REMINISCENCES OF MIRIAM
When Hilda and himself turned away from the unfinished bust, the
sculptor’s mind still dwelt upon the reminiscences which it suggested.
“You have not seen Donatello recently,” he remarked, “and therefore
cannot be aware how sadly he is changed.”
“No wonder!” exclaimed Hilda, growing pale.
The terrible scene which she had witnessed, when Donatello’s face
gleamed out in so fierce a light, came back upon her memory, almost
for the first time since she knelt at the confessional. Hilda, as is
sometimes the case with persons whose delicate organization requires
a peculiar safeguard, had an elastic faculty of throwing off such
recollections as would be too painful for endurance. The first shock
of Donatello’s and Miriam’s crime had, indeed, broken through the frail
defence of this voluntary forgetfulness; but, once enabled to relieve
herself of the ponderous anguish over which she had so long brooded, she
had practised a subtile watchfulness in preventing its return.
“No wonder, do you say?” repeated the sculptor, looking at her with
interest, but not exactly with surprise; for he had long suspected that
Hilda had a painful knowledge of events which he himself little more
than surmised. “Then you know!--you have heard! But what can you
possibly have heard, and through what channel?”
“Nothing!” replied Hilda faintly. “Not one word has reached my ears from
the lips of any human being. Let us never speak of it again! No, no!
never again!”
“And Miriam!” said Kenyon, with irrepressible interest. “Is it also
forbidden to speak of her?”
“Hush! do not even utter her name! Try not to think of it!” Hilda
whispered. “It may bring terrible consequences!”
“My dear Hilda!” exclaimed Kenyon, regarding her with wonder and deep
sympathy. “My sweet friend, have you had this secret hidden in your
delicate, maidenly heart, through all these many months! No wonder that
your life was withering out of you.”
“It was so, indeed!” said Hilda, shuddering. “Even now, I sicken at the
recollection.”
“And how could it have come to your knowledge?” continued the sculptor.
“But no matter! Do not torture yourself with referring to the subject.
Only, if at any time it should be a relief to you, remember that we can
speak freely together, for Miriam has herself suggested a confidence
between us.”
“Miriam has suggested this!” exclaimed Hilda. “Yes, I remember, now, her
advising that the secret should be shared with you. But I have
survived the death struggle that it cost me, and need make no further
revelations. And Miriam has spoken to you! What manner of woman can
she be, who, after sharing in such a deed, can make it a topic of
conversation with her friends?”
“Ah, Hilda,” replied Kenyon, “you do not know, for you could never
learn it from your own heart, which is all purity and rectitude, what
a mixture of good there may be in things evil; and how the greatest
criminal, if you look at his conduct from his own point of view, or from
any side point, may seem not so unquestionably guilty, after all. So
with Miriam; so with Donatello. They are, perhaps, partners in what we
must call awful guilt; and yet, I will own to you,--when I think of the
original cause, the motives, the feelings, the sudden concurrence of
circumstances thrusting them onward, the urgency of the moment, and
the sublime unselfishness on either part,--I know not well how to
distinguish it from much that the world calls heroism. Might we not
render some such verdict as this?--‘Worthy of Death, but not unworthy of
Love! ’”
“Never!” answered Hilda, looking at the matter through the clear crystal
medium of her own integrity. “This thing, as regards its causes, is all
a mystery to me, and must remain so. But there is, I believe, only one
right and one wrong; and I do not understand, and may God keep me from
ever understanding, how two things so totally unlike can be mistaken for
one another; nor how two mortal foes, as Right and Wrong surely are, can
work together in the same deed. This is my faith; and I should be led
astray, if you could persuade me to give it up.”
“Alas for poor human nature, then!” said Kenyon sadly, and yet half
smiling at Hilda’s unworldly and impracticable theory. “I always felt
you, my dear friend, a terribly severe judge, and have been perplexed to
conceive how such tender sympathy could coexist with the remorselessness
of a steel blade. You need no mercy, and therefore know not how to show
any.”
