"Oh, never mind him!" said Bessie, with the brevity of contempt.
"You speak as if you did n't like him."
"I don't!" Bessie affirmed, and put Rowland to bed again.
The hammock was swung at the end of the veranda, in the thickest shade of the vines, and this fragment of dialogue had passed unnoticed.Rowland submitted a while longer to be cradled, and contented himself with listening to Mr.Hudson's voice.
It was a soft and not altogether masculine organ, and was pitched on this occasion in a somewhat plaintive and pettish key.
The young man's mood seemed fretful; he complained of the heat, of the dust, of a shoe that hurt him, of having gone on an errand a mile to the other side of the town and found the person he was in search of had left Northampton an hour before.
"Won't you have a cup of tea?" Cecilia asked."Perhaps that will restore your equanimity.""Aye, by keeping me awake all night!" said Hudson.
"At the best, it 's hard enough to go down to the office.
With my nerves set on edge by a sleepless night, I should perforce stay at home and be brutal to my poor mother.""Your mother is well, I hope."
"Oh, she 's as usual."
"And Miss Garland?"
"She 's as usual, too.Every one, everything, is as usual.
Nothing ever happens, in this benighted town.""I beg your pardon; things do happen, sometimes," said Cecilia.
"Here is a dear cousin of mine arrived on purpose to congratulate you on your statuette." And she called to Rowland to come and be introduced to Mr.Hudson.The young man sprang up with alacrity, and Rowland, coming forward to shake hands, had a good look at him in the light projected from the parlor window.
Something seemed to shine out of Hudson's face as a warning against a "compliment" of the idle, unpondered sort.
"Your statuette seems to me very good," Rowland said gravely.
"It has given me extreme pleasure."
"And my cousin knows what is good," said Cecilia.
"He 's a connoisseur."
Hudson smiled and stared."A connoisseur?" he cried, laughing."He 's the first I 've ever seen! Let me see what they look like;" and he drew Rowland nearer to the light."Have they all such good heads as that?
I should like to model yours."
"Pray do," said Cecilia."It will keep him a while.
He is running off to Europe."
"Ah, to Europe!" Hudson exclaimed with a melancholy cadence, as they sat down."Happy man!"But the note seemed to Rowland to be struck rather at random, for he perceived no echo of it in the boyish garrulity of his later talk.Hudson was a tall, slender young fellow, with a singularly mobile and intelligent face.
Rowland was struck at first only with its responsive vivacity, but in a short time he perceived it was remarkably handsome.
The features were admirably chiseled and finished, and a frank smile played over them as gracefully as a breeze among flowers.
The fault of the young man's whole structure was an excessive want of breadth.The forehead, though it was high and rounded, was narrow; the jaw and the shoulders were narrow;and the result was an air of insufficient physical substance.
But Mallet afterwards learned that this fair, slim youth could draw indefinitely upon a mysterious fund of nervous force, which outlasted and outwearied the endurance of many a sturdier temperament.
And certainly there was life enough in his eye to furnish an immortality! It was a generous dark gray eye, in which there came and went a sort of kindling glow, which would have made a ruder visage striking, and which gave at times to Hudson's harmonious face an altogether extraordinary beauty.
There was to Rowland's sympathetic sense a slightly pitiful disparity between the young sculptor's delicate countenance and the shabby gentility of his costume.
He was dressed for a visit--a visit to a pretty woman.
He was clad from head to foot in a white linen suit, which had never been remarkable for the felicity of its cut, and had now quite lost that crispness which garments of this complexion can as ill spare as the back-scene of a theatre the radiance of the footlights.He wore a vivid blue cravat, passed through a ring altogether too splendid to be valuable;he pulled and twisted, as he sat, a pair of yellow kid gloves;he emphasized his conversation with great dashes and flourishes of a light, silver-tipped walking-stick, and he kept constantly taking off and putting on one of those slouched sombreros which are the traditional property of the Virginian or Carolinian of romance.When this was on, he was very picturesque, in spite of his mock elegance; and when it was off, and he sat nursing it and turning it about and not knowing what to do with it, he could hardly be said to be awkward.
He evidently had a natural relish for brilliant accessories, and appropriated what came to his hand.This was visible in his talk, which abounded in the florid and sonorous.
He liked words with color in them.
Rowland, who was but a moderate talker, sat by in silence, while Cecilia, who had told him that she desired his opinion upon her friend, used a good deal of characteristic finesse in leading the young man to expose himself.
She perfectly succeeded, and Hudson rattled away for an hour with a volubility in which boyish unconsciousness and manly shrewdness were singularly combined.He gave his opinion on twenty topics, he opened up an endless budget of local gossip, he described his repulsive routine at the office of Messrs.
Striker and Spooner, counselors at law, and he gave with great felicity and gusto an account of the annual boat-race between Harvard and Yale, which he had lately witnessed at Worcester.
He had looked at the straining oarsmen and the swaying crowd with the eye of the sculptor.Rowland was a good deal amused and not a little interested.Whenever Hudson uttered some peculiarly striking piece of youthful grandiloquence, Cecilia broke into a long, light, familiar laugh.
"What are you laughing at?" the young man then demanded.
"Have I said anything so ridiculous?"
"Go on, go on," Cecilia replied."You are too delicious!