A Foregone Conclusion

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He could not tell whether she was grateful for his words, or annoyed.
She resolutely said no more, but her mother took up the strain and
discoursed long upon it, arranging all the particulars of their meeting
and going together. Ferris was a little piqued, and began to wonder why
Miss Vervain did not stay at home if she did not want to go. To be
sure, she went everywhere with her mother but it was strange, with her
habitual violent submissiveness, that she should have said anything in
opposition to her mother's wish or purpose.

After dinner, Mrs. Vervain frankly withdrew for her nap, and Florida
seemed to make a little haste to take some sewing in her hand, and sat
down with the air of a woman willing; to detain her visitor. Ferris was
not such a stoic as not to be dimly flattered by this, but he was too
much of a man to be fully aware how great an advance it might seem.

"I suppose we shall see most of the priests of Venice, and what they
are like, in the procession to-morrow," she said. "Do you remember
speaking to me about priests, the other day, Mr. Ferris?"

"Yes, I remember it very well. I think I overdid it; and I couldn't
perceive afterwards that I had shown any motive but a desire to make
trouble for Don Ippolito."

"I never thought that," answered Florida, seriously. "What you said was
true, wasn't it?"

"Yes, it was and it wasn't, and I don't know that it differed from
anything else in the world, in that respect. It is true that there is a
great distrust of the priests amongst the Italians. The young men hate
them--or think they do--or say they do. Most educated men in middle
life are materialists, and of course unfriendly to the priests. There
are even women who are skeptical about religion. But I suspect that the
largest number of all those who talk loudest against the priests are
really subject to them. You must consider how very intimately they are
bound up with every family in the most solemn relations of life."

"Do you think the priests are generally bad men?" asked the young girl
shyly.

"I don't, indeed. I don't see how things could hang together if it were
so. There must be a great basis of sincerity and goodness in them, when
all is said and done. It seems to me that at the worst they're merely
professional people--poor fellows who have gone into the church for a
living. You know it isn't often now that the sons of noble families
take orders; the priests are mostly of humble origin; not that they're
necessarily the worse for that; the patricians used to be just as bad
in another way."

"I wonder," said Florida, with her head on one side, considering her
seam, "why there is always something so dreadful to us in the idea of a
priest."

"They _do_ seem a kind of alien creature to us Protestants. I
can't make out whether they seem so to Catholics, or not. But we have a
repugnance to all doomed people, haven't we? And a priest is a man
under sentence of death to the natural ties between himself and the
human race. He is dead to us. That makes him dreadful. The spectre of
our dearest friend, father or mother, would be terrible. And yet,"
added Ferris, musingly, "a nun isn't terrible."

"No," answered the girl, "that's because a woman's life even in the
world seems to be a constant giving up. No, a nun isn't unnatural, but
a priest is."

She was silent for a time, in which she sewed swiftly; then she
suddenly dropped her work into her lap, and pressing it down with both
hands, she asked, "Do you believe that priests themselves are ever
skeptical about religion?"

"I suppose it must happen now and then. In the best days of the church
it was a fashion to doubt, you know. I've often wanted to ask our
friend Don Ippolito something about these matters, but I didn't see how
it could be managed." Ferris did not note the change that passed over
Florida's face, and he continued. "Our acquaintance hasn't become so
intimate as I hoped it might. But you only get to a certain point with
Italians. They like to meet you on the street; maybe they haven't any
indoors."

"Yes, it must sometimes happen, as you say," replied Florida, with a
quick sigh, reverting to the beginning of Ferris's answer. "But is it
any worse for a false priest than for a hypocritical minister?"

"It's bad enough for either, but it's worse for the priest. You see
Miss Vervain, a minister doesn't set up for so much. He doesn't pretend
to forgive us our sins, and he doesn't ask us to confess them; he
doesn't offer us the veritable body and blood in the sacrament, and he
doesn't bear allegiance to the visible and tangible vicegerent of
Christ upon earth. A hypocritical parson may be absurd; but a skeptical
priest is tragical."

"Yes, oh yes, I see," murmured the girl, with a grieving face. "Are
they always to blame for it? They must be induced, sometimes, to enter
the church before they've seriously thought about it, and then don't
know how to escape from the path that has been marked out for them from
their childhood. Should you think such a priest as that was to blame
for being a skeptic?" she asked very earnestly.

"No," said Ferris, with a smile at her seriousness, "I should think
such a skeptic as that was to blame for being a priest."

