The Marble Faun Volume 1 - Page 50/130

As the music came fresher on their ears, they danced to its cadence,

extemporizing new steps and attitudes. Each varying movement had a grace

which might have been worth putting into marble, for the long delight of

days to come, but vanished with the movement that gave it birth, and was

effaced from memory by another. In Miriam's motion, freely as she flung

herself into the frolic of the hour, there was still an artful beauty;

in Donatello's, there was a charm of indescribable grotesqueness hand

in hand with grace; sweet, bewitching, most provocative of laughter,

and yet akin to pathos, so deeply did it touch the heart. This was the

ultimate peculiarity, the final touch, distinguishing between the sylvan

creature and the beautiful companion at his side. Setting apart only

this, Miriam resembled a Nymph, as much as Donatello did a Faun.

There were flitting moments, indeed, when she played the sylvan

character as perfectly as he. Catching glimpses of her, then, you would

have fancied that an oak had sundered its rough bark to let her dance

freely forth, endowed with the same spirit in her human form as that

which rustles in the leaves; or that she had emerged through the

pebbly bottom of a fountain, a water-nymph, to play and sparkle in

the sunshine, flinging a quivering light around her, and suddenly

disappearing in a shower of rainbow drops.

As the fountain sometimes subsides into its basin, so in Miriam there

were symptoms that the frolic of her spirits would at last tire itself

out.

"Ah! Donatello," cried she, laughing, as she stopped to take a breath;

"you have an unfair advantage over me! I am no true creature of the

woods; while you are a real Faun, I do believe. When your curls shook

just now, methought I had a peep at the pointed ears."

Donatello snapped his fingers above his head, as fauns and satyrs taught

us first to do, and seemed to radiate jollity out of his whole nimble

person. Nevertheless, there was a kind of dim apprehension in his face,

as if he dreaded that a moment's pause might break the spell, and snatch

away the sportive companion whom he had waited for through so many

dreary months.

"Dance! dance!" cried he joyously. "If we take breath, we shall be as

we were yesterday. There, now, is the music, just beyond this clump of

trees. Dance, Miriam, dance!"

They had now reached an open, grassy glade (of which there are many in

that artfully constructed wilderness), set round with stone seats,

on which the aged moss had kindly essayed to spread itself instead of

cushions. On one of the stone benches sat the musicians, whose strains

had enticed our wild couple thitherward. They proved to be a vagrant

band, such as Rome, and all Italy, abounds with; comprising a harp,

a flute, and a violin, which, though greatly the worse for wear,

the performers had skill enough to provoke and modulate into tolerable

harmony. It chanced to be a feast-day; and, instead of playing in

the sun-scorched piazzas of the city, or beneath the windows of some

unresponsive palace, they had bethought themselves to try the echoes

of these woods; for, on the festas of the Church, Rome scatters its

merrymakers all abroad, ripe for the dance or any other pastime.