A Foregone Conclusion
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W. D. Howells >> A Foregone Conclusion
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"Delicious!" she said, in a deep voice, which conveyed something of
this anxiety in its guarded tones, and yet was not wanting in a kind of
frankness. "Did you mean them for me, Mr. Ferris?"
"I didn't, but I do," answered Mr. Ferris. "I bought them in ignorance,
but I understand now what they were meant for by nature;" and in fact
the hyacinths, with their smooth textures and their pure colors,
harmonized well with Miss Vervain, as she bent her face over them and
inhaled their full, rich perfume.
"I will put them in water," she said, "if you'll excuse me a moment.
Mother will be down directly."
Before she could return, her mother rustled into the parlor.
Mrs. Vervain was gracefully, fragilely unlike her daughter. She entered
with a gentle and gliding step, peering near-sightedly about through
her glasses, and laughing triumphantly when she had determined Mr.
Ferris's exact position, where he stood with a smile shaping his full
brown beard and glancing from his hazel eyes. She was dressed in
perfect taste with reference to her matronly years, and the lingering
evidences of her widowhood, and she had an unaffected naturalness of
manner which even at her age of forty-eight could not be called less
than charming. She spoke in a trusting, caressing tone, to which no man
at least could respond unkindly.
"So very good of you, to take all this trouble, Mr. Ferris," she said,
giving him a friendly hand, "and I suppose you are letting us encroach
upon very valuable time. I'm quite ashamed to take it. But isn't it a
heavenly day? What _I_ call a perfect day, just right every way;
none of those disagreeable extremes. It's so unpleasant to have it too
hot, for instance. I'm the greatest person for moderation, Mr. Ferris,
and I carry the principle into everything; but I do think the
breakfasts at these Italian hotels are too light altogether. I like our
American breakfasts, don't you? I've been telling Florida I can't stand
it; we really must make some arrangement. To be sure, you oughtn't to
think of such a thing as eating, in a place like Venice, all poetry;
but a sound mind in a sound body, _I_ say. We're perfectly wild
over it. Don't you think it's a place that grows upon you very much,
Mr. Ferris? All those associations,--it does seem too much; and the
gondolas everywhere. But I'm always afraid the gondoliers cheat us; and
in the stores I never feel safe a moment--not a moment. I do think the
Venetians are lacking in truthfulness, a little. I don't believe they
understand our American fairdealing and sincerity. I shouldn't want to
do them injustice, but I really think they take advantages in
bargaining. Now such a thing even as corals. Florida is extremely fond
of them, and we bought a set yesterday in the Piazza, and I _know_
we paid too much for them. Florida," said Mrs. Vervain, for her
daughter had reentered the room, and stood with some shawls and wraps
upon her arm, patiently waiting for the conclusion of the elder lady's
speech, "I wish you would bring down that set of corals. I'd like Mr.
Ferris to give an unbiased opinion. I'm sure we were cheated."
"I don't know anything about corals, Mrs. Vervain," interposed Mr.
Ferris.
"Well, but you ought to see this set for the beauty of the color;
they're really exquisite. I'm sure it will gratify your artistic
taste."
Miss Vervain hesitated with a look of desire to obey, and of doubt
whether to force the pleasure upon Mr. Ferris. "Won't it do another
time, mother?" she asked faintly; "the gondola is waiting for us."
Mrs. Vervain gave a frailish start from the chair, into which she had
sunk, "Oh, do let us be off at once, then," she said; and when they
stood on the landing-stairs of the hotel: "What gloomy things these
gondolas are!" she added, while the gondolier with one foot on the
gunwale of the boat received the ladies' shawls, and then crooked his
arm for them to rest a hand on in stepping aboard; "I wonder they don't
paint them some cheerful color."
"Blue, or pink, Mrs. Vervain?" asked Mr. Ferris. "I knew you were
coming to that question; they all do. But we needn't have the top on at
all, if it depresses your spirits. We shall be just warm enough in the
open sunlight."
"Well, have it off, then. It sends the cold chills over me to look at
it. What _did_ Byron call it?"
"Yes, it's time for. Byron, now. It was very good of you not to mention
him before, Mrs. Vervain. Bat I knew he had to come. He called it a
coffin clapped in a canoe."
"Exactly," said Mrs. Vervain. "I always feel as if I were going to my
own funeral when I get into it; and I've certainly had enough of
funerals never to want to have anything to do with another, as long as
I live."
