William Dean Howells

“ I never could have dreamed of a priest’s disbelieving; but now I can’t dream of anything else. It seems to me that none of these priests or monks can believe anything. Their faces look false and sly and bad—all of them!”
“No, no, Miss Vervain,” said Ferris, smiling at her despair, “you push matters a little beyond—as a woman has a right to do, of course. I don’t think their faces are bad, by any means. Some of them are dull and torpid, and some are frivolous, just like the faces of other people. ”

“ Vervain, to whom Ferris gave an account of this trial as they set out again on their long-hindered return, had no mind save for the magical effect of his consular quality upon the commissary, and accused him of a vain and culpable modesty.
“Ah,” said the diplomatist, “there’s nothing like knowing just when to produce your dignity. There are some officials who know too little,—like those guards; and there are some who know too much,—like the commissary’s superiors. But he is just in that golden mean of ignorance where he supposes a consul is a person of importance.” ”

“ 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 free minds, unashamed and unafraid. If it is a little 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. ”

“ After so long disuse, it was charming to be with a beautiful girl who neither regarded him with distrust nor expected him to ask her in marriage because he sat alone with her, rode out with her in a gondola, walked with her, read with her. All young men like a house in which no ado is made about their coming and going, and Mrs. Vervain perfectly understood the art of letting him make himself at home. ”

“ The dreamy warmth in Don Ippolito’s deep eyes kindled to a flame; a dark red glowed in his thin cheeks; he drew a box from the folds of his drapery and took snuff in a great whiff, as if inhaling the sulphurous fumes of battle, or titillating his nostrils with grains of gunpowder. He was at least in full enjoyment of the poetic power of his invention, and no doubt had before his eyes a vivid picture of a score of secessionists surprised and blown to atoms in the very moment of triumph. “Behold, Signor Console!” ”

“ I don’t know anything more affecting except a procession of lantern-lit gondolas and barges on the Grand Canal. It’s phantasmal. It’s the spectral resurrection of the old dead forms into the present. It’s not even the ghost, it’s the corpse of other ages that’s haunting Venice. The city ought to have been destroyed by Napoleon when he destroyed the Republic, and thrown overboard—St. Mark, Winged Lion, Bucentaur, and all. There is no land like America for true cheerfulness and light-heartedness. ”

“ But surely you can somehow help yourself. Are men, that seem so strong and able, just as powerless as women, after all, when it comes to real trouble? Is a man”—
“I cannot answer. I am only a priest,” said Don Ippolito coldly, letting his eyes drop to the gown that fell about him like a woman’s skirt.
“Yes, but a priest should be a man, and so much more; a priest”—
Don Ippolito shrugged his shoulders.
“No, no!” cried the girl. “Your own schemes have all failed, you say; then why do you not think of becoming a priest in reality, and getting the good there must be in such a calling? ”

“ But one does not so easily cast off a matter that does not concern one. He found himself haunted by certain tones and looks and attitudes of the young girl, wholly alien to the character he had just constructed for her. They were child-like, trusting, unconscious, far beyond anything he had yet known in women, and they appealed to him now with a maddening pathos. She was standing there before Don Ippolito’s picture as on that morning when she came to Ferris, looking anxiously at him, her innocent beauty, troubled with some hidden care, hallowing the place. ”

“ She asked, “But shouldn’t you abhor him if he were a skeptical priest?”
Ferris shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, I don’t find it such an easy matter to abhor people. It would be interesting,” he continued musingly, “to have such a dreamer waked up, once, and suddenly confronted with what he recognized as perfect truthfulness, and couldn’t help contrasting himself with. But it would be a little cruel.”
“Would you rather have him left as he was?” asked Florida, lifting her eyes to his.
“As a moralist, no; as a humanitarian, yes, Miss Vervain. He’d be much happier as he was.” ”

“ You I A priest?”
“Priest! priest!” cried Don Ippolito, violently. “From this day I am no longer a priest! From this hour I am a man, and I can offer her the honorable love of a man, the truth of a most sacred marriage, and fidelity to death!”
Ferris made no answer. He began to look very coldly and haughtily at Don Ippolito, whose heat died away under his stare, and who at last met it with a glance of tremulous perplexity. His hand had dropped from Ferris’s arm, and he now moved some steps from him. “What is it, dear friend?” he besought him. “Is there something that offends you? ”

