# Roderick Hudson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 21

XXI
Of Roderick meanwhile he 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 his two country women, but as Roderick's absence continued he was able neither to dispense much comfort nor to feign much conviction. Mary's tense smoothness—a serenity with a surface like slippery ice and from which any vain remark rebounded with its heels in the air—seemed to him an image of his own state of mind. He was deeply depressed, he felt a real storm in the wind and wished it would come and wash away their troubles. On the afternoon of the third day he pushed into Saint Peter's, in whose vast clear element the hardest particles of thought ever infallibly entered into solution. From a heartache to a Roman rain there were few contrarieties 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 piers. He saw it was that of an artist hastily transferring to his sketch-book the sense of some emphasised instant, there, of the immense procession of the hours; and in a moment he perceived the artist to be little Sam Singleton.
Singleton pocketed his notes with a guilty air, as if he had been caught picking a rose in a royal conservatory or lighting his cigarette at the lamp of a shrine. ​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 informal conduit; but the result was always a sense of extreme moral refreshment. On this occasion he mentally blessed his ingenuous friend and heard presently with regret that he was to leave Rome on the morrow. Singleton had come to take leave of the great basilica, where he was gathering a few last impressions. He had earned a pocketful of money and 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, N. Y.—had been writing him peremptory letters and appealing to him as son, brother and fellow-citizen. He would have been grateful for another year in Rome, but he submitted to fate the more patiently that he had laid up treasure which at 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 enquired as they looked down the splendid avenue of the nave.
"Well, it will depend upon the views—upon the attitude—of my family. Oh, I think I shall get on; ​I think it can be done," Singleton went on. "If I find it can be done I shall really be quite proud of it; as an artist, of course I mean, don't you know? Do you know I 've some nine hundred sketches? I shall live in my portfolio. And so long as one 's 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 in particular."
"Don't envy Hudson; he has nothing to envy," Rowland could n't help risking.
Singleton wondered—but it might be a harmless jest. "Why, is n't he going to be the great man of our time? And is n't it quite a treat to think that it 's we who have turned him out?"
Rowland's heart was full, and the tender touch of this personage made it overflow a little where a harder knock might have steadied it. "Between ourselves, since you ask, he has rather disappointed me."
Singleton stared open-mouthed. "Dear me then, what did you expect?"
"Verily," Rowland said to himself, "what did I expect?"
"I confess," Singleton pursued, "I can't judge him rationally. He fascinates me; he 's the sort of man one makes one's hero of."
"Strictly speaking, he 's not a positive ideal hero," Rowland remarked.
Singleton looked intensely grave, and with almost scared eyes, "Is there anything amiss with him, any thing there should n't be?" 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 extraordinary high relief, as beautiful and clear and complete 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 recognised as Madame Grandoni's maid. Her mistress was on the spot, 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 in possession of rather more than a mere pilgrim's portion of the steps of the tribune behind the great altar, where, spreading a shawl on the polished red marble, she had spaciously seated herself. He suspected that she had been nursing a germ of truth and she lost no time in bringing forth her treasure.
"Don't shout very loud," she said; "remember that we 're in church: there 's a limit to the noise one may make even in Saint Peter's. Christina Light was married this morning to her Prince—or at least to her mother's."
​Rowland exhaled a long breath. "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 obscure little drama of which he had caught a glimpse had played itself almost violently out. He had believed that Christina would resist; that she had succumbed was a proof that the way taken with her had had some last dire directness. His excited vision followed her, with much blinking, into the world toward which she was rolling away with her unappreciated husband and her stifled ideal; but it must be confessed that if the first impulse of his compassion was for Christina the second was now 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 presently, "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, "it 's all none of my business, and perhaps I see things melodramatically. But certain suppositions have taken shape in my mind which serve as answers to two or three riddles."
"It 's very true," Madame Grandoni replied, "that ​the Cavaliere, as he stands, has always needed to be explained."
"He 's explained by the hypothesis that four-and-twenty years ago, at Ancona, Mrs. Light had a lover."
