CHAPTER XLIII
THE EXTINCTION OF A LAMP
Between Hilda and the sculptor there had been a kind of half-expressedunderstanding, that both were to visit the galleries of the Vaticanthe day subsequent to their meeting at the studio. Kenyon, accordingly,failed not to be there, and wandered through the vast ranges ofapartments, but saw nothing of his expected friend. The marble faces,which stand innumerable along the walls, and have kept themselves socalm through the vicissitudes of twenty centuries, had no sympathyfor his disappointment; and he, on the other hand, strode past thesetreasures and marvels of antique art, with the indifference which anypreoccupation of the feelings is apt to produce, in reference to objectsof sculpture. Being of so cold and pure a substance, and mostly derivingtheir vitality more from thought than passion, they require to be seenthrough a perfectly transparent medium.
And, moreover, Kenyon had counted so much upon Hilda's delicateperceptions in enabling him to look at two or three of the statues,about which they had talked together, that the entire purpose of hisvisit was defeated by her absence. It is a delicious sort of mutual aid,when the united power of two sympathetic, yet dissimilar, intelligencesis brought to bear upon a poem by reading it aloud, or upon a pictureor statue by viewing it in each other's company. Even if not a wordof criticism be uttered, the insight of either party is wonderfullydeepened, and the comprehension broadened; so that the inner mysteryof a work of genius, hidden from one, will often reveal itself to two.Missing such help, Kenyon saw nothing at the Vatican which he had notseen a thousand times before, and more perfectly than now.
In the chili of his disappointment, he suspected that it was a verycold art to which he had devoted himself. He questioned, at that moment,whether sculpture really ever softens and warms the material which ithandles; whether carved marble is anything but limestone, after all;and whether the Apollo Belvedere itself possesses any merit aboveits physical beauty, or is beyond criticism even in that generallyacknowledged excellence. In flitting glances, heretofore, he had seemedto behold this statue, as something ethereal and godlike, but not now.
Nothing pleased him, unless it were the group of the Laocoon, which,in its immortal agony, impressed Kenyon as a type of the long, fiercestruggle of man, involved in the knotted entanglements of Error andEvil, those two snakes, which, if no divine help intervene, will be sureto strangle him and his children in the end. What he most admired wasthe strange calmness diffused through this bitter strife; so that itresembled the rage of the sea made calm by its immensity,' or the tumultof Niagara which ceases to be tumult because it lasts forever. Thus, inthe Laocoon, the horror of a moment grew to be the fate of interminableages. Kenyon looked upon the group as the one triumph of sculpture,creating the repose, which is essential to it, in the very acme ofturbulent effort; but, in truth, it was his mood of unwonted despondencythat made him so sensitive to the terrible magnificence, as well as tothe sad moral, of this work. Hilda herself could not have helped him tosee it with nearly such intelligence.
A good deal more depressed than the nature of the disappointmentwarranted, Kenyon went to his studio, and took in hand a great lump ofclay. He soon found, however, that his plastic cunning had departed fromhim for the time. So he wandered forth again into the uneasy streetsof Rome, and walked up and down the Corso, where, at that period of theday, a throng of passers-by and loiterers choked up the narrow sidewalk.A penitent was thus brought in contact with the sculptor.
It was a figure in a white robe, with a kind of featureless maskover the face, through the apertures of which the eyes threw anunintelligible light. Such odd, questionable shapes are often seengliding through the streets of Italian cities, and are understood to beusually persons of rank, who quit their palaces, their gayeties, theirpomp and pride, and assume the penitential garb for a season, with aview of thus expiating some crime, or atoning for the aggregate of pettysins that make up a worldly life. It is their custom to ask alms, andperhaps to measure the duration of their penance by the time requisiteto accumulate a sum of money out of the little droppings of individualcharity. The avails are devoted to some beneficent or religious purpose;so that the benefit accruing to their own souls is, in a manner, linkedwith a good done, or intended, to their fellow-men. These figures havea ghastly and startling effect, not so much from any very impressivepeculiarity in the garb, as from the mystery which they bear about withthem, and the sense that there is an acknowledged sinfulness as thenucleus of it.
In the present instance, however, the penitent asked no alms of Kenyon;although, for the space of a minute or two, they stood face to face, thehollow eyes of the mask encountering the sculptor's gaze. But, just asthe crowd was about to separate them, the former spoke, in a voice notunfamiliar to Kenyon, though rendered remote and strange by the guiltyveil through which it penetrated.
