_ The sculptor now looked through art embrasure, and threw down a bit of
lime, watching its fall, till it struck upon a stone bench at the
rocky foundation of the tower, and flew into many fragments.
"Pray pardon me for helping Time to crumble away your ancestral walls,"
said he. "But I am one of those persons who have a natural tendency
to climb heights, and to stand on the verge of them, measuring the
depth below. If I were to do just as I like, at this moment, I should
fling myself down after that bit of lime. It is a very singular
temptation, and all but irresistible; partly, I believe, because it
might be so easily done, and partly because such momentous
consequences would ensue, without my being compelled to wait a moment
for them. Have you never felt this strange impulse of an evil spirit
at your back, shoving you towards a precipice?"
"Ah, no!" cried. Donatello, shrinking from the battlemented wall with
a face of horror. "I cling to life in a way which you cannot conceive;
it has been so rich, so warm, so sunny!--and beyond its verge,
nothing but the chilly dark! And then a fall from a precipice is such
an awful death!"
"Nay; if it be a great height," said Kenyon, "a man would leave his
life in the air, and never feel the hard shock at the bottom."
"That is not the way with this kind of death!" exclaimed Donatello, in
a low, horrorstricken voice, which grew higher and more full of
emotion as he proceeded. "Imagine a fellow creature,--breathing now,
and looking you in the face,--and now tumbling down, down, down, with
a long shriek wavering after him, all the way! He does not leave his
life in the air! No; but it keeps in him till he thumps against the
stones, a horribly long while; then he lies there frightfully quiet, a
dead heap of bruised flesh and broken bones! A quiver runs through
the crushed mass; and no more movement after that! No; not if you
would give your soul to make him stir a finger! Ah, terrible! Yes,
yes; I would fain fling myself down for the very dread of it, that I
might endure it once for all, and dream of it no morel"
"How forcibly, how frightfully you conceive this!" said the sculptor,
aghast at the passionate horror which was betrayed in the Count's
words, and still more in his wild gestures and ghastly look. "Nay, if
the height of your tower affects your imagination thus, you do wrong
to trust yourself here in solitude, and in the night-time, and at all
unguarded hours. You are not safe in your chamber. It is but a step
or two; and what if a vivid dream should lead you up hither at
midnight, and act itself out as a reality!"
Donatello had hidden his face in his hands, and was leaning against
the parapet.
"No fear of that!" said he. "Whatever the dream may be, I am too
genuine a coward to act out my own death in it."
The paroxysm passed away, and the two friends continued their
desultory talk, very much as if no such interruption had occurred.
Nevertheless, it affected the sculptor with infinite pity to see this
young man, who had been born to gladness as an assured heritage, now
involved in a misty bewilderment of grievous thoughts, amid which he
seemed to go staggering blindfold. Kenyon, not without an unshaped
suspicion of the definite fact, knew that his condition must have
resulted from the weight and gloom of life, now first, through the
agency of a secret trouble, making themselves felt on a character that
had heretofore breathed only an atmosphere of joy. The effect of this
hard lesson, upon Donatello's intellect and disposition, was very
striking. It was perceptible that he had already had glimpses of
strange and subtle matters in those dark caverns, into which all men
must descend, if they would know anything beneath the surface and
illusive pleasures of existence. And when they emerge, though dazzled
and blinded by the first glare of daylight, they take truer and sadder
views of life forever afterwards.
From some mysterious source, as the sculptor felt assured, a soul had
been inspired into the young Count's simplicity, since their
intercourse in Rome. He now showed a far deeper sense, and an
intelligence that began to deal with high subjects, though in a feeble
and childish way. He evinced, too, a more definite and nobler
individuality, but developed out of grief and pain, and fearfully
conscious of the pangs that had given it birth. Every human life, if
it ascends to truth or delves down to reality, must undergo a similar
change; but sometimes, perhaps, the instruction comes without the
sorrow; and oftener the sorrow teaches no lesson that abides with us.
