Roderick Hudson

Evidently the Cavaliere was not shallow, and Rowland repeated respectfully, “You are a devoted friend.”

“That ‘s very true. I am a devoted friend. A man may do himself justice, after twenty years!”

Rowland, after a pause, made some remark about the beauty of the ball. It was very brilliant.

“Stupendous!” said the Cavaliere, solemnly. “It is a great day. We have four Roman princes, to say nothing of others.” And he counted them over on his fingers and held up his hand triumphantly. “And there she stands, the girl to whom I—I, Giuseppe Giacosa—taught her alphabet and her piano-scales; there she stands in her incomparable beauty, and Roman princes come and bow to her. Here, in his corner, her old master permits himself to be proud.”

“It is very friendly of him,” said Rowland, smiling.

The Cavaliere contracted his lids a little more and gave another keen glance. “It is very natural, signore. The Christina is a good girl; she remembers my little services. But here comes,” he added in a moment, “the young Prince of the Fine Arts. I am sure he has bowed lowest of all.”

Rowland looked round and saw Roderick moving slowly across the room and casting about him his usual luminous, unshrinking looks. He presently joined them, nodded familiarly to the Cavaliere, and immediately demanded of Rowland, “Have you seen her?”

“I have seen Miss Light,” said Rowland. “She ‘s magnificent.”

“I ‘m half crazy!” cried Roderick; so loud that several persons turned round.

Rowland saw that he was flushed, and laid his hand on his arm. Roderick was trembling. “If you will go away,” Rowland said instantly, “I will go with you.”

“Go away?” cried Roderick, almost angrily. “I intend to dance with her!”

The Cavaliere had been watching him attentively; he gently laid his hand on his other arm. “Softly, softly, dear young man,” he said. “Let me speak to you as a friend.”

“Oh, speak even as an enemy and I shall not mind it,” Roderick answered, frowning.

“Be very reasonable, then, and go away.”

“Why the deuce should I go away?”

“Because you are in love,” said the Cavaliere.

“I might as well be in love here as in the streets.”

“Carry your love as far as possible from Christina. She will not listen to you—she can’t.”

“She ‘can’t’?” demanded Roderick. “She is not a person of whom you may say that. She can if she will; she does as she chooses.”

“Up to a certain point. It would take too long to explain; I only beg you to believe that if you continue to love Miss Light you will be very unhappy. Have you a princely title? have you a princely fortune? Otherwise you can never have her.”

And the Cavaliere folded his arms again, like a man who has done his duty. Roderick wiped his forehead and looked askance at Rowland; he seemed to be guessing his thoughts and they made him blush a little. But he smiled blandly, and addressing the Cavaliere, “I ‘m much obliged to you for the information,” he said. “Now that I have obtained it, let me tell you that I am no more in love with Miss Light than you are. Mr. Mallet knows that. I admire her—yes, profoundly. But that ‘s no one’s business but my own, and though I have, as you say, neither a princely title nor a princely fortune, I mean to suffer neither those advantages nor those who possess them to diminish my right.”

“If you are not in love, my dear young man,” said the Cavaliere, with his hand on his heart and an apologetic smile, “so much the better. But let me entreat you, as an affectionate friend, to keep a watch on your emotions. You are young, you are handsome, you have a brilliant genius and a generous heart, but—I may say it almost with authority—Christina is not for you!”

Whether Roderick was in love or not, he was nettled by what apparently seemed to him an obtrusive negation of an inspiring possibility. “You speak as if she had made her choice!” he cried. “Without pretending to confidential information on the subject, I am sure she has not.”

“No, but she must make it soon,” said the Cavaliere. And raising his forefinger, he laid it against his under lip. “She must choose a name and a fortune—and she will!”

“She will do exactly as her inclination prompts! She will marry the man who pleases her, if he has n’t a dollar! I know her better than you.”

The Cavaliere turned a little paler than usual, and smiled more urbanely. “No, no, my dear young man, you do not know her better than I. You have not watched her, day by day, for twenty years. I too have admired her. She is a good girl; she has never said an unkind word to me; the blessed Virgin be thanked! But she must have a brilliant destiny; it has been marked out for her, and she will submit. You had better believe me; it may save you much suffering.”

“We shall see!” said Roderick, with an excited laugh.

“Certainly we shall see. But I retire from the discussion,” the Cavaliere added. “I have no wish to provoke you to attempt to prove to me that I am wrong. You are already excited.”

