It is a question whether the reader will know why, but this letter gave Rowland extraordinary pleasure.He liked its very brevity and meagreness, and there seemed to him an exquisite modesty in its saying nothing from the young girl herself.
He delighted in the formal address and conclusion;they pleased him as he had been pleased by an angular gesture in some expressive girlish figure in an early painting.
The letter renewed that impression of strong feeling combined with an almost rigid simplicity, which Roderick's betrothed had personally given him.And its homely stiffness seemed a vivid reflection of a life concentrated, as the young girl had borrowed warrant from her companion to say, in a single devoted idea.
The monotonous days of the two women seemed to Rowland's fancy to follow each other like the tick-tick of a great time-piece, marking off the hours which separated them from the supreme felicity of clasping the far-away son and lover to lips sealed with the excess of joy.He hoped that Roderick, now that he had shaken off the oppression of his own importunate faith, was not losing a tolerant temper for the silent prayers of the two women at Northampton.
He was left to vain conjectures, however, as to Roderick's actual moods and occupations.He knew he was no letter-writer, and that, in the young sculptor's own phrase, he had at any time rather build a monument than write a note.But when a month had passed without news of him, he began to be half anxious and half angry, and wrote him three lines, in the care of a Continental banker, begging him at least to give some sign of whether he was alive or dead.
A week afterwards came an answer--brief, and dated Baden-Baden."Iknow I have been a great brute," Roderick wrote, "not to have sent you a word before; but really I don't know what has got into me.
I have lately learned terribly well how to be idle.I am afraid to think how long it is since I wrote to my mother or to Mary.
Heaven help them--poor, patient, trustful creatures!
I don't know how to tell you what I am doing.It seems all amusing enough while I do it, but it would make a poor show in a narrative intended for your formidable eyes.I found Baxter in Switzerland, or rather he found me, and he grabbed me by the arm and brought me here.
I was walking twenty miles a day in the Alps, drinking milk in lonely chalets, sleeping as you sleep, and thinking it was all very good fun; but Baxter told me it would never do, that the Alps were 'd----d rot,' that Baden-Baden was the place, and that if I knew what was good for me I would come along with him.
It is a wonderful place, certainly, though, thank the Lord, Baxter departed last week, blaspheming horribly at trente et quarante.
But you know all about it and what one does--what one is liable to do.
I have succumbed, in a measure, to the liabilities, and I wish I had some one here to give me a thundering good blowing up.
Not you, dear friend; you would draw it too mild; you have too much of the milk of human kindness.I have fits of horrible homesickness for my studio, and I shall be devoutly grateful when the summer is over and I can go back and swing a chisel.
I feel as if nothing but the chisel would satisfy me;as if I could rush in a rage at a block of unshaped marble.
There are a lot of the Roman people here, English and American;I live in the midst of them and talk nonsense from morning till night.
There is also some one else; and to her I don't talk sense, nor, thank heaven, mean what I say.I confess, I need a month's work to recover my self-respect."These lines brought Rowland no small perturbation;the more, that what they seemed to point to surprised him.
During the nine months of their companionship Roderick had shown so little taste for dissipation that Rowland had come to think of it as a canceled danger, and it greatly perplexed him to learn that his friend had apparently proved so pliant to opportunity.
But Roderick's allusions were ambiguous, and it was possible they might simply mean that he was out of patience with a frivolous way of life and fretting wholesomely over his absent work.
It was a very good thing, certainly, that idleness should prove, on experiment, to sit heavily on his conscience.Nevertheless, the letter needed, to Rowland's mind, a key: the key arrived a week later.
"In common charity," Roderick wrote, "lend me a hundred pounds!
I have gambled away my last franc--I have made a mountain of debts.
Send me the money first; lecture me afterwards!" Rowland sent the money by return of mail; then he proceeded, not to lecture, but to think.He hung his head; he was acutely disappointed.
He had no right to be, he assured himself; but so it was.
Roderick was young, impulsive, unpracticed in stoicism; it was a hundred to one that he was to pay the usual vulgar tribute to folly.
But his friend had regarded it as securely gained to his own belief in virtue that he was not as other foolish youths are, and that he would have been capable of looking at folly in the face and passing on his way.Rowland for a while felt a sore sense of wrath.
What right had a man who was engaged to that fine girl in Northampton to behave as if his consciousness were a common blank, to be overlaid with coarse sensations? Yes, distinctly, he was disappointed.
He had accompanied his missive with an urgent recommendation to leave Baden-Baden immediately, and an offer to meet Roderick at any point he would name.The answer came promptly; it ran as follows:
"Send me another fifty pounds! I have been back to the tables.
I will leave as soon as the money comes, and meet you at Geneva.
There I will tell you everything."
There is an ancient terrace at Geneva, planted with trees and studded with benches, overlooked by gravely aristocratic old dwellings and overlooking the distant Alps.A great many generations have made it a lounging-place, a great many friends and lovers strolled there, a great many confidential talks and momentous interviews gone forward.