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 bloodstain!” 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 race 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 forbore 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 whir of wings, moreover, that
hovered in the air. It may have been all an illusion; but Kenyon fancied
that he could 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 their 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 further 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 dewdrop, 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, Signore,” 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.