XXI
Of Roderick meanwhile he saw nothing; but he immediately went to Mrs. Hudson and assured her that her son was in even exceptionally good health and spirits. After this he called again on his two country women, but as Roderick's absence continued he was able neither to dispense much comfort nor to feign much conviction. Mary's tense smoothness—a serenity with a surface like slippery ice and from which any vain remark rebounded with its heels in the air—seemed to him an image of his own state of mind. He was deeply depressed, he felt a real storm in the wind and wished it would come and wash away their troubles. On the afternoon of the third day he pushed into Saint Peter's, in whose vast clear element the hardest particles of thought ever infallibly entered into solution. From a heartache to a Roman rain there were few contrarieties the great church did not help him to forget. He had wandered there for half an hour when he came upon a short figure lurking in the shadow of one of the piers. He saw it was that of an artist hastily transferring to his sketch-book the sense of some emphasised instant, there, of the immense procession of the hours; and in a moment he perceived the artist to be little Sam Singleton.
Singleton pocketed his notes with a guilty air, as if he had been caught picking a rose in a royal conservatory or lighting his cigarette at the lamp of a shrine.
413
