“This is what I mean,” said Rowland, after a pause. “That girl finds you interesting, and is pleased, even though she may play indifference, at your finding her so. I said to myself that it might save her some sentimental disappointment to know without delay that you are not at liberty to become indefinitely interested in other women.”
“You seem to have taken the measure of my liberty with extraordinary minuteness!” cried Roderick.
“You must do me justice. I am the cause of your separation from Miss Garland, the cause of your being exposed to temptations which she hardly even suspects. How could I ever face her,” Rowland demanded, with much warmth of tone, “if at the end of it all she should be unhappy?”
“I had no idea that Miss Garland had made such an impression on you. You are too zealous; I take it she did n’t charge you to look after her interests.”
“If anything happens to you, I am accountable. You must understand that.”
“That ‘s a view of the situation I can’t accept; in your own interest, no less than in mine. It can only make us both very uncomfortable. I know all I owe you; I feel it; you know that! But I am not a small boy nor an outer barbarian any longer, and, whatever I do, I do with my eyes open. When I do well, the merit ‘s mine; if I do ill, the fault ‘s mine! The idea that I make you nervous is detestable. Dedicate your nerves to some better cause, and believe that if Miss Garland and I have a quarrel, we shall settle it between ourselves.”
Rowland had found himself wondering, shortly before, whether possibly his brilliant young friend was without a conscience; now it dimly occurred to him that he was without a heart. Rowland, as we have already intimated, was a man with a moral passion, and no small part of it had gone forth into his relations with Roderick. There had been, from the first, no protestations of friendship on either side, but Rowland had implicitly offered everything that belongs to friendship, and Roderick had, apparently, as deliberately accepted it. Rowland, indeed, had taken an exquisite satisfaction in his companion’s deep, inexpressive assent to his interest in him. “Here is an uncommonly fine thing,” he said to himself: “a nature unconsciously grateful, a man in whom friendship does the thing that love alone generally has the credit of—knocks the bottom out of pride!” His reflective judgment of Roderick, as time went on, had indulged in a great many irrepressible vagaries; but his affection, his sense of something in his companion’s whole personality that overmastered his heart and beguiled his imagination, had never for an instant faltered. He listened to Roderick’s last words, and then he smiled as he rarely smiled—with bitterness.
“I don’t at all like your telling me I am too zealous,” he said. “If I had not been zealous, I should never have cared a fig for you.”
Roderick flushed deeply, and thrust his modeling tool up to the handle into the clay. “Say it outright! You have been a great fool to believe in me.”
“I desire to say nothing of the kind, and you don’t honestly believe I do!” said Rowland. “It seems to me I am really very good-natured even to reply to such nonsense.”