 | XVIII. A foregone conclusion |  |
18. XVIII.
The terrible stroke sobered Ferris; he woke from
his long debauch of hate and jealousy and despair;
for the first time since that night in the garden, he
faced his fate with a clear mind. Death had set
his seal forever to a testimony which he had been
able neither to refuse nor to accept; in abject sorrow
and shame he thanked God that he had been
kept from dealing that last cruel blow; but if Don
Ippolito had come back from the dead to repeat
his witness, Ferris felt that the miracle could not
change his own passive state. There was now but
one thing in the world for him to do: to see Florida,
to confront her with his knowledge of all that had
been, and to abide by her word, whatever it was.
At the worst, there was the war, whose drums had
already called to him, for a refuge.
He thought at first that he might perhaps overtake
the Vervains before they sailed for America,
but he remembered that they had left Venice six
weeks before. It seemed impossible that he could
wait, but when he landed in New York, he was tormented
in his impatience by a strange reluctance
and hesitation. A fantastic light fell upon his
plans; a sense of its wildness enfeebled his purpose.
What was he going to do? Had he come four
was dead? Or was he going to say, “I have
heard that you love me, but I don't believe it: is it
true?”
He pushed on to Providence, stifling these antic
misgivings as he might, and without allowing himself
time to falter from his intent, he set out to find
Mrs. Vervain's house. He knew the street and the
number, for she had often given him the address in
her invitations against the time when he should return
to America. As he drew near the house a
tender trepidation filled him and silenced all other
senses in him; his heart beat thickly; the universe
included only the fact that he was to look upon the
face he loved, and this fact had neither past nor
future.
But a terrible foreboding as of death seized him
when he stood before the house, and glanced up at
its close-shuttered front, and round upon the dusty
grass-plots and neglected flower-beds of the dooryard.
With a cold hand he rang and rang again,
and no answer came. At last a man lounged up to
the fence from the next house-door. “Guess you
won't make anybody hear,” he said, casually.
“Does n't Mrs. Vervain live in this house?”
asked Ferris, finding a husky voice in his throat
that sounded to him like some other's voice lost
there.
“She used to, but she is n't at home. Family 's
in Europe.”
They had not come back yet.
“Thanks,” said Ferris mechanically, and he went
away. He laughed to himself at this keen irony of
fortune; he was prepared for the confirmation of his
doubts; he was ready for relief from them, Heaven
knew; but this blank that the turn of the wheel
had brought, this Nothing!
The Vervains were as lost to him as if Europe
were in another planet. How should he find them
there? Besides, he was poor; he had no money to
get back with, if he had wanted to return.
He took the first train to New York, and hunted
up a young fellow of his acquaintance, who in the
days of peace had been one of the governor's aides.
He was still holding this place, and was an ardent
recruiter. He hailed with rapture the expression of
Ferris's wish to go into the war. “Look here!”
he said after a moment's thought, “did n't you
have some rank as a consul?”
“Yes,” replied Ferris with a dreary smile, “I
have been equivalent to a commander in the navy
and a colonel in the army — I don't mean both, but
either.”
“Good!” cried his friend. “We must strike
high. The colonelcies are rather inaccessible, just
at present, and so are the lieutenant-colonelcies;
but a majorship, now”....
“Oh no; don't!” pleaded Ferris. “Make me
a corporal — or a cook. I shall not be so mischievous
to our own side, then, and when the other fellows
shoot me, I shall not be so much of a loss.”
“Oh, they won't shoot you,” expostulated his
friend, high-heartedly. He got Ferris a commission
as second lieutenant, and lent him money to buy a
uniform.
Ferris's regiment was sent to a part of the southwest,
where he saw a good deal of fighting and
fever and ague. At the end of two years, spent alternately
in the field and the hospital, he was riding
out near the camp one morning in unusual spirits,
when two men in butternut fired at him: one had
the mortification to miss him; the bullet of the
other struck him in the arm. There was talk of
amputation at first, but the case was finally managed
without. In Ferris's state of health it was
quite the same an end of his soldiering.
He came North sick and maimed and poor. He
smiled now to think of confronting Florida in any
imperative or challenging spirit; but the current of
his hopeless melancholy turned more and more
towards her. He had once, at a desperate venture,
written to her at Providence, but he had got no answer.
He asked of a Providence man among the
artists in New York, if he knew the Vervains; the
Providence man said that he did know them a little
when he was much younger; they had been abroad
a great deal; he believed in a dim way that they
were still in Europe. The young one, he added,
used to have a temper of her own.
