Very odd, you may say, that at this time of day Rowland should still be brooding over a plain girl of whom he had had but the lightest of glimpses two years before; very odd that so deep an impression should have been made by so lightly-pressed an instrument.
We must admit the oddity and offer simply in explanation that his sentiment apparently belonged to that species of emotion of which, by the testimony of the poets, the very name and essence is oddity.One night he slept but half an hour;he found his thoughts taking a turn which excited him portentously.
He walked up and down his room half the night.It looked out on the Arno; the noise of the river came in at the open window;he felt like dressing and going down into the streets.
Toward morning he flung himself into a chair; though he was wide awake he was less excited.It seemed to him that he saw his idea from the outside, that he judged it and condemned it;yet it stood there before him, distinct, and in a certain way imperious.During the day he tried to banish it and forget it;but it fascinated, haunted, at moments frightened him.
He tried to amuse himself, paid visits, resorted to several rather violent devices for diverting his thoughts.If on the morrow he had committed a crime, the persons whom he had seen that day would have testified that he had talked strangely and had not seemed like himself.He felt certainly very unlike himself;long afterwards, in retrospect, he used to reflect that during those days he had for a while been literally beside himself.
His idea persisted; it clung to him like a sturdy beggar.
The sense of the matter, roughly expressed, was this:
If Roderick was really going, as he himself had phrased it, to "fizzle out," one might help him on the way--one might smooth the descensus Averno.For forty-eight hours there swam before Rowland's eyes a vision of Roderick, graceful and beautiful as he passed, plunging, like a diver, from an eminence into a misty gulf.The gulf was destruction, annihilation, death;but if death was decreed, why should not the agony be brief?
Beyond this vision there faintly glimmered another, as in the children's game of the "magic lantern" a picture is superposed on the white wall before the last one has quite faded.
It represented Mary Garland standing there with eyes in which the horror seemed slowly, slowly to expire, and hanging, motionless hands which at last made no resistance when his own offered to take them.When, of old, a man was burnt at the stake it was cruel to have to be present; but if one was present it was kind to lend a hand to pile up the fuel and make the flames do their work quickly and the smoke muffle up the victim.
With all deference to your kindness, this was perhaps an obligation you would especially feel if you had a reversionary interest in something the victim was to leave behind him.
One morning, in the midst of all this, Rowland walked heedlessly out of one of the city gates and found himself on the road to Fiesole.It was a completely lovely day;the March sun felt like May, as the English poet of Florence says;the thick-blossomed shrubs and vines that hung over the walls of villa and podere flung their odorous promise into the warm, still air.Rowland followed the winding, climbing lanes;lingered, as he got higher, beneath the rusty cypresses, beside the low parapets, where you look down on the charming city and sweep the vale of the Arno; reached the little square before the cathedral, and rested awhile in the massive, dusky church; then climbed higher, to the Franciscan convent which is poised on the very apex of the mountain.
He rang at the little gateway; a shabby, senile, red-faced brother admitted him with almost maudlin friendliness.There was a dreary chill in the chapel and the corridors, and he passed rapidly through them into the delightfully steep and tangled old garden which runs wild over the forehead of the great hill.
He had been in it before, and he was very fond of it.
The garden hangs in the air, and you ramble from terrace to terrace and wonder how it keeps from slipping down, in full consummation of its bereaved forlornness, into the nakedly romantic gorge beneath.It was just noon when Rowland went in, and after roaming about awhile he flung himself in the sun on a mossy stone bench and pulled his hat over his eyes.
The short shadows of the brown-coated cypresses above him had grown very long, and yet he had not passed back through the convent.
One of the monks, in his faded snuff-colored robe, came wandering out into the garden, reading his greasy little breviary.
Suddenly he came toward the bench on which Rowland had stretched himself, and paused a moment, attentively.
Rowland was lingering there still; he was sitting with his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees.
He seemed not to have heard the sandaled tread of the good brother, but as the monk remained watching him, he at last looked up.
It was not the ignoble old man who had admitted him, but a pale, gaunt personage, of a graver and more ascetic, and yet of a benignant, aspect.Rowland's face bore the traces of extreme trouble.The frate kept his finger in his little book, and folded his arms picturesquely across his breast.
It can hardly be determined whether his attitude, as he bent his sympathetic Italian eye upon Rowland, was a happy accident or the result of an exquisite spiritual discernment.
To Rowland, at any rate, under the emotion of that moment, it seemed blessedly opportune.He rose and approached the monk, and laid his hand on his arm.
"My brother," he said, "did you ever see the Devil?"The frate gazed, gravely, and crossed himself."Heaven forbid!""He was here," Rowland went on, "here in this lovely garden, as he was once in Paradise, half an hour ago.But have no fear;I drove him out." And Rowland stooped and picked up his hat, which had rolled away into a bed of cyclamen, in vague symbolism of an actual physical tussle.
"You have been tempted, my brother?" asked the friar, tenderly.
"Hideously!"