The Marble Faun Volume 1 - Page 64/130

After contemplating a little while a scene which their long residence in

Rome had made familiar to them, Kenyon and Hilda again let their glances

fall into the piazza at their feet. They there beheld Miriam, who had

just entered the Porta del Popolo, and was standing by the obelisk and

fountain. With a gesture that impressed Kenyon as at once suppliant and

imperious, she seemed to intimate to a figure which had attended her

thus far, that it was now her desire to be left alone. The pertinacious

model, however, remained immovable.

And the sculptor here noted a circumstance, which, according to the

interpretation he might put upon it, was either too trivial to be

mentioned, or else so mysteriously significant that he found it

difficult to believe his eyes. Miriam knelt down on the steps of the

fountain; so far there could be no question of the fact. To other

observers, if any there were, she probably appeared to take this

attitude merely for the convenience of dipping her fingers into the gush

of water from the mouth of one of the stone lions. But as she clasped

her hands together after thus bathing them, and glanced upward at the

model, an idea took strong possession of Kenyon's mind that Miriam was

kneeling to this dark follower there in the world's face!

"Do you see it?" he said to Hilda.

"See what?" asked she, surprised at the emotion of his tone. "I see

Miriam, who has just bathed her hands in that delightfully cool water. I

often dip my fingers into a Roman fountain, and think of the brook that

used to be one of my playmates in my New England village."

"I fancied I saw something else," said Kenyon; "but it was doubtless a

mistake."

But, allowing that he had caught a true glimpse into the hidden

significance of Miriam's gesture, what a terrible thraldom did it

suggest! Free as she seemed to be,--beggar as he looked,--the nameless

vagrant must then be dragging the beautiful Miriam through the streets

of Rome, fettered and shackled more cruelly than any captive queen of

yore following in an emperor's triumph. And was it conceivable that

she would have been thus enthralled unless some great error--how great

Kenyon dared not think--or some fatal weakness had given this dark

adversary a vantage ground?

"Hilda," said he abruptly, "who and what is Miriam? Pardon me; but are

you sure of her?"

"Sure of her!" repeated Hilda, with an angry blush, for her friend's

sake. "I am sure that she is kind, good, and generous; a true and

faithful friend, whom I love dearly, and who loves me as well! What more

than this need I be sure of?"

"And your delicate instincts say all this in her favor?--nothing against

her?" continued the sculptor, without heeding the irritation of Hilda's

tone. "These are my own impressions, too. But she is such a mystery!

We do not even know whether she is a countrywoman of ours, or an

Englishwoman, or a German. There is Anglo-Saxon blood in her veins, one

would say, and a right English accent on her tongue, but much that is

not English breeding, nor American. Nowhere else but in Rome, and as an

artist, could she hold a place in society without giving some clew to

her past life."