# Roderick Hudson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 3

III
Early on the morrow he 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 row at home, as he called it, but 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 doesn't scold nor storm, and she doesn't argue nor insist. She sits with her eyes full of tears that never fall, and looks at me, when I vex her, as if I were a monster of depravity. And the trouble is that I was born to vex her. She doesn't trust me; she never has, and she never will. I don't know what I've done to set her against me, but ever since I can remember I've been looked at with tears. The trouble is," he went on, giving a twist to his moustache, "I've been too great a mollycoddle. 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 cook's sent out to explore for me with a lantern. When I think of it I'm quite sick of my meekness. It's rather a hard fate, to live like a tame cat and to pass for a desperado. 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'd like nothing of the sort. If you 've acted as a gentleman don't spoil it by pretending you'd have preferred to be a brute. You've been very happy in spite of your virtues, and there are worse fates in the world than being loved too well. I've not had the pleasure of seeing your mother, but I'll lay you a wager that this is where the shoe pinches. She's passionately fond of you, and her hopes, like all intense hopes, are next neighbours to alarms and despairs." Rowland, as he spoke, had an instinctive vision of the sentiments infallibly entertained for this beautiful and amusing youth by the women of his house.
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's 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 indoors to be kissed by the ladies while he made mud-pies in the garden. In fact, you know, he was much more the right thing. When he was brought home that horrible night with a piece of shell in his skull, my poor mother began to think she hadn'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 every thing that he would have been. I made no end of vows, but I have n't kept them all. I've been very different from Stephen. I've been idle, restless, egotistical, discontented. I've done no vulgar harm, I believe, but I've done no vulgar good. My brother, if he had lived, would have made fifty thousand dollars and had the parlour done up. My mother, brooding night and day on her bereavement, has come to fix her ideal in little attentions of that sort. Judged by that standard I'm nowhere."
Rowland was at a loss what to believe of this account of his friend's domestic circumstances; it had an honourable candour, but would be probably open to control. "You must lose no time in producing some important thing," he answered; "then with the proceeds you can do up the whole house."
"So I've told her; but she only half believes in 'art,' anyway. She can see no good in my modelling from the life; it seems to her a snare of the enemy. She would fain see me all my days tethered to the law like a browsing goat to a stake. In that way I'm kept before her. 'It's a more natural occupation!'—that's all I can get out of her. A more natural damnation! Is it a fact that artists in general are such bold, bad men? I've never had the pleasure of knowing one, so I can't refute her with an example. She has 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 parlour table) and who used to drink raw brandy and beat his wife. I promised ​her last night 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 take stock of one's intentions, and I assure you that pleading my cause, I became 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 racketing house. I long to be out of it!"
"I'm extremely sorry to have brought things to such a crisis," said Rowland. "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 doesn't see why you should have come here and set me by the ears: you're made to poison ingenuous minds 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's an evil word in my mother's vocabulary, to be said below the breath, as you 'd repeat some profanity or tell a 'low' story. Northampton Mass is in just the centre of Christendom, and Rome far off in the mere margin, benighted heathendom too at that, into which it can do no proper moral man any good to penetrate. And ​there was I but yesterday a regular attendant at that repository of every virtue, Mr. Striker's office!"
"And does Mr. Striker know of your decision?"
Rowland asked.
"Why, sure! 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 as opposite as the poles, but I freely forgive him his zealous attempts to unscrew my headpiece and set it on another way. 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 took the bull by the horns. I picked up 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 every thing they contain?' says the great 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 to work at that. So now there! I won't bid you good-bye just yet; I shall see you again. But I bid good-bye here with enthusiasm to these four detested walls—to this living tomb! I didn't know till now how I hated the place! My compliments to Mr. Spooner, and my thanks for all you've not made of me!"
"I'm glad to know you're to see Mr. Striker again," Rowland answered, correcting a primary inclination to show himself as taking this report for an amusing burlesque of the facts. "You certainly owe him a respectful farewell, even if he has not understood you. I confess you rather strike me at moments as a little of a hard sum. There's another person," he presently added, "whose opinion as to your new career I should like to hear. What does your friend Miss Garland think?"
Hudson looked at him keenly, with a slight change of colour. 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, just in that moment, as a decidedly positive quantity, and I'm sure she has opinions."
The smile on Roderick's mobile face turned dim. "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 future. "I've launched you, as I may say," he said, "and I feel as if I ought to see you into port. I'm 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 5th of September; can you make your preparations to start with me?"
Roderick assented to all this with an air of luxurious surrender to his friend's wisdom that expressed more than any formal pledge. "I've 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'm 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 of bags and boxes in deposit at his banker's.
