.

Putkof, the Russian, worked along the river fronts, and started a series of bad fires which, fanned by the wind, spread with terrifying rapidity. To these points the Mayor already had directed the firemen. But their efforts were confined to saving the neighborhoods, where the devastating flames roared and hissed, sending upwards volumes of sparks, and throwing upwards too the horrid red spectres of incendiarism. Bomber had been sent up town to lead the assaults upon the houses of Carrara, and where the villa of the Lorimers raised its marble roofs, there the insatiable Longtinsky commanded them to wreak their utmost powers of destruction. There too the Mayor had ordered the two regiments of militia now left in the city—the 22d and the 69th—but the slow process of assembling the men allowed the rioters to get the start, and commence their onslaught.

Despatches to Chicago whither the militia had gone upon a vast holiday parade were hurried away; but the distance was great and a day at least would elapse before relief from that quarter could be expected. Even the forts of the City were without garrisons. This was known to the leaders of the insurrection and they hoped, buoyed up by the mad promises and delusions of Longtinsky, to receive some monster accession of strength from the people, and that a contagion of revolt would come to their assistance. At any rate let them destroy, pillage, and then, if the worst was to be feared, concentrate and retreat into the hills of Westchester and parley for POWER! This was his fanatical promise, and now that they saw the Municipal Building in their hands, the city emptied of defenders, the police repulsed, the river fronts streaming with flame and smoke, and heard too that the attack upon Carrara had begun, these madmen suddenly felt that their hopes would be realized.

Yet, already in answer to the Mayor’s explicit appeal, soldiers were forming in line and boarding the train at the stations in Chicago, and the practising garrisons ordered home from Montauk. The Mayor and the occupants of the City Hall knew of the extremity of those in the Municipal Building; they could easily see the state of things there from the uppermost windows of the City Hall. The Mayor’s first thought had been for the safety of Carrara, and thither the regiments had been ordered. It was expected that the police would be able to dislodge the rioters, and when the discomfiture of the police was learned, when the determined and prepared attitude of the mob was seen, its undisguised control by thinking leaders, it was realized that the moment the prisoners—and Longtinsky among them—were liberated an attack on the City Hall would follow, and it also seemed pretty clear that its fall would be a matter of a few minutes only, unless help came. The telephone wires, worked desperately, brought no answer. The continued absence of any police for its protection awoke the worst apprehensions at first, until a message from the Police Headquarters arrived, explaining the recall of the squads sent down Broadway, and their slow equipment with guns.

Scurrying orders sent through the city had so far failed to secure the necessary armament. In the confusion, from the suddenness of it all, with the plain evidence of preparation, and of some associative plan, involving large numbers, the Mayor and his advisers felt powerless, until an actual physical resistance to the rioters could be summoned. Mr. Briggs wanted the Mayor to leave the Hall, and unite himself with the troops at their armories; this the Mayor refused to do; his place he thought was in the City Hall. Indeed he would confront the mob himself. If there was no help he would undertake to speak and argue with them.

This Mr. Briggs protested against. It was a confession of weakness, it was courting death, it meant nothing but disaster.

And during this time, while the men debated, anxiously watching for the promised succor, the rioters were pouring into the Municipal Building. Armed with crowbars, with wooden beams, with stones, with almost anything, they battered down door after door, following the guards into the last corridor in the basement, around the prison cells, where the faithful wardens gathered, ready with their lives to defend their charge. It was a frightful extremity. A handful of men against a host, and yet they formed silently in a line at the foot of the stairs which descended into the basement, where the cells were built.

The agitated and blanched faces of the prisoners were pressed against the bars of their cages; a few lights only were turned on, and in the half illuminated gloom the reflections from the gratings, a glint cast upward from the barrel of a gun, the wan spots of light on the ceiling above the lamps, seemed to weirdly accentuate the awful suspense.

The keepers, twenty in number, were well armed, with magazine rifles, and they had ammunition. They were trained men, utterly fearless. The stairway was narrow, too narrow for three men to descend it abreast. The keepers thought the chance a fighting one. They might hold back the mob for some time, a dozen dead men would choke up the entrance; the police were doubtless rushing preparations for a fresh descent; they had arranged a firing line of six, into which by turns they would step, as each set exhausted their shots; the lights left were nearest the stairs, so that the faces of their assailants would be seen, and they were themselves screened in shadow further back—and then—at the last gasp—there was a fair run for safety through some passages to other cellars, to area-ways, from which, by ladders—already there to be put into use—they might reach the street outside and escape!

It was a bold scheme, bold to the verge of desperation, but it bore some promise of success. As for the prisoners, one of the wardens stood at their cages with a gun—it was no idle threat—a sound, and the man making it was a corpse.

And now the raging torrent was heard above them, cries, execrations, the tramp of feet, the breaking of doors and—they strained their ears at the sound—something like the roar and crackle of flames. Another crash—a shout, a titanic rise of laughter, and then immense tumult of voices in which rose contentious cries: “The jury—the jury—Hang ’em—Hang ’em Hooray—No—No Keep ’em. Let the boys they tried have a go at ’em—Oh, damn it—hang ’em. What’s the use?”—then a sudden silence.

The wardens wondered. It was true, the jury forgotten in the tumult, had remained locked up, and now so uncomfortably relieved from their imprisonment, were in the hands of the mob. Still no sound—a low repetition struck their ears. Some one was speaking, perhaps in expostulation, perhaps in command. Then silence again—and then a storm of running feet and more cries: “This way—to the cells—we’ll break the boys out. This way! Here——”

The wardens tightened their hold upon their guns—raised to their shoulders, their muscles set in their necks, and their lips closed hard. The man at the cells also raised his gun and speaking to the figures who, motionless at the confines of their cells, had simultaneously glued their eyes upon the narrow stairway, said: “One word and you’re all in, any one of you.” Longtinsky alone was not at the front of his cage. Somewhere in the half discovered background of his cell, he sat upon a low stool, silent and benumbed.

And now they came tumbling down the steps. The door was full of figures. Crack—crack—a flash of light, six flashes of light and as many men fell forward, stark dead. The mob by reason of the steep descent could not see the wardens, could hardly divine what obstreperous obstruction they had encountered. The cries redoubled, those in front pushed back, those behind forward; in the confused and contradictory efforts many fell.

The wardens waited. Not a man in the struggling heap was armed, which was surprising enough. Sticks only were in their hands. It would have been a pitiless slaughter to have fired then, and no one had yet entered the darkened cellar. Suddenly to their left in the place itself, a hoarse wild cry—a cry of mingled insanity and fright came to their ears:

“Save me—Save me—Longtinsky is here—here—Save me!”

And then a shot, the groan of death, a fall—Longtinsky lay a corpse on the floor of his cell. But the wardens never turned: their eyes still measured every detail of the daunted multitude on the stairway, and the vigilant watchman paced slowly along the cells, with no trace of the ominous scowl that had darkened his face as he heard Longtinsky’s voice. Silence for an instant—and then again a plunge forward of the crowd, and three big men shot into the space before them. Once more a consentaneous movement, the crackle and report, and all three fell back, dead, almost heaped together in the doorway.

Awful cries arose, and in the fierce declamation the stolid guardians kneeling on the pavement, as yet unrelieved by the waiting marksmen beside them and at their back, could distinguish with a shock, that perhaps was only registered in a quicker heart beat, the savage threat of:

“Bombs; Bombs—This way—Clean out the Rats; Blow them to Hell!”

Again there was a cessation of the tumult, and some strong voice was heard cautioning; perhaps the rioters realized that the prisoners would be blown to pieces too with their imperturbable keepers. It seemed so. The stayed crowd on the stairway scrambled back—and—peering forward the wardens saw the steps almost empty save for the grewsome burden of the dead remaining on them. Perhaps five minutes passed; then to their dismay they saw smoke curling and floating in the basement room, and that rushing distant sound, least perceptible before, as of the swish and pouring rage of ascending fires came nearer. It was indeed Fire—Conflagration; now the smoke began to gather in light veils and films, and it was rapidly thickening. The rioters had left. Doubtless they expected the wardens would be smoked or routed out, but how about the prisoners? how about Longtinsky, whose liberation had been the motive of their attack? There was another guess; the fire had been started somehow in the ungovernable orgy of violence, and the rioters had deserted the spot, careless now even of the fate of their friends.

But the wardens had little time to think over any plausible answer to these questions—little more than enough time indeed to shackle the prisoners, handcuff them, and retreat to the area-ways on Court Street, whence they could reach the street up the raised ladders. And when they crept up the ladders, climbed over the iron railing to the street, to their stupefaction the street was deserted. They, huddled with their prisoners, were irresolute. The flames were raging in the magnificent structure they had left, smoke and sparks were pouring from its broken windows, sinuous trails of light slipped from story to story, a roar burst from the engulfing fires leaping up the shaft with the stentorian might of the air’s pressure, and high up towards the very summit of the building, black columns of smoke, dimly smitten with reflected light from the ravenous blaze far beneath, rolled tardily outward—and there—Good God! could it be possible!—the wardens, in the ghastly illumination, saw on the edge of the roof—but just discernibly—gesturing figures. Those figures were those sent up to the attic in the elevators, and among them were Helen Lorimer and Amato!

But there was scant time for deliberation: shots were heard in rapid explosive succession. They seemed to come from the west, from Broadway. The men hustled their prisoners over the street, surrounded them, and marched rapidly to Centre. The shots were more distinctly heard, and with occasional hoarse throated jeers. The City Hall was beleaguered; the fight was for its possession. That seemed certain. The wind was still blowing, though less violently, and the rain had ceased, the clouds were rolling together into denser masses, and here and there a star revealed the cleared sky. Starting on a trot, forcing their prisoners on, the squad hurried down Centre Street toward the police headquarters at Market Square and Broome Street. One or two looked back at the deserted towering pile; it was emitting red forks of flame from its windows, and murky clouds swayed over it, streaming off in a stupendous blanket that took fantastic outlines, beneath the glow of the electrical aurora—unchecked by the disorders—that yet bathed the tall buildings of the city, with its delicate refulgence.

The bitterest fight had already begun at the City Hall. Thither all the resources of the police had been concentrated; the first detachment, recalled for reinforcement and armament had returned to the Hall, prepared to defend it, and to expel the rioters from the Municipal Building. They formed practically almost a regiment. Their dread had been the rapid firing gun of the rioters which had already wrought such destruction among their comrades in Centre Street. They came down Broadway, after their recall and replenishment with such guns as the department could assemble, and had hastened across the City Hall park as the rioters forced their way into the Municipal Building. They were seen, of course, but they effected a lodgment in the Hall, and prepared to defend it, being there placed under the command of the Mayor. The mob at length ejected from the Municipal Building by the raging storm of fire and smoke that now filled it, had assembled outside, their swelling tumult being each minute augmented by the additions of new arrivals of loafers, curiosity seekers and sympathizers, the wild, ill disposed scum of the city.

This disorderly multitude filled the spaces around the Chatham Street Hill, swarmed over the Printing House Square area, crowded into Spruce and Nassau Streets, and were pushed up against the northern and eastern ends of the City Hall. A recoil of those occupying Chambers Street from the police had made a fierce jam about the Record Hall, and it was then that the leaders, Felix, Madder, and Poni, determined to actually precipitate a battle with the police in the City Hall. Their first intentions had been to liberate Longtinsky, and then rush the City Hall, and install the agitator there as mayor. This had been planned already by Longtinsky himself. There were almost one thousand men, and the Maxim; with these they might capture the Hall, and the Mayor, who now they had learned was within it. But they felt the need of a directive, formative, and speaking mind. Proclamations and literary appeals were not in their line. They recognized already the danger of disintegration. Something must be done at once which would keep their forces together and win them recruits by success.

“There are ink-slingers enough,” said Madder with an oath, “if we only make the place safe for ’em.”

“Well, we’ll need ’em,” said the handsome Greek. “We may kill people, but we can’t make ’em see things our way, unless we teach ’em.”

“To Hell with teaching,” broke in Poni, whose passion grew insupportable as he thought of the capture of Jessie by the hated Tom. “Get what we want and teach afterwards.”

“Yes, I know,” grumbled Felix. “But it’s win or hang with us; and just killing won’t fetch it. Reason has a hand in the game too. Longtinsky could have wiped their eyes with a little hot air. You know that.”

“Come! Come! Right about and take the Hall! The Mayor’s there. Perhaps,” Madder added with a sneer, “we can persuade him to say something for us. Eh?”

Just then a clamor arose from the ranks of the little army, who were still gathered in front of the Municipal Building, somewhat split up into squads by the pouring and surging throngs around them, and only recognizable by small red ribbons tied in their hat bands, their only uniform, though the possession of a gun by each of them told more plainly their confederation. This improvised army was the whole strength of the revolution, together with the mass controlled by Bomber, and soon to be engaged in an attack upon Carrara at the north of the city. Rude and undisciplined, yet the mere fact of their subordination to orders made them formidable. They had become impatient with the delay at the Municipal Building, and the news of the arrival of the police armed with guns at the City Hall daunted them. The bolder spirits saw at once that action was necessary, and it was their cries that now sounded in the ears of the leaders who were parleying together nearer the Chatham Street side of the square.

The cries were answered quickly enough. Madder ordered the men with the guns to form and surround the Hall. He stood for one moment revealed above the shoulders of the crowd, standing on a settee. His harangue was short and rough.

“Boys, we’ve smoked the rats out; everything is ours; All for everyone and everyone for All; Short shrift for the satin coats. Take the Hall; the Mayor’s in there. You know him. He set the militia on you in the Strike. Perhaps you’d like to see him where he can’t do much harm any more. Fight like tigers; you’ve got the Cops now. Let them fry in their own grease. Down with Tyranny!”

This direct appeal was greeted with shrieks, imprecations, shouts, and groans. The repeated cries were echoed from the edges of the crowd, and rolled in and out again, in a wave of rising sound, that brought the little garrison of the City Hall to the windows and doors, and told them clearly that the fight was on.

Indeed it was. The rioters were now thoroughly inflamed. Their success with the Municipal Building, despite the loss of their friends, the prisoners, had driven them mad, and the easy access to liquor, begun by the breaking in of a few saloons, had added the fury of an insane insolence to their zeal. This with many, but there were many more to whom this effort meant a serious and heroic struggle for the overthrow of a wicked and cruel State. Longtinsky had instilled the sullen rage of his own fanaticism in many, and in many more this rage was mingled with strange delusions of happiness and ease.

The day had progressed and the tolling of the belfry of St. Paul’s announced the hour of eight; there had been no interference with the lamps that converted the park spaces into vivid escutcheons on the dark neighborhoods, and the streets into gashes of light. Crowds of adventuresome men and with them—by the purest caprice of contradiction—a few ambitious and careless women had come down town to the City Hall, and occupied spots of observation, while many more, emboldened by their fears of danger to property, had hurried to their stores and office buildings, gathering with them such improvised forces for protection as could be hastily summoned in the increasing tumult and dismay of the whole city. These were not ready to become helpful; their intent was only self-protection.

The force of the rioters led by Madder, Felix, and Poni, marched out into the spaces about St. Paul’s and Broadway, about the railed end of the City Park, and also formed up along Park Row, Barclay, Warren, and Murray Streets. The battle ground was to be the park space in front of the City Hall. The Maxim rapid shooter was brought forward and the men sullenly pressed up into the park, pushing the Maxim before them, in a somewhat ludicrous confidence that its appearance would stampede the garrison of the City Hall. Then began the firing which the wardens had heard, as they led their prisoners up Centre Street. They could see the stalking figures of the mob running from point to point, and firing carefully at the chances that the windows of the Hall afforded, where crouched the police, who responded with easy assurance, and not without effect.

A reeling form sank constantly to the ground in many directions, and this unfavorable balance of disaster drove Madder wild with doubt; he knew his men would not long stand the murderous depletion. Already the improvised auxiliaries behind the drilled men had broken and fled, scattered over the neighboring alleys and doorways, in which safe refuges they stared out upon the irregular frontier-like duel. Madder’s men were taking advantage of the stone rimmed fountain in front of the Hall, and from this screen the bullets ripped and whistled, and often entered the windows of the Hall within whose walls also dead and dying bodies lay.

Madder ordered the men to form and “rush” the Hall. With a yell they sprang into the lit space on the roadway and ran forward to the steps of the entrance. The movement had been unexpected, and the fire of the police had for a moment dropped; this cover enabled the rioters to reach the steps, and, for a short distance, to mount them. Then came a sharp volley of cracking reports and every window in the Hall was spitted with fire. The figures jumping and scrambling in a thick mass were rolled back, and many stumbled over the fallen; cries burst forth from the distant spectators many of whom at this juncture had also pushed out from their hiding places and made trailing broken lines along the far off streets. Almost at the same instant a charge of men shot out from the doors of the Hall, and fell on the wavering files on the steps, while from windows above and below the sharp rattling discharges of the guns kept up.

But where the insurgents had forced themselves, the aim of the police, guarding the windows, failed in precision and was wasted. The shooting was wild, though men could be seen pushed far out from the sills, trying to circumvent the misfortune of their retired position, arising from the indentation of the walls behind the porch of the Hall. Others had clambered to the narrow lintels of the windows on the second story, and sent withering charges down on the men beneath them, and more destructively enfiladed them from the wings.

The fire of the police ceased entirely as they recognized the peril of their comrades. These men chosen from the strongest and bravest, had actually sallied from the doors of the Hall, armed only with clubs. They fought like demons, smashing their sticks right and left, and devastating the throng, within whose yielding mass they soon found themselves enclosed. It was a devoted and foolhardy risk.

With almost magical swiftness, maddened by the very sight of the “blue-coats,” the lines behind the advance which had fallen somewhat apart from their advanced comrades, sprang back, and in an instant the policemen were imprisoned in the surging ball, from whose surface rose and fell the night sticks of its desperate prisoners. Another instant and the crowd dragging their prisoners with them broke to the sidewalk, and then Madder’s powerful voice yelled: “Stand back and Shoot.”

Fleeing on all sides the mob freed itself from the devoted band of the police, and they were seen staggering and crushed together, daunted by the sudden desertion of their enemies. Then, almost before they realized their peril, the assassinating fire of the guns all around them, and in the very faces of their friends, blazed upon them, and they fell one by one, in twos and threes, while a few dazed and exhausted tried to regain the entrance of the Hall. It was a signal massacre. Its record was a heap of dead bodies on the steps, and here and there a twitching figure yet unreleased from its mortal sufferings. The windows of the Hall reddened again with the discharges of the guns, held by its defenders, but now the rioters, exulting over the destruction of the little group of their assailants returned, and drove up the steps of the Hall, almost unchecked. The gates through which the police had emerged, as they beat down upon the mob, were yet unclosed, and they were reached by the first of the ascending throng, before they could be shut. Quicker than thought these men shot in upon the inner court of the Hall, in spite of the fire directed against them from the doors and the stairways. Physical mass asserted its mastery; those outside pressed upon those within, and, though dying and wounded, the police could not withstand their mere mechanical pressure. Then sounded again the terrible voice of Madder:

“Bomb ’em, Bomb ’em.”

The cry made the stoutest heart quail, it took away the breath of the crowd itself and the panic seized many. An interior revolt developed, some trying to escape, others hurling themselves against them in their efforts, while shouts, groans, a fusillade of shots, made an indescribable confusion. The police yet held the stairway, and from the circular gallery poured their hail of lead upon the rioters, who returned their shots. It became a carnage and all semblance of restraint vanished.

Those familiar with the present City Hall will recall that the visitor enters a room-like space cut up by columns beyond, which, in the well-like rotunda, rises the circular stairway with its narrow marble steps and iron hand rail, its two arms sweeping right and left from the initial landing, which is raised some ten steps from the floor of the entrance. Above, encircling the rotunda space, and making a fence to the circular hallway is also an iron railing. At this fence the Mayor was standing, watching the strange and tragic fight. Behind the stout channelled pillars of the room below, the fighters attempted to screen themselves as the shots from above and from the doors on either side riddled the mass and zipped remorselessly through the chamber. The escape of those already confined in the straitened quarters was prevented by the blockade of those attempting to force their way in. It was at this critical and terrible moment that Madder ordered the Bombs.

The order thus given was a cry which bore all the vocal marks of rage and defiance; it was taken up by a hundred throats whose hoarse and various accents of terrible execration made the next moment loom large and hideous to all their startled hearers. It was then that the Mayor shouted back:

“Shame! Hold back. Listen to me.”

He flung himself over the railing, wrenching himself loose from Briggs’ restraining hand, and somehow, clambering, falling, clutching at heads and shoulders, landed upon the small landing, raised a few feet above the floor of the court below. His clear voice sounded—in some stifling instant of terrified expectation—in the spaces around with a quite superhuman loudness. The cowering figures of the frightened ones, the motion of the mass at the doors plunging in and out, the outside mob jostled together in a heap, bewildered by the sweeping fire of the police, from the wings of the Hall, which had now become withering and deadly, the rushing forms on either side of him, as the police from above renewed a final effort to break into the rioters and hurl them from the enclosure made before his eyes a picture of stupefying terror. His action, by some alertness of attention, in everyone, to the risk he ran, created a pause, an arrest of motion, as the sudden flash of an electric spark seems to stop the revolving wheel of light and colors.

“Why this madness! Take me if you will. Kill me if that is your wish, but stop this insane murder!”

