Chapter 8

“It’s nine o’clock, signorina; and I thought you would be tired this morning, and would like your coffee in bed. Oh, misericordia!” cried the girl, still in whisper, with a glance through the doorway, “you haven’t been in bed at all!”

“My mother doesn’t seem well. I sat down beside her, and fell asleep in my chair without knowing it.”

“Ah, poor little thing! Then you must drink your coffee at once. It refreshes.”

“Yes, yes,” said Florida, closing the door, and pointing to a table in the next room, “put it down here. I will serve myself, Nina. Go call the gondola, please. I am going out, at once, and I want you to go with me. Tell Checa to come here and stay with my mother till I come back.”

She poured out a cup of coffee with a trembling hand, and hastily drank it; then bathing her eyes, she went to the glass and bestowed a touch or two upon yesterday’s toilet, studied the effect a moment, and turned away. She ran back for another look, and the next moment she was walking down to the water-gate, where she found Nina waiting her in the gondola.

A rapid course brought them to Ferris’s landing. “Ring,” she said to the gondolier, “and say that one of the American ladies wishes to see the consul.”

Ferris was standing on the balcony over her, where he had been watching her approach in mute wonder. “Why, Miss Vervain,” he called down, “what in the world is the matter?”

“I don’t know. I want to see you,” said Florida, looking up with a wistful face.

“I’ll come down.”

“Yes, please. Or no, I had better come up. Yes, Nina and I will come up.”

Ferris met them at the lower door and led them to his apartment. Nina sat down in the outer room, and Florida followed the painter into his studio. Though her face was so wan, it seemed to him that he had never seen it lovelier, and he had a strange pride in her being there, though the disorder of the place ought to have humbled him. She looked over it with a certain childlike, timid curiosity, and something of that lofty compassion with which young ladies regard the haunts of men when they come into them by chance; in doing this she had a haughty, slow turn of the head that fascinated him.

“I hope,” he said, “you don’t mind the smell,” which was a mingled one of oil-colors and tobacco-smoke. “The woman’s putting my office to rights, and it’s all in a cloud of dust. So I have to bring you in here.”

Florida sat down on a chair fronting the easel, and found herself looking into the sad eyes of Don Ippolito. Ferris brusquely turned the back of the canvas toward her. “I didn’t mean you to see that. It isn’t ready to show, yet,” he said, and then he stood expectantly before her. He waited for her to speak, for he never knew how to take Miss Vervain; he was willing enough to make light of her grand moods, but now she was too evidently unhappy for mocking; at the same time he did not care to invoke a snub by a prematurely sympathetic demeanor. His mind ran on the events of the day before, and he thought this visit probably related somehow to Don Ippolito. But his visitor did not speak, and at last he said: “I hope there’s nothing wrong at home, Miss Vervain. It’s rather odd to have yesterday, last night, and next morning all run together as they have been for me in the last twenty-four hours. I trust Mrs. Vervain is turning the whole thing into a good solid oblivion.”

“It’s about--it’s about--I came to see you”--said Florida, hoarsely. “I mean,” she hurried on to say, “that I want to ask you who is the best doctor here?”

Then it was not about Don Ippolito. “Is your mother sick?” asked Ferris, eagerly. “She must have been fearfully tired by that unlucky expedition of ours. I hope there’s nothing serious?”

“No, no! But she is not well. She is very frail, you know. You must have noticed how frail she is,” said Florida, tremulously.

Ferris had noticed that all his countrywomen, past their girlhood, seemed to be sick, he did not know how or why; he supposed it was all right, it was so common. In Mrs. Vervain’s case, though she talked a great deal about her ill-health, he had noticed it rather less than usual, she had so great spirit. He recalled now that he _had_ thought her at times rather a shadowy presence, and that occasionally it had amused him that so slight a structure should hang together as it did--not only successfully, but triumphantly.

