A Foregone Conclusion

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"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 face 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.

A panic seemed to seize her as she saw him open it. She ran after him.
"Don Ippolito, Don Ippolito," she said, coming up to him; and stammered
and faltered. "I don't know; I am frightened. You must do nothing from
me; I cannot let you; I'm not fit to advise you. It must be wholly from
your own conscience. Oh no, don't look so! I _will_ be your
friend, whatever happens. But if what you think of doing has seemed so
terrible to you, perhaps it _is_ more terrible than I can
understand. If it is the only way, it is right. But is there no other?
What I mean is, have you no one to talk all this over with? I mean,
can't you speak of it to--to Mr. Ferris? He is so true and honest and
just."

"I was going to him," said Don Ippolito, with a dim trouble in his
face.

"Oh, I am so glad of that! Remember, I don't take anything back. No
matter what happens, I will be your friend. But he will tell you just
what to do."

Don Ippolito bowed and opened the gate.

Florida went back to her mother, who asked her, "What in the world have
you and Don Ippolito been talking about so earnestly? What makes you so
pale and out of breath?"

"I have been wanting to tell you, mother," said Florida. She drew her
chair in front of the elder lady, and sat down.

XIV.

Don Ippolito did not go directly to the painter's. He walked toward his
house at first, and then turned aside, and wandered out through the
noisy and populous district of Canaregio to the Campo di Marte. A squad
of cavalry which had been going through some exercises there was
moving off the parade ground; a few infantry soldiers were strolling
about under the trees. Don Ippolito walked across the field to the
border of the lagoon, where he began to pace to and fro, with his head
sunk in deep thought. He moved rapidly, but sometimes he stopped and
stood still in the sun, whose heat he did not seem to feel, though a
perspiration bathed his pale face and stood in drops on his forehead
under the shadow of his nicchio. Some little dirty children of the
poor, with which this region swarms, looked at him from the sloping
shore of the Campo di Giustizia, where the executions used to take
place, and a small boy began to mock his movements and pauses, but was
arrested by one of the girls, who shook him and gesticulated warningly.

At this point the long railroad bridge which connects Venice with the
mainland is in full sight, and now from the reverie in which he
continued, whether he walked or stood still, Don Ippolito was roused by
the whistle of an outward train. He followed it with his eye as it
streamed along over the far-stretching arches, and struck out into the
flat, salt marshes beyond. When the distance hid it, he put on his hat,
which he had unknowingly removed, and turned his rapid steps toward the
railroad station. Arrived there, he lingered in the vestibule for half
an hour, watching the people as they bought their tickets for
departure, and had their baggage examined by the customs officers, and
weighed and registered by the railroad porters, who passed it through
the wicket shutting out the train, while the passengers gathered up
their smaller parcels and took their way to the waiting-rooms. He
followed a group of English people some paces in this direction, and
then returned to the wicket, through which he looked long and wistfully
at the train. The baggage was all passed through; the doors of the
waiting-rooms were thrown open with harsh proclamation by the guards,
and the passengers flocked into the carriages. Whistles and bells were
sounded, and the train crept out of the station.

A man in the company's uniform approached the unconscious priest, and
striking his hands softly together, said with a pleasant smile, "Your
servant, Don Ippolito. Are you expecting some one?"

"Ah, good day!" answered the priest, with a little start. "No," he
added, "I was not looking for any one."

"I see," said the other. "Amusing yourself as usual with the machinery.
Excuse the freedom, Don Ippolito; but you ought to have been of our
profession,--ha, ha! When you have the leisure, I should like to show
you the drawing of an American locomotive which a friend of mine has
sent me from Nuova York. It is very different from ours, very curious.
But monstrous in size, you know, prodigious! May I come with it to your
house, some evening?"

"You will do me a great pleasure," said Don Ippolito. He gazed dreamily
in the direction of the vanished train. "Was that the train for Milan?"
he asked presently.

"Exactly," said the man.

"Does it go all the way to Milan?"

