 | II. A foregone conclusion |  |
2. II.
Mr. Ferris took his way through the devious
footways where the shadow was chill, and through
the broad campos where the sun was tenderly warm,
and the towers of the church rose against the speckless
azure of the vernal heaven. As he went along,
he frowned in a helpless perplexity with the case
of Don Ippolito, whom he had begun by doubting
for a spy with some incomprehensible motive, and
had ended by pitying with a certain degree of
amusement and a deep sense of the futility of his
compassion. He presently began to think of him
with a little disgust, as people commonly think of
one whom they pity and yet cannot help, and he
made haste to cast off the hopeless burden. He
shrugged his shoulders, struck his stick on the
smooth paving-stones, and let his eyes rove up and
down the fronts of the houses, for the sake of the
pretty faces that glanced out of the casements.
He was a young man, and it was spring, and this
was Venice. He made himself joyfully part of the
city and the season; he was glad of the narrowness
of the streets, of the good-humored jostling and
pushing; he crouched into an arched doorway to
let a water-carrier pass with her copper buckets
shoulder, and he returned her smiles and excuses
with others as broad and gay; he brushed by the
swelling hoops of ladies, and stooped before the
unwieldy burdens of porters, who as they staggered
through the crowd with a thrust here and a shove
there forgave themselves, laughing, with “We are
in Venice, signori;” and he stood aside for the files
of soldiers clanking heavily over the pavement, their
muskets kindling to a blaze in the sunlit campos and
quenched again in the damp shadows of the calles.
His ear was taken by the vibrant jargoning of
the boatmen as they pushed their craft under the
bridges he crossed, and the keen notes of the canaries
and the songs of the golden-billed blackbirds
whose cages hung at lattices far overhead. Heaps
of oranges, topped by the fairest cut in halves,
gave their color, at frequent intervals, to the dusky
corners and recesses and the long-drawn cry of the
venders, “Oranges of Palermo!” rose above the
clatter of feet and the clamor of other voices. At
a little shop where butter and eggs and milk
abounded, together with early flowers of various
sorts, he bought a bunch of hyacinths, blue and
white and yellow, and he presently stood smelling
these while he waited in the hotel parlor for the
ladies to whom he had sent his card. He turned at
the sound of drifting drapery, and could not forbear
placing the hyacinths in the hand of Miss Florida
Vervain, who had come into the room to receive
him.
She was a girl of about seventeen years, who
looked older; she was tall rather than short, and
rather full, — though it could not be said that she
erred in point of solidity. In the attitudes of shy
hauteur into which she constantly fell, there was a
touch of defiant awkwardness which had a certain
fascination. She was blonde, with a throat and
hands of milky whiteness; there was a suggestion
of freckles on her regular face, where a quick color
came and went, though her cheeks were habitually
somewhat pale; her eyes were very blue under
their level brows, and the lashes were even lighter
in color than the masses of her fair gold hair; the
edges of the lids were touched with the faintest red.
The late Colonel Vervain of the United States
army, whose complexion his daughter had inherited,
was an officer whom it would not have been
peaceable to cross in any purpose or pleasure, and
Miss Vervain seemed sometimes a little burdened
by the passionate nature which he had left her together
with the tropical name he had bestowed in
honor of the State where he had fought the Seminoles
in his youth, and where he chanced still to be
stationed when she was born; she had the air of
being embarrassed in presence of herself, and of
having an anxious watch upon her impulses. I do
not know how otherwise to describe the effort of
proud, helpless femininity, which would have struck
the close observer in Miss Vervain.
“Delicious!” she said, in a deep voice, which
tones, and yet was not wanting in a kind of frankness.
“Did you mean them for me, Mr. Ferris?”
“I did n't, but I do,” answered Mr. Ferris. “I
bought them in ignorance, but I understand now
what they were meant for by nature;” and in fact
the hyacinths, with their smooth textures and their
pure colors, harmonized well with Miss Vervain, as
she bent her face over them and inhaled their full,
rich perfume.
“I will put them in water,” she said, “if you 'll
excuse me a moment. Mother will be down directly.”
Before she could return, her mother rustled into
the parlor.
