Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  A panic seemed to seize her as she saw him open it. She ran after him. “Don Ippolito, Don Ippolito,” she said, coming up to him; and stammered and faltered. “I don’t know; I am frightened. You must do nothing from me; I cannot let you; I’m not fit to advise you. It must be wholly from your own conscience. Oh no, don’t look so! I will be your friend, whatever happens. But if what you think of doing has seemed so terrible to you, perhaps it is more terrible than I can understand. If it is the only way, it is right. But is there no other? What I mean is, have you no one to talk all this over with? I mean, can’t you speak of it to — to Mr. Ferris? He is so true and honest and just.”

  “I was going to him,” said Don Ippolito, with a dim trouble in his face.

  “Oh, I am so glad of that! Remember, I don’t take anything back. No matter what happens, I will be your friend. But he will tell you just what to do.”

  Don Ippolito bowed and opened the gate.

  Florida went back to her mother, who asked her, “What in the world have you and Don Ippolito been talking about so earnestly? What makes you so pale and out of breath?”

  “I have been wanting to tell you, mother,” said Florida. She drew her chair in front of the elder lady, and sat down.

  XIV.

  Don Ippolito did not go directly to the painter’s. He walked toward his house at first, and then turned aside, and wandered out through the noisy and populous district of Canaregio to the Campo di Marte. A squad of cavalry which had been going through some exercises there was moving off the parade ground; a few infantry soldiers were strolling about under the trees. Don Ippolito walked across the field to the border of the lagoon, where he began to pace to and fro, with his head sunk in deep thought. He moved rapidly, but sometimes he stopped and stood still in the sun, whose heat he did not seem to feel, though a perspiration bathed his pale face and stood in drops on his forehead under the shadow of his nicchio. Some little dirty children of the poor, with which this region swarms, looked at him from the sloping shore of the Campo di Giustizia, where the executions used to take place, and a small boy began to mock his movements and pauses, but was arrested by one of the girls, who shook him and gesticulated warningly.

  At this point the long railroad bridge which connects Venice with the mainland is in full sight, and now from the reverie in which he continued, whether he walked or stood still, Don Ippolito was roused by the whistle of an outward train. He followed it with his eye as it streamed along over the far-stretching arches, and struck out into the flat, salt marshes beyond. When the distance hid it, he put on his hat, which he had unknowingly removed, and turned his rapid steps toward the railroad station. Arrived there, he lingered in the vestibule for half an hour, watching the people as they bought their tickets for departure, and had their baggage examined by the customs officers, and weighed and registered by the railroad porters, who passed it through the wicket shutting out the train, while the passengers gathered up their smaller parcels and took their way to the waiting-rooms. He followed a group of English people some paces in this direction, and then returned to the wicket, through which he looked long and wistfully at the train. The baggage was all passed through; the doors of the waiting-rooms were thrown open with harsh proclamation by the guards, and the passengers flocked into the carriages. Whistles and bells were sounded, and the train crept out of the station.

  A man in the company’s uniform approached the unconscious priest, and striking his hands softly together, said with a pleasant smile, “Your servant, Don Ippolito. Are you expecting some one?”

  “Ah, good day!” answered the priest, with a little start. “No,” he added, “I was not looking for any one.”

  “I see,” said the other. “Amusing yourself as usual with the machinery. Excuse the freedom, Don Ippolito; but you ought to have been of our profession, — ha, ha! When you have the leisure, I should like to show you the drawing of an American locomotive which a friend of mine has sent me from Nuova York. It is very different from ours, very curious. But monstrous in size, you know, prodigious! May I come with it to your house, some evening?”

  “You will do me a great pleasure,” said Don Ippolito. He gazed dreamily in the direction of the vanished train. “Was that the train for Milan?” he asked presently.

  “Exactly,” said the man.

  “Does it go all the way to Milan?”

