As it turned out the precaution had not been needed, for three hours
later, just as I had finished my dinner, Miss Bordereau’s niece
appeared, unannounced, in the open doorway of the room in which my
simple repasts were served. I remember well that I felt no surprise at
seeing her; which is not a proof that I did not believe in her timidity.
It was immense, but in a case in which there was a particular reason for
boldness it never would have prevented her from running up to my rooms.
I saw that she was now quite full of a particular reason; it threw her
forward--made her seize me, as I rose to meet her, by the arm.
“My aunt is very ill; I think she is dying!”
“Never in the world,” I answered bitterly. “Don’t you be afraid!”
“Do go for a doctor--do, do! Olimpia is gone for the one we always have,
but she doesn’t come back; I don’t know what has happened to her. I told
her that if he was not at home she was to follow him where he had gone;
but apparently she is following him all over Venice. I don’t know what
to do--she looks so as if she were sinking.”
“May I see her, may I judge?” I asked. “Of course I shall be delighted
to bring someone; but hadn’t we better send my man instead, so that I
may stay with you?”
Miss Tita assented to this and I dispatched my servant for the best
doctor in the neighborhood. I hurried downstairs with her, and on the
way she told me that an hour after I quitted them in the afternoon Miss
Bordereau had had an attack of “oppression,” a terrible difficulty in
breathing. This had subsided but had left her so exhausted that she did
not come up: she seemed all gone. I repeated that she was not gone, that
she would not go yet; whereupon Miss Tita gave me a sharper sidelong
glance than she had ever directed at me and said, “Really, what do you
mean? I suppose you don’t accuse her of making believe!” I forget what
reply I made to this, but I grant that in my heart I thought the old
woman capable of any weird maneuver. Miss Tita wanted to know what I
had done to her; her aunt had told her that I had made her so angry. I
declared I had done nothing--I had been exceedingly careful; to which
my companion rejoined that Miss Bordereau had assured her she had had
a scene with me--a scene that had upset her. I answered with some
resentment that it was a scene of her own making--that I couldn’t think
what she was angry with me for unless for not seeing my way to give a
thousand pounds for the portrait of Jeffrey Aspern. “And did she show
you that? Oh, gracious--oh, deary me!” groaned Miss Tita, who appeared
to feel that the situation was passing out of her control and that the
elements of her fate were thickening around her. I said that I would
give anything to possess it, yet that I had not a thousand pounds; but
I stopped when we came to the door of Miss Bordereau’s room. I had an
immense curiosity to pass it, but I thought it my duty to represent
to Miss Tita that if I made the invalid angry she ought perhaps to be
spared the sight of me. “The sight of you? Do you think she can SEE?” my
companion demanded almost with indignation. I did think so but forebore
to say it, and I softly followed my conductress.
I remember that what I said to her as I stood for a moment beside the
old woman’s bed was, “Does she never show you her eyes then? Have you
never seen them?” Miss Bordereau had been divested of her green shade,
but (it was not my fortune to behold Juliana in her nightcap) the upper
half of her face was covered by the fall of a piece of dingy lacelike
muslin, a sort of extemporized hood which, wound round her head,
descended to the end of her nose, leaving nothing visible but her white
withered cheeks and puckered mouth, closed tightly and, as it were
consciously. Miss Tita gave me a glance of surprise, evidently not
seeing a reason for my impatience. “You mean that she always wears
something? She does it to preserve them.”
“Because they are so fine?”
“Oh, today, today!” And Miss Tita shook her head, speaking very low.
“But they used to be magnificent!”
“Yes indeed, we have Aspern’s word for that.” And as I looked again at
the old woman’s wrappings I could imagine that she had not wished to
allow people a reason to say that the great poet had overdone it. But
I did not waste my time in considering Miss Bordereau, in whom the
appearance of respiration was so slight as to suggest that no human
attention could ever help her more. I turned my eyes all over the room,
rummaging with them the closets, the chests of drawers, the tables. Miss
Tita met them quickly and read, I think, what was in them; but she
did not answer it, turning away restlessly, anxiously, so that I felt
rebuked, with reason, for a preoccupation that was almost profane in
the presence of our dying companion. All the same I took another look,
endeavoring to pick out mentally the place to try first, for a person
who should wish to put his hand on Miss Bordereau’s papers directly
after her death. The room was a dire confusion; it looked like the room
of an old actress. There were clothes hanging over chairs, odd-looking
shabby bundles here and there, and various pasteboard boxes piled
together, battered, bulging, and discolored, which might have been fifty
years old. Miss Tita after a moment noticed the direction of my
eyes again and, as if she guessed how I judged the air of the place
(forgetting I had no business to judge it at all), said, perhaps to
defend herself from the imputation of complicity in such untidiness:
“She likes it this way; we can’t move things. There are old bandboxes
she has had most of her life.” Then she added, half taking pity on my
real thought, “Those things were THERE.” And she pointed to a small,
low trunk which stood under a sofa where there was just room for it.
