Kitabı oxu: «Roderick Hudson»

CHAPTER I. Rowland

Mallet had made his arrangements to sail for Europe on the first of September, and having in the interval a fortnight to spare, he determined to spend it with his cousin Cecilia, the widow of a nephew of his father. He was urged by the reflection that an affectionate farewell might help to exonerate him from the charge of neglect frequently preferred by this lady. It was not that the young man disliked her; on the contrary, he regarded her with a tender admiration, and he had not forgotten how, when his cousin had brought her home on her marriage, he had seemed to feel the upward sweep of the empty bough from which the golden fruit had been plucked, and had then and there accepted the prospect of bachelorhood. The truth was, that, as it will be part of the entertainment of this narrative to exhibit, Rowland Mallet had an uncomfortably sensitive conscience, and that, in spite of the seeming paradox, his visits to Cecilia were rare because she and her misfortunes were often uppermost in it. Her misfortunes were three in number: first, she had lost her husband; second, she had lost her money (or the greater part of it); and third, she lived at Northampton, Massachusetts. Mallet’s compassion was really wasted, because Cecilia was a very clever woman, and a most skillful counter-plotter to adversity. She had made herself a charming home, her economies were not obtrusive, and there was always a cheerful flutter in the folds of her crape. It was the consciousness of all this that puzzled Mallet whenever he felt tempted to put in his oar. He had money and he had time, but he never could decide just how to place these gifts gracefully at Cecilia’s service. He no longer felt like marrying her: in these eight years that fancy had died a natural death. And yet her extreme cleverness seemed somehow to make charity difficult and patronage impossible. He would rather chop off his hand than offer her a check, a piece of useful furniture, or a black silk dress; and yet there was some sadness in seeing such a bright, proud woman living in such a small, dull way. Cecilia had, moreover, a turn for sarcasm, and her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a lurking scratch in it. Rowland remembered that, for him, she was all smiles, and suspected, awkwardly, that he ministered not a little to her sense of the irony of things. And in truth, with his means, his leisure, and his opportunities, what had he done? He had an unaffected suspicion of his uselessness. Cecilia, meanwhile, cut out her own dresses, and was personally giving her little girl the education of a princess.

This time, however, he presented himself bravely enough; for in the way of activity it was something definite, at least, to be going to Europe and to be meaning to spend the winter in Rome. Cecilia met him in the early dusk at the gate of her little garden, amid a studied combination of floral perfumes. A rosy widow of twenty-eight, half cousin, half hostess, doing the honors of an odorous cottage on a midsummer evening, was a phenomenon to which the young man’s imagination was able to do ample justice. Cecilia was always gracious, but this evening she was almost joyous. She was in a happy mood, and Mallet imagined there was a private reason for it—a reason quite distinct from her pleasure in receiving her honored kinsman. The next day he flattered himself he was on the way to discover it.

For the present, after tea, as they sat on the rose-framed porch, while Rowland held his younger cousin between his knees, and she, enjoying her situation, listened timorously for the stroke of bedtime, Cecilia insisted on talking more about her visitor than about herself.

“What is it you mean to do in Europe?” she asked, lightly, giving a turn to the frill of her sleeve—just such a turn as seemed to Mallet to bring out all the latent difficulties of the question.

“Why, very much what I do here,” he answered. “No great harm.”

“Is it true,” Cecilia asked, “that here you do no great harm? Is not a man like you doing harm when he is not doing positive good?”

“Your compliment is ambiguous,” said Rowland.

“No,” answered the widow, “you know what I think of you. You have a particular aptitude for beneficence. You have it in the first place in your character. You are a benevolent person. Ask Bessie if you don’t hold her more gently and comfortably than any of her other admirers.”

“He holds me more comfortably than Mr. Hudson,” Bessie declared, roundly.

Rowland, not knowing Mr. Hudson, could but half appreciate the eulogy, and Cecilia went on to develop her idea. “Your circumstances, in the second place, suggest the idea of social usefulness. You are intelligent, you are well-informed, and your charity, if one may call it charity, would be discriminating. You are rich and unoccupied, so that it might be abundant. Therefore, I say, you are a person to do something on a large scale. Bestir yourself, dear Rowland, or we may be taught to think that virtue herself is setting a bad example.”

“Heaven forbid,” cried Rowland, “that I should set the examples of virtue! I am quite willing to follow them, however, and if I don’t do something on the grand scale, it is that my genius is altogether imitative, and that I have not recently encountered any very striking models of grandeur. Pray, what shall I do? Found an orphan asylum, or build a dormitory for Harvard College? I am not rich enough to do either in an ideally handsome way, and I confess that, yet awhile, I feel too young to strike my grand coup. I am holding myself ready for inspiration. I am waiting till something takes my fancy irresistibly. If inspiration comes at forty, it will be a hundred pities to have tied up my money-bag at thirty.”

“Well, I give you till forty,” said Cecilia. “It ‘s only a word to the wise, a notification that you are expected not to run your course without having done something handsome for your fellow-men.”

Nine o’clock sounded, and Bessie, with each stroke, courted a closer embrace. But a single winged word from her mother overleaped her successive intrenchments. She turned and kissed her cousin, and deposited an irrepressible tear on his moustache. Then she went and said her prayers to her mother: it was evident she was being admirably brought up. Rowland, with the permission of his hostess, lighted a cigar and puffed it awhile in silence. Cecilia’s interest in his career seemed very agreeable. That Mallet was without vanity I by no means intend to affirm; but there had been times when, seeing him accept, hardly less deferentially, advice even more peremptory than the widow’s, you might have asked yourself what had become of his vanity. Now, in the sweet-smelling starlight, he felt gently wooed to egotism. There was a project connected with his going abroad which it was on his tongue’s end to communicate. It had no relation to hospitals or dormitories, and yet it would have sounded very generous. But it was not because it would have sounded generous that poor Mallet at last puffed it away in the fumes of his cigar. Useful though it might be, it expressed most imperfectly the young man’s own personal conception of usefulness. He was extremely fond of all the arts, and he had an almost passionate enjoyment of pictures. He had seen many, and he judged them sagaciously. It had occurred to him some time before that it would be the work of a good citizen to go abroad and with all expedition and secrecy purchase certain valuable specimens of the Dutch and Italian schools as to which he had received private proposals, and then present his treasures out of hand to an American city, not unknown to aesthetic fame, in which at that time there prevailed a good deal of fruitless aspiration toward an art-museum. He had seen himself in imagination, more than once, in some mouldy old saloon of a Florentine palace, turning toward the deep embrasure of the window some scarcely-faded Ghirlandaio or Botticelli, while a host in reduced circumstances pointed out the lovely drawing of a hand. But he imparted none of these visions to Cecilia, and he suddenly swept them away with the declaration that he was of course an idle, useless creature, and that he would probably be even more so in Europe than at home. “The only thing is,” he said, “that there I shall seem to be doing something. I shall be better entertained, and shall be therefore, I suppose, in a better humor with life. You may say that that is just the humor a useless man should keep out of. He should cultivate discontentment. I did a good many things when I was in Europe before, but I did not spend a winter in Rome. Every one assures me that this is a peculiar refinement of bliss; most people talk about Rome in the same way. It is evidently only a sort of idealized form of loafing: a passive life in Rome, thanks to the number and the quality of one’s impressions, takes on a very respectable likeness to activity. It is still lotus-eating, only you sit down at table, and the lotuses are served up on rococo china. It ‘s all very well, but I have a distinct prevision of this—that if Roman life does n’t do something substantial to make you happier, it increases tenfold your liability to moral misery. It seems to me a rash thing for a sensitive soul deliberately to cultivate its sensibilities by rambling too often among the ruins of the Palatine, or riding too often in the shadow of the aqueducts. In such recreations the chords of feeling grow tense, and after-life, to spare your intellectual nerves, must play upon them with a touch as dainty as the tread of Mignon when she danced her egg-dance.”

“I should have said, my dear Rowland,” said Cecilia, with a laugh, “that your nerves were tough, that your eggs were hard!”

“That being stupid, you mean, I might be happy? Upon my word I am not. I am clever enough to want more than I ‘ve got. I am tired of myself, my own thoughts, my own affairs, my own eternal company. True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out—you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand. Unfortunately, I ‘ve got no errand, and nobody will trust me with one. I want to care for something, or for some one. And I want to care with a certain ardor; even, if you can believe it, with a certain passion. I can’t just now feel ardent and passionate about a hospital or a dormitory. Do you know I sometimes think that I ‘m a man of genius, half finished? The genius has been left out, the faculty of expression is wanting; but the need for expression remains, and I spend my days groping for the latch of a closed door.”

“What an immense number of words,” said Cecilia after a pause, “to say you want to fall in love! I ‘ve no doubt you have as good a genius for that as any one, if you would only trust it.”

“Of course I ‘ve thought of that, and I assure you I hold myself ready. But, evidently, I ‘m not inflammable. Is there in Northampton some perfect epitome of the graces?”

“Of the graces?” said Cecilia, raising her eyebrows and suppressing too distinct a consciousness of being herself a rosy embodiment of several. “The household virtues are better represented. There are some excellent girls, and there are two or three very pretty ones. I will have them here, one by one, to tea, if you like.”

“I should particularly like it; especially as I should give you a chance to see, by the profundity of my attention, that if I am not happy, it ‘s not for want of taking pains.”

Cecilia was silent a moment; and then, “On the whole,” she resumed, “I don’t think there are any worth asking. There are none so very pretty, none so very pleasing.”

“Are you very sure?” asked the young man, rising and throwing away his cigar-end.

“Upon my word,” cried Cecilia, “one would suppose I wished to keep you for myself. Of course I am sure! But as the penalty of your insinuations, I shall invite the plainest and prosiest damsel that can be found, and leave you alone with her.”

Rowland smiled. “Even against her,” he said, “I should be sorry to conclude until I had given her my respectful attention.”

This little profession of ideal chivalry (which closed the conversation) was not quite so fanciful on Mallet’s lips as it would have been on those of many another man; as a rapid glance at his antecedents may help to make the reader perceive. His life had been a singular mixture of the rough and the smooth. He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures. His progenitors had submitted in the matter of dogmatic theology to the relaxing influences of recent years; but if Rowland’s youthful consciousness was not chilled by the menace of long punishment for brief transgression, he had at least been made to feel that there ran through all things a strain of right and of wrong, as different, after all, in their complexions, as the texture, to the spiritual sense, of Sundays and week-days. His father was a chip of the primal Puritan block, a man with an icy smile and a stony frown. He had always bestowed on his son, on principle, more frowns than smiles, and if the lad had not been turned to stone himself, it was because nature had blessed him, inwardly, with a well of vivifying waters. Mrs. Mallet had been a Miss Rowland, the daughter of a retired sea-captain, once famous on the ships that sailed from Salem and Newburyport. He had brought to port many a cargo which crowned the edifice of fortunes already almost colossal, but he had also done a little sagacious trading on his own account, and he was able to retire, prematurely for so sea-worthy a maritime organism, upon a pension of his own providing. He was to be seen for a year on the Salem wharves, smoking the best tobacco and eying the seaward horizon with an inveteracy which superficial minds interpreted as a sign of repentance. At last, one evening, he disappeared beneath it, as he had often done before; this time, however, not as a commissioned navigator, but simply as an amateur of an observing turn likely to prove oppressive to the officer in command of the vessel. Five months later his place at home knew him again, and made the acquaintance also of a handsome, blonde young woman, of redundant contours, speaking a foreign tongue. The foreign tongue proved, after much conflicting research, to be the idiom of Amsterdam, and the young woman, which was stranger still, to be Captain Rowland’s wife. Why he had gone forth so suddenly across the seas to marry her, what had happened between them before, and whether—though it was of questionable propriety for a good citizen to espouse a young person of mysterious origin, who did her hair in fantastically elaborate plaits, and in whose appearance “figure” enjoyed such striking predominance—he would not have had a heavy weight on his conscience if he had remained an irresponsible bachelor; these questions and many others, bearing with varying degrees of immediacy on the subject, were much propounded but scantily answered, and this history need not be charged with resolving them. Mrs. Rowland, for so handsome a woman, proved a tranquil neighbor and an excellent housewife. Her extremely fresh complexion, however, was always suffused with an air of apathetic homesickness, and she played her part in American society chiefly by having the little squares of brick pavement in front of her dwelling scoured and polished as nearly as possible into the likeness of Dutch tiles. Rowland Mallet remembered having seen her, as a child—an immensely stout, white-faced lady, wearing a high cap of very stiff tulle, speaking English with a formidable accent, and suffering from dropsy. Captain Rowland was a little bronzed and wizened man, with eccentric opinions. He advocated the creation of a public promenade along the sea, with arbors and little green tables for the consumption of beer, and a platform, surrounded by Chinese lanterns, for dancing. He especially desired the town library to be opened on Sundays, though, as he never entered it on week-days, it was easy to turn the proposition into ridicule. If, therefore, Mrs. Mallet was a woman of an exquisite moral tone, it was not that she had inherited her temper from an ancestry with a turn for casuistry. Jonas Mallet, at the time of his marriage, was conducting with silent shrewdness a small, unpromising business. Both his shrewdness and his silence increased with his years, and at the close of his life he was an extremely well-dressed, well-brushed gentleman, with a frigid gray eye, who said little to anybody, but of whom everybody said that he had a very handsome fortune. He was not a sentimental father, and the roughness I just now spoke of in Rowland’s life dated from his early boyhood. Mr. Mallet, whenever he looked at his son, felt extreme compunction at having made a fortune. He remembered that the fruit had not dropped ripe from the tree into his own mouth, and determined it should be no fault of his if the boy was corrupted by luxury. Rowland, therefore, except for a good deal of expensive instruction in foreign tongues and abstruse sciences, received the education of a poor man’s son. His fare was plain, his temper familiar with the discipline of patched trousers, and his habits marked by an exaggerated simplicity which it really cost a good deal of money to preserve unbroken. He was kept in the country for months together, in the midst of servants who had strict injunctions to see that he suffered no serious harm, but were as strictly forbidden to wait upon him. As no school could be found conducted on principles sufficiently rigorous, he was attended at home by a master who set a high price on the understanding that he was to illustrate the beauty of abstinence not only by precept but by example. Rowland passed for a child of ordinary parts, and certainly, during his younger years, was an excellent imitation of a boy who had inherited nothing whatever that was to make life easy. He was passive, pliable, frank, extremely slow at his books, and inordinately fond of trout-fishing. His hair, a memento of his Dutch ancestry, was of the fairest shade of yellow, his complexion absurdly rosy, and his measurement around the waist, when he was about ten years old, quite alarmingly large. This, however, was but an episode in his growth; he became afterwards a fresh-colored, yellow-bearded man, but he was never accused of anything worse than a tendency to corpulence. He emerged from childhood a simple, wholesome, round-eyed lad, with no suspicion that a less roundabout course might have been taken to make him happy, but with a vague sense that his young experience was not a fair sample of human freedom, and that he was to make a great many discoveries. When he was about fifteen, he achieved a momentous one. He ascertained that his mother was a saint. She had always been a very distinct presence in his life, but so ineffably gentle a one that his sense was fully opened to it only by the danger of losing her. She had an illness which for many months was liable at any moment to terminate fatally, and during her long-arrested convalescence she removed the mask which she had worn for years by her husband’s order. Rowland spent his days at her side and felt before long as if he had made a new friend. All his impressions at this period were commented and interpreted at leisure in the future, and it was only then that he understood that his mother had been for fifteen years a perfectly unhappy woman. Her marriage had been an immitigable error which she had spent her life in trying to look straight in the face. She found nothing to oppose to her husband’s will of steel but the appearance of absolute compliance; her spirit sank, and she lived for a while in a sort of helpless moral torpor. But at last, as her child emerged from babyhood, she began to feel a certain charm in patience, to discover the uses of ingenuity, and to learn that, somehow or other, one can always arrange one’s life. She cultivated from this time forward a little private plot of sentiment, and it was of this secluded precinct that, before her death, she gave her son the key. Rowland’s allowance at college was barely sufficient to maintain him decently, and as soon as he graduated, he was taken into his father’s counting-house, to do small drudgery on a proportionate salary. For three years he earned his living as regularly as the obscure functionary in fustian who swept the office. Mr. Mallet was consistent, but the perfection of his consistency was known only on his death. He left but a third of his property to his son, and devoted the remainder to various public institutions and local charities. Rowland’s third was an easy competence, and he never felt a moment’s jealousy of his fellow-pensioners; but when one of the establishments which had figured most advantageously in his father’s will bethought itself to affirm the existence of a later instrument, in which it had been still more handsomely treated, the young man felt a sudden passionate need to repel the claim by process of law. There was a lively tussle, but he gained his case; immediately after which he made, in another quarter, a donation of the contested sum. He cared nothing for the money, but he had felt an angry desire to protest against a destiny which seemed determined to be exclusively salutary. It seemed to him that he would bear a little spoiling. And yet he treated himself to a very modest quantity, and submitted without reserve to the great national discipline which began in 1861. When the Civil War broke out he immediately obtained a commission, and did his duty for three long years as a citizen soldier. His duty was obscure, but he never lost a certain private satisfaction in remembering that on two or three occasions it had been performed with something of an ideal precision. He had disentangled himself from business, and after the war he felt a profound disinclination to tie the knot again. He had no desire to make money, he had money enough; and although he knew, and was frequently reminded, that a young man is the better for a fixed occupation, he could discover no moral advantage in driving a lucrative trade. Yet few young men of means and leisure ever made less of a parade of idleness, and indeed idleness in any degree could hardly be laid at the door of a young man who took life in the serious, attentive, reasoning fashion of our friend. It often seemed to Mallet that he wholly lacked the prime requisite of a graceful flaneur—the simple, sensuous, confident relish of pleasure. He had frequent fits of extreme melancholy, in which he declared that he was neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring. He was neither an irresponsibly contemplative nature nor a sturdily practical one, and he was forever looking in vain for the uses of the things that please and the charm of the things that sustain. He was an awkward mixture of strong moral impulse and restless aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would have made a most ineffective reformer and a very indifferent artist. It seemed to him that the glow of happiness must be found either in action, of some immensely solid kind, on behalf of an idea, or in producing a masterpiece in one of the arts. Oftenest, perhaps, he wished he were a vigorous young man of genius, without a penny. As it was, he could only buy pictures, and not paint them; and in the way of action, he had to content himself with making a rule to render scrupulous moral justice to handsome examples of it in others. On the whole, he had an incorruptible modesty. With his blooming complexion and his serene gray eye, he felt the friction of existence more than was suspected; but he asked no allowance on grounds of temper, he assumed that fate had treated him inordinately well and that he had no excuse for taking an ill-natured view of life, and he undertook constantly to believe that all women were fair, all men were brave, and the world was a delightful place of sojourn, until the contrary had been distinctly proved.

Cecilia’s blooming garden and shady porch had seemed so friendly to repose and a cigar, that she reproached him the next morning with indifference to her little parlor, not less, in its way, a monument to her ingenious taste. “And by the way,” she added as he followed her in, “if I refused last night to show you a pretty girl, I can at least show you a pretty boy.”

She threw open a window and pointed to a statuette which occupied the place of honor among the ornaments of the room. Rowland looked at it a moment and then turned to her with an exclamation of surprise. She gave him a rapid glance, perceived that her statuette was of altogether exceptional merit, and then smiled, knowingly, as if this had long been an agreeable certainty.

“Who did it? where did you get it?” Rowland demanded.

“Oh,” said Cecilia, adjusting the light, “it ‘s a little thing of Mr. Hudson’s.”

“And who the deuce is Mr. Hudson?” asked Rowland. But he was absorbed; he lost her immediate reply. The statuette, in bronze, something less than two feet high, represented a naked youth drinking from a gourd. The attitude was perfectly simple. The lad was squarely planted on his feet, with his legs a little apart; his back was slightly hollowed, his head thrown back, and both hands raised to support the rustic cup. There was a loosened fillet of wild flowers about his head, and his eyes, under their drooped lids, looked straight into the cup. On the base was scratched the Greek word Δἱψα, Thirst. The figure might have been some beautiful youth of ancient fable,—Hylas or Narcissus, Paris or Endymion. Its beauty was the beauty of natural movement; nothing had been sought to be represented but the perfection of an attitude. This had been most attentively studied, and it was exquisitely rendered. Rowland demanded more light, dropped his head on this side and that, uttered vague exclamations. He said to himself, as he had said more than once in the Louvre and the Vatican, “We ugly mortals, what beautiful creatures we are!” Nothing, in a long time, had given him so much pleasure. “Hudson—Hudson,” he asked again; “who is Hudson?”

“A young man of this place,” said Cecilia.

“A young man? How old?”

“I suppose he is three or four and twenty.”

“Of this place, you say—of Northampton, Massachusetts?”

“He lives here, but he comes from Virginia.”

“Is he a sculptor by profession?”

“He ‘s a law-student.”

Rowland burst out laughing. “He has found something in Blackstone that I never did. He makes statues then simply for his pleasure?”

Cecilia, with a smile, gave a little toss of her head. “For mine!”

“I congratulate you,” said Rowland. “I wonder whether he could be induced to do anything for me?”

“This was a matter of friendship. I saw the figure when he had modeled it in clay, and of course greatly admired it. He said nothing at the time, but a week ago, on my birthday, he arrived in a buggy, with this. He had had it cast at the foundry at Chicopee; I believe it ‘s a beautiful piece of bronze. He begged me to accept.”

“Upon my word,” said Mallet, “he does things handsomely!” And he fell to admiring the statue again.

“So then,” said Cecilia, “it ‘s very remarkable?”

“Why, my dear cousin,” Rowland answered, “Mr. Hudson, of Virginia, is an extraordinary—” Then suddenly stopping: “Is he a great friend of yours?” he asked.

“A great friend?” and Cecilia hesitated. “I regard him as a child!”

“Well,” said Rowland, “he ‘s a very clever child. Tell me something about him: I should like to see him.”

Cecilia was obliged to go to her daughter’s music-lesson, but she assured Rowland that she would arrange for him a meeting with the young sculptor. He was a frequent visitor, and as he had not called for some days it was likely he would come that evening. Rowland, left alone, examined the statuette at his leisure, and returned more than once during the day to take another look at it. He discovered its weak points, but it wore well. It had the stamp of genius. Rowland envied the happy youth who, in a New England village, without aid or encouragement, without models or resources, had found it so easy to produce a lovely work.

In the evening, as he was smoking his cigar on the veranda, a light, quick step pressed the gravel of the garden path, and in a moment a young man made his bow to Cecilia. It was rather a nod than a bow, and indicated either that he was an old friend, or that he was scantily versed in the usual social forms. Cecilia, who was sitting near the steps, pointed to a neighboring chair, but the young man seated himself abruptly on the floor at her feet, began to fan himself vigorously with his hat, and broke out into a lively objurgation upon the hot weather. “I ‘m dripping wet!” he said, without ceremony.

“You walk too fast,” said Cecilia. “You do everything too fast.”

“I know it, I know it!” he cried, passing his hand through his abundant dark hair and making it stand out in a picturesque shock. “I can’t be slow if I try. There ‘s something inside of me that drives me. A restless fiend!”

Cecilia gave a light laugh, and Rowland leaned forward in his hammock. He had placed himself in it at Bessie’s request, and was playing that he was her baby and that she was rocking him to sleep. She sat beside him, swinging the hammock to and fro, and singing a lullaby. When he raised himself she pushed him back and said that the baby must finish its nap. “But I want to see the gentleman with the fiend inside of him,” said Rowland.

“What is a fiend?” Bessie demanded. “It ‘s only Mr. Hudson.”

“Very well, I want to see him.”

“Oh, never mind him!” said Bessie, with the brevity of contempt.

“You speak as if you did n’t like him.”

“I don’t!” Bessie affirmed, and put Rowland to bed again.

The hammock was swung at the end of the veranda, in the thickest shade of the vines, and this fragment of dialogue had passed unnoticed. Rowland submitted a while longer to be cradled, and contented himself with listening to Mr. Hudson’s voice. It was a soft and not altogether masculine organ, and was pitched on this occasion in a somewhat plaintive and pettish key. The young man’s mood seemed fretful; he complained of the heat, of the dust, of a shoe that hurt him, of having gone on an errand a mile to the other side of the town and found the person he was in search of had left Northampton an hour before.

CHAPTER II. Roderick

Early on the morrow Rowland received a visit from his new friend. Roderick was in a state of extreme exhilaration, tempered, however, by a certain amount of righteous wrath. He had had a domestic struggle, but he had remained master of the situation. He had shaken the dust of Mr. Striker’s office from his feet.

“I had it out last night with my mother,” he said. “I dreaded the scene, for she takes things terribly hard. She does n’t scold nor storm, and she does n’t argue nor insist. She sits with her eyes full of tears that never fall, and looks at me, when I displease her, as if I were a perfect monster of depravity. And the trouble is that I was born to displease her. She does n’t trust me; she never has and she never will. I don’t know what I have done to set her against me, but ever since I can remember I have been looked at with tears. The trouble is,” he went on, giving a twist to his moustache, “I ‘ve been too absurdly docile. I ‘ve been sprawling all my days by the maternal fireside, and my dear mother has grown used to bullying me. I ‘ve made myself cheap! If I ‘m not in my bed by eleven o’clock, the girl is sent out to explore with a lantern. When I think of it, I fairly despise my amiability. It ‘s rather a hard fate, to live like a saint and to pass for a sinner! I should like for six months to lead Mrs. Hudson the life some fellows lead their mothers!”

“Allow me to believe,” said Rowland, “that you would like nothing of the sort. If you have been a good boy, don’t spoil it by pretending you don’t like it. You have been very happy, I suspect, in spite of your virtues, and there are worse fates in the world than being loved too well. I have not had the pleasure of seeing your mother, but I would lay you a wager that that is the trouble. She is passionately fond of you, and her hopes, like all intense hopes, keep trembling into fears.” Rowland, as he spoke, had an instinctive vision of how such a beautiful young fellow must be loved by his female relatives.

Roderick frowned, and with an impatient gesture, “I do her justice,” he cried. “May she never do me less!” Then after a moment’s hesitation, “I ‘ll tell you the perfect truth,” he went on. “I have to fill a double place. I have to be my brother as well as myself. It ‘s a good deal to ask of a man, especially when he has so little talent as I for being what he is not. When we were both young together I was the curled darling. I had the silver mug and the biggest piece of pudding, and I stayed in-doors to be kissed by the ladies while he made mud-pies in the garden and was never missed, of course. Really, he was worth fifty of me! When he was brought home from Vicksburg with a piece of shell in his skull, my poor mother began to think she had n’t loved him enough. I remember, as she hung round my neck sobbing, before his coffin, she told me that I must be to her everything that he would have been. I swore in tears and in perfect good faith that I would, but naturally I have not kept my promise. I have been utterly different. I have been idle, restless, egotistical, discontented. I have done no harm, I believe, but I have done no good. My brother, if he had lived, would have made fifty thousand dollars and put gas and water into the house. My mother, brooding night and day on her bereavement, has come to fix her ideal in offices of that sort. Judged by that standard I ‘m nowhere!”

Rowland was at loss how to receive this account of his friend’s domestic circumstances; it was plaintive, and yet the manner seemed to him over-trenchant. “You must lose no time in making a masterpiece,” he answered; “then with the proceeds you can give her gas from golden burners.”

“So I have told her; but she only half believes either in masterpiece or in proceeds. She can see no good in my making statues; they seem to her a snare of the enemy. She would fain see me all my life tethered to the law, like a browsing goat to a stake. In that way I ‘m in sight. ‘It ‘s a more regular occupation!’ that ‘s all I can get out of her. A more regular damnation! Is it a fact that artists, in general, are such wicked men? I never had the pleasure of knowing one, so I could n’t confute her with an example. She had the advantage of me, because she formerly knew a portrait-painter at Richmond, who did her miniature in black lace mittens (you may see it on the parlor table), who used to drink raw brandy and beat his wife. I promised her that, whatever I might do to my wife, I would never beat my mother, and that as for brandy, raw or diluted, I detested it. She sat silently crying for an hour, during which I expended treasures of eloquence. It ‘s a good thing to have to reckon up one’s intentions, and I assure you, as I pleaded my cause, I was most agreeably impressed with the elevated character of my own. I kissed her solemnly at last, and told her that I had said everything and that she must make the best of it. This morning she has dried her eyes, but I warrant you it is n’t a cheerful house. I long to be out of it!”

“I ‘m extremely sorry,” said Rowland, “to have been the prime cause of so much suffering. I owe your mother some amends; will it be possible for me to see her?”

“If you ‘ll see her, it will smooth matters vastly; though to tell the truth she ‘ll need all her courage to face you, for she considers you an agent of the foul fiend. She does n’t see why you should have come here and set me by the ears: you are made to ruin ingenuous youths and desolate doting mothers. I leave it to you, personally, to answer these charges. You see, what she can’t forgive—what she ‘ll not really ever forgive—is your taking me off to Rome. Rome is an evil word, in my mother’s vocabulary, to be said in a whisper, as you ‘d say ‘damnation.’ Northampton is in the centre of the earth and Rome far away in outlying dusk, into which it can do no Christian any good to penetrate. And there was I but yesterday a doomed habitue of that repository of every virtue, Mr. Striker’s office!”

“And does Mr. Striker know of your decision?” asked Rowland.

“To a certainty! Mr. Striker, you must know, is not simply a good-natured attorney, who lets me dog’s-ear his law-books. He’s a particular friend and general adviser. He looks after my mother’s property and kindly consents to regard me as part of it. Our opinions have always been painfully divergent, but I freely forgive him his zealous attempts to unscrew my head-piece and set it on hind part before. He never understood me, and it was useless to try to make him. We speak a different language—we ‘re made of a different clay. I had a fit of rage yesterday when I smashed his bust, at the thought of all the bad blood he had stirred up in me; it did me good, and it ‘s all over now. I don’t hate him any more; I ‘m rather sorry for him. See how you ‘ve improved me! I must have seemed to him wilfully, wickedly stupid, and I ‘m sure he only tolerated me on account of his great regard for my mother. This morning I grasped the bull by the horns. I took an armful of law-books that have been gathering the dust in my room for the last year and a half, and presented myself at the office. ‘Allow me to put these back in their places,’ I said. ‘I shall never have need for them more—never more, never more, never more!’ ‘So you ‘ve learned everything they contain?’ asked Striker, leering over his spectacles. ‘Better late than never.’ ‘I ‘ve learned nothing that you can teach me,’ I cried. ‘But I shall tax your patience no longer. I ‘m going to be a sculptor. I ‘m going to Rome. I won’t bid you good-by just yet; I shall see you again. But I bid good-by here, with rapture, to these four detested walls—to this living tomb! I did n’t know till now how I hated it! My compliments to Mr. Spooner, and my thanks for all you have not made of me!’”

“I ‘m glad to know you are to see Mr. Striker again,” Rowland answered, correcting a primary inclination to smile. “You certainly owe him a respectful farewell, even if he has not understood you. I confess you rather puzzle me. There is another person,” he presently added, “whose opinion as to your new career I should like to know. What does Miss Garland think?”

Hudson looked at him keenly, with a slight blush. Then, with a conscious smile, “What makes you suppose she thinks anything?” he asked.

“Because, though I saw her but for a moment yesterday, she struck me as a very intelligent person, and I am sure she has opinions.”

The smile on Roderick’s mobile face passed rapidly into a frown. “Oh, she thinks what I think!” he answered.

Before the two young men separated Rowland attempted to give as harmonious a shape as possible to his companion’s scheme. “I have launched you, as I may say,” he said, “and I feel as if I ought to see you into port. I am older than you and know the world better, and it seems well that we should voyage a while together. It ‘s on my conscience that I ought to take you to Rome, walk you through the Vatican, and then lock you up with a heap of clay. I sail on the fifth of September; can you make your preparations to start with me?”

Roderick assented to all this with an air of candid confidence in his friend’s wisdom that outshone the virtue of pledges. “I have no preparations to make,” he said with a smile, raising his arms and letting them fall, as if to indicate his unencumbered condition. “What I am to take with me I carry here!” and he tapped his forehead.

“Happy man!” murmured Rowland with a sigh, thinking of the light stowage, in his own organism, in the region indicated by Roderick, and of the heavy one in deposit at his banker’s, of bags and boxes.

When his companion had left him he went in search of Cecilia. She was sitting at work at a shady window, and welcomed him to a low chintz-covered chair. He sat some time, thoughtfully snipping tape with her scissors; he expected criticism and he was preparing a rejoinder. At last he told her of Roderick’s decision and of his own influence in it. Cecilia, besides an extreme surprise, exhibited a certain fine displeasure at his not having asked her advice.

“What would you have said, if I had?” he demanded.

“I would have said in the first place, ‘Oh for pity’s sake don’t carry off the person in all Northampton who amuses me most!’ I would have said in the second place, ‘Nonsense! the boy is doing very well. Let well alone!’”

“That in the first five minutes. What would you have said later?”

“That for a man who is generally averse to meddling, you were suddenly rather officious.”

Rowland’s countenance fell. He frowned in silence. Cecilia looked at him askance; gradually the spark of irritation faded from her eye.

“Excuse my sharpness,” she resumed at last. “But I am literally in despair at losing Roderick Hudson. His visits in the evening, for the past year, have kept me alive. They have given a silver tip to leaden days. I don’t say he is of a more useful metal than other people, but he is of a different one. Of course, however, that I shall miss him sadly is not a reason for his not going to seek his fortune. Men must work and women must weep!”

“Decidedly not!” said Rowland, with a good deal of emphasis. He had suspected from the first hour of his stay that Cecilia had treated herself to a private social luxury; he had then discovered that she found it in Hudson’s lounging visits and boyish chatter, and he had felt himself wondering at last whether, judiciously viewed, her gain in the matter was not the young man’s loss. It was evident that Cecilia was not judicious, and that her good sense, habitually rigid under the demands of domestic economy, indulged itself with a certain agreeable laxity on this particular point. She liked her young friend just as he was; she humored him, flattered him, laughed at him, caressed him—did everything but advise him. It was a flirtation without the benefits of a flirtation. She was too old to let him fall in love with her, which might have done him good; and her inclination was to keep him young, so that the nonsense he talked might never transgress a certain line. It was quite conceivable that poor Cecilia should relish a pastime; but if one had philanthropically embraced the idea that something considerable might be made of Roderick, it was impossible not to see that her friendship was not what might be called tonic. So Rowland reflected, in the glow of his new-born sympathy. There was a later time when he would have been grateful if Hudson’s susceptibility to the relaxing influence of lovely women might have been limited to such inexpensive tribute as he rendered the excellent Cecilia.

