A Foregone Conclusion

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Florida cast at the painter a swift glance of latent appeal and
intelligence, which he refused, and in the same instant she met him
with another look, as if she now saw him for the first time, and gave
him her hand in greeting. It was a beautiful hand; he could not help
worshipping its lovely forms, and the lily whiteness and softness of
the back, the rose of the palm and finger-tips.

She idly resumed the great Venetian fan which hung from her waist by a
chain. "Don Ippolito has been talking about the vitteggiatura on the
Brenta in the old days," she explained.

"Oh, yes," said the painter, "they used to have merry times in the
villas then, and it was worth while being a priest, or at least an
abbate di casa. I should think you would sigh for a return of those
good old days, Don Ippolito. Just imagine, if you were abbate di casa
with some patrician family about the close of the last century, you
might be the instructor, companion, and spiritual adviser of
Illustrissima at the theatres, card-parties, and masquerades, all
winter; and at this season, instead of going up the Brenta for a day's
pleasure with us barbarous Yankees, you might be setting out with
Illustrissima and all the 'Strissimi and 'Strissime, big and little,
for a spring villeggiatura there. You would be going in a gilded barge,
with songs and fiddles and dancing, instead of a common gondola, and
you would stay a month, walking, going to parties and caffes, drinking
chocolate and lemonade gaming, sonneteering, and butterflying about
generally."

"It was doubtless a beautiful life," answered the priest, with simple
indifference. "But I never have thought of it with regret, because I
have been preoccupied with other ideas than those of social pleasures,
though perhaps they were no wiser."

Florida had watched Don Ippolito's face while Ferris was speaking, and
she now asked gravely, "But don't you think their life nowadays is more
becoming to the clergy?"

"Why, madamigella? What harm was there in those gayeties? I suppose the
bad features of the old life are exaggerated to us."

"They couldn't have been worse than the amusements of the hard-
drinking, hard-riding, hard-swearing, fox-hunting English parsons about
the same time," said Ferris. "Besides, the abbate di casa had a charm of
his own, the charm of all _rococo_ things, which, whatever you may
say of them, are somehow elegant and refined, or at least refer to
elegance and refinement. I don't say they're ennobling, but they're
fascinating. I don't respect them, but I love them. When I think about
the past of Venice, I don't care so much to see any of the heroically
historical things; but I should like immensely to have looked in at the
Ridotto, when the place was at its gayest with wigs and masks, hoops
and small-clothes, fans and rapiers, bows and courtesies, whispers and
glances. I dare say I should have found Don Ippolito there in some
becoming disguise."

Florida looked from the painter to the priest and back to the painter,
as Ferris spoke, and then she turned a little anxiously toward the
terrace, and a shadow slipped from her face as her mother came rustling
down the steps, catching at her drapery and shaking it into place. The
young girl hurried to meet her, lifted her arms for what promised an
embrace, and with firm hands set the elder lady's bonnet straight with
her forehead.

"I'm always getting it on askew," Mrs. Vervain said for greeting to
Ferris. "How do you do, Don Ippolito? But I suppose you think I've kept
you long enough to get it on straight for once. So I have. I _am_
a fuss, and I don't deny it. At my time of life, it's much harder to
make yourself shipshape than it is when you're younger. I tell Florida
that anybody would take _her_ for the _old_ lady, she does seem
to give so little care to getting up an appearance."

"And yet she has the effect of a stylish young person in the bloom of
youth," observed Ferris, with a touch of caricature.

"We had better lunch with our things on," said Mrs. Vervain, "and then
there needn't be any delay in starting. I thought we would have it
here," she added, as Nina and the house-servant appeared with trays of
dishes and cups. "So that we can start in a real picnicky spirit. I
knew you'd think it a womanish lunch, Mr. Ferris--Don Ippolito likes
what we do--and so I've provided you with a chicken salad; and I'm
going to ask you for a taste of it; I'm really hungry."

There was salad for all, in fact; and it was quite one o'clock before
the lunch was ended, and wraps of just the right thickness and thinness
were chosen, and the party were comfortably placed under the striped
linen canopy of the gondola, which they had from a public station, the
house-gondola being engaged that day. They rowed through the narrow
canal skirting the garden out into the expanse before the Giudecca, and
then struck across the lagoon towards Fusina, past the island-church of
San Giorgio in Alga, whose beautiful tower has flushed and darkened in
so many pictures of Venetian sunsets, and past the Austrian lagoon
forts with their coronets of guns threatening every point, and the
Croatian sentinels pacing to and fro on their walls. They stopped long
enough at one of the customs barges to declare to the swarthy, amiable
officers the innocence of their freight, and at the mouth of the Canal
of the Brenta they paused before the station while a policeman came out
and scanned them. He bowed to Don Ippolito's cloth, and then they began
to push up the sluggish canal, shallow and overrun with weeds and
mosses, into the heart of the land.

