“Not follow you!” repeated Donatello, soothed from anger into sorrow, less by the purport of what she said, than by the melancholy sweetness of her voice,—­“not follow you!  What other path have I?”

“We will talk of it once again,” said Miriam still soothingly; “soon—­to-morrow when you will; only leave me now.”

CHAPTER XI

FRAGMENTARY SENTENCES

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.