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_ Along with the lamp on Hilda's tower, the sculptor now felt that a
light had gone out, or, at least, was ominously obscured, to which he
owed whatever cheerfulness had heretofore illuminated his cold,
artistic life. The idea of this girl had been like a taper of virgin
wax, burning with a pure and steady flame, and chasing away the evil
spirits out of the magic circle of its beams. It had darted its rays
afar, and modified the whole sphere in which Kenyon had his being.
Beholding it no more, he at once found himself in darkness and astray.
This was the time, perhaps, when Kenyon first became sensible what a
dreary city is Rome, and what a terrible weight is there imposed on
human life, when any gloom within the heart corresponds to the spell
of ruin that has been thrown over the site of ancient empire. He
wandered, as it were, and stumbled over the fallen columns, and among
the tombs, and groped his way into the sepulchral darkness of the
catacombs, and found no path emerging from them. The happy may well
enough continue to be such, beneath the brilliant sky of Rome. But,
if you go thither in melancholy mood, if you go with a ruin in your
heart, or with a vacant site there, where once stood the airy fabric
of happiness, now vanished,--all the ponderous gloom of the Roman Past
will pile itself upon that spot, and crush you down as with the
heaped-up marble and granite, the earth-mounds, and multitudinous
bricks of its material decay.
It might be supposed that a melancholy man would here make
acquaintance with a grim philosophy. He should learn to bear
patiently his individual griefs, that endure only for one little
lifetime, when here are the tokens of such infinite misfortune on an
imperial scale, and when so many far landmarks of time, all around him,
are bringing the remoteness of a thousand years ago into the sphere
of yesterday. But it is in vain that you seek this shrub of bitter
sweetness among the plants that root themselves on the roughness of
massive walls, or trail downward from the capitals of pillars, or
spring out of the green turf in the palace of the Caesars. It does
not grow in Rome; not even among the five hundred various weeds which
deck the grassy arches of the Coliseum. You look through a vista of
century beyond century,--through much shadow, and a little sunshine,
--through barbarism and civilization, alternating with one another
like actors that have prearranged their parts: through a broad pathway
of progressive generations bordered by palaces and temples, and
bestridden by old, triumphal arches, until, in the distance, you
behold the obelisks, with their unintelligible inscriptions, hinting
at a past infinitely more remote than history can define. Your own
life is as nothing, when compared with that immeasurable distance; but
still you demand, none the less earnestly, a gleam of sunshine,
instead of a speck of shadow, on the step or two that will bring you
to your quiet rest.
How exceedingly absurd! All men, from the date of the earliest
obelisk,--and of the whole world, moreover, since that far epoch, and
before,--have made a similar demand, and seldom had their wish. If
they had it, what are they the better now? But, even while you taunt
yourself with this sad lesson, your heart cries out obstreperously for
its small share of earthly happiness, and will not be appeased by the
myriads of dead hopes that lie crushed into the soil of Rome. How
wonderful that this our narrow foothold of the Present should hold its
own so constantly, and, while every moment changing, should still be
like a rock betwixt the encountering tides of the long Past and the
infinite To-come!
Man of marble though he was, the sculptor grieved for the Irrevocable.
Looking back upon Hilda's way of life, he marvelled at his own blind
stupidity, which had kept him from remonstrating as a friend, if with
no stronger right against the risks that she continually encountered.
Being so innocent, she had no means of estimating those risks, nor
even a possibility of suspecting their existence. But he--who had
spent years in Rome, with a man's far wider scope of observation and
experience--knew things that made him shudder. It seemed to Kenyon,
looking through the darkly colored medium of his fears, that all modes
of crime were crowded into the close intricacy of Roman streets, and
that there was no redeeming element, such as exists in other dissolute
and wicked cities.
For here was a priesthood, pampered, sensual, with red and bloated
cheeks, and carnal eyes. With apparently a grosser development of
animal life than most men, they were placed in an unnatural relation
with woman, and thereby lost the healthy, human conscience that
pertains to other human beings, who own the sweet household ties
connecting them with wife and daughter. And here was an indolent
nobility, with no high aims or opportunities, but cultivating a
vicious way of life, as if it were an art, and the only one which they
cared to learn. Here was a population, high and low, that had no
genuine belief in virtue; and if they recognized any act as criminal,
they might throw off all care, remorse, and memory of it, by kneeling
a little while at the confessional, and rising unburdened, active,
elastic, and incited by fresh appetite for the next ensuing sin. Here
was a soldiery who felt Rome to be their conquered city, and doubtless
considered themselves the legal inheritors of the foul license which
Gaul, Goth, and Vandal have here exercised in days gone by.
