Roderick Hudson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 8
VIII
The door of the studio was promptly flung open, and a lady advanced to the threshold—an imposing voluminous person who quite filled up the doorway. Rowland immediately felt that he had seen her before, but he recognised her only when she moved forward and disclosed an attendant in the person of a little bright-eyed elderly gentleman with a bristling white moustache. Then he remembered that just a year before he and his companion had seen in the Ludovisi gardens a wonderfully beautiful girl strolling in the train of this conspicuous couple. He looked for her now, and in a moment she appeared, following her companions with the same maidenly majesty as before and leading her great snow-white poodle, who was decorated as before with motley ribbons. The elder lady offered the two young men a sufficiently gracious salute; the little old gentleman bowed and smiled with extreme deference. The young girl, without casting a glance either at Roderick or at Rowland, looked about for a chair and, on perceiving one, sank into it listlessly, pulled her poodle towards her and began to re-arrange his top-knot. Rowland saw that, even with her eyes dropped, her beauty was still dazzling.
"I trust we're at liberty to enter," said the elder lady with urbanity. "We were told that Mr. Hudson has no fixed jour and that we might come at any time. Let us not disturb you."
Roderick, as one of the newer lights of the Roman art-world, had not hitherto been subject to incursions from inquisitive tourists and, having no regular reception-day, was not versed in the usual arts of hospitality. He said nothing, and Rowland, looking at him, saw that he was staring amazedly at the younger woman and was apparently unconscious of everything else. "By Jove!" he cried precipitately, "it 's that goddess of the Villa Ludovisi!" Rowland, in some confusion, did the honours as he could, but the little old gentleman begged him with the most obsequious of smiles to give himself no trouble. "I 've been in a many studio, tanti, tanti!" he said with his finger in the air and a strong Italian accent.
"We 're going about everywhere," said his companion. "I 'm passionately fond of art!"
Rowland smiled sympathetically and let them turn to Roderick's statue. He glanced again at the young sculptor, to invite him to bestir himself, but Roderick was still nothing but eyes for the beautiful young mistress of the poodle, who by this time had looked up and was gazing straight at him. There was no thing bold in her look; it expressed but the reserve of systematic indifference. Her beauty was extraordinary; it grew and grew as the young man regarded her. In such a face the maidenly custom of averted eyes and ready blushes would have seemed an anomaly; nature had produced it for man's delight and meant that it should surrender itself freely and coldly to admiration. It was not immediately apparent, however, that the young lady found answering entertainment in the physiognomy of her host; she turned her head after a moment and looked idly round the room, and at last let her eyes rest on the statue of the woman seated. It being left to Rowland to stimulate conversation, he began by complimenting her on the appearance of her dog.
"Yes, he 's very handsome," she murmured. "He 's a Florentine. The dogs in Florence are handsomer than the people." Then, on Rowland's caressing him, "His name 's Stenterello," she added: "Stenterello, give your hand to the kind gentleman." This order was given in Italian. "Say buon giorno a Lei."
Stenterello thrust out his paw and gave four short shrill barks; upon which the elder lady turned round and raised her forefinger. "My dear, my dear, remember where you are! Pardon my foolish child," she added, turning to Roderick with an agreeable smile. "She can think of nothing but her funny poodle."
"I 'm teaching him to talk for me," the girl went on without heeding her mother; "to say the proper little things in society. It will save me a great deal of trouble. Stenterello, love, give a pretty smile and say tanti complimenti!" The poodle wagged his white pate—it looked like one of those little pads in swan's-down for applying powder to the face—and repeated the barking process.
"He 's surely a wonderful beast," said Rowland.
"He 's not a beast at all," the animal's mistress protested. "A beast is something black and dirty—something you can't touch; whereas Stenterello 's a perfect gentleman, with all the personal signs and personal habits of one. I 've seen other gentlemen whom I would n't trust so far."
"He 's a very valuable dog indeed," the elder lady explained as a commentary to this striking plea. "He was presented to my daughter by a great Florentine personage."
"It's not for that I care about him. It's for himself. He 's a great Florentine personage."
"My precious love!" exclaimed the mother in deprecating accents, but with a significant glance at Rowland which seemed to bespeak his attention to the originality of her possessing a daughter who was herself so original.
