A Foregone Conclusion. William Dean Howells
streets, of the good-humored jostling and pushing; he crouched into an arched doorway to let a water-carrier pass with her copper buckets dripping at the end of the yoke balanced on her shoulder, and he returned her smiles and excuses with others as broad and gay; he brushed by the swelling hoops of ladies, and stooped before the unwieldy burdens of porters, who as they staggered through the crowd with a thrust hero, and a shove there forgave themselves, laughing, with “We are in Venice, signori;” and he stood aside for the files of soldiers clanking heavily over the pavement, then muskets kindling to a blaze in the sunlit campos and quenched again in the damp shadows of the calles. His ear was taken by the vibrant jargoning of the boatmen as they pushed their craft under the bridges he crossed, and the keen notes of the canaries and the songs of the golden-billed blackbirds whose cages hung at lattices far overhead. Heaps of oranges, topped by the fairest cut in halves, gave their color, at frequent intervals, to the dusky corners and recesses and the long-drawn cry of the venders, “Oranges of Palermo!” rose above the clatter of feet and the clamor of other voices. At a little shop where butter and eggs and milk abounded, together with early flowers of various sorts, he bought a bunch of hyacinths, blue and white and yellow, and he presently stood smelling these while he waited in the hotel parlor for the ladies to whom he had sent his card. He turned at the sound of drifting drapery, and could not forbear placing the hyacinths in the hand of Miss Florida Vervain, who had come into the room to receive him. She was a girl of about seventeen years, who looked older; she was tall rather than short, and rather full,—though it could not be said that she erred in point of solidity. In the attitudes of shy hauteur into which she constantly fell, there was a touch of defiant awkwardness which had a certain fascination. She was blonde, with a throat and hands of milky whiteness; there was a suggestion of freckles on her regular face, where a quick color came and went, though her cheeks were habitually somewhat pale; her eyes were very blue under their level brows, and the lashes were even lighter in color than the masses of her fair gold hair; the edges of the lids were touched with the faintest red. The late Colonel Vervain of the United States army, whose complexion his daughter had inherited, was an officer whom it would not have been peaceable to cross in any purpose or pleasure, and Miss Vervain seemed sometimes a little burdened by the passionate nature which he had left her together with the tropical name he had bestowed in honor of the State where he had fought the Seminoles in his youth, and where he chanced still to be stationed when she was born; she had the air of being embarrassed in presence of herself, and of having an anxious watch upon her impulses. I do not know how otherwise to describe the effort of proud, helpless femininity, which would have struck the close observer in Miss Vervain.
“Delicious!” she said, in a deep voice, which conveyed something of this anxiety in its guarded tones, and yet was not wanting in a kind of frankness. “Did you mean them for me, Mr. Ferris?”
“I didn’t, but I do,” answered Mr. Ferris. “I bought them in ignorance, but I understand now what they were meant for by nature;” and in fact the hyacinths, with their smooth textures and their pure colors, harmonized well with Miss Vervain, as she bent her face over them and inhaled their full, rich perfume.
“I will put them in water,” she said, “if you’ll excuse me a moment. Mother will be down directly.”
Before she could return, her mother rustled into the parlor.
Mrs. Vervain was gracefully, fragilely unlike her daughter. She entered with a gentle and gliding step, peering near-sightedly about through her glasses, and laughing triumphantly when she had determined Mr. Ferris’s exact position, where he stood with a smile shaping his full brown beard and glancing from his hazel eyes. She was dressed in perfect taste with reference to her matronly years, and the lingering evidences of her widowhood, and she had an unaffected naturalness of manner which even at her age of forty-eight could not be called less than charming. She spoke in a trusting, caressing tone, to which no man at least could respond unkindly.
“So very good of you, to take all this trouble, Mr. Ferris,” she said, giving him a friendly hand, “and I suppose you are letting us encroach upon very valuable time. I’m quite ashamed to take it. But isn’t it a heavenly day? What I call a perfect day, just right every way; none of those disagreeable extremes. It’s so unpleasant to have it too hot, for instance. I’m the greatest person for moderation, Mr. Ferris, and I carry the principle into everything; but I do think the breakfasts at these Italian hotels are too light altogether. I like our American breakfasts, don’t you? I’ve been telling Florida I can’t stand it; we really must make some arrangement. To be sure, you oughtn’t to think of such a thing as eating, in a place like Venice, all poetry; but a sound mind in a sound body, I say. We’re perfectly wild over it. Don’t you think it’s a place that grows upon you very much, Mr. Ferris? All those associations,—it does seem too much; and the gondolas everywhere. But I’m always afraid the gondoliers cheat us; and in the stores I never feel safe a moment—not a moment. I do think the Venetians are lacking in truthfulness, a little. I don’t believe they understand our American fairdealing and sincerity. I shouldn’t want to do them injustice, but I really think they take advantages in bargaining. Now such a thing even as corals. Florida is extremely fond of them, and we bought a set yesterday in the Piazza, and I know we paid too much for them. Florida,” said Mrs. Vervain, for her daughter had reentered the room, and stood with some shawls and wraps upon her arm, patiently waiting for the conclusion of the elder lady’s speech, “I wish you would bring down that set of corals. I’d like Mr. Ferris to give an unbiased opinion. I’m sure we were cheated.”
“I don’t know anything about corals, Mrs. Vervain,” interposed Mr. Ferris.
“Well, but you ought to see this set for the beauty of the color; they’re really exquisite. I’m sure it will gratify your artistic taste.”
Miss Vervain hesitated with a look of desire to obey, and of doubt whether to force the pleasure upon Mr. Ferris. “Won’t it do another time, mother?” she asked faintly; “the gondola is waiting for us.”
Mrs. Vervain gave a frailish start from the chair, into which she had sunk, “Oh, do let us be off at once, then,” she said; and when they stood on the landing-stairs of the hotel: “What gloomy things these gondolas are!” she added, while the gondolier with one foot on the gunwale of the boat received the ladies’ shawls, and then crooked his arm for them to rest a hand on in stepping aboard; “I wonder they don’t paint them some cheerful color.”
“Blue, or pink, Mrs. Vervain?” asked Mr. Ferris. “I knew you were coming to that question; they all do. But we needn’t have the top on at all, if it depresses your spirits. We shall be just warm enough in the open sunlight.”
“Well, have it off, then. It sends the cold chills over me to look at it. What did Byron call it?”
“Yes, it’s time for Byron, now. It was very good of you not to mention him before, Mrs. Vervain. But I knew he had to come. He called it a coffin clapped in a canoe.”
“Exactly,” said Mrs. Vervain. “I always feel as if I were going to my own funeral when I get into it; and I’ve certainly had enough of funerals never to want to have anything to do with another, as long as I live.”
She settled herself luxuriously upon the feather-stuffed leathern cushions when the cabin was removed. Death had indeed been near her very often; father and mother had been early lost to her, and the brothers and sisters orphaned with her had faded and perished one after another, as they ripened to men and women; she had seen four of her own children die; her husband had been dead six years. All these bereavements had left her what they had found her. She had truly grieved, and, as she said, she had hardly ever been out of black since she could remember.
“I never was in colors when I was a girl,” she went on, indulging many obituary memories as the gondola dipped and darted down the canal, “and I was married in my mourning for my last sister. It did seem a little too much when she went, Mr. Ferris. I was too young to feel it so much about the others, but we were nearly of the same age, and that makes a difference, don’t you know. First a brother and then a sister: it was very strange how they kept going that way. I seemed to break the charm when I got married; though, to be sure, there was no brother left after