The protest seemed foolish; to Briggs, gritting his teeth in a spasm of disgust, it appeared a bit of grotesque bombast. The fighting police—for one moment as the rest—transfixed into immobility by the suddenness of the Mayor’s motion, hardly believed their ears, and the mob of crouching fallen and torn men gazed at the bared head with the sharp stare of derision. The next instant the police on the stairway seized the Mayor as he attempted to fulfill his offer, and mix bodily with the bleeding and dying men in the lower room; but, in some strange way, this interjection of astonishment helped the day for the police. The bombs were not thrown; at least the attempt came too late. By the slight coercion of some customary deferences to command, bred in the brain molecules through years of work and service, the rebels themselves paused in their attack, and the police sharper in intuition and especially quickened by a superior sense of duty saw their opportunity. From all sides from the hallways above, they swarmed pell-mell; leaping past the Mayor they prodded with battering instantaneity the stunned crowd. It was an avalanche, impetuous irresistible, and, like no avalanche of dumb natural missiles, seized its victims with discrimination and lightning speed.

The man raising the bomb was struck senseless; a dozen or more lifted guns were knocked from the hands of their holders, hither, thither, the baffled insurgents were driven, pinioned, beaten into insensibility. Nor was this all. The propitious instant coincided over a larger field of action. The police garrison in the wings of the Hall, poured through the windows, and precipitated themselves upon the invading ranks on the front steps of the Hall. They seemed like a living whirlwind, from whose mad moving surfaces a thousand arms, in simultaneous thrashing, hit right and left. The crowd broke, men fled to this side and to that, only occasionally turning back to fire off their yet unemptied and carelessly aimed guns. And reinforcements came. New companies had been armed at the Police headquarters. They strode upon the scene from Centre Street, from Broadway, from Spruce and Nassau, encircling by anticipation the little boiling tempest of disorder.

Then it was that Poni who had not led in the attack rushed to the Machine Gun. Apparently it had been forgotten. It might shrewdly have wondered why, when in the midst of wearying arms its tireless mechanical swiftness lay unused. Gorged and yet powerless, its volleys of leaden pellets crowding to its bore each waiting for the click of separation to become a faintly jubilant assassin. Just let a human hand start off its awful alacrity and, perhaps, it thought, a different story will be told.

So too thought Poni, still cursing the bitter luck that had lost him Jessie. In all directions the mob were now fleeing; the men hitherto inactive that had been sent to the defence of the offices on Broadway made themselves also into lines of marksmen, and threaded the panic-mad multitude with killing bullets. Everywhere the sudden collapse of the rioters seemed imminent, only the pillar of smoke and flames, where the Municipal Building stood, yet told of their first horrible success.

Poni approached the Maxim with the glee of desperation. He saw the struggle yet fitfully prolonged on the steps of the Hall, and perhaps he yet might turn the tide of battle when this belching terror began its slaughtering work. He had looked long about the scene for the face of Tom Ratler; he cared really little for Longtinsky’s social revolution. His one thought had been to get away with Jessie. If now he could meet his rival the satisfaction of killing him might sensibly lighten the grief of losing Jessie. But nowhere in the fighting groups, among the faces looking out from the windows of the Hall, along the side streets—or any where, was Tom. Poni bitterly berated his luck, that it had not allowed him the heavenly privilege of sticking a knife into the cushion of Tom’s body, and settling one score at least before the game was up.

And yet Tom was there all the time. After he had left the Mayor at the Hall, Tom had run his machine into the garage on Chambers Street, locked the doors, and actually mingled with the growing crowds which then surrounded the Municipal Building, thinking that he might enter and hear the results of the Trial. It did not take him long to see that mischief was uppermost in the hustling multitude, and it was only a few minutes later that the attack on the Building began.

Tom hastened towards the Hall thinking only of reaching the Mayor and telling him of the conditions. These the Mayor of course knew and Tom was told to hasten back to the garage and await there orders from the Mayor. These orders never came; the attack on the Hall quite displaced them, and in the fierce melee Tom and his car was quite forgotten. Then came the dramatic intervention of the Mayor, the sudden doubling up of the efficiency of the police, and the rapidly accomplished discomfiture of the mob. Tom had started to reconnoitre for himself and, in the nature of things, as Chance or Destiny arranges the contact of opposites, he came on the scene, just in time to meet his antagonist. He and Poni were almost alone in the empty spaces in front of the Hall.

Scarcely had Poni placed his hand on the Maxim, than Tom, swift as his intuition of the peril of this new ally of the rioters, had rushed upon him. Then Poni turning saw him. Tom had not been far away, but in the night—bright as it was—and in the confusion, he had never noted the solitary figure underneath the trees, watching with himself the raging conflict at the doors and on the steps of the Hall. Then he SAW him! Something like a hiss escaping from his lips, as though steam had gotten loose from too hard a confinement, was the only note given of recognition. His hand left the machine, and probed the breast pocket of his coat. It came out from that ambush with a glittering knife.

“Now, by God, I’ve got ye:” the voice sounded like a continuation of the hiss. Tom’s rush was stopped. Defence was his policy just then; for Poni had stooped and was creeping towards him. Tom had no weapon; the knife was a significant advantage. Poni straightened himself, Tom saw he was gathering all his strength for a mortal dash, and he too stood erect, with a slight wavering motion from side to side in the interests of evasion, when the dash came.

The dash came, and Tom, with a cat’s agility leaped to one side, but followed by Poni who too had showed an incredible flexibility. Tom dodged, so did Poni. The two shooting figures became clear in the lighter squares, and were partly hidden in the shadows. Poni was breathing a little hard, Tom thought; he made the mistake of cursing Tom too often; it was a waste of breath, and to both breath was the subjective element of safety. Then, too, Poni’s lunges missed, because of Tom’s quickness and coolness. But there was Poni’s implacable hatred; it fed him with a strength past comprehension. This mutual detachment could not last long; Poni had cornered his enemy against the railing of the park itself. The thought flashed into Tom’s mind of butting the raging beast before him down to the ground, and running the risk of a knife wound. The dreadful blade flashed and turned in the light; he feared it. Again he sprang aside, and with a yell Poni struck his shoulder, and the bitter edge entered his flesh. It was a bad injury, but not so bad as to disable him. The tear and smart turned him too into a tiger. His hands closed about the throat of the demon, now yelling in his ears, and they came almost together with a hideous compression. Something cracked, two forms rolled over on the ground.

It was a death struggle. Poni had freed himself from the clasp of Tom’s fingers, but suffocation, or something like it, closed his throat. And yet sense was left, and in it hate. He struck again, for the knife had never left his hand and his blows hit. Suddenly Tom loosened himself and KICKED. Kicking was elemental and irresistible with Tom. It had once saved him against an infuriated stag. It saved him now from something worse. The stout legs remembered their old power. Poni spun like a waif from Tom’s side and—his knife flew from his hand. Tom was weak and bleeding, but with the last gathered effort of his will he got up and staggered over to the spot where Poni writhed in the agonies of a broken wind-pipe—and—then the little park grew dim, and the trees above him sped in dizzying circles. Pictures came one by one to him. Again, as so often before, the little room in the attic and the filled book-cases on the walls, and then the faces of his old Mother and the kindly visage of a rugged Father, and then—then a little farther off and smiling at him Jessie’s sweet eyes and then—darkness.

CHAPTER XV

AN UP-TO-DATE RESCUE

Ned Link was almost sleeping—dozing certainly—in the big waiting room of one of the Zeppelins where he had been engaged since that astounding trip on the Fourth herein veraciously rehearsed. He was sleepingly ruminating over the possible arrival upon his domestic hearth of a smaller Ned Link when the door of the apartment incontinently burst open and a frightened man stumbled into the room.

Ned recognized him as one from a near-by telegraph office; he seemed out of breath, indeed his disorder roused Ned into a sitting posture of attention.

“Well, old Man, what’s the row. You look as if you had heart failure. Ennything up?”

The gasping figure caught its wind once more, and stuttered, “UP! Well I guess Yes. Riot and Bloodshed. That’s what’s UP. You’re wanted—or SOMEONE and quick too I can tell yer.”

Ned jumped to his feet. The man handed him a telegram. Its contents were startling enough. It read:

“Hurry up a Balloon to the Municipal Building, Court Street, City Hall. Rioters! Party marooned on roof. Building on FIRE. C. Q. D.”

Ned’s experience in various capacities, some of which the reader recalls, had induced in him a preternatural composure under trying and nerve-unsettling circumstances, but it was evident that he was now a little disturbed.

He whistled in a tender low way that always marked a crisis in his perplexities:

“When did this telegram come?”

“This minute, I wasn’t——”

But the sentence was not completed. Three messengers burst in at the door, each almost speechless, and each ambitious of priority. They showed exactly the same marconigram. Well! there must be action somehow. Ned called up the foreman, ordered the shaft opened above the storage stable of the huge dirigible, and after choosing three assistants who stayed below in the coach mounted in his seat on the pilot. It might have then been noticed by any one to whom Ned’s previous exploits were familiar that a ladder-way of steel ropes led from the pilot to the passenger coach. A lesson had been learned.

Slowly, with its irksome style of getting under way, as if reluctant to break its rest with a new struggle in the wide oceans of air to which it soared, the big Zeppelin rose between its guides, the motor fans began their whizzing revolutions, and the four messengers strained their necks watching its straight ascent. It was just eight o’clock. A few minutes later the watchers relieved their necks, for the balloon ship was swiftly gliding southward in the yet squally and uncertain lowering night, at first a dark shadowy bolide noiselessly veering right and left, then suddenly, as Ned turned on its light, an aerial pyrosome flashing in the upper sky.

Ned had prepared for emergencies—he revolved the affair in his patient mind. Some people, he thought, driven to the top of the magnificent sky-scraper—he knew it well—couldn’t get off on any adjoining and level surface for there were none—but how, it puzzled him to think, had the huge place taken fire—what did it mean—rioters? Eh,—Tom had been talking that—Sure, but then—Well, he had his job cut out all right just now—and he knew it meant trouble—he couldn’t settle his gas-bag down in a sheet of flame or—for that matter in any much heated lake of air—couldn’t do it nohow—everything would expand—and—BUST!

How was the wind?—blowing—was it blowing at all—Yes—a fairly stiff breeze from the north-west—it was clearing—Well, he could get on the lee side of the flames—perhaps?—he had ropes and baskets, the men certainly could windlass ’em up—it looked that way—if—there weren’t TOO MANY—Confound it—rather risky business—but—good pay for the Consarn—and for himself?—well—He wasn’t saying anything—that was a matter of duty—yes, damn it, DUTY—And yet there might be some “dough” in it—he was not above considering life-saving a thing of business—and—Reward—not that he wouldn’t do it without pay—of course—NOT A SHINER—SURE!

Ha—he saw it—the smoke away down there—on the jagged sky-line. Where was he now? About 110th street he guessed—there was the black colossus of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine—and the pillars in Mount Morris park—emitting the purple crown of rays that shed a spectral splendor in the heavens and put out the stars—just there at least to the East. YES—he was making it. Time? Gee Wizz—the wind was just hurling him—it made him nervous about stopping—his megaphone?—all right.

IF he could get an anchorage—his grapples were stout—chains too—he’d swing and let down—throw out his anchors—heave over—hold fast—and then let the men lower the baskets and get the Galoots up—some way—To Hell with fires anyhow!—WHERE they belong too. And Ned Link snickered at his forlorn humour.

What was this below him now—Why St. Patrick’s—Fifth and Fiftieth—he WAS going SOME—no mistake—and now the ragged smoke line southward smitten by the auroras of the city looked like some metallic python unrolling its horrid gold and bronzy folds across the edges of the houses—yes, twenty of ’em—Soon he would be there—he saw it all—the Municipal in flames and—he thought he heard SHOOTING—lots of it—he was sweeping then away from the Kohinoor—or, Tom’s old roost—and below him the glitter of Union Square suddenly showed up—Yes!—it was shooting!—what in the name of Goodness was up anyhow?—Rebellion?—why, to be sure, he had heard Tom talking some about popular insurrection, and anarchical high-jinks—but Pshaw!—well, it was time to be taking notice—he was getting down town—there was a deal of bustle going on below—he now heard the guns and cries distinctly—but—God! look there!——

And wasn’t that some one hallooing?

Ned had indeed approached the flaming, sullenly smoking Municipal Building. For an instant he had dangerously grazed, as it were, the invisible boisterous streams of hot air uplifted from it, making tempestuous drifts in the upper sky and had gotten an idea of the fierce convection of air that whirled him upwards or tossed him around like a cork in the spiral twists of a rapid. The wind was blowing but slightly; the night had cleared. Ned studied the situation a few minutes; he saw that the fire was on one side of the building and though roaring within with a stentorian hum and pushing upwards as floor after floor dissolved away in its awful heat the roof was yet at a considerable height above the flames. It seemed to him possible to maneuver so that he might get close in, on the off side—the windward side—and he swept past the building once or twice almost on the level of its upper stories, shouting through his megaphone to the cluster of people—he counted twelve—who had also seen him and who called back, some of them running to and fro, a few motionless together, and others standing apart with bowed heads.

From the moment when they were incontinently hurried to the roof, at the instant when the attacking rioters surrounded the Building, to the welcome sight of Ned’s aerial arrival in the monstrous air-ship, that, in the night, afire with its lights, glided to them like some impossible globular exhalation, Helen Lorimer and Amato had passed through some trying hours. The unexpected events developed with such rapidity that no one had very much considered the situation or understood at all well just what had happened.

Flight somewhere from an unexpected danger was about the only thing at first clearly realized. The flight had been effectively quick, and when the elevator started to the roof it held the ten who had obeyed the hasty summons, they consisting of the Judge, Helen, Amato, Mr. Moser, his opponent Meldexter, a court stenographer, two reporters, and, strangely enough, two women who had been in the court room during the trial.

There was a whimsical element in the escape thus effected to the roof of a sixteen story building, for, by no apparent means, could their isolation there be relieved, and, though pretty well startled, some were not disinclined to see the humorous side of the situation.

“We shall be above the danger—whatever it is—but shall we be any better off there? I should prefer to be nearer the ground myself, where my legs might be more useful. I haven’t grown wings yet,” said Mr. Meldexter.

“Well,” said Mr. Moser, “at least we may hope to be forgotten. Out of sight out of mind, though, your Honor, it may be yourself that will prevent any such fortunate oblivion. If these are really desperate rioters they won’t forget the Judge.”

That distinguished jurist failed to see the amusing side of the predicament and yet, driven to the wall by the real or assumed coolness of the company, grudgingly admitted a forlorn attempt at pleasantry, in his reply. It was hardly a subject he thought for amusement, but if it was in his power to apply “summary proceeding” for their extrication, he would not hesitate to stretch the limits of his prerogative in the case.

Amato was unmistakably worried, and Helen Lorimer was silent. The reporters had learned something about the facts, and their tale, when understood, put a very serious complexion upon the disturbance. It was an insurrection for the release of the prisoners, and had been well planned and was unexpectedly vigorous. After the manner of their class they enlarged picturesquely upon the few rumors they possessed, and were not loth to impress upon the little company around them their own unsupported convictions that the City was in the throes of a monstrous and quite ungovernable upheaval.

“It can not be,” it was Helen Lorimer speaking, “There is no reason for any thing so wrong, so frightful! A few wicked spirits have done this. They mislead and destroy their helpless dupes. Oh! how ruthless, shameless, unfair it is!”

“It’s probably no particular care of theirs how often they try this same hopeless cause, as long as they can get a good living, a little useful notoriety, and an uninterrupted holiday out of it. But, Madame, your interest in miscreants of this class hardly permits you, it seems to me, now to find fault with them.”

It was Mr. Meldexter speaking.

“I find fault with the real offenders, Sir; my sympathy for those unjustly accused is all the more real, because I detest their selfish leaders.”

Then the Judge interrupted; “It won’t do just now, my friends, for us to argue this out, or even to run the risk of disagreement in anything. Let us keep together, bodily and mentally, and give our undivided attention to getting out of a bad scrape. Were we not told that a marconigram had been sent for a Zeppelin?”

“Yes; Yes,” was the reassuring answer of the elevator-man: “a balloon has been called. It’s pretty sure to be needed. You can’t go down now. The building’s afire.”

This forlorn state of affairs might already have been detected, for the acrid smell of smoke came up the shaft, carried by the hurrying currents of warm air that was filling the place, though the eating energy of the conflagration had not yet reached the shaft.

The faces of the majority blanched, and Amato felt a strange dread. Perhaps to all the thoughtful there, the physical factors involved in a building sixteen stories high, with a fire at its base, suggested how the irresistible draught and pressure would add incalculable force to the voracious flames, and how the enormous structure might soon become a volcano-like funnel, consuming its own walls, and guiding its seething storms of fire to the topmost pinnacle, until it too was overtaken and sank within, amid all the crashing floors below it. This sea of flames beneath them was a less negotiable quantity than the insane mob.

There was no more conversation. Some whimpers of fear started with the two women, but they were suppressed quickly. Mr. Moser undertook the needful task, after a moment of silence, of supplying a little cheerfulness.

“The fire won’t reach us. Long before it has made so tiresome a climb—remember there are some fifteen solid floors hemming it in—its strength will be exhausted. It will burn itself out in the room it started in. And at any rate we are sure to be taken off.”

“How do you know that?” timidly murmured one of the softly sobbing women, whose tears felt the relief of Mr. Moser’s agreeable encouragement.

“Know it?” said Mr. Moser with a sort of querulous and yet jocular interrogation, as he noticed the good effect of his confidence, “Know it? How do we know anything? The call for a Zeppelin has been sent out. It’s inconceivable that it will not be read, and if it is—By the way” with a sudden emphasis, “what was the call? Do you know?” turning to the elevator-man.

“Here’s the operator. Ask him.”

The elevator which had ascended slowly was now at the end of its trip, at the lofty wind-encircled summit. The door slid back, and the slender company stepped hastily out into a small chamber, where the clicks and the soft hum of a “wireless” were heard. The operator, with clasped ears and running fingers over the board of his receiver, was almost insensible of their entrance, at least he paid no notice, except an instant’s glance at the faces of the group. Instinctively they gathered about him, feeling his absolute possession of the only means now of escape. Amato had walked out through the doorway of the apartment upon the rather wide gallery that encompassed the building, and leaned far over to see the conditions below them. The spectacle was not reassuring.

Amato had slowly made his way to the north-west side of the huge structure, and could see down into Court Street. From the south side upon which he emerged at first, when he left the room of the wireless operator, he beheld Chatham Street blocked with people, a surge of heads massed into individual obliteration far south into Nassau Street and Park Row; he discerned the incessant shifting of squads of men immediately at the foot of the building; he had already heard the detonations of the bombs, which broke in the doors—and, at the moment, a tempest of cries rose weirdly to him, and there was light enough—that supplied by the street lamps—for him to make out the massive inrush of the rioters, as they continued to shove through the apertures of the entrance.

Before Amato had reached his dizzy aerie of observation the first section of the rioters had begun the work of incendiarism, careless of all consequences. It was done, as the guards defended their prisoners in the vaults. Oil and combustibles soon displayed their demoniacal powers, not averse, it might seem, to have escaped incarceration in lamps and the innocent vessels of trade, laughing with hiss and roar, in their new orgies of disaster. Spirts of flame, wide surfaces of tortured tongues of fire, explosions scattering fire-brands in all directions, to become new centres for the rising fury of heat, quickly made the great court room a furnace of death, and expelled headlong the panic-stricken invaders.

For many minutes Amato studied the exciting scene, leaning over the balustrade in the cool night air, centered almost 200 feet above the tumult—and then—he saw the flames! They smote against the glass windows, and leaped through them with sharp cracks of rupture. He could see the reflected glare of their mounting waves upon the faces of the receding multitude—now stampeded towards the City Hall, following a large, somewhat straggling regiment of armed men. This was just before the assault upon the City Hall.

There was no doubt the Municipal Building was on fire. The wind had risen, the rain was suddenly abating, the fanned furnace beneath him would increase into a volcanic violence, and the writhing iron supports, the columns under the rising floors, would be twisted into cork-screws, and the building would fall! Even as he speculated upon this—a roar reached his ears, the crash of a fallen floor whose iron work had crumpled in the fierce heat and pulled it down, offering another mass of fuel to the ravenous element. It seemed indeed to Amato that the building shook, though his excited fancy might just have erred in this. He then went on the north side, and scanned the light aureoled city, looking down the terrific cliff of masonry to the street. He shuddered to think of the inevitable ascent of the fire, as it marched from story to story, and the yielding strain of the warped and racked supports, undermining the building, which might sink or fall. It would take time, perhaps there was not enough material to feed the fire—the floors might hold out, and caged within its walls the fire might quench itself for want of reinforcement.

Amato shook his head mournfully, he half believed their doom was very near indeed! There—again—a crash, and another vibration like a thrill of agony, in the searing column, seemed to sway his feet. He looked long over the sheer precipice—with rope enough they might be lowered to the street, and some one—the strongest—himself—might be the last to slip over the parapet, and slide down from window to window! It was an appalling risk, and his heart halted in its rapid pulse, as he thought of Helen Lorimer entrusted to this terrifying hazard. A queer illusion seemed to master him, and his head turned and he supported himself for one moment groaning aloud at the awful extremity a chance had brought them in.

