"You make me tremble," said Donatello, "by your bold aspersion of men
who have devoted themselves to God's service!"
"They serve neither God nor man, and themselves least of all, though
their motives be utterly selfish," replied Kenyon. "Avoid the convent,
my dear friend, as you would shun the death of the soul! But, for my own
part, if I had an insupportable burden,--if, for any cause, I were
bent upon sacrificing every earthly hope as a peace-offering towards
Heaven,--I would make the wide world my cell, and good deeds to mankind
my prayer. Many penitent men have done this, and found peace in it."
"Ah, but you are a heretic!" said the Count.
Yet his face brightened beneath the stars; and, looking at it through
the twilight, the sculptor's remembrance went back to that scene in the
Capitol, where, both in features and expression, Donatello had seemed
identical with the Faun. And still there was a resemblance; for now,
when first the idea was suggested of living for the welfare of his
fellow-creatures, the original beauty, which sorrow had partly effaced,
came back elevated and spiritualized. In the black depths the Faun had
found a soul, and was struggling with it towards the light of heaven.
The illumination, it is true, soon faded out of Donatello's face. The
idea of lifelong and unselfish effort was too high to be received by
him with more than a momentary comprehension. An Italian, indeed,
seldom dreams of being philanthropic, except in bestowing alms among the
paupers, who appeal to his beneficence at every step; nor does it
occur to him that there are fitter modes of propitiating Heaven than
by penances, pilgrimages, and offerings at shrines. Perhaps, too, their
system has its share of moral advantages; they, at all events, cannot
well pride themselves, as our own more energetic benevolence is apt to
do, upon sharing in the counsels of Providence and kindly helping out
its otherwise impracticable designs.
And now the broad valley twinkled with lights, that glimmered through
its duskiness like the fireflies in the garden of a Florentine palace. A
gleam of lightning from the rear of the tempest showed the circumference
of hills and the great space between, as the last cannon-flash of a
retreating army reddens across the field where it has fought. The
sculptor was on the point of descending the turret stair, when,
somewhere in the darkness that lay beneath them, a woman's voice was
heard, singing a low, sad strain.
"Hark!" said he, laying his hand on Donatello's arm.
And Donatello had said "Hark!" at the same instant.
The song, if song it could be called, that had only a wild rhythm, and
flowed forth in the fitful measure of a wind-harp, did not clothe itself
in the sharp brilliancy of the Italian tongue. The words, so far as they
could be distinguished, were German, and therefore unintelligible to the
Count, and hardly less so to the sculptor; being softened and molten,
as it were, into the melancholy richness of the voice that sung them. It
was as the murmur of a soul bewildered amid the sinful gloom of earth,
and retaining only enough memory of a better state to make sad music
of the wail, which would else have been a despairing shriek. Never was
there profounder pathos than breathed through that mysterious voice;
it brought the tears into the sculptor's eyes, with remembrances and
forebodings of whatever sorrow he had felt or apprehended; it made
Donatello sob, as chiming in with the anguish that he found unutterable,
and giving it the expression which he vaguely sought.