It appeared to be a queer, superannuated coffer, of painted wood, with
elaborate handles and shriveled straps and with the color (it had last
been endued with a coat of light green) much rubbed off. It evidently
had traveled with Juliana in the olden time--in the days of her
adventures, which it had shared. It would have made a strange figure
arriving at a modern hotel.
“WERE there--they aren’t now?” I asked, startled by Miss Tita’s
implication.
She was going to answer, but at that moment the doctor came in--the
doctor whom the little maid had been sent to fetch and whom she had at
last overtaken. My servant, going on his own errand, had met her with
her companion in tow, and in the sociable Venetian spirit, retracing his
steps with them, had also come up to the threshold of Miss Bordereau’s
room, where I saw him peeping over the doctor’s shoulder. I motioned him
away the more instantly that the sight of his prying face reminded me
that I myself had almost as little to do there--an admonition confirmed
by the sharp way the little doctor looked at me, appearing to take me
for a rival who had the field before him. He was a short, fat, brisk
gentleman who wore the tall hat of his profession and seemed to look
at everything but his patient. He looked particularly at me, as if it
struck him that I should be better for a dose, so that I bowed to him
and left him with the women, going down to smoke a cigar in the garden.
I was nervous; I could not go further; I could not leave the place.
I don’t know exactly what I thought might happen, but it seemed to me
important to be there. I wandered about in the alleys--the warm night
had come on--smoking cigar after cigar and looking at the light in Miss
Bordereau’s windows. They were open now, I could see; the situation
was different. Sometimes the light moved, but not quickly; it did not
suggest the hurry of a crisis. Was the old woman dying, or was she
already dead? Had the doctor said that there was nothing to be done at
her tremendous age but to let her quietly pass away; or had he simply
announced with a look a little more conventional that the end of the end
had come? Were the other two women moving about to perform the offices
that follow in such a case? It made me uneasy not to be nearer, as if I
thought the doctor himself might carry away the papers with him. I bit
my cigar hard as it came over me again that perhaps there were now no
papers to carry!
I wandered about for an hour--for an hour and a half. I looked out for
Miss Tita at one of the windows, having a vague idea that she might come
there to give me some sign. Would she not see the red tip of my cigar
moving about in the dark and feel that I wanted eminently to know what
the doctor had said? I am afraid it is a proof my anxieties had made me
gross that I should have taken in some degree for granted that at such
an hour, in the midst of the greatest change that could take place in
her life, they were uppermost also in Miss Tita’s mind. My servant came
down and spoke to me; he knew nothing save that the doctor had gone
after a visit of half an hour. If he had stayed half an hour then Miss
Bordereau was still alive: it could not have taken so much time as that
to enunciate the contrary. I sent the man out of the house; there were
moments when the sense of his curiosity annoyed me, and this was one of
them. HE had been watching my cigar tip from an upper window, if Miss
Tita had not; he could not know what I was after and I could not tell
him, though I was conscious he had fantastic private theories about me
which he thought fine and which I, had I known them, should have thought
offensive.
I went upstairs at last but I ascended no higher than the sala. The
door of Miss Bordereau’s apartment was open, showing from the parlor the
dimness of a poor candle. I went toward it with a light tread, and
at the same moment Miss Tita appeared and stood looking at me as I
approached. “She’s better--she’s better,” she said, even before I had
asked. “The doctor has given her something; she woke up, came back to
life while he was there. He says there is no immediate danger.”
“No immediate danger? Surely he thinks her condition strange!”
“Yes, because she had been excited. That affects her dreadfully.”
“It will do so again then, because she excites herself. She did so this
afternoon.”
