Title: The Marble Faun; Or, The Romance of Monte Beni - Volume 2
Author: Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Language: English
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THE MARBLE FAUN,

or The Romance of Monte Beni

BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE


Volume II.

In Two Volumes



Contents:

     Volume I

     I       MIRIAM, HILDA, KENYON, DONATELLO
     II      THE FAUN
     III     SUBTERRANEAN REMINISCENCES
     IV      THE SPECTRE OF THE CATACOMB
     V       MIRIAM’S STUDIO
     VI      THE VIRGIN’S SHRINE
     VII     BEATRICE
     VIII    THE SUBURBAN VILLA
     IX      THE FAUN AND NYMPH
     X       THE SYLVAN DANCE
     XI      FRAGMENTARY SENTENCES
     XII     A STROLL ON THE PINCIAN
     XIII    A SCULPTOR’S STUDIO
     XIV     CLEOPATRA
     XV      AN AESTHETIC COMPANY
     XVI     A MOONLIGHT RAMBLE
     XVII    MIRIAM’S TROUBLE
     XVIII   ON THE EDGE OF A PRECIPICE
     XIX     THE FAUN’S TRANSFORMATION
     XX      THE BURIAL CHANT
     XXI     THE DEAD CAPUCHIN
     XXII    THE MEDICI GARDENS
     XXIII   MIRIAM AND HILDA


     Volume II

     XXIV    THE TOWER AMONG THE APENNINES
     XXV     SUNSHINE
     XXVI    THE PEDIGREE OF MONTE BENI
     XXVII   MYTHS
     XXVIII  THE OWL TOWER
     XXIX    ON THE BATTLEMENTS
     XXX     DONATELLO’S BUST
     XXXI    THE MARBLE SALOON
     XXXII   SCENES BY THE WAY
     XXXIII  PICTURED WINDOWS
     XXXIV   MARKET-DAY IN PERUGIA
     XXXV    THE BRONZE PONTIFF’S BENEDICTION
     XXXVI   HILDA’S TOWER
     XXXVII  THE EMPTINESS OF PICTURE GALLERIES
     XXXVIII ALTARS AND INCENSE
     XXXIX   THE WORLD’S CATHEDRAL
     XL      HILDA AND A FRIEND
     XLI     SNOWDROPS AND MAIDENLY DELIGHTS
     XLII    REMINISCENCES OF MIRIAM
     XLIII   THE EXTINCTION OF A LAMP
     XLIV    THE DESERTED SHRINE
     XLV     THE FLIGHT OF HILDA’S DOVES
     XLVI    A WALK ON THE CAMPAGNA
     XLVII   THE PEASANT AND CONTADINA
     XLVIII  A SCENE IN THE CORSO
     XLIX    A FROLIC OF THE CARNIVAL
     L       MIRIAM, HILDA, KENYON, DONATELLO



THE MARBLE FAUN

Volume II



CHAPTER XXIV


THE TOWER AMONG THE APENNINES


It was in June that the sculptor, Kenyon, arrived on horseback at the
gate of an ancient country house (which, from some of its features,
might almost be called a castle) situated in a part of Tuscany somewhat
remote from the ordinary track of tourists. Thither we must now
accompany him, and endeavor to make our story flow onward, like a
streamlet, past a gray tower that rises on the hillside, overlooking a
spacious valley, which is set in the grand framework of the Apennines.

The sculptor had left Rome with the retreating tide of foreign
residents. For, as summer approaches, the Niobe of Nations is made to
bewail anew, and doubtless with sincerity, the loss of that large
part of her population which she derives from other lands, and on whom
depends much of whatever remnant of prosperity she still enjoys. Rome,
at this season, is pervaded and overhung with atmospheric terrors, and
insulated within a charmed and deadly circle. The crowd of wandering
tourists betake themselves to Switzerland, to the Rhine, or, from this
central home of the world, to their native homes in England or America,
which they are apt thenceforward to look upon as provincial, after
once having yielded to the spell of the Eternal City. The artist, who
contemplates an indefinite succession of winters in this home of art
(though his first thought was merely to improve himself by a brief
visit), goes forth, in the summer time, to sketch scenery and costume
among the Tuscan hills, and pour, if he can, the purple air of Italy
over his canvas. He studies the old schools of art in the mountain towns
where they were born, and where they are still to be seen in the faded
frescos of Giotto and Cimabue, on the walls of many a church, or in
the dark chapels, in which the sacristan draws aside the veil from a
treasured picture of Perugino. Thence, the happy painter goes to walk
the long, bright galleries of Florence, or to steal glowing colors from
the miraculous works, which he finds in a score of Venetian palaces.
Such summers as these, spent amid whatever is exquisite in art, or wild
and picturesque in nature, may not inadequately repay him for the chill
neglect and disappointment through which he has probably languished, in
his Roman winter. This sunny, shadowy, breezy, wandering life, in which
he seeks for beauty as his treasure, and gathers for his winter’s honey
what is but a passing fragrance to all other men, is worth living for,
come afterwards what may. Even if he die unrecognized, the artist has
had his share of enjoyment and success.

Kenyon had seen, at a distance of many miles, the old villa or castle
towards which his journey lay, looking from its height over a broad
expanse of valley. As he drew nearer, however, it had been hidden among
the inequalities of the hillside, until the winding road brought him
almost to the iron gateway. The sculptor found this substantial barrier
fastened with lock and bolt. There was no bell, nor other instrument
of sound; and, after summoning the invisible garrison with his voice,
instead of a trumpet, he had leisure to take a glance at the exterior of
the fortress.

About thirty yards within the gateway rose a square tower, lofty
enough to be a very prominent object in the landscape, and more than
sufficiently massive in proportion to its height. Its antiquity was
evidently such that, in a climate of more abundant moisture, the ivy
would have mantled it from head to foot in a garment that might, by this
time, have been centuries old, though ever new. In the dry Italian air,
however, Nature had only so far adopted this old pile of stonework as to
cover almost every hand’s-breadth of it with close-clinging lichens
and yellow moss; and the immemorial growth of these kindly productions
rendered the general hue of the tower soft and venerable, and took away
the aspect of nakedness which would have made its age drearier than now.

Up and down the height of the tower were scattered three or four
windows, the lower ones grated with iron bars, the upper ones vacant
both of window frames and glass. Besides these larger openings, there
were several loopholes and little square apertures, which might be
supposed to light the staircase, that doubtless climbed the
interior towards the battlemented and machicolated summit. With this
last-mentioned warlike garniture upon its stern old head and brow,
the tower seemed evidently a stronghold of times long past. Many a
crossbowman had shot his shafts from those windows and loop-holes, and
from the vantage height of those gray battlements; many a flight of
arrows, too, had hit all round about the embrasures above, or the
apertures below, where the helmet of a defender had momentarily
glimmered. On festal nights, moreover, a hundred lamps had often gleamed
afar over the valley, suspended from the iron hooks that were ranged for
the purpose beneath the battlements and every window.

Connected with the tower, and extending behind it, there seemed to be
a very spacious residence, chiefly of more modern date. It perhaps owed
much of its fresher appearance, however, to a coat of stucco and
yellow wash, which is a sort of renovation very much in vogue with the
Italians. Kenyon noticed over a doorway, in the portion of the edifice
immediately adjacent to the tower, a cross, which, with a bell suspended
above the roof, indicated that this was a consecrated precinct, and the
chapel of the mansion.

Meanwhile, the hot sun so incommoded the unsheltered traveller, that he
shouted forth another impatient summons. Happening, at the same moment,
to look upward, he saw a figure leaning from an embrasure of the
battlements, and gazing down at him.

“Ho, Signore Count!” cried the sculptor, waving his straw hat, for he
recognized the face, after a moment’s doubt. “This is a warm reception,
truly! Pray bid your porter let me in, before the sun shrivels me quite
into a cinder.”

“I will come myself,” responded Donatello, flinging down his voice out
of the clouds, as it were; “old Tomaso and old Stella are both asleep,
no doubt, and the rest of the people are in the vineyard. But I have
expected you, and you are welcome!”

The young Count--as perhaps we had better designate him in his ancestral
tower--vanished from the battlements; and Kenyon saw his figure
appear successively at each of the windows, as he descended. On every
reappearance, he turned his face towards the sculptor and gave a nod and
smile; for a kindly impulse prompted him thus to assure his visitor of a
welcome, after keeping him so long at an inhospitable threshold.

Kenyon, however (naturally and professionally expert at reading the
expression of the human countenance), had a vague sense that this was
not the young friend whom he had known so familiarly in Rome; not the
sylvan and untutored youth, whom Miriam, Hilda, and himself had liked,
laughed at, and sported with; not the Donatello whose identity they had
so playfully mixed up with that of the Faun of Praxiteles.

Finally, when his host had emerged from a side portal of the mansion,
and approached the gateway, the traveller still felt that there was
something lost, or something gained (he hardly knew which), that set the
Donatello of to-day irreconcilably at odds with him of yesterday. His
very gait showed it, in a certain gravity, a weight and measure of step,
that had nothing in common with the irregular buoyancy which used to
distinguish him. His face was paler and thinner, and the lips less full
and less apart.

“I have looked for you a long while,” said Donatello; and, though his
voice sounded differently, and cut out its words more sharply than had
been its wont, still there was a smile shining on his face, that, for
the moment, quite brought back the Faun. “I shall be more cheerful,
perhaps, now that you have come. It is very solitary here.”

“I have come slowly along, often lingering, often turning aside,”
 replied Kenyon; “for I found a great deal to interest me in the
mediaeval sculpture hidden away in the churches hereabouts. An artist,
whether painter or sculptor, may be pardoned for loitering through such
a region. But what a fine old tower! Its tall front is like a page of
black letter, taken from the history of the Italian republics.”

“I know little or nothing of its history,” said the Count, glancing
upward at the battlements, where he had just been standing. “But I thank
my forefathers for building it so high. I like the windy summit better
than the world below, and spend much of my time there, nowadays.”

“It is a pity you are not a star-gazer,” observed Kenyon, also looking
up. “It is higher than Galileo’s tower, which I saw, a week or two ago,
outside of the walls of Florence.”

“A star-gazer? I am one,” replied Donatello. “I sleep in the tower,
and often watch very late on the battlements. There is a dismal old
staircase to climb, however, before reaching the top, and a succession
of dismal chambers, from story to story. Some of them were prison
chambers in times past, as old Tomaso will tell you.”

The repugnance intimated in his tone at the idea of this gloomy
staircase and these ghostly, dimly lighted rooms, reminded Kenyon of the
original Donatello, much more than his present custom of midnight vigils
on the battlements.

“I shall be glad to share your watch,” said the guest; “especially by
moonlight. The prospect of this broad valley must be very fine. But I
was not aware, my friend, that these were your country habits. I have
fancied you in a sort of Arcadian life, tasting rich figs, and squeezing
the juice out of the sunniest grapes, and sleeping soundly all night,
after a day of simple pleasures.”

“I may have known such a life, when I was younger,” answered the Count
gravely. “I am not a boy now. Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow
behind.”

The sculptor could not but smile at the triteness of the remark, which,
nevertheless, had a kind of originality as coming from Donatello. He had
thought it out from his own experience, and perhaps considered himself
as communicating a new truth to mankind.

They were now advancing up the courtyard; and the long extent of the
villa, with its iron-barred lower windows and balconied upper ones,
became visible, stretching back towards a grove of trees.

“At some period of your family history,” observed Kenyon, “the Counts
of Monte Beni must have led a patriarchal life in this vast house. A
great-grandsire and all his descendants might find ample verge here, and
with space, too, for each separate brood of little ones to play within
its own precincts. Is your present household a large one?”

“Only myself,” answered Donatello, “and Tomaso, who has been butler
since my grandfather’s time, and old Stella, who goes sweeping and
dusting about the chambers, and Girolamo, the cook, who has but an idle
life of it. He shall send you up a chicken forthwith. But, first of all,
I must summon one of the contadini from the farmhouse yonder, to take
your horse to the stable.”

Accordingly, the young Count shouted again, and with such effect that,
after several repetitions of the outcry, an old gray woman protruded
her head and a broom-handle from a chamber window; the venerable butler
emerged from a recess in the side of the house, where was a well, or
reservoir, in which he had been cleansing a small wine cask; and
a sunburnt contadino, in his shirt-sleeves, showed himself on the
outskirts of the vineyard, with some kind of a farming tool in his
hand. Donatello found employment for all these retainers in providing
accommodation for his guest and steed, and then ushered the sculptor
into the vestibule of the house.

It was a square and lofty entrance-room, which, by the solidity of its
construction, might have been an Etruscan tomb, being paved and walled
with heavy blocks of stone, and vaulted almost as massively overhead.
On two sides there were doors, opening into long suites of anterooms
and saloons; on the third side, a stone staircase of spacious breadth,
ascending, by dignified degrees and with wide resting-places, to another
floor of similar extent. Through one of the doors, which was ajar,
Kenyon beheld an almost interminable vista of apartments, opening one
beyond the other, and reminding him of the hundred rooms in Blue Beard’s
castle, or the countless halls in some palace of the Arabian Nights.

It must have been a numerous family, indeed, that could ever have
sufficed to people with human life so large an abode as this, and impart
social warmth to such a wide world within doors. The sculptor confessed
to himself, that Donatello could allege reason enough for growing
melancholy, having only his own personality to vivify it all.

“How a woman’s face would brighten it up!” he ejaculated, not intending
to be overheard.

But, glancing at Donatello, he saw a stern and sorrowful look in his
eyes, which altered his youthful face as if it had seen thirty years of
trouble; and, at the same moment, old Stella showed herself through one
of the doorways, as the only representative of her sex at Monte Beni.



CHAPTER XXV


SUNSHINE


“Come,” said the Count, “I see you already find the old house dismal.
So do I, indeed! And yet it was a cheerful place in my boyhood. But, you
see, in my father’s days (and the same was true of all my endless line
of grandfathers, as I have heard), there used to be uncles, aunts, and
all manner of kindred, dwelling together as one family. They were
a merry and kindly race of people, for the most part, and kept one
another’s hearts warm.”

“Two hearts might be enough for warmth,” observed the sculptor, “even in
so large a house as this. One solitary heart, it is true, may be apt to
shiver a little. But, I trust, my friend, that the genial blood of your
race still flows in many veins besides your own?”

“I am the last,” said Donatello gloomily. “They have all vanished from
me, since my childhood. Old Tomaso will tell you that the air of Monte
Beni is not so favorable to length of days as it used to be. But that is
not the secret of the quick extinction of my kindred.”

“Then you are aware of a more satisfactory reason?” suggested Kenyon.

“I thought of one, the other night, while I was gazing at the stars,”
 answered Donatello; “but, pardon me, I do not mean to tell it. One
cause, however, of the longer and healthier life of my forefathers was,
that they had many pleasant customs, and means of making themselves
glad, and their guests and friends along with them. Nowadays we have but
one!”

“And what is that?” asked the sculptor.

“You shall see!” said his young host.

By this time, he had ushered the sculptor into one of the numberless
saloons; and, calling for refreshment, old Stella placed a cold fowl
upon the table, and quickly followed it with a savory omelet, which
Girolamo had lost no time in preparing. She also brought some cherries,
plums, and apricots, and a plate full of particularly delicate figs, of
last year’s growth. The butler showing his white head at the door, his
master beckoned to him. “Tomaso, bring some Sunshine!” said he. The
readiest method of obeying this order, one might suppose, would have
been to fling wide the green window-blinds, and let the glow of the
summer noon into the carefully shaded room. But, at Monte Beni, with
provident caution against the wintry days, when there is little
sunshine, and the rainy ones, when there is none, it was the hereditary
custom to keep their Sunshine stored away in the cellar. Old Tomaso
quickly produced some of it in a small, straw-covered flask, out of
which he extracted the cork, and inserted a little cotton wool, to
absorb the olive oil that kept the precious liquid from the air.

“This is a wine,” observed the Count, “the secret of making which has
been kept in our family for centuries upon centuries; nor would it avail
any man to steal the secret, unless he could also steal the vineyard, in
which alone the Monte Beni grape can be produced. There is little else
left me, save that patch of vines. Taste some of their juice, and tell
me whether it is worthy to be called Sunshine! for that is its name.”
 “A glorious name, too!” cried the sculptor. “Taste it,” said Donatello,
filling his friend’s glass, and pouring likewise a little into his own.
“But first smell its fragrance; for the wine is very lavish of it, and
will scatter it all abroad.”

“Ah, how exquisite!” said Kenyon. “No other wine has a bouquet like
this. The flavor must be rare, indeed, if it fulfill the promise of this
fragrance, which is like the airy sweetness of youthful hopes, that no
realities will ever satisfy!”

This invaluable liquor was of a pale golden hue, like other of the
rarest Italian wines, and, if carelessly and irreligiously quaffed,
might have been mistaken for a very fine sort of champagne. It was not,
however, an effervescing wine, although its delicate piquancy produced
a somewhat similar effect upon the palate. Sipping, the guest longed
to sip again; but the wine demanded so deliberate a pause, in order to
detect the hidden peculiarities and subtile exquisiteness of its flavor,
that to drink it was really more a moral than a physical enjoyment.
There was a deliciousness in it that eluded analysis, and--like whatever
else is superlatively good--was perhaps better appreciated in the memory
than by present consciousness.

One of its most ethereal charms lay in the transitory life of the wine’s
richest qualities; for, while it required a certain leisure and delay,
yet, if you lingered too long upon the draught, it became disenchanted
both of its fragrance and its flavor.

The lustre should not be forgotten, among the other admirable endowments
of the Monte Beni wine; for, as it stood in Kenyon’s glass, a little
circle of light glowed on the table round about it, as if it were really
so much golden sunshine.

“I feel myself a better man for that ethereal potation,” observed the
sculptor. “The finest Orvieto, or that famous wine, the Est Est Est of
Montefiascone, is vulgar in comparison. This is surely the wine of the
Golden Age, such as Bacchus himself first taught mankind to press from
the choicest of his grapes. My dear Count, why is it not illustrious?
The pale, liquid gold, in every such flask as that, might be solidified
into golden scudi, and would quickly make you a millionaire!”

Tomaso, the old butler, who was standing by the table, and enjoying
the praises of the wine quite as much as if bestowed upon himself, made
answer,--“We have a tradition, Signore,” said he, “that this rare wine
of our vineyard would lose all its wonderful qualities, if any of it
were sent to market. The Counts of Monte Beni have never parted with a
single flask of it for gold. At their banquets, in the olden time, they
have entertained princes, cardinals, and once an emperor and once a
pope, with this delicious wine, and always, even to this day, it has
been their custom to let it flow freely, when those whom they love and
honor sit at the board. But the grand duke himself could not drink that
wine, except it were under this very roof!”

“What you tell me, my good friend,” replied Kenyon, “makes me venerate
the Sunshine of Monte Beni even more abundantly than before. As I
understand you, it is a sort of consecrated juice, and symbolizes the
holy virtues of hospitality and social kindness?”

“Why, partly so, Signore,” said the old butler, with a shrewd twinkle
in his eye; “but, to speak out all the truth, there is another excellent
reason why neither a cask nor a flask of our precious vintage should
ever be sent to market. The wine, Signore, is so fond of its native
home, that a transportation of even a few miles turns it quite sour. And
yet it is a wine that keeps well in the cellar, underneath this floor,
and gathers fragrance, flavor, and brightness, in its dark dungeon. That
very flask of Sunshine, now, has kept itself for you, sir guest (as a
maid reserves her sweetness till her lover comes for it), ever since a
merry vintage-time, when the Signore Count here was a boy!”

“You must not wait for Tomaso to end his discourse about the wine,
before drinking off your glass,” observed Donatello. “When once the
flask is uncorked, its finest qualities lose little time in making their
escape. I doubt whether your last sip will be quite so delicious as you
found the first.”

And, in truth, the sculptor fancied that the Sunshine became almost
imperceptibly clouded, as he approached the bottom of the flask. The
effect of the wine, however, was a gentle exhilaration, which did not so
speedily pass away.

Being thus refreshed, Kenyon looked around him at the antique saloon
in which they sat. It was constructed in a most ponderous style, with
a stone floor, on which heavy pilasters were planted against the wall,
supporting arches that crossed one another in the vaulted ceiling. The
upright walls, as well as the compartments of the roof, were completely
Covered with frescos, which doubtless had been brilliant when first
executed, and perhaps for generations afterwards. The designs were of
a festive and joyous character, representing Arcadian scenes, where
nymphs, fauns, and satyrs disported themselves among mortal youths and
maidens; and Pan, and the god of wine, and he of sunshine and music,
disdained not to brighten some sylvan merry-making with the scarcely
veiled glory of their presence. A wreath of dancing figures, in
admirable variety of shape and motion, was festooned quite round the
cornice of the room.

In its first splendor, the saloon must have presented an aspect both
gorgeous and enlivening; for it invested some of the cheerfullest ideas
and emotions of which the human mind is susceptible with the external
reality of beautiful form, and rich, harmonious glow and variety of
color. But the frescos were now very ancient. They had been rubbed and
scrubbed by old Stein and many a predecessor, and had been defaced in
one spot, and retouched in another, and had peeled from the wall in
patches, and had hidden some of their brightest portions under dreary
dust, till the joyousness had quite vanished out of them all. It was
often difficult to puzzle out the design; and even where it was more
readily intelligible, the figures showed like the ghosts of dead and
buried joys,--the closer their resemblance to the happy past, the
gloomier now. For it is thus, that with only an inconsiderable change,
the gladdest objects and existences become the saddest; hope fading
into disappointment; joy darkening into grief, and festal splendor into
funereal duskiness; and all evolving, as their moral, a grim identity
between gay things and sorrowful ones. Only give them a little time, and
they turn out to be just alike!

“There has been much festivity in this saloon, if I may judge by the
character of its frescos,” remarked Kenyon, whose spirits were still
upheld by the mild potency of the Monte Beni wine. “Your forefathers,
my dear Count, must have been joyous fellows, keeping up the vintage
merriment throughout the year. It does me good to think of them
gladdening the hearts of men and women, with their wine of Sunshine,
even in the Iron Age, as Pan and Bacchus, whom we see yonder, did in the
Golden one!”

“Yes; there have been merry times in the banquet hall of Monte Beni,
even within my own remembrance,” replied Donatello, looking gravely
at the painted walls. “It was meant for mirth, as you see; and when
I brought my own cheerfulness into the saloon, these frescos looked
cheerful too. But, methinks, they have all faded since I saw them last.”

“It would be a good idea,” said the sculptor, falling into his
companion’s vein, and helping him out with an illustration which
Donatello himself could not have put into shape, “to convert this saloon
into a chapel; and when the priest tells his hearers of the instability
of earthly joys, and would show how drearily they vanish, he may point
to these pictures, that were so joyous and are so dismal. He could not
illustrate his theme so aptly in any other way.”

“True, indeed,” answered the Count, his former simplicity strangely
mixing itself up with ah experience that had changed him; “and yonder,
where the minstrels used to stand, the altar shall be placed. A sinful
man might do all the more effective penance in this old banquet hall.”

“But I should regret to have suggested so ungenial a transformation in
your hospitable saloon,” continued Kenyon, duly noting the change in
Donatello’s characteristics. “You startle me, my friend, by so ascetic a
design! It would hardly have entered your head, when we first met. Pray
do not,--if I may take the freedom of a somewhat elder man to advise
you,” added he, smiling,--“pray do not, under a notion of improvement,
take upon yourself to be sombre, thoughtful, and penitential, like all
the rest of us.”

Donatello made no answer, but sat awhile, appearing to follow with
his eyes one of the figures, which was repeated many times over in the
groups upon the walls and ceiling. It formed the principal link of an
allegory, by which (as is often the case in such pictorial designs)
the whole series of frescos were bound together, but which it would be
impossible, or, at least, very wearisome, to unravel. The sculptor’s
eyes took a similar direction, and soon began to trace through the
vicissitudes,--once gay, now sombre,--in which the old artist had
involved it, the same individual figure. He fancied a resemblance in it
to Donatello himself; and it put him in mind of one of the purposes with
which he had come to Monte Beni.

“My dear Count,” said he, “I have a proposal to make. You must let me
employ a little of my leisure in modelling your bust. You remember what
a striking resemblance we all of us--Hilda, Miriam, and I--found between
your features and those of the Faun of Praxiteles. Then, it seemed an
identity; but now that I know your face better, the likeness is far less
apparent. Your head in marble would be a treasure to me. Shall I have
it?”

“I have a weakness which I fear I cannot overcome,” replied the Count,
turning away his face. “It troubles me to be looked at steadfastly.”

“I have observed it since we have been sitting here, though never
before,” rejoined the sculptor. “It is a kind of nervousness, I
apprehend, which, you caught in the Roman air, and which grows upon you,
in your solitary life. It need be no hindrance to my taking your bust;
for I will catch the likeness and expression by side glimpses, which
(if portrait painters and bust makers did but know it) always bring home
richer results than a broad stare.”

“You may take me if you have the power,” said Donatello; but, even as he
spoke, he turned away his face; “and if you can see what makes me shrink
from you, you are welcome to put it in the bust. It is not my will, but
my necessity, to avoid men’s eyes. Only,” he added, with a smile which
made Kenyon doubt whether he might not as well copy the Faun as model a
new bust,--“only, you know, you must not insist on my uncovering these
ears of mine!”

“Nay; I never should dream of such a thing,” answered the sculptor,
laughing, as the young Count shook his clustering curls. “I could not
hope to persuade you, remembering how Miriam once failed!”

Nothing is more unaccountable than the spell that often lurks in a
spoken word. A thought may be present to the mind, so distinctly that
no utterance could make it more so; and two minds may be conscious of
the same thought, in which one or both take the profoundest interest;
but as long as it remains unspoken, their familiar talk flows quietly
over the hidden idea, as a rivulet may sparkle and dimple over something
sunken in its bed. But speak the word, and it is like bringing up a
drowned body out of the deepest pool of the rivulet, which has been
aware of the horrible secret all along, in spite of its smiling surface.

And even so, when Kenyon chanced to make a distinct reference to
Donatello’s relations with Miriam (though the subject was already in
both their minds), a ghastly emotion rose up out of the depths of the
young Count’s heart. He trembled either with anger or terror, and
glared at the sculptor with wild eyes, like a wolf that meets you in
the forest, and hesitates whether to flee or turn to bay. But, as Kenyon
still looked calmly at him, his aspect gradually became less disturbed,
though far from resuming its former quietude.

“You have spoken her name,” said he, at last, in an altered and
tremulous tone; “tell me, now, all that you know of her.”

“I scarcely think that I have any later intelligence than yourself,”
 answered Kenyon; “Miriam left Rome at about the time of your own
departure. Within a day or two after our last meeting at the Church of
the Capuchins, I called at her studio and found it vacant. Whither she
has gone, I cannot tell.”

Donatello asked no further questions.

They rose from table, and strolled together about the premises, whiling
away the afternoon with brief intervals of unsatisfactory conversation,
and many shadowy silences. The sculptor had a perception of change in
his companion,--possibly of growth and development, but certainly of
change,--which saddened him, because it took away much of the simple
grace that was the best of Donatello’s peculiarities.

Kenyon betook himself to repose that night in a grim, old, vaulted
apartment, which, in the lapse of five or six centuries, had probably
been the birth, bridal, and death chamber of a great many generations
of the Monte Beni family. He was aroused, soon after daylight, by the
clamor of a tribe of beggars who had taken their stand in a little
rustic lane that crept beside that portion of the villa, and were
addressing their petitions to the open windows. By and by they appeared
to have received alms, and took their departure.

“Some charitable Christian has sent those vagabonds away,” thought the
sculptor, as he resumed his interrupted nap; “who could it be? Donatello
has his own rooms in the tower; Stella, Tomaso, and the cook are a
world’s width off; and I fancied myself the only inhabitant in this part
of the house.”

In the breadth and space which so delightfully characterize an Italian
villa, a dozen guests might have had each his suite of apartments
without infringing upon one another’s ample precincts. But, so far as
Kenyon knew, he was the only visitor beneath Donatello’s widely extended
roof.



CHAPTER XXVI


THE PEDIGREE OF MONTE BENI


From the old butler, whom he found to be a very gracious and affable
personage, Kenyon soon learned many curious particulars about the family
history and hereditary peculiarities of the Counts of Monte Beni. There
was a pedigree, the later portion of which--that is to say, for a little
more than a thousand years--a genealogist would have found delight in
tracing out, link by link, and authenticating by records and documentary
evidences. It would have been as difficult, however, to follow up the
stream of Donatello’s ancestry to its dim source, as travellers have
found it to reach the mysterious fountains of the Nile. And, far beyond
the region of definite and demonstrable fact, a romancer might have
strayed into a region of old poetry, where the rich soil, so long
uncultivated and untrodden, had lapsed into nearly its primeval state
of wilderness. Among those antique paths, now overgrown with tangled and
riotous vegetation, the wanderer must needs follow his own guidance, and
arrive nowhither at last.

The race of Monte Beni, beyond a doubt, was one of the oldest in Italy,
where families appear to survive at least, if not to flourish, on their
half-decayed roots, oftener than in England or France. It came down in
a broad track from the Middle Ages; but, at epochs anterior to those,
it was distinctly visible in the gloom of the period before chivalry put
forth its flower; and further still, we are almost afraid to say, it was
seen, though with a fainter and wavering course, in the early morn of
Christendom, when the Roman Empire had hardly begun to show symptoms of
decline. At that venerable distance, the heralds gave up the lineage in
despair.

But where written record left the genealogy of Monte Beni, tradition
took it up, and carried it without dread or shame beyond the Imperial
ages into the times of the Roman republic; beyond those, again, into the
epoch of kingly rule. Nor even so remotely among the mossy centuries did
it pause, but strayed onward into that gray antiquity of which there
is no token left, save its cavernous tombs, and a few bronzes, and some
quaintly wrought ornaments of gold, and gems with mystic figures and
inscriptions. There, or thereabouts, the line was supposed to have had
its origin in the sylvan life of Etruria, while Italy was yet guiltless
of Rome.

Of course, as we regret to say, the earlier and very much the larger
portion of this respectable descent--and the same is true of many
briefer pedigrees--must be looked upon as altogether mythical. Still,
it threw a romantic interest around the unquestionable antiquity of the
Monte Beni family, and over that tract of their own vines and fig-trees
beneath the shade of which they had unquestionably dwelt for immemorial
ages. And there they had laid the foundations of their tower, so long
ago that one half of its height was said to be sunken under the surface
and to hide subterranean chambers which once were cheerful with the
olden sunshine.

One story, or myth, that had mixed itself up with their mouldy
genealogy, interested the sculptor by its wild, and perhaps grotesque,
yet not unfascinating peculiarity. He caught at it the more eagerly,
as it afforded a shadowy and whimsical semblance of explanation for the
likeness which he, with Miriam and Hilda, had seen or fancied between
Donatello and the Faun of Praxiteles.

The Monte Beni family, as this legend averred, drew their origin
from the Pelasgic race, who peopled Italy in times that may be called
prehistoric. It was the same noble breed of men, of Asiatic birth,
that settled in Greece; the same happy and poetic kindred who dwelt in
Arcadia, and--whether they ever lived such life or not--enriched the
world with dreams, at least, and fables, lovely, if unsubstantial, of a
Golden Age. In those delicious times, when deities and demigods appeared
familiarly on earth, mingling with its inhabitants as friend with
friend,--when nymphs, satyrs, and the whole train of classic faith or
fable hardly took pains to hide themselves in the primeval woods,--at
that auspicious period the lineage of Monte Beni had its rise. Its
progenitor was a being not altogether human, yet partaking so largely of
the gentlest human qualities, as to be neither awful nor shocking to
the imagination. A sylvan creature, native among the woods, had loved
a mortal maiden, and--perhaps by kindness, and the subtile courtesies
which love might teach to his simplicity, or possibly by a ruder
wooing--had won her to his haunts. In due time he gained her womanly
affection; and, making their bridal bower, for aught we know, in the
hollow of a great tree, the pair spent a happy wedded life in that
ancient neighborhood where now stood Donatello’s tower.

From this union sprang a vigorous progeny that took its place
unquestioned among human families. In that age, however, and long
afterwards, it showed the ineffaceable lineaments of its wild paternity:
it was a pleasant and kindly race of men, but capable of savage
fierceness, and never quite restrainable within the trammels of social
law. They were strong, active, genial, cheerful as the sunshine,
passionate as the tornado. Their lives were rendered blissful by art
unsought harmony with nature.

But, as centuries passed away, the Faun’s wild blood had necessarily
been attempered with constant intermixtures from the more ordinary
streams of human life. It lost many of its original qualities, and
served for the most part only to bestow an unconquerable vigor, which
kept the family from extinction, and enabled them to make their own part
good throughout the perils and rude emergencies of their interminable
descent. In the constant wars with which Italy was plagued, by the
dissensions of her petty states and republics, there was a demand for
native hardihood.

The successive members of the Monte Beni family showed valor and policy
enough’ at all events, to keep their hereditary possessions out of the
clutch of grasping neighbors, and probably differed very little from the
other feudal barons with whom they fought and feasted. Such a degree
of conformity with the manners of the generations through which it
survived, must have been essential to the prolonged continuance of the
race.

It is well known, however, that any hereditary peculiarity--as a
supernumerary finger, or an anomalous shape of feature, like the
Austrian lip--is wont to show itself in a family after a very wayward
fashion. It skips at its own pleasure along the line, and, latent for
half a century or so, crops out again in a great-grandson. And thus, it
was said, from a period beyond memory or record, there had ever and
anon been a descendant of the Monte Benis bearing nearly all the
characteristics that were attributed to the original founder of the
race. Some traditions even went so far as to enumerate the ears, covered
with a delicate fur, and shaped like a pointed leaf, among the proofs
of authentic descent which were seen in these favored individuals. We
appreciate the beauty of such tokens of a nearer kindred to the great
family of nature than other mortals bear; but it would be idle to ask
credit for a statement which might be deemed to partake so largely of
the grotesque.

But it was indisputable that, once in a century or oftener, a son of
Monte Beni gathered into himself the scattered qualities of his
race, and reproduced the character that had been assigned to it from
immemorial times. Beautiful, strong, brave, kindly, sincere, of
honest impulses, and endowed with simple tastes and the love of homely
pleasures, he was believed to possess gifts by which he could associate
himself with the wild things of the forests, and with the fowls of the
air, and could feel a sympathy even with the trees; among which it was
his joy to dwell. On the other hand, there were deficiencies both of
intellect and heart, and especially, as it seemed, in the development of
the higher portion of man’s nature. These defects were less perceptible
in early youth, but showed themselves more strongly with advancing
age, when, as the animal spirits settled down upon a lower level, the
representative of the Monte Benis was apt to become sensual, addicted to
gross pleasures, heavy, unsympathizing, and insulated within the narrow
limits of a surly selfishness.

A similar change, indeed, is no more than what we constantly observe to
take place in persons who are not careful to substitute other graces for
those which they inevitably lose along with the quick sensibility and
joyous vivacity of youth. At worst, the reigning Count of Monte Beni,
as his hair grew white, was still a jolly old fellow over his flask of
wine, the wine that Bacchus himself was fabled to have taught his sylvan
ancestor how to express, and from what choicest grapes, which would
ripen only in a certain divinely favored portion of the Monte Beni
vineyard.

The family, be it observed, were both proud and ashamed of these
legends; but whatever part of them they might consent to incorporate
into their ancestral history, they steadily repudiated all that referred
to their one distinctive feature, the pointed and furry ears. In a great
many years past, no sober credence had been yielded to the mythical
portion of the pedigree. It might, however, be considered as typifying
some such assemblage of qualities--in this case, chiefly remarkable for
their simplicity and naturalness--as, when they reappear in successive
generations, constitute what we call family character. The sculptor
found, moreover, on the evidence of some old portraits, that the
physical features of the race had long been similar to what he now saw
them in Donatello. With accumulating years, it is true, the Monte
Beni face had a tendency to look grim and savage; and, in two or three
instances, the family pictures glared at the spectator in the eyes like
some surly animal, that had lost its good humor when it outlived its
playfulness.

The young Count accorded his guest full liberty to investigate the
personal annals of these pictured worthies, as well as all the rest
of his progenitors; and ample materials were at hand in many chests of
worm-eaten papers and yellow parchments, that had been gathering into
larger and dustier piles ever since the dark ages. But, to confess the
truth, the information afforded by these musty documents was so much
more prosaic than what Kenyon acquired from Tomaso’s legends, that even
the superior authenticity of the former could not reconcile him to its
dullness. What especially delighted the sculptor was the analogy between
Donatello’s character, as he himself knew it, and those peculiar traits
which the old butler’s narrative assumed to have been long hereditary
in the race. He was amused at finding, too, that not only Tomaso but the
peasantry of the estate and neighboring village recognized his friend
as a genuine Monte Beni, of the original type. They seemed to cherish a
great affection for the young Count, and were full of stories about his
sportive childhood; how he had played among the little rustics, and been
at once the wildest and the sweetest of them all; and how, in his very
infancy, he had plunged into the deep pools of the streamlets and never
been drowned, and had clambered to the topmost branches of tall trees
without ever breaking his neck. No such mischance could happen to the
sylvan child because, handling all the elements of nature so fearlessly
and freely, nothing had either the power or the will to do him harm.

He grew up, said these humble friends, the playmate not only of all
mortal kind, but of creatures of the woods; although, when Kenyon
pressed them for some particulars of this latter mode of companionship,
they could remember little more than a few anecdotes of a pet fox, which
used to growl and snap at everybody save Donatello himself.

But they enlarged--and never were weary of the theme--upon the
blithesome effects of Donatello’s presence in his rosy childhood and
budding youth. Their hovels had always glowed like sunshine when he
entered them; so that, as the peasants expressed it, their young master
had never darkened a doorway in his life. He was the soul of vintage
festivals. While he was a mere infant, scarcely able to run alone, it
had been the custom to make him tread the winepress with his tender
little feet, if it were only to crush one cluster of the grapes. And the
grape-juice that gushed beneath his childish tread, be it ever so small
in quantity, sufficed to impart a pleasant flavor to a whole cask of
wine. The race of Monte Beni--so these rustic chroniclers assured
the sculptor--had possessed the gift from the oldest of old times of
expressing good wine from ordinary grapes, and a ravishing liquor from
the choice growth of their vineyard.

In a word, as he listened to such tales as these, Kenyon could have
imagined that the valleys and hillsides about him were a veritable
Arcadia; and that Donatello was not merely a sylvan faun, but the genial
wine god in his very person. Making many allowances for the poetic
fancies of Italian peasants, he set it down for fact that his friend, in
a simple way and among rustic folks, had been an exceedingly delightful
fellow in his younger days.

But the contadini sometimes added, shaking their heads and sighing, that
the young Count was sadly changed since he went to Rome. The village
girls now missed the merry smile with which he used to greet them.

The sculptor inquired of his good friend Tomaso, whether he, too,
had noticed the shadow which was said to have recently fallen over
Donatello’s life.

“Ah, yes, Signore!” answered the old butler, “it is even so, since
he came back from that wicked and miserable city. The world has grown
either too evil, or else too wise and sad, for such men as the old
Counts of Monte Beni used to be. His very first taste of it, as you see,
has changed and spoilt my poor young lord. There had not been a single
count in the family these hundred years or more, who was so true a Monte
Beni, of the antique stamp, as this poor signorino; and now it brings
the tears into my eyes to hear him sighing over a cup of Sunshine! Ah,
it is a sad world now!”

“Then you think there was a merrier world once?” asked Kenyon.

“Surely, Signore,” said Tomaso; “a merrier world, and merrier Counts of
Monte Beni to live in it! Such tales of them as I have heard, when I was
a child on my grandfather’s knee! The good old man remembered a lord of
Monte Beni--at least, he had heard of such a one, though I will not make
oath upon the holy crucifix that my grandsire lived in his time who used
to go into the woods and call pretty damsels out of the fountains, and
out of the trunks of the old trees. That merry lord was known to dance
with them a whole long summer afternoon! When shall we see such frolics
in our days?”

“Not soon, I am afraid,” acquiesced the sculptor. “You are right,
excellent Tomaso; the world is sadder now!”

And, in truth, while our friend smiled at these wild fables, he sighed
in the same breath to think how the once genial earth produces, in every
successive generation, fewer flowers than used to gladden the preceding
ones. Not that the modes and seeming possibilities of human enjoyment
are rarer in our refined and softened era,--on the contrary, they never
before were nearly so abundant,--but that mankind are getting so far
beyond the childhood of their race that they scorn to be happy any
longer. A simple and joyous character can find no place for itself
among the sage and sombre figures that would put his unsophisticated
cheerfulness to shame. The entire system of man’s affairs, as at present
established, is built up purposely to exclude the careless and happy
soul. The very children would upbraid the wretched individual who should
endeavor to take life and the world as w what we might naturally suppose
them meant for--a place and opportunity for enjoyment.

It is the iron rule in our day to require an object and a purpose in
life. It makes us all parts of a complicated scheme of progress, which
can only result in our arrival at a colder and drearier region than
we were born in. It insists upon everybody’s adding somewhat--a mite,
perhaps, but earned by incessant effort--to an accumulated pile of
usefulness, of which the only use will be, to burden our posterity with
even heavier thoughts and more inordinate labor than our own. No life
now wanders like an unfettered stream; there is a mill-wheel for the
tiniest rivulet to turn. We go all wrong, by too strenuous a resolution
to go all right.

Therefore it was--so, at least, the sculptor thought, although partly
suspicious of Donatello’s darker misfortune--that the young Count found
it impossible nowadays to be what his forefathers had been. He could
not live their healthy life of animal spirits, in their sympathy with
nature, and brotherhood with all that breathed around them. Nature, in
beast, fowl, and tree, and earth, flood, and sky, is what it was of old;
but sin, care, and self-consciousness have set the human portion of the
world askew; and thus the simplest character is ever the soonest to go
astray.

“At any rate, Tomaso,” said Kenyon, doing his best to comfort the old
man, “let us hope that your young lord will still enjoy himself at
vintage time. By the aspect of the vineyard, I judge that this will be
a famous year for the golden wine of Monte Beni. As long as your grapes
produce that admirable liquor, sad as you think the world, neither the
Count nor his guests will quite forget to smile.”

“Ah, Signore,” rejoined the butler with a sigh, “but he scarcely wets
his lips with the sunny juice.”

“There is yet another hope,” observed Kenyon; “the young Count may fall
in love, and bring home a fair and laughing wife to chase the gloom out
of yonder old frescoed saloon. Do you think he could do a better thing,
my good Tomaso?”

“Maybe not, Signore,” said the sage butler, looking earnestly at him;
“and, maybe, not a worse!”

The sculptor fancied that the good old man had it partly in his mind to
make some remark, or communicate some fact, which, on second thoughts,
he resolved to keep concealed in his own breast. He now took his
departure cellarward, shaking his white head and muttering to himself,
and did not reappear till dinner-time, when he favored Kenyon, whom he
had taken far into his good graces, with a choicer flask of Sunshine
than had yet blessed his palate.

To say the truth, this golden wine was no unnecessary ingredient towards
making the life of Monte Beni palatable. It seemed a pity that Donatello
did not drink a little more of it, and go jollily to bed at least,
even if he should awake with an accession of darker melancholy the next
morning.

Nevertheless, there was no lack of outward means for leading an
agreeable life in the old villa. Wandering musicians haunted the
precincts of Monte Beni, where they seemed to claim a prescriptive
right; they made the lawn and shrubbery tuneful with the sound of
fiddle, harp, and flute, and now and then with the tangled squeaking of
a bagpipe. Improvisatori likewise came and told tales or recited verses
to the contadini--among whom Kenyon was often an auditor--after their
day’s work in the vineyard. Jugglers, too, obtained permission to do
feats of magic in the hall, where they set even the sage Tomaso, and
Stella, Girolamo, and the peasant girls from the farmhouse, all of a
broad grin, between merriment and wonder. These good people got food and
lodging for their pleasant pains, and some of the small wine of Tuscany,
and a reasonable handful of the Grand Duke’s copper coin, to keep up
the hospitable renown of Monte Beni. But very seldom had they the young
Count as a listener or a spectator.

There were sometimes dances by moonlight on the lawn, but never since he
came from Rome did Donatello’s presence deepen the blushes of the
pretty contadinas, or his footstep weary out the most agile partner or
competitor, as once it was sure to do.

Paupers--for this kind of vermin infested the house of Monte Beni worse
than any other spot in beggar-haunted Italy--stood beneath all the
windows, making loud supplication, or even establishing themselves on
the marble steps of the grand entrance. They ate and drank, and filled
their bags, and pocketed the little money that was given them, and went
forth on their devious ways, showering blessings innumerable on the
mansion and its lord, and on the souls of his deceased forefathers, who
had always been just such simpletons as to be compassionate to
beggary. But, in spite of their favorable prayers, by which Italian
philanthropists set great store, a cloud seemed to hang over these once
Arcadian precincts, and to be darkest around the summit of the tower
where Donatello was wont to sit and brood.



CHAPTER XXVII


MYTHS


After the sculptor’s arrival, however, the young Count sometimes
came down from his forlorn elevation, and rambled with him among the
neighboring woods and hills. He led his friend to many enchanting nooks,
with which he himself had been familiar in his childhood. But of late,
as he remarked to Kenyon, a sort of strangeness had overgrown them,
like clusters of dark shrubbery, so that he hardly recognized the places
which he had known and loved so well.

To the sculptor’s eye, nevertheless, they were still rich with beauty.
They were picturesque in that sweetly impressive way where wildness, in
a long lapse of years, has crept over scenes that have been once adorned
with the careful art and toil of man; and when man could do no more for
them, time and nature came, and wrought hand in hand to bring them to a
soft and venerable perfection. There grew the fig-tree that had run wild
and taken to wife the vine, which likewise had gone rampant out of
all human control; so that the two wild things had tangled and
knotted themselves into a wild marriage bond, and hung their various
progeny--the luscious figs, the grapes, oozy with the Southern juice,
and both endowed with a wild flavor that added the final charm--on the
same bough together.

In Kenyon’s opinion, never was any other nook so lovely as a certain
little dell which he and Donatello visited. It was hollowed in among the
hills, and open to a glimpse of the broad, fertile valley. A fountain
had its birth here, and fell into a marble basin, which was all covered
with moss and shaggy with water-weeds. Over the gush of the small
stream, with an urn in her arms, stood a marble nymph, whose nakedness
the moss had kindly clothed as with a garment; and the long trails and
tresses of the maidenhair had done what they could in the poor thing’s
behalf, by hanging themselves about her waist, In former days--it might
be a remote antiquity--this lady of the fountain had first received the
infant tide into her urn and poured it thence into the marble basin.
But now the sculptured urn had a great crack from top to bottom; and the
discontented nymph was compelled to see the basin fill itself through
a channel which she could not control, although with water long ago
consecrated to her.