  “Oh, no! it stops at Peschiera, where the passengers have their passports examined; and then another train backs down from Desenzano and takes them on to Milan. And after that,” continued the man with animation, “if you are on the way to England, for example, another train carries you to Susa, and there you get the diligence over the mountain to St. Michel, where you take railroad again, and so on up through Paris to Boulogne-sur-Mer, and then by steamer to Folkestone, and then by railroad to London and to Liverpool. It is at Liverpool that you go on board the steamer for America, and piff! in ten days you are in Nuova York. My friend has written me all about it.”

  “Ah yes, your friend. Does he like it there in America?”

  “Passably, passably. The Americans have no manners; but they are good devils. They are governed by the Irish. And the wine is dear. But he likes America; yes, he likes it. Nuova York is a fine city. But immense, you know! Eight times as large as Venice!”

  “Is your friend prosperous there?”

  “Ah heigh! That is the prettiest part of the story. He has made himself rich. He is employed by a large house to make designs for mantlepieces, and marble tables, and tombs; and he has — listen! — six hundred francs a month!”

  “Oh per Bacco!” cried Don Ippolito.

  “Honestly. But you spend a great deal there. Still, it is magnificent, is it not? If it were not for that blessed war there, now, that would be the place for you, Don Ippolito. He tells me the Americans are actually mad for inventions. Your servant. Excuse the freedom, you know,” said the man, bowing and moving away.

  “Nothing, dear, nothing,” answered the priest. He walked out of the station with a light step, and went to his own house, where he sought the room in which his inventions were stored. He had not touched them for weeks. They were all dusty and many were cobwebbed. He blew the dust from some, and bringing them to the light, examined them critically, finding them mostly disabled in one way or other, except the models of the portable furniture which he polished with his handkerchief and set apart, surveying them from a distance with a look of hope. He took up the breech-loading cannon and then suddenly put it down again with a little shiver, and went to the threshold of the perverted oratory and glanced in at his forge. Veneranda had carelessly left the window open, and the draught had carried the ashes about the floor. On the cinder-heap lay the tools which he had used in mending the broken pipe of the fountain at Casa Vervain, and had not used since. The place seemed chilly even on that summer’s day. He stood in the doorway with clenched hands. Then he called Veneranda, chid her for leaving the window open, and bade her close it, and so quitted the house and left her muttering.

  Ferris seemed surprised to see him when he appeared at the consulate near the middle of the afternoon, and seated himself in the place where he was wont to pose for the painter.

  “Were you going to give me a sitting?” asked the latter, hesitating. “The light is horrible, just now, with this glare from the canal. Not that I manage much better when it’s good. I don’t get on with you, Don Ippolito. There are too many of you. I shouldn’t have known you in the procession yesterday.”

  Don Ippolito did not respond. He rose and went toward his portrait on the easel, and examined it long, with a curious minuteness. Then he returned to his chair, and continued to look at it. “I suppose that it resembles me a great deal,” he said, “and yet I do not feel like that. I hardly know what is the fault. It is as I should be if I were like other priests, perhaps?”

  “I know it’s not good,” said the painter. “It is conventional, in spite of everything. But here’s that first sketch I made of you.” />
  He took up a canvas facing the wall, and set it on the easel. The character in this charcoal sketch was vastly sincerer and sweeter.

  “Ah!” said Don Ippolito, with a sigh and smile of relief, “that is immeasurably better. I wish I could speak to you, dear friend, in a mood of yours as sympathetic as this picture records, of some matters that concern me very nearly. I have just come from the railroad station.”

  “Seeing some friends off?” asked the painter, indifferently, hovering near the sketch with a bit of charcoal in his hand, and hesitating whether to give it a certain touch. He glanced with half-shut eyes at the priest.

  Don Ippolito sighed again. “I hardly know. I was seeing off my hopes, my desires, my prayers, that followed the train to America!”

  The painter put down his charcoal, dusted his fingers, and looked at the priest without saying anything.

  “Do you remember when I first came to you?” asked Don Ippolito.

  “Certainly,” said Ferris. “Is it of that matter you want to speak to me? I’m very sorry to hear it, for I don’t think it practical.”

