Why have you been at such pains to assure 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 compassing 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 passions 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 reassure 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 reassure 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 partition 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 pronounced 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.