"I am dying to see it in the marble, with a red velvet screen behind it,"said Mrs.Light.
"Placed there under the Sassoferrato!" Christina went on.
"I hope you keep well in mind, Mr.Hudson, that you have not a grain of property in your work, and that if mamma chooses, she may have it photographed and the copies sold in the Piazza di Spagna, at five francs apiece, without your having a sou of the profits.""Amen!" said Roderick."It was so nominated in the bond.
My profits are here!" and he tapped his forehead.
"It would be prettier if you said here!" And Christina touched her heart.
"My precious child, how you do run on!" murmured Mrs.Light.
"It is Mr.Mallet," the young girl answered.
"I can't talk a word of sense so long as he is in the room.
I don't say that to make you go," she added, "I say it simply to justify myself."Rowland bowed in silence.Roderick declared that he must get at work and requested Christina to take her usual position, and Mrs.Light proposed to her visitor that they should adjourn to her boudoir.
This was a small room, hardly more spacious than an alcove, opening out of the drawing-room and having no other issue.
Here, as they entered, on a divan near the door, Rowland perceived the Cavaliere Giacosa, with his arms folded, his head dropped upon his breast, and his eyes closed.
"Sleeping at his post!" said Rowland with a kindly laugh.
"That 's a punishable offense," rejoined Mrs.Light, sharply.
She was on the point of calling him, in the same tone, when he suddenly opened his eyes, stared a moment, and then rose with a smile and a bow.
"Excuse me, dear lady," he said, "I was overcome by the--the great heat."
"Nonsense, Cavaliere!" cried the lady, "you know we are perishing here with the cold! You had better go and cool yourself in one of the other rooms.""I obey, dear lady," said the Cavaliere; and with another smile and bow to Rowland he departed, walking very discreetly on his toes.
Rowland out-stayed him but a short time, for he was not fond of Mrs.Light, and he found nothing very inspiring in her frank intimation that if he chose, he might become a favorite.He was disgusted with himself for pleasing her; he confounded his fatal urbanity.
In the court-yard of the palace he overtook the Cavaliere, who had stopped at the porter's lodge to say a word to his little girl.
She was a young lady of very tender years and she wore a very dirty pinafore.
He had taken her up in his arms and was singing an infantine rhyme to her, and she was staring at him with big, soft Roman eyes.
On seeing Rowland he put her down with a kiss, and stepped forward with a conscious grin, an unresentful admission that he was sensitive both to chubbiness and ridicule.Rowland began to pity him again;he had taken his dismissal from the drawing-room so meekly.
"You don't keep your promise," said Rowland, "to come and see me.
Don't forget it.I want you to tell me about Rome thirty years ago.""Thirty years ago? Ah, dear sir, Rome is Rome still; a place where strange things happen! But happy things too, since Ihave your renewed permission to call.You do me too much honor.
Is it in the morning or in the evening that I should least intrude?""Take your own time, Cavaliere; only come, sometime.
I depend upon you," said Rowland.
The Cavaliere thanked him with an humble obeisance.
To the Cavaliere, too, he felt that he was, in Roman phrase, sympathetic, but the idea of pleasing this extremely reduced gentleman was not disagreeable to him.
Miss Light's bust stood for a while on exhibition in Roderick's studio, and half the foreign colony came to see it.
With the completion of his work, however, Roderick's visits at the Palazzo F---- by no means came to an end.
He spent half his time in Mrs.Light's drawing-room, and began to be talked about as "attentive" to Christina.
The success of the bust restored his equanimity, and in the garrulity of his good-humor he suffered Rowland to see that she was just now the object uppermost in his thoughts.
Rowland, when they talked of her, was rather listener than speaker;partly because Roderick's own tone was so resonant and exultant, and partly because, when his companion laughed at him for having called her unsafe, he was too perplexed to defend himself.
The impression remained that she was unsafe; that she was a complex, willful, passionate creature, who might easily engulf a too confiding spirit in the eddies of her capricious temper.
And yet he strongly felt her charm; the eddies had a strange fascination! Roderick, in the glow of that renewed admiration provoked by the fixed attention of portrayal, was never weary of descanting on the extraordinary perfection of her beauty.
"I had no idea of it," he said, "till I began to look at her with an eye to reproducing line for line and curve for curve.
Her face is the most exquisite piece of modeling that ever came from creative hands.Not a line without meaning, not a hair's breadth that is not admirably finished.And then her mouth!
It 's as if a pair of lips had been shaped to utter pure truth without doing it dishonor!" Later, after he had been working for a week, he declared if Miss Light were inordinately plain, she would still be the most fascinating of women."I 've quite forgotten her beauty,"he said, "or rather I have ceased to perceive it as something distinct and defined, something independent of the rest of her.
She is all one, and all consummately interesting!""What does she do--what does she say, that is so remarkable?"Rowland had asked.
"Say? Sometimes nothing--sometimes everything.She is never the same.
Sometimes she walks in and takes her place without a word, without a smile, gravely, stiffly, as if it were an awful bore.
She hardly looks at me, and she walks away without even glancing at my work.
On other days she laughs and chatters and asks endless questions, and pours out the most irresistible nonsense.She is a creature of moods;you can't count upon her; she keeps observation on the stretch.