Roderick Hudson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 22
XXII
The Villa Pandolfini leaned largely upon a grass-grown piazzetta at the top of a hill which sloped straight from one of the gates of Florence. It offered to the outer world an ample front, though not of rare elevation, coloured a dull dark yellow and pierced with windows of various sizes, no one of which save those on the ground floor was on the same level with any other. Within was a great cool grey cortile, graced round about with high light arches and heavily-corniced doors of majestic altitude and furnished on one side with a grand old archaic well. Mrs. Hudson's rooms opened into a small garden founded on substructions of immense strength, rising from the part of the hill that sloped steeply away. This garden was a charming place. Its southern wall was curtained with a screen of orange-blossoms, a dozen fig-trees here and there offered you their large-leaved shade, and over the low parapet the soft grave Tuscan landscape kept you company. The rooms themselves were as high as chapels and as cool as royal sepulchres. Silence, peace and security seemed to abide in the ancient house, to make of it a square fortress against further assault of fortune. Mrs. Hudson took into her service a stunted brown-faced Maddalena, who wore a crimson handkerchief passed over her coarse black locks and tied under her sharp pertinacious chin, and played over the domestic question in general a smile as vivid, though perhaps as treacherous, as some flaring mediæval torch, the signal to confederates without. A glance, a word, a motion, made her show her teeth like a friendly she-wolf. This formidable flicker formed her sole substitute for speech with her melancholy mistress, to whom she had been bequeathed by the late occupant of the apartment and who, to Rowland's satisfaction, promised to be diverted from the study of his predicament by the still deeper perversity of Maddalena's theory of roasting, sweeping and bed-making.
Rowland took rooms at a villa a trifle nearer Florence, whence in the summer mornings he had five minutes' walk in the sharp black shadow-strip projected by winding flower-topped walls to join his friends. The life at Villa Pandolfini, when it had begun to fill out its measure, took the rhythm of the slow summer days, during which nothing would have been more open to it than to confess itself charmed to patience. If it was under a sensible shadow this was because it had an inherent vice; it feigned an unconsciousness that it too scantily felt. Roderick had lost no time in showing how little he was still able to save, and as he was the central figure of the small group, as he held its heart-strings all in his hand, it reflected faithfully the eclipse of his genius. No one had ventured upon the cheerful commonplace of saying that the change of air and of scene would restore his spirits; this would have had, in the conditions, altogether too silly a sound. The change had clearly done nothing of the sort, and his companions had at least the comfort of their mute recognition. An essential spring had dried up within him, and there was no household magic, no waving of any blest wand, to make it flow again. He was rarely violent, he expressed little of the irritation and ennui he must have constantly felt; it was as if he believed that an inward miracle—but only a miracle—might yet take place for him and was perhaps worth waiting for. The most that one could do, however, was to wait grimly and doggedly, suppressing an imprecation as from time to time one looked at one's watch. An attitude of positive urbanity towards life was not to be expected; it was doing one's duty to hold one's tongue and keep one's hands off one's own windpipe and other people's. He had long sad silences, fits of a deeper detachment than any before, during which he sat in the garden by the hour, with his head thrown back, his legs outstretched, his hands in his pockets and his eyes attached to the blinding summer sky. He would gather a dozen books about him, tumble them out on the ground, take one into his lap and leave it with the pages unturned. These moods would alternate with attacks of high restlessness, when, at unnatural hours, he made unexplained absences. He bore the heat of the Italian summer like a salamander and used to start off in the glare of noon for long walks over the hills. He often went down into Florence, rambled through the close dim streets and lounged away mornings in the churches and galleries. On several of these occasions Rowland bore him company, for they were the times when his contact had most of its early charm. Before Michael Angelo's statues and the pictures of the early Tuscans he quite forgot his disaster and picked up the thread of his old love of ideas. He found again in Florence certain of his Roman friends and made with them appointments more or less genial. More than once he asked Mary Garland to accompany him to the city, where he showed her the things he most cared for. He had a mass of sculptor's clay brought up to the villa and deposited in a room suitable for his work, but when this had been done he turned the key in the door and the clay was never touched. His eye was heavy and his hand cold, and his mother was more than once caught in the act of praying that he might be induced to see a doctor. On one of these occasions he had a great outburst of anger, begging her to know once for all that his health in these days fairly mocked him with its excellence. On the whole, and most of the time, he irresistibly appealed, the air being charged with him as with some rich wasted essence, some spirit scattered by the breaking of its phial and yet unable, for its very quality, to lose itself. If he was not querulous and bitter it was because he had taken an extraordinary vow not to be; a vow heroic for him and which those who knew him well had the tenderness to appreciate. Talking with him was like skating on thin ice, and his companions had a constant mental vision of spots marked dangerous.
