47. CHAPTER XLVII.
—Mana qo c'u x-opon-vi ri v'oyeualal, ri v'achihilal! ahcarroc cah, ahcarroc
uleu! la quitzih varal in camel, in zachel varal chuxmut cah, chuxmut uleu!
Rabinal-Achi.
PHILIP'S first effort was to get Harry out of the Tombs.
He gained permission to see him, in the presence of an
officer, during the day, and he found that hero very much
cast down.
“I never intended to come to such a place as this, old fellow,”
he said to Philip; “it's no place for a gentleman, they've
no idea how to treat a gentleman. Look at that provender,”
pointing to his uneaten prison ration. “They tell me I am
detained as a witness, and I passed the night among a lot of
cut-throats and dirty rascals—a pretty witness I'd be in a
month spent in such company.”
“But what under heavens,” asked Philip, “induced you to
come to New York with Laura! What was it for?”
“What for? Why, she wanted me to come. I didn't
know anything about that cursed Selby. She said it was
lobby business for the University. I'd no idea what she
was dragging me into that confounded hotel for. I suppose
she knew that the Southerners all go there, and thought she'd
find her man. Oh! Lord, I wish I'd taken your advice. You
might as well murder somebody and have the credit of it, as
get into the newspapers the way I have. She's pure devil,
that girl. You ought to have seen how sweet she was on
me; what an ass I am.”
“Well, I'm not going to dispute a poor prisoner. But the
first thing is to get you out of this. I've brought the note
Laura wrote you, for one thing, and I've seen your uncle, and
explained the truth of the case to him. He will be here
soon.”
Harry's uncle came, with other friends, and in the course
of the day made such a showing to the authorities that Harry
was released, on giving bonds to appear as a witness when
wanted. His spirits rose with their usual elasticity as soon
as he was out of Centre Street, and he insisted on giving
Philip and his friends a royal supper at Delmonico's, an
excess which was perhaps excusable in the rebound of his
feelings, and which was committed with his usual reckless
generosity. Harry ordered the supper, and it is perhaps
needless to say that Philip paid the bill.
Neither of the young men felt like attempting to see Laura
that day, and she saw no company except the newspaper
reporters, until the arrival of Col. Sellers and Washington
Hawkins, who had hastened to New York with all speed.
They found Laura in a cell in the upper tier of the women's
department. The cell was somewhat larger than those in the
men's department, and might be eight feet by ten square,
perhaps a little longer. It was of stone, floor and all, and
the roof was oven shaped. A narrow slit in the roof admitted
sufficient light, and was the only means of ventilation; when
the window was opened there was nothing to prevent the
rain coming in. The only means of heating being from the
corridor, when the door was ajar, the cell was chilly and at
this time damp. It was whitewashed and clean, but it had a
slight jail odor; its only furniture was a narrow iron bedstead,
with a tick of straw and some blankets, not too clean.
When Col. Sellers was conducted to this cell by the matron
and looked in, his emotions quite overcame him, the tears
rolled down his cheeks and his voice trembled so that he could
hardly speak. Washington was unable to say anything; he
looked from Laura to the miserable creatures who were walking
in the corridor with unutterable disgust. Laura was
alone calm and self-contained, though she was not unmoved
by the sight of the grief of her friends.
“Are you comfortable, Laura?” was the first word the
Colonel could get out.
“You see,” she replied. “I can't say it's exactly comfortable.”
“Are you cold?”
“It is pretty chilly. The stone floor is like ice. It chills
me through to step on it. I have to sit on the bed.”
“Poor thing, poor thing. And can you eat any thing?”
“No, I am not hungry. I don't know that I could eat
any thing, I can't eat that.”
“Oh dear,” continued the Colonel, “it's dreadful. But
cheer up, dear, cheer up;” and the Colonel broke down
entirely.
“But,” he went on, “we'll stand by you. We'll do everything
for you. I know you couldn't have meant to do it, it
must have been insanity, you know, or something of that sort.
You never did anything of the sort before.”
Laura smiled very faintly and said,
“Yes, it was something of that sort. It's all a whirl. He
was a villain; you don't know.”
“I'd rather have killed him myself, in a duel you know,
all fair. I wish I had. But don't you be down. We'll get
you off—the best counsel, the lawyers in New York can do
anything; I've read of cases. But you must be comfortable
now. We've brought some of your clothes, at the hotel.
What else can we get for you?”
Laura suggested that she would like some sheets for her
bed, a piece of carpet to step on, and her meals sent in; and
some books and writing materials if it was allowed. The
Colonel and Washington promised to procure all these things,
and then took their sorrowful leave, a great deal more affected
than the criminal was, apparently, by her situation.
The Colonel told the matron as he went away that if she
would look to Laura's comfort a little it shouldn't be the
worse for her; and to the turnkey who let them out he patronizingly
said,
“You've got a big establishment here, a credit to the city.
I've got a friend in there—I shall see you again, sir.”
By the next day something more of Laura's own story
began to appear in the newspapers, colored and heightened
by reporters' rhetoric. Some of them cast a lurid light upon
the Colonel's career, and represented his victim as a beautiful
avenger of her murdered innocence; and others pictured her
as his willing paramour and pitiless slayer. Her communications
to the reporters were stopped by her lawyers as soon as
they were retained and visited her, but this fact did not prevent—it
may have facilitated—the appearance of casual paragraphs
here and there which were likely to beget popular
sympathy for the poor girl.
The occasion did not pass without “improvement” by the
leading journals; and Philip preserved the editorial comments
of three or four of them which pleased him most. These he
used to read aloud to his friends afterwards and ask them
to guess from which journal each of them had been cut. One
began in this simple manner:—
History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured
present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.
