Perhaps it did, but all the same, six weeks later, toward the middle of
June, the moment when Mrs. Prest undertook her annual migration, I had
made no measurable advance. I was obliged to confess to her that I had
no results to speak of. My first step had been unexpectedly rapid, but
there was no appearance that it would be followed by a second. I was
a thousand miles from taking tea with my hostesses--that privilege
of which, as I reminded Mrs. Prest, we both had had a vision. She
reproached me with wanting boldness, and I answered that even to be bold
you must have an opportunity: you may push on through a breach but
you can’t batter down a dead wall. She answered that the breach I had
already made was big enough to admit an army and accused me of wasting
precious hours in whimpering in her salon when I ought to have been
carrying on the struggle in the field. It is true that I went to see her
very often, on the theory that it would console me (I freely expressed
my discouragement) for my want of success on my own premises. But I
began to perceive that it did not console me to be perpetually chaffed
for my scruples, especially when I was really so vigilant; and I was
rather glad when my derisive friend closed her house for the summer. She
had expected to gather amusement from the drama of my intercourse with
the Misses Bordereau, and she was disappointed that the intercourse, and
consequently the drama, had not come off. “They’ll lead you on to your
ruin,” she said before she left Venice. “They’ll get all your money
without showing you a scrap.” I think I settled down to my business with
more concentration after she had gone away.
It was a fact that up to that time I had not, save on a single brief
occasion, had even a moment’s contact with my queer hostesses. The
exception had occurred when I carried them according to my promise the
terrible three thousand francs. Then I found Miss Tita waiting for me in
the hall, and she took the money from my hand so that I did not see
her aunt. The old lady had promised to receive me, but she apparently
thought nothing of breaking that vow. The money was contained in a bag
of chamois leather, of respectable dimensions, which my banker had given
me, and Miss Tita had to make a big fist to receive it. This she did
with extreme solemnity, though I tried to treat the affair a little as a
joke. It was in no jocular strain, yet it was with simplicity, that she
inquired, weighing the money in her two palms: “Don’t you think it’s
too much?” To which I replied that that would depend upon the amount of
pleasure I should get for it. Hereupon she turned away from me quickly,
as she had done the day before, murmuring in a tone different from any
she had used hitherto: “Oh, pleasure, pleasure--there’s no pleasure in
this house!”
After this, for a long time, I never saw her, and I wondered that the
common chances of the day should not have helped us to meet. It could
only be evident that she was immensely on her guard against them; and in
addition to this the house was so big that for each other we were lost
in it. I used to look out for her hopefully as I crossed the sala in my
comings and goings, but I was not rewarded with a glimpse of the tail of
her dress. It was as if she never peeped out of her aunt’s apartment. I
used to wonder what she did there week after week and year after year.
I had never encountered such a violent parti pris of seclusion; it was
more than keeping quiet--it was like hunted creatures feigning death.
The two ladies appeared to have no visitors whatever and no sort of
contact with the world. I judged at least that people could not have
come to the house and that Miss Tita could not have gone out without my
having some observation of it. I did what I disliked myself for doing
(reflecting that it was only once in a way): I questioned my servant
about their habits and let him divine that I should be interested in any
information he could pick up. But he picked up amazingly little for a
knowing Venetian: it must be added that where there is a perpetual fast
there are very few crumbs on the floor. His cleverness in other ways was
sufficient, if it was not quite all that I had attributed to him on
the occasion of my first interview with Miss Tita. He had helped my
gondolier to bring me round a boatload of furniture; and when these
articles had been carried to the top of the palace and distributed
according to our associated wisdom he organized my household with
such promptitude as was consistent with the fact that it was composed
exclusively of himself. He made me in short as comfortable as I could be
with my indifferent prospects. I should have been glad if he had fallen
in love with Miss Bordereau’s maid or, failing this, had taken her
in aversion; either event might have brought about some kind of
catastrophe, and a catastrophe might have led to some parley. It was
my idea that she would have been sociable, and I myself on various
occasions saw her flit to and fro on domestic errands, so that I was
sure she was accessible. But I tasted of no gossip from that fountain,
and I afterward learned that Pasquale’s affections were fixed upon an
object that made him heedless of other women. This was a young lady with
a powdered face, a yellow cotton gown, and much leisure, who used often
to come to see him. She practiced, at her convenience, the art of a
stringer of beads (these ornaments are made in Venice, in profusion; she
had her pocket full of them, and I used to find them on the floor of my
apartment), and kept an eye on the maiden in the house. It was not for
me of course to make the domestics tattle, and I never said a word to
Miss Bordereau’s cook.
