 | III. A foregone conclusion |  |
3. III.
Don Ippolito had slept upon his interview with
Ferris, and now sat in his laboratory, amidst the
many witnesses of his inventive industry, with the
model of the breech-loading cannon on the workbench
before him. He had neatly mounted it on
wheels, that its completeness might do him the
greater credit with the consul when he should show
it him, but the carriage had been broken in his
pocket, on the way home, by an unlucky thrust
from the burden of a porter, and the poor toy lay
there disabled, as if to dramatize that premature
explosion in the secret chamber.
His heart was in these inventions of his, which
had as yet so grudgingly repaid his affection. For
their sake he had stinted himself of many needful
things. The meagre stipend which he received
from the patrimony of his church, eked out with
the money paid him for baptisms, funerals, and
marriages, and for masses by people who had friends
to be prayed out of purgatory, would at best have
barely sufficed to support him; but he denied himself
everything save the necessary decorums of dress
and lodging; he fasted like a saint, and slept hard
as a hermit, that he might spend upon these ungrateful
creatures of his brain. They were the
of their construction; but there were many
little outlays for materials and for tools, which he
could not avoid, and with him a little was all.
They not only famished him; they isolated him.
His superiors in the church, and his brother priests,
looked with doubt or ridicule upon the labors for
which he shunned their company, while he gave up
the other social joys, few and small, which a priest
might know in the Venice of that day, when all
generous spirits regarded him with suspicion for
his cloth's sake, and church and state were alert
to detect disaffection or indifference in him. But
bearing these things willingly, and living as frugally
as he might, he had still not enough, and he
had been fain to assume the instruction of a young
girl of old and noble family in certain branches of
polite learning which a young lady of that sort
might fitly know. The family was not so rich as
it was old and noble, and Don Ippolito was paid
from its purse rather than its pride. But the slender
salary was a help; these patricians were very
good to him; many a time he dined with them,
and so spared the cost of his own pottage at home;
they always gave him coffee when he came, and
that was a saving; at the proper seasons little presents
from them were not wanting. In a word, his
condition was not privation. He did his duty as a
teacher faithfully, and the only trouble with it was
that the young girl was growing into a young
forever. In an evil hour, as it seemed to Don
Ippolito, that made the years she had been his
pupil shrivel to a mere pinch of time, there came
from a young count of the Friuli, visiting Venice,
an offer of marriage; and Don Ippolito lost his
place. It was hard, but he bade himself have patience;
and he composed an ode for the nuptials of
his late pupil, which, together with a brief sketch
of her ancestral history, he had elegantly printed,
according to the Italian usage, and distributed
among the family friends; he also made a sonnet
to the bridegroom, and these literary tributes were
handsomely acknowledged.
He managed a whole year upon the proceeds,
and kept a cheerful spirit till the last soldo was
spent, inventing one thing after another, and giving
much time and money to a new principle of steam
propulsion, which, as applied without steam to a
small boat on the canal before his door, failed to
work, though it had no logical excuse for its delinquency.
He tried to get other pupils, but he got
none, and he began to dream of going to America.
He pinned his faith in all sorts of magnificent possibilities
to the names of Franklin, Fulton, and
Morse; he was so ignorant of our politics and geography
as to suppose us at war with the South American
Spaniards, but he knew that English was the
language of the North, and he applied himself to
the study of it. Heaven only knows what kind of
appeared to him in these dreams of his, and I can
but dimly figure it to myself. But he might very
naturally desire to come to a land where the spirit
of invention is recognized and fostered, and where
he could hope to find that comfort of incentive and
companionship which our artists find in Italy.
The idea of the breech-loading cannon had occurred
to him suddenly one day, in one of his New-World-ward
reveries, and he had made haste to
realize it, carefully studying the form and general
effect of the Austrian cannon under the gallery of
the Ducal Palace, to the high embarrassment of the
Croat sentry who paced up and down there, and
who did not feel free to order off a priest as he
would a civilian. Don Ippolito's model was of
admirable finish; he even painted the carriage yellow
and black, because that of the original was so,
and colored the piece to look like brass; and he lost
a day while the paint was drying, after he was
otherwise ready to show it to the consul.
