The terrible stroke sobered Ferris, he woke from his long debauch of
hate and jealousy and despair; for the first time since that night in
the garden, he faced his fate with a clear mind. Death had set his seal
forever to a testimony which he had been able neither to refuse nor to
accept; in abject sorrow and shame he thanked God that he had been kept
from dealing that last cruel blow; but if Don Ippolito had come back
from the dead to repeat his witness, Ferris felt that the miracle could
not change his own passive state. There was now but one thing in the
world for him to do: to see Florida, to confront her with his knowledge
of all that had been, and to abide by her word, whatever it was. At the
worst, there was the war, whose drums had already called to him, for a
refuge.
He thought at first that he might perhaps overtake the Vervains before
they sailed for America, but he remembered that they had left Venice
six weeks before. It seemed impossible that he could wait, but when
he landed in New York, he was tormented in his impatience by a strange
reluctance and hesitation. A fantastic light fell upon his plans; a
sense of its wildness enfeebled his purpose. What was he going to do?
Had he come four thousand miles to tell Florida that Don Ippolito was
dead? Or was he going to say, “I have heard that you love me, but I
don’t believe it: is it true?”
He pushed on to Providence, stifling these antic misgivings as he might,
and without allowing himself time to falter from his intent, he set out
to find Mrs. Vervain’s house. He knew the street and the number, for she
had often given him the address in her invitations against the time
when he should return to America. As he drew near the house a tender
trepidation filled him and silenced all other senses in him; his heart
beat thickly; the universe included only the fact that he was to look
upon the face he loved, and this fact had neither past nor future.
But a terrible foreboding as of death seized him when he stood before
the house, and glanced up at its close-shuttered front, and round upon
the dusty grass-plots and neglected flower-beds of the door-yard. With
a cold hand he rang and rang again, and no answer came. At last a man
lounged up to the fence from the next house-door. “Guess you won’t make
anybody hear,” he said, casually.
“Doesn’t Mrs. Vervain live in this house?” asked Ferris, finding a husky
voice in his throat that sounded to him like some other’s voice lost
there.
“She used to, but she isn’t at home. Family’s in Europe.”
They had not come back yet.
“Thanks,” said Ferris mechanically, and he went away. He laughed
to himself at this keen irony of fortune; he was prepared for the
confirmation of his doubts; he was ready for relief from them, Heaven
knew; but this blank that the turn of the wheel had brought, this
Nothing!
The Vervains were as lost to him as if Europe were in another planet.
How should he find them there? Besides, he was poor; he had no money to
get back with, if he had wanted to return.
He took the first train to New York, and hunted up a young fellow of his
acquaintance, who in the days of peace had been one of the governor’s
aides. He was still holding this place, and was an ardent recruiter. He
hailed with rapture the expression of Ferris’s wish to go into the war.
“Look here!” he said after a moment’s thought, “didn’t you have some
rank as a consul?”
“Yes,” replied Ferris with a dreary smile, “I have been equivalent to a
commander in the navy and a colonel in the army--I don’t mean both, but
either.”
“Good!” cried his friend. “We must strike high. The colonelcies
are rather inaccessible, just at present, and so are the
lieutenant-colonelcies, but a majorship, now”....
“Oh no; don’t!” pleaded Ferris. “Make me a corporal--or a cook. I shall
not be so mischievous to our own side, then, and when the other fellows
shoot me, I shall not be so much of a loss.”
“Oh, they won’t _shoot_ you,” expostulated his friend, high-heartedly.
He got Ferris a commission as second lieutenant, and lent him money to
buy a uniform.
Ferris’s regiment was sent to a part of the southwest, where he saw a
good deal of fighting and fever and ague. At the end of two years, spent
alternately in the field and the hospital, he was riding out near the
camp one morning in unusual spirits, when two men in butternut fired
at him: one had the mortification to miss him; the bullet of the other
struck him in the arm. There was talk of amputation at first, but the
case was finally managed without. In Ferris’s state of health it was
quite the same an end of his soldiering.
He came North sick and maimed and poor. He smiled now to think of
confronting Florida in any imperative or challenging spirit; but the
current of his hopeless melancholy turned more and more towards her. He
had once, at a desperate venture, written to her at Providence, but he
had got no answer. He asked of a Providence man among the artists in New
York, if he knew the Vervains; the Providence man said that he did know
them a little when he was much younger; they had been abroad a great
deal; he believed in a dim way that they were still in Europe. The young
one, he added, used to have a temper of her own.
