A Foregone Conclusion
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W. D. Howells >> A Foregone Conclusion
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"You won't make a Don Ippolito of him," said Florida, after serious
consideration of his face to see whether he was quite in earnest, "if
you put all that into him. He has the simplest and openest look in the
world," she added warmly, "and there's neither pagan, nor martyr, nor
rebel in it."
Ferris laughed again. "Excuse me; I don't think you know. I can
convince you."...
Florida rose, and looking down the garden path said, "He's coming;" and
as Don Ippolito drew near, his face lighting up with a joyous and
innocent smile, she continued absently, "he's got on new stockings, and
a different coat and hat."
The stockings were indeed new and the hat was not the accustomed
_nicchio_, but a new silk cylinder with a very worldly, curling
brim. Don Ippolito's coat, also, was of a more mundane cut than the
talare; he wore a waistcoat and small-clothes, meeting the stockings at
the knee with a sprightly buckle. His person showed no traces of the
snuff with which it used to be so plentifully dusted; in fact, he no
longer took snuff in the presence of the ladies. The first week he had
noted an inexplicable uneasiness in them when he drew forth that blue
cotton handkerchief after the solace of a pinch shortly afterwards,
being alone with Florida, he saw her give a nervous start at its
appearance. He blushed violently, and put it back into the pocket from
which he had half drawn it, and whence it never emerged again in her
presence. The contessina his former pupil had not shown any aversion to
Don Ippolito's snuff or his blue handkerchief; but then the contessina
had never rebuked his finger-nails by the tints of rose and ivory with
which Miss Vervain's hands bewildered him. It was a little droll how
anxiously he studied the ways of these Americans, and conformed to them
as far as he knew. His English grew rapidly in their society, and it
happened sometimes that the only Italian in the day's lesson was what
he read with Florida, for she always yielded to her mother's wish to
talk, and Mrs. Vervain preferred the ease of her native tongue. He was
Americanizing in that good lady's hands as fast as she could transform
him, and he listened to her with trustful reverence, as to a woman of
striking though eccentric mind. Yet he seemed finally to refer every
point to Florida, as if with an intuition of steadier and stronger
character in her; and now, as he ascended the terrace steps in his
modified costume, he looked intently at her. She swept him from head to
foot with a glance, and then gravely welcomed him with unchanged
countenance.
At the same moment Mrs. Vervain came out through one of the long
windows, and adjusting her glasses, said with a start, "Why, my dear
Don Ippolito, I shouldn't have known you!"
"Indeed, madama?" asked the priest--with a painful smile. "Is it so
great a change? We can wear this dress as well as the other, if we
please."
"Why, of course it's very becoming and all that; but it does look so
out of character," Mrs. Vervain said, leading the way to the breakfast-
room. "It's like seeing a military man in a civil coat."
"It must be a great relief to lay aside the uniform now and then,
mother," said Florida, as they sat down. "I can remember that papa used
to be glad to get out of his."
"Perfectly wild," assented Mrs. Vervain. "But he never seemed the same
person. Soldiers and--clergymen--are so much more stylish in their own
dress--not stylish, exactly, but taking; don't you know?"
"There, Don Ippolito," interposed Ferris, "you had better put on your
talare and your nicchio again. Your _abbate's_ dress isn't
acceptable, you see."
The painter spoke in Italian, but Don Ippolito answered--with certain
blunders which it would be tedious to reproduce--in his patient,
conscientious English, half sadly, half playfully, and glancing at
Florida, before he turned to Mrs. Vervain, "You are as rigid as the
rest of the world, madama. I thought you would like this dress, but it
seems that you think it a masquerade. As madamigella says, it is a
relief to lay aside the uniform, now and then, for us who fight the
spiritual enemies as well as for the other soldiers. There was one
time, when I was younger and in the subdiaconate orders, that I put off
the priest's dress altogether, and wore citizen's clothes, not an
abbate's suit like this. We were in Padua, another young priest and I,
my nearest and only friend, and for a whole night we walked about the
streets in that dress, meeting the students, as they strolled singing
through the moonlight; we went to the theatre and to the caffe,--we
smoked cigars, all the time laughing and trembling to think of the
tonsure under our hats. But in the morning we had to put on the
stockings and the talare and the nicchio again."
Don Ippolito gave a melancholy laugh. He had thrust the corner of his
napkin into his collar; seeing that Ferris had not his so, he twitched
it out, and made a feint of its having been all the time in his lap.