It seemed to me a proof of the old lady’s determination to have nothing
to do with me that she should never have sent me a receipt for my three
months’ rent. For some days I looked out for it and then, when I had
given it up, I wasted a good deal of time in wondering what her reason
had been for neglecting so indispensable and familiar a form. At first I
was tempted to send her a reminder, after which I relinquished the idea
(against my judgment as to what was right in the particular case), on
the general ground of wishing to keep quiet. If Miss Bordereau
suspected me of ulterior aims she would suspect me less if I should
be businesslike, and yet I consented not to be so. It was possible she
intended her omission as an impertinence, a visible irony, to show
how she could overreach people who attempted to overreach her. On that
hypothesis it was well to let her see that one did not notice her little
tricks. The real reading of the matter, I afterward perceived, was
simply the poor old woman’s desire to emphasize the fact that I was in
the enjoyment of a favor as rigidly limited as it had been liberally
bestowed. She had given me part of her house, and now she would not give
me even a morsel of paper with her name on it. Let me say that even
at first this did not make me too miserable, for the whole episode was
essentially delightful to me. I foresaw that I should have a summer
after my own literary heart, and the sense of holding my opportunity
was much greater than the sense of losing it. There could be no Venetian
business without patience, and since I adored the place I was much more
in the spirit of it for having laid in a large provision. That spirit
kept me perpetual company and seemed to look out at me from the revived
immortal face--in which all his genius shone--of the great poet who was
my prompter. I had invoked him and he had come; he hovered before me
half the time; it was as if his bright ghost had returned to earth to
tell me that he regarded the affair as his own no less than mine and
that we should see it fraternally, cheerfully to a conclusion. It was
as if he had said, “Poor dear, be easy with her; she has some natural
prejudices; only give her time. Strange as it may appear to you she was
very attractive in 1820. Meanwhile are we not in Venice together, and
what better place is there for the meeting of dear friends? See how it
glows with the advancing summer; how the sky and the sea and the rosy
air and the marble of the palaces all shimmer and melt together.” My
eccentric private errand became a part of the general romance and the
general glory--I felt even a mystic companionship, a moral fraternity
with all those who in the past had been in the service of art. They
had worked for beauty, for a devotion; and what else was I doing? That
element was in everything that Jeffrey Aspern had written, and I was
only bringing it to the light.
I lingered in the sala when I went to and fro; I used to watch--as long
as I thought decent--the door that led to Miss Bordereau’s part of the
house. A person observing me might have supposed I was trying to cast a
spell upon it or attempting some odd experiment in hypnotism. But I was
only praying it would open or thinking what treasure probably lurked
behind it. I hold it singular, as I look back, that I should never
have doubted for a moment that the sacred relics were there; never have
failed to feel a certain joy at being under the same roof with them.
