HILDA’S TOWER
When we have once known Rome, and left her where she lies, like a
long-decaying corpse, retaining a trace of the noble shape it was, but
with accumulated dust and a fungous growth overspreading all its more
admirable features, left her in utter weariness, no doubt, of her
narrow, crooked, intricate streets, so uncomfortably paved with little
squares of lava that to tread over them is a penitential pilgrimage, so
indescribably ugly, moreover, so cold, so alley-like, into which the sun
never falls, and where a chill wind forces its deadly breath into our
lungs,--left her, tired of the sight of those immense seven-storied,
yellow-washed hovels, or call them palaces, where all that is dreary
in domestic life seems magnified and multiplied, and weary of climbing
those staircases, which ascend from a ground-floor of cook shops,
cobblers’ stalls, stables, and regiments of cavalry, to a middle region
of princes, cardinals, and ambassadors, and an upper tier of artists,
just beneath the unattainable sky,--left her, worn out with shivering
at the cheerless and smoky fireside by day, and feasting with our own
substance the ravenous little populace of a Roman bed at night,--left
her, sick at heart of Italian trickery, which has uprooted whatever
faith in man’s integrity had endured till now, and sick at stomach
of sour bread, sour wine, rancid butter, and bad cookery, needlessly
bestowed on evil meats,--left her, disgusted with the pretence of
holiness and the reality of nastiness, each equally omnipresent,--left
her, half lifeless from the languid atmosphere, the vital principle
of which has been used up long ago, or corrupted by myriads of
slaughters,--left her, crushed down in spirit with the desolation of her
ruin, and the hopelessness of her future,--left her, in short, hating
her with all our might, and adding our individual curse to the infinite
anathema which her old crimes have unmistakably brought down,--when we
have left Rome in such mood as this, we are astonished by the discovery,
by and by, that our heart-strings have mysteriously attached themselves
to the Eternal City, and are drawing us thitherward again, as if it were
more familiar, more intimately our home, than even the spot where we
were born.
It is with a kindred sentiment, that we now follow the course of our
story back through the Flaminian Gate, and, treading our way to the Via
Portoghese, climb the staircase to the upper chamber of the tower where
we last saw Hilda.
Hilda all along intended to pass the summer in Rome; for she had laid
out many high and delightful tasks, which she could the better complete
while her favorite haunts were deserted by the multitude that thronged
them throughout the winter and early spring. Nor did she dread the
summer atmosphere, although generally held to be so pestilential. She
had already made trial of it, two years before, and found no worse
effect than a kind of dreamy languor, which was dissipated by the first
cool breezes that came with autumn. The thickly populated centre of the
city, indeed, is never affected by the feverish influence that lies in
wait in the Campagna, like a besieging foe, and nightly haunts those
beautiful lawns and woodlands, around the suburban villas, just at the
season when they most resemble Paradise. What the flaming sword was to
the first Eden, such is the malaria to these sweet gardens and grove. We
may wander through them, of an afternoon, it is true, but they cannot
be made a home and a reality, and to sleep among them is death. They are
but illusions, therefore, like the show of gleaming waters and shadowy
foliage in a desert.
But Rome, within the walls, at this dreaded season, enjoys its festal
days, and makes itself merry with characteristic and hereditary
pas-times, for which its broad piazzas afford abundant room. It leads
its own life with a freer spirit, now that the artists and foreign
visitors are scattered abroad. No bloom, perhaps, would be visible in
a cheek that should be unvisited, throughout the summer, by more
invigorating winds than any within fifty miles of the city; no bloom,
but yet, if the mind kept its healthy energy, a subdued and colorless
well-being. There was consequently little risk in Hilda’s purpose to
pass the summer days in the galleries of Roman palaces, and her nights
in that aerial chamber, whither the heavy breath of the city and its
suburbs could not aspire. It would probably harm her no more than it
did the white doves, who sought the same high atmosphere at sunset, and,
when morning came, flew down into the narrow streets, about their daily
business, as Hilda likewise did.
