"If it is sinful, I absolve you," said Rowland, "in so far as I have power. We are made, I suppose, both to suffer and to enjoy. As you say, it "s a mixture. Just now and here, it seems a peculiarly strange one.
But we must take things in turn."
His words had a singular aptness, for he had hardly uttered them when Roderick came out from the house, evidently in his darkest mood. He stood for a moment gazing hard at the view.
"It "s a very beautiful night, my son," said his mother, going to him timidly, and touching his arm.
He pa.s.sed his hand through his hair and let it stay there, clasping his thick locks. "Beautiful?" he cried; "of course it "s beautiful!
Everything is beautiful; everything is insolent, defiant, atrocious with beauty. Nothing is ugly but me--me and my poor dead brain!"
"Oh, my dearest son," pleaded poor Mrs. Hudson, "don"t you feel any better?"
Roderick made no immediate answer; but at last he spoke in a different voice. "I came expressly to tell you that you need n"t trouble yourselves any longer to wait for something to turn up. Nothing will turn up! It "s all over! I said when I came here I would give it a chance. I have given it a chance. Have n"t I, eh? Have n"t I, Rowland?
It "s no use; the thing "s a failure! Do with me now what you please. I recommend you to set me up there at the end of the garden and shoot me."
"I feel strongly inclined," said Rowland gravely, "to go and get my revolver."
"Oh, mercy on us, what language!" cried Mrs. Hudson.
"Why not?" Roderick went on. "This would be a lovely night for it, and I should be a lucky fellow to be buried in this garden. But bury me alive, if you prefer. Take me back to Northampton."
"Roderick, will you really come?" cried his mother.
"Oh yes, I "ll go! I might as well be there as anywhere--reverting to idiocy and living upon alms. I can do nothing with all this; perhaps I should really like Northampton. If I "m to vegetate for the rest of my days, I can do it there better than here."
"Oh, come home, come home," Mrs. Hudson said, "and we shall all be safe and quiet and happy. My dearest son, come home with your poor mother!"
"Let us go, then, and go quickly!"
Mrs. Hudson flung herself upon his neck for grat.i.tude. "We "ll go to-morrow!" she cried. "The Lord is very good to me!"
Mary Garland said nothing to this; but she looked at Rowland, and her eyes seemed to contain a kind of alarmed appeal. Rowland noted it with exultation, but even without it he would have broken into an eager protest.
"Are you serious, Roderick?" he demanded.
"Serious? of course not! How can a man with a crack in his brain be serious? how can a muddlehead reason? But I "m not jesting, either; I can no more make jokes than utter oracles!"
"Are you willing to go home?"
"Willing? G.o.d forbid! I am simply amenable to force; if my mother chooses to take me, I won"t resist. I can"t! I have come to that!"
"Let me resist, then," said Rowland. "Go home as you are now? I can"t stand by and see it."
It may have been true that Roderick had lost his sense of humor, but he scratched his head with a gesture that was almost comical in its effect.
"You are a queer fellow! I should think I would disgust you horribly."
"Stay another year," Rowland simply said.
"Doing nothing?"
"You shall do something. I am responsible for your doing something."
"To whom are you responsible?"
Rowland, before replying, glanced at Miss Garland, and his glance made her speak quickly. "Not to me!"
"I "m responsible to myself," Rowland declared.
"My poor, dear fellow!" said Roderick.
"Oh, Mr. Mallet, are n"t you satisfied?" cried Mrs. Hudson, in the tone in which Niobe may have addressed the avenging archers, after she had seen her eldest-born fall. "It "s out of all nature keeping him here.
When we "re in a poor way, surely our own dear native land is the place for us. Do leave us to ourselves, sir!"
This just failed of being a dismissal in form, and Rowland bowed his head to it. Roderick was silent for some moments; then, suddenly, he covered his face with his two hands. "Take me at least out of this terrible Italy," he cried, "where everything mocks and reproaches and torments and eludes me! Take me out of this land of impossible beauty and put me in the midst of ugliness. Set me down where nature is coa.r.s.e and flat, and men and manners are vulgar. There must be something awfully ugly in Germany. Pack me off there!"
Rowland answered that if he wished to leave Italy the thing might be arranged; he would think it over and submit a proposal on the morrow.
He suggested to Mrs. Hudson, in consequence, that she should spend the autumn in Switzerland, where she would find a fine tonic climate, plenty of fresh milk, and several pensions at three francs and a half a day.
Switzerland, of course, was not ugly, but one could not have everything.
Mrs. Hudson neither thanked him nor a.s.sented; but she wept and packed her trunks. Rowland had a theory, after the scene which led to these preparations, that Mary Garland was weary of waiting for Roderick to come to his senses, that the faith which had bravely borne his manhood company hitherto, on the tortuous march he was leading it, had begun to believe it had gone far enough. This theory was not vitiated by something she said to him on the day before that on which Mrs. Hudson had arranged to leave Florence.
"Cousin Sarah, the other evening," she said, "asked you to please leave us. I think she hardly knew what she was saying, and I hope you have not taken offense."
"By no means; but I honestly believe that my leaving you would contribute greatly to Mrs. Hudson"s comfort. I can be your hidden providence, you know; I can watch you at a distance, and come upon the scene at critical moments."
Miss Garland looked for a moment at the ground; and then, with sudden earnestness, "I beg you to come with us!" she said.
It need hardly be added that after this Rowland went with them.
