Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “I should not be afraid of him in any case,” said Florida; “but I can’t believe any wrong of him.”

  Ferris frowned in annoyance. “I don’t want you to; I don’t, myself. I’ve bungled the matter as I might have known I would. I was trying to put into words an undefined uneasiness of mine, a quite formless desire to have you possessed of the whole case as it had come up in my mind. I’ve made a mess of it,” said Ferris rising, with a rueful air. “Besides, I ought to have spoken to Mrs. Vervain.”

  “Oh no,” cried Florida, eagerly, springing to her feet beside him. “Don’t! Little things wear upon my mother, so. I’m glad you didn’t speak to her. I don’t misunderstand you, I think; I expressed myself badly,” she added with an anxious face. “I thank you very much. What do you want me to do?”

  By Ferris’s impulse they both began to move down the garden path toward the water-gate. The sunset had faded out of the fountain, but it still lit the whole heaven, in whose vast blue depths hung light whiffs of pinkish cloud, as ethereal as the draperies that floated after Miss Vervain as she walked with a splendid grace beside him, no awkwardness, now, or self-constraint in her. As she turned to Ferris, and asked in her deep tones, to which some latent feeling imparted a slight tremor, “What do you want me to do?” the sense of her willingness to be bidden by him gave him a delicious thrill. He looked at the superb creature, so proud, so helpless; so much a woman, so much a child; and he caught his breath before he answered. Her gauzes blew about his feet in the light breeze that lifted the foliage; she was a little near-sighted, and in her eagerness she drew closer to him, fixing her eyes full upon his with a bold innocence. “Good heavens! Miss Vervain,” he cried, with a sudden blush, “it isn’t a serious matter. I’m a fool to have spoken to you. Don’t do anything. Let things go on as before. It isn’t for me to instruct you.”

  “I should have been very glad of your advice,” she said with a disappointed, almost wounded manner, keeping her eyes upon him. “It seems to me we are always going wrong” —

  She stopped short, with a flush and then a pallor.

  Ferris returned her look with one of comical dismay. This apparent readiness of Miss Vervain’s to be taken command of, daunted him, on second thoughts. “I wish you’d dismiss all my stupid talk from your mind,” he said. “I feel as if I’d been guiltily trying to set you against a man whom I like very much and have no reason not to trust, and who thinks me so much his friend that he couldn’t dream of my making any sort of trouble for him. It would break his heart, I’m afraid, if you treated him in a different way from that in which you’ve treated him till now. It’s really touching to listen to his gratitude to you and your mother. It’s only conceivable on the ground that he has never had friends before in the world. He seems like another man, or the same man come to life. And it isn’t his fault that he’s a priest. I suppose,” he added, with a sort of final throe, “that a Venetian family wouldn’t use him with the frank hospitality you’ve shown, not because they distrusted him at all, perhaps, but because they would be afraid of other Venetian tongues.”

  This ultimate drop of venom, helplessly distilled, did not seem to rankle in Miss Vervain’s mind. She walked now with her face turned from his, and she answered coldly, “We shall not be troubled. We don’t care for Venetian tongues.”

  They were at the gate. “Good-by,” said Ferris, abruptly, “I’m going.”

  “Won’t you wait and see my mother?” asked Florida, with her awkward self-constraint again upon her.

  “No, thanks,” said Ferris, gloomily. “I haven’t time. I just dropped in for a moment, to blast an innocent man’s reputation, and destroy a young lady’s peace of mind.”

  “Then you needn’t go, yet,” answered Florida, coldly, “for you haven’t succeeded.”

  “Well, I’ve done my worst,” returned Ferris, drawing the bolt.

  He went away, hanging his head in amazement and disgust at himself for his clumsiness and bad taste. It seemed to him a contemptible part, first to embarrass them with Don Ippolito’s acquaintance, if it was an embarrassment, and then try to sneak out of his responsibility by these tardy cautions; and if it was not going to be an embarrassment, it was folly to have approached the matter at all.

