jumped up and stood looking at one of his statues, which shone vaguely
across the room in the dim lamplight.

"Yes, do tell us," said Rowland, "what to hold on by!"

"Those things of mine were tolerably good," he answered. "But my idea
was better--and that 's what I mean!"

Rowland said nothing. He was willing to wait for Roderick to complete
the circle of his metamorphoses, but he had no desire to officiate as
chorus to the play. If Roderick chose to fish in troubled waters, he
must land his prizes himself.

"You think I 'm an impudent humbug," the latter said at last, "coming
up to moralize at this hour of the night. You think I want to throw
dust into your eyes, to put you off the scent. That 's your eminently
rational view of the case."

"Excuse me from taking any view at all," said Rowland.

"You have given me up, then?"

"No, I have merely suspended judgment. I am waiting."

"You have ceased then positively to believe in me?"

Rowland made an angry gesture. "Oh, cruel boy! When you have hit your
mark and made people care for you, you should n't twist your weapon
about at that rate in their vitals. Allow me to say I am sleepy. Good
night!"

Some days afterward it happened that Rowland, on a long afternoon
ramble, took his way through one of the quiet corners of the Trastevere.
He was particularly fond of this part of Rome, though he could hardly
have expressed the charm he found in it. As you pass away from the
dusky, swarming purlieus of the Ghetto, you emerge into a region of
empty, soundless, grass-grown lanes and alleys, where the shabby houses
seem mouldering away in disuse, and yet your footstep brings figures of
startling Roman type to the doorways. There are few monuments here, but
no part of Rome seemed more historic, in the sense of being weighted
with a crushing past, blighted with the melancholy of things that had
had their day. When the yellow afternoon sunshine slept on the sallow,
battered walls, and lengthened the shadows in the grassy courtyards of
small closed churches, the place acquired a strange fascination. The
church of Saint Cecilia has one of these sunny, waste-looking courts;
the edifice seems abandoned to silence and the charity of chance
devotion. Rowland never passed it without going in, and he was generally
the only visitor. He entered it now, but found that two persons had
preceded him. Both were women. One was at her prayers at one of the side
altars; the other was seated against a column at the upper end of the
nave. Rowland walked to the altar, and paid, in a momentary glance at
the clever statue of the saint in death, in the niche beneath it, the
usual tribute to the charm of polished ingenuity. As he turned away he
looked at the person seated and recognized Christina Light. Seeing that
she perceived him, he advanced to speak to her.

She was sitting in a listless attitude, with her hands in her lap;
she seemed to be tired. She was dressed simply, as if for walking and
escaping observation. When he had greeted her he glanced back at her
companion, and recognized the faithful Assunta.

Christina smiled. "Are you looking for Mr. Hudson? He is not here, I am
happy to say."

"But you?" he asked. "This is a strange place to find you."

"Not at all! People call me a strange girl, and I might as well have the
comfort of it. I came to take a walk; that, by the way, is part of
my strangeness. I can't loll all the morning on a sofa, and all the
afternoon in a carriage. I get horribly restless. I must move; I must
do something and see something. Mamma suggests a cup of tea. Meanwhile I
put on an old dress and half a dozen veils, I take Assunta under my arm,
and we start on a pedestrian tour. It 's a bore that I can't take the
poodle, but he attracts attention. We trudge about everywhere; there
is nothing I like so much. I hope you will congratulate me on the
simplicity of my tastes."

"I congratulate you on your wisdom. To live in Rome and not to walk
would, I think, be poor pleasure. But you are terribly far from home,
and I am afraid you are tired."

"A little--enough to sit here a while."

"Might I offer you my company while you rest?"

"If you will promise to amuse me. I am in dismal spirits."

Rowland said he would do what he could, and brought a chair and placed
it near her. He was not in love with her; he disapproved of her; he
mistrusted her; and yet he felt it a kind of privilege to watch her, and
he found a peculiar excitement in talking to her. The background of her
nature, as he would have called it, was large and mysterious, and it
emitted strange, fantastic gleams and flashes. Watching for these rather
quickened one's pulses. Moreover, it was not a disadvantage to talk to
a girl who made one keep guard on one's composure; it diminished one's
chronic liability to utter something less than revised wisdom.

Assunta had risen from her prayers, and, as he took his place, was
coming back to her mistress. But Christina motioned her away. "No, no;
while you are about it, say a few dozen more!" she said. "Pray for me,"
she added in English. "Pray, I say nothing silly. She has been at it
half an hour; I envy her capacity!"

"Have you never felt in any degree," Rowland asked, "the fascination of
Catholicism?"

"Yes, I have been through that, too! There was a time when I wanted
immensely to be a nun; it was not a laughing matter. It was when I was
about sixteen years old. I read the Imitation and the Life of Saint
Catherine. I fully believed in the miracles of the saints, and I was
dying to have one of my own. The least little accident that could have
been twisted into a miracle would have carried me straight into the
bosom of the church. I had the real religious passion. It has passed
away, and, as I sat here just now, I was wondering what had become of
it!"

Rowland had already been sensible of something in this young lady's tone
which he would have called a want of veracity, and this epitome of her
religious experience failed to strike him as an absolute statement of
fact. But the trait was not disagreeable, for she herself was evidently
the foremost dupe of her inventions. She had a fictitious history
in which she believed much more fondly than in her real one, and an
infinite capacity for extemporized reminiscence adapted to the mood
of the hour. She liked to idealize herself, to take interesting and
picturesque attitudes to her own imagination; and the vivacity and
spontaneity of her character gave her, really, a starting-point in
experience; so that the many-colored flowers of fiction which blossomed
in her talk were not so much perversions, as sympathetic exaggerations,
of fact. And Rowland felt that whatever she said of herself might have
been, under the imagined circumstances; impulse was there, audacity, the
restless, questioning temperament. "I am afraid I am sadly prosaic,"
he said, "for in these many months now that I have been in Rome, I
have never ceased for a moment to look at Catholicism simply from the
outside. I don't see an opening as big as your finger-nail where I could
creep into it!"

"What do you believe?" asked Christina, looking at him. "Are you
religious?"

"I believe in God."

Christina let her beautiful eyes wander a while, and then gave a little
sigh. "You are much to be envied!"

"You, I imagine, in that line have nothing to envy me."

"Yes, I have. Rest!"

"You are too young to say that."

"I am not young; I have never been young! My mother took care of that. I
was a little wrinkled old woman at ten."

"I am afraid," said Rowland, in a moment, "that you are fond of painting
yourself in dark colors."

She looked at him a while in silence. "Do you wish," she demanded at
last, "to win my eternal gratitude? Prove to me that I am better than I
suppose."

"I should have first to know what you really suppose."

She shook her head. "It would n't do. You would be horrified to learn
even the things I imagine about myself, and shocked at the knowledge of
evil displayed in my very mistakes."

"Well, then," said Rowland, "I will ask no questions. But, at a venture,
I promise you to catch you some day in the act of doing something very
good."

"Can it be, can it be," she asked, "that you too are trying to flatter
me? I thought you and I had fallen, from the first, into rather a
truth-speaking vein."

"Oh, I have not abandoned it!" said Rowland; and he determined, since he
had the credit of homely directness, to push his advantage farther. The
opportunity seemed excellent. But while he was hesitating as to just how
to begin, the young girl said, bending forward and clasping her hands in
her lap, "Please tell me about your religion."

"Tell you about it? I can't!" said Rowland, with a good deal of
emphasis.

She flushed a little. "Is it such a mighty mystery it cannot be put into
words, nor communicated to my base ears?"

"It is simply a sentiment that makes part of my life, and I can't detach
myself from it sufficiently to talk about it."

"Religion, it seems to me, should be eloquent and aggressive. It should
wish to make converts, to persuade and illumine, to sway all hearts!"

"One's religion takes the color of one's general disposition. I am not
aggressive, and certainly I am not eloquent."

"Beware, then, of finding yourself confronted with doubt and despair! I
am sure that doubt, at times, and the bitterness that comes of it, can
be terribly eloquent. To tell the truth, my lonely musings, before
you came in, were eloquent enough, in their way. What do you know of
anything but this strange, terrible world that surrounds you? How do you
know that your faith is not a mere crazy castle in the air; one of those
castles that we are called fools for building when we lodge them in this
life?"

"I don't know it, any more than any one knows the contrary. But one's
religion is extremely ingenious in doing without knowledge."

"In such a world as this it certainly needs to be!"

Rowland smiled. "What is your particular quarrel with this world?"

"It 's a general quarrel. Nothing is true, or fixed, or permanent. We
all seem to be playing with shadows more or less grotesque. It all comes
over me here so dismally! The very atmosphere of this cold, deserted
church seems to mock at one's longing to believe in something. Who cares
for it now? who comes to it? who takes it seriously? Poor stupid Assunta
there gives in her adhesion in a jargon she does n't understand, and
you and I, proper, passionless tourists, come lounging in to rest from
a walk. And yet the Catholic church was once the proudest institution
in the world, and had quite its own way with men's souls. When such a
mighty structure as that turns out to have a flaw, what faith is one to
put in one's poor little views and philosophies? What is right and what
is wrong? What is one really to care for? What is the proper rule of
life? I am tired of trying to discover, and I suspect it 's not worth
the trouble. Live as most amuses you!"

"Your perplexities are so terribly comprehensive," said Rowland,
smiling, "that one hardly knows where to meet them first."

"I don't care much for anything you can say, because it 's sure to be
half-hearted. You are not in the least contented, yourself."

"How do you know that?"

"Oh, I am an observer!"

"No one is absolutely contented, I suppose, but I assure you I complain
of nothing."

"So much the worse for your honesty. To begin with, you are in love."

"You would not have me complain of that!"

"And it does n't go well. There are grievous obstacles. So much I know!
You need n't protest; I ask no questions. You will tell no one--me least
of all. Why does one never see you?"

"Why, if I came to see you," said Rowland, deliberating, "it would n't
be, it could n't be, for a trivial reason--because I had not been in a
month, because I was passing, because I admire you. It would be because
I should have something very particular to say. I have not come, because
I have been slow in making up my mind to say it."

