University of Virginia Library

2. CHAPTER II.
MYTHS.

After the sculptor's arrival, however, the young count
sometimes came down from his forlorn elevation, and
rambled with him among the neighboring woods and hills.
He led his friend to many enchanting nooks, with which
he himself had been familiar in his childhood. But of
late, as he remarked to Kenyon, a sort of strangeness had
overgrown them, like clusters of dark shrubbery, so that
he hardly recognized the places which he had known and
loved so well.

To the sculptor's eye, nevertheless, they were still rich
with beauty. They were picturesque in that sweetly impressive
way, where wildness, in a long lapse of years,
has crept over scenes that have been once adorned with
the careful art and toil of man; and when man could do
no more for them, time and nature came, and wrought
hand in hand to bring them to a soft and venerable perfection.
There grew the fig-tree that had run wild and taken
to wife the vine, which likewise had gone rampant out of
all human control; so that the two wild things had tangled
and knotted themselves into a wild marriage-bond, and

hung their various progeny — the luscious figs, the grapes,
oozy with the southern juice, and both endowed with a
wild flavor that added the final charm — on the same
bough together.

In Kenyon's opinion, never was any other nook so
lovely as a certain little dell which he and Donatello
visited. It was hollowed in among the hills, and open to
a glimpse of the broad, fertile valley. A fountain had its
birth here, and fell into a marble basin, which was all
covered with moss and shaggy with water-weeds. Over
the gush of the small stream, with an urn in her arms,
stood a marble nymph, whose nakedness the moss had
kindly clothed as with a garment; and the long trails and
tresses of the maidenhair had done what they could in
the poor thing's behalf, by hanging themselves about her
waist. In former days — it might be a remote antiquity
— this lady of the fountain had first received the infant
tide into her urn and poured it thence into the marble
basin. But now the sculptured urn had a great crack
from top to bottom; and the discontented nymph was
compelled to see the basin fill itself through a channel
which she could not control, although with water long
ago consecrated to her.

For this reason, or some other, she looked terribly forlorn;
and you might have fancied that the whole fountain
was but the overflow of her lonely tears.

“This was a place that I used greatly to delight in,”
remarked Donatello, sighing. “As a child, and as a boy,
I have been very happy here.”

“And, as a man, I should ask no fitter place to be

happy in,” answered Kenyon. “But you, my friend, are
of such a social nature, that I should hardly have thought
these lonely haunts would take your fancy. It is a place
for a poet to dream in, and people it with the beings of
his imagination.”

“I am no poet, that I know of,” said Donatello, “but
yet, as I tell you, I have been very happy here, in the
company of this fountain and this nymph. It is said that
a Faun, my oldest forefather, brought home hither to this
very spot a human maiden, whom he loved and wedded.
This spring of delicious water was their household well.”

“It is a most enchanting fable!” exclaimed Kenyon;
“that is, if it be not a fact.”

“And why not a fact?” said the simple Donatello.
“There is likewise another sweet old story connected with
this spot. But, now that I remember it, it seems to me
more sad than sweet, though formerly the sorrow, in
which it closes, did not so much impress me. If I had
the gift of tale-telling, this one would be sure to interest
you mightily.”

“Pray tell it,” said Kenyon; “no matter whether well
or ill. These wild legends have often the most powerful
charm when least artfully told.”

So the young count narrated a myth of one of his progenitors,
— he might have lived a century ago, or a thousand
years, or before the Christian epoch, for anything
that Donatello knew to the contrary, — who had made acquaintance
with a fair creature belonging to this fountain.
Whether woman or sprite was a mystery, as was all else
about her, except that her life and soul were somehow

interfused throughout the gushing water. She was a
fresh, cool, dewy thing, sunny and shadowy, full of pleasant
little mischiefs, fitful and changeable with the whim
of the moment, but yet as constant as her native stream,
which kept the same gush and flow forever, while marble
crumbled over and around it. The fountain woman loved
the youth, — a knight, as Donatello called him, — for,
according to the legend, his race was akin to hers. At
least, whether kin or no, there had been friendship and
sympathy of old betwixt an ancestor of his, with furry
ears, and the long-lived lady of the fountain. And, after
all those ages, she was still as young as a May morning,
and as frolicsome as a bird upon a tree, or a breeze that
makes merry with the leaves.

She taught him how to call her from her pebbly source,
and they spent many a happy hour together, more especially
in the fervor of the summer days. For often as he
sat waiting for her by the margin of the spring, she would
suddenly fall down around him in a shower of sunny raindrops,
with a rainbow glancing through them, and forthwith
gather herself up into the likeness of a beautiful girl,
laughing — or was it the warble of the rill over the pebbles?
— to see the youth's amazement.

Thus, kind maiden that she was, the hot atmosphere
became deliciously cool and fragrant for this favored
knight; and, furthermore, when he knelt down to drink
out of the spring, nothing was more common than for a
pair of rosy lips to come up out of its little depths, and
touch his mouth with the thrill of a sweet, cool, dewy
kiss!

