The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  The allusion resided chiefly in the extreme earnestness with which the words were uttered. Rowland immediately asked her the reason of her gladness.

  “It ‘s not that painting is not fine,” she said, “but that sculpture is finer. It is more manly.”

  Rowland tried at times to make her talk about herself, but in this she had little skill. She seemed to him so much older, so much more pliant to social uses than when he had seen her at home, that he had a desire to draw from her some categorical account of her occupation and thoughts. He told her his desire and what suggested it. “It appears, then,” she said, “that, after all, one can grow at home!”

  “Unquestionably, if one has a motive. Your growth, then, was unconscious? You did not watch yourself and water your roots?”

  She paid no heed to his question. “I am willing to grant,” she said, “that Europe is more delightful than I supposed; and I don’t think that, mentally, I had been stingy. But you must admit that America is better than you have supposed.”

  “I have not a fault to find with the country which produced you!” Rowland thought he might risk this, smiling.

  “And yet you want me to change—to assimilate Europe, I suppose you would call it.”

  “I have felt that desire only on general principles. Shall I tell you what I feel now? America has made you thus far; let America finish you! I should like to ship you back without delay and see what becomes of you. That sounds unkind, and I admit there is a cold intellectual curiosity in it.”

  She shook her head. “The charm is broken; the thread is snapped! I prefer to remain here.”

  Invariably, when he was inclined to make of something they were talking of a direct application to herself, she wholly failed to assist him; she made no response. Whereupon, once, with a spark of ardent irritation, he told her she was very “secretive.” At this she colored a little, and he said that in default of any larger confidence it would at least be a satisfaction to make her confess to that charge. But even this satisfaction she denied him, and his only revenge was in making, two or three times afterward, a softly ironical allusion to her slyness. He told her that she was what is called in French a sournoise. “Very good,” she answered, almost indifferently, “and now please tell me again—I have forgotten it—what you said an ‘architrave’ was.”

  It was on the occasion of her asking him a question of this kind that he charged her, with a humorous emphasis in which, also, if she had been curious in the matter, she might have detected a spark of restless ardor, with having an insatiable avidity for facts. “You are always snatching at information,” he said; “you will never consent to have any disinterested conversation.”

  She frowned a little, as she always did when he arrested their talk upon something personal. But this time she assented, and said that she knew she was eager for facts. “One must make hay while the sun shines,” she added. “I must lay up a store of learning against dark days. Somehow, my imagination refuses to compass the idea that I may be in Rome indefinitely.”

  He knew he had divined her real motives; but he felt that if he might have said to her—what it seemed impossible to say—that fortune possibly had in store for her a bitter disappointment, she would have been capable of answering, immediately after the first sense of pain, “Say then that I am laying up resources for solitude!”

  But all the accusations were not his. He had been watching, once, during some brief argument, to see whether she would take her forefinger out of her Murray, into which she had inserted it to keep a certain page. It would have been hard to say why this point interested him, for he had not the slightest real apprehension that she was dry or pedantic. The simple human truth was, the poor fellow was jealous of science. In preaching science to her, he had over-estimated his powers of self-effacement. Suddenly, sinking science for the moment, she looked at him very frankly and began to frown. At the same time she let the Murray slide down to the ground, and he was so charmed with this circumstance that he made no movement to pick it up.

  “You are singularly inconsistent, Mr. Mallet,” she said.

  “How?”

  “That first day that we were in Saint Peter’s you said things that inspired me. You bade me plunge into all this. I was all ready; I only wanted a little push; yours was a great one; here I am in mid-ocean! And now, as a reward for my bravery, you have repeatedly snubbed me.”

  “Distinctly, then,” said Rowland, “I strike you as inconsistent?”

  “That is the word.”

  “Then I have played my part very ill.”

  “Your part? What is your part supposed to have been?”

  He hesitated a moment. “That of usefulness, pure and simple.”

  “I don’t understand you!” she said; and picking up her Murray, she fairly buried herself in it.

  That evening he said something to her which necessarily increased her perplexity, though it was not uttered with such an intention. “Do you remember,” he asked, “my begging you, the other day, to do occasionally as I told you? It seemed to me you tacitly consented.”

  “Very tacitly.”