After all they were under my hand--they had not escaped me yet; and they
made my life continuous, in a fashion, with the illustrious life they
had touched at the other end. I lost myself in this satisfaction to the
point of assuming--in my quiet extravagance--that poor Miss Tita also
went back, went back, as I used to phrase it. She did indeed, the gentle
spinster, but not quite so far as Jeffrey Aspern, who was simply
hearsay to her, quite as he was to me. Only she had lived for years with
Juliana, she had seen and handled the papers and (even though she was
stupid) some esoteric knowledge had rubbed off on her. That was what the
old woman represented--esoteric knowledge; and this was the idea with
which my editorial heart used to thrill. It literally beat faster often,
of an evening, when I had been out, as I stopped with my candle in the
re-echoing hall on my way up to bed. It was as if at such a moment as
that, in the stillness, after the long contradiction of the day, Miss
Bordereau’s secrets were in the air, the wonder of her survival more
palpable. These were the acute impressions. I had them in another form,
with more of a certain sort of reciprocity, during the hours that I sat
in the garden looking up over the top of my book at the closed windows
of my hostess. In these windows no sign of life ever appeared; it was
as if, for fear of my catching a glimpse of them, the two ladies
passed their days in the dark. But this only proved to me that they had
something to conceal; which was what I had wished to demonstrate. Their
motionless shutters became as expressive as eyes consciously closed,
and I took comfort in thinking that at all events through invisible
themselves they saw me between the lashes.
I made a point of spending as much time as possible in the garden, to
justify the picture I had originally given of my horticultural passion.
And I not only spent time, but (hang it! as I said) I spent money. As
soon as I had got my rooms arranged and could give the proper thought to
the matter I surveyed the place with a clever expert and made terms for
having it put in order. I was sorry to do this, for personally I liked
it better as it was, with its weeds and its wild, rough tangle, its
sweet, characteristic Venetian shabbiness. I had to be consistent, to
keep my promise that I would smother the house in flowers. Moreover
I formed this graceful project that by flowers I would make my way--I
would succeed by big nosegays. I would batter the old women with
lilies--I would bombard their citadel with roses. Their door would have
to yield to the pressure when a mountain of carnations should be piled
up against it. The place in truth had been brutally neglected. The
Venetian capacity for dawdling is of the largest, and for a good
many days unlimited litter was all my gardener had to show for his
ministrations. There was a great digging of holes and carting about
of earth, and after a while I grew so impatient that I had thoughts of
sending for my bouquets to the nearest stand. But I reflected that the
ladies would see through the chinks of their shutters that they must
have been bought and might make up their minds from this that I was a
humbug. So I composed myself and finally, though the delay was long,
perceived some appearances of bloom. This encouraged me, and I waited
serenely enough till they multiplied. Meanwhile the real summer days
arrived and began to pass, and as I look back upon them they seem to me
almost the happiest of my life. I took more and more care to be in the
garden whenever it was not too hot. I had an arbor arranged and a
low table and an armchair put into it; and I carried out books and
portfolios (I had always some business of writing in hand), and worked
and waited and mused and hoped, while the golden hours elapsed and the
plants drank in the light and the inscrutable old palace turned pale and
then, as the day waned, began to flush in it and my papers rustled in
the wandering breeze of the Adriatic.
Considering how little satisfaction I got from it at first it is
remarkable that I should not have grown more tired of wondering what
mystic rites of ennui the Misses Bordereau celebrated in their darkened
rooms; whether this had always been the tenor of their life and how in
previous years they had escaped elbowing their neighbors. It was clear
that they must have had other habits and other circumstances; that they
must once have been young or at least middle-aged. There was no end
to the questions it was possible to ask about them and no end to
the answers it was not possible to frame. I had known many of my
country-people in Europe and was familiar with the strange ways they
were liable to take up there; but the Misses Bordereau formed altogether
a new type of the American absentee. Indeed it was plain that the
American name had ceased to have any application to them--I had seen
this in the ten minutes I spent in the old woman’s room. You could
never have said whence they came, from the appearance of either of them;
wherever it was they had long ago dropped the local accent and fashion.
There was nothing in them that one recognized, and putting the question
of speech aside they might have been Norwegians or Spaniards. Miss
Bordereau, after all, had been in Europe nearly three-quarters of a
century; it appeared by some verses addressed to her by Aspern on the
occasion of his own second absence from America--verses of which Cumnor
and I had after infinite conjecture established solidly enough the
date--that she was even then, as a girl of twenty, on the foreign side
of the sea. There was an implication in the poem (I hope not just for
the phrase) that he had come back for her sake. We had no real light
upon her circumstances at that moment, any more than we had upon her
origin, which we believed to be of the sort usually spoken of as modest.
