FrascatiOne day, on entering Roderick's lodging (not the modest rooms on the Ripetta which he had first occupied, but a much more sumptuous apartment on the Corso), Rowland found a letter on the table addressed to himself.It was from Roderick, and consisted of but three lines: "I am gone to Frascati--for meditation.
If I am not at home on Friday, you had better join me."On Friday he was still absent, and Rowland went out to Frascati.
Here he found his friend living at the inn and spending his days, according to his own account, lying under the trees of the Villa Mondragone, reading Ariosto.He was in a sombre mood; "meditation" seemed not to have been fruitful.
Nothing especially pertinent to our narrative had passed between the two young men since Mrs.Light's ball, save a few words bearing on an incident of that entertainment.
Rowland informed Roderick, the next day, that he had told Miss Light of his engagement."I don't know whether you 'll thank me," he had said, "but it 's my duty to let you know it.
Miss Light perhaps has already done so."
Roderick looked at him a moment, intently, with his color slowly rising.
"Why should n't I thank you?" he asked."I am not ashamed of my engagement.""As you had not spoken of it yourself, I thought you might have a reason for not having it known.""A man does n't gossip about such a matter with strangers,"Roderick rejoined, with the ring of irritation in his voice.
"With strangers--no!" said Rowland, smiling.
Roderick continued his work; but after a moment, turning round with a frown:
"If you supposed I had a reason for being silent, pray why should you have spoken?""I did not speak idly, my dear Roderick.I weighed the matter before I spoke, and promised myself to let you know immediately afterwards.It seemed to me that Miss Light had better know that your affections are pledged.""The Cavaliere has put it into your head, then, that I am making love to her?""No; in that case I would not have spoken to her first.""Do you mean, then, that she is making love to me?""This is what I mean," said Rowland, after a pause.
"That girl finds you interesting, and is pleased, even though she may play indifference, at your finding her so.
I said to myself that it might save her some sentimental disappointment to know without delay that you are not at liberty to become indefinitely interested in other women.""You seem to have taken the measure of my liberty with extraordinary minuteness!" cried Roderick.
"You must do me justice.I am the cause of your separation from Miss Garland, the cause of your being exposed to temptations which she hardly even suspects.How could I ever face her,"Rowland demanded, with much warmth of tone, "if at the end of it all she should be unhappy?""I had no idea that Miss Garland had made such an impression on you.
You are too zealous; I take it she did n't charge you to look after her interests.""If anything happens to you, I am accountable.You must understand that.""That 's a view of the situation I can't accept; in your own interest, no less than in mine.It can only make us both very uncomfortable.
I know all I owe you; I feel it; you know that! But I am not a small boy nor an outer barbarian any longer, and, whatever I do, I do with my eyes open.
When I do well, the merit 's mine; if I do ill, the fault 's mine!
The idea that I make you nervous is detestable.Dedicate your nerves to some better cause, and believe that if Miss Garland and I have a quarrel, we shall settle it between ourselves."Rowland had found himself wondering, shortly before, whether possibly his brilliant young friend was without a conscience;now it dimly occurred to him that he was without a heart.
Rowland, as we have already intimated, was a man with a moral passion, and no small part of it had gone forth into his relations with Roderick.There had been, from the first, no protestations of friendship on either side, but Rowland had implicitly offered everything that belongs to friendship, and Roderick had, apparently, as deliberately accepted it.
Rowland, indeed, had taken an exquisite satisfaction in his companion's deep, inexpressive assent to his interest in him.
"Here is an uncommonly fine thing," he said to himself:
"a nature unconsciously grateful, a man in whom friendship does the thing that love alone generally has the credit of--knocks the bottom out of pride!" His reflective judgment of Roderick, as time went on, had indulged in a great many irrepressible vagaries; but his affection, his sense of something in his companion's whole personality that overmastered his heart and beguiled his imagination, had never for an instant faltered.
He listened to Roderick's last words, and then he smiled as he rarely smiled--with bitterness.
"I don't at all like your telling me I am too zealous," he said.
"If I had not been zealous, I should never have cared a fig for you."Roderick flushed deeply, and thrust his modeling tool up to the handle into the clay."Say it outright!
You have been a great fool to believe in me.""I desire to say nothing of the kind, and you don't honestly believe I do!"said Rowland."It seems to me I am really very good-natured even to reply to such nonsense."Roderick sat down, crossed his arms, and fixed his eyes on the floor.
Rowland looked at him for some moments; it seemed to him that he had never so clearly read his companion's strangely commingled character--his strength and his weakness, his picturesque personal attractiveness and his urgent egoism, his exalted ardor and his puerile petulance.
It would have made him almost sick, however, to think that, on the whole, Roderick was not a generous fellow, and he was so far from having ceased to believe in him that he felt just now, more than ever, that all this was but the painful complexity of genius.Rowland, who had not a grain of genius either to make one say he was an interested reasoner, or to enable one to feel that he could afford a dangerous theory or two, adhered to his conviction of the essential salubrity of genius.