“Indeed!” said Ferris stiffly.
The one fast friend whom he found in New York
was the governor's dashing aide. The enthusiasm
of this recruiter of regiments had not ceased with
Ferris's departure for the front; the number of disabled
officers forbade him to lionize any one of
them, but he befriended Ferris; he made a feint of
discovering the open secret of his poverty, and
asked how he could help him.
“I don't know,” said Ferris, “it looks like a
hopeless case, to me.”
“Oh no it is n't,” retorted his friend, as cheerfully
and confidently as he had promised him that
he should not be shot. “Did n't you bring back
any pictures from Venice with you?”
“I brought back a lot of sketches and studies.
I 'm sorry to say that I loafed a good deal there;
I used to feel that I had eternity before me; and I
was a theorist and a purist and an idiot generally.
There are none of them fit to be seen.”
“Never mind; let 's look at them.”
They hunted out Ferris's property from a catch-all
closet in the studio of a sculptor with whom he
had left them, and who expressed a polite pleasure
in handing them over to Ferris rather than to his
heirs and assigns.
“Well, I 'm not sure that I share your satisfaction,
old fellow,” said the painter ruefully; but he
unpacked the sketches.
Their inspection certainly revealed a disheartening
condition of half-work. “And I can't do anything
Ferris, stopping midway in the business, and making
as if to shut the case again.
“Hold on,” said his friend. “What 's this?
Why, this is n't so bad.” It was the study of Don
Ippolito as a Venetian priest, which Ferris beheld
with a stupid amaze, remembering that he had
meant to destroy it, and wondering how it had got
where it was, but not really caring much. “It 's
worse than you can imagine,” said he, still looking
at it with this apathy.
“No matter; I want you to sell it to me.
Come!”
“I can't!” replied Ferris piteously. “It would
be flat burglary.”
“Then put it into the exhibition.”
The sculptor, who had gone back to scraping the
chin of the famous public man on whose bust he
was at work, stabbed him to the heart with his
modeling-tool, and turned to Ferris and his friend.
He slanted his broad red beard for a sidelong look
at the picture, and said: “I know what you mean,
Ferris. It 's hard, and it 's feeble in some ways;
and it looks a little too much like experimenting.
But it is n't so infernally bad.”
“Don't be fulsome,” responded Ferris, jadedly.
He was thinking in a thoroughly vanquished mood
what a tragico-comic end of the whole business it
was that poor Don Ippolito should come to his
rescue in this fashion, and as it were offer to succor
of suffering such help; it would be much better
to starve; but he felt cowed, and he had not courage
to take arms against this sarcastic destiny,
which had pursued him with a mocking smile from
one lower level to another. He rubbed his forehead
and brooded upon the picture. At least it
would be some comfort to be rid of it; and Don
Ippolito was dead; and to whom could it mean
more than the face of it?
His friend had his way about framing it, and it
was got into the exhibition. The hanging-committee
offered it the hospitalities of an obscure corner;
but it was there, and it stood its chance. Nobody
seemed to know that it was there, however,
unless confronted with it by Ferris's friend, and
then no one seemed to care for it, much less want
to buy it. Ferris saw so many much worse pictures
sold all around it, that he began gloomily to
respect it. At first it had shocked him to see it on
the Academy's wall; but it soon came to have no
other relation to him than that of creatureship, like
a poem in which a poet celebrates his love or laments
his dead, and sells for a price. His pride as
well as his poverty was set on having the picture
sold; he had nothing to do, and he used to lurk
about, and see if it would not interest somebody at
last. But it remained unsold throughout May, and
well into June, long after the crowds had ceased to
frequent the exhibition, and only chance visitors
from the country straggled in by twos and threes.
One warm, dusty afternoon, when he turned into
the Academy out of Fourth Avenue, the empty hall
echoed to no footfall but his own. A group of
weary women, who wore that look of wanting lunch
which characterizes all picture-gallery-goers at home
and abroad, stood faint before a certain large Venetian
subject which Ferris abhorred, and the very
name of which he spat out of his mouth with loathing
for its unreality. He passed them with a sombre
glance, as he took his way toward the retired
spot where his own painting hung.
