University of Virginia Library

18. CHAPTER XVIII.
THE EXTINCTION OF A LAMP.

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

And, moreover, Kenyon had counted so much upon
Hilda's delicate perceptions in enabling him to look at
two or three of the statues, about which they had talked
together, that the entire purpose of his visit was defeated

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

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

Nothing pleased him, unless it were the group of the
Laocoön, which, in its immortal agony, impressed Kenyon
as a type of the long, fierce struggle of man, involved in
the knotted entanglements of error and evil, those two
snakes, which, if no divine help intervene, will be sure
to strangle him and his children in the end. What he
most admired was the strange calmness diffused through
this bitter strife; so that it resembled the rage of the sea,

made calm by its immensity, or the tumult of Niagara
which ceases to be tumult because it lasts forever. Thus,
in the Laocoön, the horror of a moment grew to be the
fate of interminable ages. Kenyon looked upon the
group as the one triumph of sculpture, creating the repose,
which is essential to it, in the very acme of turbulent
effort; but, in truth, it was his mood of unwonted
despondency that made him so sensitive to the terrible
magnificence, as well as to the sad moral of this work.
Hilda herself could not have helped him to see it with
nearly such intelligence.

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

It was a figure in a white robe, with a kind of featureless
mask over the face, through the apertures of which
the eyes threw an unintelligible light. Such odd, questionable
shapes are often seen gliding through the streets
of Italian cities, and are understood to be usually persons
of rank, who quit their palaces, their gayeties, their pomp
and pride, and assume the penitential garb for a season,
with a view of thus expiating some crime, or atoning for
the aggregate of petty sins that make up a worldly life.
It is their custom to ask alms, and perhaps to measure the

duration of their penance by the time requisite to accumulate
a sum of money out of the little droppings of individual
charity. The avails are devoted to some beneficent
or religious purpose; so that the benefit accruing to
their own souls is, in a manner, linked with a good done,
or intended, to their fellow-men. These figures have a
ghastly and startling effect, not so much from any very
impressive peculiarity in the garb, as from the mystery
which they bear about with them, and the sense that there
is an acknowledged sinfulness as the nucleus of it.

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

“Is all well with you, signor?” inquired the penitent,
out of the cloud in which he walked.

“All is well,” answered Kenyon. “And with you?”

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

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

“How strange!” thought Kenyon to himself. “It was

surely Donatello! What can bring him to Rome, where
his recollections must be so painful, and his presence not
without peril? And Miriam! Can she have accompanied
him?”

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

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

If it had not been for a peculiar sort of pique, with
which lovers are much conversant, a preposterous kind of
resentment which endeavors to wreak itself on the beloved
object, and on one's own heart, in requital of mishaps

for which neither are in fault, Kenyon might at once
have betaken himself to Hilda's studio, and asked why
the appointment was not kept. But the interview of to-day
was to have been so rich in present joy, and its results
so important to his future life, that the bleak failure
was too much for his equanimity. He was angry with
poor Hilda, and censured her without a hearing; angry
with himself, too, and therefore inflicted on this latter
criminal the severest penalty in his power; angry with
the day that was passing over him, and would not permit
its latter hours to redeem the disappointment of the
morning.

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

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

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

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

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

window. On his part, Kenyon at once knew the face,
and hastened to the carriage, which had now stopped.

“Miriam! you in Rome?” he exclaimed. “And your
friends know nothing of it?”

“Is all well with you?” she asked.

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

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

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

just now scintillating more brilliantly than ever, in sympathy
with some emotion of her heart.

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

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

Miriam put her finger on her lips, and seemed desirous
that Kenyon should know of the presence of a third person.
He now saw, indeed, that there was some one beside
her in the carriage, hitherto concealed by her attitude;
a man, it appeared, with a sallow Italian face,

which the sculptor distinguished but imperfectly, and
did not recognize.

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

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

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

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

Flinging aside the morbid hesitation, and the dallyings
with his own wishes, which he had permitted to influence
his mind throughout the day, he now hastened to the Via
Portoghese. Soon the old palace stood before him, with
its massive tower rising into the clouded night; obscured

from view at its midmost elevation, but revealed again,
higher upward, by the Virgin's lamp that twinkled on the
summit. Feeble as it was, in the broad, surrounding
gloom, that little ray made no inconsiderable illumination
among Kenyon's sombre thoughts; for, remembering Miriam's
last words, a fantasy had seized him that he should
find the sacred lamp extinguished.

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