Roderick Hudson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 24
XXIV
One day shortly after this, as the two young men sat at the inn door watching the sunset, which on that evening was very rich and clear, Rowland made an attempt to sound his companion's actual sentiment touching Christina Light. "I wonder where she is," he permitted himself to begin, "and what sort of a life she 's leading her Prince."
Roderick at first made no response. He was watching a figure on the summit of some distant rocks opposite. The figure was apparently descending into the valley, and in relief against the crimson screen of the western sky it looked gigantic. "Christina Light?" he at last repeated, as if rousing himself from a reverie. "Where she is? It's 'rum' how little I care!"
"Have you completely got over caring?"
To this he made no direct reply; he sat brooding a while. "She 's a fearful fraud!" he presently exclaimed.
"She 's certainly not a mere child of nature. But she had elements of interest."
"She did n't at all come up to my original idea of her," Roderick pursued.
"In what manner then did she fall away from it?"
"Oh, don't ask me or remind me!" Roderick cried. "What 's the use of going into it now? It was only three months ago, but it seems like ten years." His friend said nothing more, and after a while he went on of his own accord. "I believed there was a future in it all! She gave me pleasure—extraordinary pleasure; and when an artist, such a one as I was, receives extraordinary pleasure, you know—!" And he paused again. "You never saw her as I did, you never heard her in her great moments. But there 's no help in talking about that! At first she would n't regard me seriously; she only chaffed me and made light of me and kept me off. Then at last I forced her to admit I was a great man. She told me she believed that, and it gave me more extraordinary pleasure than anything else. A great man was what she was looking for, and we agreed to find our happiness for life in each other. To please me she promised not to marry till I should say I was prepared—so far as I could be prepared—to see her. I was of course not in a marrying way myself, but it was a stiff dose—which I kept begging off from—to have to think of another man's possessing her. To spare my sensibilities she promised to turn off her Prince, and the idea of her doing so made me as happy as to see some blest idea shaping itself in the block. You 've seen how she kept her promise. When I learned it, it was as if my block had suddenly split and turned rotten. She died for me, like that!" And he snapped his fingers. "Was it wounded vanity, disappointed desire, betrayed confidence? I 'm sure I don't know. I make the beastly mistakes, and you find the proper names for them."
Rowland, after an instant, could but temporise. "The poor girl did the best she could."
"That that was her best then was exactly the grand sell! I 've hardly thought of her these two months, but you see, and I 'm in fact myself surprised to find, how little I 've forgiven her."
"Well, you may probably take it that you 're avenged. I can't think of her as very happy."
"Ah, I can't pity her!" said Roderick. After which he relapsed into silence, and the two sat watching the colossal figure as it made its way downward along the jagged silhouette of the rocks. "Who 's this mighty man," he finally demanded, "and what 's he coming down on us for? We 're small people here, and we can't keep company with giants."
"Wait till we meet him on our own level," said Rowland, "and perhaps he 'll not overtop us."
"He's like me," Roderick rejoined; "he'll have passed for ten minutes for bigger than he is." At this moment the figure sank beneath the horizon and became invisible in the uncertain light. Suddenly he went on: "I should like to see her once more — simply to look at her."
"I wouldn't advise it," his companion observed.
"It was the wonderful nature of her beauty that did it!" Roderick kept on. "It was all her beauty — so fitful, so alive, so subject to life, yet so always there and so interesting and so splendid. In comparison the rest was nothing. What befooled me was to think of it as my own property and possession — somehow bought and paid for. I had mastered it and made it mine; no one else had studied it as I had, no one else so understood it. What does that stick of a Casamassima know about it at this hour? There were things I could say of her, things I could say to her—because I know, or at least did know—that made her more beautiful, put her into possession of more of her value. Therefore I should like to see it just once more; it 's the only thing in the world of which I can say so."
"I would n't advise it," Rowland felt himself too meagrely repeat.
"That's right, my dear fellow," his friend returned. "Don't advise! That 's no use now."
