The Marble Faun Volume 1 - Page 87/130

The proposal for a moonlight ramble was received with acclamation by

all the younger portion of the company. They immediately set forth and

descended from story to story, dimly lighting their way by waxen tapers,

which are a necessary equipment to those whose thoroughfare, in the

night-time, lies up and down a Roman staircase. Emerging from the

courtyard of the edifice, they looked upward and saw the sky full of

light, which seemed to have a delicate purple or crimson lustre, or, at

least some richer tinge than the cold, white moonshine of other

skies. It gleamed over the front of the opposite palace, showing the

architectural ornaments of its cornice and pillared portal, as well as

the iron-barred basement windows, that gave such a prison-like aspect to

the structure, and the shabbiness and Squalor that lay along its base.

A cobbler was just shutting up his little shop, in the basement of the

palace; a cigar vender's lantern flared in the blast that came through

the archway; a French sentinel paced to and fro before the portal; a

homeless dog, that haunted thereabouts, barked as obstreperously at the

party as if he were the domestic guardian of the precincts.

The air was quietly full of the noise of falling water, the cause

of which was nowhere visible, though apparently near at hand. This

pleasant, natural sound, not unlike that of a distant cascade in the

forest, may be heard in many of the Roman streets and piazzas, when

the tumult of the city is hushed; for consuls, emperors, and popes, the

great men of every age, have found no better way of immortalizing their

memories than by the shifting, indestructible, ever new, yet unchanging,

upgush and downfall of water. They have written their names in that

unstable element, and proved it a more durable record than brass or

marble.

"Donatello, you had better take one of those gay, boyish artists for

your companion," said Miriam, when she found the Italian youth at

her side. "I am not now in a merry mood, as when we set all the world

a-dancing the other afternoon, in the Borghese grounds."

"I never wish to dance any more," answered Donatello.

"What a melancholy was in that tone!" exclaimed Miriam. "You are getting

spoilt in this dreary Rome, and will be as wise and as wretched as all

the rest of mankind, unless you go back soon to your Tuscan vineyards.

Well; give me your arm, then! But take care that no friskiness comes

over you. We must walk evenly and heavily to-night!"

The party arranged itself according to its natural affinities or casual

likings; a sculptor generally choosing a painter, and a painter a

sculp--tor, for his companion, in preference to brethren of their own

art. Kenyon would gladly have taken Hilda to himself, and have drawn

her a little aside from the throng of merry wayfarers. But she kept near

Miriam, and seemed, in her gentle and quiet way, to decline a separate

alliance either with him or any other of her acquaintances.