Here, one morning, sitting on one of the battered green benches, Roderick, as he had promised, told his friend everything.
He had arrived late the night before; he looked tired, and yet flushed and excited.He made no professions of penitence, but he practiced an unmitigated frankness, and his self-reprobation might be taken for granted.He implied in every phrase that he had done with it all, and that he was counting the hours till he could get back to work.
We shall not rehearse his confession in detail; its main outline will be sufficient.He had fallen in with some very idle people, and had discovered that a little example and a little practice were capable of producing on his own part a considerable relish for their diversions.
What could he do? He never read, and he had no studio; in one way or another he had to pass the time.He passed it in dangling about several very pretty women in wonderful Paris toilets, and reflected that it was always something gained for a sculptor to sit under a tree, looking at his leisure into a charming face and saying things that made it smile and play its muscles and part its lips and show its teeth.
Attached to these ladies were certain gentlemen who walked about in clouds of perfume, rose at midday, and supped at midnight.Roderick had found himself in the mood for thinking them very amusing fellows.
He was surprised at his own taste, but he let it take its course.
It led him to the discovery that to live with ladies who expect you to present them with expensive bouquets, to ride with them in the Black Forest on well-looking horses, to come into their opera-boxes on nights when Patti sang and prices were consequent, to propose little light suppers at the Conversation House after the opera or drives by moonlight to the Castle, to be always arrayed and anointed, trinketed and gloved,--that to move in such society, we say, though it might be a privilege, was a privilege with a penalty attached.But the tables made such things easy; half the Baden world lived by the tables.Roderick tried them and found that at first they smoothed his path delightfully.
This simplification of matters, however, was only momentary, for he soon perceived that to seem to have money, and to have it in fact, exposed a good-looking young man to peculiar liabilities.
At this point of his friend's narrative, Rowland was reminded of Madame de Cruchecassee in The Newcomes, and though he had listened in tranquil silence to the rest of it, he found it hard not to say that all this had been, under the circumstances, a very bad business.
Roderick admitted it with bitterness, and then told how much--measured simply financially--it had cost him.His luck had changed;the tables had ceased to back him, and he had found himself up to his knees in debt.Every penny had gone of the solid sum which had seemed a large equivalent of those shining statues in Rome.
He had been an ass, but it was not irreparable; he could make another statue in a couple of months.
Rowland frowned."For heaven's sake," he said, "don't play such dangerous games with your facility.If you have got facility, revere it, respect it, adore it, treasure it--don't speculate on it."And he wondered what his companion, up to his knees in debt, would have done if there had been no good-natured Rowland Mallet to lend a helping hand.
But he did not formulate his curiosity audibly, and the contingency seemed not to have presented itself to Roderick's imagination.
The young sculptor reverted to his late adventures again in the evening, and this time talked of them more objectively, as the phrase is;more as if they had been the adventures of another person.
He related half a dozen droll things that had happened to him, and, as if his responsibility had been disengaged by all this free discussion, he laughed extravagantly at the memory of them.
Rowland sat perfectly grave, on principle.Then Roderick began to talk of half a dozen statues that he had in his head, and set forth his design, with his usual vividness.Suddenly, as it was relevant, he declared that his Baden doings had not been altogether fruitless, for that the lady who had reminded Rowland of Madame de Cruchecassee was tremendously statuesque.Rowland at last said that it all might pass if he felt that he was really the wiser for it.
"By the wiser," he added, "I mean the stronger in purpose, in will.""Oh, don't talk about will!" Roderick answered, throwing back his head and looking at the stars.This conversation also took place in the open air, on the little island in the shooting Rhone where Jean-Jacques has a monument."The will, I believe, is the mystery of mysteries.
Who can answer for his will? who can say beforehand that it 's strong?
There are all kinds of indefinable currents moving to and fro between one's will and one's inclinations.People talk as if the two things were essentially distinct; on different sides of one's organism, like the heart and the liver.Mine, I know, are much nearer together.
It all depends upon circumstances.I believe there is a certain group of circumstances possible for every man, in which his will is destined to snap like a dry twig.""My dear boy," said Rowland, "don't talk about the will being 'destined.'
The will is destiny itself.That 's the way to look at it.""Look at it, my dear Rowland," Roderick answered, "as you find most comfortable.One conviction I have gathered from my summer's experience," he went on--"it 's as well to look it frankly in the face--is that I possess an almost unlimited susceptibility to the influence of a beautiful woman."Rowland stared, then strolled away, softly whistling to himself.
He was unwilling to admit even to himself that this speech had really the sinister meaning it seemed to have.
In a few days the two young men made their way back to Italy, and lingered a while in Florence before going on to Rome.
In Florence Roderick seemed to have won back his old innocence and his preference for the pleasures of study over any others.