"Donatello," she hastily exclaimed, "for your own sake, leave me! It is
not such a happy thing as you imagine it, to wander in these woods with
me, a girl from another land, burdened with a doom that she tells to
none. I might make you dread me,--perhaps hate me,--if I chose; and I
must choose, if I find you loving me too well!"
"I fear nothing!" said Donatello, looking into her unfathomable eyes
with perfect trust. "I love always!"
"I speak in vain," thought Miriam within herself.
"Well, then, for this one hour, let me be such as he imagines me.
To-morrow will be time enough to come back to my reality. My reality!
what is it? Is the past so indestructible? the future so immitigable?
Is the dark dream, in which I walk, of such solid, stony substance, that
there can be no escape out of its dungeon? Be it so! There is, at
least, that ethereal quality in my spirit, that it can make me as gay as
Donatello himself,--for this one hour!"
And immediately she brightened up, as if an inward flame, heretofore
stifled, were now permitted to fill her with its happy lustre, glowing
through her cheeks and dancing in her eye-beams.
Donatello, brisk and cheerful as he seemed before, showed a sensibility
to Miriam's gladdened mood by breaking into still wilder and
ever-varying activity. He frisked around her, bubbling over with joy,
which clothed itself in words that had little individual meaning, and
in snatches of song that seemed as natural as bird notes. Then they both
laughed together, and heard their own laughter returning in the echoes,
and laughed again at the response, so that the ancient and solemn grove
became full of merriment for these two blithe spirits. A bird happening
to sing cheerily, Donatello gave a peculiar call, and the little
feathered creature came fluttering about his head, as if it had known
him through many summers.
"How close he stands to nature!" said Miriam, observing this pleasant
familiarity between her companion and the bird. "He shall make me as
natural as himself for this one hour."
As they strayed through that sweet wilderness, she felt more and more
the influence of his elastic temperament. Miriam was an impressible
and impulsive creature, as unlike herself, in different moods, as if a
melancholy maiden and a glad one were both bound within the girdle about
her waist, and kept in magic thraldom by the brooch that clasped it.
Naturally, it is true, she was the more inclined to melancholy,
yet fully capable of that high frolic of the spirits which richly
compensates for many gloomy hours; if her soul was apt to lurk in the
darkness of a cavern, she could sport madly in the sunshine before
the cavern's mouth. Except the freshest mirth of animal spirits, like
Donatello's, there is no merriment, no wild exhilaration, comparable to
that of melancholy people escaping from the dark region in which it is
their custom to keep themselves imprisoned.