Mrs. Vervain was gracefully, fragilely unlike her
daughter. She entered with a gentle and gliding
step, peering near-sightedly about through her
glasses, and laughing triumphantly when she had
determined Mr. Ferris's exact position, where he
stood with a smile shaping his full brown beard
and glancing from his hazel eyes. She was dressed
in perfect taste with reference to her matronly
years, and the lingering evidences of her widowhood,
and she had an unaffected naturalness of
manner which even at her age of forty-eight could
not be called less than charming. She spoke in a
trusting, caressing tone, to which no man at least
could respond unkindly.
“So very good of you, to take all this trouble,
“and I suppose you are letting us encroach upon
very valuable time. I 'm quite ashamed to take it.
But is n't it a heavenly day? What I call a perfect
day, just right every way; none of those disagreeable
extremes. It 's so unpleasant to have it
too hot, for instance. I 'm the greatest person for
moderation, Mr. Ferris, and I carry the principle
into everything; but I do think the breakfasts at
these Italian hotels are too light altogether. I
like our American breakfasts, don't you? I 've
been telling Florida I can't stand it; we really
must make some arrangement. To be sure, you
ought n't to think of such a thing as eating, in a
place like Venice, all poetry; but a sound mind in
a sound body, I say. We 're perfectly wild over
it. Don't you think it 's a place that grows upon
you very much, Mr. Ferris? All those associations,
— it does seem too much; and the gondolas everywhere.
But I 'm always afraid the gondoliers
cheat us; and in the stores I never feel safe a moment
— not a moment. I do think the Venetians
are lacking in truthfulness, a little. I don't believe
they understand our American fairdealing
and sincerity. I should n't want to do them injustice,
but I really think they take advantages in
bargaining. Now such a thing even as corals.
Florida is extremely fond of them, and we bought
a set yesterday in the Piazza, and I know we paid
too much for them. Florida,” said Mrs. Vervain,
with some shawls and wraps upon her arm, patiently
waiting for the conclusion of the elder lady's
speech, “I wish you would bring down that set of
corals. I 'd like Mr. Ferris to give an unbiased
opinion. I 'm sure we were cheated.”
“I don't know anything about corals, Mrs. Vervain,”
interposed Mr. Ferris.
“Well, but you ought to see this set for the
beauty of the color; they 're really exquisite. I 'm
sure it will gratify your artistic taste.”
Miss Vervain hesitated with a look of desire to
obey, and of doubt whether to force the pleasure
upon Mr. Ferris. “Won't it do another time,
mother?” she asked faintly; “the gondola is
waiting for us.”
Mrs. Vervain gave a frailish start from the chair,
into which she had sunk. “Oh, do let us be off
at once, then,” she said; and when they stood on
the landing-stairs of the hotel: “What gloomy
things these gondolas are!” she added, while the
gondolier with one foot on the gunwale of the boat
received the ladies' shawls, and then crooked his
arm for them to rest a hand on in stepping aboard;
“I wonder they don't paint them some cheerful
color.”
“Blue, or pink, Mrs. Vervain?” asked Mr.
Ferris. “I knew you were coming to that question;
they all do. But we need n't have the top
on at all, if it depresses your spirits. We shall be
just warm enough in the open sunlight.”
“Well, have it off, then. It sends the cold chills
over me to look at it. What did Byron call it?”
“Yes, it 's time for Byron, now. It was very
good of you not to mention him before, Mrs. Vervain.
But I knew he had to come. He called it
a coffin clapped in a canoe.”
“Exactly,” said Mrs. Vervain. “I always feel
as if I were going to my own funeral when I get
into it; and I 've certainly had enough of funerals
never to want to have anything to do with another,
as long as I live.”
She settled herself luxuriously upon the feather-stuffed
leathern cushions when the cabin was removed.
Death had indeed been near her very
often; father and mother had been early lost to
her, and the brothers and sisters orphaned with her
had faded and perished one after another, as they
ripened to men and women; she had seen four of
her own children die; her husband had been dead
six years. All these bereavements had left her
what they had found her. She had truly grieved,
and, as she said, she had hardly ever been out of
black since she could remember.
“I never was in colors when I was a girl,” she
went on, indulging many obituary memories as the
gondola dipped and darted down the canal, “and
I was married in my mourning for my last sister.
It did seem a little too much when she went, Mr.
