University of Virginia Library

17. CHAPTER XVII.
REMINISCENCES OF MIRIAM.

When Hilda and himself turned away from the unfinished
bust, the sculptor's mind still dwelt upon the
reminiscences which it suggested.

“You have not seen Donatello recently,” he remarked,
“and therefore cannot be aware how sadly he is changed.”

“No wonder!” exclaimed Hilda, growing pale.

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

“No wonder, do you say?” repeated the sculptor,
looking at her with interest, but not exactly with surprise;

for he had long suspected that Hilda had a painful
knowledge of events which he himself little more than
surmised. “Then you know! — you have heard! But
what can you possibly have heard, and through what
channel?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Miriam has suggested this!” exclaimed Hilda.
“Yes, I remember, now, her advising that the secret
should be shared with you. But I have survived the
death-struggle that it cost me, and need make no further

revelations. And Miriam has spoken to you! What
manner of woman can she be, who, after sharing in such
a deed, can make it a topic of conversation with her
friends?”

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

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

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

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

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

In spite of her efforts to withdraw them to other subjects,
her thoughts dwelt upon Miriam; and, as had not
heretofore happened, they brought with them a painful
doubt whether a wrong had not been committed, on Hilda's
part, towards the friend once so beloved. Something
that Miriam had said, in their final conversation, recurred
to her memory, and seemed now to deserve more weight
than Hilda had assigned to it, in her horror at the crime

just perpetrated. It was not that the deed looked less
wicked and terrible in the retrospect; but she asked herself
whether there were not other questions to be considered,
aside from that single one of Miriam's guilt or
innocence; as, for example, whether a close bond of
friendship, in which we once voluntarily engage, ought
to be severed on account of any unworthiness, which we
subsequently detect in our friend. For, in these unions
of hearts, — call them marriage, or whatever else, — we
take each other for better for worse. Availing ourselves
of our friend's intimate affection, we pledge our own, as
to be relied upon in every emergency. And what sadder,
more desperate emergency could there be, than had befallen
Miriam? Who more need the tender succor of the
innocent, than wretches stained with guilt? And must a
selfish care for the spotlessness of our own garments keep
us from pressing the guilty ones close to our hearts,
wherein, for the very reason that we are innocent, lies
their securest refuge from further ill?

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

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

Miriam loved her well; and not less ardent had been
the affection which Miriam's warm, tender, and generous

characteristics had excited in Hilda's more reserved and
quiet nature. It had never been extinguished; for, in
part, the wretchedness which Hilda had since endured
was but the struggle and writhing of her sensibility, still
yearning towards her friend. And now, at the earliest
encouragement, it awoke again, and cried out piteously,
complaining of the violence that had been done it.

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

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

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

“How nearly I had violated my promise!” said Hilda.

“And, since we are separated forever, it has the sacredness
of an injunction from a dead friend. There is no
time to be lost.”

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

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

continues to make a paradise around itself, and keep it
still unfallen.

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

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

It is a question of speculative interest, whether the ancient
Romans were as unclean a people as we everywhere
find those who have succeeded them. There appears to
be a kind of malignant spell in the spots that have been
inhabited by these masters of the world, or made famous

in their history; an inherited and inalienable curse, impelling
their successors to fling dirt and defilement upon
whatever temple, column, ruined palace, or triumphal
arch, may be nearest at hand; and on every monument
that the old Romans built. It is most probably a classic
trait, regularly transmitted downward, and perhaps a little
modified by the better civilization of Christianity; so
that Cæsar may have trod narrower and filthier ways in
his path to the Capitol, than even those of modern
Rome.

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

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

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

Hilda thanked the old dame, but alleged the necessity
of doing her errand in person. She approached the front
of the palace, which, with all its immensity, had but a
mean appearance, and seemed an abode which the lovely
shade of Beatrice would not be apt to haunt, unless her
doom made it inevitable. Some soldiers stood about the

portal, and gazed at the brown-haired, fair-cheeked Anglo-Saxon
girl, with approving glances, but not indecorously.
Hilda began to ascend the staircase, three lofty flights of
which were to be surmounted, before reaching the door
whither she was bound.