But Rowland had two substantial aids for giving patience the air of contentment: he was an inquisitive reader and a passionate rider.He plunged into bulky German octavos on Italian history, and he spent long afternoons in the saddle, ranging over the grassy desolation of the Campagna.
As the season went on and the social groups began to constitute themselves, he found that he knew a great many people and that he had easy opportunity for knowing others.
He enjoyed a quiet corner of a drawing-room beside an agreeable woman, and although the machinery of what calls itself society seemed to him to have many superfluous wheels, he accepted invitations and made visits punctiliously, from the conviction that the only way not to be overcome by the ridiculous side of most of such observances is to take them with exaggerated gravity.
He introduced Roderick right and left, and suffered him to make his way himself--an enterprise for which Roderick very soon displayed an all-sufficient capacity.Wherever he went he made, not exactly what is called a favorable impression, but what, from a practical point of view, is better--a puzzling one.
He took to evening parties as a duck to water, and before the winter was half over was the most freely and frequently discussed young man in the heterogeneous foreign colony.Rowland's theory of his own duty was to let him run his course and play his cards, only holding himself ready to point out shoals and pitfalls, and administer a friendly propulsion through tight places.
Roderick's manners on the precincts of the Pincian were quite the same as his manners on Cecilia's veranda:
that is, they were no manners at all.But it remained as true as before that it would have been impossible, on the whole, to violate ceremony with less of lasting offense.
He interrupted, he contradicted, he spoke to people he had never seen, and left his social creditors without the smallest conversational interest on their loans;he lounged and yawned, he talked loud when he should have talked low, and low when he should have talked loud.
Many people, in consequence, thought him insufferably conceited, and declared that he ought to wait till he had something to show for his powers, before he assumed the airs of a spoiled celebrity.
But to Rowland and to most friendly observers this judgment was quite beside the mark, and the young man's undiluted naturalness was its own justification.He was impulsive, spontaneous, sincere; there were so many people at dinner-tables and in studios who were not, that it seemed worth while to allow this rare specimen all possible freedom of action.
If Roderick took the words out of your mouth when you were just prepared to deliver them with the most effective accent, he did it with a perfect good conscience and with no pretension of a better right to being heard, but simply because he was full to overflowing of his own momentary thought and it sprang from his lips without asking leave.There were persons who waited on your periods much more deferentially, who were a hundred times more capable than Roderick of a reflective impertinence.
Roderick received from various sources, chiefly feminine, enough finely-adjusted advice to have established him in life as an embodiment of the proprieties, and he received it, as he afterwards listened to criticisms on his statues, with unfaltering candor and good-humor.Here and there, doubtless, as he went, he took in a reef in his sail;but he was too adventurous a spirit to be successfully tamed, and he remained at most points the florid, rather strident young Virginian whose serene inflexibility had been the despair of Mr.Striker.All this was what friendly commentators (still chiefly feminine) alluded to when they spoke of his delightful freshness, and critics of harsher sensibilities (of the other sex) when they denounced his damned impertinence.
His appearance enforced these impressions--his handsome face, his radiant, unaverted eyes, his childish, unmodulated voice.
Afterwards, when those who loved him were in tears, there was something in all this unspotted comeliness that seemed to lend a mockery to the causes of their sorrow.
Certainly, among the young men of genius who, for so many ages, have gone up to Rome to test their powers, none ever made a fairer beginning than Roderick.
He rode his two horses at once with extraordinary good fortune;he established the happiest modus vivendi betwixt work and play.
He wrestled all day with a mountain of clay in his studio, and chattered half the night away in Roman drawing-rooms.
It all seemed part of a kind of divine facility.
He was passionately interested, he was feeling his powers;now that they had thoroughly kindled in the glowing aesthetic atmosphere of Rome, the ardent young fellow should be pardoned for believing that he never was to see the end of them.
He enjoyed immeasurably, after the chronic obstruction of home, the downright act of production.He kept models in his studio till they dropped with fatigue; he drew, on other days, at the Capitol and the Vatican, till his own head swam with his eagerness, and his limbs stiffened with the cold.
He had promptly set up a life-sized figure which he called an "Adam," and was pushing it rapidly toward completion.
There were naturally a great many wiseheads who smiled at his precipitancy, and cited him as one more example of Yankee crudity, a capital recruit to the great army of those who wish to dance before they can walk.They were right, but Roderick was right too, for the success of his statue was not to have been foreseen; it partook, really, of the miraculous.
He never surpassed it afterwards, and a good judge here and there has been known to pronounce it the finest piece of sculpture of our modern era.To Rowland it seemed to justify superbly his highest hopes of his friend, and he said to himself that if he had invested his happiness in fostering a genius, he ought now to be in possession of a boundless complacency.
