William Dean Howells: 27 Novels in One Volume (Illustrated). William Dean Howells
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playing over there, Don Ippolito, and then we'll sit down on this stone bench before it, and imagine ourselves in the garden of Casa Vervain at Venice."
"No, no; let me be the last to set it playing here," said the priest, quickly stooping to the pipe at the foot of the figure, "and then we will sit down here, and imagine ourselves in the garden of Casa Vervain at Providence."
Florida put her hand on his shoulder. "You mustn't do it," she said simply. "The padrone doesn't like to waste the water."
"Oh, we'll pray the saints to rain it back on him some day," cried Don Ippolito with willful levity, and the stream leaped into the moonlight and seemed to hang there like a tangled skein of silver. "But how shall I shut it off when you are gone?" asked the young girl, looking ruefully at the floating threads of splendor.
"Oh, I will shut it off before I go," answered Don Ippolito. "Let it play a moment," he continued, gazing rapturously upon it, while the moon painted his lifted face with a pallor that his black robes heightened. He fetched a long, sighing breath, as if he inhaled with that respiration all the rich odors of the flowers, blanched like his own visage in the white lustre; as if he absorbed into his heart at once the wide glory of the summer night, and the beauty of the young girl at his side. It seemed a supreme moment with him; he looked as a man might look who has climbed out of lifelong defeat into a single instant of release and triumph.
Florida sank upon the bench before the fountain, indulging his caprice with that sacred, motherly tolerance, some touch of which is in all womanly yielding to men's will, and which was perhaps present in greater degree in her feeling towards a man more than ordinarily orphaned and unfriended.
"Is Providence your native city?" asked Don Ippolito, abruptly, after a little silence.
"Oh no; I was born at St. Augustine in Florida."
"Ah yes, I forgot; madama has told me about it; Providence is her city. But the two are near together?"
"No," said Florida, compassionately, "they are a thousand miles apart."
"A thousand miles? What a vast country!"
"Yes, it's a whole world."
"Ah, a world, indeed!" cried the priest, softly. "I shall never comprehend it."
"You never will," answered the young girl gravely, "if you do not think about it more practically."
"Practically, practically!" lightly retorted the priest. "What a word with you Americans; That is the consul's word: practical."
"Then you have been to see him to-day?" asked Florida, with eagerness. "I wanted to ask you"—
"Yes, I went to consult the oracle, as you bade me."
"Don Ippolito"—
"And he was averse to my going to America. He said it was not practical."
"Oh!" murmured the girl.
"I think," continued the priest with vehemence, "that Signor Ferris is no longer my friend."
"Did he treat you coldly—harshly?" she asked, with a note of indignation in her voice. "Did he know that I—that you came"—
"Perhaps he was right. Perhaps I shall indeed go to ruin there. Ruin, ruin! Do I not live ruin here?"
"What did he say—what did he tell you?"
"No, no; not now, madamigella! I do not want to think of that man, now. I want you to help me once more to realize myself in America, where I shall never have been a priest, where I shall at least battle even-handed with the world. Come, let us forget him; the thought of him palsies all my hope. He could not see me save in this robe, in this figure that I abhor."
"Oh, it was strange, it was not like him, it was cruel! What did he say?"
"In everything but words, he bade me despair; he bade me look upon all that makes life dear and noble as impossible to me!"
"Oh, how? Perhaps he did not understand you. No, he did not understand you. What did you say to him, Don Ippolito? Tell me!" She leaned towards him, in anxious emotion, as she spoke.
The priest rose, and stretched out his arms, as if he would gather something of courage from the infinite space. In his visage were the sublimity and the terror of a man who puts everything to the risk.
"How will it really be with me, yonder?" he demanded. "As it is with other men, whom their past life, if it has been guiltless, does not follow to that new world of freedom and justice?"
"Why should it not be so?" demanded Florida. "Did he say it would not?"
"Need it be known there that I have been a priest? Or if I tell it, will it make me appear a kind of monster, different from other men?"
"No, no!" she answered fervently. "Your story would gain friends and honor for you everywhere in America. Did he"—
"A moment, a moment!" cried Don Ippolito, catching his breath. "Will it ever be possible for me to win something more than honor and friendship there?"
She looked up at him askingly, confusedly.
"If I am a man, and the time should ever come that a face, a look, a voice, shall be to me what they are to other men, will she remember it against me that I have been a priest, when I tell her—say to her, madamigella—how dear she is to me, offer her my life's devotion, ask her to be my wife?"...
Florida rose from the seat, and stood confronting him, in a helpless silence, which he seemed not to notice.
Suddenly he clasped his hands together, and desperately stretched them towards her.
"Oh, my hope, my trust, my life, if it were you that I loved?"...
"What!" shuddered the girl, recoiling, with almost a shriek. "You? A priest!"
Don Ippolito gave a low cry, half sob:—
"His words, his words! It is true, I cannot escape, I am doomed, I must die as I have lived!"
He dropped his face into his hands, and stood with his head bowed before her; neither spoke for a long time, or moved.
Then Florida said absently, in the husky murmur to which her voice fell when she was strongly moved, "Yes, I see it all, how it has been," and was silent again, staring, as if a procession of the events and scenes of the past months were passing before her; and presently she moaned to herself "Oh, oh, oh!" and wrung her hands. The foolish fountain kept capering and babbling on. All at once, now, as a flame flashes up and then expires, it leaped and dropped extinct at the foot of the statue.
Its going out seemed somehow to leave them in darkness, and under cover of that gloom she drew nearer the priest, and by such approaches as one makes toward a fancied apparition, when his fear will not let him fly, but it seems better to suffer the worst from it at once than to live in terror of it ever after, she lifted her hands to his, and gently taking them away from his face, looked into his hopeless eyes.
"Oh, Don Ippolito," she grieved. "What shall I say to you, what can I do for you, now?"
But there was nothing to do. The whole edifice of his dreams, his wild imaginations, had fallen into dust at a word; no magic could rebuild it; the end that never seems the end had come. He let her keep his cold hands, and presently he returned the entreaty of her tears with his wan, patient smile.
"You cannot help me; there is no help for an error like mine. Sometime, if ever the thought of me is a greater pain than it is at this moment, you can forgive me. Yes, you can do that for me."
"But who, who will ever forgive me" she cried, "for my blindness! Oh, you must believe that I never thought, I never dreamt"—
"I know it well. It was your fatal truth that did it; truth too high and fine for me to have discerned save through such agony as.... You too loved my soul, like the rest, and you would have had me no priest for the reason that they would have had