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The Marble Faun; Or, The Romance of Monte Beni - Volume 1

by Nathaniel Hawthorne · English · Gutenberg #2181 · 379,485 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Marble Faun; Or, The Romance of Monte Beni - Volume 1

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne


        
Release date: February 26, 2006 [eBook #2181]
                Most recently updated: December 15, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2181

Credits: Produced by Michael Pullen and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MARBLE FAUN; OR, THE ROMANCE OF MONTE BENI - VOLUME 1 ***




Produced by Michael Pullen and David Widger





THE MARBLE FAUN

or The Romance of Monte Beni


By Nathaniel Hawthorne


In Two Volumes

This is Volume One




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 I




CHAPTER I


MIRIAM, HILDA, KENYON, DONATELLO


Four individuals, in whose fortunes we should be glad to interest
the reader, happened to be standing in one of the saloons of the
sculpture-gallery in the Capitol at Rome. It was that room (the first,
after ascending the staircase) in the centre of which reclines the noble
and most pathetic figure of the Dying Gladiator, just sinking into his
death-swoon. Around the walls stand the Antinous, the Amazon, the Lycian
Apollo, the Juno; all famous productions of antique sculpture, and still
shining in the undiminished majesty and beauty of their ideal life,
although the marble that embodies them is yellow with time, and perhaps
corroded by the damp earth in which they lay buried for centuries. Here,
likewise, is seen a symbol (as apt at this moment as it was two thousand
years ago) of the Human Soul, with its choice of Innocence or Evil close
at hand, in the pretty figure of a child, clasping a dove to her bosom,
but assaulted by a snake.

From one of the windows of this saloon, we may see a flight of broad
stone steps, descending alongside the antique and massive foundation of
the Capitol, towards the battered triumphal arch of Septimius Severus,
right below. Farther on, the eye skirts along the edge of the desolate
Forum (where Roman washerwomen hang out their linen to the sun), passing
over a shapeless confusion of modern edifices, piled rudely up with
ancient brick and stone, and over the domes of Christian churches,
built on the old pavements of heathen temples, and supported by the very
pillars that once upheld them. At a distance beyond--yet but a little
way, considering how much history is heaped into the intervening
space--rises the great sweep of the Coliseum, with the blue sky
brightening through its upper tier of arches. Far off, the view is shut
in by the Alban Mountains, looking just the same, amid all this decay
and change, as when Romulus gazed thitherward over his half finished
wall.

We glance hastily at these things,--at this bright sky, and those
blue distant mountains, and at the ruins, Etruscan, Roman, Christian,
venerable with a threefold antiquity, and at the company of world-famous
statues in the saloon,--in the hope of putting the reader into that
state of feeling which is experienced oftenest at Rome. It is a vague
sense of ponderous remembrances; a perception of such weight and density
in a bygone life, of which this spot was the centre, that the present
moment is pressed down or crowded out, and our individual affairs and
interests are but half as real here as elsewhere. Viewed through this
medium, our narrative--into which are woven some airy and unsubstantial
threads, intermixed with others, twisted out of the commonest stuff of
human existence--may seem not widely different from the texture of all
our lives.

Side by side with the massiveness of the Roman Past, all matters that we
handle or dream of nowadays look evanescent and visionary alike.

It might be that the four persons whom we are seeking to introduce were
conscious of this dreamy character of the present, as compared with the
square blocks of granite wherewith the Romans built their lives. Perhaps
it even contributed to the fanciful merriment which was just now their
mood. When we find ourselves fading into shadows and unrealities, it
seems hardly worth while to be sad, but rather to laugh as gayly as we
may, and ask little reason wherefore.

Of these four friends of ours, three were artists, or connected with
art; and, at this moment, they had been simultaneously struck by a
resemblance between one of the antique statues, a well-known masterpiece
of Grecian sculpture, and a young Italian, the fourth member of their
party.

“You must needs confess, Kenyon,” said a dark-eyed young woman, whom
her friends called Miriam, “that you never chiselled out of marble, nor
wrought in clay, a more vivid likeness than this, cunning a bust-maker
as you think yourself. The portraiture is perfect in character,
sentiment, and feature. If it were a picture, the resemblance might be
half illusive and imaginary; but here, in this Pentelic marble, it is a
substantial fact, and may be tested by absolute touch and measurement.
Our friend Donatello is the very Faun of Praxiteles. Is it not true,
Hilda?”

“Not quite--almost--yes, I really think so,” replied Hilda, a slender,
brown-haired, New England girl, whose perceptions of form and expression
were wonderfully clear and delicate. “If there is any difference between
the two faces, the reason may be, I suppose, that the Faun dwelt in
woods and fields, and consorted with his like; whereas Donatello has
known cities a little, and such people as ourselves. But the resemblance
is very close, and very strange.”

“Not so strange,” whispered Miriam mischievously; “for no Faun in
Arcadia was ever a greater simpleton than Donatello. He has hardly a
man’s share of wit, small as that may be. It is a pity there are no
longer any of this congenial race of rustic creatures for our friend to
consort with!”

“Hush, naughty one!” returned Hilda. “You are very ungrateful, for you
well know he has wit enough to worship you, at all events.”

“Then the greater fool he!” said Miriam so bitterly that Hilda’s quiet
eyes were somewhat startled.

“Donatello, my dear friend,” said Kenyon, in Italian, “pray gratify us
all by taking the exact attitude of this statue.”

The young man laughed, and threw himself into the position in which
the statue has been standing for two or three thousand years. In truth,
allowing for the difference of costume, and if a lion’s skin could have
been substituted for his modern talma, and a rustic pipe for his stick,
Donatello might have figured perfectly as the marble Faun, miraculously
softened into flesh and blood.

“Yes; the resemblance is wonderful,” observed Kenyon, after examining
the marble and the man with the accuracy of a sculptor’s eye. “There
is one point, however, or, rather, two points, in respect to which our
friend Donatello’s abundant curls will not permit us to say whether the
likeness is carried into minute detail.”

And the sculptor directed the attention of the party to the ears of the
beautiful statue which they were contemplating.

But we must do more than merely refer to this exquisite work of art; it
must be described, however inadequate may be the effort to express its
magic peculiarity in words.

The Faun is the marble image of a young man, leaning his right arm on
the trunk or stump of a tree; one hand hangs carelessly by his side;
in the other he holds the fragment of a pipe, or some such sylvan
instrument of music. His only garment--a lion’s skin, with the claws
upon his shoulder--falls halfway down his back, leaving the limbs
and entire front of the figure nude. The form, thus displayed, is
marvellously graceful, but has a fuller and more rounded outline, more
flesh, and less of heroic muscle, than the old sculptors were wont to
assign to their types of masculine beauty. The character of the face
corresponds with the figure; it is most agreeable in outline and
feature, but rounded and somewhat voluptuously developed, especially
about the throat and chin; the nose is almost straight, but very
slightly curves inward, thereby acquiring an indescribable charm of
geniality and humor. The mouth, with its full yet delicate lips, seems
so nearly to smile outright, that it calls forth a responsive smile. The
whole statue--unlike anything else that ever was wrought in that severe
material of marble--conveys the idea of an amiable and sensual creature,
easy, mirthful, apt for jollity, yet not incapable of being touched
by pathos. It is impossible to gaze long at this stone image without
conceiving a kindly sentiment towards it, as if its substance were warm
to the touch, and imbued with actual life. It comes very close to some
of our pleasantest sympathies.

Perhaps it is the very lack of moral severity, of any high and heroic
ingredient in the character of the Faun, that makes it so delightful an
object to the human eye and to the frailty of the human heart. The being
here represented is endowed with no principle of virtue, and would be
incapable of comprehending such; but he would be true and honest by dint
of his simplicity. We should expect from him no sacrifice or effort for
an abstract cause; there is not an atom of martyr’s stuff in all that
softened marble; but he has a capacity for strong and warm attachment,
and might act devotedly through its impulse, and even die for it at
need. It is possible, too, that the Faun might be educated through the
medium of his emotions, so that the coarser animal portion of his nature
might eventually be thrown into the background, though never utterly
expelled.

The animal nature, indeed, is a most essential part of the Faun’s
composition; for the characteristics of the brute creation meet and
combine with those of humanity in this strange yet true and natural
conception of antique poetry and art. Praxiteles has subtly diffused
throughout his work that mute mystery, which so hopelessly perplexes us
whenever we attempt to gain an intellectual or sympathetic knowledge of
the lower orders of creation. The riddle is indicated, however, only by
two definite signs: these are the two ears of the Faun, which are leaf
shaped, terminating in little peaks, like those of some species of
animals. Though not so seen in the marble, they are probably to be
considered as clothed in fine, downy fur. In the coarser representations
of this class of mythological creatures, there is another token of brute
kindred,--a certain caudal appendage; which, if the Faun of Praxiteles
must be supposed to possess it at all, is hidden by the lion’s skin that
forms his garment. The pointed and furry ears, therefore, are the sole
indications of his wild, forest nature.

Only a sculptor of the finest imagination, the most delicate taste, the
sweetest feeling, and the rarest artistic skill--in a word, a sculptor
and a poet too--could have first dreamed of a Faun in this guise, and
then have succeeded in imprisoning the sportive and frisky thing in
marble. Neither man nor animal, and yet no monster, but a being in whom
both races meet on friendly ground. The idea grows coarse as we handle
it, and hardens in our grasp. But, if the spectator broods long over
the statue, he will be conscious of its spell; all the pleasantness of
sylvan life, all the genial and happy characteristics of creatures that
dwell in woods and fields, will seem to be mingled and kneaded into one
substance, along with the kindred qualities in the human soul. Trees,
grass, flowers, woodland streamlets, cattle, deer, and unsophisticated
man. The essence of all these was compressed long ago, and still exists,
within that discolored marble surface of the Faun of Praxiteles.

And, after all, the idea may have been no dream, but rather a poet’s
reminiscence of a period when man’s affinity with nature was more
strict, and his fellowship with every living thing more intimate and
dear.




CHAPTER II


THE FAUN


“Donatello,” playfully cried Miriam, “do not leave us in this perplexity!
Shake aside those brown curls, my friend, and let us see whether this
marvellous resemblance extends to the very tips of the ears. If so, we
shall like you all the better!”

“No, no, dearest signorina,” answered Donatello, laughing, but with
a certain earnestness. “I entreat you to take the tips of my ears for
granted.” As he spoke, the young Italian made a skip and jump, light
enough for a veritable faun; so as to place himself quite beyond the
reach of the fair hand that was outstretched, as if to settle the matter
by actual examination. “I shall be like a wolf of the Apennines,” he
continued, taking his stand on the other side of the Dying Gladiator,
“if you touch my ears ever so softly. None of my race could endure it.
It has always been a tender point with my forefathers and me.”

He spoke in Italian, with the Tuscan rusticity of accent, and an
unshaped sort of utterance, betokening that he must heretofore have been
chiefly conversant with rural people.

“Well, well,” said Miriam, “your tender point--your two tender points,
if you have them--shall be safe, so far as I am concerned. But how
strange this likeness is, after all! and how delightful, if it really
includes the pointed ears! O, it is impossible, of course,” she
continued, in English, “with a real and commonplace young man like
Donatello; but you see how this peculiarity defines the position of
the Faun; and, while putting him where he cannot exactly assert his
brotherhood, still disposes us kindly towards the kindred creature. He
is not supernatural, but just on the verge of nature, and yet within
it. What is the nameless charm of this idea, Hilda? You can feel it more
delicately than I.”

“It perplexes me,” said Hilda thoughtfully, and shrinking a little;
“neither do I quite like to think about it.”

“But, surely,” said Kenyon, “you agree with Miriam and me that there is
something very touching and impressive in this statue of the Faun. In
some long-past age, he must really have existed. Nature needed, and
still needs, this beautiful creature; standing betwixt man and animal,
sympathizing with each, comprehending the speech of either race, and
interpreting the whole existence of one to the other. What a pity that
he has forever vanished from the hard and dusty paths of life,--unless,”
 added the sculptor, in a sportive whisper, “Donatello be actually he!”

“You cannot conceive how this fantasy takes hold of me,” responded
Miriam, between jest and earnest. “Imagine, now, a real being, similar
to this mythic Faun; how happy, how genial, how satisfactory would be
his life, enjoying the warm, sensuous, earthy side of nature; revelling
in the merriment of woods and streams; living as our four-footed kindred
do,--as mankind did in its innocent childhood; before sin, sorrow or
morality itself had ever been thought of! Ah! Kenyon, if Hilda and you
and I--if I, at least--had pointed ears! For I suppose the Faun had
no conscience, no remorse, no burden on the heart, no troublesome
recollections of any sort; no dark future either.”

“What a tragic tone was that last, Miriam!” said the sculptor;
and, looking into her face, he was startled to behold it pale and
tear-stained. “How suddenly this mood has come over you!”

“Let it go as it came,” said Miriam, “like a thunder-shower in this
Roman sky. All is sunshine again, you see!”

Donatello’s refractoriness as regarded his ears had evidently cost him
something, and he now came close to Miriam’s side, gazing at her with an
appealing air, as if to solicit forgiveness. His mute, helpless gesture
of entreaty had something pathetic in it, and yet might well enough
excite a laugh, so like it was to what you may see in the aspect of a
hound when he thinks himself in fault or disgrace. It was difficult to
make out the character of this young man. So full of animal life as
he was, so joyous in his deportment, so handsome, so physically
well-developed, he made no impression of incompleteness, of maimed or
stinted nature. And yet, in social intercourse, these familiar friends
of his habitually and instinctively allowed for him, as for a child or
some other lawless thing, exacting no strict obedience to conventional
rules, and hardly noticing his eccentricities enough to pardon them.
There was an indefinable characteristic about Donatello that set him
outside of rules.

He caught Miriam’s hand, kissed it, and gazed into her eyes without
saying a word. She smiled, and bestowed on him a little careless caress,
singularly like what one would give to a pet dog when he puts himself in
the way to receive it. Not that it was so decided a caress either, but
only the merest touch, somewhere between a pat and a tap of the finger;
it might be a mark of fondness, or perhaps a playful pretence of
punishment. At all events, it appeared to afford Donatello exquisite
pleasure; insomuch that he danced quite round the wooden railing that
fences in the Dying Gladiator.

“It is the very step of the Dancing Faun,” said Miriam, apart, to Hilda.
“What a child, or what a simpleton, he is! I continually find myself
treating Donatello as if he were the merest unfledged chicken; and yet
he can claim no such privileges in the right of his tender age, for he
is at least--how old should you think him, Hilda?”

“Twenty years, perhaps,” replied Hilda, glancing at Donatello; “but,
indeed, I cannot tell; hardly so old, on second thoughts, or possibly
older. He has nothing to do with time, but has a look of eternal youth
in his face.”

“All underwitted people have that look,” said Miriam scornfully.

“Donatello has certainly the gift of eternal youth, as Hilda suggests,”
 observed Kenyon, laughing; “for, judging by the date of this statue,
which, I am more and more convinced, Praxiteles carved on purpose for
him, he must be at least twenty-five centuries old, and he still looks
as young as ever.”

“What age have you, Donatello?” asked Miriam.

“Signorina, I do not know,” he answered; “no great age, however; for I
have only lived since I met you.”

“Now, what old man of society could have turned a silly compliment more
smartly than that!” exclaimed Miriam. “Nature and art are just at one
sometimes. But what a happy ignorance is this of our friend Donatello!
Not to know his own age! It is equivalent to being immortal on earth. If
I could only forget mine!”

“It is too soon to wish that,” observed the sculptor; “you are scarcely
older than Donatello looks.”

“I shall be content, then,” rejoined Miriam, “if I could only forget
one day of all my life.” Then she seemed to repent of this allusion, and
hastily added, “A woman’s days are so tedious that it is a boon to leave
even one of them out of the account.”

The foregoing conversation had been carried on in a mood in which all
imaginative people, whether artists or poets, love to indulge. In this
frame of mind, they sometimes find their profoundest truths side by side
with the idlest jest, and utter one or the other, apparently without
distinguishing which is the most valuable, or assigning any considerable
value to either. The resemblance between the marble Faun and their
living companion had made a deep, half-serious, half-mirthful impression
on these three friends, and had taken them into a certain airy region,
lifting up, as it is so pleasant to feel them lifted, their heavy
earthly feet from the actual soil of life. The world had been set
afloat, as it were, for a moment, and relieved them, for just so long,
of all customary responsibility for what they thought and said.

It might be under this influence--or, perhaps, because sculptors always
abuse one another’s works--that Kenyon threw in a criticism upon the
Dying Gladiator.

“I used to admire this statue exceedingly,” he remarked, “but, latterly,
I find myself getting weary and annoyed that the man should be such a
length of time leaning on his arm in the very act of death. If he is so
terribly hurt, why does he not sink down and die without further ado?
Flitting moments, imminent emergencies, imperceptible intervals between
two breaths, ought not to be incrusted with the eternal repose of
marble; in any sculptural subject, there should be a moral standstill,
since there must of necessity be a physical one. Otherwise, it is
like flinging a block of marble up into the air, and, by some trick of
enchantment, causing it to stick there. You feel that it ought to come
down, and are dissatisfied that it does not obey the natural law.”

“I see,” said Miriam mischievously, “you think that sculpture should
be a sort of fossilizing process. But, in truth, your frozen art has
nothing like the scope and freedom of Hilda’s and mine. In painting
there is no similar objection to the representation of brief snatches
of time,--perhaps because a story can be so much more fully told in
picture, and buttressed about with circumstances that give it an epoch.
For instance, a painter never would have sent down yonder Faun out of
his far antiquity, lonely and desolate, with no companion to keep his
simple heart warm.”

“Ah, the Faun!” cried Hilda, with a little gesture of impatience; “I
have been looking at him too long; and now, instead of a beautiful
statue, immortally young, I see only a corroded and discolored stone.
This change is very apt to occur in statues.”

“And a similar one in pictures, surely,” retorted the sculptor. “It is
the spectator’s mood that transfigures the Transfiguration itself.
I defy any painter to move and elevate me without my own consent and
assistance.”

“Then you are deficient of a sense,” said Miriam.

The party now strayed onward from hall to hall of that rich gallery,
pausing here and there, to look at the multitude of noble and lovely
shapes, which have been dug up out of the deep grave in which old Rome
lies buried. And still, the realization of the antique Faun, in the
person of Donatello, gave a more vivid character to all these marble
ghosts. Why should not each statue grow warm with life! Antinous might
lift his brow, and tell us why he is forever sad. The Lycian Apollo
might strike his lyre; and, at the first vibration, that other Faun in
red marble, who keeps up a motionless dance, should frisk gayly forth,
leading yonder Satyrs, with shaggy goat-shanks, to clatter their little
hoofs upon the floor, and all join hands with Donatello! Bacchus, too,
a rosy flush diffusing itself over his time-stained surface, could
come down from his pedestal, and offer a cluster of purple grapes to
Donatello’s lips; because the god recognizes him as the woodland elf
who so often shared his revels. And here, in this sarcophagus, the
exquisitely carved figures might assume life, and chase one another
round its verge with that wild merriment which is so strangely
represented on those old burial coffers: though still with some subtile
allusion to death, carefully veiled, but forever peeping forth amid
emblems of mirth and riot.

As the four friends descended the stairs, however, their play of fancy
subsided into a much more sombre mood; a result apt to follow upon such
exhilaration as that which had so recently taken possession of them.

“Do you know,” said Miriam confidentially to Hilda, “I doubt the reality
of this likeness of Donatello to the Faun, which we have been talking so
much about? To say the truth, it never struck me so forcibly as it did
Kenyon and yourself, though I gave in to whatever you were pleased to
fancy, for the sake of a moment’s mirth and wonder.” “I was certainly
in earnest, and you seemed equally so,” replied Hilda, glancing back
at Donatello, as if to reassure herself of the resemblance. “But faces
change so much, from hour to hour, that the same set of features has
often no keeping with itself; to an eye, at least, which looks at
expression more than outline. How sad and sombre he has grown all of a
sudden!” “Angry too, methinks! nay, it is anger much more than sadness,”
 said Miriam. “I have seen Donatello in this mood once or twice before.
If you consider him well, you will observe an odd mixture of
the bulldog, or some other equally fierce brute, in our friend’s
composition; a trait of savageness hardly to be expected in such a
gentle creature as he usually is. Donatello is a very strange young man.
I wish he would not haunt my footsteps so continually.”

“You have bewitched the poor lad,” said the sculptor, laughing. “You
have a faculty of bewitching people, and it is providing you with a
singular train of followers. I see another of them behind yonder pillar;
and it is his presence that has aroused Donatello’s wrath.”

