"Your note, nevertheless, and your absence," Rowland said, "have very naturally alarmed your mother. I advise you to go to her directly and rea.s.sure her."
"Go to her? Going to her would be worse than staying away. Staying away at present is a kindness." And he inhaled deeply his huge rose, looking up over it at Rowland. "My presence, in fact, would be indecent."
"Indecent? Pray explain."
"Why, you see, as regards Mary Garland. I am divinely happy! Does n"t it strike you? You ought to agree with me. You wish me to spare her feelings; I spare them by staying away. Last night I heard something"--
"I heard it, too," said Rowland with brevity. "And it "s in honor of this piece of news that you have taken to your bed in this fashion?"
"Extremes meet! I can"t get up for joy."
"May I inquire how you heard your joyous news?--from Miss Light herself?"
"By no means. It was brought me by her maid, who is in my service as well."
"Casama.s.sima"s loss, then, is to a certainty your gain?"
"I don"t talk about certainties. I don"t want to be arrogant, I don"t want to offend the immortal G.o.ds. I "m keeping very quiet, but I can"t help being happy. I shall wait a while; I shall bide my time."
"And then?"
"And then that transcendent girl will confess to me that when she threw overboard her prince she remembered that I adored her!"
"I feel bound to tell you," was in the course of a moment Rowland"s response to this speech, "that I am now on my way to Mrs. Light"s."
"I congratulate you, I envy you!" Roderick murmured, imperturbably.
"Mrs. Light has sent for me to remonstrate with her daughter, with whom she has taken it into her head that I have influence. I don"t know to what extent I shall remonstrate, but I give you notice I shall not speak in your interest."
Roderick looked at him a moment with a lazy radiance in his eyes. "Pray don"t!" he simply answered.
"You deserve I should tell her you are a very shabby fellow."
"My dear Rowland, the comfort with you is that I can trust you. You "re incapable of doing anything disloyal."
"You mean to lie here, then, smelling your roses and nursing your visions, and leaving your mother and Miss Garland to fall ill with anxiety?"
"Can I go and flaunt my felicity in their faces? Wait till I get used to it a trifle. I have done them a palpable wrong, but I can at least forbear to add insult to injury. I may be an arrant fool, but, for the moment, I have taken it into my head to be prodigiously pleased. I should n"t be able to conceal it; my pleasure would offend them; so I lock myself up as a dangerous character."
"Well, I can only say, "May your pleasure never grow less, or your danger greater!""
Roderick closed his eyes again, and sniffed at his rose. "G.o.d"s will be done!"
On this Rowland left him and repaired directly to Mrs. Light"s. This afflicted lady hurried forward to meet him. Since the Cavaliere"s report of her condition she had somewhat smoothed and trimmed the exuberance of her distress, but she was evidently in extreme tribulation, and she clutched Rowland by his two hands, as if, in the shipwreck of her hopes, he were her single floating spar. Rowland greatly pitied her, for there is something respectable in pa.s.sionate grief, even in a very bad cause; and as pity is akin to love, he endured her rather better than he had done hitherto.
"Speak to her, plead with her, command her!" she cried, pressing and shaking his hands. "She "ll not heed us, no more than if we were a pair of clocks a-ticking. Perhaps she will listen to you; she always liked you."
"She always disliked me," said Rowland. "But that does n"t matter now.
I have come here simply because you sent for me, not because I can help you. I cannot advise your daughter."
"Oh, cruel, deadly man! You must advise her; you shan"t leave this house till you have advised her!" the poor woman pa.s.sionately retorted. "Look at me in my misery and refuse to help me! Oh, you need n"t be afraid, I know I "m a fright, I have n"t an idea what I have on. If this goes on, we may both as well turn scarecrows. If ever a woman was desperate, frantic, heart-broken, I am that woman. I can"t begin to tell you. To have nourished a serpent, sir, all these years! to have lavished one"s self upon a viper that turns and stings her own poor mother! To have toiled and prayed, to have pushed and struggled, to have eaten the bread of bitterness, and all the rest of it, sir--and at the end of all things to find myself at this pa.s.s. It can"t be, it "s too cruel, such things don"t happen, the Lord don"t allow it. I "m a religious woman, sir, and the Lord knows all about me. With his own hand he had given me his reward! I would have lain down in the dust and let her walk over me; I would have given her the eyes out of my head, if she had taken a fancy to them. No, she "s a cruel, wicked, heartless, unnatural girl! I speak to you, Mr. Mallet, in my dire distress, as to my only friend. There is n"t a creature here that I can look to--not one of them all that I have faith in. But I always admired you. I said to Christina the first time I saw you that there at last was a real gentleman. Come, don"t disappoint me now! I feel so terribly alone, you see; I feel what a nasty, hard, heartless world it is that has come and devoured my dinners and danced to my fiddles, and yet that has n"t a word to throw to me in my agony!
Oh, the money, alone, that I have put into this thing, would melt the heart of a Turk!"
During this frenzied outbreak Rowland had had time to look round the room, and to see the Cavaliere sitting in a corner, like a major-domo on the divan of an antechamber, pale, rigid, and inscrutable.
"I have it at heart to tell you," Rowland said, "that if you consider my friend Hudson"--
Mrs. Light gave a toss of her head and hands. "Oh, it "s not that. She told me last night to bother her no longer with Hudson, Hudson! She did n"t care a b.u.t.ton for Hudson. I almost wish she did; then perhaps one might understand it. But she does n"t care for anything in the wide world, except to do her own hard, wicked will, and to crush me and shame me with her cruelty."
"Ah, then," said Rowland, "I am as much at sea as you, and my presence here is an impertinence. I should like to say three words to Miss Light on my own account. But I must absolutely and inexorably decline to urge the cause of Prince Casama.s.sima. This is simply impossible."