“I only desire to remind you,” she pursued, “that you are likely to have your hands full.”

“I ‘ve thought of that, and I rather like the idea; liking, as I do, the man. I told you the other day, you know, that I longed to have something on my hands. When it first occurred to me that I might start our young friend on the path of glory, I felt as if I had an unimpeachable inspiration. Then I remembered there were dangers and difficulties, and asked myself whether I had a right to step in between him and his obscurity. My sense of his really having the divine flame answered the question. He is made to do the things that humanity is the happier for! I can’t do such things myself, but when I see a young man of genius standing helpless and hopeless for want of capital, I feel—and it ‘s no affectation of humility, I assure you—as if it would give at least a reflected usefulness to my own life to offer him his opportunity.”

“In the name of humanity, I suppose, I ought to thank you. But I want, first of all, to be happy myself. You guarantee us at any rate, I hope, the masterpieces.”

“A masterpiece a year,” said Rowland smiling, “for the next quarter of a century.”

“It seems to me that we have a right to ask more: to demand that you guarantee us not only the development of the artist, but the security of the man.”

Rowland became grave again. “His security?”

“His moral, his sentimental security. Here, you see, it ‘s perfect. We are all under a tacit compact to preserve it. Perhaps you believe in the necessary turbulence of genius, and you intend to enjoin upon your protege the importance of cultivating his passions.”

“On the contrary, I believe that a man of genius owes as much deference to his passions as any other man, but not a particle more, and I confess I have a strong conviction that the artist is better for leading a quiet life. That is what I shall preach to my protege, as you call him, by example as well as by precept. You evidently believe,” he added in a moment, “that he will lead me a dance.”

“Nay, I prophesy nothing. I only think that circumstances, with our young man, have a great influence; as is proved by the fact that although he has been fuming and fretting here for the last five years, he has nevertheless managed to make the best of it, and found it easy, on the whole, to vegetate. Transplanted to Rome, I fancy he ‘ll put forth a denser leafage. I should like vastly to see the change. You must write me about it, from stage to stage. I hope with all my heart that the fruit will be proportionate to the foliage. Don’t think me a bird of ill omen; only remember that you will be held to a strict account.”

“A man should make the most of himself, and be helped if he needs help,” Rowland answered, after a long pause. “Of course when a body begins to expand, there comes in the possibility of bursting; but I nevertheless approve of a certain tension of one’s being. It ‘s what a man is meant for. And then I believe in the essential salubrity of genius—true genius.”

“Very good,” said Cecilia, with an air of resignation which made Rowland, for the moment, seem to himself culpably eager. “We ‘ll drink then to-day at dinner to the health of our friend.”

* * *

Having it much at heart to convince Mrs. Hudson of the purity of his intentions, Rowland waited upon her that evening. He was ushered into a large parlor, which, by the light of a couple of candles, he perceived to be very meagrely furnished and very tenderly and sparingly used. The windows were open to the air of the summer night, and a circle of three persons was temporarily awed into silence by his appearance. One of these was Mrs. Hudson, who was sitting at one of the windows, empty-handed save for the pocket-handkerchief in her lap, which was held with an air of familiarity with its sadder uses. Near her, on the sofa, half sitting, half lounging, in the attitude of a visitor outstaying ceremony, with one long leg flung over the other and a large foot in a clumsy boot swinging to and fro continually, was a lean, sandy-haired gentleman whom Rowland recognized as the original of the portrait of Mr. Barnaby Striker. At the table, near the candles, busy with a substantial piece of needle-work, sat the young girl of whom he had had a moment’s quickened glimpse in Roderick’s studio, and whom he had learned to be Miss Garland, his companion’s kinswoman. This young lady’s limpid, penetrating gaze was the most effective greeting he received. Mrs. Hudson rose with a soft, vague sound of distress, and stood looking at him shrinkingly and waveringly, as if she were sorely tempted to retreat through the open window. Mr. Striker swung his long leg a trifle defiantly. No one, evidently, was used to offering hollow welcomes or telling polite fibs. Rowland introduced himself; he had come, he might say, upon business.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Hudson tremulously; “I know—my son has told me. I suppose it is better I should see you. Perhaps you will take a seat.”

With this invitation Rowland prepared to comply, and, turning, grasped the first chair that offered itself.

“Not that one,” said a full, grave voice; whereupon he perceived that a quantity of sewing-silk had been suspended and entangled over the back, preparatory to being wound on reels. He felt the least bit irritated at the curtness of the warning, coming as it did from a young woman whose countenance he had mentally pronounced interesting, and with regard to whom he was conscious of the germ of the inevitable desire to produce a responsive interest. And then he thought it would break the ice to say something playfully urbane.

“Oh, you should let me take the chair,” he answered, “and have the pleasure of holding the skeins myself!”

For all reply to this sally he received a stare of undisguised amazement from Miss Garland, who then looked across at Mrs. Hudson with a glance which plainly said: “You see he ‘s quite the insidious personage we feared.” The elder lady, however, sat with her eyes fixed on the ground and her two hands tightly clasped. But touching her Rowland felt much more compassion than resentment; her attitude was not coldness, it was a kind of dread, almost a terror. She was a small, eager woman, with a pale, troubled face, which added to her apparent age. After looking at her for some minutes Rowland saw that she was still young, and that she must have been a very girlish bride. She had been a pretty one, too, though she probably had looked terribly frightened at the altar. She was very delicately made, and Roderick had come honestly by his physical slimness and elegance. She wore no cap, and her flaxen hair, which was of extraordinary fineness, was smoothed and confined with Puritanic precision. She was excessively shy, and evidently very humble-minded; it was singular to see a woman to whom the experience of life had conveyed so little reassurance as to her own resources or the chances of things turning out well. Rowland began immediately to like her, and to feel impatient to persuade her that there was no harm in him, and that, twenty to one, her son would make her a well-pleased woman yet. He foresaw that she would be easy to persuade, and that a benevolent conversational tone would probably make her pass, fluttering, from distrust into an oppressive extreme of confidence. But he had an indefinable sense that the person who was testing that strong young eyesight of hers in the dim candle-light was less readily beguiled from her mysterious feminine preconceptions. Miss Garland, according to Cecilia’s judgment, as Rowland remembered, had not a countenance to inspire a sculptor; but it seemed to Rowland that her countenance might fairly inspire a man who was far from being a sculptor. She was not pretty, as the eye of habit judges prettiness, but when you made the observation you somehow failed to set it down against her, for you had already passed from measuring contours to tracing meanings. In Mary Garland’s face there were many possible ones, and they gave you the more to think about that it was not—like Roderick Hudson’s, for instance—a quick and mobile face, over which expression flickered like a candle in a wind. They followed each other slowly, distinctly, gravely, sincerely, and you might almost have fancied that, as they came and went, they gave her a sort of pain. She was tall and slender, and had an air of maidenly strength and decision. She had a broad forehead and dark eyebrows, a trifle thicker than those of classic beauties; her gray eye was clear but not brilliant, and her features were perfectly irregular. Her mouth was large, fortunately for the principal grace of her physiognomy was her smile, which displayed itself with magnificent amplitude. Rowland, indeed, had not yet seen her smile, but something assured him that her rigid gravity had a radiant counterpart. She wore a scanty white dress, and had a nameless rustic air which would have led one to speak of her less as a young lady than as a young woman. She was evidently a girl of a great personal force, but she lacked pliancy. She was hemming a kitchen towel with the aid of a large steel thimble. She bent her serious eyes at last on her work again, and let Rowland explain himself.

“I have become suddenly so very intimate with your son,” he said at last, addressing himself to Mrs. Hudson, “that it seems just I should make your acquaintance.”

“Very just,” murmured the poor lady, and after a moment’s hesitation was on the point of adding something more; but Mr. Striker here interposed, after a prefatory clearance of the throat.

“I should like to take the liberty,” he said, “of addressing you a simple question. For how long a period of time have you been acquainted with our young friend?” He continued to kick the air, but his head was thrown back and his eyes fixed on the opposite wall, as if in aversion to the spectacle of Rowland’s inevitable confusion.

“A very short time, I confess. Hardly three days.”

“And yet you call yourself intimate, eh? I have been seeing Mr. Roderick daily these three years, and yet it was only this morning that I felt as if I had at last the right to say that I knew him. We had a few moments’ conversation in my office which supplied the missing links in the evidence. So that now I do venture to say I ‘m acquainted with Mr. Roderick! But wait three years, sir, like me!” and Mr. Striker laughed, with a closed mouth and a noiseless shake of all his long person.

Mrs. Hudson smiled confusedly, at hazard; Miss Garland kept her eyes on her stitches. But it seemed to Rowland that the latter colored a little. “Oh, in three years, of course,” he said, “we shall know each other better. Before many years are over, madam,” he pursued, “I expect the world to know him. I expect him to be a great man!”

Mrs. Hudson looked at first as if this could be but an insidious device for increasing her distress by the assistance of irony. Then reassured, little by little, by Rowland’s benevolent visage, she gave him an appealing glance and a timorous “Really?”

But before Rowland could respond, Mr. Striker again intervened. “Do I fully apprehend your expression?” he asked. “Our young friend is to become a great man?”

“A great artist, I hope,” said Rowland.

“This is a new and interesting view,” said Mr. Striker, with an assumption of judicial calmness. “We have had hopes for Mr. Roderick, but I confess, if I have rightly understood them, they stopped short of greatness. We should n’t have taken the responsibility of claiming it for him. What do you say, ladies? We all feel about him here—his mother, Miss Garland, and myself—as if his merits were rather in the line of the”—and Mr. Striker waved his hand with a series of fantastic flourishes in the air—“of the light ornamental!” Mr. Striker bore his recalcitrant pupil a grudge, but he was evidently trying both to be fair and to respect the susceptibilities of his companions. But he was unversed in the mysterious processes of feminine emotion. Ten minutes before, there had been a general harmony of sombre views; but on hearing Roderick’s limitations thus distinctly formulated to a stranger, the two ladies mutely protested. Mrs. Hudson uttered a short, faint sigh, and Miss Garland raised her eyes toward their advocate and visited him with a short, cold glance.

“I ‘m afraid, Mrs. Hudson,” Rowland pursued, evading the discussion of Roderick’s possible greatness, “that you don’t at all thank me for stirring up your son’s ambition on a line which leads him so far from home. I suspect I have made you my enemy.”

Mrs. Hudson covered her mouth with her finger-tips and looked painfully perplexed between the desire to confess the truth and the fear of being impolite. “My cousin is no one’s enemy,” Miss Garland hereupon declared, gently, but with that same fine deliberateness with which she had made Rowland relax his grasp of the chair.

“Does she leave that to you?” Rowland ventured to ask, with a smile.

“We are inspired with none but Christian sentiments,” said Mr. Striker; “Miss Garland perhaps most of all. Miss Garland,” and Mr. Striker waved his hand again as if to perform an introduction which had been regrettably omitted, “is the daughter of a minister, the granddaughter of a minister, the sister of a minister.” Rowland bowed deferentially, and the young girl went on with her sewing, with nothing, apparently, either of embarrassment or elation at the promulgation of these facts. Mr. Striker continued: “Mrs. Hudson, I see, is too deeply agitated to converse with you freely. She will allow me to address you a few questions. Would you kindly inform her, as exactly as possible, just what you propose to do with her son?”

The poor lady fixed her eyes appealingly on Rowland’s face and seemed to say that Mr. Striker had spoken her desire, though she herself would have expressed it less defiantly. But Rowland saw in Mr. Striker’s many-wrinkled light blue eye, shrewd at once and good-natured, that he had no intention of defiance, and that he was simply pompous and conceited and sarcastically compassionate of any view of things in which Roderick Hudson was regarded in a serious light.

“Do, my dear madam?” demanded Rowland. “I don’t propose to do anything. He must do for himself. I simply offer him the chance. He ‘s to study, to work—hard, I hope.”

“Not too hard, please,” murmured Mrs. Hudson, pleadingly, wheeling about from recent visions of dangerous leisure. “He ‘s not very strong, and I ‘m afraid the climate of Europe is very relaxing.”

“Ah, study?” repeated Mr. Striker. “To what line of study is he to direct his attention?” Then suddenly, with an impulse of disinterested curiosity on his own account, “How do you study sculpture, anyhow?”

“By looking at models and imitating them.”

“At models, eh? To what kind of models do you refer?”

“To the antique, in the first place.”

“Ah, the antique,” repeated Mr. Striker, with a jocose intonation. “Do you hear, madam? Roderick is going off to Europe to learn to imitate the antique.”

“I suppose it ‘s all right,” said Mrs. Hudson, twisting herself in a sort of delicate anguish.

“An antique, as I understand it,” the lawyer continued, “is an image of a pagan deity, with considerable dirt sticking to it, and no arms, no nose, and no clothing. A precious model, certainly!”

“That ‘s a very good description of many,” said Rowland, with a laugh.

“Mercy! Truly?” asked Mrs. Hudson, borrowing courage from his urbanity.

“But a sculptor’s studies, you intimate, are not confined to the antique,” Mr. Striker resumed. “After he has been looking three or four years at the objects I describe”—

“He studies the living model,” said Rowland.

“Does it take three or four years?” asked Mrs. Hudson, imploringly.

“That depends upon the artist’s aptitude. After twenty years a real artist is still studying.”

“Oh, my poor boy!” moaned Mrs. Hudson, finding the prospect, under every light, still terrible.

“Now this study of the living model,” Mr. Striker pursued. “Inform Mrs. Hudson about that.”

“Oh dear, no!” cried Mrs. Hudson, shrinkingly.

“That too,” said Rowland, “is one of the reasons for studying in Rome. It ‘s a handsome race, you know, and you find very well-made people.”

“I suppose they ‘re no better made than a good tough Yankee,” objected Mr. Striker, transposing his interminable legs. “The same God made us.”

“Surely,” sighed Mrs. Hudson, but with a questioning glance at her visitor which showed that she had already begun to concede much weight to his opinion. Rowland hastened to express his assent to Mr. Striker’s proposition.

Miss Garland looked up, and, after a moment’s hesitation: “Are the Roman women very beautiful?” she asked.

Rowland too, in answering, hesitated; he was looking straight at the young girl. “On the whole, I prefer ours,” he said.

She had dropped her work in her lap; her hands were crossed upon it, her head thrown a little back. She had evidently expected a more impersonal answer, and she was dissatisfied. For an instant she seemed inclined to make a rejoinder, but she slowly picked up her work in silence and drew her stitches again.

Rowland had for the second time the feeling that she judged him to be a person of a disagreeably sophisticated tone. He noticed too that the kitchen towel she was hemming was terribly coarse. And yet his answer had a resonant inward echo, and he repeated to himself, “Yes, on the whole, I prefer ours.”

Rowland listened to all this with a sort of feeling that fortune had played him an elaborately-devised trick. It had lured him out into mid-ocean and smoothed the sea and stilled the winds and given him a singularly sympathetic comrade, and then it had turned and delivered him a thumping blow in mid-chest. “Yes,” he said, after an attempt at the usual formal congratulation, “you certainly ought to do better—with Miss Garland waiting for you at Northampton.”

Roderick, now that he had broken ground, was eloquent and rung a hundred changes on the assurance that he was a very happy man. Then at last, suddenly, his climax was a yawn, and he declared that he must go to bed. Rowland let him go alone, and sat there late, between sea and sky.

CHAPTER III. Rome

One warm, still day, late in the Roman autumn, our two young men were sitting beneath one of the high-stemmed pines of the Villa Ludovisi. They had been spending an hour in the mouldy little garden-house, where the colossal mask of the famous Juno looks out with blank eyes from that dusky corner which must seem to her the last possible stage of a lapse from Olympus. Then they had wandered out into the gardens, and were lounging away the morning under the spell of their magical picturesqueness. Roderick declared that he would go nowhere else; that, after the Juno, it was a profanation to look at anything but sky and trees. There was a fresco of Guercino, to which Rowland, though he had seen it on his former visit to Rome, went dutifully to pay his respects. But Roderick, though he had never seen it, declared that it could n’t be worth a fig, and that he did n’t care to look at ugly things. He remained stretched on his overcoat, which he had spread on the grass, while Rowland went off envying the intellectual comfort of genius, which can arrive at serene conclusions without disagreeable processes. When the latter came back, his friend was sitting with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. Rowland, in the geniality of a mood attuned to the mellow charm of a Roman villa, found a good word to say for the Guercino; but he chiefly talked of the view from the little belvedere on the roof of the casino, and how it looked like the prospect from a castle turret in a fairy tale.

“Very likely,” said Roderick, throwing himself back with a yawn. “But I must let it pass. I have seen enough for the present; I have reached the top of the hill. I have an indigestion of impressions; I must work them off before I go in for any more. I don’t want to look at any more of other people’s works, for a month—not even at Nature’s own. I want to look at Roderick Hudson’s. The result of it all is that I ‘m not afraid. I can but try, as well as the rest of them! The fellow who did that gazing goddess yonder only made an experiment. The other day, when I was looking at Michael Angelo’s Moses, I was seized with a kind of defiance—a reaction against all this mere passive enjoyment of grandeur. It was a rousing great success, certainly, that rose there before me, but somehow it was not an inscrutable mystery, and it seemed to me, not perhaps that I should some day do as well, but that at least I might!”

“As you say, you can but try,” said Rowland. “Success is only passionate effort.”

“Well, the passion is blazing; we have been piling on fuel handsomely. It came over me just now that it is exactly three months to a day since I left Northampton. I can’t believe it!”

“It certainly seems more.”

“It seems like ten years. What an exquisite ass I was!”

“Do you feel so wise now?”

“Verily! Don’t I look so? Surely I have n’t the same face. Have n’t I a different eye, a different expression, a different voice?”

“I can hardly say, because I have seen the transition. But it ‘s very likely. You are, in the literal sense of the word, more civilized. I dare say,” added Rowland, “that Miss Garland would think so.”

“That ‘s not what she would call it; she would say I was corrupted.”

Rowland asked few questions about Miss Garland, but he always listened narrowly to his companion’s voluntary observations.

“Are you very sure?” he replied.

“Why, she ‘s a stern moralist, and she would infer from my appearance that I had become a cynical sybarite.” Roderick had, in fact, a Venetian watch-chain round his neck and a magnificent Roman intaglio on the third finger of his left hand.

“Will you think I take a liberty,” asked Rowland, “if I say you judge her superficially?”

“For heaven’s sake,” cried Roderick, laughing, “don’t tell me she ‘s not a moralist! It was for that I fell in love with her, and with rigid virtue in her person.”

“She is a moralist, but not, as you imply, a narrow one. That ‘s more than a difference in degree; it ‘s a difference in kind. I don’t know whether I ever mentioned it, but I admire her extremely. There is nothing narrow about her but her experience; everything else is large. My impression of her is of a person of great capacity, as yet wholly unmeasured and untested. Some day or other, I ‘m sure, she will judge fairly and wisely of everything.”

“Stay a bit!” cried Roderick; “you ‘re a better Catholic than the Pope. I shall be content if she judges fairly of me—of my merits, that is. The rest she must not judge at all. She ‘s a grimly devoted little creature; may she always remain so! Changed as I am, I adore her none the less. What becomes of all our emotions, our impressions,” he went on, after a long pause, “all the material of thought that life pours into us at such a rate during such a memorable three months as these? There are twenty moments a week—a day, for that matter, some days—that seem supreme, twenty impressions that seem ultimate, that appear to form an intellectual era. But others come treading on their heels and sweeping them along, and they all melt like water into water and settle the question of precedence among themselves. The curious thing is that the more the mind takes in, the more it has space for, and that all one’s ideas are like the Irish people at home who live in the different corners of a room, and take boarders.”

“I fancy it is our peculiar good luck that we don’t see the limits of our minds,” said Rowland. “We are young, compared with what we may one day be. That belongs to youth; it is perhaps the best part of it. They say that old people do find themselves at last face to face with a solid blank wall, and stand thumping against it in vain. It resounds, it seems to have something beyond it, but it won’t move! That ‘s only a reason for living with open doors as long as we can!”

“Open doors?” murmured Roderick. “Yes, let us close no doors that open upon Rome. For this, for the mind, is eternal summer! But though my doors may stand open to-day,” he presently added, “I shall see no visitors. I want to pause and breathe; I want to dream of a statue. I have been working hard for three months; I have earned a right to a reverie.”

Rowland, on his side, was not without provision for reflection, and they lingered on in broken, desultory talk. Rowland felt the need for intellectual rest, for a truce to present care for churches, statues, and pictures, on even better grounds than his companion, inasmuch as he had really been living Roderick’s intellectual life the past three months, as well as his own. As he looked back on these full-flavored weeks, he drew a long breath of satisfaction, almost of relief. Roderick, thus far, had justified his confidence and flattered his perspicacity; he was rapidly unfolding into an ideal brilliancy. He was changed even more than he himself suspected; he had stepped, without faltering, into his birthright, and was spending money, intellectually, as lavishly as a young heir who has just won an obstructive lawsuit. Roderick’s glance and voice were the same, doubtless, as when they enlivened the summer dusk on Cecilia’s veranda, but in his person, generally, there was an indefinable expression of experience rapidly and easily assimilated. Rowland had been struck at the outset with the instinctive quickness of his observation and his free appropriation of whatever might serve his purpose. He had not been, for instance, half an hour on English soil before he perceived that he was dressed like a rustic, and he had immediately reformed his toilet with the most unerring tact. His appetite for novelty was insatiable, and for everything characteristically foreign, as it presented itself, he had an extravagant greeting; but in half an hour the novelty had faded, he had guessed the secret, he had plucked out the heart of the mystery and was clamoring for a keener sensation. At the end of a month, he presented, mentally, a puzzling spectacle to his companion. He had caught, instinctively, the key-note of the old world. He observed and enjoyed, he criticised and rhapsodized, but though all things interested him and many delighted him, none surprised him; he had divined their logic and measured their proportions, and referred them infallibly to their categories. Witnessing the rate at which he did intellectual execution on the general spectacle of European life, Rowland at moments felt vaguely uneasy for the future; the boy was living too fast, he would have said, and giving alarming pledges to ennui in his later years. But we must live as our pulses are timed, and Roderick’s struck the hour very often. He was, by imagination, though he never became in manner, a natural man of the world; he had intuitively, as an artist, what one may call the historic consciousness. He had a relish for social subtleties and mysteries, and, in perception, when occasion offered him an inch he never failed to take an ell. A single glimpse of a social situation of the elder type enabled him to construct the whole, with all its complex chiaroscuro, and Rowland more than once assured him that he made him believe in the metempsychosis, and that he must have lived in European society, in the last century, as a gentleman in a cocked hat and brocaded waistcoat. Hudson asked Rowland questions which poor Rowland was quite unable to answer, and of which he was equally unable to conceive where he had picked up the data. Roderick ended by answering them himself, tolerably to his satisfaction, and in a short time he had almost turned the tables and become in their walks and talks the accredited source of information. Rowland told him that when he turned sculptor a capital novelist was spoiled, and that to match his eye for social detail one would have to go to Honore de Balzac. In all this Rowland took a generous pleasure; he felt an especial kindness for his comrade’s radiant youthfulness of temperament. He was so much younger than he himself had ever been! And surely youth and genius, hand in hand, were the most beautiful sight in the world. Roderick added to this the charm of his more immediately personal qualities. The vivacity of his perceptions, the audacity of his imagination, the picturesqueness of his phrase when he was pleased,—and even more when he was displeased,—his abounding good-humor, his candor, his unclouded frankness, his unfailing impulse to share every emotion and impression with his friend; all this made comradeship a pure felicity, and interfused with a deeper amenity their long evening talks at cafe doors in Italian towns.

They had gone almost immediately to Paris, and had spent their days at the Louvre and their evenings at the theatre. Roderick was divided in mind as to whether Titian or Mademoiselle Delaporte was the greater artist. They had come down through France to Genoa and Milan, had spent a fortnight in Venice and another in Florence, and had now been a month in Rome. Roderick had said that he meant to spend three months in simply looking, absorbing, and reflecting, without putting pencil to paper. He looked indefatigably, and certainly saw great things—things greater, doubtless, at times, than the intentions of the artist. And yet he made few false steps and wasted little time in theories of what he ought to like and to dislike. He judged instinctively and passionately, but never vulgarly. At Venice, for a couple of days, he had half a fit of melancholy over the pretended discovery that he had missed his way, and that the only proper vestment of plastic conceptions was the coloring of Titian and Paul Veronese. Then one morning the two young men had themselves rowed out to Torcello, and Roderick lay back for a couple of hours watching a brown-breasted gondolier making superb muscular movements, in high relief, against the sky of the Adriatic, and at the end jerked himself up with a violence that nearly swamped the gondola, and declared that the only thing worth living for was to make a colossal bronze and set it aloft in the light of a public square. In Rome his first care was for the Vatican; he went there again and again. But the old imperial and papal city altogether delighted him; only there he really found what he had been looking for from the first—the complete antipodes of Northampton. And indeed Rome is the natural home of those spirits with which we just now claimed fellowship for Roderick—the spirits with a deep relish for the artificial element in life and the infinite superpositions of history. It is the immemorial city of convention. The stagnant Roman air is charged with convention; it colors the yellow light and deepens the chilly shadows. And in that still recent day the most impressive convention in all history was visible to men’s eyes, in the Roman streets, erect in a gilded coach drawn by four black horses. Roderick’s first fortnight was a high aesthetic revel. He declared that Rome made him feel and understand more things than he could express: he was sure that life must have there, for all one’s senses, an incomparable fineness; that more interesting things must happen to one than anywhere else. And he gave Rowland to understand that he meant to live freely and largely, and be as interested as occasion demanded. Rowland saw no reason to regard this as a menace of dissipation, because, in the first place, there was in all dissipation, refine it as one might, a grossness which would disqualify it for Roderick’s favor, and because, in the second, the young sculptor was a man to regard all things in the light of his art, to hand over his passions to his genius to be dealt with, and to find that he could live largely enough without exceeding the circle of wholesome curiosity. Rowland took immense satisfaction in his companion’s deep impatience to make something of all his impressions. Some of these indeed found their way into a channel which did not lead to statues, but it was none the less a safe one. He wrote frequent long letters to Miss Garland; when Rowland went with him to post them he thought wistfully of the fortune of the great loosely-written missives, which cost Roderick unconscionable sums in postage. He received punctual answers of a more frugal form, written in a clear, minute hand, on paper vexatiously thin. If Rowland was present when they came, he turned away and thought of other things—or tried to. These were the only moments when his sympathy halted, and they were brief. For the rest he let the days go by unprotestingly, and enjoyed Roderick’s serene efflorescence as he would have done a beautiful summer sunrise. Rome, for the past month, had been delicious. The annual descent of the Goths had not yet begun, and sunny leisure seemed to brood over the city.

Roderick had taken out a note-book and was roughly sketching a memento of the great Juno. Suddenly there was a noise on the gravel, and the young men, looking up, saw three persons advancing. One was a woman of middle age, with a rather grand air and a great many furbelows. She looked very hard at our friends as she passed, and glanced back over her shoulder, as if to hasten the step of a young girl who slowly followed her. She had such an expansive majesty of mien that Rowland supposed she must have some proprietary right in the villa and was not just then in a hospitable mood. Beside her walked a little elderly man, tightly buttoned in a shabby black coat, but with a flower in his lappet, and a pair of soiled light gloves. He was a grotesque-looking personage, and might have passed for a gentleman of the old school, reduced by adversity to playing cicerone to foreigners of distinction. He had a little black eye which glittered like a diamond and rolled about like a ball of quicksilver, and a white moustache, cut short and stiff, like a worn-out brush. He was smiling with extreme urbanity, and talking in a low, mellifluous voice to the lady, who evidently was not listening to him. At a considerable distance behind this couple strolled a young girl, apparently of about twenty. She was tall and slender, and dressed with extreme elegance; she led by a cord a large poodle of the most fantastic aspect. He was combed and decked like a ram for sacrifice; his trunk and haunches were of the most transparent pink, his fleecy head and shoulders as white as jeweler’s cotton, and his tail and ears ornamented with long blue ribbons. He stepped along stiffly and solemnly beside his mistress, with an air of conscious elegance. There was something at first slightly ridiculous in the sight of a young lady gravely appended to an animal of these incongruous attributes, and Roderick, with his customary frankness, greeted the spectacle with a confident smile. The young girl perceived it and turned her face full upon him, with a gaze intended apparently to enforce greater deference. It was not deference, however, her face provoked, but startled, submissive admiration; Roderick’s smile fell dead, and he sat eagerly staring. A pair of extraordinary dark blue eyes, a mass of dusky hair over a low forehead, a blooming oval of perfect purity, a flexible lip, just touched with disdain, the step and carriage of a tired princess—these were the general features of his vision. The young lady was walking slowly and letting her long dress rustle over the gravel; the young men had time to see her distinctly before she averted her face and went her way. She left a vague, sweet perfume behind her as she passed.

“Immortal powers!” cried Roderick, “what a vision! In the name of transcendent perfection, who is she?” He sprang up and stood looking after her until she rounded a turn in the avenue. “What a movement, what a manner, what a poise of the head! I wonder if she would sit to me.”

“You had better go and ask her,” said Rowland, laughing. “She is certainly most beautiful.”

“Beautiful? She ‘s beauty itself—she ‘s a revelation. I don’t believe she is living—she ‘s a phantasm, a vapor, an illusion!”

“The poodle,” said Rowland, “is certainly alive.”

“Nay, he too may be a grotesque phantom, like the black dog in Faust.”

“I hope at least that the young lady has nothing in common with Mephistopheles. She looked dangerous.”

“If beauty is immoral, as people think at Northampton,” said Roderick, “she is the incarnation of evil. The mamma and the queer old gentleman, moreover, are a pledge of her reality. Who are they all?”

“The Prince and Princess Ludovisi and the principessina,” suggested Rowland.

“There are no such people,” said Roderick. “Besides, the little old man is not the papa.” Rowland smiled, wondering how he had ascertained these facts, and the young sculptor went on. “The old man is a Roman, a hanger-on of the mamma, a useful personage who now and then gets asked to dinner. The ladies are foreigners, from some Northern country; I won’t say which.”

“Perhaps from the State of Maine,” said Rowland.

“No, she ‘s not an American, I ‘ll lay a wager on that. She ‘s a daughter of this elder world. We shall see her again, I pray my stars; but if we don’t, I shall have done something I never expected to—I shall have had a glimpse of ideal beauty.” He sat down again and went on with his sketch of the Juno, scrawled away for ten minutes, and then handed the result in silence to Rowland. Rowland uttered an exclamation of surprise and applause. The drawing represented the Juno as to the position of the head, the brow, and the broad fillet across the hair; but the eyes, the mouth, the physiognomy were a vivid portrait of the young girl with the poodle. “I have been wanting a subject,” said Roderick: “there ‘s one made to my hand! And now for work!”

They saw no more of the young girl, though Roderick looked hopefully, for some days, into the carriages on the Pincian. She had evidently been but passing through Rome; Naples or Florence now happily possessed her, and she was guiding her fleecy companion through the Villa Reale or the Boboli Gardens with the same superb defiance of irony. Roderick went to work and spent a month shut up in his studio; he had an idea, and he was not to rest till he had embodied it. He had established himself in the basement of a huge, dusky, dilapidated old house, in that long, tortuous, and preeminently Roman street which leads from the Corso to the Bridge of St. Angelo. The black archway which admitted you might have served as the portal of the Augean stables, but you emerged presently upon a mouldy little court, of which the fourth side was formed by a narrow terrace, overhanging the Tiber. Here, along the parapet, were stationed half a dozen shapeless fragments of sculpture, with a couple of meagre orange-trees in terra-cotta tubs, and an oleander that never flowered. The unclean, historic river swept beneath; behind were dusky, reeking walls, spotted here and there with hanging rags and flower-pots in windows; opposite, at a distance, were the bare brown banks of the stream, the huge rotunda of St. Angelo, tipped with its seraphic statue, the dome of St. Peter’s, and the broad-topped pines of the Villa Doria. The place was crumbling and shabby and melancholy, but the river was delightful, the rent was a trifle, and everything was picturesque. Roderick was in the best humor with his quarters from the first, and was certain that the working mood there would be intenser in an hour than in twenty years of Northampton. His studio was a huge, empty room with a vaulted ceiling, covered with vague, dark traces of an old fresco, which Rowland, when he spent an hour with his friend, used to stare at vainly for some surviving coherence of floating draperies and clasping arms. Roderick had lodged himself economically in the same quarter. He occupied a fifth floor on the Ripetta, but he was only at home to sleep, for when he was not at work he was either lounging in Rowland’s more luxurious rooms or strolling through streets and churches and gardens.