Rowland remembered that when their unknown visitors had passed before them, in the Villa Ludovisi, with an effect that had remained oddly distinct in spite of the many revolving seasons, Roderick and he had exchanged conjectures as to their nationality and social quality. Roderick had declared that they were old-world people; but Rowland now needed no telling to feel that he might claim the elder lady as a fellow-countrywoman. She was a person of what is called a great deal of presence, with the faded traces, artfully revived here and there, of once brilliant beauty. Her young companion was therefore accountably fair, but Rowland mentally made the distinction that the mother was inordinately shallow and the daughter — also perhaps inordinately — deep. The mother had a fatuous countenance — a countenance Rowland felt himself make out to represent a fairly fantastic fatuity. The girl, in spite of her childish satisfaction in her poodle, was not a person of a feeble understanding. Rowland received an impression that for reasons of her own she was playing a part before the world. What was the part and what were her reasons? She was interesting; Rowland wondered what were her domestic secrets. If her parent had been a daughter of the great Republic it was to be supposed that she herself was a flower of the American soil; but her beauty had, in spite of her youth, an air of longer history than consorts, in general, with the rather extemporised look of American loveliness. She spoke with a vague foreign accent, as if she had spent her life in strange countries. Their Italian squire apparently divined Rowland's mute imaginings, for he stepped with a conciliatory flourish into the breach. "I've not done my duty," he remarked, "in not announcing these ladies. Madama Light, Mees Light!"
Rowland was not materially the wiser for this information, but Roderick was roused by it to the exercise of some slight civility. He altered the lighting, pulled forward two or three figures and made an apology for not having more to show. "I don't pretend to have anything of an exhibition — I 'm only a novice."
"Indeed? — a novice! For a novice this will certainly pass," Mrs. Light declared. "Cavaliere, we 've seen nothing better than this."
The Cavaliere smiled rapturously. "It's stupend ous!" he murmured. "And we've been to all the studios."
"Not to all — goodness gracious!" cried Mrs. Light. "But to a number that I 've had pointed out by artistic friends. I delight in studios — I should have been so happy myself to be a little quiet artist! And if you 're a novice, Mr. Hudson," she went on, "you 've already great admirers. Half a dozen people have told us that yours were quite among the things to see." This amiability, however, went unanswered; Roderick had already wandered across to the other side of the studio and was revolving about Miss Light. "Ah, he 's gone to look at my beautiful daughter; he 's not the first that has had his head turned," the irrepressible lady resumed, lowering her voice to a confidential undertone; a favour which, considering the shortness of their acquaintance, Rowland was bound to appreciate. "The artists are all crazy about her. When she goes into a studio she 's fatal to the pictures. And when she goes into the ball-room what do the other women say? Eh, Cavaliere mio?"
"She 's very very beautiful," Rowland said simply. Mrs. Light, who through her long gold-cased glasses was looking a little at everything and at no thing as if she saw it, interrupted her random murmurs and exclamations and surveyed Rowland from head to foot. She eyed him all over; apparently he had not been mentioned to her as a feature of Roderick's establishment. It was the challenge, Rowland felt, which the vigilant and ambitious mother of a beautiful daughter has always at her command for well-appointed young men. Her inspection in this case seemed satisfactory. "Are you also an artist?" she inquired with an almost affectionate inflexion. It was clear that what she meant was something of this kind: "Be so good as to assure me without delay that you 're really the rather manageable young man of fortune that you appear."
But Rowland answered only the formal question — not the latent one. "Dear me, no; I'm merely a poor friend of Mr. Hudson's."
Mrs. Light, with a sigh, returned to the statues and, after mistaking the Adam for a gladiator and the Eve for a gypsy, declared she could never judge of such things unless she saw them in the marble. Rowland hesitated a moment and then, speaking in the interest of Roderick's renown, said that he was the happy possessor of several of his friend's works and that she was welcome to come and see them at his rooms. She bade the Cavaliere, with alacrity, make a note of his address. "Ah, you 're, for your pleasure, a protector of the arts," she said. "That's what I should like to be if I had a little money. I revel in beauty in every form. But all these people ask such monstrous prices. One must be a millionaire to think of such things, eh? Twenty years ago my husband had my portrait painted, here in Rome, by Papucci, who was the great man in those days. I was in a ball-dress, with my famous jewels and my bare shoulders and arms, which were then rather famous too — were not at any rate a petite affaire. The man got six hundred francs and thought he was very well treated. Those were the days when a family could live like princes in Italy for five thousand scudi a year. The Cavaliere once upon a time was a great dandy — don't blush, Cavaliere: any one can see that, just as any one can see what I was! Get him to tell you what he made a figure upon. The railroads have brought in the vulgarians. That 's what I call it now — the invasion of the vulgarians! What are poor we to do?"