“Indeed!” said Ferris stiffly.
The one fast friend whom he found in New York was the governor’s dashing
aide. The enthusiasm of this recruiter of regiments had not ceased
with Ferris’s departure for the front; the number of disabled officers
forbade him to lionize any one of them, but he befriended Ferris; he
made a feint of discovering the open secret of his poverty, and asked
how he could help him.
“I don’t know,” said Ferris, “it looks like a hopeless case, to me.”
“Oh no it isn’t,” retorted his friend, as cheerfully and confidently as
he had promised him that he should not be shot. “Didn’t you bring back
any pictures from Venice with you?”
“I brought back a lot of sketches and studies. I’m sorry to say that I
loafed a good deal there; I used to feel that I had eternity before me;
and I was a theorist and a purist and an idiot generally. There are none
of them fit to be seen.”
“Never mind; let’s look at them.”
They hunted out Ferris’s property from a catch-all closet in the studio
of a sculptor with whom he had left them, and who expressed a polite
pleasure in handing them over to Ferris rather than to his heirs and
assigns.
“Well, I’m not sure that I share your satisfaction, old fellow,” said
the painter ruefully; but he unpacked the sketches.
Their inspection certainly revealed a disheartening condition of
half-work. “And I can’t do anything to help the matter for the present,”
groaned Ferris, stopping midway in the business, and making as if to
shut the case again.
“Hold on,” said his friend. “What’s this? Why, this isn’t so bad.” It
was the study of Don Ippolito as a Venetian priest, which Ferris beheld
with a stupid amaze, remembering that he had meant to destroy it, and
wondering how it had got where it was, but not really caring much. “It’s
worse than you can imagine,” said he, still looking at it with this
apathy.
“No matter; I want you to sell it to me. Come!”
“I can’t!” replied Ferris piteously. “It would be flat burglary.”
“Then put it into the exhibition.”
The sculptor, who had gone back to scraping the chin of the famous
public man on whose bust he was at work, stabbed him to the heart with
his modeling-tool, and turned to Ferris and his friend. He slanted his
broad red beard for a sidelong look at the picture, and said: “I know
what you mean, Ferris. It’s hard, and it’s feeble in some ways and it
looks a little too much like experimenting. But it isn’t so _infernally_
bad.”
“Don’t be fulsome,” responded Ferris, jadedly. He was thinking in
a thoroughly vanquished mood what a tragico-comic end of the whole
business it was that poor Don Ippolito should come to his rescue in
this fashion, and as it were offer to succor him in his extremity. He
perceived the shamefulness of suffering such help; it would be much
better to starve; but he felt cowed, and he had not courage to take arms
against this sarcastic destiny, which had pursued him with a mocking
smile from one lower level to another. He rubbed his forehead and
brooded upon the picture. At least it would be some comfort to be rid of
it; and Don Ippolito was dead; and to whom could it mean more than the
face of it?
His friend had his way about framing it, and it was got into the
exhibition. The hanging-committee offered it the hospitalities of an
obscure corner; but it was there, and it stood its chance. Nobody
seemed to know that it was there, however, unless confronted with it by
Ferris’s friend, and then no one seemed to care for it, much less want
to buy it. Ferris saw so many much worse pictures sold all around it,
that he began gloomily to respect it. At first it had shocked him to see
it on the Academy’s wall; but it soon came to have no other relation to
him than that of creatureship, like a poem in which a poet celebrates
his love or laments his dead, and sells for a price. His pride as well
as his poverty was set on having the picture sold; he had nothing to do,
and he used to lurk about, and see if it would not interest somebody at
last. But it remained unsold throughout May, and well into June, long
after the crowds had ceased to frequent the exhibition, and only chance
visitors from the country straggled in by twos and threes.
One warm, dusty afternoon, when he turned into the Academy out of Fourth
Avenue, the empty hall echoed to no footfall but his own. A group of
weary women, who wore that look of wanting lunch which characterizes all
picture-gallery-goers at home and abroad, stood faint before a certain
large Venetian subject which Ferris abhorred, and the very name of which
he spat out of his mouth with loathing for its unreality. He passed them
with a sombre glance, as he took his way toward the retired spot where
his own painting hung.
A lady whose crapes would have betrayed to her own sex the latest touch
of Paris stood a little way back from it, and gazed fixedly at it.
The pose of her head, her whole attitude, expressed a quiet dejection;
without seeing her face one could know its air of pensive wistfulness.
