When we have once known Rome, and
left her where she lies, like a long-decaying corpse,
retaining a trace of the noble shape it was, but with
accumulated dust and a fungous growth overspreading
all its more admirable features, left her in utter
weariness, no doubt, of her narrow, crooked, intricate
streets, so uncomfortably paved with little squares
of lava that to tread over them is a penitential pilgrimage,
so indescribably ugly, moreover, so cold, so alley-like,
into which the sun never falls, and where a chill
wind forces its deadly breath into our lungs, left
her, tired of the sight of those immense seven-storied,
yellow-washed hovels, or call them palaces, where all
that is dreary in domestic life seems magnified and
multiplied, and weary of climbing those staircases,
which ascend from a ground-floor of cook shops, cobblers’
stalls, stables, and regiments of cavalry, to a middle
region of princes, cardinals, and ambassadors, and
an upper tier of artists, just beneath the unattainable
sky, left her, worn out with shivering
at the cheerless and smoky fireside by day, and feasting
with our own substance the ravenous little populace
of a Roman bed at night, left her, sick
at heart of Italian trickery, which has uprooted whatever
faith in man’s integrity had endured till now,
and sick at stomach of sour bread, sour wine, rancid
butter, and bad cookery, needlessly bestowed on evil
meats, left her, disgusted with the pretence
of holiness and the reality of nastiness, each equally
omnipresent, left her, half lifeless from
the languid atmosphere, the vital principle of which
has been used up long ago, or corrupted by myriads
of slaughters, left her, crushed down in
spirit with the desolation of her ruin, and the hopelessness
of her future, left her, in short, hating
her with all our might, and adding our individual curse
to the infinite anathema which her old crimes have
unmistakably brought down, when we have
left Rome in such mood as this, we are astonished by
the discovery, by and by, that our heart-strings have
mysteriously attached themselves to the Eternal City,
and are drawing us thitherward again, as if it were
more familiar, more intimately our home, than even
the spot where we were born.
It is with a kindred sentiment, that
we now follow the course of our story back through
the Flaminian Gate, and, treading our way to the Via
Portoghese, climb the staircase to the upper chamber
of the tower where we last saw Hilda.
Hilda all along intended to pass the
summer in Rome; for she had laid out many high and
delightful tasks, which she could the better complete
while her favorite haunts were deserted by the multitude
that thronged them throughout the winter and early
spring. Nor did she dread the summer atmosphere,
although generally held to be so pestilential.
She had already made trial of it, two years before,
and found no worse effect than a kind of dreamy languor,
which was dissipated by the first cool breezes that
came with autumn. The thickly populated centre
of the city, indeed, is never affected by the feverish
influence that lies in wait in the Campagna, like
a besieging foe, and nightly haunts those beautiful
lawns and woodlands, around the suburban villas, just
at the season when they most resemble Paradise.
What the flaming sword was to the first Eden, such
is the malaria to these sweet gardens and grove.
We may wander through them, of an afternoon, it is
true, but they cannot be made a home and a reality,
and to sleep among them is death. They are but
illusions, therefore, like the show of gleaming waters
and shadowy foliage in a desert.
But Rome, within the walls, at this
dreaded season, enjoys its festal days, and makes
itself merry with characteristic and hereditary pas-times,
for which its broad piazzas afford abundant room.
It leads its own life with a freer spirit, now that
the artists and foreign visitors are scattered abroad.
No bloom, perhaps, would be visible in a cheek that
should be unvisited, throughout the summer, by more
invigorating winds than any within fifty miles of the
city; no bloom, but yet, if the mind kept its healthy
energy, a subdued and colorless well-being. There
was consequently little risk in Hilda’s purpose
to pass the summer days in the galleries of Roman
palaces, and her nights in that aerial chamber, whither
the heavy breath of the city and its suburbs could
not aspire. It would probably harm her no more
than it did the white doves, who sought the same high
atmosphere at sunset, and, when morning came, flew
down into the narrow streets, about their daily business,
as Hilda likewise did.