He had parted from Ferris with some gleams of
comfort, caught chiefly from his kindly manner, but
they had died away before nightfall, and this morning
he could not rekindle them.
He had had his coffee served to him on the
bench, as his frequent custom was, but it stood untasted
in the little copper pot beside the dismounted
cannon, though it was now ten o'clock, and it was
full time he had breakfasted, for he had risen early
women, two beggars, a cat, and a paralytic nobleman,
in the ancient and beautiful church to which he
was attached. He had tried to go about his wonted
occupations, but he was still sitting idle before his
bench, while his servant gossiped from her balcony
to the mistress of the next house, across a calle so
deep and narrow that it opened like a mountain
chasm beneath them. “It were well if the master
read his breviary a little more, instead of always
maddening himself with those blessed inventions,
that eat more soldi than a Christian, and never
come to anything. There he sits before his table,
as if he were nailed to his chair, and lets his coffee
cool — and God knows I was ready to drink it
warm two hours ago — and never looks at me if I
open the door twenty times to see whether he has
finished. Holy patience! You have not even the
advantage of fasting to the glory of God in this
house, though you keep Lent the year round. It 's
the Devil's Lent, I say. Eh, Diana! There goes
the bell. Who now? Adieu, Lusetta. To meet
again, dear. Farewell!”
She ran to another window, and admitted the
visitor. It was Ferris, and she went to announce
him to her master by the title he had given, while
he amused his leisure in the darkness below by falling
over a cistern-top, with a loud clattering of his
cane on the copper lid, after which he heard the
voice of the priest begging him to remain at his
show him the way up-stairs. His eyes were not
yet used to the obscurity of the narrow entry in
which he stood, when he felt a cold hand laid on
his, and passively yielded himself to its guidance.
He tried to excuse himself for intruding upon Don
Ippolito so soon, but the priest in far suppler Italian
overwhelmed him with lamentations that he should
be so unworthy the honor done him, and ushered his
guest into his apartment. He plainly took it for
granted that Ferris had come to see his inventions,
in compliance with the invitation he had given him
the day before, and he made no affectation of delay,
though after the excitement of the greetings was
past, it was with a quiet dejection that he rose and
offered to lead his visitor to his laboratory.
The whole place was an outgrowth of himself;
it was his history as well as his character. It recorded
his quaint and childish tastes, his restless
endeavors, his partial and halting successes. The
ante-room in which he had paused with Ferris was
painted to look like a grape-arbor, where the vines
sprang from the floor, and flourishing up the trellised
walls, with many a wanton tendril and flaunting
leaf, displayed their lavish clusters of white and
purple all over the ceiling. It touched Ferris, when
Don Ippolito confessed that this decoration had
been the distraction of his own vacant moments, to
find that it was like certain grape-arbors he had
seen in remote corners of Venice before the doors
open-air restaurants, and did not seem at all to have
been studied from grape-arbors in the country.
He perceived the archaic striving for exact truth,
and he successfully praised the mechanical skill and
love of reality with which it was done; but he was
silenced by a collection of paintings in Don Ippolito's
parlor, where he had been made to sit down a
moment. Hard they were in line, fixed in expression,
and opaque in color, these copies of famous
masterpieces, — saints of either sex, ascensions, assumptions,
martyrdoms, and what not, — and they
were not quite comprehensible till Don Ippolito explained
that he had made them from such prints
of the subjects as he could get, and had colored
them after his own fancy. All this, in a city whose
art had been the glory of the world for nigh half a
thousand years, struck Ferris as yet more comically
pathetic than the frescoed grape-arbor; he stared
about him for some sort of escape from the pictures,
and his eye fell upon a piano and a melodeon placed
end to end in a right angle. Don Ippolito, seeing
his look of inquiry, sat down and briefly played the
same air with a hand upon each instrument.
Ferris smiled. “Don Ippolito, you are another
Da Vinci, a universal genius.”
“Bagatelles, bagatelles,” said the priest pensively;
but he rose with greater spirit than he had
yet shown, and preceded the consul into the little
room that served him for a smithy. It seemed
an oratory, but it was now begrimed with smoke and
dust from the forge which Don Ippolito had set up
in it; the embers of a recent fire, the bellows, the
pincers, the hammers, and the other implements of
the trade, gave it a sinister effect, as if the place of
prayer had been invaded by mocking imps, or as if
some hapless mortal in contract with the evil powers
were here searching, by the help of the adversary,
for the forbidden secrets of the metals and of fire.
