Chapter 12

Why did Miss Vervain send Don Ippolito to him? Was it some scheme of her secret love for the priest; or mere coarse resentment of the cautions Ferris had once hinted, a piece of vulgar bravado? But if she had acted throughout in pure simplicity, in unwise goodness of heart? If Don Ippolito were altogether self-deceived, and nothing but her unknowing pity had given him grounds of hope? He himself had suggested this to the priest, and how with a different motive he looked at it in his own behalf. A great load began slowly to lift itself from Ferris’s heart, which could ache now for this most unhappy priest. But if his conjecture were just, his duty would be different. He must not coldly acquiesce and let things take their course. He had introduced Don Ippolito to the Vervains; he was in some sort responsible for him; he must save them if possible from the painful consequences of the priest’s hallucination. But how to do this was by no means clear. He blamed himself for not having been franker with Don Ippolito and tried to make him see that the Vervains might regard his passion as a presumption upon their kindness to him, an abuse of their hospitable friendship; and yet how could he have done this without outrage to a sensitive and right-meaning soul? For a moment it seemed to him that he must seek Don Ippolito, and repair his fault; but they had hardly parted as friends, and his action might be easily misconstrued. If he shrank from the thought of speaking to him of the matter again, it appeared yet more impossible to bring it before the Vervains. Like a man of the imaginative temperament as he was, he exaggerated the probable effect, and pictured their dismay in colors that made his interference seem a ludicrous enormity; in fact, it would have been an awkward business enough for one not hampered by his intricate obligations. He felt bound to the Vervains, the ignorant young girl, and the addle-pated mother; but if he ought to go to them and tell them what he knew, to which of them ought he to speak, and how? In an anguish of perplexity that made the sweat stand in drops upon his forehead, he smiled to think it just possible that Mrs. Vervain might take the matter seriously, and wish to consider the propriety of Florida’s accepting Don Ippolito. But if he spoke to the daughter, how should he approach the subject? “Don Ippolito tells me he loves you, and he goes to America with the expectation that when he has made his fortune with a patent back-action apple-corer, you will marry him.” Should he say something to this purport? And in Heaven’s name what right had he, Ferris, to say anything at all? The horrible absurdity, the inexorable delicacy of his position made him laugh.

On the other hand, besides, he was bound to Don Ippolito, who had come to him as the nearest friend of both, and confided in him. He remembered with a tardy, poignant intelligence how in their first talk of the Vervains Don Ippolito had taken pains to inform himself that Ferris was not in love with Florida. Could he be less manly and generous than this poor priest, and violate the sanctity of his confidence? Ferris groaned aloud. No, contrive it as he would, call it by what fair name he chose, he could not commit this treachery. It was the more impossible to him because, in this agony of doubt as to what he should do, he now at least read his own heart clearly, and had no longer a doubt what was in it. He pitied her for the pain she must suffer. He saw how her simple goodness, her blind sympathy with Don Ippolito, and only this, must have led the priest to the mistaken pass at which he stood. But Ferris felt that the whole affair had been fatally carried beyond his reach; he could do nothing now but wait and endure. There are cases in which a man must not protect the woman he loves. This was one.

The afternoon wore away. In the evening he went to the Piazza, and drank a cup of coffee at Florian’s. Then he walked to the Public Gardens, where he watched the crowd till it thinned in the twilight and left him alone. He hung upon the parapet, looking off over the lagoon that at last he perceived to be flooded with moonlight. He desperately called a gondola, and bade the man row him to the public landing nearest the Vervains’, and so walked up the calle, and entered the palace from the campo, through the court that on one side opened into the garden.

Mrs. Vervain was alone in the room where he had always been accustomed to find her daughter with her, and a chill as of the impending change fell upon him. He felt how pleasant it had been to find them together; with a vain, piercing regret he felt how much like home the place had been to him. Mrs. Vervain, indeed, was not changed; she was even more than ever herself, though all that she said imported change. She seemed to observe nothing unwonted in him, and she began to talk in her way of things that she could not know were so near his heart.

“Now, Mr. Ferris, I have a little surprise for you. Guess what it is!”

“I’m not good at guessing. I’d rather not know what it is than have to guess it,” said Ferris, trying to be light, under his heavy trouble.

