After that distressing scene in Rome which had immediately preceded their departure, it was of course impossible that there should not be on Miss Garland's part some frankness of allusion to Roderick's sad condition.She had been present, the reader will remember, during only half of his unsparing confession, and Rowland had not seen her confronted with any absolute proof of Roderick's passion for Christina Light.
But he knew that she knew far too much for her happiness;Roderick had told him, shortly after their settlement at the Villa Pandolfini, that he had had a "tremendous talk"with his cousin.Rowland asked no questions about it;he preferred not to know what had passed between them.
If their interview had been purely painful, he wished to ignore it for Miss Garland's sake; and if it had sown the seeds of reconciliation, he wished to close his eyes to it for his own--for the sake of that unshaped idea, forever dismissed and yet forever present, which hovered in the background of his consciousness, with a hanging head, as it were, and yet an unshamed glance, and whose lightest motions were an effectual bribe to patience.
Was the engagement broken? Rowland wondered, yet without asking.
But it hardly mattered, for if, as was more than probable, Miss Garland had peremptorily released her cousin, her own heart had by no means recovered its liberty.
It was very certain to Rowland's mind that if she had given him up she had by no means ceased to care for him passionately, and that, to exhaust her charity for his weaknesses, Roderick would have, as the phrase is, a long row to hoe.
She spoke of Roderick as she might have done of a person suffering from a serious malady which demanded much tenderness;but if Rowland had found it possible to accuse her of dishonesty he would have said now that she believed appreciably less than she pretended to in her victim's being an involuntary patient.
There are women whose love is care-taking and patronizing, and who rather prefer a weak man because he gives them a comfortable sense of strength.It did not in the least please Rowland to believe that Mary Garland was one of these;for he held that such women were only males in petticoats, and he was convinced that Miss Garland's heart was constructed after the most perfect feminine model.That she was a very different woman from Christina Light did not at all prove that she was less a woman, and if the Princess Casamassima had gone up into a high place to publish her disrelish of a man who lacked the virile will, it was very certain that Mary Garland was not a person to put up, at any point, with what might be called the princess's leavings.
It was Christina's constant practice to remind you of the complexity of her character, of the subtlety of her mind, of her troublous faculty of seeing everything in a dozen different lights.
Mary Garland had never pretended not to be simple; but Rowland had a theory that she had really a more multitudinous sense of human things, a more delicate imagination, and a finer instinct of character.
She did you the honors of her mind with a grace far less regal, but was not that faculty of quite as remarkable an adjustment?
If in poor Christina's strangely commingled nature there was circle within circle, and depth beneath depth, it was to be believed that Mary Garland, though she did not amuse herself with dropping stones into her soul, and waiting to hear them fall, laid quite as many sources of spiritual life under contribution.
She had believed Roderick was a fine fellow when she bade him farewell beneath the Northampton elms, and this belief, to her young, strenuous, concentrated imagination, had meant many things.
If it was to grow cold, it would be because disenchantment had become total and won the battle at each successive point.
Miss Garland had even in her face and carriage something of the preoccupied and wearied look of a person who is watching at a sick-bed; Roderick's broken fortunes, his dead ambitions, were a cruel burden to the heart of a girl who had believed that he possessed "genius," and supposed that genius was to one's spiritual economy what full pockets were to one's domestic.
And yet, with her, Rowland never felt, as with Mrs.Hudson, that undercurrent of reproach and bitterness toward himself, that impertinent implication that he had defrauded her of happiness.
Was this justice, in Miss Garland, or was it mercy?
The answer would have been difficult, for she had almost let Rowland feel before leaving Rome that she liked him well enough to forgive him an injury.It was partly, Rowland fancied, that there were occasional lapses, deep and sweet, in her sense of injury.When, on arriving at Florence, she saw the place Rowland had brought them to in their trouble, she had given him a look and said a few words to him that had seemed not only a remission of guilt but a positive reward.This happened in the court of the villa--the large gray quadrangle, overstretched, from edge to edge of the red-tiled roof, by the soft Italian sky.
Mary had felt on the spot the sovereign charm of the place;it was reflected in her deeply intelligent glance, and Rowland immediately accused himself of not having done the villa justice.
Miss Garland took a mighty fancy to Florence, and used to look down wistfully at the towered city from the windows and garden.
Roderick having now no pretext for not being her cicerone, Rowland was no longer at liberty, as he had been in Rome, to propose frequent excursions to her.Roderick's own invitations, however, were not frequent, and Rowland more than once ventured to introduce her to a gallery or a church.
These expeditions were not so blissful, to his sense, as the rambles they had taken together in Rome, for his companion only half surrendered herself to her enjoyment, and seemed to have but a divided attention at her command.
Often, when she had begun with looking intently at a picture, her silence, after an interval, made him turn and glance at her.
