"forget it! cast it all behind you!" said miriam, detecting, by her sympathy, the pang that was in his heart."the deed has done its office, and has no existence any more."they flung the past behind them, as she counselled, or else distilled from it a fiery, intoxication, which sufficed to carry them triumphantly through those first moments of their doom.for guilt has its moment of rapture too.the foremost result of a broken law is ever an ecstatic sense of freedom.and thus there exhaled upward (out of their dark sympathy, at the base of which lay a human corpse) a bliss, or an insanity, which the unhappy pair imagined to be well worth the sleepy innocence that was forever lost to them.
as their spirits rose to the solemn madness of the occasion, they went onward, not stealthily, not fearfully, but with a stately gait and aspect.passion lent them (as it does to meaner shapes) its brief nobility of carriage.they trod through the streets of rome, as if they, too, were among the majestic and guilty shadows, that, from ages long gone by, have haunted the blood-stained city.and, at miriam's suggestion, they turned aside, for the sake of treading loftily past the old site of pompey's forum.
"for there was a great deed done here!" she said,--"a deed of blood like ours! who knows but we may meet the high and ever-sad fraternity of caesar's murderers, and exchange a salutation?""are they our brethren, now?"asked donatello.
"yes; all of them," said miriam,--" and many another, whom the world little dreams of, has been made our brother or our sister, by what we have done within this hour!"and at the thought she shivered.where then was the seclusion, the remoteness, the strange, lonesome paradise, into which she and her one companion had been transported by their crime? was there, indeed, no such refuge, but only a crowded thoroughfare and jostling throng of criminals? and was it true, that whatever hand had a blood-stain on it,--orhad poured out poison,--or strangled a babe at its birth,--or clutched a grandsire's throat, he sleeping, and robbed him of his few last breaths, -- had now the right to offer itself in fellowship with their two hands? too certainly, that right existed.it is a terrible thought, that an individual wrong-doing melts into the great mass of human crime, and makes us, who dreamed only of our own little separate sin,--makes us guilty of the whole.and thus miriam and her lover were not an insulated pair, but members of an innumerable confraternity of guilty ones, all shuddering at each other.