A lady whose crapes would have betrayed to her
own sex the latest touch of Paris stood a little way
back from it, and gazed fixedly at it. The pose of
her head, her whole attitude, expressed a quiet dejection;
without seeing her face one could know its
air of pensive wistfulness. Ferris resolved to indulge
himself in a near approach to this unwonted
spectacle of interest in his picture; at the sound of
his steps the lady slowly turned a face of somewhat
heavily molded beauty, and from low-growing, thick
pale hair and level brows, stared at him with the
sad eyes of Florida Vervain. She looked fully the
last two years older.
As though she were listening to the sound of his
steps in the dark instead of having him there visibly
before her, she kept her eyes upon him with a
dreamy unrecognition.
“Yes, it is I,” said Ferris, as if she had spoken.
She recovered herself, and with a subdued, sorrowful
“I supposed you must be in New York,” and she
indicated that she had supposed so from seeing this
picture.
Ferris felt the blood mounting to his head. “Do
you think it is like?” he asked.
“No,” she said, “it is n't just to him; it attributes
things that did n't belong to him, and it leaves
out a great deal.”
“I could scarcely have hoped to please you in a
portrait of Don Ippolito.” Ferris saw the red light
break out as it used on the girl's pale cheeks, and
her eyes dilate angrily. He went on recklessly:
“He sent for me after you went away, and gave
me a message for you. I never promised to deliver
it, but I will do so now. He asked me to tell you
when we met, that he had acted on your desire, and
had tried to reconcile himself to his calling and his
religion; he was going to enter a Carmelite convent.”
Florida made no answer, but she seemed to expect
him to go on, and he was constrained to do so.
“He never carried out his purpose,” Ferris said,
with a keen glance at her; “he died the night
after I saw him.”
“Died?” The fan and the parasol and the two
or three light packages she had been holding slid
down one by one, and lay at her feet. “Thank
you for bringing me his last words,” she said, but
did not ask him anything more.
Ferris did not offer to gather up her things; he
stood irresolute; presently he continued with a
downcast look: “He had had a fever, but they
thought he was getting well. His death must have
been sudden.” He stopped, and resumed fiercely,
resolved to have the worst out: “I went to him,
with no good-will toward him, the next day after
I saw him; but I came too late. That was God's
mercy to me. I hope you have your consolation,
Miss Vervain.”
It maddened him to see her so little moved, and
he meant to make her share his remorse.
“Did he blame me for anything?” she asked.
“No!” said Ferris, with a bitter laugh, “he
praised you.”
“I am glad of that,” returned Florida, “for I
have thought it all over many times, and I know
that I was not to blame, though at first I blamed
myself. I never intended him anything but good.
That is my consolation, Mr. Ferris. But you,” she
added, “you seem to make yourself my judge.
Well, and what do you blame me for? I have a
right to know what is in your mind.”
The thing that was in his mind had rankled
there for two years; in many a black reverie of
those that alternated with his moods of abject
self-reproach and perfect trust of her, he had confronted
her and flung it out upon her in one stinging
phrase. But he was now suddenly at a loss;
the words would not come; his torment fell dumb
Her lips had quivered a little in making that
demand, and there had been a corresponding break
in her voice.
“Florida! Florida!” Ferris heard himself saying,
“I loved you all the time!”
“Oh indeed, did you love me?” she cried, indignantly,
while the tears shone in her eyes. “And
was that why you left a helpless young girl to
meet that trouble alone? Was that why you refused
me your advice, and turned your back on me,
and snubbed me? Oh, many thanks for your
love!” She dashed the gathered tears angrily
away, and went on. “Perhaps you knew, too,
what that poor priest was thinking of?”
“Yes,” said Ferris, stolidly, “I did at last: he
told me.”
“Oh, then you acted generously and nobly to let
him go on! It was kind to him, and very, very
kind to me!”
“What could I do?” demanded Ferris, amazed
and furious to find himself on the defensive. “His
telling me put it out of my power to act.”
“I 'm glad that you can satisfy yourself with
such a quibble! But I wonder that you can tell
me — any woman of it!”
“By Heavens, this is atrocious!” cried Ferris.
“Do you think.... Look here!” he went on
rudely. “I 'll put the case to you, and you shall
judge it. Remember that I was such a fool as to
told me that he was going to risk everything — going
to give up home, religion, friends — on the ten
thousandth part of a chance that you might some
day care for him. I did not believe he had even so
much chance as that; but he had always thought
me his friend, and he trusted me. Was it a quibble
that kept me from betraying him? I don't know
what honor is among women; but no man could
have done it. I confess to my shame that I went
to your house that night longing to betray him.