"I see. Ancona was dull, Mrs. Light was lively, and—four-and-twenty years ago perhaps—the Cavaliere was dangerous. Such are the dangers of dull places. Poverino!"
"He has had his compensation," Rowland said. "It has been a life for him to be near Christina. What other life could he have had?"
"What indeed? But has the girl never wondered why hers should have had to have so much of him?"
"If she had been near guessing," Rowland replied, "her mother's high way with him would have put her off the trace. Mrs. Light's view has apparently been that she could minimise her fault by minimising her lover. She has lived it down by living him down, and so she has kept her secret. But what 's the profit of a secret—as 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 produce an effect with it."
"I don't understand."
"Neither do I, morally," said Rowland. "I only conceive that there was an odious, dangerous, desperate, a very possibly vain, but, as it has turned out for her, quite successful scene. The poor Cavaliere stood outside, at the door, as livid as a corpse and as dumb. The mother and daughter had it out together. Mrs. Light burned her ships. When she ​came out she had three lines of writing in her daughter's hand, which the Cavaliere was despatched 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 grand manner of his bride's amends to him; but that 's how I roughly reconstruct history."
"You mean her mother told her—?" The old lady wondered. "I don't really see the difference that that was to make to her."
"Well," said Rowland "it was to make the difference of her deciding that she could n't afford not really to place herself. I 've figured it out, you see. She had to knock under to a revelation—to an humiliation. She was shown 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 have proceeded from the Prince and not from her."
Madame Grandoni thought of these things. "But must n't Christina have long ago guessed?"
"Her mother appears to have been satisfied she had n't."
"People in this enlightened age don't mind that sort of thing," Madame Grandoni objected. "The old obloquy attaching to irregular birth is now mere stage convention and melodrama."
"Well, Christina has a taste for that—she was glad immediately to be able to see herself in a new ​high light. You and I don't 'mind,' but I can easily put myself in the place of the proudest girl in the world, deeply wounded in her pride and not stopping to calculate probabilities, but muffling her wound with an almost sensuous relief in a splendour that stood within her grasp and would cover everything. Is it not possible that the late Mr. Light had made an outbreak before witnesses who are still living?—that the child's coming into the world was in itself a scandal? Say Light had quarrelled with his wife and was at the time virtually separated from her. Say too," Rowland went on, "that it quite imaginably came home to her—this first of all appeals from her father as a father."
"Ah, she won't have liked him for that!" Madame Grandoni declared. "Her being the Cavaliere's daughter must, if she had really been ignorant, have been a stiff dose for her to swallow."
"A reason the more then for her consenting to become grand!"
The old woman got up at last, resuming her progress and her sense of the situation. "Well, she has done what she was to do. She was nobly to decline it—yet not to miss it. Which would have been a pity."
It threw Rowland, as they went, into meditation again. "Yes, she clearly wasn't made to miss!"
He called on the evening of the morrow upon Mrs. Hudson and found Roderick with the two ladies. Their companion seemed to have but lately joined them, and Rowland afterwards learned that it was his first appearance since the writing of the note which had so distressed his mother. He had dropped ​upon a sofa, where he lounged like a young Pasha bored with a state seraglio; greeting Rowland with hardly more form than if he had been one of the usual guards of such penetralia. The manner of his advent had visibly not been happy; Mrs. Hudson had seated herself near him in mute appeal, while Mary was sunk, up to her firm chin, in one of her eternal pretexts for the fine needle and the occupied attention.
Mrs. Hudson, however, instantly broke out to Rowland. "Oh, we have such comfortable news! Roderick 's now ready to leave Rome."
"It is n't decent to be too glad," said Roderick. "There is n't a harm this place can do us, or has done us, that has n't had something in it we shall ache for again in some better one."
She had but a wan stare for this perversity. "If you mean we shall never get over it—perhaps! And the proof may very well be in your looking so pulled down—whatever that may mean! Isn't he, Mr. Mallet, too thin to live? It shows in all your bones that you need a change. I 'm sure we 'll go wherever in the world you like. Where should you like to go?"
Roderick had let her take his hand, which she pressed tenderly in her own, but he looked at her from terribly far off. "Poor sweet old mother!", he said at last all gently, if very inconclusively.
