A Foregone Conclusion

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 is n’t at all the same thing, you know. Florida has no faculty for describing things; 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 goodnatured 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. ”

“ Oh, I know it, I know it,” she murmured. “ I don’t see how I could say such a cruel thing.”

“Not cruel; no, madamigella, not cruel,” softly pleaded Don Ippolito.

“ But — but is there no escape for you? ”

They looked steadfastly at each other for a moment, and then Don Ippolito spoke.

“ Yes,” he said very gravely, " there is one way of escape. I have often thought of it, and once I thought I had taken the first step towards it; but it is beset with many great obstacles, and to be a priest makes one timid and insecure.”

He lapsed into his musing melancholy with the last words; but she would not suffer him to lose whatever heart he had begun to speak with. “ That’s nothing,” she said, " you must think again of that way of escape, and never turn from it till you have tried it. Only take the first step and you can go on. Friends will rise up everywhere, and make it easy for you. Come,” she implored him fervently, “ you must promise. ”

He bent his dreamy eyes upon her.

“ If I should take this only way of escape, and it seemed desperate to all others, would you still be my friend? ”

“ I should be your friend if the whole world turned against you.”

“ Would you he my friend,” he asked eagerly in lower tones, and with signs of an inward struggle, “ if this way of escape were for me to be no longer a priest ? ”

“ Oh yes, yes! Why not? ” cried the girl; and her face glowed with heroic sympathy and defiance. It is from this heaven-born ignorance in women of the insuperable difficulties of doing right that men take fire and accomplish the sublime impossibilities. Our sense of details, our fatal habits of reasoning, paralyze us; we need the impulse of the pure ideal which we can get only from them. These two were alike children as regarded the world, but he had a man’s dark prevision of the means, and she a heavenly scorn of everything but the end to be achieved.

He drew a long breath. “ Then it does not seem terrible to you? ”

“ Terrible? Ho! I don’t see how you cau rest till it is done !”

“ Is it true, then, that you urge me to this step, which indeed I have so long desired to take? ”

“ Yes, it is true! Listen, Don Ippolito: it is the very thing that I hoped you would do, but I wanted to speak of it first. You must have all the honor of it, and I am glad you thought of it before. You will never regret it! ”

She smiled radiantly upon him, and he kindled at her enthusiasm. In another moment his face darkened again. “ But it will cost much,” he murmured.

“ No matter,” cried Florida. “ Such a man as you ought to leave the priesthood at any risk or hazard. You should cease to be a priest, if it cost you kindred, friends, good fame, country, everything !” She blushed with irrelevant consciousness. “ Why need you be downhearted? With your genius once free, you can make country and fame and friends everywhere. Leave Venice! There are other places. Think how inventors succeed in America ” —

“ In America ! ” exclaimed the priest. “ Ah, how long I have desired to be there !”

“ You must go. You will soon be famous and honored there, and you shall not be a stranger, even at the first. Do you know that we are going home very soon? Yes, my mother and I have been talking of it to-day. We are both homesick, and you see that she is not well. You shall come to us there, and make our house your home till you have formed some plans of your own. Everything will be easy. God is good,” she said in a breaking voice, “ and you may be sure he will befriend you.”

“ Some one,” answered Don Ippolito, with tears in his eyes, “ has already been very good to me. I thought it was you, but I will call it God! ”

“ Hush! You must u’t say such things. But you must go, now. Take time to think, but not too much time. Do right — be true to yourself.”

They rose, and she laid her hand on his arm with an instinctive gesture of appeal. He stood bewildered. Then, “ Thanks, madamigella, thanks !” he said, and caught her fragrant hand to his lips. He loosed it and lifted both his arms by a blind impulse in which he arrested himself with a burning blush, and turned away. He did not take leave of her with his wonted formalities, but hurried abruptly toward the gate.

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 unconsciously 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 bohght 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, white 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. “ Diverting 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 hoard 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; bnt 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 mantelpieces, 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 should n’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,” be said, “ but I think you have misconceived the character somewhat.

You have put too much into it, and yet scarcely enough.”