For this reason, or some other, she looked terribly forlorn; and you
might have fancied that the whole fountain was but the overflow of her
lonely tears.

“This was a place that I used greatly to delight in,” remarked
Donatello, sighing. “As a child, and as a boy, I have been very happy
here.”

“And, as a man, I should ask no fitter place to be happy in,” answered
Kenyon. “But you, my friend, are of such a social nature, that I should
hardly have thought these lonely haunts would take your fancy. It is
a place for a poet to dream in, and people it with the beings of his
imagination.”

“I am no poet, that I know of,” said Donatello, “but yet, as I tell you,
I have been very happy here, in the company of this fountain and this
nymph. It is said that a Faun, my oldest forefather, brought home hither
to this very spot a human maiden, whom he loved and wedded. This spring
of delicious water was their household well.”

“It is a most enchanting fable!” exclaimed Kenyon; “that is, if it be
not a fact.”

“And why not a fact?” said the simple Donatello. “There is, likewise,
another sweet old story connected with this spot. But, now that I
remember it, it seems to me more sad than sweet, though formerly the
sorrow, in which it closes, did not so much impress me. If I had the
gift of tale-telling, this one would be sure to interest you mightily.”

“Pray tell it,” said Kenyon; “no matter whether well or ill. These wild
legends have often the most powerful charm when least artfully told.”

So the young Count narrated a myth of one of his Progenitors,--he might
have lived a century ago, or a thousand years, or before the Christian
epoch, for anything that Donatello knew to the contrary,--who had made
acquaintance with a fair creature belonging to this fountain. Whether
woman or sprite was a mystery, as was all else about her, except that
her life and soul were somehow interfused throughout the gushing water.
She was a fresh, cool, dewy thing, sunny and shadowy, full of pleasant
little mischiefs, fitful and changeable with the whim of the moment, but
yet as constant as her native stream, which kept the same gush and flow
forever, while marble crumbled over and around it. The fountain woman
loved the youth,--a knight, as Donatello called him,--for, according
to the legend, his race was akin to hers. At least, whether kin or no,
there had been friendship and sympathy of old betwixt an ancestor of
his, with furry ears, and the long-lived lady of the fountain. And,
after all those ages, she was still as young as a May morning, and as
frolicsome as a bird upon a tree, or a breeze that makes merry with the
leaves.

She taught him how to call her from her pebbly source, and they spent
many a happy hour together, more especially in the fervor of the summer
days. For often as he sat waiting for her by the margin of the spring,
she would suddenly fall down around him in a shower of sunny raindrops,
with a rainbow glancing through them, and forthwith gather herself up
into the likeness of a beautiful girl, laughing--or was it the warble of
the rill over the pebbles?--to see the youth’s amazement.


Thus, kind maiden that she was, the hot atmosphere became deliciously
cool and fragrant for this favored knight; and, furthermore, when he
knelt down to drink out of the spring, nothing was more common than for
a pair of rosy lips to come up out of its little depths, and touch his
mouth with the thrill of a sweet, cool, dewy kiss!

“It is a delightful story for the hot noon of your Tuscan summer,”
 observed the sculptor, at this point. “But the deportment of the watery
lady must have had a most chilling influence in midwinter. Her lover
would find it, very literally, a cold reception!”

“I suppose,” said Donatello rather sulkily, “you are making fun of the
story. But I see nothing laughable in the thing itself, nor in what you
say about it.”

He went on to relate, that for a long While the knight found infinite
pleasure and comfort in the friendship of the fountain nymph. In his
merriest hours, she gladdened him with her sportive humor. If ever he
was annoyed with earthly trouble, she laid her moist hand upon his brow,
and charmed the fret and fever quite away.

But one day--one fatal noontide--the young knight came rushing with
hasty and irregular steps to the accustomed fountain. He called the
nymph; but--no doubt because there was something unusual and frightful
in his tone she did not appear, nor answer him. He flung himself down,
and washed his hands and bathed his feverish brow in the cool, pure
water. And then there was a sound of woe; it might have been a woman’s
voice; it might have been only the sighing of the brook over the
pebbles. The water shrank away from the youth’s hands, and left his brow
as dry and feverish as before.

Donatello here came to a dead pause.

“Why did the water shrink from this unhappy knight?” inquired the
sculptor.

“Because he had tried to wash off a bloodstain!” said the young Count,
in a horror-stricken whisper. “The guilty man had polluted the pure
water. The nymph might have comforted him in sorrow, but could not
cleanse his conscience of a crime.”

“And did he never behold her more?” asked Kenyon.

“Never but once,” replied his friend. “He never beheld her blessed face
but once again, and then there was a blood-stain on the poor nymph’s
brow; it was the stain his guilt had left in the fountain where he tried
to wash it off. He mourned for her his whole life long, and employed
the best sculptor of the time to carve this statue of the nymph from his
description of her aspect. But, though my ancestor would fain have had
the image wear her happiest look, the artist, unlike yourself, was so
impressed with the mournfulness of the story, that, in spite of his best
efforts, he made her forlorn, and forever weeping, as you see!”

Kenyon found a certain charm in this simple legend. Whether so intended
or not, he understood it as an apologue, typifying the soothing and
genial effects of an habitual intercourse with nature in all ordinary
cares and griefs; while, on the other hand, her mild influences fall
short in their effect upon the ruder passions, and are altogether
powerless in the dread fever-fit or deadly chill of guilt.

“Do you say,” he asked, “that the nymph’s race has never since been
shown to any mortal? Methinks you, by your native qualities, are as well
entitled to her favor as ever your progenitor could have been. Why have
you not summoned her?”

“I called her often when I was a silly child,” answered Donatello; and
he added, in an inward voice, “Thank Heaven, she did not come!”

“Then you never saw her?” said the sculptor.

“Never in my life!” rejoined the Count. “No, my dear friend, I have
not seen the nymph; although here, by her fountain, I used to make many
strange acquaintances; for, from my earliest childhood, I was familiar
with whatever creatures haunt the woods. You would have laughed to see
the friends I had among them; yes, among the wild, nimble things, that
reckon man their deadliest enemy! How it was first taught me, I cannot
tell; but there was a charm--a voice, a murmur, a kind of chant--by
which I called the woodland inhabitants, the furry people, and the
feathered people, in a language that they seemed to understand.”

“I have heard of such a gift,” responded the sculptor gravely, “but
never before met with a person endowed with it. Pray try the charm;
and lest I should frighten your friends away, I will withdraw into this
thicket, and merely peep at them.”

“I doubt,” said Donatello, “whether they will remember my voice now. It
changes, you know, as the boy grows towards manhood.”

Nevertheless, as the young Count’s good-nature and easy persuadability
were among his best characteristics, he set about complying with
Kenyon’s request. The latter, in his concealment among the shrubberies,
heard him send forth a sort of modulated breath, wild, rude, yet
harmonious. It struck the auditor as at once the strangest and the
most natural utterance that had ever reached his ears. Any idle boy,
it should seem, singing to himself and setting his wordless song to
no other or more definite tune than the play of his own pulses,
might produce a sound almost identical with this; and yet, it was as
individual as a murmur of the breeze. Donatello tried it, over and over
again, with many breaks, at first, and pauses of uncertainty; then with
more confidence, and a fuller swell, like a wayfarer groping out
of obscurity into the light, and moving with freer footsteps as it
brightens around him.

Anon, his voice appeared to fill the air, yet not with an obtrusive
clangor. The sound was of a murmurous character, soft, attractive,
persuasive, friendly. The sculptor fancied that such might have been
the original voice and utterance of the natural man, before the
sophistication of the human intellect formed what we now call language.
In this broad dialect--broad as the sympathies of nature--the human
brother might have spoken to his inarticulate brotherhood that prowl the
woods, or soar upon the wing, and have been intelligible to such extent
as to win their confidence.

The sound had its pathos too. At some of its simple cadences, the tears
came quietly into Kenyon’s eyes. They welled up slowly from his heart,
which was thrilling with an emotion more delightful than he had often
felt before, but which he forbore to analyze, lest, if he seized it, it
should at once perish in his grasp.

Donatello paused two or three times, and seemed to listen,--then,
recommencing, he poured his spirit and life more earnestly into the
strain. And finally,--or else the sculptor’s hope and imagination
deceived him,--soft treads were audible upon the fallen leaves. There
was a rustling among the shrubbery; a whir of wings, moreover, that
hovered in the air. It may have been all an illusion; but Kenyon fancied
that he could distinguish the stealthy, cat-like movement of some small
forest citizen, and that he could even see its doubtful shadow, if not
really its substance. But, all at once, whatever might be the reason,
there ensued a hurried rush and scamper of little feet; and then the
sculptor heard a wild, sorrowful cry, and through the crevices of the
thicket beheld Donatello fling himself on the ground.

Emerging from his hiding-place, he saw no living thing, save a brown
lizard (it was of the tarantula species) rustling away through the
sunshine. To all present appearance, this venomous reptile was the only
creature that had responded to the young Count’s efforts to renew his
intercourse with the lower orders of nature.

“What has happened to you?” exclaimed Kenyon, stooping down over his
friend, and wondering at the anguish which he betrayed.

“Death, death!” sobbed Donatello. “They know it!”

He grovelled beside the fountain, in a fit of such passionate sobbing
and weeping, that it seemed as if his heart had broken, and spilt its
wild sorrows upon the ground. His unrestrained grief and childish tears
made Kenyon sensible in how small a degree the customs and restraints of
society had really acted upon this young man, in spite of the quietude
of his ordinary deportment. In response to his friend’s efforts to
console him, he murmured words hardly more articulate than the strange
chant which he had so recently been breathing into the air.

“They know it!” was all that Kenyon could yet distinguish,--“they know
it!”

“Who know it?” asked the sculptor. “And what is it their know?” “They
know it!” repeated Donatello, trembling. “They shun me! All nature
shrinks from me, and shudders at me! I live in the midst of a curse,
that hems me round with a circle of fire! No innocent thing can come
near me.”

“Be comforted, my dear friend,” said Kenyon, kneeling beside him. “You
labor under some illusion, but no curse. As for this strange, natural
spell, which you have been exercising, and of which I have heard before,
though I never believed in, nor expected to witness it, I am satisfied
that you still possess it. It was my own half-concealed presence, no
doubt, and some involuntary little movement of mine, that scared away
your forest friends.”

“They are friends of mine no longer,” answered Donatello.

“We all of us, as we grow older,” rejoined Kenyon, “lose somewhat of our
proximity to nature. It is the price we pay for experience.”

“A heavy price, then!” said Donatello, rising from the ground. “But we
will speak no more of it. Forget this scene, my dear friend. In your
eyes, it must look very absurd. It is a grief, I presume, to all men, to
find the pleasant privileges and properties of early life departing from
them. That grief has now befallen me. Well; I shall waste no more tears
for such a cause!”

Nothing else made Kenyon so sensible of a change in Donatello, as his
newly acquired power of dealing with his own emotions, and, after a
struggle more or less fierce, thrusting them down into the prison cells
where he usually kept them confined. The restraint, which he now put
upon himself, and the mask of dull composure which he succeeded in
clasping over his still beautiful, and once faun-like face, affected the
sensitive sculptor more sadly than even the unrestrained passion of the
preceding scene. It is a very miserable epoch, when the evil necessities
of life, in our tortuous world, first get the better of us so far as to
compel us to attempt throwing a cloud over our transparency. Simplicity
increases in value the longer we can keep it, and the further we carry
it onward into life; the loss of a child’s simplicity, in the inevitable
lapse of years, causes but a natural sigh or two, because even his
mother feared that he could not keep it always. But after a young man
has brought it through his childhood, and has still worn it in
his bosom, not as an early dewdrop, but as a diamond of pure white
lustre,--it is a pity to lose it, then. And thus, when Kenyon saw how
much his friend had now to hide, and how well he hid it, he would have
wept, although his tears would have been even idler than those which
Donatello had just shed.

They parted on the lawn before the house, the Count to climb his tower,
and the sculptor to read an antique edition of Dante, which he had found
among some old volumes of Catholic devotion, in a seldom-visited room,
Tomaso met him in the entrance hall, and showed a desire to speak.

“Our poor signorino looks very sad to-day!” he said.

“Even so, good Tomaso,” replied the sculptor. “Would that we could raise
his spirits a little!”

“There might be means, Signore,” answered the old butler, “if one might
but be sure that they were the right ones. We men are but rough nurses
for a sick body or a sick spirit.”

“Women, you would say, my good friend, are better,” said the sculptor,
struck by an intelligence in the butler’s face. “That is possible! But
it depends.”

“Ah; we will wait a little longer,” said Tomaso, with the customary
shake of his head.



CHAPTER XXVIII


THE OWL TOWER


“Will you not show me your tower?” said the sculptor one day to his
friend.

“It is plainly enough to be seen, methinks,” answered the Count, with
a kind of sulkiness that often appeared in him, as one of the little
symptoms of inward trouble.

“Yes; its exterior is visible far and wide,” said Kenyon. “But such
a gray, moss-grown tower as this, however valuable as an object of
scenery, will certainly be quite as interesting inside as out. It cannot
be less than six hundred years old; the foundations and lower story are
much older than that, I should judge; and traditions probably cling to
the walls within quite as plentifully as the gray and yellow lichens
cluster on its face without.”

“No doubt,” replied Donatello,--“but I know little of such things, and
never could comprehend the interest which some of you Forestieri take
in them. A year or two ago an English signore, with a venerable white
beard--they say he was a magician, too--came hither from as far off as
Florence, just to see my tower.”

“Ah, I have seen him at Florence,” observed Kenyon. “He is a
necromancer, as you say, and dwells in an old mansion of the Knights
Templars, close by the Ponte Vecchio, with a great many ghostly books,
pictures, and antiquities, to make the house gloomy, and one bright-eyed
little girl, to keep it cheerful!”

“I know him only by his white beard,” said Donatello; “but he could
have told you a great deal about the tower, and the sieges which it has
stood, and the prisoners who have been confined in it. And he gathered
up all the traditions of the Monte Beni family, and, among the rest,
the sad one which I told you at the fountain the other day. He had known
mighty poets, he said, in his earlier life; and the most illustrious
of them would have rejoiced to preserve such a legend in immortal
rhyme,--especially if he could have had some of our wine of Sunshine to
help out his inspiration!”

“Any man might be a poet, as well as Byron, with such wine and such
a theme,” rejoined the sculptor. “But shall we climb your tower The
thunder-storm gathering yonder among the hills will be a spectacle worth
witnessing.”

“Come, then,” said the Count, adding, with a sigh, “it has a weary
staircase, and dismal chambers, and it is very lonesome at the summit!”

“Like a man’s life, when he has climbed to eminence,” remarked the
sculptor; “or, let us rather say, with its difficult steps, and the dark
prison cells you speak of, your tower resembles the spiritual experience
of many a sinful soul, which, nevertheless, may struggle upward into the
pure air and light of Heaven at last!”

Donatello sighed again, and led the way up into the tower.

Mounting the broad staircase that ascended from the entrance hall,
they traversed the great wilderness of a house, through some obscure
passages, and came to a low, ancient doorway. It admitted them to a
narrow turret stair which zigzagged upward, lighted in its progress by
loopholes and iron-barred windows. Reaching the top of the first flight,
the Count threw open a door of worm-eaten oak, and disclosed a chamber
that occupied the whole area of the tower. It was most pitiably forlorn
of aspect, with a brick-paved floor, bare holes through the massive
walls, grated with iron, instead of windows, and for furniture an
old stool, which increased the dreariness of the place tenfold, by
suggesting an idea of its having once been tenanted.

“This was a prisoner’s cell in the old days,” said Donatello; “the
white-bearded necromancer, of whom I told you, found out that a certain
famous monk was confined here, about five hundred years ago. He was a
very holy man, and was afterwards burned at the stake in the Grand-ducal
Square at Firenze. There have always been stories, Tomaso says, of
a hooded monk creeping up and down these stairs, or standing in the
doorway of this chamber. It must needs be the ghost of the ancient
prisoner. Do you believe in ghosts?”

“I can hardly tell,” replied Kenyon; “on the whole, I think not.”

“Neither do I,” responded the Count; “for, if spirits ever come back,
I should surely have met one within these two months past. Ghosts never
rise! So much I know, and am glad to know it!”

Following the narrow staircase still higher, they came to another room
of similar size and equally forlorn, but inhabited by two personages of
a race which from time immemorial have held proprietorship and occupancy
in ruined towers. These were a pair of owls, who, being doubtless
acquainted with Donatello, showed little sign of alarm at the entrance
of visitors. They gave a dismal croak or two, and hopped aside into the
darkest corner, since it was not yet their hour to flap duskily abroad.

“They do not desert me, like my other feathered acquaintances,” observed
the young Count, with a sad smile, alluding to the scene which Kenyon
had witnessed at the fountain-side. “When I was a wild, playful boy, the
owls did not love me half so well.”

He made no further pause here, but led his friend up another flight of
steps--while, at every stage, the windows and narrow loopholes afforded
Kenyon more extensive eye-shots over hill and valley, and allowed him
to taste the cool purity of mid-atmosphere. At length they reached the
topmost chamber, directly beneath the roof of the tower.

“This is my own abode,” said Donatello; “my own owl’s nest.”

In fact, the room was fitted up as a bedchamber, though in a style of
the utmost simplicity. It likewise served as an oratory; there being
a crucifix in one corner, and a multitude of holy emblems, such as
Catholics judge it necessary to help their devotion withal. Several
ugly little prints, representing the sufferings of the Saviour, and the
martyrdoms of saints, hung on the wall; and behind the crucifix there
was a good copy of Titian’s Magdalen of the Pitti Palace, clad only in
the flow of her golden ringlets. She had a confident look (but it was
Titian’s fault, not the penitent woman’s), as if expecting to win
heaven by the free display of her earthly charms. Inside of a glass case
appeared an image of the sacred Bambino, in the guise of a little waxen
boy, very prettily made, reclining among flowers, like a Cupid, and
holding up a heart that resembled a bit of red sealing-wax. A small vase
of precious marble was full of holy water.

Beneath the crucifix, on a table, lay a human skull, which looked as if
it might have been dug up out of some old grave. But, examining it
more closely, Kenyon saw that it was carved in gray alabaster; most
skillfully done to the death, with accurate imitation of the teeth,
the sutures, the empty eye-caverns, and the fragile little bones of the
nose. This hideous emblem rested on a cushion of white marble, so nicely
wrought that you seemed to see the impression of the heavy skull in a
silken and downy substance.

Donatello dipped his fingers into the holy-water vase, and crossed
himself. After doing so he trembled.

“I have no right to make the sacred symbol on a sinful breast!” he said.

“On what mortal breast can it be made, then?” asked the sculptor. “Is
there one that hides no sin?”

“But these blessed emblems make you smile, I fear,” resumed the Count,
looking askance at his friend. “You heretics, I know, attempt to pray
without even a crucifix to kneel at.”

“I, at least, whom you call a heretic, reverence that holy symbol,”
 answered Kenyon. “What I am most inclined to murmur at is this death’s
head. I could laugh, moreover, in its ugly face! It is absurdly
monstrous, my dear friend, thus to fling the dead weight of our
mortality upon our immortal hopes. While we live on earth, ‘t is true,
we must needs carry our skeletons about with us; but, for Heaven’s sake,
do not let us burden our spirits with them, in our feeble efforts to
soar upward! Believe me, it will change the whole aspect of death, if
you can once disconnect it, in your idea, with that corruption from
which it disengages our higher part.”

“I do not well understand you,” said Donatello; and he took up the
alabaster skull, shuddering, and evidently feeling it a kind of penance
to touch it. “I only know that this skull has been in my family for
centuries. Old Tomaso has a story that it was copied by a famous
sculptor from the skull of that same unhappy knight who loved the
fountain lady, and lost her by a blood-stain. He lived and died with a
deep sense of sin upon him, and on his death-bed he ordained that this
token of him should go down to his posterity. And my forefathers, being
a cheerful race of men in their natural disposition, found it needful to
have the skull often before their eyes, because they dearly loved life
and its enjoyments, and hated the very thought of death.”

“I am afraid,” said Kenyon, “they liked it none the better, for seeing
its face under this abominable mask.”

Without further discussion, the Count led the way up one more flight of
stairs, at the end of which they emerged upon the summit of the tower.
The sculptor felt as if his being were suddenly magnified a hundredfold;
so wide was the Umbrian valley that suddenly opened before him, set in
its grand framework of nearer and more distant hills. It seemed as if
all Italy lay under his eyes in that one picture. For there was the
broad, sunny smile of God, which we fancy to be spread over that favored
land more abundantly than on other regions, and beneath it glowed a
most rich and varied fertility. The trim vineyards were there, and the
fig-trees, and the mulberries, and the smoky-hued tracts of the olive
orchards; there, too, were fields of every kind of grain, among which,
waved the Indian corn, putting Kenyon in mind of the fondly remembered
acres of his father’s homestead. White villas, gray convents, church
spires, villages, towns, each with its battlemented walls and towered
gateway, were scattered upon this spacious map; a river gleamed across
it; and lakes opened their blue eyes in its face, reflecting heaven,
lest mortals should forget that better land when they beheld the earth
so beautiful.


What made the valley look still wider was the two or three varieties
of weather that were visible on its surface, all at the same instant of
time. Here lay the quiet sunshine; there fell the great black patches
of ominous shadow from the clouds; and behind them, like a giant of
league-long strides, came hurrying the thunderstorm, which had already
swept midway across the plain. In the rear of the approaching tempest,
brightened forth again the sunny splendor, which its progress had
darkened with so terrible a frown.

All round this majestic landscape, the bald-peaked or forest-crowned
mountains descended boldly upon the plain. On many of their spurs and
midway declivities, and even on their summits, stood cities, some of
them famous of old; for these had been the seats and nurseries of early
art, where the flower of beauty sprang out of a rocky soil, and in
a high, keen atmosphere, when the richest and most sheltered gardens
failed to nourish it.

“Thank God for letting me again behold this scene!” Said the sculptor, a
devout man in his way, reverently taking off his hat. “I have viewed it
from many points, and never without as full a sensation of gratitude
as my heart seems capable of feeling. How it strengthens the poor human
spirit in its reliance on His providence, to ascend but this little way
above the common level, and so attain a somewhat wider glimpse of His
dealings with mankind! He doeth all things right! His will be done!”

“You discern something that is hidden from me,” observed Donatello
gloomily, yet striving with unwonted grasp to catch the analogies
which so cheered his friend. “I see sunshine on one spot, and cloud in
another, and no reason for it in either ease. The sun on you; the cloud
on me! What comfort can I draw from this?”

“Nay; I cannot preach,” said Kenyon, “with a page of heaven and a page
of earth spread wide open before us! Only begin to read it, and you
will find it interpreting itself without the aid of words. It is a great
mistake to try to put our best thoughts into human language. When we
ascend into the higher regions of emotion and spiritual enjoyment, they
are only expressible by such grand hieroglyphics as these around us.”

They stood awhile, contemplating the scene; but, as inevitably happens
after a spiritual flight, it was not long before the sculptor felt his
wings flagging in the rarity of the upper atmosphere. He was glad to let
himself quietly downward out of the mid-sky, as it were, and alight on
the solid platform of the battlemented tower. He looked about him,
and beheld growing out of the stone pavement, which formed the roof, a
little shrub, with green and glossy leaves. It was the only green thing
there; and Heaven knows how its seeds had ever been planted, at that
airy height, or how it had found nourishment for its small life in the
chinks of the stones; for it had no earth, and nothing more like soil
than the crumbling mortar, which had been crammed into the crevices in a
long-past age.

Yet the plant seemed fond of its native site; and Donatello said it
had always grown there from his earliest remembrance, and never, he
believed, any smaller or any larger than they saw it now.

“I wonder if the shrub teaches you any good lesson,” said he, observing
the interest with which Kenyon examined it. “If the wide valley has a
great meaning, the plant ought to have at least a little one; and it has
been growing on our tower long enough to have learned how to speak it.”

“O, certainly!” answered the sculptor; “the shrub has its moral, or
it would have perished long ago. And, no doubt, it is for your use and
edification, since you have had it before your eyes all your lifetime,
and now are moved to ask what may be its lesson.”

“It teaches me nothing,” said the simple Donatello, stooping over the
plant, and perplexing himself with a minute scrutiny. “But here was a
worm that would have killed it; an ugly creature, which I will fling
over the battlements.”



CHAPTER XXIX


ON THE BATTLEMENTS


The sculptor now looked through art embrasure, and threw down a bit of
lime, watching its fall, till it struck upon a stone bench at the rocky
foundation of the tower, and flew into many fragments.

“Pray pardon me for helping Time to crumble away your ancestral walls,”
 said he. “But I am one of those persons who have a natural tendency to
climb heights, and to stand on the verge of them, measuring the depth
below. If I were to do just as I like, at this moment, I should fling
myself down after that bit of lime. It is a very singular temptation,
and all but irresistible; partly, I believe, because it might be so
easily done, and partly because such momentous consequences would ensue,
without my being compelled to wait a moment for them. Have you never
felt this strange impulse of an evil spirit at your back, shoving you
towards a precipice?”

“Ah, no!” cried. Donatello, shrinking from the battlemented wall with a
face of horror. “I cling to life in a way which you cannot conceive; it
has been so rich, so warm, so sunny!--and beyond its verge, nothing
but the chilly dark! And then a fall from a precipice is such an awful
death!”

“Nay; if it be a great height,” said Kenyon, “a man would leave his life
in the air, and never feel the hard shock at the bottom.”

“That is not the way with this kind of death!” exclaimed Donatello, in a
low, horror-stricken voice, which grew higher and more full of emotion
as he proceeded. “Imagine a fellow creature,--breathing now, and looking
you in the face,--and now tumbling down, down, down, with a long shriek
wavering after him, all the way! He does not leave his life in the air!
No; but it keeps in him till he thumps against the stones, a horribly
long while; then he lies there frightfully quiet, a dead heap of bruised
flesh and broken bones! A quiver runs through the crushed mass; and no
more movement after that! No; not if you would give your soul to make
him stir a finger! Ah, terrible! Yes, yes; I would fain fling myself
down for the very dread of it, that I might endure it once for all, and
dream of it no more!”

“How forcibly, how frightfully you conceive this!” said the sculptor,
aghast at the passionate horror which was betrayed in the Count’s words,
and still more in his wild gestures and ghastly look. “Nay, if the
height of your tower affects your imagination thus, you do wrong to
trust yourself here in solitude, and in the night-time, and at all
unguarded hours. You are not safe in your chamber. It is but a step or
two; and what if a vivid dream should lead you up hither at midnight,
and act itself out as a reality!”

Donatello had hidden his face in his hands, and was leaning against the
parapet.

“No fear of that!” said he. “Whatever the dream may be, I am too genuine
a coward to act out my own death in it.”

The paroxysm passed away, and the two friends continued their desultory
talk, very much as if no such interruption had occurred. Nevertheless,
it affected the sculptor with infinite pity to see this young man, who
had been born to gladness as an assured heritage, now involved in a
misty bewilderment of grievous thoughts, amid which he seemed to go
staggering blindfold. Kenyon, not without an unshaped suspicion of
the definite fact, knew that his condition must have resulted from the
weight and gloom of life, now first, through the agency of a secret
trouble, making themselves felt on a character that had heretofore
breathed only an atmosphere of joy. The effect of this hard lesson,
upon Donatello’s intellect and disposition, was very striking. It was
perceptible that he had already had glimpses of strange and subtle
matters in those dark caverns, into which all men must descend, if
they would know anything beneath the surface and illusive pleasures of
existence. And when they emerge, though dazzled and blinded by the first
glare of daylight, they take truer and sadder views of life forever
afterwards.

From some mysterious source, as the sculptor felt assured, a soul had
been inspired into the young Count’s simplicity, since their intercourse
in Rome. He now showed a far deeper sense, and an intelligence that
began to deal with high subjects, though in a feeble and childish way.
He evinced, too, a more definite and nobler individuality, but developed
out of grief and pain, and fearfully conscious of the pangs that had
given it birth. Every human life, if it ascends to truth or delves down
to reality, must undergo a similar change; but sometimes, perhaps, the
instruction comes without the sorrow; and oftener the sorrow teaches
no lesson that abides with us. In Donatello’s case, it was pitiful, and
almost ludicrous, to observe the confused struggle that he made; how
completely he was taken by surprise; how ill-prepared he stood, on this
old battlefield of the world, to fight with such an inevitable foe as
mortal calamity, and sin for its stronger ally.

“And yet,” thought Kenyon, “the poor fellow bears himself like a hero,
too! If he would only tell me his trouble, or give me an opening to
speak frankly about it, I might help him; but he finds it too horrible
to be uttered, and fancies himself the only mortal that ever felt the
anguish of remorse. Yes; he believes that nobody ever endured his agony
before; so that--sharp enough in itself--it has all the additional zest
of a torture just invented to plague him individually.”

The sculptor endeavored to dismiss the painful subject from his mind;
and, leaning against the battlements, he turned his face southward and
westward, and gazed across the breadth of the valley. His thoughts
flew far beyond even those wide boundaries, taking an air-line from
Donatello’s tower to another turret that ascended into the sky of the
summer afternoon, invisibly to him, above the roofs of distant Rome.
Then rose tumultuously into his consciousness that strong love for
Hilda, which it was his habit to confine in one of the heart’s inner
chambers, because he had found no encouragement to bring it forward. But
now he felt a strange pull at his heart-strings. It could not have been
more perceptible, if all the way between these battlements and Hilda’s
dove-cote had stretched an exquisitely sensitive cord, which, at the
hither end, was knotted with his aforesaid heart-strings, and, at the
remoter one, was grasped by a gentle hand. His breath grew tremulous. He
put his hand to his breast; so distinctly did he seem to feel that cord
drawn once, and again, and again, as if--though still it was bashfully
intimated there were an importunate demand for his presence. O for the
white wings of Hilda’s doves, that he might, have flown thither, and
alighted at the Virgin’s shrine!

But lovers, and Kenyon knew it well, project so lifelike a copy of
their mistresses out of their own imaginations, that it can pull at
the heartstrings almost as perceptibly as the genuine original. No airy
intimations are to be trusted; no evidences of responsive affection less
positive than whispered and broken words, or tender pressures of the
hand, allowed and half returned; or glances, that distil many passionate
avowals into one gleam of richly colored light. Even these should
be weighed rigorously, at the instant; for, in another instant, the
imagination seizes on them as its property, and stamps them with its
own arbitrary value. But Hilda’s maidenly reserve had given her lover no
such tokens, to be interpreted either by his hopes or fears.

“Yonder, over mountain and valley, lies Rome,” said the sculptor; “shall
you return thither in the autumn?”

“Never! I hate Rome,” answered Donatello; “and have good cause.”

“And yet it was a pleasant winter that we spent there,” observed
Kenyon, “and with pleasant friends about us. You would meet them again
there--all of them.”

“All?” asked Donatello.

“All, to the best of my belief,” said the sculptor: “but you need not go
to Rome to seek them. If there were one of those friends whose lifetime
was twisted with your own, I am enough of a fatalist to feel assured
that you will meet that one again, wander whither you may. Neither can
we escape the companions whom Providence assigns for us, by climbing an
old tower like this.”

“Yet the stairs are steep and dark,” rejoined the Count; “none but
yourself would seek me here, or find me, if they sought.”

As Donatello did not take advantage of this opening which his friend had
kindly afforded him to pour out his hidden troubles, the latter again
threw aside the subject, and returned to the enjoyment of the scene
before him. The thunder-storm, which he had beheld striding across the
valley, had passed to the left of Monte Beni, and was continuing its
march towards the hills that formed the boundary on the eastward.
Above the whole valley, indeed, the sky was heavy with tumbling vapors,
interspersed with which were tracts of blue, vividly brightened by the
sun; but, in the east, where the tempest was yet trailing its ragged
skirts, lay a dusky region of cloud and sullen mist, in which some of
the hills appeared of a dark purple hue. Others became so indistinct,
that the spectator could not tell rocky height from impalpable cloud.
Far into this misty cloud region, however,--within the domain of chaos,
as it were,--hilltops were seen brightening in the sunshine; they looked
like fragments of the world, broken adrift and based on nothingness,
or like portions of a sphere destined to exist, but not yet finally
compacted.

The sculptor, habitually drawing many of the images and illustrations
of his thoughts from the plastic art, fancied that the scene represented
the process of the Creator, when he held the new, imperfect earth in his
hand, and modelled it.

“What a magic is in mist and vapor among the mountains!” he exclaimed.
“With their help, one single scene becomes a thousand. The cloud scenery
gives such variety to a hilly landscape that it would be worth while to
journalize its aspect from hour to hour. A cloud, however,--as I have
myself experienced,--is apt to grow solid and as heavy as a stone the
instant that you take in hand to describe it, But, in my own heart,
I have found great use in clouds. Such silvery ones as those to the
northward, for example, have often suggested sculpturesque groups,
figures, and attitudes; they are especially rich in attitudes of living
repose, which a sculptor only hits upon by the rarest good fortune. When
I go back to my dear native land, the clouds along the horizon will be
my only gallery of art!”

“I can see cloud shapes, too,” said Donatello; “yonder is one that
shifts strangely; it has been like people whom I knew. And now, if I
watch it a little longer, it will take the figure of a monk reclining,
with his cowl about his head and drawn partly over his face, and--well!
did I not tell you so?”

“I think,” remarked Kenyon, “we can hardly be gazing at the same cloud.
What I behold is a reclining figure, to be sure, but feminine, and with
a despondent air, wonderfully well expressed in the wavering outline
from head to foot. It moves my very heart by something indefinable that
it suggests.”

“I see the figure, and almost the face,” said the Count; adding, in a
lower voice, “It is Miriam’s!”

“No, not Miriam’s,” answered the sculptor. While the two gazers thus
found their own reminiscences and presentiments floating among the
clouds, the day drew to its close, and now showed them the fair
spectacle of an Italian sunset. The sky was soft and bright, but not so
gorgeous as Kenyon had seen it, a thousand times, in America; for there
the western sky is wont to be set aflame with breadths and depths of
color with which poets seek in vain to dye their verses, and which
painters never dare to copy. As beheld from the tower of Monte Beni, the
scene was tenderly magnificent, with mild gradations of hue and a lavish
outpouring of gold, but rather such gold as we see on the leaf of a
bright flower than the burnished glow of metal from the mine. Or, if
metallic, it looked airy and unsubstantial, like the glorified dreams
of an alchemist. And speedily--more speedily than in our own clime--came
the twilight, and, brightening through its gray transparency, the stars.

A swarm of minute insects that had been hovering all day round the
battlements were now swept away by the freshness of a rising breeze.
The two owls in the chamber beneath Donatello’s uttered their soft
melancholy cry,--which, with national avoidance of harsh sounds, Italian
owls substitute for the hoot of their kindred in other countries,--and
flew darkling forth among the shrubbery. A convent bell rang out near at
hand, and was not only echoed among the hills, but answered by another
bell, and still another, which doubtless had farther and farther
responses, at various distances along the valley; for, like the English
drumbeat around the globe, there is a chain of convent bells from end
to end, and crosswise, and in all possible directions over priest-ridden
Italy.

“Come,” said the sculptor, “the evening air grows cool. It is time to
descend.”

“Time for you, my friend,” replied the Count; and he hesitated a little
before adding, “I must keep a vigil here for some hours longer. It is my
frequent custom to keep vigils,--and sometimes the thought occurs to me
whether it were not better to keep them in yonder convent, the bell of
which just now seemed to summon me. Should I do wisely, do you think, to
exchange this old tower for a cell?”

“What! Turn monk?” exclaimed his friend. “A horrible idea!”

“True,” said Donatello, sighing. “Therefore, if at all, I purpose doing
it.”

“Then think of it no more, for Heaven’s sake!” cried the sculptor.
“There are a thousand better and more poignant methods of being
miserable than that, if to be miserable is what you wish. Nay; I
question whether a monk keeps himself up to the intellectual and
spiritual height which misery implies. A monk I judge from their sensual
physiognomies, which meet me at every turn--is inevitably a beast! Their
souls, if they have any to begin with, perish out of them, before their
sluggish, swinish existence is half done. Better, a million times, to
stand star-gazing on these airy battlements, than to smother your new
germ of a higher life in a monkish cell!”

“You make me tremble,” said Donatello, “by your bold aspersion of men
who have devoted themselves to God’s service!”

“They serve neither God nor man, and themselves least of all, though
their motives be utterly selfish,” replied Kenyon. “Avoid the convent,
my dear friend, as you would shun the death of the soul! But, for my own
part, if I had an insupportable burden,--if, for any cause, I were
bent upon sacrificing every earthly hope as a peace-offering towards
Heaven,--I would make the wide world my cell, and good deeds to mankind
my prayer. Many penitent men have done this, and found peace in it.”

“Ah, but you are a heretic!” said the Count.

Yet his face brightened beneath the stars; and, looking at it through
the twilight, the sculptor’s remembrance went back to that scene in the
Capitol, where, both in features and expression, Donatello had seemed
identical with the Faun. And still there was a resemblance; for now,
when first the idea was suggested of living for the welfare of his
fellow-creatures, the original beauty, which sorrow had partly effaced,
came back elevated and spiritualized. In the black depths the Faun had
found a soul, and was struggling with it towards the light of heaven.

The illumination, it is true, soon faded out of Donatello’s face. The
idea of lifelong and unselfish effort was too high to be received by
him with more than a momentary comprehension. An Italian, indeed,
seldom dreams of being philanthropic, except in bestowing alms among the
paupers, who appeal to his beneficence at every step; nor does it
occur to him that there are fitter modes of propitiating Heaven than
by penances, pilgrimages, and offerings at shrines. Perhaps, too, their
system has its share of moral advantages; they, at all events, cannot
well pride themselves, as our own more energetic benevolence is apt to
do, upon sharing in the counsels of Providence and kindly helping out
its otherwise impracticable designs.

And now the broad valley twinkled with lights, that glimmered through
its duskiness like the fireflies in the garden of a Florentine palace. A
gleam of lightning from the rear of the tempest showed the circumference
of hills and the great space between, as the last cannon-flash of a
retreating army reddens across the field where it has fought. The
sculptor was on the point of descending the turret stair, when,
somewhere in the darkness that lay beneath them, a woman’s voice was
heard, singing a low, sad strain.

“Hark!” said he, laying his hand on Donatello’s arm.

And Donatello had said “Hark!” at the same instant.

The song, if song it could be called, that had only a wild rhythm, and
flowed forth in the fitful measure of a wind-harp, did not clothe itself
in the sharp brilliancy of the Italian tongue. The words, so far as they
could be distinguished, were German, and therefore unintelligible to the
Count, and hardly less so to the sculptor; being softened and molten,
as it were, into the melancholy richness of the voice that sung them. It
was as the murmur of a soul bewildered amid the sinful gloom of earth,
and retaining only enough memory of a better state to make sad music
of the wail, which would else have been a despairing shriek. Never was
there profounder pathos than breathed through that mysterious voice;
it brought the tears into the sculptor’s eyes, with remembrances and
forebodings of whatever sorrow he had felt or apprehended; it made
Donatello sob, as chiming in with the anguish that he found unutterable,
and giving it the expression which he vaguely sought.

But, when the emotion was at its profoundest depth, the voice rose out
of it, yet so gradually that a gloom seemed to pervade it, far upward
from the abyss, and not entirely to fall away as it ascended into a
higher and purer region. At last, the auditors would have fancied that
the melody, with its rich sweetness all there, and much of its sorrow
gone, was floating around the very summit of the tower.

“Donatello,” said the sculptor, when there was silence again, “had that
voice no message for your ear?”

“I dare not receive it,” said Donatello; “the anguish of which it spoke
abides with me: the hope dies away with the breath that brought it
hither. It is not good for me to hear that voice.”

The sculptor sighed, and left the poor penitent keeping his vigil on the
tower.



CHAPTER XXX


DONATELLO’S BUST


Kenyon, it will be remembered, had asked Donatello’s permission to model
his bust. The work had now made considerable progress, and necessarily
kept the sculptor’s thoughts brooding much and often upon his host’s
personal characteristics. These it was his difficult office to bring out
from their depths, and interpret them to all men, showing them what they
could not discern for themselves, yet must be compelled to recognize at
a glance, on the surface of a block of marble.

He had never undertaken a portrait-bust which gave him so much trouble
as Donatello’s; not that there was any special difficulty in hitting
the likeness, though even in this respect the grace and harmony of
the features seemed inconsistent with a prominent expression of
individuality; but he was chiefly perplexed how to make this genial and
kind type of countenance the index of the mind within. His acuteness and
his sympathies, indeed, were both somewhat at fault in their efforts
to enlighten him as to the moral phase through which the Count was now
passing. If at one sitting he caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a
genuine and permanent trait, it would probably be less perceptible on
a second occasion, and perhaps have vanished entirely at a third. So
evanescent a show of character threw the sculptor into despair; not
marble or clay, but cloud and vapor, was the material in which it
ought to be represented. Even the ponderous depression which constantly
weighed upon Donatello’s heart could not compel him into the kind of
repose which the plastic art requires.

Hopeless of a good result, Kenyon gave up all preconceptions about the
character of his subject, and let his hands work uncontrolled with the
clay, somewhat as a spiritual medium, while holding a pen, yields it
to an unseen guidance other than that of her own will. Now and then he
fancied that this plan was destined to be the successful one. A skill
and insight beyond his consciousness seemed occasionally to take up the
task. The mystery, the miracle, of imbuing an inanimate substance
with thought, feeling, and all the intangible attributes of the soul,
appeared on the verge of being wrought. And now, as he flattered
himself, the true image of his friend was about to emerge from the
facile material, bringing with it more of Donatello’s character than
the keenest observer could detect at any one moment in the face of the
original Vain expectation!--some touch, whereby the artist thought to
improve or hasten the result, interfered with the design of his unseen
spiritual assistant, and spoilt the whole. There was still the moist,
brown clay, indeed, and the features of Donatello, but without any
semblance of intelligent and sympathetic life.

“The difficulty will drive me mad, I verily believe!” cried the sculptor
nervously. “Look at the wretched piece of work yourself, my dear friend,
and tell me whether you recognize any manner of likeness to your inner
man?”

“None,” replied Donatello, speaking the simple truth. “It is like
looking a stranger in the face.”

This frankly unfavorable testimony so wrought with the sensitive artist,
that he fell into a passion with the stubborn image, and cared not what
might happen to it thenceforward. Wielding that wonderful power which
sculptors possess over moist clay, however refractory it may show itself
in certain respects, he compressed, elongated, widened, and otherwise
altered the features of the bust in mere recklessness, and at every
change inquired of the Count whether the expression became anywise more
satisfactory.

“Stop!” cried Donatello at last, catching the sculptor’s hand. “Let
it remain so!” By some accidental handling of the clay, entirely
independent of his own will, Kenyon had given the countenance a
distorted and violent look, combining animal fierceness with intelligent
hatred. Had Hilda, or had Miriam, seen the bust, with the expression
which it had now assumed, they might have recognized Donatello’s face as
they beheld it at that terrible moment when he held his victim over the
edge of the precipice.

“What have I done?” said the sculptor, shocked at his own casual
production. “It were a sin to let the clay which bears your features
harden into a look like that. Cain never wore an uglier one.”

“For that very reason, let it remain!” answered the Count, who had grown
pale as ashes at the aspect of his crime, thus strangely presented to
him in another of the many guises under which guilt stares the criminal
in the face. “Do not alter it! Chisel it, rather, in eternal marble!
I will set it up in my oratory and keep it continually before my eyes.
Sadder and more horrible is a face like this, alive with my own crime,
than the dead skull which my forefathers handed down to me!”

But, without in the least heeding Donatello’s remonstrances, the
sculptor again applied his artful fingers to the clay, and compelled the
bust to dismiss the expression that had so startled them both.

“Believe me,” said he, turning his eyes upon his friend, full of grave
and tender sympathy, “you know not what is requisite for your spiritual
growth, seeking, as you do, to keep your soul perpetually in the
unwholesome region of remorse. It was needful for you to pass through
that dark valley, but it is infinitely dangerous to linger there too
long; there is poison in the atmosphere, when we sit down and brood in
it, instead of girding up our loins to press onward. Not despondency,
not slothful anguish, is what you now require,--but effort! Has there
been an unalterable evil in your young life? Then crowd it out with
good, or it will lie corrupting there forever, and cause your capacity
for better things to partake its noisome corruption!”

“You stir up many thoughts,” said Donatello, pressing his hand upon his
brow, “but the multitude and the whirl of them make me dizzy.”

They now left the sculptor’s temporary studio, without observing that
his last accidental touches, with which he hurriedly effaced the look of
deadly rage, had given the bust a higher and sweeter expression than it
had hitherto worn. It is to be regretted that Kenyon had not seen
it; for only an artist, perhaps, can conceive the irksomeness, the
irritation of brain, the depression of spirits, that resulted from his
failure to satisfy himself, after so much toil and thought as he had
bestowed on Donatello’s bust. In case of success, indeed, all this
thoughtful toil would have been reckoned, not only as well bestowed,
but as among the happiest hours of his life; whereas, deeming himself to
have failed, it was just so much of life that had better never have
been lived; for thus does the good or ill result of his labor throw back
sunshine or gloom upon the artist’s mind. The sculptor, therefore, would
have done well to glance again at his work; for here were still the
features of the antique Faun, but now illuminated with a higher meaning,
such as the old marble never bore.

Donatello having quitted him, Kenyon spent the rest of the day strolling
about the pleasant precincts of Monte Beni, where the summer was now
so far advanced that it began, indeed, to partake of the ripe wealth of
autumn. Apricots had long been abundant, and had passed away, and plums
and cherries along with them. But now came great, juicy pears, melting
and delicious, and peaches of goodly size and tempting aspect, though
cold and watery to the palate, compared with the sculptor’s rich
reminiscences of that fruit in America. The purple figs had already
enjoyed their day, and the white ones were luscious now. The contadini
(who, by this time, knew Kenyon well) found many clusters of ripe grapes
for him, in every little globe of which was included a fragrant draught
of the sunny Monte Beni wine.