They had now emerged from the gateway of the palace; and partly
concealed by one of the pillars of the portico stood a figure such as
may often be encountered in the streets and piazzas of Rome, and nowhere
else. He looked as if he might just have stepped out of a picture, and,
in truth, was likely enough to find his way into a dozen pictures; being
no other than one of those living models, dark, bushy bearded, wild
of aspect and attire, whom artists convert into saints or assassins,
according as their pictorial purposes demand.

“Miriam,” whispered Hilda, a little startled, “it is your model!”




CHAPTER III


SUBTERRANEAN REMINISCENCES


Miriam’s model has so important a connection with our story, that it is
essential to describe the singular mode of his first appearance, and
how he subsequently became a self-appointed follower of the young female
artist. In the first place, however, we must devote a page or two to
certain peculiarities in the position of Miriam herself.

There was an ambiguity about this young lady, which, though it did not
necessarily imply anything wrong, would have operated unfavorably as
regarded her reception in society, anywhere but in Rome. The truth was,
that nobody knew anything about Miriam, either for good or evil. She had
made her appearance without introduction, had taken a studio, put her
card upon the door, and showed very considerable talent as a painter in
oils. Her fellow professors of the brush, it is true, showered abundant
criticisms upon her pictures, allowing them to be well enough for the
idle half-efforts of an amateur, but lacking both the trained skill and
the practice that distinguish the works of a true artist.

Nevertheless, be their faults what they might, Miriam’s pictures met
with good acceptance among the patrons of modern art. Whatever technical
merit they lacked, its absence was more than supplied by a warmth
and passionateness, which she had the faculty of putting into her
productions, and which all the world could feel. Her nature had a great
deal of color, and, in accordance with it, so likewise had her pictures.

Miriam had great apparent freedom of intercourse; her manners were so
far from evincing shyness, that it seemed easy to become acquainted with
her, and not difficult to develop a casual acquaintance into intimacy.
Such, at least, was the impression which she made, upon brief contact,
but not such the ultimate conclusion of those who really sought to know
her. So airy, free, and affable was Miriam’s deportment towards all who
came within her sphere, that possibly they might never be conscious of
the fact, but so it was, that they did not get on, and were seldom any
further advanced into her good graces to-day than yesterday. By some
subtile quality, she kept people at a distance, without so much as
letting them know that they were excluded from her inner circle. She
resembled one of those images of light, which conjurers evoke and cause
to shine before us, in apparent tangibility, only an arm’s length beyond
our grasp: we make a step in advance, expecting to seize the illusion,
but find it still precisely so far out of our reach. Finally, society
began to recognize the impossibility of getting nearer to Miriam, and
gruffly acquiesced.

There were two persons, however, whom she appeared to acknowledge as
friends in the closer and truer sense of the word; and both of these
more favored individuals did credit to Miriam’s selection. One was
a young American sculptor, of high promise and rapidly increasing
celebrity; the other, a girl of the same country, a painter like Miriam
herself, but in a widely different sphere of art. Her heart flowed out
towards these two; she requited herself by their society and friendship
(and especially by Hilda’s) for all the loneliness with which, as
regarded the rest of the world, she chose to be surrounded. Her two
friends were conscious of the strong, yearning grasp which Miriam laid
upon them, and gave her their affection in full measure; Hilda, indeed,
responding with the fervency of a girl’s first friendship, and Kenyon
with a manly regard, in which there was nothing akin to what is
distinctively called love.

A sort of intimacy subsequently grew up between these three friends
and a fourth individual; it was a young Italian, who, casually visiting
Rome, had been attracted by the beauty which Miriam possessed in a
remarkable degree. He had sought her, followed her, and insisted, with
simple perseverance, upon being admitted at least to her acquaintance; a
boon which had been granted, when a more artful character, seeking it by
a more subtle mode of pursuit, would probably have failed to obtain it.
This young man, though anything but intellectually brilliant, had many
agreeable characteristics which won him the kindly and half-contemptuous
regard of Miriam and her two friends. It was he whom they called
Donatello, and whose wonderful resemblance to the Faun of Praxiteles
forms the keynote of our narrative.

Such was the position in which we find Miriam some few months after her
establishment at Rome. It must be added, however, that the world did not
permit her to hide her antecedents without making her the subject of
a good deal of conjecture; as was natural enough, considering the
abundance of her personal charms, and the degree of notice that she
attracted as an artist. There were many stories about Miriam’s origin
and previous life, some of which had a very probable air, while others
were evidently wild and romantic fables. We cite a few, leaving the
reader to designate them either under the probable or the romantic head.

It was said, for example, that Miriam was the daughter and heiress of
a great Jewish banker (an idea perhaps suggested by a certain rich
Oriental character in her face), and had fled from her paternal home
to escape a union with a cousin, the heir of another of that golden
brotherhood; the object being to retain their vast accumulation of
wealth within the family. Another story hinted that she was a German
princess, whom, for reasons of state, it was proposed to give in
marriage either to a decrepit sovereign, or a prince still in his
cradle. According to a third statement, she was the off-spring of a
Southern American planter, who had given her an elaborate education and
endowed her with his wealth; but the one burning drop of African
blood in her veins so affected her with a sense of ignominy, that she
relinquished all and fled her country. By still another account she was
the lady of an English nobleman; and, out of mere love and honor of
art, had thrown aside the splendor of her rank, and come to seek a
subsistence by her pencil in a Roman studio.

In all the above cases, the fable seemed to be instigated by the large
and bounteous impression which Miriam invariably made, as if necessity
and she could have nothing to do with one another. Whatever deprivations
she underwent must needs be voluntary. But there were other surmises,
taking such a commonplace view as that Miriam was the daughter of a
merchant or financier, who had been ruined in a great commercial crisis;
and, possessing a taste for art, she had attempted to support herself by
the pencil, in preference to the alternative of going out as governess.

Be these things how they might, Miriam, fair as she looked, was plucked
up out of a mystery, and had its roots still clinging to her. She was a
beautiful and attractive woman, but based, as it were, upon a cloud, and
all surrounded with misty substance; so that the result was to render
her sprite-like in her most ordinary manifestations. This was the case
even in respect to Kenyon and Hilda, her especial friends. But such was
the effect of Miriam’s natural language, her generosity, kindliness, and
native truth of character, that these two received her as a dear friend
into their hearts, taking her good qualities as evident and genuine, and
never imagining that what was hidden must be therefore evil.

We now proceed with our narrative.

The same party of friends, whom we have seen at the sculpture-gallery of
the Capitol, chanced to have gone together, some months before, to the
catacomb of St. Calixtus. They went joyously down into that vast
tomb, and wandered by torchlight through a sort of dream, in which
reminiscences of church aisles and grimy cellars--and chiefly the
latter--seemed to be broken into fragments, and hopelessly intermingled.
The intricate passages along which they followed their guide had been
hewn, in some forgotten age, out of a dark-red, crumbly stone. On either
side were horizontal niches, where, if they held their torches closely,
the shape of a human body was discernible in white ashes, into which the
entire mortality of a man or woman had resolved itself. Among all this
extinct dust, there might perchance be a thigh-bone, which crumbled at
a touch; or possibly a skull, grinning at its own wretched plight, as is
the ugly and empty habit of the thing.

Sometimes their gloomy pathway tended upward, so that, through a
crevice, a little daylight glimmered down upon them, or even a streak of
sunshine peeped into a burial niche; then again, they went downward by
gradual descent, or by abrupt, rudely hewn steps, into deeper and deeper
recesses of the earth. Here and there the narrow and tortuous passages
widened somewhat, developing themselves into small chapels;--which
once, no doubt, had been adorned with marble-work and lighted with
ever-burning lamps and tapers. All such illumination and ornament,
however, had long since been extinguished and stript away; except,
indeed, that the low roofs of a few of these ancient sites of worship
were covered with dingy stucco, and frescoed with scriptural scenes and
subjects, in the dreariest stage of ruin.

In one such chapel, the guide showed them a low arch, beneath which the
body of St. Cecilia had been buried after her martyrdom, and where it
lay till a sculptor saw it, and rendered it forever beautiful in marble.

In a similar spot they found two sarcophagi, one containing a skeleton,
and the other a shrivelled body, which still wore the garments of its
former lifetime.

“How dismal all this is!” said Hilda, shuddering. “I do not know why we
came here, nor why we should stay a moment longer.”

“I hate it all!” cried Donatello with peculiar energy. “Dear friends,
let us hasten back into the blessed daylight!”

From the first, Donatello had shown little fancy for the expedition;
for, like most Italians, and in especial accordance with the law of his
own simple and physically happy nature, this young man had an infinite
repugnance to graves and skulls, and to all that ghastliness which the
Gothic mind loves to associate with the idea of death. He shuddered,
and looked fearfully round, drawing nearer to Miriam, whose attractive
influence alone had enticed him into that gloomy region.

“What a child you are, poor Donatello!” she observed, with the freedom
which she always used towards him. “You are afraid of ghosts!”

“Yes, signorina; terribly afraid!” said the truthful Donatello.

“I also believe in ghosts,” answered Miriam, “and could tremble at them,
in a suitable place. But these sepulchres are so old, and these skulls
and white ashes so very dry, that methinks they have ceased to be
haunted. The most awful idea connected with the catacombs is their
interminable extent, and the possibility of going astray into this
labyrinth of darkness, which broods around the little glimmer of our
tapers.”

“Has any one ever been lost here?” asked Kenyon of the guide.

“Surely, signor; one, no longer ago than my father’s time,” said the
guide; and he added, with the air of a man who believed what he was
telling, “but the first that went astray here was a pagan of old Rome,
who hid himself in order to spy out and betray the blessed saints, who
then dwelt and worshipped in these dismal places. You have heard the
story, signor? A miracle was wrought upon the accursed one; and, ever
since (for fifteen centuries at least), he has been groping in the
darkness, seeking his way out of the catacomb.”

“Has he ever been seen?” asked Hilda, who had great and tremulous faith
in marvels of this kind.

“These eyes of mine never beheld him, signorina; the saints forbid!”
 answered the guide. “But it is well known that he watches near parties
that come into the catacomb, especially if they be heretics, hoping to
lead some straggler astray. What this lost wretch pines for, almost as
much as for the blessed sunshine, is a companion to be miserable with
him.”

“Such an intense desire for sympathy indicates something amiable in the
poor fellow, at all events,” observed Kenyon.

They had now reached a larger chapel than those heretofore seen; it
was of a circular shape, and, though hewn out of the solid mass of red
sandstone, had pillars, and a carved roof, and other tokens of a regular
architectural design. Nevertheless, considered as a church, it was
exceedingly minute, being scarcely twice a man’s stature in height, and
only two or three paces from wall to wall; and while their collected
torches illuminated this one small, consecrated spot, the great darkness
spread all round it, like that immenser mystery which envelops our
little life, and into which friends vanish from us, one by one. “Why,
where is Miriam?” cried Hilda. The party gazed hurriedly from face to
face, and became aware that one of their party had vanished into
the great darkness, even while they were shuddering at the remote
possibility of such a misfortune.




CHAPTER IV


THE SPECTRE OF THE CATACOMB


“Surely, she cannot be lost!” exclaimed Kenyon. “It is but a moment since
she was speaking.”

“No, no!” said Hilda, in great alarm. “She was behind us all; and it is
a long while since we have heard her voice!”

“Torches! torches!” cried Donatello desperately. “I will seek her, be
the darkness ever so dismal!”

But the guide held him back, and assured them all that there was no
possibility of assisting their lost companion, unless by shouting at
the very top of their voices. As the sound would go very far along these
close and narrow passages, there was a fair probability that Miriam
might hear the call, and be able to retrace her steps.

Accordingly, they all--Kenyon with his bass voice; Donatello with his
tenor; the guide with that high and hard Italian cry, which makes the
streets of Rome so resonant; and Hilda with her slender scream, piercing
farther than the united uproar of the rest--began to shriek, halloo, and
bellow, with the utmost force of their lungs. And, not to prolong the
reader’s suspense (for we do not particularly seek to interest him
in this scene, telling it only on account of the trouble and strange
entanglement which followed), they soon heard a responsive call, in a
female voice.

“It was the signorina!” cried Donatello joyfully.

“Yes; it was certainly dear Miriam’s voice,” said Hilda. “And here she
comes! Thank Heaven! Thank Heaven!”

The figure of their friend was now discernible by her own torchlight,
approaching out of one of the cavernous passages. Miriam came forward,
but not with the eagerness and tremulous joy of a fearful girl, just
rescued from a labyrinth of gloomy mystery. She made no immediate
response to their inquiries and tumultuous congratulations; and, as they
afterwards remembered, there was something absorbed, thoughtful, and
self-concentrated in her deportment. She looked pale, as well she might,
and held her torch with a nervous grasp, the tremor of which was seen
in the irregular twinkling of the flame. This last was the chief
perceptible sign of any recent agitation or alarm.

“Dearest, dearest Miriam,” exclaimed Hilda, throwing her arms about her
friend, “where have you been straying from us? Blessed be Providence,
which has rescued you out of that miserable darkness!”

“Hush, dear Hilda!” whispered Miriam, with a strange little laugh. “Are
you quite sure that it was Heaven’s guidance which brought me back?
If so, it was by an odd messenger, as you will confess. See; there he
stands.”

Startled at Miriam’s words and manner, Hilda gazed into the duskiness
whither she pointed, and there beheld a figure standing just on the
doubtful limit of obscurity, at the threshold of the small, illuminated
chapel. Kenyon discerned him at the same instant, and drew nearer with
his torch; although the guide attempted to dissuade him, averring that,
once beyond the consecrated precincts of the chapel, the apparition
would have power to tear him limb from limb. It struck the sculptor,
however, when he afterwards recurred to these circumstances, that the
guide manifested no such apprehension on his own account as he professed
on behalf of others; for he kept pace with Kenyon as the latter
approached the figure, though still endeavoring to restrain ‘him.

In fine, they both drew near enough to get as good a view of the spectre
as the smoky light of their torches, struggling with the massive gloom,
could supply.

The stranger was of exceedingly picturesque, and even melodramatic
aspect. He was clad in a voluminous cloak, that seemed to be made of a
buffalo’s hide, and a pair of those goat-skin breeches, with the hair
outward, which are still commonly worn by the peasants of the Roman
Campagna. In this garb, they look like antique Satyrs; and, in truth,
the Spectre of the Catacomb might have represented the last survivor
of that vanished race, hiding himself in sepulchral gloom, and mourning
over his lost life of woods and streams.

Furthermore, he had on a broad-brimmed, conical hat, beneath the shadow
of which a wild visage was indistinctly seen, floating away, as it were,
into a dusky wilderness of mustache and beard. His eyes winked, and
turned uneasily from the torches, like a creature to whom midnight would
be more congenial than noonday.

On the whole, the spectre might have made a considerable impression
on the sculptor’s nerves, only that he was in the habit of observing
similar figures, almost every day, reclining on the Spanish steps,
and waiting for some artist to invite them within the magic realm of
picture. Nor, even thus familiarized with the stranger’s peculiarities
of appearance, could Kenyon help wondering to see such a personage,
shaping himself so suddenly out of the void darkness of the catacomb.

“What are you?” said the sculptor, advancing his torch nearer. “And how
long have you been wandering here?”

“A thousand and five hundred years!” muttered the guide, loud enough to
be heard by all the party. “It is the old pagan phantom that I told you
of, who sought to betray the blessed saints!”

“Yes; it is a phantom!” cried Donatello, with a shudder. “Ah, dearest
signorina, what a fearful thing has beset you in those dark corridors!”

“Nonsense, Donatello,” said the sculptor. “The man is no more a phantom
than yourself. The only marvel is, how he comes to be hiding himself in
the catacomb. Possibly our guide might solve the riddle.”

The spectre himself here settled the point of his tangibility, at all
events, and physical substance, by approaching a step nearer, and laying
his hand on Kenyon’s arm.

“Inquire not what I am, nor wherefore I abide in the darkness,” said he,
in a hoarse, harsh voice, as if a great deal of damp were clustering in
his throat. “Henceforth, I am nothing but a shadow behind her footsteps.
She came to me when I sought her not. She has called me forth, and must
abide the consequences of my reappearance in the world.”

“Holy Virgin! I wish the signorina joy of her prize,” said the guide,
half to himself. “And in any case, the catacomb is well rid of him.”

We need follow the scene no further. So much is essential to the
subsequent narrative, that, during the short period while astray in
those tortuous passages, Miriam had encountered an unknown man, and
led him forth with her, or was guided back by him, first into the
torchlight, thence into the sunshine.

It was the further singularity of this affair, that the connection, thus
briefly and casually formed, did not terminate with the incident
that gave it birth. As if her service to him, or his service to her,
whichever it might be, had given him an indefeasible claim on Miriam’s
regard and protection, the Spectre of the Catacomb never long allowed
her to lose sight of him, from that day forward. He haunted her
footsteps with more than the customary persistency of Italian
mendicants, when once they have recognized a benefactor. For days
together, it is true, he occasionally vanished, but always reappeared,
gliding after her through the narrow streets, or climbing the hundred
steps of her staircase and sitting at her threshold.

Being often admitted to her studio, he left his features, or some shadow
or reminiscence of them, in many of her sketches and pictures. The moral
atmosphere of these productions was thereby so influenced, that rival
painters pronounced it a case of hopeless mannerism, which would destroy
all Miriam’s prospects of true excellence in art.

The story of this adventure spread abroad, and made its way beyond
the usual gossip of the Forestieri, even into Italian circles, where,
enhanced by a still potent spirit of superstition, it grew far more
wonderful than as above recounted. Thence, it came back among the
Anglo-Saxons, and was communicated to the German artists, who so richly
supplied it with romantic ornaments and excrescences, after their
fashion, that it became a fantasy worthy of Tieck or Hoffmann. For
nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a
marvellous tale.

The most reasonable version of the incident, that could anywise be
rendered acceptable to the auditors, was substantially the one suggested
by the guide of the catacomb, in his allusion to the legend of Memmius.
This man, or demon, or man-demon, was a spy during the persecutions
of the early Christians, probably under the Emperor Diocletian, and
penetrated into the catacomb of St. Calixtus, with the malignant purpose
of tracing out the hiding-places of the refugees. But, while he stole
craftily through those dark corridors, he chanced to come upon a little
chapel, where tapers were burning before an altar and a crucifix, and
a priest was in the performance of his sacred office. By divine
indulgence, there was a single moment’s grace allowed to Memmius, during
which, had he been capable of Christian faith and love, he might have
knelt before the cross, and received the holy light into his soul, and
so have been blest forever. But he resisted the sacred impulse. As
soon, therefore, as that one moment had glided by, the light of the
consecrated tapers, which represent all truth, bewildered the wretched
man with everlasting error, and the blessed cross itself was stamped
as a seal upon his heart, so that it should never open to receive
conviction.

Thenceforth, this heathen Memmius has haunted the wide and dreary
precincts of the catacomb, seeking, as some say, to beguile new victims
into his own misery; but, according to other statements, endeavoring to
prevail on any unwary visitor to take him by the hand, and guide him out
into the daylight. Should his wiles and entreaties take effect, however,
the man-demon would remain only a little while above ground. He would
gratify his fiendish malignity by perpetrating signal mischief on his
benefactor, and perhaps bringing some old pestilence or other forgotten
and long-buried evil on society; or, possibly, teaching the modern
world some decayed and dusty kind of crime, which the antique Romans
knew,--and then would hasten back to the catacomb, which, after so long
haunting it, has grown his most congenial home.

Miriam herself, with her chosen friends, the sculptor and the gentle
Hilda, often laughed at the monstrous fictions that had gone abroad in
reference to her adventure. Her two confidants (for such they were,
on all ordinary subjects) had not failed to ask an explanation of the
mystery, since undeniably a mystery there was, and one sufficiently
perplexing in itself, without any help from the imaginative faculty.
And, sometimes responding to their inquiries with a melancholy sort of
playfulness, Miriam let her fancy run off into wilder fables than any
which German ingenuity or Italian superstition had contrived.

For example, with a strange air of seriousness over all her face, only
belied by a laughing gleam in her dark eyes, she would aver that the
spectre (who had been an artist in his mortal lifetime) had promised
to teach her a long-lost, but invaluable secret of old Roman fresco
painting. The knowledge of this process would place Miriam at the head
of modern art; the sole condition being agreed upon, that she should
return with him into his sightless gloom, after enriching a certain
extent of stuccoed wall with the most brilliant and lovely designs. And
what true votary of art would not purchase unrivalled excellence, even
at so vast a sacrifice!