The dusk meanwhile had thickened, and they had not perceived a figure approaching them across the open space in front of the house. Suddenly it stepped into the circle of light projected from the door and windows and they beheld little Sam Singleton stopping to stare at them. He was the giant they had seen so strikingly presented. When this was made apparent Roderick was seized with high amusement; it was the first time he had laughed for ever so many weeks. Singleton, who carried a knapsack and walking-staff, received from Rowland the friendliest welcome. He was still the same almost irritating little image of happy diligence, and if in the way of luggage his knapsack contained nothing but a comb and a second shirt, he extracted from it a dozen admirable sketches. He had been trudging over half Switzerland and making everywhere the most vivid pictorial notes. They were mostly in a box at Interlaken, and in gratitude for Rowland's appreciation he presently telegraphed for his box, which, according to the excellent Swiss method, was punctually delivered by post. The nights were cold, and our friends, with three or four other chance sojourners, sat indoors, over a fire of great logs. Even with Roderick hovering moodily apart they made a sympathetic little circle, and they turned over Singleton's drawings while he perched in the chimney-corner, blushing and explaining, with his feet on the rounds of his chair. He had been pedestrianising for six weeks, and he was glad to rest a while at Engelthal. It was no empty interval, however, for he sallied forth every morning, his utensils on his back, in search of material for new studies. Roderick's ironic sense of him, after the first evening, had spent itself, and he might have been listening, as under a sombre spell, to the hum of some prosperous workshop from which he had been discharged for incompetence. Singleton, who was not in the secret of his personal misfortunes, still treated him, with romantic reverence, as the rising star of American art. Roderick had said to Rowland at first that their friend reminded him of some curious insect with a remarkable mechanical instinct in its antennae; but as the days went by it was apparent that the modest landscapist's successful method grew to have an oppressive meaning for him. It pointed a moral, and Roderick used to sit and con the moral as he saw it figured in the little painter's bent back, on the hot hillsides, protruding from beneath a white umbrella. One day he wandered up a long slope and overtook him as he sat at work; Singleton related the incident afterwards to Rowland, who, since giving him in Rome a hint of the other's aberrations, had strictly kept his own counsel.
"Are you always just like this?" Roderick had asked in almost sepulchral accents.
"Like this?" Singleton, startled, had repeated with a guilty blink.
"You remind me of a watch that never runs down. If one listens hard one hears you always at it. Tic-tic-tic, tic-tic-tic."
"Oh, I see," Singleton had returned while he beamed ingenuously. "I 'm very regular."
"You 're very regular, yes. And I suppose you find it very pleasant to be very regular?"
Singleton had hereupon turned and smiled more brightly, sucking the water from his camel's-hair brush. Then with a quickened sense of his indebtedness to a Providence that had endowed him with intrinsic facilities: "Oh, most delightful!" he had exclaimed.
Roderick had stood looking at him a moment. "Damnation!" was the single word that then had fallen from him; with which he had turned his back.
Later in the week our two friends took together one of their longest rambles. They had walked before in a dozen different directions, but had not yet crossed a charming little wooded pass which shut in their valley on one side and descended into the vale of Engelberg. In coming from Lucerne they had approached their inn by this path, and then, feeling that they knew it, had neglected it for more untrodden ways. But at last the list of these was exhausted, and Rowland proposed the walk to Engelberg as a novelty. The place is half bleak and half pastoral; a huge white monastery rises abruptly from the green floor of the valley and contributes to the somewhat spare concert of blue-green and blue-grey the diversion of a sharp discord. Hard by is a group of châlets and inns, with the usual appurtenances of a prosperous Swiss resort — lean brown guides in baggy homespun loafing under carved wooden galleries, stacks of alpen stocks in every doorway, sun-scorched Englishmen without shirt-collars. The companions sat a while at the door of an inn and discussed a pint of wine, and then Roderick, whose light, elegant legs never gave way, whatever else in him did, announced his intention of climbing to a certain rocky pinnacle which overhung the valley and, according to the testimony of one of the guides, commanded a view of the Lake of Lucerne. To go and come back was only a matter of an hour, but Rowland, with the prospect of his homeward march before him, confessed to a preference for lounging on his bench or, at most, strolling a trifle further and paying a visit to the monastery. Roderick went off alone, and the elder man took after a little the direction of the monasterial church. It was remarkable, like most of the churches of Catholic Switzerland, for a coarse floridity, but one was free to view this, if one would, as brave romantic character. Rowland lingered a quarter of an hour under the influence of that suggestion. While he was near the high altar another visitor or two appeared to have come in at the west door, but he gave no heed and was presently engaged in deciphering a curious old German epitaph on one of the mural tablets. At last he turned away, wondering if its syntax or its theology were the more uncomfortable, and, to his infinite surprise, found himself confronted with Prince and Princess Casamassima.
The surprise on Christina's part, for an instant, was equal, and its first effect might have been to make her seek, for the time, the refuge of assumed unconsciousness. The Prince, however, saluted gravely, and then Christina, in silence, put out her hand. Rowland immediately asked if they were staying at Engelberg, but Christina only looked at him hard, and still without speaking. The Prince answered his questions and related that they had been making a month's tour in Switzerland, that at Lucerne his wife had been somewhat obstinately indisposed, and that the physician had recommended a week's trial of the tonic air and goat's milk of Engelberg. The scenery, said the Prince, was stupendous, but the life was terribly sad—and they had three days more! It was a blessing, he urbanely added, to see a good Roman face.