He said yes, he knew that Mrs. Vervain was not strong, and Florida continued: “It’s only advice that I want for her, but I think we had better see some one--or know some one that we could go to in need. We are so far from any one we know, or help of any kind.” She seemed to be trying to account to herself, rather than to Ferris, for what she was doing. “We mustn’t let anything pass unnoticed”.... She looked at him entreatingly, but a shadow, as of some wounding memory, passed over her face, and she said no more.

“I’ll go with you to a doctor’s,” said Ferris, kindly.

“No, please, I won’t trouble you.”

“It’s no trouble.”

“I don’t _want_ you to go with me, please. I’d rather go alone.” Ferris looked at her perplexedly, as she rose. “Just give me the address, and I shall manage best by myself. I’m used to doing it.”

“As you like. Wait a moment.” Ferris wrote the address. “There,” he said, giving it to her; “but isn’t there anything I can do for you?”

“Yes,” answered Florida with awkward hesitation, and a half-defiant, half-imploring look at him. “You must have all sorts of people applying to you, as a consul; and you look after their affairs--and try to forget them”--

“Well?” said Ferris.

“I wish you wouldn’t remember that I’ve asked this favor of you; that you’d consider it a”--

“Consular service? With all my heart,” answered Ferris, thinking for the third or fourth time how very young Miss Vervain was.

“You are very good; you are kinder than I have any right,” said Florida, smiling piteously. “I only mean, don’t speak of it to my mother. Not,” she added, “but what I want her to know everything I do; but it would worry her if she thought I was anxious about her. Oh! I wish I wouldn’t.”

She began a hasty search for her handkerchief; he saw her lips tremble and his soul trembled with them.

In another moment, “Good-morning,” she said briskly, with a sort of airy sob, “I don’t want you to come down, please.”

She drifted out of the room and down the stairs, the servant-maid falling into her wake.

Ferris filled his pipe and went out on his balcony again, and stood watching the gondola in its course toward the address he had given, and smoking thoughtfully. It was really the same girl who had given poor Don Ippolito that cruel slap in the face, yesterday. But that seemed no more out of reason than her sudden, generous, exaggerated remorse both were of a piece with her coming to him for help now, holding him at a distance, flinging herself upon his sympathy, and then trying to snub him, and breaking down in the effort. It was all of a piece, and the piece was bad; yes, she had an ugly temper; and yet she had magnanimous traits too. These contradictions, which in his reverie he felt rather than formulated, made him smile, as he stood on his balcony bathed by the morning air and sunlight, in fresh, strong ignorance of the whole mystery of women’s nerves. These caprices even charmed him. He reflected that he had gone on doing the Vervains one favor after another in spite of Florida’s childish petulancies; and he resolved that he would not stop now; her whims should be nothing to him, as they had been nothing, hitherto. It is flattering to a man to be indispensable to a woman so long as he is not obliged to it; Miss Vervain’s dependent relation to himself in this visit gave her a grace in Ferris’s eyes which she had wanted before.

In the mean time he saw her gondola stop, turn round, and come back to the canal that bordered the Vervain garden.

“Another change of mind,” thought Ferris, complacently; and rising superior to the whole fitful sex, he released himself from uneasiness on Mrs. Vervain’s account. But in the evening he went to ask after her. He first sent his card to Florida, having written on it, “I hope Mrs. Vervain is better. Don’t let me come in if it’s any disturbance.” He looked for a moment at what he had written, dimly conscious that it was patronizing, and when he entered he saw that Miss Vervain stood on the defensive and from some willfulness meant to make him feel that he was presumptuous in coming; it did not comfort him to consider that she was very young. “Mother will be in directly,” said Florida in a tone that relegated their morning’s interview to the age of fable.

Mrs. Vervain came in smiling and cordial, apparently better and not worse for yesterday’s misadventures.

“Oh, I pick up quickly,” she explained. “I’m an old campaigner, you know. Perhaps a little _too_ old, now. Years do make a difference; and you’ll find it out as you get on, Mr. Ferris.”

“I suppose so,” said Ferris, not caring to have Mrs. Vervain treat him so much like a boy. “Even at twenty-six I found it pleasant to take a nap this afternoon. How does one stand it at seventeen, Miss Vervain?” he asked.

