The Marble Faun Volume 1 - Page 51/130

As Miriam and Donatello emerged from among the trees, the musicians

scraped, tinkled, or blew, each according to his various kind of

instrument, more inspiringly than ever. A darkchecked little girl,

with bright black eyes, stood by, shaking a tambourine set round

with tinkling bells, and thumping it on its parchment head. Without

interrupting his brisk, though measured movement, Donatello snatched

away this unmelodious contrivance, and, flourishing it above his head,

produced music of indescribable potency, still dancing with frisky step,

and striking the tambourine, and ringing its little bells, all in one

jovial act.

It might be that there was magic in the sound, or contagion, at least,

in the spirit which had got possession of Miriam and himself, for very

soon a number of festal people were drawn to the spot, and struck

into the dance, singly or in pairs, as if they were all gone mad with

jollity. Among them were some of the plebeian damsels whom we meet

bareheaded in the Roman streets, with silver stilettos thrust through

their glossy hair; the contadinas, too, from the Campagna and the

villages, with their rich and picturesque costumes of scarlet and all

bright hues, such as fairer maidens might not venture to put on. Then

came the modern Roman from Trastevere, perchance, with his old cloak

drawn about him like a toga, which anon, as his active motion heated

him, he flung aside. Three French soldiers capered freely into the

throng, in wide scarlet trousers, their short swords dangling at their

sides; and three German artists in gray flaccid hats and flaunting

beards; and one of the Pope's Swiss guardsmen in the strange motley garb

which Michael Angelo contrived for them. Two young English tourists (one

of them a lord) took contadine partners and dashed in, as did also a

shaggy man in goat-skin breeches, who looked like rustic Pan in person,

and footed it as merrily as he. Besides the above there was a herdsman

or two from the Campagna, and a few peasants in sky-blue jackets, and

small-clothes tied with ribbons at the knees; haggard and sallow were

these last, poor serfs, having little to eat and nothing but the malaria

to breathe; but still they plucked up a momentary spirit and joined

hands in Donatello's dance.

Here, as it seemed, had the Golden Age come back again within the

Precincts of this sunny glade, thawing mankind out of their cold

formalities, releasing them from irksome restraint, mingling them

together in such childlike gayety that new flowers (of which the old

bosom of the earth is full) sprang up beneath their footsteps. The sole

exception to the geniality of the moment, as we have understood, was

seen in a countryman of our own, who sneered at the spectacle, and

declined to compromise his dignity by making part of it.