The Marble Faun; Or, The Romance of Monte Beni - Volume 2
by Nathaniel Hawthorne · English · Gutenberg #2182 · 466,539 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Marble Faun; Or, The Romance of Monte Beni - Volume 2
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Release date: February 26, 2006 [eBook #2182]
Most recently updated: December 15, 2016
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2182
Credits: Produced by Michael Pullen and David Widger
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MARBLE FAUN; OR, THE ROMANCE OF MONTE BENI - VOLUME 2 ***
Produced by Michael Pullen and David Widger
THE MARBLE FAUN,
or The Romance of Monte Beni
BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
Volume II.
In Two Volumes
Contents:
Volume I
I MIRIAM, HILDA, KENYON, DONATELLO
II THE FAUN
III SUBTERRANEAN REMINISCENCES
IV THE SPECTRE OF THE CATACOMB
V MIRIAM’S STUDIO
VI THE VIRGIN’S SHRINE
VII BEATRICE
VIII THE SUBURBAN VILLA
IX THE FAUN AND NYMPH
X THE SYLVAN DANCE
XI FRAGMENTARY SENTENCES
XII A STROLL ON THE PINCIAN
XIII A SCULPTOR’S STUDIO
XIV CLEOPATRA
XV AN AESTHETIC COMPANY
XVI A MOONLIGHT RAMBLE
XVII MIRIAM’S TROUBLE
XVIII ON THE EDGE OF A PRECIPICE
XIX THE FAUN’S TRANSFORMATION
XX THE BURIAL CHANT
XXI THE DEAD CAPUCHIN
XXII THE MEDICI GARDENS
XXIII MIRIAM AND HILDA
Volume II
XXIV THE TOWER AMONG THE APENNINES
XXV SUNSHINE
XXVI THE PEDIGREE OF MONTE BENI
XXVII MYTHS
XXVIII THE OWL TOWER
XXIX ON THE BATTLEMENTS
XXX DONATELLO’S BUST
XXXI THE MARBLE SALOON
XXXII SCENES BY THE WAY
XXXIII PICTURED WINDOWS
XXXIV MARKET-DAY IN PERUGIA
XXXV THE BRONZE PONTIFF’S BENEDICTION
XXXVI HILDA’S TOWER
XXXVII THE EMPTINESS OF PICTURE GALLERIES
XXXVIII ALTARS AND INCENSE
XXXIX THE WORLD’S CATHEDRAL
XL HILDA AND A FRIEND
XLI SNOWDROPS AND MAIDENLY DELIGHTS
XLII REMINISCENCES OF MIRIAM
XLIII THE EXTINCTION OF A LAMP
XLIV THE DESERTED SHRINE
XLV THE FLIGHT OF HILDA’S DOVES
XLVI A WALK ON THE CAMPAGNA
XLVII THE PEASANT AND CONTADINA
XLVIII A SCENE IN THE CORSO
XLIX A FROLIC OF THE CARNIVAL
L MIRIAM, HILDA, KENYON, DONATELLO
THE MARBLE FAUN
Volume II
CHAPTER XXIV
THE TOWER AMONG THE APENNINES
It was in June that the sculptor, Kenyon, arrived on horseback at the
gate of an ancient country house (which, from some of its features,
might almost be called a castle) situated in a part of Tuscany somewhat
remote from the ordinary track of tourists. Thither we must now
accompany him, and endeavor to make our story flow onward, like a
streamlet, past a gray tower that rises on the hillside, overlooking a
spacious valley, which is set in the grand framework of the Apennines.
The sculptor had left Rome with the retreating tide of foreign
residents. For, as summer approaches, the Niobe of Nations is made to
bewail anew, and doubtless with sincerity, the loss of that large
part of her population which she derives from other lands, and on whom
depends much of whatever remnant of prosperity she still enjoys. Rome,
at this season, is pervaded and overhung with atmospheric terrors, and
insulated within a charmed and deadly circle. The crowd of wandering
tourists betake themselves to Switzerland, to the Rhine, or, from this
central home of the world, to their native homes in England or America,
which they are apt thenceforward to look upon as provincial, after
once having yielded to the spell of the Eternal City. The artist, who
contemplates an indefinite succession of winters in this home of art
(though his first thought was merely to improve himself by a brief
visit), goes forth, in the summer time, to sketch scenery and costume
among the Tuscan hills, and pour, if he can, the purple air of Italy
over his canvas. He studies the old schools of art in the mountain towns
where they were born, and where they are still to be seen in the faded
frescos of Giotto and Cimabue, on the walls of many a church, or in
the dark chapels, in which the sacristan draws aside the veil from a
treasured picture of Perugino. Thence, the happy painter goes to walk
the long, bright galleries of Florence, or to steal glowing colors from
the miraculous works, which he finds in a score of Venetian palaces.
Such summers as these, spent amid whatever is exquisite in art, or wild
and picturesque in nature, may not inadequately repay him for the chill
neglect and disappointment through which he has probably languished, in
his Roman winter. This sunny, shadowy, breezy, wandering life, in which
he seeks for beauty as his treasure, and gathers for his winter’s honey
what is but a passing fragrance to all other men, is worth living for,
come afterwards what may. Even if he die unrecognized, the artist has
had his share of enjoyment and success.
Kenyon had seen, at a distance of many miles, the old villa or castle
towards which his journey lay, looking from its height over a broad
expanse of valley. As he drew nearer, however, it had been hidden among
the inequalities of the hillside, until the winding road brought him
almost to the iron gateway. The sculptor found this substantial barrier
fastened with lock and bolt. There was no bell, nor other instrument
of sound; and, after summoning the invisible garrison with his voice,
instead of a trumpet, he had leisure to take a glance at the exterior of
the fortress.
About thirty yards within the gateway rose a square tower, lofty
enough to be a very prominent object in the landscape, and more than
sufficiently massive in proportion to its height. Its antiquity was
evidently such that, in a climate of more abundant moisture, the ivy
would have mantled it from head to foot in a garment that might, by this
time, have been centuries old, though ever new. In the dry Italian air,
however, Nature had only so far adopted this old pile of stonework as to
cover almost every hand’s-breadth of it with close-clinging lichens
and yellow moss; and the immemorial growth of these kindly productions
rendered the general hue of the tower soft and venerable, and took away
the aspect of nakedness which would have made its age drearier than now.
Up and down the height of the tower were scattered three or four
windows, the lower ones grated with iron bars, the upper ones vacant
both of window frames and glass. Besides these larger openings, there
were several loopholes and little square apertures, which might be
supposed to light the staircase, that doubtless climbed the
interior towards the battlemented and machicolated summit. With this
last-mentioned warlike garniture upon its stern old head and brow,
the tower seemed evidently a stronghold of times long past. Many a
crossbowman had shot his shafts from those windows and loop-holes, and
from the vantage height of those gray battlements; many a flight of
arrows, too, had hit all round about the embrasures above, or the
apertures below, where the helmet of a defender had momentarily
glimmered. On festal nights, moreover, a hundred lamps had often gleamed
afar over the valley, suspended from the iron hooks that were ranged for
the purpose beneath the battlements and every window.
Connected with the tower, and extending behind it, there seemed to be
a very spacious residence, chiefly of more modern date. It perhaps owed
much of its fresher appearance, however, to a coat of stucco and
yellow wash, which is a sort of renovation very much in vogue with the
Italians. Kenyon noticed over a doorway, in the portion of the edifice
immediately adjacent to the tower, a cross, which, with a bell suspended
above the roof, indicated that this was a consecrated precinct, and the
chapel of the mansion.
Meanwhile, the hot sun so incommoded the unsheltered traveller, that he
shouted forth another impatient summons. Happening, at the same moment,
to look upward, he saw a figure leaning from an embrasure of the
battlements, and gazing down at him.
“Ho, Signore Count!” cried the sculptor, waving his straw hat, for he
recognized the face, after a moment’s doubt. “This is a warm reception,
truly! Pray bid your porter let me in, before the sun shrivels me quite
into a cinder.”
“I will come myself,” responded Donatello, flinging down his voice out
of the clouds, as it were; “old Tomaso and old Stella are both asleep,
no doubt, and the rest of the people are in the vineyard. But I have
expected you, and you are welcome!”
The young Count--as perhaps we had better designate him in his ancestral
tower--vanished from the battlements; and Kenyon saw his figure
appear successively at each of the windows, as he descended. On every
reappearance, he turned his face towards the sculptor and gave a nod and
smile; for a kindly impulse prompted him thus to assure his visitor of a
welcome, after keeping him so long at an inhospitable threshold.
Kenyon, however (naturally and professionally expert at reading the
expression of the human countenance), had a vague sense that this was
not the young friend whom he had known so familiarly in Rome; not the
sylvan and untutored youth, whom Miriam, Hilda, and himself had liked,
laughed at, and sported with; not the Donatello whose identity they had
so playfully mixed up with that of the Faun of Praxiteles.
Finally, when his host had emerged from a side portal of the mansion,
and approached the gateway, the traveller still felt that there was
something lost, or something gained (he hardly knew which), that set the
Donatello of to-day irreconcilably at odds with him of yesterday. His
very gait showed it, in a certain gravity, a weight and measure of step,
that had nothing in common with the irregular buoyancy which used to
distinguish him. His face was paler and thinner, and the lips less full
and less apart.
“I have looked for you a long while,” said Donatello; and, though his
voice sounded differently, and cut out its words more sharply than had
been its wont, still there was a smile shining on his face, that, for
the moment, quite brought back the Faun. “I shall be more cheerful,
perhaps, now that you have come. It is very solitary here.”
“I have come slowly along, often lingering, often turning aside,”
replied Kenyon; “for I found a great deal to interest me in the
mediaeval sculpture hidden away in the churches hereabouts. An artist,
whether painter or sculptor, may be pardoned for loitering through such
a region. But what a fine old tower! Its tall front is like a page of
black letter, taken from the history of the Italian republics.”
“I know little or nothing of its history,” said the Count, glancing
upward at the battlements, where he had just been standing. “But I thank
my forefathers for building it so high. I like the windy summit better
than the world below, and spend much of my time there, nowadays.”
“It is a pity you are not a star-gazer,” observed Kenyon, also looking
up. “It is higher than Galileo’s tower, which I saw, a week or two ago,
outside of the walls of Florence.”
“A star-gazer? I am one,” replied Donatello. “I sleep in the tower,
and often watch very late on the battlements. There is a dismal old
staircase to climb, however, before reaching the top, and a succession
of dismal chambers, from story to story. Some of them were prison
chambers in times past, as old Tomaso will tell you.”
The repugnance intimated in his tone at the idea of this gloomy
staircase and these ghostly, dimly lighted rooms, reminded Kenyon of the
original Donatello, much more than his present custom of midnight vigils
on the battlements.
“I shall be glad to share your watch,” said the guest; “especially by
moonlight. The prospect of this broad valley must be very fine. But I
was not aware, my friend, that these were your country habits. I have
fancied you in a sort of Arcadian life, tasting rich figs, and squeezing
the juice out of the sunniest grapes, and sleeping soundly all night,
after a day of simple pleasures.”
“I may have known such a life, when I was younger,” answered the Count
gravely. “I am not a boy now. Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow
behind.”
The sculptor could not but smile at the triteness of the remark, which,
nevertheless, had a kind of originality as coming from Donatello. He had
thought it out from his own experience, and perhaps considered himself
as communicating a new truth to mankind.
They were now advancing up the courtyard; and the long extent of the
villa, with its iron-barred lower windows and balconied upper ones,
became visible, stretching back towards a grove of trees.
“At some period of your family history,” observed Kenyon, “the Counts
of Monte Beni must have led a patriarchal life in this vast house. A
great-grandsire and all his descendants might find ample verge here, and
with space, too, for each separate brood of little ones to play within
its own precincts. Is your present household a large one?”
“Only myself,” answered Donatello, “and Tomaso, who has been butler
since my grandfather’s time, and old Stella, who goes sweeping and
dusting about the chambers, and Girolamo, the cook, who has but an idle
life of it. He shall send you up a chicken forthwith. But, first of all,
I must summon one of the contadini from the farmhouse yonder, to take
your horse to the stable.”
Accordingly, the young Count shouted again, and with such effect that,
after several repetitions of the outcry, an old gray woman protruded
her head and a broom-handle from a chamber window; the venerable butler
emerged from a recess in the side of the house, where was a well, or
reservoir, in which he had been cleansing a small wine cask; and
a sunburnt contadino, in his shirt-sleeves, showed himself on the
outskirts of the vineyard, with some kind of a farming tool in his
hand. Donatello found employment for all these retainers in providing
accommodation for his guest and steed, and then ushered the sculptor
into the vestibule of the house.
It was a square and lofty entrance-room, which, by the solidity of its
construction, might have been an Etruscan tomb, being paved and walled
with heavy blocks of stone, and vaulted almost as massively overhead.
On two sides there were doors, opening into long suites of anterooms
and saloons; on the third side, a stone staircase of spacious breadth,
ascending, by dignified degrees and with wide resting-places, to another
floor of similar extent. Through one of the doors, which was ajar,
Kenyon beheld an almost interminable vista of apartments, opening one
beyond the other, and reminding him of the hundred rooms in Blue Beard’s
castle, or the countless halls in some palace of the Arabian Nights.
It must have been a numerous family, indeed, that could ever have
sufficed to people with human life so large an abode as this, and impart
social warmth to such a wide world within doors. The sculptor confessed
to himself, that Donatello could allege reason enough for growing
melancholy, having only his own personality to vivify it all.
“How a woman’s face would brighten it up!” he ejaculated, not intending
to be overheard.
But, glancing at Donatello, he saw a stern and sorrowful look in his
eyes, which altered his youthful face as if it had seen thirty years of
trouble; and, at the same moment, old Stella showed herself through one
of the doorways, as the only representative of her sex at Monte Beni.
CHAPTER XXV
SUNSHINE
“Come,” said the Count, “I see you already find the old house dismal.
So do I, indeed! And yet it was a cheerful place in my boyhood. But, you
see, in my father’s days (and the same was true of all my endless line
of grandfathers, as I have heard), there used to be uncles, aunts, and
all manner of kindred, dwelling together as one family. They were
a merry and kindly race of people, for the most part, and kept one
another’s hearts warm.”
“Two hearts might be enough for warmth,” observed the sculptor, “even in
so large a house as this. One solitary heart, it is true, may be apt to
shiver a little. But, I trust, my friend, that the genial blood of your
race still flows in many veins besides your own?”
“I am the last,” said Donatello gloomily. “They have all vanished from
me, since my childhood. Old Tomaso will tell you that the air of Monte
Beni is not so favorable to length of days as it used to be. But that is
not the secret of the quick extinction of my kindred.”
“Then you are aware of a more satisfactory reason?” suggested Kenyon.
“I thought of one, the other night, while I was gazing at the stars,”
answered Donatello; “but, pardon me, I do not mean to tell it. One
cause, however, of the longer and healthier life of my forefathers was,
that they had many pleasant customs, and means of making themselves
glad, and their guests and friends along with them. Nowadays we have but
one!”
“And what is that?” asked the sculptor.
“You shall see!” said his young host.
By this time, he had ushered the sculptor into one of the numberless
saloons; and, calling for refreshment, old Stella placed a cold fowl
upon the table, and quickly followed it with a savory omelet, which
Girolamo had lost no time in preparing. She also brought some cherries,
plums, and apricots, and a plate full of particularly delicate figs, of
last year’s growth. The butler showing his white head at the door, his
master beckoned to him. “Tomaso, bring some Sunshine!” said he. The
readiest method of obeying this order, one might suppose, would have
been to fling wide the green window-blinds, and let the glow of the
summer noon into the carefully shaded room. But, at Monte Beni, with
provident caution against the wintry days, when there is little
sunshine, and the rainy ones, when there is none, it was the hereditary
custom to keep their Sunshine stored away in the cellar. Old Tomaso
quickly produced some of it in a small, straw-covered flask, out of
which he extracted the cork, and inserted a little cotton wool, to
absorb the olive oil that kept the precious liquid from the air.
“This is a wine,” observed the Count, “the secret of making which has
been kept in our family for centuries upon centuries; nor would it avail
any man to steal the secret, unless he could also steal the vineyard, in
which alone the Monte Beni grape can be produced. There is little else
left me, save that patch of vines. Taste some of their juice, and tell
me whether it is worthy to be called Sunshine! for that is its name.”
“A glorious name, too!” cried the sculptor. “Taste it,” said Donatello,
filling his friend’s glass, and pouring likewise a little into his own.
“But first smell its fragrance; for the wine is very lavish of it, and
will scatter it all abroad.”
“Ah, how exquisite!” said Kenyon. “No other wine has a bouquet like
this. The flavor must be rare, indeed, if it fulfill the promise of this
fragrance, which is like the airy sweetness of youthful hopes, that no
realities will ever satisfy!”
This invaluable liquor was of a pale golden hue, like other of the
rarest Italian wines, and, if carelessly and irreligiously quaffed,
might have been mistaken for a very fine sort of champagne. It was not,
however, an effervescing wine, although its delicate piquancy produced
a somewhat similar effect upon the palate. Sipping, the guest longed
to sip again; but the wine demanded so deliberate a pause, in order to
detect the hidden peculiarities and subtile exquisiteness of its flavor,
that to drink it was really more a moral than a physical enjoyment.
There was a deliciousness in it that eluded analysis, and--like whatever
else is superlatively good--was perhaps better appreciated in the memory
than by present consciousness.
One of its most ethereal charms lay in the transitory life of the wine’s
richest qualities; for, while it required a certain leisure and delay,
yet, if you lingered too long upon the draught, it became disenchanted
both of its fragrance and its flavor.
The lustre should not be forgotten, among the other admirable endowments
of the Monte Beni wine; for, as it stood in Kenyon’s glass, a little
circle of light glowed on the table round about it, as if it were really
so much golden sunshine.
“I feel myself a better man for that ethereal potation,” observed the
sculptor. “The finest Orvieto, or that famous wine, the Est Est Est of
Montefiascone, is vulgar in comparison. This is surely the wine of the
Golden Age, such as Bacchus himself first taught mankind to press from
the choicest of his grapes. My dear Count, why is it not illustrious?
The pale, liquid gold, in every such flask as that, might be solidified
into golden scudi, and would quickly make you a millionaire!”
Tomaso, the old butler, who was standing by the table, and enjoying
the praises of the wine quite as much as if bestowed upon himself, made
answer,--“We have a tradition, Signore,” said he, “that this rare wine
of our vineyard would lose all its wonderful qualities, if any of it
were sent to market. The Counts of Monte Beni have never parted with a
single flask of it for gold. At their banquets, in the olden time, they
have entertained princes, cardinals, and once an emperor and once a
pope, with this delicious wine, and always, even to this day, it has
been their custom to let it flow freely, when those whom they love and
honor sit at the board. But the grand duke himself could not drink that
wine, except it were under this very roof!”
“What you tell me, my good friend,” replied Kenyon, “makes me venerate
the Sunshine of Monte Beni even more abundantly than before. As I
understand you, it is a sort of consecrated juice, and symbolizes the
holy virtues of hospitality and social kindness?”
“Why, partly so, Signore,” said the old butler, with a shrewd twinkle
in his eye; “but, to speak out all the truth, there is another excellent
reason why neither a cask nor a flask of our precious vintage should
ever be sent to market. The wine, Signore, is so fond of its native
home, that a transportation of even a few miles turns it quite sour. And
yet it is a wine that keeps well in the cellar, underneath this floor,
and gathers fragrance, flavor, and brightness, in its dark dungeon. That
very flask of Sunshine, now, has kept itself for you, sir guest (as a
maid reserves her sweetness till her lover comes for it), ever since a
merry vintage-time, when the Signore Count here was a boy!”
“You must not wait for Tomaso to end his discourse about the wine,
before drinking off your glass,” observed Donatello. “When once the
flask is uncorked, its finest qualities lose little time in making their
escape. I doubt whether your last sip will be quite so delicious as you
found the first.”
And, in truth, the sculptor fancied that the Sunshine became almost
imperceptibly clouded, as he approached the bottom of the flask. The
effect of the wine, however, was a gentle exhilaration, which did not so
speedily pass away.
Being thus refreshed, Kenyon looked around him at the antique saloon
in which they sat. It was constructed in a most ponderous style, with
a stone floor, on which heavy pilasters were planted against the wall,
supporting arches that crossed one another in the vaulted ceiling. The
upright walls, as well as the compartments of the roof, were completely
Covered with frescos, which doubtless had been brilliant when first
executed, and perhaps for generations afterwards. The designs were of
a festive and joyous character, representing Arcadian scenes, where
nymphs, fauns, and satyrs disported themselves among mortal youths and
maidens; and Pan, and the god of wine, and he of sunshine and music,
disdained not to brighten some sylvan merry-making with the scarcely
veiled glory of their presence. A wreath of dancing figures, in
admirable variety of shape and motion, was festooned quite round the
cornice of the room.
