Part 13 (1/2)
It was rea.s.suring to hear that Roderick, in his own view, was but ”just beginning” to spread his wings, and Rowland, if he had had any forebodings, might have suffered them to be modified by this declaration. This was the first time since their meeting at Geneva that Roderick had mentioned Miss Garland's name, but the ice being broken, he indulged for some time afterward in frequent allusions to his betrothed, which always had an accent of scrupulous, of almost studied, consideration. An uninitiated observer, hearing him, would have imagined her to be a person of a certain age--possibly an affectionate maiden aunt--who had once done him a kindness which he highly appreciated: perhaps presented him with a check for a thousand dollars. Rowland noted the difference between his present frankness and his reticence during the first six months of his engagement, and sometimes wondered whether it was not rather an anomaly that he should expatiate more largely as the happy event receded. He had wondered over the whole matter, first and last, in a great many different ways, and looked at it in all possible lights. There was something terribly hard to explain in the fact of his having fallen in love with his cousin. She was not, as Rowland conceived her, the sort of girl he would have been likely to fancy, and the operation of sentiment, in all cases so mysterious, was particularly so in this one. Just why it was that Roderick should not logically have fancied Miss Garland, his companion would have been at loss to say, but I think the conviction had its roots in an unformulated comparison between himself and the accepted suitor. Roderick and he were as different as two men could be, and yet Roderick had taken it into his head to fall in love with a woman for whom he himself had been keeping in reserve, for years, a profoundly characteristic pa.s.sion. That if he chose to conceive a great notion of the merits of Roderick's mistress, the irregularity here was hardly Roderick's, was a view of the case to which poor Rowland did scanty justice. There were women, he said to himself, whom it was every one's business to fall in love with a little--women beautiful, brilliant, artful, easily fascinating. Miss Light, for instance, was one of these; every man who spoke to her did so, if not in the language, at least with something of the agitation, the divine tremor, of a lover. There were other women--they might have great beauty, they might have small; perhaps they were generally to be cla.s.sified as plain--whose triumphs in this line were rare, but immutably permanent. Such a one preeminently, was Mary Garland. Upon the doctrine of probabilities, it was unlikely that she had had an equal charm for each of them, and was it not possible, therefore, that the charm for Roderick had been simply the charm imagined, unquestioningly accepted: the general charm of youth, sympathy, kindness--of the present feminine, in short--enhanced indeed by several fine facial traits?
The charm in this case for Rowland was--the charm!--the mysterious, individual, essential woman. There was an element in the charm, as his companion saw it, which Rowland was obliged to recognize, but which he forbore to ponder; the rather important attraction, namely, of reciprocity. As to Miss Garland being in love with Roderick and becoming charming thereby, this was a point with which his imagination ventured to take no liberties; partly because it would have been indelicate, and partly because it would have been vain. He contented himself with feeling that the young girl was still as vivid an image in his memory as she had been five days after he left her, and with drifting nearer and nearer to the impression that at just that crisis any other girl would have answered Roderick's sentimental needs as well. Any other girl indeed would do so still! Roderick had confessed as much to him at Geneva, in saying that he had been taking at Baden the measure of his susceptibility to female beauty.
His extraordinary success in modeling the bust of the beautiful Miss Light was pertinent evidence of this amiable quality. She sat to him, repeatedly, for a fortnight, and the work was rapidly finished. On one of the last days Roderick asked Rowland to come and give his opinion as to what was still wanting; for the sittings had continued to take place in Mrs. Light's apartment, the studio being p.r.o.nounced too damp for the fair model. When Rowland presented himself, Christina, still in her white dress, with her shoulders bare, was standing before a mirror, readjusting her hair, the arrangement of which, on this occasion, had apparently not met the young sculptor's approval. He stood beside her, directing the operation with a peremptoriness of tone which seemed to Rowland to denote a considerable advance in intimacy. As Rowland entered, Christina was losing patience. ”Do it yourself, then!” she cried, and with a rapid movement unloosed the great coil of her tresses and let them fall over her shoulders.
They were magnificent, and with her perfect face dividing their rippling flow she looked like some immaculate saint of legend being led to martyrdom. Rowland's eyes presumably betrayed his admiration, but her own manifested no consciousness of it. If Christina was a coquette, as the remarkable timeliness of this incident might have suggested, she was not a superficial one.
