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_ When Hilda and himself turned away from the unfinished bust, the
sculptor's mind still dwelt upon the reminiscences which it suggested.
"You have not seen Donatello recently," he remarked, "and therefore
cannot be aware how sadly he is changed."
"No wonder!" exclaimed Hilda, growing pale.
The terrible scene which she had witnessed, when Donatello's face
gleamed out in so fierce a light, came back upon her memory, almost
for the first time since she knelt at the confessional. Hilda, as is
sometimes the case with persons whose delicate organization requires a
peculiar safeguard, had an elastic faculty of throwing off such
recollections as would be too painful for endurance. The first shock
of Donatello's and Miriam's crime had, indeed, broken through the
frail defence of this voluntary forgetfulness; but, once enabled to
relieve herself of the ponderous anguish over which she had so long
brooded, she had practised a subtile watchfulness in preventing its
return.
"No wonder, do you say?" repeated the sculptor, looking at her with
interest, but not exactly with surprise; for he had long suspected
that Hilda had a painful knowledge of events which he himself little
more than surmised. "Then you know!--you have heard! But what can
you possibly have heard, and through what channel?"
"Nothing!" replied Hilda faintly. "Not one word has reached my ears
from the lips of any human being. Let us never speak of it again! No,
no! never again!"
"And Miriam!" said Kenyon, with irrepressible interest. "Is it also
forbidden to speak of her?"
"Hush! do not even utter her name! Try not to think of it!" Hilda
whispered. "It may bring terrible consequences!"
"My dear Hilda!" exclaimed Kenyon, regarding her with wonder and deep
sympathy. "My sweet friend, have you had this secret hidden in your
delicate, maidenly heart, through all these many months! No wonder
that your life was withering out of you."
"It was so, indeed!" said Hilda, shuddering. "Even now, I sicken at
the recollection."
"And how could it have come to your knowledge?" continued the sculptor.
"But no matter! Do not torture yourself with referring to the
subject. Only, if at any time it should be a relief to you, remember
that we can speak freely together, for Miriam has herself suggested a
confidence between us."
"Miriam has suggested this!" exclaimed Hilda. "Yes, I remember, now,
her advising that the secret should be shared with you. But I have
survived the death struggle that it cost me, and need make no further
revelations. And Miriam has spoken to you! What manner of woman can
she be, who, after sharing in such a deed, can make it a topic of
conversation with her friends?"
"Ah, Hilda," replied Kenyon, "you do not know, for you could never
learn it from your own heart, which is all purity and rectitude, what
a mixture of good there may be in things evil; and how the greatest
criminal, if you look at his conduct from his own point of view, or
from any side point, may seem not so unquestionably guilty, after all.
So with Miriam; so with Donatello. They are, perhaps, partners in
what we must call awful guilt; and yet, I will own to you,--when I
think of the original cause, the motives, the feelings, the sudden
concurrence of circumstances thrusting them onward, the urgency of the
moment, and the sublime unselfishness on either part,--I know not well
how to distinguish it from much that the world calls heroism. Might
we not render some such verdict as this?--'Worthy of Death, but not
unworthy of Love! '"
"Never!" answered Hilda, looking at the matter through the clear
crystal medium of her own integrity. "This thing, as regards its
causes, is all a mystery to me, and must remain so. But there is, I
believe, only one right and one wrong; and I do not understand, and
may God keep me from ever understanding, how two things so totally
unlike can be mistaken for one another; nor how two mortal foes, as
Right and Wrong surely are, can work together in the same deed. This
is my faith; and I should be led astray, if you could persuade me to
give it up."
"Alas for poor human nature, then!" said Kenyon sadly, and yet half
smiling at Hilda's unworldly and impracticable theory. "I always felt
you, my dear friend, a terribly severe judge, and have been perplexed
to conceive how such tender sympathy could coexist with the
remorselessness of a steel blade. You need no mercy, and therefore
know not how to show any."