"You are simply cruel. Something particular, in this ocean of inanities?
In common charity, speak!"

"I doubt whether you will like it."

"Oh, I hope to heaven it 's not a compliment!"

"It may be called a compliment to your reasonableness. You perhaps
remember that I gave you a hint of it the other day at Frascati."

"Has it been hanging fire all this time? Explode! I promise not to stop
my ears."

"It relates to my friend Hudson." And Rowland paused. She was looking at
him expectantly; her face gave no sign. "I am rather disturbed in mind
about him. He seems to me at times to be in an unpromising way." He
paused again, but Christina said nothing. "The case is simply this,"
he went on. "It was by my advice he renounced his career at home and
embraced his present one. I made him burn his ships. I brought him to
Rome, I launched him in the world, and I stand surety, in a measure,
to--to his mother, for his prosperity. It is not such smooth sailing as
it might be, and I am inclined to put up prayers for fair winds. If he
is to succeed, he must work--quietly, devotedly. It is not news to you,
I imagine, that Hudson is a great admirer of yours."

Christina remained silent; she turned away her eyes with an air, not
of confusion, but of deep deliberation. Surprising frankness had, as a
general thing, struck Rowland as the key-note of her character, but she
had more than once given him a suggestion of an unfathomable power
of calculation, and her silence now had something which it is hardly
extravagant to call portentous. He had of course asked himself how far
it was questionable taste to inform an unprotected girl, for the needs
of a cause, that another man admired her; the thing, superficially, had
an uncomfortable analogy with the shrewdness that uses a cat's paw and
lets it risk being singed. But he decided that even rigid discretion
is not bound to take a young lady at more than her own valuation,
and Christina presently reassured him as to the limits of her
susceptibility. "Mr. Hudson is in love with me!" she said.

Rowland flinched a trifle. Then--"Am I," he asked, "from this point of
view of mine, to be glad or sorry?"

"I don't understand you."

"Why, is Hudson to be happy, or unhappy?"

She hesitated a moment. "You wish him to be great in his profession? And
for that you consider that he must be happy in his life?"

"Decidedly. I don't say it 's a general rule, but I think it is a rule
for him."

"So that if he were very happy, he would become very great?"

"He would at least do himself justice."

"And by that you mean a great deal?"

"A great deal."

Christina sank back in her chair and rested her eyes on the cracked
and polished slabs of the pavement. At last, looking up, "You have not
forgotten, I suppose, that you told me he was engaged?"

"By no means."

"He is still engaged, then?"

"To the best of my belief."

"And yet you desire that, as you say, he should be made happy by
something I can do for him?"

"What I desire is this. That your great influence with him should
be exerted for his good, that it should help him and not retard him.
Understand me. You probably know that your lovers have rather a restless
time of it. I can answer for two of them. You don't know your own mind
very well, I imagine, and you like being admired, rather at the expense
of the admirer. Since we are really being frank, I wonder whether I
might not say the great word."

"You need n't; I know it. I am a horrible coquette."

"No, not a horrible one, since I am making an appeal to your generosity.
I am pretty sure you cannot imagine yourself marrying my friend."

"There 's nothing I cannot imagine! That is my trouble."

Rowland's brow contracted impatiently. "I cannot imagine it, then!" he
affirmed.

Christina flushed faintly; then, very gently, "I am not so bad as you
think," she said.

"It is not a question of badness; it is a question of whether
circumstances don't make the thing an extreme improbability."

"Worse and worse. I can be bullied, then, or bribed!"

"You are not so candid," said Rowland, "as you pretend to be. My feeling
is this. Hudson, as I understand him, does not need, as an artist, the
stimulus of strong emotion, of passion. He's better without it; he's
emotional and passionate enough when he 's left to himself. The sooner
passion is at rest, therefore, the sooner he will settle down to work,
and the fewer emotions he has that are mere emotions and nothing more,
the better for him. If you cared for him enough to marry him, I should
have nothing to say; I would never venture to interfere. But I strongly
suspect you don't, and therefore I would suggest, most respectfully,
that you should let him alone."

"And if I let him alone, as you say, all will be well with him for ever
more?"

"Not immediately and not absolutely, but things will be easier. He will
be better able to concentrate himself."

"What is he doing now? Wherein does he dissatisfy you?"

"I can hardly say. He 's like a watch that 's running down. He is moody,
desultory, idle, irregular, fantastic."

"Heavens, what a list! And it 's all poor me?"

"No, not all. But you are a part of it, and I turn to you because you
are a more tangible, sensible, responsible cause than the others."

Christina raised her hand to her eyes, and bent her head thoughtfully.
Rowland was puzzled to measure the effect of his venture; she rather
surprised him by her gentleness. At last, without moving, "If I were to
marry him," she asked, "what would have become of his fiancee?"

"I am bound to suppose that she would be extremely unhappy."

Christina said nothing more, and Rowland, to let her make her
reflections, left his place and strolled away. Poor Assunta, sitting
patiently on a stone bench, and unprovided, on this occasion, with
military consolation, gave him a bright, frank smile, which might have
been construed as an expression of regret for herself, and of sympathy
for her mistress. Rowland presently seated himself again near Christina.

"What do you think," she asked, looking at him, "of your friend's
infidelity?"

"I don't like it."

"Was he very much in love with her?"

"He asked her to marry him. You may judge."

"Is she rich?"

"No, she is poor."

"Is she very much in love with him?"

"I know her too little to say."

She paused again, and then resumed: "You have settled in your mind,
then, that I will never seriously listen to him?"

"I think it unlikely, until the contrary is proved."

"How shall it be proved? How do you know what passes between us?"

"I can judge, of course, but from appearance; but, like you, I am an
observer. Hudson has not at all the air of a prosperous suitor."

"If he is depressed, there is a reason. He has a bad conscience. One
must hope so, at least. On the other hand, simply as a friend," she
continued gently, "you think I can do him no good?"

The humility of her tone, combined with her beauty, as she made this
remark, was inexpressibly touching, and Rowland had an uncomfortable
sense of being put at a disadvantage. "There are doubtless many good
things you might do, if you had proper opportunity," he said. "But you
seem to be sailing with a current which leaves you little leisure for
quiet benevolence. You live in the whirl and hurry of a world into which
a poor artist can hardly find it to his advantage to follow you."

"In plain English, I am hopelessly frivolous. You put it very
generously."

"I won't hesitate to say all my thought," said Rowland. "For better or
worse, you seem to me to belong, both by character and by circumstance,
to what is called the world, the great world. You are made to ornament
it magnificently. You are not made to be an artist's wife."

"I see. But even from your point of view, that would depend upon the
artist. Extraordinary talent might make him a member of the great
world!"

Rowland smiled. "That is very true."

"If, as it is," Christina continued in a moment, "you take a low view of
me--no, you need n't protest--I wonder what you would think if you knew
certain things."

"What things do you mean?"

"Well, for example, how I was brought up. I have had a horrible
education. There must be some good in me, since I have perceived it,
since I have turned and judged my circumstances."

"My dear Miss Light!" Rowland murmured.

She gave a little, quick laugh. "You don't want to hear? you don't want
to have to think about that?"

"Have I a right to? You need n't justify yourself."

She turned upon him a moment the quickened light of her beautiful eyes,
then fell to musing again. "Is there not some novel or some play," she
asked at last, "in which some beautiful, wicked woman who has ensnared a
young man sees his father come to her and beg her to let him go?"

"Very likely," said Rowland. "I hope she consents."

"I forget. But tell me," she continued, "shall you consider--admitting
your proposition--that in ceasing to flirt with Mr. Hudson, so that
he may go about his business, I do something magnanimous, heroic,
sublime--something with a fine name like that?"

Rowland, elated with the prospect of gaining his point, was about
to reply that she would deserve the finest name in the world; but he
instantly suspected that this tone would not please her, and, besides,
it would not express his meaning.

"You do something I shall greatly respect," he contented himself with
saying.

She made no answer, and in a moment she beckoned to her maid. "What have
I to do to-day?" she asked.

Assunta meditated. "Eh, it 's a very busy day! Fortunately I have a
better memory than the signorina," she said, turning to Rowland. She
began to count on her fingers. "We have to go to the Pie di Marmo to see
about those laces that were sent to be washed. You said also that you
wished to say three sharp words to the Buonvicini about your pink dress.
You want some moss-rosebuds for to-night, and you won't get them for
nothing! You dine at the Austrian Embassy, and that Frenchman is to
powder your hair. You 're to come home in time to receive, for the
signora gives a dance. And so away, away till morning!"

"Ah, yes, the moss-roses!" Christina murmured, caressingly. "I must have
a quantity--at least a hundred. Nothing but buds, eh? You must sew them
in a kind of immense apron, down the front of my dress. Packed tight
together, eh? It will be delightfully barbarous. And then twenty more or
so for my hair. They go very well with powder; don't you think so?" And
she turned to Rowland. "I am going en Pompadour."

"Going where?"

"To the Spanish Embassy, or whatever it is."

"All down the front, signorina? Dio buono! You must give me time!"
Assunta cried.

"Yes, we'll go!" And she left her place. She walked slowly to the door
of the church, looking at the pavement, and Rowland could not guess
whether she was thinking of her apron of moss-rosebuds or of her
opportunity for moral sublimity. Before reaching the door she turned
away and stood gazing at an old picture, indistinguishable with
blackness, over an altar. At last they passed out into the court.
Glancing at her in the open air, Rowland was startled; he imagined he
saw the traces of hastily suppressed tears. They had lost time, she
said, and they must hurry; she sent Assunta to look for a fiacre. She
remained silent a while, scratching the ground with the point of her
parasol, and then at last, looking up, she thanked Rowland for his
confidence in her "reasonableness." "It 's really very comfortable to be
asked, to be expected, to do something good, after all the horrid things
one has been used to doing--instructed, commanded, forced to do! I 'll
think over what you have said to me." In that deserted quarter fiacres
are rare, and there was some delay in Assunta's procuring one. Christina
talked of the church, of the picturesque old court, of that strange,
decaying corner of Rome. Rowland was perplexed; he was ill at ease.
At last the fiacre arrived, but she waited a moment longer. "So,
decidedly," she suddenly asked, "I can only harm him?"