Cumnor had a theory that she had been a governess in some family in
which the poet visited and that, in consequence of her position, there
was from the first something unavowed, or rather something positively
clandestine, in their relations. I on the other hand had hatched a
little romance according to which she was the daughter of an artist, a
painter or a sculptor, who had left the western world when the century
was fresh, to study in the ancient schools. It was essential to my
hypothesis that this amiable man should have lost his wife, should have
been poor and unsuccessful and should have had a second daughter, of a
disposition quite different from Juliana’s. It was also indispensable
that he should have been accompanied to Europe by these young ladies and
should have established himself there for the remainder of a struggling,
saddened life. There was a further implication that Miss Bordereau
had had in her youth a perverse and adventurous, albeit a generous and
fascinating character, and that she had passed through some singular
vicissitudes. By what passions had she been ravaged, by what sufferings
had she been blanched, what store of memories had she laid away for the
monotonous future?
I asked myself these things as I sat spinning theories about her in my
arbor and the bees droned in the flowers. It was incontestable that,
whether for right or for wrong, most readers of certain of Aspern’s
poems (poems not as ambiguous as the sonnets--scarcely more divine, I
think--of Shakespeare) had taken for granted that Juliana had not always
adhered to the steep footway of renunciation. There hovered about her
name a perfume of reckless passion, an intimation that she had not been
exactly as the respectable young person in general. Was this a sign that
her singer had betrayed her, had given her away, as we say nowadays, to
posterity? Certain it is that it would have been difficult to put one’s
finger on the passage in which her fair fame suffered an imputation.
Moreover was not any fame fair enough that was so sure of duration and
was associated with works immortal through their beauty? It was a
part of my idea that the young lady had had a foreign lover (and an
unedifying tragical rupture) before her meeting with Jeffrey Aspern.
She had lived with her father and sister in a queer old-fashioned,
expatriated, artistic Bohemia, in the days when the aesthetic was only
the academic and the painters who knew the best models for a contadina
and pifferaro wore peaked hats and long hair. It was a society less
furnished than the coteries of today (in its ignorance of the wonderful
chances, the opportunities of the early bird, with which its path was
strewn), with tatters of old stuff and fragments of old crockery; so
that Miss Bordereau appeared not to have picked up or have inherited
many objects of importance. There was no enviable bric-a-brac, with its
provoking legend of cheapness, in the room in which I had seen her. Such
a fact as that suggested bareness, but nonetheless it worked happily
into the sentimental interest I had always taken in the early movements
of my countrymen as visitors to Europe. When Americans went abroad in
1820 there was something romantic, almost heroic in it, as compared with
the perpetual ferryings of the present hour, when photography and other
conveniences have annihilated surprise. Miss Bordereau sailed with
her family on a tossing brig, in the days of long voyages and sharp
differences; she had her emotions on the top of yellow diligences,
passed the night at inns where she dreamed of travelers’ tales, and was
struck, on reaching the Eternal City, with the elegance of Roman pearls
and scarfs. There was something touching to me in all that, and my
imagination frequently went back to the period. If Miss Bordereau
carried it there of course Jeffrey Aspern at other times had done so a
great deal more. It was a much more important fact, if one were looking
at his genius critically, that he had lived in the days before the
general transfusion. It had happened to me to regret that he had known
Europe at all; I should have liked to see what he would have written
without that experience, by which he had incontestably been enriched.
But as his fate had ordered otherwise I went with him--I tried to judge
how the Old World would have struck him. It was not only there, however,
that I watched him; the relations he had entertained with the new had
even a livelier interest. His own country after all had had most of his
life, and his muse, as they said at that time, was essentially American.
That was originally what I had loved him for: that at a period when
our native land was nude and crude and provincial, when the famous
“atmosphere” it is supposed to lack was not even missed, when literature
was lonely there and art and form almost impossible, he had found means
to live and write like one of the first; to be free and general and not
at all afraid; to feel, understand, and express everything.
