Then one morning the two young men had themselves rowed out to Torcello, and Roderick lay back for a couple of hours watching a brown-breasted gondolier making superb muscular movements, in high relief, against the sky of the Adriatic, and at the end jerked himself up with a violence that nearly swamped the gondola, and declared that the only thing worth living for was to make a colossal bronze and set it aloft in the light of a public square.
In Rome his first care was for the Vatican; he went there again and again.But the old imperial and papal city altogether delighted him; only there he really found what he had been looking for from the first--the complete antipodes of Northampton.
And indeed Rome is the natural home of those spirits with which we just now claimed fellowship for Roderick--the spirits with a deep relish for the artificial element in life and the infinite superpositions of history.It is the immemorial city of convention.
The stagnant Roman air is charged with convention;it colors the yellow light and deepens the chilly shadows.
And in that still recent day the most impressive convention in all history was visible to men's eyes, in the Roman streets, erect in a gilded coach drawn by four black horses.
Roderick's first fortnight was a high aesthetic revel.
He declared that Rome made him feel and understand more things than he could express: he was sure that life must have there, for all one's senses, an incomparable fineness; that more interesting things must happen to one than anywhere else.
And he gave Rowland to understand that he meant to live freely and largely, and be as interested as occasion demanded.
Rowland saw no reason to regard this as a menace of dissipation, because, in the first place, there was in all dissipation, refine it as one might, a grossness which would disqualify it for Roderick's favor, and because, in the second, the young sculptor was a man to regard all things in the light of his art, to hand over his passions to his genius to be dealt with, and to find that he could live largely enough without exceeding the circle of wholesome curiosity.
Rowland took immense satisfaction in his companion's deep impatience to make something of all his impressions.
Some of these indeed found their way into a channel which did not lead to statues, but it was none the less a safe one.
He wrote frequent long letters to Miss Garland;when Rowland went with him to post them he thought wistfully of the fortune of the great loosely-written missives, which cost Roderick unconscionable sums in postage.
He received punctual answers of a more frugal form, written in a clear, minute hand, on paper vexatiously thin.
If Rowland was present when they came, he turned away and thought of other things--or tried to.These were the only moments when his sympathy halted, and they were brief.
For the rest he let the days go by unprotestingly, and enjoyed Roderick's serene efflorescence as he would have done a beautiful summer sunrise.Rome, for the past month, had been delicious.
The annual descent of the Goths had not yet begun, and sunny leisure seemed to brood over the city.
Roderick had taken out a note-book and was roughly sketching a memento of the great Juno.Suddenly there was a noise on the gravel, and the young men, looking up, saw three persons advancing.
One was a woman of middle age, with a rather grand air and a great many furbelows.She looked very hard at our friends as she passed, and glanced back over her shoulder, as if to hasten the step of a young girl who slowly followed her.
She had such an expansive majesty of mien that Rowland supposed she must have some proprietary right in the villa and was not just then in a hospitable mood.Beside her walked a little elderly man, tightly buttoned in a shabby black coat, but with a flower in his lappet, and a pair of soiled light gloves.
He was a grotesque-looking personage, and might have passed for a gentleman of the old school, reduced by adversity to playing cicerone to foreigners of distinction.He had a little black eye which glittered like a diamond and rolled about like a ball of quicksilver, and a white moustache, cut short and stiff, like a worn-out brush.He was smiling with extreme urbanity, and talking in a low, mellifluous voice to the lady, who evidently was not listening to him.At a considerable distance behind this couple strolled a young girl, apparently of about twenty.
She was tall and slender, and dressed with extreme elegance;she led by a cord a large poodle of the most fantastic aspect.
He was combed and decked like a ram for sacrifice;his trunk and haunches were of the most transparent pink, his fleecy head and shoulders as white as jeweler's cotton, and his tail and ears ornamented with long blue ribbons.
He stepped along stiffly and solemnly beside his mistress, with an air of conscious elegance.There was something at first slightly ridiculous in the sight of a young lady gravely appended to an animal of these incongruous attributes, and Roderick, with his customary frankness, greeted the spectacle with a confident smile.
The young girl perceived it and turned her face full upon him, with a gaze intended apparently to enforce greater deference.
It was not deference, however, her face provoked, but startled, submissive admiration; Roderick's smile fell dead, and he sat eagerly staring.A pair of extraordinary dark blue eyes, a mass of dusky hair over a low forehead, a blooming oval of perfect purity, a flexible lip, just touched with disdain, the step and carriage of a tired princess--these were the general features of his vision.
The young lady was walking slowly and letting her long dress rustle over the gravel; the young men had time to see her distinctly before she averted her face and went her way.
She left a vague, sweet perfume behind her as she passed.