Unexpectedly, in a nook close by the farmhouse, he happened upon a spot
where the vintage had actually commenced. A great heap of early ripened
grapes had been gathered, and thrown into a mighty tub. In the middle
of it stood a lusty and jolly contadino, nor stood, merely, but stamped
with all his might, and danced amain; while the red juice bathed his
feet, and threw its foam midway up his brown and shaggy legs. Here,
then, was the very process that shows so picturesquely in Scripture
and in poetry, of treading out the wine-press and dyeing the feet and
garments with the crimson effusion as with the blood of a battlefield.
The memory of the process does not make the Tuscan wine taste more
deliciously. The contadini hospitably offered Kenyon a sample of the new
liquor, that had already stood fermenting for a day or two. He had tried
a similar draught, however, in years past, and was little inclined to
make proof of it again; for he knew that it would be a sour and bitter
juice, a wine of woe and tribulation, and that the more a man drinks of
such liquor, the sorrier he is likely to be.

The scene reminded the sculptor of our New England vintages, where the
big piles of golden and rosy apples lie under the orchard trees, in the
mild, autumnal sunshine; and the creaking cider-mill, set in motion by
a circumgyratory horse, is all a-gush with the luscious juice. To speak
frankly, the cider-making is the more picturesque sight of the two,
and the new, sweet cider an infinitely better drink than the ordinary,
unripe Tuscan wine. Such as it is, however, the latter fills thousands
upon thousands of small, flat barrels, and, still growing thinner and
sharper, loses the little life it had, as wine, and becomes apotheosized
as a more praiseworthy vinegar.

Yet all these vineyard scenes, and the processes connected with the
culture of the grape, had a flavor of poetry about them. The toil that
produces those kindly gifts of nature which are not the substance of
life, but its luxury, is unlike other toil. We are inclined to fancy
that it does not bend the sturdy frame and stiffen the overwrought
muscles, like the labor that is devoted in sad, hard earnest to
raise grain for sour bread. Certainly, the sunburnt young men and
dark-cheeked, laughing girls, who weeded the rich acres of Monte Beni,
might well enough have passed for inhabitants of an unsophisticated
Arcadia. Later in the season, when the true vintage time should come,
and the wine of Sunshine gush into the vats, it was hardly too wild a
dream that Bacchus himself might revisit the haunts which he loved of
old. But, alas! where now would he find the Faun with whom we see him
consorting in so many an antique group?

Donatello’s remorseful anguish saddened this primitive and delightful
life. Kenyon had a pain of his own, moreover, although not all a pain,
in the never quiet, never satisfied yearning of his heart towards Hilda.
He was authorized to use little freedom towards that shy maiden, even
in his visions; so that he almost reproached himself when sometimes his
imagination pictured in detail the sweet years that they might spend
together, in a retreat like this. It had just that rarest quality of
remoteness from the actual and ordinary world B a remoteness
through which all delights might visit them freely, sifted from all
troubles--which lovers so reasonably insist upon, in their ideal
arrangements for a happy union. It is possible, indeed, that even
Donatello’s grief and Kenyon’s pale, sunless affection lent a charm
to Monte Beni, which it would not have retained amid a more abundant
joyousness. The sculptor strayed amid its vineyards and orchards,
its dells and tangled shrubberies, with somewhat the sensations of an
adventurer who should find his way to the site of ancient Eden, and
behold its loveliness through the transparency of that gloom which has
been brooding over those haunts of innocence ever since the fall. Adam
saw it in a brighter sunshine, but never knew the shade of Pensive
beauty which Eden won from his expulsion.

It was in the decline of the afternoon that Kenyon returned from his
long, musing ramble, Old Tomaso--between whom and himself for some time
past there had been a mysterious understanding,--met him in the entrance
hall, and drew him a little aside.

“The signorina would speak with you,” he whispered.

“In the chapel?” asked the sculptor.

“No; in the saloon beyond it,” answered the butler: “the entrance you
once saw the signorina appear through it is near the altar, hidden
behind the tapestry.”

Kenyon lost no time in obeying the summons.



CHAPTER XXXI


THE MARBLE SALOON


In an old Tuscan villa, a chapel ordinarily makes one among the numerous
apartments; though it often happens that the door is permanently closed,
the key lost, and the place left to itself, in dusty sanctity, like that
chamber in man’s heart where he hides his religious awe. This was very
much the case with the chapel of Monte Beni. One rainy day, however,
in his wanderings through the great, intricate house, Kenyon had
unexpectedly found his way into it, and been impressed by its solemn
aspect. The arched windows, high upward in the wall, and darkened with
dust and cobweb, threw down a dim light that showed the altar, with a
picture of a martyrdom above, and some tall tapers ranged before it.
They had apparently been lighted, and burned an hour or two, and been
extinguished perhaps half a century before. The marble vase at the
entrance held some hardened mud at the bottom, accruing from the dust
that had settled in it during the gradual evaporation of the holy water;
and a spider (being an insect that delights in pointing the moral of
desolation and neglect) had taken pains to weave a prodigiously thick
tissue across the circular brim. An old family banner, tattered by
the moths, drooped from the vaulted roof. In niches there were some
mediaeval busts of Donatello’s forgotten ancestry; and among them, it
might be, the forlorn visage of that hapless knight between whom and the
fountain-nymph had occurred such tender love passages.

Throughout all the jovial prosperity of Monte Beni, this one spot within
the domestic walls had kept itself silent, stern, and sad. When the
individual or the family retired from song and mirth, they here sought
those realities which men do not invite their festive associates to
share. And here, on the occasion above referred to, the sculptor had
discovered--accidentally, so far as he was concerned, though with a
purpose on her part--that there was a guest under Donatello’s roof,
whose presence the Count did not suspect. An interview had since taken
place, and he was now summoned to another.

He crossed the chapel, in compliance with Tomaso’s instructions, and,
passing through the side entrance, found himself in a saloon, of no
great size, but more magnificent than he had supposed the villa to
contain. As it was vacant, Kenyon had leisure to pace it once or twice,
and examine it with a careless sort of scrutiny, before any person
appeared.

This beautiful hall was floored with rich marbles, in artistically
arranged figures and compartments. The walls, likewise, were almost
entirely cased in marble of various kinds, the prevalent, variety
being giallo antico, intermixed with verd-antique, and others equally
precious. The splendor of the giallo antico, however, was what gave
character to the saloon; and the large and deep niches, apparently
intended for full length statues, along the walls, were lined with the
same costly material. Without visiting Italy, one can have no idea of
the beauty and magnificence that are produced by these fittings-up of
polished marble. Without such experience, indeed, we do not even know
what marble means, in any sense, save as the white limestone of which
we carve our mantelpieces. This rich hall of Monte Beni, moreover, was
adorned, at its upper end, with two pillars that seemed to consist of
Oriental alabaster; and wherever there was a space vacant of precious
and variegated marble, it was frescoed with ornaments in arabesque.
Above, there was a coved and vaulted ceiling, glowing with pictured
scenes, which affected Kenyon with a vague sense of splendor, without
his twisting his neck to gaze at them.

It is one of the special excellences of such a saloon of polished and
richly colored marble, that decay can never tarnish it. Until the house
crumbles down upon it, it shines indestructibly, and, with a little
dusting, looks just as brilliant in its three hundredth year as the day
after the final slab of giallo antico was fitted into the wall. To the
sculptor, at this first View of it, it seemed a hall where the sun was
magically imprisoned, and must always shine. He anticipated Miriam’s
entrance, arrayed in queenly robes, and beaming with even more than the
singular beauty that had heretofore distinguished her.

While this thought was passing through his mind, the pillared door, at
the upper end of the saloon, was partly opened, and Miriam appeared. She
was very pale, and dressed in deep mourning. As she advanced towards the
sculptor, the feebleness of her step was so apparent that he made haste
to meet her, apprehending that she might sink down on the marble floor,
without the instant support of his arm.

But, with a gleam of her natural self-reliance, she declined his aid,
and, after touching her cold hand to his, went and sat down on one of
the cushioned divans that were ranged against the wall.

“You are very ill, Miriam!” said Kenyon, much shocked at her appearance.
“I had not thought of this.”

“No; not so ill as I seem to you,” she answered; adding despondently,
“yet I am ill enough, I believe, to die, unless some change speedily
occurs.”

“What, then, is your disorder?” asked the sculptor; “and what the
remedy?”

“The disorder!” repeated Miriam. “There is none that I know of save too
much life and strength, without a purpose for one or the other. It is
my too redundant energy that is slowly--or perhaps rapidly--wearing me
away, because I can apply it to no use. The object, which I am bound to
consider my only one on earth, fails me utterly. The sacrifice which I
yearn to make of myself, my hopes, my everything, is coldly put aside.
Nothing is left for me but to brood, brood, brood, all day, all night,
in unprofitable longings and repinings.”

“This is very sad, Miriam,” said Kenyon.

“Ay, indeed; I fancy so,” she replied, with a short, unnatural laugh.

“With all your activity of mind,” resumed he, “so fertile in plans as
I have known you, can you imagine no method of bringing your resources
into play?”

“My mind is not active any longer,” answered Miriam, in a cold,
indifferent tone. “It deals with one thought and no more. One
recollection paralyzes it. It is not remorse; do not think it! I put
myself out of the question, and feel neither regret nor penitence on
my own behalf. But what benumbs me, what robs me of all power,-it is
no secret for a woman to tell a man, yet I care not though you know it,
--is the certainty that I am, and must ever be, an object of horror in
Donatello’s sight.”

The sculptor--a young man, and cherishing a love which insulated
him from the wild experiences which some men gather--was startled to
perceive how Miriam’s rich, ill-regulated nature impelled her to
fling herself, conscience and all, on one passion, the object of which
intellectually seemed far beneath her.

“How have you obtained the certainty of which you speak?” asked he,
after a pause.

“O, by a sure token,” said Miriam; “a gesture, merely; a shudder, a cold
shiver, that ran through him one sunny morning when his hand happened to
touch mine! But it was enough.”

“I firmly believe, Miriam,” said the sculptor, “that he loves you
still.”

She started, and a flush of color came tremulously over the paleness of
her cheek.

“Yes,” repeated Kenyon, “if my interest in Donatello--and in yourself,
Miriam--endows me with any true insight, he not only loves you still,
but with a force and depth proportioned to the stronger grasp of his
faculties, in their new development.”

“Do not deceive me,” said Miriam, growing pale again.

“Not for the world!” replied Kenyon. “Here is what I take to be
the truth. There was an interval, no doubt, when the horror of some
calamity, which I need not shape out in my conjectures, threw Donatello
into a stupor of misery. Connected with the first shock there was an
intolerable pain and shuddering repugnance attaching themselves to
all the circumstances and surroundings of the event that so terribly
affected him. Was his dearest friend involved within the horror of that
moment? He would shrink from her as he shrank most of all from himself.
But as his mind roused itself,--as it rose to a higher life than he had
hitherto experienced,--whatever had been true and permanent within him
revived by the selfsame impulse. So has it been with his love.”

“But, surely,” said Miriam, “he knows that I am here! Why, then, except
that I am odious to him, does he not bid me welcome?”

“He is, I believe, aware of your presence here,” answered the sculptor.
“Your song, a night or two ago, must have revealed it to him, and, in
truth, I had fancied that there was already a consciousness of it in
his mind. But, the more passionately he longs for your society, the more
religiously he deems himself bound to avoid it. The idea of a lifelong
penance has taken strong possession of Donatello. He gropes blindly
about him for some method of sharp self-torture, and finds, of course,
no other so efficacious as this.”

“But he loves me,” repeated Miriam, in a low voice, to herself. “Yes; he
loves me!”

It was strange to observe the womanly softness that came over her,
as she admitted that comfort into her bosom. The cold, unnatural
indifference of her manner, a kind of frozen passionateness which had
shocked and chilled the sculptor, disappeared. She blushed, and turned
away her eyes, knowing that there was more surprise and joy in their
dewy glances than any man save one ought to detect there.

“In other respects,” she inquired at length, “is he much changed?”

“A wonderful process is going forward in Donatello’s mind,” answered the
sculptor. “The germs of faculties that have heretofore slept are fast
springing into activity. The world of thought is disclosing itself to
his inward sight. He startles me, at times, with his perception of deep
truths; and, quite as often, it must be owned, he compels me to smile by
the intermixture of his former simplicity with a new intelligence. But
he is bewildered with the revelations that each day brings. Out of
his bitter agony, a soul and intellect, I could almost say, have been
inspired into him.”

“Ah, I could help him here!” cried Miriam, clasping her hands. “And
how sweet a toil to bend and adapt my whole nature to do him good! To
instruct, to elevate, to enrich his mind with the wealth that would flow
in upon me, had I such a motive for acquiring it! Who else can perform
the task? Who else has the tender sympathy which he requires? Who else,
save only me,--a woman, a sharer in the same dread secret, a partaker in
one identical guilt,--could meet him on such terms of intimate equality
as the case demands? With this object before me, I might feel a right to
live! Without it, it is a shame for me to have lived so long.”

“I fully agree with you,” said Kenyon, “that your true place is by his
side.”

“Surely it is,” replied Miriam. “If Donatello is entitled to aught on
earth, it is to my complete self-sacrifice for his sake. It does not
weaken his claim, methinks, that my only prospect of happiness a
fearful word, however lies in the good that may accrue to him from our
intercourse. But he rejects me! He will not listen to the whisper of his
heart, telling him that she, most wretched, who beguiled him into evil,
might guide him to a higher innocence than that from which he fell. How
is this first great difficulty to be obviated?”

“It lies at your own option, Miriam, to do away the obstacle, at any
moment,” remarked the sculptor. “It is but to ascend Donatello’s tower,
and you will meet him there, under the eye of God.”

“I dare not,” answered Miriam. “No; I dare not!”

“Do you fear,” asked the sculptor, “the dread eye-witness whom I have
named?”

“No; for, as far as I can see into that cloudy and inscrutable thing, my
heart, it has none but pure motives,” replied Miriam. “But, my friend,
you little know what a weak or what a strong creature a woman is! I
fear not Heaven, in this case, at least, but--shall I confess it? I
am greatly in dread of Donatello. Once he shuddered at my touch. If he
shudder once again, or frown, I die!”

Kenyon could not but marvel at the subjection into which this proud and
self-dependent woman had willfully flung herself, hanging her life upon
the chance of an angry or favorable regard from a person who, a little
while before, had seemed the plaything of a moment. But, in Miriam’s
eyes, Donatello was always, thenceforth, invested with the tragic
dignity of their hour of crime; and, furthermore, the keen and deep
insight, with which her love endowed her, enabled her to know him
far better than he could be known by ordinary observation. Beyond all
question, since she loved him so, there was a force in Donatello worthy
of her respect and love.

“You see my weakness,” said Miriam, flinging out her hands, as a person
does when a defect is acknowledged, and beyond remedy. “What I need,
now, is an opportunity to show my strength.”

“It has occurred to me,” Kenyon remarked, “that the time is come when
it may be desirable to remove Donatello from the complete seclusion in
which he buries himself. He has struggled long enough with one idea.
He now needs a variety of thought, which cannot be otherwise so readily
supplied to him, as through the medium of a variety of scenes. His mind
is awakened, now; his heart, though full of pain, is no longer benumbed.
They should have food and solace. If he linger here much longer, I fear
that he may sink back into a lethargy. The extreme excitability, which
circumstances have imparted to his moral system, has its dangers and
its advantages; it being one of the dangers, that an obdurate scar may
supervene upon its very tenderness. Solitude has done what it could for
him; now, for a while, let him be enticed into the outer world.”

“What is your plan, then?” asked Miriam.

“Simply,” replied Kenyon, “to persuade Donatello to be my companion in
a ramble among these hills and valleys. The little adventures and
vicissitudes of travel will do him infinite good. After his recent
profound experience, he will re-create the world by the new eyes with
which he will regard it. He will escape, I hope, out of a morbid life,
and find his way into a healthy one.”

“And what is to be my part in this process?” inquired Miriam sadly, and
not without jealousy. “You are taking him from me, and putting yourself,
and all manner of living interests, into the place which I ought to
fill!”

“It would rejoice me, Miriam, to yield the entire responsibility of this
office to yourself,” answered the sculptor. “I do not pretend to be
the guide and counsellor whom Donatello needs; for, to mention no
other obstacle, I am a man, and between man and man there is always an
insuperable gulf. They can never quite grasp each other’s hands; and
therefore man never derives any intimate help, any heart sustenance,
from his brother man, but from woman--his mother, his sister, or his
wife. Be Donatello’s friend at need, therefore, and most gladly will I
resign him!”

“It is not kind to taunt me thus,” said Miriam. “I have told you that I
cannot do what you suggest, because I dare not.”

“Well, then,” rejoined the sculptor, “see if there is any possibility of
adapting yourself to my scheme. The incidents of a journey often fling
people together in the oddest and therefore the most natural way.
Supposing you were to find yourself on the same route, a reunion with
Donatello might ensue, and Providence have a larger hand in it than
either of us.”

“It is not a hopeful plan,” said Miriam, shaking her head, after a
moment’s thought; “yet I will not reject it without a trial. Only in
case it fail, here is a resolution to which I bind myself, come what
come may! You know the bronze statue of Pope Julius in the great square
of Perugia? I remember standing in the shadow of that statue one sunny
noontime, and being impressed by its paternal aspect, and fancying that
a blessing fell upon me from its outstretched hand. Ever since, I have
had a superstition, you will call it foolish, but sad and ill-fated
persons always dream such things,--that, if I waited long enough in
that same spot, some good event would come to pass. Well, my friend,
precisely a fortnight after you begin your tour,--unless we sooner
meet,--bring Donatello, at noon, to the base of the statue. You will
find me there!”

Kenyon assented to the proposed arrangement, and, after some
conversation respecting his contemplated line of travel, prepared to
take his leave. As he met Miriam’s eyes, in bidding farewell, he was
surprised at the new, tender gladness that beamed out of them, and at
the appearance of health and bloom, which, in this little while, had
overspread her face.’

“May I tell you, Miriam,” said he, smiling, “that you are still as
beautiful as ever?”

“You have a right to notice it,” she replied, “for, if it be so, my
faded bloom has been revived by the hopes you give me. Do you, then,
think me beautiful? I rejoice, most truly. Beauty--if I possess
it--shall be one of the instruments by which I will try to educate and
elevate him, to whose good I solely dedicate myself.”

The sculptor had nearly reached the door, when, hearing her call him, he
turned back, and beheld Miriam still standing where he had left her, in
the magnificent hall which seemed only a fit setting for her beauty. She
beckoned him to return.

“You are a man of refined taste,” said she; “more than that,--a man of
delicate sensibility. Now tell me frankly, and on your honor! Have I not
shocked you many times during this interview by my betrayal of woman’s
cause, my lack of feminine modesty, my reckless, passionate, most
indecorous avowal, that I live only in the life of one who, perhaps,
scorns and shudders at me?”

Thus adjured, however difficult the point to which she brought him, the
sculptor was not a man to swerve aside from the simple truth.

“Miriam,” replied he, “you exaggerate the impression made upon my
mind; but it has been painful, and somewhat of the character which you
suppose.”

“I knew it,” said Miriam, mournfully, and with no resentment. “What
remains of my finer nature would have told me so, even if it had not
been perceptible in all your manner. Well, my dear friend, when you
go back to Rome, tell Hilda what her severity has done! She was all
womanhood to me; and when she cast me off, I had no longer any terms to
keep with the reserves and decorums of my sex. Hilda has set me free!
Pray tell her so, from Miriam, and thank her!”

“I shall tell Hilda nothing that will give her pain,” answered Kenyon.
“But, Miriam, though I know not what passed between her and yourself, I
feel,--and let the noble frankness of your disposition forgive me if
I say so,--I feel that she was right. You have a thousand admirable
qualities. Whatever mass of evil may have fallen into your life,
--pardon me, but your own words suggest it,--you are still as capable
as ever of many high and heroic virtues. But the white shining purity
of Hilda’s nature is a thing apart; and she is bound, by the undefiled
material of which God moulded her, to keep that severity which I, as
well as you, have recognized.”

“O, you are right!” said Miriam; “I never questioned it; though, as
I told you, when she cast me off, it severed some few remaining bonds
between me and decorous womanhood. But were there anything to forgive, I
do forgive her. May you win her virgin heart; for methinks there can
be few men in this evil world who are not more unworthy of her than
yourself.”



CHAPTER XXXII


SCENES BY THE WAY


When it came to the point of quitting the reposeful life of Monte Beni,
the sculptor was not without regrets, and would willingly have dreamed a
little longer of the sweet paradise on earth that Hilda’s presence
there might make. Nevertheless, amid all its repose, he had begun to be
sensible of a restless melancholy, to which the cultivators of the ideal
arts are more liable than sturdier men. On his own part, therefore, and
leaving Donatello out of the case, he would have judged it well to go.
He made parting visits to the legendary dell, and to other delightful
spots with which he had grown familiar; he climbed the tower again, and
saw a sunset and a moonrise over the great valley; he drank, on the
eve of his departure, one flask, and then another, of the Monte Beni
Sunshine, and stored up its flavor in his memory as the standard of what
is exquisite in wine. These things accomplished, Kenyon was ready for
the journey.

Donatello had not very easily been stirred out of the peculiar
sluggishness, which enthralls and bewitches melancholy people. He had
offered merely a passive resistance, however, not an active one, to his
friend’s schemes; and when the appointed hour came, he yielded to the
impulse which Kenyon failed not to apply; and was started upon the
journey before he had made up his mind to undertake it. They wandered
forth at large, like two knights-errant, among the valleys, and the
mountains, and the old mountain towns of that picturesque and
lovely region. Save to keep the appointment with Miriam, a fortnight
thereafter, in the great square of Perugia, there was nothing more
definite in the sculptor’s plan than that they should let themselves
be blown hither and thither like Winged seeds, that mount upon each
wandering breeze. Yet there was an idea of fatality implied in the
simile of the winged seeds which did not altogether suit Kenyon’s fancy;
for, if you look closely into the matter, it will be seen that whatever
appears most vagrant, and utterly purposeless, turns out, in the end,
to have been impelled the most surely on a preordained and unswerving
track. Chance and change love to deal with men’s settled plans, not with
their idle vagaries. If we desire unexpected and unimaginable events,
we should contrive an iron framework, such as we fancy may compel the
future to take one inevitable shape; then comes in the unexpected, and
shatters our design in fragments.

The travellers set forth on horseback, and purposed to perform much of
their aimless journeyings under the moon, and in the cool of the morning
or evening twilight; the midday sun, while summer had hardly begun to
trail its departing skirts over Tuscany, being still too fervid to allow
of noontide exposure.

For a while, they wandered in that same broad valley which Kenyon had
viewed with such delight from the Monte Beni tower. The sculptor soon
began to enjoy the idle activity of their new life, which the lapse of
a day or two sufficed to establish as a kind of system; it is so natural
for mankind to be nomadic, that a very little taste of that primitive
mode of existence subverts the settled habits of many preceding years.
Kenyon’s cares, and whatever gloomy ideas before possessed him, seemed
to be left at Monte Beni, and were scarcely remembered by the time
that its gray tower grew undistinguishable on the brown hillside. His
perceptive faculties, which had found little exercise of late, amid so
thoughtful a way of life, became keen, and kept his eyes busy with a
hundred agreeable scenes.

He delighted in the picturesque bits of rustic character and manners, so
little of which ever comes upon the surface of our life at home. There,
for example, were the old women, tending pigs or sheep by the wayside.
As they followed the vagrant steps of their charge, these venerable
ladies kept spinning yarn with that elsewhere forgotten contrivance,
the distaff; and so wrinkled and stern looking were they, that you might
have taken them for the Parcae, spinning the threads of human destiny.
In contrast with their great-grandmothers were the children, leading
goats of shaggy beard, tied by the horns, and letting them browse on
branch and shrub. It is the fashion of Italy to add the petty industry
of age and childhood to the hum of human toil. To the eyes of an
observer from the Western world, it was a strange spectacle to see
sturdy, sunburnt creatures, in petticoats, but otherwise manlike,
toiling side by side with male laborers, in the rudest work of the
fields. These sturdy women (if as such we must recognize them) wore the
high-crowned, broad brimmed hat of Tuscan straw, the customary female
head-apparel; and, as every breeze blew back its breadth of brim, the
sunshine constantly added depth to the brown glow of their cheeks. The
elder sisterhood, however, set off their witch-like ugliness to the
worst advantage with black felt hats, bequeathed them, one would fancy,
by their long-buried husbands.

Another ordinary sight, as sylvan as the above and more agreeable, was
a girl, bearing on her back a huge bundle of green twigs and shrubs,
or grass, intermixed with scarlet poppies and blue flowers; the verdant
burden being sometimes of such size as to hide the bearer’s figure, and
seem a self-moving mass of fragrant bloom and verdure. Oftener, however,
the bundle reached only halfway down the back of the rustic nymph,
leaving in sight her well-developed lower limbs, and the crooked knife,
hanging behind her, with which she had been reaping this strange
harvest sheaf. A pre-Raphaelite artist (he, for instance, who painted
so marvellously a wind-swept heap of autumnal leaves) might find an
admirable subject in one of these Tuscan girls, stepping with a free,
erect, and graceful carriage. The miscellaneous herbage and tangled
twigs and blossoms of her bundle, crowning her head (while her ruddy,
comely face looks out between the hanging side festoons like a
larger flower), would give the painter boundless scope for the minute
delineation which he loves.

Though mixed up with what was rude and earthlike, there was still a
remote, dreamlike, Arcadian charm, which is scarcely to be found in the
daily toil of other lands. Among the pleasant features of the wayside
were always the vines, clambering on fig-trees, or other sturdy trunks;
they wreathed themselves in huge and rich festoons from one tree to
another, suspending clusters of ripening grapes in the interval between.
Under such careless mode of culture, the luxuriant vine is a lovelier
spectacle than where it produces a more precious liquor, and is
therefore more artificially restrained and trimmed. Nothing can be
more picturesque than an old grapevine, with almost a trunk of its own,
clinging fast around its supporting tree. Nor does the picture lack its
moral. You might twist it to more than one grave purpose, as you saw how
the knotted, serpentine growth imprisoned within its strong embrace
the friend that had supported its tender infancy; and how (as seemingly
flexible natures are prone to do) it converted the sturdier tree
entirely to its own selfish ends, extending its innumerable arms on
every bough, and permitting hardly a leaf to sprout except its own. It
occurred to Kenyon, that the enemies of the vine, in his native land,
might here have seen an emblem of the remorseless gripe, which the habit
of vinous enjoyment lays upon its victim, possessing him wholly, and
letting him live no life but such as it bestows.

The scene was not less characteristic when their path led the two
wanderers through some small, ancient town. There, besides the
peculiarities of present life, they saw tokens of the life that had long
ago been lived and flung aside. The little town, such as we see in our
mind’s eye, would have its gate and its surrounding walls, so ancient
and massive that ages had not sufficed to crumble them away; but in the
lofty upper portion of the gateway, still standing over the empty arch,
where there was no longer a gate to shut, there would be a dove-cote,
and peaceful doves for the only warders. Pumpkins lay ripening in the
open chambers of the structure. Then, as for the town wall, on the
outside an orchard extends peacefully along its base, full, not of
apple-trees, but of those old humorists with gnarled trunks and twisted
boughs, the olives. Houses have been built upon the ramparts, or
burrowed out of their ponderous foundation. Even the gray, martial
towers, crowned with ruined turrets, have been converted into rustic
habitations, from the windows of which hang ears of Indian corn. At a
door, that has been broken through the massive stonework where it
was meant to be strongest, some contadini are winnowing grain. Small
windows, too, are pierced through the whole line of ancient wall, so
that it seems a row of dwellings with one continuous front, built in a
strange style of needless strength; but remnants of the old battlements
and machicolations are interspersed with the homely chambers and
earthen-tiled housetops; and all along its extent both grapevines and
running flower-shrubs are encouraged to clamber and sport over the
roughness of its decay.

Finally the long grass, intermixed with weeds and wild flowers, waves
on the uppermost height of the shattered rampart; and it is exceedingly
pleasant in the golden sunshine of the afternoon to behold the warlike
precinct so friendly in its old days, and so overgrown with rural
peace. In its guard rooms, its prison chambers, and scooped out of its
ponderous breadth, there are dwellings nowadays where happy human lives
are spent. Human parents and broods of children nestle in them, even as
the swallows nestle in the little crevices along the broken summit of
the wall.

Passing through the gateway of this same little town, challenged only
by those watchful sentinels, the pigeons, we find ourselves in a long,
narrow street, paved from side to side with flagstones, in the old Roman
fashion. Nothing can exceed the grim ugliness of the houses, most of
which are three or four stories high, stone built, gray, dilapidated, or
half-covered with plaster in patches, and contiguous all along from
end to end of the town. Nature, in the shape of tree, shrub, or grassy
sidewalk, is as much shut out from the one street of the rustic village
as from the heart of any swarming city. The dark and half ruinous
habitations, with their small windows, many of which are drearily closed
with wooden shutters, are but magnified hovels, piled story upon story,
and squalid with the grime that successive ages have left behind them.
It would be a hideous scene to contemplate in a rainy day, or when
no human life pervaded it. In the summer noon, however, it possesses
vivacity enough to keep itself cheerful; for all the within-doors of
the village then bubbles over upon the flagstones, or looks out from the
small windows, and from here and there a balcony. Some of the populace
are at the butcher’s shop; others are at the fountain, which gushes into
a marble basin that resembles an antique sarcophagus. A tailor is sewing
before his door with a young priest seated sociably beside him; a burly
friar goes by with an empty wine-barrel on his head; children are at
play; women, at their own doorsteps, mend clothes, embroider, weave hats
of Tuscan straw, or twirl the distaff. Many idlers, meanwhile, strolling
from one group to another, let the warm day slide by in the sweet,
interminable task of doing nothing.

From all these people there comes a babblement that seems quite
disproportioned to the number of tongues that make it. So many words are
not uttered in a New England village throughout the year--except it
be at a political canvass or town-meeting--as are spoken here, with no
especial purpose, in a single day. Neither so many words, nor so much
laughter; for people talk about nothing as if they were terribly
in earnest, and make merry at nothing as if it were the best of all
possible jokes. In so long a time as they have existed, and within such
narrow precincts, these little walled towns are brought into a closeness
of society that makes them but a larger household. All the inhabitants
are akin to each, and each to all; they assemble in the street as their
common saloon, and thus live and die in a familiarity of intercourse,
such as never can be known where a village is open at either end, and
all roundabout, and has ample room within itself.

Stuck up beside the door of one house, in this village street, is a
withered bough; and on a stone seat, just under the shadow of the
bough, sits a party of jolly drinkers, making proof of the new wine, or
quaffing the old, as their often-tried and comfortable friend. Kenyon
draws bridle here (for the bough, or bush, is a symbol of the wine-shop
at this day in Italy, as it was three hundred years ago in England), and
calls for a goblet of the deep, mild, purple juice, well diluted with
water from the fountain. The Sunshine of Monte Beni would be welcome
now. Meanwhile, Donatello has ridden onward, but alights where a shrine,
with a burning lamp before it, is built into the wall of an inn stable.
He kneels and crosses himself, and mutters a brief prayer, without
attracting notice from the passers-by, many of whom are parenthetically
devout in a similar fashion. By this time the sculptor has drunk off his
wine-and-water, and our two travellers resume their way, emerging from
the opposite gate of the village.

Before them, again, lies the broad valley, with a mist so thinly
scattered over it as to be perceptible only in the distance, and most so
in the nooks of the hills. Now that we have called it mist, it seems
a mistake not rather to have called it sunshine; the glory of so much
light being mingled with so little gloom, in the airy material of that
vapor. Be it mist or sunshine, it adds a touch of ideal beauty to the
scene, almost persuading the spectator that this valley and those hills
are visionary, because their visible atmosphere is so like the substance
of a dream.

Immediately about them, however, there were abundant tokens that the
country was not really the paradise it looked to be, at a casual glance.
Neither the wretched cottages nor the dreary farmhouses seemed to
partake of the prosperity, with which so kindly a climate, and so
fertile a portion of Mother Earth’s bosom, should have filled them, one
and all. But possibly the peasant inhabitants do not exist in so grimy
a poverty, and in homes so comfortless, as a stranger, with his native
ideas of those matters, would be likely to imagine. The Italians appear
to possess none of that emulative pride which we see in our New England
villages, where every householder, according to his taste and
means, endeavors to make his homestead an ornament to the grassy
and elm-shadowed wayside. In Italy there are no neat doorsteps
and thresholds; no pleasant, vine-sheltered porches; none of those
grass-plots or smoothly shorn lawns, which hospitably invite the
imagination into the sweet domestic interiors of English life.
Everything, however sunny and luxuriant may be the scene around, is
especially disheartening in the immediate neighborhood of an Italian
home.

An artist, it is true, might often thank his stars for those old houses,
so picturesquely time-stained, and with the plaster falling in blotches
from the ancient brick-work. The prison-like, iron-barred windows, and
the wide arched, dismal entrance, admitting on one hand to the stable,
on the other to the kitchen, might impress him as far better worth
his pencil than the newly painted pine boxes, in which--if he be an
American--his countrymen live and thrive. But there is reason to suspect
that a people are waning to decay and ruin the moment that their life
becomes fascinating either in the poet’s imagination or the painter’s
eye.

As usual on Italian waysides, the wanderers passed great, black crosses,
hung with all the instruments of the sacred agony and passion: there
were the crown of thorns, the hammer and nails, the pincers, the spear,
the sponge; and perched over the whole, the cock that crowed to St.
Peter’s remorseful conscience. Thus, while the fertile scene showed the
never-failing beneficence of the Creator towards man in his transitory
state, these symbols reminded each wayfarer of the Saviour’s infinitely
greater love for him as an immortal spirit. Beholding these consecrated
stations, the idea seemed to strike Donatello of converting the
otherwise aimless journey into a penitential pilgrimage. At each of them
he alighted to kneel and kiss the cross, and humbly press his forehead
against its foot; and this so invariably, that the sculptor soon learned
to draw bridle of his own accord. It may be, too, heretic as he was,
that Kenyon likewise put up a prayer, rendered more fervent by the
symbols before his eyes, for the peace of his friend’s conscience and
the pardon of the sin that so oppressed him.

Not only at the crosses did Donatello kneel, but at each of the many
shrines, where the Blessed Virgin in fresco--faded with sunshine and
half washed out with showers--looked benignly at her worshipper; or
where she was represented in a wooden image, or a bas-relief of plaster
or marble, as accorded with the means of the devout person who built,
or restored from a mediaeval antiquity, these places of wayside worship.
They were everywhere: under arched niches, or in little penthouses with
a brick tiled roof just large enough to shelter them; or perhaps in
some bit of old Roman masonry, the founders of which had died before the
Advent; or in the wall of a country inn or farmhouse; or at the midway
point of a bridge; or in the shallow cavity of a natural rock; or high
upward in the deep cuts of the road. It appeared to the sculptor that
Donatello prayed the more earnestly and the more hopefully at these
shrines, because the mild face of the Madonna promised him to intercede
as a tender mother betwixt the poor culprit and the awfulness of
judgment.

It was beautiful to observe, indeed, how tender was the soul of man and
woman towards the Virgin mother, in recognition of the tenderness which,
as their faith taught them, she immortally cherishes towards all human
souls. In the wire-work screen ‘before each shrine hung offerings of
roses, or whatever flower was sweetest and most seasonable; some already
wilted and withered, some fresh with that very morning’s dewdrops.
Flowers there were, too, that, being artificial, never bloomed on earth,
nor would ever fade. The thought occurred to Kenyon, that flower-pots
with living plants might be set within the niches, or even that
rose-trees, and all kinds of flowering shrubs, might be reared under the
shrines, and taught to twine and wreathe themselves around; so that
the Virgin should dwell within a bower of verdure, bloom, and fragrant
freshness, symbolizing a homage perpetually new. There are many things
in the religious customs of these people that seem good; many things,
at least, that might be both good and beautiful, if the soul of goodness
and the sense of beauty were as much alive in the Italians now as they
must have been when those customs were first imagined and adopted. But,
instead of blossoms on the shrub, or freshly gathered, with the dewdrops
on their leaves, their worship, nowadays, is best symbolized by the
artificial flower.

The sculptor fancied, moreover (but perhaps it was his heresy that
suggested the idea), that it would be of happy influence to place a
comfortable and shady seat beneath every wayside shrine. Then the weary
and sun-scorched traveller, while resting himself under her protecting
shadow, might thank the Virgin for her hospitality. Nor, perchance,
were he to regale himself, even in such a consecrated spot, with the
fragrance of a pipe, would it rise to heaven more offensively than
the smoke of priestly incense. We do ourselves wrong, and too meanly
estimate the Holiness above us, when we deem that any act or enjoyment,
good in itself, is not good to do religiously.

Whatever may be the iniquities of the papal system, it was a wise and
lovely sentiment that set up the frequent shrine and cross along the
roadside. No wayfarer, bent on whatever worldly errand, can fail to be
reminded, at every mile or two, that this is not the business which
most concerns him. The pleasure-seeker is silently admonished to look
heavenward for a joy infinitely greater than he now possesses. The
wretch in temptation beholds the cross, and is warned that, if he yield,
the Saviour’s agony for his sake will have been endured in vain. The
stubborn criminal, whose heart has long been like a stone, feels it
throb anew with dread and hope; and our poor Donatello, as he went
kneeling from shrine to cross, and from cross to shrine, doubtless found
an efficacy in these symbols that helped him towards a higher penitence.

Whether the young Count of Monte Beni noticed the fact, or no, there was
more than one incident of their journey that led Kenyon to believe that
they were attended, or closely followed, or preceded, near at hand, by
some one who took an interest in their motions. As it were, the
step, the sweeping garment, the faintly heard breath, of an invisible
companion, was beside them, as they went on their way. It was like a
dream that had strayed out of their slumber, and was haunting them in
the daytime, when its shadowy substance could have neither density nor
outline, in the too obtrusive light. After sunset, it grew a little more
distinct.

“On the left of that last shrine,” asked the sculptor, as they rode,
under the moon, “did you observe the figure of a woman kneeling, with
her, face hidden in her hands?”

“I never looked that way,” replied Donatello. “I was saying my own
prayer. It was some penitent, perchance. May the Blessed Virgin be the
more gracious to the poor soul, because she is a woman.”



CHAPTER XXXIII


PICTURED WINDOWS


After wide wanderings through the valley, the two travellers directed
their course towards its boundary of hills. Here, the natural scenery
and men’s modifications of it immediately took a different aspect from
that of the fertile and smiling plain. Not unfrequently there was a
convent on the hillside; or, on some insulated promontory, a mined
castle, once the den of a robber chieftain, who was accustomed to dash
down from his commanding height upon the road that wound below. For ages
back, the old fortress had been flinging down its crumbling ramparts,
stone by stone, towards the grimy village at its foot.

Their road wound onward among the hills, which rose steep and lofty from
the scanty level space that lay between them. They continually thrust
their great bulks before the wayfarers, as if grimly resolute to forbid
their passage, or closed abruptly behind them, when they still dared to
proceed. A gigantic hill would set its foot right down before them, and
only at the last moment would grudgingly withdraw it, just far enough to
let them creep towards another obstacle. Adown these rough heights were
visible the dry tracks of many a mountain torrent that had lived a life
too fierce and passionate to be a long one. Or, perhaps, a stream was
yet hurrying shyly along the edge of a far wider bed of pebbles and
shelving rock than it seemed to need, though not too wide for the
swollen rage of which this shy rivulet was capable. A stone bridge
bestrode it, the ponderous arches of which were upheld and rendered
indestructible by the weight of the very stones that threatened to crush
them down. Old Roman toil was perceptible in the foundations of that
massive bridge; the first weight that it ever bore was that of an army
of the Republic.

Threading these defiles, they would arrive at some immemorial city,
crowning the high summit of a hill with its cathedral, its many
churches, and public edifices, all of Gothic architecture. With no more
level ground than a single piazza in the midst, the ancient town tumbled
its crooked and narrow streets down the mountainside, through arched
passages and by steps of stone. The aspect of everything was awfully
old; older, indeed, in its effect on the imagination than Rome itself,
because history does not lay its finger on these forgotten edifices and
tell us all about their origin. Etruscan princes may have dwelt in them.
A thousand years, at all events, would seem but a middle age for these
structures. They are built of such huge, square stones, that their
appearance of ponderous durability distresses the beholder with the idea
that they can never fall,--never crumble away,--never be less fit than
now for human habitation. Many of them may once have been palaces, and
still retain a squalid grandeur. But, gazing at them, we recognize how
undesirable it is to build the tabernacle of our brief lifetime out of
permanent materials, and with a view to their being occupied by future
‘generations.

All towns should be made capable of purification by fire, or of decay,
within each half-century. Otherwise, they become the hereditary haunts
of vermin and noisomeness, besides standing apart from the possibility
of such improvements as are constantly introduced into the rest of
man’s contrivances and accommodations. It is beautiful, no doubt, and
exceedingly satisfactory to some of our natural instincts, to imagine
our far posterity dwelling under the same roof-tree as ourselves. Still,
when people insist on building indestructible houses, they incur, or
their children do, a misfortune analogous to that of the Sibyl, when
she obtained the grievous boon of immortality. So we may build almost
immortal habitations, it is true; but we cannot keep them from growing
old, musty, unwholesome, dreary,--full of death scents, ghosts, and
murder stains; in short, such habitations as one sees everywhere in
Italy, be they hovels or palaces.

“You should go with me to my native country,” observed the sculptor to
Donatello. “In that fortunate land, each generation has only its own
sins and sorrows to bear. Here, it seems as if all the weary and dreary
Past were piled upon the back of the Present. If I were to lose my
spirits in this country,--if I were to suffer any heavy misfortune
here,--methinks it would be impossible to stand up against it, under
such adverse influences.”

“The sky itself is an old roof, now,” answered the Count; “and, no
doubt, the sins of mankind have made it gloomier than it used to be.”
 “O, my poor Faun,” thought Kenyon to himself, “how art thou changed!”

A city, like this of which we speak, seems a sort of stony growth out
of the hillside, or a fossilized town; so ancient and strange it looks,
without enough of life and juiciness in it to be any longer susceptible
of decay. An earthquake would afford it the only chance of being ruined,
beyond its present ruin.

Yet, though dead to all the purposes for which we live to-day, the place
has its glorious recollections, and not merely rude and warlike ones,
but those of brighter and milder triumphs, the fruits of which we still
enjoy. Italy can count several of these lifeless towns which, four or
five hundred years ago, were each the birthplace of its own school of
art; nor have they yet forgotten to be proud of the dark old pictures,
and the faded frescos, the pristine beauty of which was a light and
gladness to the world. But now, unless one happens to be a painter,
these famous works make us miserably desperate. They are poor, dim
ghosts of what, when Giotto or Cimabue first created them, threw a
splendor along the stately aisles; so far gone towards nothingness,
in our day, that scarcely a hint of design or expression can glimmer
through the dusk. Those early artists did well to paint their frescos.
Glowing on the church-walls, they might be looked upon as symbols of the
living spirit that made Catholicism a true religion, and that glorified
it as long as it retained a genuine life; they filled the transepts with
a radiant throng of saints and angels, and threw around the high altar
a faint reflection--as much as mortals could see, or bear--of a Diviner
Presence. But now that the colors are so wretchedly bedimmed,--now that
blotches of plastered wall dot the frescos all over, like a mean reality
thrusting itself through life’s brightest illusions,--the next best
artist to Cimabue or Giotto or Ghirlandaio or Pinturicchio will be he
that shall reverently cover their ruined masterpieces with whitewash!

Kenyon, however, being an earnest student and critic of Art, lingered
long before these pathetic relics; and Donatello, in his present phase
of penitence, thought no time spent amiss while he could be kneeling
before an altar. Whenever they found a cathedral, therefore, or a Gothic
church, the two travellers were of one mind to enter it. In some of
these holy edifices they saw pictures that time had not dimmed nor
injured in the least, though they perhaps belonged to as old a school
of Art as any that were perishing around them. These were the painted
windows; and as often as he gazed at them the sculptor blessed the
medieval time, and its gorgeous contrivances of splendor; for surely the
skill of man has never accomplished, nor his mind imagined, any other
beauty or glory worthy to be compared with these.

It is the special excellence of pictured glass, that the light, which
falls merely on the outside of other pictures, is here interfused
throughout the work; it illuminates the design, and invests it with
a living radiance; and in requital the unfading colors transmute the
common daylight into a miracle of richness and glory in its passage
through the heavenly substance of the blessed and angelic shapes which
throng the high-arched window.

“It is a woeful thing,” cried Kenyon, while one of these frail yet
enduring and fadeless pictures threw its hues on his face, and on the
pavement of the church around him,--“a sad necessity that any Christian
soul should pass from earth without once seeing an antique painted
window, with the bright Italian sunshine glowing through it! There is
no other such true symbol of the glories of the better world, where
a celestial radiance will be inherent in all things and persons, and
render each continually transparent to the sight of all.”

“But what a horror it would be,” said Donatello sadly, “if there were a
soul among them through which the light could not be transfused!”

“Yes; and perhaps this is to be the punishment of sin,” replied the
sculptor; “not that it shall be made evident to the universe, which can
profit nothing by such knowledge, but that it shall insulate the sinner
from all sweet society by rendering him impermeable to light, and,
therefore, unrecognizable in the abode of heavenly simplicity and truth.
Then, what remains for him, but the dreariness of infinite and eternal
solitude?”

“That would be a horrible destiny, indeed!” said Donatello.

His voice as he spoke the words had a hollow and dreary cadence, as if
he anticipated some such frozen solitude for himself. A figure in a dark
robe was lurking in the obscurity of a side chapel close by, and made an
impulsive movement forward, but hesitated as Donatello spoke again.

“But there might be a more miserable torture than to be solitary
forever,” said he. “Think of having a single companion in eternity, and
instead of finding any consolation, or at all events variety of torture,
to see your own weary, weary sin repeated in that inseparable soul.”

“I think, my dear Count, you have never read Dante,” observed Kenyon.
“That idea is somewhat in his style, but I cannot help regretting that
it came into your mind just then.”

The dark-robed figure had shrunk back, and was quite lost to sight among
the shadows of the chapel.

