First American book edition,
Macmillan and Co., 1888.
I
I had taken Mrs. Prest into my confidence; in truth without her I
should have made but little advance, for the fruitful idea in the whole
business dropped from her friendly lips. It was she who invented the
short cut, who severed the Gordian knot. It is not supposed to be the
nature of women to rise as a general thing to the largest and most
liberal view--I mean of a practical scheme; but it has struck me that
they sometimes throw off a bold conception--such as a man would not have
risen to--with singular serenity. “Simply ask them to take you in on the
footing of a lodger”--I don’t think that unaided I should have risen to
that. I was beating about the bush, trying to be ingenious, wondering
by what combination of arts I might become an acquaintance, when she
offered this happy suggestion that the way to become an acquaintance was
first to become an inmate. Her actual knowledge of the Misses Bordereau
was scarcely larger than mine, and indeed I had brought with me from
England some definite facts which were new to her. Their name had been
mixed up ages before with one of the greatest names of the century, and
they lived now in Venice in obscurity, on very small means, unvisited,
unapproachable, in a dilapidated old palace on an out-of-the-way canal:
this was the substance of my friend’s impression of them. She herself
had been established in Venice for fifteen years and had done a great
deal of good there; but the circle of her benevolence did not include
the two shy, mysterious and, as it was somehow supposed, scarcely
respectable Americans (they were believed to have lost in their long
exile all national quality, besides having had, as their name implied,
some French strain in their origin), who asked no favors and desired no
attention. In the early years of her residence she had made an attempt
to see them, but this had been successful only as regards the little
one, as Mrs. Prest called the niece; though in reality as I afterward
learned she was considerably the bigger of the two. She had heard Miss
Bordereau was ill and had a suspicion that she was in want; and she had
gone to the house to offer assistance, so that if there were suffering
(and American suffering), she should at least not have it on her
conscience. The “little one” received her in the great cold, tarnished
Venetian sala, the central hall of the house, paved with marble and
roofed with dim crossbeams, and did not even ask her to sit down. This
was not encouraging for me, who wished to sit so fast, and I remarked
as much to Mrs. Prest. She however replied with profundity, “Ah, but
there’s all the difference: I went to confer a favor and you will go
to ask one. If they are proud you will be on the right side.” And she
offered to show me their house to begin with--to row me thither in her
gondola. I let her know that I had already been to look at it half a
dozen times; but I accepted her invitation, for it charmed me to hover
about the place. I had made my way to it the day after my arrival in
Venice (it had been described to me in advance by the friend in England
to whom I owed definite information as to their possession of the
papers), and I had besieged it with my eyes while I considered my plan
of campaign. Jeffrey Aspern had never been in it that I knew of;
but some note of his voice seemed to abide there by a roundabout
implication, a faint reverberation.
Mrs. Prest knew nothing about the papers, but she was interested in my
curiosity, as she was always interested in the joys and sorrows of her
friends. As we went, however, in her gondola, gliding there under the
sociable hood with the bright Venetian picture framed on either side by
the movable window, I could see that she was amused by my infatuation,
the way my interest in the papers had become a fixed idea. “One would
think you expected to find in them the answer to the riddle of the
universe,” she said; and I denied the impeachment only by replying
that if I had to choose between that precious solution and a bundle
of Jeffrey Aspern’s letters I knew indeed which would appear to me the
greater boon. She pretended to make light of his genius, and I took
no pains to defend him. One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is
in himself a defense. Besides, today, after his long comparative
obscuration, he hangs high in the heaven of our literature, for all the
world to see; he is a part of the light by which we walk. The most I
said was that he was no doubt not a woman’s poet: to which she rejoined
aptly enough that he had been at least Miss Bordereau’s. The strange
thing had been for me to discover in England that she was still alive:
it was as if I had been told Mrs. Siddons was, or Queen Caroline, or
the famous Lady Hamilton, for it seemed to me that she belonged to a
generation as extinct. “Why, she must be tremendously old--at least a
hundred,” I had said; but on coming to consider dates I saw that it was
not strictly necessary that she should have exceeded by very much the
common span. Nonetheless she was very far advanced in life, and her
relations with Jeffrey Aspern had occurred in her early womanhood.
“That is her excuse,” said Mrs. Prest, half-sententiously and yet also
somewhat as if she were ashamed of making a speech so little in the
real tone of Venice. As if a woman needed an excuse for having loved the
divine poet! He had been not only one of the most brilliant minds of
his day (and in those years, when the century was young, there were,
as everyone knows, many), but one of the most genial men and one of the
handsomest.