  “I have never yet really presumed on your consent. But now I would like you to do this: whenever you catch me in the act of what you call inconsistency, ask me the meaning of some architectural term. I will know what you mean; a word to the wise!”

  One morning they spent among the ruins of the Palatine, that sunny desolation of crumbling, over-tangled fragments, half excavated and half identified, known as the Palace of the Caesars. Nothing in Rome is more interesting, and no locality has such a confusion of picturesque charms. It is a vast, rambling garden, where you stumble at every step on the disinterred bones of the past; where damp, frescoed corridors, relics, possibly, of Nero’s Golden House, serve as gigantic bowers, and where, in the springtime, you may sit on a Latin inscription, in the shade of a flowering almond-tree, and admire the composition of the Campagna. The day left a deep impression on Rowland’s mind, partly owing to its intrinsic sweetness, and partly because his companion, on this occasion, let her Murray lie unopened for an hour, and asked several questions irrelevant to the Consuls and the Caesars. She had begun by saying that it was coming over her, after all, that Rome was a ponderously sad place. The sirocco was gently blowing, the air was heavy, she was tired, she looked a little pale.

  “Everything,” she said, “seems to say that all things are vanity. If one is doing something, I suppose one feels a certain strength within one to contradict it. But if one is idle, surely it is depressing to live, year after year, among the ashes of things that once were mighty. If I were to remain here I should either become permanently ‘low,’ as they say, or I would take refuge in some dogged daily work.”

  “What work?”

  “I would open a school for those beautiful little beggars; though I am sadly afraid I should never bring myself to scold them.”

  “I am idle,” said Rowland, “and yet I have kept up a certain spirit.”

  “I don’t call you idle,” she answered with emphasis.

  “It is very good of you. Do you remember our talking about that in Northampton?”

  “During that picnic? Perfectly. Has your coming abroad succeeded, for yourself, as well as you hoped?”

  “I think I may say that it has turned out as well as I expected.”

  “Are you happy?”

  “Don’t I look so?”

  “So it seems to me. But”—and she hesitated a moment—”I imagine you look happy whether you are so or not.”

  “I ‘m like that ancient comic mask that we saw just now in yonder excavated fresco: I am made to grin.”

  “Shall you come back here next winter?”

  “Very probably.”

  “Are you settled here forever?”

  “‘Forever’ is a long time. I live only from year to year.”

  “Shall you never marry?”

  Rowland gave a laugh. “‘Forever’—’never!’ You handle large ideas. I hav
e not taken a vow of celibacy.”

  “Would n’t you like to marry?”

  “I should like it immensely.”

  To this she made no rejoinder: but presently she asked, “Why don’t you write a book?”

  Rowland laughed, this time more freely. “A book! What book should I write?”

  “A history; something about art or antiquities.”

  “I have neither the learning nor the talent.”

  She made no attempt to contradict him; she simply said she had supposed otherwise. “You ought, at any rate,” she continued in a moment, “to do something for yourself.”

  “For myself? I should have supposed that if ever a man seemed to live for himself”—

  “I don’t know how it seems,” she interrupted, “to careless observers. But we know—we know that you have lived—a great deal—for us.”

  Her voice trembled slightly, and she brought out the last words with a little jerk.

  “She has had that speech on her conscience,” thought Rowland; “she has been thinking she owed it to me, and it seemed to her that now was her time to make it and have done with it.”

  She went on in a way which confirmed these reflections, speaking with due solemnity. “You ought to be made to know very well what we all feel. Mrs. Hudson tells me that she has told you what she feels. Of course Roderick has expressed himself. I have been wanting to thank you too; I do, from my heart.”

  Rowland made no answer; his face at this moment resembled the tragic mask much more than the comic. But Miss Garland was not looking at him; she had taken up her Murray again.