“There was an English poet,” resumed Kenyon, turning again towards the
window, “who speaks of the ‘dim, religious light,’ transmitted through
painted glass. I always admired this richly descriptive phrase; but,
though he was once in Italy, I question whether Milton ever saw any
but the dingy pictures in the dusty windows of English cathedrals,
imperfectly shown by the gray English daylight. He would else have
illuminated that word ‘dim’ with some epithet that should not chase
away the dimness, yet should make it glow like a million of rubies,
sapphires, emeralds, and topazes. Is it not so with yonder window? The
pictures are most brilliant in themselves, yet dim with tenderness and
reverence, because God himself is shining through them.”

“The pictures fill me with emotion, but not such as you seem to
experience,” said Donatello. “I tremble at those awful saints; and, most
of all, at the figure above them. He glows with Divine wrath!”

“My dear friend,” said Kenyon, “how strangely your eyes have transmuted
the expression of the figure! It is divine love, not wrath!”

“To my eyes,” said Donatello stubbornly, “it is wrath, not love! Each
must interpret for himself.”

The friends left the church, and looking up, from the exterior, at
the window which they had just been contemplating within, nothing; was
visible but the merest outline of dusky shapes, Neither the individual
likeness of saint, angel, nor Saviour, and far less the combined scheme
and purport of the picture, could anywise be made out. That miracle of
radiant art, thus viewed, was nothing better than an incomprehensible
obscurity, without a gleam of beauty to induce the beholder to attempt
unravelling it.

“All this,” thought the sculptor, “is a most forcible emblem of the
different aspect of religious truth and sacred story, as viewed from the
warm interior of belief, or from its cold and dreary outside. Christian
faith is a grand cathedral, with divinely pictured windows. Standing
without, you see no glory, nor can possibly imagine any; standing
within, every ray of light reveals a harmony of unspeakable splendors.”

After Kenyon and Donatello emerged from the church, however, they had
better opportunity for acts of charity and mercy than for religious
contemplation; being immediately surrounded by a swarm of beggars, who
are the present possessors of Italy, and share the spoil of the stranger
with the fleas and mosquitoes, their formidable allies. These pests--the
human ones--had hunted the two travellers at every stage of their
journey. From village to village, ragged boys and girls kept almost
under the horses’ feet; hoary grandsires and grandames caught glimpses
of their approach, and hobbled to intercept them at some point of
vantage; blind men stared them out of countenance with their sightless
orbs; women held up their unwashed babies; cripples displayed their
wooden legs, their grievous scars, their dangling, boneless arms, their
broken backs, their burden of a hump, or whatever infirmity or deformity
Providence had assigned them for an inheritance. On the highest mountain
summit--in the most shadowy ravine--there was a beggar waiting for them.
In one small village, Kenyon had the curiosity to count merely how many
children were crying, whining, and bellowing all at once for alms. They
proved to be more than forty of as ragged and dirty little imps as any
in the world; besides whom, all the wrinkled matrons, and most of the
village maids, and not a few stalwart men, held out their hands grimly,
piteously, or smilingly in the forlorn hope of whatever trifle of
coin might remain in pockets already so fearfully taxed. Had they
been permitted, they would gladly have knelt down and worshipped the
travellers, and have cursed them, without rising from their knees, if
the expected boon failed to be awarded.

Yet they were not so miserably poor but that the grown people kept
houses over their heads.

In the way of food, they had, at least, vegetables in their little
gardens, pigs and chickens to kill, eggs to fry into omelets with oil,
wine to drink, and many other things to make life comfortable. As for
the children, when no more small coin appeared to be forthcoming, they
began to laugh and play, and turn heels over head, showing themselves
jolly and vivacious brats, and evidently as well fed as needs be. The
truth is, the Italian peasantry look upon strangers as the almoners of
Providence, and therefore feel no more shame in asking and receiving
alms, than in availing themselves of providential bounties in whatever
other form.

In accordance with his nature, Donatello was always exceedingly
charitable to these ragged battalions, and appeared to derive a certain
consolation from the prayers which many of them put up in his behalf. In
Italy a copper coin of minute value will often make all the difference
between a vindictive curse--death by apoplexy being the favorite
one-mumbled in an old witch’s toothless jaws, and a prayer from the same
lips, so earnest that it would seem to reward the charitable soul with
at least a puff of grateful breath to help him heavenward. Good wishes
being so cheap, though possibly not very efficacious, and anathemas so
exceedingly bitter,--even if the greater portion of their poison remain
in the mouth that utters them,--it may be wise to expend some reasonable
amount in the purchase of the former. Donatello invariably did so; and
as he distributed his alms under the pictured window, of which we have
been speaking, no less than seven ancient women lifted their hands and
besought blessings on his head.

“Come,” said the sculptor, rejoicing at the happier expression which he
saw in his friend’s face. “I think your steed will not stumble with you
to-day. Each of these old dames looks as much like Horace’s Atra Cura
as can well be conceived; but, though there are seven of them, they will
make your burden on horseback lighter instead of heavier.”

“Are we to ride far?” asked the Count.

“A tolerable journey betwixt now and to-morrow noon,” Kenyon replied;
“for, at that hour, I purpose to be standing by the Pope’s statue in the
great square of Perugia.”



CHAPTER XXXIV


MARKET DAY IN PERUGIA


Perugia, on its lofty hilltop, was reached by the two travellers before
the sun had quite kissed away the early freshness of the morning. Since
midnight, there had been a heavy, rain, bringing infinite refreshment to
the scene of verdure and fertility amid which this ancient civilization
stands; insomuch that Kenyon loitered, when they came to the gray city
wall, and was loath to give up the prospect of the sunny wilderness that
lay below. It was as green as England, and bright as Italy alone. There
was all the wide valley, sweeping down and spreading away on all sides
from the weed grown ramparts, and bounded afar by mountains, which lay
asleep in the sun, with thin mists and silvery clouds floating about
their heads by way of morning dreams.

“It lacks still two hours of noon,” said the sculptor to his friend, as
they stood under the arch of the gateway, waiting for their passports
to be examined; “will you come with me to see some admirable frescos by
Perugino? There is a hall in the Exchange, of no great magnitude, but
covered with what must have been--at the time it was painted--such
magnificence and beauty as the world had not elsewhere to show.”

“It depresses me to look at old frescos,” responded the Count; “it is a
pain, yet not enough of a pain to answer as a penance.”

“Will you look at some pictures by Fra Angelico in the Church of San
Domenico?” asked Kenyon; “they are full of religious sincerity, When
one studies them faithfully, it is like holding a conversation about
heavenly things with a tender and devout-minded man.”

“You have shown me some of Fra Angelico’s pictures, I remember,”
 answered Donatello; “his angels look as if they had never taken a flight
out of heaven; and his saints seem to have been born saints, and always
to have lived so. Young maidens, and all innocent persons, I doubt not,
may find great delight and profit in looking at such holy pictures. But
they are not for me.”

“Your criticism, I fancy, has great moral depth,” replied Kenyon; “and
I see in it the reason why Hilda so highly appreciates Fra Angelico’s
pictures. Well; we will let all such matters pass for to-day, and stroll
about this fine old city till noon.”

They wandered to and fro, accordingly, and lost themselves among the
strange, precipitate passages, which, in Perugia, are called streets,
Some of them are like caverns, being arched all over, and plunging down
abruptly towards an unknown darkness; which, when you have fathomed
its depths, admits you to a daylight that you scarcely hoped to behold
again. Here they met shabby men, and the careworn wives and mothers
of the people, some of whom guided children in leading strings through
those dim and antique thoroughfares, where a hundred generations had
passed before the little feet of to-day began to tread them. Thence they
climbed upward again, and came to the level plateau, on the summit of
the hill, where are situated the grand piazza and the principal public
edifices.

It happened to be market day in Perugia. The great square, therefore,
presented a far more vivacious spectacle than would have been witnessed
in it at any other time of the week, though not so lively as to overcome
the gray solemnity of the architectural portion of the scene. In the
shadow of the cathedral and other old Gothic structures--seeking shelter
from the sunshine that fell across the rest of the piazza--was a crowd
of people, engaged as buyers or sellers in the petty traffic of a
country fair. Dealers had erected booths and stalls on the pavement,
and overspread them with scanty awnings, beneath which they stood,
vociferously crying their merchandise; such as shoes, hats and caps,
yarn stockings, cheap jewelry and cutlery, books, chiefly little volumes
of a religious Character, and a few French novels; toys, tinware,
old iron, cloth, rosaries of beads, crucifixes, cakes, biscuits,
sugar-plums, and innumerable little odds and ends, which we see no
object in advertising. Baskets of grapes, figs, and pears stood on the
ground. Donkeys, bearing panniers stuffed out with kitchen vegetables,
and requiring an ample roadway, roughly shouldered aside the throng.

Crowded as the square was, a juggler found room to spread out a white
cloth upon the pavement, and cover it with cups, plates, balls, cards,
w the whole material of his magic, in short,--wherewith he proceeded to
work miracles under the noonday sun. An organ grinder at one point, and
a clarion and a flute at another, accomplished what their could towards
filling the wide space with tuneful noise, Their small uproar,
however, was nearly drowned by the multitudinous voices of the people,
bargaining, quarrelling, laughing, and babbling copiously at random;
for the briskness of the mountain atmosphere, or some other cause, made
everybody so loquacious, that more words were wasted in Perugia on this
one market day, than the noisiest piazza of Rome would utter in a month.

Through all this petty tumult, which kept beguiling one’s eyes and upper
strata of thought, it was delightful to catch glimpses of the grand
old architecture that stood around the square. The life of the
flitting moment, existing in the antique shell of an age gone by, has a
fascination which we do not find in either the past or present, taken by
themselves. It might seem irreverent to make the gray cathedral and
the tall, time-worn palaces echo back the exuberant vociferation of the
market; but they did so, and caused the sound to assume a kind of
poetic rhythm, and themselves looked only the more majestic for their
condescension.

On one side, there was an immense edifice devoted to public purposes,
with an antique gallery, and a range of arched and stone-mullioned
windows, running along its front; and by way of entrance it had a
central Gothic arch, elaborately wreathed around with sculptured
semicircles, within which the spectator was aware of a stately and
impressive gloom. Though merely the municipal council-house and exchange
of a decayed country town, this structure was worthy to have held in
one portion of it the parliament hall of a nation, and in the other, the
state apartments of its ruler. On another side of the square rose the
mediaeval front of the cathedral, where the imagination of a Gothic
architect had long ago flowered out indestructibly, in the first place,
a grand design, and then covering it with such abundant detail of
ornament, that the magnitude of the work seemed less a miracle than its
minuteness. You would suppose that he must have softened the stone
into wax, until his most delicate fancies were modelled in the pliant
material, and then had hardened it into stone again. The whole was a
vast, black-letter page of the richest and quaintest poetry. In fit
keeping with all this old magnificence was a great marble fountain,
where again the Gothic imagination showed its overflow and gratuity of
device in the manifold sculptures which it lavished as freely as the
water did its shifting shapes.

Besides the two venerable structures which we have described, there were
lofty palaces, perhaps of as old a date, rising story above Story, and
adorned with balconies, whence, hundreds of years ago, the princely
occupants had been accustomed to gaze down at the sports, business, and
popular assemblages of the piazza. And, beyond all question, they thus
witnessed the erection of a bronze statue, which, three centuries since,
was placed on the pedestal that it still occupies.

“I never come to Perugia,” said Kenyon, “without spending as much time
as I can spare in studying yonder statue of Pope Julius the Third. Those
sculptors of the Middle Age have fitter lessons for the professors of
my art than we can find in the Grecian masterpieces. They belong to our
Christian civilization; and, being earnest works, they always express
something which we do not get from the antique. Will you look at it?”

“Willingly,” replied the Count, “for I see, even so far off, that the
statue is bestowing a benediction, and there is a feeling in my heart
that I may be permitted to share it.”

Remembering the similar idea which Miriam a short time before had
expressed, the sculptor smiled hopefully at the coincidence. They made
their way through the throng of the market place, and approached close
to the iron railing that protected the pedestal of the statue.

It was the figure of a pope, arrayed in his pontifical robes, and
crowned with the tiara. He sat in a bronze chair, elevated high above
the pavement, and seemed to take kindly yet authoritative cognizance
of the busy scene which was at that moment passing before his eye. His
right hand was raised and spread abroad, as if in the act of shedding
forth a benediction, which every man--so broad, so wise, and so serenely
affectionate was the bronze pope’s regard--might hope to feel quietly
descending upon the need, or the distress, that he had closest at his
heart. The statue had life and observation in it, as well as patriarchal
majesty. An imaginative spectator could not but be impressed with
the idea that this benignly awful representative of divine and human
authority might rise from his brazen chair, should any great public
exigency demand his interposition, and encourage or restrain the people
by his gesture, or even by prophetic utterances worthy of so grand a
presence.

And in the long, calm intervals, amid the quiet lapse of ages, the
pontiff watched the daily turmoil around his seat, listening with
majestic patience to the market cries, and all the petty uproar that
awoke the echoes of the stately old piazza. He was the enduring friend
of these men, and of their forefathers and children, the familiar face
of generations.

“The pope’s blessing, methinks, has fallen upon you,” observed the
sculptor, looking at his friend.

In truth, Donatello’s countenance indicated a healthier spirit than
while he was brooding in his melancholy tower. The change of scene, the
breaking up of custom, the fresh flow of incidents, the sense of being
homeless, and therefore free, had done something for our poor Faun;
these circumstances had at least promoted a reaction, which might else
have been slower in its progress. Then, no doubt, the bright day, the
gay spectacle of the market place, and the sympathetic exhilaration
of so many people’s cheerfulness, had each their suitable effect on a
temper naturally prone to be glad. Perhaps, too, he was magnetically
conscious of a presence that formerly sufficed to make him happy. Be the
cause what it might, Donatello’s eyes shone with a serene and hopeful
expression while looking upward at the bronze pope, to whose widely
diffused blessing, it may be, he attributed all this good influence.

“Yes, my dear friend,” said he, in reply to the sculptor’s remark, “I
feel the blessing upon my spirit.”

“It is wonderful,” said Kenyon, with a smile, “wonderful and delightful
to think how long a good man’s beneficence may be potent, even after his
death. How great, then, must have been the efficacy of this excellent
pontiff’s blessing while he was alive!”

“I have heard,” remarked the Count, “that there was a brazen image set
up in the wilderness, the sight of which healed the Israelites of their
poisonous and rankling wounds. If it be the Blessed Virgin’s pleasure,
why should not this holy image before us do me equal good? A wound has
long been rankling in my soul, and filling it with poison.”

“I did wrong to smile,” answered Kenyon. “It is not for me to limit
Providence in its operations on man’s spirit.”

While they stood talking, the clock in the neighboring cathedral told
the hour, with twelve reverberating strokes, which it flung down upon
the crowded market place, as if warning one and all to take advantage
of the bronze pontiff’s benediction, or of Heaven’s blessing, however
proffered, before the opportunity were lost.

“High noon,” said the sculptor. “It is Miriam’s hour!”



CHAPTER XXXV


THE BRONZE PONTIFF’S BENEDICTION


When the last of the twelve strokes had fallen from the cathedral clock,
Kenyon threw his eyes over the busy scene of the market place, expecting
to discern Miriam somewhere in the ‘crowd. He looked next towards the
cathedral itself, where it was reasonable to imagine that she might have
taken shelter, while awaiting her appointed time. Seeing no trace of
her in either direction, his eyes came back from their quest somewhat
disappointed, and rested on a figure which was leaning, like Donatello
and himself, on the iron balustrade that surrounded the statue. Only a
moment before, they two had been alone.

It was the figure of a woman, with her head bowed on her hands, as if
she deeply felt--what we have been endeavoring to convey into our feeble
description--the benign and awe-inspiring influence which the pontiff’s
statue exercises upon a sensitive spectator. No matter though it were
modelled for a Catholic chief priest, the desolate heart, whatever be
its religion, recognizes in that image the likeness of a father.

“Miriam,” said the sculptor, with a tremor in his voice, “is it
yourself?”

“It is I,” she replied; “I am faithful to my engagement, though with
many fears.” She lifted her head, and revealed to Kenyon--revealed to
Donatello likewise--the well-remembered features of Miriam. They were
pale and worn, but distinguished even now, though less gorgeously, by
a beauty that might be imagined bright enough to glimmer with its own
light in a dim cathedral aisle, and had no need to shrink from the
severer test of the mid-day sun. But she seemed tremulous, and hardly
able to go through with a scene which at a distance she had found
courage to undertake.

“You are most welcome, Miriam!” said the sculptor, seeking to afford
her the encouragement which he saw she so greatly required. “I have
a hopeful trust that the result of this interview will be propitious.
Come; let me lead you to Donatello.”

“No, Kenyon, no!” whispered Miriam, shrinking back; “unless of his own
accord he speaks my name,--unless he bids me stay,--no word shall ever
pass between him and me. It is not that I take upon me to be proud at
this late hour. Among other feminine qualities, I threw away my pride
when Hilda cast me off.”

“If not pride, what else restrains you?” Kenyon asked, a little angry at
her unseasonable scruples, and also at this half-complaining reference
to Hilda’s just severity. “After daring so much, it is no time for fear!
If we let him part from you without a word, your opportunity of doing
him inestimable good is lost forever.”

“True; it will be lost forever!” repeated Miriam sadly. “But, dear
friend, will it be my fault? I willingly fling my woman’s pride at his
feet. But--do you not see?--his heart must be left freely to its own
decision whether to recognize me, because on his voluntary choice
depends the whole question whether my devotion will do him good or
harm. Except he feel an infinite need of me, I am a burden and fatal
obstruction to him!”

“Take your own course, then, Miriam,” said Kenyon; “and, doubtless,
the crisis being what it is, your spirit is better instructed for its
emergencies than mine.”

While the foregoing words passed between them they had withdrawn a
little from the immediate vicinity of the statue, so as to be out of
Donatello’s hearing. Still, however, they were beneath the pontiff’s
outstretched hand; and Miriam, with her beauty and her sorrow, looked up
into his benignant face, as if she had come thither for his pardon and
paternal affection, and despaired of so vast a boon.

Meanwhile, she had not stood thus long in the public square of Perugia,
without attracting the observation of many eyes. With their quick sense
of beauty, these Italians had recognized her loveliness, and spared not
to take their fill of gazing at it; though their native gentleness and
courtesy made their homage far less obtrusive than that of Germans,
French, or Anglo-Saxons might have been. It is not improbable that
Miriam had planned this momentous interview, on so public a spot and at
high noon, with an eye to the sort of protection that would be thrown
over it by a multitude of eye-witnesses. In circumstances of profound
feeling and passion, there is often a sense that too great a seclusion
cannot be endured; there is an indefinite dread of being quite alone
with the object of our deepest interest. The species of solitude that
a crowd harbors within itself is felt to be preferable, in certain
conditions of the heart, to the remoteness of a desert or the depths
of an untrodden wood. Hatred, love, or whatever kind of too
intense emotion, or even indifference, where emotion has once been,
instinctively seeks to interpose some barrier between itself and the
corresponding passion in another breast. This, we suspect, was what
Miriam had thought of, in coming to the thronged piazza; partly this,
and partly, as she said, her superstition that the benign statue held
good influences in store.

But Donatello remained leaning against the balustrade. She dared not
glance towards him, to see whether he were pale and agitated, or calm as
ice. Only, she knew that the moments were fleetly lapsing away, and that
his heart must call her soon, or the voice would never reach her. She
turned quite away from him and spoke again to the sculptor.

“I have wished to meet you,” said she, “for more than one reason. News
has come to me respecting a dear friend of ours. Nay, not of mine! I
dare not call her a friend of mine, though once the dearest.”

“Do you speak of Hilda?” exclaimed Kenyon, with quick alarm. “Has
anything befallen her? When I last heard of her, she was still in Rome,
and well.”

“Hilda remains in Rome,” replied Miriam, “nor is she ill as regards
physical health, though much depressed in spirits. She lives quite alone
in her dove-cote; not a friend near her, not one in Rome, which, you
know, is deserted by all but its native inhabitants. I fear for her
health, if she continue long in such solitude, with despondency preying
on her mind. I tell you this, knowing the interest which the rare beauty
of her character has awakened in you.”

“I will go to Rome!” said the sculptor, in great emotion. “Hilda has
never allowed me to manifest more than a friendly regard; but, at least,
she cannot prevent my watching over her at a humble distance. I will set
out this very hour.”

“Do not leave us now!” whispered Miriam imploringly, and laying her hand
on his arm. “One moment more! Ah; he has no word for me!”

“Miriam!” said Donatello.

Though but a single word, and the first that he had spoken, its tone was
a warrant of the sad and tender depth from which it came. It told Miriam
things of infinite importance, and, first of all, that he still loved
her. The sense of their mutual crime had stunned, but not destroyed, the
vitality of his affection; it was therefore indestructible. That tone,
too, bespoke an altered and deepened character; it told of a vivified
intellect, and of spiritual instruction that had come through sorrow and
remorse; so that instead of the wild boy, the thing of sportive,
animal nature, the sylvan Faun, here was now the man of feeling and
intelligence.

She turned towards him, while his voice still reverberated in the depths
of her soul.

“You have called me!” said she.

“Because my deepest heart has need of you!” he replied. “Forgive,
Miriam, the coldness, the hardness with which I parted from you! I was
bewildered with strange horror and gloom.”

“Alas! and it was I that brought it on you,” said she. “What repentance,
what self-sacrifice, can atone for that infinite wrong? There was
something so sacred in the innocent and joyous life which you were
leading! A happy person is such an unaccustomed and holy creature in
this sad world! And, encountering so rare a being, and gifted with the
power of sympathy with his sunny life, it was my doom, mine, to bring
him within the limits of sinful, sorrowful mortality! Bid me depart,
Donatello! Fling me off! No good, through my agency, can follow upon
such a mighty evil!”

“Miriam,” said he, “our lot lies together. Is it not so? Tell me, in
Heaven’s name, if it be otherwise.”

Donatello’s conscience was evidently perplexed with doubt, whether the
communion of a crime, such as they two were jointly stained with, ought
not to stifle all the instinctive motions of their hearts, impelling
them one towards the other. Miriam, on the other hand, remorsefully
questioned with herself whether the misery, already accruing from
her influence, should not warn her to withdraw from his path. In this
momentous interview, therefore, two souls were groping for each other in
the darkness of guilt and sorrow, and hardly were bold enough to grasp
the cold hands that they found.

The sculptor stood watching the scene with earnest sympathy.

“It seems irreverent,” said he, at length; “intrusive, if not
irreverent, for a third person to thrust himself between the two solely
concerned in a crisis like the present. Yet, possibly as a bystander,
though a deeply interested one, I may discern somewhat of truth that
is hidden from you both; nay, at least interpret or suggest some ideas
which you might not so readily convey to each other.”

“Speak!” said Miriam. “We confide in you.” “Speak!” said Donatello. “You
are true and upright.”

“I well know,” rejoined Kenyon, “that I shall not succeed in uttering
the few, deep words which, in this matter, as in all others, include the
absolute truth. But here, Miriam, is one whom a terrible misfortune has
begun to educate; it has taken him, and through your agency, out of a
wild and happy state, which, within circumscribed limits, gave him joys
that he cannot elsewhere find on earth. On his behalf, you have incurred
a responsibility which you cannot fling aside. And here, Donatello, is
one whom Providence marks out as intimately connected with your destiny.
The mysterious process, by which our earthly life instructs us for
another state of being, was begun for you by her. She has rich gifts of
heart and mind, a suggestive power, a magnetic influence, a sympathetic
knowledge, which, wisely and religiously exercised, are what your
condition needs. She possesses what you require, and, with utter self
devotion, will use it for your good. The bond betwixt you, therefore,
is a true one, and never--except by Heaven’s own act--should be rent
asunder.”

“Ah; he has spoken the truth!” cried Donatello, grasping Miriam’s hand.


“The very truth, dear friend,” cried Miriam.

“But take heed,” resumed the sculptor, anxious not to violate the
integrity of his own conscience, “take heed; for you love one another,
and yet your bond is twined with such black threads that you must never
look upon it as identical with the ties that unite other loving souls.
It is for mutual support; it is for one another’s final good; it is for
effort, for sacrifice, but not for earthly happiness. If such be your
motive, believe me, friends, it were better to relinquish each other’s
hands at this sad moment. There would be no holy sanction on your wedded
life.”

“None,” said Donatello, shuddering. “We know it well.”

“None,” repeated Miriam, also shuddering. “United--miserably entangled
with me, rather--by a bond of guilt, our union might be for eternity,
indeed, and most intimate;--but, through all that endless duration, I
should be conscious of his horror.”

“Not for earthly bliss, therefore,” said Kenyon, “but for mutual
elevation, and encouragement towards a severe and painful life, you take
each other’s hands. And if, out of toil, sacrifice, prayer, penitence,
and earnest effort towards right things, there comes at length a sombre
and thoughtful, happiness, taste it, and thank Heaven! So that you live
not for it,--so that it be a wayside flower, springing along a path that
leads to higher ends,--it will be Heaven’s gracious gift, and a token
that it recognizes your union here below.”

“Have you no more to say?” asked Miriam earnestly. “There is matter of
sorrow and lofty consolation strangely mingled in your words.”

“Only this, dear Miriam,” said the sculptor; “if ever in your lives
the highest duty should require from either of you the sacrifice of the
other, meet the occasion without shrinking. This is all.”

While Kenyon spoke, Donatello had evidently taken in the ideas which he
propounded, and had ennobled them by the sincerity of his reception.
His aspect unconsciously assumed a dignity, which, elevating his former
beauty, accorded with the change that had long been taking place in his
interior self. He was a man, revolving grave and deep thoughts in his
breast. He still held Miriam’s hand; and there they stood, the beautiful
man, the beautiful woman, united forever, as they felt, in the
presence of these thousand eye-witnesses, who gazed so curiously at the
unintelligible scene. Doubtless the crowd recognized them as lovers,
and fancied this a betrothal that was destined to result in lifelong
happiness. And possibly it might be so. Who can tell where happiness may
come; or where, though an expected guest, it may never show its face?
Perhaps--shy, subtle thing--it had crept into this sad marriage bond,
when the partners would have trembled at its presence as a crime.

“Farewell!” said Kenyon; “I go to Rome.”

“Farewell, true friend!” said Miriam.

“Farewell!” said Donatello too. “May you be happy. You have no guilt to
make you shrink from happiness.”

At this moment it so chanced that all the three friends by one impulse
glanced upward at the statue of Pope Julius; and there was the majestic
figure stretching out the hand of benediction over them, and bending
down upon this guilty and repentant pair its visage of grand benignity.
There is a singular effect oftentimes when, out of the midst of
engrossing thought and deep absorption, we suddenly look up, and catch a
glimpse of external objects. We seem at such moments to look farther and
deeper into them, than by any premeditated observation; it is as if they
met our eyes alive, and with all their hidden meaning on the surface,
but grew again inanimate and inscrutable the instant that they became
aware of our glances. So now, at that unexpected glimpse, Miriam,
Donatello, and the sculptor, all three imagined that they beheld the
bronze pontiff endowed with spiritual life. A blessing was felt
descending upon them from his outstretched hand; he approved by look and
gesture the pledge of a deep union that had passed under his auspices.



CHAPTER XXXVI


HILDA’S TOWER


When we have once known Rome, and left her where she lies, like a
long-decaying corpse, retaining a trace of the noble shape it was, but
with accumulated dust and a fungous growth overspreading all its more
admirable features, left her in utter weariness, no doubt, of her
narrow, crooked, intricate streets, so uncomfortably paved with little
squares of lava that to tread over them is a penitential pilgrimage, so
indescribably ugly, moreover, so cold, so alley-like, into which the sun
never falls, and where a chill wind forces its deadly breath into our
lungs,--left her, tired of the sight of those immense seven-storied,
yellow-washed hovels, or call them palaces, where all that is dreary
in domestic life seems magnified and multiplied, and weary of climbing
those staircases, which ascend from a ground-floor of cook shops,
cobblers’ stalls, stables, and regiments of cavalry, to a middle region
of princes, cardinals, and ambassadors, and an upper tier of artists,
just beneath the unattainable sky,--left her, worn out with shivering
at the cheerless and smoky fireside by day, and feasting with our own
substance the ravenous little populace of a Roman bed at night,--left
her, sick at heart of Italian trickery, which has uprooted whatever
faith in man’s integrity had endured till now, and sick at stomach
of sour bread, sour wine, rancid butter, and bad cookery, needlessly
bestowed on evil meats,--left her, disgusted with the pretence of
holiness and the reality of nastiness, each equally omnipresent,--left
her, half lifeless from the languid atmosphere, the vital principle
of which has been used up long ago, or corrupted by myriads of
slaughters,--left her, crushed down in spirit with the desolation of her
ruin, and the hopelessness of her future,--left her, in short, hating
her with all our might, and adding our individual curse to the infinite
anathema which her old crimes have unmistakably brought down,--when we
have left Rome in such mood as this, we are astonished by the discovery,
by and by, that our heart-strings have mysteriously attached themselves
to the Eternal City, and are drawing us thitherward again, as if it were
more familiar, more intimately our home, than even the spot where we
were born.

It is with a kindred sentiment, that we now follow the course of our
story back through the Flaminian Gate, and, treading our way to the Via
Portoghese, climb the staircase to the upper chamber of the tower where
we last saw Hilda.

Hilda all along intended to pass the summer in Rome; for she had laid
out many high and delightful tasks, which she could the better complete
while her favorite haunts were deserted by the multitude that thronged
them throughout the winter and early spring. Nor did she dread the
summer atmosphere, although generally held to be so pestilential. She
had already made trial of it, two years before, and found no worse
effect than a kind of dreamy languor, which was dissipated by the first
cool breezes that came with autumn. The thickly populated centre of the
city, indeed, is never affected by the feverish influence that lies in
wait in the Campagna, like a besieging foe, and nightly haunts those
beautiful lawns and woodlands, around the suburban villas, just at the
season when they most resemble Paradise. What the flaming sword was to
the first Eden, such is the malaria to these sweet gardens and grove. We
may wander through them, of an afternoon, it is true, but they cannot
be made a home and a reality, and to sleep among them is death. They are
but illusions, therefore, like the show of gleaming waters and shadowy
foliage in a desert.

But Rome, within the walls, at this dreaded season, enjoys its festal
days, and makes itself merry with characteristic and hereditary
pas-times, for which its broad piazzas afford abundant room. It leads
its own life with a freer spirit, now that the artists and foreign
visitors are scattered abroad. No bloom, perhaps, would be visible in
a cheek that should be unvisited, throughout the summer, by more
invigorating winds than any within fifty miles of the city; no bloom,
but yet, if the mind kept its healthy energy, a subdued and colorless
well-being. There was consequently little risk in Hilda’s purpose to
pass the summer days in the galleries of Roman palaces, and her nights
in that aerial chamber, whither the heavy breath of the city and its
suburbs could not aspire. It would probably harm her no more than it
did the white doves, who sought the same high atmosphere at sunset, and,
when morning came, flew down into the narrow streets, about their daily
business, as Hilda likewise did.

With the Virgin’s aid and blessing, which might be hoped for even by
a heretic, who so religiously lit the lamp before her shrine, the New
England girl would sleep securely in her old Roman tower, and go forth
on her pictorial pilgrimages without dread or peril. In view of such
a summer, Hilda had anticipated many months of lonely, but unalloyed
enjoyment. Not that she had a churlish disinclination to society, or
needed to be told that we taste one intellectual pleasure twice, and
with double the result, when we taste it with a friend. But, keeping a
maiden heart within her bosom, she rejoiced in the freedom that enabled
her still to choose her own sphere, and dwell in it, if she pleased,
without another inmate.

Her expectation, however, of a delightful summer was woefully
disappointed. Even had she formed no previous plan of remaining there,
it is improbable that Hilda would have gathered energy to stir from
Rome. A torpor, heretofore unknown to her vivacious though quiet
temperament, had possessed itself of the poor girl, like a half-dead
serpent knotting its cold, inextricable wreaths about her limbs. It
was that peculiar despair, that chill and heavy misery, which only
the innocent can experience, although it possesses many of the gloomy
characteristics that mark a sense of guilt. It was that heartsickness,
which, it is to be hoped, we may all of us have been pure enough to
feel, once in our lives, but the capacity for which is usually exhausted
early, and perhaps with a single agony. It was that dismal certainty of
the existence of evil in the world, which, though we may fancy ourselves
fully assured of the sad mystery long before, never becomes a portion of
our practical belief until it takes substance and reality from the sin
of some guide, whom we have deeply trusted and revered, or some friend
whom we have dearly loved.

When that knowledge comes, it is as if a cloud had suddenly gathered
over the morning light; so dark a cloud, that there seems to be
no longer any sunshine behind it or above it. The character of our
individual beloved one having invested itself with all the attributes
of right,--that one friend being to us the symbol and representative of
whatever is good and true,--when he falls, the effect is almost as if
the sky fell with him, bringing down in chaotic ruin the columns
that upheld our faith. We struggle forth again, no doubt, bruised and
bewildered. We stare wildly about us, and discover--or, it may be, we
never make the discovery--that it was not actually the sky that has
tumbled down, but merely a frail structure of our own rearing, which
never rose higher than the housetops, and has fallen because we founded
it on nothing. But the crash, and the affright and trouble, are as
overwhelming, for the time, as if the catastrophe involved the whole
moral world. Remembering these things, let them suggest one generous
motive for walking heedfully amid the defilement of earthly ways! Let us
reflect, that the highest path is pointed out by the pure Ideal of those
who look up to us, and who, if we tread less loftily, may never look so
high again.

Hilda’s situation was made infinitely more wretched by the necessity of
Confining all her trouble within her own consciousness. To this innocent
girl, holding the knowledge of Miriam’s crime within her tender and
delicate soul, the effect was almost the same as if she herself had
participated in the guilt. Indeed, partaking the human nature of
those who could perpetrate such deeds, she felt her own spotlessness
impugnent.

Had there been but a single friend,--or not a friend, since friends were
no longer to be confided in, after Miriam had betrayed her trust,--but,
had there been any calm, wise mind, any sympathizing intelligence; or,
if not these, any dull, half-listening ear into which she might have
flung the dreadful secret, as into an echoless cavern, what a relief
would have ensued! But this awful loneliness! It enveloped her
whithersoever she went. It was a shadow in the sunshine of festal days;
a mist between her eyes and the pictures at which she strove to look; a
chill dungeon, which kept her in its gray twilight and fed her with its
unwholesome air, fit only for a criminal to breathe and pine in! She
could not escape from it. In the effort to do so, straying farther into
the intricate passages of our nature, she stumbled, ever and again, over
this deadly idea of mortal guilt.

Poor sufferer for another’s sin! Poor wellspring of a virgin’s heart,
into which a murdered corpse had casually fallen, and whence it could
not be drawn forth again, but lay there, day after day, night after
night, tainting its sweet atmosphere with the scent of crime and ugly
death!

The strange sorrow that had befallen Hilda did not fail to impress
its mysterious seal upon her face, and to make itself perceptible to
sensitive observers in her manner and carriage. A young Italian artist,
who frequented the same galleries which Hilda haunted, grew deeply
interested in her expression. One day, while she stood before Leonardo
da Vinci’s picture of Joanna of Aragon, but evidently without seeing
it,--for, though it had attracted her eyes, a fancied resemblance to
Miriam had immediately drawn away her thoughts,--this artist drew a
hasty sketch which he afterwards elaborated into a finished portrait. It
represented Hilda as gazing with sad and earnest horror at a bloodspot
which she seemed just then to have discovered on her white robe. The
picture attracted considerable notice. Copies of an engraving from
it may still be found in the print shops along the Corso. By many
connoisseurs, the idea of the face was supposed to have been suggested
by the portrait of Beatrice Cenci; and, in fact, there was a look
somewhat similar to poor Beatrice’s forlorn gaze out of the dreary
isolation and remoteness, in which a terrible doom had involved a tender
soul. But the modern artist strenuously upheld the originality of his
own picture, as well as the stainless purity its subject, and chose
to call it--and was laughed at for his pains--“Innocence, dying of a
Blood-stain!”

“Your picture, Signore Panini, does you credit,” remarked the picture
dealer, who had bought it of the young man for fifteen scudi, and
afterwards sold it for ten times the sum; “but it would be worth a
better price if you had given it a more intelligible title. Looking at
the face and expression of this fair signorina, we seem to comprehend
readily enough, that she is undergoing one or another of those troubles
of the heart to which young ladies are but too liable. But what is this
blood-stain? And what has innocence to do with it? Has she stabbed her
perfidious lover with a bodkin?”

“She! she commit a crime!” cried the young artist. “Can you look at the
innocent anguish in her face, and ask that question? No; but, as I
read the mystery, a man has been slain in her presence, and the blood,
spurting accidentally on her white robe, has made a stain which eats
into her life.”

“Then, in the name of her patron saint,” exclaimed the picture dealer,
“why don’t she get the robe made white again at the expense of a few
baiocchi to her washerwoman? No, no, my dear Panini. The picture being
now my property, I shall call it ‘The Signorina’s Vengeance.’ She
has stabbed her lover overnight, and is repenting it betimes the next
morning. So interpreted, the picture becomes an intelligible and very
natural representation of a not uncommon fact.”

Thus coarsely does the world translate all finer griefs that meet its
eye. It is more a coarse world than an unkind one.

But Hilda sought nothing either from the world’s delicacy or its pity,
and never dreamed of its misinterpretations. Her doves often flew in
through the windows of the tower, winged messengers, bringing her what
sympathy they could, and uttering soft, tender, and complaining sounds,
deep in their bosoms, which soothed the girl more than a distincter
utterance might. And sometimes Hilda moaned quietly among the doves,
teaching her voice to accord with theirs, and thus finding a temporary
relief from the burden of her incommunicable sorrow, as if a little
portion of it, at least, had been told to these innocent friends, and
been understood and pitied.

When she trimmed the lamp before the Virgin’s shrine, Hilda gazed at
the sacred image, and, rude as was the workmanship, beheld, or fancied,
expressed with the quaint, powerful simplicity which sculptors sometimes
had five hundred years ago, a woman’s tenderness responding to her
gaze. If she knelt, if she prayed, if her oppressed heart besought the
sympathy of divine womanhood afar in bliss, but not remote, because
forever humanized by the memory of mortal griefs, was Hilda to be
blamed? It was not a Catholic kneeling at an idolatrous shrine, but a
child lifting its tear-stained face to seek comfort from a mother.



CHAPTER XXXVII


THE EMPTINESS OF PICTURE GALLERIES


Hilda descended, day by day, from her dove-cote, and went to one or
another of the great old palaces,--the Pamfili Doria, the Corsini, the
Sciarra, the Borghese, the Colonna,--where the doorkeepers knew her
well, and offered her a kindly greeting. But they shook their heads and
sighed, on observing the languid step with which the poor girl toiled up
the grand marble staircases. There was no more of that cheery alacrity
with which she used to flit upward, as if her doves had lent her their
wings, nor of that glow of happy spirits which had been wont to set the
tarnished gilding of the picture frames and the shabby splendor of the
furniture all a-glimmer, as she hastened to her congenial and delightful
toil.

An old German artist, whom she often met in the galleries, once laid a
paternal hand on Hilda’s head, and bade her go back to her own country.


“Go back soon,” he said, with kindly freedom and directness, “or you
will go never more. And, if you go not, why, at least, do you spend the
whole summer-time in Rome? The air has been breathed too often, in so
many thousand years, and is not wholesome for a little foreign
flower like you, my child, a delicate wood-anemone from the western
forest-land.”

“I have no task nor duty anywhere but here,” replied Hilda. “The old
masters will not set me free!”

“Ah, those old masters!” cried the veteran artist, shaking his head.
“They are a tyrannous race! You will find them of too mighty a spirit to
be dealt with, for long together, by the slender hand, the fragile mind,
and the delicate heart, of a young girl. Remember that Raphael’s genius
wore out that divinest painter before half his life was lived. Since you
feel his influence powerfully enough to reproduce his miracles so well,
it will assuredly consume you like a flame.”

“That might have been my peril once,” answered Hilda. “It is not so
now.”

“Yes, fair maiden, you stand in that peril now!” insisted the kind old
man; and he added, smiling, yet in a melancholy vein, and with a
German grotesqueness of idea, “Some fine morning, I shall come to the
Pinacotheca of the Vatican, with my palette and my brushes, and shall
look for my little American artist that sees into the very heart of the
grand pictures! And what shall I behold? A heap of white ashes on the
marble floor, just in front of the divine Raphael’s picture of the
Madonna da Foligno! Nothing more, upon my word! The fire, which the poor
child feels so fervently, will have gone into her innermost, and burnt
her quite up!”

“It would be a happy martyrdom!” said Hilda, faintly smiling. “But I
am far from being worthy of it. What troubles me much, among other
troubles, is quite the reverse of what you think. The old masters hold
me here, it is true, but they no longer warm me with their influence.
It is not flame consuming, but torpor chilling me, that helps to make me
wretched.”

“Perchance, then,” said the German, looking keenly at her, “Raphael has
a rival in your heart? He was your first love; but young maidens are not
always constant, and one flame is sometimes extinguished by another!”
 Hilda shook her head, and turned away. She had spoken the truth,
however, in alleging that torpor, rather than fire, was what she had
to dread. In those gloomy days that had befallen her, it was a great
additional calamity that she felt conscious of the present dimness of an
insight which she once possessed in more than ordinary measure. She had
lost--and she trembled lest it should have departed forever--the faculty
of appreciating those great works of art, which heretofore had made so
large a portion of her happiness. It was no wonder.

A picture, however admirable the painter’s art, and wonderful his power,
requires of the spectator a surrender of himself, in due proportion with
the miracle which has been wrought. Let the canvas glow as it may, you
must look with the eye of faith, or its highest excellence escapes you.
There is always the necessity of helping out the painter’s art with your
own resources of sensibility and imagination. Not that these qualities
shall really add anything to what the master has effected; but they must
be put so entirely under his control, and work along with him to such
an extent, that, in a different mood, when you are cold and critical,
instead of sympathetic, you will be apt to fancy that the loftier merits
of the picture were of your own dreaming, not of his creating.

Like all revelations of the better life, the adequate perception of a
great work of art demands a gifted simplicity of vision. In this, and
in her self-surrender, and the depth and tenderness of her sympathy, had
lain Hilda’s remarkable power as a copyist of the old masters. And now
that her capacity of emotion was choked up with a horrible experience,
it inevitably followed that she should seek in vain, among those friends
so venerated and beloved, for the marvels which they had heretofore
shown her. In spite of a reverence that lingered longer than her
recognition, their poor worshipper became almost an infidel, and
sometimes doubted whether the pictorial art be not altogether a
delusion.

For the first time in her life, Hilda now grew acquainted with that
icy demon of weariness, who haunts great picture galleries. He is
a plausible Mephistopheles, and possesses the magic that is the
destruction of all other magic. He annihilates color, warmth, and, more
especially, sentiment and passion, at a touch. If he spare anything, it
will be some such matter as an earthen pipkin, or a bunch of herrings by
Teniers; a brass kettle, in which you can see your rice, by Gerard Douw;
a furred robe, or the silken texture of a mantle, or a straw hat, by Van
Mieris; or a long-stalked wineglass, transparent and full of shifting
reflection, or a bit of bread and cheese, or an over-ripe peach with
a fly upon it, truer than reality itself, by the school of Dutch
conjurers. These men, and a few Flemings, whispers the wicked demon,
were the only painters. The mighty Italian masters, as you deem them,
were not human, nor addressed their work to human sympathies, but to
a false intellectual taste, which they themselves were the first to
create. Well might they call their doings “art,” for they substituted
art instead of nature. Their fashion is past, and ought, indeed, to have
died and been buried along with them.

Then there is such a terrible lack of variety in their subjects. The
churchmen, their great patrons, suggested most of their themes, and
a dead mythology the rest. A quarter part, probably, of any large
collection of pictures consists of Virgins and infant Christs, repeated
over and over again in pretty much an identical spirit, and generally
with no more mixture of the Divine than just enough to spoil them as
representations of maternity and childhood, with which everybody’s heart
might have something to do. Half of the other pictures are Magdalens,
Flights into Egypt, Crucifixions, Depositions from the Cross, Pietas,
Noli-me-tangeres, or the Sacrifice of Abraham, or martyrdoms of saints,
originally painted as altar-pieces, or for the shrines of chapels, and
woefully lacking the accompaniments which the artist haft in view.

The remainder of the gallery comprises mythological subjects, such as
nude Venuses, Ledas, Graces, and, in short, a general apotheosis of
nudity, once fresh and rosy perhaps, but yellow and dingy in our day,
and retaining only a traditionary charm. These impure pictures are from
the same illustrious and impious hands that adventured to call before
us the august forms of Apostles and Saints, the Blessed Mother of the
Redeemer, and her Son, at his death, and in his glory, and even the
awfulness of Him, to whom the martyrs, dead a thousand years ago, have
not yet dared to raise their eyes. They seem to take up one task or the
other w the disrobed woman whom they call Venus, or the type of highest
and tenderest womanhood in the mother of their Saviour with equal
readiness, but to achieve the former with far more satisfactory success.
If an artist sometimes produced a picture of the Virgin, possessing
warmth enough to excite devotional feelings, it was probably the object
of his earthly love to whom he thus paid the stupendous and fearful
homage of setting up her portrait to be worshipped, not figuratively as
a mortal, but by religious souls in their earnest aspirations towards
Divinity. And who can trust the religious sentiment of Raphael, or
receive any of his Virgins as heaven-descended likenesses, after seeing,
for example, the Fornarina of the Barberini Palace, and feeling how
sensual the artist must have been to paint such a brazen trollop of his
own accord, and lovingly? Would the Blessed Mary reveal herself to his
spiritual vision, and favor him with sittings alternately with that type
of glowing earthliness, the Fornarina?

But no sooner have we given expression to this irreverent criticism,
than a throng of spiritual faces look reproachfully upon us. We see
cherubs by Raphael, whose baby innocence could only have been nursed
in paradise; angels by Raphael as innocent as they, but whose serene
intelligence embraces both earthly and celestial things; madonnas by
Raphael, on whose lips he has impressed a holy and delicate reserve,
implying sanctity on earth, and into whose soft eyes he has thrown a
light which he never could have imagined except by raising his own
eyes with a pure aspiration heavenward. We remember, too, that divinest
countenance in the Transfiguration, and withdraw all that we have said.

Poor Hilda, however, in her gloomiest moments, was never guilty of the
high treason suggested in the above remarks against her beloved and
honored Raphael. She had a faculty (which, fortunately for themselves,
pure women often have) of ignoring all moral blotches in a character
that won her admiration. She purified the objects; of her regard by the
mere act of turning such spotless eyes upon them.

