THE MARBLE FAUN, VOL. II
or The Romance of Monte Beni

BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

IN TWO VOLUMES




Table of 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 ironbarred 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, horrorstricken 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 morel"

"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
cannonflash 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 timestained, 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 sodety 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 ail at once for alms.  They proved
to be more than forty of as ragged and dirty little imps as any in the
world; besides whom, all the wrinkled matrons, and most of the village
maids, and not a few stalwart men, held out their hands grimly,
piteously, or smilingly in the forlorn hope of whatever trifle of coin
might remain in pockets already so fearfully taxed.  Had they been
permitted, they would gladly have knelt down and worshipped the
travellers, and have cursed them, without rising from their knees, if
the expected boon failed to be awarded.

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

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

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

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

"Are we to ride far?" asked the Count.

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





CHAPTER XXXIV


MARKET DAY IN PERUGIA


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The pope's blessing, methinks, has fallen upon you," observed the
sculptor, looking at his friend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"High noon," said the sculptor.  "It is Miriam's hour!"





CHAPTER XXXV


THE BRONZE PONTIFF'S BENEDICTION


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Miriam!" said Donatello.

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

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

"You have called me!" said she.

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

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

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

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

The sculptor stood watching the scene with earnest sympathy.

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

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

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

"Ah; he has spoken the truth!" cried Donatello, grasping Miriam's hand.


"The very truth, dear friend," cried Miriam.

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

"None," said Donatello, shuddering.  "We know it well."

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

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

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

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

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

"Farewell!" said Kenyon; "I go to Rome."

"Farewell, true friend!" said Miriam.

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

At this moment it so chanced that all the three friends by one impulse
glanced upward at the statue of Pope Julius; and there was the
majestic figure stretching out the hand of benediction over them, and
bending down upon this guilty and repentant pair its visage of grand
benignity.  There is a singular effect oftentimes when, out

of the midst of engrossing thought and deep absorption, we suddenly
look up, and catch a glimpse of external objects.  We seem at such
moments to look farther and deeper into them, than by any premeditated
observation; it is as if they met our eyes alive, and with all their
hidden meaning on the surface, but grew again inanimate and
inscrutable the instant that they became aware of our glances.  So now,
at that unexpected glimpse, Miriam, Donatello, and the sculptor, all
three imagined that they beheld the bronze pontiff endowed with
spiritual life.  A blessing was felt descending upon them from his
outstretched hand; he approved by look and gesture the pledge of a
deep union that had passed under his auspices.





CHAPTER XXXVI


HILDA'S TOWER


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





CHAPTER XXXVII


THE EMPTINESS OF PICTURE GALLERIES


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





CHAPTER XXXVIII


ALTARS AND INCENSE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





CHAPTER XXXIX


THE WORLD'S CATHEDRAL


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

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

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

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

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

"O help!  O help!" cried Hilda; "I cannot, cannot bear it!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Never, father," said Hilda.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"This is not right, father!" said Hilda, fixing her eyes on the old
man's.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





CHAPTER XL


HILDA AND A FRIEND


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Would to Heaven I had!" ejaculated Kenyon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Then you think of going home?"  Kenyon asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





CHAPTER XLI


SNOWDROPS AND MAIDENLY DELIGHTS


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





CHAPTER XLII


REMINISCENCES OF MIRIAM


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

"No wonder!" exclaimed Hilda, growing pale.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


"No," said Hilda; "I seek the Palazzo Cenci."

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

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





CHAPTER XLIII


THE EXTINCTION OF A LAMP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"All is well," answered Kenyon.  "And with you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Is all well with you?" she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





CHAPTER XLIV


THE DESERTED SHRINE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





CHAPTER XLV


THE FLIGHT OF HILDA'S DOVES


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"She has gone from me, father," said he.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





CHAPTER XLVI


A WALK ON THE CAMPAGNA


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





CHAPTER XLVII


THE PEASANT AND CONTADINA


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And will it not do so now?"  Miriam asked.

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

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

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

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

"A grave!" exclaimed the sculptor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some time afterwards had occurred that terrible event to which Miriam
had alluded when she revealed her name; an event, the frightful and
mysterious circumstances of which will recur to many minds, but of
which few or none can have found for themselves a satisfactory
explanation.  It only concerns the present narrative, inasmuch as the
suspicion of being at least an accomplice in the crime fell darkly and
directly upon Miriam herself.

"But you know that I am innocent!" she cried, interrupting herself
again, and looking Kenyon in the face.

"I know it by my deepest consciousness," he answered; "and I know it
by Hilda's trust and entire affection, which you never could have won
had you been capable of guilt."

"That is sure ground, indeed, for pronouncing me innocent," said
Miriam, with the tears gushing into her eyes.  "Yet I have since
become a horror to your saint-like Hilda, by a crime which she herself
saw me help to perpetrate!"

She proceeded with her story.  The great influence of her family
connections had shielded her from some of the consequences of her
imputed guilt.  But, in her despair, she had fled from home, and had
surrounded her flight with such circumstances as rendered it the most
probable conclusion that she had committed suicide.  Miriam, however,
was not of the feeble nature which takes advantage of that obvious and
poor resource in earthly difficulties.  She flung herself upon the
world, and speedily created a new sphere, in which Hilda's gentle
purity, the sculptor's sensibility, clear thought, and genius, and
Donatello's genial simplicity had given her almost her first
experience of happiness.  Then came that ill-omened adventure of the
catacomb, The spectral figure which she encountered there was the evil
fate that had haunted her through life.

Looking back upon what had happened, Miriam observed, she now
considered him a madman.  Insanity must have been mixed up with his
original composition, and developed by those very acts of depravity
which it suggested, and still more intensified, by the remorse that
ultimately followed them.  Nothing was stranger in his dark career
than the penitence which often seemed to go hand in hand with crime.
Since his death she had ascertained that it finally led him to a
convent, where his severe and self-inflicted penance had even acquired
him the reputation of unusual sanctity, and had been the cause of his
enjoying greater freedom than is commonly allowed to monks.

"Need I tell you more?" asked Miriam, after proceeding thus far.  "It
is still a dim and dreary mystery, a gloomy twilight into which I
guide you; but possibly you may catch a glimpse of much that I myself
can explain only by conjecture.  At all events, you can comprehend
what my situation must have been, after that fatal interview in the
catacomb.  My persecutor had gone thither for penance, but followed me
forth with fresh impulses to crime.  He had me in his power.  Mad as
he was, and wicked as he was, with one word he could have blasted me
in the belief of all the world.  In your belief too, and Hilda's!
Even Donatello would have shrunk from me with horror!"

"Never," said Donatello, "my instinct would have known you innocent."

"Hilda and Donatello and myself,--we three would have acquitted you,"
said Kenyon, "let the world say what it might.  Ah, Miriam, you should
have told us this sad story sooner!"

"I thought often of revealing it to you," answered Miriam; "on one
occasion, especially,--it was after you had shown me your Cleopatra;
it seemed to leap out of my heart, and got as far as my very lips.
But finding you cold to accept my confidence, I thrust it back again.
Had I obeyed my first impulse, all would have turned out differently."

"And Hilda!" resumed the sculptor.  "What can have been her connection
with these dark incidents?"

"She will, doubtless, tell you with her own lips," replied Miriam.
"Through sources of information which I possess in Rome, I can assure
you of her safety.  In two days more--by the help of the special
Providence that, as I love to tell you, watches over Hilda--she shall
rejoin you."

