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Roderick Hudson

by Henry James · English · Gutenberg #176 · 756,450 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Roderick Hudson

Author: Henry James


        
Release date: March 12, 2006 [eBook #176]
                Most recently updated: September 20, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/176

Credits: Produced by Judy Boss and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RODERICK HUDSON ***




Produced by Judy Boss and David Widger





RODERICK HUDSON

by Henry James



CONTENTS

     I.    Rowland
     II.   Roderick
     III.  Rome
     IV.   Experience
     V.    Christina
     VI.   Frascati
     VII.  St. Cecilia’s
     VIII. Provocation
     IX.   Mary Garland
     X.    The Cavaliere
     XI.   Mrs. Hudson
     XII.  The Princess Casamassima
     XIII. Switzerland




CHAPTER I. Rowland

Mallet had made his arrangements to sail for Europe on the first
of September, and having in the interval a fortnight to spare, he
determined to spend it with his cousin Cecilia, the widow of a nephew of
his father. He was urged by the reflection that an affectionate farewell
might help to exonerate him from the charge of neglect frequently
preferred by this lady. It was not that the young man disliked her; on
the contrary, he regarded her with a tender admiration, and he had not
forgotten how, when his cousin had brought her home on her marriage, he
had seemed to feel the upward sweep of the empty bough from which the
golden fruit had been plucked, and had then and there accepted the
prospect of bachelorhood. The truth was, that, as it will be part of
the entertainment of this narrative to exhibit, Rowland Mallet had an
uncomfortably sensitive conscience, and that, in spite of the seeming
paradox, his visits to Cecilia were rare because she and her misfortunes
were often uppermost in it. Her misfortunes were three in number: first,
she had lost her husband; second, she had lost her money (or the
greater part of it); and third, she lived at Northampton, Massachusetts.
Mallet’s compassion was really wasted, because Cecilia was a very clever
woman, and a most skillful counter-plotter to adversity. She had made
herself a charming home, her economies were not obtrusive, and there
was always a cheerful flutter in the folds of her crape. It was the
consciousness of all this that puzzled Mallet whenever he felt tempted
to put in his oar. He had money and he had time, but he never could
decide just how to place these gifts gracefully at Cecilia’s service.
He no longer felt like marrying her: in these eight years that fancy had
died a natural death. And yet her extreme cleverness seemed somehow to
make charity difficult and patronage impossible. He would rather chop
off his hand than offer her a check, a piece of useful furniture, or
a black silk dress; and yet there was some sadness in seeing such a
bright, proud woman living in such a small, dull way. Cecilia had,
moreover, a turn for sarcasm, and her smile, which was her pretty
feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a lurking
scratch in it. Rowland remembered that, for him, she was all smiles, and
suspected, awkwardly, that he ministered not a little to her sense of
the irony of things. And in truth, with his means, his leisure, and his
opportunities, what had he done? He had an unaffected suspicion of
his uselessness. Cecilia, meanwhile, cut out her own dresses, and was
personally giving her little girl the education of a princess.

This time, however, he presented himself bravely enough; for in the way
of activity it was something definite, at least, to be going to Europe
and to be meaning to spend the winter in Rome. Cecilia met him in the
early dusk at the gate of her little garden, amid a studied combination
of floral perfumes. A rosy widow of twenty-eight, half cousin, half
hostess, doing the honors of an odorous cottage on a midsummer evening,
was a phenomenon to which the young man’s imagination was able to do
ample justice. Cecilia was always gracious, but this evening she was
almost joyous. She was in a happy mood, and Mallet imagined there was
a private reason for it--a reason quite distinct from her pleasure in
receiving her honored kinsman. The next day he flattered himself he was
on the way to discover it.

For the present, after tea, as they sat on the rose-framed porch, while
Rowland held his younger cousin between his knees, and she, enjoying
her situation, listened timorously for the stroke of bedtime, Cecilia
insisted on talking more about her visitor than about herself.

“What is it you mean to do in Europe?” she asked, lightly, giving a
turn to the frill of her sleeve--just such a turn as seemed to Mallet to
bring out all the latent difficulties of the question.

“Why, very much what I do here,” he answered. “No great harm.”

“Is it true,” Cecilia asked, “that here you do no great harm? Is not a
man like you doing harm when he is not doing positive good?”

“Your compliment is ambiguous,” said Rowland.

“No,” answered the widow, “you know what I think of you. You have a
particular aptitude for beneficence. You have it in the first place in
your character. You are a benevolent person. Ask Bessie if you don’t
hold her more gently and comfortably than any of her other admirers.”

“He holds me more comfortably than Mr. Hudson,” Bessie declared,
roundly.

Rowland, not knowing Mr. Hudson, could but half appreciate the eulogy,
and Cecilia went on to develop her idea. “Your circumstances, in
the second place, suggest the idea of social usefulness. You are
intelligent, you are well-informed, and your charity, if one may call it
charity, would be discriminating. You are rich and unoccupied, so that
it might be abundant. Therefore, I say, you are a person to do something
on a large scale. Bestir yourself, dear Rowland, or we may be taught to
think that virtue herself is setting a bad example.”

“Heaven forbid,” cried Rowland, “that I should set the examples of
virtue! I am quite willing to follow them, however, and if I don’t
do something on the grand scale, it is that my genius is altogether
imitative, and that I have not recently encountered any very striking
models of grandeur. Pray, what shall I do? Found an orphan asylum, or
build a dormitory for Harvard College? I am not rich enough to do either
in an ideally handsome way, and I confess that, yet awhile, I feel
too young to strike my grand coup. I am holding myself ready for
inspiration. I am waiting till something takes my fancy irresistibly. If
inspiration comes at forty, it will be a hundred pities to have tied up
my money-bag at thirty.”

“Well, I give you till forty,” said Cecilia. “It ‘s only a word to
the wise, a notification that you are expected not to run your course
without having done something handsome for your fellow-men.”

Nine o’clock sounded, and Bessie, with each stroke, courted a closer
embrace. But a single winged word from her mother overleaped her
successive intrenchments. She turned and kissed her cousin, and
deposited an irrepressible tear on his moustache. Then she went and
said her prayers to her mother: it was evident she was being admirably
brought up. Rowland, with the permission of his hostess, lighted a cigar
and puffed it awhile in silence. Cecilia’s interest in his career seemed
very agreeable. That Mallet was without vanity I by no means intend to
affirm; but there had been times when, seeing him accept, hardly less
deferentially, advice even more peremptory than the widow’s, you
might have asked yourself what had become of his vanity. Now, in the
sweet-smelling starlight, he felt gently wooed to egotism. There was a
project connected with his going abroad which it was on his tongue’s end
to communicate. It had no relation to hospitals or dormitories, and yet
it would have sounded very generous. But it was not because it would
have sounded generous that poor Mallet at last puffed it away in
the fumes of his cigar. Useful though it might be, it expressed most
imperfectly the young man’s own personal conception of usefulness. He
was extremely fond of all the arts, and he had an almost passionate
enjoyment of pictures. He had seen many, and he judged them sagaciously.
It had occurred to him some time before that it would be the work of a
good citizen to go abroad and with all expedition and secrecy purchase
certain valuable specimens of the Dutch and Italian schools as to which
he had received private proposals, and then present his treasures out of
hand to an American city, not unknown to aesthetic fame, in which at
that time there prevailed a good deal of fruitless aspiration toward an
art-museum. He had seen himself in imagination, more than once, in
some mouldy old saloon of a Florentine palace, turning toward the deep
embrasure of the window some scarcely-faded Ghirlandaio or Botticelli,
while a host in reduced circumstances pointed out the lovely drawing
of a hand. But he imparted none of these visions to Cecilia, and he
suddenly swept them away with the declaration that he was of course an
idle, useless creature, and that he would probably be even more so in
Europe than at home. “The only thing is,” he said, “that there I shall
seem to be doing something. I shall be better entertained, and shall be
therefore, I suppose, in a better humor with life. You may say that that
is just the humor a useless man should keep out of. He should cultivate
discontentment. I did a good many things when I was in Europe before,
but I did not spend a winter in Rome. Every one assures me that this is
a peculiar refinement of bliss; most people talk about Rome in the same
way. It is evidently only a sort of idealized form of loafing: a passive
life in Rome, thanks to the number and the quality of one’s impressions,
takes on a very respectable likeness to activity. It is still
lotus-eating, only you sit down at table, and the lotuses are served up
on rococo china. It ‘s all very well, but I have a distinct prevision of
this--that if Roman life does n’t do something substantial to make you
happier, it increases tenfold your liability to moral misery. It seems
to me a rash thing for a sensitive soul deliberately to cultivate its
sensibilities by rambling too often among the ruins of the Palatine, or
riding too often in the shadow of the aqueducts. In such recreations the
chords of feeling grow tense, and after-life, to spare your intellectual
nerves, must play upon them with a touch as dainty as the tread of
Mignon when she danced her egg-dance.”

“I should have said, my dear Rowland,” said Cecilia, with a laugh, “that
your nerves were tough, that your eggs were hard!”

“That being stupid, you mean, I might be happy? Upon my word I am not.
I am clever enough to want more than I ‘ve got. I am tired of myself, my
own thoughts, my own affairs, my own eternal company. True happiness,
we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not
only to get out--you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some
absorbing errand. Unfortunately, I ‘ve got no errand, and nobody will
trust me with one. I want to care for something, or for some one. And I
want to care with a certain ardor; even, if you can believe it, with
a certain passion. I can’t just now feel ardent and passionate about a
hospital or a dormitory. Do you know I sometimes think that I ‘m a man
of genius, half finished? The genius has been left out, the faculty of
expression is wanting; but the need for expression remains, and I spend
my days groping for the latch of a closed door.”

“What an immense number of words,” said Cecilia after a pause, “to say
you want to fall in love! I ‘ve no doubt you have as good a genius for
that as any one, if you would only trust it.”

“Of course I ‘ve thought of that, and I assure you I hold myself ready.
But, evidently, I ‘m not inflammable. Is there in Northampton some
perfect epitome of the graces?”

“Of the graces?” said Cecilia, raising her eyebrows and suppressing too
distinct a consciousness of being herself a rosy embodiment of several.
“The household virtues are better represented. There are some excellent
girls, and there are two or three very pretty ones. I will have them
here, one by one, to tea, if you like.”

“I should particularly like it; especially as I should give you a chance
to see, by the profundity of my attention, that if I am not happy, it ‘s
not for want of taking pains.”

Cecilia was silent a moment; and then, “On the whole,” she resumed, “I
don’t think there are any worth asking. There are none so very pretty,
none so very pleasing.”

“Are you very sure?” asked the young man, rising and throwing away his
cigar-end.

“Upon my word,” cried Cecilia, “one would suppose I wished to keep
you for myself. Of course I am sure! But as the penalty of your
insinuations, I shall invite the plainest and prosiest damsel that can
be found, and leave you alone with her.”

Rowland smiled. “Even against her,” he said, “I should be sorry to
conclude until I had given her my respectful attention.”

This little profession of ideal chivalry (which closed the conversation)
was not quite so fanciful on Mallet’s lips as it would have been on
those of many another man; as a rapid glance at his antecedents may help
to make the reader perceive. His life had been a singular mixture of the
rough and the smooth. He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had
been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life
than of its privileges and pleasures. His progenitors had submitted in
the matter of dogmatic theology to the relaxing influences of recent
years; but if Rowland’s youthful consciousness was not chilled by the
menace of long punishment for brief transgression, he had at least been
made to feel that there ran through all things a strain of right and of
wrong, as different, after all, in their complexions, as the texture, to
the spiritual sense, of Sundays and week-days. His father was a chip of
the primal Puritan block, a man with an icy smile and a stony frown. He
had always bestowed on his son, on principle, more frowns than smiles,
and if the lad had not been turned to stone himself, it was because
nature had blessed him, inwardly, with a well of vivifying waters. Mrs.
Mallet had been a Miss Rowland, the daughter of a retired sea-captain,
once famous on the ships that sailed from Salem and Newburyport. He
had brought to port many a cargo which crowned the edifice of fortunes
already almost colossal, but he had also done a little sagacious trading
on his own account, and he was able to retire, prematurely for so
sea-worthy a maritime organism, upon a pension of his own providing. He
was to be seen for a year on the Salem wharves, smoking the best tobacco
and eying the seaward horizon with an inveteracy which superficial
minds interpreted as a sign of repentance. At last, one evening, he
disappeared beneath it, as he had often done before; this time,
however, not as a commissioned navigator, but simply as an amateur of an
observing turn likely to prove oppressive to the officer in command of
the vessel. Five months later his place at home knew him again, and made
the acquaintance also of a handsome, blonde young woman, of redundant
contours, speaking a foreign tongue. The foreign tongue proved, after
much conflicting research, to be the idiom of Amsterdam, and the young
woman, which was stranger still, to be Captain Rowland’s wife. Why
he had gone forth so suddenly across the seas to marry her, what had
happened between them before, and whether--though it was of questionable
propriety for a good citizen to espouse a young person of mysterious
origin, who did her hair in fantastically elaborate plaits, and in whose
appearance “figure” enjoyed such striking predominance--he would
not have had a heavy weight on his conscience if he had remained an
irresponsible bachelor; these questions and many others, bearing with
varying degrees of immediacy on the subject, were much propounded but
scantily answered, and this history need not be charged with resolving
them. Mrs. Rowland, for so handsome a woman, proved a tranquil neighbor
and an excellent housewife. Her extremely fresh complexion, however, was
always suffused with an air of apathetic homesickness, and she played
her part in American society chiefly by having the little squares of
brick pavement in front of her dwelling scoured and polished as nearly
as possible into the likeness of Dutch tiles. Rowland Mallet remembered
having seen her, as a child--an immensely stout, white-faced lady,
wearing a high cap of very stiff tulle, speaking English with a
formidable accent, and suffering from dropsy. Captain Rowland was a
little bronzed and wizened man, with eccentric opinions. He advocated
the creation of a public promenade along the sea, with arbors and little
green tables for the consumption of beer, and a platform, surrounded by
Chinese lanterns, for dancing. He especially desired the town library
to be opened on Sundays, though, as he never entered it on week-days,
it was easy to turn the proposition into ridicule. If, therefore, Mrs.
Mallet was a woman of an exquisite moral tone, it was not that she had
inherited her temper from an ancestry with a turn for casuistry.
Jonas Mallet, at the time of his marriage, was conducting with silent
shrewdness a small, unpromising business. Both his shrewdness and his
silence increased with his years, and at the close of his life he was an
extremely well-dressed, well-brushed gentleman, with a frigid gray eye,
who said little to anybody, but of whom everybody said that he had
a very handsome fortune. He was not a sentimental father, and the
roughness I just now spoke of in Rowland’s life dated from his early
boyhood. Mr. Mallet, whenever he looked at his son, felt extreme
compunction at having made a fortune. He remembered that the fruit had
not dropped ripe from the tree into his own mouth, and determined it
should be no fault of his if the boy was corrupted by luxury. Rowland,
therefore, except for a good deal of expensive instruction in foreign
tongues and abstruse sciences, received the education of a poor man’s
son. His fare was plain, his temper familiar with the discipline of
patched trousers, and his habits marked by an exaggerated simplicity
which it really cost a good deal of money to preserve unbroken. He was
kept in the country for months together, in the midst of servants who
had strict injunctions to see that he suffered no serious harm, but
were as strictly forbidden to wait upon him. As no school could be found
conducted on principles sufficiently rigorous, he was attended at home
by a master who set a high price on the understanding that he was to
illustrate the beauty of abstinence not only by precept but by example.
Rowland passed for a child of ordinary parts, and certainly, during his
younger years, was an excellent imitation of a boy who had inherited
nothing whatever that was to make life easy. He was passive,
pliable, frank, extremely slow at his books, and inordinately fond of
trout-fishing. His hair, a memento of his Dutch ancestry, was of
the fairest shade of yellow, his complexion absurdly rosy, and his
measurement around the waist, when he was about ten years old, quite
alarmingly large. This, however, was but an episode in his growth; he
became afterwards a fresh-colored, yellow-bearded man, but he was never
accused of anything worse than a tendency to corpulence. He emerged from
childhood a simple, wholesome, round-eyed lad, with no suspicion that a
less roundabout course might have been taken to make him happy, but with
a vague sense that his young experience was not a fair sample of human
freedom, and that he was to make a great many discoveries. When he was
about fifteen, he achieved a momentous one. He ascertained that his
mother was a saint. She had always been a very distinct presence in his
life, but so ineffably gentle a one that his sense was fully opened to
it only by the danger of losing her. She had an illness which for many
months was liable at any moment to terminate fatally, and during her
long-arrested convalescence she removed the mask which she had worn for
years by her husband’s order. Rowland spent his days at her side and
felt before long as if he had made a new friend. All his impressions at
this period were commented and interpreted at leisure in the future, and
it was only then that he understood that his mother had been for fifteen
years a perfectly unhappy woman. Her marriage had been an immitigable
error which she had spent her life in trying to look straight in the
face. She found nothing to oppose to her husband’s will of steel but the
appearance of absolute compliance; her spirit sank, and she lived for
a while in a sort of helpless moral torpor. But at last, as her child
emerged from babyhood, she began to feel a certain charm in patience, to
discover the uses of ingenuity, and to learn that, somehow or other, one
can always arrange one’s life. She cultivated from this time forward a
little private plot of sentiment, and it was of this secluded precinct
that, before her death, she gave her son the key. Rowland’s allowance at
college was barely sufficient to maintain him decently, and as soon as
he graduated, he was taken into his father’s counting-house, to do small
drudgery on a proportionate salary. For three years he earned his living
as regularly as the obscure functionary in fustian who swept the office.
Mr. Mallet was consistent, but the perfection of his consistency was
known only on his death. He left but a third of his property to his
son, and devoted the remainder to various public institutions and local
charities. Rowland’s third was an easy competence, and he never felt
a moment’s jealousy of his fellow-pensioners; but when one of the
establishments which had figured most advantageously in his father’s
will bethought itself to affirm the existence of a later instrument, in
which it had been still more handsomely treated, the young man felt a
sudden passionate need to repel the claim by process of law. There was a
lively tussle, but he gained his case; immediately after which he made,
in another quarter, a donation of the contested sum. He cared nothing
for the money, but he had felt an angry desire to protest against a
destiny which seemed determined to be exclusively salutary. It seemed to
him that he would bear a little spoiling. And yet he treated himself
to a very modest quantity, and submitted without reserve to the great
national discipline which began in 1861. When the Civil War broke out he
immediately obtained a commission, and did his duty for three long years
as a citizen soldier. His duty was obscure, but he never lost a certain
private satisfaction in remembering that on two or three occasions
it had been performed with something of an ideal precision. He had
disentangled himself from business, and after the war he felt a profound
disinclination to tie the knot again. He had no desire to make money,
he had money enough; and although he knew, and was frequently reminded,
that a young man is the better for a fixed occupation, he could discover
no moral advantage in driving a lucrative trade. Yet few young men of
means and leisure ever made less of a parade of idleness, and indeed
idleness in any degree could hardly be laid at the door of a young
man who took life in the serious, attentive, reasoning fashion of
our friend. It often seemed to Mallet that he wholly lacked the prime
requisite of a graceful flaneur--the simple, sensuous, confident relish
of pleasure. He had frequent fits of extreme melancholy, in which he
declared that he was neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring. He was
neither an irresponsibly contemplative nature nor a sturdily practical
one, and he was forever looking in vain for the uses of the things
that please and the charm of the things that sustain. He was an awkward
mixture of strong moral impulse and restless aesthetic curiosity,
and yet he would have made a most ineffective reformer and a very
indifferent artist. It seemed to him that the glow of happiness must be
found either in action, of some immensely solid kind, on behalf of
an idea, or in producing a masterpiece in one of the arts. Oftenest,
perhaps, he wished he were a vigorous young man of genius, without a
penny. As it was, he could only buy pictures, and not paint them; and
in the way of action, he had to content himself with making a rule to
render scrupulous moral justice to handsome examples of it in others. On
the whole, he had an incorruptible modesty. With his blooming complexion
and his serene gray eye, he felt the friction of existence more than was
suspected; but he asked no allowance on grounds of temper, he assumed
that fate had treated him inordinately well and that he had no excuse
for taking an ill-natured view of life, and he undertook constantly to
believe that all women were fair, all men were brave, and the world was
a delightful place of sojourn, until the contrary had been distinctly
proved.

Cecilia’s blooming garden and shady porch had seemed so friendly to
repose and a cigar, that she reproached him the next morning with
indifference to her little parlor, not less, in its way, a monument to
her ingenious taste. “And by the way,” she added as he followed her in,
“if I refused last night to show you a pretty girl, I can at least show
you a pretty boy.”

She threw open a window and pointed to a statuette which occupied the
place of honor among the ornaments of the room. Rowland looked at it a
moment and then turned to her with an exclamation of surprise. She
gave him a rapid glance, perceived that her statuette was of altogether
exceptional merit, and then smiled, knowingly, as if this had long been
an agreeable certainty.

“Who did it? where did you get it?” Rowland demanded.