This was an arduous time for Rowland; he said to himself that he would see it through but must never court again such perils. Mrs. Hudson divided it between looking askance at her son, with her hands tightly clasped about her pocket-handkerchief, as if she were wringing it dry of the last hour's tears, and turning her eyes much more directly to his perfidious patron, on whom they rested in the mutest, the feeblest, the most unbearable reprehension. She never phrased her accusations, but he felt them gather in the poor lady's inward gloom like monsters and spectral shapes. These things were a felt weight, of the heaviest, to him, and if at the outset of his experiment he had seen the possibility of them, how dimly so ever, in the opposite scale, the brilliancy of Roderick's promises would have counted for little. It would have been better perhaps had she appeared voluble and vulgar, for neat and noiseless and dismally ladylike as she sat there, keeping her grievance green with her soft-dropping tears, her forbearance had somehow an edge and her propriety a chill. He did his best to be thoroughly civil to her and to treat her with distinguished deference, but perhaps his exasperated nerves made him overshoot the mark and rendered his attentions too grimly formal. She met them at moments almost as if they had represented a longer stretch of duplicity. She seemed capable of believing that he was trying to make a fool of her; she would have thought him cruelly recreant if he had suddenly turned his back, and yet she gave him no visible credit for consistency. It often struck him that he had too abjectly forfeited his freedom. Was n't it grotesque, at his age, to be put into a corner for punishment?
But Mary Garland had helped him before and she helped him now—helped him not less than he had assured himself she would when he found him self drifting to Florence. Yet her help was rendered as unconsciously, he believed, and certainly as indirectly as before: he had made no apologies, and she had offered to remit no penalties. After that dreadful scene in Rome which had hurried their departure it was of course impossible that there should not be on the girl's part some frankness of allusion to Roderick's so pronounced and so public perversity. She had been present, the reader will remember, during only half this supreme demonstration of it, and Rowland had not seen her confronted with any absolute proof of the dependence of their friend's equilibrium on a crookedness the more or less in the tortuous progress of Christina Light. But he knew that she knew too much for her trust or her peace—even for the most indulgent view of her dignity: Roderick had told him, shortly after their settlement at the Villa Pandolfini, that he had had a "tremendous talk" with his cousin. Rowland asked no questions about it; he preferred not to have to take this knowledge into account. If the interview had but stirred the waters of bitterness he wished to ignore it for Mary's sake; and if it had sown the seeds of reconciliation he wished to close his eyes to it for his own—for the sake of that shy contingency, for ever dismissed and yet for ever present, which hovered in the background of his consciousness with a hanging head and yet an unshamed glance, and which had only, like a sentry in a narrow niche, to shift from one foot to the other, in order to become a fresh bribe to patience. Was the old understanding "off," or was Mary, in spite of humiliation, keeping it on?— was she in short consenting to that, to humiliation? Rowland looked at the question rather than asked it, since everything hung for him on her possible appetite for sacrifice, on his measure, so to call it, of what she would abjectly "take." Was she one of those who would be abject for some last scrap of the feast of their dream? It wronged her, as he liked to think of her, to believe either that she was or that she was n't, and, as if the matter were none of his business, he tried to turn away his head. There are women whose love is care-taking and patronising and who attach themselves to those persons of the other sex in whom the manly grain is soft and submissive. It did not in the least please him to hold her one of these, for he regarded such women as mere males in petticoats, and he was convinced that this young lady was intensely of her sex. That she was a very different person from Christina Light did n't at all prove that she was a less considerable one, and if the Princess Casamassima had gone up into a high place to publish her dismissal of a man who could n't strike out like a man, it had been hitherto presumable that she was not of a complexion to put up at any point with what might be called the Princess's leavings. It was Christina's constant practice to remind you of the complexity of her character, of the subtlety of her mind, of her troublous faculty of seeing