THE FAUN’S TRANSFORMATION
The door of the courtyard swung slowly, and closed itself of its own
accord. Miriam and Donatello were now alone there. She clasped her
hands, and looked wildly at the young man, whose form seemed to have
dilated, and whose eyes blazed with the fierce energy that had suddenly
inspired him. It had kindled him into a man; it had developed within him
an intelligence which was no native characteristic of the Donatello whom
we have heretofore known. But that simple and joyous creature was gone
forever.
“What have you done?” said Miriam, in a horror-stricken whisper.
The glow of rage was still lurid on Donatello’s face, and now flashed
out again from his eyes.
“I did what ought to be done to a traitor!” he replied. “I did what your
eyes bade me do, when I asked them with mine, as I held the wretch over
the precipice!”
These last words struck Miriam like a bullet. Could it be so? Had her
eyes provoked or assented to this deed? She had not known it. But, alas!
looking back into the frenzy and turmoil of the scene just acted, she
could not deny--she was not sure whether it might be so, or no--that a
wild joy had flamed up in her heart, when she beheld her persecutor in
his mortal peril. Was it horror?--or ecstasy? or both in one? Be the
emotion what it might, it had blazed up more madly, when Donatello
flung his victim off the cliff, and more and more, while his shriek went
quivering downward. With the dead thump upon the stones below had come
an unutterable horror.
“And my eyes bade you do it!” repeated she.
They both leaned over the parapet, and gazed downward as earnestly as if
some inestimable treasure had fallen over, and were yet recoverable.
On the pavement below was a dark mass, lying in a heap, with little or
nothing human in its appearance, except that the hands were stretched
out, as if they might have clutched for a moment at the small square
stones. But there was no motion in them now. Miriam watched the heap of
mortality while she could count a hundred, which she took pains to do.
No stir; not a finger moved!
“You have killed him, Donatello! He is quite dead!” said she. “Stone
dead! Would I were so, too!”
“Did you not mean that he should die?” sternly asked Donatello, still in
the glow of that intelligence which passion had developed in him. “There
was short time to weigh the matter; but he had his trial in that breath
or two while I held him over the cliff, and his sentence in that one
glance, when your eyes responded to mine! Say that I have slain him
against your will,--say that he died without your whole consent,--and,
in another breath, you shall see me lying beside him.”
“O, never!” cried Miriam. “My one, own friend! Never, never, never!”
She turned to him,--the guilty, bloodstained, lonely woman,--she turned
to her fellow criminal, the youth, so lately innocent, whom she had
drawn into her doom. She pressed him close, close to her bosom, with a
clinging embrace that brought their two hearts together, till the horror
and agony of each was combined into one emotion, and that a kind of
rapture.
“Yes, Donatello, you speak the truth!” said she; “my heart consented to
what you did. We two slew yonder wretch. The deed knots us together, for
time and eternity, like the coil of a serpent!”
They threw one other glance at the heap of death below, to assure
themselves that it was there; so like a dream was the whole thing. Then
they turned from that fatal precipice, and came out of the courtyard,
arm in arm, heart in heart. Instinctively, they were heedful not to
sever themselves so much as a pace or two from one another, for fear
of the terror and deadly chill that would thenceforth wait for them
in solitude. Their deed--the crime which Donatello wrought, and Miriam
accepted on the instant--had wreathed itself, as she said, like a
serpent, in inextricable links about both their souls, and drew them
into one, by its terrible contractile power. It was closer than a
marriage bond. So intimate, in those first moments, was the union, that
it seemed as if their new sympathy annihilated all other ties, and that
they were released from the chain of humanity; a new sphere, a special
law, had been created for them alone. The world could not come near
them; they were safe!
When they reached the flight of steps leading downward from the Capitol,
there was a faroff noise of singing and laughter. Swift, indeed, had
been the rush of the crisis that was come and gone! This was still the
merriment of the party that had so recently been their companions. They
recognized the voices which, a little while ago, had accorded and sung
in cadence with their own. But they were familiar voices no more; they
sounded strangely, and, as it were, out of the depths of space; so
remote was all that pertained to the past life of these guilty ones, in
the moral seclusion that had suddenly extended itself around them. But
how close, and ever closer, did the breath of the immeasurable waste,
that lay between them and all brotherhood or sisterhood, now press them
one within the other!