Ferris resolved to indulge himself in a near approach to this unwonted
spectacle of interest in his picture; at the sound of his steps the
lady slowly turned a face of somewhat heavily molded beauty, and from
low-growing, thick pale hair and level brows, stared at him with the sad
eyes of Florida Vervain. She looked fully the last two years older.
As though she were listening to the sound of his steps in the dark
instead of having him there visibly before her, she kept her eyes upon
him with a dreamy unrecognition.
“Yes, it is I,” said Ferris, as if she had spoken.
She recovered herself, and with a subdued, sorrowful quiet in her old
directness, she answered, “I supposed you must be in New York,” and she
indicated that she had supposed so from seeing this picture.
Ferris felt the blood mounting to his head. “Do you think it is like?”
he asked.
“No,” she said, “it isn’t just to him; it attributes things that didn’t
belong to him, and it leaves out a great deal.”
“I could scarcely have hoped to please you in a portrait of Don
Ippolito.” Ferris saw the red light break out as it used on the girl’s
pale cheeks, and her eyes dilate angrily. He went on recklessly: “He
sent for me after you went away, and gave me a message for you. I never
promised to deliver it, but I will do so now. He asked me to tell
you when we met, that he had acted on your desire, and had tried to
reconcile himself to his calling and his religion; he was going to enter
a Carmelite convent.”
Florida made no answer, but she seemed to expect him to go on, and he
was constrained to do so.
“He never carried out his purpose,” Ferris said, with a keen glance at
her; “he died the night after I saw him.”
“Died?” The fan and the parasol and the two or three light packages she
had been holding slid down one by one, and lay at her feet. “Thank you
for bringing me his last words,” she said, but did not ask him anything
more.
Ferris did not offer to gather up her things; he stood irresolute;
presently he continued with a downcast look: “He had had a fever, but
they thought he was getting well. His death must have been sudden.” He
stopped, and resumed fiercely, resolved to have the worst out: “I went
to him, with no good-will toward him, the next day after I saw him;
but I came too late. That was God’s mercy to me. I hope you have your
consolation, Miss Vervain.”
It maddened him to see her so little moved, and he meant to make her
share his remorse.
“Did he blame me for anything?” she asked.
“No!” said Ferris, with a bitter laugh, “he praised you.”
“I am glad of that,” returned Florida, “for I have thought it all over
many times, and I know that I was not to blame, though at first I
blamed myself. I never intended him anything but good. That is _my_
consolation, Mr. Ferris. But you,” she added, “you seem to make yourself
my judge. Well, and what do _you_ blame me for? I have a right to know
what is in your mind.”
The thing that was in his mind had rankled there for two years; in
many a black reverie of those that alternated with his moods of abject
self-reproach and perfect trust of her, he had confronted her and flung
it out upon her in one stinging phrase. But he was now suddenly at a
loss; the words would not come; his torment fell dumb before her; in her
presence the cause was unspeakable. Her lips had quivered a little in
making that demand, and there had been a corresponding break in her
voice.
“Florida! Florida!” Ferris heard himself saying, “I loved you all the
time!”
“Oh indeed, did you love me?” she cried, indignantly, while the tears
shone in her eyes. “And was that why you left a helpless young girl to
meet that trouble alone? Was that why you refused me your advice, and
turned your back on me, and snubbed me? Oh, many thanks for your love!”
She dashed the gathered tears angrily away, and went on. “Perhaps you
knew, too, what that poor priest was thinking of?”
“Yes,” said Ferris, stolidly, “I did at last: he told me.”
“Oh, then you acted generously and nobly to let him go on! It was kind
to him, and very, very kind to me!”
“What could I do?” demanded Ferris, amazed and furious to find himself
on the defensive. “His telling me put it out of my power to act.”
“I’m glad that you can satisfy yourself with such a quibble! But I
wonder that you can tell _me_--_any_ woman of it!”
“By Heavens, this is atrocious!” cried Ferris. “Do you think ... Look
here!” he went on rudely. “I’ll put the case to you, and you shall judge
it. Remember that I was such a fool as to be in love with you. Suppose
Don Ippolito had told me that he was going to risk everything--going to
give up home, religion, friends--on the ten thousandth part of a chance
that you might some day care for him. I did not believe he had even so
much chance as that; but he had always thought me his friend, and he
trusted me. Was it a quibble that kept me from betraying him? I don’t
know what honor is among women; but no _man_ could have done it. I
confess to my shame that I went to your house that night longing to
betray him. And then suppose your mother sent me into the garden to call
you, and I saw ... what has made my life a hell of doubt for the last
two years; what ... No, excuse me! I can’t put the case to you after
all.”
