# Roderick Hudson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 18

XVIII
Roderick came almost immediately back to his idea 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 had really taken hold of him it was an immense pity his inspiration should be wasted; inspiration had become in these days too rare a visitor. 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 birdlike, 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 as Mary Garland had her mornings free Rowland should feel it no more than civil to offer himself as a guide. He could scarce find it in his heart to accuse Roderick of neglect of that function, united to him though the girl might be by a double bond; for it was natural that the inspirations of a man of genius should be both capricious and imperious, and on what plan had he ever started moreover but on that of diligence and claustration? Yet he wondered how Mary felt, as the young man's promised wife, on being so summarily handed over to another man to be entertained. However she might feel he was still certain ​he should learn very little about it. There had been between them none but indirect allusions to her intended marriage; 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, had a particular blessing on it. The elder lady had usually gone off to the studio, and he found Mary sitting alone at the open window, turning the leaves of some book of artistic or antiquarian reference that he had given her. She was always eager, alert, responsive; she had always her large settled smile, which reminded him of some clear ample "spare-room," some expectant guest-chamber, as they said in New England, with its windows up for ventilation. 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—able to respond to any vivid appeal. Her response was not a random chatter, but it was full of intention. It was not amusement and sensation she coveted, but knowledge—facts that she might noiselessly lay away, piece by piece, in the fragrant 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, with her arrested concession, at the moment; but she ​watched them on their way over the crest of the hill, and when her attention seemed not likely to be missed it went hurrying after them and ran breathless at their side and begged them for the secret. Rowland took a high satisfaction in observing that she never mistook the second-best for the best and that when she stood in great presences she recognised the importance of the occasion. She said many things that he thought very happy—that is if they meant certain other things that they perhaps did n't, and meant all of those. This point he usually tried to ascertain; but he was obliged to proceed cautiously, for the effect of her so suddenly-quickened vision of a more mixed order than she had ever dreamt of was to make her see everything as mixed, and cross-examination, by that law, as necessarily ironic. She wished to know just where she was going—what she should gain or lose. This was partly on account of the purity and rigidity of a mind that had not lived with its door ajar upon the high-road of cosmopolite chatter, for passing phrases to drop in and out at their pleasure, but that had none the less looked out, ever, from the threshold, for any straggler on the "march of ideas," any limping rumour or broken-winged echo of life, that would stop and be cherished as a guest. It was even more perhaps because she was aware of a sort of growing self-respect, a sense of devoting her consciousness not to her own ends, but to those of another whose career would be high and splendid. She had been brought up to think a great deal of "nature" and nature's innocent laws; but now Rowland had talked to her ​ingeniously of the need of man's spirit to refine upon them, her fresh imagination had responded, and she was following this mystic clue into retreats where the intellectual effort gave her a well-nigh tragic tension. She wished to be very sure, to take only the best, knowing it to be the best. Her desire to improve herself struck him at moments as almost grim, and not the less so that the fruits of the process for which his aid was indispensable were so little to be served at any table of his. She might have been originally as angular as he had, on the other scene, positively liked her for being; but who was to say now what might n't result for her from the cultivation of a motive for curves? "Oh, exquisite virtue of circumstance," her companion admiringly mused, "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 unsuspected faculties!" She would develop, evidently, right and left, and to the top of her capacity; and he would have been at the bottom of it all. But that was where he would remain, essentially and obscurely; all taken for granted, merely for granted, as a good cellar, with its dusky supporting vaults, is taken for granted in a sound house.