  What had he wanted to do, and with what motive? He hardly knew. As he battled the ground over and over again, nothing comforted him save the thought that, bad as it was to have spoken to Miss Vervain, it must have been infinitely worse to speak to her mother.

  VIII.

  It was late before Ferris forgot his chagrin in sleep, and when he woke the next morning, the sun was making the solid green blinds at his window odorous of their native pine woods with its heat, and thrusting a golden spear at the heart of Don Ippolito’s effigy where he had left it on the easel.

  Marina brought a letter with his coffee. The letter was from Mrs. Vervain, and it entreated him to come to lunch at twelve, and then join them on an excursion, of which they had all often talked, up the Canal of the Brenta. “Don Ippolito has got his permission — think of his not being able to go to the mainland without the Patriarch’s leave! and can go with us to-day. So I try to make this hasty arrangement. You must come — it all depends upon you.”

  “Yes, so it seems,” groaned the painter, and went.

  In the garden he found Don Ippolito and Florida, at the fountain where he had himself parted with her the evening before; and he observed with a guilty relief that Don Ippolito was talking to her in the happy unconsciousness habitual with him.

  Florida cast at the painter a swift glance of latent appeal and intelligence, which he refused, and in the same instant she met him with another look, as if she now saw him for the first time, and gave him her hand in greeting. It was a beautiful hand; he could not help worshipping its lovely forms, and the lily whiteness and softness of the back, the rose of the palm and finger-tips.

  She idly resumed the great Venetian fan which hung from her waist by a chain. “Don Ippolito has been talking about the villeggiatura on the Brenta in the old days,” she explained.

  “Oh, yes,” said the painter, “they used to have merry times in the villas then, and it was worth while being a priest, or at least an abbate di casa. I should think you would sigh for a return of those good old days, Don Ippolito. Just imagine, if you were abbate di casa with some patrician family about the close of the last century, you might be the instructor, companion, and spiritual adviser of Illustrissima at the theatres, card-parties, and masquerades, all winter; and at this season, instead of going up the Brenta for a day’s pleasure with us barbarous Yankees, you might be setting out with Illustrissima and all the ‘Strissimi and ‘Strissime, big and little, for a spring villeggiatura there. You would be going in a gilded barge, with songs and fiddles and dancing, instead of a common gondola, and you would stay a month, walking, going to parties and caffès, drinking chocolate and lemonade, gaming, sonneteering, and butterflying about generally.”

  “It was doubtless a beautiful life,” answered the priest, with simple indifference. “But I never have thought of it with regret, because I have been preoccupied with other ideas than those of social pleasures, though perhaps they were no wiser.”

  Florida had watched Don Ippolito’s face while Ferris was speaking, and she now asked gravely, “But don’t you think their life nowadays is more becoming to the clergy?”

  “Why, madamigella? What harm was there in those gayeties? I suppose the bad features of the old life are exaggerated to us.”

  “They couldn’t have been worse than the amusements of the hard-drinking, hard-riding, hard-swearing, fox-hunting English parsons about the same time,” said Ferris. “Besides, the abbate di casa had a charm of his own, the charm of all rococo things, which, whatever you may say of them, are somehow elegant and refined, or at least refer to elegance and refinement. I don’t say they’re ennobling, but they’re fascinating. I don’t respect them, but I love them. When I think about the past of Venice, I don’t care so muc
h to see any of the heroically historical things; but I should like immensely to have looked in at the Ridotto, when the place was at its gayest with wigs and masks, hoops and small-clothes, fans and rapiers, bows and courtesies, whispers and glances. I dare say I should have found Don Ippolito there in some becoming disguise.”

  Florida looked from the painter to the priest and back to the painter, as Ferris spoke, and then she turned a little anxiously toward the terrace, and a shadow slipped from her face as her mother came rustling down the steps, catching at her drapery and shaking it into place. The young girl hurried to meet her, lifted her arms for what promised an embrace, and with firm hands set the elder lady’s bonnet straight with her forehead.