And what localities for new crime existed in those guilty sites, where
the crime of departed ages used to be at home, and had its long,
hereditary haunt! What street in Rome, what ancient ruin, what one
place where man had standing-room, what fallen stone was there,
unstained with one or another kind of guilt! In some of the
vicissitudes of the city's pride or its calamity, the dark tide of
human evil had swelled over it, far higher than the Tiber ever rose
against the acclivities of the seven hills. To Kenyon's morbid view,
there appeared to be a contagious element, rising fog-like from the
ancient depravity of Rome, and brooding over the dead and half-rotten
city, as nowhere else on earth. It prolonged the tendency to crime,
and developed an instantaneous growth of it, whenever an opportunity
was found; And where could it be found so readily as here! In those
vast palaces, there were a hundred remote nooks where Innocence might
shriek in vain. Beneath meaner houses there were unsuspected dungeons
that had once been princely chambers, and open to the daylight; but,
on account of some wickedness there perpetrated, each passing age had
thrown its handful of dust upon the spot, and buried it from sight.
Only ruffians knew of its existence, and kept it for murder, and worse
crime.
Such was the city through which Hilda, for three years past, had been
wandering without a protector or a guide. She had trodden lightly
over the crumble of old crimes; she had taken her way amid the grime
and corruption which Paganism had left there, and a perverted
Christianity had made more noisome; walking saint-like through it all,
with white, innocent feet; until, in some dark pitfall that lay right
across her path, she had vanished out of sight. It was terrible to
imagine what hideous outrage might have thrust her into that abyss!
Then the lover tried to comfort himself with the idea that Hilda's
sanctity was a sufficient safeguard. Ah, yes; she was so pure! The
angels, that were of the same sisterhood, would never let Hilda come
to harm. A miracle would be wrought on her behalf, as naturally as a
father would stretch out his hand to save a best-beloved child.
Providence would keep a little area and atmosphere about her as safe
and wholesome as heaven itself, although the flood of perilous
iniquity might hem her round, and its black waves hang curling above
her head! But these reflections were of slight avail. No doubt they
were the religious truth. Yet the ways of Providence are utterly
inscrutable; and many a murder has been done, and many an innocent
virgin has lifted her white arms, beseeching its aid in her extremity,
and all in vain; so that, though Providence is infinitely good and
wise, and perhaps for that very reason, it may be half an eternity
before the great circle of its scheme shall bring us the superabundant
recompense for all these sorrows! But what the lover asked was such
prompt consolation as might consist with the brief span of mortal life;
the assurance of Hilda's present safety, and her restoration within
that very hour.
An imaginative man, he suffered the penalty of his endowment in the
hundred-fold variety of gloomily tinted scenes that it presented to
him, in which Hilda was always a central figure. The sculptor forgot
his marble. Rome ceased to be anything, for him, but a labyrinth of
dismal streets, in one or another of which the lost girl had
disappeared. He was haunted with the idea that some circumstance,
most important to be known, and perhaps easily discoverable, had
hitherto been overlooked, and that, if he could lay hold of this one
clew, it would guide him directly in the track of Hilda's footsteps.
With this purpose in view, he went, every morning, to the Via
Portoghese, and made it the starting-point of fresh investigations.
After nightfall, too, he invariably returned thither, with a faint
hope fluttering at his heart that the lamp might again be shining on
the summit of the tower, and would dispel this ugly mystery out of the
circle consecrated by its rays. There being no point of which he
could take firm hold, his mind was filled with unsubstantial hopes and
fears. Once Kenyon had seemed to cut his life in marble; now he
vaguely clutched at it, and found it vapor.
In his unstrung and despondent mood, one trifling circumstance
affected him with an idle pang. The doves had at first been faithful
to their lost mistress. They failed not to sit in a row upon her
window-sill, or to alight on the shrine, or the church-angels, and on
the roofs and portals of the neighboring houses, in evident
expectation of her reappearance. After the second week, however, they
began to take flight, and dropping off by pairs, betook themselves to
other dove-cotes. Only a single dove remained, and brooded drearily
beneath the shrine. The flock that had departed were like the many
hopes that had vanished from Kenyon's heart; the one that still
lingered, and looked so wretched,--was it a Hope, or already a
Despair?