They went a great deal to Saint Peter's, and Mary easily recognised that to climb the long low yellow steps, beneath the huge florid facade, and then, pushing the ponderous leathern apron of the door, find one's self a mere sentient point in that brilliant immensity, was an act that had its way of remaining a thrill. 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 it was that communication for our friends found its best allies; here Rowland, mounting a mild æsthetic hobby or two, might amble down long perspectives as with the ring of silver hoofs on marble floors. He discovered that she made notes of her likes and dislikes in a new-looking little pocket-book, and he wondered to what extent she reported his own discourse. These were hours of grave felicity. 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 comparative chill of the image-bordered vistas was as tonic as the breath of antiquity. The great herd of tourists had almost departed, and the couple often felt 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 marbles. Once, when they were standing before that noblest of sculptured portraits, the so-called ​Demosthenes of the Braccio Nuovo, she made the only spontaneous allusion to her plighted faith that had yet fallen from her lips. "I 'm so glad that Roderick 's a sculptor—like the man who did that. Glad, I mean, that he 's not a painter." And then when Row land had asked her the reason of her gladness: "It 's not that painting 's not fine, but that sculpture 's so much finer. It 's work for men!"
Rowland tried at times to make her talk about herself, but in this she had little skill. Since she thus struck him as older, as much older, more pliant to social uses than when he had seen her at home, he wished to make her tell him how her interval had been occupied. He had begun by exaggerating to her, even, the degree in which he found her different. "It appears then," she said, "that, after all, one can grow even in our hard air."
"Unquestionably. You may there, by taking thought, add the famous cubit. But you must take a great deal of thought. Your growth then," he went on, "was unconscious? You didn't watch yourself and water your roots?"
She paid no heed to his question. "I 'm willing to grant," she said, "that Europe's richer than I supposed; and I don't admit that I had thought of it stupidly. But you must admit that America has a drop for the thirsty."
"I have not a fault to find with the country that produced you."
"It produced me without a strain of its resources. And yet you want me to change," she said: "to assimilate Europe, I suppose you 'd call it."
​"I've felt that desire only on general principles. Shall I tell you what I feel now? If America has made you thus far, why not let America finish you? I should like to ship you back without delay and see what becomes of you. If that sounds uncivil I admit there 's a cold intellectual curiosity in it."
She shook her head. "The charm's broken; the thread 's snapped! I prefer to remain here."
Invariably, when he was inclined to make of some chance of their talk a direct application to herself, she wholly failed to assist him; she let the application, no matter how awkwardly for him, lie where it had fallen. Once, with a spark of ardent irritation, he told her she was very secretive. At this she coloured 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 risking, two or three times afterwards, an allusion to her duplicity that was violent enough for a joke. He told her that she was both abysmal and tortuous and he wound up on one occasion by pronouncing her labyrinthine. "Very good," she answered almost indifferently, "and now please remind me again—I have forgotten it—of what you said an 'architrave' was."
It was on the occasion of her asking him a question of this kind that he charged her—still by way of pleasantry, but in a tone in which, had she been curious in the matter, she might have detected a spark of restless ardour—with having an insatiable avidity for facts. "You 're always snatching at useful instruction," he ​said; "you 'll never consent to any disinterested conversation."
She frowned a little, as she always did when he arrested their talk upon something personal. But this time she assented; she confessed she was eager for items. "One must make hay while the sun shines. I must lay up a store against dark days. After all, I can't believe that I shall spend my life here."
He knew he had divined her real motive; but he felt that if he might have said to her—what it seemed impossible to say—that fortune possibly had a bitter disappointment in store for her, she would have been capable of answering immediately, after the first sense of pain: "Say then I 'm laying up resources for solitude!"
But all the accusations were not his own. He had been waiting once while they talked—they were differing and arguing a little—to see whether she would take her forefinger out of her "Murray," into which she had inserted it to keep her place. It would have been hard to say why this point interested him, for he had not the slightest real fear she would ever turn priggish. The simple human truth was that Rowland was jealous of science. In preaching art and history to her he had slighted again the good cause that he might never, never plead. Suddenly sinking, at any rate, the question of his lessons or of her learning, she faced him very frankly and began to frown. At the same time she let the "Murray" slide to the ground, and he was so charmed with this circumstance that he made no movement to pick it up.
