“Do what you can, then,” said Roderick gravely, putting out his hand. “Do what you can!” His tone and his hand-shake seemed to constitute a promise, and upon this they parted.
Roderick’s bust of his mother, whether or no it was a discharge of what he called the filial debt, was at least a most admirable production. Rowland, at the time it was finished, met Gloriani one evening, and this unscrupulous genius immediately began to ask questions about it. “I am told our high-flying friend has come down,” he said. “He has been doing a queer little old woman.”
“A queer little old woman!” Rowland exclaimed. “My dear sir, she is Hudson’s mother.”
“All the more reason for her being queer! It is a bust for terra-cotta, eh?”
“By no means; it is for marble.”
“That ‘s a pity. It was described to me as a charming piece of quaintness: a little demure, thin-lipped old lady, with her head on one side, and the prettiest wrinkles in the world—a sort of fairy godmother.”
“Go and see it, and judge for yourself,” said Rowland.
“No, I see I shall be disappointed. It ‘s quite the other thing, the sort of thing they put into the campo-santos. I wish that boy would listen to me an hour!”
But a day or two later Rowland met him again in the street, and, as they were near, proposed they should adjourn to Roderick’s studio. He consented, and on entering they found the young master. Roderick’s demeanor to Gloriani was never conciliatory, and on this occasion supreme indifference was apparently all he had to offer. But Gloriani, like a genuine connoisseur, cared nothing for his manners; he cared only for his skill. In the bust of Mrs. Hudson there was something almost touching; it was an exquisite example of a ruling sense of beauty. The poor lady’s small, neat, timorous face had certainly no great character, but Roderick had reproduced its sweetness, its mildness, its minuteness, its still maternal passion, with the most unerring art. It was perfectly unflattered, and yet admirably tender; it was the poetry of fidelity. Gloriani stood looking at it a long time most intently. Roderick wandered away into the neighboring room.
“I give it up!” said the sculptor at last. “I don’t understand it.”