"My own dear precious son!" Mrs. Hudson as responsively and as vaguely wailed.
"I don't care a straw where you go! I don't care a straw for anything!"
​"Oh, my dear boy," she remonstrated, "you must n't say that before us all here—before Mary, before Mr. Mallet!"
"Mary—Mr. Mallet?" He took up these names as after a long disuse and seemed to look at them as at objects of obscure application. Then he released himself from his mother's locked clasp and turned away, leaning his elbows on his knees and holding his head in his hands. There was a silence, Rowland's share in which was the intensity of his consciousness of the young woman at the window.
"Why should I stand on ceremony with Mary and Mr. Mallet?" Roderick presently demanded. "Mary pretends to believe I 'm a great man, and if she believes it as she ought 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!' Mrs. Hudson quavered. "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 had got up and he began to walk about the room; Rowland felt how as never yet there was something reckless in him to count with. He observed further, with all anxiety, that Mrs. Hudson, without a sense of the delicate ground under her feet, was disposed to chide him endearingly, to show the intimacy of her tenderness. He foresaw that she would bring down the hovering thunderbolt on her head.
"Ah, in God's name," Roderick in fact broke out, "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, bankrupt! Do you know what that means?"
The poor lady gazed in dismay, and Rowland sharply interfered. "Oh, spare your mother your wild figures! Don't you see you 're frightening her half to death?"
"Frightening her? She may as well then be frightened first as last. Do I frighten you, mother?"
"Oh, Roderick, what do you mean?" she impatiently whimpered. "Mr. Mallet, what 's he talking about?"
"I'm talking about this," Roderick replied—"that I 'm an angry, savage, disappointed, miserable man. 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 honour 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 immensely well aware of: not with all it 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 or two ago I don't say, for I myself then ​really believed I was a swell. But do you know what has become of me now? I 've gone utterly to the devil."
There was something in the ring of his voice as he uttered these words which sent them home with convincing force. He was not talking for effect or for the mere personal pleasure of extravagant and paradoxical utterance, as had often enough been the case ere this; he was not even talking viciously or ill-humouredly. He was talking passionately, desperately, sincerely, 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 and, coming straight to him and laying her hand on his arm, let her eyes fix him with an effort of influence of which she seemed now to wish to test for the first time the real, the sovereign power. But the power proved the mere weak fumble of a key in a lock too hard for it; he made no movement to disengage himself, but it was as if he wondered for the moment what she could want. Rowland had been living for the past month in such intolerable expectancy of disaster that, now that the ice was broken and the fatal cold splash administered, his foremost feeling on receiving his share of the spray was almost elation. But the next instant his eternal second thought, his vision of the case for others, had corrected it.
"I really don't make out," he observed, "the profit of your talking in just this way at just this ​time. Don't you see how you 're 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 has a sound of the last impudence, no doubt, and I certainly don't deny your right to be disgusted with me."
"Will you keep what you 've 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 humour now; it won't keep! It 's a very simple matter—it is n't worth keeping. I 'm a dead 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 turned away and buried her face in her hands; but Roderick, affected apparently now in some unwonted fashion by her gesture, drew her toward him again and went on a little differently. "It 's hardly worth while we should have any private talk about this, Mary"—and he had one of his strange, straight drops (stranger than any flare of passion or of irony) into simple kindness. "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 strike me sometimes as deep, you know—one never can tell."
​"I can imagine nothing you should n't talk to me about," she returned impenetrably enough—impenetrably, that is, to Rowland.
"You're not afraid?"—Roderick pressed her with a sharpness that was, for the few seconds, almost like interest.
She turned away abruptly, with lowered eyes, intensely hesitating. "Anything you think I should hear I 'll hear." And she went back to her place at the window and took up her work.
"I've had a great smashing blow," Roderick pursued. "I was the biggest ass to be seen anywhere, but it does n't make the blow any easier to bear."
"Mr. Mallet, tell me exactly what Roderick means!" said Mrs. Hudson, who had found her voice, in a tone more peremptory than Rowland had yet heard her use.
