8

 

As it turned out the precaution had not been needed, for three hours later, just as I had finished my dinner, Miss Tina 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 of my not believing 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 floor.  I saw that she was not 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's very ill; I think she's dying!'

      'Never in the world,' I answered bitterly.  'Don't you be afraid!'

      'Do go for a doctor - do, do!  Olimpia's 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 wasn't at home she was to follow him where he had gone; but apparently she's following him all over Venice.  I don't know what to do - she looks 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 Tina assented to this and I despatched my servant for the best doctor in the neighbourhood.  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 didn't come up; she seemed all spent and gone.  I repeated that she wasn't gone, that she wouldn't go yet; whereupon Miss Tina gave me a sharper sidelong glance than she had ever favoured me withal and said: 'Really, what do you mean?  I suppose you don't accuse her of make-believe!'  I forget what reply I made to this, but I fear that in my heart I thought the old woman capable of any weird manoeuvre.  Miss Tina wanted to know what I had done to her; her aunt had told her I had made her so angry.  I declared I had done nothing whatever - I had been exceedingly careful; to which my companion rejoined that our friends had assured her she had had a scene with me - a scene that had upset her.  I answered with some resentment that the scene had been of her 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 Jeffery Aspern.  'And did she show you that?  Oh gracious - oh deary me!' groaned Miss Tina, who seemed to feel the situation pass out of her control and the elements of her fate thicken round her.  I answered her I'd give anything to possess it, yet that I had no 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 Tina 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 resignation.  I did think so but forbore 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 lace-like muslin, a sort of extemporised 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 Tina gave me a glance of surprise, evidently not seeing a reason for my impatience.  'You mean she always wears something?  She does it to preserve them?'

      'Because they're so fine?'

      'Oh today, today!'  And Miss Tina shook her head speaking very low.  'But they used to be magnificent!'

      'Yes indeed - we've Aspern's word for that.'  And as I looked again at the old woman's wrappings I could imagine her not having wished to allow any supposition that the greet poet had overdone it.  But I didn't waste my time in considering Juliana, 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 once more all over the room, rummaging with them the closets, the chests of drawers, the tables.  Miss Tina at once noted their direction and read, I think, what was in them; but she didn't answer it, turning away restlessly, anxiously, so that I felt rebuked, with reason, for an appetite well-nigh indecent in the presence of our dying companion.  All the same I took another view, endeavouring to pick out mentally the receptacle to try first, for a person who should wish to put his hand on Miss Bordereau's papers directly after her death.  The place was a dire confusion; it looked like the dressing-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 discoloured, which might have been fifty years old.  Miss Tina after a moment noticed the direction of my eyes again, and, as if she guessed how I judged such appearances - forgetting that I had no business to judge them at all - said, perhaps to defend herself from the imputation of complicity in the disorder:

      '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 that just allowed room for it.  It struck me as a queer superannuated coffer, of painted wood, with elaborate handles and shrivelled straps and with the colour - it had last been endued with a coat of light green - much rubbed off.  It evidently had travelled with Juliana in the olden time - in the days of 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 Tina'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 the padrona's room, where I saw him peep over the doctor's shoulder.  I motioned him away the more instantly that the sight of his prying face reminded me how little I myself had to do there - an admonition confirmed by the sharp way the little doctor eyed me, his air of taking 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 kept me still in range as if it struck him I too 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 couldn't go further; I couldn't leave the place.  I don't know exactly what I thought might happen, but I felt it important to be there.  I wandered about the alleys - the warm night had come on - smoking cigar after cigar and studying 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 didn't 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 just going and coming over 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 while it assailed me again that perhaps there were now no papers to carry!

      I wandered about an hour and more.  I looked out for Miss Tina at one of the windows, having a vague idea that she might come there to give me some sign.  Wouldn't she see the red tip of my cigar in the dark and feel sure I was hanging on to know what the doctor had said?  I'm afraid it's a proof of the grossness of my anxieties that I should have taken in some degree for granted at such an hour, in the midst of the greatest change that could fall on her, poor Miss Tina's having also a free mind for them.  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 couldn't have taken so long to attest her decease.  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 Tina hadn't; he couldn't know what I was after and I couldn't tell him, though I suspected in him fantastic private theories about me which he thought fine and which, had I more exactly known them, I should have thought offensive.

      I went upstairs at last, but I mounted no higher than the sala.  The door of Miss Bordereau's apartment was open, showing from the parlour the dimness of a poor candle.  I went toward it with a light tread, and at the same moment Miss Tina 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's no immediate danger.'

      'No immediate danger?  Surely he thinks her condition serious?'

      'Yes, because she had been excited.  That affects her dreadfully.'

      'It will do so again then, because she works herself up.  She did so this afternoon.'

      'Yes, she mustn't come out any more,' said Miss Tina with one of her lapses into a deeper detachment.

      'What's the use of making such a remark as that,' I permitted myself to ask, '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're scared and upset.'

      'Well, I'm not upset now,' said Miss Tina placidly enough.  'She's 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 returned, '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're here?'

      Miss Tina waited a little; though her face was in deep shadow - she had her back to the light in the parlour 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 had heard your step.'

      'Why, I came on tiptoe, as soundlessly as possible.'

      'Well, I had heard you,' said Miss Tina.

      'And is your aunt alone now?'

      'Oh no - Olimpia sits there.'

      On my side I debated.  'Shall we then pass in there?'  And I nodded at the parlour; I wanted more and more to be on the spot.

      'We can't talk there - she'll hear us.'

