# Roderick Hudson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 16

XVI
This obscure hero walked hard for a couple of hours. He passed up the Corso, out of Porta del Popolo and into Villa Borghese, of which he made a complete circuit. The keenness of his irritation subsided, but it left an intolerable weight on his heart. When dusk had fallen he found himself near the lodging of his friend Madame Grandoni. He frequently paid her a visit during the hour which preceded dinner, and he now ascended her unillumined staircase and rang at her relaxed bell-rope with an especial desire for diversion. He was told that for the moment she was occupied, but that if he would come in and wait she would presently be with him. He had not sat musing in the firelight for five minutes when he heard the jingle of the door-bell and then a rustle and a murmur in the hall. The door of the little parlour opened, but before the visitor appeared he had recognised her voice. Christina Light swept forward, preceded by her poodle and almost filling the narrow room with the train of her dress. She was coloured here and there by the flickering firelight.
"They told me you were here," she simply said as she took a seat.
"And yet you came in? It was very brave," Rowland returned.
​"You 're the brave one, when one thinks of it! The padrona 's to come?"
"I 've already waited some minutes; I expect her from moment to moment."
"Meanwhile we're alone?" And she glanced at the duskier background.
"Unless Stenterello counts," said Rowland.
"Oh, he knows my secrets—unfortunate brute!"
She sat silent a while, looking into the firelight. Then at last, glancing at Rowland, "Voyons! say something pleasant!" she exclaimed.
"I 've been very happy to hear of your engagement."
"Oh, I don't mean that! I have heard that so often, only since breakfast, that it has lost all sense. I mean some of those unexpected charming things that you said to me a month ago at Saint Cecilia's."
"I did n't please you then," said Rowland. "I was afraid I had n't."
"Ah, such things occur to you? Then why have n't I seen you since?"
"Really I don't know." And he hesitated for an explanation. "I think I must have called but you 've never been at home."
"You were careful to choose the wrong times. You have a way with a poor girl! You sit down and state to her that she 's a person with whom a respectable young man can't associate without contamination; your friend 's a very superior person, you 're very careful of his morals, you wish him to know none but nice people, and you beg me therefore to desist. You request me to take these suggestions to heart and to act upon them as promptly as
​possible. They 're not particularly flattering to my vanity. Vanity, however, is a sin, and I listen submissively, with an immense desire to be just. If I have many faults I know it in a general way, and I try, on the whole, to do my best. 'Voyons,{'} I say to myself, 'it is n't particularly charming to hear one's self made out a pig, but it's worth thinking over; there 's probably a good deal of truth in it and at any rate we must be as good a girl as we can. That 's the great point! And then here 's a magnificent chance for humility. If there 's doubt in the matter, let the doubt count against one's self. It 's what Saint Catherine did, and Saint Theresa, and all the others, and they 're said to have had in consequence the most ineffable joys. Let us go in for a little ineffable joy.' I tried it; I swallowed my rising sobs, I made you my curtsey, I determined I would n't be spiteful, nor passionate, nor vengeful, nor anything that 's supposed to be particularly feminine and that ces dames, now saints in heaven, would n't have been. I was a better girl than you made out—better at least than you thought; but I would let the difference go, and do magnificently right lest I should not do right enough. I thought of it a great deal for six hours, when I know I did n't seem to be thinking, and then at last I did it. Santo Dio!"
"My dear Miss Light, my dear Miss Light!" her companion rather vaguely pleaded.
"Since then," the young girl went on, "I've been waiting for the ineffable joys. But they 're dividends, on my speculation, that have n't yet begun to come in."
​"Pray, listen to me!" Rowland began.
"Nothing, nothing, nothing has come of it. I 've passed the dreariest month of my life."
"You're a very terrible young woman," Rowland remarked.
"What do you mean by that?"
"A good many things. We'll talk them over. But first forgive me if I really wounded you."
She looked at him a moment, hesitating, and then thrust her hands into her muff. "That means nothing. Forgiveness is between equals, and you don't regard me as your equal."
"How do you make it out?"
Christina rose and moved for a moment about the room. Then turning suddenly, "You don't believe in me!" she cried; "not a grain! I don't know what I would n't give to force you to believe in me!"
Rowland sprang up, protesting, but before he had time to go far one of the scanty portières was raised and Madame Grandoni came in, pulling her wig straight. "You shall believe in me yet, you know," Christina murmured as she passed toward her hostess.
Madame Grandoni turned tenderly to her young friend. "I must give you a very solemn kiss, my dear; you 're the heroine of the hour. You 've really accepted him, eh?"
"So they say!"
"But you ought to know best."