Rowland had found a convenient corner in a stately old palace not far from the Fountain of Trevi, and made himself a home to which books and pictures and prints and odds and ends of curious furniture gave an air of leisurely permanence. He had the tastes of a collector; he spent half his afternoons ransacking the dusty magazines of the curiosity-mongers, and often made his way, in quest of a prize, into the heart of impecunious Roman households, which had been prevailed upon to listen—with closed doors and an impenetrably wary smile—to proposals for an hereditary “antique.” In the evening, often, under the lamp, amid dropped curtains and the scattered gleam of firelight upon polished carvings and mellow paintings, the two friends sat with their heads together, criticising intaglios and etchings, water-color drawings and illuminated missals. Roderick’s quick appreciation of every form of artistic beauty reminded his companion of the flexible temperament of those Italian artists of the sixteenth century who were indifferently painters and sculptors, sonneteers and engravers. At times when he saw how the young sculptor’s day passed in a single sustained pulsation, while his own was broken into a dozen conscious devices for disposing of the hours, and intermingled with sighs, half suppressed, some of them, for conscience’ sake, over what he failed of in action and missed in possession—he felt a pang of something akin to envy. But Rowland had two substantial aids for giving patience the air of contentment: he was an inquisitive reader and a passionate rider. He plunged into bulky German octavos on Italian history, and he spent long afternoons in the saddle, ranging over the grassy desolation of the Campagna. As the season went on and the social groups began to constitute themselves, he found that he knew a great many people and that he had easy opportunity for knowing others. He enjoyed a quiet corner of a drawing-room beside an agreeable woman, and although the machinery of what calls itself society seemed to him to have many superfluous wheels, he accepted invitations and made visits punctiliously, from the conviction that the only way not to be overcome by the ridiculous side of most of such observances is to take them with exaggerated gravity. He introduced Roderick right and left, and suffered him to make his way himself—an enterprise for which Roderick very soon displayed an all-sufficient capacity. Wherever he went he made, not exactly what is called a favorable impression, but what, from a practical point of view, is better—a puzzling one. He took to evening parties as a duck to water, and before the winter was half over was the most freely and frequently discussed young man in the heterogeneous foreign colony. Rowland’s theory of his own duty was to let him run his course and play his cards, only holding himself ready to point out shoals and pitfalls, and administer a friendly propulsion through tight places. Roderick’s manners on the precincts of the Pincian were quite the same as his manners on Cecilia’s veranda: that is, they were no manners at all. But it remained as true as before that it would have been impossible, on the whole, to violate ceremony with less of lasting offense. He interrupted, he contradicted, he spoke to people he had never seen, and left his social creditors without the smallest conversational interest on their loans; he lounged and yawned, he talked loud when he should have talked low, and low when he should have talked loud. Many people, in consequence, thought him insufferably conceited, and declared that he ought to wait till he had something to show for his powers, before he assumed the airs of a spoiled celebrity. But to Rowland and to most friendly observers this judgment was quite beside the mark, and the young man’s undiluted naturalness was its own justification. He was impulsive, spontaneous, sincere; there were so many people at dinner-tables and in studios who were not, that it seemed worth while to allow this rare specimen all possible freedom of action. If Roderick took the words out of your mouth when you were just prepared to deliver them with the most effective accent, he did it with a perfect good conscience and with no pretension of a better right to being heard, but simply because he was full to overflowing of his own momentary thought and it sprang from his lips without asking leave. There were persons who waited on your periods much more deferentially, who were a hundred times more capable than Roderick of a reflective impertinence. Roderick received from various sources, chiefly feminine, enough finely-adjusted advice to have established him in life as an embodiment of the proprieties, and he received it, as he afterwards listened to criticisms on his statues, with unfaltering candor and good-humor. Here and there, doubtless, as he went, he took in a reef in his sail; but he was too adventurous a spirit to be successfully tamed, and he remained at most points the florid, rather strident young Virginian whose serene inflexibility had been the despair of Mr. Striker. All this was what friendly commentators (still chiefly feminine) alluded to when they spoke of his delightful freshness, and critics of harsher sensibilities (of the other sex) when they denounced his damned impertinence. His appearance enforced these impressions—his handsome face, his radiant, unaverted eyes, his childish, unmodulated voice. Afterwards, when those who loved him were in tears, there was something in all this unspotted comeliness that seemed to lend a mockery to the causes of their sorrow.

Certainly, among the young men of genius who, for so many ages, have gone up to Rome to test their powers, none ever made a fairer beginning than Roderick. He rode his two horses at once with extraordinary good fortune; he established the happiest modus vivendi betwixt work and play. He wrestled all day with a mountain of clay in his studio, and chattered half the night away in Roman drawing-rooms. It all seemed part of a kind of divine facility. He was passionately interested, he was feeling his powers; now that they had thoroughly kindled in the glowing aesthetic atmosphere of Rome, the ardent young fellow should be pardoned for believing that he never was to see the end of them. He enjoyed immeasurably, after the chronic obstruction of home, the downright act of production. He kept models in his studio till they dropped with fatigue; he drew, on other days, at the Capitol and the Vatican, till his own head swam with his eagerness, and his limbs stiffened with the cold. He had promptly set up a life-sized figure which he called an “Adam,” and was pushing it rapidly toward completion. There were naturally a great many wiseheads who smiled at his precipitancy, and cited him as one more example of Yankee crudity, a capital recruit to the great army of those who wish to dance before they can walk. They were right, but Roderick was right too, for the success of his statue was not to have been foreseen; it partook, really, of the miraculous. He never surpassed it afterwards, and a good judge here and there has been known to pronounce it the finest piece of sculpture of our modern era. To Rowland it seemed to justify superbly his highest hopes of his friend, and he said to himself that if he had invested his happiness in fostering a genius, he ought now to be in possession of a boundless complacency. There was something especially confident and masterly in the artist’s negligence of all such small picturesque accessories as might serve to label his figure to a vulgar apprehension. If it represented the father of the human race and the primal embodiment of human sensation, it did so in virtue of its look of balanced physical perfection, and deeply, eagerly sentient vitality. Rowland, in fraternal zeal, traveled up to Carrara and selected at the quarries the most magnificent block of marble he could find, and when it came down to Rome, the two young men had a “celebration.” They drove out to Albano, breakfasted boisterously (in their respective measure) at the inn, and lounged away the day in the sun on the top of Monte Cavo. Roderick’s head was full of ideas for other works, which he described with infinite spirit and eloquence, as vividly as if they were ranged on their pedestals before him. He had an indefatigable fancy; things he saw in the streets, in the country, things he heard and read, effects he saw just missed or half-expressed in the works of others, acted upon his mind as a kind of challenge, and he was terribly restless until, in some form or other, he had taken up the glove and set his lance in rest.

A week after his dinner-party, Rowland went into Roderick’s studio and found him sitting before an unfinished piece of work, with a hanging head and a heavy eye. He could have fancied that the fatal hour foretold by Gloriani had struck. Roderick rose with a sombre yawn and flung down his tools. “It ‘s no use,” he said, “I give it up!”

“What is it?”

“I have struck a shallow! I have been sailing bravely, but for the last day or two my keel has been crunching the bottom.”

“A difficult place?” Rowland asked, with a sympathetic inflection, looking vaguely at the roughly modeled figure.

“Oh, it ‘s not the poor clay!” Roderick answered. “The difficult place is here!” And he struck a blow on his heart. “I don’t know what ‘s the matter with me. Nothing comes; all of a sudden I hate things. My old things look ugly; everything looks stupid.”

Rowland was perplexed. He was in the situation of a man who has been riding a blood horse at an even, elastic gallop, and of a sudden feels him stumble and balk. As yet, he reflected, he had seen nothing but the sunshine of genius; he had forgotten that it has its storms. Of course it had! And he felt a flood of comradeship rise in his heart which would float them both safely through the worst weather. “Why, you ‘re tired!” he said. “Of course you ‘re tired. You have a right to be!”

“Do you think I have a right to be?” Roderick asked, looking at him.

“Unquestionably, after all you have done.”

“Well, then, right or wrong, I am tired. I certainly have done a fair winter’s work. I want a change.”

Rowland declared that it was certainly high time they should be leaving Rome. They would go north and travel. They would go to Switzerland, to Germany, to Holland, to England. Roderick assented, his eye brightened, and Rowland talked of a dozen things they might do. Roderick walked up and down; he seemed to have something to say which he hesitated to bring out. He hesitated so rarely that Rowland wondered, and at last asked him what was on his mind. Roderick stopped before him, frowning a little.

“I have such unbounded faith in your good-will,” he said, “that I believe nothing I can say would offend you.”

“Try it,” said Rowland.

“Well, then, I think my journey will do me more good if I take it alone. I need n’t say I prefer your society to that of any man living. For the last six months it has been everything to me. But I have a perpetual feeling that you are expecting something of me, that you are measuring my doings by a terrifically high standard. You are watching me; I don’t want to be watched. I want to go my own way; to work when I choose and to loaf when I choose. It is not that I don’t know what I owe you; it is not that we are not friends. It is simply that I want a taste of absolutely unrestricted freedom. Therefore, I say, let us separate.”

Rowland shook him by the hand. “Willingly. Do as you desire, I shall miss you, and I venture to believe you ‘ll pass some lonely hours. But I have only one request to make: that if you get into trouble of any kind whatever, you will immediately let me know.”

They began their journey, however, together, and crossed the Alps side by side, muffled in one rug, on the top of the St. Gothard coach. Rowland was going to England to pay some promised visits; his companion had no plan save to ramble through Switzerland and Germany as fancy guided him. He had money, now, that would outlast the summer; when it was spent he would come back to Rome and make another statue. At a little mountain village by the way, Roderick declared that he would stop; he would scramble about a little in the high places and doze in the shade of the pine forests. The coach was changing horses; the two young men walked along the village street, picking their way between dunghills, breathing the light, cool air, and listening to the plash of the fountain and the tinkle of cattle-bells. The coach overtook them, and then Rowland, as he prepared to mount, felt an almost overmastering reluctance.

“Say the word,” he exclaimed, “and I will stop too.”

Roderick frowned. “Ah, you don’t trust me; you don’t think I ‘m able to take care of myself. That proves that I was right in feeling as if I were watched!”

“Watched, my dear fellow!” said Rowland. “I hope you may never have anything worse to complain of than being watched in the spirit in which I watch you. But I will spare you even that. Good-by!” Standing in his place, as the coach rolled away, he looked back at his friend lingering by the roadside. A great snow-mountain, behind Roderick, was beginning to turn pink in the sunset. The young man waved his hat, still looking grave. Rowland settled himself in his place, reflecting after all that this was a salubrious beginning of independence. He was among forests and glaciers, leaning on the pure bosom of nature. And then—and then—was it not in itself a guarantee against folly to be engaged to Mary Garland?

CHAPTER IV. Experience

Rowland passed the summer in England, staying with several old friends and two or three new ones. On his arrival, he felt it on his conscience to write to Mrs. Hudson and inform her that her son had relieved him of his tutelage. He felt that she considered him an incorruptible Mentor, following Roderick like a shadow, and he wished to let her know the truth. But he made the truth very comfortable, and gave a succinct statement of the young man’s brilliant beginnings. He owed it to himself, he said, to remind her that he had not judged lightly, and that Roderick’s present achievements were more profitable than his inglorious drudgery at Messrs. Striker & Spooner’s. He was now taking a well-earned holiday and proposing to see a little of the world. He would work none the worse for this; every artist needed to knock about and look at things for himself. They had parted company for a couple of months, for Roderick was now a great man and beyond the need of going about with a keeper. But they were to meet again in Rome in the autumn, and then he should be able to send her more good news. Meanwhile, he was very happy in what Roderick had already done—especially happy in the happiness it must have brought to her. He ventured to ask to be kindly commended to Miss Garland.

His letter was promptly answered—to his surprise in Miss Garland’s own hand. The same mail brought also an epistle from Cecilia. The latter was voluminous, and we must content ourselves with giving an extract.

“Your letter was filled with an echo of that brilliant Roman world, which made me almost ill with envy. For a week after I got it I thought Northampton really unpardonably tame. But I am drifting back again to my old deeps of resignation, and I rush to the window, when any one passes, with all my old gratitude for small favors. So Roderick Hudson is already a great man, and you turn out to be a great prophet? My compliments to both of you; I never heard of anything working so smoothly. And he takes it all very quietly, and does n’t lose his balance nor let it turn his head? You judged him, then, in a day better than I had done in six months, for I really did not expect that he would settle down into such a jog-trot of prosperity. I believed he would do fine things, but I was sure he would intersperse them with a good many follies, and that his beautiful statues would spring up out of the midst of a straggling plantation of wild oats. But from what you tell me, Mr. Striker may now go hang himself..... There is one thing, however, to say as a friend, in the way of warning. That candid soul can keep a secret, and he may have private designs on your equanimity which you don’t begin to suspect. What do you think of his being engaged to Miss Garland? The two ladies had given no hint of it all winter, but a fortnight ago, when those big photographs of his statues arrived, they first pinned them up on the wall, and then trotted out into the town, made a dozen calls, and announced the news. Mrs. Hudson did, at least; Miss Garland, I suppose, sat at home writing letters. To me, I confess, the thing was a perfect surprise. I had not a suspicion that all the while he was coming so regularly to make himself agreeable on my veranda, he was quietly preferring his cousin to any one else. Not, indeed, that he was ever at particular pains to make himself agreeable! I suppose he has picked up a few graces in Rome. But he must not acquire too many: if he is too polite when he comes back, Miss Garland will count him as one of the lost. She will be a very good wife for a man of genius, and such a one as they are often shrewd enough to take. She ‘ll darn his stockings and keep his accounts, and sit at home and trim the lamp and keep up the fire while he studies the Beautiful in pretty neighbors at dinner-parties. The two ladies are evidently very happy, and, to do them justice, very humbly grateful to you. Mrs. Hudson never speaks of you without tears in her eyes, and I am sure she considers you a specially patented agent of Providence. Verily, it ‘s a good thing for a woman to be in love: Miss Garland has grown almost pretty. I met her the other night at a tea-party; she had a white rose in her hair, and sang a sentimental ballad in a fine contralto voice.”

Miss Garland’s letter was so much shorter that we may give it entire:—

My dear Sir,—Mrs. Hudson, as I suppose you know, has been for some time unable to use her eyes. She requests me, therefore, to answer your favor of the 22d of June. She thanks you extremely for writing, and wishes me to say that she considers herself in every way under great obligations to you. Your account of her son’s progress and the high estimation in which he is held has made her very happy, and she earnestly prays that all may continue well with him. He sent us, a short time ago, several large photographs of his two statues, taken from different points of view. We know little about such things, but they seem to us wonderfully beautiful. We sent them to Boston to be handsomely framed, and the man, on returning them, wrote us that he had exhibited them for a week in his store, and that they had attracted great attention. The frames are magnificent, and the pictures now hang in a row on the parlor wall. Our only quarrel with them is that they make the old papering and the engravings look dreadfully shabby. Mr. Striker stood and looked at them the other day full five minutes, and said, at last, that if Roderick’s head was running on such things it was no wonder he could not learn to draw up a deed. We lead here so quiet and monotonous a life that I am afraid I can tell you nothing that will interest you. Mrs. Hudson requests me to say that the little more or less that may happen to us is of small account, as we live in our thoughts and our thoughts are fixed on her dear son. She thanks Heaven he has so good a friend. Mrs. Hudson says that this is too short a letter, but I can say nothing more.

Yours most respectfully,

Mary Garland.

It is a question whether the reader will know why, but this letter gave Rowland extraordinary pleasure. He liked its very brevity and meagreness, and there seemed to him an exquisite modesty in its saying nothing from the young girl herself. He delighted in the formal address and conclusion; they pleased him as he had been pleased by an angular gesture in some expressive girlish figure in an early painting. The letter renewed that impression of strong feeling combined with an almost rigid simplicity, which Roderick’s betrothed had personally given him. And its homely stiffness seemed a vivid reflection of a life concentrated, as the young girl had borrowed warrant from her companion to say, in a single devoted idea. The monotonous days of the two women seemed to Rowland’s fancy to follow each other like the tick-tick of a great time-piece, marking off the hours which separated them from the supreme felicity of clasping the far-away son and lover to lips sealed with the excess of joy. He hoped that Roderick, now that he had shaken off the oppression of his own importunate faith, was not losing a tolerant temper for the silent prayers of the two women at Northampton.

He was left to vain conjectures, however, as to Roderick’s actual moods and occupations. He knew he was no letter-writer, and that, in the young sculptor’s own phrase, he had at any time rather build a monument than write a note. But when a month had passed without news of him, he began to be half anxious and half angry, and wrote him three lines, in the care of a Continental banker, begging him at least to give some sign of whether he was alive or dead. A week afterwards came an answer—brief, and dated Baden-Baden. “I know I have been a great brute,” Roderick wrote, “not to have sent you a word before; but really I don’t know what has got into me. I have lately learned terribly well how to be idle. I am afraid to think how long it is since I wrote to my mother or to Mary. Heaven help them—poor, patient, trustful creatures! I don’t know how to tell you what I am doing. It seems all amusing enough while I do it, but it would make a poor show in a narrative intended for your formidable eyes. I found Baxter in Switzerland, or rather he found me, and he grabbed me by the arm and brought me here. I was walking twenty miles a day in the Alps, drinking milk in lonely chalets, sleeping as you sleep, and thinking it was all very good fun; but Baxter told me it would never do, that the Alps were ‘d–d rot,’ that Baden-Baden was the place, and that if I knew what was good for me I would come along with him. It is a wonderful place, certainly, though, thank the Lord, Baxter departed last week, blaspheming horribly at trente et quarante. But you know all about it and what one does—what one is liable to do. I have succumbed, in a measure, to the liabilities, and I wish I had some one here to give me a thundering good blowing up. Not you, dear friend; you would draw it too mild; you have too much of the milk of human kindness. I have fits of horrible homesickness for my studio, and I shall be devoutly grateful when the summer is over and I can go back and swing a chisel. I feel as if nothing but the chisel would satisfy me; as if I could rush in a rage at a block of unshaped marble. There are a lot of the Roman people here, English and American; I live in the midst of them and talk nonsense from morning till night. There is also some one else; and to her I don’t talk sense, nor, thank heaven, mean what I say. I confess, I need a month’s work to recover my self-respect.”

These lines brought Rowland no small perturbation; the more, that what they seemed to point to surprised him. During the nine months of their companionship Roderick had shown so little taste for dissipation that Rowland had come to think of it as a canceled danger, and it greatly perplexed him to learn that his friend had apparently proved so pliant to opportunity. But Roderick’s allusions were ambiguous, and it was possible they might simply mean that he was out of patience with a frivolous way of life and fretting wholesomely over his absent work. It was a very good thing, certainly, that idleness should prove, on experiment, to sit heavily on his conscience. Nevertheless, the letter needed, to Rowland’s mind, a key: the key arrived a week later. “In common charity,” Roderick wrote, “lend me a hundred pounds! I have gambled away my last franc—I have made a mountain of debts. Send me the money first; lecture me afterwards!” Rowland sent the money by return of mail; then he proceeded, not to lecture, but to think. He hung his head; he was acutely disappointed. He had no right to be, he assured himself; but so it was. Roderick was young, impulsive, unpracticed in stoicism; it was a hundred to one that he was to pay the usual vulgar tribute to folly. But his friend had regarded it as securely gained to his own belief in virtue that he was not as other foolish youths are, and that he would have been capable of looking at folly in the face and passing on his way. Rowland for a while felt a sore sense of wrath. What right had a man who was engaged to that fine girl in Northampton to behave as if his consciousness were a common blank, to be overlaid with coarse sensations? Yes, distinctly, he was disappointed. He had accompanied his missive with an urgent recommendation to leave Baden-Baden immediately, and an offer to meet Roderick at any point he would name. The answer came promptly; it ran as follows: “Send me another fifty pounds! I have been back to the tables. I will leave as soon as the money comes, and meet you at Geneva. There I will tell you everything.”

There is an ancient terrace at Geneva, planted with trees and studded with benches, overlooked by gravely aristocratic old dwellings and overlooking the distant Alps. A great many generations have made it a lounging-place, a great many friends and lovers strolled there, a great many confidential talks and momentous interviews gone forward. Here, one morning, sitting on one of the battered green benches, Roderick, as he had promised, told his friend everything. He had arrived late the night before; he looked tired, and yet flushed and excited. He made no professions of penitence, but he practiced an unmitigated frankness, and his self-reprobation might be taken for granted. He implied in every phrase that he had done with it all, and that he was counting the hours till he could get back to work. We shall not rehearse his confession in detail; its main outline will be sufficient. He had fallen in with some very idle people, and had discovered that a little example and a little practice were capable of producing on his own part a considerable relish for their diversions. What could he do? He never read, and he had no studio; in one way or another he had to pass the time. He passed it in dangling about several very pretty women in wonderful Paris toilets, and reflected that it was always something gained for a sculptor to sit under a tree, looking at his leisure into a charming face and saying things that made it smile and play its muscles and part its lips and show its teeth. Attached to these ladies were certain gentlemen who walked about in clouds of perfume, rose at midday, and supped at midnight. Roderick had found himself in the mood for thinking them very amusing fellows. He was surprised at his own taste, but he let it take its course. It led him to the discovery that to live with ladies who expect you to present them with expensive bouquets, to ride with them in the Black Forest on well-looking horses, to come into their opera-boxes on nights when Patti sang and prices were consequent, to propose little light suppers at the Conversation House after the opera or drives by moonlight to the Castle, to be always arrayed and anointed, trinketed and gloved,—that to move in such society, we say, though it might be a privilege, was a privilege with a penalty attached. But the tables made such things easy; half the Baden world lived by the tables. Roderick tried them and found that at first they smoothed his path delightfully. This simplification of matters, however, was only momentary, for he soon perceived that to seem to have money, and to have it in fact, exposed a good-looking young man to peculiar liabilities. At this point of his friend’s narrative, Rowland was reminded of Madame de Cruchecassee in The Newcomes, and though he had listened in tranquil silence to the rest of it, he found it hard not to say that all this had been, under the circumstances, a very bad business. Roderick admitted it with bitterness, and then told how much—measured simply financially—it had cost him. His luck had changed; the tables had ceased to back him, and he had found himself up to his knees in debt. Every penny had gone of the solid sum which had seemed a large equivalent of those shining statues in Rome. He had been an ass, but it was not irreparable; he could make another statue in a couple of months.

Rowland frowned. “For heaven’s sake,” he said, “don’t play such dangerous games with your facility. If you have got facility, revere it, respect it, adore it, treasure it—don’t speculate on it.” And he wondered what his companion, up to his knees in debt, would have done if there had been no good-natured Rowland Mallet to lend a helping hand. But he did not formulate his curiosity audibly, and the contingency seemed not to have presented itself to Roderick’s imagination. The young sculptor reverted to his late adventures again in the evening, and this time talked of them more objectively, as the phrase is; more as if they had been the adventures of another person. He related half a dozen droll things that had happened to him, and, as if his responsibility had been disengaged by all this free discussion, he laughed extravagantly at the memory of them. Rowland sat perfectly grave, on principle. Then Roderick began to talk of half a dozen statues that he had in his head, and set forth his design, with his usual vividness. Suddenly, as it was relevant, he declared that his Baden doings had not been altogether fruitless, for that the lady who had reminded Rowland of Madame de Cruchecassee was tremendously statuesque. Rowland at last said that it all might pass if he felt that he was really the wiser for it. “By the wiser,” he added, “I mean the stronger in purpose, in will.”

“Oh, don’t talk about will!” Roderick answered, throwing back his head and looking at the stars. This conversation also took place in the open air, on the little island in the shooting Rhone where Jean-Jacques has a monument. “The will, I believe, is the mystery of mysteries. Who can answer for his will? who can say beforehand that it ‘s strong? There are all kinds of indefinable currents moving to and fro between one’s will and one’s inclinations. People talk as if the two things were essentially distinct; on different sides of one’s organism, like the heart and the liver. Mine, I know, are much nearer together. It all depends upon circumstances. I believe there is a certain group of circumstances possible for every man, in which his will is destined to snap like a dry twig.”

“My dear boy,” said Rowland, “don’t talk about the will being ‘destined.’ The will is destiny itself. That ‘s the way to look at it.”

“Look at it, my dear Rowland,” Roderick answered, “as you find most comfortable. One conviction I have gathered from my summer’s experience,” he went on—“it ‘s as well to look it frankly in the face—is that I possess an almost unlimited susceptibility to the influence of a beautiful woman.”

Rowland stared, then strolled away, softly whistling to himself. He was unwilling to admit even to himself that this speech had really the sinister meaning it seemed to have. In a few days the two young men made their way back to Italy, and lingered a while in Florence before going on to Rome. In Florence Roderick seemed to have won back his old innocence and his preference for the pleasures of study over any others. Rowland began to think of the Baden episode as a bad dream, or at the worst as a mere sporadic piece of disorder, without roots in his companion’s character. They passed a fortnight looking at pictures and exploring for out the way bits of fresco and carving, and Roderick recovered all his earlier fervor of appreciation and comment. In Rome he went eagerly to work again, and finished in a month two or three small things he had left standing on his departure. He talked the most joyous nonsense about finding himself back in his old quarters. On the first Sunday afternoon following their return, on their going together to Saint Peter’s, he delivered himself of a lyrical greeting to the great church and to the city in general, in a tone of voice so irrepressibly elevated that it rang through the nave in rather a scandalous fashion, and almost arrested a procession of canons who were marching across to the choir. He began to model a new statue—a female figure, of which he had said nothing to Rowland. It represented a woman, leaning lazily back in her chair, with her head drooping as if she were listening, a vague smile on her lips, and a pair of remarkably beautiful arms folded in her lap. With rather less softness of contour, it would have resembled the noble statue of Agrippina in the Capitol. Rowland looked at it and was not sure he liked it. “Who is it? what does it mean?” he asked.

“Anything you please!” said Roderick, with a certain petulance. “I call it A Reminiscence.”

Rowland then remembered that one of the Baden ladies had been “statuesque,” and asked no more questions. This, after all, was a way of profiting by experience. A few days later he took his first ride of the season on the Campagna, and as, on his homeward way, he was passing across the long shadow of a ruined tower, he perceived a small figure at a short distance, bent over a sketch-book. As he drew near, he recognized his friend Singleton. The honest little painter’s face was scorched to flame-color by the light of southern suns, and borrowed an even deeper crimson from his gleeful greeting of his most appreciative patron. He was making a careful and charming little sketch. On Rowland’s asking him how he had spent his summer, he gave an account of his wanderings which made poor Mallet sigh with a sense of more contrasts than one. He had not been out of Italy, but he had been delving deep into the picturesque heart of the lovely land, and gathering a wonderful store of subjects. He had rambled about among the unvisited villages of the Apennines, pencil in hand and knapsack on back, sleeping on straw and eating black bread and beans, but feasting on local color, rioting, as it were, on chiaroscuro, and laying up a treasure of pictorial observations. He took a devout satisfaction in his hard-earned wisdom and his happy frugality. Rowland went the next day, by appointment, to look at his sketches, and spent a whole morning turning them over. Singleton talked more than he had ever done before, explained them all, and told some quaintly humorous anecdote about the production of each.

“Dear me, how I have chattered!” he said at last. “I am afraid you had rather have looked at the things in peace and quiet. I did n’t know I could talk so much. But somehow, I feel very happy; I feel as if I had improved.”

“That you have,” said Rowland. “I doubt whether an artist ever passed a more profitable three months. You must feel much more sure of yourself.”

Singleton looked for a long time with great intentness at a knot in the floor. “Yes,” he said at last, in a fluttered tone, “I feel much more sure of myself. I have got more facility!” And he lowered his voice as if he were communicating a secret which it took some courage to impart. “I hardly like to say it, for fear I should after all be mistaken. But since it strikes you, perhaps it ‘s true. It ‘s a great happiness; I would not exchange it for a great deal of money.”

“Yes, I suppose it ‘s a great happiness,” said Rowland. “I shall really think of you as living here in a state of scandalous bliss. I don’t believe it ‘s good for an artist to be in such brutally high spirits.”

Singleton stared for a moment, as if he thought Rowland was in earnest; then suddenly fathoming the kindly jest, he walked about the room, scratching his head and laughing intensely to himself. “And Mr. Hudson?” he said, as Rowland was going; “I hope he is well and happy.”

“He is very well,” said Rowland. “He is back at work again.”

“Ah, there ‘s a man,” cried Singleton, “who has taken his start once for all, and does n’t need to stop and ask himself in fear and trembling every month or two whether he is advancing or not. When he stops, it ‘s to rest! And where did he spend his summer?”

“The greater part of it at Baden-Baden.”

“Ah, that ‘s in the Black Forest,” cried Singleton, with profound simplicity. “They say you can make capital studies of trees there.”

“No doubt,” said Rowland, with a smile, laying an almost paternal hand on the little painter’s yellow head. “Unfortunately trees are not Roderick’s line. Nevertheless, he tells me that at Baden he made some studies. Come when you can, by the way,” he added after a moment, “to his studio, and tell me what you think of something he has lately begun.” Singleton declared that he would come delightedly, and Rowland left him to his work.

He met a number of his last winter’s friends again, and called upon Madame Grandoni, upon Miss Blanchard, and upon Gloriani, shortly after their return. The ladies gave an excellent account of themselves. Madame Grandoni had been taking sea-baths at Rimini, and Miss Blanchard painting wild flowers in the Tyrol. Her complexion was somewhat browned, which was very becoming, and her flowers were uncommonly pretty. Gloriani had been in Paris and had come away in high good-humor, finding no one there, in the artist-world, cleverer than himself. He came in a few days to Roderick’s studio, one afternoon when Rowland was present. He examined the new statue with great deference, said it was very promising, and abstained, considerately, from irritating prophecies. But Rowland fancied he observed certain signs of inward jubilation on the clever sculptor’s part, and walked away with him to learn his private opinion.

“Certainly; I liked it as well as I said,” Gloriani declared in answer to Rowland’s anxious query; “or rather I liked it a great deal better. I did n’t say how much, for fear of making your friend angry. But one can leave him alone now, for he ‘s coming round. I told you he could n’t keep up the transcendental style, and he has already broken down. Don’t you see it yourself, man?”

“I don’t particularly like this new statue,” said Rowland.

“That ‘s because you ‘re a purist. It ‘s deuced clever, it ‘s deuced knowing, it ‘s deuced pretty, but it is n’t the topping high art of three months ago. He has taken his turn sooner than I supposed. What has happened to him? Has he been disappointed in love? But that ‘s none of my business. I congratulate him on having become a practical man.”

Miss Light looked for some moments at Roderick’s statues. “Yes,” she said, “they are not so silly as most of the things we have seen. They have no chic, and yet they are beautiful.”

“You describe them perfectly,” said Rowland. “They are beautiful, and yet they have no chic. That ‘s it!”

“If he will promise to put none into my bust, I have a mind to let him make it. A request made in those terms deserves to be granted.”

“In what terms?”

“Did n’t you hear him? ‘Mademoiselle, you almost satisfy my conception of the beautiful. I must model your bust.’ That almost should be rewarded. He is like me; he likes to face the truth. I think we should get on together.”

The Cavaliere approached Rowland, to express the pleasure he had derived from his beautiful “collection.” His smile was exquisitely bland, his accent appealing, caressing, insinuating. But he gave Rowland an odd sense of looking at a little waxen image, adjusted to perform certain gestures and emit certain sounds. It had once contained a soul, but the soul had leaked out. Nevertheless, Rowland reflected, there are more profitless things than mere sound and gesture, in a consummate Italian. And the Cavaliere, too, had soul enough left to desire to speak a few words on his own account, and call Rowland’s attention to the fact that he was not, after all, a hired cicerone, but an ancient Roman gentleman. Rowland felt sorry for him; he hardly knew why. He assured him in a friendly fashion that he must come again; that his house was always at his service. The Cavaliere bowed down to the ground. “You do me too much honor,” he murmured. “If you will allow me—it is not impossible!”

Mrs. Light, meanwhile, had prepared to depart. “If you are not afraid to come and see two quiet little women, we shall be most happy!” she said. “We have no statues nor pictures—we have nothing but each other. Eh, darling?”

“I beg your pardon,” said Christina.

“Oh, and the Cavaliere,” added her mother.

“The poodle, please!” cried the young girl.

Rowland glanced at the Cavaliere; he was smiling more blandly than ever.

A few days later Rowland presented himself, as civility demanded, at Mrs. Light’s door. He found her living in one of the stately houses of the Via dell’ Angelo Custode, and, rather to his surprise, was told she was at home. He passed through half a dozen rooms and was ushered into an immense saloon, at one end of which sat the mistress of the establishment, with a piece of embroidery. She received him very graciously, and then, pointing mysteriously to a large screen which was unfolded across the embrasure of one of the deep windows, “I am keeping guard!” she said. Rowland looked interrogative; whereupon she beckoned him forward and motioned him to look behind the screen. He obeyed, and for some moments stood gazing. Roderick, with his back turned, stood before an extemporized pedestal, ardently shaping a formless mass of clay. Before him sat Christina Light, in a white dress, with her shoulders bare, her magnificent hair twisted into a classic coil, and her head admirably poised. Meeting Rowland’s gaze, she smiled a little, only with her deep gray eyes, without moving. She looked divinely beautiful.

CHAPTER V. Christina

The brilliant Roman winter came round again, and Rowland enjoyed it, in a certain way, more deeply than before. He grew at last to feel that sense of equal possession, of intellectual nearness, which it belongs to the peculiar magic of the ancient city to infuse into minds of a cast that she never would have produced. He became passionately, unreasoningly fond of all Roman sights and sensations, and to breathe the Roman atmosphere began to seem a needful condition of being. He could not have defined and explained the nature of his great love, nor have made up the sum of it by the addition of his calculable pleasures. It was a large, vague, idle, half-profitless emotion, of which perhaps the most pertinent thing that may be said is that it enforced a sort of oppressive reconciliation to the present, the actual, the sensuous—to life on the terms that there offered themselves. It was perhaps for this very reason that, in spite of the charm which Rome flings over one’s mood, there ran through Rowland’s meditations an undertone of melancholy, natural enough in a mind which finds its horizon insidiously limited to the finite, even in very picturesque forms. Whether it is one that tacitly concedes to the Roman Church the monopoly of a guarantee of immortality, so that if one is indisposed to bargain with her for the precious gift, one must do without it altogether; or whether in an atmosphere so heavily weighted with echoes and memories one grows to believe that there is nothing in one’s consciousness that is not foredoomed to moulder and crumble and become dust for the feet, and possible malaria for the lungs, of future generations—the fact at least remains that one parts half-willingly with one’s hopes in Rome, and misses them only under some very exceptional stress of circumstance. For this reason one may perhaps say that there is no other place in which one’s daily temper has such a mellow serenity, and none, at the same time, in which acute attacks of depression are more intolerable. Rowland found, in fact, a perfect response to his prevision that to live in Rome was an education to one’s senses and one’s imagination, but he sometimes wondered whether this was not a questionable gain in case of one’s not being prepared to live wholly by one’s imagination and one’s senses. The tranquil profundity of his daily satisfaction seemed sometimes to turn, by a mysterious inward impulse, and face itself with questioning, admonishing, threatening eyes. “But afterwards…?” it seemed to ask, with a long reverberation; and he could give no answer but a shy affirmation that there was no such thing as afterwards, and a hope, divided against itself, that his actual way of life would last forever. He often felt heavy-hearted; he was sombre without knowing why; there were no visible clouds in his heaven, but there were cloud-shadows on his mood. Shadows projected, they often were, without his knowing it, by an undue apprehension that things after all might not go so ideally well with Roderick. When he understood his anxiety it vexed him, and he rebuked himself for taking things unmanfully hard. If Roderick chose to follow a crooked path, it was no fault of his; he had given him, he would continue to give him, all that he had offered him—friendship, sympathy, advice. He had not undertaken to provide him with unflagging strength of purpose, nor to stand bondsman for unqualified success.

