# Roderick Hudson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 20

XX
The opportunity presenting itself the next day, he failed not, as you may imagine, to ask Mary Garland what she thought of Christina. It was a Saturday afternoon, the time at which the beautiful marbles of the Villa Borghese are thrown open to the public. Mary had told him that Roderick had promised to take her to see them with his mother, and he joined the party in the splendid Casino. The warm weather had left so few strangers in Rome that they had the place to almost themselves. Mrs. Hudson had confessed to an invincible fear of treading even with the help of her son's arm the polished marble floors, and was sitting patiently on a stool, with folded hands, looking shyly here and there at the undraped paganism around her. Roderick had sauntered off alone with an irritated brow which seemed to betray the conflict between the instinct of observation and the perplexities of circumstance. His cousin was astray in another direction, and if Rowland caught her with her eyes on the catalogue he explained it as a sign of her system of concealing anxieties. He joined her, and she presently dropped for him on a divan and rather wearily closed her eternal red handbook. Then he asked her abruptly how Christina had pleased her. She started the least bit at the question, and he felt she had been thinking of Christina. "I don't like her!" she dryly said.
​"What do you think of her?"
"I think she 's false." It quite rang out.
"But she wished to please you; she tried," Rowland rejoined in a moment.
"She wished above all to please herself!"
He was silent again, held a moment by a strange intensity of thought. Yes, this young woman would never be anything but unjust to the other one, and that though neither had a vulgar soul. And he saw the attitude in Mary as immutable for ever, and Christina was interesting, and Mary would be wrong. He himself could take it thus and yet not "mind." How little with her there, verily, he minded! This came and went in fifty seconds—leaving all the rest, however, not less distinct. He knew that his companion knew, by that infallible sixth sense of a woman who loves, how the beautiful strange girl she had seen for the first time at Saint Peter's (since when she had asked no question about her) had possibly the power to do her a definite wrong. To what extent she had the will remained of course ambiguous, and last night's interview had somehow, by a perverse process, only proved an omen of ill. It was in these conditions equally unbecoming for Rowland to depreciate or to defend Christina, and he had to content himself with simply having verified the latter's own assurance that she had made a bad impression. He tried to talk of indifferent matters—about the statues and the frescoes; but to-day plainly the quest of elegant knowledge on Mary's part had folded its wings. Curiosity of another sort had taken its place. She was longing, he was sure, to break ground again ​on the subject of Christina; but she found a dozen reasons for hesitating. Her questions would imply that Roderick had not treated her with confidence; for information on this point should properly have come from himself. They would imply that she was jealous, and to betray her jealousy was intolerable to her pride. For some minutes, as she sat pressing the brilliant pavement with the point of her umbrella, it was to be supposed that her pride and her anxiety held an earnest debate. At last anxiety won.
"About Miss Light then," she asked; "do you know her very well?"
"I can hardly say that. But I 've seen her repeatedly."
"Do you like her very much?"
"Yes and no. I think I 'm sorry for her."
Mary had spoken with her eyes on the pavement. At this she looked up. "Sorry for her? Why?"
"Well—she 's unhappy."
"What are her miseries?"
"Well—she has a horrible mother and has had a wretched bringing-up."
For a moment Mary was still. Then "Is n't she very beautiful?" she asked.
"Don't you think so?"
"That's measured by what men think! She's extremely clever too."
"Oh yes—speaking as men think'"
"She has beautiful dresses."
"Any number of them."
"And beautiful manners."
"Yes—sometimes."
​"And plenty of money."
"Money enough apparently."
"And she 's enormously admired."
"Oh, enormously."
"And she 's to marry a grandee."
"So they say."
Mary rose and turned to rejoin her companions, commenting these admissions with a pregnant silence. "Poor Miss Light!" she at last simply said. But it went, as for her ironic purpose, very far.
Late the next evening his servant brought him the card of a visitor. He was surprised at so nocturnal a call, but it may be said that when he read the inscription—Cavaliere Giuseppe Giacosa—he recognised the working of events. He had had an unnamed prevision of some sequel to the apparition at Madame Grandoni's—which the Cavaliere would have come to usher in.
He had come evidently on a portentous errand. He was as pale as some livid old marble mask into which he might have suggested that a pair of polished agate eyes had been for an occasion inserted. Prodigiously grave, he might have been the bearer of a cartel, had not his deep deference to his host and to the latter's general situation been clearly again his first need.