Mrs. Light burst into angry tears. "Because the poor boy is a prince, eh? because he "s of a great family, and has an income of millions, eh?
That "s why you grudge him and hate him. I knew there were vulgar people of that way of feeling, but I did n"t expect it of you. Make an effort, Mr. Mallet; rise to the occasion; forgive the poor fellow his splendor.
Be just, be reasonable! It "s not his fault, and it "s not mine. He "s the best, the kindest young man in the world, and the most correct and moral and virtuous! If he were standing here in rags, I would say it all the same. The man first--the money afterwards: that was always my motto, and always will be. What do you take me for? Do you suppose I would give Christina to a vicious person? do you suppose I would sacrifice my precious child, little comfort as I have in her, to a man against whose character one word could be breathed? Casama.s.sima is only too good, he "s a saint of saints, he "s stupidly good! There is n"t such another in the length and breadth of Europe. What he has been through in this house, not a common peasant would endure. Christina has treated him as you would n"t treat a dog. He has been insulted, outraged, persecuted!
He has been driven hither and thither till he did n"t know where he was. He has stood there where you stand--there, with his name and his millions and his devotion--as white as your handkerchief, with hot tears in his eyes, and me ready to go down on my knees to him and say, "My own sweet prince, I could kiss the ground you tread on, but it is n"t decent that I should allow you to enter my house and expose yourself to these horrors again." And he would come back, and he would come back, and go through it all again, and take all that was given him, and only want the girl the more! I was his confidant; I know everything. He used to beg my forgiveness for Christina. What do you say to that? I seized him once and kissed him, I did! To find that and to find all the rest with it, and to believe it was a gift straight from the pitying angels of heaven, and then to see it dashed away before your eyes and to stand here helpless--oh, it "s a fate I hope you may ever be spared!"
"It would seem, then, that in the interest of Prince Casama.s.sima himself I ought to refuse to interfere," said Rowland.
Mrs. Light looked at him hard, slowly drying her eyes. The intensity of her grief and anger gave her a kind of majesty, and Rowland, for the moment, felt ashamed of the ironical ring of his observation. "Very good, sir," she said. "I "m sorry your heart is not so tender as your conscience. My compliments to your conscience! It must give you great happiness. Heaven help me! Since you fail us, we are indeed driven to the wall. But I have fought my own battles before, and I have never lost courage, and I don"t see why I should break down now. Cavaliere, come here!"
Giacosa rose at her summons and advanced with his usual deferential alacrity. He shook hands with Rowland in silence.
"Mr. Mallet refuses to say a word," Mrs. Light went on. "Time presses, every moment is precious. Heaven knows what that poor boy may be doing.
If at this moment a clever woman should get hold of him she might be as ugly as she pleased! It "s horrible to think of it."
The Cavaliere fixed his eyes on Rowland, and his look, which the night before had been singular, was now most extraordinary. There was a nameless force of anguish in it which seemed to grapple with the young man"s reluctance, to plead, to entreat, and at the same time to be glazed over with a reflection of strange things.
Suddenly, though most vaguely, Rowland felt the presence of a new element in the drama that was going on before him. He looked from the Cavaliere to Mrs. Light, whose eyes were now quite dry, and were fixed in stony hardness on the floor.
"If you could bring yourself," the Cavaliere said, in a low, soft, caressing voice, "to address a few words of solemn remonstrance to Miss Light, you would, perhaps, do more for us than you know. You would save several persons a great pain. The dear signora, first, and then Christina herself. Christina in particular. Me too, I might take the liberty to add!"
There was, to Rowland, something acutely touching in this humble pet.i.tion. He had always felt a sort of imaginative tenderness for poor little unexplained Giacosa, and these words seemed a supreme contortion of the mysterious obliquity of his life. All of a sudden, as he watched the Cavaliere, something occurred to him; it was something very odd, and it stayed his glance suddenly from again turning to Mrs. Light. His idea embarra.s.sed him, and to carry off his embarra.s.sment, he repeated that it was folly to suppose that his words would have any weight with Christina.
The Cavaliere stepped forward and laid two fingers on Rowland"s breast.
"Do you wish to know the truth? You are the only man whose words she remembers."
Rowland was going from surprise to surprise. "I will say what I can!"
he said. By this time he had ventured to glance at Mrs. Light. She was looking at him askance, as if, upon this, she was suddenly mistrusting his motives.
"If you fail," she said sharply, "we have something else! But please to lose no time."
She had hardly spoken when the sound of a short, sharp growl caused the company to turn. Christina"s fleecy poodle stood in the middle of the vast saloon, with his muzzle lowered, in pompous defiance of the three conspirators against the comfort of his mistress. This young lady"s claims for him seemed justified; he was an animal of amazingly delicate instincts. He had preceded Christina as a sort of van-guard of defense, and she now slowly advanced from a neighboring room.
"You will be so good as to listen to Mr. Mallet," her mother said, in a terrible voice, "and to reflect carefully upon what he says. I suppose you will admit that he is disinterested. In half an hour you shall hear from me again!" And pa.s.sing her hand through the Cavaliere"s arm, she swept rapidly out of the room.
Christina looked hard at Rowland, but offered him no greeting. She was very pale, and, strangely enough, it at first seemed to Rowland that her beauty was in eclipse. But he very soon perceived that it had only changed its character, and that if it was a trifle less brilliant than usual, it was admirably touching and n.o.ble. The clouded light of her eyes, the magnificent gravity of her features, the conscious erectness of her head, might have belonged to a deposed sovereign or a condemned martyr. "Why have you come here at this time?" she asked.
"Your mother sent for me in pressing terms, and I was very glad to have an opportunity to speak to you."