In its first splendor, the saloon must have presented an aspect both
gorgeous and enlivening; for it invested some of the cheerfullest ideas
and emotions of which the human mind is susceptible with the external
reality of beautiful form, and rich, harmonious glow and variety of
color. But the frescos were now very ancient. They had been rubbed and
scrubbed by old Stein and many a predecessor, and had been defaced in
one spot, and retouched in another, and had peeled from the wall in
patches, and had hidden some of their brightest portions under dreary
dust, till the joyousness had quite vanished out of them all. It was
often difficult to puzzle out the design; and even where it was more
readily intelligible, the figures showed like the ghosts of dead and
buried joys,--the closer their resemblance to the happy past, the
gloomier now. For it is thus, that with only an inconsiderable change,
the gladdest objects and existences become the saddest; hope fading
into disappointment; joy darkening into grief, and festal splendor into
funereal duskiness; and all evolving, as their moral, a grim identity
between gay things and sorrowful ones. Only give them a little time, and
they turn out to be just alike!
“There has been much festivity in this saloon, if I may judge by the
character of its frescos,” remarked Kenyon, whose spirits were still
upheld by the mild potency of the Monte Beni wine. “Your forefathers,
my dear Count, must have been joyous fellows, keeping up the vintage
merriment throughout the year. It does me good to think of them
gladdening the hearts of men and women, with their wine of Sunshine,
even in the Iron Age, as Pan and Bacchus, whom we see yonder, did in the
Golden one!”
“Yes; there have been merry times in the banquet hall of Monte Beni,
even within my own remembrance,” replied Donatello, looking gravely
at the painted walls. “It was meant for mirth, as you see; and when
I brought my own cheerfulness into the saloon, these frescos looked
cheerful too. But, methinks, they have all faded since I saw them last.”
“It would be a good idea,” said the sculptor, falling into his
companion’s vein, and helping him out with an illustration which
Donatello himself could not have put into shape, “to convert this saloon
into a chapel; and when the priest tells his hearers of the instability
of earthly joys, and would show how drearily they vanish, he may point
to these pictures, that were so joyous and are so dismal. He could not
illustrate his theme so aptly in any other way.”
“True, indeed,” answered the Count, his former simplicity strangely
mixing itself up with ah experience that had changed him; “and yonder,
where the minstrels used to stand, the altar shall be placed. A sinful
man might do all the more effective penance in this old banquet hall.”
“But I should regret to have suggested so ungenial a transformation in
your hospitable saloon,” continued Kenyon, duly noting the change in
Donatello’s characteristics. “You startle me, my friend, by so ascetic a
design! It would hardly have entered your head, when we first met. Pray
do not,--if I may take the freedom of a somewhat elder man to advise
you,” added he, smiling,--“pray do not, under a notion of improvement,
take upon yourself to be sombre, thoughtful, and penitential, like all
the rest of us.”
Donatello made no answer, but sat awhile, appearing to follow with
his eyes one of the figures, which was repeated many times over in the
groups upon the walls and ceiling. It formed the principal link of an
allegory, by which (as is often the case in such pictorial designs)
the whole series of frescos were bound together, but which it would be
impossible, or, at least, very wearisome, to unravel. The sculptor’s
eyes took a similar direction, and soon began to trace through the
vicissitudes,--once gay, now sombre,--in which the old artist had
involved it, the same individual figure. He fancied a resemblance in it
to Donatello himself; and it put him in mind of one of the purposes with
which he had come to Monte Beni.
“My dear Count,” said he, “I have a proposal to make. You must let me
employ a little of my leisure in modelling your bust. You remember what
a striking resemblance we all of us--Hilda, Miriam, and I--found between
your features and those of the Faun of Praxiteles. Then, it seemed an
identity; but now that I know your face better, the likeness is far less
apparent. Your head in marble would be a treasure to me. Shall I have
it?”
“I have a weakness which I fear I cannot overcome,” replied the Count,
turning away his face. “It troubles me to be looked at steadfastly.”
“I have observed it since we have been sitting here, though never
before,” rejoined the sculptor. “It is a kind of nervousness, I
apprehend, which, you caught in the Roman air, and which grows upon you,
in your solitary life. It need be no hindrance to my taking your bust;
for I will catch the likeness and expression by side glimpses, which
(if portrait painters and bust makers did but know it) always bring home
richer results than a broad stare.”
“You may take me if you have the power,” said Donatello; but, even as he
spoke, he turned away his face; “and if you can see what makes me shrink
from you, you are welcome to put it in the bust. It is not my will, but
my necessity, to avoid men’s eyes. Only,” he added, with a smile which
made Kenyon doubt whether he might not as well copy the Faun as model a
new bust,--“only, you know, you must not insist on my uncovering these
ears of mine!”
“Nay; I never should dream of such a thing,” answered the sculptor,
laughing, as the young Count shook his clustering curls. “I could not
hope to persuade you, remembering how Miriam once failed!”
Nothing is more unaccountable than the spell that often lurks in a
spoken word. A thought may be present to the mind, so distinctly that
no utterance could make it more so; and two minds may be conscious of
the same thought, in which one or both take the profoundest interest;
but as long as it remains unspoken, their familiar talk flows quietly
over the hidden idea, as a rivulet may sparkle and dimple over something
sunken in its bed. But speak the word, and it is like bringing up a
drowned body out of the deepest pool of the rivulet, which has been
aware of the horrible secret all along, in spite of its smiling surface.
And even so, when Kenyon chanced to make a distinct reference to
Donatello’s relations with Miriam (though the subject was already in
both their minds), a ghastly emotion rose up out of the depths of the
young Count’s heart. He trembled either with anger or terror, and
glared at the sculptor with wild eyes, like a wolf that meets you in
the forest, and hesitates whether to flee or turn to bay. But, as Kenyon
still looked calmly at him, his aspect gradually became less disturbed,
though far from resuming its former quietude.
“You have spoken her name,” said he, at last, in an altered and
tremulous tone; “tell me, now, all that you know of her.”
“I scarcely think that I have any later intelligence than yourself,”
answered Kenyon; “Miriam left Rome at about the time of your own
departure. Within a day or two after our last meeting at the Church of
the Capuchins, I called at her studio and found it vacant. Whither she
has gone, I cannot tell.”
Donatello asked no further questions.
They rose from table, and strolled together about the premises, whiling
away the afternoon with brief intervals of unsatisfactory conversation,
and many shadowy silences. The sculptor had a perception of change in
his companion,--possibly of growth and development, but certainly of
change,--which saddened him, because it took away much of the simple
grace that was the best of Donatello’s peculiarities.
Kenyon betook himself to repose that night in a grim, old, vaulted
apartment, which, in the lapse of five or six centuries, had probably
been the birth, bridal, and death chamber of a great many generations
of the Monte Beni family. He was aroused, soon after daylight, by the
clamor of a tribe of beggars who had taken their stand in a little
rustic lane that crept beside that portion of the villa, and were
addressing their petitions to the open windows. By and by they appeared
to have received alms, and took their departure.
“Some charitable Christian has sent those vagabonds away,” thought the
sculptor, as he resumed his interrupted nap; “who could it be? Donatello
has his own rooms in the tower; Stella, Tomaso, and the cook are a
world’s width off; and I fancied myself the only inhabitant in this part
of the house.”
In the breadth and space which so delightfully characterize an Italian
villa, a dozen guests might have had each his suite of apartments
without infringing upon one another’s ample precincts. But, so far as
Kenyon knew, he was the only visitor beneath Donatello’s widely extended
roof.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE PEDIGREE OF MONTE BENI
From the old butler, whom he found to be a very gracious and affable
personage, Kenyon soon learned many curious particulars about the family
history and hereditary peculiarities of the Counts of Monte Beni. There
was a pedigree, the later portion of which--that is to say, for a little
more than a thousand years--a genealogist would have found delight in
tracing out, link by link, and authenticating by records and documentary
evidences. It would have been as difficult, however, to follow up the
stream of Donatello’s ancestry to its dim source, as travellers have
found it to reach the mysterious fountains of the Nile. And, far beyond
the region of definite and demonstrable fact, a romancer might have
strayed into a region of old poetry, where the rich soil, so long
uncultivated and untrodden, had lapsed into nearly its primeval state
of wilderness. Among those antique paths, now overgrown with tangled and
riotous vegetation, the wanderer must needs follow his own guidance, and
arrive nowhither at last.
The race of Monte Beni, beyond a doubt, was one of the oldest in Italy,
where families appear to survive at least, if not to flourish, on their
half-decayed roots, oftener than in England or France. It came down in
a broad track from the Middle Ages; but, at epochs anterior to those,
it was distinctly visible in the gloom of the period before chivalry put
forth its flower; and further still, we are almost afraid to say, it was
seen, though with a fainter and wavering course, in the early morn of
Christendom, when the Roman Empire had hardly begun to show symptoms of
decline. At that venerable distance, the heralds gave up the lineage in
despair.
But where written record left the genealogy of Monte Beni, tradition
took it up, and carried it without dread or shame beyond the Imperial
ages into the times of the Roman republic; beyond those, again, into the
epoch of kingly rule. Nor even so remotely among the mossy centuries did
it pause, but strayed onward into that gray antiquity of which there
is no token left, save its cavernous tombs, and a few bronzes, and some
quaintly wrought ornaments of gold, and gems with mystic figures and
inscriptions. There, or thereabouts, the line was supposed to have had
its origin in the sylvan life of Etruria, while Italy was yet guiltless
of Rome.
Of course, as we regret to say, the earlier and very much the larger
portion of this respectable descent--and the same is true of many
briefer pedigrees--must be looked upon as altogether mythical. Still,
it threw a romantic interest around the unquestionable antiquity of the
Monte Beni family, and over that tract of their own vines and fig-trees
beneath the shade of which they had unquestionably dwelt for immemorial
ages. And there they had laid the foundations of their tower, so long
ago that one half of its height was said to be sunken under the surface
and to hide subterranean chambers which once were cheerful with the
olden sunshine.
One story, or myth, that had mixed itself up with their mouldy
genealogy, interested the sculptor by its wild, and perhaps grotesque,
yet not unfascinating peculiarity. He caught at it the more eagerly,
as it afforded a shadowy and whimsical semblance of explanation for the
likeness which he, with Miriam and Hilda, had seen or fancied between
Donatello and the Faun of Praxiteles.
The Monte Beni family, as this legend averred, drew their origin
from the Pelasgic race, who peopled Italy in times that may be called
prehistoric. It was the same noble breed of men, of Asiatic birth,
that settled in Greece; the same happy and poetic kindred who dwelt in
Arcadia, and--whether they ever lived such life or not--enriched the
world with dreams, at least, and fables, lovely, if unsubstantial, of a
Golden Age. In those delicious times, when deities and demigods appeared
familiarly on earth, mingling with its inhabitants as friend with
friend,--when nymphs, satyrs, and the whole train of classic faith or
fable hardly took pains to hide themselves in the primeval woods,--at
that auspicious period the lineage of Monte Beni had its rise. Its
progenitor was a being not altogether human, yet partaking so largely of
the gentlest human qualities, as to be neither awful nor shocking to
the imagination. A sylvan creature, native among the woods, had loved
a mortal maiden, and--perhaps by kindness, and the subtile courtesies
which love might teach to his simplicity, or possibly by a ruder
wooing--had won her to his haunts. In due time he gained her womanly
affection; and, making their bridal bower, for aught we know, in the
hollow of a great tree, the pair spent a happy wedded life in that
ancient neighborhood where now stood Donatello’s tower.
From this union sprang a vigorous progeny that took its place
unquestioned among human families. In that age, however, and long
afterwards, it showed the ineffaceable lineaments of its wild paternity:
it was a pleasant and kindly race of men, but capable of savage
fierceness, and never quite restrainable within the trammels of social
law. They were strong, active, genial, cheerful as the sunshine,
passionate as the tornado. Their lives were rendered blissful by art
unsought harmony with nature.
But, as centuries passed away, the Faun’s wild blood had necessarily
been attempered with constant intermixtures from the more ordinary
streams of human life. It lost many of its original qualities, and
served for the most part only to bestow an unconquerable vigor, which
kept the family from extinction, and enabled them to make their own part
good throughout the perils and rude emergencies of their interminable
descent. In the constant wars with which Italy was plagued, by the
dissensions of her petty states and republics, there was a demand for
native hardihood.
The successive members of the Monte Beni family showed valor and policy
enough’ at all events, to keep their hereditary possessions out of the
clutch of grasping neighbors, and probably differed very little from the
other feudal barons with whom they fought and feasted. Such a degree
of conformity with the manners of the generations through which it
survived, must have been essential to the prolonged continuance of the
race.
It is well known, however, that any hereditary peculiarity--as a
supernumerary finger, or an anomalous shape of feature, like the
Austrian lip--is wont to show itself in a family after a very wayward
fashion. It skips at its own pleasure along the line, and, latent for
half a century or so, crops out again in a great-grandson. And thus, it
was said, from a period beyond memory or record, there had ever and
anon been a descendant of the Monte Benis bearing nearly all the
characteristics that were attributed to the original founder of the
race. Some traditions even went so far as to enumerate the ears, covered
with a delicate fur, and shaped like a pointed leaf, among the proofs
of authentic descent which were seen in these favored individuals. We
appreciate the beauty of such tokens of a nearer kindred to the great
family of nature than other mortals bear; but it would be idle to ask
credit for a statement which might be deemed to partake so largely of
the grotesque.
But it was indisputable that, once in a century or oftener, a son of
Monte Beni gathered into himself the scattered qualities of his
race, and reproduced the character that had been assigned to it from
immemorial times. Beautiful, strong, brave, kindly, sincere, of
honest impulses, and endowed with simple tastes and the love of homely
pleasures, he was believed to possess gifts by which he could associate
himself with the wild things of the forests, and with the fowls of the
air, and could feel a sympathy even with the trees; among which it was
his joy to dwell. On the other hand, there were deficiencies both of
intellect and heart, and especially, as it seemed, in the development of
the higher portion of man’s nature. These defects were less perceptible
in early youth, but showed themselves more strongly with advancing
age, when, as the animal spirits settled down upon a lower level, the
representative of the Monte Benis was apt to become sensual, addicted to
gross pleasures, heavy, unsympathizing, and insulated within the narrow
limits of a surly selfishness.
A similar change, indeed, is no more than what we constantly observe to
take place in persons who are not careful to substitute other graces for
those which they inevitably lose along with the quick sensibility and
joyous vivacity of youth. At worst, the reigning Count of Monte Beni,
as his hair grew white, was still a jolly old fellow over his flask of
wine, the wine that Bacchus himself was fabled to have taught his sylvan
ancestor how to express, and from what choicest grapes, which would
ripen only in a certain divinely favored portion of the Monte Beni
vineyard.
The family, be it observed, were both proud and ashamed of these
legends; but whatever part of them they might consent to incorporate
into their ancestral history, they steadily repudiated all that referred
to their one distinctive feature, the pointed and furry ears. In a great
many years past, no sober credence had been yielded to the mythical
portion of the pedigree. It might, however, be considered as typifying
some such assemblage of qualities--in this case, chiefly remarkable for
their simplicity and naturalness--as, when they reappear in successive
generations, constitute what we call family character. The sculptor
found, moreover, on the evidence of some old portraits, that the
physical features of the race had long been similar to what he now saw
them in Donatello. With accumulating years, it is true, the Monte
Beni face had a tendency to look grim and savage; and, in two or three
instances, the family pictures glared at the spectator in the eyes like
some surly animal, that had lost its good humor when it outlived its
playfulness.
The young Count accorded his guest full liberty to investigate the
personal annals of these pictured worthies, as well as all the rest
of his progenitors; and ample materials were at hand in many chests of
worm-eaten papers and yellow parchments, that had been gathering into
larger and dustier piles ever since the dark ages. But, to confess the
truth, the information afforded by these musty documents was so much
more prosaic than what Kenyon acquired from Tomaso’s legends, that even
the superior authenticity of the former could not reconcile him to its
dullness. What especially delighted the sculptor was the analogy between
Donatello’s character, as he himself knew it, and those peculiar traits
which the old butler’s narrative assumed to have been long hereditary
in the race. He was amused at finding, too, that not only Tomaso but the
peasantry of the estate and neighboring village recognized his friend
as a genuine Monte Beni, of the original type. They seemed to cherish a
great affection for the young Count, and were full of stories about his
sportive childhood; how he had played among the little rustics, and been
at once the wildest and the sweetest of them all; and how, in his very
infancy, he had plunged into the deep pools of the streamlets and never
been drowned, and had clambered to the topmost branches of tall trees
without ever breaking his neck. No such mischance could happen to the
sylvan child because, handling all the elements of nature so fearlessly
and freely, nothing had either the power or the will to do him harm.
He grew up, said these humble friends, the playmate not only of all
mortal kind, but of creatures of the woods; although, when Kenyon
pressed them for some particulars of this latter mode of companionship,
they could remember little more than a few anecdotes of a pet fox, which
used to growl and snap at everybody save Donatello himself.
But they enlarged--and never were weary of the theme--upon the
blithesome effects of Donatello’s presence in his rosy childhood and
budding youth. Their hovels had always glowed like sunshine when he
entered them; so that, as the peasants expressed it, their young master
had never darkened a doorway in his life. He was the soul of vintage
festivals. While he was a mere infant, scarcely able to run alone, it
had been the custom to make him tread the winepress with his tender
little feet, if it were only to crush one cluster of the grapes. And the
grape-juice that gushed beneath his childish tread, be it ever so small
in quantity, sufficed to impart a pleasant flavor to a whole cask of
wine. The race of Monte Beni--so these rustic chroniclers assured
the sculptor--had possessed the gift from the oldest of old times of
expressing good wine from ordinary grapes, and a ravishing liquor from
the choice growth of their vineyard.
In a word, as he listened to such tales as these, Kenyon could have
imagined that the valleys and hillsides about him were a veritable
Arcadia; and that Donatello was not merely a sylvan faun, but the genial
wine god in his very person. Making many allowances for the poetic
fancies of Italian peasants, he set it down for fact that his friend, in
a simple way and among rustic folks, had been an exceedingly delightful
fellow in his younger days.
But the contadini sometimes added, shaking their heads and sighing, that
the young Count was sadly changed since he went to Rome. The village
girls now missed the merry smile with which he used to greet them.
The sculptor inquired of his good friend Tomaso, whether he, too,
had noticed the shadow which was said to have recently fallen over
Donatello’s life.
“Ah, yes, Signore!” answered the old butler, “it is even so, since
he came back from that wicked and miserable city. The world has grown
either too evil, or else too wise and sad, for such men as the old
Counts of Monte Beni used to be. His very first taste of it, as you see,
has changed and spoilt my poor young lord. There had not been a single
count in the family these hundred years or more, who was so true a Monte
Beni, of the antique stamp, as this poor signorino; and now it brings
the tears into my eyes to hear him sighing over a cup of Sunshine! Ah,
it is a sad world now!”
“Then you think there was a merrier world once?” asked Kenyon.
“Surely, Signore,” said Tomaso; “a merrier world, and merrier Counts of
Monte Beni to live in it! Such tales of them as I have heard, when I was
a child on my grandfather’s knee! The good old man remembered a lord of
Monte Beni--at least, he had heard of such a one, though I will not make
oath upon the holy crucifix that my grandsire lived in his time who used
to go into the woods and call pretty damsels out of the fountains, and
out of the trunks of the old trees. That merry lord was known to dance
with them a whole long summer afternoon! When shall we see such frolics
in our days?”
“Not soon, I am afraid,” acquiesced the sculptor. “You are right,
excellent Tomaso; the world is sadder now!”
And, in truth, while our friend smiled at these wild fables, he sighed
in the same breath to think how the once genial earth produces, in every
successive generation, fewer flowers than used to gladden the preceding
ones. Not that the modes and seeming possibilities of human enjoyment
are rarer in our refined and softened era,--on the contrary, they never
before were nearly so abundant,--but that mankind are getting so far
beyond the childhood of their race that they scorn to be happy any
longer. A simple and joyous character can find no place for itself
among the sage and sombre figures that would put his unsophisticated
cheerfulness to shame. The entire system of man’s affairs, as at present
established, is built up purposely to exclude the careless and happy
soul. The very children would upbraid the wretched individual who should
endeavor to take life and the world as w what we might naturally suppose
them meant for--a place and opportunity for enjoyment.
It is the iron rule in our day to require an object and a purpose in
life. It makes us all parts of a complicated scheme of progress, which
can only result in our arrival at a colder and drearier region than
we were born in. It insists upon everybody’s adding somewhat--a mite,
perhaps, but earned by incessant effort--to an accumulated pile of
usefulness, of which the only use will be, to burden our posterity with
even heavier thoughts and more inordinate labor than our own. No life
now wanders like an unfettered stream; there is a mill-wheel for the
tiniest rivulet to turn. We go all wrong, by too strenuous a resolution
to go all right.
