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<h2> V </h2>
<p>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 cafe, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>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."</p>
<p>"Never in these fragrant alleys, blooming here under your nose?"</p>
<p>"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.</p>
<p>"Why I didn't know they were for me!"</p>
<p>"They were for both of you. Why should I make a difference?"</p>
<p>Miss Tita reflected as if she might by 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?"</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>"She didn't tell me to ask you," Miss Tita replied without confusion; she
was the oddest mixture of the shrinking and the direct.</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>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!"</p>
<p>"Has she always kept you back so?" I went on, to show her that I could be
as irrelevant as herself.</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 arriere-pensee. Poor woman, before we parted for the night my mind was
at rest as to HER capacity for entertaining one.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"You might do a few things that <i>I</i> like," I said with a sigh.</p>
<p>"Oh, you—I don't believe you!" she murmured at this, looking at me
with her simple solemnity.</p>
<p>"Why don't you believe me?"</p>
<p>"Because I don't understand you."</p>
<p>"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.</p>
<p>"I shall like the flowers better now that I know they are also meant for
me."</p>
<p>"How could you have doubted it? If you will tell me the kind you like best
I will send a double lot of them."</p>
<p>"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?"</p>
<p>"I don't do that at night, at this season. The lamplight brings in the
animals."</p>
<p>"You might have known that when you came."</p>
<p>"I did know it!"</p>
<p>"And in winter do you work at night?"</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>"Oh, we read him—we HAVE read him," she quietly replied.</p>
<p>"He is my poet of poets—I know him almost by heart."</p>
<p>For an instant Miss Tita hesitated; then her sociability was too much for
her.</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>"As a visitor?" I repeated, staring.</p>
<p>"He used to call on her and take her out."</p>
<p>I continued to stare. "My dear lady, he died a hundred years ago!"</p>
<p>"Well," she said mirthfully, "my aunt is a hundred and fifty."</p>
<p>"Mercy on us!" I exclaimed; "why didn't you tell me before? I should like
so to ask her about him."</p>
<p>"She wouldn't care for that—she wouldn't tell you," Miss Tita
replied.</p>
<p>"I don't care what she cares for! She MUST tell me—it's not a chance
to be lost."</p>
<p>"Oh, you should have come twenty years ago: then she still talked about
him."</p>
<p>"And what did she say?" I asked eagerly.</p>
<p>"I don't know—that he liked her immensely."</p>
<p>"And she—didn't she like him?"</p>
<p>"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.</p>
<p>"Fancy, fancy!" I murmured. And then, "Tell me this, please—has she
got a portrait of him? They are distressingly rare."</p>
<p>"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.</p>
<p>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?"</p>
<p>"If she had what?" the poor lady asked, looking at me queerly over the
flame of her candle.</p>
<p>"A portrait of the god. I don't know what I wouldn't give to see it."</p>
<p>"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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"Do you write—do you write?" There was a shake in her voice—she
could scarcely bring out what she wanted to ask.</p>
<p>"Do I write? Oh, don't speak of my writing on the same day with Aspern's!"</p>
<p>"Do you write about HIM—do you pry into his life?"</p>
<p>"Ah, that's your aunt's question; it can't be yours!" I said, in a tone of
slightly wounded sensibility.</p>
<p>"All the more reason then that you should answer it. Do you, please?"</p>
<p>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?"</p>
<p>"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.</p>
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