Hilda’s despondency, nevertheless, while it dulled her perceptions in
one respect, had deepened them in another; she saw beauty less vividly,
but felt truth, or the lack of it, more profoundly. She began to suspect
that some, at least, of her venerated painters, had left an inevitable
hollowness in their works, because, in the most renowned of them, they
essayed to express to the world what they had not in their own souls.
They deified their light and Wandering affections, and were continually
playing off the tremendous jest, alluded to above, of offering the
features of some venal beauty to be enshrined in the holiest places. A
deficiency of earnestness and absolute truth is generally discoverable
in Italian pictures, after the art had become consummate. When you
demand what is deepest, these painters have not wherewithal to respond.
They substituted a keen intellectual perception, and a marvellous knack
of external arrangement, instead of the live sympathy and sentiment
which should have been their inspiration. And hence it happens, that
shallow and worldly men are among the best critics of their works; a
taste for pictorial art is often no more than a polish upon the hard
enamel of an artificial character. Hilda had lavished her whole heart
upon it, and found (just as if she had lavished it upon a human idol)
that the greater part was thrown away.

For some of the earlier painters, however, she still retained much
of her former reverence. Fra Angelico, she felt, must have breathed a
humble aspiration between every two touches of his brush, in order to
have made the finished picture such a visible prayer as we behold it, in
the guise of a prim angel, or a saint without the human nature. Through
all these dusky centuries, his works may still help a struggling heart
to pray. Perugino was evidently a devout man; and the Virgin, therefore,
revealed herself to him in loftier and sweeter faces of celestial
womanhood, and yet with a kind of homeliness in their human mould, than
even the genius of Raphael could imagine. Sodoma, beyond a question,
both prayed and wept, while painting his fresco, at Siena, of Christ
bound to a pillar.

In her present need and hunger for a spiritual revelation, Hilda felt a
vast and weary longing to see this last-mentioned picture once again. It
is inexpressibly touching. So weary is the Saviour and utterly worn out
with agony, that his lips have fallen apart from mere exhaustion; his
eyes seem to be set; he tries to lean his head against the pillar, but
is kept from sinking down upon the ground only by the cords that
bind him. One of the most striking effects produced is the sense of
loneliness. You behold Christ deserted both in heaven and earth; that
despair is in him which wrung forth the saddest utterance man ever made,
“Why hast Thou forsaken me?” Even in this extremity, however, he is
still divine. The great and reverent painter has not suffered the Son of
God to be merely an object of pity, though depicting him in a state so
profoundly pitiful. He is rescued from it, we know not how,--by nothing
less than miracle,--by a celestial majesty and beauty, and some quality
of which these are the outward garniture. He is as much, and as visibly,
our Redeemer, there bound, there fainting, and bleeding from the
scourge, with the cross in view, as if he sat on his throne of glory in
the heavens! Sodoma, in this matchless picture, has done more towards
reconciling the incongruity of Divine Omnipotence and outraged,
suffering Humanity, combined in one person, than the theologians ever
did.

This hallowed work of genius shows what pictorial art, devoutly
exercised, might effect in behalf of religious truth; involving, as it
does, deeper mysteries of revelation, and bringing them closer to man’s
heart, and making him tenderer to be impressed by them, than the most
eloquent words of preacher or prophet.

It is not of pictures like the above that galleries, in Rome or
elsewhere, are made up, but of productions immeasurably below them,
and requiring to be appreciated by a very different frame of mind. Few
amateurs are endowed with a tender susceptibility to the sentiment of
a picture; they are not won from an evil life, nor anywise morally
improved by it. The love of art, therefore, differs widely in its
influence from the love of nature; whereas, if art had not strayed away
from its legitimate paths and aims, it ought to soften and sweeten
the lives of its worshippers, in even a more exquisite degree than the
contemplation of natural objects. But, of its own potency, it has no
such effect; and it fails, likewise, in that other test of its moral
value which poor Hilda was now involuntarily trying upon it. It cannot
comfort the heart in affliction; it grows dim when the shadow is upon
us.

So the melancholy girl wandered through those long galleries, and over
the mosaic pavements of vast, solitary saloons, wondering what had
become of the splendor that used to beam upon her from the walls. She
grew sadly critical, and condemned almost everything that she was wont
to admire. Heretofore, her sympathy went deeply into a picture, yet
seemed to leave a depth which it was inadequate to sound; now, on the
contrary, her perceptive faculty penetrated the canvas like a steel
probe, and found but a crust of paint over an emptiness. Not that she
gave up all art as worthless; only it had lost its consecration. One
picture in ten thousand, perhaps, ought to live in the applause of
mankind, from generation to generation, until the colors fade and
blacken out of sight, or the canvas rot entirely away. For the rest, let
them be piled in garrets, just as the tolerable poets are shelved, when
their little day is over. Is a painter more sacred than a poet?

And as for these galleries of Roman palaces, they were to Hilda,
--though she still trod them with the forlorn hope of getting back her
sympathies,--they were drearier than the whitewashed walls of a prison
corridor. If a magnificent palace were founded, as was generally the
case, on hardened guilt and a stony conscience,--if the prince or
cardinal who stole the marble of his vast mansion from the Coliseum, or
some Roman temple, had perpetrated still deadlier crimes, as probably he
did,--there could be no fitter punishment for his ghost than to wander,
perpetually through these long suites of rooms, over the cold marble or
mosaic of the floors, growing chiller at every eternal footstep. Fancy
the progenitor of the Dorias thus haunting those heavy halls where
his posterity reside! Nor would it assuage his monotonous misery, but
increase it manifold, to be compelled to scrutinize those masterpieces
of art, which he collected with so much cost and care, and gazing at
them unintelligently, still leave a further portion of his vital warmth
at every one.

Such, or of a similar kind, is the torment of those who seek to enjoy
pictures in an uncongenial mood. Every haunter of picture galleries,
we should imagine, must have experienced it, in greater or less degree;
Hilda never till now, but now most bitterly.

And now, for the first time in her lengthened absence, comprising
so many years of her young life, she began to be acquainted with the
exile’s pain. Her pictorial imagination brought up vivid scenes of her
native village, with its great old elm-trees; and the neat, comfortable
houses, scattered along the wide, grassy margin of its street, and the
white meeting-house, and her mother’s very door, and the stream of gold
brown water, which her taste for color had kept flowing, all this
while, through her remembrance. O dreary streets, palaces, churches, and
imperial sepulchres of hot and dusty Rome, with the muddy Tiber eddying
through the midst, instead of the gold-brown rivulet! How she pined
under this crumbly magnificence, as if it were piled all upon her
human heart! How she yearned for that native homeliness, those familiar
sights, those faces which she had known always, those days that never
brought any strange event; that life of sober week-days, and a solemn
sabbath at the close! The peculiar fragrance of a flower-bed, which
Hilda used to cultivate, came freshly to her memory, across the windy
sea, and through the long years since the flowers had withered. Her
heart grew faint at the hundred reminiscences that were awakened by that
remembered smell of dead blossoms; it was like opening a drawer, where
many things were laid away, and every one of them scented with lavender
and dried rose-leaves.

We ought not to betray Hilda’s secret; but it is the truth, that being
so sad, and so utterly alone, and in such great need of sympathy, her
thoughts sometimes recurred to the sculptor. Had she met him now, her
heart, indeed, might not have been won, but her confidence would have
flown to him like a bird to its nest. One summer afternoon, especially,
Hilda leaned upon the battlements of her tower, and looked over Rome
towards the distant mountains, whither Kenyon had told her that he was
going.

“O that he were here!” she sighed; “I perish under this terrible secret;
and he might help me to endure it. O that he were here!”

That very afternoon, as the reader may remember, Kenyon felt
Hilda’s hand pulling at the silken cord that was connected with his
heart-strings, as he stood looking towards Rome from the battlements of
Monte Beni.



CHAPTER XXXVIII


ALTARS AND INCENSE


Rome has a certain species of consolation readier at hand, for all the
necessitous, than any other spot under the sun; and Hilda’s despondent
state made her peculiarly liable to the peril, if peril it can justly be
termed, of seeking, or consenting, to be thus consoled.

Had the Jesuits known the situation of this troubled heart, her
inheritance of New England Puritanism would hardly have protected the
poor girl from the pious strategy of those good fathers. Knowing, as
they do, how to work each proper engine, it would have been ultimately
impossible for Hilda to resist the attractions of a faith, which so
marvellously adapts itself to every human need. Not, indeed, that it can
satisfy the soul’s cravings, but, at least, it can sometimes help
the soul towards a higher satisfaction than the faith contains within
itself. It supplies a multitude of external forms, in which the
spiritual may be clothed and manifested; it has many painted windows,
as it were, through which the celestial sunshine, else disregarded, may
make itself gloriously perceptible in visions of beauty and splendor.
There is no one want or weakness of human nature for which Catholicism
will own itself without a remedy; cordials, certainly, it possesses in
abundance, and sedatives in inexhaustible variety, and what may once
have been genuine medicaments, though a little the worse for long
keeping.

To do it justice, Catholicism is such a miracle of fitness for its
own ends, many of which might seem to be admirable ones, that it is
difficult to imagine it a contrivance of mere man. Its mighty machinery
was forged and put together, not on middle earth, but either above
or below. If there were but angels to work it, instead of the very
different class of engineers who now manage its cranks and safety
valves, the system would soon vindicate the dignity and holiness of its
origin.

Hilda had heretofore made many pilgrimages among the churches of Rome,
for the sake of wondering at their gorgeousness. Without a glimpse at
these palaces of worship, it is impossible to imagine the magnificence
of the religion that reared them. Many of them shine with burnished
gold. They glow with pictures. Their walls, columns, and arches seem a
quarry of precious stones, so beautiful and costly are the marbles
with which they are inlaid. Their pavements are often a mosaic, of rare
workmanship. Around their lofty cornices hover flights of sculptured
angels; and within the vault of the ceiling and the swelling interior
of the dome, there are frescos of such brilliancy, and wrought with so
artful a perspective, that the sky, peopled with sainted forms, appears
to be opened only a little way above the spectator. Then there are
chapels, opening from the side aisles and transepts, decorated by
princes for their own burial places, and as shrines for their especial
saints. In these, the splendor of the entire edifice is intensified
and gathered to a focus. Unless words were gems, that would flame with
many-colored light upon the page, and throw thence a tremulous glimmer
into the reader’s eyes, it were wain to attempt a description of a
princely chapel.

Restless with her trouble, Hilda now entered upon another pilgrimage
among these altars and shrines. She climbed the hundred steps of the Ara
Coeli; she trod the broad, silent nave of St. John Lateran; she stood
in the Pantheon, under the round opening in the dome, through which
the blue sunny sky still gazes down, as it used to gaze when there were
Roman deities in the antique niches. She went into every church that
rose before her, but not now to wonder at its magnificence, when she
hardly noticed more than if it had been the pine-built interior of a New
England meeting-house.

She went--and it was a dangerous errand--to observe how closely and
comfortingly the popish faith applied itself to all human occasions. It
was impossible to doubt that multitudes of people found their spiritual
advantage in it, who would find none at all in our own formless mode of
worship; which, besides, so far as the sympathy of prayerful souls is
concerned, can be enjoyed only at stated and too unfrequent periods. But
here, whenever the hunger for divine nutriment came upon the soul, it
could on the instant be appeased. At one or another altar, the incense
was forever ascending; the mass always being performed, and carrying
upward with it the devotion of such as had not words for their own
prayer. And yet, if the worshipper had his individual petition to offer,
his own heart-secret to whisper below his breath, there were divine
auditors ever ready to receive it from his lips; and what encouraged him
still more, these auditors had not always been divine, but kept, within
their heavenly memories, the tender humility of a human experience. Now
a saint in heaven, but once a man on earth.

Hilda saw peasants, citizens, soldiers, nobles, women with bare heads,
ladies in their silks, entering the churches individually, kneeling for
moments or for hours, and directing their inaudible devotions to the
shrine of some saint of their own choice. In his hallowed person, they
felt themselves possessed of an own friend in heaven. They were too
humble to approach the Deity directly. Conscious of their unworthiness,
they asked the mediation of their sympathizing patron, who, on the score
of his ancient martyrdom, and after many ages of celestial life, might
venture to talk with the Divine Presence, almost as friend with friend.
Though dumb before its Judge, even despair could speak, and pour out the
misery of its soul like water, to an advocate so wise to comprehend the
case, and eloquent to plead it, and powerful to win pardon whatever
were the guilt. Hilda witnessed what she deemed to be an example of this
species of confidence between a young man and his saint. He stood before
a shrine, writhing, wringing his hands, contorting his whole frame in
an agony of remorseful recollection, but finally knelt down to weep and
pray. If this youth had been a Protestant, he would have kept all that
torture pent up in his heart, and let it burn there till it seared him
into indifference.

Often and long, Hilda lingered before the shrines and chapels of the
Virgin, and departed from them with reluctant steps. Here, perhaps,
strange as it may seem, her delicate appreciation of art stood her
in good stead, and lost Catholicism a convert. If the painter had
represented Mary with a heavenly face, poor Hilda was now in the very
mood to worship her, and adopt the faith in which she held so elevated
a position. But she saw that it was merely the flattered portrait of
an earthly beauty; the wife, at best, of the artist; or, it might be, a
peasant girl of the Campagna, or some Roman princess, to whom he desired
to pay his court. For love, or some even less justifiable motive, the
old painter had apotheosized these women; he thus gained for them, as
far as his skill would go, not only the meed of immortality, but the
privilege of presiding over Christian altars, and of being worshipped
with far holier fervors than while they dwelt on earth. Hilda’s fine
sense of the fit and decorous could not be betrayed into kneeling at
such a shrine.

She never found just the virgin mother whom she needed. Here it was
an earthly mother, worshipping the earthly baby in her lap, as any and
every mother does, from Eve’s time downward. In another picture, there
was a dim sense, shown in the mother’s face, of some divine quality
in the child. In a third, the artist seemed to have had a higher
perception, and had striven hard to shadow out the Virgin’s joy at
bringing the Saviour into the world, and her awe and love, inextricably
mingled, of the little form which she pressed against her bosom. So
far was good. But still, Hilda looked for something more; a face of
celestial beauty, but human as well as heavenly, and with the shadow
of past grief upon it; bright with immortal youth, yet matronly and
motherly; and endowed with a queenly dignity, but infinitely tender, as
the highest and deepest attribute of her divinity.

“Ah,” thought Hilda to herself, “why should not there be a woman to
listen to the prayers of women? A mother in heaven for all motherless
girls like me? In all God’s thought and care for us, can he have
withheld this boon, which our weakness so much needs?”

Oftener than to the other churches, she wandered into St. Peter’s.
Within its vast limits, she thought, and beneath the sweep of its great
dome, there should be space for all forms of Christian truth; room both
for the faithful and the heretic to kneel; due help for every creature’s
spiritual want.

Hilda had not always been adequately impressed by the grandeur of this
mighty cathedral. When she first lifted the heavy leathern curtain, at
one of the doors, a shadowy edifice in her imagination had been dazzled
out of sight by the reality. Her preconception of St. Peter’s was a
structure of no definite outline, misty in its architecture, dim
and gray and huge, stretching into an interminable perspective, and
overarched by a dome like the cloudy firmament. Beneath that vast
breadth and height, as she had fancied them, the personal man might
feel his littleness, and the soul triumph in its immensity. So, in
her earlier visits, when the compassed splendor Of the actual interior
glowed before her eyes, she had profanely called it a great prettiness;
a gay piece of cabinet work, on a Titanic scale; a jewel casket,
marvellously magnified.

This latter image best pleased her fancy; a casket, all inlaid in the
inside with precious stones of various hue, so that there Should not be
a hair’s-breadth of the small interior unadorned with its resplendent
gem. Then, conceive this minute wonder of a mosaic box, increased to
the magnitude of a cathedral, without losing the intense lustre of its
littleness, but all its petty glory striving to be sublime. The magic
transformation from the minute to the vast has not been so cunningly
effected but that the rich adornment still counteracts the impression of
space and loftiness. The spectator is more sensible of its limits than
of its extent.

Until after many visits, Hilda continued to mourn for that dim,
illimitable interior, which with her eyes shut she had seen from
childhood, but which vanished at her first glimpse through the actual
door. Her childish vision seemed preferable to the cathedral which
Michael Angelo, and all the great architects, had built; because, of
the dream edifice, she had said, “How vast it is!” while of the real St.
Peter’s she could only say, “After all, it is not so immense!” Besides,
such as the church is, it can nowhere be made visible at one glance.
It stands in its own way. You see an aisle, or a transept; you see the
nave, or the tribune; but, on account of its ponderous piers and other
obstructions, it is only by this fragmentary process that you get an
idea of the cathedral.

There is no answering such objections. The great church smiles calmly
upon its critics, and, for all response, says, “Look at me!” and if you
still murmur for the loss of your shadowy perspective, there comes no
reply, save, “Look at me!” in endless repetition, as the one thing to
be said. And, after looking many times, with long intervals between, you
discover that the cathedral has gradually extended itself over the whole
compass of your idea; it covers all the site of your visionary temple,
and has room for its cloudy pinnacles beneath the dome.

One afternoon, as Hilda entered St. Peter’s in sombre mood, its interior
beamed upon her with all the effect of a new creation. It seemed an
embodiment of whatever the imagination could conceive, or the heart
desire, as a magnificent, comprehensive, majestic symbol of religious
faith. All splendor was included within its verge, and there was space
for all. She gazed with delight even at the multiplicity of ornament.
She was glad at the cherubim that fluttered upon the pilasters, and of
the marble doves, hovering unexpectedly, with green olive-branches
of precious stones. She could spare nothing, now, of the manifold
magnificence that had been lavished, in a hundred places, richly enough
to have made world-famous shrines in any other church, but which
here melted away into the vast sunny breadth, and were of no separate
account. Yet each contributed its little all towards the grandeur of the
whole.

She would not have banished one of those grim popes, who sit each over
his own tomb, scattering cold benedictions out of their marble hands;
nor a single frozen sister of the Allegoric family, to whom--as, like
hired mourners at an English funeral, it costs them no wear and tear of
heart--is assigned the office of weeping for the dead. If you choose to
see these things, they present themselves; if you deem them unsuitable
and out of place, they vanish, individually, but leave their life upon
the walls.

The pavement! it stretched out illimitably, a plain of many-colored
marble, where thousands of worshippers might kneel together, and
shadowless angels tread among them without brushing their heavenly
garments against those earthly ones. The roof! the dome! Rich, gorgeous,
filled with sunshine, cheerfully sublime, and fadeless after
centuries, those lofty depths seemed to translate the heavens to mortal
comprehension, and help the spirit upward to a yet higher and wider
sphere. Must not the faith, that built this matchless edifice, and
warmed, illuminated, and overflowed from it, include whatever can
satisfy human aspirations at the loftiest, or minister to human
necessity at the sorest? If Religion had a material home, was it not
here?

As the scene which we but faintly suggest shone calmly before the New
England maiden at her entrance, she moved, as if by very instinct, to
one of the vases of holy water, upborne against a column by two mighty
cherubs. Hilda dipped her fingers, and had almost signed the cross upon
her breast, but forbore, and trembled, while shaking the water from her
finger-tips. She felt as if her mother’s spirit, somewhere within
the dome, were looking down upon her child, the daughter of Puritan
forefathers, and weeping to behold her ensnared by these gaudy
superstitions. So she strayed sadly onward, up the nave, and towards the
hundred golden lights that swarm before the high altar. Seeing a woman;
a priest, and a soldier kneel to kiss the toe of the brazen St. Peter,
who protrudes it beyond his pedestal for the purpose, polished bright
with former salutations, while a child stood on tiptoe to do the same,
the glory of the church was darkened before Hilda’s eyes. But again she
went onward into remoter regions. She turned into the right transept,
and thence found her way to a shrine, in the extreme corner of the
edifice, which is adorned with a mosaic copy of Guido’s beautiful
Archangel, treading on the prostrate fiend.

This was one of the few pictures, which, in these dreary days, had not
faded nor deteriorated in Hilda’s estimation; not that it was better
than many in which she no longer took an interest; but the subtile
delicacy of the painter’s genius was peculiarly adapted to her
character. She felt, while gazing at it, that the artist had done a
great thing, not merely for the Church of Rome, but for the cause of
Good. The moral of the picture, the immortal youth and loveliness of
virtue, and its irresistibles might against ugly Evil, appealed as much
to Puritans as Catholics.

Suddenly, and as if it were done in a dream, Hilda found herself
kneeling before the shrine, under the ever-burning lamp that throws
its rays upon the Archangel’s face. She laid her forehead on the marble
steps before the altar, and sobbed out a prayer; she hardly knew to
whom, whether Michael, the Virgin, or the Father; she hardly knew for
what, save only a vague longing, that thus the burden of her spirit
might be lightened a little.

In an instant she snatched herself up, as it were, from her knees, all
a-throb with the emotions which were struggling to force their way out
of her heart by the avenue that had so nearly been opened for them. Yet
there was a strange sense of relief won by that momentary, passionate
prayer; a strange joy, moreover, whether from what she had done, or for
what she had escaped doing, Hilda could not tell. But she felt as one
half stifled, who has stolen a breath of air.

Next to the shrine where she had knelt there is another, adorned with
a picture by Guercino, representing a maiden’s body in the jaws of the
sepulchre, and her lover weeping over it; while her beatified spirit
looks down upon the scene, in the society of the Saviour and a throng
of saints. Hilda wondered if it were not possible, by some miracle of
faith, so to rise above her present despondency that she might look down
upon what she was, just as Petronilla in the picture looked at her own
corpse. A hope, born of hysteric trouble, fluttered in her heart. A
presentiment, or what she fancied such, whispered her, that, before she
had finished the circuit of the cathedral, relief would come.

The unhappy are continually tantalized by similar delusions of succor
near at hand; at least, the despair is very dark that has no such
will-o’-the-wisp to glimmer in it.



CHAPTER XXXIX


THE WORLD’S CATHEDRAL


Still gliding onward, Hilda now looked up into the dome, where the
sunshine came through the western windows, and threw across long shafts
of light. They rested upon the mosaic figures of two evangelists above
the cornice. These great beams of radiance, traversing what seemed the
empty space, were made visible in misty glory, by the holy cloud of
incense, else unseen, which had risen into the middle dome. It was to
Hilda as if she beheld the worship of the priest and people ascending
heavenward, purified from its alloy of earth, and acquiring celestial
substance in the golden atmosphere to which it aspired, She wondered if
angels did not sometimes hover within the dome, and show themselves, in
brief glimpses, floating amid the sunshine and the glorified vapor, to
those who devoutly worshipped on the pavement.

She had now come into the southern transept. Around this portion of the
church are ranged a number of confessionals. They are small tabernacles
of carved wood, with a closet for the priest in the centre; and, on
either side, a space for a penitent to kneel, and breathe his confession
through a perforated auricle into the good father’s ear. Observing this
arrangement, though already familiar to her, our poor Hilda was anew
impressed with the infinite convenience--if we may use so poor a
phrase--of the Catholic religion to its devout believers.

Who, in truth, that considers the matter, can resist a similar
impression! In the hottest fever-fit of life, they can always find,
ready for their need, a cool, quiet, beautiful place of worship. They
may enter its sacred precincts at any hour, leaving the fret and trouble
of the world behind them, and purifying themselves with a touch of
holy water at the threshold. In the calm interior, fragrant of rich and
soothing incense, they may hold converse with some saint, their awful,
kindly friend. And, most precious privilege of all, whatever perplexity,
sorrow, guilt, may weigh upon their souls, they can fling down the dark
burden at the foot of the cross, and go forth--to sin no more, nor be
any longer disquieted; but to live again in the freshness and elasticity
of innocence.

“Do not these inestimable advantages,” thought Hilda, “or some of them
at least, belong to Christianity itself? Are they not a part of the
blessings which the system was meant to bestow upon mankind? Can the
faith in which I was born and bred be perfect, if it leave a weak girl
like me to wander, desolate, with this great trouble crushing me down?”

A poignant anguish thrilled within her breast; it was like a thing that
had life, and was struggling to get out.

“O help! O help!” cried Hilda; “I cannot, cannot bear it!”

Only by the reverberations that followed--arch echoing the sound to
arch, and a pope of bronze repeating it to a pope of marble, as each
sat enthroned over his tomb--did Hilda become aware that she had really
spoken above her breath. But, in that great space, there is no need to
hush up the heart within one’s own bosom, so carefully as elsewhere;
and if the cry reached any distant auditor, it came broken into many
fragments, and from various quarters of the church.

Approaching one of the confessionals, she saw a woman kneeling within.
Just as Hilda drew near, the penitent rose, came forth, and kissed the
hand of the priest, who regarded her with a look of paternal benignity,
and appeared to be giving her some spiritual counsel, in a low voice.
She then knelt to receive his blessing, which was fervently bestowed.
Hilda was so struck with the peace and joy in the woman’s face, that, as
the latter retired, she could not help speaking to her.

“You look very happy!” said she. “Is it so sweet, then, to go to the
confessional?”

“O, very sweet, my dear signorina!” answered the woman, with moistened
eyes and an affectionate smile; for she was so thoroughly softened with
what she had been doing, that she felt as if Hilda were her younger
sister. “My heart is at rest now. Thanks be to the Saviour, and the
Blessed Virgin and the saints, and this good father, there is no more
trouble for poor Teresa!”

“I am glad for your sake,” said Hilda, sighing for her own. “I am a poor
heretic, but a human sister; and I rejoice for you!”

She went from one to another of the confessionals, and, looking at
each, perceived that they were inscribed with gilt letters: on one,
Pro Italica Lingua; on another, Pro Flandrica Lingua; on a third, Pro
Polonica Lingua; on a fourth, Pro Illyrica Lingua; on a fifth, Pro
Hispanica Lingua. In this vast and hospitable cathedral, worthy to be
the religious heart of the whole world, there was room for all nations;
there was access to the Divine Grace for every Christian soul; there was
an ear for what the overburdened heart might have to murmur, speak in
what native tongue it would.

When Hilda had almost completed the circuit of the transept, she came to
a confessional--the central part was closed, but a mystic room protruded
from it, indicating the presence of a priest within--on which was
inscribed, Pro Anglica Lingua.

It was the word in season! If she had heard her mother’s voice from
within the tabernacle, calling her, in her own mother-tongue, to come
and lay her poor head in her lap, and sob out all her troubles, Hilda
could not have responded with a more inevitable obedience. She did not
think; she only felt. Within her heart was a great need. Close at hand,
within the veil of the confessional, was the relief. She flung herself
down in the penitent’s place; and, tremulously, passionately, with sobs,
tears, and the turbulent overflow of emotion too long repressed, she
poured out the dark story which had infused its poison into her innocent
life.

Hilda had not seen, nor could she now see, the visage of the priest.
But, at intervals, in the pauses of that strange confession, half choked
by the struggle of her feelings toward an outlet, she heard a mild, calm
voice, somewhat mellowed by age. It spoke soothingly; it encouraged her;
it led her on by apposite questions that seemed to be suggested by a
great and tender interest, and acted like magnetism in attracting the
girl’s confidence to this unseen friend. The priest’s share in the
interview, indeed, resembled that of one who removes the stones,
clustered branches, or whatever entanglements impede the current of a
swollen stream. Hilda could have imagined--so much to the purpose were
his inquiries--that he was already acquainted with some outline of what
she strove to tell him.

Thus assisted, she revealed the whole of her terrible secret! The whole,
except that no name escaped her lips.

And, ah, what a relief! When the hysteric gasp, the strife between words
and sobs, had subsided, what a torture had passed away from her soul! It
was all gone; her bosom was as pure now as in her childhood. She was a
girl again; she was Hilda of the dove-cote; not that doubtful creature
whom her own doves had hardly recognized as their mistress and playmate,
by reason of the death-scent that clung to her garments!

After she had ceased to speak, Hilda heard the priest bestir
himself with an old man’s reluctant movement. He stepped out of the
confessional; and as the girl was still kneeling in the penitential
corner, he summoned her forth.

“Stand up, my daughter,” said the mild voice of the confessor; “what we
have further to say must be spoken face to face.”

Hilda did his bidding, and stood before him with a downcast visage,
which flushed and grew pale again. But it had the wonderful beauty which
we may often observe in those who have recently gone through a great
struggle, and won the peace that lies just on the other side. We see
it in a new mother’s face; we see it in the faces of the dead; and
in Hilda’s countenance--which had always a rare natural charm for her
friends--this glory of peace made her as lovely as an angel.

On her part, Hilda beheld a venerable figure with hair as white as snow,
and a face strikingly characterized by benevolence. It bore marks of
thought, however, and penetrative insight; although the keen glances of
the eyes were now somewhat bedimmed with tears, which the aged shed, or
almost shed, on lighter stress of emotion than would elicit them from
younger men.

“It has not escaped my observation, daughter,” said the priest, “that
this is your first acquaintance with the confessional. How is this?”

“Father,” replied Hilda, raising her eyes, and again letting them fall,
“I am of New Eng land birth, and was bred as what you call a heretic.”

“From New England!” exclaimed the priest. “It was my own birthplace,
likewise; nor have fifty years of absence made me cease to love it. But
a heretic! And are you reconciled to the Church?”

“Never, father,” said Hilda.

“And, that being the case,” demanded the old man, “on what ground, my
daughter, have you sought to avail yourself of these blessed privileges,
confined exclusively to members of the one true Church, of confession
and absolution?”

“Absolution, father?” exclaimed Hilda, shrinking back. “O no, no! I
never dreamed of that! Only our Heavenly Father can forgive my sins; and
it is only by sincere repentance of whatever wrong I may have done, and
by my own best efforts towards a higher life, that I can hope for his
forgiveness! God forbid that I should ask absolution from mortal man!”

“Then wherefore,” rejoined the priest, with somewhat less mildness in
his tone,--“wherefore, I ask again, have you taken possession, as I may
term it, of this holy ordinance; being a heretic, and neither seeking to
share, nor having faith in, the unspeakable advantages which the Church
offers to its penitents?”

“Father,” answered Hilda, trying to tell the old man the simple truth,
“I am a motherless girl, and a stranger here in Italy. I had only God
to take care of me, and be my closest friend; and the terrible, terrible
crime, which I have revealed to you, thrust itself between him and me;
so that I groped for him in the darkness, as it were, and found him
not,--found nothing but a dreadful solitude, and this crime in the midst
of it! I could not bear it. It seemed as if I made the awful guilt my
own, by keeping it hidden in my heart. I grew a fearful thing to myself.
I was going mad!”

“It was a grievous trial, my poor child!” observed the confessor. “Your
relief, I trust, will prove to be greater than you yet know!”

“I feel already how immense it is!” said Hilda, looking gratefully in
his face. “Surely, father, it was the hand of Providence that led me
hither, and made me feel that this vast temple of Christianity, this
great home of religion, must needs contain some cure, some ease, at
least, for my unutterable anguish. And it has proved so. I have told the
hideous secret; told it under the sacred seal of the confessional; and
now it will burn my poor heart no more!”

“But, daughter,” answered the venerable priest, not unmoved by what
Hilda said, “you forget! you mistake!--you claim a privilege to which
you have not entitled yourself! The seal of the confessional, do you
say? God forbid that it should ever be broken where it has been fairly
impressed; but it applies only to matters that have been confided to its
keeping in a certain prescribed method, and by persons, moreover, who
have faith in the sanctity of the ordinance. I hold myself, and any
learned casuist of the Church would hold me, as free to disclose all the
particulars of what you term your confession, as if they had come to my
knowledge in a secular way.”

“This is not right, father!” said Hilda, fixing her eyes on the old
man’s.

“Do not you see, child,” he rejoined, with some little heat, “with all
your nicety of conscience, cannot you recognize it as my duty to make
the story known to the proper authorities; a great crime against public
justice being involved, and further evil consequences likely to ensue?”

“No, father, no!” answered Hilda, courageously, her cheeks flushing and
her eyes brightening as she spoke. “Trust a girl’s simple heart sooner
than any casuist of your Church, however learned he may be. Trust your
own heart, too! I came to your confessional, father, as I devoutly
believe, by the direct impulse of Heaven, which also brought you hither
to-day, in its mercy and love, to relieve me of a torture that I could
no longer bear. I trusted in the pledge which your Church has always
held sacred between the priest and the human soul, which, through his
medium, is struggling towards its Father above. What I have confided to
you lies sacredly between God and yourself. Let it rest there, father;
for this is right, and if you do otherwise, you will perpetrate a great
wrong, both as a priest and a man! And believe me, no question, no
torture, shall ever force my lips to utter what would be necessary,
in order to make my confession available towards the punishment of the
guilty ones. Leave Providence to deal with them!”

“My quiet little countrywoman,” said the priest, with half a smile on
his kindly old face, “you can pluck up a spirit, I perceive, when you
fancy an occasion for one.”

“I have spirit only to do what I think right,” replied Hilda simply. “In
other respects I am timorous.”

“But you confuse yourself between right feelings and very foolish
inferences,” continued the priest, “as is the wont of women,--so much
I have learnt by long experience in the confessional,--be they young or
old. However, to set your heart at rest, there is no probable need
for me to reveal the matter. What you have told, if I mistake not, and
perhaps more, is already known in the quarter which it most concerns.”

“Known!” exclaimed Hilda. “Known to the authorities of Rome! And what
will be the consequence?”

“Hush!” answered the confessor, laying his finger on his lips. “I tell
you my supposition--mind, it is no assertion of the fact--in order
that you may go the more cheerfully on your way, not deeming yourself
burdened with any responsibility as concerns this dark deed. And now,
daughter, what have you to give in return for an old man’s kindness and
sympathy?”

“My grateful remembrance,” said Hilda, fervently, “as long as I live!”

“And nothing more?” the priest inquired, with a persuasive smile. “Will
you not reward him with a great joy; one of the last joys that he may
know on earth, and a fit one to take with him into the better world? In
a word, will you not allow me to bring you as a stray lamb into the true
fold? You have experienced some little taste of the relief and comfort
which the Church keeps abundantly in store for all its faithful
children. Come home, dear child,--poor wanderer, who hast caught a
glimpse of the heavenly light,--come home, and be at rest.”

“Father,” said Hilda, much moved by his kindly earnestness, in
which, however, genuine as it was, there might still be a leaven of
professional craft, “I dare not come a step farther than Providence
shall guide me. Do not let it grieve you, therefore, if I never return
to the confessional; never dip my fingers in holy water; never sign my
bosom with the cross. I am a daughter of the Puritans. But, in spite of
my heresy,” she added with a sweet, tearful smile, “you may one day
see the poor girl, to whom you have done this great Christian kindness,
coming to remind you of it, and thank you for it, in the Better Land.”

The old priest shook his head. But, as he stretched out his hands at the
same moment, in the act of benediction, Hilda knelt down and received
the blessing with as devout a simplicity as any Catholic of them all.



CHAPTER XL


HILDA AND A FRIEND


When Hilda knelt to receive the priest’s benediction, the act was
witnessed by a person who stood leaning against the marble balustrade
that surrounds the hundred golden lights, before the high altar. He had
stood there, indeed, from the moment of the girl’s entrance into the
confessional. His start of surprise, at first beholding her, and
the anxious gloom that afterwards settled on his face, sufficiently
betokened that he felt a deep and sad interest in what was going
forward.

After Hilda had bidden the priest farewell, she came slowly towards the
high altar. The individual to whom we have alluded seemed irresolute
whether to advance or retire. His hesitation lasted so long that the
maiden, straying through a happy reverie, had crossed the wide extent
of the pavement between the confessional and the altar, before he had
decided whether to meet her. At last, when within a pace or two, she
raised her eyes and recognized Kenyon.

“It is you!” she exclaimed, with joyful surprise. “I am so happy.”

In truth, the sculptor had never before seen, nor hardly imagined, such
a figure of peaceful beatitude as Hilda now presented. While coming
towards him in the solemn radiance which, at that period of the day, is
diffused through the transept, and showered down beneath the dome, she
seemed of the same substance as the atmosphere that enveloped her. He
could scarcely tell whether she was imbued with sunshine, or whether it
was a glow of happiness that shone out of her.

At all events, it was a marvellous change from the sad girl, who had
entered the confessional bewildered with anguish, to this bright, yet
softened image of religious consolation that emerged from it. It was
as if one of the throng of angelic people, who might be hovering in the
sunny depths of the dome, had alighted on the pavement. Indeed, this
capability of transfiguration, which we often see wrought by inward
delight on persons far less capable of it than Hilda, suggests how
angels come by their beauty, it grows out of their happiness, and lasts
forever only because that is immortal.

She held out her hand, and Kenyon was glad to take it in his own, if
only to assure himself that she was made of earthly material.

“Yes, Hilda, I see that you are very happy,” he replied gloomily, and
withdrawing his hand after a single pressure. “For me, I never was less
so than at this moment.”

“Has any misfortune befallen you?” asked Hilda with earnestness. “Pray
tell me, and you shall have my sympathy, though I must still be very
happy. Now I know how it is that the saints above are touched by the
sorrows of distressed people on earth, and yet are never made wretched
by them. Not that I profess to be a saint, you know,” she added, smiling
radiantly. “But the heart grows so large, and so rich, and so variously
endowed, when it has a great sense of bliss, that it can give smiles to
some, and tears to others, with equal sincerity, and enjoy its own peace
throughout all.”

“Do not say you are no saint!” answered Kenyon with a smile, though he
felt that the tears stood in his eves. “You will still be Saint Hilda,
whatever church may canonize you.”

“Ah! you would not have said so, had you seen me but an hour ago!”
 murmured she. “I was so wretched, that there seemed a grievous sin in
it.”

“And what has made you so suddenly happy?” inquired the sculptor. “But
first, Hilda, will you not tell me why you were so wretched?”

“Had I met you yesterday, I might have told you that,” she replied.
“To-day, there is no need.”

“Your happiness, then?” said the sculptor, as sadly as before. “Whence
comes it?”

“A great burden has been lifted from my heart--from my conscience, I had
almost said,”--answered Hilda, without shunning the glance that he fixed
upon her. “I am a new creature, since this morning, Heaven be praised
for it! It was a blessed hour--a blessed impulse--that brought me
to this beautiful and glorious cathedral. I shall hold it in loving
remembrance while I live, as the spot where I found infinite peace after
infinite trouble.”

Her heart seemed so full, that it spilt its new gush of happiness, as
it were, like rich and sunny wine out of an over-brimming goblet. Kenyon
saw that she was in one of those moods of elevated feeling, when the
soul is upheld by a strange tranquility, which is really more passionate
and less controllable than emotions far exceeding it in violence. He
felt that there would be indelicacy, if he ought not rather to call it
impiety, in his stealing upon Hilda, while she was thus beyond her
own guardianship, and surprising her out of secrets which she might
afterwards bitterly regret betraying to him. Therefore, though yearning
to know what had happened, he resolved to forbear further question.

Simple and earnest people, however, being accustomed to speak from their
genuine impulses, cannot easily, as craftier men do, avoid the subject
which they have at heart. As often as the sculptor unclosed his lips,
such words as these were ready to burst out:--“Hilda, have you flung
your angelic purity into that mass of unspeakable corruption, the Roman
Church?”

“What were you saying?” she asked, as Kenyon forced back an almost
uttered exclamation of this kind.

“I was thinking of what you have just remarked about the cathedral,”
 said he, looking up into the mighty hollow of the dome. “It is indeed
a magnificent structure, and an adequate expression of the Faith which
built it. When I behold it in a proper mood,--that is to say, when I
bring my mind into a fair relation with the minds and purposes of its
spiritual and material architects,--I see but one or two criticisms to
make. One is, that it needs painted windows.”

“O, no!” said Hilda. “They would be quite inconsistent with so much
richness of color in the interior of the church. Besides, it is a Gothic
ornament, and only suited to that style of architecture, which requires
a gorgeous dimness.”

“Nevertheless,” continued the sculptor, “yonder square apertures,
filled with ordinary panes of glass, are quite out of keeping with the
superabundant splendor of everything about them. They remind me of that
portion of Aladdin’s palace which he left unfinished, in order that
his royal father-in-law might put the finishing touch. Daylight, in its
natural state, ought not to be admitted here. It should stream through a
brilliant illusion of saints and hierarchies, and old scriptural images,
and symbolized dogmas, purple, blue, golden, and a broad flame of
scarlet. Then, it would be just such an illumination as the Catholic
faith allows to its believers. But, give me--to live and die in--the
pure, white light of heaven!”

“Why do you look so sorrowfully at me?” asked Hilda, quietly meeting his
disturbed gaze. “What would you say to me? I love the white light too!”

“I fancied so,” answered Kenyon. “Forgive me, Hilda; but I must needs
speak. You seemed to me a rare mixture of impressibility, sympathy,
sensitiveness to many influences, with a certain quality of common
sense;--no, not that, but a higher and finer attribute, for which I find
no better word. However tremulously you might vibrate, this quality,
I supposed, would always bring you back to the equipoise. You were a
creature of imagination, and yet as truly a New England girl as any with
whom you grew up in your native village. If there were one person in
the world whose native rectitude of thought, and something deeper, more
reliable, than thought, I would have trusted against all the arts of a
priesthood,--whose taste alone, so exquisite and sincere that it rose
to be a moral virtue, I would have rested upon as a sufficient
safeguard,--it was yourself!”

“I am conscious of no such high and delicate qualities as you allow me,”
 answered Hilda. “But what have I done that a girl of New England birth
and culture, with the right sense that her mother taught her, and the
conscience that she developed in her, should not do?”

“Hilda, I saw you at the confessional!” said Kenyon.

“Ah well, my dear friend,” replied Hilda, casting down her eyes, and
looking somewhat confused, yet not ashamed, “you must try to forgive me
for that,--if you deem it wrong, because it has saved my reason, and
made me very happy. Had you been here yesterday, I would have confessed
to you.”

“Would to Heaven I had!” ejaculated Kenyon.

“I think,” Hilda resumed, “I shall never go to the confessional again;
for there can scarcely come such a sore trial twice in my life. If I had
been a wiser girl, a stronger, and a more sensible, very likely I might
not have gone to the confessional at all. It was the sin of others that
drove me thither; not my own, though it almost seemed so. Being what
I am, I must either have done what you saw me doing, or have gone mad.
Would that have been better?”

“Then you are not a Catholic?” asked the sculptor earnestly.

“Really, I do not quite know what I am,” replied Hilda, encountering his
eyes with a frank and simple gaze. “I have a great deal of faith, and
Catholicism seems to have a great deal of good. Why should not I be a
Catholic, if I find there what I need, and what I cannot find elsewhere?
The more I see of this worship, the more I wonder at the exuberance with
which it adapts itself to all the demands of human infirmity. If its
ministers were but a little more than human, above all error, pure from
all iniquity, what a religion would it be!”

“I need not fear your conversion to the Catholic faith,” remarked
Kenyon, “if you are at all aware of the bitter sarcasm implied in your
last observation. It is very just. Only the exceeding ingenuity of the
system stamps it as the contrivance of man, or some worse author; not an
emanation of the broad and simple wisdom from on high.”

“It may be so,” said Hilda; “but I meant no sarcasm.”

Thus conversing, the two friends went together down the grand extent
of the nave. Before leaving the church, they turned to admire again its
mighty breadth, the remoteness of the glory behind the altar, and the
effect of visionary splendor and magnificence imparted by the long bars
of smoky sunshine, which travelled so far before arriving at a place of
rest.

“Thank Heaven for having brought me hither!” said Hilda fervently.

Kenyon’s mind was deeply disturbed by his idea of her Catholic
propensities; and now what he deemed her disproportionate and misapplied
veneration for the sublime edifice stung him into irreverence.

“The best thing I know of St. Peter’s,” observed he, “is its equable
temperature. We are now enjoying the coolness of last winter, which, a
few months hence, will be the warmth of the present summer. It has no
cure, I suspect, in all its length and breadth, for a sick soul, but
it would make an admirable atmospheric hospital for sick bodies. What
a delightful shelter would it be for the invalids who throng to Rome,
where the sirocco steals away their strength, and the tramontana stabs
them through and through, like cold steel with a poisoned point! But
within these walls, the thermometer never varies. Winter and summer are
married at the high altar, and dwell together in perfect harmony.”

“Yes,” said Hilda; “and I have always felt this soft, unchanging climate
of St. Peter’s to be another manifestation of its sanctity.”

“That is not precisely my idea,” replied Kenyon. “But what a delicious
life it would be, if a colony of people with delicate lungs or merely
with delicate fancies--could take up their abode in this ever-mild and
tranquil air. These architectural tombs of the popes might serve for
dwellings, and each brazen sepulchral doorway would become a domestic
threshold. Then the lover, if he dared, might say to his mistress,
‘Will you share my tomb with me?’ and, winning her soft consent, he
would lead her to the altar, and thence to yonder sepulchre of Pope
Gregory, which should be their nuptial home. What a life would be
theirs, Hilda, in their marble Eden!”

“It is not kind, nor like yourself,” said Hilda gently, “to throw
ridicule on emotions which are genuine. I revere this glorious church
for itself and its purposes; and love it, moreover, because here I have
found sweet peace, after’ a great anguish.”

“Forgive me,” answered the sculptor, “and I will do so no more. My heart
is not so irreverent as my words.”

They went through the piazza of St. Peter’s and the adjacent streets,
silently at first; but, before reaching the bridge of St. Angelo,
Hilda’s flow of spirits began to bubble forth, like the gush of a
streamlet that has been shut up by frost, or by a heavy stone over its
source. Kenyon had never found her so delightful as now; so softened
out of the chillness of her virgin pride; so full of fresh thoughts,
at which he was often moved to smile, although, on turning them over
a little more, he sometimes discovered that they looked fanciful only
because so absolutely true.

But, indeed, she was not quite in a normal state. Emerging from gloom
into sudden cheerfulness, the effect upon Hilda was as if she were
just now created. After long torpor, receiving back her intellectual
activity, she derived an exquisite pleasure from the use of her
faculties, which were set in motion by causes that seemed inadequate.
She continually brought to Kenyon’s mind the image of a child, making
its plaything of every object, but sporting in good faith, and with
a kind of seriousness. Looking up, for example, at the statue of St.
Michael, on the top of Hadrian’s castellated tomb, Hilda fancied an
interview between the Archangel and the old emperor’s ghost, who was
naturally displeased at finding his mausoleum, which he had ordained
for the stately and solemn repose of his ashes, converted to its present
purposes.

