A Foregone Conclusion | Page 6

a helpless
perplexity with the case of Don Ippolito, whom he had begun by
doubting for a spy with some incomprehensible motive, and had ended
by pitying with a certain degree of amusement and a deep sense of the
futility of his compassion. He presently began to think of him with a
little disgust, as people commonly think of one whom they pity and yet
cannot help, and he made haste to cast off the hopeless burden. He
shrugged his shoulders, struck his stick on the smooth paving-stones,
and let his eyes rove up and down the fronts of the houses, for the sake
of the pretty faces that glanced out of the casements. He was a young

man, and it was spring, and this was Venice. He made himself joyfully
part of the city and the season; he was glad of the narrowness of the
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