第45章

An uninitiated observer, hearing him, would have imagined her to be a person of a certain age--possibly an affectionate maiden aunt--who had once done him a kindness which he highly appreciated:

perhaps presented him with a check for a thousand dollars.

Rowland noted the difference between his present frankness and his reticence during the first six months of his engagement, and sometimes wondered whether it was not rather an anomaly that he should expatiate more largely as the happy event receded.

He had wondered over the whole matter, first and last, in a great many different ways, and looked at it in all possible lights.There was something terribly hard to explain in the fact of his having fallen in love with his cousin.

She was not, as Rowland conceived her, the sort of girl he would have been likely to fancy, and the operation of sentiment, in all cases so mysterious, was particularly so in this one.

Just why it was that Roderick should not logically have fancied Miss Garland, his companion would have been at loss to say, but I think the conviction had its roots in an unformulated comparison between himself and the accepted suitor.

Roderick and he were as different as two men could be, and yet Roderick had taken it into his head to fall in love with a woman for whom he himself had been keeping in reserve, for years, a profoundly characteristic passion.

That if he chose to conceive a great notion of the merits of Roderick's mistress, the irregularity here was hardly Roderick's, was a view of the case to which poor Rowland did scanty justice.There were women, he said to himself, whom it was every one's business to fall in love with a little--women beautiful, brilliant, artful, easily fascinating.

Miss Light, for instance, was one of these; every man who spoke to her did so, if not in the language, at least with something of the agitation, the divine tremor, of a lover.

There were other women--they might have great beauty, they might have small; perhaps they were generally to be classified as plain--whose triumphs in this line were rare, but immutably permanent.

Such a one pre; aueminently, was Mary Garland.

Upon the doctrine of probabilities, it was unlikely that she had had an equal charm for each of them, and was it not possible, therefore, that the charm for Roderick had been simply the charm imagined, unquestioningly accepted:

the general charm of youth, sympathy, kindness--of the present feminine, in short--enhanced indeed by several fine facial traits? The charm in this case for Rowland was--the charm!--the mysterious, individual, essential woman.

There was an element in the charm, as his companion saw it, which Rowland was obliged to recognize, but which he forbore to ponder; the rather important attraction, namely, of reciprocity.

As to Miss Garland being in love with Roderick and becoming charming thereby, this was a point with which his imagination ventured to take no liberties; partly because it would have been indelicate, and partly because it would have been vain.

He contented himself with feeling that the young girl was still as vivid an image in his memory as she had been five days after he left her, and with drifting nearer and nearer to the impression that at just that crisis any other girl would have answered Roderick's sentimental needs as well.

Any other girl indeed would do so still! Roderick had confessed as much to him at Geneva, in saying that he had been taking at Baden the measure of his susceptibility to female beauty.

His extraordinary success in modeling the bust of the beautiful Miss Light was pertinent evidence of this amiable quality.

She sat to him, repeatedly, for a fortnight, and the work was rapidly finished.On one of the last days Roderick asked Rowland to come and give his opinion as to what was still wanting;for the sittings had continued to take place in Mrs.Light's apartment, the studio being pronounced too damp for the fair model.

When Rowland presented himself, Christina, still in her white dress, with her shoulders bare, was standing before a mirror, readjusting her hair, the arrangement of which, on this occasion, had apparently not met the young sculptor's approval.

He stood beside her, directing the operation with a peremptoriness of tone which seemed to Rowland to denote a considerable advance in intimacy.As Rowland entered, Christina was losing patience.

"Do it yourself, then!" she cried, and with a rapid movement unloosed the great coil of her tresses and let them fall over her shoulders.

They were magnificent, and with her perfect face dividing their rippling flow she looked like some immaculate saint of legend being led to martyrdom.Rowland's eyes presumably betrayed his admiration, but her own manifested no consciousness of it.

If Christina was a coquette, as the remarkable timeliness of this incident might have suggested, she was not a superficial one.

"Hudson 's a sculptor," said Rowland, with warmth.

"But if I were only a painter!"

"Thank Heaven you are not!" said Christina."I am having quite enough of this minute inspection of my charms.""My dear young man, hands off!" cried Mrs.Light, coming forward and seizing her daughter's hair."Christina, love, I am surprised.""Is it indelicate?" Christina asked."I beg Mr.Mallet's pardon."Mrs.Light gathered up the dusky locks and let them fall through her fingers, glancing at her visitor with a significant smile.