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 wools with her scissors; he expected criticism and he was bracing himself. At last he told her of Roderick's decision and of his own part in the matter. Cecilia, besides an extreme surprise, exhibited a certain fine displeasure at his not having asked her advice.
"What would you have said then if I had?" he demanded.
"I should have said in the first place 'Oh, for pity's sake, don't carry off the person in all Northampton who most amuses me!' I should have said ​in the second place 'Nonsense! the boy's doing very well. Let well alone!'
"That in the first five minutes. What would you have said later?"
"That for a man who's 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. "Pardon my sharpness," she resumed at last. "But I'm literally in despair at losing Roderick Hudson. His visits in the evening, for the past year, have kept me alive. They 've given a point to a very dull time—a shining little silver-tip to days that seemed made of a baser metal. I don't say he's a phœnix or that he's always an angel, never a bore—but I liked to see him. 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, for all her quiet life, was in the enjoyment of some private and peculiar satisfaction, and he discovered that she found it in Hudson's lounging visits and communicative youth. Now he wondered whether, responsibly viewed, her gain in the matter were not her young friend's loss. It was evident that Cecilia was haunted here with no morbid vision of duty, and that her judgement, habitually clear under the demands of domestic economy, had made easy terms, her dull life prompting, with the joy of eye and ear. She liked her young friend ​just as he was; she humoured him, flattered him, laughed at him, caressed him—did everything but advise him right. It was a flirtation without the benefits of a flirtation for Roderick. She was too old to make it quite exemplary she should let him fall in love with her, which might have done him good; and it was her perversity to keep him notoriously fresh, so that the nonsense he talked might never transgress a certain line. It was quite conceivable that poor Cecilia should desire to pass the time; 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 at least Rowland reflected in the glow of an almost creative ardour. 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 this excellent lady. "I only wish to remind you," she went on, "that you 're likely to have your hands rather full."
"I've thought of that, and I positively like the idea; liking as I do the man. I told you the other day, you know, that I was bored to feel my hands always so empty. 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 drag him out of his obscurity. My notion of his really having the great gift answered the question. He is made to do the things that we are the better for ​having. 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 the general public I suppose I ought to thank you. But I want first of all to see where my own interest comes in. You guarantee us, at any rate, I hope, all the beautiful things."
"A masterpiece a year," said Rowland cheerily, "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, all that 's perfect. We are all under a tacit compact to keep him quiet. Perhaps you believe in the necessary turbulence of genius, and you intend to enjoin upon your gifted pupil 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's what I shall preach to my gifted pupil, as you call him, by example—except that I 'm unfortunately not an artist!—as well as by precept. You evidently believe," he added in a moment, "that he'll lead me a dance!"
"No, 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 us and found it easy, on the whole, to vegetate. Transplanted to Rome I feel sure he 'll put forth some wonderful flowers. 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 we shall consider you 've really taken an engagement."
"A man should make the most of himself and be helped if he needs help," Rowland answered after a long pause. "Of course if a silk balloon is inflated very suddenly and very fast there is always the danger of its bursting. But I nevertheless approve of a certain tension of one's being. It 's what a man is meant for. And then Roderick is n't a mere pretty parachute. And then too I believe in the essential good health of the sincere imagination. A man may be all imagination—if he is sincere."
"Very good, since you 've thought it so wonderfully out," Cecilia said with an air of resignation that made Rowland for the moment seem to himself eager to selfishness. "We'll drink then to-day at dinner to the imagination—I mean to the good 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 parlour 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 recognised 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 person 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. The limpid penetrating gaze of this member of the group was the most effective greeting he received. Mrs. Hudson rose with a soft, vague sound of distress and stood looking at him shrinkingly and helplessly, as if 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 's better I should see you. Perhaps you 'll take a seat."
​With this invitation Rowland prepared to comply, and, turning, grasped the first chair that offered it self.