V
I was seldom at home in the evening, for when I attempted to occupy
myself in my apartments the lamplight brought in a swarm of noxious
insects, and it was too hot for closed windows. Accordingly I spent the
late hours either on the water (the moonlight of Venice is famous), or
in the splendid square which serves as a vast forecourt to the strange
old basilica of Saint Mark. I sat in front of Florian’s café, eating
ices, listening to music, talking with acquaintances: the traveler will
remember how the immense cluster of tables and little chairs stretches
like a promontory into the smooth lake of the Piazza. The whole place,
of a summer’s evening, under the stars and with all the lamps, all the
voices and light footsteps on marble (the only sounds of the arcades
that enclose it), is like an open-air saloon dedicated to cooling drinks
and to a still finer degustation--that of the exquisite impressions
received during the day. When I did not prefer to keep mine to myself
there was always a stray tourist, disencumbered of his Baedeker, to
discuss them with, or some domesticated painter rejoicing in the return
of the season of strong effects. The wonderful church, with its
low domes and bristling embroideries, the mystery of its mosaic and
sculpture, looking ghostly in the tempered gloom, and the sea breeze
passed between the twin columns of the Piazzetta, the lintels of a door
no longer guarded, as gently as if a rich curtain were swaying there. I
used sometimes on these occasions to think of the Misses Bordereau and
of the pity of their being shut up in apartments which in the Venetian
July even Venetian vastness did not prevent from being stuffy. Their
life seemed miles away from the life of the Piazza, and no doubt it was
really too late to make the austere Juliana change her habits. But
poor Miss Tita would have enjoyed one of Florian’s ices, I was sure;
sometimes I even had thoughts of carrying one home to her. Fortunately
my patience bore fruit, and I was not obliged to do anything so
ridiculous.
One evening about the middle of July I came in earlier than usual--I
forget what chance had led to this--and instead of going up to my
quarters made my way into the garden. The temperature was very high; it
was such a night as one would gladly have spent in the open air, and
I was in no hurry to go to bed. I had floated home in my gondola,
listening to the slow splash of the oar in the narrow dark canals, and
now the only thought that solicited me was the vague reflection that it
would be pleasant to recline at one’s length in the fragrant darkness
on a garden bench. The odor of the canal was doubtless at the bottom
of that aspiration and the breath of the garden, as I entered it, gave
consistency to my purpose. It was delicious--just such an air as must
have trembled with Romeo’s vows when he stood among the flowers and
raised his arms to his mistress’s balcony. I looked at the windows of
the palace to see if by chance the example of Verona (Verona being
not far off) had been followed; but everything was dim, as usual, and
everything was still. Juliana, on summer nights in her youth, might have
murmured down from open windows at Jeffrey Aspern, but Miss Tita was
not a poet’s mistress any more than I was a poet. This however did not
prevent my gratification from being great as I became aware on reaching
the end of the garden that Miss Tita was seated in my little bower. At
first I only made out an indistinct figure, not in the least counting on
such an overture from one of my hostesses; it even occurred to me that
some sentimental maidservant had stolen in to keep a tryst with her
sweetheart. I was going to turn away, not to frighten her, when the
figure rose to its height and I recognized Miss Bordereau’s niece. I
must do myself the justice to say that I did not wish to frighten her
either, and much as I had longed for some such accident I should have
been capable of retreating. It was as if I had laid a trap for her
by coming home earlier than usual and adding to that eccentricity
by creeping into the garden. As she rose she spoke to me, and then I
reflected that perhaps, secure in my almost inveterate absence, it was
her nightly practice to take a lonely airing. There was no trap, in
truth, because I had had no suspicion. At first I took for granted that
the words she uttered expressed discomfiture at my arrival; but as she
repeated them--I had not caught them clearly--I had the surprise of
hearing her say, “Oh, dear, I’m so very glad you’ve come!” She and her
aunt had in common the property of unexpected speeches. She came out of
the arbor almost as if she were going to throw herself into my arms.
