He lowered his pitch and answered, simply, "Because I wanted to do something for you.""Suppose you had fallen," said Miss Garland.
"I believed I would not fall.And you believed it, I think.""I believed nothing.I simply trusted you, as you asked me.""Quod erat demonstrandum!" cried Rowland."I think you know Latin."When our four friends were established in what I have called their grassy valley, there was a good deal of scrambling over slopes both grassy and stony, a good deal of flower-plucking on narrow ledges, a great many long walks, and, thanks to the lucid mountain air, not a little exhilaration.Mrs.Hudson was obliged to intermit her suspicions of the deleterious atmosphere of the old world, and to acknowledge the edifying purity of the breezes of Engelthal.
She was certainly more placid than she had been in Italy;having always lived in the country, she had missed in Rome and Florence that social solitude mitigated by bushes and rocks which is so dear to the true New England temperament.
The little unpainted inn at Engelthal, with its plank partitions, its milk-pans standing in the sun, its "help," in the form of angular young women of the country-side, reminded her of places of summer sojourn in her native land; and the beautiful historic chambers of the Villa Pandolfini passed from her memory without a regret, and without having in the least modified her ideal of domiciliary grace.
Roderick had changed his sky, but he had not changed his mind;his humor was still that of which he had given Rowland a glimpse in that tragic explosion on the Lake of Como.He kept his despair to himself, and he went doggedly about the ordinary business of life;but it was easy to see that his spirit was mortally heavy, and that he lived and moved and talked simply from the force of habit.
In that sad half-hour among the Italian olives there had been such a fierce sincerity in his tone, that Rowland began to abdicate the critical attitude.He began to feel that it was essentially vain to appeal to the poor fellow's will; there was no will left;its place was an impotent void.This view of the case indeed was occasionally contravened by certain indications on Roderick's part of the power of resistance to disagreeable obligations:
one might still have said, if one had been disposed to be didactic at any hazard, that there was a method in his madness, that his moral energy had its sleeping and its waking hours, and that, in a cause that pleased it, it was capable of rising with the dawn.But on the other hand, pleasure, in this case, was quite at one with effort; evidently the greatest bliss in life, for Roderick, would have been to have a plastic idea.
And then, it was impossible not to feel tenderly to a despair which had so ceased to be aggressive--not to forgive a great deal of apathy to a temper which had so unlearned its irritability.
Roderick said frankly that Switzerland made him less miserable than Italy, and the Alps seemed less to mock at his enforced leisure than the Apennines.He indulged in long rambles, generally alone, and was very fond of climbing into dizzy places, where no sound could overtake him, and there, flinging himself on the never-trodden moss, of pulling his hat over his eyes and lounging away the hours in perfect immobility.Rowland sometimes walked with him; though Roderick never invited him, he seemed duly grateful for his society.
Rowland now made it a rule to treat him like a perfectly sane man, to assume that all things were well with him, and never to allude to the prosperity he had forfeited or to the work he was not doing.
He would have still said, had you questioned him, that Roderick's condition was a mood--certainly a puzzling one.It might last yet for many a weary hour; but it was a long lane that had no turning.
Roderick's blues would not last forever.Rowland's interest in Miss Garland's relations with her cousin was still profoundly attentive, and perplexed as he was on all sides, he found nothing transparent here.
After their arrival at Engelthal, Roderick appeared to seek the young girl's society more than he had done hitherto, and this revival of ardor could not fail to set his friend a-wondering.They sat together and strolled together, and Miss Garland often read aloud to him.
One day, on their coming to dinner, after he had been lying half the morning at her feet, in the shadow of a rock, Rowland asked him what she had been reading.
"I don't know," Roderick said, "I don't heed the sense."Miss Garland heard this, and Rowland looked at her.
She looked at Roderick sharply and with a little blush.
"I listen to Mary," Roderick continued, "for the sake of her voice.
It 's distractingly sweet!" At this Miss Garland's blush deepened, and she looked away.
Rowland, in Florence, as we know, had suffered his imagination to wander in the direction of certain conjectures which the reader may deem unflattering to Miss Garland's constancy.
He had asked himself whether her faith in Roderick had not faltered, and that demand of hers which had brought about his own departure for Switzerland had seemed almost equivalent to a confession that she needed his help to believe.
Rowland was essentially a modest man, and he did not risk the supposition that Miss Garland had contrasted him with Roderick to his own advantage; but he had a certain consciousness of duty resolutely done which allowed itself to fancy, at moments, that it might be not illogically rewarded by the bestowal of such stray grains of enthusiasm as had crumbled away from her estimate of his companion.
If some day she had declared, in a sudden burst of passion, that she was outwearied and sickened, and that she gave up her recreant lover, Rowland's expectation would have gone half-way to meet her.And certainly if her passion had taken this course no generous critic would utterly condemn her.
She had been neglected, ignored, forsaken, treated with a contempt which no girl of a fine temper could endure.