"Still two days morel" murmured the sculptor.

"Ah, you are cruel now!  More cruel than you know!" exclaimed Miriam,
with another gleam of that fantastic, fitful gayety, which had more
than once marked her manner during this interview.  "Spare your poor
friends!"

"I know not what you mean, Miriam," said Kenyon.

"No matter," she replied; "you will understand hereafter.  But could
you think it?  Here is Donatello haunted with strange remorse, and an
unmitigable resolve to obtain what he deems justice upon himself.  He
fancies, with a kind of direct simplicity, which I have vainly tried
to combat, that, when a wrong has been done, the doer is bound to
submit himself to whatsoever tribunal takes cognizance of such things,
and abide its judgment.  I have assured him that there is no such
thing as earthly justice, and especially none here, under the head of
Christendom."

"We will not argue the point again," said Donatello, smiling.  "I have
no head for argument, but only a sense, an impulse, an instinct, I
believe, which sometimes leads me right.  But why do we talk now of
what may make us sorrowful?  There are still two days more.  Let us be
happy!"

It appeared to Kenyon that since he last saw Donatello, some of the
sweet and delightful characteristics of the antique Faun had returned
to him.  There were slight, careless graces, pleasant and simple
peculiarities, that had been obliterated by the heavy grief through
which he was passing at Monte Beni, and out of which he had hardly
emerged when the sculptor parted with Miriam and him beneath the
bronze pontiffs outstretched hand.  These happy blossoms had now
reappeared.  A playfulness came out of his heart, and glimmered like
firelight in his actions, alternating, or even closely intermingled,
with profound sympathy and serious thought.

"Is he not beautiful?" said Miriam, watching the sculptor's eye as it
dwelt admiringly on Donatello.  "So changed, yet still, in a deeper
sense, so much the same!  He has travelled in a circle, as all things
heavenly and earthly do, and now comes back to his original self, with
an inestimable treasure of improvement won from an experience of pain.
How wonderful is this!  I tremble at my own thoughts, yet must needs
probe them to their depths.  Was the crime--in which he and I were
wedded--was it a blessing, in that strange disguise?  Was it a means
of education, bringing a simple and imperfect nature to a point of
feeling and intelligence which it could have reached under no other
discipline?"

"You stir up deep and perilous matter, Miriam," replied Kenyon.  "I
dare not follow you into the unfathomable abysses whither you are
tending."

"Yet there is a pleasure in them!  I delight to brood on the verge of
this great mystery," returned she.  "The story of the fall of man!  Is
it not repeated in our romance of Monte Beni?  And may we follow the
analogy yet further?  Was that very sin,--into which Adam precipitated
himself and all his race, was it the destined means by which, over a
long pathway of toil and sorrow, we are to attain a higher, brighter,
and profounder happiness, than our lost birthright gave?  Will not
this idea account for the permitted existence of sin, as no other
theory can?"

"It is too dangerous, Miriam!  I cannot follow you!" repeated the
sculptor.  "Mortal man has no right to tread on the ground where you
now set your feet."

"Ask Hilda what she thinks of it," said Miriam, with a thoughtful
smile.  "At least, she might conclude that sin--which man chose
instead of good--has been so beneficently handled by omniscience and
omnipotence, that, whereas our dark enemy sought to destroy us by it,
it has really become an instrument most effective in the education of
intellect and soul."

Miriam paused a little longer among these meditations, which the
sculptor rightly felt to be so perilous; she then pressed his hand, in
token of farewell.

"The day after to-morrow," said she, "an hour before sunset, go to the
Corso, and stand in front of the fifth house on your left, beyond the
Antonine column.  You will learn tidings of a friend."

Kenyon would have besought her for more definite intelligence, but she
shook her head, put her finger on her lips, and turned away with an
illusive smile.  The fancy impressed him that she too, like Donatello,
had reached a wayside paradise, in their mysterious life journey,
where they both threw down the burden of the before and after, and,
except for this interview with himself, were happy in the flitting
moment.  To-day Donatello was the sylvan Faun; to-day Miriam was his
fit companion, a Nymph of grove or fountain; to-morrow--a remorseful
man and woman, linked by a marriage bond of crime--they would set
forth towards an inevitable goal.





CHAPTER XLVIII


A SCENE IN THE CORSO


On the appointed afternoon, Kenyon failed not to make his appearance
in the Corso, and at an hour much earlier than Miriam had named.

It was carnival time.  The merriment of this famous festival was in
full progress; and the stately avenue of the Corso was peopled with
hundreds of fantastic shapes, some of which probably represented the
mirth of ancient times, surviving through all manner of calamity, ever
since the days of the Roman Empire.  For a few afternoons of early
spring, this mouldy gayety strays into the sunshine; all the remainder
of the year, it seems to be shut up in the catacombs or some other
sepulchral storehouse of the past.

Besides these hereditary forms, at which a hundred generations have
laughed, there were others of modern date, the humorous effluence of
the day that was now passing.  It is a day, however, and an age, that
appears to be remarkably barren, when compared with the prolific
originality of former times, in productions of a scenic and ceremonial
character, whether grave or gay.  To own the truth, the Carnival is
alive, this present year, only because it has existed through
centuries gone by.  It is traditionary, not actual.  If decrepit and
melancholy Rome smiles, and laughs broadly, indeed, at carnival time,
it is not in the old simplicity of real mirth, but with a
half-conscious effort, like our self-deceptive pretence of jollity at
a threadbare joke.  Whatever it may once have been, it is now but a
narrow stream of merriment, noisy of set purpose, running along the
middle of the Corso, through the solemn heart of the decayed city,
without extending its shallow influence on either side.  Nor, even
within its own limits, does it affect the mass of spectators, but only
a comparatively few, in street and balcony, who carry on the warfare
of nosegays and counterfeit sugar plums.  The populace look on with
staid composure; the nobility and priesthood take little or no part in
the matter; and, but for the hordes of Anglo-Saxons who annually take
up the flagging mirth, the Carnival might long ago have been swept
away, with the snowdrifts of confetti that whiten all the pavement.

No doubt, however, the worn-out festival is still new to the youthful
and light hearted, who make the worn-out world itself as fresh as Adam
found it on his first forenoon in Paradise.  It may be only age and
care that chill the life out of its grotesque and airy riot, with the
impertinence of their cold criticism.

Kenyon, though young, had care enough within his breast to render the
Carnival the emptiest of mockeries.  Contrasting the stern anxiety of
his present mood with the frolic spirit of the preceding year, he
fancied that so much trouble had, at all events, brought wisdom in its
train.  But there is a wisdom that looks grave, and sneers at
merriment; and again a deeper wisdom, that stoops to be gay as often
as occasion serves, and oftenest avails itself of shallow and trifling
grounds of mirth; because, if we wait for more substantial ones, we
seldom can be gay at all.  Therefore, had it been possible, Kenyon
would have done well to mask himself in some wild, hairy visage, and
plunge into the throng of other maskers, as at the Carnival before.
Then Donatello had danced along the Corso in all the equipment of a
Faun, doing the part with wonderful felicity of execution, and
revealing furry ears, which looked absolutely real; and Miriam had
been alternately a lady of the antique regime, in powder and brocade,
and the prettiest peasant girl of the Campagna, in the gayest of
costumes; while Hilda, sitting demurely in a balcony, had hit the
sculptor with a single rosebud,--so sweet and fresh a bud that he knew
at once whose hand had flung it.

