5

 

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 moonlights of Venice are famous - or in the splendid square which serves as a vast forecourt to the strange old church of Saint Mark.  I sat in front of Florian's café eating ices, listening to music, talking with acquaintances; the traveller 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 immense arcade that encloses it - is an open-air saloon dedicated to cooling drinks and to a still finer degustation, that of the splendid impressions received during the day.  When I didn't prefer to keep mine to myself there was always a stray tourist, disencumbered of his Bädeker, to discuss them with, or some domesticated painter rejoicing in the return of the season of strong effects.  The great basilica, with its low domes and bristling embroideries, the mystery of its mosaic and sculpture, looked 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 swayed 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 couldn't relieve of some stuffiness.  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 Tina 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 dark narrow canals, and now the only thought that occupied me was that it would be good to recline at one's length in the fragrant darkness of a garden-bench.  The odour 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 thick 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 might on the summer nights of her youth have murmured down from open windows at Jeffery Aspern, but Miss Tina was not a poet's mistress any more than I was a poet.  This, however, didn't prevent my gratification from being great as I became aware on reaching the end of the garden that my younger padrona was seated in one of the bowers.  At first I made out but an indistinct figure, not in the least counting on such an overture from one of my hostesses; it even occurred to me that some enamoured 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 recognised Miss Bordereau's niece.  I must do myself the justice that I didn't 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 by adding to that oddity my invasion of the garden.  As she rose she spoke to me, and then I guessed 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 no suspicion.  At first I took the words she uttered for an impatience of my arrival; but as she repeated them - I hadn't caught them clearly - I had the surprise of hearing her say: 'Oh dear, I'm so glad you've come!'  She and her aunt had in common the property of unexpected speeches.  She came out of the arbour almost as if to throw herself in my arms.

      I hasten to add that I escaped this ordeal and that she didn't even shake hands with me.  It was an ease to her to see me and presently she told me why - because she was nervous when out-of-doors at night alone.  The plants and shrubs looked so strange in the dark, and there were all sorts of queer sounds - she couldn't tell me 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 felt how little nocturnal prowlings could have been her habit, and I was also reminded - I had been afflicted by the same in talking with her before I took possession - that it was impossible to allow too much for her simplicity.

      'You speak as if you were lost in the backwoods,' I cheeringly laughed.  'How you manage to keep out of this charming place when you've only three steps to take to get into it is more than I've yet been able to discover.  You hide away amazingly so long as I'm on the premises, I know; but I had a hope 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 had spoken a strange tongue, and her answer was so little of one that I felt it make for irritation.  'We go to bed very early - earlier than you'd believe.'  I was on the point of saying that this only deepened the mystery, but she gave me some relief by adding: 'Before you came we weren't so private.  But I've never been out at night.'

      'Never in these fragrant alleys, blooming here under your nose?'

      'Ah,' said Miss Tina, 'they were never nice till now!'  There was a finer sense in this and a flattering comparison, so that it seemed to me I had gained some advantage.  As I might follow that further by establishing a good 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 Tina 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 so much to know us?'

      'I ought after all to make a difference,' I replied.  'That question's 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 Tina replied without confusion.  She was indeed the oddest mixture of shyness and straightness.

      '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'm insufferably pushing.  Upon my word I think I've 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're of the same country and have at least some of the same tastes, since, like you, I'm intensely fond of Venice.'

      My friend seemed incapable of grasping more than one clause in any proposition, and she now spoke quickly, eagerly, as if she were answering my whole speech.  'I'm 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 I could be as irrelevant as herself.

      'She told me to come out tonight; she has told me very often,' said Miss Tina.  'It is I who wouldn't come.  I don't like to leave her.'

      'Is she too weak, is she really failing?' I demanded, with more emotion, I think, than I meant to betray.  I measured this by the way her eyes rested on me in the darkness.  It embarrassed me a little, and to turn the matter of I continued genially: 'Do let us sit down together comfortably somewhere - while you tell me about her.'

      Miss Tina made no resistance to this.  We found a bench less secluded, less confidential, as it were, than the one in the arbour; 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 Tina 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 gathered 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.  We talked freely, answering questions and asking them and not even taking advantage of certain longish pauses by which they were naturally broken 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 how much less well her aunt had been for a good many days, and in a way that was rather new.  She was markedly weaker; at moments she showed 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 pronounced poor Miss Tina 'a worry, a bore and a source of aggravation'.  She sat still for hours together, as if for long sleep; she had always done that, musing and dozing; but at such times formerly she gave, in breaks, some small sign of life, of interest, liking her companion to be near her with her work.  This sad personage confided to me that at present her aunt was so motionless as to create the fear she was dead; moreover she scarce ate or drank - 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 had always, little company as they had received for years, made a point of sitting in the great parlour.

      I scarce knew what to think of all this - of Miss Tina's sudden conversion to sociability and of the strange fact that the more the old woman appeared to decline to her end the less she should desire to be looked after.  The story hung indifferently together, and I even asked myself if it mightn't be a trap laid for me, the result of a design to make me show my hand.  I couldn't have told why my companions (as they could only be courtesy be called) should have this purpose - why they should try to trip up a lucrative a lodger.  But at any hazard I kept on my guard, so that Miss Tina shouldn't have occasion again to ask me what I might really be 'up to'.  Poor woman, before we parted for the night my mind was at rest as to what she might be.  She was up to nothing at all.

