by Henry James
They were magnificent, and with her perfect face dividing their rippling flow she looked like some immaculate saint of legend being led to martyrdom. Rowland’s eyes presumably betrayed his admiration, but her own manifested no consciousness of it. If Christina was a coquette, as the remarkable timeliness of this incident might have suggested, she was not a superficial one.
“Hudson ‘s a sculptor,” said Rowland, with warmth. “But if I were only a painter!”
“Thank Heaven you are not!” said Christina. “I am having quite enough of this minute inspection of my charms.”
“My dear young man, hands off!” cried Mrs. Light, coming forward and seizing her daughter’s hair. “Christina, love, I am surprised.”
“Is it indelicate?” Christina asked. “I beg Mr. Mallet’s pardon.” Mrs. Light gathered up the dusky locks and let them fall through her fingers, glancing at her visitor with a significant smile. Rowland had never been in the East, but if he had attempted to make a sketch of an old slave-merchant, calling attention to the “points” of a Circassian beauty, he would have depicted such a smile as Mrs. Light’s. “Mamma ‘s not really shocked,” added Christina in a moment, as if she had guessed her mother’s by-play. “She is only afraid that Mr. Hudson might have injured my hair, and that, per consequenza, I should sell for less.”
“You unnatural child!” cried mamma. “You deserve that I should make a fright of you!” And with half a dozen skillful passes she twisted the tresses into a single picturesque braid, placed high on the head, as a kind of coronal.
“What does your mother do when she wants to do you justice?” Rowland asked, observing the admirable line of the young girl’s neck.
“I do her justice when I say she says very improper things. What is one to do with such a thorn in the flesh?” Mrs. Light demanded.
“Think of it at your leisure, Mr. Mallet,” said Christina, “and when you ‘ve discovered something, let us hear. But I must tell you that I shall not willingly believe in any remedy of yours, for you have something in your physiognomy that particularly provokes me to make the remarks that my mother so sincerely deplores. I noticed it the first time I saw you. I think it ‘s because your face is so broad. For some reason or other, broad faces exasperate me; they fill me with a kind of rabbia. Last summer, at Carlsbad, there was an Austrian count, with enormous estates and some great office at court. He was very attentive—seriously so; he was really very far gone. Cela ne tenait qu’ a moi! But I could n’t; he was impossible! He must have measured, from ear to ear, at least a yard and a half. And he was blond, too, which made it worse—as blond as Stenterello; pure fleece! So I said to him frankly, ‘Many thanks, Herr Graf; your uniform is magnificent, but your face is too fat.’”
“I am afraid that mine also,” said Rowland, with a smile, “seems just now to have assumed an unpardonable latitude.”
“Oh, I take it you know very well that we are looking for a husband, and that none but tremendous swells need apply. Surely, before these gentlemen, mamma, I may speak freely; they are disinterested. Mr. Mallet won’t do, because, though he ‘s rich, he ‘s not rich enough. Mamma made that discovery the day after we went to see you, moved to it by the promising look of your furniture. I hope she was right, eh? Unless you have millions, you know, you have no chance.”
“I feel like a beggar,” said Rowland.
“Oh, some better girl than I will decide some day, after mature reflection, that on the whole you have enough. Mr. Hudson, of course, is nowhere; he has nothing but his genius and his beaux yeux.”
Roderick had stood looking at Christina intently while she delivered herself, softly and slowly, of this surprising nonsense. When she had finished, she turned and looked at him; their eyes met, and he blushed a little. “Let me model you, and he who can may marry you!” he said, abruptly.
Mrs. Light, while her daughter talked, had been adding a few touches to her coiffure. “She is not so silly as you might suppose,” she said to Rowland, with dignity. “If you will give me your arm, we will go and look at the bust.”
“Does that represent a silly girl?” Christina demanded, when they stood before it.
Rowland transferred his glance several times from the portrait to the original. “It represents a young lady,” he said, “whom I should not pretend to judge off-hand.”
“She may be a fool, but you are not sure. Many thanks! You have seen me half a dozen times. You are either very slow or I am very deep.”
“I am certainly slow,” said Rowland. “I don’t expect to make up my mind about you within six months.”
“I give you six months if you will promise then a perfectly frank opinion. Mind, I shall not forget; I shall insist upon it.”
“Well, though I am slow, I am tolerably brave,” said Rowland. “We shall see.”
Christina looked at the bust with a sigh. “I am afraid, after all,” she said, “that there ‘s very little wisdom in it save what the artist has put there. Mr. Hudson looked particularly wise while he was working; he scowled and growled, but he never opened his mouth. It is very kind of him not to have represented me gaping.”
“If I had talked a lot of stuff to you,” said Roderick, roundly, “the thing would not have been a tenth so good.”
“Is it good, after all? Mr. Mallet is a famous connoisseur; has he not come here to pronounce?”