With the Virgin’s aid and blessing, which might be hoped for even by
a heretic, who so religiously lit the lamp before her shrine, the New
England girl would sleep securely in her old Roman tower, and go forth
on her pictorial pilgrimages without dread or peril. In view of such
a summer, Hilda had anticipated many months of lonely, but unalloyed
enjoyment. Not that she had a churlish disinclination to society, or
needed to be told that we taste one intellectual pleasure twice, and
with double the result, when we taste it with a friend. But, keeping a
maiden heart within her bosom, she rejoiced in the freedom that enabled
her still to choose her own sphere, and dwell in it, if she pleased,
without another inmate.
Her expectation, however, of a delightful summer was woefully
disappointed. Even had she formed no previous plan of remaining there,
it is improbable that Hilda would have gathered energy to stir from
Rome. A torpor, heretofore unknown to her vivacious though quiet
temperament, had possessed itself of the poor girl, like a half-dead
serpent knotting its cold, inextricable wreaths about her limbs. It
was that peculiar despair, that chill and heavy misery, which only
the innocent can experience, although it possesses many of the gloomy
characteristics that mark a sense of guilt. It was that heartsickness,
which, it is to be hoped, we may all of us have been pure enough to
feel, once in our lives, but the capacity for which is usually exhausted
early, and perhaps with a single agony. It was that dismal certainty of
the existence of evil in the world, which, though we may fancy ourselves
fully assured of the sad mystery long before, never becomes a portion of
our practical belief until it takes substance and reality from the sin
of some guide, whom we have deeply trusted and revered, or some friend
whom we have dearly loved.
When that knowledge comes, it is as if a cloud had suddenly gathered
over the morning light; so dark a cloud, that there seems to be
no longer any sunshine behind it or above it. The character of our
individual beloved one having invested itself with all the attributes
of right,--that one friend being to us the symbol and representative of
whatever is good and true,--when he falls, the effect is almost as if
the sky fell with him, bringing down in chaotic ruin the columns
that upheld our faith. We struggle forth again, no doubt, bruised and
bewildered. We stare wildly about us, and discover--or, it may be, we
never make the discovery--that it was not actually the sky that has
tumbled down, but merely a frail structure of our own rearing, which
never rose higher than the housetops, and has fallen because we founded
it on nothing. But the crash, and the affright and trouble, are as
overwhelming, for the time, as if the catastrophe involved the whole
moral world. Remembering these things, let them suggest one generous
motive for walking heedfully amid the defilement of earthly ways! Let us
reflect, that the highest path is pointed out by the pure Ideal of those
who look up to us, and who, if we tread less loftily, may never look so
high again.
Hilda’s situation was made infinitely more wretched by the necessity of
Confining all her trouble within her own consciousness. To this innocent
girl, holding the knowledge of Miriam’s crime within her tender and
delicate soul, the effect was almost the same as if she herself had
participated in the guilt. Indeed, partaking the human nature of
those who could perpetrate such deeds, she felt her own spotlessness
impugnent.
Had there been but a single friend,--or not a friend, since friends were
no longer to be confided in, after Miriam had betrayed her trust,--but,
had there been any calm, wise mind, any sympathizing intelligence; or,
if not these, any dull, half-listening ear into which she might have
flung the dreadful secret, as into an echoless cavern, what a relief
would have ensued! But this awful loneliness! It enveloped her
whithersoever she went. It was a shadow in the sunshine of festal days;
a mist between her eyes and the pictures at which she strove to look; a
chill dungeon, which kept her in its gray twilight and fed her with its
unwholesome air, fit only for a criminal to breathe and pine in! She
could not escape from it. In the effort to do so, straying farther into
the intricate passages of our nature, she stumbled, ever and again, over
this deadly idea of mortal guilt.
