Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  In the middle of the square stood the Austrian military band, motionless, encircling their leader with his gold-headed staff uplifted. During the night a light colonnade of wood, roofed with blue cloth, had been put up around the inside of the Piazza, and under this now paused the long pomp of the ecclesiastical procession — the priests of all the Venetian churches in their richest vestments, followed in their order by facchini, in white sandals and gay robes, with caps of scarlet, white, green, and blue, who bore huge painted candles and silken banners displaying the symbol or the portrait of the titular saints of the several churches, and supported the canopies under which the host of each was elevated. Before the clergy went a company of Austrian soldiers, and behind the facchini came a long array of religious societies, charity-school boys in uniforms, old paupers in holiday dress, little naked urchins with shepherds’ crooks and bits of fleece about their loins like John the Baptist in the Wilderness, little girls with angels’ wings and crowns, the monks of the various orders, and civilian penitents of all sorts in cloaks or dress-coats, hooded or bareheaded, and carrying each a lighted taper. The corridors under the Imperial Palace and the New and Old Procuratie were packed with spectators; from every window up and down the fronts of the palaces, gay stuffs were flung; the startled doves of St. Mark perched upon the cornices, or fluttered uneasily to and fro above the crowd. The baton of the band leader descended with a crash of martial music, the priests chanted, the charity-boys sang shrill, a vast noise of shuffling feet arose, mixed with the foliage-like rustling of the sheets of tinsel attached to the banners and candles in the procession: the whole strange, gorgeous picture came to life.

  After all her plans and preparations, Mrs. Vervain had not felt well enough that morning to come to the spectacle which she had counted so much upon seeing, but she had therefore insisted the more that her daughter should go, and Ferris now stood with Florida alone at a window in the Old Procuratie.

  “Well, what do you think, Miss Vervain?” he asked, when their senses had somewhat accustomed themselves to the noise of the procession; “do you say now that Venice is too gloomy a city to have ever had any possibility of gayety in her?”

  “I never said that,” answered Florida, opening her eyes upon him.

  “Neither did I,” returned Ferris, “but I’ve often thought it, and I’m not sure now but I’m right. There’s something extremely melancholy to me in all this. I don’t care so much for what one may call the deplorable superstition expressed in the spectacle, but the mere splendid sight and the music are enough to make one shed tears. I don’t know anything more affecting except a procession of lantern-lit gondolas and barges on the Grand Canal. It’s phantasmal. It’s the spectral resurrection of the old dead forms into the present. It’s not even the ghost, it’s the corpse of other ages that’s haunting Venice. The city ought to have been destroyed by Napoleon when he destroyed the Republic, and thrown overboard — St. Mark, Winged Lion, Bucentaur, and all. There is no land like America for true cheerfulness and light-heartedness. Think of our Fourth of Julys and our State Fairs. Selah!”

  Ferris looked into the girl’s serious face with twinkling eyes. He liked to embarrass her gravity with his antic speeches, and enjoyed her endeavors to find an earnest meaning in them, and her evident trouble when she could find none.

  “I’m curious to know how our friend will look,” he began again, as he arranged the cushion on the window-sill for Florida’s greater comfort in watching the spectacle, “but it won’t be an easy matter to pick him out in this masquerade, I fancy. Candle-carrying, as well as the other acts of devotion, seems rather out of character with Don Ippolito, and I can’t imagine his putting much soul into it. However, very few of the clergy appear to do that. Look at those holy men with their eyes to the wind! They are wondering who is the bella bionda at the window here.”

  Florida listened to his persiflage with an air of sad distraction. She was intent upon the procession as it approached from the other side of the Piazza, and she replied at random to his comments on the different bodies that formed it.