"You make me feel very brutal," said Rowland.

"And he is such a fine fellow that it would be really a great pity, eh?"

"I shall praise him no more," Rowland said.

She turned away quickly, but she lingered still. "Do you remember
promising me, soon after we first met, that at the end of six months you
would tell me definitely what you thought of me?"

"It was a foolish promise."

"You gave it. Bear it in mind. I will think of what you have said to me.
Farewell." She stepped into the carriage, and it rolled away. Rowland
stood for some minutes, looking after it, and then went his way with
a sigh. If this expressed general mistrust, he ought, three days
afterward, to have been reassured. He received by the post a note
containing these words:--

"I have done it. Begin and respect me!

"--C. L."

To be perfectly satisfactory, indeed, the note required a commentary.
He called that evening upon Roderick, and found one in the information
offered him at the door, by the old serving-woman--the startling
information that the signorino had gone to Naples.

CHAPTER VIII. Provocation

About a month later, Rowland addressed to his cousin Cecilia a letter of
which the following is a portion:--

... "So much for myself; yet I tell you but a tithe of my own story
unless I let you know how matters stand with poor Hudson, for he gives
me more to think about just now than anything else in the world. I need
a good deal of courage to begin this chapter. You warned me, you know,
and I made rather light of your warning. I have had all kinds of hopes
and fears, but hitherto, in writing to you, I have resolutely put the
hopes foremost. Now, however, my pride has forsaken me, and I should
like hugely to give expression to a little comfortable despair. I should
like to say, 'My dear wise woman, you were right and I was wrong; you
were a shrewd observer and I was a meddlesome donkey!' When I think of
a little talk we had about the 'salubrity of genius,' I feel my ears
tingle. If this is salubrity, give me raging disease! I 'm pestered to
death; I go about with a chronic heartache; there are moments when I
could shed salt tears. There 's a pretty portrait of the most placid
of men! I wish I could make you understand; or rather, I wish you could
make me! I don't understand a jot; it 's a hideous, mocking mystery; I
give it up! I don't in the least give it up, you know; I 'm incapable
of giving it up. I sit holding my head by the hour, racking my brain,
wondering what under heaven is to be done. You told me at Northampton
that I took the thing too easily; you would tell me now, perhaps, that
I take it too hard. I do, altogether; but it can't be helped. Without
flattering myself, I may say I 'm sympathetic. Many another man before
this would have cast his perplexities to the winds and declared that Mr.
Hudson must lie on his bed as he had made it. Some men, perhaps, would
even say that I am making a mighty ado about nothing; that I have only
to give him rope, and he will tire himself out. But he tugs at his rope
altogether too hard for me to hold it comfortably. I certainly never
pretended the thing was anything else than an experiment; I promised
nothing, I answered for nothing; I only said the case was hopeful, and
that it would be a shame to neglect it. I have done my best, and if
the machine is running down I have a right to stand aside and let it
scuttle. Amen, amen! No, I can write that, but I can't feel it. I can't
be just; I can only be generous. I love the poor fellow and I can't give
him up. As for understanding him, that 's another matter; nowadays I
don't believe even you would. One's wits are sadly pestered over here,
I assure you, and I 'm in the way of seeing more than one puzzling
specimen of human nature. Roderick and Miss Light, between them!...
Have n't I already told you about Miss Light? Last winter everything was
perfection. Roderick struck out bravely, did really great things, and
proved himself, as I supposed, thoroughly solid. He was strong, he was
first-rate; I felt perfectly secure and sang private paeans of joy. We
had passed at a bound into the open sea, and left danger behind. But
in the summer I began to be puzzled, though I succeeded in not being
alarmed. When we came back to Rome, however, I saw that the tide had
turned and that we were close upon the rocks. It is, in fact, another
case of Ulysses alongside of the Sirens; only Roderick refuses to be
tied to the mast. He is the most extraordinary being, the strangest
mixture of qualities. I don't understand so much force going with so
much weakness--such a brilliant gift being subject to such lapses. The
poor fellow is incomplete, and it is really not his own fault; Nature
has given him the faculty out of hand and bidden him be hanged with it.
I never knew a man harder to advise or assist, if he is not in the mood
for listening. I suppose there is some key or other to his character,
but I try in vain to find it; and yet I can't believe that Providence
is so cruel as to have turned the lock and thrown the key away. He
perplexes me, as I say, to death, and though he tires out my patience,
he still fascinates me. Sometimes I think he has n't a grain of
conscience, and sometimes I think that, in a way, he has an excess. He
takes things at once too easily and too hard; he is both too lax and too
tense, too reckless and too ambitious, too cold and too passionate. He
has developed faster even than you prophesied, and for good and evil
alike he takes up a formidable space. There 's too much of him for me,
at any rate. Yes, he is hard; there is no mistake about that. He 's
inflexible, he 's brittle; and though he has plenty of spirit, plenty of
soul, he has n't what I call a heart. He has something that Miss Garland
took for one, and I 'm pretty sure she 's a judge. But she judged on
scanty evidence. He has something that Christina Light, here, makes
believe at times that she takes for one, but she is no judge at all! I
think it is established that, in the long run, egotism makes a failure
in conduct: is it also true that it makes a failure in the arts?...
Roderick's standard is immensely high; I must do him that justice. He
will do nothing beneath it, and while he is waiting for inspiration, his
imagination, his nerves, his senses must have something to amuse them.
This is a highly philosophical way of saying that he has taken to
dissipation, and that he has just been spending a month at Naples--a
city where 'pleasure' is actively cultivated--in very bad company.
Are they all like that, all the men of genius? There are a great many
artists here who hammer away at their trade with exemplary industry; in
fact I am surprised at their success in reducing the matter to a steady,
daily grind: but I really don't think that one of them has his exquisite
quality of talent. It is in the matter of quantity that he has broken
down. The bottle won't pour; he turns it upside down; it 's no use!
Sometimes he declares it 's empty--that he has done all he was made to
do. This I consider great nonsense; but I would nevertheless take him on
his own terms if it was only I that was concerned. But I keep thinking
of those two praying, trusting neighbors of yours, and I feel wretchedly
like a swindler. If his working mood came but once in five years I would
willingly wait for it and maintain him in leisure, if need be, in the
intervals; but that would be a sorry account to present to them. Five
years of this sort of thing, moreover, would effectually settle the
question. I wish he were less of a genius and more of a charlatan! He 's
too confoundedly all of one piece; he won't throw overboard a grain
of the cargo to save the rest. Fancy him thus with all his brilliant
personal charm, his handsome head, his careless step, his look as of a
nervous nineteenth-century Apollo, and you will understand that there
is mighty little comfort in seeing him in a bad way. He was tolerably
foolish last summer at Baden Baden, but he got on his feet, and for a
while he was steady. Then he began to waver again, and at last toppled
over. Now, literally, he 's lying prone. He came into my room last
night, miserably tipsy. I assure you, it did n't amuse me..... About
Miss Light it 's a long story. She is one of the great beauties of all
time, and worth coming barefoot to Rome, like the pilgrims of old, to
see. Her complexion, her glance, her step, her dusky tresses, may have
been seen before in a goddess, but never in a woman. And you may take
this for truth, because I 'm not in love with her. On the contrary! Her
education has been simply infernal. She is corrupt, perverse, as proud
as the queen of Sheba, and an appalling coquette; but she is generous,
and with patience and skill you may enlist her imagination in a good
cause as well as in a bad one. The other day I tried to manipulate it a
little. Chance offered me an interview to which it was possible to give
a serious turn, and I boldly broke ground and begged her to suffer
my poor friend to go in peace. After a good deal of finessing she
consented, and the next day, with a single word, packed him off to
Naples to drown his sorrow in debauchery. I have come to the conclusion
that she is more dangerous in her virtuous moods than in her vicious
ones, and that she probably has a way of turning her back which is the
most provoking thing in the world. She 's an actress, she could n't
forego doing the thing dramatically, and it was the dramatic touch that
made it fatal. I wished her, of course, to let him down easily; but
she desired to have the curtain drop on an attitude, and her attitudes
deprive inflammable young artists of their reason..... Roderick made an
admirable bust of her at the beginning of the winter, and a dozen women
came rushing to him to be done, mutatis mutandis, in the same style.
They were all great ladies and ready to take him by the hand, but he
told them all their faces did n't interest him, and sent them away
vowing his destruction."

At this point of his long effusion, Rowland had paused and put by his
letter. He kept it three days and then read it over. He was disposed at
first to destroy it, but he decided finally to keep it, in the hope that
it might strike a spark of useful suggestion from the flint of Cecilia's
good sense. We know he had a talent for taking advice. And then it might
be, he reflected, that his cousin's answer would throw some light on
Mary Garland's present vision of things. In his altered mood he added
these few lines:--

"I unburdened myself the other day of this monstrous load of perplexity;
I think it did me good, and I let it stand. I was in a melancholy
muddle, and I was trying to work myself free. You know I like
discussion, in a quiet way, and there is no one with whom I can have it
as quietly as with you, most sagacious of cousins! There is an excellent
old lady with whom I often chat, and who talks very much to the point.
But Madame Grandoni has disliked Roderick from the first, and if I were
to take her advice I would wash my hands of him. You will laugh at me
for my long face, but you would do that in any circumstances. I am half
ashamed of my letter, for I have a faith in my friend that is deeper
than my doubts. He was here last evening, talking about the Naples
Museum, the Aristides, the bronzes, the Pompeian frescoes, with such
a beautiful intelligence that doubt of the ultimate future seemed
blasphemy. I walked back to his lodging with him, and he was as mild
as midsummer moonlight. He has the ineffable something that charms and
convinces; my last word about him shall not be a harsh one."

Shortly after sending his letter, going one day into his friend's
studio, he found Roderick suffering from the grave infliction of a visit
from Mr. Leavenworth. Roderick submitted with extreme ill grace to being
bored, and he was now evidently in a state of high exasperation. He had
lately begun a representation of a lazzarone lounging in the sun; an
image of serene, irresponsible, sensuous life. The real lazzarone, he
had admitted, was a vile fellow; but the ideal lazzarone--and his own
had been subtly idealized--was a precursor of the millennium.