With the Virgin’s aid and blessing,
which might be hoped for even by a heretic, who so
religiously lit the lamp before her shrine, the New
England girl would sleep securely in her old Roman
tower, and go forth on her pictorial pilgrimages without
dread or peril. In view of such a summer, Hilda
had anticipated many months of lonely, but unalloyed
enjoyment. Not that she had a churlish disinclination
to society, or needed to be told that we taste one
intellectual pleasure twice, and with double the result,
when we taste it with a friend. But, keeping a
maiden heart within her bosom, she rejoiced in the
freedom that enabled her still to choose her own sphere,
and dwell in it, if she pleased, without another inmate.
Her expectation, however, of a delightful
summer was woefully disappointed. Even had she
formed no previous plan of remaining there, it is
improbable that Hilda would have gathered energy to
stir from Rome. A torpor, heretofore unknown
to her vivacious though quiet temperament, had possessed
itself of the poor girl, like a half-dead serpent
knotting its cold, inextricable wreaths about her limbs.
It was that peculiar despair, that chill and heavy
misery, which only the innocent can experience, although
it possesses many of the gloomy characteristics that
mark a sense of guilt. It was that heartsickness,
which, it is to be hoped, we may all of us have been
pure enough to feel, once in our lives, but the capacity
for which is usually exhausted early, and perhaps
with a single agony. It was that dismal certainty
of the existence of evil in the world, which, though
we may fancy ourselves fully assured of the sad mystery
long before, never becomes a portion of our practical
belief until it takes substance and reality from the
sin of some guide, whom we have deeply trusted and
revered, or some friend whom we have dearly loved.
When that knowledge comes, it is as
if a cloud had suddenly gathered over the morning
light; so dark a cloud, that there seems to be no
longer any sunshine behind it or above it. The
character of our individual beloved one having invested
itself with all the attributes of right, that
one friend being to us the symbol and representative
of whatever is good and true, when he falls,
the effect is almost as if the sky fell with him,
bringing down in chaotic ruin the columns that upheld
our faith. We struggle forth again, no doubt,
bruised and bewildered. We stare wildly about
us, and discover or, it may be, we never
make the discovery that it was not actually
the sky that has tumbled down, but merely a frail
structure of our own rearing, which never rose higher
than the housetops, and has fallen because we founded
it on nothing. But the crash, and the affright
and trouble, are as overwhelming, for the time, as
if the catastrophe involved the whole moral world.
Remembering these things, let them suggest one generous
motive for walking heedfully amid the defilement of
earthly ways! Let us reflect, that the highest
path is pointed out by the pure Ideal of those who
look up to us, and who, if we tread less loftily, may
never look so high again.
Hilda’s situation was made infinitely
more wretched by the necessity of Confining all her
trouble within her own consciousness. To this
innocent girl, holding the knowledge of Miriam’s
crime within her tender and delicate soul, the effect
was almost the same as if she herself had participated
in the guilt. Indeed, partaking the human nature
of those who could perpetrate such deeds, she felt
her own spotlessness impugnent.
Had there been but a single friend, or
not a friend, since friends were no longer to be confided
in, after Miriam had betrayed her trust, but,
had there been any calm, wise mind, any sympathizing
intelligence; or, if not these, any dull, half-listening
ear into which she might have flung the dreadful secret,
as into an echoless cavern, what a relief would have
ensued! But this awful loneliness! It enveloped
her whithersoever she went. It was a shadow in
the sunshine of festal days; a mist between her eyes
and the pictures at which she strove to look; a chill
dungeon, which kept her in its gray twilight and fed
her with its unwholesome air, fit only for a criminal
to breathe and pine in! She could not escape
from it. In the effort to do so, straying farther
into the intricate passages of our nature, she stumbled,
ever and again, over this deadly idea of mortal guilt.
