During the summer of 1866, while his wife was in the country, he brought his Baltimore inamoretta to New York, and established her in his splendid mansion on the Avenue. With an impudence and infatuation perfectly astounding in so shrewd a man, he took no pains to conceal his conquest. Jauntily would he pace down Broadway with her on his arm in the morning, and in the evening she would be in waiting to accompany him home.
Tidings of this open liaison reached the lawyer's wife in her retreat among the Vermont hills, and she promptly came to New York and dislodged the mistress pro tem. Relatives of the infatuated widow also appeared at this juncture and strongly urged her to conquer her mad infatuation, while a like appeal was made to the lawyer. But he was deaf to reason. He refused to give up his idol, and the widow declared her intention, to use her own language, "of sticking to him as long as he had a button on his coat."
Time sped on. The lawyer's passion began to be exhausted, and the unending insistence of her's began to excite his repugnance. As Ouida happily remarked, "A woman who is ice to his fire, is less pain to a man than the woman who is fire to his ice." There is hope for him in the one, but only a dreary despair in the other. In the latter part of 1867, the lawyer began to realize the force of this philosophy. The amorous widow was then boarding at the Metropolitan Hotel, and he began to take the initiatory steps to be rid of her. After two years of madness, during which she had sacrificed the respect of every relative she had, including her own daughter, a pretty girl in her teens, it was hardly likely that he would evince the moral courage to declare openly and straightforward to her that their relations must end. On the contrary, he invoked the aid of three lawyers—two of them her own cousins, the other bearing an historic name—to kidnap and spirit her out of the city. First they forcibly conveyed her to police headquarters. Then, in spite of tears and protestations, she was kept all night in a dark room. Her screams and entreaties might have moved a heart of stone, but they were unavailing. In the morning she saw Superintendent Kennedy, and demanded the cause of the outrage. He informed her that she had been brought there on a charge of being insane about the lawyer. A physician was summoned, and by his direction, after he had submitted her to an examination, she was sent back to her hotel. During the same afternoon, the lawyer called and emphatically denied having had any hand in her contemplated imprisonment, and secured her release, conveniently imputing the conspiracy to the jealousy of his wife.
Meantime, however, the lawyer and his fellow-accomplices of the law were plotting to get the wretched woman placed in some private asylum. Bloomingdale and Flushing asylums were full, and as she continued to follow her whilom lover and importune him to visit her, he found it politic and convenient to renew his attentions and to feign a revival of his passion. In a certain sense, he was to be pitied. Love of this kind begins as a gift; but a woman of this temperament does not leave it so. She promptly turned it into a debt, and the more she loved the debtor, the more oppressively and inexorably did she extort the uttermost penny from him. About this time she was introduced to an eminent medical specialist in mental diseases, who, by some inexplicable means, was induced to give a certificate of her insanity. Then her cousins took her before a justice, and swore that she was an indigent lunatic, upon which showing the court issued an order of committal to an asylum. A few days before her contemplated abduction, the lawyer induced her to board at the Astor House, and on the morning of February 26, 1868, he being engaged in the Federal court, while she was leisurely sauntering along Broadway looking for him, as was her wont, she was suddenly seized by three hired ruffians, hustled into a carriage, gagged and driven rapidly up-town to Central Park, when the bandage was removed from her mouth. For four mortal hours she was driven about the park in the company of her brutal captors, and afterward placed on board the afternoon train for Albany at the old Hudson River depot. "All along the road," as she subsequently told the writer, "I implored the conductor to furnish me with paper and pencil so that I might telegraph to New York, but it was only when we reached the end of the journey that he did so. I gave him money to pay for the dispatch, but he probably never sent it. When I reached Utica I was placed in a pretty bad ward, and when the physician, Dr. Kellogg, saw me he went and reported to Dr. Gray, the director of the place. When he came up he said I must not be treated so, and I was at once removed to the well ward; I remained there two weeks, when I was discharged." Yes, she was discharged, and was received with crocodile congratulations by the lawyer and one of her lawyer cousins, and triumphantly, as it were, transported back to New York.
She was now placed in elegant apartments in the Hoffman House, and her lawyer lover resumed his visits as formerly. During the summer she went to the country at his expense, and when, in September, 1868, she returned to the city, he finally ceased to visit her. She was frantic with disappointment, and her insane infatuation led her into all manner of indelicate demonstrations. She dogged him in the streets; she followed him into court and interrupted him in his pleadings. Sometimes she sat on the stoop of his elegant mansion all night. Once she dressed herself as a soldier, and tried to gain access to him. Frequently she waylaid him, and sunk upon the pavement in real or assumed paroxysmal fits when he approached. There were other demonstrations that no decent pen could describe, except in a medical book for purposes of science. Naturally the unfortunate lawyer was driven to the brink of desperation, and at this time he never went out of doors without being accompanied by two detectives to protect him from her indelicate approaches.