"Shouldn't you be very sorry for him?" pursued Florida still more
solemnly.

"I should, indeed, if I liked him. If I didn't, I'm afraid I
shouldn't," said Ferris; but he saw that his levity jarred upon her.
"Come, Miss Vervain, you're not going to look at those fat monks and
sleek priests in the procession to-morrow as so many incorporate
tragedies, are you? You'll spoil my pleasure if you do. I dare say
they'll be all of them devout believers, accepting everything, down to
the animalcula in the holy water."

"If _you_ were that kind of a priest," persisted the girl, without
heeding his jests, "what should you do?"

"Upon my word, I don't know. I can't imagine it. Why," he continued,
"think what a helpless creature a priest is in everything but his
priesthood--more helpless than a woman, even. The only thing he could
do would be to leave the church, and how could he do that? He's in the
world, but he isn't of it, and I don't see what he could do with it, or
it with him. If an Italian priest were to leave the church, even the
liberals, who distrust him now, would despise him still more. Do you
know that they have a pleasant fashion of calling the Protestant
converts apostates? The first thing for such a priest would be exile.
But I'm not supposably the kind of priest you mean, and I don't think
just such a priest supposable. I dare say if a priest found himself
drifting into doubt, he'd try to avoid the disagreeable subject, and,
if he couldn't, he'd philosophize it some way, and wouldn't let his
skepticism worry him."

"Then you mean that they haven't consciences like us?"

"They have consciences, but not like us. The Italians are kinder people
than we are, but they're not so just, and I should say that they don't
think truth the chief good of life. They believe there are pleasanter
and better things. Perhaps they're right."

"No, no; you don't believe that, you know you don't," said Florida,
anxiously. "And you haven't answered my question."

"Oh yes, I have. I've told you it wasn't a supposable case."

"But suppose it was."

"Well, if I must," answered Ferris with a laugh. "With my unfortunate
bringing up, I couldn't say less than that such a man ought to get out
of his priesthood at any hazard. He should cease to be a priest, if it
cost him kindred, friends, good fame, country, everything. I don't see
how there can be any living in such a lie, though I know there is. In
all reason, it ought to eat the soul out of a man, and leave him
helpless to do or be any sort of good. But there seems to be something,
I don't know what it is, that is above all reason of ours, something
that saves each of us for good in spite of the bad that's in us. It's
very good practice, for a man who wants to be modest, to come and live
in a Latin country. He learns to suspect his own topping virtues, and
to be lenient to the novel combinations of right and wrong that he
sees. But as for our insupposable priest--yes, I should say decidedly
he ought to get out of it by all means."

Florida fell back in her chair with an aspect of such relief as comes
to one from confirmation on an important point. She passed her hand
over the sewing in her lap, but did not speak.

Ferris went on, with a doubting look at her, for he had been shy of
introducing Don Ippolito's name since the day on the Brenta, and he did
not know what effect a recurrence to him in this talk might have. "I've
often wondered if our own clerical friend were not a little shaky in
his faith. I don't think nature meant him for a priest. He always
strikes me as an extremely secular-minded person. I doubt if he's ever
put the question whether he is what he professes to be, squarely to
himself--he's such a mere dreamer."

Florida changed her posture slightly, and looked down at her sewing.
She asked, "But shouldn't you abhor him if he were a skeptical priest?"

Ferris shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, I don't find it such an easy matter
to abhor people. It would be interesting," he continued musingly, "to
have such a dreamer waked up, once, and suddenly confronted with what
he recognized as perfect truthfulness, and couldn't help contrasting
himself with. But it would be a little cruel."

"Would you rather have him left as he was?" asked Florida, lifting her
eyes to his.

"As a moralist, no; as a humanitarian, yes, Miss Vervain. He'd be much
happier as he was."

"What time ought we to be ready for you tomorrow?" demanded the girl in
a tone of decision,

"We ought to be in the Piazza by nine o'clock," said Ferris, carelessly
accepting the change of subject; and he told her of his plan for seeing
the procession from a window of the Old Procuratie.

When he rose to go, he said lightly, "Perhaps, after all, we may see
the type of tragical priest we've been talking about. Who can tell? I
say his nose will be red."

"Perhaps," answered Florida, with unheeding gravity.

XII.

