Chapter 4

“Oh,” said Don Ippolito, with a mortified air, “I am afraid that I have wearied the Signor Console.”

“Not at all, not at all,” Ferris made haste to answer, with a frown at his own awkwardness. “But your speaking English yesterday; ... perhaps what I was thinking of is quite foreign to your tastes and possibilities.”... He hesitated with a look of perplexity, while Don Ippolito stood before him in an attitude of expectation, pressing the points of his fingers together, and looking curiously into his face. “The case is this,” resumed Ferris desperately. “There are two American ladies, friends of mine, sojourning in Venice, who expect to be here till midsummer. They are mother and daughter, and the young lady wants to read and speak Italian with somebody a few hours each day. The question is whether it is quite out of your way or not to give her lessons of this kind. I ask it quite at a venture. I suppose no harm is done, at any rate,” and he looked at Don Ippolito with apologetic perturbation.

“No,” said the priest, “there is no harm. On the contrary, I am at this moment in a position to consider it a great favor that you do me in offering me this employment. I accept it with the greatest pleasure. Oh!” he cried, breaking by a sudden impulse from the composure with which he had begun to speak, “you don’t know what you do for me; you lift me out of despair. Before you came, I had reached one of those passes that seem the last bound of endeavor. But you give me new life. Now I can go on with my experiment. I can attest my gratitude by possessing your native country of the weapon I had designed for it--I am sure of the principle: some slight improvement, perhaps the use of some different explosive, would get over that difficulty you suggested,” he said eagerly. “Yes, something can be done. God bless you, my dear little son--I mean--perdoni!--my dear sir.”...

“Wait--not so fast,” said Ferris with a laugh, yet a little annoyed that a question so purely tentative as his should have met at once such a definite response. “Are you quite sure you can do what they want?” He unfolded to him, as fully as he understood it, Mrs. Vervain’s scheme.

Don Ippolito entered into it with perfect intelligence. He said that he had already had charge of the education of a young girl of noble family, and he could therefore the more confidently hope to be useful to this American lady. A light of joyful hope shone in his dreamy eyes, the whole man changed, he assumed the hospitable and caressing host. He conducted Ferris back to his parlor, and making him sit upon the hard sofa that was his hard bed by night, he summoned his servant, and bade her serve them coffee. She closed her lips firmly, and waved her finger before her face, to signify that there was no more coffee. Then he bade her fetch it from the caffè: and he listened with a sort of rapt inattention while Ferris again returned to the subject and explained that he had approached him without first informing the ladies, and that he must regard nothing as final. It was at this point that Don Ippolito, who had understood so clearly what Mrs. Vervain wanted, appeared a little slow to understand; and Ferris had a doubt whether it was from subtlety or from simplicity that the priest seemed not to comprehend the impulse on which he had acted. He finished his coffee in this perplexity, and when he rose to go, Don Ippolito followed him down to the street-door, and preserved him from a second encounter with the cistern-top.

“But, Don Ippolito--remember! I make no engagement for the ladies, whom you must see before anything is settled,” said Ferris.

“Surely,--surely!” answered the priest, and he remained smiling at the door till the American turned the next corner. Then he went back to his work-room, and took up the broken model from the bench. But he could not work at it now, he could not work at anything; he began to walk up and down the floor.

“Could he really have been so stupid because his mind was on his ridiculous cannon?” wondered Ferris as he sauntered frowning away; and he tried to prepare his own mind for his meeting with the Vervains, to whom he must now go at once. He felt abused and victimized. Yet it was an amusing experience, and he found himself able to interest both of the ladies in it. The younger had received him as coldly as the forms of greeting would allow; but as he talked she drew nearer him with a reluctant haughtiness which he noted. He turned the more conspicuously towards Mrs. Vervain. “Well, to make a long story short,” he said, “I couldn’t discourage Don Ippolito. He refused to be dismayed--as I should have been at the notion of teaching Miss Vervain. I didn’t arrange with him not to fall in love with her as his secular predecessors have done--it seemed superfluous. But you can mention it to him if you like. In fact,” said Ferris, suddenly addressing the daughter, “you might make the stipulation yourself, Miss Vervain.”

