 | VIII. A foregone conclusion |  |
8. VIII.
It was late before Ferris forgot his chagrin in
sleep, and when he woke the next morning, the sun
was making the solid green blinds at his window
odorous of their native pine woods with its heat,
and thrusting a golden spear at the heart of Don
Ippolito's effigy where he had left it on the easel.
Marina brought a letter with his coffee. The
letter was from Mrs. Vervain, and it entreated him
to come to lunch at twelve, and then join them on
an excursion, of which they had all often talked, up
the Canal of the Brenta. “Don Ippolito has got
his permission — think of his not being able to go
to the mainland without the Patriarch's leave! and
can go with us to-day. So I try to make this hasty
arrangement. You must come — it all depends
upon you.”
“Yes, so it seems,” groaned the painter, and
went.
In the garden he found Don Ippolito and Florida,
at the fountain where he had himself parted with
her the evening before; and he observed with a
guilty relief that Don Ippolito was talking to her
in the happy unconsciousness habitual with him.
Florida cast at the painter a swift glance of latent
appeal and intelligence, which he refused, and in
if she now saw him for the first time, and gave him
her hand in greeting. It was a beautiful hand;
he could not help worshipping its lovely forms, and
the lily whiteness and softness of the back, the rose
of the palm and finger-tips.
She idly resumed the great Venetian fan which
hung from her waist by a chain. “Don Ippolito
has been talking about the villeggiatura on the
Brenta in the old days,” she explained.
“Oh, yes,” said the painter, “they used to have
merry times in the villas then, and it was worth
while being a priest, or at least an abbate di casa.
I should think you would sigh for a return of those
good old days, Don Ippolito. Just imagine, if you
were abbate di casa with some patrician family
about the close of the last century, you might be the
instructor, companion, and spiritual adviser of Illustrissima
at the theatres, card-parties, and masquerades,
all winter; and at this season, instead of going
up the Brenta for a day's pleasure with us
barbarous Yankees, you might be setting out with
Illustrissima and all the `Strissimi and 'Strissime,
big and little, for a spring villeggiatura there. You
would be going in a gilded barge, with songs and
fiddles and dancing, instead of a common gondola,
and you would stay a month, walking, going to
parties and caffès, drinking chocolate and lemonade,
gaming, sonneteering, and butterflying about generally.”
“It was doubtless a beautiful life,” answered
the priest, with simple indifference. “But I never
have thought of it with regret, because I have been
preoccupied with other ideas than those of social
pleasures, though perhaps they were no wiser.”
Florida had watched Don Ippolito's face while
Ferris was speaking, and she now asked gravely,
“But don't you think their life nowadays is more
becoming to the clergy?”
“Why, madamigella? What harm was there
in those gayeties? I suppose the bad features of
the old life are exaggerated to us.”
“They could n't have been worse than the amusements
of the hard-drinking, hard-riding, hard-swearing,
fox-hunting English parsons about the
same time,” said Ferris. “Besides, the abbate di
casa had a charm of his own, the charm of all rococo
things, which, whatever you may say of them, are
somehow elegant and refined, or at least refer to
elegance and refinement. I don't say they 're ennobling,
but they 're fascinating. I don't respect
them, but I love them. When I think about the
past of Venice, I don't care so much to see any of
the heroically historical things; but I should like
immensely to have looked in at the Ridotto, when
the place was at its gayest with wigs and masks,
hoops and small-clothes, fans and rapiers, bows and
courtesies, whispers and glances. I dare say I
should have found Don Ippolito there in some becoming
disguise.'
Florida looked from the painter to the priest and
back to the painter, as Ferris spoke, and then she
turned a little anxiously toward the terrace, and
a shadow slipped from her face as her mother came
rustling down the steps, catching at her drapery
and shaking it into place. The young girl hurried
to meet her, lifted her arms for what promised
an embrace, and with firm hands set the elder
lady's bonnet straight with her forehead.
“I 'm always getting it on askew,” Mrs. Vervain
said for greeting to Ferris. “How do you do,
Don Ippolito? But I suppose you think I 've kept
you long enough to get it on straight for once. So
I have. I am a fuss, and I don't deny it. At my
time of life, it 's much harder to make yourself shipshape
than it is when you 're younger. I tell Florida
that anybody would take her for the old lady,
she does seem to give so little care to getting up an
appearance.”