In Donatello's case, it was pitiful, and almost ludicrous, to observe
the confused struggle that he made; how completely he was taken by
surprise; how ill-prepared he stood, on this old battlefield of the
world, to fight with such an inevitable foe as mortal calamity, and
sin for its stronger ally.
"And yet," thought Kenyon," the poor fellow bears himself like a hero,
too! If he would only tell me his trouble, or give me an opening to
speak frankly about it, I might help him; but he finds it too horrible
to be uttered, and fancies himself the only mortal that ever felt the
anguish of remorse. Yes; he believes that nobody ever endured his
agony before; so that--sharp enough in itself--it has all the
additional zest of a torture just invented to plague him individually."
The sculptor endeavored to dismiss the painful subject from his mind;
and, leaning against the battlements, he turned his face southward and
westward, and gazed across the breadth of the valley. His thoughts
flew far beyond even those wide boundaries, taking an air-line from
Donatello's tower to another turret that ascended into the sky of the
summer afternoon, invisibly to him, above the roofs of distant Rome.
Then rose tumultuously into his consciousness that strong love for
Hilda, which it was his habit to confine in one of the heart's inner
chambers, because he had found no encouragement to bring it forward.
But now he felt a strange pull at his heart-strings. It could not
have been more perceptible, if all the way between these battlements
and Hilda's dove-cote had stretched an exquisitely sensitive cord,
which, at the hither end, was knotted with his aforesaid heart-strings,
and, at the remoter one, was grasped by a gentle hand. His breath
grew tremulous. He put his hand to his breast; so distinctly did he
seem to feel that cord drawn once, and again, and again, as if--though
still it was bashfully intimated there were an importunate demand for
his presence. O for the white wings of Hilda's doves, that he might,
have flown thither, and alighted at the Virgin's shrine!
But lovers, and Kenyon knew it well, project so lifelike a copy of
their mistresses out of their own imaginations, that it can pull at
the heartstrings almost as perceptibly as the genuine original. No
airy intimations are to be trusted; no evidences of responsive
affection less positive than whispered and broken words, or tender
pressures of the hand, allowed and half returned; or glances, that
distil many passionate avowals into one gleam of richly colored light.
Even these should be weighed rigorously, at the instant; for, in
another instant, the imagination seizes on them as its property, and
stamps them with its own arbitrary value. But Hilda's maidenly
reserve had given her lover no such tokens, to be interpreted either
by his hopes or fears.
"Yonder, over mountain and valley, lies Rome," said the sculptor;
"shall you return thither in the autumn?"
"Never! I hate Rome," answered Donatello; "and have good cause."
"And yet it was a pleasant winter that we spent there," observed
Kenyon, "and with pleasant friends about us. You would meet them
again there--all of them."
"All?" asked Donatello.
"All, to the best of my belief," said the sculptor: "but you need not
go to Rome to seek them. If there were one of those friends whose
lifetime was twisted with your own, I am enough of a fatalist to feel
assured that you will meet that one again, wander whither you may.
Neither can we escape the companions whom Providence assigns for us,
by climbing an old tower like this."
"Yet the stairs are steep and dark," rejoined the Count; "none but
yourself would seek me here, or find me, if they sought."
As Donatello did not take advantage of this opening which his friend
had kindly afforded him to pour out his hidden troubles, the latter
again threw aside the subject, and returned to the enjoyment of the
scene before him. The thunder-storm, which he had beheld striding
across the valley, had passed to the left of Monte Beni, and was
continuing its march towards the hills that formed the boundary on the
eastward. Above the whole valley, indeed, the sky was heavy with
tumbling vapors, interspersed with which were tracts of blue, vividly
brightened by the sun; but, in the east, where the tempest was yet
trailing its ragged skirts, lay a dusky region of cloud and sullen
mist, in which some of the hills appeared of a dark purple hue.
Others became so indistinct, that the spectator could not tell rocky
height from impalpable cloud. Far into this misty cloud region,
however,--within the domain of chaos, as it were,--hilltops were seen
brightening in the sunshine; they looked like fragments of the world,
broken adrift and based on nothingness, or like portions of a sphere
destined to exist, but not yet finally compacted.