These were all gone; all those dear friends whose sympathetic mirth
had made him gay.  Kenyon felt as if an interval of many years had
passed since the last Carnival.  He had grown old, the nimble jollity
was tame, and the maskers dull and heavy; the Corso was but a narrow
and shabby street of decaying palaces; and even the long, blue
streamer of Italian sky, above it, not half so brightly blue as
formerly.

Yet, if he could have beheld the scene with his clear, natural
eyesight, he might still have found both merriment and splendor in it.
Everywhere, and all day long, there had been tokens of the festival,
in the baskets brimming over with bouquets, for sale at the street
corners, or borne about on people's heads; while bushels upon bushels
of variously colored confetti were displayed, looking just like
veritable sugar plums; so that a stranger would have imagined that the
whole commerce and business of stern old Rome lay in flowers and
sweets.  And now, in the sunny afternoon, there could hardly be a
spectacle more picturesque than the vista of that noble street,
stretching into the interminable distance between two rows of lofty
edifices, from every window of which, and many a balcony, flaunted gay
and gorgeous carpets, bright silks, scarlet cloths with rich golden
fringes, and Gobelin tapestry, still lustrous with varied hues, though
the product of antique looms.  Each separate palace had put on a gala
dress, and looked festive for the occasion, whatever sad or guilty
secret it might hide within.  Every window, moreover, was alive with
the faces of women, rosy girls, and children, all kindled into brisk
and mirthful expression, by the incidents in the street below.  In the
balconies that projected along the palace fronts stood groups of
ladies, some beautiful, all richly dressed, scattering forth their
laughter, shrill, yet sweet, and the musical babble of their voices,
to thicken into an airy tumult over the heads of common mortals.

All these innumerable eyes looked down into the street, the whole
capacity of which was thronged with festal figures, in such fantastic
variety that it had taken centuries to contrive them; and through the
midst of the mad, merry stream of human life rolled slowly onward a
never-ending procession of all the vehicles in Rome, from the ducal
carriage, with the powdered coachman high in front, and the three
golden lackeys clinging in the rear, down to the rustic cart drawn by
its single donkey.  Among this various crowd, at windows and in
balconies, in cart, cab, barouche, or gorgeous equipage, or bustling
to and fro afoot, there was a sympathy of nonsense; a true and genial
brotherhood and sisterhood, based on the honest purpose--and a wise
one, too--of being foolish, all together.  The sport of mankind, like
its deepest earnest, is a battle; so these festive people fought one
another with an ammunition of sugar plums and flowers.

Not that they were veritable sugar plums, however, but something that
resembled them only as the apples of Sodom look like better fruit.
They were concocted mostly of lime, with a grain of oat, or some other
worthless kernel, in the midst.  Besides the hailstorm of confetti,
the combatants threw handfuls of flour or lime into the air, where it
hung like smoke over a battlefield, or, descending, whitened a black
coat or priestly robe, and made the curly locks of youth irreverently
hoary.

At the same time with this acrid contest of quicklime, which caused
much effusion of tears from suffering eyes, a gentler warfare of
flowers was carried on, principally between knights and ladies.
Originally, no doubt, when this pretty custom was first instituted, it
may have had a sincere and modest import.  Each youth and damsel,
gathering bouquets of field flowers, or the sweetest and fairest that
grew in their own gardens, all fresh and virgin blossoms, flung them
with true aim at the one, or few, whom they regarded with a sentiment
of shy partiality at least, if not with love.  Often, the lover in the
Corso may thus have received from his bright mistress, in her father's
princely balcony, the first sweet intimation that his passionate
glances had not struck against a heart of marble.  What more
appropriate mode of suggesting her tender secret could a maiden find
than by the soft hit of a rosebud against a young man's cheek?

This was the pastime and the earnest of a more innocent and homelier
age.  Nowadays the nosegays are gathered and tied up by sordid hands,
chiefly of the most ordinary flowers, and are sold along the Corso, at
mean price, yet more than such Venal things are worth.  Buying a
basketful, you find them miserably wilted, as if they had flown hither
and thither through two or three carnival days already; muddy, too,
having been fished up from the pavement, where a hundred feet have
trampled on them.  You may see throngs of men and boys who thrust
themselves beneath the horses' hoofs to gather up bouquets that were
aimed amiss from balcony and carriage; these they sell again, and yet
once more, and ten times over, defiled as they all are with the wicked
filth of Rome.

Such are the flowery favors--the fragrant bunches of sentiment--that
fly between cavalier and dame, and back again, from one end of the
Corso to the other.  Perhaps they may symbolize, more aptly than was
intended, the poor, battered, wilted hearts of those who fling them;
hearts which--crumpled and crushed by former possessors, and stained
with various mishap--have been passed from hand to hand along the
muddy street-way of life, instead of being treasured in one faithful
bosom.

These venal and polluted flowers, therefore, and those deceptive
bonbons, are types of the small reality that still subsists in the
observance of the Carnival.  Yet the government seemed to imagine that
there might be excitement enough,--wild mirth, perchance, following
its antics beyond law, and frisking from frolic into earnest,--to
render it expedient to guard the Corso with an imposing show of
military power.  Besides the ordinary force of gendarmes, a strong
patrol of papal dragoons, in steel helmets and white cloaks, were
stationed at all the street corners.  Detachments of French infantry
stood by their stacked muskets in the Piazza del Popolo, at one
extremity of the course, and before the palace of the Austrian embassy,
at the other, and by the column of Antoninus, midway between.  Had
that chained tiger-cat, the Roman populace, shown only so much as the
tip of his claws, the sabres would have been flashing and the bullets
whistling, in right earnest, among the combatants who now pelted one
another with mock sugar plums and wilted flowers.

But, to do the Roman people justice, they were restrained by a better
safeguard than the sabre or the bayonet; it was their own gentle
courtesy, which imparted a sort of sacredness to the hereditary
festival.  At first sight of a spectacle so fantastic and extravagant,
a cool observer might have imagined the whole town gone mad; but, in
the end, he would see that all this apparently unbounded license is
kept strictly within a limit of its own; he would admire a people who
can so freely let loose their mirthful propensities, while muzzling
those fiercer ones that tend to mischief.  Everybody seemed lawless;
nobody was rude.  If any reveller overstepped the mark, it was sure to
be no Roman, but an Englishman or an American; and even the rougher
play of this Gothic race was still softened by the insensible
influence of a moral atmosphere more delicate, in some respects, than
we breathe at home.  Not that, after all, we like the fine Italian
spirit better than our own; popular rudeness is sometimes the symptom
of rude moral health.  But, where a Carnival is in question, it would
probably pass off more decorously, as well as more airily and
delightfully, in Rome, than in any Anglo-Saxon city.

When Kenyon emerged from a side lane into the Corso, the mirth was at
its height.  Out of the seclusion of his own feelings, he looked forth
at the tapestried and damask-curtained palaces, the slow-moving double
line of carriages, and the motley maskers that swarmed on foot, as if
he were gazing through the iron lattice of a prison window.  So remote
from the scene were his sympathies, that it affected him like a thin
dream, through the dim, extravagant material of which he could discern
more substantial objects, while too much under its control to start
forth broad awake.  Just at that moment, too, there came another
spectacle, making its way right through the masquerading throng.

