Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “I certainly did.”

  “Well, there’s where I think woman’s intuition is better than man’s reason.”

  The painter silently bowed his head.

  “Yes, I’m quite woman’s rights in that respect,” said Mrs. Vervain.

  “Oh, without doubt,” answered Ferris, aimlessly.

  “I’m perfectly delighted,” she went on, “at the idea of Don Ippolito’s giving up the priesthood, and I’ve told him he must get married to some good American girl. You ought to have seen how the poor fellow blushed! But really, you know, there are lots of nice girls that would jump at him — so handsome and sad-looking, and a genius.”

  Ferris could only stare helplessly at Mrs. Vervain, who continued: —

  “Yes, I think he’s a genius, and I’m determined that he shall have a chance. I suppose we’ve got a job on our hands; but I’m not sorry. I’ll introduce him into society, and if he needs money he shall have it. What does God give us money for, Mr. Ferris, but to help our fellow-creatures?”

  So miserable, as he was, from head to foot, that it seemed impossible he could endure more, Ferris could not forbear laughing at this burst of piety.

  “What are you laughing at?” asked Mrs. Vervain, who had cheerfully joined him. “Something I’ve been saying. Well, you won’t have me to laugh at much longer. I do wonder whom you’ll have next.”

  Ferris’s merriment died away in something like a groan, and when Mrs. Vervain again spoke, it was in a tone of sudden querulousness. “I wish Florida would come! She went to bolt the land-gate after Don Ippolito, — I wanted her to, — but she ought to have been back long ago. It’s odd you didn’t meet them, coming in. She must be in the garden somewhere; I suppose she’s sorry to be leaving it. But I need her. Would you be so very kind, Mr. Ferris, as to go and ask her to come to me?”

  Ferris rose heavily from the chair in which he seemed to have grown ten years older. He had hardly heard anything that he did not know already, but the clear vision of the affair with which he had come to the Vervains was hopelessly confused and darkened. He could make nothing of any phase of it. He did not know whether he cared now to see Florida or not. He mechanically obeyed Mrs. Vervain, and stepping out upon the terrace, slowly descended the stairway.

  The moon was shining brightly into the garden.

  XV.

  Florida and Don Ippolito had paused in the pathway which parted at the fountain and led in one direction to the water-gate, and in the other out through the palace-court into the campo.

  “Now, you must not give way to despair again,” she said to him. “You will succeed, I am sure, for you will deserve success.”

  “It is all your goodness, madamigella,” sighed the priest, “and at the bottom of my heart I am afraid that all the hope and courage I have are also yours.”

  “You shall never want for hope and courage then. We believe in you, and we honor your purpose, and we will be your steadfast friends. But now you must think only of the present — of how you are to get away from Venice. Oh, I can understand how you must hate to leave it! What a beautiful night! You mustn’t expect such moonlight as this in America, Don Ippolito.”

  “It is beautiful, is it not?” said the priest, kindling from her. “But I think we Venetians are never so conscious of the beauty of Venice as you strangers are.”

  “I don’t know. I only know that now, since we have made up our minds to go, and fixed the day and hour, it is more like leaving my own country than anything else I’ve ever felt. This garden, I seem to have spent my whole life in it; and when we are settled in Providence, I’m going to have mother send back for some of these statues. I suppose Signor Cavaletti wouldn’t mind our robbing his place of them if he were paid enough. At any rate we must have this one that belongs to the fountain. You shall be the first to set the fountain playing over there, Don Ippolito, and then we’ll sit down on this stone bench before it, and imagine ourselves in the garden of Casa Vervain at Venice.”

  “No, no; let me be the last to set it playing here,” said the priest, quickly stooping to the pipe at the foot of the figure, “and then we will sit down here, and imagine ourselves in the garden of Casa Vervain at Providence.”

  Florida put her hand on his shoulder. “You mustn’t do it,” she said simply. “The padrone doesn’t like to waste the water.”