Every one was silent as if something shocking had been said; Florida
looked with grave rebuke at Don Ippolito, whose story affected Ferris
like that of some girl's adventure in men's clothes. He was in terror
lest Mrs. Vervain should be going to say it was like that; she was
going to say something; he made haste to forestall her, and turn the
talk on other things.
The next day the priest came in his usual dress, and he did not again
try to escape from it.
VI.
One afternoon, as Don Ippolito was posing to Perris for his picture of
A Venetian Priest, the painter asked, to make talk, "Have you hit upon
that new explosive yet, which is to utilize your breech-loading cannon?
Or are you engaged upon something altogether new?"
"No," answered the other uneasily, "I have not touched the cannon since
that day you saw it at my house; and as for other things, I have not
been able to put my mind to them. I have made a few trifles which I
have ventured to offer the ladies."
Ferris had noticed the ingenious reading-desk which Don Ippolito had
presented to Florida, and the footstool, contrived with springs and
hinges so that it would fold up into the compass of an ordinary
portfolio, which Mrs. Vervain carried about with her.
An odd look, which the painter caught at and missed, came into the
priest's face, as he resumed: "I suppose it is the distraction of my
new occupation, and of the new acquaintances--so very strange to me in
every way--that I have made in your amiable country-women, which
hinders me from going about anything in earnest, now that their
munificence has enabled me to pursue my aims with greater advantages
than ever before. But this idle mood will pass, and in the mean time I
am very happy. They are real angels, and madama is a true original."
"Mrs. Vervain is rather peculiar," said the painter, retiring a few
paces from his picture, and quizzing it through his half-closed eyes.
"She is a woman who has had affliction enough to turn a stronger head
than hers could ever have been," he added kindly. "But she has the best
heart in the world. In fact," he burst forth, "she is the most
extraordinary combination of perfect fool and perfect lady I ever saw."
"Excuse me; I don't understand," blankly faltered Don Ippolito.
"No; and I'm afraid I couldn't explain to you," answered Ferris.
There was a silence for a time, broken at last by Don Ippolito, who
asked, "Why do you not marry madamigella?"
He seemed not to feel that there was anything out of the way in the
question, and Ferris was too well used to the childlike directness of
the most maneuvering of races to be surprised. Yet he was displeased,
as he would not have been if Don Ippolito were not a priest. He was not
of the type of priests whom the American knew from the prejudice and
distrust of the Italians; he was alienated from his clerical fellows by
all the objects of his life, and by a reciprocal dislike. About other
priests there were various scandals; but Don Ippolito was like that
pretty match-girl of the Piazza of whom it was Venetianly answered,
when one asked if so sweet a face were not innocent, "Oh yes, she is
mad!" He was of a purity so blameless that he was reputed crack-brained
by the caffe-gossip that in Venice turns its searching light upon
whomever you mention; and from his own association with the man Ferris
perceived in him an apparent single-heartedness such as no man can have
but the rarest of Italians. He was the albino of his species; a gray
crow, a white fly; he was really this, or he knew how to seem it with
an art far beyond any common deceit. It was the half expectation of
coming sometime upon the lurking duplicity in Don Ippolito, that
continually enfeebled the painter in his attempts to portray his
Venetian priest, and that gave its undecided, unsatisfactory character
to the picture before him--its weak hardness, its provoking
superficiality. He expressed the traits of melancholy and loss that he
imagined in him, yet he always was tempted to leave the picture with a
touch of something sinister in it, some airy and subtle shadow of
selfish design.
He stared hard at Don Ippolito while this perplexity filled his mind,
for the hundredth time; then he said stiffly, "I don't know. I don't
want to marry anybody. Besides," he added, relaxing into a smile of
helpless amusement, "it's possible that Miss Vervain might not want to
marry me."
"As to that," replied Don Ippolito, "you never can tell. All young
girls desire to be married, I suppose," he continued with a sigh. "She
is very beautiful, is she not? It is seldom that we see such a blonde
in Italy. Our blondes are dark; they have auburn hair and blue eyes,
but their complexions are thick. Miss Vervain is blonde as the morning
light; the sun's gold is in her hair, his noonday whiteness in her
dazzling throat; the flush of his coming is on her lips; she might
utter the dawn!"
"You're a poet, Don Ippolito," laughed the painter. "What property of
the sun is in her angry-looking eyes?"
