"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 circ.u.mstances."
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 compa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sion; it was a gentle nature"s dream of a pa.s.sion."
"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. G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed, Don Ippolito has at last ceased to be even the memory of a man with a pa.s.sionate 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.