It was, first and foremost, a full band of martial music,
reverberating, in that narrow and confined though stately avenue,
between the walls of the lofty palaces, and roaring upward to the sky
with melody so powerful that it almost grew to discord.  Next came a
body of cavalry and mounted gendarmes, with great display of military
pomp.  They were escorting a long train of equipages, each and all of
which shone as gorgeously as Cinderella's coach, with paint and
gilding.  Like that, too, they were provided with coachmen of mighty
breadth, and enormously tall footmen, in immense powdered wigs, and
all the splendor of gold-laced, three cornered hats, and embroidered
silk coats and breeches.  By the old-fashioned magnificence of this
procession, it might worthily have included his Holiness in person,
with a suite of attendant Cardinals, if those sacred dignitaries would
kindly have lent their aid to heighten the frolic of the Carnival.
But, for all its show of a martial escort, and its antique splendor of
costume, it was but a train of the municipal authorities of Rome,
--illusive shadows, every one, and among them a phantom, styled the
Roman Senator,--proceeding to the Capitol.

The riotous interchange of nosegays and confetti was partially
suspended, while the procession passed.  One well-directed shot,
however,--it was a double handful of powdered lime, flung by an
impious New Englander,--hit the coachman of the Roman Senator full in
the face, and hurt his dignity amazingly.  It appeared to be his
opinion that the Republic was again crumbling into ruin, and that the
dust of it now filled his nostrils; though, in fact, it would hardly
be distinguished from the official powder with which he was already
plentifully bestrewn.

While the sculptor, with his dreamy eyes, was taking idle note of this
trifling circumstance, two figures passed before him, hand in hand.
The countenance of each was covered with an impenetrable black mask;
but one seemed a peasant of the Campagna; the other, a contadina in
her holiday costume.





CHAPTER XLIX


A FROLIC OF THE CARNIVAL


The crowd and confusion, just at that moment, hindered the sculptor
from pursuing these figures,--the peasant and contadina,--who, indeed,
were but two of a numerous tribe that thronged the Corso, in similar
costume.  As soon as he could squeeze a passage, Kenyon tried to
follow in their footsteps, but quickly lost sight of them, and was
thrown off the track by stopping to examine various groups of
masqueraders, in which he fancied the objects of his search to be
included.  He found many a sallow peasant or herdsman of the Campagna,
in such a dress as Donatello wore; many a contadina, too, brown, broad,
and sturdy, in her finery of scarlet, and decked out with gold or
coral beads, a pair of heavy earrings, a curiously wrought cameo or
mosaic brooch, and a silver comb or long stiletto among her glossy
hair.  But those shapes of grace and beauty which he sought had
vanished.

As soon as the procession of the Senator had passed, the merry-makers
resumed their antics with fresh spirit, and the artillery of bouquets
and sugar plums, suspended for a moment, began anew.  The sculptor
himself, being probably the most anxious and unquiet spectator there,
was especially a mark for missiles from all quarters, and for the
practical jokes which the license of the Carnival permits.  In fact,
his sad and contracted brow so ill accorded with the scene, that the
revellers might be pardoned for thus using him as the butt of their
idle mirth, since he evidently could not otherwise contribute to it.

Fantastic figures, with bulbous heads, the circumference of a bushel,
grinned enormously in his face.  Harlequins struck him with their
wooden swords, and appeared to expect his immediate transformation
into some jollier shape.  A little, long-tailed, horned fiend sidled
up to him and suddenly blew at him through a tube, enveloping our poor
friend in a whole harvest of winged seeds.  A biped, with an ass's
snout, brayed close to his ear, ending his discordant uproar with a
peal of human laughter.  Five strapping damsels--so, at least, their
petticoats bespoke them, in spite of an awful freedom in the flourish
of their legs--joined hands, and danced around him, inviting him by
their gestures to perform a hornpipe in the midst.  Released from
these gay persecutors, a clown in motley rapped him on the back with a
blown bladder, in which a handful of dried peas rattled horribly.

Unquestionably, a care-stricken mortal has no business abroad, when
the rest of mankind are at high carnival; they must either pelt him
and absolutely martyr him with jests, and finally bury him beneath the
aggregate heap; or else the potency of his darker mood, because the
tissue of human life takes a sad dye more readily than a gay one, will
quell their holiday humors, like the aspect of a death's-head at a
banquet.  Only that we know Kenyon's errand, we could hardly forgive
him for venturing into the Corso with that troubled face.

Even yet, his merry martyrdom was not half over.  There came along a
gigantic female figure, seven feet high, at least, and taking up a
third of the street's breadth with the preposterously swelling sphere
of her crinoline skirts.  Singling out the sculptor, she began to make
a ponderous assault upon his heart, throwing amorous glances at him
out of her great goggle eyes, offering him a vast bouquet of
sunflowers and nettles, and soliciting his pity by all sorts of
pathetic and passionate dumb-show.  Her suit meeting no favor, the
rejected Titaness made a gesture of despair and rage; then suddenly
drawing a huge pistol, she took aim right at the obdurate sculptor's
breast, and pulled the trigger.  The shot took effect, for the
abominable plaything went off by a spring, like a boy's popgun,
covering Kenyon with a cloud of lime dust, under shelter of which the
revengeful damsel strode away.

Hereupon, a whole host of absurd figures surrounded him, pretending to
sympathize in his mishap.  Clowns and party-colored harlequins;
orang-outangs; bear-headed, bull-headed, and dog-headed individuals;
faces that would have been human, but for their enormous noses; one
terrific creature, with a visage right in the centre of his breast;
and all other imaginable kinds of monstrosity and exaggeration.  These
apparitions appeared to be investigating the case, after the fashion
of a coroner's jury, poking their pasteboard countenances close to the
sculptor's with an unchangeable grin, that gave still more ludicrous
effect to the comic alarm and sorrow of their gestures.  Just then, a
figure came by, in a gray wig and rusty gown, with an inkhorn at his
buttonhole and a pen behind his ear; he announced himself as a notary,
and offered to make the last will and testament of the assassinated
man.  This solemn duty, however, was interrupted by a surgeon, who
brandished a lancet, three feet long, and proposed to him to let him
take blood.

The affair was so like a feverish dream, that Kenyon resigned himself
to let it take its course.  Fortunately the humors of the Carnival
pass from one absurdity to another, without lingering long enough on
any, to wear out even the slightest of them.  The passiveness of his
demeanor afforded too little scope for such broad merriment as the
masqueraders sought.  In a few moments they vanished from him, as
dreams and spectres do, leaving him at liberty to pursue his quest,
with no impediment except the crowd that blocked up the footway.

He had not gone far when the peasant and the contadina met him.  They
were still hand in hand, and appeared to be straying through the
grotesque and animated scene, taking as little part in it as himself.
It might be because he recognized them, and knew their solemn secret,
that the sculptor fancied a melancholy emotion to be expressed by the
very movement and attitudes of these two figures; and even the grasp
of their hands, uniting them so closely, seemed to set them in a sad
remoteness from the world at which they gazed.

"I rejoice to meet you," said Kenyon.  But they looked at him through
the eye-holes of their black masks, without answering a word.

"Pray give me a little light on the matter which I have so much at
heart," said he; "if you know anything of Hilda, for Heaven's sake,
speak!"