Therefore it was--so, at least, the sculptor thought, although partly
suspicious of Donatello’s darker misfortune--that the young Count found
it impossible nowadays to be what his forefathers had been. He could
not live their healthy life of animal spirits, in their sympathy with
nature, and brotherhood with all that breathed around them. Nature, in
beast, fowl, and tree, and earth, flood, and sky, is what it was of old;
but sin, care, and self-consciousness have set the human portion of the
world askew; and thus the simplest character is ever the soonest to go
astray.
“At any rate, Tomaso,” said Kenyon, doing his best to comfort the old
man, “let us hope that your young lord will still enjoy himself at
vintage time. By the aspect of the vineyard, I judge that this will be
a famous year for the golden wine of Monte Beni. As long as your grapes
produce that admirable liquor, sad as you think the world, neither the
Count nor his guests will quite forget to smile.”
“Ah, Signore,” rejoined the butler with a sigh, “but he scarcely wets
his lips with the sunny juice.”
“There is yet another hope,” observed Kenyon; “the young Count may fall
in love, and bring home a fair and laughing wife to chase the gloom out
of yonder old frescoed saloon. Do you think he could do a better thing,
my good Tomaso?”
“Maybe not, Signore,” said the sage butler, looking earnestly at him;
“and, maybe, not a worse!”
The sculptor fancied that the good old man had it partly in his mind to
make some remark, or communicate some fact, which, on second thoughts,
he resolved to keep concealed in his own breast. He now took his
departure cellarward, shaking his white head and muttering to himself,
and did not reappear till dinner-time, when he favored Kenyon, whom he
had taken far into his good graces, with a choicer flask of Sunshine
than had yet blessed his palate.
To say the truth, this golden wine was no unnecessary ingredient towards
making the life of Monte Beni palatable. It seemed a pity that Donatello
did not drink a little more of it, and go jollily to bed at least,
even if he should awake with an accession of darker melancholy the next
morning.
Nevertheless, there was no lack of outward means for leading an
agreeable life in the old villa. Wandering musicians haunted the
precincts of Monte Beni, where they seemed to claim a prescriptive
right; they made the lawn and shrubbery tuneful with the sound of
fiddle, harp, and flute, and now and then with the tangled squeaking of
a bagpipe. Improvisatori likewise came and told tales or recited verses
to the contadini--among whom Kenyon was often an auditor--after their
day’s work in the vineyard. Jugglers, too, obtained permission to do
feats of magic in the hall, where they set even the sage Tomaso, and
Stella, Girolamo, and the peasant girls from the farmhouse, all of a
broad grin, between merriment and wonder. These good people got food and
lodging for their pleasant pains, and some of the small wine of Tuscany,
and a reasonable handful of the Grand Duke’s copper coin, to keep up
the hospitable renown of Monte Beni. But very seldom had they the young
Count as a listener or a spectator.
There were sometimes dances by moonlight on the lawn, but never since he
came from Rome did Donatello’s presence deepen the blushes of the
pretty contadinas, or his footstep weary out the most agile partner or
competitor, as once it was sure to do.
Paupers--for this kind of vermin infested the house of Monte Beni worse
than any other spot in beggar-haunted Italy--stood beneath all the
windows, making loud supplication, or even establishing themselves on
the marble steps of the grand entrance. They ate and drank, and filled
their bags, and pocketed the little money that was given them, and went
forth on their devious ways, showering blessings innumerable on the
mansion and its lord, and on the souls of his deceased forefathers, who
had always been just such simpletons as to be compassionate to
beggary. But, in spite of their favorable prayers, by which Italian
philanthropists set great store, a cloud seemed to hang over these once
Arcadian precincts, and to be darkest around the summit of the tower
where Donatello was wont to sit and brood.
CHAPTER XXVII
MYTHS
After the sculptor’s arrival, however, the young Count sometimes
came down from his forlorn elevation, and rambled with him among the
neighboring woods and hills. He led his friend to many enchanting nooks,
with which he himself had been familiar in his childhood. But of late,
as he remarked to Kenyon, a sort of strangeness had overgrown them,
like clusters of dark shrubbery, so that he hardly recognized the places
which he had known and loved so well.
To the sculptor’s eye, nevertheless, they were still rich with beauty.
They were picturesque in that sweetly impressive way where wildness, in
a long lapse of years, has crept over scenes that have been once adorned
with the careful art and toil of man; and when man could do no more for
them, time and nature came, and wrought hand in hand to bring them to a
soft and venerable perfection. There grew the fig-tree that had run wild
and taken to wife the vine, which likewise had gone rampant out of
all human control; so that the two wild things had tangled and
knotted themselves into a wild marriage bond, and hung their various
progeny--the luscious figs, the grapes, oozy with the Southern juice,
and both endowed with a wild flavor that added the final charm--on the
same bough together.
In Kenyon’s opinion, never was any other nook so lovely as a certain
little dell which he and Donatello visited. It was hollowed in among the
hills, and open to a glimpse of the broad, fertile valley. A fountain
had its birth here, and fell into a marble basin, which was all covered
with moss and shaggy with water-weeds. Over the gush of the small
stream, with an urn in her arms, stood a marble nymph, whose nakedness
the moss had kindly clothed as with a garment; and the long trails and
tresses of the maidenhair had done what they could in the poor thing’s
behalf, by hanging themselves about her waist, In former days--it might
be a remote antiquity--this lady of the fountain had first received the
infant tide into her urn and poured it thence into the marble basin.
But now the sculptured urn had a great crack from top to bottom; and the
discontented nymph was compelled to see the basin fill itself through
a channel which she could not control, although with water long ago
consecrated to her.
For this reason, or some other, she looked terribly forlorn; and you
might have fancied that the whole fountain was but the overflow of her
lonely tears.
“This was a place that I used greatly to delight in,” remarked
Donatello, sighing. “As a child, and as a boy, I have been very happy
here.”
“And, as a man, I should ask no fitter place to be happy in,” answered
Kenyon. “But you, my friend, are of such a social nature, that I should
hardly have thought these lonely haunts would take your fancy. It is
a place for a poet to dream in, and people it with the beings of his
imagination.”
“I am no poet, that I know of,” said Donatello, “but yet, as I tell you,
I have been very happy here, in the company of this fountain and this
nymph. It is said that a Faun, my oldest forefather, brought home hither
to this very spot a human maiden, whom he loved and wedded. This spring
of delicious water was their household well.”
“It is a most enchanting fable!” exclaimed Kenyon; “that is, if it be
not a fact.”
“And why not a fact?” said the simple Donatello. “There is, likewise,
another sweet old story connected with this spot. But, now that I
remember it, it seems to me more sad than sweet, though formerly the
sorrow, in which it closes, did not so much impress me. If I had the
gift of tale-telling, this one would be sure to interest you mightily.”
“Pray tell it,” said Kenyon; “no matter whether well or ill. These wild
legends have often the most powerful charm when least artfully told.”
So the young Count narrated a myth of one of his Progenitors,--he might
have lived a century ago, or a thousand years, or before the Christian
epoch, for anything that Donatello knew to the contrary,--who had made
acquaintance with a fair creature belonging to this fountain. Whether
woman or sprite was a mystery, as was all else about her, except that
her life and soul were somehow interfused throughout the gushing water.
She was a fresh, cool, dewy thing, sunny and shadowy, full of pleasant
little mischiefs, fitful and changeable with the whim of the moment, but
yet as constant as her native stream, which kept the same gush and flow
forever, while marble crumbled over and around it. The fountain woman
loved the youth,--a knight, as Donatello called him,--for, according
to the legend, his race was akin to hers. At least, whether kin or no,
there had been friendship and sympathy of old betwixt an ancestor of
his, with furry ears, and the long-lived lady of the fountain. And,
after all those ages, she was still as young as a May morning, and as
frolicsome as a bird upon a tree, or a breeze that makes merry with the
leaves.
She taught him how to call her from her pebbly source, and they spent
many a happy hour together, more especially in the fervor of the summer
days. For often as he sat waiting for her by the margin of the spring,
she would suddenly fall down around him in a shower of sunny raindrops,
with a rainbow glancing through them, and forthwith gather herself up
into the likeness of a beautiful girl, laughing--or was it the warble of
the rill over the pebbles?--to see the youth’s amazement.
Thus, kind maiden that she was, the hot atmosphere became deliciously
cool and fragrant for this favored knight; and, furthermore, when he
knelt down to drink out of the spring, nothing was more common than for
a pair of rosy lips to come up out of its little depths, and touch his
mouth with the thrill of a sweet, cool, dewy kiss!
“It is a delightful story for the hot noon of your Tuscan summer,”
observed the sculptor, at this point. “But the deportment of the watery
lady must have had a most chilling influence in midwinter. Her lover
would find it, very literally, a cold reception!”
“I suppose,” said Donatello rather sulkily, “you are making fun of the
story. But I see nothing laughable in the thing itself, nor in what you
say about it.”
He went on to relate, that for a long While the knight found infinite
pleasure and comfort in the friendship of the fountain nymph. In his
merriest hours, she gladdened him with her sportive humor. If ever he
was annoyed with earthly trouble, she laid her moist hand upon his brow,
and charmed the fret and fever quite away.
But one day--one fatal noontide--the young knight came rushing with
hasty and irregular steps to the accustomed fountain. He called the
nymph; but--no doubt because there was something unusual and frightful
in his tone she did not appear, nor answer him. He flung himself down,
and washed his hands and bathed his feverish brow in the cool, pure
water. And then there was a sound of woe; it might have been a woman’s
voice; it might have been only the sighing of the brook over the
pebbles. The water shrank away from the youth’s hands, and left his brow
as dry and feverish as before.
Donatello here came to a dead pause.
“Why did the water shrink from this unhappy knight?” inquired the
sculptor.
“Because he had tried to wash off a bloodstain!” said the young Count,
in a horror-stricken whisper. “The guilty man had polluted the pure
water. The nymph might have comforted him in sorrow, but could not
cleanse his conscience of a crime.”
“And did he never behold her more?” asked Kenyon.
“Never but once,” replied his friend. “He never beheld her blessed face
but once again, and then there was a blood-stain on the poor nymph’s
brow; it was the stain his guilt had left in the fountain where he tried
to wash it off. He mourned for her his whole life long, and employed
the best sculptor of the time to carve this statue of the nymph from his
description of her aspect. But, though my ancestor would fain have had
the image wear her happiest look, the artist, unlike yourself, was so
impressed with the mournfulness of the story, that, in spite of his best
efforts, he made her forlorn, and forever weeping, as you see!”
Kenyon found a certain charm in this simple legend. Whether so intended
or not, he understood it as an apologue, typifying the soothing and
genial effects of an habitual intercourse with nature in all ordinary
cares and griefs; while, on the other hand, her mild influences fall
short in their effect upon the ruder passions, and are altogether
powerless in the dread fever-fit or deadly chill of guilt.
“Do you say,” he asked, “that the nymph’s race has never since been
shown to any mortal? Methinks you, by your native qualities, are as well
entitled to her favor as ever your progenitor could have been. Why have
you not summoned her?”
“I called her often when I was a silly child,” answered Donatello; and
he added, in an inward voice, “Thank Heaven, she did not come!”
“Then you never saw her?” said the sculptor.
“Never in my life!” rejoined the Count. “No, my dear friend, I have
not seen the nymph; although here, by her fountain, I used to make many
strange acquaintances; for, from my earliest childhood, I was familiar
with whatever creatures haunt the woods. You would have laughed to see
the friends I had among them; yes, among the wild, nimble things, that
reckon man their deadliest enemy! How it was first taught me, I cannot
tell; but there was a charm--a voice, a murmur, a kind of chant--by
which I called the woodland inhabitants, the furry people, and the
feathered people, in a language that they seemed to understand.”
“I have heard of such a gift,” responded the sculptor gravely, “but
never before met with a person endowed with it. Pray try the charm;
and lest I should frighten your friends away, I will withdraw into this
thicket, and merely peep at them.”
“I doubt,” said Donatello, “whether they will remember my voice now. It
changes, you know, as the boy grows towards manhood.”
Nevertheless, as the young Count’s good-nature and easy persuadability
were among his best characteristics, he set about complying with
Kenyon’s request. The latter, in his concealment among the shrubberies,
heard him send forth a sort of modulated breath, wild, rude, yet
harmonious. It struck the auditor as at once the strangest and the
most natural utterance that had ever reached his ears. Any idle boy,
it should seem, singing to himself and setting his wordless song to
no other or more definite tune than the play of his own pulses,
might produce a sound almost identical with this; and yet, it was as
individual as a murmur of the breeze. Donatello tried it, over and over
again, with many breaks, at first, and pauses of uncertainty; then with
more confidence, and a fuller swell, like a wayfarer groping out
of obscurity into the light, and moving with freer footsteps as it
brightens around him.
Anon, his voice appeared to fill the air, yet not with an obtrusive
clangor. The sound was of a murmurous character, soft, attractive,
persuasive, friendly. The sculptor fancied that such might have been
the original voice and utterance of the natural man, before the
sophistication of the human intellect formed what we now call language.
In this broad dialect--broad as the sympathies of nature--the human
brother might have spoken to his inarticulate brotherhood that prowl the
woods, or soar upon the wing, and have been intelligible to such extent
as to win their confidence.
The sound had its pathos too. At some of its simple cadences, the tears
came quietly into Kenyon’s eyes. They welled up slowly from his heart,
which was thrilling with an emotion more delightful than he had often
felt before, but which he forbore to analyze, lest, if he seized it, it
should at once perish in his grasp.
Donatello paused two or three times, and seemed to listen,--then,
recommencing, he poured his spirit and life more earnestly into the
strain. And finally,--or else the sculptor’s hope and imagination
deceived him,--soft treads were audible upon the fallen leaves. There
was a rustling among the shrubbery; a whir of wings, moreover, that
hovered in the air. It may have been all an illusion; but Kenyon fancied
that he could distinguish the stealthy, cat-like movement of some small
forest citizen, and that he could even see its doubtful shadow, if not
really its substance. But, all at once, whatever might be the reason,
there ensued a hurried rush and scamper of little feet; and then the
sculptor heard a wild, sorrowful cry, and through the crevices of the
thicket beheld Donatello fling himself on the ground.
Emerging from his hiding-place, he saw no living thing, save a brown
lizard (it was of the tarantula species) rustling away through the
sunshine. To all present appearance, this venomous reptile was the only
creature that had responded to the young Count’s efforts to renew his
intercourse with the lower orders of nature.
“What has happened to you?” exclaimed Kenyon, stooping down over his
friend, and wondering at the anguish which he betrayed.
“Death, death!” sobbed Donatello. “They know it!”
He grovelled beside the fountain, in a fit of such passionate sobbing
and weeping, that it seemed as if his heart had broken, and spilt its
wild sorrows upon the ground. His unrestrained grief and childish tears
made Kenyon sensible in how small a degree the customs and restraints of
society had really acted upon this young man, in spite of the quietude
of his ordinary deportment. In response to his friend’s efforts to
console him, he murmured words hardly more articulate than the strange
chant which he had so recently been breathing into the air.
“They know it!” was all that Kenyon could yet distinguish,--“they know
it!”
“Who know it?” asked the sculptor. “And what is it their know?” “They
know it!” repeated Donatello, trembling. “They shun me! All nature
shrinks from me, and shudders at me! I live in the midst of a curse,
that hems me round with a circle of fire! No innocent thing can come
near me.”
“Be comforted, my dear friend,” said Kenyon, kneeling beside him. “You
labor under some illusion, but no curse. As for this strange, natural
spell, which you have been exercising, and of which I have heard before,
though I never believed in, nor expected to witness it, I am satisfied
that you still possess it. It was my own half-concealed presence, no
doubt, and some involuntary little movement of mine, that scared away
your forest friends.”
“They are friends of mine no longer,” answered Donatello.
“We all of us, as we grow older,” rejoined Kenyon, “lose somewhat of our
proximity to nature. It is the price we pay for experience.”
“A heavy price, then!” said Donatello, rising from the ground. “But we
will speak no more of it. Forget this scene, my dear friend. In your
eyes, it must look very absurd. It is a grief, I presume, to all men, to
find the pleasant privileges and properties of early life departing from
them. That grief has now befallen me. Well; I shall waste no more tears
for such a cause!”
Nothing else made Kenyon so sensible of a change in Donatello, as his
newly acquired power of dealing with his own emotions, and, after a
struggle more or less fierce, thrusting them down into the prison cells
where he usually kept them confined. The restraint, which he now put
upon himself, and the mask of dull composure which he succeeded in
clasping over his still beautiful, and once faun-like face, affected the
sensitive sculptor more sadly than even the unrestrained passion of the
preceding scene. It is a very miserable epoch, when the evil necessities
of life, in our tortuous world, first get the better of us so far as to
compel us to attempt throwing a cloud over our transparency. Simplicity
increases in value the longer we can keep it, and the further we carry
it onward into life; the loss of a child’s simplicity, in the inevitable
lapse of years, causes but a natural sigh or two, because even his
mother feared that he could not keep it always. But after a young man
has brought it through his childhood, and has still worn it in
his bosom, not as an early dewdrop, but as a diamond of pure white
lustre,--it is a pity to lose it, then. And thus, when Kenyon saw how
much his friend had now to hide, and how well he hid it, he would have
wept, although his tears would have been even idler than those which
Donatello had just shed.
They parted on the lawn before the house, the Count to climb his tower,
and the sculptor to read an antique edition of Dante, which he had found
among some old volumes of Catholic devotion, in a seldom-visited room,
Tomaso met him in the entrance hall, and showed a desire to speak.
“Our poor signorino looks very sad to-day!” he said.
“Even so, good Tomaso,” replied the sculptor. “Would that we could raise
his spirits a little!”
“There might be means, Signore,” answered the old butler, “if one might
but be sure that they were the right ones. We men are but rough nurses
for a sick body or a sick spirit.”
“Women, you would say, my good friend, are better,” said the sculptor,
struck by an intelligence in the butler’s face. “That is possible! But
it depends.”
“Ah; we will wait a little longer,” said Tomaso, with the customary
shake of his head.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE OWL TOWER
“Will you not show me your tower?” said the sculptor one day to his
friend.
“It is plainly enough to be seen, methinks,” answered the Count, with
a kind of sulkiness that often appeared in him, as one of the little
symptoms of inward trouble.
“Yes; its exterior is visible far and wide,” said Kenyon. “But such
a gray, moss-grown tower as this, however valuable as an object of
scenery, will certainly be quite as interesting inside as out. It cannot
be less than six hundred years old; the foundations and lower story are
much older than that, I should judge; and traditions probably cling to
the walls within quite as plentifully as the gray and yellow lichens
cluster on its face without.”
“No doubt,” replied Donatello,--“but I know little of such things, and
never could comprehend the interest which some of you Forestieri take
in them. A year or two ago an English signore, with a venerable white
beard--they say he was a magician, too--came hither from as far off as
Florence, just to see my tower.”
“Ah, I have seen him at Florence,” observed Kenyon. “He is a
necromancer, as you say, and dwells in an old mansion of the Knights
Templars, close by the Ponte Vecchio, with a great many ghostly books,
pictures, and antiquities, to make the house gloomy, and one bright-eyed
little girl, to keep it cheerful!”
“I know him only by his white beard,” said Donatello; “but he could
have told you a great deal about the tower, and the sieges which it has
stood, and the prisoners who have been confined in it. And he gathered
up all the traditions of the Monte Beni family, and, among the rest,
the sad one which I told you at the fountain the other day. He had known
mighty poets, he said, in his earlier life; and the most illustrious
of them would have rejoiced to preserve such a legend in immortal
rhyme,--especially if he could have had some of our wine of Sunshine to
help out his inspiration!”
“Any man might be a poet, as well as Byron, with such wine and such
a theme,” rejoined the sculptor. “But shall we climb your tower The
thunder-storm gathering yonder among the hills will be a spectacle worth
witnessing.”
“Come, then,” said the Count, adding, with a sigh, “it has a weary
staircase, and dismal chambers, and it is very lonesome at the summit!”
“Like a man’s life, when he has climbed to eminence,” remarked the
sculptor; “or, let us rather say, with its difficult steps, and the dark
prison cells you speak of, your tower resembles the spiritual experience
of many a sinful soul, which, nevertheless, may struggle upward into the
pure air and light of Heaven at last!”
Donatello sighed again, and led the way up into the tower.
Mounting the broad staircase that ascended from the entrance hall,
they traversed the great wilderness of a house, through some obscure
passages, and came to a low, ancient doorway. It admitted them to a
narrow turret stair which zigzagged upward, lighted in its progress by
loopholes and iron-barred windows. Reaching the top of the first flight,
the Count threw open a door of worm-eaten oak, and disclosed a chamber
that occupied the whole area of the tower. It was most pitiably forlorn
of aspect, with a brick-paved floor, bare holes through the massive
walls, grated with iron, instead of windows, and for furniture an
old stool, which increased the dreariness of the place tenfold, by
suggesting an idea of its having once been tenanted.