“ 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, kinder, sweeter.

“ All! ” 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 halfshut 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 the priest.

“ 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 had n’t you thought of that when you first came to me? ”

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

Both were silent for a time, 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, as it were, drop 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 since then 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 over his bewildered 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 happened she would be my friend. Ah, dear friend, may I speak in 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 undercurrent 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! 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 ?”

“ Heaven forbid! ” said the painter with a kind of groan. He sat down in a tall, carven gothic chair, — the furniture of one of his pictures, — and rested his head against its high back and looked at the priest across the room. “ Excuse me,” he continued languidly. " I am ready to befriend you to the utmost of my power. What was it you wanted to ask me? I have told you truly what I thought of your scheme of going to America; but I may very well be mistaken. Was it about that Miss Vervain desired you to consult me? ” His voice and manner hardened again in spite of him. “ Or did she wish me to advise you about the renunciation of your priesthood? You must have thought that carefully over for yourself.”

“ Yes, I do not think you could make me see that as a greater difficulty than it has appeared to me.” He paused with a confused and daunted air, as if some important point had slipped his mind. “ But I must take the step; the burden of the double part I play is unendurable, is it not? ”

“ Yon know better than I. ”

“ But if you were such a man as I, with neither love for your vocation nor faith in it, should you not cease to be a priest? ”

“ If you ask me in that way, yes,” answered the painter. “ But I advise you nothing. I could not counsel another in such a case.”

“ But you think and feel as I do,” said the priest, “ and I am right, then.”

“ I do not say you are wrong.”

Ferris was silent while Don Ippolito moved up and down the room, with his sliding step, like some tall, gaunt, unhappy girl. Neither could put an end to this interview, so full of intangible, inconclusive misery, Ferris drew a long breath, and then said with an effort, “ Don Ippolito, I suppose you did not speak idly to me of your — your feeling for Miss Vervain, and that I may speak plainly to you in return.”

“ Surely,” answered the priest, pausing in his walk and fixing his eyes upon the painter. “ It was to you as the friend of both that I spoke of my love, and my hope — which is oftener my despair.”

“ Then you have not much reason to believe that she returns your — feeling ?”

“ Ah, how could she consciously return it? I have been hitherto a priest to her, and the thought of me would have been impurity. But hereafter, if I can prove myself a man, if I can win my place in the world . . . No, even now, why should she care so much for my escape from these bonds, if she did not care for me more than she knew ? ”

“ Have you ever thought of that extravagant generosity of Miss Vervain’s character? ”

“ It is divine! ”

“ Has it seemed to you that if such a woman knew herself to have once wrongly given you pain, her atonement might be as headlong and excessive as her offense? That she could have no reserves in her reparation? ”

Don Ippolito looked at Ferris, but did not interpose,

“ Miss Vervain is very religious in her way, and she is truth itself. Are you sure that it is not concern for what seems to her your terrible position, that has made her show so much anxiety on your account ? ”

“ Do I not know that, well? Have I not felt the balm of her most heavenly pity ? ”

“ And may she not be only trying to appeal to something in you as high as the impulse of her own heart ? ”

“ As high !” cried Don Ippolito, almost angrily. “ Can there be any higher thing in heaven or on earth than love for such a woman? ”

“ Yes; both in heaven and on earth,” answered Ferris.

“ I do not understand you,” said Don Ippolito with a puzzled stare.

Ferris did not reply. He fell into a dull reverie in which he seemed to forget Don Ippolito and the whole affair. At last the priest spoke again: “ Have you nothing to say to me, signore? ”

“ I? What is there to say? ” returned the other blankly.

“ Do you know any reason why I should not love her, save that I am — have been — a priest? ”

“ No, I know none,” said the painter, wearily.

