 | XVI. A foregone conclusion |  |
16. XVI.
Florida swiftly mounted the terrace steps, but
she stopped with her hand on the door, panting, and
turned and walked slowly away to the end of the
terrace, drying her eyes with dashes of her handkerchief,
and ordering her hair, some coils of which
had been loosened by her flight. Then she went
back to the door, waited, and softly opened it.
Her mother was not in the parlor where she had
left her, and she passed noiselessly into her own
room, where some trunks stood open and half-packed
against the wall. She began to gather up
the pieces of dress that lay upon the bed and chairs,
and to fold them with mechanical carefulness and
put them in the boxes. Her mother's voice called
from the other chamber, “Is that you, Florida?”
“Yes, mother,” answered the girl, but remained
kneeling before one of the boxes, with that pale
green robe in her hand which she had worn on the
morning when Ferris had first brought Don Ippolito
to see them. She smoothed its folds and looked
down at it without making any motion to pack it
away, and so she lingered while her mother advanced
with one question after another; “What are
you doing, Florida? Where are you? Why did n't
you come to me?” and finally stood in the doorway.
I 'm getting very impatient about going. I
wish we could be off at once.”
A tremor passed over the young girl and she
started from her languid posture, and laid the dress
in the trunk. “So do I, mother. I would give the
world if we could go to-morrow!”
“Yes, but we can't, you see. I 'm afraid we 've
undertaken a great deal, my dear. It 's quite a
weight upon my mind, already; and I don't know
what it will be. If we were free, now, I should
say, go to-morrow, by all means. But we could n't
arrange it with Don Ippolito on our hands.”
Florida waited a moment before she replied.
Then she said coldly, “Don Ippolito is not going
with us, mother.”
“Not going with us? Why” —
“He is not going to America. He will not leave
Venice; he is to remain a priest,” said Florida, doggedly.
Mrs. Vervain sat down in the chair that stood
beside the door. “Not going to America; not
leave Venice; remain a priest? Florida, you astonish
me! But I am not the least surprised, not
the least in the world. I thought Don Ippolito
would give out, all along. He is not what I should
call fickle, exactly, but he is weak, or timid, rather.
He is a good man, but he lacks courage, resolution.
I always doubted if he would succeed in America;
he is too much of a dreamer. But this, really, goes
What did he say, Florida? How did he excuse
himself?”
“I hardly know; very little. What was there
to say?”
“To be sure, to be sure. Did you try to reason
with him, Florida?”
“No,” answered the girl, drearily.
“I am glad of that. I think you had said quite
enough already. You owed it to yourself not to do
so, and he might have misinterpreted it. These
foreigners are very different from Americans. No
doubt we should have had a time of it, if he had
gone with us. It must be for the best. I 'm sure
it was ordered so. But all that does n't relieve
Don Ippolito from the charge of black ingratitude,
and want of consideration for us. He 's quite made
fools of us.”
“He was not to blame. It was a very great step
for him. And if”....
“I know that. But he ought not to have talked
of it. He ought to have known his own mind fully
before speaking; that 's the only safe way. Well,
then, there is nothing to prevent our going to-morrow.”
Florida drew a long breath, and rose to go on
with the work of packing.
“Have you been crying, Florida? Well, of
course, you can't help feeling sorry for such a man.
There 's a great deal of good in Don Ippolito, a
won't cry so easily, my dear. It 's very trying,”
said Mrs. Vervain. She sat awhile in silence before
she asked: “Will he come here to-morrow
morning?”
Her daughter looked at her with a glance of terrified
inquiry.
“Do have your wits about you, my dear! We
can't go away without saying good-by to him, and
we can't go away without paying him.”
“Paying him?”
“Yes, paying him — paying him for your lessons.
It 's always been very awkward. He has n't
been like other teachers, you know: more like a
guest, or friend of the family. He never seemed
to want to take the money, and of late, I 've been
letting it run along, because I hated so to offer it,
till now, it 's quite a sum. I suppose he needs it,
poor fellow. And how to get it to him is the question.
He may not come to-morrow, as usual, and
I could n't trust it to the padrone. We might
send it to him in a draft from Paris, but I 'd rather
pay him before we go. Besides, it would be rather
rude, going away without seeing him again.” Mrs.
Vervain thought a moment; then, “I 'll tell you,”
she resumed. “If he does n't happen to come here
to-morrow morning, we can stop on our way to the
station and give him the money.”
Florida did not answer.
“Don't you think that would be a good plan?”