I hasten to add that she did nothing of the kind; she did not even shake
hands with me. It was a gratification to her to see me and presently she
told me why--because she was nervous when she was out-of-doors at night
alone. The plants and bushes looked so strange in the dark, and there
were all sorts of queer sounds--she could not tell what they were--like
the noises of animals. She stood close to me, looking about her with an
air of greater security but without any demonstration of interest in me
as an individual. Then I guessed that nocturnal prowlings were not in
the least her habit, and I was also reminded (I had been struck with the
circumstance in talking with her before I took possession) that it was
impossible to overestimate her simplicity.
“You speak as if you were lost in the backwoods,” I said, laughing. “How
you manage to keep out of this charming place when you have only three
steps to take to get into it is more than I have yet been able to
discover. You hide away mighty well so long as I am on the premises, I
know; but I had a hope that you peeped out a little at other times. You
and your poor aunt are worse off than Carmelite nuns in their cells.
Should you mind telling me how you exist without air, without exercise,
without any sort of human contact? I don’t see how you carry on the
common business of life.”
She looked at me as if I were talking some strange tongue, and her
answer was so little of an answer that I was considerably irritated.
“We go to bed very early--earlier than you would believe.” I was on the
point of saying that this only deepened the mystery when she gave me
some relief by adding, “Before you came we were not so private. But I
never have been out at night.”
“Never in these fragrant alleys, blooming here under your nose?”
“Ah,” said Miss Tita, “they were never nice till now!” There was an
unmistakable reference in this and a flattering comparison, so that
it seemed to me I had gained a small advantage. As it would help me to
follow it up to establish a sort of grievance I asked her why, since
she thought my garden nice, she had never thanked me in any way for the
flowers I had been sending up in such quantities for the previous three
weeks. I had not been discouraged--there had been, as she would have
observed, a daily armful; but I had been brought up in the common forms
and a word of recognition now and then would have touched me in the
right place.
“Why I didn’t know they were for me!”
“They were for both of you. Why should I make a difference?”
Miss Tita reflected as if she might be thinking of a reason for that,
but she failed to produce one. Instead of this she asked abruptly, “Why
in the world do you want to know us?”
“I ought after all to make a difference,” I replied. “That question is
your aunt’s; it isn’t yours. You wouldn’t ask it if you hadn’t been put
up to it.”
“She didn’t tell me to ask you,” Miss Tita replied without confusion;
she was the oddest mixture of the shrinking and the direct.
“Well, she has often wondered about it herself and expressed her wonder
to you. She has insisted on it, so that she has put the idea into your
head that I am insufferably pushing. Upon my word I think I have
been very discreet. And how completely your aunt must have lost every
tradition of sociability, to see anything out of the way in the idea
that respectable intelligent people, living as we do under the same
roof, should occasionally exchange a remark! What could be more natural?
We are of the same country, and we have at least some of the same
tastes, since, like you, I am intensely fond of Venice.”
My interlocutress appeared incapable of grasping more than one clause
in any proposition, and she declared quickly, eagerly, as if she were
answering my whole speech: “I am not in the least fond of Venice. I
should like to go far away!”
“Has she always kept you back so?” I went on, to show her that I could
be as irrelevant as herself.
“She told me to come out tonight; she has told me very often,” said Miss
Tita. “It is I who wouldn’t come. I don’t like to leave her.”
“Is she too weak, is she failing?” I demanded, with more emotion, I
think, than I intended to show. I judged this by the way her eyes rested
upon me in the darkness. It embarrassed me a little, and to turn
the matter off I continued genially: “Do let us sit down together
comfortably somewhere, and you will tell me all about her.”
Miss Tita made no resistance to this. We found a bench less secluded,
less confidential, as it were, than the one in the arbor; and we were
still sitting there when I heard midnight ring out from those clear
bells of Venice which vibrate with a solemnity of their own over the
lagoon and hold the air so much more than the chimes of other places.
