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 work of his own hands, and so he saved the expense 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 woman, and that he could not go on teaching her 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 inventor’s Utopia, our poor, patent-ridden
country 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 to perform the matin service
for three peasant 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 convenience a moment till he could descend and show him the way
upstairs. 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
of degenerate palaces, or forming the entrances of 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 from some
peculiarities of shape to have once been 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, had some fatal defect: they were
aspirations toward 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 my gratitude by
possessing your native country 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 approached him without first informing the ladies, 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 received him as coldly as the forms
of greeting 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
couldn’t discourage Don Ippolito. He refused to be dismayed--as I should
have been at the notion of teaching Miss Vervain. I didn’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
wouldn’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
had taught himself English--with the help of an 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 didn’t have your interests solely in mind when I went to see Don
Ippolito. I hadn’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 didn’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 didn’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 here--and you let him get
you in black and white 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 haven’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 wouldn’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 couldn’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 forebode suffering. Their interest in Don Ippolito
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.