“Oh,” said Cecilia, adjusting the light, “it ‘s a little thing of Mr.
Hudson’s.”

“And who the deuce is Mr. Hudson?” asked Rowland. But he was absorbed;
he lost her immediate reply. The statuette, in bronze, something less
than two feet high, represented a naked youth drinking from a gourd. The
attitude was perfectly simple. The lad was squarely planted on his feet,
with his legs a little apart; his back was slightly hollowed, his head
thrown back, and both hands raised to support the rustic cup. There was
a loosened fillet of wild flowers about his head, and his eyes, under
their drooped lids, looked straight into the cup. On the base was
scratched the Greek word Δἱψα, Thirst. The figure might have
been some beautiful youth of ancient fable,--Hylas or Narcissus, Paris
or Endymion. Its beauty was the beauty of natural movement; nothing had
been sought to be represented but the perfection of an attitude. This
had been most attentively studied, and it was exquisitely rendered.
Rowland demanded more light, dropped his head on this side and that,
uttered vague exclamations. He said to himself, as he had said more than
once in the Louvre and the Vatican, “We ugly mortals, what beautiful
creatures we are!” Nothing, in a long time, had given him so much
pleasure. “Hudson--Hudson,” he asked again; “who is Hudson?”

“A young man of this place,” said Cecilia.

“A young man? How old?”

“I suppose he is three or four and twenty.”

“Of this place, you say--of Northampton, Massachusetts?”

“He lives here, but he comes from Virginia.”

“Is he a sculptor by profession?”

“He ‘s a law-student.”

Rowland burst out laughing. “He has found something in Blackstone that I
never did. He makes statues then simply for his pleasure?”

Cecilia, with a smile, gave a little toss of her head. “For mine!”

“I congratulate you,” said Rowland. “I wonder whether he could be
induced to do anything for me?”

“This was a matter of friendship. I saw the figure when he had modeled
it in clay, and of course greatly admired it. He said nothing at the
time, but a week ago, on my birthday, he arrived in a buggy, with
this. He had had it cast at the foundry at Chicopee; I believe it ‘s a
beautiful piece of bronze. He begged me to accept.”

“Upon my word,” said Mallet, “he does things handsomely!” And he fell to
admiring the statue again.

“So then,” said Cecilia, “it ‘s very remarkable?”

“Why, my dear cousin,” Rowland answered, “Mr. Hudson, of Virginia, is
an extraordinary--” Then suddenly stopping: “Is he a great friend of
yours?” he asked.

“A great friend?” and Cecilia hesitated. “I regard him as a child!”

“Well,” said Rowland, “he ‘s a very clever child. Tell me something
about him: I should like to see him.”

Cecilia was obliged to go to her daughter’s music-lesson, but she
assured Rowland that she would arrange for him a meeting with the young
sculptor. He was a frequent visitor, and as he had not called for some
days it was likely he would come that evening. Rowland, left alone,
examined the statuette at his leisure, and returned more than once
during the day to take another look at it. He discovered its weak
points, but it wore well. It had the stamp of genius. Rowland envied the
happy youth who, in a New England village, without aid or encouragement,
without models or resources, had found it so easy to produce a lovely
work.

In the evening, as he was smoking his cigar on the veranda, a light,
quick step pressed the gravel of the garden path, and in a moment a
young man made his bow to Cecilia. It was rather a nod than a bow, and
indicated either that he was an old friend, or that he was scantily
versed in the usual social forms. Cecilia, who was sitting near the
steps, pointed to a neighboring chair, but the young man seated himself
abruptly on the floor at her feet, began to fan himself vigorously with
his hat, and broke out into a lively objurgation upon the hot weather.
“I ‘m dripping wet!” he said, without ceremony.

“You walk too fast,” said Cecilia. “You do everything too fast.”

“I know it, I know it!” he cried, passing his hand through his abundant
dark hair and making it stand out in a picturesque shock. “I can’t
be slow if I try. There ‘s something inside of me that drives me. A
restless fiend!”

Cecilia gave a light laugh, and Rowland leaned forward in his hammock.
He had placed himself in it at Bessie’s request, and was playing that he
was her baby and that she was rocking him to sleep. She sat beside him,
swinging the hammock to and fro, and singing a lullaby. When he raised
himself she pushed him back and said that the baby must finish its nap.
“But I want to see the gentleman with the fiend inside of him,” said
Rowland.

“What is a fiend?” Bessie demanded. “It ‘s only Mr. Hudson.”

“Very well, I want to see him.”

“Oh, never mind him!” said Bessie, with the brevity of contempt.

“You speak as if you did n’t like him.”

“I don’t!” Bessie affirmed, and put Rowland to bed again.

The hammock was swung at the end of the veranda, in the thickest shade
of the vines, and this fragment of dialogue had passed unnoticed.
Rowland submitted a while longer to be cradled, and contented himself
with listening to Mr. Hudson’s voice. It was a soft and not altogether
masculine organ, and was pitched on this occasion in a somewhat
plaintive and pettish key. The young man’s mood seemed fretful; he
complained of the heat, of the dust, of a shoe that hurt him, of having
gone on an errand a mile to the other side of the town and found the
person he was in search of had left Northampton an hour before.

“Won’t you have a cup of tea?” Cecilia asked. “Perhaps that will restore
your equanimity.”

“Aye, by keeping me awake all night!” said Hudson. “At the best, it ‘s
hard enough to go down to the office. With my nerves set on edge by a
sleepless night, I should perforce stay at home and be brutal to my poor
mother.”

“Your mother is well, I hope.”

“Oh, she ‘s as usual.”

“And Miss Garland?”

“She ‘s as usual, too. Every one, everything, is as usual. Nothing ever
happens, in this benighted town.”

“I beg your pardon; things do happen, sometimes,” said Cecilia. “Here
is a dear cousin of mine arrived on purpose to congratulate you on your
statuette.” And she called to Rowland to come and be introduced to
Mr. Hudson. The young man sprang up with alacrity, and Rowland, coming
forward to shake hands, had a good look at him in the light projected
from the parlor window. Something seemed to shine out of Hudson’s face
as a warning against a “compliment” of the idle, unpondered sort.

“Your statuette seems to me very good,” Rowland said gravely. “It has
given me extreme pleasure.”

“And my cousin knows what is good,” said Cecilia. “He ‘s a connoisseur.”

Hudson smiled and stared. “A connoisseur?” he cried, laughing. “He ‘s
the first I ‘ve ever seen! Let me see what they look like;” and he drew
Rowland nearer to the light. “Have they all such good heads as that? I
should like to model yours.”

“Pray do,” said Cecilia. “It will keep him a while. He is running off to
Europe.”

“Ah, to Europe!” Hudson exclaimed with a melancholy cadence, as they sat
down. “Happy man!”

But the note seemed to Rowland to be struck rather at random, for he
perceived no echo of it in the boyish garrulity of his later talk.
Hudson was a tall, slender young fellow, with a singularly mobile and
intelligent face. Rowland was struck at first only with its responsive
vivacity, but in a short time he perceived it was remarkably handsome.
The features were admirably chiseled and finished, and a frank smile
played over them as gracefully as a breeze among flowers. The fault of
the young man’s whole structure was an excessive want of breadth. The
forehead, though it was high and rounded, was narrow; the jaw and
the shoulders were narrow; and the result was an air of insufficient
physical substance. But Mallet afterwards learned that this fair, slim
youth could draw indefinitely upon a mysterious fund of nervous
force, which outlasted and outwearied the endurance of many a sturdier
temperament. And certainly there was life enough in his eye to furnish
an immortality! It was a generous dark gray eye, in which there came
and went a sort of kindling glow, which would have made a ruder visage
striking, and which gave at times to Hudson’s harmonious face an
altogether extraordinary beauty. There was to Rowland’s sympathetic
sense a slightly pitiful disparity between the young sculptor’s delicate
countenance and the shabby gentility of his costume. He was dressed for
a visit--a visit to a pretty woman. He was clad from head to foot in a
white linen suit, which had never been remarkable for the felicity of
its cut, and had now quite lost that crispness which garments of this
complexion can as ill spare as the back-scene of a theatre the radiance
of the footlights. He wore a vivid blue cravat, passed through a ring
altogether too splendid to be valuable; he pulled and twisted, as he
sat, a pair of yellow kid gloves; he emphasized his conversation with
great dashes and flourishes of a light, silver-tipped walking-stick,
and he kept constantly taking off and putting on one of those slouched
sombreros which are the traditional property of the Virginian or
Carolinian of romance. When this was on, he was very picturesque, in
spite of his mock elegance; and when it was off, and he sat nursing it
and turning it about and not knowing what to do with it, he could hardly
be said to be awkward. He evidently had a natural relish for brilliant
accessories, and appropriated what came to his hand. This was visible in
his talk, which abounded in the florid and sonorous. He liked words with
color in them.

Rowland, who was but a moderate talker, sat by in silence, while
Cecilia, who had told him that she desired his opinion upon her friend,
used a good deal of characteristic finesse in leading the young man to
expose himself. She perfectly succeeded, and Hudson rattled away for
an hour with a volubility in which boyish unconsciousness and manly
shrewdness were singularly combined. He gave his opinion on twenty
topics, he opened up an endless budget of local gossip, he described
his repulsive routine at the office of Messrs. Striker and Spooner,
counselors at law, and he gave with great felicity and gusto an account
of the annual boat-race between Harvard and Yale, which he had lately
witnessed at Worcester. He had looked at the straining oarsmen and the
swaying crowd with the eye of the sculptor. Rowland was a good deal
amused and not a little interested. Whenever Hudson uttered some
peculiarly striking piece of youthful grandiloquence, Cecilia broke into
a long, light, familiar laugh.

“What are you laughing at?” the young man then demanded. “Have I said
anything so ridiculous?”

“Go on, go on,” Cecilia replied. “You are too delicious! Show Mr. Mallet
how Mr. Striker read the Declaration of Independence.”

Hudson, like most men with a turn for the plastic arts, was an excellent
mimic, and he represented with a great deal of humor the accent and
attitude of a pompous country lawyer sustaining the burden of this
customary episode of our national festival. The sonorous twang, the
see-saw gestures, the odd pronunciation, were vividly depicted. But
Cecilia’s manner, and the young man’s quick response, ruffled a little
poor Rowland’s paternal conscience. He wondered whether his cousin was
not sacrificing the faculty of reverence in her clever protege to
her need for amusement. Hudson made no serious rejoinder to Rowland’s
compliment on his statuette until he rose to go. Rowland wondered
whether he had forgotten it, and supposed that the oversight was a sign
of the natural self-sufficiency of genius. But Hudson stood a moment
before he said good night, twirled his sombrero, and hesitated for the
first time. He gave Rowland a clear, penetrating glance, and then, with
a wonderfully frank, appealing smile: “You really meant,” he
asked, “what you said a while ago about that thing of mine? It is
good--essentially good?”

“I really meant it,” said Rowland, laying a kindly hand on his shoulder.
“It is very good indeed. It is, as you say, essentially good. That is
the beauty of it.”

Hudson’s eyes glowed and expanded; he looked at Rowland for some time in
silence. “I have a notion you really know,” he said at last. “But if you
don’t, it does n’t much matter.”

“My cousin asked me to-day,” said Cecilia, “whether I supposed you knew
yourself how good it is.”

Hudson stared, blushing a little. “Perhaps not!” he cried.

“Very likely,” said Mallet. “I read in a book the other day that
great talent in action--in fact the book said genius--is a kind of
somnambulism. The artist performs great feats, in a dream. We must not
wake him up, lest he should lose his balance.”

“Oh, when he ‘s back in bed again!” Hudson answered with a laugh. “Yes,
call it a dream. It was a very happy one!”

“Tell me this,” said Rowland. “Did you mean anything by your young
Water-drinker? Does he represent an idea? Is he a symbol?”

Hudson raised his eyebrows and gently scratched his head. “Why, he ‘s
youth, you know; he ‘s innocence, he ‘s health, he ‘s strength, he ‘s
curiosity. Yes, he ‘s a good many things.”

“And is the cup also a symbol?”

“The cup is knowledge, pleasure, experience. Anything of that kind!”

“Well, he ‘s guzzling in earnest,” said Rowland.

Hudson gave a vigorous nod. “Aye, poor fellow, he ‘s thirsty!” And on
this he cried good night, and bounded down the garden path.

“Well, what do you make of him?” asked Cecilia, returning a short
time afterwards from a visit of investigation as to the sufficiency of
Bessie’s bedclothes.

“I confess I like him,” said Rowland. “He ‘s very immature,--but there
‘s stuff in him.”

“He ‘s a strange being,” said Cecilia, musingly.

“Who are his people? what has been his education?” Rowland asked.

“He has had no education, beyond what he has picked up, with little
trouble, for himself. His mother is a widow, of a Massachusetts country
family, a little timid, tremulous woman, who is always on pins and
needles about her son. She had some property herself, and married a
Virginian gentleman of good estates. He turned out, I believe, a very
licentious personage, and made great havoc in their fortune. Everything,
or almost everything, melted away, including Mr. Hudson himself. This
is literally true, for he drank himself to death. Ten years ago his wife
was left a widow, with scanty means and a couple of growing boys.
She paid her husband’s debts as best she could, and came to establish
herself here, where by the death of a charitable relative she had
inherited an old-fashioned ruinous house. Roderick, our friend, was her
pride and joy, but Stephen, the elder, was her comfort and support.
I remember him, later; he was an ugly, sturdy, practical lad, very
different from his brother, and in his way, I imagine, a very fine
fellow. When the war broke out he found that the New England blood ran
thicker in his veins than the Virginian, and immediately obtained
a commission. He fell in some Western battle and left his mother
inconsolable. Roderick, however, has given her plenty to think about,
and she has induced him, by some mysterious art, to abide, nominally at
least, in a profession that he abhors, and for which he is about as fit,
I should say, as I am to drive a locomotive. He grew up a la grace de
Dieu, and was horribly spoiled. Three or four years ago he graduated at
a small college in this neighborhood, where I am afraid he had given a
good deal more attention to novels and billiards than to mathematics and
Greek. Since then he has been reading law, at the rate of a page a day.
If he is ever admitted to practice I ‘m afraid my friendship won’t avail
to make me give him my business. Good, bad, or indifferent, the boy is
essentially an artist--an artist to his fingers’ ends.”

“Why, then,” asked Rowland, “does n’t he deliberately take up the
chisel?”

“For several reasons. In the first place, I don’t think he more than
half suspects his talent. The flame is smouldering, but it is never
fanned by the breath of criticism. He sees nothing, hears nothing, to
help him to self-knowledge. He ‘s hopelessly discontented, but he
does n’t know where to look for help. Then his mother, as she one
day confessed to me, has a holy horror of a profession which consists
exclusively, as she supposes, in making figures of people without their
clothes on. Sculpture, to her mind, is an insidious form of immorality,
and for a young man of a passionate disposition she considers the law a
much safer investment. Her father was a judge, she has two brothers at
the bar, and her elder son had made a very promising beginning in the
same line. She wishes the tradition to be perpetuated. I ‘m pretty sure
the law won’t make Roderick’s fortune, and I ‘m afraid it will, in the
long run, spoil his temper.”

“What sort of a temper is it?”

“One to be trusted, on the whole. It is quick, but it is generous. I
have known it to breathe flame and fury at ten o’clock in the evening,
and soft, sweet music early on the morrow. It ‘s a very entertaining
temper to observe. I, fortunately, can do so dispassionately, for I ‘m
the only person in the place he has not quarreled with.”

“Has he then no society? Who is Miss Garland, whom you asked about?”

“A young girl staying with his mother, a sort of far-away cousin; a good
plain girl, but not a person to delight a sculptor’s eye. Roderick has
a goodly share of the old Southern arrogance; he has the aristocratic
temperament. He will have nothing to do with the small towns-people; he
says they ‘re ‘ignoble.’ He cannot endure his mother’s friends--the
old ladies and the ministers and the tea-party people; they bore him to
death. So he comes and lounges here and rails at everything and every
one.”

This graceful young scoffer reappeared a couple of evenings later, and
confirmed the friendly feeling he had provoked on Rowland’s part. He
was in an easier mood than before, he chattered less extravagantly, and
asked Rowland a number of rather naif questions about the condition of
the fine arts in New York and Boston. Cecilia, when he had gone, said
that this was the wholesome effect of Rowland’s praise of his statuette.
Roderick was acutely sensitive, and Rowland’s tranquil commendation had
stilled his restless pulses. He was ruminating the full-flavored verdict
of culture. Rowland felt an irresistible kindness for him, a mingled
sense of his personal charm and his artistic capacity. He had an
indefinable attraction--the something divine of unspotted, exuberant,
confident youth. The next day was Sunday, and Rowland proposed that they
should take a long walk and that Roderick should show him the country.
The young man assented gleefully, and in the morning, as Rowland at the
garden gate was giving his hostess Godspeed on her way to church, he
came striding along the grassy margin of the road and out-whistling the
music of the church bells. It was one of those lovely days of August
when you feel the complete exuberance of summer just warned and checked
by autumn. “Remember the day, and take care you rob no orchards,” said
Cecilia, as they separated.

The young men walked away at a steady pace, over hill and dale, through
woods and fields, and at last found themselves on a grassy elevation
studded with mossy rocks and red cedars. Just beneath them, in a great
shining curve, flowed the goodly Connecticut. They flung themselves
on the grass and tossed stones into the river; they talked like old
friends. Rowland lit a cigar, and Roderick refused one with a grimace
of extravagant disgust. He thought them vile things; he did n’t see how
decent people could tolerate them. Rowland was amused, and wondered what
it was that made this ill-mannered speech seem perfectly inoffensive
on Roderick’s lips. He belonged to the race of mortals, to be pitied
or envied according as we view the matter, who are not held to a strict
account for their aggressions. Looking at him as he lay stretched in the
shade, Rowland vaguely likened him to some beautiful, supple, restless,
bright-eyed animal, whose motions should have no deeper warrant than the
tremulous delicacy of its structure, and be graceful even when they
were most inconvenient. Rowland watched the shadows on Mount Holyoke,
listened to the gurgle of the river, and sniffed the balsam of the
pines. A gentle breeze had begun to tickle their summits, and brought
the smell of the mown grass across from the elm-dotted river meadows. He
sat up beside his companion and looked away at the far-spreading
view. It seemed to him beautiful, and suddenly a strange feeling of
prospective regret took possession of him. Something seemed to tell
him that later, in a foreign land, he would remember it lovingly and
penitently.

“It ‘s a wretched business,” he said, “this practical quarrel of ours
with our own country, this everlasting impatience to get out of it. Is
one’s only safety then in flight? This is an American day, an American
landscape, an American atmosphere. It certainly has its merits, and
some day when I am shivering with ague in classic Italy, I shall accuse
myself of having slighted them.”

Roderick kindled with a sympathetic glow, and declared that America was
good enough for him, and that he had always thought it the duty of an
honest citizen to stand by his own country and help it along. He had
evidently thought nothing whatever about it, and was launching his
doctrine on the inspiration of the moment. The doctrine expanded with
the occasion, and he declared that he was above all an advocate for
American art. He did n’t see why we should n’t produce the greatest
works in the world. We were the biggest people, and we ought to have the
biggest conceptions. The biggest conceptions of course would bring forth
in time the biggest performances. We had only to be true to ourselves,
to pitch in and not be afraid, to fling Imitation overboard and fix our
eyes upon our National Individuality. “I declare,” he cried, “there ‘s
a career for a man, and I ‘ve twenty minds to decide, on the spot, to
embrace it--to be the consummate, typical, original, national American
artist! It ‘s inspiring!”

Rowland burst out laughing and told him that he liked his practice
better than his theory, and that a saner impulse than this had inspired
his little Water-drinker. Roderick took no offense, and three minutes
afterwards was talking volubly of some humbler theme, but half heeded
by his companion, who had returned to his cogitations. At last Rowland
delivered himself of the upshot of these. “How would you like,” he
suddenly demanded, “to go to Rome?”

Hudson stared, and, with a hungry laugh which speedily consigned our
National Individuality to perdition, responded that he would like it
reasonably well. “And I should like, by the same token,” he added,
“to go to Athens, to Constantinople, to Damascus, to the holy city of
Benares, where there is a golden statue of Brahma twenty feet tall.”

“Nay,” said Rowland soberly, “if you were to go to Rome, you should
settle down and work. Athens might help you, but for the present I
should n’t recommend Benares.”

“It will be time to arrange details when I pack my trunk,” said Hudson.

“If you mean to turn sculptor, the sooner you pack your trunk the
better.”

“Oh, but I ‘m a practical man! What is the smallest sum per annum, on
which one can keep alive the sacred fire in Rome?”

“What is the largest sum at your disposal?”

Roderick stroked his light moustache, gave it a twist, and then
announced with mock pomposity: “Three hundred dollars!”

“The money question could be arranged,” said Rowland. “There are ways of
raising money.”

“I should like to know a few! I never yet discovered one.”

“One consists,” said Rowland, “in having a friend with a good deal more
than he wants, and not being too proud to accept a part of it.”

Roderick stared a moment and his face flushed. “Do you mean--do you
mean?”.... he stammered. He was greatly excited.

