It was natural that such a glorious victory should be celebrated, and the gang, when it assembled in Jimmy’s place, immediately after the session was over, could not restrain its impatience. The boys longed to have the fruits of the day’s work; with their wages they could celebrate with glad, care-free hearts. But Jimmy was of a Gaelic cunning. He would not jeopardize the victory at that stage by any indiscretion. He saw at a glance the mood the gang was in. He smiled, as he always smiled—and any one, to see his smile, must have loved him—but he shook his head.
“The drink’s in you, boys,” he said, “and you can’t trust your tongues. You’ll have to wait. Monday night you’ll be over. Then we’ll talk business.”
Subconsciously, they still were sober; in a strange dual mentality they saw the safety there was in his decision; and, in the paralysis of will his magnetism worked in them, they loved him the more for it. They remembered that it was just what Malachi would have done. And so, noisy and excited as they were, they applauded his sagacity. Then they gave themselves over unreservedly to their appetites. It was a famous night in the annals of the gang. Jimmy himself joined in the revelry. And in the calm, silent Sunday morning, with the new sunlight of spring glaring in his swollen, aching eyes, he found himself, with a companion, in a Clark Street chop house. Just as they were going to order breakfast, a young man came in, with a black look in his eyes. No one saw it then, though they all remembered it afterward. Jimmy greeted him as gaily as he greeted everybody, but the young man did not warm to Jimmy’s greeting. There were words, the quick rush of anger to Jimmy’s face, a blow, and the pistol shot. At first the newspapers were glad to trace some sinister connection between the franchise fight and the tragedy. Afterward, they said it was only some private grudge. No one dreamed that Jimmy Tiernan had an enemy on earth.
At the hospital, Jimmy opened his eyes, and on his face, grown very white, there was a smile again, the last of his winning smiles. His friends were with him, and they wept, unashamed. Then he rolled his head on his pillow, and spoke of Annie. The calm Sister of Charity pressed her rosary into his hand, and stooped to listen. They had just time to send for Father Daugherty.
Down in the ward, the sadness that had come to Leadam Street spread blackly. Many a man, and many a woman, and many a child, cried. The poor had lost a friend, and they would not soon forget him. In the long days of the distant winter they would think of him over and over. Every one in that ward was poor, though the reformers, condescending that way whenever Jimmy was up for reëlection, somehow never grasped the real significance of the fact. And it was a somber Monday around the city hall. Jimmy had been a man with a genius for friendship. The gang mourned him in a sadness that had added to it the remorse of a recent sobriety, but their grief, genuine as it was, had in it an evil bitterness their hearts would not have owned. They were restive and troubled. Whenever they got together in little groups, they read consternation in one another’s faces, and now and then they cursed the caution they had extolled on Saturday night. Besides these varied effects, Jimmy’s death, while it could not create a crisis in the market, nevertheless gave rise to nervous feelings in certain segments of financial circles. It was inevitable that financial and political circles should overlap and intersect each other in this matter, and there were conferences which seemed to reflect a sense of personal resentment at Jimmy for having been murdered so inopportunely. In the end, the financiers were peremptory with Baldwin. He must fix the thing some way. And he assured them that he would give the appointment of the administrator his immediate attention. Already, he said, he had a man in view who would be reasonable and practical. There were suggestions of strong-handed methods, but that was never George R. Baldwin’s way. He went out with his air of affability unimpaired. Meanwhile, political and financial circles could only wait and hope.
The excitement of the first few days following the tragedy kept Annie’s mind occupied; but, when the funeral was over, and she returned to her little flat, when the neighborly women had at last gone back to their homes and their interrupted duties, and the world to its work, Annie was left to face life alone. She could not adjust herself to the change, and fear and despair added their blackness to her grief. Father Daugherty knew how great a blow Jimmy’s death would be to her, and, though he gave what comfort he could, he left her grief to time. He did not belong to the preaching orders. But, as he pondered in his wise old head, he shrewdly guessed that the careless Jimmy would hardly have made provision against anything so far from his thoughts as death, and he perceived that if Annie were to be protected from a future with which she, alone and unaided, would hardly have the capacity to deal, some one must act.
Long ago might Father Daugherty have celebrated his silver jubilee as pastor of St. Patrick’s, but he was not the man for celebrations. The parish was one big family to him, and he knew the joys and sorrows, the little hopes and pathetic ambitions of every one in it. The sorrows of his children he bore in his own heart; they had wrought their complex and tragic tale in his face. The joys he left them to taste alone; but he found too much sorrow to have time for joy. During all those years, he had given himself unsparingly; if it was all he had to give, it was the most precious thing he could have given—a daily sacrifice that exhausted a temperament keenly sensitive and sympathetic. So he had grown old and white before his time. Many a man had he kept straight when times were hard and the right to work denied him; many a widow had he saved from the wiles of the claim-agent. The corporations and the lawyers hated him.
And so, on Monday morning, the clerks of the probate court had scarcely had time to yawn reluctantly before beginning a new week’s work, when Father Daugherty appeared to file Annie’s waiver of her own right to be appointed administratrix of the estate of James Tiernan, deceased, with an application for the appointment, instead, of Francis Daugherty as administrator.
“He must keep a set of blanks,” whispered one clerk to another.