"I don't know — I don't care!" She stood with her hand in Madame Grandoni's, but looking askance at Rowland.
​"That 's a pretty state of mind," said the old lady, "for a young person who's going to be so great."
Christina shrugged her shoulders. "Every one expects me to go into ecstasies over my greatness. Could anything be more vulgar? Let others do the gloating. Mamma will do any amount. Will you let me stay to dinner?"
"If you can dine on black bread and onions. But I imagine you 're expected at home."
"Nothing 's more certain. Prince Casamassima dines there en famille. I 'm not of his family yet!"
"Do you know you're very wicked?" the old lady asked. "I 've half a mind not to keep you."
Christina dropped her eyes reflectively. "I wish awfully you 'd let me stay," she said. "If you want to cure me of my wickedness you must be very patient and kind with me. It will be worth the trouble. You must show confidence in me." And she gave Rowland another look. Then suddenly, in a different tone, "I don't know what I'm saying!" she wailed. "I'm weary and dreary; I 'm more lonely than ever; I wish I were dead!" The tears rose to her eyes, she struggled with them an instant and buried her face in her muff; but at last she burst into uncontrollable sobs, flinging herself on Madame Grandoni's neck. This shrewd woman gave Rowland a significant nod and a little shrug over the young girl's beautiful bowed head, and then led Christina tenderly away into the adjoining room. Rowland, left alone, stood there for an instant, intolerably puzzled, face to face with Miss Light's poodle, who had set up a sharp unearthly cry of ​sympathy with his mistress. Rowland vented his confusion in dealing a rap with his stick at the animal's unmelodious muzzle, and rapidly quitted the house. He saw Mrs. Light's carriage waiting at the door, and heard afterwards that Christina had gone home to dinner.
A couple of days later he went for a fortnight to Florence. He had twenty minds to leave Italy altogether, and at Florence he could at least more freely decide upon his future movements. He felt deeply, incureably disgusted. Reflective benevolence stood prudently aside for the time, touching the source of his irritation with no softening side-lights. It was the middle of March, however, and by the middle of March, in Florence, the spring is already warm and deep. He had an infinite taste for the place and the season, but as he strolled by the Arno and paused here and there in the great galleries they failed to bring balm to his ache. He was sore at heart, and as the days went by the soreness rather deepened than healed. He had a complaint against fortune and, good-natured as he was, his good-nature itself now took up the quarrel. He had tried to be wise, he had tried to be kind, he had engaged in an estimable enterprise; but his wisdom, his kindness, his labour, had all been thrown back in his face. He was intensely disappointed, and his disappointment for a while burned hot. The sense of wasted time, of wasted hope and faith, kept him constant company. There were times when the beautiful things about him only exasperated his pain. He went to the Pitti Palace, and Raphael's ​Madonna of the Chair seemed in its soft serenity to mock him with the suggestion of unattainable repose. He lingered on the bridges at sunset and knew that the light was enchanting and the mountains divine, but there seemed something horribly invidious and unwelcome in the fact. He felt himself, in a word, a man cruelly defrauded and naturally bent on revenge. Life owed him, he thought, a compensation and he should be restless and resentful till he should find it. He knew—or seemed to know—where he should find it; but he hardly told himself, thinking of it under mental protest, as a man in want of money may think of funds that he holds in trust. In his melancholy meditation the idea of something better than all this, something that might softly, richly interpose, that might reconcile him to the future, that might freshen up a vision of life tainted with staleness—the idea, in fine, of compensation in concrete form found itself remarkably resembling a certain young woman in America, shaped itself sooner or later into the image of Mary Garland.
Very odd, you may say, that at this time of day Rowland should still be brooding over a girl of no brilliancy, of whom he had had a bare glimpse two years before; very odd that an impression should have fixed itself so sharply under so few applications of the die. It is of the very nature of such impressions, however, to show a total never represented by the mere sum of their constituent parts. One night he could n't sleep; his thought was too urgent; it kept him pacing his room. His windows were on the Arno, and as they stood open the noise ​of the river came in; it would have taken little more to make him go down into the street. Toward morning he flung himself into a chair; though he was wide awake he was now less a prey to agitation. It seemed to him that he saw his idea from the outside, that he judged it and condemned it, and it stood still there all distinct and with a strange face of authority. During the day he tried to keep it down; but it fascinated, haunted, at moments quite frightened him. He tried to amuse himself, paid visits, resorted to several violent devices for diverting his thoughts. If he had been guilty on the morrow of some misdeed the persons he had seen that day would have testified that he had talked incoherently and had not seemed himself. He felt, certainly, very much somebody else; long afterwards, in retrospect, he used to perceive that during those days he had been literally beside himself—even as the ass, in the farmer's row of stalls, may be beside the ox. His uncanny idea persisted; it clung to him like a sturdy beggar. The sense of the matter, roughly expressed, was that if Roderick were really going, as he himself had phrased it, to fizzle out, one might help him on the way—one might smooth the descensus Averni. For forty-eight hours there swam before Rowland's eyes a vision of the wondrous youth, graceful and beautiful as he passed, plunging like a diver into a misty gulf. The gulf was destruction, annihilation, death; but if death had been decreed why should n't the agony be at least brief? Beyond this vision there faintly glimmered another, as in the children's game of the magic lantern a ​picture is superposed on the white wall before the last one has quite faded. It represented Mary Garland standing there with eyes in which the horror seemed slowly, slowly to expire, and hanging motionless hands which at last made no resistance when his own offered to take them. When of old a man was burnt at the stake it was cruel to have to be present; but, one's presence assumed, it was charity to lend a hand, to pile up the fuel and make the flames do their work quickly and the smoke muffle up the victim. And it did n't diminish the charity that this was perhaps an obligation especially felt if one had a reversionary interest in something the victim was to leave behind.