  “I’m always getting it on askew,” Mrs. Vervain said for greeting to Ferris. “How do you do, Don Ippolito? But I suppose you think I’ve kept you long enough to get it on straight for once. So I have. I am a fuss, and I don’t deny it. At my time of life, it’s much harder to make yourself shipshape than it is when you’re younger. I tell Florida that anybody would take her for the old lady, she does seem to give so little care to getting up an appearance.”

  “And yet she has the effect of a stylish young person in the bloom of youth,” observed Ferris, with a touch of caricature.

  “We had better lunch with our things on,” said Mrs. Vervain, “and then there needn’t be any delay in starting. I thought we would have it here,” she added, as Nina and the house-servant appeared with trays of dishes and cups. “So that we can start in a real picnicky spirit. I knew you’d think it a womanish lunch, Mr. Ferris — Don Ippolito likes what we do — and so I’ve provided you with a chicken salad; and I’m going to ask you for a taste of it; I’m really hungry.”

  There was salad for all, in fact; and it was quite one o’clock before the lunch was ended, and wraps of just the right thickness and thinness were chosen, and the party were comfortably placed under the striped linen canopy of the gondola, which they had from a public station, the house-gondola being engaged that day. They rowed through the narrow canal skirting the garden out into the expanse before the Giudecca, and then struck across the lagoon towards Fusina, past the island-church of San Giorgio in Alga, whose beautiful tower has flushed and darkened in so many pictures of Venetian sunsets, and past the Austrian lagoon forts with their coronets of guns threatening every point, and the Croatian sentinels pacing to and fro on their walls. They stopped long enough at one of the customs barges to declare to the swarthy, amiable officers the innocence of their freight, and at the mouth of the Canal of the Brenta they paused before the station while a policeman came out and scanned them. He bowed to Don Ippolito’s cloth, and then they began to push up the sluggish canal, shallow and overrun with weeds and mosses, into the heart of the land.

  The spring, which in Venice comes in the softening air and the perpetual azure of the heavens, was renewed to their senses in all its miraculous loveliness. The garden of the Vervains had indeed confessed it in opulence of leaf and bloom, but there it seemed somehow only like a novel effect of the artifice which had been able to create a garden in that city of stone and sea. Here a vernal world suddenly opened before them, with wide-stretching fields of green under a dome of perfect blue; against its walls only the soft curves of far-off hills were traced, and near at hand the tender forms of full-foliaged trees. The long garland of vines that festoons all Italy seemed to begin in the neighboring orchards; the meadows waved their tall grasses in the sun, and broke in poppies as the sea-waves break in iridescent spray; the well-grown maize shook its gleaming blades in the light; the poplars marched in stately procession on either side of the straight, white road to Padua, till they vanished in the long perspective. The blossoms had fallen from the trees many weeks before, but the air was full of the vague sweetness of the perfect spring, which here and there gathered and defined itself as the spicy odor of the grass cut on the shore of the canal, and drying in the mellow heat of the sun.

  The voyagers spoke from time to time of some peculiarity of the villas that succeeded each other along the canal. Don Ippolito knew a few of them, the gondoliers knew others; but after all, their names were nothing. These haunts of old-time splendor and idleness weary of themselves, and unable to escape, are sadder than anything in Venice, and they belonged, as far as the Americans were concerned, to a world as strange as any to which they should go in another life, — the world of a faded fashion and an alien history. Some of the villas were kept in a sort of repair; some were even maintained in the state of old; but the most showed marks of greater or less decay, and here and there one was falling to ruin. They had gardens about them, tangled and wild-grown; a population of decrepit statues in the rococo taste strolled in their walks or simpered from their gates. Two or three houses seemed to be occupied; the rest stood empty, each

  “Close latticed to the brooding heat,

  And silent in its dusty vines.”

  The pleasure-party had no fixed plan for the day further than to ascend the canal, and by and by take a carriage at some convenient village and drive to the famous Villa Pisani at Strà.

