“It is true,” said the priest. “Sometimes within the last two months I have almost forgotten it.”
“And what has brought it so forcibly to your mind again?”
“That is what I so greatly desire to tell you,” replied Don Ippolito, with an appealing look at the painter’s face. He moistened his parched lips a little, waiting for further question from the painter, to whom he seemed a man fevered by some strong emotion and at that moment not quite wholesome. Ferris did not speak, and Don Ippolito began again: “Even though I have not said so in words to you, dear friend, has it not appeared to you that I have no heart in my vocation?”
“Yes, I have sometimes fancied that. I had no right to ask you why.”
“Some day I will tell you, when I have the courage to go all over it again. It is partly my own fault, but it is more my miserable fortune. But wherever the wrong lies, it has at last become intolerable to me. I cannot endure it any longer and live. I must go away, I must fly from it.”
Ferris shrank from him a little, as men instinctively do from one who has set himself upon some desperate attempt. “Do you mean, Don Ippolito, that you are going to renounce your priesthood?”
Don Ippolito opened his hands and let his priesthood drop, as it were, to the ground.
“You never spoke of this before, when you talked of going to America. Though to be sure”—
“Yes, yes!” replied Don Ippolito with vehemence, “but now an angel has appeared and shown me the blackness of my life!”
Ferris began to wonder if he or Don Ippolito were not perhaps mad.