Rowland got up, blushing a little, and Roderick sprang to his feet. “In
three words, if you are to be a sculptor, you ought to go to Rome and
study the antique. To go to Rome you need money. I ‘m fond of fine
statues, but unfortunately I can’t make them myself. I have to order
them. I order a dozen from you, to be executed at your convenience. To
help you, I pay you in advance.”

Roderick pushed off his hat and wiped his forehead, still gazing at his
companion. “You believe in me!” he cried at last.

“Allow me to explain,” said Rowland. “I believe in you, if you are
prepared to work and to wait, and to struggle, and to exercise a great
many virtues. And then, I ‘m afraid to say it, lest I should disturb
you more than I should help you. You must decide for yourself. I simply
offer you an opportunity.”

Hudson stood for some time, profoundly meditative. “You have not seen my
other things,” he said suddenly. “Come and look at them.”

“Now?”

“Yes, we ‘ll walk home. We ‘ll settle the question.”

He passed his hand through Rowland’s arm and they retraced their steps.
They reached the town and made their way along a broad country street,
dusky with the shade of magnificent elms. Rowland felt his companion’s
arm trembling in his own. They stopped at a large white house, flanked
with melancholy hemlocks, and passed through a little front garden,
paved with moss-coated bricks and ornamented with parterres bordered
with high box hedges. The mansion had an air of antiquated dignity, but
it had seen its best days, and evidently sheltered a shrunken household.
Mrs. Hudson, Rowland was sure, might be seen in the garden of a
morning, in a white apron and a pair of old gloves, engaged in frugal
horticulture. Roderick’s studio was behind, in the basement; a large,
empty room, with the paper peeling off the walls. This represented, in
the fashion of fifty years ago, a series of small fantastic landscapes
of a hideous pattern, and the young sculptor had presumably torn it away
in great scraps, in moments of aesthetic exasperation. On a board in
a corner was a heap of clay, and on the floor, against the wall,
stood some dozen medallions, busts, and figures, in various stages of
completion. To exhibit them Roderick had to place them one by one on
the end of a long packing-box, which served as a pedestal. He did so
silently, making no explanations, and looking at them himself with a
strange air of quickened curiosity. Most of the things were portraits;
and the three at which he looked longest were finished busts. One was a
colossal head of a negro, tossed back, defiant, with distended nostrils;
one was the portrait of a young man whom Rowland immediately perceived,
by the resemblance, to be his deceased brother; the last represented a
gentleman with a pointed nose, a long, shaved upper lip, and a tuft on
the end of his chin. This was a face peculiarly unadapted to sculpture;
but as a piece of modeling it was the best, and it was admirable. It
reminded Rowland in its homely veracity, its artless artfulness, of
the works of the early Italian Renaissance. On the pedestal was cut
the name--Barnaby Striker, Esq. Rowland remembered that this was the
appellation of the legal luminary from whom his companion had undertaken
to borrow a reflected ray, and although in the bust there was naught
flagrantly set down in malice, it betrayed, comically to one who could
relish the secret, that the features of the original had often been
scanned with an irritated eye. Besides these there were several rough
studies of the nude, and two or three figures of a fanciful kind. The
most noticeable (and it had singular beauty) was a small modeled design
for a sepulchral monument; that, evidently, of Stephen Hudson. The young
soldier lay sleeping eternally, with his hand on his sword, like an old
crusader in a Gothic cathedral.

Rowland made no haste to pronounce; too much depended on his judgment.
“Upon my word,” cried Hudson at last, “they seem to me very good.”

And in truth, as Rowland looked, he saw they were good. They were
youthful, awkward, and ignorant; the effort, often, was more apparent
than the success. But the effort was signally powerful and intelligent;
it seemed to Rowland that it needed only to let itself go to compass
great things. Here and there, too, success, when grasped, had something
masterly. Rowland turned to his companion, who stood with his hands in
his pockets and his hair very much crumpled, looking at him askance.
The light of admiration was in Rowland’s eyes, and it speedily kindled a
wonderful illumination on Hudson’s handsome brow. Rowland said at last,
gravely, “You have only to work!”

“I think I know what that means,” Roderick answered. He turned away,
threw himself on a rickety chair, and sat for some moments with his
elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. “Work--work?” he said at
last, looking up, “ah, if I could only begin!” He glanced round the
room a moment and his eye encountered on the mantel-shelf the vivid
physiognomy of Mr. Barnaby Striker. His smile vanished, and he stared at
it with an air of concentrated enmity. “I want to begin,” he cried, “and
I can’t make a better beginning than this! Good-by, Mr. Striker!” He
strode across the room, seized a mallet that lay at hand, and before
Rowland could interfere, in the interest of art if not of morals, dealt
a merciless blow upon Mr. Striker’s skull. The bust cracked into a
dozen pieces, which toppled with a great crash upon the floor. Rowland
relished neither the destruction of the image nor his companion’s look
in working it, but as he was about to express his displeasure the door
opened and gave passage to a young girl. She came in with a rapid step
and startled face, as if she had been summoned by the noise. Seeing the
heap of shattered clay and the mallet in Roderick’s hand, she gave a
cry of horror. Her voice died away when she perceived that Rowland was a
stranger, but she murmured reproachfully, “Why, Roderick, what have you
done?”

Roderick gave a joyous kick to the shapeless fragments. “I ‘ve driven
the money-changers out of the temple!” he cried.

The traces retained shape enough to be recognized, and she gave a little
moan of pity. She seemed not to understand the young man’s allegory, but
yet to feel that it pointed to some great purpose, which must be an evil
one, from being expressed in such a lawless fashion, and to perceive
that Rowland was in some way accountable for it. She looked at him with
a sharp, frank mistrust, and turned away through the open door. Rowland
looked after her with extraordinary interest.





CHAPTER II. Roderick

Early on the morrow Rowland received a visit from his new friend.
Roderick was in a state of extreme exhilaration, tempered, however, by
a certain amount of righteous wrath. He had had a domestic struggle, but
he had remained master of the situation. He had shaken the dust of Mr.
Striker’s office from his feet.

“I had it out last night with my mother,” he said. “I dreaded the scene,
for she takes things terribly hard. She does n’t scold nor storm, and
she does n’t argue nor insist. She sits with her eyes full of tears
that never fall, and looks at me, when I displease her, as if I were
a perfect monster of depravity. And the trouble is that I was born to
displease her. She does n’t trust me; she never has and she never will.
I don’t know what I have done to set her against me, but ever since I
can remember I have been looked at with tears. The trouble is,” he went
on, giving a twist to his moustache, “I ‘ve been too absurdly docile.
I ‘ve been sprawling all my days by the maternal fireside, and my dear
mother has grown used to bullying me. I ‘ve made myself cheap! If I ‘m
not in my bed by eleven o’clock, the girl is sent out to explore with
a lantern. When I think of it, I fairly despise my amiability. It ‘s
rather a hard fate, to live like a saint and to pass for a sinner! I
should like for six months to lead Mrs. Hudson the life some fellows
lead their mothers!”

“Allow me to believe,” said Rowland, “that you would like nothing of
the sort. If you have been a good boy, don’t spoil it by pretending you
don’t like it. You have been very happy, I suspect, in spite of your
virtues, and there are worse fates in the world than being loved too
well. I have not had the pleasure of seeing your mother, but I would lay
you a wager that that is the trouble. She is passionately fond of you,
and her hopes, like all intense hopes, keep trembling into fears.”
 Rowland, as he spoke, had an instinctive vision of how such a beautiful
young fellow must be loved by his female relatives.

Roderick frowned, and with an impatient gesture, “I do her justice,” he
cried. “May she never do me less!” Then after a moment’s hesitation, “I
‘ll tell you the perfect truth,” he went on. “I have to fill a double
place. I have to be my brother as well as myself. It ‘s a good deal to
ask of a man, especially when he has so little talent as I for being
what he is not. When we were both young together I was the curled
darling. I had the silver mug and the biggest piece of pudding, and I
stayed in-doors to be kissed by the ladies while he made mud-pies in the
garden and was never missed, of course. Really, he was worth fifty of
me! When he was brought home from Vicksburg with a piece of shell in
his skull, my poor mother began to think she had n’t loved him enough. I
remember, as she hung round my neck sobbing, before his coffin, she told
me that I must be to her everything that he would have been. I swore in
tears and in perfect good faith that I would, but naturally I have
not kept my promise. I have been utterly different. I have been idle,
restless, egotistical, discontented. I have done no harm, I believe, but
I have done no good. My brother, if he had lived, would have made
fifty thousand dollars and put gas and water into the house. My mother,
brooding night and day on her bereavement, has come to fix her ideal in
offices of that sort. Judged by that standard I ‘m nowhere!”

Rowland was at loss how to receive this account of his friend’s domestic
circumstances; it was plaintive, and yet the manner seemed to him
over-trenchant. “You must lose no time in making a masterpiece,” he
answered; “then with the proceeds you can give her gas from golden
burners.”

“So I have told her; but she only half believes either in masterpiece or
in proceeds. She can see no good in my making statues; they seem to her
a snare of the enemy. She would fain see me all my life tethered to the
law, like a browsing goat to a stake. In that way I ‘m in sight. ‘It
‘s a more regular occupation!’ that ‘s all I can get out of her. A
more regular damnation! Is it a fact that artists, in general, are such
wicked men? I never had the pleasure of knowing one, so I could n’t
confute her with an example. She had the advantage of me, because she
formerly knew a portrait-painter at Richmond, who did her miniature in
black lace mittens (you may see it on the parlor table), who used to
drink raw brandy and beat his wife. I promised her that, whatever I
might do to my wife, I would never beat my mother, and that as for
brandy, raw or diluted, I detested it. She sat silently crying for an
hour, during which I expended treasures of eloquence. It ‘s a good thing
to have to reckon up one’s intentions, and I assure you, as I pleaded my
cause, I was most agreeably impressed with the elevated character of
my own. I kissed her solemnly at last, and told her that I had said
everything and that she must make the best of it. This morning she has
dried her eyes, but I warrant you it is n’t a cheerful house. I long to
be out of it!”

“I ‘m extremely sorry,” said Rowland, “to have been the prime cause of
so much suffering. I owe your mother some amends; will it be possible
for me to see her?”

“If you ‘ll see her, it will smooth matters vastly; though to tell the
truth she ‘ll need all her courage to face you, for she considers you an
agent of the foul fiend. She does n’t see why you should have come
here and set me by the ears: you are made to ruin ingenuous youths and
desolate doting mothers. I leave it to you, personally, to answer these
charges. You see, what she can’t forgive--what she ‘ll not really ever
forgive--is your taking me off to Rome. Rome is an evil word, in my
mother’s vocabulary, to be said in a whisper, as you ‘d say ‘damnation.’
Northampton is in the centre of the earth and Rome far away in outlying
dusk, into which it can do no Christian any good to penetrate. And there
was I but yesterday a doomed habitue of that repository of every virtue,
Mr. Striker’s office!”

“And does Mr. Striker know of your decision?” asked Rowland.

“To a certainty! Mr. Striker, you must know, is not simply a
good-natured attorney, who lets me dog’s-ear his law-books. He’s a
particular friend and general adviser. He looks after my mother’s
property and kindly consents to regard me as part of it. Our opinions
have always been painfully divergent, but I freely forgive him his
zealous attempts to unscrew my head-piece and set it on hind part
before. He never understood me, and it was useless to try to make him.
We speak a different language--we ‘re made of a different clay. I had a
fit of rage yesterday when I smashed his bust, at the thought of all the
bad blood he had stirred up in me; it did me good, and it ‘s all over
now. I don’t hate him any more; I ‘m rather sorry for him. See how you
‘ve improved me! I must have seemed to him wilfully, wickedly stupid,
and I ‘m sure he only tolerated me on account of his great regard for my
mother. This morning I grasped the bull by the horns. I took an armful
of law-books that have been gathering the dust in my room for the last
year and a half, and presented myself at the office. ‘Allow me to put
these back in their places,’ I said. ‘I shall never have need for
them more--never more, never more, never more!’ ‘So you ‘ve learned
everything they contain?’ asked Striker, leering over his spectacles.
‘Better late than never.’ ‘I ‘ve learned nothing that you can teach me,’
I cried. ‘But I shall tax your patience no longer. I ‘m going to be a
sculptor. I ‘m going to Rome. I won’t bid you good-by just yet; I shall
see you again. But I bid good-by here, with rapture, to these four
detested walls--to this living tomb! I did n’t know till now how I hated
it! My compliments to Mr. Spooner, and my thanks for all you have not
made of me!’”

“I ‘m glad to know you are to see Mr. Striker again,” Rowland answered,
correcting a primary inclination to smile. “You certainly owe him a
respectful farewell, even if he has not understood you. I confess you
rather puzzle me. There is another person,” he presently added, “whose
opinion as to your new career I should like to know. What does Miss
Garland think?”

Hudson looked at him keenly, with a slight blush. Then, with a conscious
smile, “What makes you suppose she thinks anything?” he asked.

“Because, though I saw her but for a moment yesterday, she struck me as
a very intelligent person, and I am sure she has opinions.”

The smile on Roderick’s mobile face passed rapidly into a frown. “Oh,
she thinks what I think!” he answered.

Before the two young men separated Rowland attempted to give as
harmonious a shape as possible to his companion’s scheme. “I have
launched you, as I may say,” he said, “and I feel as if I ought to see
you into port. I am older than you and know the world better, and
it seems well that we should voyage a while together. It ‘s on my
conscience that I ought to take you to Rome, walk you through the
Vatican, and then lock you up with a heap of clay. I sail on the fifth
of September; can you make your preparations to start with me?”

Roderick assented to all this with an air of candid confidence in
his friend’s wisdom that outshone the virtue of pledges. “I have no
preparations to make,” he said with a smile, raising his arms and
letting them fall, as if to indicate his unencumbered condition. “What I
am to take with me I carry here!” and he tapped his forehead.

“Happy man!” murmured Rowland with a sigh, thinking of the light
stowage, in his own organism, in the region indicated by Roderick, and
of the heavy one in deposit at his banker’s, of bags and boxes.

When his companion had left him he went in search of Cecilia. She
was sitting at work at a shady window, and welcomed him to a low
chintz-covered chair. He sat some time, thoughtfully snipping tape with
her scissors; he expected criticism and he was preparing a rejoinder. At
last he told her of Roderick’s decision and of his own influence in
it. Cecilia, besides an extreme surprise, exhibited a certain fine
displeasure at his not having asked her advice.

“What would you have said, if I had?” he demanded.

“I would have said in the first place, ‘Oh for pity’s sake don’t carry
off the person in all Northampton who amuses me most!’ I would have said
in the second place, ‘Nonsense! the boy is doing very well. Let well
alone!’”

“That in the first five minutes. What would you have said later?”

“That for a man who is generally averse to meddling, you were suddenly
rather officious.”

Rowland’s countenance fell. He frowned in silence. Cecilia looked at him
askance; gradually the spark of irritation faded from her eye.

“Excuse my sharpness,” she resumed at last. “But I am literally in
despair at losing Roderick Hudson. His visits in the evening, for the
past year, have kept me alive. They have given a silver tip to leaden
days. I don’t say he is of a more useful metal than other people, but he
is of a different one. Of course, however, that I shall miss him sadly
is not a reason for his not going to seek his fortune. Men must work and
women must weep!”

“Decidedly not!” said Rowland, with a good deal of emphasis. He had
suspected from the first hour of his stay that Cecilia had treated
herself to a private social luxury; he had then discovered that she
found it in Hudson’s lounging visits and boyish chatter, and he had felt
himself wondering at last whether, judiciously viewed, her gain in the
matter was not the young man’s loss. It was evident that Cecilia was not
judicious, and that her good sense, habitually rigid under the demands
of domestic economy, indulged itself with a certain agreeable laxity on
this particular point. She liked her young friend just as he was; she
humored him, flattered him, laughed at him, caressed him--did
everything but advise him. It was a flirtation without the benefits of
a flirtation. She was too old to let him fall in love with her, which
might have done him good; and her inclination was to keep him young, so
that the nonsense he talked might never transgress a certain line. It
was quite conceivable that poor Cecilia should relish a pastime; but if
one had philanthropically embraced the idea that something considerable
might be made of Roderick, it was impossible not to see that her
friendship was not what might be called tonic. So Rowland reflected, in
the glow of his new-born sympathy. There was a later time when he would
have been grateful if Hudson’s susceptibility to the relaxing influence
of lovely women might have been limited to such inexpensive tribute as
he rendered the excellent Cecilia.

“I only desire to remind you,” she pursued, “that you are likely to have
your hands full.”

“I ‘ve thought of that, and I rather like the idea; liking, as I do, the
man. I told you the other day, you know, that I longed to have something
on my hands. When it first occurred to me that I might start our
young friend on the path of glory, I felt as if I had an unimpeachable
inspiration. Then I remembered there were dangers and difficulties,
and asked myself whether I had a right to step in between him and his
obscurity. My sense of his really having the divine flame answered the
question. He is made to do the things that humanity is the happier for!
I can’t do such things myself, but when I see a young man of genius
standing helpless and hopeless for want of capital, I feel--and it ‘s
no affectation of humility, I assure you--as if it would give at least a
reflected usefulness to my own life to offer him his opportunity.”

“In the name of humanity, I suppose, I ought to thank you. But I want,
first of all, to be happy myself. You guarantee us at any rate, I hope,
the masterpieces.”

“A masterpiece a year,” said Rowland smiling, “for the next quarter of a
century.”

“It seems to me that we have a right to ask more: to demand that you
guarantee us not only the development of the artist, but the security of
the man.”

Rowland became grave again. “His security?”

“His moral, his sentimental security. Here, you see, it ‘s perfect. We
are all under a tacit compact to preserve it. Perhaps you believe in
the necessary turbulence of genius, and you intend to enjoin upon your
protege the importance of cultivating his passions.”

“On the contrary, I believe that a man of genius owes as much deference
to his passions as any other man, but not a particle more, and I confess
I have a strong conviction that the artist is better for leading a quiet
life. That is what I shall preach to my protege, as you call him, by
example as well as by precept. You evidently believe,” he added in a
moment, “that he will lead me a dance.”

“Nay, I prophesy nothing. I only think that circumstances, with our
young man, have a great influence; as is proved by the fact that
although he has been fuming and fretting here for the last five years,
he has nevertheless managed to make the best of it, and found it easy,
on the whole, to vegetate. Transplanted to Rome, I fancy he ‘ll put
forth a denser leafage. I should like vastly to see the change. You must
write me about it, from stage to stage. I hope with all my heart that
the fruit will be proportionate to the foliage. Don’t think me a bird of
ill omen; only remember that you will be held to a strict account.”

“A man should make the most of himself, and be helped if he needs help,”
 Rowland answered, after a long pause. “Of course when a body begins to
expand, there comes in the possibility of bursting; but I nevertheless
approve of a certain tension of one’s being. It ‘s what a man is meant
for. And then I believe in the essential salubrity of genius--true
genius.”

“Very good,” said Cecilia, with an air of resignation which made
Rowland, for the moment, seem to himself culpably eager. “We ‘ll drink
then to-day at dinner to the health of our friend.”

* * *

Having it much at heart to convince Mrs. Hudson of the purity of his
intentions, Rowland waited upon her that evening. He was ushered into a
large parlor, which, by the light of a couple of candles, he perceived
to be very meagrely furnished and very tenderly and sparingly used. The
windows were open to the air of the summer night, and a circle of three
persons was temporarily awed into silence by his appearance. One
of these was Mrs. Hudson, who was sitting at one of the windows,
empty-handed save for the pocket-handkerchief in her lap, which was held
with an air of familiarity with its sadder uses. Near her, on the sofa,
half sitting, half lounging, in the attitude of a visitor outstaying
ceremony, with one long leg flung over the other and a large foot in a
clumsy boot swinging to and fro continually, was a lean, sandy-haired
gentleman whom Rowland recognized as the original of the portrait of Mr.
Barnaby Striker. At the table, near the candles, busy with a substantial
piece of needle-work, sat the young girl of whom he had had a moment’s
quickened glimpse in Roderick’s studio, and whom he had learned to
be Miss Garland, his companion’s kinswoman. This young lady’s limpid,
penetrating gaze was the most effective greeting he received. Mrs.
Hudson rose with a soft, vague sound of distress, and stood looking at
him shrinkingly and waveringly, as if she were sorely tempted to
retreat through the open window. Mr. Striker swung his long leg a trifle
defiantly. No one, evidently, was used to offering hollow welcomes or
telling polite fibs. Rowland introduced himself; he had come, he might
say, upon business.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Hudson tremulously; “I know--my son has told me. I
suppose it is better I should see you. Perhaps you will take a seat.”

With this invitation Rowland prepared to comply, and, turning, grasped
the first chair that offered itself.

“Not that one,” said a full, grave voice; whereupon he perceived that a
quantity of sewing-silk had been suspended and entangled over the back,
preparatory to being wound on reels. He felt the least bit irritated at
the curtness of the warning, coming as it did from a young woman whose
countenance he had mentally pronounced interesting, and with regard to
whom he was conscious of the germ of the inevitable desire to produce a
responsive interest. And then he thought it would break the ice to say
something playfully urbane.