"Oh, no! it stops at Peschiera, where the passengers have their
passports examined; and then another train backs down from Desenzano
and takes them on to Milan. And after that," continued the man with
animation, "if you are on the way to England, for example, another
train carries you to Susa, and there you get the diligence over the
mountain to St. Michel, where you take railroad again, and so on up
through Paris to Boulogne-sur-Mer, and then by steamer to Folkestone,
and then by railroad to London and to Liverpool. It is at Liverpool
that you go on board the steamer for America, and piff! in ten days you
are in Nuova York. My friend has written me all about it."

"Ah yes, your friend. Does he like it there in America?"

"Passably, passably. The Americans have no manners; but they are good
devils. They are governed by the Irish. And the wine is dear. But he
likes America; yes, he likes it. Nuova York is a fine city. But
immense, you know! Eight times as large as Venice!"

"Is your friend prosperous there?"

"Ah heigh! That is the prettiest part of the story. He has made himself
rich. He is employed by a large house to make designs for mantlepieces,
and marble tables, and tombs; and he has--listen!--six hundred francs a
month!"

"Oh per Bacco!" cried Don Ippolito.

"Honestly. But you spend a great deal there. Still, it is magnificent,
is it not? If it were not for that blessed war there, now, that would
be the place for you, Don Ippolito. He tells me the Americans are
actually mad for inventions. Your servant. Excuse the freedom, you
know," said the man, bowing and moving away.

"Nothing, dear, nothing," answered the priest. He walked out of the
station with a light step, and went to his own house, where he sought
the room in which his inventions were stored. He had not touched them
for weeks. They were all dusty and many were cobwebbed. He blew the
dust from some, and bringing them to the light, examined them
critically, finding them mostly disabled in one way or other, except
the models of the portable furniture which he polished with his
handkerchief and set apart, surveying them from a distance with a look
of hope. He took up the breech-loading cannon and then suddenly put it
down again with a little shiver, and went to the threshold of the
perverted oratory and glanced in at his forge. Veneranda had carelessly
left the window open, and the draught had carried the ashes about the
floor. On the cinder-heap lay the tools which he had used in mending
the broken pipe of the fountain at Casa Vervain, and had not used
since. The place seemed chilly even on that summer's day. He stood in
the doorway with clenched hands. Then he called Veneranda, chid her for
leaving the window open, and bade her close it, and so quitted the
house and left her muttering.

Ferris seemed surprised to see him when he appeared at the consulate
near the middle of the afternoon, and seated himself in the place where
he was wont to pose for the painter.

"Were you going to give me a sitting?" asked the latter, hesitating.
"The light is horrible, just now, with this glare from the canal. Not
that I manage much better when it's good. I don't get on with you, Don
Ippolito. There are too many of you. I shouldn't have known you in the
procession yesterday."

Don Ippolito did not respond. He rose and went toward his portrait on
the easel, and examined it long, with a curious minuteness. Then he
returned to his chair, and continued to look at it. "I suppose that it
resembles me a great deal," he said, "and yet I do not _feel_ like
that. I hardly know what is the fault. It is as I should be if I were
like other priests, perhaps?"

"I know it's not good," said the painter. "It _is_ conventional,
in spite of everything. But here's that first sketch I made of you."

He took up a canvas facing the wall, and set it on the easel. The
character in this charcoal sketch was vastly sincerer and sweeter.

"Ah!" said Don Ippolito, with a sigh and smile of relief, "that is
immeasurably better. I wish I could speak to you, dear friend, in a
mood of yours as sympathetic as this picture records, of some matters
that concern me very nearly. I have just come from the railroad
station."

"Seeing some friends off?" asked the painter, indifferently, hovering
near the sketch with a bit of charcoal in his hand, and hesitating
whether to give it a certain touch. He glanced with half-shut eyes at
the priest.

Don Ippolito sighed again. "I hardly know. I was seeing off my hopes,
my desires, my prayers, that followed the train to America!"

The painter put down his charcoal, dusted his fingers, and looked at
the priest without saying anything.

"Do you remember when I first came to you?" asked Don Ippolito.

"Certainly," said Ferris. "Is it of that matter you want to speak to
me? I'm very sorry to hear it, for I don't think it practical."