"He ought to have told you before," Roderick interposed. "Really, Rowland, if you 'll 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 uncannily quiet. Allow me to tell you it 's very weak of you."
"Speaking too well of you 's a fault that 's easily mended!" said Rowland with a laugh.
"Oh, what is it, sir; what is this horror?" Mrs. Hudson insistently groaned.
"It 's what Roderick says. He 's a most unexpected failure!"
​Mary Garland, on hearing this statement, gave the speaker 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 the large, clear, beautiful looks, so often at his command, which made his approval, or his patience, so unexpectedly shine, and which set his companion wondering again, as all too frequently before, at the extraordinary disparities of his nature. "My dear mother, if you had had eyes that were n't 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 at once to Mr. Striker!"
"Money?" said Roderick. "I've not a cent of money. Where and how should I have got it?"
"Oh, Mr. Mallet, how could you let him?" Mrs. Hudson asked terribly.
"Everything I have is at his service," said Rowland, sick now of the scene.
"Of course Mr. Mallet will help you, my son!" the poor lady hastened to proclaim.
"Ah, leave Mr. Mallet alone!" said Roderick. "I 've squeezed him dry; it 's not my fault if he has anything left!"
"Roderick, what have you done with all your money?" his mother demanded.
​"Thrown it away. It was no such great amount. I 've done nothing this winter."
"You 've done nothing?"
"I 've done no manner of work! Why in the world did n't you guess it and spare me all this? Could n't you see I was empty, distracted, debauched?"
"Debauched, 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 've no doubt Miss Garland saw," Rowland said.
"But Mary has said nothing whatever!" Mrs. Hudson protested.
"Oh, she 's too wonderful," Rowland permitted himself to observe.
"Have you done anything that will hurt poor Mary?" Mrs. Hudson gasped.
"I 've only been thinking night and day of another woman."
She 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 rap 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 honour. I was in a lovely 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 've 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 bullied and hustled, horribly against her will, into a mercenary marriage with a man she could n't bear. She led me to believe that she would send her Prince about his business and keep herself free and sacred and pure for me. This was a great honour, and you may believe 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 her infernal coquetry and falsity could suggest."
"Oh, I say, this is too much!" Rowland bewilderedly interposed.
"So you back her up, eh?" Roderick cried with a renewal of his passion. "Do you pretend to say 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 figured in his own drama 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 separateness of his sensibility. 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, was hardly the person to raise the cry of treason, was a point to which at his leisure Rowland was of course capable of rendering impartial justice; but his friend's present collapse was so absolute that it imposed itself on his sympathies. "Do you pretend to say," the interesting youth went on, "that she did n't lead me along to the very edge of fulfilment and stupefy me with all she suffered me to believe, all she provoked me, invited me, to count upon? 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 ferocious flirt, and why a flirt 's a flirt is more than I can tell you now. I can't understand playing with such a relation; for me it can only be a serious thing, but too deadly serious, whether to go in for or to be afraid of. I don't see what 's in your head, my boy, to attempt to defend such a person since you were the first, you 'll remember, to cry out against her and to warn me. You told me she was dangerous, and I pooh-poohed you. You were intensely right; you 're always so intensely right. She 's as cold and false and heartless as she's beautiful—which is saying all; and she has sold her heartless beauty to the highest bidder. I hope he knows what he gets!"
"Oh, my son," Mrs. Hudson plaintively wailed, "how could you ever care for such a dreadful creature?"
"It would take long to tell you, dear mother!"
​Rowland's lately quickened interest in Christina had still its fine capacity to throb, and he felt that in loyalty to it as to an at least more enlightened view he must say a word for her. "You took her, I did think, too seriously at first," he remarked, "but you take her too harshly now. She had no idea of wronging or of so terribly upsetting you."
Roderick looked at him on this with eyes almost lurid. "She's a ministering 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, my dear fellow, be, in mercy, just a little wrong for once!"