“Oh, you should let me take the chair,” he answered, “and have the
pleasure of holding the skeins myself!”

For all reply to this sally he received a stare of undisguised amazement
from Miss Garland, who then looked across at Mrs. Hudson with a glance
which plainly said: “You see he ‘s quite the insidious personage we
feared.” The elder lady, however, sat with her eyes fixed on the ground
and her two hands tightly clasped. But touching her Rowland felt much
more compassion than resentment; her attitude was not coldness, it was
a kind of dread, almost a terror. She was a small, eager woman, with a
pale, troubled face, which added to her apparent age. After looking at
her for some minutes Rowland saw that she was still young, and that she
must have been a very girlish bride. She had been a pretty one, too,
though she probably had looked terribly frightened at the altar. She
was very delicately made, and Roderick had come honestly by his physical
slimness and elegance. She wore no cap, and her flaxen hair, which was
of extraordinary fineness, was smoothed and confined with Puritanic
precision. She was excessively shy, and evidently very humble-minded; it
was singular to see a woman to whom the experience of life had conveyed
so little reassurance as to her own resources or the chances of things
turning out well. Rowland began immediately to like her, and to feel
impatient to persuade her that there was no harm in him, and that,
twenty to one, her son would make her a well-pleased woman yet. He
foresaw that she would be easy to persuade, and that a benevolent
conversational tone would probably make her pass, fluttering, from
distrust into an oppressive extreme of confidence. But he had an
indefinable sense that the person who was testing that strong young
eyesight of hers in the dim candle-light was less readily beguiled
from her mysterious feminine preconceptions. Miss Garland, according
to Cecilia’s judgment, as Rowland remembered, had not a countenance to
inspire a sculptor; but it seemed to Rowland that her countenance might
fairly inspire a man who was far from being a sculptor. She was not
pretty, as the eye of habit judges prettiness, but when you made the
observation you somehow failed to set it down against her, for you had
already passed from measuring contours to tracing meanings. In Mary
Garland’s face there were many possible ones, and they gave you the more
to think about that it was not--like Roderick Hudson’s, for instance--a
quick and mobile face, over which expression flickered like a candle in
a wind. They followed each other slowly, distinctly, gravely, sincerely,
and you might almost have fancied that, as they came and went, they gave
her a sort of pain. She was tall and slender, and had an air of maidenly
strength and decision. She had a broad forehead and dark eyebrows, a
trifle thicker than those of classic beauties; her gray eye was clear
but not brilliant, and her features were perfectly irregular. Her mouth
was large, fortunately for the principal grace of her physiognomy was
her smile, which displayed itself with magnificent amplitude. Rowland,
indeed, had not yet seen her smile, but something assured him that her
rigid gravity had a radiant counterpart. She wore a scanty white dress,
and had a nameless rustic air which would have led one to speak of her
less as a young lady than as a young woman. She was evidently a girl
of a great personal force, but she lacked pliancy. She was hemming
a kitchen towel with the aid of a large steel thimble. She bent her
serious eyes at last on her work again, and let Rowland explain himself.

“I have become suddenly so very intimate with your son,” he said at
last, addressing himself to Mrs. Hudson, “that it seems just I should
make your acquaintance.”

“Very just,” murmured the poor lady, and after a moment’s hesitation was
on the point of adding something more; but Mr. Striker here interposed,
after a prefatory clearance of the throat.

“I should like to take the liberty,” he said, “of addressing you a
simple question. For how long a period of time have you been acquainted
with our young friend?” He continued to kick the air, but his head was
thrown back and his eyes fixed on the opposite wall, as if in aversion
to the spectacle of Rowland’s inevitable confusion.

“A very short time, I confess. Hardly three days.”

“And yet you call yourself intimate, eh? I have been seeing Mr. Roderick
daily these three years, and yet it was only this morning that I felt as
if I had at last the right to say that I knew him. We had a few moments’
conversation in my office which supplied the missing links in the
evidence. So that now I do venture to say I ‘m acquainted with Mr.
Roderick! But wait three years, sir, like me!” and Mr. Striker laughed,
with a closed mouth and a noiseless shake of all his long person.

Mrs. Hudson smiled confusedly, at hazard; Miss Garland kept her eyes on
her stitches. But it seemed to Rowland that the latter colored a little.
“Oh, in three years, of course,” he said, “we shall know each other
better. Before many years are over, madam,” he pursued, “I expect the
world to know him. I expect him to be a great man!”

Mrs. Hudson looked at first as if this could be but an insidious device
for increasing her distress by the assistance of irony. Then reassured,
little by little, by Rowland’s benevolent visage, she gave him an
appealing glance and a timorous “Really?”

But before Rowland could respond, Mr. Striker again intervened. “Do
I fully apprehend your expression?” he asked. “Our young friend is to
become a great man?”

“A great artist, I hope,” said Rowland.

“This is a new and interesting view,” said Mr. Striker, with an
assumption of judicial calmness. “We have had hopes for Mr. Roderick,
but I confess, if I have rightly understood them, they stopped short of
greatness. We should n’t have taken the responsibility of claiming
it for him. What do you say, ladies? We all feel about him here--his
mother, Miss Garland, and myself--as if his merits were rather in the
line of the”--and Mr. Striker waved his hand with a series of fantastic
flourishes in the air--“of the light ornamental!” Mr. Striker bore his
recalcitrant pupil a grudge, but he was evidently trying both to be
fair and to respect the susceptibilities of his companions. But he was
unversed in the mysterious processes of feminine emotion. Ten minutes
before, there had been a general harmony of sombre views; but on hearing
Roderick’s limitations thus distinctly formulated to a stranger, the two
ladies mutely protested. Mrs. Hudson uttered a short, faint sigh, and
Miss Garland raised her eyes toward their advocate and visited him with
a short, cold glance.

“I ‘m afraid, Mrs. Hudson,” Rowland pursued, evading the discussion
of Roderick’s possible greatness, “that you don’t at all thank me for
stirring up your son’s ambition on a line which leads him so far from
home. I suspect I have made you my enemy.”

Mrs. Hudson covered her mouth with her finger-tips and looked painfully
perplexed between the desire to confess the truth and the fear of being
impolite. “My cousin is no one’s enemy,” Miss Garland hereupon declared,
gently, but with that same fine deliberateness with which she had made
Rowland relax his grasp of the chair.

“Does she leave that to you?” Rowland ventured to ask, with a smile.

“We are inspired with none but Christian sentiments,” said Mr. Striker;
“Miss Garland perhaps most of all. Miss Garland,” and Mr. Striker
waved his hand again as if to perform an introduction which had been
regrettably omitted, “is the daughter of a minister, the granddaughter
of a minister, the sister of a minister.” Rowland bowed deferentially,
and the young girl went on with her sewing, with nothing, apparently,
either of embarrassment or elation at the promulgation of these facts.
Mr. Striker continued: “Mrs. Hudson, I see, is too deeply agitated
to converse with you freely. She will allow me to address you a few
questions. Would you kindly inform her, as exactly as possible, just
what you propose to do with her son?”

The poor lady fixed her eyes appealingly on Rowland’s face and seemed
to say that Mr. Striker had spoken her desire, though she herself would
have expressed it less defiantly. But Rowland saw in Mr. Striker’s
many-wrinkled light blue eye, shrewd at once and good-natured, that
he had no intention of defiance, and that he was simply pompous and
conceited and sarcastically compassionate of any view of things in which
Roderick Hudson was regarded in a serious light.

“Do, my dear madam?” demanded Rowland. “I don’t propose to do anything.
He must do for himself. I simply offer him the chance. He ‘s to study,
to work--hard, I hope.”

“Not too hard, please,” murmured Mrs. Hudson, pleadingly, wheeling about
from recent visions of dangerous leisure. “He ‘s not very strong, and I
‘m afraid the climate of Europe is very relaxing.”

“Ah, study?” repeated Mr. Striker. “To what line of study is he to
direct his attention?” Then suddenly, with an impulse of disinterested
curiosity on his own account, “How do you study sculpture, anyhow?”

“By looking at models and imitating them.”

“At models, eh? To what kind of models do you refer?”

“To the antique, in the first place.”

“Ah, the antique,” repeated Mr. Striker, with a jocose intonation. “Do
you hear, madam? Roderick is going off to Europe to learn to imitate the
antique.”

“I suppose it ‘s all right,” said Mrs. Hudson, twisting herself in a
sort of delicate anguish.

“An antique, as I understand it,” the lawyer continued, “is an image of
a pagan deity, with considerable dirt sticking to it, and no arms, no
nose, and no clothing. A precious model, certainly!”

“That ‘s a very good description of many,” said Rowland, with a laugh.

“Mercy! Truly?” asked Mrs. Hudson, borrowing courage from his urbanity.

“But a sculptor’s studies, you intimate, are not confined to the
antique,” Mr. Striker resumed. “After he has been looking three or four
years at the objects I describe”--

“He studies the living model,” said Rowland.

“Does it take three or four years?” asked Mrs. Hudson, imploringly.

“That depends upon the artist’s aptitude. After twenty years a real
artist is still studying.”

“Oh, my poor boy!” moaned Mrs. Hudson, finding the prospect, under every
light, still terrible.

“Now this study of the living model,” Mr. Striker pursued. “Inform Mrs.
Hudson about that.”

“Oh dear, no!” cried Mrs. Hudson, shrinkingly.

“That too,” said Rowland, “is one of the reasons for studying in Rome.
It ‘s a handsome race, you know, and you find very well-made people.”

“I suppose they ‘re no better made than a good tough Yankee,” objected
Mr. Striker, transposing his interminable legs. “The same God made us.”

“Surely,” sighed Mrs. Hudson, but with a questioning glance at her
visitor which showed that she had already begun to concede much weight
to his opinion. Rowland hastened to express his assent to Mr. Striker’s
proposition.

Miss Garland looked up, and, after a moment’s hesitation: “Are the Roman
women very beautiful?” she asked.

Rowland too, in answering, hesitated; he was looking straight at the
young girl. “On the whole, I prefer ours,” he said.

She had dropped her work in her lap; her hands were crossed upon it, her
head thrown a little back. She had evidently expected a more impersonal
answer, and she was dissatisfied. For an instant she seemed inclined to
make a rejoinder, but she slowly picked up her work in silence and drew
her stitches again.

Rowland had for the second time the feeling that she judged him to be
a person of a disagreeably sophisticated tone. He noticed too that the
kitchen towel she was hemming was terribly coarse. And yet his answer
had a resonant inward echo, and he repeated to himself, “Yes, on the
whole, I prefer ours.”

“Well, these models,” began Mr. Striker. “You put them into an attitude,
I suppose.”

“An attitude, exactly.”

“And then you sit down and look at them.”

“You must not sit too long. You must go at your clay and try to build up
something that looks like them.”

“Well, there you are with your model in an attitude on one side,
yourself, in an attitude too, I suppose, on the other, and your pile of
clay in the middle, building up, as you say. So you pass the morning.
After that I hope you go out and take a walk, and rest from your
exertions.”

“Unquestionably. But to a sculptor who loves his work there is no time
lost. Everything he looks at teaches or suggests something.”

“That ‘s a tempting doctrine to young men with a taste for sitting by
the hour with the page unturned, watching the flies buzz, or the frost
melt on the window-pane. Our young friend, in this way, must have laid
up stores of information which I never suspected!”

“Very likely,” said Rowland, with an unresentful smile, “he will prove
some day the completer artist for some of those lazy reveries.”

This theory was apparently very grateful to Mrs. Hudson, who had never
had the case put for her son with such ingenious hopefulness, and found
herself disrelishing the singular situation of seeming to side against
her own flesh and blood with a lawyer whose conversational tone betrayed
the habit of cross-questioning.

“My son, then,” she ventured to ask, “my son has great--what you would
call great powers?”

“To my sense, very great powers.”

Poor Mrs. Hudson actually smiled, broadly, gleefully, and glanced at
Miss Garland, as if to invite her to do likewise. But the young girl’s
face remained serious, like the eastern sky when the opposite sunset is
too feeble to make it glow. “Do you really know?” she asked, looking at
Rowland.

“One cannot know in such a matter save after proof, and proof takes
time. But one can believe.”

“And you believe?”

“I believe.”

But even then Miss Garland vouchsafed no smile. Her face became graver
than ever.

“Well, well,” said Mrs. Hudson, “we must hope that it is all for the
best.”

Mr. Striker eyed his old friend for a moment with a look of some
displeasure; he saw that this was but a cunning feminine imitation of
resignation, and that, through some untraceable process of transition,
she was now taking more comfort in the opinions of this insinuating
stranger than in his own tough dogmas. He rose to his feet,
without pulling down his waistcoat, but with a wrinkled grin at the
inconsistency of women. “Well, sir, Mr. Roderick’s powers are nothing to
me,” he said, “nor no use he makes of them. Good or bad, he ‘s no son
of mine. But, in a friendly way, I ‘m glad to hear so fine an account
of him. I ‘m glad, madam, you ‘re so satisfied with the prospect.
Affection, sir, you see, must have its guarantees!” He paused a moment,
stroking his beard, with his head inclined and one eye half-closed,
looking at Rowland. The look was grotesque, but it was significant, and
it puzzled Rowland more than it amused him. “I suppose you ‘re a very
brilliant young man,” he went on, “very enlightened, very cultivated,
quite up to the mark in the fine arts and all that sort of thing. I ‘m a
plain, practical old boy, content to follow an honorable profession in a
free country. I did n’t go off to the Old World to learn my business; no
one took me by the hand; I had to grease my wheels myself, and, such as
I am, I ‘m a self-made man, every inch of me! Well, if our young friend
is booked for fame and fortune, I don’t suppose his going to Rome will
stop him. But, mind you, it won’t help him such a long way, either. If
you have undertaken to put him through, there ‘s a thing or two you ‘d
better remember. The crop we gather depends upon the seed we sow. He may
be the biggest genius of the age: his potatoes won’t come up without his
hoeing them. If he takes things so almighty easy as--well, as one or two
young fellows of genius I ‘ve had under my eye--his produce will never
gain the prize. Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch
by inch, and does n’t believe that we ‘ll wake up to find our work done
because we ‘ve lain all night a-dreaming of it; anything worth doing is
devilish hard to do! If your young protajay finds things easy and has
a good time and says he likes the life, it ‘s a sign that--as I may
say--you had better step round to the office and look at the books. That
‘s all I desire to remark. No offense intended. I hope you ‘ll have a
first-rate time.”

Rowland could honestly reply that this seemed pregnant sense, and he
offered Mr. Striker a friendly hand-shake as the latter withdrew. But
Mr. Striker’s rather grim view of matters cast a momentary shadow on his
companions, and Mrs. Hudson seemed to feel that it necessitated between
them some little friendly agreement not to be overawed.

Rowland sat for some time longer, partly because he wished to please the
two women and partly because he was strangely pleased himself. There
was something touching in their unworldly fears and diffident hopes,
something almost terrible in the way poor little Mrs. Hudson seemed
to flutter and quiver with intense maternal passion. She put forth one
timid conversational venture after another, and asked Rowland a number
of questions about himself, his age, his family, his occupations, his
tastes, his religious opinions. Rowland had an odd feeling at last that
she had begun to consider him very exemplary, and that she might
make, later, some perturbing discovery. He tried, therefore, to invent
something that would prepare her to find him fallible. But he could
think of nothing. It only seemed to him that Miss Garland secretly
mistrusted him, and that he must leave her to render him the service,
after he had gone, of making him the object of a little firm derogation.
Mrs. Hudson talked with low-voiced eagerness about her son.

“He ‘s very lovable, sir, I assure you. When you come to know him you
‘ll find him very lovable. He ‘s a little spoiled, of course; he has
always done with me as he pleased; but he ‘s a good boy, I ‘m sure he ‘s
a good boy. And every one thinks him very attractive: I ‘m sure he ‘d be
noticed, anywhere. Don’t you think he ‘s very handsome, sir? He features
his poor father. I had another--perhaps you ‘ve been told. He was
killed.” And the poor little lady bravely smiled, for fear of doing
worse. “He was a very fine boy, but very different from Roderick.
Roderick is a little strange; he has never been an easy boy. Sometimes
I feel like the goose--was n’t it a goose, dear?” and startled by the
audacity of her comparison she appealed to Miss Garland--“the goose, or
the hen, who hatched a swan’s egg. I have never been able to give him
what he needs. I have always thought that in more--in more brilliant
circumstances he might find his place and be happy. But at the same time
I was afraid of the world for him; it was so large and dangerous and
dreadful. No doubt I know very little about it. I never suspected, I
confess, that it contained persons of such liberality as yours.”

Rowland replied that, evidently, she had done the world but scanty
justice. “No,” objected Miss Garland, after a pause, “it is like
something in a fairy tale.”

“What, pray?”

“Your coming here all unknown, so rich and so polite, and carrying off
my cousin in a golden cloud.”

If this was badinage Miss Garland had the best of it, for Rowland almost
fell a-musing silently over the question whether there was a possibility
of irony in that transparent gaze. Before he withdrew, Mrs. Hudson made
him tell her again that Roderick’s powers were extraordinary. He had
inspired her with a clinging, caressing faith in his wisdom. “He will
really do great things,” she asked, “the very greatest?”

“I see no reason in his talent itself why he should not.”

“Well, we ‘ll think of that as we sit here alone,” she rejoined. “Mary
and I will sit here and talk about it. So I give him up,” she went on,
as he was going. “I ‘m sure you ‘ll be the best of friends to him,
but if you should ever forget him, or grow tired of him, or lose your
interest in him, and he should come to any harm or any trouble, please,
sir, remember”--And she paused, with a tremulous voice.

“Remember, my dear madam?”

“That he is all I have--that he is everything--and that it would be very
terrible.”

“In so far as I can help him, he shall succeed,” was all Rowland could
say. He turned to Miss Garland, to bid her good night, and she rose and
put out her hand. She was very straightforward, but he could see that if
she was too modest to be bold, she was much too simple to be shy. “Have
you no charge to lay upon me?” he asked--to ask her something.

She looked at him a moment and then, although she was not shy, she
blushed. “Make him do his best,” she said.

Rowland noted the soft intensity with which the words were uttered. “Do
you take a great interest in him?” he demanded.

“Certainly.”

“Then, if he will not do his best for you, he will not do it for me.”
 She turned away with another blush, and Rowland took his leave.

He walked homeward, thinking of many things. The great Northampton
elms interarched far above in the darkness, but the moon had risen and
through scattered apertures was hanging the dusky vault with silver
lamps. There seemed to Rowland something intensely serious in the scene
in which he had just taken part. He had laughed and talked and braved it
out in self-defense; but when he reflected that he was really meddling
with the simple stillness of this little New England home, and that he
had ventured to disturb so much living security in the interest of a
far-away, fantastic hypothesis, he paused, amazed at his temerity. It
was true, as Cecilia had said, that for an unofficious man it was a
singular position. There stirred in his mind an odd feeling of annoyance
with Roderick for having thus peremptorily enlisted his sympathies. As
he looked up and down the long vista, and saw the clear white houses
glancing here and there in the broken moonshine, he could almost have
believed that the happiest lot for any man was to make the most of life
in some such tranquil spot as that. Here were kindness, comfort, safety,
the warning voice of duty, the perfect hush of temptation. And as
Rowland looked along the arch of silvered shadow and out into the lucid
air of the American night, which seemed so doubly vast, somehow, and
strange and nocturnal, he felt like declaring that here was beauty
too--beauty sufficient for an artist not to starve upon it. As he stood,
lost in the darkness, he presently heard a rapid tread on the other side
of the road, accompanied by a loud, jubilant whistle, and in a moment
a figure emerged into an open gap of moonshine. He had no difficulty
in recognizing Hudson, who was presumably returning from a visit to
Cecilia. Roderick stopped suddenly and stared up at the moon, with his
face vividly illumined. He broke out into a snatch of song:--

“The splendor falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story!”

And with a great, musical roll of his voice he went swinging off into
the darkness again, as if his thoughts had lent him wings. He was
dreaming of the inspiration of foreign lands,--of castled crags and
historic landscapes. What a pity, after all, thought Rowland, as he went
his own way, that he should n’t have a taste of it!