"You 've more than once done me the honour to invite me to call upon you, and I 'm ashamed of my long delay. But my time for many months has been particularly little my own." Rowland assented, ungrudgingly, fumbled for some Italian correlative of "Better late than never," begged him to be seated and offered him a cigar. The Cavaliere sniffed ​imperceptibly the fragant weed and then declared that if his entertainer would allow him he would reserve it for consumption at another time. It was not a case, clearly, for hanging up smoke-wreaths. "I must confess," he said, "that even now I come on business not of my own—or my own at least only in a secondary sense. I 've been despatched as an ambassador—an envoy extraordinary, I may say—by my dear friend Mrs. Light."
"If I can in any way be of service to Mrs. Light I shall much rejoice," Rowland found himself a little recklessly articulating.
"Well then, dear sir, Casa Light's in high commotion. The povera signora 's in great trouble, in terrible trouble." For a moment Rowland expected to hear that the povera signora's trouble was of a nature that a loan of five thousand francs would assuage. But the Cavaliere was more interesting even than that. "Miss Light has committed a great crime; she has plunged a dagger into the heart of her mother."
"A dagger—?"
The Cavaliere nervously patted the air. "I speak strongly—one must: che vuole? She has broken off her marriage."
"Broken it off?"
"Short! She has turned the Prince out of the house." And the good gentleman, with this report, folded his arms and, straight at his friend, looked strange, the strangest, things. A mocking little light of pride might have glimmered in his decent despair.
Rowland greeted the news with a gasp, and there ​sounded in his ears the sinister click as of a fitting together of bad pieces. She had been too plausible to be honest. Without being able to trace the connection, he yet instinctively associated her present rebellion with her meeting of Mary. Sinister it thus suddenly showed, her exhibition of eager mildness at Madame Grandoni's, and all the uneasiness she had then stirred in him came back with a chill. Yes, it was clearer than it was obscure, and he recognised in the stroke now startling him the hand armed to deal some blow at Miss Garland's small remnant of security. So it hung before him, portentous and ugly. If she had not seen Mary she would have let things stand, but she had seen her and she had acted. It was monstrous indeed to suppose that she could have sacrificed so brilliant a fortune to a mere movement of jealousy, to a calculation of quite futile effects, to a desire to create for the poor girl some poisonous alarm. Yet he remembered his first impression of her; she was "dangerous," and she had measured in each quarter the penetration of her announced rupture. She hovered there for him as tasting that strength in it. If the question had been of her penetrating, he, verily, was penetrated, and it made him long, for a minute that was as sharp as a knife-edge, to denounce her to her face. But of course all he could say to his visitor was that he was extremely sorry, though indeed he was not surprised.
"You 're not surprised?"
"With Miss Light everything's possible. Isn't that true?"
Another ripple seemed to play an instant in the ​current of the old man's irony, but he made no answer. "It was a magnificent marriage," he said at last. "I have my reserves about a great many people, but I had none about the Signer Principe."
"I should judge him indeed a very honourable young man," said Rowland.
"Eh, young as he is he 's made of the old stuff. And now perhaps he 's blowing his brains out. He 's the last of his house; it 's a great house. But Miss Light will have made it, for the nonce, feel very small."
"Is that what she has wanted to do?"
The Cavaliere's smile was like the red tip of a cigar seen for a few seconds in the dark. "You 've observed Miss Light with attention," he said, "and this brings me to my errand. Mrs. Light has a high opinion of your wisdom, of your kindness, and she has reason to believe you 've great influence with her daughter."
"I—with her daughter? Not a grain!"
"That's possibly your modesty. Mrs. Light believes that something may yet be done and that our young lady will listen to you as to no one. She begs you therefore to come and see her before it 's too late."
"But all this, my dear Cavaliere, is none of my business," Rowland objected. "I can't possibly in such a matter take the responsibility of advising Miss Light."
The Cavaliere fixed his eyes for a moment on the floor, in brief but intense reflection. Then looking up, "Unfortunately," he said, "she has no man near her whom she respects. She has no father."
​"And such a finished fool of a mother!" Rowland gave himself the satisfaction of exclaiming.
The Cavaliere was so pale that he could not easily have turned paler; yet it seemed for a moment that his dead complexion blanched. "Eh, signore, such as she is the mother appeals to you. A very handsome woman—dishevelled, in tears, in despair, literally undressed, uncombed and refusing food." Rowland reflected a moment, not on the attractions of Mrs. Light in the guise evoked by the Cavaliere, but on the relief he should find in bringing home to Christina her damnable need of making mischief.
"I must add," said the Cavaliere, "that Mrs. Light desires also to speak to you on the subject of Mr. Hudson."
"She believes Mr. Hudson connected with this step of her daughter's?"
"Intimately. He must be got out of Rome."