She looked at him a moment with a sort of defenseless pain that made him ashamed; and then walked away from him towards the window, with a frank resentment that made him smile, as he continued, “But I suppose you would like to have some explanation of my motive in precipitating Don Ippolito upon you in this way, when I told you only yesterday that he wouldn’t do at all; in fact I think myself that I’ve behaved rather fickle-mindedly--for a representative of the country. But I’ll tell you; and you won’t be surprised to learn that I acted from mixed motives. I’m not at all sure that he’ll do; I’ve had awful misgivings about it since I left him, and I’m glad of the chance to make a clean breast of it. When I came to think the matter over last night, the fact that he had taught himself English--with the help of an Irishman for the pronunciation--seemed to promise that he’d have the right sort of sympathy with your scheme, and it showed that he must have something practical about him, too. And here’s where the selfish admixture comes in. I didn’t have your interests solely in mind when I went to see Don Ippolito. I hadn’t been able to get rid of him; he stuck in my thought. I fancied he might be glad of the pay of a teacher, and--I had half a notion to ask him to let me paint him. It was an even chance whether I should try to secure him for Miss Vervain, or for Art--as they call it. Miss Vervain won because she could pay him, and I didn’t see how Art could. I can bring him round any time; and that’s the whole inconsequent business. My consolation is that I’ve left you perfectly free. There’s nothing decided.”

“Thanks,” said Mrs. Vervain; “then it’s all settled. You can bring him as soon as you like, to our new place. We’ve taken that apartment we looked at the other day, and we’re going into it this afternoon. Here’s the landlord’s letter,” she added, drawing a paper out of her pocket. “If he’s cheated us, I suppose you can see justice done. I didn’t want to trouble you before.”

“You’re a woman of business, Mrs. Vervain,” said Ferris. “The man’s a perfect Jew--or a perfect Christian, one ought to say in Venice; we true believers do gouge so much, more infamously here--and you let him get you in black and white before you come to me. Well,” he continued, as he glanced at the paper, “you’ve done it! He makes you pay one half too much. However, it’s cheap enough; twice as cheap as your hotel.”

“But I don’t care for cheapness. I hate to be imposed upon. What’s to be done about it?”

“Nothing; if he has your letter as you have his. It’s a bargain, and you must stand to it.”

“A bargain? Oh nonsense, now, Mr. Ferris. This is merely a note of mutual understanding.”

“Yes, that’s one way of looking at it. The Civil Tribunal would call it a binding agreement of the closest tenure,--if you want to go to law about it.”

“I _will_ go to law about it.”

“Oh no, you won’t--unless you mean to spend your remaining days and all your substance in Venice. Come, you haven’t done so badly, Mrs. Vervain. I don’t call four rooms, completely furnished for housekeeping, with that lovely garden, at all dear at eleven francs a day. Besides, the landlord is a man of excellent feeling, sympathetic and obliging, and a perfect gentleman, though he is such an outrageous scoundrel. He’ll cheat you, of course, in whatever he can; you must look out for that; but he’ll do you any sort of little neighborly kindness. Good-by,” said Ferris, getting to the door before Mrs. Vervain could intercept him. “I’ll come to your new place this evening to see how you are pleased.”

“Florida,” said Mrs. Vervain, “this is outrageous.”

“I wouldn’t mind it, mother. We pay very little, after all.”

“Yes, but we pay too much. That’s what I can’t bear. And as you said yesterday, I don’t think Mr. Ferris’s manners are quite respectful to me.”

“He only told you the truth; I think he advised you for the best. The matter couldn’t be helped now.”

“But I call it a want of feeling to speak the truth so bluntly.”