“That sounds like a bitter gibe,” said Hilda, with the tears springing
into her eyes. “But I cannot help it. It does not alter my perception of
the truth. If there be any such dreadful mixture of good and evil as
you affirm,--and which appears to me almost more shocking than
pure evil,--then the good is turned to poison, not the evil to
wholesomeness.”
The sculptor seemed disposed to say something more, but yielded to the
gentle steadfastness with which Hilda declined to listen. She grew very
sad; for a reference to this one dismal topic had set, as it were, a
prison door ajar, and allowed a throng of torturing recollections to
escape from their dungeons into the pure air and white radiance of
her soul. She bade Kenyon a briefer farewell than ordinary, and went
homeward to her tower.
In spite of her efforts to withdraw them to other subjects, her thoughts
dwelt upon Miriam; and, as had not heretofore happened, they brought
with them a painful doubt whether a wrong had not been committed on
Hilda’s part, towards the friend once so beloved. Something that Miriam
had said, in their final conversation, recurred to her memory, and
seemed now to deserve more weight than Hilda had assigned to it, in her
horror at the crime just perpetrated. It was not that the deed looked
less wicked and terrible in the retrospect; but she asked herself
whether there were not other questions to be considered, aside from that
single one of Miriam’s guilt or innocence; as, for example, whether a
close bond of friendship, in which we once voluntarily engage, ought to
be severed on account of any unworthiness, which we subsequently detect
in our friend. For, in these unions of hearts,--call them marriage,
or whatever else,--we take each other for better for worse. Availing
ourselves of our friend’s intimate affection, we pledge our own, as
to be relied upon in every emergency. And what sadder, more desperate
emergency could there be, than had befallen Miriam? Who more need the
tender succor of the innocent, than wretches stained with guilt! And
must a selfish care for the spotlessness of our own garments keep us
from pressing the guilty ones close to our hearts, wherein, for the very
reason that we are innocent, lies their securest refuge from further
ill?
It was a sad thing for Hilda to find this moral enigma propounded to her
conscience; and to feel that, whichever way she might settle it, there
would be a cry of wrong on the other side. Still, the idea stubbornly
came back, that the tie between Miriam and herself had been real, the
affection true, and that therefore the implied compact was not to be
shaken off.
“Miriam loved me well,” thought Hilda remorsefully, “and I failed her at
her sorest need.”
Miriam loved her well; and not less ardent had been the affection which
Miriam’s warm, tender, and generous characteristics had excited in
Hilda’s more reserved and quiet nature. It had never been extinguished;
for, in part, the wretchedness which Hilda had since endured was but
the struggle and writhing of her sensibility, still yearning towards
her friend. And now, at the earliest encouragement, it awoke again, and
cried out piteously, complaining of the violence that had been done it.
Recurring to the delinquencies of which she fancied (we say “fancied,”
because we do not unhesitatingly adopt Hilda’s present view, but rather
suppose her misled by her feelings)--of which she fancied herself guilty
towards her friend, she suddenly remembered a sealed packet that
Miriam had confided to her. It had been put into her hands with earnest
injunctions of secrecy and care, and if unclaimed after a certain
period, was to be delivered according to its address. Hilda had
forgotten it; or, rather, she had kept the thought of this commission in
the background of her consciousness, with all other thoughts referring
to Miriam.
But now the recollection of this packet, and the evident stress which
Miriam laid upon its delivery at the specified time, impelled Hilda to
hurry up the staircase of her tower, dreading lest the period should
already have elapsed.
No; the hour had not gone by, but was on the very point of passing.
Hilda read the brief note of instruction, on a corner of the envelope,
and discovered, that, in case of Miriam’s absence from Rome, the packet
was to be taken to its destination that very day.
“How nearly I had violated my promise!” said Hilda. “And, since we are
separated forever, it has the sacredness of an injunction from a dead
friend. There is no time to be lost.”
So Hilda set forth in the decline of the afternoon, and pursued her way
towards the quarter of the city in which stands the Palazzo Cenci. Her
habit of self-reliance was so simply strong, so natural, and now so well
established by long use, that the idea of peril seldom or never occurred
to Hilda, in her lonely life.