"Mrs. Light then must get an order from the Pope to remove him. It 's not in my power."
The Cavaliere showed his intelligence. "Mrs. Light 's equally helpless. She would leave Rome to-morrow, but nothing will induce Christina to budge. An order from the Pope would do nothing. A bull in council would do nothing."
"She's really," said Rowland, "a terrible explosive force."
But the Cavaliere rose—he responded more coldly. "She has a great spirit—the very greatest."
And it seemed to Rowland that her great spirit, for mysterious reasons, gave him more pleasure than the ​distressing use she made of it gave him pain. He was on the point of charging him with his inconsistency when the good gentleman took himself up. "But if the marriage can be saved it must be saved. It 's a beautiful marriage. It will be saved."
"Notwithstanding Miss Light's great spirit to the contrary?"
"Miss Light, notwithstanding her great spirit, will come round again to her duty."
"And will the Signer Principe come round?"
"I warrant him!"
"Well then," said Rowland, "heaven grant our prayer!"
"Oh, we must help heaven!" And with Rowland's promise to present himself on the morrow at Casa Light his visitor departed. He left our friend revolving many things: Christina's magnanimity, Christina's perversity, Roderick's contingent fortune, Mary Garland's certain misery and the Cavaliere's own fine ambiguities.
Rowland's present vow obliged him to disengage himself from an excursion which he had arranged with the two ladies at the inn. Before going to Casa Light he repaired in person to that establishment. He found Roderick's mother seated with tearful eyes, staring at an open note that lay in her lap. At the window hovered Mary, who turned on him as he entered a gaze both anxious and confident. Mrs. Hudson quickly rose and came to him, holding out the note.
"In pity's name what 's the matter with my boy? If he 's ill I entreat you to take me to him!"
​"He's not ill, to my knowledge," Rowland said. "What have you there?"
"A note—a most dreadful thing. He tells us we 're not to see him nor to think of him for a week. If I could only go to his room! But I 'm afraid, I'm afraid!"
"I imagine there 's no need of going to his room. What 's the occasion, may I ask, of his note?"
"He was to have gone with us on this drive to—what is the place?—to Cervara. You know it was arranged yesterday morning. In the evening he was to have dined with us. But he never came, and this morning arrives this awfulness. Oh dear, I 'm so nervous. Would you mind reading it?"
Rowland took the note and glanced at its half-dozen lines. "I mustn't go to Cervara," they ran; "I have something else to do. This will occupy me perhaps a week, so you won't see me. Don't talk about me too much and don't miss me. Learn not to miss me. I bless you both, but I know what I need and must insist on my conditions. R. H."
"Why, it means," Rowland explained, "that he has taken up a fresh piece of work and that it 's all-absorbing. That 's very good news." This explanation was not sincere, but he had not the courage not to offer it as a stop-gap. And he found he needed all his courage to support it, for Mary had left her place and approached him, formidably unsatisfied.
"He never works in the evening," said Mrs. Hudson. "Can't he come for five minutes? Why does he write such a cruel cold note to his poor mother ​—to poor Mary? What have we done that he acts so strangely? It 's this wicked, infectious, heathenish place!" And the poor lady's suppressed mistrust of the Eternal City broke passionately out. "Oh, dear Mr. Mallet," she went on, "I'm sure it 's this poisonous air, that the fever 's on him and that he 's already delirious."
"I 'm very sure it 's not that," Mary distinctly protested.
She was still fixing Rowland, so that his eyes met hers and his own glance wandered away. This made him angry, and to carry off his confusion he pretended to be looking meditatively at the floor. After all, what had he to be ashamed of? For a moment he was on the point of making a clean breast of it, of crying out "Good ladies, I abdicate; I can't help you!" But he checked himself; he felt so impatient to have his three words with Christina. He grasped his hat. "I 'll see what it is and let you know." And then he was glad he had not abdicated, for as he turned away he glanced again at Mary and saw that, though her face was full of apprehensions, it was not hard and accusing, but charged with appealing friendship.
He went straight to Roderick's apartment, deeming this, at an early hour, the safest place to seek him. He found him in his sitting-room, which had been closely darkened to keep out the heat. The carpets and rugs had been removed, the floor of speckled concrete was bare and lightly sprinkled with water. Here and there, over it, certain strongly-odorous flowers had been scattered. Roderick was lying on ​his divan in a white dressing-gown, staring at the frescoed ceiling. The room was deliciously cool and filled with the moist sweet fragrance of the circumjacent roses and violets. These were somehow "quaint" notes, yet Rowland hardly felt surprised.
