The sculptor now looked through art embrasure, and threw down a bit of
lime, watching its fall, till it struck upon a stone bench at the rocky
foundation of the tower, and flew into many fragments.
"Pray pardon me for helping Time to crumble away your ancestral walls,"
said he. "But I am one of those persons who have a natural tendency to
climb heights, and to stand on the verge of them, measuring the depth
below. If I were to do just as I like, at this moment, I should fling
myself down after that bit of lime. It is a very singular temptation,
and all but irresistible; partly, I believe, because it might be so
easily done, and partly because such momentous consequences would ensue,
without my being compelled to wait a moment for them. Have you never
felt this strange impulse of an evil spirit at your back, shoving you
towards a precipice?"
"Ah, no!" cried. Donatello, shrinking from the battlemented wall with a
face of horror. "I cling to life in a way which you cannot conceive; it
has been so rich, so warm, so sunny!--and beyond its verge, nothing
but the chilly dark! And then a fall from a precipice is such an awful
death!"
"Nay; if it be a great height," said Kenyon, "a man would leave his life
in the air, and never feel the hard shock at the bottom."
"That is not the way with this kind of death!" exclaimed Donatello, in a
low, horror-stricken voice, which grew higher and more full of emotion
as he proceeded. "Imagine a fellow creature,--breathing now, and looking
you in the face,--and now tumbling down, down, down, with a long shriek
wavering after him, all the way! He does not leave his life in the air!
No; but it keeps in him till he thumps against the stones, a horribly
long while; then he lies there frightfully quiet, a dead heap of bruised
flesh and broken bones! A quiver runs through the crushed mass; and no
more movement after that! No; not if you would give your soul to make
him stir a finger! Ah, terrible! Yes, yes; I would fain fling myself
down for the very dread of it, that I might endure it once for all, and
dream of it no more!"
"How forcibly, how frightfully you conceive this!" said the sculptor,
aghast at the passionate horror which was betrayed in the Count's words,
and still more in his wild gestures and ghastly look. "Nay, if the
height of your tower affects your imagination thus, you do wrong to
trust yourself here in solitude, and in the night-time, and at all
unguarded hours. You are not safe in your chamber. It is but a step or
two; and what if a vivid dream should lead you up hither at midnight,
and act itself out as a reality!"