If Rowland felt his roots striking and spreading in the Roman soil, Roderick also surrendered himself with renewed abandon to the local influence. More than once he declared to his companion that he meant to live and die within the shadow of Saint Peter’s, and that he cared little if he never again drew breath in American air. “For a man of my temperament, Rome is the only possible place,” he said; “it ‘s better to recognize the fact early than late. So I shall never go home unless I am absolutely forced.”

“What is your idea of ‘force’?” asked Rowland, smiling. “It seems to me you have an excellent reason for going home some day or other.”

“Ah, you mean my engagement?” Roderick answered with unaverted eyes. “Yes, I am distinctly engaged, in Northampton, and impatiently waited for!” And he gave a little sympathetic sigh. “To reconcile Northampton and Rome is rather a problem. Mary had better come out here. Even at the worst I have no intention of giving up Rome within six or eight years, and an engagement of that duration would be rather absurd.”

“Miss Garland could hardly leave your mother,” Rowland observed.

“Oh, of course my mother should come. I think I will suggest it in my next letter. It will take her a year or two to make up her mind to it, but if she consents it will brighten her up. It ‘s too small a life, over there, even for a timid old lady. It is hard to imagine,” he added, “any change in Mary being a change for the better; but I should like her to take a look at the world and have her notions stretched a little. One is never so good, I suppose, but that one can improve a little.”

“If you wish your mother and Miss Garland to come,” Rowland suggested, “you had better go home and bring them.”

“Oh, I can’t think of leaving Europe, for many a day,” Roderick answered. “At present it would quite break the charm. I am just beginning to profit, to get used to things and take them naturally. I am sure the sight of Northampton Main Street would permanently upset me.”

It was reassuring to hear that Roderick, in his own view, was but “just beginning” to spread his wings, and Rowland, if he had had any forebodings, might have suffered them to be modified by this declaration. This was the first time since their meeting at Geneva that Roderick had mentioned Miss Garland’s name, but the ice being broken, he indulged for some time afterward in frequent allusions to his betrothed, which always had an accent of scrupulous, of almost studied, consideration. An uninitiated observer, hearing him, would have imagined her to be a person of a certain age—possibly an affectionate maiden aunt—who had once done him a kindness which he highly appreciated: perhaps presented him with a check for a thousand dollars. Rowland noted the difference between his present frankness and his reticence during the first six months of his engagement, and sometimes wondered whether it was not rather an anomaly that he should expatiate more largely as the happy event receded. He had wondered over the whole matter, first and last, in a great many different ways, and looked at it in all possible lights. There was something terribly hard to explain in the fact of his having fallen in love with his cousin. She was not, as Rowland conceived her, the sort of girl he would have been likely to fancy, and the operation of sentiment, in all cases so mysterious, was particularly so in this one. Just why it was that Roderick should not logically have fancied Miss Garland, his companion would have been at loss to say, but I think the conviction had its roots in an unformulated comparison between himself and the accepted suitor. Roderick and he were as different as two men could be, and yet Roderick had taken it into his head to fall in love with a woman for whom he himself had been keeping in reserve, for years, a profoundly characteristic passion. That if he chose to conceive a great notion of the merits of Roderick’s mistress, the irregularity here was hardly Roderick’s, was a view of the case to which poor Rowland did scanty justice. There were women, he said to himself, whom it was every one’s business to fall in love with a little—women beautiful, brilliant, artful, easily fascinating. Miss Light, for instance, was one of these; every man who spoke to her did so, if not in the language, at least with something of the agitation, the divine tremor, of a lover. There were other women—they might have great beauty, they might have small; perhaps they were generally to be classified as plain—whose triumphs in this line were rare, but immutably permanent. Such a one preeminently, was Mary Garland. Upon the doctrine of probabilities, it was unlikely that she had had an equal charm for each of them, and was it not possible, therefore, that the charm for Roderick had been simply the charm imagined, unquestioningly accepted: the general charm of youth, sympathy, kindness—of the present feminine, in short—enhanced indeed by several fine facial traits? The charm in this case for Rowland was—the charm!—the mysterious, individual, essential woman. There was an element in the charm, as his companion saw it, which Rowland was obliged to recognize, but which he forbore to ponder; the rather important attraction, namely, of reciprocity. As to Miss Garland being in love with Roderick and becoming charming thereby, this was a point with which his imagination ventured to take no liberties; partly because it would have been indelicate, and partly because it would have been vain. He contented himself with feeling that the young girl was still as vivid an image in his memory as she had been five days after he left her, and with drifting nearer and nearer to the impression that at just that crisis any other girl would have answered Roderick’s sentimental needs as well. Any other girl indeed would do so still! Roderick had confessed as much to him at Geneva, in saying that he had been taking at Baden the measure of his susceptibility to female beauty.

His extraordinary success in modeling the bust of the beautiful Miss Light was pertinent evidence of this amiable quality. She sat to him, repeatedly, for a fortnight, and the work was rapidly finished. On one of the last days Roderick asked Rowland to come and give his opinion as to what was still wanting; for the sittings had continued to take place in Mrs. Light’s apartment, the studio being pronounced too damp for the fair model. When Rowland presented himself, Christina, still in her white dress, with her shoulders bare, was standing before a mirror, readjusting her hair, the arrangement of which, on this occasion, had apparently not met the young sculptor’s approval. He stood beside her, directing the operation with a peremptoriness of tone which seemed to Rowland to denote a considerable advance in intimacy. As Rowland entered, Christina was losing patience. “Do it yourself, then!” she cried, and with a rapid movement unloosed the great coil of her tresses and let them fall over her shoulders.

They were magnificent, and with her perfect face dividing their rippling flow she looked like some immaculate saint of legend being led to martyrdom. Rowland’s eyes presumably betrayed his admiration, but her own manifested no consciousness of it. If Christina was a coquette, as the remarkable timeliness of this incident might have suggested, she was not a superficial one.

“Hudson ‘s a sculptor,” said Rowland, with warmth. “But if I were only a painter!”

“Thank Heaven you are not!” said Christina. “I am having quite enough of this minute inspection of my charms.”

“My dear young man, hands off!” cried Mrs. Light, coming forward and seizing her daughter’s hair. “Christina, love, I am surprised.”

“Is it indelicate?” Christina asked. “I beg Mr. Mallet’s pardon.” Mrs. Light gathered up the dusky locks and let them fall through her fingers, glancing at her visitor with a significant smile. Rowland had never been in the East, but if he had attempted to make a sketch of an old slave-merchant, calling attention to the “points” of a Circassian beauty, he would have depicted such a smile as Mrs. Light’s. “Mamma ‘s not really shocked,” added Christina in a moment, as if she had guessed her mother’s by-play. “She is only afraid that Mr. Hudson might have injured my hair, and that, per consequenza, I should sell for less.”

“You unnatural child!” cried mamma. “You deserve that I should make a fright of you!” And with half a dozen skillful passes she twisted the tresses into a single picturesque braid, placed high on the head, as a kind of coronal.

“What does your mother do when she wants to do you justice?” Rowland asked, observing the admirable line of the young girl’s neck.

“I do her justice when I say she says very improper things. What is one to do with such a thorn in the flesh?” Mrs. Light demanded.

“Think of it at your leisure, Mr. Mallet,” said Christina, “and when you ‘ve discovered something, let us hear. But I must tell you that I shall not willingly believe in any remedy of yours, for you have something in your physiognomy that particularly provokes me to make the remarks that my mother so sincerely deplores. I noticed it the first time I saw you. I think it ‘s because your face is so broad. For some reason or other, broad faces exasperate me; they fill me with a kind of rabbia. Last summer, at Carlsbad, there was an Austrian count, with enormous estates and some great office at court. He was very attentive—seriously so; he was really very far gone. Cela ne tenait qu’ a moi! But I could n’t; he was impossible! He must have measured, from ear to ear, at least a yard and a half. And he was blond, too, which made it worse—as blond as Stenterello; pure fleece! So I said to him frankly, ‘Many thanks, Herr Graf; your uniform is magnificent, but your face is too fat.’”

“I am afraid that mine also,” said Rowland, with a smile, “seems just now to have assumed an unpardonable latitude.”

“Oh, I take it you know very well that we are looking for a husband, and that none but tremendous swells need apply. Surely, before these gentlemen, mamma, I may speak freely; they are disinterested. Mr. Mallet won’t do, because, though he ‘s rich, he ‘s not rich enough. Mamma made that discovery the day after we went to see you, moved to it by the promising look of your furniture. I hope she was right, eh? Unless you have millions, you know, you have no chance.”

“I feel like a beggar,” said Rowland.

“Oh, some better girl than I will decide some day, after mature reflection, that on the whole you have enough. Mr. Hudson, of course, is nowhere; he has nothing but his genius and his beaux yeux.”

Roderick had stood looking at Christina intently while she delivered herself, softly and slowly, of this surprising nonsense. When she had finished, she turned and looked at him; their eyes met, and he blushed a little. “Let me model you, and he who can may marry you!” he said, abruptly.

Mrs. Light, while her daughter talked, had been adding a few touches to her coiffure. “She is not so silly as you might suppose,” she said to Rowland, with dignity. “If you will give me your arm, we will go and look at the bust.”

“Does that represent a silly girl?” Christina demanded, when they stood before it.

Rowland transferred his glance several times from the portrait to the original. “It represents a young lady,” he said, “whom I should not pretend to judge off-hand.”

“She may be a fool, but you are not sure. Many thanks! You have seen me half a dozen times. You are either very slow or I am very deep.”

“I am certainly slow,” said Rowland. “I don’t expect to make up my mind about you within six months.”

“I give you six months if you will promise then a perfectly frank opinion. Mind, I shall not forget; I shall insist upon it.”

“Well, though I am slow, I am tolerably brave,” said Rowland. “We shall see.”

Christina looked at the bust with a sigh. “I am afraid, after all,” she said, “that there ‘s very little wisdom in it save what the artist has put there. Mr. Hudson looked particularly wise while he was working; he scowled and growled, but he never opened his mouth. It is very kind of him not to have represented me gaping.”

“If I had talked a lot of stuff to you,” said Roderick, roundly, “the thing would not have been a tenth so good.”

“Is it good, after all? Mr. Mallet is a famous connoisseur; has he not come here to pronounce?”

The bust was in fact a very happy performance, and Roderick had risen to the level of his subject. It was thoroughly a portrait, and not a vague fantasy executed on a graceful theme, as the busts of pretty women, in modern sculpture, are apt to be. The resemblance was deep and vivid; there was extreme fidelity of detail and yet a noble simplicity. One could say of the head that, without idealization, it was a representation of ideal beauty. Rowland, however, as we know, was not fond of exploding into superlatives, and, after examining the piece, contented himself with suggesting two or three alterations of detail.

“Nay, how can you be so cruel?” demanded Mrs. Light, with soft reproachfulness. “It is surely a wonderful thing!”

“Rowland knows it ‘s a wonderful thing,” said Roderick, smiling. “I can tell that by his face. The other day I finished something he thought bad, and he looked very differently from this.”

“How did Mr. Mallet look?” asked Christina.

“My dear Rowland,” said Roderick, “I am speaking of my seated woman. You looked as if you had on a pair of tight boots.”

“Ah, my child, you ‘ll not understand that!” cried Mrs. Light. “You never yet had a pair that were small enough.”

“It ‘s a pity, Mr. Hudson,” said Christina, gravely, “that you could not have introduced my feet into the bust. But we can hang a pair of slippers round the neck!”

“I nevertheless like your statues, Roderick,” Rowland rejoined, “better than your jokes. This is admirable. Miss Light, you may be proud!”

“Thank you, Mr. Mallet, for the permission,” rejoined the young girl.

“I am dying to see it in the marble, with a red velvet screen behind it,” said Mrs. Light.

“Placed there under the Sassoferrato!” Christina went on. “I hope you keep well in mind, Mr. Hudson, that you have not a grain of property in your work, and that if mamma chooses, she may have it photographed and the copies sold in the Piazza di Spagna, at five francs apiece, without your having a sou of the profits.”

“Amen!” said Roderick. “It was so nominated in the bond. My profits are here!” and he tapped his forehead.

“It would be prettier if you said here!” And Christina touched her heart.

“My precious child, how you do run on!” murmured Mrs. Light.

“It is Mr. Mallet,” the young girl answered. “I can’t talk a word of sense so long as he is in the room. I don’t say that to make you go,” she added, “I say it simply to justify myself.”

Rowland bowed in silence. Roderick declared that he must get at work and requested Christina to take her usual position, and Mrs. Light proposed to her visitor that they should adjourn to her boudoir. This was a small room, hardly more spacious than an alcove, opening out of the drawing-room and having no other issue. Here, as they entered, on a divan near the door, Rowland perceived the Cavaliere Giacosa, with his arms folded, his head dropped upon his breast, and his eyes closed.

“Sleeping at his post!” said Rowland with a kindly laugh.

“That ‘s a punishable offense,” rejoined Mrs. Light, sharply. She was on the point of calling him, in the same tone, when he suddenly opened his eyes, stared a moment, and then rose with a smile and a bow.

“Excuse me, dear lady,” he said, “I was overcome by the—the great heat.”

“Nonsense, Cavaliere!” cried the lady, “you know we are perishing here with the cold! You had better go and cool yourself in one of the other rooms.”

“I obey, dear lady,” said the Cavaliere; and with another smile and bow to Rowland he departed, walking very discreetly on his toes. Rowland out-stayed him but a short time, for he was not fond of Mrs. Light, and he found nothing very inspiring in her frank intimation that if he chose, he might become a favorite. He was disgusted with himself for pleasing her; he confounded his fatal urbanity. In the court-yard of the palace he overtook the Cavaliere, who had stopped at the porter’s lodge to say a word to his little girl. She was a young lady of very tender years and she wore a very dirty pinafore. He had taken her up in his arms and was singing an infantine rhyme to her, and she was staring at him with big, soft Roman eyes. On seeing Rowland he put her down with a kiss, and stepped forward with a conscious grin, an unresentful admission that he was sensitive both to chubbiness and ridicule. Rowland began to pity him again; he had taken his dismissal from the drawing-room so meekly.

“You don’t keep your promise,” said Rowland, “to come and see me. Don’t forget it. I want you to tell me about Rome thirty years ago.”

“Thirty years ago? Ah, dear sir, Rome is Rome still; a place where strange things happen! But happy things too, since I have your renewed permission to call. You do me too much honor. Is it in the morning or in the evening that I should least intrude?”

“Take your own time, Cavaliere; only come, sometime. I depend upon you,” said Rowland.

The Cavaliere thanked him with an humble obeisance. To the Cavaliere, too, he felt that he was, in Roman phrase, sympathetic, but the idea of pleasing this extremely reduced gentleman was not disagreeable to him.

Miss Light’s bust stood for a while on exhibition in Roderick’s studio, and half the foreign colony came to see it. With the completion of his work, however, Roderick’s visits at the Palazzo F– by no means came to an end. He spent half his time in Mrs. Light’s drawing-room, and began to be talked about as “attentive” to Christina. The success of the bust restored his equanimity, and in the garrulity of his good-humor he suffered Rowland to see that she was just now the object uppermost in his thoughts. Rowland, when they talked of her, was rather listener than speaker; partly because Roderick’s own tone was so resonant and exultant, and partly because, when his companion laughed at him for having called her unsafe, he was too perplexed to defend himself. The impression remained that she was unsafe; that she was a complex, willful, passionate creature, who might easily engulf a too confiding spirit in the eddies of her capricious temper. And yet he strongly felt her charm; the eddies had a strange fascination! Roderick, in the glow of that renewed admiration provoked by the fixed attention of portrayal, was never weary of descanting on the extraordinary perfection of her beauty.

“I had no idea of it,” he said, “till I began to look at her with an eye to reproducing line for line and curve for curve. Her face is the most exquisite piece of modeling that ever came from creative hands. Not a line without meaning, not a hair’s breadth that is not admirably finished. And then her mouth! It ‘s as if a pair of lips had been shaped to utter pure truth without doing it dishonor!” Later, after he had been working for a week, he declared if Miss Light were inordinately plain, she would still be the most fascinating of women. “I ‘ve quite forgotten her beauty,” he said, “or rather I have ceased to perceive it as something distinct and defined, something independent of the rest of her. She is all one, and all consummately interesting!”

“What does she do—what does she say, that is so remarkable?” Rowland had asked.

“Say? Sometimes nothing—sometimes everything. She is never the same. Sometimes she walks in and takes her place without a word, without a smile, gravely, stiffly, as if it were an awful bore. She hardly looks at me, and she walks away without even glancing at my work. On other days she laughs and chatters and asks endless questions, and pours out the most irresistible nonsense. She is a creature of moods; you can’t count upon her; she keeps observation on the stretch. And then, bless you, she has seen such a lot! Her talk is full of the oddest allusions!”

“It is altogether a very singular type of young lady,” said Rowland, after the visit which I have related at length. “It may be a charm, but it is certainly not the orthodox charm of marriageable maidenhood, the charm of shrinking innocence and soft docility. Our American girls are accused of being more knowing than any others, and Miss Light is nominally an American. But it has taken twenty years of Europe to make her what she is. The first time we saw her, I remember you called her a product of the old world, and certainly you were not far wrong.”

“Ah, she has an atmosphere,” said Roderick, in the tone of high appreciation.

“Young unmarried women,” Rowland answered, “should be careful not to have too much!”

“Ah, you don’t forgive her,” cried his companion, “for hitting you so hard! A man ought to be flattered at such a girl as that taking so much notice of him.”

“A man is never flattered at a woman’s not liking him.”

“Are you sure she does n’t like you? That ‘s to the credit of your humility. A fellow of more vanity might, on the evidence, persuade himself that he was in favor.”

“He would have also,” said Rowland, laughing, “to be a fellow of remarkable ingenuity!” He asked himself privately how the deuce Roderick reconciled it to his conscience to think so much more of the girl he was not engaged to than of the girl he was. But it amounted almost to arrogance, you may say, in poor Rowland to pretend to know how often Roderick thought of Miss Garland. He wondered gloomily, at any rate, whether for men of his companion’s large, easy power, there was not a larger moral law than for narrow mediocrities like himself, who, yielding Nature a meagre interest on her investment (such as it was), had no reason to expect from her this affectionate laxity as to their accounts. Was it not a part of the eternal fitness of things that Roderick, while rhapsodizing about Miss Light, should have it at his command to look at you with eyes of the most guileless and unclouded blue, and to shake off your musty imputations by a toss of his picturesque brown locks? Or had he, in fact, no conscience to speak of? Happy fellow, either way!

Our friend Gloriani came, among others, to congratulate Roderick on his model and what he had made of her. “Devilish pretty, through and through!” he said as he looked at the bust. “Capital handling of the neck and throat; lovely work on the nose. You ‘re a detestably lucky fellow, my boy! But you ought not to have squandered such material on a simple bust; you should have made a great imaginative figure. If I could only have got hold of her, I would have put her into a statue in spite of herself. What a pity she is not a ragged Trasteverine, whom we might have for a franc an hour! I have been carrying about in my head for years a delicious design for a fantastic figure, but it has always stayed there for want of a tolerable model. I have seen intimations of the type, but Miss Light is the perfection of it. As soon as I saw her I said to myself, ‘By Jove, there ‘s my statue in the flesh!’”

“What is your subject?” asked Roderick.

“Don’t take it ill,” said Gloriani. “You know I ‘m the very deuce for observation. She would make a magnificent Herodias!”

If Roderick had taken it ill (which was unlikely, for we know he thought Gloriani an ass, and expected little of his wisdom), he might have been soothed by the candid incense of Sam Singleton, who came and sat for an hour in a sort of mental prostration before both bust and artist. But Roderick’s attitude before his patient little devotee was one of undisguised though friendly amusement; and, indeed, judged from a strictly plastic point of view, the poor fellow’s diminutive stature, his enormous mouth, his pimples and his yellow hair were sufficiently ridiculous. “Nay, don’t envy our friend,” Rowland said to Singleton afterwards, on his expressing, with a little groan of depreciation of his own paltry performances, his sense of the brilliancy of Roderick’s talent. “You sail nearer the shore, but you sail in smoother waters. Be contented with what you are and paint me another picture.”

Rowland hesitated. He wondered whether Christina’s insistence was the result of a general interest in Roderick’s antecedents or of a particular suspicion. He looked at her; she was looking at him a little askance, waiting for his answer. As Roderick had said nothing about his engagement to the Cavaliere, it was probable that with this beautiful girl he had not been more explicit. And yet the thing was announced, it was public; that other girl was happy in it, proud of it. Rowland felt a kind of dumb anger rising in his heart. He deliberated a moment intently.

“What are you frowning at?” Christina asked.

“There was another person,” he answered, “the most important of all: the young girl to whom he is engaged.”

Christina stared a moment, raising her eyebrows. “Ah, Mr. Hudson is engaged?” she said, very simply. “Is she pretty?”

“She is not called a beauty,” said Rowland. He meant to practice great brevity, but in a moment he added, “I have seen beauties, however, who pleased me less.”

“Ah, she pleases you, too? Why don’t they marry?”

“Roderick is waiting till he can afford to marry.”

Christina slowly put out her arm again and looked at the dimple in her elbow. “Ah, he ‘s engaged?” she repeated in the same tone. “He never told me.”

Rowland perceived at this moment that the people about them were beginning to return to the dancing-room, and immediately afterwards he saw Roderick making his way toward themselves. Roderick presented himself before Miss Light.

“I don’t claim that you have promised me the cotillon,” he said, “but I consider that you have given me hopes which warrant the confidence that you will dance with me.”

Christina looked at him a moment. “Certainly I have made no promises,” she said. “It seemed to me that, as the daughter of the house, I should keep myself free and let it depend on circumstances.”

“I beseech you to dance with me!” said Roderick, with vehemence.

Christina rose and began to laugh. “You say that very well, but the Italians do it better.”

This assertion seemed likely to be put to the proof. Mrs. Light hastily approached, leading, rather than led by, a tall, slim young man, of an unmistakably Southern physiognomy. “My precious love,” she cried, “what a place to hide in! We have been looking for you for twenty minutes; I have chosen a cavalier for you, and chosen well!”

The young man disengaged himself, made a ceremonious bow, joined his two hands, and murmured with an ecstatic smile, “May I venture to hope, dear signorina, for the honor of your hand?”

“Of course you may!” said Mrs. Light. “The honor is for us.”

Christina hesitated but for a moment, then swept the young man a courtesy as profound as his own bow. “You are very kind, but you are too late. I have just accepted!”

“Ah, my own darling!” murmured—almost moaned—Mrs. Light.

Christina and Roderick exchanged a single glance—a glance brilliant on both sides. She passed her hand into his arm; he tossed his clustering locks and led her away.

A short time afterwards Rowland saw the young man whom she had rejected leaning against a doorway. He was ugly, but what is called distinguished-looking. He had a heavy black eye, a sallow complexion, a long, thin neck; his hair was cropped en brosse. He looked very young, yet extremely bored. He was staring at the ceiling and stroking an imperceptible moustache. Rowland espied the Cavaliere Giacosa hard by, and, having joined him, asked him the young man’s name.

“Oh,” said the Cavaliere, “he ‘s a pezzo grosso! A Neapolitan. Prince Casamassima.”

CHAPTER VI. Frascati

One day, on entering Roderick’s lodging (not the modest rooms on the Ripetta which he had first occupied, but a much more sumptuous apartment on the Corso), Rowland found a letter on the table addressed to himself. It was from Roderick, and consisted of but three lines: “I am gone to Frascati—for meditation. If I am not at home on Friday, you had better join me.” On Friday he was still absent, and Rowland went out to Frascati. Here he found his friend living at the inn and spending his days, according to his own account, lying under the trees of the Villa Mondragone, reading Ariosto. He was in a sombre mood; “meditation” seemed not to have been fruitful. Nothing especially pertinent to our narrative had passed between the two young men since Mrs. Light’s ball, save a few words bearing on an incident of that entertainment. Rowland informed Roderick, the next day, that he had told Miss Light of his engagement. “I don’t know whether you ‘ll thank me,” he had said, “but it ‘s my duty to let you know it. Miss Light perhaps has already done so.”

Roderick looked at him a moment, intently, with his color slowly rising. “Why should n’t I thank you?” he asked. “I am not ashamed of my engagement.”

“As you had not spoken of it yourself, I thought you might have a reason for not having it known.”

“A man does n’t gossip about such a matter with strangers,” Roderick rejoined, with the ring of irritation in his voice.

“With strangers—no!” said Rowland, smiling.

Roderick continued his work; but after a moment, turning round with a frown: “If you supposed I had a reason for being silent, pray why should you have spoken?”

“I did not speak idly, my dear Roderick. I weighed the matter before I spoke, and promised myself to let you know immediately afterwards. It seemed to me that Miss Light had better know that your affections are pledged.”

“The Cavaliere has put it into your head, then, that I am making love to her?”

“No; in that case I would not have spoken to her first.”

“Do you mean, then, that she is making love to me?”

“This is what I mean,” said Rowland, after a pause. “That girl finds you interesting, and is pleased, even though she may play indifference, at your finding her so. I said to myself that it might save her some sentimental disappointment to know without delay that you are not at liberty to become indefinitely interested in other women.”

“You seem to have taken the measure of my liberty with extraordinary minuteness!” cried Roderick.

“You must do me justice. I am the cause of your separation from Miss Garland, the cause of your being exposed to temptations which she hardly even suspects. How could I ever face her,” Rowland demanded, with much warmth of tone, “if at the end of it all she should be unhappy?”

“I had no idea that Miss Garland had made such an impression on you. You are too zealous; I take it she did n’t charge you to look after her interests.”

“If anything happens to you, I am accountable. You must understand that.”

“That ‘s a view of the situation I can’t accept; in your own interest, no less than in mine. It can only make us both very uncomfortable. I know all I owe you; I feel it; you know that! But I am not a small boy nor an outer barbarian any longer, and, whatever I do, I do with my eyes open. When I do well, the merit ‘s mine; if I do ill, the fault ‘s mine! The idea that I make you nervous is detestable. Dedicate your nerves to some better cause, and believe that if Miss Garland and I have a quarrel, we shall settle it between ourselves.”

Rowland had found himself wondering, shortly before, whether possibly his brilliant young friend was without a conscience; now it dimly occurred to him that he was without a heart. Rowland, as we have already intimated, was a man with a moral passion, and no small part of it had gone forth into his relations with Roderick. There had been, from the first, no protestations of friendship on either side, but Rowland had implicitly offered everything that belongs to friendship, and Roderick had, apparently, as deliberately accepted it. Rowland, indeed, had taken an exquisite satisfaction in his companion’s deep, inexpressive assent to his interest in him. “Here is an uncommonly fine thing,” he said to himself: “a nature unconsciously grateful, a man in whom friendship does the thing that love alone generally has the credit of—knocks the bottom out of pride!” His reflective judgment of Roderick, as time went on, had indulged in a great many irrepressible vagaries; but his affection, his sense of something in his companion’s whole personality that overmastered his heart and beguiled his imagination, had never for an instant faltered. He listened to Roderick’s last words, and then he smiled as he rarely smiled—with bitterness.

“I don’t at all like your telling me I am too zealous,” he said. “If I had not been zealous, I should never have cared a fig for you.”

Roderick flushed deeply, and thrust his modeling tool up to the handle into the clay. “Say it outright! You have been a great fool to believe in me.”

“I desire to say nothing of the kind, and you don’t honestly believe I do!” said Rowland. “It seems to me I am really very good-natured even to reply to such nonsense.”

Roderick sat down, crossed his arms, and fixed his eyes on the floor. Rowland looked at him for some moments; it seemed to him that he had never so clearly read his companion’s strangely commingled character—his strength and his weakness, his picturesque personal attractiveness and his urgent egoism, his exalted ardor and his puerile petulance. It would have made him almost sick, however, to think that, on the whole, Roderick was not a generous fellow, and he was so far from having ceased to believe in him that he felt just now, more than ever, that all this was but the painful complexity of genius. Rowland, who had not a grain of genius either to make one say he was an interested reasoner, or to enable one to feel that he could afford a dangerous theory or two, adhered to his conviction of the essential salubrity of genius. Suddenly he felt an irresistible compassion for his companion; it seemed to him that his beautiful faculty of production was a double-edged instrument, susceptible of being dealt in back-handed blows at its possessor. Genius was priceless, inspired, divine; but it was also, at its hours, capricious, sinister, cruel; and men of genius, accordingly, were alternately very enviable and very helpless. It was not the first time he had had a sense of Roderick’s standing helpless in the grasp of his temperament. It had shaken him, as yet, but with a half good-humored wantonness; but, henceforth, possibly, it meant to handle him more roughly. These were not times, therefore, for a friend to have a short patience.

“When you err, you say, the fault ‘s your own,” he said at last. “It is because your faults are your own that I care about them.”

Rowland’s voice, when he spoke with feeling, had an extraordinary amenity. Roderick sat staring a moment longer at the floor, then he sprang up and laid his hand affectionately on his friend’s shoulder. “You are the best man in the world,” he said, “and I am a vile brute. Only,” he added in a moment, “you don’t understand me!” And he looked at him with eyes of such radiant lucidity that one might have said (and Rowland did almost say so, himself) that it was the fault of one’s own grossness if one failed to read to the bottom of that beautiful soul.

Rowland smiled sadly. “What is it now? Explain.”

“Oh, I can’t explain!” cried Roderick impatiently, returning to his work. “I have only one way of expressing my deepest feelings—it ‘s this!” And he swung his tool. He stood looking at the half-wrought clay for a moment, and then flung the instrument down. “And even this half the time plays me false!”

Rowland felt that his irritation had not subsided, and he himself had no taste for saying disagreeable things. Nevertheless he saw no sufficient reason to forbear uttering the words he had had on his conscience from the beginning. “We must do what we can and be thankful,” he said. “And let me assure you of this—that it won’t help you to become entangled with Miss Light.”

Roderick pressed his hand to his forehead with vehemence and then shook it in the air, despairingly; a gesture that had become frequent with him since he had been in Italy. “No, no, it ‘s no use; you don’t understand me! But I don’t blame you. You can’t!”

“You think it will help you, then?” said Rowland, wondering.

“I think that when you expect a man to produce beautiful and wonderful works of art, you ought to allow him a certain freedom of action, you ought to give him a long rope, you ought to let him follow his fancy and look for his material wherever he thinks he may find it! A mother can’t nurse her child unless she follows a certain diet; an artist can’t bring his visions to maturity unless he has a certain experience. You demand of us to be imaginative, and you deny us that which feeds the imagination. In labor we must be as passionate as the inspired sibyl; in life we must be mere machines. It won’t do. When you have got an artist to deal with, you must take him as he is, good and bad together. I don’t say they are pleasant fellows to know or easy fellows to live with; I don’t say they satisfy themselves any better than other people. I only say that if you want them to produce, you must let them conceive. If you want a bird to sing, you must not cover up its cage. Shoot them, the poor devils, drown them, exterminate them, if you will, in the interest of public morality; it may be morality would gain—I dare say it would! But if you suffer them to live, let them live on their own terms and according to their own inexorable needs!”

Rowland burst out laughing. “I have no wish whatever either to shoot you or to drown you!” he said. “Why launch such a tirade against a warning offered you altogether in the interest of your freest development? Do you really mean that you have an inexorable need of embarking on a flirtation with Miss Light?—a flirtation as to the felicity of which there may be differences of opinion, but which cannot at best, under the circumstances, be called innocent. Your last summer’s adventures were more so! As for the terms on which you are to live, I had an idea you had arranged them otherwise!”

“I have arranged nothing—thank God! I don’t pretend to arrange. I am young and ardent and inquisitive, and I admire Miss Light. That ‘s enough. I shall go as far as admiration leads me. I am not afraid. Your genuine artist may be sometimes half a madman, but he ‘s not a coward!”

“Suppose that in your speculation you should come to grief, not only sentimentally but artistically?”

“Come what come will! If I ‘m to fizzle out, the sooner I know it the better. Sometimes I half suspect it. But let me at least go out and reconnoitre for the enemy, and not sit here waiting for him, cudgeling my brains for ideas that won’t come!”

Do what he would, Rowland could not think of Roderick’s theory of unlimited experimentation, especially as applied in the case under discussion, as anything but a pernicious illusion. But he saw it was vain to combat longer, for inclination was powerfully on Roderick’s side. He laid his hand on Roderick’s shoulder, looked at him a moment with troubled eyes, then shook his head mournfully and turned away.

“I can’t work any more,” said Roderick. “You have upset me! I ‘ll go and stroll on the Pincian.” And he tossed aside his working-jacket and prepared himself for the street. As he was arranging his cravat before the glass, something occurred to him which made him thoughtful. He stopped a few moments afterward, as they were going out, with his hand on the door-knob. “You did, from your own point of view, an indiscreet thing,” he said, “to tell Miss Light of my engagement.”

Rowland looked at him with a glance which was partly an interrogation, but partly, also, an admission.

“If she ‘s the coquette you say,” Roderick added, “you have given her a reason the more.”

“And that ‘s the girl you propose to devote yourself to?” cried Rowland.

“Oh, I don’t say it, mind! I only say that she ‘s the most interesting creature in the world! The next time you mean to render me a service, pray give me notice beforehand!”

It was perfectly characteristic of Roderick that, a fortnight later, he should have let his friend know that he depended upon him for society at Frascati, as freely as if no irritating topic had ever been discussed between them. Rowland thought him generous, and he had at any rate a liberal faculty of forgetting that he had given you any reason to be displeased with him. It was equally characteristic of Rowland that he complied with his friend’s summons without a moment’s hesitation. His cousin Cecilia had once told him that he was the dupe of his intense benevolence. She put the case with too little favor, or too much, as the reader chooses; it is certain, at least, that he had a constitutional tendency towards magnanimous interpretations. Nothing happened, however, to suggest to him that he was deluded in thinking that Roderick’s secondary impulses were wiser than his primary ones, and that the rounded total of his nature had a harmony perfectly attuned to the most amiable of its brilliant parts. Roderick’s humor, for the time, was pitched in a minor key; he was lazy, listless, and melancholy, but he had never been more friendly and kindly and appealingly submissive. Winter had begun, by the calendar, but the weather was divinely mild, and the two young men took long slow strolls on the hills and lounged away the mornings in the villas. The villas at Frascati are delicious places, and replete with romantic suggestiveness. Roderick, as he had said, was meditating, and if a masterpiece was to come of his meditations, Rowland was perfectly willing to bear him company and coax along the process. But Roderick let him know from the first that he was in a miserably sterile mood, and, cudgel his brains as he would, could think of nothing that would serve for the statue he was to make for Mr. Leavenworth.