“You won’t try once, even? Well, you’re going to be rid of us soon I We are going away.”

“Yes, I knew that,” said Ferris quietly. “Don Ippolito told me so to-day.”

“And is that all you have to say? Isn’t it rather sad? Isn’t it sudden? Come, Mr. Ferris, do be a little complimentary, for once!”

“It’s sudden, and I can assure you it’s sad enough for me,” replied the painter, in a tone which could not leave any doubt of his sincerity.

“Well, so it is for us,” quavered Mrs. Vervain. “You have been very, very good to us,” she went on more collectedly, “and we shall never forget it. Florida has been speaking of it, too, and she’s extremely grateful, and thinks we’ve quite imposed upon you.”

“Thanks.”

“I suppose we have, but as I always say, you’re the representative of the country here. However, that’s neither here nor there. We have no relatives on the face of the earth, you know; but I have a good many old friends in Providence, and we’re going back there. We both think I shall be better at home; for I’m sorry to say, Mr. Ferns, that though I don’t complain of Venice,--it’s really a beautiful place, and all that; not the least exaggerated,--still I don’t think it’s done my health much good; or at least I don’t seem to gain, don’t you know, I don’t seem to gain.”

“I’m very sorry to hear it, Mrs. Vervain.”

“Yes, I’m sure you are; but you see, don’t you, that we must go? We are going next week. When we’ve once made up our minds, there’s no object in prolonging the agony.”

Mrs. Vervain adjusted her glasses with the thumb and finger of her right hand, and peered into Ferris’s face with a gay smile. “But the greatest part of the surprise is,” she resumed, lowering her voice a little, “that Don Ippolito is going with us.”

“Ah!” cried Ferris sharply.

“I _knew_ I should surprise you,” laughed Mrs. Vervain. “We’ve been having a regular confab--_clave_, I mean--about it here, and he’s all on fire to go to America; though it must be kept a great secret on his account, poor fellow. He’s to join us in France, and then he can easily get into England, with us. You know he’s to give up being a priest, and is going to devote himself to invention when he gets to America. Now, what _do_ you think of it, Mr. Ferris? Quite strikes you dumb, doesn’t it?” triumphed Mrs. Vervain. “I suppose it’s what you would call a wild goose chase,--I used to pick up all those phrases,--but we shall carry it through.”

Ferris gasped, as though about to speak, but said nothing.

“Don Ippolito’s been here the whole afternoon,” continued Mrs. Vervain, “or rather ever since about five o’clock. He took dinner with us, and we’ve been talking it over and over. He’s _so_ enthusiastic about it, and yet he breaks down every little while, and seems quite to despair of the undertaking. But Florida won’t let him do that; and really it’s funny, the way he defers to her judgment--you know _I_ always regard Florida as such a mere child--and seems to take every word she says for gospel. But, shedding tears, now: it’s dreadful in a man, isn’t it? I wish Don Ippolito wouldn’t do that. It makes one creep. I can’t feel that it’s manly; can you?”

Ferris found voice to say something about those things being different with the Latin races.

“Well, at any rate,” said Mrs. Vervain, “I’m glad that _Americans_ don’t shed tears, as a general _rule_. Now, Florida: you’d think she was the man all through this business, she’s so perfectly heroic about it; that is, outwardly: for I can see--women can, in each other, Mr. Ferris--just where she’s on the point of breaking down, all the while. Has she ever spoken to you about Don Ippolito? She does think so highly of your opinion, Mr. Ferris.”

“She does me too much honor,” said Ferris, with ghastly irony.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” returned Mrs. Vervain. “She told me this morning that she’d made Don Ippolito promise to speak to you about it; but he didn’t mention having done so, and--I hated, don’t you know, to ask him.... In fact, Florida had told me beforehand that I mustn’t. She said he must be left entirely to himself in that matter, and”--Mrs. Vervain looked suggestively at Ferris.

“He spoke to me about it,” said Ferris.

“Then why in the world did you let me run on? I suppose you advised him against it.”

“I certainly did.”

“Well, there’s where I think woman’s intuition is better than man’s reason.”

The painter silently bowed his head.