“O friend!” cried Miriam, so putting her soul into the word that it
took a heavy richness of meaning, and seemed never to have been spoken
before, “O friend, are you conscious, as I am, of this companionship
that knits our heart-strings together?”
“I feel it, Miriam,” said Donatello. “We draw one breath; we live one
life!”
“Only yesterday,” continued Miriam; “nay, only a short half-hour ago,
I shivered in an icy solitude. No friendship, no sisterhood, could come
near enough to keep the warmth within my heart. In an instant all is
changed! There can be no more loneliness!”
“None, Miriam!” said Donatello.
“None, my beautiful one!” responded Miriam, gazing in his face, which
had taken a higher, almost an heroic aspect, from the strength of
passion. “None, my innocent one! Surely, it is no crime that we have
committed. One wretched and worthless life has been sacrificed to cement
two other lives for evermore.”
“For evermore, Miriam!” said Donatello; “cemented with his blood!”
The young man started at the word which he had himself spoken; it may be
that it brought home, to the simplicity of his imagination, what he had
not before dreamed of,--the ever-increasing loathsomeness of a union
that consists in guilt. Cemented with blood, which would corrupt and
grow more noisome forever and forever, but bind them none the less
strictly for that.
“Forget it! Cast it all behind you!” said Miriam, detecting, by her
sympathy, the pang that was in his heart. “The deed has done its office,
and has no existence any more.”
They flung the past behind them, as she counselled, or else distilled
from it a fiery, intoxication, which sufficed to carry them triumphantly
through those first moments of their doom. For guilt has its moment of
rapture too. The foremost result of a broken law is ever an ecstatic
sense of freedom. And thus there exhaled upward (out of their dark
sympathy, at the base of which lay a human corpse) a bliss, or an
insanity, which the unhappy pair imagined to be well worth the sleepy
innocence that was forever lost to them.
As their spirits rose to the solemn madness of the occasion, they went
onward, not stealthily, not fearfully, but with a stately gait and
aspect. Passion lent them (as it does to meaner shapes) its brief
nobility of carriage. They trod through the streets of Rome, as if they,
too, were among the majestic and guilty shadows, that, from ages
long gone by, have haunted the blood-stained city. And, at Miriam’s
suggestion, they turned aside, for the sake of treading loftily past the
old site of Pompey’s Forum.
“For there was a great deed done here!” she said,--“a deed of blood
like ours! Who knows but we may meet the high and ever-sad fraternity of
Caesar’s murderers, and exchange a salutation?”
“Are they our brethren, now?” asked Donatello.
“Yes; all of them,” said Miriam,--“and many another, whom the world
little dreams of, has been made our brother or our sister, by what we
have done within this hour!”
And at the thought she shivered. Where then was the seclusion, the
remoteness, the strange, lonesome Paradise, into which she and her one
companion had been transported by their crime? Was there, indeed, no
such refuge, but only a crowded thoroughfare and jostling throng of
criminals? And was it true, that whatever hand had a blood-stain on
it,--or had poured out poison,--or strangled a babe at its birth,--or
clutched a grandsire’s throat, he sleeping, and robbed him of his few
last breaths,--had now the right to offer itself in fellowship with
their two hands? Too certainly, that right existed. It is a terrible
thought, that an individual wrong-doing melts into the great mass of
human crime, and makes us, who dreamed only of our own little separate
sin,--makes us guilty of the whole. And thus Miriam and her lover were
not an insulated pair, but members of an innumerable confraternity of
guilty ones, all shuddering at each other.
“But not now; not yet,” she murmured to herself. “To-night, at least,
there shall be no remorse!”
Wandering without a purpose, it so chanced that they turned into a
street, at one extremity of which stood Hilda’s tower. There was a
light in her high chamber; a light, too, at the Virgin’s shrine; and the
glimmer of these two was the loftiest light beneath the stars. Miriam
drew Donatello’s arm, to make him stop, and while they stood at some
distance looking at Hilda’s window, they beheld her approach and throw
it open. She leaned far forth, and extended her clasped hands towards
the sky.
“The good, pure child! She is praying, Donatello,” said Miriam, with a
kind of simple joy at witnessing the devoutness of her friend. Then her
own sin rushed upon her, and she shouted, with the rich strength of her
voice, “Pray for us, Hilda; we need it!”
Whether Hilda heard and recognized the voice we cannot tell. The window
was immediately closed, and her form disappeared from behind the snowy
curtain. Miriam felt this to be a token that the cry of her condemned
spirit was shut out of heaven.