Rowland had begun to murmur some remedial proposition when he was interrupted by the voice of Miss Light calling across the room, "Mamma!"
"My own love?"
"This gentleman wishes to model my bust. Please speak to him about it."
The Cavaliere emitted a sound between a growl and a giggle. "Already? Santo Dio!" he cried.
Rowland looked round, equally surprised at the promptitude of the proposal. Roderick stood planted before the girl with his arms folded, looking at her as he would have done at the Medicean Venus. He never paid cheap compliments, and Rowland, though he had not heard him speak, could imagine the startling distinctness with which he made his request.
"He saw me a year ago," Miss Light went on, "and he has been thinking of me ever since." Her mode of speech was peculiar; it had a kind of studied inexpressiveness which was yet not the conscious drawl of affectation.
"I must make your daughter's bust — that's all, madam!" cried Roderick with warmth.
"I would rather you should make the poodle's," this young lady returned. "Is it very very tiresome? I 've spent half my life sitting for my photograph, in every conceivable attitude and with every conceivable coiffure. It seems to me I 've posed enough."
"My dear child," said Mrs. Light, "it may be one's duty to pose! But as to my daughter's sitting to you, sir — to a young artist whom we don't know — it 's a matter that one must look at a little. It 's not a favour that 's to be had for the mere asking."
"If I don't make her from life," Roderick replied with energy, "I'll make her from memory, and if the thing's to be done you had better have it done as well as possible."
"Mamma hesitates," Miss Light explained, "because she does n't know whether you mean she shall pay you for the bust or you 'll pay me for the sitting. She 's capable of thinking of that, mamma. I can assure you at least that she won't pay you a sou."
"My daughter, you forget yourself," said the poor lady with an attempt at a high tone. "Of course," she added in a moment with a change of note, "the bust would be my own property."
"Of course!" cried Roderick impatiently.
"Dearest mother," the girl interposed, "how can you carry another stone image about the world with you? Is n't it enough to drag the poor original?"
"My dear, you 're talking great nonsense," Mrs. Light curtly pronounced.
"You can always get something for it," the girl pursued with the same practised innocence. "You always get something for everything. I dare say that with patience you 'll still get something even for me."
Mrs. Light turned to Rowland, who was sorry for her, flushed and irritated. "She 's as wicked to-day as she knows how to be, and that 's saying a good deal!"
The Cavaliere grinned in silence and walked away on tiptoe with his hat to his lips, as if to leave the field clear for action. Rowland, on the contrary, wished to mediate. "You had better not refuse," he said to Miss Light, "until you 've seen Mr. Hudson's things in the marble. Your mother 's to come and look at some that I possess."
"Thank you; I 've no doubt you 'll see us. I dare say Mr. Hudson 's very clever; but I don't care for modern sculpture. I can't look at it."
"You shall care for my bust, I promise you!" Roderick declared with a laugh.
"To satisfy Miss Light," said the Cavaliere, "one of the old Greeks ought to come to life."
"It would be worth his while," said Roderick, acquitting himself, to Rowland's knowledge, of his first public madrigal.
"I might sit to Phidias if he would promise to be very amusing and make me laugh. What do you say, Stenterello? would you sit to Phidias?"
"We must talk of this some other time," said Mrs. Light. "We 're in Rome for the winter. Many thanks. Cavaliere, call the carriage." The Cavaliere led the way out, backing like a silver-stick, and Miss Light, following her mother, nodded, without looking at them, to each of the young men.
"Immortal powers, what a head!" cried Roderick when they were gone. "There's my fortune — on that girl's two feet."
"She 's certainly very beautiful," said Rowland. "But I 'm sorry you 've undertaken her bust."
"And why, pray?"
"I suspect it will bring trouble."
"What kind of trouble?"
"I hardly know. They're queer people. The mamma strikes me as a good bit of an adventuress. Heaven knows what the daughter may be."
"The daughter 's simply a breathing goddess," Roderick instantly returned.
"Just so. She 's all the more dangerous."
"Dangerous? What will she do to me? She doesn't bite, I imagine."
"It remains to be seen. There are two kinds of women — you ought to know by this time — the safe and the unsafe. Besides, there 's more than one way of biting — and I thought you had been bitten."
"My dear man," smiled Roderick very boldly, "with you to plaster me up —!" But he broke off — only to fall gaily a-whistling: a demonstration addressed apparently to the advent, as he had said, of his fortune.
