RODERICK HUDSON
Now they 've taken me all. It was their choice; may they never repent!"
"I shall hear of you," said Rowland.
"You 'll hear of me. And whatever you do hear, remember this: I was sincere!"
Prince Casamassima had approached, and Rowland looked at him with a good deal of simple compassion as a part of that "world" against which Christina had launched her mysterious menace. It was obvious that he was what is called a well-meaning person, and that he could not in the nature of things be a positively bad husband; but his distinguished inoffensiveness only deepened the infelicity of Christina's situation by depriving her defiant attitude of the sanction of relative justice. So long as she had been free to choose she had esteemed him; but from the moment she was forced to marry him she had detested him. Rowland read in the young man's elastic Italian mask a profound consciousness of all this; and as he found there also a record of other curious things — of pride, of temper, of bigotry, of an immense heritage of more or less aggressive traditions he reflected that the matrimonial conjunction of his two companions might be sufficiently prolific in incident.
"You're going to Naples?" he inquired byway of conversation.
"We're going to Paris," Christina interposed slowly and softly. "We 're going to London. We 're going to Vienna. We 're going to St. Petersburg. We may even go to China."
The Prince dropped his eyes and fretted the earth
493
