Henry James - Henry James - The Complete Novels (The Greatest Novelists of All Time – Book 10)

“Yes, do tell us,” said Rowland, “what to hold on by!”

“Those things of mine were tolerably good,” he answered. “But my idea was better — and that’s what I mean!”

Rowland said nothing. He was willing to wait for Roderick to complete the circle of his metamorphoses, but he had no desire to officiate as chorus to the play. If Roderick chose to fish in troubled waters, he must land his prizes himself.

“You think I ’m an impudent humbug,” the latter said at last, “coming up to moralize at this hour of the night. You think I want to throw dust into your eyes, to put you off the scent. That’s your eminently rational view of the case.”

“Excuse me from taking any view at all,” said Rowland.

“You have given me up, then?”

“No, I have merely suspended judgment. I am waiting.”

“You have ceased then positively to believe in me?”

Rowland made an angry gesture. “Oh, cruel boy! When you have hit your mark and made people care for you, you should n’t twist your weapon about at that rate in their vitals. Allow me to say I am sleepy. Good night!”

Some days afterward it happened that Rowland, on a long afternoon ramble, took his way through one of the quiet corners of the Trastevere. He was particularly fond of this part of Rome, though he could hardly have expressed the charm he found in it. As you pass away from the dusky, swarming purlieus of the Ghetto, you emerge into a region of empty, soundless, grass-grown lanes and alleys, where the shabby houses seem mouldering away in disuse, and yet your footstep brings figures of startling Roman type to the doorways. There are few monuments here, but no part of Rome seemed more historic, in the sense of being weighted with a crushing past, blighted with the melancholy of things that had had their day. When the yellow afternoon sunshine slept on the sallow, battered walls, and lengthened the shadows in the grassy courtyards of small closed churches, the place acquired a strange fascination. The church of Saint Cecilia has one of these sunny, waste-looking courts; the edifice seems abandoned to silence and the charity of chance devotion. Rowland never passed it without going in, and he was generally the only visitor. He entered it now, but found that two persons had preceded him. Both were women. One was at her prayers at one of the side altars; the other was seated against a column at the upper end of the nave. Rowland walked to the altar, and paid, in a momentary glance at the clever statue of the saint in death, in the niche beneath it, the usual tribute to the charm of polished ingenuity. As he turned away he looked at the person seated and recognized Christina Light. Seeing that she perceived him, he advanced to speak to her.

She was sitting in a listless attitude, with her hands in her lap; she seemed to be tired. She was dressed simply, as if for walking and escaping observation. When he had greeted her he glanced back at her companion, and recognized the faithful Assunta.

Christina smiled. “Are you looking for Mr. Hudson? He is not here, I am happy to say.”

“But you?” he asked. “This is a strange place to find you.”

“Not at all! People call me a strange girl, and I might as well have the comfort of it. I came to take a walk; that, by the way, is part of my strangeness. I can’t loll all the morning on a sofa, and all the afternoon in a carriage. I get horribly restless. I must move; I must do something and see something. Mamma suggests a cup of tea. Meanwhile I put on an old dress and half a dozen veils, I take Assunta under my arm, and we start on a pedestrian tour. It’s a bore that I can’t take the poodle, but he attracts attention. We trudge about everywhere; there is nothing I like so much. I hope you will congratulate me on the simplicity of my tastes.”

“I congratulate you on your wisdom. To live in Rome and not to walk would, I think, be poor pleasure. But you are terribly far from home, and I am afraid you are tired.”

“A little — enough to sit here a while.”

“Might I offer you my company while you rest?”

“If you will promise to amuse me. I am in dismal spirits.”

Rowland said he would do what he could, and brought a chair and placed it near her. He was not in love with her; he disapproved of her; he mistrusted her; and yet he felt it a kind of privilege to watch her, and he found a peculiar excitement in talking to her. The background of her nature, as he would have called it, was large and mysterious, and it emitted strange, fantastic gleams and flashes. Watching for these rather quickened one’s pulses. Moreover, it was not a disadvantage to talk to a girl who made one keep guard on one’s composure; it diminished one’s chronic liability to utter something less than revised wisdom.

Assunta had risen from her prayers, and, as he took his place, was coming back to her mistress. But Christina motioned her away. “No, no; while you are about it, say a few dozen more!” she said. “Pray for me,” she added in English. “Pray, I say nothing silly. She has been at it half an hour; I envy her capacity!”

“Have you never felt in any degree,” Rowland asked, “the fascination of Catholicism?”

“Yes, I have been through that, too! There was a time when I wanted immensely to be a nun; it was not a laughing matter. It was when I was about sixteen years old. I read the Imitation and the Life of Saint Catherine. I fully believed in the miracles of the saints, and I was dying to have one of my own. The least little accident that could have been twisted into a miracle would have carried me straight into the bosom of the church. I had the real religious passion. It has passed away, and, as I sat here just now, I was wondering what had become of it!”

Rowland had already been sensible of something in this young lady’s tone which he would have called a want of veracity, and this epitome of her religious experience failed to strike him as an absolute statement of fact. But the trait was not disagreeable, for she herself was evidently the foremost dupe of her inventions. She had a fictitious history in which she believed much more fondly than in her real one, and an infinite capacity for extemporized reminiscence adapted to the mood of the hour. She liked to idealize herself, to take interesting and picturesque attitudes to her own imagination; and the vivacity and spontaneity of her character gave her, really, a starting-point in experience; so that the many-colored flowers of fiction which blossomed in her talk were not so much perversions, as sympathetic exaggerations, of fact. And Rowland felt that whatever she said of herself might have been, under the imagined circumstances; impulse was there, audacity, the restless, questioning temperament. “I am afraid I am sadly prosaic,” he said, “for in these many months now that I have been in Rome, I have never ceased for a moment to look at Catholicism simply from the outside. I don’t see an opening as big as your finger-nail where I could creep into it!”

“What do you believe?” asked Christina, looking at him. “Are you religious?”

“I believe in God.”

Christina let her beautiful eyes wander a while, and then gave a little sigh. “You are much to be envied!”

“You, I imagine, in that line have nothing to envy me.”

“Yes, I have. Rest!”

“You are too young to say that.”

“I am not young; I have never been young! My mother took care of that. I was a little wrinkled old woman at ten.”

“I am afraid,” said Rowland, in a moment, “that you are fond of painting yourself in dark colors.”

She looked at him a while in silence. “Do you wish,” she demanded at last, “to win my eternal gratitude? Prove to me that I am better than I suppose.”

“I should have first to know what you really suppose.”