CHAPTER XIX
THE FAUN'S TRANSFORMATION
The door of the courtyard swung slowly, and closed itself of its ownaccord. Miriam and Donatello were now alone there. She clasped herhands, and looked wildly at the young man, whose form seemed to havedilated, and whose eyes blazed with the fierce energy that had suddenlyinspired him. It had kindled him into a man; it had developed within himan intelligence which was no native characteristic of the Donatello whomwe have heretofore known. But that simple and joyous creature was goneforever.
"What have you done?" said Miriam, in a horror-stricken whisper.
The glow of rage was still lurid on Donatello's face, and now flashedout again from his eyes.
"I did what ought to be done to a traitor!" he replied. "I did what youreyes bade me do, when I asked them with mine, as I held the wretch overthe precipice!"
These last words struck Miriam like a bullet. Could it be so? Had hereyes 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, shecould not deny--she was not sure whether it might be so, or no--that awild joy had flamed up in her heart, when she beheld her persecutor inhis mortal peril. Was it horror?--or ecstasy? or both in one? Be theemotion what it might, it had blazed up more madly, when Donatelloflung his victim off the cliff, and more and more, while his shriek wentquivering downward. With the dead thump upon the stones below had comean unutterable horror.
"And my eyes bade you do it!" repeated she.
They both leaned over the parapet, and gazed downward as earnestly as ifsome inestimable treasure had fallen over, and were yet recoverable.On the pavement below was a dark mass, lying in a heap, with little ornothing human in its appearance, except that the hands were stretchedout, as if they might have clutched for a moment at the small squarestones. But there was no motion in them now. Miriam watched the heap ofmortality 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. "Stonedead! Would I were so, too!"
"Did you not mean that he should die?" sternly asked Donatello, still inthe glow of that intelligence which passion had developed in him. "Therewas short time to weigh the matter; but he had his trial in that breathor two while I held him over the cliff, and his sentence in that oneglance, when your eyes responded to mine! Say that I have slain himagainst 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 turnedto her fellow criminal, the youth, so lately innocent, whom she haddrawn into her doom. She pressed him close, close to her bosom, with aclinging embrace that brought their two hearts together, till the horrorand agony of each was combined into one emotion, and that a kind ofrapture.
"Yes, Donatello, you speak the truth!" said she; "my heart consented towhat you did. We two slew yonder wretch. The deed knots us together, fortime and eternity, like the coil of a serpent!"
They threw one other glance at the heap of death below, to assurethemselves that it was there; so like a dream was the whole thing. Thenthey turned from that fatal precipice, and came out of the courtyard,arm in arm, heart in heart. Instinctively, they were heedful not tosever themselves so much as a pace or two from one another, for fearof the terror and deadly chill that would thenceforth wait for themin solitude. Their deed--the crime which Donatello wrought, and Miriamaccepted on the instant--had wreathed itself, as she said, like aserpent, in inextricable links about both their souls, and drew theminto one, by its terrible contractile power. It was closer than amarriage bond. So intimate, in those first moments, was the union, thatit seemed as if their new sympathy annihilated all other ties, and thatthey were released from the chain of humanity; a new sphere, a speciallaw, had been created for them alone. The world could not come nearthem; 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, hadbeen the rush of the crisis that was come and gone! This was still themerriment of the party that had so recently been their companions. Theyrecognized the voices which, a little while ago, had accorded and sungin cadence with their own. But they were familiar voices no more; theysounded strangely, and, as it were, out of the depths of space; soremote was all that pertained to the past life of these guilty ones, inthe moral seclusion that had suddenly extended itself around them. Buthow close, and ever closer, did the breath of the immeasurable waste,that lay between them and all brotherhood or sisterhood, now press themone within the other!
"O friend!" cried Miriam, so putting her soul into the word that ittook a heavy richness of meaning, and seemed never to have been spokenbefore, "O friend, are you conscious, as I am, of this companionshipthat knits our heart-strings together?"