“I haven’t felt the need of sleep,” replied Florida, indifferently, and he felt shelved, as an old fellow.

He had an empty, frivolous visit, to his thinking. Mrs. Vervain asked if he had seen Don Ippolito, and wondered that the priest had not come about, all day. She told a long story, and at the end tapped herself on the mouth with her fan to punish a yawn.

Ferris rose to go. Mrs. Vervain wondered again in the same words why Don Ippolito had not been near them all day.

“Because he’s a wise man,” said Ferris with bitterness, “and knows when to time his visits.” Mrs. Vervain did not notice his bitterness, but something made Florida follow him to the outer door.

“Why, it’s moonlight!” she exclaimed; and she glanced at him as though she had some purpose of atonement in her mind.

But he would not have it. “Yes, there’s a moon,” he said moodily. “Good-night.”

“Good night,” answered Florida, and she impulsively offered him her hand. He thought that it shook in his, but it was probably the agitation of his own nerves.

A soreness that had been lifted from his heart, came back; he walked home disappointed and defeated, he hardly knew why or in what. He did not laugh now to think how she had asked him that morning to forget her coming to him for help; he was outraged that he should have been repaid in this sort, and the rebuff with which his sympathy had just been met was vulgar; there was no other name for it but vulgarity. Yet he could not relate this quality to the face of the young girl as he constantly beheld it in his homeward walk. It did not defy him or repulse him; it looked up at him wistfully as from the gondola that morning. Nevertheless he hardened his heart. The Vervains should see him next when they had sent for him. After all, one is not so very old at twenty-six.

X.

“Don Ippolito has come, signorina,” said Nina, the next morning, approaching Florida, where she sat in an attitude of listless patience, in the garden.

“Don Ippolito!” echoed the young girl in a weary tone. She rose and went into the house, and they met with the constraint which was but too natural after the events of their last parting. It is hard to tell which has most to overcome in such a case, the forgiver or the forgiven. Pardon rankles even in a generous soul, and the memory of having pardoned embarrasses the sensitive spirit before the object of its clemency, humbling and making it ashamed. It would be well, I suppose, if there need be nothing of the kind between human creatures, who cannot sustain such a relation without mutual distrust. It is not so ill with them when apart, but when they meet they must be cold and shy at first.

“Now I see what you two are thinking about,” said Mrs. Vervain, and a faint blush tinged the cheek of the priest as she thus paired him off with her daughter. “You are thinking about what happened the other day; and you had better forget it. There is no use brooding over these matters. Dear me! if _I_ had stopped to brood over every little unpleasant thing that happened, I wonder where I should be now? By the way, where were _you_ all day yesterday, Don Ippolito?”

“I did not come to disturb you because I thought you must be very tired. Besides I was quite busy.”

“Oh yes, those inventions of yours. I think you are _so_ ingenious! But you mustn’t apply too closely. Now really, yesterday,--after all you had been through, it was too much for the brain.” She tapped herself on the forehead with her fan.

“I was not busy with my inventions, madama,” answered Don Ippolito, who sat in the womanish attitude priests get from their drapery, and fingered the cord round his three-cornered hat. “I have scarcely touched them of late. But our parish takes part in the procession of Corpus Domini in the Piazza, and I had my share of the preparations.”

“Oh, to be sure! When is it to be? We must all go. Our Nina has been telling Florida of the grand sights,--little children dressed up like John the Baptist, leading lambs. I suppose it’s a great event with you.”

The priest shrugged his shoulders, and opened both his hands, so that his hat slid to the floor, bumping and tumbling some distance away. He recovered it and sat down again. “It’s an observance,” he said coldly.

“And shall you be in the procession?”

“I shall be there with the other priests of my parish.”

“Delightful!” cried Mrs. Vervain. “We shall be looking out for you. I shall feel greatly honored to think I actually know some one in the procession. I’m going to give you a little nod. You won’t think it very wrong?”

