 | XVII. A foregone conclusion |  |
17. XVII.
Ferris returned at nightfall to his house, where
he had not been since daybreak, and flung himself
exhausted upon the bed. His face was burnt red
with the sun, and his eyes were bloodshot. He fell
into a doze and dreamed that he was still at Malamocco,
whither he had gone that morning in a sort
of craze, with some fishermen, who were to cast
their nets there; then he was rowing back to
Venice across the lagoon, that seemed a molten fire
under the keel. He woke with a heavy groan, and
bade Marina fetch him a light.
She set it on the table, and handed him the card
Mrs. Vervain had left. He read it and read it
again, and then he laid it down, and putting on
his hat, he took his cane and went out. “Do not
wait for me, Marina,” he said, “I may be late.
Go to bed.”
He returned at midnight, and lighting his candle
took up the card and read it once more. He could
not tell whether to be glad or sorry that he had
failed to see the Vervains again. He took it for
granted that Don Ippolito was to follow; he would
not ask himself what motive had hastened their going.
The reasons were all that he should never
more look upon the woman so hatefully lost to him,
them.
He lay down in his clothes, and began to dream
almost before he began to sleep. He woke early,
and went out to walk. He did not rest all day.
Once he came home, and found a letter from Mrs.
Vervain, postmarked Verona, reiterating her lamentations
and adieux, and explaining that the
priest had relinquished his purpose, and would not
go to America at all. The deeper mystery in
which this news left him was not less sinister than
before.
In the weeks that followed, Ferris had no other
purpose than to reduce the days to hours, the hours
to minutes. The burden that fell upon him when
he woke lay heavy on his heart till night, and oppressed
him far into his sleep. He could not give
his trouble certain shape; what was mostly with
him was a formless loss, which he could not resolve
into any definite shame or wrong. At times, what
he had seen seemed to him some baleful trick of the
imagination, some lurid and foolish illusion.
But he could do nothing, he could not ask himself
what the end was to be. He kept indoors by
day, trying to work, trying to read, marveling
somewhat that he did not fall sick and die. At
night he set out on long walks, which took him he
cared not where, and often detained him till the
gray lights of morning began to tremble through
the nocturnal blue. But even by night he shunned
Their landlord sent him a package of trifles they
had left behind, but he refused to receive them,
sending back word that he did not know where the
ladies were. He had half expected that Mrs. Vervain,
though he had not answered her last letter,
might write to him again from England, but she
did not. The Vervains had passed out of his
world; he knew that they had been in it only by
the torment they had left him.
He wondered in a listless way that he should see
nothing of Don Ippolito. Once at midnight he
fancied that the priest was coming towards him
across a campo he had just entered; he stopped and
turned back into the calle: when the priest came
up to him, it was not Don Ippolito.
In these days Ferris received a dispatch from the
Department of State, informing him that his successor
had been appointed, and directing him to
deliver up the consular flags, seals, archives, and
other property of the United States. No reason
for his removal was given; but as there had never
been any reason for his appointment, he had no
right to complain; the balance was exactly dressed
by this simple device of our civil service. He determined
not to wait for the coming of his successor
before giving up the consular effects, and he
placed them at once in the keeping of the worthy
ship-chandler who had so often transferred them
from departing to arriving consuls. Then being
found himself in nowise eager to go; but he began
in a desultory way to pack up his sketches and
studies.
One morning as he sat idle in his dismantled
studio, Marina came to tell him that an old woman,
waiting at the door below, wished to speak with
him.
“Well, let her come up,” said Ferris wearily,
and presently Marina returned with a very ill-favored
beldam, who stared hard at him while he
frowningly puzzled himself as to where he had seen
that malign visage before.
“Well?” he said harshly.
“I come,” answered the old woman, “on the
part of Don Ippolito Rondinelli, who desires so
much to see your excellency.”