“Yes, I’m quite woman’s rights in that respect,” said Mrs. Vervain.

“Oh, without doubt,” answered Ferris, aimlessly.

“I’m perfectly delighted,” she went on, “at the idea of Don Ippolito’s giving up the priesthood, and I’ve told him he must get married to some good American girl. You ought to have seen how the poor fellow blushed! But really, you know, there are lots of nice girls that would _jump_ at him--so handsome and sad-looking, and a genius.”

Ferris could only stare helplessly at Mrs. Vervain, who continued:--

“Yes, I think he’s a genius, and I’m determined that he shall have a chance. I suppose we’ve got a job on our hands; but I’m not sorry. I’ll introduce him into society, and if he needs money he shall have it. What does God give us money for, Mr. Ferris, but to help our fellow-creatures?”

So miserable, as he was, from head to foot, that it seemed impossible he could endure more, Ferris could not forbear laughing at this burst of piety.

“What are you laughing at?” asked Mrs. Vervain, who had cheerfully joined him. “Something I’ve been saying. Well, you won’t have me to laugh at much longer. I do wonder whom you’ll have next.”

Ferris’s merriment died away in something like a groan, and when Mrs. Vervain again spoke, it was in a tone of sudden querulousness. “I _wish_ Florida would come! She went to bolt the land-gate after Don Ippolito,--I wanted her to,--but she ought to have been back long ago. It’s odd you didn’t meet them, coming in. She must be in the garden somewhere; I suppose she’s sorry to be leaving it. But I need her. Would you be so very kind, Mr. Ferris, as to go and ask her to come to me?”

Ferris rose heavily from the chair in which he seemed to have grown ten years older. He had hardly heard anything that he did not know already, but the clear vision of the affair with which he had come to the Vervains was hopelessly confused and darkened. He could make nothing of any phase of it. He did not know whether he cared now to see Florida or not. He mechanically obeyed Mrs. Vervain, and stepping out upon the terrace, slowly descended the stairway.

The moon was shining brightly into the garden.

XV.

Florida and Don Ippolito had paused in the pathway which parted at the fountain and led in one direction to the water-gate, and in the other out through the palace-court into the campo.

“Now, you must not give way to despair again,” she said to him. “You will succeed, I am sure, for you will deserve success.”

“It is all your goodness, madamigella,” sighed the priest, “and at the bottom of my heart I am afraid that all the hope and courage I have are also yours.”

“You shall never want for hope and courage then. We believe in you, and we honor your purpose, and we will be your steadfast friends. But now you must think only of the present--of how you are to get away from Venice. Oh, I can understand how you must hate to leave it! What a beautiful night! You mustn’t expect such moonlight as this in America, Don Ippolito.”

“It _is_ beautiful, is it not?” said the priest, kindling from her. “But I think we Venetians are never so conscious of the beauty of Venice as you strangers are.”

“I don’t know. I only know that now, since we have made up our minds to go, and fixed the day and hour, it is more like leaving my own country than anything else I’ve ever felt. This garden, I seem to have spent my whole life in it; and when we are settled in Providence, I’m going to have mother send back for some of these statues. I suppose Signor Cavaletti wouldn’t mind our robbing his place of them if he were paid enough. At any rate we must have this one that belongs to the fountain. You shall be the first to set the fountain playing over there, Don Ippolito, and then we’ll sit down on this stone bench before it, and imagine ourselves in the garden of Casa Vervain at Venice.”

“No, no; let me be the last to set it playing here,” said the priest, quickly stooping to the pipe at the foot of the figure, “and then we will sit down here, and imagine ourselves in the garden of Casa Vervain at Providence.”

Florida put her hand on his shoulder. “You mustn’t do it,” she said simply. “The padrone doesn’t like to waste the water.”

“Oh, we’ll pray the saints to rain it back on him some day,” cried Don Ippolito with willful levity, and the stream leaped into the moonlight and seemed to hang there like a tangled skein of silver. “But how shall I shut it off when you are gone?” asked the young girl, looking ruefully at the floating threads of splendor.

