Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “No!” said the painter with a kind of groan. He sat down in a tall, carven gothic chair, — the furniture of one of his pictures, — and rested his head against its high back and looked at the priest across the room. “Excuse me,” he continued with a strong effort. “I am ready to befriend you to the utmost of my power. What was it you wanted to ask me? I have told you truly what I thought of your scheme of going to America; but I may very well be mistaken. Was it about that Miss Vervain desired you to consult me?” His voice and manner hardened again in spite of him. “Or did she wish me to advise you about the renunciation of your priesthood? You must have thought that carefully over for yourself.”

  “Yes, I do not think you could make me see that as a greater difficulty than it has appeared to me.” He paused with a confused and daunted air, as if some important point had slipped his mind. “But I must take the step; the burden of the double part I play is unendurable, is it not?”

  “You know better than I.”

  “But if you were such a man as I, with neither love for your vocation nor faith in it, should you not cease to be a priest?”

  “If you ask me in that way, — yes,” answered the painter. “But I advise you nothing. I could not counsel another in such a case.”

  “But you think and feel as I do,” said the priest, “and I am right, then.”

  “I do not say you are wrong.”

  Ferris was silent while Don Ippolito moved up and down the room, with his sliding step, like some tall, gaunt, unhappy girl. Neither could put an end to this interview, so full of intangible, inconclusive misery. Ferris drew a long breath, and then said steadily, “Don Ippolito, I suppose you did not speak idly to me of your — your feeling for Miss Vervain, and that I may speak plainly to you in return.”

  “Surely,” answered the priest, pausing in his walk and fixing his eyes upon the painter. “It was to you as the friend of both that I spoke of my love, and my hope — which is oftener my despair.”

  “Then you have not much reason to believe that she returns your — feeling?”

  “Ah, how could she consciously return it? I have been hitherto a priest to her, and the thought of me would have been impurity. But hereafter, if I can prove myself a man, if I can win my place in the world.... No, even now, why should she care so much for my escape from these bonds, if she did not care for me more than she knew?”

  “Have you ever thought of that extravagant generosity of Miss Vervain’s character?”

  “It is divine!”

  “Has it seemed to you that if such a woman knew herself to have once wrongly given you pain, her atonement might be as headlong and excessive as her offense? That she could have no reserves in her reparation?”

  Don Ippolito looked at Ferris, but did not interpose.

  “Miss Vervain is very religious in her way, and she is truth itself. Are you sure that it is not concern for what seems to her your terrible position, that has made her show so much anxiety on your account?”

  “Do I not know that well? Have I not felt the balm of her most heavenly pity?”

  “And may she not be only trying to appeal to something in you as high as the impulse of her own heart?”

  “As high!” cried Don Ippolito, almost angrily. “Can there be any higher thing in heaven or on earth than love for such a woman?”

  “Yes; both in heaven and on earth,” answered Ferris.

  “I do not understand you,” said Don Ippolito with a puzzled stare.

  Ferris did not reply. He fell into a dull reverie in which he seemed to forget Don Ippolito and the whole affair. At last the priest spoke again: “Have you nothing to say to me, signore?”

  “I? What is there to say?” returned the other blankly.

  “Do you know any reason why I should not love her, save that I am — have been — a priest?”

  “No, I know none,” said the painter, wearily.

  “Ah,” exclaimed Don Ippolito, “there is something on your mind that you will not speak. I beseech you not to let me go wrong. I love her so well that I would rather die than let my love offend her. I am a man with the passions and hopes of a man, but without a man’s experience, or a man’s knowledge of what is just and right in these relations. If you can be my friend in this so far as to advise or warn me; if you can be her friend” —

  Ferris abruptly rose and went to his balcony, and looked out upon the Grand Canal. The time-stained palace opposite had not changed in the last half-hour. As on many another summer day, he saw the black boats going by. A heavy, high-pointed barge from the Sile, with the captain’s family at dinner in the shade of a matting on the roof, moved sluggishly down the middle current. A party of Americans in a gondola, with their opera-glasses and guide-books in their hands, pointed out to each other the eagle on the consular arms. They were all like sights in a mirror, or things in a world turned upside down.

  Ferris came back and looked dizzily at the priest trying to believe that this unhuman, sacerdotal phantasm had been telling him that it loved a beautiful young girl of his own race, faith, and language.

  “Will you not answer me, signore?” meekly demanded Don Ippolito.

  “In this matter,” replied the painter, “I cannot advise or warn you. The whole affair is beyond my conception. I mean no unkindness, but I cannot consult with you about it. There are reasons why I should not. The mother of Miss Vervain is here with her, and I do not feel that her interests in such a matter are in my hands. If they come to me for help, that is different. What do you wish? You tell me that you are resolved to renounce the priesthood and go to America; and I have answered you to the best of my power. You tell me that you are in love with Miss Vervain. What can I have to say about that?”

  Don Ippolito stood listening with a patient, and then a wounded air. “Nothing,” he answered proudly. “I ask your pardon for troubling you with my affairs. Your former kindness emboldened me too much. I shall not trespass again. It was my ignorance, which I pray you to excuse. I take my leave, signore.”