"Your mother was greatly alarmed at your note," he said, "and I came to satisfy myself that, as I believed, you 're not ill."
Roderick lay motionless except that he slightly turned his head towards his friend. He was smelling a large white rose, which he continued to present to his nose. In the darkness of the room he looked exceedingly pale, but his beautiful eyes quite shed a light. He let them rest for some time on Rowland, lying there like a Buddhist in an intellectual swoon, a deep dreamer whose perception should be slowly ebbing back to temporal matters. "Oh, I 'm not ill," he said at last. "I 've never been better in my life."
"Your note, nevertheless, and your announced absence, have very naturally alarmed your mother. I advise you to go to her directly and reassure her."
"Go to her? Going to her would be worse than staying away. Staying away at present is a kindness." And he inhaled deeply his huge rose, look ing up over it at Rowland. "My presence, in fact, would be indecent."
"Indecent? Pray explain."
"Why, you see, as regards Mary Garland. I 'm disgustingly happy. Does n't it strike you? You ought to agree with me. You wish me to spare her ​feelings; I spare them by staying away. Last night I heard something—"
"I heard it too," Rowland said with a high intention of dryness. "And it 's in honour of this piece of news that you 've taken to your bed in this fashion?"
"Extremes meet! I can't get up for joy."
"May I enquire how you heard what has given you such pleasure? From Miss Light herself?"
"By no means. It was brought me by her maid, who 's in my service as well."
"The Prince's loss then is to such a certainty your own gain?"
"I don't talk about certainties. I don't want to be arrogant. I don't want to offend the immortal gods. I 'm keeping very quiet and behaving, I maintain, as a gentleman should. But I can't help my deep peace. I shall wait a while. I shall bide my time."
"And then?"
"And then the most interesting person in the world—in my world—will confess to me that when she threw overboard her Prince she remembered that I adore her."
"I feel bound to tell you," was in the course of a moment Rowland's response to this speech, "that I 'm now on my way to Mrs. Light's."
"I congratulate you—I envy you," Roderick imperturbably remarked.
"Mrs. Light has sent for me to remonstrate with her daughter, with whom she has taken it into her head that I have an influence. I don't know to what extent I shall remonstrate, but I give you notice I shall not speak in your interest."
​Roderick looked at him for a moment with a lazy radiance. "Pray don't!" he simply answered.
"You deserve I should tell her you're a very shabby fellow."
"My dear Rowland, the comfort with you is that I can so beautifully trust you. You 're incapable of doing anything the least tiny bit indelicate."
"You mean to lie here then smelling your roses and nursing your visions and leaving your mother and Miss Garland to eat their hearts out?"
"Can I go and flaunt my felicity in their faces? Wait till I get used to it a trifle. I 've done them a villainous wrong, but I can at least forbear to add insult to injury. I may be the biggest donkey, or the blackest monster, in Rome, but for the moment I have taken it into my head to be glad to be alive. I should n't be able to keep it from them; my being glad, or even my being alive, on such a basis, would mortally scandalise them. So I lock myself up as a dangerous character."
"Well, I can only hope that your gladness may not grow less or your danger greater."
Roderick closed his eyes again and sniffed at his rose. "God's will be done!"
On this Rowland left him and repaired directly to Mrs. Light's. This afflicted lady hurried forward to meet him. Since the Cavaliere's visit to Rowland she had taken a reef, as the saying is, in her distress, but she was evidently still in high agitation and she clutched Rowland by his two hands as if in the shipwreck of her hopes he were her single floating spar. Rowland greatly pitied her—so respectable is ​sincerity of sorrow. She too was in the blighting circle of her daughter's contact, and this exposure, shared with the others who were more interesting, almost gave her, with the crudity of her candour, something of their dignity.
"Speak to her, plead with her, don't leave her till you 've moved her!" she cried, pressing and shaking his hands. "She 'll not heed us, no more than if we were a pair of running fountains. Perhaps she 'll listen to you; she always liked you."
"She always disliked me," said Rowland. "But that does n't matter now. I 've come here simply because you sent for me—not because I can help you. I can't advise your daughter."
