Chapter 14

The stir of his robes roused Don Ippolito. He slowly and weakly turned his head, and his eyes fell upon the painter. He made a helpless gesture of salutation with his thin hand, and began to excuse himself, for the trouble he had given, with a gentle politeness that touched the painter’s heart through all the complex resentments that divided them. It was indeed a strange ground on which the two men met. Ferris could not have described Don Ippolito as his enemy, for the priest had wittingly done him no wrong; he could not have logically hated him as a rival, for till it was too late he had not confessed to his own heart the love that was in it; he knew no evil of Don Ippolito, he could not accuse him of any betrayal of trust, or violation of confidence. He felt merely that this hapless creature, lying so deathlike before him, had profaned, however involuntarily, what was sacredest in the world to him; beyond this all was chaos. He had heard of the priest’s sickness with a fierce hardening of the heart; yet as he beheld him now, he began to remember things that moved him to a sort of remorse. He recalled again the simple loyalty with which Don Ippolito had first spoken to him of Miss Vervain and tried to learn his own feeling toward her; he thought how trustfully at their last meeting the priest had declared his love and hope, and how, when he had coldly received his confession, Don Ippolito had solemnly adjured him to be frank with him; and Ferris could not. That pity for himself as the prey of fantastically cruel chances, which he had already vaguely felt, began now also to include the priest; ignoring all but that compassion, he went up to the bed and took the weak, chill, nerveless hand in his own.

The canonico rose and placed his chair for Ferris beside the pillow, on which lay a brass crucifix, and then softly left the room, exchanging a glance of affectionate intelligence with the sick man.

“I might have waited a little while,” said Don Ippolito weakly, speaking in a hollow voice that was the shadow of his old deep tones, “but you will know how to forgive the impatience of a man not yet quite master of himself. I thank you for coming. I have been very sick, as you see; I did not think to live; I did not care.... I am very weak, now; let me say to you quickly what I want to say. Dear friend,” continued Don Ippolito, fixing his eyes upon the painter’s face, “I spoke to her that night after I had parted from you.”

The priest’s voice was now firm; the painter turned his face away.

“I spoke without hope,” proceeded Don Ippolito, “and because I must. I spoke in vain; all was lost, all was past in a moment.”

The coil of suspicions and misgivings and fears in which Ferris had lived was suddenly without a clew; he could not look upon the pallid visage of the priest lest he should now at last find there that subtle expression of deceit; the whirl of his thoughts kept him silent; Don Ippolito went on.

“Even if I had never been a priest, I would still have been impossible to her. She”....

He stopped as if for want of strength to go on. All at once he cried, “Listen!” and he rapidly recounted the story of his life, ending with the fatal tragedy of his love. When it was told, he said calmly, “But now everything is over with me on earth. I thank the Infinite Compassion for the sorrows through which I have passed. I, also, have proved the miraculous power of the church, potent to save in all ages.” He gathered the crucifix in his spectral grasp, and pressed it to his lips. “Many merciful things have befallen me on this bed of sickness. My uncle, whom the long years of my darkness divided from me, is once more at peace with me. Even that poor old woman whom I sent to call you, and who had served me as I believed with hate for me as a false priest in her heart, has devoted herself day and night to my helplessness; she has grown decrepit with her cares and vigils. Yes, I have had many and signal marks of the divine pity to be grateful for.” He paused, breathing quickly, and then added, “They tell me that the danger of this sickness is past. But none the less I have died in it. When I rise from this bed it shall be to take the vows of a Carmelite friar.”

Ferris made no answer, and Don Ippolito resumed:--

“I have told you how when I first owned to her the falsehood in which I lived, she besought me to try if I might not find consolation in the holy life to which I had been devoted. When you see her, dear friend, will you not tell her that I came to understand that this comfort, this refuge, awaited me in the cell of the Carmelite? I have brought so much trouble into her life that I would fain have her know I have found peace where she bade me seek it, that I have mastered my affliction by reconciling myself to it. Tell her that but for her pity and fear for me, I believe that I must have died in my sins.”