Still they were silent; and the sculptor began to imagine that he must
have mistaken the identity of these figures, there being such a
multitude in similar costume.  Yet there was no other Donatello, no
other Miriam.  He felt, too, that spiritual certainty which impresses
us with the presence of our friends, apart from any testimony of the
senses.

"You are unkind," resumed he,--"knowing the anxiety which oppresses me,
--not to relieve it, if in your power."

The reproach evidently had its effect; for the contadina now spoke,
and it was Miriam's voice.

"We gave you all the light we could," said she.  "You are yourself
unkind, though you little think how much so, to come between us at
this hour.  There may be a sacred hour, even in carnival time."

In another state of mind, Kenyon could have been amused by the
impulsiveness of this response, and a sort of vivacity that he had
often noted in Miriam's conversation.  But he was conscious of a
profound sadness in her tone, overpowering its momentary irritation,
and assuring him that a pale, tear-stained face was hidden behind her
mask.

"Forgive me!" said he.

Donatello here extended his hand,--not that which was clasping
Miriam's,--and she, too, put her free one into the sculptor's left; so
that they were a linked circle of three, with many reminiscences and
forebodings flashing through their hearts.  Kenyon knew intuitively
that these once familiar friends were parting with him now.

"Farewell!" they all three said, in the same breath.

No sooner was the word spoken, than they loosed their hands; and the
uproar of the Carnival swept like a tempestuous sea over the spot
which they had included within their small circle of isolated feeling.

By this interview, the sculptor had learned nothing in reference to
Hilda; but he understood that he was to adhere to the instructions
already received, and await a solution of the mystery in some mode
that he could not yet anticipate.  Passing his hands over his eyes,
and looking about him,--for the event just described had made the
scene even more dreamlike than before,--he now found himself
approaching that broad piazza bordering on the Corso, which has for
its central object the sculptured column of Antoninus.  It was not far
from this vicinity that Miriam had bid him wait.  Struggling onward as
fast as the tide of merrymakers, setting strong against him, would
permit, he was now beyond the Palazzo Colonna, and began to count the
houses.  The fifth was a palace, with a long front upon the Corso, and
of stately height, but somewhat grim with age.

Over its arched and pillared entrance there was a balcony, richly hung
with tapestry and damask, and tenanted, for the time, by a gentleman
of venerable aspect and a group of ladies.  The white hair and
whiskers of the former, and the winter roses in his cheeks, had an
English look; the ladies, too, showed a fair-haired Saxon bloom, and
seemed to taste the mirth of the Carnival with the freshness of
spectators to whom the scene was new.  All the party, the old
gentleman with grave earnestness, as if he were defending a rampart,
and his young companions with exuberance of frolic, showered confetti
inexhaustibly upon the passers-by.

In the rear of the balcony, a broad-brimmed, ecclesiastical beaver was
visible.  An abbate, probably an acquaintance and cicerone of the
English family, was sitting there, and enjoying the scene, though
partially withdrawn from view, as the decorum for his order dictated.

There seemed no better nor other course for Kenyon than to keep watch
at this appointed spot, waiting for whatever should happen next.
Clasping his arm round a lamp-post, to prevent being carried away by
the turbulent stream of wayfarers, he scrutinized every face, with the
idea that some one of them might meet his eyes with a glance of
intelligence.  He looked at each mask,--harlequin, ape, bulbous-headed
monster, or anything that was absurdest,--not knowing but that the
messenger might come, even in such fantastic guise.  Or perhaps one of
those quaint figures, in the stately ruff, the cloak, tunic, and
trunk-hose of three centuries ago, might bring him tidings of Hilda,
out of that long-past age.  At times his disquietude took a hopeful
aspect; and he fancied that Hilda might come by, her own sweet self,
in some shy disguise which the instinct Of his love would be sure to
penetrate.  Or, she might be borne past on a triumphal car, like the
one just now approaching, its slow-moving wheels encircled and spoked
with foliage, and drawn by horses, that were harnessed and wreathed
with flowers.  Being, at best, so far beyond the bounds of reasonable
conjecture, he might anticipate the wildest event, or find either his
hopes or fears disappointed in what appeared most probable.

The old Englishman and his daughters, in the opposite balcony, must
have seen something unutterably absurd in the sculptor's deportment,
poring into this whirlpool of nonsense so earnestly, in quest of what
was to make his life dark or bright.  Earnest people, who try to get a
reality out of human existence, are necessarily absurd in the view of
the revellers and masqueraders.  At all events, after a good deal of
mirth at the expense of his melancholy visage, the fair occupants of
the balcony favored Kenyon with a salvo of confetti, which came
rattling about him like a hailstorm.  Looking up instinctively, he was
surprised to see the abbate in the background lean forward and give a
courteous sign of recognition.

It was the same old priest with whom he had seen Hilda, at the
confessional; the same with whom he had talked of her disappearance on
meeting him in the street.

Yet, whatever might be the reason, Kenyon did not now associate this
ecclesiastical personage with the idea of Hilda.  His eyes lighted on
the old man, just for an instant, and then returned to the eddying
throng of the Corso, on his minute scrutiny of which depended, for
aught he knew, the sole chance of ever finding any trace of her.
There was, about this moment, a bustle on the other side of the street,
the cause of which Kenyon did not see, nor exert himself to discover.
A small party of soldiers or gendarmes appeared to be concerned in it;
they were perhaps arresting some disorderly character, who, under the
influence of an extra flask of wine, might have reeled across the
mystic limitation of carnival proprieties.

The sculptor heard some people near him talking of the incident.

"That contadina, in a black mask, was a fine figure of a woman."

"She was not amiss," replied a female voice; "but her companion was
far the handsomer figure of the two.  Could they be really a peasant
and a contadina, do you imagine?"

"No, no," said the other.  "It is some frolic of the Carnival, carried
a little too far."

This conversation might have excited Kenyon's interest; only that,
just as the last words were spoken, he was hit by two missiles, both
of a kind that were flying abundantly on that gay battlefield.  One,
we are ashamed to say, was a cauliflower, which, flung by a young man
from a passing carriage, came with a prodigious thump against his
shoulder; the other was a single rosebud, so fresh that it seemed that
moment gathered.  It flew from the opposite balcony, smote gently on
his lips, and fell into his hand.  He looked upward, and beheld the
face of his lost Hilda!

She was dressed in a white domino, and looked pale and bewildered, and
yet full of tender joy.  Moreover, there was a gleam of delicate
mirthfulness in her eyes, which the sculptor had seen there only two
or three times in the course of their acquaintance, but thought it the
most bewitching and fairylike of all Hilda's expressions.  That soft,
mirthful smile caused her to melt, as it were, into the wild frolic of
the Carnival, and become not so strange and alien to the scene, as her
unexpected apparition must otherwise have made her.

Meanwhile, the venerable Englishman and his daughters were staring at
poor Hilda in a way that proved them altogether astonished, as well as
inexpressibly shocked, by her sudden intrusion into their private
balcony.  They looked,--as, indeed, English people of respectability
would, if an angel were to alight in their circle, without due
introduction from somebody whom they knew, in the court above,--they
looked as if an unpardonable liberty had been taken, and a suitable
apology must be made; after which, the intruder would be expected to
withdraw.