“No more than is natural to a man who in an hour or so is to dance the cotillon with Miss Light.”

“The cotillon? has she promised?”

Roderick patted the air with a grand confidence. “You ‘ll see!” His gesture might almost have been taken to mean that the state of his relations with Miss Light was such that they quite dispensed with vain formalities.

The Cavaliere gave an exaggerated shrug. “You make a great many mourners!”

“He has made one already!” Rowland murmured to himself. This was evidently not the first time that reference had been made between Roderick and the Cavaliere to the young man’s possible passion, and Roderick had failed to consider it the simplest and most natural course to say in three words to the vigilant little gentleman that there was no cause for alarm—his affections were preoccupied. Rowland hoped, silently, with some dryness, that his motives were of a finer kind than they seemed to be. He turned away; it was irritating to look at Roderick’s radiant, unscrupulous eagerness. The tide was setting toward the supper-room and he drifted with it to the door. The crowd at this point was dense, and he was obliged to wait for some minutes before he could advance. At last he felt his neighbors dividing behind him, and turning he saw Christina pressing her way forward alone. She was looking at no one, and, save for the fact of her being alone, you would not have supposed she was in her mother’s house. As she recognized Rowland she beckoned to him, took his arm, and motioned him to lead her into the supper-room. She said nothing until he had forced a passage and they stood somewhat isolated.

“Take me into the most out-of-the-way corner you can find,” she then said, “and then go and get me a piece of bread.”

“Nothing more? There seems to be everything conceivable.”

“A simple roll. Nothing more, on your peril. Only bring something for yourself.”

It seemed to Rowland that the embrasure of a window (embrasures in Roman palaces are deep) was a retreat sufficiently obscure for Miss Light to execute whatever design she might have contrived against his equanimity. A roll, after he had found her a seat, was easily procured. As he presented it, he remarked that, frankly speaking, he was at loss to understand why she should have selected for the honor of a tete-a-tete an individual for whom she had so little taste.

“Ah yes, I dislike you,” said Christina. “To tell the truth, I had forgotten it. There are so many people here whom I dislike more, that when I espied you just now, you seemed like an intimate friend. But I have not come into this corner to talk nonsense,” she went on. “You must not think I always do, eh?”

“I have never heard you do anything else,” said Rowland, deliberately, having decided that he owed her no compliments.

“Very good. I like your frankness. It ‘s quite true. You see, I am a strange girl. To begin with, I am frightfully egotistical. Don’t flatter yourself you have said anything very clever if you ever take it into your head to tell me so. I know it much better than you. So it is, I can’t help it. I am tired to death of myself; I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet. If a person wished to do me a favor I would say to him, ‘I beg you, with tears in my eyes, to interest me. Be strong, be positive, be imperious, if you will; only be something,—something that, in looking at, I can forget my detestable self!’ Perhaps that is nonsense too. If it is, I can’t help it. I can only apologize for the nonsense I know to be such and that I talk—oh, for more reasons than I can tell you! I wonder whether, if I were to try, you would understand me.”

“I am afraid I should never understand,” said Rowland, “why a person should willingly talk nonsense.”

“That proves how little you know about women. But I like your frankness. When I told you the other day that you displeased me, I had an idea you were more formal,—how do you say it?—more guinde. I am very capricious. To-night I like you better.”

“Oh, I am not guinde,” said Rowland, gravely.

“I beg your pardon, then, for thinking so. Now I have an idea that you would make a useful friend—an intimate friend—a friend to whom one could tell everything. For such a friend, what would n’t I give!”

Rowland looked at her in some perplexity. Was this touching sincerity, or unfathomable coquetry? Her beautiful eyes looked divinely candid; but then, if candor was beautiful, beauty was apt to be subtle. “I hesitate to recommend myself out and out for the office,” he said, “but I believe that if you were to depend upon me for anything that a friend may do, I should not be found wanting.”

“Very good. One of the first things one asks of a friend is to judge one not by isolated acts, but by one’s whole conduct. I care for your opinion—I don’t know why.”

“Nor do I, I confess,” said Rowland with a laugh.

“What do you think of this affair?” she continued, without heeding his laugh.

“Of your ball? Why, it ‘s a very grand affair.”