"His fire! Ah, that is her greatest charm! Those strange eyes of hers,
they seem full of tragedies. She looks made to be the heroine of some
stormy romance; and yet how simply patient and good she is!"
"Yes," said Ferris, who often responded in English to the priest's
Italian; and he added half musingly in his own tongue, after a moment,
"but I don't think it would be safe to count upon her. I'm afraid she
has a bad temper. At any rate, I always expect to see smoke somewhere
when I look at those eyes of hers. She has wonderful self-control,
however; and I don't exactly understand why. Perhaps people of strong
impulses have strong wills to overrule them; it seems no more than
fair."
"Is it the custom," asked Don Ippolito, after a moment, "for the
American young ladies always to address their mammas as _mother_?"
"No; that seems to be a peculiarity of Miss Vervain's. It's a little
formality that I should say served to hold Mrs. Vervain in check."
"Do you mean that it repulses her?"
"Not at all. I don't think I could explain," said Ferris with a certain
air of regretting to have gone so far in comment on the Vervains. He
added recklessly, "Don't you see that Mrs. Vervain sometimes does and
says things that embarrass her daughter, and that Miss Vervain seems to
try to restrain her?"
"I thought," returned Don Ippolito meditatively, "that the signorina
was always very tenderly submissive to her mother."
"Yes, so she is," said the painter dryly, and looked in annoyance from
the priest to the picture, and from the picture to the priest.
After a minute Don Ippolito said, "They must be very rich to live as
they do."
"I don't know about that," replied Ferris. "Americans spend and save in
ways different from the Italians. I dare say the Vervains find Venice
very cheap after London and Paris and Berlin."
"Perhaps," said Don Ippolito, "if they were rich you would be in a
position to marry her."
"I should not marry Miss Vervain for her money," answered the painter,
sharply.
"No, but if you loved her, the money would enable you to marry her."
"Listen to me, Don Ippolito. I never said that I loved Miss Vervain,
and I don't know how you feel warranted in speaking to me about the
matter. Why do you do so?"
"I? Why? I could not but imagine that you must love her. Is there
anything wrong in speaking of such things? Is it contrary to the
American custom? I ask pardon from my heart if I have done anything
amiss."
"There is no offense,' said the painter, with a laugh," and I don't
wonder you thought I ought to be in love with Miss Vervain. She
_is_ beautiful, and I believe she's good. But if men had to marry
because women were beautiful and good, there isn't one of us could live
single a day. Besides, I'm the victim of another passion,--I'm laboring
under an unrequited affection for Art."
"Then you do _not_ love her?" asked Don Ippolito, eagerly.
"So far as I'm advised at present, no, I don't."
"It is strange!" said the priest, absently, but with a glowing face.
He quitted the painter's and walked swiftly homeward with a triumphant
buoyancy of step. A subtle content diffused itself over his face, and a
joyful light burnt in his deep eyes. He sat down before the piano and
organ as he had arranged them, and began to strike their keys in
unison; this seemed to him for the first time childish. Then he played
some lively bars on the piano alone; they sounded too light and
trivial, and he turned to the other instrument. As the plaint of the
reeds arose, it filled his sense like a solemn organ-music, and
transfigured the place; the notes swelled to the ample vault of a
church, and at the high altar he was celebrating the mass in his
sacerdotal robes. He suddenly caught his fingers away from the keys;
his breast heaved, he hid his face in his hands.
VII.
Ferris stood cleaning his palette, after Don Ippolito was gone,
scraping the colors together with his knife and neatly buttering them
on the palette's edge, while he wondered what the priest meant by
pumping him in that way. Nothing, he supposed, and yet it was odd. Of
course she had a bad temper....
He put on his hat and coat and strolled vaguely forth, and in an hour
or two came by a roundabout course to the gondola station nearest his
own house. There he stopped, and after an absent contemplation of the
boats, from which the gondoliers were clamoring for his custom, he
stepped into one and ordered the man to row him to a gate on a small
canal opposite. The gate opened, at his ringing, into the garden of the
Vervains.
Florida was sitting alone on a bench near the fountain. It was no
longer a ruined fountain; the broken-nosed naiad held a pipe above her
head, and from this rose a willowy spray high enough to catch some
colors of the sunset then striking into the garden, and fell again in a
mist around her, making her almost modest.
"What does this mean?" asked Ferris, carelessly taking the young girl's
hand. "I thought this lady's occupation was gone."