The niece, according to Mrs. Prest, was not so old, and she risked the
conjecture that she was only a grandniece. This was possible; I had
nothing but my share in the very limited knowledge of my English fellow
worshipper John Cumnor, who had never seen the couple. The world, as I
say, had recognized Jeffrey Aspern, but Cumnor and I had recognized him
most. The multitude, today, flocked to his temple, but of that temple he
and I regarded ourselves as the ministers. We held, justly, as I think,
that we had done more for his memory than anyone else, and we had done
it by opening lights into his life. He had nothing to fear from us
because he had nothing to fear from the truth, which alone at such a
distance of time we could be interested in establishing. His early
death had been the only dark spot in his life, unless the papers in Miss
Bordereau’s hands should perversely bring out others. There had been an
impression about 1825 that he had “treated her badly,” just as there had
been an impression that he had “served,” as the London populace says,
several other ladies in the same way. Each of these cases Cumnor and
I had been able to investigate, and we had never failed to acquit
him conscientiously of shabby behavior. I judged him perhaps more
indulgently than my friend; certainly, at any rate, it appeared to me
that no man could have walked straighter in the given circumstances.
These were almost always awkward. Half the women of his time, to speak
liberally, had flung themselves at his head, and out of this pernicious
fashion many complications, some of them grave, had not failed to arise.
He was not a woman’s poet, as I had said to Mrs. Prest, in the modern
phase of his reputation; but the situation had been different when
the man’s own voice was mingled with his song. That voice, by every
testimony, was one of the sweetest ever heard. “Orpheus and the
Maenads!” was the exclamation that rose to my lips when I first turned
over his correspondence. Almost all the Maenads were unreasonable, and
many of them insupportable; it struck me in short that he was kinder,
more considerate than, in his place (if I could imagine myself in such a
place!) I should have been.
It was certainly strange beyond all strangeness, and I shall not take
up space with attempting to explain it, that whereas in all these other
lines of research we had to deal with phantoms and dust, the mere echoes
of echoes, the one living source of information that had lingered
on into our time had been unheeded by us. Every one of Aspern’s
contemporaries had, according to our belief, passed away; we had not
been able to look into a single pair of eyes into which his had looked
or to feel a transmitted contact in any aged hand that his had touched.
Most dead of all did poor Miss Bordereau appear, and yet she alone had
survived. We exhausted in the course of months our wonder that we had
not found her out sooner, and the substance of our explanation was that
she had kept so quiet. The poor lady on the whole had had reason for
doing so. But it was a revelation to us that it was possible to keep so
quiet as that in the latter half of the nineteenth century--the age of
newspapers and telegrams and photographs and interviewers. And she had
taken no great trouble about it either: she had not hidden herself away
in an undiscoverable hole; she had boldly settled down in a city of
exhibition. The only secret of her safety that we could perceive was
that Venice contained so many curiosities that were greater than she.
And then accident had somehow favored her, as was shown for example in
the fact that Mrs. Prest had never happened to mention her to me, though
I had spent three weeks in Venice--under her nose, as it were--five
years before. Mrs. Prest had not mentioned this much to anyone; she
appeared almost to have forgotten she was there. Of course she had not
the responsibilities of an editor. It was no explanation of the
old woman’s having eluded us to say that she lived abroad, for our
researches had again and again taken us (not only by correspondence
but by personal inquiry) to France, to Germany, to Italy, in which
countries, not counting his important stay in England, so many of the
too few years of Aspern’s career were spent. We were glad to think at
least that in all our publishings (some people consider I believe that
we have overdone them), we had only touched in passing and in the most
discreet manner on Miss Bordereau’s connection. Oddly enough, even if we
had had the material (and we often wondered what had become of it), it
would have been the most difficult episode to handle.
The gondola stopped, the old palace was there; it was a house of the
class which in Venice carries even in extreme dilapidation the dignified
name. “How charming! It’s gray and pink!” my companion exclaimed;
and that is the most comprehensive description of it. It was not
particularly old, only two or three centuries; and it had an air not so
much of decay as of quiet discouragement, as if it had rather missed its
career. But its wide front, with a stone balcony from end to end of the
piano nobile or most important floor, was architectural enough, with the
aid of various pilasters and arches; and the stucco with which in the
intervals it had long ago been endued was rosy in the April afternoon.
It overlooked a clean, melancholy, unfrequented canal, which had
a narrow riva or convenient footway on either side. “I don’t know
why--there are no brick gables,” said Mrs. Prest, “but this corner has
seemed to me before more Dutch than Italian, more like Amsterdam than
like Venice. It’s perversely clean, for reasons of its own; and though
you can pass on foot scarcely anyone ever thinks of doing so. It has the
air of a Protestant Sunday. Perhaps the people are afraid of the Misses
Bordereau. I daresay they have the reputation of witches.”
I forget what answer I made to this--I was given up to two other
reflections. The first of these was that if the old lady lived in such a
big, imposing house she could not be in any sort of misery and therefore
would not be tempted by a chance to let a couple of rooms. I expressed
this idea to Mrs. Prest, who gave me a very logical reply. “If she
didn’t live in a big house how could it be a question of her having
rooms to spare? If she were not amply lodged herself you would lack
ground to approach her. Besides, a big house here, and especially in
this quartier perdu, proves nothing at all: it is perfectly compatible
with a state of penury. Dilapidated old palazzi, if you will go out of
the way for them, are to be had for five shillings a year. And as for
the people who live in them--no, until you have explored Venice socially
as much as I have you can form no idea of their domestic desolation.