Ferris. I was too young to feel it so much about
the others, but we were nearly of the same age, and
brother and then a sister: it was very strange how
they kept going that way. I seemed to break the
charm when I got married; though, to be sure,
there was no brother left after Marian.”
Miss Vervain heard her mother's mortuary
prattle with a face from which no impatience of it
could be inferred, and Mr. Ferris made no comment
on what was oddly various in character and
manner, for Mrs. Vervain touched upon the gloomiest
facts of her history with a certain impersonal
statistical interest. They were rowing across the
lagoon to the Island of San Lazzaro, where for reasons
of her own she intended to venerate the convent
in which Byron studied the Armenian language
preparatory to writing his great poem in it;
if her pilgrimage had no very earnest motive, it was
worthy of the fact which it was designed to honor.
The lagoon was of a perfect, shining smoothness,
broken by the shallows over which the ebbing tide
had left the sea-weed trailed like long, disheveled
hair. The fishermen, as they waded about staking
their nets, or stooped to gather the small shell-fish
of the shallows, showed legs as brown and tough as
those of the apostles in Titian's Assumption. Here
and there was a boat, with a boy or an old man
asleep in the bottom of it. The gulls sailed high,
white flakes against the illimitable blue of the heavens;
the air, though it was of early spring, and in
the shade had a salty pungency, was here almost
and rich colors of the scene there was a melancholy
before which Mrs. Vervain fell fitfully silent. Now
and then Ferris briefly spoke, calling Miss Vervain's
notice to this or that, and she briefly responded.
As they passed the mad-house of San Servolo, a
maniac standing at an open window took his black
velvet skull-cap from his white hair, bowed low
three times, and kissed his hand to the ladies.
The Lido in front of them stretched a brown strip
of sand with white villages shining out of it; on
their left the Public Gardens showed a mass of
hovering green; far beyond and above, the ghost-like
snows of the Alpine heights haunted the misty
horizon.
It was chill in the shadow of the convent when
they landed at San Lazzaro, and it was cool in the
parlor where they waited for the monk who was to
show them through the place; but it was still and
warm in the gardened court, where the bees murmured
among the crocuses and hyacinths under the
noonday sun. Miss Vervain stood looking out of
the window upon the lagoon, while her mother
drifted about the room, peering at the objects on
the wall through her eyeglasses. She was praising
a Chinese painting of fish on rice-paper, when a
young monk entered with a cordial greeting in
English for Mr. Ferris. She turned and saw them
shaking hands, but at the same moment her eyeglasses
abandoned her nose with a vigorous leap;
over her dress, bowed at random as Mr. Ferris presented
Padre Girolamo.
“I 've been admiring this painting so much, Padre
Girolamo,” she said, with instant good-will, and
taking the monk into the easy familiarity of her
friendship by the tone with which she spoke his
name. “Some of the brothers did it, I suppose.”
“Oh no,” said the monk, “it 's a Chinese painting.
We hung it up there because it was given to
us, and was curious.”
“Well, now, do you know,” returned Mrs. Vervain,
“I thought it was Chinese! Their things are
so odd. But really, in an Armenian convent it 's
very misleading. I don't think you ought to leave
it there; it certainly does throw people off the
track,” she added, subduing the expression to something
very lady-like, by the winning appeal with
which she used it.
“Oh, but if they put up Armenian paintings in
Chinese convents?” said Mr. Ferris.
“You 're joking!” cried Mrs. Vervain, looking
at him with a graciously amused air. “There are
no Chinese convents. To be sure those rebels are
a kind of Christians,” she added thoughtfully, “but
there can't be many of them left, poor things, hundreds
of them executed at a time, that way. It 's
perfectly sickening to read of it; and you can't
help it, you know. But they say they have n't
really so much feeling as we have — not so nervous.”