Or, if her friends still solicited a soberer account, Miriam replied,
that, meeting the old infidel in one of the dismal passages of the
catacomb, she had entered into controversy with him, hoping to achieve
the glory and satisfaction of converting him to the Christian faith. For
the sake of so excellent a result; she had even staked her own salvation
against his, binding herself to accompany him back into his penal gloom,
if, within a twelvemonth’s space, she should not have convinced him of
the errors through which he had so long groped and stumbled. But, alas!
up to the present time, the controversy had gone direfully in favor of
the man-demon; and Miriam (as she whispered in Hilda’s ear) had awful
forebodings, that, in a few more months, she must take an eternal
farewell of the sun!

It was somewhat remarkable that all her romantic fantasies arrived at
this self-same dreary termination,--it appeared impossible for her even
to imagine any other than a disastrous result from her connection with
her ill-omened attendant.

This singularity might have meant nothing, however, had it not suggested
a despondent state of mind, which was likewise indicated by many other
tokens. Miriam’s friends had no difficulty in perceiving that, in
one way or another, her happiness was very seriously compromised. Her
spirits were often depressed into deep melancholy. If ever she was gay,
it was seldom with a healthy cheerfulness. She grew moody, moreover, and
subject to fits of passionate ill temper; which usually wreaked itself
on the heads of those who loved her best. Not that Miriam’s indifferent
acquaintances were safe from similar outbreaks of her displeasure,
especially if they ventured upon any allusion to the model. In such
cases, they were left with little disposition to renew the subject, but
inclined, on the other hand, to interpret the whole matter as much to
her discredit as the least favorable coloring of the facts would allow.

It may occur to the reader, that there was really no demand for so much
rumor and speculation in regard to an incident, Which might well enough
have been explained without going many steps beyond the limits of
probability. The spectre might have been merely a Roman beggar, whose
fraternity often harbor in stranger shelters than the catacombs; or one
of those pilgrims, who still journey from remote countries to kneel
and worship at the holy sites, among which these haunts of the early
Christians are esteemed especially sacred. Or, as was perhaps a more
plausible theory, he might be a thief of the city, a robber of the
Campagna, a political offender, or an assassin, with blood upon his
hand; whom the negligence or connivance of the police allowed to take
refuge in those subterranean fastnesses, where such outlaws have been
accustomed to hide themselves from a far antiquity downward. Or he might
have been a lunatic, fleeing instinctively from man, and making it his
dark pleasure to dwell among the tombs, like him whose awful cry echoes
afar to us from Scripture times.

And, as for the stranger’s attaching himself so devotedly to Miriam, her
personal magnetism might be allowed a certain weight in the explanation.
For what remains, his pertinacity need not seem so very singular to
those who consider how slight a link serves to connect these vagabonds
of idle Italy with any person that may have the ill-hap to bestow
charity, or be otherwise serviceable to them, or betray the slightest
interest in their fortunes.

Thus little would remain to be accounted for, except the deportment of
Miriam herself; her reserve, her brooding melancholy, her petulance,
and moody passion. If generously interpreted, even these morbid symptoms
might have sufficient cause in the stimulating and exhaustive influences
of imaginative art, exercised by a delicate young woman, in the nervous
and unwholesome atmosphere of Rome. Such, at least, was the view of the
case which Hilda and Kenyon endeavored to impress on their own minds,
and impart to those whom their opinions might influence.

One of Miriam’s friends took the matter sadly to heart. This was the
young Italian. Donatello, as we have seen, had been an eyewitness of
the stranger’s first appearance, and had ever since nourished a singular
prejudice against the mysterious, dusky, death-scented apparition.
It resembled not so much a human dislike or hatred, as one of those
instinctive, unreasoning antipathies which the lower animals sometimes
display, and which generally prove more trustworthy than the acutest
insight into character. The shadow of the model, always flung into the
light which Miriam diffused around her, caused no slight trouble to
Donatello. Yet he was of a nature so remarkably genial and joyous, so
simply happy, that he might well afford to have something subtracted
from his comfort, and make tolerable shift to live upon what remained.




CHAPTER V


MIRIAM’S STUDIO


The courtyard and staircase of a palace built three hundred years ago
are a peculiar feature of modern Rome, and interest the stranger more
than many things of which he has heard loftier descriptions. You pass
through the grand breadth and height of a squalid entrance-way, and
perhaps see a range of dusky pillars, forming a sort of cloister round
the court, and in the intervals, from pillar to pillar, are strewn
fragments of antique statues, headless and legless torsos, and busts
that have invariably lost what it might be well if living men could lay
aside in that unfragrant atmosphere--the nose. Bas-reliefs, the spoil of
some far older palace, are set in the surrounding walls, every stone of
which has been ravished from the Coliseum, or any other imperial ruin
which earlier barbarism had not already levelled with the earth. Between
two of the pillars, moreover, stands an old sarcophagus without its
lid, and with all its more prominently projecting sculptures broken
off; perhaps it once held famous dust, and the bony framework of some
historic man, although now only a receptacle for the rubbish of the
courtyard, and a half-worn broom.

In the centre of the court, under the blue Italian sky, and with the
hundred windows of the vast palace gazing down upon it from four sides,
appears a fountain. It brims over from one stone basin to another,
or gushes from a Naiad’s urn, or spurts its many little jets from the
mouths of nameless monsters, which were merely grotesque and artificial
when Bernini, or whoever was their unnatural father, first produced
them; but now the patches of moss, the tufts of grass, the trailing
maiden-hair, and all sorts of verdant weeds that thrive in the cracks
and crevices of moist marble, tell us that Nature takes the fountain
back into her great heart, and cherishes it as kindly as if it were a
woodland spring. And hark, the pleasant murmur, the gurgle, the plash!
You might hear just those tinkling sounds from any tiny waterfall in the
forest, though here they gain a delicious pathos from the stately
echoes that reverberate their natural language. So the fountain is not
altogether glad, after all its three centuries at play!

In one of the angles of the courtyard, a pillared doorway gives access
to the staircase, with its spacious breadth of low marble steps, up
which, in former times, have gone the princes and cardinals of the great
Roman family who built this palace. Or they have come down, with still
grander and loftier mien, on their way to the Vatican or the Quirinal,
there to put off their scarlet hats in exchange for the triple crown.
But, in fine, all these illustrious personages have gone down
their hereditary staircase for the last time, leaving it to be the
thoroughfare of ambassadors, English noblemen, American millionnaires,
artists, tradesmen, washerwomen, and people of every degree,--all of
whom find such gilded and marble-panelled saloons as their pomp and
luxury demand, or such homely garrets as their necessity can pay for,
within this one multifarious abode. Only, in not a single nook of the
palace (built for splendor, and the accommodation of a vast retinue, but
with no vision of a happy fireside or any mode of domestic enjoyment)
does the humblest or the haughtiest occupant find comfort.

Up such a staircase, on the morning after the scene at the sculpture
gallery, sprang the light foot of Donatello. He ascended from story
to story, passing lofty doorways, set within rich frames of sculptured
marble, and climbing unweariedly upward, until the glories of the first
piano and the elegance of the middle height were exchanged for a sort of
Alpine region, cold and naked in its aspect. Steps of rough stone, rude
wooden balustrades, a brick pavement in the passages, a dingy whitewash
on the walls; these were here the palatial features. Finally, he paused
before an oaken door, on which was pinned a card, bearing the name of
Miriam Schaefer, artist in oils. Here Donatello knocked, and the door
immediately fell somewhat ajar; its latch having been pulled up by means
of a string on the inside. Passing through a little anteroom, he found
himself in Miriam’s presence.

“Come in, wild Faun,” she said, “and tell me the latest news from
Arcady!”

The artist was not just then at her easel, but was busied with the
feminine task of mending a pair of gloves.

There is something extremely pleasant, and even touching,--at least,
of very sweet, soft, and winning effect,--in this peculiarity of
needlework, distinguishing women from men. Our own sex is incapable of
any such by-play aside from the main business of life; but women--be
they of what earthly rank they may, however gifted with intellect or
genius, or endowed with awful beauty--have always some little handiwork
ready to fill the tiny gap of every vacant moment. A needle is familiar
to the fingers of them all. A queen, no doubt, plies it on occasion; the
woman poet can use it as adroitly as her pen; the woman’s eye, that has
discovered a new star, turns from its glory to send the polished little
instrument gleaming along the hem of her kerchief, or to darn a casual
fray in her dress. And they have greatly the advantage of us in this
respect. The slender thread of silk or cotton keeps them united with
the small, familiar, gentle interests of life, the continually operating
influences of which do so much for the health of the character, and
carry off what would otherwise be a dangerous accumulation of morbid
sensibility. A vast deal of human sympathy runs along this electric
line, stretching from the throne to the wicker chair of the humblest
seamstress, and keeping high and low in a species of communion with
their kindred beings. Methinks it is a token of healthy and gentle
characteristics, when women of high thoughts and accomplishments love
to sew; especially as they are never more at home with their own hearts
than while so occupied.

And when the work falls in a woman’s lap, of its own accord, and the
needle involuntarily ceases to fly, it is a sign of trouble, quite as
trustworthy as the throb of the heart itself. This was what happened
to Miriam. Even while Donatello stood gazing at her, she seemed to have
forgotten his presence, allowing him to drop out of her thoughts, and
the torn glove to fall from her idle fingers. Simple as he was, the
young man knew by his sympathies that something was amiss.

“Dear lady, you are sad,” said he, drawing close to her.

“It is nothing, Donatello,” she replied, resuming her work; “yes;
a little sad, perhaps; but that is not strange for us people of the
ordinary world, especially for women. You are of a cheerfuller race, my
friend, and know nothing of this disease of sadness. But why do you come
into this shadowy room of mine?”

“Why do you make it so shadowy?” asked he.

“We artists purposely exclude sunshine, and all but a partial light,”
 said Miriam, “because we think it necessary to put ourselves at
odds with Nature before trying to imitate her. That strikes you very
strangely, does it not? But we make very pretty pictures sometimes with
our artfully arranged lights and shadows. Amuse yourself with some
of mine, Donatello, and by and by I shall be in the mood to begin the
portrait we were talking about.”

The room had the customary aspect of a painter’s studio; one of those
delightful spots that hardly seem to belong to the actual world, but
rather to be the outward type of a poet’s haunted imagination, where
there are glimpses, sketches, and half-developed hints of beings and
objects grander and more beautiful than we can anywhere find in reality.
The windows were closed with shutters, or deeply curtained, except one,
which was partly open to a sunless portion of the sky, admitting only
from high upward that partial light which, with its strongly marked
contrast of shadow, is the first requisite towards seeing objects
pictorially. Pencil-drawings were pinned against the wall or scattered
on the tables. Unframed canvases turned their backs on the spectator,
presenting only a blank to the eye, and churlishly concealing whatever
riches of scenery or human beauty Miriam’s skill had depicted on the
other side.

In the obscurest part of the room Donatello was half startled at
perceiving duskily a woman with long dark hair, who threw up her arms
with a wild gesture of tragic despair, and appeared to beckon him into
the darkness along with her.

“Do not be afraid, Donatello,” said Miriam, smiling to see him peering
doubtfully into the mysterious dusk. “She means you no mischief, nor
could perpetrate any if she wished it ever so much. It is a lady of
exceedingly pliable disposition; now a heroine of romance, and now a
rustic maid; yet all for show; being created, indeed, on purpose to wear
rich shawls and other garments in a becoming fashion. This is the true
end of her being, although she pretends to assume the most varied duties
and perform many parts in life, while really the poor puppet has nothing
on earth to do. Upon my word, I am satirical unawares, and seem to be
describing nine women out of ten in the person of my lay-figure. For
most purposes she has the advantage of the sisterhood. Would I were like
her!”

“How it changes her aspect,” exclaimed Donatello, “to know that she is
but a jointed figure! When my eyes first fell upon her, I thought her
arms moved, as if beckoning me to help her in some direful peril.”

“Are you often troubled with such sinister freaks of fancy?” asked
Miriam. “I should not have supposed it.”

“To tell you the truth, dearest signorina,” answered the young Italian,
“I am apt to be fearful in old, gloomy houses, and in the dark. I love
no dark or dusky corners, except it be in a grotto, or among the thick
green leaves of an arbor, or in some nook of the woods, such as I know
many in the neighborhood of my home. Even there, if a stray sunbeam
steal in, the shadow is all the better for its cheerful glimmer.”

“Yes; you are a Faun, you know,” said the fair artist, laughing at the
remembrance of the scene of the day before. “But the world is sadly
changed nowadays; grievously changed, poor Donatello, since those happy
times when your race used to dwell in the Arcadian woods, playing hide
and seek with the nymphs in grottoes and nooks of shrubbery. You have
reappeared on earth some centuries too late.”

“I do not understand you now,” answered Donatello, looking perplexed;
“only, signorina, I am glad to have my lifetime while you live; and
where you are, be it in cities or fields, I would fain be there too.”

“I wonder whether I ought to allow you to speak in this way,” said
Miriam, looking thoughtfully at him. “Many young women would think it
behooved them to be offended. Hilda would never let you speak so, I dare
say. But he is a mere boy,” she added, aside, “a simple boy, putting his
boyish heart to the proof on the first woman whom he chances to meet.
If yonder lay-figure had had the luck to meet him first, she would have
smitten him as deeply as I.”

“Are you angry with me?” asked Donatello dolorously.

“Not in the least,” answered Miriam, frankly giving him her hand. “Pray
look over some of these sketches till I have leisure to chat with you
a little. I hardly think I am in spirits enough to begin your portrait
to-day.”

Donatello was as gentle and docile as a pet spaniel; as playful, too, in
his general disposition, or saddening with his mistress’s variable mood
like that or any other kindly animal which has the faculty of
bestowing its sympathies more completely than men or women can ever do.
Accordingly, as Miriam bade him, he tried to turn his attention to a
great pile and confusion of pen and ink sketches and pencil drawings
which lay tossed together on a table. As it chanced, however, they gave
the poor youth little delight.

The first that he took up was a very impressive sketch, in which the
artist had jotted down her rough ideas for a picture of Jael driving the
nail through the temples of Sisera. It was dashed off with remarkable
power, and showed a touch or two that were actually lifelike and
deathlike, as if Miriam had been standing by when Jael gave the first
stroke of her murderous hammer, or as if she herself were Jael, and felt
irresistibly impelled to make her bloody confession in this guise.

Her first conception of the stern Jewess had evidently been that of
perfect womanhood, a lovely form, and a high, heroic face of lofty
beauty; but, dissatisfied either with her own work or the terrible story
itself, Miriam had added a certain wayward quirk of her pencil, which at
once converted the heroine into a vulgar murderess. It was evident that
a Jael like this would be sure to search Sisera’s pockets as soon as the
breath was out of his body.

In another sketch she had attempted the story of Judith, which we see
represented by the old masters so often, and in such various styles.
Here, too, beginning with a passionate and fiery conception of the
subject in all earnestness, she had given the last touches in utter
scorn, as it were, of the feelings which at first took such powerful
possession of her hand. The head of Holofernes (which, by the bye, had a
pair of twisted mustaches, like those of a certain potentate of the
day) being fairly cut off, was screwing its eyes upward and twirling
its features into a diabolical grin of triumphant malice, which it flung
right in Judith’s face. On her part, she had the startled aspect that
might be conceived of a cook if a calf’s head should sneer at her when
about to be popped into the dinner-pot.

Over and over again, there was the idea of woman, acting the part of a
revengeful mischief towards man. It was, indeed, very singular to
see how the artist’s imagination seemed to run on these stories of
bloodshed, in which woman’s hand was crimsoned by the stain; and how,
too,--in one form or another, grotesque or sternly sad,--she failed not
to bring out the moral, that woman must strike through her own heart to
reach a human life, whatever were the motive that impelled her.

One of the sketches represented the daughter of Herodias receiving the
head of John the Baptist in a charger. The general conception appeared
to be taken from Bernardo Luini’s picture, in the Uffizzi Gallery at
Florence; but Miriam had imparted to the saint’s face a look of gentle
and heavenly reproach, with sad and blessed eyes fixed upward at the
maiden; by the force of which miraculous glance, her whole womanhood was
at once awakened to love and endless remorse.

These sketches had a most disagreeable effect on Donatello’s peculiar
temperament. He gave a shudder; his face assumed a look of trouble,
fear, and disgust; he snatched up one sketch after another, as if about
to tear it in pieces. Finally, shoving away the pile of drawings, he
shrank back from the table and clasped his hands over his eyes.

“What is the matter, Donatello?” asked Miriam, looking up from a
letter which she was now writing. “Ah! I did not mean you to see those
drawings. They are ugly phantoms that stole out of my mind; not things
that I created, but things that haunt me. See! here are some trifles
that perhaps will please you better.”

She gave him a portfolio, the sketches in which indicated a happier mood
of mind, and one, it is to be hoped, more truly characteristic of the
artist. Supposing neither of these classes of subject to show anything
of her own individuality, Miriam had evidently a great scope of fancy,
and a singular faculty of putting what looked like heart into her
productions. The latter sketches were domestic and common scenes, so
finely and subtilely idealized that they seemed such as we may see
at any moment, and eye, where; while still there was the indefinable
something added, or taken away, which makes all the difference between
sordid life and an earthly paradise. The feeling and sympathy in all of
them were deep and true. There was the scene, that comes once in every
life, of the lover winning the soft and pure avowal of bashful affection
from the maiden whose slender form half leans towards his arm, half
shrinks from it, we know not which. There was wedded affection in its
successive stages, represented in a series of delicately conceived
designs, touched with a holy fire, that burned from youth to age in
those two hearts, and gave one identical beauty to the faces throughout
all the changes of feature.

There was a drawing of an infant’s shoe, half worn out, with the airy
print of the blessed foot within; a thing that would make a mother smile
or weep out of the very depths of her heart; and yet an actual mother
would not have been likely to appreciate the poetry of the little shoe,
until Miriam revealed it to her. It was wonderful, the depth and force
with which the above, and other kindred subjects, were depicted, and the
profound significance which they often acquired. The artist, still in
her fresh youth, could not probably have drawn any of these dear and
rich experiences from her own life; unless, perchance, that first sketch
of all, the avowal of maiden affection, were a remembered incident, and
not a prophecy. But it is more delightful to believe that, from first to
last, they were the productions of a beautiful imagination, dealing with
the warm and pure suggestions of a woman’s heart, and thus idealizing
a truer and lovelier picture of the life that belongs to woman, than
an actual acquaintance with some of its hard and dusty facts could have
inspired. So considered, the sketches intimated such a force and variety
of imaginative sympathies as would enable Miriam to fill her life richly
with the bliss and suffering of womanhood, however barren it might
individually be.

There was one observable point, indeed, betokening that the artist
relinquished, for her personal self, the happiness which she could so
profoundly appreciate for others. In all those sketches of common life,
and the affections that spiritualize it, a figure was portrayed apart,
now it peeped between the branches of a shrubbery, amid which two lovers
sat; now it was looking through a frosted window, from the outside,
while a young wedded pair sat at their new fireside within; and once it
leaned from a chariot, which six horses were whirling onward in pomp
and pride, and gazed at a scene of humble enjoyment by a cottage door.
Always it was the same figure, and always depicted with an expression of
deep sadness; and in every instance, slightly as they were brought out,
the face and form had the traits of Miriam’s own.

“Do you like these sketches better, Donatello?” asked Miriam. “Yes,”
 said Donatello rather doubtfully. “Not much, I fear,” responded she,
laughing. “And what should a boy like you--a Faun too,--know about the
joys and sorrows, the intertwining light and shadow, of human life? I
forgot that you were a Faun. You cannot suffer deeply; therefore you
can but half enjoy. Here, now, is a subject which you can better
appreciate.”

The sketch represented merely a rustic dance, but with such extravagance
of fun as was delightful to behold; and here there was no drawback,
except that strange sigh and sadness which always come when we are
merriest.

“I am going to paint the picture in oils,” said the artist; “and I want
you, Donatello, for the wildest dancer of them all. Will you sit for me,
some day?--or, rather, dance for me?”

“O, most gladly, signorina!” exclaimed Donatello. “See; it shall be like
this.”

And forthwith he began to dance, and flit about the studio, like an
incarnate sprite of jollity, pausing at last on the extremity of one
toe, as if that were the only portion of himself whereby his frisky
nature could come in contact with the earth. The effect in that shadowy
chamber, whence the artist had so carefully excluded the sunshine, was
as enlivening as if one bright ray had contrived to shimmer in and
frolic around the walls, and finally rest just in the centre of the
floor.

“That was admirable!” said Miriam, with an approving smile. “If I can
catch you on my canvas, it will be a glorious picture; only I am afraid
you will dance out of it, by the very truth of the representation, just
when I shall have given it the last touch. We will try it one of these
days. And now, to reward you for that jolly exhibition, you shall see
what has been shown to no one else.”