​"You 're awfully inconsistent, Mr. Mallet, you know," she said.
"Oh, nothing so makes for good relations as inconsistency."
"Not of your elaborate kind. That first day 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; you gave me a great one; here I am up to my neck! And now, instead of helping me to swim, you stand on the shore—the shore of superior information—and fling pebbles at me!"
"Pebbles, my dear young lady? They 're life-preservers? I must have played my part very ill."
"Your part? What 's 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 guide-book she fairly buried her nose in it.
That evening he made her a speech which she perhaps understood as little. "Do you remember my begging you the other day to do occasionally as I told you? It seemed to me you tacitly consented."
"Very tacitly!"
"I 've never yet really presumed on your consent. But now I should like you to do this: whenever you catch me in the act of what you call flinging pebbles, ask me the meaning of some architectural term. I shall know what you mean—a word to the wise!"
There came a morning that they spent among the ruins of the Palatine, that sunny chaos of rich decay and irrelevant renewal, of scattered and overtangled ​fragments, half excavated and half identified, known as the Palace of the Cæsars. Nothing in Rome is more interesting than this confused and crumbling 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 spring-time you may sit on a Latin inscription in the shade of a flowering almond 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 some book of reference she had brought with her lie unopened for an hour and asked several questions which had no connection with Consuls or Cæsars. 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 pale and grave.
"Everything," she said, "seems to insist that all things are vanity indeed. If one has something good to do I suppose one feels a certain strength within one to say otherwise. But if one has nothing it 's surely 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 practical occupation."
"And what occupation would be your idea?"
"I would open a school for those beautiful little beggars, though I 'm sadly afraid I should never bring myself to scold them."
​"I've no practical occupation," said Rowland, "and yet I 've kept, I think, from growing absolutely limp."
"I don't call you at all unoccupied," Mary Garland declared.
"It 's very good of you. Do you remember our talking about that at Northampton?"
"During that walk in the woods? 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 very happy?"
"Don't I look so?"
"So it seems to me. But"—and she hesitated a moment—"I imagine you look happy whether you 're so or not."
"I'm like that ancient comic mask that we saw just now in yonder excavated fresco; I 'm made to grin."
"Shall you come back here next winter?" she went on without heed of this.
"Very probably."
"Are you settled for ever?"
"'For ever' is a long time. I live only from year to year."
"Shall you never marry?"
Rowland gave a laugh. "'For ever'—'never'! You go in for big figures. I 've taken no monastic vow."
"Should n't you like to have a home?"
"You mean in the American sense?" And then as ​she seemed to wonder: "Some one to share it with? Oh yes, 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 've 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 some thing 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 've 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 reflexions, speaking with due solemnity. "You ought to be made to know very well what we all feel. Mrs. Hudson tells me she has told you what she feels. Of course Roderick has expressed himself. I 've been wanting to thank you too; I do, most sincerely."
Rowland made no answer; his face at this moment might have resembled the tragic mask more than the ​comic. But Mary was not looking at him; she had opened her eternal explanatory volume.
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 hôtel-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's reflecting surface exhibited, for the time, something of a blur. He was preoccupied with his progress 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 was no necessary sign of disaffection, for he clearly liked again, almost as he had liked it as a boy, in convalescence from measles, to lounge away the hours in an air so charged with feminine service. 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 neither harsh comments nor sombre allusions. Row land 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 sordid little table-d'hôte; 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 sawdust, and that there may even be a gay impunity in tickling the absurd nose. As to whether the love-knot of which Mary Garland had the keeping still held firm, who should pronounce? The young woman, as we know, wore no such favour on her sleeve. She always sat at the table, near the candles, with rather a strenuous-looking piece of needlework. This was the attitude in which Rowland had first seen her, and he thought, now that he had seen her in several others, that, even when maintained with perhaps too deep a discretion, it was not the least becoming.