 | XII. A foregone conclusion |  |
12. XII.
The day was one of those which can come to the
world only in early June at Venice. The heaven
was without a cloud, but a blue haze made mystery
of the horizon where the lagoon and sky met unseen.
The breath of the sea bathed in freshness
the city at whose feet her tides sparkled and slept.
The great square of St. Mark was transformed
from a mart, from a salon, to a temple. The shops
under the colonnades that inclose it upon three
sides were shut; the caffès, before which the circles
of idle coffee-drinkers and sherbet-eaters ordinarily
spread out into the Piazza, were repressed to the
limits of their own doors; the stands of the watervenders,
the baskets of those that sold oranges of
Palermo and black cherries of Padua, had vanished
from the base of the church of St. Mark, which
with its dim splendor of mosaics and its carven
luxury of pillar and arch and finial rose like the
high-altar, ineffably rich and beautiful, of the vaster
temple whose inclosure it completed. Before it
stood the three great red flag-staffs, like painted
tapers before an altar, and from them hung the
Austrian flags of red and white, and yellow and
black.
In the middle of the square stood the Austrian
with his gold-headed staff uplifted. During the
night a light colonnade of wood, rooded with blue
cloth, had been put up around the inside of the
Piazza, and under this now paused the long pomp
of the ecclesiastical procession — the priests of all
the Venetian churches in their richest vestments,
followed in their order by facchini, in white sandals
and gay robes, with caps of scarlet, white, green,
and blue, who bore huge painted candles and silken
banners displaying the symbol or the portrait of the
titular saints of the several churches, and supported
the canopies under which the host of each was elevated.
Before the clergy went a company of Austrian
soldiers, and behind the facchini came a long
array of religious societies, charity-school boys in
uniforms, old paupers in holiday dress, little naked
urchins with shepherds' crooks and bits of fleece
about their loins like John the Baptist in the Wilderness,
little girls with angels' wings and crowns,
the monks of the various orders, and civilian penitents
of all sorts in cloaks or dress-coats, hooded or
bareheaded, and carrying each a lighted taper.
The corridors under the Imperial Palace and the
New and Old Procuratie were packed with spectators;
from every window up and down the fronts
of the palaces, gay stuffs were flung; the startled
doves of St. Mark perched upon the cornices, or
fluttered uneasily to and fro above the crowd.
The baton of the band leader descended with a
charity-boys sang shrill, a vast noise of shuffling
feet arose, mixed with the foliage-like rustling of
the sheets of tinsel attached to the banners and
candles in the procession: the whole strange, gorgeous
picture came to life.
After all her plans and preparations, Mrs. Vervain
had not felt well enough that morning to come
to the spectacle which she had counted so much
upon seeing, but she had therefore insisted the more
that her daughter should go, and Ferris now stood
with Florida alone at a window in the Old Procuratie.
“Well, what do you think, Miss Vervain?” he
asked, when their senses had somewhat accustomed
themselves to the noise of the procession; “do you
say now that Venice is too gloomy a city to have
ever had any possibility of gayety in her?”
“I never said that,” answered Florida, opening
her eyes upon him.
“Neither did I,” returned Ferris, “but I 've
often thought it, and I 'm not sure now but I 'm
right. There 's something extremely melancholy
to me in all this. I don't care so much for what
one may call the deplorable superstition expressed
in the spectacle, but the mere splendid sight and
the music are enough to make one shed tears. I
don't know anything more affecting except a procession
of lantern-lit gondolas and barges on the
Grand Canal. It 's phantasmal. It 's the spectral
It 's not even the ghost, it 's the corpse, of other
ages that 's haunting Venice. The city ought to
have been destroyed by Napoleon when he destroyed
the Republic, and thrown overboard — St.
Mark, Winged Lion, Bucentaur, and all. There is
no land like America for true cheerfulness and
light-heartedness. Think of our Fourth of Julys
and our State Fairs. Selah!”
Ferris looked into the girl's serious face with
twinkling eyes. He liked to embarrass her gravity
with his antic speeches, and enjoyed her endeavors
to find an earnest meaning in them, and her evident
trouble when she could find none.
“I 'm curious to know how our friend will look,”
he began again, as he arranged the cushion on the
window-sill for Florida's greater comfort in watching
the spectacle, “but it won't be an easy matter
to pick him out in this masquerade, I fancy. Candle-carrying,
as well as the other acts of devotion,
seems rather out of character with Don Ippolito,
and I can't imagine his putting much soul into it.
However, very few of the clergy appear to do that.
Look at those holy men with their eyes to the
wind! They are wondering who is the bella bionda
at the window here.”
Florida listened to his persiflage with an air of
sad distraction. She was intent upon the procession
as it approached from the other side of the
Piazza, and she replied at random to his comments
on the different bodies that formed it.