“This was a prisoner’s cell in the old days,” said Donatello; “the
white-bearded necromancer, of whom I told you, found out that a certain
famous monk was confined here, about five hundred years ago. He was a
very holy man, and was afterwards burned at the stake in the Grand-ducal
Square at Firenze. There have always been stories, Tomaso says, of
a hooded monk creeping up and down these stairs, or standing in the
doorway of this chamber. It must needs be the ghost of the ancient
prisoner. Do you believe in ghosts?”
“I can hardly tell,” replied Kenyon; “on the whole, I think not.”
“Neither do I,” responded the Count; “for, if spirits ever come back,
I should surely have met one within these two months past. Ghosts never
rise! So much I know, and am glad to know it!”
Following the narrow staircase still higher, they came to another room
of similar size and equally forlorn, but inhabited by two personages of
a race which from time immemorial have held proprietorship and occupancy
in ruined towers. These were a pair of owls, who, being doubtless
acquainted with Donatello, showed little sign of alarm at the entrance
of visitors. They gave a dismal croak or two, and hopped aside into the
darkest corner, since it was not yet their hour to flap duskily abroad.
“They do not desert me, like my other feathered acquaintances,” observed
the young Count, with a sad smile, alluding to the scene which Kenyon
had witnessed at the fountain-side. “When I was a wild, playful boy, the
owls did not love me half so well.”
He made no further pause here, but led his friend up another flight of
steps--while, at every stage, the windows and narrow loopholes afforded
Kenyon more extensive eye-shots over hill and valley, and allowed him
to taste the cool purity of mid-atmosphere. At length they reached the
topmost chamber, directly beneath the roof of the tower.
“This is my own abode,” said Donatello; “my own owl’s nest.”
In fact, the room was fitted up as a bedchamber, though in a style of
the utmost simplicity. It likewise served as an oratory; there being
a crucifix in one corner, and a multitude of holy emblems, such as
Catholics judge it necessary to help their devotion withal. Several
ugly little prints, representing the sufferings of the Saviour, and the
martyrdoms of saints, hung on the wall; and behind the crucifix there
was a good copy of Titian’s Magdalen of the Pitti Palace, clad only in
the flow of her golden ringlets. She had a confident look (but it was
Titian’s fault, not the penitent woman’s), as if expecting to win
heaven by the free display of her earthly charms. Inside of a glass case
appeared an image of the sacred Bambino, in the guise of a little waxen
boy, very prettily made, reclining among flowers, like a Cupid, and
holding up a heart that resembled a bit of red sealing-wax. A small vase
of precious marble was full of holy water.
Beneath the crucifix, on a table, lay a human skull, which looked as if
it might have been dug up out of some old grave. But, examining it
more closely, Kenyon saw that it was carved in gray alabaster; most
skillfully done to the death, with accurate imitation of the teeth,
the sutures, the empty eye-caverns, and the fragile little bones of the
nose. This hideous emblem rested on a cushion of white marble, so nicely
wrought that you seemed to see the impression of the heavy skull in a
silken and downy substance.
Donatello dipped his fingers into the holy-water vase, and crossed
himself. After doing so he trembled.
“I have no right to make the sacred symbol on a sinful breast!” he said.
“On what mortal breast can it be made, then?” asked the sculptor. “Is
there one that hides no sin?”
“But these blessed emblems make you smile, I fear,” resumed the Count,
looking askance at his friend. “You heretics, I know, attempt to pray
without even a crucifix to kneel at.”
“I, at least, whom you call a heretic, reverence that holy symbol,”
answered Kenyon. “What I am most inclined to murmur at is this death’s
head. I could laugh, moreover, in its ugly face! It is absurdly
monstrous, my dear friend, thus to fling the dead weight of our
mortality upon our immortal hopes. While we live on earth, ‘t is true,
we must needs carry our skeletons about with us; but, for Heaven’s sake,
do not let us burden our spirits with them, in our feeble efforts to
soar upward! Believe me, it will change the whole aspect of death, if
you can once disconnect it, in your idea, with that corruption from
which it disengages our higher part.”
“I do not well understand you,” said Donatello; and he took up the
alabaster skull, shuddering, and evidently feeling it a kind of penance
to touch it. “I only know that this skull has been in my family for
centuries. Old Tomaso has a story that it was copied by a famous
sculptor from the skull of that same unhappy knight who loved the
fountain lady, and lost her by a blood-stain. He lived and died with a
deep sense of sin upon him, and on his death-bed he ordained that this
token of him should go down to his posterity. And my forefathers, being
a cheerful race of men in their natural disposition, found it needful to
have the skull often before their eyes, because they dearly loved life
and its enjoyments, and hated the very thought of death.”
“I am afraid,” said Kenyon, “they liked it none the better, for seeing
its face under this abominable mask.”
Without further discussion, the Count led the way up one more flight of
stairs, at the end of which they emerged upon the summit of the tower.
The sculptor felt as if his being were suddenly magnified a hundredfold;
so wide was the Umbrian valley that suddenly opened before him, set in
its grand framework of nearer and more distant hills. It seemed as if
all Italy lay under his eyes in that one picture. For there was the
broad, sunny smile of God, which we fancy to be spread over that favored
land more abundantly than on other regions, and beneath it glowed a
most rich and varied fertility. The trim vineyards were there, and the
fig-trees, and the mulberries, and the smoky-hued tracts of the olive
orchards; there, too, were fields of every kind of grain, among which,
waved the Indian corn, putting Kenyon in mind of the fondly remembered
acres of his father’s homestead. White villas, gray convents, church
spires, villages, towns, each with its battlemented walls and towered
gateway, were scattered upon this spacious map; a river gleamed across
it; and lakes opened their blue eyes in its face, reflecting heaven,
lest mortals should forget that better land when they beheld the earth
so beautiful.
What made the valley look still wider was the two or three varieties
of weather that were visible on its surface, all at the same instant of
time. Here lay the quiet sunshine; there fell the great black patches
of ominous shadow from the clouds; and behind them, like a giant of
league-long strides, came hurrying the thunderstorm, which had already
swept midway across the plain. In the rear of the approaching tempest,
brightened forth again the sunny splendor, which its progress had
darkened with so terrible a frown.
All round this majestic landscape, the bald-peaked or forest-crowned
mountains descended boldly upon the plain. On many of their spurs and
midway declivities, and even on their summits, stood cities, some of
them famous of old; for these had been the seats and nurseries of early
art, where the flower of beauty sprang out of a rocky soil, and in
a high, keen atmosphere, when the richest and most sheltered gardens
failed to nourish it.
“Thank God for letting me again behold this scene!” Said the sculptor, a
devout man in his way, reverently taking off his hat. “I have viewed it
from many points, and never without as full a sensation of gratitude
as my heart seems capable of feeling. How it strengthens the poor human
spirit in its reliance on His providence, to ascend but this little way
above the common level, and so attain a somewhat wider glimpse of His
dealings with mankind! He doeth all things right! His will be done!”
“You discern something that is hidden from me,” observed Donatello
gloomily, yet striving with unwonted grasp to catch the analogies
which so cheered his friend. “I see sunshine on one spot, and cloud in
another, and no reason for it in either ease. The sun on you; the cloud
on me! What comfort can I draw from this?”
“Nay; I cannot preach,” said Kenyon, “with a page of heaven and a page
of earth spread wide open before us! Only begin to read it, and you
will find it interpreting itself without the aid of words. It is a great
mistake to try to put our best thoughts into human language. When we
ascend into the higher regions of emotion and spiritual enjoyment, they
are only expressible by such grand hieroglyphics as these around us.”
They stood awhile, contemplating the scene; but, as inevitably happens
after a spiritual flight, it was not long before the sculptor felt his
wings flagging in the rarity of the upper atmosphere. He was glad to let
himself quietly downward out of the mid-sky, as it were, and alight on
the solid platform of the battlemented tower. He looked about him,
and beheld growing out of the stone pavement, which formed the roof, a
little shrub, with green and glossy leaves. It was the only green thing
there; and Heaven knows how its seeds had ever been planted, at that
airy height, or how it had found nourishment for its small life in the
chinks of the stones; for it had no earth, and nothing more like soil
than the crumbling mortar, which had been crammed into the crevices in a
long-past age.
Yet the plant seemed fond of its native site; and Donatello said it
had always grown there from his earliest remembrance, and never, he
believed, any smaller or any larger than they saw it now.
“I wonder if the shrub teaches you any good lesson,” said he, observing
the interest with which Kenyon examined it. “If the wide valley has a
great meaning, the plant ought to have at least a little one; and it has
been growing on our tower long enough to have learned how to speak it.”
“O, certainly!” answered the sculptor; “the shrub has its moral, or
it would have perished long ago. And, no doubt, it is for your use and
edification, since you have had it before your eyes all your lifetime,
and now are moved to ask what may be its lesson.”
“It teaches me nothing,” said the simple Donatello, stooping over the
plant, and perplexing himself with a minute scrutiny. “But here was a
worm that would have killed it; an ugly creature, which I will fling
over the battlements.”
CHAPTER XXIX
ON THE BATTLEMENTS
The sculptor now looked through art embrasure, and threw down a bit of
lime, watching its fall, till it struck upon a stone bench at the rocky
foundation of the tower, and flew into many fragments.
“Pray pardon me for helping Time to crumble away your ancestral walls,”
said he. “But I am one of those persons who have a natural tendency to
climb heights, and to stand on the verge of them, measuring the depth
below. If I were to do just as I like, at this moment, I should fling
myself down after that bit of lime. It is a very singular temptation,
and all but irresistible; partly, I believe, because it might be so
easily done, and partly because such momentous consequences would ensue,
without my being compelled to wait a moment for them. Have you never
felt this strange impulse of an evil spirit at your back, shoving you
towards a precipice?”
“Ah, no!” cried. Donatello, shrinking from the battlemented wall with a
face of horror. “I cling to life in a way which you cannot conceive; it
has been so rich, so warm, so sunny!--and beyond its verge, nothing
but the chilly dark! And then a fall from a precipice is such an awful
death!”
“Nay; if it be a great height,” said Kenyon, “a man would leave his life
in the air, and never feel the hard shock at the bottom.”
“That is not the way with this kind of death!” exclaimed Donatello, in a
low, horror-stricken voice, which grew higher and more full of emotion
as he proceeded. “Imagine a fellow creature,--breathing now, and looking
you in the face,--and now tumbling down, down, down, with a long shriek
wavering after him, all the way! He does not leave his life in the air!
No; but it keeps in him till he thumps against the stones, a horribly
long while; then he lies there frightfully quiet, a dead heap of bruised
flesh and broken bones! A quiver runs through the crushed mass; and no
more movement after that! No; not if you would give your soul to make
him stir a finger! Ah, terrible! Yes, yes; I would fain fling myself
down for the very dread of it, that I might endure it once for all, and
dream of it no more!”
“How forcibly, how frightfully you conceive this!” said the sculptor,
aghast at the passionate horror which was betrayed in the Count’s words,
and still more in his wild gestures and ghastly look. “Nay, if the
height of your tower affects your imagination thus, you do wrong to
trust yourself here in solitude, and in the night-time, and at all
unguarded hours. You are not safe in your chamber. It is but a step or
two; and what if a vivid dream should lead you up hither at midnight,
and act itself out as a reality!”
Donatello had hidden his face in his hands, and was leaning against the
parapet.
“No fear of that!” said he. “Whatever the dream may be, I am too genuine
a coward to act out my own death in it.”
The paroxysm passed away, and the two friends continued their desultory
talk, very much as if no such interruption had occurred. Nevertheless,
it affected the sculptor with infinite pity to see this young man, who
had been born to gladness as an assured heritage, now involved in a
misty bewilderment of grievous thoughts, amid which he seemed to go
staggering blindfold. Kenyon, not without an unshaped suspicion of
the definite fact, knew that his condition must have resulted from the
weight and gloom of life, now first, through the agency of a secret
trouble, making themselves felt on a character that had heretofore
breathed only an atmosphere of joy. The effect of this hard lesson,
upon Donatello’s intellect and disposition, was very striking. It was
perceptible that he had already had glimpses of strange and subtle
matters in those dark caverns, into which all men must descend, if
they would know anything beneath the surface and illusive pleasures of
existence. And when they emerge, though dazzled and blinded by the first
glare of daylight, they take truer and sadder views of life forever
afterwards.
From some mysterious source, as the sculptor felt assured, a soul had
been inspired into the young Count’s simplicity, since their intercourse
in Rome. He now showed a far deeper sense, and an intelligence that
began to deal with high subjects, though in a feeble and childish way.
He evinced, too, a more definite and nobler individuality, but developed
out of grief and pain, and fearfully conscious of the pangs that had
given it birth. Every human life, if it ascends to truth or delves down
to reality, must undergo a similar change; but sometimes, perhaps, the
instruction comes without the sorrow; and oftener the sorrow teaches
no lesson that abides with us. In Donatello’s case, it was pitiful, and
almost ludicrous, to observe the confused struggle that he made; how
completely he was taken by surprise; how ill-prepared he stood, on this
old battlefield of the world, to fight with such an inevitable foe as
mortal calamity, and sin for its stronger ally.
“And yet,” thought Kenyon, “the poor fellow bears himself like a hero,
too! If he would only tell me his trouble, or give me an opening to
speak frankly about it, I might help him; but he finds it too horrible
to be uttered, and fancies himself the only mortal that ever felt the
anguish of remorse. Yes; he believes that nobody ever endured his agony
before; so that--sharp enough in itself--it has all the additional zest
of a torture just invented to plague him individually.”
The sculptor endeavored to dismiss the painful subject from his mind;
and, leaning against the battlements, he turned his face southward and
westward, and gazed across the breadth of the valley. His thoughts
flew far beyond even those wide boundaries, taking an air-line from
Donatello’s tower to another turret that ascended into the sky of the
summer afternoon, invisibly to him, above the roofs of distant Rome.
Then rose tumultuously into his consciousness that strong love for
Hilda, which it was his habit to confine in one of the heart’s inner
chambers, because he had found no encouragement to bring it forward. But
now he felt a strange pull at his heart-strings. It could not have been
more perceptible, if all the way between these battlements and Hilda’s
dove-cote had stretched an exquisitely sensitive cord, which, at the
hither end, was knotted with his aforesaid heart-strings, and, at the
remoter one, was grasped by a gentle hand. His breath grew tremulous. He
put his hand to his breast; so distinctly did he seem to feel that cord
drawn once, and again, and again, as if--though still it was bashfully
intimated there were an importunate demand for his presence. O for the
white wings of Hilda’s doves, that he might, have flown thither, and
alighted at the Virgin’s shrine!
But lovers, and Kenyon knew it well, project so lifelike a copy of
their mistresses out of their own imaginations, that it can pull at
the heartstrings almost as perceptibly as the genuine original. No airy
intimations are to be trusted; no evidences of responsive affection less
positive than whispered and broken words, or tender pressures of the
hand, allowed and half returned; or glances, that distil many passionate
avowals into one gleam of richly colored light. Even these should
be weighed rigorously, at the instant; for, in another instant, the
imagination seizes on them as its property, and stamps them with its
own arbitrary value. But Hilda’s maidenly reserve had given her lover no
such tokens, to be interpreted either by his hopes or fears.
“Yonder, over mountain and valley, lies Rome,” said the sculptor; “shall
you return thither in the autumn?”
“Never! I hate Rome,” answered Donatello; “and have good cause.”
“And yet it was a pleasant winter that we spent there,” observed
Kenyon, “and with pleasant friends about us. You would meet them again
there--all of them.”
“All?” asked Donatello.
“All, to the best of my belief,” said the sculptor: “but you need not go
to Rome to seek them. If there were one of those friends whose lifetime
was twisted with your own, I am enough of a fatalist to feel assured
that you will meet that one again, wander whither you may. Neither can
we escape the companions whom Providence assigns for us, by climbing an
old tower like this.”
“Yet the stairs are steep and dark,” rejoined the Count; “none but
yourself would seek me here, or find me, if they sought.”
As Donatello did not take advantage of this opening which his friend had
kindly afforded him to pour out his hidden troubles, the latter again
threw aside the subject, and returned to the enjoyment of the scene
before him. The thunder-storm, which he had beheld striding across the
valley, had passed to the left of Monte Beni, and was continuing its
march towards the hills that formed the boundary on the eastward.
Above the whole valley, indeed, the sky was heavy with tumbling vapors,
interspersed with which were tracts of blue, vividly brightened by the
sun; but, in the east, where the tempest was yet trailing its ragged
skirts, lay a dusky region of cloud and sullen mist, in which some of
the hills appeared of a dark purple hue. Others became so indistinct,
that the spectator could not tell rocky height from impalpable cloud.
Far into this misty cloud region, however,--within the domain of chaos,
as it were,--hilltops were seen brightening in the sunshine; they looked
like fragments of the world, broken adrift and based on nothingness,
or like portions of a sphere destined to exist, but not yet finally
compacted.
The sculptor, habitually drawing many of the images and illustrations
of his thoughts from the plastic art, fancied that the scene represented
the process of the Creator, when he held the new, imperfect earth in his
hand, and modelled it.
“What a magic is in mist and vapor among the mountains!” he exclaimed.
“With their help, one single scene becomes a thousand. The cloud scenery
gives such variety to a hilly landscape that it would be worth while to
journalize its aspect from hour to hour. A cloud, however,--as I have
myself experienced,--is apt to grow solid and as heavy as a stone the
instant that you take in hand to describe it, But, in my own heart,
I have found great use in clouds. Such silvery ones as those to the
northward, for example, have often suggested sculpturesque groups,
figures, and attitudes; they are especially rich in attitudes of living
repose, which a sculptor only hits upon by the rarest good fortune. When
I go back to my dear native land, the clouds along the horizon will be
my only gallery of art!”
“I can see cloud shapes, too,” said Donatello; “yonder is one that
shifts strangely; it has been like people whom I knew. And now, if I
watch it a little longer, it will take the figure of a monk reclining,
with his cowl about his head and drawn partly over his face, and--well!
did I not tell you so?”
“I think,” remarked Kenyon, “we can hardly be gazing at the same cloud.
What I behold is a reclining figure, to be sure, but feminine, and with
a despondent air, wonderfully well expressed in the wavering outline
from head to foot. It moves my very heart by something indefinable that
it suggests.”
“I see the figure, and almost the face,” said the Count; adding, in a
lower voice, “It is Miriam’s!”
“No, not Miriam’s,” answered the sculptor. While the two gazers thus
found their own reminiscences and presentiments floating among the
clouds, the day drew to its close, and now showed them the fair
spectacle of an Italian sunset. The sky was soft and bright, but not so
gorgeous as Kenyon had seen it, a thousand times, in America; for there
the western sky is wont to be set aflame with breadths and depths of
color with which poets seek in vain to dye their verses, and which
painters never dare to copy. As beheld from the tower of Monte Beni, the
scene was tenderly magnificent, with mild gradations of hue and a lavish
outpouring of gold, but rather such gold as we see on the leaf of a
bright flower than the burnished glow of metal from the mine. Or, if
metallic, it looked airy and unsubstantial, like the glorified dreams
of an alchemist. And speedily--more speedily than in our own clime--came
the twilight, and, brightening through its gray transparency, the stars.
A swarm of minute insects that had been hovering all day round the
battlements were now swept away by the freshness of a rising breeze.
The two owls in the chamber beneath Donatello’s uttered their soft
melancholy cry,--which, with national avoidance of harsh sounds, Italian
owls substitute for the hoot of their kindred in other countries,--and
flew darkling forth among the shrubbery. A convent bell rang out near at
hand, and was not only echoed among the hills, but answered by another
bell, and still another, which doubtless had farther and farther
responses, at various distances along the valley; for, like the English
drumbeat around the globe, there is a chain of convent bells from end
to end, and crosswise, and in all possible directions over priest-ridden
Italy.
“Come,” said the sculptor, “the evening air grows cool. It is time to
descend.”
“Time for you, my friend,” replied the Count; and he hesitated a little
before adding, “I must keep a vigil here for some hours longer. It is my
frequent custom to keep vigils,--and sometimes the thought occurs to me
whether it were not better to keep them in yonder convent, the bell of
which just now seemed to summon me. Should I do wisely, do you think, to
exchange this old tower for a cell?”
“What! Turn monk?” exclaimed his friend. “A horrible idea!”
“True,” said Donatello, sighing. “Therefore, if at all, I purpose doing
it.”
“Then think of it no more, for Heaven’s sake!” cried the sculptor.
“There are a thousand better and more poignant methods of being
miserable than that, if to be miserable is what you wish. Nay; I
question whether a monk keeps himself up to the intellectual and
spiritual height which misery implies. A monk I judge from their sensual
physiognomies, which meet me at every turn--is inevitably a beast! Their
souls, if they have any to begin with, perish out of them, before their
sluggish, swinish existence is half done. Better, a million times, to
stand star-gazing on these airy battlements, than to smother your new
germ of a higher life in a monkish cell!”
