Roderick Hudson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 26
XXVI
Rowland passed the remainder of the day as best he could. He could scarce have said whether he were exalted or depressed; he felt, uneasily, placed in the wrong in spite of his excellent cause. Roderick made no appearance at luncheon; but of this, with his passion for mooning away the hours on far-off mountain-sides, he had almost made a habit. Mrs. Hudson's face, at the noonday repast, showed how his sharp demand for money had unsealed the fountains of her distress. Little Singleton consumed an enor mous and well-earned meal. Mary Garland, Rowland observed, had not contributed her scanty assistance to her kinsman's pursuit of the Princess Casamassima without an effort that had ploughed deep. She had clearly, in fact, been ravaged by it, and she looked so ill and remained so silent that, the repast over, Rowland expressed to her the fear that she was seriously unwell. They had come out upon the grass in front of the inn.
"I've a bad headache — that's all." And then suddenly, looking about at the menacing sky and motionless air, "It's this horrible day!" she said.
He that afternoon tried to write a letter to his cousin Cecilia, but his head and his heart were alike heavy, and he traced upon the paper but a single line. "I believe there 's such a thing as being too reasonable. Yet when once the habit 's formed what is one to do?" He had occasion to use his keys, and he felt for them in his pockets; they were missing, and he remembered that he had left them lying on the hill-top where he had had his talk with Roderick. He went forth in search of them and found them where he had thrown them. He flung himself down in the same place again; he felt it impossible to walk. He was conscious that his mood had greatly changed since the morning; his extraordinary acute sense of his rights had been replaced by the familiar chronic sense of his duties. His duties, however, now seemed only to defy him; he turned over and buried his face in his arms. He lay so a long time, thinking of many things; the sum of them all was that Roderick had beaten him. At last he was startled by an extraordinary sound, which defined itself the next instant as a portentous growl of thunder. He got up and saw that the whole face of the sky had altered. The clouds that had hung motionless all day were moving from their stations and getting into position for a battle. The wind was rising, the turbid vapours growing dark and thick. It was a striking spectacle, but Rowland judged best to observe it briefly, as a storm was evidently imminent. He took the path to the inn and found Singleton still at his post, profiting by the last of the rapidly-failing light to finish his study and yet at the same time making rapid notes of the actual condition of the clouds.
"We 're going to have the biggest show the Alps can give," the little painter gleefully cried. "I should like awfully to do it."
Rowland adjured him to pack up his tools and decamp, and then repaired to the house. The air by this time had become densely dark, and the thunder was incessant and deafening; in the midst of it the lightning flashed and vanished as the treble shrills upon the bass. The innkeeper and his servants, wondering and blinking, pale in the frequent flare, had pressed to the doorway, and, as Rowland approached, the group divided to let some one pass from within. Mrs. Hudson, her face white and convulsed, waving her arms, came out as if, on some alarm of a flood, she were walking in the water breast-high.
"My boy, my boy, where 's my boy?" she cried. "Mr. Mallet, why are you here without him? Bring him straight home to me!"
"Has no one seen Mr. Hudson?" Rowland asked of the others. "Has he not returned?"
Each one shook his head and looked grave, and Rowland represented to the poor lady, and by the same urgency to himself, that Roderick would of course have sought asylum in some secure châlet.
"Go and find him, go and find him!" she none the less imperiously quavered. "Don't stand there and talk, or my reason will give way!" It was now as dark as evening, and Rowland could just distinguish the figure of Singleton scampering home with his box and easel. "And where 's Mary?" Mrs. Hudson went on; "what in mercy's name has become of her? Mr. Mallet, why did you ever bring us here?"
There came a huge white glare, under which, for thirty seconds, all nature stood still and Rowland, making out a slight figure on the top of an eminence near the house, recognised the younger woman, urged forth by her anxiety and almost insanely exposed. He sprang out to join her, but in a moment he met her coming back. He seized her hand and hurried her to the house, where, as soon as she stepped into the covered gallery, Mrs. Hudson fell upon her with frantic lamentations.
"Did you see anything — nothing? Tell Mr. Mallet he must go and find him, with some men, some lights, some wraps, some wine. Go, go, go, sir! In mercy, go!"
