The Marble Faun Volume 2 - Page 75/157

Thus coarsely does the world translate all finer griefs that meet its

eye. It is more a coarse world than an unkind one.

But Hilda sought nothing either from the world's delicacy or its pity,

and never dreamed of its misinterpretations. Her doves often flew in

through the windows of the tower, winged messengers, bringing her what

sympathy they could, and uttering soft, tender, and complaining sounds,

deep in their bosoms, which soothed the girl more than a distincter

utterance might. And sometimes Hilda moaned quietly among the doves,

teaching her voice to accord with theirs, and thus finding a temporary

relief from the burden of her incommunicable sorrow, as if a little

portion of it, at least, had been told to these innocent friends, and

been understood and pitied.

When she trimmed the lamp before the Virgin's shrine, Hilda gazed at

the sacred image, and, rude as was the workmanship, beheld, or fancied,

expressed with the quaint, powerful simplicity which sculptors sometimes

had five hundred years ago, a woman's tenderness responding to her

gaze. If she knelt, if she prayed, if her oppressed heart besought the

sympathy of divine womanhood afar in bliss, but not remote, because

forever humanized by the memory of mortal griefs, was Hilda to be

blamed? It was not a Catholic kneeling at an idolatrous shrine, but a

child lifting its tear-stained face to seek comfort from a mother.