“But St. Michael, no doubt,” she thoughtfully remarked, “would finally
convince the Emperor Hadrian that where a warlike despot is sown as the
seed, a fortress and a prison are the only possible crop.”

They stopped on the bridge to look into the swift eddying flow of the
yellow Tiber, a mud puddle in strenuous motion; and Hilda wondered
whether the seven-branched golden candlestick,--the holy candlestick of
the Jews, which was lost at the Ponte Molle, in Constantine’s time, had
yet been swept as far down the river as this.

“It probably stuck where it fell,” said the sculptor; “and, by this
time, is imbedded thirty feet deep in the mud of the Tiber. Nothing will
ever bring it to light again.”

“I fancy you are mistaken,” replied Hilda, smiling. “There was a meaning
and purpose in each of its seven branches, and such a candlestick cannot
be lost forever. When it is found again, and seven lights are kindled
and burning in it, the whole world will gain the illumination which
it needs. Would not this be an admirable idea for a mystic story or
parable, or seven-branched allegory, full of poetry, art, philosophy,
and religion? It shall be called ‘The Recovery of the Sacred
Candlestick.’ As each branch is lighted, it shall have a differently
colored lustre from the other six; and when all the seven are kindled,
their radiance shall combine into the intense white light of truth.”

“Positively, Hilda, this is a magnificent conception,” cried Kenyon.
“The more I look at it, the brighter it burns.”

“I think so too,” said Hilda, enjoying a childlike pleasure in her own
idea. “The theme is better suited for verse than prose; and when I go
home to America, I will suggest it to one of our poets. Or seven poets
might write the poem together, each lighting a separate branch of the
Sacred Candlestick.”

“Then you think of going home?” Kenyon asked.

“Only yesterday,” she replied, “I longed to flee away. Now, all is
changed, and, being happy again, I should feel deep regret at leaving
the Pictorial Land. But I cannot tell. In Rome, there is something
dreary and awful, which we can never quite escape. At least, I thought
so yesterday.”

When they reached the Via Portoghese, and approached Hilda’s tower, the
doves, who were waiting aloft, flung themselves upon the air, and came
floating down about her head. The girl caressed them, and responded to
their cooings with similar sounds from her own lips, and with words
of endearment; and their joyful flutterings and airy little flights,
evidently impelled by pure exuberance of spirits, seemed to show that
the doves had a real sympathy with their mistress’s state of mind. For
peace had descended upon her like a dove.

Bidding the sculptor farewell, Hilda climbed her tower, and came forth
upon its summit to trim the Virgin’s lamp. The doves, well knowing her
custom, had flown up thither to meet her, and again hovered about her
head; and very lovely was her aspect, in the evening Sunlight, which had
little further to do with the world just then, save to fling a golden
glory on Hilda’s hair, and vanish.

Turning her eyes down into the dusky street which she had just quitted,
Hilda saw the sculptor still there, and waved her hand to him.

“How sad and dim he looks, down there in that dreary street!” she said
to herself. “Something weighs upon his spirits. Would I could comfort
him!”

“How like a spirit she looks, aloft there, with the evening glory round
her head, and those winged creatures claiming her as akin to them!”
 thought Kenyon, on his part. “How far above me! how unattainable! Ah,
if I could lift myself to her region! Or--if it be not a sin to wish
it--would that I might draw her down to an earthly fireside!”

What a sweet reverence is that, when a young man deems his mistress a
little more than mortal, and almost chides himself for longing to bring
her close to his heart! A trifling circumstance, but such as lovers
make much of, gave him hope. One of the doves, which had been resting on
Hilda’s shoulder, suddenly flew downward, as if recognizing him as its
mistress’s dear friend; and, perhaps commissioned with an errand of
regard, brushed his upturned face with its wings, and again soared
aloft.

The sculptor watched the bird’s return, and saw Hilda greet it with a
smile.



CHAPTER XLI


SNOWDROPS AND MAIDENLY DELIGHTS


It being still considerably earlier than the period at which artists
and tourists are accustomed to assemble in Rome, the sculptor and Hilda
found themselves comparatively alone there. The dense mass of native
Roman life, in the midst of which they were, served to press them near
one another. It was as if they had been thrown together on a desert
island. Or they seemed to have wandered, by some strange chance, out
of the common world, and encountered each other in a depopulated city,
where there were streets of lonely palaces, and unreckonable treasures
of beautiful and admirable things, of which they two became the sole
inheritors.

In such circumstances, Hilda’s gentle reserve must have been stronger
than her kindly disposition permitted, if the friendship between Kenyon
and herself had not grown as warm as a maiden’s friendship can ever be,
without absolutely and avowedly blooming into love. On the sculptor’s
side, the amaranthine flower was already in full blow. But it is very
beautiful, though the lover’s heart may grow chill at the perception, to
see how the snow will sometimes linger in a virgin’s breast, even after
the spring is well advanced. In such alpine soils, the summer will not
be anticipated; we seek vainly for passionate flowers, and blossoms
of fervid hue and spicy fragrance, finding only snowdrops and sunless
violets, when it is almost the full season for the crimson rose.

With so much tenderness as Hilda had in her nature, it was strange that
she so reluctantly admitted the idea of love; especially as, in
the sculptor, she found both congeniality and variety of taste, and
likenesses and differences of character; these being as essential as
those to any poignancy of mutual emotion.

So Hilda, as far as Kenyon could discern, still did not love him, though
she admitted him within the quiet circle of her affections as a dear
friend and trusty counsellor. If we knew what is best for us, or could
be content with what is reasonably good, the sculptor might well have
been satisfied, for a season, with this calm intimacy, which so sweetly
kept him a stranger in her heart, and a ceremonious guest; and yet
allowed him the free enjoyment of all but its deeper recesses. The
flowers that grow outside of those minor sanctities have a wild, hasty
charm, which it is well to prove; there may be sweeter ones within the
sacred precinct, but none that will die while you are handling them, and
bequeath you a delicious legacy, as these do, in the perception of their
evanescence and unreality.

And this may be the reason, after all, why Hilda, like so many other
maidens, lingered on the hither side of passion; her finer instinct and
keener sensibility made her enjoy those pale delights in a degree of
which men are incapable. She hesitated to grasp a richer happiness, as
possessing already such measure of it as her heart could hold, and of a
quality most agreeable to her virgin tastes.

Certainly, they both were very happy. Kenyon’s genius, unconsciously
wrought upon by Hilda’s influence, took a more delicate character than
heretofore. He modelled, among other things, a beautiful little statue
of maidenhood gathering a snowdrop. It was never put into marble,
however, because the sculptor soon recognized it as one of those fragile
creations which are true only to the moment that produces them, and
are wronged if we try to imprison their airy excellence in a permanent
material.

On her part, Hilda returned to her customary Occupations with a fresh
love for them, and yet with a deeper look into the heart of things; such
as those necessarily acquire who have passed from picture galleries into
dungeon gloom, and thence come back to the picture gallery again. It is
questionable whether she was ever so perfect a copyist thenceforth. She
could not yield herself up to the painter so unreservedly as in times
past; her character had developed a sturdier quality, which made her
less pliable to the influence of other minds. She saw into the picture
as profoundly as ever, and perhaps more so, but not with the devout
sympathy that had formerly given her entire possession of the old
master’s idea. She had known such a reality, that it taught her to
distinguish inevitably the large portion that is unreal, in every work
of art. Instructed by sorrow, she felt that there is something beyond
almost all which pictorial genius has produced; and she never forgot
those sad wanderings from gallery to gallery, and from church to church,
where she had vainly sought a type of the Virgin Mother, or the Saviour,
or saint, or martyr, which a soul in extreme need might recognize as the
adequate one.

How, indeed, should she have found such? How could holiness be revealed
to the artist of an age when the greatest of them put genius and
imagination in the place of spiritual insight, and when, from the pope
downward, all Christendom was corrupt?

Meanwhile, months wore away, and Rome received back that large portion
of its life-blood which runs in the veins of its foreign and temporary
population. English visitors established themselves in the hotels, and
in all the sunny suites of apartments, in the streets convenient to
the Piazza di Spagna; the English tongue was heard familiarly along the
Corso, and English children sported in the Pincian Gardens.

The native Romans, on the other hand, like the butterflies and
grasshoppers, resigned themselves to the short, sharp misery which
winter brings to a people whose arrangements are made almost exclusively
with a view to summer. Keeping no fire within-doors, except possibly a
spark or two in the kitchen, they crept out of their cheerless houses
into the narrow, sunless, sepulchral streets, bringing their firesides
along with them, in the shape of little earthen pots, vases, or pipkins,
full of lighted charcoal and warm ashes, over which they held their
tingling finger-ends. Even in this half-torpid wretchedness, they still
seemed to dread a pestilence in the sunshine, and kept on the shady side
of the piazzas, as scrupulously as in summer. Through the open doorways
w no need to shut them when the weather within was bleaker than
without--a glimpse into the interior of their dwellings showed the
uncarpeted brick floors, as dismal as the pavement of a tomb.

They drew their old cloaks about them, nevertheless, and threw the
corners over their shoulders, with the dignity of attitude and action
that have come down to these modern citizens, as their sole inheritance
from the togated nation. Somehow or other, they managed to keep up their
poor, frost-bitten hearts against the pitiless atmosphere with a quiet
and uncomplaining endurance that really seems the most respectable point
in the present Roman character. For in New England, or in Russia, or
scarcely in a hut of the Esquimaux, there is no such discomfort to be
borne as by Romans in wintry weather, when the orange-trees bear icy
fruit in the gardens; and when the rims of all the fountains are shaggy
with icicles, and the Fountain of Trevi skimmed almost across with a
glassy surface; and when there is a slide in the piazza of St. Peter’s,
and a fringe of brown, frozen foam along the eastern shore of the Tiber,
and sometimes a fall of great snowflakes into the dreary lanes and
alleys of the miserable city. Cold blasts, that bring death with them,
now blow upon the shivering invalids, who came hither in the hope of
breathing balmy airs.

Wherever we pass our summers, may all our inclement months, from
November to April, henceforth be spent in some country that recognizes
winter as an integral portion of its year!

Now, too, there was especial discomfort in the stately picture
galleries, where nobody, indeed,--not the princely or priestly founders,
nor any who have inherited their cheerless magnificence,--ever dreamed
of such an impossibility as fireside warmth, since those great palaces
were built. Hilda, therefore, finding her fingers so much benumbed that
the spiritual influence could not be transmitted to them, was persuaded
to leave her easel before a picture, on one of these wintry days, and
pay a visit to Kenyon’s studio. But neither was the studio anything
better than a dismal den, with its marble shapes shivering around the
walls, cold as the snow images which the sculptor used to model in his
boyhood, and sadly behold them weep themselves away at the first thaw.

Kenyon’s Roman artisans, all this while, had been at work on the
Cleopatra. The fierce Egyptian queen had now struggled almost out of the
imprisoning stone; or, rather, the workmen had found her within the mass
of marble, imprisoned there by magic, but still fervid to the touch
with fiery life, the fossil woman of an age that produced statelier,
stronger, and more passionate creatures than our own. You already felt
her compressed heat, and were aware of a tiger-like character even in
her repose. If Octavius should make his appearance, though the marble
still held her within its embrace, it was evident that she would tear
herself forth in a twinkling, either to spring enraged at his
throat, or, sinking into his arms, to make one more proof of her rich
blandishments, or, falling lowly at his feet, to try the efficacy of a
woman’s tears.

“I am ashamed to tell you how much I admire this statue,” said Hilda.
“No other sculptor could have done it.”

“This is very sweet for me to hear,” replied Kenyon; “and since your
reserve keeps you from saying more, I shall imagine you expressing
everything that an artist would wish to hear said about his work.”

“You will not easily go beyond my genuine opinion,” answered Hilda, with
a smile.

“Ah, your kind word makes me very happy,” said the sculptor, “and I
need it, just now, on behalf of my Cleopatra. That inevitable period has
come,--for I have found it inevitable, in regard to all my works,--when
I look at what I fancied to be a statue, lacking only breath to make it
live, and find it a mere lump of senseless stone, into which I have not
really succeeded in moulding the spiritual part of my idea. I should
like, now,--only it would be such shameful treatment for a discrowned
queen, and my own offspring too,--I should like to hit poor Cleopatra a
bitter blow on her Egyptian nose with this mallet.”

“That is a blow which all statues seem doomed to receive, sooner or
later, though seldom from the hand that sculptured them,” said Hilda,
laughing. “But you must not let yourself be too much disheartened by
the decay of your faith in what you produce. I have heard a poet express
similar distaste for his own most exquisite poem, and I am afraid that
this final despair, and sense of short-coming, must always be the reward
and punishment of those who try to grapple with a great or beautiful
idea. It only proves that you have been able to imagine things too high
for mortal faculties to execute. The idea leaves you an imperfect image
of itself, which you at first mistake for the ethereal reality, but soon
find that the latter has escaped out of your closest embrace.”

“And the only consolation is,” remarked Kenyon, “that the blurred and
imperfect image may still make a very respectable appearance in the eyes
of those who have not seen the original.”

“More than that,” rejoined Hilda; “for there is a class of spectators
whose sympathy will help them to see the perfect through a mist of
imperfection. Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures
or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or
artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.”

“You, Hilda, are yourself the only critic in whom I have much faith,”
 said Kenyon. “Had you condemned Cleopatra, nothing should have saved
her.”

“You invest me with such an awful responsibility,” she replied, “that I
shall not dare to say a single word about your other works.”

“At least,” said the sculptor, “tell me whether you recognize this
bust?”

He pointed to a bust of Donatello. It was not the one which Kenyon had
begun to model at Monte Beni, but a reminiscence of the Count’s face,
wrought under the influence of all the sculptor’s knowledge of his
history, and of his personal and hereditary character. It stood on a
wooden pedestal, not nearly finished, but with fine white dust and small
chips of marble scattered about it, and itself incrusted all round with
the white, shapeless substance of the block. In the midst appeared
the features, lacking sharpness, and very much resembling a fossil
countenance,--but we have already used this simile, in reference to
Cleopatra, with the accumulations of long-past ages clinging to it.

And yet, strange to say, the face had an expression, and a more
recognizable one than Kenyon had succeeded in putting into the
clay model at Monte Beni. The reader is probably acquainted with
Thorwaldsen’s three-fold analogy,--the clay model, the Life; the plaster
cast, the Death; and the sculptured marble, the Resurrection,--and
it seemed to be made good by the spirit that was kindling up these
imperfect features, like a lambent flame.

“I was not quite sure, at first glance, that I knew the face,” observed
Hilda; “the likeness surely is not a striking one. There is a good
deal of external resemblance, still, to the features of the Faun of
Praxiteles, between whom and Donatello, you know, we once insisted that
there was a perfect twin-brotherhood. But the expression is now so very
different!”

“What do you take it to be?” asked the sculptor.

“I hardly know how to define it,” she answered. “But it has an effect
as if I could see this countenance gradually brightening while I look
at it. It gives the impression of a growing intellectual power and
moral sense. Donatello’s face used to evince little more than a genial,
pleasurable sort of vivacity, and capability of enjoyment. But here, a
soul is being breathed into him; it is the Faun, but advancing towards a
state of higher development.”

“Hilda, do you see all this?” exclaimed Kenyon, in considerable
surprise. “I may have had such an idea in my mind, but was quite unaware
that I had succeeded in conveying it into the marble.”

“Forgive me,” said Hilda, “but I question whether this striking effect
has been brought about by any skill or purpose on the sculptor’s part.
Is it not, perhaps, the chance result of the bust being just so far
shaped out, in the marble, as the process of moral growth had advanced
in the original? A few more strokes of the chisel might change the whole
expression, and so spoil it for what it is now worth.”

“I believe you are right,” answered Kenyon, thoughtfully examining his
work; “and, strangely enough, it was the very expression that I tried
unsuccessfully to produce in the clay model. Well; not another chip
shall be struck from the marble.”

And, accordingly, Donatello’s bust (like that rude, rough mass of the
head of Brutus, by Michael Angelo, at Florence) has ever since remained
in an unfinished state. Most spectators mistake it for an unsuccessful
attempt towards copying the features of the Faun of Praxiteles. One
observer in a thousand is conscious of something more, and lingers long
over this mysterious face, departing from it reluctantly, and with many
a glance thrown backward. What perplexes him is the riddle that he sees
propounded there; the riddle of the soul’s growth, taking its first
impulse amid remorse and pain, and struggling through the incrustations
of the senses. It was the contemplation of this imperfect portrait of
Donatello that originally interested us in his history, and impelled us
to elicit from Kenyon what he knew of his friend’s adventures.



CHAPTER XLII


REMINISCENCES OF MIRIAM


When Hilda and himself turned away from the unfinished bust, the
sculptor’s mind still dwelt upon the reminiscences which it suggested.
“You have not seen Donatello recently,” he remarked, “and therefore
cannot be aware how sadly he is changed.”

“No wonder!” exclaimed Hilda, growing pale.

The terrible scene which she had witnessed, when Donatello’s face
gleamed out in so fierce a light, came back upon her memory, almost
for the first time since she knelt at the confessional. Hilda, as is
sometimes the case with persons whose delicate organization requires
a peculiar safeguard, had an elastic faculty of throwing off such
recollections as would be too painful for endurance. The first shock
of Donatello’s and Miriam’s crime had, indeed, broken through the frail
defence of this voluntary forgetfulness; but, once enabled to relieve
herself of the ponderous anguish over which she had so long brooded, she
had practised a subtile watchfulness in preventing its return.

“No wonder, do you say?” repeated the sculptor, looking at her with
interest, but not exactly with surprise; for he had long suspected that
Hilda had a painful knowledge of events which he himself little more
than surmised. “Then you know!--you have heard! But what can you
possibly have heard, and through what channel?”

“Nothing!” replied Hilda faintly. “Not one word has reached my ears from
the lips of any human being. Let us never speak of it again! No, no!
never again!”

“And Miriam!” said Kenyon, with irrepressible interest. “Is it also
forbidden to speak of her?”

“Hush! do not even utter her name! Try not to think of it!” Hilda
whispered. “It may bring terrible consequences!”

“My dear Hilda!” exclaimed Kenyon, regarding her with wonder and deep
sympathy. “My sweet friend, have you had this secret hidden in your
delicate, maidenly heart, through all these many months! No wonder that
your life was withering out of you.”

“It was so, indeed!” said Hilda, shuddering. “Even now, I sicken at the
recollection.”

“And how could it have come to your knowledge?” continued the sculptor.
“But no matter! Do not torture yourself with referring to the subject.
Only, if at any time it should be a relief to you, remember that we can
speak freely together, for Miriam has herself suggested a confidence
between us.”

“Miriam has suggested this!” exclaimed Hilda. “Yes, I remember, now, her
advising that the secret should be shared with you. But I have
survived the death struggle that it cost me, and need make no further
revelations. And Miriam has spoken to you! What manner of woman can
she be, who, after sharing in such a deed, can make it a topic of
conversation with her friends?”

“Ah, Hilda,” replied Kenyon, “you do not know, for you could never
learn it from your own heart, which is all purity and rectitude, what
a mixture of good there may be in things evil; and how the greatest
criminal, if you look at his conduct from his own point of view, or from
any side point, may seem not so unquestionably guilty, after all. So
with Miriam; so with Donatello. They are, perhaps, partners in what we
must call awful guilt; and yet, I will own to you,--when I think of the
original cause, the motives, the feelings, the sudden concurrence of
circumstances thrusting them onward, the urgency of the moment, and
the sublime unselfishness on either part,--I know not well how to
distinguish it from much that the world calls heroism. Might we not
render some such verdict as this?--‘Worthy of Death, but not unworthy of
Love! ’”

“Never!” answered Hilda, looking at the matter through the clear crystal
medium of her own integrity. “This thing, as regards its causes, is all
a mystery to me, and must remain so. But there is, I believe, only one
right and one wrong; and I do not understand, and may God keep me from
ever understanding, how two things so totally unlike can be mistaken for
one another; nor how two mortal foes, as Right and Wrong surely are, can
work together in the same deed. This is my faith; and I should be led
astray, if you could persuade me to give it up.”

“Alas for poor human nature, then!” said Kenyon sadly, and yet half
smiling at Hilda’s unworldly and impracticable theory. “I always felt
you, my dear friend, a terribly severe judge, and have been perplexed to
conceive how such tender sympathy could coexist with the remorselessness
of a steel blade. You need no mercy, and therefore know not how to show
any.”

“That sounds like a bitter gibe,” said Hilda, with the tears springing
into her eyes. “But I cannot help it. It does not alter my perception of
the truth. If there be any such dreadful mixture of good and evil as
you affirm,--and which appears to me almost more shocking than
pure evil,--then the good is turned to poison, not the evil to
wholesomeness.”

The sculptor seemed disposed to say something more, but yielded to the
gentle steadfastness with which Hilda declined to listen. She grew very
sad; for a reference to this one dismal topic had set, as it were, a
prison door ajar, and allowed a throng of torturing recollections to
escape from their dungeons into the pure air and white radiance of
her soul. She bade Kenyon a briefer farewell than ordinary, and went
homeward to her tower.

In spite of her efforts to withdraw them to other subjects, her thoughts
dwelt upon Miriam; and, as had not heretofore happened, they brought
with them a painful doubt whether a wrong had not been committed on
Hilda’s part, towards the friend once so beloved. Something that Miriam
had said, in their final conversation, recurred to her memory, and
seemed now to deserve more weight than Hilda had assigned to it, in her
horror at the crime just perpetrated. It was not that the deed looked
less wicked and terrible in the retrospect; but she asked herself
whether there were not other questions to be considered, aside from that
single one of Miriam’s guilt or innocence; as, for example, whether a
close bond of friendship, in which we once voluntarily engage, ought to
be severed on account of any unworthiness, which we subsequently detect
in our friend. For, in these unions of hearts,--call them marriage,
or whatever else,--we take each other for better for worse. Availing
ourselves of our friend’s intimate affection, we pledge our own, as
to be relied upon in every emergency. And what sadder, more desperate
emergency could there be, than had befallen Miriam? Who more need the
tender succor of the innocent, than wretches stained with guilt! And
must a selfish care for the spotlessness of our own garments keep us
from pressing the guilty ones close to our hearts, wherein, for the very
reason that we are innocent, lies their securest refuge from further
ill?

It was a sad thing for Hilda to find this moral enigma propounded to her
conscience; and to feel that, whichever way she might settle it, there
would be a cry of wrong on the other side. Still, the idea stubbornly
came back, that the tie between Miriam and herself had been real, the
affection true, and that therefore the implied compact was not to be
shaken off.

“Miriam loved me well,” thought Hilda remorsefully, “and I failed her at
her sorest need.”

Miriam loved her well; and not less ardent had been the affection which
Miriam’s warm, tender, and generous characteristics had excited in
Hilda’s more reserved and quiet nature. It had never been extinguished;
for, in part, the wretchedness which Hilda had since endured was but
the struggle and writhing of her sensibility, still yearning towards
her friend. And now, at the earliest encouragement, it awoke again, and
cried out piteously, complaining of the violence that had been done it.

Recurring to the delinquencies of which she fancied (we say “fancied,”
 because we do not unhesitatingly adopt Hilda’s present view, but rather
suppose her misled by her feelings)--of which she fancied herself guilty
towards her friend, she suddenly remembered a sealed packet that
Miriam had confided to her. It had been put into her hands with earnest
injunctions of secrecy and care, and if unclaimed after a certain
period, was to be delivered according to its address. Hilda had
forgotten it; or, rather, she had kept the thought of this commission in
the background of her consciousness, with all other thoughts referring
to Miriam.

But now the recollection of this packet, and the evident stress which
Miriam laid upon its delivery at the specified time, impelled Hilda to
hurry up the staircase of her tower, dreading lest the period should
already have elapsed.

No; the hour had not gone by, but was on the very point of passing.
Hilda read the brief note of instruction, on a corner of the envelope,
and discovered, that, in case of Miriam’s absence from Rome, the packet
was to be taken to its destination that very day.

“How nearly I had violated my promise!” said Hilda. “And, since we are
separated forever, it has the sacredness of an injunction from a dead
friend. There is no time to be lost.”

So Hilda set forth in the decline of the afternoon, and pursued her way
towards the quarter of the city in which stands the Palazzo Cenci. Her
habit of self-reliance was so simply strong, so natural, and now so well
established by long use, that the idea of peril seldom or never occurred
to Hilda, in her lonely life.

She differed, in this particular, from the generality of her sex,
--although the customs and character of her native land often produce
women who meet the world with gentle fearlessness, and discover that its
terrors have been absurdly exaggerated by the tradition of mankind. In
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the apprehensiveness of women is
quite gratuitous. Even as matters now stand, they are really safer in
perilous situations and emergencies than men; and might be still more
so, if they trusted themselves more confidingly to the chivalry of
manhood. In all her wanderings about Rome, Hilda had gone and returned
as securely as she had been accustomed to tread the familiar street of
her New England village, where every face wore a look of recognition.
With respect to whatever was evil, foul, and ugly, in this populous and
corrupt city, she trod as if invisible, and not only so, but blind. She
was altogether unconscious of anything wicked that went along the same
pathway, but without jostling or impeding her, any more than gross
substance hinders the wanderings of a spirit. Thus it is, that, bad as
the world is said to have grown, innocence continues to make a paradise
around itself, and keep it still unfallen.

Hilda’s present expedition led her into what was--physically, at
least--the foulest and ugliest part of Rome. In that vicinity lies the
Ghetto, where thousands of Jews are crowded within a narrow compass,
and lead a close, unclean, and multitudinous life, resembling that of
maggots when they over-populate a decaying cheese.

Hilda passed on the borders of this region, but had no occasion to
step within it. Its neighborhood, however, naturally partook of
characteristics ‘like its own. There was a confusion of black and
hideous houses, piled massively out of the ruins of former ages; rude
and destitute of plan, as a pauper would build his hovel, and yet
displaying here and there an arched gateway, a cornice, a pillar, or
a broken arcade, that might have adorned a palace. Many of the houses,
indeed, as they stood, might once have been palaces, and possessed still
a squalid kind of grandeur. Dirt was everywhere, strewing the narrow
streets, and incrusting the tall shabbiness of the edifices, from the
foundations to the roofs; it lay upon the thresholds, and looked out of
the windows, and assumed the guise of human life in the children that
Seemed to be engendered out of it. Their father was the sun, and their
mother--a heap of Roman mud.

It is a question of speculative interest, whether the ancient Romans
were as unclean a people as we everywhere find those who have succeeded
them. There appears to be a kind of malignant spell in the spots that
have been inhabited by these masters of the world, or made famous in
their history; an inherited and inalienable curse, impelling their
successors to fling dirt and defilement upon whatever temple, column,
mined palace, or triumphal arch may be nearest at hand, and on every
monument that the old Romans built. It is most probably a classic trait,
regularly transmitted downward, and perhaps a little modified by the
better civilization of Christianity; so that Caesar may have trod
narrower and filthier ways in his path to the Capitol, than even those
of modern Rome.

As the paternal abode of Beatrice, the gloomy old palace of the Cencis
had an interest for Hilda, although not sufficiently strong, hitherto,
to overcome the disheartening effect of the exterior, and draw her over
its threshold. The adjacent piazza, of poor aspect, contained only an
old woman selling roasted chestnuts and baked squash-seeds; she looked
sharply at Hilda, and inquired whether she had lost her way.


“No,” said Hilda; “I seek the Palazzo Cenci.”

“Yonder it is, fair signorina,” replied the Roman matron. “If you wish
that packet delivered, which I see in your hand, my grandson Pietro
shall run with it for a baiocco. The Cenci palace is a spot of ill omen
for young maidens.”

Hilda thanked the old dame, but alleged the necessity of doing her
errand in person. She approached the front of the palace, which, with
all its immensity, had but a mean appearance, and seemed an abode which
the lovely shade of Beatrice would not be apt to haunt, unless her doom
made it inevitable. Some soldiers stood about the portal, and gazed at
the brown-haired, fair-cheeked Anglo-Saxon girl, with approving glances,
but not indecorously. Hilda began to ascend the staircase, three lofty
flights of which were to be surmounted, before reaching the door whither
she was bound.



CHAPTER XLIII


THE EXTINCTION OF A LAMP

Between Hilda and the sculptor there had been a kind of half-expressed
understanding, that both were to visit the galleries of the Vatican
the day subsequent to their meeting at the studio. Kenyon, accordingly,
failed not to be there, and wandered through the vast ranges of
apartments, but saw nothing of his expected friend. The marble faces,
which stand innumerable along the walls, and have kept themselves so
calm through the vicissitudes of twenty centuries, had no sympathy
for his disappointment; and he, on the other hand, strode past these
treasures and marvels of antique art, with the indifference which any
preoccupation of the feelings is apt to produce, in reference to objects
of sculpture. Being of so cold and pure a substance, and mostly deriving
their vitality more from thought than passion, they require to be seen
through a perfectly transparent medium.

And, moreover, Kenyon had counted so much upon Hilda’s delicate
perceptions in enabling him to look at two or three of the statues,
about which they had talked together, that the entire purpose of his
visit was defeated by her absence. It is a delicious sort of mutual aid,
when the united power of two sympathetic, yet dissimilar, intelligences
is brought to bear upon a poem by reading it aloud, or upon a picture
or statue by viewing it in each other’s company. Even if not a word
of criticism be uttered, the insight of either party is wonderfully
deepened, and the comprehension broadened; so that the inner mystery
of a work of genius, hidden from one, will often reveal itself to two.
Missing such help, Kenyon saw nothing at the Vatican which he had not
seen a thousand times before, and more perfectly than now.

In the chili of his disappointment, he suspected that it was a very
cold art to which he had devoted himself. He questioned, at that moment,
whether sculpture really ever softens and warms the material which it
handles; whether carved marble is anything but limestone, after all;
and whether the Apollo Belvedere itself possesses any merit above
its physical beauty, or is beyond criticism even in that generally
acknowledged excellence. In flitting glances, heretofore, he had seemed
to behold this statue, as something ethereal and godlike, but not now.

Nothing pleased him, unless it were the group of the Laocoon, which,
in its immortal agony, impressed Kenyon as a type of the long, fierce
struggle of man, involved in the knotted entanglements of Error and
Evil, those two snakes, which, if no divine help intervene, will be sure
to strangle him and his children in the end. What he most admired was
the strange calmness diffused through this bitter strife; so that it
resembled the rage of the sea made calm by its immensity,’ or the tumult
of Niagara which ceases to be tumult because it lasts forever. Thus, in
the Laocoon, the horror of a moment grew to be the fate of interminable
ages. Kenyon looked upon the group as the one triumph of sculpture,
creating the repose, which is essential to it, in the very acme of
turbulent effort; but, in truth, it was his mood of unwonted despondency
that made him so sensitive to the terrible magnificence, as well as to
the sad moral, of this work. Hilda herself could not have helped him to
see it with nearly such intelligence.

A good deal more depressed than the nature of the disappointment
warranted, Kenyon went to his studio, and took in hand a great lump of
clay. He soon found, however, that his plastic cunning had departed from
him for the time. So he wandered forth again into the uneasy streets
of Rome, and walked up and down the Corso, where, at that period of the
day, a throng of passers-by and loiterers choked up the narrow sidewalk.
A penitent was thus brought in contact with the sculptor.

It was a figure in a white robe, with a kind of featureless mask
over the face, through the apertures of which the eyes threw an
unintelligible light. Such odd, questionable shapes are often seen
gliding through the streets of Italian cities, and are understood to be
usually persons of rank, who quit their palaces, their gayeties, their
pomp and pride, and assume the penitential garb for a season, with a
view of thus expiating some crime, or atoning for the aggregate of petty
sins that make up a worldly life. It is their custom to ask alms, and
perhaps to measure the duration of their penance by the time requisite
to accumulate a sum of money out of the little droppings of individual
charity. The avails are devoted to some beneficent or religious purpose;
so that the benefit accruing to their own souls is, in a manner, linked
with a good done, or intended, to their fellow-men. These figures have
a ghastly and startling effect, not so much from any very impressive
peculiarity in the garb, as from the mystery which they bear about with
them, and the sense that there is an acknowledged sinfulness as the
nucleus of it.

In the present instance, however, the penitent asked no alms of Kenyon;
although, for the space of a minute or two, they stood face to face, the
hollow eyes of the mask encountering the sculptor’s gaze. But, just as
the crowd was about to separate them, the former spoke, in a voice not
unfamiliar to Kenyon, though rendered remote and strange by the guilty
veil through which it penetrated.

“Is all well with you, Signore?” inquired the penitent, out of the cloud
in which he walked.

“All is well,” answered Kenyon. “And with you?”

But the masked penitent returned no answer, being borne away by the
pressure of the throng.

The sculptor stood watching the figure, and was almost of a mind to
hurry after him and follow up the conversation that had been begun; but
it occurred to him that there is a sanctity (or, as we might rather term
it, an inviolable etiquette) which prohibits the recognition of persons
who choose to walk under the veil of penitence.

“How strange!” thought Kenyon to himself. “It was surely Donatello! What
can bring him to Rome, where his recollections must be so painful, and
his presence not without peril? And Miriam! Can she have accompanied
him?”

He walked on, thinking of the vast change in Donatello, since those days
of gayety and innocence, when the young Italian was new in Rome, and was
just beginning to be sensible of a more poignant felicity than he had
yet experienced, in the sunny warmth of Miriam’s smile. The growth of
a soul, which the sculptor half imagined that he had witnessed in his
friend, seemed hardly worth the heavy price that it had cost, in the
sacrifice of those simple enjoyments that were gone forever. A creature
of antique healthfulness had vanished from the earth; and, in his stead,
there was only one other morbid and remorseful man, among millions that
were cast in the same indistinguishable mould.

The accident of thus meeting Donatello the glad Faun of his imagination
and memory, now transformed into a gloomy penitent--contributed to
deepen the cloud that had fallen over Kenyon’s spirits. It caused him
to fancy, as we generally do, in the petty troubles which extend not a
hand’s-breadth beyond our own sphere, that the whole world was saddening
around him. It took the sinister aspect of an omen, although he could
not distinctly see what trouble it might forebode.

If it had not been for a peculiar sort of pique, with which lovers are
much conversant, a preposterous kind of resentment which endeavors to
wreak itself on the beloved object, and on one’s own heart, in requital
of mishaps for which neither are in fault, Kenyon might at once have
betaken himself to Hilda’s studio, and asked why the appointment was not
kept. But the interview of to-day was to have been so rich in present
joy, and its results so important to his future life, that the bleak
failure was too much for his equanimity. He was angry with poor Hilda,
and censured her without a hearing; angry with himself, too, and
therefore inflicted on this latter criminal the severest penalty in
his power; angry with the day that was passing over him, and would not
permit its latter hours to redeem the disappointment of the morning.

To confess the truth, it had been the sculptor’s purpose to stake all
his hopes on that interview in the galleries of the Vatican. Straying
with Hilda through those long vistas of ideal beauty, he meant, at last,
to utter himself upon that theme which lovers are fain to discuss in
village lanes, in wood paths, on seaside sands, in crowded streets; it
little matters where, indeed, since roses are sure to blush along the
way, and daisies and violets to spring beneath the feet, if the spoken
word be graciously received. He was resolved to make proof whether
the kindness that Hilda evinced for him was the precious token of an
individual preference, or merely the sweet fragrance of her disposition,
which other friends might share as largely as himself. He would try if
it were possible to take this shy, yet frank, and innocently fearless
creature captive, and imprison her in his heart, and make her sensible
of a wider freedom there, than in all the world besides.

It was hard, we must allow, to see the shadow of a wintry sunset falling
upon a day that was to have been so bright, and to find himself just
where yesterday had left him, only with a sense of being drearily
balked, and defeated without an opportunity for struggle. So much had
been anticipated from these now vanished hours, that it seemed as if no
other day could bring back the same golden hopes.

In a case like this, it is doubtful whether Kenyon could have done a
much better thing than he actually did, by going to dine at the Cafe
Nuovo, and drinking a flask of Montefiascone; longing, the while, for a
beaker or two of Donatello’s Sunshine. It would have been just the wine
to cure a lover’s melancholy, by illuminating his heart with tender
light and warmth, and suggestions of undefined hopes, too ethereal for
his morbid humor to examine and reject them.

No decided improvement resulting from the draught of Montefiascone, he
went to the Teatro Argentino, and sat gloomily to see an Italian
comedy, which ought to have cheered him somewhat, being full of glancing
merriment, and effective over everybody’s disabilities except his own.
The sculptor came out, however, before the close of the performance, as
disconsolate as he went in.

As he made his way through the complication of narrow streets, which
perplex that portion of the city, a carriage passed him. It was driven
rapidly, but not too fast for the light of a gas-lamp to flare upon a
face within--especially as it was bent forward, appearing to recognize
him, while a beckoning hand was protruded from the window. On his part,
Kenyon at once knew the face, and hastened to the carriage, which had
now stopped.

“Miriam! you in Rome?” he exclaimed “And your friends know nothing of
it?”

“Is all well with you?” she asked.

This inquiry, in the identical words which Donatello had so recently
addressed to him from beneath the penitent’s mask, startled the
sculptor. Either the previous disquietude of his mind, or some tone in
Miriam’s voice, or the unaccountableness of beholding her there at all,
made it seem ominous.

“All is well, I believe,” answered he doubtfully. “I am aware of no
misfortune. Have you any to announce’?”

He looked still more earnestly at Miriam, and felt a dreamy uncertainty
whether it was really herself to whom he spoke. True; there were those
beautiful features, the contour of which he had studied too often, and
with a sculptor’s accuracy of perception, to be in any doubt that it was
Miriam’s identical face. But he was conscious of a change, the nature of
which he could not satisfactorily define; it might be merely her dress,
which, imperfect as the light was, he saw to be richer than the simple
garb that she had usually worn. The effect, he fancied, was partly owing
to a gem which she had on her bosom; not a diamond, but something that
glimmered with a clear, red lustre, like the stars in a southern sky.
Somehow or other, this colored light seemed an emanation of herself,
as if all that was passionate and glowing in her native disposition
had crystallized upon her breast, and were just now scintillating more
brilliantly than ever, in sympathy with some emotion of her heart.

Of course there could be no real doubt that it was Miriam, his artist
friend, with whom and Hilda he had spent so many pleasant and familiar
hours, and whom he had last seen at Perugia, bending with Donatello
beneath the bronze pope’s benediction. It must be that selfsame Miriam;
but the sensitive sculptor felt a difference of manner, which impressed
him more than he conceived it possible to be affected by so external a
thing. He remembered the gossip so prevalent in Rome on Miriam’s first
appearance; how that she was no real artist, but the daughter of an
illustrious or golden lineage, who was merely playing at necessity;
mingling with human struggle for her pastime; stepping out of her native
sphere only for an interlude, just as a princess might alight from her
gilded equipage to go on foot through a rustic lane. And now, after a
mask in which love and death had performed their several parts, she had
resumed her proper character.

“Have you anything to tell me?” cried he impatiently; for nothing causes
a more disagreeable vibration of the nerves than this perception of
ambiguousness in familiar persons or affairs. “Speak; for my spirits and
patience have been much tried to-day.”

Miriam put her finger on her lips, and seemed desirous that Kenyon
should know of the presence of a third person. He now saw, indeed, that,
there was some one beside her in the carriage, hitherto concealed by
her attitude; a man, it appeared, with a sallow Italian face, which the
sculptor distinguished but imperfectly, and did not recognize.

“I can tell you nothing,” she replied; and leaning towards him, she
whispered,--appearing then more like the Miriam whom he knew than in
what had before passed,--“Only, when the lamp goes out do not despair.”

The carriage drove on, leaving Kenyon to muse over this unsatisfactory
interview, which seemed to have served no better purpose than to fill
his mind with more ominous forebodings than before. Why were Donatello
and Miriam in Rome, where both, in all likelihood, might have much to
dread? And why had one and the other addressed him with a question that
seemed prompted by a knowledge of some calamity, either already fallen
on his unconscious head, or impending closely over him?

“I am sluggish,” muttered Kenyon, to himself; “a weak, nerveless fool,
devoid of energy and promptitude; or neither Donatello nor Miriam could
have escaped me thus! They are aware of some misfortune that concerns me
deeply. How soon am I to know it too?”

There seemed but a single calamity possible to happen within so narrow
a sphere as that with which the sculptor was connected; and even to that
one mode of evil he could assign no definite shape, but only felt that
it must have some reference to Hilda.

Flinging aside the morbid hesitation, and the dallyings with his own
wishes, which he had permitted to influence his mind throughout the day,
he now hastened to the Via Portoghese. Soon the old palace stood before
him, with its massive tower rising into the clouded night; obscured from
view at its midmost elevation, but revealed again, higher upward, by
the Virgin’s lamp that twinkled on the summit. Feeble as it was, in
the broad, surrounding gloom, that little ray made no inconsiderable
illumination among Kenyon’s sombre thoughts; for; remembering Miriam’s
last words, a fantasy had seized him that he should find the sacred lamp
extinguished.

And even while he stood gazing, as a mariner at the star in which he put
his trust, the light quivered, sank, gleamed up again, and finally went
out, leaving the battlements of Hilda’s tower in utter darkness. For the
first time in centuries, the consecrated and legendary flame before the
loftiest shrine in Rome had ceased to burn.



CHAPTER XLIV


THE DESERTED SHRINE


Kenyon knew the sanctity which Hilda (faithful Protestant, and daughter
of the Puritans, as the girl was) imputed to this shrine. He was aware
of the profound feeling of responsibility, as well earthly as religious,
with which her conscience had been impressed, when she became the
occupant of her aerial chamber, and undertook the task of keeping the
consecrated lamp alight. There was an accuracy and a certainty about
Hilda’s movements, as regarded all matters that lay deep enough to have
their roots in right or wrong, which made it as possible and safe to
rely upon the timely and careful trimming of this lamp (if she were in
life, and able to creep up the steps), as upon the rising of to-morrow’s
sun, with lustre-undiminished from to-day.

The sculptor could scarcely believe his eyes, therefore, when he saw the
flame flicker and expire. His sight had surely deceived him. And now,
since the light did not reappear, there must be some smoke wreath
or impenetrable mist brooding about the tower’s gray old head, and
obscuring it from the lower world. But no! For right over the dim
battlements, as the wind chased away a mass of clouds, he beheld a star,
and moreover, by an earnest concentration of his sight, was soon able to
discern even the darkened shrine itself. There was no obscurity around
the tower; no infirmity of his own vision. The flame had exhausted its
supply of oil, and become extinct. But where was Hilda?

A man in a cloak happened to be passing; and Kenyon--anxious to distrust
the testimony of his senses, if he could get more acceptable evidence on
the other side--appealed to him.

“Do me the favor, Signore,” said he, “to look at the top of yonder
tower, and tell me whether you see the lamp burning at the Virgin’s
shrine.”

“The lamp, Signore?” answered the man, without at first troubling
himself to look up. “The lamp that has burned these four hundred years!
How is it possible, Signore, that it should not be burning now?” “But
look!” said the sculptor impatiently. With good-natured indulgence for
what he seemed to consider as the whim of an eccentric Forestiero, the
Italian carelessly threw his eyes upwards; but, as soon as he perceived
that there was really no light, he lifted his hands with a vivid
expression of wonder and alarm.

“The lamp is extinguished!” cried he. “The lamp that has been
burning these four hundred years! This surely must portend some great
misfortune; and, by my advice, Signore, you will hasten hence, lest the
tower tumble on our heads. A priest once told me that, if the Virgin
withdrew her blessing and the light went out, the old Palazzo del Torte
would sink into the earth, with all that dwell in it. There will be a
terrible crash before morning!”

The stranger made the best of his way from the doomed premises; while
Kenyon--who would willingly have seen the tower crumble down before his
eyes, on condition of Hilda’s safety--determined, late as it was, to
attempt ascertaining if she were in her dove-cote.

Passing through the arched entrance,--which, as is often the case with
Roman entrances, was as accessible at midnight as at noon,--he groped
his way to the broad staircase, and, lighting his wax taper, went
glimmering up the multitude of steps that led to Hilda’s door. The hour
being so unseasonable, he intended merely to knock, and, as soon as
her voice from within should reassure him, to retire, keeping his
explanations and apologies for a fitter time. Accordingly, reaching the
lofty height where the maiden, as he trusted, lay asleep, with angels
watching over her, though the Virgin seemed to have suspended her care,
he tapped lightly at the door panels,--then knocked more forcibly,--then
thundered an impatient summons. No answer came; Hilda, evidently, was
not there.

After assuring himself that this must be the fact, Kenyon descended the
stairs, but made a pause at every successive stage, and knocked at the
door of its apartment, regardless whose slumbers he might disturb, in
his anxiety to learn where the girl had last been seen. But, at each
closed entrance, there came those hollow echoes, which a chamber, or any
dwelling, great or small, never sends out, in response to human knuckles
or iron hammer, as long as there is life within to keep its heart from
getting dreary.

Once indeed, on the lower landing-place, the sculptor fancied that there
was a momentary stir inside the door, as if somebody were listening at
the threshold. He hoped, at least, that the small iron-barred aperture
would be unclosed, through which Roman housekeepers are wont to take
careful cognizance of applicants for admission, from a traditionary
dread, perhaps, of letting in a robber or assassin. But it remained
shut; neither was the sound repeated; and Kenyon concluded that his
excited nerves had played a trick upon his senses, as they are apt to do
when we most wish for the clear evidence of the latter.

There was nothing to be done, save to go heavily away, and await
whatever good or ill to-morrow’s daylight might disclose.

Betimes in the morning, therefore, Kenyon went back to the Via
Portoghese, before the slant rays of the sun had descended halfway down
the gray front of Hilda’s tower. As he drew near its base, he saw the
doves perched in full session, on the sunny height of the battlements,
and a pair of them--who were probably their mistress’s especial pets,
and the confidants of her bosom secrets, if Hilda had any--came shooting
down, and made a feint of alighting on his shoulder. But, though they
evidently recognized him, their shyness would not yet allow so decided
a demonstration. Kenyon’s eyes followed them as they flew upward, hoping
that they might have come as joyful messengers of the girl’s safety,
and that he should discern her slender form, half hidden by the parapet,
trimming the extinguished lamp at the Virgin’s shrine, just as other
maidens set about the little duties of a household. Or, perhaps, he
might see her gentle and sweet face smiling down upon him, midway
towards heaven, as if she had flown thither for a day or two, just to
visit her kindred, but had been drawn earthward again by the spell of
unacknowledged love.