"Oh, if you think I 'm going to take that from you—! You must advise her; you sha'n't leave this house till you 've advised her!" the poor woman passionately retorted. "Look at me in my misery and refuse to help me! You need n't be afraid, I know I 'm a fright, I have n't an idea what I 've on. If this goes on she and I may both as well turn scarecrows. If ever a woman was desperate and heartbroken, such a woman speaks to you now! I can't begin to tell you. To have nourished a serpent, sir, all these years! To have lavished one's self upon a viper that turns and stings her own devoted mother! To have toiled and prayed, to have pushed and struggled, to have eaten the bread of bitterness and gone through fire and water—and at the end of all things to find myself at this pass! It can't be, it's too cruel, such things don't happen, the Lord don't allow it. I 'm a religious ​woman, sir, and if the Saints above don't know all about me it is n't my fault. But had n't they, with their own very hands, just given me their reward? I would have lain down in the dust and let her walk over me; I would have given her the eyes out of my head if she had taken a fancy to them. No, she's a cruel, wicked, heartless, unnatural girl! I speak to you, Mr. Mallet, in my dire distress, as to my only friend. There is n't a creature here that I can look to—not one of them all that I have faith in. But I always thought everything of you. I said to Christina the first time I saw you that you were a perfect gentleman, a real one—different enough from some I could name! Come, don't disappoint me now! I feel so terribly alone, you see; I feel what a nasty hard heartless world it is that has come and devoured my dinners and danced to my fiddles and yet that has n't a word to throw to me in my trouble. The mere money I 've spent, all round, to do it—I could speak of that too if I cared!"
While this high tide was flowing Rowland had had time to look round the room and to see the Cavaliere sitting in a corner, like a major-domo on the divan of an ante-chamber, pale, rigid, inscrutable. "I have it at heart to tell you," he said, "that if you consider my friend Hudson—"
Mrs. Light gave a toss of her head and hands. "Oh, it 's not that! She told me last night to bother her no longer with Hudson. Hudson, forsooth! She did n't care a button for Hudson. I almost wish she did; then perhaps one might understand it. But she does n't care for anything in the wide world except to do her ​own hard wicked will and to crush me and shame me with her cruelty."
"Ah then," said Rowland, "I 'm as much at sea as you, and my presence here 's an impertinence. I should like to say three words to Miss Light on my own account. But I must wholly decline to talk to her about the Prince. This is simply impossible."
Mrs. Light burst into angry tears. "Because the poor boy is a prince, eh? because he 's of a great family and has an income of millions, eh? That 's why you begrudge him and stand off from him and won't lift a finger for him. I knew there were vulgar people of that way of feeling, but I did n't expect it of you. Make an effort, Mr. Mallet; rise to the occasion; forgive the poor darling his advantages. Be just, be reasonable! It's not his fault, and it's not mine. Pray, has n't he human feelings and is n't he horribly suffering? He 's the best, the truest, the kindest young man in Italy and the most correct and cultivated and incapable of a thought—! If he were standing here in rags I would say it all the same. The man first—the money afterwards: that was always my motto—ask the Cavaliere. What do you take me for? Do you suppose I would give Christina to a vicious person? do you suppose I would sacrifice my precious child, little comfort as I have in her, to a man against whose character a syllable could be breathed? Casamassima 's only too good, too innocently good; he 's a saint of saints; his word is his word and he understands nothing else. There is n't such another in the length and breadth of Europe. What he has been through in this house not a common peasant ​would endure. Christina has treated him as you would n't treat a dog. He has been dealt with as if to see how much of it he would take. He has been driven hither and thither till he did n't know where he was. He has stood there where you stand—there, with his name and his millions and his devotion—as white as your handkerchief, with hot tears in his eyes and me ready to go down on my knees to him and say 'My own sweet Prince, I could kiss the ground you tread on, but it is n't decent that I should allow you to enter my house and expose yourself to these horrors again.' And he would come back, and he would come back, and go through it all again, and take all that was given him, and only want the girl the more. He opened himself to me as he might to his mother in heaven, and it 's not too much to say that we lived through everything together. He used to beg my own forgiveness for her worst caprices. What do you say to that? I seized him once and kissed him hard, I verily did! To find that and to find all the rest with it, and to believe that luck was at last, in spite of everything, on my side, and then to see it dashed away before my eyes and to stand here helpless—oh, it 's a fate I hope you may ever be spared!"
"It would seem then that in the interest of Prince Casamassima himself I ought to refuse to interfere," Rowland presently said.
Mrs. Light looked at him hard, slowly drying her eyes. The magnificence of her woe gave her a kind of majesty, and Rowland for the moment felt ashamed of the somewhat grim humour of his observation. "Very good, sir," she said. "I 'm sorry your heart ​is n't so tender as your conscience. My compliments to your conscience! It must give you great happiness. Of course it 's your own affair. Since you fail us we 're indeed driven to the wall. But I 've fought my own battles before and have never really lost courage, so I don't see why I should break down now. Cavaliere, come here!" That personage rose at her summons and stood impenetrably at attention. He had shaken hands with Rowland in silence. "Mr. Mallet refuses to say a word," Mrs. Light went on. "Time presses, every minute 's precious. God only knows what that poor boy may be doing. If at this moment a truly clever woman should get hold of him it would n't matter if she were a fright: it would be her grand chance. It 's horrible to think of."