  “Oh, we’ll pray the saints to rain it back on him some day,” cried Don Ippolito with willful levity, and the stream leaped into the moonlight and seemed to hang there like a tangled skein of silver. “But how shall I shut it off when you are gone?” asked the young girl, looking ruefully at the floating threads of splendor.

  “Oh, I will shut it off before I go,” answered Don Ippolito. “Let it play a moment,” he continued, gazing rapturously upon it, while the moon painted his lifted face with a pallor that his black robes heightened. He fetched a long, sighing breath, as if he inhaled with that respiration all the rich odors of the flowers, blanched like his own visage in the white lustre; as if he absorbed into his heart at once the wide glory of the summer night, and the beauty of the young girl at his side. It seemed a supreme moment with him; he looked as a man might look who has climbed out of lifelong defeat into a single instant of release and triumph.

  Florida sank upon the bench before the fountain, indulging his caprice with that sacred, motherly tolerance, some touch of which is in all womanly yielding to men’s will, and which was perhaps present in greater degree in her feeling towards a man more than ordinarily orphaned and unfriended.

  “Is Providence your native city?” asked Don Ippolito, abruptly, after a little silence.

  “Oh no; I was born at St. Augustine in Florida.”

  “Ah yes, I forgot; madama has told me about it; Providence is her city. But the two are near together?”

  “No,” said Florida, compassionately, “they are a thousand miles apart.”

  “A thousand miles? What a vast country!”

  “Yes, it’s a whole world.”

  “Ah, a world, indeed!” cried the priest, softly. “I shall never comprehend it.”

  “You never will,” answered the young girl gravely, “if you do not think about it more practically.”

  “Practically, practically!” lightly retorted the priest. “What a word with you Americans; That is the consul’s word: practical.”

  “Then you have been to see him to-day?” asked Florida, with eagerness. “I wanted to ask you” —

  “Yes, I went to consult the oracle, as you bade me.”

  “Don Ippolito” —

  “And he was averse to my going to America. He said it was not practical.”

  “Oh!” murmured the girl.

  “I think,” continued the priest with vehemence, “that Signor Ferris is no longer my friend.”

  “Did he treat you coldly — harshly?” she asked, with a note of indignation in her voice. “Did he know that I — that you came” —

  “Perhaps he was right. Perhaps I shall indeed go to ruin there. Ruin, ruin! Do I not live ruin here?”

  “What did he say — what did he tell you?”

  “No, no; not now, madamigella! I do not want to think of that man, now. I want you to help me once more to realize myself in America, where I shall never have been a priest, where I shall at least battle even-handed with the world. Come, let us forget him; the thought of him palsies all my hope. He could not see me save in this robe, in this figure that I abhor.”

  “Oh, it was strange, it was not like him, it was cruel! What did he say?”

  “In everything but words, he bade me despair; he bade me look upon all that makes life dear and noble as impossible to me!”

  “Oh, how? Perhaps he did not understand you. No, he did not understand you. What did you say to him, Don Ippolito? Tell me!” She leaned towards him, in anxious emotion, as she spoke.

  The priest rose, and stretched out his arms, as if he would gather something of courage from the infinite space. In his visage were th
e sublimity and the terror of a man who puts everything to the risk.

  “How will it really be with me, yonder?” he demanded. “As it is with other men, whom their past life, if it has been guiltless, does not follow to that new world of freedom and justice?”

  “Why should it not be so?” demanded Florida. “Did he say it would not?”

  “Need it be known there that I have been a priest? Or if I tell it, will it make me appear a kind of monster, different from other men?”

  “No, no!” she answered fervently. “Your story would gain friends and honor for you everywhere in America. Did he” —

  “A moment, a moment!” cried Don Ippolito, catching his breath. “Will it ever be possible for me to win something more than honor and friendship there?”

  She looked up at him askingly, confusedly.

  “If I am a man, and the time should ever come that a face, a look, a voice, shall be to me what they are to other men, will she remember it against me that I have been a priest, when I tell her — say to her, madamigella — how dear she is to me, offer her my life’s devotion, ask her to be my wife?”...