She settled herself luxuriously upon the feather-stuffed leathern
cushions when the cabin was removed. Death had indeed been near her
very often; father and mother had been early lost to her, and the
brothers and sisters orphaned with her had faded and perished one after
another, as they ripened to men and women; she had seen four of her own
children die; her husband had been dead six years. All these
bereavements had left her what they had found her. She had truly
grieved, and, as she said, she had hardly ever been out of black since
she could remember.
"I never was in colors when I was a girl," she went on, indulging many
obituary memories as the gondola dipped and darted down the canal, "and
I was married in my mourning for my last sister. It did seem a little
too much when she went, Mr. Ferris. I was too young to feel it so much
about the others, but we were nearly of the same age, and that makes a
difference, don't you know. First a brother and then a sister: it was
very strange how they kept going that way. I seemed to break the charm
when I got married; though, to be sure, there was no brother left after
Marian."
Miss Vervain heard her mother's mortuary prattle with a face from which
no impatience of it could be inferred, and Mr. Ferris made no comment
on what was oddly various in character and manner, for Mrs. Vervain
touched upon the gloomiest facts of her history with a certain
impersonal statistical interest. They were rowing across the lagoon to
the Island of San Lazzaro, where for reasons of her own she intended to
venerate the convent in which Byron studied the Armenian language
preparatory to writing his great poem in it; if her pilgrimage had no
very earnest motive, it was worthy of the fact which it was designed to
honor. The lagoon was of a perfect, shining smoothness, broken by the
shallows over which the ebbing tide had left the sea-weed trailed like
long, disheveled hair. The fishermen, as they waded about staking their
nets, or stooped to gather the small shell-fish of the shallows, showed
legs as brown and tough as those of the apostles in Titian's
Assumption. Here and there was a boat, with a boy or an old man asleep
in the bottom of it. The gulls sailed high, white flakes against the
illimitable blue of the heavens; the air, though it was of early
spring, and in the shade had a salty pungency, was here almost
languorously warm; in the motionless splendors and rich colors of the
scene there was a melancholy before which Mrs. Vervain fell fitfully
silent. Now and then Ferris briefly spoke, calling Miss Vervain's
notice to this or that, and she briefly responded. As they passed the
mad-house of San Servolo, a maniac standing at an open window took his
black velvet skull-cap from his white hair, bowed low three times, and
kissed his hand to the ladies. The Lido in front of them stretched a
brown strip of sand with white villages shining out of it; on their
left the Public Gardens showed a mass of hovering green; far beyond and
above, the ghostlike snows of the Alpine heights haunted the misty
horizon.
It was chill in the shadow of the convent when they landed at San
Lazzaro, and it was cool in the parlor where they waited for the monk
who was to show them through the place; but it was still and warm in
the gardened court, where the bees murmured among the crocuses and
hyacinths under the noonday sun. Miss Vervain stood looking out of the
window upon the lagoon, while her mother drifted about the room,
peering at the objects on the wall through her eyeglasses. She was
praising a Chinese painting of fish on rice-paper, when a young monk
entered with a cordial greeting in English for Mr. Ferris. She turned
and saw them shaking hands, but at the same moment her eyeglasses
abandoned her nose with a vigorous leap; she gave an amiable laugh, and
groping for them over her dress, bowed at random as Mr. Ferris
presented Padre Girolamo.
"I've been admiring this painting so much, Padre Girolamo," she said,
with instant good-will, and taking the monk into the easy familiarity
of her friendship by the tone with which she spoke his name. "Some of
the brothers did it, I suppose."
"Oh no," said the monk, "it's a Chinese painting. We hung it up there
because it was given to us, and was curious."
"Well, now, do you know," returned Mrs. Vervain, "I _thought_ it
was Chinese! Their things _are_, so odd. But really, in an
Armenian convent it's very misleading. I don't think you ought to leave
it there; it certainly does throw people off the track," she added,
subduing the expression to something very lady-like, by the winning
appeal with which she used it.
"Oh, but if they put up Armenian paintings in Chinese convents?" said
Mr. Ferris.
"You're joking!" cried Mrs. Vervain, looking at him with a graciously
amused air. "There _are_ no Chinese convents. To be sure those
rebels are a kind of Christians," she added thoughtfully, "but there
can't be many of them left, poor things, hundreds of them executed at a
time, that way. It's perfectly sickening to read of it; and you can't
help it, you know. But they say they haven't really so much feeling as
we have--not so nervous."
