THE SYLVAN DANCE
As the music came fresher on their ears, they danced to its cadence,
extemporizing new steps and attitudes. Each varying movement had a grace
which might have been worth putting into marble, for the long delight of
days to come, but vanished with the movement that gave it birth, and was
effaced from memory by another. In Miriam’s motion, freely as she flung
herself into the frolic of the hour, there was still an artful beauty;
in Donatello’s, there was a charm of indescribable grotesqueness hand
in hand with grace; sweet, bewitching, most provocative of laughter,
and yet akin to pathos, so deeply did it touch the heart. This was the
ultimate peculiarity, the final touch, distinguishing between the sylvan
creature and the beautiful companion at his side. Setting apart only
this, Miriam resembled a Nymph, as much as Donatello did a Faun.
There were flitting moments, indeed, when she played the sylvan
character as perfectly as he. Catching glimpses of her, then, you would
have fancied that an oak had sundered its rough bark to let her dance
freely forth, endowed with the same spirit in her human form as that
which rustles in the leaves; or that she had emerged through the
pebbly bottom of a fountain, a water-nymph, to play and sparkle in
the sunshine, flinging a quivering light around her, and suddenly
disappearing in a shower of rainbow drops.
As the fountain sometimes subsides into its basin, so in Miriam there
were symptoms that the frolic of her spirits would at last tire itself
out.
“Ah! Donatello,” cried she, laughing, as she stopped to take a breath;
“you have an unfair advantage over me! I am no true creature of the
woods; while you are a real Faun, I do believe. When your curls shook
just now, methought I had a peep at the pointed ears.”
Donatello snapped his fingers above his head, as fauns and satyrs taught
us first to do, and seemed to radiate jollity out of his whole nimble
person. Nevertheless, there was a kind of dim apprehension in his face,
as if he dreaded that a moment’s pause might break the spell, and snatch
away the sportive companion whom he had waited for through so many
dreary months.
“Dance! dance!” cried he joyously. “If we take breath, we shall be as
we were yesterday. There, now, is the music, just beyond this clump of
trees. Dance, Miriam, dance!”
They had now reached an open, grassy glade (of which there are many in
that artfully constructed wilderness), set round with stone seats,
on which the aged moss had kindly essayed to spread itself instead of
cushions. On one of the stone benches sat the musicians, whose strains
had enticed our wild couple thitherward. They proved to be a vagrant
band, such as Rome, and all Italy, abounds with; comprising a harp,
a flute, and a violin, which, though greatly the worse for wear,
the performers had skill enough to provoke and modulate into tolerable
harmony. It chanced to be a feast-day; and, instead of playing in
the sun-scorched piazzas of the city, or beneath the windows of some
unresponsive palace, they had bethought themselves to try the echoes
of these woods; for, on the festas of the Church, Rome scatters its
merrymakers all abroad, ripe for the dance or any other pastime.
As Miriam and Donatello emerged from among the trees, the musicians
scraped, tinkled, or blew, each according to his various kind of
instrument, more inspiringly than ever. A darkchecked little girl,
with bright black eyes, stood by, shaking a tambourine set round
with tinkling bells, and thumping it on its parchment head. Without
interrupting his brisk, though measured movement, Donatello snatched
away this unmelodious contrivance, and, flourishing it above his head,
produced music of indescribable potency, still dancing with frisky step,
and striking the tambourine, and ringing its little bells, all in one
jovial act.
It might be that there was magic in the sound, or contagion, at least,
in the spirit which had got possession of Miriam and himself, for very
soon a number of festal people were drawn to the spot, and struck
into the dance, singly or in pairs, as if they were all gone mad with
jollity. Among them were some of the plebeian damsels whom we meet
bareheaded in the Roman streets, with silver stilettos thrust through
their glossy hair; the contadinas, too, from the Campagna and the
villages, with their rich and picturesque costumes of scarlet and all
bright hues, such as fairer maidens might not venture to put on. Then
came the modern Roman from Trastevere, perchance, with his old cloak
drawn about him like a toga, which anon, as his active motion heated
him, he flung aside. Three French soldiers capered freely into the
throng, in wide scarlet trousers, their short swords dangling at their
sides; and three German artists in gray flaccid hats and flaunting
beards; and one of the Pope’s Swiss guardsmen in the strange motley garb
which Michael Angelo contrived for them. Two young English tourists (one
of them a lord) took contadine partners and dashed in, as did also a
shaggy man in goat-skin breeches, who looked like rustic Pan in person,
and footed it as merrily as he. Besides the above there was a herdsman
or two from the Campagna, and a few peasants in sky-blue jackets, and
small-clothes tied with ribbons at the knees; haggard and sallow were
these last, poor serfs, having little to eat and nothing but the malaria
to breathe; but still they plucked up a momentary spirit and joined
hands in Donatello’s dance.
Here, as it seemed, had the Golden Age come back again within the
Precincts of this sunny glade, thawing mankind out of their cold
formalities, releasing them from irksome restraint, mingling them
together in such childlike gayety that new flowers (of which the old
bosom of the earth is full) sprang up beneath their footsteps. The sole
exception to the geniality of the moment, as we have understood, was
seen in a countryman of our own, who sneered at the spectacle, and
declined to compromise his dignity by making part of it.