Poor sufferer for another’s sin! Poor wellspring of a virgin’s heart,
into which a murdered corpse had casually fallen, and whence it could
not be drawn forth again, but lay there, day after day, night after
night, tainting its sweet atmosphere with the scent of crime and ugly
death!
The strange sorrow that had befallen Hilda did not fail to impress
its mysterious seal upon her face, and to make itself perceptible to
sensitive observers in her manner and carriage. A young Italian artist,
who frequented the same galleries which Hilda haunted, grew deeply
interested in her expression. One day, while she stood before Leonardo
da Vinci’s picture of Joanna of Aragon, but evidently without seeing
it,--for, though it had attracted her eyes, a fancied resemblance to
Miriam had immediately drawn away her thoughts,--this artist drew a
hasty sketch which he afterwards elaborated into a finished portrait. It
represented Hilda as gazing with sad and earnest horror at a bloodspot
which she seemed just then to have discovered on her white robe. The
picture attracted considerable notice. Copies of an engraving from
it may still be found in the print shops along the Corso. By many
connoisseurs, the idea of the face was supposed to have been suggested
by the portrait of Beatrice Cenci; and, in fact, there was a look
somewhat similar to poor Beatrice’s forlorn gaze out of the dreary
isolation and remoteness, in which a terrible doom had involved a tender
soul. But the modern artist strenuously upheld the originality of his
own picture, as well as the stainless purity its subject, and chose
to call it--and was laughed at for his pains--“Innocence, dying of a
Blood-stain!”
“Your picture, Signore Panini, does you credit,” remarked the picture
dealer, who had bought it of the young man for fifteen scudi, and
afterwards sold it for ten times the sum; “but it would be worth a
better price if you had given it a more intelligible title. Looking at
the face and expression of this fair signorina, we seem to comprehend
readily enough, that she is undergoing one or another of those troubles
of the heart to which young ladies are but too liable. But what is this
blood-stain? And what has innocence to do with it? Has she stabbed her
perfidious lover with a bodkin?”
“She! she commit a crime!” cried the young artist. “Can you look at the
innocent anguish in her face, and ask that question? No; but, as I
read the mystery, a man has been slain in her presence, and the blood,
spurting accidentally on her white robe, has made a stain which eats
into her life.”
“Then, in the name of her patron saint,” exclaimed the picture dealer,
“why don’t she get the robe made white again at the expense of a few
baiocchi to her washerwoman? No, no, my dear Panini. The picture being
now my property, I shall call it ‘The Signorina’s Vengeance.’ She
has stabbed her lover overnight, and is repenting it betimes the next
morning. So interpreted, the picture becomes an intelligible and very
natural representation of a not uncommon fact.”
Thus coarsely does the world translate all finer griefs that meet its
eye. It is more a coarse world than an unkind one.
But Hilda sought nothing either from the world’s delicacy or its pity,
and never dreamed of its misinterpretations. Her doves often flew in
through the windows of the tower, winged messengers, bringing her what
sympathy they could, and uttering soft, tender, and complaining sounds,
deep in their bosoms, which soothed the girl more than a distincter
utterance might. And sometimes Hilda moaned quietly among the doves,
teaching her voice to accord with theirs, and thus finding a temporary
relief from the burden of her incommunicable sorrow, as if a little
portion of it, at least, had been told to these innocent friends, and
been understood and pitied.
When she trimmed the lamp before the Virgin’s shrine, Hilda gazed at
the sacred image, and, rude as was the workmanship, beheld, or fancied,
expressed with the quaint, powerful simplicity which sculptors sometimes
had five hundred years ago, a woman’s tenderness responding to her
gaze. If she knelt, if she prayed, if her oppressed heart besought the
sympathy of divine womanhood afar in bliss, but not remote, because
forever humanized by the memory of mortal griefs, was Hilda to be
blamed? It was not a Catholic kneeling at an idolatrous shrine, but a
child lifting its tear-stained face to seek comfort from a mother.