“We won’t have to complain of that in our landlord, it seems,” said Florida. “Perhaps not in our priest, either,” she added.

“Yes, that _was_ kind of Mr. Ferris,” said Mrs. Vervain. “It was thoroughly thoughtful and considerate--what I call an instance of true delicacy. I’m really quite curious to see him. Don Ippolito! How very odd to call a priest _Don_! I should have said Padre. Don always makes you think of a Spanish cavalier. Don Rodrigo: something like that.”

They went on to talk, desultorily, of Don Ippolito, and what he might be like. In speaking of him the day before, Ferris had hinted at some mysterious sadness in him; and to hint of sadness in a man always interests women in him, whether they are old or young: the old have suffered, the young forebode suffering. Their interest in Don Ippolito had not been diminished by what Ferris had told them of his visit to the priest’s house and of the things he had seen there; for there had always been the same strain of pity in his laughing account, and he had imparted none of his doubts to them. They did not talk as if it were strange that Ferris should do to-day what he had yesterday said he would not do; perhaps as women they could not find such a thing strange; but it vexed him more and more as he went about all afternoon thinking of his inconsistency, and wondering whether he had not acted rashly.

IV.

The palace in which Mrs. Vervain had taken an apartment fronted on a broad campo, and hung its empty marble balconies from gothic windows above a silence scarcely to be matched elsewhere in Venice. The local pharmacy, the caffè, the grocery, the fruiterer’s, the other shops with which every Venetian campo is furnished, had each a certain life about it, but it was a silent life, and at midday a frowsy-headed woman clacking across the flags in her wooden-heeled shoes made echoes whose garrulity was interrupted by no other sound. In the early morning, when the lid of the public cistern in the centre of the campo was unlocked, there was a clamor of voices and a clangor of copper vessels, as the housewives of the neighborhood and the local force of strong-backed Frinlan water-girls drew their day’s supply of water; and on that sort of special parochial holiday, called a _sagra_, the campo hummed and clattered and shrieked with a multitude celebrating the day around the stands where pumpkin seeds and roast pumpkin and anisette-water were sold, and before the movable kitchen where cakes were fried in caldrons of oil, and uproariously offered to the crowd by the cook, who did not suffer himself to be embarrassed by the rival drama of adjoining puppet-shows, but continued to bellow forth his bargains all day long and far into the night, when the flames under his kettles painted his visage a fine crimson. The sagra once over, however, the campo relapsed into its habitual silence, and no one looking at the front of the palace would have thought of it as a place for distraction-seeking foreign sojourners. But it was not on this side that the landlord tempted his tenants; his principal notice of lodgings to let was affixed to the water-gate of the palace, which opened on a smaller channel so near the Grand Canal that no wandering eye could fail to see it. The portal was a tall arch of Venetian gothic tipped with a carven flame; steps of white Istrian stone descended to the level of the lowest ebb, irregularly embossed with barnacles, and dabbling long fringes of soft green sea-mosses in the rising and falling tide. Swarms of water-bugs and beetles played over the edges of the steps, and crabs scuttled side-wise into deeper water at the approach of a gondola. A length of stone-capped brick wall, to which patches of stucco still clung, stretched from the gate on either hand under cover of an ivy that flung its mesh of shining green from within, where there lurked a lovely garden, stately, spacious for Venice, and full of a delicious, half-sad surprise for whoso opened upon it. In the midst it had a broken fountain, with a marble naiad standing on a shell, and looking saucier than the sculptor meant, from having lost the point of her nose, nymphs and fauns, and shepherds and shepherdesses, her kinsfolk, coquetted in and out among the greenery in flirtation not to be embarrassed by the fracture of an arm, or the casting of a leg or so; one lady had no head, but she was the boldest of all. In this garden there were some mulberry and pomegranate trees, several of which hung about the fountain with seats in their shade, and for the rest there seemed to be mostly roses and oleanders, with other shrubs of a kind that made the greatest show of blossom and cost the least for tendance. A wide terrace stretched across the rear of the palace, dropping to the garden path by a flight of balustraded steps, and upon this terrace opened the long windows of Mrs. Vervain’s parlor and dining-room. Her landlord owned only the first story and the basement of the palace, in some corner of which he cowered with his servants, his taste for pictures and _bric-à-brac_, and his little branch of inquiry into Venetian history, whatever it was, ready to let himself or anything he had for hire at a moment’s notice, but very pleasant, gentle, and unobtrusive; a cheat and a liar, but of a kind heart and sympathetic manners. Under his protection Mrs. Vervain set up her impermanent household gods. The apartment was taken only from week to week, and as she freely explained to the _padrone_ hovering about with offers of service, she knew herself too well ever to unpack anything that would not spoil by remaining packed. She made her trunks yield all the appliances necessary for an invalid’s comfort, and then left them in a state to be strapped and transported to the station within half a day after the desire of change or the exigencies of her feeble health caused her going. Everything for housekeeping was furnished with the rooms. There was a gondolier and a sort of house-servant in the employ of the landlord, of whom Mrs. Vervain hired them, and she caressingly dismissed the padrone at an early moment after her arrival, with the charge to find a maid for herself and daughter. As if she had been waiting at the next door this maid appeared promptly, and being Venetian, and in domestic service, her name was of course Nina. Mrs. Vervain now said to Florida that everything was perfect, and contentedly began her life in Venice by telling Mr. Ferris, when he came in the evening, that he could bring Don Ippolito the day after the morrow, if he liked.