Mr. Leavenworth had apparently just transferred his unhurrying gaze to
the figure.

"Something in the style of the Dying Gladiator?" he sympathetically
observed.

"Oh no," said Roderick seriously, "he 's not dying, he 's only drunk!"

"Ah, but intoxication, you know," Mr. Leavenworth rejoined, "is not a
proper subject for sculpture. Sculpture should not deal with transitory
attitudes."

"Lying dead drunk is not a transitory attitude! Nothing is more
permanent, more sculpturesque, more monumental!"

"An entertaining paradox," said Mr. Leavenworth, "if we had time to
exercise our wits upon it. I remember at Florence an intoxicated figure
by Michael Angelo which seemed to me a deplorable aberration of a
great mind. I myself touch liquor in no shape whatever. I have traveled
through Europe on cold water. The most varied and attractive lists of
wines are offered me, but I brush them aside. No cork has ever been
drawn at my command!"

"The movement of drawing a cork calls into play a very pretty set
of muscles," said Roderick. "I think I will make a figure in that
position."

"A Bacchus, realistically treated! My dear young friend, never trifle
with your lofty mission. Spotless marble should represent virtue, not
vice!" And Mr. Leavenworth placidly waved his hand, as if to exorcise
the spirit of levity, while his glance journeyed with leisurely
benignity to another object--a marble replica of the bust of Miss Light.
"An ideal head, I presume," he went on; "a fanciful representation of
one of the pagan goddesses--a Diana, a Flora, a naiad or dryad? I often
regret that our American artists should not boldly cast off that extinct
nomenclature."

"She is neither a naiad nor a dryad," said Roderick, "and her name is as
good as yours or mine."

"You call her"--Mr. Leavenworth blandly inquired.

"Miss Light," Rowland interposed, in charity.

"Ah, our great American beauty! Not a pagan goddess--an American,
Christian lady! Yes, I have had the pleasure of conversing with Miss
Light. Her conversational powers are not remarkable, but her beauty
is of a high order. I observed her the other evening at a large party,
where some of the proudest members of the European aristocracy were
present--duchesses, princesses, countesses, and others distinguished by
similar titles. But for beauty, grace, and elegance my fair countrywoman
left them all nowhere. What women can compare with a truly refined
American lady? The duchesses the other night had no attractions for my
eyes; they looked coarse and sensual! It seemed to me that the tyranny
of class distinctions must indeed be terrible when such countenances
could inspire admiration. You see more beautiful girls in an hour on
Broadway than in the whole tour of Europe. Miss Light, now, on Broadway,
would excite no particular remark."

"She has never been there!" cried Roderick, triumphantly.

"I 'm afraid she never will be there. I suppose you have heard the news
about her."

"What news?" Roderick had stood with his back turned, fiercely poking
at his lazzarone; but at Mr. Leavenworth's last words he faced quickly
about.

"It 's the news of the hour, I believe. Miss Light is admired by the
highest people here. They tacitly recognize her superiority. She has had
offers of marriage from various great lords. I was extremely happy
to learn this circumstance, and to know that they all had been left
sighing. She has not been dazzled by their titles and their gilded
coronets. She has judged them simply as men, and found them wanting. One
of them, however, a young Neapolitan prince, I believe, has after a long
probation succeeded in making himself acceptable. Miss Light has at last
said yes, and the engagement has just been announced. I am not generally
a retailer of gossip of this description, but the fact was alluded to
an hour ago by a lady with whom I was conversing, and here, in Europe,
these conversational trifles usurp the lion's share of one's attention.
I therefore retained the circumstance. Yes, I regret that Miss Light
should marry one of these used-up foreigners. Americans should stand by
each other. If she wanted a brilliant match we could have fixed it for
her. If she wanted a fine fellow--a fine, sharp, enterprising modern
man--I would have undertaken to find him for her without going out of
the city of New York. And if she wanted a big fortune, I would have
found her twenty that she would have had hard work to spend: money
down--not tied up in fever-stricken lands and worm-eaten villas! What is
the name of the young man? Prince Castaway, or some such thing!"

It was well for Mr. Leavenworth that he was a voluminous and
imperturbable talker; for the current of his eloquence floated him
past the short, sharp, startled cry with which Roderick greeted his
"conversational trifle." The young man stood looking at him with parted
lips and an excited eye.

"The position of woman," Mr. Leavenworth placidly resumed, "is certainly
a very degraded one in these countries. I doubt whether a European
princess can command the respect which in our country is exhibited
toward the obscurest females. The civilization of a country should
be measured by the deference shown to the weaker sex. Judged by that
standard, where are they, over here?"

Though Mr. Leavenworth had not observed Roderick's emotion, it was not
lost upon Rowland, who was making certain uncomfortable reflections upon
it. He saw that it had instantly become one with the acute irritation
produced by the poor gentleman's oppressive personality, and that
an explosion of some sort was imminent. Mr. Leavenworth, with calm
unconsciousness, proceeded to fire the mine.

"And now for our Culture!" he said in the same sonorous tones, demanding
with a gesture the unveiling of the figure, which stood somewhat apart,
muffled in a great sheet.

Roderick stood looking at him for a moment with concentrated rancor, and
then strode to the statue and twitched off the cover. Mr. Leavenworth
settled himself into his chair with an air of flattered proprietorship,
and scanned the unfinished image. "I can conscientiously express myself
as gratified with the general conception," he said. "The figure has
considerable majesty, and the countenance wears a fine, open expression.
The forehead, however, strikes me as not sufficiently intellectual. In
a statue of Culture, you know, that should be the great point. The eye
should instinctively seek the forehead. Could n't you heighten it up a
little?"

Roderick, for all answer, tossed the sheet back over the statue. "Oblige
me, sir," he said, "oblige me! Never mention that thing again."

"Never mention it? Why my dear sir"--

"Never mention it. It 's an abomination!"

"An abomination! My Culture!"

"Yours indeed!" cried Roderick. "It 's none of mine. I disown it."

"Disown it, if you please," said Mr. Leavenworth sternly, "but finish it
first!"

"I 'd rather smash it!" cried Roderick.

"This is folly, sir. You must keep your engagements."

"I made no engagement. A sculptor is n't a tailor. Did you ever hear of
inspiration? Mine is dead! And it 's no laughing matter. You yourself
killed it."

"I--I--killed your inspiration?" cried Mr. Leavenworth, with the accent
of righteous wrath. "You 're a very ungrateful boy! If ever I encouraged
and cheered and sustained any one, I 'm sure I have done so to you."

"I appreciate your good intentions, and I don't wish to be uncivil. But
your encouragement is--superfluous. I can't work for you!"

"I call this ill-humor, young man!" said Mr. Leavenworth, as if he had
found the damning word.

"Oh, I 'm in an infernal humor!" Roderick answered.

"Pray, sir, is it my infelicitous allusion to Miss Light's marriage?"

"It 's your infelicitous everything! I don't say that to offend you;
I beg your pardon if it does. I say it by way of making our rupture
complete, irretrievable!"

Rowland had stood by in silence, but he now interfered. "Listen to me,"
he said, laying his hand on Roderick's arm. "You are standing on the
edge of a gulf. If you suffer anything that has passed to interrupt
your work on that figure, you take your plunge. It 's no matter that
you don't like it; you will do the wisest thing you ever did if you make
that effort of will necessary for finishing it. Destroy the statue then,
if you like, but make the effort. I speak the truth!"

Roderick looked at him with eyes that still inexorableness made almost
tender. "You too!" he simply said.

Rowland felt that he might as well attempt to squeeze water from a
polished crystal as hope to move him. He turned away and walked into the
adjoining room with a sense of sickening helplessness. In a few moments
he came back and found that Mr. Leavenworth had departed--presumably in
a manner somewhat portentous. Roderick was sitting with his elbows on
his knees and his head in his hands.

Rowland made one more attempt. "You decline to think of what I urge?"

"Absolutely."

"There's one more point--that you shouldn't, for a month, go to Mrs.
Light's."

"I go there this evening."

"That too is an utter folly."

"There are such things as necessary follies."

"You are not reflecting; you are speaking in passion."

"Why then do you make me speak?"

Rowland meditated a moment. "Is it also necessary that you should lose
the best friend you have?"

Roderick looked up. "That 's for you to settle!"

His best friend clapped on his hat and strode away; in a moment the door
closed behind him. Rowland walked hard for nearly a couple of hours.
He passed up the Corso, out of the Porta del Popolo and into the Villa
Borghese, of which he made a complete circuit. The keenness of his
irritation subsided, but it left him with an intolerable weight upon 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 ten minutes when he heard the jingle of the
door-bell and then a rustling and murmuring in the hall. The door of the
little saloon opened, but before the visitor appeared he had recognized
her voice. Christina Light swept forward, preceded by her poodle, and
almost filling the narrow parlor with the train of her dress. She was
colored here and there by the flicking firelight.

"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 regard 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."

He was going, but Roderick forcibly detained him. It would have been
but a rough way of expressing it to say that one could never know how
Roderick would take a thing. It had happened more than once that when
hit hard, deservedly, he had received the blow with touching gentleness.
On the other hand, he had often resented the softest 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 reflect."
And he walked up and down awhile, reflecting. At last he stopped, with
a look in his face that Rowland had not seen all winter. It was a
strikingly beautiful look.

"How strange it is," he said, "that the simplest devices are the last
that occur to one!" And he broke into a light laugh. "To see Mary
Garland is just what I want. And my mother--my mother can't hurt me
now."

"You will write, then?"

