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, insulating 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 continuous scene, we
undertake a task resembling in its perplexity that of gathering up
and piecing together the fragments ora 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 ill-omened 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 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.