Washington is not Corinth, and Lais, the beautiful daughter of Timandra,
might not have been the prototype of the ravishing Laura, daughter of the plebeian
house of Hawkins; but the orators and statesmen who were the purchasers
of the favors of the one, may have been as incorruptible as the Republican statesmen
who learned how to love and how to vote from the sweet lips of the Washington
lobbyist; and perhaps the modern Lais would never have departed from
the national Capital if there had been there even one republican Xenocrates who
resisted her blandishments. But here the parallel fails. Lais, wandering away
with the youth Hippostratus, is slain by the women who are jealous of her charms.
Laura, straying into her Thessaly with the youth Brierly, slays her other lover
and becomes the champion of the wrongs of her sex.
Another journal began its editorial with less lyrical beauty,
but with equal force. It closed as follows:—
With Laura Hawkins, fair, fascinating and fatal, and with the dissolute Colonel
of a lost cause, who has reaped the harvest he sowed, we have nothing to do.
But as the curtain rises on this awful tragedy, we catch a glimpse of the society
at the capital under this Administration, which we cannot contemplate without
alarm for the fate of the Republic.
A third newspaper took up the subject in a different tone.
It said:—
Our repeated predictions are verified. The pernicious doctrines which we
have announced as prevailing in American society have been again illustrated.
The name of the city is becoming a reproach. We may have done something in
averting its ruin in our resolute exposure of the Great Frauds; we shall not be
deterred from insisting that the outraged laws for the protection of human life
shall be vindicated now, so that a person can walk the streets or enter the public
houses, at least in the day-time, without the risk of a bullet through his
brain.
A fourth journal began its remarks as follows:—
The fullness with which we present our readers this morning the details of
the Selby-Hawkins homicide is a miracle of modern journalism. Subsequent
investigation can do little to fill out the picture. It is the old story. A beautiful
woman shoots her absconding lover in cold-blood; and we shall doubtless
learn in due time that if she was not as mad as a hare in this month of March,
she was at least laboring under what is termed “momentary insanity.”
It would not be too much to say that upon the first publication
of the facts of the tragedy, there was an almost universal
feeling of rage against the murderess in the Tombs, and
that reports of her beauty only heightened the indignation.
It was as if she presumed upon that and upon her sex, to defy
the law; and there was a fervent hope that the law would
take its plain course.
Yet Laura was not without friends, and some of them very
influential too. She had in her keeping a great many secrets
and a great many reputations, perhaps. Who shall set himself
up to judge human motives? Why, indeed, might we
not feel pity for a woman whose brilliant career had been so
suddenly extinguished in misfortune and crime? Those who
had known her so well in Washington might find it impossible
to believe that the fascinating woman could have had
murder in her heart, and would readily give ear to the current
sentimentality about the temporary aberration of mind under
the stress of personal calamity.
Senator Dilworthy was greatly shocked, of course, but he
was full of charity for the erring.
“We shall all need mercy,” he said. “Laura as an inmate
of my family was a most exemplary female, amiable, affectionate
and truthful, perhaps too fond of gaiety, and neglectful
of the externals of religion, but a woman of principle.
She may have had experiences of which I am ignorant, but
she could not have gone to this extremity if she had been in
her own right mind.”
To the Senator's credit be it said, he was willing to help
Laura and her family in this dreadful trial. She, herself, was
not without money, for the Washington lobbyist is not seldom
more fortunate than the Washington claimant, and she was
able to procure a good many luxuries to mitigate the severity
of her prison life. It enabled her also to have her own family
near her, and to see some of them daily. The tender solicitude
of her mother, her childlike grief, and her firm belief in
the real guiltlessness of her daughter, touched even the custodians
of the Tombs who are enured to scenes of pathos.
Mrs. Hawkins had hastened to her daughter as soon as she
received money for the journey. She had no reproaches, she
had only tenderness and pity. She could not shut out the
dreadful facts of the case, but it had been enough for her
that Laura had said, in their first interview, “mother, I did
not know what I was doing.” She obtained lodgings near
the prison and devoted her life to her daughter, as if she had
been really her own child. She would have remained in the
prison day and night if it had been permitted. She was aged
and feeble, but this great necessity seemed to give her new
life.
The pathetic story of the old lady's ministrations, and her
simplicity and faith, also got into the newspapers in time, and
probably added to the pathos of this wrecked woman's fate,
which was beginning to be felt by the public. It was certain
that she had champions who thought that her wrongs ought
to be placed against her crime, and expressions of this feeling
came to her in various ways. Visitors came to see her, and
gifts of fruit and flowers were sent, which brought some
cheer into her hard and gloomy cell.
Laura had declined to see either Philip or Harry, somewhat
to the former's relief, who had a notion that she would necessarily
feel humiliated by seeing him after breaking faith with
him, but to the discomfiture of Harry, who still felt her fascination,
and thought her refusal heartless. He told Philip
that of course he had got through with such a woman, but
he wanted to see her.
Philip, to keep him from some new foolishness, persuaded
him to go with him to Philadelphia, and give his valuable
services in the mining operations at Ilium.
The law took its course with Laura. She was indicted for
murder in the first degree, and held for trial at the summer
term. The two most distinguished criminal lawyers in the
city had been retained for her defence, and to that the resolute
woman devoted her days, with a courage that rose as she
consulted with her counsel and understood the methods of
criminal procedure in New York.
She was greatly depressed, however, by the news from
Washington. Congress adjourned and her bill had failed to
pass the Senate. It must wait for the next session.