It had been a very just remark of Cecilia’s that Roderick would change
with a change in his circumstances. Rowland had telegraphed to New York
for another berth on his steamer, and from the hour the answer came
Hudson’s spirits rose to incalculable heights. He was radiant with
good-humor, and his kindly jollity seemed the pledge of a brilliant
future. He had forgiven his old enemies and forgotten his old
grievances, and seemed every way reconciled to a world in which he was
going to count as an active force. He was inexhaustibly loquacious and
fantastic, and as Cecilia said, he had suddenly become so good that
it was only to be feared he was going to start not for Europe but for
heaven. He took long walks with Rowland, who felt more and more the
fascination of what he would have called his giftedness. Rowland
returned several times to Mrs. Hudson’s, and found the two ladies doing
their best to be happy in their companion’s happiness. Miss Garland, he
thought, was succeeding better than her demeanor on his first visit had
promised. He tried to have some especial talk with her, but her extreme
reserve forced him to content himself with such response to his rather
urgent overtures as might be extracted from a keenly attentive smile.
It must be confessed, however, that if the response was vague, the
satisfaction was great, and that Rowland, after his second visit, kept
seeing a lurking reflection of this smile in the most unexpected places.
It seemed strange that she should please him so well at so slender
a cost, but please him she did, prodigiously, and his pleasure had
a quality altogether new to him. It made him restless, and a trifle
melancholy; he walked about absently, wondering and wishing. He
wondered, among other things, why fate should have condemned him to
make the acquaintance of a girl whom he would make a sacrifice to know
better, just as he was leaving the country for years. It seemed to him
that he was turning his back on a chance of happiness--happiness of a
sort of which the slenderest germ should be cultivated. He asked himself
whether, feeling as he did, if he had only himself to please, he would
give up his journey and--wait. He had Roderick to please now, for whom
disappointment would be cruel; but he said to himself that certainly, if
there were no Roderick in the case, the ship should sail without him.
He asked Hudson several questions about his cousin, but Roderick,
confidential on most points, seemed to have reasons of his own for
being reticent on this one. His measured answers quickened Rowland’s
curiosity, for Miss Garland, with her own irritating half-suggestions,
had only to be a subject of guarded allusion in others to become
intolerably interesting. He learned from Roderick that she was the
daughter of a country minister, a far-away cousin of his mother,
settled in another part of the State; that she was one of a half-a-dozen
daughters, that the family was very poor, and that she had come a couple
of months before to pay his mother a long visit. “It is to be a very
long one now,” he said, “for it is settled that she is to remain while I
am away.”

The fermentation of contentment in Roderick’s soul reached its climax a
few days before the young men were to make their farewells. He had been
sitting with his friends on Cecilia’s veranda, but for half an hour past
he had said nothing. Lounging back against a vine-wreathed column and
gazing idly at the stars, he kept caroling softly to himself with that
indifference to ceremony for which he always found allowance, and which
in him had a sort of pleading grace. At last, springing up: “I want to
strike out, hard!” he exclaimed. “I want to do something violent, to let
off steam!”

“I ‘ll tell you what to do, this lovely weather,” said Cecilia. “Give a
picnic. It can be as violent as you please, and it will have the merit
of leading off our emotion into a safe channel, as well as yours.”

Roderick laughed uproariously at Cecilia’s very practical remedy for his
sentimental need, but a couple of days later, nevertheless, the picnic
was given. It was to be a family party, but Roderick, in his magnanimous
geniality, insisted on inviting Mr. Striker, a decision which Rowland
mentally applauded. “And we ‘ll have Mrs. Striker, too,” he said, “if
she ‘ll come, to keep my mother in countenance; and at any rate we
‘ll have Miss Striker--the divine Petronilla!” The young lady thus
denominated formed, with Mrs. Hudson, Miss Garland, and Cecilia, the
feminine half of the company. Mr. Striker presented himself, sacrificing
a morning’s work, with a magnanimity greater even than Roderick’s, and
foreign support was further secured in the person of Mr. Whitefoot, the
young Orthodox minister. Roderick had chosen the feasting-place; he
knew it well and had passed many a summer afternoon there, lying at his
length on the grass and gazing at the blue undulations of the horizon.
It was a meadow on the edge of a wood, with mossy rocks protruding
through the grass and a little lake on the other side. It was a
cloudless August day; Rowland always remembered it, and the scene, and
everything that was said and done, with extraordinary distinctness.
Roderick surpassed himself in friendly jollity, and at one moment, when
exhilaration was at the highest, was seen in Mr. Striker’s high white
hat, drinking champagne from a broken tea-cup to Mr. Striker’s health.
Miss Striker had her father’s pale blue eye; she was dressed as if she
were going to sit for her photograph, and remained for a long time with
Roderick on a little promontory overhanging the lake. Mrs. Hudson sat
all day with a little meek, apprehensive smile. She was afraid of an
“accident,” though unless Miss Striker (who indeed was a little of
a romp) should push Roderick into the lake, it was hard to see what
accident could occur. Mrs. Hudson was as neat and crisp and uncrumpled
at the end of the festival as at the beginning. Mr. Whitefoot, who but
a twelvemonth later became a convert to episcopacy and was already
cultivating a certain conversational sonority, devoted himself to
Cecilia. He had a little book in his pocket, out of which he read to
her at intervals, lying stretched at her feet, and it was a lasting joke
with Cecilia, afterwards, that she would never tell what Mr. Whitefoot’s
little book had been. Rowland had placed himself near Miss Garland,
while the feasting went forward on the grass. She wore a so-called gypsy
hat--a little straw hat, tied down over her ears, so as to cast her
eyes into shadow, by a ribbon passing outside of it. When the company
dispersed, after lunch, he proposed to her to take a stroll in the
wood. She hesitated a moment and looked toward Mrs. Hudson, as if for
permission to leave her. But Mrs. Hudson was listening to Mr. Striker,
who sat gossiping to her with relaxed magniloquence, his waistcoat
unbuttoned and his hat on his nose.

“You can give your cousin your society at any time,” said Rowland. “But
me, perhaps, you ‘ll never see again.”

“Why then should we wish to be friends, if nothing is to come of it?”
 she asked, with homely logic. But by this time she had consented, and
they were treading the fallen pine-needles.

“Oh, one must take all one can get,” said Rowland. “If we can be friends
for half an hour, it ‘s so much gained.”

“Do you expect never to come back to Northampton again?”

“‘Never’ is a good deal to say. But I go to Europe for a long stay.”

“Do you prefer it so much to your own country?”

“I will not say that. But I have the misfortune to be a rather idle man,
and in Europe the burden of idleness is less heavy than here.”

She was silent for a few minutes; then at last, “In that, then, we are
better than Europe,” she said. To a certain point Rowland agreed with
her, but he demurred, to make her say more.

“Would n’t it be better,” she asked, “to work to get reconciled to
America, than to go to Europe to get reconciled to idleness?”

“Doubtless; but you know work is hard to find.”

“I come from a little place where every one has plenty,” said Miss
Garland. “We all work; every one I know works. And really,” she added
presently, “I look at you with curiosity; you are the first unoccupied
man I ever saw.”

“Don’t look at me too hard,” said Rowland, smiling. “I shall sink into
the earth. What is the name of your little place?”

“West Nazareth,” said Miss Garland, with her usual sobriety. “It is not
so very little, though it ‘s smaller than Northampton.”

“I wonder whether I could find any work at West Nazareth,” Rowland said.

“You would not like it,” Miss Garland declared reflectively. “Though
there are far finer woods there than this. We have miles and miles of
woods.”

“I might chop down trees,” said Rowland. “That is, if you allow it.”

“Allow it? Why, where should we get our firewood?” Then, noticing that
he had spoken jestingly, she glanced at him askance, though with no
visible diminution of her gravity. “Don’t you know how to do anything?
Have you no profession?”

Rowland shook his head. “Absolutely none.”

“What do you do all day?”

“Nothing worth relating. That ‘s why I am going to Europe. There, at
least, if I do nothing, I shall see a great deal; and if I ‘m not a
producer, I shall at any rate be an observer.”

“Can’t we observe everywhere?”

“Certainly; and I really think that in that way I make the most of my
opportunities. Though I confess,” he continued, “that I often remember
there are things to be seen here to which I probably have n’t done
justice. I should like, for instance, to see West Nazareth.”

She looked round at him, open-eyed; not, apparently, that she exactly
supposed he was jesting, for the expression of such a desire was not
necessarily facetious; but as if he must have spoken with an ulterior
motive. In fact, he had spoken from the simplest of motives. The girl
beside him pleased him unspeakably, and, suspecting that her charm
was essentially her own and not reflected from social circumstance,
he wished to give himself the satisfaction of contrasting her with the
meagre influences of her education. Miss Garland’s second movement was
to take him at his word. “Since you are free to do as you please, why
don’t you go there?”

“I am not free to do as I please now. I have offered your cousin to bear
him company to Europe, he has accepted with enthusiasm, and I cannot
retract.”

“Are you going to Europe simply for his sake?”

Rowland hesitated a moment. “I think I may almost say so.”

Miss Garland walked along in silence. “Do you mean to do a great deal
for him?” she asked at last.

“What I can. But my power of helping him is very small beside his power
of helping himself.”

For a moment she was silent again. “You are very generous,” she said,
almost solemnly.

“No, I am simply very shrewd. Roderick will repay me. It ‘s an
investment. At first, I think,” he added shortly afterwards, “you would
not have paid me that compliment. You distrusted me.”

She made no attempt to deny it. “I did n’t see why you should wish to
make Roderick discontented. I thought you were rather frivolous.”

“You did me injustice. I don’t think I ‘m that.”

“It was because you are unlike other men--those, at least, whom I have
seen.”

“In what way?”

“Why, as you describe yourself. You have no duties, no profession, no
home. You live for your pleasure.”

“That ‘s all very true. And yet I maintain I ‘m not frivolous.”

“I hope not,” said Miss Garland, simply. They had reached a point where
the wood-path forked and put forth two divergent tracks which lost
themselves in a verdurous tangle. Miss Garland seemed to think that the
difficulty of choice between them was a reason for giving them up and
turning back. Rowland thought otherwise, and detected agreeable grounds
for preference in the left-hand path. As a compromise, they sat down on
a fallen log. Looking about him, Rowland espied a curious wild shrub,
with a spotted crimson leaf; he went and plucked a spray of it and
brought it to Miss Garland. He had never observed it before, but she
immediately called it by its name. She expressed surprise at his not
knowing it; it was extremely common. He presently brought her a specimen
of another delicate plant, with a little blue-streaked flower. “I
suppose that ‘s common, too,” he said, “but I have never seen it--or
noticed it, at least.” She answered that this one was rare, and
meditated a moment before she could remember its name. At last she
recalled it, and expressed surprise at his having found the plant in the
woods; she supposed it grew only in open marshes. Rowland complimented
her on her fund of useful information.

“It ‘s not especially useful,” she answered; “but I like to know the
names of plants as I do those of my acquaintances. When we walk in the
woods at home--which we do so much--it seems as unnatural not to know
what to call the flowers as it would be to see some one in the town with
whom we were not on speaking terms.”

“Apropos of frivolity,” Rowland said, “I ‘m sure you have very little
of it, unless at West Nazareth it is considered frivolous to walk in the
woods and nod to the nodding flowers. Do kindly tell me a little about
yourself.” And to compel her to begin, “I know you come of a race of
theologians,” he went on.

“No,” she replied, deliberating; “they are not theologians, though they
are ministers. We don’t take a very firm stand upon doctrine; we are
practical, rather. We write sermons and preach them, but we do a great
deal of hard work beside.”

“And of this hard work what has your share been?”

“The hardest part: doing nothing.”

“What do you call nothing?”

“I taught school a while: I must make the most of that. But I confess I
did n’t like it. Otherwise, I have only done little things at home, as
they turned up.”

“What kind of things?”

“Oh, every kind. If you had seen my home, you would understand.”

Rowland would have liked to make her specify; but he felt a more urgent
need to respect her simplicity than he had ever felt to defer to the
complex circumstance of certain other women. “To be happy, I imagine,”
 he contented himself with saying, “you need to be occupied. You need to
have something to expend yourself upon.”

“That is not so true as it once was; now that I am older, I am sure I am
less impatient of leisure. Certainly, these two months that I have been
with Mrs. Hudson, I have had a terrible amount of it. And yet I have
liked it! And now that I am probably to be with her all the while that
her son is away, I look forward to more with a resignation that I don’t
quite know what to make of.”

“It is settled, then, that you are to remain with your cousin?”

“It depends upon their writing from home that I may stay. But that is
probable. Only I must not forget,” she said, rising, “that the ground
for my doing so is that she be not left alone.”

“I am glad to know,” said Rowland, “that I shall probably often hear
about you. I assure you I shall often think about you!” These words were
half impulsive, half deliberate. They were the simple truth, and he had
asked himself why he should not tell her the truth. And yet they were
not all of it; her hearing the rest would depend upon the way she
received this. She received it not only, as Rowland foresaw, without
a shadow of coquetry, of any apparent thought of listening to it
gracefully, but with a slight movement of nervous deprecation, which
seemed to betray itself in the quickening of her step. Evidently, if
Rowland was to take pleasure in hearing about her, it would have to be a
highly disinterested pleasure. She answered nothing, and Rowland too,
as he walked beside her, was silent; but as he looked along the
shadow-woven wood-path, what he was really facing was a level three
years of disinterestedness. He ushered them in by talking composed
civility until he had brought Miss Garland back to her companions.

He saw her but once again. He was obliged to be in New York a couple of
days before sailing, and it was arranged that Roderick should overtake
him at the last moment. The evening before he left Northampton he went
to say farewell to Mrs. Hudson. The ceremony was brief. Rowland soon
perceived that the poor little lady was in the melting mood, and, as he
dreaded her tears, he compressed a multitude of solemn promises into a
silent hand-shake and took his leave. Miss Garland, she had told him,
was in the back-garden with Roderick: he might go out to them. He did
so, and as he drew near he heard Roderick’s high-pitched voice ringing
behind the shrubbery. In a moment, emerging, he found Miss Garland
leaning against a tree, with her cousin before her talking with great
emphasis. He asked pardon for interrupting them, and said he wished only
to bid her good-by. She gave him her hand and he made her his bow in
silence. “Don’t forget,” he said to Roderick, as he turned away. “And
don’t, in this company, repent of your bargain.”

“I shall not let him,” said Miss Garland, with something very like
gayety. “I shall see that he is punctual. He must go! I owe you an
apology for having doubted that he ought to.” And in spite of the dusk
Rowland could see that she had an even finer smile than he had supposed.

Roderick was punctual, eagerly punctual, and they went. Rowland for
several days was occupied with material cares, and lost sight of his
sentimental perplexities. But they only slumbered, and they were
sharply awakened. The weather was fine, and the two young men always sat
together upon deck late into the evening. One night, toward the last,
they were at the stern of the great ship, watching her grind the solid
blackness of the ocean into phosphorescent foam. They talked on these
occasions of everything conceivable, and had the air of having no
secrets from each other. But it was on Roderick’s conscience that this
air belied him, and he was too frank by nature, moreover, for permanent
reticence on any point.

“I must tell you something,” he said at last. “I should like you to know
it, and you will be so glad to know it. Besides, it ‘s only a question
of time; three months hence, probably, you would have guessed it. I am
engaged to Mary Garland.”

Rowland sat staring; though the sea was calm, it seemed to him that the
ship gave a great dizzying lurch. But in a moment he contrived to
answer coherently: “Engaged to Miss Garland! I never supposed--I never
imagined”--

“That I was in love with her?” Roderick interrupted. “Neither did I,
until this last fortnight. But you came and put me into such ridiculous
good-humor that I felt an extraordinary desire to tell some woman that I
adored her. Miss Garland is a magnificent girl; you know her too little
to do her justice. I have been quietly learning to know her, these
past three months, and have been falling in love with her without
being conscious of it. It appeared, when I spoke to her, that she had
a kindness for me. So the thing was settled. I must of course make some
money before we can marry. It ‘s rather droll, certainly, to engage
one’s self to a girl whom one is going to leave the next day, for years.
We shall be condemned, for some time to come, to do a terrible deal
of abstract thinking about each other. But I wanted her blessing on my
career and I could not help asking for it. Unless a man is unnaturally
selfish he needs to work for some one else than himself, and I am sure
I shall run a smoother and swifter course for knowing that that fine
creature is waiting, at Northampton, for news of my greatness. If ever I
am a dull companion and over-addicted to moping, remember in justice
to me that I am in love and that my sweetheart is five thousand miles
away.”

Rowland listened to all this with a sort of feeling that fortune had
played him an elaborately-devised trick. It had lured him out into
mid-ocean and smoothed the sea and stilled the winds and given him a
singularly sympathetic comrade, and then it had turned and delivered him
a thumping blow in mid-chest. “Yes,” he said, after an attempt at the
usual formal congratulation, “you certainly ought to do better--with
Miss Garland waiting for you at Northampton.”

Roderick, now that he had broken ground, was eloquent and rung a hundred
changes on the assurance that he was a very happy man. Then at last,
suddenly, his climax was a yawn, and he declared that he must go to bed.
Rowland let him go alone, and sat there late, between sea and sky.





CHAPTER III. Rome

One warm, still day, late in the Roman autumn, our two young men were
sitting beneath one of the high-stemmed pines of the Villa Ludovisi.
They had been spending an hour in the mouldy little garden-house, where
the colossal mask of the famous Juno looks out with blank eyes from that
dusky corner which must seem to her the last possible stage of a lapse
from Olympus. Then they had wandered out into the gardens, and
were lounging away the morning under the spell of their magical
picturesqueness. Roderick declared that he would go nowhere else; that,
after the Juno, it was a profanation to look at anything but sky and
trees. There was a fresco of Guercino, to which Rowland, though he had
seen it on his former visit to Rome, went dutifully to pay his respects.
But Roderick, though he had never seen it, declared that it could n’t
be worth a fig, and that he did n’t care to look at ugly things. He
remained stretched on his overcoat, which he had spread on the grass,
while Rowland went off envying the intellectual comfort of genius, which
can arrive at serene conclusions without disagreeable processes. When
the latter came back, his friend was sitting with his elbows on his
knees and his head in his hands. Rowland, in the geniality of a mood
attuned to the mellow charm of a Roman villa, found a good word to say
for the Guercino; but he chiefly talked of the view from the little
belvedere on the roof of the casino, and how it looked like the prospect
from a castle turret in a fairy tale.

“Very likely,” said Roderick, throwing himself back with a yawn. “But I
must let it pass. I have seen enough for the present; I have reached the
top of the hill. I have an indigestion of impressions; I must work them
off before I go in for any more. I don’t want to look at any more of
other people’s works, for a month--not even at Nature’s own. I want to
look at Roderick Hudson’s. The result of it all is that I ‘m not afraid.
I can but try, as well as the rest of them! The fellow who did that
gazing goddess yonder only made an experiment. The other day, when I
was looking at Michael Angelo’s Moses, I was seized with a kind
of defiance--a reaction against all this mere passive enjoyment of
grandeur. It was a rousing great success, certainly, that rose there
before me, but somehow it was not an inscrutable mystery, and it seemed
to me, not perhaps that I should some day do as well, but that at least
I might!”

“As you say, you can but try,” said Rowland. “Success is only passionate
effort.”

“Well, the passion is blazing; we have been piling on fuel handsomely.
It came over me just now that it is exactly three months to a day since
I left Northampton. I can’t believe it!”

“It certainly seems more.”

“It seems like ten years. What an exquisite ass I was!”

“Do you feel so wise now?”

“Verily! Don’t I look so? Surely I have n’t the same face. Have n’t I a
different eye, a different expression, a different voice?”

“I can hardly say, because I have seen the transition. But it ‘s very
likely. You are, in the literal sense of the word, more civilized. I
dare say,” added Rowland, “that Miss Garland would think so.”

“That ‘s not what she would call it; she would say I was corrupted.”

Rowland asked few questions about Miss Garland, but he always listened
narrowly to his companion’s voluntary observations.

“Are you very sure?” he replied.

“Why, she ‘s a stern moralist, and she would infer from my appearance
that I had become a cynical sybarite.” Roderick had, in fact, a Venetian
watch-chain round his neck and a magnificent Roman intaglio on the third
finger of his left hand.

“Will you think I take a liberty,” asked Rowland, “if I say you judge
her superficially?”

“For heaven’s sake,” cried Roderick, laughing, “don’t tell me she ‘s
not a moralist! It was for that I fell in love with her, and with rigid
virtue in her person.”

“She is a moralist, but not, as you imply, a narrow one. That ‘s more
than a difference in degree; it ‘s a difference in kind. I don’t know
whether I ever mentioned it, but I admire her extremely. There is
nothing narrow about her but her experience; everything else is large.
My impression of her is of a person of great capacity, as yet wholly
unmeasured and untested. Some day or other, I ‘m sure, she will judge
fairly and wisely of everything.”

“Stay a bit!” cried Roderick; “you ‘re a better Catholic than the Pope.
I shall be content if she judges fairly of me--of my merits, that is.
The rest she must not judge at all. She ‘s a grimly devoted little
creature; may she always remain so! Changed as I am, I adore her none
the less. What becomes of all our emotions, our impressions,” he went
on, after a long pause, “all the material of thought that life pours
into us at such a rate during such a memorable three months as these?
There are twenty moments a week--a day, for that matter, some days--that
seem supreme, twenty impressions that seem ultimate, that appear to
form an intellectual era. But others come treading on their heels and
sweeping them along, and they all melt like water into water and settle
the question of precedence among themselves. The curious thing is that
the more the mind takes in, the more it has space for, and that all
one’s ideas are like the Irish people at home who live in the different
corners of a room, and take boarders.”

“I fancy it is our peculiar good luck that we don’t see the limits of
our minds,” said Rowland. “We are young, compared with what we may one
day be. That belongs to youth; it is perhaps the best part of it. They
say that old people do find themselves at last face to face with a solid
blank wall, and stand thumping against it in vain. It resounds, it seems
to have something beyond it, but it won’t move! That ‘s only a reason
for living with open doors as long as we can!”