“Yes; she mustn’t come out any more,” said Miss Tita, with one of her
lapses into a deeper placidity.
“What is the use of making such a remark as that if you begin to rattle
her about again the first time she bids you?”
“I won’t--I won’t do it any more.”
“You must learn to resist her,” I went on.
“Oh, yes, I shall; I shall do so better if you tell me it’s right.”
“You mustn’t do it for me; you must do it for yourself. It all comes
back to you, if you are frightened.”
“Well, I am not frightened now,” said Miss Tita cheerfully. “She is very
quiet.”
“Is she conscious again--does she speak?”
“No, she doesn’t speak, but she takes my hand. She holds it fast.”
“Yes,” I rejoined, “I can see what force she still has by the way she
grabbed that picture this afternoon. But if she holds you fast how comes
it that you are here?”
Miss Tita hesitated a moment; though her face was in deep shadow (she
had her back to the light in the parlor and I had put down my own
candle far off, near the door of the sala), I thought I saw her smile
ingenuously. “I came on purpose--I heard your step.”
“Why, I came on tiptoe, as inaudibly as possible.”
“Well, I heard you,” said Miss Tita.
“And is your aunt alone now?”
“Oh, no; Olimpia is sitting there.”
On my side I hesitated. “Shall we then step in there?” And I nodded at
the parlor; I wanted more and more to be on the spot.
“We can’t talk there--she will hear us.”
I was on the point of replying that in that case we would sit silent,
but I was too conscious that this would not do, as there was something I
desired immensely to ask her. So I proposed that we should walk a little
in the sala, keeping more at the other end, where we should not disturb
the old lady. Miss Tita assented unconditionally; the doctor was coming
again, she said, and she would be there to meet him at the door.
We strolled through the fine superfluous hall, where on the marble
floor--particularly as at first we said nothing--our footsteps were more
audible than I had expected. When we reached the other end--the wide
window, inveterately closed, connecting with the balcony that overhung
the canal--I suggested that we should remain there, as she would see the
doctor arrive still better. I opened the window and we passed out on the
balcony. The air of the canal seemed even heavier, hotter than that of
the sala. The place was hushed and void; the quiet neighborhood had gone
to sleep. A lamp, here and there, over the narrow black water, glimmered
in double; the voice of a man going homeward singing, with his jacket
on his shoulder and his hat on his ear, came to us from a distance.
This did not prevent the scene from being very comme il faut, as Miss
Bordereau had called it the first time I saw her. Presently a gondola
passed along the canal with its slow rhythmical plash, and as we
listened we watched it in silence. It did not stop, it did not carry the
doctor; and after it had gone on I said to Miss Tita:
“And where are they now--the things that were in the trunk?”
“In the trunk?”
“That green box you pointed out to me in her room. You said her papers
had been there; you seemed to imply that she had transferred them.”
“Oh, yes; they are not in the trunk,” said Miss Tita.
“May I ask if you have looked?”
“Yes, I have looked--for you.”
“How for me, dear Miss Tita? Do you mean you would have given them to me
if you had found them?” I asked, almost trembling.
She delayed to reply and I waited. Suddenly she broke out, “I don’t know
what I would do--what I wouldn’t!”
“Would you look again--somewhere else?”
She had spoken with a strange unexpected emotion, and she went on in the
same tone: “I can’t--I can’t--while she lies there. It isn’t decent.”
“No, it isn’t decent,” I replied gravely. “Let the poor lady rest in
peace.” And the words, on my lips, were not hypocritical, for I felt
reprimanded and shamed.
Miss Tita added in a moment, as if she had guessed this and were sorry
for me, but at the same time wished to explain that I did drive her on
or at least did insist too much: “I can’t deceive her that way. I can’t
deceive her--perhaps on her deathbed.”
“Heaven forbid I should ask you, though I have been guilty myself!”
“You have been guilty?”
“I have sailed under false colors.” I felt now as if I must tell her
that I had given her an invented name, on account of my fear that her
aunt would have heard of me and would refuse to take me in. I explained
this and also that I had really been a party to the letter written to
them by John Cumnor months before.
She listened with great attention, looking at me with parted lips, and
when I had made my confession she said, “Then your real name--what is
it?” She repeated it over twice when I had told her, accompanying it
with the exclamation “Gracious, gracious!” Then she added, “I like your
own best.”