The Cavaliere fixed his eyes on Rowland, and his expression, which the night before had been singular, was now extraordinary in its mixture of fine anxiety—an anxiety that seemed to plead against the young man's reluctance—and of some emotion of a bearing less calculable. Suddenly and vaguely Rowland felt the presence of a new active element in the situation that had been made a drama somehow by Christina's having been made, so all generically, a heroine. It was as if a subordinate performer had suddenly advanced to the footlights. He looked from their companion to Mrs. Light, whose tears had been succeeded by a grand air of detachment.
"If you could bring yourself," the Cavaliere said with all his grave rich unction and with the effect, in his fine Roman voice, as of a round-hand copy set ​for a pupil, "if you could bring yourself to address a few words of solemn remonstrance to Miss Light you would perhaps do more for us than you know. You would save several persons a great deal of pain. This gracious lady here first and then Christina herself. Christina in particular. Me too, I might take the liberty to add!"
Rowland felt these words, after an instant, press upon his heart as with a repetition of discreet and intense finger-taps. To the personage so urbanely sounding them his imagination had from the first all benevolently attached itself, and they now seemed a supreme manifestation of the mysterious obliquity of his life. On the spot something sharply occurred to him; it was something very odd and it stayed his glance from again turning to Mrs. Light. His idea embarrassed him, and to carry off his embarrassment he repeated that it was folly to suppose his counsel would have any weight with their young friend.
The Cavaliere stepped forward and laid two fingers, as for positive emphasis of the effect Rowland had already figured, on his interlocutor's breast. "Do you wish to know the truth of the case? You 're the only man whose words she ever repeats."
Rowland was moving from one new light to another. "I 'll say then what I can!" By this time he had again caught Mrs. Light's conscious eyes, which appeared to accuse him for an instant of possible defection.
"If you fail," she said sharply, "there's something else we can do. But for God's sake be straight!"
​She had hardly spoken when the sound of a short sharp growl caused the company to turn. Christina's pompous poodle stood in the middle of the great drawing-room with his nose raised as if to sniff conspiracy. He had preceded his mistress as the sharpest of scouts, and she now slowly advanced from a neighbouring place.
"You will be so good as to listen to Mr. Mallet," her mother promptly rang out, "and to reflect carefully on what he says. I suppose you 'll admit that he 's disinterested. In half an hour you shall hear from me again!" And her retreat with her companion might have been the march of a squad that has changed guard.
Christina looked hard at Rowland, but offered him no greeting. She was very pale, and, strangely enough, it at first seemed to Rowland that her beauty was in eclipse. But he recognised more than ever that its shadows were as fine as its lights and that attempted discussion would always have it to reckon with. "Why have you come here at this time?" she asked.
"Your mother sent for me in pressing terms, and I was very glad to have an opportunity to speak to you."
"Have you come to help me or to worry me?"
"I 've as little power to do one as I 've desire to do the other. I came in great part to ask you a question. First, is your determination absolutely taken?"
Christina's two hands had been hanging clasped in front of her; she separated them and flung them apart by an admirable gesture.
​"Would you have done this if you had not seen a certain person?"
"What person?"
"The young lady you so much admire."
She looked at him with quickened attention; then suddenly, "This is really interesting," she exclaimed. "Let us see what's in it." And she flung herself into a chair and pointed to another.
"You don't answer my question," Rowland said.
"You 've no right that I know of to ask it. But it 's very intelligent—it puts such a lot into it. Into my having seen her, I mean." She paused a moment; then with her eyes on him, "She helped me certainly," she went on.
"Provoked you, you mean, to hurt her—through Roderick?"
For a moment she deeply coloured, and he had really not intended to force the tears to her eyes. A cold clearness, however, quickly forced them back. "I see your train of reasoning, but it 's really all wrong. I meant no harm whatever to Miss Garland; I should be extremely sorry to cause her any distress. Tell me that, since I assure you of that, you believe it."
"How am I to tell you," he asked in a moment, "that I don't?"