In calling this young lady and her mamma queer people Rowland had perhaps too crudely betrayed his now alert sense for possible complications. They were so marked a variation from the monotonous troop of his compatriots that he felt much curiosity as to the sources of the change, especially since he doubted greatly whether on the whole it elevated the type. During the next week he saw the two ladies driving daily in a well-appointed landau, with the Cavaliere and the poodle in the front seat. From Mrs. Light he received a gracious salute, tempered by her native majesty; but the young girl, looking straight before her, seemed profoundly indifferent to observers. Her extraordinary beauty, however, had already made observers numerous and given the haunters of the Pincian plenty to talk about. The echoes of their commentary reached Rowland's ears; but he had little taste for raw rumour and preferred it responsibly prepared. It was so supplied him by Madame Grandoni, to whom Mrs. Light and her wonderful daughter had been from of old familiar objects.
"I 've known the mamma for twenty years," said this judicious critic, "and if you ask any of the people who have been living here as long as I, you will find they remember her well. I 've held the beautiful Christina on my knee when she was a little wizened baby with a very red face and no promise of beauty but those magnificent eyes. Ten years ago Mrs. Light disappeared, and was not afterwards seen in Rome, except for a few days, not long since, when she passed through on her way to Naples. Then it was you met the trio in the Ludovisi gardens. When I first knew her she was the unmarried but very marriageable daughter of an old American painter of very bad landscapes, which people used to buy from charity and use for fire-boards. His name was Savage; it used to make every one laugh, he was such a mild, melancholy, pitiful old personage. He had married a horrible wife, an Englishwoman who had been on the stage. It was said she used to beat poor Savage with his mahlstick and, when the domestic finances were low, to lock him up in his studio and tell him he should n't come out until he had painted half a dozen of his daubs. She had a good deal of showy beauty. She would go forth with the key in her pocket and, her beauty assisting, she would make certain people take the pictures. It helped her at last to make an English lord run away with her. At the time I speak of she had quite disappeared. Mrs. Light was then a very handsome girl, though by no means so handsome as her daughter has now become. Mr. Light was an American consul, newly appointed at one of the Adriatic ports. He was a mild, fair-whiskered young man, with some little property, and my impression is that he had got into bad company at home and his family had procured him his place to keep him out of harm's way. He was at any rate clearly a gentleman. He came up to Rome on a holiday, fell in love with Miss Savage and married her on the spot. He had not been married three years when he was drowned in the Adriatic, no one ever knew how. The young widow came back to Rome, to her father, and here shortly afterwards, in the dear shadow of Saint Peter's, her little girl was born. It might have been supposed that Mrs. Light would marry again, and I know she had opportunities. But she overreached herself. She would take nothing less than a title and a fortune, and they were not forthcoming. She was admired and very fond of admiration; very vain, very worldly, very silly. She remained a pretty widow with a surprising variety of bonnets and a dozen men always in her train. Giacosa dates from this period. He calls himself a Roman, but I 've an impression he came up from Ancona with her. He was l'ami de la maison. He used to hold her bouquets, clean her gloves and satin shoes, run her errands, get her opera-boxes, fight her battles with the shopkeepers. For this he needed courage, for she was smothered in debt. She at last left Rome to escape her creditors. Many of them must remember her still, but she seems now to have money to satisfy them. She left her poor old father here alone — helpless, infirm and unable to work. A subscription was shortly afterwards taken up among the foreigners, and he was sent back to America, where, as I finally heard, he died in some sort of asylum. From time to time, for several years, I heard vaguely of Mrs. Light as a wandering beauty at French and German watering-places. Once came a rumour that she was going to make a grand marriage in England; then we heard that the gentleman had thought better of it and left her to keep afloat as she could. She was a terribly scatter-brained creature. She pretends to be a great lady—Dieu sait pourquoi!—but I consider that old Filomena, my washerwoman, is in essentials a greater one. Certainly, after all, however, she has been fortunate. She embarked at last on a lawsuit about some property with her husband's family, and went to America to attend to it. She came back triumphant, with a long purse. She reappeared in Italy and established herself for a while in Venice. Then she came to Florence, where she spent a couple of years and where I saw her. Last year she passed down to Naples, which I should have said was just the place for her, and this winter she has laid siege to Rome. She seems very prosperous. She has taken a floor in the Palazzo Falconieri, she keeps her carriage, and Christina and she, between them, must have a pretty milliner's bill. Giacosa has turned up again, looking like one of those collapsed balloons, that children play with, blown out again for the occasion."