“So do I,” I said, laughing. “Ouf! it’s a relief to get rid of the
other.”
“So it was a regular plot--a kind of conspiracy?”
“Oh, a conspiracy--we were only two,” I replied, leaving out Mrs. Prest
of course.
She hesitated; I thought she was perhaps going to say that we had been
very base. But she remarked after a moment, in a candid, wondering way,
“How much you must want them!”
“Oh, I do, passionately!” I conceded, smiling. And this chance made
me go on, forgetting my compunction of a moment before. “How can she
possibly have changed their place herself? How can she walk? How can
she arrive at that sort of muscular exertion? How can she lift and carry
things?”
“Oh, when one wants and when one has so much will!” said Miss Tita, as
if she had thought over my question already herself and had simply had
no choice but that answer--the idea that in the dead of night, or at
some moment when the coast was clear, the old woman had been capable of
a miraculous effort.
“Have you questioned Olimpia? Hasn’t she helped her--hasn’t she done it
for her?” I asked; to which Miss Tita replied promptly and positively
that their servant had had nothing to do with the matter, though without
admitting definitely that she had spoken to her. It was as if she were
a little shy, a little ashamed now of letting me see how much she had
entered into my uneasiness and had me on her mind. Suddenly she said to
me, without any immediate relevance:
“I feel as if you were a new person, now that you have got a new name.”
“It isn’t a new one; it is a very good old one, thank heaven!”
She looked at me a moment. “I do like it better.”
“Oh, if you didn’t I would almost go on with the other!”
“Would you really?”
I laughed again, but for all answer to this inquiry I said, “Of course
if she can rummage about that way she can perfectly have burnt them.”
“You must wait--you must wait,” Miss Tita moralized mournfully; and her
tone ministered little to my patience, for it seemed after all to accept
that wretched possibility. I would teach myself to wait, I declared
nevertheless; because in the first place I could not do otherwise and in
the second I had her promise, given me the other night, that she would
help me.
“Of course if the papers are gone that’s no use,” she said; not as if
she wished to recede, but only to be conscientious.
“Naturally. But if you could only find out!” I groaned, quivering again.
“I thought you said you would wait.”
“Oh, you mean wait even for that?”
“For what then?”
“Oh, nothing,” I replied, rather foolishly, being ashamed to tell her
what had been implied in my submission to delay--the idea that she would
do more than merely find out. I know not whether she guessed this; at
all events she appeared to become aware of the necessity for being a
little more rigid.
“I didn’t promise to deceive, did I? I don’t think I did.”
“It doesn’t much matter whether you did or not, for you couldn’t!”
I don’t think Miss Tita would have contested this event had she not been
diverted by our seeing the doctor’s gondola shoot into the little canal
and approach the house. I noted that he came as fast as if he believed
that Miss Bordereau was still in danger. We looked down at him while he
disembarked and then went back into the sala to meet him. When he came
up however I naturally left Miss Tita to go off with him alone, only
asking her leave to come back later for news.
I went out of the house and took a long walk, as far as the Piazza,
where my restlessness declined to quit me. I was unable to sit down (it
was very late now but there were people still at the little tables in
front of the cafés); I could only walk round and round, and I did
so half a dozen times. I was uncomfortable, but it gave me a certain
pleasure to have told Miss Tita who I really was. At last I took my way
home again, slowly getting all but inextricably lost, as I did whenever
I went out in Venice: so that it was considerably past midnight when I
reached my door. The sala, upstairs, was as dark as usual and my lamp as
I crossed it found nothing satisfactory to show me. I was disappointed,
for I had notified Miss Tita that I would come back for a report, and
I thought she might have left a light there as a sign. The door of
the ladies’ apartment was closed; which seemed an intimation that my
faltering friend had gone to bed, tired of waiting for me. I stood
in the middle of the place, considering, hoping she would hear me and
perhaps peep out, saying to myself too that she would never go to bed
with her aunt in a state so critical; she would sit up and watch--she
would be in a chair, in her dressing gown. I went nearer the door; I
stopped there and listened. I heard nothing at all and at last I tapped
gently. No answer came and after another minute I turned the handle.
