"I might chop down trees," said Rowland. "That is, if you allow it."
"Allow it? Why, where should we get our firewood?" Then, noticing that he had spoken jestingly, she glanced at him askance, though with no visible diminution of her gravity. "Don"t you know how to do anything?
Have you no profession?"
Rowland shook his head. "Absolutely none."
"What do you do all day?"
"Nothing worth relating. That "s why I am going to Europe. There, at least, if I do nothing, I shall see a great deal; and if I "m not a producer, I shall at any rate be an observer."
"Can"t we observe everywhere?"
"Certainly; and I really think that in that way I make the most of my opportunities. Though I confess," he continued, "that I often remember there are things to be seen here to which I probably have n"t done justice. I should like, for instance, to see West Nazareth."
She looked round at him, open-eyed; not, apparently, that she exactly supposed he was jesting, for the expression of such a desire was not necessarily facetious; but as if he must have spoken with an ulterior motive. In fact, he had spoken from the simplest of motives. The girl beside him pleased him unspeakably, and, suspecting that her charm was essentially her own and not reflected from social circ.u.mstance, he wished to give himself the satisfaction of contrasting her with the meagre influences of her education. Miss Garland"s second movement was to take him at his word. "Since you are free to do as you please, why don"t you go there?"
"I am not free to do as I please now. I have offered your cousin to bear him company to Europe, he has accepted with enthusiasm, and I cannot retract."
"Are you going to Europe simply for his sake?"
Rowland hesitated a moment. "I think I may almost say so."
Miss Garland walked along in silence. "Do you mean to do a great deal for him?" she asked at last.
"What I can. But my power of helping him is very small beside his power of helping himself."
For a moment she was silent again. "You are very generous," she said, almost solemnly.
"No, I am simply very shrewd. Roderick will repay me. It "s an investment. At first, I think," he added shortly afterwards, "you would not have paid me that compliment. You distrusted me."
She made no attempt to deny it. "I did n"t see why you should wish to make Roderick discontented. I thought you were rather frivolous."
"You did me injustice. I don"t think I "m that."
"It was because you are unlike other men--those, at least, whom I have seen."
"In what way?"
"Why, as you describe yourself. You have no duties, no profession, no home. You live for your pleasure."
"That "s all very true. And yet I maintain I "m not frivolous."
"I hope not," said Miss Garland, simply. They had reached a point where the wood-path forked and put forth two divergent tracks which lost themselves in a verdurous tangle. Miss Garland seemed to think that the difficulty of choice between them was a reason for giving them up and turning back. Rowland thought otherwise, and detected agreeable grounds for preference in the left-hand path. As a compromise, they sat down on a fallen log. Looking about him, Rowland espied a curious wild shrub, with a spotted crimson leaf; he went and plucked a spray of it and brought it to Miss Garland. He had never observed it before, but she immediately called it by its name. She expressed surprise at his not knowing it; it was extremely common. He presently brought her a specimen of another delicate plant, with a little blue-streaked flower. "I suppose that "s common, too," he said, "but I have never seen it--or noticed it, at least." She answered that this one was rare, and meditated a moment before she could remember its name. At last she recalled it, and expressed surprise at his having found the plant in the woods; she supposed it grew only in open marshes. Rowland complimented her on her fund of useful information.
"It "s not especially useful," she answered; "but I like to know the names of plants as I do those of my acquaintances. When we walk in the woods at home--which we do so much--it seems as unnatural not to know what to call the flowers as it would be to see some one in the town with whom we were not on speaking terms."
"Apropos of frivolity," Rowland said, "I "m sure you have very little of it, unless at West Nazareth it is considered frivolous to walk in the woods and nod to the nodding flowers. Do kindly tell me a little about yourself." And to compel her to begin, "I know you come of a race of theologians," he went on.
"No," she replied, deliberating; "they are not theologians, though they are ministers. We don"t take a very firm stand upon doctrine; we are practical, rather. We write sermons and preach them, but we do a great deal of hard work beside."
"And of this hard work what has your share been?"
"The hardest part: doing nothing."
"What do you call nothing?"
"I taught school a while: I must make the most of that. But I confess I did n"t like it. Otherwise, I have only done little things at home, as they turned up."
"What kind of things?"
"Oh, every kind. If you had seen my home, you would understand."
Rowland would have liked to make her specify; but he felt a more urgent need to respect her simplicity than he had ever felt to defer to the complex circ.u.mstance of certain other women. "To be happy, I imagine,"
he contented himself with saying, "you need to be occupied. You need to have something to expend yourself upon."
"That is not so true as it once was; now that I am older, I am sure I am less impatient of leisure. Certainly, these two months that I have been with Mrs. Hudson, I have had a terrible amount of it. And yet I have liked it! And now that I am probably to be with her all the while that her son is away, I look forward to more with a resignation that I don"t quite know what to make of."
"It is settled, then, that you are to remain with your cousin?"
"It depends upon their writing from home that I may stay. But that is probable. Only I must not forget," she said, rising, "that the ground for my doing so is that she be not left alone."
