But Hilda sought nothing either from the world’s delicacy or its pity, and never dreamed of its misinterpretations.  Her doves often flew in through the windows of the tower, winged messengers, bringing her what sympathy they could, and uttering soft, tender, and complaining sounds, deep in their bosoms, which soothed the girl more than a distincter utterance might.  And sometimes Hilda moaned quietly among the doves, teaching her voice to accord with theirs, and thus finding a temporary relief from the burden of her incommunicable sorrow, as if a little portion of it, at least, had been told to these innocent friends, and been understood and pitied.

When she trimmed the lamp before the Virgin’s shrine, Hilda gazed at the sacred image, and, rude as was the workmanship, beheld, or fancied, expressed with the quaint, powerful simplicity which sculptors sometimes had five hundred years ago, a woman’s tenderness responding to her gaze.  If she knelt, if she prayed, if her oppressed heart besought the sympathy of divine womanhood afar in bliss, but not remote, because forever humanized by the memory of mortal griefs, was Hilda to be blamed?  It was not a Catholic kneeling at an idolatrous shrine, but a child lifting its tear-stained face to seek comfort from a mother.

CHAPTER XXXVII

THE EMPTINESS OF PICTURE GALLERIES

Hilda descended, day by day, from her dove-cote, and went to one or another of the great old palaces,—­the Pamfili Doria, the Corsini, the Sciarra, the Borghese, the Colonna,—­where the doorkeepers knew her well, and offered her a kindly greeting.  But they shook their heads and sighed, on observing the languid step with which the poor girl toiled up the grand marble staircases.  There was no more of that cheery alacrity with which she used to flit upward, as if her doves had lent her their wings, nor of that glow of happy spirits which had been wont to set the tarnished gilding of the picture frames and the shabby splendor of the furniture all a-glimmer, as she hastened to her congenial and delightful toil.

An old German artist, whom she often met in the galleries, once laid a paternal hand on Hilda’s head, and bade her go back to her own country.

“Go back soon,” he said, with kindly freedom and directness, “or you will go never more.  And, if you go not, why, at least, do you spend the whole summer-time in Rome?  The air has been breathed too often, in so many thousand years, and is not wholesome for a little foreign flower like you, my child, a delicate wood-anemone from the western forest-land.”

“I have no task nor duty anywhere but here,” replied Hilda.  “The old masters will not set me free!”

“Ah, those old masters!” cried the veteran artist, shaking his head.  “They are a tyrannous race!  You will find them of too mighty a spirit to be dealt with, for long together, by the slender hand, the fragile mind, and the delicate heart, of a young girl.  Remember that Raphael’s genius wore out that divinest painter before half his life was lived.  Since you feel his influence powerfully enough to reproduce his miracles so well, it will assuredly consume you like a flame.”