She walked by the side of the young friar as he led the way to such
parts of the convent as are open to visitors, and Mr. Ferris came after
with her daughter, who, he fancied, met his attempts at talk with
sudden and more than usual hauteur. "What a fool!" he said to himself.
"Is she afraid I shall be wanting to make love to her?" and he followed
in rather a sulky silence the course of Mrs. Vervain and her guide. The
library, the chapel, and the museum called out her friendliest praises,
and in the last she praised the mummy on show there at the expense of
one she had seen in New York; but when Padre Girolamo pointed out the
desk in the refectory from which one of the brothers read while the
rest were eating, she took him to task. "Oh, but I can't think that's
at all good for the digestion, you know,--using the brain that way
whilst you're at table. I really hope you don't listen too attentively;
it would be better for you in the long run, even in a religious point
of view. But now--Byron! You _must_ show me his cell!" The monk
deprecated the non-existence of such a cell, and glanced in perplexity
at Mr. Ferris, who came to his relief. "You couldn't have seen his
cell, if he'd had one, Mrs. Vervain. They don't admit ladies to the
cloister."
"What nonsense!" answered Mrs. Vervain, apparently regarding this as
another of Mr. Ferris's pleasantries; but Padre Girolamo silently
confirmed his statement, and she briskly assailed the rule as a
disrespect to the sex, which reflected even upon the Virgin, the
object, as he was forced to allow, of their high veneration. He smiled
patiently, and confessed that Mrs. Vervain had all the reasons on her
side. At the polyglot printing-office, where she handsomely bought
every kind of Armenian book and pamphlet, and thus repaid in the only
way possible the trouble their visit had given, he did not offer to
take leave of them, but after speaking with Ferris, of whom he seemed
an old friend, he led them through the garden environing the convent,
to a little pavilion perched on the wall that defends the island from
the tides of the lagoon. A lay-brother presently followed them, bearing
a tray with coffee, toasted rusk, and a jar of that conserve of rose-
leaves which is the convent's delicate hospitality to favored guests.
Mrs. Vervain cried out over the poetic confection when Padre Girolamo
told her what it was, and her daughter suffered herself to express a
guarded pleasure. The amiable matron brushed the crumbs of the
_baicolo_ from her lap when the lunch was ended, and fitting on
her glasses leaned forward for a better look at the monk's black-
bearded face. "I'm perfectly delighted," she said. "You must be very
happy here. I suppose you are."
"Yes," answered the monk rapturously; "so happy that I should be
content never to leave San Lazzaro. I came here when I was very young,
and the greater part of my life has been passed on this little island.
It is my home--my country."
"Do you never go away?"
"Oh yes; sometimes to Constantinople, sometimes to London and Paris."
"And you've never been to America yet? Well now, I'll tell you; you
ought to go. You would like it, I know, and our people would give you a
very cordial reception."
"Reception?" The monk appealed once more to Ferris with a look.
Ferris broke into a laugh. "I don't believe Padre Girolamo would come
in quality of distinguished foreigner, Mrs. Vervain, and I don't think
he'd know what to do with one of our cordial receptions."
"Well, he ought to go to America, any way. He can't really know
anything about us till he's been there. Just think how ignorant the
English are of our country! You _will_ come, won't you? I should
be delighted to welcome you at my house in Providence. Rhode Island is
a small State, but there's a great deal of wealth there, and very good
society in Providence. It's quite New-Yorky, you know," said Mrs.
Vervain expressively. She rose as she spoke, and led the way back to
the gondola. She told Padre Girolamo that they were to be some weeks in
Venice, and made him promise to breakfast with them at their hotel. She
smiled and nodded to him after the boat had pushed off, and kept him
bowing on the landing-stairs.
"What a lovely place, and what a perfectly heavenly morning you
_have_ given us, Mr. Ferris I We never can thank you enough for
it. And now, do you know what I'm thinking of? Perhaps you can help me.
It was Byron's studying there put me in mind of it. How soon do the
mosquitoes come?"
"About the end of June," responded Ferris mechanically, staring with
helpless mystification at Mrs. Vervain.