“ Ah,” exclaimed Don Ippolito, “ there is something on your mind that you will not speak, I beseech you notto let me go wrong. I love her so well that I would rather die than let my love offend her. I am a man with the passions and hopes of a man, but without a man’s experience, or a man’s knowledge of what is just and right in these relations. If you can be my friend in this so far as to advise or warn me; if you can be her friend ” —

Ferris abruptly rose and went to his balcony, and looked out upon the Grand Canal. The time-stained palace opposite had not changed in the last halfhour. As on many another summer day, he saw the black boats going by. A heavy, high-pointed barge from the Sile, with the captain’s family at dinner in the shade of a matting on the roof, moved sluggishly down the middle current. A party of Americans in a gondola, with their opera-glasses and guide-books in their hands, pointed out to each other the eagle on the consular arms. They were all like sights in a mirror, or things in a world turned upside down.

Ferris came back and looked dizzily at the priest, trying to believe that this unhuman, sacerdotal phantasm had been telling him that it loved a beautiful young girl of his own race, faith, and language.

“ Will you not answer me, signore ?” meekly demanded Don Ippolito.

“ In this matter,” replied the painter, “ I cannot advise or warn you. The whole affair is beyond my conception. I mean no unkindness, but I cannot consult with you about it. There are reasons why I should not. The mother of Miss Vervain is here with her, and I do not feel that her interests in such a matter are in my hands. If they come to me for help, that is different. What do you wish? You tell me that you are resolved to renounce the priesthood and go to America; and I have answered you to the best of my power. You tell me that you are in love with Miss Vervain. What can I have to say about that? ”

Don Ippolito stood listening with a patient, and then a wounded air. “ Nothing,” he answered proudly. “ I ask your pardon for troubling you with my affairs. Your former kindness emboldened me too much. I shall not trespass again. It was my ignorance, which I pray you to excuse. I take my leave, signore.”

He bowed, and moved out of the room, and a dull remorse filled the painter, as he heard the outer door close after him. But he could do nothing. If he had given a wound to the heart that trusted him, it was in an anguish which he had not been able to master, and whose causes he could not yet define. It was all a shapeless torment; it held him like the memory of some hideous nightmare prolonging its horror beyond sleep. It seemed impossible that what had happened should have happened.

It was long, as he sat in the chair from which he had talked with Don Ippolito, before he could reason about what, had been said; and then the worst phase presented itself first. He could not help seeing that the priest might have found cause for hope in the girl’s behavior toward him. Her violent resentments, and her equally violent repentances; her fervent interest in his unhappy fortunes, and her anxiety that he should at once forsake the priesthood; her urging him to go to America, and her promising him a home under her mother’s roof there: why might it not all he in fact a proof of her tenderness for him? She might have found it necessary to he thus coarsely explicit with him, for a man in Don Ippolito’s relation to her could not otherwise have imagined her interest in him. But her making use of Ferris to confirm her own purposes by his words, her repeating them so that they should come back to him from Don Ippolito’s lips, her letting another man go with her to look upon the procession in which her priestly lover was to appear in his sacerdotal panoply; these things could not be accounted for except by that strain of insolent, passionate defiance which he had noted in her from the beginning. Why should she first tell Don Ippolito of their going away? “ Well, I wish him joy of his bargain,” said Ferris aloud, and rising, shrugged his shoulders, and tried to cast off all care of a matter that did not concern him. But one does not so easily cast off a matter that does not concern one. He found himself haunted by certain tones and looks and attitudes of the young girl, utterly alien to the character he had just constructed for her. They were child-like, trusting, unconscious, far beyond anything he had yet known in women, and they appealed to him now with a maddening pathos. She was standing there before Don Ippolito’s picture as on that morning when she came to Ferris, looking anxiously at him, her innocent beauty, troubled with some hidden care, hallowing the place. Ferris thought of the young fellow who told him that he had spent three months in a dull German town because he had the room there that was once occupied by the girl who had refused him; the painter remembered that the young fellow said he had just read of her marriage in an American newspaper.