“Oh, I will shut it off before I go,” answered Don Ippolito. “Let it play a moment,” he continued, gazing rapturously upon it, while the moon painted his lifted face with a pallor that his black robes heightened. He fetched a long, sighing breath, as if he inhaled with that respiration all the rich odors of the flowers, blanched like his own visage in the white lustre; as if he absorbed into his heart at once the wide glory of the summer night, and the beauty of the young girl at his side. It seemed a supreme moment with him; he looked as a man might look who has climbed out of lifelong defeat into a single instant of release and triumph.

Florida sank upon the bench before the fountain, indulging his caprice with that sacred, motherly tolerance, some touch of which is in all womanly yielding to men’s will, and which was perhaps present in greater degree in her feeling towards a man more than ordinarily orphaned and unfriended.

“Is Providence your native city?” asked Don Ippolito, abruptly, after a little silence.

“Oh no; I was born at St. Augustine in Florida.”

“Ah yes, I forgot; madama has told me about it; Providence is _her_ city. But the two are near together?”

“No,” said Florida, compassionately, “they are a thousand miles apart.”

“A thousand miles? What a vast country!”

“Yes, it’s a whole world.”

“Ah, a world, indeed!” cried the priest, softly. “I shall never comprehend it.”

“You never will,” answered the young girl gravely, “if you do not think about it more practically.”

“Practically, practically!” lightly retorted the priest. “What a word with you Americans; That is the consul’s word: _practical_.”

“Then you have been to see him to-day?” asked Florida, with eagerness. “I wanted to ask you”--

“Yes, I went to consult the oracle, as you bade me.”

“Don Ippolito”--

“And he was averse to my going to America. He said it was not practical.”

“Oh!” murmured the girl.

“I think,” continued the priest with vehemence, “that Signor Ferris is no longer my friend.”

“Did he treat you coldly--harshly?” she asked, with a note of indignation in her voice. “Did he know that I--that you came”--

“Perhaps he was right. Perhaps I shall indeed go to ruin there. Ruin, ruin! Do I not _live_ ruin here?”

“What did he say--what did he tell you?”

“No, no; not now, madamigella! I do not want to think of that man, now. I want you to help me once more to realize myself in America, where I shall never have been a priest, where I shall at least battle even-handed with the world. Come, let us forget him; the thought of him palsies all my hope. He could not see me save in this robe, in this figure that I abhor.”

“Oh, it was strange, it was not like him, it was cruel! What did he say?”

“In everything but words, he bade me despair; he bade me look upon all that makes life dear and noble as impossible to me!”

“Oh, how? Perhaps he did not understand you. No, he did not understand you. What did you say to him, Don Ippolito? Tell me!” She leaned towards him, in anxious emotion, as she spoke.

The priest rose, and stretched out his arms, as if he would gather something of courage from the infinite space. In his visage were the sublimity and the terror of a man who puts everything to the risk.

“How will it really be with me, yonder?” he demanded. “As it is with other men, whom their past life, if it has been guiltless, does not follow to that new world of freedom and justice?”

“Why should it not be so?” demanded Florida. “Did _he_ say it would not?”

“Need it be known there that I have been a priest? Or if I tell it, will it make me appear a kind of monster, different from other men?”

“No, no!” she answered fervently. “Your story would gain friends and honor for you everywhere in America. Did _he_”--

“A moment, a moment!” cried Don Ippolito, catching his breath. “Will it ever be possible for me to win something more than honor and friendship there?”

She looked up at him askingly, confusedly.

“If I am a man, and the time should ever come that a face, a look, a voice, shall be to me what they are to other men, will _she_ remember it against me that I have been a priest, when I tell her--say to her, madamigella--how dear she is to me, offer her my life’s devotion, ask her to be my wife?”...

Florida rose from the seat, and stood confronting him, in a helpless silence, which he seemed not to notice.

Suddenly he clasped his hands together, and desperately stretched them towards her.

“Oh, my hope, my trust, my life, if it were you that I loved?”...

“What!” shuddered the girl, recoiling, with almost a shriek. “_You_? _A priest_!”

Don Ippolito gave a low cry, half sob:--

“His words, his words! It is true, I cannot escape, I am doomed, I must die as I have lived!”

He dropped his face into his hands, and stood with his head bowed before her; neither spoke for a long time, or moved.