She and Florida sat on the terrace waiting for them on the morning named, when Ferris, with the priest in his clerical best, came up the garden path in the sunny light. Don Ippolito’s best was a little poverty-stricken; he had faltered a while, before leaving home, over the sad choice between a shabby cylinder hat of obsolete fashion and his well-worn three-cornered priestly beaver, and had at last put on the latter with a sigh. He had made his servant polish the buckles of his shoes, and instead of a band of linen round his throat, he wore a strip of cloth covered with small white beads, edged above and below with a single row of pale blue ones.

As he mounted the steps with Ferris, Mrs. Vervain came forward a little to meet them, while Florida rose and stood beside her chair in a sort of proud suspense and timidity. The elder lady was in that black from which she had so seldom been able to escape; but the daughter wore a dress of delicate green, in which she seemed a part of the young season that everywhere clothed itself in the same tint. The sunlight fell upon her blonde hair, melting into its light gold; her level brows frowned somewhat with the glance of scrutiny which she gave the dark young priest, who was making his stately bow to her mother, and trying to answer her English greetings in the same tongue.

“My daughter,” said Mrs. Vervain, and Don Ippolito made another low bow, and then looked at the girl with a sort of frank and melancholy wonder, as she turned and exchanged a few words with Ferris, who was assailing her seriousness and hauteur with unabashed levity of compliment. A quick light flashed and fled in her cheek as she talked, and the fringes of her serious, asking eyes swept slowly up and down as she bent them upon him a moment before she broke abruptly, not coquettishly, away from him, and moved towards her mother, while Ferris walked off to the other end of the terrace, with a laugh. Mrs. Vervain and the priest were trying each other in French, and not making great advance; he explained to Florida in Italian, and she answered him hesitatingly; whereupon he praised her Italian in set phrase.

“Thank you,” said the girl sincerely, “I have tried to learn. I hope,” she added as before, “you can make me see how little I know.” The deprecating wave of the hand with which Don Ippolito appealed to her from herself, seemed arrested midway by his perception of some novel quality in her. He said gravely that he should try to be of use, and then the two stood silent.

“Come, Mr. Ferris,” called out Mrs. Vervain, “breakfast is ready, and I want you to take me in.”

“Too much honor,” said the painter, coming forward and offering his arm, and Mrs. Vervain led the way indoors.