The bust was in fact a very happy performance, and Roderick had risen to the level of his subject. It was thoroughly a portrait, and not a vague fantasy executed on a graceful theme, as the busts of pretty women, in modern sculpture, are apt to be. The resemblance was deep and vivid; there was extreme fidelity of detail and yet a noble simplicity. One could say of the head that, without idealization, it was a representation of ideal beauty. Rowland, however, as we know, was not fond of exploding into superlatives, and, after examining the piece, contented himself with suggesting two or three alterations of detail.
“Nay, how can you be so cruel?” demanded Mrs. Light, with soft reproachfulness. “It is surely a wonderful thing!”
“Rowland knows it ‘s a wonderful thing,” said Roderick, smiling. “I can tell that by his face. The other day I finished something he thought bad, and he looked very differently from this.”
“How did Mr. Mallet look?” asked Christina.
“My dear Rowland,” said Roderick, “I am speaking of my seated woman. You looked as if you had on a pair of tight boots.”
“Ah, my child, you ‘ll not understand that!” cried Mrs. Light. “You never yet had a pair that were small enough.”
“It ‘s a pity, Mr. Hudson,” said Christina, gravely, “that you could not have introduced my feet into the bust. But we can hang a pair of slippers round the neck!”
“I nevertheless like your statues, Roderick,” Rowland rejoined, “better than your jokes. This is admirable. Miss Light, you may be proud!”
“Thank you, Mr. Mallet, for the permission,” rejoined the young girl.
“I am dying to see it in the marble, with a red velvet screen behind it,” said Mrs. Light.
“Placed there under the Sassoferrato!” Christina went on. “I hope you keep well in mind, Mr. Hudson, that you have not a grain of property in your work, and that if mamma chooses, she may have it photographed and the copies sold in the Piazza di Spagna, at five francs apiece, without your having a sou of the profits.”
“Amen!” said Roderick. “It was so nominated in the bond. My profits are here!” and he tapped his forehead.
“It would be prettier if you said here!” And Christina touched her heart.
“My precious child, how you do run on!” murmured Mrs. Light.
“It is Mr. Mallet,” the young girl answered. “I can’t talk a word of sense so long as he is in the room. I don’t say that to make you go,” she added, “I say it simply to justify myself.”
Rowland bowed in silence. Roderick declared that he must get at work and requested Christina to take her usual position, and Mrs. Light propo
sed to her visitor that they should adjourn to her boudoir. This was a small room, hardly more spacious than an alcove, opening out of the drawing-room and having no other issue. Here, as they entered, on a divan near the door, Rowland perceived the Cavaliere Giacosa, with his arms folded, his head dropped upon his breast, and his eyes closed.
“Sleeping at his post!” said Rowland with a kindly laugh.
“That ‘s a punishable offense,” rejoined Mrs. Light, sharply. She was on the point of calling him, in the same tone, when he suddenly opened his eyes, stared a moment, and then rose with a smile and a bow.
“Excuse me, dear lady,” he said, “I was overcome by the—the great heat.”
“Nonsense, Cavaliere!” cried the lady, “you know we are perishing here with the cold! You had better go and cool yourself in one of the other rooms.”
“I obey, dear lady,” said the Cavaliere; and with another smile and bow to Rowland he departed, walking very discreetly on his toes. Rowland out-stayed him but a short time, for he was not fond of Mrs. Light, and he found nothing very inspiring in her frank intimation that if he chose, he might become a favorite. He was disgusted with himself for pleasing her; he confounded his fatal urbanity. In the court-yard of the palace he overtook the Cavaliere, who had stopped at the porter’s lodge to say a word to his little girl. She was a young lady of very tender years and she wore a very dirty pinafore. He had taken her up in his arms and was singing an infantine rhyme to her, and she was staring at him with big, soft Roman eyes. On seeing Rowland he put her down with a kiss, and stepped forward with a conscious grin, an unresentful admission that he was sensitive both to chubbiness and ridicule. Rowland began to pity him again; he had taken his dismissal from the drawing-room so meekly.
“You don’t keep your promise,” said Rowland, “to come and see me. Don’t forget it. I want you to tell me about Rome thirty years ago.”
“Thirty years ago? Ah, dear sir, Rome is Rome still; a place where strange things happen! But happy things too, since I have your renewed permission to call. You do me too much honor. Is it in the morning or in the evening that I should least intrude?”
“Take your own time, Cavaliere; only come, sometime. I depend upon you,” said Rowland.
The Cavaliere thanked him with an humble obeisance. To the Cavaliere, too, he felt that he was, in Roman phrase, sympathetic, but the idea of pleasing this extremely reduced gentleman was not disagreeable to him.
Miss Light’s bust stood for a while on exhibition in Roderick’s studio, and half the foreign colony came to see it. With the completion of his work, however, Roderick’s visits at the Palazzo F–- by no means came to an end. He spent half his time in Mrs. Light’s drawing-room, and began to be talked about as “attentive” to Christina. The success of the bust restored his equanimity, and in the garrulity of his good-humor he suffered Rowland to see that she was just now the object uppermost in his thoughts. Rowland, when they talked of her, was rather listener than speaker; partly because Roderick’s own tone was so resonant and exultant, and partly because, when his companion laughed at him for having called her unsafe, he was too perplexed to defend himself. The impression remained that she was unsafe; that she was a complex, willful, passionate creature, who might easily engulf a too confiding spirit in the eddies of her capricious temper. And yet he strongly felt her charm; the eddies had a strange fascination! Roderick, in the glow of that renewed admiration provoked by the fixed attention of portrayal, was never weary of descanting on the extraordinary perfection of her beauty.
