The Marble Faun Volume 1 - Page 108/130

"Only yesterday," continued Miriam; "nay, only a short half-hour ago,

I shivered in an icy solitude. No friendship, no sisterhood, could come

near enough to keep the warmth within my heart. In an instant all is

changed! There can be no more loneliness!"

"None, Miriam!" said Donatello.

"None, my beautiful one!" responded Miriam, gazing in his face, which

had taken a higher, almost an heroic aspect, from the strength of

passion. "None, my innocent one! Surely, it is no crime that we have

committed. One wretched and worthless life has been sacrificed to cement

two 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 be

that it brought home, to the simplicity of his imagination, what he had

not before dreamed of,--the ever-increasing loathsomeness of a union

that consists in guilt. Cemented with blood, which would corrupt and

grow more noisome forever and forever, but bind them none the less

strictly for that.

"Forget it! Cast it all behind you!" said Miriam, detecting, by her

sympathy, 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 distilled

from it a fiery, intoxication, which sufficed to carry them triumphantly

through those first moments of their doom. For guilt has its moment of

rapture too. The foremost result of a broken law is ever an ecstatic

sense of freedom. And thus there exhaled upward (out of their dark

sympathy, at the base of which lay a human corpse) a bliss, or an

insanity, which the unhappy pair imagined to be well worth the sleepy

innocence that was forever lost to them.

As their spirits rose to the solemn madness of the occasion, they went

onward, not stealthily, not fearfully, but with a stately gait and

aspect. Passion lent them (as it does to meaner shapes) its brief

nobility of carriage. They trod through the streets of Rome, as if they,

too, were among the majestic and guilty shadows, that, from ages

long gone by, have haunted the blood-stained city. And, at Miriam's

suggestion, they turned aside, for the sake of treading loftily past the

old site of Pompey's Forum.

"For there was a great deed done here!" she said,--"a deed of blood

like ours! Who knows but we may meet the high and ever-sad fraternity of

Caesar's murderers, and exchange a salutation?"

"Are they our brethren, now?" asked Donatello.

"Yes; all of them," said Miriam,--"and many another, whom the world

little dreams of, has been made our brother or our sister, by what we

have done within this hour!"

And at the thought she shivered. Where then was the seclusion, the

remoteness, the strange, lonesome Paradise, into which she and her one

companion had been transported by their crime? Was there, indeed, no

such refuge, but only a crowded thoroughfare and jostling throng of

criminals? And was it true, that whatever hand had a blood-stain on

it,--or had poured out poison,--or strangled a babe at its birth,--or

clutched a grandsire's throat, he sleeping, and robbed him of his few

last breaths,--had now the right to offer itself in fellowship with

their two hands? Too certainly, that right existed. It is a terrible

thought, that an individual wrong-doing melts into the great mass of

human crime, and makes us, who dreamed only of our own little separate

sin,--makes us guilty of the whole. And thus Miriam and her lover were

not an insulated pair, but members of an innumerable confraternity of

guilty ones, all shuddering at each other.