"What sort of education," Rowland attentively asked, "do you suppose the mother's adventures to have been for the daughter?"
"A strange school enough. But Mrs. Light told me in Florence that she had given her child the education of a princess. In other words I suppose she speaks three or four languages and has read several hundred French novels. Christina, I imagine, has plenty of wit—also plenty of will. When I saw her at that same time I was amazed at her beauty, and certainly if there be any truth in faces she ought to have the soul of an angel. Perhaps she has. I don't judge her; she 's an extraordinary young person. She has been told twenty times a day by her mother, since she was five years old, that she 's a beauty of beauties, that her face is her fortune, that she was born for great things, and that if she plays her cards she may marry God knows whom. If she has not been quite ruined she 's a very decent creature. My own impression is that, like the most interesting people always, she 's a mixture of better and worse, of good passions and bad — always of passions, however; and that, whatever she is, she 's neither stupid nor mean and possibly, by a miracle, not even false. Mrs. Light having failed to make her own fortune in matrimony, has transferred her hopes to her daughter and nursed them till they 've become a craze. She has a hobby, which she rides in secret; but some day she 'll let you see it. I 'm sure that if you go in some evening unannounced you 'll find her studying the tea-leaves in her cup or telling her daughter's fortune with a greasy pack of cards. She reminds me, like that, of some extravagant old woman in a novel—in something of Hofmann or Balzac, something even of your own Thackeray. She promises the girl a prince—a reigning prince. But if Mrs. Light's a fool she can still count on her fingers, and lest considerations of state should deny her potentate the luxury of a love-match she keeps on hand a few common mortals. At the worst she would take a duke, an English lord, or even a young American with a proper number of millions. The poor woman can certainly never lie quiet, she 's unacquainted with the luxury of repose. She 's always building castles and knocking them down again—always casting her nets and pulling them in. If her daughter were less of a beauty her pretensions would be grotesque; but there 's something in the girl, as one looks at her, that seems to make it very possible she may be marked out for one of those romantic fortunes that history now and then relates. 'Who, after all, was the Empress of the French?' Mrs. Light is for ever saying. 'And beside Christina the Empress is a dowdy!"
"And what does Christina say?"
"She makes no scruple, as you know, of saying that she wouldn't mind her mother's idiocy if it was n 't for her vulgarity. What she 'thinks' goodness knows. I suspect that practically she doesn't commit herself. She 's excessively proud, and holds herself fit for the highest station in the world; but she knows that her mother would make her ridiculous if anything could, and that even she herself might look awkward in making unsuccessful advances. So she remains sublimely detached and lets mamma take the risks. If the prince is captured so much the better; if he 's not she need never confess to herself that even a reigning sovereign has slighted her."
"Your report's as solid," Rowland said to Madame Grandoni, thanking her, "as if it had been drawn up for the Academy of Sciences;" and he congratulated himself on having listened to it when a couple of days later Mrs. Light and her daughter, attended by the Cavaliere and the poodle, came to his rooms to look at Roderick's statues. It was more comfortable to know just with whom he was dealing.
Mrs. Light was prodigiously gracious and showered down compliments not only on the statues but on all his possessions. "Upon my word," she said, "you rich young men know how to make yourselves comfortable. If one of us poor women had half as many easy-chairs and nick-nacks we should be famously abused. It 's really selfish to be living all alone in such a place as this. Cavaliere, how should you like this suite of rooms and a fortune to fill them with pictures and bibelots? Christina love, look at that mosaic table. Mr. Mallet, I could almost beg it from you! Yes, that Eve is certainly very fine. We need n't be ashamed of such a great-grandmother as that. If she was really such a beautiful woman it accounts for the good looks of some of us. Where 's Mr. Roderick, whom we all the other day fell in love with—we thought him handsomer than any of his figures. Why is n't he here to be complimented?"
Christina had remained but a moment in the chair Rowland placed for her, had given but a cursory glance at the statues, and then, leaving her seat, had begun to wander round the room looking at herself in the mirrors, touching the ornaments and curiosities, glancing at the books and prints. Rowland's saloon was encumbered with valuable pieces, and she found plenty of occupation. Rowland presently joined her and pointed out some of the objects supposed to be interesting.