She went to her easel, on which was placed a picture with its back
turned towards the spectator. Reversing the position, there appeared the
portrait of a beautiful woman, such as one sees only two or three, if
even so many times, in all a lifetime; so beautiful, that she seemed to
get into your consciousness and memory, and could never afterwards be
shut out, but haunted your dreams, for pleasure or for pain; holding
your inner realm as a conquered territory, though without deigning to
make herself at home there.

She was very youthful, and had what was usually thought to be a Jewish
aspect; a complexion in which there was no roseate bloom, yet neither
was it pale; dark eyes, into which you might look as deeply as your
glance would go, and still be conscious of a depth that you had not
sounded, though it lay open to the day. She had black, abundant hair,
with none of the vulgar glossiness of other women’s sable locks; if she
were really of Jewish blood, then this was Jewish hair, and a dark glory
such as crowns no Christian maiden’s head. Gazing at this portrait, you
saw what Rachel might have been, when Jacob deemed her worth the wooing
seven years, and seven more; or perchance she might ripen to be what
Judith was, when she vanquished Holofernes with her beauty, and slew him
for too much adoring it.

Miriam watched Donatello’s contemplation of the picture, and seeing his
simple rapture, a smile of pleasure brightened on her face, mixed with a
little scorn; at least, her lips curled, and her eyes gleamed, as if she
disdained either his admiration or her own enjoyment of it.

“Then you like the picture, Donatello?” she asked.

“O, beyond what I can tell!” he answered. “So beautiful!--so beautiful!”

“And do you recognize the likeness?”

“Signorina,” exclaimed Donatello, turning from the picture to the
artist, in astonishment that she should ask the question, “the
resemblance is as little to be mistaken as if you had bent over the
smooth surface of a fountain, and possessed the witchcraft to call forth
the image that you made there! It is yourself!”

Donatello said the truth; and we forebore to speak descriptively of
Miriam’s beauty earlier in our narrative, because we foresaw this
occasion to bring it perhaps more forcibly before the reader.

We know not whether the portrait were a flattered likeness; probably
not, regarding it merely as the delineation of a lovely face; although
Miriam, like all self-painters, may have endowed herself with certain
graces which Other eyes might not discern. Artists are fond of painting
their own portraits; and, in Florence, there is a gallery of hundreds
of them, including the most illustrious, in all of which there are
autobiographical characteristics, so to speak,--traits, expressions,
loftinesses, and amenities, which would have been invisible, had they
not been painted from within. Yet their reality and truth are none
the less. Miriam, in like manner, had doubtless conveyed some of the
intimate results of her heart knowledge into her own portrait, and
perhaps wished to try whether they would be perceptible to so simple and
natural an observer as Donatello.

“Does the expression please you?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Donatello hesitatingly; “if it would only smile so like the
sunshine as you sometimes do. No, it is sadder than I thought at first.
Cannot you make yourself smile a little, signorina?”

“A forced smile is uglier than a frown,” said Miriam, a bright, natural
smile breaking out over her face even as she spoke.

“O, catch it now!” cried Donatello, clapping his hands. “Let it shine
upon the picture! There! it has vanished already! And you are sad again,
very sad; and the picture gazes sadly forth at me, as if some evil had
befallen it in the little time since I looked last.”

“How perplexed you seem, my friend!” answered Miriam. “I really half
believe you are a Faun, there is such a mystery and terror for you in
these dark moods, which are just as natural as daylight to us people of
ordinary mould. I advise you, at all events, to look at other faces with
those innocent and happy eyes, and never more to gaze at mine!”

“You speak in vain,” replied the young man, with a deeper emphasis than
she had ever before heard in his voice; “shroud yourself in what gloom
you will, I must needs follow you.”

“Well, well, well,” said Miriam impatiently; “but leave me now; for to
speak plainly, my good friend, you grow a little wearisome. I walk
this afternoon in the Borghese grounds. Meet me there, if it suits your
pleasure.”




CHAPTER VI


THE VIRGIN’S SHRINE


After Donatello had left the studio, Miriam herself came forth, and
taking her way through some of the intricacies of the city, entered what
might be called either a widening of a street, or a small piazza. The
neighborhood comprised a baker’s oven, emitting the usual fragrance of
sour bread; a shoe shop; a linen-draper’s shop; a pipe and cigar shop; a
lottery office; a station for French soldiers, with a sentinel pacing in
front; and a fruit-stand, at which a Roman matron was selling the
dried kernels of chestnuts, wretched little figs, and some bouquets of
yesterday. A church, of course, was near at hand, the facade of which
ascended into lofty pinnacles, whereon were perched two or three winged
figures of stone, either angelic or allegorical, blowing stone trumpets
in close vicinity to the upper windows of an old and shabby palace.
This palace was distinguished by a feature not very common in the
architecture of Roman edifices; that is to say, a mediaeval tower,
square, massive, lofty, and battlemented and machicolated at the summit.

At one of the angles of the battlements stood a shrine of the Virgin,
such as we see everywhere at the street corners of Rome, but seldom or
never, except in this solitary, instance, at a height above the ordinary
level of men’s views and aspirations. Connected with this old tower and
its lofty shrine, there is a legend which we cannot here pause to tell;
but for centuries a lamp has been burning before the Virgin’s image, at
noon, at midnight, and at all hours of the twenty-four, and must be kept
burning forever, as long as the tower shall stand; or else the tower
itself, the palace, and whatever estate belongs to it, shall pass from
its hereditary possessor, in accordance with an ancient vow, and become
the property of the Church.

As Miriam approached, she looked upward, and saw,--not, indeed, the
flame of the never-dying lamp, which was swallowed up in the broad
sunlight that brightened the shrine, but a flock of white doves,
skimming, fluttering, and wheeling about the topmost height of the
tower, their silver wings flashing in the pure transparency of the
air. Several of them sat on the ledge of the upper window, pushing one
another off by their eager struggle for this favorite station, and all
tapping their beaks and flapping their wings tumultuously against the
panes; some had alighted in the street, far below, but flew hastily
upward, at the sound of the window being thrust ajar, and opening in the
middle, on rusty hinges, as Roman windows do.

A fair young girl, dressed in white, showed herself at the aperture for
a single instant, and threw forth as much as her two small hands could
hold of some kind of food, for the flock of eleemosynary doves. It
seemed greatly to the taste of the feathered people; for they tried to
snatch beakfuls of it from her grasp, caught it in the air, and rushed
downward after it upon the pavement.

“What a pretty scene this is,” thought Miriam, with a kindly smile, “and
how like a dove she is herself, the fair, pure creature! The other doves
know her for a sister, I am sure.”

Miriam passed beneath the deep portal of the palace, and turning to the
left, began to mount flight after flight of a staircase, which, for the
loftiness of its aspiration, was worthy to be Jacob’s ladder, or, at all
events, the staircase of the Tower of Babel. The city bustle, which
is heard even in Rome, the rumble of wheels over the uncomfortable
paving-stones, the hard harsh cries reechoing in the high and narrow
streets, grew faint and died away; as the turmoil of the world will
always die, if we set our faces to climb heavenward. Higher, and higher
still; and now, glancing through the successive windows that threw in
their narrow light upon the stairs, her view stretched across the roofs
of the city, unimpeded even by the stateliest palaces. Only the domes of
churches ascend into this airy region, and hold up their golden crosses
on a level with her eye; except that, out of the very heart of Rome,
the column of Antoninus thrusts itself upward, with St. Paul upon its
summit, the sole human form that seems to have kept her company.

Finally, the staircase came to an end; save that, on one side of the
little entry where it terminated, a flight of a dozen steps gave access
to the roof of the tower and the legendary shrine. On the other side was
a door, at which Miriam knocked, but rather as a friendly announcement
of her presence than with any doubt of hospitable welcome; for, awaiting
no response, she lifted the latch and entered.

“What a hermitage you have found for yourself, dear Hilda!” she,
exclaimed. “You breathe sweet air, above all the evil scents of Rome;
and even so, in your maiden elevation, you dwell above our vanities and
passions, our moral dust and mud, with the doves and the angels for your
nearest neighbors. I should not wonder if the Catholics were to make a
saint of you, like your namesake of old; especially as you have almost
avowed yourself of their religion, by undertaking to keep the lamp
alight before the Virgin’s shrine.”

“No, no, Miriam!” said Hilda, who had come joyfully forward to greet
her friend. “You must not call me a Catholic. A Christian girl--even
a daughter of the Puritans--may surely pay honor to the idea of divine
Womanhood, without giving up the faith of her forefathers. But how kind
you are to climb into my dove-cote!”

“It is no trifling proof of friendship, indeed,” answered Miriam; “I
should think there were three hundred stairs at least.”

“But it will do you good,” continued Hilda. “A height of some fifty feet
above the roofs of Rome gives me all the advantages that I could get
from fifty miles of distance. The air so exhilarates my spirits, that
sometimes I feel half inclined to attempt a flight from the top of my
tower, in the faith that I should float upward.”

“O, pray don’t try it!” said Miriam, laughing; “If it should turn out
that you are less than an angel, you would find the stones of the Roman
pavement very hard; and if an angel, indeed, I am afraid you would never
come down among us again.”

This young American girl was an example of the freedom of life which
it is possible for a female artist to enjoy at Rome. She dwelt in her
tower, as free to descend into the corrupted atmosphere of the city
beneath, as one of her companion doves to fly downward into the
street;--all alone, perfectly independent, under her own sole
guardianship, unless watched over by the Virgin, whose shrine she
tended; doing what she liked without a suspicion or a shadow upon the
snowy whiteness of her fame. The customs of artist life bestow such
liberty upon the sex, which is elsewhere restricted within so much
narrower limits; and it is perhaps an indication that, whenever we admit
women to a wider scope of pursuits and professions, we must also remove
the shackles of our present conventional rules, which would then become
an insufferable restraint on either maid or wife. The system seems to
work unexceptionably in Rome; and in many other cases, as in Hilda’s,
purity of heart and life are allowed to assert themselves, and to be
their own proof and security, to a degree unknown in the society of
other cities.

Hilda, in her native land, had early shown what was pronounced by
connoisseurs a decided genius for the pictorial art. Even in her
schooldays--still not so very distant--she had produced sketches that
were seized upon by men of taste, and hoarded as among the choicest
treasures of their portfolios; scenes delicately imagined, lacking,
perhaps, the reality which comes only from a close acquaintance with
life, but so softly touched with feeling and fancy that you seemed to
be looking at humanity with angels’ eyes. With years and experience
she might be expected to attain a darker and more forcible touch, which
would impart to her designs the relief they needed. Had Hilda remained
in her own country, it is not improbable that she might have produced
original works worthy to hang in that gallery of native art which,
we hope, is destined to extend its rich length through many future
centuries. An orphan, however, without near relatives, and possessed of
a little property, she had found it within her possibilities to come
to Italy; that central clime, whither the eyes and the heart of every
artist turn, as if pictures could not be made to glow in any other
atmosphere, as if statues could not assume grace and expression, save in
that land of whitest marble.

Hilda’s gentle courage had brought her safely over land and sea; her
mild, unflagging perseverance had made a place for her in the famous
city, even like a flower that finds a chink for itself, and a little
earth to grow in, on whatever ancient wall its slender roots may fasten.
Here she dwelt, in her tower, possessing a friend or two in Rome, but
no home companion except the flock of doves, whose cote was in a ruinous
chamber contiguous to her own. They soon became as familiar with the
fair-haired Saxon girl as if she were a born sister of their brood; and
her customary white robe bore such an analogy to their snowy plumage
that the confraternity of artists called Hilda the Dove, and recognized
her aerial apartment as the Dovecote. And while the other doves flew far
and wide in quest of what was good for them, Hilda likewise spread
her wings, and sought such ethereal and imaginative sustenance as God
ordains for creatures of her kind.

We know not whether the result of her Italian studies, so far as it
could yet be seen, will be accepted as a good or desirable one. Certain
it is, that since her arrival in the pictorial land, Hilda seemed to
have entirely lost the impulse of original design, which brought her
thither. No doubt the girl’s early dreams had been of sending forms and
hues of beauty into the visible world out of her own mind; of compelling
scenes of poetry and history to live before men’s eyes, through
conceptions and by methods individual to herself. But more and more, as
she grew familiar with the miracles of art that enrich so many galleries
in Rome, Hilda had ceased to consider herself as an original artist. No,
wonder that this change should have befallen her. She was endowed with
a deep and sensitive faculty of appreciation; she had the gift of
discerning and worshipping excellence in a most unusual measure. No
other person, it is probable, recognized so adequately, and enjoyed with
such deep delight, the pictorial wonders that were here displayed. She
saw no, not saw, but felt through and through a picture; she bestowed
upon it all the warmth and richness of a woman’s sympathy; not by any
intellectual effort, but by this strength of heart, and this guiding
light of sympathy, she went straight to the central point, in which the
master had conceived his work. Thus she viewed it, as it were, with his
own eyes, and hence her comprehension of any picture that interested her
was perfect.

This power and depth of appreciation depended partly upon Hilda’s
physical organization, which was at once healthful and exquisitely
delicate; and, connected with this advantage, she had a command of
hand, a nicety and force of touch, which is an endowment separate from
pictorial genius, though indispensable to its exercise.

It has probably happened in many other instances, as it did in Hilda’s
case, that she ceased to aim at original achievement in consequence of
the very gifts which so exquisitely fitted her to profit by familiarity
with the works of the mighty old masters. Reverencing these wonderful
men so deeply, she was too grateful for all they bestowed upon her,
too loyal, too humble, in their awful presence, to think of enrolling
herself in their society. Beholding the miracles of beauty which they
had achieved, the world seemed already rich enough in original designs,
and nothing more was so desirable as to diffuse those self-same beauties
more widely among mankind. All the youthful hopes and ambitions, the
fanciful ideas which she had brought from home, of great pictures to be
conceived in her feminine mind, were flung aside, and, so far as those
most intimate with her could discern, relinquished without a sigh. All
that she would henceforth attempt and that most reverently, not to say
religiously was to catch and reflect some of the glory which had been
shed upon canvas from the immortal pencils of old.

So Hilda became a copyist: in the Pinacotheca of the Vatican, in the
galleries of the Pam-fili-Doria palace, the Borghese, the Corsini, the
Sciarra, her easel was set up before many a famous picture by Guido,
Domenichino, Raphael, and the devout painters of earlier schools than
these. Other artists and visitors from foreign lands beheld the slender,
girlish figure in front of some world-known work, absorbed, unconscious
of everything around her, seeming to live only in what she sought to do.
They smiled, no doubt, at the audacity which led her to dream of
copying those mighty achievements. But, if they paused to look over her
shoulder, and had sensibility enough to understand what was before their
eyes, they soon felt inclined to believe that the spirits of the old
masters were hovering over Hilda, and guiding her delicate white hand.
In truth, from whatever realm of bliss and many colored beauty those
spirits might descend, it would have been no unworthy errand to help so
gentle and pure a worshipper of their genius in giving the last divine
touch to her repetitions of their works.

Her copies were indeed marvellous. Accuracy was not the phrase for them;
a Chinese copy is accurate. Hilda’s had that evanescent and ethereal
life--that flitting fragrance, as it were, of the originals--which it
is as difficult to catch and retain as it would be for a sculptor to
get the very movement and varying color of a living man into his marble
bust. Only by watching the efforts of the most skilful copyists--men who
spend a lifetime, as some of them do, in multiplying copies of a
single picture--and observing how invariably they leave out just the
indefinable charm that involves the last, inestimable value, can we
understand the difficulties of the task which they undertake.

It was not Hilda’s general practice to attempt reproducing the whole of
a great picture, but to select some high, noble, and delicate portion
of it, in which the spirit and essence of the picture culminated: the
Virgin’s celestial sorrow, for example, or a hovering angel, imbued
with immortal light, or a saint with the glow of heaven in his dying
face,--and these would be rendered with her whole soul. If a picture had
darkened into an indistinct shadow through time and neglect, or had been
injured by cleaning, or retouched by some profane hand, she seemed to
possess the faculty of seeing it in its pristine glory. The copy would
come from her hands with what the beholder felt must be the light which
the old master had left upon the original in bestowing his final and
most ethereal touch. In some instances even (at least, so those believed
who best appreciated Hilda’s power and sensibility) she had been enabled
to execute what the great master had conceived in his imagination, but
had not so perfectly succeeded in putting upon canvas; a result surely
not impossible when such depth of sympathy as she possessed was assisted
by the delicate skill and accuracy of her slender hand. In such cases
the girl was but a finer instrument, a more exquisitely effective piece
of mechanism, by the help of which the spirit of some great departed
painter now first achieved his ideal, centuries after his own earthly
hand, that other tool, had turned to dust.

Not to describe her as too much a wonder, however, Hilda, or the Dove,
as her well-wishers half laughingly delighted to call her, had been
pronounced by good judges incomparably the best copyist in Rome. After
minute examination of her works, the most skilful artists declared that
she had been led to her results by following precisely the same process
step by step through which the original painter had trodden to the
development of his idea. Other copyists--if such they are worthy to be
called--attempt only a superficial imitation. Copies of the old masters
in this sense are produced by thousands; there are artists, as we have
said, who spend their lives in painting the works, or perhaps one single
work, of one illustrious painter over and over again: thus they
convert themselves into Guido machines, or Raphaelic machines. Their
performances, it is true, are often wonderfully deceptive to a careless
eye; but working entirely from the outside, and seeking only to
reproduce the surface, these men are sure to leave out that indefinable
nothing, that inestimable something, that constitutes the life and
soul through which the picture gets its immortality. Hilda was no
such machine as this; she wrought religiously, and therefore wrought a
miracle.

It strikes us that there is something far higher and nobler in all this,
in her thus sacrificing herself to the devout recognition of the highest
excellence in art, than there would have been in cultivating her not
inconsiderable share of talent for the production of works from her own
ideas. She might have set up for herself, and won no ignoble name; she
might have helped to fill the already crowded and cumbered world with
pictures, not destitute of merit, but falling short, if by ever so
little, of the best that has been done; she might thus have gratified
some tastes that were incapable of appreciating Raphael. But this could
be done only by lowering the standard of art to the comprehension of
the spectator. She chose the better and loftier and more unselfish
part, laying her individual hopes, her fame, her prospects of enduring
remembrance, at the feet of those great departed ones whom she so loved
and venerated; and therefore the world was the richer for this feeble
girl.

Since the beauty and glory of a great picture are confined within
itself, she won out that glory by patient faith and self-devotion,
and multiplied it for mankind. From the dark, chill corner of a
gallery,--from some curtained chapel in a church, where the light came
seldom and aslant,--from the prince’s carefully guarded cabinet, where
not one eye in thousands was permitted to behold it, she brought the
wondrous picture into daylight, and gave all its magic splendor for the
enjoyment of the world. Hilda’s faculty of genuine admiration is one of
the rarest to be found in human nature; and let us try to recompense her
in kind by admiring her generous self-surrender, and her brave, humble
magnanimity in choosing to be the handmaid of those old magicians,
instead of a minor enchantress within a circle of her own.

The handmaid of Raphael, whom she loved with a virgin’s love! Would it
have been worth Hilda’s while to relinquish this office for the sake of
giving the world a picture or two which it would call original; pretty
fancies of snow and moonlight; the counterpart in picture of so many
feminine achievements in literature!




CHAPTER VII


BEATRICE


Miriam was glad to find the Dove in her turret-home; for being endowed
with an infinite activity, and taking exquisite delight in the sweet
labor of which her life was full, it was Hilda’s practice to flee abroad
betimes, and haunt the galleries till dusk. Happy were those (but they
were very few) whom she ever chose to be the companions of her day; they
saw the art treasures of Rome, under her guidance, as they had never
seen them before. Not that Hilda could dissertate, or talk learnedly
about pictures; she would probably have been puzzled by the technical
terms of her own art. Not that she had much to say about what she most
profoundly admired; but even her silent sympathy was so powerful that
it drew your own along with it, endowing you with a second-sight that
enabled you to see excellences with almost the depth and delicacy of her
own perceptions.

