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The Marble Faun: Kenyon

Thither, in the summer, Kenyon went to pay a long-planned visit. He found the poor faun sadly changed. The idea of a life-long penance had taken firm possession of Donatello. He was intent on finding some method of self-torture. Kenyon, knowing now something of what had happened, arranged with Miriam that she should be in the public square of Perugia on a specified day, near the statue of Pope Julius. There the lovers met again. The sense of their mutual crime had stunned, but not destroyed the youth's affection. They needed one another. Kenyon cheered and encouraged them. Their two lives flowed together and the great bronze statue of the Pope, his hand outreached in a papal benediction, beneath which they had met, appeared to impart a blessing on their marriage.

So Kenyon went back to Rome to woo the gentle Hilda, whose sensitive soul was burdened by the knowledge of the awful guilt of her friends. The secret weighed upon her heavily. She sought the seclusion of great churches, and at last, Protestant though she was, she found relief by pouring out in the confessional at St. Peter's the story of the crime that she had witnessed. But for Miriam and Donatello the end was not yet reached. The sense of sin had awakened in the faun-like youth what human love could not assuage. Miriam could not rid him of the idea that he must surrender himself to justice. Kenyon had glimpses of the pair now taking part in revelries, but again concealed behind habiliments of woe. In a desolate spot in the Campagna, Miriam at last disclosed the mystery surrounding her own past. It was the story of a marriage to be forced upon her from which her soul revolted. She escaped, though not without unjust suspicions of a crime. Concealing her identity, she gave herself to art. Then, in the Catacombs, the man whom she loathed, half brute and half religious maniac, had reappeared, dogging her steps and threatening to disclose her to the world--with what catastrophe the sculptor knew.

As for Hilda and Kenyon, they went forward into happiness, their pure love consecrating all they did. But even as they plighted their troth to one another in the Pantheon before the tomb of Raphael, upon turning around they saw a kneeling figure on the pavement. It was Miriam, who reached out her hands in a blessing, but a blessing which seemed also to repel. As for Donatello, remorse eventually worked its way, and when heard of last he was in a dungeon as deep as that beneath the Castle of St. Angelo. Houghton Mifflin Company, authorized publishers.