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

Owing, it may be, to this moral estrangement, — this
chill remoteness of their position, — there have come to
us but a few vague whisperings of what passed in Miriam's
interview that afternoon with the sinister personage
who had dogged her footsteps ever since the visit to the
catacomb. In weaving these mystic utterances into a

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continuous scene, we undertake a task resembling in its
perplexity that of gathering up and piecing together the
fragments of a letter which has been torn and scattered
to the winds. Many words of deep significance, many
entire sentences, and those possibly the most important
ones, have flown too far on the winged breeze to be recovered.
If we insert our own conjectural amendments,
we perhaps give a purport utterly at variance with the
true one. Yet unless we attempt something in this way,
there must remain an unsightly gap, and a lack of continuousness
and dependence in our narrative; so that it
would arrive at certain inevitable catastrophes without
due warning of their imminence.

Of so much we are sure, that there seemed to be a
sadly mysterious fascination in the influence of this illomened
person over Miriam; it was such as beasts and
reptiles of subtle and evil nature sometimes exercise upon
their victims. Marvellous it was to see the hopelessness
with which — being naturally of so courageous a spirit —
she resigned herself to the thraldom in which he held
her. That iron chain, of which some of the massive
links were round her feminine waist, and the others in
his ruthless hand, — or which, perhaps, bound the pair
together by a bond equally torturing to each, — must have
been forged in some such unhallowed furnace as is only
kindled by evil passions and fed by evil deeds.

Yet, let us trust, there may have been no crime in
Miriam, but only one of those fatalities which are among
the most insoluble riddles propounded to mortal comprehension;
the fatal decree by which every crime is made

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to be the agony of many innocent persons, as well as of
the single guilty one.

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

“You follow me too closely,” she said, in low, faltering
accents; “you allow me too scanty room to draw my
breath. Do you know what will be the end of this?”

“I know well what must be the end,” he replied.

“Tell me, then,” said Miriam, “that I may compare
your foreboding with my own. Mine is a very dark
one.”

“There can be but one result, and that soon,” answered
the model. “You must throw off your present mask and
assume another. You must vanish out of the scene:
quit Rome with me, and leave no trace whereby to follow
you. It is in my power, as you well know, to compel
your acquiescence in my 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 her persecutor, “is not so simple and
opportune a thing as you imagine. You are strong and
warm with life. Sensitive and irritable as your spirit is,
these many months of trouble, this latter thraldom in
which I hold you, have scarcely made your cheek paler
than I saw it in your girlhood. Miriam, — for I forbear

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to speak another name, at which these leaves would shiver
above our heads, — Miriam, you cannot die!”

“Might not a dagger find my heart?” said she, for the
first time meeting his eyes. “Would not poison make an
end of me? Will not the Tiber drown me?”

“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 be sinned and suffered
in the world. We have a destiny which we must needs
fulfil together. I, too, have struggled to escape it. I
was as anxious as yourself to break the tie between us—
to bury the past in a fathomless grave — to make
it impossible that we should ever meet, until you confront
me at the bar of Judgment! You little can
imagine what steps I took to render all this secure; and
what was the result? Our strange interview in the
bowels of the earth convinced me of the futility of my
design.”

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

“Yes, your heart trembled with horror when you recognized
me,” rejoined he; “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 down upon us both, forcing us apart, but
burying us equally?” cried Miriam, in a burst of vehement
passion. “Oh, that we could have wandered in
those dismal passages till we both perished, taking opposite
paths in the darkness, so that when we lay down to
die our last breaths might not mingle!”

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“It were vain to wish it,” said the model. “In all
that labyrinth of midnight paths, we should have found
one another out to live or die together. Our fates cross
and are entangled. The threads are twisted into a strong
cord, which is dragging us to an evil doom. Could the
knots be severed, we might escape. But neither can
your slender fingers untie those knots, nor my masculine
force break them. We must submit!”

