That Booth should have used Harold is very naturally accounted for.
Actors live only to be admired; vanity rises to its climax in them.
Booth preferred this sparrow to sing him peans rather than live by an
eagle and be screamed at now and then.
At the right hand side of Harold sits a soldier in blue, who is evidently thinking about a game of quoits with his comrades in the jail yard; he wonders why lawyers are so very dry, and is surprised to find a trial for murder as tedious as a thanksgiving sermon.
But on the soldier's other hand is a figure which makes the center and cynosure of this thrilling scene. Taller by a whole head than either his companions or the sentries, Payne, the assassin, sits erect, and flings his barbarian eye to and fro, radiating the tremendous energy of his colossal physique.
He is the only man worthy to have murdered Mr. Seward. When against the delicate organization, the fine, subtle, nervous mind of the Secretary of State, this giant, knife in hand, precipitated himself, two forms of civilization met as distinctly as when the savage Gauls invaded the Roman senate.
Lawlessness and intelligence, the savage and the statesman, body and mind, fought together upon Mr. Seward's bed.
The mystery attending Payne's home and parentage still exists to make him more incomprehensible. Out of the vague, dim ultima thule, like those Asiatic hordes which came from nowhere and shivered civilization, Payne suddenly appeared and fought his way to the sanctum sanctorum of law. I think his part in the assassination more remarkable than Booth's, The latter's crime was shrewdly plotted, as by one measuring intelligence with the whole government. But Payne did not think—he only struck!
With this man's face before me as I write, I am reminded of some Maori chief waging war from the lust of blood or the pride of local dominion. His complexion is bloodless, yet so healthy that a passing observer would afterward speak of it as ruddy. His face is broad, with a character nose, sensual lips, and very high cheek bones; the cranium is full and the brow speaking, while the head runs back to an abnormal apex at the tip of the cerebellum. His straight, lusterless black hair, duly parted, is at the summit so disturbed that tufts of it rise up like Red Jacket's or Tecumseh's; but the head is kept well up, and rests upon a wonderfully broad throat, muscular as one's thigh, and without any trace, as he sits, of the protuberance called Adam's apple. Withal, the eye is the man Payne's power. It is dark and speechless, and rolls here and there like that of a beast in a cage which strives in vain to understand the language of its captors. It seems to say, if anything, that, it has no sympathy with anybody approximate, and has submitted, like a lion bound, to the logic of conviction and of chains.
Payne looks at none of his fellow-prisoners: assassins caught seldom cares to recognise each other; for while there is faithfulness among thieves, there is none among murderers. His great white eyeball never roves to anybody's in the dock, nor theirs to his. He has confessed his crime and they know it; so they have no mutual hope; they listen to the evidence because it concerns them; ho looks at it only, because it cannot save him. He is entirely beardless, yet in his boyish chin more of a man physically than the rest, combined.
While I watch this man I am constantly repeating to myself that stanza of Bryant's:
"Upon the market place he stood,—
A man of giant frame,
Amid the gathering multitude
That shrank to hear his name;
All proud of step and firm of limb,
His dark eye on the ground—
And silently they gazed on him,
As on a lion bound."