Roderick Hudson

“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 sculptor whom we don’t know—it is a matter that needs reflection. It is not a favor that ‘s to be had for the mere asking.”

“If I don’t make her from life,” said Roderick, with energy, “I will make her from memory, and if the thing ‘s to be done, you had better have it done as well as possible.”

“Mamma hesitates,” said Miss Light, “because she does n’t know whether you mean she shall pay you for the bust. I can assure you that she will not pay you a sou.”

“My darling, you forget yourself,” said Mrs. Light, with an attempt at majestic severity. “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,” interposed the young girl, “how can you carry a marble bust about the world with you? Is it not enough to drag the poor original?”

“My dear, you ‘re nonsensical!” cried Mrs. Light, almost angrily.

“You can always sell it,” said the young girl, with the same artful artlessness.

Mrs. Light turned to Rowland, who pitied her, flushed and irritated. “She is very wicked to-day!”

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 avert the coming storm. “You had better not refuse,” he said to Miss Light, “until you have seen Mr. Hudson’s things in the marble. Your mother is to come and look at some that I possess.”

“Thank you; I have no doubt you will see us. I dare say Mr. Hudson is 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!” cried Roderick, 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, paying, to Rowland’s knowledge, his first compliment.

“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 are 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 had gone. “There ‘s my fortune!”

“She is certainly very beautiful,” said Rowland. “But I ‘m sorry you have undertaken her bust.”

“And why, pray?”

“I suspect it will bring trouble with it.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“I hardly know. They are queer people. The mamma, I suspect, is the least bit of an adventuress. Heaven knows what the daughter is.”

“She ‘s a goddess!” cried Roderick.

“Just so. She is all the more dangerous.”

“Dangerous? What will she do to me? She does n’t bite, I imagine.”

“It remains to be seen. There are two kinds of women—you ought to know it by this time—the safe and the unsafe. Miss Light, if I am not mistaken, is one of the unsafe. A word to the wise!”

“Much obliged!” said Roderick, and he began to whistle a triumphant air, in honor, apparently, of the advent of his beautiful model.

In calling this young lady and her mamma “queer people,” Rowland but roughly expressed his sentiment. They were so marked a variation from the monotonous troop of his fellow-country people 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. For a 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 habitues of the Pincian plenty to talk about. The echoes of their commentary reached Rowland’s ears; but he had little taste for random gossip, and desired a distinctly veracious informant. He had found one in the person of Madame Grandoni, for whom Mrs. Light and her beautiful daughter were a pair of old friends.

“I have 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 have 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 has not since been seen in Rome, except for a few days last winter, 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 gentleman. 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 mahl-stick 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 then go forth, and, her beauty helping, 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 that his family procured him his place to keep him out of harm’s way. 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 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 have 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 (I was told), run her errands, get her opera-boxes, and 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 afterwards 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 rumor 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, but I consider that old Filomena, my washer-woman, is in essentials a greater one. But certainly, after all, 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 F–, she keeps her carriage, and Christina and she, between them, must have a pretty milliner’s bill. Giacosa has turned up again, looking as if he had been kept on ice at Ancona, for her return.”

“What sort of education,” Rowland asked, “do you imagine the mother’s adventures to have been for the daughter?”

“A strange school! 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 suspect, is very clever. When I saw her, I was amazed at her beauty, and, certainly, if there is 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 is a beauty of beauties, that her face is her fortune, and that, if she plays her cards, she may marry a duke. If she has not been fatally corrupted, she is a very superior girl. My own impression is that she is a mixture of good and bad, of ambition and indifference. Mrs. Light, having failed to make her own fortune in matrimony, has transferred her hopes to her daughter, and nursed them till they have become a kind of monomania. She has a hobby, which she rides in secret; but some day she will let you see it. I ‘m sure that if you go in some evening unannounced, you will find her scanning the tea-leaves in her cup, or telling her daughter’s fortune with a greasy pack of cards, preserved for the purpose. She promises her a prince—a reigning prince. But if Mrs. Light is silly, she is shrewd, too, and, lest considerations of state should deny her prince 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 must be rather uncomfortable. She is 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 transparent ambition would be very ridiculous; but there is something in the girl, as one looks at her, that seems to make it very possible she is marked out for one of those wonderful romantic fortunes that history now and then relates. ‘Who, after all, was the Empress of the French?’ Mrs. Light is forever saying. ‘And beside Christina the Empress is a dowdy!’”

“And what does Christina say?”

“She makes no scruple, as you know, of saying that her mother is a fool. What she thinks, heaven knows. I suspect that, practically, she does not commit herself. She is excessively proud, and thinks herself good enough to occupy the highest station in the world; but she knows that her mother talks nonsense, and that even a beautiful girl may look awkward in making unsuccessful advances. So she remains superbly indifferent, and lets her mother take the risks. If the prince is secured, so much the better; if he is not, she need never confess to herself that even a prince has slighted her.”

“Your report is as solid,” Rowland said to Madame Grandoni, thanking her, “as if it had been prepared 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 men know how to make yourselves comfortable. If one of us poor women had half as many easy-chairs and knick-knacks, 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 statues? 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 is Mr. What ‘s-his-name, the young sculptor? Why is n’t he here to be complimented?”

Christina had remained but for a moment in the chair which Rowland had placed for her, had given but a cursory glance at the statues, and then, leaving her place, had begun to wander round the room—looking at herself in the mirror, touching the ornaments and curiosities, glancing at the books and prints. Rowland’s sitting-room was encumbered with bric-a-brac, and she found plenty of occupation. Rowland presently joined her, and pointed out some of the objects he most valued.

“It ‘s an odd jumble,” she said frankly. “Some things are very pretty—some are very ugly. But I like ugly things, when they have a certain look. Prettiness is terribly vulgar nowadays, and it is not every one that knows just the sort of ugliness that has chic. But chic is getting dreadfully common too. There ‘s a hint of it even in Madame Baldi’s bonnets. I like looking at people’s things,” she added in a moment, turning to Rowland and resting her eyes on him. “It helps you to find out their characters.”

“Am I to suppose,” asked Rowland, smiling, “that you have arrived at any conclusions as to mine?”

“I am rather muddled; you have too many things; one seems to contradict another. You are very artistic and yet you are very prosaic; you have what is called a ‘catholic’ taste and yet you are full of obstinate little prejudices and habits of thought, 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 am very amiable.”

“Yes, I am 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 are necessary enemies.”

“No, I don’t dislike you.”

“Worse and worse; for you certainly will not like me.”

“You are very discouraging.”

“I am fond of facing the truth, though some day you will deny that. Where is that queer friend of yours?”

“You mean Mr. Hudson. He is represented by these beautiful works.”

Miss Light looked for some moments at Roderick’s statues. “Yes,” she said, “they are not so silly as most of the things we have seen. They have no chic, and yet they are beautiful.”

“You describe them perfectly,” said Rowland. “They are beautiful, and yet they have no chic. That ‘s it!”

“If he will promise to put none into my bust, I have a mind to let him make it. A request made in those terms deserves to be granted.”

“In what terms?”