One morning in the midst of all this Rowland walked heedlessly out of a florid city gate and found himself on the road to Fiesole. It was a day all benignant; the March sun felt like May, as the English poet of Florence says; the thick-blossomed shrubs, the high-climbing plants that hung over the walls of villa and podere flung their odorous promise into the warm still air. He followed, our friend, the winding, mounting lanes; lingered as he got higher beneath the rusty cypresses, beside the low parapets, where you look down on the charming city and sweep the vale of the Arno; reached the small square before the cathedral and rested a while in the massive, dusky church; then, climbing higher, pushed up to the Franciscan convent poised on the very apex of the great hill. He rang at the little gateway; a shabby, senile, red-faced brother admitted him, a personage almost maudlin with the milk of human kindness. ​There was a dreary chill in the chapel and the corridors, and he passed rapidly through them into the delightfully steep and tangled old garden which runs wild over the forehead of the mountain. He had been there before, he came back to it as to a friend. The garden hangs in the air, and you ramble from terrace to terrace and wonder how it keeps from slipping down, in full consummation of its dishonour and decay, to the nakedly romantic gorge beneath. It was just noon at Rowland's visit, and after roaming about a while he flung himself on the sun-warmed slab of a mossy stone bench and pulled his hat over his eyes. The short shadows of the brown-coated cypresses above him had grown very long, later on, and yet he had not passed back through the convent. One of the monks, in a faded snuff-coloured robe, came wandering out into the garden, reading a greasy little breviary. Suddenly he approached the bench on which Rowland had stretched himself and paused for respectful interest. Rowland was still in possession, but seated now with his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees. He seemed not to have heard the sandalled tread of the good brother, but as the monk remained watching him he at last looked up. It was not the ignoble old man who had admitted him, but a pale, gaunt personage, of a graver and more ascetic and yet of a charitable aspect. Rowland's face might have borne for him the traces of extreme trouble; something he appeared mildly to consider as he kept his finger in his little book and folded his arms picturesquely across his breast. Was his attitude, as he bent his sympathetic Italian eyes, the mere accident of his ​civility or the fruit of an exquisite spiritual tact? To Rowland, however this might have been, it appeared a sort of offer of ready intelligence. He rose and approached the monk, laying his hand on his arm.
"My brother," he said, "did you ever see the Devil in person?"
The frate gazed gravely and crossed himself. "Heaven forbid, my son!"
"He was here," Rowland went on, "here in this lovely garden, as he was once in Paradise, half an hour ago. But have no fear; I drove him out." And he stooped and picked up his hat, which had rolled away into a bed of cyclamen in vague suggestion of a positive scrimmage.
"You've been tempted, figlio mio?" asked the friar tenderly.
"Hideously!"
"And you 've resisted—and conquered!"
"I believe I 've conquered."
"The blessed Saint Francis be praised! It's well done. If you like we 'll offer a mass for you."
Rowland hesitated. "I 'm not of your faith."
The frate smiled with dignity. "That's a reason the more."
"But it 's for you then to choose. Shake hands with me," Rowland added; "that will do as well; and suffer me as I go out to stop a moment in your chapel."
They shook hands and separated. The frate crossed himself, opened his book and wandered away in relief against the western sky. Rowland passed back into the convent and paused long enough in the chapel to look for the alms-box. He had had what is vulgarly ​called a great scare; he believed very poignantly, for the time, in Beelzebub and felt an irresistible need to subscribe to any institution that might engage to keep him at a distance.