“You make me tremble,” said Donatello, “by your bold aspersion of men
who have devoted themselves to God’s service!”
“They serve neither God nor man, and themselves least of all, though
their motives be utterly selfish,” replied Kenyon. “Avoid the convent,
my dear friend, as you would shun the death of the soul! But, for my own
part, if I had an insupportable burden,--if, for any cause, I were
bent upon sacrificing every earthly hope as a peace-offering towards
Heaven,--I would make the wide world my cell, and good deeds to mankind
my prayer. Many penitent men have done this, and found peace in it.”
“Ah, but you are a heretic!” said the Count.
Yet his face brightened beneath the stars; and, looking at it through
the twilight, the sculptor’s remembrance went back to that scene in the
Capitol, where, both in features and expression, Donatello had seemed
identical with the Faun. And still there was a resemblance; for now,
when first the idea was suggested of living for the welfare of his
fellow-creatures, the original beauty, which sorrow had partly effaced,
came back elevated and spiritualized. In the black depths the Faun had
found a soul, and was struggling with it towards the light of heaven.
The illumination, it is true, soon faded out of Donatello’s face. The
idea of lifelong and unselfish effort was too high to be received by
him with more than a momentary comprehension. An Italian, indeed,
seldom dreams of being philanthropic, except in bestowing alms among the
paupers, who appeal to his beneficence at every step; nor does it
occur to him that there are fitter modes of propitiating Heaven than
by penances, pilgrimages, and offerings at shrines. Perhaps, too, their
system has its share of moral advantages; they, at all events, cannot
well pride themselves, as our own more energetic benevolence is apt to
do, upon sharing in the counsels of Providence and kindly helping out
its otherwise impracticable designs.
And now the broad valley twinkled with lights, that glimmered through
its duskiness like the fireflies in the garden of a Florentine palace. A
gleam of lightning from the rear of the tempest showed the circumference
of hills and the great space between, as the last cannon-flash of a
retreating army reddens across the field where it has fought. The
sculptor was on the point of descending the turret stair, when,
somewhere in the darkness that lay beneath them, a woman’s voice was
heard, singing a low, sad strain.
“Hark!” said he, laying his hand on Donatello’s arm.
And Donatello had said “Hark!” at the same instant.
The song, if song it could be called, that had only a wild rhythm, and
flowed forth in the fitful measure of a wind-harp, did not clothe itself
in the sharp brilliancy of the Italian tongue. The words, so far as they
could be distinguished, were German, and therefore unintelligible to the
Count, and hardly less so to the sculptor; being softened and molten,
as it were, into the melancholy richness of the voice that sung them. It
was as the murmur of a soul bewildered amid the sinful gloom of earth,
and retaining only enough memory of a better state to make sad music
of the wail, which would else have been a despairing shriek. Never was
there profounder pathos than breathed through that mysterious voice;
it brought the tears into the sculptor’s eyes, with remembrances and
forebodings of whatever sorrow he had felt or apprehended; it made
Donatello sob, as chiming in with the anguish that he found unutterable,
and giving it the expression which he vaguely sought.
But, when the emotion was at its profoundest depth, the voice rose out
of it, yet so gradually that a gloom seemed to pervade it, far upward
from the abyss, and not entirely to fall away as it ascended into a
higher and purer region. At last, the auditors would have fancied that
the melody, with its rich sweetness all there, and much of its sorrow
gone, was floating around the very summit of the tower.
“Donatello,” said the sculptor, when there was silence again, “had that
voice no message for your ear?”
“I dare not receive it,” said Donatello; “the anguish of which it spoke
abides with me: the hope dies away with the breath that brought it
hither. It is not good for me to hear that voice.”
The sculptor sighed, and left the poor penitent keeping his vigil on the
tower.
CHAPTER XXX
DONATELLO’S BUST
Kenyon, it will be remembered, had asked Donatello’s permission to model
his bust. The work had now made considerable progress, and necessarily
kept the sculptor’s thoughts brooding much and often upon his host’s
personal characteristics. These it was his difficult office to bring out
from their depths, and interpret them to all men, showing them what they
could not discern for themselves, yet must be compelled to recognize at
a glance, on the surface of a block of marble.
He had never undertaken a portrait-bust which gave him so much trouble
as Donatello’s; not that there was any special difficulty in hitting
the likeness, though even in this respect the grace and harmony of
the features seemed inconsistent with a prominent expression of
individuality; but he was chiefly perplexed how to make this genial and
kind type of countenance the index of the mind within. His acuteness and
his sympathies, indeed, were both somewhat at fault in their efforts
to enlighten him as to the moral phase through which the Count was now
passing. If at one sitting he caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a
genuine and permanent trait, it would probably be less perceptible on
a second occasion, and perhaps have vanished entirely at a third. So
evanescent a show of character threw the sculptor into despair; not
marble or clay, but cloud and vapor, was the material in which it
ought to be represented. Even the ponderous depression which constantly
weighed upon Donatello’s heart could not compel him into the kind of
repose which the plastic art requires.
Hopeless of a good result, Kenyon gave up all preconceptions about the
character of his subject, and let his hands work uncontrolled with the
clay, somewhat as a spiritual medium, while holding a pen, yields it
to an unseen guidance other than that of her own will. Now and then he
fancied that this plan was destined to be the successful one. A skill
and insight beyond his consciousness seemed occasionally to take up the
task. The mystery, the miracle, of imbuing an inanimate substance
with thought, feeling, and all the intangible attributes of the soul,
appeared on the verge of being wrought. And now, as he flattered
himself, the true image of his friend was about to emerge from the
facile material, bringing with it more of Donatello’s character than
the keenest observer could detect at any one moment in the face of the
original Vain expectation!--some touch, whereby the artist thought to
improve or hasten the result, interfered with the design of his unseen
spiritual assistant, and spoilt the whole. There was still the moist,
brown clay, indeed, and the features of Donatello, but without any
semblance of intelligent and sympathetic life.
“The difficulty will drive me mad, I verily believe!” cried the sculptor
nervously. “Look at the wretched piece of work yourself, my dear friend,
and tell me whether you recognize any manner of likeness to your inner
man?”
“None,” replied Donatello, speaking the simple truth. “It is like
looking a stranger in the face.”
This frankly unfavorable testimony so wrought with the sensitive artist,
that he fell into a passion with the stubborn image, and cared not what
might happen to it thenceforward. Wielding that wonderful power which
sculptors possess over moist clay, however refractory it may show itself
in certain respects, he compressed, elongated, widened, and otherwise
altered the features of the bust in mere recklessness, and at every
change inquired of the Count whether the expression became anywise more
satisfactory.
“Stop!” cried Donatello at last, catching the sculptor’s hand. “Let
it remain so!” By some accidental handling of the clay, entirely
independent of his own will, Kenyon had given the countenance a
distorted and violent look, combining animal fierceness with intelligent
hatred. Had Hilda, or had Miriam, seen the bust, with the expression
which it had now assumed, they might have recognized Donatello’s face as
they beheld it at that terrible moment when he held his victim over the
edge of the precipice.
“What have I done?” said the sculptor, shocked at his own casual
production. “It were a sin to let the clay which bears your features
harden into a look like that. Cain never wore an uglier one.”
“For that very reason, let it remain!” answered the Count, who had grown
pale as ashes at the aspect of his crime, thus strangely presented to
him in another of the many guises under which guilt stares the criminal
in the face. “Do not alter it! Chisel it, rather, in eternal marble!
I will set it up in my oratory and keep it continually before my eyes.
Sadder and more horrible is a face like this, alive with my own crime,
than the dead skull which my forefathers handed down to me!”
But, without in the least heeding Donatello’s remonstrances, the
sculptor again applied his artful fingers to the clay, and compelled the
bust to dismiss the expression that had so startled them both.
“Believe me,” said he, turning his eyes upon his friend, full of grave
and tender sympathy, “you know not what is requisite for your spiritual
growth, seeking, as you do, to keep your soul perpetually in the
unwholesome region of remorse. It was needful for you to pass through
that dark valley, but it is infinitely dangerous to linger there too
long; there is poison in the atmosphere, when we sit down and brood in
it, instead of girding up our loins to press onward. Not despondency,
not slothful anguish, is what you now require,--but effort! Has there
been an unalterable evil in your young life? Then crowd it out with
good, or it will lie corrupting there forever, and cause your capacity
for better things to partake its noisome corruption!”
“You stir up many thoughts,” said Donatello, pressing his hand upon his
brow, “but the multitude and the whirl of them make me dizzy.”
They now left the sculptor’s temporary studio, without observing that
his last accidental touches, with which he hurriedly effaced the look of
deadly rage, had given the bust a higher and sweeter expression than it
had hitherto worn. It is to be regretted that Kenyon had not seen
it; for only an artist, perhaps, can conceive the irksomeness, the
irritation of brain, the depression of spirits, that resulted from his
failure to satisfy himself, after so much toil and thought as he had
bestowed on Donatello’s bust. In case of success, indeed, all this
thoughtful toil would have been reckoned, not only as well bestowed,
but as among the happiest hours of his life; whereas, deeming himself to
have failed, it was just so much of life that had better never have
been lived; for thus does the good or ill result of his labor throw back
sunshine or gloom upon the artist’s mind. The sculptor, therefore, would
have done well to glance again at his work; for here were still the
features of the antique Faun, but now illuminated with a higher meaning,
such as the old marble never bore.
Donatello having quitted him, Kenyon spent the rest of the day strolling
about the pleasant precincts of Monte Beni, where the summer was now
so far advanced that it began, indeed, to partake of the ripe wealth of
autumn. Apricots had long been abundant, and had passed away, and plums
and cherries along with them. But now came great, juicy pears, melting
and delicious, and peaches of goodly size and tempting aspect, though
cold and watery to the palate, compared with the sculptor’s rich
reminiscences of that fruit in America. The purple figs had already
enjoyed their day, and the white ones were luscious now. The contadini
(who, by this time, knew Kenyon well) found many clusters of ripe grapes
for him, in every little globe of which was included a fragrant draught
of the sunny Monte Beni wine.
Unexpectedly, in a nook close by the farmhouse, he happened upon a spot
where the vintage had actually commenced. A great heap of early ripened
grapes had been gathered, and thrown into a mighty tub. In the middle
of it stood a lusty and jolly contadino, nor stood, merely, but stamped
with all his might, and danced amain; while the red juice bathed his
feet, and threw its foam midway up his brown and shaggy legs. Here,
then, was the very process that shows so picturesquely in Scripture
and in poetry, of treading out the wine-press and dyeing the feet and
garments with the crimson effusion as with the blood of a battlefield.
The memory of the process does not make the Tuscan wine taste more
deliciously. The contadini hospitably offered Kenyon a sample of the new
liquor, that had already stood fermenting for a day or two. He had tried
a similar draught, however, in years past, and was little inclined to
make proof of it again; for he knew that it would be a sour and bitter
juice, a wine of woe and tribulation, and that the more a man drinks of
such liquor, the sorrier he is likely to be.
The scene reminded the sculptor of our New England vintages, where the
big piles of golden and rosy apples lie under the orchard trees, in the
mild, autumnal sunshine; and the creaking cider-mill, set in motion by
a circumgyratory horse, is all a-gush with the luscious juice. To speak
frankly, the cider-making is the more picturesque sight of the two,
and the new, sweet cider an infinitely better drink than the ordinary,
unripe Tuscan wine. Such as it is, however, the latter fills thousands
upon thousands of small, flat barrels, and, still growing thinner and
sharper, loses the little life it had, as wine, and becomes apotheosized
as a more praiseworthy vinegar.
Yet all these vineyard scenes, and the processes connected with the
culture of the grape, had a flavor of poetry about them. The toil that
produces those kindly gifts of nature which are not the substance of
life, but its luxury, is unlike other toil. We are inclined to fancy
that it does not bend the sturdy frame and stiffen the overwrought
muscles, like the labor that is devoted in sad, hard earnest to
raise grain for sour bread. Certainly, the sunburnt young men and
dark-cheeked, laughing girls, who weeded the rich acres of Monte Beni,
might well enough have passed for inhabitants of an unsophisticated
Arcadia. Later in the season, when the true vintage time should come,
and the wine of Sunshine gush into the vats, it was hardly too wild a
dream that Bacchus himself might revisit the haunts which he loved of
old. But, alas! where now would he find the Faun with whom we see him
consorting in so many an antique group?
Donatello’s remorseful anguish saddened this primitive and delightful
life. Kenyon had a pain of his own, moreover, although not all a pain,
in the never quiet, never satisfied yearning of his heart towards Hilda.
He was authorized to use little freedom towards that shy maiden, even
in his visions; so that he almost reproached himself when sometimes his
imagination pictured in detail the sweet years that they might spend
together, in a retreat like this. It had just that rarest quality of
remoteness from the actual and ordinary world B a remoteness
through which all delights might visit them freely, sifted from all
troubles--which lovers so reasonably insist upon, in their ideal
arrangements for a happy union. It is possible, indeed, that even
Donatello’s grief and Kenyon’s pale, sunless affection lent a charm
to Monte Beni, which it would not have retained amid a more abundant
joyousness. The sculptor strayed amid its vineyards and orchards,
its dells and tangled shrubberies, with somewhat the sensations of an
adventurer who should find his way to the site of ancient Eden, and
behold its loveliness through the transparency of that gloom which has
been brooding over those haunts of innocence ever since the fall. Adam
saw it in a brighter sunshine, but never knew the shade of Pensive
beauty which Eden won from his expulsion.
It was in the decline of the afternoon that Kenyon returned from his
long, musing ramble, Old Tomaso--between whom and himself for some time
past there had been a mysterious understanding,--met him in the entrance
hall, and drew him a little aside.
“The signorina would speak with you,” he whispered.
“In the chapel?” asked the sculptor.
“No; in the saloon beyond it,” answered the butler: “the entrance you
once saw the signorina appear through it is near the altar, hidden
behind the tapestry.”
Kenyon lost no time in obeying the summons.
CHAPTER XXXI
THE MARBLE SALOON
In an old Tuscan villa, a chapel ordinarily makes one among the numerous
apartments; though it often happens that the door is permanently closed,
the key lost, and the place left to itself, in dusty sanctity, like that
chamber in man’s heart where he hides his religious awe. This was very
much the case with the chapel of Monte Beni. One rainy day, however,
in his wanderings through the great, intricate house, Kenyon had
unexpectedly found his way into it, and been impressed by its solemn
aspect. The arched windows, high upward in the wall, and darkened with
dust and cobweb, threw down a dim light that showed the altar, with a
picture of a martyrdom above, and some tall tapers ranged before it.
They had apparently been lighted, and burned an hour or two, and been
extinguished perhaps half a century before. The marble vase at the
entrance held some hardened mud at the bottom, accruing from the dust
that had settled in it during the gradual evaporation of the holy water;
and a spider (being an insect that delights in pointing the moral of
desolation and neglect) had taken pains to weave a prodigiously thick
tissue across the circular brim. An old family banner, tattered by
the moths, drooped from the vaulted roof. In niches there were some
mediaeval busts of Donatello’s forgotten ancestry; and among them, it
might be, the forlorn visage of that hapless knight between whom and the
fountain-nymph had occurred such tender love passages.
Throughout all the jovial prosperity of Monte Beni, this one spot within
the domestic walls had kept itself silent, stern, and sad. When the
individual or the family retired from song and mirth, they here sought
those realities which men do not invite their festive associates to
share. And here, on the occasion above referred to, the sculptor had
discovered--accidentally, so far as he was concerned, though with a
purpose on her part--that there was a guest under Donatello’s roof,
whose presence the Count did not suspect. An interview had since taken
place, and he was now summoned to another.
He crossed the chapel, in compliance with Tomaso’s instructions, and,
passing through the side entrance, found himself in a saloon, of no
great size, but more magnificent than he had supposed the villa to
contain. As it was vacant, Kenyon had leisure to pace it once or twice,
and examine it with a careless sort of scrutiny, before any person
appeared.
This beautiful hall was floored with rich marbles, in artistically
arranged figures and compartments. The walls, likewise, were almost
entirely cased in marble of various kinds, the prevalent, variety
being giallo antico, intermixed with verd-antique, and others equally
precious. The splendor of the giallo antico, however, was what gave
character to the saloon; and the large and deep niches, apparently
intended for full length statues, along the walls, were lined with the
same costly material. Without visiting Italy, one can have no idea of
the beauty and magnificence that are produced by these fittings-up of
polished marble. Without such experience, indeed, we do not even know
what marble means, in any sense, save as the white limestone of which
we carve our mantelpieces. This rich hall of Monte Beni, moreover, was
adorned, at its upper end, with two pillars that seemed to consist of
Oriental alabaster; and wherever there was a space vacant of precious
and variegated marble, it was frescoed with ornaments in arabesque.
Above, there was a coved and vaulted ceiling, glowing with pictured
scenes, which affected Kenyon with a vague sense of splendor, without
his twisting his neck to gaze at them.
It is one of the special excellences of such a saloon of polished and
richly colored marble, that decay can never tarnish it. Until the house
crumbles down upon it, it shines indestructibly, and, with a little
dusting, looks just as brilliant in its three hundredth year as the day
after the final slab of giallo antico was fitted into the wall. To the
sculptor, at this first View of it, it seemed a hall where the sun was
magically imprisoned, and must always shine. He anticipated Miriam’s
entrance, arrayed in queenly robes, and beaming with even more than the
singular beauty that had heretofore distinguished her.
While this thought was passing through his mind, the pillared door, at
the upper end of the saloon, was partly opened, and Miriam appeared. She
was very pale, and dressed in deep mourning. As she advanced towards the
sculptor, the feebleness of her step was so apparent that he made haste
to meet her, apprehending that she might sink down on the marble floor,
without the instant support of his arm.
But, with a gleam of her natural self-reliance, she declined his aid,
and, after touching her cold hand to his, went and sat down on one of
the cushioned divans that were ranged against the wall.
“You are very ill, Miriam!” said Kenyon, much shocked at her appearance.
“I had not thought of this.”
“No; not so ill as I seem to you,” she answered; adding despondently,
“yet I am ill enough, I believe, to die, unless some change speedily
occurs.”
“What, then, is your disorder?” asked the sculptor; “and what the
remedy?”
“The disorder!” repeated Miriam. “There is none that I know of save too
much life and strength, without a purpose for one or the other. It is
my too redundant energy that is slowly--or perhaps rapidly--wearing me
away, because I can apply it to no use. The object, which I am bound to
consider my only one on earth, fails me utterly. The sacrifice which I
yearn to make of myself, my hopes, my everything, is coldly put aside.
Nothing is left for me but to brood, brood, brood, all day, all night,
in unprofitable longings and repinings.”
“This is very sad, Miriam,” said Kenyon.
“Ay, indeed; I fancy so,” she replied, with a short, unnatural laugh.
“With all your activity of mind,” resumed he, “so fertile in plans as
I have known you, can you imagine no method of bringing your resources
into play?”
“My mind is not active any longer,” answered Miriam, in a cold,
indifferent tone. “It deals with one thought and no more. One
recollection paralyzes it. It is not remorse; do not think it! I put
myself out of the question, and feel neither regret nor penitence on
my own behalf. But what benumbs me, what robs me of all power,-it is
no secret for a woman to tell a man, yet I care not though you know it,
--is the certainty that I am, and must ever be, an object of horror in
Donatello’s sight.”
The sculptor--a young man, and cherishing a love which insulated
him from the wild experiences which some men gather--was startled to
perceive how Miriam’s rich, ill-regulated nature impelled her to
fling herself, conscience and all, on one passion, the object of which
intellectually seemed far beneath her.
“How have you obtained the certainty of which you speak?” asked he,
after a pause.
“O, by a sure token,” said Miriam; “a gesture, merely; a shudder, a cold
shiver, that ran through him one sunny morning when his hand happened to
touch mine! But it was enough.”
“I firmly believe, Miriam,” said the sculptor, “that he loves you
still.”
She started, and a flush of color came tremulously over the paleness of
her cheek.
“Yes,” repeated Kenyon, “if my interest in Donatello--and in yourself,
Miriam--endows me with any true insight, he not only loves you still,
but with a force and depth proportioned to the stronger grasp of his
faculties, in their new development.”
“Do not deceive me,” said Miriam, growing pale again.
“Not for the world!” replied Kenyon. “Here is what I take to be
the truth. There was an interval, no doubt, when the horror of some
calamity, which I need not shape out in my conjectures, threw Donatello
into a stupor of misery. Connected with the first shock there was an
intolerable pain and shuddering repugnance attaching themselves to
all the circumstances and surroundings of the event that so terribly
affected him. Was his dearest friend involved within the horror of that
moment? He would shrink from her as he shrank most of all from himself.
But as his mind roused itself,--as it rose to a higher life than he had
hitherto experienced,--whatever had been true and permanent within him
revived by the selfsame impulse. So has it been with his love.”
“But, surely,” said Miriam, “he knows that I am here! Why, then, except
that I am odious to him, does he not bid me welcome?”