  Florida rose from the seat, and stood confronting him, in a helpless silence, which he seemed not to notice.

  Suddenly he clasped his hands together, and desperately stretched them towards her.

  “Oh, my hope, my trust, my life, if it were you that I loved?”...

  “What!” shuddered the girl, recoiling, with almost a shriek. “You? A priest!”

  Don Ippolito gave a low cry, half sob: —

  “His words, his words! It is true, I cannot escape, I am doomed, I must die as I have lived!”

  He dropped his face into his hands, and stood with his head bowed before her; neither spoke for a long time, or moved.

  Then Florida said absently, in the husky murmur to which her voice fell when she was strongly moved, “Yes, I see it all, how it has been,” and was silent again, staring, as if a procession of the events and scenes of the past months were passing before her; and presently she moaned to herself “Oh, oh, oh!” and wrung her hands. The foolish fountain kept capering and babbling on. All at once, now, as a flame flashes up and then expires, it leaped and dropped extinct at the foot of the statue.

  Its going out seemed somehow to leave them in darkness, and under cover of that gloom she drew nearer the priest, and by such approaches as one makes toward a fancied apparition, when his fear will not let him fly, but it seems better to suffer the worst from it at once than to live in terror of it ever after, she lifted her hands to his, and gently taking them away from his face, looked into his hopeless eyes.

  “Oh, Don Ippolito,” she grieved. “What shall I say to you, what can I do for you, now?”

  But there was nothing to do. The whole edifice of his dreams, his wild imaginations, had fallen into dust at a word; no magic could rebuild it; the end that never seems the end had come. He let her keep his cold hands, and presently he returned the entreaty of her tears with his wan, patient smile.

  “You cannot help me; there is no help for an error like mine. Sometime, if ever the thought of me is a greater pain than it is at this moment, you can forgive me. Yes, you can do that for me.”

  “But who, who will ever forgive me” she cried, “for my blindness! Oh, you must believe that I never thought, I never dreamt” —

  “I know it well. It was your fatal truth that did it; truth too high and fine for me to have discerned save through such agony as.... You too loved my soul, like the rest, and you would have had me no priest for the reason that they would have had me a priest — I see it. But you had no right to love my soul and not me — you, a woman. A woman must not love only the soul of a man.”

  “Yes, yes!” piteously explained the girl, “but you were a priest to me!”

  “That is true, madamigella. I was always a priest to you; and now I see that I never could be otherwise. Ah, the wrong began many years before we met. I was trying to blame you a little” —

  “Blame me, blame me; do!”

  — “but there is no blame. Think that it was another way of asking your forgiveness.... O my God, my God, my God!”

  He released his hands from her, and uttered this cry under his breath, with his face lifted towards the heavens. When he looked at her again, he said: “Madamigella, if my share of this misery gives me the right to ask of you” —

  “Oh ask anything of me! I will give everything, do everything!”

  He faltered, and then, “You do not love me,” he said abruptly; “is there some one else that you love?”

  She did not answer.

  “Is it ... he?”

  She hid her face.

  “I knew it,” groaned the priest, “I knew that too!” and he turned away.

  “Don Ippolito, Don Ippolito — oh, poor, poor Don Ippolito!” cried the girl, springing towards him. “Is this the way you leave me? Where are you going? What will you do now?”

  “Did I not say? I am going to die a priest.”

  “Is there nothing that you will let me be to you, hope for you?”

  “Nothing,” said Don Ippolito, after a moment. “What could you?” He seized the hands imploringly extended towards him, and clasped them together and kissed them both. “Adieu!” he whispered; then he opened them, and passionately kissed either palm; “adieu, adieu!”

  A great wave of sorrow and compassion and despair for him swept through her. She flung her arms about his neck, and pulled his head down upon her heart, and held it tight there, weeping and moaning over him as over some hapless, harmless thing that she had unpurposely bruised or killed. Then she suddenly put her hands against his breast, and thrust him away, and turned and ran.