"It 's an odd jumble, you know," she said frankly. "Some things are very good—some are very ugly. But I like ugly things when they have a certain look. Prettiness is terribly vulgar nowadays, and it 's not every one that knows just the sort of ugliness that 's amusing. However, there are more people now that are horridly knowing than not—and the only nice thing, I think really, is to be as ignorant as a fish. We can't be though, you or I, unfortunately, can we? we 're so awfully intelligent. We 're born to know and to suffer, aren't we?" With which, suddenly, she broke off. "I like looking at people's things," she then went on, turning to Rowland and resting her lovely eyes on him. "It helps you to find out their characters."
"Am I to suppose," asked Rowland smiling, "that you 've arrived at any conclusions as to mine?"
"I 'm rather intriguée; you have too many things; one seems to contradict another. You're very artistic and yet you 're very prosaic; you have what is called a 'catholic' taste, and yet you're full of obstinate little prejudices and preferences which, if I knew you, I should find very tiresome. I don't think I like you."
"You make a great mistake," laughed Rowland. "I assure you I 'm worth liking."
"Yes, I 'm probably wrong, and if I knew you I should find out I was wrong, and that would irritate me and make me dislike you more. So you see we're necessarily enemies."
"No, I don't at all object to you."
"Worse and worse; for you certainly will never get any good of me."
"You're very discouraging then."
"I'm fond of facing the truth, though some day you'll deny even that. Where's the young man of genius?" she pursued—"whom I'm not, in spite of my mother, in love with!"
"You mean my friend Hudson? He 's represented by these beautiful works."
Miss Light looked for some moments at the objects in question. "Yes," she said, "they 're not so silly as most of the things we've seen. They've no beastly chic, and yet they 're beautiful."
"You describe them perfectly," said Rowland. "They're beautiful, and yet they 've no beastly chic. That 's it!"
"If he'll promise to put no beastly chic into my bust I 've a mind to let him make it. A request made in those terms deserves to be granted."
"In what terms?"
"Didn't you hear him? 'Mademoiselle, you almost come up to one of my dreams. I must model your bust.' That almost should be rewarded! He's like me, he likes to face the truth. No, I'm not in love with him, but I think we should get on together."
The Cavaliere approached Rowland to express the pleasure he had derived from his splendid collection. His smile was exquisitely bland, his attitude seemed to call attention to its exemplary correctness. But he gave Rowland an odd sense of looking at an elaborate waxen image adjusted to perform certain gestures and emit certain sounds. It had once contained the marvellous machinery of a spirit too, but some accident had apparently befallen that part of the mechanism, to the cost of the perfect imitation of life. Nevertheless, Rowland reflected, there are more graceless things than the mere motions and passes of a very old civilisation—the civilisation that had given this personage his inexhausted impetus never having struck him as so immemorially old. The Cavaliere also had spirit enough left to desire to speak a few words on his own account and call Rowland's attention to the fact that he was not after all a hired cicerone, but an ancient Roman gentleman. Rowland felt sorry for him; he hardly knew why. He assured him in friendly fashion that he must come again, that his house was always at his service. The Cavaliere took it with perfect delicacy. "You do me too much honour," he murmured. "If you 'll allow me—it 's not impossible!"
Mrs. Light meanwhile had prepared to depart. "If you 're not afraid to come and see two quiet little women we shall be most happy! We have no statues nor pictures—we have nothing but each other. Eh, darling?"
"I beg your pardon," said Christina.
"Oh, and the Cavaliere," added her mother.
"The poodle, please!" cried the girl.
Rowland glanced at the Cavaliere; he was smiling more blandly than ever.
Our friend presented himself a few days later, as civility demanded, at Mrs. Light's door. He found her living in one of the stately houses of the Via dell' Angelo Custode and rather to his surprise was told she was at home. He passed through half a dozen rooms and was ushered into an immense saloon, at one end of which sat the mistress of the establishment with a piece of embroidery. She received him very graciously and then, pointing mysteriously to a large screen which was unfolded across the embrasure of one of the deep windows, "I 'm mounting guard, you see!" she said. Rowland looked interrogative, where upon she beckoned him forward and motioned him to step beyond the screen. He obeyed and for some moments stood gazing. Roderick, with his back turned, stood before an extemporised pedestal, ardently shaping a formless mass of clay. Before him sat Christina Light, in a white dress, with her shoulders bare, her magnificent hair twisted into a classic coil, her head admirably carried. Meeting Rowland's gaze she smiled a little, only in the depths of her blue-grey eyes, without moving. She looked divinely fair.