  “It’s very hard to decide which are my favorites,” he continued, surveying the long column through an opera-glass. “My religious disadvantages have been such that I don’t care much for priests or monks, or young John the Baptists, or small female cherubim, but I do like little charity-boys with voices of pins and needles and hair cut à la dead-rabbit. I should like, if it were consistent with the consular dignity, to go down and rub their heads. I’m fond, also, of old charity-boys, I find. Those paupers make one in love with destitute and dependent age, by their aspect of irresponsible enjoyment. See how briskly each of them topples along on the leg that he hasn’t got in the grave! How attractive likewise are the civilian devotees in those imperishable dress-coats of theirs! Observe their high collars of the era of the Holy Alliance: they and their fathers and their grandfathers before them have worn those dress-coats; in a hundred years from now their posterity will keep holiday in them. I should like to know the elixir by which the dress-coats of civil employees render themselves immortal. Those penitents in the cloaks and cowls are not bad, either, Miss Vervain. Come, they add a very pretty touch of mystery to this spectacle. They’re the sort of thing that painters are expected to paint in Venice — that people sigh over as so peculiarly Venetian. If you’ve a single sentiment about you, Miss Vervain, now is the time to produce it.”

  “But I haven’t. I’m afraid I have no sentiment at all,” answered the girl ruefully. “But this makes me dreadfully sad.”

  “Why that’s just what I was saying a while ago. Excuse me, Miss Vervain, but your sadness lacks novelty; it’s a sort of plagiarism.”

  “Don’t, please,” she pleaded yet more earnestly. “I was just thinking — I don’t know why such an awful thought should come to me — that it might all be a mistake after all; perhaps there might not be any other world, and every bit of this power and display of the church — our church as well as the rest — might be only a cruel blunder, a dreadful mistake. Perhaps there isn’t even any God! Do you think there is?”

  “I don’t think it,” said Ferris gravely, “I know it. But I don’t wonder that this sight makes you doubt. Great God! How far it is from Christ! Look there, at those troops who go before the followers of the Lamb: their trade is murder. In a minute, if a dozen men called out, ‘Long live the King of Italy!’ it would be the duty of those soldiers to fire into the helpless crowd. Look at the silken and gilded pomp of the servants of the carpenter’s son! Look at those miserable monks, voluntary prisoners, beggars, aliens to their kind! Look at those penitents who think that they can get forgiveness for their sins by carrying a candle round the square! And it is nearly two thousand years since the world turned Christian! It is pretty slow. But I suppose God lets men learn Him from their own experience of evil. I imagine the kingdom of heaven is a sort of republic, and that God draws men to Him only through their perfect freedom.”

  “Yes, yes, it must be so,” answered Florida, staring down on the crowd with unseeing eyes, “but I can’t fix my mind on it. I keep thinking the whole time of what we were talking about yesterday. I never could have dreamed of a priest’s disbelieving; but now I can’t dream of anything else. It seems to me that none of these priests or monks can believe anything. Their faces look false and sly and bad — all of them!”

  “No, no, Miss Vervain,” said Ferris, smiling at her despair, “you push matters a little beyond — as a woman has a right to do, of course. I don’t think their faces are bad, by any means. Some of them are dull and torpid, and some are frivolous, just like the faces of other people. But I’ve been noticing the number of good, kind, friendly faces, and they’re in the majority, just as they are amongst other people; for there are very few souls altogether out of drawing, in my opinion. I’ve even caught sight of some faces in which there was a real rapture of devotion, and now and then a very innocent one. Here, for instance, is a man I should like to bet on, if he’d only look up.�
��

  The priest whom Ferris indicated was slowly advancing toward the space immediately under their window. He was dressed in robes of high ceremony, and in his hand he carried a lighted taper. He moved with a gentle tread, and the droop of his slender figure intimated a sort of despairing weariness. While most of his fellows stared carelessly or curiously about them, his face was downcast and averted.

  Suddenly the procession paused, and a hush fell upon the vast assembly. Then the silence was broken by the rustle and stir of all those thousands going down upon their knees, as the cardinal-patriarch lifted his hands to bless them.