On November 16, 1868, he caused her to be arrested for disorderly conduct and thrown into the Tombs. The lawyer with the historic name appeared against her, and, to use her own language, "without any examination, I was committed by Judge Dowling." Her gentle bearing and lady-like address again stood her good stead, however, and in a few days she was released.
She now consulted the late James T. Brady, the greatest lawyer who ever practiced at the American bar, and after listening carefully to her statement, he promised to see her "righted." Pending legal action that eminent advocate died, and in the beginning of February, 1869, she took the opinion of Edwin James, the English barrister, and a suit was immediately instituted against her whilom lawyer lover in the Court of Common Pleas, damages being laid at $100,000. When the defendant received notice of the suit he hastened to see Mr. James, and during several conversations offered any reasonable compromise to procure a stay of proceedings. The lady's version of the suit and the subsequent negotiations is as follows: "The suit was never placed on the calendar. It was arranged with Mr. James to allow the case to proceed a certain length and then obtain a release. Mr. James got no retainer, but took my case on speculation, with the understanding that he was to have one thousand dollars at the end of the suit, if there were any proceeds from the same. He continuously urged me to go to Europe with my daughter for two years, and they would advance the money; but I declined. An order was obtained by the defendant's lawyer to examine me; whereupon Mr. James advised me to leave the city in order to avoid the examination. On my return Mr. James advised me to release the suit on the payment of a certain sum by the defendant, he, the defendant, at the same time to make an apology for what he had done and to express regret for my sufferings."
Accordingly, on May 27, 1868, she wrote a letter by advice of her counsel, authorizing him to withdraw the suit on these conditions, and early in June she signed a "general release," professing afterwards to be entirely ignorant of the nature of the instrument. Indeed the unhappy woman cared more for an expression of regret from her enslaver than for any pecuniary solace, and she received no money, although her lawyer did, when the general release was signed. When she discovered the nature of the instrument she was extremely indignant and demanded from Mr. James the telegrams and letters in his possession which had been sent to her by her worshiper in the heyday of their passion. The lawyer hesitated and delayed, and finally, being pressed by a friend and kinsman of the unhappy lady, said, "I won't give them up unless I have an order from the court." Subsequently he claimed that he had destroyed these tell-tale documents, and that the "general release" authorized the proceedings.
She now consulted another law firm, but her case came to nothing, and meantime her former adorer, now grown fiercely hostile, instituted proceedings in the Supreme Court, for the purpose of procuring a perpetual injunction to forever restrain her from harassing him with such suits. This was in 1870, in the early days of March, when the writer saw her last, and conversed with her on her wrongs. Her picture lives in his recollection yet: The soft, large brown eyes, half sad and half voluptuous in their tenderness; the soft, pleading face, with a refinement—even a sort of nobleness—that had outlived the sacrifice of her virtue and reputation. To the last she was a lady of extreme sweetness of manner, and a fascinating and interesting conversationalist.
Another notable man, now also a member of the "great majority"—a renowned Shakespearean critic, author and censor in the domain of belles-lettres—brought great trouble and humiliation upon himself by an amour with a ridiculously plain-looking and by no means young woman. He had naturally, perhaps, a penchant in that direction, for on the appearance of the Lydia Thompson troupe of original British blondes in this city, he wrought himself into a fervor of passionate folly over the statuesque Markham, and designated her in his Erosian outpourings as "she of the vocal velvet voice." There may have been some excuse for this passing delirium, and many others were touched by it, Pauline Markham was a singularly beautiful girl, and she never looked so well as when she sang; it sent warmth into her lips and took the hardness from her face. But the lady with whom he became involved in a scrape, with the attendant litigation, payment of damages, danger of publicity and total ruin of reputation in the exclusive places where his character was respected and his judgment esteemed, was in every respect different from the lady of burlesque opera. Bitterly did he regret his follies, for the facts were given to a newspaper famous for its sensations, and the great littérateur was compelled literally to go down on his marrow bones to induce the editor to withhold the particulars of his seduction of the lady from publication. The sword of Damocles was suspended for weeks, during which the high-toned censor's condition was sometimes pitiable to see. His entreaties finally carried the point, and the case became one of those scandals of the existence of which the public never dreams.