“He is, I believe, aware of your presence here,” answered the sculptor.
“Your song, a night or two ago, must have revealed it to him, and, in
truth, I had fancied that there was already a consciousness of it in
his mind. But, the more passionately he longs for your society, the more
religiously he deems himself bound to avoid it. The idea of a lifelong
penance has taken strong possession of Donatello. He gropes blindly
about him for some method of sharp self-torture, and finds, of course,
no other so efficacious as this.”
“But he loves me,” repeated Miriam, in a low voice, to herself. “Yes; he
loves me!”
It was strange to observe the womanly softness that came over her,
as she admitted that comfort into her bosom. The cold, unnatural
indifference of her manner, a kind of frozen passionateness which had
shocked and chilled the sculptor, disappeared. She blushed, and turned
away her eyes, knowing that there was more surprise and joy in their
dewy glances than any man save one ought to detect there.
“In other respects,” she inquired at length, “is he much changed?”
“A wonderful process is going forward in Donatello’s mind,” answered the
sculptor. “The germs of faculties that have heretofore slept are fast
springing into activity. The world of thought is disclosing itself to
his inward sight. He startles me, at times, with his perception of deep
truths; and, quite as often, it must be owned, he compels me to smile by
the intermixture of his former simplicity with a new intelligence. But
he is bewildered with the revelations that each day brings. Out of
his bitter agony, a soul and intellect, I could almost say, have been
inspired into him.”
“Ah, I could help him here!” cried Miriam, clasping her hands. “And
how sweet a toil to bend and adapt my whole nature to do him good! To
instruct, to elevate, to enrich his mind with the wealth that would flow
in upon me, had I such a motive for acquiring it! Who else can perform
the task? Who else has the tender sympathy which he requires? Who else,
save only me,--a woman, a sharer in the same dread secret, a partaker in
one identical guilt,--could meet him on such terms of intimate equality
as the case demands? With this object before me, I might feel a right to
live! Without it, it is a shame for me to have lived so long.”
“I fully agree with you,” said Kenyon, “that your true place is by his
side.”
“Surely it is,” replied Miriam. “If Donatello is entitled to aught on
earth, it is to my complete self-sacrifice for his sake. It does not
weaken his claim, methinks, that my only prospect of happiness a
fearful word, however lies in the good that may accrue to him from our
intercourse. But he rejects me! He will not listen to the whisper of his
heart, telling him that she, most wretched, who beguiled him into evil,
might guide him to a higher innocence than that from which he fell. How
is this first great difficulty to be obviated?”
“It lies at your own option, Miriam, to do away the obstacle, at any
moment,” remarked the sculptor. “It is but to ascend Donatello’s tower,
and you will meet him there, under the eye of God.”
“I dare not,” answered Miriam. “No; I dare not!”
“Do you fear,” asked the sculptor, “the dread eye-witness whom I have
named?”
“No; for, as far as I can see into that cloudy and inscrutable thing, my
heart, it has none but pure motives,” replied Miriam. “But, my friend,
you little know what a weak or what a strong creature a woman is! I
fear not Heaven, in this case, at least, but--shall I confess it? I
am greatly in dread of Donatello. Once he shuddered at my touch. If he
shudder once again, or frown, I die!”
Kenyon could not but marvel at the subjection into which this proud and
self-dependent woman had willfully flung herself, hanging her life upon
the chance of an angry or favorable regard from a person who, a little
while before, had seemed the plaything of a moment. But, in Miriam’s
eyes, Donatello was always, thenceforth, invested with the tragic
dignity of their hour of crime; and, furthermore, the keen and deep
insight, with which her love endowed her, enabled her to know him
far better than he could be known by ordinary observation. Beyond all
question, since she loved him so, there was a force in Donatello worthy
of her respect and love.
“You see my weakness,” said Miriam, flinging out her hands, as a person
does when a defect is acknowledged, and beyond remedy. “What I need,
now, is an opportunity to show my strength.”
“It has occurred to me,” Kenyon remarked, “that the time is come when
it may be desirable to remove Donatello from the complete seclusion in
which he buries himself. He has struggled long enough with one idea.
He now needs a variety of thought, which cannot be otherwise so readily
supplied to him, as through the medium of a variety of scenes. His mind
is awakened, now; his heart, though full of pain, is no longer benumbed.
They should have food and solace. If he linger here much longer, I fear
that he may sink back into a lethargy. The extreme excitability, which
circumstances have imparted to his moral system, has its dangers and
its advantages; it being one of the dangers, that an obdurate scar may
supervene upon its very tenderness. Solitude has done what it could for
him; now, for a while, let him be enticed into the outer world.”
“What is your plan, then?” asked Miriam.
“Simply,” replied Kenyon, “to persuade Donatello to be my companion in
a ramble among these hills and valleys. The little adventures and
vicissitudes of travel will do him infinite good. After his recent
profound experience, he will re-create the world by the new eyes with
which he will regard it. He will escape, I hope, out of a morbid life,
and find his way into a healthy one.”
“And what is to be my part in this process?” inquired Miriam sadly, and
not without jealousy. “You are taking him from me, and putting yourself,
and all manner of living interests, into the place which I ought to
fill!”
“It would rejoice me, Miriam, to yield the entire responsibility of this
office to yourself,” answered the sculptor. “I do not pretend to be
the guide and counsellor whom Donatello needs; for, to mention no
other obstacle, I am a man, and between man and man there is always an
insuperable gulf. They can never quite grasp each other’s hands; and
therefore man never derives any intimate help, any heart sustenance,
from his brother man, but from woman--his mother, his sister, or his
wife. Be Donatello’s friend at need, therefore, and most gladly will I
resign him!”
“It is not kind to taunt me thus,” said Miriam. “I have told you that I
cannot do what you suggest, because I dare not.”
“Well, then,” rejoined the sculptor, “see if there is any possibility of
adapting yourself to my scheme. The incidents of a journey often fling
people together in the oddest and therefore the most natural way.
Supposing you were to find yourself on the same route, a reunion with
Donatello might ensue, and Providence have a larger hand in it than
either of us.”
“It is not a hopeful plan,” said Miriam, shaking her head, after a
moment’s thought; “yet I will not reject it without a trial. Only in
case it fail, here is a resolution to which I bind myself, come what
come may! You know the bronze statue of Pope Julius in the great square
of Perugia? I remember standing in the shadow of that statue one sunny
noontime, and being impressed by its paternal aspect, and fancying that
a blessing fell upon me from its outstretched hand. Ever since, I have
had a superstition, you will call it foolish, but sad and ill-fated
persons always dream such things,--that, if I waited long enough in
that same spot, some good event would come to pass. Well, my friend,
precisely a fortnight after you begin your tour,--unless we sooner
meet,--bring Donatello, at noon, to the base of the statue. You will
find me there!”
Kenyon assented to the proposed arrangement, and, after some
conversation respecting his contemplated line of travel, prepared to
take his leave. As he met Miriam’s eyes, in bidding farewell, he was
surprised at the new, tender gladness that beamed out of them, and at
the appearance of health and bloom, which, in this little while, had
overspread her face.’
“May I tell you, Miriam,” said he, smiling, “that you are still as
beautiful as ever?”
“You have a right to notice it,” she replied, “for, if it be so, my
faded bloom has been revived by the hopes you give me. Do you, then,
think me beautiful? I rejoice, most truly. Beauty--if I possess
it--shall be one of the instruments by which I will try to educate and
elevate him, to whose good I solely dedicate myself.”
The sculptor had nearly reached the door, when, hearing her call him, he
turned back, and beheld Miriam still standing where he had left her, in
the magnificent hall which seemed only a fit setting for her beauty. She
beckoned him to return.
“You are a man of refined taste,” said she; “more than that,--a man of
delicate sensibility. Now tell me frankly, and on your honor! Have I not
shocked you many times during this interview by my betrayal of woman’s
cause, my lack of feminine modesty, my reckless, passionate, most
indecorous avowal, that I live only in the life of one who, perhaps,
scorns and shudders at me?”
Thus adjured, however difficult the point to which she brought him, the
sculptor was not a man to swerve aside from the simple truth.
“Miriam,” replied he, “you exaggerate the impression made upon my
mind; but it has been painful, and somewhat of the character which you
suppose.”
“I knew it,” said Miriam, mournfully, and with no resentment. “What
remains of my finer nature would have told me so, even if it had not
been perceptible in all your manner. Well, my dear friend, when you
go back to Rome, tell Hilda what her severity has done! She was all
womanhood to me; and when she cast me off, I had no longer any terms to
keep with the reserves and decorums of my sex. Hilda has set me free!
Pray tell her so, from Miriam, and thank her!”
“I shall tell Hilda nothing that will give her pain,” answered Kenyon.
“But, Miriam, though I know not what passed between her and yourself, I
feel,--and let the noble frankness of your disposition forgive me if
I say so,--I feel that she was right. You have a thousand admirable
qualities. Whatever mass of evil may have fallen into your life,
--pardon me, but your own words suggest it,--you are still as capable
as ever of many high and heroic virtues. But the white shining purity
of Hilda’s nature is a thing apart; and she is bound, by the undefiled
material of which God moulded her, to keep that severity which I, as
well as you, have recognized.”
“O, you are right!” said Miriam; “I never questioned it; though, as
I told you, when she cast me off, it severed some few remaining bonds
between me and decorous womanhood. But were there anything to forgive, I
do forgive her. May you win her virgin heart; for methinks there can
be few men in this evil world who are not more unworthy of her than
yourself.”
CHAPTER XXXII
SCENES BY THE WAY
When it came to the point of quitting the reposeful life of Monte Beni,
the sculptor was not without regrets, and would willingly have dreamed a
little longer of the sweet paradise on earth that Hilda’s presence
there might make. Nevertheless, amid all its repose, he had begun to be
sensible of a restless melancholy, to which the cultivators of the ideal
arts are more liable than sturdier men. On his own part, therefore, and
leaving Donatello out of the case, he would have judged it well to go.
He made parting visits to the legendary dell, and to other delightful
spots with which he had grown familiar; he climbed the tower again, and
saw a sunset and a moonrise over the great valley; he drank, on the
eve of his departure, one flask, and then another, of the Monte Beni
Sunshine, and stored up its flavor in his memory as the standard of what
is exquisite in wine. These things accomplished, Kenyon was ready for
the journey.
Donatello had not very easily been stirred out of the peculiar
sluggishness, which enthralls and bewitches melancholy people. He had
offered merely a passive resistance, however, not an active one, to his
friend’s schemes; and when the appointed hour came, he yielded to the
impulse which Kenyon failed not to apply; and was started upon the
journey before he had made up his mind to undertake it. They wandered
forth at large, like two knights-errant, among the valleys, and the
mountains, and the old mountain towns of that picturesque and
lovely region. Save to keep the appointment with Miriam, a fortnight
thereafter, in the great square of Perugia, there was nothing more
definite in the sculptor’s plan than that they should let themselves
be blown hither and thither like Winged seeds, that mount upon each
wandering breeze. Yet there was an idea of fatality implied in the
simile of the winged seeds which did not altogether suit Kenyon’s fancy;
for, if you look closely into the matter, it will be seen that whatever
appears most vagrant, and utterly purposeless, turns out, in the end,
to have been impelled the most surely on a preordained and unswerving
track. Chance and change love to deal with men’s settled plans, not with
their idle vagaries. If we desire unexpected and unimaginable events,
we should contrive an iron framework, such as we fancy may compel the
future to take one inevitable shape; then comes in the unexpected, and
shatters our design in fragments.
The travellers set forth on horseback, and purposed to perform much of
their aimless journeyings under the moon, and in the cool of the morning
or evening twilight; the midday sun, while summer had hardly begun to
trail its departing skirts over Tuscany, being still too fervid to allow
of noontide exposure.
For a while, they wandered in that same broad valley which Kenyon had
viewed with such delight from the Monte Beni tower. The sculptor soon
began to enjoy the idle activity of their new life, which the lapse of
a day or two sufficed to establish as a kind of system; it is so natural
for mankind to be nomadic, that a very little taste of that primitive
mode of existence subverts the settled habits of many preceding years.
Kenyon’s cares, and whatever gloomy ideas before possessed him, seemed
to be left at Monte Beni, and were scarcely remembered by the time
that its gray tower grew undistinguishable on the brown hillside. His
perceptive faculties, which had found little exercise of late, amid so
thoughtful a way of life, became keen, and kept his eyes busy with a
hundred agreeable scenes.
He delighted in the picturesque bits of rustic character and manners, so
little of which ever comes upon the surface of our life at home. There,
for example, were the old women, tending pigs or sheep by the wayside.
As they followed the vagrant steps of their charge, these venerable
ladies kept spinning yarn with that elsewhere forgotten contrivance,
the distaff; and so wrinkled and stern looking were they, that you might
have taken them for the Parcae, spinning the threads of human destiny.
In contrast with their great-grandmothers were the children, leading
goats of shaggy beard, tied by the horns, and letting them browse on
branch and shrub. It is the fashion of Italy to add the petty industry
of age and childhood to the hum of human toil. To the eyes of an
observer from the Western world, it was a strange spectacle to see
sturdy, sunburnt creatures, in petticoats, but otherwise manlike,
toiling side by side with male laborers, in the rudest work of the
fields. These sturdy women (if as such we must recognize them) wore the
high-crowned, broad brimmed hat of Tuscan straw, the customary female
head-apparel; and, as every breeze blew back its breadth of brim, the
sunshine constantly added depth to the brown glow of their cheeks. The
elder sisterhood, however, set off their witch-like ugliness to the
worst advantage with black felt hats, bequeathed them, one would fancy,
by their long-buried husbands.
Another ordinary sight, as sylvan as the above and more agreeable, was
a girl, bearing on her back a huge bundle of green twigs and shrubs,
or grass, intermixed with scarlet poppies and blue flowers; the verdant
burden being sometimes of such size as to hide the bearer’s figure, and
seem a self-moving mass of fragrant bloom and verdure. Oftener, however,
the bundle reached only halfway down the back of the rustic nymph,
leaving in sight her well-developed lower limbs, and the crooked knife,
hanging behind her, with which she had been reaping this strange
harvest sheaf. A pre-Raphaelite artist (he, for instance, who painted
so marvellously a wind-swept heap of autumnal leaves) might find an
admirable subject in one of these Tuscan girls, stepping with a free,
erect, and graceful carriage. The miscellaneous herbage and tangled
twigs and blossoms of her bundle, crowning her head (while her ruddy,
comely face looks out between the hanging side festoons like a
larger flower), would give the painter boundless scope for the minute
delineation which he loves.
Though mixed up with what was rude and earthlike, there was still a
remote, dreamlike, Arcadian charm, which is scarcely to be found in the
daily toil of other lands. Among the pleasant features of the wayside
were always the vines, clambering on fig-trees, or other sturdy trunks;
they wreathed themselves in huge and rich festoons from one tree to
another, suspending clusters of ripening grapes in the interval between.
Under such careless mode of culture, the luxuriant vine is a lovelier
spectacle than where it produces a more precious liquor, and is
therefore more artificially restrained and trimmed. Nothing can be
more picturesque than an old grapevine, with almost a trunk of its own,
clinging fast around its supporting tree. Nor does the picture lack its
moral. You might twist it to more than one grave purpose, as you saw how
the knotted, serpentine growth imprisoned within its strong embrace
the friend that had supported its tender infancy; and how (as seemingly
flexible natures are prone to do) it converted the sturdier tree
entirely to its own selfish ends, extending its innumerable arms on
every bough, and permitting hardly a leaf to sprout except its own. It
occurred to Kenyon, that the enemies of the vine, in his native land,
might here have seen an emblem of the remorseless gripe, which the habit
of vinous enjoyment lays upon its victim, possessing him wholly, and
letting him live no life but such as it bestows.
The scene was not less characteristic when their path led the two
wanderers through some small, ancient town. There, besides the
peculiarities of present life, they saw tokens of the life that had long
ago been lived and flung aside. The little town, such as we see in our
mind’s eye, would have its gate and its surrounding walls, so ancient
and massive that ages had not sufficed to crumble them away; but in the
lofty upper portion of the gateway, still standing over the empty arch,
where there was no longer a gate to shut, there would be a dove-cote,
and peaceful doves for the only warders. Pumpkins lay ripening in the
open chambers of the structure. Then, as for the town wall, on the
outside an orchard extends peacefully along its base, full, not of
apple-trees, but of those old humorists with gnarled trunks and twisted
boughs, the olives. Houses have been built upon the ramparts, or
burrowed out of their ponderous foundation. Even the gray, martial
towers, crowned with ruined turrets, have been converted into rustic
habitations, from the windows of which hang ears of Indian corn. At a
door, that has been broken through the massive stonework where it
was meant to be strongest, some contadini are winnowing grain. Small
windows, too, are pierced through the whole line of ancient wall, so
that it seems a row of dwellings with one continuous front, built in a
strange style of needless strength; but remnants of the old battlements
and machicolations are interspersed with the homely chambers and
earthen-tiled housetops; and all along its extent both grapevines and
running flower-shrubs are encouraged to clamber and sport over the
roughness of its decay.
Finally the long grass, intermixed with weeds and wild flowers, waves
on the uppermost height of the shattered rampart; and it is exceedingly
pleasant in the golden sunshine of the afternoon to behold the warlike
precinct so friendly in its old days, and so overgrown with rural
peace. In its guard rooms, its prison chambers, and scooped out of its
ponderous breadth, there are dwellings nowadays where happy human lives
are spent. Human parents and broods of children nestle in them, even as
the swallows nestle in the little crevices along the broken summit of
the wall.
Passing through the gateway of this same little town, challenged only
by those watchful sentinels, the pigeons, we find ourselves in a long,
narrow street, paved from side to side with flagstones, in the old Roman
fashion. Nothing can exceed the grim ugliness of the houses, most of
which are three or four stories high, stone built, gray, dilapidated, or
half-covered with plaster in patches, and contiguous all along from
end to end of the town. Nature, in the shape of tree, shrub, or grassy
sidewalk, is as much shut out from the one street of the rustic village
as from the heart of any swarming city. The dark and half ruinous
habitations, with their small windows, many of which are drearily closed
with wooden shutters, are but magnified hovels, piled story upon story,
and squalid with the grime that successive ages have left behind them.
It would be a hideous scene to contemplate in a rainy day, or when
no human life pervaded it. In the summer noon, however, it possesses
vivacity enough to keep itself cheerful; for all the within-doors of
the village then bubbles over upon the flagstones, or looks out from the
small windows, and from here and there a balcony. Some of the populace
are at the butcher’s shop; others are at the fountain, which gushes into
a marble basin that resembles an antique sarcophagus. A tailor is sewing
before his door with a young priest seated sociably beside him; a burly
friar goes by with an empty wine-barrel on his head; children are at
play; women, at their own doorsteps, mend clothes, embroider, weave hats
of Tuscan straw, or twirl the distaff. Many idlers, meanwhile, strolling
from one group to another, let the warm day slide by in the sweet,
interminable task of doing nothing.
From all these people there comes a babblement that seems quite
disproportioned to the number of tongues that make it. So many words are
not uttered in a New England village throughout the year--except it
be at a political canvass or town-meeting--as are spoken here, with no
especial purpose, in a single day. Neither so many words, nor so much
laughter; for people talk about nothing as if they were terribly
in earnest, and make merry at nothing as if it were the best of all
possible jokes. In so long a time as they have existed, and within such
narrow precincts, these little walled towns are brought into a closeness
of society that makes them but a larger household. All the inhabitants
are akin to each, and each to all; they assemble in the street as their
common saloon, and thus live and die in a familiarity of intercourse,
such as never can be known where a village is open at either end, and
all roundabout, and has ample room within itself.
Stuck up beside the door of one house, in this village street, is a
withered bough; and on a stone seat, just under the shadow of the
bough, sits a party of jolly drinkers, making proof of the new wine, or
quaffing the old, as their often-tried and comfortable friend. Kenyon
draws bridle here (for the bough, or bush, is a symbol of the wine-shop
at this day in Italy, as it was three hundred years ago in England), and
calls for a goblet of the deep, mild, purple juice, well diluted with
water from the fountain. The Sunshine of Monte Beni would be welcome
now. Meanwhile, Donatello has ridden onward, but alights where a shrine,
with a burning lamp before it, is built into the wall of an inn stable.
He kneels and crosses himself, and mutters a brief prayer, without
attracting notice from the passers-by, many of whom are parenthetically
devout in a similar fashion. By this time the sculptor has drunk off his
wine-and-water, and our two travellers resume their way, emerging from
the opposite gate of the village.
Before them, again, lies the broad valley, with a mist so thinly
scattered over it as to be perceptible only in the distance, and most so
in the nooks of the hills. Now that we have called it mist, it seems
a mistake not rather to have called it sunshine; the glory of so much
light being mingled with so little gloom, in the airy material of that
vapor. Be it mist or sunshine, it adds a touch of ideal beauty to the
scene, almost persuading the spectator that this valley and those hills
are visionary, because their visible atmosphere is so like the substance
of a dream.
