The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  She started the least bit at the question, and he felt that she had been thinking of Christina.

  “I don’t like her!” she said with decision.

  “What do you think of her?”

  “I think she ‘s false.” This was said without petulance or bitterness, but with a very positive air.

  “But she wished to please you; she tried,” Rowland rejoined, in a moment.

  “I think not. She wished to please herself!”

  Rowland felt himself at liberty to say no more. No allusion to Christina had passed between them since the day they met her at Saint Peter’s, but he knew that she knew, by that infallible sixth sense of a woman who loves, that this strange, beautiful girl had the power to injure her. To what extent she had the will, Mary was uncertain; but last night’s interview, apparently, had not reassured her. It was, under these circumstances, equally unbecoming for Rowland either to depreciate or to defend Christina, and he had to content himself with simply having verified the girl’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, aesthetic curiosity, with Miss Garland, had folded its wings. Curiosity of another sort had taken its place. Mary was longing, he was sure, to question him about 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 him. They would imply that she was jealous, and to betray her jealousy was intolerable to her pride. For some minutes, as she sat scratching 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.

  “A propos of Miss Light,” she asked, “do you know her well?”

  “I can hardly say that. But I have seen her repeatedly.”

  “Do you like her?”

  “Yes and no. I think I am sorry for her.”

  Mary had spoken with her eyes on the pavement. At this she looked up. “Sorry for her? Why?”

  “Well—she is unhappy.”

  “What are her misfortunes?”

  “Well—she has a horrible mother, and she has had a most injurious education.”

  For a moment Miss Garland was silent. Then, “Is n’t she very beautiful?” she asked.

  “Don’t you think so?”

  “That ‘s measured by what men think! She is extremely clever, too.”

  “Oh, incontestably.”

  “She has beautiful dresses.”

  “Yes, any number of them.”

  “And beautiful manners.”

  “Yes—sometimes.”

  “And plenty of money.”

  “Money enough, apparently.”

  “And she receives great admiration.”

  “Very true.”

  “And she is to marry a prince.”

  “So they say.”

  Miss Garland rose and turned to rejoin her companions, commenting these admissions with a pregnant silence. “Poor Miss Light!” she said at last, simply. And in this it seemed to Rowland there was a touch of bitterness.

  Very late on the following evening his servant brought him the card of a visitor. He was surprised at a visit at such an hour, but it may be said that when he read the inscription—Cavaliere Giuseppe Giacosa—his surprise declined. He had had an unformulated conviction that there was to be a sequel to the apparition at Madame Grandoni’s; the Cavaliere had come to usher it in.

  He had come, evidently, on a portentous errand. He was as pale as ashes and prodigiously serious; his little cold black eye had grown ardent, and he had left his caressing smile at home. He saluted Rowland, however, with his usual obsequious bow.

  “You have more than once done me the honor to invite me to call upon you,” he said. “I am ashamed of my long delay, and I can only say to you, frankly, that my time this winter has not been my own.” Rowland assented, ungrudgingly fumbled for the Italian correlative of the adage “Better late than never,” begged him to be seated, and offered him a cigar. The Cavaliere sniffed imperceptibly the fragrant weed, and then declared that, if his kind host would allow him, he would reserve it for consumption at another time. He apparently desired to intimate that the solemnity of his errand left him no breath for idle smoke-puffings. Rowland stayed himself, just in time, from an enthusiastic offer of a dozen more cigars, and, as he watched the Cavaliere stow his treasure tenderly away in his pocket-book, reflected that only an Italian could go through such a performance with uncompromised dignity. “I must confess,” the little old man resumed, “that even now I come on business not of my own—or my own, at least, only in a secondary sense. I have been dispatched 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 be happy,” Rowland said.

  “Well then, dear sir, Casa Light is in commotion. The signora is in trouble—in terrible trouble.” For a moment Rowland expected to hear that the signora’s trouble was of a nature that a loan of five thousand francs would assuage. But the Cavaliere continued: “Miss Light has committed a great crime; she has plunged a dagger into the heart of her mother.”

  “A dagger!” cried Rowland.

  The Cavaliere patted the air an instant with his finger-tips. “I speak figuratively. She has broken off her marriage.”

  “Broken it off?”

  “Short! She has turned the prince from the door.” And the Cavaliere, when he had made this announcement, folded his arms and bent upon Rowland his intense, inscrutable gaze. It seemed to Rowland that he detected in the polished depths of it a sort of fantastic gleam of irony or of triumph; but superficially, at least, Giacosa did nothing to discredit his character as a presumably sympathetic representative of Mrs. Light’s affliction.

  Rowland heard his news with a kind of fierce disgust; it seemed the sinister counterpart of Christina’s preternatural mildness at Madame Grandoni’s tea-party. 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 with Mary Garland. If she had not seen Mary, she would have let things stand. It was monstrous to suppose that she could have sacrificed so brilliant a fortune to a mere movement of jealousy, to a refined instinct of feminine deviltry, to a desire to frighten poor Mary from her security by again appearing in the field. Yet Rowland remembered his first impression of her; she was “dangerous,” and she had measured in each direction the perturbing effect of her rupture. She was smiling her sweetest smile at it! For half an hour Rowland simply detested her, and longed to denounce her to her face. Of course all he could say to Giacosa was that he was extremely sorry. “But I am not surprised,” he added.