"And yet your idea of an inward connexion between our meeting and what has happened since corresponds to something that has been, for me, an inward reality. I took into my head, as I told you," Christina continued, "to be greatly struck with Miss Garland (since that's her sweet name!) ​and I frankly confess that I was tormented, that I was moved to envy, call it, if you like, to jealousy, by something I found in her. There came to me there in five minutes the sense of her character. C'est bien beau, you know, a character like that, and I got it full in the face. It made me say to myself 'She in my place would never marry Gennaro—no, no, no, never!' I could n't help coming back to it, and I thought of it so often that I found a kind of inspiration in it. I hated the idea of being worse than she—of doing something that she would n't do. I might be bad by nature, but I need n't be by reflexion. The end of it all was that I found it impossible not to tell the Prince that I was his very humble servant, but that decidedly I could n't take him for mine."
"Are you sure it was only of Miss Garland's character that you were jealous," Rowland asked, "and not of her affection for her cousin?"
"Sure is a good deal to say. Still, I think I may do so. There are two reasons; one at least I can tell you. Her affection has not a shadow's weight with Mr. Hudson! Why then should one resent it?"
"And what 's the other reason?"
"Excuse me; that's my own affair."
Rowland felt himself puzzled, baffled, charmed, inspired. "I 've promised your mother," he presently went on, "to do my best on behalf of the Prince."
She shook her head sadly. "The Prince needs nothing you can say for him. He 's a magnificent parti. I know it perfectly."
​"You know also of your mother's deep disappointment?"
"Her disappointment's demonstrative. She has been abusing me for the last twenty-four hours as if I were the vilest of the vile"—a statement to which the purity of the girl's beauty gave a high dramatic value. "I 've failed of respect to her at other times, but I 've not done so now. How is it failing of respect to have found out at last, once for all, and with terrible trouble and pain, by how much too little I care for the person she wishes to force upon me—by how much too much I don't care for him? I tried—I 've been trying for months—I went as far as I could. And I liked what he offered me, liked it immensely—if I could have had it without him. But to let him think he pleased or satisfied me too—or ever would—that deception struck me finally as too base. I know, I feel in all my bones, nevertheless, what I give up; so that to be clear—clear about my innermost feeling of all, and about that only—has n't been, I assure you, child's play. I was looking for inspiration, if you like; and I found it—well, I found it," she went on, "where I could. Shall I tell you?" she demanded with sudden ardour; "will you understand me? It was on the one side the world, the splendid, beautiful, powerful, interesting world. I know what that is; I 've tasted of the cup; I like its sweetness. Ah, if I chose, if I should let myself go, if I should fling everything to the winds, the world and I would be famous friends. I know its merits, and I think without vanity it would feel mine. You ​should see some fruits of the alliance. I should like to be a grandee—the Prince is, among many wonderful things hereditary Grand d'Espagne—and I think I should be a very good one; I would play my part well. I 'm fond of luxury, I 'm fond of a great society, I 'm fond of being looked at, I thrill with the idea of high consideration. Mamma, you see, has never had any. There I am in all my native horror. I 'm corrupt, corrupting, corruption! Ah, what a pity that could n't be too! Mercy of heaven!" Her voice had a convulsion; she covered her face with her hands and sat motionless. Rowland saw that an intense agitation, hitherto successfully repressed, underlay her fine pretence of finality, and he could easily believe her battle had been fierce. She rose quickly and turned away, walked a few paces and stopped. In a moment she was before him again, her air confessing at once to her pride and her humility. "But you need n't think I'm afraid!" she said. "I've chosen, and I shall hold to it. I Ve something here, here, here!" and she patted her heart. "It 's my own. I sha'n't part with it. Is it what you call in Boston one's higher self? I don't know; I don't care! It's bigger and brighter than the Casamassima diamonds—every one of which, if you please, I 've seen and handled and adored."
"You say that certain things are your own affair," Rowland presently rejoined; "but I must nevertheless make an attempt to learn what all this means—what it promises for my friend Hudson. Is there any hope for him?"
​"This 's a point I can't discuss with you minutely. I like him very much."
"Would you marry him if he were to ask you?"
"He has asked me."
"And if he should ask again?"
"I shall marry no one just now."
"Roderick," said Rowland, "has been wonderfully affected. He appears much exalted."
"He knows then of my rupture?"
"He 's making a great holiday of it."
Christina pulled her poodle towards her and began to retouch his beauty. "I like him very much," she repeated; "much more than I used to. Since you told me all that about him at Saint Cecilia's I 've felt a great friendship for him. Il n'est ni banal ni bête; and then there 's nothing in life he 's afraid of. He 's not afraid of failure; he 's not afraid of ruin or death."
Rowland had a stare—he indeed had a chill—for this singular description. "Oh, he 's a romantic figure!"
"A romantic figure, yes; the most romantic I 've ever met, I think—and with the charm of coming, so oddly, from your awful country. There are things in one to which it makes him quite sharply appeal."
