“I have told you how when I first owned to her the falsehood in which
I lived, she besought me to try if I might not find consolation in the
holy life to which I had been devoted. When you see her, dear friend,
will you not tell her that I came to understand that this comfort, this
refuge, awaited me in the cell of the Carmelite? I have brought so much
trouble into her life that I would fain have her know I have found
peace where she bade me seek it, that I have mastered my affliction by
reconciling myself to it. Tell her that but for her pity and fear for
me, I believe that I must have died in my sins.”
It was perhaps inevitable from Ferris’s Protestant association of monks
and convents and penances chiefly with the machinery of fiction, that
all this affected him as unreally as talk in a stage-play. His heart was
cold, as he answered: “I am glad that your mind is at rest concerning
the doubts which so long troubled you. Not all men are so easily
pacified; but, as you say, it is the privilege of your church to work
miracles. As to Miss Vervain, I am sorry that I cannot promise to give
her your message. I shall never see her again. Excuse me,” he continued,
“but your servant said there was something you wished to say that
concerned me?”
“You will never see her again!” cried the priest, struggling to lift
himself upon his elbow and falling back upon the pillow. “Oh, bereft!
Oh, deaf and blind! It was _you_ that she loved! She confessed it to me
that night.”
“Wait!” said Ferris, trying to steady his voice, and failing; “I was
with Mrs. Vervain that night; she sent me into the garden to call her
daughter, and I saw how Miss Vervain parted from the man she did not
love! I saw”....
It was a horrible thing to have said it, he felt now that he had spoken;
a sense of the indelicacy, the shamefulness, seemed to alienate him from
all high concern in the matter, and to leave him a mere self-convicted
eavesdropper. His face flamed; the wavering hopes, the wavering doubts
alike died in his heart. He had fallen below the dignity of his own
trouble.
“You saw, you saw,” softly repeated the priest, without looking at him,
and without any show of emotion; apparently, the convalescence that had
brought him perfect clearness of reason had left his sensibilities still
somewhat dulled. He closed his lips and lay silent. At last, he asked
very gently, “And how shall I make you believe that what you saw was not
a woman’s love, but an angel’s heavenly pity for me? Does it seem hard
to believe this of her?”
“Yes,” answered the painter doggedly, “it is hard.”
“And yet it is the very truth. Oh, you do not know her, you never knew
her! In the same moment that she denied me her love, she divined the
anguish of my soul, and with that embrace she sought to console me for
the friendlessness of a whole life, past and to come. But I know that I
waste my words on you,” he cried bitterly. “You never would see me as I
was; you would find no singleness in me, and yet I had a heart as full
of loyalty to you as love for her. In what have I been false to you?”
“You never were false to me,” answered Ferris, “and God knows I have
been true to you, and at what cost. We might well curse the day we met,
Don Ippolito, for we have only done each other harm. But I never meant
you harm. And now I ask you to forgive me if I cannot believe you. I
cannot--yet. I am of another race from you, slow to suspect, slow to
trust. Give me a little time; let me see you again. I want to go away
and think. I don’t question your truth. I’m afraid you don’t know. I’m
afraid that the same deceit has tricked us both. I must come to you
to-morrow. Can I?”
He rose and stood beside the couch.
“Surely, surely,” answered the priest, looking into Ferris’s troubled
eyes with calm meekness. “You will do me the greatest pleasure. Yes,
come again to-morrow. You know,” he said with a sad smile, referring to
his purpose of taking vows, “that my time in the world is short. Adieu,
to meet again!”
He took Ferris’s hand, hanging weak and hot by his side, and drew him
gently down by it, and kissed him on either bearded cheek. “It is our
custom, you know, among _friends_. Farewell.”
The canonico in the anteroom bowed austerely to him as he passed
through; the old woman refused with a harsh “Nothing!” the money he
offered her at the door.
He bitterly upbraided himself for the doubts he could not banish, and he
still flushed with shame that he should have declared his knowledge of a
scene which ought, at its worst, to have been inviolable by his speech.
He scarcely cared now for the woman about whom these miseries grouped
themselves; he realized that a fantastic remorse may be stronger than a
jealous love.
He longed for the morrow to come, that he might confess his shame and
regret; but a reaction to this violent repentance came before the night
fell. As the sound of the priest’s voice and the sight of his wasted
face faded from the painter’s sense, he began to see everything in the
old light again. Then what Don Ippolito had said took a character of
ludicrous, of insolent improbability.
After dark, Ferris set out upon one of his long, rambling walks. He
walked hard and fast, to try if he might not still, by mere fatigue of
body, the anguish that filled his soul. But whichever way he went
he came again and again to the house of Don Ippolito, and at last he
stopped there, leaning against the parapet of the quay, and staring at
the house, as though he would spell from the senseless stones the truth
of the secret they sheltered. Far up in the chamber, where he knew that
the priest lay, the windows were dimly lit.
As he stood thus, with his upturned face haggard in the moonlight, the
soldier commanding the Austrian patrol which passed that way halted his
squad, and seemed about to ask him what he wanted there.
Ferris turned and walked swiftly homeward; but he did not even lie down.
His misery took the shape of an intent that would not suffer him to
rest. He meant to go to Don Ippolito and tell him that his story had
failed of its effect, that he was not to be fooled so easily, and,
without demanding anything further, to leave him in his lie.
At the earliest hour when he might hope to be admitted, he went, and
rang the bell furiously. The door opened, and he confronted the priest’s
servant. “I want to see Don Ippolito,” said Ferris abruptly.
“It cannot be,” she began.
“I tell you I must,” cried Ferris, raising his voice. “I tell you.”....
“Madman!” fiercely whispered the old woman, shaking both her open hands
in his face, “he’s dead! He died last night!”