THE MEDICI GARDENS
“Donatello,” said Miriam anxiously, as they came through the Piazza
Barberini, “what can I do for you, my beloved friend? You are shaking as
with the cold fit of the Roman fever.” “Yes,” said Donatello; “my heart
shivers.” As soon as she could collect her thoughts, Miriam led the
young man to the gardens of the Villa Medici, hoping that the quiet
shade and sunshine of that delightful retreat would a little revive his
spirits. The grounds are there laid out in the old fashion of straight
paths, with borders of box, which form hedges of great height and
density, and are shorn and trimmed to the evenness of a wall of
stone, at the top and sides. There are green alleys, with long vistas
overshadowed by ilex-trees; and at each intersection of the paths, the
visitor finds seats of lichen-covered stone to repose upon, and marble
statues that look forlornly at him, regretful of their lost noses. In
the more open portions of the garden, before the sculptured front of
the villa, you see fountains and flower-beds, and in their season
a profusion of roses, from which the genial sun of Italy distils a
fragrance, to be scattered abroad by the no less genial breeze.
But Donatello drew no delight from these things. He walked onward in
silent apathy, and looked at Miriam with strangely half-awakened and
bewildered eyes, when she sought to bring his mind into sympathy with
hers, and so relieve his heart of the burden that lay lumpishly upon it.
She made him sit down on a stone bench, where two embowered alleys
crossed each other; so that they could discern the approach of any
casual intruder a long way down the path.
“My sweet friend,” she said, taking one of his passive hands in both of
hers, “what can I say to comfort you?”
“Nothing!” replied Donatello, with sombre reserve. “Nothing will ever
comfort me.”
“I accept my own misery,” continued Miriam, “my own guilt, if guilt it
be; and, whether guilt or misery, I shall know how to deal with it. But
you, dearest friend, that were the rarest creature in all this world,
and seemed a being to whom sorrow could not cling,--you, whom I
half fancied to belong to a race that had vanished forever, you only
surviving, to show mankind how genial and how joyous life used to be, in
some long-gone age,--what had you to do with grief or crime?”
“They came to me as to other men,” said Donatello broodingly. “Doubtless
I was born to them.”
“No, no; they came with me,” replied Miriam. “Mine is the
responsibility! Alas! wherefore was I born? Why did we ever meet? Why
did I not drive you from me, knowing for my heart foreboded it--that the
cloud in which I walked would likewise envelop you!”
Donatello stirred uneasily, with the irritable impatience that is often
combined With a mood of leaden despondency. A brown lizard with two
tails--a monster often engendered by the Roman sunshine--ran across his
foot, and made him start. Then he sat silent awhile, and so did Miriam,
trying to dissolve her whole heart into sympathy, and lavish it all upon
him, were it only for a moment’s cordial.
The young man lifted his hand to his breast, and, unintentionally, as
Miriam’s hand was within his, he lifted that along with it. “I have a
great weight here!” said he. The fancy struck Miriam (but she drove it
resolutely down) that Donatello almost imperceptibly shuddered, while,
in pressing his own hand against his heart, he pressed hers there too.
“Rest your heart on me, dearest one!” she resumed. “Let me bear all its
weight; I am well able to bear it; for I am a woman, and I love you! I
love you, Donatello! Is there no comfort for you in this avowal? Look
at me! Heretofore you have found me pleasant to your sight. Gaze into my
eyes! Gaze into my soul! Search as deeply as you may, you can never see
half the tenderness and devotion that I henceforth cherish for you. All
that I ask is your acceptance of the utter self-sacrifice (but it shall
be no sacrifice, to my great love) with which I seek to remedy the evil
you have incurred for my sake!”
All this fervor on Miriam’s part; on Donatello’s, a heavy silence.
“O, speak to me!” she exclaimed. “Only promise me to be, by and by, a
little happy!”
“Happy?” murmured Donatello. “Ah, never again! never again!”
“Never? Ah, that is a terrible word to say to me!” answered Miriam. “A
terrible word to let fall upon a woman’s heart, when she loves you, and
is conscious of having caused your misery! If you love me, Donatello,
speak it not again. And surely you did love me?”
“I did,” replied Donatello gloomily and absently.
Miriam released the young man’s hand, but suffered one of her own to
lie close to his, and waited a moment to see whether he would make
any effort to retain it. There was much depending upon that simple
experiment.