Then he heard shots, many of them—like a fusillade—he thought he heard screams, but the wind carried them away. There was no doubts about the shots. Again the cracking reports came thinly to his ears. He looked down again—little flames were licking, far, far, below, the window frames, and smoke in floating curls, like eddies in a stream, rose past him. He supposed the firemen were busy elsewhere. He could see to the east, quivering, rising and sinking, phantoms of reflected light, on the sky—but yet very faintly. The firemen were busy. Putkof had them engaged at the river front. And thus he watched for a half hour or so.

Suddenly his eyes fell upon a little galaxy of light moving like a huge ignis fatuus. He wondered. It grew bright. Could it be a balloon—was it theirs—the relief balloon they had called up? Perhaps! Watch it. It waned and waxed, now eclipsed behind a high tower and now emerging, and always brighter. It was certainly coming towards him, Amato thought. He traced its sinuous, up and down, right and left course, with fascinated interest. It came on, its bulk was visible—high up in the air; it passed over his head, shutting out the stars like a monstrous hand. Then it whirled about and rose higher. He shouted:

“Here we are! Here we are! Come back!”

His cry was heard in the operator’s room, and the people there led by Miss Lorimer came out in the gallery, and joined him, some shrinking from the gaze over the parapet that seemed just leaning against space.

“Do you see anything?” said Miss Lorimer, “the operator has just caught a message telling him that relief has been sent to us.”

“See! Yes, indeed! Can’t you see that dancing globe above your head?” and Amato pointed to the balloon, where Ned Link sat, looking down too on them, as the air draughts flung him away from his destination. For now, by some reinforcement, the fire had gained an incredible impetus; long forks of yellow lurid flames were crowding to the windows on the south side. The windows went in by dozens, their splintering tinklings of broken panes lost in the succeeding roar of the flood of fire pouring out. The floors were falling too, and actual shudders strained the building whose very top at one moment, to Amato, seemed to describe an arc.

And now the balloon swept round and again vanished, and again came into view, while all the watchers called and shouted, even the judge bawling with the rest. Helen Lorimer laughed—Oh, just a little!—the group, screaming and gesturing, shaking out handkerchiefs, even coats, had there, over the furnace of white heat rising to them, a ludicrousness that, for one brief spasm of forgetfulness, amused her.

But another shock came, and another, the building rocked, the two women gasped and swooned, the men had white faces, the Judge reeled against the parapet. It was unmistakable, Amato watched the finial on the apex. It described a circle, and it was a larger one than before. He looked for the balloon. Helen was at his side; he felt her hand on his shoulder; he pressed his own over it and whispered:

“Oh! we shall get out of this. Are you afraid?”

“Yes—I am, but not terror stricken. There is a difference.”

“I understand you—there is—but some things can’t happen! You cannot be hurt!”

He turned to her; there was a light in her eyes that shone into his own, and his heart beat fast, a tide of blood had entered her face and made it more beautiful. He forgot everything, the danger, the awful crisis, the place; for an instant, that carried it in an eternity of bliss, he felt her submission, her peace was in his hands, and he felt it somehow wrenched from her by fear, and yet not by any stupefaction of dread; fear, perhaps the strange solemnity of a portentous predicament, had only broken the chrysalis of silence, wherein—he knew it—lay the formed powers of her love for himself. The shouts of those around him awoke him; he looked up. The huge air-ship was close at hand; it passed immediately over the apex of the building, and from it he could see the dangling ends of ropes, and affixed to them hooked irons, like anchors. He turned to her again, she leaned against him, the hand upon his shoulder moved softly around his neck. He freed himself gently, and took her arms within his hands; their faces came closer; Amato’s lips moved, Helen’s ears caught the whisper:

“The beginning of such joy CANNOT end in death! We shall be saved!”

“Look sharp there. Catch that kedge and fix it,” the voice came from the skies, and on the top of it came another shock or explosion or both; the building rocked again, to some it seemed that the roof on which they stood, wavered and reeled, from somewhere a block of stone slid from its pediment and dropped to the street; Amato heard its thud on the pavements. But he was only thinking of the orders from the skies. He seized the swinging ropes. He found their ends weighted with grappling irons, like the flukes of an anchor; he called to the men, and Moser and Meldexter came to him from the distant end of the gallery, and behind them the rest. There were in all five anchors; these the men fastened as best they could, holding them in place on the arches of the gallery and calling to Ned to pull on them. Ned pulled and with a long snapping rip the arches gave way, splitting the railing of the gallery, exposing lengths of it, from whose naked edges a few shrunk away, dreading the startling depth they confronted without the saving intervention of the fence.

The balloon drifted away and the hearts of all sank, while the two women sobbed and shrieked. It was disconcerting. But a voice came back, shot from the sepulchral cone of a megaphone:

“Stand to! All right, I’ll be back! Set the anchors inside the windows.”

The thudding action of the fans were heard, and the gigantic bolide swam upward, preparing for another descent in one magnificent sweep. Amato took occasion to look down and measure, if he could, the extent of the building’s dislocation. The information vouchsafed by this inspection was terrifying enough.

He could not see the street! There was a bulge in the side of the building—and he detected a confusion of murmurs coming up to him, as if from the lower floors, a complication of movements, of breakages, strains, and slow surrenders of stanchions, girders and pillars, had set in. The roar of the flames was heard, but the wind, now losing strength, still kept the flames and smoke driven to the south, yet the fire was mounting—it must be—sheets of redness blazed momentarily in the air below him accompanied by low explosions. Amato dreaded the greater ones, those that announced some falling floor, and almost betokened the overtaking of stored combustibles or explosives.

There!—a tremendous racking reverberation sounded below, and, after a pause, another—and distinctly the building moved! Amato caught hastily at a support, and terror stricken looked up again for the balloon, while others about him breathed in sighs and gasps. The balloon was coming in again on a long sweep, and its daring navigator intended to bring it very near. The other men saw it; there were eleven all told, including Amato, and the wireless operator. The windows opening on the gallery, and fortunately at its level had been kicked in, and they were found to be the openings to a sort of attic. There were no lights now; the operator, when they reached him after their flight in the elevator, had kept at his task with only an oil lamp and a candle to help him to see.

But these were brought round from the south side, relighted in the garret room, and while five of the men entered this chamber, the other six awaited the descent of the balloon to catch the ropes and anchors, pass them to the men inside, who hoped—obediently to Ned Link’s suggestion—to find some means within of making them fast. Once moored, the men in the balloon could draw the air-ship down, and the embarkation of the marooned company from the roof be effected.

All stood waiting. Helen Lorimer had joined the two women, and her composure—outwardly perfect, though her heart beat fast with doubt—soothed and helped them. Moser, Meldexter, Amato, the two reporters, remained on the gallery, the three other men went into the attic, the elevator boy stood near Amato, ready to assist. The search of the men inside the attic for means of “tieing up” was unrewarded. The garret-like space was almost destitute of furniture, and presented no irons, links, staples, frogs, or even girders, for holding down the balloon with the anchors and ropes. There were however, some long timbers, joists, or beams lying on the floor, as if remnants of unused lumber from the first construction. The wireless man, coming through a window again to the gallery called out despondently:

“Nothing here but sticks of wood.”

“How long are the beams?” asked Amato.

“Oh! twelve feet perhaps.”

“Well, tie the ropes to them, put them across the windows and let them purchase on the walls, across the opening of the windows.”

“Well said—the very thing. Look out! here she comes! Catch hold. For God’s sake don’t lose her,” and the wireless tumbles again back into the attic.

The balloon was over them, Ned, backing her down with great success. The ropes were eagerly seized—and held; Amato saw Link peering from the “pilot,” and the crew’s heads over the sides of the compartment’s deck. As quickly as he could Moser explained the scheme of fastening inside the garret, while the ropes and anchors were flung inside and the ropes paid out for length. They were taken in at three windows, two at two windows, one at the third. The tieing up inside was a matter simply of winding them round the beams, and driving the anchors—so well as the men could—into the wood. Link kept shouting orders—and said—he’d break off the ends of the ropes on the balloon when he rose, and leave the anchors in the doomed edifice—just then he was holding everything taut.

Doomed indeed the fabric, they were on, was. Its increasing danger was frightful; the whole stupendous mass was leaning! Its interior had not proven fireproof in any sense. The materials of its construction were for the most part combustible, being wood encased in stone walls, and held up by an iron framework. Few of its floors were of brick—it had been a flagrant example either of misconception, or carelessness, or of some shameless corruption. Many of the rooms were sumptuously furnished, many sealed in splendid oaken walls, and into this labyrinth of ignitable stuffs, leagued with hundreds of square feet of thickly painted, or oil encrusted walls, the fire made its way with exulting ease. Nothing could withstand its horrible violence, the immensity of its ruthless power—only its possible suffocation in the riotous profusion of things combustible—through lack of air to feed its own ravenous vitality. And that could not be.

The men finished their work in the attic and came out through the windows to the group, now all gathered together watching the slowly lowering balloon. The ropes and anchors held, and Meldexter led a feeble cheer as the hope of escape brightened. Ned was hauling on the cables, and so far nothing yielded; only one thing kept Amato in suspense, the recurrent jolts of the building, as it seemed to sink or fall together—he hardly knew which it was. With each jolt the balloon swayed, feeling the drag on the ropes. If they only held! The crew was cautious, Link understood the danger; all waited, and ever and anon as Amato’s ears strained to note the reactions at work in the building, he heard the firing of the engaged forces around the City Hall, though he thought its early vigor had waned.

“Hold fast. Lower the crib,” it was Ned’s voice. The creak of the windlass on the balloon’s deck ceased, and over the railing of the compartment descended a basket large enough for one person.

“Ladies first” called Moser, as all crowded towards the welcome vehicle of safety.

One of the two women was lifted in the basket, and it was slowly hoisted, disappearing above their heads or just seen as a swinging spot until it came to the balloon. The balloon was kept floating at about fifty feet above them; Ned did not dare to approach nearer. How long the wait seemed to Amato before the little vessel again swung into their hands, and the second woman was launched upward to life and the world again! It was slow business, and the explosions increased, and the heavy structure swayed. Was there time for all? Amato glanced about him, the light from the balloon’s lamps made it possible for him to finally see the pale faces of the men; he saw too that Helen Lorimer had crossed to him, and was at his side. She had refused the first proffer of the basket, and said she would go last. It was now her turn; a second time the basket returned, and all held tight. Moser and Meldexter spoke together:

“Miss Lorimer, we are ready.” The smoke was coming up to them, and even spits of fire and a shower of sparks at intervals burst around them; these Ned feared. His voice sounded from the pilot:

“Look alive. Let the men come double.” Miss Lorimer did not stir; But no one was kept waiting, she spoke very clearly “I will go with Amato!”

Amato felt his heart stand still—No—Madness—She must go. He too spoke clearly:

“Helen, for God’s sake don’t wait! We will all come. But now—delay is fatal—take the chair.”

“Come there” it was Ned Link’s voice, “This is no time for kidding.”

Amato seized Miss Lorimer’s hand; what had occurred flashed upon him as her Acceptance. Strange to be introduced to one’s perpetual happiness on the edge of the chance of Death! He helped her to the chair, and it went upward as a fresh uprush of sparks and blinding smoke issued even from their feet. That was an awful instant, but to Amato its terror faded and—as though he trod along some earthly vale of flowers in the very midst of applauding friends, with his soul’s desires satisfied—he forgot its very existence; he dreamed:

“Rudolph, I would rather wait. But I will go. Be sure to follow.”

The whisper was in his ears, as the basket rose for the third time.

No one spoke; the men were by themselves; there was a possibility of panic; Moser felt it, so did Meldexter: they drew together, there had been a sort of scuffle between the reporters, and the court stenographer had showed a suspicious excitement. The Judge had intervened in the quarrel between the reporters, and pointed out the danger of any folly; there was but one way out of the crisis; if they lost their heads, they lost their lives. Stilled for a moment, the group watched for the return of the basket, and it came back quickly. As it approached the two scufflers rushed past Amato—they were on his side—and seized the cradle; they were white with terror, and at its side they struck out, the taller pushing the smaller man off, as he fought with Moser and Meldexter to keep possession of the basket. Amato had been almost hurled from the gallery through one of the open spaces made by the previous tearing off of the gallery wall. His recovery was just quick enough, and the next moment, discovering the predicament this loss of self-control placed them in, he dashed upon the tall combatant, seized him by the coat collar, and flung him off the cradle. He stumbled upon the smaller man, and the three fell together in a heap upon the gallery space. Amato was on his feet in a trice, and as the other two rose, he knocked them both flat again on their backs. The lesson was deserved; it was remembered as well.

During this incipient brawl Moser and Meldexter got the Judge into the chair, which again swung off, and was pulled up. After that there were no more interruptions. Discipline did its perfect work, but there was good reason for speed. The smoke was increasing, and the rain of sparks, not unmixed with heavier elements, fell about them. In the next load the two reporters and operator were placed, as the other men feared for their collapse. It was now actually getting hot, and Ned, watching everything, was shouting for greater haste. The huge inflated bag veered and tossed and strained on the ropes, and the imminent danger of its freeing itself grew more alarming. Again the basket descended, and this time Ned ordered that two men and the boy get in:

“Get in sitting on each others’ lap, and hold fast the guide rope;” thundered the impatient Ned. It was done and the three arrived in safety upon the balloon deck. Once more the cradle shot down, and there were now only the stenographer and Amato left. They would ascend together. When the women were sent aloft some little pains had been taken to insure against the possibility of their falling out, by fastening them in with binding cords, and this had consumed a little more time than was quite consistent with the urgency of the rescue. The men had abandoned this precaution. Amato being the larger man told the court attendant he would seat himself in the basket first, and then the stenographer should place himself in his lap; both were feeling the effects of the stifling smoke now shooting up from the crevices on the roof in spiral volleys. Suddenly as both had seemed ready for the lift, and had shouted to the men above to draw them up, the building lurched, its great summit slipped away from their feet, and thus, slowly sliding over, was dragging the balloon with it, while the basket caught at an inclined angle against the gallery railing, was tipped, and spilled its human contents out upon the gallery space. Amato felt the heat of the copper surface, and he heard as well, the command shouted from the balloon:

“Let go all! Rise!”

The basket was still there and it was attached to the air-ship. As the anchoring ropes dropped, the basket rose following the upward surge of the balloon. There was one chance for both. The stenographer cowered at the feet of Amato screaming in a mania of terror. Amato seized the basket, coiled the loose suspension rope about his arm and wrist; there was some hesitancy in the motion of the balloon; it settled back again, and this gave time; the rattle of the ropes as they slammed around him, thrown off from the deck, whereon all he loved was now deserting him, aroused him to an insane strength. He could not leave the young man; he felt his arm and wrist would stand the tug of that suspension and lifting; could it stand a double weight?

“Throw your arms about my neck. Now clutch hard. I’ll hold you.”

Amato caught the hanging rope above his chanceried wrist, and thus in mid-air the two swung above the crashing mass of iron, from whose crumbling stories rose flame and smoke, as if, with one wild onset of demoniacal fury, the penned legions of fire intended to break up through the very apex of the proud edifice, crowning their destructive work with a last towering splendor of flames, that would assault the stars. So tremendous and amazing was the spectacle that the men on the platform of the balloon, for one inappreciable but blood-curdling moment, forgot their work. Amato with the stenographer on his back hung unrelieved above the maelstrom of fire. Then came the pull. Ned was raging with oaths at their slowness. But the men were wiser than their captain. It required an even, steady, unaccelerated pull, to hold the strange load; Amato felt the wrench, as his shoulder, and ligament and muscle yielded; the pain darted through him with excruciating force; if only he could keep consciousness! they would yet be safe and—Helen!—Helen—!!

“Good God save him! save him!” thus Helen Lorimer cried and prayed. All were watching the appalling sight—not of the fire but this struggle there in the air-spaces, spaces made hot with the dust of sparks—Helen alone did not watch, but smote her breast and plead with suffocated sobs, upon her knees, her eyes dried in the agony of suspense, her lips scorched and pallid with a heart-tortured fear, her body bowed in the convulsion of her supreme petition for the life of the man she now loved, with an ecstacy of pride, and homage, and wonder, and obedience.

AND THE HEAVENS HEARD. The head of the unconscious Rudolph Amato lay in the lap of Helen Lorimer on the floor of the soaring balloon, pitching and rolling in the billows of the ascending heat; her hands soothed his temples, and pressed to his lips the restoratives that slowly brought back color to his handsome face, and awoke the smiles of recognition in his gracious and loving eyes.

Ned had not separated his inflammable gas-bag a moment too soon. As Amato had been drawn “aboard” belching clouds of winged sparks, like innumerable swarms of illuminated bugs, rose about the balloon; parts of the riggings caught afire, and were extinguished by the crew, and a stinging smoke followed. For the tremendous ranged pile of floors that had made up the great Municipal Building—a landmark in the wonderful city—had begun to double up, tumbling to the ground, ensheathed in volumes of flames and blinding fire-motes; a roar like the faraway beating of the shores by waves proceeded from it. Its pyramidal top, with the gallery, fenced with stone, where the rescued group had only just been standing, had bent curiously to the south—it was this rising of the north edge that had kept the balloon’s basket a little longer under the control of Amato—and the bowed head of the giant, dropped stones and disrupted ornaments from its crest upon the smashing pavements of the square south of it, some shooting outward to the platforms of the elevated railroad and the causeway approach to the East River Bridge. That great conduit of travel had been deserted; Brooklyn at the beginning of the fight had retreated, or the home swarming multitudes turned elsewhere for a safer transit.

Still the balloon drew off, mounting higher and higher. The blazing furnace shone like a colossal wand of light, its thunderous sounds of combustion died away; the last noises of the combat, yet unfinished about the City Hall, were scarcely distinguishable as Link pushed the aerial monster on, and, as it countered the upper air-currents above the mammoth metropolis, beaming in its nocturnal dress of electric aureoles, no note of the warfare there reached them. But lights along the East River side of the city showed where Putkof was busy, and, following Miss Lorimer’s request that they should all repair to Carrara, Link directed his aerial car towards that famous section.

Congratulations were fervent enough among the adventurers in this strange twenty-first century rescue, and the disorders that had threatened the safety of all were forgotten. Amato had become the hero, and the two men who had felt the force of his fists, seemed willing to acknowledge his merit, soothing their discomfiture with the thought that only his presence of mind and quick action prevented a dangerous panic. The poor stenographer hung over Amato in the cabin of the balloon, deck, where he lay nursed by Helen Lorimer. He had very soon recovered consciousness but movement was painful, because of the torn ligaments of his shoulders.

The cabin of the air-ship, of that remote day, to whose triumphs over the powers of the air, the indications of to-day so certainly point, was a small room on the deck of the balloon’s compartment, which was suspended from the balloon, and formed the accommodation for the passengers. In this space fitted with divans, its windows prettily curtained, and holding a few chairs, a table, and some convenient mirrors, serviceable, for their own vain inspection, to the merry companies that made such frequent use of the Zeppelins of the city, in the pleasant days. In this room Helen Lorimer sat by the side of Amato, and watched him with a strange pride and pleasure.

Helen Lorimer’s nature was utterly lacking in coquetry, and she could no more have concealed her feelings, her quick interior acknowledgement of submission to this man, who had so modestly insisted upon recognition, and at this minute had stirred all her feminine reverence for courage, than she could have stultified herself at any instant in her life, by self-deception. Her frank and almost masculine candor prevented that, and her elevation of mind and position made the customary deceits of courtship unnecessary. She knew that this man loved her, and she frankly conceded her acceptance of his love at the exact moment when her own met and embraced it.

“It was an experience—something of a night-mare—” whispered Amato from his little couch as the balloon swam into the purer air; “and how awful it seemed to see you there, and all the possibilities—Ah—!” the pain made him groan a little, and he relapsed into an idolatrous gaze at the lovely woman who bent over him, adjusting with such gentleness the cushions and the wrappings about him.

“Night-mares are temporary expedients, fortunately, for the great purpose of letting us awake into the joy of living, and—there!—is that more comfortable?”

Amato almost laughed; “You did not finish that almost sublime bit of wisdom—of course you meant to say—at least I DO—living and LOVING—now did you not?” and he caught her hand and brought it to his lips.

“Under the circumstances,” and Helen Lorimer laughed almost as delightedly, though the color shot into her cheeks, and the faintest surprise stole from her eyes; “some indulgence is to be expected by you, bold Man, but you must not be as indiscreet in your thoughts as you are in your actions”—yet she did not withdraw her hand, just apparently leaned a little closer to him, so that its retention was more easily secured by the irresponsible party, who even tried to lift the hand of his lame arm to affirm its complete possession—and which brought on a sharp twinge of agony, and a few muttered ejaculations of disgust.

“Be careful. You may be even more useful when we reach the earth, than you have been in the skies. A little patience and your injury will be quite well, and then, perhaps some great risks—I feel grave over this revolt. What madness!—that shameless Longtinsky!”

“Risks,” he smiled delightedly. “The greatest risk I could run, you, have turned to success—Isn’t it so?—Helen?”

“You mean a—risk—with me? Well I cannot say—but I will be kind to you in your helplessness just now—I may retract later—you know women have privileges—you probably ran no risk. It was your own modesty that made it seem one——”

She disengaged her hand, and stood up beside him—his face shadowed a little, but the cloud passed and he almost cried out:

“If you invite me to boldness Miss Lorimer, I fear I may excel in that—it is an easier role to play!”

“Yes?—but you remember the old adage—the adventurer who passed from room to room and met the last door, with the inscription ‘Be not too Bold.’”

