by Henry James
“They told me you were here,” she said simply, as she took a seat.
“And yet you came in? It is very brave,” said Rowland.
“You are the brave one, when one thinks of it! Where is the padrona?”
“Occupied for the moment. But she is coming.”
“How soon?”
“I have already waited ten minutes; I expect her from moment to moment.”
“Meanwhile we are alone?” And she glanced into the dusky corners of the room.
“Unless Stenterello counts,” said Rowland.
“Oh, he knows my secrets—unfortunate brute!” She sat silent awhile, looking into the firelight. Then at last, glancing at Rowland, “Come! say something pleasant!” she exclaimed.
“I have been very happy to hear of your engagement.”
“No, 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 offended you, then,” said Rowland. “I was afraid I had.”
“Ah, it occurred to you? Why have n’t I seen you since?”
“Really, I don’t know.” And he began to hesitate for an explanation. “I have called, but you have never been at home.”
“You were careful to choose the wrong times. You have a way with a poor girl! You sit down and inform her that she is a person with whom a respectable young man cannot associate without contamination; your friend is a very nice fellow, you are 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 are 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 such a low person, but it is 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. That is what Saint Catherine did, and Saint Theresa, and all the others, and they are 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 courtesy, I determined I would not be spiteful, nor passionate, nor vengeful, nor anything that is supposed to be particularly feminine. 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 deal for six hours when I know I did n’t seem to be, and then at last I did it! Santo Dio!”
“My dear Miss Light, my dear Miss Light!” said Rowland, pleadingly.
“Since then,” the young girl went on, “I have been waiting for the ineffable joys. They have n’t yet turned up!”
“Pray listen to me!” Rowland urged.
“Nothing, nothing, nothing has come of it. I have passed the dreariest month of my life!”
“My dear Miss Light, you are a very terrible young lady!” cried Rowland.
“What do you mean by that?”
“A good many things. We ‘ll talk them over. But first, forgive me if I have offended 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.”
“Really, I don’t understand!”
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 not give to force you to believe in me!”
Rowland sprang up, protesting, but before he had time to go far one of the scanty portieres was raised, and Madame Grandoni came in, pulling her wig straight. “But you shall believe in me yet,” murmured Christina, as she passed toward her hostess.
Madame Grandoni turned tenderly to Christina. “I must give you a very solemn kiss, my dear; you are the heroine of the hour. You have 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 is going to become a princess.”
Christina shrugged her shoulders. “Every one expects me to go into ecstacies over that! Could anything be more vulgar? They may chuckle by themselves! Will you let me stay to dinner?”
“If you can dine on a risotto. But I imagine you are expected at home.”
“You are right. Prince Casamassima dines there, en famille. But I ‘m not in his family, yet!”
“Do you know you are very wicked? I have half a mind not to keep you.”
Christina dropped her eyes, reflectively. “I beg you will let me stay,” she said. “If you wish 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 another glance at Rowland. Then suddenly, in a different tone, “I don’t know what I ‘m saying!” she cried. “I am weary, I am 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 and flung her arms upon 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 then rapidly left the house. He saw Mrs. Light’s carriage waiting at the door, and heard afterwards that Christina went 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 profoundly, incurably disgusted. Reflective benevolence stood prudently aside, and for the time touched the source of his irritation with no softening side-lights.
It was the middle of March, and by the middle of March in Florence the spring is already warm and deep. He had an infinite relish 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 soothe his irritation. He was sore at heart, and as the days went by the soreness deepened rather than healed. He felt as if he had a complaint against fortune; good-natured as he was, his good-nature this time quite declined to let it pass. He had tried to be wise, he had tried to be kind, he had embarked upon an estimable enterprise; but his wisdom, his kindness, his energy, had been thrown back in his face. He was disappointed, and his disappointment had an angry spark in it. 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 discontent. 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 to be something horribly invidious and unwelcome in the fact. He felt, in a word, like a man who has been cruelly defrauded and who wishes to have his revenge. Life owed him, he thought, a compensation, and he would be restless and resentful until he found it. He knew—or he seemed to know—where he should find it; but he hardly told himself, and thought of the thing under mental protest, as a man in want of money may think of certain funds that he holds in trust.