“Open doors?” murmured Roderick. “Yes, let us close no doors that open
upon Rome. For this, for the mind, is eternal summer! But though my
doors may stand open to-day,” he presently added, “I shall see no
visitors. I want to pause and breathe; I want to dream of a statue.
I have been working hard for three months; I have earned a right to a
reverie.”

Rowland, on his side, was not without provision for reflection, and
they lingered on in broken, desultory talk. Rowland felt the need for
intellectual rest, for a truce to present care for churches, statues,
and pictures, on even better grounds than his companion, inasmuch as
he had really been living Roderick’s intellectual life the past three
months, as well as his own. As he looked back on these full-flavored
weeks, he drew a long breath of satisfaction, almost of relief.
Roderick, thus far, had justified his confidence and flattered his
perspicacity; he was rapidly unfolding into an ideal brilliancy. He was
changed even more than he himself suspected; he had stepped, without
faltering, into his birthright, and was spending money, intellectually,
as lavishly as a young heir who has just won an obstructive lawsuit.
Roderick’s glance and voice were the same, doubtless, as when they
enlivened the summer dusk on Cecilia’s veranda, but in his person,
generally, there was an indefinable expression of experience rapidly
and easily assimilated. Rowland had been struck at the outset with the
instinctive quickness of his observation and his free appropriation of
whatever might serve his purpose. He had not been, for instance, half
an hour on English soil before he perceived that he was dressed like
a rustic, and he had immediately reformed his toilet with the most
unerring tact. His appetite for novelty was insatiable, and for
everything characteristically foreign, as it presented itself, he had an
extravagant greeting; but in half an hour the novelty had faded, he had
guessed the secret, he had plucked out the heart of the mystery and was
clamoring for a keener sensation. At the end of a month, he presented,
mentally, a puzzling spectacle to his companion. He had caught,
instinctively, the key-note of the old world. He observed and enjoyed,
he criticised and rhapsodized, but though all things interested him and
many delighted him, none surprised him; he had divined their logic
and measured their proportions, and referred them infallibly to their
categories. Witnessing the rate at which he did intellectual execution
on the general spectacle of European life, Rowland at moments felt
vaguely uneasy for the future; the boy was living too fast, he would
have said, and giving alarming pledges to ennui in his later years. But
we must live as our pulses are timed, and Roderick’s struck the hour
very often. He was, by imagination, though he never became in manner, a
natural man of the world; he had intuitively, as an artist, what one may
call the historic consciousness. He had a relish for social subtleties
and mysteries, and, in perception, when occasion offered him an inch he
never failed to take an ell. A single glimpse of a social situation of
the elder type enabled him to construct the whole, with all its complex
chiaroscuro, and Rowland more than once assured him that he made him
believe in the metempsychosis, and that he must have lived in European
society, in the last century, as a gentleman in a cocked hat and
brocaded waistcoat. Hudson asked Rowland questions which poor Rowland
was quite unable to answer, and of which he was equally unable to
conceive where he had picked up the data. Roderick ended by answering
them himself, tolerably to his satisfaction, and in a short time he
had almost turned the tables and become in their walks and talks the
accredited source of information. Rowland told him that when he turned
sculptor a capital novelist was spoiled, and that to match his eye for
social detail one would have to go to Honore de Balzac. In all this
Rowland took a generous pleasure; he felt an especial kindness for his
comrade’s radiant youthfulness of temperament. He was so much younger
than he himself had ever been! And surely youth and genius, hand in
hand, were the most beautiful sight in the world. Roderick added to this
the charm of his more immediately personal qualities. The vivacity of
his perceptions, the audacity of his imagination, the picturesqueness
of his phrase when he was pleased,--and even more when he was
displeased,--his abounding good-humor, his candor, his unclouded
frankness, his unfailing impulse to share every emotion and impression
with his friend; all this made comradeship a pure felicity, and
interfused with a deeper amenity their long evening talks at cafe doors
in Italian towns.

They had gone almost immediately to Paris, and had spent their days at
the Louvre and their evenings at the theatre. Roderick was divided in
mind as to whether Titian or Mademoiselle Delaporte was the greater
artist. They had come down through France to Genoa and Milan, had spent
a fortnight in Venice and another in Florence, and had now been a month
in Rome. Roderick had said that he meant to spend three months in simply
looking, absorbing, and reflecting, without putting pencil to paper. He
looked indefatigably, and certainly saw great things--things greater,
doubtless, at times, than the intentions of the artist. And yet he made
few false steps and wasted little time in theories of what he ought to
like and to dislike. He judged instinctively and passionately, but
never vulgarly. At Venice, for a couple of days, he had half a fit of
melancholy over the pretended discovery that he had missed his way, and
that the only proper vestment of plastic conceptions was the coloring
of Titian and Paul Veronese. Then one morning the two young men had
themselves rowed out to Torcello, and Roderick lay back for a couple
of hours watching a brown-breasted gondolier making superb muscular
movements, in high relief, against the sky of the Adriatic, and at the
end jerked himself up with a violence that nearly swamped the gondola,
and declared that the only thing worth living for was to make a colossal
bronze and set it aloft in the light of a public square. In Rome his
first care was for the Vatican; he went there again and again. But the
old imperial and papal city altogether delighted him; only there he
really found what he had been looking for from the first--the complete
antipodes of Northampton. And indeed Rome is the natural home of those
spirits with which we just now claimed fellowship for Roderick--the
spirits with a deep relish for the artificial element in life and
the infinite superpositions of history. It is the immemorial city of
convention. The stagnant Roman air is charged with convention; it colors
the yellow light and deepens the chilly shadows. And in that still
recent day the most impressive convention in all history was visible to
men’s eyes, in the Roman streets, erect in a gilded coach drawn by four
black horses. Roderick’s first fortnight was a high aesthetic revel.
He declared that Rome made him feel and understand more things than
he could express: he was sure that life must have there, for all one’s
senses, an incomparable fineness; that more interesting things must
happen to one than anywhere else. And he gave Rowland to understand that
he meant to live freely and largely, and be as interested as occasion
demanded. Rowland saw no reason to regard this as a menace of
dissipation, because, in the first place, there was in all dissipation,
refine it as one might, a grossness which would disqualify it for
Roderick’s favor, and because, in the second, the young sculptor was
a man to regard all things in the light of his art, to hand over his
passions to his genius to be dealt with, and to find that he could live
largely enough without exceeding the circle of wholesome curiosity.
Rowland took immense satisfaction in his companion’s deep impatience to
make something of all his impressions. Some of these indeed found their
way into a channel which did not lead to statues, but it was none the
less a safe one. He wrote frequent long letters to Miss Garland; when
Rowland went with him to post them he thought wistfully of the
fortune of the great loosely-written missives, which cost Roderick
unconscionable sums in postage. He received punctual answers of a more
frugal form, written in a clear, minute hand, on paper vexatiously thin.
If Rowland was present when they came, he turned away and thought of
other things--or tried to. These were the only moments when his
sympathy halted, and they were brief. For the rest he let the days go by
unprotestingly, and enjoyed Roderick’s serene efflorescence as he would
have done a beautiful summer sunrise. Rome, for the past month, had been
delicious. The annual descent of the Goths had not yet begun, and sunny
leisure seemed to brood over the city.

Roderick had taken out a note-book and was roughly sketching a memento
of the great Juno. Suddenly there was a noise on the gravel, and the
young men, looking up, saw three persons advancing. One was a woman
of middle age, with a rather grand air and a great many furbelows. She
looked very hard at our friends as she passed, and glanced back over her
shoulder, as if to hasten the step of a young girl who slowly followed
her. She had such an expansive majesty of mien that Rowland supposed she
must have some proprietary right in the villa and was not just then in
a hospitable mood. Beside her walked a little elderly man, tightly
buttoned in a shabby black coat, but with a flower in his lappet, and a
pair of soiled light gloves. He was a grotesque-looking personage,
and might have passed for a gentleman of the old school, reduced by
adversity to playing cicerone to foreigners of distinction. He had a
little black eye which glittered like a diamond and rolled about like a
ball of quicksilver, and a white moustache, cut short and stiff, like a
worn-out brush. He was smiling with extreme urbanity, and talking in a
low, mellifluous voice to the lady, who evidently was not listening
to him. At a considerable distance behind this couple strolled a young
girl, apparently of about twenty. She was tall and slender, and dressed
with extreme elegance; she led by a cord a large poodle of the most
fantastic aspect. He was combed and decked like a ram for sacrifice; his
trunk and haunches were of the most transparent pink, his fleecy head
and shoulders as white as jeweler’s cotton, and his tail and ears
ornamented with long blue ribbons. He stepped along stiffly and solemnly
beside his mistress, with an air of conscious elegance. There was
something at first slightly ridiculous in the sight of a young lady
gravely appended to an animal of these incongruous attributes, and
Roderick, with his customary frankness, greeted the spectacle with a
confident smile. The young girl perceived it and turned her face full
upon him, with a gaze intended apparently to enforce greater deference.
It was not deference, however, her face provoked, but startled,
submissive admiration; Roderick’s smile fell dead, and he sat eagerly
staring. A pair of extraordinary dark blue eyes, a mass of dusky hair
over a low forehead, a blooming oval of perfect purity, a flexible
lip, just touched with disdain, the step and carriage of a tired
princess--these were the general features of his vision. The young lady
was walking slowly and letting her long dress rustle over the gravel;
the young men had time to see her distinctly before she averted her
face and went her way. She left a vague, sweet perfume behind her as she
passed.

“Immortal powers!” cried Roderick, “what a vision! In the name of
transcendent perfection, who is she?” He sprang up and stood looking
after her until she rounded a turn in the avenue. “What a movement, what
a manner, what a poise of the head! I wonder if she would sit to me.”

“You had better go and ask her,” said Rowland, laughing. “She is
certainly most beautiful.”

“Beautiful? She ‘s beauty itself--she ‘s a revelation. I don’t believe
she is living--she ‘s a phantasm, a vapor, an illusion!”

“The poodle,” said Rowland, “is certainly alive.”

“Nay, he too may be a grotesque phantom, like the black dog in Faust.”

“I hope at least that the young lady has nothing in common with
Mephistopheles. She looked dangerous.”

“If beauty is immoral, as people think at Northampton,” said Roderick,
“she is the incarnation of evil. The mamma and the queer old gentleman,
moreover, are a pledge of her reality. Who are they all?”

“The Prince and Princess Ludovisi and the principessina,” suggested
Rowland.

“There are no such people,” said Roderick. “Besides, the little old man
is not the papa.” Rowland smiled, wondering how he had ascertained
these facts, and the young sculptor went on. “The old man is a Roman, a
hanger-on of the mamma, a useful personage who now and then gets asked
to dinner. The ladies are foreigners, from some Northern country; I
won’t say which.”

“Perhaps from the State of Maine,” said Rowland.

“No, she ‘s not an American, I ‘ll lay a wager on that. She ‘s a
daughter of this elder world. We shall see her again, I pray my stars;
but if we don’t, I shall have done something I never expected to--I
shall have had a glimpse of ideal beauty.” He sat down again and went
on with his sketch of the Juno, scrawled away for ten minutes, and then
handed the result in silence to Rowland. Rowland uttered an exclamation
of surprise and applause. The drawing represented the Juno as to the
position of the head, the brow, and the broad fillet across the hair;
but the eyes, the mouth, the physiognomy were a vivid portrait of
the young girl with the poodle. “I have been wanting a subject,” said
Roderick: “there ‘s one made to my hand! And now for work!”

They saw no more of the young girl, though Roderick looked hopefully,
for some days, into the carriages on the Pincian. She had evidently been
but passing through Rome; Naples or Florence now happily possessed her,
and she was guiding her fleecy companion through the Villa Reale or the
Boboli Gardens with the same superb defiance of irony. Roderick went to
work and spent a month shut up in his studio; he had an idea, and he was
not to rest till he had embodied it. He had established himself in
the basement of a huge, dusky, dilapidated old house, in that long,
tortuous, and preeminently Roman street which leads from the Corso to
the Bridge of St. Angelo. The black archway which admitted you might
have served as the portal of the Augean stables, but you emerged
presently upon a mouldy little court, of which the fourth side was
formed by a narrow terrace, overhanging the Tiber. Here, along the
parapet, were stationed half a dozen shapeless fragments of sculpture,
with a couple of meagre orange-trees in terra-cotta tubs, and an
oleander that never flowered. The unclean, historic river swept beneath;
behind were dusky, reeking walls, spotted here and there with hanging
rags and flower-pots in windows; opposite, at a distance, were the bare
brown banks of the stream, the huge rotunda of St. Angelo, tipped with
its seraphic statue, the dome of St. Peter’s, and the broad-topped pines
of the Villa Doria. The place was crumbling and shabby and melancholy,
but the river was delightful, the rent was a trifle, and everything was
picturesque. Roderick was in the best humor with his quarters from the
first, and was certain that the working mood there would be intenser
in an hour than in twenty years of Northampton. His studio was a huge,
empty room with a vaulted ceiling, covered with vague, dark traces of an
old fresco, which Rowland, when he spent an hour with his friend, used
to stare at vainly for some surviving coherence of floating draperies
and clasping arms. Roderick had lodged himself economically in the same
quarter. He occupied a fifth floor on the Ripetta, but he was only at
home to sleep, for when he was not at work he was either lounging in
Rowland’s more luxurious rooms or strolling through streets and churches
and gardens.

Rowland had found a convenient corner in a stately old palace not far
from the Fountain of Trevi, and made himself a home to which books and
pictures and prints and odds and ends of curious furniture gave an air
of leisurely permanence. He had the tastes of a collector; he spent half
his afternoons ransacking the dusty magazines of the curiosity-mongers,
and often made his way, in quest of a prize, into the heart of
impecunious Roman households, which had been prevailed upon to
listen--with closed doors and an impenetrably wary smile--to proposals
for an hereditary “antique.” In the evening, often, under the lamp,
amid dropped curtains and the scattered gleam of firelight upon polished
carvings and mellow paintings, the two friends sat with their heads
together, criticising intaglios and etchings, water-color drawings and
illuminated missals. Roderick’s quick appreciation of every form of
artistic beauty reminded his companion of the flexible temperament of
those Italian artists of the sixteenth century who were indifferently
painters and sculptors, sonneteers and engravers. At times when he saw
how the young sculptor’s day passed in a single sustained pulsation,
while his own was broken into a dozen conscious devices for disposing of
the hours, and intermingled with sighs, half suppressed, some of them,
for conscience’ sake, over what he failed of in action and missed in
possession--he felt a pang of something akin to envy. But Rowland had
two substantial aids for giving patience the air of contentment: he
was an inquisitive reader and a passionate rider. He plunged into bulky
German octavos on Italian history, and he spent long afternoons in
the saddle, ranging over the grassy desolation of the Campagna. As the
season went on and the social groups began to constitute themselves, he
found that he knew a great many people and that he had easy opportunity
for knowing others. He enjoyed a quiet corner of a drawing-room beside
an agreeable woman, and although the machinery of what calls itself
society seemed to him to have many superfluous wheels, he accepted
invitations and made visits punctiliously, from the conviction that
the only way not to be overcome by the ridiculous side of most of such
observances is to take them with exaggerated gravity. He introduced
Roderick right and left, and suffered him to make his way himself--an
enterprise for which Roderick very soon displayed an all-sufficient
capacity. Wherever he went he made, not exactly what is called a
favorable impression, but what, from a practical point of view, is
better--a puzzling one. He took to evening parties as a duck to water,
and before the winter was half over was the most freely and frequently
discussed young man in the heterogeneous foreign colony. Rowland’s
theory of his own duty was to let him run his course and play his
cards, only holding himself ready to point out shoals and pitfalls,
and administer a friendly propulsion through tight places. Roderick’s
manners on the precincts of the Pincian were quite the same as his
manners on Cecilia’s veranda: that is, they were no manners at all. But
it remained as true as before that it would have been impossible, on the
whole, to violate ceremony with less of lasting offense. He interrupted,
he contradicted, he spoke to people he had never seen, and left his
social creditors without the smallest conversational interest on their
loans; he lounged and yawned, he talked loud when he should have
talked low, and low when he should have talked loud. Many people, in
consequence, thought him insufferably conceited, and declared that he
ought to wait till he had something to show for his powers, before he
assumed the airs of a spoiled celebrity. But to Rowland and to most
friendly observers this judgment was quite beside the mark, and the
young man’s undiluted naturalness was its own justification. He
was impulsive, spontaneous, sincere; there were so many people at
dinner-tables and in studios who were not, that it seemed worth while
to allow this rare specimen all possible freedom of action. If Roderick
took the words out of your mouth when you were just prepared to deliver
them with the most effective accent, he did it with a perfect good
conscience and with no pretension of a better right to being heard, but
simply because he was full to overflowing of his own momentary thought
and it sprang from his lips without asking leave. There were persons who
waited on your periods much more deferentially, who were a hundred
times more capable than Roderick of a reflective impertinence. Roderick
received from various sources, chiefly feminine, enough finely-adjusted
advice to have established him in life as an embodiment of the
proprieties, and he received it, as he afterwards listened to criticisms
on his statues, with unfaltering candor and good-humor. Here and there,
doubtless, as he went, he took in a reef in his sail; but he was too
adventurous a spirit to be successfully tamed, and he remained at
most points the florid, rather strident young Virginian whose serene
inflexibility had been the despair of Mr. Striker. All this was what
friendly commentators (still chiefly feminine) alluded to when they
spoke of his delightful freshness, and critics of harsher sensibilities
(of the other sex) when they denounced his damned impertinence. His
appearance enforced these impressions--his handsome face, his radiant,
unaverted eyes, his childish, unmodulated voice. Afterwards, when those
who loved him were in tears, there was something in all this unspotted
comeliness that seemed to lend a mockery to the causes of their sorrow.

Certainly, among the young men of genius who, for so many ages, have
gone up to Rome to test their powers, none ever made a fairer beginning
than Roderick. He rode his two horses at once with extraordinary good
fortune; he established the happiest modus vivendi betwixt work and
play. He wrestled all day with a mountain of clay in his studio, and
chattered half the night away in Roman drawing-rooms. It all seemed part
of a kind of divine facility. He was passionately interested, he was
feeling his powers; now that they had thoroughly kindled in the glowing
aesthetic atmosphere of Rome, the ardent young fellow should be pardoned
for believing that he never was to see the end of them. He enjoyed
immeasurably, after the chronic obstruction of home, the downright
act of production. He kept models in his studio till they dropped with
fatigue; he drew, on other days, at the Capitol and the Vatican, till
his own head swam with his eagerness, and his limbs stiffened with the
cold. He had promptly set up a life-sized figure which he called
an “Adam,” and was pushing it rapidly toward completion. There were
naturally a great many wiseheads who smiled at his precipitancy, and
cited him as one more example of Yankee crudity, a capital recruit to
the great army of those who wish to dance before they can walk. They
were right, but Roderick was right too, for the success of his statue
was not to have been foreseen; it partook, really, of the miraculous. He
never surpassed it afterwards, and a good judge here and there has been
known to pronounce it the finest piece of sculpture of our modern
era. To Rowland it seemed to justify superbly his highest hopes of his
friend, and he said to himself that if he had invested his happiness
in fostering a genius, he ought now to be in possession of a boundless
complacency. There was something especially confident and masterly in
the artist’s negligence of all such small picturesque accessories
as might serve to label his figure to a vulgar apprehension. If it
represented the father of the human race and the primal embodiment of
human sensation, it did so in virtue of its look of balanced physical
perfection, and deeply, eagerly sentient vitality. Rowland, in fraternal
zeal, traveled up to Carrara and selected at the quarries the most
magnificent block of marble he could find, and when it came down to
Rome, the two young men had a “celebration.” They drove out to Albano,
breakfasted boisterously (in their respective measure) at the inn, and
lounged away the day in the sun on the top of Monte Cavo. Roderick’s
head was full of ideas for other works, which he described with infinite
spirit and eloquence, as vividly as if they were ranged on their
pedestals before him. He had an indefatigable fancy; things he saw in
the streets, in the country, things he heard and read, effects he saw
just missed or half-expressed in the works of others, acted upon his
mind as a kind of challenge, and he was terribly restless until, in some
form or other, he had taken up the glove and set his lance in rest.