But his eyes were blessed by no such fair vision or reality; nor, in
truth, were the eager, unquiet flutterings of the doves indicative of
any joyful intelligence, which they longed to share with Hilda’s friend,
but of anxious inquiries that they knew not how to utter. They could
not tell, any more than he, whither their lost companion had withdrawn
herself, but were in the same void despondency with him, feeling their
sunny and airy lives darkened and grown imperfect, now that her sweet
society was taken out of it.

In the brisk morning air, Kenyon found it much easier to pursue his
researches than at the preceding midnight, when, if any slumberers heard
the clamor that he made, they had responded only with sullen and drowsy
maledictions, and turned to sleep again. It must be a very dear and
intimate reality for which people will be content to give up a dream.
When the sun was fairly up, however, it was quite another thing. The
heterogeneous population, inhabiting the lower floor of the old tower,
and the other extensive regions of the palace, were now willing to tell
all they knew, and imagine a great deal more. The amiability of these
Italians, assisted by their sharp and nimble wits, caused them to
overflow with plausible suggestions, and to be very bounteous in their
avowals of interest for the lost Hilda. In a less demonstrative people,
such expressions would have implied an eagerness to search land and sea,
and never rest till she were found. In the mouths that uttered them they
meant good wishes, and were, so far, better than indifference. There
was little doubt that many of them felt a genuine kindness for the shy,
brown-haired, delicate young foreign maiden, who had flown from some
distant land to alight upon their tower, where she consorted only with
the doves. But their energy expended itself in exclamation, and they
were content to leave all more active measures to Kenyon, and to the
Virgin, whose affair it was to see that the faithful votary of her lamp
received no harm.

In a great Parisian domicile, multifarious as its inhabitants might
be, the concierge under the archway would be cognizant of all their
incomings and issuings forth. But except in rare cases, the general
entrance and main staircase of a Roman house are left as free as the
street, of which they form a sort of by-lane. The sculptor, therefore,
could hope to find information about Hilda’s movements only from casual
observers.

On probing the knowledge of these people to the bottom, there was
various testimony as to the period when the girl had last been seen.
Some said that it was four days since there had been a trace of her;
but an English lady, in the second piano of the palace, was rather of
opinion that she had met her, the morning before, with a drawing-book
in her hand. Having no acquaintance with the young person, she had taken
little notice and might have been mistaken. A count, on the piano next
above, was very certain that he had lifted his hat to Hilda, under the
archway, two afternoons ago. An old woman, who had formerly tended the
shrine, threw some light upon the matter, by testifying that the lamp
required to be replenished once, at least, in three days, though its
reservoir of oil was exceedingly capacious.

On the whole, though there was other evidence enough to create some
perplexity, Kenyon could not satisfy himself that she had been visible
since the afternoon of the third preceding day, when a fruit seller
remembered her coming out of the arched passage, with a sealed packet in
her hand. As nearly as he could ascertain, this was within an hour
after Hilda had taken leave of the sculptor at his own studio, with the
understanding that they were to meet at the Vatican the next day. Two
nights, therefore, had intervened, during which the lost maiden was
unaccounted for.

The door of Hilda’s apartments was still locked, as on the preceding
night; but Kenyon sought out the wife of the person who sublet them, and
prevailed on her to give him admittance by means of the duplicate key
which the good woman had in her possession. On entering, the maidenly
neatness and simple grace, recognizable in all the arrangements, made
him visibly sensible that this was the daily haunt of a pure soul, in
whom religion and the love of beauty were at one.

Thence, the sturdy Roman matron led the sculptor across a narrow
passage, and threw open the door of a small chamber, on the threshold of
which he reverently paused. Within, there was a bed, covered with white
drapery, enclosed with snowy curtains like a tent, and of barely width
enough for a slender figure to repose upon it. The sight of this cool,
airy, and secluded bower caused the lover’s heart to stir as if enough
of Hilda’s gentle dreams were lingering there to make him happy for
a single instant. But then came the closer consciousness of her loss,
bringing along with it a sharp sting of anguish.

“Behold, Signore,” said the matron; “here is the little staircase by
which the signorina used to ascend and trim the Blessed Virgin’s lamp.
She was worthy to be a Catholic, such pains the good child bestowed to
keep it burning; and doubtless the Blessed Mary will intercede for her,
in consideration of her pious offices, heretic though she was. What will
become of the old palazzo, now that the lamp is extinguished, the saints
above us only know! Will you mount, Signore, to the battlements, and see
if she have left any trace of herself there?”

The sculptor stepped across the chamber and ascended the little
staircase, which gave him access to the breezy summit of the tower. It
affected him inexpressibly to see a bouquet of beautiful flowers beneath
the shrine, and to recognize in them an offering of his own to Hilda,
who had put them in a vase of water, and dedicated them to the Virgin,
in a spirit partly fanciful, perhaps, but still partaking of the
religious sentiment which so profoundly influenced her character. One
rosebud, indeed, she had selected for herself from the rich mass of
flowers; for Kenyon well remembered recognizing it in her bosom when he
last saw her at his studio.

“That little part of my great love she took,” said he to himself. “The
remainder she would have devoted to Heaven; but has left it withering
in the sun and wind. Ah! Hilda, Hilda, had you given me a right to watch
over you, this evil had not come!”

“Be not downcast, signorino mio,” said the Roman matron, in response to
the deep sigh which struggled out of Kenyon’s breast. “The dear little
maiden, as we see, has decked yonder blessed shrine as devoutly as
I myself, or any Other good Catholic woman, could have done. It is a
religious act, and has more than the efficacy of a prayer. The signorina
will as surely come back as the sun will fall through the window
to-morrow no less than to-day. Her own doves have often been missing
for a day or two, but they were sure to come fluttering about her head
again, when she least expected them. So will it be with this dove-like
child.”

“It might be so,” thought Kenyon, with yearning anxiety, “if a pure
maiden were as safe as a dove, in this evil world of ours.”

As they returned through the studio, with the furniture and arrangements
of which the sculptor was familiar, he missed a small ebony writing-desk
that he remembered as having always been placed on a table there. He
knew that it was Hilda’s custom to deposit her letters in this desk,
as well as other little objects of which she wished to be specially
careful.

“What has become of it?” he suddenly inquired, laying his hand on the
table.

“Become of what, pray?” exclaimed the woman, a little disturbed. “Does
the Signore suspect a robbery, then?”

“The signorina’s writing-desk is gone,” replied Kenyon; “it always stood
on this table, and I myself saw it there only a few days ago.”

“Ah, well!” said the woman, recovering her composure, which she seemed
partly to have lost. “The signorina has doubtless taken it away with
her. The fact is of good omen; for it proves that she did not go
unexpectedly, and is likely to return when it may best suit her
convenience.”

“This is very singular,” observed Kenyon. “Have the rooms been entered
by yourself, or any other person, since the signorina’s disappearance?”

“Not by me, Signore, so help me Heaven and the saints!” said the matron.
“And I question whether there are more than two keys in Rome that will
suit this strange old lock. Here is one; and as for the other, the
signorina carlies it in her pocket.”

The sculptor had no reason to doubt the word of this respectable dame.
She appeared to be well meaning and kind hearted, as Roman matrons
generally are; except when a fit of passion incites them to shower
horrible curses on an obnoxious individual, or perhaps to stab him
with the steel stiletto that serves them for a hairpin. But Italian
asseverations of any questionable fact, however true they may chance to
be, have no witness of their truth in the faces of those who utter them.
Their words are spoken with strange earnestness, and yet do not vouch
for themselves as coming from any depth, like roots drawn out of the
substance of the soul, with some of the soil clinging to them. There is
always a something inscrutable, instead of frankness, in their eyes. In
short, they lie so much like truth, and speak truth so much as if they
were telling a lie, that their auditor suspects himself in the wrong,
whether he believes or disbelieves them; it being the one thing certain,
that falsehood is seldom an intolerable burden to the tenderest of
Italian consciences.

“It is very strange what can have become of the desk!” repeated Kenyon,
looking the woman in the face.

“Very strange, indeed, Signore,” she replied meekly, without turning
away her eyes in the least, but checking his insight of them at about
half an inch below the surface. “I think the signorina must have taken
it with her.”

It seemed idle to linger here any longer. Kenyon therefore departed,
after making an arrangement with the woman, by the terms of which she
was to allow the apartments to remain in their present state, on his
assuming the responsibility for the rent.

He spent the day in making such further search and investigation as he
found practicable; and, though at first trammelled by an unwillingness
to draw public attention to Hilda’s affairs, the urgency of the
circumstances soon compelled him to be thoroughly in earnest. In the
course of a week, he tried all conceivable modes of fathoming the
mystery, not merely by his personal efforts and those of his brother
artists and friends, but through the police, who readily undertook the
task, and expressed strong confidence of success. But the Roman police
has very little efficiency, except in the interest of the despotism of
which it is a tool. With their cocked hats, shoulder belts, and swords,
they wear a sufficiently imposing aspect, and doubtless keep their eyes
open wide enough to track a political offender, but are too often blind
to private outrage, be it murder or any lesser crime. Kenyon counted
little upon their assistance, and profited by it not at all.

Remembering the mystic words which Miriam had addressed to him, he
was anxious to meet her, but knew not whither she had gone, nor how
to obtain an interview either with herself or Donatello. The days wore
away, and still there were no tidings of the lost one; no lamp rekindled
before the Virgin’s shrine; no light shining into the lover’s heart;
no star of Hope--he was ready to say, as he turned his eyes almost
reproachfully upward--in heaven itself!



CHAPTER XLV


THE FLIGHT OF HILDA’S DOVES


Along with the lamp on Hilda’s tower, the sculptor now felt that a light
had gone out, or, at least, was ominously obscured, to which he owed
whatever cheerfulness had heretofore illuminated his cold, artistic
life. The idea of this girl had been like a taper of virgin wax, burning
with a pure and steady flame, and chasing away the evil spirits out of
the magic circle of its beams. It had darted its rays afar, and modified
the whole sphere in which Kenyon had his being. Beholding it no more, he
at once found himself in darkness and astray.

This was the time, perhaps, when Kenyon first became sensible what a
dreary city is Rome, and what a terrible weight is there imposed on
human life, when any gloom within the heart corresponds to the spell of
ruin that has been thrown over the site of ancient empire. He wandered,
as it were, and stumbled over the fallen columns, and among the tombs,
and groped his way into the sepulchral darkness of the catacombs, and
found no path emerging from them. The happy may well enough continue to
be such, beneath the brilliant sky of Rome. But, if you go thither in
melancholy mood, if you go with a ruin in your heart, or with a
vacant site there, where once stood the airy fabric of happiness, now
vanished,--all the ponderous gloom of the Roman Past will pile itself
upon that spot, and crush you down as with the heaped-up marble and
granite, the earth-mounds, and multitudinous bricks of its material
decay.

It might be supposed that a melancholy man would here make acquaintance
with a grim philosophy. He should learn to bear patiently his individual
griefs, that endure only for one little lifetime, when here are the
tokens of such infinite misfortune on an imperial scale, and when so
many far landmarks of time, all around him, are bringing the remoteness
of a thousand years ago into the sphere of yesterday. But it is in vain
that you seek this shrub of bitter sweetness among the plants that root
themselves on the roughness of massive walls, or trail downward from the
capitals of pillars, or spring out of the green turf in the palace of
the Caesars. It does not grow in Rome; not even among the five hundred
various weeds which deck the grassy arches of the Coliseum. You look
through a vista of century beyond century,--through much shadow, and a
little sunshine,--through barbarism and civilization, alternating with
one another like actors that have prearranged their parts: through
a broad pathway of progressive generations bordered by palaces and
temples, and bestridden by old, triumphal arches, until, in the
distance, you behold the obelisks, with their unintelligible
inscriptions, hinting at a past infinitely more remote than history
can define. Your own life is as nothing, when compared with that
immeasurable distance; but still you demand, none the less earnestly, a
gleam of sunshine, instead of a speck of shadow, on the step or two that
will bring you to your quiet rest.

How exceedingly absurd! All men, from the date of the earliest
obelisk,--and of the whole world, moreover, since that far epoch, and
before,--have made a similar demand, and seldom had their wish. If they
had it, what are they the better now? But, even while you taunt yourself
with this sad lesson, your heart cries out obstreperously for its small
share of earthly happiness, and will not be appeased by the myriads of
dead hopes that lie crushed into the soil of Rome. How wonderful
that this our narrow foothold of the Present should hold its own so
constantly, and, while every moment changing, should still be like a
rock betwixt the encountering tides of the long Past and the infinite
To-come!

Man of marble though he was, the sculptor grieved for the Irrevocable.
Looking back upon Hilda’s way of life, he marvelled at his own blind
stupidity, which had kept him from remonstrating as a friend, if with no
stronger right against the risks that she continually encountered. Being
so innocent, she had no means of estimating those risks, nor even a
possibility of suspecting their existence. But he--who had spent
years in Rome, with a man’s far wider scope of observation and
experience--knew things that made him shudder. It seemed to Kenyon,
looking through the darkly colored medium of his fears, that all modes
of crime were crowded into the close intricacy of Roman streets, and
that there was no redeeming element, such as exists in other dissolute
and wicked cities.

For here was a priesthood, pampered, sensual, with red and bloated
cheeks, and carnal eyes. With apparently a grosser development of animal
life than most men, they were placed in an unnatural relation with
woman, and thereby lost the healthy, human conscience that pertains to
other human beings, who own the sweet household ties connecting them
with wife and daughter. And here was an indolent nobility, with no high
aims or opportunities, but cultivating a vicious way of life, as if
it were an art, and the only one which they cared to learn. Here was a
population, high and low, that had no genuine belief in virtue; and
if they recognized any act as criminal, they might throw off all
care, remorse, and memory of it, by kneeling a little while at the
confessional, and rising unburdened, active, elastic, and incited by
fresh appetite for the next ensuing sin. Here was a soldiery who felt
Rome to be their conquered city, and doubtless considered themselves the
legal inheritors of the foul license which Gaul, Goth, and Vandal have
here exercised in days gone by.

And what localities for new crime existed in those guilty sites,
where the crime of departed ages used to be at home, and had its long,
hereditary haunt! What street in Rome, what ancient ruin, what one place
where man had standing-room, what fallen stone was there, unstained with
one or another kind of guilt! In some of the vicissitudes of the city’s
pride or its calamity, the dark tide of human evil had swelled over it,
far higher than the Tiber ever rose against the acclivities of the
seven hills. To Kenyon’s morbid view, there appeared to be a contagious
element, rising fog-like from the ancient depravity of Rome, and
brooding over the dead and half-rotten city, as nowhere else on earth.
It prolonged the tendency to crime, and developed an instantaneous
growth of it, whenever an opportunity was found; And where could it be
found so readily as here! In those vast palaces, there were a hundred
remote nooks where Innocence might shriek in vain. Beneath meaner houses
there were unsuspected dungeons that had once been princely chambers,
and open to the daylight; but, on account of some wickedness there
perpetrated, each passing age had thrown its handful of dust upon the
spot, and buried it from sight. Only ruffians knew of its existence, and
kept it for murder, and worse crime.

Such was the city through which Hilda, for three years past, had been
wandering without a protector or a guide. She had trodden lightly over
the crumble of old crimes; she had taken her way amid the grime and
corruption which Paganism had left there, and a perverted Christianity
had made more noisome; walking saint-like through it all, with white,
innocent feet; until, in some dark pitfall that lay right across her
path, she had vanished out of sight. It was terrible to imagine what
hideous outrage might have thrust her into that abyss!

Then the lover tried to comfort himself with the idea that Hilda’s
sanctity was a sufficient safeguard. Ah, yes; she was so pure! The
angels, that were of the same sisterhood, would never let Hilda come to
harm. A miracle would be wrought on her behalf, as naturally as a father
would stretch out his hand to save a best-beloved child. Providence
would keep a little area and atmosphere about her as safe and wholesome
as heaven itself, although the flood of perilous iniquity might hem
her round, and its black waves hang curling above her head! But these
reflections were of slight avail. No doubt they were the religious
truth. Yet the ways of Providence are utterly inscrutable; and many a
murder has been done, and many an innocent virgin has lifted her white
arms, beseeching its aid in her extremity, and all in vain; so that,
though Providence is infinitely good and wise, and perhaps for that very
reason, it may be half an eternity before the great circle of its scheme
shall bring us the superabundant recompense for all these sorrows! But
what the lover asked was such prompt consolation as might consist with
the brief span of mortal life; the assurance of Hilda’s present safety,
and her restoration within that very hour.

An imaginative man, he suffered the penalty of his endowment in the
hundred-fold variety of gloomily tinted scenes that it presented to
him, in which Hilda was always a central figure. The sculptor forgot his
marble. Rome ceased to be anything, for him, but a labyrinth of dismal
streets, in one or another of which the lost girl had disappeared. He
was haunted with the idea that some circumstance, most important to be
known, and perhaps easily discoverable, had hitherto been overlooked,
and that, if he could lay hold of this one clew, it would guide him
directly in the track of Hilda’s footsteps. With this purpose in
view, he went, every morning, to the Via Portoghese, and made it
the starting-point of fresh investigations. After nightfall, too, he
invariably returned thither, with a faint hope fluttering at his heart
that the lamp might again be shining on the summit of the tower, and
would dispel this ugly mystery out of the circle consecrated by its
rays. There being no point of which he could take firm hold, his mind
was filled with unsubstantial hopes and fears. Once Kenyon had seemed
to cut his life in marble; now he vaguely clutched at it, and found it
vapor.

In his unstrung and despondent mood, one trifling circumstance affected
him with an idle pang. The doves had at first been faithful to their
lost mistress. They failed not to sit in a row upon her window-sill,
or to alight on the shrine, or the church-angels, and on the roofs
and portals of the neighboring houses, in evident expectation of her
reappearance. After the second week, however, they began to take flight,
and dropping off by pairs, betook themselves to other dove-cotes. Only a
single dove remained, and brooded drearily beneath the shrine. The
flock that had departed were like the many hopes that had vanished
from Kenyon’s heart; the one that still lingered, and looked so
wretched,--was it a Hope, or already a Despair?

In the street, one day, the sculptor met a priest of mild and venerable
aspect; and as his mind dwelt continually upon Hilda, and was especially
active in bringing up all incidents that had ever been connected with
her, it immediately struck him that this was the very father with whom
he had seen her at the confessional. Such trust did Hilda inspire
in him, that Kenyon had never asked what was the subject of the
communication between herself and this old priest. He had no reason for
imagining that it could have any relation with her disappearance,
so long subsequently; but, being thus brought face to face with a
personage, mysteriously associated, as he now remembered, with her whom
he had lost, an impulse ran before his thoughts and led the sculptor to
address him.

It might be that the reverend kindliness of the old man’s expression
took Kenyon’s heart by surprise; at all events, he spoke as if there
were a recognized acquaintanceship, and an object of mutual interest
between them.

“She has gone from me, father,” said he.

“Of whom do you speak, my son?” inquired the priest.

“Of that sweet girl,” answered Kenyon, “who knelt to you at the
confessional. Surely you remember her, among all the mortals to whose
confessions you have listened! For she alone could have had no sins to
reveal.”

“Yes; I remember,” said the priest, with a gleam of recollection in his
eyes. “She was made to bear a miraculous testimony to the efficacy of
the divine ordinances of the Church, by seizing forcibly upon one of
them, and finding immediate relief from it, heretic though she was.
It is my purpose to publish a brief narrative of this miracle, for
the edification of mankind, in Latin, Italian, and English, from the
printing press of the Propaganda. Poor child! Setting apart her heresy,
she was spotless, as you say. And is she dead?”

“Heaven forbid, father!” exclaimed Kenyon, shrinking back. “But she has
gone from me, I know not whither. It may be--yes, the idea seizes upon
my mind--that what she revealed to you will suggest some clew to the
mystery of her disappearance.’”

“None, my son, none,” answered the priest, shaking his head;
“nevertheless, I bid you be of good cheer. That young maiden is not
doomed to die a heretic. Who knows what the Blessed Virgin may at this
moment be doing for her soul! Perhaps, when you next behold her, she
will be clad in the shining white robe of the true faith.”

This latter suggestion did not convey all the comfort which the old
priest possibly intended by it; but he imparted it to the sculptor,
along with his blessing, as the two best things that he could bestow,
and said nothing further, except to bid him farewell.

When they had parted, however, the idea of Hilda’s conversion to
Catholicism recurred to her lover’s mind, bringing with it certain
reflections, that gave a new turn to his surmises about the mystery into
which she had vanished. Not that he seriously apprehended--although
the superabundance of her religious sentiment might mislead her for
a moment--that the New England girl would permanently succumb to the
scarlet superstitions which surrounded her in Italy. But the incident
of the confessional if known, as probably it was, to the eager
propagandists who prowl about for souls, as cats to catch a mouse--would
surely inspire the most confident expectations of bringing her over to
the faith. With so pious an end in view, would Jesuitical morality be
shocked at the thought of kidnapping the mortal body, for the sake of
the immortal spirit that might otherwise be lost forever? Would not the
kind old priest, himself, deem this to be infinitely the kindest service
that he could perform for the stray lamb, who had so strangely sought
his aid?

If these suppositions were well founded, Hilda was most likely a
prisoner in one of the religious establishments that are so numerous in
Rome. The idea, according to the aspect in which it was viewed, brought
now a degree of comfort, and now an additional perplexity. On the one
hand, Hilda was safe from any but spiritual assaults; on the other,
where was the possibility of breaking through all those barred portals,
and searching a thousand convent cells, to set her free?

Kenyon, however, as it happened, was prevented from endeavoring to
follow out this surmise, which only the state of hopeless uncertainty,
that almost bewildered his reason, could have led him for a moment
to entertain. A communication reached him by an unknown hand, in
consequence of which, and within an hour after receiving it, he took his
way through one of the gates of Rome.



CHAPTER XLVI


A WALK ON THE CAMPAGNA


It was a bright forenoon of February; a month in which the brief
severity of a Roman winter is already past, and when violets and daisies
begin to show themselves in spots favored by the sun. The sculptor came
out of the city by the gate of San Sebastiano, and walked briskly along
the Appian Way.

For the space of a mile or two beyond the gate, this ancient and famous
road is as desolate and disagreeable as most of the other Roman avenues.
It extends over small, uncomfortable paving-stones, between brick and
plastered walls, which are very solidly constructed, and so high as
almost to exclude a view of the surrounding country. The houses are of
most uninviting aspect, neither picturesque, nor homelike and social;
they have seldom or never a door opening on the wayside, but are
accessible only from the rear, and frown inhospitably upon the traveller
through iron-grated windows. Here and there appears a dreary inn or a
wine-shop, designated by the withered bush beside the entrance, within
which you discern a stone-built and sepulchral interior, where guests
refresh themselves with sour bread and goats’-milk cheese, washed down
with wine of dolorous acerbity.

At frequent intervals along the roadside up-rises the ruin of an ancient
tomb. As they stand now, these structures are immensely high and broken
mounds of conglomerated brick, stone, pebbles, and earth, all molten
by time into a mass as solid and indestructible as if each tomb were
composed of a single boulder of granite. When first erected, they were
cased externally, no doubt, with slabs of polished marble, artfully
wrought bas-reliefs, and all such suitable adornments, and were rendered
majestically beautiful by grand architectural designs. This antique
splendor has long since been stolen from the dead, to decorate the
palaces and churches of the living. Nothing remains to the dishonored
sepulchres, except their massiveness.

Even the pyramids form hardly a stranger spectacle, or are more alien
from human sympathies, than the tombs of the Appian Way, with their
gigantic height, breadth, and solidity, defying time and the elements,
and far too mighty to be demolished by an ordinary earthquake. Here you
may see a modern dwelling, and a garden with its vines and olive-trees,
perched on the lofty dilapidation of a tomb, which forms a precipice of
fifty feet in depth on each of the four sides. There is a home on
that funereal mound, where generations of children have been born, and
successive lives been spent, undisturbed by the ghost of the stern Roman
whose ashes were so preposterously burdened. Other sepulchres wear a
crown of grass, shrubbery, and forest-trees, which throw out a broad
sweep of branches, having had time, twice over, to be a thousand years
of age. On one of them stands a tower, which, though immemorially more
modern than the tomb, was itself built by immemorial hands, and is
now rifted quite from top to bottom by a vast fissure of decay; the
tomb-hillock, its foundation, being still as firm as ever, and likely to
endure until the last trump shall rend it wide asunder, and summon forth
its unknown dead.

Yes; its unknown dead! For, except in one or two doubtful instances,
these mountainous sepulchral edifices have not availed to keep so much
as the bare name of an individual or a family from oblivion. Ambitious
of everlasting remembrance, as they were, the slumberers might just
as well have gone quietly to rest, each in his pigeon-hole of a
columbarium, or under his little green hillock in a graveyard, without a
headstone to mark the spot. It is rather satisfactory than otherwise, to
think that all these idle pains have turned out so utterly abortive.

About two miles, or more, from the city gate, and right upon the
roadside, Kenyon passed an immense round pile, sepulchral in its
original purposes, like those already mentioned. It was built of
great blocks of hewn stone, on a vast, square foundation of rough,
agglomerated material, such as composes the mass of all the other
ruinous tombs. But whatever might be the cause, it was in a far
better state of preservation than they. On its broad summit rose the
battlements of a mediaeval fortress, out of the midst of which (so long
since had time begun to crumble the supplemental structure, and cover
it with soil, by means of wayside dust) grew trees, bushes, and thick
festoons of ivy. This tomb of a woman had become the citadel and
donjon-keep of a castle; and all the care that Cecilia Metella’s husband
could bestow, to secure endless peace for her beloved relics, had only
sufficed to make that handful of precious ashes the nucleus of battles,
long ages after her death.

A little beyond this point, the sculptor turned aside from the Appian
Way, and directed his course across the Campagna, guided by tokens that
were obvious only to himself. On one side of him, but at a distance, the
Claudian aqueduct was striding over fields and watercourses. Before him,
many miles away, with a blue atmosphere between, rose the Alban hills,
brilliantly silvered with snow and sunshine.

He was not without a companion. A buffalo-calf, that seemed shy and
sociable by the selfsame impulse, had begun to make acquaintance with
him, from the moment when he left the road. This frolicsome creature
gambolled along, now before, now behind; standing a moment to gaze at
him, with wild, curious eyes, he leaped aside and shook his shaggy head,
as Kenyon advanced too nigh; then, after loitering in the rear, he came
galloping up, like a charge of cavalry, but halted, all of a sudden,
when the sculptor turned to look, and bolted across the Campagna at the
slightest signal of nearer approach. The young, sportive thing, Kenyon
half fancied, was serving him as a guide, like the heifer that led
Cadmus to the site of his destined city; for, in spite of a hundred
vagaries, his general course was in the right direction, and along by
several objects which the sculptor had noted as landmarks of his way.

In this natural intercourse with a rude and healthy form of animal life,
there was something that wonderfully revived Kenyon’s spirits. The warm
rays of the sun, too, were wholesome for him in body and soul; and so
was a breeze that bestirred itself occasionally, as if for the sole
purpose of breathing upon his cheek and dying softly away, when he would
fain have felt a little more decided kiss. This shy but loving breeze
reminded him strangely of what Hilda’s deportment had sometimes been
towards himself.

The weather had very much to do, no doubt, with these genial and
delightful sensations, that made the sculptor so happy with mere life,
in spite of a head and heart full of doleful thoughts, anxieties, and
fears, which ought in all reason to have depressed him. It was like no
weather that exists anywhere, save in Paradise and in Italy; certainly
not in America, where it is always too strenuous on the side either of
heat or cold. Young as the season was, and wintry, as it would have
been under a more rigid sky, it resembled summer rather than what we
New Englanders recognize in our idea of spring. But there was an
indescribable something, sweet, fresh, and remotely affectionate, which
the matronly summer loses, and which thrilled, and, as it were, tickled
Kenyon’s heart with a feeling partly of the senses, yet far more a
spiritual delight. In a word, it was as if Hilda’s delicate breath were
on his cheek.

After walking at a brisk pace for about half an hour, he reached a
spot where an excavation appeared to have been begun, at some not
very distant period. There was a hollow space in the earth, looking
exceedingly like a deserted cellar, being enclosed within old
subterranean walls, constructed of thin Roman bricks, and made
accessible by a narrow flight of stone steps. A suburban villa had
probably stood over this site, in the imperial days of Rome, and these
might have been the ruins of a bathroom, or some other apartment that
was required to be wholly or partly under ground. A spade can scarcely
be put into that soil, so rich in lost and forgotten things, without
hitting upon some discovery which would attract all eyes, in any other
land. If you dig but a little way, you gather bits of precious marble,
coins, rings, and engraved gems; if you go deeper, you break into
columbaria, or into sculptured and richly frescoed apartments that look
like festive halls, but were only sepulchres.

The sculptor descended into the cellar-like cavity, and sat down on a
block of stone. His eagerness had brought him thither sooner than
the appointed hour. The sunshine fell slantwise into the hollow, and
happened to be resting on what Kenyon at first took to be a shapeless
fragment of stone, possibly marble, which was partly concealed by the
crumbling down of earth.

But his practised eye was soon aware of something artistic in this rude
object. To relieve the anxious tedium of his situation, he cleared
away some of the soil, which seemed to have fallen very recently, and
discovered a headless figure of marble. It was earth stained, as well it
might be, and had a slightly corroded surface, but at once impressed the
sculptor as a Greek production, and wonderfully delicate and beautiful.
The head was gone; both arms were broken off at the elbow. Protruding
from the loose earth, however, Kenyon beheld the fingers of a marble
hand; it was still appended to its arm, and a little further search
enabled him to find the other. Placing these limbs in what the nice
adjustment of the fractures proved to be their true position, the
poor, fragmentary woman forthwith showed that she retained her modest
instincts to the last. She had perished with them, and snatched them
back at the moment of revival. For these long-buried hands immediately
disposed themselves in the manner that nature prompts, as the antique
artist knew, and as all the world has seen, in the Venus de’ Medici.

“What a discovery is here!” thought Kenyon to himself. “I seek for
Hilda, and find a marble woman! Is the omen good or ill?”

In a corner of the excavation lay a small round block of stone, much
incrusted with earth that had dried and hardened upon it. So, at least,
you would have described this object, until the sculptor lifted it,
turned it hither and thither in his hands, brushed off the clinging
soil, and finally placed it on the slender neck of the newly discovered
statue. The effect was magical. It immediately lighted up and vivified
the whole figure, endowing it with personality, soul, and intelligence.
The beautiful Idea at once asserted its immortality, and converted that
heap of forlorn fragments into a whole, as perfect to the mind, if not
to the eye, as when the new marble gleamed with snowy lustre; nor was
the impression marred by the earth that still hung upon the exquisitely
graceful limbs, and even filled the lovely crevice of the lips. Kenyon
cleared it away from between them, and almost deemed himself rewarded
with a living smile.

It was either the prototype or a better repetition of the Venus of the
Tribune. But those who have been dissatisfied with the small head, the
narrow, soulless face, the button-hole eyelids, of that famous statue,
and its mouth such as nature never moulded, should see the genial
breadth of this far nobler and sweeter countenance. It is one of the few
works of antique sculpture in which we recognize womanhood, and that,
moreover, without prejudice to its divinity.

Here, then, was a treasure for the sculptor to have found! How happened
it to be lying there, beside its grave of twenty centuries? Why were not
the tidings of its discovery already noised abroad? The world was richer
than yesterday, by something far more precious than gold. Forgotten
beauty had come back, as beautiful as ever; a goddess had risen from her
long slumber, and was a goddess still. Another cabinet in the Vatican
was destined to shine as lustrously as that of the Apollo Belvedere;
or, if the aged pope should resign his claim, an emperor would woo this
tender marble, and win her as proudly as an imperial bride!

Such were the thoughts with which Kenyon exaggerated to himself the
importance of the newly discovered statue, and strove to feel at least
a portion of the interest which this event would have inspired in him a
little while before. But, in reality, he found it difficult to fix
his mind upon the subject. He could hardly, we fear, be reckoned a
consummate artist, because there was something dearer to him than his
art; and, by the greater strength of a human affection, the divine
statue seemed to fall asunder again, and become only a heap of worthless
fragments.

While the sculptor sat listlessly gazing at it, there was a sound of
small hoofs, clumsily galloping on the Campagna; and soon his frisky
acquaintance, the buffalo-calf, came and peeped over the edge of the
excavation. Almost at the same moment he heard voices, which approached
nearer and nearer; a man’s voice, and a feminine one, talking the
musical tongue of Italy. Besides the hairy visage of his four footed
friend, Kenyon now saw the figures of a peasant and a contadina, making
gestures of salutation to him, on the opposite verge of the hollow
space.



CHAPTER XLVII


THE PEASANT AND CONTADINA


They descended into the excavation: a young peasant, in the short blue
jacket, the small-clothes buttoned at the knee, and buckled shoes, that
compose one of the ugliest dresses ever worn by man, except the wearer’s
form have a grace which any garb, or the nudity of an antique statue,
would equally set off; and, hand in hand with him, a village girl, in
one of those brilliant costumes largely kindled up with scarlet, and
decorated with gold embroidery, in which the contadinas array themselves
on feast-days. But Kenyon was not deceived; he had recognized the voices
of his friends, indeed, even before their disguised figures came between
him and the sunlight. Donatello was the peasant; the contadina, with the
airy smile, half mirthful, though it shone out of melancholy eyes,--was
Miriam.

They both greeted the sculptor with a familiar kindness which reminded
him of the days when Hilda and they and he had lived so happily
together, before the mysterious adventure of the catacomb. What a
succession of sinister events had followed one spectral figure out of
that gloomy labyrinth.

“It is carnival time, you know,” said Miriam, as if in explanation of
Donatello’s and her own costume. “Do you remember how merrily we spent
the Carnival, last year?”

“It seems many years ago,” replied Kenyon. “We are all so changed!”

When individuals approach one another with deep purposes on both sides,
they seldom come at once to the matter which they have most at heart.
They dread the electric shock of a too sudden contact with it. A natural
impulse leads them to steal gradually onward, hiding themselves, as it
were, behind a closer, and still a closer topic, until they stand face
to face with the true point of interest. Miriam was conscious of this
impulse, and partially obeyed it.

“So your instincts as a sculptor have brought you into the presence of
our newly discovered statue,” she observed. “Is it not beautiful? A
far truer image of immortal womanhood than the poor little damsel at
Florence, world famous though she be.”

“Most beautiful,” said Kenyon, casting an indifferent glance at the
Venus. “The time has been when the sight of this statue would have been
enough to make the day memorable.”

“And will it not do so now?” Miriam asked.

“I fancied so, indeed, when we discovered it two days ago. It is
Donatello’s prize. We were sitting here together, planning an interview
with you, when his keen eyes detected the fallen goddess, almost
entirely buried under that heap of earth, which the clumsy excavators
showered down upon her, I suppose. We congratulated ourselves, chiefly
for your sake. The eyes of us three are the only ones to which she
has yet revealed herself. Does it not frighten you a little, like the
apparition of a lovely woman that livid of old, and has long lain in the
grave?”

“Ah, Miriam! I cannot respond to you,” said the sculptor, with
irrepressible impatience. “Imagination and the love of art have both
died out of me.”

“Miriam,” interposed Donatello with gentle gravity, “why should we keep
our friend in suspense? We know what anxiety he feels. Let us give him
what intelligence we can.”

“You are so direct and immediate, my beloved friend!” answered Miriam
with an unquiet smile. “There are several reasons why I should like
to play round this matter a little while, and cover it with fanciful
thoughts, as we strew a grave with flowers.”

“A grave!” exclaimed the sculptor.

“No grave in which your heart need be buried,” she replied; “you have no
such calamity to dread. But I linger and hesitate, because every word I
speak brings me nearer to a crisis from which I shrink. Ah, Donatello!
let us live a little longer the life of these last few days! It is so
bright, so airy, so childlike, so without either past or future! Here,
on the wild Campagna, you seem to have found, both for yourself and me,
the life that belonged to you in early youth; the sweet irresponsible
life which you inherited from your mythic ancestry, the Fauns of Monte
Beni. Our stern and black reality will come upon us speedily enough.
But, first, a brief time more of this strange happiness.”

“I dare not linger upon it,” answered Donatello, with an expression
that reminded the sculptor of the gloomiest days of his remorse at Monte
Beni. “I dare to be so happy as you have seen me, only because I have
felt the time to be so brief.”

“One day, then!” pleaded Miriam. “One more day in the wild freedom of
this sweet-scented air.”

“Well, one more day,” said Donatello, smiling; and his smile touched
Kenyon with a pathos beyond words, there being gayety and sadness both
melted into it; “but here is Hilda’s friend, and our own. Comfort him,
at least, and set his heart at rest, since you have it partly in your
power.”

“Ah, surely he might endure his pangs a little longer!” cried Miriam,
turning to Kenyon with a tricksy, fitful kind of mirth, that served to
hide some solemn necessity, too sad and serious to be looked at in its
naked aspect. “You love us both, I think, and will be content to suffer
for our sakes, one other day. Do I ask too much?”

“Tell me of Hilda,” replied the sculptor; “tell me only that she is
safe, and keep back what else you will.”

“Hilda is safe,” said Miriam. “There is a Providence purposely for
Hilda, as I remember to have told you long ago. But a great trouble--an
evil deed, let us acknowledge it has spread out its dark branches so
widely, that the shadow falls on innocence as well as guilt. There was
one slight link that connected your sweet Hilda with a crime which it
was her unhappy fortune to witness, but of which I need not say she was
as guiltless as the angels that looked out of heaven, and saw it too.
No matter, now, what the consequence has been. You shall have your lost
Hilda back, and--who knows?--perhaps tenderer than she was.”

“But when will she return?” persisted the sculptor; “tell me the when,
and where, and how!”

“A little patience. Do not press me so,” said Miriam; and again Kenyon
was struck by the sprite-like, fitful characteristic of her manner, and
a sort of hysteric gayety, which seemed to be a will-o’-the-wisp from
a sorrow stagnant at her heart. “You have more time to spare than I.
First, listen to something that I have to tell. We will talk of Hilda by
and by.”

Then Miriam spoke of her own life, and told facts that threw a gleam
of light over many things which had perplexed the sculptor in all his
previous knowledge of her. She described herself as springing from
English parentage, on the mother’s side, but with a vein, likewise, of
Jewish blood; yet connected, through her father, with one of those few
princely families of Southern Italy, which still retain great wealth and
influence. And she revealed a name at which her auditor started and grew
pale; for it was one that, only a few years before, had been familiar
to the world in connection with a mysterious and terrible event.
The reader, if he think it worth while to recall some of the strange
incidents which have been talked of, and forgotten, within no long time
past, will remember Miriam’s name.

“You shudder at me, I perceive,” said Miriam, suddenly interrupting her
narrative.

“No; you were innocent,” replied the sculptor. “I shudder at the
fatality that seems to haunt your footsteps, and throws a shadow of
crime about your path, you being guiltless.”

“There was such a fatality,” said Miriam; “yes; the shadow fell upon
me, innocent, but I went astray in it, and wandered--as Hilda could tell
you--into crime.”

She went on to say that, while yet a child, she had lost her English
mother. From a very early period of her life, there had been a contract
of betrothal between herself and a certain marchese, the representative
of another branch of her paternal house,--a family arrangement between
two persons of disproportioned ages, and in which feeling went for
nothing. Most Italian girls of noble rank would have yielded themselves
to such a marriage as an affair of course. But there was something
in Miriam’s blood, in her mixed race, in her recollections of her
mother,--some characteristic, finally, in her own nature,--which
had given her freedom of thought, and force of will, and made this
prearranged connection odious to her. Moreover, the character of her
destined husband would have been a sufficient and insuperable objection;
for it betrayed traits so evil, so treacherous, so vile, and yet so
strangely subtle, as could only be accounted for by the insanity which
often develops itself in old, close-kept races of men, when long unmixed
with newer blood. Reaching the age when the marriage contract should
have been fulfilled, Miriam had utterly repudiated it.

Some time afterwards had occurred that terrible event to which Miriam
had alluded when she revealed her name; an event, the frightful and
mysterious circumstances of which will recur to many minds, but of which
few or none can have found for themselves a satisfactory explanation. It
only concerns the present narrative, inasmuch as the suspicion of being
at least an accomplice in the crime fell darkly and directly upon Miriam
herself.

“But you know that I am innocent!” she cried, interrupting herself
again, and looking Kenyon in the face.

“I know it by my deepest consciousness,” he answered; “and I know it by
Hilda’s trust and entire affection, which you never could have won had
you been capable of guilt.”

“That is sure ground, indeed, for pronouncing me innocent,” said Miriam,
with the tears gushing into her eyes. “Yet I have since become a horror
to your saint-like Hilda, by a crime which she herself saw me help to
perpetrate!”

She proceeded with her story. The great influence of her family
connections had shielded her from some of the consequences of her
imputed guilt. But, in her despair, she had fled from home, and had
surrounded her flight with such circumstances as rendered it the most
probable conclusion that she had committed suicide. Miriam, however, was
not of the feeble nature which takes advantage of that obvious and poor
resource in earthly difficulties. She flung herself upon the world,
and speedily created a new sphere, in which Hilda’s gentle purity,
the sculptor’s sensibility, clear thought, and genius, and Donatello’s
genial simplicity had given her almost her first experience of
happiness. Then came that ill-omened adventure of the catacomb, The
spectral figure which she encountered there was the evil fate that had
haunted her through life.

Looking back upon what had happened, Miriam observed, she now considered
him a madman. Insanity must have been mixed up with his original
composition, and developed by those very acts of depravity which it
suggested, and still more intensified, by the remorse that ultimately
followed them. Nothing was stranger in his dark career than the
penitence which often seemed to go hand in hand with crime. Since his
death she had ascertained that it finally led him to a convent,
where his severe and self-inflicted penance had even acquired him the
reputation of unusual sanctity, and had been the cause of his enjoying
greater freedom than is commonly allowed to monks.

“Need I tell you more?” asked Miriam, after proceeding thus far. “It
is still a dim and dreary mystery, a gloomy twilight into which I guide
you; but possibly you may catch a glimpse of much that I myself can
explain only by conjecture. At all events, you can comprehend what my
situation must have been, after that fatal interview in the catacomb.
My persecutor had gone thither for penance, but followed me forth with
fresh impulses to crime. He had me in his power. Mad as he was, and
wicked as he was, with one word he could have blasted me in the belief
of all the world. In your belief too, and Hilda’s! Even Donatello would
have shrunk from me with horror!”

“Never,” said Donatello, “my instinct would have known you innocent.”

“Hilda and Donatello and myself,--we three would have acquitted you,”
 said Kenyon, “let the world say what it might. Ah, Miriam, you should
have told us this sad story sooner!”

“I thought often of revealing it to you,” answered Miriam; “on one
occasion, especially,--it was after you had shown me your Cleopatra;
it seemed to leap out of my heart, and got as far as my very lips. But
finding you cold to accept my confidence, I thrust it back again. Had I
obeyed my first impulse, all would have turned out differently.”

“And Hilda!” resumed the sculptor. “What can have been her connection
with these dark incidents?”

“She will, doubtless, tell you with her own lips,” replied Miriam.
“Through sources of information which I possess in Rome, I can assure
you of her safety. In two days more--by the help of the special
Providence that, as I love to tell you, watches over Hilda--she shall
rejoin you.”

“Still two days more!” murmured the sculptor.

“Ah, you are cruel now! More cruel than you know!” exclaimed Miriam,
with another gleam of that fantastic, fitful gayety, which had more than
once marked her manner during this interview. “Spare your poor friends!”

“I know not what you mean, Miriam,” said Kenyon.

“No matter,” she replied; “you will understand hereafter. But could
you think it? Here is Donatello haunted with strange remorse, and an
unmitigable resolve to obtain what he deems justice upon himself. He
fancies, with a kind of direct simplicity, which I have vainly tried to
combat, that, when a wrong has been done, the doer is bound to submit
himself to whatsoever tribunal takes cognizance of such things, and
abide its judgment. I have assured him that there is no such thing
as earthly justice, and especially none here, under the head of
Christendom.”

“We will not argue the point again,” said Donatello, smiling. “I have no
head for argument, but only a sense, an impulse, an instinct, I believe,
which sometimes leads me right. But why do we talk now of what may make
us sorrowful? There are still two days more. Let us be happy!”

It appeared to Kenyon that since he last saw Donatello, some of the
sweet and delightful characteristics of the antique Faun had returned
to him. There were slight, careless graces, pleasant and simple
peculiarities, that had been obliterated by the heavy grief through
which he was passing at Monte Beni, and out of which he had hardly
emerged when the sculptor parted with Miriam and him beneath the bronze
pontiffs outstretched hand. These happy blossoms had now reappeared. A
playfulness came out of his heart, and glimmered like firelight in
his actions, alternating, or even closely intermingled, with profound
sympathy and serious thought.

“Is he not beautiful?” said Miriam, watching the sculptor’s eye as
it dwelt admiringly on Donatello. “So changed, yet still, in a deeper
sense, so much the same! He has travelled in a circle, as all things
heavenly and earthly do, and now comes back to his original self, with
an inestimable treasure of improvement won from an experience of pain.
How wonderful is this! I tremble at my own thoughts, yet must needs
probe them to their depths. Was the crime--in which he and I were
wedded--was it a blessing, in that strange disguise? Was it a means of
education, bringing a simple and imperfect nature to a point of feeling
and intelligence which it could have reached under no other discipline?”

“You stir up deep and perilous matter, Miriam,” replied Kenyon. “I dare
not follow you into the unfathomable abysses whither you are tending.”

“Yet there is a pleasure in them! I delight to brood on the verge of
this great mystery,” returned she. “The story of the fall of man! Is it
not repeated in our romance of Monte Beni? And may we follow the analogy
yet further? Was that very sin,--into which Adam precipitated himself
and all his race, was it the destined means by which, over a long
pathway of toil and sorrow, we are to attain a higher, brighter, and
profounder happiness, than our lost birthright gave? Will not this idea
account for the permitted existence of sin, as no other theory can?”

“It is too dangerous, Miriam! I cannot follow you!” repeated the
sculptor. “Mortal man has no right to tread on the ground where you now
set your feet.”

“Ask Hilda what she thinks of it,” said Miriam, with a thoughtful smile.
“At least, she might conclude that sin--which man chose instead of
good--has been so beneficently handled by omniscience and omnipotence,
that, whereas our dark enemy sought to destroy us by it, it has really
become an instrument most effective in the education of intellect and
soul.”