“It ‘s horrible—that ‘s what it is! It ‘s a mere rabble! There are people here whom I never saw before, people who were never asked. Mamma went about inviting every one, asking other people to invite any one they knew, doing anything to have a crowd. I hope she is satisfied! It is not my doing. I feel weary, I feel angry, I feel like crying. I have twenty minds to escape into my room and lock the door and let mamma go through with it as she can. By the way,” she added in a moment, without a visible reason for the transition, “can you tell me something to read?”

Rowland stared, at the disconnectedness of the question.

“Can you recommend me some books?” she repeated. “I know you are a great reader. I have no one else to ask. We can buy no books. We can make debts for jewelry and bonnets and five-button gloves, but we can’t spend a sou for ideas. And yet, though you may not believe it, I like ideas quite as well.”

“I shall be most happy to lend you some books,” Rowland said. “I will pick some out to-morrow and send them to you.”

“No novels, please! I am tired of novels. I can imagine better stories for myself than any I read. Some good poetry, if there is such a thing nowadays, and some memoirs and histories and books of facts.”

“You shall be served. Your taste agrees with my own.”

She was silent a moment, looking at him. Then suddenly—“Tell me something about Mr. Hudson,” she demanded. “You are great friends!”

“Oh yes,” said Rowland; “we are great friends.”

“Tell me about him. Come, begin!”

“Where shall I begin? You know him for yourself.”

“No, I don’t know him; I don’t find him so easy to know. Since he has finished my bust and begun to come here disinterestedly, he has become a great talker. He says very fine things; but does he mean all he says?”

“Few of us do that.”

“You do, I imagine. You ought to know, for he tells me you discovered him.” Rowland was silent, and Christina continued, “Do you consider him very clever?”

“Unquestionably.”

“His talent is really something out of the common way?”

“So it seems to me.”

“In short, he ‘s a man of genius?”

“Yes, call it genius.”

“And you found him vegetating in a little village and took him by the hand and set him on his feet in Rome?”

“Is that the popular legend?” asked Rowland.

“Oh, you need n’t be modest. There was no great merit in it; there would have been none at least on my part in the same circumstances. Real geniuses are not so common, and if I had discovered one in the wilderness, I would have brought him out into the market-place to see how he would behave. It would be excessively amusing. You must find it so to watch Mr. Hudson, eh? Tell me this: do you think he is going to be a great man—become famous, have his life written, and all that?”

“I don’t prophesy, but I have good hopes.”

Christina was silent. She stretched out her bare arm and looked at it a moment absently, turning it so as to see—or almost to see—the dimple in her elbow. This was apparently a frequent gesture with her; Rowland had already observed it. It was as coolly and naturally done as if she had been in her room alone. “So he ‘s a man of genius,” she suddenly resumed. “Don’t you think I ought to be extremely flattered to have a man of genius perpetually hanging about? He is the first I ever saw, but I should have known he was not a common mortal. There is something strange about him. To begin with, he has no manners. You may say that it ‘s not for me to blame him, for I have none myself. That ‘s very true, but the difference is that I can have them when I wish to (and very charming ones too; I ‘ll show you some day); whereas Mr. Hudson will never have them. And yet, somehow, one sees he ‘s a gentleman. He seems to have something urging, driving, pushing him, making him restless and defiant. You see it in his eyes. They are the finest, by the way, I ever saw. When a person has such eyes as that you can forgive him his bad manners. I suppose that is what they call the sacred fire.”

Rowland made no answer except to ask her in a moment if she would have another roll. She merely shook her head and went on:—

“Tell me how you found him. Where was he—how was he?”

“He was in a place called Northampton. Did you ever hear of it? He was studying law—but not learning it.”

“It appears it was something horrible, eh?”

“Something horrible?”

“This little village. No society, no pleasures, no beauty, no life.”

“You have received a false impression. Northampton is not as gay as Rome, but Roderick had some charming friends.”

“Tell me about them. Who were they?”

“Well, there was my cousin, through whom I made his acquaintance: a delightful woman.”

“Young—pretty?”

“Yes, a good deal of both. And very clever.”

“Did he make love to her?”

“Not in the least.”

“Well, who else?”

“He lived with his mother. She is the best of women.”

“Ah yes, I know all that one’s mother is. But she does not count as society. And who else?”