  Ferris stepped back again into the shadow of the tree from which he had just emerged, and clung to its trunk lest he should fall. Another seemed to creep out of the court in his person, and totter across the white glare of the campo and down the blackness of the calle. In the intersected spaces where the moonlight fell, this alien, miserable man saw the figure of a priest gliding on before him.

  XVI.

  Florida swiftly mounted the terrace steps, but she stopped with her hand on the door, panting, and turned and walked slowly away to the end of the terrace, drying her eyes with dashes of her handkerchief, and ordering her hair, some coils of which had been loosened by her flight. Then she went back to the door, waited, and softly opened it. Her mother was not in the parlor where she had left her, and she passed noiselessly into her own room, where some trunks stood open and half-packed against the wall. She began to gather up the pieces of dress that lay upon the bed and chairs, and to fold them with mechanical carefulness and put them in the boxes. Her mother’s voice called from the other chamber, “Is that you, Florida?”

  “Yes, mother,” answered the girl, but remained kneeling before one of the boxes, with that pale green robe in her hand which she had worn on the morning when Ferris had first brought Don Ippolito to see them. She smoothed its folds and looked down at it without making any motion to pack it away, and so she lingered while her mother advanced with one question after another; “What are you doing, Florida? Where are you? Why didn’t you come to me?” and finally stood in the doorway. “Oh, you’re packing. Do you know, Florida, I’m getting very impatient about going. I wish we could be off at once.”

  A tremor passed over the young girl and she started from her languid posture, and laid the dress in the trunk. “So do I, mother. I would give the world if we could go to-morrow!”

  “Yes, but we can’t, you see. I’m afraid we’ve undertaken a great deal, my dear. It’s quite a weight upon my mind, already; and I don’t know what it will be. If we were free, now, I should say, go to-morrow, by all means. But we couldn’t arrange it with Don Ippolito on our hands.”

  Florida waited a moment before she replied. Then she said coldly, “Don Ippolito is not going with us, mother.”

  “Not going with us? Why” —

  “He is not going to Amer
ica. He will not leave Venice; he is to remain a priest,” said Florida, doggedly.

  Mrs. Vervain sat down in the chair that stood beside the door. “Not going to America; not leave Venice; remain a priest? Florida, you astonish me! But I am not the least surprised, not the least in the world. I thought Don Ippolito would give out, all along. He is not what I should call fickle, exactly, but he is weak, or timid, rather. He is a good man, but he lacks courage, resolution. I always doubted if he would succeed in America; he is too much of a dreamer. But this, really, goes a little beyond anything. I never expected this. What did he say, Florida? How did he excuse himself?”

  “I hardly know; very little. What was there to say?”

  “To be sure, to be sure. Did you try to reason with him, Florida?”

  “No,” answered the girl, drearily.

  “I am glad of that. I think you had said quite enough already. You owed it to yourself not to do so, and he might have misinterpreted it. These foreigners are very different from Americans. No doubt we should have had a time of it, if he had gone with us. It must be for the best. I’m sure it was ordered so. But all that doesn’t relieve Don Ippolito from the charge of black ingratitude, and want of consideration for us. He’s quite made fools of us.”

  “He was not to blame. It was a very great step for him. And if”....

  “I know that. But he ought not to have talked of it. He ought to have known his own mind fully before speaking; that’s the only safe way. Well, then, there is nothing to prevent our going to-morrow.”

  Florida drew a long breath, and rose to go on with the work of packing.

  “Have you been crying, Florida? Well, of course, you can’t help feeling sorry for such a man. There’s a great deal of good in Don Ippolito, a great deal. But when you come to my age you won’t cry so easily, my dear. It’s very trying,” said Mrs. Vervain. She sat awhile in silence before she asked: “Will he come here to-morrow morning?”

  Her daughter looked at her with a glance of terrified inquiry.

  “Do have your wits about you, my dear! We can’t go away without saying good-by to him, and we can’t go away without paying him.”