Immediately about them, however, there were abundant tokens that the
country was not really the paradise it looked to be, at a casual glance.
Neither the wretched cottages nor the dreary farmhouses seemed to
partake of the prosperity, with which so kindly a climate, and so
fertile a portion of Mother Earth’s bosom, should have filled them, one
and all. But possibly the peasant inhabitants do not exist in so grimy
a poverty, and in homes so comfortless, as a stranger, with his native
ideas of those matters, would be likely to imagine. The Italians appear
to possess none of that emulative pride which we see in our New England
villages, where every householder, according to his taste and
means, endeavors to make his homestead an ornament to the grassy
and elm-shadowed wayside. In Italy there are no neat doorsteps
and thresholds; no pleasant, vine-sheltered porches; none of those
grass-plots or smoothly shorn lawns, which hospitably invite the
imagination into the sweet domestic interiors of English life.
Everything, however sunny and luxuriant may be the scene around, is
especially disheartening in the immediate neighborhood of an Italian
home.
An artist, it is true, might often thank his stars for those old houses,
so picturesquely time-stained, and with the plaster falling in blotches
from the ancient brick-work. The prison-like, iron-barred windows, and
the wide arched, dismal entrance, admitting on one hand to the stable,
on the other to the kitchen, might impress him as far better worth
his pencil than the newly painted pine boxes, in which--if he be an
American--his countrymen live and thrive. But there is reason to suspect
that a people are waning to decay and ruin the moment that their life
becomes fascinating either in the poet’s imagination or the painter’s
eye.
As usual on Italian waysides, the wanderers passed great, black crosses,
hung with all the instruments of the sacred agony and passion: there
were the crown of thorns, the hammer and nails, the pincers, the spear,
the sponge; and perched over the whole, the cock that crowed to St.
Peter’s remorseful conscience. Thus, while the fertile scene showed the
never-failing beneficence of the Creator towards man in his transitory
state, these symbols reminded each wayfarer of the Saviour’s infinitely
greater love for him as an immortal spirit. Beholding these consecrated
stations, the idea seemed to strike Donatello of converting the
otherwise aimless journey into a penitential pilgrimage. At each of them
he alighted to kneel and kiss the cross, and humbly press his forehead
against its foot; and this so invariably, that the sculptor soon learned
to draw bridle of his own accord. It may be, too, heretic as he was,
that Kenyon likewise put up a prayer, rendered more fervent by the
symbols before his eyes, for the peace of his friend’s conscience and
the pardon of the sin that so oppressed him.
Not only at the crosses did Donatello kneel, but at each of the many
shrines, where the Blessed Virgin in fresco--faded with sunshine and
half washed out with showers--looked benignly at her worshipper; or
where she was represented in a wooden image, or a bas-relief of plaster
or marble, as accorded with the means of the devout person who built,
or restored from a mediaeval antiquity, these places of wayside worship.
They were everywhere: under arched niches, or in little penthouses with
a brick tiled roof just large enough to shelter them; or perhaps in
some bit of old Roman masonry, the founders of which had died before the
Advent; or in the wall of a country inn or farmhouse; or at the midway
point of a bridge; or in the shallow cavity of a natural rock; or high
upward in the deep cuts of the road. It appeared to the sculptor that
Donatello prayed the more earnestly and the more hopefully at these
shrines, because the mild face of the Madonna promised him to intercede
as a tender mother betwixt the poor culprit and the awfulness of
judgment.
It was beautiful to observe, indeed, how tender was the soul of man and
woman towards the Virgin mother, in recognition of the tenderness which,
as their faith taught them, she immortally cherishes towards all human
souls. In the wire-work screen ‘before each shrine hung offerings of
roses, or whatever flower was sweetest and most seasonable; some already
wilted and withered, some fresh with that very morning’s dewdrops.
Flowers there were, too, that, being artificial, never bloomed on earth,
nor would ever fade. The thought occurred to Kenyon, that flower-pots
with living plants might be set within the niches, or even that
rose-trees, and all kinds of flowering shrubs, might be reared under the
shrines, and taught to twine and wreathe themselves around; so that
the Virgin should dwell within a bower of verdure, bloom, and fragrant
freshness, symbolizing a homage perpetually new. There are many things
in the religious customs of these people that seem good; many things,
at least, that might be both good and beautiful, if the soul of goodness
and the sense of beauty were as much alive in the Italians now as they
must have been when those customs were first imagined and adopted. But,
instead of blossoms on the shrub, or freshly gathered, with the dewdrops
on their leaves, their worship, nowadays, is best symbolized by the
artificial flower.
The sculptor fancied, moreover (but perhaps it was his heresy that
suggested the idea), that it would be of happy influence to place a
comfortable and shady seat beneath every wayside shrine. Then the weary
and sun-scorched traveller, while resting himself under her protecting
shadow, might thank the Virgin for her hospitality. Nor, perchance,
were he to regale himself, even in such a consecrated spot, with the
fragrance of a pipe, would it rise to heaven more offensively than
the smoke of priestly incense. We do ourselves wrong, and too meanly
estimate the Holiness above us, when we deem that any act or enjoyment,
good in itself, is not good to do religiously.
Whatever may be the iniquities of the papal system, it was a wise and
lovely sentiment that set up the frequent shrine and cross along the
roadside. No wayfarer, bent on whatever worldly errand, can fail to be
reminded, at every mile or two, that this is not the business which
most concerns him. The pleasure-seeker is silently admonished to look
heavenward for a joy infinitely greater than he now possesses. The
wretch in temptation beholds the cross, and is warned that, if he yield,
the Saviour’s agony for his sake will have been endured in vain. The
stubborn criminal, whose heart has long been like a stone, feels it
throb anew with dread and hope; and our poor Donatello, as he went
kneeling from shrine to cross, and from cross to shrine, doubtless found
an efficacy in these symbols that helped him towards a higher penitence.
Whether the young Count of Monte Beni noticed the fact, or no, there was
more than one incident of their journey that led Kenyon to believe that
they were attended, or closely followed, or preceded, near at hand, by
some one who took an interest in their motions. As it were, the
step, the sweeping garment, the faintly heard breath, of an invisible
companion, was beside them, as they went on their way. It was like a
dream that had strayed out of their slumber, and was haunting them in
the daytime, when its shadowy substance could have neither density nor
outline, in the too obtrusive light. After sunset, it grew a little more
distinct.
“On the left of that last shrine,” asked the sculptor, as they rode,
under the moon, “did you observe the figure of a woman kneeling, with
her, face hidden in her hands?”
“I never looked that way,” replied Donatello. “I was saying my own
prayer. It was some penitent, perchance. May the Blessed Virgin be the
more gracious to the poor soul, because she is a woman.”
CHAPTER XXXIII
PICTURED WINDOWS
After wide wanderings through the valley, the two travellers directed
their course towards its boundary of hills. Here, the natural scenery
and men’s modifications of it immediately took a different aspect from
that of the fertile and smiling plain. Not unfrequently there was a
convent on the hillside; or, on some insulated promontory, a mined
castle, once the den of a robber chieftain, who was accustomed to dash
down from his commanding height upon the road that wound below. For ages
back, the old fortress had been flinging down its crumbling ramparts,
stone by stone, towards the grimy village at its foot.
Their road wound onward among the hills, which rose steep and lofty from
the scanty level space that lay between them. They continually thrust
their great bulks before the wayfarers, as if grimly resolute to forbid
their passage, or closed abruptly behind them, when they still dared to
proceed. A gigantic hill would set its foot right down before them, and
only at the last moment would grudgingly withdraw it, just far enough to
let them creep towards another obstacle. Adown these rough heights were
visible the dry tracks of many a mountain torrent that had lived a life
too fierce and passionate to be a long one. Or, perhaps, a stream was
yet hurrying shyly along the edge of a far wider bed of pebbles and
shelving rock than it seemed to need, though not too wide for the
swollen rage of which this shy rivulet was capable. A stone bridge
bestrode it, the ponderous arches of which were upheld and rendered
indestructible by the weight of the very stones that threatened to crush
them down. Old Roman toil was perceptible in the foundations of that
massive bridge; the first weight that it ever bore was that of an army
of the Republic.
Threading these defiles, they would arrive at some immemorial city,
crowning the high summit of a hill with its cathedral, its many
churches, and public edifices, all of Gothic architecture. With no more
level ground than a single piazza in the midst, the ancient town tumbled
its crooked and narrow streets down the mountainside, through arched
passages and by steps of stone. The aspect of everything was awfully
old; older, indeed, in its effect on the imagination than Rome itself,
because history does not lay its finger on these forgotten edifices and
tell us all about their origin. Etruscan princes may have dwelt in them.
A thousand years, at all events, would seem but a middle age for these
structures. They are built of such huge, square stones, that their
appearance of ponderous durability distresses the beholder with the idea
that they can never fall,--never crumble away,--never be less fit than
now for human habitation. Many of them may once have been palaces, and
still retain a squalid grandeur. But, gazing at them, we recognize how
undesirable it is to build the tabernacle of our brief lifetime out of
permanent materials, and with a view to their being occupied by future
‘generations.
All towns should be made capable of purification by fire, or of decay,
within each half-century. Otherwise, they become the hereditary haunts
of vermin and noisomeness, besides standing apart from the possibility
of such improvements as are constantly introduced into the rest of
man’s contrivances and accommodations. It is beautiful, no doubt, and
exceedingly satisfactory to some of our natural instincts, to imagine
our far posterity dwelling under the same roof-tree as ourselves. Still,
when people insist on building indestructible houses, they incur, or
their children do, a misfortune analogous to that of the Sibyl, when
she obtained the grievous boon of immortality. So we may build almost
immortal habitations, it is true; but we cannot keep them from growing
old, musty, unwholesome, dreary,--full of death scents, ghosts, and
murder stains; in short, such habitations as one sees everywhere in
Italy, be they hovels or palaces.
“You should go with me to my native country,” observed the sculptor to
Donatello. “In that fortunate land, each generation has only its own
sins and sorrows to bear. Here, it seems as if all the weary and dreary
Past were piled upon the back of the Present. If I were to lose my
spirits in this country,--if I were to suffer any heavy misfortune
here,--methinks it would be impossible to stand up against it, under
such adverse influences.”
“The sky itself is an old roof, now,” answered the Count; “and, no
doubt, the sins of mankind have made it gloomier than it used to be.”
“O, my poor Faun,” thought Kenyon to himself, “how art thou changed!”
A city, like this of which we speak, seems a sort of stony growth out
of the hillside, or a fossilized town; so ancient and strange it looks,
without enough of life and juiciness in it to be any longer susceptible
of decay. An earthquake would afford it the only chance of being ruined,
beyond its present ruin.
Yet, though dead to all the purposes for which we live to-day, the place
has its glorious recollections, and not merely rude and warlike ones,
but those of brighter and milder triumphs, the fruits of which we still
enjoy. Italy can count several of these lifeless towns which, four or
five hundred years ago, were each the birthplace of its own school of
art; nor have they yet forgotten to be proud of the dark old pictures,
and the faded frescos, the pristine beauty of which was a light and
gladness to the world. But now, unless one happens to be a painter,
these famous works make us miserably desperate. They are poor, dim
ghosts of what, when Giotto or Cimabue first created them, threw a
splendor along the stately aisles; so far gone towards nothingness,
in our day, that scarcely a hint of design or expression can glimmer
through the dusk. Those early artists did well to paint their frescos.
Glowing on the church-walls, they might be looked upon as symbols of the
living spirit that made Catholicism a true religion, and that glorified
it as long as it retained a genuine life; they filled the transepts with
a radiant throng of saints and angels, and threw around the high altar
a faint reflection--as much as mortals could see, or bear--of a Diviner
Presence. But now that the colors are so wretchedly bedimmed,--now that
blotches of plastered wall dot the frescos all over, like a mean reality
thrusting itself through life’s brightest illusions,--the next best
artist to Cimabue or Giotto or Ghirlandaio or Pinturicchio will be he
that shall reverently cover their ruined masterpieces with whitewash!
Kenyon, however, being an earnest student and critic of Art, lingered
long before these pathetic relics; and Donatello, in his present phase
of penitence, thought no time spent amiss while he could be kneeling
before an altar. Whenever they found a cathedral, therefore, or a Gothic
church, the two travellers were of one mind to enter it. In some of
these holy edifices they saw pictures that time had not dimmed nor
injured in the least, though they perhaps belonged to as old a school
of Art as any that were perishing around them. These were the painted
windows; and as often as he gazed at them the sculptor blessed the
medieval time, and its gorgeous contrivances of splendor; for surely the
skill of man has never accomplished, nor his mind imagined, any other
beauty or glory worthy to be compared with these.
It is the special excellence of pictured glass, that the light, which
falls merely on the outside of other pictures, is here interfused
throughout the work; it illuminates the design, and invests it with
a living radiance; and in requital the unfading colors transmute the
common daylight into a miracle of richness and glory in its passage
through the heavenly substance of the blessed and angelic shapes which
throng the high-arched window.
“It is a woeful thing,” cried Kenyon, while one of these frail yet
enduring and fadeless pictures threw its hues on his face, and on the
pavement of the church around him,--“a sad necessity that any Christian
soul should pass from earth without once seeing an antique painted
window, with the bright Italian sunshine glowing through it! There is
no other such true symbol of the glories of the better world, where
a celestial radiance will be inherent in all things and persons, and
render each continually transparent to the sight of all.”
“But what a horror it would be,” said Donatello sadly, “if there were a
soul among them through which the light could not be transfused!”
“Yes; and perhaps this is to be the punishment of sin,” replied the
sculptor; “not that it shall be made evident to the universe, which can
profit nothing by such knowledge, but that it shall insulate the sinner
from all sweet society by rendering him impermeable to light, and,
therefore, unrecognizable in the abode of heavenly simplicity and truth.
Then, what remains for him, but the dreariness of infinite and eternal
solitude?”
“That would be a horrible destiny, indeed!” said Donatello.
His voice as he spoke the words had a hollow and dreary cadence, as if
he anticipated some such frozen solitude for himself. A figure in a dark
robe was lurking in the obscurity of a side chapel close by, and made an
impulsive movement forward, but hesitated as Donatello spoke again.
“But there might be a more miserable torture than to be solitary
forever,” said he. “Think of having a single companion in eternity, and
instead of finding any consolation, or at all events variety of torture,
to see your own weary, weary sin repeated in that inseparable soul.”
“I think, my dear Count, you have never read Dante,” observed Kenyon.
“That idea is somewhat in his style, but I cannot help regretting that
it came into your mind just then.”
The dark-robed figure had shrunk back, and was quite lost to sight among
the shadows of the chapel.
“There was an English poet,” resumed Kenyon, turning again towards the
window, “who speaks of the ‘dim, religious light,’ transmitted through
painted glass. I always admired this richly descriptive phrase; but,
though he was once in Italy, I question whether Milton ever saw any
but the dingy pictures in the dusty windows of English cathedrals,
imperfectly shown by the gray English daylight. He would else have
illuminated that word ‘dim’ with some epithet that should not chase
away the dimness, yet should make it glow like a million of rubies,
sapphires, emeralds, and topazes. Is it not so with yonder window? The
pictures are most brilliant in themselves, yet dim with tenderness and
reverence, because God himself is shining through them.”
“The pictures fill me with emotion, but not such as you seem to
experience,” said Donatello. “I tremble at those awful saints; and, most
of all, at the figure above them. He glows with Divine wrath!”
“My dear friend,” said Kenyon, “how strangely your eyes have transmuted
the expression of the figure! It is divine love, not wrath!”
“To my eyes,” said Donatello stubbornly, “it is wrath, not love! Each
must interpret for himself.”
The friends left the church, and looking up, from the exterior, at
the window which they had just been contemplating within, nothing; was
visible but the merest outline of dusky shapes, Neither the individual
likeness of saint, angel, nor Saviour, and far less the combined scheme
and purport of the picture, could anywise be made out. That miracle of
radiant art, thus viewed, was nothing better than an incomprehensible
obscurity, without a gleam of beauty to induce the beholder to attempt
unravelling it.
“All this,” thought the sculptor, “is a most forcible emblem of the
different aspect of religious truth and sacred story, as viewed from the
warm interior of belief, or from its cold and dreary outside. Christian
faith is a grand cathedral, with divinely pictured windows. Standing
without, you see no glory, nor can possibly imagine any; standing
within, every ray of light reveals a harmony of unspeakable splendors.”
After Kenyon and Donatello emerged from the church, however, they had
better opportunity for acts of charity and mercy than for religious
contemplation; being immediately surrounded by a swarm of beggars, who
are the present possessors of Italy, and share the spoil of the stranger
with the fleas and mosquitoes, their formidable allies. These pests--the
human ones--had hunted the two travellers at every stage of their
journey. From village to village, ragged boys and girls kept almost
under the horses’ feet; hoary grandsires and grandames caught glimpses
of their approach, and hobbled to intercept them at some point of
vantage; blind men stared them out of countenance with their sightless
orbs; women held up their unwashed babies; cripples displayed their
wooden legs, their grievous scars, their dangling, boneless arms, their
broken backs, their burden of a hump, or whatever infirmity or deformity
Providence had assigned them for an inheritance. On the highest mountain
summit--in the most shadowy ravine--there was a beggar waiting for them.
In one small village, Kenyon had the curiosity to count merely how many
children were crying, whining, and bellowing all at once for alms. They
proved to be more than forty of as ragged and dirty little imps as any
in the world; besides whom, all the wrinkled matrons, and most of the
village maids, and not a few stalwart men, held out their hands grimly,
piteously, or smilingly in the forlorn hope of whatever trifle of
coin might remain in pockets already so fearfully taxed. Had they
been permitted, they would gladly have knelt down and worshipped the
travellers, and have cursed them, without rising from their knees, if
the expected boon failed to be awarded.
Yet they were not so miserably poor but that the grown people kept
houses over their heads.
In the way of food, they had, at least, vegetables in their little
gardens, pigs and chickens to kill, eggs to fry into omelets with oil,
wine to drink, and many other things to make life comfortable. As for
the children, when no more small coin appeared to be forthcoming, they
began to laugh and play, and turn heels over head, showing themselves
jolly and vivacious brats, and evidently as well fed as needs be. The
truth is, the Italian peasantry look upon strangers as the almoners of
Providence, and therefore feel no more shame in asking and receiving
alms, than in availing themselves of providential bounties in whatever
other form.
In accordance with his nature, Donatello was always exceedingly
charitable to these ragged battalions, and appeared to derive a certain
consolation from the prayers which many of them put up in his behalf. In
Italy a copper coin of minute value will often make all the difference
between a vindictive curse--death by apoplexy being the favorite
one-mumbled in an old witch’s toothless jaws, and a prayer from the same
lips, so earnest that it would seem to reward the charitable soul with
at least a puff of grateful breath to help him heavenward. Good wishes
being so cheap, though possibly not very efficacious, and anathemas so
exceedingly bitter,--even if the greater portion of their poison remain
in the mouth that utters them,--it may be wise to expend some reasonable
amount in the purchase of the former. Donatello invariably did so; and
as he distributed his alms under the pictured window, of which we have
been speaking, no less than seven ancient women lifted their hands and
besought blessings on his head.
“Come,” said the sculptor, rejoicing at the happier expression which he
saw in his friend’s face. “I think your steed will not stumble with you
to-day. Each of these old dames looks as much like Horace’s Atra Cura
as can well be conceived; but, though there are seven of them, they will
make your burden on horseback lighter instead of heavier.”
“Are we to ride far?” asked the Count.
“A tolerable journey betwixt now and to-morrow noon,” Kenyon replied;
“for, at that hour, I purpose to be standing by the Pope’s statue in the
great square of Perugia.”
CHAPTER XXXIV
MARKET DAY IN PERUGIA
Perugia, on its lofty hilltop, was reached by the two travellers before
the sun had quite kissed away the early freshness of the morning. Since
midnight, there had been a heavy, rain, bringing infinite refreshment to
the scene of verdure and fertility amid which this ancient civilization
stands; insomuch that Kenyon loitered, when they came to the gray city
wall, and was loath to give up the prospect of the sunny wilderness that
lay below. It was as green as England, and bright as Italy alone. There
was all the wide valley, sweeping down and spreading away on all sides
from the weed grown ramparts, and bounded afar by mountains, which lay
asleep in the sun, with thin mists and silvery clouds floating about
their heads by way of morning dreams.
“It lacks still two hours of noon,” said the sculptor to his friend, as
they stood under the arch of the gateway, waiting for their passports
to be examined; “will you come with me to see some admirable frescos by
Perugino? There is a hall in the Exchange, of no great magnitude, but
covered with what must have been--at the time it was painted--such
magnificence and beauty as the world had not elsewhere to show.”
“It depresses me to look at old frescos,” responded the Count; “it is a
pain, yet not enough of a pain to answer as a penance.”