“It is worse out here than in Rome,” he said, “for here I am face to face with the dead blank of my mind! There I could n’t think of anything either, but there I found things to make me forget that I needed to.” This was as frank an allusion to Christina Light as could have been expected under the circumstances; it seemed, indeed, to Rowland surprisingly frank, and a pregnant example of his companion’s often strangely irresponsible way of looking at harmful facts. Roderick was silent sometimes for hours, with a puzzled look on his face and a constant fold between his even eyebrows; at other times he talked unceasingly, with a slow, idle, half-nonsensical drawl. Rowland was half a dozen times on the point of asking him what was the matter with him; he was afraid he was going to be ill. Roderick had taken a great fancy to the Villa Mondragone, and used to declaim fantastic compliments to it as they strolled in the winter sunshine on the great terrace which looks toward Tivoli and the iridescent Sabine mountains. He carried his volume of Ariosto in his pocket, and took it out every now and then and spouted half a dozen stanzas to his companion. He was, as a general thing, very little of a reader; but at intervals he would take a fancy to one of the classics and peruse it for a month in disjointed scraps. He had picked up Italian without study, and had a wonderfully sympathetic accent, though in reading aloud he ruined the sense of half the lines he rolled off so sonorously. Rowland, who pronounced badly but understood everything, once said to him that Ariosto was not the poet for a man of his craft; a sculptor should make a companion of Dante. So he lent him the Inferno, which he had brought with him, and advised him to look into it. Roderick took it with some eagerness; perhaps it would brighten his wits. He returned it the next day with disgust; he had found it intolerably depressing.

“A sculptor should model as Dante writes—you ‘re right there,” he said. “But when his genius is in eclipse, Dante is a dreadfully smoky lamp. By what perversity of fate,” he went on, “has it come about that I am a sculptor at all? A sculptor is such a confoundedly special genius; there are so few subjects he can treat, so few things in life that bear upon his work, so few moods in which he himself is inclined to it.” (It may be noted that Rowland had heard him a dozen times affirm the flat reverse of all this.) “If I had only been a painter—a little quiet, docile, matter-of-fact painter, like our friend Singleton—I should only have to open my Ariosto here to find a subject, to find color and attitudes, stuffs and composition; I should only have to look up from the page at that mouldy old fountain against the blue sky, at that cypress alley wandering away like a procession of priests in couples, at the crags and hollows of the Sabine hills, to find myself grasping my brush. Best of all would be to be Ariosto himself, or one of his brotherhood. Then everything in nature would give you a hint, and every form of beauty be part of your stock. You would n’t have to look at things only to say,—with tears of rage half the time,—‘Oh, yes, it ‘s wonderfully pretty, but what the deuce can I do with it?’ But a sculptor, now! That ‘s a pretty trade for a fellow who has got his living to make and yet is so damnably constituted that he can’t work to order, and considers that, aesthetically, clock ornaments don’t pay! You can’t model the serge-coated cypresses, nor those mouldering old Tritons and all the sunny sadness of that dried-up fountain; you can’t put the light into marble—the lovely, caressing, consenting Italian light that you get so much of for nothing. Say that a dozen times in his life a man has a complete sculpturesque vision—a vision in which the imagination recognizes a subject and the subject kindles the imagination. It is a remunerative rate of work, and the intervals are comfortable!”

One morning, as the two young men were lounging on the sun-warmed grass at the foot of one of the slanting pines of the Villa Mondragone, Roderick delivered himself of a tissue of lugubrious speculations as to the possible mischances of one’s genius. “What if the watch should run down,” he asked, “and you should lose the key? What if you should wake up some morning and find it stopped, inexorably, appallingly stopped? Such things have been, and the poor devils to whom they happened have had to grin and bear it. The whole matter of genius is a mystery. It bloweth where it listeth and we know nothing of its mechanism. If it gets out of order we can’t mend it; if it breaks down altogether we can’t set it going again. We must let it choose its own pace, and hold our breath lest it should lose its balance. It ‘s dealt out in different doses, in big cups and little, and when you have consumed your portion it ‘s as naif to ask for more as it was for Oliver Twist to ask for more porridge. Lucky for you if you ‘ve got one of the big cups; we drink them down in the dark, and we can’t tell their size until we tip them up and hear the last gurgle. Those of some men last for life; those of others for a couple of years. Nay, what are you smiling at so damnably?” he went on. “Nothing is more common than for an artist who has set out on his journey on a high-stepping horse to find himself all of a sudden dismounted and invited to go his way on foot. You can number them by the thousand—the people of two or three successes; the poor fellows whose candle burnt out in a night. Some of them groped their way along without it, some of them gave themselves up for blind and sat down by the wayside to beg. Who shall say that I ‘m not one of these? Who shall assure me that my credit is for an unlimited sum? Nothing proves it, and I never claimed it; or if I did, I did so in the mere boyish joy of shaking off the dust of Northampton. If you believed so, my dear fellow, you did so at your own risk! What am I, what are the best of us, but an experiment? Do I succeed—do I fail? It does n’t depend on me. I ‘m prepared for failure. It won’t be a disappointment, simply because I shan’t survive it. The end of my work shall be the end of my life. When I have played my last card, I shall cease to care for the game. I ‘m not making vulgar threats of suicide; for destiny, I trust, won’t add insult to injury by putting me to that abominable trouble. But I have a conviction that if the hour strikes here,” and he tapped his forehead, “I shall disappear, dissolve, be carried off in a cloud! For the past ten days I have had the vision of some such fate perpetually swimming before my eyes. My mind is like a dead calm in the tropics, and my imagination as motionless as the phantom ship in the Ancient Mariner!”

Rowland listened to this outbreak, as he often had occasion to listen to Roderick’s heated monologues, with a number of mental restrictions. Both in gravity and in gayety he said more than he meant, and you did him simple justice if you privately concluded that neither the glow of purpose nor the chill of despair was of so intense a character as his florid diction implied. The moods of an artist, his exaltations and depressions, Rowland had often said to himself, were like the pen-flourishes a writing-master makes in the air when he begins to set his copy. He may bespatter you with ink, he may hit you in the eye, but he writes a magnificent hand. It was nevertheless true that at present poor Roderick gave unprecedented tokens of moral stagnation, and as for genius being held by the precarious tenure he had sketched, Rowland was at a loss to see whence he could borrow the authority to contradict him. He sighed to himself, and wished that his companion had a trifle more of little Sam Singleton’s evenness of impulse. But then, was Singleton a man of genius? He answered that such reflections seemed to him unprofitable, not to say morbid; that the proof of the pudding was in the eating; that he did n’t know about bringing a genius that had palpably spent its last breath back to life again, but that he was satisfied that vigorous effort was a cure for a great many ills that seemed far gone. “Don’t heed your mood,” he said, “and don’t believe there is any calm so dead that your own lungs can’t ruffle it with a breeze. If you have work to do, don’t wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.”

“Set to work and produce abortions!” cried Roderick with ire. “Preach that to others. Production with me must be either pleasure or nothing. As I said just now, I must either stay in the saddle or not go at all. I won’t do second-rate work; I can’t if I would. I have no cleverness, apart from inspiration. I am not a Gloriani! You are right,” he added after a while; “this is unprofitable talk, and it makes my head ache. I shall take a nap and see if I can dream of a bright idea or two.”

He turned his face upward to the parasol of the great pine, closed his eyes, and in a short time forgot his sombre fancies. January though it was, the mild stillness seemed to vibrate with faint midsummer sounds. Rowland sat listening to them and wishing that, for the sake of his own felicity, Roderick’s temper were graced with a certain absent ductility. He was brilliant, but was he, like many brilliant things, brittle? Suddenly, to his musing sense, the soft atmospheric hum was overscored with distincter sounds. He heard voices beyond a mass of shrubbery, at the turn of a neighboring path. In a moment one of them began to seem familiar, and an instant later a large white poodle emerged into view. He was slowly followed by his mistress. Miss Light paused a moment on seeing Rowland and his companion; but, though the former perceived that he was recognized, she made no bow. Presently she walked directly toward him. He rose and was on the point of waking Roderick, but she laid her finger on her lips and motioned him to forbear. She stood a moment looking at Roderick’s handsome slumber.

“What delicious oblivion!” she said. “Happy man! Stenterello”—and she pointed to his face—“wake him up!”

The poodle extended a long pink tongue and began to lick Roderick’s cheek.

“Why,” asked Rowland, “if he is happy?”

“Oh, I want companions in misery! Besides, I want to show off my dog.” Roderick roused himself, sat up, and stared. By this time Mrs. Light had approached, walking with a gentleman on each side of her. One of these was the Cavaliere Giacosa; the other was Prince Casamassima. “I should have liked to lie down on the grass and go to sleep,” Christina added. “But it would have been unheard of.”

“Oh, not quite,” said the Prince, in English, with a tone of great precision. “There was already a Sleeping Beauty in the Wood!”

“Charming!” cried Mrs. Light. “Do you hear that, my dear?”

“When the prince says a brilliant thing, it would be a pity to lose it,” said the young girl. “Your servant, sir!” And she smiled at him with a grace that might have reassured him, if he had thought her compliment ambiguous.

Roderick meanwhile had risen to his feet, and Mrs. Light began to exclaim on the oddity of their meeting and to explain that the day was so lovely that she had been charmed with the idea of spending it in the country. And who would ever have thought of finding Mr. Mallet and Mr. Hudson sleeping under a tree!

“Oh, I beg your pardon; I was not sleeping,” said Rowland.

“Don’t you know that Mr. Mallet is Mr. Hudson’s sheep-dog?” asked Christina. “He was mounting guard to keep away the wolves.”

“To indifferent purpose, madame!” said Rowland, indicating the young girl.

“Is that the way you spend your time?” Christina demanded of Roderick. “I never yet happened to learn what men were doing when they supposed women were not watching them but it was something vastly below their reputation.”

“When, pray,” said Roderick, smoothing his ruffled locks, “are women not watching them?”

“We shall give you something better to do, at any rate. How long have you been here? It ‘s an age since I have seen you. We consider you domiciled here, and expect you to play host and entertain us.”

Roderick said that he could offer them nothing but to show them the great terrace, with its view; and ten minutes later the group was assembled there. Mrs. Light was extravagant in her satisfaction; Christina looked away at the Sabine mountains, in silence. The prince stood by, frowning at the rapture of the elder lady.

CHAPTER VII. Saint Cecilia’s

Rowland went often to the Coliseum; he never wearied of it. One morning, about a month after his return from Frascati, as he was strolling across the vast arena, he observed a young woman seated on one of the fragments of stone which are ranged along the line of the ancient parapet. It seemed to him that he had seen her before, but he was unable to localize her face. Passing her again, he perceived that one of the little red-legged French soldiers at that time on guard there had approached her and was gallantly making himself agreeable. She smiled brilliantly, and Rowland recognized the smile (it had always pleased him) of a certain comely Assunta, who sometimes opened the door for Mrs. Light’s visitors. He wondered what she was doing alone in the Coliseum, and conjectured that Assunta had admirers as well as her young mistress, but that, being without the same domiciliary conveniencies, she was using this massive heritage of her Latin ancestors as a boudoir. In other words, she had an appointment with her lover, who had better, from present appearances, be punctual. It was a long time since Rowland had ascended to the ruinous upper tiers of the great circus, and, as the day was radiant and the distant views promised to be particularly clear, he determined to give himself the pleasure. The custodian unlocked the great wooden wicket, and he climbed through the winding shafts, where the eager Roman crowds had billowed and trampled, not pausing till he reached the highest accessible point of the ruin. The views were as fine as he had supposed; the lights on the Sabine Mountains had never been more lovely. He gazed to his satisfaction and retraced his steps. In a moment he paused again on an abutment somewhat lower, from which the glance dropped dizzily into the interior. There are chance anfractuosities of ruin in the upper portions of the Coliseum which offer a very fair imitation of the rugged face of an Alpine cliff. In those days a multitude of delicate flowers and sprays of wild herbage had found a friendly soil in the hoary crevices, and they bloomed and nodded amid the antique masonry as freely as they would have done in the virgin rock. Rowland was turning away, when he heard a sound of voices rising up from below. He had but to step slightly forward to find himself overlooking two persons who had seated themselves on a narrow ledge, in a sunny corner. They had apparently had an eye to extreme privacy, but they had not observed that their position was commanded by Rowland’s stand-point. One of these airy adventurers was a lady, thickly veiled, so that, even if he had not been standing directly above her, Rowland could not have seen her face. The other was a young man, whose face was also invisible, but who, as Rowland stood there, gave a toss of his clustering locks which was equivalent to the signature—Roderick Hudson. A moment’s reflection, hereupon, satisfied him of the identity of the lady. He had been unjust to poor Assunta, sitting patient in the gloomy arena; she had not come on her own errand. Rowland’s discoveries made him hesitate. Should he retire as noiselessly as possible, or should he call out a friendly good morning? While he was debating the question, he found himself distinctly hearing his friends’ words. They were of such a nature as to make him unwilling to retreat, and yet to make it awkward to be discovered in a position where it would be apparent that he had heard them.

“If what you say is true,” said Christina, with her usual soft deliberateness—it made her words rise with peculiar distinctness to Rowland’s ear—“you are simply weak. I am sorry! I hoped—I really believed—you were not.”

“No, I am not weak,” answered Roderick, with vehemence; “I maintain that I am not weak! I am incomplete, perhaps; but I can’t help that. Weakness is a man’s own fault!”

“Incomplete, then!” said Christina, with a laugh. “It ‘s the same thing, so long as it keeps you from splendid achievement. Is it written, then, that I shall really never know what I have so often dreamed of?”

“What have you dreamed of?”

“A man whom I can perfectly respect!” cried the young girl, with a sudden flame. “A man, at least, whom I can unrestrictedly admire. I meet one, as I have met more than one before, whom I fondly believe to be cast in a larger mould than most of the vile human breed, to be large in character, great in talent, strong in will! In such a man as that, I say, one’s weary imagination at last may rest; or it may wander if it will, yet never need to wander far from the deeps where one’s heart is anchored. When I first knew you, I gave no sign, but you had struck me. I observed you, as women observe, and I fancied you had the sacred fire.”

“Before heaven, I believe I have!” cried Roderick.

“Ah, but so little! It flickers and trembles and sputters; it goes out, you tell me, for whole weeks together. From your own account, it ‘s ten to one that in the long run you ‘re a failure.”

“I say those things sometimes myself, but when I hear you say them they make me feel as if I could work twenty years at a sitting, on purpose to refute you!”

“Ah, the man who is strong with what I call strength,” Christina replied, “would neither rise nor fall by anything I could say! I am a poor, weak woman; I have no strength myself, and I can give no strength. I am a miserable medley of vanity and folly. I am silly, I am ignorant, I am affected, I am false. I am the fruit of a horrible education, sown on a worthless soil. I am all that, and yet I believe I have one merit! I should know a great character when I saw it, and I should delight in it with a generosity which would do something toward the remission of my sins. For a man who should really give me a certain feeling—which I have never had, but which I should know when it came—I would send Prince Casamassima and his millions to perdition. I don’t know what you think of me for saying all this; I suppose we have not climbed up here under the skies to play propriety. Why have you been at such pains to assure me, after all, that you are a little man and not a great one, a weak one and not a strong? I innocently imagined that your eyes declared you were strong. But your voice condemns you; I always wondered at it; it ‘s not the voice of a conqueror!”

“Give me something to conquer,” cried Roderick, “and when I say that I thank you from my soul, my voice, whatever you think of it, shall speak the truth!”

Christina for a moment said nothing. Rowland was too interested to think of moving. “You pretend to such devotion,” she went on, “and yet I am sure you have never really chosen between me and that person in America.”

“Do me the favor not to speak of her,” said Roderick, imploringly.

“Why not? I say no ill of her, and I think all kinds of good. I am certain she is a far better girl than I, and far more likely to make you happy.”

“This is happiness, this present, palpable moment,” said Roderick; “though you have such a genius for saying the things that torture me!”

“It ‘s greater happiness than you deserve, then! You have never chosen, I say; you have been afraid to choose. You have never really faced the fact that you are false, that you have broken your faith. You have never looked at it and seen that it was hideous, and yet said, ‘No matter, I ‘ll brave the penalty, I ‘ll bear the shame!’ You have closed your eyes; you have tried to stifle remembrance, to persuade yourself that you were not behaving as badly as you seemed to be, and there would be some way, after all, of compassing bliss and yet escaping trouble. You have faltered and drifted, you have gone on from accident to accident, and I am sure that at this present moment you can’t tell what it is you really desire!”

Roderick was sitting with his knees drawn up and bent, and his hands clapsed around his legs. He bent his head and rested his forehead on his knees.

Christina went on with a sort of infernal calmness: “I believe that, really, you don’t greatly care for your friend in America any more than you do for me. You are one of the men who care only for themselves and for what they can make of themselves. That ‘s very well when they can make something great, and I could interest myself in a man of extraordinary power who should wish to turn all his passions to account. But if the power should turn out to be, after all, rather ordinary? Fancy feeling one’s self ground in the mill of a third-rate talent! If you have doubts about yourself, I can’t reassure you; I have too many doubts myself, about everything in this weary world. You have gone up like a rocket, in your profession, they tell me; are you going to come down like the stick? I don’t pretend to know; I repeat frankly what I have said before—that all modern sculpture seems to me weak, and that the only things I care for are some of the most battered of the antiques of the Vatican. No, no, I can’t reassure you; and when you tell me—with a confidence in my discretion of which, certainly, I am duly sensible—that at times you feel terribly small, why, I can only answer, ‘Ah, then, my poor friend, I am afraid you are small.’ The language I should like to hear, from a certain person, would be the language of absolute decision.”

Roderick raised his head, but he said nothing; he seemed to be exchanging a long glance with his companion. The result of it was to make him fling himself back with an inarticulate murmur. Rowland, admonished by the silence, was on the point of turning away, but he was arrested by a gesture of the young girl. She pointed for a moment into the blue air. Roderick followed the direction of her gesture.

“Is that little flower we see outlined against that dark niche,” she asked, “as intensely blue as it looks through my veil?” She spoke apparently with the amiable design of directing the conversation into a less painful channel.

Rowland, from where he stood, could see the flower she meant—a delicate plant of radiant hue, which sprouted from the top of an immense fragment of wall some twenty feet from Christina’s place.

Roderick turned his head and looked at it without answering. At last, glancing round, “Put up your veil!” he said. Christina complied. “Does it look as blue now?” he asked.

“Ah, what a lovely color!” she murmured, leaning her head on one side.

“Would you like to have it?”

She stared a moment and then broke into a light laugh.

“Would you like to have it?” he repeated in a ringing voice.

“Don’t look as if you would eat me up,” she answered. “It ‘s harmless if I say yes!”

Roderick rose to his feet and stood looking at the little flower. It was separated from the ledge on which he stood by a rugged surface of vertical wall, which dropped straight into the dusky vaults behind the arena. Suddenly he took off his hat and flung it behind him. Christina then sprang to her feet.

“I will bring it you,” he said.

She seized his arm. “Are you crazy? Do you mean to kill yourself?”

“I shall not kill myself. Sit down!”

“Excuse me. Not till you do!” And she grasped his arm with both hands.

Roderick shook her off and pointed with a violent gesture to her former place. “Go there!” he cried fiercely.

“You can never, never!” she murmured beseechingly, clasping her hands. “I implore you!”

Roderick turned and looked at her, and then in a voice which Rowland had never heard him use, a voice almost thunderous, a voice which awakened the echoes of the mighty ruin, he repeated, “Sit down!” She hesitated a moment and then she dropped on the ground and buried her face in her hands.

Rowland had seen all this, and he saw more. He saw Roderick clasp in his left arm the jagged corner of the vertical partition along which he proposed to pursue his crazy journey, stretch out his leg, and feel for a resting-place for his foot. Rowland had measured with a glance the possibility of his sustaining himself, and pronounced it absolutely nil. The wall was garnished with a series of narrow projections, the remains apparently of a brick cornice supporting the arch of a vault which had long since collapsed. It was by lodging his toes on these loose brackets and grasping with his hands at certain mouldering protuberances on a level with his head, that Roderick intended to proceed. The relics of the cornice were utterly worthless as a support. Rowland had observed this, and yet, for a moment, he had hesitated. If the thing were possible, he felt a sudden admiring glee at the thought of Roderick’s doing it. It would be finely done, it would be gallant, it would have a sort of masculine eloquence as an answer to Christina’s sinister persiflage. But it was not possible! Rowland left his place with a bound, and scrambled down some neighboring steps, and the next moment a stronger pair of hands than Christina’s were laid upon Roderick’s shoulder.

He turned, staring, pale and angry. Christina rose, pale and staring, too, but beautiful in her wonder and alarm. “My dear Roderick,” said Rowland, “I am only preventing you from doing a very foolish thing. That ‘s an exploit for spiders, not for young sculptors of promise.”

Roderick wiped his forehead, looked back at the wall, and then closed his eyes, as if with a spasm, of retarded dizziness. “I won’t resist you,” he said. “But I have made you obey,” he added, turning to Christina. “Am I weak now?”

She had recovered her composure; she looked straight past him and addressed Rowland: “Be so good as to show me the way out of this horrible place!”

He helped her back into the corridor; Roderick followed after a short interval. Of course, as they were descending the steps, came questions for Rowland to answer, and more or less surprise. Where had he come from? how happened he to have appeared at just that moment? Rowland answered that he had been rambling overhead, and that, looking out of an aperture, he had seen a gentleman preparing to undertake a preposterous gymnastic feat, and a lady swooning away in consequence. Interference seemed justifiable, and he had made it as prompt as possible. Roderick was far from hanging his head, like a man who has been caught in the perpetration of an extravagant folly; but if he held it more erect than usual Rowland believed that this was much less because he had made a show of personal daring than because he had triumphantly proved to Christina that, like a certain person she had dreamed of, he too could speak the language of decision. Christina descended to the arena in silence, apparently occupied with her own thoughts. She betrayed no sense of the privacy of her interview with Roderick needing an explanation. Rowland had seen stranger things in New York! The only evidence of her recent agitation was that, on being joined by her maid, she declared that she was unable to walk home; she must have a carriage. A fiacre was found resting in the shadow of the Arch of Constantine, and Rowland suspected that after she had got into it she disburdened herself, under her veil, of a few natural tears.

Rowland had played eavesdropper to so good a purpose that he might justly have omitted the ceremony of denouncing himself to Roderick. He preferred, however, to let him know that he had overheard a portion of his talk with Christina.

“Of course it seems to you,” Roderick said, “a proof that I am utterly infatuated.”

“Miss Light seemed to me to know very well how far she could go,” Rowland answered. “She was twisting you round her finger. I don’t think she exactly meant to defy you; but your crazy pursuit of that flower was a proof that she could go all lengths in the way of making a fool of you.”

“Yes,” said Roderick, meditatively; “she is making a fool of me.”

“And what do you expect to come of it?”

“Nothing good!” And Roderick put his hands into his pockets and looked as if he had announced the most colorless fact in the world.

“And in the light of your late interview, what do you make of your young lady?”

“If I could tell you that, it would be plain sailing. But she ‘ll not tell me again I am weak!”

“Are you very sure you are not weak?”

“I may be, but she shall never know it.”

Rowland said no more until they reached the Corso, when he asked his companion whether he was going to his studio.

Roderick started out of a reverie and passed his hands over his eyes. “Oh no, I can’t settle down to work after such a scene as that. I was not afraid of breaking my neck then, but I feel all in a tremor now. I will go—I will go and sit in the sun on the Pincio!”

“Promise me this, first,” said Rowland, very solemnly: “that the next time you meet Miss Light, it shall be on the earth and not in the air.”

Since his return from Frascati, Roderick had been working doggedly at the statue ordered by Mr. Leavenworth. To Rowland’s eye he had made a very fair beginning, but he had himself insisted, from the first, that he liked neither his subject nor his patron, and that it was impossible to feel any warmth of interest in a work which was to be incorporated into the ponderous personality of Mr. Leavenworth. It was all against the grain; he wrought without love. Nevertheless after a fashion he wrought, and the figure grew beneath his hands. Miss Blanchard’s friend was ordering works of art on every side, and his purveyors were in many cases persons whom Roderick declared it was infamy to be paired with. There had been grand tailors, he said, who declined to make you a coat unless you got the hat you were to wear with it from an artist of their own choosing. It seemed to him that he had an equal right to exact that his statue should not form part of the same system of ornament as the “Pearl of Perugia,” a picture by an American confrere who had, in Mr. Leavenworth’s opinion, a prodigious eye for color. As a customer, Mr. Leavenworth used to drop into Roderick’s studio, to see how things were getting on, and give a friendly hint or so. He would seat himself squarely, plant his gold-topped cane between his legs, which he held very much apart, rest his large white hands on the head, and enunciate the principles of spiritual art, as he hoisted them one by one, as you might say, out of the depths of his moral consciousness. His benignant and imperturbable pomposity gave Roderick the sense of suffocating beneath a large fluffy bolster, and the worst of the matter was that the good gentleman’s placid vanity had an integument whose toughness no sarcastic shaft could pierce. Roderick admitted that in thinking over the tribulations of struggling genius, the danger of dying of over-patronage had never occurred to him.

The deterring effect of the episode of the Coliseum was apparently of long continuance; if Roderick’s nerves had been shaken his hand needed time to recover its steadiness. He cultivated composure upon principles of his own; by frequenting entertainments from which he returned at four o’clock in the morning, and lapsing into habits which might fairly be called irregular. He had hitherto made few friends among the artistic fraternity; chiefly because he had taken no trouble about it, and there was in his demeanor an elastic independence of the favor of his fellow-mortals which made social advances on his own part peculiarly necessary. Rowland had told him more than once that he ought to fraternize a trifle more with the other artists, and he had always answered that he had not the smallest objection to fraternizing: let them come! But they came on rare occasions, and Roderick was not punctilious about returning their visits. He declared there was not one of them whose works gave him the smallest desire to make acquaintance with the insides of their heads. For Gloriani he professed a superb contempt, and, having been once to look at his wares, never crossed his threshold again. The only one of the fraternity for whom by his own admission he cared a straw was little Singleton; but he expressed his regard only in a kind of sublime hilarity whenever he encountered this humble genius, and quite forgot his existence in the intervals. He had never been to see him, but Singleton edged his way, from time to time, timidly, into Roderick’s studio, and agreed with characteristic modesty that brilliant fellows like the sculptor might consent to receive homage, but could hardly be expected to render it. Roderick never exactly accepted homage, and apparently did not quite observe whether poor Singleton spoke in admiration or in blame. Roderick’s taste as to companions was singularly capricious. There were very good fellows, who were disposed to cultivate him, who bored him to death; and there were others, in whom even Rowland’s good-nature was unable to discover a pretext for tolerance, in whom he appeared to find the highest social qualities. He used to give the most fantastic reasons for his likes and dislikes. He would declare he could n’t speak a civil word to a man who brushed his hair in a certain fashion, and he would explain his unaccountable fancy for an individual of imperceptible merit by telling you that he had an ancestor who in the thirteenth century had walled up his wife alive. “I like to talk to a man whose ancestor has walled up his wife alive,” he would say. “You may not see the fun of it, and think poor P– is a very dull fellow. It ‘s very possible; I don’t ask you to admire him. But, for reasons of my own, I like to have him about. The old fellow left her for three days with her face uncovered, and placed a long mirror opposite to her, so that she could see, as he said, if her gown was a fit!”

His relish for an odd flavor in his friends had led him to make the acquaintance of a number of people outside of Rowland’s well-ordered circle, and he made no secret of their being very queer fish. He formed an intimacy, among others, with a crazy fellow who had come to Rome as an emissary of one of the Central American republics, to drive some ecclesiastical bargain with the papal government. The Pope had given him the cold shoulder, but since he had not prospered as a diplomatist, he had sought compensation as a man of the world, and his great flamboyant curricle and negro lackeys were for several weeks one of the striking ornaments of the Pincian. He spoke a queer jargon of Italian, Spanish, French, and English, humorously relieved with scraps of ecclesiastical Latin, and to those who inquired of Roderick what he found to interest him in such a fantastic jackanapes, the latter would reply, looking at his interlocutor with his lucid blue eyes, that it was worth any sacrifice to hear him talk nonsense! The two had gone together one night to a ball given by a lady of some renown in the Spanish colony, and very late, on his way home, Roderick came up to Rowland’s rooms, in whose windows he had seen a light. Rowland was going to bed, but Roderick flung himself into an armchair and chattered for an hour. The friends of the Costa Rican envoy were as amusing as himself, and in very much the same line. The mistress of the house had worn a yellow satin dress, and gold heels to her slippers, and at the close of the entertainment had sent for a pair of castanets, tucked up her petticoats, and danced a fandango, while the gentlemen sat cross-legged on the floor. “It was awfully low,” Roderick said; “all of a sudden I perceived it, and bolted. Nothing of that kind ever amuses me to the end: before it ‘s half over it bores me to death; it makes me sick. Hang it, why can’t a poor fellow enjoy things in peace? My illusions are all broken-winded; they won’t carry me twenty paces! I can’t laugh and forget; my laugh dies away before it begins. Your friend Stendhal writes on his book-covers (I never got farther) that he has seen too early in life la beaute parfaite. I don’t know how early he saw it; I saw it before I was born—in another state of being! I can’t describe it positively; I can only say I don’t find it anywhere now. Not at the bottom of champagne glasses; not, strange as it may seem, in that extra half-yard or so of shoulder that some women have their ball-dresses cut to expose. I don’t find it at merry supper-tables, where half a dozen ugly men with pomatumed heads are rapidly growing uglier still with heat and wine; not when I come away and walk through these squalid black streets, and go out into the Forum and see a few old battered stone posts standing there like gnawed bones stuck into the earth. Everything is mean and dusky and shabby, and the men and women who make up this so-called brilliant society are the meanest and shabbiest of all. They have no real spontaneity; they are all cowards and popinjays. They have no more dignity than so many grasshoppers. Nothing is good but one!” And he jumped up and stood looking at one of his statues, which shone vaguely across the room in the dim lamplight.

“Yes, do tell us,” said Rowland, “what to hold on by!”

“Those things of mine were tolerably good,” he answered. “But my idea was better—and that ‘s what I mean!”

Rowland said nothing. He was willing to wait for Roderick to complete the circle of his metamorphoses, but he had no desire to officiate as chorus to the play. If Roderick chose to fish in troubled waters, he must land his prizes himself.

“You think I ‘m an impudent humbug,” the latter said at last, “coming up to moralize at this hour of the night. You think I want to throw dust into your eyes, to put you off the scent. That ‘s your eminently rational view of the case.”

“Excuse me from taking any view at all,” said Rowland.

“You have given me up, then?”

“No, I have merely suspended judgment. I am waiting.”

“You have ceased then positively to believe in me?”

Rowland made an angry gesture. “Oh, cruel boy! When you have hit your mark and made people care for you, you should n’t twist your weapon about at that rate in their vitals. Allow me to say I am sleepy. Good night!”

Some days afterward it happened that Rowland, on a long afternoon ramble, took his way through one of the quiet corners of the Trastevere. He was particularly fond of this part of Rome, though he could hardly have expressed the charm he found in it. As you pass away from the dusky, swarming purlieus of the Ghetto, you emerge into a region of empty, soundless, grass-grown lanes and alleys, where the shabby houses seem mouldering away in disuse, and yet your footstep brings figures of startling Roman type to the doorways. There are few monuments here, but no part of Rome seemed more historic, in the sense of being weighted with a crushing past, blighted with the melancholy of things that had had their day. When the yellow afternoon sunshine slept on the sallow, battered walls, and lengthened the shadows in the grassy courtyards of small closed churches, the place acquired a strange fascination. The church of Saint Cecilia has one of these sunny, waste-looking courts; the edifice seems abandoned to silence and the charity of chance devotion. Rowland never passed it without going in, and he was generally the only visitor. He entered it now, but found that two persons had preceded him. Both were women. One was at her prayers at one of the side altars; the other was seated against a column at the upper end of the nave. Rowland walked to the altar, and paid, in a momentary glance at the clever statue of the saint in death, in the niche beneath it, the usual tribute to the charm of polished ingenuity. As he turned away he looked at the person seated and recognized Christina Light. Seeing that she perceived him, he advanced to speak to her.

She was sitting in a listless attitude, with her hands in her lap; she seemed to be tired. She was dressed simply, as if for walking and escaping observation. When he had greeted her he glanced back at her companion, and recognized the faithful Assunta.

Christina smiled. “Are you looking for Mr. Hudson? He is not here, I am happy to say.”

“But you?” he asked. “This is a strange place to find you.”

“Not at all! People call me a strange girl, and I might as well have the comfort of it. I came to take a walk; that, by the way, is part of my strangeness. I can’t loll all the morning on a sofa, and all the afternoon in a carriage. I get horribly restless. I must move; I must do something and see something. Mamma suggests a cup of tea. Meanwhile I put on an old dress and half a dozen veils, I take Assunta under my arm, and we start on a pedestrian tour. It ‘s a bore that I can’t take the poodle, but he attracts attention. We trudge about everywhere; there is nothing I like so much. I hope you will congratulate me on the simplicity of my tastes.”

“I congratulate you on your wisdom. To live in Rome and not to walk would, I think, be poor pleasure. But you are terribly far from home, and I am afraid you are tired.”

“A little—enough to sit here a while.”

“Might I offer you my company while you rest?”

“If you will promise to amuse me. I am in dismal spirits.”

Rowland said he would do what he could, and brought a chair and placed it near her. He was not in love with her; he disapproved of her; he mistrusted her; and yet he felt it a kind of privilege to watch her, and he found a peculiar excitement in talking to her. The background of her nature, as he would have called it, was large and mysterious, and it emitted strange, fantastic gleams and flashes. Watching for these rather quickened one’s pulses. Moreover, it was not a disadvantage to talk to a girl who made one keep guard on one’s composure; it diminished one’s chronic liability to utter something less than revised wisdom.