The abbate, however, drew the old gentleman aside, and whispered a few
words that served to mollify him; he bestowed on Hilda a sufficiently
benignant, though still a perplexed and questioning regard, and
invited her, in dumb-show, to put herself at her ease.

But, whoever was in fault, our shy and gentle Hilda had dreamed of no
intrusion.  Whence she had come, or where she had been hidden, during
this mysterious interval, we can but imperfectly surmise, and do not
mean, at present, to make it a matter of formal explanation with the
reader.  It is better, perhaps, to fancy that she had been snatched
away to a land of picture; that she had been straying with Claude in
the golden light which he used to shed over his landscapes, but which
he could never have beheld with his waking eyes till he awoke in the
better clime.  We will imagine that, for the sake of the true
simplicity with which she loved them, Hilda had been permitted, for a
season, to converse with the great, departed masters of the pencil,
and behold the diviner works which they have painted in heavenly
colors.  Guido had shown her another portrait of Beatrice Cenci, done
from the celestial life, in which that forlorn mystery of the earthly
countenance was exchanged for a radiant joy.  Perugino had allowed her
a glimpse at his easel, on which she discerned what seemed a woman's
face, but so divine, by the very depth and softness of its womanhood,
that a gush of happy tears blinded the maiden's eyes before she had
time to look.  Raphael had taken Hilda by the hand, that fine,
forcible hand which Kenyon sculptured,--and drawn aside the curtain of
gold-fringed cloud that hung before his latest masterpiece.  On earth,
Raphael painted the Transfiguration.  What higher scene may he have
since depicted, not from imagination, but as revealed to his actual
sight!

Neither will we retrace the steps by which she returned to the actual
world.  For the present, be it enough to say that Hilda had been
summoned forth from a secret place, and led we know not through what
mysterious passages, to a point where the tumult of life burst
suddenly upon her ears.  She heard the tramp of footsteps, the rattle
of wheels, and the mingled hum of a multitude of voices, with strains
of music and loud laughter breaking through.  Emerging into a great,
gloomy hall, a curtain was drawn aside; she found herself gently
propelled into an open balcony, whence she looked out upon the festal
street, with gay tapestries flaunting over all the palace fronts, the
windows thronged with merry faces, and a crowd of maskers rioting upon
the pavement below.

Immediately she seemed to become a portion of the scene.  Her pale,
large-eyed, fragile beauty, her wondering aspect and bewildered grace,
attracted the gaze of many; and there fell around her a shower of
bouquets and bonbons--freshest blossoms and sweetest sugar plums,
sweets to the sweet--such as the revellers of the Carnival reserve as
tributes to especial loveliness.  Hilda pressed her hand across her
brow; she let her eyelids fall, and, lifting them again, looked
through the grotesque and gorgeous show, the chaos of mad jollity, in
quest of some object by which she might assure herself that the whole
spectacle was not an illusion.

Beneath the balcony, she recognized a familiar and fondly remembered
face.  The spirit of the hour and the scene exercised its influence
over her quick and sensitive nature; she caught up one of the rosebuds
that had been showered upon her, and aimed it at the sculptor; It hit
the mark; he turned his sad eyes upward, and there was Hilda, in whose
gentle presence his own secret sorrow and the obtrusive uproar of the
Carnival alike died away from his perception.

That night, the lamp beneath the Virgin's shrine burned as brightly as
if it had never been extinguished; and though the one faithful dove
had gone to her melancholy perch, she greeted Hilda rapturously the
next morning, and summoned her less constant companions, whithersoever
they had flown, to renew their homage.





CHAPTER L


MIRIAM, HILDA, KENYON, DONATELLO


The gentle reader, we trust, would not thank us for one of those
minute elucidations, which are so tedious, and, after all, so
unsatisfactory, in clearing up the romantic mysteries of a story.  He
is too wise to insist upon looking closely at the wrong side of the
tapestry, after the right one has been sufficiently displayed to him,
woven with the best of the artist's skill, and cunningly arranged with
a view to the harmonious exhibition of its colors.  If any brilliant,
or beautiful, or even tolerable effect have been produced, this
pattern of kindly readers will accept it at its worth, without tearing
its web apart, with the idle purpose of discovering how the threads
have been knit together; for the sagacity by which he is distinguished
will long ago have taught him that any narrative of human action and
adventure whether we call it history or romance--is certain to be a
fragile handiwork, more easily rent than mended.  The actual
experience of even the most ordinary life is full of events that never
explain themselves, either as regards their origin or their tendency.

It would be easy, from conversations which we have held with the
sculptor, to suggest a clew to the mystery of Hilda's disappearance;
although, as long as she remained in Italy, there was a remarkable
reserve in her communications upon this subject, even to her most
intimate friends.  Either a pledge of secrecy had been exacted, or a
prudential motive warned her not to reveal the stratagems of a
religious body, or the secret acts of a despotic government--whichever
might be responsible in the present instance--while still within the
scope of their jurisdiction.  Possibly, she might not herself be fully
aware what power had laid its grasp upon her person.  What has chiefly
perplexed us, however, among Hilda's adventures, is the mode of her
release, in which some inscrutable tyranny or other seemed to take
part in the frolic of the Carnival.  We can only account for it, by
supposing that the fitful and fantastic imagination of a
woman--sportive, because she must otherwise be desperate--had arranged
this incident, and made it the condition of a step which her
conscience, or the conscience of another, required her to take.

A few days after Hilda's reappearance, she and the sculptor were
straying together through the streets of Rome.  Being deep in talk, it
so happened that they found themselves near the majestic, pillared
portico, and huge, black rotundity of the Pantheon.  It stands almost
at the central point of the labyrinthine intricacies of the modern
city, and often presents itself before the bewildered stranger, when
he is in search of other objects.  Hilda, looking up, proposed that
they should enter.

"I never pass it without going in," she said, "to pay my homage at the
tomb of Raphael."

"Nor I," said Kenyon, "without stopping to admire the noblest edifice
which the barbarism of the early ages, and the more barbarous pontiffs
and princes of later ones, have spared to us."

They went in accordingly, and stood in the free space of that great
circle, around which are ranged the arched recesses and stately altars,
formerly dedicated to heathen gods, but Christianized through twelve
centuries gone by.  The world has nothing else like the Pantheon.  So
grand it is, that the pasteboard statues over the lofty cornice do not
disturb the effect, any more than the tin crowns and hearts, the dusty
artificial flowers, and all manner of trumpery gew-gaws, hanging at
the saintly shrines.  The rust and dinginess that have dimmed the
precious marble on the walls; the pavement, with its great squares and
rounds of porphyry and granite, cracked crosswise and in a hundred
directions, showing how roughly the troublesome ages have trampled
here; the gray dome above, with its opening to the sky, as if heaven
were looking down into the interior of this place of worship, left
unimpeded for prayers to ascend the more freely; all these things make
an impression of solemnity, which St. Peter's itself fails to produce.

"I think," said the sculptor, "it is to the aperture in the dome--that
great Eye, gazing heavenward that the Pantheon owes the peculiarity of
its effect.  It is so heathenish, as it were,--so unlike all the
snugness of our modern civilization!  Look, too, at the pavement,
directly beneath the open space!  So much rain has fallen there, in
the last two thousand years, that it is green with small, fine moss,
such as grows over tombstones in a damp English churchyard."