The spring, which in Venice comes in the softening air and the
perpetual azure of the heavens, was renewed to their senses in all its
miraculous loveliness. The garden of the Vervains had indeed confessed
it in opulence of leaf and bloom, but there it seemed somehow only like
a novel effect of the artifice which had been able to create a garden
in that city of stone and sea. Here a vernal world suddenly opened
before them, with wide-stretching fields of green under a dome of
perfect blue; against its walls only the soft curves of far-off hills
were traced, and near at hand the tender forms of full-foliaged trees.
The long garland of vines that festoons all Italy seemed to begin in
the neighboring orchards; the meadows waved their tall grasses in the
sun, and broke in poppies as the sea-waves break in iridescent spray;
the well-grown maize shook its gleaming blades in the light; the
poplars marched in stately procession on either side of the straight,
white road to Padua, till they vanished in the long perspective. The
blossoms had fallen from the trees many weeks before, but the air was
full of the vague sweetness of the perfect spring, which here and there
gathered and defined itself as the spicy odor of the grass cut on the
shore of the canal, and drying in the mellow heat of the sun.

The voyagers spoke from time to time of some peculiarity of the villas
that succeeded each other along the canal. Don Ippolito knew a few of
them, the gondoliers knew others; but after all, their names were
nothing. These haunts of old-time splendor and idleness weary of
themselves, and unable to escape, are sadder than anything in Venice,
and they belonged, as far as the Americans were concerned, to a world
as strange as any to which they should go in another life,--the world
of a faded fashion and an alien history. Some of the villas were kept
in a sort of repair; some were even maintained in the state of old; but
the most showed marks of greater or less decay, and here and there one
was falling to ruin. They had gardens about them, tangled and wild-
grown; a population of decrepit statues in the rococo taste strolled in
their walks or simpered from their gates. Two or three houses seemed to
be occupied; the rest stood empty, each

"Close latticed to the brooding heat,
And silent in its dusty vines."

The pleasure-party had no fixed plan for the day further than to ascend
the canal, and by and by take a carriage at some convenient village and
drive to the famous Villa Pisani at Stra.

"These houses are very well," said Don Ippolito, who had visited the
villa once, and with whom it had remained a memory almost as signal as
that night in Padua when he wore civil dress, "but it is at Stra you
see something really worthy of the royal splendor of the patricians of
Venice. Royal? The villa is now one of the palaces of the ex-Emperor of
Austria, who does not find it less imperial than his other palaces."
Don Ippolito had celebrated the villa at Stra in this strain ever since
they had spoken of going up the Brenta: now it was the magnificent
conservatories and orangeries that he sang, now the vast garden with
its statued walks between rows of clipt cedars and firs, now the
stables with their stalls for numberless horses, now the palace itself
with its frescoed halls and treasures of art and vertu. His enthusiasm
for the villa at Stra had become an amiable jest with the Americans.
Ferris laughed at his fresh outburst he declared himself tired of the
gondola, and he asked Florida to disembark with him and walk under the
trees of a pleasant street running on one side between the villas and
the canal. "We are going to find something much grander than the
Villa Pisani," he boasted, with a look at Don Ippolito.

As they sauntered along the path together, they came now and then to a
stately palace like that of the Contarini, where the lions, that give
their name to one branch of the family, crouch in stone before the
grand portal; but most of the houses were interesting only from their
unstoried possibilities to the imagination. They were generally of
stucco, and glared with fresh whitewash through the foliage of their
gardens. When a peasant's cottage broke their line, it gave, with its
barns and straw-stacks and its beds of pot-herbs, a homely relief from
the decaying gentility of the villas.