"That sounds like a bitter gibe," said Hilda, with the tears springing
into her eyes. "But I cannot help it. It does not alter my
perception of the truth. If there be any such dreadful mixture of
good and evil as you affirm,--and which appears to me almost more
shocking than pure evil,--then the good is turned to poison, not the
evil to wholesomeness."
The sculptor seemed disposed to say something more, but yielded to the
gentle steadfastness with which Hilda declined to listen. She grew
very sad; for a reference to this one dismal topic had set, as it were,
a prison door ajar, and allowed a throng of torturing recollections
to escape from their dungeons into the pure air and white radiance of
her soul. She bade Kenyon a briefer farewell than ordinary, and went
homeward to her tower.
In spite of her efforts to withdraw them to other subjects, her
thoughts dwelt upon Miriam; and, as had not heretofore happened, they
brought with them a painful doubt whether a wrong had not been
committed on Hilda's part, towards the friend once so beloved.
Something that Miriam had said, in their final conversation, recurred
to her memory, and seemed now to deserve more weight than Hilda had
assigned to it, in her horror at the crime just perpetrated. It was
not that the deed looked less wicked and terrible in the retrospect;
but she asked herself whether there were not other questions to be
considered, aside from that single one of Miriam's guilt or innocence;
as, for example, whether a close bond of friendship, in which we once
voluntarily engage, ought to be severed on account of any unworthiness,
which we subsequently detect in our friend. For, in these unions of
hearts,--call them marriage, or whatever else,--we take each other for
better for worse. Availing ourselves of our friend's intimate
affection, we pledge our own, as to be relied upon in every emergency.
And what sadder, more desperate emergency could there be, than had
befallen Miriam? Who more need the tender succor of the innocent,
than wretches stained with guilt! And must a selfish care for the
spotlessness of our own garments keep us from pressing the guilty ones
close to our hearts, wherein, for the very reason that we are innocent,
lies their securest refuge from further ill?
It was a sad thing for Hilda to find this moral enigma propounded to
her conscience; and to feel that, whichever way she might settle it,
there would be a cry of wrong on the other side. Still, the idea
stubbornly came back, that the tie between Miriam and herself had been
real, the affection true, and that therefore the implied compact was
not to be shaken off.
"Miriam loved me well," thought Hilda remorsefully, "and I failed her
at her sorest need."
Miriam loved her well; and not less ardent had been the affection
which Miriam's warm, tender, and generous characteristics had excited
in Hilda's more reserved and quiet nature. It had never been
extinguished; for, in part, the wretchedness which Hilda had since
endured was but the struggle and writhing of her sensibility, still
yearning towards her friend. And now, at the earliest encouragement,
it awoke again, and cried out piteously, complaining of the violence
that had been done it.
Recurring to the delinquencies of which she fancied (we say "fancied,"
because we do not unhesitatingly adopt Hilda's present view, but
rather suppose her misled by her feelings)--of which she fancied
herself guilty towards her friend, she suddenly remembered a sealed
packet that Miriam had confided to her. It had been put into her
hands with earnest injunctions of secrecy and care, and if unclaimed
after a certain period, was to be delivered according to its address.
Hilda had forgotten it; or, rather, she had kept the thought of this
commission in the background of her consciousness, with all other
thoughts referring to Miriam.
But now the recollection of this packet, and the evident stress which
Miriam laid upon its delivery at the specified time, impelled Hilda to
hurry up the staircase of her tower, dreading lest the period should
already have elapsed.
No; the hour had not gone by, but was on the very point of passing.
Hilda read the brief note of instruction, on a corner of the envelope,
and discovered, that, in case of Miriam's absence from Rome, the
packet was to be taken to its destination that very day.
"How nearly I had violated my promise!" said Hilda. "And, since we
are separated forever, it has the sacredness of an injunction from a
dead friend. There is no time to be lost."
So Hilda set forth in the decline of the afternoon, and pursued her
way towards the quarter of the city in which stands the Palazzo Cenci.
Her habit of self-reliance was so simply strong, so natural, and now
so well established by long use, that the idea of peril seldom or
never occurred to Hilda, in her lonely life.