It was perhaps inevitable from Ferris’s Protestant association of monks and convents and penances chiefly with the machinery of fiction, that all this affected him as unreally as talk in a stage-play. His heart was cold, as he answered: “I am glad that your mind is at rest concerning the doubts which so long troubled you. Not all men are so easily pacified; but, as you say, it is the privilege of your church to work miracles. As to Miss Vervain, I am sorry that I cannot promise to give her your message. I shall never see her again. Excuse me,” he continued, “but your servant said there was something you wished to say that concerned me?”

“You will never see her again!” cried the priest, struggling to lift himself upon his elbow and falling back upon the pillow. “Oh, bereft! Oh, deaf and blind! It was _you_ that she loved! She confessed it to me that night.”

“Wait!” said Ferris, trying to steady his voice, and failing; “I was with Mrs. Vervain that night; she sent me into the garden to call her daughter, and I saw how Miss Vervain parted from the man she did not love! I saw”....

It was a horrible thing to have said it, he felt now that he had spoken; a sense of the indelicacy, the shamefulness, seemed to alienate him from all high concern in the matter, and to leave him a mere self-convicted eavesdropper. His face flamed; the wavering hopes, the wavering doubts alike died in his heart. He had fallen below the dignity of his own trouble.

“You saw, you saw,” softly repeated the priest, without looking at him, and without any show of emotion; apparently, the convalescence that had brought him perfect clearness of reason had left his sensibilities still somewhat dulled. He closed his lips and lay silent. At last, he asked very gently, “And how shall I make you believe that what you saw was not a woman’s love, but an angel’s heavenly pity for me? Does it seem hard to believe this of her?”

“Yes,” answered the painter doggedly, “it is hard.”

“And yet it is the very truth. Oh, you do not know her, you never knew her! In the same moment that she denied me her love, she divined the anguish of my soul, and with that embrace she sought to console me for the friendlessness of a whole life, past and to come. But I know that I waste my words on you,” he cried bitterly. “You never would see me as I was; you would find no singleness in me, and yet I had a heart as full of loyalty to you as love for her. In what have I been false to you?”

“You never were false to me,” answered Ferris, “and God knows I have been true to you, and at what cost. We might well curse the day we met, Don Ippolito, for we have only done each other harm. But I never meant you harm. And now I ask you to forgive me if I cannot believe you. I cannot--yet. I am of another race from you, slow to suspect, slow to trust. Give me a little time; let me see you again. I want to go away and think. I don’t question your truth. I’m afraid you don’t know. I’m afraid that the same deceit has tricked us both. I must come to you to-morrow. Can I?”

He rose and stood beside the couch.

“Surely, surely,” answered the priest, looking into Ferris’s troubled eyes with calm meekness. “You will do me the greatest pleasure. Yes, come again to-morrow. You know,” he said with a sad smile, referring to his purpose of taking vows, “that my time in the world is short. Adieu, to meet again!”

He took Ferris’s hand, hanging weak and hot by his side, and drew him gently down by it, and kissed him on either bearded cheek. “It is our custom, you know, among _friends_. Farewell.”

The canonico in the anteroom bowed austerely to him as he passed through; the old woman refused with a harsh “Nothing!” the money he offered her at the door.

He bitterly upbraided himself for the doubts he could not banish, and he still flushed with shame that he should have declared his knowledge of a scene which ought, at its worst, to have been inviolable by his speech. He scarcely cared now for the woman about whom these miseries grouped themselves; he realized that a fantastic remorse may be stronger than a jealous love.

He longed for the morrow to come, that he might confess his shame and regret; but a reaction to this violent repentance came before the night fell. As the sound of the priest’s voice and the sight of his wasted face faded from the painter’s sense, he began to see everything in the old light again. Then what Don Ippolito had said took a character of ludicrous, of insolent improbability.