  “Practical, practical!” cried the priest hotly. “Nothing is practical till it has been tried. And why should I not go to America?”

  “Because you can’t get your passport, for one thing,” answered the painter dryly.

  “I have thought of that,” rejoined Don Ippolito more patiently. “I can get a passport for France from the Austrian authorities here, and at Milan there must be ways in which I could change it for one from my own king” — it was by this title that patriotic Venetians of those days spoke of Victor Emmanuel— “that would carry me out of France into England.”

  Ferris pondered a moment. “That is quite true,” he said. “Why hadn’t you thought of that when you first came to me?”

  “I cannot tell. I didn’t know that I could even get a passport for France till the other day.”

  Both were silent while the painter filled his pipe. “Well,” he said presently, “I’m very sorry. I’m afraid you’re dooming yourself to many bitter disappointments in going to America. What do you expect to do there?”

  “Why, with my inventions” —

  “I suppose,” interrupted the other, putting a lighted match to his pipe, “that a painter must be a very poor sort of American: his first thought is of coming to Italy. So I know very little directly about the fortunes of my inventive fellow-countrymen, or whether an inventor has any prospect of making a living. But once when I was at Washington I went into the Patent Office, where the models of the inventions are deposited; the building is about as large as the Ducal Palace, and it is full of them. The people there told me nothing was commoner than for the same invention to be repeated over and over again by different inventors. Some few succeed, and then they have lawsuits with the infringers of their patents; some sell out their inventions for a trifle to companies that have capital, and that grow rich upon them; the great number can never bring their ideas to the public notice at all. You can judge for yourself what your chances would be. You have asked me why you should not go to America. Well, because I think you would starve there.”

  “I am used to that,” said Don Ippolito; “and besides, until some of my inventions became known, I could give lessons in Italian.”

  “Oh, bravo!” said Ferris, “you prefer instant death, then?”

  “But madamigella seemed to believe that my success as an inventor would be assured, there.”

  Ferris gave a very ironical laugh. “Miss Vervain must have been about twelve years old when she left America. Even a lady’s knowledge of business, at that age, is limited. When did you talk with her about it? You had not spoken of it to me, of late, and I thought you were more contented than you used to be.”

  “It is true,” said the priest. “Sometimes within the last two months I have almost forgotten it.”

  “And what has brought it so forcibly to your mind again?”

  “That is what I so greatly desire to tell you,” replied Don Ippolito, with an appealing look at the painter’s face. He moistened his parched lips a little, waiting for further question from the painter, to whom he seemed a man fevered by some strong emotion and at that moment not quite wholesome. Ferris did not speak, and Don Ippolito began again: “Even though I have not said so in words to you, dear friend, has it not appeared to you that I have no heart in my vocation?”

  “Yes, I have sometimes fancied that. I had no right to ask you why.”

  “Some day I will tell you, when I have the courage to go all over it again. It is partly my own fault, but it is more my miserable fortune. But wherever the wrong lies, it has at last become intolerable to me. I cannot endure it any longer and live. I must go away, I must fly from it.”

  Ferris shrank from him a little, as men instinctively do from one who has set himself upon some desperate attempt. “Do you mean, Don Ippolito, that you are going to renounce your priesthood?”

  Don Ippolito opened his hands and let his priesthood drop, as it were, to the ground.

  “You never spoke of this before, when you talked of going to America. Though to be sure” —

  “Yes, yes!” replied Don Ippolito with vehemence, “but now an angel has appeared and shown me the blackness of my life!”

  Ferris began to wonder if he or Don Ippolito were not perhaps mad.

  “An angel, yes,” the priest went on, rising from his chair, “an angel whose immaculate truth has mirrored my falsehood in all its vileness and distortion — to whom, if it destroys me, I cannot devote less than a truthfulness like hers!”

  “Hers — hers?” cried the painter, with a sudden pang. “Whose? Don’t speak in these riddles. Whom do you mean?”

  “Whom can I mean but only one? — madamigella!”

  “Miss Vervain? Do you mean to say that Miss Vervain has advised you to renounce your priesthood?”

