"O, never!" cried Miriam. "My one, own friend! Never, never, never!"
She turned to him,--the guilty, bloodstained, lonely woman,--she turned
to her fellow criminal, the youth, so lately innocent, whom she had
drawn into her doom. She pressed him close, close to her bosom, with a
clinging embrace that brought their two hearts together, till the horror
and agony of each was combined into one emotion, and that a kind of
rapture.
"Yes, Donatello, you speak the truth!" said she; "my heart consented to
what you did. We two slew yonder wretch. The deed knots us together, for
time and eternity, like the coil of a serpent!"
They threw one other glance at the heap of death below, to assure
themselves that it was there; so like a dream was the whole thing. Then
they turned from that fatal precipice, and came out of the courtyard,
arm in arm, heart in heart. Instinctively, they were heedful not to
sever themselves so much as a pace or two from one another, for fear
of the terror and deadly chill that would thenceforth wait for them
in solitude. Their deed--the crime which Donatello wrought, and Miriam
accepted on the instant--had wreathed itself, as she said, like a
serpent, in inextricable links about both their souls, and drew them
into one, by its terrible contractile power. It was closer than a
marriage bond. So intimate, in those first moments, was the union, that
it seemed as if their new sympathy annihilated all other ties, and that
they were released from the chain of humanity; a new sphere, a special
law, had been created for them alone. The world could not come near
them; they were safe!
When they reached the flight of steps leading downward from the Capitol,
there was a faroff noise of singing and laughter. Swift, indeed, had
been the rush of the crisis that was come and gone! This was still the
merriment of the party that had so recently been their companions. They
recognized the voices which, a little while ago, had accorded and sung
in cadence with their own. But they were familiar voices no more; they
sounded strangely, and, as it were, out of the depths of space; so
remote was all that pertained to the past life of these guilty ones, in
the moral seclusion that had suddenly extended itself around them. But
how close, and ever closer, did the breath of the immeasurable waste,
that lay between them and all brotherhood or sisterhood, now press them
one within the other!
"O friend!" cried Miriam, so putting her soul into the word that it
took a heavy richness of meaning, and seemed never to have been spoken
before, "O friend, are you conscious, as I am, of this companionship
that knits our heart-strings together?"
"I feel it, Miriam," said Donatello. "We draw one breath; we live one
life!"