The sculptor, habitually drawing many of the images and illustrations
of his thoughts from the plastic art, fancied that the scene
represented the process of the Creator, when he held the new,
imperfect earth in his hand, and modelled it.
"What a magic is in mist and vapor among the mountains!" he exclaimed.
"With their help, one single scene becomes a thousand. The cloud
scenery gives such variety to a hilly landscape that it would be worth
while to journalize its aspect from hour to hour. A cloud, however,
--as I have myself experienced,--is apt to grow solid and as heavy as
a stone the instant that you take in hand to describe it, But, in my
own heart, I have found great use in clouds. Such silvery ones as
those to the northward, for example, have often suggested
sculpturesque groups, figures, and attitudes; they are especially rich
in attitudes of living repose, which a sculptor only hits upon by the
rarest good fortune. When I go back to my dear native land, the
clouds along the horizon will be my only gallery of art!"
"I can see cloud shapes, too," said Donatello; "yonder is one that
shifts strangely; it has been like people whom I knew. And now, if I
watch it a little longer, it will take the figure of a monk reclining,
with his cowl about his head and drawn partly over his face, and--well!
did I not tell you so?"
"I think," remarked Kenyon, "we can hardly be gazing at the same cloud.
What I behold is a reclining figure, to be sure, but feminine, and
with a despondent air, wonderfully well expressed in the wavering
outline from head to foot. It moves my very heart by something
indefinable that it suggests."
"I see the figure, and almost the face," said the Count; adding, in a
lower voice, "It is Miriam's!"
"No, not Miriam's," answered the sculptor. While the two gazers thus
found their own reminiscences and presentiments floating among the
clouds, the day drew to its close, and now showed them the fair
spectacle of an Italian sunset. The sky was soft and bright, but not
so gorgeous as Kenyon had seen it, a thousand times, in America; for
there the western sky is wont to be set aflame with breadths and
depths of color with which poets seek in vain to dye their verses, and
which painters never dare to copy. As beheld from the tower of Monte
Beni, the scene was tenderly magnificent, with mild gradations of hue
and a lavish outpouring of gold, but rather such gold as we see on the
leaf of a bright flower than the burnished glow of metal from the mine.
Or, if metallic, it looked airy and unsubstantial, like the
glorified dreams of an alchemist. And speedily--more speedily than in
our own clime--came the twilight, and, brightening through its gray
transparency, the stars.
A swarm of minute insects that had been hovering all day round the
battlements were now swept away by the freshness of a rising breeze.
The two owls in the chamber beneath Donatello's uttered their soft
melancholy cry,--which, with national avoidance of harsh sounds,
Italian owls substitute for the hoot of their kindred in other
countries,--and flew darkling forth among the shrubbery. A convent
bell rang out near at hand, and was not only echoed among the hills,
but answered by another bell, and still another, which doubtless had
farther and farther responses, at various distances along the valley;
for, like the English drumbeat around the globe, there is a chain of
convent bells from end to end, and crosswise, and in all possible
directions over priest-ridden Italy.
"Come," said the sculptor, "the evening air grows cool. It is time to
descend."
"Time for you, my friend," replied the Count; and he hesitated a
little before adding, "I must keep a vigil here for some hours longer.
It is my frequent custom to keep vigils,--and sometimes the thought
occurs to me whether it were not better to keep them in yonder convent,
the bell of which just now seemed to summon me. Should I do wisely,
do you think, to exchange this old tower for a cell?"
"What! Turn monk?" exclaimed his friend. "A horrible idea!"
"True," said Donatello, sighing. "Therefore, if at all, I purpose
doing it."
"Then think of it no more, for Heaven's sake!" cried the sculptor.