“What do you mean?” asked Florida. “I don’t understand you!”
“What do I mean? You don’t understand? Are you so blind as that, or are
you making a fool of me? What could I think but that you had played with
that priest’s heart till your own”....
“Oh!” cried Florida with a shudder, starting away from him, “did you
think I was such a wicked girl as that?”
It was no defense, no explanation, no denial; it simply left the case
with Ferris as before. He stood looking like a man who does not know
whether to bless or curse himself, to laugh or blaspheme.
She stooped and tried to pick up the things she had let fall upon
the floor; but she seemed not able to find them. He bent over, and,
gathering them together, returned them to her with his left hand,
keeping the other in the breast of his coat.
“Thanks,” she said; and then after a moment, “Have you been hurt?” she
asked timidly.
“Yes,” said Ferris in a sulky way. “I have had my share.” He glanced
down at his arm askance. “It’s rather conventional,” he added. “It isn’t
much of a hurt; but then, I wasn’t much of a soldier.”
The girl’s eyes looked reverently at the conventional arm; those were
the days, so long past, when women worshipped men for such things. But
she said nothing, and as Ferris’s eyes wandered to her, he received a
novel and painful impression. He said, hesitatingly, “I have not asked
before: but your mother, Miss Vervain--I hope she is well?”
“She is dead,” answered Florida, with stony quiet.
They were both silent for a time. Then Ferris said, “I had a great
affection for your mother.”
“Yes,” said the girl, “she was fond of you, too. But you never wrote or
sent her any word; it used to grieve her.”
Her unjust reproach went to his heart, so long preoccupied with its own
troubles; he recalled with a tender remorse the old Venetian days and
the kindliness of the gracious, silly woman who had seemed to like him
so much; he remembered the charm of her perfect ladylikeness, and of her
winning, weak-headed desire to make every one happy to whom she spoke;
the beauty of the good-will, the hospitable soul that in an imaginably
better world than this will outvalue a merely intellectual or aesthetic
life. He humbled himself before her memory, and as keenly reproached
himself as if he could have made her hear from him at any time during
the past two years. He could only say, “I am sorry that I gave your
mother pain; I loved her very truly. I hope that she did not suffer much
before”--
“No,” said Florida, “it was a peaceful end; but finally it was very
sudden. She had not been well for many years, with that sort of decline;
I used sometimes to feel troubled about her before we came to Venice;
but I was very young. I never was really alarmed till that day I went to
you.”
“I remember,” said Ferris contritely.
“She had fainted, and I thought we ought to see a doctor; but
afterwards, because I thought that I ought not to do so without speaking
to her, I did not go to the doctor; and that day we made up our minds
to get home as soon as we could; and she seemed so much better, for a
while; and then, everything seemed to happen at once. When we did start
home, she could not go any farther than Switzerland, and in the fall we
went back to Italy. We went to Sorrento, where the climate seemed to
do her good. But she was growing frailer, the whole time. She died in
March. I found some old friends of hers in Naples, and came home with
them.”
The girl hesitated a little over the words, which she nevertheless
uttered unbroken, while the tears fell quietly down her face. She
seemed to have forgotten the angry words that had passed between her and
Ferris, to remember him only as one who had known her mother, while she
went on to relate some little facts in the history of her mother’s last
days; and she rose into a higher, serener atmosphere, inaccessible to
his resentment or his regret, as she spoke of her loss. The simple tale
of sickness and death inexpressibly belittled his passionate woes, and
made them look theatrical to him. He hung his head as they turned at her
motion and walked away from the picture of Don Ippolito, and down the
stairs toward the street-door; the people before the other Venetian
picture had apparently yielded to their craving for lunch, and had
vanished.
“I have very little to tell you of my own life,” Ferris began awkwardly.
“I came home soon after you started, and I went to Providence to find
you, but you had not got back.”
Florida stopped him and looked perplexedly into his face, and then moved
on.
“Then I went into the army. I wrote once to you.”
“I never got your letter,” she said.
They were now in the lower hall, and near the door.
“Florida,” said Ferris, abruptly, “I’m poor and disabled; I’ve no more
right than any sick beggar in the street to say it to you; but I loved
you, I must always love you. I--Good-by!”