"Yet your mother," Rowland objected, "told me just now that you say you don't care a button for him."
"Very likely! I meant as an amoureux. One does n't want a lover one pities, and one does n't want—of all things in the world—a husband who 's a ​picturesque curiosity. The Prince himself is, in his own way, almost that. I should like Mr. Hudson as something else. The world's idea of possible relations, either for man or woman, is so poor—there would be so many nice free ones. I wish he were even my brother, so that he could never talk to me of marriage. Then I could adore him. I would nurse him, I would wait on him and save him all disagreeable rubs and shocks. I 'm much stronger than he, and I would stand between him and the world. Indeed with Mr. Hudson for my brother I should be willing to live and die an old maid."
"Have you ever expressed to him these sentiments?"
"I dare say. I 've chattered to him like a magpie. If you wish I 'll put it to him formally so he 'll know à quoi s'en tenir."
"There's nothing I could wish less!" Rowland promptly replied. "The one thing I ask of you is to let him alone."
"Good," said the girl. "I make a note of it."
He was lingering there, weighing one impression against another, weighing sympathy against suspicion and feeling it sink the scale, when the curtain of a distant doorway was lifted and Mrs. Light passed across the room. She stopped half-way and rather grimly took in our interlocutors. Sniffing the air for the powder of the battle, she perhaps too much missed the scent as she moved away with a passionate toss of her drapery. Rowland's previous impression came back to him: he saw her somehow possessed of some obscure and odious, some wholly ungenerous advantage, a means of influence too base to be used save ​under sharp coercion. She might, to his fancy, at that moment, have had this furbished weapon concealed in the folds of her not particularly fresh wrapper. Christina, meanwhile, had really for the time been soaring aloft, to his vision, and though in such flights of her moral nature—the energy of which now affected him as real—there was a certain painful effort and tension of wing, it was none the less piteous to imagine her being rudely jerked down to the base earth. She would need all her magnanimity for her own contest, and there was grossness in his making other demands upon it.
He took up his hat. "You asked a while ago if I had come to help you. If I knew how I might help you I should be particularly glad."
She stood a moment thinking. Then at last looking up: "You remember your promising six months ago to tell me what you should finally think of me? I should like you to tell me now."
Ah, this pressed the spring, and his inward irony, for himself, gave a hum! Madame Grandoni had insisted on the fact that she was an actress, and this little speech seemed a glimpse of the cothurnus. She had played her great scene, she had made her point, and now she had her eye at the hole in the curtain and she was watching the house. But she blushed as she guessed his fine comment, and her blush, which was beautiful, carried off her betrayal. He turned his back. There was a great chain of rooms in Mrs. Light's apartment, the pride and joy of the hostess on festal evenings, through which the departing visitor passed before reaching the door, and in one of the first of ​these he found himself waylaid and arrested by the distracted mistress of the house.
"Well, well?" she cried, seizing his arm. "Has she listened to you—have you moved her?"
"Hadn't you better, dear madam," Rowland rather ruefully asked, "leave the poor girl alone? She 's doing—for herself, I mean—the best she can."
"For herself?" the wretched woman shrieked. "Is that what I asked you to find out?—as if we did n't know enough about it! Pray, what is she doing for me and for him?—and what have you been doing for either of us?" And then as he had nothing but his blankness to show her she turned upon him with fury. "I believe you came, perfidiously, but to back her up, and you 're conspiring with her to kill me."
Rowland tried for a moment, with small taste for the job, to appease her unreason and persuade her that if she would stay her wrath she might gain something by patience. This however, too visibly, was a counsel of perfection, and she broke away from him in undiminished disgust, leaving him to come an instant later upon the Cavaliere, who was sitting with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, so buried in thought that he had to call him before he roused himself. The poor gentleman's eyes then charged themselves heavily with his question, but Rowland could again only throw up his hands. "Mrs. Light, all the same, seems to have an idea she can still do something; so that if you believe in Mrs. Light's idea—!"
​The Cavaliere stood a moment in deep gloom. "I always believe in Mrs. Light's ideas. It 's a magnificent marriage. The girl should be reasonable."
"Ah," Rowland sighed, "if you 've a way to make her that—!"
"It will make her either that—"
"Or it will dish you altogether?" Rowland asked as he hesitated.
The old man's face probed a moment the consciousness from which this question had sprung. "Pray for her, dear sir," he at last simply said.
"I 'll pray for you, Cavaliere," Rowland answered as he went.
He had become aware of Mrs. Light's renewed approach and he slipped straight away. Yes, it was after this some providential support to her vague coadjutor that he found himself most invoking.