Even yet, his merry martyrdom was not half over. There came along a
gigantic female figure, seven feet high, at least, and taking up a third
of the street's breadth with the preposterously swelling sphere of
her crinoline skirts. Singling out the sculptor, she began to make a
ponderous assault upon his heart, throwing amorous glances at him out
of her great goggle eyes, offering him a vast bouquet of sunflowers and
nettles, and soliciting his pity by all sorts of pathetic and passionate
dumb-show. Her suit meeting no favor, the rejected Titaness made a
gesture of despair and rage; then suddenly drawing a huge pistol,
she took aim right at the obdurate sculptor's breast, and pulled the
trigger. The shot took effect, for the abominable plaything went off
by a spring, like a boy's popgun, covering Kenyon with a cloud of lime
dust, under shelter of which the revengeful damsel strode away.
Hereupon, a whole host of absurd figures surrounded him, pretending
to sympathize in his mishap. Clowns and party-colored harlequins;
orang-outangs; bear-headed, bull-headed, and dog-headed individuals;
faces that would have been human, but for their enormous noses; one
terrific creature, with a visage right in the centre of his breast;
and all other imaginable kinds of monstrosity and exaggeration. These
apparitions appeared to be investigating the case, after the fashion
of a coroner's jury, poking their pasteboard countenances close to the
sculptor's with an unchangeable grin, that gave still more ludicrous
effect to the comic alarm and sorrow of their gestures. Just then, a
figure came by, in a gray wig and rusty gown, with an inkhorn at his
buttonhole and a pen behind his ear; he announced himself as a notary,
and offered to make the last will and testament of the assassinated man.
This solemn duty, however, was interrupted by a surgeon, who brandished
a lancet, three feet long, and proposed to him to let him take blood.
The affair was so like a feverish dream, that Kenyon resigned himself to
let it take its course. Fortunately the humors of the Carnival pass from
one absurdity to another, without lingering long enough on any, to wear
out even the slightest of them. The passiveness of his demeanor afforded
too little scope for such broad merriment as the masqueraders sought. In
a few moments they vanished from him, as dreams and spectres do, leaving
him at liberty to pursue his quest, with no impediment except the crowd
that blocked up the footway.
He had not gone far when the peasant and the contadina met him. They
were still hand in hand, and appeared to be straying through the
grotesque and animated scene, taking as little part in it as himself. It
might be because he recognized them, and knew their solemn secret, that
the sculptor fancied a melancholy emotion to be expressed by the very
movement and attitudes of these two figures; and even the grasp of their
hands, uniting them so closely, seemed to set them in a sad remoteness
from the world at which they gazed.