No one had ventured upon the cheerful commonplace of saying that the change of air and of scene would restore his spirits; this would have had, under the circumstances, altogether too silly a sound.
The change in question had done nothing of the sort, and his companions had, at least, the comfort of their perspicacity.
An essential spring had dried up within him, and there was no visible spiritual law for making it flow again.
He was rarely violent, he expressed little of the irritation and ennui that he must have constantly felt; it was as if he believed that a spiritual miracle for his redemption was just barely possible, and was therefore worth waiting for.
The most that one could do, however, was to wait grimly and doggedly, suppressing an imprecation as, from time to time, one looked at one's watch.An attitude of positive urbanity toward life was not to be expected; it was doing one's duty to hold one's tongue and keep one's hands off one's own windpipe, and other people's.Roderick had long silences, fits of profound lethargy, almost of stupefaction.
He used to sit in the garden by the hour, with his head thrown back, his legs outstretched, his hands in his pockets, and his eyes fastened upon the blinding summer sky.He would gather a dozen books about him, tumble them out on the ground, take one into his lap, and leave it with the pages unturned.
These moods would alternate with hours of extreme restlessness, during which he mysteriously absented himself.
He bore the heat of the Italian summer like a salamander, and used to start off at high noon for long walks over the hills.
He often went down into Florence, rambled through her close, dim streets, and lounged away mornings in the churches and galleries.
On many of these occasions Rowland bore him company, for they were the times when he was most like his former self.
Before Michael Angelo's statues and the pictures of the early Tuscans, he quite forgot his own infelicities, and picked up the thread of his old aesthetic loquacity.
He had a particular fondness for Andrea del Sarto, and affirmed that if he had been a painter he would have taken the author of the Madonna del Sacco for his model.He found in Florence some of his Roman friends, and went down on certain evenings to meet them.More than once he asked Mary Garland to go with him into town, and showed her the things he most cared for.
He had some modeling clay brought up to the villa and deposited in a room suitable for his work; but when this had been done he turned the key in the door and the clay never was touched.
His eye was heavy and his hand cold, and his mother put up a secret prayer that he might be induced to see a doctor.
But on a certain occasion, when her prayer became articulate, he had a great outburst of anger and begged her to know, once for all, that his health was better than it had ever been.
On the whole, and most of the time, he was a sad spectacle;he looked so hopelessly idle.If he was not querulous and bitter, it was because he had taken an extraordinary vow not to be;a vow heroic, for him, a vow which those who knew him well had the tenderness to appreciate.Talking with him was like skating on thin ice, and his companions had a constant mental vision of spots designated "dangerous."This was a difficult time for Rowland; he said to himself that he would endure it to the end, but that it must be his last adventure of the kind.
Mrs.Hudson divided her time between looking askance at her son, with her hands tightly clasped about her pocket-handkerchief, as if she were wringing it dry of the last hour's tears, and turning her eyes much more directly upon Rowland, in the mutest, the feeblest, the most intolerable reproachfulness.She never phrased her accusations, but he felt that in the unillumined void of the poor lady's mind they loomed up like vaguely-outlined monsters.Her demeanor caused him the acutest suffering, and if, at the outset of his enterprise, he had seen, how dimly soever, one of those plaintive eye-beams in the opposite scale, the brilliancy of Roderick's promises would have counted for little.
They made their way to the softest spot in his conscience and kept it chronically aching.If Mrs.Hudson had been loquacious and vulgar, he would have borne even a less valid persecution with greater fortitude.
But somehow, neat and noiseless and dismally lady-like, as she sat there, keeping her grievance green with her soft-dropping tears, her displeasure conveyed an overwhelming imputation of brutality.
He felt like a reckless trustee who has speculated with the widow's mite, and is haunted with the reflection of ruin that he sees in her tearful eyes.
He did everything conceivable to be polite to Mrs.Hudson, and to treat her with distinguished deference.Perhaps his exasperated nerves made him overshoot the mark, and rendered his civilities a trifle peremptory.
She seemed capable of believing that he was trying to make a fool of her;she would have thought him cruelly recreant if he had suddenly departed in desperation, and yet she gave him no visible credit for his constancy.
Women are said by some authorities to be cruel; I don't know how true this is, but it may at least be pertinent to remark that Mrs.Hudson was very much of a woman.It often seemed to Rowland that he had too decidedly forfeited his freedom, and that there was something positively grotesque in a man of his age and circumstances living in such a moral bondage.
But Mary Garland had helped him before, and she helped him now--helped him not less than he had assured himself she would when he found himself drifting to Florence.Yet her help was rendered in the same unconscious, unacknowledged fashion as before; there was no explicit change in their relations.
