Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/357

 Garland's wish, at Leghorn, on finding they were left to their own devices, had been to telegraph to Roderick and await an answer, for she was not unaware that they had rather stolen a march. But Mrs. Hudson's maternal heart had taken the alarm. Roderick's sending for them at all was, to her imagination, a confession of some pernicious ill, some visitation, probably, of malignant disease, and his not being at Leghorn a proof of the worst; an hour's delay was therefore cruel both to herself and to him. She insisted on immediate departure, and, unversed as they were in strange tongues and systems, they had somehow floundered along. Reaching Rome late in the evening and knowing nothing of inns, they had got into a cab and proceeded to Roderick's lodging. At the door poor Mrs. Hudson's trepidation had overcome her, and she had sat paralysed and weeping in the vehicle. Mary had bravely gone in, groped her way up the dusky staircase, gained Roderick's door and, with the assistance of such acquaintance with the local idiom as she had culled from a phrase-book during the calm hours of the voyage, learned from the old woman who had her cousin's household economy in charge that he was in the best of health and spirits and had gone forth a few hours before, his hat on his ear, per divertirsi.

These things Rowland learned during a visit paid the ladies the second evening of their stay. Mrs. Hudson spoke of them with great abundance and repetition and with an air of clinging confidence which told her visitor that he was now enshrined 323