“Does she leave that to you?” Rowland ventured to ask, with a smile.
“We are inspired with none but Christian sentiments,” said Mr. Striker; “Miss Garland perhaps most of all. Miss Garland,” and Mr. Striker waved his hand again as if to perform an introduction which had been regrettably omitted, “is the daughter of a minister, the granddaughter of a minister, the sister of a minister.” Rowland bowed deferentially, and the young girl went on with her sewing, with nothing, apparently, either of embarrassment or elation at the promulgation of these facts. Mr. Striker continued: “Mrs. Hudson, I see, is too deeply agitated to converse with you freely. She will allow me to address you a few questions. Would you kindly inform her, as exactly as possible, just what you propose to do with her son?”
The poor lady fixed her eyes appealingly on Rowland’s face and seemed to say that Mr. Striker had spoken her desire, though she herself would have expressed it less defiantly. But Rowland saw in Mr. Striker’s many-wrinkled light blue eye, shrewd at once and good-natured, that he had no intention of defiance, and that he was simply pompous and conceited and sarcastically compassionate of any view of things in which Roderick Hudson was regarded in a serious light.
“Do, my dear madam?” demanded Rowland. “I don’t propose to do anything. He must do for himself. I simply offer him the chance. He ‘s to study, to work—hard, I hope.”
“Not too hard, please,” murmured Mrs. Hudson, pleadingly, wheeling about from recent visions of dangerous leisure. “He ‘s not very strong, and I ‘m afraid the climate of Europe is very relaxing.”
“Ah, study?” repeated Mr. Striker. “To what line of study is he to direct his attention?” Then suddenly, with an impulse of disinterested curiosity on his own account, “How do you study sculpture, anyhow?”
“By looking at models and imitating them.”
“At models, eh? To what kind of models do you refer?”
“To the antique, in the first place.”
“Ah, the antique,” repeated Mr. Striker, with a jocose intonation. “Do you hear, madam? Roderick is going off to Europe to learn to imitate the antique.”
“I suppose it ‘s all right,” said Mrs. Hudson, twisting herself in a sort of delicate anguish.
“An antique, as I understand it,” the lawyer continued, “is an image of a pagan deity, with considerable dirt sticking to it, and no arms, no nose, and no clothing. A precious model, certainly!”
“That ‘s a very good description of many,” said Rowland, with a laugh.
“Mercy! Truly?” asked Mrs. Hudson, borrowing courage from his urbanity.
“But a sculptor’s studies, you intimate, are not confined to the antique,” Mr. Striker resumed. “After he has been looking three or four years at the objects I describe”—
“He studies the living model,” said Rowland.
“Does it take three or four years?” asked Mrs. Hudson, imploringly.
“That depends upon the artist’s aptitude. After twenty years a real artist is still studying.”
“Oh, my poor boy!” moaned Mrs. Hudson, finding the prospect, under every light, still terrible.
“Now this study of the living model,” Mr. Striker pursued. “Inform Mrs. Hudson about that.”
“Oh dear, no!” cried Mrs. Hudson, shrinkingly.
“That too,” said Rowland, “is one of the reasons for studying in Rome. It ‘s a handsome race, you know, and you find very well-made people.”
“I suppose they ‘re no better made than a good tough Yankee,” objected Mr. Striker, transposing his interminable legs. “The same God made us.”
“Surely,” sighed Mrs. Hudson, but with a questioning glance at her visitor which showed that she had already begun to concede much weight to his opinion. Rowland hastened to express his assent to Mr. Striker’s proposition.
Miss Garland looked up, and, after a moment’s hesitation: “Are the Roman women very beautiful?” she asked.
Rowland too, in answering, hesitated; he was looking straight at the young girl. “On the whole, I prefer ours,” he said.
She had dropped her work in her lap; her hands were crossed upon it, her head thrown a little back. She had evidently expected a more impersonal answer, and she was dissatisfied. For an instant she seemed inclined to make a rejoinder, but she slowly picked up her work in silence and drew her stitches again.
Rowland had for the second time the feeling that she judged him to be a person of a disagreeably sophisticated tone. He noticed too that the kitchen towel she was hemming was terribly coarse. And yet his answer had a resonant inward echo, and he repeated to himself, “Yes, on the whole, I prefer ours.”
“Well, these models,” began Mr. Striker. “You put them into an attitude, I suppose.”
“An attitude, exactly.”
“And then you sit down and look at them.”
“You must not sit too long. You must go at your clay and try to build up something that looks like them.”
“Well, there you are with your model in an attitude on one side, yourself, in an attitude too, I suppose, on the other, and your pile of clay in the middle, building up, as you say. So you pass the morning. After that I hope you go out and take a walk, and rest from your exertions.”
“Unquestionably. But to a sculptor who loves his work there is no time lost. Everything he looks at teaches or suggests something.”
“That ‘s a tempting doctrine to young men with a taste for sitting by the hour with the page unturned, watching the flies buzz, or the frost melt on the window-pane. Our young friend, in this way, must have laid up stores of information which I never suspected!”
“Very likely,” said Rowland, with an unresentful smile, “he will prove some day the completer artist for some of those lazy reveries.”
This theory was apparently very grateful to Mrs. Hudson, who had never had the case put for her son with such ingenious hopefulness, and found herself disrelishing the singular situation of seeming to side against her own flesh and blood with a lawyer whose conversational tone betrayed the habit of cross-questioning.
“My son, then,” she ventured to ask, “my son has great—what you would call great powers?”
“To my sense, very great powers.”
Poor Mrs. Hudson actually smiled, broadly, gleefully, and glanced at Miss Garland, as if to invite her to do likewise. But the young girl’s face remained serious, like the eastern sky when the opposite sunset is too feeble to make it glow. “Do you really know?” she asked, looking at Rowland.
“One cannot know in such a matter save after proof, and proof takes time. But one can believe.”
“And you believe?”
“I believe.”
But even then Miss Garland vouchsafed no smile. Her face became graver than ever.
“Well, well,” said Mrs. Hudson, “we must hope that it is all for the best.”
Mr. Striker eyed his old friend for a moment with a look of some displeasure; he saw that this was but a cunning feminine imitation of resignation, and that, through some untraceable process of transition, she was now taking more comfort in the opinions of this insinuating stranger than in his own tough dogmas. He rose to his feet, without pulling down his waistcoat, but with a wrinkled grin at the inconsistency of women. “Well, sir, Mr. Roderick’s powers are nothing to me,” he said, “nor no use he makes of them. Good or bad, he ‘s no son of mine. But, in a friendly way, I ‘m glad to hear so fine an account of him. I ‘m glad, madam, you ‘re so satisfied with the prospect.