  The priest upon whom Ferris and Florida had fixed their eyes faltered a moment, and before he knelt his next neighbor had to pluck him by the skirt. Then he too knelt hastily, mechanically lifting his head, and glancing along the front of the Old Procuratie. His face had that weariness in it which his figure and movement had suggested, and it was very pale, but it was yet more singular for the troubled innocence which its traits expressed.

  “There,” whispered Ferris, “that’s what I call an uncommonly good face.”

  Florida raised her hand to silence him, and the heavy gaze of the priest rested on them coldly at first. Then a light of recognition shot into his eyes and a flush suffused his pallid visage, which seemed to grow the more haggard and desperate. His head fell again, and he dropped the candle from his hand. One of those beggars who went by the side of the procession, to gather the drippings of the tapers, restored it to him.

  “Why,” said Ferris aloud, “it’s Don Ippolito! Did you know him at first?”

  XIII.

  The ladies were sitting on the terrace when Don Ippolito came next morning to say that he could not read with Miss Vervain that day nor for several days after, alleging in excuse some priestly duties proper to the time. Mrs. Vervain began to lament that she had not been able to go to the procession of the day before. “I meant to have kept a sharp lookout for you; Florida saw you, and so did Mr. Ferris. But it isn’t at all the same thing, you know. Florida has no faculty for describing; and now I shall probably go away from Venice without seeing you in your real character once.”

  Don Ippolito suffered this and more in meek silence. He waited his opportunity with unfailing politeness, and then with gentle punctilio took his leave.

  “Well, come again as soon as your duties will let you, Don Ippolito,” cried Mrs. Vervain. “We shall miss you dreadfully, and I begrudge every one of your readings that Florida loses.”

  The priest passed, with the sliding step which his impeding drapery imposed, down the garden walk, and was half-way to the gate, when Florida, who had stood watching him, said to her mother, “I must speak to him again,” and lightly descended the steps and swiftly glided in pursuit.

  “Don Ippolito!” she called.

  He already had his hand upon the gate, but he turned, and rapidly went back to meet her.

  She stood in the walk where she had stopped when her voice arrested him, breathing quickly. Their eyes met; a painful shadow overcast the face of the young girl, who seemed to be trying in vain to speak.

  Mrs. Vervain put on her glasses and peered down at the two with good-natured curiosity.

  “Well, madamigella,” said the priest at last, “what do you command me?” He gave a faint, patient sigh.

  The tears came into her eyes. “Oh,” she began vehemently, “I wish there was some one who had the right to speak to you!”

  “No one,” answered Don Ippolito, “has so much the right as you.”

  “I saw you yesterday,” she began again, “and I thought of what you had told me, Don Ippolito.”

  “Yes, I thought of it, too,” answered the priest; “I have thought of it ever since.”

  “But haven’t you thought of any hope for yourself? Must you still go on as before? How can you go back now to those things, and pretend to think them holy, and all the time have no heart or faith in them? It’s terrible!”

  “What would you, madamigella?” demanded Don Ippolito, with a moody shrug. “It is my profession, my trade, you know. You might say to the prisoner,” he added bitterly, “‘It is terrible to see you chained here.’ Yes, it is terrible. Oh, I don’t reject your compassion! But what can I do?”

  “Sit down with me here,” said Florida in her blunt, child-like way, and sank upon the stone seat beside the walk. She clasped her hands together in her lap with some strong, bashful emotion, while Don Ippolito, obeying her command, waited for her to speak. Her voice was scarcely more than a hoarse whisper when she began.

  “I don’t know how to begin what I want to say. I am not fit to advise any one. I am so young, and so very ignorant of the world.”

  “I too know little of the world,” said the priest, as much to himself as to her.

  “It may be all wrong, all wrong. Besides,” she said abruptly, “how do I know that you are a good man, Don Ippolito? How do I know that you’ve been telling me the truth? It may be all a kind of trap” —

  He looked blankly at her.