Rowland, thus assaulted by the terrors of others, threw himself back with force on his own argument. He had offered it in all sincerity; nothing was more probable than that Roderick had found shelter in a herdsman's cabin. These were numerous on the neighbouring mountains, and the storm had given fair warning of its approach. Mary stood there at first without a word, only looking hard at him. He expected she would try to soothe her cousin. "Could you find him?" she suddenly asked. "Would it be of use?"
The question struck him as a flash intenser than when the jaws of the night opened to the whiteness of a thousand teeth. It shattered his dream that he weighed in the scale. But before he could answer the tempest was in possession and the rain, about them, like the sound of the deeps about a ship's sides. Every one fell back into the house. There had been no time to light lamps, and in the little uncarpeted parlour, in the unnatural darkness, Rowland felt Mary's hand on his arm. He imputed for a moment a meaning to it, some attenuation of her vain challenge, an assurance that she accepted, for Roderick, whatever he thought probable. But, nevertheless, thought Rowland, the cry had come, her passion had spoken; her first impulse had been to sacrifice him. He had been uncertain before; here at least was the comfort of certainty.
It must be confessed, however, that the certainty did little to enliven the gloom of that formidable evening. There was a noisy crowd everywhere — noisy even beyond the uproar without; lodgers and servants, chattering, shuffling, bustling, vociferating; breaking in, as he felt, upon the dignity of the storm. It was some time, in the confusion, before a lamp was lighted, and the first thing it showed him when swung from the ceiling was the closed eyes of Mrs. Hudson, carried away in a faint by two stout maid-servants and with Mary Garland forcing a passage. He rendered what help he could, but when they had laid their companion on her bed Mary motioned him away.
"I think you make her worse," was all the girl's comment.
He could but betake himself then to his own room. The partitions in Swiss mountain-inns are thin, and he heard Mrs. Hudson's wail three doors away. The rage of the weather, for all its violence, was slow to abate; it held its own for two lone hours. With the drop of the thunder the rush of water continued, and night had come on impenetrably black. Rowland thought of Mary Garland's question in the porch, but he thought still more that, although the fetid interior of a high-nestling châlet may offer a convenient refuge from an Alpine tempest, there was no possible music in the universe so sweet as the sound of Roderick's voice. At midnight, from his window, through the ebb of the tide, he made out a star and immediately went below and out into the gallery. The rain had ceased, the cloud-masses showed gaps and the gaps cold points of light. In a few minutes he heard a step behind him and, turning, saw Mary Garland. He asked about Mrs. Hudson and learned that she was sleeping, exhausted by her long tension. Mary's eyes kept sounding the night, but she said nothing to cast doubt on the idea of Roderick's having found a refuge. Rowland noticed it and knew this assurance then for a matter as to which he would be held responsible. There was something she further wished to learn, and a question presently revealed it. "What made him start on a long walk so suddenly?" she asked. "I saw him at eleven o'clock, and then he meant to go to Engelberg and sleep."
"On his way to Interlaken!" Rowland said.
"Yes," she answered under cover of the darkness.
"We had some talk," said Rowland, "and he seemed, for the day, to have given up Interlaken."
"Did you dissuade him?"
"Not exactly. We discussed another question, which for the time appeared to have superseded his plan."
Mary was silent; after which, "May I ask whether your discussion was violent?" she went on.
"I 'm afraid it was easy for neither of us."
"And Roderick left you in — in irritation?"
"I offered him my company on his walk, but he would n't have me."
Mary paced to the end of the gallery and came back. "If he had gone to Engelberg he would have reached the hotel before the storm began."
Rowland felt himself suddenly break out. "Oh, if you like, he can start for Interlaken as soon as he comes back!"
But it was as if she were unconscious of his remark. "Will he come back early?" she pursued.
"We may suppose so."
"He 'll know how anxious we are, and he 'll start with the first light."
He was on the point of declaring that Roderick's readiness to throw himself into the feelings of others made this extremely probable; but he checked him self and said simply: "I expect him at sunrise."