Christina's odd attitude, her voluntary silence and her inscrutable gaze, seemed to Rowland at first to promise, a little alarmingly, or even boringly, some new "line"; but he then perceived that she was really moved by the sight of him and was afraid of betraying herself. "Do let us leave this Swiss hideousness," she said; "the whole place seems horribly to 'jodel' at us!" They passed slowly to the door, and when they stood outside, in the sunny coolness of the valley, she turned more frankly to her old acquaintance. "It is a blessing, you know—such a meeting. I 'm too delighted to see you." She glanced about her and observed against the wall of the church a large stone seat. She looked at her companion a moment, and he smiled more intensely, Rowland thought, than the occasion demanded. "I should like to sit here a little and speak to this good friend — alone."
"At your pleasure, cara mia," said the Prince.
The tone of each was measured, to Rowland's ear; but that of Christina was not imperceptibly dry and that of her husband irreproachably urbane. Rowland remembered how the Cavaliere had told him that Mrs. Light's candidate had, in his way, the inner as well as the outer marks of the grand seigneur, and our friend wondered how he relished a certain curtness. He was, comparatively speaking, an Italian of the undemonstrative type, but Rowland nevertheless divined that, like other potentates, great and small, before him, he had had to look concessions in the face. "Shall I come back?" he imperturbably asked.
"In half an hour," said Christina.
In the clear outer light Rowland's first impression of her was that her beauty had received some strange accession, affecting him after the manner of a musical composition better "given," to his sense, than ever before. And yet in three months she could hardly have changed; the change was in Rowland's own vision of her, in which that last interview on the eve of her marriage had sown the seeds of a new appreciation.
"How came you to be in this queer place?" she asked. "Are you making a stay?"
"I 'm staying at Engelthal, some ten miles away. I walked over."
"Then you 're alone?"
"I 'm with Roderick Hudson."
"Is he here with you now?"
"He went half an hour ago to climb a rock for a view."
"And his mother and—and the promessa—where are they?"
"They also are at Engelthal."
She had a pause. "What then are you all doing there?"
"What are you doing here?" Rowland returned.
"Counting the minutes till my week's over. I hate mountains; they always strike me as great rough lumps and chunks of Nature—hopeless confessions of her stupidity. I 'm sure Miss Garland likes them."
"She 's very fond of them, I believe."
"You believe—don't you know? But I think I 've given up trying to imitate Miss Garland," said Christina.
"You surely need imitate no one."
"Don't say that," she said gravely. "So you 've walked ten miles this morning? And you 're to walk back again?"
"Back again to dinner."
"And Mr. Hudson too?"
"Mr. Hudson especially. He's a great walker."
"You men are happy!" Christina cried. "I believe I should enjoy the mountains if I could do such things. It 's sitting still and having them scowl down at you. The Prince never walks. He only goes on a mule. He was carried up the Faulhorn in a palanquin."
"In a palanquin?"
"In one of those machines—a chaise-à-porteurs —like a woman." And then when Rowland had received this information in silence, since it was equally unbecoming to be either amused or shocked: "Is Mr. Hudson to join you again? Will he come to this spot?"
"I shall soon begin to expect him."
"What shall you do when you leave Switzerland?" she continued. "Shall you go back to Rome?"
"I rather doubt it. My plans are very uncertain."
"They depend upon Mr. Hudson, eh?"
"In a great measure."
"I want you to tell me about him. Is he still in that perverse state of mind that distressed you so much?"
Rowland looked at her mistrustfully, making no answer. He was indisposed, instinctively, to tell her Roderick was out of sorts; it was so possible she might offer to try to bring him round. She immediately perceived his hesitation.
"I see no reason why we should n't be frank," she said. "I should think we were excellently placed for that sort of thing. You remember that formerly I cared very little what I said, don't you? Well, I care absolutely not at all now. I say what I please, I do what I please! How did Mr. Hudson receive the news of my marriage?"
"Very badly," said Rowland.
"With rage and reproaches?" And as he hesitated again: "With silent contempt?"
"I can tell you but little. He spoke to me on the subject, but I stopped him. I told him it was none of his business nor of mine."
"That was an excellent answer," Christina ob served. "Yet it was a little your business, after those sublime protestations I treated you to. I was really very fine that morning, eh?"
"You do yourself injustice," said Rowland. "I should be at liberty now to believe you were insincere."
"What does it matter now whether I was insincere or not? I can't conceive of anything mattering less. I was very fine—is n't it true?"
"You know what I think of you," he replied. And for fear of being forced to betray his suspicion of the influence brought to bear upon her crisis he took refuge in a commonplace. "I hope your mother 's well."