"Don Ippolito repaired the fountain for the landlord, and he agreed to
pay for filling the tank that feeds it," said Florida. "He seems to
think it a hard bargain, for he only lets it play about half an hour a
day. But he says it's very ingeniously mended. He didn't believe it
could be done. It _is_ pretty.
"It is, indeed," said the painter, with a singular desire, going
through him like a pang, likewise to do something for Miss Vervain.
"Did you go to Don Ippolito's house the other day, to see his traps?"
"Yes; we were very much interested. I was sorry that I knew so little
about inventions. Do you think there are many practical ideas amongst
his things? I hope there are--he seemed so proud and pleased to show
them. Shouldn't you think he had some real inventive talent?"
"Yes, I think he has; but I know as little about the matter as you do."
He sat down beside her, and picking up a twig from the gravel, pulled
the bark off in silence. Then, "Miss Vervain," he said, knitting his
brows, as he always did when he had something on his conscience and
meant to ease it at any cost, "I'm the dog that fetches a bone and
carries a bone; I talked Don Ippolito over with you, the other day, and
now I've been talking you over with him. But I've the grace to say that
I'm ashamed of myself."
"Why need you be ashamed?" asked Florida. "You said no harm of him. Did
you of us?"
"Not exactly; but I don't think it was quite my business to discuss you
at all. I think you can't let people alone too much. For my part, if I
try to characterize my friends, I fail to do them perfect justice, of
course; and yet the imperfect result remains representative of them in
my mind; it limits them and fixes them; and I can't get them back again
into the undefined and the ideal where they really belong. One ought
never to speak of the faults of one's friends: it mutilates them; they
can never be the same afterwards."
"So you have been talking of my faults," said Florida, breathing
quickly. "Perhaps you could tell me of them to my face."
"I should have to say that unfairness was one of them. But that is
common to the whole sex. I never said I was talking of your faults. I
declared against doing so, and you immediately infer that my motive is
remorse. I don't know that you have any faults. They may be virtues in
disguise. There is a charm even in unfairness. Well, I did Bay that I
thought you had a quick temper,"--
Florida colored violently.
--"but now I see that I was mistaken," said Ferris with a laugh.
"May I ask what else you said?" demanded the young girl haughtily.
"Oh, that would be a betrayal of confidence," said Ferris, unaffected
by her hauteur.
"Then why have you mentioned the matter to me at all?"
"I wanted to clear my conscience, I suppose, and sin again. I wanted to
talk with you about Don Ippolito."
Florida looked with perplexity at Ferris's face, while her own slowly
cooled and paled.
"What did you want to say of him?" she asked calmly.
"I hardly know how to put it: that he puzzles me, to begin with. You
know I feel somewhat responsible for him."
"Yes."
"Of course, I never should have thought of him, if it hadn't been for
your mother's talk that morning coming back from San Lazzaro."
"I know," said Florida, with a faint blush.
"And yet, don't you see, it was as much a fancy of mine, a weakness for
the man himself, as the desire to serve your mother, that prompted me
to bring him to you."
"Yes, I see," answered the young girl.
"I acted in the teeth of a bitter Venetian prejudice against priests.
All my friends here--they're mostly young men with the modern Italian
ideas, or old liberals--hate and despise the priests They believe that
priests are full of guile and deceit, that they are spies for the
Austrians, and altogether evil."
"Don Ippolito is welcome to report our most secret thoughts to the
police," said Florida, whose look of rising alarm relaxed into a smile.
"Oh," cried the painter, "how you leap to conclusions! I never
intimated that Don Ippolito was a spy. On the contrary, it was his
difference from other priests that made me think of him for a moment.
He seems to be as much cut off from the church as from the world. And
yet he is a priest, with a priest's education. What if I should have
been altogether mistaken? He is either one of the openest souls in the
world, as you have insisted, or he is one of the closest."
"I should not be afraid of him in any case," said Florida; "but I can't
believe any wrong of him."
Ferris frowned in annoyance. "I don't want you to; I don't, myself.
I've bungled the matter as I might have known I would. I was trying to
put into words an undefined uneasiness of mine, a quite formless desire
to have you possessed of the whole case as it had come up in my mind.
I've made a mess of it," said Ferris rising, with a rueful air.
"Besides, I ought to have spoken to Mrs. Vervain."
"Oh no," cried Florida, eagerly, springing to her feet beside him.
"Don't! Little things wear upon my mother, so. I'm glad you didn't
speak to her. I don't misunderstand you, I think; I expressed myself
badly," she added with an anxious face. "I thank you very much. What do
you want me to do?"
