________________________________________________
_ 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 m 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. _
Read next: VOLUME I: CHAPTER XX - THE BURIAL CHANT
Read previous: VOLUME I: CHAPTER XVIII - ON THE EDGE OF A PRECIPICE
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