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 caffè, — 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 Ferris 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 caffè-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 form
ality 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 say 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 t
o 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.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 46