Hilda descended, day by day, from her dove-cote, and went to one or
another of the great old palaces,--the Pamfili Doria, the Corsini, the
Sciarra, the Borghese, the Colonna,--where the doorkeepers knew her
well, and offered her a kindly greeting. But they shook their heads and
sighed, on observing the languid step with which the poor girl toiled up
the grand marble staircases. There was no more of that cheery alacrity
with which she used to flit upward, as if her doves had lent her their
wings, nor of that glow of happy spirits which had been wont to set the
tarnished gilding of the picture frames and the shabby splendor of the
furniture all a-glimmer, as she hastened to her congenial and delightful
toil.
An old German artist, whom she often met in the galleries, once laid a
paternal hand on Hilda's head, and bade her go back to her own country.
"Go back soon," he said, with kindly freedom and directness, "or you
will go never more. And, if you go not, why, at least, do you spend the
whole summer-time in Rome? The air has been breathed too often, in so
many thousand years, and is not wholesome for a little foreign
flower like you, my child, a delicate wood-anemone from the western
forest-land."
"I have no task nor duty anywhere but here," replied Hilda. "The old
masters will not set me free!"
"Ah, those old masters!" cried the veteran artist, shaking his head.
"They are a tyrannous race! You will find them of too mighty a spirit to
be dealt with, for long together, by the slender hand, the fragile mind,
and the delicate heart, of a young girl. Remember that Raphael's genius
wore out that divinest painter before half his life was lived. Since you
feel his influence powerfully enough to reproduce his miracles so well,
it will assuredly consume you like a flame."
"That might have been my peril once," answered Hilda. "It is not so
now."
"Yes, fair maiden, you stand in that peril now!" insisted the kind old
man; and he added, smiling, yet in a melancholy vein, and with a
German grotesqueness of idea, "Some fine morning, I shall come to the
Pinacotheca of the Vatican, with my palette and my brushes, and shall
look for my little American artist that sees into the very heart of the
grand pictures! And what shall I behold? A heap of white ashes on the
marble floor, just in front of the divine Raphael's picture of the
Madonna da Foligno! Nothing more, upon my word! The fire, which the poor
child feels so fervently, will have gone into her innermost, and burnt
her quite up!"
"It would be a happy martyrdom!" said Hilda, faintly smiling. "But I
am far from being worthy of it. What troubles me much, among other
troubles, is quite the reverse of what you think. The old masters hold
me here, it is true, but they no longer warm me with their influence.
It is not flame consuming, but torpor chilling me, that helps to make me
wretched."