"I will telegraph. 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 which ply between
that port and New York. They would arrive, therefore, in less than a
month. Rowland passed this month of expectation in no very serene frame
of mind. His suggestion had had its source in the deepest places of his
agitated conscience; but there was something intolerable in the thought
of the suffering to which the event was probably subjecting those
undefended women. They had scraped together their scanty funds and
embarked, at twenty-four hours' notice, upon the dreadful sea, to
journey tremulously to shores darkened by the shadow of deeper alarms.
He could only promise himself to be their devoted friend and servant.
Preoccupied as he was, he was able to observe that expectation,
with Roderick, took a form which seemed singular even among his
characteristic singularities. If redemption--Roderick seemed to
reason--was to arrive with his mother and his affianced bride, these
last moments of error should be doubly erratic. He did nothing; but
inaction, with him, took on an unwonted air of gentle gayety. He laughed
and whistled and went often to Mrs. Light's; though Rowland knew not
in what fashion present circumstances had modified his relations with
Christina. The month ebbed away and Rowland daily expected to hear from
Roderick that he had gone to Leghorn to meet the ship. He heard nothing,
and late one evening, not having seen his friend in three or four days,
he stopped at Roderick's lodging to assure himself that he had gone at
last. 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 street-doorway on hearing
the advancing footstep of a person with whom he wished to avoid coming
into collision. While he did so he heard another footstep behind him,
and turning round found that Roderick in person 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, glanced at him out of
the darkness. He gave a cry--it was the face of Mary Garland. Her glance
flew past him to Roderick, and in a second a startled exclamation broke
from her own lips. It made Rowland turn again. Roderick stood there,
pale, apparently trying to speak, but saying nothing. His lips were
parted and he was wavering slightly with a strange movement--the
movement 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!

CHAPTER IX. Mary Garland

How it befell that Roderick had failed to be in Leghorn on his mother's
arrival never clearly transpired; for he undertook to give no elaborate
explanation of his fault. He never indulged in professions (touching
personal conduct) as to the future, or in remorse as to the past, and
as he would have asked no praise if he had traveled night and day to
embrace his mother as she set foot on shore, he made (in Rowland's
presence, at least) no apology for having left her to come in search of
him. It was to be said that, thanks to an unprecedentedly fine season,
the voyage of the two ladies had been surprisingly rapid, and that,
according to common probabilities, if Roderick had left Rome on the
morrow (as he declared that he had intended), he would have had a day or
two of waiting at Leghorn. Rowland's silent inference was that
Christina Light had beguiled him into letting the time slip, and it was
accompanied with a silent inquiry whether she had done so unconsciously
or maliciously. He had told her, presumably, that his mother and his
cousin were about to arrive; and it was pertinent to remember hereupon
that she was a young lady of mysterious impulses. Rowland heard in due
time the story of the adventures of the two ladies from Northampton.
Miss Garland's wish, at Leghorn, on finding they were left at the mercy
of circumstances, had been to telegraph to Roderick and await an
answer; for she knew that their arrival was a trifle premature. But Mrs.
Hudson's maternal heart had taken the alarm. Roderick's sending for them
was, to her imagination, a confession of illness, and his not being
at Leghorn, a proof of it; an hour's delay was therefore cruel both to
herself and to him. She insisted on immediate departure; and, unskilled
as they were in the mysteries of foreign (or even of domestic) travel,
they had hurried in trembling eagerness to Rome. They had arrived late
in the evening, and, knowing nothing of inns, had got into a cab
and proceeded to Roderick's lodging. At the door, poor Mrs. Hudson's
frightened anxiety had overcome her, and she had sat quaking and crying
in the vehicle, too weak to move. Miss Garland had bravely gone in,
groped her way up the dusky staircase, reached Roderick's door, and,
with the assistance of such acquaintance with the Italian tongue as she
had culled from a phrase-book during the calmer hours of the voyage,
had learned from the old woman who had her cousin's household economy in
charge that he was in the best of health and spirits, and had gone forth
a few hours before with his hat on his ear, per divertirsi.

These things Rowland learned during a visit he paid the two ladies the
evening after their arrival. Mrs. Hudson spoke of them at great length
and with an air of clinging confidence in Rowland which told him how
faithfully time had served him, in her imagination. But her fright was
over, though she was still catching her breath a little, like a person
dragged ashore out of waters uncomfortably deep. She was excessively
bewildered and confused, and seemed more than ever to demand a tender
handling from her friends. Before Miss Garland, Rowland was distinctly
conscious that he trembled. He wondered extremely what was going on in
her mind; what was her silent commentary on the incidents of the night
before. He wondered all the more, because he immediately perceived that
she was greatly changed since their parting, and that the change was by
no means for the worse. She was older, easier, more free, more like
a young woman who went sometimes into company. She had more beauty
as well, inasmuch as her beauty before had been the depth of her
expression, and the sources from which this beauty was fed had in
these two years evidently not wasted themselves. Rowland felt almost
instantly--he could hardly have said why: it was in her voice, in her
tone, in the air--that a total change had passed over her attitude
towards himself. She trusted him now, absolutely; whether or no she
liked him, she believed he was solid. He felt that during the coming
weeks he would need to be solid. Mrs. Hudson was at one of the smaller
hotels, and her sitting-room was frugally lighted by a couple of
candles. Rowland made the most of this dim illumination to try to detect
the afterglow of that frightened flash from Miss Garland's eyes
the night before. It had been but a flash, for what provoked it had
instantly vanished. Rowland had murmured a rapturous blessing on
Roderick's head, as he perceived him instantly apprehend the situation.
If he had been drinking, its gravity sobered him on the spot; in a
single moment he collected his wits. The next moment, with a ringing,
jovial cry, he was folding the young girl in his arms, and the next
he was beside his mother's carriage, half smothered in her sobs and
caresses. Rowland had recommended a hotel close at hand, and had then
discreetly withdrawn. Roderick was at this time doing his part superbly,
and Miss Garland's brow was serene. It was serene now, twenty-four hours
later; but nevertheless, her alarm had lasted an appreciable moment.
What had become of it? It had dropped down deep into her memory, and
it was lying there for the present in the shade. But with another
week, Rowland said to himself, it would leap erect again; the lightest
friction would strike a spark from it. Rowland thought he had schooled
himself to face the issue of Mary Garland's advent, casting it even in
a tragical phase; but in her personal presence--in which he found a
poignant mixture of the familiar and the strange--he seemed to face
it and all that it might bring with it for the first time. In vulgar
parlance, he stood uneasy in his shoes. He felt like walking on tiptoe,
not to arouse the sleeping shadows. He felt, indeed, almost like saying
that they might have their own way later, if they would only allow
to these first few days the clear light of ardent contemplation. For
Rowland at last was ardent, and all the bells within his soul were
ringing bravely in jubilee. Roderick, he learned, had been the whole
day with his mother, and had evidently responded to her purest trust.
He appeared to her appealing eyes still unspotted by the world. That
is what it is, thought Rowland, to be "gifted," to escape not only the
superficial, but the intrinsic penalties of misconduct. The two ladies
had spent the day within doors, resting from the fatigues of travel.
Miss Garland, Rowland suspected, was not so fatigued as she suffered
it to be assumed. She had remained with Mrs. Hudson, to attend to her
personal wants, which the latter seemed to think, now that she was in
a foreign land, with a southern climate and a Catholic religion, would
forthwith become very complex and formidable, though as yet they had
simply resolved themselves into a desire for a great deal of tea and for
a certain extremely familiar old black and white shawl across her feet,
as she lay on the sofa. But the sense of novelty was evidently strong
upon Miss Garland, and the light of expectation was in her eye. She was
restless and excited; she moved about the room and went often to the
window; she was observing keenly; she watched the Italian servants
intently, as they came and went; she had already had a long colloquy
with the French chambermaid, who had expounded her views on the Roman
question; she noted the small differences in the furniture, in the food,
in the sounds that came in from the street. Rowland felt, in all this,
that her intelligence, here, would have a great unfolding. He wished
immensely he might have a share in it; he wished he might show her Rome.
That, of course, would be Roderick's office. But he promised himself at
least to take advantage of off-hours.

"It behooves you to appreciate your good fortune," he said to her. "To
be young and elastic, and yet old enough and wise enough to discriminate
and reflect, and to come to Italy for the first time--that is one of the
greatest pleasures that life offers us. It is but right to remind you of
it, so that you make the most of opportunity and do not accuse yourself,
later, of having wasted the precious season."

Miss Garland looked at him, smiling intently, and went to the window
again. "I expect to enjoy it," she said. "Don't be afraid; I am not
wasteful."

"I am afraid we are not qualified, you know," said Mrs. Hudson. "We are
told that you must know so much, that you must have read so many books.
Our taste has not been cultivated. When I was a young lady at school, I
remember I had a medal, with a pink ribbon, for 'proficiency in Ancient
History'--the seven kings, or is it the seven hills? and Quintus Curtius
and Julius Caesar and--and that period, you know. I believe I have my
medal somewhere in a drawer, now, but I have forgotten all about the
kings. But after Roderick came to Italy we tried to learn something
about it. Last winter Mary used to read 'Corinne' to me in the evenings,
and in the mornings she used to read another book, to herself. What was
it, Mary, that book that was so long, you know,--in fifteen volumes?"

"It was Sismondi's Italian Republics," said Mary, simply.

Rowland could not help laughing; whereupon Mary blushed. "Did you finish
it?" he asked.

"Yes, and began another--a shorter one--Roscoe's Leo the Tenth."

"Did you find them interesting?"

"Oh yes."

"Do you like history?"

"Some of it."

"That 's a woman's answer! And do you like art?"

She paused a moment. "I have never seen it!"

"You have great advantages, now, my dear, with Roderick and Mr. Mallet,"
said Mrs. Hudson. "I am sure no young lady ever had such advantages. You
come straight to the highest authorities. Roderick, I suppose, will show
you the practice of art, and Mr. Mallet, perhaps, if he will be so
good, will show you the theory. As an artist's wife, you ought to know
something about it."

"One learns a good deal about it, here, by simply living," said Rowland;
"by going and coming about one's daily avocations."

"Dear, dear, how wonderful that we should be here in the midst of it!"
murmured Mrs. Hudson. "To think of art being out there in the streets!
We did n't see much of it last evening, as we drove from the depot. But
the streets were so dark and we were so frightened! But we are very easy
now; are n't we, Mary?"

"I am very happy," said Mary, gravely, and wandered back to the window
again.