We were together more than an hour, and our interview gave, as it struck
me, a great lift to my undertaking. Miss Tita accepted the situation
without a protest; she had avoided me for three months, yet now she
treated me almost as if these three months had made me an old friend. If
I had chosen I might have inferred from this that though she had avoided
me she had given a good deal of consideration to doing so. She paid no
attention to the flight of time--never worried at my keeping her so long
away from her aunt. She talked freely, answering questions and asking
them and not even taking advantage of certain longish pauses with which
they inevitably alternated to say she thought she had better go in. It
was almost as if she were waiting for something--something I might say
to her--and intended to give me my opportunity. I was the more struck
by this as she told me that her aunt had been less well for a good many
days and in a way that was rather new. She was weaker; at moments it
seemed as if she had no strength at all; yet more than ever before she
wished to be left alone. That was why she had told her to come out--not
even to remain in her own room, which was alongside; she said her niece
irritated her, made her nervous. She sat still for hours together, as
if she were asleep; she had always done that, musing and dozing; but at
such times formerly she gave at intervals some small sign of life, of
interest, liking her companion to be near her with her work. Miss Tita
confided to me that at present her aunt was so motionless that she
sometimes feared she was dead; moreover she took hardly any food--one
couldn’t see what she lived on. The great thing was that she still on
most days got up; the serious job was to dress her, to wheel her out of
her bedroom. She clung to as many of her old habits as possible and she
had always, little company as they had received for years, made a point
of sitting in the parlor.
I scarcely knew what to think of all this--of Miss Tita’s sudden
conversion to sociability and of the strange circumstance that the more
the old lady appeared to decline toward her end the less she should
desire to be looked after. The story did not hang together, and I even
asked myself whether it were not a trap laid for me, the result of a
design to make me show my hand. I could not have told why my companions
(as they could only by courtesy be called) should have this purpose--why
they should try to trip up so lucrative a lodger. At any rate I kept on
my guard, so that Miss Tita should not have occasion again to ask me if
I had an arrière-pensée. Poor woman, before we parted for the night my
mind was at rest as to HER capacity for entertaining one.
She told me more about their affairs than I had hoped; there was no
need to be prying, for it evidently drew her out simply to feel that I
listened, that I cared. She ceased wondering why I cared, and at last,
as she spoke of the brilliant life they had led years before, she almost
chattered. It was Miss Tita who judged it brilliant; she said that when
they first came to live in Venice, years and years before (I saw that
her mind was essentially vague about dates and the order in which events
had occurred), there was scarcely a week that they had not some visitor
or did not make some delightful passeggio in the city. They had seen all
the curiosities; they had even been to the Lido in a boat (she spoke
as if I might think there was a way on foot); they had had a collation
there, brought in three baskets and spread out on the grass. I asked
her what people they had known and she said, Oh! very nice ones--the
Cavaliere Bombicci and the Contessa Altemura, with whom they had had a
great friendship. Also English people--the Churtons and the Goldies and
Mrs. Stock-Stock, whom they had loved dearly; she was dead and gone,
poor dear. That was the case with most of their pleasant circle (this
expression was Miss Tita’s own), though a few were left, which was a
wonder considering how they had neglected them. She mentioned the names
of two or three Venetian old women; of a certain doctor, very clever,
who was so kind--he came as a friend, he had really given up practice;
of the avvocato Pochintesta, who wrote beautiful poems and had addressed
one to her aunt. These people came to see them without fail every year,
usually at the capo d’anno, and of old her aunt used to make them some
little present--her aunt and she together: small things that she, Miss
Tita, made herself, like paper lampshades or mats for the decanters of
wine at dinner or those woolen things that in cold weather were worn
on the wrists. The last few years there had not been many presents; she
could not think what to make, and her aunt had lost her interest and
never suggested. But the people came all the same; if the Venetians
liked you once they liked you forever.