"I am glad to know," said Rowland, "that I shall probably often hear about you. I a.s.sure you I shall often think about you!" These words were half impulsive, half deliberate. They were the simple truth, and he had asked himself why he should not tell her the truth. And yet they were not all of it; her hearing the rest would depend upon the way she received this. She received it not only, as Rowland foresaw, without a shadow of coquetry, of any apparent thought of listening to it gracefully, but with a slight movement of nervous deprecation, which seemed to betray itself in the quickening of her step. Evidently, if Rowland was to take pleasure in hearing about her, it would have to be a highly disinterested pleasure. She answered nothing, and Rowland too, as he walked beside her, was silent; but as he looked along the shadow-woven wood-path, what he was really facing was a level three years of disinterestedness. He ushered them in by talking composed civility until he had brought Miss Garland back to her companions.
He saw her but once again. He was obliged to be in New York a couple of days before sailing, and it was arranged that Roderick should overtake him at the last moment. The evening before he left Northampton he went to say farewell to Mrs. Hudson. The ceremony was brief. Rowland soon perceived that the poor little lady was in the melting mood, and, as he dreaded her tears, he compressed a mult.i.tude of solemn promises into a silent hand-shake and took his leave. Miss Garland, she had told him, was in the back-garden with Roderick: he might go out to them. He did so, and as he drew near he heard Roderick"s high-pitched voice ringing behind the shrubbery. In a moment, emerging, he found Miss Garland leaning against a tree, with her cousin before her talking with great emphasis. He asked pardon for interrupting them, and said he wished only to bid her good-by. She gave him her hand and he made her his bow in silence. "Don"t forget," he said to Roderick, as he turned away. "And don"t, in this company, repent of your bargain."
"I shall not let him," said Miss Garland, with something very like gayety. "I shall see that he is punctual. He must go! I owe you an apology for having doubted that he ought to." And in spite of the dusk Rowland could see that she had an even finer smile than he had supposed.
Roderick was punctual, eagerly punctual, and they went. Rowland for several days was occupied with material cares, and lost sight of his sentimental perplexities. But they only slumbered, and they were sharply awakened. The weather was fine, and the two young men always sat together upon deck late into the evening. One night, toward the last, they were at the stern of the great ship, watching her grind the solid blackness of the ocean into phosph.o.r.escent foam. They talked on these occasions of everything conceivable, and had the air of having no secrets from each other. But it was on Roderick"s conscience that this air belied him, and he was too frank by nature, moreover, for permanent reticence on any point.
"I must tell you something," he said at last. "I should like you to know it, and you will be so glad to know it. Besides, it "s only a question of time; three months hence, probably, you would have guessed it. I am engaged to Mary Garland."
Rowland sat staring; though the sea was calm, it seemed to him that the ship gave a great dizzying lurch. But in a moment he contrived to answer coherently: "Engaged to Miss Garland! I never supposed--I never imagined"--
"That I was in love with her?" Roderick interrupted. "Neither did I, until this last fortnight. But you came and put me into such ridiculous good-humor that I felt an extraordinary desire to tell some woman that I adored her. Miss Garland is a magnificent girl; you know her too little to do her justice. I have been quietly learning to know her, these past three months, and have been falling in love with her without being conscious of it. It appeared, when I spoke to her, that she had a kindness for me. So the thing was settled. I must of course make some money before we can marry. It "s rather droll, certainly, to engage one"s self to a girl whom one is going to leave the next day, for years.
We shall be condemned, for some time to come, to do a terrible deal of abstract thinking about each other. But I wanted her blessing on my career and I could not help asking for it. Unless a man is unnaturally selfish he needs to work for some one else than himself, and I am sure I shall run a smoother and swifter course for knowing that that fine creature is waiting, at Northampton, for news of my greatness. If ever I am a dull companion and over-addicted to moping, remember in justice to me that I am in love and that my sweetheart is five thousand miles away."
Rowland listened to all this with a sort of feeling that fortune had played him an elaborately-devised trick. It had lured him out into mid-ocean and smoothed the sea and stilled the winds and given him a singularly sympathetic comrade, and then it had turned and delivered him a thumping blow in mid-chest. "Yes," he said, after an attempt at the usual formal congratulation, "you certainly ought to do better--with Miss Garland waiting for you at Northampton."
Roderick, now that he had broken ground, was eloquent and rung a hundred changes on the a.s.surance that he was a very happy man. Then at last, suddenly, his climax was a yawn, and he declared that he must go to bed.
Rowland let him go alone, and sat there late, between sea and sky.
CHAPTER III. Rome
One warm, still day, late in the Roman autumn, our two young men were sitting beneath one of the high-stemmed pines of the Villa Ludovisi.
They had been spending an hour in the mouldy little garden-house, where the colossal mask of the famous Juno looks out with blank eyes from that dusky corner which must seem to her the last possible stage of a lapse from Olympus. Then they had wandered out into the gardens, and were lounging away the morning under the spell of their magical picturesqueness. Roderick declared that he would go nowhere else; that, after the Juno, it was a profanation to look at anything but sky and trees. There was a fresco of Guercino, to which Rowland, though he had seen it on his former visit to Rome, went dutifully to pay his respects.