"Oh yes, Mr. Mallet, show a little mercy!" said Mrs. Hudson in a tone which, for all its gentleness, made Rowland stare. This demonstration on his part 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 abrupt and perverse 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 had evidently not penetrated at all, having no imagination for it whatever, the strange cloud of her son's personal situation. Sitting without, in dismay, she only saw that all was darkness and trouble, and as his gained position, or what she had been deeming such, appeared quite to exceed her original measure and lift 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 only beginning. "Had n't you better forget all this, my dear?" Mrs. Hudson said to Rod erick. "Hadn't you better just quietly attend to your work?"
"Work, madam?" cried Roderick. "My work's over. I can't work—I have n't worked all winter. If I were fit for anything this tremendous slap in the face would have been just the thing to cure me of my apathy. 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've made a beautiful likeness of your poor dreary little mother," said Mrs. Hudson coaxingly.
"I had done nothing before, and I 've done nothing since! I quarrelled 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, complications that bristled and defied her touch; but here was a concrete fact, lucidly stated, and she looked it for a moment in the face. She repeated his words a third time with a gasping murmur, and then suddenly she burst into piteous 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 brokenheartedly. She said not a word, she uttered no judgement, but the desolation of her tears was dire. It lasted some time—too long for Rowland's courage. He had stood silent, wishing simply to appear very respectful; but his first weary relief, that of finding their crisis really there, in definite and measurable form, to be practically dealt with, had utterly ebbed, and he found his situation intolerable. He was reduced to the vulgar expedient of leaving the room.
His servant, the next morning, 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 her. Roderick's countenance threw no light; but Roderick's explanatory power was but too subject to rich intermittences. He had not for several weeks graced the scene now open to him, and he immediately began to look at those of his own works that adorned it. He gave himself up to independent contemplation. Mrs. Hudson had evidently armed herself with dignity, and so far as she might she meant to be impressive. Rowland took comfort, however, in her small quaint majesty, which might have been that of a shorn sheep roused to discriminations and trying to correct both nature and fate; for anything was better than seeing her again break down. She told him that she had come to him ​for practical advice; she took leave to remind him that she was a stranger in the land. Where were they to go, please? What were they to do? His eyes, for a moment, took in Roderick—Roderick who had his back turned and, with his head on one side like a tourist in a church, was lost in the consideration of his own proved power. The proof, meeting him there in its several forms, had made him catch his breath.
"Roderick says he does n't know, he does n't care," Mrs. Hudson meanwhile observed. "He leaves it entirely to you."
Many another man, in Rowland's place, would have greeted this information with an irate and sarcastic laugh, telling his visitors that he thanked them infinitely for their confidence, but that really, as things stood now, they must settle these little matters between themselves; many another man might have so comported himself even had he been, deep within, equally occupied with the image of Mary Garland, and not less amply conscious that her destiny was also part of the question. But Rowland was now fairly used to his daily dose of bitterness, and after a hard look, as always, at the cup, he again swallowed the draught and entered, responsively and formally, into Mrs. Hudson's dilemma. His wits, however, were but indifferently at his command; they were dulled by his sense of the singular change that had taken place in the attitude of this bewildered woman. Her visit was evidently intended as a grave reminder of forgotten vows. She was doubtless too sincerely humble a person ​to suppose that if he had had the wicked levity to break faith with her any shadow she might cast would act as a lash on his shoulders. But she had convinced herself by some elaborate lonely logic that she had been weakly wanting in "style" and had suffered him to think too meanly not only of her understanding but of her social consequence. A visit in her best gown would have an admonitory effect as regards both of these attributes; it would cancel some favours received and show him that she was not incapable of grasping the theory, at least, of retribution. These were the reflections of a very shy woman, who, determining for once in her life to hold up her head, was actually flying it like a kite.
"You know we 've very little money to spend," she said while her host waited for the full expression of her idea. "Roderick tells me he has debts and has also nothing at all to pay them with. He says I must write to Mr. Striker to sell my house for what it will bring and send me out the money. When the money comes I must give it to him. I 'm sure I don't know; I never heard of anything so dreadful. My house is really the principal part of my property. But that 's all Roderick will say. We must be very economical."