In his melancholy meditations the idea of something better than all this, something that might softly, richly interpose, something that might reconcile him to the future, something that might make one’s tenure of life deep and zealous instead of harsh and uneven—the idea of concrete compensation, in a word—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 plain girl of whom he had had but the lightest of glimpses two years before; very odd that so deep an impression should have been made by so lightly-pressed an instrument. We must admit the oddity and offer simply in explanation that his sentiment apparently belonged to that species of emotion of which, by the testimony of the poets, the very name and essence is oddity. One night he slept but half an hour; he found his thoughts taking a turn which excited him portentously. He walked up and down his room half the night. It looked out on the Arno; the noise of the river came in at the open window; he felt like dressing and going down into the streets. Toward morning he flung himself into a chair; though he was wide awake he was less excited. It seemed to him that he saw his idea from the outside, that he judged it and condemned it; yet it stood there before him, distinct, and in a certain way imperious. During the day he tried to banish it and forget it; but it fascinated, haunted, at moments frightened him. He tried to amuse himself, paid visits, resorted to several rather violent devices for diverting his thoughts. If on the morrow he had committed a crime, the persons whom he had seen that day would have testified that he had talked strangely and had not seemed like himself. He felt certainly very unlike himself; long afterwards, in retrospect, he used to reflect that during those days he had for a while been literally beside himself. His idea persisted; it clung to him like a sturdy beggar. The sense of the matter, roughly expressed, was this: If Roderick was really going, as he himself had phrased it, to “fizzle out,” one might help him on the way—one might smooth the descensus Averno. For forty-eight hours there swam before Rowland’s eyes a vision of Roderick, graceful and beautiful as he passed, plunging, like a diver, from an eminence into a misty gulf. The gulf was destruction, annihilation, death; but if death was decreed, why should not the agony be 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 if one was present it was kind to lend a hand to pile up the fuel and make the flames do their work quickly and the smoke muffle up the victim. With all deference to your kindness, this was perhaps an obligation you would especially feel if you had a reversionary interest in something the victim was to leave behind him.
One morning, in the midst of all this, Rowland walked heedlessly out of one of the city gates and found himself on the road to Fiesole. It was a completely lovely day; the March sun felt like May, as the English poet of Florence says; the thick-blossomed shrubs and vines that hung over the walls of villa and podere flung their odorous promise into the warm, still air. Rowland followed the winding, climbing 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 little square before the cathedral, and rested awhile in the massive, dusky church; then climbed higher, to the Franciscan convent which is poised on the very apex of the mountain. He rang at the little gateway; a shabby, senile, red-faced brother admitted him with almost maudlin friendliness. 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 great hill. He had been in it before, and he was very fond of it. 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 bereaved forlornness, into the nakedly romantic gorge beneath. It was just noon when Rowland went in, and after roaming about awhile he flung himself in the sun on 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, and yet he had not passed back through the convent. One of the monks, in his faded snuff-colored robe, came wandering out into the garden, reading his greasy little breviary. Suddenly he came toward the bench on which Rowland had stretched himself, and paused a moment, attentively. Rowland was lingering there still; he was sitting with his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees. He seemed not to have heard the sandaled 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 benignant, aspect. Rowland’s face bore the traces of extreme trouble. The frate kept his finger in his little book, and folded his arms picturesquely across his breast. It can hardly be determined whether his attitude, as he bent his sympathetic Italian eye upon Rowland, was a happy accident or the result of an exquisite spiritual discernment. To Rowland, at any rate, under the emotion of that moment, it seemed blessedly opportune. He rose and approached the monk, and laid his hand on his arm.
“My brother,” he said, “did you ever see the Devil?”
The frate gazed, gravely, and crossed himself. “Heaven forbid!”
“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 Rowland stooped and picked up his hat, which had rolled away into a bed of cyclamen, in vague symbolism of an actual physical tussle.
“You have been tempted, my brother?” asked the friar, tenderly.
“Hideously!”
“And you have resisted—and conquered!”
“I believe I have conquered.”
“The blessed Saint Francis be praised! It is well done. If you like, we will offer a mass for you.”
“I am not a Catholic,” said Rowland.
The frate smiled with dignity. “That is 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 termed a great scare; he believed, very poignantly for the time, in the Devil, and he felt an irresistible need to subscribe to any institution which engaged to keep him at a distance.
The next day he returned to Rome, and the day afterwards he went in search of Roderick. He found him on the Pincian with his back turned to the crowd, looking at the sunset. “I went to Florence,” Rowland said, “and I thought of going farther; but I came back on purpose to give you another piece of advice. Once more, you refuse to leave Rome?”
“Never!” said Roderick.
“The only chance that I see, then, of your reviving your sense of responsibility to—to those various sacred things you have 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?”
“Tell me this; I have often wondered, but till now I have forborne to ask. You are still engaged to Miss Garland?”
Roderick frowned darkly, but assented.
“It would give you pleasure, then, to see her?”
Roderick turned away and for some moments answered nothing. “Pleasure!” he said at last, huskily. “Call it pain.”
“I regar
d you as a sick man,” Rowland continued. “In such a case Miss Garland would say that her place was at your side.”
Roderick looked at him some time askance, mistrustfully. “Is this a deep-laid snare?” he asked slowly.
Rowland had come back with all his patience rekindled, but these words gave it an almost fatal chill. “Heaven forgive you!” he cried bitterly. “My idea has been simply this. Try, in decency, to understand it. I have tried to befriend you, to help you, to inspire you with confidence, and I have failed. I took you from the hands of your mother and your betrothed, and it seemed to me my duty to restore you to their hands. That ‘s all I have to say.”