“And yet she has the effect of a stylish young
person in the bloom of youth,” observed Ferris,
with a touch of caricature.
“We had better lunch with our things on,” said
Mrs. Vervain, “and then there need n't be any
delay in starting. I thought we would have it
here,” she added, as Nina and the house-servant
appeared with trays of dishes and cups. “So that
we can start in a real picnicky spirit. I knew
you 'd think it a womanish lunch, Mr. Ferris — Don
Ippolito likes what we do — and so I've provided
you for a taste of it; I 'm really hungry.”
There was salad for all, in fact; and it was quite
one o'clock before the lunch was ended, and wraps
of just the right thickness and thinness were chosen,
and the party were comfortably placed under the
striped linen canopy of the gondola, which they had
from a public station, the house-gondola being engaged
that day. They rowed through the narrow
canal skirting the garden out into the expanse before
the Gindecca, and then struck across the lagoon
towards Fusina, past the island-church of San
Giorgio in Alga, whose beautiful tower has flushed
and darkened in so many pictures of Venetian sunsets,
and past the Austrian lagoon forts with their
coronets of guns threatening every point, and the
Croatian sentinels pacing to and fro on their walls.
They stopped long enough at one of the customs
barges to declare to the swarthy, amiable officers
the innocence of their freight, and at the mouth of
the Canal of the Brenta they paused before the
station while a policeman came out and scanned
them. He bowed to Don Ippolito's cloth, and then
they began to push up the sluggish canal, shallow
and overrun with weeds and mosses, into the heart
of the land.
The spring, which in Venice comes in the softening
air and the perpetual azure of the heavens, was
renewed to their senses in all its miraculous loveliness.
The garden of the Vervains had indeed confessed
seemed somehow only like a novel effect of the artifice
which had been able to create a garden in that
city of stone and sea. Here a vernal world suddenly
opened before them, with wide-stretching
fields of green under a dome of perfect blue;
against its walls only the soft curves of far-off hills
were traced, and near at hand the tender forms of
full-foliaged trees. The long garland of vines that
festoons all Italy seemed to begin in the neighboring
orchards; the meadows waved their tall grasses
in the sun, and broke in poppies as the sea-waves
break in iridescent spray; the well-grown maize
shook its gleaming blades in the light; the poplars
marched in stately procession on either side of the
straight, white road to Padua, till they vanished
in the long perspective. The blossoms had fallen
from the trees many weeks before, but the air was
full of the vague sweetness of the perfect spring,
which here and there gathered and defined itself as
the spicy odor of the grass cut on the shore of the
canal, and drying in the mellow heat of the sun.
The voyagers spoke from time to time of some
peculiarity of the villas that succeeded each other
along the canal. Don Ippolito knew a few of them,
the gondoliers knew others; but after all, their
names were nothing. These haunts of old-time
splendor and idleness weary of themselves, and unable
to escape, are sadder than anything in Venice,
and they belonged, as far as the Americans were
they should go in another life, — the world of a
faded fashion and an alien history. Some of the
villas were kept in a sort of repair; some were even
maintained in the state of old; but the most showed
marks of greater or less decay, and here and there
one was falling to ruin. They had gardens about
them, tangled and wild-grown; a population of decrepit
statues in the rococo taste strolled in their
walks or simpered from their gates. Two or three
houses seemed to be occupied; the rest stood
empty, each
And silent in its dusty vines.”
The pleasure-party had no fixed plan for the day
further than to ascend the canal, and by and by
take a carriage at some convenient village and
drive to the famous Villa Pisani at Strà.
“These houses are very well,” said Don Ippolito,
who had visited the villa once, and with whom it
had remained a memory almost as signal as that
night in Padua when he wore civil dress, “but it is
at Strà that you see something really worthy of the
royal splendor of the patricians of Venice. Royal?
The villa is now one of the palaces of the ex-Emperor
of Austria, who does not find it less imperial
than his other palaces.” Don Ippolito had
celebrated the villa at Strà in this strain ever since
they had spoken of going up the Brenta: now it
was the magnificent conservatories and orangeries
walks between rows of clipt cedars and firs, now
the stables with their stalls for numberless horses,
now the palace itself with its frescoed halls and
treasures of art and vertu. His enthusiasm for the
villa at Strà had become an amiable jest with the
Americans. Ferris laughed at his fresh outburst;
he declared himself tired of the gondola, and he
asked Florida to disembark with him and walk
under the trees of a pleasant street running on one
side between the villas and the canal. “We are
going to find something much grander than the
Villa Pisani,” he boasted, with a look at Don Ippolito.