“Will you look at some pictures by Fra Angelico in the Church of San
Domenico?” asked Kenyon; “they are full of religious sincerity, When
one studies them faithfully, it is like holding a conversation about
heavenly things with a tender and devout-minded man.”
“You have shown me some of Fra Angelico’s pictures, I remember,”
answered Donatello; “his angels look as if they had never taken a flight
out of heaven; and his saints seem to have been born saints, and always
to have lived so. Young maidens, and all innocent persons, I doubt not,
may find great delight and profit in looking at such holy pictures. But
they are not for me.”
“Your criticism, I fancy, has great moral depth,” replied Kenyon; “and
I see in it the reason why Hilda so highly appreciates Fra Angelico’s
pictures. Well; we will let all such matters pass for to-day, and stroll
about this fine old city till noon.”
They wandered to and fro, accordingly, and lost themselves among the
strange, precipitate passages, which, in Perugia, are called streets,
Some of them are like caverns, being arched all over, and plunging down
abruptly towards an unknown darkness; which, when you have fathomed
its depths, admits you to a daylight that you scarcely hoped to behold
again. Here they met shabby men, and the careworn wives and mothers
of the people, some of whom guided children in leading strings through
those dim and antique thoroughfares, where a hundred generations had
passed before the little feet of to-day began to tread them. Thence they
climbed upward again, and came to the level plateau, on the summit of
the hill, where are situated the grand piazza and the principal public
edifices.
It happened to be market day in Perugia. The great square, therefore,
presented a far more vivacious spectacle than would have been witnessed
in it at any other time of the week, though not so lively as to overcome
the gray solemnity of the architectural portion of the scene. In the
shadow of the cathedral and other old Gothic structures--seeking shelter
from the sunshine that fell across the rest of the piazza--was a crowd
of people, engaged as buyers or sellers in the petty traffic of a
country fair. Dealers had erected booths and stalls on the pavement,
and overspread them with scanty awnings, beneath which they stood,
vociferously crying their merchandise; such as shoes, hats and caps,
yarn stockings, cheap jewelry and cutlery, books, chiefly little volumes
of a religious Character, and a few French novels; toys, tinware,
old iron, cloth, rosaries of beads, crucifixes, cakes, biscuits,
sugar-plums, and innumerable little odds and ends, which we see no
object in advertising. Baskets of grapes, figs, and pears stood on the
ground. Donkeys, bearing panniers stuffed out with kitchen vegetables,
and requiring an ample roadway, roughly shouldered aside the throng.
Crowded as the square was, a juggler found room to spread out a white
cloth upon the pavement, and cover it with cups, plates, balls, cards,
w the whole material of his magic, in short,--wherewith he proceeded to
work miracles under the noonday sun. An organ grinder at one point, and
a clarion and a flute at another, accomplished what their could towards
filling the wide space with tuneful noise, Their small uproar,
however, was nearly drowned by the multitudinous voices of the people,
bargaining, quarrelling, laughing, and babbling copiously at random;
for the briskness of the mountain atmosphere, or some other cause, made
everybody so loquacious, that more words were wasted in Perugia on this
one market day, than the noisiest piazza of Rome would utter in a month.
Through all this petty tumult, which kept beguiling one’s eyes and upper
strata of thought, it was delightful to catch glimpses of the grand
old architecture that stood around the square. The life of the
flitting moment, existing in the antique shell of an age gone by, has a
fascination which we do not find in either the past or present, taken by
themselves. It might seem irreverent to make the gray cathedral and
the tall, time-worn palaces echo back the exuberant vociferation of the
market; but they did so, and caused the sound to assume a kind of
poetic rhythm, and themselves looked only the more majestic for their
condescension.
On one side, there was an immense edifice devoted to public purposes,
with an antique gallery, and a range of arched and stone-mullioned
windows, running along its front; and by way of entrance it had a
central Gothic arch, elaborately wreathed around with sculptured
semicircles, within which the spectator was aware of a stately and
impressive gloom. Though merely the municipal council-house and exchange
of a decayed country town, this structure was worthy to have held in
one portion of it the parliament hall of a nation, and in the other, the
state apartments of its ruler. On another side of the square rose the
mediaeval front of the cathedral, where the imagination of a Gothic
architect had long ago flowered out indestructibly, in the first place,
a grand design, and then covering it with such abundant detail of
ornament, that the magnitude of the work seemed less a miracle than its
minuteness. You would suppose that he must have softened the stone
into wax, until his most delicate fancies were modelled in the pliant
material, and then had hardened it into stone again. The whole was a
vast, black-letter page of the richest and quaintest poetry. In fit
keeping with all this old magnificence was a great marble fountain,
where again the Gothic imagination showed its overflow and gratuity of
device in the manifold sculptures which it lavished as freely as the
water did its shifting shapes.
Besides the two venerable structures which we have described, there were
lofty palaces, perhaps of as old a date, rising story above Story, and
adorned with balconies, whence, hundreds of years ago, the princely
occupants had been accustomed to gaze down at the sports, business, and
popular assemblages of the piazza. And, beyond all question, they thus
witnessed the erection of a bronze statue, which, three centuries since,
was placed on the pedestal that it still occupies.
“I never come to Perugia,” said Kenyon, “without spending as much time
as I can spare in studying yonder statue of Pope Julius the Third. Those
sculptors of the Middle Age have fitter lessons for the professors of
my art than we can find in the Grecian masterpieces. They belong to our
Christian civilization; and, being earnest works, they always express
something which we do not get from the antique. Will you look at it?”
“Willingly,” replied the Count, “for I see, even so far off, that the
statue is bestowing a benediction, and there is a feeling in my heart
that I may be permitted to share it.”
Remembering the similar idea which Miriam a short time before had
expressed, the sculptor smiled hopefully at the coincidence. They made
their way through the throng of the market place, and approached close
to the iron railing that protected the pedestal of the statue.
It was the figure of a pope, arrayed in his pontifical robes, and
crowned with the tiara. He sat in a bronze chair, elevated high above
the pavement, and seemed to take kindly yet authoritative cognizance
of the busy scene which was at that moment passing before his eye. His
right hand was raised and spread abroad, as if in the act of shedding
forth a benediction, which every man--so broad, so wise, and so serenely
affectionate was the bronze pope’s regard--might hope to feel quietly
descending upon the need, or the distress, that he had closest at his
heart. The statue had life and observation in it, as well as patriarchal
majesty. An imaginative spectator could not but be impressed with
the idea that this benignly awful representative of divine and human
authority might rise from his brazen chair, should any great public
exigency demand his interposition, and encourage or restrain the people
by his gesture, or even by prophetic utterances worthy of so grand a
presence.
And in the long, calm intervals, amid the quiet lapse of ages, the
pontiff watched the daily turmoil around his seat, listening with
majestic patience to the market cries, and all the petty uproar that
awoke the echoes of the stately old piazza. He was the enduring friend
of these men, and of their forefathers and children, the familiar face
of generations.
“The pope’s blessing, methinks, has fallen upon you,” observed the
sculptor, looking at his friend.
In truth, Donatello’s countenance indicated a healthier spirit than
while he was brooding in his melancholy tower. The change of scene, the
breaking up of custom, the fresh flow of incidents, the sense of being
homeless, and therefore free, had done something for our poor Faun;
these circumstances had at least promoted a reaction, which might else
have been slower in its progress. Then, no doubt, the bright day, the
gay spectacle of the market place, and the sympathetic exhilaration
of so many people’s cheerfulness, had each their suitable effect on a
temper naturally prone to be glad. Perhaps, too, he was magnetically
conscious of a presence that formerly sufficed to make him happy. Be the
cause what it might, Donatello’s eyes shone with a serene and hopeful
expression while looking upward at the bronze pope, to whose widely
diffused blessing, it may be, he attributed all this good influence.
“Yes, my dear friend,” said he, in reply to the sculptor’s remark, “I
feel the blessing upon my spirit.”
“It is wonderful,” said Kenyon, with a smile, “wonderful and delightful
to think how long a good man’s beneficence may be potent, even after his
death. How great, then, must have been the efficacy of this excellent
pontiff’s blessing while he was alive!”
“I have heard,” remarked the Count, “that there was a brazen image set
up in the wilderness, the sight of which healed the Israelites of their
poisonous and rankling wounds. If it be the Blessed Virgin’s pleasure,
why should not this holy image before us do me equal good? A wound has
long been rankling in my soul, and filling it with poison.”
“I did wrong to smile,” answered Kenyon. “It is not for me to limit
Providence in its operations on man’s spirit.”
While they stood talking, the clock in the neighboring cathedral told
the hour, with twelve reverberating strokes, which it flung down upon
the crowded market place, as if warning one and all to take advantage
of the bronze pontiff’s benediction, or of Heaven’s blessing, however
proffered, before the opportunity were lost.
“High noon,” said the sculptor. “It is Miriam’s hour!”
CHAPTER XXXV
THE BRONZE PONTIFF’S BENEDICTION
When the last of the twelve strokes had fallen from the cathedral clock,
Kenyon threw his eyes over the busy scene of the market place, expecting
to discern Miriam somewhere in the ‘crowd. He looked next towards the
cathedral itself, where it was reasonable to imagine that she might have
taken shelter, while awaiting her appointed time. Seeing no trace of
her in either direction, his eyes came back from their quest somewhat
disappointed, and rested on a figure which was leaning, like Donatello
and himself, on the iron balustrade that surrounded the statue. Only a
moment before, they two had been alone.
It was the figure of a woman, with her head bowed on her hands, as if
she deeply felt--what we have been endeavoring to convey into our feeble
description--the benign and awe-inspiring influence which the pontiff’s
statue exercises upon a sensitive spectator. No matter though it were
modelled for a Catholic chief priest, the desolate heart, whatever be
its religion, recognizes in that image the likeness of a father.
“Miriam,” said the sculptor, with a tremor in his voice, “is it
yourself?”
“It is I,” she replied; “I am faithful to my engagement, though with
many fears.” She lifted her head, and revealed to Kenyon--revealed to
Donatello likewise--the well-remembered features of Miriam. They were
pale and worn, but distinguished even now, though less gorgeously, by
a beauty that might be imagined bright enough to glimmer with its own
light in a dim cathedral aisle, and had no need to shrink from the
severer test of the mid-day sun. But she seemed tremulous, and hardly
able to go through with a scene which at a distance she had found
courage to undertake.
“You are most welcome, Miriam!” said the sculptor, seeking to afford
her the encouragement which he saw she so greatly required. “I have
a hopeful trust that the result of this interview will be propitious.
Come; let me lead you to Donatello.”
“No, Kenyon, no!” whispered Miriam, shrinking back; “unless of his own
accord he speaks my name,--unless he bids me stay,--no word shall ever
pass between him and me. It is not that I take upon me to be proud at
this late hour. Among other feminine qualities, I threw away my pride
when Hilda cast me off.”
“If not pride, what else restrains you?” Kenyon asked, a little angry at
her unseasonable scruples, and also at this half-complaining reference
to Hilda’s just severity. “After daring so much, it is no time for fear!
If we let him part from you without a word, your opportunity of doing
him inestimable good is lost forever.”
“True; it will be lost forever!” repeated Miriam sadly. “But, dear
friend, will it be my fault? I willingly fling my woman’s pride at his
feet. But--do you not see?--his heart must be left freely to its own
decision whether to recognize me, because on his voluntary choice
depends the whole question whether my devotion will do him good or
harm. Except he feel an infinite need of me, I am a burden and fatal
obstruction to him!”
“Take your own course, then, Miriam,” said Kenyon; “and, doubtless,
the crisis being what it is, your spirit is better instructed for its
emergencies than mine.”
While the foregoing words passed between them they had withdrawn a
little from the immediate vicinity of the statue, so as to be out of
Donatello’s hearing. Still, however, they were beneath the pontiff’s
outstretched hand; and Miriam, with her beauty and her sorrow, looked up
into his benignant face, as if she had come thither for his pardon and
paternal affection, and despaired of so vast a boon.
Meanwhile, she had not stood thus long in the public square of Perugia,
without attracting the observation of many eyes. With their quick sense
of beauty, these Italians had recognized her loveliness, and spared not
to take their fill of gazing at it; though their native gentleness and
courtesy made their homage far less obtrusive than that of Germans,
French, or Anglo-Saxons might have been. It is not improbable that
Miriam had planned this momentous interview, on so public a spot and at
high noon, with an eye to the sort of protection that would be thrown
over it by a multitude of eye-witnesses. In circumstances of profound
feeling and passion, there is often a sense that too great a seclusion
cannot be endured; there is an indefinite dread of being quite alone
with the object of our deepest interest. The species of solitude that
a crowd harbors within itself is felt to be preferable, in certain
conditions of the heart, to the remoteness of a desert or the depths
of an untrodden wood. Hatred, love, or whatever kind of too
intense emotion, or even indifference, where emotion has once been,
instinctively seeks to interpose some barrier between itself and the
corresponding passion in another breast. This, we suspect, was what
Miriam had thought of, in coming to the thronged piazza; partly this,
and partly, as she said, her superstition that the benign statue held
good influences in store.
But Donatello remained leaning against the balustrade. She dared not
glance towards him, to see whether he were pale and agitated, or calm as
ice. Only, she knew that the moments were fleetly lapsing away, and that
his heart must call her soon, or the voice would never reach her. She
turned quite away from him and spoke again to the sculptor.
“I have wished to meet you,” said she, “for more than one reason. News
has come to me respecting a dear friend of ours. Nay, not of mine! I
dare not call her a friend of mine, though once the dearest.”
“Do you speak of Hilda?” exclaimed Kenyon, with quick alarm. “Has
anything befallen her? When I last heard of her, she was still in Rome,
and well.”
“Hilda remains in Rome,” replied Miriam, “nor is she ill as regards
physical health, though much depressed in spirits. She lives quite alone
in her dove-cote; not a friend near her, not one in Rome, which, you
know, is deserted by all but its native inhabitants. I fear for her
health, if she continue long in such solitude, with despondency preying
on her mind. I tell you this, knowing the interest which the rare beauty
of her character has awakened in you.”
“I will go to Rome!” said the sculptor, in great emotion. “Hilda has
never allowed me to manifest more than a friendly regard; but, at least,
she cannot prevent my watching over her at a humble distance. I will set
out this very hour.”
“Do not leave us now!” whispered Miriam imploringly, and laying her hand
on his arm. “One moment more! Ah; he has no word for me!”
“Miriam!” said Donatello.
Though but a single word, and the first that he had spoken, its tone was
a warrant of the sad and tender depth from which it came. It told Miriam
things of infinite importance, and, first of all, that he still loved
her. The sense of their mutual crime had stunned, but not destroyed, the
vitality of his affection; it was therefore indestructible. That tone,
too, bespoke an altered and deepened character; it told of a vivified
intellect, and of spiritual instruction that had come through sorrow and
remorse; so that instead of the wild boy, the thing of sportive,
animal nature, the sylvan Faun, here was now the man of feeling and
intelligence.
She turned towards him, while his voice still reverberated in the depths
of her soul.
“You have called me!” said she.
“Because my deepest heart has need of you!” he replied. “Forgive,
Miriam, the coldness, the hardness with which I parted from you! I was
bewildered with strange horror and gloom.”
“Alas! and it was I that brought it on you,” said she. “What repentance,
what self-sacrifice, can atone for that infinite wrong? There was
something so sacred in the innocent and joyous life which you were
leading! A happy person is such an unaccustomed and holy creature in
this sad world! And, encountering so rare a being, and gifted with the
power of sympathy with his sunny life, it was my doom, mine, to bring
him within the limits of sinful, sorrowful mortality! Bid me depart,
Donatello! Fling me off! No good, through my agency, can follow upon
such a mighty evil!”
“Miriam,” said he, “our lot lies together. Is it not so? Tell me, in
Heaven’s name, if it be otherwise.”
Donatello’s conscience was evidently perplexed with doubt, whether the
communion of a crime, such as they two were jointly stained with, ought
not to stifle all the instinctive motions of their hearts, impelling
them one towards the other. Miriam, on the other hand, remorsefully
questioned with herself whether the misery, already accruing from
her influence, should not warn her to withdraw from his path. In this
momentous interview, therefore, two souls were groping for each other in
the darkness of guilt and sorrow, and hardly were bold enough to grasp
the cold hands that they found.
The sculptor stood watching the scene with earnest sympathy.
“It seems irreverent,” said he, at length; “intrusive, if not
irreverent, for a third person to thrust himself between the two solely
concerned in a crisis like the present. Yet, possibly as a bystander,
though a deeply interested one, I may discern somewhat of truth that
is hidden from you both; nay, at least interpret or suggest some ideas
which you might not so readily convey to each other.”
“Speak!” said Miriam. “We confide in you.” “Speak!” said Donatello. “You
are true and upright.”
“I well know,” rejoined Kenyon, “that I shall not succeed in uttering
the few, deep words which, in this matter, as in all others, include the
absolute truth. But here, Miriam, is one whom a terrible misfortune has
begun to educate; it has taken him, and through your agency, out of a
wild and happy state, which, within circumscribed limits, gave him joys
that he cannot elsewhere find on earth. On his behalf, you have incurred
a responsibility which you cannot fling aside. And here, Donatello, is
one whom Providence marks out as intimately connected with your destiny.
The mysterious process, by which our earthly life instructs us for
another state of being, was begun for you by her. She has rich gifts of
heart and mind, a suggestive power, a magnetic influence, a sympathetic
knowledge, which, wisely and religiously exercised, are what your
condition needs. She possesses what you require, and, with utter self
devotion, will use it for your good. The bond betwixt you, therefore,
is a true one, and never--except by Heaven’s own act--should be rent
asunder.”
“Ah; he has spoken the truth!” cried Donatello, grasping Miriam’s hand.
“The very truth, dear friend,” cried Miriam.
“But take heed,” resumed the sculptor, anxious not to violate the
integrity of his own conscience, “take heed; for you love one another,
and yet your bond is twined with such black threads that you must never
look upon it as identical with the ties that unite other loving souls.
It is for mutual support; it is for one another’s final good; it is for
effort, for sacrifice, but not for earthly happiness. If such be your
motive, believe me, friends, it were better to relinquish each other’s
hands at this sad moment. There would be no holy sanction on your wedded
life.”
“None,” said Donatello, shuddering. “We know it well.”
“None,” repeated Miriam, also shuddering. “United--miserably entangled
with me, rather--by a bond of guilt, our union might be for eternity,
indeed, and most intimate;--but, through all that endless duration, I
should be conscious of his horror.”
“Not for earthly bliss, therefore,” said Kenyon, “but for mutual
elevation, and encouragement towards a severe and painful life, you take
each other’s hands. And if, out of toil, sacrifice, prayer, penitence,
and earnest effort towards right things, there comes at length a sombre
and thoughtful, happiness, taste it, and thank Heaven! So that you live
not for it,--so that it be a wayside flower, springing along a path that
leads to higher ends,--it will be Heaven’s gracious gift, and a token
that it recognizes your union here below.”
“Have you no more to say?” asked Miriam earnestly. “There is matter of
sorrow and lofty consolation strangely mingled in your words.”
“Only this, dear Miriam,” said the sculptor; “if ever in your lives
the highest duty should require from either of you the sacrifice of the
other, meet the occasion without shrinking. This is all.”
While Kenyon spoke, Donatello had evidently taken in the ideas which he
propounded, and had ennobled them by the sincerity of his reception.
His aspect unconsciously assumed a dignity, which, elevating his former
beauty, accorded with the change that had long been taking place in his
interior self. He was a man, revolving grave and deep thoughts in his
breast. He still held Miriam’s hand; and there they stood, the beautiful
man, the beautiful woman, united forever, as they felt, in the
presence of these thousand eye-witnesses, who gazed so curiously at the
unintelligible scene. Doubtless the crowd recognized them as lovers,
and fancied this a betrothal that was destined to result in lifelong
happiness. And possibly it might be so. Who can tell where happiness may
come; or where, though an expected guest, it may never show its face?
Perhaps--shy, subtle thing--it had crept into this sad marriage bond,
when the partners would have trembled at its presence as a crime.
“Farewell!” said Kenyon; “I go to Rome.”
“Farewell, true friend!” said Miriam.
“Farewell!” said Donatello too. “May you be happy. You have no guilt to
make you shrink from happiness.”
At this moment it so chanced that all the three friends by one impulse
glanced upward at the statue of Pope Julius; and there was the majestic
figure stretching out the hand of benediction over them, and bending
down upon this guilty and repentant pair its visage of grand benignity.
There is a singular effect oftentimes when, out of the midst of
engrossing thought and deep absorption, we suddenly look up, and catch a
glimpse of external objects. We seem at such moments to look farther and
deeper into them, than by any premeditated observation; it is as if they
met our eyes alive, and with all their hidden meaning on the surface,
but grew again inanimate and inscrutable the instant that they became
aware of our glances. So now, at that unexpected glimpse, Miriam,
Donatello, and the sculptor, all three imagined that they beheld the
bronze pontif
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