THE DEAD CAPUCHIN
The dead monk was clad, as when alive, in the brown woollen frock of the Capuchins, with the hood drawn over his head, but so as to leave the features and a portion of the beard uncovered.His rosary and cross hung at his side; his hands were folded over his breast; his feet (he was of a barefooted order in his lifetime, and continued so in death) protruded from beneath his habit, stiff and stark, with a more waxen look than even his face. They were tied together at the ankles with a black ribbon.
The countenance, as we have already said, was fully displayed.It had a purplish hue upon it, unlike the paleness of an ordinary corpse, but as little resembling the flush of natural life.The eyelids were but partially drawn down, and showed the eyeballs beneath; as if the deceased friar were stealing a glimpse at the bystanders, to watch whether they were duly impressed with the solemnity of his obsequies.The shaggy eyebrows gave sternness to the look.Miriam passed between two of the lighted candles, and stood close beside the bier.
"My God!"murmured she."What is this?"
She grasped Donatello's hand, and, at the same instant, felt him give a convulsive shudder, which she knew to have been caused by a sudden and terrible throb of the heart.His hand, by an instantaneous change, became like ice within hers, which likewise grew so icy that their insensible fingers might have rattled, one against the other.No wonder that their blood curdled; no wonder that their hearts leaped and paused! The dead face of the monk, gazing at them beneath its half-closed eyelids, was the same visage that had glared upon their naked souls, the past midnight, as Donatello flung him over the precipice.
The sculptor was standing at the foot of the bier, and had not yet seen the monk's features.
"Those naked feet!" said he."I know not why, but they affect me strangely.They have walked to and fro over the hard pavements of Rome, and through a hundred other rough ways of this life, where themonk went begging for his brotherhood; along the cloisters and dreary corridors of his convent, too, from his youth upward! It is a suggestive idea, to track those worn feet backward through all the paths they have trodden, ever since they were the tender and rosy little feet of a baby, and (cold as they now are) were kept warm in his mother's hand."As his companions, whom the sculptor supposed to be close by him, made no response to his fanciful musing, he looked up, and saw them at the head of the bier. He advanced thither himself.
"Ha!"exclaimed he.
He cast a horror-stricken and bewildered glance at Miriam, but withdrew it immediately.Not that he had any definite suspicion, or, it may be, even a remote idea, that she could be held responsible in the least degree for this man's sudden death.In truth, it seemed too wild a thought to connect, in reality, Miriam's persecutor of many past months and the vagabond of the preceding night, with the dead Capuchin of to-day.It resembled one of those unaccountable changes and interminglings of identity, which so often occur among the personages of a dream.But Kenyon, as befitted the professor of an imaginative art, was endowed with an exceedingly quick sensibility, which was apt to give him intimations of the true state of matters that lay beyond his actual vision.There was a whisper in his ear; it said, "Hush!" Without asking himself wherefore, he resolved to be silent as regarded the mysterious discovery which he had made, and to leave any remark or exclamation to be voluntarily offered by Miriam. If she never spoke, then let the riddle be unsolved.
And now occurred a circumstance that would seem too fantastic to be told, if it had not actually happened, precisely as we set it down.As the three friends stood by the bier, they saw that a little stream of blood had begun to ooze from the dead monk's nostrils; it crept slowly towards the thicket of his beard, where, in the course of a moment or two, it hid itself.
"How strange!" ejaculated Kenyon."The monk died of apoplexy, I suppose, or by some sudden accident, and the blood has not yet congealed.""Do you consider that a sufficient explanation?"asked Miriam, with a smile from which the sculptor involuntarily turned away his eyes.
"Does it satisfy you?"
"And why not?"he inquired.
"Of course, you know the old superstition about this phenomenon of blood flowing from a dead body," she rejoined."How can we tell but that the murderer of this monk (or, possibly, it may be only that privileged murderer, his physician) may have just entered the church?""I cannot jest about it," said Kenyon."It is an ugly sight!""True, true; horrible to see, or dream of!" she replied, with one of those long, tremulous sighs, which so often betray a sick heart by escaping unexpectedly."We will not look at it any more.Come away, Donatello.Let us escape from this dismal church. The sunshine will do you good."When had ever a woman such a trial to sustain as this! By no possible supposition could Miriam explain the identity of the dead Capuchin, quietly and decorously laid out in the nave of his convent church, with that of her murdered persecutor, flung heedlessly at the foot of the precipice.The effect upon her imagination was as if a strange and unknown corpse had miraculously, while she was gazing at it, assumed the likeness of that face, so terrible henceforth in her remembrance.It was a symbol, perhaps, of the deadly iteration with which she was doomed to behold the image of her crime reflected back upon her in a thousand ways, and converting the great, calm face of Nature, in the whole, and in its innumerable details, into a manifold reminiscence of that one dead visage.