“ My ambition and my attempted inventions are a scandal to him, for he is a priest of those like the Holy Father, who believe that all the wickedness of the modern world has come from the devices of science; my indifference to the things of religion is a terror and a sorrow to him which he combats with prayers and penances. He starves himself and goes cold and faint that God may have mercy and turn my heart to the things on which his own is fixed. He loves my soul, but not me, and we are scarcely friends.”
Florida continued to look at him with steadfast, compassionate eyes. ”

“ The villa is now one of the palaces of the ex-Emperor of Austria, who does not find it less imperial than his other palaces.” Don Ippolito had celebrated the villa at Strà in this strain ever since they had spoken of going up the Brenta: now it was the magnificent conservatories and orangeries that he sang, now the vast garden with its statued walks between rows of clipt cedars and firs, now the stables with their stalls for numberless horses, now the palace itself with its frescoed halls and treasures of art and vertu. ”

“ 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 flowers into the canal. As she put down the empty 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. ”

“ When a peasant’s cottage broke their line, it gave, with its barns and straw-stacks and its beds of pot-herbs, a homely relief from the decaying gentility of the villas.
“What a pity, Miss Vervain,” said the painter, “that the blessings of this world should be so unequally divided! Why should all this sketchable adversity be lavished upon the neighborhood of a city that is so rich as Venice in picturesque dilapidation? It’s pretty hard on us Americans, and forces people of sensibility into exile. ”

“ As Don Ippolito passed down the long narrow calle or footway leading from the Campo San Stefano to the Grand Canal in Venice, he peered anxiously about him: now turning for a backward look up the calle, where there was no living thing in sight but a cat on a garden gate; now running a quick eye along the palace walls that rose vast on either hand and notched the slender strip of blue sky visible overhead with the lines of their jutting balconies, chimneys, and cornices ”

“ He was of a purity so blameless that he was reputed crack-brained by the caffè-gossip that in Venice turns its searching light upon whomever you mention; and from his own association with the man Ferris perceived in him an apparent single-heartedness such as no man can have but the rarest of Italians. He was the albino of his species; a gray crow, a white fly; he was really this, or he knew how to seem it with an art far beyond any common deceit. ”

“ Vervain is rather peculiar,” said the painter, retiring a few paces from his picture, and quizzing it through his half-closed eyes. “She is a woman who has had affliction enough to turn a stronger head than hers could ever have been,” he added kindly. “But she has the best heart in the world. In fact,” he burst forth, “she is the most extraordinary combination of perfect fool and perfect lady I ever saw.”
“Excuse me; I don’t understand,” blankly faltered Don Ippolito.
“No; and I’m afraid I couldn’t explain to you,” answered Ferris. ”

“ One ought never to speak of the faults of one’s friends: it mutilates them; they can never be the same afterwards.”
“So you have been talking of my faults,” said Florida, breathing quickly. “Perhaps you could tell me of them to my face.”
“I should have to say that unfairness was one of them. But that is common to the whole sex. I never said I was talking of your faults. I declared against doing so, and you immediately infer that my motive is remorse. I don’t know that you have any faults. They may be virtues in disguise. There is a charm even in unfairness. ”

“ Ferris returned her look with one of comical dismay. This apparent readiness of Miss Vervain’s to be taken command of, daunted him, on second thoughts. “I wish you’d dismiss all my stupid talk from your mind,” he said. “I feel as if I’d been guiltily trying to set you against a man whom I like very much and have no reason not to trust, and who thinks me so much his friend that he couldn’t dream of my making any sort of trouble for him. ”

“ The voyagers spoke from time to time of some peculiarity of the villas that succeeded each other along the canal. Don Ippolito knew a few of them, the gondoliers knew others; but after all, their names were nothing. These haunts of old-time splendor and idleness weary of themselves, and unable to escape, are sadder than anything in Venice, and they belonged, as far as the Americans were concerned, to a world as strange as any to which they should go in another life,—the world of a faded fashion and an alien history. Some of the villas were kept in a sort of repair ”