Then Florida said absently, in the husky murmur to which her voice fell when she was strongly moved, “Yes, I see it all, how it has been,” and was silent again, staring, as if a procession of the events and scenes of the past months were passing before her; and presently she moaned to herself “Oh, oh, oh!” and wrung her hands. The foolish fountain kept capering and babbling on. All at once, now, as a flame flashes up and then expires, it leaped and dropped extinct at the foot of the statue.

Its going out seemed somehow to leave them in darkness, and under cover of that gloom she drew nearer the priest, and by such approaches as one makes toward a fancied apparition, when his fear will not let him fly, but it seems better to suffer the worst from it at once than to live in terror of it ever after, she lifted her hands to his, and gently taking them away from his face, looked into his hopeless eyes.

“Oh, Don Ippolito,” she grieved. “What shall I say to you, what can I do for you, now?”

But there was nothing to do. The whole edifice of his dreams, his wild imaginations, had fallen into dust at a word; no magic could rebuild it; the end that never seems the end had come. He let her keep his cold hands, and presently he returned the entreaty of her tears with his wan, patient smile.

“You cannot help me; there is no help for an error like mine. Sometime, if ever the thought of me is a greater pain than it is at this moment, you can forgive me. Yes, you can do that for me.”

“But who, _who_ will ever forgive me” she cried, “for my blindness! Oh, you must believe that I never thought, I never dreamt”--

“I know it well. It was your fatal truth that did it; truth too high and fine for me to have discerned save through such agony as.... You too loved my soul, like the rest, and you would have had me no priest for the reason that they would have had me a priest--I see it. But you had no right to love my soul and not me--you, a woman. A woman must not love only the soul of a man.”

“Yes, yes!” piteously explained the girl, “but you were a priest to me!”

“That is true, madamigella. I was always a priest to you; and now I see that I never could be otherwise. Ah, the wrong began many years before we met. I was trying to blame you a little”--

“Blame me, blame me; do!”

--“but there is no blame. Think that it was another way of asking your forgiveness.... O my God, my God, my God!”

He released his hands from her, and uttered this cry under his breath, with his face lifted towards the heavens. When he looked at her again, he said: “Madamigella, if my share of this misery gives me the right to ask of you”--

“Oh ask anything of me! I will give everything, do everything!”

He faltered, and then, “You do not love me,” he said abruptly; “is there some one else that you love?”

She did not answer.

“Is it ... he?”

She hid her face.

“I knew it,” groaned the priest, “I knew that too!” and he turned away.

“Don Ippolito, Don Ippolito--oh, poor, poor Don Ippolito!” cried the girl, springing towards him. “Is _this_ the way you leave me? Where are you going? What will you do now?”

“Did I not say? I am going to die a priest.”

“Is there nothing that you will let me be to you, hope for you?”

“Nothing,” said Don Ippolito, after a moment. “What could you?” He seized the hands imploringly extended towards him, and clasped them together and kissed them both. “Adieu!” he whispered; then he opened them, and passionately kissed either palm; “adieu, adieu!”

A great wave of sorrow and compassion and despair for him swept through her. She flung her arms about his neck, and pulled his head down upon her heart, and held it tight there, weeping and moaning over him as over some hapless, harmless thing that she had unpurposely bruised or killed. Then she suddenly put her hands against his breast, and thrust him away, and turned and ran.

Ferris stepped back again into the shadow of the tree from which he had just emerged, and clung to its trunk lest he should fall. Another seemed to creep out of the court in his person, and totter across the white glare of the campo and down the blackness of the calle. In the intersected spaces where the moonlight fell, this alien, miserable man saw the figure of a priest gliding on before him.

XVI.

Florida swiftly mounted the terrace steps, but she stopped with her hand on the door, panting, and turned and walked slowly away to the end of the terrace, drying her eyes with dashes of her handkerchief, and ordering her hair, some coils of which had been loosened by her flight. Then she went back to the door, waited, and softly opened it. Her mother was not in the parlor where she had left her, and she passed noiselessly into her own room, where some trunks stood open and half-packed against the wall. She began to gather up the pieces of dress that lay upon the bed and chairs, and to fold them with mechanical carefulness and put them in the boxes. Her mother’s voice called from the other chamber, “Is that you, Florida?”