And then suppose your mother sent me into the
garden to call you, and I saw... what has made
my life a hell of doubt for the last two years; what
... No, excuse me! I can't put the case to you
after all.”
“What do you mean?” asked Florida. “I don't
understand you!”
“What do I mean? You don't understand?
Are you so blind as that, or are you making a fool
of me? What could I think but that you had
played with that priest's heart till your own”....
“Oh!” cried Florida with a shudder, starting
away from him, “did you think I was such a wicked
girl as that?”
It was no defense, no explanation, no denial; it
simply left the case with Ferris as before. He
stood looking like a man who does not know
whether to bless or curse himself, to laugh or blaspheme.
She stooped and tried to pick up the things she
had let fall upon the floor; but she seemed not able
to find them. He bent over, and, gathering them
together, returned them to her with his left hand,
keeping the other in the breast of his coat.
“Thanks,” she said; and then after a moment,
“Have you been hurt?” she asked timidly.
“Yes,” said Ferris in a sulky way. “I have had
my share.” He glanced down at his arm askance.
“It 's rather conventional,” he added. “It is n't
much of a hurt; but then, I was n't much of a
soldier.
The girl's eyes looked reverently at the conventional
arm; those were the days, so long past, when
women worshipped men for such things. But she
said nothing, and as Ferris's eyes wandered to her,
he received a novel and painful impression. He
said, hesitatingly, “I have not asked before: but
your mother, Miss Vervain — I hope she is well?”
“She is dead,” answered Florida, with stony
quiet.
They were both silent for a time. Then Ferris
said, “I had a great affection for your mother.”
“Yes,” said the girl, “she was fond of you, too.
But you never wrote or sent her any word; it used
to grieve her.”
Her unjust reproach went to his heart, so long
preoccupied with its own troubles; he recalled with
a tender remorse the old Venetian days and the
kindliness of the gracious, silly woman who had
charm of her perfect ladylikeness, and of her winning,
weak-headed desire to make every one happy
to whom she spoke; the beauty of the good-will,
the hospitable soul that in an imaginably better
world than this will outvalue a merely intellectual
or æsthetic life. He humbled himself before her
memory, and as keenly reproached himself as if he
could have made her hear from him at any time
during the past two years. He could only say, “I
am sorry that I gave your mother pain; I loved her
very truly. I hope that she did not suffer much
before” —
“No,” said Florida, “it was a peaceful end; but
finally it was very sudden. She had not been well
for many years, with that sort of decline; I used
sometimes to feel troubled about her before we came
to Venice; but I was very young. I never was
really alarmed till that day I went to you.”
“I remember,” said Ferris contritely.
“She had fainted, and I thought we ought to see
a doctor; but afterwards, because I thought that I
ought not to do so without speaking to her, I did
not go to the doctor; and that day we made up
our minds to get home as soon as we could; and
she seemed so much better, for a while; and then,
everything seemed to happen at once. When we
did start home, she could not go any farther than
Switzerland, and in the fall we went back to Italy.
We went to Sorrento, where the climate seemed to
whole time. She died in March. I found some
old friends of hers in Naples, and came home with
them.”
The girl hesitated a little over the words, which
she nevertheless uttered unbroken, while the tears
fell quietly down her face. She seemed to have
forgotten the angry words that had passed between
her and Ferris, to remember him only as one
who had known her mother, while she went on to
relate some little facts in the history of her mother's
last days; and she rose into a higher, serener atmosphere,
inaccessible to his resentment or his regret,
as she spoke of her loss. The simple tale of
sickness and death inexpressibly belittled his passionate
woes, and made them look theatrical to him.
He hung his head as they turned at her motion
and walked away from the picture of Don Ippolito,
and down the stairs toward the street-door; the
people before the other Venetian picture had apparently
yielded to their craving for lunch, and had
vanished.
“I have very little to tell you of my own life,”
Ferris began awkwardly. “I came home soon after
you started, and I went to Providence to find you,
but you had not got back.”
Florida stopped him and looked perplexedly into
his face, and then moved on.
“Then I went into the army. I wrote once to
you.”
“I never got your letter,” she said.
They were now in the lower hall, and near the
door.
“Florida,” said Ferris, abruptly, “I 'm poor and
disabled; I 've no more right than any sick beggar
in the street to say it to you; but I loved you, I
must always love you. I — Good-by!”