As they sauntered along the path together, they
came now and then to a stately palace like that of
the Contarini, where the lions, that give their name
to one branch of the family, crouch in stone before
the grand portal; but most of the houses were interesting
only from their unstoried possibilities to
the imagination. They were generally of stucco,
and glared with fresh whitewash through the foliage
of their gardens. When a peasant's cottage
broke their line, it gave, with its barns and strawstacks
and its beds of pot-herbs, a homely relief
from the decaying gentility of the villas.
“What a pity, Miss Vervain,” said the painter,
“that the blessings of this world should be so unequally
divided! Why should all this sketchable
adversity be lavished upon the neighborhood of a
It 's pretty hard on us Americans, and
forces people of sensibility into exile. What
would n't cultivated persons give for a stretch of
this street in the suburbs of Boston, or of your own
Providence? I suppose the New Yorkers will be
setting up something of the kind one of these days,
and giving it a French name — they 'll call it Aux
bords du Brenta. There was one of them carried
back a gondola the other day to put on a pond in
their new park. But the worst of it is, you can't
take home the sentiment of these things.”
“I thought it was the business of painters to
send home the sentiment of them in pictures,” said
Florida.
Ferris talked to her in this way because it was
his way of talking; it always surprised him a little
that she entered into the spirit of it; he was not
quite sure that she did; he sometimes thought she
waited till she could seize upon a point to turn
against him, and so give herself the air of having
comprehended the whole. He laughed: “Oh yes,
a poor little fragmentary, faded-out reproduction of
their sentiment — which is `as moonlight unto sunlight
and as water unto wine,' when compared with
the real thing. Suppose I made a picture of this
very bit, ourselves in the foreground, looking at the
garden over there where that amusing Vandal of an
owner has just had his statues painted white: would
our friends at home understand it? A whole history
an entire situation. Of course, people with a taste
for olives would get the flavor; but even they would
wonder that I chose such an unsuggestive bit. Why,
it is just the most maddeningly suggestive thing to
be found here! And if I may put it modestly, for
my share in it, I think we two young Americans
looking on at this supreme excess of the rococo, are
the very essence of the sentiment of the scene; but
what would the honored connoisseurs — the good
folks who get themselves up on Ruskin and try so
honestly hard to have some little ideas about art
— make of us? To be sure they might justifiably
praise the grace of your pose, if I were so lucky as
to catch it, and your way of putting your hand
under the elbow of the arm that holds your parasol,”
— Florida seemed disdainfully to keep her
attitude, and the painter smiled, — “but they
would n't know what it all meant, and could n't
imagine that we were inspired by this rascally little
villa to sigh longingly over the wicked past.”....
“Excuse me,” interrupted Florida, with a touch
of trouble in her proud manner, “I 'm not sighing
over it, for one, and I don't want it back. I 'm glad
that I 'm American and that there is no past for me.
I can't understand how you and Don Ippolito can
speak so tolerantly of what no one can respect,”
she added, in almost an aggrieved tone.
If Miss Vervain wanted to turn the talk upon
Don Ippolito, Ferris by no means did; he had had
away from it as he could.
“Oh, Don Ippolito 's a pagan, I tell you; and
I 'm a painter, and the rococo is my weakness. I
wish I could paint it, but I can't; I 'm a hundred
years too late. I could n't even paint myself in the
act of sentimentalizing it.”
While he talked, he had been making a few lines
in a small pocket sketch-book, with a furtive glance
or two at Florida. When they returned to the
boat, he busied himself again with the book, and
presently he handed it to Mrs. Vervain.
“Why, it 's Florida!” cried the lady. “How
very nicely you do sketch, Mr. Ferris.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Vervain; you 're always flattering
me.”
“No, but seriously. I wish that I had paid more
attention to my drawing when I was a girl. And
now, Florida — she won't touch a pencil. I wish
you 'd talk to her, Mr. Ferris.”
“Oh, people who are pictures need n't trouble
themselves to be painters,” said Ferris, with a little
burlesque.
Mrs. Vervain began to look at the sketch through
her tubed hand; the painter made a grimace.
“But you 've made her too proud, Mr. Ferris. She
does n't look like that.”
“Yes she does — to those unworthy of her kindness.