“It 's very hard to decide which are my favorites,”
he continued, surveying the long column
through an opera-glass. “My religious disadvantages
have been such that I don't care much for
priests or monks, or young John the Baptists, or
small female cherubim, but I do like little charity-boys
with voices of pins and needles and hair cut à
la dead-rabbit. I should like, if it were consistent
with the consular dignity, to go down and rub their
heads. I 'm fond, also, of old charity-boys, I find.
Those paupers make one in love with destitute and
dependent age, by their aspect of irresponsible enjoyment.
See how briskly each of them topples
along on the leg that he has n't got in the grave!
How attractive likewise are the civilian devotees in
those imperishable dress-coats of theirs! Observe
their high collars of the era of the Holy Alliance:
they and their fathers and their grandfathers before
them have worn those dress-coats; in a hundred
years from now their posterity will keep holiday in
them. I should like to know the elixir by which
the dress-coats of civil employees render themselves
immortal. Those penitents in the cloaks and cowls
are not bad, either, Miss Vervain. Come, they add
a very pretty touch of mystery to this spectacle.
They 're the sort of thing that painters are expected
to paint in Venice — that people sigh over as so
peculiarly Venetian. If you 've a single sentiment
about you, Miss Vervain, now is the time to produce
it.”
“But I have n't. I'm afraid I have no sentiment
at all,” answered the girl ruefully. “But this
makes me dreadfully sad.”
“Why that 's just what I was saying a while
ago. Excuse me, Miss Vervain, but your sadness
lacks novelty; it 's a sort of plagiarism.”
“Don't, please,” she pleaded yet more earnestly.
“I was just thinking — I don't know why such an
awful thought should come to me — that it might
all be a mistake after all; perhaps there might not
be any other world, and every bit of this power and
display of the church — our church as well as the
rest — might be only a cruel blunder, a dreadful
mistake. Perhaps there is n't even any God! Do
you think there is?”
“I don't think it,” said Ferris gravely, “I know
it. But I don't wonder that this sight makes you
doubt. Great God! How far it is from Christ!
Look there, at those troops who go before the followers
of the Lamb: their trade is murder. In a
minute, if a dozen men called out, `Long live the
King of Italy!' it would be the duty of those soldiers
to fire into the helpless crowd. Look at the
silken and gilded pomp of the servants of the carpenter's
son! Look at those miserable monks, voluntary
prisoners, beggars, aliens to their kind!
Look at those penitents who think that they can
get forgiveness for their sins by carrying a candle
round the square! And it is nearly two thousand
years since the world turned Christian! It is
Him from their own experience of evil. I imagine
the kingdom of heaven is a sort of republic, and
that God draws men to Him only through their
perfect freedom.”
“Yes, yes, it must be so,” answered Florida,
staring down on the crowd with unseeing eyes,
“but I can't fix my mind on it. I keep thinking
the whole time of what we were talking about yesterday.
I never could have dreamed of a priest's
disbelieving; but now I can't dream of anything
else. It seems to me that none of these priests or
monks can believe anything. Their faces look false
and sly and bad — all of them!”
“No, no, Miss Vervain,” said Ferris, smiling at
her despair, “you push matters a little beyond —
as a woman has a right to do, of course. I don't
think their faces are bad, by any means. Some of
them are dull and torpid, and some are frivolous,
just like the faces of other people. But I 've been
noticing the number of good, kind, friendly faces,
and they 're in the majority, just as they are
amongst other people; for there are very few souls
altogether out of drawing, in my opinion. I 've
even caught sight of some faces in which there was
a real rapture of devotion, and now and then a very
innocent one. Here, for instance, is a man I should
like to bet on, if he 'd only look up.”
The priest whom Ferris indicated was slowly advancing
toward the space immediately under their
and in his hand he carried a lighted taper. He
moved with a gentle tread, and the droop of his
slender figure intimated a sort of despairing weariness.
While most of his fellows stared carelessly
or curiously about them, his face was downcast and
averted.
Suddenly the procession paused, and a hush fell
upon the vast assembly. Then the silence was
broken by the rustle and stir of all those thousands
going down upon their knees, as the cardinal-patriarch
lifted his hands to bless them.
The priest upon whom Ferris and Florida had
fixed their eyes faltered a moment, and before he
knelt his next neighbor had to pluck him by the
skirt. Then he too knelt hastily, mechanically
lifting his head, and glancing along the front of
the Old Procuratie. His face had that weariness
in it which his figure and movement had suggested,
and it was very pale, but it was yet more singular
for the troubled innocence which its traits expressed.
“There,” whispered Ferris, “that 's what I call
an uncommonly good face.”
Florida raised her hand to silence him, and the
heavy gaze of the priest rested on them coldly at
first. Then a light of recognition shot into his eyes
and a flush suffused his pallid visage, which seemed
to grow the more haggard and desperate. His
head fell again, and he dropped the candle from
side of the procession, to gather the drippings of the
tapers, restored it to him.
“Why,” said Ferris aloud, “it 's Don Ippolito!
Did you know him at first?”
| XII. A foregone conclusion | |