Why did Miss Vervain send Don Ippolito to him? Was it some scheme of her secret love for the priest; or mere coarse resentment, of the cautions Ferris had once hinted, a piece of vulgar bravado? But if she had acted throughout in pure simplicity, in unwise goodness of heart? If Don Ippolito were altogether self-deceived, and nothing but her unknowing pity had given him grounds of hope? He himself had suggested this to the priest, and now with a different motive he looked at it in his own behalf. A great load began slowly to lift itself from Ferris’s heart, which could ache now for this most unhappy priest. But if his conjecture were just, his duty would be different. He must not coldly acquiesce and let things take their course. He had introduced Don Ippolito to the Vervains; he was in some sort responsible for him; he must save them if possible from the painful consequences of the priest’s hallucination. But how to do this was by no means clear. He blamed himself for not having been franker with Don Ippolito and tried to make him see that the Vervains might regard his passion as a presumption upon their kindness to him, an abuse of their hospitable friendship; and yet how could he have done this without outrage to a sensitive and rightmeaning soul? For a moment it seemed to him that he must seek Don Ippolito, and repair his fault; but they had hardly parted as friends, and his action might be easily misconstrued. If he shrank from the thought of speaking to him of the matter again, it appeared yet more impossible to bring It before the Vervains. Like a man of the imaginative temperament as he was, he exaggerated the probable effect, and pictured their dismay in colors that made his interference seem a ludicrous enormity; in fact, it would have been an awkward business enough for one not hampered by his intricate obligations. He felt bound to the Vervains, the ignorant young girl, and the addle-pated mother; but if he ought to go to them and tell them what he knew, to which of them ought he to speak, and how? In an anguish of perplexity that made the sweat stand in drops upon his forehead, he smiled to think it just possible that Mrs. Vervain might take the matter seriously, and wish to consider the propriety of Florida’s accepting Don Ippolito. But if he spoke to the daughter, how should he approach the subject? “ Don Ippolito tells me he loves you, and he goes to America with the expectation that when he has made his fortune with a patent back-action apple-corer, you will marry him.” Should he say something to this purport? And in Heaven’s name what right had he, Ferris, to say anything at all? The horrible absurdity, the inexorable delicacy of his position made him laugh.

On the other hand, besides, he was bound to Don Ippolito, who had come to him as the nearest friend of both, and confided in him. He remembered with a tardy, poignant intelligence how in their first talk of the Vervains Don Ippolito had taken pains to inform himself that Ferris was not in love with Florida. Could he be less manly and generous than this poor priest, and violate the sanctity of his confidence? Ferris groaned aloud. No, contrive it as he would, call it by what fair name he chose, he could not commit this treachery. It was the more impossible to him because, in this agony of doubt as to what he should do, he now at least read his own heart clearly, and had no longer a doubt what was in it. He pitied her for the pain she must suffer. He saw how her simple goodness, her blind sympathy with Don Ippolito, and only this, must have led the priest to the mistaken pass at which he stood. But Ferris felt that the whole affair had been fatally carried beyond his reach; he could do nothing now but wait and endure. There are cases in which a man must not protect the woman he loves. This was one.

The afternoon wore away. In the evening he went to the Piazza, and* drank a cup of coffee at Florian’s. Then he walked to the Public Gardens, where he watched the crowd till it thinned in the twilight and left him alone. He hung upon the parapet, looking off over the lagoon that at last he perceived to be flooded with moonlight. He desperately called a gondola, and bade the man row him to the public landing nearest the Vervains’, and so walked up the calle, and entered the palace from the campo, through the court that on one side opened into the garden.

Mrs. Vervain was alone in the room where he had always been accustomed to find her daughter with her, and a chill as of the impending change fell upon him. lie felt how pleasant it had been to find them together; with a vain, piercing regret he felt, how much like home the place had been to him. Mrs. Vervain, indeed, was not changed; she was even more than ever herself, though all that she said imported change. She seemed to observe nothing unwonted in him, and she began to talk in her way of things that she could not know were so near his heart.

“Now, Mr. Ferris, I have a little surprise for you. Guess what it is ! ”

“ I !m not good at guessing. I’d rather not know what it is than have to guess it,” said Ferris, trying to be light, under his heavy trouble.

“ You won’t try once, even? Well, you ’re going to be rid of us soon! We are going away.”

“ Yes, I knew that,” said Ferris quietly. “Don Ippolito told me so today.”

