“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 me a priest--I see it. But you had
no right to love my soul and not me--you, a woman. A woman must not love
only the soul of a man.”
“Yes, yes!” piteously explained the girl, “but you were a priest to me!”
“That is true, madamigella. I was always a priest to you; and now I see
that I never could be otherwise. Ah, the wrong began many years before
we met. I was trying to blame you a little”--
“Blame me, blame me; do!”
--“but there is no blame. Think that it was another way of asking your
forgiveness.... O my God, my God, my God!”
He released his hands from her, and uttered this cry under his breath,
with his face lifted towards the heavens. When he looked at her again,
he said: “Madamigella, if my share of this misery gives me the right to
ask of you”--
“Oh ask anything of me! I will give everything, do everything!”
He faltered, and then, “You do not love me,” he said abruptly; “is there
some one else that you love?”
She did not answer.
“Is it ... he?”
She hid her face.
“I knew it,” groaned the priest, “I knew that too!” and he turned away.
“Don Ippolito, Don Ippolito--oh, poor, poor Don Ippolito!” cried the
girl, springing towards him. “Is _this_ the way you leave me? Where are
you going? What will you do now?”
“Did I not say? I am going to die a priest.”
“Is there nothing that you will let me be to you, hope for you?”
“Nothing,” said Don Ippolito, after a moment. “What could you?” He
seized the hands imploringly extended towards him, and clasped them
together and kissed them both. “Adieu!” he whispered; then he opened
them, and passionately kissed either palm; “adieu, adieu!”
A great wave of sorrow and compassion and despair for him swept through
her. She flung her arms about his neck, and pulled his head down upon
her heart, and held it tight there, weeping and moaning over him as over
some hapless, harmless thing that she had unpurposely bruised or killed.
Then she suddenly put her hands against his breast, and thrust him away,
and turned and ran.
Ferris stepped back again into the shadow of the tree from which he had
just emerged, and clung to its trunk lest he should fall. Another seemed
to creep out of the court in his person, and totter across the
white glare of the campo and down the blackness of the calle. In the
intersected spaces where the moonlight fell, this alien, miserable man
saw the figure of a priest gliding on before him.