“I had no idea of it,” he said, “till I began to look at her with an eye to reproducing line for line and curve for curve. Her face is the most exquisite piece of modeling that ever came from creative hands. Not a line without meaning, not a hair’s breadth that is not admirably finished. And then her mouth! It ‘s as if a pair of lips had been shaped to utter pure truth without doing it dishonor!” Later, after he had been working for a week, he declared if Miss Light were inordinately plain, she would still be the most fascinating of women. “I ‘ve quite forgotten her beauty,” he said, “or rather I have ceased to perceive it as something distinct and defined, something independent of the rest of her. She is all one, and all consummately interesting!”
“What does she do—what does she say, that is so remarkable?” Rowland had asked.
“Say? Sometimes nothing—sometimes everything. She is never the same. Sometimes she walks in and takes her place without a word, without a smile, gravely, stiffly, as if it were an awful bore. She hardly looks at me, and she walks away without even glancing at my work. On other days she laughs and chatters and asks endless questions, and pours out the most irresistible nonsense. She is a creature of moods; you can’t count upon her; she keeps observation on the stretch. And then, bless you, she has seen such a lot! Her talk is full of the oddest allusions!”
“It is altogether a very singular type of young lady,” said Rowland, after the visit which I have related at length. “It may be a charm, but it is certainly not the orthodox charm of marriageable maidenhood, the charm of shrinking innocence and soft docility. Our American girls are accused of being more knowing than any others, and Miss Light is nominally an American. But it has taken twenty years of Europe to make her what she is. The first time we saw her, I remember you called her a product of the old world, and certainly you were not far wrong.”
“Ah, she has an atmosphere,” said Roderick, in the tone of high appreciation.
“Young unmarried women,” Rowland answered, “should be careful not to have too much!”
“Ah, you don’t forgive her,” cried his companion, “for hitting you so hard! A man ought to be flattered at such a girl as that taking so much notice of him.”
“A man is never flattered at a woman’s not liking him.”
“Are you sure she does n’t like you? That ‘s to the credit of your humility. A fellow of more vanity might, on the evidence, persuade himself that he was in favor.”
“He would have also,” said Rowland, laughing, “to be a fellow of remarkable ingenuity!” He asked himself privately how the deuce Roderick reconciled it to his conscience to think so much more of the girl he was not engaged to than of the girl he was. But it amounted almost to arrogance, you may say, in poor Rowland to pretend to know how often Roderick thought of Miss Garland. He wondered gloomily, at any rate, whether for men of his companion’s large, easy power, there was not a larger moral law than for narrow mediocrities like himself, who, yielding Nature a meagre interest on her investment (such as it was), had no reason to expect from her this affectionate laxity as to their accounts. Was it not a part of the eternal fitness of things that Roderick, while rhapsodizing about Miss Light, should have it at his command to look at you with eyes of the most guileless and unclouded blue, and to shake off your musty imputations by a toss of his picturesque brown locks? Or had he, in fact, no conscience to speak of? Happy fellow, either way!
Our friend Gloriani came, among others, to congratulate Roderick on his model and what he had made of her. “Devilish pretty, through and through!” he said as he looked at the bust. “Capital handling of the neck and throat; lovely work on the nose. You ‘re a detestably lucky fellow, my boy! But you ought not to have squandered such material on a simple bust; you should have made a great imaginative figure. If I could only have got hold of her, I would have put her into a statue in spite of herself. What a pity she is not a ragged Trasteverine, whom we might have for a franc an hour! I have been carrying about in my head for years a delicious design for a fantastic figure, but it has always stayed there for want of a tolerable model. I have seen intimations of the type, but Miss Light is the perfection of it. As soon as I saw her I said to myself, ‘By Jove, there ‘s my statue in the flesh!’”
“What is your subject?” asked Roderick.
“Don’t take it ill,” said Gloriani. “You know I ‘m the very deuce for observation. She would make a magnificent Herodias!”
If Roderick had
taken it ill (which was unlikely, for we know he thought Gloriani an ass, and expected little of his wisdom), he might have been soothed by the candid incense of Sam Singleton, who came and sat for an hour in a sort of mental prostration before both bust and artist. But Roderick’s attitude before his patient little devotee was one of undisguised though friendly amusement; and, indeed, judged from a strictly plastic point of view, the poor fellow’s diminutive stature, his enormous mouth, his pimples and his yellow hair were sufficiently ridiculous. “Nay, don’t envy our friend,” Rowland said to Singleton afterwards, on his expressing, with a little groan of depreciation of his own paltry performances, his sense of the brilliancy of Roderick’s talent. “You sail nearer the shore, but you sail in smoother waters. Be contented with what you are and paint me another picture.”