everything in a dozen different lights. Mary had never pretended not to be simple; but Rowland had a theory that she had really a finer sense of human things and had made more, for observation and for temper, of her scant material of experience, than Christina had ever made of the stuff of her wild weaving. She did you the honours of her intelligence with a less accomplished grace, but was not that retreat as fragrant a maiden's bower? If in poor Christina's strangely mixed nature there was circle within circle and depth beneath depth, it was to be believed that the object of Rowland's preference, though she did not amuse herself with dropping stones into her soul and waiting to hear them fall, could none the less draw from the reservoir in question as brimming a bucket of energy. She had believed Roderick was "splendid" when she bade him farewell beneath their New England elms, and this synthetic term, to her young, strenuous, concentrated imagination, had meant many things. If it was to know itself chilled to the core, that would be because disenchantment had won the battle at each successive point and was now encamped on the field.
She showed even in her face and step, meanwhile, the tension of the watcher and the time-keeper: poor Roderick's muddled sum was a mystifying page to a girl who had supposed genius to be to one's spiritual economy what a large balance at the bank is to one's domestic. And yet our friend never tasted with her, as with Mrs. Hudson, of that acrid undercurrent — the impertinent implication that he had defrauded her of a promised security. Did this spring in her from a vague imagination of his own feeling, or even from a vague pity for it? The answer might have been hopeful, inasmuch as she had almost let him think before leaving Rome that she liked him well enough to forgive him an injury. It was partly, he fancied, that there were occasional lapses, deep and sweet, in her sense of what had happened. When on arriving at Florence she saw the place he had brought them to in their trouble, she had given him a look, and said a few words, that had seemed almost more than a remission of penalties. This happened in the court of the villa—the large grey quadrangle, overstretched, from edge to edge of the red-tiled roof, by the deep Italian sky. Mary had felt on the spot the sovereign charm of the place; it was reflected in her sincere eyes, and, immediately promising himself to work it, as the phrase was, for all it was worth, Rowland as promptly accepted the odium of not having done the villa justice. She fell in love on the spot with Florence, and used to look down wistfully at the towered city from their terraced garden. Roderick having now no pretext for not being her cicerone, Rowland was no longer at liberty, as he had been in Rome, to propose frequent excursions to her. Roderick's own invitations, however, were much interspaced, and their companion more than once ventured to introduce her to a gallery or a church. These expeditions were not so blissful, to Rowland's sense, as the rambles they had taken together in Rome, for the excellent reason that they made unmistakeably, a more embarrassed appeal to hers. She was trying what they could do for her—little indeed as she might betray it if they failed. She had at her command but half her attention, and often, when she had begun with looking closely at a picture, her silence, after an interval, made him turn and see that if her eyes were fixed, her thoughts were wandering and an image more vivid than any Raphael or Titian had superposed itself upon the canvas. She asked fewer questions than before and seemed to have lost heart for consulting guide-books and encyclopædias. From time to time, however, she uttered a deep full murmur of gratification. Florence in midsummer was perfectly void of travellers, and the dense little city gave forth its historic soul with that larger passion with which the nightingale sings when listeners have ceased to be visible. The churches were deliciously cool, but the grey streets stifling and the great dovetailed polygons of pavement hot to the lingering tread. Rowland, who suffered from deadness of air, would have found all this uncomfortable in solitude; but Florence had never charmed him so completely as during these midsummer strolls with his preoccupied companion. One evening they had arranged to go on the morrow to the Academy. Mary kept her appointment, but as soon as she appeared he saw that, though she was doing her best to look at her ease, she had had some evil hour. When he hinted that he feared she was ill and that if she preferred to give up their adventure he would submit with what grace he might, she replied, after hesitation, that she would adhere to their plan. "I 'm certainly not 'well,'" she presently added, "but it's a moral malady, and in such cases I regard your company as a tonic."
