"I say those things sometimes myself, but when I hear you say them they make me feel as if I could work twenty years at a sitting, on purpose to refute you!"
"Ah, the man who is strong with what I call strength," Christina replied, "would neither rise nor fall by anything I could say! I am a poor, weak woman; I have no strength myself, and I can give no strength.
I am a miserable medley of vanity and folly. I am silly, I am ignorant, I am affected, I am false. I am the fruit of a horrible education, sown on a worthless soil. I am all that, and yet I believe I have one merit!
I should know a great character when I saw it, and I should delight in it with a generosity which would do something toward the remission of my sins. For a man who should really give me a certain feeling--which I have never had, but which I should know when it came--I would send Prince Casama.s.sima and his millions to perdition. I don"t know what you think of me for saying all this; I suppose we have not climbed up here under the skies to play propriety. Why have you been at such pains to a.s.sure me, after all, that you are a little man and not a great one, a weak one and not a strong? I innocently imagined that your eyes declared you were strong. But your voice condemns you; I always wondered at it; it "s not the voice of a conqueror!"
"Give me something to conquer," cried Roderick, "and when I say that I thank you from my soul, my voice, whatever you think of it, shall speak the truth!"
Christina for a moment said nothing. Rowland was too interested to think of moving. "You pretend to such devotion," she went on, "and yet I am sure you have never really chosen between me and that person in America."
"Do me the favor not to speak of her," said Roderick, imploringly.
"Why not? I say no ill of her, and I think all kinds of good. I am certain she is a far better girl than I, and far more likely to make you happy."
"This is happiness, this present, palpable moment," said Roderick; "though you have such a genius for saying the things that torture me!"
"It "s greater happiness than you deserve, then! You have never chosen, I say; you have been afraid to choose. You have never really faced the fact that you are false, that you have broken your faith. You have never looked at it and seen that it was hideous, and yet said, "No matter, I "ll brave the penalty, I "ll bear the shame!" You have closed your eyes; you have tried to stifle remembrance, to persuade yourself that you were not behaving as badly as you seemed to be, and there would be some way, after all, of compa.s.sing bliss and yet escaping trouble. You have faltered and drifted, you have gone on from accident to accident, and I am sure that at this present moment you can"t tell what it is you really desire!"
Roderick was sitting with his knees drawn up and bent, and his hands clapsed around his legs. He bent his head and rested his forehead on his knees.
Christina went on with a sort of infernal calmness: "I believe that, really, you don"t greatly care for your friend in America any more than you do for me. You are one of the men who care only for themselves and for what they can make of themselves. That "s very well when they can make something great, and I could interest myself in a man of extraordinary power who should wish to turn all his pa.s.sions to account.
But if the power should turn out to be, after all, rather ordinary?
Fancy feeling one"s self ground in the mill of a third-rate talent! If you have doubts about yourself, I can"t rea.s.sure you; I have too many doubts myself, about everything in this weary world. You have gone up like a rocket, in your profession, they tell me; are you going to come down like the stick? I don"t pretend to know; I repeat frankly what I have said before--that all modern sculpture seems to me weak, and that the only things I care for are some of the most battered of the antiques of the Vatican. No, no, I can"t rea.s.sure you; and when you tell me--with a confidence in my discretion of which, certainly, I am duly sensible--that at times you feel terribly small, why, I can only answer, "Ah, then, my poor friend, I am afraid you are small." The language I should like to hear, from a certain person, would be the language of absolute decision."
Roderick raised his head, but he said nothing; he seemed to be exchanging a long glance with his companion. The result of it was to make him fling himself back with an inarticulate murmur. Rowland, admonished by the silence, was on the point of turning away, but he was arrested by a gesture of the young girl. She pointed for a moment into the blue air. Roderick followed the direction of her gesture.
"Is that little flower we see outlined against that dark niche," she asked, "as intensely blue as it looks through my veil?" She spoke apparently with the amiable design of directing the conversation into a less painful channel.
Rowland, from where he stood, could see the flower she meant--a delicate plant of radiant hue, which sprouted from the top of an immense fragment of wall some twenty feet from Christina"s place.
Roderick turned his head and looked at it without answering. At last, glancing round, "Put up your veil!" he said. Christina complied. "Does it look as blue now?" he asked.
"Ah, what a lovely color!" she murmured, leaning her head on one side.
"Would you like to have it?"
She stared a moment and then broke into a light laugh.
"Would you like to have it?" he repeated in a ringing voice.
"Don"t look as if you would eat me up," she answered. "It "s harmless if I say yes!"
Roderick rose to his feet and stood looking at the little flower. It was separated from the ledge on which he stood by a rugged surface of vertical wall, which dropped straight into the dusky vaults behind the arena. Suddenly he took off his hat and flung it behind him. Christina then sprang to her feet.
"I will bring it you," he said.
She seized his arm. "Are you crazy? Do you mean to kill yourself?"
"I shall not kill myself. Sit down!"
"Excuse me. Not till you do!" And she grasped his arm with both hands.
Roderick shook her off and pointed with a violent gesture to her former place. "Go there!" he cried fiercely.
"You can never, never!" she murmured beseechingly, clasping her hands.