CHAPTER XII. The Princess Casama.s.sima
Rowland had a very friendly memory of a little mountain inn, accessible with moderate trouble from Lucerne, where he had once spent a blissful ten days. He had at that time been trudging, knapsack on back, over half Switzerland, and not being, on his legs, a particularly light weight, it was no shame to him to confess that he was mortally tired. The inn of which I speak presented striking a.n.a.logies with a cow-stable; but in spite of this circ.u.mstance, it was crowded with hungry tourists.
It stood in a high, shallow valley, with flower-strewn Alpine meadows sloping down to it from the base of certain rugged rocks whose outlines were grotesque against the evening sky. Rowland had seen grander places in Switzerland that pleased him less, and whenever afterwards he wished to think of Alpine opportunities at their best, he recalled this gra.s.sy concave among the mountain-tops, and the August days he spent there, resting deliciously, at his length, in the lee of a sun-warmed boulder, with the light cool air stirring about his temples, the wafted odors of the pines in his nostrils, the tinkle of the cattle-bells in his ears, the vast progression of the mountain shadows before his eyes, and a volume of Wordsworth in his pocket. His face, on the Swiss hill-sides, had been scorched to within a shade of the color nowadays called magenta, and his bed was a pallet in a loft, which he shared with a German botanist of colossal stature--every inch of him quaking at an open window. These had been drawbacks to felicity, but Rowland hardly cared where or how he was lodged, for he spent the livelong day under the sky, on the crest of a slope that looked at the Jungfrau. He remembered all this on leaving Florence with his friends, and he reflected that, as the midseason was over, accommodations would be more ample, and charges more modest. He communicated with his old friend the landlord, and, while September was yet young, his companions established themselves under his guidance in the gra.s.sy valley.
He had crossed the Saint Gothard Pa.s.s with them, in the same carriage.
During the journey from Florence, and especially during this portion of it, the cloud that hung over the little party had been almost dissipated, and they had looked at each other, in the close contiguity of the train and the posting-carriage, without either accusing or consoling glances. It was impossible not to enjoy the magnificent scenery of the Apennines and the Italian Alps, and there was a tacit agreement among the travelers to abstain from sombre allusions. The effect of this delicate compact seemed excellent; it ensured them a week"s intellectual sunshine. Roderick sat and gazed out of the window with a fascinated stare, and with a perfect docility of att.i.tude. He concerned himself not a particle about the itinerary, or about any of the wayside arrangements; he took no trouble, and he gave none. He a.s.sented to everything that was proposed, talked very little, and led for a week a perfectly contemplative life. His mother rarely removed her eyes from him; and if, a while before, this would have extremely irritated him, he now seemed perfectly unconscious of her observation and profoundly indifferent to anything that might befall him. They spent a couple of days on the Lake of Como, at a hotel with white porticoes smothered in oleander and myrtle, and the terrace-steps leading down to little boats with striped awnings. They agreed it was the earthly paradise, and they pa.s.sed the mornings strolling through the perfumed alleys of cla.s.sic villas, and the evenings floating in the moonlight in a circle of outlined mountains, to the music of silver-trickling oars. One day, in the afternoon, the two young men took a long stroll together. They followed the winding footway that led toward Como, close to the lake-side, past the gates of villas and the walls of vineyards, through little hamlets propped on a dozen arches, and bathing their feet and their pendant tatters in the gray-green ripple; past frescoed walls and crumbling campaniles and gra.s.sy village piazzas, and the mouth of soft ravines that wound upward, through belts of swinging vine and vaporous olive and splendid chestnut, to high ledges where white chapels gleamed amid the paler boskage, and bare cliff-surfaces, with their sun-cracked lips, drank in the azure light. It all was confoundingly picturesque; it was the Italy that we know from the steel engravings in old keepsakes and annuals, from the vignettes on music-sheets and the drop-curtains at theatres; an Italy that we can never confess to ourselves--in spite of our own changes and of Italy"s--that we have ceased to believe in. Rowland and Roderick turned aside from the little paved footway that clambered and dipped and wound and doubled beside the lake, and stretched themselves idly beneath a fig-tree, on a gra.s.sy promontory. Rowland had never known anything so divinely soothing as the dreamy softness of that early autumn afternoon. The iridescent mountains shut him in; the little waves, beneath him, fretted the white pebbles at the laziest intervals; the festooned vines above him swayed just visibly in the all but motionless air.
Roderick lay observing it all with his arms thrown back and his hands under his head. "This suits me," he said; "I could be happy here and forget everything. Why not stay here forever?" He kept his position for a long time and seemed lost in his thoughts. Rowland spoke to him, but he made vague answers; at last he closed his eyes. It seemed to Rowland, also, a place to stay in forever; a place for perfect oblivion of the disagreeable. Suddenly Roderick turned over on his face, and buried it in his arms. There had been something pa.s.sionate in his movement; but Rowland was nevertheless surprised, when he at last jerked himself back into a sitting posture, to perceive the trace of tears in his eyes.
Roderick turned to his friend, stretching his two hands out toward the lake and mountains, and shaking them with an eloquent gesture, as if his heart was too full for utterance.
"Pity me, sir; pity me!" he presently cried. "Look at this lovely world, and think what it must be to be dead to it!"
"Dead?" said Rowland.
"Dead, dead; dead and buried! Buried in an open grave, where you lie staring up at the sailing clouds, smelling the waving flowers, and hearing all nature live and grow above you! That "s the way I feel!"