  “These houses are very well,” said Don Ippolito, who had visited the villa once, and with whom it had remained a memory almost as signal as that night in Padua when he wore civil dress, “but it is at Strà you see something really worthy of the royal splendor of the patricians of Venice. Royal? The villa is now one of the palaces of the ex-Emperor of Austria, who does not find it less imperial than his other palaces.” Don Ippolito had celebrated the villa at Strà in this strain ever since they had spoken of going up the Brenta: now it was the magnificent conservatories and orangeries that he sang, now the vast garden with its statued walks between rows of clipt cedars and firs, now the stables with their stalls for numberless horses, now the palace itself with its frescoed halls and treasures of art and vertu. His enthusiasm for the villa at Strà had become an amiable jest with the Americans. Ferris laughed at his fresh outburst he declared himself tired of the gondola, and he asked Florida to disembark with him and walk under the trees of a pleasant street running on one side between the villas and the canal. “We are going to find something much grander than the Villa Pisani,” he boasted, with a look at Don Ippolito.

  As they sauntered along the path together, they came now and then to a stately palace like that of the Contarini, where the lions, that give their name to one branch of the family, crouch in stone before the grand portal; but most of the houses were interesting only from their unstoried possibilities to the imagination. They were generally of stucco, and glared with fresh whitewash through the foliage of their gardens. When a peasant’s cottage broke their line, it gave, with its barns and straw-stacks and its beds of pot-herbs, a homely relief from the decaying gentility of the villas.

  “What a pity, Miss Vervain,” said the painter, “that the blessings of this world should be so unequally divided! Why should all this sketchable adversity be lavished upon the neighborhood of a city that is so rich as Venice in picturesque dilapidation? It’s pretty hard on us Americans, and forces people of sensibility into exile. What wouldn’t cultivated persons give for a stretch of this street in the suburbs of Boston, or of your own Providence? I suppose the New Yorkers will be setting up something of the kind one of these days, and giving it a French name — they’ll call it Aux bords du Brenta. There was one of them carried back a gondola the other day to put on a pond in their new park. But the worst of it is, you can’t take home the sentiment of these things.”

  “I thought it was the business of painters to send home the sentiment of them in pictures,” said Florida.

  Ferris talked to her in this way because it was his way of talking; it always surprised him a little that she entered into the spirit of it; he was not quite sure that she did; he sometimes thought she waited till she could seize upon a point to turn against him, and so give herself the air of having comprehended the whole. He laughed: “Oh yes, a poor little fragmentary, faded-out reproduction of their sentimen
t — which is ‘as moonlight unto sunlight and as water unto wine,’ when compared with the real thing. Suppose I made a picture of this very bit, ourselves in the foreground, looking at the garden over there where that amusing Vandal of an owner has just had his statues painted white: would our friends at home understand it? A whole history must be left unexpressed. I could only hint at an entire situation. Of course, people with a taste for olives would get the flavor; but even they would wonder that I chose such an unsuggestive bit. Why, it is just the most maddeningly suggestive thing to be found here! And if I may put it modestly, for my share in it, I think we two young Americans looking on at this supreme excess of the rococo, are the very essence of the sentiment of the scene; but what would the honored connoisseurs — the good folks who get themselves up on Ruskin and try so honestly hard to have some little ideas about art — make of us? To be sure they might justifiably praise the grace of your pose, if I were so lucky as to catch it, and your way of putting your hand under the elbow of the arm that holds your parasol,” — Florida seemed disdainfully to keep her attitude, and the painter smiled,— “but they wouldn’t know what it all meant, and couldn’t imagine that we were inspired by this rascally little villa to sigh longingly over the wicked past.”

  “Excuse me,” interrupted Florida, with a touch of trouble in her proud manner, “I’m not sighing over it, for one, and I don’t want it back. I’m glad that I’m American and that there is no past for me. I can’t understand how you and Don Ippolito can speak so tolerantly of what no one can respect,” she added, in almost an aggrieved tone.

  If Miss Vervain wanted to turn the talk upon Don Ippolito, Ferris by no means did; he had had enough of that subject yesterday; he got as lightly away from it as he could.