"Not that one," said a full grave voice; whereupon he perceived that a thick skein of sewing-silk had been suspended in entanglement over the back for the purpose of 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 skein 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 insinuating foreigner we feared." The elder lady, however, sat with her eyes fixed on the ground and her two hands tightly clasped. But as regards Mrs. Hudson Rowland felt much more compassion than resentment; her attitude was not coldness, it was the instinct of fear, almost of terror. She was a small, softly-desperate woman, whose desperation gave her a false air of eagerness, just as her pale troubled face added to her apparent age. After looking at her for some minutes Rowland saw that she was still young and personable and that she must have been a very ​girlish bride. She had had beauty at that hour, though she probably had looked terribly frightened at the altar. Her marked refinement of line and surface seemed to tell how her son had come by his elegance, his physical finish. She wore no cap, and her auburn hair, which was of extraordinary fineness, was smoothed and confined with Puritanic precision. She was excessively shy and altogether most humble-minded; it was singular to see a woman to whom the experience of the elm-shaded life had conveyed such scanty reassurance. Rowland began immediately to like her and to feel impatient to persuade her that, as Cecilia had originally said of him, he meant well. He foresaw that she would be easy to persuade and that the right shade of encouragement—it would have to be only the right one—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 a strong young eyesight in the dim candle-light was less readily beguiled from her mysterious feminine preconceptions. Miss Garland, according to Cecilia's judgement, as Rowland remembered, had not a countenance to inspire a sculptor; but it seemed to Rowland that she might with some success hold in contemplation a man whose relation to the beautiful was amateurish. She was not pretty as the eye of habit judges prettiness, but he noted that when he had made the observation he had somehow failed to set it down against her, for he had already passed from measuring contours to tracing meanings. In Mary Garland's face there were many possible ones, and they might give him the more to ​think about that it was not—like Roderick's for instance—one of the quick and mobile faces over which expression flickers like a candle in a wind. They followed each other slowly, distinctly, sincerely, and you might almost have fancied that as they came and went they gave her a nameless pain. She was tall and straight 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 dark pupils, a trifle heavy, failed, as might be said, of publicity of expression. Her features were bravely irregular, and her mouth enabled her smile—which was the principal grace of her physiognomy—to display itself with magnificent amplitude. Rowland indeed had not yet seen this accident produced; but something assured him that when, on due cause shown, she should cease to be serious, it would be like the final rising of the plain green curtain of the old theatre on some—not very modern—comedy. She wore a scanty white dress and had a vaguely rustic, provincial air; she looked like a distinguished villager. She was evidently a girl of extreme personal force, but she lacked pliancy. She was hemming a kitchen towel with the aid of a large steel thimble. She bent her almost portentous eyes at last on the work again and let Rowland explain himself.
"I 've become suddenly so very intimate with your son," he said at last, addressing himself to Mrs. Hudson, "that it seems proper I should make your acquaintance."
"Very proper," 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, sir, 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 to avert themselves from the spectacle of Rowland's inevitable confusion.
"A very short time, I confess. Hardly three days."
"And yet you call yourself intimate, eh? I 've 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 coloured 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 some art of comedy. Then reassured little by little by Rowland's air of conviction, ​she gave him an appealing glance and a timorous "Really?"
But before her visitor could respond Mr. Striker again intervened. "Do I fully apprehend your expression?" he asked. "Our young friend is to become one of our great men?"
"One of our great artists, I hope. Perhaps greater than any."
"This is a new and interesting view," said Mr. Striker with an assumption of judicial calmness. "We 've had hopes for Mr. Roderick, but I confess that if I 've rightly understood them they stopped short of towering eminence. We shouldn't have taken the responsibility of entertaining that idea 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; yet he was evidently trying both to be fair and to respect the susceptibilities of his companions. He was still 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 question of the ultimate future, "that ​you don't at all thank me for stirring up your son's ambition for objects that lead him so far from home. I seem to feel that I 've 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 's no one's enemy," Miss Garland hereupon declared gently, but with the same remorseless consistency 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 frivolously omitted, "is the daughter of a minister, the granddaughter of a minister, the sister of a minister."
Rowland signified, so far as he could by a gesture, that he had nothing to say against it, and the girl prosecuted her work with quite as little apparently either of embarrassment or elation at the promulgation of these facts. "Mrs. Hudson, I see," Mr. Striker continued, "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 crudely. 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 scheme of things in which Roderick was not a negligeable quantity.
"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 strive, to work—very hard, I hope."
"Ah, not too hard, please," murmured Mrs. Hudson pleadingly, wheeling about from recent alarms at the dolce far niente. "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"—and Mr. Striker gave it the 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 while she twisted 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, borrow ing 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?" Mrs. Hudson hopelessly enquired.
"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. "Give Mrs. Hudson a sketch of 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 at her kindly enough. "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 reply and she was not satisfied. For an instant she seemed inclined to make a rejoinder, but she picked up her work in silence and drew her stitches again.
Rowland had for the second time the feeling that she judged him 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."
"Well, these models," began Mr. Striker. "You put them into an attitude, I suppose?"
"An attitude, exactly."
"And then you sit down and look at them?"
"Ah, you mustn't sit too long. You must go at your clay and try to build up something that looks like them."
"Well, there you are with your model in an attitude on one side, yourself in an attitude too, I suppose, on the other, and your pile of clay in the middle, building up, as you say. So you pass the morning. After that I hope you go out and take a walk and rest from your exertions."
