MIRIAM’S TROUBLE
As usual of a moonlight evening, several carriages stood at the entrance
of this famous ruin, and the precincts and interior were anything but a
solitude. The French sentinel on duty beneath the principal archway eyed
our party curiously, but offered no obstacle to their admission. Within,
the moonlight filled and flooded the great empty space; it glowed upon
tier above tier of ruined, grass-grown arches, and made them even
too distinctly visible. The splendor of the revelation took away that
inestimable effect of dimness and mystery by which the imagination
might be assisted to build a grander structure than the Coliseum, and to
shatter it with a more picturesque decay. Byron’s celebrated description
is better than the reality. He beheld the scene in his mind’s eye,
through the witchery of many intervening years, and faintly illuminated
it as if with starlight instead of this broad glow of moonshine.
The party of our friends sat down, three or four of them on a prostrate
column, another on a shapeless lump of marble, once a Roman altar;
others on the steps of one of the Christian shrines. Goths and
barbarians though they were, they chatted as gayly together as if they
belonged to the gentle and pleasant race of people who now inhabit
Italy. There was much pastime and gayety just then in the area of the
Coliseum, where so many gladiators and Wild beasts had fought and died,
and where so much blood of Christian martyrs had been lapped up by that
fiercest of wild beasts, the Roman populace of yore. Some youths and
maidens were running merry races across the open space, and playing at
hide and seek a little way within the duskiness of the ground tier of
arches, whence now and then you could hear the half-shriek, halflaugh of
a frolicsome girl, whom the shadow had betrayed into a young man’s
arms. Elder groups were seated on the fragments of pillars and blocks
of marble that lay round the verge of the arena, talking in the quick,
short ripple of the Italian tongue. On the steps of the great black
cross in the centre of the Coliseum sat a party singing scraps of songs,
with much laughter and merriment between the stanzas.
It was a strange place for song and mirth. That black cross marks one of
the special blood-spots of the earth where, thousands of times over, the
dying gladiator fell, and more of human agony has been endured for the
mere pastime of the multitude than on the breadth of many battlefields.
From all this crime and suffering, however, the spot has derived a more
than common sanctity. An inscription promises seven years’ indulgence,
seven years of remission from the pains of purgatory, and earlier
enjoyment of heavenly bliss, for each separate kiss imprinted on the
black cross. What better use could be made of life, after middle age,
when the accumulated sins are many and the remaining temptations few,
than to spend it all in kissing the black cross of the Coliseum!
Besides its central consecration, the whole area has been made sacred
by a range of shrines, which are erected round the circle, each
commemorating some scene or circumstance of the Saviour’s passion and
suffering. In accordance with an ordinary custom, a pilgrim was
making his progress from shrine to shrine upon his knees, and saying a
penitential prayer at each. Light-footed girls ran across the path along
which he crept, or sported with their friends close by the shrines
where he was kneeling. The pilgrim took no heed, and the girls meant
no irreverence; for in Italy religion jostles along side by side
with business and sport, after a fashion of its own, and people are
accustomed to kneel down and pray, or see others praying, between two
fits of merriment, or between two sins.
To make an end of our description, a red twinkle of light was visible
amid the breadth of shadow that fell across the upper part of the
Coliseum. Now it glimmered through a line of arches, or threw a broader
gleam as it rose out of some profound abyss of ruin; now it was muffled
by a heap of shrubbery which had adventurously clambered to that dizzy
height; and so the red light kept ascending to loftier and loftier
ranges of the structure, until it stood like a star where the blue sky
rested against the Coliseum’s topmost wall. It indicated a party of
English or Americans paying the inevitable visit by moonlight, and
exalting themselves with raptures that were Byron’s, not their own.
Our company of artists sat on the fallen column, the pagan altar, and
the steps of the Christian shrine, enjoying the moonlight and shadow,
the present gayety and the gloomy reminiscences of the scene, in almost
equal share. Artists, indeed, are lifted by the ideality of their
pursuits a little way off the earth, and are therefore able to catch
the evanescent fragrance that floats in the atmosphere of life above
the heads of the ordinary crowd. Even if they seem endowed with little
imagination individually, yet there is a property, a gift, a talisman,
common to their class, entitling them to partake somewhat more
bountifully than other people in the thin delights of moonshine and
romance.
