Part 12 (2/2)
Miss Light looked for some moments at Roderick's statues. ”Yes,” she said, ”they are not so silly as most of the things we have seen. They have no chic, and yet they are beautiful.”
”You describe them perfectly,” said Rowland. ”They are beautiful, and yet they have no chic. That 's it!”
”If he will promise to put none into my bust, I have a mind to let him make it. A request made in those terms deserves to be granted.”
”In what terms?”
”Did n't you hear him? 'Mademoiselle, you almost satisfy my conception of the beautiful. I must model your bust.' That almost should be rewarded. He is like me; he likes to face the truth. I think we should get on together.”
The Cavaliere approached Rowland, to express the pleasure he had derived from his beautiful ”collection.” His smile was exquisitely bland, his accent appealing, caressing, insinuating. But he gave Rowland an odd sense of looking at a little waxen image, adjusted to perform certain gestures and emit certain sounds. It had once contained a soul, but the soul had leaked out. Nevertheless, Rowland reflected, there are more profitless things than mere sound and gesture, in a consummate Italian.
And the Cavaliere, too, had soul enough left to desire to speak a few words on his own account, and call Rowland's attention to the fact that he was not, after all, a hired cicerone, but an ancient Roman gentleman.
Rowland felt sorry for him; he hardly knew why. He a.s.sured him in a friendly fas.h.i.+on that he must come again; that his house was always at his service. The Cavaliere bowed down to the ground. ”You do me too much honor,” he murmured. ”If you will allow me--it is not impossible!”
Mrs. Light, meanwhile, had prepared to depart. ”If you are not afraid to come and see two quiet little women, we shall be most happy!” she said.
”We have no statues nor pictures--we have nothing but each other. Eh, darling?”
”I beg your pardon,” said Christina.
”Oh, and the Cavaliere,” added her mother.
”The poodle, please!” cried the young girl.
Rowland glanced at the Cavaliere; he was smiling more blandly than ever.
A few days later Rowland presented himself, as civility demanded, at Mrs. Light's door. He found her living in one of the stately houses of the Via dell' Angelo Custode, and, rather to his surprise, was told she was at home. He pa.s.sed through half a dozen rooms and was ushered into an immense saloon, at one end of which sat the mistress of the establishment, with a piece of embroidery. She received him very graciously, and then, pointing mysteriously to a large screen which was unfolded across the embrasure of one of the deep windows, ”I am keeping guard!” she said. Rowland looked interrogative; whereupon she beckoned him forward and motioned him to look behind the screen. He obeyed, and for some moments stood gazing. Roderick, with his back turned, stood before an extemporized pedestal, ardently shaping a formless ma.s.s of clay. Before him sat Christina Light, in a white dress, with her shoulders bare, her magnificent hair twisted into a cla.s.sic coil, and her head admirably poised. Meeting Rowland's gaze, she smiled a little, only with her deep gray eyes, without moving. She looked divinely beautiful.
CHAPTER V. Christina
The brilliant Roman winter came round again, and Rowland enjoyed it, in a certain way, more deeply than before. He grew at last to feel that sense of equal possession, of intellectual nearness, which it belongs to the peculiar magic of the ancient city to infuse into minds of a cast that she never would have produced. He became pa.s.sionately, unreasoningly fond of all Roman sights and sensations, and to breathe the Roman atmosphere began to seem a needful condition of being. He could not have defined and explained the nature of his great love, nor have made up the sum of it by the addition of his calculable pleasures.
It was a large, vague, idle, half-profitless emotion, of which perhaps the most pertinent thing that may be said is that it enforced a sort of oppressive reconciliation to the present, the actual, the sensuous--to life on the terms that there offered themselves. It was perhaps for this very reason that, in spite of the charm which Rome flings over one's mood, there ran through Rowland's meditations an undertone of melancholy, natural enough in a mind which finds its horizon insidiously limited to the finite, even in very picturesque forms. Whether it is one that tacitly concedes to the Roman Church the monopoly of a guarantee of immortality, so that if one is indisposed to bargain with her for the precious gift, one must do without it altogether; or whether in an atmosphere so heavily weighted with echoes and memories one grows to believe that there is nothing in one's consciousness that is not foredoomed to moulder and crumble and become dust for the feet, and possible malaria for the lungs, of future generations--the fact at least remains that one parts half-willingly with one's hopes in Rome, and misses them only under some very exceptional stress of circ.u.mstance. For this reason one may perhaps say that there is no other place in which one's daily temper has such a mellow serenity, and none, at the same time, in which acute attacks of depression are more intolerable. Rowland found, in fact, a perfect response to his prevision that to live in Rome was an education to one's senses and one's imagination, but he sometimes wondered whether this was not a questionable gain in case of one's not being prepared to live wholly by one's imagination and one's senses. The tranquil profundity of his daily satisfaction seemed sometimes to turn, by a mysterious inward impulse, and face itself with questioning, admonis.h.i.+ng, threatening eyes. ”But afterwards...?” it seemed to ask, with a long reverberation; and he could give no answer but a shy affirmation that there was no such thing as afterwards, and a hope, divided against itself, that his actual way of life would last forever.
He often felt heavy-hearted; he was sombre without knowing why; there were no visible clouds in his heaven, but there were cloud-shadows on his mood. Shadows projected, they often were, without his knowing it, by an undue apprehension that things after all might not go so ideally well with Roderick. When he understood his anxiety it vexed him, and he rebuked himself for taking things unmanfully hard. If Roderick chose to follow a crooked path, it was no fault of his; he had given him, he would continue to give him, all that he had offered him--friends.h.i.+p, sympathy, advice. He had not undertaken to provide him with unflagging strength of purpose, nor to stand bondsman for unqualified success.
If Rowland felt his roots striking and spreading in the Roman soil, Roderick also surrendered himself with renewed abandon to the local influence. More than once he declared to his companion that he meant to live and die within the shadow of Saint Peter's, and that he cared little if he never again drew breath in American air. ”For a man of my temperament, Rome is the only possible place,” he said; ”it 's better to recognize the fact early than late. So I shall never go home unless I am absolutely forced.”
”What is your idea of 'force'?” asked Rowland, smiling. ”It seems to me you have an excellent reason for going home some day or other.”
”Ah, you mean my engagement?” Roderick answered with unaverted eyes.
”Yes, I am distinctly engaged, in Northampton, and impatiently waited for!” And he gave a little sympathetic sigh. ”To reconcile Northampton and Rome is rather a problem. Mary had better come out here. Even at the worst I have no intention of giving up Rome within six or eight years, and an engagement of that duration would be rather absurd.”
”Miss Garland could hardly leave your mother,” Rowland observed.
”Oh, of course my mother should come. I think I will suggest it in my next letter. It will take her a year or two to make up her mind to it, but if she consents it will brighten her up. It 's too small a life, over there, even for a timid old lady. It is hard to imagine,” he added, ”any change in Mary being a change for the better; but I should like her to take a look at the world and have her notions stretched a little. One is never so good, I suppose, but that one can improve a little.”
”If you wish your mother and Miss Garland to come,” Rowland suggested, ”you had better go home and bring them.”
”Oh, I can't think of leaving Europe, for many a day,” Roderick answered. ”At present it would quite break the charm. I am just beginning to profit, to get used to things and take them naturally. I am sure the sight of Northampton Main Street would permanently upset me.”
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