The next day he returned to Rome and the day after that went in search of Roderick. He found him on the Pincian with his back turned to the crowd and his eyes to the beauty of the sunset. "I went to Florence," he said, "and I thought of going further; but I came back on purpose to give you another piece of advice. You decline decidedly to leave Rome?"
"Oh, my boy, rather!"
"The only chance I then see of a revival of your sense of responsibility to — to those various sacred things you 've forgotten is in sending for your mother to join you here."
Roderick stared. "For my mother?"
"For your mother—and for Miss Garland."
Roderick still stared; and then, slowly and faintly, his face flushed. "For Mary Garland—for my mother?" he repeated. "Send for them?"
"Answer me now a question," Rowland simply pursued, "which I 've long forborne, out of delicacy, to ask you. Your engagement still holds?"
"'Holds'?" Roderick glared. "Holds what?"
"Well, some residuum of what it originally did. If you were to see your intended you would perhaps be able to judge."
Roderick thought. "Do you mean by that that if you see her you may be better able to squash me?"
Rowland winced at this—he flushed; but he bore up. "I should in the light of that speech, even if I ​had n't already, as it seems to me, other lights, regard you as a very sick man. I can't imagine that if Miss Garland knew how sick she should n't at once feel that her place is at your side."
Roderick looked at him for some time darkly and askance. "Is there more in this than meets the eye?"
"More—?"
"I mean is it a deeper scheme than my poor wit can fathom?"
Rowland had come back to Rome with his patience reinstated, but these words gave it again a mortal chill. "Heaven forgive you!" he none the less resolutely answered. "My idea shouldn't surely be beyond your comprehension—though it ought, I think, to be beyond your suspicion. I 've tried to befriend you, to help you, to inspire you with confidence, and I 've failed. I took you from your mother and that young lady, and it seems to me my duty to restore you to their hands. That 's all I have to say."
He was going, but Roderick forcibly detained him. It would have been but a rough way of expressing the case to say that one could never know what particular reaction any touch of that young man would produce. It had happened more than once that when deservedly hit hard he had received the blow with a noble mildness. On the other hand he had often resented the lightest taps. The secondary effect of Rowland's present admonition seemed reassuring. "I beg you to wait," he said, "to forgive that shabby speech and to let me think it over." And he walked up and down and publicly considered. At last he stopped; the reign of all reason was in his face. It ​was like the sudden light of a golden age to come. "How strange it is that the simplest arrangements are the last to suggest themselves!" And he broke into easy laughter. "To see Mary Garland 's just what I want. And my mother—my mother can't hurt me now!"
"You'll write then?"
"I 'll cable. They must come at whatever cost. Striker can arrange it all for them."
In a couple of days he told Rowland that he had received a telegraphic answer to his message, informing him that the two ladies were to sail immediately for Leghorn in one of the small steamers then plying between that port and New York. They would arrive therefore in less than a month. Rowland passed this month of expectation in no great riot of relief. His suggestion had had its source in the deepest places of his charity; but there was something intolerable in the thought of the pain to which the possible event might subject creatures so little forearmed. They had scraped together their scanty funds and embarked at twenty-four hours' notice upon the dreadful sea, only to be handed over at the end to an element still more capable of betraying them. He could but promise himself to be their stubborn even if disdained support. Preoccupied as he was, he could still observe how expectation, with Roderick, took a form which seemed singular even among his characteristic singularities. If redemption—the brilliant youth appeared to reason—was to arrive with his mother and his affianced bride, these last moments of error should be worth redeeming. He only ​idled, but he idled with intensity. He laughed and whistled and went often to Mrs. Light's; though Rowland could but wonder to what issue events had brought his relations with Christina. The month ebbed away, and our friend daily expected to learn that he had gone to Leghorn to meet the ship. No such report came, however, and late one evening, not having seen him for three or four days, he stopped at his lodging to make sure of his absence. A cab was standing in the street, but as it was a couple of doors off he hardly heeded it. The hall at the foot of the staircase was dark, like most Roman halls, and he paused in the open doorway on hearing the advancing footstep of a person with whom he wished to avoid a collision. While he did so he heard another footstep behind him and, turning round, found that Roderick himself had just overtaken him. At the same moment a woman's figure advanced from within, into the light of the street-lamp, and a face, half startled, looked at him out of the darkness. He gave a cry—it was the face of Mary Garland. Her attention flew past him to Roderick, and in a second a startled exclamation broke from her own lips. It made him turn again, turn to see Roderick stand there strange and pale, apparently trying to speak, yet producing no sound. His lips were parted and his attitude foolish, the attitude, unmistakeably, of a man who has drunk too much. Then Rowland's eyes met Miss Garland's again, and her own, which had rested a moment on Roderick's were formidable.