Ferris made no response, while the old woman
knotted the fringe of her shawl with quaking hands,
and presently added with a tenderness in her voice
which oddly discorded with the hardness of her
face: “He has been very sick, poor thing, with a
fever; but now he is in his senses again, and the
doctors say he will get well. I hope so. But he is
still very weak. He tried to write two lines to you,
but he had not the strength; so he bade me bring
you this word: That he had something to say
which it greatly concerned you to hear, and that
he prayed you to forgive his not coming to revere
you, for it was impossible, and that you should have
him the quickest you could.”
The old woman wiped her eyes with the corner
of her shawl, and her chin wobbled pathetically
while she shot a glance of baleful dislike at Ferris,
who answered after a long dull stare at her, “Tell
him I 'll come.”
He did not believe that Don Ippolito could tell
him anything that greatly concerned him; but he
was worn out with going round in the same circle
of conjecture, and so far as he could be glad, he was
glad of this chance to face his calamity. He would
go, but not at once; he would think it over; he
would go to-morrow, when he had got some grasp
of the matter.
The old woman lingered.
“Tell him I 'll come,” repeated Ferris impatiently.
“A thousand excuses; but my poor master has
been very sick. The doctors say he will get well.
I hope so. But he is very weak indeed; a little
shock, a little disappointment..... Is the signore
very, very much occupied this morning? He
greatly desired, — he prayed that if such a thing
were possible in the goodness of your excellency
.... But I am offending the signore!”
“What do you want?” demanded Ferris.
The old wretch set up a pitiful whimper, and
tried to possess herself of his hand; she kissed his
coat-sleeve instead. “That you will return with
me,” she besought him.
“Oh, I 'll go!” groaned the painter. “I might
as well go first as last,” he added in English.
“There, stop that! Enough, enough, I tell you!
Did n't I say I was going with you?” he cried to
the old woman.
“God bless you!” she mumbled, and set off before
him down the stairs and out of the door. She
looked so miserably old and weary that he called a
gondola to his landing and made her get into it
with him.
It tormented Don Ippolito's idle neighborhood to
see Veneranda arrive in such state, and a passionate
excitement arose at the caffè, where the person
of the consul was known, when Ferris entered the
priest's house with her.
He had not often visited Don Ippolito, but the
quaintness of the place had been so vividly impressed
upon him, that he had a certain familiarity
with the grape-arbor of the anteroom, the paintings
of the parlor, and the puerile arrangement of the
piano and melodeon. Veneranda led him through
these rooms to the chamber where Don Ippolito
had first shown him his inventions. They were all
removed now, and on a bed, set against the wall
opposite the door, lay the priest, with his hands on
his breast, and a faint smile on his lips, so peaceful,
so serene, that the painter stopped with a sudden
awe, as if he had unawares come into the presence
of death.
“Advance, advance,” whispered the old woman.
Near the head of the bed sat a white-haired
priest wearing the red stockings of a canonico; his
face was fanatically stern; but he rose, and bowed
courteously to Ferris.
The stir of his robes roused Don Ippolito. He
slowly and weakly turned his head, and his eyes
fell upon the painter. He made a helpless gesture
of salutation with his thin hand, and began to excuse
himself, for the trouble he had given, with a
gentle politeness that touched the painter's heart
through all the complex resentments that divided
them. It was indeed a strange ground on which
the two men met. Ferris could not have described
Don Ippolito as his enemy, for the priest had wittingly
done him no wrong; he could not have logically
hated him as a rival, for till it was too late he
had not confessed to his own heart the love that
was in it; he knew no evil of Don Ippolito, he
could not accuse him of any betraval of trust, or
violation of confidence. He felt merely that this
hapless creature, lying so deathlike before him, had
profaned, however involuntarily, what was sacredest
in the world to him; beyond this all was chaos.
He had heard of the priest's sickness with a fierce
hardening of the heart; yet as he beheld him now,
he began to remember things that moved him to a
sort of remorse. He recalled again the simple loyalty
with which Don Ippolito had first spoken to
him of Miss Vervain and tried to learn his own
feeling toward her; he thought how trustfully at
and hope, and how, when he had coldly received
his confession, Don Ippolito had solemnly adjured
him to be frank with him; and Ferris could not.
