The Marble Faun Volume 1 - Page 17/130

Thenceforth, this heathen Memmius has haunted the wide and dreary

precincts of the catacomb, seeking, as some say, to beguile new victims

into his own misery; but, according to other statements, endeavoring to

prevail on any unwary visitor to take him by the hand, and guide him out

into the daylight. Should his wiles and entreaties take effect, however,

the man-demon would remain only a little while above ground. He would

gratify his fiendish malignity by perpetrating signal mischief on his

benefactor, and perhaps bringing some old pestilence or other forgotten

and long-buried evil on society; or, possibly, teaching the modern

world some decayed and dusty kind of crime, which the antique Romans

knew,--and then would hasten back to the catacomb, which, after so long

haunting it, has grown his most congenial home.

Miriam herself, with her chosen friends, the sculptor and the gentle

Hilda, often laughed at the monstrous fictions that had gone abroad in

reference to her adventure. Her two confidants (for such they were,

on all ordinary subjects) had not failed to ask an explanation of the

mystery, since undeniably a mystery there was, and one sufficiently

perplexing in itself, without any help from the imaginative faculty.

And, sometimes responding to their inquiries with a melancholy sort of

playfulness, Miriam let her fancy run off into wilder fables than any

which German ingenuity or Italian superstition had contrived.

For example, with a strange air of seriousness over all her face, only

belied by a laughing gleam in her dark eyes, she would aver that the

spectre (who had been an artist in his mortal lifetime) had promised

to teach her a long-lost, but invaluable secret of old Roman fresco

painting. The knowledge of this process would place Miriam at the head

of modern art; the sole condition being agreed upon, that she should

return with him into his sightless gloom, after enriching a certain

extent of stuccoed wall with the most brilliant and lovely designs. And

what true votary of art would not purchase unrivalled excellence, even

at so vast a sacrifice!

Or, if her friends still solicited a soberer account, Miriam replied,

that, meeting the old infidel in one of the dismal passages of the

catacomb, she had entered into controversy with him, hoping to achieve

the glory and satisfaction of converting him to the Christian faith. For

the sake of so excellent a result; she had even staked her own salvation

against his, binding herself to accompany him back into his penal gloom,

if, within a twelvemonth's space, she should not have convinced him of

the errors through which he had so long groped and stumbled. But, alas!

up to the present time, the controversy had gone direfully in favor of

the man-demon; and Miriam (as she whispered in Hilda's ear) had awful

forebodings, that, in a few more months, she must take an eternal

farewell of the sun!