I have taken Miss Vervain in the act of
scorning the rococo, and its humble admirer, me,
with it.”
“I 'm sure I don't know what you mean, Mr.
Ferris; but I can't think that this proud look is
habitual with Florida; and I 've heard people say
— very good judges — that an artist ought n't to
perpetuate a temporary expression. Something like
that.”
“It can't be helped now, Mrs. Vervain: the
sketch is irretrievably immortal. I 'm sorry, but
it 's too late.”
“Oh, stuff! As if you could n't turn up the corners
of the mouth a little. Or something.”
“And give her the appearance of laughing at
me? Never!”
“Don Ippolito,” said Mrs. Vervain, turning
to the priest, who had been listening intently to
all this trivial talk, “what do you think of this
sketch?”
He took the book with an eager hand, and perused
the sketch as if trying to read some secret
there. After a minute he handed it back with a
light sigh, apparently of relief, but said nothing.
“Well?” asked Mrs. Vervain.
“Oh! I ask pardon. No, it is n't my idea of
madamigella. It seems to me that her likeness
must be sketched in color. Those lines are true,
but they need color to subdue them; they go too
far, they are more than true.”
“You 're quite right, Don Ippolito,” said Ferris.
“Then you don't think she always has this proud
look?” pursued Mrs. Vervain.
The painter fancied that Florida quelled in herself
a movement of impatience; he looked at her
with an amused smile.
“Not always, no,” answered Don Ippolito.
“Sometimes her face expresses the greatest meekness
in the world.”
“But not at the present moment,” thought Ferris,
fascinated by the stare of angry pride which the
girl bent upon the unconscious priest.
“Though I confess that I should hardly know
how to characterize her habitual expression,” added
Don Ippolito.
“Thanks,” said Florida, peremptorily. “I 'm
tired of the subject; it is n't an important one.”
“Oh yes it is, my dear,” said Mrs. Vervain.
“At least it 's important to me, if it is n't to you;
for I 'm your mother, and really, if I thought you
looked like this, as a general thing, to a casual observer,
I should consider it a reflection upon myself.”
Ferris gave a provoking laugh, as she continued
sweetly, “I must insist, Don Ippolito: now
did you ever see Florida look so?”
The girl leaned back, and began to wave her fan
slowly to and fro before her face.
“I never saw her look so with you, dear madama,”
said the priest with an anxious glance at Florida,
who let her fan fall folded into her lap, and sat
still. He went on with priestly smoothness, and a
touch of something like invoked authority, such as
a man might show who could dispense indulgences
her devotedness to you, and I have admired from
the first an obedience and tenderness that I have
never known equaled. In all her relations to you,
madamigella has seemed to me” —
Florida started forward. “You are not asked to
comment on my behavior to my mother; you are
not invited to speak of my conduct at all!” she
burst out with sudden violence, her visage flaming,
and her blue eyes burning upon Don Ippolito, who
shrank from the astonishing rudeness as from a blow
in the face. “What is it to you how I treat my
mother?”
She sank back again upon the cushions, and
opening the fan with a clash swept it swiftly before
her.
“Florida!” said her mother gravely.
Ferris turned away in cold disgust, like one who
has witnessed a cruelty done to some helpless thing.
Don Ippolito's speech was not fortunate at the best,
but it might have come from a foreigner's misapprehensions,
and at the worst it was good-natured
and well-meant. “The girl is a perfect brute, as
I thought in the beginning,” the painter said to
himself. “How could I have ever thought differently?
I shall have to tell Don Ippolito that I 'm
ashamed of her, and disclaim all responsibility.
Pah! I wish I was out of this.”
The pleasure of the day was dead. It could not
rally from that stroke. They went on to Strà, as
was eclipsed for Don Ippolito. He plainly did not
know what to do. He did not address Florida
again, whose savagery he would not probably have
known how to resent if he had wished to resent it.
Mrs. Vervain prattled away to him with unrelenting
kindness; Ferris kept near him, and with affectionate
zeal tried to make him talk of the villa; but
neither the frescoes, nor the orangeries, nor the
green-houses, nor the stables, nor the gardens could
rouse him from the listless daze in which he moved,
though Ferris found them all as wonderful as he
had said. Amidst this heavy embarrassment no one
seemed at ease but the author of it. She did not,
to be sure, speak to Don Ippolito, but she followed
her mother as usual with her assiduous cares, and
she appeared tranquilly unconscious of the sarcastic
civility with which Ferris rendered her any service.