“I don't know,” replied the girl in a dull way
“Why, Florida, if you think from anything Don
Ippolito said that he would rather not see us again
— that it would be painful to him — why, we could
ask Mr. Ferris to hand him the money.”
“Oh no, no, no, mother!” cried Florida, hiding
her face, “that would be too horribly indelicate!”
“Well, perhaps it would n't be quite good taste,”
said Mrs. Vervain perturbedly, “but you need n't
express yourself so violently, my dear. It 's not a
matter of life and death. I 'm sure I don't know
what to do. We must stop at Don Ippolito's
house, I suppose. Don't you think so?”
“Yes,” faintly assented the daughter.
Mrs. Vervain yawned. “Well I can't think
anything more about it to-night; I 'm too stupid.
But that 's the way we shall do. Will you help me
to bed, my dear? I shall be good for nothing to-morrow.”
She went on talking of Don Ippolito's change of
purpose till her head touched the pillow, from
which she suddenly lifted it again, and called out to
her daughter, who had passed into the next room:
“But Mr. Ferris — why did n't he come back with
you?”
“Come back with me?”
“Why yes, child. I sent him out to call you,
just before you came in. This Don Ippolito business
put him quite out of my head. Did n't you
see him?.... Oh! What 's that?”
“Nothing: I dropped my candle.”
“You 're sure you did n't set anything on fire?”
“No! It went dead out.”
“Light it again, and do look. Now is everything
right?”
“Yes.”
“It 's queer he did n't come back to say he
could n't find you. What do you suppose became
of him?”
“I don't know, mother.”
“It 's very perplexing. I wish Mr. Ferris were
not so odd. It quite borders on affectation. I don't
know what to make of it. We must send word to
him the very first thing to-morrow morning, that
we 're going, and ask him to come to see us.”
Florida made no reply. She sat staring at the
black space of the door-way into her mother's room.
Mrs. Vervain did not speak again. After a while
her daughter softly entered her chamber, shading
the candle with her hand; and seeing that she
slept, softly withdrew, closed the door, and went
about the work of packing again. When it was all
done, she flung herself upon her bed and hid her
face in the pillow.
The next morning was spent in bestowing those
interminable last touches which the packing of ladies'
baggage demands, and in taking leave with
largess (in which Mrs. Vervain shone) of all the
people in the house and out of it, who had so much
The whole was not a vast sum; nor did the
sundry extgortions of the padrone come to much,
though the honest man racked his brain to invent
injuries to his apartments and furniture. Being
unmurmuringly paid, he gave way to his real good-will
for his tenants in many little useful offices.
At the end he persisted in sending them to the station
in his own gondola and could with difficulty be
kept from going with them.
Mrs. Vervain had early sent a message to Ferris,
but word came back a first and a second time that
he was not at home, and the forenoon wore away
and he had not appeared. A certain indignation
sustained her till the gondola pushed out into the
canal, and then it yielded to an intolerable regret
that she should not see him.
“I can't go without saying good-by to Mr. Ferris,
Florida,” she said at last, “and it 's no use asking
me. He may have been wanting a little in
politeness, but he 's been so good all along; and we
owe him too much not to make an effort to thank
him before we go. We really must stop a moment
at his house.”
Florida, who had regarded her mother's efforts to
summon Ferris to them with passive coldness,
turned a look of agony upon her. But in a moment
she bade the gondolier stop at the consulate, and
dropping her veil over her face, fell back in the
shadow of the tenda-curtains.
Mrs. Vervain sentimentalized their departure a
little, but her daughter made no comment on the
scene they were leaving.
The gondolier rang at Ferris's door and returned
with the answer that he was not at home.
Mrs. Vervain gave way to despair. “Oh dear,
oh dear! This is too bad! What shall we do?”
“We 'll lose the train, mother, if we loiter in this
way,” said Florida.
“Well, wait. I must leave a message at least.”
“How could you be away,” she wrote on her card,
“when we called to say good-by? We 've changed
our plans and we 're going to-day. I shall write you
a nice scolding letter from Verona — we 're going
over the Brenner — for your behavior last night.
Who will keep you straight when I'm gone? You 've
been very, very kind. Florida joins me in a thousand
thanks, regrets, and good-byes.”
“There, I have n't said anything, after all,” she
fretted, with tears in her eyes.
The gondolier carried the card again to the door,
where Ferris's servant let down a basket by a string
and fished it up.
“If Don Ippolito should n't be in,” said Mrs.
Vervain, as the boat moved on again, “I don't
know what I shall do with this money. It will be
awkward beyond anything.”