"Unquestionably. But to an artist who loves ​his work there is no lost time. Everything he looks at teaches or suggests something."
"That 's a tempting doctrine to young men with a taste for sitting by the hour with the page unturned, watching the flies buzz, or the frost melt, on the window-pane. Our young friend in this way must have laid up stores of information that I never suspected."
"It 's very possible," said Rowland with an unresentful smile, "that he will prove some day the happier artist for some of those very same lazy reveries."
This theory was apparently very grateful to Mrs. Hudson, who had never had the case put for her son with such ingenious hopefulness, and who found herself disrelishing the singular situation of seeming to side against her own flesh and blood with a lawyer whose conversational tone betrayed the habit of public cross-questioning.
"My son, then," she ventured to enquire, "my son has exceptional—what you would call remarkable—powers?"
"To my sense distinctly remarkable powers."
Poor Mrs. Hudson actually smiled, broadly, gleefully, and glanced at Miss Garland as if to invite her to do likewise. But the girl's face remained as serious as the eastern sky when the opposite sunset is too feeble to make it glow. "Do you really know?" she asked, looking at Rowland.
"One can't know in such a matter save after proof, and proof takes time. But one can believe."
"And you believe?"
"I believe."
​But even then Miss Garland vouchsafed no smile; her face became graver than ever.
"Well, well," said Mrs. Hudson, "we must hope that it 's all for the best."
Mr. Striker eyed his old friend for a moment with a look of some displeasure; he saw that this was but a cunning female device for pretending still to hang back, and that, through some untraceable logic of treachery, she was now taking more comfort in the opinions of this sophistical stranger than in his own tough dogmas. He rose to his feet without pulling down his waistcoat, but with a wrinkled grin at the perfidy, let alone the inconsistency, of women. "Well, sir, Mr. Roderick's powers are nothing to me," he said, "no, nor the use he makes of them. Good or bad, he 's no son of mine. But in a friendly way I 'm glad to hear so fine an account of him. I 'm glad, madam, you 're so satisfied with the prospect. Affection, sir, you see, must have its guarantees!" He paused a moment, stroking his beard, with his head inclined and one eye half closed, looking at Rowland. The look was grotesque, but it was significant, and it puzzled Rowland more than it amused him. "I suppose you're a very brilliant young man," he went on, "very enlightened, very cultivated, quite up to the mark in the fine arts and all that sort of thing. I 'm a plain practical old boy, content to follow an honourable profession in a free country. I did n't go to any part of Europe to learn my business; no one took me by the hand; I had to grease my wheels myself, and such as I am, I 'm a self-made man, every inch ​of me! Well, if our young friend 's booked for fame and fortune I don't suppose his going to Rome will stop him. But, mind you, it won't help him such a long way neither. If you 've undertaken to put him through there 's a thing or two you had better remember. The crop we gather depends upon the seed we sow. He may be the biggest genius of the age: his potatoes won't come up without his hoeing them. If he takes things so almighty easy as—well, as one or two young fellows of genius I 've had under my eye—his produce will never gain the prize. Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch and does n't believe that we wake up to find our work done because we have lain all night a-dreaming of it: anything worth doing is plaguy hard to do! If your young gentleman finds everything all right, and has a good time of it, and says he likes the life, it 's a sign that—as I may say—you had better step round to the office and look at the books. That 's all I desire to remark. No offence intended. I hope you 'll have a first-rate time yourself."
Rowland could honestly reply that this seemed pregnant sense, and he offered Mr. Striker a friendly hand-shake as the latter withdrew. But Mr. Striker's rather grim view of matters cast a momentary shadow on his companions, and Mrs. Hudson seemed to feel that it necessitated between them some little friendly agreement not to be overawed.
Rowland sat for some time longer, partly because he wished to please the two women and partly because he was himself strangely beguiled. There was ​something touching in their worldly fears and diffident hopes, something almost terrible in the way poor little Mrs. Hudson seemed to flutter and quiver with maternal passion. She put forth one timid conversational venture after another, and asked Rowland a number of questions about himself, his age, his family, his occupations, his tastes, his religious opinions. Rowland had an odd feeling at last that she had begun to believe him very exemplary and that she might make later some perturbing discovery. He tried therefore to invent something that would prepare her to find him fallible. But he could think of nothing. It only seemed to him that Miss Garland secretly mistrusted him and that he must leave her to render him the service, after he had gone, of making him the object of a little conscientious derogation. Mrs. Hudson talked with low-voiced eagerness about her son.
