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 boys in uniforms, old paupers in holiday

dress, little naked urchins with shepherds’ crooks and bits of fleece

about their loins like John the Baptist in the Wilderness, little girls

with angels’ wings and crowns, the monks of the various orders, and

civilian penitents of all sorts in cloaks or dress-coats, hooded or

bareheaded, and carrying each a lighted taper. The corridors under

the Imperial Palace and the New and Old Procuratie were packed with

spectators; from every window up and down the fronts of the palaces,

gay stuffs were flung; the startled doves of St. Mark perched upon the

cornices, or fluttered uneasily to and fro above the crowd. The baton

of the band leader descended with a crash of martial music, the priests

chanted, the charity-boys sang shrill, a vast noise of shuffling feet

arose, mixed with the foliage-like rustling of the sheets of tinsel

attached to the banners and candles in the procession: the whole

strange, gorgeous picture came to life.

After all her plans and preparations, Mrs. Vervain had not felt well

enough that morning to come to the spectacle which she had counted

so much upon seeing, but she had therefore insisted the more that her

daughter should go, and Ferris now stood with Florida alone at a window

in the Old Procuratie.

“Well, what do you think, Miss Vervain?” he asked, when their senses had

somewhat accustomed themselves to the noise of the procession; “do

you say now that Venice is too gloomy a city to have ever had any

possibility of gayety in her?”

“I never said that,” answered Florida, opening her eyes upon him.

“Neither did I,” returned Ferris, “but I’ve often thought it, and I’m

not sure now but I’m right. There’s something extremely melancholy to me

in all this. I don’t care so much for what one may call the deplorable

superstition expressed in the spectacle, but the mere splendid sight and

the music are enough to make one shed tears. 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. Think of our

Fourth of Julys and our State Fairs. Selah!”

Ferris looked into the girl’s serious face with twinkling eyes. He

liked to embarrass her gravity with his antic speeches, and enjoyed her

endeavors to find an earnest meaning in them, and her evident trouble

when she could find none.

“I’m curious to know how our friend will look,” he began again, as he

arranged the cushion on the window-sill for Florida’s greater comfort in

watching the spectacle, “but it won’t be an easy matter to pick him out

in this masquerade, I fancy. Candle-carrying, as well as the other acts

of devotion, seems rather out of character with Don Ippolito, and I

can’t imagine his putting much soul into it. However, very few of the

clergy appear to do that. Look at those holy men with their eyes to the

wind! They are wondering who is the _bella bionda_ at the window here.”

Florida listened to his persiflage with an air of sad distraction. She

was intent upon the procession as it approached from the other side of

the Piazza, and she replied at random to his comments on the different

bodies that formed it.

“It’s very hard to decide which are my favorites,” he continued,

surveying the long column through an opera-glass. “My religious

disadvantages have been such that I don’t care much for priests or

monks, or young John the Baptists, or small female cherubim, but I do

like little charity-boys with voices of pins and needles and hair cut _à

la_ dead-rabbit. I should like, if it were consistent with the consular

dignity, to go down and rub their heads. I’m fond, also, of _old_

charity-boys, I find. Those paupers make one in love with destitute

and dependent age, by their aspect of irresponsible enjoyment. See how

briskly each of them topples along on the leg that he hasn’t got in

the grave! How attractive likewise are the civilian devotees in those

imperishable dress-coats of theirs! Observe their high collars of the

era of the Holy Alliance: they and their fathers and their grandfathers

before them have worn those dress-coats; in a hundred years from now

their posterity will keep holiday in them. I should like to know the

elixir by which the dress-coats of civil employees render themselves

immortal. Those penitents in the cloaks and cowls are not bad, either,

Miss Vervain. Come, they add a very pretty touch of mystery to this

spectacle. They’re the sort of thing that painters are expected to paint

in Venice--that people sigh over as so peculiarly Venetian. If you’ve

a single sentiment about you, Miss Vervain, now is the time to produce

it.”

“But I haven’t. I’m afraid I have no sentiment at all,” answered the

girl ruefully. “But this makes me dreadfully sad.”

“Why that’s just what I was saying a while ago. Excuse me, Miss Vervain,

but your sadness lacks novelty; it’s a sort of plagiarism.”

“Don’t, please,” she pleaded yet more earnestly. “I was just thinking--I

don’t know why such an awful thought should come to me--that it might

all be a mistake after all; perhaps there might not be any other world,

and every bit of this power and display of the church--_our_ church as

well as the rest--might be only a cruel blunder, a dreadful mistake.

Perhaps there isn’t even any God! Do you think there is?”

“I don’t _think_ it,” said Ferris gravely, “I _know_ it. But I don’t

wonder that this sight makes you doubt. Great God! How far it is from

Christ! Look there, at those troops who go before the followers of the

Lamb: their trade is murder. In a minute, if a dozen men called out,

‘Long live the King of Italy!’ it would be the duty of those soldiers to

fire into the helpless crowd. Look at the silken and gilded pomp of

the servants of the carpenter’s son! Look at those miserable monks,

voluntary prisoners, beggars, aliens to their kind! Look at those

penitents who think that they can get forgiveness for their sins by

carrying a candle round the square! And it is nearly two thousand years

since the world turned Christian! It is pretty slow. But I suppose God

lets men learn Him from their own experience of evil. I imagine the

kingdom of heaven is a sort of republic, and that God draws men to Him

only through their perfect freedom.”

“Yes, yes, it must be so,” answered Florida, staring down on the crowd

with unseeing eyes, “but I can’t fix my mind on it. I keep thinking the

whole time of what we were talking about yesterday. 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. But

I’ve been noticing the number of good, kind, friendly faces, and they’re

in the majority, just as they are amongst other people; for there are

very few souls altogether out of drawing, in my opinion. I’ve even

caught sight of some faces in which there was a real rapture of

devotion, and now and then a very innocent one. Here, for instance, is a

man I should like to bet on, if he’d only look up.”

The priest whom Ferris indicated was slowly advancing toward the

space immediately under their window. He was dressed in robes of high

ceremony, and in his hand he carried a lighted taper. He moved with a

gentle tread, and the droop of his slender figure intimated a sort of

despairing weariness. While most of his fellows stared carelessly or

curiously about them, his face was downcast and averted.

Suddenly the procession paused, and a hush fell upon the vast assembly.

Then the silence was broken by the rustle and stir of all those

thousands going down upon their knees, as the cardinal-patriarch lifted

his hands to bless them.

The priest upon whom Ferris and Florida had fixed their eyes faltered

a moment, and before he knelt his next neighbor had to pluck him by the

skirt. Then he too knelt hastily, mechanically lifting his head, and

glancing along the front of the Old Procuratie. His face had that

weariness in it which his figure and movement had suggested, and it was

very pale, but it was yet more singular for the troubled innocence which

its traits expressed.

“There,” whispered Ferris, “that’s what I call an uncommonly good face.”

Florida raised her hand to silence him, and the heavy gaze of the priest

rested on them coldly at first. Then a light of recognition shot into

his eyes and a flush suffused his pallid visage, which seemed to grow

the more haggard and desperate. His head fell again, and he dropped the

candle from his hand. One of those beggars who went by the side of the

procession, to gather the drippings of the tapers, restored it to him.

“Why,” said Ferris aloud, “it’s Don Ippolito! Did you know him at

first?”