“I suppose I ought to have taken Don Ippolito’s arm,” she confided in under-tone, “but the fact is, our French is so unlike that we don’t understand each other very well.”

“Oh,” returned Ferris, “I’ve known Italians and Americans whom Frenchmen themselves couldn’t understand.”

“You see it’s an American breakfast,” said Mrs. Vervain with a critical glance at the table before she sat down. “All but hot bread; _that_ you _can’t_ have,” and Don Ippolito was for the first time in his life confronted by a breakfast of hot beef-steak, eggs and toast, fried potatoes, and coffee with milk, with a choice of tea. He subdued all signs of the wonder he must have felt, and beyond cutting his meat into little bits before eating it, did nothing to betray his strangeness to the feast.

The breakfast had passed off very pleasantly, with occasional lapses. “We break down under the burden of so many languages,” said Ferris. “It is an _embarras de richesses_. Let us fix upon a common maccheronic. May I trouble you for a poco piú di sugar dans mon café, Mrs. Vervain? What do you think of the bellazza de ce weather magnifique, Don Ippolito?”

“How ridiculous!” said Mrs. Vervain in a tone of fond admiration aside to Don Ippolito, who smiled, but shrank from contributing to the new tongue.

“Very well, then,” said the painter. “I shall stick to my native Bergamask for the future; and Don Ippolito may translate for the foreign ladies.”

He ended by speaking English with everybody; Don Ippolito eked out his speeches to Mrs. Vervain in that tongue with a little French; Florida, conscious of Ferris’s ironical observance, used an embarrassed but defiant Italian with the priest.

“I’m so pleased!” said Mrs. Vervain, rising when Ferris said that he must go, and Florida shook hands with both guests.

“Thank you, Mrs. Vervain; I could have gone before, if I’d thought you would have liked it,” answered the painter.

“Oh nonsense, now,” returned the lady. “You know what I mean. I’m perfectly delighted with him,” she continued, getting Ferris to one side, “and I _know_ he must have a good accent. So very kind of you. Will you arrange with him about the pay?--such a _shame_! Thanks. Then I needn’t say anything to him about that. I’m so glad I had him to breakfast the first day; though Florida thought not. Of course, one needn’t keep it up. But seriously, it isn’t an ordinary case, you know.”

Ferris laughed at her with a sort of affectionate disrespect, and said good-by. Don Ippolito lingered for a while to talk over the proposed lessons, and then went, after more elaborate adieux. Mrs. Vervain remained thoughtful a moment before she said:--

“That was rather droll, Florida.”

“What, mother?”

“His cutting his meat into small bites, before he began to eat. But perhaps it’s the Venetian custom. At any rate, my dear, he’s a gentleman in virtue of his profession, and I couldn’t do less than ask him to breakfast. He has beautiful manners; and if he must take snuff, I suppose it’s neater to carry two handkerchiefs, though it does look odd. I wish he wouldn’t take snuff.”

“I don’t see why we need care, mother. At any rate, we cannot help it.”

“That’s true, my dear. And his nails. Now when they’re spread out on a book, you know, to keep it open,--won’t it be unpleasant?”

“They seem to have just such fingernails all over Europe--except in England.”

“Oh, yes; I know it. I dare say we shouldn’t care for it in him, if he didn’t seem so very nice otherwise. How handsome he is!”

V.

It was understood that Don Ippolito should come every morning at ten o’clock, and read and talk with Miss Vervain for an hour or two; but Mrs. Vervain’s hospitality was too aggressive for the letter of the agreement. She oftener had him to breakfast at nine, for, as she explained to Ferris, she could not endure to have him feel that it was a mere mercenary transaction, and there was no limit fixed for the lessons on these days. When she could, she had Ferris come, too, and she missed him when he did not come. “I like that bluntness of his,” she professed to her daughter, “and I don’t mind his making light of me. You are so apt to be heavy if you’re not made light of occasionally. I certainly shouldn’t want a _son_ to be so respectful and obedient as you are, my dear.”