"Is all well with you, Signore?" inquired the penitent, out of the cloudin which he walked.
"All is well," answered Kenyon. "And with you?"
But the masked penitent returned no answer, being borne away by thepressure of the throng.
The sculptor stood watching the figure, and was almost of a mind tohurry after him and follow up the conversation that had been begun; butit occurred to him that there is a sanctity (or, as we might rather termit, an inviolable etiquette) which prohibits the recognition of personswho choose to walk under the veil of penitence.
"How strange!" thought Kenyon to himself. "It was surely Donatello! Whatcan bring him to Rome, where his recollections must be so painful, andhis presence not without peril? And Miriam! Can she have accompaniedhim?"
He walked on, thinking of the vast change in Donatello, since those daysof gayety and innocence, when the young Italian was new in Rome, and wasjust beginning to be sensible of a more poignant felicity than he hadyet experienced, in the sunny warmth of Miriam's smile. The growth ofa soul, which the sculptor half imagined that he had witnessed in hisfriend, seemed hardly worth the heavy price that it had cost, in thesacrifice of those simple enjoyments that were gone forever. A creatureof antique healthfulness had vanished from the earth; and, in his stead,there was only one other morbid and remorseful man, among millions thatwere cast in the same indistinguishable mould.
The accident of thus meeting Donatello the glad Faun of his imaginationand memory, now transformed into a gloomy penitent--contributed todeepen the cloud that had fallen over Kenyon's spirits. It caused himto fancy, as we generally do, in the petty troubles which extend not ahand's-breadth beyond our own sphere, that the whole world was saddeningaround him. It took the sinister aspect of an omen, although he couldnot distinctly see what trouble it might forebode.
If it had not been for a peculiar sort of pique, with which lovers aremuch conversant, a preposterous kind of resentment which endeavors towreak itself on the beloved object, and on one's own heart, in requitalof mishaps for which neither are in fault, Kenyon might at once havebetaken himself to Hilda's studio, and asked why the appointment was notkept. But the interview of to-day was to have been so rich in presentjoy, and its results so important to his future life, that the bleakfailure was too much for his equanimity. He was angry with poor Hilda,and censured her without a hearing; angry with himself, too, andtherefore inflicted on this latter criminal the severest penalty inhis power; angry with the day that was passing over him, and would notpermit its latter hours to redeem the disappointment of the morning.
To confess the truth, it had been the sculptor's purpose to stake allhis hopes on that interview in the galleries of the Vatican. Strayingwith Hilda through those long vistas of ideal beauty, he meant, at last,to utter himself upon that theme which lovers are fain to discuss invillage lanes, in wood paths, on seaside sands, in crowded streets; itlittle matters where, indeed, since roses are sure to blush along theway, and daisies and violets to spring beneath the feet, if the spokenword be graciously received. He was resolved to make proof whetherthe kindness that Hilda evinced for him was the precious token of anindividual preference, or merely
the sweet fragrance of her disposition,which other friends might share as largely as himself. He would try ifit were possible to take this shy, yet frank, and innocently fearlesscreature captive, and imprison her in his heart, and make her sensibleof a wider freedom there, than in all the world besides.
It was hard, we must allow, to see the shadow of a wintry sunset fallingupon a day that was to have been so bright, and to find himself justwhere yesterday had left him, only with a sense of being drearilybalked, and defeated without an opportunity for struggle. So much hadbeen anticipated from these now vanished hours, that it seemed as if noother day could bring back the same golden hopes.
In a case like this, it is doubtful whether Kenyon could have done amuch better thing than he actually did, by going to dine at the CafeNuovo, and drinking a flask of Montefiascone; longing, the while, for abeaker or two of Donatello's Sunshine. It would have been just the wineto cure a lover's melancholy, by illuminating his heart with tenderlight and warmth, and suggestions of undefined hopes, too ethereal forhis morbid humor to examine and reject them.
No decided improvement resulting from the draught of Montefiascone, hewent to the Teatro Argentino, and sat gloomily to see an Italiancomedy, which ought to have cheered him somewhat, being full of glancingmerriment, and effective over everybody's disabilities except his own.The sculptor came out, however, before the close of the performance, asdisconsolate as he went in.
As he made his way through the complication of narrow streets, whichperplex that portion of the city, a carriage passed him. It was drivenrapidly, but not too fast for the light of a gas-lamp to flare upon aface within--especially as it was bent forward, appearing to recognizehim, while a beckoning hand was protruded from the window. On his part,Kenyon at once knew the face, and hastened to the carriage, which hadnow stopped.