She halted him again, and “You said,” she
grieved, “that you doubted me; you said that I
had made your life a” —
“Yes, I said that; I know it,” answered Ferris.
“You thought I could be such a false and cruel
girl as that!”
“Yes, yes: I thought it all, God help me!”
“When I was only sorry for him, when it was
you that I” —
“Oh, I know it,” answered Ferris in a heartsick,
hopeless voice. “He knew it, too. He told me so
the day before he died.”
“And did n't you believe him?”
Ferris could not answer.
“Do you believe him now?”
“I believe anything you tell me. When I look
at you, I can't believe I ever doubted you.”
“Why?”
“Because — because — I love you.”
“Oh! That 's no reason.”
“I know it; but I 'm used to being without a
reason.”
Florida looked gravely at his penitent face, and a
brave red color mantled her own, while she advanced
an unanswerable argument: “Then what
are you going away for?”
The world seemed to melt and float away from
between them. It returned and solidified at the
sound of the janitor's steps as he came towards
them on his round through the empty building.
Ferris caught her hand; she leaned heavily upon
his arm as they walked out into the street. It was
all they could do at the moment except to look into
each other's faces, and walk swiftly on.
At last, after how long a time he did not know,
Ferris cried: “Where are we going, Florida?”
“Why, I don't know!” she replied. “I 'm
stopping with those friends of ours at the Fifth
Avenue Hotel. We were going on to Providence
to-morrow. We landed yesterday; and we stayed
to do some shopping” —
“And may I ask why you happened to give your
first moments in America to the fine arts?”
“The fine arts? Oh! I thought I might find
something of yours, there!”
At the hotel she presented him to her party as a
friend whom her mother and she had known in
Italy; and then went to lay aside her hat. The
Providence people received him with the easy, half-southern
warmth of manner which seems to have
floated northward as far as their city on the Gulf
Stream bathing the Rhode Island shores. The
an outline history of their acquaintance, which she
evolved from him with so much tact that he was
not conscious of parting with information; and she
divined indefinitely more when she saw them together
again. She was charming; but to Ferris's
thinking she had a fault, she kept him too much
from Florida, though she talked of nothing else,
and at the last she was discreetly merciful.
“Do you think,” whispered Florida, very close
against his face, when they parted, “that I 'll have
a bad temper?”
“I hope you will — or I shall be killed with
kindness,” he replied.
She stood a moment, nervously buttoning his
coat across his breast. “You must n't let that picture
be sold, Henry,” she said, and by this touch
alone did she express any sense, if she had it, of his
want of feeling in proposing to sell it. He winced,
and she added with a soft pity in her voice, “He
did bring us together, after all. I wish you had
believed him, dear!”
“So do I,” said Ferris, most humbly.
People are never equal to the romance of their
youth in after life, except by fits, and Ferris especially
could not keep himself at what he called the
operatic pitch of their brief betrothal and the early
days of their marriage. With his help, or even his
encouragement, his wife might have been able to
least, and as his hurt healed but slowly, and it
was a good while before he could paint with his
wounded arm, it was an easy matter for her to believe
in the meanwhile that he would have been
the greatest painter of his time, but for his honorable
disability; to hear her, you would suppose no
one else had ever been shot in the service of his
country.
It was fortunate for Ferris, since he could not
work, that she had money; in exalted moments he
had thought this a barrier to their marriage; yet
he could not recall any one who had refused the
hand of a beautiful girl because of the accident of
her wealth, and in the end he silenced his scruples.
It might be said that in many other ways he was
not her equal; but one ought to reflect how very
few men are worthy of their wives in any sense.
After his fashion he certainly loved her always, —
even when she tried him most, for it must be owned
that she really had that hot temper which he had
dreaded in her from the first. Not that her imperiousness
directly affected him. For a long time
after their marriage, she seemed to have no other
desire than to lose her outwearied will in his.
There was something a little pathetic in this; there
was a kind of bewilderment in her gentleness, as
though the relaxed tension of her long self-devotion
to her mother left her without a full motive; she
apparently found it impossible to give herself with
could do so many things for himself. When her
children came they filled this vacancy, and afforded
her scope for the greatest excesses of self-devotion.
Ferris laughed to find her protecting them and
serving them with the same tigerish tenderness, the
same haughty humility, as that with which she
used to care for poor Mrs. Vervain; and he perceived
that this was merely the direction away from
herself of that intense arrogance of nature which,
but for her power and need of loving, would have
made her intolerable. What she chiefly exacted
from them in return for her fierce devotedness was
the truth in everything; she was content that they
should be rather less fond of her than of their father,
whom indeed they found much more amusing.