"Practical, practical!" cried the priest hotly. "Nothing is practical
till it has been tried. And why should I not go to America?"

"Because you can't get your passport, for one thing," answered the
painter dryly.

"I have thought of that," rejoined Don Ippolito more patiently. "I can
get a passport for France from the Austrian authorities here, and at
Milan there must be ways in which I could change it for one from my own
king"--it was by this title that patriotic Venetians of those days
spoke of Victor Emmanuel--"that would carry me out of France into
England."

Ferris pondered a moment. "That is quite true," he said. "Why hadn't
you thought of that when you first came to me?"

"I cannot tell. I didn't know that I could even get a passport for
France till the other day."

Both were silent while the painter filled his pipe. "Well," he said
presently, "I'm very sorry. I'm afraid you're dooming yourself to many
bitter disappointments in going to America. What do you expect to do
there?"

"Why, with my inventions"--

"I suppose," interrupted the other, putting a lighted match to his
pipe, "that a painter must be a very poor sort of American: _his_
first thought is of coming to Italy. So I know very little directly
about the fortunes of my inventive fellow-countrymen, or whether an
inventor has any prospect of making a living. But once when I was at
Washington I went into the Patent Office, where the models of the
inventions are deposited; the building is about as large as the Ducal
Palace, and it is full of them. The people there told me nothing was
commoner than for the same invention to be repeated over and over again
by different inventors. Some few succeed, and then they have lawsuits
with the infringers of their patents; some sell out their inventions
for a trifle to companies that have capital, and that grow rich upon
them; the great number can never bring their ideas to the public notice
at all. You can judge for yourself what your chances would be. You have
asked me why you should not go to America. Well, because I think you
would starve there."

"I am used to that," said Don Ippolito; "and besides, until some of my
inventions became known, I could give lessons in Italian."

"Oh, bravo!" said Ferris, "you prefer instant death, then?"

"But madamigella seemed to believe that my success as an inventor would
be assured, there."

Ferris gave a very ironical laugh. "Miss Vervain must have been about
twelve years old when she left America. Even a lady's knowledge of
business, at that age, is limited. When did you talk with her about it?
You had not spoken of it to me, of late, and I thought you were more
contented than you used to be."

"It is true," said the priest. "Sometimes within the last two months I
have almost forgotten it."

"And what has brought it so forcibly to your mind again?"

"That is what I so greatly desire to tell you," replied Don Ippolito,
with an appealing look at the painter's face. He moistened his parched
lips a little, waiting for further question from the painter, to whom
he seemed a man fevered by some strong emotion and at that moment not
quite wholesome. Ferris did not speak, and Don Ippolito began again:
"Even though I have not said so in words to you, dear friend, has it
not appeared to you that I have no heart in my vocation?"

"Yes, I have sometimes fancied that. I had no right to ask you why."

"Some day I will tell you, when I have the courage to go all over it
again. It is partly my own fault, but it is more my miserable fortune.
But wherever the wrong lies, it has at last become intolerable to me. I
cannot endure it any longer and live. I must go away, I must fly from
it."

Ferris shrank from him a little, as men instinctively do from one who
has set himself upon some desperate attempt. "Do you mean, Don
Ippolito, that you are going to renounce your priesthood?"

Don Ippolito opened his hands and let his priesthood drop, as it were,
to the ground.

"You never spoke of this before, when you talked of going to America.
Though to be sure"--

"Yes, yes!" replied Don Ippolito with vehemence, "but now an angel has
appeared and shown me the blackness of my life!"

Ferris began to wonder if he or Don Ippolito were not perhaps mad.

"An angel, yes," the priest went on, rising from his chair, "an angel
whose immaculate truth has mirrored my falsehood in all its vileness
and distortion--to whom, if it destroys me, I cannot devote less than a
truthfulness like hers!"

"Hers--hers?" cried the painter, with a sudden pang. "Whose? Don't
speak in these riddles. Whom do you mean?"

"Whom can I mean but only one?--madamigella!"