She retreated a little, and bent towards him with her hands pressed upon her knees and a mock dissembling frown was allowed to add its charm to her beauty—a fact so overwhelmingly appreciated by the young man that he groaned at his impotence and then—without any attempted exculpation for his ingratitude—complained that his nurse neglected his comfort, that he needed more coverings—that his shoulder should be lifted higher, that he must sit up, that he was hungry—thirsty—in short that nursing, considered as an art of “absent treatment” was insufferable torture, and that Miss Lorimer MUST come nearer to him, and minister to his immediate necessities.

But that amiable lady remained at a safe distance, assuring him that her care for him was directed by the most approved wisdom—that excitement was absolutely fatal to convalescence—that he as a patient was not cold, nor hungry, nor thirsty, but—if he indeed did wish to sit up, and would ask for assistance to that end, less offensively she, as his constituted nurse, might be willing to offer him the requisite help. The patient did not remonstrate at this view of his condition, nor did he palliate the resentment of his nurse by assenting to her pacific proposal. He simply rolled and emitted a qualified form of howling—it might have been so called in the parlance of Scripture—and at any rate was sufficiently and intentionally subdued to such a point that it could not have been audible to the company on the outside, whose sympathy was, at the moment, curiously ignored.

The effect of this uncontrolled suffering was immediate. It brought the apparently subservient nurse to the side of the wailing victim of circumstances—and, that her presence there was instantly consoling might have been inferred from the cessation of that unfortunate being’s distress—and, through some less conceivable reason than trained service as a nurse, it brought about a train of results not assumed necessary in ordinary hospital practice. As the young woman leaned over her subject his healthy arm became engaged somewhere in the vicinity of her neck—there was room for some confusion of mind in this operation as she appeared to assist him in the process—and then succeeded a slight cervical intermixture—so to speak—it almost seemed as if the nurse lifted him into an upright position, but there was a slight relaxation, and the patient was finally left conveniently propped up on cushions, with a singularly animated expression of complete relief, on his face, while the nurse—recognizing the urgency of the situation—sat near him with an appropriately pleased manner and some unmistakably—and improving—flushes of color upon her cheeks.

The company leaning on the taffrail of the compartment deck of the balloon, wondering at the marvellous prospect of the outspread city, thrilled with a delight that kept them silent over their wonderful escape, scarcely noticed the absence of Amato and Helen Lorimer, having perhaps some correct intuitions as to their mutual happiness. Onward in the illimitable lake of air the huge aerial leviathan made its way; the city below it was indistinguishable now in its details and became a punctured surface wherein dots of light ran into streams of sinuous gleamings while ever and anon a spoke of light emitted by some tremendous electric arc, shot up like a veritable pillar. The city was delimited by the vaporous splendor of the overspreading aurora of light, that strange wonder that had awakened Tom Ratler’s first amazement, and far away over Long Island the reverberations of light shimmered on the skies.

“Rather a narrow escape, your Honor,” said Meldexter, “I wonder what became of the Jury—and the Case?”

The Judge laughed. “Yes, it is a trying predicament as a legal precedent—a Jury liberated perhaps from mortal confinement by the victims of its own deliberations could hardly be trusted if their convictions were against the prisoners; they would be less or more than human if they did not give them the benefit of a change of mind, after they got out. There was probably no verdict reached and the Case is—as if—it had not been.”

“Of course the Jury must have escaped,” said Mr. Moser “Perhaps—the prisoners too.”

“The Case has undergone some enlargement since the morning,” it was one of the reporters who was speaking, “any guilt on the part of Longtinsky, Polinck & Co., has evolved into a tragic immensity that means treason to the State.”

“LOOK, LOOK!” the cry came from the opposite side of the deck. The men hurried round to the place whence the call had been heard, and there were the two women, the stenographer, the wireless operator, with the men of the balloon’s crew, pointing below them to a conflagration which flickered and smoked, rose and fell. The balloon had been rapidly falling. Ned Link intended to land somewhere in the flat space near the intersection of the present Speed way, Dyckman Street, and the Kingsbridge road. The anchors were no longer on board, and his descent was made more precarious, and necessitated a drop upon some even ground. This space was convenient, having been made into a grass land, holding lawn tennis courts, and croquet fields. But as he drove downward at 190th street, what was his astonishment when he saw that the region was swarming with men, and that the torch of the incendiary had fired the buildings of the public park upon the summit of St. George.

It was this spectacle that startled the sightseers on the balloon. But the balloon itself had not escaped detection from the earth, and as it approached, a sizzling bomb shot up towards it to explode harmlessly some hundred feet below it. The warning was however heeded and again Ned raised his apparatus, and soared in circles like a watching dragon, confusing and alarming his assailants beneath; they evidently feared his maneuvers, for now a sudden volley of missiles ascended, being for the most part pyrotechnical demonstrations, in the shape of sky-rockets. The little party of aeronauts were visibly impressed. It certainly resembled—this hostile gathering, there in the northern section of the city—some prearranged movement, and might as well as not have a direct connection with the outbreak at the City Hall.

The balloon whirled upward again and Ned examined the conditions around the opposite hill of Carrara. Here all saw lights moving fitfully; confused murmurs reached them, and a sense of some sort of trepidation in the inmates of the tiered palaces came to them. Helen Lorimer had left for an instant her charge, after a confirmed assurance from him that he was altogether comfortable—at least for a few minutes, though his condition might, after the expiration of a short interval, assume desperate extremes—and was gazing too, with the rest, at the alarming symptoms of disorder in the city, with the Carrara homes as the immediate object of its attack.

The suddenness of the assault upon the Municipal Building had been astonishing, and its success unexpected; it was evident that the City was unguarded. Moser and Meldexter both recalled the fact of the absence of the Militia; the fighting around the City Hall showed the perilous state of affairs, and now they realized that, more significantly yet, a dangerous attempt to ruin the famous Carrara Ridge was in progress.

The more it was thought over the clearer it became; the city was in the throes of a convulsion. Helen Lorimer was agonized at the thought of the danger to her Mother, and of her home. What was to be done? She turned a questioning glance up to Ned Link in the pilot above her, and he saw her wistful face, pale and anxious in the light of the lamps, which had been again reillumined, after a short eclipse, when in the neighborhood of the skyrocketing rioters at St. George’s.

“Well!” he answered exactly her mute interrogation, “we’ll sail down the Kingsbridge road a way, and I’ll let you out near Depot Lane—perhaps, if you care to chance it—you can get to the Carrara by the back way along the Lafayette Boulevard. I don’t think it’s very safe. I might get you somewhere else further away, but the ship has got to light soon; there’s something wrong—she’s scorched a hole or something—Hello—they’re off—” and he pointed to the east.

On the hillside where the broad street sweeps now from the brewery at Fort Mendel, to the Inwood valley, a moving train of lights was observed. There were not many and they came and went as if extinguished and again relighted, but they allowed the watchers dimly to discern descending a mass which could only be interpreted as the invading army of the mob. It was indeed Bomber’s force, timing his attack with the assault upon the City Hall. He was a little late; the fight in the City Hall was then waning with the rioters discomfited. Almost as the same instant red globes of fire ascended from the ridge in Carrara, like a silent yet luminous challenge—but that was not their meaning—they were the signals of distress, they were meant to call assistance. The party on the balloon understood them also; all there was again uncertainty and irresolution. Ned followed his own head. He determined to alight near Depot Lane and let them out; the balloon was becoming unmanageable. Suddenly it lurched and slipped through the air sideways, pitching the groups and the crew almost off their feet and righting again with a shock that knocked Amato from his cushions. Helen was at his side—how it delighted him to notice her alacrity—and as she helped him tenderly to regain his position, she told him of the discovery that an attack was about to take place at Carrara. It furnished him some food for thought.

Link kept driving the balloon, shouting to the crew to shift ballast from time to time, and telling all to make ready to “GET OUT.” When the critical state of the region was first noticed, the Judge and the lawyers thought it would be best to go elsewhere, fearing the danger of alighting in the midst of the social hornet’s-nest, which was buzzing so obstreperously. But this council was intolerable to Helen Lorimer, and to Amato as well—injured though he was. Argument had progressed somewhat on these points when Ned Link finished all indecision by assuring them he must descend; he thought he could “fetch ’em a little east of the Arrowhead inn”. Thither their course was now directed. But they never reached it. The balloon either exhausted by its strenuous experiences, and perhaps, too, somewhat overcome and distrait with the reckless and unusual proceedings in the great city, even it may be surmised, suffering from a distracted sense of responsibility with its official and distinguished burden—or, it may be from some more prosaic cause, as a hole in its sides, began visibly to fall, still however sliding forward at lower and lower levels. Ned saw its inevitable collapse, and fearing to come down obliquely on the roof tops attempted to steer it into the highway of the Kingsbridge Boulevard. With his fans alternately set forward or reversed he managed to keep it, though rolling, (which motion played havoc with the gravity of its occupants and forced Helen to remain close to her charge assisted by Mr. Moser, the latter to Amato’s personal weariness) in the roadway, when seized by some last whim of desperation it rose, swerved, and—so to speak—dashed its brains out against a chance stone structure, whose convenient eminence caught its fancy, and went to pieces.

A violent surge upward, a tilt that sent men and women sprawling, mingled with the irresolute and shifting furniture of the deck, a terrific bump, magnified, past all conception, beyond ordinary bumps, and then tearings, crashings, splinterings, and cries. That was the end of it. The contributions of cries came more from the streets than from the balloon. The streets were full of people: commotion and excitement reigned everywhere, and this new portent dropping from the air gave an additional and pleasurable impetus to the emotions of the miscellaneous crowds; another consternation for their jumping nerves.

Ned had leaped from the pilot, getting down to the compartment by a rope ladder, and ordered everyone to retire to the cabin. It was more stoutly made than the deck, and the balloon pitching heavily would probably split, and the extensions of the deck would act as guards. He had turned off all the power, put out the lights, and shot a hole in the gas-bag. Then he let things take their course, prepared for the last bump, and hoped to escape injury in the enclosed cabin.

The bump came, and with it a long hoarse wail, beginning with a queer murmurous hiss, and rising past the wail to a stertorous scream; it was the escaping gas, and the ripping sides of the gas-vault. The balloon shrank into a depleted cavernous bunch of waste, and this abrupt disappearance of the last remnant of buoyancy saved them all. They were all about flat on their backs, and the thud came just and disarranged them a little more, and really no one the worse for it. And after the thud came stagnation, and silence. It was again a humorous situation, and both Helen and Amato thought so.

Not a sound had been uttered, even the two despairing women and the two belligerent reporters had been shocked into voiceless consternation. The distinguished Judge and the celebrated solicitors, the famous Helen Lorimer, reduced by danger—as she herself felt—to the ignominious level of clutching a more or less perpendicular floor, and waiting for eventualities, had certainly a comic interest. And when they at last settled down with the last jounce and no one seemed hurt, though, by reason of the mechanics of an inclined plane, they suffered from a little heterogeneous mixture, and Amato was in greater pain, both these happy souls laughed. In the darkness that laugh restored confidence and it was followed by Helen Lorimer’s voice:

“Well we can be quite sure that we have arrived; that was an unmistakable thump, but doesn’t it feel good to be here? Mother Earth has an unforgettable reality about her. Mr. Link, we owe our lives to you, and now if we can get out into the streets, and see about us, all will be right with us I know. As a sky-pilot, Mr. Link, you are a better success than many who boast of their prerogatives in that respect.”

This alertness and cheerfulness put all in good humor, and relieved the anxiety. There was really not much reason for alarm; the underpinning of the deck had been crushed out of all recognition, but its crumpling up had made the impact of the compartment less severe, and with the exception of the few bruises caught in their miscellaneous contact with the walls of the cabin, and with each other, the party was altogether unhurt.

They found themselves at last on the earth again and proceeded with all possible haste to extricate themselves from the wreck. Willing and numerous hands helped them; they had fallen at about the junction of the old Kingsbridge road and Amsterdam Avenue. They were not so far away from Carrara. After they had “found themselves,” so to speak, Ned Link telephoned for the wrecking forces of the Zeppelin to which he belonged, to clear the wreckage; Mr. Moser offered his assistance to Amato and Miss Lorimer; the Judge, the two reporters, the two women, the stenographer, the wireless operator, and the elevator boy scattered, with more or less haste, to their several homes, after hurried congratulations. Moser, Helen, Amato repaired to a druggist’s where Amato was made more comfortable, and then Mr. Moser looked about for an auto to convey them to Miss Lorimer’s home. Already that home and its bordering habitations were beleaguered by the storming rioters, led by Bomber.

CHAPTER XVI

THE MAYOR’S DEATH

When the Mayor ordered out the 69th and 22d regiments, the sole remnants of the large militia forces of the city, he enjoined their commands to protect the properties at Carrara. At the same time, even as his messages flew to their destinations, Bomber was awaiting the influx of the men intended to effect its destruction. He had made his headquarters in the Park on St. George’s Hill, and he was not disappointed in the rapid concentration of an armed multitude. They came from the east, approaching their improvised rendez-vous over the Washington Bridge, and some moved southward from the north, reaching their position, over the hills of Fordham by the Mosholu Driveway, tramping in files or companies, all the way from the low lands of West Farms. The riot at the Municipal Building and the City Hall began at night-fall—about six o’clock,—and had been thwarted and defeated somewhere between nine and ten. The refugees whose perils we have recounted, had escaped to the roof of the Municipal Building at six, had been taken off about eight-thirty, and had returned to the north-central part of the city where this story has just left them, seeking safety and refuge at—it may be stated—nine, for the dial of the clock has some reference to the remaining incidents of this narrative.

The Mayor, after the repulse of the mob, had sent in a call for the ambulances, and essayed himself to help the wounded on both sides. It was a sorrowful and bitter sight. This, he thought, had at last been the outcome of the years of increasing class hatred. His heart bled for it; the fame of the noble city vanished, grown so beautiful and crowded too with manifold means of mercy! Was it just; was it right; was he to blame! The accusation smote him with an insufferable agony. He had worked hard to heal these social wounds, and the pride, the joy, alleviating his forlorn sense of desertion, had been an exulting realization that he had done so in these last months of tireless effort. And now—this pitiful cheerless tragic sequel! Tears started to his eyes, and sobs almost broke from his lips. He had loved New York so well and all its people. Was everything he loved to disappoint him?—and then the thought of the endangered Carrara flashed through his mind. He stood up, rising from the task of helping a poor wretch into an ambulance, with the young doctor that accompanied it, and saw his secretary Mr. Briggs following him.

He turned towards him almost with a motion of anger; this man had perhaps steeled his heart, blinded his sympathies, made him ruthless in the use of power! He knew his worth but it was a worth caked into a rigidity of cruel formalism by the prejudices of industrial needs, the set phrases of an apprehensive Capitalism. Personally he—the Mayor—had no faith, as faiths are counted, but he worshipped the ideal of a social Brotherhood—whatever that might be called. Perhaps he had allowed this man to obliterate this picture too easily with his incessant lectures, his frigidism, his secularity. He let his resentment flame out:

“Perhaps this Sir is your work—this slaughter—this fratricide. This is the outcome of the discord you love to foment. Do you like it?”

He advanced towards him almost with a menace in his voice and action.

Mr. Briggs stopped suddenly and looked at the Mayor, just long enough to let the shadow of something like contemptuous pity steal into his eyes and then quietly answered:

“No Sir, it is not my work—nor YOURS; I have just put Tom Ratler in an ambulance and sent him to the hospital. I found him unconscious lying over there against the railing of the park.”

The Mayor was sincerely fond of Tom, and this information startled him out of all his brooding misgivings; over the field the doctors and nurses were working, lamps moved from place to place, groans too issued from many quarters; the police from the Hall covered the ground, and the outskirts of the park swarmed with crowds as the police pushed backward the sullen or the indifferent or the curious. The rioters had apparently vanished. Briggs told the Mayor he had sent to the same hospital and in the same ambulance Tom’s bitter enemy, Poniatowsky and with them had gone Jessie Longtinsky, though he added:

“Her predicament is painful, they are both her lovers; she fears one and loves the other; I need not say which is which,” and the speaker looked oddly at the Mayor and smiled.

“How did it happen; was Tom in the fight?” asked the Mayor.

“Well, I think he was, and he was fighting his dearest foe—that Poniatowsky—they are both near the end of things.”

Pain came into the Mayor’s face, and some reminiscent revery held him for an instant. He looked over the workers gradually finishing the gruesome duty of getting the dead together, and despatching the wounded away to the hospitals. He turned again to Mr. Briggs:

“See that every one here—striker—” the word brought a sigh from his lips—were these the men he had repulsed?—“Ah—rioter and policeman alike are attended to. I shall take the machine and go north—to Carrara—”

Mr. Briggs was inclined to resist this determination at first, but he understood the Mayor’s feelings too well, and he really feared his outbursts if he provoked them; they could be unpleasantly vindictive and ugly; he would let nothing separate him from the Mayor. The man had been his best friend and he almost adored certain qualities in the Mayor, though he cherished a contempt for his dreams of social rehabilitation.

“Everything shall be attended to as you wish. But Sir if I might be permitted to offer one word of advice; it seems to me——”

“Not another word Briggs; the worst outbreak will be at Carrara—I know it. The very sight of those white palaces will make the blood boil in the veins of these unhappy, these misguided men. They will feel there as if they were about to throttle their enemy, kill him in his lair. If I can I will prevent it—whatever happens——”

He waved his hand and walked rapidly away; Briggs watched his disappearing form sadly. He was not a man of psychic sensibility but somehow he felt that a gulf of final separation was opening between him and the Mayor, and in that gulf lay the prostrate body of his master. A few moments later the Mayor shot from the City Hall park moving through a lane made for him by the police. His vehicle passed up Broadway which was streaming with crowds, restlessly surging towards and from the City Hall. Except for the trolley cars that occupied it, as they do to-day, there were no other carriages than the Mayor’s and it swiftly sped on its way.

A few recognized the Mayor’s automobile, and a shout or some hurled defiance, a cheer, a query, or simply the amazed gaze of the spectators greeted him. The Mayor was buried in his own excited thoughts. He felt the critical terror of this day, and he revolted with his whole soul against the needlessness, the awful consequences of it. It was not simply the pain of sympathy and bereavement, but the more disturbing dread of a disordered state, with civil unrest and embittered irreconcilable social elements, whose enmities would corrode the foundations of government and infiltrate all the veins and circulations of political life.

Sunk in the pillows of the Limousine he pondered over the action he should now take. He was not unacquainted with previous threats made against Carrara and he understood the hideous rage of the Longtinsky people. That man’s hatred of Helen Lorimer possessed him like a consuming fever. And now her home was to be destroyed, if it were possible, and she—his heart almost stopped at the thought—herself was in danger. And while the Mayor glided northward on the spinning wheels of his noiseless carriage, at intervals bruising the silence with its clamorous honk, and always sweeping the ground before it with two broad brushes of light; while Helen Lorimer and Amato and Mr. Moser were searching for a conveyance to the same destination as the Mayor’s; while the militiamen were hurrying to their armories expecting a sanguinary struggle at the same point, Bomber had anticipated these contrasted forces of opposition, and—though much later than he hoped—had moved down the Dyckman road and already was filing in three columns through Nagle, Sherman and Post Avenues to the marble terraces of Carrara, aiming especially to capture the home and mistress of the Lorimer villa.

Bomber was a man after Longtinsky’s own heart, and he had moulded him to his purposes, inflaming a bitter and criminal nature with the promise of gain, and filling his ears and mind with the murmurs of envy. An inordinate conceit, a feeling of injury, that he was the victim of a false social system, and a heart grown ruthless from brooding over imaginary wrongs, made him a fit instrument to accomplish Longtinsky’s designs. Bomber was the child of an Irish mother and an American father, and he inherited the verbal fluency of the first, with the undaunted self-confidence of the latter, and he had wandered far from the moral fortitude of both. His vanity, and the smoothness of his tongue had hurried him into foolish enterprises, and credulity and lack of discretion had invariably brought about his ruin. These disappointments had vexed his self-esteem and soured him. He had not been saved the consequences of an admired physical charm, and indulgences had perverted still more the easy rules of his life. Yet the strangest circumstance of this man’s life remains untold. HE TOO LOVED HELEN LORIMER.

At the death of his parents, Bomber inherited enough money to be able to live much as he wished. He had received a fairly good education, an education which might have been improved, if he had himself helped more the opportunities accompanying it. The city’s pleasures he understood, and his skill in talking, his dalliance with the brighter novelties of living, had given him a sort of vogue in a fast set of young men, among whom, occasionally, he met some belonging to the acquaintances of the beautiful Helen Lorimer. This was of course some years before. Bomber had often seen the famous lady at public places of entertainment, the theatres, the opera, at concerts—Bomber had some skill himself in playing, and much musical taste—and he had actually spoken with her at her Settlement House, when he endeavored to put himself in as good a light as possible, and thought that he had succeeded. Contact with women had bred in him an infatuation, a very great sense of his conquering personal charm. He felt pretty sure that Helen Lorimer must have noted it too. At the time he stood well, and the sharp reverses that later left him penniless had not yet developed. He had just then no use for socialism and rather sported his aristocratic prejudices.