"I implore you!"
Roderick turned and looked at her, and then in a voice which Rowland had never heard him use, a voice almost thunderous, a voice which awakened the echoes of the mighty ruin, he repeated, "Sit down!" She hesitated a moment and then she dropped on the ground and buried her face in her hands.
Rowland had seen all this, and he saw more. He saw Roderick clasp in his left arm the jagged corner of the vertical part.i.tion along which he proposed to pursue his crazy journey, stretch out his leg, and feel for a resting-place for his foot. Rowland had measured with a glance the possibility of his sustaining himself, and p.r.o.nounced it absolutely nil.
The wall was garnished with a series of narrow projections, the remains apparently of a brick cornice supporting the arch of a vault which had long since collapsed. It was by lodging his toes on these loose brackets and grasping with his hands at certain mouldering protuberances on a level with his head, that Roderick intended to proceed. The relics of the cornice were utterly worthless as a support. Rowland had observed this, and yet, for a moment, he had hesitated. If the thing were possible, he felt a sudden admiring glee at the thought of Roderick"s doing it. It would be finely done, it would be gallant, it would have a sort of masculine eloquence as an answer to Christina"s sinister persiflage. But it was not possible! Rowland left his place with a bound, and scrambled down some neighboring steps, and the next moment a stronger pair of hands than Christina"s were laid upon Roderick"s shoulder.
He turned, staring, pale and angry. Christina rose, pale and staring, too, but beautiful in her wonder and alarm. "My dear Roderick," said Rowland, "I am only preventing you from doing a very foolish thing. That "s an exploit for spiders, not for young sculptors of promise."
Roderick wiped his forehead, looked back at the wall, and then closed his eyes, as if with a spasm, of r.e.t.a.r.ded dizziness. "I won"t resist you," he said. "But I have made you obey," he added, turning to Christina. "Am I weak now?"
She had recovered her composure; she looked straight past him and addressed Rowland: "Be so good as to show me the way out of this horrible place!"
He helped her back into the corridor; Roderick followed after a short interval. Of course, as they were descending the steps, came questions for Rowland to answer, and more or less surprise. Where had he come from? how happened he to have appeared at just that moment? Rowland answered that he had been rambling overhead, and that, looking out of an aperture, he had seen a gentleman preparing to undertake a preposterous gymnastic feat, and a lady swooning away in consequence. Interference seemed justifiable, and he had made it as prompt as possible. Roderick was far from hanging his head, like a man who has been caught in the perpetration of an extravagant folly; but if he held it more erect than usual Rowland believed that this was much less because he had made a show of personal daring than because he had triumphantly proved to Christina that, like a certain person she had dreamed of, he too could speak the language of decision. Christina descended to the arena in silence, apparently occupied with her own thoughts. She betrayed no sense of the privacy of her interview with Roderick needing an explanation. Rowland had seen stranger things in New York! The only evidence of her recent agitation was that, on being joined by her maid, she declared that she was unable to walk home; she must have a carriage.
A fiacre was found resting in the shadow of the Arch of Constantine, and Rowland suspected that after she had got into it she disburdened herself, under her veil, of a few natural tears.
Rowland had played eavesdropper to so good a purpose that he might justly have omitted the ceremony of denouncing himself to Roderick. He preferred, however, to let him know that he had overheard a portion of his talk with Christina.
"Of course it seems to you," Roderick said, "a proof that I am utterly infatuated."
"Miss Light seemed to me to know very well how far she could go,"
Rowland answered. "She was twisting you round her finger. I don"t think she exactly meant to defy you; but your crazy pursuit of that flower was a proof that she could go all lengths in the way of making a fool of you."
"Yes," said Roderick, meditatively; "she is making a fool of me."
"And what do you expect to come of it?"
"Nothing good!" And Roderick put his hands into his pockets and looked as if he had announced the most colorless fact in the world.
"And in the light of your late interview, what do you make of your young lady?"
"If I could tell you that, it would be plain sailing. But she "ll not tell me again I am weak!"
"Are you very sure you are not weak?"
"I may be, but she shall never know it."
Rowland said no more until they reached the Corso, when he asked his companion whether he was going to his studio.
Roderick started out of a reverie and pa.s.sed his hands over his eyes.
"Oh no, I can"t settle down to work after such a scene as that. I was not afraid of breaking my neck then, but I feel all in a tremor now. I will go--I will go and sit in the sun on the Pincio!"
"Promise me this, first," said Rowland, very solemnly: "that the next time you meet Miss Light, it shall be on the earth and not in the air."
Since his return from Frascati, Roderick had been working doggedly at the statue ordered by Mr. Leavenworth. To Rowland"s eye he had made a very fair beginning, but he had himself insisted, from the first, that he liked neither his subject nor his patron, and that it was impossible to feel any warmth of interest in a work which was to be incorporated into the ponderous personality of Mr. Leavenworth. It was all against the grain; he wrought without love. Nevertheless after a fashion he wrought, and the figure grew beneath his hands. Miss Blanchard"s friend was ordering works of art on every side, and his purveyors were in many cases persons whom Roderick declared it was infamy to be paired with.