“What have you done?” said Miriam, in a horror-stricken whisper.
“I did what ought to be done to a traitor5!” he replied. “I did what your eyes bade me do, when I asked them with mine, as I held the wretch6 over the precipice7!”
These last words struck Miriam like a bullet. Could it be so? Had her eyes provoked or assented8 to this deed? She had not known it. But, alas9! looking back into the frenzy10 and turmoil11 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 beheld12 her persecutor13 in his mortal peril14. Was it horror?—or ecstasy15? 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 shriek16 went quivering downward. With the dead thump17 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 slain18 him against your will,—say that he died without your whole consent,—and, in another breath, you shall see me lying beside him.”
“O, never!” cried Miriam. “My one, own friend! Never, never, never!”
She turned to him,—the guilty, bloodstained, lonely woman,—she turned to her fellow criminal, the youth, so lately innocent, whom she had drawn20 into her doom21. She pressed him close, close to her bosom22, 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 rapture23.
“Yes, Donatello, you speak the truth!” said she; “my heart consented to what you did. We two slew24 yonder wretch. The deed knots us together, for time and eternity25, 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 courtyard, arm in arm, heart in heart. Instinctively26, they were heedful not to sever27 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 solitude29. Their deed—the crime which Donatello wrought30, 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 annihilated31 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 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 cadence32 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 pertained33 to the past life of these guilty ones, in the moral seclusion34 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 brotherhood35 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 simplicity36 of his imagination, what he had not before dreamed of,—the ever-increasing loathsomeness37 of a union that consists in guilt19. Cemented with blood, which would corrupt38 and grow more noisome39 forever and forever, but bind40 them none the less strictly41 for that.
“Forget it! Cast it all behind you!” said Miriam, detecting, by her sympathy, the pang42 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 distilled43 from it a fiery44, intoxication45, which sufficed to carry them triumphantly46 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 exhaled47 upward (out of their dark sympathy, at the base of which lay a human corpse) a bliss48, or an insanity49, which the unhappy pair imagined to be well worth the sleepy innocence50 that was forever lost to them.
As their spirits rose to the solemn madness of the occasion, they went onward51, 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 majestic52 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 Forum53.
“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 throng54 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 shuddering55 at each other.
Wandering without a purpose, it so chanced that they turned into a street, at one extremity57 of which stood Hilda’s tower. There was a light in her high chamber58; a light, too, at the Virgin’s shrine59; and the glimmer60 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 forth28, 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 devoutness61 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 condemned62 spirit was shut out of heaven.
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1
dilated
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| adj.加宽的，扩大的v.（使某物）扩大，膨胀，张大( dilate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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2
kindled
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| （使某物）燃烧，着火( kindle的过去式和过去分词 )； 激起（感情等）； 发亮，放光 | |
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joyous
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| adj.充满快乐的；令人高兴的 | |
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lurid
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| adj.可怕的；血红的；苍白的 | |
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5
traitor
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| n.叛徒，卖国贼 | |
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wretch
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| n.可怜的人，不幸的人；卑鄙的人 | |
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7
precipice
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| n.悬崖，危急的处境 | |
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8
assented
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| 同意，赞成( assent的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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alas
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| int.唉(表示悲伤、忧愁、恐惧等) | |
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frenzy
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| n.疯狂，狂热，极度的激动 | |
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turmoil
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| n.骚乱，混乱，动乱 | |
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12
beheld
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| v.看，注视( behold的过去式和过去分词 )；瞧；看呀；（叙述中用于引出某人意外的出现）哎哟 | |
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13
persecutor
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| n. 迫害者 | |
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peril
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| n.(严重的)危险；危险的事物 | |
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15
ecstasy
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| n.狂喜，心醉神怡，入迷 | |
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shriek
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| v./n.尖叫，叫喊 | |
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17
thump
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| v.重击，砰然地响；n.重击，重击声 | |
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18
slain
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| 杀死，宰杀，杀戮( slay的过去分词 )； (slay的过去分词) | |
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19
guilt
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| n.犯罪；内疚；过失，罪责 | |
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20
drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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21
doom
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| n.厄运，劫数；v.注定，命定 | |
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bosom
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| n.胸，胸部；胸怀；内心；adj.亲密的 | |
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23
rapture
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| n.狂喜；全神贯注；着迷；v.使狂喜 | |
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24
slew
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| v.（使）旋转；n.大量，许多 | |
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eternity
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| n.不朽，来世；永恒，无穷 | |
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instinctively
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| adv.本能地 | |
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sever
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| v.切开，割开；断绝，中断 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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solitude
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| n. 孤独; 独居,荒僻之地,幽静的地方 | |
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30
wrought
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| v.引起；以…原料制作；运转；adj.制造的 | |
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31
annihilated
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| v.（彻底）消灭( annihilate的过去式和过去分词 )；使无效；废止；彻底击溃 | |
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32
cadence
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| n.（说话声调的）抑扬顿挫 | |
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33
pertained
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| 关于( pertain的过去式和过去分词 )； 有关； 存在； 适用 | |
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34
seclusion
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| n.隐遁，隔离 | |
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35
brotherhood
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| n.兄弟般的关系，手中情谊 | |
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36
simplicity
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| n.简单，简易；朴素；直率，单纯 | |
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loathsomeness
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corrupt
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| v.贿赂，收买；adj.腐败的，贪污的 | |
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noisome
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| adj.有害的，可厌的 | |
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40
bind
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| vt.捆，包扎；装订；约束；使凝固；vi.变硬 | |
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41
strictly
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| adv.严厉地，严格地；严密地 | |
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42
pang
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| n.剧痛，悲痛，苦闷 | |
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43
distilled
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| adj.由蒸馏得来的v.蒸馏( distil的过去式和过去分词 )；从…提取精华 | |
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44
fiery
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| adj.燃烧着的，火红的；暴躁的；激烈的 | |
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45
intoxication
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| n.wild excitement;drunkenness；poisoning | |
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46
triumphantly
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| ad.得意洋洋地；得胜地；成功地 | |
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47
exhaled
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| v.呼出，发散出( exhale的过去式和过去分词 )；吐出（肺中的空气、烟等），呼气 | |
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48
bliss
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| n.狂喜，福佑，天赐的福 | |
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49
insanity
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| n.疯狂，精神错乱；极端的愚蠢，荒唐 | |
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50
innocence
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| n.无罪；天真；无害 | |
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51
onward
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| adj.向前的，前进的；adv.向前，前进，在先 | |
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52
majestic
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| adj.雄伟的，壮丽的，庄严的，威严的，崇高的 | |
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53
forum
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| n.论坛，讨论会 | |
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54
throng
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| n.人群，群众；v.拥挤，群集 | |
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55
shuddering
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| v.战栗( shudder的现在分词 )；发抖；（机器、车辆等）突然震动；颤动 | |
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56
remorse
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| n.痛恨，悔恨，自责 | |
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57
extremity
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| n.末端，尽头；尽力；终极；极度 | |
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58
chamber
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| n.房间，寝室；会议厅；议院；会所 | |
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59
shrine
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| n.圣地，神龛，庙；v.将...置于神龛内，把...奉为神圣 | |
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60
glimmer
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| v.发出闪烁的微光；n.微光，微弱的闪光 | |
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61
devoutness
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| 朝拜 | |
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62
condemned
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| adj. 被责难的, 被宣告有罪的 动词condemn的过去式和过去分词 | |
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