"My mother 's in the enjoyment of superb health, and may be seen every evening in the Casino at the Baths of Lucca confiding to every new-comer that she has married her daughter—tremendously."
Rowland was anxious for news of Mrs. Light's companion, and the natural course was frankly to inquire about him. "And the dear Cavaliere 's well?"
Christina hesitated, but she betrayed no other embarrassment. "The dear Cavaliere has retired to his native city of Ancona, upon a pension, for the rest of his natural life. Poverino!"
"I've a great regard for him," said Rowland gravely, at the same time that he privately wondered if Poverino's pension were paid by Prince Casamassima for services rendered in connexion with his marriage. "And what do you do," he continued, "on leaving this place?"
"We go to Italy—we go to Naples." She rose and stood silent some minutes, looking down the valley. The figure of Prince Casamassima appeared in the distance, balancing his white umbrella. As her eyes took it in Rowland could feel he saw something deeper in the strange expression that had lurked in her face while he talked to her. Was it pure imagination, or did they grow harder with this view, and was the bitterness so suggested the outward mark of her sacrificed ideal? When she presently afterwards turned them on himself they showed to Rowland as almost tragic. There was a new dread in his sympathy; he wished to give her a proof of friendship, and yet it seemed to him that she had now fixed her face in a direction where friendship was powerless to interpose. She half read his feelings apparently, and she had a beautiful sad smile. "I hope we may never meet again!" she said. And as Rowland appeared to protest: "You 've seen me at my best. I wish to tell you solemnly, I was sincere. I know the whole look of it 's against me," she went on quickly. "There 's a great deal I can't tell you. Perhaps you 've guessed it; I care very little. You know at any rate I did my best. It wouldn't serve; I was beaten and broken; they were stronger than I. Now it 's another affair!"
"It seems to me you 've a large opportunity for happiness yet," he vaguely remarked, seeming foolish even to himself.
"Happiness? I mean to cultivate delight; I mean to go in for passing my time. You remember I told you that I was in part the world's and the devil's. Now they 've taken me all. It was their choice; may they never repent!"
"I shall hear of you," said Rowland.
"You 'll hear of me. And whatever you do hear, remember this: I was sincere!"
Prince Casamassima had approached, and Rowland looked at him with a good deal of simple compassion as a part of that "world" against which Christina had launched her mysterious menace. It was obvious that he was what is called a well-meaning person, and that he could not in the nature of things be a positively bad husband; but his distinguished inoffensiveness only deepened the infelicity of Christina's situation by depriving her defiant attitude of the sanction of relative justice. So long as she had been free to choose she had esteemed him; but from the moment she was forced to marry him she had detested him. Rowland read in the young man's elastic Italian mask a profound consciousness of all this; and as he found there also a record of other curious things — of pride, of temper, of bigotry, of an immense heritage of more or less aggressive traditions he reflected that the matrimonial conjunction of his two companions might be sufficiently prolific in incident.
"You're going to Naples?" he inquired byway of conversation.
"We're going to Paris," Christina interposed slowly and softly. "We 're going to London. We 're going to Vienna. We 're going to St. Petersburg. We may even go to China."
The Prince dropped his eyes and fretted the earth with the point of his umbrella. While he engaged Rowland's attention Christina turned away, and when our friend observed her again a fresh impression was reflected in her face. She had noticed something concealed from his own sight by the angle of the church wall. In a moment Roderick stepped upon the scene.
He stopped short, astonished; his face and figure were jaded, his garments dusty. He looked at Christina from head to foot, and then, slowly, his cheek flushed and his eyes darkened. Christina returned this unadorned recognition, and for some moments there was a singular silence. "You don't look well!" she said at last.
Roderick answered nothing; he only kept his attention on her as if she had been some striking object in the picture. "I don't see that you 're less wonderful, you know," he presently remarked.
She turned away with a smile and stood a while gazing down the valley; Roderick then simply stared at her husband. Christina put out her hand to Rowland. "Farewell," she said. "If you 're near me in future don't try to see me." And after a pause, in a lower tone: "I was sincere!" She addressed herself again to Roderick and asked him some commonplace about his walk; but his answer, barely articulate, was all in his eyes. Rowland at first had expected an outbreak of reproach, but it was evident that the danger was every moment diminishing. He was forgetting everything but her beauty, and as she stood there and let him feast upon it Rowland was sure she acted with intention. "I won't say good-bye to you," she rang out clear; "we shall meet again!" And she moved gravely away. The Prince took courteous leave of Rowland; upon Roderick he bestowed a bow of exaggerated civility. The latter appeared not to notice; he was watching Christina as she passed over the grass. His eyes followed her until she reached the door of her inn. Here she stopped and looked back at him.