"Very well; then there's no reason why we shouldn't stay in Venice till
that time. We are both very fond of the place, and we'd quite
concluded, this morning, to stop here till the mosquitoes came. You
know, Mr. Ferris, my daughter had to leave school much earlier than she
ought, for my health has obliged me to travel a great deal since I lost
my husband; and I must have her with me, for we're all that there is of
us; we haven't a chick or a child that's related to us anywhere. But
wherever we stop, even for a few weeks, I contrive to get her some kind
of instruction. I feel the need of it so much in my own case; for to
tell you the truth, Mr. Ferris, I married too young. I suppose I should
do the same thing over again if it was to be done over; but don't you
see, my mind wasn't properly formed; and then following my husband
about from pillar to post, and my first baby born when I was nineteen--
well, it wasn't education, at any rate, whatever else it was; and I've
determined that Florida, though we are such a pair of wanderers, shall
not have my regrets. I got teachers for her in England,--the English
are not anything like so disagreeable at home as they are in
traveling, and we stayed there two years,--and I did in France, and I
did in Germany. And now, Italian. Here we are in Italy, and I think we
ought to improve the time. Florida knows a good deal of Italian
already, for her music teacher in France was an Italian, and he taught
her the language as well as music. What she wants now, I should say, is
to perfect her accent and get facility. I think she ought to have some
one come every day and read and converse an hour or two with her."
Mrs. Vervain leaned back in her seat, and looked at Ferris, who said,
feeling that the matter was referred to him, "I think--without
presuming to say what Miss Vervain's need of instruction is--that your
idea is a very good one." He mused in silence his wonder that so much
addlepatedness as was at once observable in Mrs. Vervain should exist
along with so much common-sense. "It's certainly very good in the
abstract," he added, with a glance at the daughter, as if the sense
must be hers. She did not meet his glance at once, but with an
impatient recognition of the heat that was now great for the warmth
with which she was dressed, she pushed her sleeve from her wrist,
showing its delicious whiteness, and letting her fingers trail through
the cool water; she dried them on her handkerchief, and then bent her
eyes full upon him as if challenging him to think this unlady-like.
"No, clearly the sense does not come from her," said Ferris to himself;
it is impossible to think well of the mind of a girl who treats one
with tacit contempt.
"Yes," resumed Mrs. Vervain, "it's certainly very good in the abstract.
But oh dear me! you've no idea of the difficulties in the way. I may
speak frankly with you, Mr. Ferris, for you are here as the
representative of the country, and you naturally sympathize with the
difficulties of Americans abroad; the teachers will fall in love with
their pupils."
"Mother!" began Miss Vervain; and then she checked herself.
Ferris gave a vengeful laugh. "Really, Mrs. Vervain, though I
sympathize with you in my official capacity, I must own that as a man
and a brother, I can't help feeling a little sorry for those poor
fellows, too."
"To be sure, they are to be pitied, of course, and _I_ feel for
them; I did when I was a girl; for the same thing used to happen then.
I don't know why Florida should be subjected to such embarrassments,
too. It does seem sometimes as if it were something in the blood. They
all get the idea that you have money, you know."
"Then I should say that it might be something in the pocket," suggested
Ferris with a look at Miss Vervain, in whose silent suffering, as he
imagined it, he found a malicious consolation for her scorn.
"Well, whatever it is," replied Mrs. Vervain, "it's too vexatious. Of
course, going to new places, that way, as we're always doing, and only
going to stay for a limited time, perhaps, you can't pick and choose.
And even when you _do_ get an elderly teacher, they're as bad as
any. It really is too trying. Now, when I was talking with that nice
monk of yours at the convent, there, I couldn't help thinking how
perfectly delightful it would be if Florida could have _him_ for a
teacher. Why couldn't she? He told me that he would come to take
breakfast or lunch with us, but not dinner, for he always had to be at
the convent before nightfall. Well, he might come to give the lessons
sometime in the middle of the day."
"You couldn't manage it, Mrs. Vervain, I know you couldn't," answered
Ferris earnestly. "I'm sure the Armenians never do anything of the
kind. They're all very busy men, engaged in ecclesiastical or literary
work, and they couldn't give the time."
"Why not? There was Byron."
"But Byron went to them, and he studied Armenian, not Italian, with
them. Padre Girolamo speaks perfect Italian, for all that I can see;
but I doubt if he'd undertake to impart the native accent, which is
what you want. In fact, the scheme is altogether impracticable."
"Well," said Mrs. Vervain; "I'm exceedingly sorry. I had quite set my
heart on it. I never took such a fancy to any one in such a short time
before."
"It seemed to be a case of love at first sight on both sides," said
Ferris. "Padre Girolamo doesn't shower those syruped rose-leaves
indiscriminately upon visitors."
"Thanks," returned Mrs. Vervain; "it's very good of you to say so, Mr.