  He bowed, and moved out of the room, and a dull remorse filled the painter, as he heard the outer door close after him. But he could do nothing. If he had given a wound to the heart that trusted him, it was in an anguish which he had not been able to master, and whose causes he could not yet define. It was all a shapeless torment; it held him like the memory of some hideous nightmare prolonging its horror beyond sleep. It seemed impossible that what had happened should have happened.

  It was long, as he sat in the chair from which he had talked with Don Ippolito, before he could reason about what had been said; and then the worst phase presented itself first. He could not help seeing that the priest might have found cause for hope in the girl’s behavior toward him. Her violent resentments, and her equally violent repentances; her fervent interest in his unhappy fortunes, and her anxiety that he should at once forsake the priesthood; her urging him to go to America, and her promising him a home under her mother’s roof there: why might it not all be in fact a proof of her tenderness for him? She might have found it necessary to be thus coarsely explicit with him, for a man in Don Ippolito’s relation to her could not otherwise have imagined her interest in him. But her making use of Ferris to confirm her own purposes by his words, her repeating them so that they should come back to him from Don Ippolito’s lips, her letting another man go with her to look upon the procession in which her priestly lover was to appear in his sacerdotal panoply; these things could not be accounted for except by that strain of insolent, passionate defiance which he had noted ill her from the beginning. Why should she first tell Don Ippolito of their going away? “Well, I wish him joy of his bargain,” said Ferris aloud, and rising, shrugged his shoulders, and tried to cast off all care of a matter that did not concern him. But one does not so easily cast off a matter that does not concern one. He found himself haunted by certain tones and looks and attitudes of the young girl, wholly alien to the character he had just constructed for her. They were child-like, trusting,
unconscious, far beyond anything he had yet known in women, and they appealed to him now with a maddening pathos. She was standing there before Don Ippolito’s picture as on that morning when she came to Ferris, looking anxiously at him, her innocent beauty, troubled with some hidden care, hallowing the place. Ferris thought of the young fellow who told him that he had spent three months in a dull German town because he had the room there that was once occupied by the girl who had refused him; the painter remembered that the young fellow said he had just read of her marriage in an American newspaper.

  Why did Miss Vervain send Don Ippolito to him? Was it some scheme of her secret love for the priest; or mere coarse resentment of the cautions Ferris had once hinted, a piece of vulgar bravado? But if she had acted throughout in pure simplicity, in unwise goodness of heart? If Don Ippolito were altogether self-deceived, and nothing but her unknowing pity had given him grounds of hope? He himself had suggested this to the priest, and how with a different motive he looked at it in his own behalf. A great load began slowly to lift itself from Ferris’s heart, which could ache now for this most unhappy priest. But if his conjecture were just, his duty would be different. He must not coldly acquiesce and let things take their course. He had introduced Don Ippolito to the Vervains; he was in some sort responsible for him; he must save them if possible from the painful consequences of the priest’s hallucination. But how to do this was by no means clear. He blamed himself for not having been franker with Don Ippolito and tried to make him see that the Vervains might regard his passion as a presumption upon their kindness to him, an abuse of their hospitable friendship; and yet how could he have done this without outrage to a sensitive and right-meaning soul? For a moment it seemed to him that he must seek Don Ippolito, and repair his fault; but they had hardly parted as friends, and his action might be easily misconstrued. If he shrank from the thought of speaking to him of the matter again, it appeared yet more impossible to bring it before the Vervains. Like a man of the imaginative temperament as he was, he exaggerated the probable effect, and pictured their dismay in colors that made his interference seem a ludicrous enormity; in fact, it would have been an awkward business enough for one not hampered by his intricate obligations. He felt bound to the Vervains, the ignorant young girl, and the addle-pated mother; but if he ought to go to them and tell them what he knew, to which of them ought he to speak, and how? In an anguish of perplexity that made the sweat stand in drops upon his forehead, he smiled to think it just possible that Mrs. Vervain might take the matter seriously, and wish to consider the propriety of Florida’s accepting Don Ippolito. But if he spoke to the daughter, how should he approach the subject? “Don Ippolito tells me he loves you, and he goes to America with the expectation that when he has made his fortune with a patent back-action apple-corer, you will marry him.” Should he say something to this purport? And in Heaven’s name what right had he, Ferris, to say anything at all? The horrible absurdity, the inexorable delicacy of his position made him laugh.

  On the other hand, besides, he was bound to Don Ippolito, who had come to him as the nearest friend of both, and confided in him. He remembered with a tardy, poignant intelligence how in their first talk of the Vervains Don Ippolito had taken pains to inform himself that Ferris was not in love with Florida. Could he be less manly and generous than this poor priest, and violate the sanctity of his confidence? Ferris groaned aloud. No, contrive it as he would, call it by what fair name he chose, he could not commit this treachery. It was the more impossible to him because, in this agony of doubt as to what he should do, he now at least read his own heart clearly, and had no longer a doubt what was in it. He pitied her for the pain she must suffer. He saw how her simple goodness, her blind sympathy with Don Ippolito, and only this, must have led the priest to the mistaken pass at which he stood. But Ferris felt that the whole affair had been fatally carried beyond his reach; he could do nothing now but wait and endure. There are cases in which a man must not protect the woman he loves. This was one.