"What a pity, Miss Vervain," said the painter, "that the blessings of
this world should be so unequally divided! Why should all this
sketchable adversity be lavished upon the neighborhood of a city that
is so rich as Venice in picturesque dilapidation? It's pretty hard on
us Americans, and forces people of sensibility into exile. What
wouldn't cultivated persons give for a stretch of this street in the
suburbs of Boston, or of your own Providence? I suppose the New Yorkers
will be setting up something of the kind one of these days, and giving
it a French name--they'll call it _Aux bords du Brenta_. There was
one of them carried back a gondola the other day to put on a pond in
their new park. But the worst of it is, you can't take home the
sentiment of these things."

"I thought it was the business of painters to send home the sentiment
of them in pictures," said Florida.

Ferris talked to her in this way because it was his way of talking; it
always surprised him a little that she entered into the spirit of it;
he was not quite sure that she did; he sometimes thought she waited
till she could seize upon a point to turn against him, and so give
herself the air of having comprehended the whole. He laughed: "Oh yes,
a poor little fragmentary, faded-out reproduction of their sentiment--
which is 'as moonlight unto sunlight and as water unto wine,' when
compared with the real thing. Suppose I made a picture of this very
bit, ourselves in the foreground, looking at the garden over there
where that amusing Vandal of an owner has just had his statues painted
white: would our friends at home understand it? A whole history must be
left unexpressed. I could only hint at an entire situation. Of course,
people with a taste for olives would get the flavor; but even they
would wonder that I chose such an unsuggestive bit. Why, it is just the
most maddeningly suggestive thing to be found here! And if I may put it
modestly, for my share in it, I think we two young Americans looking on
at this supreme excess of the rococo, are the very essence of the
sentiment of the scene; but what would the honored connoisseurs--the
good folks who get themselves up on Ruskin and try so honestly hard to
have some little ideas about art--make of us? To be sure they might
justifiably praise the grace of your pose, if I were so lucky as to
catch it, and your way of putting your hand under the elbow of the arm
that holds your parasol,"--Florida seemed disdainfully to keep her
attitude, and the painter smiled,--"but they wouldn't know what it all
meant, and couldn't imagine that we were inspired by this rascally
little villa to sigh longingly over the wicked past."

"Excuse me," interrupted Florida, with a touch of trouble in her proud
manner, "I'm not sighing over it, for one, and I don't want it back.
I'm glad that I'm American and that there is no past for me. I can't
understand how you and Don Ippolito can speak so tolerantly of what no
one can respect," she added, in almost an aggrieved tone.

If Miss Vervain wanted to turn the talk upon Don Ippolito, Ferris by no
means did; he had had enough of that subject yesterday; he got as
lightly away from it as he could.

"Oh, Don Ippolito's a pagan, I tell you; and I'm a painter, and the
rococo is my weakness. I wish I could paint it, but I can't; I'm a
hundred years too late. I couldn't even paint myself in the act of
sentimentalizing it."

While he talked, he had been making a few lines in a small pocket
sketch-book, with a furtive glance or two at Florida. When they
returned to the boat, he busied himself again with the book, and
presently he handed it to Mrs. Vervain.

"Why, it's Florida!" cried the lady. "How very nicely you do sketch,
Mr. Ferris."

"Thanks, Mrs. Vervain; you're always flattering me."

"No, but seriously. I _wish_ that I had paid more attention to my
drawing when I was a girl. And now, Florida--she won't touch a pencil.
I wish you'd talk to her, Mr. Ferris."

"Oh, people who are pictures needn't trouble themselves to be
painters," said Ferris, with a little burlesque.

Mrs. Vervain began to look at the sketch through her tubed hand; the
painter made a grimace. "But you've made her too proud, Mr. Ferris. She
doesn't look like that."

"Yes she does--to those unworthy of her kindness. I have taken Miss
Vervain in the act of scorning the rococo, and its humble admirer, me,
with it."

"I'm sure _I_ don't know what you mean, Mr. Ferris; but I can't
think that this proud look is habitual with Florida; and I've heard
people say--very good judges--that an artist oughtn't to perpetuate a
temporary expression. Something like that."

"It can't be helped now, Mrs. Vervain: the sketch is irretrievably
immortal. I'm sorry, but it's too late."

"Oh, stuff! As if you couldn't turn up the corners of the mouth a
little. Or something."

"And give her the appearance of laughing at me? Never!"

"Don Ippolito," said Mrs. Vervain, turning to the priest, who had been
listening intently to all this trivial talk, "what do you think of this
sketch?"

He took the book with an eager hand, and perused the sketch as if
trying to read some secret there. After a minute he handed it back with
a light sigh, apparently of relief, but said nothing.

