“Oh, I say, this is too much!” Rowland broke out.
“Do you defend her?” Roderick cried, with a renewal of his passion. “Do you pretend to say that she gave me no hopes?” He had been speaking with growing bitterness, quite losing sight of his mother’s pain and bewilderment in the passionate joy of publishing his wrongs. Since he was hurt, he must cry out; since he was in pain, he must scatter his pain abroad. Of his never thinking of others, save as they spoke and moved from his cue, as it were, this extraordinary insensibility to the injurious effects of his eloquence was a capital example; the more so as the motive of his eloquence was never an appeal for sympathy or compassion, things to which he seemed perfectly indifferent and of which he could make no use. The great and characteristic point with him was the perfect absoluteness of his own emotions and experience. He never saw himself as part of a whole; only as the clear-cut, sharp-edged, isolated individual, rejoicing or raging, as the case might be, but needing in any case absolutely to affirm himself. All this, to Rowland, was ancient history, but his perception of it stirred within him afresh, at the sight of Roderick’s sense of having been betrayed. That he, under the circumstances, should not in fairness be the first to lodge a complaint of betrayal was a point to which, at his leisure, Rowland was of course capable of rendering impartial justice; but Roderick’s present desperation was so peremptory that it imposed itself on one’s sympathies. “Do you pretend to say,” he went on, “that she did n’t lead me along to the very edge of fulfillment and stupefy me with all that she suffered me to believe, all that she sacredly promised? It amused her to do it, and she knew perfectly well what she really meant. She never meant to be sincere; she never dreamed she could be. She ‘s a ravenous flirt, and why a flirt is a flirt is more than I can tell you. I can’t understand playing with those matters; for me they ‘re serious, whether I take them up or lay them down. I don’t see what ‘s in your head, Rowland, to attempt to defend Miss Light; you were the first to cry out against her! You told me she was dangerous, and I pooh-poohed you. You were right; you ‘re always right. She ‘s as cold and false and heartless as she ‘s beautiful, and she has sold her heartless beauty to the highest bidder. I hope he knows what he gets!”
“Oh, my son,” cried Mrs. Hudson, plaintively, “how could you ever care for such a dreadful creature?”
“It would take long to tell you, dear mother!”
Rowland’s lately-deepened sympathy and compassion for Christina was still throbbing in his mind, and he felt that, in loyalty to it, he must say a word for her. “You believed in her too much at first,” he declared, “and you believe in her too little now.”
Roderick looked at him with eyes almost lurid, beneath lowering brows. “She is an angel, then, after all?—that ‘s what you want to prove!” he cried. “That ‘s consoling for me, who have lost her! You ‘re always right, I say; but, dear friend, in mercy, be wrong for once!”
“Oh yes, Mr. Mallet, be merciful!” said Mrs. Hudson, in a tone which, for all its gentleness, made Rowland stare. The poor fellow’s stare covered a great deal of concentrated wonder and apprehension—a presentiment of what a small, sweet, feeble, elderly lady might be capable of, in the way of suddenly generated animosity. There was no space in Mrs. Hudson’s tiny maternal mind for complications of feeling, and one emotion existed only by turning another over flat and perching on top of it. She was evidently not following Roderick at all in his dusky aberrations. Sitting without, in dismay, she only saw that all was darkness and trouble, and as Roderick’s glory had now quite outstripped her powers of imagination and urged him beyond her jurisdiction, so that he had become a thing too precious and sacred for blame, she found it infinitely comfortable to lay the burden of their common affliction upon Rowland’s broad shoulders. Had he not promised to make them all rich and happy? And this was the end of it! Rowland felt as if his trials were, in a sense, only beginning. “Had n’t you better forget all this, my dear?” Mrs. Hudson said. “Had n’t you better just quietly attend to your work?”
“Work, madame?” cried Roderick. “My work ‘s over. I can’t work—I have n’t worked all winter. If I were fit for anything, this sentimental collapse would have been just the thing to cure me of my apathy and break the spell of my idleness. But there ‘s a perfect vacuum here!” And he tapped his forehead. “It ‘s bigger than ever; it grows bigger every hour!”
“I ‘m sure you have made a beautiful likeness of your poor little mother,” said Mrs. Hudson, coaxingly.
“I had done nothing before, and I have done nothing since! I quarreled with an excellent man, the other day, from mere exasperation of my nerves, and threw away five thousand dollars!”