Before this speech was finished her voice had begun to quaver softly, and her face, after all so inadequately grim, to have motions that beat the air like the wild arms of the sinking. Rowland found himself turning hereupon to their companion and speaking almost as a schoolmaster. "Come away ​from those statues and sit down here and listen to me."
Roderick started, but obeyed with the most graceful docility, choosing a stiff-backed antique chair.
"What do you propose to your mother to do?" Rowland then enquired.
"Propose?" said Roderick absently. "Oh, I propose nothing."
The tone, the look, the gesture with which this was said were horribly irritating, and for an instant an imprecation rose to Rowland's lips. But he checked it, and was afterwards glad he had done so. "You must do something of some sort, you know," he said. "Choose, select, decide."
"My dear Rowland, how impossibly you talk!" his companion hereupon exclaimed. "The very point of the whole thing is that I can't do anything. I 'll do as I 'm told, of course, and be thankful, but I don't call that doing. We must leave Rome, I suppose, though I don't see why. We 've no money, and you have to pay cash, you know, on the railroads."
Mrs. Hudson surreptitiously wrung her hands. "Listen to him, please! Not leave Rome, when we 've stayed here later than any respectable family ever did before! It's this dreadful place that has made us so unhappy. If Roderick 's so relaxed it 's no more than I am, too, and it 's all the poison of the air."
"It 's very true that I 'm relaxed," said Roderick serenely. "If I had n't come to Rome I should n't have risen, and if I had n't risen I should n't have fallen."
​"Fallen—fallen!" sighed Mrs. Hudson. "Just hear him!"
"I 'll do anything you say, my dear man," Roderick continued. "I 'll do anything you want. I 've not been unkind to my mother have I, mother? I was unkind yesterday, without meaning it; for, after all, you know, all that had to be said. Murder will out, and my little troubles can't be hidden. But we talked it over and made it up, did n't we? It seemed to me we did. Let Rowland decide it, mother; whatever he suggests will be the right thing." And Roderick, who had hardly removed his eyes from the exhibition of his work, got up again and went back to the great figure in which, during his divine first freshness, he had embodied his idea of the primal Adam.
Mrs. Hudson fixed her eyes upon the opposite wall. There was not a trace in Roderick's face or in his voice of the bitterness of his emotion of the day before, and not a hint of his having the lightest weight upon his conscience. He looked at his friend, all radiance and intelligence, as if there had never been a difference of opinion between them; as if each had ever been for both, unalterably, and both unalterably for each.
Rowland had received a few days before a letter from a lady of his acquaintance, a worthy Scotswoman domiciled in a villa upon one of the olive-covered hills near Florence. She held her apartments in the villa upon a long lease, and she enjoyed for a sum not worth mentioning the possession of an extraordinary number of noble, stone-floored rooms, ​with ceilings vaulted and frescoed, with barred windows commanding the loveliest view in the world. She was a needy and thrifty spinster who never hesitated to declare that the lovely view was all very well, but that for her own part she lived in the villa for cheapness and that with five hundred a year assured she would undertake to lead a worthier life near her sister, a knight's lady at Glasgow. She was now proposing a visit to that seat of discipline, and she desired to turn an honest penny by subletting for a few weeks her historic Italian chambers. The terms on which she occupied them enabled her to ask a rent scarce worth mention, and she had begged Rowland to do what she called a little genteel advertising for her. Would he say a good word for her rooms to his numerous friends in Rome? He said a good word for them now to Mrs. Hudson and told her in dollars and cents how cheap a summer's lodging she might secure. He dwelt upon the fact that she would strike a truce with tables-d'hôte, and have a servant of her own, amenable possibly to instruction in the Northampton mysteries. He had touched a tender chord, and his visitor gave out a vague hum of reassurance. Her sentiments upon the table-d'hôte system and upon foreign household habits generally had arrived at a high development, and if we had space for it would repay analysis; and the idea of reclaiming a lost soul to the conception of a good New England "tea" set before her a light at which she could dimly blink. While Rowland argued his case Roderick slowly walked through the rooms with his hands in his pockets. Rowland waited for him to show some ​interest in their discussion, but he had no attention for his friend's ingenuity. Rowland had always at his friends' service and his own his vision of the how and the how much; he possessed conspicuously the sense of detail. He entered into Mrs. Hudson's position minutely and told her exactly why it seemed good that she should remove immediately to the Florentine villa. She received his advice, but sat on her guard for it, averting her eyes much and sighing like a person suspicious of a plausibility which might be, on her entertainer's part, but an escape from penalties. Yet she had nothing better to propose, and Rowland received her permission to write to his friend that she would take the rooms.
