"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.