All the Anglo-Saxon denizens of Rome, by this time, knew Hilda by sight.
Unconsciously, the poor child had become one of the spectacles of the
Eternal City, and was often pointed out to strangers, sitting at her
easel among the wild-bearded young men, the white-haired old ones, and
the shabbily dressed, painfully plain women, who make up the throng of
copyists. The old custodes knew her well, and watched over her as their
own child. Sometimes a young artist, instead of going on with a copy
of the picture before which he had placed his easel, would enrich
his canvas with an original portrait of Hilda at her work. A lovelier
subject could not have been selected, nor one which required nicer skill
and insight in doing it anything like justice. She was pretty at all
times, in our native New England style, with her light-brown ringlets,
her delicately tinged, but healthful cheek, her sensitive, intelligent,
yet most feminine and kindly face. But, every few moments, this pretty
and girlish face grew beautiful and striking, as some inward thought and
feeling brightened, rose to the surface, and then, as it were, passed
out of sight again; so that, taking into view this constantly recurring
change, it really seemed as if Hilda were only visible by the sunshine
of her soul.

In other respects, she was a good subject for a portrait, being
distinguished by a gentle picturesqueness, which was perhaps
unconsciously bestowed by some minute peculiarity of dress, such as
artists seldom fail to assume. The effect was to make her appear like an
inhabitant of pictureland, a partly ideal creature, not to be handled,
nor even approached too closely. In her feminine self, Hilda was
natural, and of pleasant deportment, endowed with a mild cheerfulness of
temper, not overflowing with animal spirits, but never long despondent.
There was a certain simplicity that made every one her friend, but it
was combined with a subtile attribute of reserve, that insensibly kept
those at a distance who were not suited to her sphere.

Miriam was the dearest friend whom she had ever known. Being a year or
two the elder, of longer acquaintance with Italy, and better fitted to
deal with its crafty and selfish inhabitants, she had helped Hilda to
arrange her way of life, and had encouraged her through those first
weeks, when Rome is so dreary to every newcomer.

“But how lucky that you are at home today,” said Miriam, continuing the
conversation which was begun, many pages back. “I hardly hoped to find
you, though I had a favor to ask,--a commission to put into your charge.
But what picture is this?”

“See!” said Hilda, taking her friend’s hand, and leading her in front of
the easel. “I wanted your opinion of it.”

“If you have really succeeded,” observed Miriam, recognizing the picture
at the first glance, “it will be the greatest miracle you have yet
achieved.”

The picture represented simply a female head; a very youthful, girlish,
perfectly beautiful face, enveloped in white drapery, from beneath which
strayed a lock or two of what seemed a rich, though hidden luxuriance
of auburn hair. The eyes were large and brown, and met those of the
spectator, but evidently with a strange, ineffectual effort to escape.
There was a little redness about the eyes, very slightly indicated, so
that you would question whether or no the girl had been weeping. The
whole face was quiet; there was no distortion or disturbance of any
single feature; nor was it easy to see why the expression was not
cheerful, or why a single touch of the artist’s pencil should not
brighten it into joyousness. But, in fact, it was the very saddest
picture ever painted or conceived; it involved an unfathomable depth of
sorrow, the sense of which came to the observer by a sort of intuition.
It was a sorrow that removed this beautiful girl out of the sphere
of humanity, and set her in a far-off region, the remoteness of
which--while yet her face is so close before us--makes us shiver as at a
spectre.

“Yes, Hilda,” said her friend, after closely examining the picture,
“you have done nothing else so wonderful as this. But by what unheard-of
solicitations or secret interest have you obtained leave to copy Guido’s
Beatrice Cenci? It is an unexampled favor; and the impossibility
of getting a genuine copy has filled the Roman picture shops with
Beatrices, gay, grievous, or coquettish, but never a true one among
them.”

“There has been one exquisite copy, I have heard,” said Hilda, “by
an artist capable of appreciating the spirit of the picture. It was
Thompson, who brought it away piecemeal, being forbidden (like the
rest of us) to set up his easel before it. As for me, I knew the Prince
Barberini would be deaf to all entreaties; so I had no resource but
to sit down before the picture, day after day, and let it sink into my
heart. I do believe it is now photographed there. It is a sad face to
keep so close to one’s heart; only what is so very beautiful can never
be quite a pain. Well; after studying it in this way, I know not how
many times, I came home, and have done my best to transfer the image to
canvas.”

“Here it is, then,” said Miriam, contemplating Hilda’s work with great
interest and delight, mixed with the painful sympathy that the picture
excited. “Everywhere we see oil-paintings, crayon sketches, cameos,
engravings, lithographs, pretending to be Beatrice, and representing the
poor girl with blubbered eyes, a leer of coquetry, a merry look as if
she were dancing, a piteous look as if she were beaten, and twenty other
modes of fantastic mistake. But here is Guido’s very Beatrice; she that
slept in the dungeon, and awoke, betimes, to ascend the scaffold, And
now that you have done it, Hilda, can you interpret what the feeling
is, that gives this picture such a mysterious force? For my part, though
deeply sensible of its influence, I cannot seize it.”

“Nor can I, in words,” replied her friend. “But while I was painting
her, I felt all the time as if she were trying to escape from my gaze.
She knows that her sorrow is so strange and so immense, that she ought
to be solitary forever, both for the world’s sake and her own; and this
is the reason we feel such a distance between Beatrice and ourselves,
even when our eyes meet hers. It is infinitely heart-breaking to meet
her glance, and to feel that nothing can be done to help or comfort her;
neither does she ask help or comfort, knowing the hopelessness of her
case better than we do. She is a fallen angel,--fallen, and yet sinless;
and it is only this depth of sorrow, with its weight and darkness, that
keeps her down upon earth, and brings her within our view even while it
sets her beyond our reach.”

“You deem her sinless?” asked Miriam; “that is not so plain to me. If
I can pretend to see at all into that dim region, whence she gazes so
strangely and sadly at us, Beatrice’s own conscience does not acquit her
of something evil, and never to be forgiven!”

“Sorrow so black as hers oppresses her very nearly as sin would,” said
Hilda.

“Then,” inquired Miriam, “do you think that there was no sin in the deed
for which she suffered?”

“Ah!” replied Hilda, shuddering, “I really had quite forgotten
Beatrice’s history, and was thinking of her only as the picture seems
to reveal her character. Yes, yes; it was terrible guilt, an inexpiable
crime, and she feels it to be so. Therefore it is that the forlorn
creature so longs to elude our eyes, and forever vanish away into
nothingness! Her doom is just!”

“O Hilda, your innocence is like a sharp steel sword!” exclaimed her
friend. “Your judgments are often terribly severe, though you seem all
made up of gentleness and mercy. Beatrice’s sin may not have been so
great: perhaps it was no sin at all, but the best virtue possible in the
circumstances. If she viewed it as a sin, it may have been because her
nature was too feeble for the fate imposed upon her. Ah!” continued
Miriam passionately, “if I could only get within her consciousness!--if
I could but clasp Beatrice Cenci’s ghost, and draw it into myself! I
would give my life to know whether she thought herself innocent, or the
one great criminal since time began.”

As Miriam gave utterance to these words, Hilda looked from the picture
into her face, and was startled to observe that her friend’s expression
had become almost exactly that of the portrait; as if her passionate
wish and struggle to penetrate poor Beatrice’s mystery had been
successful.

“O, for Heaven’s sake, Miriam, do not look so!” she cried. “What an
actress you are! And I never guessed it before. Ah! now you are yourself
again!” she added, kissing her. “Leave Beatrice to me in future.”

“Cover up your magical picture, then,” replied her friend, “else I
never can look away from it. It is strange, dear Hilda, how an innocent,
delicate, white soul like yours has been able to seize the subtle
mystery of this portrait; as you surely must, in order to reproduce it
so perfectly. Well; we will not talk of it any more. Do you know, I
have come to you this morning on a small matter of business. Will you
undertake it for me?”

“O, certainly,” said Hilda, laughing; “if you choose to trust me with
business.”

“Nay, it is not a matter of any difficulty,” answered Miriam; “merely to
take charge of this packet, and keep it for me awhile.”

“But why not keep it yourself?” asked Hilda.

“Partly because it will be safer in your charge,” said her friend. “I
am a careless sort of person in ordinary things; while you, for all you
dwell so high above the world, have certain little housewifely ways of
accuracy and order. The packet is of some slight importance; and yet, it
may be, I shall not ask you for it again. In a week or two, you know,
I am leaving Rome. You, setting at defiance the malarial fever, mean to
stay here and haunt your beloved galleries through the summer. Now, four
months hence, unless you hear more from me, I would have you deliver the
packet according to its address.”

Hilda read the direction; it was to Signore Luca Barboni, at the Plazzo
Cenci, third piano.

“I will deliver it with my own hand,” said she, “precisely four months
from to-day, unless you bid me to the contrary. Perhaps I shall meet the
ghost of Beatrice in that grim old palace of her forefathers.”

“In that case,” rejoined Miriam, “do not fail to speak to her, and
try to win her confidence. Poor thing! she would be all the better for
pouring her heart out freely, and would be glad to do it, if she were
sure of sympathy. It irks my brain and heart to think of her, all shut
up within herself.” She withdrew the cloth that Hilda had drawn over the
picture, and took another long look at it. “Poor sister Beatrice! for
she was still a woman, Hilda, still a sister, be her sin or sorrow what
they might. How well you have done it, Hilda! I knot not whether Guido
will thank you, or be jealous of your rivalship.”

“Jealous, indeed!” exclaimed Hilda. “If Guido had not wrought through
me, my pains would have been thrown away.”

“After all,” resumed Miriam, “if a woman had painted the original
picture, there might have been something in it which we miss now. I
have a great mind to undertake a copy myself; and try to give it what
it lacks. Well; goodby. But, stay! I am going for a little airing to
the grounds of the Villa Borghese this afternoon. You will think it very
foolish, but I always feel the safer in your company, Hilda, slender
little maiden as you are. Will you come?”

“Ah, not to-day, dearest Miriam,” she replied; “I have set my heart on
giving another touch or two to this picture, and shall not stir abroad
till nearly sunset.”

“Farewell, then,” said her visitor. “I leave you in your dove-cote. What
a sweet, strange life you lead here; conversing with the souls of the
old masters, feeding and fondling your sister doves, and trimming the
Virgin’s lamp! Hilda, do you ever pray to the Virgin while you tend her
shrine?”

“Sometimes I have been moved to do so,” replied the Dove, blushing,
and lowering her eyes; “she was a woman once. Do you think it would be
wrong?”

“Nay, that is for you to judge,” said Miriam; “but when you pray next,
dear friend, remember me!”

She went down the long descent of the lower staircase, and just as she
reached the street the flock of doves again took their hurried flight
from the pavement to the topmost window. She threw her eyes upward
and beheld them hovering about Hilda’s head; for, after her friend’s
departure, the girl had been more impressed than before by something
very sad and troubled in her manner. She was, therefore, leaning forth
from her airy abode, and flinging down a kind, maidenly kiss, and a
gesture of farewell, in the hope that these might alight upon Miriam’s
heart, and comfort its unknown sorrow a little. Kenyon the sculptor, who
chanced to be passing the head of the street, took note of that ethereal
kiss, and wished that he could have caught it in the air and got Hilda’s
leave to keep it.




CHAPTER VIII


THE SUBURBAN VILLA


Donatello, while it was still a doubtful question betwixt afternoon and
morning, set forth to keep the appointment which Miriam had carelessly
tendered him in the grounds of the Villa Borghese. The entrance to these
grounds (as all my readers know, for everybody nowadays has been in
Rome) is just outside of the Porta del Popolo. Passing beneath that not
very impressive specimen of Michael Angelo’s architecture, a minute’s
walk will transport the visitor from the small, uneasy, lava stones
of the Roman pavement into broad, gravelled carriage-drives, whence
a little farther stroll brings him to the soft turf of a beautiful
seclusion. A seclusion, but seldom a solitude; for priest, noble, and
populace, stranger and native, all who breathe Roman air, find free
admission, and come hither to taste the languid enjoyment of the
day-dream that they call life.

But Donatello’s enjoyment was of a livelier kind. He soon began to draw
long and delightful breaths among those shadowy walks. Judging by the
pleasure which the sylvan character of the scene excited in him, it
might be no merely fanciful theory to set him down as the kinsman, not
far remote, of that wild, sweet, playful, rustic creature, to whose
marble image he bore so striking a resemblance. How mirthful a discovery
would it be (and yet with a touch of pathos in it), if the breeze which
sported fondly with his clustering locks were to waft them suddenly
aside, and show a pair of leaf-shaped, furry ears! What an honest strain
of wildness would it indicate! and into what regions of rich mystery
would it extend Donatello’s sympathies, to be thus linked (and by no
monstrous chain) with what we call the inferior trioes of being, whose
simplicity, mingled with his human intelligence, might partly restore
what man has lost of the divine!

The scenery amid which the youth now strayed was such as arrays itself
in the imagination when we read the beautiful old myths, and fancy a
brighter sky, a softer turf, a more picturesque arrangement of venerable
trees, than we find in the rude and untrained landscapes of the Western
world. The ilex-trees, so ancient and time-honored were they, seemed to
have lived for ages undisturbed, and to feel no dread of profanation by
the axe any more than overthrow by the thunder-stroke. It had already
passed out of their dreamy old memories that only a few years ago they
were grievously imperilled by the Gaul’s last assault upon the walls of
Rome. As if confident in the long peace of their lifetime, they assumed
attitudes of indolent repose. They leaned over the green turf in
ponderous grace, throwing abroad their great branches without danger
of interfering with other trees, though other majestic trees grew near
enough for dignified society, but too distant for constraint. Never
was there a more venerable quietude than that which slept among their
sheltering boughs; never a sweeter sunshine than that now gladdening
the gentle gloom which these leafy patriarchs strove to diffuse over the
swelling and subsiding lawns.

In other portions of the grounds the stone-pines lifted their dense
clump of branches upon a slender length of stem, so high that they
looked like green islands in the air, flinging down a shadow upon the
turf so far off that you hardly knew which tree had made it. Again,
there were avenues of cypress, resembling dark flames of huge funeral
candles, which spread dusk and twilight round about them instead of
cheerful radiance. The more open spots were all abloom, even so early in
the season, with anemones of wondrous size, both white and rose-colored,
and violets that betrayed themselves by their rich fragrance, even if
their blue eyes failed to meet your own. Daisies, too, were abundant,
but larger than the modest little English flower, and therefore of small
account.

These wooded and flowery lawns are more beautiful than the finest
of English park scenery, more touching, more impressive, through the
neglect that leaves Nature so much to her own ways and methods. Since
man seldom interferes with her, she sets to work in her quiet way
and makes herself at home. There is enough of human care, it is true,
bestowed, long ago and still bestowed, to prevent wildness from growing
into deformity; and the result is an ideal landscape, a woodland scene
that seems to have been projected out of the poet’s mind. If the ancient
Faun were other than a mere creation of old poetry, and could have
reappeared anywhere, it must have been in such a scene as this.

In the openings of the wood there are fountains plashing into marble
basins, the depths of which are shaggy with water-weeds; or they tumble
like natural cascades from rock to rock, sending their murmur afar, to
make the quiet and silence more appreciable. Scattered here and there
with careless artifice, stand old altars bearing Roman inscriptions.
Statues, gray with the long corrosion of even that soft atmosphere, half
hide and half reveal themselves, high on pedestals, or perhaps fallen
and broken on the turf. Terminal figures, columns of marble or granite
porticos, arches, are seen in the vistas of the wood-paths, either
veritable relics of antiquity, or with so exquisite a touch of artful
ruin on them that they are better than if really antique. At all events,
grass grows on the tops of the shattered pillars, and weeds and flowers
root themselves in the chinks of the massive arches and fronts of
temples, and clamber at large over their pediments, as if this were the
thousandth summer since their winged seeds alighted there.

What a strange idea--what a needless labor--to construct artificial
ruins in Rome, the native soil of ruin! But even these sportive
imitations, wrought by man in emulation of what time has done to temples
and palaces, are perhaps centuries old, and, beginning as illusions,
have grown to be venerable in sober earnest. The result of all is a
scene, pensive, lovely, dreamlike, enjoyable and sad, such as is to
be found nowhere save in these princely villa-residences in the
neighborhood of Rome; a scene that must have required generations and
ages, during which growth, decay, and man’s intelligence wrought kindly
together, to render it so gently wild as we behold it now.

The final charm is bestowed by the malaria. There is a piercing,
thrilling, delicious kind of regret in the idea of so much beauty thrown
away, or only enjoyable at its half-development, in winter and early
spring, and never to be dwelt amongst, as the home scenery of any human
being. For if you come hither in summer, and stray through these glades
in the golden sunset, fever walks arm in arm with you, and death awaits
you at the end of the dim vista. Thus the scene is like Eden in its
loveliness; like Eden, too, in the fatal spell that removes it beyond
the scope of man’s actual possessions. But Donatello felt nothing of
this dream-like melancholy that haunts the spot. As he passed among the
sunny shadows, his spirit seemed to acquire new elasticity. The flicker
of the sunshine, the sparkle of the fountain’s gush, the dance of the
leaf upon the bough, the woodland fragrance, the green freshness,
the old sylvan peace and freedom, were all intermingled in those long
breaths which he drew.

The ancient dust, the mouldiness of Rome, the dead atmosphere in which
he had wasted so many months, the hard pavements, the smell of ruin and
decaying generations, the chill palaces, the convent bells, the heavy
incense of altars, the life that he had led in those dark, narrow
streets, among priests, soldiers, nobles, artists, and women,--all the
sense of these things rose from the young man’s consciousness like a
cloud which had darkened over him without his knowing how densely.

He drank in the natural influences of the scene, and was intoxicated as
by an exhilarating wine. He ran races with himself along the gleam and
shadow of the wood-paths. He leapt up to catch the overhanging bough of
an ilex, and swinging himself by it alighted far onward, as if he had
flown thither through the air. In a sudden rapture he embraced the
trunk of a sturdy tree, and seemed to imagine it a creature worthy of
affection and capable of a tender response; he clasped it closely in his
arms, as a Faun might have clasped the warm feminine grace of the nymph,
whom antiquity supposed to dwell within that rough, encircling rind.
Then, in order to bring himself closer to the genial earth, with which
his kindred instincts linked him so strongly, he threw himself at full
length on the turf, and pressed down his lips, kissing the violets and
daisies, which kissed him back again, though shyly, in their maiden
fashion.

While he lay there, it was pleasant to see how the green and blue
lizards, who had beta basking on some rock or on a fallen pillar that
absorbed the warmth of the sun, scrupled not to scramble over him with
their small feet; and how the birds alighted on the nearest twigs and
sang their little roundelays unbroken by any chirrup of alarm; they
recognized him, it may be, as something akin to themselves, or else they
fancied that he was rooted and grew there; for these wild pets of nature
dreaded him no more in his buoyant life than if a mound of soil and
grass and flowers had long since covered his dead body, converting it
back to the sympathies from which human existence had estranged it.

All of us, after a long abode in cities, have felt the blood gush more
joyously through our veins with the first breath of rural air; few could
feel it so much as Donatello, a creature of simple elements, bred in
the sweet sylvan life of Tuscany, and for months back dwelling amid the
mouldy gloom and dim splendor of old Rome. Nature has been shut out for
numberless centuries from those stony-hearted streets, to which he had
latterly grown accustomed; there is no trace of her, except for what
blades of grass spring out of the pavements of the less trodden piazzas,
or what weeds cluster and tuft themselves on the cornices of ruins.
Therefore his joy was like that of a child that had gone astray from
home, and finds him suddenly in his mother’s arms again.

At last, deeming it full time for Miriam to keep her tryst, he climbed
to the tiptop of the tallest tree, and thence looked about him, swaying
to and fro in the gentle breeze, which was like the respiration of that
great leafy, living thing. Donatello saw beneath him the whole circuit
of the enchanted ground; the statues and columns pointing upward from
among the shrubbery, the fountains flashing in the sunlight, the paths
winding hither and thither, and continually finding out some nook of new
and ancient pleasantness. He saw the villa, too, with its marble front
incrusted all over with basreliefs, and statues in its many niches. It
was as beautiful as a fairy palace, and seemed an abode in which the
lord and lady of this fair domain might fitly dwell, and come forth each
morning to enjoy as sweet a life as their happiest dreams of the past
night could have depicted. All this he saw, but his first glance had
taken in too wide a sweep, and it was not till his eyes fell almost
directly beneath him, that Donatello beheld Miriam just turning into the
path that led across the roots of his very tree.

He descended among the foliage, waiting for her to come close to the
trunk, and then suddenly dropped from an impending bough, and alighted
at her side. It was as if the swaying of the branches had let a ray
of sunlight through. The same ray likewise glimmered among the gloomy
meditations that encompassed Miriam, and lit up the pale, dark beauty of
her face, while it responded pleasantly to Donatello’s glance.

“I hardly know,” said she, smiling, “whether you have sprouted out of
the earth, or fallen from the clouds. In either case you are welcome.”

And they walked onward together.




