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.