“ And is that all you have to say? Is n’t it rather sad? Isn’t it sudden? Come, Mr. Ferris, do be a little complimentary, for once! ”

“ It’s sudden, and I can assure you it’s sad enough for me,” replied the painter, in a tone which could not leave any doubt of his sincerity.

“Well, so it is for us,” quavered Mrs. Vervain. “ You have been very, very good to us,” she went on more collectedly, “ and we shall never forget it. Florida has been speaking of it, too, and she’s extremely grateful, and thinks we’ve quite imposed upon you.”

“ Thanks.”

“ I suppose we have, but as I always say, you ’re the representative of the country here. However, that’s neither here nor there. We have no relatives on the face of the earth, you know; but I have a good many old friends in Providence, and we’re going back there. We both think I shall he better at home; for 1 ’m sorry to say, Mr. Ferris, that though I don’t complain of Venice, — it’s really a beautiful place, and all that; not the least exaggerated, —still I don’t think it’s done my health much good; or at least I don’t seem to gain, don’t you know, I don’t seem to gain.”

“I’m very sorry to hear it, Mrs. Vervain.”

“ Yes, I’m sure you are; but you see, don’t you, that we must go? We are going next week. When we’ve once made up our minds, there’s no object in prolonging the agony.”

Mrs. Vervain adjusted her glasses with the thumb and finger of her right hand, and peered into Ferris’s face with a gay smile. “ But the greatest part of the surprise is,” she resumed, lowering her voice a little, “that Don Ippolito is going with us.”

“ Ah!” cried Ferris sharply.

“ I knew I should surprise you, laughed Mrs. Vervain. “We’ve been having a regular confab— clave, I mean — about it here, and he’s all on fire to goto America: though it must be kept a great secret on his account, poor fellow. He ’s to join us in France, and then he can easily get into England, with us. You know he’s to give up being a priest, and is going to devote himself to invention when he gets to America. Now, what do you think of it, Mr. Ferris? Quite strikes you dumb, doesn’t it ?” triumphed Mrs. Vervain. " I suppose it ’s what you would call a wild goose chase, — I used to pick up all those phrases, —but we shall carry it through.”

Ferris gasped, as though about to speak, but said nothing.

“ Don Ippolito ’s been here the whole afternoon,” continued Mrs. Vervain, “ or rather ever since about five o’clock. He took dinner with us, and we’ve been talking it over and over. He’s so enthusiastic about it, and yet he breaks down every little while, and seems quite to despair of the undertaking. But Florida won’t let him do that; and really it’s funny, the way he defers to her judgment — yon know I always regard Florida as such a mere child — and seems to take every word she says for gospel. But, shedding tears, now: it’s dreadful in a man, is n’t it? I wish Don Ippolito would n’t do that. It makes one creep. I can’t feel that it ’s manly; can you ?”

Ferris found voice to say something about those things being different with the Latin races.

“ Well, at any rate,” said Mrs. Vervain, “I'm glad that Americans don’t shed tears, as a general rule. Now, Florida: you’d think she was the man all through this business, she’s so perfectly heroic about it; that is, outwardly: for I can see — women can, in each other, Mr. Ferris — just where she’s on the point of breaking down, all the while. Has she ever spoken to you about Don Ippolito? She does think so highly of your opinion, Mr. Ferris.”

“ She does me too much honor,” said Ferris, with ghastly irony.

“ Oh, I don’t think so,” returned Mrs. Vervain. " She told me this morning that she’d made Don Ippolito promise to speak to you about it; but he didn’t mention having done so, and — I hated, don’t you know, to ask him. ... In fact, Florida had told me beforehand that I mustn’t. She said he must be left entirely to himself in the matter, and ” — Mrs. Vervain looked suggestively at Ferris.

“ He spoke to me about it,” said Ferris.

“ Then why in the world did you let me run on? I suppose you advised him against it.”

“ I certainly did.”

“ Well, there’s where I think woman’s intuition is better than man’s reason.”

The painter silently bowed his head.

“ Yes, I’m quite woman’s rights in that, respect,” said Mrs. Vervain.