The harper thrummed with rapid fingers; the violin player flashed his
bow back and forth across the strings; the flautist poured his breath in
quick puffs of jollity, while Donatello shook the tambourine above his
head, and led the merry throng with unweariable steps. As they followed
one another in a wild ring of mirth, it seemed the realization of one
of those bas-reliefs where a dance of nymphs, satyrs, or bacchanals
is twined around the circle of an antique vase; or it was like the
sculptured scene on the front and sides of a sarcophagus, where, as
often as any other device, a festive procession mocks the ashes and
white bones that are treasured up within. You might take it for a
marriage pageant; but after a while, if you look at these merry-makers,
following them from end to end of the marble coffin, you doubt whether
their gay movement is leading them to a happy close. A youth has
suddenly fallen in the dance; a chariot is overturned and broken,
flinging the charioteer headlong to the ground; a maiden seems to have
grown faint or weary, and is drooping on the bosom of a friend. Always
some tragic incident is shadowed forth or thrust sidelong into the
spectacle; and when once it has caught your eye you can look no more
at the festal portions of the scene, except with reference to this one
slightly suggested doom and sorrow.
As in its mirth, so in the darker characteristic here alluded to, there
was an analogy between the sculptured scene on the sarcophagus and the
wild dance which we have been describing. In the midst of its madness
and riot Miriam found herself suddenly confronted by a strange figure
that shook its fantastic garments in the air, and pranced before her on
its tiptoes, almost vying with the agility of Donatello himself. It was
the model.
A moment afterwards Donatello was aware that she had retired from the
dance. He hastened towards her, and flung himself on the grass beside
the stone bench on which Miriam was sitting. But a strange distance and
unapproachableness had all at once enveloped her; and though he saw her
within reach of his arm, yet the light of her eyes seemed as far off as
that of a star, nor was there any warmth in the melancholy smile with
which she regarded him.
“Come back!” cried he. “Why should this happy hour end so soon?”
“It must end here, Donatello,” said she, in answer to his words and
outstretched hand; “and such hours, I believe, do not often repeat
themselves in a lifetime. Let me go, my friend; let me vanish from you
quietly among the shadows of these trees. See, the companions of our
pastime are vanishing already!”
Whether it was that the harp-strings were broken, the violin out of
tune, or the flautist out of breath, so it chanced that the music had
ceased, and the dancers come abruptly to a pause. All that motley throng
of rioters was dissolved as suddenly as it had been drawn together. In
Miriam’s remembrance the scene had a character of fantasy. It was as if
a company of satyrs, fauns, and nymphs, with Pan in the midst of them,
had been disporting themselves in these venerable woods only a moment
ago; and now in another moment, because some profane eye had looked at
them too closely, or some intruder had cast a shadow on their mirth,
the sylvan pageant had utterly disappeared. If a few of the merry-makers
lingered among the trees, they had hidden their racy peculiarities under
the garb and aspect of ordinary people, and sheltered themselves in the
weary commonplace of daily life. Just an instant before it was Arcadia
and the Golden Age. The spell being broken, it was now only that old
tract of pleasure ground, close by the people’s gate of Rome,--a
tract where the crimes and calamities of ages, the many battles, blood
recklessly poured out, and deaths of myriads, have corrupted all the
soil, creating an influence that makes the air deadly to human lungs.
“You must leave me,” said Miriam to Donatello more imperatively than
before; “have I not said it? Go; and look not behind you.”
“Miriam,” whispered Donatello, grasping her hand forcibly, “who is it
that stands in the shadow yonder, beckoning you to follow him?”
“Hush; leave me!” repeated Miriam. “Your hour is past; his hour has
come.”
Donatello still gazed in the direction which he had indicated, and
the expression of his face was fearfully changed, being so disordered,
perhaps with terror,--at all events with anger and invincible
repugnance,--that Miriam hardly knew him. His lips were drawn apart so
as to disclose his set teeth, thus giving him a look of animal rage,
which we seldom see except in persons of the simplest and rudest
natures. A shudder seemed to pass through his very bones.
“I hate him!” muttered he.
“Be satisfied; I hate him too!” said Miriam.
She had no thought of making this avowal, but was irresistibly drawn to
it by the sympathy of the dark emotion in her own breast with that so
strongly expressed by Donatello. Two drops of water or of blood do not
more naturally flow into each other than did her hatred into his.
“Shall I clutch him by the throat?” whispered Donatello, with a savage
scowl. “Bid me do so, and we are rid of him forever.”
“In Heaven’s name, no violence!” exclaimed Miriam, affrighted out of the
scornful control which she had hitherto held over her companion, by
the fierceness that he so suddenly developed. “O, have pity on
me, Donatello, if for nothing else, yet because in the midst of my
wretchedness I let myself be your playmate for this one wild
hour! Follow me no farther. Henceforth leave me to my doom. Dear
friend,--kind, simple, loving friend,--make me not more wretched by the
remembrance of having thrown fierce hates or loves into the wellspring
of your happy life!”
“Not follow you!” repeated Donatello, soothed from anger into sorrow,
less by the purport of what she said, than by the melancholy sweetness
of her voice,--“not follow you! What other path have I?”
“We will talk of it once again,” said Miriam still soothingly;
“soon--to-morrow when you will; only leave me now.”