He undertook to give the “young Portia of the city,” as he called Miss Lorimer, advice in some well written letters, upon her various projects, and assiduously set himself about getting into her graces by an apparent interest in the poor—an hypocritical affectation then. The letters had been answered by Miss Lorimer’s secretary and a little curtly. Then he made a mistake, a most ill-considered blunder. He told her in a letter, full of ridiculous tropes and foolish imagery—a letter such as self-deluded men often write when fate drives them to their ruin—that he loved her. The letter reached Helen Lorimer. She blushed, laughed and carefully burned it up. Bomber waited for an answer. So intolerable was his conceit that he really deceived himself into believing that Miss Lorimer’s silence was to be interpreted as a favorable sign of her favor, and—making “his will lord of his reason”—wrote her another fatuous epistle. This letter Miss Lorimer did not see; it fell into the hands of her uncle, who, opening it by a mistake and catching its contents fell into a tremendous rage, and in an answer told the incorrigible Bomber that he was a jackass, that his effrontery deserved public exposure, that Miss Lorimer was insulted by any association with his name.

Bomber writhed under this repulse, and then his fortune failed, his plans went all wrong, his money vanished, the better sort of his companions deserted him, and he fell from round to round in the scale of decency, and he turned with an almost impious hatred upon all he had once admired. Bitten by jealousy, his heart poisoned by failure, his stupid pride affronted, almost to others a spectacle of indigence, the ulcer of discontent wore into his soul and he handed himself over to the forces of annihilation. He made a living by conceiving vitriolic attacks upon property, upon reputations, and he avenged himself for his repulse by insinuations, false, cruel and repulsive, on the fair name of Helen Lorimer.

The man became furiously bestial. His strength, his youth, carried him through trials of dissipation, that less stalwart or inured natures would have crumbled or decayed under. The fever of denunciation grew on him; Longtinsky’s plan, mad, impossible, delirious, suited him precisely. He rushed into it and helped its author to more completely arrange and perfect its details. He shared with Longtinsky the overmastering control of the whole impudent and hopeless scheme. But it was the chance to him for revenge! His impatience overcame every scruple, and he revelled in the dream of destroying the homes of Carrara, the villa of the Lorimers—even, in some more atrocious moments of desire of capturing, enslaving the queen of that proud society!

Thus, when Bomber led his little army to destruction, he found himself where at last he might work out his long cherished hopes. And it was a strange fact that in the notable uprising of this distant day, the leaders were entirely selfish—most of them—while the devoted believers in some sort of social upheaval, the men who formed the rank and file of the movement, were more moved by ideas of justice, and of readjustment, in which their rights would be restored and their ills righted.

The shuffling lines of men came down the long hill of Fort George, they turned from Dyckman Street into the three avenues which lead southwesterly to the Kingsbridge Road. There was no uniform among them; here and there a red ribbon, and an occasional show of brass buttons in some frayed coat, hardly helped the physical homogeneity of about twelve hundred men of all sizes and service. Bomber had been disappointed at the numbers of his army, and he had a discouraged feeling about their enthusiasm. They were the enrolled members of an anarchistic society, and probably would fight well if it came to fighting. Longtinsky had once insisted that with any show of force, the Mayor would compromise—and then, on some favorable terms perhaps, they would gain power and there would be an UPRISING.

It all seemed simple enough, planned in a guarded room. Out in the open, beneath the stars the conquest of the city was more a matter of daring than words. So Bomber thought. Yet his hopes blinded him to fear. He did not expect any difficulties at Carrara. The place should be destroyed. He almost laughed to think of it. The police would be kept busy at the City Hall. Perhaps Helen Lorimer would have a little more respect for him after that!—suppose he took her a prisoner—an hostage of that sort, might make the stubborn necks and the dull heads of the Plum-Puddings bend, and think just a little. Indeed he was not averse to dwell upon the favorable chance of a conversation with Miss Lorimer and the diabolical fancy entered his mind of making some matrimonial agreement with her. So banal and ludicrous is a depraved vanity!

Bomber’s tall frame had been moving among the men, as they slowly assembled, painting in glowing colors the ease of their work, and just what it was. They would be almost unopposed. Scouts had brought in the news that Carrara was being deserted; whether the Lorimer villa was empty was uncertain; lights were burning there, and figures had been seen moving in the chambers. But that was of no consequence—only some frightened women! Bomber naturally thought that Miss Lorimer had returned home from the trial, which, it was universally known, she had most punctually attended each day. He did not know of the conflagration and disaster at the Municipal Building.

He told his gloating hearers that the Revolution had been started at the City Hall—Putkof had set the shipping afire throughout the East Side—all the prisoners would be liberated, the city was panic-stricken—nerveless; the militia away—no regular troop anywhere around—the garrisons at the forts, at the Narrows sent away, and those at Throg’s Neck as well. They would win on their own terms. This was their chance to wipe out Carrara—the luxurious homes of their masters, the tyrants of wealth, the sleek vainglorious idlers who fattened on the sweat and earnings and skill and daily risks of the workers.

So he walked and so he talked—yet he had misgivings. One thing was annoying; his guns, his ammunition, had not arrived. They were concealed in an empty house at High Bridge, and the wagons drawing them with muffled wheels had not appeared. Only a few of those that pushed their way into the entrance of the park carried arms. However, he had no doubt that the guns would come—it made things late—though, and time counted for something. But a hollowness in the whole effort suddenly struck him; for one instant the great reserves of defence in the mammoth city were indeed abroad, but how long would it take for the four quarters of the country to pour in their support—how long before these reserves themselves would be storming his little host with all the implements of death? Unless—Ah, he pinned some hope on that—unless as Longtinsky told him, the Time EVERYWHERE was ripe for Revolution. He half believed it. The thought gave him nerve and confidence.

The attacks of the rioters at the City Hall, and on the East Side, had summoned all the police to the southern districts of the city, and Bomber, acquainted with the fact of the presence of the members of the 22d and 69th regiments in the city, was convinced that they would not be able to interfere with him. The Mayor’s warning and his own fears as well were destined to frustrate these hopes.

Still no supplies. Bomber chafed and raged—already more than an hour had been lost. He was general enough to realize the importance of promptness. Messenger after messenger had been despatched to High Bridge, and none had returned. Bomber was in a group of his lieutenants at the brow of the hill overlooking the Inwood depression, and the viaduct, to Kingsbridge, of the present subway. His first move had been to interrupt the trains of the Subway, and a detachment of his men had pushed their way up to the Dyckman Street station, and into the opening of the long tunnel leading south to 155th street—but no trains were running, the company deeming it too dangerous for one thing, and because orders from the armories requisitioned them for the service of the troops.

Still Bomber’s men tore up the free rails of the tracks, for a short distance.

“What in thunder holds those men—Here—” to a dozen staring auditors who happened to carry guns on their shoulders, “Get down to High Bridge, a pack of you—Perhaps help is needed—Wait—” the men turned—“Let more of you go. There is a kit of tools up on the balcony—” pointing to the pleasure house raised in soaring terraces at the highest point of the park—“a few crowbars may help you—and for that matter a bomb or so—” he added savagely, for it was Bomber who gave these orders.

“Perhaps they can’t get at the guns and ammunition. Hammer everything to Hell, and bring them up;” then turning aside to a man who stood apart, watching the fitful signs of agitation across the valley, on the Carrara Hills—“We’re running our heads into a noose perhaps—Eh—but if we stand here and wait for sunrise it will be cold bullets!—”

The man did not stir; the whispered fear did not seem to interest him, it certainly failed to withdraw his scrutiny from the pale white palaces, now growing more and more indistinct, as the lights went out, or again illumined in a spectral glare as some white flash flared in the courtyards, or the gleam of a descending rocket shone on them. At length the man dropped his glass, and showed he was not unconscious of the speaker—but he only muttered—almost as to himself—pointing with his disengaged hand to the opposite rim of land.

“Win that and if the worst comes—there are ways out—Money provides.”

Bomber seized his arm, drew him around to face himself, and then dropped his hands on the man’s shoulders and brought his face close to his:

“Yes, I know it does—but will a few empty houses furnish it? Do you know anything?”

“Know,” said the other returning the gaze fearlessly, and just perceptibly shrinking backward, as if finding this menacing scrutiny repugnant;—“I know that those money-bags have been storing coins and greenbacks in their safes for months. They expected this—some of them. Sly foxes, they knew the cry of the hounds long before they saw their teeth—they’re ready to give us the slip—Trap ’em and you are made. They’ve sold stocks, bonds everything and were getting their plunder together to slip over to Canada, make a dash for Europe, Mexico, anywhere—They’re too late. Bomber, if our hands close on that treasure we can take the same trip. Canada or any place might be a happier home for us than this city.”

Bomber looked nervously around. No one stood very close to them—the occasional rockets rising languidly from point to point in Carrara intimating some telegraphy between the houses, as if preparations or alarm were keeping their occupants busy, had attracted every eye. Bomber pulled his friend farther away from any chance interruption; his voice sank to a whisper, and his mouth sought his companion’s ear:

“I’ve been thinking of the same thing—But can we do it?”

“Do it—I can. You know me, a bank-cracksman for years. I’ve not learned my trade for nothing. Get me in those houses yonder and I’ll find the bottoms of their long purses. Trust me.”

A cry startled them. They looked behind them, and they saw the flames shooting upward in the park—The pleasure house was burning—It was this blaze, then culminating into a vast pyre, that the frightened travellers in the balloon saw a half hour or so later.

It caused almost as much consternation to Bomber and his advisers. Their force was revealed—the increasing light brought out with terrible distinctness the formless straggling groups—their position—and in its discovering brilliancy, illumined the long slant hill, on which a few companies of men were moving. It conveyed a further terror to Carrara—the rockets ascended in sudden flight from new points. Evidently it was interpreted as a signal for the opening of the anticipated attack.

Bomber was quick to act on his part. He left the man whose sordid selfishness and cynical opportunism were already shared by himself, and ordering his subalterns to rush through the crowds, commanded them to hurry down to the hillside and screen themselves in the oblique avenues below—Nagle, Sherman, and Post Avenues—somewhat further away from this unfavorable exposure.

The conflagration had been started by the men whom Bomber had despatched to High Bridge. In rummaging about for the crowbars and picks, as weapons of assault on the closed doors that perhaps yet foiled the rioters’ plans they had upset an oil lamp, whose trailing fringes of flame had ignited the woodwork of the well dried and combustible pleasure house, and, as if responsive to the growing alarm of the great city, that frail fabric burst into a sheet of swerving and dazzling light. The men in companies and scattered arrangements of files and groups ran down the hill, and it was a few last individuals that Helen Lorimer and Amato saw as they passed overhead later. The floating habitation caused a little consternation to the men yet unequipped for the attack upon Carrara, and Bomber watched it with misgivings, while to the anxious sentinels—both men and women—on Carrara, it was hailed as an omen of rescue.

In Carrara, to which place we must now direct our inspection, all was in confusion, and in the dismay, increased every moment by new disquieting news brought in by scouts, or received over the telephone and by messengers, mingled the baleful prognostications of some special upheaval, and the long dreaded and often forewarned condition of affairs in the city was soon understood, though all the happenings at the City Hall were not reported, and when it became apparent that an attack was to be made upon Carrara itself, the householders hurried together and council was taken as to what was to be done.

Some argued for instant evacuation, others believed that an armed resistance was possible, but that bold decision was coolly shown to be impossible, unless the united men—proprietors and servants—garrisoned some one of the stronger houses and deserted the rest. Julieta Lorimer was in despair over the continued absence of her daughter, and no information could be secured from the offices down town while the few who in some way had heard of the incarceration of the inmates in the Municipal Building, and among them Helen Lorimer, and its consequent burning, none dared to tell the awful tale.

Perhaps in all three hundred men could be mustered, and these poorly supplied with arms, and resistance seemed hopeless with this number against the overwhelming odds. There had not been much time for deliberation, but such time as was allowed was well employed. Very helpful to the householders was the path of communication between the villas. It ran along the crest of the ridge irregularly set with alcoves, stone benches, and ascending and descending steps that gave it a most pleasing variety. Over this, that evening, the neighbors passed and their hurried conference was made at the home of Helen Lorimer. Hither came the family heads, young and less prudent younger members, and gathering with them a squad of the male dependents who were not all disposed to encourage a resistance to the approaching invasion.

The impending danger hastened the deliberations. There seemed to the wiser ones but one thing to do. It was a partial retreat, taking with them such conveniently removable articles of great value as they could gather, and retire together to one of the strong Norman keep-like erection on the Bolton Road, just over the Dyckman Street pass to the Hudson River. If extremities, too serious, threatened them there, escape could again be effected to the river itself immediately behind, and finally embarkation in some steamboat to be at once summoned and held in readiness. The season had so far advanced that the many steam yachts that were familiar features on the shore line of the river at Carrara were no longer to be seen. They had retired to the winter station, as at present, near Gowanus on the Long Island shores.

The last words of directions were spoken by a Duncan, the owner of the picturesque mansion where they were to find refuge:

“Shut, lock and barricade all the entrances of your homes, the more passive resistance of that sort we can devise the better. Remove all valuables, the things you especially value of small size; concentrate at my home and await relief. It must come! Should we be forced into an extremity we can beat a retreat to the river and escape. This seems the safest way. We are powerless against such odds.”

And so the hurried evacuation was made, while signal lights—the rockets seen by Bomber—arose from point to point as a constant warning for vigilance and for haste. There was much confusion. In the short time possible to be employed before the invasion began, it was out of the question to carry away the many things that each householder dearly wished to save, and the bustle and struggle of uncertainty was consequently frequent and prolonged. Doors banged, improvised barricades were formed against the backs of the entrances, windows were shut and fastened, the chasing of servants up and down the stairs, the calls of the younger men and the impatient orders of the older with many feminine sighs and exclamations were mingled with the miscellaneous and confused murmurs and more violent noises, proceeding from the opening and shutting of safe doors, the secreting of objects of especial interest—and too large for removal—in closets and cellars, while constantly mishaps, punctuated with cries and recriminations, arose and added to the panic and disorder.

Amid it all Julieta Lorimer sat in her chamber bowed in prayer for the safety of her daughter. She had quickly brought together the jewelry of Helen, and her own, and packed the treasured trinkets in a small agate-mosaic casket that now lay on the bed in front of her. All sorts of dreadful possibilities crowded in her mind, racked to the limit of endurance with fearful surmises, as happening to her child. The thought of Amato kept up her courage. She knew his readiness and courage, and she trusted his devotion.

How many wistful pictures of the past filled her mental vista of the almost forgotten years—the years of Robert’s tempestuous courtship, the birth of Helen, the increasing affection and chivalrous loyalty of her husband, the periods of travel over the fair face of the world, their mutual wonder of the beauty and promise of the girl growing up in the revolving seasons, and gaining new charms of person and mind, her splendid adoration of high ideals, and her rich and embracing love of all human kind, her distinction, the patrician courtesy, the austere ambition and her peculiar sweetness of thought and word.

How Robert adored her; she saw them again and again walking together in a very ecstacy of genial communion, and, as though breathed upon her from the pregnant air, there came to her there, almost audibly, the accents of his wonder and delight as he told her of Helen’s unfolding excellence. She, whose respite from sorrow for the death of her own loved one, had only come in the intervals of her proud consciousness of the worth and buoyancy, of her daughter, now with terrified questionings looked out in the darkening night, and revolted against the sordid cruelty of circumstance if, in this vulgar exigency of commotion, that daughter’s life became the prey of accident. And as she gazed, half immersed in a praying thoughtfulness, there suddenly came before her eyes in the night the onrushing apparition of the lamp-lit balloon, in which that very daughter glided above her to safety. She had tarried long. Carrara was emptied and yet she remained. In the headlong flight her absence had escaped attention, even among her own fleeing servants.

And yet she did not stir, for now she thought of Helen’s unhappiness, the shocking discovery of her uncle’s perfidy, and the miserable disappointment that had darkened her life. Julieta sighed—she could not altogether regret it—Amato pleased her more; indeed, thus falling into reveries, she married him to her, and then the strange fervency of the desire of both to see the Pope placed in America and the new missionizing plan rose before her, and she forgot her grief, almost smiling over the Quixotic dream—for so it seemed to her. And yet no movement; she saw the thickening clusters of rockets, the frightening reminder of danger in the sheets of flame in the burning pleasure house on the hill, and the black crowds of men gathered in slovenly ranks for mischief. The lights yet burned in her room; she realized that they prevented any certain view of the outside, and she rose and extinguished them, and returned to the seat strangely oblivious perhaps in the indulgence of the luxury of her reveries, wherein she drew to her side the vanished dead, careless of remembering.

All had become still in Carrara, the shouts smothered in dull calls, the movement, the sounds of running feet, the opening and shutting of doors, the interrupted grating discords of shoved furniture and reinforced bolts and locks—all was quiet, for the refugees had crushed themselves into the Norman Duncan keep beyond the Dyckman Road. Here some guns had been distributed, a sort of garrison armament formed, scouts sent out, and a beleaguered attitude taken. The precaution was looked after of getting a boat ready at the water’s side behind them, and after some uncertainty and delay it was decided, then and there, to remove the women. Under guard the latter passed down the road to the Hudson in little companies, each with an escort of armed men. In all this commotion and anxiety, the absence of Julieta was somehow quite unnoticed.

Events were hurrying on to some fatal denouement among the rioters. The obstacles, which had delayed the arrival of their stores of guns and ammunition, and which were rightly explained by Bomber as due to the desertion of his allies who had been watching them, thus leaving them strongly locked up, inside barricades demanding destruction before the agents of the rioters could reach them, had at length arrived. The distribution of the arms to the men, the preparation of an advance party with bombs, the slow infiltration of orders to all the men and companies had consumed much time, and when at length the host moved forward along the three avenues—Nagle, Post and Sherman—the hour of nine had long passed.

Bomber had placed himself in the company of bomb-throwers, and the man who had boasted of his skill in discovering the hiding place of treasure was at his side. This little group headed the slow and irregular entrance of the men on the Kingsbridge Road. Immediately before them was the villa of the Lorimers, its marble terraces shining spectrally, and the outlined palace above them on the hillside, destitute of lights, inviting an easy assault. But Bomber feared some ambush, and he ordered a company of younger men—who had been acting as scouts for his army—to steal forward, and make their way through the shrubbery to the top of the eminence, for an observation of the measures of defence taken by the inmates. The men returned and told their chief that apparently the house was deserted. One man had broken in a window pane after forcing a shutter open, and the sound, sharp and crackling, brought no response. Still Bomber doubted, and he again ordered the men to push the examination further, and see the other houses, spy out the gardens, and return. The men dashed back, they were convinced that there was no danger in the abandoned Carrara. After a longer absence they again came back, and made their asseverations so strong that the place was deserted, that Bomber gave orders for the whole body to ascend the terraces and capture the ridge.

Julieta Lorimer raised her head; she had indeed fallen into a half sleep wherein with half muttered prayers and clustering memories her bewildered and exhausted body and mind had taken refuge. She rose and moved to the windows again, almost as if in a dream, to see if there was any sign of her returning daughter. It was the moment in which Bomber’s spies were hurrying back with their reports about the deserted Carrara, the moment when Bomber decided to rush forward and take the houses.

The night was clear but there was no moon, the stars ruled the skies with a soft and remote beauty, but their effects were less apparent over the city of that coming day by reason of the spreading pulsations of the upper light, artificially created and irregularly distributed over the enormous commonwealth. This light, as Tom Ratler noticed on the first evening of his arrival was more concentrated in the lower parts of the city, but it now bathed the foreground of the scene that Julieta looked out upon, though by it flushes of brightness alternated, like shifting clouds, with intervals of penumbral vagueness. Julieta pushed open the windowed door that led to a balcony and stepped out into the ledge formed by its floor, just at that instant when the light grew stronger.

She leaned far out, and her white dress formed a contrast with the shadows on the wall behind her. She was seen by the watching men in the roadway, and for an instant Bomber suspected treachery. And then the thought arose with tempting plausibility that SHE—Helen Lorimer—might have been left alone; this outstretched figure was hers, and he might now be able, under less humiliating conditions, than before, to ask for some consideration at her hands. The stupid dream awoke in him a strange restlessness. He had not been altogether thoughtless about his appearance either. He wore a khaki uniform which became him; its contrast with the rude and often torn garments around their commander had already awakened unfavorable comment. It was regarded with some dissatisfaction. The broad unrolled soft chapeau on his head added its theatrical touch, even gauntleted hands and an unused sabre dangling picturesquely at his manly hip contributed to an impression of dashing chivalry, which he had quite serenely noticed himself. He now strode forward to the middle of the highway, intercepting the movement that had begun to ascend the terraces, and in a loud voice calling upon all to desist.

“He intended to reconnoitre the place himself. He would give a signal for the charge as soon as he had convinced himself that no rascally ambuscade awaited them. He prized their lives, and rather than risk an unnecessary slaughter would first determine the nature of the ground before them. One life,” he grandiloquently concluded, “sacrificed, was better than the loss of many strong men whose strength was now needed for the Renewal of Society, and the establishment of the New Republic.”

The grotesque coxcombery of all this struck one man forcibly, and he cursed the silly display, the bravado of an idiot.

“Why damn him,” he muttered hoarsely—and it was the man of the lock-picking skill, the man who had plotted with Bomber for the chance of interviewing the safes in the Carrara mansions—“Damn him; what good will his maundering over there do. He’s losing time and enough has been lost now to let those tin soldiers get here with their pop guns and do us for ever. Bust the whole shee-bang, rip, tear, and level it! That’s the way and then—GIT.”