After dark, Ferris set out upon one of his long, rambling walks. He walked hard and fast, to try if he might not still, by mere fatigue of body, the anguish that filled his soul. But whichever way he went he came again and again to the house of Don Ippolito, and at last he stopped there, leaning against the parapet of the quay, and staring at the house, as though he would spell from the senseless stones the truth of the secret they sheltered. Far up in the chamber, where he knew that the priest lay, the windows were dimly lit.

As he stood thus, with his upturned face haggard in the moonlight, the soldier commanding the Austrian patrol which passed that way halted his squad, and seemed about to ask him what he wanted there.

Ferris turned and walked swiftly homeward; but he did not even lie down. His misery took the shape of an intent that would not suffer him to rest. He meant to go to Don Ippolito and tell him that his story had failed of its effect, that he was not to be fooled so easily, and, without demanding anything further, to leave him in his lie.

At the earliest hour when he might hope to be admitted, he went, and rang the bell furiously. The door opened, and he confronted the priest’s servant. “I want to see Don Ippolito,” said Ferris abruptly.

“It cannot be,” she began.

“I tell you I must,” cried Ferris, raising his voice. “I tell you.”....

“Madman!” fiercely whispered the old woman, shaking both her open hands in his face, “he’s dead! He died last night!”

XVIII.

The terrible stroke sobered Ferris, he woke from his long debauch of hate and jealousy and despair; for the first time since that night in the garden, he faced his fate with a clear mind. Death had set his seal forever to a testimony which he had been able neither to refuse nor to accept; in abject sorrow and shame he thanked God that he had been kept from dealing that last cruel blow; but if Don Ippolito had come back from the dead to repeat his witness, Ferris felt that the miracle could not change his own passive state. There was now but one thing in the world for him to do: to see Florida, to confront her with his knowledge of all that had been, and to abide by her word, whatever it was. At the worst, there was the war, whose drums had already called to him, for a refuge.

He thought at first that he might perhaps overtake the Vervains before they sailed for America, but he remembered that they had left Venice six weeks before. It seemed impossible that he could wait, but when he landed in New York, he was tormented in his impatience by a strange reluctance and hesitation. A fantastic light fell upon his plans; a sense of its wildness enfeebled his purpose. What was he going to do? Had he come four thousand miles to tell Florida that Don Ippolito was dead? Or was he going to say, “I have heard that you love me, but I don’t believe it: is it true?”

He pushed on to Providence, stifling these antic misgivings as he might, and without allowing himself time to falter from his intent, he set out to find Mrs. Vervain’s house. He knew the street and the number, for she had often given him the address in her invitations against the time when he should return to America. As he drew near the house a tender trepidation filled him and silenced all other senses in him; his heart beat thickly; the universe included only the fact that he was to look upon the face he loved, and this fact had neither past nor future.

But a terrible foreboding as of death seized him when he stood before the house, and glanced up at its close-shuttered front, and round upon the dusty grass-plots and neglected flower-beds of the door-yard. With a cold hand he rang and rang again, and no answer came. At last a man lounged up to the fence from the next house-door. “Guess you won’t make anybody hear,” he said, casually.

“Doesn’t Mrs. Vervain live in this house?” asked Ferris, finding a husky voice in his throat that sounded to him like some other’s voice lost there.

“She used to, but she isn’t at home. Family’s in Europe.”

They had not come back yet.

“Thanks,” said Ferris mechanically, and he went away. He laughed to himself at this keen irony of fortune; he was prepared for the confirmation of his doubts; he was ready for relief from them, Heaven knew; but this blank that the turn of the wheel had brought, this Nothing!

The Vervains were as lost to him as if Europe were in another planet. How should he find them there? Besides, he was poor; he had no money to get back with, if he had wanted to return.

He took the first train to New York, and hunted up a young fellow of his acquaintance, who in the days of peace had been one of the governor’s aides. He was still holding this place, and was an ardent recruiter. He hailed with rapture the expression of Ferris’s wish to go into the war. “Look here!” he said after a moment’s thought, “didn’t you have some rank as a consul?”