CHAPTER IX


THE FAUN AND NYMPH


Miriam’s sadder mood, it might be, had at first an effect on Donatello’s
spirits. It checked the joyous ebullition into which they would
otherwise have effervesced when he found himself in her society, not, as
heretofore, in the old gloom of Rome, but under that bright soft sky and
in those Arcadian woods. He was silent for a while; it being, indeed,
seldom Donatello’s impulse to express himself copiously in words. His
usual modes of demonstration were by the natural language of gesture,
the instinctive movement of his agile frame, and the unconscious play
of his features, which, within a limited range of thought and emotion,
would speak volumes in a moment.

By and by, his own mood seemed to brighten Miriam’s, and was reflected
back upon himself. He began inevitably, as it were, to dance along
the wood-path; flinging himself into attitudes of strange comic grace.
Often, too, he ran a little way in advance of his companion, and then
stood to watch her as she approached along the shadowy and sun-fleckered
path. With every step she took, he expressed his joy at her nearer
and nearer presence by what might be thought an extravagance of
gesticulation, but which doubtless was the language of the natural man,
though laid aside and forgotten by other men, now that words have been
feebly substituted in the place of signs and symbols. He gave Miriam the
idea of a being not precisely man, nor yet a child, but, in a high and
beautiful sense, an animal, a creature in a state of development less
than what mankind has attained, yet the more perfect within itself
for that very deficiency. This idea filled her mobile imagination with
agreeable fantasies, which, after smiling at them herself, she tried to
convey to the young man.

“What are you, my friend?” she exclaimed, always keeping in mind his
singular resemblance to the Faun of the Capitol. “If you are, in good
truth, that wild and pleasant creature whose face you wear, pray make me
known to your kindred. They will be found hereabouts, if anywhere. Knock
at the rough rind of this ilex-tree, and summon forth the Dryad! Ask the
water-nymph to rise dripping from yonder fountain, and exchange a moist
pressure of the hand with me! Do not fear that I shall shrink; even if
one of your rough cousins, a hairy Satyr, should come capering on his
goat-legs out of the haunts of far antiquity, and propose to dance with
me among these lawns! And will not Bacchus,--with whom you consorted so
familiarly of old, and who loved you so well,--will he not meet us here,
and squeeze rich grapes into his cup for you and me?”

Donatello smiled; he laughed heartily, indeed, in sympathy with the
mirth that gleamed out of Miriam’s deep, dark eyes. But he did not seem
quite to understand her mirthful talk, nor to be disposed to explain
what kind of creature he was, or to inquire with what divine or poetic
kindred his companion feigned to link him. He appeared only to know that
Miriam was beautiful, and that she smiled graciously upon him; that
the present moment was very sweet, and himself most happy, with the
sunshine, the sylvan scenery, and woman’s kindly charm, which it
enclosed within its small circumference. It was delightful to see the
trust which he reposed in Miriam, and his pure joy in her propinquity;
he asked nothing, sought nothing, save to be near the beloved object,
and brimmed over with ecstasy at that simple boon. A creature of the
happy tribes below us sometimes shows the capacity of this enjoyment; a
man, seldom or never.

“Donatello,” said Miriam, looking at him thoughtfully, but amused, yet
not without a shade of sorrow, “you seem very happy; what makes you so?”

“Because I love you!” answered Donatello.

He made this momentous confession as if it were the most natural
thing in the world; and on her part,--such was the contagion of his
simplicity,--Miriam heard it without anger or disturbance, though with
no responding emotion. It was as if they had strayed across the limits
of Arcadia; and come under a civil polity where young men might avow
their passion with as little restraint as a bird pipes its note to a
similar purpose.

“Why should you love me, foolish boy?” said she. “We have no points of
sympathy at all. There are not two creatures more unlike, in this wide
world, than you and I!”

“You are yourself, and I am Donatello,” replied he. “Therefore I love
you! There needs no other reason.”

Certainly, there was no better or more explicable reason. It might
have been imagined that Donatello’s unsophisticated heart would be more
readily attracted to a feminine nature of clear simplicity like his own,
than to one already turbid with grief or wrong, as Miriam’s seemed to
be. Perhaps, On the other hand, his character needed the dark element,
which it found in her. The force and energy of will, that sometimes
flashed through her eyes, may have taken him captive; or, not
improbably, the varying lights and shadows of her temper, now so
mirthful, and anon so sad with mysterious gloom, had bewitched the
youth. Analyze the matter as we may, the reason assigned by Donatello
himself was as satisfactory as we are likely to attain.

Miriam could not think seriously of the avowal that had passed. He held
out his love so freely, in his open palm, that she felt it could be
nothing but a toy, which she might play with for an instant, and give
back again. And yet Donatello’s heart was so fresh a fountain, that,
had Miriam been more world-worn than she was, she might have found
it exquisite to slake her thirst with the feelings that welled up and
brimmed over from it. She was far, very far, from the dusty mediaeval
epoch, when some women have a taste for such refreshment. Even for
her, however, there was an inexpressible charm in the simplicity that
prompted Donatello’s words and deeds; though, unless she caught them
in precisely the true light, they seemed but folly, the offspring of
a maimed or imperfectly developed intellect. Alternately, she almost
admired, or wholly scorned him, and knew not which estimate resulted
from the deeper appreciation. But it could not, she decided for herself,
be other than an innocent pastime, if they two--sure to be separated by
their different paths in life, to-morrow--were to gather up some of the
little pleasures that chanced to grow about their feet, like the violets
and wood-anemones, to-day.

Yet an impulse of rectitude impelled Miriam to give him what she still
held to be a needless warning against an imaginary peril.

“If you were wiser, Donatello, you would think me a dangerous person,”
 said she, “If you follow my footsteps, they will lead you to no good.
You ought to be afraid of me.”

“I would as soon think of fearing the air we breathe,” he replied.

“And well you may, for it is full of malaria,” said Miriam; she went on,
hinting at an intangible confession, such as persons with overburdened
hearts often make to children or dumb animals, or to holes in the earth,
where they think their secrets may be at once revealed and buried.
“Those who come too near me are in danger of great mischiefs, I do
assure you. Take warning, therefore! It is a sad fatality that has
brought you from your home among the Apennines,--some rusty old castle,
I suppose, with a village at its foot, and an Arcadian environment of
vineyards, fig-trees, and olive orchards,--a sad mischance, I say, that
has transported you to my side. You have had a happy life hitherto, have
you not, Donatello?”

“O, yes,” answered the young man; and, though not of a retrospective
turn, he made the best effort he could to send his mind back into the
past. “I remember thinking it happiness to dance with the contadinas at
a village feast; to taste the new, sweet wine at vintage-time, and the
old, ripened wine, which our podere is famous for, in the cold winter
evenings; and to devour great, luscious figs, and apricots, peaches,
cherries, and melons. I was often happy in the woods, too, with hounds
and horses, and very happy in watching all sorts, of creatures and birds
that haunt the leafy solitudes. But never half so happy as now!”

“In these delightful groves?” she asked.

“Here, and with you,” answered Donatello. “Just as we are now.”

“What a fulness of content in him! How silly, and how delightful!” said
Miriam to herself. Then addressing him again: “But, Donatello, how long
will this happiness last?”

“How long!” he exclaimed; for it perplexed him even more to think of the
future than to remember the past. “Why should it have any end? How long!
Forever! forever! forever!”

“The child! the simpleton!” said Miriam, with sudden laughter, and
checking it as suddenly. “But is he a simpleton indeed? Here, in those
few natural words, he has expressed that deep sense, that profound
conviction of its own immortality, which genuine love never fails to
bring. He perplexes me,--yes, and bewitches me,--wild, gentle, beautiful
creature that he is! It is like playing with a young greyhound!”

Her eyes filled with tears, at the same time that a smile shone out of
them. Then first she became sensible of a delight and grief at once, in
feeling this zephyr of a new affection, with its untainted freshness,
blow over her weary, stifled heart, which had no right to be revived by
it. The very exquisiteness of the enjoyment made her know that it ought
to be a forbidden one.

“Donatello,” she hastily exclaimed, “for your own sake, leave me! It is
not such a happy thing as you imagine it, to wander in these woods with
me, a girl from another land, burdened with a doom that she tells to
none. I might make you dread me,--perhaps hate me,--if I chose; and I
must choose, if I find you loving me too well!”

“I fear nothing!” said Donatello, looking into her unfathomable eyes
with perfect trust. “I love always!”

“I speak in vain,” thought Miriam within herself.

“Well, then, for this one hour, let me be such as he imagines me.
To-morrow will be time enough to come back to my reality. My reality!
what is it? Is the past so indestructible? the future so immitigable?
Is the dark dream, in which I walk, of such solid, stony substance, that
there can be no escape out of its dungeon? Be it so! There is, at
least, that ethereal quality in my spirit, that it can make me as gay as
Donatello himself,--for this one hour!”

And immediately she brightened up, as if an inward flame, heretofore
stifled, were now permitted to fill her with its happy lustre, glowing
through her cheeks and dancing in her eye-beams.

Donatello, brisk and cheerful as he seemed before, showed a sensibility
to Miriam’s gladdened mood by breaking into still wilder and
ever-varying activity. He frisked around her, bubbling over with joy,
which clothed itself in words that had little individual meaning, and
in snatches of song that seemed as natural as bird notes. Then they both
laughed together, and heard their own laughter returning in the echoes,
and laughed again at the response, so that the ancient and solemn grove
became full of merriment for these two blithe spirits. A bird happening
to sing cheerily, Donatello gave a peculiar call, and the little
feathered creature came fluttering about his head, as if it had known
him through many summers.

“How close he stands to nature!” said Miriam, observing this pleasant
familiarity between her companion and the bird. “He shall make me as
natural as himself for this one hour.”

As they strayed through that sweet wilderness, she felt more and more
the influence of his elastic temperament. Miriam was an impressible
and impulsive creature, as unlike herself, in different moods, as if a
melancholy maiden and a glad one were both bound within the girdle about
her waist, and kept in magic thraldom by the brooch that clasped it.
Naturally, it is true, she was the more inclined to melancholy,
yet fully capable of that high frolic of the spirits which richly
compensates for many gloomy hours; if her soul was apt to lurk in the
darkness of a cavern, she could sport madly in the sunshine before
the cavern’s mouth. Except the freshest mirth of animal spirits, like
Donatello’s, there is no merriment, no wild exhilaration, comparable to
that of melancholy people escaping from the dark region in which it is
their custom to keep themselves imprisoned.

So the shadowy Miriam almost outdid Donatello on his own ground. They
ran races with each other, side by side, with shouts and laughter; they
pelted one another with early flowers, and gathering them up twined
them with green leaves into garlands for both their heads. They played
together like children, or creatures of immortal youth. So much had they
flung aside the sombre habitudes of daily life, that they seemed born
to be sportive forever, and endowed with eternal mirthfulness instead
of any deeper joy. It was a glimpse far backward into Arcadian life, or,
further still, into the Golden Age, before mankind was burdened with
sin and sorrow, and before pleasure had been darkened with those shadows
that bring it into high relief, and make it happiness.

“Hark!” cried Donatello, stopping short, as he was about to bind
Miriam’s fair hands with flowers, and lead her along in triumph, “there
is music somewhere in the grove!”

“It is your kinsman, Pan, most likely,” said Miriam, “playing on his
pipe. Let us go seek him, and make him puff out his rough cheeks and
pipe his merriest air! Come; the strain of music will guide us onward
like a gayly colored thread of silk.”

“Or like a chain of flowers,” responded Donatello, drawing her along by
that which he had twined. “This way!--Come!”




CHAPTER X


THE SYLVAN DANCE


As the music came fresher on their ears, they danced to its cadence,
extemporizing new steps and attitudes. Each varying movement had a grace
which might have been worth putting into marble, for the long delight of
days to come, but vanished with the movement that gave it birth, and was
effaced from memory by another. In Miriam’s motion, freely as she flung
herself into the frolic of the hour, there was still an artful beauty;
in Donatello’s, there was a charm of indescribable grotesqueness hand
in hand with grace; sweet, bewitching, most provocative of laughter,
and yet akin to pathos, so deeply did it touch the heart. This was the
ultimate peculiarity, the final touch, distinguishing between the sylvan
creature and the beautiful companion at his side. Setting apart only
this, Miriam resembled a Nymph, as much as Donatello did a Faun.

There were flitting moments, indeed, when she played the sylvan
character as perfectly as he. Catching glimpses of her, then, you would
have fancied that an oak had sundered its rough bark to let her dance
freely forth, endowed with the same spirit in her human form as that
which rustles in the leaves; or that she had emerged through the
pebbly bottom of a fountain, a water-nymph, to play and sparkle in
the sunshine, flinging a quivering light around her, and suddenly
disappearing in a shower of rainbow drops.

As the fountain sometimes subsides into its basin, so in Miriam there
were symptoms that the frolic of her spirits would at last tire itself
out.

“Ah! Donatello,” cried she, laughing, as she stopped to take a breath;
“you have an unfair advantage over me! I am no true creature of the
woods; while you are a real Faun, I do believe. When your curls shook
just now, methought I had a peep at the pointed ears.”

Donatello snapped his fingers above his head, as fauns and satyrs taught
us first to do, and seemed to radiate jollity out of his whole nimble
person. Nevertheless, there was a kind of dim apprehension in his face,
as if he dreaded that a moment’s pause might break the spell, and snatch
away the sportive companion whom he had waited for through so many
dreary months.

“Dance! dance!” cried he joyously. “If we take breath, we shall be as
we were yesterday. There, now, is the music, just beyond this clump of
trees. Dance, Miriam, dance!”

They had now reached an open, grassy glade (of which there are many in
that artfully constructed wilderness), set round with stone seats,
on which the aged moss had kindly essayed to spread itself instead of
cushions. On one of the stone benches sat the musicians, whose strains
had enticed our wild couple thitherward. They proved to be a vagrant
band, such as Rome, and all Italy, abounds with; comprising a harp,
a flute, and a violin, which, though greatly the worse for wear,
the performers had skill enough to provoke and modulate into tolerable
harmony. It chanced to be a feast-day; and, instead of playing in
the sun-scorched piazzas of the city, or beneath the windows of some
unresponsive palace, they had bethought themselves to try the echoes
of these woods; for, on the festas of the Church, Rome scatters its
merrymakers all abroad, ripe for the dance or any other pastime.

As Miriam and Donatello emerged from among the trees, the musicians
scraped, tinkled, or blew, each according to his various kind of
instrument, more inspiringly than ever. A darkchecked little girl,
with bright black eyes, stood by, shaking a tambourine set round
with tinkling bells, and thumping it on its parchment head. Without
interrupting his brisk, though measured movement, Donatello snatched
away this unmelodious contrivance, and, flourishing it above his head,
produced music of indescribable potency, still dancing with frisky step,
and striking the tambourine, and ringing its little bells, all in one
jovial act.

It might be that there was magic in the sound, or contagion, at least,
in the spirit which had got possession of Miriam and himself, for very
soon a number of festal people were drawn to the spot, and struck
into the dance, singly or in pairs, as if they were all gone mad with
jollity. Among them were some of the plebeian damsels whom we meet
bareheaded in the Roman streets, with silver stilettos thrust through
their glossy hair; the contadinas, too, from the Campagna and the
villages, with their rich and picturesque costumes of scarlet and all
bright hues, such as fairer maidens might not venture to put on. Then
came the modern Roman from Trastevere, perchance, with his old cloak
drawn about him like a toga, which anon, as his active motion heated
him, he flung aside. Three French soldiers capered freely into the
throng, in wide scarlet trousers, their short swords dangling at their
sides; and three German artists in gray flaccid hats and flaunting
beards; and one of the Pope’s Swiss guardsmen in the strange motley garb
which Michael Angelo contrived for them. Two young English tourists (one
of them a lord) took contadine partners and dashed in, as did also a
shaggy man in goat-skin breeches, who looked like rustic Pan in person,
and footed it as merrily as he. Besides the above there was a herdsman
or two from the Campagna, and a few peasants in sky-blue jackets, and
small-clothes tied with ribbons at the knees; haggard and sallow were
these last, poor serfs, having little to eat and nothing but the malaria
to breathe; but still they plucked up a momentary spirit and joined
hands in Donatello’s dance.

Here, as it seemed, had the Golden Age come back again within the
Precincts of this sunny glade, thawing mankind out of their cold
formalities, releasing them from irksome restraint, mingling them
together in such childlike gayety that new flowers (of which the old
bosom of the earth is full) sprang up beneath their footsteps. The sole
exception to the geniality of the moment, as we have understood, was
seen in a countryman of our own, who sneered at the spectacle, and
declined to compromise his dignity by making part of it.

The harper thrummed with rapid fingers; the violin player flashed his
bow back and forth across the strings; the flautist poured his breath in
quick puffs of jollity, while Donatello shook the tambourine above his
head, and led the merry throng with unweariable steps. As they followed
one another in a wild ring of mirth, it seemed the realization of one
of those bas-reliefs where a dance of nymphs, satyrs, or bacchanals
is twined around the circle of an antique vase; or it was like the
sculptured scene on the front and sides of a sarcophagus, where, as
often as any other device, a festive procession mocks the ashes and
white bones that are treasured up within. You might take it for a
marriage pageant; but after a while, if you look at these merry-makers,
following them from end to end of the marble coffin, you doubt whether
their gay movement is leading them to a happy close. A youth has
suddenly fallen in the dance; a chariot is overturned and broken,
flinging the charioteer headlong to the ground; a maiden seems to have
grown faint or weary, and is drooping on the bosom of a friend. Always
some tragic incident is shadowed forth or thrust sidelong into the
spectacle; and when once it has caught your eye you can look no more
at the festal portions of the scene, except with reference to this one
slightly suggested doom and sorrow.

As in its mirth, so in the darker characteristic here alluded to, there
was an analogy between the sculptured scene on the sarcophagus and the
wild dance which we have been describing. In the midst of its madness
and riot Miriam found herself suddenly confronted by a strange figure
that shook its fantastic garments in the air, and pranced before her on
its tiptoes, almost vying with the agility of Donatello himself. It was
the model.

A moment afterwards Donatello was aware that she had retired from the
dance. He hastened towards her, and flung himself on the grass beside
the stone bench on which Miriam was sitting. But a strange distance and
unapproachableness had all at once enveloped her; and though he saw her
within reach of his arm, yet the light of her eyes seemed as far off as
that of a star, nor was there any warmth in the melancholy smile with
which she regarded him.

“Come back!” cried he. “Why should this happy hour end so soon?”

“It must end here, Donatello,” said she, in answer to his words and
outstretched hand; “and such hours, I believe, do not often repeat
themselves in a lifetime. Let me go, my friend; let me vanish from you
quietly among the shadows of these trees. See, the companions of our
pastime are vanishing already!”

Whether it was that the harp-strings were broken, the violin out of
tune, or the flautist out of breath, so it chanced that the music had
ceased, and the dancers come abruptly to a pause. All that motley throng
of rioters was dissolved as suddenly as it had been drawn together. In
Miriam’s remembrance the scene had a character of fantasy. It was as if
a company of satyrs, fauns, and nymphs, with Pan in the midst of them,
had been disporting themselves in these venerable woods only a moment
ago; and now in another moment, because some profane eye had looked at
them too closely, or some intruder had cast a shadow on their mirth,
the sylvan pageant had utterly disappeared. If a few of the merry-makers
lingered among the trees, they had hidden their racy peculiarities under
the garb and aspect of ordinary people, and sheltered themselves in the
weary commonplace of daily life. Just an instant before it was Arcadia
and the Golden Age. The spell being broken, it was now only that old
tract of pleasure ground, close by the people’s gate of Rome,--a
tract where the crimes and calamities of ages, the many battles, blood
recklessly poured out, and deaths of myriads, have corrupted all the
soil, creating an influence that makes the air deadly to human lungs.

“You must leave me,” said Miriam to Donatello more imperatively than
before; “have I not said it? Go; and look not behind you.”

“Miriam,” whispered Donatello, grasping her hand forcibly, “who is it
that stands in the shadow yonder, beckoning you to follow him?”

“Hush; leave me!” repeated Miriam. “Your hour is past; his hour has
come.”

Donatello still gazed in the direction which he had indicated, and
the expression of his face was fearfully changed, being so disordered,
perhaps with terror,--at all events with anger and invincible
repugnance,--that Miriam hardly knew him. His lips were drawn apart so
as to disclose his set teeth, thus giving him a look of animal rage,
which we seldom see except in persons of the simplest and rudest
natures. A shudder seemed to pass through his very bones.

“I hate him!” muttered he.

“Be satisfied; I hate him too!” said Miriam.