The Adam was put into marble, and all the world came to see it. Of the
criticisms passed upon it this history undertakes to offer no record;
over many of them the two young men had a daily laugh for a month, and
certain of the formulas of the connoisseurs, restrictive or indulgent,
furnished Roderick with a permanent supply of humorous catch-words. But
people enough spoke flattering good-sense to make Roderick feel as if
he were already half famous. The statue passed formally into Rowland’s
possession, and was paid for as if an illustrious name had been chiseled
on the pedestal. Poor Roderick owed every franc of the money. It was not
for this, however, but because he was so gloriously in the mood, that,
denying himself all breathing-time, on the same day he had given the
last touch to the Adam, he began to shape the rough contour of an Eve.
This went forward with equal rapidity and success. Roderick lost his
temper, time and again, with his models, who offered but a gross,
degenerate image of his splendid ideal; but his ideal, as he assured
Rowland, became gradually such a fixed, vivid presence, that he had only
to shut his eyes to behold a creature far more to his purpose than
the poor girl who stood posturing at forty sous an hour. The Eve was
finished in a month, and the feat was extraordinary, as well as the
statue, which represented an admirably beautiful woman. When the spring
began to muffle the rugged old city with its clambering festoons, it
seemed to him that he had done a handsome winter’s work and had fairly
earned a holiday. He took a liberal one, and lounged away the lovely
Roman May, doing nothing. He looked very contented; with himself,
perhaps, at times, a trifle too obviously. But who could have said
without good reason? He was “flushed with triumph;” this classic
phrase portrayed him, to Rowland’s sense. He would lose himself in long
reveries, and emerge from them with a quickened smile and a heightened
color. Rowland grudged him none of his smiles, and took an extreme
satisfaction in his two statues. He had the Adam and the Eve transported
to his own apartment, and one warm evening in May he gave a little
dinner in honor of the artist. It was small, but Rowland had meant it
should be very agreeably composed. He thought over his friends and chose
four. They were all persons with whom he lived in a certain intimacy.

One of them was an American sculptor of French extraction, or remotely,
perhaps, of Italian, for he rejoiced in the somewhat fervid name of
Gloriani. He was a man of forty, he had been living for years in Paris
and in Rome, and he now drove a very pretty trade in sculpture of the
ornamental and fantastic sort. In his youth he had had money; but he
had spent it recklessly, much of it scandalously, and at twenty-six
had found himself obliged to make capital of his talent. This was quite
inimitable, and fifteen years of indefatigable exercise had brought
it to perfection. Rowland admitted its power, though it gave him very
little pleasure; what he relished in the man was the extraordinary
vivacity and frankness, not to call it the impudence, of his ideas. He
had a definite, practical scheme of art, and he knew at least what he
meant. In this sense he was solid and complete. There were so many of
the aesthetic fraternity who were floundering in unknown seas, without
a notion of which way their noses were turned, that Gloriani, conscious
and compact, unlimitedly intelligent and consummately clever, dogmatic
only as to his own duties, and at once gracefully deferential and
profoundly indifferent to those of others, had for Rowland a certain
intellectual refreshment quite independent of the character of his
works. These were considered by most people to belong to a very corrupt,
and by many to a positively indecent school. Others thought them
tremendously knowing, and paid enormous prices for them; and indeed, to
be able to point to one of Gloriani’s figures in a shady corner of your
library was tolerable proof that you were not a fool. Corrupt things
they certainly were; in the line of sculpture they were quite the latest
fruit of time. It was the artist’s opinion that there is no essential
difference between beauty and ugliness; that they overlap and
intermingle in a quite inextricable manner; that there is no saying
where one begins and the other ends; that hideousness grimaces at you
suddenly from out of the very bosom of loveliness, and beauty blooms
before your eyes in the lap of vileness; that it is a waste of wit to
nurse metaphysical distinctions, and a sadly meagre entertainment to
caress imaginary lines; that the thing to aim at is the expressive, and
the way to reach it is by ingenuity; that for this purpose everything
may serve, and that a consummate work is a sort of hotch-potch of the
pure and the impure, the graceful and the grotesque. Its prime duty is
to amuse, to puzzle, to fascinate, to savor of a complex imagination.
Gloriani’s statues were florid and meretricious; they looked like
magnified goldsmith’s work. They were extremely elegant, but they had no
charm for Rowland. He never bought one, but Gloriani was such an
honest fellow, and withal was so deluged with orders, that this made
no difference in their friendship. The artist might have passed for a
Frenchman. He was a great talker, and a very picturesque one; he was
almost bald; he had a small, bright eye, a broken nose, and a moustache
with waxed ends. When sometimes he received you at his lodging, he
introduced you to a lady with a plain face whom he called Madame
Gloriani--which she was not.

Rowland’s second guest was also an artist, but of a very different type.
His friends called him Sam Singleton; he was an American, and he had
been in Rome a couple of years. He painted small landscapes, chiefly in
water-colors: Rowland had seen one of them in a shop window, had liked
it extremely, and, ascertaining his address, had gone to see him and
found him established in a very humble studio near the Piazza Barberini,
where, apparently, fame and fortune had not yet found him out. Rowland
took a fancy to him and bought several of his pictures; Singleton made
few speeches, but was grateful. Rowland heard afterwards that when he
first came to Rome he painted worthless daubs and gave no promise
of talent. Improvement had come, however, hand in hand with patient
industry, and his talent, though of a slender and delicate order, was
now incontestable. It was as yet but scantily recognized, and he had
hard work to live. Rowland hung his little water-colors on the parlor
wall, and found that, as he lived with them, he grew very fond of
them. Singleton was a diminutive, dwarfish personage; he looked like
a precocious child. He had a high, protuberant forehead, a transparent
brown eye, a perpetual smile, an extraordinary expression of modesty and
patience. He listened much more willingly than he talked, with a little
fixed, grateful grin; he blushed when he spoke, and always offered his
ideas in a sidelong fashion, as if the presumption were against them.
His modesty set them off, and they were eminently to the point. He was
so perfect an example of the little noiseless, laborious artist whom
chance, in the person of a moneyed patron, has never taken by the hand,
that Rowland would have liked to befriend him by stealth. Singleton had
expressed a fervent admiration for Roderick’s productions, but had
not yet met the young master. Roderick was lounging against the
chimney-piece when he came in, and Rowland presently introduced him. The
little water-colorist stood with folded hands, blushing, smiling, and
looking up at him as if Roderick were himself a statue on a pedestal.
Singleton began to murmur something about his pleasure, his admiration;
the desire to make his compliment smoothly gave him a kind of grotesque
formalism. Roderick looked down at him surprised, and suddenly burst
into a laugh. Singleton paused a moment and then, with an intenser
smile, went on: “Well, sir, your statues are beautiful, all the same!”

Rowland’s two other guests were ladies, and one of them, Miss Blanchard,
belonged also to the artistic fraternity. She was an American, she
was young, she was pretty, and she had made her way to Rome alone and
unaided. She lived alone, or with no other duenna than a bushy-browed
old serving-woman, though indeed she had a friendly neighbor in the
person of a certain Madame Grandoni, who in various social emergencies
lent her a protecting wing, and had come with her to Rowland’s dinner.
Miss Blanchard had a little money, but she was not above selling her
pictures. These represented generally a bunch of dew-sprinkled roses,
with the dew-drops very highly finished, or else a wayside shrine, and
a peasant woman, with her back turned, kneeling before it. She did backs
very well, but she was a little weak in faces. Flowers, however, were
her speciality, and though her touch was a little old-fashioned and
finical, she painted them with remarkable skill. Her pictures were
chiefly bought by the English. Rowland had made her acquaintance early
in the winter, and as she kept a saddle horse and rode a great deal,
he had asked permission to be her cavalier. In this way they had become
almost intimate. Miss Blanchard’s name was Augusta; she was slender,
pale, and elegant looking; she had a very pretty head and brilliant
auburn hair, which she braided with classical simplicity. She talked in
a sweet, soft voice, used language at times a trifle superfine, and made
literary allusions. These had often a patriotic strain, and Rowland had
more than once been irritated by her quotations from Mrs. Sigourney in
the cork-woods of Monte Mario, and from Mr. Willis among the ruins of
Veii. Rowland was of a dozen different minds about her, and was half
surprised, at times, to find himself treating it as a matter of serious
moment whether he liked her or not. He admired her, and indeed there
was something admirable in her combination of beauty and talent, of
isolation and tranquil self-support. He used sometimes to go into the
little, high-niched, ordinary room which served her as a studio, and
find her working at a panel six inches square, at an open casement,
profiled against the deep blue Roman sky. She received him with a
meek-eyed dignity that made her seem like a painted saint on a church
window, receiving the daylight in all her being. The breath of reproach
passed her by with folded wings. And yet Rowland wondered why he did not
like her better. If he failed, the reason was not far to seek. There was
another woman whom he liked better, an image in his heart which refused
to yield precedence.

On that evening to which allusion has been made, when Rowland was left
alone between the starlight and the waves with the sudden knowledge
that Mary Garland was to become another man’s wife, he had made, after a
while, the simple resolution to forget her. And every day since, like a
famous philosopher who wished to abbreviate his mourning for a faithful
servant, he had said to himself in substance--“Remember to forget Mary
Garland.” Sometimes it seemed as if he were succeeding; then, suddenly,
when he was least expecting it, he would find her name, inaudibly, on
his lips, and seem to see her eyes meeting his eyes. All this made him
uncomfortable, and seemed to portend a possible discord. Discord was not
to his taste; he shrank from imperious passions, and the idea of finding
himself jealous of an unsuspecting friend was absolutely repulsive. More
than ever, then, the path of duty was to forget Mary Garland, and he
cultivated oblivion, as we may say, in the person of Miss Blanchard. Her
fine temper, he said to himself, was a trifle cold and conscious, her
purity prudish, perhaps, her culture pedantic. But since he was obliged
to give up hopes of Mary Garland, Providence owed him a compensation,
and he had fits of angry sadness in which it seemed to him that to
attest his right to sentimental satisfaction he would be capable of
falling in love with a woman he absolutely detested, if she were the
best that came in his way. And what was the use, after all, of bothering
about a possible which was only, perhaps, a dream? Even if Mary Garland
had been free, what right had he to assume that he would have pleased
her? The actual was good enough. Miss Blanchard had beautiful hair, and
if she was a trifle old-maidish, there is nothing like matrimony for
curing old-maidishness.

Madame Grandoni, who had formed with the companion of Rowland’s rides
an alliance which might have been called defensive on the part of the
former and attractive on that of Miss Blanchard, was an excessively ugly
old lady, highly esteemed in Roman society for her homely benevolence
and her shrewd and humorous good sense. She had been the widow of a
German archaeologist, who had come to Rome in the early ages as an
attache of the Prussian legation on the Capitoline. Her good sense had
been wanting on but a single occasion, that of her second marriage. This
occasion was certainly a momentous one, but these, by common consent,
are not test cases. A couple of years after her first husband’s death,
she had accepted the hand and the name of a Neapolitan music-master, ten
years younger than herself, and with no fortune but his fiddle-bow. The
marriage was most unhappy, and the Maestro Grandoni was suspected of
using the fiddle-bow as an instrument of conjugal correction. He had
finally run off with a prima donna assoluta, who, it was to be hoped,
had given him a taste of the quality implied in her title. He was
believed to be living still, but he had shrunk to a small black spot
in Madame Grandoni’s life, and for ten years she had not mentioned
his name. She wore a light flaxen wig, which was never very artfully
adjusted, but this mattered little, as she made no secret of it. She
used to say, “I was not always so ugly as this; as a young girl I had
beautiful golden hair, very much the color of my wig.” She had worn
from time immemorial an old blue satin dress, and a white crape shawl
embroidered in colors; her appearance was ridiculous, but she had an
interminable Teutonic pedigree, and her manners, in every presence, were
easy and jovial, as became a lady whose ancestor had been cup-bearer
to Frederick Barbarossa. Thirty years’ observation of Roman society had
sharpened her wits and given her an inexhaustible store of anecdotes,
but she had beneath her crumpled bodice a deep-welling fund of Teutonic
sentiment, which she communicated only to the objects of her particular
favor. Rowland had a great regard for her, and she repaid it by wishing
him to get married. She never saw him without whispering to him that
Augusta Blanchard was just the girl.

It seemed to Rowland a sort of foreshadowing of matrimony to see Miss
Blanchard standing gracefully on his hearth-rug and blooming behind
the central bouquet at his circular dinner-table. The dinner was very
prosperous and Roderick amply filled his position as hero of the feast.
He had always an air of buoyant enjoyment in his work, but on this
occasion he manifested a good deal of harmless pleasure in his glory.
He drank freely and talked bravely; he leaned back in his chair with
his hands in his pockets, and flung open the gates of his eloquence.
Singleton sat gazing and listening open-mouthed, as if Apollo in person
were talking. Gloriani showed a twinkle in his eye and an evident
disposition to draw Roderick out. Rowland was rather regretful, for
he knew that theory was not his friend’s strong point, and that it was
never fair to take his measure from his talk.

“As you have begun with Adam and Eve,” said Gloriani, “I suppose you are
going straight through the Bible.” He was one of the persons who thought
Roderick delightfully fresh.

“I may make a David,” said Roderick, “but I shall not try any more of
the Old Testament people. I don’t like the Jews; I don’t like pendulous
noses. David, the boy David, is rather an exception; you can think of
him and treat him as a young Greek. Standing forth there on the plain
of battle between the contending armies, rushing forward to let fly his
stone, he looks like a beautiful runner at the Olympic games. After that
I shall skip to the New Testament. I mean to make a Christ.”

“You ‘ll put nothing of the Olympic games into him, I hope,” said
Gloriani.

“Oh, I shall make him very different from the Christ of tradition;
more--more”--and Roderick paused a moment to think. This was the first
that Rowland had heard of his Christ.

“More rationalistic, I suppose,” suggested Miss Blanchard.

“More idealistic!” cried Roderick. “The perfection of form, you know, to
symbolize the perfection of spirit.”

“For a companion piece,” said Miss Blanchard, “you ought to make a
Judas.”

“Never! I mean never to make anything ugly. The Greeks never made
anything ugly, and I ‘m a Hellenist; I ‘m not a Hebraist! I have been
thinking lately of making a Cain, but I should never dream of making
him ugly. He should be a very handsome fellow, and he should lift up the
murderous club with the beautiful movement of the fighters in the Greek
friezes who are chopping at their enemies.”

“There ‘s no use trying to be a Greek,” said Gloriani. “If Phidias were
to come back, he would recommend you to give it up. I am half Italian
and half French, and, as a whole, a Yankee. What sort of a Greek should
I make? I think the Judas is a capital idea for a statue. Much obliged
to you, madame, for the suggestion. What an insidious little scoundrel
one might make of him, sitting there nursing his money-bag and his
treachery! There can be a great deal of expression in a pendulous nose,
my dear sir, especially when it is cast in green bronze.”

“Very likely,” said Roderick. “But it is not the sort of expression I
care for. I care only for perfect beauty. There it is, if you want to
know it! That ‘s as good a profession of faith as another. In future, so
far as my things are not positively beautiful, you may set them down as
failures. For me, it ‘s either that or nothing. It ‘s against the taste
of the day, I know; we have really lost the faculty to understand beauty
in the large, ideal way. We stand like a race with shrunken muscles,
staring helplessly at the weights our forefathers easily lifted. But I
don’t hesitate to proclaim it--I mean to lift them again! I mean to go
in for big things; that ‘s my notion of my art. I mean to do things
that will be simple and vast and infinite. You ‘ll see if they won’t be
infinite! Excuse me if I brag a little; all those Italian fellows in the
Renaissance used to brag. There was a sensation once common, I am sure,
in the human breast--a kind of religious awe in the presence of a marble
image newly created and expressing the human type in superhuman purity.
When Phidias and Praxiteles had their statues of goddesses unveiled in
the temples of the AEgean, don’t you suppose there was a passionate
beating of hearts, a thrill of mysterious terror? I mean to bring it
back; I mean to thrill the world again! I mean to produce a Juno that
will make you tremble, a Venus that will make you swoon!”

“So that when we come and see you,” said Madame Grandoni, “we must be
sure and bring our smelling-bottles. And pray have a few soft sofas
conveniently placed.”

“Phidias and Praxiteles,” Miss Blanchard remarked, “had the advantage
of believing in their goddesses. I insist on believing, for myself, that
the pagan mythology is not a fiction, and that Venus and Juno and Apollo
and Mercury used to come down in a cloud into this very city of Rome
where we sit talking nineteenth century English.”

“Nineteenth century nonsense, my dear!” cried Madame Grandoni. “Mr.
Hudson may be a new Phidias, but Venus and Juno--that ‘s you and
I--arrived to-day in a very dirty cab; and were cheated by the driver,
too.”

“But, my dear fellow,” objected Gloriani, “you don’t mean to say you
are going to make over in cold blood those poor old exploded Apollos and
Hebes.”

“It won’t matter what you call them,” said Roderick. “They shall be
simply divine forms. They shall be Beauty; they shall be Wisdom; they
shall be Power; they shall be Genius; they shall be Daring. That ‘s all
the Greek divinities were.”

“That ‘s rather abstract, you know,” said Miss Blanchard.

“My dear fellow,” cried Gloriani, “you ‘re delightfully young.”

“I hope you ‘ll not grow any older,” said Singleton, with a flush of
sympathy across his large white forehead. “You can do it if you try.”

“Then there are all the Forces and Mysteries and Elements of Nature,”
 Roderick went on. “I mean to do the Morning; I mean to do the Night! I
mean to do the Ocean and the Mountains; the Moon and the West Wind. I
mean to make a magnificent statue of America!”

“America--the Mountains--the Moon!” said Gloriani. “You ‘ll find it
rather hard, I ‘m afraid, to compress such subjects into classic forms.”

“Oh, there ‘s a way,” cried Roderick, “and I shall think it out. My
figures shall make no contortions, but they shall mean a tremendous
deal.”

“I ‘m sure there are contortions enough in Michael Angelo,” said Madame
Grandoni. “Perhaps you don’t approve of him.”

“Oh, Michael Angelo was not me!” said Roderick, with sublimity. There
was a great laugh; but after all, Roderick had done some fine things.

Rowland had bidden one of the servants bring him a small portfolio of
prints, and had taken out a photograph of Roderick’s little statue of
the youth drinking. It pleased him to see his friend sitting there
in radiant ardor, defending idealism against so knowing an apostle of
corruption as Gloriani, and he wished to help the elder artist to be
confuted. He silently handed him the photograph.

“Bless me!” cried Gloriani, “did he do this?”

“Ages ago,” said Roderick.

Gloriani looked at the photograph a long time, with evident admiration.

“It ‘s deucedly pretty,” he said at last. “But, my dear young friend,
you can’t keep this up.”

“I shall do better,” said Roderick.

“You will do worse! You will become weak. You will have to take to
violence, to contortions, to romanticism, in self-defense. This sort
of thing is like a man trying to lift himself up by the seat of his
trousers. He may stand on tiptoe, but he can’t do more. Here you stand
on tiptoe, very gracefully, I admit; but you can’t fly; there ‘s no use
trying.”

“My ‘America’ shall answer you!” said Roderick, shaking toward him a
tall glass of champagne and drinking it down.

Singleton had taken the photograph and was poring over it with a little
murmur of delight.

“Was this done in America?” he asked.

“In a square white wooden house at Northampton, Massachusetts,” Roderick
answered.

“Dear old white wooden houses!” said Miss Blanchard.

“If you could do as well as this there,” said Singleton, blushing and
smiling, “one might say that really you had only to lose by coming to
Rome.”

“Mallet is to blame for that,” said Roderick. “But I am willing to risk
the loss.”

The photograph had been passed to Madame Grandoni. “It reminds me,” she
said, “of the things a young man used to do whom I knew years ago, when
I first came to Rome. He was a German, a pupil of Overbeck and a votary
of spiritual art. He used to wear a black velvet tunic and a very low
shirt collar; he had a neck like a sickly crane, and let his hair grow
down to his shoulders. His name was Herr Schafgans. He never painted
anything so profane as a man taking a drink, but his figures were all
of the simple and slender and angular pattern, and nothing if not
innocent--like this one of yours. He would not have agreed with Gloriani
any more than you. He used to come and see me very often, and in those
days I thought his tunic and his long neck infallible symptoms of
genius. His talk was all of gilded aureoles and beatific visions; he
lived on weak wine and biscuits, and wore a lock of Saint Somebody’s
hair in a little bag round his neck. If he was not a Beato Angelico, it
was not his own fault. I hope with all my heart that Mr. Hudson will do
the fine things he talks about, but he must bear in mind the history of
dear Mr. Schafgans as a warning against high-flown pretensions. One fine
day this poor young man fell in love with a Roman model, though she
had never sat to him, I believe, for she was a buxom, bold-faced,
high-colored creature, and he painted none but pale, sickly women. He
offered to marry her, and she looked at him from head to foot, gave a
shrug, and consented. But he was ashamed to set up his menage in Rome.
They went to Naples, and there, a couple of years afterwards, I saw him.
The poor fellow was ruined. His wife used to beat him, and he had taken
to drinking. He wore a ragged black coat, and he had a blotchy, red
face. Madame had turned washerwoman and used to make him go and fetch
the dirty linen. His talent had gone heaven knows where! He was getting
his living by painting views of Vesuvius in eruption on the little boxes
they sell at Sorrento.”

“Moral: don’t fall in love with a buxom Roman model,” said Roderick. “I
‘m much obliged to you for your story, but I don’t mean to fall in love
with any one.”

Gloriani had possessed himself of the photograph again, and was looking
at it curiously. “It ‘s a happy bit of youth,” he said. “But you can’t
keep it up--you can’t keep it up!”