She gave again, into the darkness round her, a long, strained stare and then went into the house. Rowland, it must be averred, in spite of his determination not to worry, found no sleep that night. When the early dawn began to tremble in the east he came forth again into the open air. The storm had completely cleared it, and the day gave promise of cloudless splendour. He watched the first sun-shafts slowly reach higher and remembered that if Roderick should not be back to breakfast there were two points to be made. One was the heaviness of the soil on the mountain-sides, saturated with the rain, which would make him walk slowly; the other was the fact that, speaking without irony, he was not remarkable for his divination of the convenience of others. Breakfast at the inn was early, and Roderick had not then reappeared. Rowland admitted with this that he was worrying. Neither Mrs. Hudson nor her companion had left their apartment; Rowland had a mental vision of the two women sitting there face to face and listening; he had no desire to see them in fact. There were a couple of men who hung about the inn as guides for going up the Titlis; Rowland sent each of them forth in a different direction to ask for news wherever news might be gathered. Then he called Sam Singleton, whose peregrinations had made him a prime rambler and whose zeal and sympathy were now unbounded, and the two started together to ascertain what they might. By the time they had lost sight of the inn they were obliged to confess that decidedly their friend had had time to come back.
Ours, poor man, wandered about for several hours, but found only the sunny stillness of the mountain sides. Before long he had parted company with Singleton, who, to his suggestion that separation would extend their search, assented with fixed eyes that reflected his own dire obsession. The day was magnificent, the sun everywhere; the storm had lashed the lower slopes into a deeper flush of autumnal colour and the snow-peaks reared themselves above the near horizon in shining blocks and sharp incisions. He made his way to several far-perched huts, but most of them were empty and some of them closed. He thumped at their low foul doors with nervous savage anger; he challenged the stupid silence to speak to him of his friend. Some of these places had evidently not been open for months. The silence everywhere was horrible; it mocked at his impatience, it was charged with cruelty and danger. In the midst of it, at the door of one of the cabins, quite alone, sat a hideous crétin who grinned at him over a vast goitre when, hardly knowing what he did, he put vain questions. This creature's family was scattered on the mountain; he could give no help toward finding them. Rowland climbed into the awkward places Roderick loved; he looked down into ugly chasms from narrow steep-dropping ledges; and he was to consider afterwards, uneasily, how little he had heeded his foothold. But the sun, as I have said, was everywhere; it illumined the depths and heights in presence of which, not knowing where to turn next, he halted and lingered, and showed him nothing but the stony Alpine void — nothing so human even as a catastrophe or a trace. At noon he paused in his quest and sat down on a stone; the conviction pressed him hard that the worst now conceivable was true. He stopped looking; he was afraid to go on. He sat there for an hour, sick to his innermost soul. Without his knowing why, several things, chiefly trivial, that had happened during the last two years and that he had quite forgotten, lived again before him and breathed their mortal chill into his face. He was roused at last by the sound of a stone dislodged near by, which rattled down the mountain. In a moment, on a rough slope opposite, he beheld a figure cautiously descending — a figure which was not Roderick's. It was Singleton's, who had seen him and begun to beckon.
"Come down — come down!" cried this companion, steadily making his own way down. Row land saw that as he moved, and even as he selected his foothold and watched his steps, he was looking at something at the bottom of the cliff. This was a great rugged wall that sloped backward from the perpendicular, and the descent, though difficult, was with care sufficiently practicable.
"What do you see?" Rowland managed to call.
Singleton stopped, looked across at him and seemed to hesitate; then, "Come down — come down!" he simply repeated.
Rowland's course was also precipitous, and he attacked it so dizzily that he marvelled, later on, he had not broken his neck. It was a ten minutes' headlong scramble. Half-way down he saw something that for a minute did make him reel; he saw what Singleton had seen. In the gorge below a vague white mass lay tumbled upon the stones. He let himself go, blindly, fiercely, to where Singleton, reaching the rocky bottom of the ravine first, had bounded forward and fallen upon his knees. Rowland overtook him, and his own legs gave way for horror. The thing that yesterday was his friend lay before him as the chance of the last breath had left it, and out of it Roderick's face stared open-eyed at the sky.