“It is a delightful story for the hot noon of your Tuscan
summer,” observed the sculptor, at this point. “But
the deportment of the watery lady must have had a most
chilling influence in midwinter. Her lover would find it,
very literally, a cold reception!”

“I suppose,” said Donatello, rather sulkily, “you are
making fun of the story. But I see nothing laughable in
the thing itself, nor in what you say about it.”

He went on to relate, that for a long while, the knight
found infinite pleasure and comfort in the friendship of the
fountain nymph. In his merriest hours, she gladdened
him with her sportive humor. If ever he was annoyed
with earthly trouble, she laid her moist hand upon his
brow, and charmed the fret and fever quite away.

But one day — one fatal noontide — the young knight
came rushing with hasty and irregular steps to the accustomed
fountain. He called the nymph; but — no doubt
because there was something unusual and frightful in his
tone — she did not appear, nor answer him. He flung
himself down, and washed his hands and bathed his feverish
brow in the cool, pure water. And then, there was a
sound of woe; it might have been a woman's voice; it
might have been only the sighing of the brook over the
pebbles. The water shrank away from the youth's hands,
and left his brow as dry and feverish as before. —

Donatello here came to a dead pause.

“Why did the water shrink from this unhappy knight?”
inquired the sculptor.

“Because he had tried to wash off a blood-stain!” said
the young count, in a horror-stricken whisper. “The

guilty man had polluted the pure water. The nymph
might have comforted him in sorrow, but could not cleanse
his conscience of a crime.”

“And did he never behold her more?” asked Kenyon.

“Never but once,” replied his friend. “He never beheld
her blessed face but once again, and then there was a
blood-stain on the poor nymph's brow; it was the stain
his guilt had left in the fountain where he tried to wash it
off. He mourned for her his whole life long, and employed
the best sculptor of the time to carve this statue of the
nymph from his description of her aspect. But, though
my ancestor would fain have had the image wear her happiest
look, the artist, unlike yourself, was so impressed with
the mournfulness of the story, that, in spite of his best
efforts, he made her forlorn, and forever weeping, as you
see!”

Kenyon found a certain charm in this simple legend.
Whether so intended or not, he understood it as an apologue,
typifying the soothing and genial effects of an
habitual intercourse with nature, in all ordinary cares and
griefs; while, on the other hand, her mild influences fall
short in their effect upon the ruder passions, and are altogether
powerless in the dread fever-fit or deadly chill of
guilt.

“Do you say,” he asked, “that the nymph's face has
never since been shown to any mortal? Methinks, you,
by your native qualities, are as well entitled to her favor
as ever your progenitor could have been. Why have you
not summoned her?”

“I called her often when I was a silly child,” answered

Donatello; and he added, in an inward voice, — “Thank
Heaven, she did not come!”

“Then you never saw her?” said the sculptor.

“Never in my life!” rejoined the count. “No, my
dear friend, I have not seen the nymph; although here,
by her fountain, I used to make many strange acquaintances;
for, from my earliest childhood, I was familiar
with whatever creatures haunt the woods. You would
have laughed to see the friends I had among them; yes,
among the wild, nimble things, that reckon man their
deadliest enemy! How it was first taught me, I cannot
tell; but there was a charm — a voice, a murmur, a kind
of chant — by which I called the woodland inhabitants,
the furry people, and the feathered people, in a language
that they seemed to understand.”

“I have heard of such a gift,” responded the sculptor
gravely, “but never before met with a person endowed
with it. Pray, try the charm; and lest I should frighten
your friends away, I will withdraw into this thicket, and
merely peep at them.”

“I doubt,” said Donatello, “whether they will remember
my voice now. It changes, you know, as the boy
grows towards manhood.”

Nevertheless, as the young count's good-nature and
easy persuadability were among his best characteristics,
he set about complying with Kenyon's request. The latter,
in his concealment among the shrubberies, heard him
send forth a sort of modulated breath, wild, rude, yet harmonious.
It struck the auditor as at once the strangest
and the most natural utterance that had ever reached his

ears. Any idle boy, it should seem, singing to himself,
and setting his wordless song to no other or more definite
tune than the play of his own pulses, might produce a
sound almost identical with this; and yet, it was as individual
as a murmur of the breeze. Donatello tried it,
over and over again, with many breaks, at first, and
pauses of uncertainty; then with more confidence, and a
fuller swell, like a wayfarer groping out of obscurity into
the light, and moving with freer footsteps as it brightens
around him.

Anon, his voice appeared to fill the air, yet not with an
obtrusive clangor. The sound was of a murmurous character,
soft, attractive, persuasive, friendly. The sculptor
fancied that such might have been the original voice and
utterance of the natural man, before the sophistication of
the human intellect formed what we now call language.
In this broad dialect — broad as the sympathies of nature
— the human brother might have spoken to his inarticulate
brotherhood that prowl the woods, or soar upon the
wing, and have been intelligible, to such extent as to win
their confidence.