The day was one of those which can come to the world only in early June
at Venice. The heaven was without a cloud, but a blue haze made mystery
of the horizon where the lagoon and sky met unseen. The breath of the
sea bathed in freshness the city at whose feet her tides sparkled and
slept.

The great square of St. Mark was transformed from a mart, from a
_salon_, to a temple. The shops under the colonnades that inclose
it upon three sides were shut; the caffes, before which the circles of
idle coffee-drinkers and sherbet-eaters ordinarily spread out into the
Piazza, were repressed to the limits of their own doors; the stands of
the water-venders, the baskets of those that sold oranges of Palermo
and black cherries of Padua, had vanished from the base of the church
of St. Mark, which with its dim splendor of mosaics and its carven
luxury of pillar and arch and finial rose like the high-altar,
ineffably rich and beautiful, of the vaster temple whose inclosure it
completed. Before it stood the three great red flag-staffs, like
painted tapers before an altar, and from them hung the Austrian flags
of red and white, and yellow and black.

In the middle of the square stood the Austrian military band,
motionless, encircling their leader with his gold-headed staff
uplifted. During the night a light colonnade of wood, roofed with blue
cloth, had been put up around the inside of the Piazza, and under this
now paused the long pomp of the ecclesiastical procession--the priests
of all the Venetian churches in their richest vestments, followed in
their order by facchini, in white sandals and gay robes, with caps of
scarlet, white, green, and blue, who bore huge painted candles and
silken banners displaying the symbol or the portrait of the titular
saints of the several churches, and supported the canopies under which
the host of each was elevated. Before the clergy went a company of
Austrian soldiers, and behind the facchini came a long array of
religious societies, charity-school boys in uniforms, old paupers in
holiday dress, little naked urchins with shepherds' crooks and bits of
fleece about their loins like John the Baptist in the Wilderness,
little girls with angels' wings and crowns, the monks of the various
orders, and civilian penitents of all sorts in cloaks or dress-coats,
hooded or bareheaded, and carrying each a lighted taper. The corridors
under the Imperial Palace and the New and Old Procuratie were packed
with spectators; from every window up and down the fronts of the palaces,
gay stuffs were flung; the startled doves of St. Mark perched upon the
cornices, or fluttered uneasily to and fro above the crowd. The baton
of the band leader descended with a crash of martial music, the priests
chanted, the charity-boys sang shrill, a vast noise of shuffling feet
arose, mixed with the foliage-like rustling of the sheets of tinsel
attached to the banners and candles in the procession: the whole
strange, gorgeous picture came to life.

After all her plans and preparations, Mrs. Vervain had not felt well
enough that morning to come to the spectacle which she had counted so
much upon seeing, but she had therefore insisted the more that her
daughter should go, and Ferris now stood with Florida alone at a window
in the Old Procuratie.

"Well, what do you think, Miss Vervain?" he asked, when their senses
had somewhat accustomed themselves to the noise of the procession; "do
you say now that Venice is too gloomy a city to have ever had any
possibility of gayety in her?"

"I never said that," answered Florida, opening her eyes upon him.

"Neither did I," returned Ferris, "but I've often thought it, and I'm
not sure now but I'm right. There's something extremely melancholy to
me in all this. I don't care so much for what one may call the
deplorable superstition expressed in the spectacle, but the mere
splendid sight and the music are enough to make one shed tears. I don't
know anything more affecting except a procession of lantern-lit
gondolas and barges on the Grand Canal. It's phantasmal. It's the
spectral resurrection of the old dead forms into the present. It's not
even the ghost, it's the corpse, of other ages that's haunting Venice.
The city ought to have been destroyed by Napoleon when he destroyed the
Republic, and thrown overboard----St. Mark, Winged Lion, Bucentaur, and
all. There is no land like America for true cheerfulness and light-
heartedness. Think of our Fourth of Julys and our State Fairs. Selah!"

Ferris looked into the girl's serious face with twinkling eyes. He
liked to embarrass her gravity with his antic speeches, and enjoyed her
endeavors to find an earnest meaning in them, and her evident trouble
when she could find none.

"I'm curious to know how our friend will look," he began again, as he
arranged the cushion on the window-sill for Florida's greater comfort
in watching the spectacle, "but it won't be an easy matter to pick him
out in this masquerade, I fancy. Candle-carrying, as well as the other
acts of devotion, seems rather out of character with Don Ippolito, and
I can't imagine his putting much soul into it. However, very few of the
clergy appear to do that. Look at those holy men with their eyes to the
wind! They are wondering who is the _bella bionda_ at the window
here."

