The Marble Faun Volume 1 - Page 54/130

In the Borghese Grove, so recently uproarious with merriment and music,

there remained only Miriam and her strange follower.

A solitude had suddenly spread itself around them. It perhaps symbolized

a peculiar character in the relation of these two, insulating them, and

building up an insuperable barrier between their life-streams and other

currents, which might seem to flow in close vicinity. For it is one of

the chief earthly incommodities of some species of misfortune, or of a

great crime, that it makes the actor in the one, or the sufferer of

the other, an alien in the world, by interposing a wholly unsympathetic

medium betwixt himself and those whom he yearns to meet.

Owing, it may be, to this moral estrangement,--this chill remoteness of

their position,--there have come to us but a few vague whisperings

of what passed in Miriam's interview that afternoon with the sinister

personage who had dogged her footsteps ever since the visit to the

catacomb. In weaving these mystic utterances into a continuous scene, we

undertake a task resembling in its perplexity that of gathering up

and piecing together the fragments ora letter which has been torn and

scattered to the winds. Many words of deep significance, many entire

sentences, and those possibly the most important ones, have flown

too far on the winged breeze to be recovered. If we insert our own

conjectural amendments, we perhaps give a purport utterly at variance

with the true one. Yet unless we attempt something in this way,

there must remain an unsightly gap, and a lack of continuousness

and dependence in our narrative; so that it would arrive at certain

inevitable catastrophes without due warning of their imminence.

Of so much we are sure, that there seemed to be a sadly mysterious

fascination in the influence of this ill-omened person over Miriam;

it was such as beasts and reptiles of subtle and evil nature sometimes

exercise upon their victims. Marvellous it was to see the hopelessness

with which being naturally of so courageous a spirit she resigned

herself to the thraldom in which he held her. That iron chain, of which

some of the massive links were round her feminine waist, and the others

in his ruthless hand,--or which, perhaps, bound the pair together by

a bond equally torturing to each,--must have been forged in some such

unhallowed furnace as is only kindled by evil passions, and fed by evil

deeds.

Yet, let us trust, there may have been no crime in Miriam, but only

one of those fatalities which are among the most insoluble riddles

propounded to mortal comprehension; the fatal decree by which every

crime is made to be the agony of many innocent persons, as well as of

the single guilty one.

It was, at any rate, but a feeble and despairing kind of remonstrance

which she had now the energy to oppose against his persecution.