“ Oh, without doubt,” answered Ferris, aimlessly,

“I’m perfectly delighted,”she went on, " at the idea of Don Ippolito’s giving up the priesthood, and I’ve told him he must get married to some good American girl. You ought to have seen how the poor fellow blushed! But really, you know, there are lots of nice girls that would jump at him — so handsome and sad-looking, and a genius.”

Ferris could only stare helplessly at Mrs. Vervain, wdio continued : —

“ Yes, I think he’s a genius, and I’m determined that he shall have a chance. I suppose we’ve got a job on our hands; but I’m not sorry. I ’ll introduce him into society, and if he needs money he shall have it. What does God give us money for, Mr. Ferris, but to help our fellow-creatures? ”

So miserable, as he was, from head to foot, that it seemed impossible he could endure more, Ferris could not forbear laughing at this burst of piety.

“ What are you laughing at? ” asked Mrs. Vervain, who had cheerfully joined him. " Something I’ve been saying. Well, you won’t have me to laugh at much longer. I do wonder whom you ’ll have next.”

Ferris’s merriment died away in something like a groan, and when Mrs. Vervain again spoke, it was in a tone of sudden querulousness. " I wish Florida would come! She went to bolt the land-gate after Don Ippolito, — I wanted her to, — but she ought to have been back long ago. It’s odd you didn’t meet them, coming in. She must be in the garden somewhere; I suppose she ’s sorry to be leaving it. But I need her. Would you be so very kind, Mr. Ferris, as to go and ask her to come to me? ”

Ferris rose heavily from the chair in which he seemed to have grown ten years older. He had hardly heard anything that he did not know already, but the clear vision of the affair with which he had come to the Vervains was hopelessly confused and darkened. He could make nothing of any phase of it. He did not know whether he cared to see Florida or not. He mechanically obeyed Mrs. Vervain, and stepping out upon the terrace, slowly descended the stairway.

The moon was shining brightly into the garden.

XV.

Florida and Don Ippolito had paused in the pathway which parted at the fountain and led in one direction to the water-gate, and in the other out through the palace-court into the campo.

“ Now, you must not give way to despair again,” she said to him. “ You will succeed, I am sure, for you will deserve success.”

“ It is all your goodness, madamigella,” sighed the priest, “ and at the bottom of my heart I am afraid that all the hope and courage I have are also yours.”

“ You shall never want for hope and courage then. We believe in you, and we honor your purpose, and we will be your steadfast friends. But now you must think only of the present —of how you are to get away from Venice. Oh, I can understand how you must hate to leave it! What a beautiful night! You must n’t expect such moonlight as this in America, Don Ippolito.”

“ It is beautiful, is it not? ” said the priest, kindling from her. “ But I think we Venetians are never so conscious of the beauty of Venice as you strangers are.”

“ I don’t know. I only know that now, since we have made up our minds to go, and fixed the day and hour, it is more like leaving my own country than anything else I’ve ever felt. This garden, I seem to have spent my whole life in it; and when we are settled in Providence, I’m going to have mother send back for some of these statues. I suppose Signor Cavaletti would n’t mind our robbing his place of them if he were paid enough. At any rate we must have this one that belongs to the fountain. You shall be the first to set the fountain playing over there, Don Ippolito, and then we ’ll sit down on this stone bench before it, and imagine ourselves in the garden of Casa Vervain at Venice.”

“ Ho, no; let me be the last to set it playing here,” said the priest, quickly stooping to the pipe at the foot of the figure, “ and then we will sit down here, and imagine ourselves in the garden of Casa Vervain at Providence.”

Florida put her hand on his shoulder. “ You must n’t do it,” she said simply. “ The padrone does n’t like to waste the water.”

“ Oh, we ’ll pray the saints to rain it back on him some day,” cried Don Ippolito with willful levity, and the stream leaped into the moonlight and seemed to hang there like a tangled skein of silver.

“ But how shall I shut it off when you are gone? ” asked the young girl, looking ruefully at the floating threads of splendor.

