Part 30 (1/2)
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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 appet.i.te 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 circ.u.mstance, 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 pa.s.sing 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 n.o.ble 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 circ.u.mstance!” cried Rowland to himself, ”that takes us by the hand and leads us forth out of corners where, perforce, our att.i.tudes 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 circ.u.mstance 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 a.s.sociations, 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 ap.r.o.n 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 pa.s.s 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, gra.s.s-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 n.o.blest 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!”