"But if I 'm to administer you remedies," he said, "you must tell me how your indisposition came on."
"I can tell you very little. It came on with Mrs. Hudson's doing me an injustice—for the first time in her life. And now I 'm already better."
This scant passage confirmed for Rowland an impression he had tried positively to cultivate. He was but too aware of the shocked, scared element in Mrs. Hudson's view of her son's "sentimental" infidelity, but he was surer than ever now that the young man himself, much more than his wronged bride-that-was-to-be, had been marked by it for her indulgence. She was fond enough, obviously, of her serviceable little cousin, but she had valued her primarily, during the last two years, as an assistant priestess at Roderick's shrine. Roderick had paid her the compliment of asking her to become, at his later convenience, his wife, but that poor Mary's own, and her present, convenience was sharply involved appeared not to have occurred to his mother. Her understanding of the matter was of course not rigidly formulated, but it was as if she felt that Rodderick and she together sufficed as victims, without their counting in their kinswoman. It would be Rowland and Rome and the artistic temperament that had victimised them, but it would be the people naturally enamoured of Roderick most of all. He had been wretchedly upset—that was enough; and Mary's duty was to join her patience and her prayers to those of a disinterested parent. He might feel the force of charms greater than Mary's; no doubt women trained in the subtle Roman arts were only too proud and too happy to make it easy for him; and it was very presuming in a plain second cousin to make a wonder of the inevitable. Mrs. Hudson kept clear of the reflexion that a mother may forgive where a mistress may not, and she seemed to feel it a further drain on her own depletion that Mary should n't be glad to act as a handmaid without wages. She was ready to hold her breath so that Roderick might howl, if need be, at his ease, and she was capable of seeing any one else gasp for air without a tremor of compassion. The girl had now perhaps given some intimation of her belief that if constancy is the flower of devotion reciprocity is the guarantee of constancy, and Mrs. Hudson had denounced this as arrogant doctrine. That she had found it hard to reason with her protectress, that something was expected of her which she could n't give, and that in short he had companionship in misfortune — these things relieved a little the pressure of which Rowland was conscious.
The party at Villa Pandolfini used to sit in the garden in the evenings, which Rowland almost always spent with them. Their entertainment was in the heavy scent of the air, in the dim, far starlight, in the crenellated tower of a neighbouring villa, which loomed vaguely above them through the warm darkness, and in such conversation as depressing reflections permitted. Roderick, habited always in white, stalked about like a restless ghost, silent for the most part, but making from time to time an observation in which, as it seemed to the elder man, the spirit of vain paradox and of loose pessimism too freely overflowed. With Rowland alone he talked more, and as well as ever, and even about the things that had formerly interested him; but, taking a vicious twist always, it ended for the most part in some abrupt profession of despair and disgust. When this current set in our friend straightway turned his back and stopped his ears, and Roderick now witnessed these movements with perfect indifference. When the latter was absent from the starlit circle in the garden, as often happened, they knew nothing of his whereabouts: Rowland supposed him to be in Florence but never learned what he did there. All this was not enlivening; yet with an even, muffled tread the days followed each other and brought the month of August to a close. One particular evening at this time was admirable; there was a perfect moon, looking so extraordinarily large that it made everything its light fell on turn pale and shrink; the heat was tempered by a soft west wind and the air laden with the breath of the early harvest. The hills, the vale of the Arno, the yellow river, the domes of Florence, were not so much lighted as obscured by the white glow. Rowland had found the two ladies alone at the villa, and he had dropped into a seat as discreetly as if they had been, as he said, at a "show." He felt hushed by the solemn splendour of the scene, but he risked the remark that, what ever life might yet have in store for either of them, this was a night they would never forget.