"I like better," replied Hilda, "to look at the bright, blue sky,
roofing the edifice where the builders left it open.  It is very
delightful, in a breezy day, to see the masses of white cloud float
over the opening, and then the sunshine fall through it again,
fitfully, as it does now.  Would it be any wonder if we were to see
angels hovering there, partly in and partly out, with genial, heavenly
faces, not intercepting the light, but only transmuting it into
beautiful colors?  Look at that broad, golden beam--a sloping cataract
of sunlight--which comes down from the aperture and rests upon the
shrine, at the right hand of the entrance!"

"There is a dusky picture over that altar," observed the sculptor.
"Let us go and see if this strong illumination brings out any merit in
it."

Approaching the shrine, they found the picture little worth looking at,
but could not forbear smiling, to see that a very plump and
comfortable tabby-cat--whom we ourselves have often observed haunting
the Pantheon--had established herself on the altar, in the genial
sunbeam, and was fast asleep among the holy tapers.  Their footsteps
disturbing her, she awoke, raised herself, and sat blinking in the sun,
yet with a certain dignity and self-possession, as if conscious of
representing a saint.

"I presume," remarked Kenyon, "that this is the first of the feline
race that has ever set herself up as an object of worship, in the
Pantheon or elsewhere, since the days of ancient Egypt.  See; there is
a peasant from the neighboring market, actually kneeling to her!  She
seems a gracious and benignant saint enough."

"Do not make me laugh," said Hilda reproachfully," but help me to
drive the creature away.  It distresses me to see that poor man, or
any human being, directing his prayers so much amiss."

"Then, Hilda," answered the sculptor more seriously, "the only Place
in the Pantheon for you and me to kneel is on the pavement beneath the
central aperture.  If we pray at a saint's shrine, we shall give
utterance to earthly wishes; but if we pray face to face with the
Deity, we shall feel it impious to petition for aught that is narrow
and selfish.  Methinks it is this that makes the Catholics so delight
in the worship of saints; they can bring up all their little worldly
wants and whims, their individualities and human weaknesses, not as
things to be repented of, but to be humored by the canonized humanity
to which they pray.  Indeed, it is very tempting!"

What Hilda might have answered must be left to conjecture; for as she
turned from the shrine, her eyes were attracted to the figure of a
female penitent, kneeling on the pavement just beneath the great
central eye, in the very spot which Kenyon had designated as the only
one whence prayers should ascend.  The upturned face was invisible,
behind a veil or mask, which formed a part of the garb.

"It cannot be!" whispered Hilda, with emotion.  "No; it cannot be!"

"What disturbs you?" asked Kenyon.  "Why do you tremble so?"

"If it were possible," she replied," I should fancy that kneeling
figure to be Miriam!"

"As you say, it is impossible," rejoined the sculptor; "We know too
well what has befallen both her and Donatello."  "Yes; it is
impossible!" repeated Hilda.  Her voice was still tremulous, however,
and she seemed unable to withdraw her attention from the kneeling
figure.  Suddenly, and as if the idea of Miriam had opened the whole
volume of Hilda's reminiscences, she put this question to the sculptor:
"Was Donatello really a Faun?"

"If you had ever studied the pedigree of the far-descended heir of
Monte Beni, as I did," answered Kenyon, with an irrepressible smile,
"you would have retained few doubts on that point.  Faun or not, he
had a genial nature, which, had the rest of mankind been in accordance
with it, would have made earth a paradise to our poor friend.  It
seems the moral of his story, that human beings of Donatello's
character, compounded especially for happiness, have no longer any
business on earth, or elsewhere.  Life has grown so sadly serious,
that such men must change their nature, or else perish, like the
antediluvian creatures that required, as the condition of their
existence, a more summerlike atmosphere than ours."

"I will not accept your moral!" replied the hopeful and happy-natured
Hilda.

"Then here is another; take your choice!" said the sculptor,
remembering what Miriam had recently suggested, in reference to the
same point.  "He perpetrated a great crime; and his remorse, gnawing
into his soul, has awakened it; developing a thousand high
capabilities, moral and intellectual, which we never should have
dreamed of asking for, within the scanty compass of the Donatello whom
we knew."

"I know not whether this is so," said Hilda.  "But what then?"

"Here comes my perplexity," continued Kenyon.  "Sin has educated
Donatello, and elevated him.  Is sin, then,--which we deem such a
dreadful blackness in the universe,--is it, like sorrow, merely an
element of human education, through which we struggle to a higher and
purer state than we could otherwise have attained?  Did Adam fall,
that we might ultimately rise to a far loftier paradise than his?"  "O
hush!" cried Hilda, shrinking from him with an expression of horror
which wounded the poor, speculative sculptor to the soul.  "This is
terrible; and I could weep for you, if you indeed believe it.  Do not
you perceive what a mockery your creed makes, not only of all
religious sentiments, but of moral law?  And how it annuls and
obliterates whatever precepts of Heaven are written deepest within us?
You have shocked me beyond words!"

"Forgive me, Hilda!" exclaimed the sculptor, startled by her agitation;
"I never did believe it!  But the mind wanders wild and wide; and, so
lonely as I live and work, I have neither pole-star above nor light of
cottage windows here below, to bring me home.  Were you my guide, my
counsellor, my inmost friend, with that white wisdom which clothes you
as a celestial garment, all would go well.  O Hilda, guide me home!"

"We are both lonely; both far from home!" said Hilda, her eyes filling
with tears.  "I am a poor, weak girl, and have no such wisdom as you
fancy in me."

What further may have passed between these lovers, while standing
before the pillared shrine, and the marble Madonna that marks
Raphael's tomb; whither they had now wandered, we are unable to record.
But when the kneeling figure beneath the open eye of the Pantheon
arose, she looked towards the pair and extended her hands with a
gesture of benediction.  Then they knew that it was Miriam.  They
suffered her to glide out of the portal, however, without a greeting;
for those extended hands, even while they blessed, seemed to repel, as
if Miriam stood on the other side of a fathomless abyss, and warned
them from its verge.

So Kenyon won the gentle Hilda's shy affection, and her consent to be
his bride.  Another hand must henceforth trim the lamp before the
Virgin's shrine; for Hilda was coming down from her old tower, to be
herself enshrined and worshipped as a household saint, in the light of
her husband's fireside.  And, now that life had so much human promise
in it, they resolved to go back to their own land; because the years,
after all, have a kind of emptiness, when we spend too many of them on
a foreign shore.  We defer the reality of life, in such cases, until a
future moment, when we shall again breathe our native air; but, by and
by, there are no future moments; or, if we do return, we find that the
native air has lost its invigorating quality, and that life has
shifted its reality to the spot where we have deemed ourselves only
temporary residents.  Thus, between two countries, we have none at all,
or only that little space of either in which we finally lay down our
discontented bones.  It is wise, therefore, to come back betimes, or
never.

Before they quitted Rome, a bridal gift was laid on Hilda's table.  It
was a bracelet, evidently of great cost, being composed of seven
ancient Etruscan gems, dug out of seven sepulchres, and each one of
them the signet of some princely personage, who had lived an
immemorial time ago.  Hilda remembered this precious ornament.  It had
been Miriam's; and once, with the exuberance of fancy that
distinguished her, she had amused herself with telling a mythical and
magic legend for each gem, comprising the imaginary adventures and
catastrophe of its former wearer.  Thus the Etruscan bracelet became
the connecting bond of a series of seven wondrous tales, all of which,
as they were dug out of seven sepulchres, were characterized by a
sevenfold sepulchral gloom; such as Miriam's imagination, shadowed by
her own misfortunes, was wont to fling over its most sportive flights.

