 | XV. A foregone conclusion |  |
15. 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, it is 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
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.”
“No, 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
robes heightened. He fetched a long, sighing
breath, as if he inhaled with that respiration all
the rich odors of the flowers, blanched like his own
visage in the white lustre; 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 to-day?”
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
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!”
“Oh, 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
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 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 procession 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
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 be
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 you?” He seized the 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.
| XV. A foregone conclusion | |