"It 's a night that makes a success," Mary Garland replied, "of one's having lived at all."
"'At all,' dear?" Mrs. Hudson echoed. "You surely have n't waited till this evening to feel that you've lived very comfortably!" And she surveyed the scene as in vague reprehension and as finding in the accumulated loveliness of the hour something shameless and unholy.
They were silent after this for some time, but at last Rowland addressed to the girl some tentative idle word. She made no reply, and he turned to look at her. She was sitting motionless, with her head pressed to Mrs. Hudson's shoulder, and the latter lady was gazing at him through the silvered dusk with an air that gave a sort of spectral solemnity to the sad weak meaning of her eyes. She might have been for the moment a little old malevolent fairy. Mary, Rowland perceived in an instant, was not absolutely motionless; some strange agitation had shaken her. She was softly crying, or about so to cry, and unable to trust herself to speak. Rowland left his place and wandered to another part of the garden, affected by this sudden access and asking himself what had determined it. Of women's weeping in general he had a developed dread, but this particular appearance moved him to odd rejoicing. When he returned to his place Mary had raised her head and composed her aspect. She came away from Mrs. Hudson, and they stood for a short time together, leaning against the parapet.
"It seems to you very strange, I suppose," Rowland presently said, "that there should have to be anxiety and pain in such a world as this."
"I used to think," she answered, "that if any trouble came to me I should bear it like a stoic. But that was at home, where things don't speak to us of enjoyment as they do here. Here it 's such a mixture; one does n't know what to choose, what to believe. Beauty stands there—beauty such as this night and this place and all this sad strange summer have been so full of—and it penetrates to one's soul and lodges there and keeps saying that man was n't made, as we think at home, to struggle so much and miss so much, but to ask of life as a matter of course some beauty and some charm. This place has destroyed any scrap of consistency that I ever possessed, but even if I must myself say something sinful I love it!"
"If it 's sinful, I absolve you—in so far as I have power. We should n't be able to enjoy, I suppose, unless we could suffer, and in anything that 's worthy of the name of experience—that experience which is the real taste of life, is n't it?—the mixture is of the finest and subtlest. Just now and here it 's certainly wonderful enough. Yet we must take things as much as possible in turn."
His words had a singular aptness, for he had hardly uttered them when Roderick came out from the house, not, as appeared, on pleasure bent. He stood for a moment taking in the effulgence.
"It 's a very beautiful night, my son," said his mother, going to him timidly and touching his arm. He passed his hand through his hair and let it stay there, clasping his thick locks. "Beautiful?" he cried. "Of course it's beautiful! Everything's beautiful; everything 's insolent, defiant, atrocious with beauty. Nothing 's ugly but me—me and my poor dead brain!"
"Oh, my dearest son," pleaded the poor lady; "don't you feel any better?"
Roderick made no immediate answer, but at last he spoke in a different voice. "I came expressly to tell you that you need n't trouble yourselves any longer to wait for something to turn up. Nothing will turn up. It 's all over. I said when I came here I would give it a chance. I 've given it a chance. Have n't I, eh? Have n't I, Rowland? It 's no use; our little experiment 's a failure. Do with me now what you please. I recommend you to set me up there at the end of the garden and shoot me dead."
"I feel strongly inclined," said Rowland gravely, "to go and get my revolver."
"Oh, mercy on us, what language!" cried Mrs. Hudson.
