Part 11 (1/2)
”My dear, my dear!” repeated the mother in deprecating accents, but with a significant glance at Rowland which seemed to bespeak his attention to the glory of possessing a daughter who could deal in that fas.h.i.+on with the aristocracy.
Rowland remembered that when their unknown visitors had pa.s.sed before them, a year previous, in the Villa Ludovisi, Roderick and he had exchanged conjectures as to their nationality and social quality.
Roderick had declared that they were old-world people; but Rowland now needed no telling to feel that he might claim the elder lady as a fellow-countrywoman. She was a person of what is called a great deal of presence, with the faded traces, artfully revived here and there, of once brilliant beauty. Her daughter had come lawfully by her loveliness, but Rowland mentally made the distinction that the mother was silly and that the daughter was not. The mother had a very silly mouth--a mouth, Rowland suspected, capable of expressing an inordinate degree of unreason. The young girl, in spite of her childish satisfaction in her poodle, was not a person of feeble understanding. Rowland received an impression that, for reasons of her own, she was playing a part. What was the part and what were her reasons? She was interesting; Rowland wondered what were her domestic secrets. If her mother was a daughter of the great Republic, it was to be supposed that the young girl was a flower of the American soil; but her beauty had a robustness and tone uncommon in the somewhat facile loveliness of our western maidenhood.
She spoke with a vague foreign accent, as if she had spent her life in strange countries. The little Italian apparently divined Rowland's mute imaginings, for he presently stepped forward, with a bow like a master of ceremonies. ”I have not done my duty,” he said, ”in not announcing these ladies. Mrs. Light, Miss Light!”
Rowland was not materially the wiser for this information, but Roderick was aroused by it to the exercise of some slight hospitality. He altered the light, pulled forward two or three figures, and made an apology for not having more to show. ”I don't pretend to have anything of an exhibition--I am only a novice.”
”Indeed?--a novice! For a novice this is very well,” Mrs. Light declared. ”Cavaliere, we have seen nothing better than this.”
The Cavaliere smiled rapturously. ”It is stupendous!” he murmured. ”And we have been to all the studios.”
”Not to all--heaven forbid!” cried Mrs. Light. ”But to a number that I have had pointed out by artistic friends. I delight in studios: they are the temples of the beautiful here below. And if you are a novice, Mr.
Hudson,” she went on, ”you have already great admirers. Half a dozen people have told us that yours were among the things to see.” This gracious speech went unanswered; Roderick had already wandered across to the other side of the studio and was revolving about Miss Light. ”Ah, he 's gone to look at my beautiful daughter; he is not the first that has had his head turned,” Mrs. Light resumed, lowering her voice to a confidential undertone; a favor which, considering the shortness of their acquaintance, Rowland was bound to appreciate. ”The artists are all crazy about her. When she goes into a studio she is fatal to the pictures. And when she goes into a ball-room what do the other women say? Eh, Cavaliere?”
”She is very beautiful,” Rowland said, gravely.
Mrs. Light, who through her long, gold-cased gla.s.s was looking a little at everything, and at nothing as if she saw it, interrupted her random murmurs and exclamations, and surveyed Rowland from head to foot. She looked at him all over; apparently he had not been mentioned to her as a feature of Roderick's establishment. It was the gaze, Rowland felt, which the vigilant and ambitious mamma of a beautiful daughter has always at her command for well-dressed young men of candid physiognomy.
Her inspection in this case seemed satisfactory. ”Are you also an artist?” she inquired with an almost caressing inflection. It was clear that what she meant was something of this kind: ”Be so good as to a.s.sure me without delay that you are really the young man of substance and amiability that you appear.”
But Rowland answered simply the formal question--not the latent one.
”Dear me, no; I am only a friend of Mr. Hudson.”
Mrs. Light, with a sigh, returned to the statues, and after mistaking the Adam for a gladiator, and the Eve for a Pocahontas, declared that she could not judge of such things unless she saw them in the marble.
Rowland hesitated a moment, and then speaking in the interest of Roderick's renown, said that he was the happy possessor of several of his friend's works and that she was welcome to come and see them at his rooms. She bade the Cavaliere make a note of his address. ”Ah, you 're a patron of the arts,” she said. ”That 's what I should like to be if I had a little money. I delight in beauty in every form. But all these people ask such monstrous prices. One must be a millionaire, to think of such things, eh? Twenty years ago my husband had my portrait painted, here in Rome, by Papucci, who was the great man in those days. I was in a ball dress, with all my jewels, my neck and arms, and all that. The man got six hundred francs, and thought he was very well treated. Those were the days when a family could live like princes in Italy for five thousand scudi a year. The Cavaliere once upon a time was a great dandy--don't blush, Cavaliere; any one can see that, just as any one can see that I was once a pretty woman! Get him to tell you what he made a figure upon. The railroads have brought in the vulgarians. That 's what I call it now--the invasion of the vulgarians! What are poor we to do?”
Rowland had begun to murmur some remedial proposition, when he was interrupted by the voice of Miss Light calling across the room, ”Mamma!”
”My own love?”
”This gentleman wishes to model my bust. Please speak to him.”
The Cavaliere gave a little chuckle. ”Already?” he cried.
Rowland looked round, equally surprised at the prompt.i.tude of the proposal. Roderick stood planted before the young girl with his arms folded, looking at her as he would have done at the Medicean Venus. He never paid compliments, and Rowland, though he had not heard him speak, could imagine the startling distinctness with which he made his request.
”He saw me a year ago,” the young girl went on, ”and he has been thinking of me ever since.” Her tone, in speaking, was peculiar; it had a kind of studied inexpressiveness, which was yet not the vulgar device of a drawl.
”I must make your daughter's bust--that 's all, madame!” cried Roderick, with warmth.
”I had rather you made the poodle's,” said the young girl. ”Is it very tiresome? I have spent half my life sitting for my photograph, in every conceivable att.i.tude and with every conceivable coiffure. I think I have posed enough.”
”My dear child,” said Mrs. Light, ”it may be one's duty to pose. But as to my daughter's sitting to you, sir--to a young sculptor whom we don't know--it is a matter that needs reflection. It is not a favor that 's to be had for the mere asking.”
”If I don't make her from life,” said Roderick, with energy, ”I will make her from memory, and if the thing 's to be done, you had better have it done as well as possible.”
”Mamma hesitates,” said Miss Light, ”because she does n't know whether you mean she shall pay you for the bust. I can a.s.sure you that she will not pay you a sou.”
”My darling, you forget yourself,” said Mrs. Light, with an attempt at majestic severity. ”Of course,” she added, in a moment, with a change of note, ”the bust would be my own property.”