Bomber was a mistake and for once the crafty Longtinsky had perhaps miscalculated. But the element of mistake was in the unsuspected fancy this apparently well chosen limb of mischief had for Miss Lorimer, which entangled with his own preposterous personal conceit made him the easy tool of circumstances and circumstances now most ludicrously related to his stupid prepossessions. Nothing can be more mischievous in unsettling a vain man’s sense of relations and propriety, not to say his more important sense of his own position, than the foolish imagination of his possible importance in the eyes of a pretty woman.

Bomber turned his back to his astonished companions, and mounted the steps with rapid strides, his own conviction growing that the white figure above him was indeed Miss Lorimer the nearer he approached the now excited and attending lady who began to awaken from the strange coma of grief and recollection which had held her enchained in a half unconsciousness.

Julieta Lorimer slowly recognized her situation, and something like an intense keenness supervened to make it all plainer to her. She had somehow failed—she now saw—to join the others when they had deserted the Ridge, and she was entrapped in her villa, and stood in the face of the storming rioters. She recalled the commotion of her fleeing friends, and she remembered she had stolen to her room, and here she had become isolated in her own sorrowful and oblivious thoughts. Her faculties were now fully awake; the terror only served to sharpen her appreciation of the predicament she was in. She did not become useless in her fear, but her mind engaged quickly and sharply in the preparation of some sort of defence. Who was this man—a figure ascending in leaps the marble steps—and why did he come alone? Down on the Kingsbridge Road she saw the massed men and women and seemed to discern their faint prolongation back into the avenues. Was it not strange—this immobile mob, voiceless, ominously still—while this man—a leader perhaps advanced all alone?

What was to be done; should she escape and pursue her vanished friends—the thought struck her suddenly that she would rush through the mansion, and turn on all the lights—she perceived the darkness of the place—it might create the appearance of relief or occupation. She hesitated—and there below her under the window’s balcony, the figure looked up to her, and she heard his voice: and noticed that his hat was removed from his head, and something in his accents made her stop, shocked with an incredible impression.

“Miss—Lorimer? I believe—I feel the awkwardness of this—position—but—time presses—I must enter your home—it is deserted—you are alone—you may trust yourself to me—it is an honor I have asked for before, and which then you saw fit to repel—as leader of a new Revolution—the revolution of the great heart of the people you may condescend to treat me—less carelessly—” the words were spoken with a mixture of impudence and menace.

Nothing had escaped Julieta’s ears and her mind worked with the marvellous concentration of memory, acting under the impelling sense of a real danger; she divined the situation; she recalled Bomber’s declaration of love for her daughter—this man is doubtless he—his name she had heard mentioned as the chief of the mob at her doors—she knew that relief was under way—that too she had heard—could she delay this aspirant for Helen’s hand?—keep him awhile—every moment might help—was she equal to the dangerous ruse? At any rate the evident delusion of the speaker must be encouraged.

Almost mechanically she asked—“Is this Mr. Bomber?” the question answered would illuminate the situation, and as she asked it she half turned away so that that gentleman might not discover his mistake.

“Yes I am Bomber, Miss Lorimer. Alaric Mitchess Bomber—I would be happy to assist you in this extremity—there need be no alarm—but the doors of this house must be opened at once—these men—” a flourish of his scabbard indicated the waiting crowds at the foot of the slope—“are in earnest—everywhere the forces of revolt are in motion—the City must succumb—perhaps I could persuade you to negotiate some sort of compromise with the Aristocracy of Carrara—Excuse me, I dread violence but this parley cannot be kept up too long—my men are impatient—”

There flew through Julieta’s mind several projects—and among them was one of startling possibilities—almost too audacious too, full of grave consequence to herself—and yet it tempted her by its amazing daring and shrewdness. She would entrap the leader of the mob—put him under lock and key—she, Julieta Lorimer!—he should be decoyed into the house, and she would agree to meet him within, and then—a smile crept into her face that was darkened the next instant with doubt; the indecision had been noticed by Bomber, and had elicited his threat. But the indecision was gone; Julieta committed herself to the rash expedient—she would take Alaric Mitchess Bomber prisoner. Shades of Longtinsky!!!

“Alaric”—in her sweetest tones—the figure started and stretched itself upward—“I will see you in the house—it is possible we can together do something to prevent mischief, and—if so—perhaps—we may—” the last words were permitted intentionally to fade away into nothingness—conveying thereby to the credulous hearer some indiscreet concession, that made him bound with delight and desire.

“Yes—Yes, Miss Lorimer—may I say Helen?—” the stupidity and dull conceit of the man made her project seem again very plausible to Julieta—“but it must be done quickly—it may be necessary for me to return to the men there”—pointing—“and make them understand—they might suspect treachery—is there no one in the house? They expected a fight and they are in the humour for destruction—you see—I will do all you advise—but——”

“Alaric,” still insinuating and delicious to the ears of the vanquished leader of revolution, “go tell them you are about to confer with Helen Lorimer, who speaks for the whole colony of Carrara—your own eloquence will convince them, or if they cannot be controlled entirely, tell them to be patient a moment—surely you can restrain them, and then come TO ME.” Bomber’s arms actually crossed themselves upon his breast with the unction of an embrace. Julieta saw it. “And we can at least devise some measure for my safety. That is but just, is it not?”

“Helen”—the voice was deep with passion and obedience as well—“let it be so. I will return and speak to them, and then admit—me.”

Julieta hid her face in the silken scarf about her shoulders and leaned down, whispering. “No one is here. I am alone. Come in at the front, the iron gateway through the peristyle, through the front doors. There is a great hall. Ascend the stairway to the dining-room, and then pass into a side room and await me. The side room is a butler’s pantry—you can tell it by the one light that will be alight there. Adieu, Alaric.” The old star of Robert Lorimer’s improvised show retained her skill, and her Italian hand still showed a delightful fineness. But then she had such plastic stuff to treat!

Bomber waved his hat, his gauntleted hand touched his lips. He turned and jumped down the terraces with really splendid youthfulness. His youthfulness did not desert him in the emergency of getting to the top of the gate post of the Lorimer estate; he clambered up somehow, and there in full view, with his hat removed, a few assisting gestures, he delivered his oration.

“Patriots of the New Order, we are about to accept the capitulation of the Aristocrats”—a long rising hiss, culminating in a yell of derision—“Miss Helen Lorimer, of whom we can all admit she possesses the virtues of her class, with none of their faults”—a mixed reception of cheers and hisses greeted this admission—“has agreed to see me in her own palace of art and beauty, and there I shall be permitted to dictate the terms of surrender. Miss Lorimer has had the courage to remain, while all her BRAVE”—uttered with impressive sarcasm—“defenders have fled. I only ask you, my noble comrades——” Bomber was a traitor; while he spoke these words he was secretly turning over in his mind the chances of freeing himself from these now unnecessary associates, and turning body and soul over to the abhorrent aristocrats. Here was the goal of his fondest dreams—becoming with Helen Lorimer rehabilitated, and an ornament of the class he affected to despise.

“I only ask you now to await the results of this interview; when it is finished you shall enter Carrara and POSSESS it.” He paused, and a cheer arose; he interpreted it as his permission—he was too impatient himself to return—he jumped off his elevated rostrum, and as he turned and ran again backward a voice—loud, soaring, he knew it—shouted in the silence, “Al Bomber you’re a LIAR.”

But Bomber had no desire to refute the statement, his heart burned with the strangest hopes, and his self inflation, his fatal aptitude for gallantry approached, as he thought, a new and marvellous satisfaction. He kept on his way unchallenged.

Julieta left the balcony; her heart beat tumultuously; the trick was bold, and desperate—it almost seemed. Would she be successful? There was danger—plenty of it—too; if he suspected; if he brought men back with him; if his hearers were not affected with the reasons for gullibility he succumbed to; if she herself could escape—and WHERE? Certainly the butler’s pantry was a well chosen place for the incarceration of the dashing leader of the New Order. It was practically a strong box—literally a safe—with iron walls and iron doors, where the silver of the family was also kept. Besides entrance from the dining-room, it possessed but one other egress, a back door, fastened on the inside. That she believed was already secured; locked, with the key removed; it was the practice so to do at night. It was to be her hands that would shove the bolts, upon the imprisoned Bomber, from the outside, of the very entrance he would use. Her limbs trembled with the agitation of thinking of the work before her, but the instant she had groped her way down to the spot, turned on the single lamp that would announce the rendez-vous and then secreted herself in an alcove of the dining-room, with her dress covered by a voluminous black overskirt she felt a singular firmness, almost a jubilant expectation. She had concluded to rush from the room at once when the deed was done, and make her way to the Duncan keep.

Suddenly she bethought her that the doors below, the great gate of the entrance also were yet shut. Gathering her dress about her, she descended the stairs, and unlocked and unbolted all. It took time, some strength was required, and her nervous excitement alone made it possible to accomplish it. Of course she became visible to one near at hand, when she pushed her way out into the peristyle, to open the iron gate of the courtyard. She shivered as she crossed the yard; her confidence almost deserted her as she saw through the trellis of the gate the returning figure of the man she was about to capture.

It was indeed only by a superhuman effort she pulled down the huge bolt for he was close upon her. Bomber had detected the woman form moving behind the trellis, as he ascended; he knew it was SHE and he hastened his steps. Julieta felt her heart fail her; she staggered—in another second, before she could possibly return, he would be at her side, and the revelation would be made—she turned irresolutely to run, when an oath almost at her side, as she thought, came to her ears, and the sound of a falling body. Instinctively she turned again, and she saw Bomber sprawling on the outer steps—that unlucky emblem of authority, his sword, had twisted between his legs and tripped him. It was Julieta’s chance.

She raced up the inner steps—those leading to the dining-room—the superb banquet-chamber where we have seen Helen Lorimer dispensing the hospitality of the Lorimers—she crouched in the selected alcove, not far from the open door of the butler’s pantry, where the seductive little light gleamed secretively. She stiffened her resolution, though the mounting beats of her heart warned her of the terrific strain. She heard the rising footsteps—perhaps a little more careful since their proud owner had learned the wisdom of caution—and then something darkened the door of the dining-room. It was he. He stopped; her shuddering heart shrank within her at the suspicion that he saw her. No; he passed on, his eye had seen the interior light of the pantry, and he stood at its entrance. Why did he not enter? The strain was insupportable, the pale light shone on him, though dimly, and he seemed to be examining the place as if fearing a surprise. If he waited longer his accustomed eyes would find her out; there was a little light diffusing from the lamp in the pantry; her hammering heart, it felt so, was itself audible in the dead silence.

Julieta had run a serious risk in assigning the butler’s pantry for a meeting with Bomber. She knew only its peculiar strength and adequacy for service as a prison; she did not know how it had been left by her fleeing servants. The great key which locked both the inner and outer doors was always removed at night by the housekeeper and given to Julieta. She had not received it that night; it was not in her room; she concluded it still remained in the door of the pantry, but had the INNER DOOR BEEN LOCKED? When she descended to the dining-room her first anxiety was to assure herself of the position of the key. Her heart leaped when she found it in the keyhole of the outer door, the door leading from the dining-room. A moment later the lamp was turned on in the pantry, and she tried the inner door. It had been locked. Both locks were identical: one key fitted both. They were large constructions, the key itself ponderous, and it threw three heavy steel bolts when turned.

So far the trap was ready. One imprudence was committed. She left the key in the outer door, but in order to execute her design she took the risk willingly. To insert the key in the dark, to shut the door and turn the lock would be an involved process, and in the delay, and possible bungling, her quarry might have more than enough time to break its net and escape. So the key was left; if Bomber took the precaution to remove the key before entering the ambuscade and to pocket it! Julieta would have been thwarted, and only headlong flight would have saved her.

Bomber still stood at the door of the pantry, almost as if suspicious; it was thus impossible to close it upon him. He even stepped back again, possibly puzzled that the figure which, a minute before had been in the courtyard, should now have so completely vanished. If he struck a match! If he fumbled around and attempted to turn on the lights! Julieta grew dizzy at the thought. She cowered together, her knees trembling, and her hands abjectly pressed upon her face. He looked again into the pantry and—walked in. His unmeasured personal conceit had saved her.

Bomber’s eye had fallen upon the lustrous expanse of a superb silver service-tray; in the half light this immense and beautiful work of the silversmith, hanging on the wall of the pantry, shone softly, and displayed invitingly a damasked surface, and its high decorative borders. It tempted the eye irresistibly. Bomber had actually in his delight with its richness and, in a feverish anticipation of a great success, walked to it, and caught his own reflection in the polished mirror of a central oval of smooth silver. He stooped and observed that his hair had become artistically disarranged, that his cheeks glowed, his eyes—yes, he was sure of it—emitted an unusual light, and his mouth—ah! he smiled, he leaned over to the beguiling picture, when—what was it?—a sluggish thud, and the click of a shot lock!

He turned like a shot animal, his face convulsed with terror; the door was shut; he sprang to it with his strength—and it was considerable—he wrenched at the knob, but though it flew to and fro, nothing yielded. HE WAS A PRISONER. He looked around him; he leaped at the inner door and attempted to open it. Locked! No window, no crevice, no loophole of escape.

“My God,” he groaned aloud, “the she-devil, the tiger, witch, curse her. Am I trapped here like a rat?”

His face grew almost livid; he raised his voice shouting, yelling, shriek after shriek in the bootless effort to call help. He hurled the silver tray at the walls, he searched them with knives but only a steel wall met his fury. And then he sank back on the only chair in the room, in a convulsion of sheer rage and agony.

And Julieta, like a flying cloud, her black skirt lost from her in her flight, sped out of the house, and on the well-known pathway, down and up steps, in front of and behind low shrubs, through archways, quicker and quicker she ran on, stumbling now, even falling, regaining her feet, and yet running on in a vertigo of excitement, the first stages of a terrible reaction.

But while this half ludicrous intre-acte was taking place, events outside of them were rushing on to a tragic end. The waiting army enormously enlarged by the running concourse of sightseers, the various accessions of the idle and vicious, was waiting the return of their fatuous leader. A growing discontent, with an increasing fear that some one had blundered, that time was being lost, that the police or the soldiers would soon confront them, made itself apparent. A hubbub of voices was now heard where all, an hour before, had been silent, and the presage of dangerous work before them had kept the men grave and dumb. Disintegration was evident. The disgusted safe-robber felt that, and sneered at the futile idiot chosen for this work.

Suddenly a distant honk announced an approaching automobile, another and another—it was coming on fast—the coarse grating alarm sounded now almost among them. The foremost drew back from the roadway, a few wandering in the Lorimer grounds, looking up the shining stairs, slashing at the plants and grumbling aloud, turned back, so that the vehicle passed between two solid files. It stopped; the door of the limousine swung open—a tall, thin man alighted. He ordered the chauffeur to assist him, as he mounted the puffed tire of the wheel, and was pushed upon the roof of the car. He stood up, and by the lucky incidence of light from a distant electric lamp he was revealed. It was the MAYOR.

A long roll of subdued imprecations greeted him, rising with a sudden access of noise into a clamor of shouts, oaths, and yells. It increased, the suppressed impatience and their inaction, the confusion of mind produced by the disappearance of Bomber, some doubt as to their position, and the disquietude of a sense of impending failure, all intensified by their hostility to the man who had vanquished them in an industrial war, merged into an awful expression of hatred. An abstract alarm sharpened into a real rage at a concrete personality, and they stormed forward, filling the highway, surging upon the automobile, while the cries of “Kill him, kill him,” maddened them to violence. They crushed about the wagon, and guns came to their shoulders. Not a missile had been thrown; the passion of the mob vented itself in execrations.

“The Scab,” “He took our bread,” “The Carrara Stool-pigeon,” “Have him down and tear him to bits,” “Rip his glib tongue out,” “To Hell with him: He belongs there.”

The seething tide, in another instant would have overturned the machine. It could not advance. It was wedged in a matrix of solid humanity; that alone saved it from an ignominious upset.

The Mayor had been silent and held his place; his arms were folded, and not a word of expostulation as yet. His attitude both vexed and puzzled the insane mob. For one instant the voices were silenced—it was the prelude to a murderous design—and then came the clear startling words, strangely almost weirdly penetrating; “Yes! You can kill me if you like. The thing is easily done—but you will lose a friend—I beg to tell you you will lose your fight—” The silence continued, the Mayor jumped at the chance and his voice rose higher with that peculiar musical distinctness and charm that Helen Lorimer had noticed when she first saw him in the City Hall.

“What have you got against me? One thing. I did my duty as the Law commanded. I put down your Lawlessness. Could I do anything else? Could you? But is that all I have done? Have I not also restrained the men who would have destroyed you so far as they could? What is your grievance? Are you starved? Are you naked? Are you unsheltered? I know that you are not. Labor conditions are not bad here. You are misled. You have been listening to foolish promises, you have followed false leaders. You have let envy take the place of sense. You dream of some sort of a new State. It is called The New Era; no New Era can be well considered that begins with WAR. Unnecessary, cruel, careless, brutal WAR! Any Economic idea that starts with WAR will end with it! It cannot abide. Civil disorder, Civil strife, means one thing—ANARCHY; and anarchy is not a thinkable civil state. You might as well—you who are builders—think that a house can stand which is built out of plumb, out of line—you who are plumbers that you can have health with broken pipes, and empty reservoirs, you who are cloth-makers or hat-makers or workers of any sort, that you can do your labor without tools. You preach SOCIALISM but society comes first, and society is superior to any theory as to how society shall be conducted. I think I understand as well as you do much that can be said for the aims of Socialism, but I understand a great deal better than you do, much that can be said against it. I too have learned things. Are you above learning also? These people,” waving his arm towards the houses of Carrara—“have done you no harm by living. Would you care to live as they do? Hardly. Cannot we take a lesson from Nature—a flat world would be an uninhabitable world—a flat Society—all alike—would be impossible. I will talk this over with you, but not here. IF YOU WILL ARGUE THIS MATTER WITH GUNS, YOU SHALL BE ANSWERED WITH GUNS.”

His voice ceased and the silence was for an instant broken by cries and questions. He had made an impression. The Mayor felt that, and he was eager to take advantage of the favorable opening. He leaned forward—when suddenly the Gun Argument, he had invoked, began somewhere back in the streets toward the Saint George Hill. There was firing—sharp unmistakable firing. All again was disorder, tumult, panic. A terrible cry smote his ears.

“Clear out!—the SOLDIERS—make off!” It was true. The two regiments—the 22d and the 69th—had been partially mustered, and they were forcing their way down the three avenues towards the Kingsbridge Road. And thus unexpectedly, shamelessly, this silver voiced flatterer became to the men in front of him a deceiver—the traitor had kept them there while the troops gathered; his very words “answered with guns”, was the signal for this assault. The Mayor realized the awful accusation of this coincidence. He recoiled from it, his face darkened with suffering. Curses reached his ears, and then the whistle of a bullet, and he fell backward on the roof of the car.

An avalanche of men hurled out of the avenues. They were in flight. The firing came closer. Only the rush of feet was heard. Still firing, and the despairing race of men past the motionless Mayor there on the top of the limousine, that, like some slight pebble in a stream, sufficed to divide the tearing unguided current. And yet none of those who passed, bore any evidence of wounds. There were none. The Mayor, in ordering the soldiers had commanded that dispersal not slaughter should first be tried with the rioters. Fear did its perfect work. It was as the Mayor wished, but he had fallen the victim of his own imprudence; in a manner, of his own forbearance.

Soon it was all over; the troops emerged from the streets into the roadway, and the vast throngs, the little army of Bomber, the idle gazers, the haunting lines of free-booters, had EVAPORATED as completely as the patch of water on the flagging succumbs to the dry summer wind that sweeps it into space.

The Mayor was carried into the Lorimer mansion; the soldiers patrolled the streets; the dispossessed returned, lights spread over the deserted ridge, doctors hurried to the side of the City’s executive, Briggs arrived, and, under orders from the Lieutenant Governor, the surplus of the soldiers marched to the east side to assist the police and the firemen, who still fought an uncertain contest with the wily incendiary Putkoff. And in the midst of the mingling confusion of renewed confidence, the bustle of return, the flashing telegrams from all parts of the city, the news of the speeding armaments from Chicago, the resumption of the whirling life of the huge metropolis, stifled into inaction for a few short hours by this flurry of insurrection, Helen Lorimer and Amato and Mr. Moser arrived, and Helen learned all.

Julieta had made her way to the Duncan Keep after her successful encounter with Bomber, and there became incoherent and dizzy with fever. She managed to tell her story, and almost the first thing done when the rehabilitation of the houses began and the colonel of the regiments came on the scene was to open the now famous Butler’s pantry. There indeed sat the raving Bomber. He was pale with frenzy. He leaped at the first man who entered, and only a sharp struggle overcame him. As he passed down the steps of the mansion, handcuffed, he encountered Amato and Helen hurrying upward, but he averted his eyes, and the bitterness of his defeat, the confession of his shallowness and vanity made him writhe with anguish.

Helen had asked for her mother. Julieta had been very carefully conducted back to her home, and lay in her bed yielding to the first vagaries of a disordered mind. Helen stood at her side and leaning over the changed flushed face of the beautiful woman whispered her name, and pressed her lips upon her own. Julieta opened her eyes and her hands feebly closed over the head of her child, holding her in a delirium of joy. But the strained nerves gave way, and she relapsed into a kind of inanition awaking at times to beckon from the air some shape appearing there to her, as she called softly, “Robert, Robert.” Then Helen herself surrendered. The ordeal had been a long one, and this climax of anxiety, with the strange vicissitude of the Mayor’s extremity in her own home, completed the breakdown. Still it was not serious, and nourishment and rest would restore the strong nature to its natural estate.

