Her tone and gesture were such as she might have used in taming down the
wrath of a faithful hound, that had taken upon himself to avenge some
supposed affront to his mistress. She smoothed the young man's curls
(for his fierce and sudden fury seemed to bristle among his hair), and
touched his cheek with her soft palm, till his angry mood was a little
assuaged.
"Signorina, do I look as when you first knew me?" asked he, with a
heavy, tremulous sigh, as they went onward, somewhat apart from their
companions. "Methinks there has been a change upon me, these many
months; and more and more, these last few days. The joy is gone out of
my life; all gone! all gone! Feel my hand! Is it not very hot? Ah; and
my heart burns hotter still!"
"My poor Donatello, you are ill!" said Miriam, with deep sympathy and
pity. "This melancholy and sickly Rome is stealing away the rich, joyous
life that belongs to you. Go back, my dear friend, to your home among
the hills, where (as I gather from what you have told me) your days were
filled with simple and blameless delights. Have you found aught in the
world that is worth' what you there enjoyed? Tell me truly, Donatello!"
"Yes!" replied the young man.
"And what, in Heaven's name?" asked she.
"This burning pain in my heart," said Donatello; "for you are in the
midst of it."
By this time, they had left the Fountain of Trevi considerably behind
them. Little further allusion was made to the scene at its margin; for
the party regarded Miriam's persecutor as diseased in his wits, and were
hardly to be surprised by any eccentricity in his deportment.
Threading several narrow streets, they passed through the Piazza of the
Holy Apostles, and soon came to Trajan's Forum. All over the surface
of what once was Rome, it seems to be the effort of Time to bury up the
ancient city, as if it were a corpse, and he the sexton; so that, in
eighteen centuries, the soil over its grave has grown very deep, by the
slow scattering of dust, and the accumulation of more modern decay upon
older ruin.
This was the fate, also, of Trajan's Forum, until some papal antiquary,
a few hundred years ago, began to hollow it out again, and disclosed the
full height of the gigantic column wreathed round with bas-reliefs of
the old emperor's warlike deeds. In the area before it stands a grove of
stone, consisting of the broken and unequal shafts of a vanished temple,
still keeping a majestic order, and apparently incapable of further
demolition. The modern edifices of the piazza (wholly built, no doubt,
out of the spoil of its old magnificence) look down into the hollow
space whence these pillars rise.