Poor sufferer for another’s
sin! Poor wellspring of a virgin’s heart,
into which a murdered corpse had casually fallen, and
whence it could not be drawn forth again, but lay
there, day after day, night after night, tainting
its sweet atmosphere with the scent of crime and ugly
death!
The strange sorrow that had befallen
Hilda did not fail to impress its mysterious seal
upon her face, and to make itself perceptible to sensitive
observers in her manner and carriage. A young
Italian artist, who frequented the same galleries
which Hilda haunted, grew deeply interested in her
expression. One day, while she stood before Leonardo
da Vinci’s picture of Joanna of Aragon,
but evidently without seeing it, for, though
it had attracted her eyes, a fancied resemblance to
Miriam had immediately drawn away her thoughts, this
artist drew a hasty sketch which he afterwards elaborated
into a finished portrait. It represented Hilda
as gazing with sad and earnest horror at a bloodspot
which she seemed just then to have discovered on her
white robe. The picture attracted considerable
notice. Copies of an engraving from it may still
be found in the print shops along the Corso. By
many connoisseurs, the idea of the face was supposed
to have been suggested by the portrait of Beatrice
Cenci; and, in fact, there was a look somewhat similar
to poor Beatrice’s forlorn gaze out of the dreary
isolation and remoteness, in which a terrible doom
had involved a tender soul. But the modern artist
strenuously upheld the originality of his own picture,
as well as the stainless purity its subject, and chose
to call it and was laughed at for his pains “Innocence,
dying of a Blood-stain!”
“Your picture, Signore Panini,
does you credit,” remarked the picture dealer,
who had bought it of the young man for fifteen scudi,
and afterwards sold it for ten times the sum; “but
it would be worth a better price if you had given
it a more intelligible title. Looking at the
face and expression of this fair signorina, we seem
to comprehend readily enough, that she is undergoing
one or another of those troubles of the heart to which
young ladies are but too liable. But what is this
blood-stain? And what has innocence to do with
it? Has she stabbed her perfidious lover with
a bodkin?”
“She! she commit a crime!”
cried the young artist. “Can you look at
the innocent anguish in her face, and ask that question?
No; but, as I read the mystery, a man has been slain
in her presence, and the blood, spurting accidentally
on her white robe, has made a stain which eats into
her life.”
“Then, in the name of her patron
saint,” exclaimed the picture dealer, “why
don’t she get the robe made white again at the
expense of a few baiocchi to her washerwoman?
No, no, my dear Panini. The picture being now
my property, I shall call it ‘The Signorina’s
Vengeance.’ She has stabbed her lover overnight,
and is repenting it betimes the next morning.
So interpreted, the picture becomes an intelligible
and very natural representation of a not uncommon
fact.”
Thus coarsely does the world translate
all finer griefs that meet its eye. It is more
a coarse world than an unkind one.
But Hilda sought nothing either from
the world’s delicacy or its pity, and never
dreamed of its misinterpretations. Her doves often
flew in through the windows of the tower, winged messengers,
bringing her what sympathy they could, and uttering
soft, tender, and complaining sounds, deep in their
bosoms, which soothed the girl more than a distincter
utterance might. And sometimes Hilda moaned quietly
among the doves, teaching her voice to accord with
theirs, and thus finding a temporary relief from the
burden of her incommunicable sorrow, as if a little
portion of it, at least, had been told to these innocent
friends, and been understood and pitied.
When she trimmed the lamp before the
Virgin’s shrine, Hilda gazed at the sacred image,
and, rude as was the workmanship, beheld, or fancied,
expressed with the quaint, powerful simplicity which
sculptors sometimes had five hundred years ago, a
woman’s tenderness responding to her gaze.
If she knelt, if she prayed, if her oppressed heart
besought the sympathy of divine womanhood afar in
bliss, but not remote, because forever humanized by
the memory of mortal griefs, was Hilda to be blamed?
It was not a Catholic kneeling at an idolatrous shrine,
but a child lifting its tear-stained face to seek
comfort from a mother.