  The afternoon wore away. In the evening he went to the Piazza, and drank a cup of coffee at Florian’s. Then he walked to the Public Gardens, where he watched the crowd till it thinned in the twilight and left him alone. He hung upon the parapet, looking off over the lagoon that at last he perceived to be flooded with moonlight. He desperately called a gondola, and bade the man row him to the public landing nearest the Vervains’, and so walked up the calle, and entered the palace from the campo, through the court that on one side opened into the garden.

  Mrs. Vervain was alone in the room where he had always been accustomed to find her daughter with her, and a chill as of the impending change fell upon him. He felt how pleasant it had been to find them together; with a vain, piercing regret he felt how much like home the place had been to him. Mrs. Vervain, indeed, was not changed; she was even more than ever herself, though all that she said imported change. She seemed to observe nothing unwonted in him, and she began to talk in her way of things that she could not know were so near his heart.

  “Now, Mr. Ferris, I have a little surprise for you. Guess what it is!”

  “I’m not good at guessing. I’d rather not know what it is than have to guess it,” said Ferris, trying to be light, under his heavy trouble.

  “You won’t try once, even? Well, you’re going to be rid of us soon I We are going away.”

  “Yes, I knew that,” said Ferris quietly. “Don Ippolito told me so to-day.”

  “And is that all you have to say? Isn’t it rather sad? Isn’t it sudden? Come, Mr. Ferris, do be a little complimentary, for once!”

  “It’s sudden, and I can assure you it’s sad enough for me,” replied the painter, in a tone which could not leave any doubt of his sincerity.

  “Well, so it is for us,” quavered Mrs. Vervain. “You have been very, very good to us,” she went on more collectedly, “and we shall never forget it. Florida has been speaking of it, too, and she’s extremely grateful, and thinks we’ve quite imposed upon you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I suppose we have, but as I always say, you’re the representative of the country here. However, that’s neither here nor there. We have no relatives on the face of the earth, you know; but I have a good many old friends in Providence, and we’re going back there. We both think I shall be better at home; for I’m sorry to say, Mr. Ferns, that though I don’t complain of Venice, — it’s really a beautiful place, and all that; not the least exaggerated, — still I don’t think it’s done my health much good; or at least I don’t seem to gain, don’t you know, I don’t seem to gain.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear it, Mrs. Vervain.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you are; but you see, don’t you, that we must go? We are going next week. When we’ve once made up our minds, there’s no object in prolonging the agony.”

  Mrs. Vervain adjusted her glasses with the thumb and finger of her right hand, and peered into Ferris’s face with a gay smile. “But the greatest part of the surprise is,” she resumed, lowering her voice a little, “that Don Ippolito is going with us.”

  “Ah!” cried Ferris sharply.

  “I knew I should surprise you,” laughed Mrs. Vervain. “We’ve been having a regular confab — clave, I mean — about it here, and he’s all on fire to go to America; though it must be kept a great secret on his account, poor fellow. He’s to join us in France, and then he can easily get into England, with us. You know he’s to give up being a priest, and is going to devote himself to invention when he gets to America. Now, what do you think of it, Mr. Ferris? Quite strikes you dumb, doesn’t it?” triumphed Mrs. Vervain. “I suppose it’s what you would call a wild goose chase, — I used to pick up all those phrases, — but we shall carry it through.”

  Ferris gasped, as though about to speak, but said nothing.

  “Don Ippolito’s been here the whole afternoon,” continued Mrs. Vervain, “or rather ever since about five o’clock. He took dinner with us, and we’ve been talking it over and over. He’s so
enthusiastic about it, and yet he breaks down every little while, and seems quite to despair of the undertaking. But Florida won’t let him do that; and really it’s funny, the way he defers to her judgment — you know I always regard Florida as such a mere child — and seems to take every word she says for gospel. But, shedding tears, now: it’s dreadful in a man, isn’t it? I wish Don Ippolito wouldn’t do that. It makes one creep. I can’t feel that it’s manly; can you?”

  Ferris found voice to say something about those things being different with the Latin races.

  “Well, at any rate,” said Mrs. Vervain, “I’m glad that Americans don’t shed tears, as a general rule. Now, Florida: you’d think she was the man all through this business, she’s so perfectly heroic about it; that is, outwardly: for I can see — women can, in each other, Mr. Ferris — just where she’s on the point of breaking down, all the while. Has she ever spoken to you about Don Ippolito? She does think so highly of your opinion, Mr. Ferris.”

  “She does me too much honor,” said Ferris, with ghastly irony.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” returned Mrs. Vervain. “She told me this morning that she’d made Don Ippolito promise to speak to you about it; but he didn’t mention having done so, and — I hated, don’t you know, to ask him.... In fact, Florida had told me beforehand that I mustn’t. She said he must be left entirely to himself in that matter, and” — Mrs. Vervain looked suggestively at Ferris.

  “He spoke to me about it,” said Ferris.

  “Then why in the world did you let me run on? I suppose you advised him against it.”