The Mayor’s condition was critical; life ebbed and returned; the doctors camped at his bedside; skill and art and experience worked hard together to keep him alive, yet sensibly the flagging heart released its control, and the solemn end grew more and more certain. Then it was—the next day in the afternoon—that the dying man asked for Miss Lorimer. He knew where he was, from time to time in the brief intervals, when pain left him, his eyes reviewed the decorated and charming room, dwelling with such a depth of tender interest on all these things that recalled—how pathetically who shall say—the ONE love of his life.

Helen came. The Mayor lay in the room of her uncle—the man who had separated them. It was a luxurious apartment, with every appointment perfect, and its windows opening to the west, in the sinking November day caught the last lights over the russet and gold of the Palisades. The Mayor lay on the bed, with his face turned to the flushing western sky, rent as it were, with seams of gold, as though the purple tapestry of the clouds were torn, and the gateway of the sun’s descent disclosed. Helen stood at the doorway; she had come noiselessly, and waited for her own heart to beat less wildly. A doctor held the Mayor’s wrist, timing the sullenly retreating tide of blood from his young heart; a nurse bent over him. Both happened to hide Miss Lorimer from him.

The doctor turned, the nurse moved away, the Mayor’s eyes fell on the face of the woman who there awaited his summons. It came from those blue eyes whose mystery had first enchanted her. And her own answered them. Slowly she came forward, and sank into the chair the doctor had just deserted. The Mayor looked past her for one moment at his attendants, and a mute entreaty they read in his face, caused them both to withdraw.

“Pardon me, Miss Lorimer,” said the doctor, “I must soon return.” Helen bowed her head, a gesture of the doctor’s summoned the nurse and the two went out together. Helen had taken the dying man’s hand; she held back the struggling tears; his own eyes were strangely soft and winning, the effort of this interview brought again some color to his face—but so very little!—the pitiful remnant of his wasting life—and his voice, that appealing musical voice just retained or recovered its former note. She bent her face close to his as he spake.

“Miss Lorimer,” he began, but this noble girl whispered, “let it be Helen please,” and he smiled, “Helen,—you recall that talk we had in the museum,—your new museum—?”

“Yes,” she quietly responded.

“Well, here in my wandering dreams I have gone over it for hours. You have always been near me, and your voice has sounded to me almost as if it bore to me the music of another World”—his face darkened with the overwhelming torrent of his sadness, but no sobs broke from his lips. The spasm of grief passed, she pressed his hands, she wiped the stricken eyes, she slid softly from her chair, she knelt at his side.

“Helen, I go too with the setting sun—my day is finished—I thank the Everlasting that it passes thus. But let me be clear in your eyes. Your uncle drove me from this house. My pride could not brook his insult. Helen, my love has never ceased, never changed. Death only takes away its earthly dwelling place, and IF—If, as you began to teach me, there is still life THERE”—he pointed feebly to the blazing west—“if there is, there too my love will stay unchanged. Ah! the long day’s task is done, and I must sleep. But Helen you forgive me”—then with an ardor that made the girl before him pale with apprehension that the untoward passion would put out the fluttering flame of life, he added—“Helen have I still your Love?”

The woman bent her face to his; their lips met—a golden light entered the windows, it filled the room; it was so intense and brilliant that objects seemed lost in it; it dazzled as though an etherialized substance suffused the space, blotting out all definite shape, and enthralling all the senses in the captivity of one. It was so for the interval of half a minute, and then again the depleted room was established in the commonplaces of its utilities.

The doctor and the nurse had returned, and behind them came the bowed form of the Mayor’s mother, led by Mr. Briggs. Helen rose and passed to the window, her eyes straining at the spectacle of glory in the clouds. To her catholic heart and nurture it seemed appallingly cold and ruthless, this passage of a soul into the awful futurity, unattended by prayers, unaccompanied by the offices of devotion, with no sensible presentation, still to hold the dissolving corporeal powers fixed in adoration that the soul might more purely, more wisely, pass on to its new appointments, rising on the wings of aspiration.

The strength of a tremendous religious faith was hers, and in that strength her lips repeated the Orison of Help for the dying.

A half-stifled cry, a movement behind her, caused her to turn. The doctor was taking away the stunned mother of the man who had already just made his confession to her ears. Helen passed quickly to her side, took her in her arms, and brought her out of the room, passing through a crowd of men, officers of the city,—state and citizens, and gently made her way to her own chamber, with a tenderness that was itself a ministration of healing to the crushed heart, the hopeless spirit of a Mother.

THE MAYOR WAS DEAD.

CHAPTER XVII

THE POPE COMES TO AMERICA

The Mayor was buried with splendid pomp. His body lay in state; the militia who flocked back as the alarm over the city’s dilemma spread to the neighboring cities, with the garrisons of the regular troops, who had also returned, formed his escort, and the music at his funeral touched the limits of elegiac elaboration. A sense of his excellence as an administrator, a sudden recognition of his intellectual delicacy and skill, combined with the thrill of admiration felt at his daring in confronting the rioters, the relief that followed the dispersal of the insurrection together with the repudiation of the whole Longtinsky anarchistic plot by the sane and moderate socialistic organs contributed to elevate his memory, and imbue his name with a peculiar—to some a mystifying—glory of renown and nobility.

When all was over, the huge city-state resumed its myriad activities, and for a while the political asperities abated, the differing parties vanished, and the warring sections of society forgot or dissembled their mutual hatred. The exhortations of the Mayor were printed on cards, sold as mottoes, or decorated the pages of the newspapers. He was regarded as a martyr, a sacrifice to the turbulence and wickedness of agitators and plotters, and, with something like a religious ecstacy the people idolized his memory, and before the adoration, clamor, discord, petulance and envy, for a time, hid themselves. A wonderful peace prevailed, and the magnificent metropolis turned to its avocations or its pleasures with unrestrained energy and delight.

Mr. Briggs, who now worshipped the memory of his master, became attached to a newspaper, and furnished periodic outbursts of Cassandra-like prophecy over the dark future which threatened society at large, and while they, when read aloud, had a portentous sound, and a certain rhetorical ornamentation with enough penetration to make them significant, they were generally wisely put aside as sophomoric and unnecessary. Mr. Briggs brought the Mayor’s mother to his home, and this partnership proved wonderfully consoling to the afflicted lady. Mr. Briggs lived in one of the charming colonial restorations of the Greenwich village area of the city, and maintained—though a bachelor—an establishment of considerable dignity.

Of course Tom Ratler survived his encounter with Poni, and seized the fruits of his popularity with the gentle and pretty Jessie Longtinsky and she discovered upon the death of her father, that a moderate competence was hers. The conspirators—at least the formidable Bomber, Madder, Putkof, and Poni himself—were put behind the bars for a practically life period, and no ingenuities of law were expended in proving the injustice of this arrangement. As to the rest, hundreds of whom were under arrest, a general amnesty was proclaimed, and the prisoners who had brought about the famous trial, all, except Polinck, were discharged; Polinck being reserved for another trial. In this general dispensation of urbanity and moderation none rejoiced more than Helen Lorimer. She undertook the education and advancement of the abnormal child Angelo Shimura, and especially she turned to the project she had discussed so long ago with the Mayor—her Museum—and which now might become a sort of memorial of the man himself—with almost religious ardor.

The question of the classes still remained unsettled, and Helen Lorimer as the apostle of the essential necessity of a classified Society, with the avenues of promotion fully created through education, and with emphasis laid upon the essential mutual interaction of all parts of Society with particular reference to the indispensable patriotism and benevolence—in a large and economic sense—of the upper classes, began again her instructions, and readings, and writings. For a time, Amato felt her intellect put aside the claims of her emotions or else—WAS IT, that in this outburst of energy and propagandist zeal she sought again in some esoteric way, the companionship of the man she deeply mourned. The splendid magnanimity of Rudolpho found no fault with this. There was a little hurt, a little uneasiness and dismay perhaps, but the gentleness of his nature, the fine heroism of his feelings, quickly restored his equanimity and he followed at her side, encouraged all her attempts, aided her designs, and so patiently and wisely obeyed her wishes that he entered deeper and deeper into her affections, and captivated her anew by the beauty of his unselfishness.

It was a few weeks after the death of the Mayor that a most unexpected occurrence brought the man’s personality again vividly forward and reawakened in Helen Lorimer the half forgotten plan to strengthen the religious life of the country by establishing the Pope within it. The latter project had momentarily lost its interest, though with Cardinal Fenton, who now fully understood the inevitable union of his nephew and Miss Lorimer, it had only suffered a temporary suppression. Conditions indeed in Europe became more and more insupportable for the Church. The exorbitant so-called civilization with the still surviving colossal selfishness, viciousness and hollowness of the representatives of inherited privilege, had produced through two opposite influences an almost total repudiation of religion, looked at in large way, and as representing a national feeling.

First the strong socialistic tendencies—verging into radical phases contemplating the extermination of Society as constituted—denied the tenets of formal religion, and advised its abolition; second, the sensual and sensational inclinations of the upper classes had reached ruinous proportions. They amounted to a moral devastation. Europe, advanced in the methods of enlivening life by exciting appetite, had also become eclipsed in its intellectual aspects by the hebetude that succeeds satiety, and religion was laughed at or cultivated as a cloak to deceive the herd. The tabernacles were empty, the priests were useless, the Pope was impoverished, the prestige of the Church had vanished.

Cardinal Fenton realized sorrowfully that in the protestant Teutonic nations religion yet held its sway more rigorously, than in the former homes of his own church; that Russia, somehow barricaded within a wall of barbarous autocracy and childish slavish superstitions maintained its quondam religious expression almost unchanged. To him and an advanced group of Catholic prelates in Europe and America a surmise that American influences somehow established the Church, renovated and revivified it had become a conviction. To them for some years the dream of bringing the Pope to America, of—the language was decorously veiled in its apparent significance—liberating him from the somnolent antiquities, the enthralling traditions, the half ludicrous isolation, or, to quote language used less obsequiously, a hundred years before, by Father McGlynn, of putting the Pope in the streets of New York with a stove-pipe hat on his head, had become more and more alluring.

Here in America the Church had shuffled off the encumbering follies which had grown up within her through a constant association with a system of privilege, of monarchy, of the artifices of title and place. In America, in a sweet exhilarating air of free institutions, universal opportunity, and amid fresh pure aspirations for happiness, the Church forgot cabals and intrigues and politics, and generated itself in a region apart, in worship, good deeds, lofty teachings, sacramental offices, and enveloped, at least by implication ALL, under the aegis of its divine commission. Its personnel became saturated with sense and sympathy, and no more useful men than its priests could be found in practical charity, educational enthusiasm, and broad philosophic erudition. Protestantism had almost protested itself out of existence.

To this New World let the Pope come. It seemed to men like Fenton, the last chance, the last entrenchment wherein the incessant fight against Negation might be fought. And to pious Catholic patriots it seemed that so good a possession as the Pope belonged to their own dear country. On the other hand it meant the uprooting of an established identification of Rome and the church of two thousand years, something almost appalling to conceive of. Should the arc of that covenant be ruthlessly touched—even though it shook and tottered—by the modern Uzzahs of this movement?

Yet many believed the violent disruption desirable. As in a sedentary organism parasitic things, mere unavailing accidents had become encysted in the outward tissue of the Church, enfeebling it. These would be dislodged, shaken off, and left behind. They had been debilitating and even malign. Tone, a freshened vigor, a stronger, readier, adaptive stage to the new outlooks in the New World would succeed, or by another imagery, the barque of the Church launched upon a broader, brighter sea would free itself of old wrecks, floating debris, the relics of mistakes, collisions, abandoned cargoes, the barnacle growths of centuries, and sail forward to new ports with certainty and power. The encrustations of foolish practice the mere hindrances of time-honored but stupid devotions—as that of the Bambino—would be swept away, and the Church more intellectually more healthfully, with a freer scope of thought, and with No Loss of essential dogma would confront her enemies, her critics, the whole antagonistic World, still championing the claim of her divine authority.

Helen Lorimer and Cardinal Fenton had often talked over all these things; for years the latter cherished the idea with a foolish fervor. Gradually the number of adherents grew. It was recognized as an inner illuminated circle, and without any formal pledges, secrecy was self imposed and sternly guarded. Entrance to the College of Cardinals at Rome had been effected, and with every renewed outburst of hostility to the Pope, not only were the convictions of the sympathizers strengthened but new converts were gained. At one time, the moment alluded to in a former chapter when Helen Lorimer and Amato met in the library of the Cardinal, the approaching crisis seemed imminent and the little Society of the Americanists, as its members called themselves, was transported with hopeful expectations.

But disappointment—a crushing reversal of all their dreams followed. The Pope caught ear of the revolutionary scheme, denied and denounced it. It became doubtful whether or not some sort of Bull might not threaten the extermination of the cult, and put on it the stigma of heresy. With this danger hanging over them everything became still, and the frightened colleagues no longer ventilated their hopes, or even indulged in the precarious pleasure of consoling each other. Cardinal Fenton bided his time. His knowledge of the crumbling state of the European religious institution was too large and keen to permit him to doubt some eventual catastrophe.

Helen Lorimer plunged into her humanitarian and civil schemes. Amato said nothing. He was her faithful hand servant, always ready, always sympathetic, ever gracious, loving, willing and enchanting. So the thought of the Pope’s Importation, as it was half ironically referred to—had apparently been forgotten when the thing happened which again, by some peculiar reasoning, brought it back compellingly into Helen Lorimer’s mind; and almost immediately something else happened in Europe that actually won for it toleration and final accomplishment there.

In America the momentous influence with Miss Lorimer was a posthumous publication of a little book by the Mayor—the MS was found among his papers by Mr. Briggs—entitled MORE LIGHT. It created a sensation. None read it more excitedly than Helen Lorimer, Cardinal Fenton, and Amato. Helen detected in it some of her own ideas literally reproduced, and saw plainly a deeper influence pervading it, which she knew was hers also. The book made the Mayor live again before her eyes and live even more strangely and despotically within her heart. Amato knew this, and a sharp pain sprang through his being but he persisted with the same admirable temper, and no reproach rose to his lips, not even a trace of the almost insupportable knowledge could be discerned in his words, or his behaviour. As ever he did her bidding with incomparable zeal.

The book began with an eloquent and convincing picture of the World’s distress, the aimlessness, fragility, hopelessness, pettiness of life in millions upon millions of human beings, the astonishing and apparently purposeless fecundity of the race, the silence of the grave, the depravity and meanness of mere living—and then in chapters, fervid with wonder and despair it pointed out the extraordinary inadequacy of Revelation, even when supplemented by all the authority and beauty of the Church—and it closed with a thrilling imploring appeal to the shut and silent skies, urging the whole Earth through its manifold organs of utterance to upbraid and beseech those skies, to force their mocking canopy of blue to open and let down new vessels of Consecration and of Knowledge. It was well conceived, skillfully graded in a progression of intense feeling to its climax, and it enlisted a lyric power of expression which caught the reader in the broad and noble flow of its imagery and emotion.

Helen Lorimer had read the book aloud to her Mother—still unwell—and to Amato in the great library of her home. It was a room the reader has not entered, and it was the chief treasure of the marvelous palace. It lay in a northern section of the mansion with its roof upheld by columns of Numidian marble. The ceiling in groined vaults sprang from capital to capital and each vault held the golden picture of a constellation set in a blue background. The book-cases in square rose-wood boxes encased the columns at their bases; only at two points around the room did the book-cases rise higher than four feet, and here on both the east and west walls latticed shelves carried the books almost to the high ceiling. Everywhere upon the low cases stood marble busts and Barye bronzes. The walls were fairly covered by paintings, though they might easily have been increased in numbers without exhausting the ample space. Windows pierced the walls above the book-cases on the sides, nowhere reaching the floor, and only one entrance permitted access to this generous study.

The north end of the library was surrendered to the installation of a gigantic fireplace built of a soft sienna terra-cotta brick, with a high broad marble mantle above it, on which was placed a marble replica of the Hudson-Fulton Water Gate, while over that on the wall above hung an entrancing painting of the East River in the Morning when the pearly exhalations of the dawn, the smoke of a propeller and the projecting cliffs of the bridge-piers and high buildings, with the tracery of the bridge cables and roads compose one of the most wonderful metropolitan pictures on the entire earth.

Sheraton chairs and tables were pleasantly disposed throughout the room, and on the tables were objects of interest and beauty. The floor was covered from end to end and from side to side with a deep cramoisy-red carpet that gave luxurious warmth to the whole room; green tapestries framed the windows, and the illumination was achieved by opaline globes from the apex of each groined vault while on the tables burned oil lamps of captivating designs in glass and brass. The room was almost too grandiose, too public and expositional in character, but its beauty was really remarkable and the first impression on entering it was memorable. The books were not numerous, many book-shelves were empty; the lowness of the book-cases precluded a very large collection.

The winter had grown cold and now, at the end of February a heavy snow mantled the Inwood ridge, and Carrara amid its leafless trees rose from the dazzling surface, an indifferent rival of its purity. The wind drove through the ranged mansions, the bleak highway was deserted, but at night, as ever, enhanced in its strange loveliness, the electrical aureole crowned the huge metropolis, this monumental city-state where hurrying feet sought work and pleasure, and vice and devotion and labor followed their designed and inevitable tasks.

Julieta, Helen Lorimer, and Amato sat in front of the great hearth and the eyes of two watched the scurrying wisps of blue and yellow light moving waywardly over the blocks of coal. The third—Helen—was somewhat behind the other two at a round table reading. The last sentence of the Mayor’s book was heard; it ran, “the Revelation, the churches, our spirits—to-day the sole witnesses to God—move in regions of persuasion exorbitantly feeble for the purposes of Conviction in this matter, and, through the avenues of prayer, by which all our needs should receive consideration, we ask, or may ask for a SIGN.

“If God answers, the world emerges into a welcome light of reassurance, and, if there is no answer, then seizing, as it were the reins of things ourselves, let society resolve into new units of action, in conformity with the demands of an utilitarian UTOPIA.”

The voice was clear and penetrating with an indefinable sweetness in it that thrilled Amato—as it had often thrilled the dead writer of these pregnant words. There was a silence, and again the voice was heard:

“Those are sad, they sound to me as dreadful words. It is the expatriation of Hope, the convulsion of despair, and that means the Death of the Soul. If only those who ask so much could FEEL; their questions would then die on their lips.”

“No,” answered Amato, “perhaps not. The thought is plain enough and as he—the author puts it—it does not really seem so unreasonable. It has a noble ring after all.”

“But,” continued Helen, “the SIGN is here. Surely you, Rudolpho Amato”—a start brought the listener’s face around towards the speaker, and it was filled with an almost strained attention—“know there can be for Us, you and me”—Amato’s eyes grew tender and grateful—“but one sign. It is the CHURCH; THAT IS THE COVENANT. To go beyond it, outside of it, away from it, is to stumble heedlessly, and to stumble too, unforgiven and unhelped”; it almost seemed to Amato that the voice grew a little hard. And yet at that very moment his own heart leaped with a great joy—it meant Helen’s return to him from the personified Memory that had so weirdly and just perceptibly separated them.

Amato looked a minute longer at the wonderfully beautiful and earnest woman and then turned to the dancing flickers before him, saying:

“Are honest doubts to be so harshly punished?”

“It is the LAW,” quickly answered the woman, and in her eagerness she rose, the Mayor’s book closing behind her on the table; “we cannot extricate ourselves from our own conditions: we are not permitted to criticise them. It is not a question of whether this is the best possible world. Rather is it a question, is this a world at all?—are we here—is anything a reality? If one allows himself to drop into the bottomless pit of Negation, HE IS LOST. Faith—faith only is the solvent of doubt and—it must be either Faith or doubt. Yes, there can be works, good works, this Man”—the voice paused an instant—“was a worker, a hard, belligerent, noble worker—works it seems to me attest to some sort of faith—but as far as the possibility of deliverance from this Order of things appears, it is only through Union with God—IN THE CHURCH”; something then happened—who can say what it was—Amato turned—the woman had sunk back into her chair—her head lay in her hands upon the table and she was sobbing. In an instant—so rapid was he that his figure passing through the room might have seemed almost moved by thought—Amato was kneeling at her side, his hand pressed upon her shoulder. “Helen?” he said.

The face lifted—a smile broke through the tears—she stood up and drew him to her—and then—she turned and left the room. Amato watched her with his hands pressed to his breast; he looked towards Julieta—she was fast asleep.

The next day the morning papers brought a new astonishment into thousands of households throughout the New World. The Vatican had been assaulted—an armed mob had invaded the gardens of the Pope’s palace, and the Pope himself had retreated to St. Peter’s wherein he was literally barricaded, while the troops of the state remained on the defensive at its doors. The event in itself was astonishing enough, but the most serious feature of the situation was the temporizing, supine, almost approving policy of the government. Catholics were terror stricken at the almost inconceivable predicament. This news was received on Saturday.