"Miss Vervain? Do you mean to say that Miss Vervain has advised you to
renounce your priesthood?"

"In as many words she has bidden me forsake it at any risk,--at the
cost of kindred, friends, good fame, country, everything."

The painter passed his hand confusedly over his face. These were his
own words, the words he had used in speaking with Florida of the
supposed skeptical priest. He grew very pale. "May I ask," he demanded
in a hard, dry voice, "how she came to advise such a step?"

"I can hardly tell. Something had already moved her to learn from me
the story of my life--to know that I was a man with neither faith nor
hope. Her pure heart was torn by the thought of my wrong and of my
error. I had never seen myself in such deformity as she saw me even
when she used me with that divine compassion. I was almost glad to be
what I was because of her angelic pity for me!"

The tears sprang to Don Ippolito's eyes, but Ferris asked in the same
tone as before, "Was it then that she bade you be no longer a priest?"

"No, not then," patiently replied the other; "she was too greatly
overwhelmed with my calamity to think of any cure for it. To-day it was
that she uttered those words--words which I shall never forget, which
will support and comfort me, whatever happens!"

The painter was biting hard upon the stem of his pipe. He turned away
and began ordering the color-tubes and pencils on a table against the
wall, putting them close together in very neat, straight rows.
Presently he said: "Perhaps Miss Vervain also advised you to go to
America?"

"Yes," answered the priest reverently. "She had thought of everything.
She has promised me a refuge under her mother's roof there, until I can
make my inventions known; and I shall follow them at once."

"Follow them?"

"They are going, she told me. Madama does not grow better. They are
homesick. They--but you must know all this already?"

"Oh, not at all, not at all," said the painter with a very bitter
smile. "You are telling me news. Pray go on."

"There is no more. She made me promise to come to you and listen to
your advice before I took any step. I must not trust to her alone, she
said; but if I took this step, then through whatever happened she would
be my friend. Ah, dear friend, may I speak to you of the hope that
these words gave me? You have seen--have you not?--you must have seen
that"--

The priest faltered, and Ferris stared at him helpless. When the next
words came he could not find any strangeness in the fact which yet gave
him so great a shock. He found that to his nether consciousness it had
been long familiar--ever since that day when he had first jestingly
proposed Don Ippolito as Miss Vervain's teacher. Grotesque, tragic,
impossible--it had still been the under-current of all his reveries; or
so now it seemed to have been.

Don Ippolito anxiously drew nearer to him and laid an imploring touch
upon his arm,--"I love her!"

"What!" gasped the painter. "You? You I A priest?"

"Priest! priest!" cried Don Ippolito, violently. "From this day I am no
longer a priest! From this hour I am a man, and I can offer her the
honorable love of a man, the truth of a most sacred marriage, and
fidelity to death!"

Ferris made no answer. He began to look very coldly and haughtily at
Don Ippolito, whose heat died away under his stare, and who at last met
it with a glance of tremulous perplexity. His hand had dropped from
Ferris's arm, and he now moved some steps from him. "What is it, dear
friend?" he besought him. "Is there something that offends you? I came
to you for counsel, and you meet me with a repulse little short of
enmity. I do not understand. Do I intend anything wrong without knowing
it? Oh, I conjure you to speak plainly!"

"Wait! Wait a minute," said Ferris, waving his hand like a man
tormented by a passing pain. "I am trying to think. What you say is....
I cannot imagine it!"

"Not imagine it? Not imagine it? And why? Is she not beautiful?"

"Yes."

"And good?"

"Without doubt."

"And young, and yet wise beyond her years? And true, and yet
angelically kind?"

"It is all as you say, God knows. But.... a priest"--

"Oh! Always that accursed word! And at heart, what is a priest, then,
but a man?--a wretched, masked, imprisoned, banished man! Has he not
blood and nerves like you? Has he not eyes to see what is fair, and
ears to hear what is sweet? Can he live near so divine a flower and not
know her grace, not inhale the fragrance of her soul, not adore her
beauty? Oh, great God! And if at last he would tear off his stifling
mask, escape from his prison, return from his exile, would you gainsay
him?"

"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?"

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