University of Virginia Library

25. CHAPTER XXV.
MIRIAM, HILDA, KENYON, DONATELLO.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I think,” said the sculptor, “it is to the aperture in
the dome — that great Eye, gazing heavenward — that
the Pantheon owes the peculiarity of its effect. It is
so heathenish, as it were — so unlike all the snugness
of our modern civilization! Look, too, at the pavement

directly beneath the open space! So much rain has
fallen there, in the last two thousand years, that it is
green with small, fine moss, such as grows over tombstones
in a damp English churchyard.”

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

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

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

“I presume,” remarked Kenyon, “that this is the first

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

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

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

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

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

“What disturbs you?” asked Kenyon. “Why do
you tremble so?”

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

“As you say, it is impossible,” rejoined the sculptor.
“We know too well what has befallen both her and Donatello.”

“Yes; it is impossible!” repeated Hilda.

Her voice was still tremulous, however, and she seemed
unable to withdraw her attention from the kneeling figure.
Suddenly, and as if the idea of Miriam had opened the
whole volume of Hilda's reminiscences, she put this question
to the sculptor:—

“Was Donatello really a Faun?”

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

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

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

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

“Here comes my perplexity,” continued Kenyon.
“Sin has educated Donatello, and elevated him. Is sin,
then — which we deem such a dreadful blackness in the
universe — is it, like sorrow, merely an element of human
education, through which we struggle to a higher and
purer state than we could otherwise have attained? Did
Adam fall, that we might ultimately rise to a far loftier
paradise than his?”

“Oh, hush!” cried Hilda, shrinking from him with an
expression of horror which wounded the poor, speculative
sculptor to the soul. “This is terrible; and I could weep
for you, if you indeed believe it. Do not you perceive
what a mockery your creed makes, not only of all religious
sentiments, but of moral law? and how it annuls
and obliterates whatever precepts of Heaven are written
deepest within us? You have shocked me beyond
words!”

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

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

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

So Kenyon won the gentle Hilda's shy affection, and
her consent to be his bride. Another hand must henceforth
trim the lamp before the Virgin's shrine; for Hilda
was coming down from her old tower, to be herself enshrined
and worshipped as a household saint, in the light
of her husband's fireside. And, now that life had so much

human promise in it, they resolved to go back to their own
land; because the years, after all, have a kind of emptiness,
when we spend too many of them on a foreign shore. We
defer the reality of life, in such cases, until a future moment,
when we shall again breathe our native air; but,
by-and-by, there are no future moments; or, if we do return,
we find that the native air has lost its invigorating
quality, and that life has shifted its reality to the spot
where we have deemed ourselves only temporary residents.
Thus, between two countries, we have none at all,
or only that little space of either, in which we finally lay
down our discontented bones. It is wise, therefore, to
come back betimes, or never.

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

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