“How delightful this is!” said Hilda; and she sighed for very pleasure.
“Yes,” said Kenyon, who sat on the column, at her side. “The Coliseum
is far more delightful, as we enjoy it now, than when eighty thousand
persons sat squeezed together, row above row, to see their fellow
creatures torn by lions and tigers limb from limb. What a strange
thought that the Coliseum was really built for us, and has not come to
its best uses till almost two thousand years after it was finished!”
“The Emperor Vespasian scarcely had us in his mind,” said Hilda,
smiling; “but I thank him none the less for building it.”
“He gets small thanks, I fear, from the people whose bloody instincts
he pampered,” rejoined Kenyon. “Fancy a nightly assemblage of eighty
thousand melancholy and remorseful ghosts, looking down from those tiers
of broken arches, striving to repent of the savage pleasures which they
once enjoyed, but still longing to enjoy them over again.”
“You bring a Gothic horror into this peaceful moonlight scene,” said
Hilda.
“Nay, I have good authority for peopling the Coliseum with phantoms,”
replied the sculptor. “Do you remember that veritable scene in Benvenuto
Cellini’s autobiography, in which a necromancer of his acquaintance
draws a magic circle--just where the black cross stands now, I
suppose--and raises myriads of demons? Benvenuto saw them with his
own eyes,--giants, pygmies, and other creatures of frightful aspect,
capering and dancing on yonder walls. Those spectres must have been
Romans, in their lifetime, and frequenters of this bloody amphitheatre.”
“I see a spectre, now!” said Hilda, with a little thrill of uneasiness.
“Have you watched that pilgrim, who is going round the whole circle of
shrines, on his knees, and praying with such fervency at every one? Now
that he has revolved so far in his orbit, and has the moonshine on his
face as he turns towards us, methinks I recognize him!”
“And so do I,” said Kenyon. “Poor Miriam! Do you think she sees him?”
They looked round, and perceived that Miriam had risen from the steps of
the shrine and disappeared. She had shrunk back, in fact, into the deep
obscurity of an arch that opened just behind them.
Donatello, whose faithful watch was no more to be eluded than that of
a hound, had stolen after her, and became the innocent witness of a
spectacle that had its own kind of horror. Unaware of his presence,
and fancying herself wholly unseen, the beautiful Miriam began to
gesticulate extravagantly, gnashing her teeth, flinging her arms wildly
abroad, stamping with her foot.
It was as if she had stepped aside for an instant, solely to snatch the
relief of a brief fit of madness. Persons in acute trouble, or laboring
under strong excitement, with a necessity for concealing it, are prone
to relieve their nerves in this wild way; although, when practicable,
they find a more effectual solace in shrieking aloud.
Thus, as soon as she threw off her self-control, under the dusky arches
of the Coliseum, we may consider Miriam as a mad woman, concentrating
the elements of a long insanity into that instant.
“Signorina! signorina! have pity on me!” cried Donatello, approaching
her; “this is too terrible!”
“How dare you look, at me!” exclaimed Miriam, with a start; then,
whispering below her breath, “men have been struck dead for a less
offence!”
“If you desire it, or need it,” said Donatello humbly, “I shall not be
loath to die.”
“Donatello,” said Miriam, coming close to the young man, and speaking
low, but still the almost insanity of the moment vibrating in her voice,
“if you love yourself; if you desire those earthly blessings, such as
you, of all men, were made for; if you would come to a good old age
among your olive orchards and your Tuscan vines, as your forefathers
did; if you would leave children to enjoy the same peaceful, happy,
innocent life, then flee from me. Look not behind you! Get you gone
without another word.” He gazed sadly at her, but did not stir. “I tell
you,” Miriam went on, “there is a great evil hanging over me! I know
it; I see it in the sky; I feel it in the air! It will overwhelm me
as utterly as if this arch should crumble down upon our heads! It will
crush you, too, if you stand at my side! Depart, then; and make the sign
of the cross, as your faith bids you, when an evil spirit is nigh. Cast
me off, or you are lost forever.”
