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.