They live on nothing, for they have nothing to live on.” The other idea
that had come into my head was connected with a high blank wall which
appeared to confine an expanse of ground on one side of the house.
Blank I call it, but it was figured over with the patches that please a
painter, repaired breaches, crumblings of plaster, extrusions of brick
that had turned pink with time; and a few thin trees, with the poles of
certain rickety trellises, were visible over the top. The place was a
garden, and apparently it belonged to the house. It suddenly occurred to
me that if it did belong to the house I had my pretext.
I sat looking out on all this with Mrs. Prest (it was covered with the
golden glow of Venice) from the shade of our felze, and she asked me if
I would go in then, while she waited for me, or come back another time.
At first I could not decide--it was doubtless very weak of me. I wanted
still to think I MIGHT get a footing, and I was afraid to meet failure,
for it would leave me, as I remarked to my companion, without another
arrow for my bow. “Why not another?” she inquired as I sat there
hesitating and thinking it over; and she wished to know why even now
and before taking the trouble of becoming an inmate (which might be
wretchedly uncomfortable after all, even if it succeeded), I had not
the resource of simply offering them a sum of money down. In that way I
might obtain the documents without bad nights.
“Dearest lady,” I exclaimed, “excuse the impatience of my tone when
I suggest that you must have forgotten the very fact (surely I
communicated it to you) which pushed me to throw myself upon your
ingenuity. The old woman won’t have the documents spoken of; they are
personal, delicate, intimate, and she hasn’t modern notions, God bless
her! If I should sound that note first I should certainly spoil the
game. I can arrive at the papers only by putting her off her guard, and
I can put her off her guard only by ingratiating diplomatic practices.
Hypocrisy, duplicity are my only chance. I am sorry for it, but for
Jeffrey Aspern’s sake I would do worse still. First I must take tea with
her; then tackle the main job.” And I told over what had happened to
John Cumnor when he wrote to her. No notice whatever had been taken of
his first letter, and the second had been answered very sharply, in six
lines, by the niece. “Miss Bordereau requested her to say that she
could not imagine what he meant by troubling them. They had none of Mr.
Aspern’s papers, and if they had should never think of showing them
to anyone on any account whatever. She didn’t know what he was talking
about and begged he would let her alone.” I certainly did not want to be
met that way.
“Well,” said Mrs. Prest after a moment, provokingly, “perhaps after all
they haven’t any of his things. If they deny it flat how are you sure?”
“John Cumnor is sure, and it would take me long to tell you how his
conviction, or his very strong presumption--strong enough to stand
against the old lady’s not unnatural fib--has built itself up. Besides,
he makes much of the internal evidence of the niece’s letter.”
“The internal evidence?”
“Her calling him ‘Mr. Aspern.’”
“I don’t see what that proves.”
“It proves familiarity, and familiarity implies the possession of
mementoes, or relics. I can’t tell you how that ‘Mr.’ touches me--how it
bridges over the gulf of time and brings our hero near to me--nor what
an edge it gives to my desire to see Juliana. You don’t say, ‘Mr.’
Shakespeare.”
“Would I, any more, if I had a box full of his letters?”
“Yes, if he had been your lover and someone wanted them!” And I added
that John Cumnor was so convinced, and so all the more convinced by
Miss Bordereau’s tone, that he would have come himself to Venice on the
business were it not that for him there was the obstacle that it would
be difficult to disprove his identity with the person who had written
to them, which the old ladies would be sure to suspect in spite of
dissimulation and a change of name. If they were to ask him point-blank
if he were not their correspondent it would be too awkward for him to
lie; whereas I was fortunately not tied in that way. I was a fresh hand
and could say no without lying.
“But you will have to change your name,” said Mrs. Prest. “Juliana lives
out of the world as much as it is possible to live, but none the less
she has probably heard of Mr. Aspern’s editors; she perhaps possesses
what you have published.”
“I have thought of that,” I returned; and I drew out of my pocketbook a
visiting card, neatly engraved with a name that was not my own.
“You are very extravagant; you might have written it,” said my
companion.
“This looks more genuine.”
“Certainly, you are prepared to go far! But it will be awkward about
your letters; they won’t come to you in that mask.”
“My banker will take them in, and I will go every day to fetch them. It
will give me a little walk.”
“Shall you only depend upon that?” asked Mrs. Prest. “Aren’t you coming
to see me?”
“Oh, you will have left Venice, for the hot months, long before
there are any results. I am prepared to roast all summer--as well as
hereafter, perhaps you’ll say! Meanwhile, John Cumnor will bombard me
with letters addressed, in my feigned name, to the care of the padrona.”
“She will recognize his hand,” my companion suggested.
“On the envelope he can disguise it.”
“Well, you’re a precious pair! Doesn’t it occur to you that even if you
are able to say you are not Mr. Cumnor in person they may still suspect
you of being his emissary?”
“Certainly, and I see only one way to parry that.”
“And what may that be?”