It was late in the afternoon when they got back
to their boat and began to descend the canal towards
Venice, and long before they reached Fusina
the day had passed. A sunset of melancholy red,
streaked with level lines of murky cloud, stretched
across the flats behind them, and faintly tinged
with its reflected light the eastern horizon which
the towers and domes of Venice had not yet begun
to break. The twilight came, and then through
the overcast heavens the moon shone dim; a light
blossomed here and there in the villas, distant voices
called musically; a cow lowed, a dog barked; the
odors with the sultry air of the neighboring lagoon.
The wayfarers spoke little; the time hung heavy
on all, no doubt; to Ferris it was a burden almost
intolerable to hear the creak of the oars and the
breathing of the gondoliers keeping time together.
At last the boat stopped in front of the police-station
in Fusina; a soldier with a sword at his side
and a lantern in his hand came out and briefly parleyed
with the gondoliers; they stepped ashore,
and he marched them into the station before him.
“We have nothing left to wish for now,” said
Ferris, breaking into an ironical laugh.
“What does it all mean?” asked Mrs. Vervain.
“I think I had better go see.”
“We will go with you,” said Mrs. Vervain.
“Pazienza!” replied Ferris.
The ladies rose; but Don Ippolito remained
seated. “Are n't you going too, Don Ippolito?”
asked Mrs. Vervain.
“Thanks, madama; but I prefer to stay here.”
Lamentable cries and shrieks, as if the prisoners
had immediately been put to the torture, came from
the station as Ferris opened the door. A lamp of
petroleum lighted the scene, and shone upon the figures
of two fishermen, who bewailed themselves unintelligibly
in the vibrant accents of Chiozza, and
from time to time advanced upon the gondoliers, and
shook their heads and beat their breasts at them.
A few police-guards reclined upon benches about
Ferris politely asked one of them the cause of
the detention.
“Why, you see, signore,” answered the guard
amiably, “these honest men accuse your gondoliers
of having stolen a rope out of their boat at Dolo.”
“It was my blood, you know!” howled the elder
of the fishermen, tossing his arms wildly abroad,
“it was my own heart,” he cried, letting the last
vowel die away and rise again in mournful refrain,
while he stared tragically into Ferris's face.
“What is the matter?” asked Mrs. Vervain,
putting up her glasses, and trying with graceful futility
to focus the melodrama.
“Nothing,” said Ferris; “our gondoliers have
had the heart's blood of this respectable Dervish;
that is to say, they have stolen a rope belonging to
him.”
“Our gondoliers! I don't believe it. They 've
no right to keep us here all night. Tell them
you 're the American consul.”
“I 'd rather not try my dignity on these underlings,
Mrs. Vervain; there 's no American squadron
here that I could order to bombard Fusina, if they
did n't mind me. But I 'll see what I can do
further in quality of courteous foreigner. Can you
perhaps tell me how long you will be obliged to detain
us here?” he asked of the guard again.
“I am very sorry to detain you at all, signore.
absent. He may be here soon.”
The guard renewed his apathetic contemplation
of the gondoliers, who did not speak a word; the
windy lamentation of the fishermen rose and fell fitfully.
Presently they went out of doors and poured
forth their wrongs to the moon.
The room was close, and with some trouble Ferris
persuaded Mrs. Vervain to return to the gondola,
Florida seconding his arguments with gentle good
sense.
It seemed a long time till the commissary came,
but his coming instantly simplified the situation.
Perhaps because he had never been able to befriend
a consul in trouble before, he befriended Ferris to
the utmost. He had met him with rather a browbeating
air; but after a glance at his card, he gave
a kind of roar of deprecation and apology. He had
the ladies and Don Ippolito in out of the gondola,
and led them to an upper chamber, where he made
them all repose their honored persons upon his sofas.
He ordered up his housekeeper to make them coffee,
which he served with his own hands, excusing its
hurried feebleness, and he stood by, rubbing his
palms together and smiling, while they refreshed
themselves.
“They need never tell me again that the Austrains
are tyrants,” said Mrs. Vervain in undertone
to the consul.
It was not easy for Ferris to remind his host of
The commissary begged pardon, and
asked him to accompany him below, where he confronted
the accused and the accusers. The tragedy
was acted over again with blood-curdling effectiveness
by the Chiozzotti; the gondoliers maintaining
the calm of conscious innocence.