Rowland hesitated. He wondered whether Christina’s insistence was the result of a general interest in Roderick’s antecedents or of a particular suspicion. He looked at her; she was looking at him a little askance, waiting for his answer. As Roderick had said nothing about his engagement to the Cavaliere, it was probable that with this beautiful girl he had not been more explicit. And yet the thing was announced, it was public; that other girl was happy in it, proud of it. Rowland felt a kind of dumb anger rising in his heart. He deliberated a moment intently.

“What are you frowning at?” Christina asked.

“There was another person,” he answered, “the most important of all: the young girl to whom he is engaged.”

Christina stared a moment, raising her eyebrows. “Ah, Mr. Hudson is engaged?” she said, very simply. “Is she pretty?”

“She is not called a beauty,” said Rowland. He meant to practice great brevity, but in a moment he added, “I have seen beauties, however, who pleased me less.”

“Ah, she pleases you, too? Why don’t they marry?”

“Roderick is waiting till he can afford to marry.”

Christina slowly put out her arm again and looked at the dimple in her elbow. “Ah, he ‘s engaged?” she repeated in the same tone. “He never told me.”

Rowland perceived at this moment that the people about them were beginning to return to the dancing-room, and immediately afterwards he saw Roderick making his way toward themselves. Roderick presented himself before Miss Light.

“I don’t claim that you have promised me the cotillon,” he said, “but I consider that you have given me hopes which warrant the confidence that you will dance with me.”

Christina looked at him a moment. “Certainly I have made no promises,” she said. “It seemed to me that, as the daughter of the house, I should keep myself free and let it depend on circumstances.”

“I beseech you to dance with me!” said Roderick, with vehemence.

Christina rose and began to laugh. “You say that very well, but the Italians do it better.”

This assertion seemed likely to be put to the proof. Mrs. Light hastily approached, leading, rather than led by, a tall, slim young man, of an unmistakably Southern physiognomy. “My precious love,” she cried, “what a place to hide in! We have been looking for you for twenty minutes; I have chosen a cavalier for you, and chosen well!”

The young man disengaged himself, made a ceremonious bow, joined his two hands, and murmured with an ecstatic smile, “May I venture to hope, dear signorina, for the honor of your hand?”

“Of course you may!” said Mrs. Light. “The honor is for us.”

Christina hesitated but for a moment, then swept the young man a courtesy as profound as his own bow. “You are very kind, but you are too late. I have just accepted!”

“Ah, my own darling!” murmured—almost moaned—Mrs. Light.

Christina and Roderick exchanged a single glance—a glance brilliant on both sides. She passed her hand into his arm; he tossed his clustering locks and led her away.

A short time afterwards Rowland saw the young man whom she had rejected leaning against a doorway. He was ugly, but what is called distinguished-looking. He had a heavy black eye, a sallow complexion, a long, thin neck; his hair was cropped en brosse. He looked very young, yet extremely bored. He was staring at the ceiling and stroking an imperceptible moustache. Rowland espied the Cavaliere Giacosa hard by, and, having joined him, asked him the young man’s name.

“Oh,” said the Cavaliere, “he ‘s a pezzo grosso! A Neapolitan. Prince Casamassima.”

CHAPTER VI. Frascati

One day, on entering Roderick’s lodging (not the modest rooms on the Ripetta which he had first occupied, but a much more sumptuous apartment on the Corso), Rowland found a letter on the table addressed to himself. It was from Roderick, and consisted of but three lines: “I am gone to Frascati—for meditation. If I am not at home on Friday, you had better join me.” On Friday he was still absent, and Rowland went out to Frascati. Here he found his friend living at the inn and spending his days, according to his own account, lying under the trees of the Villa Mondragone, reading Ariosto. He was in a sombre mood; “meditation” seemed not to have been fruitful. Nothing especially pertinent to our narrative had passed between the two young men since Mrs. Light’s ball, save a few words bearing on an incident of that entertainment. Rowland informed Roderick, the next day, that he had told Miss Light of his engagement. “I don’t know whether you ‘ll thank me,” he had said, “but it ‘s my duty to let you know it. Miss Light perhaps has already done so.”

Roderick looked at him a moment, intently, with his color slowly rising. “Why should n’t I thank you?” he asked. “I am not ashamed of my engagement.”

“As you had not spoken of it yourself, I thought you might have a reason for not having it known.”

“A man does n’t gossip about such a matter with strangers,” Roderick rejoined, with the ring of irritation in his voice.

“With strangers—no!” said Rowland, smiling.

