When they reached the flight of steps leading downward from the Capitol, there was a faroff noise of singing and laughter.Swift, indeed, had been the rush of the crisis that was come and gone! This was still the merriment of the party that had so recently been their companions.They recognized the voices which, a little while ago, had accorded and sung in cadence with their own.But they were familiar voices no more; they sounded strangely, and, as it were, out of the depths of space; so remote was all that pertained to the past life of these guilty ones, in the moral seclusion that had suddenly extended itself around them.But how close, and ever closer, did the breath of the immeasurable waste, that lay between them and all brotherhood or sisterhood, now press them one within the other!
"O friend!" cried Miriam, so putting her soul into the word that it took a heavy richness of meaning, and seemed never to have been spoken before, "O friend, are you conscious, as I am, of this companionshiP that knits our heart-strings together?""I feel it, Miriam," said Donatello."We draw one breath; we live one life!""Only yesterday," continued Miriam; "nay, only a short half-hour ago, I shivered in an icy solitude.No friendship, no sisterhood, could come near enough to keep the warmth within my heart.In an instant all is changed!There can be no more loneliness!""None, Miriam!"said Donatello.
"None, my beautiful one!" responded Miriam, gazing in his face, which had taken a higher, almost an heroic aspect, from the strength of passion."None, my innocent one! Surely, it is no crime that we have committed.One wretched and worthless life has been sacrificed to cement two other lives for evermore.""For evermore, Miriam!"said Donatello; "cemented with his blood!" The young man started at the word which he had himself spoken; it may be that it brought home, to the simplicity of his imagination, what he had not before dreamed of,--the ever-increasing loathsomeness of a unionthat consists in guilt.Cemented with blood, which would corrupt and grow more noisome forever and forever, but bind them none the less strictly for that.
"Forget it! Cast it all behind you!" said Miriam, detecting, by her sympathy, the pang that was in his heart."The deed has done its office, and has no existence any more."They flung the past behind them, as she counselled, or else distilled from it a fiery, intoxication, which sufficed to carry them triumphantly through those first moments of their doom.For guilt has its moment of rapture too.The foremost result of a broken law is ever an ecstatic sense of freedom.And thus there exhaled upward (out of their dark sympathy, at the base of which lay a human corpse) a bliss, or an insanity, which the unhappy pair imagined to be well worth the sleepy innocence that was forever lost to them.
As their spirits rose to the solemn madness of the occasion, they went onward, not stealthily, not fearfully, but with a stately gait and aspect.Passion lent them (as it does to meaner shapes) its brief nobility of carriage.They trod through the streets of Rome, as if they, too, were among the majestic and guilty shadows, that, from ages long gone by, have haunted the blood-stained city.And, at Miriam's suggestion, they turned aside, for the sake of treading loftily past the old site of Pompey's Forum.
"For there was a great deed done here!" she said,--"a deed of blood like ours! Who knows but we may meet the high and ever-sad fraternity of Caesar's murderers, and exchange a salutation?""Are they our brethren, now?"asked Donatello.
"Yes; all of them," said Miriam,--" and many another, whom the world little dreams of, has been made our brother or our sister, by what we have done within this hour!"And at the thought she shivered.Where then was the seclusion, the remoteness, the strange, lonesome Paradise, into which she and her one companion had been transported by their crime? Was there, indeed, no such refuge, but only a crowded thoroughfare and jostling throng of criminals? And was it true, that whatever hand had a blood-stain on it,--orhad poured out poison,--or strangled a babe at its birth,--or clutched a grandsire's throat, he sleeping, and robbed him of his few last breaths, -- had now the right to offer itself in fellowship with their two hands? Too certainly, that right existed.It is a terrible thought, that an individual wrong-doing melts into the great mass of human crime, and makes us, who dreamed only of our own little separate sin,--makes us guilty of the whole.And thus Miriam and her lover were not an insulated pair, but members of an innumerable confraternity of guilty ones, all shuddering at each other.
"But not now; not yet," she murmured to herself."To-night, at least, there shall be no remorse!"Wandering without a purpose, it so chanced that they turned into a street, at one extremity of which stood Hilda's tower.There was a light in her high chamber; a light, too, at the Virgin's shrine; and the glimmer of these two was the loftiest light beneath the stars.Miriam drew Donatello's arm, to make him stop, and while they stood at some distance looking at Hilda's window, they beheld her approach and throw it open.She leaned far forth, and extended her clasped hands towards the sky.
"The good, pure child!She is praying, Donatello," said Miriam, with a kind of simple joy at witnessing the devoutness of her friend.Then her own sin rushed upon her, and she shouted, with the rich strength of her voice, "Pray for us, Hilda; we need it!"Whether Hilda heard and recognized the voice we cannot tell.The window was immediately closed, and her form disappeared from behind the snowy curtain.Miriam felt this to be a token that the cry of her condemned spirit was shut out of heaven.