"There are a thousand better and more poignant methods of being
miserable than that, if to be miserable is what you wish. Nay; I
question whether a monk keeps himself up to the intellectual and
spiritual height which misery implies. A monk I judge from their
sensual physiognomies, which meet me at every turn--is inevitably a
beast! Their souls, if they have any to begin with, perish out of
them, before their sluggish, swinish existence is half done. Better,
a million times, to stand star-gazing on these airy battlements, than
to smother your new germ of a higher life in a monkish cell!"
"You make me tremble," said Donatello, "by your bold aspersion of men
who have devoted themselves to God's service!"
"They serve neither God nor man, and themselves least of all, though
their motives be utterly selfish," replied Kenyon. "Avoid the convent,
my dear friend, as you would shun the death of the soul! But, for my
own part, if I had an insupportable burden,--if, for any cause, I were
bent upon sacrificing every earthly hope as a peace-offering towards
Heaven,--I would make the wide world my cell, and good deeds to
mankind my prayer. Many penitent men have done this, and found peace
in it."
"Ah, but you are a heretic!" said the Count.
Yet his face brightened beneath the stars; and, looking at it through
the twilight, the sculptor's remembrance went back to that scene in
the Capitol, where, both in features and expression, Donatello had
seemed identical with the Faun. And still there was a resemblance;
for now, when first the idea was suggested of living for the welfare
of his fellow-creatures, the original beauty, which sorrow had partly
effaced, came back elevated and spiritualized. In the black depths
the Faun had found a soul, and was struggling with it towards the
light of heaven.
The illumination, it is true, soon faded out of Donatello's face. The
idea of lifelong and unselfish effort was too high to be received by
him with more than a momentary comprehension. An Italian, indeed,
seldom dreams of being philanthropic, except in bestowing alms among
the paupers, who appeal to his beneficence at every step; nor does it
occur to him that there are fitter modes of propitiating Heaven than
by penances, pilgrimages, and offerings at shrines. Perhaps, too,
their system has its share of moral advantages; they, at all events,
cannot well pride themselves, as our own more energetic benevolence is
apt to do, upon sharing in the counsels of Providence and kindly
helping out its otherwise impracticable designs.
And now the broad valley twinkled with lights, that glimmered through
its duskiness like the fireflies in the garden of a Florentine palace.
A gleam of lightning from the rear of the tempest showed the
circumference of hills and the great space between, as the last
cannonflash of a retreating army reddens across the field where it has
fought. The sculptor was on the point of descending the turret stair,
when, somewhere in the darkness that lay beneath them, a woman's voice
was heard, singing a low, sad strain.
"Hark!" said he, laying his hand on Donatello's arm.
And Donatello had said "Hark!" at the same instant.
The song, if song it could be called, that had only a wild rhythm, and
flowed forth in the fitful measure of a wind-harp, did not clothe
itself in the sharp brilliancy of the Italian tongue. The words, so
far as they could be distinguished, were German, and therefore
unintelligible to the Count, and hardly less so to the sculptor; being
softened and molten, as it were, into the melancholy richness of the
voice that sung them. It was as the murmur of a soul bewildered amid
the sinful gloom of earth, and retaining only enough memory of a
better state to make sad music of the wail, which would else have been
a despairing shriek. Never was there profounder pathos than breathed
through that mysterious voice; it brought the tears into the
sculptor's eyes, with remembrances and forebodings of whatever sorrow
he had felt or apprehended; it made Donatello sob, as chiming in with
the anguish that he found unutterable, and giving it the expression
which he vaguely sought.
But, when the emotion was at its profoundest depth, the voice rose out
of it, yet so gradually that a gloom seemed to pervade it, far upward
from the abyss, and not entirely to fall away as it ascended into a
higher and purer region. At last, the auditors would have fancied
that the melody, with its rich sweetness all there, and much of its
sorrow gone, was floating around the very summit of the tower.
"Donatello," said the sculptor, when there was silence again, "had
that voice no message for your ear?"
"I dare not receive it," said Donatello; "the anguish of which it
spoke abides with me: the hope dies away with the breath that brought
it hither. It is not good for me to hear that voice."
The sculptor sighed, and left the poor penitent keeping his vigil on
the tower. _