"Donatello," said Miriam, looking at him thoughtfully, but amused, yet
not without a shade of sorrow, "you seem very happy; what makes you so?"
"Because I love you!" answered Donatello.
He made this momentous confession as if it were the most natural
thing in the world; and on her part,--such was the contagion of his
simplicity,--Miriam heard it without anger or disturbance, though with
no responding emotion. It was as if they had strayed across the limits
of Arcadia; and come under a civil polity where young men might avow
their passion with as little restraint as a bird pipes its note to a
similar purpose.
"Why should you love me, foolish boy?" said she. "We have no points of
sympathy at all. There are not two creatures more unlike, in this wide
world, than you and I!"
"You are yourself, and I am Donatello," replied he. "Therefore I love
you! There needs no other reason."
Certainly, there was no better or more explicable reason. It might
have been imagined that Donatello's unsophisticated heart would be more
readily attracted to a feminine nature of clear simplicity like his own,
than to one already turbid with grief or wrong, as Miriam's seemed to
be. Perhaps, On the other hand, his character needed the dark element,
which it found in her. The force and energy of will, that sometimes
flashed through her eyes, may have taken him captive; or, not
improbably, the varying lights and shadows of her temper, now so
mirthful, and anon so sad with mysterious gloom, had bewitched the
youth. Analyze the matter as we may, the reason assigned by Donatello
himself was as satisfactory as we are likely to attain.
Miriam could not think seriously of the avowal that had passed. He held
out his love so freely, in his open palm, that she felt it could be
nothing but a toy, which she might play with for an instant, and give
back again. And yet Donatello's heart was so fresh a fountain, that,
had Miriam been more world-worn than she was, she might have found
it exquisite to slake her thirst with the feelings that welled up and
brimmed over from it. She was far, very far, from the dusty mediaeval
epoch, when some women have a taste for such refreshment. Even for
her, however, there was an inexpressible charm in the simplicity that
prompted Donatello's words and deeds; though, unless she caught them
in precisely the true light, they seemed but folly, the offspring of
a maimed or imperfectly developed intellect. Alternately, she almost
admired, or wholly scorned him, and knew not which estimate resulted
from the deeper appreciation. But it could not, she decided for herself,
be other than an innocent pastime, if they two--sure to be separated by
their different paths in life, to-morrow--were to gather up some of the
little pleasures that chanced to grow about their feet, like the violets
and wood-anemones, to-day.