“ Oh, I will shut it off before I go,” answered Don Ippolito. “ Let it play a moment,” he continued, gazing rapturously upon it, while the moon painted his lifted face with a pallor that his black robes heightened. He fetched a long, sighing breath, as if he inhaled with that respiration the rich odors of the flowers, blanched like his own visage in the strong unluminous brightness; as if he absorbed into his heart at once the wide glory of the summer night, and the beauty of the young girl at his side.

It seemed a supreme moment with him; he looked as a man might look who has climbed out of life-long defeat into a single instant of release and triumph.

Florida sank upon the bench before the fountain, indulging his caprice with that sacred, motherly tolerance, some touch of which is in all womanly yielding to men’s will, and which was perhaps present in greater degree in her feeling towards a man more than ordinarily orphaned and unfriended.

“ Is Providence your native city? ” asked Don Ippolito, abruptly, after a little silence.

“ Oh no; I was born at St. Augustine in Florida.”

“ Ah yes, I forgot; madama has told me about it; Providence is her city. But the two are near together? ”

“ No,” said Florida, compassionately, “ they are a thousand miles apart.”

“ A thousand miles? What a vast country! ”

“ Yes, it’s a whole world.”

“ Ah, a world, indeed !” cried the priest, softly. “ I shall never comprehend it.”

“ You never will,” answered the young girl gravely, “ if you do not think about it more practically.”

“ Practically, practically! ” lightly retorted the priest. “ What a word with you Americans! That is the consul’s word: practical.”

“ Then you have been to see him today? ” asked Florida, with eagerness.

“ I wanted to ask you ” —

“ Yes, I went to consult the oracle, as you bade me.”

“ Don Ippolito ” —

“ And he was averse to my going to America. He said it was not practical.”

“ Oh! ” murmured the girl.

“ I think,” continued the priest with vehemence, “ that Signor Ferris is no longer my friend.”

“ Did he treat you coldly — harshly? ” she asked, with a note of indignation in her voice. “ Did he know that I — that you came ” —

“ Perhaps he was right. Perhaps I shall indeed go to ruin there. Ruin, ruin ! Do I not live ruin here ? ”

“ What did he say — what did he tell you? ”

“ No, no; not now, madamigella! I do not want to think of that man, now. I want you to help me once more to realize myself in America, where I shall never have been a priest, where I shall at least battle even-handed with the world. Come, let us forget him; the thought of him palsies all my hope. He could not see me save in this robe, in this figure that I abhor.”

“ Oh, it was strange, it was not like him, it was cruel ! What did he say? ”

“ In everything but words, he bade me despair ; he bade me look upon all that makes life dear and noble as impossible to me! ”

“ Ok, how? Perhaps he did not understand you. No, he did not understand you. What did you say to him, Don Ippolito? Tell me !” She leaned towards him, in anxious emotion, as she spoke.

The priest rose, and stretched out his arms, as if he would gather something of courage from the infinite space. In his visage were the sublimity and the terror of a man who puts everything to the risk.

“ How will it really be with me, yonder? ” he demanded. “As it is with other men, whom their past life, if it has been guiltless, does not follow to that, new world of freedom and justice ? ”

“ Why should it not be so? ” demanded Florida. “ Did he say it would not ? ”

“ Need it be known there that I have been a priest? Or if I tell it, will it make me appear a kind of monster, different from other men? ”

“ No, no !” she answered fervently. “ Your story would gain friends and honor for you everywhere in America. Did he ” —

“ A moment, a moment! ” cried Don Ippolito, catching his breath. “ Will it ever be possible for me to win something more than honor and friendship there? ”

She looked up at him askingly, confusedly.

“ If I am a man, and the time should ever come that a face, a look, a voice. shall be to me what they are to other men, will she remember it against me that I have been a priest, when I tell her — say to her, madamigella — how dear she is to me, offer her my life’s devotion, ask her to be my wife ” . . .

Florida rose from the seat, and stood confronting him, in a helpless silence, which he seemed not to notice.

Suddenly he clasped his hands together, and desperately stretched them towards her.

“ Oh, my hope, my trust, my life, if it were you that I loved? ” . . .