With a deep sigh--as when, sometimes, a slumberer turns over in a
troubled dream Donatello changed his position, and clasped both his
hands over his forehead. The genial warmth of a Roman April kindling
into May was in the atmosphere around them; but when Miriam saw
that involuntary movement and heard that sigh of relief (for so she
interpreted it), a shiver ran through her frame, as if the iciest wind
of the Apennines were blowing over her.
“He has done himself a greater wrong than I dreamed of,” thought she,
with unutterable compassion. “Alas! it was a sad mistake! He might
have had a kind of bliss in the consequences of this deed, had he been
impelled to it by a love vital enough to survive the frenzy of that
terrible moment, mighty enough to make its own law, and justify itself
against the natural remorse. But to have perpetrated a dreadful murder
(and such was his crime, unless love, annihilating moral distinctions,
made it otherwise) on no better warrant than a boy’s idle fantasy! I
pity him from the very depths of my soul! As for myself, I am past my
own or other’s pity.”
She arose from the young man’s side, and stood before him with a sad,
commiserating aspect; it was the look of a ruined soul, bewailing,
in him, a grief less than what her profounder sympathies imposed upon
herself.
“Donatello, we must part,” she said, with melancholy firmness. “Yes;
leave me! Go back to your old tower, which overlooks the green valley
you have told me of among the Apennines. Then, all that has passed will
be recognized as but an ugly dream. For in dreams the conscience sleeps,
and we often stain ourselves with guilt of which we should be incapable
in our waking moments. The deed you seemed to do, last night, was
no more than such a dream; there was as little substance in what you
fancied yourself doing. Go; and forget it all!”
“Ah, that terrible face!” said Donatello, pressing his hands over his
eyes. “Do you call that unreal?”
“Yes; for you beheld it with dreaming eyes,” replied Miriam. “It was
unreal; and, that you may feel it so, it is requisite that you see this
face of mine no more. Once, you may have thought it beautiful; now, it
has lost its charm. Yet it would still retain a miserable potency’ to
bring back the past illusion, and, in its train, the remorse and anguish
that would darken all your life. Leave me, therefore, and forget me.”
“Forget you, Miriam!” said Donatello, roused somewhat from his apathy of
despair.
“If I could remember you, and behold you, apart from that frightful
visage which stares at me over your shoulder, that were a consolation,
at least, if not a joy.”
“But since that visage haunts you along with mine,” rejoined Miriam,
glancing behind her, “we needs must part. Farewell, then! But if
ever--in distress, peril, shame, poverty, or whatever anguish is most
poignant, whatever burden heaviest--you should require a life to be
given wholly, only to make your own a little easier, then summon me! As
the case now stands between us, you have bought me dear, and find me of
little worth. Fling me away, therefore! May you never need me more! But,
if otherwise, a wish--almost an unuttered wish will bring me to you!”
She stood a moment, expecting a reply. But Donatello’s eyes had again
fallen on the ground, and he had not, in his bewildered mind and
overburdened heart, a word to respond.
“That hour I speak of may never come,” said Miriam. “So
farewell--farewell forever.”
“Farewell,” said Donatello.
His voice hardly made its way through the environment of unaccustomed
thoughts and emotions which had settled over him like a dense and dark
cloud. Not improbably, he beheld Miriam through so dim a medium that she
looked visionary; heard her speak only in a thin, faint echo.
She turned from the young man, and, much as her heart yearned towards
him, she would not profane that heavy parting by an embrace, or even a
pressure of the hand. So soon after the semblance of such mighty love,
and after it had been the impulse to so terrible a deed, they parted,
in all outward show, as coldly as people part whose whole mutual
intercourse has been encircled within a single hour.
And Donatello, when Miriam had departed, stretched himself at full
length on the stone bench, and drew his hat over his eyes, as the idle
and light-hearted youths of dreamy Italy are accustomed to do, when they
lie down in the first convenient shade, and snatch a noonday slumber.
A stupor was upon him, which he mistook for such drowsiness as he had
known in his innocent past life. But, by and by, he raised himself
slowly and left the garden. Sometimes poor Donatello started, as if
he heard a shriek; sometimes he shrank back, as if a face, fearful to
behold, were thrust close to his own. In this dismal mood, bewildered
with the novelty of sin and grief, he had little left of that singular
resemblance, on account of which, and for their sport, his three friends
had fantastically recognized him as the veritable Faun of Praxiteles.