The gondola slipped from the Canalazzo into the
network of the smaller canals, where the dense
shadows were as old as the palaces that cast them,
gondolier dismounted and rang at Don Ippolito's
door. There was no response; he rang again and
again. At last from a window of the uppermost
story the head of the priest himself peered out.
The gondolier touched his hat and said, “It is the
ladies who ask for you, Don Ippolito.”
It was a minute before the door opened, and the
priest, bare-headed and blinking in the strong light,
came with a stupefied air across the quay to the
landing-steps.
“Well, Don Ippolito!” cried Mrs. Vervain,
rising and giving him her hand, which she first
waved at the trunks and bags piled up in the
vacant space in the front of the boat, “what do you
think of this? We are really going, immediately;
we can change our minds too; and I don't think it
would have been too much,” she added with a
friendly smile, “if we had gone without saying
good-by to you. What in the world does it all
mean, your giving up that grand project of yours so
suddenly?”
She sat down again, that she might talk more at
her ease, and seemed thoroughly happy to have
Don Ippolito before her again.
“It finally appeared best, madama,” he said
quietly, after a quick, keen glance at Florida, who
did not lift her veil.
“Well, perhaps you 're partly right. But I
can't help thinking that you with your talent would
there, in the most surprising way. There 's the
Screw Company of Providence. It 's such a simple
thing; and now the shares are worth eight hundred.
Are you well to-day, Don Ippolito?”
“Quite well, madama.”
“I thought you looked rather pale. But I believe
you 're always a little pale. You must n't
work too hard. We shall miss you a great deal,
Don Ippolito.”
“Thanks, madama.”
“Yes, we shall be quite lost without you. And
I wanted to say this to you, Don Ippolito, that if
ever you change your mind again, and conclude to
come to America, you must write to me, and let me
help you just as I had intended to do.”
The priest shivered, as if cold, and gave another
look at Florida's veiled face.
“You are too good,” he said.
“Yes, I really think I am,” replied Mrs. Vervain,
playfully. “Considering that you were going
to let me leave Venice without even trying to say
good-by to me, I think I 'm very good indeed.”
Mrs. Vervain's mood became overcast, and her
eyes filled with tears: “I hope you 're sorry to
have us going, Don Ippolito, for you know how
very highly I prize your acquaintance. It was
rather cruel of you, I think.”
She seemed not to remember that he could not
have known of their change of plan. Don Ippolito
gesture of deprecation, but did not speak.
“I 'm really afraid you 're not well, and I think
it 's too bad of us to be going,” resumed Mrs. Vervain;
“but it can't be helped now: we are all
packed, don't you see. But I want to ask one
favor of you, Don Ippolito; and that is,” said Mrs.
Vervain, covertly taking a little rouleau from her
pocket, “that you 'll leave these inventions of yours
for a while, and give yourself a vacation. You
need rest of mind. Go into the country, somewhere,
do. That 's what 's preying upon you.
But we must really be off, now. Shake hands with
Florida — I 'm going to be the last to part with
you,” she said, with a tearful smile.
Don Ippolito and Florida extended their hands.
Neither spoke, and as she sank back upon the seat
from which she had half risen, she drew more
closely the folds of the veil which she had not lifted
from her face.
Mrs. Vervain gave a little sob as Don Ippolito
took her hand and kissed it; and she had some
difficulty in leaving with him the rouleau, which she
tried artfully to press into his palm. “Good-by,
good-by,” she said, “don't drop it,” and attempted
to close his fingers over it.
But he let it lie carelessly in his open hand, as
the gondola moved off, and there it still lay as he
stood watching the boat slip under a bridge at the
next corner, and disappear. While he stood there
aspect approached. It was said that this man's
brain had been turned by the death of his brother,
who was betrayed to the Austrians after the revolution
of '48, by his wife's confessor. He advanced
with swift strides, and at the moment he reached
Don Ippolito's side he suddenly turned his face upon
him and cursed him through his clenched teeth:
“Dog of a priest!”
Don Ippolito, as if his whole race had renounced
him in the maniac's words, uttered a desolate cry,
and hiding his face in his hands, tottered into his
house.
The rouleau had dropped from his palm; it
rolled down the shelving marble of the quay, and
slipped into the water.
The young beggar who had held Mrs. Vervain's
gondola to the shore while she talked, looked up
and down the deserted quay, and at the doors and
windows. Then he began to take off his clothes
for a bath.
| XVI. A foregone conclusion | |