William Dean Howells: 27 Novels in One Volume (Illustrated). William Dean HowellsЧитать онлайн книгу.
of you. I shouldn't have known you in the procession yesterday."
Don Ippolito did not respond. He rose and went toward his portrait on the easel, and examined it long, with a curious minuteness. Then he returned to his chair, and continued to look at it. "I suppose that it resembles me a great deal," he said, "and yet I do not feel like that. I hardly know what is the fault. It is as I should be if I were like other priests, perhaps?"
"I know it's not good," said the painter. "It is conventional, in spite of everything. But here's that first sketch I made of you."
He took up a canvas facing the wall, and set it on the easel. The character in this charcoal sketch was vastly sincerer and sweeter.
"Ah!" said Don Ippolito, with a sigh and smile of relief, "that is immeasurably better. I wish I could speak to you, dear friend, in a mood of yours as sympathetic as this picture records, of some matters that concern me very nearly. I have just come from the railroad station."
"Seeing some friends off?" asked the painter, indifferently, hovering near the sketch with a bit of charcoal in his hand, and hesitating whether to give it a certain touch. He glanced with half-shut eyes at the priest.
Don Ippolito sighed again. "I hardly know. I was seeing off my hopes, my desires, my prayers, that followed the train to America!"
The painter put down his charcoal, dusted his fingers, and looked at the priest without saying anything.
"Do you remember when I first came to you?" asked Don Ippolito.
"Certainly," said Ferris. "Is it of that matter you want to speak to me? I'm very sorry to hear it, for I don't think it practical."
"Practical, practical!" cried the priest hotly. "Nothing is practical till it has been tried. And why should I not go to America?"
"Because you can't get your passport, for one thing," answered the painter dryly.
"I have thought of that," rejoined Don Ippolito more patiently. "I can get a passport for France from the Austrian authorities here, and at Milan there must be ways in which I could change it for one from my own king"—it was by this title that patriotic Venetians of those days spoke of Victor Emmanuel—"that would carry me out of France into England."
Ferris pondered a moment. "That is quite true," he said. "Why hadn't you thought of that when you first came to me?"
"I cannot tell. I didn't know that I could even get a passport for France till the other day."
Both were silent while the painter filled his pipe. "Well," he said presently, "I'm very sorry. I'm afraid you're dooming yourself to many bitter disappointments in going to America. What do you expect to do there?"
"Why, with my inventions"—
"I suppose," interrupted the other, putting a lighted match to his pipe, "that a painter must be a very poor sort of American: his first thought is of coming to Italy. So I know very little directly about the fortunes of my inventive fellow-countrymen, or whether an inventor has any prospect of making a living. But once when I was at Washington I went into the Patent Office, where the models of the inventions are deposited; the building is about as large as the Ducal Palace, and it is full of them. The people there told me nothing was commoner than for the same invention to be repeated over and over again by different inventors. Some few succeed, and then they have lawsuits with the infringers of their patents; some sell out their inventions for a trifle to companies that have capital, and that grow rich upon them; the great number can never bring their ideas to the public notice at all. You can judge for yourself what your chances would be. You have asked me why you should not go to America. Well, because I think you would starve there."
"I am used to that," said Don Ippolito; "and besides, until some of my inventions became known, I could give lessons in Italian."
"Oh, bravo!" said Ferris, "you prefer instant death, then?"
"But madamigella seemed to believe that my success as an inventor would be assured, there."
Ferris gave a very ironical laugh. "Miss Vervain must have been about twelve years old when she left America. Even a lady's knowledge of business, at that age, is limited. When did you talk with her about it? You had not spoken of it to me, of late, and I thought you were more contented than you used to be."
"It is true," said the priest. "Sometimes within the last two months I have almost forgotten it."
"And what has brought it so forcibly to your mind again?"
"That is what I so greatly desire to tell you," replied Don Ippolito, with an appealing look at the painter's face. He moistened his parched lips a little, waiting for further question from the painter, to whom he seemed a man fevered by some strong emotion and at that moment not quite wholesome. Ferris did not speak, and Don Ippolito began again: "Even though I have not said so in words to you, dear friend, has it not appeared to you that I have no heart in my vocation?"
"Yes, I have sometimes fancied that. I had no right to ask you why."
"Some day I will tell you, when I have the courage to go all over it again. It is partly my own fault, but it is more my miserable fortune. But wherever the wrong lies, it has at last become intolerable to me. I cannot endure it any longer and live. I must go away, I must fly from it."
Ferris shrank from him a little, as men instinctively do from one who has set himself upon some desperate attempt. "Do you mean, Don Ippolito, that you are going to renounce your priesthood?"
Don Ippolito opened his hands and let his priesthood drop, as it were, to the ground.
"You never spoke of this before, when you talked of going to America. Though to be sure"—
"Yes, yes!" replied Don Ippolito with vehemence, "but now an angel has appeared and shown me the blackness of my life!"
Ferris began to wonder if he or Don Ippolito were not perhaps mad.
"An angel, yes," the priest went on, rising from his chair, "an angel whose immaculate truth has mirrored my falsehood in all its vileness and distortion—to whom, if it destroys me, I cannot devote less than a truthfulness like hers!"
"Hers—hers?" cried the painter, with a sudden pang. "Whose? Don't speak in these riddles. Whom do you mean?"
"Whom can I mean but only one?—madamigella!"
"Miss Vervain? Do you mean to say that Miss Vervain has advised you to renounce your priesthood?"
"In as many words she has bidden me forsake it at any risk,—at the cost of kindred, friends, good fame, country, everything."
The painter passed his hand confusedly over his face. These were his own words, the words he had used in speaking with Florida of the supposed skeptical priest. He grew very pale. "May I ask," he demanded in a hard, dry voice, "how she came to advise such a step?"
"I can hardly tell. Something had already moved her to learn from me the story of my life—to know that I was a man with neither faith nor hope. Her pure heart was torn by the thought of my wrong and of my error. I had never seen myself in such deformity as she saw me even when she used me with that divine compassion. I was almost glad to be what I was because of her angelic pity for me!"
The tears sprang to Don Ippolito's eyes, but Ferris asked in the same tone as before, "Was it then that she bade you be no longer a priest?"
"No, not then," patiently replied the other; "she was too greatly overwhelmed with my calamity to think of any cure for it. To-day it was that she uttered those words—words which I shall never forget, which will support and comfort me, whatever happens!"
The painter was biting hard upon the stem of his pipe. He turned away and began ordering the color-tubes and pencils on a table against the wall, putting them close together in very neat, straight rows. Presently he said: "Perhaps Miss Vervain also advised you to go to America?"
"Yes," answered the priest reverently. "She had thought of everything. She has promised