Your mother is to come and look at some that I possess.""Thank you; I have no doubt you will see us.I dare say Mr.Hudson is very clever; but I don't care for modern sculpture.
I can't look at it!"
"You shall care for my bust, I promise you!" cried Roderick, with a laugh.
"To satisfy Miss Light," said the Cavaliere, "one of the old Greeks ought to come to life.""It would be worth his while," said Roderick, paying, to Rowland's knowledge, his first compliment.
"I might sit to Phidias, if he would promise to be very amusing and make me laugh.What do you say, Stenterello? would you sit to Phidias?""We must talk of this some other time," said Mrs.Light."We are in Rome for the winter.Many thanks.Cavaliere, call the carriage."The Cavaliere led the way out, backing like a silver-stick, and Miss Light, following her mother, nodded, without looking at them, to each of the young men.
"Immortal powers, what a head!" cried Roderick, when they had gone.
"There 's my fortune!"
"She is certainly very beautiful," said Rowland.
"But I 'm sorry you have undertaken her bust.""And why, pray?"
"I suspect it will bring trouble with it.""What kind of trouble?"
"I hardly know.They are queer people.The mamma, I suspect, is the least bit of an adventuress.Heaven knows what the daughter is.""She 's a goddess!" cried Roderick.
"Just so.She is all the more dangerous.""Dangerous? What will she do to me? She does n't bite, I imagine.""It remains to be seen.There are two kinds of women--you ought to know it by this time--the safe and the unsafe.
Miss Light, if I am not mistaken, is one of the unsafe.
A word to the wise!"
"Much obliged!" said Roderick, and he began to whistle a triumphant air, in honor, apparently, of the advent of his beautiful model.
In calling this young lady and her mamma "queer people,"Rowland but roughly expressed his sentiment.They were so marked a variation from the monotonous troop of his fellow-country people that he felt much curiosity as to the sources of the change, especially since he doubted greatly whether, on the whole, it elevated the type.For a week he saw the two ladies driving daily in a well-appointed landau, with the Cavaliere and the poodle in the front seat.From Mrs.Light he received a gracious salute, tempered by her native majesty; but the young girl, looking straight before her, seemed profoundly indifferent to observers.
Her extraordinary beauty, however, had already made observers numerous and given the habitues of the Pincian plenty to talk about.
The echoes of their commentary reached Rowland's ears; but he had little taste for random gossip, and desired a distinctly veracious informant.
He had found one in the person of Madame Grandoni, for whom Mrs.Light and her beautiful daughter were a pair of old friends.
"I have known the mamma for twenty years," said this judicious critic, "and if you ask any of the people who have been living here as long as I, you will find they remember her well.
I have held the beautiful Christina on my knee when she was a little wizened baby with a very red face and no promise of beauty but those magnificent eyes.Ten years ago Mrs.Light disappeared, and has not since been seen in Rome, except for a few days last winter, when she passed through on her way to Naples.
Then it was you met the trio in the Ludovisi gardens.
When I first knew her she was the unmarried but very marriageable daughter of an old American painter of very bad landscapes, which people used to buy from charity and use for fire-boards.
His name was Savage; it used to make every one laugh, he was such a mild, melancholy, pitiful old gentleman.
He had married a horrible wife, an Englishwoman who had been on the stage.It was said she used to beat poor Savage with his mahl-stick and when the domestic finances were low to lock him up in his studio and tell him he should n't come out until he had painted half a dozen of his daubs.
She had a good deal of showy beauty.She would then go forth, and, her beauty helping, she would make certain people take the pictures.
It helped her at last to make an English lord run away with her.
At the time I speak of she had quite disappeared.
Mrs.Light was then a very handsome girl, though by no means so handsome as her daughter has now become.Mr.Light was an American consul, newly appointed at one of the Adriatic ports.
He was a mild, fair-whiskered young man, with some little property, and my impression is that he had got into bad company at home, and that his family procured him his place to keep him out of harm's way.He came up to Rome on a holiday, fell in love with Miss Savage, and married her on the spot.
He had not been married three years when he was drowned in the Adriatic, no one ever knew how.The young widow came back to Rome, to her father, and here shortly afterwards, in the shadow of Saint Peter's, her little girl was born.
It might have been supposed that Mrs.Light would marry again, and I know she had opportunities.But she overreached herself.
She would take nothing less than a title and a fortune, and they were not forthcoming.She was admired and very fond of admiration; very vain, very worldly, very silly.
She remained a pretty widow, with a surprising variety of bonnets and a dozen men always in her train.
Giacosa dates from this period.He calls himself a Roman, but I have an impression he came up from Ancona with her.
He was l'ami de la maison.He used to hold her bouquets, clean her gloves (I was told), run her errands, get her opera-boxes, and fight her battles with the shopkeepers.
For this he needed courage, for she was smothered in debt.
She at last left Rome to escape her creditors.Many of them must remember her still, but she seems now to have money to satisfy them.
She left her poor old father here alone--helpless, infirm and unable to work.A subscription was shortly afterwards taken up among the foreigners, and he was sent back to America, where, as I afterwards heard, he died in some sort of asylum.