By Ferris's impulse they both began to move down the garden path toward
the water-gate. The sunset had faded out of the fountain, but it still
lit the whole heaven, in whose vast blue depths hung light whiffs of
pinkish cloud, as ethereal as the draperies that floated after Miss
Vervain as she walked with a splendid grace beside him, no awkwardness,
now, or self-constraint in her. As she turned to Ferris, and asked in
her deep tones, to which some latent feeling imparted a slight tremor,
"What do you want me to do?" the sense of her willingness to be bidden
by him gave him a delicious thrill. He looked at the superb creature,
so proud, so helpless; so much a woman, so much a child; and he caught
his breath before he answered. Her gauzes blew about his feet in the
light breeze that lifted the foliage; she was a little near-sighted,
and in her eagerness she drew closer to him, fixing her eyes full upon
his with a bold innocence. "Good heavens! Miss Vervain," he cried, with
a sudden blush, "it isn't a serious matter. I'm a fool to have spoken
to you. Don't do anything. Let things go on as before. It isn't for me
to instruct you."
"I should have been very glad of your advice," she said with a
disappointed, almost wounded manner, keeping her eyes upon him. "It
seems to me we are always going wrong"--
She stopped short, with a flush and then a pallor.
Ferris returned her look with one of comical dismay. This apparent
readiness of Miss Vervain's to be taken command of, daunted him, on
second thoughts. "I wish you'd dismiss all my stupid talk from your
mind," he said. "I feel as if I'd been guiltily trying to set you
against a man whom I like very much and have no reason not to trust,
and who thinks me so much his friend that he couldn't dream of my
making any sort of trouble for him. It would break his heart, I'm
afraid, if you treated him in a different way from that in which you've
treated him till now. It's really touching to listen to his gratitude
to you and your mother. It's only conceivable on the ground that he has
never had friends before in the world. He seems like another man, or
the same man come to life. And it isn't his fault that he's a priest. I
suppose," he added, with a sort of final throe, "that a Venetian family
wouldn't use him with the frank hospitality you've shown, not because
they distrusted him at all, perhaps, but because they would be afraid
of other Venetian tongues."
This ultimate drop of venom, helplessly distilled, did not seem to
rankle in Miss Vervain's mind. She walked now with her face turned from
his, and she answered coldly, "We shall not be troubled. We don't care
for Venetian tongues."
They were at the gate. "Good-by," said Ferris, abruptly, "I'm going."
"Won't you wait and see my mother?" asked Florida, with her awkward
self-constraint again upon her.
"No, thanks," said Ferris, gloomily. "I haven't time. I just dropped in
for a moment, to blast an innocent man's reputation, and destroy a
young lady's peace of mind."
"Then you needn't go, yet," answered Florida, coldly, "for you haven't
succeeded."
"Well, I've done my worst," returned Ferris, drawing the bolt.
He went away, hanging his head in amazement and disgust at himself for
his clumsiness and bad taste. It seemed to him a contemptible part,
first to embarrass them with Don Ippolito's acquaintance, if it was an
embarrassment, and then try to sneak out of his responsibility by these
tardy cautions; and if it was not going to be an embarrassment, it was
folly to have approached the matter at all.
What had he wanted to do, and with what motive? He hardly knew. As he
battled the ground over and over again, nothing comforted him save the
thought that, bad as it was to have spoken to Miss Vervain, it must
have been infinitely worse to speak to her mother.
VIII.
It was late before Ferris forgot his chagrin in sleep, and when he woke
the next morning, the sun was making the solid green blinds at his
window odorous of their native pine woods with its heat, and thrusting
a golden spear at the heart of Don Ippolito's effigy where he had left
it on the easel.
Marina brought a letter with his coffee. The letter was from Mrs.
Vervain, and it entreated him to come to lunch at twelve, and then join
them on an excursion, of which they had all often talked, up the Canal
of the Brenta. "Don Ippolito has got his permission--think of his not
being able to go to the mainland without the Patriarch's leave! and can
go with us to-day. So I try to make this hasty arrangement. You
_must_ come--it all depends upon you."
"Yes, so it seems," groaned the painter, and went.
In the garden he found Don Ippolito and Florida, at the fountain where
he had himself parted with her the evening before; and he observed with
a guilty relief that Don Ippolito was talking to her in the happy
unconsciousness habitual with him.
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