Assunta had risen from her prayers, and, as he took his place, was coming back to her mistress. But Christina motioned her away. “No, no; while you are about it, say a few dozen more!” she said. “Pray for me,” she added in English. “Pray, I say nothing silly. She has been at it half an hour; I envy her capacity!”

“Have you never felt in any degree,” Rowland asked, “the fascination of Catholicism?”

“Yes, I have been through that, too! There was a time when I wanted immensely to be a nun; it was not a laughing matter. It was when I was about sixteen years old. I read the Imitation and the Life of Saint Catherine. I fully believed in the miracles of the saints, and I was dying to have one of my own. The least little accident that could have been twisted into a miracle would have carried me straight into the bosom of the church. I had the real religious passion. It has passed away, and, as I sat here just now, I was wondering what had become of it!”

Rowland had already been sensible of something in this young lady’s tone which he would have called a want of veracity, and this epitome of her religious experience failed to strike him as an absolute statement of fact. But the trait was not disagreeable, for she herself was evidently the foremost dupe of her inventions. She had a fictitious history in which she believed much more fondly than in her real one, and an infinite capacity for extemporized reminiscence adapted to the mood of the hour. She liked to idealize herself, to take interesting and picturesque attitudes to her own imagination; and the vivacity and spontaneity of her character gave her, really, a starting-point in experience; so that the many-colored flowers of fiction which blossomed in her talk were not so much perversions, as sympathetic exaggerations, of fact. And Rowland felt that whatever she said of herself might have been, under the imagined circumstances; impulse was there, audacity, the restless, questioning temperament. “I am afraid I am sadly prosaic,” he said, “for in these many months now that I have been in Rome, I have never ceased for a moment to look at Catholicism simply from the outside. I don’t see an opening as big as your finger-nail where I could creep into it!”

“What do you believe?” asked Christina, looking at him. “Are you religious?”

“I believe in God.”

Christina let her beautiful eyes wander a while, and then gave a little sigh. “You are much to be envied!”

“You, I imagine, in that line have nothing to envy me.”

“Yes, I have. Rest!”

“You are too young to say that.”

“I am not young; I have never been young! My mother took care of that. I was a little wrinkled old woman at ten.”

“I am afraid,” said Rowland, in a moment, “that you are fond of painting yourself in dark colors.”

She looked at him a while in silence. “Do you wish,” she demanded at last, “to win my eternal gratitude? Prove to me that I am better than I suppose.”

“I should have first to know what you really suppose.”

She shook her head. “It would n’t do. You would be horrified to learn even the things I imagine about myself, and shocked at the knowledge of evil displayed in my very mistakes.”

“Well, then,” said Rowland, “I will ask no questions. But, at a venture, I promise you to catch you some day in the act of doing something very good.”

“Can it be, can it be,” she asked, “that you too are trying to flatter me? I thought you and I had fallen, from the first, into rather a truth-speaking vein.”

“Oh, I have not abandoned it!” said Rowland; and he determined, since he had the credit of homely directness, to push his advantage farther. The opportunity seemed excellent. But while he was hesitating as to just how to begin, the young girl said, bending forward and clasping her hands in her lap, “Please tell me about your religion.”

“Tell you about it? I can’t!” said Rowland, with a good deal of emphasis.

She flushed a little. “Is it such a mighty mystery it cannot be put into words, nor communicated to my base ears?”

“It is simply a sentiment that makes part of my life, and I can’t detach myself from it sufficiently to talk about it.”

“Religion, it seems to me, should be eloquent and aggressive. It should wish to make converts, to persuade and illumine, to sway all hearts!”

“One’s religion takes the color of one’s general disposition. I am not aggressive, and certainly I am not eloquent.”

“Beware, then, of finding yourself confronted with doubt and despair! I am sure that doubt, at times, and the bitterness that comes of it, can be terribly eloquent. To tell the truth, my lonely musings, before you came in, were eloquent enough, in their way. What do you know of anything but this strange, terrible world that surrounds you? How do you know that your faith is not a mere crazy castle in the air; one of those castles that we are called fools for building when we lodge them in this life?”

“I don’t know it, any more than any one knows the contrary. But one’s religion is extremely ingenious in doing without knowledge.”

“In such a world as this it certainly needs to be!”

Rowland smiled. “What is your particular quarrel with this world?”

“It ‘s a general quarrel. Nothing is true, or fixed, or permanent. We all seem to be playing with shadows more or less grotesque. It all comes over me here so dismally! The very atmosphere of this cold, deserted church seems to mock at one’s longing to believe in something. Who cares for it now? who comes to it? who takes it seriously? Poor stupid Assunta there gives in her adhesion in a jargon she does n’t understand, and you and I, proper, passionless tourists, come lounging in to rest from a walk. And yet the Catholic church was once the proudest institution in the world, and had quite its own way with men’s souls. When such a mighty structure as that turns out to have a flaw, what faith is one to put in one’s poor little views and philosophies? What is right and what is wrong? What is one really to care for? What is the proper rule of life? I am tired of trying to discover, and I suspect it ‘s not worth the trouble. Live as most amuses you!”

“Your perplexities are so terribly comprehensive,” said Rowland, smiling, “that one hardly knows where to meet them first.”

“I don’t care much for anything you can say, because it ‘s sure to be half-hearted. You are not in the least contented, yourself.”

“How do you know that?”

“Oh, I am an observer!”

“No one is absolutely contented, I suppose, but I assure you I complain of nothing.”

“So much the worse for your honesty. To begin with, you are in love.”

“You would not have me complain of that!”

“And it does n’t go well. There are grievous obstacles. So much I know! You need n’t protest; I ask no questions. You will tell no one—me least of all. Why does one never see you?”

“Why, if I came to see you,” said Rowland, deliberating, “it would n’t be, it could n’t be, for a trivial reason—because I had not been in a month, because I was passing, because I admire you. It would be because I should have something very particular to say. I have not come, because I have been slow in making up my mind to say it.”

“You are simply cruel. Something particular, in this ocean of inanities? In common charity, speak!”

“I doubt whether you will like it.”

“Oh, I hope to heaven it ‘s not a compliment!”

“It may be called a compliment to your reasonableness. You perhaps remember that I gave you a hint of it the other day at Frascati.”

“Has it been hanging fire all this time? Explode! I promise not to stop my ears.”

“It relates to my friend Hudson.” And Rowland paused. She was looking at him expectantly; her face gave no sign. “I am rather disturbed in mind about him. He seems to me at times to be in an unpromising way.” He paused again, but Christina said nothing. “The case is simply this,” he went on. “It was by my advice he renounced his career at home and embraced his present one. I made him burn his ships. I brought him to Rome, I launched him in the world, and I stand surety, in a measure, to—to his mother, for his prosperity. It is not such smooth sailing as it might be, and I am inclined to put up prayers for fair winds. If he is to succeed, he must work—quietly, devotedly. It is not news to you, I imagine, that Hudson is a great admirer of yours.”

Christina remained silent; she turned away her eyes with an air, not of confusion, but of deep deliberation. Surprising frankness had, as a general thing, struck Rowland as the key-note of her character, but she had more than once given him a suggestion of an unfathomable power of calculation, and her silence now had something which it is hardly extravagant to call portentous. He had of course asked himself how far it was questionable taste to inform an unprotected girl, for the needs of a cause, that another man admired her; the thing, superficially, had an uncomfortable analogy with the shrewdness that uses a cat’s paw and lets it risk being singed. But he decided that even rigid discretion is not bound to take a young lady at more than her own valuation, and Christina presently reassured him as to the limits of her susceptibility. “Mr. Hudson is in love with me!” she said.

Rowland flinched a trifle. Then—“Am I,” he asked, “from this point of view of mine, to be glad or sorry?”

“I don’t understand you.”

“Why, is Hudson to be happy, or unhappy?”

She hesitated a moment. “You wish him to be great in his profession? And for that you consider that he must be happy in his life?”

“Decidedly. I don’t say it ‘s a general rule, but I think it is a rule for him.”

“So that if he were very happy, he would become very great?”

“He would at least do himself justice.”

“And by that you mean a great deal?”

“A great deal.”

Christina sank back in her chair and rested her eyes on the cracked and polished slabs of the pavement. At last, looking up, “You have not forgotten, I suppose, that you told me he was engaged?”

“By no means.”

“He is still engaged, then?”

“To the best of my belief.”

“And yet you desire that, as you say, he should be made happy by something I can do for him?”

“What I desire is this. That your great influence with him should be exerted for his good, that it should help him and not retard him. Understand me. You probably know that your lovers have rather a restless time of it. I can answer for two of them. You don’t know your own mind very well, I imagine, and you like being admired, rather at the expense of the admirer. Since we are really being frank, I wonder whether I might not say the great word.”

“You need n’t; I know it. I am a horrible coquette.”

“No, not a horrible one, since I am making an appeal to your generosity. I am pretty sure you cannot imagine yourself marrying my friend.”

“There ‘s nothing I cannot imagine! That is my trouble.”

Rowland’s brow contracted impatiently. “I cannot imagine it, then!” he affirmed.

Christina flushed faintly; then, very gently, “I am not so bad as you think,” she said.

“It is not a question of badness; it is a question of whether circumstances don’t make the thing an extreme improbability.”

“Worse and worse. I can be bullied, then, or bribed!”

“You are not so candid,” said Rowland, “as you pretend to be. My feeling is this. Hudson, as I understand him, does not need, as an artist, the stimulus of strong emotion, of passion. He’s better without it; he’s emotional and passionate enough when he ‘s left to himself. The sooner passion is at rest, therefore, the sooner he will settle down to work, and the fewer emotions he has that are mere emotions and nothing more, the better for him. If you cared for him enough to marry him, I should have nothing to say; I would never venture to interfere. But I strongly suspect you don’t, and therefore I would suggest, most respectfully, that you should let him alone.”

“And if I let him alone, as you say, all will be well with him for ever more?”

“Not immediately and not absolutely, but things will be easier. He will be better able to concentrate himself.”

“What is he doing now? Wherein does he dissatisfy you?”

“I can hardly say. He ‘s like a watch that ‘s running down. He is moody, desultory, idle, irregular, fantastic.”

“Heavens, what a list! And it ‘s all poor me?”

“No, not all. But you are a part of it, and I turn to you because you are a more tangible, sensible, responsible cause than the others.”

Christina raised her hand to her eyes, and bent her head thoughtfully. Rowland was puzzled to measure the effect of his venture; she rather surprised him by her gentleness. At last, without moving, “If I were to marry him,” she asked, “what would have become of his fiancee?”

“I am bound to suppose that she would be extremely unhappy.”

Christina said nothing more, and Rowland, to let her make her reflections, left his place and strolled away. Poor Assunta, sitting patiently on a stone bench, and unprovided, on this occasion, with military consolation, gave him a bright, frank smile, which might have been construed as an expression of regret for herself, and of sympathy for her mistress. Rowland presently seated himself again near Christina.

“What do you think,” she asked, looking at him, “of your friend’s infidelity?”

“I don’t like it.”

“Was he very much in love with her?”

“He asked her to marry him. You may judge.”

“Is she rich?”

“No, she is poor.”

“Is she very much in love with him?”

“I know her too little to say.”

She paused again, and then resumed: “You have settled in your mind, then, that I will never seriously listen to him?”

“I think it unlikely, until the contrary is proved.”

“How shall it be proved? How do you know what passes between us?”

“I can judge, of course, but from appearance; but, like you, I am an observer. Hudson has not at all the air of a prosperous suitor.”

“If he is depressed, there is a reason. He has a bad conscience. One must hope so, at least. On the other hand, simply as a friend,” she continued gently, “you think I can do him no good?”

The humility of her tone, combined with her beauty, as she made this remark, was inexpressibly touching, and Rowland had an uncomfortable sense of being put at a disadvantage. “There are doubtless many good things you might do, if you had proper opportunity,” he said. “But you seem to be sailing with a current which leaves you little leisure for quiet benevolence. You live in the whirl and hurry of a world into which a poor artist can hardly find it to his advantage to follow you.”

“In plain English, I am hopelessly frivolous. You put it very generously.”

“I won’t hesitate to say all my thought,” said Rowland. “For better or worse, you seem to me to belong, both by character and by circumstance, to what is called the world, the great world. You are made to ornament it magnificently. You are not made to be an artist’s wife.”

“I see. But even from your point of view, that would depend upon the artist. Extraordinary talent might make him a member of the great world!”

Rowland smiled. “That is very true.”

“If, as it is,” Christina continued in a moment, “you take a low view of me—no, you need n’t protest—I wonder what you would think if you knew certain things.”

“What things do you mean?”

“Well, for example, how I was brought up. I have had a horrible education. There must be some good in me, since I have perceived it, since I have turned and judged my circumstances.”

“My dear Miss Light!” Rowland murmured.

She gave a little, quick laugh. “You don’t want to hear? you don’t want to have to think about that?”

“Have I a right to? You need n’t justify yourself.”

She turned upon him a moment the quickened light of her beautiful eyes, then fell to musing again. “Is there not some novel or some play,” she asked at last, “in which some beautiful, wicked woman who has ensnared a young man sees his father come to her and beg her to let him go?”

“Very likely,” said Rowland. “I hope she consents.”

“I forget. But tell me,” she continued, “shall you consider—admitting your proposition—that in ceasing to flirt with Mr. Hudson, so that he may go about his business, I do something magnanimous, heroic, sublime—something with a fine name like that?”

Rowland, elated with the prospect of gaining his point, was about to reply that she would deserve the finest name in the world; but he instantly suspected that this tone would not please her, and, besides, it would not express his meaning.

“You do something I shall greatly respect,” he contented himself with saying.

She made no answer, and in a moment she beckoned to her maid. “What have I to do to-day?” she asked.

Assunta meditated. “Eh, it ‘s a very busy day! Fortunately I have a better memory than the signorina,” she said, turning to Rowland. She began to count on her fingers. “We have to go to the Pie di Marmo to see about those laces that were sent to be washed. You said also that you wished to say three sharp words to the Buonvicini about your pink dress. You want some moss-rosebuds for to-night, and you won’t get them for nothing! You dine at the Austrian Embassy, and that Frenchman is to powder your hair. You ‘re to come home in time to receive, for the signora gives a dance. And so away, away till morning!”

“Ah, yes, the moss-roses!” Christina murmured, caressingly. “I must have a quantity—at least a hundred. Nothing but buds, eh? You must sew them in a kind of immense apron, down the front of my dress. Packed tight together, eh? It will be delightfully barbarous. And then twenty more or so for my hair. They go very well with powder; don’t you think so?” And she turned to Rowland. “I am going en Pompadour.”

“Going where?”

“To the Spanish Embassy, or whatever it is.”

“All down the front, signorina? Dio buono! You must give me time!” Assunta cried.

“Yes, we’ll go!” And she left her place. She walked slowly to the door of the church, looking at the pavement, and Rowland could not guess whether she was thinking of her apron of moss-rosebuds or of her opportunity for moral sublimity. Before reaching the door she turned away and stood gazing at an old picture, indistinguishable with blackness, over an altar. At last they passed out into the court. Glancing at her in the open air, Rowland was startled; he imagined he saw the traces of hastily suppressed tears. They had lost time, she said, and they must hurry; she sent Assunta to look for a fiacre. She remained silent a while, scratching the ground with the point of her parasol, and then at last, looking up, she thanked Rowland for his confidence in her “reasonableness.” “It ‘s really very comfortable to be asked, to be expected, to do something good, after all the horrid things one has been used to doing—instructed, commanded, forced to do! I ‘ll think over what you have said to me.” In that deserted quarter fiacres are rare, and there was some delay in Assunta’s procuring one. Christina talked of the church, of the picturesque old court, of that strange, decaying corner of Rome. Rowland was perplexed; he was ill at ease. At last the fiacre arrived, but she waited a moment longer. “So, decidedly,” she suddenly asked, “I can only harm him?”

“You make me feel very brutal,” said Rowland.

“And he is such a fine fellow that it would be really a great pity, eh?”

“I shall praise him no more,” Rowland said.

She turned away quickly, but she lingered still. “Do you remember promising me, soon after we first met, that at the end of six months you would tell me definitely what you thought of me?”

“It was a foolish promise.”

“You gave it. Bear it in mind. I will think of what you have said to me. Farewell.” She stepped into the carriage, and it rolled away. Rowland stood for some minutes, looking after it, and then went his way with a sigh. If this expressed general mistrust, he ought, three days afterward, to have been reassured. He received by the post a note containing these words:—

“I have done it. Begin and respect me!

“—C. L.”

To be perfectly satisfactory, indeed, the note required a commentary. He called that evening upon Roderick, and found one in the information offered him at the door, by the old serving-woman—the startling information that the signorino had gone to Naples.

CHAPTER VIII. Provocation

About a month later, Rowland addressed to his cousin Cecilia a letter of which the following is a portion:—

… “So much for myself; yet I tell you but a tithe of my own story unless I let you know how matters stand with poor Hudson, for he gives me more to think about just now than anything else in the world. I need a good deal of courage to begin this chapter. You warned me, you know, and I made rather light of your warning. I have had all kinds of hopes and fears, but hitherto, in writing to you, I have resolutely put the hopes foremost. Now, however, my pride has forsaken me, and I should like hugely to give expression to a little comfortable despair. I should like to say, ‘My dear wise woman, you were right and I was wrong; you were a shrewd observer and I was a meddlesome donkey!’ When I think of a little talk we had about the ‘salubrity of genius,’ I feel my ears tingle. If this is salubrity, give me raging disease! I ‘m pestered to death; I go about with a chronic heartache; there are moments when I could shed salt tears. There ‘s a pretty portrait of the most placid of men! I wish I could make you understand; or rather, I wish you could make me! I don’t understand a jot; it ‘s a hideous, mocking mystery; I give it up! I don’t in the least give it up, you know; I ‘m incapable of giving it up. I sit holding my head by the hour, racking my brain, wondering what under heaven is to be done. You told me at Northampton that I took the thing too easily; you would tell me now, perhaps, that I take it too hard. I do, altogether; but it can’t be helped. Without flattering myself, I may say I ‘m sympathetic. Many another man before this would have cast his perplexities to the winds and declared that Mr. Hudson must lie on his bed as he had made it. Some men, perhaps, would even say that I am making a mighty ado about nothing; that I have only to give him rope, and he will tire himself out. But he tugs at his rope altogether too hard for me to hold it comfortably. I certainly never pretended the thing was anything else than an experiment; I promised nothing, I answered for nothing; I only said the case was hopeful, and that it would be a shame to neglect it. I have done my best, and if the machine is running down I have a right to stand aside and let it scuttle. Amen, amen! No, I can write that, but I can’t feel it. I can’t be just; I can only be generous. I love the poor fellow and I can’t give him up. As for understanding him, that ‘s another matter; nowadays I don’t believe even you would. One’s wits are sadly pestered over here, I assure you, and I ‘m in the way of seeing more than one puzzling specimen of human nature. Roderick and Miss Light, between them!… Have n’t I already told you about Miss Light? Last winter everything was perfection. Roderick struck out bravely, did really great things, and proved himself, as I supposed, thoroughly solid. He was strong, he was first-rate; I felt perfectly secure and sang private paeans of joy. We had passed at a bound into the open sea, and left danger behind. But in the summer I began to be puzzled, though I succeeded in not being alarmed. When we came back to Rome, however, I saw that the tide had turned and that we were close upon the rocks. It is, in fact, another case of Ulysses alongside of the Sirens; only Roderick refuses to be tied to the mast. He is the most extraordinary being, the strangest mixture of qualities. I don’t understand so much force going with so much weakness—such a brilliant gift being subject to such lapses. The poor fellow is incomplete, and it is really not his own fault; Nature has given him the faculty out of hand and bidden him be hanged with it. I never knew a man harder to advise or assist, if he is not in the mood for listening. I suppose there is some key or other to his character, but I try in vain to find it; and yet I can’t believe that Providence is so cruel as to have turned the lock and thrown the key away. He perplexes me, as I say, to death, and though he tires out my patience, he still fascinates me. Sometimes I think he has n’t a grain of conscience, and sometimes I think that, in a way, he has an excess. He takes things at once too easily and too hard; he is both too lax and too tense, too reckless and too ambitious, too cold and too passionate. He has developed faster even than you prophesied, and for good and evil alike he takes up a formidable space. There ‘s too much of him for me, at any rate. Yes, he is hard; there is no mistake about that. He ‘s inflexible, he ‘s brittle; and though he has plenty of spirit, plenty of soul, he has n’t what I call a heart. He has something that Miss Garland took for one, and I ‘m pretty sure she ‘s a judge. But she judged on scanty evidence. He has something that Christina Light, here, makes believe at times that she takes for one, but she is no judge at all! I think it is established that, in the long run, egotism makes a failure in conduct: is it also true that it makes a failure in the arts?… Roderick’s standard is immensely high; I must do him that justice. He will do nothing beneath it, and while he is waiting for inspiration, his imagination, his nerves, his senses must have something to amuse them. This is a highly philosophical way of saying that he has taken to dissipation, and that he has just been spending a month at Naples—a city where ‘pleasure’ is actively cultivated—in very bad company. Are they all like that, all the men of genius? There are a great many artists here who hammer away at their trade with exemplary industry; in fact I am surprised at their success in reducing the matter to a steady, daily grind: but I really don’t think that one of them has his exquisite quality of talent. It is in the matter of quantity that he has broken down. The bottle won’t pour; he turns it upside down; it ‘s no use! Sometimes he declares it ‘s empty—that he has done all he was made to do. This I consider great nonsense; but I would nevertheless take him on his own terms if it was only I that was concerned. But I keep thinking of those two praying, trusting neighbors of yours, and I feel wretchedly like a swindler. If his working mood came but once in five years I would willingly wait for it and maintain him in leisure, if need be, in the intervals; but that would be a sorry account to present to them. Five years of this sort of thing, moreover, would effectually settle the question. I wish he were less of a genius and more of a charlatan! He ‘s too confoundedly all of one piece; he won’t throw overboard a grain of the cargo to save the rest. Fancy him thus with all his brilliant personal charm, his handsome head, his careless step, his look as of a nervous nineteenth-century Apollo, and you will understand that there is mighty little comfort in seeing him in a bad way. He was tolerably foolish last summer at Baden Baden, but he got on his feet, and for a while he was steady. Then he began to waver again, and at last toppled over. Now, literally, he ‘s lying prone. He came into my room last night, miserably tipsy. I assure you, it did n’t amuse me..... About Miss Light it ‘s a long story. She is one of the great beauties of all time, and worth coming barefoot to Rome, like the pilgrims of old, to see. Her complexion, her glance, her step, her dusky tresses, may have been seen before in a goddess, but never in a woman. And you may take this for truth, because I ‘m not in love with her. On the contrary! Her education has been simply infernal. She is corrupt, perverse, as proud as the queen of Sheba, and an appalling coquette; but she is generous, and with patience and skill you may enlist her imagination in a good cause as well as in a bad one. The other day I tried to manipulate it a little. Chance offered me an interview to which it was possible to give a serious turn, and I boldly broke ground and begged her to suffer my poor friend to go in peace. After a good deal of finessing she consented, and the next day, with a single word, packed him off to Naples to drown his sorrow in debauchery. I have come to the conclusion that she is more dangerous in her virtuous moods than in her vicious ones, and that she probably has a way of turning her back which is the most provoking thing in the world. She ‘s an actress, she could n’t forego doing the thing dramatically, and it was the dramatic touch that made it fatal. I wished her, of course, to let him down easily; but she desired to have the curtain drop on an attitude, and her attitudes deprive inflammable young artists of their reason..... Roderick made an admirable bust of her at the beginning of the winter, and a dozen women came rushing to him to be done, mutatis mutandis, in the same style. They were all great ladies and ready to take him by the hand, but he told them all their faces did n’t interest him, and sent them away vowing his destruction.”

At this point of his long effusion, Rowland had paused and put by his letter. He kept it three days and then read it over. He was disposed at first to destroy it, but he decided finally to keep it, in the hope that it might strike a spark of useful suggestion from the flint of Cecilia’s good sense. We know he had a talent for taking advice. And then it might be, he reflected, that his cousin’s answer would throw some light on Mary Garland’s present vision of things. In his altered mood he added these few lines:—

“I unburdened myself the other day of this monstrous load of perplexity; I think it did me good, and I let it stand. I was in a melancholy muddle, and I was trying to work myself free. You know I like discussion, in a quiet way, and there is no one with whom I can have it as quietly as with you, most sagacious of cousins! There is an excellent old lady with whom I often chat, and who talks very much to the point. But Madame Grandoni has disliked Roderick from the first, and if I were to take her advice I would wash my hands of him. You will laugh at me for my long face, but you would do that in any circumstances. I am half ashamed of my letter, for I have a faith in my friend that is deeper than my doubts. He was here last evening, talking about the Naples Museum, the Aristides, the bronzes, the Pompeian frescoes, with such a beautiful intelligence that doubt of the ultimate future seemed blasphemy. I walked back to his lodging with him, and he was as mild as midsummer moonlight. He has the ineffable something that charms and convinces; my last word about him shall not be a harsh one.”

Shortly after sending his letter, going one day into his friend’s studio, he found Roderick suffering from the grave infliction of a visit from Mr. Leavenworth. Roderick submitted with extreme ill grace to being bored, and he was now evidently in a state of high exasperation. He had lately begun a representation of a lazzarone lounging in the sun; an image of serene, irresponsible, sensuous life. The real lazzarone, he had admitted, was a vile fellow; but the ideal lazzarone—and his own had been subtly idealized—was a precursor of the millennium.

CHAPTER IX. Mary Garland

How it befell that Roderick had failed to be in Leghorn on his mother’s arrival never clearly transpired; for he undertook to give no elaborate explanation of his fault. He never indulged in professions (touching personal conduct) as to the future, or in remorse as to the past, and as he would have asked no praise if he had traveled night and day to embrace his mother as she set foot on shore, he made (in Rowland’s presence, at least) no apology for having left her to come in search of him. It was to be said that, thanks to an unprecedentedly fine season, the voyage of the two ladies had been surprisingly rapid, and that, according to common probabilities, if Roderick had left Rome on the morrow (as he declared that he had intended), he would have had a day or two of waiting at Leghorn. Rowland’s silent inference was that Christina Light had beguiled him into letting the time slip, and it was accompanied with a silent inquiry whether she had done so unconsciously or maliciously. He had told her, presumably, that his mother and his cousin were about to arrive; and it was pertinent to remember hereupon that she was a young lady of mysterious impulses. Rowland heard in due time the story of the adventures of the two ladies from Northampton. Miss Garland’s wish, at Leghorn, on finding they were left at the mercy of circumstances, had been to telegraph to Roderick and await an answer; for she knew that their arrival was a trifle premature. But Mrs. Hudson’s maternal heart had taken the alarm. Roderick’s sending for them was, to her imagination, a confession of illness, and his not being at Leghorn, a proof of it; an hour’s delay was therefore cruel both to herself and to him. She insisted on immediate departure; and, unskilled as they were in the mysteries of foreign (or even of domestic) travel, they had hurried in trembling eagerness to Rome. They had arrived late in the evening, and, knowing nothing of inns, had got into a cab and proceeded to Roderick’s lodging. At the door, poor Mrs. Hudson’s frightened anxiety had overcome her, and she had sat quaking and crying in the vehicle, too weak to move. Miss Garland had bravely gone in, groped her way up the dusky staircase, reached Roderick’s door, and, with the assistance of such acquaintance with the Italian tongue as she had culled from a phrase-book during the calmer hours of the voyage, had learned from the old woman who had her cousin’s household economy in charge that he was in the best of health and spirits, and had gone forth a few hours before with his hat on his ear, per divertirsi.

These things Rowland learned during a visit he paid the two ladies the evening after their arrival. Mrs. Hudson spoke of them at great length and with an air of clinging confidence in Rowland which told him how faithfully time had served him, in her imagination. But her fright was over, though she was still catching her breath a little, like a person dragged ashore out of waters uncomfortably deep. She was excessively bewildered and confused, and seemed more than ever to demand a tender handling from her friends. Before Miss Garland, Rowland was distinctly conscious that he trembled. He wondered extremely what was going on in her mind; what was her silent commentary on the incidents of the night before. He wondered all the more, because he immediately perceived that she was greatly changed since their parting, and that the change was by no means for the worse. She was older, easier, more free, more like a young woman who went sometimes into company. She had more beauty as well, inasmuch as her beauty before had been the depth of her expression, and the sources from which this beauty was fed had in these two years evidently not wasted themselves. Rowland felt almost instantly—he could hardly have said why: it was in her voice, in her tone, in the air—that a total change had passed over her attitude towards himself. She trusted him now, absolutely; whether or no she liked him, she believed he was solid. He felt that during the coming weeks he would need to be solid. Mrs. Hudson was at one of the smaller hotels, and her sitting-room was frugally lighted by a couple of candles. Rowland made the most of this dim illumination to try to detect the afterglow of that frightened flash from Miss Garland’s eyes the night before. It had been but a flash, for what provoked it had instantly vanished. Rowland had murmured a rapturous blessing on Roderick’s head, as he perceived him instantly apprehend the situation. If he had been drinking, its gravity sobered him on the spot; in a single moment he collected his wits. The next moment, with a ringing, jovial cry, he was folding the young girl in his arms, and the next he was beside his mother’s carriage, half smothered in her sobs and caresses. Rowland had recommended a hotel close at hand, and had then discreetly withdrawn. Roderick was at this time doing his part superbly, and Miss Garland’s brow was serene. It was serene now, twenty-four hours later; but nevertheless, her alarm had lasted an appreciable moment. What had become of it? It had dropped down deep into her memory, and it was lying there for the present in the shade. But with another week, Rowland said to himself, it would leap erect again; the lightest friction would strike a spark from it. Rowland thought he had schooled himself to face the issue of Mary Garland’s advent, casting it even in a tragical phase; but in her personal presence—in which he found a poignant mixture of the familiar and the strange—he seemed to face it and all that it might bring with it for the first time. In vulgar parlance, he stood uneasy in his shoes. He felt like walking on tiptoe, not to arouse the sleeping shadows. He felt, indeed, almost like saying that they might have their own way later, if they would only allow to these first few days the clear light of ardent contemplation. For Rowland at last was ardent, and all the bells within his soul were ringing bravely in jubilee. Roderick, he learned, had been the whole day with his mother, and had evidently responded to her purest trust. He appeared to her appealing eyes still unspotted by the world. That is what it is, thought Rowland, to be “gifted,” to escape not only the superficial, but the intrinsic penalties of misconduct. The two ladies had spent the day within doors, resting from the fatigues of travel. Miss Garland, Rowland suspected, was not so fatigued as she suffered it to be assumed. She had remained with Mrs. Hudson, to attend to her personal wants, which the latter seemed to think, now that she was in a foreign land, with a southern climate and a Catholic religion, would forthwith become very complex and formidable, though as yet they had simply resolved themselves into a desire for a great deal of tea and for a certain extremely familiar old black and white shawl across her feet, as she lay on the sofa. But the sense of novelty was evidently strong upon Miss Garland, and the light of expectation was in her eye. She was restless and excited; she moved about the room and went often to the window; she was observing keenly; she watched the Italian servants intently, as they came and went; she had already had a long colloquy with the French chambermaid, who had expounded her views on the Roman question; she noted the small differences in the furniture, in the food, in the sounds that came in from the street. Rowland felt, in all this, that her intelligence, here, would have a great unfolding. He wished immensely he might have a share in it; he wished he might show her Rome. That, of course, would be Roderick’s office. But he promised himself at least to take advantage of off-hours.

“It behooves you to appreciate your good fortune,” he said to her. “To be young and elastic, and yet old enough and wise enough to discriminate and reflect, and to come to Italy for the first time—that is one of the greatest pleasures that life offers us. It is but right to remind you of it, so that you make the most of opportunity and do not accuse yourself, later, of having wasted the precious season.”

Miss Garland looked at him, smiling intently, and went to the window again. “I expect to enjoy it,” she said. “Don’t be afraid; I am not wasteful.”

“I am afraid we are not qualified, you know,” said Mrs. Hudson. “We are told that you must know so much, that you must have read so many books. Our taste has not been cultivated. When I was a young lady at school, I remember I had a medal, with a pink ribbon, for ‘proficiency in Ancient History’—the seven kings, or is it the seven hills? and Quintus Curtius and Julius Caesar and—and that period, you know. I believe I have my medal somewhere in a drawer, now, but I have forgotten all about the kings. But after Roderick came to Italy we tried to learn something about it. Last winter Mary used to read ‘Corinne’ to me in the evenings, and in the mornings she used to read another book, to herself. What was it, Mary, that book that was so long, you know,—in fifteen volumes?”

“It was Sismondi’s Italian Republics,” said Mary, simply.

Rowland could not help laughing; whereupon Mary blushed. “Did you finish it?” he asked.

“Yes, and began another—a shorter one—Roscoe’s Leo the Tenth.”

“Did you find them interesting?”

“Oh yes.”

“Do you like history?”

“Some of it.”

“That ‘s a woman’s answer! And do you like art?”

She paused a moment. “I have never seen it!”

“You have great advantages, now, my dear, with Roderick and Mr. Mallet,” said Mrs. Hudson. “I am sure no young lady ever had such advantages. You come straight to the highest authorities. Roderick, I suppose, will show you the practice of art, and Mr. Mallet, perhaps, if he will be so good, will show you the theory. As an artist’s wife, you ought to know something about it.”

“One learns a good deal about it, here, by simply living,” said Rowland; “by going and coming about one’s daily avocations.”

“Dear, dear, how wonderful that we should be here in the midst of it!” murmured Mrs. Hudson. “To think of art being out there in the streets! We did n’t see much of it last evening, as we drove from the depot. But the streets were so dark and we were so frightened! But we are very easy now; are n’t we, Mary?”

“I am very happy,” said Mary, gravely, and wandered back to the window again.

Roderick came in at this moment and kissed his mother, and then went over and joined Miss Garland. Rowland sat with Mrs. Hudson, who evidently had a word which she deemed of some value for his private ear. She followed Roderick with intensely earnest eyes.

“I wish to tell you, sir,” she said, “how very grateful—how very thankful—what a happy mother I am! I feel as if I owed it all to you, sir. To find my poor boy so handsome, so prosperous, so elegant, so famous—and ever to have doubted of you! What must you think of me? You ‘re our guardian angel, sir. I often say so to Mary.”

