William Dean Howells: 27 Novels in One Volume (Illustrated). William Dean Howells
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I didn't see how it could be managed." Ferris did not note the change that passed over Florida's face, and he continued. "Our acquaintance hasn't become so intimate as I hoped it might. But you only get to a certain point with Italians. They like to meet you on the street; maybe they haven't any indoors."
"Yes, it must sometimes happen, as you say," replied Florida, with a quick sigh, reverting to the beginning of Ferris's answer. "But is it any worse for a false priest than for a hypocritical minister?"
"It's bad enough for either, but it's worse for the priest. You see Miss Vervain, a minister doesn't set up for so much. He doesn't pretend to forgive us our sins, and he doesn't ask us to confess them; he doesn't offer us the veritable body and blood in the sacrament, and he doesn't bear allegiance to the visible and tangible vicegerent of Christ upon earth. A hypocritical parson may be absurd; but a skeptical priest is tragical."
"Yes, oh yes, I see," murmured the girl, with a grieving face. "Are they always to blame for it? They must be induced, sometimes, to enter the church before they've seriously thought about it, and then don't know how to escape from the path that has been marked out for them from their childhood. Should you think such a priest as that was to blame for being a skeptic?" she asked very earnestly.
"No," said Ferris, with a smile at her seriousness, "I should think such a skeptic as that was to blame for being a priest."
"Shouldn't you be very sorry for him?" pursued Florida still more solemnly.
"I should, indeed, if I liked him. If I didn't, I'm afraid I shouldn't," said Ferris; but he saw that his levity jarred upon her. "Come, Miss Vervain, you're not going to look at those fat monks and sleek priests in the procession to-morrow as so many incorporate tragedies, are you? You'll spoil my pleasure if you do. I dare say they'll be all of them devout believers, accepting everything, down to the animalcula in the holy water."
"If you were that kind of a priest," persisted the girl, without heeding his jests, "what should you do?"
"Upon my word, I don't know. I can't imagine it. Why," he continued, "think what a helpless creature a priest is in everything but his priesthood—more helpless than a woman, even. The only thing he could do would be to leave the church, and how could he do that? He's in the world, but he isn't of it, and I don't see what he could do with it, or it with him. If an Italian priest were to leave the church, even the liberals, who distrust him now, would despise him still more. Do you know that they have a pleasant fashion of calling the Protestant converts apostates? The first thing for such a priest would be exile. But I'm not supposably the kind of priest you mean, and I don't think just such a priest supposable. I dare say if a priest found himself drifting into doubt, he'd try to avoid the disagreeable subject, and, if he couldn't, he'd philosophize it some way, and wouldn't let his skepticism worry him."
"Then you mean that they haven't consciences like us?"
"They have consciences, but not like us. The Italians are kinder people than we are, but they're not so just, and I should say that they don't think truth the chief good of life. They believe there are pleasanter and better things. Perhaps they're right."
"No, no; you don't believe that, you know you don't," said Florida, anxiously. "And you haven't answered my question."
"Oh yes, I have. I've told you it wasn't a supposable case."
"But suppose it was."
"Well, if I must," answered Ferris with a laugh. "With my unfortunate bringing up, I couldn't say less than that such a man ought to get out of his priesthood at any hazard. He should cease to be a priest, if it cost him kindred, friends, good fame, country, everything. I don't see how there can be any living in such a lie, though I know there is. In all reason, it ought to eat the soul out of a man, and leave him helpless to do or be any sort of good. But there seems to be something, I don't know what it is, that is above all reason of ours, something that saves each of us for good in spite of the bad that's in us. It's very good practice, for a man who wants to be modest, to come and live in a Latin country. He learns to suspect his own topping virtues, and to be lenient to the novel combinations of right and wrong that he sees. But as for our insupposable priest—yes, I should say decidedly he ought to get out of it by all means."
Florida fell back in her chair with an aspect of such relief as comes to one from confirmation on an important point. She passed her hand over the sewing in her lap, but did not speak.
Ferris went on, with a doubting look at her, for he had been shy of introducing Don Ippolito's name since the day on the Brenta, and he did not know what effect a recurrence to him in this talk might have. "I've often wondered if our own clerical friend were not a little shaky in his faith. I don't think nature meant him for a priest. He always strikes me as an extremely secular-minded person. I doubt if he's ever put the question whether he is what he professes to be, squarely to himself—he's such a mere dreamer."
Florida changed her posture slightly, and looked down at her sewing. 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."
"What time ought we to be ready for you tomorrow?" demanded the girl in a tone of decision.
"We ought to be in the Piazza by nine o'clock," said Ferris, carelessly accepting the change of subject; and he told her of his plan for seeing the procession from a window of the Old Procuratie.
When he rose to go, he said lightly, "Perhaps, after all, we may see the type of tragical priest we've been talking about. Who can tell? I say his nose will be red."
"Perhaps," answered Florida, with unheeding gravity.
XII
The day was one of those which can come to the world only in early June at Venice. The heaven was without a cloud, but a blue haze made mystery of the horizon where the lagoon and sky met unseen. The breath of the sea bathed in freshness the city at whose feet her tides sparkled and slept.
The great square of St. Mark was transformed from a mart, from a salon, to a temple. The shops under the colonnades that inclose it upon three sides were shut; the caffès, before which the circles of idle coffee-drinkers and sherbet-eaters ordinarily spread out into the Piazza, were repressed to the limits of their own doors; the stands of the water-venders, the baskets of those that sold oranges of Palermo and black cherries of Padua, had vanished from the base of the church of St. Mark, which with its dim splendor of mosaics and its carven luxury of pillar and arch and finial rose like the high-altar, ineffably rich and beautiful, of the vaster temple whose inclosure it completed. Before it stood the three great red flag-staffs, like painted tapers before an altar, and from them hung the Austrian flags of red and white, and yellow and black.
In the middle of the square stood the Austrian military band, motionless, encircling their leader with his gold-headed staff uplifted. During the night a light colonnade of wood, roofed with blue cloth, had been put up around the inside of the Piazza, and under this now paused the long pomp of the ecclesiastical procession—the priests of all the Venetian churches in their richest vestments, followed in their order by facchini, in white sandals and gay robes, with caps of scarlet, white, green, and blue, who bore huge painted candles and silken banners displaying the symbol or the portrait of the titular saints of the several churches, and supported the canopies under which the host of each was elevated. Before the clergy went a company of Austrian soldiers, and behind the facchini came a long array of religious societies, charity-school