  “In as many words she has bidden me forsake it at any risk, — at the cost of kindred, friends, good fame, country, everything.”

  The painter passed his hand confusedly over his face. These were his own words, the words he had used in speaking with Florida of the supposed skeptical priest. He grew very pale. “May I ask,” he demanded in a hard, dry voice, “how she came to advise such a step?”

  “I can hardly tell. Something had already moved her to learn from me the story of my life — to know that I was a man with neither faith nor hope. Her pure heart was torn by the thought of my wrong and of my error. I had never seen myself in such deformity as she saw me even when she used me with that divine compassion. I was almost glad to be what I was because of her angelic pity for me!”

  The tears sprang to Don Ippolito’s eyes, but Ferris asked in the same tone as before, “Was it then that she bade you be no longer a priest?”

  “No, not then,” patiently replied the other; “she was too greatly overwhelmed with my calamity to think of any cure for it. To-day it was that she uttered those words — words which I shall never forget, which will support and comfort me, whatever happens!”

  The painter was biting hard upon the stem of his pipe. He turned away and began ordering the color-tubes and pencils on a table against the wall, putting them close together in very neat, straight rows. Presently he said: “Perhaps Miss Vervain also advised you to go to America?”

  “Yes,” answered the priest reverently. “She had thought of everything. She has promised me a refuge under her mother’s roof there, until I can make my inventions known; and I shall follow them at once.”

  “Follow them?”

  “They are going, she told me. Madama does not grow better. They are homesick. They — but you must know all this already?”

  “Oh, not at all, not at all,” said the painter with a very bitter smile. “You are telling me news. Pray go on.”

  “There is no more. She made me promise to come to you and listen to your advice before I took any step. I must not trust to her alone, she said; but if I took this step, then through whatever ha
ppened she would be my friend. Ah, dear friend, may I speak to you of the hope that these words gave me? You have seen — have you not? — you must have seen that” —

  The priest faltered, and Ferris stared at him helpless. When the next words came he could not find any strangeness in the fact which yet gave him so great a shock. He found that to his nether consciousness it had been long familiar — ever since that day when he had first jestingly proposed Don Ippolito as Miss Vervain’s teacher. Grotesque, tragic, impossible — it had still been the under-current of all his reveries; or so now it seemed to have been.

  Don Ippolito anxiously drew nearer to him and laid an imploring touch upon his arm,— “I love her!”

  “What!” gasped the painter. “You? You I A priest?”

  “Priest! priest!” cried Don Ippolito, violently. “From this day I am no longer a priest! From this hour I am a man, and I can offer her the honorable love of a man, the truth of a most sacred marriage, and fidelity to death!”

  Ferris made no answer. He began to look very coldly and haughtily at Don Ippolito, whose heat died away under his stare, and who at last met it with a glance of tremulous perplexity. His hand had dropped from Ferris’s arm, and he now moved some steps from him. “What is it, dear friend?” he besought him. “Is there something that offends you? I came to you for counsel, and you meet me with a repulse little short of enmity. I do not understand. Do I intend anything wrong without knowing it? Oh, I conjure you to speak plainly!”

  “Wait! Wait a minute,” said Ferris, waving his hand like a man tormented by a passing pain. “I am trying to think. What you say is.... I cannot imagine it!”

  “Not imagine it? Not imagine it? And why? Is she not beautiful?”

  “Yes.”

  “And good?”

  “Without doubt.”

  “And young, and yet wise beyond her years? And true, and yet angelically kind?”

  “It is all as you say, God knows. But.... a priest” —

  “Oh! Always that accursed word! And at heart, what is a priest, then, but a man? — a wretched, masked, imprisoned, banished man! Has he not blood and nerves like you? Has he not eyes to see what is fair, and ears to hear what is sweet? Can he live near so divine a flower and not know her grace, not inhale the fragrance of her soul, not adore her beauty? Oh, great God! And if at last he would tear off his stifling mask, escape from his prison, return from his exile, would you gainsay him?”