She walked by the side of the young friar as he
led the way to such parts of the convent as are open
to visitors, and Mr. Ferris came after with her
daughter, who, he fancied, met his attempts at talk
with sudden and more than usual hauteur. “What
a fool!” he said to himself. “Is she afraid I shall
be wanting to make love to her?” and he followed
in rather a sulky silence the course of Mrs. Vervain
and her guide. The library, the chapel, and the
museum called out her friendliest praises, and in
the last she praised the mummy on show there at
the expense of one she had seen in New York; but
when Padre Girolamo pointed out the desk in the
refectory from which one of the brothers read while
the rest were eating, she took him to task. “Oh,
but I can't think that 's at all good for the digestion,
you know, — using the brain that way whilst
you 're at table. I really hope you don't listen
too attentively; it would be better for you in the
long run, even in a religious point of view. But
now — Byron! You must show me his cell!” The
monk deprecated the non-existence of such a cell,
and glanced in perplexity at Mr. Ferris, who came
to his relief. “You could n't have seen his cell, if
he 'd had one, Mrs. Vervain. They don't admit
ladies to the cloister.”
“What nonsense!” answered Mrs. Vervain, apparently
regarding this as another of Mr. Ferris's
pleasantries; but Padre Girolamo silently confirmed
his statement, and she briskly assailed the rule as a
Virgin, the object, as he was forced to allow, of
their high veneration. He smiled patiently, and
confessed that Mrs. Vervain had all the reasons on
her side. At the polyglot printing-office, where
she handsomely bought every kind of Armenian
book and pamphlet, and thus repaid in the only
way possible the trouble their visit had given, he
did not offer to take leave of them, but after speaking
with Ferris, of whom he seemed an old friend,
he led them through the garden environing the convent,
to a little pavilion perched on the wall that
defends the island from the tides of the lagoon. A
lay-brother presently followed them, bearing a tray
with coffee, toasted rusk, and a jar of that conserve
of rose-leaves which is the convent's delicate hospitality
to favored guests. Mrs. Vervain cried out
over the poetic confection when Padre Girolamo
told her what it was, and her daughter suffered herself
to express a guarded pleasure. The amiable
matron brushed the crumbs of the baicolo from her
lap when the lunch was ended, and fitting on her
glasses leaned forward for a better look at the
monk's black-bearded face. “I 'm perfectly delighted,”
she said. “You must be very happy
here. I suppose you are.”
“Yes,” answered the monk rapturously; “so
happy that I should be content never to leave San
Lazzaro. I came here when I was very young, and
the greater part of my life has been passed on this
little island. It is my home — my country.”
“Do you never go away?”
“Oh yes; sometimes to Constantinople, sometimes
to London and Paris.”
“And you've never been to America yet? Well
now, I 'll tell you; you ought to go. You would
like it, I know, and our people would give you a
very cordial reception.”
“Reception?” The monk appealed once more
to Ferris with a look.
Ferris broke into a laugh. “I don't believe Padre
Girolamo would come in quality of distinguished
foreigner, Mrs. Vervain, and I don't think he 'd
know what to do with one of our cordial receptions.”
“Well, he ought to go to America, any way.
He can't really know anything about us till he 's
been there. Just think how ignorant the English
are of our country! You will come, won't you?
I should be delighted to welcome you at my house
in Providence. Rhode Island is a small State, but
there 's a great deal of wealth there, and very good
society in Providence. It 's quite New-Yorky, you
know,” said Mrs. Vervain expressively. She rose
as she spoke, and led the way back to the gondola.
She told Padre Girolamo that they were to be some
weeks in Venice, and made him promise to breakfast
with them at their hotel. She smiled and
nodded to him after the boat had pushed off, and
kept him bowing on the landing-stairs.
“What a lovely place, and what a perfectly heavenly
never can thank you enough for it. And now, do
you know what I 'm thinking of? Perhaps you can
help me. It was Byron's studying there put me
in mind of it. How soon do the mosquitoes come?”
“About the end of June,” responded Ferris mechanically,
staring with helpless mystification at
Mrs. Vervain.