Roderick continued his work; but after a moment, turning round with a frown: “If you supposed I had a reason for being silent, pray why should you have spoken?”

“I did not speak idly, my dear Roderick. I weighed the matter before I spoke, and promised myself to let you know immediately afterwards. It seemed to me that Miss Light had better know that your affections are pledged.”

“The Cavaliere has put it into your head, then, that I am making love to her?”

“No; in that case I would not have spoken to her first.”

“Do you mean, then, that she is making love to me?”

“This is what I mean,” said Rowland, after a pause. “That girl finds you interesting, and is pleased, even though she may play indifference, at your finding her so. I said to myself that it might save her some sentimental disappointment to know without delay that you are not at liberty to become indefinitely interested in other women.”

“You seem to have taken the measure of my liberty with extraordinary minuteness!” cried Roderick.

“You must do me justice. I am the cause of your separation from Miss Garland, the cause of your being exposed to temptations which she hardly even suspects. How could I ever face her,” Rowland demanded, with much warmth of tone, “if at the end of it all she should be unhappy?”

“I had no idea that Miss Garland had made such an impression on you. You are too zealous; I take it she did n’t charge you to look after her interests.”

“If anything happens to you, I am accountable. You must understand that.”

“That ‘s a view of the situation I can’t accept; in your own interest, no less than in mine. It can only make us both very uncomfortable. I know all I owe you; I feel it; you know that! But I am not a small boy nor an outer barbarian any longer, and, whatever I do, I do with my eyes open. When I do well, the merit ‘s mine; if I do ill, the fault ‘s mine! The idea that I make you nervous is detestable. Dedicate your nerves to some better cause, and believe that if Miss Garland and I have a quarrel, we shall settle it between ourselves.”

Rowland had found himself wondering, shortly before, whether possibly his brilliant young friend was without a conscience; now it dimly occurred to him that he was without a heart. Rowland, as we have already intimated, was a man with a moral passion, and no small part of it had gone forth into his relations with Roderick. There had been, from the first, no protestations of friendship on either side, but Rowland had implicitly offered everything that belongs to friendship, and Roderick had, apparently, as deliberately accepted it. Rowland, indeed, had taken an exquisite satisfaction in his companion’s deep, inexpressive assent to his interest in him. “Here is an uncommonly fine thing,” he said to himself: “a nature unconsciously grateful, a man in whom friendship does the thing that love alone generally has the credit of—knocks the bottom out of pride!” His reflective judgment of Roderick, as time went on, had indulged in a great many irrepressible vagaries; but his affection, his sense of something in his companion’s whole personality that overmastered his heart and beguiled his imagination, had never for an instant faltered. He listened to Roderick’s last words, and then he smiled as he rarely smiled—with bitterness.

“I don’t at all like your telling me I am too zealous,” he said. “If I had not been zealous, I should never have cared a fig for you.”

Roderick flushed deeply, and thrust his modeling tool up to the handle into the clay. “Say it outright! You have been a great fool to believe in me.”

“I desire to say nothing of the kind, and you don’t honestly believe I do!” said Rowland. “It seems to me I am really very good-natured even to reply to such nonsense.”

Roderick sat down, crossed his arms, and fixed his eyes on the floor. Rowland looked at him for some moments; it seemed to him that he had never so clearly read his companion’s strangely commingled character—his strength and his weakness, his picturesque personal attractiveness and his urgent egoism, his exalted ardor and his puerile petulance. It would have made him almost sick, however, to think that, on the whole, Roderick was not a generous fellow, and he was so far from having ceased to believe in him that he felt just now, more than ever, that all this was but the painful complexity of genius. Rowland, who had not a grain of genius either to make one say he was an interested reasoner, or to enable one to feel that he could afford a dangerous theory or two, adhered to his conviction of the essential salubrity of genius. Suddenly he felt an irresistible compassion for his companion; it seemed to him that his beautiful faculty of production was a double-edged instrument, susceptible of being dealt in back-handed blows at its possessor. Genius was priceless, inspired, divine; but it was also, at its hours, capricious, sinister, cruel; and men of genius, accordingly, were alternately very enviable and very helpless. It was not the first time he had had a sense of Roderick’s standing helpless in the grasp of his temperament. It had shaken him, as yet, but with a half good-humored wantonness; but, henceforth, possibly, it meant to handle him more roughly. These were not times, therefore, for a friend to have a short patience.