The next morning at the Cathedral of St. Patrick’s, Cardinal Fenton rose in the pulpit and to an enormous audience, among whom sat Helen Lorimer and Amato, delivered a sermon of marvellous skill and boldness. The note of defiance rose in it at times, to be succeeded by invocations to the loyalty of believers, and to be followed by denunciations of Europe as brutal, perverted sterilized, and hopeless. Then came passages of extraordinary novelty. The speaker dwelt upon the forlorn and debilitating position of the Church in Europe—enveloped in a false civilization, of privilege, of title, of social selfishness, turpitude, and callous heartlessness; he pointed out the enfeebling influence of the association through centuries, with the prejudices, misconceptions, and artificial structure of a society that through interior decay presented only the glazed and ornamented shell of civilization, and was decomposing into some final product of sensuality and atheism.

Then he turned his contemplative gaze upon America, strong in its immense material power, resolute in its support of its original contentions in civic life, fortified beyond belief by the average elevation of the masses who found in it peace, education, competence, and opportunity. Yet here again the note of complete confidence wavered and there was betrayed a deep misgiving. The recent socialistic or anarchistic outbreak was analysed as the ebullition of hatred and envy as also the symptom of a deep-seated disorder—the false theory of the State as a collective organism with indisputably no individualistic rights, a formless mass of industrial units, animated by a vacuous sentiment of brotherhood, and destitute of the power of real and vitalizing progress, because the Individual was thwarted in his ambitions and denied his preeminence.

He paused a moment to dwell on popular vices, on indulgences, on luxury, on the growth of pernicious habits, on the schism of self-destruction, and then quoting an old author of the Nineteenth Century—George Santayana—he proceeded “if a noble and civilized democracy is to subsist, the common citizen must be something of a saint and something of a hero. We see therefore how justly flattering and profound and at the same time, how ominous was Montesquieu’s saying that the Principle of Democracy is VIRTUE.”

From this point on to his peroration Cardinal Fenton pressed the contention that the Church was indeed the safe-guard, and vindication of Virtue; the terms he presented were inexorable, the consequences of their rejection disastrous. But with again startling emphasis he predicted the approach of the last conflict between Satan and God. He urged upon grounds of sanity and strategy and experience that the Church entrench herself, gathering in her forces, concentrating her energy, establishing her prestige within the United States of America where alone to-day, he concluded “her beauty is most ravishing and irresistible, her efficacy most transcendental, her sanctuaries most honored” and then in rushing winged sentences he plead for the Translation of the Pope—of the Vicar of Christ—“to these western shores where with the Faithful he shall yet defend this foot-stool of the Most High against the swarming emissaries of Hell.”

The sermon was literally reproduced in the great dailies, indeed printed copies of it were despatched over the entire country throughout the larger cities, and in a moment, in the interval between the setting of one sun and the rising of the next, the reflective mind of the nation confronted an extraordinary proposition.

Censure, approval, comment and derision met it, but by some psychological sequence, it became an absorbing and interesting question that assumed greater and greater reality. Helen Lorimer’s apathy vanished. She seized anew upon the discarded hope, and somehow it worked harmoniously with her repudiation of the claim or plea made in the Mayor’s book. The Pope established in America should be the Sign—no other; in the displacement of his two thousand year’s residence in Rome, in the abolition of an ancient glory, in the new growth and sanctification of the Church in this free land—in these things should be seen the Hand of God. Amato was no less enthusiastic. He worked at the same problem and exerted all his art and fluency to win converts.

The sensation caused by the Cardinal’s sermon was even greater in Europe than in America where the custom of free speech was recognized. Abroad its impact upon the formalized ears of the dignitaries of the church was stunning. And yet there was no resentment. Dismay and consternation spread, but not in remonstrance, only in a heart breaking attitude of amazement that this extremity should be so boldly risked. And deeply working, the leaven of this suggestion—not unknown before to many, even well considered by many, as we have seen in Amato’s report to the Cardinal—was converting the heart of the POPE himself.

Suddenly there appeared a bull—Ecclesia renovata et migratoria—and the edict was issued that the Pope would abandon Europe, walk out of Rome, and transfer the seat of his See to the shores of America. Amazing contradiction, when a few months before, this same procedure had been anathematized. But Inconsistency is the secret of Progress. The dilemma was sternly stated, the whole bull was minatory and yet, in places it was tearful with lamentations, which in rolling Latin had a most august solemnity. It was a moment of violent transition. The bull, unannounced, unreviewed, calmly thrown into the faces of the Propaganda, and the Congregation awoke no terrible opposition. Cardinal Fenton by a stroke, had won. The position in Europe had become unbearable. But it was an act of superb renouncement, of stupendous humiliation; the emptying of its Glory by the Head of the Church; the stripping bare to flesh and bone of the notorious and priceless apparel which time, and devotion, and wealth, had dressed him in; for it was ordained that He come to America as a Man among men—a world-traveller seeking a new home, as of one who had nowhere to lay his head. It was indeed a prostration, a vast penance, a dislocation that at last severed the Church from its awful past, a past superb in its spiritual conquests, but a past also black with sins.

The house was made ready. It crowned the low hills of Staten Island. Everything was provided by Helen Lorimer. She hastened every preparation, with pride, with gayety, with love—for the pact had been made between her and Amato that the Pope should marry them. At last it seemed to Amato that the Mayor no longer ruled in her heart; the conflict was quite passed, and he—he alone possessed her.

And the Pope came. He came in analogy with the whole wonderful and incredible procedure. He came in conformity with just the requirement which the jealous and suspicious temperament of the country he visited, required. He came as a priest with priests, without pomp, or retinue, or vestments. The affair had been anticipated with a new delight by hundreds of thousands who rejoiced in sensations, in spectacles, in violent surprises, in the climaxes of public events. And it had been most curiously regarded by that protestant portion of the society, which, a hundred years before, would have been thrown into paroxysms of revolt, consternation, and rage, at the mere thought of the transference of the Roman See to this country. Now, at a time when spiritual power among their churches seemed so near extinction, they hailed it with pleasure, with the most cordial congratulations, and with actual endorsement. This very attitude had been in a way expected by Cardinal Fenton, who saw how immensely it ameliorated the abrupt Transition on both sides of the religious fences.

The former of these groups—those who looked for some monumental display of ceremony—was disappointed. It was all so quiet, so informal, so commonplace, that except for its momentous moral significance, it hardly stirred the surface of events with a perceptible disturbance. Nothing could have been less phenomenal or less memorable. Art and calculation had combined to make its impression, as a physical event, almost imperceptible. But the expatriation of the Pope was an extraordinary fact, and no suppression of external show could minimize its stupendous implications. It indeed marked a crisis in the religious life of the whole world.

The Pope left Rome incognito, traversed France, embarked at Havre, reached New York, was received by a committee, itself so inconspicuously constituted, as scarcely to receive notice in the public prints, and taken in a closed carriage to the modest mansion, adjoining a small but beautiful chapel—the whole installation devised by Helen Lorimer and Cardinal Fenton, and its expense wholly defrayed by her—on the highest hill of Staten Island.

There was really something quite abnormal and disillusionizing in it all. The Pope had even for the time divorced himself from the appurtenances of his immense establishments. The Index, the Inquisition, the Propaganda, the vast complicated machinery of extension and distribution remained at Rome. The Pope alone appeared at the threshold of the New World, coming without any artifice of show and pageantry. It had something evangelical and primary about it, and touched the imagination favorably. A wave of affection went out to the prelate, and the absence of rebuke or injurious derision marked a subtle influence propitious to the Cardinal’s project. The personality of the Pope himself helped this delightful result. He was charming, and tactful, and intellectually strong. He had already said beautiful and true things about America. He had captured her attention, and approval, long ago. Protestant bigotry restrained itself, and the sightseers and the indifferent wondered, smiled and applauded. It was all excellent throughout, and Pope Sextus celebrated his first Mass in America without remonstrance, without disturbance, almost without comment. He was indeed a Bernard of Clairvaux.

Later the inevitable happened. That vast insatiable appetite for the marvelous, and the recondite, and ritualistic, with its tremendous possibilities of satisfaction, which the Catholic Church nurtured, demanded its conditioning approval. It could only be given on one assumption, that the resources gathered through ages of ceremonial development, magnified by the most modern auxiliaries of light and music should be employed to memorialize and establish the monstrous revolution. Unless the seal of the Supernatural rested upon it, its triumph would be temporary and crumbling. Thus, spontaneously and together, the Catholic congregations throughout the country prepared a glorious and stupifying Jubilee. In it the ardor of devotion, the zeal of faith, and the pride of sect united with a discernible prophetic instinct, to make it unparalleled. An incredible skill controlled it. Cardinal Fenton and his agents were everywhere, bringing the products of thought, of eloquence, of allusion, to be inwrought and perpetuated through the myriad-tongued utterances of its sermons and addresses. And in the midst of it with the most thrilling nobility of style the POPE appeared at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, as its cause and inspiration.

Pope Sextus was a peculiar man, shaped in a mould of mental, moral, and physical perfection; perhaps the only Pope, that ever ruled the Church, who could have taken this precarious step, a step threatening such monstrous revulsions, and so inevitably endangered by collapse, ridicule, the extinction of personal prestige as the Pope separated himself from seclusion, and all the veils of splendid and historical accidents. For once the MAN stood out before the world in the habiliments of the street, as it were. He was not found at the end of long corridors, mysteriously guarded by chamberlains and soldiers, fixed beneath a canopy, and surrounded by the marvels of art. He had abdicated all that, and his PRESENCE was in the open. It was an ordeal, a shock that only the rarest combinations of qualities could meet and survive. And the Pope met it and survived. This was the magnificent fact that brought a profound ecstacy to Cardinal Fenton, to Helen Lorimer, to Amato, and the leaders of this bold innovation. But the Pope himself—he alone—made it possible.

A reporter of the New York Times, who attended the Pope’s Mass at the Cathedral, thus described him: “The Pope seems young, but that impression is dissipated when his bearing, action, voice, and eloquence are considered. At first I could only think of the St. Gabriel depicted by Guido where the young and stalwart archangel descends with his sword upon the head of the falling Satan. His type is certainly not blond, yet it is noticeably less dark than the typical Italian. His hair is brown or chestnut, luxuriant, and in light rolling waves surmounts a brow of fine proportions, in a countenance of the most pronounced beauty. It is quite impossible to describe the power of his eyes which appear always soft and tender, and yet have a peculiar indefinable penetration. He is utterly apart from the conventional pope, with a skull cap, and no hair, diaphanous features, and the filminess of ascetic depletion, imparting to him a ghostly sacredness. The Pope is probably fifty; the first impression of youth is effaced as you watch him, and, above all, as you hear him.

“The service was a pontifical mass grandly rendered, the music subdued, and full prominence was given to the celebrant, who was the Pope himself. It was a lesson in the majesty and music of the human voice. Never (and as a catholic I constantly attend mass), have I heard singing so moving and ideal. But that again was forgotten, when the superb figure—the Pope is tall—rose in the pulpit, and the same entrancing voice preached from the Text; ‘Lo I am with you Always.’

“Here he was miraculous. His self assertion was most puzzling but it was ineffaceable. He moved from appeals to historical description, and from these to argument, and then decorating everything with poetry, he threw all aside, and revealed himself as The Vicar of Christ on Earth. It seemed appalling, the intensity of his confidence, and yet more amazing it seemed convincing. As he retreated to the altar, an anthem of Hayden’s broke forth in delicate and joyous strains, its musical pulsations wavering over the prostrate multitude, who were about to receive the Apostolic Benediction while the subtler fragrance of the incense lingered through the church, and the windows blazed their illuminated suggestions of sacrifice and worship. As the dazed disciple said, it ‘seemed good to be there.’”

This hap-hazard reportorial encounter described correctly the feeling created in the gigantic multitude that thronged the edifice. And all this was followed by a most beautifully conceived Bull, issued from Staten Island which, as with the finger of an act of transfiguration rooted the Pope and the Idea of the Pope forever in the New World.

And then rising with thrills and transports of pleasure from one surprise to another, the staring populace of the great City-State were invited to consider the marriage of Helen Lorimer to Rudolpho Amato, celebrated by this same democratic and transported Pope. It was a climax. It came at a moment of precise effectiveness. Never had Miss Lorimer risen to a higher power for good than since the Mayor’s death, and the end of the unsuccessful socialistic revolution. We have already seen how her own class struggled—and honestly—to create a beneficent and democratic aristocracy in the state. This was continued. It was one of the dearest dreams of Helen herself. She arranged and animated its advances. Her action in the defense of the suspected but innocent men, caught at the fire of her Settlement House, had given to her a renewed and an almost impregnable popularity and vogue. And this was supplemented and augmented by the splendid gift to the City of her completed Museum—completed one year after the death of the Mayor, and on the anniversary of the insurrection. The New Museum was placed exactly where the old Settlement House had been.

It was a square building with a flat roof, and possessed seven stories. The roof was fitted out for recreation, and its height supplied a healthful and cool resort in the hot summer months; the two floors below it were kept for meetings, classes, libraries, and a creche for working mothers. The remaining floors held the Museum, and it was developed in the line of Helen’s own explanations to the Mayor, in that first night of their meeting at her home. It was an objectified Gazetteer, with more history, and more allusion, and a mild didacticism interwoven. Civilizations were depicted, and contrasted, and much of their forlornness was not forgotten, the lesson of progressive betterments being shown, and that gradual emancipation of the race from a debased selfishness, but the growth of all such altruism was regarded—a little narrowly—as the fruit of Christianity.

On that score Miss Lorimer would abate nothing. It was an unique and most original spot, and so well imagined to combine pleasure, and usefulness, and instruction, and help—for in its lower basement it had a dispensatory—that it was instantly thronged. But Miss Lorimer intended to attach to it a proprietary interest. No one could enter it and use it but the Members of the Order Club. Everyone could belong to this club, but its membership came under the scrutiny of its directors, and they were elected. Every head of a Household paid five cents a month for his family, and all others one cent. The scheme worked well, and the people took a pride in it, and in their memberships. Miss Lorimer endowed it, and put well paid curators in it as well. Its expansion was further provided for.

It was the night before their wedding that Amato and Helen were together in the great library of her home. The winter cold had hastened somewhat, and the fireplace was filled with flaring logs. They had been sitting together in front of this cheerful light. Helen sat forward on her chair her face resting in her hands while her arms rested on her knees and she looked into the ranked and flaming wood-pile. Amato leaned far back in his chair and his eyes were on her alone, their rapt and happy gaze changing at intervals into brief smiles that parted the curved lips and made him more handsome. For never had that extreme physical charm seemed fairer to him than to-night. Helen had only just turned her bewildered glance from his compelling beauty, as if she fled from its overpowering tyranny. Amato was perhaps half conscious of his control, and that brought into his eyes the rising and vanishing smile. But his slavery to the beautiful woman was abject. There may have been just then the sense of a vanquishing power which maintained his freedom and his mastery; but in his heart he knew the relentless passion that desired and yet, through the benignity of his mind’s higher insight, feared.

“Helen, can you see the future in those blazing embers? Tea-leaves are better accredited among the sybils.” The voice was half mocking.

Helen laughed a little, and without turning to her companion answered: “Sometimes I wonder whether we can give inanimate things—when they are not altogether stocks and stones—some power born of ourselves to tell us what we wish to know. Surely those burning motes filled with fire, all their parts vibrating with motion, down to their last atoms, might now be ready to respond to the tyrannous demands of our souls.”

“But how will they answer?” the voice now betrayed some interest.

“Why, by pictures. They have no other power. We ourselves are the Seers and we catch in them thrown outwards from our own divinations the images of the things to come.”

“Like the Pythagorean who by looking formed the clay after the image of his thought, or those less recondite magicians who tell your fortune by a crystal sphere.”

“Ah! Rudolph you must not trifle; the pictures are symbols and they are allusions only—not photographs of what you and I will do—” she rose from her stooping position and laid her hand upon his, still regarding the crumbling and reforming mirages of the fire;—“but types, as now a flame, and now a star, and now the—Yes I see it—the Cross—”.

“Helen are you one who ‘looks into the seeds of time and tells which grain will grow and which will not?’”

“Why Rudolph, it sometimes seems to me as if our souls left us, were like sensitive glasses feeling the approaching years with what they hold, as the barometer, long before the storm or the fair weather, falls or rises, responding so minutely to the changing pressure around it.”

“O Love could you and I with fate conspire

To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire,

Would not we shatter it to bits—and then

Remould it nearer to the heart’s desire?”

Amato leaned forward as he repeated the smooth lines, with his voice tuned to the depth of his devotion for this woman, leaned so far forward indeed that his cheek brushed against her own, and then his hand was lifted and rested on her shoulder. She turned, he slid forward to his knees on the floor before her. Their faces were opposite each other, their eyes met, and then—almost with violence—Amato leaped to his feet seized her hands, drew her up to himself and crushed her lips with his own. She was plastic in his arms, but there was no return of his frantic pressure.

He slowly relinquished his constraint, and a sudden pain wrote itself in his face—it almost again seemed to him that that invisible partition of the dead man’s memory yet divided them, very slightly perhaps, but Love is so imperious, that the thought stabbed him like a knife and Helen understood. She saw his pain—her words came to his ears like music—such sweet blissful assurance—and yet—;

“No! No! Amato I love you—there is no reservation—” her voice faltered, and tears sprang into her eyes: “We shall be happy—we shall work—the greatness of human destiny will be for us a watchword for endeavor—for all sorts of noble enterprises—”

It was her turn to rouse him—he stood looking at her wistfully, thankfully—but somehow that deep egotism of the true lover craved some greater personal surrender—Why now should designs of Work hide HIM from her—was there not Love—Possession—at least for a little while; let all else be forgotten, and the one personal act of Union reign supreme.

He dropped her hands and laughed bitterly.

“Ah Helen—ever Work! Cannot I count for something?” the laugh vanished—that tender boyish smile, so beguiling and winning came into his eyes and his mouth parted. Helen Lorimer saw it all now—and the revelation, pointing so deeply to the unsatisfied longing, the quenchless thirst for surrender and temporal oblivion, lit up within her a strange wonderful delight. She flung her arms about Amato’s neck, she nestled her head upon his shoulder, she sought his mouth with her lips, and in the flood—the tide running fast and unrestrained—of joy, as if a touch had liberated imprisoned waters, the two lost all reference to the Future—one abounding, mastering, remorselessly ecstatic PRESENT held them wedded in mind, in heart, in soul.

Six months later an official ceremony sealed this voiceless pact. It was a glorious wedding. Such a nuptial splendor had never before been seen in New York. Cardinal Fenton intended that it should be made tributary to his own designs; it certainly accentuated again the fact of the new Presence in America—the Pope’s. It was held at dawn. The long procession of carriages from Carrara was resplendently conceived. They were lit with oil torches, and, along the avenues they passed, arches of lights and welcoming discharges of rockets administered a civic public note that was unmistakable. Agreeable to Helen Lorimer’s orders largess, in forms of banquets, gifts and endowments had incorporated the whole great city in this noble function. The Cathedral of St. Patrick’s was encrusted with light, from arch and fret and angle the electric coronas sent their rays, and at its entrance the Pope’s Arms deftly interwoven with the Eagle and the Flag of the States surmounted a flashing arch of lights, and, more ominously to some, above these shone the escutcheon of the City-State.

Within the sacred structure the spectacle was a ravishing picture of color and coruscation. Climbing coils of light terminating in pendent colored globes, lined the central aisle, the altar dressed to its very summit with roses sparkled also with lights; enormous candles burned within the sanctuary, the thrones of the Pope and the Cardinal were opposite each other and each was a hill of lilies. The Pope celebrated the Nuptial Mass and awaited at the altar the slow progress of the bridal procession which was itself a vision of beauty. Priests and acolytes, in swaying groups surrounded the Pope and the Cardinal.

Helen had wished to embody again her generous emotions in this great act of her life. One of the lovely and touching features of the bridal train was the presence of fifty little girls from the East Side, and as many boys carrying chains of flowers, chosen protegees from her many foundations of charity. In the centre of this escort Helen, with her twelve bridesmaids, accompanied only by her Mother Julieta, approached. Rudolph awaited her at the steps of the Communion Rail supported by his company of groomsmen, while through the huge temple of worship the music and the chorus of the Lohengrün Wedding March breathed its festive melodies. The curious archaic custom of enclosing the bride and bridegroom in the nuptial cloth was observed, and when at last the rite was consummated the blessing given by the transported Pope, the recessional begun to the accompaniment of a full orchestra playing Mendelssohn’s Spring Song, while three thousand guests watched and wondered—it truly seemed as if the Great City was about to enter itself upon some new chapter of development wherein should be seen again, in closer conflict, the allied strength of Helen Lorimer’s beneficent Democracy of Wealth and the Hierarchy of the Church, against the Lust of Life and the disintegrating agitations of Socialism.

Was it auspicious that as Rudolph assisted Helen, and her Mother, to the equipage, of which he was now an occupant, that the risen Sun of the May morning shone brightly, and that throngs in the streets burst into cheers?

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Inconsistent punctuation has been left unchanged while typographical errors, hyphenation inconsistencies and numerous spelling errors have been silently corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within the text and consultation of external sources.

Except for those changes noted below archaic usage has been retained.

- Page 28 “it was called—the region-Carrara” changed to “it was called—the region—Carrara”

- Page 213 “It was a pet theory of the Cardinals” changed to “It was a pet theory of the Cardinal’s”

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Table of Contents

THE Mayor of New York

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS.

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE