The Marble Faun; Or, The Romance of Monte Beni - Volume 1

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

  CHAPTER XI

  FRAGMENTARY SENTENCES

  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 symbolizeda peculiar character in the relation of these two, insulating them, andbuilding up an insuperable barrier between their life-streams and othercurrents, which might seem to flow in close vicinity. For it is one ofthe chief earthly incommodities of some species of misfortune, or of agreat crime, that it makes the actor in the one, or the sufferer ofthe other, an alien in the world, by interposing a wholly unsympatheticmedium betwixt himself and those whom he yearns to meet.

  Owing, it may be, to this moral estrangement,--this chill remoteness oftheir position,--there have come to us but a few vague whisperingsof what passed in Miriam's interview that afternoon with the sinisterpersonage who had dogged her footsteps ever since the visit to thecatacomb. In weaving these mystic utterances into a continuous scene, weundertake a task resembling in its perplexity that of gathering upand piecing together the fragments ora letter which has been torn andscattered to the winds. Many words of deep significance, many entiresentences, and those possibly the most important ones, have flowntoo far on the winged breeze to be recovered. If we insert our ownconjectural amendments, we perhaps give a purport utterly at variancewith the true one. Yet unless we attempt something in this way,there must remain an unsightly gap, and a lack of continuousnessand dependence in our narrative; so that it would arrive at certaininevitable catastrophes without due warning of their imminence.

  Of so much we are sure, that there seemed to be a sadly mysteriousfascination in the influence of this ill-omened person over Miriam;it was such as beasts and reptiles of subtle and evil nature sometimesexercise upon their victims. Marvellous it was to see the hopelessnesswith which being naturally of so courageous a spirit she resignedherself to the thraldom in which he held her. That iron chain, of whichsome of the massive links were round her feminine waist, and the othersin his ruthless hand,--or which, perhaps, bound the pair together bya bond equally torturing to each,--must have been forged in some suchunhallowed furnace as is only kindled by evil passions, and fed by evildeeds.

  Yet, let us trust, there may have been no crime in Miriam, but onlyone of those fatalities which are among the most insoluble riddlespropounded to mortal comprehension the fatal decree by which everycrime is made to be the agony of many innocent persons, as well as ofthe single guilty one.

  It was, at any rate, but a feeble and despairing kind of remonstrancewhich she had now the energy to oppose against his persecution.

  "You follow me too closely," she said, in low, faltering accents; "youallow me too scanty room to draw my breath. Do you know what will be theend of this?" "I know well what must be the end," he replied.

  "Tell me, then," said Miriam, "that I may compare your foreboding withmy own. Mine is a very dark one."

  "There can be but one result, and that soon," answered the model. "Youmust throw off your present mask and assume another. You must vanish outof the scene: quit Rome with me, and leave no trace whereby to followyou. It is in my power, as you well know, to compel your acquiescence inmy bidding. You are aware of the penalty of a refusal."

  "Not that penalty with which you would terrify me," said Miriam;"another there may be, but not so grievous." "What is that other?"he inquired. "Death! simply death!" she answered. "Death," said herpersecutor, "is not so simple and opportune a thing as you imagine. Youare strong and warm with life. Sensitive and irritable as your spiritis, these many months of trouble, this latter thraldom in which I holdyou, have scarcely made your cheek paler than I saw it in your girlhood.Miriam,--for I forbear to speak another name, at which these leaveswould shiver above our heads,--Miriam, you cannot die!"

  "Might not a dagger find my heart?" said she, for the first time meetinghis eyes. "Would not poison make an end of me? Will not the Tiber drownme?"

  "It might," he answered; "for I allow that you are mortal. But, Miriam,believe me, it is not your fate to die while there remains so much to besinned and suffered in the world. We have a destiny which we must needsfulfil together. I, too, have struggled to escape it. I was as anxiousas yourself to break the tie between us,--to bury the past in afathomless grave,--to make it impossible that we should ever meet, untilyou confront me at the bar of Judgment! You little can imagine whatsteps I took to render all this secure; and what was the result?Our strange interview in the bowels of the earth convinced me of thefutility of my design."

  "Ah, fatal chance!" cried Miriam, covering her face with her hands.

  "Yes, your heart trembled with horror when you recognized me," rejoinedhe; "but you did not guess that there was an equal horror in my own!"

  "Why would not the weight of earth above our heads have crumbled downupon us both, forcing us apart, but burying us equally?" cried Miriam,in a burst of vehement passion. "O, that we could have wandered in thosedismal passages till we both perished, taking opposite paths in thedarkness, so that when we lay down to die, our last breaths might notmingle!"

  "It were vain to wish it," said the model. "In all that labyrinth ofmidnight paths, we should have found one another out to live or dietogether. Our fates cross and are entangled. The threads are twistedinto a strong cord, which is dragging us to an evil doom. Could theknots be severed, we might escape. But neither can your slender fingersuntie these knots, nor my masculine force break them. We must submit!"