She differed, in this particular, from the generality of her sex,
--although the customs and character of her native land often produce
women who meet the world with gentle fearlessness, and discover that
its terrors have been absurdly exaggerated by the tradition of mankind.
In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the apprehensiveness of women
is quite gratuitous. Even as matters now stand, they are really safer
in perilous situations and emergencies than men; and might be still
more so, if they trusted themselves more confidingly to the chivalry
of manhood. In all her wanderings about Rome, Hilda had gone and
returned as securely as she had been accustomed to tread the familiar
street of her New England village, where every face wore a look of
recognition. With respect to whatever was evil, foul, and ugly, in
this populous and corrupt city, she trod as if invisible, and not only
so, but blind. She was altogether unconscious of anything wicked that
went along the same pathway, but without jostling or impeding her, any
more than gross substance hinders the wanderings of a spirit. Thus it
is, that, bad as the world is said to have grown, innocence continues
to make a paradise around itself, and keep it still unfallen.
Hilda's present expedition led her into what was--physically, at
least--the foulest and ugliest part of Rome. In that vicinity lies
the Ghetto, where thousands of Jews are crowded within a narrow
compass, and lead a close, unclean, and multitudinous life, resembling
that of maggots when they over-populate a decaying cheese.
Hilda passed on the borders of this region, but had no occasion to
step within it. Its neighborhood, however, naturally partook of
characteristics 'like its own. There was a confusion of black and
hideous houses, piled massively out of the ruins of former ages; rude
and destitute of plan, as a pauper would build his hovel, and yet
displaying here and there an arched gateway, a cornice, a pillar, or a
broken arcade, that might have adorned a palace. Many of the houses,
indeed, as they stood, might once have been palaces, and possessed
still a squalid kind of grandeur. Dirt was everywhere, strewing the
narrow streets, and incrusting the tall shabbiness of the edifices,
from the foundations to the roofs; it lay upon the thresholds, and
looked out of the windows, and assumed the guise of human life in the
children that Seemed to be engendered out of it. Their father was the
sun, and their mother--a heap of Roman mud.
It is a question of speculative interest, whether the ancient Romans
were as unclean a people as we everywhere find those who have
succeeded them. There appears to be a kind of malignant spell in the
spots that have been inhabited by these masters of the world, or made
famous in their history; an inherited and inalienable curse, impelling
their successors to fling dirt and defilement upon whatever temple,
column, mined palace, or triumphal arch may be nearest at hand, and on
every monument that the old Romans built. It is most probably a
classic trait, regularly transmitted downward, and perhaps a little
modified by the better civilization of Christianity; so that Caesar
may have trod narrower and filthier ways in his path to the Capitol,
than even those of modern Rome.
As the paternal abode of Beatrice, the gloomy old palace of the Cencis
had an interest for Hilda, although not sufficiently strong, hitherto,
to overcome the disheartening effect of the exterior, and draw her
over its threshold. The adjacent piazza, of poor aspect, contained
only an old woman selling roasted chestnuts and baked squash-seeds;
she looked sharply at Hilda, and inquired whether she had lost her way.
"No," said Hilda; "I seek the Palazzo Cenci."
"Yonder it is, fair signorina," replied the Roman matron. "If you
wish that packet delivered, which I see in your hand, my grandson
Pietro shall run with it for a baiocco. The Cenci palace is a spot of
ill omen for young maidens."
Hilda thanked the old dame, but alleged the necessity of doing her
errand in person. She approached the front of the palace, which, with
all its immensity, had but a mean appearance, and seemed an abode
which the lovely shade of Beatrice would not be apt to haunt, unless
her doom made it inevitable. Some soldiers stood about the portal,
and gazed at the brown-haired, fair-cheeked Anglo-Saxon girl, with
approving glances, but not indecorously. Hilda began to ascend the
staircase, three lofty flights of which were to be surmounted, before
reaching the door whither she was bound. _
Read next: VOLUME II: CHAPTER XLIII - THE EXTINCTION OF A LAMP
Read previous: VOLUME II: CHAPTER XLI - SNOWDROPS AND MAIDENLY DELIGHTS
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