She had no thought of making this avowal, but was irresistibly drawn to
it by the sympathy of the dark emotion in her own breast with that so
strongly expressed by Donatello. Two drops of water or of blood do not
more naturally flow into each other than did her hatred into his.

“Shall I clutch him by the throat?” whispered Donatello, with a savage
scowl. “Bid me do so, and we are rid of him forever.”

“In Heaven’s name, no violence!” exclaimed Miriam, affrighted out of the
scornful control which she had hitherto held over her companion, by
the fierceness that he so suddenly developed. “O, have pity on
me, Donatello, if for nothing else, yet because in the midst of my
wretchedness I let myself be your playmate for this one wild
hour! Follow me no farther. Henceforth leave me to my doom. Dear
friend,--kind, simple, loving friend,--make me not more wretched by the
remembrance of having thrown fierce hates or loves into the wellspring
of your happy life!”

“Not follow you!” repeated Donatello, soothed from anger into sorrow,
less by the purport of what she said, than by the melancholy sweetness
of her voice,--“not follow you! What other path have I?”

“We will talk of it once again,” said Miriam still soothingly;
“soon--to-morrow when you will; only leave me now.”




CHAPTER XI


FRAGMENTARY SENTENCES


In the Borghese Grove, so recently uproarious with merriment and music,
there remained only Miriam and her strange follower.

A solitude had suddenly spread itself around them. It perhaps symbolized
a peculiar character in the relation of these two, insulating them, and
building up an insuperable barrier between their life-streams and other
currents, which might seem to flow in close vicinity. For it is one of
the chief earthly incommodities of some species of misfortune, or of a
great crime, that it makes the actor in the one, or the sufferer of
the other, an alien in the world, by interposing a wholly unsympathetic
medium betwixt himself and those whom he yearns to meet.

Owing, it may be, to this moral estrangement,--this chill remoteness of
their position,--there have come to us but a few vague whisperings
of what passed in Miriam’s interview that afternoon with the sinister
personage who had dogged her footsteps ever since the visit to the
catacomb. In weaving these mystic utterances into a continuous scene, we
undertake a task resembling in its perplexity that of gathering up
and piecing together the fragments ora letter which has been torn and
scattered to the winds. Many words of deep significance, many entire
sentences, and those possibly the most important ones, have flown
too far on the winged breeze to be recovered. If we insert our own
conjectural amendments, we perhaps give a purport utterly at variance
with the true one. Yet unless we attempt something in this way,
there must remain an unsightly gap, and a lack of continuousness
and dependence in our narrative; so that it would arrive at certain
inevitable catastrophes without due warning of their imminence.

Of so much we are sure, that there seemed to be a sadly mysterious
fascination in the influence of this ill-omened person over Miriam;
it was such as beasts and reptiles of subtle and evil nature sometimes
exercise upon their victims. Marvellous it was to see the hopelessness
with which being naturally of so courageous a spirit she resigned
herself to the thraldom in which he held her. That iron chain, of which
some of the massive links were round her feminine waist, and the others
in his ruthless hand,--or which, perhaps, bound the pair together by
a bond equally torturing to each,--must have been forged in some such
unhallowed furnace as is only kindled by evil passions, and fed by evil
deeds.

Yet, let us trust, there may have been no crime in Miriam, but only
one of those fatalities which are among the most insoluble riddles
propounded to mortal comprehension; the fatal decree by which every
crime is made to be the agony of many innocent persons, as well as of
the single guilty one.

It was, at any rate, but a feeble and despairing kind of remonstrance
which she had now the energy to oppose against his persecution.

“You follow me too closely,” she said, in low, faltering accents; “you
allow me too scanty room to draw my breath. Do you know what will be the
end of this?” “I know well what must be the end,” he replied.

“Tell me, then,” said Miriam, “that I may compare your foreboding with
my own. Mine is a very dark one.”

“There can be but one result, and that soon,” answered the model. “You
must throw off your present mask and assume another. You must vanish out
of the scene: quit Rome with me, and leave no trace whereby to follow
you. It is in my power, as you well know, to compel your acquiescence in
my bidding. You are aware of the penalty of a refusal.”

“Not that penalty with which you would terrify me,” said Miriam;
“another there may be, but not so grievous.” “What is that other?”
 he inquired. “Death! simply death!” she answered. “Death,” said her
persecutor, “is not so simple and opportune a thing as you imagine. You
are strong and warm with life. Sensitive and irritable as your spirit
is, these many months of trouble, this latter thraldom in which I hold
you, have scarcely made your cheek paler than I saw it in your girlhood.
Miriam,--for I forbear to speak another name, at which these leaves
would shiver above our heads,--Miriam, you cannot die!”

“Might not a dagger find my heart?” said she, for the first time meeting
his eyes. “Would not poison make an end of me? Will not the Tiber drown
me?”

“It might,” he answered; “for I allow that you are mortal. But, Miriam,
believe me, it is not your fate to die while there remains so much to be
sinned and suffered in the world. We have a destiny which we must needs
fulfil together. I, too, have struggled to escape it. I was as anxious
as yourself to break the tie between us,--to bury the past in a
fathomless grave,--to make it impossible that we should ever meet, until
you confront me at the bar of Judgment! You little can imagine what
steps I took to render all this secure; and what was the result?
Our strange interview in the bowels of the earth convinced me of the
futility of my design.”

“Ah, fatal chance!” cried Miriam, covering her face with her hands.

“Yes, your heart trembled with horror when you recognized me,” rejoined
he; “but you did not guess that there was an equal horror in my own!”

“Why would not the weight of earth above our heads have crumbled down
upon us both, forcing us apart, but burying us equally?” cried Miriam,
in a burst of vehement passion. “O, that we could have wandered in those
dismal passages till we both perished, taking opposite paths in the
darkness, so that when we lay down to die, our last breaths might not
mingle!”

“It were vain to wish it,” said the model. “In all that labyrinth of
midnight paths, we should have found one another out to live or die
together. Our fates cross and are entangled. The threads are twisted
into a strong cord, which is dragging us to an evil doom. Could the
knots be severed, we might escape. But neither can your slender fingers
untie these knots, nor my masculine force break them. We must submit!”

“Pray for rescue, as I have,” exclaimed Miriam. “Pray for deliverance
from me, since I am your evil genius, as you mine. Dark as your life has
been, I have known you to pray in times past!”

At these words of Miriam, a tremor and horror appeared to seize upon her
persecutor, insomuch that he shook and grew ashy pale before her eyes.
In this man’s memory there was something that made it awful for him to
think of prayer; nor would any torture be more intolerable than to be
reminded of such divine comfort and succor as await pious souls
merely for the asking; This torment was perhaps the token of a native
temperament deeply susceptible of religious impressions, but which had
been wronged, violated, and debased, until, at length, it was capable
only of terror from the sources that were intended for our purest and
loftiest consolation. He looked so fearfully at her, and with such
intense pain struggling in his eyes, that Miriam felt pity.

And now, all at once, it struck her that he might be mad. It was an idea
that had never before seriously occurred to her mind, although, as soon
as suggested, it fitted marvellously into many circumstances that
lay within her knowledge. But, alas! such was her evil fortune, that,
whether mad or no, his power over her remained the same, and was likely
to be used only the more tyrannously, if exercised by a lunatic.

“I would not give you pain,” she said, soothingly; “your faith allows you
the consolations of penance and absolution. Try what help there may be
in these, and leave me to myself.”

“Do not think it, Miriam,” said he; “we are bound together, and can
never part again.” “Why should it seem so impossible?” she rejoined.
“Think how I had escaped from all the past! I had made for myself a
new sphere, and found new friends, new occupations, new hopes and
enjoyments. My heart, methinks, was almost as unburdened as if there had
been no miserable life behind me. The human spirit does not perish of a
single wound, nor exhaust itself in a single trial of life. Let us
but keep asunder, and all may go well for both.” “We fancied ourselves
forever sundered,” he replied. “Yet we met once, in the bowels of the
earth; and, were we to part now, our fates would fling us together again
in a desert, on a mountain-top, or in whatever spot seemed safest. You
speak in vain, therefore.”

“You mistake your own will for an iron necessity,” said Miriam;
“otherwise, you might have suffered me to glide past you like a ghost,
when we met among those ghosts of ancient days. Even now you might bid
me pass as freely.”

“Never!” said he, with unmitigable will; “your reappearance has
destroyed the work of years. You know the power that I have over you.
Obey my bidding; or, within a short time, it shall be exercised: nor
will I cease to haunt you till the moment comes.”

“Then,” said Miriam more calmly, “I foresee the end, and have already
warned you of it. It will be death!”

“Your own death, Miriam,--or mine?” he asked, looking fixedly at her.

“Do you imagine me a murderess?” said she, shuddering; “you, at least,
have no right to think me so!”

“Yet,” rejoined he, with a glance of dark meaning, “men have said that
this white hand had once a crimson stain.” He took her hand as he spoke,
and held it in his own, in spite of the repugnance, amounting to nothing
short of agony, with which she struggled to regain it. Holding it up
to the fading light (for there was already dimness among the trees),
he appeared to examine it closely, as if to discover the imaginary
blood-stain with which he taunted her. He smiled as he let it go. “It
looks very white,” said he; “but I have known hands as white, which all
the water in the ocean would not have washed clean.”

“It had no stain,” retorted Miriam bitterly, “until you grasped it in
your own.”

The wind has blown away whatever else they may have spoken.

They went together towards the town, and, on their way, continued to
make reference, no doubt, to some strange and dreadful history of their
former life, belonging equally to this dark man and to the fair and
youthful woman whom he persecuted. In their words, or in the breath that
uttered them, there seemed to be an odor of guilt, and a scent of blood.
Yet, how can we imagine that a stain of ensanguined crime should attach
to Miriam! Or how, on the other hand, should spotless innocence be
subjected to a thraldom like that which she endured from the spectre,
whom she herself had evoked out of the darkness! Be this as it might,
Miriam, we have reason to believe, still continued to beseech him,
humbly, passionately, wildly, only to go his way, and leave her free to
follow her own sad path.

Thus they strayed onward through the green wilderness of the Borghese
grounds, and soon came near the city wall, where, had Miriam raised her
eyes, she might have seen Hilda and the sculptor leaning on the parapet.
But she walked in a mist of trouble, and could distinguish little beyond
its limits. As they came within public observation, her persecutor fell
behind, throwing off the imperious manner which he had assumed during
their solitary interview. The Porta del Popolo swarmed with life. The
merry-makers, who had spent the feast-day outside the walls, were now
thronging in; a party of horsemen were entering beneath the arch; a
travelling carriage had been drawn up just within the verge, and was
passing through the villainous ordeal of the papal custom-house. In the
broad piazza, too, there was a motley crowd.

But the stream of Miriam’s trouble kept its way through this flood of
human life, and neither mingled with it nor was turned aside. With a sad
kind of feminine ingenuity, she found a way to kneel before her tyrant
undetected, though in full sight of all the people, still beseeching him
for freedom, and in vain.




CHAPTER XII


A STROLL ON THE PINCIAN


Hilda, after giving the last touches to the picture of Beatrice Cenci,
had flown down from her dove-cote, late in the afternoon, and gone to
the Pincian Hill, in the hope of hearing a strain or two of exhilarating
music. There, as it happened, she met the sculptor, for, to say the
truth, Kenyon had well noted the fair artist’s ordinary way of life,
and was accustomed to shape his own movements so as to bring him often
within her sphere.

The Pincian Hill is the favorite promenade of the Roman aristocracy. At
the present day, however, like most other Roman possessions, it belongs
less to the native inhabitants than to the barbarians from Gaul, Great
Britain, anti beyond the sea, who have established a peaceful usurpation
over whatever is enjoyable or memorable in the Eternal City. These
foreign guests are indeed ungrateful, if they do not breathe a prayer
for Pope Clement, or whatever Holy Father it may have been, who levelled
the summit of the mount so skilfully, and bounded it with the parapet of
the city wall; who laid out those broad walks and drives, and overhung
them with the deepening shade of many kinds of tree; who scattered the
flowers, of all seasons and of every clime, abundantly over those green,
central lawns; who scooped out hollows in fit places, and, setting great
basins of marble in them, caused ever-gushing fountains to fill them to
the brim; who reared up the immemorial obelisk out of the soil that had
long hidden it; who placed pedestals along the borders of the avenues,
and crowned them with busts of that multitude of worthies--statesmen,
heroes, artists, men of letters and of song--whom the whole world claims
as its chief ornaments, though Italy produced them all. In a word, the
Pincian garden is one of the things that reconcile the stranger (since
he fully appreciates the enjoyment, and feels nothing of the cost) to
the rule of an irresponsible dynasty of Holy Fathers, who seem to have
aimed at making life as agreeable an affair as it can well be.

In this pleasant spot, the red-trousered French soldiers are always to
be seen; bearded and grizzled veterans, perhaps with medals of Algiers
or the Crimea on their breasts. To them is assigned the peaceful duty of
seeing that children do not trample on the flower beds, nor any youthful
lover rifle them of their fragrant blossoms to stick in the beloved
one’s hair. Here sits (drooping upon some marble bench, in the
treacherous sunshine) the consumptive girl, whose friends have brought
her, for cure, to a climate that instils poison into its very purest
breath. Here, all day, come nursery-maids, burdened with rosy English
babies, or guiding the footsteps of little travellers from the far
Western world. Here, in the sunny afternoons, roll and rumble all kinds
of equipages, from the cardinal’s old-fashioned and gorgeous purple
carriage to the gay barouche of modern date. Here horsemen gallop on
thoroughbred steeds. Here, in short, all the transitory population of
Rome, the world’s great watering-place, rides, drives, or promenades!
Here are beautiful sunsets; and here, whichever way you turn your eyes,
are scenes as well worth gazing at, both in themselves and for their
historic interest, as any that the sun ever rose and set upon. Here,
too, on certain afternoons of the week, a French military band flings
out rich music over the poor old city, floating her with strains as loud
as those of her own echoless triumphs.

Hilda and the sculptor (by the contrivance of the latter, who loved best
to be alone with his young countrywoman) had wandered beyond the throng
of promenaders, whom they left in a dense cluster around the music. They
strayed, indeed, to the farthest point of the Pincian Hill, and leaned
over the parapet, looking down upon the Muro Torto, a massive fragment
of the oldest Roman wall, which juts over, as if ready to tumble down
by its own weight, yet seems still the most indestructible piece of work
that men’s hands ever piled together. In the blue distance rose Soracte,
and other heights, which have gleamed afar, to our imaginations, but
look scarcely real to our bodily eyes, because, being dreamed about so
much, they have taken the aerial tints which belong only to a dream.
These, nevertheless, are the solid framework of hills that shut in Rome,
and its wide surrounding Campagna,--no land of dreams, but the broadest
page of history, crowded so full with memorable events that one
obliterates another; as if Time had crossed and recrossed his own
records till they grew illegible.

But, not to meddle with history,--with which our narrative is no
otherwise concerned, than that the very dust of Rome is historic, and
inevitably settles on our page and mingles with our ink,--we will return
to our two friends, who were still leaning over the wall. Beneath them
lay the broad sweep of the Borghese grounds, covered with trees, amid
which appeared the white gleam of pillars and statues, and the flash of
an upspringing fountain, all to be overshadowed at a later period of the
year by the thicker growth of foliage.

The advance of vegetation, in this softer climate, is less abrupt than
the inhabitant of the cold North is accustomed to observe. Beginning
earlier,--even in February,--Spring is not compelled to burst into
Summer with such headlong haste; there is time to dwell upon each
opening beauty, and to enjoy the budding leaf, the tender green, the
sweet youth and freshness of the year; it gives us its maiden charm,
before, settling into the married Summer, which, again, does not so soon
sober itself into matronly Autumn. In our own country, the virgin Spring
hastens to its bridal too abruptly. But here, after a month or two of
kindly growth, the leaves of the young trees, which cover that portion
of the Borghese grounds nearest the city wall, were still in their
tender half-development.

In the remoter depths, among the old groves of ilex-trees, Hilda and
Kenyon heard the faint sound of music, laughter, and mingling voices. It
was probably the uproar--spreading even so far as the walls of Rome,
and growing faded and melancholy in its passage--of that wild sylvan
merriment, which we have already attempted to describe. By and by it
ceased--although the two listeners still tried to distinguish it between
the bursts of nearer music from the military band. But there was no
renewal of that distant mirth. Soon afterwards they saw a solitary
figure advancing along one of the paths that lead from the obscurer part
of the ground towards the gateway.

“Look! is it not Donatello?” said Hilda.

“He it is, beyond a doubt,” replied the sculptor. “But how gravely he
walks, and with what long looks behind him! He seems either very weary,
or very sad. I should not hesitate to call it sadness, if Donatello were
a creature capable of the sin and folly of low spirits. In all these
hundred paces, while we have been watching him, he has not made one
of those little caprioles in the air which are characteristic of his
natural gait. I begin to doubt whether he is a veritable Faun.”

“Then,” said Hilda, with perfect simplicity, “you have thought him--and
do think him--one of that strange, wild, happy race of creatures, that
used to laugh and sport in the woods, in the old, old times? So do
I, indeed! But I never quite believed, till now, that fauns existed
anywhere but in poetry.”

The sculptor at first merely smiled. Then, as the idea took further
possession of his mind, he laughed outright, and wished from the bottom
of his heart (being in love with Hilda, though he had never told her
so) that he could have rewarded or punished her for its pretty absurdity
with a kiss.

“O Hilda, what a treasure of sweet faith and pure imagination you hide
under that little straw hat!” cried he, at length. “A Faun! a Faun!
Great Pan is not dead, then, after all! The whole tribe of mythical
creatures yet live in the moonlit seclusion of a young girl’s fancy,
and find it a lovelier abode and play-place, I doubt not, than their
Arcadian haunts of yore. What bliss, if a man of marble, like myself,
could stray thither, too!”

“Why do you laugh so?” asked Hilda, reddening; for she was a little
disturbed at Kenyon’s ridicule, however kindly expressed. “What can I
have said, that you think so very foolish?”

“Well, not foolish, then,” rejoined the sculptor, “but wiser, it may
be, than I can fathom. Really, however, the idea does strike one as
delightfully fresh, when we consider Donatello’s position and external
environment. Why, my dear Hilda, he is a Tuscan born, of an old noble
race in that part of Italy; and he has a moss-grown tower among the
Apennines, where he and his forefathers have dwelt, under their own
vines and fig-trees, from an unknown antiquity. His boyish passion
for Miriam has introduced him familiarly to our little circle; and our
republican and artistic simplicity of intercourse has included this
young Italian, on the same terms as one of ourselves. But, if we
paid due respect to rank and title, we should bend reverentially to
Donatello, and salute him as his Excellency the Count di Monte Beni.”

“That is a droll idea, much droller than his being a Faun!” said
Hilda, laughing in her turn. “This does not quite satisfy me, however,
especially as you yourself recognized and acknowledged his wonderful
resemblance to the statue.”

“Except as regards the pointed ears,” said Kenyon; adding, aside, “and
one other little peculiarity, generally observable in the statues of
fauns.”

“As for his Excellency the Count di Monte Beni’s ears,” replied Hilda,
smiling again at the dignity with which this title invested their
playful friend, “you know we could never see their shape, on account of
his clustering curls. Nay, I remember, he once started back, as shyly as
a wild deer, when Miriam made a pretence of examining them. How do you
explain that?”

“O, I certainly shall not contend against such a weight of evidence,
the fact of his faunship being otherwise so probable,” answered the
sculptor, still hardly retaining his gravity. “Faun or not, Donatello or
the Count di Monte Beni--is a singularly wild creature, and, as I have
remarked on other occasions, though very gentle, does not love to be
touched. Speaking in no harsh sense, there is a great deal of animal
nature in him, as if he had been born in the woods, and had run wild all
his childhood, and were as yet but imperfectly domesticated. Life, even
in our day, is very simple and unsophisticated in some of the shaggy
nooks of the Apennines.”

“It annoys me very much,” said Hilda, “this inclination, which
most people have, to explain away the wonder and the mystery out
of everything. Why could not you allow me--and yourself, too--the
satisfaction of thinking him a Faun?”

“Pray keep your belief, dear Hilda, if it makes you any happier,” said
the sculptor; “and I shall do my best to become a convert. Donatello has
asked me to spend the summer with him, in his ancestral tower, where
I purpose investigating the pedigree of these sylvan counts, his
forefathers; and if their shadows beckon me into dreamland, I shall
willingly follow. By the bye, speaking of Donatello, there is a point on
which I should like to be enlightened.”

“Can I help you, then?” said Hilda, in answer to his look.

“Is there the slightest chance of his winning Miriam’s affections?”
 suggested Kenyon.