Florida listened to his persiflage with an air of sad distraction. She
was intent upon the procession as it approached from the other side of
the Piazza, and she replied at random to his comments on the different
bodies that formed it.

"It's very hard to decide which are my favorites," he continued,
surveying the long column through an opera-glass. "My religious
disadvantages have been such that I don't care much for priests or
monks, or young John the Baptists, or small female cherubim, but I do
like little charity-boys with voices of pins and needles and hair cut
_a la_ dead-rabbit. I should like, if it were consistent with the
consular dignity, to go down and rub their heads. I'm fond, also, of
_old_ charity-boys, I find. Those paupers make one in love with
destitute and dependent age, by their aspect of irresponsible
enjoyment. See how briskly each of them topples along on the leg that
he hasn't got in the grave! How attractive likewise are the civilian
devotees in those imperishable dress-coats of theirs! Observe their
high collars of the era of the Holy Alliance: they and their fathers
and their grandfathers before them have worn those dress-coats; in a
hundred years from now their posterity will keep holiday in them. I
should like to know the elixir by which the dress-coats of civil
employees render themselves immortal. Those penitents in the cloaks and
cowls are not bad, either, Miss Vervain. Come, they add a very pretty
touch of mystery to this spectacle. They're the sort of thing that
painters are expected to paint in Venice--that people sigh over as so
peculiarly Venetian. If you've a single sentiment about you, Miss
Vervain, now is the time to produce it."

"But I haven't. I'm afraid I have no sentiment at all," answered the
girl ruefully. "But this makes me dreadfully sad."

"Why that's just what I was saying a while ago. Excuse me, Miss
Vervain, but your sadness lacks novelty; it's a sort of plagiarism."

"Don't, please," she pleaded yet more earnestly. "I was just thinking--
I don't know why such an awful thought should come to me--that it might
all be a mistake after all; perhaps there might not be any other world,
and every bit of this power and display of the church--_our_
church as well as the rest--might be only a cruel blunder, a dreadful
mistake. Perhaps there isn't even any God! Do you think there is?"

"I don't _think _it," said Ferris gravely, "I _know_ it. But
I don't wonder that this sight makes you doubt. Great God! How far it
is from Christ! Look there, at those troops who go before the followers
of the Lamb: their trade is murder. In a minute, if a dozen men called
out, 'Long live the King of Italy!' it would be the duty of those
soldiers to fire into the helpless crowd. Look at the silken and gilded
pomp of the servants of the carpenter's son! Look at those miserable
monks, voluntary prisoners, beggars, aliens to their kind! Look at
those penitents who think that they can get forgiveness for their sins
by carrying a candle round the square! And it is nearly two thousand
years since the world turned Christian! It is pretty slow. But I
suppose God lets men learn Him from their own experience of evil. I
imagine the kingdom of heaven is a sort of republic, and that God draws
men to Him only through their perfect freedom."

"Yes, yes, it must be so," answered Florida, staring down on the crowd
with unseeing eyes, "but I can't fix my mind on it. I keep thinking the
whole time of what we were talking about yesterday. I never could have
dreamed of a priest's disbelieving; but now I can't dream of anything
else. It seems to me that none of these priests or monks can believe
anything. Their faces look false and sly and bad--_all_ of them!"

"No, no, Miss Vervain," said Ferris, smiling at her despair, "you push
matters a little beyond--as a woman has a right to do, of course. I
don't think their faces are bad, by any means. Some of them are dull
and torpid, and some are frivolous, just like the faces of other
people. But I've been noticing the number of good, kind, friendly
faces, and they're in the majority, just as they are amongst other
people; for there are very few souls altogether out of drawing, in my
opinion. I've even caught sight of some faces in which there was a real
rapture of devotion, and now and then a very innocent one. Here, for
instance, is a man I should like to bet on, if he'd only look up."

The priest whom Ferris indicated was slowly advancing toward the space
immediately under their window. He was dressed in robes of high
ceremony, and in his hand he carried a lighted taper. He moved with a
gentle tread, and the droop of his slender figure intimated a sort of
despairing weariness. While most of his fellows stared carelessly or
curiously about them, his face was downcast and averted.

Suddenly the procession paused, and a hush fell upon the vast assembly.
Then the silence was broken by the rustle and stir of all those
thousands going down upon their knees, as the cardinal-patriarch lifted
his hands to bless them.