He had fallen from a great height, but he was singularly little disfigured. The rain had spent its torrents upon him, and his clothes and hair were as wet as if the billows of the ocean had flung him upon the strand. An attempt to move him would attest some fatal fracture, some horrible physical dishonour, but what Rowland saw on first looking at him was only a noble expression of life. The eyes were the eyes of death, but in a short time, when he had closed them, the whole face seemed to revive. The rain had washed away all blood; it was as if violence, having wrought her ravage, had stolen away in shame. Roderick's face might have shamed her; it was indescribably, and all so innocently, fair.
Then Singleton spoke as for the time of his life. "He was the most beautiful of men!"
They looked up through their dismay at the cliff from which he had unmistakeably fallen and which lifted its blank and stony face above him, with no care now but to drink the sunshine on which his eyes were closed; and Rowland had thus a wild outbreak of pity and anguish. His friend put round him a supporting arm, and the pair gasped together, for a long minute, in their pain, like guilty creatures discovered. At last they spoke of carrying their comrade home. "There must be three or four men," Rowland said, "and they must be brought fast. I haven't the least idea where we are."
"We 're at about three hours' walk from the inn. It 's I who must go for help," Singleton insisted; "I can easily find my way."
"Remember then whom you 'll have to face!" said Rowland.
"I remember," the little artist answered. "There was nothing I could ever do for him before; I 'll do what I can now."
He went off and Rowland remained alone. He watched in the flesh for seven long hours, but the vigil of his spirit was a thing that would never cease. The most rational of men wandered and lost himself in the dark places of passion, lashed his "conduct" with a scourge of steel, accusing it of cruelty and in justice: he would have lain down there in Roderick's place to unsay the words that had yesterday driven him forth on his ramble of despair. Roderick had been fond of saying that there are such things as necessary follies, and he, of all men, was now proving it. The great gaunt wicked cliff above them became almost company to him, as the chance-saved photograph of a murderer might become for a shipwrecked castaway a link with civilisation: it had but done its part too, and what were they both, in their stupidity, he and it, but dumb agents of fate? He tried at any rate to understand what had hideously happened. Not that it offered one healing touch; before the absoluteness, the grim majesty, of the fact explanations and suppositions had only an effect of contributive meanness. Roderick's stricken state had driven him, in the mere motion of flight, higher and further than he knew; he had outstayed supposeably the first menace of the storm and perhaps even found a dark distraction in watching it. Perhaps he had simply lost himself. The tempest had overtaken him, and when he tried to return it had been too late. He had attempted to descend the cliff in the treacherous gloom, he had made the inevitable slip, and whether he had fallen fifty feet or three hundred little mattered now. Even if it had not been far, it had been far enough. Now that all was over Rowland understood how up to the brim, for two years, his personal world had been filled. It looked to him at present as void and blank and sinister as a theatre bankrupt and closed.
Singleton came back with four men—one of them the landlord of the inn. They had formed a rude bier of the frame of a chaise-à-porteurs, and by taking a very roundabout course homeward were able to follow a tolerably level path and carry their burden with due decency. To Rowland it seemed as if the little procession would never reach the inn, yet as they drew near it he would have given his right hand for a longer holding-off. The few lingerers came forward to do them silent solemn homage, and in the doorway, clinging together, appeared the two bereaved women. Mrs. Hudson tottered forward with outstretched hands, divided between yearning and terror; but before she reached her son Mary Garland had rushed past her and, in the face of the staring, pitying, awestricken crowd, had flung herself, with the magnificent movement of one whose rights were supreme and with a loud tremendous cry, upon the senseless vestige of all she had cherished.
That cry still lives in Rowland's ears. It interposes persistently against the consciousness that when he sometimes—very rarely—sees her, she is inscrutably civil to him; against the reflection that during the awful journey back to America, made of course with his assistance, she had used him, with the last rigour of consistency, as a character definitely appointed to her use. She lives with Mrs. Hudson under the New England elms, where he also visits his cousin Cecilia more frequently than of old. When he calls on Mary he never sees the elder lady. Cecilia, who, having her shrewd impression that he comes for the young person, the still young person, of interest at the other house as much as for any one else, fails to show as unduly flattered, and in fact pronounces him, at each reappearance, the most restless of mortals. But he always says to her in answer: "No, I assure you I 'm the most patient!" And then he talks to her of Roderick, of whose history she never wearies and whom he never elsewhere names.
THE END