"Well?" asked Mrs. Vervain.

"Oh! I ask pardon. No, it isn't my idea of madamigella. It seems to me
that her likeness must be sketched in color. Those lines are true, but
they need color to subdue them; they go too far, they are more than
true."

"You're quite right, Don Ippolito," said Ferris.

"Then _you_ don't think she always has this proud look?" pursued
Mrs. Vervain. The painter fancied that Florida quelled in herself a
movement of impatience; he looked at her with an amused smile.

"Not always, no," answered Don Ippolito.

"Sometimes her face expresses the greatest meekness in the world."

"But not at the present moment," thought Ferris, fascinated by the
stare of angry pride which the girl bent upon the unconscious priest.

"Though I confess that I should hardly know how to characterize her
habitual expression," added Don Ippolito.

"Thanks," said Florida, peremptorily. "I'm tired of the subject; it
isn't an important one."

"Oh yes it is, my dear," said Mrs. Vervain. "At least it's important to
me, if it isn't to you; for I'm your mother, and really, if I thought
you looked like this, as a general thing, to a casual observer, I
should consider it a reflection upon myself." Ferris gave a provoking
laugh, as she continued sweetly, "I must insist, Don Ippolito: now did
you ever see Florida look so?"

The girl leaned back, and began to wave her fan slowly to and fro
before her face.

"I never saw her look so with you, dear madama," said the priest with
an anxious glance at Florida, who let her fan fall folded into her lap,
and sat still. He went on with priestly smoothness, and a touch of
something like invoked authority, such as a man might show who could
dispense indulgences and inflict penances. "No one could help seeing
her devotedness to you, and I have admired from the first an obedience
and tenderness that I have never known equaled. In all her relations to
you, madamigella has seemed to me"--

Florida started forward. "You are not asked to comment on my behavior
to my mother; you are not invited to speak of my conduct at all!" she
burst out with sudden violence, her visage flaming, and her blue eyes
burning upon Don Ippolito, who shrank from the astonishing rudeness as
from a blow in the face. "What is it to you how I treat my mother?"

She sank back again upon the cushions, and opening the fan with a clash
swept it swiftly before her.

"Florida!" said her mother gravely.

Ferris turned away in cold disgust, like one who has witnessed a
cruelty done to some helpless thing. Don Ippolito's speech was not
fortunate at the best, but it might have come from a foreigner's
misapprehension, and at the worst it was good-natured and well-meant.
"The girl is a perfect brute, as I thought in the beginning," the
painter said to himself. "How could I have ever thought differently? I
shall have to tell Don Ippolito that I'm ashamed of her, and disclaim
all responsibility. Pah! I wish I was out of this."

The pleasure of the day was dead. It could not rally from that stroke.
They went on to Stra, as they had planned, but the glory of the Villa
Pisani was eclipsed for Don Ippolito. He plainly did not know what to
do. He did not address Florida again, whose savagery he would not
probably have known how to resent if he had wished to resent it. Mrs.
Vervain prattled away to him with unrelenting kindness; Ferris kept
near him, and with affectionate zeal tried to make him talk of the
villa, but neither the frescoes, nor the orangeries, nor the green-
houses, nor the stables, nor the gardens could rouse him from the
listless daze in which he moved, though Ferris found them all as
wonderful as he had said. Amidst this heavy embarrassment no one seemed
at ease but the author of it. She did not, to be sure, speak to Don
Ippolito, but she followed her mother as usual with her assiduous
cares, and she appeared tranquilly unconscious of the sarcastic
civility with which Ferris rendered her any service. It was late in the
afternoon when they got back to their boat and began to descend the
canal towards Venice, and long before they reached Fusina the day had
passed. A sunset of melancholy red, streaked with level lines of murky
cloud, stretched across the flats behind them, and faintly tinged with
its reflected light the eastern horizon which the towers and domes of
Venice had not yet begun to break. The twilight came, and then through
the overcast heavens the moon shone dim; a light blossomed here and
there in the villas, distant voices called musically; a cow lowed, a
dog barked; the rich, sweet breath of the vernal land mingled its odors
with the sultry air of the neighboring lagoon. The wayfarers spoke
little; the time hung heavy on all, no doubt; to Ferris it was a burden
almost intolerable to hear the creak of the oars and the breathing of
the gondoliers keeping time together. At last the boat stopped in front
of the police-station in Fusina; a soldier with a sword at his side and
a lantern in his hand came out and briefly parleyed with the
gondoliers; they stepped ashore, and he marched them into the station
before him.