There was something affecting in the good faith of this sketch of former
social glories; the picnic at the Lido had remained vivid through the
ages, and poor Miss Tita evidently was of the impression that she had
had a brilliant youth. She had in fact had a glimpse of the Venetian
world in its gossiping, home-keeping, parsimonious, professional walks;
for I observed for the first time that she had acquired by contact
something of the trick of the familiar, soft-sounding, almost infantile
speech of the place. I judged that she had imbibed this invertebrate
dialect from the natural way the names of things and people--mostly
purely local--rose to her lips. If she knew little of what they
represented she knew still less of anything else. Her aunt had drawn
in--her failing interest in the table mats and lampshades was a sign of
that--and she had not been able to mingle in society or to entertain
it alone; so that the matter of her reminiscences struck one as an old
world altogether. If she had not been so decent her references would
have seemed to carry one back to the queer rococo Venice of Casanova.
I found myself falling into the error of thinking of her too as one of
Jeffrey Aspern’s contemporaries; this came from her having so little in
common with my own. It was possible, I said to myself, that she had not
even heard of him; it might very well be that Juliana had not cared to
lift even for her the veil that covered the temple of her youth. In this
case she perhaps would not know of the existence of the papers, and I
welcomed that presumption--it made me feel more safe with her--until
I remembered that we had believed the letter of disavowal received by
Cumnor to be in the handwriting of the niece. If it had been dictated
to her she had of course to know what it was about; yet after all the
effect of it was to repudiate the idea of any connection with the poet.
I held it probable at all events that Miss Tita had not read a word of
his poetry. Moreover if, with her companion, she had always escaped the
interviewer there was little occasion for her having got it into her
head that people were “after” the letters. People had not been after
them, inasmuch as they had not heard of them; and Cumnor’s fruitless
feeler would have been a solitary accident.
When midnight sounded Miss Tita got up; but she stopped at the door of
the house only after she had wandered two or three times with me round
the garden. “When shall I see you again?” I asked before she went in; to
which she replied with promptness that she should like to come out the
next night. She added however that she should not come--she was so far
from doing everything she liked.
“You might do a few things that _I_ like,” I said with a sigh.
“Oh, you--I don’t believe you!” she murmured at this, looking at me with
her simple solemnity.
“Why don’t you believe me?”
“Because I don’t understand you.”
“That is just the sort of occasion to have faith.” I could not say more,
though I should have liked to, as I saw that I only mystified her; for
I had no wish to have it on my conscience that I might pass for
having made love to her. Nothing less should I have seemed to do had
I continued to beg a lady to “believe in me” in an Italian garden on
a midsummer night. There was some merit in my scruples, for Miss Tita
lingered and lingered: I perceived that she felt that she should
not really soon come down again and wished therefore to protract the
present. She insisted too on making the talk between us personal to
ourselves; and altogether her behavior was such as would have been
possible only to a completely innocent woman.
“I shall like the flowers better now that I know they are also meant for
me.”
“How could you have doubted it? If you will tell me the kind you like
best I will send a double lot of them.”
“Oh, I like them all best!” Then she went on, familiarly: “Shall you
study--shall you read and write--when you go up to your rooms?”
“I don’t do that at night, at this season. The lamplight brings in the
animals.”
“You might have known that when you came.”
“I did know it!”
“And in winter do you work at night?”
“I read a good deal, but I don’t often write.” She listened as if these
details had a rare interest, and suddenly a temptation quite at variance
with the prudence I had been teaching myself associated itself with her
plain, mild face. Ah yes, she was safe and I could make her safer!
It seemed to me from one moment to another that I could not wait
longer--that I really must take a sounding. So I went on: “In general
before I go to sleep--very often in bed (it’s a bad habit, but I confess
to it), I read some great poet. In nine cases out of ten it’s a volume
of Jeffrey Aspern.”
I watched her well as I pronounced that name but I saw nothing
wonderful. Why should I indeed--was not Jeffrey Aspern the property of
the human race?
“Oh, we read him--we HAVE read him,” she quietly replied.
“He is my poet of poets--I know him almost by heart.”
For an instant Miss Tita hesitated; then her sociability was too much
for her.
“Oh, by heart--that’s nothing!” she murmured, smiling. “My aunt used to
know him--to know him”--she paused an instant and I wondered what she
was going to say--“to know him as a visitor.”
“As a visitor?” I repeated, staring.
“He used to call on her and take her out.”