 | VII. A foregone conclusion |  |
7. VII.
Ferris stood cleaning his palette, after Don Ippolito
was gone, scraping the colors together with
his knife and neatly buttering them on the palette's
edge, while he wondered what the priest meant by
pumping him in that way. Nothing, he supposed,
and yet it was odd. Of course she had a bad temper.....
He put on his hat and coat and strolled vaguely
forth, and in an hour or two came by a roundabout
course to the gondola station nearest his own house.
There he stopped, and after an absent contemplation
of the boats, from which the gondoliers were clamoring
for his custom, he stepped into one and ordered
the man to row him to a gate on a small canal
opposite. The gate opened, at his ringing, into
the garden of the Vervains.
Florida was sitting alone on a bench near the
fountain. It was no longer a ruined fountain; the
broken-nosed naiad held a pipe above her head,
and from this rose a willowy spray high enough to
catch some colors of the sunset then striking into
the garden, and fell again in a mist around her,
making her almost modest.
“What does this mean?” asked Ferris, carelessly
this lady's occupation was gone.”
“Don Ippolito repaired the fountain for the landlord,
and he agreed to pay for filling the tank that
feeds it,” said Florida. “He seems to think it a
hard bargain, for he only lets it play about half an
hour a day. But he says it 's very ingeniously
mended. He did n't believe it could be done. It
is pretty.
“It is, indeed,” said the painter, with a singular
desire, going through him like a pang, likewise to
do something for Miss Vervain. “Did you go to
Don Ippolito's house the other day, to see his
traps?”
“Yes; we were very much interested. I was
sorry that I knew so little about inventions. Do
you think there are many practical ideas amongst
his things? I hope there are — he seemed so proud
and pleased to show them. Should n't you think
he had some real inventive talent?”
“Yes, I think he has; but I know as little about
the matter as you do.” He sat down beside her,
and picking up a twig from the gravel, pulled the
bark off in silence. Then, “Miss Vervain,” he
said, knitting his brows, as he always did when he
had something on his conscience and meant to ease
it at any cost, “I 'm the dog that fetches a bone
and carries a bone; I talked Don Ippolito over with
you, the other day, and now I 've been talking you
over with him. But I 've the grace to say that I 'm
ashamed of myself.”
“Why need you be ashamed?” asked Florida.
“You said no harm of him. Did you of us?”
“Not exactly; but I don't think it was quite my
business to discuss you at all. I think you can't
let people alone too much. For my part, if I try to
characterize my friends, I fail to do them perfect
justice, of course; and yet the imperfect result remains
representative of them in my mind; it limits
them and fixes them; and I can't get them back
again into the undefined and the ideal where they
really belong. One ought never to speak of the
faults of one's friends: it mutilates them; they can
never be the same afterwards.”
“So you have been talking of my faults,” said
Florida, breathing quickly. “Perhaps you could
tell me of them to my face.”
“I should have to say that unfairness was one of
them. But that is common to the whole sex. I
never said I was talking of your faults. I declared
against doing so, and you immediately infer that
my motive is remorse. I don't know that you have
any faults. They may be virtues in disguise.
There is a charm even in unfairness. Well, I did
say that I thought you had a quick temper,” —
Florida colored violently.
— “but now I see that I was mistaken,” said
Ferris with a laugh.
“May I ask what else you said?” demanded the
young girl haughtily.
“Oh, that would be a betrayal of confidence,”
said Ferris, unaffected by her hauteur.
“Then why have you mentioned the matter to
me at all?”
“I wanted to clear my conscience, I suppose,
and sin again. I wanted to talk with you about
Don Ippolito.”
Florida looked with perplexity at Ferris's face,
while her own slowly cooled and paled.
“What did you want to say of him?” she asked
calmly.
“I hardly know how to put it: that he puzzles
me, to begin with. You know I feel somewhat responsible
for him.”
“Yes.”
“Of course, I never should have thought of him,
if it had n't been for your mother's talk that morning
coming back from San Lazzaro.”
“I know,” said Florida, with a faint blush.
“And yet, don't you see, it was as much a fancy
of mine, a weakness for the man himself, as the desire
to serve your mother, that prompted me to
bring him to you.”
“Yes, I see,” answered the young girl.
“I acted in the teeth of a bitter Venetian prejudice
against priests. All my friends here — they 're
mostly young men with the modern Italian ideas,
or old liberals — hate and despise the priests.
They believe that priests are full of guile and deceit,
that they are spies for the Austrians, and altogether
evil.”
“Don Ippolito is welcome to report our most secret
look of rising alarm relaxed into a smile.
“Oh,” cried the painter, “how you leap to conclusions!