Roderick came in at this moment and kissed his mother, and then
went over and joined Miss Garland. Rowland sat with Mrs. Hudson, who
evidently had a word which she deemed of some value for his private ear.
She followed Roderick with intensely earnest eyes.

"I wish to tell you, sir," she said, "how very grateful--how very
thankful--what a happy mother I am! I feel as if I owed it all to you,
sir. To find my poor boy so handsome, so prosperous, so elegant, so
famous--and ever to have doubted of you! What must you think of me? You
're our guardian angel, sir. I often say so to Mary."

Rowland wore, in response to this speech, a rather haggard brow. He
could only murmur that he was glad she found Roderick looking well.
He had of course promptly asked himself whether the best discretion
dictated that he should give her a word of warning--just turn the handle
of the door through which, later, disappointment might enter. He had
determined to say nothing, but simply to wait in silence for Roderick to
find effective inspiration in those confidently expectant eyes. It was
to be supposed that he was seeking for it now; he remained sometime at
the window with his cousin. But at last he turned away and came over to
the fireside with a contraction of the eyebrows which seemed to
intimate that Miss Garland's influence was for the moment, at least,
not soothing. She presently followed him, and for an instant Rowland
observed her watching him as if she thought him strange. "Strange
enough," thought Rowland, "he may seem to her, if he will!" Roderick
directed his glance to his friend with a certain peremptory air,
which--roughly interpreted--was equivalent to a request to share the
intellectual expense of entertaining the ladies. "Good heavens!" Rowland
cried within himself; "is he already tired of them?"

"To-morrow, of course, we must begin to put you through the mill,"
Roderick said to his mother. "And be it hereby known to Mallet that we
count upon him to turn the wheel."

"I will do as you please, my son," said Mrs. Hudson. "So long as I have
you with me I don't care where I go. We must not take up too much of Mr.
Mallet's time."

"His time is inexhaustible; he has nothing under the sun to do. Have
you, Rowland? If you had seen the big hole I have been making in it!
Where will you go first? You have your choice--from the Scala Santa to
the Cloaca Maxima."

"Let us take things in order," said Rowland. "We will go first to Saint
Peter's. Miss Garland, I hope you are impatient to see Saint Peter's."

"I would like to go first to Roderick's studio," said Miss Garland.

"It 's a very nasty place," said Roderick. "At your pleasure!"

"Yes, we must see your beautiful things before we can look contentedly
at anything else," said Mrs. Hudson.

"I have no beautiful things," said Roderick. "You may see what there is!
What makes you look so odd?"

This inquiry was abruptly addressed to his mother, who, in response,
glanced appealingly at Mary and raised a startled hand to her smooth
hair.

"No, it 's your face," said Roderick. "What has happened to it these two
years? It has changed its expression."

"Your mother has prayed a great deal," said Miss Garland, simply.

"I did n't suppose, of course, it was from doing anything bad! It makes
you a very good face--very interesting, very solemn. It has very fine
lines in it; something might be done with it." And Rowland held one of
the candles near the poor lady's head.

She was covered with confusion. "My son, my son," she said with dignity,
"I don't understand you."

In a flash all his old alacrity had come to him. "I suppose a man may
admire his own mother!" he cried. "If you please, madame, you 'll sit to
me for that head. I see it, I see it! I will make something that a queen
can't get done for her."

Rowland respectfully urged her to assent; he saw Roderick was in the
vein and would probably do something eminently original. She gave
her promise, at last, after many soft, inarticulate protests and a
frightened petition that she might be allowed to keep her knitting.

Rowland returned the next day, with plenty of zeal for the part Roderick
had assigned to him. It had been arranged that they should go to Saint
Peter's. Roderick was in high good-humor, and, in the carriage, was
watching his mother with a fine mixture of filial and professional
tenderness. Mrs. Hudson looked up mistrustfully at the tall, shabby
houses, and grasped the side of the barouche in her hand, as if she
were in a sail-boat, in dangerous waters. Rowland sat opposite to Miss
Garland. She was totally oblivious of her companions; from the moment
the carriage left the hotel, she sat gazing, wide-eyed and absorbed, at
the objects about them. If Rowland had felt disposed he might have made
a joke of her intense seriousness. From time to time he told her the
name of a place or a building, and she nodded, without looking at him.
When they emerged into the great square between Bernini's colonnades,
she laid her hand on Mrs. Hudson's arm and sank back in the carriage,
staring up at the vast yellow facade of the church. Inside the
church, Roderick gave his arm to his mother, and Rowland constituted
himself the especial guide of Miss Garland. He walked with her slowly
everywhere, and made the entire circuit, telling her all he knew of
the history of the building. This was a great deal, but she listened
attentively, keeping her eyes fixed on the dome. To Rowland himself
it had never seemed so radiantly sublime as at these moments; he felt
almost as if he had contrived it himself and had a right to be proud of
it. He left Miss Garland a while on the steps of the choir, where she
had seated herself to rest, and went to join their companions. Mrs.
Hudson was watching a great circle of tattered contadini, who were
kneeling before the image of Saint Peter. The fashion of their tatters
fascinated her; she stood gazing at them in a sort of terrified pity,
and could not be induced to look at anything else. Rowland went back to
Miss Garland and sat down beside her.

"Well, what do you think of Europe?" he asked, smiling.

"I think it 's horrible!" she said abruptly.

"Horrible?"

"I feel so strangely--I could almost cry."

"How is it that you feel?"

"So sorry for the poor past, that seems to have died here, in my heart,
in an hour!"

"But, surely, you 're pleased--you 're interested."

"I am overwhelmed. Here in a single hour, everything is changed. It is
as if a wall in my mind had been knocked down at a stroke. Before me
lies an immense new world, and it makes the old one, the poor little
narrow, familiar one I have always known, seem pitiful."

"But you did n't come to Rome to keep your eyes fastened on that narrow
little world. Forget it, turn your back on it, and enjoy all this."

"I want to enjoy it; but as I sat here just now, looking up at that
golden mist in the dome, I seemed to see in it the vague shapes of
certain people and things at home. To enjoy, as you say, as these things
demand of one to enjoy them, is to break with one's past. And breaking
is a pain!"

"Don't mind the pain, and it will cease to trouble you. Enjoy, enjoy; it
is your duty. Yours especially!"

"Why mine especially?"

"Because I am very sure that you have a mind capable of doing the
most liberal justice to everything interesting and beautiful. You are
extremely intelligent."

"You don't know," said Miss Garland, simply.

"In that matter one feels. I really think that I know better than you.
I don't want to seem patronizing, but I suspect that your mind is
susceptible of a great development. Give it the best company, trust it,
let it go!"

She looked away from him for some moments, down the gorgeous vista of
the great church. "But what you say," she said at last, "means change!"

"Change for the better!" cried Rowland.

"How can one tell? As one stands, one knows the worst. It seems to me
very frightful to develop," she added, with her complete smile.

"One is in for it in one way or another, and one might as well do it
with a good grace as with a bad! Since one can't escape life, it is
better to take it by the hand."

"Is this what you call life?" she asked.

"What do you mean by 'this'?"

"Saint Peter's--all this splendor, all Rome--pictures, ruins, statues,
beggars, monks."

"It is not all of it, but it is a large part of it. All these things
are impregnated with life; they are the fruits of an old and complex
civilization."

"An old and complex civilization: I am afraid I don't like that."

"Don't conclude on that point just yet. Wait till you have tested
it. While you wait, you will see an immense number of very beautiful
things--things that you are made to understand. They won't leave you as
they found you; then you can judge. Don't tell me I know nothing about
your understanding. I have a right to assume it."

Miss Garland gazed awhile aloft in the dome. "I am not sure I understand
that," she said.

"I hope, at least, that at a cursory glance it pleases you," said
Rowland. "You need n't be afraid to tell the truth. What strikes some
people is that it is so remarkably small."

"Oh, it's large enough; it's very wonderful. There are things in Rome,
then," she added in a moment, turning and looking at him, "that are
very, very beautiful?"

"Lots of them."

"Some of the most beautiful things in the world?"

"Unquestionably."

"What are they? which things have most beauty?"

"That is according to taste. I should say the statues."

"How long will it take to see them all? to know, at least, something
about them?"

"You can see them all, as far as mere seeing goes, in a fortnight. But
to know them is a thing for one's leisure. The more time you spend among
them, the more you care for them." After a moment's hesitation he went
on: "Why should you grudge time? It 's all in your way, since you are to
be an artist's wife."

"I have thought of that," she said. "It may be that I shall always live
here, among the most beautiful things in the world!"

"Very possibly! I should like to see you ten years hence."

"I dare say I shall seem greatly altered. But I am sure of one thing."

"Of what?"

"That for the most part I shall be quite the same. I ask nothing better
than to believe the fine things you say about my understanding, but even
if they are true, it won't matter. I shall be what I was made, what I am
now--a young woman from the country! The fruit of a civilization not old
and complex, but new and simple."

"I am delighted to hear it: that 's an excellent foundation."

"Perhaps, if you show me anything more, you will not always think so
kindly of it. Therefore I warn you."

"I am not frightened. I should like vastly to say something to you: Be
what you are, be what you choose; but do, sometimes, as I tell you."

If Rowland was not frightened, neither, perhaps, was Miss Garland; but
she seemed at least slightly disturbed. She proposed that they should
join their companions.

Mrs. Hudson spoke under her breath; she could not be accused of the want
of reverence sometimes attributed to Protestants in the great Catholic
temples. "Mary, dear," she whispered, "suppose we had to kiss that
dreadful brass toe. If I could only have kept our door-knocker, at
Northampton, as bright as that! I think it's so heathenish; but Roderick
says he thinks it 's sublime."

Roderick had evidently grown a trifle perverse. "It 's sublimer than
anything that your religion asks you to do!" he exclaimed.

"Surely our religion sometimes gives us very difficult duties," said
Miss Garland.

"The duty of sitting in a whitewashed meeting-house and listening to a
nasal Puritan! I admit that 's difficult. But it 's not sublime. I am
speaking of ceremonies, of forms. It is in my line, you know, to make
much of forms. I think this is a very beautiful one. Could n't you do
it?" he demanded, looking at his cousin.