A higher sentiment brightened upon Donatello’s face than had hitherto
seemed to belong to its simple expression and sensuous beauty.
“I will never quit you,” he said; “you cannot drive me from you.”
“Poor Donatello!” said Miriam in a changed tone, and rather to herself
than him. “Is there no other that seeks me out, follows me,--is
obstinate to share my affliction and my doom,--but only you! They call
me beautiful; and I used to fancy that, at my need, I could bring the
whole world to my feet. And lo! here is my utmost need; and my beauty
and my gifts have brought me only this poor, simple boy. Half-witted,
they call him; and surely fit for nothing but to be happy. And I accept
his aid! To-morrow, to-morrow, I will tell him all! Ah! what a sin to
stain his joyous nature with the blackness of a woe like mine!”
She held out her hand to him, and smiled sadly as Donatello pressed it
to his lips. They were now about to emerge from the depth of the arch;
but just then the kneeling pilgrim, in his revolution round the orbit of
the shrines, had reached the one on the steps of which Miriam had been
sitting. There, as at the other shrines, he prayed, or seemed to
pray. It struck Kenyon, however,--who sat close by, and saw his face
distinctly, that the suppliant was merely performing an enjoined
penance, and without the penitence that ought to have given it effectual
life. Even as he knelt, his eyes wandered, and Miriam soon felt that
he had detected her, half hidden as she was within the obscurity of the
arch.
“He is evidently a good Catholic, however,” whispered one of the party.
“After all, I fear we cannot identify him with the ancient pagan who
haunts the catacombs.”
“The doctors of the Propaganda may have converted him,” said another;
“they have had fifteen hundred years to perform the task.”
The company now deemed it time to continue their ramble. Emerging from
a side entrance of the Coliseum, they had on their left the Arch of
Constantine, and above it the shapeless ruins of the Palace of the
Caesars; portions of which have taken shape anew, in mediaeval convents
and modern villas. They turned their faces cityward, and, treading over
the broad flagstones of the old Roman pavement, passed through the
Arch of Titus. The moon shone brightly enough within it to show the
seven-branched Jewish candlestick, cut in the marble of the interior.
The original of that awful trophy lies buried, at this moment, in the
yellow mud of the Tiber; and, could its gold of Ophir again be brought
to light, it would be the most precious relic of past ages, in the
estimation of both Jew and Gentile.
Standing amid so much ancient dust, it is difficult to spare the reader
the commonplaces of enthusiasm, on which hundreds of tourists have
already insisted. Over this half-worn pavement, and beneath this Arch
of Titus, the Roman armies had trodden in their outward march, to fight
battles a world’s width away. Returning victorious, with royal captives
and inestimable spoil, a Roman triumph, that most gorgeous pageant of
earthly pride, had streamed and flaunted in hundred-fold succession
over these same flagstones, and through this yet stalwart archway. It is
politic, however, to make few allusions to such a past; nor, if we would
create an interest in the characters of our story, is it wise to suggest
how Cicero’s foot may have stepped on yonder stone, or how Horace was
wont to stroll near by, making his footsteps chime with the measure of
the ode that was ringing in his mind. The very ghosts of that massive
and stately epoch have so much density that the actual people of to-day
seem the thinner of the two, and stand more ghost-like by the arches
and columns, letting the rich sculpture be discerned through their
ill-compacted substance.
The party kept onward, often meeting pairs and groups of midnight
strollers like themselves. On such a moonlight night as this, Rome keeps
itself awake and stirring, and is full of song and pastime, the noise of
which mingles with your dreams, if you have gone betimes to bed. But it
is better to be abroad, and take our own share of the enjoyable time;
for the languor that weighs so heavily in the Roman atmosphere by day is
lightened beneath the moon and stars.
They had now reached the precincts of the Forum.