I never intimated that Don Ippolito was
a spy. On the contrary, it was his difference from
other priests that made me think of him for a moment.
He seems to be as much cut off from the
church as from the world. And yet he is a priest,
with a priest's education. What if I should have
been altogether mistaken? He is either one of the
openest souls in the world, as you have insisted, or
he is one of the closest.”
“I should not be afraid of him in any case,” said
Florida; “but I can't believe any wrong of him.”
Ferris frowned in annoyance. “I don't want
you to; I don't myself. I 've bungled the matter
as I might have known I would. I was trying to
put into words an undefined uneasiness of mine, a
quite formless desire to have you possessed of the
whole case as it had come up in my mind. I 've
made a mess of it,” said Ferris rising, with a rueful
air. “Besides, I ought to have spoken to Mrs.
Vervain.”
“Oh no,” cried Florida, eagerly, springing to her
feet beside him. “Don't! Little things wear upon
my mother, so. I 'm glad you did n't speak to her.
I don't misunderstand you, I think; I expressed
myself badly,” she added with an anxious face. “I
thank you very much. What do you want me to
do?”
By Ferris's impulse they both began to move
down the garden path toward the water-gate. The
sunset had faded out of the fountain, but it still lit
the whole heaven, in whose vast blue depths hung
light whiffs of pinkish cloud, as ethereal as the draperies
that floated after Miss Vervain as she walked
with a splendid grace beside him, no awkwardness,
now, or self-constraint in her. As she turned to
Ferris, and asked in her deep tones, to which some
latent feeling imparted a slight tremor, “What do
you want me to do?” the sense of her willingness
to be bidden by him gave him a delicious thrill.
He looked at the superb creature, so proud, so helpless;
so much a woman, so much a child; and he
caught his breath before he answered. Her gauzes
blew about his feet in the light breeze that lifted
the foliage; she was a little near-sighted, and in
her eagerness she drew closer to him, fixing her
eyes full upon his with a bold innocence. “Good
heavens! Miss Vervain,” he cried, with a sudden
blush, “it is n't a serious matter. I 'm a fool to
have spoken to you. Don't do anything. Let
things go on as before. It is n't for me to instruct
you.”
“I should have been very glad of your advice,”
she said with a disappointed, almost wounded manner,
keeping her eyes upon him. “It seems to me
we are always going wrong” —
She stopped short, with a flush and then a pallor.
Ferris returned her look with one of comical dismay.
to be taken command of, daunted him, on second
thoughts. “I wish you 'd dismiss all my stupid
talk from your mind,” he said. “I feel as if I 'd
been guiltily trying to set you against a man whom
I like very much and have no reason not to trust,
and who thinks me so much his friend that he
could n't dream of my making any sort of trouble
for him. It would break his heart, I 'm afraid, if
you treated him in a different way from that in
which you 've treated him till now. It 's really
touching to listen to his gratitude to you and your
mother. It 's only conceivable on the ground that
he has never had friends before in the world. He
seems like another man, or the same man come to
life. And it is n't his fault that he 's a priest. I
suppose,” he added, with a sort of final throe,
“that a Venetian family would n't use him with
the frank hospitality you 've shown, not because
they distrusted him at all, perhaps, but because
they would be afraid of other Venetian tongues.”
This ultimate drop of venom, helplessly distilled,
did not seem to rankle in Miss Vervain's mind.
She walked now with her face turned from his, and
she answered coldly, “We shall not be troubled.
We don't care for Venetian tongues.”
They were at the gate. “Good-by,” said Ferris,
abruptly, “I 'm going.”
“Won't you wait and see my mother?” asked
Florida, with her awkward self-constraint again
upon her.
“No, thanks,” said Ferris, gloomily. “I have n't
time. I just dropped in for a moment, to blast an
innocent man's reputation, and destroy a young
lady's peace of mind.”
“Then you need n't go, yet,” answered Florida,
coldly, “for you have n't succeeded.”
“Well, I 've done my worst,” returned Ferris,
drawing the bolt.
He went away, hanging his head in amazement
and disgust at himself for his clumsiness and bad
taste. It seemed to him a contemptible part, first
to embarrass them with Don Ippolito's acquaintance,
if it was an embarrassment, and then try to
sneak out of his responsibility by these tardy cautions;
and if it was not going to be an embarrassment,
it was folly to have approached the matter at
all.
What had he wanted to do, and with what motive?
He hardly knew. As he battled the ground
over and over again, nothing comforted him save
the thought that, bad as it was to have spoken to
Miss Vervain, it must have been infinitely worse to
speak to her mother.
| VII. A foregone conclusion | |