C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
The Faun’s Transformation
By Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864)
T
“What have you done?” said Miriam in a horror-stricken whisper.
The glow of rage was still lurid on Donatello’s face, and now flashed out again from his eyes.
“I did what ought to be done to a traitor!” he replied. “I did what your eyes bade me do, when I asked them with mine, as I held the wretch over the precipice!”
These last words struck Miriam like a bullet. Could it be so? had her eyes provoked or assented to this deed? She had not known it. But alas! looking back into the frenzy and turmoil of the scene just acted, she could not deny—she was not sure whether it might be so or no—that a wild joy had flamed up in her heart when she beheld her persecutor in his mortal peril. Was it horror? or ecstasy? or both in one? Be the emotion what it might, it had blazed up more madly when Donatello flung his victim off the cliff, and more and more while his shriek went quivering downward. With the dead thump upon the stones below had come an unutterable horror.
“And my eyes bade you do it!” repeated she.
They both leaned over the parapet, and gazed downward as earnestly as if some inestimable treasure had fallen over, and were yet recoverable. On the pavement below was a dark mass lying in a heap, with little or nothing human in its appearance, except that the hands were stretched out, as if they might have clutched for a moment at the small square stones. But there was no motion in them now. Miriam watched the heap of mortality while she could count a hundred, which she took pains to do. No stir; not a finger moved!
“You have killed him, Donatello! he is quite dead!” said she. “Stone dead! Would I were so too!”
“Did you not mean that he should die?” sternly asked Donatello, still in the glow of that intelligence which passion had developed in him. “There was short time to weigh the matter; but he had his trial in that breath or two while I held him over the cliff, and his sentence in that one glance when your eyes responded to mine! Say that I have slain him against your will,—say that he died without your whole consent,—and in another breath you shall see me lying beside him.”
“Oh, never!” cried Miriam. “My one, own friend! Never, never, never!”
She turned to him,—the guilty, blood-stained, lonely woman,—she turned to her fellow criminal, the youth, so lately innocent, whom she had drawn into her doom. She pressed him close, close to her bosom, with a clinging embrace that brought their two hearts together, till the horror and agony of each was combined into one emotion, and that a kind of rapture.
“Yes, Donatello, you speak the truth!” said she: “my heart consented to what you did. We two slew yonder wretch. The deed knots us together for time and eternity, like the coil of a serpent!”
They threw one other glance at the heap of death below, to assure themselves that it was there; so like a dream was the whole thing. Then they turned from that fatal precipice, and came out of the court-yard, arm in arm, heart in heart. Instinctively, they were heedful not to sever themselves so much as a pace or two from one another, for fear of the terror and deadly chill that would thenceforth wait for them in solitude. Their deed—the crime which Donatello wrought, and Miriam accepted on the instant—had wreathed itself, as she said, like a serpent in inextricable links about both their souls, and drew them into one, by its terrible contractile power. It was closer than a marriage bond. So intimate in those first moments was the union, that it seemed as if their new sympathy annihilated all other ties, and that they were released from the chain of humanity; a new sphere, a special law, had been created for them alone. The world could not come near them: they were safe!
When they reached the flight of steps leading downward from the Capitol, there was a far-off 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 breadth 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 union that consists in guilt. Cemented with blood, which would corrupt and grow more noisome for ever and for ever, 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 counseled, 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 trode 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 Cæsar’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, or had 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.