She looked back at him intently and then shook her head. "I think not!"

"Why not?"

"I don't know; I could n't!"

During this little discussion our four friends were standing near the
venerable image of Saint Peter, and a squalid, savage-looking peasant,
a tattered ruffian of the most orthodox Italian aspect, had been
performing his devotions before it. He turned away, crossing himself,
and Mrs. Hudson gave a little shudder of horror.

"After that," she murmured, "I suppose he thinks he is as good as any
one! And here is another. Oh, what a beautiful person!"

A young lady had approached the sacred effigy, after having wandered
away from a group of companions. She kissed the brazen toe, touched it
with her forehead, and turned round, facing our friends. Rowland then
recognized Christina Light. He was stupefied: had she suddenly embraced
the Catholic faith? It was but a few weeks before that she had treated
him to a passionate profession of indifference. Had she entered the
church to put herself en regle with what was expected of a Princess
Casamassima? While Rowland was mentally asking these questions she was
approaching him and his friends, on her way to the great altar. At first
she did not perceive them.

Mary Garland had been gazing at her. "You told me," she said gently, to
Rowland, "that Rome contained some of the most beautiful things in the
world. This surely is one of them!"

At this moment Christina's eye met Rowland's and before giving him
any sign of recognition she glanced rapidly at his companions. She saw
Roderick, but she gave him no bow; she looked at Mrs. Hudson, she looked
at Mary Garland. At Mary Garland she looked fixedly, piercingly, from
head to foot, as the slow pace at which she was advancing made possible.
Then suddenly, as if she had perceived Roderick for the first time,
she gave him a charming nod, a radiant smile. In a moment he was at her
side. She stopped, and he stood talking to her; she continued to look at
Miss Garland.

"Why, Roderick knows her!" cried Mrs. Hudson, in an awe-struck whisper.
"I supposed she was some great princess."

"She is--almost!" said Rowland. "She is the most beautiful girl in
Europe, and Roderick has made her bust."

"Her bust? Dear, dear!" murmured Mrs. Hudson, vaguely shocked. "What a
strange bonnet!"

"She has very strange eyes," said Mary, and turned away.

The two ladies, with Rowland, began to descend toward the door of the
church. On their way they passed Mrs. Light, the Cavaliere, and the
poodle, and Rowland informed his companions of the relation in which
these personages stood to Roderick's young lady.

"Think of it, Mary!" said Mrs. Hudson. "What splendid people he must
know! No wonder he found Northampton dull!"

"I like the poor little old gentleman," said Mary.

"Why do you call him poor?" Rowland asked, struck with the observation.

"He seems so!" she answered simply.

As they were reaching the door they were overtaken by Roderick, whose
interview with Miss Light had perceptibly brightened his eye. "So you
are acquainted with princesses!" said his mother softly, as they passed
into the portico.

"Miss Light is not a princess!" said Roderick, curtly.

"But Mr. Mallet says so," urged Mrs. Hudson, rather disappointed.

"I meant that she was going to be!" said Rowland.

"It 's by no means certain that she is even going to be!" Roderick
answered.

"Ah," said Rowland, "I give it up!"

Roderick almost immediately demanded that his mother should sit to him,
at his studio, for her portrait, and Rowland ventured to add another
word of urgency. If Roderick's idea really held him, it was an immense
pity that his inspiration should be wasted; inspiration, in these days,
had become too precious a commodity. It was arranged therefore that, for
the present, during the mornings, Mrs. Hudson should place herself at
her son's service. This involved but little sacrifice, for the good
lady's appetite for antiquities was diminutive and bird-like, the
usual round of galleries and churches fatigued her, and she was glad
to purchase immunity from sight-seeing by a regular afternoon drive. It
became natural in this way that, Miss Garland having her mornings
free, Rowland should propose to be the younger lady's guide in whatever
explorations she might be disposed to make. She said she knew nothing
about it, but she had a great curiosity, and would be glad to see
anything that he would show her. Rowland could not find it in his heart
to accuse Roderick of neglect of the young girl; for it was natural that
the inspirations of a capricious man of genius, when they came, should
be imperious; but of course he wondered how Miss Garland felt, as the
young man's promised wife, on being thus expeditiously handed over to
another man to be entertained. However she felt, he was certain he would
know little about it. There had been, between them, none but indirect
allusions to her engagement, and Rowland had no desire to discuss it
more largely; for he had no quarrel with matters as they stood. They
wore the same delightful aspect through the lovely month of May, and the
ineffable charm of Rome at that period seemed but the radiant sympathy
of nature with his happy opportunity. The weather was divine; each
particular morning, as he walked from his lodging to Mrs. Hudson's
modest inn, seemed to have a blessing upon it. The elder lady had
usually gone off to the studio, and he found Miss Garland sitting alone
at the open window, turning the leaves of some book of artistic or
antiquarian reference that he had given her. She always had a smile, she
was always eager, alert, responsive. She might be grave by nature, she
might be sad by circumstance, she might have secret doubts and pangs,
but she was essentially young and strong and fresh and able to enjoy.
Her enjoyment was not especially demonstrative, but it was curiously
diligent. Rowland felt that it was not amusement and sensation that she
coveted, but knowledge--facts that she might noiselessly lay away, piece
by piece, in the perfumed darkness of her serious mind, so that, under
this head at least, she should not be a perfectly portionless bride. She
never merely pretended to understand; she let things go, in her modest
fashion, at the moment, but she watched them on their way, over the
crest of the hill, and when her fancy seemed not likely to be missed it
went hurrying after them and ran breathless at their side, as it were,
and begged them for the secret. Rowland took an immense satisfaction in
observing that she never mistook the second-best for the best, and
that when she was in the presence of a masterpiece, she recognized the
occasion as a mighty one. She said many things which he thought very
profound--that is, if they really had the fine intention he suspected.
This point he usually tried to ascertain; but he was obliged to proceed
cautiously, for in her mistrustful shyness it seemed to her that
cross-examination must necessarily be ironical. She wished to know just
where she was going--what she would gain or lose. This was partly on
account of a native intellectual purity, a temper of mind that had
not lived with its door ajar, as one might say, upon the high-road of
thought, for passing ideas to drop in and out at their pleasure; but had
made much of a few long visits from guests cherished and honored--guests
whose presence was a solemnity. But it was even more because she was
conscious of a sort of growing self-respect, a sense of devoting her
life not to her own ends, but to those of another, whose life would be
large and brilliant. She had been brought up to think a great deal of
"nature" and nature's innocent laws; but now Rowland had spoken to her
ardently of culture; her strenuous fancy had responded, and she was
pursuing culture into retreats where the need for some intellectual
effort gave a noble severity to her purpose. She wished to be very sure,
to take only the best, knowing it to be the best. There was something
exquisite in this labor of pious self-adornment, and Rowland helped it,
though its fruits were not for him. In spite of her lurking rigidity
and angularity, it was very evident that a nervous, impulsive sense
of beauty was constantly at play in her soul, and that her actual
experience of beautiful things moved her in some very deep places. For
all that she was not demonstrative, that her manner was simple, and her
small-talk of no very ample flow; for all that, as she had said, she was
a young woman from the country, and the country was West Nazareth, and
West Nazareth was in its way a stubborn little fact, she was feeling
the direct influence of the great amenities of the world, and they were
shaping her with a divinely intelligent touch. "Oh exquisite virtue of
circumstance!" cried Rowland to himself, "that takes us by the hand
and leads us forth out of corners where, perforce, our attitudes are a
trifle contracted, and beguiles us into testing mistrusted faculties!"
When he said to Mary Garland that he wished he might see her ten years
hence, he was paying mentally an equal compliment to circumstance and
to the girl herself. Capacity was there, it could be freely trusted;
observation would have but to sow its generous seed. "A superior
woman"--the idea had harsh associations, but he watched it imaging
itself in the vagueness of the future with a kind of hopeless
confidence.

They went a great deal to Saint Peter's, for which Rowland had an
exceeding affection, a large measure of which he succeeded in infusing
into his companion. She confessed very speedily that to climb the long,
low, yellow steps, beneath the huge florid facade, and then to push
the ponderous leathern apron of the door, to find one's self confronted
with that builded, luminous sublimity, was a sensation of which the
keenness renewed itself with surprising generosity. In those days the
hospitality of the Vatican had not been curtailed, and it was an easy
and delightful matter to pass from the gorgeous church to the solemn
company of the antique marbles. Here Rowland had with his companion a
great deal of talk, and found himself expounding aesthetics a perte de
vue. He discovered that she made notes of her likes and dislikes in a
new-looking little memorandum book, and he wondered to what extent she
reported his own discourse. These were charming hours. The galleries had
been so cold all winter that Rowland had been an exile from them; but
now that the sun was already scorching in the great square between the
colonnades, where the twin fountains flashed almost fiercely, the marble
coolness of the long, image-bordered vistas made them a delightful
refuge. The great herd of tourists had almost departed, and our two
friends often found themselves, for half an hour at a time, in sole and
tranquil possession of the beautiful Braccio Nuovo. Here and there was
an open window, where they lingered and leaned, looking out into the
warm, dead air, over the towers of the city, at the soft-hued, historic
hills, at the stately shabby gardens of the palace, or at some sunny,
empty, grass-grown court, lost in the heart of the labyrinthine pile.
They went sometimes into the chambers painted by Raphael, and of course
paid their respects to the Sistine Chapel; but Mary's evident preference
was to linger among the statues. Once, when they were standing before
that noblest of sculptured portraits, the so-called Demosthenes, in the
Braccio Nuovo, she made the only spontaneous allusion to her projected
marriage, direct or indirect, that had yet fallen from her lips. "I am
so glad," she said, "that Roderick is a sculptor and not a painter."

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
have 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!"

"Well, I can only say that you don't know what you are giving up."

Roderick gave a quickened glance. "Do you know, so well?"

"I admire her immeasurably."

Roderick smiled, we may almost say sympathetically. "You have not wasted
time."