“Miriam! she, so accomplished and gifted!” exclaimed Hilda; “and he, a
rude, uncultivated boy! No, no, no!”

“It would seem impossible,” said the sculptor. “But, on the other hand,
a gifted woman flings away her affections so unaccountably, sometimes!
Miriam of late has been very morbid and miserable, as we both know.
Young as she is, the morning light seems already to have faded out of
her life; and now comes Donatello, with natural sunshine enough for
himself and her, and offers her the opportunity of making her heart and
life all new and cheery again. People of high intellectual endowments do
not require similar ones in those they love. They are just the persons
to appreciate the wholesome gush of natural feeling, the honest
affection, the simple joy, the fulness of contentment with what
he loves, which Miriam sees in Donatello. True; she may call him a
simpleton. It is a necessity of the case; for a man loses the capacity
for this kind of affection, in proportion as he cultivates and refines
himself.”

“Dear me!” said Hilda, drawing imperceptibly away from her companion.
“Is this the penalty of refinement? Pardon me; I do not believe it.
It is because you are a sculptor, that you think nothing can be finely
wrought except it be cold and hard, like the marble in which your ideas
take shape. I am a painter, and know that the most delicate beauty may
be softened and warmed throughout.”

“I said a foolish thing, indeed,” answered the sculptor. “It surprises
me, for I might have drawn a wiser knowledge out of my own experience.
It is the surest test of genuine love, that it brings back our early
simplicity to the worldliest of us.”

Thus talking, they loitered slowly along beside the parapet which
borders the level summit of the Pincian with its irregular sweep. At
intervals they looked through the lattice-work of their thoughts at the
varied prospects that lay before and beneath them.

From the terrace where they now stood there is an abrupt descent towards
the Piazza del Popolo; and looking down into its broad space they
beheld the tall palatial edifices, the church domes, and the ornamented
gateway, which grew and were consolidated out of the thought of Michael
Angelo. They saw, too, the red granite obelisk, oldest of things,
even in Rome, which rises in the centre of the piazza, with a fourfold
fountain at its base. All Roman works and ruins (whether of the
empire, the far-off republic, or the still more distant kings) assume a
transient, visionary, and impalpable character when we think that this
indestructible monument supplied one of the recollections which Moses
and the Israelites bore from Egypt into the desert. Perchance, on
beholding the cloudy pillar and the fiery column, they whispered
awestricken to one another, “In its shape it is like that old obelisk
which we and our fathers have so often seen on the borders of the Nile.”
 And now that very obelisk, with hardly a trace of decay upon it, is the
first thing that the modern traveller sees after entering the Flaminian
Gate!

Lifting their eyes, Hilda and her companion gazed westward, and saw
beyond the invisible Tiber the Castle of St. Angelo; that immense tomb
of a pagan emperor, with the archangel at its summit.

Still farther off appeared a mighty pile of buildings, surmounted by the
vast dome, which all of us have shaped and swelled outward, like a huge
bubble, to the utmost Scope of our imaginations, long before we see it
floating over the worship of the city. It may be most worthily seen
from precisely the point where our two friends were now standing. At
any nearer view the grandeur of St. Peter’s hides itself behind the
immensity of its separate parts,--so that we see only the front, only
the sides, only the pillared length and loftiness of the portico, and
not the mighty whole. But at this distance the entire outline of the
world’s cathedral, as well as that of the palace of the world’s
chief priest, is taken in at once. In such remoteness, moreover, the
imagination is not debarred from lending its assistance, even while
we have the reality before our eyes, and helping the weakness of human
sense to do justice to so grand an object. It requires both faith and
fancy to enable us to feel, what is nevertheless so true, that yonder,
in front of the purple outline of hills, is the grandest edifice ever
built by man, painted against God’s loveliest sky.

After contemplating a little while a scene which their long residence in
Rome had made familiar to them, Kenyon and Hilda again let their glances
fall into the piazza at their feet. They there beheld Miriam, who had
just entered the Porta del Popolo, and was standing by the obelisk and
fountain. With a gesture that impressed Kenyon as at once suppliant and
imperious, she seemed to intimate to a figure which had attended her
thus far, that it was now her desire to be left alone. The pertinacious
model, however, remained immovable.

And the sculptor here noted a circumstance, which, according to the
interpretation he might put upon it, was either too trivial to be
mentioned, or else so mysteriously significant that he found it
difficult to believe his eyes. Miriam knelt down on the steps of the
fountain; so far there could be no question of the fact. To other
observers, if any there were, she probably appeared to take this
attitude merely for the convenience of dipping her fingers into the gush
of water from the mouth of one of the stone lions. But as she clasped
her hands together after thus bathing them, and glanced upward at the
model, an idea took strong possession of Kenyon’s mind that Miriam was
kneeling to this dark follower there in the world’s face!

“Do you see it?” he said to Hilda.

“See what?” asked she, surprised at the emotion of his tone. “I see
Miriam, who has just bathed her hands in that delightfully cool water. I
often dip my fingers into a Roman fountain, and think of the brook that
used to be one of my playmates in my New England village.”

“I fancied I saw something else,” said Kenyon; “but it was doubtless a
mistake.”

But, allowing that he had caught a true glimpse into the hidden
significance of Miriam’s gesture, what a terrible thraldom did it
suggest! Free as she seemed to be,--beggar as he looked,--the nameless
vagrant must then be dragging the beautiful Miriam through the streets
of Rome, fettered and shackled more cruelly than any captive queen of
yore following in an emperor’s triumph. And was it conceivable that
she would have been thus enthralled unless some great error--how great
Kenyon dared not think--or some fatal weakness had given this dark
adversary a vantage ground?

“Hilda,” said he abruptly, “who and what is Miriam? Pardon me; but are
you sure of her?”

“Sure of her!” repeated Hilda, with an angry blush, for her friend’s
sake. “I am sure that she is kind, good, and generous; a true and
faithful friend, whom I love dearly, and who loves me as well! What more
than this need I be sure of?”

“And your delicate instincts say all this in her favor?--nothing against
her?” continued the sculptor, without heeding the irritation of Hilda’s
tone. “These are my own impressions, too. But she is such a mystery!
We do not even know whether she is a countrywoman of ours, or an
Englishwoman, or a German. There is Anglo-Saxon blood in her veins, one
would say, and a right English accent on her tongue, but much that is
not English breeding, nor American. Nowhere else but in Rome, and as an
artist, could she hold a place in society without giving some clew to
her past life.”

“I love her dearly,” said Hilda, still with displeasure in her tone,
“and trust her most entirely.”

“My heart trusts her at least, whatever my head may do,” replied Kenyon;
“and Rome is not like one of our New England villages, where we need the
permission of each individual neighbor for every act that we do, every
word that we utter, and every friend that we make or keep. In these
particulars the papal despotism allows us freer breath than our native
air; and if we like to take generous views of our associates, we can do
so, to a reasonable extent, without ruining ourselves.”

“The music has ceased,” said Hilda; “I am going now.”

There are three streets that, beginning close beside each other, diverge
from the Piazza del Popolo towards the heart of Rome: on the left, the
Via del Babuino; on the right, the Via della Ripetta; and between these
two that world-famous avenue, the Corso. It appeared that Miriam and her
strange companion were passing up the first mentioned of these three,
and were soon hidden from Hilda and the sculptor.

The two latter left the Pincian by the broad and stately walk that
skirts along its brow. Beneath them, from the base of the abrupt
descent, the city spread wide away in a close contiguity of red-earthen
roofs, above which rose eminent the domes of a hundred churches, beside
here and there a tower, and the upper windows of some taller or higher
situated palace, looking down on a multitude of palatial abodes. At a
distance, ascending out of the central mass of edifices, they could see
the top of the Antonine column, and near it the circular roof of the
Pantheon looking heavenward with its ever-open eye.

Except these two objects, almost everything that they beheld was
mediaeval, though built, indeed, of the massive old stones and
indestructible bricks of imperial Rome; for the ruins of the Coliseum,
the Golden House, and innumerable temples of Roman gods, and mansions of
Caesars and senators, had supplied the material for all those gigantic
hovels, and their walls were cemented with mortar of inestimable cost,
being made of precious antique statues, burnt long ago for this petty
purpose.

Rome, as it now exists, has grown up under the Popes, and seems like
nothing but a heap of broken rubbish, thrown into the great chasm
between our own days and the Empire, merely to fill it up; and, for the
better part of two thousand years, its annals of obscure policies,
and wars, and continually recurring misfortunes, seem also but broken
rubbish, as compared with its classic history.

If we consider the present city as at all connected with the famous one
of old, it is only because we find it built over its grave. A depth of
thirty feet of soil has covered up the Rome of ancient days, so that it
lies like the dead corpse of a giant, decaying for centuries, with no
survivor mighty enough even to bury it, until the dust of all those
years has gathered slowly over its recumbent form and made a casual
sepulchre.

We know not how to characterize, in any accordant and compatible
terms, the Rome that lies before us; its sunless alleys, and streets
of palaces; its churches, lined with the gorgeous marbles that were
originally polished for the adornment of pagan temples; its thousands of
evil smells, mixed up with fragrance of rich incense, diffused from as
many censers; its little life, deriving feeble nutriment from what
has long been dead. Everywhere, some fragment of ruin suggesting the
magnificence of a former epoch; everywhere, moreover, a Cross,--and
nastiness at the foot of it. As the sum of all, there are recollections
that kindle the soul, and a gloom and languor that depress it beyond any
depth of melancholic sentiment that can be elsewhere known.

Yet how is it possible to say an unkind or irreverential word of Rome?
The city of all time, and of all the world! The spot for which man’s
great life and deeds have done so much, and for which decay has done
whatever glory and dominion could not do! At this moment, the evening
sunshine is flinging its golden mantle over it, making all that we
thought mean magnificent; the bells of all the churches suddenly ring
out, as if it were a peal of triumph because Rome is still imperial.

“I sometimes fancy,” said Hilda, on whose susceptibility the scene
always made a strong impression, “that Rome--mere Rome--will crowd
everything else out of my heart.”

“Heaven forbid!” ejaculated the sculptor. They had now reached the grand
stairs that ascend from the Piazza di Spagna to the hither brow of the
Pincian Hill. Old Beppo, the millionnaire of his ragged fraternity,
it is a wonder that no artist paints him as the cripple whom St. Peter
heals at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple,--was just mounting his donkey
to depart, laden with the rich spoil of the day’s beggary.

Up the stairs, drawing his tattered cloak about his face, came the
model, at whom Beppo looked askance, jealous of an encroacher on his
rightful domain. The figure passed away, however, up the Via Sistina. In
the piazza below, near the foot of the magnificent steps, stood Miriam,
with her eyes bent on the ground, as if she were counting those
little, square, uncomfortable paving-stones, that make it a penitential
pilgrimage to walk in Rome. She kept this attitude for several minutes,
and when, at last, the importunities of a beggar disturbed her from it,
she seemed bewildered and pressed her hand upon her brow.

“She has been in some sad dream or other, poor thing!” said Kenyon
sympathizingly; “and even now she is imprisoned there in a kind of cage,
the iron bars of which are made of her own thoughts.”

“I fear she is not well,” said Hilda. “I am going down the stairs, and
will join Miriam.”

“Farewell, then,” said the sculptor. “Dear Hilda, this is a perplexed
and troubled world! It soothes me inexpressibly to think of you in your
tower, with white doves and white thoughts for your companions, so high
above us all, and With the Virgin for your household friend. You know
not how far it throws its light, that lamp which you keep burning at her
shrine! I passed beneath the tower last night, and the ray cheered me,
because you lighted it.”

“It has for me a religious significance,” replied Hilda quietly, “and
yet I am no Catholic.”

They parted, and Kenyon made haste along the Via Sistina, in the hope
of overtaking the model, whose haunts and character he was anxious to
investigate, for Miriam’s sake. He fancied that he saw him a long way
in advance, but before he reached the Fountain of the Triton the dusky
figure had vanished.




CHAPTER XIII


A SCULPTOR’S STUDIO


About this period, Miriam seems to have been goaded by a weary
restlessness that drove her abroad on any errand or none. She went one
morning to visit Kenyon in his studio, whither he had invited her to
see a new statue, on which he had staked many hopes, and which was now
almost completed in the clay. Next to Hilda, the person for whom
Miriam felt most affection and confidence was Kenyon; and in all the
difficulties that beset her life, it was her impulse to draw near Hilda
for feminine sympathy, and the sculptor for brotherly counsel.

Yet it was to little purpose that she approached the edge of the
voiceless gulf between herself and them. Standing on the utmost verge of
that dark chasm, she might stretch out her hand, and never clasp a hand
of theirs; she might strive to call out, “Help, friends! help!” but, as
with dreamers when they shout, her voice would perish inaudibly in
the remoteness that seemed such a little way. This perception of an
infinite, shivering solitude, amid which we cannot come close enough to
human beings to be warmed by them, and where they turn to cold, chilly
shapes of mist, is one of the most forlorn results of any accident,
misfortune, crime, or peculiarity of character, that puts an individual
ajar with the world. Very often, as in Miriam’s case, there is an
insatiable instinct that demands friendship, love, and intimate
communion, but is forced to pine in empty forms; a hunger of the heart,
which finds only shadows to feed upon.

Kenyon’s studio was in a cross-street, or, rather, an ugly and dirty
little lane, between the Corso and the Via della Ripetta; and though
chill, narrow, gloomy, and bordered with tall and shabby structures,
the lane was not a whit more disagreeable than nine tenths of the Roman
streets. Over the door of one of the houses was a marble tablet, bearing
an inscription, to the purport that the sculpture-rooms within had
formerly been occupied by the illustrious artist Canova. In these
precincts (which Canova’s genius was not quite of a character to render
sacred, though it certainly made them interesting) the young American
sculptor had now established himself.

The studio of a sculptor is generally but a rough and dreary-looking
place, with a good deal the aspect, indeed, of a stone-mason’s workshop.
Bare floors of brick or plank, and plastered walls,--an old chair
or two, or perhaps only a block of marble (containing, however, the
possibility of ideal grace within it) to sit down upon; some hastily
scrawled sketches of nude figures on the whitewash of the wall. These
last are probably the sculptor’s earliest glimpses of ideas that may
hereafter be solidified into imperishable stone, or perhaps may remain
as impalpable as a dream. Next there are a few very roughly modelled
little figures in clay or plaster, exhibiting the second stage of the
idea as it advances towards a marble immortality; and then is seen the
exquisitely designed shape of clay, more interesting than even the
final marble, as being the intimate production of the sculptor himself,
moulded throughout with his loving hands, and nearest to his imagination
and heart. In the plaster-cast, from this clay model, the beauty of
the statue strangely disappears, to shine forth again with pure white
radiance, in the precious marble of Carrara. Works in all these stages
of advancement, and some with the final touch upon them, might be found
in Kenyon’s studio.

Here might be witnessed the process of actually chiselling the marble,
with which (as it is not quite satisfactory to think) a sculptor in
these days has very little to do. In Italy, there is a class of men
whose merely mechanical skill is perhaps more exquisite than was
possessed by the ancient artificers, who wrought out the designs of
Praxiteles; or, very possibly, by Praxiteles himself. Whatever of
illusive representation can be effected in marble, they are capable of
achieving, if the object be before their eyes. The sculptor has but to
present these men with a plaster-cast of his design, and a sufficient
block of marble, and tell them that the figure is imbedded in the stone,
and must be freed from its encumbering superfluities; and, in due time,
without the necessity of his touching the work with his own finger,
he will see before him the statue that is to make him renowned. His
creative power has wrought it with a word.

In no other art, surely, does genius find such effective instruments,
and so happily relieve itself of the drudgery, of actual performance;
doing wonderfully nice things by the hands of other people, when it may
be suspected they could not always be done by the sculptor’s own. And
how much of the admiration which our artists get for their buttons
and buttonholes, their shoe-ties, their neckcloths,--and these, at our
present epoch of taste, make a large share of the renown,--would be
abated, if we were generally aware that the sculptor can claim no credit
for such pretty performances, as immortalized in marble! They are not
his work, but that of some nameless machine in human shape.

Miriam stopped an instant in an antechamber, to look at a half-finished
bust, the features of which seemed to be struggling out of the stone;
and, as it were, scattering and dissolving its hard substance by the
glow of feeling and intelligence. As the skilful workman gave stroke
after stroke of the chisel with apparent carelessness, but sure effect,
it was impossible not to think that the outer marble was merely an
extraneous environment; the human countenance within its embrace must
have existed there since the limestone ledges of Carrara were first
made. Another bust was nearly completed, though still one of Kenyon’s
most trustworthy assistants was at work, giving delicate touches,
shaving off an impalpable something, and leaving little heaps of marble
dust to attest it.

“As these busts in the block of marble,” thought Miriam, “so does our
individual fate exist in the limestone of time. We fancy that we carve
it out; but its ultimate shape is prior to all our action.”

Kenyon was in the inner room, but, hearing a step in the antechamber, he
threw a veil over what he was at work upon, and came out to receive his
visitor. He was dressed in a gray blouse, with a little cap on the top
of his head; a costume which became him better than the formal garments
which he wore whenever he passed out of his own domains. The sculptor
had a face which, when time had done a little more for it, would offer a
worthy subject for as good an artist as himself: features finely cut, as
if already marble; an ideal forehead, deeply set eyes, and a mouth much
hidden in a light-brown beard, but apparently sensitive and delicate.

“I will not offer you my hand,” said he; “it is grimy with Cleopatra’s
clay.”

“No; I will not touch clay; it is earthy and human,” answered Miriam.
“I have come to try whether there is any calm and coolness among
your marbles. My own art is too nervous, too passionate, too full of
agitation, for me to work at it whole days together, without intervals
of repose. So, what have you to show me?”

“Pray look at everything here,” said Kenyon. “I love to have painters
see my work. Their judgment is unprejudiced, and more valuable than that
of the world generally, from the light which their own art throws on
mine. More valuable, too, than that of my brother sculptors, who never
judge me fairly,--nor I them, perhaps.”

To gratify him, Miriam looked round at the specimens in marble or
plaster, of which there were several in the room, comprising originals
or casts of most of the designs that Kenyon had thus far produced. He
was still too young to have accumulated a large gallery of such things.
What he had to show were chiefly the attempts and experiments, in
various directions, of a beginner in art, acting as a stern tutor to
himself, and profiting more by his failures than by any successes of
which he was yet capable. Some of them, however, had great merit; and
in the pure, fine glow of the new marble, it may be, they dazzled the
judgment into awarding them higher praise than they deserved. Miriam
admired the statue of a beautiful youth, a pearlfisher; who had got
entangled in the weeds at the bottom of the sea, and lay dead among the
pearl-oysters, the rich shells, and the seaweeds, all of like value to
him now.

“The poor young man has perished among the prizes that he sought,”
 remarked she. “But what a strange efficacy there is in death! If we
cannot all win pearls, it causes an empty shell to satisfy us just as
well. I like this statue, though it is too cold and stern in its moral
lesson; and, physically, the form has not settled itself into sufficient
repose.”

In another style, there was a grand, calm head of Milton, not copied
from any one bust or picture, yet more authentic than any of them,
because all known representations of the poet had been profoundly
studied, and solved in the artist’s mind. The bust over the tomb in
Grey Friars Church, the original miniatures and pictures, wherever to
be found, had mingled each its special truth in this one work; wherein,
likewise, by long perusal and deep love of the Paradise Lost, the Comus,
the Lycidas, and L’Allegro, the sculptor had succeeded, even better than
he knew, in spiritualizing his marble with the poet’s mighty genius. And
this was a great thing to have achieved, such a length of time after the
dry bones and dust of Milton were like those of any other dead man.

There were also several portrait-busts, comprising those of two or three
of the illustrious men of our own country, whom Kenyon, before he left
America, had asked permission to model. He had done so, because he
sincerely believed that, whether he wrought the busts in marble or
bronze, the one would corrode and the other crumble in the long lapse
of time, beneath these great men’s immortality. Possibly, however, the
young artist may have underestimated the durability of his material.
Other faces there were, too, of men who (if the brevity of their
remembrance, after death, can be augured from their little value in
life) should have been represented in snow rather than marble. Posterity
will be puzzled what to do with busts like these, the concretions and
petrifactions of a vain self-estimate; but will find, no doubt, that they
serve to build into stone walls, or burn into quicklime, as well as if
the marble had never been blocked into the guise of human heads.

But it is an awful thing, indeed, this endless endurance, this almost
indestructibility, of a marble bust! Whether in our own case, or that of
other men, it bids us sadly measure the little, little time during which
our lineaments are likely to be of interest to any human being. It
is especially singular that Americans should care about perpetuating
themselves in this mode. The brief duration of our families, as
a hereditary house

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