There was no light in the room; this ought to have prevented me from
going in, but it had no such effect. If I have candidly narrated the
importunities, the indelicacies, of which my desire to possess myself of
Jeffrey Aspern’s papers had rendered me capable I need not shrink from
confessing this last indiscretion. I think it was the worst thing I did;
yet there were extenuating circumstances. I was deeply though doubtless
not disinterestedly anxious for more news of the old lady, and Miss Tita
had accepted from me, as it were, a rendezvous which it might have been
a point of honor with me to keep. It may be said that her leaving the
place dark was a positive sign that she released me, and to this I can
only reply that I desired not to be released.
The door of Miss Bordereau’s room was open and I could see beyond it the
faintness of a taper. There was no sound--my footstep caused no one to
stir. I came further into the room; I lingered there with my lamp in my
hand. I wanted to give Miss Tita a chance to come to me if she were with
her aunt, as she must be. I made no noise to call her; I only waited to
see if she would not notice my light. She did not, and I explained this
(I found afterward I was right) by the idea that she had fallen
asleep. If she had fallen asleep her aunt was not on her mind, and my
explanation ought to have led me to go out as I had come. I must repeat
again that it did not, for I found myself at the same moment thinking of
something else. I had no definite purpose, no bad intention, but I
felt myself held to the spot by an acute, though absurd, sense of
opportunity. For what I could not have said, inasmuch as it was not
in my mind that I might commit a theft. Even if it had been I was
confronted with the evident fact that Miss Bordereau did not leave her
secretary, her cupboard, and the drawers of her tables gaping. I had no
keys, no tools, and no ambition to smash her furniture. Nonetheless it
came to me that I was now, perhaps alone, unmolested, at the hour of
temptation and secrecy, nearer to the tormenting treasure than I had
ever been. I held up my lamp, let the light play on the different
objects as if it could tell me something. Still there came no movement
from the other room. If Miss Tita was sleeping she was sleeping sound.
Was she doing so--generous creature--on purpose to leave me the field?
Did she know I was there and was she just keeping quiet to see what I
would do--what I COULD do? But what could I do, when it came to that?
She herself knew even better than I how little.
I stopped in front of the secretary, looking at it very idiotically; for
what had it to say to me after all? In the first place it was locked,
and in the second it almost surely contained nothing in which I was
interested. Ten to one the papers had been destroyed; and even if they
had not been destroyed the old woman would not have put them in such a
place as that after removing them from the green trunk--would not have
transferred them, if she had the idea of their safety on her brain,
from the better hiding place to the worse. The secretary was more
conspicuous, more accessible in a room in which she could no longer
mount guard. It opened with a key, but there was a little brass handle,
like a button, as well; I saw this as I played my lamp over it. I did
something more than this at that moment: I caught a glimpse of the
possibility that Miss Tita wished me really to understand. If she did
not wish me to understand, if she wished me to keep away, why had she
not locked the door of communication between the sitting room and the
sala? That would have been a definite sign that I was to leave them
alone. If I did not leave them alone she meant me to come for a
purpose--a purpose now indicated by the quick, fantastic idea that to
oblige me she had unlocked the secretary. She had not left the key,
but the lid would probably move if I touched the button. This theory
fascinated me, and I bent over very close to judge. I did not propose
to do anything, not even--not in the least--to let down the lid; I only
wanted to test my theory, to see if the cover WOULD move. I touched the
button with my hand--a mere touch would tell me; and as I did so (it is
embarrassing for me to relate it), I looked over my shoulder. It was
a chance, an instinct, for I had not heard anything. I almost let my
luminary drop and certainly I stepped back, straightening myself up at
what I saw. Miss Bordereau stood there in her nightdress, in the doorway
of her room, watching me; her hands were raised, she had lifted the
everlasting curtain that covered half her face, and for the first, the
last, the only time I beheld her extraordinary eyes. They glared at me,
they made me horribly ashamed. I never shall forget her strange little
bent white tottering figure, with its lifted head, her attitude, her
expression; neither shall I forget the tone in which as I turned,
looking at her, she hissed out passionately, furiously:
“Ah, you publishing scoundrel!”
I know not what I stammered, to excuse myself, to explain; but I went
toward her, to tell her I meant no harm. She waved me off with her old
hands, retreating before me in horror; and the next thing I knew she had
fallen back with a quick spasm, as if death had descended on her, into
Miss Tita’s arms.