Ferris felt outraged by the trumped-up charge
against them.
“Listen, you others the prisoners,” said the commissary.
“Your padrone is anxious to return to
Venice, and I wish to inflict no further displeasures
upon him. Restore their rope to these honest men,
and go about your business.”
The injured gondoliers spoke in low tones together;
then one of them shrugged his shoulders
and went out. He came back in a moment and
laid a rope before the commissary.
“Is that the rope?” he asked. “We found it
floating down the canal, and picked it up that we
might give it to the rightful owner. But now I
wish to heaven we had let it sink to the bottom of
the sea.”
“Oh, a beautiful story!” wailed the Chiozzoti.
They flung themselves upon the rope, and lugged
it off to their boat; and the gondoliers went out,
too.
The commissary turned to Ferris with an amiable
smile. “I am sorry that those rogues should
escape,” said the American.
“Oh,” said the Italian, “they are poor fellows;
it is a little matter; I am glad to have served
you.”
He took leave of his involuntary guests with
effusion, following them with a lantern to the gondola.
Mrs. Vervain, to whom Ferris gave an account
of this trial as they set out again on their long-hindered
return, had no mind save for the magical effect
of his consular quality upon the commissary, and
accused him of a vain and culpable modesty.
“Ah,” said the diplomatist, “there 's nothing
like knowing just when to produce your dignity.
There are some officials who know too little, —
like those guards; and there are some who know
too much, — like the commissary's superiors. But
he is just in that golden mean of ignorance where
he supposes a consul is a person of importance.”
Mrs. Vervain disputed this, and Ferris submitted
in silence. Presently, as they skirted the shore to
get their bearings for the route across the lagoon, a
fierce voice in Venetian shouted from the darkness,
“Indrio, indrio!” (Back, back!) and a gleam of
the moon through the pale, watery clouds revealed
the figure of a gendarme on the nearest point of
land. The gondoliers bent to their oars, and sent
the boat swiftly out into the lagoon.
“There, for example, is a person who would be
quite insensible to my greatness, even if I had the
consular seal in my pocket. To him we are possi
out his watch, and staring hard at it, “that if I
were a disinterested person, and heard his suspicion
met with the explanation that we were a little
party out here for pleasure at half past twelve P. M.,
I should say he was right. At any rate we won't
engage him in controversy. Quick, quick!” he
added to the gondoliers, glancing at the receding
shore, and then at the first of the lagoon forts which
they were approaching. A dim shape moved along
the top of the wall, and seemed to linger and scrutinize
them. As they drew nearer, the challenge,
“Wer da?” rang out.
The gondoliers eagerly answered with the one
word of German known to their craft, “Freunde,”
and struggled to urge the boat forward; the oar of
the gondolier in front slipped from the high rowlock,
and fell out of his hand into the water. The
gondola lurched, and then suddenly ran aground on
the shallow. The sentry halted, dropped his gun
from his shoulder, and ordered them to go on, while
the gondoliers clamored back in the high key of
fear, and one of them screamed out to his passengers
to do something, saying that, a few weeks
before, a sentinel had fired upon a fisherman and
killed him.
“What 's that he 's talking about?” demanded
Mrs. Vervain. “If we don't get on, it will be that
said, nerved and interested by the presence of this
danger.
The gondoliers leaped into the water and tried to
push the boat off. It would not move, and without
warning, Don Ippolito, who had sat silent since
they left Fusina, stepped over the side of the gondola,
and thrusting an oar under its bottom lifted it
free of the shallow.
“Oh, how very unnecessary!” cried Mrs. Vervain,
as the priest and the gondoliers clambered
back into the boat. “He will take his death of
cold.”
“It 's ridiculous,” said Ferris. “You ought to
have told these worthless rascals what to do, Don
Ippolito. You 've got yourself wet for nothing.
It 's too bad!”
“It 's nothing,” said Don Ippolito, taking his
seat on the little prow deck, and quietly dripping
where the water would not incommode the others.
“Oh, here!” cried Mrs. Vervain, gathering
some shawls together, “make him wrap those about
him. He 'll die, I know he will — with that reeking
skirt of his. If you must go into the water, I
wish you had worn your abbate's dress. How could
you, Don Ippolito?”
The gondoliers set their oars, but before they
had given a stroke, they were arrested by a sharp
“Halt!” from the fort. Another figure had
joined the sentry, and stood looking at them.
