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.