"Miriam! you in Rome?" he exclaimed "And your friends know nothing ofit?"
"Is all well with you?" she asked.
This inquiry, in the identical words which Donatello had so recentlyaddressed to him from beneath the penitent's mask, startled thesculptor. Either the previous disquietude of his mind, or some tone inMiriam's voice, or the unaccountableness of beholding her there at all,made it seem ominous.
"All is well, I believe," answered he doubtfully. "I am aware of nomisfortune. Have you any to announce'?"
He looked still more earnestly at Miriam, and felt a dreamy uncertaintywhether it was really herself to whom he spoke. True; there were thosebeautiful features, the contour of which he had studied too often, andwith a sculptor's accuracy of perception, to be in any doubt that it wasMiriam's identical face. But he was conscious of a change, the nature ofwhich he could not satisfactorily define; it might be merely her dress,which, imperfect as the light was, he saw to be richer than the simplegarb that she had usually worn. The effect, he fancied, was partly owingto a gem which she had on her bosom; not a diamond, but something thatglimmered with a clear, red lustre, like the stars in a southern sky.Somehow or other, this colored light seemed an emanation of herself,as if all that was passionate and glowing in her native dispositionhad crystallized upon her breast, and were just now scintillating morebrilliantly than ever, in sympathy with some emotion of her heart.
Of course there could be no real doubt that it was Miriam, his artistfriend, with whom and Hilda he had spent so many pleasant and familiarhours, and whom he had last seen at Perugia, bending with Donatellobeneath the bronze pope's benediction. It must be that selfsame Miriam;but the sensitive sculptor felt a difference of manner, which impressedhim more than he conceived it possible to be affected by so external athing. He remembered the gossip so prevalent in Rome on Miriam's firstappearance; how that she was no real artist, but the daughter of anillustrious or golden lineage, who was merely playing at necessity;mingling with human struggle for her pastime; stepping out of her nativesphere only for an interlude, just as a princess might alight from hergilded equipage to go on foot through a rustic lane. And now, after amask in which love and death had performed their several parts, she hadresumed her proper character.
"Have you anything to tell me?" cried he impatiently; for nothing causesa more disagreeable vibration of the nerves than this perception ofambiguousness in familiar persons or affairs. "Speak; for my spirits andpatience have been much tried to-day."
Miriam put her finger on her lips, and seemed desirous that Kenyonshould know of the presence of a third person. He now saw, indeed, that,there was some one beside her in the carriage, hitherto concealed byher attitude; a man, it appeared, with a sallow Italian face, which thesculptor distinguished but imperfectly, and did not recognize.
"I can tell you nothing," she replied; and leaning towards him, shewhispered,--appearing then more like the Miriam whom he knew than inwhat had before passed,--"Only, when the lamp goes out do not despair."
The carriage drove on, leaving Kenyon to muse over this unsatisfactoryinterview, which seemed to have served no better purpose than to fillhis mind with more ominous forebodings than before. Why were Donatelloand Miriam in Rome, where both, in all likelihood, might have much todread? And why had one and the other addressed him with a question thatseemed prompted by a knowledge of some calamity, either already fallenon his unconscious head, or impending closely over him?
"I am sluggish," muttered Kenyon, to himself; "a weak, nerveless fool,devoid of energy and promptitude; or neither Donatello nor Miriam couldhave escaped me thus! They are aware of some misfortune that concerns medeeply. How soon am I to know it too?"
There seemed but a single calamity possible to happen within so narrowa sphere as that with which the sculptor was connected; and even to thatone mode of evil he could assign no definite shape, but only felt thatit must have some reference to Hilda.
Flinging aside the morbid hesitation, and the dallyings with his ownwishes, which he had permitted to influence his mind throughout the day,he now hastened to the Via Portoghese. Soon the old palace stood beforehim, with its massive tower rising into the clouded night; obscured fromview at its midmost elevation, but revealed again, higher upward, bythe Virgin's lamp that twinkled on the summit. Feeble as it was, inthe broad, surrounding gloom, that little ray made no inconsiderableillumination among Kenyon's sombre thoughts; for; remembering Miriam'slast words, a fantasy had seized him that he should find the sacred lampextinguished.
And even while he stood gazing, as a mariner at the star in which he puthis trust, the light quivered, sank, gleamed up again, and finally wentout, leaving the battlements of Hilda's tower in utter darkness. For thefirst time in centuries, the consecrated and legendary flame before theloftiest shrine in Rome had ceased to burn.