Miriam paused a little longer among these meditations, which the
sculptor rightly felt to be so perilous; she then pressed his hand, in
token of farewell.

“The day after to-morrow,” said she, “an hour before sunset, go to the
Corso, and stand in front of the fifth house on your left, beyond the
Antonine column. You will learn tidings of a friend.”

Kenyon would have besought her for more definite intelligence, but she
shook her head, put her finger on her lips, and turned away with an
illusive smile. The fancy impressed him that she too, like Donatello,
had reached a wayside paradise, in their mysterious life journey, where
they both threw down the burden of the before and after, and, except for
this interview with himself, were happy in the flitting moment. To-day
Donatello was the sylvan Faun; to-day Miriam was his fit companion,
a Nymph of grove or fountain; to-morrow--a remorseful man and woman,
linked by a marriage bond of crime--they would set forth towards an
inevitable goal.



CHAPTER XLVIII


A SCENE IN THE CORSO


On the appointed afternoon, Kenyon failed not to make his appearance in
the Corso, and at an hour much earlier than Miriam had named.

It was carnival time. The merriment of this famous festival was in full
progress; and the stately avenue of the Corso was peopled with hundreds
of fantastic shapes, some of which probably represented the mirth of
ancient times, surviving through all manner of calamity, ever since the
days of the Roman Empire. For a few afternoons of early spring, this
mouldy gayety strays into the sunshine; all the remainder of the
year, it seems to be shut up in the catacombs or some other sepulchral
storehouse of the past.

Besides these hereditary forms, at which a hundred generations have
laughed, there were others of modern date, the humorous effluence of the
day that was now passing. It is a day, however, and an age, that appears
to be remarkably barren, when compared with the prolific originality
of former times, in productions of a scenic and ceremonial character,
whether grave or gay. To own the truth, the Carnival is alive, this
present year, only because it has existed through centuries gone by. It
is traditionary, not actual. If decrepit and melancholy Rome smiles,
and laughs broadly, indeed, at carnival time, it is not in the old
simplicity of real mirth, but with a half-conscious effort, like our
self-deceptive pretence of jollity at a threadbare joke. Whatever it may
once have been, it is now but a narrow stream of merriment, noisy of set
purpose, running along the middle of the Corso, through the solemn heart
of the decayed city, without extending its shallow influence on either
side. Nor, even within its own limits, does it affect the mass of
spectators, but only a comparatively few, in street and balcony, who
carry on the warfare of nosegays and counterfeit sugar plums. The
populace look on with staid composure; the nobility and priesthood take
little or no part in the matter; and, but for the hordes of Anglo-Saxons
who annually take up the flagging mirth, the Carnival might long ago
have been swept away, with the snowdrifts of confetti that whiten all
the pavement.

No doubt, however, the worn-out festival is still new to the youthful
and light hearted, who make the worn-out world itself as fresh as Adam
found it on his first forenoon in Paradise. It may be only age and
care that chill the life out of its grotesque and airy riot, with the
impertinence of their cold criticism.

Kenyon, though young, had care enough within his breast to render the
Carnival the emptiest of mockeries. Contrasting the stern anxiety of his
present mood with the frolic spirit of the preceding year, he fancied
that so much trouble had, at all events, brought wisdom in its train.
But there is a wisdom that looks grave, and sneers at merriment; and
again a deeper wisdom, that stoops to be gay as often as occasion
serves, and oftenest avails itself of shallow and trifling grounds of
mirth; because, if we wait for more substantial ones, we seldom can be
gay at all. Therefore, had it been possible, Kenyon would have done well
to mask himself in some wild, hairy visage, and plunge into the throng
of other maskers, as at the Carnival before. Then Donatello had danced
along the Corso in all the equipment of a Faun, doing the part with
wonderful felicity of execution, and revealing furry ears, which looked
absolutely real; and Miriam had been alternately a lady of the antique
regime, in powder and brocade, and the prettiest peasant girl of the
Campagna, in the gayest of costumes; while Hilda, sitting demurely in a
balcony, had hit the sculptor with a single rosebud,--so sweet and fresh
a bud that he knew at once whose hand had flung it.

These were all gone; all those dear friends whose sympathetic mirth had
made him gay. Kenyon felt as if an interval of many years had passed
since the last Carnival. He had grown old, the nimble jollity was tame,
and the maskers dull and heavy; the Corso was but a narrow and shabby
street of decaying palaces; and even the long, blue streamer of Italian
sky, above it, not half so brightly blue as formerly.

Yet, if he could have beheld the scene with his clear, natural eyesight,
he might still have found both merriment and splendor in it. Everywhere,
and all day long, there had been tokens of the festival, in the baskets
brimming over with bouquets, for sale at the street corners, or borne
about on people’s heads; while bushels upon bushels of variously colored
confetti were displayed, looking just like veritable sugar plums; so
that a stranger would have imagined that the whole commerce and business
of stern old Rome lay in flowers and sweets. And now, in the sunny
afternoon, there could hardly be a spectacle more picturesque than the
vista of that noble street, stretching into the interminable distance
between two rows of lofty edifices, from every window of which, and
many a balcony, flaunted gay and gorgeous carpets, bright silks, scarlet
cloths with rich golden fringes, and Gobelin tapestry, still lustrous
with varied hues, though the product of antique looms. Each separate
palace had put on a gala dress, and looked festive for the occasion,
whatever sad or guilty secret it might hide within. Every window,
moreover, was alive with the faces of women, rosy girls, and children,
all kindled into brisk and mirthful expression, by the incidents in the
street below. In the balconies that projected along the palace fronts
stood groups of ladies, some beautiful, all richly dressed, scattering
forth their laughter, shrill, yet sweet, and the musical babble of their
voices, to thicken into an airy tumult over the heads of common mortals.

All these innumerable eyes looked down into the street, the whole
capacity of which was thronged with festal figures, in such fantastic
variety that it had taken centuries to contrive them; and through the
midst of the mad, merry stream of human life rolled slowly onward a
never-ending procession of all the vehicles in Rome, from the ducal
carriage, with the powdered coachman high in front, and the three golden
lackeys clinging in the rear, down to the rustic cart drawn by its
single donkey. Among this various crowd, at windows and in balconies, in
cart, cab, barouche, or gorgeous equipage, or bustling to and fro afoot,
there was a sympathy of nonsense; a true and genial brotherhood and
sisterhood, based on the honest purpose--and a wise one, too--of being
foolish, all together. The sport of mankind, like its deepest earnest,
is a battle; so these festive people fought one another with an
ammunition of sugar plums and flowers.

Not that they were veritable sugar plums, however, but something that
resembled them only as the apples of Sodom look like better fruit.
They were concocted mostly of lime, with a grain of oat, or some other
worthless kernel, in the midst. Besides the hailstorm of confetti, the
combatants threw handfuls of flour or lime into the air, where it hung
like smoke over a battlefield, or, descending, whitened a black coat or
priestly robe, and made the curly locks of youth irreverently hoary.

At the same time with this acrid contest of quicklime, which caused much
effusion of tears from suffering eyes, a gentler warfare of flowers
was carried on, principally between knights and ladies. Originally, no
doubt, when this pretty custom was first instituted, it may have had a
sincere and modest import. Each youth and damsel, gathering bouquets
of field flowers, or the sweetest and fairest that grew in their own
gardens, all fresh and virgin blossoms, flung them with true aim at the
one, or few, whom they regarded with a sentiment of shy partiality at
least, if not with love. Often, the lover in the Corso may thus have
received from his bright mistress, in her father’s princely balcony,
the first sweet intimation that his passionate glances had not struck
against a heart of marble. What more appropriate mode of suggesting
her tender secret could a maiden find than by the soft hit of a rosebud
against a young man’s cheek?

This was the pastime and the earnest of a more innocent and homelier
age. Nowadays the nosegays are gathered and tied up by sordid hands,
chiefly of the most ordinary flowers, and are sold along the Corso,
at mean price, yet more than such Venal things are worth. Buying a
basketful, you find them miserably wilted, as if they had flown hither
and thither through two or three carnival days already; muddy, too,
having been fished up from the pavement, where a hundred feet have
trampled on them. You may see throngs of men and boys who thrust
themselves beneath the horses’ hoofs to gather up bouquets that were
aimed amiss from balcony and carriage; these they sell again, and yet
once more, and ten times over, defiled as they all are with the wicked
filth of Rome.

Such are the flowery favors--the fragrant bunches of sentiment--that fly
between cavalier and dame, and back again, from one end of the Corso to
the other. Perhaps they may symbolize, more aptly than was intended,
the poor, battered, wilted hearts of those who fling them; hearts
which--crumpled and crushed by former possessors, and stained with
various mishap--have been passed from hand to hand along the muddy
street-way of life, instead of being treasured in one faithful bosom.

These venal and polluted flowers, therefore, and those deceptive
bonbons, are types of the small reality that still subsists in the
observance of the Carnival. Yet the government seemed to imagine that
there might be excitement enough,--wild mirth, perchance, following its
antics beyond law, and frisking from frolic into earnest,--to render it
expedient to guard the Corso with an imposing show of military power.
Besides the ordinary force of gendarmes, a strong patrol of papal
dragoons, in steel helmets and white cloaks, were stationed at all the
street corners. Detachments of French infantry stood by their stacked
muskets in the Piazza del Popolo, at one extremity of the course, and
before the palace of the Austrian embassy, at the other, and by the
column of Antoninus, midway between. Had that chained tiger-cat, the
Roman populace, shown only so much as the tip of his claws, the sabres
would have been flashing and the bullets whistling, in right earnest,
among the combatants who now pelted one another with mock sugar plums
and wilted flowers.

But, to do the Roman people justice, they were restrained by a better
safeguard than the sabre or the bayonet; it was their own gentle
courtesy, which imparted a sort of sacredness to the hereditary
festival. At first sight of a spectacle so fantastic and extravagant, a
cool observer might have imagined the whole town gone mad; but, in the
end, he would see that all this apparently unbounded license is kept
strictly within a limit of its own; he would admire a people who can
so freely let loose their mirthful propensities, while muzzling those
fiercer ones that tend to mischief. Everybody seemed lawless; nobody was
rude. If any reveller overstepped the mark, it was sure to be no Roman,
but an Englishman or an American; and even the rougher play of this
Gothic race was still softened by the insensible influence of a moral
atmosphere more delicate, in some respects, than we breathe at home. Not
that, after all, we like the fine Italian spirit better than our own;
popular rudeness is sometimes the symptom of rude moral health. But,
where a Carnival is in question, it would probably pass off more
decorously, as well as more airily and delightfully, in Rome, than in
any Anglo-Saxon city.

When Kenyon emerged from a side lane into the Corso, the mirth was at
its height. Out of the seclusion of his own feelings, he looked forth at
the tapestried and damask-curtained palaces, the slow-moving double line
of carriages, and the motley maskers that swarmed on foot, as if he were
gazing through the iron lattice of a prison window. So remote from
the scene were his sympathies, that it affected him like a thin dream,
through the dim, extravagant material of which he could discern more
substantial objects, while too much under its control to start forth
broad awake. Just at that moment, too, there came another spectacle,
making its way right through the masquerading throng.

It was, first and foremost, a full band of martial music, reverberating,
in that narrow and confined though stately avenue, between the walls of
the lofty palaces, and roaring upward to the sky with melody so powerful
that it almost grew to discord. Next came a body of cavalry and mounted
gendarmes, with great display of military pomp. They were escorting a
long train of equipages, each and all of which shone as gorgeously as
Cinderella’s coach, with paint and gilding. Like that, too, they were
provided with coachmen of mighty breadth, and enormously tall footmen,
in immense powdered wigs, and all the splendor of gold-laced, three
cornered hats, and embroidered silk coats and breeches. By the
old-fashioned magnificence of this procession, it might worthily have
included his Holiness in person, with a suite of attendant Cardinals,
if those sacred dignitaries would kindly have lent their aid to heighten
the frolic of the Carnival. But, for all its show of a martial escort,
and its antique splendor of costume, it was but a train of the municipal
authorities of Rome,--illusive shadows, every one, and among them a
phantom, styled the Roman Senator,--proceeding to the Capitol.

The riotous interchange of nosegays and confetti was partially
suspended, while the procession passed. One well-directed shot,
however,--it was a double handful of powdered lime, flung by an impious
New Englander,--hit the coachman of the Roman Senator full in the face,
and hurt his dignity amazingly. It appeared to be his opinion that the
Republic was again crumbling into ruin, and that the dust of it now
filled his nostrils; though, in fact, it would hardly be distinguished
from the official powder with which he was already plentifully bestrewn.

While the sculptor, with his dreamy eyes, was taking idle note of this
trifling circumstance, two figures passed before him, hand in hand. The
countenance of each was covered with an impenetrable black mask; but one
seemed a peasant of the Campagna; the other, a contadina in her holiday
costume.



CHAPTER XLIX


A FROLIC OF THE CARNIVAL


The crowd and confusion, just at that moment, hindered the sculptor from
pursuing these figures,--the peasant and contadina,--who, indeed, were
but two of a numerous tribe that thronged the Corso, in similar costume.
As soon as he could squeeze a passage, Kenyon tried to follow in their
footsteps, but quickly lost sight of them, and was thrown off the track
by stopping to examine various groups of masqueraders, in which he
fancied the objects of his search to be included. He found many a sallow
peasant or herdsman of the Campagna, in such a dress as Donatello
wore; many a contadina, too, brown, broad, and sturdy, in her finery
of scarlet, and decked out with gold or coral beads, a pair of heavy
earrings, a curiously wrought cameo or mosaic brooch, and a silver comb
or long stiletto among her glossy hair. But those shapes of grace and
beauty which he sought had vanished.

As soon as the procession of the Senator had passed, the merry-makers
resumed their antics with fresh spirit, and the artillery of bouquets
and sugar plums, suspended for a moment, began anew. The sculptor
himself, being probably the most anxious and unquiet spectator there,
was especially a mark for missiles from all quarters, and for the
practical jokes which the license of the Carnival permits. In fact,
his sad and contracted brow so ill accorded with the scene, that the
revellers might be pardoned for thus using him as the butt of their idle
mirth, since he evidently could not otherwise contribute to it.

Fantastic figures, with bulbous heads, the circumference of a bushel,
grinned enormously in his face. Harlequins struck him with their wooden
swords, and appeared to expect his immediate transformation into some
jollier shape. A little, long-tailed, horned fiend sidled up to him and
suddenly blew at him through a tube, enveloping our poor friend in a
whole harvest of winged seeds. A biped, with an ass’s snout, brayed
close to his ear, ending his discordant uproar with a peal of human
laughter. Five strapping damsels--so, at least, their petticoats bespoke
them, in spite of an awful freedom in the flourish of their legs--joined
hands, and danced around him, inviting him by their gestures to perform
a hornpipe in the midst. Released from these gay persecutors, a clown in
motley rapped him on the back with a blown bladder, in which a handful
of dried peas rattled horribly.

Unquestionably, a care-stricken mortal has no business abroad, when
the rest of mankind are at high carnival; they must either pelt him
and absolutely martyr him with jests, and finally bury him beneath the
aggregate heap; or else the potency of his darker mood, because the
tissue of human life takes a sad dye more readily than a gay one, will
quell their holiday humors, like the aspect of a death’s-head at a
banquet. Only that we know Kenyon’s errand, we could hardly forgive him
for venturing into the Corso with that troubled face.

Even yet, his merry martyrdom was not half over. There came along a
gigantic female figure, seven feet high, at least, and taking up a third
of the street’s breadth with the preposterously swelling sphere of
her crinoline skirts. Singling out the sculptor, she began to make a
ponderous assault upon his heart, throwing amorous glances at him out
of her great goggle eyes, offering him a vast bouquet of sunflowers and
nettles, and soliciting his pity by all sorts of pathetic and passionate
dumb-show. Her suit meeting no favor, the rejected Titaness made a
gesture of despair and rage; then suddenly drawing a huge pistol,
she took aim right at the obdurate sculptor’s breast, and pulled the
trigger. The shot took effect, for the abominable plaything went off
by a spring, like a boy’s popgun, covering Kenyon with a cloud of lime
dust, under shelter of which the revengeful damsel strode away.

Hereupon, a whole host of absurd figures surrounded him, pretending
to sympathize in his mishap. Clowns and party-colored harlequins;
orang-outangs; bear-headed, bull-headed, and dog-headed individuals;
faces that would have been human, but for their enormous noses; one
terrific creature, with a visage right in the centre of his breast;
and all other imaginable kinds of monstrosity and exaggeration. These
apparitions appeared to be investigating the case, after the fashion
of a coroner’s jury, poking their pasteboard countenances close to the
sculptor’s with an unchangeable grin, that gave still more ludicrous
effect to the comic alarm and sorrow of their gestures. Just then, a
figure came by, in a gray wig and rusty gown, with an inkhorn at his
buttonhole and a pen behind his ear; he announced himself as a notary,
and offered to make the last will and testament of the assassinated man.
This solemn duty, however, was interrupted by a surgeon, who brandished
a lancet, three feet long, and proposed to him to let him take blood.

The affair was so like a feverish dream, that Kenyon resigned himself to
let it take its course. Fortunately the humors of the Carnival pass from
one absurdity to another, without lingering long enough on any, to wear
out even the slightest of them. The passiveness of his demeanor afforded
too little scope for such broad merriment as the masqueraders sought. In
a few moments they vanished from him, as dreams and spectres do, leaving
him at liberty to pursue his quest, with no impediment except the crowd
that blocked up the footway.

He had not gone far when the peasant and the contadina met him. They
were still hand in hand, and appeared to be straying through the
grotesque and animated scene, taking as little part in it as himself. It
might be because he recognized them, and knew their solemn secret, that
the sculptor fancied a melancholy emotion to be expressed by the very
movement and attitudes of these two figures; and even the grasp of their
hands, uniting them so closely, seemed to set them in a sad remoteness
from the world at which they gazed.

“I rejoice to meet you,” said Kenyon. But they looked at him through the
eye-holes of their black masks, without answering a word.

“Pray give me a little light on the matter which I have so much at
heart,” said he; “if you know anything of Hilda, for Heaven’s sake,
speak!”

Still they were silent; and the sculptor began to imagine that he
must have mistaken the identity of these figures, there being such a
multitude in similar costume. Yet there was no other Donatello, no other
Miriam. He felt, too, that spiritual certainty which impresses us with
the presence of our friends, apart from any testimony of the senses.

“You are unkind,” resumed he,--“knowing the anxiety which oppresses me,
--not to relieve it, if in your power.”

The reproach evidently had its effect; for the contadina now spoke, and
it was Miriam’s voice.

“We gave you all the light we could,” said she. “You are yourself
unkind, though you little think how much so, to come between us at this
hour. There may be a sacred hour, even in carnival time.”

In another state of mind, Kenyon could have been amused by the
impulsiveness of this response, and a sort of vivacity that he had
often noted in Miriam’s conversation. But he was conscious of a profound
sadness in her tone, overpowering its momentary irritation, and assuring
him that a pale, tear-stained face was hidden behind her mask.

“Forgive me!” said he.

Donatello here extended his hand,--not that which was clasping
Miriam’s,--and she, too, put her free one into the sculptor’s left; so
that they were a linked circle of three, with many reminiscences and
forebodings flashing through their hearts. Kenyon knew intuitively that
these once familiar friends were parting with him now.

“Farewell!” they all three said, in the same breath.

No sooner was the word spoken, than they loosed their hands; and the
uproar of the Carnival swept like a tempestuous sea over the spot which
they had included within their small circle of isolated feeling.

By this interview, the sculptor had learned nothing in reference to
Hilda; but he understood that he was to adhere to the instructions
already received, and await a solution of the mystery in some mode
that he could not yet anticipate. Passing his hands over his eyes, and
looking about him,--for the event just described had made the scene even
more dreamlike than before,--he now found himself approaching that broad
piazza bordering on the Corso, which has for its central object the
sculptured column of Antoninus. It was not far from this vicinity
that Miriam had bid him wait. Struggling onward as fast as the tide of
merrymakers, setting strong against him, would permit, he was now beyond
the Palazzo Colonna, and began to count the houses. The fifth was a
palace, with a long front upon the Corso, and of stately height, but
somewhat grim with age.

Over its arched and pillared entrance there was a balcony, richly hung
with tapestry and damask, and tenanted, for the time, by a gentleman of
venerable aspect and a group of ladies. The white hair and whiskers of
the former, and the winter roses in his cheeks, had an English look; the
ladies, too, showed a fair-haired Saxon bloom, and seemed to taste the
mirth of the Carnival with the freshness of spectators to whom the scene
was new. All the party, the old gentleman with grave earnestness, as if
he were defending a rampart, and his young companions with exuberance of
frolic, showered confetti inexhaustibly upon the passers-by.

In the rear of the balcony, a broad-brimmed, ecclesiastical beaver was
visible. An abbate, probably an acquaintance and cicerone of the English
family, was sitting there, and enjoying the scene, though partially
withdrawn from view, as the decorum for his order dictated.

There seemed no better nor other course for Kenyon than to keep watch at
this appointed spot, waiting for whatever should happen next. Clasping
his arm round a lamp-post, to prevent being carried away by the
turbulent stream of wayfarers, he scrutinized every face, with the idea
that some one of them might meet his eyes with a glance of intelligence.
He looked at each mask,--harlequin, ape, bulbous-headed monster, or
anything that was absurdest,--not knowing but that the messenger might
come, even in such fantastic guise. Or perhaps one of those quaint
figures, in the stately ruff, the cloak, tunic, and trunk-hose of three
centuries ago, might bring him tidings of Hilda, out of that long-past
age. At times his disquietude took a hopeful aspect; and he fancied that
Hilda might come by, her own sweet self, in some shy disguise which the
instinct Of his love would be sure to penetrate. Or, she might be
borne past on a triumphal car, like the one just now approaching, its
slow-moving wheels encircled and spoked with foliage, and drawn by
horses, that were harnessed and wreathed with flowers. Being, at best,
so far beyond the bounds of reasonable conjecture, he might anticipate
the wildest event, or find either his hopes or fears disappointed in
what appeared most probable.

The old Englishman and his daughters, in the opposite balcony, must have
seen something unutterably absurd in the sculptor’s deportment, poring
into this whirlpool of nonsense so earnestly, in quest of what was to
make his life dark or bright. Earnest people, who try to get a reality
out of human existence, are necessarily absurd in the view of the
revellers and masqueraders. At all events, after a good deal of mirth at
the expense of his melancholy visage, the fair occupants of the balcony
favored Kenyon with a salvo of confetti, which came rattling about him
like a hailstorm. Looking up instinctively, he was surprised to see
the abbate in the background lean forward and give a courteous sign of
recognition.

It was the same old priest with whom he had seen Hilda, at the
confessional; the same with whom he had talked of her disappearance on
meeting him in the street.

Yet, whatever might be the reason, Kenyon did not now associate this
ecclesiastical personage with the idea of Hilda. His eyes lighted on the
old man, just for an instant, and then returned to the eddying throng of
the Corso, on his minute scrutiny of which depended, for aught he knew,
the sole chance of ever finding any trace of her. There was, about this
moment, a bustle on the other side of the street, the cause of which
Kenyon did not see, nor exert himself to discover. A small party of
soldiers or gendarmes appeared to be concerned in it; they were perhaps
arresting some disorderly character, who, under the influence of an
extra flask of wine, might have reeled across the mystic limitation of
carnival proprieties.

The sculptor heard some people near him talking of the incident.

“That contadina, in a black mask, was a fine figure of a woman.”

“She was not amiss,” replied a female voice; “but her companion was far
the handsomer figure of the two. Could they be really a peasant and a
contadina, do you imagine?”

“No, no,” said the other. “It is some frolic of the Carnival, carried a
little too far.”

This conversation might have excited Kenyon’s interest; only that, just
as the last words were spoken, he was hit by two missiles, both of a
kind that were flying abundantly on that gay battlefield. One, we are
ashamed to say, was a cauliflower, which, flung by a young man from a
passing carriage, came with a prodigious thump against his shoulder;
the other was a single rosebud, so fresh that it seemed that moment
gathered. It flew from the opposite balcony, smote gently on his lips,
and fell into his hand. He looked upward, and beheld the face of his
lost Hilda!

She was dressed in a white domino, and looked pale and bewildered,
and yet full of tender joy. Moreover, there was a gleam of delicate
mirthfulness in her eyes, which the sculptor had seen there only two or
three times in the course of their acquaintance, but thought it the most
bewitching and fairylike of all Hilda’s expressions. That soft, mirthful
smile caused her to melt, as it were, into the wild frolic of the
Carnival, and become not so strange and alien to the scene, as her
unexpected apparition must otherwise have made her.

Meanwhile, the venerable Englishman and his daughters were staring at
poor Hilda in a way that proved them altogether astonished, as well
as inexpressibly shocked, by her sudden intrusion into their private
balcony. They looked,--as, indeed, English people of respectability
would, if an angel were to alight in their circle, without due
introduction from somebody whom they knew, in the court above,--they
looked as if an unpardonable liberty had been taken, and a suitable
apology must be made; after which, the intruder would be expected to
withdraw.

The abbate, however, drew the old gentleman aside, and whispered a few
words that served to mollify him; he bestowed on Hilda a sufficiently
benignant, though still a perplexed and questioning regard, and invited
her, in dumb-show, to put herself at her ease.

But, whoever was in fault, our shy and gentle Hilda had dreamed of no
intrusion. Whence she had come, or where she had been hidden, during
this mysterious interval, we can but imperfectly surmise, and do not
mean, at present, to make it a matter of formal explanation with the
reader. It is better, perhaps, to fancy that she had been snatched away
to a land of picture; that she had been straying with Claude in the
golden light which he used to shed over his landscapes, but which he
could never have beheld with his waking eyes till he awoke in the better
clime. We will imagine that, for the sake of the true simplicity
with which she loved them, Hilda had been permitted, for a season, to
converse with the great, departed masters of the pencil, and behold
the diviner works which they have painted in heavenly colors. Guido had
shown her another portrait of Beatrice Cenci, done from the celestial
life, in which that forlorn mystery of the earthly countenance was
exchanged for a radiant joy. Perugino had allowed her a glimpse at his
easel, on which she discerned what seemed a woman’s face, but so divine,
by the very depth and softness of its womanhood, that a gush of happy
tears blinded the maiden’s eyes before she had time to look. Raphael
had taken Hilda by the hand, that fine, forcible hand which Kenyon
sculptured,--and drawn aside the curtain of gold-fringed cloud that
hung before his latest masterpiece. On earth, Raphael painted the
Transfiguration. What higher scene may he have since depicted, not from
imagination, but as revealed to his actual sight!

Neither will we retrace the steps by which she returned to the actual
world. For the present, be it enough to say that Hilda had been summoned
forth from a secret place, and led we know not through what mysterious
passages, to a point where the tumult of life burst suddenly upon her
ears. She heard the tramp of footsteps, the rattle of wheels, and the
mingled hum of a multitude of voices, with strains of music and loud
laughter breaking through. Emerging into a great, gloomy hall, a
curtain was drawn aside; she found herself gently propelled into an
open balcony, whence she looked out upon the festal street, with gay
tapestries flaunting over all the palace fronts, the windows thronged
with merry faces, and a crowd of maskers rioting upon the pavement
below.

Immediately she seemed to become a portion of the scene. Her pale,
large-eyed, fragile beauty, her wondering aspect and bewildered grace,
attracted the gaze of many; and there fell around her a shower of
bouquets and bonbons--freshest blossoms and sweetest sugar plums, sweets
to the sweet--such as the revellers of the Carnival reserve as tributes
to especial loveliness. Hilda pressed her hand across her brow; she let
her eyelids fall, and, lifting them again, looked through the grotesque
and gorgeous show, the chaos of mad jollity, in quest of some object
by which she might assure herself that the whole spectacle was not an
illusion.

Beneath the balcony, she recognized a familiar and fondly remembered
face. The spirit of the hour and the scene exercised its influence over
her quick and sensitive nature; she caught up one of the rosebuds that
had been showered upon her, and aimed it at the sculptor; It hit the
mark; he turned his sad eyes upward, and there was Hilda, in whose
gentle presence his own secret sorrow and the obtrusive uproar of the
Carnival alike died away from his perception.

That night, the lamp beneath the Virgin’s shrine burned as brightly as
if it had never been extinguished; and though the one faithful dove had
gone to her melancholy perch, she greeted Hilda rapturously the next
morning, and summoned her less constant companions, whithersoever they
had flown, to renew their homage.



CHAPTER L


MIRIAM, HILDA, KENYON, DONATELLO


The gentle reader, we trust, would not thank us for one of those minute
elucidations, which are so tedious, and, after all, so unsatisfactory,
in clearing up the romantic mysteries of a story. He is too wise to
insist upon looking closely at the wrong side of the tapestry, after the
right one has been sufficiently displayed to him, woven with the best of
the artist’s skill, and cunningly arranged with a view to the harmonious
exhibition of its colors. If any brilliant, or beautiful, or even
tolerable effect have been produced, this pattern of kindly readers will
accept it at its worth, without tearing its web apart, with the idle
purpose of discovering how the threads have been knit together; for the
sagacity by which he is distinguished will long ago have taught him that
any narrative of human action and adventure whether we call it history
or romance--is certain to be a fragile handiwork, more easily rent than
mended. The actual experience of even the most ordinary life is full of
events that never explain themselves, either as regards their origin or
their tendency.

It would be easy, from conversations which we have held with the
sculptor, to suggest a clew to the mystery of Hilda’s disappearance;
although, as long as she remained in Italy, there was a remarkable
reserve in her communications upon this subject, even to her most
intimate friends. Either a pledge of secrecy had been exacted, or a
prudential motive warned her not to reveal the stratagems of a religious
body, or the secret acts of a despotic government--whichever might be
responsible in the present instance--while still within the scope of
their jurisdiction. Possibly, she might not herself be fully aware what
power had laid its grasp upon her person. What has chiefly perplexed us,
however, among Hilda’s adventures, is the mode of her release, in which
some inscrutable tyranny or other seemed to take part in the frolic of
the Carnival. We can only account for it, by supposing that the fitful
and fantastic imagination of a woman--sportive, because she must
otherwise be desperate--had arranged this incident, and made it the
condition of a step which her conscience, or the conscience of another,
required her to take.

A few days after Hilda’s reappearance, she and the sculptor were
straying together through the streets of Rome. Being deep in talk, it so
happened that they found themselves near the majestic, pillared portico,
and huge, black rotundity of the Pantheon. It stands almost at the
central point of the labyrinthine intricacies of the modern city, and
often presents itself before the bewildered stranger, when he is in
search of other objects. Hilda, looking up, proposed that they should
enter.

“I never pass it without going in,” she said, “to pay my homage at the
tomb of Raphael.”

“Nor I,” said Kenyon, “without stopping to admire the noblest edifice
which the barbarism of the early ages, and the more barbarous pontiffs
and princes of later ones, have spared to us.”

They went in accordingly, and stood in the free space of that great
circle, around which are ranged the arched recesses and stately altars,
formerly dedicated to heathen gods, but Christianized through twelve
centuries gone by. The world has nothing else like the Pantheon. So
grand it is, that the pasteboard statues over the lofty cornice do not
disturb the effect, any more than the tin crowns and hearts, the dusty
artificial flowers, and all manner of trumpery gew-gaws, hanging at the
saintly shrines. The rust and dinginess that have dimmed the precious
marble on the walls; the pavement, with its great squares and rounds
of porphyry and granite, cracked crosswise and in a hundred directions,
showing how roughly the troublesome ages have trampled here; the gray
dome above, with its opening to the sky, as if heaven were looking down
into the interior of this place of worship, left unimpeded for prayers
to ascend the more freely; all these things make an impression of
solemnity, which St. Peter’s itself fails to produce.

“I think,” said the sculptor, “it is to the aperture in the dome--that
great Eye, gazing heavenward that the Pantheon owes the peculiarity of
its effect. It is so heathenish, as it were,--so unlike all the snugness
of our modern civilization! Look, too, at the pavement, directly beneath
the open space! So much rain has fallen there, in the last two thousand
years, that it is green with small, fine moss, such as grows over
tombstones in a damp English churchyard.”

“I like better,” replied Hilda, “to look at the bright, blue sky,
roofing the edifice where the builders left it open. It is very
delightful, in a breezy day, to see the masses of white cloud float over
the opening, and then the sunshine fall through it again, fitfully, as
it does now. Would it be any wonder if we were to see angels hovering
there, partly in and partly out, with genial, heavenly faces, not
intercepting the light, but only transmuting it into beautiful colors?
Look at that broad, golden beam--a sloping cataract of sunlight--which
comes down from the aperture and rests upon the shrine, at the right
hand of the entrance!”

“There is a dusky picture over that altar,” observed the sculptor. “Let
us go and see if this strong illumination brings out any merit in it.”

Approaching the shrine, they found the picture little worth looking at,
but could not forbear smiling, to see that a very plump and comfortable
tabby-cat--whom we ourselves have often observed haunting the
Pantheon--had established herself on the altar, in the genial sunbeam,
and was fast asleep among the holy tapers. Their footsteps disturbing
her, she awoke, raised herself, and sat blinking in the sun, yet with a
certain dignity and self-possession, as if conscious of representing a
saint.

“I presume,” remarked Kenyon, “that this is the first of the feline race
that has ever set herself up as an object of worship, in the Pantheon or
elsewhere, since the days of ancient Egypt. See; there is a peasant from
the neighboring market, actually kneeling to her! She seems a gracious
and benignant saint enough.”

“Do not make me laugh,” said Hilda reproachfully, “but help me to drive
the creature away. It distresses me to see that poor man, or any human
being, directing his prayers so much amiss.”

“Then, Hilda,” answered the sculptor more seriously, “the only Place
in the Pantheon for you and me to kneel is on the pavement beneath
the central aperture. If we pray at a saint’s shrine, we shall give
utterance to earthly wishes; but if we pray face to face with the
Deity, we shall feel it impious to petition for aught that is narrow and
selfish. Methinks it is this that makes the Catholics so delight in the
worship of saints; they can bring up all their little worldly wants and
whims, their individualities and human weaknesses, not as things to be
repented of, but to be humored by the canonized humanity to which they
pray. Indeed, it is very tempting!”

What Hilda might have answered must be left to conjecture; for as she
turned from the shrine, her eyes were attracted to the figure of a
female penitent, kneeling on the pavement just beneath the great central
eye, in the very spot which Kenyon had designated as the only one whence
prayers should ascend. The upturned face was invisible, behind a veil or
mask, which formed a part of the garb.

“It cannot be!” whispered Hilda, with emotion. “No; it cannot be!”

“What disturbs you?” asked Kenyon. “Why do you tremble so?”

“If it were possible,” she replied, “I should fancy that kneeling figure
to be Miriam!”

“As you say, it is impossible,” rejoined the sculptor; “We know too
well what has befallen both her and Donatello.” “Yes; it is impossible!”
 repeated Hilda. Her voice was still tremulous, however, and she seemed
unable to withdraw her attention from the kneeling figure. Suddenly,
and as if the idea of Miriam had opened the whole volume of Hilda’s
reminiscences, she put this question to the sculptor: “Was Donatello
really a Faun?”

“If you had ever studied the pedigree of the far-descended heir of Monte
Beni, as I did,” answered Kenyon, with an irrepressible smile, “you
would have retained few doubts on that point. Faun or not, he had a
genial nature, which, had the rest of mankind been in accordance with
it, would have made earth a paradise to our poor friend. It seems
the moral of his story, that human beings of Donatello’s character,
compounded especially for happiness, have no longer any business on
earth, or elsewhere. Life has grown so sadly serious, that such men must
change their nature, or else perish, like the antediluvian creatures
that required, as the condition of their existence, a more summer-like
atmosphere than ours.”

“I will not accept your moral!” replied the hopeful and happy-natured
Hilda.

“Then here is another; take your choice!” said the sculptor, remembering
what Miriam had recently suggested, in reference to the same point. “He
perpetrated a great crime; and his remorse, gnawing into his soul,
has awakened it; developing a thousand high capabilities, moral and
intellectual, which we never should have dreamed of asking for, within
the scanty compass of the Donatello whom we knew.”

“I know not whether this is so,” said Hilda. “But what then?”

“Here comes my perplexity,” continued Kenyon. “Sin has educated
Donatello, and elevated him. Is sin, then,--which we deem such a
dreadful blackness in the universe,--is it, like sorrow, merely an
element of human education, through which we struggle to a higher and
purer state than we could otherwise have attained? Did Adam fall, that
we might ultimately rise to a far loftier paradise than his?” “O hush!”
 cried Hilda, shrinking from him with an expression of horror which
wounded the poor, speculative sculptor to the soul. “This is terrible;
and I could weep for you, if you indeed believe it. Do not you perceive
what a mockery your creed makes, not only of all religious sentiments,
but of moral law? And how it annuls and obliterates whatever precepts of
Heaven are written deepest within us? You have shocked me beyond words!”

“Forgive me, Hilda!” exclaimed the sculptor, startled by her agitation;
“I never did believe it! But the mind wanders wild and wide; and, so
lonely as I live and work, I have neither pole-star above nor light
of cottage windows here below, to bring me home. Were you my guide, my
counsellor, my inmost friend, with that white wisdom which clothes you
as a celestial garment, all would go well. O Hilda, guide me home!”

“We are both lonely; both far from home!” said Hilda, her eyes filling
with tears. “I am a poor, weak girl, and have no such wisdom as you
fancy in me.”

What further may have passed between these lovers, while standing before
the pillared shrine, and the marble Madonna that marks Raphael’s tomb;
whither they had now wandered, we are unable to record. But when the
kneeling figure beneath the open eye of the Pantheon arose, she looked
towards the pair and extended her hands with a gesture of benediction.
Then they knew that it was Miriam. They suffered her to glide out of
the portal, however, without a greeting; for those extended hands, even
while they blessed, seemed to repel, as if Miriam stood on the other
side of a fathomless abyss, and warned them from its verge.

So Kenyon won the gentle Hilda’s shy affection, and her consent to
be his bride. Another hand must henceforth trim the lamp before the
Virgin’s shrine; for Hilda was coming down from her old tower, to be
herself enshrined and worshipped as a household saint, in the light of
her husband’s fireside. And, now that life had so much human promise in
it, they resolved to go back to their own land; because the years,
after all, have a kind of emptiness, when we spend too many of them on
a foreign shore. We defer the reality of life, in such cases, until a
future moment, when we shall again breathe our native air; but, by and
by, there are no future moments; or, if we do return, we find that the
native air has lost its invigorating quality, and that life has shifted
its reality to the spot where we have deemed ourselves only temporary
residents. Thus, between two countries, we have none at all, or
only that little space of either in which we finally lay down our
discontented bones. It is wise, therefore, to come back betimes, or
never.

Before they quitted Rome, a bridal gift was laid on Hilda’s table. It
was a bracelet, evidently of great cost, being composed of seven ancient
Etruscan gems, dug out of seven sepulchres, and each one of them the
signet of some princely personage, who had lived an immemorial time ago.
Hilda remembered this precious ornament. It had been Miriam’s; and once,
with the exuberance of fancy that distinguished her, she had amused
herself with telling a mythical and magic legend for each gem,
comprising the imaginary adventures and catastrophe of its former
wearer. Thus the Etruscan bracelet became the connecting bond of a
series of seven wondrous tales, all of which, as they were dug out of
seven sepulchres, were characterized by a sevenfold sepulchral gloom;
such as Miriam’s imagination, shadowed by her own misfortunes, was wont
to fling over its most sportive flights.

And now, happy as Hilda was, the bracelet brought the tears into her
eyes, as being, in its entire circle, the symbol of as sad a mystery
as any that Miriam had attached to the separate gems. For, what was
Miriam’s life to be? And where was Donatello? But Hilda had a hopeful
soul, and saw sunlight on the mountain-tops.



CONCLUSION

There comes to the author, from many readers of the foregoing pages, a
demand for further elucidations respecting the mysteries of the story.

He reluctantly avails himself of the opportunity afforded by a new
edition, to explain such incidents and passages as may have been left
too much in the dark; reluctantly, he repeats, because the necessity
makes him sensible that he can have succeeded but imperfectly, at best,
in throwing about this Romance the kind of atmosphere essential to the
effect at which he aimed.

He designed the story and the characters to bear, of course, a certain
relation to human nature and human life, but still to be so artfully and
airily removed from our mundane sphere, that some laws and proprieties
of their own should be implicitly and insensibly acknowledged.

The idea of the modern Faun, for example, loses all the poetry and
beauty which the Author fancied in it, and becomes nothing better than a
grotesque absurdity, if we bring it into the actual light of day. He
had hoped to mystify this anomalous creature between the Real and
the Fantastic, in such a manner that the reader’s sympathies might be
excited to a certain pleasurable degree, without impelling him to ask
how Cuvier would have classified poor Donatello, or to insist upon being
told, in so many words, whether he had furry ears or no. As respects all
who ask such questions, the book is, to that extent, a failure.

Nevertheless, the Author fortunately has it in his power to throw light
upon several matters in which some of his readers appear to feel an
interest. To confess the truth, he was himself troubled with a curiosity
similar to that which he has just deprecated on the part of his readers,
and once took occasion to cross-examine his friends, Hilda and the
sculptor, and to pry into several dark recesses of the story, with which
they had heretofore imperfectly acquainted him.

We three had climbed to the top of St. Peter’s, and were looking down
upon the Rome we were soon to leave, but which (having already sinned
sufficiently in that way) it is not my purpose further to describe. It
occurred to me, that, being so remote in the upper air, my friends might
safely utter here the secrets which it would be perilous even to whisper
on lower earth.

“Hilda,” I began, “can you tell me the contents of that mysterious
packet which Miriam entrusted to your charge, and which was addressed to
Signore Luca Barboni, at the Palazzo Cenci?”

“I never had any further knowledge of it,” replied Hilda, “nor felt it
right to let myself be curious upon the subject.”

“As to its precise contents,” interposed Kenyon, “it is impossible to
speak. But Miriam, isolated as she seemed, had family connections in
Rome, one of whom, there is reason to believe, occupied a position in
the papal government.

“This Signore Luca Barboni was either the assumed name of the personage
in question, or the medium of communication between that individual and
Miriam. Now, under such a government as that of Rome, it is obvious that
Miriam’s privacy and isolated life could only be maintained through the
connivance and support of some influential person connected with the
administration of affairs. Free and self-controlled as she appeared, her
every movement was watched and investigated far more thoroughly by the
priestly rulers than by her dearest friends.

“Miriam, if I mistake not, had a purpose to withdraw herself from this
irksome scrutiny, and to seek real obscurity in another land; and the
packet, to be delivered long after her departure, contained a reference
to this design, besides certain family documents, which were to be
imparted to her relative as from one dead and gone.”

“Yes, it is clear as a London fog,” I remarked. “On this head no further
elucidation can be desired. But when Hilda went quietly to deliver the
packet, why did she so mysteriously vanish?”

“You must recollect,” replied Kenyon, with a glance of friendly
commiseration at my obtuseness, “that Miriam had utterly disappeared,
leaving no trace by which her whereabouts could be known. In the
meantime, the municipal authorities had become aware of the murder
of the Capuchin; and from many preceding circumstances, such as his
persecution of Miriam, they must have seen an obvious connection between
herself and that tragical event. Furthermore, there is reason to believe
that Miriam was suspected of connection with some plot, or political
intrigue, of which there may have been tokens in the packet. And when
Hilda appeared as the bearer of this missive, it was really quite
a matter of course, under a despotic government, that she should be
detained.”

“Ah, quite a matter of course, as you say,” answered I. “How excessively
stupid in me not to have seen it sooner! But there are other riddles.
On the night of the extinction of the lamp, you met Donatello, in a
penitent’s garb, and afterwards saw and spoke to Miriam, in a coach,
with a gem glowing on her bosom. What was the business of these two
guilty ones in Rome, and who was Miriam’s companion?”

“Who!” repeated Kenyon, “why, her official relative, to be sure; and
as to their business, Donatello’s still gnawing remorse had brought him
hitherward, in spite of Miriam’s entreaties, and kept him lingering
in the neighborhood of Rome, with the ultimate purpose of delivering
himself up to justice. Hilda’s disappearance, which took place the day
before, was known to them through a secret channel, and had brought them
into the city, where Miriam, as I surmise, began to make arrangements,
even then, for that sad frolic of the Carnival.”

“And where was Hilda all that dreary time between?” inquired I.

“Where were you, Hilda?” asked Kenyon, smiling.

Hilda threw her eyes on all sides, and seeing that there was not even a
bird of the air to fly away with the secret, nor any human being nearer
than the loiterers by the obelisk in the piazza below, she told us about
her mysterious abode.

“I was a prisoner in the Convent of the Sacre Coeur, in the Trinita
de Monte,” said she, “but in such kindly custody of pious maidens, and
watched over by such a dear old priest, that--had it not been for one
or two disturbing recollections, and also because I am a daughter of the
Puritans I could willingly have dwelt there forever.

“My entanglement with Miriam’s misfortunes, and the good abbate’s
mistaken hope of a proselyte, seem to me a sufficient clew to the whole
mystery.”

“The atmosphere is getting delightfully lucid,” observed I, “but there
are one or two things that still puzzle me. Could you tell me--and it
shall be kept a profound secret, I assure you what were Miriam’s real
name and rank, and precisely the nature of the troubles that led to all
those direful consequences?”

“Is it possible that you need an answer to those questions?” exclaimed
Kenyon, with an aspect of vast surprise. “Have you not even surmised
Miriam’s name? Think awhile, and you will assuredly remember it. If not,
I congratulate you most sincerely; for it indicates that your feelings
have never been harrowed by one of the most dreadful and mysterious
events that have occurred within the present century!”

“Well,” resumed I, after an interval of deep consideration, “I have but
few things more to ask. Where, at this moment, is Donatello?”

“The Castle of Saint Angelo,” said Kenyon sadly, turning his face
towards that sepulchral fortress, “is no longer a prison; but there are
others which have dungeons as deep, and in one of them, I fear, lies our
poor Faun.”

“And why, then, is Miriam at large?” I asked.

“Call it cruelty if you like, not mercy,” answered Kenyon. “But, after
all, her crime lay merely in a glance. She did no murder!”

“Only one question more,” said I, with intense earnestness. “Did
Donatello’s ears resemble those of the Faun of Praxiteles?”

“I know, but may not tell,” replied Kenyon, smiling mysteriously. “On
that point, at all events, there shall be not one word of explanation.”

Leamington, March 14, 1860.





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