“Very well; then there 's no reason why we
should n't stay in Venice till that time. We are
both very fond of the place, and we 'd quite concluded,
this morning, to stop here till the mosquitoes
came. You know, Mr. Ferris, my daughter
had to leave school much earlier than she ought, for
my health has obliged me to travel a great deal
since I lost my husband; and I must have her with
me, for we 're all that there is of us; we have n't a
chick or a child that's related to us anywhere. But
wherever we stop, even for a few weeks, I contrive
to get her some kind of instruction. I feel the need
of it so much in my own case; for to tell you the
truth, Mr. Ferris, I married too young. I suppose
I should do the same thing over again if it was to
be done over; but don't you see, my mind was n't
properly formed; and then following my husband
about from pillar to post, and my first baby born
when I was nineteen — well, it was n't education,
at any rate, whatever else it was; and I 've determined
that Florida, though we are such a pair of
wanderers, shall not have my regrets. I got teachers
like so disagreeable at home as they are in
traveling, and we stayed there two years, — and I
did in France, and I did in Germany. And now,
Italian. Here we are in Italy, and I think we
ought to improve the time. Florida knows a good
deal of Italian already, for her music teacher in
France was an Italian, and he taught her the language
as well as music. What she wants now, I
should say, is to perfect her accent and get facility.
I think she ought to have some one come every day
and read and converse an hour or two with her.”
Mrs. Vervain leaned back in her seat, and looked at
Ferris, who said, feeling that the matter was referred
to him, “I think — without presuming to say what
Miss Vervain's need of instruction is — that your
idea is a very good one.” He mused in silence his
wonder that so much addlepatedness as was at once
observable in Mrs. Vervain should exist along with
so much common-sense. “It 's certainly very good
in the abstract,” he added, with a glance at the
daughter, as if the sense must be hers. She did
not meet his glance at once, but with an impatient
recognition of the heat that was now great for the
warmth with which she was dressed, she pushed her
sleeve from her wrist, showing its delicious whiteness,
and letting her fingers trail through the cool
water; she dried them on her handkerchief, and
then bent her eyes full upon him as if challenging
him to think this unlady-like.
“No, clearly the sense does not come from her,'
said Ferris to himself; it is impossible to think well
of the mind of a girl who treats one with tacit contempt.
“Yes,” resumed Mrs. Vervain, “it 's certainly
very good in the abstract. But oh dear me! you 've
no idea of the difficulties in the way. I may speak
frankly with you, Mr. Ferris, for you are here as
the representative of the country, and you naturally
sympathize with the difficulties of Americans
abroad; the teachers will fall in love with their
pupils.”
“Mother!” began Miss Vervain; and then she
checked herself.
Ferris gave a vengeful laugh. “Really, Mrs.
Vervain, though I sympathize with you in my
official capacity, I must own that as a man and a
brother, I can't help feeling a little sorry for those
poor fellows, too.”
“To be sure, they are to be pitied, of course, and
I feel for them; I did when I was a girl; for the
same thing used to happen then. I don't know why
Florida should be subjected to such embarrassments,
too. It does seem sometimes as if it were something
in the blood. They all get the idea that you
have money, you know.”
“Then I should say that it might be something
in the pocket,” suggested Ferris with a look at Miss
Vervain, in whose silent suffering, as he imagined
it, he found a malicious consolation for her scorn.
“Well, whatever it is,” replied Mrs. Vervain,
“it 's too vexatious. Of course, going to new places,
that way, as we 're always doing, and only going to
stay for a limited time, perhaps, you can't pick and
choose. And even when you do get an elderly
teacher, they 're as bad as any. It really is too trying.
Now, when I was talking with that nice monk
of yours at the convent, there, I could n't help
thinking how perfectly delightful it would be if
Florida could have him for a teacher. Why could n't
she? He told me that he would come to take breakfast
or lunch with us, but not dinner, for he always
had to be at the convent before nightfall. Well,
he might come to give the lessons sometime in the
middle of the day.”
“You could n't manage it, Mrs. Vervain, I know
you could n't,” answered Ferris earnestly. “I 'm
sure the Armenians never do anything of the kind.
They 're all very busy men, engaged in ecclesiastical
or literary work, and they could n't give the
time.”
`Why not? There was Byron.”
“But Byron went to them, and he studied Armenian,
not Italian, with them. Padre Girolamo
speaks perfect Italian, for all that I can see; but I
doubt if he 'd undertake to impart the native accent,
which is what you want. In fact, the scheme
is altogether impracticable.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Vervain; “I 'm exceedingly
sorry. I had quite set my heart on it. I never
before.”
“It seemed to be a case of love at first sight on
both sides,” said Ferris. “Padre Girolamo does n't
shower those syruped rose-leaves indiscriminately
upon visitors.”