The priest upon whom Ferris and Florida had fixed their eyes faltered a
moment, and before he knelt his next neighbor had to pluck him by the
skirt. Then he too knelt hastily, mechanically lifting his head, and
glancing along the front of the Old Procuratie. His face had that
weariness in it which his figure and movement had suggested, and it was
very pale, but it was yet more singular for the troubled innocence
which its traits expressed.

"There," whispered Ferris, "that's what I call an uncommonly good
face."

Florida raised her hand to silence him, and the heavy gaze of the
priest rested on them coldly at first. Then a light of recognition shot
into his eyes and a flush suffused his pallid visage, which seemed to
grow the more haggard and desperate. His head fell again, and he
dropped the candle from his hand. One of those beggars who went by the
side of the procession, to gather the drippings of the tapers, restored
it to him.

"Why," said Ferris aloud, "it's Don Ippolito! Did you know him at
first?"

XIII.

The ladies were sitting on the terrace when Don Ippolito came next
morning to say that he could not read with Miss Vervain that day nor
for several days after, alleging in excuse some priestly duties proper
to the time. Mrs. Vervain began to lament that she had not been able to
go to the procession of the day before. "I meant to have kept a sharp
lookout for you; Florida saw you, and so did Mr. Ferris. But it isn't
at all the same thing, you know. Florida has no faculty for describing;
and now I shall probably go away from Venice without seeing you in your
real character once."

Don Ippolito suffered this and more in meek silence. He waited his
opportunity with unfailing politeness, and then with gentle punctilio
took his leave.

"Well, come again as soon as your duties will let you, Don Ippolito,"
cried Mrs. Vervain. "We shall miss you dreadfully, and I begrudge every
one of your readings that Florida loses."

The priest passed, with the sliding step which his impeding drapery
imposed, down the garden walk, and was half-way to the gate, when
Florida, who had stood watching him, said to her mother, "I must speak
to him again," and lightly descended the steps and swiftly glided in
pursuit.

"Don Ippolito!" she called.

He already had his hand upon the gate, but he turned, and rapidly went
back to meet her.

She stood in the walk where she had stopped when her voice arrested
him, breathing quickly. Their eyes met; a painful shadow overcast the
face of the young girl, who seemed to be trying in vain to speak.

Mrs. Vervain put on her glasses and peered down at the two with good-
natured curiosity.

"Well, madamigella," said the priest at last, "what do you command me?"
He gave a faint, patient sigh.

The tears came into her eyes. "Oh," she began vehemently, "I wish there
was some one who had the right to speak to you!"

"No one," answered Don Ippolito, "has so much the right as you."

"I saw you yesterday," she began again, "and I thought of what you had
told me, Don Ippolito."

"Yes, I thought of it, too," answered the priest; "I have thought of it
ever since."

"But haven't you thought of any hope for yourself? Must you still go on
as before? How can you go back now to those things, and pretend to
think them holy, and all the time have no heart or faith in them? It's
terrible!"

"What would you, madamigella?" demanded Don Ippolito, with a moody
shrug. "It is my profession, my trade, you know. You might say to the
prisoner," he added bitterly, "'It is terrible to see you chained
here.' Yes, it is terrible. Oh, I don't reject your compassion! But
what can I do?"

"Sit down with me here," said Florida in her blunt, child-like way, and
sank upon the stone seat beside the walk. She clasped her hands
together in her lap with some strong, bashful emotion, while Don
Ippolito, obeying her command, waited for her to speak. Her voice was
scarcely more than a hoarse whisper when she began.

"I don't know how to begin what I want to say. I am not fit to advise
any one. I am so young, and so very ignorant of the world."

"I too know little of the world," said the priest, as much to himself
as to her.

"It may be all wrong, all wrong. Besides," she said abruptly, "how do I
know that you are a good man, Don Ippolito? How do I know that you've
been telling me the truth? It may be all a kind of trap"--

He looked blankly at her.

"This is in Venice; and you may be leading me on to say things to you
that will make trouble for my mother and me. You may be a spy"--

"Oh no, no, no!" cried the priest, springing to his feet with a kind of
moan, and a shudder, "God forbid!" He swiftly touched her hand with the
tips of his fingers, and then kissed them: an action of inexpressible
humility. "Madamigella, I swear to you by everything you believe good
that I would rather die than be false to you in a single breath or
thought."

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