      I was on the point of replying that in that case we'd sit silent, but I felt too much this wouldn't do, there was something I desired so immensely to ask her.  Thus I hinted we might walk a little in the sala, keeping more at the other end, where we shouldn't disturb our friend.  Miss Tina 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 submitted that we had best remain there, as she would see the doctor arrive the sooner.  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 neighbourhood 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, his jacket on his shoulder and his hat on his ear, came to us from a distance.  This didn't 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 didn't stop, it didn't carry the doctor; and after it had gone on I said to Miss Tina:

      '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 mean she had transferred them.'

      'Oh yes; they're not in the trunk,' said Miss Tina.

      'May I ask if you've looked?'

      'Yes, I've looked - for you.'

      'How for me, dear Miss Tina?  Do you mean you'd have given them to me if you had found them?' - and I fairly trembled with the question.

      She delayed to reply and I waited.  Suddenly she broke out: 'I don't know what I'd 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 Tina added in a moment, as if she had guessed this and was sorry for me, but at the same time wished to explain that I did push her, or at least harp on the chord, 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've been guilty myself!'

      'You've been guilty?'

      'I've sailed under false colours.'  I felt now I must make a clean breast of it, must tell her I had given her an invented name on account of my fear her aunt would have heard of me and so refuse to take me in.  I explained this as well as that I had really been a party to the letter addressed them by John Cumnor months before.

      She listened with great attention, almost in fact gaping for wonder, 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'd like your own best.'

      'So do I' - and I felt my laugh rueful.  '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 of course Mrs Prest.

      She considered; I thought she was perhaps going to pronounce us very base.  But this was not her way, and she remarked after a moment, as in candid impartial contemplation: 'How much you must want them!'

      'Oh I do, passionately!' I grinned, I fear, to admit.  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 Tina 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 my friend 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 rather feel you a new person, you know, now that you've a new name.'

      'It isn't a new one; it's a very gold old one, thank fortune!'

      She looked at me a moment.  'Well, I do like it better.'

      'Oh if you didn't I would almost go on with the other1'

      'Would you really?'

      I laughed again, but I returned for all answer: 'Of course if she can rummage about that way she can perfectly have burnt them.'

      'You must wait - you must wait,' Miss Tina mournfully moralised; 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 couldn't 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 promised you'd wait.'

      'Oh you mean wait even for that?'

      'For what then?'

      'Ah nothing,' I answered rather foolishly, being ashamed to tell her what had been implied in my acceptance of delay - the idea that she would perhaps do more for me than merely find out.

      I know not if she guessed this; at all events she seemed to bethink herself of some propriety of showing me more rigour.  '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!'

      Nothing is more possible than that she wouldn't have contested this even hadn't she 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 our proprietress 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 Tina to go off with him alone, only asking her leave to come back later for news.

      I went out of the house and walked far, as far as the Piazza, where my restlessness declined to quit me.  I was unable to sit down; it was very late now though there were people still at the little tables in front of the cafés: I could but uneasily revolve, and I did so half a dozen times.  The only comfort, nonetheless, was in my having told Miss Tina who I really was.  At last I took my way home again, getting gradually and 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 Tina 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 a hint that my faltering friend had gone to bed in impatience 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 my entrance, but it had no such effect.  If I have frankly stated the importunities, the indelicacies, of which my desire to possess myself of Jeffery Aspern's papers had made me capable I didn't shrink, it seems to me, from confessing this last indiscretion.  I regard it as the worst thing I did, yet there were extenuating circumstances.  I was deeply though doubtless no disinterestedly anxious for more news of Juliana, and Miss Tina had accepted from me, as it were, a rendezvous which it might have been a point of honour with me to keep.  It may be objected that her leaving the place dark was a positive sign that she released me, and to this I can only reply that I wished 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 footsteps caused no-one to stir.  I came farther into the room; I lingered there lamp in hand.  I wanted to give Miss Tina a chance to come to me if, as I couldn't doubt, she were still with her aunt.  I made no noise to call her; I only waited to see if she wouldn't notice my light.  She didn't, and I explained this - I found afterwards 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 didn't, for I found myself at the same moment given up to something else.  I had no definite purpose, no bad intention, but felt myself held to the spot by an acute, though absurd, sense of opportunity.  Opportunity for what I couldn't have said, inasmuch as it wasn't in my mind that I might proceed to thievery.  Even had this tempted me I was confronted with the evident fact that Miss Bordereau didn't 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 freedom and safety, nearer to the source of my hopes 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 Tina 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?  Yet might I, when it came to that?  She herself knew even better than I how little.

      I stopped in front of the secretary, gaping at it vainly and no doubt grotesquely; 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 hadn't the keen old woman wouldn't have put them in such a place as that after removing them from the green trunk - wouldn't have transferred them, with the idea of their safety on her brain, from the better hiding-place to the worse.  The secretary was more conspicuous, more exposed in a room in which she could no longer mount guard.  It opened with a key, but there was a small brass handle, like a button, as well: I saw this as I played my lamp over it.  I did something more, for the climax of my crisis; I caught a glimpse of the possibility that Miss Tina wished me really to understand.  If she didn't so wish me, if she wished me to keep away, why hadn't she 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 didn't leave them alone she meant me to come for a purpose - a purpose now represented by the super-subtle inference that to oblige me she had unlocked the secretary.  She hadn't left the key, but the lid would probably move if I touched the button.  This possibility pressed me hard and I bent very close to judge.  I didn't 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 really heard nothing.  I almost let my luminary drop and certainly I stepped back, straightening myself up at what I saw.  Juliana stood there in her night-dress, by 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 were like the sudden drench, for a caught burglar, of a flood of gaslight; 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 can't now say 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 Tina's arms.