“Well,” she said mirthfully, “my aunt is a hundred and fifty.”
“Mercy on us!” I exclaimed; “why didn’t you tell me before? I should
like so to ask her about him.”
“She wouldn’t care for that--she wouldn’t tell you,” Miss Tita replied.
“I don’t care what she cares for! She MUST tell me--it’s not a chance to
be lost.”
“Oh, you should have come twenty years ago: then she still talked about
him.”
“And what did she say?” I asked eagerly.
“I don’t know--that he liked her immensely.”
“And she--didn’t she like him?”
“She said he was a god.” Miss Tita gave me this information flatly,
without expression; her tone might have made it a piece of trivial
gossip. But it stirred me deeply as she dropped the words into the
summer night; it seemed such a direct testimony.
“Fancy, fancy!” I murmured. And then, “Tell me this, please--has she got
a portrait of him? They are distressingly rare.”
“A portrait? I don’t know,” said Miss Tita; and now there was
discomfiture in her face. “Well, good night!” she added; and she turned
into the house.
I accompanied her into the wide, dusky, stone-paved passage which on the
ground floor corresponded with our grand sala. It opened at one end into
the garden, at the other upon the canal, and was lighted now only by the
small lamp that was always left for me to take up as I went to bed. An
extinguished candle which Miss Tita apparently had brought down with her
stood on the same table with it. “Good night, good night!” I replied,
keeping beside her as she went to get her light. “Surely you would know,
shouldn’t you, if she had one?”
“If she had what?” the poor lady asked, looking at me queerly over the
flame of her candle.
“A portrait of the god. I don’t know what I wouldn’t give to see it.”
“I don’t know what she has got. She keeps her things locked up.” And
Miss Tita went away, toward the staircase, with the sense evidently that
she had said too much.
I let her go--I wished not to frighten her--and I contented myself with
remarking that Miss Bordereau would not have locked up such a glorious
possession as that--a thing a person would be proud of and hang up in a
prominent place on the parlor wall. Therefore of course she had not any
portrait. Miss Tita made no direct answer to this and, candle in hand,
with her back to me, ascended two or three stairs. Then she stopped
short and turned round, looking at me across the dusky space.
“Do you write--do you write?” There was a shake in her voice--she could
scarcely bring out what she wanted to ask.
“Do I write? Oh, don’t speak of my writing on the same day with
Aspern’s!”
“Do you write about HIM--do you pry into his life?”
“Ah, that’s your aunt’s question; it can’t be yours!” I said, in a tone
of slightly wounded sensibility.
“All the more reason then that you should answer it. Do you, please?”
I thought I had allowed for the falsehoods I should have to tell; but
I found that in fact when it came to the point I had not. Besides, now
that I had an opening there was a kind of relief in being frank. Lastly
(it was perhaps fanciful, even fatuous), I guessed that Miss Tita
personally would not in the last resort be less my friend. So after a
moment’s hesitation I answered, “Yes, I have written about him and I am
looking for more material. In heaven’s name have you got any?”
“Santo Dio!” she exclaimed, without heeding my question; and she hurried
upstairs and out of sight. I might count upon her in the last resort,
but for the present she was visibly alarmed. The proof of it was that
she began to hide again, so that for a fortnight I never beheld her. I
found my patience ebbing and after four or five days of this I told the
gardener to stop the flowers.