University of Virginia Library

22. CHAPTER XXII.
THE PEASANT AND CONTADINA.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And will it not do so, now?” Miriam asked. “I
fancied so, indeed, when we discovered it two days ago.
It is Donatello's prize. We were sitting here together,
planning an interview with you, when his keen eyes detected
the fallen goddess, almost entirely buried under
that heap of earth, which the clumsy excavators showered
down upon her, I suppose. We congratulated ourselves,

chiefly for your sake. The eyes of us three are the only
ones to which she has yet revealed herself. Does it not
frighten you a little, like the apparition of a lovely woman
that lived of old, and has long lain in the grave?”

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

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

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

“A grave!” exclaimed the sculptor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

what the consequence has been. You shall have your lost
Hilda back, and — who knows? — perhaps tenderer than
she was.”

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

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

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

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

“No; you were innocent,” replied the sculptor. “I

shudder at the fatality that seems to haunt your footsteps,
and throws a shadow of crime about your path, you being
guiltless.”

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

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

Some time afterwards had occurred that terrible event
to which Miriam had alluded, when she revealed her
name; an event, the frightful and mysterious circumstances

of which will recur to many minds, but of which
few or none can have found for themselves a satisfactory
explanation. It only concerns the present narrative, inasmuch
as the suspicion of being at least an accomplice in
the crime fell darkly and directly upon Miriam herself.

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

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

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

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

there was the evil fate that had haunted her through
life.

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

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

“Never,” said Donatello; “my instinct would have
known you innocent.”

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

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

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

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

“Still two days more!” murmured the sculptor.

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

“I know not what you mean, Miriam,” said Kenyon.

“No matter,” she replied; “you will understand hereafter.
But could you think it? Here is Donatello
haunted with strange remorse, and an unmitigable resolve
to obtain what he deems justice upon himself. He fancies,

with a kind of direct simplicity, which I have vainly
tried to combat, that, when a wrong has been done, the
doer is bound to submit himself to whatsoever tribunal
takes cognizance of such things, and abide its judgment.
I have assured him that there is no such thing as earthly
justice, and especially none here, under the head of
Christendom.”

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

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

“Is he not beautiful?” said Miriam, watching the
sculptor's eye as it dwelt admiringly on Donatello. “So
changed, yet still, in a deeper sense, so much the same!
He has travelled in a circle, as all things heavenly and
earthly do, and now comes back to his original self, with

an inestimable treasure of improvement won from an
experience of pain. How wonderful is this! I tremble
at my own thoughts, yet must needs probe them to their
depths. Was the crime — in which he and I were wedded
— was it a blessing, in that strange disguise? Was
it a means of education, bringing a simple and imperfect
nature to a point of feeling and intelligence which it could
have reached under no other discipline?”

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

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

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

“Ask Hilda what she thinks of it,” said Miriam, with
a thoughtful smile. “At least, she might conclude that
sin — which man chose instead of good — has been so
beneficently handled by omniscience and omnipotence,
that, whereas our dark enemy sought to destroy us by it,

it has really become an instrument most effective in the
education of intellect and soul.”

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

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

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