“Pray for rescue, as I have,” exclaimed Miriam.
“Pray for deliverance from me, since I am your evil
genius, as you mine. Dark as your life has been, I have
known you to pray in times past!”

At these words of Miriam, a tremor and horror appeared
to seize upon her persecutor, 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
to think of prayer; nor would any torture be more intolerable,
than to be reminded of such divine comfort and
succor as await pious souls merely for the asking. This
torment was perhaps the token of a native temperament
deeply susceptible of religious impressions, but which
had been wronged, violated, and debased, until, at length,
it was capable only of terror from the sources that were
intended for our purest and loftiest consolation. He
looked so fearfully at her, and with such intense 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 idea that had never before seriously
occurred to her mind, although, as soon as suggested, it
fitted marvellously into many circumstances that lay

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within her knowledge. But, alas! such was her evil
fortune, that, whether mad or no, his power over her
remained the same, and was likely to be used only the
more tyrannously, if exercised by a lunatic.

“I would not give you pain,” she said, soothingly;
“your faith allows you the consolations of penance and
absolution. Try what help there may be in these, and
leave me to myself.”

“Do not think it, Miriam,” said he; “we are bound
together, and can never part again.”

“Why should it seem so impossible?” she rejoined.
“Think how I had escaped from all the past! I had
made for myself a new sphere, and found new friends,
new occupations, new hopes and enjoyments. My heart,
methinks, was almost as unburdened as if there had
been no miserable life behind me. The human spirit
does not perish of a single wound, nor exhaust itself in a
single trial of life. Let us but keep asunder, and all may
go well for both.”

“We fancied ourselves forever sundered,” he replied.
“Yet we met once, in the bowels of the earth; and, were
we to part now, our fates would fling us together again in
a desert, on a mountain-top, or in whatever spot seemed
safest. You speak 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 bid me
pass as freely.”

“Never!” said he, with unmitigable will; “your

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reappearance has destroyed the work of years. You know
the power that I have over you. Obey my bidding; or,
within short time it shall be exercised: nor will I cease
to haunt you till the moment comes.”

“Then,” said Miriam, more calmly, “I foresee the
end, and have already warned 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 that this 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 nothing
short of agony, with which she struggled to regain it.
Holding it up to the fading light, (for there was already
dimness among the trees,) he appeared to examine it
closely, as if to discover the imaginary blood-stain with
which he taunted her. He smiled as he let it go. “It
looks very white,” said he; “but I have known hands as
white, which all the water in the ocean would not have
washed clean.”

“It had no stain,” retorted Miriam, bitterly, “until
you grasped it in your own.”

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

They went together towards the town, and, on their
way, continued to make reference, no doubt, to some
strange and dreadful history of their former life,

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belonging equally to this dark man and to the fair and youthful
woman, whom he persecuted. In their words, or in the
breath that uttered 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 attach to Miriam!
Or, how, on the other hand, should spotless innocence
be subjected 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 to follow her own sad path.

Thus they strayed onward through the green wilderness
of the Borghese grounds, and soon came near the
city wall, where, had Miriam raised her eyes, she might
have seen Hilda and the sculptor leaning on the parapet.
But she walked in a mist of trouble, and could distinguish
little beyond its limits. As they came within public
observation, her persecutor fell behind, throwing off
the imperious manner which he had assumed during
their solitary interview. The Porta del Popolo swarmed
with life. The merry-makers, who had spent the feast-day
outside the walls, were now thronging in; a party
of horsemen were entering beneath the arch; a travelling-carriage
had been drawn up just within the verge, and
was passing through the villanous ordeal of the papal
custom-house. In the broad piazza, too, there was a
motley crowd.

But the stream of Miriam's trouble kept its way
through this flood of human life, and neither mingled

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with it nor was turned aside. With a sad kind of
feminine ingenuity, she found a way to kneel before
her tyrant, undetected, though in full sight of all
the people, still beseeching him for freedom, and in
vain.

p576-133

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