Volume 1 of The Marble Faun Or The Romance of Monte Beni

Part 1 out of 4




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THE MARBLE FAUN

or The Romance of Monte Beni

Nathaniel Hawthorne

In Two Volumes

This is Volume One




Contents

Volume I

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


Volume II

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




THE MARBLE FAUN




Volume I



CHAPTER I


MIRIAM, HILDA, KENYON, DONATELLO


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Then the greater fool he!" said Miriam so bitterly that Hilda's quiet
eyes were somewhat startled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER II


THE FAUN


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"All underwitted people have that look," said Miriam scornfully.

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

"What age have you, Donatello?" asked Miriam.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Then you are deficient of a sense," said Miriam.

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER III


SUBTERRANEAN REMINISCENCES


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We now proceed with our narrative.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER IV


THE SPECTRE OF THE CATACOMB


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

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

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

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

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

"It was the signorina!" cried Donatello joyfully.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER V


MIRIAM'S STUDIO


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why do you make it so shadowy?" asked he.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Are you angry with me?" asked Donatello dolorously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Then you like the picture, Donatello?" she asked.

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

"And do you recognize the likeness?"

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

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

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

"Does the expression please you?" she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER VI


THE VIRGIN'S SHRINE


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

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

As Miriam approached, she looked upward, and saw,--not, indeed, the flame
of the neverdying lamp, which was swallowed up in the broad sunlight that
brightened the shrine, but a flock of white doves, skimming, fluttering,
and wheeling about the topmost height of the tower, their silver wings
flashing in the pure transparency of the air. Several of them sat on the
ledge of the upper window, pushing one another off by their eager struggle
for this favorite station, and all tapping their beaks and flapping their
wings tumultuously against the panes; some had alighted in the street, far
below, but flew hastily upward, at the sound of the window being thrust
ajar, and opening in the middle, on rusty hinges, as Roman windows do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER VII


BEATRICE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But why not keep it yourself?" asked Hilda.

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

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

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

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

your rivalship."

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

"After all," resumed Miriam, "if a woman had painted the original picture,
there might have been something in it which we miss now. I have a great
mind to undertake a copy myself; and try to give it what it lacks. Well;
goodby. But, stay! I am going for a little airing to the grounds of the
Villa Borghese this afternoon. You will think it very foolish, but I


 


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