In those days, Ferris was an uncompromising enemy
of the theatricalization of Italy, or indeed of anything;
but the fancy of the black-robed young
priest at work in this place appealed to him all the
more potently because of the sort of tragic innocence
which seemed to characterize Don Ippolito's
expression. He longed intensely to sketch the
picture then and there, but he had strength to rebuke
the fancy as something that could not make
itself intelligible without the help of such accessories
as he despised, and he victoriously followed the
priest into his larger workshop, where his inventions,
complete and incomplete, were stored, and
where he had been seated when his visitor arrived.
The high windows and the frescoed ceiling were
festooned with dusty cobwebs; litter of shavings
and whittlings strewed the floor; mechanical implements
and contrivances were everywhere, and
Don Ippolito's listlessness seemed to return upon
him again at the sight of the familiar disorder.
Conspicuous among other objects lay the illogically
unsuccessful model of the new principle of
steam propulsion, untouched since the day when he
had lifted it out of the canal and carried it indoors
through the ranks of grinning spectators. From a
shelf above it he took down models of a flying-machine
and a perpetual motion. “Fantastic
researches in the impossible. I never expected
results from these experiments, with which I
nevertheless once pleased myself,” he said, and
turned impatiently to various pieces of portable
furniture, chairs, tables, bedsteads, which by folding
up their legs and tops condensed themselves
into flat boxes, developing handles at the side for
convenience in carrying. They were painted and
varnished, and were in all respects complete; they
had indeed won favorable mention at an exposition
of the Provincial Society of Arts and Industries,
and Ferris could applaud their ingenuity sincerely,
though he had his tacit doubts of their usefulness.
He fell silent again when Don Ippolito called his
notice to a photographic camera, so contrived with
straps and springs that you could snatch by its help
whatever joy there might be in taking your own
photograph; and he did not know what to say of a
submarine boat, a four-wheeled water-velocipede, a
movable bridge, or the very many other principles
and ideas to which Don Ippolito's cunning hand
had given shape, more or less imperfect. It seemed
to him that they all, however perfect or imperfect,
the impossible, or realizations of the trivial
and superfluous. Yet, for all this, they strongly
appealed to the painter as the stunted fruit of a
talent denied opportunity, instruction, and sympathy.
As he looked from them at last to the
questioning face of the priest, and considered out of
what disheartened and solitary patience they must
have come in this city, — dead hundreds of years to
all such endeavor, — he could not utter some glib
phrases of compliment that he had on his tongue.
If Don Ippolito had been taken young, he might
perhaps have amounted to something, though this
was questionable; but at thirty — as he looked now,
— with his undisciplined purposes, and his head full
of vagaries of which these things were the tangible
witness..... Ferris let his eyes drop again. They
fell upon the ruin of the breech-loading cannon, and
he said, “Don Ippolito, it 's very good of you to
take the trouble of showing me these matters, and I
hope you 'll pardon the ungrateful return, if I cannot
offer any definite opinion of them now. They
are rather out of my way, I confess. I wish with
all my heart I could order an experimental, life-size
copy of your breech-loading cannon here, for trial
by my government, but I can't; and to tell you the
truth, it was not altogether the wish to see these inventions
of yours that brought me here to-day.”
“Oh,” said Don Ippolito, with a mortified air,
“I am afraid that I have wearied the Signor Console.”
“Not at all, not at all,” Ferris made haste to
answer, with a frown at his own awkwardness.
“But your speaking English yesterday;.... perhaps
what I was thinking of is quite foreign to
your tastes and possibilities.”.... He hesitated
with a look of perplexity, while Don Ippolito stood
before him in an attitude of expectation, pressing
the points of his fingers together, and looking curiously
into his face. “The case is this,” resumed
Ferris desperately. “There are two American
ladies, friends of mine, sojourning in Venice, who
expect to be here till midsummer. They are
mother and daughter, and the young lady wants
to read and speak Italian with somebody a few
hours each day. The question is whether it is
quite out of your way or not to give her lessons of
this kind. I ask it quite at a venture. I suppose
no harm is done, at any rate,” and he looked at
Don Ippolito with apologetic perturbation.