Rowland wore, in response to this speech, a rather haggard brow. He could only murmur that he was glad she found Roderick looking well. He had of course promptly asked himself whether the best discretion dictated that he should give her a word of warning—just turn the handle of the door through which, later, disappointment might enter. He had determined to say nothing, but simply to wait in silence for Roderick to find effective inspiration in those confidently expectant eyes. It was to be supposed that he was seeking for it now; he remained sometime at the window with his cousin. But at last he turned away and came over to the fireside with a contraction of the eyebrows which seemed to intimate that Miss Garland’s influence was for the moment, at least, not soothing. She presently followed him, and for an instant Rowland observed her watching him as if she thought him strange. “Strange enough,” thought Rowland, “he may seem to her, if he will!” Roderick directed his glance to his friend with a certain peremptory air, which—roughly interpreted—was equivalent to a request to share the intellectual expense of entertaining the ladies. “Good heavens!” Rowland cried within himself; “is he already tired of them?”

“To-morrow, of course, we must begin to put you through the mill,” Roderick said to his mother. “And be it hereby known to Mallet that we count upon him to turn the wheel.”

“I will do as you please, my son,” said Mrs. Hudson. “So long as I have you with me I don’t care where I go. We must not take up too much of Mr. Mallet’s time.”

“His time is inexhaustible; he has nothing under the sun to do. Have you, Rowland? If you had seen the big hole I have been making in it! Where will you go first? You have your choice—from the Scala Santa to the Cloaca Maxima.”

“Let us take things in order,” said Rowland. “We will go first to Saint Peter’s. Miss Garland, I hope you are impatient to see Saint Peter’s.”

“I would like to go first to Roderick’s studio,” said Miss Garland.

“It ‘s a very nasty place,” said Roderick. “At your pleasure!”

“Yes, we must see your beautiful things before we can look contentedly at anything else,” said Mrs. Hudson.

“I have no beautiful things,” said Roderick. “You may see what there is! What makes you look so odd?”

This inquiry was abruptly addressed to his mother, who, in response, glanced appealingly at Mary and raised a startled hand to her smooth hair.

“No, it ‘s your face,” said Roderick. “What has happened to it these two years? It has changed its expression.”

“Your mother has prayed a great deal,” said Miss Garland, simply.

“I did n’t suppose, of course, it was from doing anything bad! It makes you a very good face—very interesting, very solemn. It has very fine lines in it; something might be done with it.” And Rowland held one of the candles near the poor lady’s head.

She was covered with confusion. “My son, my son,” she said with dignity, “I don’t understand you.”

In a flash all his old alacrity had come to him. “I suppose a man may admire his own mother!” he cried. “If you please, madame, you ‘ll sit to me for that head. I see it, I see it! I will make something that a queen can’t get done for her.”

Rowland respectfully urged her to assent; he saw Roderick was in the vein and would probably do something eminently original. She gave her promise, at last, after many soft, inarticulate protests and a frightened petition that she might be allowed to keep her knitting.

Rowland returned the next day, with plenty of zeal for the part Roderick had assigned to him. It had been arranged that they should go to Saint Peter’s. Roderick was in high good-humor, and, in the carriage, was watching his mother with a fine mixture of filial and professional tenderness. Mrs. Hudson looked up mistrustfully at the tall, shabby houses, and grasped the side of the barouche in her hand, as if she were in a sail-boat, in dangerous waters. Rowland sat opposite to Miss Garland. She was totally oblivious of her companions; from the moment the carriage left the hotel, she sat gazing, wide-eyed and absorbed, at the objects about them. If Rowland had felt disposed he might have made a joke of her intense seriousness. From time to time he told her the name of a place or a building, and she nodded, without looking at him. When they emerged into the great square between Bernini’s colonnades, she laid her hand on Mrs. Hudson’s arm and sank back in the carriage, staring up at the vast yellow facade of the church. Inside the church, Roderick gave his arm to his mother, and Rowland constituted himself the especial guide of Miss Garland. He walked with her slowly everywhere, and made the entire circuit, telling her all he knew of the history of the building. This was a great deal, but she listened attentively, keeping her eyes fixed on the dome. To Rowland himself it had never seemed so radiantly sublime as at these moments; he felt almost as if he had contrived it himself and had a right to be proud of it. He left Miss Garland a while on the steps of the choir, where she had seated herself to rest, and went to join their companions. Mrs. Hudson was watching a great circle of tattered contadini, who were kneeling before the image of Saint Peter. The fashion of their tatters fascinated her; she stood gazing at them in a sort of terrified pity, and could not be induced to look at anything else. Rowland went back to Miss Garland and sat down beside her.

“Well, what do you think of Europe?” he asked, smiling.

“I think it ‘s horrible!” she said abruptly.

“Horrible?”

“I feel so strangely—I could almost cry.”

“How is it that you feel?”

“So sorry for the poor past, that seems to have died here, in my heart, in an hour!”

“But, surely, you ‘re pleased—you ‘re interested.”

“I am overwhelmed. Here in a single hour, everything is changed. It is as if a wall in my mind had been knocked down at a stroke. Before me lies an immense new world, and it makes the old one, the poor little narrow, familiar one I have always known, seem pitiful.”

“But you did n’t come to Rome to keep your eyes fastened on that narrow little world. Forget it, turn your back on it, and enjoy all this.”

“I want to enjoy it; but as I sat here just now, looking up at that golden mist in the dome, I seemed to see in it the vague shapes of certain people and things at home. To enjoy, as you say, as these things demand of one to enjoy them, is to break with one’s past. And breaking is a pain!”

“Don’t mind the pain, and it will cease to trouble you. Enjoy, enjoy; it is your duty. Yours especially!”

“Why mine especially?”

“Because I am very sure that you have a mind capable of doing the most liberal justice to everything interesting and beautiful. You are extremely intelligent.”

“You don’t know,” said Miss Garland, simply.

“In that matter one feels. I really think that I know better than you. I don’t want to seem patronizing, but I suspect that your mind is susceptible of a great development. Give it the best company, trust it, let it go!”

She looked away from him for some moments, down the gorgeous vista of the great church. “But what you say,” she said at last, “means change!”

“Change for the better!” cried Rowland.

“How can one tell? As one stands, one knows the worst. It seems to me very frightful to develop,” she added, with her complete smile.

“One is in for it in one way or another, and one might as well do it with a good grace as with a bad! Since one can’t escape life, it is better to take it by the hand.”

“Is this what you call life?” she asked.

“What do you mean by ‘this’?”

“Saint Peter’s—all this splendor, all Rome—pictures, ruins, statues, beggars, monks.”

“It is not all of it, but it is a large part of it. All these things are impregnated with life; they are the fruits of an old and complex civilization.”

“An old and complex civilization: I am afraid I don’t like that.”

“Don’t conclude on that point just yet. Wait till you have tested it. While you wait, you will see an immense number of very beautiful things—things that you are made to understand. They won’t leave you as they found you; then you can judge. Don’t tell me I know nothing about your understanding. I have a right to assume it.”

Miss Garland gazed awhile aloft in the dome. “I am not sure I understand that,” she said.

“I hope, at least, that at a cursory glance it pleases you,” said Rowland. “You need n’t be afraid to tell the truth. What strikes some people is that it is so remarkably small.”

“Oh, it’s large enough; it’s very wonderful. There are things in Rome, then,” she added in a moment, turning and looking at him, “that are very, very beautiful?”

“Lots of them.”

“Some of the most beautiful things in the world?”

“Unquestionably.”

“What are they? which things have most beauty?”

“That is according to taste. I should say the statues.”

“How long will it take to see them all? to know, at least, something about them?”

“You can see them all, as far as mere seeing goes, in a fortnight. But to know them is a thing for one’s leisure. The more time you spend among them, the more you care for them.” After a moment’s hesitation he went on: “Why should you grudge time? It ‘s all in your way, since you are to be an artist’s wife.”

“I have thought of that,” she said. “It may be that I shall always live here, among the most beautiful things in the world!”

“Very possibly! I should like to see you ten years hence.”

“I dare say I shall seem greatly altered. But I am sure of one thing.”

“Of what?”

“That for the most part I shall be quite the same. I ask nothing better than to believe the fine things you say about my understanding, but even if they are true, it won’t matter. I shall be what I was made, what I am now—a young woman from the country! The fruit of a civilization not old and complex, but new and simple.”

“I am delighted to hear it: that ‘s an excellent foundation.”

“Perhaps, if you show me anything more, you will not always think so kindly of it. Therefore I warn you.”

“I am not frightened. I should like vastly to say something to you: Be what you are, be what you choose; but do, sometimes, as I tell you.”

If Rowland was not frightened, neither, perhaps, was Miss Garland; but she seemed at least slightly disturbed. She proposed that they should join their companions.

Mrs. Hudson spoke under her breath; she could not be accused of the want of reverence sometimes attributed to Protestants in the great Catholic temples. “Mary, dear,” she whispered, “suppose we had to kiss that dreadful brass toe. If I could only have kept our door-knocker, at Northampton, as bright as that! I think it’s so heathenish; but Roderick says he thinks it ‘s sublime.”

Roderick had evidently grown a trifle perverse. “It ‘s sublimer than anything that your religion asks you to do!” he exclaimed.

“Surely our religion sometimes gives us very difficult duties,” said Miss Garland.

“The duty of sitting in a whitewashed meeting-house and listening to a nasal Puritan! I admit that ‘s difficult. But it ‘s not sublime. I am speaking of ceremonies, of forms. It is in my line, you know, to make much of forms. I think this is a very beautiful one. Could n’t you do it?” he demanded, looking at his cousin.

She looked back at him intently and then shook her head. “I think not!”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know; I could n’t!”

During this little discussion our four friends were standing near the venerable image of Saint Peter, and a squalid, savage-looking peasant, a tattered ruffian of the most orthodox Italian aspect, had been performing his devotions before it. He turned away, crossing himself, and Mrs. Hudson gave a little shudder of horror.

“After that,” she murmured, “I suppose he thinks he is as good as any one! And here is another. Oh, what a beautiful person!”

A young lady had approached the sacred effigy, after having wandered away from a group of companions. She kissed the brazen toe, touched it with her forehead, and turned round, facing our friends. Rowland then recognized Christina Light. He was stupefied: had she suddenly embraced the Catholic faith? It was but a few weeks before that she had treated him to a passionate profession of indifference. Had she entered the church to put herself en regle with what was expected of a Princess Casamassima? While Rowland was mentally asking these questions she was approaching him and his friends, on her way to the great altar. At first she did not perceive them.

Mary Garland had been gazing at her. “You told me,” she said gently, to Rowland, “that Rome contained some of the most beautiful things in the world. This surely is one of them!”

At this moment Christina’s eye met Rowland’s and before giving him any sign of recognition she glanced rapidly at his companions. She saw Roderick, but she gave him no bow; she looked at Mrs. Hudson, she looked at Mary Garland. At Mary Garland she looked fixedly, piercingly, from head to foot, as the slow pace at which she was advancing made possible. Then suddenly, as if she had perceived Roderick for the first time, she gave him a charming nod, a radiant smile. In a moment he was at her side. She stopped, and he stood talking to her; she continued to look at Miss Garland.

“Why, Roderick knows her!” cried Mrs. Hudson, in an awe-struck whisper. “I supposed she was some great princess.”

“She is—almost!” said Rowland. “She is the most beautiful girl in Europe, and Roderick has made her bust.”

“Her bust? Dear, dear!” murmured Mrs. Hudson, vaguely shocked. “What a strange bonnet!”

“She has very strange eyes,” said Mary, and turned away.

The two ladies, with Rowland, began to descend toward the door of the church. On their way they passed Mrs. Light, the Cavaliere, and the poodle, and Rowland informed his companions of the relation in which these personages stood to Roderick’s young lady.

“Think of it, Mary!” said Mrs. Hudson. “What splendid people he must know! No wonder he found Northampton dull!”

“I like the poor little old gentleman,” said Mary.

“Why do you call him poor?” Rowland asked, struck with the observation.

“He seems so!” she answered simply.

As they were reaching the door they were overtaken by Roderick, whose interview with Miss Light had perceptibly brightened his eye. “So you are acquainted with princesses!” said his mother softly, as they passed into the portico.

“Miss Light is not a princess!” said Roderick, curtly.

“But Mr. Mallet says so,” urged Mrs. Hudson, rather disappointed.

“I meant that she was going to be!” said Rowland.

“It ‘s by no means certain that she is even going to be!” Roderick answered.

“Ah,” said Rowland, “I give it up!”

Roderick almost immediately demanded that his mother should sit to him, at his studio, for her portrait, and Rowland ventured to add another word of urgency. If Roderick’s idea really held him, it was an immense pity that his inspiration should be wasted; inspiration, in these days, had become too precious a commodity. It was arranged therefore that, for the present, during the mornings, Mrs. Hudson should place herself at her son’s service. This involved but little sacrifice, for the good lady’s appetite for antiquities was diminutive and bird-like, the usual round of galleries and churches fatigued her, and she was glad to purchase immunity from sight-seeing by a regular afternoon drive. It became natural in this way that, Miss Garland having her mornings free, Rowland should propose to be the younger lady’s guide in whatever explorations she might be disposed to make. She said she knew nothing about it, but she had a great curiosity, and would be glad to see anything that he would show her. Rowland could not find it in his heart to accuse Roderick of neglect of the young girl; for it was natural that the inspirations of a capricious man of genius, when they came, should be imperious; but of course he wondered how Miss Garland felt, as the young man’s promised wife, on being thus expeditiously handed over to another man to be entertained. However she felt, he was certain he would know little about it. There had been, between them, none but indirect allusions to her engagement, and Rowland had no desire to discuss it more largely; for he had no quarrel with matters as they stood. They wore the same delightful aspect through the lovely month of May, and the ineffable charm of Rome at that period seemed but the radiant sympathy of nature with his happy opportunity. The weather was divine; each particular morning, as he walked from his lodging to Mrs. Hudson’s modest inn, seemed to have a blessing upon it. The elder lady had usually gone off to the studio, and he found Miss Garland sitting alone at the open window, turning the leaves of some book of artistic or antiquarian reference that he had given her. She always had a smile, she was always eager, alert, responsive. She might be grave by nature, she might be sad by circumstance, she might have secret doubts and pangs, but she was essentially young and strong and fresh and able to enjoy. Her enjoyment was not especially demonstrative, but it was curiously diligent. Rowland felt that it was not amusement and sensation that she coveted, but knowledge—facts that she might noiselessly lay away, piece by piece, in the perfumed darkness of her serious mind, so that, under this head at least, she should not be a perfectly portionless bride. She never merely pretended to understand; she let things go, in her modest fashion, at the moment, but she watched them on their way, over the crest of the hill, and when her fancy seemed not likely to be missed it went hurrying after them and ran breathless at their side, as it were, and begged them for the secret. Rowland took an immense satisfaction in observing that she never mistook the second-best for the best, and that when she was in the presence of a masterpiece, she recognized the occasion as a mighty one. She said many things which he thought very profound—that is, if they really had the fine intention he suspected. This point he usually tried to ascertain; but he was obliged to proceed cautiously, for in her mistrustful shyness it seemed to her that cross-examination must necessarily be ironical. She wished to know just where she was going—what she would gain or lose. This was partly on account of a native intellectual purity, a temper of mind that had not lived with its door ajar, as one might say, upon the high-road of thought, for passing ideas to drop in and out at their pleasure; but had made much of a few long visits from guests cherished and honored—guests whose presence was a solemnity. But it was even more because she was conscious of a sort of growing self-respect, a sense of devoting her life not to her own ends, but to those of another, whose life would be large and brilliant. She had been brought up to think a great deal of “nature” and nature’s innocent laws; but now Rowland had spoken to her ardently of culture; her strenuous fancy had responded, and she was pursuing culture into retreats where the need for some intellectual effort gave a noble severity to her purpose. She wished to be very sure, to take only the best, knowing it to be the best. There was something exquisite in this labor of pious self-adornment, and Rowland helped it, though its fruits were not for him. In spite of her lurking rigidity and angularity, it was very evident that a nervous, impulsive sense of beauty was constantly at play in her soul, and that her actual experience of beautiful things moved her in some very deep places. For all that she was not demonstrative, that her manner was simple, and her small-talk of no very ample flow; for all that, as she had said, she was a young woman from the country, and the country was West Nazareth, and West Nazareth was in its way a stubborn little fact, she was feeling the direct influence of the great amenities of the world, and they were shaping her with a divinely intelligent touch. “Oh exquisite virtue of circumstance!” cried Rowland to himself, “that takes us by the hand and leads us forth out of corners where, perforce, our attitudes are a trifle contracted, and beguiles us into testing mistrusted faculties!” When he said to Mary Garland that he wished he might see her ten years hence, he was paying mentally an equal compliment to circumstance and to the girl herself. Capacity was there, it could be freely trusted; observation would have but to sow its generous seed. “A superior woman”—the idea had harsh associations, but he watched it imaging itself in the vagueness of the future with a kind of hopeless confidence.

They went a great deal to Saint Peter’s, for which Rowland had an exceeding affection, a large measure of which he succeeded in infusing into his companion. She confessed very speedily that to climb the long, low, yellow steps, beneath the huge florid facade, and then to push the ponderous leathern apron of the door, to find one’s self confronted with that builded, luminous sublimity, was a sensation of which the keenness renewed itself with surprising generosity. In those days the hospitality of the Vatican had not been curtailed, and it was an easy and delightful matter to pass from the gorgeous church to the solemn company of the antique marbles. Here Rowland had with his companion a great deal of talk, and found himself expounding aesthetics a perte de vue. He discovered that she made notes of her likes and dislikes in a new-looking little memorandum book, and he wondered to what extent she reported his own discourse. These were charming hours. The galleries had been so cold all winter that Rowland had been an exile from them; but now that the sun was already scorching in the great square between the colonnades, where the twin fountains flashed almost fiercely, the marble coolness of the long, image-bordered vistas made them a delightful refuge. The great herd of tourists had almost departed, and our two friends often found themselves, for half an hour at a time, in sole and tranquil possession of the beautiful Braccio Nuovo. Here and there was an open window, where they lingered and leaned, looking out into the warm, dead air, over the towers of the city, at the soft-hued, historic hills, at the stately shabby gardens of the palace, or at some sunny, empty, grass-grown court, lost in the heart of the labyrinthine pile. They went sometimes into the chambers painted by Raphael, and of course paid their respects to the Sistine Chapel; but Mary’s evident preference was to linger among the statues. Once, when they were standing before that noblest of sculptured portraits, the so-called Demosthenes, in the Braccio Nuovo, she made the only spontaneous allusion to her projected marriage, direct or indirect, that had yet fallen from her lips. “I am so glad,” she said, “that Roderick is a sculptor and not a painter.”

The allusion resided chiefly in the extreme earnestness with which the words were uttered. Rowland immediately asked her the reason of her gladness.

“It ‘s not that painting is not fine,” she said, “but that sculpture is finer. It is more manly.”

Rowland tried at times to make her talk about herself, but in this she had little skill. She seemed to him so much older, so much more pliant to social uses than when he had seen her at home, that he had a desire to draw from her some categorical account of her occupation and thoughts. He told her his desire and what suggested it. “It appears, then,” she said, “that, after all, one can grow at home!”

“Unquestionably, if one has a motive. Your growth, then, was unconscious? You did not watch yourself and water your roots?”

She paid no heed to his question. “I am willing to grant,” she said, “that Europe is more delightful than I supposed; and I don’t think that, mentally, I had been stingy. But you must admit that America is better than you have supposed.”

“I have not a fault to find with the country which produced you!” Rowland thought he might risk this, smiling.

“And yet you want me to change—to assimilate Europe, I suppose you would call it.”

“I have felt that desire only on general principles. Shall I tell you what I feel now? America has made you thus far; let America finish you! I should like to ship you back without delay and see what becomes of you. That sounds unkind, and I admit there is a cold intellectual curiosity in it.”

She shook her head. “The charm is broken; the thread is snapped! I prefer to remain here.”

Invariably, when he was inclined to make of something they were talking of a direct application to herself, she wholly failed to assist him; she made no response. Whereupon, once, with a spark of ardent irritation, he told her she was very “secretive.” At this she colored a little, and he said that in default of any larger confidence it would at least be a satisfaction to make her confess to that charge. But even this satisfaction she denied him, and his only revenge was in making, two or three times afterward, a softly ironical allusion to her slyness. He told her that she was what is called in French a sournoise. “Very good,” she answered, almost indifferently, “and now please tell me again—I have forgotten it—what you said an ‘architrave’ was.”

It was on the occasion of her asking him a question of this kind that he charged her, with a humorous emphasis in which, also, if she had been curious in the matter, she might have detected a spark of restless ardor, with having an insatiable avidity for facts. “You are always snatching at information,” he said; “you will never consent to have any disinterested conversation.”

She frowned a little, as she always did when he arrested their talk upon something personal. But this time she assented, and said that she knew she was eager for facts. “One must make hay while the sun shines,” she added. “I must lay up a store of learning against dark days. Somehow, my imagination refuses to compass the idea that I may be in Rome indefinitely.”

He knew he had divined her real motives; but he felt that if he might have said to her—what it seemed impossible to say—that fortune possibly had in store for her a bitter disappointment, she would have been capable of answering, immediately after the first sense of pain, “Say then that I am laying up resources for solitude!”

But all the accusations were not his. He had been watching, once, during some brief argument, to see whether she would take her forefinger out of her Murray, into which she had inserted it to keep a certain page. It would have been hard to say why this point interested him, for he had not the slightest real apprehension that she was dry or pedantic. The simple human truth was, the poor fellow was jealous of science. In preaching science to her, he had over-estimated his powers of self-effacement. Suddenly, sinking science for the moment, she looked at him very frankly and began to frown. At the same time she let the Murray slide down to the ground, and he was so charmed with this circumstance that he made no movement to pick it up.

“You are singularly inconsistent, Mr. Mallet,” she said.

“How?”

“That first day that we were in Saint Peter’s you said things that inspired me. You bade me plunge into all this. I was all ready; I only wanted a little push; yours was a great one; here I am in mid-ocean! And now, as a reward for my bravery, you have repeatedly snubbed me.”

“Distinctly, then,” said Rowland, “I strike you as inconsistent?”

“That is the word.”

“Then I have played my part very ill.”

“Your part? What is your part supposed to have been?”

He hesitated a moment. “That of usefulness, pure and simple.”

“I don’t understand you!” she said; and picking up her Murray, she fairly buried herself in it.

That evening he said something to her which necessarily increased her perplexity, though it was not uttered with such an intention. “Do you remember,” he asked, “my begging you, the other day, to do occasionally as I told you? It seemed to me you tacitly consented.”

“Very tacitly.”

“I have never yet really presumed on your consent. But now I would like you to do this: whenever you catch me in the act of what you call inconsistency, ask me the meaning of some architectural term. I will know what you mean; a word to the wise!”

One morning they spent among the ruins of the Palatine, that sunny desolation of crumbling, over-tangled fragments, half excavated and half identified, known as the Palace of the Caesars. Nothing in Rome is more interesting, and no locality has such a confusion of picturesque charms. It is a vast, rambling garden, where you stumble at every step on the disinterred bones of the past; where damp, frescoed corridors, relics, possibly, of Nero’s Golden House, serve as gigantic bowers, and where, in the springtime, you may sit on a Latin inscription, in the shade of a flowering almond-tree, and admire the composition of the Campagna. The day left a deep impression on Rowland’s mind, partly owing to its intrinsic sweetness, and partly because his companion, on this occasion, let her Murray lie unopened for an hour, and asked several questions irrelevant to the Consuls and the Caesars. She had begun by saying that it was coming over her, after all, that Rome was a ponderously sad place. The sirocco was gently blowing, the air was heavy, she was tired, she looked a little pale.

“Everything,” she said, “seems to say that all things are vanity. If one is doing something, I suppose one feels a certain strength within one to contradict it. But if one is idle, surely it is depressing to live, year after year, among the ashes of things that once were mighty. If I were to remain here I should either become permanently ‘low,’ as they say, or I would take refuge in some dogged daily work.”

“What work?”

“I would open a school for those beautiful little beggars; though I am sadly afraid I should never bring myself to scold them.”

“I am idle,” said Rowland, “and yet I have kept up a certain spirit.”

“I don’t call you idle,” she answered with emphasis.

“It is very good of you. Do you remember our talking about that in Northampton?”

“During that picnic? Perfectly. Has your coming abroad succeeded, for yourself, as well as you hoped?”

“I think I may say that it has turned out as well as I expected.”

“Are you happy?”

“Don’t I look so?”

“So it seems to me. But”—and she hesitated a moment—“I imagine you look happy whether you are so or not.”

“I ‘m like that ancient comic mask that we saw just now in yonder excavated fresco: I am made to grin.”

“Shall you come back here next winter?”

“Very probably.”

“Are you settled here forever?”

“‘Forever’ is a long time. I live only from year to year.”

“Shall you never marry?”

Rowland gave a laugh. “‘Forever’—‘never!’ You handle large ideas. I have not taken a vow of celibacy.”

“Would n’t you like to marry?”

“I should like it immensely.”

To this she made no rejoinder: but presently she asked, “Why don’t you write a book?”

Rowland laughed, this time more freely. “A book! What book should I write?”

“A history; something about art or antiquities.”

“I have neither the learning nor the talent.”

She made no attempt to contradict him; she simply said she had supposed otherwise. “You ought, at any rate,” she continued in a moment, “to do something for yourself.”

“For myself? I should have supposed that if ever a man seemed to live for himself”—

“I don’t know how it seems,” she interrupted, “to careless observers. But we know—we know that you have lived—a great deal—for us.”

Her voice trembled slightly, and she brought out the last words with a little jerk.

“She has had that speech on her conscience,” thought Rowland; “she has been thinking she owed it to me, and it seemed to her that now was her time to make it and have done with it.”

She went on in a way which confirmed these reflections, speaking with due solemnity. “You ought to be made to know very well what we all feel. Mrs. Hudson tells me that she has told you what she feels. Of course Roderick has expressed himself. I have been wanting to thank you too; I do, from my heart.”

Rowland made no answer; his face at this moment resembled the tragic mask much more than the comic. But Miss Garland was not looking at him; she had taken up her Murray again.

In the afternoon she usually drove with Mrs. Hudson, but Rowland frequently saw her again in the evening. He was apt to spend half an hour in the little sitting-room at the hotel-pension on the slope of the Pincian, and Roderick, who dined regularly with his mother, was present on these occasions. Rowland saw him little at other times, and for three weeks no observations passed between them on the subject of Mrs. Hudson’s advent. To Rowland’s vision, as the weeks elapsed, the benefits to proceed from the presence of the two ladies remained shrouded in mystery. Roderick was peculiarly inscrutable. He was preoccupied with his work on his mother’s portrait, which was taking a very happy turn; and often, when he sat silent, with his hands in his pockets, his legs outstretched, his head thrown back, and his eyes on vacancy, it was to be supposed that his fancy was hovering about the half-shaped image in his studio, exquisite even in its immaturity. He said little, but his silence did not of necessity imply disaffection, for he evidently found it a deep personal luxury to lounge away the hours in an atmosphere so charged with feminine tenderness. He was not alert, he suggested nothing in the way of excursions (Rowland was the prime mover in such as were attempted), but he conformed passively at least to the tranquil temper of the two women, and made no harsh comments nor sombre allusions. Rowland wondered whether he had, after all, done his friend injustice in denying him the sentiment of duty. He refused invitations, to Rowland’s knowledge, in order to dine at the jejune little table-d’hote; wherever his spirit might be, he was present in the flesh with religious constancy. Mrs. Hudson’s felicity betrayed itself in a remarkable tendency to finish her sentences and wear her best black silk gown. Her tremors had trembled away; she was like a child who discovers that the shaggy monster it has so long been afraid to touch is an inanimate terror, compounded of straw and saw-dust, and that it is even a safe audacity to tickle its nose. As to whether the love-knot of which Mary Garland had the keeping still held firm, who should pronounce? The young girl, as we know, did not wear it on her sleeve. She always sat at the table, near the candles, with a piece of needle-work. This was the attitude in which Rowland had first seen her, and he thought, now that he had seen her in several others, it was not the least becoming.

CHAPTER X. The Cavaliere

There befell at last a couple of days during which Rowland was unable to go to the hotel. Late in the evening of the second one Roderick came into his room. In a few moments he announced that he had finished the bust of his mother.

“And it ‘s magnificent!” he declared. “It ‘s one of the best things I have done.”

“I believe it,” said Rowland. “Never again talk to me about your inspiration being dead.”

“Why not? This may be its last kick! I feel very tired. But it ‘s a masterpiece, though I do say it. They tell us we owe so much to our parents. Well, I ‘ve paid the filial debt handsomely!” He walked up and down the room a few moments, with the purpose of his visit evidently still undischarged. “There ‘s one thing more I want to say,” he presently resumed. “I feel as if I ought to tell you!” He stopped before Rowland with his head high and his brilliant glance unclouded. “Your invention is a failure!”

“My invention?” Rowland repeated.

“Bringing out my mother and Mary.”

“A failure?”

“It ‘s no use! They don’t help me.”

Rowland had fancied that Roderick had no more surprises for him; but he was now staring at him, wide-eyed.

“They bore me!” Roderick went on.

“Oh, oh!” cried Rowland.

“Listen, listen!” said Roderick with perfect gentleness. “I am not complaining of them; I am simply stating a fact. I am very sorry for them; I am greatly disappointed.”

“Have you given them a fair trial?”

“Should n’t you say so? It seems to me I have behaved beautifully.”

“You have done very well; I have been building great hopes on it.”

“I have done too well, then. After the first forty-eight hours my own hopes collapsed. But I determined to fight it out; to stand within the temple; to let the spirit of the Lord descend! Do you want to know the result? Another week of it, and I shall begin to hate them. I shall want to poison them.”

“Miserable boy!” cried Rowland. “They are the loveliest of women!”

“Very likely! But they mean no more to me than a Bible text to an atheist!”

“I utterly fail,” said Rowland, in a moment, “to understand your relation to Miss Garland.”

Roderick shrugged his shoulders and let his hands drop at his sides. “She adores me! That ‘s my relation.” And he smiled strangely.

“Have you broken your engagement?”

“Broken it? You can’t break a ray of moonshine.”

“Have you absolutely no affection for her?”

Roderick placed his hand on his heart and held it there a moment. “Dead—dead—dead!” he said at last.

“I wonder,” Rowland asked presently, “if you begin to comprehend the beauty of Miss Garland’s character. She is a person of the highest merit.”

“Evidently—or I would not have cared for her!”

“Has that no charm for you now?”

“Oh, don’t force a fellow to say rude things!”

“Well, I can only say that you don’t know what you are giving up.”

Roderick gave a quickened glance. “Do you know, so well?”

“I admire her immeasurably.”

Roderick smiled, we may almost say sympathetically. “You have not wasted time.”

Rowland’s thoughts were crowding upon him fast. If Roderick was resolute, why oppose him? If Mary was to be sacrificed, why, in that way, try to save her? There was another way; it only needed a little presumption to make it possible. Rowland tried, mentally, to summon presumption to his aid; but whether it came or not, it found conscience there before it. Conscience had only three words, but they were cogent. “For her sake—for her sake,” it dumbly murmured, and Rowland resumed his argument. “I don’t know what I would n’t do,” he said, “rather than that Miss Garland should suffer.”

“There is one thing to be said,” Roderick answered reflectively. “She is very strong.”

“Well, then, if she ‘s strong, believe that with a longer chance, a better chance, she will still regain your affection.”

“Do you know what you ask?” cried Roderick. “Make love to a girl I hate?”

“You hate?”

“As her lover, I should hate her!”

“Listen to me!” said Rowland with vehemence.

“No, listen you to me! Do you really urge my marrying a woman who would bore me to death? I would let her know it in very good season, and then where would she be?”

Rowland walked the length of the room a couple of times and then stopped suddenly. “Go your way, then! Say all this to her, not to me!”

“To her? I am afraid of her; I want you to help me.”

“My dear Roderick,” said Rowland with an eloquent smile, “I can help you no more!”

Roderick frowned, hesitated a moment, and then took his hat. “Oh, well,” he said, “I am not so afraid of her as all that!” And he turned, as if to depart.

“Stop!” cried Rowland, as he laid his hand on the door.

Roderick paused and stood waiting, with his irritated brow.

“Come back; sit down there and listen to me. Of anything you were to say in your present state of mind you would live most bitterly to repent. You don’t know what you really think; you don’t know what you really feel. You don’t know your own mind; you don’t do justice to Miss Garland. All this is impossible here, under these circumstances. You ‘re blind, you ‘re deaf, you ‘re under a spell. To break it, you must leave Rome.”

“Leave Rome! Rome was never so dear to me.”

“That ‘s not of the smallest consequence. Leave it instantly.”

“And where shall I go?”

“Go to some place where you may be alone with your mother and Miss Garland.”

“Alone? You will not come?”

“Oh, if you desire it, I will come.”

Roderick inclining his head a little, looked at his friend askance. “I don’t understand you,” he said; “I wish you liked Miss Garland either a little less, or a little more.”

Rowland felt himself coloring, but he paid no heed to Roderick’s speech. “You ask me to help you,” he went on. “On these present conditions I can do nothing. But if you will postpone all decision as to the continuance of your engagement a couple of months longer, and meanwhile leave Rome, leave Italy, I will do what I can to ‘help you,’ as you say, in the event of your still wishing to break it.”

“I must do without your help then! Your conditions are impossible. I will leave Rome at the time I have always intended—at the end of June. My rooms and my mother’s are taken till then; all my arrangements are made accordingly. Then, I will depart; not before.”

“You are not frank,” said Rowland. “Your real reason for staying has nothing to do with your rooms.”

Roderick’s face betrayed neither embarrassment nor resentment. “If I ‘m not frank, it ‘s for the first time in my life. Since you know so much about my real reason, let me hear it! No, stop!” he suddenly added, “I won’t trouble you. You are right, I have a motive. On the twenty-fourth of June Miss Light is to be married. I take an immense interest in all that concerns her, and I wish to be present at her wedding.”

“But you said the other day at Saint Peter’s that it was by no means certain her marriage would take place.”

“Apparently I was wrong: the invitations, I am told, are going out.”