  In the afternoon she usually drove with Mrs. Hudson, but Rowland frequently saw her again in the evening. He was apt to spend half an hour in the little sitting-room at the hotel-pension on the slope of the Pincian, and Roderick, who dined regularly with his mother, was present on these occasions. Rowland saw him little at other times, and for three weeks no observations passed between them on the subject of Mrs. Hudson’s advent. To Rowland’s vision, as the weeks elapsed, the benefits to proceed from the presence of the two ladies remained shrouded in mystery. Roderick was peculiarly inscrutable. He was preoccupied with his work on his mother’s portrait, which was taking a very happy turn; and often, when he sat silent, with his hands in his pockets, his legs outstretched, his head thrown back, and his eyes on vacancy, it was to be supposed that his fancy was hovering about the half-shaped image in his studio, exquisite even in its immaturity. He said little, but his silence did not of necessity imply disaffection, for he evidently found it a deep personal luxury to lounge away the hours in an atmosphere so charged with feminine tenderness. He was not alert, he suggested nothing in the way of excursions (Rowland was the prime mover in such as were attempted), but he conformed passively at least to the tranquil temper of the two women, and made no harsh comments nor sombre allusions. Rowland wondered whether he had, after all, done his friend injustice in denying him the sentiment of duty. He refused invitations, to Rowland’s knowledge, in order to dine at the jejune little table-d’hote; wherever his spirit might be, he was present in the flesh with religious constancy. Mrs. Hudson’s felicity betrayed itself in a remarkable tendency to finish her sentences and wear her best black silk gown. Her tremors had trembled away; she was like a child who discovers that the shaggy monster it has so long been afraid to touch is an inanimate terror, compounded of straw and saw-dust, and that it is even a safe audacity to tickle its nose. As to whether the love-knot of which Mary Garland had the keeping still held firm, who should pronounce? The young girl, as we know, did not wear it on her sleeve. She always sat at the table, near the candles, with a piece of needle-work. This was the attitude in which Rowland had first seen her, and he thought, now that he had seen her in several others, it was not the least becoming.

  CHAPTER X.

  The Cavaliere

  There befell at last a couple of days during which Rowland was unable to go to the hotel. Late in the evening of the second one Roderick came into his room. In a few moments he announced that he had finished the bust of his mother.

  “And it ‘s magnificent!” he declared. “It ‘s one of the best things I have done.”

  “I believe it,” said Rowland. “Never again talk to me about your inspiration being dead.”

  “Why not? This may be its last kick! I feel very tired. But it ‘s a masterpiece, though I do say it. They tell us we owe so much to our parents. Well, I ‘ve paid the filial debt handsomely!” He walked up and down the room a few moments, with the purpose of his visit evidently still undischarged. “There ‘s one thing more I want to say,” he presently resumed. “I feel as if I ought to tell you!” He stopped before Rowland with his head high and his brilliant glance unclouded. “Your invention is a failure!”

  “My invention?” Rowland repeated.

  “Bringing out my mother and Mary.”

  “A failure?”

  “It ‘s no use! They don’t help me.”

  Rowland had fancied that Roderick had no more surprises for him; but he was now staring at him, wide-eyed.

  “They bore me!” Roderick went on.

  “Oh, oh!” cried Rowland.

  “Listen, listen!” said Roderick with perfect gentleness. “I am not complaining of them; I am simply stating a fact. I am very sorry for them; I am greatly disappointed.”

  “Have you given them a fair trial?”

  “Should n’t you say so? It seems to me I have behaved beautifully.”

  “You have done very well; I have been building great hopes on it.”

  “I have done too well, then. After the first forty-eight hours my own hopes collapsed. But I determined to fight it out; to stand within the temple; to let the spirit of the Lord descend! Do you want to know the result? Another week of it, and I shall begin to hate them. I shall want to poison them.”

  “Miserable boy!” cried Rowland. “They are the loveliest of women!”

  “Very likely! But they mean no more to me than a Bible text to an atheist!”

  “I utterly fail,” said Rowland, in a moment, “to understand your relation to Miss Garland.”

  Roderick shrugged his shoulders and let his hands drop at his sides. “She adores me! That ‘s my relation.” And he smiled strangely.

  “Have you broken your engagement?”

  “Broken it? You can’t break a ray of moonshine.”

  “Have you absolutely no affection for her?”

  Roderick placed his hand on his heart and held it there a moment. “Dead—dead—dead!” he said at last.

  “I wonder,” Rowland asked presently, “if you begin to comprehend the beauty of Miss Garland’s character. She is a person of the highest merit.”

  “Evidently—or I would not have cared for her!”

  “Has that no charm for you now?”

  “Oh, don’t force a fellow to say rude things!”