Rowland's thoughts were crowding upon him fast. If Roderick was
resolute, why oppose him? If Mary was to be sacrificed, why, in that
way, try to save her? There was another way; it only needed a little
presumption to make it possible. Rowland tried, mentally, to summon
presumption to his aid; but whether it came or not, it found conscience
there before it. Conscience had only three words, but they were cogent.
"For her sake--for her sake," it dumbly murmured, and Rowland resumed
his argument. "I don't know what I would n't do," he said, "rather than
that Miss Garland should suffer."

"There is one thing to be said," Roderick answered reflectively. "She is
very strong."

"Well, then, if she 's strong, believe that with a longer chance, a
better chance, she will still regain your affection."

"Do you know what you ask?" cried Roderick. "Make love to a girl I
hate?"

"You hate?"

"As her lover, I should hate her!"

"Listen to me!" said Rowland with vehemence.

"No, listen you to me! Do you really urge my marrying a woman who would
bore me to death? I would let her know it in very good season, and then
where would she be?"

Rowland walked the length of the room a couple of times and then stopped
suddenly. "Go your way, then! Say all this to her, not to me!"

"To her? I am afraid of her; I want you to help me."

"My dear Roderick," said Rowland with an eloquent smile, "I can help you
no more!"

Roderick frowned, hesitated a moment, and then took his hat. "Oh, well,"
he said, "I am not so afraid of her as all that!" And he turned, as if
to depart.

"Stop!" cried Rowland, as he laid his hand on the door.

Roderick paused and stood waiting, with his irritated brow.

"Come back; sit down there and listen to me. Of anything you were to say
in your present state of mind you would live most bitterly to repent.
You don't know what you really think; you don't know what you really
feel. You don't know your own mind; you don't do justice to Miss
Garland. All this is impossible here, under these circumstances. You 're
blind, you 're deaf, you 're under a spell. To break it, you must leave
Rome."

"Leave Rome! Rome was never so dear to me."

"That 's not of the smallest consequence. Leave it instantly."

"And where shall I go?"

"Go to some place where you may be alone with your mother and Miss
Garland."

"Alone? You will not come?"

"Oh, if you desire it, I will come."

Roderick inclining his head a little, looked at his friend askance. "I
don't understand you," he said; "I wish you liked Miss Garland either a
little less, or a little more."

Rowland felt himself coloring, but he paid no heed to Roderick's speech.
"You ask me to help you," he went on. "On these present conditions I can
do nothing. But if you will postpone all decision as to the continuance
of your engagement a couple of months longer, and meanwhile leave Rome,
leave Italy, I will do what I can to 'help you,' as you say, in the
event of your still wishing to break it."

"I must do without your help then! Your conditions are impossible. I
will leave Rome at the time I have always intended--at the end of June.
My rooms and my mother's are taken till then; all my arrangements are
made accordingly. Then, I will depart; not before."

"You are not frank," said Rowland. "Your real reason for staying has
nothing to do with your rooms."

Roderick's face betrayed neither embarrassment nor resentment. "If I 'm
not frank, it 's for the first time in my life. Since you know so much
about my real reason, let me hear it! No, stop!" he suddenly added, "I
won't trouble you. You are right, I have a motive. On the twenty-fourth
of June Miss Light is to be married. I take an immense interest in all
that concerns her, and I wish to be present at her wedding."

"But you said the other day at Saint Peter's that it was by no means
certain her marriage would take place."

"Apparently I was wrong: the invitations, I am told, are going out."

Rowland felt that it would be utterly vain to remonstrate, and that the
only thing for him was to make the best terms possible. "If I offer no
further opposition to your waiting for Miss Light's marriage," he said,
"will you promise, meanwhile and afterwards, for a certain period, to
defer to my judgment--to say nothing that may be a cause of suffering to
Miss Garland?"

"For a certain period? What period?" Roderick demanded.

"Ah, don't drive so close a bargain! Don't you understand that I have
taken you away from her, that I suffer in every nerve in consequence,
and that I must do what I can to restore you?"

"Do what you can, then," said Roderick gravely, putting out his hand.
"Do what you can!" His tone and his hand-shake seemed to constitute a
promise, and upon this they parted.

Roderick's bust of his mother, whether or no it was a discharge of what
he called the filial debt, was at least a most admirable production.
Rowland, at the time it was finished, met Gloriani one evening, and this
unscrupulous genius immediately began to ask questions about it. "I am
told our high-flying friend has come down," he said. "He has been doing
a queer little old woman."

"A queer little old woman!" Rowland exclaimed. "My dear sir, she is
Hudson's mother."

"All the more reason for her being queer! It is a bust for terra-cotta,
eh?"

"By no means; it is for marble."

"That 's a pity. It was described to me as a charming piece of
quaintness: a little demure, thin-lipped old lady, with her head on
one side, and the prettiest wrinkles in the world--a sort of fairy
godmother."

"Go and see it, and judge for yourself," said Rowland.

"No, I see I shall be disappointed. It 's quite the other thing, the
sort of thing they put into the campo-santos. I wish that boy would
listen to me an hour!"

But a day or two later Rowland met him again in the street, and, as
they were near, proposed they should adjourn to Roderick's studio.
He consented, and on entering they found the young master. Roderick's
demeanor to Gloriani was never conciliatory, and on this occasion
supreme indifference was apparently all he had to offer. But Gloriani,
like a genuine connoisseur, cared nothing for his manners; he cared only
for his skill. In the bust of Mrs. Hudson there was something almost
touching; it was an exquisite example of a ruling sense of beauty. The
poor lady's small, neat, timorous face had certainly no great character,
but Roderick had reproduced its sweetness, its mildness, its minuteness,
its still maternal passion, with the most unerring art. It was perfectly
unflattered, and yet admirably tender; it was the poetry of fidelity.
Gloriani stood looking at it a long time most intently. Roderick
wandered away into the neighboring room.

"I give it up!" said the sculptor at last. "I don't understand it."

"But you like it?" said Rowland.

"Like it? It 's a pearl of pearls. Tell me this," he added: "is he very
fond of his mother; is he a very good son?" And he gave Rowland a sharp
look.

"Why, she adores him," said Rowland, smiling.

"That 's not an answer! But it 's none of my business. Only if I, in his
place, being suspected of having--what shall I call it?--a cold heart,
managed to do that piece of work, oh, oh! I should be called a pretty
lot of names. Charlatan, poseur, arrangeur! But he can do as he chooses!
My dear young man, I know you don't like me," he went on, as Roderick
came back. "It 's a pity; you are strong enough not to care about me at
all. You are very strong."

"Not at all," said Roderick curtly. "I am very weak!"

"I told you last year that you would n't keep it up. I was a great ass.
You will!"

"I beg your pardon--I won't!" retorted Roderick.

"Though I 'm a great ass, all the same, eh? Well, call me what you will,
so long as you turn out this sort of thing! I don't suppose it makes any
particular difference, but I should like to say now I believe in you."

Roderick stood looking at him for a moment with a strange hardness in
his face. It flushed slowly, and two glittering, angry tears filled his
eyes. It was the first time Rowland had ever seen them there; he saw
them but once again. Poor Gloriani, he was sure, had never in his life
spoken with less of irony; but to Roderick there was evidently a sense
of mockery in his profession of faith. He turned away with a muttered,
passionate imprecation. Gloriani was accustomed to deal with complex
problems, but this time he was hopelessly puzzled. "What 's the matter
with him?" he asked, simply.

Rowland gave a sad smile, and touched his forehead. "Genius, I suppose."

Gloriani sent another parting, lingering look at the bust of Mrs.
Hudson. "Well, it 's deuced perfect, it 's deuced simple; I do believe
in him!" he said. "But I 'm glad I 'm not a genius. It makes," he added
with a laugh, as he looked for Roderick to wave him good-by, and saw his
back still turned, "it makes a more sociable studio."

Rowland had purchased, as he supposed, temporary tranquillity for Mary
Garland; but his own humor in these days was not especially peaceful. He
was attempting, in a certain sense, to lead the ideal life, and he found
it, at the least, not easy. The days passed, but brought with them no
official invitation to Miss Light's wedding. He occasionally met her,
and he occasionally met Prince Casamassima; but always separately,
never together. They were apparently taking their happiness in the
inexpressive manner proper to people of social eminence. Rowland
continued to see Madame Grandoni, for whom he felt a confirmed
affection. He had always talked to her with frankness, but now he made
her a confidant of all his hidden dejection. Roderick and Roderick's
concerns had been a common theme with him, and it was in the natural
course to talk of Mrs. Hudson's arrival and Miss Garland's fine smile.
Madame Grandoni was an intelligent listener, and she lost no time in
putting his case for him in a nutshell. "At one moment you tell me the
girl is plain," she said; "the next you tell me she 's pretty. I will
invite them, and I shall see for myself. But one thing is very clear:
you are in love with her."

Rowland, for all answer, glanced round to see that no one heard her.

"More than that," she added, "you have been in love with her these two
years. There was that certain something about you!... I knew you were a
mild, sweet fellow, but you had a touch of it more than was natural.
Why did n't you tell me at once? You would have saved me a great deal of
trouble. And poor Augusta Blanchard too!" And herewith Madame Grandoni
communicated a pertinent fact: Augusta Blanchard and Mr. Leavenworth
were going to make a match. The young lady had been staying for a month
at Albano, and Mr. Leavenworth had been dancing attendance. The event
was a matter of course. Rowland, who had been lately reproaching himself
with a failure of attention to Miss Blanchard's doings, made some such
observation.

"But you did not find it so!" cried his hostess. "It was a matter of
course, perhaps, that Mr. Leavenworth, who seems to be going about
Europe with the sole view of picking up furniture for his 'home,' as he
calls it, should think Miss Blanchard a very handsome piece; but it was
not a matter of course--or it need n't have been--that she should be
willing to become a sort of superior table-ornament. She would have
accepted you if you had tried."

"You are supposing the insupposable," said Rowland. "She never gave me a
particle of encouragement."

"What would you have had her do? The poor girl did her best, and I am
sure that when she accepted Mr. Leavenworth she thought of you."

"She thought of the pleasure her marriage would give me."

"Ay, pleasure indeed! She is a thoroughly good girl, but she has her