”Hudson 's a sculptor,” said Rowland, with warmth. ”But if I were only a painter!”
”Thank Heaven you are not!” said Christina. ”I am having quite enough of this minute inspection of my charms.”
”My dear young man, hands off!” cried Mrs. Light, coming forward and seizing her daughter's hair. ”Christina, love, I am surprised.”
”Is it indelicate?” Christina asked. ”I beg Mr. Mallet's pardon.” Mrs.
Light gathered up the dusky locks and let them fall through her fingers, glancing at her visitor with a significant smile. Rowland had never been in the East, but if he had attempted to make a sketch of an old slave-merchant, calling attention to the ”points” of a Circa.s.sian beauty, he would have depicted such a smile as Mrs. Light's. ”Mamma 's not really shocked,” added Christina in a moment, as if she had guessed her mother's by-play. ”She is only afraid that Mr. Hudson might have injured my hair, and that, per consequenza, I should sell for less.”
”You unnatural child!” cried mamma. ”You deserve that I should make a fright of you!” And with half a dozen skillful pa.s.ses she twisted the tresses into a single picturesque braid, placed high on the head, as a kind of coronal.
”What does your mother do when she wants to do you justice?” Rowland asked, observing the admirable line of the young girl's neck.
”I do her justice when I say she says very improper things. What is one to do with such a thorn in the flesh?” Mrs. Light demanded.
”Think of it at your leisure, Mr. Mallet,” said Christina, ”and when you 've discovered something, let us hear. But I must tell you that I shall not willingly believe in any remedy of yours, for you have something in your physiognomy that particularly provokes me to make the remarks that my mother so sincerely deplores. I noticed it the first time I saw you.
I think it 's because your face is so broad. For some reason or other, broad faces exasperate me; they fill me with a kind of rabbia. Last summer, at Carlsbad, there was an Austrian count, with enormous estates and some great office at court. He was very attentive--seriously so; he was really very far gone. Cela ne tenait qu' a moi! But I could n't; he was impossible! He must have measured, from ear to ear, at least a yard and a half. And he was blond, too, which made it worse--as blond as Stenterello; pure fleece! So I said to him frankly, 'Many thanks, Herr Graf; your uniform is magnificent, but your face is too fat.'”
”I am afraid that mine also,” said Rowland, with a smile, ”seems just now to have a.s.sumed an unpardonable lat.i.tude.”
”Oh, I take it you know very well that we are looking for a husband, and that none but tremendous swells need apply. Surely, before these gentlemen, mamma, I may speak freely; they are disinterested. Mr. Mallet won't do, because, though he 's rich, he 's not rich enough. Mamma made that discovery the day after we went to see you, moved to it by the promising look of your furniture. I hope she was right, eh? Unless you have millions, you know, you have no chance.”
”I feel like a beggar,” said Rowland.
”Oh, some better girl than I will decide some day, after mature reflection, that on the whole you have enough. Mr. Hudson, of course, is nowhere; he has nothing but his genius and his beaux yeux.”
Roderick had stood looking at Christina intently while she delivered herself, softly and slowly, of this surprising nonsense. When she had finished, she turned and looked at him; their eyes met, and he blushed a little. ”Let me model you, and he who can may marry you!” he said, abruptly.
Mrs. Light, while her daughter talked, had been adding a few touches to her coiffure. ”She is not so silly as you might suppose,” she said to Rowland, with dignity. ”If you will give me your arm, we will go and look at the bust.”
”Does that represent a silly girl?” Christina demanded, when they stood before it.
Rowland transferred his glance several times from the portrait to the original. ”It represents a young lady,” he said, ”whom I should not pretend to judge off-hand.”
”She may be a fool, but you are not sure. Many thanks! You have seen me half a dozen times. You are either very slow or I am very deep.”
”I am certainly slow,” said Rowland. ”I don't expect to make up my mind about you within six months.”
”I give you six months if you will promise then a perfectly frank opinion. Mind, I shall not forget; I shall insist upon it.”
”Well, though I am slow, I am tolerably brave,” said Rowland. ”We shall see.”
Christina looked at the bust with a sigh. ”I am afraid, after all,” she said, ”that there 's very little wisdom in it save what the artist has put there. Mr. Hudson looked particularly wise while he was working; he scowled and growled, but he never opened his mouth. It is very kind of him not to have represented me gaping.”