“Thanks,” returned Mrs. Vervain; “it 's very
good of you to say so, Mr. Ferris, and it 's very
gratifying, all round; but don't you see, it does n't
serve the present purpose. What teachers do you
know of?”
She had been by marriage so long in the service
of the United States that she still regarded its
agents as part of her own domestic economy. Consuls
she everywhere employed as functionaries specially
appointed to look after the interests of American
ladies traveling without protection. In the
week which had passed since her arrival in Venice,
there had been no day on which she did not appeal
to Ferris for help or sympathy or advice. She took
amiable possession of him at once, and she had established
an amusing sort of intimacy with him, to
which the haughty trepidations of her daughter set
certain bounds, but in which the demand that he
should find her a suitable Italian teacher seemed
trivially matter of course.
“Yes, I know several teachers,” he said, after
thinking awhile; “but they 're all open to the objection
of being human; and besides, they all do
things in a set kind of way, and I 'm afraid they
instruction that departed very widely from Ollendorff.”
He paused, and Mrs. Vervain gave a
sketch of the different professional masters whom
she had employed in the various countries of her
sojourn, and a disquisition upon their several lives
and characters, fortifying her statements by reference
of doubtful points to her daughter. This occupied
some time, and Ferris listened to it all with
an abstracted air. At last he said, with a smile,
“There was an Italian priest came to see me this
morning, who astonished me by knowing English
— with a brogue that he 'd learned from an English
priest straight from Dublin; perhaps he might
do, Mrs. Vervain? He 's professionally pledged,
you know, not to give the kind of annoyance
you 've suffered from in teachers. He would do as
well as Padre Girolamo, I suppose.”
“Do you really? Are you in earnest?”
“Well, no, I believe I 'm not. I have n't the
least idea he would do. He belongs to the church
militant. He came to me with the model of a
breech-loading cannon he 's invented, and he wanted
a passport to go to America, so that he might
offer his cannon to our government.”
“How curious!” said Mrs. Vervain, and her
daughter looked frankly into Ferris's face. “But
I know; it 's one of your jokes.”
“You overpraise me, Mrs. Vervain. If I could
make such jokes as that priest was, I should set
pathos that they say all true pieces of humor ought
to have,” he went on instinctively addressing himself
to Miss Vervain, who did not repulse him.
“He made me melancholy; and his face haunts
me. I should like to paint him. Priests are generally
such a snuffy, common lot. And I dare
say,” he concluded, “he 's sufficiently commonplace,
too, though he did n't look it. Spare your romance,
Miss Vervain.”
The young lady blushed resentfully. “I see as
little romance as joke in it,” she said.
“It was a cannon,” returned Ferris, without
taking any notice of her, and with a sort of absent
laugh, “that would make it very lively for the
Southerners — if they had it. Poor fellow! I suppose
he came with high hopes of me, and expected
me to receive his invention with eloquent praises.
I 've no doubt he figured himself furnished not only
with a passport, but with a letter from me to President
Lincoln, and foresaw his own triumphal entry
into Washington, and his honorable interviews with
the admiring generals of the Union forces, to whom
he should display his wonderful cannon. Too bad;
is n't it?”
“And why did n't you give him the passport and
the letter?” asked Mrs. Vervain.
“Oh, that 's a state secret,” returned Ferris.
“And you think he won't do for our purpose?”
“I don't indeed.”
“Well, I 'm not so sure of it. Tell me something
more about him.”
“I don't know anything more about him. Besides,
there is n't time.”
The gondola had already entered the canal, and
was swiftly approaching the hotel.
“Oh yes, there is,” pleaded Mrs. Vervain, laying
her hand on his arm. “I want you to come in
and dine with us. We dine early.”
“Thank you, I can't. Affairs of the nation,
you know. Rebel privateer on the canal of the
Brenta.”
“Really?” Mrs. Vervain leaned towards Ferris
for sharper scrutiny of his face. Her glasses
sprang from her nose, and precipitated themselves
into his bosom.
“Allow me,” he said, with burlesque politeness,
withdrawing them from the recesses of his waistcoat
and gravely presenting them. Miss Vervain
burst into a helpless laugh; then she turned toward
her mother with a kind of indignant tenderness,
and gently arranged her shawl so that it should not
drop off when she rose to leave the gondola. She
did not look again at Ferris, who resisted Mrs.