In the street, one day, the sculptor met a priest of mild and
venerable aspect; and as his mind dwelt continually upon Hilda, and
was especially active in bringing up all incidents that had ever been
connected with her, it immediately struck him that this was the very
father with whom he had seen her at the confessional. Such trust did
Hilda inspire in him, that Kenyon had never asked what was the subject
of the communication between herself and this old priest. He had no
reason for imagining that it could have any relation with her
disappearance, so long subsequently; but, being thus brought face to
face with a personage, mysteriously associated, as he now remembered,
with her whom he had lost, an impulse ran before his thoughts and led
the sculptor to address him.
It might be that the reverend kindliness of the old man's expression
took Kenyon's heart by surprise; at all events, he spoke as if there
were a recognized acquaintanceship, and an object of mutual interest
between them.
"She has gone from me, father," said he.
"Of whom do you speak, my son?" inquired the priest.
"Of that sweet girl," answered Kenyon, "who knelt to you at the
confessional. Surely you remember her, among all the mortals to whose
confessions you have listened! For she alone could have had no sins
to reveal."
"Yes; I remember," said the priest, with a gleam of recollection in
his eyes. "She was made to bear a miraculous testimony to the
efficacy of the divine ordinances of the Church, by seizing forcibly
upon one of them, and finding immediate relief from it, heretic though
she was. It is my purpose to publish a brief narrative of this
miracle, for the edification of mankind, in Latin, Italian, and
English, from the printing press of the Propaganda. Poor child!
Setting apart her heresy, she was spotless, as you say. And is she
dead?"
"Heaven forbid, father!" exclaimed Kenyon, shrinking back. "But she
has gone from me, I know not whither. It may be--yes, the idea seizes
upon my mind--that what she revealed to you will suggest some clew to
the mystery of her disappearance.'"
"None, my son, none," answered the priest, shaking his head;
"nevertheless, I bid you be of good cheer. That young maiden is not
doomed to die a heretic. Who knows what the Blessed Virgin may at
this moment be doing for her soul! Perhaps, when you next behold her,
she will be clad in the shining white robe of the true faith."
This latter suggestion did not convey all the comfort which the old
priest possibly intended by it; but he imparted it to the sculptor,
along with his blessing, as the two best things that he could bestow,
and said nothing further, except to bid him farewell.
When they had parted, however, the idea of Hilda's conversion to
Catholicism recurred to her lover's mind, bringing with it certain
reflections, that gave a new turn to his surmises about the mystery
into which she had vanished. Not that he seriously
apprehended--although the superabundance of her religious sentiment
might mislead her for a moment--that the New England girl would
permanently succumb to the scarlet superstitions which surrounded her
in Italy. But the incident of the confessional if known, as probably
it was, to the eager propagandists who prowl about for souls, as cats
to catch a mouse--would surely inspire the most confident expectations
of bringing her over to the faith. With so pious an end in view,
would Jesuitical morality be shocked at the thought of kidnapping the
mortal body, for the sake of the immortal spirit that might otherwise
be lost forever? Would not the kind old priest, himself, deem this to
be infinitely the kindest service that he could perform for the stray
lamb, who had so strangely sought his aid?
If these suppositions were well founded, Hilda was most likely a
prisoner in one of the religious establishments that are so numerous
in Rome. The idea, according to the aspect in which it was viewed,
brought now a degree of comfort, and now an additional perplexity. On
the one hand, Hilda was safe from any but spiritual assaults; on the
other, where was the possibility of breaking through all those barred
portals, and searching a thousand convent cells, to set her free?
Kenyon, however, as it happened, was prevented from endeavoring to
follow out this surmise, which only the state of hopeless uncertainty,
that almost bewildered his reason, could have led him for a moment to
entertain. A communication reached him by an unknown hand, in
consequence of which, and within an hour after receiving it, he took
his way through one of the gates of Rome. _
Read next: VOLUME II: CHAPTER XLVI - A WALK ON THE CAMPAGNA
Read previous: VOLUME II: CHAPTER XLIV - THE DESERTED SHRINE
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