Rowland solemnly shrugged his shoulders; it seemed to him that he had nothing more to say.But as the others were going, a last light pulsation of the sense of undischarged duty led him to address to Roderick a few words of parting advice.
"You 'll find the Villa Pandolfini very delightful, very comfortable,"he said."You ought to be very contented there.Whether you work or whether you loaf, it 's a place for an artist to be happy in.
I hope you will work."
"I hope I may!" said Roderick with a magnificent smile.
"When we meet again, have something to show me.""When we meet again? Where the deuce are you going?" Roderick demanded.
"Oh, I hardly know; over the Alps."
"Over the Alps! You 're going to leave me?" Roderick cried.
Rowland had most distinctly meant to leave him, but his resolution immediately wavered.He glanced at Mrs.Hudson and saw that her eyebrows were lifted and her lips parted in soft irony.
She seemed to accuse him of a craven shirking of trouble, to demand of him to repair his cruel havoc in her life by a solemn renewal of zeal.
But Roderick's expectations were the oddest! Such as they were, Rowland asked himself why he should n't make a bargain with them.
"You desire me to go with you?" he asked.
"If you don't go, I won't--that 's all! How in the world shall I get through the summer without you?""How will you get through it with me? That 's the question.""I don't pretend to say; the future is a dead blank.
But without you it 's not a blank--it 's certain damnation!""Mercy, mercy!" murmured Mrs.Hudson.
Rowland made an effort to stand firm, and for a moment succeeded.
"If I go with you, will you try to work?"Roderick, up to this moment, had been looking as unperturbed as if the deep agitation of the day before were a thing of the remote past.
But at these words his face changed formidably; he flushed and scowled, and all his passion returned."Try to work!" he cried.
"Try--try! work--work! In God's name don't talk that way, or you 'll drive me mad! Do you suppose I 'm trying not to work?
Do you suppose I stand rotting here for the fun of it?
Don't you suppose I would try to work for myself before Itried for you?"
"Mr.Mallet," cried Mrs.Hudson, piteously, "will you leave me alone with this?"Rowland turned to her and informed her, gently, that he would go with her to Florence.After he had so pledged himself he thought not at all of the pain of his position as mediator between the mother's resentful grief and the son's incurable weakness; he drank deep, only, of the satisfaction of not separating from Mary Garland.
If the future was a blank to Roderick, it was hardly less so to himself.
He had at moments a lively foreboding of impending calamity.
He paid it no especial deference, but it made him feel indisposed to take the future into his account.When, on his going to take leave of Madame Grandoni, this lady asked at what time he would come back to Rome, he answered that he was coming back either never or forever.
When she asked him what he meant, he said he really could n't tell her, and parted from her with much genuine emotion;the more so, doubtless, that she blessed him in a quite loving, maternal fashion, and told him she honestly believed him to be the best fellow in the world.
The Villa Pandolfini stood directly upon a small grass-grown piazza, on the top of a hill which sloped straight from one of the gates of Florence.
It offered to the outer world a long, rather low fa;alcade, colored a dull, dark yellow, and pierced with windows of various sizes, no one of which, save those on the ground floor, was on the same level with any other.
Within, it had a great, cool, gray cortile, with high, light arches around it, heavily-corniced doors, of majestic altitude, opening out of it, and a beautiful mediaeval well on one side of it.Mrs.Hudson's rooms opened into a small garden supported on immense substructions, which were planted on the farther side of the hill, as it sloped steeply away.
This garden was a charming place.Its south wall was curtained with a dense orange vine, a dozen fig-trees offered you their large-leaved shade, and over the low parapet the soft, grave Tuscan landscape kept you company.
The rooms themselves were as high as chapels and as cool as royal sepulchres.
Silence, peace, and security seemed to abide in the ancient house and make it an ideal refuge for aching hearts.Mrs.Hudson had a stunted, brown-faced Maddalena, who wore a crimson handkerchief passed over her coarse, black locks and tied under her sharp, pertinacious chin, and a smile which was as brilliant as a prolonged flash of lightning.
She smiled at everything in life, especially the things she did n't like and which kept her talent for mendacity in healthy exercise.
A glance, a word, a motion was sufficient to make her show her teeth at you like a cheerful she-wolf.This inexpugnable smile constituted her whole vocabulary in her dealings with her melancholy mistress, to whom she had been bequeathed by the late occupant of the apartment, and who, to Rowland's satisfaction, promised to be diverted from her maternal sorrows by the still deeper perplexities of Maddalena's theory of roasting, sweeping, and bed-making.
Rowland took rooms at a villa a trifle nearer Florence, whence in the summer mornings he had five minutes'
walk in the sharp, black, shadow-strip projected by winding, flower-topped walls, to join his friends.The life at the Villa Pandolfini, when it had fairly defined itself, was tranquil and monotonous, but it might have borrowed from exquisite circumstance an absorbing charm.If a sensible shadow rested upon it, this was because it had an inherent vice;it was feigning a repose which it very scantily felt.
Roderick had lost no time in giving the full measure of his uncompromising chagrin, and as he was the central figure of the little group, as he held its heart-strings all in his own hand, it reflected faithfully the eclipse of his own genius.