  "Pray for rescue, as I have," exclaimed Miriam. "Pray for deliverancefrom me, since I am your evil genius, as you mine. Dark as your life hasbeen, I have known you to pray in times past!"

  At these words of Miriam, a tremor and horror appeared to seize upon herpersecutor, insomuch that he shook and grew ashy pale before her eyes.In this man's memory there was something that made it awful for him tothink of prayer; nor would any torture be more intolerable than to bereminded of such divine comfort and succor as await pious soulsmerely for the asking; This torment was perhaps the token of a nativetemperament deeply susceptible of religious impressions, but which hadbeen wronged, violated, and debased, until, at length, it was capableonly of terror from the sources that were intended for our purest andloftiest consolation. He looked so fearfully at her, and with suchintense pain struggling in his eyes, that Miriam felt pity.

  And now, all at once, it struck her that he might be mad. It was an ideathat had never before seriously occurred to her mind, although, as soonas suggested, it fitted marvellously into many circumstances thatlay within her knowledge. But, alas! such was her evil fortune, that,whether mad or no, his power over her remained the same, and was likelyto be used only the more tyrannously, if exercised by a lunatic.

  "I would not give you pain," she said, soothingly; "your faith allows youthe consolations of penance and absolution. Try what help there may bein these, and leave me to myself."

  "Do not think it, Miriam," said he; "we are bound together, and cannever part again." "Why should it seem so impossible?" she rejoined."Think how I had escaped from all the past! I had made for myself anew sphere, and found new friends, new occupations, new hopes andenjoyments. My heart, methinks, was almost as unburdened as if there hadbeen no miserable life behind me. The human spirit does not perish of asingle wound, nor exhaust itself in a single trial of life. Let usbut keep asunder, and all may go well for both." "We fancied ourselvesforever sundered," he replied. "Yet we met once, in the bowels of theearth; and, were we to part now, our fates would fling us together againin a desert, on a mountain-top, or in whatever spot seemed safest. Youspeak in vain, therefore."

  "You mistake your own will for an iron necessity," said Miriam;"otherwise, you might have suffered me to glide past you like a ghost,when we met among those ghosts of ancient days. Even now you might bidme pass as freely."

  "Never!" said he, with unmitigable will; "your reappearance hasdestroyed the work of years. You know the power that I have over you.Obey my biddi
ng; or, within a short time, it shall be exercised: norwill I cease to haunt you till the moment comes."

  "Then," said Miriam more calmly, "I foresee the end, and have alreadywarned you of it. It will be death!"

  "Your own death, Miriam,--or mine?" he asked, looking fixedly at her.

  "Do you imagine me a murderess?" said she, shuddering; "you, at least,have no right to think me so!"

  "Yet," rejoined he, with a glance of dark meaning, "men have said thatthis white hand had once a crimson stain." He took her hand as he spoke,and held it in his own, in spite of the repugnance, amounting to nothingshort of agony, with which she struggled to regain it. Holding it upto the fading light (for there was already dimness among the trees),he appeared to examine it closely, as if to discover the imaginaryblood-stain with which he taunted her. He smiled as he let it go. "Itlooks very white," said he; "but I have known hands as white, which allthe water in the ocean would not have washed clean."

  "It had no stain," retorted Miriam bitterly, "until you grasped it inyour own."

  The wind has blown away whatever else they may have spoken.

  They went together towards the town, and, on their way, continued tomake reference, no doubt, to some strange and dreadful history of theirformer life, belonging equally to this dark man and to the fair andyouthful woman whom he persecuted. In their words, or in the breath thatuttered them, there seemed to be an odor of guilt, and a scent of blood.Yet, how can we imagine that a stain of ensanguined crime should attachto Miriam! Or how, on the other hand, should spotless innocence besubjected to a thraldom like that which she endured from the spectre,whom she herself had evoked out of the darkness! Be this as it might,Miriam, we have reason to believe, still continued to beseech him,humbly, passionately, wildly, only to go his way, and leave her free tofollow her own sad path.

  Thus they strayed onward through the green wilderness of the Borghesegrounds, and soon came near the city wall, where, had Miriam raised hereyes, she might have seen Hilda and the sculptor leaning on the parapet.But she walked in a mist of trouble, and could distinguish little beyondits limits. As they came within public observation, her persecutor fellbehind, throwing off the imperious manner which he had assumed duringtheir solitary interview. The Porta del Popolo swarmed with life. Themerry-makers, who had spent the feast-day outside the walls, were nowthronging in; a party of horsemen were entering beneath the arch; atravelling carriage had been drawn up just within the verge, and waspassing through the villainous ordeal of the papal custom-house. In thebroad piazza, too, there was a motley crowd.

  But the stream of Miriam's trouble kept its way through this flood ofhuman life, and neither mingled with it nor was turned aside. With a sadkind of feminine ingenuity, she found a way to kneel before her tyrantundetected, though in full sight of all the people, still beseeching himfor freedom, and in vain.