That pity for himself as the prey of fantastically
cruel chances, which he had already vaguely felt,
began now also to include the priest; ignoring all
but that compassion, he went up to the bed and
took the weak, chill, nerveless hand in his own.
The canonico rose and placed his chair for Ferris
beside the pillow, on which lay a brass crucifix, and
then softly left the room, exchanging a glance of
affectionate intelligence with the sick man.
“I might have waited a little while,” said Don
Ippolito weakly, speaking in a hollow voice that
was the shadow of his old deep tones, “but you
will know how to forgive the impatience of a man
not yet quite master of himself. I thank you for
coming. I have been very sick, as you see; I did
not think to live; I did not care.... I am very
weak, now; let me say to you quickly what I want
to say. Dear friend,” continued Don Ippolito, fixing
his eyes upon the painter's face, “I spoke to
her that night after I had parted from you.”
The priest's voice was now firm; the painter
turned his face away.
“I spoke without hope,” proceeded Don Ippolito,
“and because I must. I spoke in vain; all
was lost, all was past in a moment.”
The coil of suspicions and misgivings and fears in
clew; he could not look upon the pallid visage of
the priest lest he should now at last find there that
subtle expression of deceit; the whirl of his thoughts
kept him silent; Don Ippolito went on.
“Even if I had never been a priest, I would still
have been impossible to her. She”....
He stopped as if for want of strength to go on.
All at once he cried, “Listen!” and he rapidly recounted
the story of his life, ending with the fatal
tragedy of his love. When it was told, he said
calmly, “But now everything is over with me on
earth. I thank the Infinite Compassion for the
sorrows through which I have passed. I, also, have
proved the miraculous power of the church, potent
to save in all ages.” He gathered the crucifix in his
spectral grasp, and pressed it to his lips. “Many
merciful things have befallen me on this bed of
sickness. My uncle, whom the long years of my
darkness divided from me, is once more at peace
with me. Even that poor old woman whom I sent
to call you, and who had served me as I believed
with hate for me as a false priest in her heart, has
devoted herself day and night to my helplessness;
she has grown decrepit with her cares and vigils.
Yes, I have had many and signal marks of the divine
pity to be grateful for.” He paused, breathing
quickly, and then added, “They tell me that
the danger of this sickness is past. But none the
less I have died in it. When I rise from this bed,
it shall be to take the vows of a Carmelite friar.”
Ferris made no answer, and Don Ippolito resumed:
—
“I have told you how when I first owned to her
the falsehood in which I lived, she besought me to
try if I might not find consolation in the holy life
to which I had been devoted. When you see her,
dear friend, will you not tell her that I came to understand
that this comfort, this refuge, awaited me
in the cell of the Carmelite? I have brought so
much trouble into her life that I would fain have
her know I have found peace where she bade me
seek it, that I have mastered my affliction by reconciling
myself to it. Tell her that but for her pity
and fear for me, I believe that I must have died in
my sins.”
It was perhaps inevitable from Ferris's Protestant
association of monks and convents and penances
chiefly with the machinery of fiction, that all this
affected him as unreally as talk in a stage-play.
His heart was cold, as he answered: “I am glad
that your mind is at rest concerning the doubts
which so long troubled you. Not all men are so
easily pacified; but, as you say, it is the privilege
of your church to work miracles. As to Miss Vervain,
I am sorry that I cannot promise to give her
your message. I shall never see her again. Excuse
me,” he continued, “but your servant said
there was something you wished to say that concerned
me?”
“You will never see her again!” cried the priest,
back upon the pillow. “Oh, bereft! Oh, deaf
and blind! It was you that she loved! She confessed
it to me that night.”
“Wait!” said Ferris, trying to steady his voice,
and failing; “I was with Mrs. Vervain that night;
she sent me into the garden to call her daughter,
and I saw how Miss Vervain parted from the man
she did not love! I saw”....
It was a horrible thing to have said it, he felt
now that he had spoken; a sense of the indelicacy,
the shamefulness, seemed to alienate him from all
high concern in the matter, and to leave him a mere
self-convicted eavesdropper. His face flamed; the
wavering hopes, the wavering doubts alike died in
his heart. He had fallen below the dignity of his
own trouble.
