The painter pa.s.sed 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 compa.s.sion. 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 me a refuge under her mother's roof there, until I can make my inventions known; and I shall follow them at once."

"Follow them?"

"They are going, she told me. Madama does not grow better. They are homesick. They--but you must know all this already?"

"Oh, not at all, not at all," said the painter with a very bitter smile.

"You are telling me news. Pray go on."

"There is no more. She made me promise to come to you and listen to your advice before I took any step. I must not trust to her alone, she said; but if I took this step, then through whatever happened she would be my friend. Ah, dear friend, may I speak to you of the hope that these words gave me? You have seen--have you not?--you must have seen that"--

The priest faltered, and Ferris stared at him helpless. When the next words came he could not find any strangeness in the fact which yet gave him so great a shock. He found that to his nether consciousness it had been long familiar--ever since that day when he had first jestingly proposed Don Ippolito as Miss Vervain's teacher. Grotesque, tragic, impossible--it had still been the under-current of all his reveries; or so now it seemed to have been.

Don Ippolito anxiously drew nearer to him and laid an imploring touch upon his arm,--"I love her!"

"What!" gasped the painter. "You? You I A priest?"

"Priest! priest!" cried Don Ippolito, violently. "From this day I am no longer a priest! From this hour I am a man, and I can offer her the honorable love of a man, the truth of a most sacred marriage, and fidelity to death!"

Ferris made no answer. He began to look very coldly and haughtily at Don Ippolito, whose heat died away under his stare, and who at last met it with a glance of tremulous perplexity. His hand had dropped from Ferris's arm, and he now moved some steps from him. "What is it, dear friend?" he besought him. "Is there something that offends you? I came to you for counsel, and you meet me with a repulse little short of enmity. I do not understand. Do I intend anything wrong without knowing it? Oh, I conjure you to speak plainly!"

"Wait! Wait a minute," said Ferris, waving his hand like a man tormented by a pa.s.sing pain. "I am trying to think. What you say is.... I cannot imagine it!"

"Not imagine it? Not imagine it? And why? Is she not beautiful?"

"Yes."

"And good?"

"Without doubt."

"And young, and yet wise beyond her years? And true, and yet angelically kind?"

"It is all as you say, G.o.d knows. But.... a priest"--

"Oh! Always that accursed word! And at heart, what is a priest, then, but a man?--a wretched, masked, imprisoned, banished man! Has he not blood and nerves like you? Has he not eyes to see what is fair, and ears to hear what is sweet? Can he live near so divine a flower and not know her grace, not inhale the fragrance of her soul, not adore her beauty?

Oh, great G.o.d! And if at last he would tear off his stifling mask, escape from his prison, return from his exile, would you gainsay him?"

"No!" said the painter with a kind of groan. He sat down in a tall, carven gothic chair,--the furniture of one of his pictures,--and rested his head against its high back and looked at the priest across the room.

"Excuse me," he continued with a strong effort. "I am ready to befriend you to the utmost of my power. What was it you wanted to ask me? I have told you truly what I thought of your scheme of going to America; but I may very well be mistaken. Was it about that Miss Vervain desired you to consult me?" His voice and manner hardened again in spite of him. "Or did she wish me to advise you about the renunciation of your priesthood?

You must have thought that carefully over for yourself."

"Yes, I do not think you could make me see that as a greater difficulty than it has appeared to me." He paused with a confused and daunted air, as if some important point had slipped his mind. "But I must take the step; the burden of the double part I play is unendurable, is it not?"

"You know better than I."

"But if you were such a man as I, with neither love for your vocation nor faith in it, should you not cease to be a priest?"

"If you ask me in that way,--yes," answered the painter. "But I advise you nothing. I could not counsel another in such a case."

"But you think and feel as I do," said the priest, "and I am right, then."

"I do not say you are wrong."

Ferris was silent while Don Ippolito moved up and down the room, with his sliding step, like some tall, gaunt, unhappy girl. Neither could put an end to this interview, so full of intangible, inconclusive misery.

Ferris drew a long breath, and then said steadily, "Don Ippolito, I suppose you did not speak idly to me of your--your feeling for Miss Vervain, and that I may speak plainly to you in return."

"Surely," answered the priest, pausing in his walk and fixing his eyes upon the painter. "It was to you as the friend of both that I spoke of my love, and my hope--which is oftener my despair."

"Then you have not much reason to believe that she returns your--feeling?"

"Ah, how could she consciously return it? I have been hitherto a priest to her, and the thought of me would have been impurity. But hereafter, if I can prove myself a man, if I can win my place in the world.... No, even now, why should she care so much for my escape from these bonds, if she did not care for me more than she knew?"

"Have you ever thought of that extravagant generosity of Miss Vervain's character?"

"It is divine!"

"Has it seemed to you that if such a woman knew herself to have once wrongly given you pain, her atonement might be as headlong and excessive as her offense? That she could have no reserves in her reparation?"

Don Ippolito looked at Ferris, but did not interpose.

"Miss Vervain is very religious in her way, and she is truth itself.

Are you sure that it is not concern for what seems to her your terrible position, that has made her show so much anxiety on your account?"

"Do I not know that well? Have I not felt the balm of her most heavenly pity?"

"And may she not be only trying to appeal to something in you as high as the impulse of her own heart?"

"As high!" cried Don Ippolito, almost angrily. "Can there be any higher thing in heaven or on earth than love for such a woman?"

"Yes; both in heaven and on earth," answered Ferris.

"I do not understand you," said Don Ippolito with a puzzled stare.

Ferris did not reply. He fell into a dull reverie in which he seemed to forget Don Ippolito and the whole affair. At last the priest spoke again: "Have you nothing to say to me, signore?"

"I? What is there to say?" returned the other blankly.