“Yes,” replied Ferris with a dreary smile, “I have been equivalent to a commander in the navy and a colonel in the army--I don’t mean both, but either.”

“Good!” cried his friend. “We must strike high. The colonelcies are rather inaccessible, just at present, and so are the lieutenant-colonelcies, but a majorship, now”....

“Oh no; don’t!” pleaded Ferris. “Make me a corporal--or a cook. I shall not be so mischievous to our own side, then, and when the other fellows shoot me, I shall not be so much of a loss.”

“Oh, they won’t _shoot_ you,” expostulated his friend, high-heartedly. He got Ferris a commission as second lieutenant, and lent him money to buy a uniform.

Ferris’s regiment was sent to a part of the southwest, where he saw a good deal of fighting and fever and ague. At the end of two years, spent alternately in the field and the hospital, he was riding out near the camp one morning in unusual spirits, when two men in butternut fired at him: one had the mortification to miss him; the bullet of the other struck him in the arm. There was talk of amputation at first, but the case was finally managed without. In Ferris’s state of health it was quite the same an end of his soldiering.

He came North sick and maimed and poor. He smiled now to think of confronting Florida in any imperative or challenging spirit; but the current of his hopeless melancholy turned more and more towards her. He had once, at a desperate venture, written to her at Providence, but he had got no answer. He asked of a Providence man among the artists in New York, if he knew the Vervains; the Providence man said that he did know them a little when he was much younger; they had been abroad a great deal; he believed in a dim way that they were still in Europe. The young one, he added, used to have a temper of her own.

“Indeed!” said Ferris stiffly.

The one fast friend whom he found in New York was the governor’s dashing aide. The enthusiasm of this recruiter of regiments had not ceased with Ferris’s departure for the front; the number of disabled officers forbade him to lionize any one of them, but he befriended Ferris; he made a feint of discovering the open secret of his poverty, and asked how he could help him.

“I don’t know,” said Ferris, “it looks like a hopeless case, to me.”

“Oh no it isn’t,” retorted his friend, as cheerfully and confidently as he had promised him that he should not be shot. “Didn’t you bring back any pictures from Venice with you?”

“I brought back a lot of sketches and studies. I’m sorry to say that I loafed a good deal there; I used to feel that I had eternity before me; and I was a theorist and a purist and an idiot generally. There are none of them fit to be seen.”

“Never mind; let’s look at them.”

They hunted out Ferris’s property from a catch-all closet in the studio of a sculptor with whom he had left them, and who expressed a polite pleasure in handing them over to Ferris rather than to his heirs and assigns.

“Well, I’m not sure that I share your satisfaction, old fellow,” said the painter ruefully; but he unpacked the sketches.

Their inspection certainly revealed a disheartening condition of half-work. “And I can’t do anything to help the matter for the present,” groaned Ferris, stopping midway in the business, and making as if to shut the case again.

“Hold on,” said his friend. “What’s this? Why, this isn’t so bad.” It was the study of Don Ippolito as a Venetian priest, which Ferris beheld with a stupid amaze, remembering that he had meant to destroy it, and wondering how it had got where it was, but not really caring much. “It’s worse than you can imagine,” said he, still looking at it with this apathy.

“No matter; I want you to sell it to me. Come!”

“I can’t!” replied Ferris piteously. “It would be flat burglary.”

“Then put it into the exhibition.”

The sculptor, who had gone back to scraping the chin of the famous public man on whose bust he was at work, stabbed him to the heart with his modeling-tool, and turned to Ferris and his friend. He slanted his broad red beard for a sidelong look at the picture, and said: “I know what you mean, Ferris. It’s hard, and it’s feeble in some ways and it looks a little too much like experimenting. But it isn’t so _infernally_ bad.”