Rowland felt that it would be utterly vain to remonstrate, and that the only thing for him was to make the best terms possible. “If I offer no further opposition to your waiting for Miss Light’s marriage,” he said, “will you promise, meanwhile and afterwards, for a certain period, to defer to my judgment—to say nothing that may be a cause of suffering to Miss Garland?”

“For a certain period? What period?” Roderick demanded.

“Ah, don’t drive so close a bargain! Don’t you understand that I have taken you away from her, that I suffer in every nerve in consequence, and that I must do what I can to restore you?”

“Do what you can, then,” said Roderick gravely, putting out his hand. “Do what you can!” His tone and his hand-shake seemed to constitute a promise, and upon this they parted.

Roderick’s bust of his mother, whether or no it was a discharge of what he called the filial debt, was at least a most admirable production. Rowland, at the time it was finished, met Gloriani one evening, and this unscrupulous genius immediately began to ask questions about it. “I am told our high-flying friend has come down,” he said. “He has been doing a queer little old woman.”

“A queer little old woman!” Rowland exclaimed. “My dear sir, she is Hudson’s mother.”

“All the more reason for her being queer! It is a bust for terra-cotta, eh?”

“By no means; it is for marble.”

“That ‘s a pity. It was described to me as a charming piece of quaintness: a little demure, thin-lipped old lady, with her head on one side, and the prettiest wrinkles in the world—a sort of fairy godmother.”

“Go and see it, and judge for yourself,” said Rowland.

“No, I see I shall be disappointed. It ‘s quite the other thing, the sort of thing they put into the campo-santos. I wish that boy would listen to me an hour!”

But a day or two later Rowland met him again in the street, and, as they were near, proposed they should adjourn to Roderick’s studio. He consented, and on entering they found the young master. Roderick’s demeanor to Gloriani was never conciliatory, and on this occasion supreme indifference was apparently all he had to offer. But Gloriani, like a genuine connoisseur, cared nothing for his manners; he cared only for his skill. In the bust of Mrs. Hudson there was something almost touching; it was an exquisite example of a ruling sense of beauty. The poor lady’s small, neat, timorous face had certainly no great character, but Roderick had reproduced its sweetness, its mildness, its minuteness, its still maternal passion, with the most unerring art. It was perfectly unflattered, and yet admirably tender; it was the poetry of fidelity. Gloriani stood looking at it a long time most intently. Roderick wandered away into the neighboring room.

“I give it up!” said the sculptor at last. “I don’t understand it.”

“But you like it?” said Rowland.

“Like it? It ‘s a pearl of pearls. Tell me this,” he added: “is he very fond of his mother; is he a very good son?” And he gave Rowland a sharp look.

“Why, she adores him,” said Rowland, smiling.

“That ‘s not an answer! But it ‘s none of my business. Only if I, in his place, being suspected of having—what shall I call it?—a cold heart, managed to do that piece of work, oh, oh! I should be called a pretty lot of names. Charlatan, poseur, arrangeur! But he can do as he chooses! My dear young man, I know you don’t like me,” he went on, as Roderick came back. “It ‘s a pity; you are strong enough not to care about me at all. You are very strong.”

“Not at all,” said Roderick curtly. “I am very weak!”

“I told you last year that you would n’t keep it up. I was a great ass. You will!”

“I beg your pardon—I won’t!” retorted Roderick.

“Though I ‘m a great ass, all the same, eh? Well, call me what you will, so long as you turn out this sort of thing! I don’t suppose it makes any particular difference, but I should like to say now I believe in you.”

Roderick stood looking at him for a moment with a strange hardness in his face. It flushed slowly, and two glittering, angry tears filled his eyes. It was the first time Rowland had ever seen them there; he saw them but once again. Poor Gloriani, he was sure, had never in his life spoken with less of irony; but to Roderick there was evidently a sense of mockery in his profession of faith. He turned away with a muttered, passionate imprecation. Gloriani was accustomed to deal with complex problems, but this time he was hopelessly puzzled. “What ‘s the matter with him?” he asked, simply.

Rowland gave a sad smile, and touched his forehead. “Genius, I suppose.”

Gloriani sent another parting, lingering look at the bust of Mrs. Hudson. “Well, it ‘s deuced perfect, it ‘s deuced simple; I do believe in him!” he said. “But I ‘m glad I ‘m not a genius. It makes,” he added with a laugh, as he looked for Roderick to wave him good-by, and saw his back still turned, “it makes a more sociable studio.”

Rowland had purchased, as he supposed, temporary tranquillity for Mary Garland; but his own humor in these days was not especially peaceful. He was attempting, in a certain sense, to lead the ideal life, and he found it, at the least, not easy. The days passed, but brought with them no official invitation to Miss Light’s wedding. He occasionally met her, and he occasionally met Prince Casamassima; but always separately, never together. They were apparently taking their happiness in the inexpressive manner proper to people of social eminence. Rowland continued to see Madame Grandoni, for whom he felt a confirmed affection. He had always talked to her with frankness, but now he made her a confidant of all his hidden dejection. Roderick and Roderick’s concerns had been a common theme with him, and it was in the natural course to talk of Mrs. Hudson’s arrival and Miss Garland’s fine smile. Madame Grandoni was an intelligent listener, and she lost no time in putting his case for him in a nutshell. “At one moment you tell me the girl is plain,” she said; “the next you tell me she ‘s pretty. I will invite them, and I shall see for myself. But one thing is very clear: you are in love with her.”

Rowland, for all answer, glanced round to see that no one heard her.

“More than that,” she added, “you have been in love with her these two years. There was that certain something about you!… I knew you were a mild, sweet fellow, but you had a touch of it more than was natural. Why did n’t you tell me at once? You would have saved me a great deal of trouble. And poor Augusta Blanchard too!” And herewith Madame Grandoni communicated a pertinent fact: Augusta Blanchard and Mr. Leavenworth were going to make a match. The young lady had been staying for a month at Albano, and Mr. Leavenworth had been dancing attendance. The event was a matter of course. Rowland, who had been lately reproaching himself with a failure of attention to Miss Blanchard’s doings, made some such observation.

“But you did not find it so!” cried his hostess. “It was a matter of course, perhaps, that Mr. Leavenworth, who seems to be going about Europe with the sole view of picking up furniture for his ‘home,’ as he calls it, should think Miss Blanchard a very handsome piece; but it was not a matter of course—or it need n’t have been—that she should be willing to become a sort of superior table-ornament. She would have accepted you if you had tried.”

“You are supposing the insupposable,” said Rowland. “She never gave me a particle of encouragement.”

“What would you have had her do? The poor girl did her best, and I am sure that when she accepted Mr. Leavenworth she thought of you.”

“She thought of the pleasure her marriage would give me.”

“Ay, pleasure indeed! She is a thoroughly good girl, but she has her little grain of feminine spite, like the rest. Well, he ‘s richer than you, and she will have what she wants; but before I forgive you I must wait and see this new arrival—what do you call her?—Miss Garland. If I like her, I will forgive you; if I don’t, I shall always bear you a grudge.”

Rowland answered that he was sorry to forfeit any advantage she might offer him, but that his exculpatory passion for Miss Garland was a figment of her fancy. Miss Garland was engaged to another man, and he himself had no claims.

“Well, then,” said Madame Grandoni, “if I like her, we ‘ll have it that you ought to be in love with her. If you fail in this, it will be a double misdemeanor. The man she ‘s engaged to does n’t care a straw for her. Leave me alone and I ‘ll tell her what I think of you.”

As to Christina Light’s marriage, Madame Grandoni could make no definite statement. The young girl, of late, had made her several flying visits, in the intervals of the usual pre-matrimonial shopping and dress-fitting; she had spoken of the event with a toss of her head, as a matter which, with a wise old friend who viewed things in their essence, she need not pretend to treat as a solemnity. It was for Prince Casamassima to do that. “It is what they call a marriage of reason,” she once said. “That means, you know, a marriage of madness!”

“What have you said in the way of advice?” Rowland asked.

A moment later he came upon the Cavaliere, who was sitting with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, so buried in thought that Rowland had to call him before he roused himself. Giacosa looked at him a moment keenly, and then gave a shake of the head, interrogatively.

Rowland gave a shake negative, to which the Cavaliere responded by a long, melancholy sigh. “But her mother is determined to force matters,” said Rowland.

“It seems that it must be!”

“Do you consider that it must be?”

“I don’t differ with Mrs. Light!”

“It will be a great cruelty!”

The Cavaliere gave a tragic shrug. “Eh! it is n’t an easy world.”

“You should do nothing to make it harder, then.”

“What will you have? It ‘s a magnificent marriage.”

“You disappoint me, Cavaliere,” said Rowland, solemnly. “I imagined you appreciated the great elevation of Miss Light’s attitude. She does n’t love the prince; she has let the matter stand or fall by that.”

The old man grasped him by the hand and stood a moment with averted eyes. At last, looking at him, he held up two fingers.

“I have two hearts,” he said, “one for myself, one for the world. This one opposes Miss Light, the other adores her! One suffers horribly at what the other does.”

“I don’t understand double people, Cavaliere,” Rowland said, “and I don’t pretend to understand you. But I have guessed that you are going to play some secret card.”

“The card is Mrs. Light’s, not mine,” said the Cavaliere.

“It ‘s a menace, at any rate?”

“The sword of Damocles! It hangs by a hair. Christina is to be given ten minutes to recant, under penalty of having it fall. On the blade there is something written in strange characters. Don’t scratch your head; you will not make it out.”

“I think I have guessed it,” Rowland said, after a pregnant silence. The Cavaliere looked at him blankly but intently, and Rowland added, “Though there are some signs, indeed, I don’t understand.”

“Puzzle them out at your leisure,” said the Cavaliere, shaking his hand. “I hear Mrs. Light; I must go to my post. I wish you were a Catholic; I would beg you to step into the first church you come to, and pray for us the next half-hour.”

“For ‘us’? For whom?”

“For all of us. At any rate remember this: I worship the Christina!”

Rowland heard the rustle of Mrs. Light’s dress; he turned away, and the Cavaliere went, as he said, to his post. Rowland for the next couple of days pondered his riddle.

CHAPTER XI. Mrs. Hudson

Of Roderick, meanwhile, Rowland saw nothing; but he immediately went to Mrs. Hudson and assured her that her son was in even exceptionally good health and spirits. After this he called again on the two ladies from Northampton, but, as Roderick’s absence continued, he was able neither to furnish nor to obtain much comfort. Miss Garland’s apprehensive face seemed to him an image of his own state of mind. He was profoundly depressed; he felt that there was a storm in the air, and he wished it would come, without more delay, and perform its ravages. On the afternoon of the third day he went into Saint Peter’s, his frequent resort whenever the outer world was disagreeable. From a heart-ache to a Roman rain there were few importunate pains the great church did not help him to forget. He had wandered there for half an hour, when he came upon a short figure, lurking in the shadow of one of the great piers. He saw it was that of an artist, hastily transferring to his sketch-book a memento of some fleeting variation in the scenery of the basilica; and in a moment he perceived that the artist was little Sam Singleton.

Singleton pocketed his sketch-book with a guilty air, as if it cost his modesty a pang to be detected in this greedy culture of opportunity. Rowland always enjoyed meeting him; talking with him, in these days, was as good as a wayside gush of clear, cold water, on a long, hot walk. There was, perhaps, no drinking-vessel, and you had to apply your lips to some simple natural conduit; but the result was always a sense of extreme moral refreshment. On this occasion he mentally blessed the ingenuous little artist, and heard presently with keen regret that he was to leave Rome on the morrow. Singleton had come to bid farewell to Saint Peter’s, and he was gathering a few supreme memories. He had earned a purse-full of money, and he was meaning to take a summer’s holiday; going to Switzerland, to Germany, to Paris. In the autumn he was to return home; his family—composed, as Rowland knew, of a father who was cashier in a bank and five unmarried sisters, one of whom gave lyceum-lectures on woman’s rights, the whole resident at Buffalo, New York—had been writing him peremptory letters and appealing to him as a son, brother, and fellow-citizen. He would have been grateful for another year in Rome, but what must be must be, and he had laid up treasure which, in Buffalo, would seem infinite. They talked some time; Rowland hoped they might meet in Switzerland, and take a walk or two together. Singleton seemed to feel that Buffalo had marked him for her own; he was afraid he should not see Rome again for many a year.

“So you expect to live at Buffalo?” Rowland asked sympathetically.

“Well, it will depend upon the views—upon the attitude—of my family,” Singleton replied. “Oh, I think I shall get on; I think it can be done. If I find it can be done, I shall really be quite proud of it; as an artist of course I mean, you know. Do you know I have some nine hundred sketches? I shall live in my portfolio. And so long as one is not in Rome, pray what does it matter where one is? But how I shall envy all you Romans—you and Mr. Gloriani, and Mr. Hudson, especially!”

“Don’t envy Hudson; he has nothing to envy.”

Singleton grinned at what he considered a harmless jest. “Yes, he ‘s going to be the great man of our time! And I say, Mr. Mallet, is n’t it a mighty comfort that it ‘s we who have turned him out?”

“Between ourselves,” said Rowland, “he has disappointed me.”

Singleton stared, open-mouthed. “Dear me, what did you expect?”

“Truly,” said Rowland to himself, “what did I expect?”

“I confess,” cried Singleton, “I can’t judge him rationally. He fascinates me; he ‘s the sort of man one makes one’s hero of.”

“Strictly speaking, he is not a hero,” said Rowland.

Singleton looked intensely grave, and, with almost tearful eyes, “Is there anything amiss—anything out of the way, about him?” he timidly asked. Then, as Rowland hesitated to reply, he quickly added, “Please, if there is, don’t tell me! I want to know no evil of him, and I think I should hardly believe it. In my memories of this Roman artist-life, he will be the central figure. He will stand there in radiant relief, as beautiful and unspotted as one of his own statues!”

“Amen!” said Rowland, gravely. He remembered afresh that the sea is inhabited by big fishes and little, and that the latter often find their way down the throats of the former. Singleton was going to spend the afternoon in taking last looks at certain other places, and Rowland offered to join him on his sentimental circuit. But as they were preparing to leave the church, he heard himself suddenly addressed from behind. Turning, he beheld a young woman whom he immediately recognized as Madame Grandoni’s maid. Her mistress was present, she said, and begged to confer with him before he departed.

This summons obliged Rowland to separate from Singleton, to whom he bade farewell. He followed the messenger, and presently found Madame Grandoni occupying a liberal area on the steps of the tribune, behind the great altar, where, spreading a shawl on the polished red marble, she had comfortably seated herself. He expected that she had something especial to impart, and she lost no time in bringing forth her treasure.

“Don’t shout very loud,” she said, “remember that we are in church; there ‘s a limit to the noise one may make even in Saint Peter’s. Christina Light was married this morning to Prince Casamassima.”

Rowland did not shout at all; he gave a deep, short murmur: “Married—this morning?”

“Married this morning, at seven o’clock, le plus tranquillement du monde, before three or four persons. The young couple left Rome an hour afterwards.”

For some moments this seemed to him really terrible; the dark little drama of which he had caught a glimpse had played itself out. He had believed that Christina would resist; that she had succumbed was a proof that the pressure had been cruel. Rowland’s imagination followed her forth with an irresistible tremor into the world toward which she was rolling away, with her detested husband and her stifled ideal; but it must be confessed that if the first impulse of his compassion was for Christina, the second was for Prince Casamassima. Madame Grandoni acknowledged an extreme curiosity as to the secret springs of these strange doings: Casamassima’s sudden dismissal, his still more sudden recall, the hurried private marriage. “Listen,” said Rowland, hereupon, “and I will tell you something.” And he related, in detail, his last visit to Mrs. Light and his talk with this lady, with Christina, and with the Cavaliere.

“Good,” she said; “it ‘s all very curious. But it ‘s a riddle, and I only half guess it.”

“Well,” said Rowland, “I desire to harm no one; but certain suppositions have taken shape in my mind which serve as a solvent to several ambiguities.”

“It is very true,” Madame Grandoni answered, “that the Cavaliere, as he stands, has always needed to be explained.”

“He is explained by the hypothesis that, three-and-twenty years ago, at Ancona, Mrs. Light had a lover.”

“I see. Ancona was dull, Mrs. Light was lively, and—three-and-twenty years ago—perhaps, the Cavaliere was fascinating. Doubtless it would be fairer to say that he was fascinated. Poor Giacosa!”

“He has had his compensation,” Rowland said. “He has been passionately fond of Christina.”

“Naturally. But has Christina never wondered why?”

“If she had been near guessing, her mother’s shabby treatment of him would have put her off the scent. Mrs. Light’s conscience has apparently told her that she could expiate an hour’s too great kindness by twenty years’ contempt. So she kept her secret. But what is the profit of having a secret unless you can make some use of it? The day at last came when she could turn hers to account; she could let the skeleton out of the closet and create a panic.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I morally,” said Rowland. “I only conceive that there was a horrible, fabulous scene. The poor Cavaliere stood outside, at the door, white as a corpse and as dumb. The mother and daughter had it out together. Mrs. Light burnt her ships. When she came out she had three lines of writing in her daughter’s hand, which the Cavaliere was dispatched with to the prince. They overtook the young man in time, and, when he reappeared, he was delighted to dispense with further waiting. I don’t know what he thought of the look in his bride’s face; but that is how I roughly reconstruct history.”

“Christina was forced to decide, then, that she could not afford not to be a princess?”

“She was reduced by humiliation. She was assured that it was not for her to make conditions, but to thank her stars that there were none made for her. If she persisted, she might find it coming to pass that there would be conditions, and the formal rupture—the rupture that the world would hear of and pry into—would then proceed from the prince and not from her.”

“That ‘s all nonsense!” said Madame Grandoni, energetically.

“To us, yes; but not to the proudest girl in the world, deeply wounded in her pride, and not stopping to calculate probabilities, but muffling her shame, with an almost sensuous relief, in a splendor that stood within her grasp and asked no questions. Is it not possible that the late Mr. Light had made an outbreak before witnesses who are still living?”

“Certainly her marriage now,” said Madame Grandoni, less analytically, “has the advantage that it takes her away from her—parents!”

This lady’s farther comments upon the event are not immediately pertinent to our history; there were some other comments of which Rowland had a deeply oppressive foreboding. He called, on the evening of the morrow upon Mrs. Hudson, and found Roderick with the two ladies. Their companion had apparently but lately entered, and Rowland afterwards learned that it was his first appearance since the writing of the note which had so distressed his mother. He had flung himself upon a sofa, where he sat with his chin upon his breast, staring before him with a sinister spark in his eye. He fixed his gaze on Rowland, but gave him no greeting. He had evidently been saying something to startle the women; Mrs. Hudson had gone and seated herself, timidly and imploringly, on the edge of the sofa, trying to take his hand. Miss Garland was applying herself to some needlework with conscious intentness.

Mrs. Hudson gave Rowland, on his entrance, a touching look of gratitude. “Oh, we have such blessed news!” she said. “Roderick is ready to leave Rome.”

“It ‘s not blessed news; it ‘s most damnable news!” cried Roderick.

“Oh, but we are very glad, my son, and I am sure you will be when you get away. You ‘re looking most dreadfully thin; is n’t he, Mr. Mallet? It ‘s plain enough you need a change. I ‘m sure we will go wherever you like. Where would you like to go?”

Roderick turned his head slowly and looked at her. He had let her take his hand, which she pressed tenderly between her own. He gazed at her for some time in silence. “Poor mother!” he said at last, in a portentous tone.

“My own dear son!” murmured Mrs. Hudson in all the innocence of her trust.

“I don’t care a straw where you go! I don’t care a straw for anything!”

“Oh, my dear boy, you must not say that before all of us here—before Mary, before Mr. Mallet!”

“Mary—Mr. Mallet?” Roderick repeated, almost savagely. He released himself from the clasp of his mother’s hand and turned away, leaning his elbows on his knees and holding his head in his hands. There was a silence; Rowland said nothing because he was watching Miss Garland. “Why should I stand on ceremony with Mary and Mr. Mallet?” Roderick presently added. “Mary pretends to believe I ‘m a fine fellow, and if she believes it as she ought to, nothing I can say will alter her opinion. Mallet knows I ‘m a hopeless humbug; so I need n’t mince my words with him.”

“Ah, my dear, don’t use such dreadful language!” said Mrs. Hudson. “Are n’t we all devoted to you, and proud of you, and waiting only to hear what you want, so that we may do it?”

Roderick got up, and began to walk about the room; he was evidently in a restless, reckless, profoundly demoralized condition. Rowland felt that it was literally true that he did not care a straw for anything, but he observed with anxiety that Mrs. Hudson, who did not know on what delicate ground she was treading, was disposed to chide him caressingly, as a mere expression of tenderness. He foresaw that she would bring down the hovering thunderbolt on her head.

“In God’s name,” Roderick cried, “don’t remind me of my obligations! It ‘s intolerable to me, and I don’t believe it ‘s pleasant to Mallet. I know they ‘re tremendous—I know I shall never repay them. I ‘m bankrupt! Do you know what that means?”

The poor lady sat staring, dismayed, and Rowland angrily interfered. “Don’t talk such stuff to your mother!” he cried. “Don’t you see you ‘re frightening her?”

“Frightening her? she may as well be frightened first as last. Do I frighten you, mother?” Roderick demanded.

“Oh, Roderick, what do you mean?” whimpered the poor lady. “Mr. Mallet, what does he mean?”

“I mean that I ‘m an angry, savage, disappointed, miserable man!” Roderick went on. “I mean that I can’t do a stroke of work nor think a profitable thought! I mean that I ‘m in a state of helpless rage and grief and shame! Helpless, helpless—that ‘s what it is. You can’t help me, poor mother—not with kisses, nor tears, nor prayers! Mary can’t help me—not for all the honor she does me, nor all the big books on art that she pores over. Mallet can’t help me—not with all his money, nor all his good example, nor all his friendship, which I ‘m so profoundly well aware of: not with it all multiplied a thousand times and repeated to all eternity! I thought you would help me, you and Mary; that ‘s why I sent for you. But you can’t, don’t think it! The sooner you give up the idea the better for you. Give up being proud of me, too; there ‘s nothing left of me to be proud of! A year ago I was a mighty fine fellow; but do you know what has become of me now? I have gone to the devil!”

There was something in the ring of Roderick’s voice, as he uttered these words, which sent them home with convincing force. He was not talking for effect, or the mere sensuous pleasure of extravagant and paradoxical utterance, as had often enough been the case ere this; he was not even talking viciously or ill-humoredly. He was talking passionately, desperately, and from an irresistible need to throw off the oppressive burden of his mother’s confidence. His cruel eloquence brought the poor lady to her feet, and she stood there with clasped hands, petrified and voiceless. Mary Garland quickly left her place, came straight to Roderick, and laid her hand on his arm, looking at him with all her tormented heart in her eyes. He made no movement to disengage himself; he simply shook his head several times, in dogged negation of her healing powers. Rowland had been living for the past month in such intolerable expectancy of disaster that now that the ice was broken, and the fatal plunge taken, his foremost feeling was almost elation; but in a moment his orderly instincts and his natural love of superficial smoothness overtook it.

“I really don’t see, Roderick,” he said, “the profit of your talking in just this way at just this time. Don’t you see how you are making your mother suffer?”

“Do I enjoy it myself?” cried Roderick. “Is the suffering all on your side and theirs? Do I look as if I were happy, and were stirring you up with a stick for my amusement? Here we all are in the same boat; we might as well understand each other! These women must know that I ‘m not to be counted on. That sounds remarkably cool, no doubt, and I certainly don’t deny your right to be utterly disgusted with me.”

“Will you keep what you have got to say till another time,” said Mary, “and let me hear it alone?”

“Oh, I ‘ll let you hear it as often as you please; but what ‘s the use of keeping it? I ‘m in the humor; it won’t keep! It ‘s a very simple matter. I ‘m a failure, that ‘s all; I ‘m not a first-rate man. I ‘m second-rate, tenth-rate, anything you please. After that, it ‘s all one!”

Mary Garland turned away and buried her face in her hands; but Roderick, struck, apparently, in some unwonted fashion with her gesture, drew her towards him again, and went on in a somewhat different tone. “It ‘s hardly worth while we should have any private talk about this, Mary,” he said. “The thing would be comfortable for neither of us. It ‘s better, after all, that it be said once for all and dismissed. There are things I can’t talk to you about. Can I, at least? You are such a queer creature!”

“I can imagine nothing you should n’t talk to me about,” said Mary.

“You are not afraid?” he demanded, sharply, looking at her.

She turned away abruptly, with lowered eyes, hesitating a moment. “Anything you think I should hear, I will hear,” she said. And then she returned to her place at the window and took up her work.

“I have had a great blow,” said Roderick. “I was a great ass, but it does n’t make the blow any easier to bear.”

“Mr. Mallet, tell me what Roderick means!” said Mrs. Hudson, who had found her voice, in a tone more peremptory than Rowland had ever heard her use.

“He ought to have told you before,” said Roderick. “Really, Rowland, if you will allow me to say so, you ought! You could have given a much better account of all this than I myself; better, especially, in that it would have been more lenient to me. You ought to have let them down gently; it would have saved them a great deal of pain. But you always want to keep things so smooth! Allow me to say that it ‘s very weak of you.”

“I hereby renounce such weakness!” said Rowland.

“Oh, what is it, sir; what is it?” groaned Mrs. Hudson, insistently.

“It ‘s what Roderick says: he ‘s a failure!”

Mary Garland, on hearing this declaration, gave Rowland a single glance and then rose, laid down her work, and walked rapidly out of the room. Mrs. Hudson tossed her head and timidly bristled. “This from you, Mr. Mallet!” she said with an injured air which Rowland found harrowing.

But Roderick, most characteristically, did not in the least resent his friend’s assertion; he sent him, on the contrary, one of those large, clear looks of his, which seemed to express a stoical pleasure in Rowland’s frankness, and which set his companion, then and there, wondering again, as he had so often done before, at the extraordinary contradictions of his temperament. “My dear mother,” Roderick said, “if you had had eyes that were not blinded by this sad maternal vanity, you would have seen all this for yourself; you would have seen that I ‘m anything but prosperous.”

“Is it anything about money?” cried Mrs. Hudson. “Oh, do write to Mr. Striker!”

“Money?” said Roderick. “I have n’t a cent of money; I ‘m bankrupt!”

“Oh, Mr. Mallet, how could you let him?” asked Mrs. Hudson, terribly.

“Everything I have is at his service,” said Rowland, feeling ill.

“Of course Mr. Mallet will help you, my son!” cried the poor lady, eagerly.

“Oh, leave Mr. Mallet alone!” said Roderick. “I have squeezed him dry; it ‘s not my fault, at least, if I have n’t!”

“Roderick, what have you done with all your money?” his mother demanded.

“Thrown it away! It was no such great amount. I have done nothing this winter.”

“You have done nothing?”

“I have done no work! Why in the world did n’t you guess it and spare me all this? Could n’t you see I was idle, distracted, dissipated?”

“Dissipated, my dear son?” Mrs. Hudson repeated.

“That ‘s over for the present! But could n’t you see—could n’t Mary see—that I was in a damnably bad way?”

“I have no doubt Miss Garland saw,” said Rowland.

“Mary has said nothing!” cried Mrs. Hudson.

“Oh, she ‘s a fine girl!” Rowland said.

“Have you done anything that will hurt poor Mary?” Mrs. Hudson asked.

“I have only been thinking night and day of another woman!”

Mrs. Hudson dropped helplessly into her seat again. “Oh dear, dear, had n’t we better go home?”

“Not to get out of her way!” Roderick said. “She has started on a career of her own, and she does n’t care a straw for me. My head was filled with her; I could think of nothing else; I would have sacrificed everything to her—you, Mary, Mallet, my work, my fortune, my future, my honor! I was in a fine state, eh? I don’t pretend to be giving you good news; but I ‘m telling the simple, literal truth, so that you may know why I have gone to the dogs. She pretended to care greatly for all this, and to be willing to make any sacrifice in return; she had a magnificent chance, for she was being forced into a mercenary marriage with a man she detested. She led me to believe that she would give this up, and break short off, and keep herself free and sacred and pure for me. This was a great honor, and you may believe that I valued it. It turned my head, and I lived only to see my happiness come to pass. She did everything to encourage me to hope it would; everything that her infernal coquetry and falsity could suggest.”

“Oh, I say, this is too much!” Rowland broke out.

“Do you defend her?” Roderick cried, with a renewal of his passion. “Do you pretend to say that she gave me no hopes?” He had been speaking with growing bitterness, quite losing sight of his mother’s pain and bewilderment in the passionate joy of publishing his wrongs. Since he was hurt, he must cry out; since he was in pain, he must scatter his pain abroad. Of his never thinking of others, save as they spoke and moved from his cue, as it were, this extraordinary insensibility to the injurious effects of his eloquence was a capital example; the more so as the motive of his eloquence was never an appeal for sympathy or compassion, things to which he seemed perfectly indifferent and of which he could make no use. The great and characteristic point with him was the perfect absoluteness of his own emotions and experience. He never saw himself as part of a whole; only as the clear-cut, sharp-edged, isolated individual, rejoicing or raging, as the case might be, but needing in any case absolutely to affirm himself. All this, to Rowland, was ancient history, but his perception of it stirred within him afresh, at the sight of Roderick’s sense of having been betrayed. That he, under the circumstances, should not in fairness be the first to lodge a complaint of betrayal was a point to which, at his leisure, Rowland was of course capable of rendering impartial justice; but Roderick’s present desperation was so peremptory that it imposed itself on one’s sympathies. “Do you pretend to say,” he went on, “that she did n’t lead me along to the very edge of fulfillment and stupefy me with all that she suffered me to believe, all that she sacredly promised? It amused her to do it, and she knew perfectly well what she really meant. She never meant to be sincere; she never dreamed she could be. She ‘s a ravenous flirt, and why a flirt is a flirt is more than I can tell you. I can’t understand playing with those matters; for me they ‘re serious, whether I take them up or lay them down. I don’t see what ‘s in your head, Rowland, to attempt to defend Miss Light; you were the first to cry out against her! You told me she was dangerous, and I pooh-poohed you. You were right; you ‘re always right. She ‘s as cold and false and heartless as she ‘s beautiful, and she has sold her heartless beauty to the highest bidder. I hope he knows what he gets!”

“Oh, my son,” cried Mrs. Hudson, plaintively, “how could you ever care for such a dreadful creature?”

“It would take long to tell you, dear mother!”

Rowland’s lately-deepened sympathy and compassion for Christina was still throbbing in his mind, and he felt that, in loyalty to it, he must say a word for her. “You believed in her too much at first,” he declared, “and you believe in her too little now.”

Roderick looked at him with eyes almost lurid, beneath lowering brows. “She is an angel, then, after all?—that ‘s what you want to prove!” he cried. “That ‘s consoling for me, who have lost her! You ‘re always right, I say; but, dear friend, in mercy, be wrong for once!”

“Oh yes, Mr. Mallet, be merciful!” said Mrs. Hudson, in a tone which, for all its gentleness, made Rowland stare. The poor fellow’s stare covered a great deal of concentrated wonder and apprehension—a presentiment of what a small, sweet, feeble, elderly lady might be capable of, in the way of suddenly generated animosity. There was no space in Mrs. Hudson’s tiny maternal mind for complications of feeling, and one emotion existed only by turning another over flat and perching on top of it. She was evidently not following Roderick at all in his dusky aberrations. Sitting without, in dismay, she only saw that all was darkness and trouble, and as Roderick’s glory had now quite outstripped her powers of imagination and urged him beyond her jurisdiction, so that he had become a thing too precious and sacred for blame, she found it infinitely comfortable to lay the burden of their common affliction upon Rowland’s broad shoulders. Had he not promised to make them all rich and happy? And this was the end of it! Rowland felt as if his trials were, in a sense, only beginning. “Had n’t you better forget all this, my dear?” Mrs. Hudson said. “Had n’t you better just quietly attend to your work?”

“Work, madame?” cried Roderick. “My work ‘s over. I can’t work—I have n’t worked all winter. If I were fit for anything, this sentimental collapse would have been just the thing to cure me of my apathy and break the spell of my idleness. But there ‘s a perfect vacuum here!” And he tapped his forehead. “It ‘s bigger than ever; it grows bigger every hour!”

“I ‘m sure you have made a beautiful likeness of your poor little mother,” said Mrs. Hudson, coaxingly.

“I had done nothing before, and I have done nothing since! I quarreled with an excellent man, the other day, from mere exasperation of my nerves, and threw away five thousand dollars!”

“Threw away—five thousand dollars!” Roderick had been wandering among formidable abstractions and allusions too dark to penetrate. But here was a concrete fact, lucidly stated, and poor Mrs. Hudson, for a moment, looked it in the face. She repeated her son’s words a third time with a gasping murmur, and then, suddenly, she burst into tears. Roderick went to her, sat down beside her, put his arm round her, fixed his eyes coldly on the floor, and waited for her to weep herself out. She leaned her head on his shoulder and sobbed broken-heartedly. She said not a word, she made no attempt to scold; but the desolation of her tears was overwhelming. It lasted some time—too long for Rowland’s courage. He had stood silent, wishing simply to appear very respectful; but the elation that was mentioned a while since had utterly ebbed, and he found his situation intolerable. He walked away—not, perhaps, on tiptoe, but with a total absence of bravado in his tread.

The next day, while he was at home, the servant brought him the card of a visitor. He read with surprise the name of Mrs. Hudson, and hurried forward to meet her. He found her in his sitting-room, leaning on the arm of her son and looking very pale, her eyes red with weeping, and her lips tightly compressed. Her advent puzzled him, and it was not for some time that he began to understand the motive of it. Roderick’s countenance threw no light upon it; but Roderick’s countenance, full of light as it was, in a way, itself, had never thrown light upon anything. He had not been in Rowland’s rooms for several weeks, and he immediately began to look at those of his own works that adorned them. He lost himself in silent contemplation. Mrs. Hudson had evidently armed herself with dignity, and, so far as she might, she meant to be impressive. Her success may be measured by the fact that Rowland’s whole attention centred in the fear of seeing her begin to weep. She told him that she had come to him for practical advice; she begged to remind him that she was a stranger in the land. Where were they to go, please? what were they to do? Rowland glanced at Roderick, but Roderick had his back turned and was gazing at his Adam with the intensity with which he might have examined Michael Angelo’s Moses.