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 retarded 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 Iam 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 passed 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.
There had been grand tailors, he said, who declined to make you a coat unless you got the hat you were to wear with it from an artist of their own choosing.It seemed to him that he had an equal right to exact that his statue should not form part of the same system of ornament as the "Pearl of Perugia," a picture by an American confrere who had, in Mr.Leavenworth's opinion, a prodigious eye for color.
As a customer, Mr.Leavenworth used to drop into Roderick's studio, to see how things were getting on, and give a friendly hint or so.
He would seat himself squarely, plant his gold-topped cane between his legs, which he held very much apart, rest his large white hands on the head, and enunciate the principles of spiritual art, as he hoisted them one by one, as you might say, out of the depths of his moral consciousness.
