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”