“Don’t be fulsome,” responded Ferris, jadedly. He was thinking in a thoroughly vanquished mood what a tragico-comic end of the whole business it was that poor Don Ippolito should come to his rescue in this fashion, and as it were offer to succor him in his extremity. He perceived the shamefulness of suffering such help; it would be much better to starve; but he felt cowed, and he had not courage to take arms against this sarcastic destiny, which had pursued him with a mocking smile from one lower level to another. He rubbed his forehead and brooded upon the picture. At least it would be some comfort to be rid of it; and Don Ippolito was dead; and to whom could it mean more than the face of it?

His friend had his way about framing it, and it was got into the exhibition. The hanging-committee offered it the hospitalities of an obscure corner; but it was there, and it stood its chance. Nobody seemed to know that it was there, however, unless confronted with it by Ferris’s friend, and then no one seemed to care for it, much less want to buy it. Ferris saw so many much worse pictures sold all around it, that he began gloomily to respect it. At first it had shocked him to see it on the Academy’s wall; but it soon came to have no other relation to him than that of creatureship, like a poem in which a poet celebrates his love or laments his dead, and sells for a price. His pride as well as his poverty was set on having the picture sold; he had nothing to do, and he used to lurk about, and see if it would not interest somebody at last. But it remained unsold throughout May, and well into June, long after the crowds had ceased to frequent the exhibition, and only chance visitors from the country straggled in by twos and threes.

One warm, dusty afternoon, when he turned into the Academy out of Fourth Avenue, the empty hall echoed to no footfall but his own. A group of weary women, who wore that look of wanting lunch which characterizes all picture-gallery-goers at home and abroad, stood faint before a certain large Venetian subject which Ferris abhorred, and the very name of which he spat out of his mouth with loathing for its unreality. He passed them with a sombre glance, as he took his way toward the retired spot where his own painting hung.

A lady whose crapes would have betrayed to her own sex the latest touch of Paris stood a little way back from it, and gazed fixedly at it. The pose of her head, her whole attitude, expressed a quiet dejection; without seeing her face one could know its air of pensive wistfulness. Ferris resolved to indulge himself in a near approach to this unwonted spectacle of interest in his picture; at the sound of his steps the lady slowly turned a face of somewhat heavily molded beauty, and from low-growing, thick pale hair and level brows, stared at him with the sad eyes of Florida Vervain. She looked fully the last two years older.

As though she were listening to the sound of his steps in the dark instead of having him there visibly before her, she kept her eyes upon him with a dreamy unrecognition.

“Yes, it is I,” said Ferris, as if she had spoken.

She recovered herself, and with a subdued, sorrowful quiet in her old directness, she answered, “I supposed you must be in New York,” and she indicated that she had supposed so from seeing this picture.

Ferris felt the blood mounting to his head. “Do you think it is like?” he asked.

“No,” she said, “it isn’t just to him; it attributes things that didn’t belong to him, and it leaves out a great deal.”

“I could scarcely have hoped to please you in a portrait of Don Ippolito.” Ferris saw the red light break out as it used on the girl’s pale cheeks, and her eyes dilate angrily. He went on recklessly: “He sent for me after you went away, and gave me a message for you. I never promised to deliver it, but I will do so now. He asked me to tell you when we met, that he had acted on your desire, and had tried to reconcile himself to his calling and his religion; he was going to enter a Carmelite convent.”

Florida made no answer, but she seemed to expect him to go on, and he was constrained to do so.

“He never carried out his purpose,” Ferris said, with a keen glance at her; “he died the night after I saw him.”

“Died?” The fan and the parasol and the two or three light packages she had been holding slid down one by one, and lay at her feet. “Thank you for bringing me his last words,” she said, but did not ask him anything more.

Ferris did not offer to gather up her things; he stood irresolute; presently he continued with a downcast look: “He had had a fever, but they thought he was getting well. His death must have been sudden.” He stopped, and resumed fiercely, resolved to have the worst out: “I went to him, with no good-will toward him, the next day after I saw him; but I came too late. That was God’s mercy to me. I hope you have your consolation, Miss Vervain.”

It maddened him to see her so little moved, and he meant to make her share his remorse.

“Did he blame me for anything?” she asked.

“No!” said Ferris, with a bitter laugh, “he praised you.”