"I feel it, Miriam," said Donatello. "We draw one breath; we live onelife!"
"Only yesterday," continued Miriam; "nay, only a short half-hour ago,I shivered in an icy solitude. No friendship, no sisterhood, could comenear enough to keep the warmth within my heart. In an instant all ischanged! There can be no more loneliness!"
"None, Miriam!" said Donatello.
"None, my beautiful one!" responded Miriam, gazing in his face, whichhad taken a higher, almost an heroic aspect, from the strength ofpassion. "None, my innocent one! Surely, it is no crime that we havecommitted. One wretched and worthless life has been sacrificed to cementtwo 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 bethat it brought home, to the simplicity of his imagination, what he hadnot before dreamed of,--the ever-increasing loathsomeness of a unionthat consists in guilt. Cemented with blood, which would corrupt andgrow more noisome forever and forever, but bind them none the lessstrictly for that.
"Forget it! Cast it all behind you!" said Miriam, detecting, by hersympathy, 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 distilledfrom it a fiery, intoxication, which sufficed to carry them triumphantlythrough those first moments of their doom. For guilt has its moment ofrapture too. The foremost result of a broken law is ever an ecstaticsense of freedom. And thus there exhaled upward (out of their darksympathy, at the base of which lay a human corpse) a bliss, or aninsanity, which the unhappy pair imagined to be well worth the sleepyinnocence that was forever lost to them.
As their spirits rose to the solemn madness of the occasion, they wentonward, not stealthily, not fearfully, but with a stately gait andaspect. Passion lent them (as it does to meaner shapes) its briefnobility of carriage. They trod through the streets of Rome, as if they,too, were among the majestic and guilty shadows, that, from ageslong gone by, have haunted the blood-stained city. And, at Miriam'ssuggestion, they turned aside, for the sake of treading loftily past theold site of Pompey's Forum.
"For there was a great deed done here!" she said,--"a deed of bloodlike ours! Who knows but we may meet the high and ever-sad fraternity ofCaesar's murderers, and exchange a salutation?"
"Are they our brethren, now?" asked Donatello.
"Yes; all of them," said Miriam,--"and many another, whom the worldlittle dreams of, has been made our brother or our sister, by what wehave done within this hour!"
And at the thought she shivered. Where then was the seclusion, theremoteness, the strange, lonesome Paradise, into which she and her onecompanion had been transported by their crime? Was there, indeed, nosuch refuge, but only a crowded thoroughfare and jostling throng ofcriminals? And was it true, that whatever hand had a blood-stain onit,--or had poured out poison,--or strangled a babe at its birth,--orclutched a grandsire's throat, he sleeping, and robbed him of his fewlas
t breaths,--had now the right to offer itself in fellowship withtheir two hands? Too certainly, that right existed. It is a terriblethought, that an individual wrong-doing melts into the great mass ofhuman crime, and makes us, who dreamed only of our own little separatesin,--makes us guilty of the whole. And thus Miriam and her lover werenot an insulated pair, but members of an innumerable confraternity ofguilty 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 astreet, at one extremity of which stood Hilda's tower. There was alight in her high chamber; a light, too, at the Virgin's shrine; and theglimmer of these two was the loftiest light beneath the stars. Miriamdrew Donatello's arm, to make him stop, and while they stood at somedistance looking at Hilda's window, they beheld her approach and throwit open. She leaned far forth, and extended her clasped hands towardsthe sky.
"The good, pure child! She is praying, Donatello," said Miriam, with akind of simple joy at witnessing the devoutness of her friend. Then herown sin rushed upon her, and she shouted, with the rich strength of hervoice, "Pray for us, Hilda; we need it!"
Whether Hilda heard and recognized the voice we cannot tell. The windowwas immediately closed, and her form disappeared from behind the snowycurtain. Miriam felt this to be a token that the cry of her condemnedspirit was shut out of heaven.