She saved him from the embarrassment he might have felt in replying, by an abrupt lapse from all apparent interest in the subject. She turned to her daughter, and said with a querulous accent, “I wish you would throw the afghan over my feet, Florida, and make me a little comfortable before you begin your reading this morning.” At the same time she feebly disposed herself among the sofa cushions on which she reclined, and waited for some final touches from her daughter. Then she said, “I’m just going to close my eyes, but I shall hear every word. You are getting a beautiful accent, my dear, I know you are. I should think Goldoni must have a very smooth, agreeable style; hasn’t he now, in Italian?”

They began to read the comedy; after fifteen or twenty minutes Mrs. Vervain opened her eyes and said, “But before you commence, Florida, I wish you’d play a little, to get me quieted down. I feel so very flighty. I suppose it’s this sirocco. And I believe I’ll lie down in the next room.”

Florida followed her to repeat the arrangements for her comfort. Then she returned, and sitting down at the piano struck with a sort of soft firmness a few low, soothing chords, out of which a lulling melody grew. With her fingers still resting on the keys she turned her stately head, and glanced through the open door at her mother.

“Don Ippolito,” she asked softly, “is there anything in the air of Venice that makes people very drowsy?”

“I have never heard that, madamigella.”

“I wonder,” continued the young girl absently, “why my mother wants to sleep so much.”

“Perhaps she has not recovered from the fatigues of the other night,” suggested the priest.

“Perhaps,” said Florida, sadly looking toward her mother’s door.

She turned again to the instrument, and let her fingers wander over the keys, with a drooping head. Presently she lifted her face, and smoothed back from her temples some straggling tendrils of hair. Without looking at the priest she asked with the child-like bluntness that characterized her, “Why don’t you like to walk in the procession of Corpus Domini?”

Don Ippolito’s color came and went, and he answered evasively, “I have not said that I did not like to do so.”

“No, that is true,” said Florida, letting her fingers drop again on the keys.

Don Ippolito rose from the sofa where he had been sitting beside her while they read, and walked the length of the room. Then he came towards her and said meekly, “Madamigella, I did not mean to repel any interest you feel in me. But it was a strange question to ask a priest, as I remembered I was when you asked it.”

“Don’t you always remember that?” demanded the girl, still without turning her head.

“No; sometimes I am suffered to forget it,” he said with a tentative accent.

She did not respond, and he drew a long breath, and walked away in silence. She let her hands fall into her lap, and sat in an attitude of expectation. As Don Ippolito came near her again he paused a second time.

“It is in this house that I forget my priesthood,” he began, “and it is the first of your kindnesses that you suffer me to do so, your good mother, there, and you. How shall I repay you? It cut me to the heart that you should ask forgiveness of me when you did, though I was hurt by your rebuke. Oh, had you not the right to rebuke me if I abused the delicate unreserve with which you had always treated me? But believe me, I meant no wrong, then.”

His voice shook, and Florida broke in, “You did nothing wrong. It was I who was cruel for no cause.”

“No, no. You shall not say that,” he returned. “And why should I have cared for a few words, when all your acts had expressed a trust of me that is like heaven to my soul?”

She turned now and looked at him, and he went on. “Ah, I see you do not understand! How could you know what it is to be a priest in this most unhappy city? To be haunted by the strict espionage of all your own class, to be shunned as a spy by all who are not of it! But you two have not put up that barrier which everywhere shuts me out from my kind. You have been willing to see the man in me, and to let me forget the priest.”

“I do not know what to say to you, Don Ippolito. I am only a foreigner, a girl, and I am very ignorant of these things,” said Florida with a slight alarm. “I am afraid that you may be saying what you will be sorry for.”

“Oh never! Do not fear for me if I am frank with you. It is my refuge from despair.”

The passionate vibration of his voice increased, as if it must break in tears. She glanced towards the other room with a little movement or stir.

“Ah, you needn’t be afraid of listening to me!” cried the priest bitterly.

“I will not wake her,” said Florida calmly, after an instant.

“See how you speak the thing you mean, always, always, always! You could not deny that you meant to wake her, for you have the life-long habit of the truth. Do you know what it is to have the life-long habit of a lie? It is to be a priest. Do you know what it is to seem, to say, to do, the thing you are not, think not, will not? To leave what you believe unspoken, what you will undone, what you are unknown? It is to be a priest!”

