A Foregone Conclusion | Page 8

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 Marian."
Miss Vervain heard her mother's mortuary prattle with a face from
which no impatience of it could be inferred, and Mr. Ferris made no
comment on what was oddly various in character and manner, for Mrs.
Vervain touched upon the gloomiest facts of her history with a certain
impersonal statistical interest. They were rowing across the lagoon to
the Island of San Lazzaro, where for reasons of her own she intended to
venerate the convent in which Byron studied the Armenian language
preparatory to writing his great poem in it; if her pilgrimage had no
very earnest motive, it was worthy of the fact which it was designed to
honor. The lagoon was of a perfect, shining smoothness, broken by the

shallows over which the ebbing tide had left the sea-weed trailed like
long, disheveled hair. The fishermen, as they waded about staking their
nets, or stooped to gather the small shell-fish of the shallows, showed
legs as brown and tough as those of the apostles in Titian's Assumption.
Here and there was a boat, with a boy or an old man asleep in the
bottom of it. The gulls sailed high, white flakes against the illimitable
blue of the heavens; the air, though it was of early spring, and in the
shade had a salty pungency, was here almost languorously warm; in the
motionless splendors and rich colors of the scene there was a
melancholy before which Mrs. Vervain fell fitfully silent. Now and
then Ferris briefly spoke, calling Miss Vervain's notice to this or that,
and she briefly responded. As they passed the mad-house of San
Servolo, a maniac standing at an open window took his black velvet
skull-cap from his white hair, bowed low three times, and kissed his
hand to the ladies. The Lido in front of them stretched a brown strip of
sand with white villages shining out of it; on their left the Public
Gardens showed a mass of hovering green; far beyond and above, the
ghostlike snows of the Alpine heights haunted the misty horizon.
It was chill in the shadow of the convent when they landed at San
Lazzaro, and it was cool in the parlor where they waited for the monk
who was to show them through the place; but it was still and warm in
the gardened court, where the bees murmured among the crocuses and
hyacinths under the noonday sun. Miss Vervain stood looking out of
the window upon the lagoon, while her mother drifted about the room,
peering at the objects on the wall through her eyeglasses. She was
praising a Chinese painting of fish on rice-paper, when a young monk
entered with a cordial greeting in English for Mr. Ferris. She turned and
saw them shaking hands, but at the same moment her eyeglasses
abandoned her nose with a vigorous leap; she gave an amiable laugh,
and groping for them over her dress, bowed at random as Mr. Ferris
presented Padre Girolamo.
"I've been admiring this painting so much, Padre Girolamo," she said,
with instant good-will, and taking the monk into the easy familiarity of
her friendship by the tone with which she spoke his name. "Some of the
brothers did it, I suppose."
"Oh no," said the monk, "it's a Chinese painting. We hung it up there
because it was given to us, and was curious."

"Well, now, do you know," returned Mrs. Vervain, "I thought it was
Chinese! Their things are, so odd. But really, in an Armenian convent
it's very misleading. I don't think you ought to leave it there; it certainly
does throw people off the track," she added, subduing the expression to
something very lady-like, by the winning appeal with which she used
it.
"Oh, but if they put up Armenian paintings in Chinese convents?" said
Mr. Ferris.
"You're joking!" cried Mrs. Vervain, looking at him with a graciously
amused air. "There are no Chinese convents. To be sure those rebels