“Well,” said Ferris, “now what, I wonder?
That 's an officer. If I had a little German about
me, I might state the situation to him.”
He felt a light touch on his arm. “I can speak
German,” said Florida timidly.
“Then you had better speak it now,” said Ferris.
She rose to her feet, and in a steady voice briefly
explained the whole affair. The figures listened
motionless; then the last comer politely replied,
begging her to be in no uneasiness, made her a
shadowy salute, and vanished. The sentry resumed
his walk, and took no further notice of them.
“Brava!” said Ferris, while Mrs. Vervain babbled
her satisfaction, “I will buy a German Ollendorff
to-morrow. The language is indispensable to
a pleasure excursion in the lagoon.”
Florida made no reply, but devoted herself to restoring
her mother to that state of defense against
the discomforts of the time and place, which the
common agitation had impaired. She seemed to
have no sense of the presence of any one else. Don
Ippolito did not speak again save to protect himself
from the anxieties and reproaches of Mrs. Vervain,
renewed and reiterated at intervals. She drowsed
after a while, and whenever she woke she thought
they had just touched her own landing. By fits it
was cloudy and moonlight; they began to meet
peasants' boats going to the Rialto market; at last,
they entered the Canal of the Zattere, then they
at Mrs. Vervain's gate; this time she had not expected
it. Don Ippolito gave her his hand, and
entered the garden with her, while Ferris lingered
behind with Florida, helping her put together the
wraps strewn about the gondola.
“Wait!” she commanded, as they moved up the
garden walk. “I want to speak with you about
Don Ippolito. What shall I do to him for my
rudeness? You must tell me — you shall,” she
said in a fierce whisper, gripping the arm which
Ferris had given to help her up the landing-stairs.
“You are — older than I am!”
“Thanks. I was afraid you were going to say
wiser. I should think your own sense of justice,
your own sense of” —
“Decency. Say it, say it!” cried the girl
passionately; “it was indecent, indecent — that
was it!”
— “would tell you what to do,” concluded the
painter dryly.
She flung away the arm to which she had been
clinging, and ran to where the priest stood with her
mother at the foot of the terrace stairs. “Don
Ippolito,” she cried, “I want to tell you that I am
sorry; I want to ask your pardon — how can you
ever forgive me? — for what I said.”
She instinctively stretched her hand towards him.
“Oh!” said the priest, with an indescribable,
long, trembling sigh. He caught her hand in his,
against his breast.
Ferris made a little start forward.
“Now, that 's right, Florida,” said her mother, as
the four stood in the pale, estranging moonlight.
“I 'm sure Don Ippolito can't cherish any resentment.
If he does, he must come in and wash it out
with a glass of wine — that 's a good old fashion.
I want you to have the wine at any rate, Don Ippolito;
it 'll keep you from taking cold. You
really must.”
“Thanks, madama; I cannot lose more time,
now; I must go home at once. Good night.”
Before Mrs. Vervain could frame a protest, or lay
hold of him, he bowed and hurried out of the land-gate.
“How perfectly absurd for him to get into the
water in that way,” she said, looking mechanically
in the direction in which he had vanished.
“Well, Mrs. Vervain, it is n't best to be too
grateful to people,” said Ferris, “but I think we
must allow that if we were in any danger, sticking
there in the mud, Don Ippolito got us out of it by
putting his shoulder to the oar.”
“Of course,” assented Mrs. Vervain.
“In fact,” continued Ferris, “I suppose we may
say that, under Providence, we probably owe our
lives to Don Ippolito's self-sacrifice and Miss Vervain's
knowledge of German. At any rate, it 's
what I shall always maintain.
“Mother, don't you think you had better go
in?” asked Florida, gently. Her gentleness ignored
the presence, the existence of Ferris. “I 'm
afraid you will be sick after all this fatigue.”
“There, Mrs. Vervain, it 'll be no use offering
me a glass of wine. I 'm sent away, you see,” said
Ferris. “And Miss Vervain is quite right. Good
night.”
“Oh — good night, Mr. Ferris,” said Mrs. Vervain,
giving her hand. “Thank you so much.”
Florida did not look towards him. She gathered
her mother's shawl about her shoulders for the
twentieth time that day, and softly urged her in
doors, while Ferris let himself out into the campo.
| VIII. A foregone conclusion | |