Don Ippolito spoke in Italian, and he uttered these words in a voice carefully guarded from every listener but the one before his face. “Do you know what it is when such a moment as this comes, and you would fling away the whole fabric of falsehood that has clothed your life--do you know what it is to keep still so much of it as will help you to unmask silently and secretly? It is to be a priest!”

His voice had lost its vehemence, and his manner was strangely subdued and cold. The sort of gentle apathy it expressed, together with a certain sad, impersonal surprise at the difference between his own and the happier fortune with which he contrasted it, was more touching than any tragic demonstration.

As if she felt the fascination of the pathos which she could not fully analyze, the young girl sat silent. After a time, in which she seemed to be trying to think it all out, she asked in a low, deep murmur: “Why did you become a priest, then?”

“It is a long story,” said Don Ippolito. “I will not trouble you with it now. Some other time.”

“No; now,” answered Florida, in English. “If you hate so to be a priest, I can’t understand why you should have allowed yourself to become one. We should be very unhappy if we could not respect you,--not trust you as we have done; and how could we, if we knew you were not true to yourself in being what you are?”

“Madamigella,” said the priest, “I never dared believe that I was in the smallest thing necessary to your happiness. Is it true, then, that you care for my being rather this than that? That you are in the least grieved by any wrong of mine?”

“I scarcely know what you mean. How could we help being grieved by what you have said to me?”

“Thanks; but why do you care whether a priest of my church loves his calling or not,--you, a Protestant? It is that you are sorry for me as an unhappy man, is it not?”

“Yes; it is that and more. I am no Catholic, but we are both Christians”--

Don Ippolito gave the faintest movement of his shoulders.

--“and I cannot endure to think of your doing the things you must do as a priest, and yet hating to be a priest. It is terrible!”

“Are all the priests of your faith devotees?”

“They cannot be. But are none of yours so?”

“Oh, God forbid that I should say that. I have known real saints among them. That friend of mine in Padua, of whom I once told you, became such, and died an angel fit for Paradise. And I suppose that my poor uncle is a saint, too, in his way.”

“Your uncle? A priest? You have never mentioned him to us.”

“No,” said Don Ippolito. After a certain pause he began abruptly, “We are of the people, my family, and in each generation we have sought to honor our blood by devoting one of the race to the church. When I was a child, I used to divert myself by making little figures out of wood and pasteboard, and I drew rude copies of the pictures I saw at church. We lived in the house where I live now, and where I was born, and my mother let me play in the small chamber where I now have my forge; it was anciently the oratory of the noble family that occupied the whole palace. I contrived an altar at one end of it; I stuck my pictures about the walls, and I ranged the puppets in the order of worshippers on the floor; then I played at saying mass, and preached to them all day long.

“My mother was a widow. She used to watch me with tears in her eyes. At last, one day, she brought my uncle to see me: I remember it all far better than yesterday. ‘Is it not the will of God?’ she asked. My uncle called me to him, and asked me whether I should like to be a priest in good earnest, when I grew up? ‘Shall I then be able to make as many little figures as I like, and to paint pictures, and carve an altar like that in your church?’ I demanded. My uncle answered that I should have real men and women to preach to, as he had, and would not that be much finer? In my heart I did not think so, for I did not care for that part of it; I only liked to preach to my puppets because I had made them. But said, ‘Oh yes,’ as children do. I kept on contriving the toys that I played with, and I grew used to hearing it told among my mates and about the neighborhood that I was to be a priest; I cannot remember any other talk with my mother, and I do not know how or when it was decided. Whenever I thought of the matter, I thought, ‘That will be very well. The priests have very little to do, and they gain a great deal of money with their masses; and I shall be able to make whatever I like.’ I only considered the office then as a means to gratify the passion that has always filled my soul for inventions and works of mechanical skill and ingenuity. My inclination was purely secular, but I was as inevitably becoming a priest as if I had been born to be one.”

“But you were not forced? There was no pressure upon you?”