"We have nothing left to wish for now," said Ferris, breaking into an
ironical laugh.

"What does it all mean?" asked Mrs. Vervain.

"I think I had better go see."

"We will go with you," said Mrs. Vervain.

"Pazienza!" replied Ferris.

The ladies rose; but Don Ippolito remained seated. "Aren't you going
too, Don Ippolito?" asked Mrs. Vervain.

"Thanks, madama; but I prefer to stay here."

Lamentable cries and shrieks, as if the prisoners had immediately been
put to the torture, came from the station as Ferris opened the door. A
lamp of petroleum lighted the scene, and shone upon the figures of two
fishermen, who bewailed themselves unintelligibly in the vibrant
accents of Chiozza, and from time to time advanced upon the gondoliers,
and shook their heads and beat their breasts at them, A few police-
guards reclined upon benches about the room, and surveyed the spectacle
with mild impassibility.

Ferris politely asked one of them the cause of the detention.

"Why, you see, signore," answered the guard amiably, "these honest men
accuse your gondoliers of having stolen a rope out of their boat at
Dolo."

"It was my blood, you know!" howled the elder of the fishermen, tossing
his arms wildly abroad, "it was my own heart," he cried, letting the
last vowel die away and rise again in mournful refrain, while he stared
tragically into Ferris's face.

"What _is_ the matter?" asked Mrs. Vervain, putting up her
glasses, and trying with graceful futility to focus the melodrama.

"Nothing," said Ferris; "our gondoliers have had the heart's blood of
this respectable Dervish; that is to say, they have stolen a rope
belonging to him."

"_Our_ gondoliers! I don't believe it. They've no right to keep us
here all night. Tell them you're the American consul."

"I'd rather not try my dignity on these underlings, Mrs. Vervain;
there's no American squadron here that I could order to bombard Fusina,
if they didn't mind me. But I'll see what I can do further in quality
of courteous foreigner. Can you perhaps tell me how long you will be
obliged to detain us here?" he asked of the guard again.

"I am very sorry to detain you at all, signore. But what can I do? The
commissary is unhappily absent. He may be here soon."

The guard renewed his apathetic contemplation of the gondoliers, who
did not speak a word; the windy lamentation of the fishermen rose and
fell fitfully. Presently they went out of doors and poured forth their
wrongs to the moon.

The room was close, and with some trouble Ferris persuaded Mrs. Vervain
to return to the gondola, Florida seconding his arguments with gentle
good sense.

It seemed a long time till the commissary came, but his coming
instantly simplified the situation. Perhaps because he had never been
able to befriend a consul in trouble before, he befriended Ferris to
the utmost. He had met him with rather a browbeating air; but after a
glance at his card, he gave a kind of roar of deprecation and apology.
He had the ladies and Don Ippolito in out of the gondola, and led them
to an upper chamber, where he made them all repose their honored
persons upon his sofas. He ordered up his housekeeper to make them
coffee, which he served with his own hands, excusing its hurried
feebleness, and he stood by, rubbing his palms together and smiling,
while they refreshed themselves.

"They need never tell me again that the Austrians are tyrants," said
Mrs. Vervain in undertone to the consul.

It was not easy for Ferris to remind his host of the malefactors; but
he brought himself to this ungraciousness. The commissary begged
pardon, and asked him to accompany him below, where he confronted the
accused and the accusers. The tragedy was acted over again with blood-
curdling effectiveness by the Chiozzotti; the gondoliers maintaining
the calm of conscious innocence.

Ferris felt outraged by the trumped-up charge against them.

"Listen, you others the prisoners," said the commissary. "Your padrone
is anxious to return to Venice, and I wish to inflict no further
displeasures upon him. Restore their rope to these honest men, and go
about your business."

The injured gondoliers spoke in low tones together; then one of them
shrugged his shoulders and went out. He came back in a moment and laid
a rope before the commissary.

"Is that the rope?" he asked. "We found it floating down the canal, and
picked it up that we might give it to the rightful owner. But now I
wish to heaven we had let it sink to the bottom of the sea."

"Oh, a beautiful story!" wailed the Chiozzoti. They flung themselves
upon the rope, and lugged it off to their boat; and the gondoliers went
out, too.

The commissary turned to Ferris with an amiable smile. "I am sorry that
those rogues should escape," said the American.

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