"He 's very loveable, sir, I assure you. When you come to know him you 'll find him very loveable. He 's a little spoiled, of course; he has always done with me as he pleased; but he 's a dear good boy, I 'm sure he 's a dear good boy. And every one thinks him very attractive: I 'm sure he would be noticed anywhere. Don't you think he 's very handsome, sir? He 's the very copy of his poor father. I had another—perhaps you have been told. He was awfully killed." And the poor little lady smiled for fear of doing worse. "He was a very fine boy, but very different from Roderick. Roderick 's a little strange; he has never been an easy boy. Sometimes I feel like the goose—was n't it a goose, dear?" ​and, startled by the audacity of her comparison, she appealed to Miss Garland—"the goose, or the hen, who hatched a swan's egg. I 've never been able to give him what he requires. I 've always thought that in more brilliant circumstances he might find his place and be happy. But at the same time I was afraid of the world for him; it was so dangerous and dreadful—so terribly mixed. No doubt I know very little about it. I never suspected, I confess, that it contained persons of such liberality as yours."
Rowland replied that evidently she had done the world but scanty justice.
"No, she always does justice," Miss Garland objected after a pause. "It 's this that 's so much like a fairy-tale."
"It 's what, pray?"
"Why, your coming here all unannounced, unknown, so rich and so polite, and carrying off my cousin in a golden cloud."
If this was banter Miss Garland had the best of it, for Rowland fairly fell a-musing over the question of its perhaps being an acid meant to bite. Before he withdrew Mrs. Hudson made him tell her again that Roderick's powers were probably remarkable. He had inspired her with a clinging, caressing faith in his wisdom. "He will really do beautiful things?" she asked—"the very most beautiful?"
"I see no intrinsic reason why he should n't."
"Well, we shall think of that as we sit here alone," she rejoined. "Mary and I will sit here and talk about it. So I give him up," she went on as he was ​going. "I 'm sure you 'll be the best of friends to him; but if you should ever forget him or grow tired of him, if you should lose your interest in him and he should come to any harm or any trouble, please, sir, remember—" And she paused with a tremulous voice.
"Remember, my dear madam?"
"That he's all I have—that he's everything—and that it would be very terrible."
"In so far as I can help him he shall succeed," was all Rowland could say. He turned to Miss Garland to bid her good-night, and she rose and put out her hand. She was very straightforward, but he could see that if she was too modest to be bold she was much too simple to be shy. "Have you no injunctions to give me?" he asked—to ask her something.
She looked at him hard, and then, even though she was not shy, she blushed. "Make him do his best," she said.
Rowland noted the full tone, the ringing depth of voice—this young woman's was a perfect contralto—with which the words were uttered. "Do you take a great interest in him?"
"The greatest interest."
"Then if he won't do his best for you he won't do it for me." She but turned away in silence at this, and Rowland took his leave.
He walked homeward thinking of many things. The great Northampton elms interarched far above in the darkness, but the moon had risen and through scattered apertures was hanging the dusky vault ​with silver lamps. There seemed to Rowland something solemn in the scene in which he had just taken part. He had laughed and talked and braved it out in self-defence; but when he reflected that he was really meddling with the simple stillness of this small New England home and that he had ventured to disturb so much living security in the interest of a far-away fantastic hypothesis, he gasped, amazed at his temerity. It was true, as Cecilia had said, that for an unofficious man it was a singular position. There stirred in his mind an odd feeling of annoyance with Roderick for having so peremptorily taken possession of his nature. As he looked up and down the long vista and saw the clear white houses glancing here and there in the broken moonshine, he could almost have believed that the happiest lot for any man was to make the most of life in some such tranquil spot as that. Here were kindness, comfort, safety, the warning voice of duty, the perfect absence of temptation. And as Rowland looked along the arch of silvered shadow and out into the lucid air of the American night, which seemed so doubly vast, somehow, and strange and nocturnal, he was moved to feel that here was beauty too—beauty sufficient for an artist not to starve upon it. As he stood there lost in the darkness he presently heard a rapid tread on the other side of the road, accompanied by a loud jubilant whistle, and in a moment a figure emerged into an open gap of moonshine. He had no difficulty in recognising his young man, who was presumably returning from a visit to Cecilia. Roderick stopped suddenly and stared ​up at the moon, his face vividly illumined. He broke out into a snatch of song—
"The splendour falls on castle walls And snowy summits old in story!"
And with a great musical roll of his voice he went swinging off into the darkness again as if his thoughts had lent him wings. He was dreaming of the inspiration of foreign lands—of mighty monuments and sacred sites. What a pity, after all, thought Rowland as he went his own way, that he should n't have a "lick" at them!