She differed, in this particular, from the generality of her sex,
--although the customs and character of her native land often produce
women who meet the world with gentle fearlessness, and discover that its
terrors have been absurdly exaggerated by the tradition of mankind. In
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the apprehensiveness of women is
quite gratuitous. Even as matters now stand, they are really safer in
perilous situations and emergencies than men; and might be still more
so, if they trusted themselves more confidingly to the chivalry of
manhood. In all her wanderings about Rome, Hilda had gone and returned
as securely as she had been accustomed to tread the familiar street of
her New England village, where every face wore a look of recognition.
With respect to whatever was evil, foul, and ugly, in this populous and
corrupt city, she trod as if invisible, and not only so, but blind. She
was altogether unconscious of anything wicked that went along the same
pathway, but without jostling or impeding her, any more than gross
substance hinders the wanderings of a spirit. Thus it is, that, bad as
the world is said to have grown, innocence continues to make a paradise
around itself, and keep it still unfallen.
Hilda’s present expedition led her into what was--physically, at
least--the foulest and ugliest part of Rome. In that vicinity lies the
Ghetto, where thousands of Jews are crowded within a narrow compass,
and lead a close, unclean, and multitudinous life, resembling that of
maggots when they over-populate a decaying cheese.
Hilda passed on the borders of this region, but had no occasion to
step within it. Its neighborhood, however, naturally partook of
characteristics ‘like its own. There was a confusion of black and
hideous houses, piled massively out of the ruins of former ages; rude
and destitute of plan, as a pauper would build his hovel, and yet
displaying here and there an arched gateway, a cornice, a pillar, or
a broken arcade, that might have adorned a palace. Many of the houses,
indeed, as they stood, might once have been palaces, and possessed still
a squalid kind of grandeur. Dirt was everywhere, strewing the narrow
streets, and incrusting the tall shabbiness of the edifices, from the
foundations to the roofs; it lay upon the thresholds, and looked out of
the windows, and assumed the guise of human life in the children that
Seemed to be engendered out of it. Their father was the sun, and their
mother--a heap of Roman mud.
It is a question of speculative interest, whether the ancient Romans
were as unclean a people as we everywhere find those who have succeeded
them. There appears to be a kind of malignant spell in the spots that
have been inhabited by these masters of the world, or made famous in
their history; an inherited and inalienable curse, impelling their
successors to fling dirt and defilement upon whatever temple, column,
mined palace, or triumphal arch may be nearest at hand, and on every
monument that the old Romans built. It is most probably a classic trait,
regularly transmitted downward, and perhaps a little modified by the
better civilization of Christianity; so that Caesar may have trod
narrower and filthier ways in his path to the Capitol, than even those
of modern Rome.
As the paternal abode of Beatrice, the gloomy old palace of the Cencis
had an interest for Hilda, although not sufficiently strong, hitherto,
to overcome the disheartening effect of the exterior, and draw her over
its threshold. The adjacent piazza, of poor aspect, contained only an
old woman selling roasted chestnuts and baked squash-seeds; she looked
sharply at Hilda, and inquired whether she had lost her way.
“No,” said Hilda; “I seek the Palazzo Cenci.”
“Yonder it is, fair signorina,” replied the Roman matron. “If you wish
that packet delivered, which I see in your hand, my grandson Pietro
shall run with it for a baiocco. The Cenci palace is a spot of ill omen
for young maidens.”
Hilda thanked the old dame, but alleged the necessity of doing her
errand in person. She approached the front of the palace, which, with
all its immensity, had but a mean appearance, and seemed an abode which
the lovely shade of Beatrice would not be apt to haunt, unless her doom
made it inevitable. Some soldiers stood about the portal, and gazed at
the brown-haired, fair-cheeked Anglo-Saxon girl, with approving glances,
but not indecorously. Hilda began to ascend the staircase, three lofty
flights of which were to be surmounted, before reaching the door whither
she was bound.