  “This is in Venice; and you may be leading me on to say things to you that will make trouble for my mother and me. You may be a spy” —

  “Oh no, no, no!” cried the priest, springing to his feet with a kind of moan, and a shudder, “God forbid!” He swiftly touched her hand with the tips of his fingers, and then kissed them: an action of inexpressible humility. “Madamigella, I swear to you by everything you believe good that I would rather die than be false to you in a single breath or thought.”

  “Oh, I know it, I know it,” she murmured. “I don’t see how I could say such a cruel thing.”

  “Not cruel; no, madamigella, not cruel,” softly pleaded Don Ippolito.

  “But — but is there no escape for you?”

  They looked steadfastly at each other for a moment, and then Don Ippolito spoke.

  “Yes,” he said very gravely, “there is one way of escape. I have often thought of it, and once I thought I had taken the first step towards it; but it is beset with many great obstacles, and to be a priest makes one timid and insecure.”

  He lapsed into his musing melancholy with the last words; but she would not suffer him to lose whatever heart he had begun to speak with. “That’s nothing,” she said, “you must think again of that way of escape, and never turn from it till you have tried it. Only take the first step and you can go on. Friends will rise up everywhere, and make it easy for you. Come,” she implored him fervently, “you must promise.”

  He bent his dreamy eyes upon her.

  “If I should take this only way of escape, and it seemed desperate to all others, would you still be my friend?”

  “I should be your friend if the whole world turned against you.”

  “Would you be my friend,” he asked eagerly in lower tones, and with signs of an inward struggle, “if this way of escape were for me to be no longer a priest?”

  “Oh yes, yes! Why not?” cried the girl; and her face glowed with heroic sympathy and defiance. It is from this heaven-born ignorance in women of the insuperable difficulties of doing right that men take fire and accomplish the sublime impossibilities. Our sense of details, our fatal habits of reasoning paralyze us; we need the impulse of the pure ideal which we can get only from them. These two were alike children as regarded the world, but he had a man’s dark prevision of the means, and she a heavenly scorn of everything but the end to be achieved.

  He drew a long breath. “Then it does not seem terrible to you?”

  “Terrible? No! I don’t see how you can rest till it is done!”

  “Is it true, then, that you urge me to this step, which indeed I have so long desired to take?”

  “Yes, it is true! Listen, Don Ippolito: it is the very thing that I hoped you would do, but I wanted you to speak of it first. You must have all the honor of it, and I am glad you thought of it before. You will never regret it!”

  She smiled radiantly upon him, and he kindled at her enthusiasm. In another moment his f
ace darkened again. “But it will cost much,” he murmured.

  “No matter,” cried Florida. “Such a man as you ought to leave the priesthood at any risk or hazard. You should cease to be a priest, if it cost you kindred, friends, good fame, country, everything!” She blushed with irrelevant consciousness. “Why need you be downhearted? With your genius once free, you can make country and fame and friends everywhere. Leave Venice! There are other places. Think how inventors succeed in America” —

  “In America!” exclaimed the priest. “Ah, how long I have desired to be there!”

  “You must go. You will soon be famous and honored there, and you shall not be a stranger, even at the first. Do you know that we are going home very soon? Yes, my mother and I have been talking of it to-day. We are both homesick, and you see that she is not well. You shall come to us there, and make our house your home till you have formed some plans of your own. Everything will be easy. God is good,” she said in a breaking voice, “and you may be sure he will befriend you.”

  “Some one,” answered Don Ippolito, with tears in his eyes, “has already been very good to me. I thought it was you, but I will call it God!”

  “Hush! You mustn’t say such things. But you must go, now. Take time to think, but not too much time. Only, — be true to yourself.”

  They rose, and she laid her hand on his arm with an instinctive gesture of appeal. He stood bewildered. Then, “Thanks, madamigella, thanks!” he said, and caught her fragrant hand to his lips. He loosed it and lifted both his arms by a blind impulse in which he arrested himself with a burning blush, and turned away. He did not take leave of her with his wonted formalities, but hurried abruptly toward the gate.