“You saw, you saw,” softly repeated the priest,
without looking at him, and without any show of
emotion; apparently, the convalescence that had
brought him perfect clearness of reason had left his
sensibilities still somewhat dulled. He closed his
lips and lay silent. At last, he asked very gently,
“And how shall I make you believe that what
you saw was not a woman's love, but an angel's
heavenly pity for me? Does it seem hard to believe
this of her?”
“Yes,” answered the painter doggedly, “it is
hard.”
“And yet it is the very truth. Oh, you do not
moment that she denied me her love, she divined
the anguish of my soul, and with that embrace she
sought to console me for the friendlessness of a
whole life, past and to come. But I know that I
waste my words on you,” he cried bitterly. “You
never would see me as I was; you would find no
singleness in me, and yet I had a heart as full of
loyalty to you as love for her. In what have I
been false to you?”
“You never were false to me,” answered Ferris,
“and God knows I have been true to you, and at
what cost. We might well curse the day we met,
Don Ippolito, for we have only done each other
harm. But I never meant you harm. And now I
ask you to forgive me if I cannot believe you. I
cannot — yet. I am of another race from you, slow
to suspect, slow to trust. Give me a little time;
let me see you again. I want to go away and
think. I don't question your truth. I 'm afraid
you don't know. I 'm afraid that the same deceit
has tricked us both. I must come to you to-morrow.
Can I?”
He rose and stood beside the couch.
“Surely, surely,” answered the priest, looking
into Ferris's troubled eyes with calm meekness.
“You will do me the greatest pleasure. Yes, come
again to-morrow. You know,” he said with a sad
smile, referring to his purpose of taking vows,
“that my time in the world is short. Adieu, to
meet again!”
He took Ferris's hand, hanging weak and hot by
his side, and drew him gently down by it, and kissed
him on either bearded cheek. “It is our custom,
you know, among friends. Farewell.”
The canonico in the anteroom bowed austerely to
him as he passed through; the old woman refused
with a fierce “Nothing!” the money he offered her
at the door.
He bitterly upbraided himself for the doubts he
could not banish, and he still flushed with shame
that he should have declared his knowledge of a
scene which ought, at its worst, to have been inviolable
by his speech. He scarcely cared now for the
woman about whom these miseries grouped themselves;
he realized that a fantastic remorse may be
stronger than a jealous love.
He longed for the morrow to come, that he might
confess his shame and regret; but a reaction to this
violent repentance came before the night fell. As
the sound of the priest's voice and the sight of his
wasted face faded from the painter's sense, he began
to see everything in the old light again. Then
what Don Ippolito had said took a character of ludicrous,
of insolent improbability.
After dark, Ferris set out upon one of his long,
rambling walks. He walked hard and fast, to try
if he might not still, by mere fatigue of body, the
anguish that filled his soul. But whichever way he
went he came again and again to the house of Don
Ippolito, and at last he stopped there, leaning
house, as though he would spell from the senseless
stones the truth of the secret they sheltered. Far
up in the chamber, where he knew that the priest
lay, the windows were dimly lit.
As he stood thus, with his upturned face haggard
in the moonlight, the soldier commanding the Austrian
patrol which passed that way halted his squad,
and seemed about to ask him what he wanted
there.
Ferris turned and walked swiftly homeward; but
he did not even lie down. His misery took the
shape of an intent that would not suffer him to rest.
He meant to go to Don Ippolito and tell him that
his story had failed of its effect, that he was not to
be fooled so easily, and, without demanding anything
further, to leave him in his lie.
At the earliest hour when he might hope to be
admitted, he went, and rang the bell furiously.
The door opened, and he confronted the priest's
servant. “I want to see Don Ippolito,” said Ferris
abruptly.
“It cannot be,” she began.
“I tell you I must,” cried Ferris, raising his voice.
“I tell you.”....
“Madman!” fiercely whispered the old woman,
shaking both her open hands in his face, “he 's
dead! He died last night!”
| XVII. A foregone conclusion | |