The Ferrises went to Europe some years after
their marriage, revisiting Venice, but sojourning
for the most part in Florence. Ferris had once
imagined that the tragedy which had given him his
wife would always invest her with the shadow of its
sadness, but in this he was mistaken. There is
nothing has really so strong a digestion as love, and
this is very lucky, seeing what manifold experiences
love has to swallow and assimilate; and when they
got back to Venice, Ferris found that the customs
of their joint life exorcised all the dark associations
of the place. These simply formed a sombre background,
against which their wedded happiness relieved
itself. They talked much of the past, with
shocking, it is nevertheless true, and true to human
nature, that they spoke of Don Ippolito as if he were
a part of their love.
Ferris had never ceased to wonder at what he
called the unfathomable innocence of his wife, and
he liked to go over all the points of their former life
in Venice, and bring home to himself the utter simplicity
of her girlish ideas, motives, and designs,
which both confounded and delighted him.
“It 's amazing, Florida,” he would say, “it 's
perfectly amazing that you should have been willing
to undertake the job of importing into America
that poor fellow with his whole stock of helplessness,
dreamery, and unpracticality. What were
you about?”
“Why, I 've often told you, Henry. I thought
he ought n't to continue a priest.”
“Yes, yes; I know.” Then he would remain
lost in thought, softly whistling to himself. On
one of these occasions he asked, “Do you think he
was really very much troubled by his false position?”
“I can't tell, now. He seemed to be so.”
“That story he told you of his childhood and of
how he became a priest; did n't it strike you at
the time like rather a made-up, melodramatic history?”
“No, no! How can you say such things, Henry?
It was too simple not to be true.”
“Well, well. Perhaps so. But he baffles me.
He always did, for that matter.”
Then came another pause, while Ferris lay back
upon the gondola cushions, getting the level of the
Lido just under his hat-brim.
“Do you think he was very much of a skeptic,
after all, Florida?”
Mrs. Ferris turned her eyes reproachfully upon
her husband. “Why, Henry, how strange you
are! You said yourself, once, that you used to
wonder if he were not a skeptic.”
“Yes; I know. But for a man who had lived
in doubt so many years, he certainly slipped back
into the bosom of mother church pretty suddenly.
Don't you think he was a person of rather light
feelings?”
“I can't talk with you, my dear, if you go on in
that way.”
“I don't mean any harm. I can see how in
many things he was the soul of truth and honor.
But it seems to me that even the life he lived was
largely imagined. I mean that he was such a
dreamer that once having fancied himself afflicted
at being what he was, he could go on and suffer
as keenly as if he really were troubled by it. Why
might n't it be that all his doubts came from anger
and resentment towards those who made him a
priest, rather than from any examination of his own
mind? I don't say it was so. But I don't believe
he knew quite what he wanted. He must have
the failure of his particular attempts. I once
thought that perhaps he had a genius in that way,
but I question now whether he had. If he had, it
seems to me he had opportunity to prove it — certainly,
as a priest he had leisure to prove it. But
when that sort of sub-consciousness of his own inadequacy
came over him, it was perfectly natural
for him to take refuge in the supposition that he
had been baffled by circumstances.”
Mrs. Ferris remained silently troubled. “I don't
know how to answer you, Henry; but I think that
you 're judging him narrowly and harshly.”
“Not harshly. I feel very compassionate towards
him. But now, even as to what one might
consider the most real thing in his life, — his caring
for you, — it seems to me there must have been
a great share of imagined sentiment in it. It was
not a passion; it was a gentle nature's dream of a
passion.”
“He did n't die of a dream,” said the wife.
“No, he died of a fever.”
“He had got well of the fever.”
“That 's very true, my dear. And whatever his
head was, he had an affectionate and faithful heart.
I wish I had been gentler with him. I must often
have bruised that sensitive soul. God knows I 'm
sorry for it. But he 's a puzzle, he 's a puzzle!”
Thus lapsing more and more into a mere problem
as the years have passed, Don Ippolito has at last
love and a mortal sorrow. Perhaps this
final effect in the mind of him who has realized the
happiness of which the poor priest vainly dreamed
is not the least tragic phase of the tragedy of Don
Ippolito.
| XVIII. A foregone conclusion | |