“No,” said the priest, “there is no harm. On
the contrary, I am at this moment in a position to
consider it a great favor that you do me in offering
me this employment. I accept it with the greatest
pleasure. Oh!” he cried, breaking by a sudden
impulse from the composure with which he had
begun to speak, “you don't know what you do for
me; you lift me out of despair. Before you came,
I had reached one of those passes that seem the last
bound of endeavor. But you give me new life.
Now I can go on with my experiment. I can attest
of the weapon I had designed for it — I am sure of
the principle: some slight improvement, perhaps
the use of some different explosive, would get over
that difficulty you suggested,” he said eagerly.
“Yes, something can be done. God bless you, my
dear little son — I mean — perdoni! — my dear
sir.”....
“Wait — not so fast,” said Ferris with a laugh,
yet a little annoyed that a question so purely tentative
as his should have met at once such a definite
response. “Are you quite sure you can do what
they want?” He unfolded to him, as fully as he
understood it, Mrs. Vervain's scheme.
Don Ippolito entered into it with perfect intelligence.
He said that he had already had charge of
the education of a young girl of noble family, and
he could therefore the more confidently hope to be
useful to this American lady. A light of joyful
hope shone in his dreamy eyes, the whole man
changed, he assumed the hospitable and caressing
host. He conducted Ferris back to his parlor, and
making him sit upon the hard sofa that was his
hard bed by night, he summoned his servant, and
bade her serve them coffee. She closed her lips
firmly, and waved her finger before her face, to
signify that there was no more coffee. Then he
bade her fetch it from the caffè; and he listened
with a sort of rapt inattention while Ferris again
returned to the subject and explained that he had
and that he must regard nothing as final. It was
at this point that Don Ippolito, who had understood
so clearly what Mrs. Vervain wanted, appeared
a little slow to understand; and Ferris had
a doubt whether it was from subtlety or from simplicity
that the priest seemed not to comprehend
the impulse on which he had acted. He finished
his coffee in this perplexity, and when he rose to go,
Don Ippolito followed him down to the street-door,
and preserved him from a second encounter with
the cistern-top.
“But, Don Ippolito — remember! I make no
engagement for the ladies, whom you must see before
anything is settled,” said Ferris.
“Surely, — surely!” answered the priest, and
he remained smiling at the door till the American
turned the next corner. Then he went back to his
work-room, and took up the broken model from the
bench. But he could not work at it now, he could
not work at anything; he began to walk up and
down the floor.
“Could he really have been so stupid because
his mind was on his ridiculous cannon?” wondered
Ferris as he sauntered frowning away; and he
tried to prepare his own mind for his meeting with
the Vervains, to whom he must now go at once.
He felt abused and victimized. Yet it was an
amusing experience, and he found himself able to
interest both of the ladies in it. The younger had
would allow; but as he talked she drew nearer him
with a reluctant haughtiness which he noted. He
turned the more conspicuously towards Mrs. Vervain.
“Well, to make a long story short,” he
said, “I could n't discourage Don Ippolito. He refused
to be dismayed — as I should have been at
the notion of teaching Miss Vervain. I did n't arrange
with him not to fall in love with her as his
secular predecessors have done — it seemed superfluous.
But you can mention it to him if you like.
In fact,” said Ferris, suddenly addressing the
daughter, “you might make the stipulation yourself,
Miss Vervain.”
She looked at him a moment with a sort of defenseless
pain that made him ashamed; and then
walked away from him towards the window, with
a frank resentment that made him smile, as he continued,
“But I suppose you would like to have
some explanation of my motive in precipitating
Don Ippolito upon you in this way, when I told
you only yesterday that he would n't do at all; in
fact I think myself that I 've behaved rather fickle-mindedly
— for a representative of the country.