The two sculptors pursued their discussion after dinner, in the
drawing-room. Rowland left them to have it out in a corner, where
Roderick’s Eve stood over them in the shaded lamplight, in vague white
beauty, like the guardian angel of the young idealist. Singleton was
listening to Madame Grandoni, and Rowland took his place on the sofa,
near Miss Blanchard. They had a good deal of familiar, desultory talk.
Every now and then Madame Grandoni looked round at them. Miss Blanchard
at last asked Rowland certain questions about Roderick: who he was,
where he came from, whether it was true, as she had heard, that Rowland
had discovered him and brought him out at his own expense. Rowland
answered her questions; to the last he gave a vague affirmative.
Finally, after a pause, looking at him, “You ‘re very generous,” Miss
Blanchard said. The declaration was made with a certain richness of
tone, but it brought to Rowland’s sense neither delight nor confusion.
He had heard the words before; he suddenly remembered the grave
sincerity with which Miss Garland had uttered them as he strolled with
her in the woods the day of Roderick’s picnic. They had pleased him
then; now he asked Miss Blanchard whether she would have some tea.

When the two ladies withdrew, he attended them to their carriage. Coming
back to the drawing-room, he paused outside the open door; he was
struck by the group formed by the three men. They were standing before
Roderick’s statue of Eve, and the young sculptor had lifted up the lamp
and was showing different parts of it to his companions. He was talking
ardently, and the lamplight covered his head and face. Rowland stood
looking on, for the group struck him with its picturesque symbolism.
Roderick, bearing the lamp and glowing in its radiant circle, seemed
the beautiful image of a genius which combined sincerity with power.
Gloriani, with his head on one side, pulling his long moustache and
looking keenly from half-closed eyes at the lighted marble, represented
art with a worldly motive, skill unleavened by faith, the mere base
maximum of cleverness. Poor little Singleton, on the other side, with
his hands behind him, his head thrown back, and his eyes following
devoutly the course of Roderick’s elucidation, might pass for an
embodiment of aspiring candor, with feeble wings to rise on. In all
this, Roderick’s was certainly the beau role.

Gloriani turned to Rowland as he came up, and pointed back with his
thumb to the statue, with a smile half sardonic, half good-natured. “A
pretty thing--a devilish pretty thing,” he said. “It ‘s as fresh as the
foam in the milk-pail. He can do it once, he can do it twice, he can do
it at a stretch half a dozen times. But--but--”

He was returning to his former refrain, but Rowland intercepted him.
“Oh, he will keep it up,” he said, smiling, “I will answer for him.”

Gloriani was not encouraging, but Roderick had listened smiling. He
was floating unperturbed on the tide of his deep self-confidence. Now,
suddenly, however, he turned with a flash of irritation in his eye, and
demanded in a ringing voice, “In a word, then, you prophesy that I am to
fail?”

Gloriani answered imperturbably, patting him kindly on the shoulder. “My
dear fellow, passion burns out, inspiration runs to seed. Some fine day
every artist finds himself sitting face to face with his lump of clay,
with his empty canvas, with his sheet of blank paper, waiting in vain
for the revelation to be made, for the Muse to descend. He must learn
to do without the Muse! When the fickle jade forgets the way to your
studio, don’t waste any time in tearing your hair and meditating on
suicide. Come round and see me, and I will show you how to console
yourself.”

“If I break down,” said Roderick, passionately, “I shall stay down.
If the Muse deserts me, she shall at least have her infidelity on her
conscience.”

“You have no business,” Rowland said to Gloriani, “to talk lightly of
the Muse in this company. Mr. Singleton, too, has received pledges from
her which place her constancy beyond suspicion.” And he pointed out on
the wall, near by, two small landscapes by the modest water-colorist.

The sculptor examined them with deference, and Singleton himself began
to laugh nervously; he was trembling with hope that the great
Gloriani would be pleased. “Yes, these are fresh too,” Gloriani said;
“extraordinarily fresh! How old are you?”

“Twenty-six, sir,” said Singleton.

“For twenty-six they are famously fresh. They must have taken you a long
time; you work slowly.”

“Yes, unfortunately, I work very slowly. One of them took me six weeks,
the other two months.”

“Upon my word! The Muse pays you long visits.” And Gloriani turned
and looked, from head to foot, at so unlikely an object of her favors.
Singleton smiled and began to wipe his forehead very hard. “Oh, you!”
 said the sculptor; “you ‘ll keep it up!”

A week after his dinner-party, Rowland went into Roderick’s studio and
found him sitting before an unfinished piece of work, with a hanging
head and a heavy eye. He could have fancied that the fatal hour foretold
by Gloriani had struck. Roderick rose with a sombre yawn and flung down
his tools. “It ‘s no use,” he said, “I give it up!”

“What is it?”

“I have struck a shallow! I have been sailing bravely, but for the last
day or two my keel has been crunching the bottom.”

“A difficult place?” Rowland asked, with a sympathetic inflection,
looking vaguely at the roughly modeled figure.

“Oh, it ‘s not the poor clay!” Roderick answered. “The difficult place
is here!” And he struck a blow on his heart. “I don’t know what ‘s the
matter with me. Nothing comes; all of a sudden I hate things. My old
things look ugly; everything looks stupid.”

Rowland was perplexed. He was in the situation of a man who has been
riding a blood horse at an even, elastic gallop, and of a sudden feels
him stumble and balk. As yet, he reflected, he had seen nothing but the
sunshine of genius; he had forgotten that it has its storms. Of course
it had! And he felt a flood of comradeship rise in his heart which would
float them both safely through the worst weather. “Why, you ‘re tired!”
 he said. “Of course you ‘re tired. You have a right to be!”

“Do you think I have a right to be?” Roderick asked, looking at him.

“Unquestionably, after all you have done.”

“Well, then, right or wrong, I am tired. I certainly have done a fair
winter’s work. I want a change.”

Rowland declared that it was certainly high time they should be leaving
Rome. They would go north and travel. They would go to Switzerland, to
Germany, to Holland, to England. Roderick assented, his eye brightened,
and Rowland talked of a dozen things they might do. Roderick walked up
and down; he seemed to have something to say which he hesitated to bring
out. He hesitated so rarely that Rowland wondered, and at last asked him
what was on his mind. Roderick stopped before him, frowning a little.

“I have such unbounded faith in your good-will,” he said, “that I
believe nothing I can say would offend you.”

“Try it,” said Rowland.

“Well, then, I think my journey will do me more good if I take it alone.
I need n’t say I prefer your society to that of any man living. For the
last six months it has been everything to me. But I have a perpetual
feeling that you are expecting something of me, that you are measuring
my doings by a terrifically high standard. You are watching me; I don’t
want to be watched. I want to go my own way; to work when I choose and
to loaf when I choose. It is not that I don’t know what I owe you; it
is not that we are not friends. It is simply that I want a taste of
absolutely unrestricted freedom. Therefore, I say, let us separate.”

Rowland shook him by the hand. “Willingly. Do as you desire, I shall
miss you, and I venture to believe you ‘ll pass some lonely hours. But I
have only one request to make: that if you get into trouble of any kind
whatever, you will immediately let me know.”

They began their journey, however, together, and crossed the Alps
side by side, muffled in one rug, on the top of the St. Gothard coach.
Rowland was going to England to pay some promised visits; his companion
had no plan save to ramble through Switzerland and Germany as fancy
guided him. He had money, now, that would outlast the summer; when
it was spent he would come back to Rome and make another statue. At
a little mountain village by the way, Roderick declared that he would
stop; he would scramble about a little in the high places and doze in
the shade of the pine forests. The coach was changing horses; the two
young men walked along the village street, picking their way between
dunghills, breathing the light, cool air, and listening to the plash of
the fountain and the tinkle of cattle-bells. The coach overtook them,
and then Rowland, as he prepared to mount, felt an almost overmastering
reluctance.

“Say the word,” he exclaimed, “and I will stop too.”

Roderick frowned. “Ah, you don’t trust me; you don’t think I ‘m able
to take care of myself. That proves that I was right in feeling as if I
were watched!”

“Watched, my dear fellow!” said Rowland. “I hope you may never have
anything worse to complain of than being watched in the spirit in which
I watch you. But I will spare you even that. Good-by!” Standing in his
place, as the coach rolled away, he looked back at his friend lingering
by the roadside. A great snow-mountain, behind Roderick, was beginning
to turn pink in the sunset. The young man waved his hat, still looking
grave. Rowland settled himself in his place, reflecting after all that
this was a salubrious beginning of independence. He was among forests
and glaciers, leaning on the pure bosom of nature. And then--and
then--was it not in itself a guarantee against folly to be engaged to
Mary Garland?






CHAPTER IV. Experience

Rowland passed the summer in England, staying with several old friends
and two or three new ones. On his arrival, he felt it on his conscience
to write to Mrs. Hudson and inform her that her son had relieved him of
his tutelage. He felt that she considered him an incorruptible Mentor,
following Roderick like a shadow, and he wished to let her know the
truth. But he made the truth very comfortable, and gave a succinct
statement of the young man’s brilliant beginnings. He owed it to
himself, he said, to remind her that he had not judged lightly, and that
Roderick’s present achievements were more profitable than his inglorious
drudgery at Messrs. Striker & Spooner’s. He was now taking a well-earned
holiday and proposing to see a little of the world. He would work none
the worse for this; every artist needed to knock about and look at
things for himself. They had parted company for a couple of months, for
Roderick was now a great man and beyond the need of going about with a
keeper. But they were to meet again in Rome in the autumn, and then he
should be able to send her more good news. Meanwhile, he was very happy
in what Roderick had already done--especially happy in the happiness it
must have brought to her. He ventured to ask to be kindly commended to
Miss Garland.

His letter was promptly answered--to his surprise in Miss Garland’s own
hand. The same mail brought also an epistle from Cecilia. The latter was
voluminous, and we must content ourselves with giving an extract.

“Your letter was filled with an echo of that brilliant Roman world,
which made me almost ill with envy. For a week after I got it I thought
Northampton really unpardonably tame. But I am drifting back again to my
old deeps of resignation, and I rush to the window, when any one passes,
with all my old gratitude for small favors. So Roderick Hudson is
already a great man, and you turn out to be a great prophet? My
compliments to both of you; I never heard of anything working so
smoothly. And he takes it all very quietly, and does n’t lose his
balance nor let it turn his head? You judged him, then, in a day better
than I had done in six months, for I really did not expect that he would
settle down into such a jog-trot of prosperity. I believed he would do
fine things, but I was sure he would intersperse them with a good many
follies, and that his beautiful statues would spring up out of the midst
of a straggling plantation of wild oats. But from what you tell me, Mr.
Striker may now go hang himself..... There is one thing, however, to say
as a friend, in the way of warning. That candid soul can keep a secret,
and he may have private designs on your equanimity which you don’t begin
to suspect. What do you think of his being engaged to Miss Garland? The
two ladies had given no hint of it all winter, but a fortnight ago, when
those big photographs of his statues arrived, they first pinned them up
on the wall, and then trotted out into the town, made a dozen calls, and
announced the news. Mrs. Hudson did, at least; Miss Garland, I suppose,
sat at home writing letters. To me, I confess, the thing was a perfect
surprise. I had not a suspicion that all the while he was coming so
regularly to make himself agreeable on my veranda, he was quietly
preferring his cousin to any one else. Not, indeed, that he was ever at
particular pains to make himself agreeable! I suppose he has picked up
a few graces in Rome. But he must not acquire too many: if he is too
polite when he comes back, Miss Garland will count him as one of the
lost. She will be a very good wife for a man of genius, and such a one
as they are often shrewd enough to take. She ‘ll darn his stockings and
keep his accounts, and sit at home and trim the lamp and keep up
the fire while he studies the Beautiful in pretty neighbors at
dinner-parties. The two ladies are evidently very happy, and, to do them
justice, very humbly grateful to you. Mrs. Hudson never speaks of you
without tears in her eyes, and I am sure she considers you a specially
patented agent of Providence. Verily, it ‘s a good thing for a woman to
be in love: Miss Garland has grown almost pretty. I met her the other
night at a tea-party; she had a white rose in her hair, and sang a
sentimental ballad in a fine contralto voice.”

Miss Garland’s letter was so much shorter that we may give it entire:--

My dear Sir,--Mrs. Hudson, as I suppose you know, has been for some time
unable to use her eyes. She requests me, therefore, to answer your favor
of the 22d of June. She thanks you extremely for writing, and wishes me
to say that she considers herself in every way under great obligations
to you. Your account of her son’s progress and the high estimation in
which he is held has made her very happy, and she earnestly prays that
all may continue well with him. He sent us, a short time ago, several
large photographs of his two statues, taken from different points of
view. We know little about such things, but they seem to us wonderfully
beautiful. We sent them to Boston to be handsomely framed, and the man,
on returning them, wrote us that he had exhibited them for a week in
his store, and that they had attracted great attention. The frames are
magnificent, and the pictures now hang in a row on the parlor wall.
Our only quarrel with them is that they make the old papering and the
engravings look dreadfully shabby. Mr. Striker stood and looked at them
the other day full five minutes, and said, at last, that if Roderick’s
head was running on such things it was no wonder he could not learn to
draw up a deed. We lead here so quiet and monotonous a life that I
am afraid I can tell you nothing that will interest you. Mrs. Hudson
requests me to say that the little more or less that may happen to us is
of small account, as we live in our thoughts and our thoughts are fixed
on her dear son. She thanks Heaven he has so good a friend. Mrs. Hudson
says that this is too short a letter, but I can say nothing more.

Yours most respectfully,

Mary Garland.

It is a question whether the reader will know why, but this letter
gave Rowland extraordinary pleasure. He liked its very brevity and
meagreness, and there seemed to him an exquisite modesty in its saying
nothing from the young girl herself. He delighted in the formal address
and conclusion; they pleased him as he had been pleased by an angular
gesture in some expressive girlish figure in an early painting. The
letter renewed that impression of strong feeling combined with an almost
rigid simplicity, which Roderick’s betrothed had personally given
him. And its homely stiffness seemed a vivid reflection of a life
concentrated, as the young girl had borrowed warrant from her companion
to say, in a single devoted idea. The monotonous days of the two women
seemed to Rowland’s fancy to follow each other like the tick-tick of a
great time-piece, marking off the hours which separated them from the
supreme felicity of clasping the far-away son and lover to lips sealed
with the excess of joy. He hoped that Roderick, now that he had shaken
off the oppression of his own importunate faith, was not losing a
tolerant temper for the silent prayers of the two women at Northampton.

He was left to vain conjectures, however, as to Roderick’s actual moods
and occupations. He knew he was no letter-writer, and that, in the young
sculptor’s own phrase, he had at any time rather build a monument than
write a note. But when a month had passed without news of him, he began
to be half anxious and half angry, and wrote him three lines, in the
care of a Continental banker, begging him at least to give some sign of
whether he was alive or dead. A week afterwards came an answer--brief,
and dated Baden-Baden. “I know I have been a great brute,” Roderick
wrote, “not to have sent you a word before; but really I don’t know what
has got into me. I have lately learned terribly well how to be idle. I
am afraid to think how long it is since I wrote to my mother or to Mary.
Heaven help them--poor, patient, trustful creatures! I don’t know how to
tell you what I am doing. It seems all amusing enough while I do it, but
it would make a poor show in a narrative intended for your formidable
eyes. I found Baxter in Switzerland, or rather he found me, and he
grabbed me by the arm and brought me here. I was walking twenty miles a
day in the Alps, drinking milk in lonely chalets, sleeping as you sleep,
and thinking it was all very good fun; but Baxter told me it would never
do, that the Alps were ‘d----d rot,’ that Baden-Baden was the place, and
that if I knew what was good for me I would come along with him. It is a
wonderful place, certainly, though, thank the Lord, Baxter departed last
week, blaspheming horribly at trente et quarante. But you know all about
it and what one does--what one is liable to do. I have succumbed, in a
measure, to the liabilities, and I wish I had some one here to give me a
thundering good blowing up. Not you, dear friend; you would draw it too
mild; you have too much of the milk of human kindness. I have fits of
horrible homesickness for my studio, and I shall be devoutly grateful
when the summer is over and I can go back and swing a chisel. I feel as
if nothing but the chisel would satisfy me; as if I could rush in a rage
at a block of unshaped marble. There are a lot of the Roman people here,
English and American; I live in the midst of them and talk nonsense from
morning till night. There is also some one else; and to her I don’t talk
sense, nor, thank heaven, mean what I say. I confess, I need a month’s
work to recover my self-respect.”

These lines brought Rowland no small perturbation; the more, that what
they seemed to point to surprised him. During the nine months of their
companionship Roderick had shown so little taste for dissipation that
Rowland had come to think of it as a canceled danger, and it greatly
perplexed him to learn that his friend had apparently proved so pliant
to opportunity. But Roderick’s allusions were ambiguous, and it was
possible they might simply mean that he was out of patience with a
frivolous way of life and fretting wholesomely over his absent work.
It was a very good thing, certainly, that idleness should prove, on
experiment, to sit heavily on his conscience. Nevertheless, the letter
needed, to Rowland’s mind, a key: the key arrived a week later. “In
common charity,” Roderick wrote, “lend me a hundred pounds! I have
gambled away my last franc--I have made a mountain of debts. Send me the
money first; lecture me afterwards!” Rowland sent the money by return of
mail; then he proceeded, not to lecture, but to think. He hung his head;
he was acutely disappointed. He had no right to be, he assured himself;
but so it was. Roderick was young, impulsive, unpracticed in stoicism;
it was a hundred to one that he was to pay the usual vulgar tribute
to folly. But his friend had regarded it as securely gained to his own
belief in virtue that he was not as other foolish youths are, and that
he would have been capable of looking at folly in the face and passing
on his way. Rowland for a while felt a sore sense of wrath. What right
had a man who was engaged to that fine girl in Northampton to behave
as if his consciousness were a common blank, to be overlaid with coarse
sensations? Yes, distinctly, he was disappointed. He had accompanied his
missive with an urgent recommendation to leave Baden-Baden immediately,
and an offer to meet Roderick at any point he would name. The answer
came promptly; it ran as follows: “Send me another fifty pounds! I have
been back to the tables. I will leave as soon as the money comes, and
meet you at Geneva. There I will tell you everything.”

There is an ancient terrace at Geneva, planted with trees and studded
with benches, overlooked by gravely aristocratic old dwellings and
overlooking the distant Alps. A great many generations have made it a
lounging-place, a great many friends and lovers strolled there, a great
many confidential talks and momentous interviews gone forward. Here, one
morning, sitting on one of the battered green benches, Roderick, as he
had promised, told his friend everything. He had arrived late the
night before; he looked tired, and yet flushed and excited. He made no
professions of penitence, but he practiced an unmitigated frankness,
and his self-reprobation might be taken for granted. He implied in every
phrase that he had done with it all, and that he was counting the hours
till he could get back to work. We shall not rehearse his confession in
detail; its main outline will be sufficient. He had fallen in with some
very idle people, and had discovered that a little example and a little
practice were capable of producing on his own part a considerable relish
for their diversions. What could he do? He never read, and he had no
studio; in one way or another he had to pass the time. He passed it in
dangling about several very pretty women in wonderful Paris toilets,
and reflected that it was always something gained for a sculptor to sit
under a tree, looking at his leisure into a charming face and saying
things that made it smile and play its muscles and part its lips and
show its teeth. Attached to these ladies were certain gentlemen who
walked about in clouds of perfume, rose at midday, and supped at
midnight. Roderick had found himself in the mood for thinking them very
amusing fellows. He was surprised at his own taste, but he let it take
its course. It led him to the discovery that to live with ladies who
expect you to present them with expensive bouquets, to ride with them in
the Black Forest on well-looking horses, to come into their opera-boxes
on nights when Patti sang and prices were consequent, to propose little
light suppers at the Conversation House after the opera or drives by
moonlight to the Castle, to be always arrayed and anointed, trinketed
and gloved,--that to move in such society, we say, though it might be a
privilege, was a privilege with a penalty attached. But the tables made
such things easy; half the Baden world lived by the tables. Roderick
tried them and found that at first they smoothed his path delightfully.
This simplification of matters, however, was only momentary, for he soon
perceived that to seem to have money, and to have it in fact, exposed
a good-looking young man to peculiar liabilities. At this point of his
friend’s narrative, Rowland was reminded of Madame de Cruchecassee in
The Newcomes, and though he had listened in tranquil silence to the rest
of it, he found it hard not to say that all this had been, under
the circumstances, a very bad business. Roderick admitted it with
bitterness, and then told how much--measured simply financially--it had
cost him. His luck had changed; the tables had ceased to back him, and
he had found himself up to his knees in debt. Every penny had gone
of the solid sum which had seemed a large equivalent of those shining
statues in Rome. He had been an ass, but it was not irreparable; he
could make another statue in a couple of months.

Rowland frowned. “For heaven’s sake,” he said, “don’t play such
dangerous games with your facility. If you have got facility, revere
it, respect it, adore it, treasure it--don’t speculate on it.” And he
wondered what his companion, up to his knees in debt, would have done
if there had been no good-natured Rowland Mallet to lend a helping hand.
But he d

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