“ What! ” shuddered the girl, recoiling, with almost a shriek. " You? A priest! ”

Don Ippolito gave a low cry, half laugh, half sob: —

“ His words, his words! It is true, I cannot escape, I am doomed, I must die as I have lived! ”

He dropped his face into his hands, and stood with his head bowed before her; neither spoke for a long time, or moved.

Then Florida said absently, in the husky murmur to which her voice fell when she was strongly moved, “ Yes, I see it all, how it has been,” and was silent again, staring, as if a proeession of the events and scenes of the past months were passing before her; and presently she moaned to herself, " Oh, oh, oh! " and wrung her hands.

The foolish fountain kept capering and babbling on. All at once, now, as a flame flashes up and then expires, it leaped and dropped extinct at the foot of the statue.

Its going out seemed somehow to leave them in darkness, and under cover of that gloom she drew nearer the priest, and by such approaches as one makes toward a fancied apparition, when his fear will not let him fly, but it seems better to suffer the worst from it at once than to live in terror of it ever after, she lifted her hands to his, and gently taking them away from his face, looked into his hopeless eyes.

“ Oh, Don Ippolito,” she grieved. “ What shall I say to you, what can I do for you, now? ”

But there was nothing to do. The whole edifice of his dreams, his wild imaginations, had fallen into dust at a word; no magic could rebuild it; the end that never seems the end had come. He let her keep his cold hands, and presently he returned the entreaty of her tears with his wan, patient smile.

“ You cannot help me; there is no help for an error like mine. Sometime, if ever the thought of me is a greater pain than it is at this moment, you can forgive me. Yes, you can do that for me.”

“ But who, who will ever forgive me,” she cried, “ for my blindness! Oh, you must believe that I never thought, I never dreamt ” —

“ I know it well. It was your fatal truth that did it; truth too high and fine for me to have discerned save through such agony as — You too loved my soul, like the rest, and you would have had me no priest for the reason that they would have had me a priest — I see it. But you had no right to love my soul and not me — you, a woman. A woman must not love only the soul of a man.”

“ Yes, yes! ” piteously explained the girl, “ but you were a priest to me! ”

“ That is true, madamigella. I was always a priest to you; and now I see that I never could he otherwise. Ah, the wrong began many years before we met. I was trying to blame you a little ” —

“ Blame me, blame me; do! ”

— “ but there is no blame. Think that it was another way of asking your forgiveness. . . . O my God, my God, my God !”

He released his hands from her, and uttered this cry under his breath, with his face lifted towards the heavens. When he looked at her again, he said: " Madamigella, if my share of this misery gives me the right to ask of you " —

“ Oh ask anything of me! I will give everything, do everything! ”

He faltered, and then, “ You do not love me,” he said abruptly; " is there some one else that you love? ”

She did not answer.

“ Is it ... he? ”

She hid her face.

“ I knew it,” groaned the priest, “ I knew that, too! ” and he turned away.

“ Don Ippolito, Don Ippolito — oh, poor, poor Don Ippolito! ” cried the girl, springing towards him. “ Is this the way you leave me ? Where are you going? What will you do now? ”

“ Did I not say? I am going to die a priest.”

“ Is there nothing that you will let me be to you, hope for you? ”

“ Nothing,” said Don Ippolito, after a moment. “ What could there be? ” He seized (he hands imploringly extended towards him, and clasped them together and kissed them both. “ Adieu! ” he whispered; then he opened them, and passionately kissed either palm; “ adieu, adieu! ”

A great wave of sorrow and compassion and despair for him swept through her. She flung her arms about his neck, and pulled his head down upon her heart, and held it tight there, weeping and moaning over him as over some hapless, harmless thing that she had unpurposely bruised or killed. Then she suddenly put her hand against his breast, and thrust him away, and turned and ran.

Ferris stepped back again into the shadow of the tree from which he had just emerged, and clung to its trunk lest he should fall. Another seemed to creep out of the court in his person, and totter across the white glare of the campo and down the blackness of the calle. In the intersected spaces where the moonlight fell, this alien, miserable man saw the figure of a priest gliding on before him.

W. D. Howells.