Vervain's entreaties to remain, and took leave as
soon as the gondola landed.
The ladies went to their room, where Florida
lifted from the table a vase of divers-colored hyacinths,
and stepping out upon the balcony flung the
vase, the lingering perfume of the banished flowers
haunted the air of the room.
“Why, Florida,” said her mother, “those were
the flowers that Mr. Ferris gave you. Did you
fancy they had begun to decay? The smell of
hyacinths when they 're a little old is dreadful.
But I can't imagine a gentleman's giving you flowers
that were at all old.”
“Oh, mother, don't speak to me!” cried Miss
Vervain, passionately, clasping her hands to her
face.
“Now I see that I 've been saying something to
vex you, my darling,” and seating herself beside
the young girl on the sofa, she fondly took down
her hands. “Do tell me what it was. Was it
about your teachers falling in love with you? You
know they did, Florida: Pestachiavi and Schulze,
both; and that horrid old Fleuron.”
“Did you think I liked any better on that account
to have you talk it over with a stranger?”
asked Florida, still angrily.
“That 's true, my dear,” said Mrs. Vervain, penitently.
“But if it worried you, why did n't you
do something to stop me? Give me a hint, or just
a little knock, somewhere?”
“No, mother; I 'd rather not. Then you 'd
have come out with the whole thing, to prove that
you were right. It 's better to let it go,” said
Florida with a fierce laugh, half sob. “But it 's
torment me.”
“I suppose it 's my weak health, dear,” answered
the mother. “I did n't use to be so. But now I
don't really seem to have the strength to be sensible.
I know it 's silly as well as you. The talk
just seems to keep going on of itself, — slipping out,
slipping out. But you need n't mind. Mr. Ferris
won't think you could ever have done anything out
of the way. I 'm sure you don't act with him as
if you 'd ever encouraged anybody. I think you 're
too haughty with him, Florida. And now, his
flowers.”
“He 's detestable. He 's conceited and presuming
beyond all endurance. I don't care what he
thinks of me. But it 's his manner towards you
that I can't tolerate.”
“I suppose it 's rather free,” said Mrs. Vervain.
“But then you know, my dear, I shall be soon getting
to be an old lady; and besides, I always feel as
if consuls were a kind of one of the family. He 's
been very obliging since we came; I don't know
what we should have done without him. And I
don't object to a little ease of manner in the gentlemen;
I never did.”
“He makes fun of you,” cried Florida: “and
there at the convent,” she said, bursting into angry
tears, “he kept exchanging glances with that monk,
as if he..... He 's insulting, and I hate
him!”
“Do you mean that he thought your mother
ridiculous, Florida?” asked Mrs. Vervain gravely.
“You must have misunderstood his looks; indeed
you must. I can't imagine why he should. I remember
that I talked particularly well during our
whole visit; my mind was active, for I felt unusually
strong, and I was interested in everything.
It 's nothing but a fancy of yours; or your prejudice,
Florida. But it 's odd, now I 've sat down
for a moment, how worn out I feel. And thirsty.”
Mrs. Vervain fitted on her glasses, but even then
felt uncertainly about for the empty vase on the
table before her.
“It is n't a goblet, mother,” said Florida; “I 'll
get you some water.”
“Do; and then throw a shawl over me. I 'm
sleepy, and a nap before dinner will do me good.
I don't see why I 'm so drowsy of late. I suppose
it 's getting into the sea air here at Venice; though
it 's mountain air that makes you drowsy. But
you 're quite mistaken about Mr. Ferris. He is n't
capable of anything really rude. Besides, there
would n't have been any sense in it.”
The young girl brought the water and then knelt
beside the sofa, on which she arranged the pillows
under her mother, and covered her with soft wraps.
She laid her cheek against the thinner face.
“Don't mind anything I 've said, mother; let 's
talk of something else.”
The mother drew some loose threads of the
little more, and presently fell into a deep slumber.
Florida gently lifted her head away, and remained
kneeling before the sofa, looking into the sleeping
face with an expression of strenuous, compassionate
devotion, mixed with a vague alarm and self-pity,
and a certain wondering anxiety.
| II. A foregone conclusion | |