  “You are not surprised?”

  “With Miss Light everything is possible. Is n’t that true?”

  Another ripple seemed to play for an instant in the current of the old man’s irony, but he waived response. “It was a magnificent marriage,” he said, solemnly. “I do not respect many people, but I respect Prince Casamassima.”

  “I should judge him indeed to be a very honorable 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 is the last of his house; it ‘s a great house. But Miss Light will have put an end to it!”

  “Is that the view she takes of it?” Rowland ventured to ask.

  This time, unmistakably, the Cavaliere smiled, but still in that very out-of-the-way place. “You have 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 have influence with her daughter.”

  “I—with her daughter? Not a grain!”

  “That is possibly your modesty. Mrs. Light believes that something may yet be done, and that Christina will listen to you. She begs you to come and
see her before it is 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 a fatally foolish 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—disheveled, in tears, in despair, in dishabille!”

  Rowland reflected a moment, not on the attractions of Mrs. Light under the circumstances thus indicated by the Cavaliere, but on the satisfaction he would take in accusing Christina to her face of having struck a cruel blow.

  “I must add,” said the Cavaliere, “that Mrs. Light desires also to speak to you on the subject of Mr. Hudson.”

  “She considers Mr. Hudson, then, 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 assented, deferentially. “Mrs. Light is equally helpless. She would leave Rome to-morrow, but Christina will not budge. An order from the Pope would do nothing. A bull in council would do nothing.”

  “She ‘s a remarkable young lady,” said Rowland, with bitterness.

  But the Cavaliere rose and responded coldly, “She has a great spirit.” 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 Giacosa resumed: “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 call Prince Casamassima back.”

  “Heaven grant it!” said Rowland.

  “I don’t know,” said the Cavaliere, solemnly, “that heaven will have much to do with it.”

  Rowland gave him a questioning look, but he laid his finger on his lips. And with Rowland’s promise to present himself on the morrow at Casa Light, he shortly afterwards departed. He left Rowland revolving many things: Christina’s magnanimity, Christina’s perversity, Roderick’s contingent fortune, Mary Garland’s certain trouble, and the Cavaliere’s own fine ambiguities.

  Rowland’s promise to the Cavaliere obliged him to withdraw from an excursion which he had arranged with the two ladies from Northampton. Before going to Casa Light he repaired in person to Mrs. Hudson’s hotel, to make his excuses.

  He found Roderick’s mother sitting with tearful eyes, staring at an open note that lay in her lap. At the window sat Miss Garland, who turned her intense regard upon him as he came in. Mrs. Hudson quickly rose and came to him, holding out the note.

  “In pity’s name,” she cried, “what is the matter with my boy? If he is ill, I entreat you to take me to him!”

  “He is not ill, to my knowledge,” said Rowland. “What have you there?”

  “A note—a dreadful note. He tells us we are not to see him for a week. If I could only go to his room! But I am afraid, I am afraid!”

  “I imagine there is no need of going to his room. What is 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 awful thing. Oh dear, I ‘m so excited! Would you mind reading it?”

  Rowland took the note and glanced at its half-dozen lines. “I cannot go to Cervara,” they ran; “I have something else to do. This will occupy me perhaps for a week, and you ‘ll not see me. Don’t miss me—learn not to miss me. R. H.”

  “Why, it means,” Rowland commented, “that he has taken up a piece of work, and that it is 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. But he found he needed all his courage to maintain it, for Miss Garland had left her place and approached him, formidably unsatisfied.

  “He does not work 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 out passionately. “Oh, dear Mr. Mallet,” she went on, “I am sure he has the fever and he ‘s already delirious!”

  “I am very sure it ‘s not that,” said Miss Garland, with a certain dryness.

  She was still looking at Rowland; his eyes met hers, and his own glance fell. This made him angry, and to carry off his confusion he pretended to be looking at the floor, in meditation. 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, “Dearest friends, 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 will see what it is!” he cried. And then he was glad he had not abdicated, for as he turned away he glanced again at Mary and saw that, though her eyes were full of trouble, they were 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 perfumed flowers had been scattered. Roderick was lying on his divan in a white dressing-gown, staring up at the frescoed ceiling. The room was deliciously cool, and filled with the moist, sweet odor of the circumjacent roses and violets. All this seemed highly fantastic, and 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 are not ill.” Roderick lay motionless, except that he slightly turned his head toward his friend. He was smelling a large white rose, and he continued to present it to his nose. In the darkness of the room he looked exceedingly pale, but his handsome eyes had an extraordinary brilliancy. He let them rest for some time on Rowland, lying there like a Buddhist in an intellectual swoon, whose perception should be slowly ebbing back to temporal matters. “Oh, I ‘m not ill,” he said at last. “I have never been better.”

  “Your note, nevertheless, and your absence,” Rowland said, “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, looking up over it at Rowland. “My presence, in fact, would be indecent.”

  “Indecent? Pray explain.”

  “Why, you see, as regards Mary Garland. I am divinely 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,” said Rowland with brevity. “And it ‘s in honor of this piece of news that you have taken to your bed in this fashion?”

  “Extremes meet! I can’t get up for joy.”

  “May I inquire how you heard your joyous news?—from Miss Light herself?”

  “By no means. It was brought me by her maid, who is in my service as well.”

  “Casamassima’s loss, then, is to a certainty your gain?”