"Why not?" Roderick went on. "This would be a lovely night for it, and I should be a lucky fellow to be buried in this garden. But bury me alive if you prefer. Take me back to Northampton."
"Roderick, will you really come?" his mother quavered.
"Why should n't I go? I might as well be there as anywhere—reverting to idiocy and living on alms. I can do nothing with all this; perhaps I should really like again the opposite pole. If I 'm to vegetate for the rest of my days I can do it there better than here."
"Oh, come home, come home," Mrs. Hudson pleaded, "and we shall all be safe and quiet and happy. My dearest son, come home with your poor little mother!"
"Let us go then—quickly!"
She flung herself on his neck for gratitude. "We 'll go to-morrow! The Lord 's very good to me!"
Mary Garland said nothing to this; but she looked at Rowland, and her eyes struck him as containing a deep, an alarmed appeal. He observed it with exultation, but even without it he would have broken into an eager protest.
"Are you serious, Roderick?" he demanded.
"Serious? Of course not! How can a man with a crack in his brain be serious, how can a damned fool reason? But I 'm not jesting either; I can no more crack jokes than utter oracles!"
"Are you willing to go home?"
"Willing? God forbid! I 'm simply amenable to force; if my mother chooses to take me I won't resist. I can't! I 've come to that!"
"Let me resist then," said Rowland. "Go home as you 're now acting and talking? I can't stand by and see it."
It may have been true that Roderick had lost his sense of humour, but he scratched his head with a gesture of comic effect. "You are a funny man. I should think I would disgust you horribly."
"Stay another year," Rowland simply said.
"Doing nothing?"
"You shall do more than you 've bargained for yet. I 'm responsible for your doing it."
"To whom are you responsible?"
Rowland, before replying, glanced at Mary Garland, and his glance made her speak quickly. "Not to me!"
"I 'm responsible to myself," he substituted.
"Ah, but my poor dear fellow!" his friend inconclusively demurred.
"Oh, Mr. Mallet, aren't you satisfied?" asked Mrs. Hudson in the tone in which Niobe may have addressed the avenging archers after she had seen her eldest-born fall. "It 's out of all nature keeping him here. When our poor hearts are broken, surely our own dear native land is the place for us. Do leave us to ourselves, sir!"
This just failed of being a dismissal in form, and Rowland made a note of it. Roderick was silent for some moments; then suddenly he covered his face with his two hands. "Take me, at least, out of this terrible Italy," he cried, "where everything mocks and reproaches and torments and eludes me! Take me out of this land of impossible beauty and put me in the midst of ugliness. Set me down where nature is coarse and flat and men and manners are vulgar. There must be something ugly enough in Germany. Pack me off, for goodness' sake, there!"
Rowland answered that if he wished to leave Italy the thing might be arranged; he would think it over and submit a proposal on the morrow. He suggested to Mrs. Hudson in consequence that she should spend the autumn in Switzerland, where she would find a fine tonic climate, plenty of fresh milk and several very inexpensive pensions. Switzerland of course was not reputed ugly, but one could n't have everything!
Mrs. Hudson neither thanked him nor assented, but she wept and packed her trunks. Rowland had a theory, after the scene which led to these preparations, that Mary was weary of waiting for Roderick to come to his senses, that the faith which had borne him company on the tortuous march he was leading it had begun to falter and droop. This theory was not vitiated by a word falling from her on the day before that on which Mrs. Hudson had settled to leave Florence.
"Cousin Sarah, the other evening," she said, "asked you to leave us to ourselves. I think she hardly knew what she was saying, and I hope you 've not taken offence."
"By no means; but I honestly believe that my leaving you would contribute greatly to Mrs. Hudson's comfort. I can be your hidden providence, you know; I can watch you at a distance and come upon the scene at critical moments."
The girl looked at everything but himself, then spoke with sudden earnestness, "I particularly want you to come with us!"
It need hardly be added that after this Rowland went with them.