She halted him again, and “You said,” she grieved, “that you doubted me;
you said that I had made your life a”--
“Yes, I said that; I know it,” answered Ferris.
“You thought I could be such a false and cruel girl as that!”
“Yes, yes: I thought it all, God help me!”
“When I was only sorry for him, when it was you that I”--
“Oh, I know it,” answered Ferris in a heartsick, hopeless voice. “He
knew it, too. He told me so the day before he died.”
“And didn’t you believe him?”
Ferris could not answer.
“Do you believe him now?”
“I believe anything you tell me. When I look at you, I can’t believe I
ever doubted you.”
“Why?”
“Because--because--I love you.”
“Oh! That’s no reason.”
“I know it; but I’m used to being without a reason.”
Florida looked gravely at his penitent face, and a brave red color
mantled her own, while she advanced an unanswerable argument: “Then what
are you going away for?”
The world seemed to melt and float away from between them. It returned
and solidified at the sound of the janitor’s steps as he came towards
them on his round through the empty building. Ferris caught her hand;
she leaned heavily upon his arm as they walked out into the street. It
was all they could do at the moment except to look into each other’s
faces, and walk swiftly on.
At last, after how long a time he did not know, Ferris cried: “Where are
we going, Florida?”
“Why, I don’t know!” she replied. “I’m stopping with those friends
of ours at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. We _were_ going on to Providence
to-morrow. We landed yesterday; and we stayed to do some shopping”--
“And may I ask why you happened to give your first moments in America to
the fine arts?”
“The fine arts? Oh! I thought I might find something of yours, there!”
At the hotel she presented him to her party as a friend whom her mother
and she had known in Italy; and then went to lay aside her hat. The
Providence people received him with the easy, half-southern warmth of
manner which seems to have floated northward as far as their city on
the Gulf Stream bathing the Rhode Island shores. The matron of the party
had, before Florida came back, an outline history of their acquaintance,
which she evolved from him with so much tact that he was not conscious
of parting with information; and she divined indefinitely more when she
saw them together again. She was charming; but to Ferris’s thinking she
had a fault, she kept him too much from Florida, though she talked of
nothing else, and at the last she was discreetly merciful.
“Do you think,” whispered Florida, very close against his face, when
they parted, “that I’ll have a bad temper?”
“I hope you will--or I shall be killed with kindness,” he replied.
She stood a moment, nervously buttoning his coat across his breast. “You
mustn’t let that picture be sold, Henry,” she said, and by this touch
alone did she express any sense, if she had it, of his want of feeling
in proposing to sell it. He winced, and she added with a soft pity in
her voice, “He did bring us together, after all. I wish you had believed
him, dear!”
“So do I,” said Ferris, most humbly.
* * * * *
People are never equal to the romance of their youth in after life,
except by fits, and Ferris especially could not keep himself at what he
called the operatic pitch of their brief betrothal and the early days of
their marriage. With his help, or even his encouragement, his wife might
have been able to maintain it. She had a gift for idealizing him, at
least, and as his hurt healed but slowly, and it was a good while before
he could paint with his wounded arm, it was an easy matter for her to
believe in the meanwhile that he would have been the greatest painter
of his time, but for his honorable disability; to hear her, you would
suppose no one else had ever been shot in the service of his country.
It was fortunate for Ferris, since he could not work, that she had
money; in exalted moments he had thought this a barrier to their
marriage; yet he could not recall any one who had refused the hand of a
beautiful girl because of the accident of her wealth, and in the end he
silenced his scruples. It might be said that in many other ways he was
not her equal; but one ought to reflect how very few men are worthy
of their wives in any sense. After his fashion he certainly loved her
always,--even when she tried him most, for it must be owned that she
really had that hot temper which he had dreaded in her from the first.
Not that her imperiousness directly affected him. For a long time after
their marriage, she seemed to have no other desire than to lose her
outwearied will in his. There was something a little pathetic in this;
there was a kind of bewilderment in her gentleness, as though the
relaxed tension of her long self-devotion to her mother left her without
a full motive; she apparently found it impossible to give herself with a
satisfactory degree of abandon to a man who could do so many things for
himself. When her children came they filled this vacancy, and afforded
her scope for the greatest excesses of self-devotion. Ferris laughed
to find her protecting them and serving them with the same tigerish
tenderness, the same haughty humility, as that with which she used to
care for poor Mrs. Vervain; and he perceived that this was merely the
direction away from herself of that intense arrogance of nature which,
but for her power and need of loving, would have made her intolerable.