And now, happy as Hilda was, the bracelet brought the tears into her
eyes, as being, in its entire circle, the symbol of as sad a mystery
as any that Miriam had attached to the separate gems.  For, what was
Miriam's life to be?  And where was Donatello?  But Hilda had a
hopeful soul, and saw sunlight on the mountain-tops.





CONCLUSION

There comes to the author, from many readers of the foregoing pages, a
demand for further elucidations respecting the mysteries of the story.

He reluctantly avails himself of the opportunity afforded by a new
edition, to explain such incidents and passages as may have been left
too much in the dark; reluctantly, he repeats, because the necessity
makes him sensible that he can have succeeded but imperfectly, at best,
in throwing about this Romance the kind of atmosphere essential to
the effect at which he aimed.

He designed the story and the characters to bear, of course, a certain
relation to human nature and human life, but still to be so artfully
and airily removed from our mundane sphere, that some laws and
proprieties of their own should be implicitly and insensibly
acknowledged.

The idea of the modern Faun, for example, loses all the poetry and
beauty which the Author fancied in it, and becomes nothing better than
a grotesque absurdity, if we bring it into the actual light of day.
He had hoped to mystify this anomalous creature between the Real and
the Fantastic, in such a manner that the reader's sympathies might be
excited to a certain pleasurable degree, without impelling him to ask
how Cuvier would have classified poor Donatello, or to insist upon
being told, in so many words, whether he had furry ears or no.  As
respects all who ask such questions, the book is, to that extent, a
failure.

Nevertheless, the Author fortunately has it in his power to throw
light upon several matters in which some of his readers appear to feel
an interest.  To confess the truth, he was himself troubled with a
curiosity similar to that which he has just deprecated on the part of
his readers, and once took occasion to cross-examine his friends,
Hilda and the sculptor, and to pry into several dark recesses of the
story, with which they had heretofore imperfectly acquainted him.

We three had climbed to the top of St. Peter's, and were looking down
upon the Rome we were soon to leave, but which (having already sinned
sufficiently in that way) it is not my purpose further to describe.
It occurred to me, that, being so remote in the upper air, my friends
might safely utter here the secrets which it would be perilous even to
whisper on lower earth.

"Hilda," I began, "can you tell me the contents of that mysterious
packet which Miriam entrusted to your charge, and which was addressed
to Signore Luca Barboni, at the Palazzo Cenci?"

"I never had any further knowledge of it," replied Hilda, "nor felt it
right to let myself be curious upon the subject."

"As to its precise contents," interposed Kenyon, "it is impossible to
speak.  But Miriam, isolated as she seemed, had family connections in
Rome, one of whom, there is reason to believe, occupied a position in
the papal government.

"This Signore Luca Barboni was either the assumed name of the
personage in question, or the medium of communication between that
individual and Miriam.  Now, under such a government as that of Rome,
it is obvious that Miriam's privacy and isolated life could only be
maintained through the connivance and support of some influential
person connected with the administration of affairs.  Free and
self-controlled as she appeared, her every movement was watched and
investigated far more thoroughly by the priestly rulers than by her
dearest friends.

"Miriam, if I mistake not, had a purpose to withdraw herself from this
irksome scrutiny, and to seek real obscurity in another land; and the
packet, to be delivered long after her departure, contained a
reference to this design, besides certain family documents, which were
to be imparted to her relative as from one dead and gone."

"Yes, it is clear as a London fog," I remarked.  "On this head no
further elucidation can be desired.  But when Hilda went quietly to
deliver the packet, why did she so mysteriously vanish?"

"You must recollect," replied Kenyon, with a glance of friendly
commiseration at my obtuseness," that Miriam had utterly disappeared,
leaving no trace by which her whereabouts could be known.  In the
meantime, the municipal authorities had become aware of the murder of
the Capuchin; and from many preceding circumstances, such as his
persecution of Miriam, they must have seen an obvious connection
between herself and that tragical event.  Furthermore, there is reason
to believe that Miriam was suspected of connection with some plot, or
political intrigue, of which there may have been tokens in the packet.
And when Hilda appeared as the bearer of this missive, it was really
quite a matter of course, under a despotic government, that she should
be detained."

"Ah, quite a matter of course, as you say," answered I. "How
excessively stupid in me not to have seen it sooner!  But there are
other riddles.  On the night of the extinction of the lamp, you met
Donatello, in a penitent's garb, and afterwards saw and spoke to
Miriam, in a coach, with a gem glowing on her bosom.  What was the
business of these two guilty ones in Rome, and who was Miriam's
companion?"

"Who!" repeated Kenyon, "why, her official relative, to be sure; and
as to their business, Donatello's still gnawing remorse had brought
him hitherward, in spite of Miriam's entreaties, and kept him
lingering in the neighborhood of Rome, with the ultimate purpose of
delivering himself up to justice.  Hilda's disappearance, which took
place the day before, was known to them through a secret channel, and
had brought them into the city, where Miriam, as I surmise, began to
make arrangements, even then, for that sad frolic of the Carnival."

"And where was Hilda all that dreary time between?" inquired I.

"Where were you, Hilda?" asked Kenyon, smiling.

Hilda threw her eyes on all sides, and seeing that there was not even
a bird of the air to fly away with the secret, nor any human being
nearer than the loiterers by the obelisk in the piazza below, she told
us about her mysterious abode.

"I was a prisoner in the Convent of the Sacre Coeur, in the Trinita de
Monte," said she," but in such kindly custody of pious maidens, and
watched over by such a dear old priest, that--had it not been for one
or two disturbing recollections, and also because I am a daughter of
the Puritans I could willingly have dwelt there forever.

"My entanglement with Miriam's misfortunes, and the good abbate's
mistaken hope of a proselyte, seem to me a sufficient clew to the
whole mystery."

"The atmosphere is getting delightfully lucid," observed I, "but there
are one or two things that still puzzle me.  Could you tell me--and it
shall be kept a profound secret, I assure you what were Miriam's real
name and rank, and precisely the nature of the troubles that led to
all those direful consequences?"

"Is it possible that you need an answer to those questions?" exclaimed
Kenyon, with an aspect of vast surprise.  "Have you not even surmised
Miriam's name?  Think awhile, and you will assuredly remember it.  If
not, I congratulate you most sincerely; for it indicates that your
feelings have never been harrowed by one of the most dreadful and
mysterious events that have occurred within the present century!"

"Well," resumed I, after an interval of deep consideration, "I have
but few things more to ask.  Where, at this moment, is Donatello?"

"The Castle of Saint Angelo," said Kenyon sadly, turning his face
towards that sepulchral fortress, "is no longer a prison; but there
are others which have dungeons as deep, and in one of them, I fear,
lies our poor Faun."

"And why, then, is Miriam at large?"  I asked.

"Call it cruelty if you like, not mercy," answered Kenyon.  "But,
after all, her crime lay merely in a glance.  She did no murder!"

"Only one question more," said I, with intense earnestness.  "Did
Donatello's ears resemble those of the Faun of Praxiteles?"

"I know, but may not tell," replied Kenyon, smiling mysteriously.  "On
that point, at all events, there shall be not one word of explanation."

Leamington, March 14, 1860.