      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 me listen and care.  She ceased wondering why I should, and at last, while describing the brilliant life they had led years before, she almost chattered.  It was Miss Tina who judged it brilliant; she said that when they first came to live in Venice, years and years back - I found her essentially vague about dates and the order in which events had occurred - there was never a week they hadn't some visitor or didn't make some pleasant passeggio in the town.  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 kind circle - this expression was Miss Tina'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 attentive - 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 Tina, turned out with her own hand, paper lampshades, or mats for the decanters of wine at dinner, or those woollen things that in cold weather are worn on the wrists.  The last few years there hadn't been many presents; she couldn't think what to make and her aunt had lost interest and never suggested.  But the people came all the same; if the good Venetians liked you once they liked you for ever.

      There was affecting matter enough 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 Tina evidently was of the impression that she had had a dashing youth.  She had in fact had a glimpse of the Venetian world in its gossiping home-keeping parsimonious professional walks; for I noted for the first time how nearly she had acquired by contact the trick of the familiar soft-sounding almost infantile prattle of the place.  I judged her to have 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 - the failure of interest in the table-mats and lampshades was a sign of that - and she hadn't been able to mingle in society or to entertain it alone; so that her range of reminiscence struck one as an old world altogether.  Her tone, hadn't it been so decent, would have seemed to carry one back to the queer rococo Venice of Goldoni and Casanova.  I found myself mistakenly think of her too as one of Jeffery Aspern's contemporaries; this came from her having so little in common with my own.  It was possible, I indeed reasoned, that she hadn't even heard of him; it might very well be that Juliana had forborne to lift for innocent eyes the veil that covered the temple of her glory.  In this case she perhaps wouldn't know of the existence of the papers, and I welcomed that presumption - it made me feel more safe with her - till I remembered 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; though the effect of it withal was to repudiate the idea of any connection with the poet.  I held it probable at all events that Miss Tina hadn't read a word of his poetry.  Moreover if, with her companion, she had always escaped invasion and research, there was little occasion for her having got it into her head that people were 'after' the letters.  People had not been after them, for people hadn't heard of them.  Cumnor's fruitless feeler would have been a solitary accident.

      When midnight sounded Miss Tina 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 shouldn't come - she was so far from doing everything she liked.

      'You might do a few things I like,' I quite sincerely sighed.

      'Oh you - I don't believe you!' she murmured at this, facing me with her simple solemnity.

      'Why don't you believe me?'

      'Because I don't understand you.'

      'That's just the sort of occasion to have faith.'  I couldn't say more, though I should have liked to, as I saw 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 Tina lingered and lingered: I made out in her the conviction that she shouldn't really soon come down again and the wish therefore to protract the present.  She insisted, too, on making the talk between us personal to ourselves; and altogether her behaviour was such as would have been possible only to a perfectly artless and a considerably witless woman.

      'I shall like the flowers better now that I know them also meant for me.'

      'How could you have doubted it?  If you'll tell me the kind you like best I'll send a double lot.'

      '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 odds with all the prudence I had been teaching myself glimmered at me in 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 couldn't 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 Jeffery Aspern.'

      I watched her well as I pronounced that name, but I saw nothing wonderful.  Why should I indeed?  Wasn't Jeffery Aspern the property of the human race?

      'Oh we read him - we have read him,' she quietly replied.

      'He's my poet of poets - I know him almost by heart.'

      For an instant Miss Tina hesitated; then her sociability was too much for her.  'Oh by heart - that's nothing;' and, though dimly, she quite lighted.  '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 guarded my tone.

      'He used to call on her and take her out.'

      I continued to stare.  'My dear lady, he died a hundred years ago!'

      'Well,' she said amusingly, 'my aunt's a hundred and fifty.'

      'Mercy on us!' I cried; '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 Tina returned.

      '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 eagerly asked.

      'I don't know - that he liked her immensely.'

      'And she - didn't she like him?'

      'She said he was a god.'  Miss Tina 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; their sound might have been the light rustle of an old unfolded love-letter.

      'Fancy, fancy!' I murmured.  And then: 'Tell me this, please - has she got a portrait of him?  They're distressingly rare.'

      'A portrait?  I don't know,' said Miss Tina; and now there was discomfiture in her face.  'Well, goodnight,' she added; and she turned into the house.

      I accompanied her into the wide dusky stone-paved passage that corresponded on the ground floor with our great sala.  It opened at one end into the garden, at the other upon the canal, and was lighted now only by the small lamp always left for me to take up as I went to bed.  An extinguished candle which Miss Tina apparently had brought down with her stood on the same table with it.  'Goodnight, goodnight,' I replied, keeping beside her as she went to get her light.  'Surely you'd 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 Tina went away toward the staircase with the sense evidently of having said too much.

      I let her go - I wished not to frighten her - and I contented myself with remarking that Miss Bordereau wouldn't 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 parlour-wall.  Therefore of course she hadn't any portrait.  Miss Tina made no direct answer to this, and candle in hand, with her back to me, mounted two or three degrees.  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 it out.

      '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 hadn't.  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 Tina personally wouldn't in the last resort be less my friend.  So after a moment's hesitation I answered: 'Yes, I've written about him and I'm 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 kept missing her.  I found my patience ebbing, and after four or five days of this I told the gardener to stop the 'floral tributes'.