The sound had its pathos too. At some of its simple
cadences, the tears came quietly into Kenyon's eyes.
They welled up slowly from his heart, which was thrilling
with an emotion more delightful than he had often
felt before, but which he forebore to analyze, lest, if he
seized it, it should at once perish in his grasp.

Donatello paused two or three times, and seemed to
listen; then, recommencing, he poured his spirit and life
more earnestly into the strain. And, finally, — or else

the sculptor's hope and imagination deceived him, — soft
treads were audible upon the fallen leaves. There was a
rustling among the shrubbery; a whirr of wings, moreover,
that hovered in the air. It may have been all an
illusion; but Kenyon fancied that he would distinguish
the stealthy, cat-like movement of some small forest citizen,
and that he could even see its doubtful shadow, if not
really its substance. But, all at once, whatever might be
the reason, there ensued a hurried rush and scamper of
little feet; and then the sculptor heard a wild, sorrowful
cry, and through the crevices of the thicket beheld Donatello
fling himself on the ground.

Emerging from his hiding-place, he saw no living thing,
save a brown lizard (it was of the tarantula species)
rustling away through the sunshine. To all present appearance,
this venomous reptile was the only creature that
had responded to the young count's efforts to renew his
intercourse with the lower orders of nature.

“What has happened to you?” exclaimed Kenyon,
stooping down over his friend, and wondering at the anguish
which he betrayed.

“Death, death!” sobbed Donatello. “They know
it!”

He grovelled beside the fountain, in a fit of such passionate
sobbing and weeping, that it seemed as if his heart
had broken, and spilt its wild sorrows upon the ground.
His unrestrained grief and childish tears made Kenyon
sensible in how small a degree the customs and restraints
of society had really acted upon this young man, in spite
of the quietude of his ordinary deportment. In response

to his friend's efforts to console him, he murmured words
hardly more articulate than the strange chant, which he
had so recently been breathing into the air.

“They know it!” was all that Kenyon could yet distinguish.
“They know it!”

“Who know it?” asked the sculptor. “And what is
it they know?”

“They know it!” repeated Donatello, trembling.
“They shun me! All nature shrinks from me, and shudders
at me! I live in the midst of a curse, that hems me
round with a circle of fire! No innocent thing can come
near me.”

“Be comforted, my dear friend,” said Kenyon, kneeling
beside him. “You labor under some illusion, but no
curse. As for this strange, natural spell, which you have
been exercising, and of which I have heard before, though
I never believed in, nor expected to witness it, I am satisfied
that you still possess it. It was my own half-concealed
presence, no doubt, and some involuntary little
movement of mine, that scared away your forest friends.”

“They are friends of mine no longer,” answered Donatello.

“We all of us, as we grow older,” rejoined Kenyon,
“lose somewhat of our proximity to nature. It is the
price we pay for experience.”

“A heavy price, then!” said Donatello, rising from
the ground. “But we will speak no more of it. Forget
this scene, my dear friend. In your eyes, it must look
very absurd. It is a grief, I presume, to all men, to find
the pleasant privileges and properties of early life departing

from them. That grief has now befallen me. Well;
I shall waste no more tears for such a cause!”

Nothing else made Kenyon so sensible of a change in
Donatello, as his newly acquired power of dealing with
his own emotions, and, after a struggle more or less fierce,
thrusting them down into the prison-cells where he usually
kept them confined. The restraint which he now put
upon himself, and the mask of dull composure which he
succeeded in clasping over his still beautiful, and once
faun-like face, affected the sensitive sculptor more sadly
than even the unrestrained passion of the preceding scene.
It is a very miserable epoch, when the evil necessities of
life, in our tortuous world, first get the better of us so far,
as to compel us to attempt throwing a cloud over our
transparency. Simplicity increases in value the longer
we can keep it, and the farther we carry it onward into
life; the loss of a child's simplicity, in the inevitable
lapse of years, causes but a natural sigh or two, because
even his mother feared that he could not keep it always.
But after a young man has brought it through his childhood,
and has still worn it in his bosom, not as an early
dew-drop, but as a diamond of pure, white lustre, — it is
a pity to lose it, then. And thus, when Kenyon saw how
much his friend had now to hide, and how well he hid it,
he would have wept, although his tears would have been
even idler than those which Donatello had just shed.

They parted on the lawn before the house, the count to
climb his tower, and the sculptor to read an antique
edition of Dante, which he had found among some old
volumes of Catholic devotion, in a seldom-visited room.

Tomaso met him in the entrance hall, and showed a desire
to speak.

“Our poor signorino looks very sad to-day!” he said.

“Even so, good Tomaso,” replied the sculptor. “Would
that we could raise his spirits a little!”

“There might be means, signor,” answered the old butler,
“if one might but be sure that they were the right
ones. We men are but rough nurses for a sick body
or a sick spirit.”

“Women, you would say, my good friend, are better,”
said the sculptor, struck by an intelligence in the butler's
face. “That is possible! But it depends.”

“Ah; we will wait a little longer,” said Tomaso, with
the customary shake of his head.