Roderick assented to this decision with a large placidity. "Those Florentine villas are capable of anything! I 'm perfectly at your service."
"Then I 'm sure I hope you 'll recover your tone up there," his mother moaned while she gathered her shawl together. Roderick laid one hand on her arm and with the other pointed to Rowland's marbles. "This is my tone just now. Once upon a time I did those things—if it 's possible to believe it."
Mrs. Hudson gazed at them vaguely, and Rowland dropped the remark that such a tone was a capital tone.
"They 're too hideously beautiful!" said Roderick.
Rowland solemnly shrugged his shoulders; it seemed to him he had nothing more to say. But as the others were going a last deep throb of the sense of undischarged duty led him to address to Roderick a ​few words of parting advice. "You 'll find the Villa Pandolfini very delightful, very comfortable. You ought to be very contented there. Whether you work or whether you do what you 're doing now, it 's a place for an artist to be happy in. But I hope you 'll work."
"I hope to heaven I may!" It was full of expression, but he might have been speaking of some interesting alien.
"When we meet again," Rowland said, "try then to have something to show me."
"When we meet again? Where the deuce are you going?" Roderick demanded.
"Oh, I hardly know; over the Alps."
"Over the Alps! You 're going to leave me?"
Rowland had certainly meant to leave him, but his resolution was not proof against this bare ejaculation. He glanced at Mrs. Hudson and saw that her eyebrows were lifted and her lips parted in delicate reprehension. She seemed to accuse him of a craven shirking of trouble, to demand of him to repair his cruel havoc in her life by a solemn renewal of zeal. But Roderick's expectations were the oddest! Such as they were, Rowland asked himself why he should n't make a bargain with them. "You want me to go with you?" he asked.
"If you don't go I won't—that 's all! How in the name of goodness shall I get through the next six months without you?"
"How will you get through them with me? That 's the question!"
"I don't pretend to say; the future 's a dead blank. ​But without you it 's not a blank—it 's certain damnation!"
"Mercy, mercy, mercy!" murmured Mrs. Hudson. Rowland made an effort to turn to account this precious symptom of a positive wish. "If I go with you, will you try to work?"
Roderick had up to this moment been looking as unperturbed as if the deep agitation of the day before were a thing of the remote past. But at these words his face changed formidably; he flushed and scowled, and all his passion returned. "Try to work!" he cried. "Try—try! work—work! In God's name don't talk that way, or I shall think you do it on purpose. Do you suppose I 'm trying not to work? Do you suppose I stand rotting here for the fun of it? Don't you suppose I would try to work for myself before I tried for you?"
"Mr. Mallet," cried Mrs. Hudson piteously, "will you leave me alone with this?"
Rowland turned to her and informed her gently that he would go with her then to Florence. After he had taken this engagement he thought not at all of the pain of his position as mediator between the mother's resentful grief and the son's incureable weakness; he drank deep, only, of the satisfaction of not cutting himself off from their other companion. If the future was a blank to Roderick it was hardly less so to himself. He had at moments a sharp foreboding of ill things yet to come. He paid it no special deference, but it seemed to warn him not to count on the future for anything he might squeeze out of the present. On his going to take leave of Madame Grandoni ​this lady asked when he would come back to Rome, and he answered that he would return either never or for always. When she asked him what he meant he said he really could n't tell her; but this moved her to embrace him in a motherly manner, as if she understood. She did more, she pronounced him a paragon among men; only that afterwards made his ears burn—it was so like a consecration afresh of the overstrained use of his reason and his charity. There were moments now when these faculties in him felt limp and lifeless.