 | V. A foregone conclusion |  |
5. V.
It was understood that Don Ippolito should come
every morning at ten o'clock, and read and talk
with Miss Vervain for an hour or two; but Mrs.
Vervain's hospitality was too aggressive for the letter
of the agreement. She oftener had him to
breakfast at nine, for, as she explained to Ferris,
she could not endure to have him feel that it was
a mere mercenary transaction, and there was no
limit fixed for the lessons on these days. When
she could, she had Ferris come, too, and she missed
him when he did not come. “I like that bluntness
of his,” she professed to her daughter, “and I don't
mind his making light of me. You are so apt to
be heavy if you 're not made light of occasionally.
I certainly should n't want a son to be so respectful
and obedient as you are, my dear.”
The painter honestly returned her fondness, and
with not much greater reason. He saw that she
took pleasure in his talk, and enjoyed it even when
she did not understand it; and this is a kind of
flattery not easy to resist. Besides, there was very
little ladies' society in Venice in those times, and
Ferris, after trying the little he could get at, had
gladly denied himself its pleasures, and consorted
with the young men he met at the caffès, or in the
to him the younger days in which he had delighted
in the companionship of women. After so
long disuse, it was charming to be with a beautiful
girl who neither regarded him with distrust nor expected
him to ask her in marriage because he sat
alone with her, rode out with her in a gondola,
walked with her, read with her. All young men
like a house in which no ado is made about their
coming and going, and Mrs. Vervain perfectly understood
the art of letting him make himself at
home. He perceived with amusement that this
amiable lady, who never did an ungraceful thing
nor wittingly said an ungracious one, was very
much of a Bohemian at heart, — the gentlest and
most blameless of the tribe, but still lawless, —
whether from her campaigning married life, or the
rovings of her widowhood, or by natural disposition;
and that Miss Vervain was inclined to be
conventionally strict, but with her irregular training
was at a loss for rules by which to check her mother's
little way wardnesses. Her anxious perplexity,
at times, together with her heroic obedience and
unswerving loyalty to her mother had something
pathetic as well as amusing in it. He saw her tried
almost to tears by her mother's helpless frankness,
— for Mrs. Vervain was apparently one of those
ladies whom the intolerable surprise of having anything
come into their heads causes instantly to say
or do it, — and he observed that she never tried to
seemed to defy him to think what he would of it.
Perhaps she was not able to do otherwise: he
thought of her at times as a person wholly abandoned
to the truth. Her pride was on the alert
against him; she may have imagined that he was
covertly smiling at her, and she no doubt tasted the
ironical flavor of much of his talk and behavior,
for in those days he liked to qualify his devotion
to the Vervains with a certain nonchalant slight,
which, while the mother openly enjoyed it, filled
the daughter with anger and apprehension. Quite
at random, she visited points of his informal manner
with unmeasured reprisal; others, for which he
might have blamed himself, she passed over with
strange caprice. Sometimes this attitude of hers
provoked him, and sometimes it disarmed him; but
whether they were at feud, or keeping an armed
truce, or, as now and then happened, were in an
entente cordiale which he found very charming, the
thing that he always contrived to treat with silent
respect and forbearance in Miss Vervain was that
sort of aggressive tenderness with which she hastened
to shield the foibles of her mother. That
was something very good in her pride, he finally decided.
At the same time, he did not pretend to
understand the curious filial self-sacrifice which it
involved.
Another thing in her that puzzled him was her
devoutness. Mrs. Vervain could with difficulty be
of the English ritual in the old palace where the
British and American tourists assembled once a
week with their guide-books in one pocket and their
prayer-books in the other, and burried the tomahawk
under the altar. Mr. Ferris was often sent with
her; and then his thoughts, which were a young
man's, wandered from the service to the beautiful
girl at his side, — the golden head that punctiliously
bowed itself at the proper places in the liturgy:
the full lips that murmured the responses; the
silken lashes that swept her pale cheeks as she perused
the morning lesson. He knew that the Vervains
were not Episcopalians when at home, for
Mrs. Vervain had told him so, and that Florida
went to the English service because there was no
other. He conjectured that perhaps her touch of
ritualism came from mere love of any form she
could make sure of.
The servants in Mrs. Vervain's lightly ordered
household, with the sympathetic quickness of the
Italians, learned to use him as the next friend of
the family, and though they may have had their
decorous surprise at his untrammeled footing, they
probably excused the whole relation as a phase of
that foreign eccentricity to which their nation is so
amiable. If they were not able to cast the same
mantle of charity over Don Ippolito's allegiance,
— and doubtless they had their reserves concerning
such frankly familiar treatment of so dubious a
somewhat in awe of him; they had the spontaneous
loyalty of their race to the people they served,
and they never intimated by a look that they found
it strange when Don Ippolito freely came and went.
Mrs. Vervain had quite adopted him into her family:
while her daughter seemed more at ease with
him than with Ferris, and treated him with a grave
politeness which had something also of compassion
and of child-like reverence in it. Ferris observed
that she was always particularly careful of his supposable
sensibilities as a Roman Catholic, and that
the priest was oddly indifferent to this deference, as
if it would have mattered very little to him whether
his church was spared or not. He had a way of
lightly avoiding, Ferris fancied, not only religious
points on which they could disagree, but all phases
of religion as matters of indifference. At such
times Miss Vervain relaxed her reverential attitude,
and used him with something like rebuke, as if it
did not please her to have the representative of even
an alien religion slight his office; as if her respect
were for his priesthood and her compassion for him
personally. That was rather hard for Don Ippolito,
Ferris thought, and waited to see him snubbed outright
some day, when he should behave without sufficient
gravity.