But I 'll tell you; and you won't be surprised to
learn that I acted from mixed motives. I 'm not
at all sure that he 'll do; I 've had awful misgivings
about it since I left him, and I 'm glad of the
chance to make a clean breast of it. When I came
to think the matter over last night, the fact that he
Irishman for the pronunciation — seemed to promise
that he 'd have the right sort of sympathy with
your scheme, and it showed that he must have
something practical about him, too. And here 's
where the selfish admixture comes in. I did n't
have your interests solely in mind when I went to
see Don Ippolito. I had n't been able to get rid of
him; he stuck in my thought. I fancied he might
be glad of the pay of a teacher, and — I had half
a notion to ask him to let me paint him. It was
an even chance whether I should try to secure him
for Miss Vervain, or for Art — as they call it.
Miss Vervain won because she could pay him, and
I did n't see how Art could. I can bring him round
any time; and that 's the whole inconsequent business.
My consolation is that I 've left you perfectly
free. There 's nothing decided.”
“Thanks,” said Mrs. Vervain; “then it 's all
settled. You can bring him as soon as you like, to
our new place. We 've taken that apartment we
looked at the other day, and we 're going into it
this afternoon. Here 's the landlord's letter,” she
added, drawing a paper out of her pocket. “If
he 's cheated us, I suppose you can see justice done.
I did n't want to trouble you before.”
“You 're a woman of business, Mrs. Vervain,”
said Ferris. “The man 's a perfect Jew — or a
perfect Christian, one ought to say in Venice; we
true believers do gouge so much more infamously
before you come to me. Well,” he continued, as
he glanced at the paper, “you 've done it! He
makes you pay one half too much. However, it 's
cheap enough; twice as cheap as your hotel.”
“But I don't care for cheapness. I hate to be
imposed upon. What 's to be done about it?”
“Nothing; if he has your letter as you have his.
It 's a bargain, and you must stand to it.”
“A bargain? Oh nonsense, now, Mr. Ferris.
This is merely a note of mutual understanding.”
“Yes, that 's one way of looking at it. The
Civil Tribunal would call it a binding agreement
of the closest tenure, — if you want to go to law
about it.”
“I will go to law about it.”
“Oh no, you won't — unless you mean to spend
your remaining days and all your substance in Venice.
Come, you have n't done so badly, Mrs. Vervain.
I don't call four rooms, completely furnished
for housekeeping, with that lovely garden, at all
dear at eleven francs a day. Besides, the landlord
is a man of excellent feeling, sympathetic and
obliging, and a perfect gentleman, though he is
such an outrageous scoundrel. He 'll cheat you, of
course, in whatever he can; you must look out for
that; but he 'll do you any sort of little neighborly
kindness. Good-by,” said Ferris, getting to the
door before Mrs. Vervain could intercept him.
“I 'll come to your new place this evening to see
how you are pleased.”
“Florida,” said Mrs. Vervain, “this is outrageous.”
“I would n't mind it, mother. We pay very
little, after all.”
“Yes, but we pay too much. That 's what I
can't bear. And as you said yesterday, I don't
think Mr. Ferris's manners are quite respectful to
me.”
“He only told you the truth; I think he advised
you for the best. The matter could n't be helped
now.”
“But I call it a want of feeling to speak the
truth so bluntly.”
“We won't have to complain of that in our landlord,
it seems,” said Florida. “Perhaps not in our
priest, either,” she added.
“Yes, that was kind of Mr. Ferris,” said Mrs.
Vervain. “It was thoroughly thoughtful and considerate
— what I call an instance of true delicacy.
I 'm really quite curious to see him. Don Ippolito!
How very odd to call a priest Don! I should have
said Padre. Don always makes you think of a
Spanish cavalier. Don Rodrigo: something like
that.”
They went on to talk, desultorily, of Don Ippolito,
and what he might be like. In speaking of
him the day before, Ferris had hinted at some mysterious
sadness in him; and to hint of sadness in a
man always interests women in him, whether they
are old or young: the old have suffered, the young
had not been diminished by what Ferris had told
them of his visit to the priest's house and of the
things he had seen there; for there had always
been the same strain of pity in his laughing account,
and he had imparted none of his doubts to
them. They did not talk as if it were strange that
Ferris should do to-day what he had yesterday said
he would not do; perhaps as women they could not
find such a thing strange; but it vexed him more
and more as he went about all afternoon thinking
of his inconsistency, and wondering whether he had
not acted rashly.
| III. A foregone conclusion | |