Ferris, and it's very gratifying, all round; but don't you see, it
doesn't serve the present purpose. What teachers do you know of?"
She had been by marriage so long in the service of the United States
that she still regarded its agents as part of her own domestic economy.
Consuls she everywhere employed as functionaries specially appointed to
look after the interests of American ladies traveling without
protection. In the week which had passed since her arrival in Venice,
there had been no day on which she did not appeal to Ferris for help or
sympathy or advice. She took amiable possession of him at once, and she
had established an amusing sort of intimacy with him, to which the
haughty trepidations of her daughter set certain bounds, but in which
the demand that he should find her a suitable Italian teacher seemed
trivially matter of course.
"Yes. I know several teachers," he said, after thinking awhile; "but
they're all open to the objection of being human; and besides, they all
do things in a set kind of way, and I'm afraid they wouldn't enter into
the spirit of any scheme of instruction that departed very widely from
Ollendorff." He paused, and Mrs. Vervain gave a sketch of the different
professional masters whom she had employed in the various countries of
her sojourn, and a disquisition upon their several lives and
characters, fortifying her statements by reference of doubtful points
to her daughter. This occupied some time, and Ferris listened to it all
with an abstracted air. At last he said, with a smile, "There was an
Italian priest came to see me this morning, who astonished me by
knowing English--with a brogue that he'd learned from an English priest
straight from Dublin; perhaps _he_ might do, Mrs. Vervain? He's
professionally pledged, you know, not to give the kind of annoyance
you've suffered from in teachers. He would do as well as Padre
Girolamo, I suppose."
"Do you really? Are you in earnest?"
"Well, no, I believe I'm not. I haven't the least idea he would do. He
belongs to the church militant. He came to me with the model of a
breech-loading cannon he's invented, and he wanted a passport to go to
America, so that he might offer his cannon to our government."
"How curious!" said Mrs. Vervain, and her daughter looked frankly into
Ferris's face. "But I know; it's one of your jokes."
"You overpraise me, Mrs. Vervain. If I could make such jokes as that
priest was, I should set up for a humorist at once. He had the touch of
pathos that they say all true pieces of humor ought to have," he went
on instinctively addressing himself to Miss Vervain, who did not
repulse him. "He made me melancholy; and his face haunts me. I should
like to paint him. Priests are generally such a snuffy, common lot. And
I dare say," he concluded, "he's sufficiently commonplace, too, though
he didn't look it. Spare your romance, Miss Vervain."
The young lady blushed resentfully. "I see as little romance as joke in
it," she said.
"It was a cannon," returned Ferris, without taking any notice of her,
and with a sort of absent laugh, "that would make it very lively for
the Southerners--if they had it. Poor fellow! I suppose he came with
high hopes of me, and expected me to receive his invention with
eloquent praises. I've no doubt he figured himself furnished not only
with a passport, but with a letter from me to President Lincoln, and
foresaw his own triumphal entry into Washington, and his honorable
interviews with the admiring generals of the Union forces, to whom he
should display his wonderful cannon. Too bad; isn't it?"
"And why didn't you give him the passport and the letter?" asked Mrs.
Vervain.
"Oh, that's a state secret," returned Ferris.
"And you think he won't do for our purpose?"
"I don't indeed."
"Well, I'm not so sure of it. Tell me something more about him."
"I don't know anything more about him. Besides, there isn't time."
The gondola had already entered the canal, and was swiftly approaching
the hotel.
"Oh yes, there is," pleaded Mrs. Vervain, laying her hand on his arm.
"I want you to come in and dine with us. We dine early."
"Thank you, I can't. Affairs of the nation, you know. Rebel privateer
on the canal of the Brenta."
"Really?" Mrs. Vervain leaned towards Ferris for sharper scrutiny of
his face. Her glasses sprang from her nose, and precipitated themselves
into his bosom.
"Allow me," he said, with burlesque politeness, withdrawing them from
the recesses of his waistcoat and gravely presenting them. Miss Vervain
burst into a helpless laugh; then she turned toward her mother with a
kind of indignant tenderness, and gently arranged her shawl so that it
should not drop off when she rose to leave the gondola. She did not
look again at Ferris, who resisted Mrs. Vervain's entreaties to remain,
and took leave as soon as the gondola landed.
The ladies went to their room, where Florida lifted from the table a
vase of divers-colored hyacinths, and stepping out upon the balcony
flung the flowers into the canal. As she put down the empty vase, the
lingering perfume of the banished flowers haunted the air of the room.
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