What she chiefly exacted from them in return for her fierce devotedness
was the truth in everything; she was content that they should be rather
less fond of her than of their father, whom indeed they found much more
amusing.
The Ferrises went to Europe some years after their marriage, revisiting
Venice, but sojourning for the most part in Florence. Ferris had once
imagined that the tragedy which had given him his wife would always
invest her with the shadow of its sadness, but in this he was mistaken.
There is nothing has really so strong a digestion as love, and this is
very lucky, seeing what manifold experiences love has to swallow and
assimilate; and when they got back to Venice, Ferris found that the
customs of their joint life exorcised all the dark associations of the
place. These simply formed a sombre background, against which their
wedded happiness relieved itself. They talked much of the past, with
free minds, unashamed and unafraid. If it is a little shocking, it is
nevertheless true, and true to human nature, that they spoke of Don
Ippolito as if he were a part of their love.
Ferris had never ceased to wonder at what he called the unfathomable
innocence of his wife, and he liked to go over all the points of their
former life in Venice, and bring home to himself the utter simplicity
of her girlish ideas, motives, and designs, which both confounded and
delighted him.
“It’s amazing, Florida,” he would say, “it’s perfectly amazing that you
should have been willing to undertake the job of importing into America
that poor fellow with his whole stock of helplessness, dreamery, and
unpracticality. What _were_ you about?”
“Why, I’ve often told you, Henry. I thought he oughtn’t to continue a
priest.”
“Yes, yes; I know.” Then he would remain lost in thought, softly
whistling to himself. On one of these occasions he asked, “Do you think
he was really very much troubled by his false position?”
“I can’t tell, now. He seemed to be so.”
“That story he told you of his childhood and of how he became a priest;
didn’t it strike you at the time like rather a made-up, melodramatic
history?”
“No, no! How can you say such things, Henry? It was too simple not to be
true.”
“Well, well. Perhaps so. But he baffles me. He always did, for that
matter.”
Then came another pause, while Ferris lay back upon the gondola
cushions, getting the level of the Lido just under his hat-brim.
“Do you think he was very much of a skeptic, after all, Florida?”
Mrs. Ferris turned her eyes reproachfully upon her husband. “Why, Henry,
how strange you are! You said yourself, once, that you used to wonder if
he were not a skeptic.”
“Yes; I know. But for a man who had lived in doubt so many years, he
certainly slipped back into the bosom of mother church pretty suddenly.
Don’t you think he was a person of rather light feelings?”
“I can’t talk with you, my dear, if you go on in that way.”
“I don’t mean any harm. I can see how in many things he was the soul
of truth and honor. But it seems to me that even the life he lived was
largely imagined. I mean that he was such a dreamer that once having
fancied himself afflicted at being what he was, he could go on and
suffer as keenly as if he really were troubled by it. Why mightn’t it
be that all his doubts came from anger and resentment towards those who
made him a priest, rather than from any examination of his own mind? I
don’t say it _was_ so. But I don’t believe he knew quite what he wanted.
He must have felt that his failure as an inventor went deeper than the
failure of his particular attempts. I once thought that perhaps he had
a genius in that way, but I question now whether he had. If he had, it
seems to me he had opportunity to prove it--certainly, as a priest he
had leisure to prove it. But when that sort of subconsciousness of his
own inadequacy came over him, it was perfectly natural for him to take
refuge in the supposition that he had been baffled by circumstances.”
Mrs. Ferris remained silently troubled. “I don’t know how to answer you,
Henry; but I think that you’re judging him narrowly and harshly.”
“Not harshly. I feel very compassionate towards him. But now, even as to
what one might consider the most real thing in his life,--his caring
for you,--it seems to me there must have been a great share of imagined
sentiment in it. It was not a passion; it was a gentle nature’s dream of
a passion.”
“He didn’t die of a dream,” said the wife.
“No, he died of a fever.”
“He had got well of the fever.”
“That’s very true, my dear. And whatever his head was, he had an
affectionate and faithful heart. I wish I had been gentler with him. I
must often have bruised that sensitive soul. God knows I’m sorry for it.
But he’s a puzzle, he’s a puzzle!”
Thus lapsing more and more into a mere problem as the years have passed,
Don Ippolito has at last ceased to be even the memory of a man with a
passionate love and a mortal sorrow. Perhaps this final effect in the
mind of him who has realized the happiness of which the poor priest
vainly dreamed is not the least tragic phase of the tragedy of Don
Ippolito.