The blossoms came and went upon the pomegranate
and almond trees in the garden, and some
of the earliest roses were in their prime; everywhere
strutting nymphs was forced into a sort of decent
seclusion, but the careless naiad of the fountain
burnt in sunlight that subtly increased its fervors
day by day, and it was no longer beginning to be
warm, it was warm, when one morning Ferris and
Miss Vervain sat on the steps of the terrace, waiting
for Don Ippolito to join them at breakfast.
By this time the painter was well on with the
picture of Don Ippolito which the first sight of the
priest had given him a longing to paint, and he had
been just now talking of it with Miss Vervain.
“But why do you paint him simply as a priest?”
she asked. “I should think you would want to
make him the centre of some famous or romantic
scene,” she added, gravely looking into his eyes as
he sat with his head thrown back against the balustrade.
“No, I doubt if you think,” answered Ferris,
“or you 'd see that a Venetian priest does n't need
any tawdry accessories. What do you want?
Somebody administering the extreme unction to a
victim of the Council of Ten? A priest stepping
into a confessional at the Frari — tomb of Canova
in the distance, perspective of one of the naves, and
so forth — with his eye on a pretty devotee coming
up to unburden her conscience? I 've no patience
with the follies people think and say about Venice!”
Florida started in haughty question at the painter.
“You 're no worse than the rest,” he continued
with indifference to her anger at his bluntness.
“You all think that there can be no picture of Venice
without a gondola or a Bridge of Sighs in it.
Have you ever read the merchant of Venice, or
Othello? There is n't a boat nor a bridge nor a
canal mentioned in either of them; and yet they
breathe and pulsate with the very life of Venice.
I 'm going to try to paint a Venetian priest so that
you 'll know him without a bit of conventional Venice
near him.”
“It was Shakespeare who wrote those plays,”
said Florida. Ferris bowed in mock suffering from
her sarcasm. “You 'd better have some sort of
symbol in your picture of a Venetian priest, or
people will wonder why you came so far to paint
Father O'Brien.”
“I don't say I shall succeed,” Ferris answered.
“In fact I 've made one failure already, and I 'm
pretty well on with a second; but the principle
is right, all the same. I don't expect everybody to
see the difference between Don Ippolito and Father
O'Brien. At any rate, what I 'm going to paint at
is the lingering pagan in the man, the renunciation
first of the inherited nature, and then of a personality
that would have enjoyed the world. I want
to show that baffled aspiration, apathetic despair,
and rebellious longing which you catch in his face
when he 's off his guard, and that suppressed look
which is the characteristic expression of all Austrian
work in that small suspicion of Jesuit which there
is in every priest. But it 's quite possible I may
make a Father O'Brien of him.”
“You won't make a Don Ippolito of him,” said
Florida, after serious consideration of his face to see
whether he was quite in earnest, “if you put all
that into him. He has the simplest and openest
look in the world,” she added warmly, “and there 's
neither pagan, nor martyr, nor rebel in it.”
Ferris laughed again. “Excuse me; I don't
think you know. I can convince you.”....
Florida rose, and looking down the garden path
said, “He 's coming;” and as Don Ippolito drew
near, his face lighting up with a joyous and innocent
smile, she continued absently, “he 's got on
new stockings, and a different coat and hat.”
The stockings were indeed new and the hat was
not the accustomed nicchio, but a new silk cylinder
with a very worldly, curling brim. Don Ippolito's
coat, also, was of a more mundane cut than the
talare; he wore a waistcoat and small-clothes, meeting
the stockings at the knee with a sprightly
buckle. His person showed no traces of the snuff
with which it used to be so plentifully dusted; in
fact, he no longer took snuff in the presence of the
ladies. The first week he had noted an inexplicable
uneasiness in them when he drew forth that
blue cotton handkerchief after the solace of a pinch;
shortly afterwards, being alone with Florida, he
He blushed violently, and put it back into the
pocket from which he had half drawn it, and whence
it never emerged again in her presence. The contessina
his former pupil had not shown any aversion
to Don Ippolito's snuff or his blue handkerchief;
but then the contessina had never rebuked his finger-nails
by the tints of rose and ivory with which
Miss Vervain's hands bewildered him. It was a
little droll how anxiously he studied the ways of
these Americans, and conformed to them as far as
he knew. His English grew rapidly in their society,
and it happened sometimes that the only Italian
in the day's lesson was what he read with Florida,
for she always yielded to her mother's wish to
talk, and Mrs. Vervain preferred the ease of her
native tongue. He was Americanizing in that good
lady's hands as fast as she could transform him, and
he listened to her with trustful reverence, as to a
woman of striking though eccentric mind. Yet he
seemed finally to refer every point to Florida, as if
with an intuition of steadier and stronger character
in her; and now, as he ascended the terrace steps
in his modified costume, he looked intently at her.
She swept him from head to foot with a glance, and
then gravely welcomed him with unchanged countenance.
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 should n'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 is n'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
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.
| V. A foregone conclusion | |