9

 

I left Venice the next morning, directly on learning that my hostess had not succumbed, as I feared at the moment, to the shock I had given her - the shock I may also say she had given me.  How in the world could I have supposed her capable of getting out of bed by herself?  I failed to see Miss Tina before going; I only say the donna, whom I entrusted with a note for her younger mistress.  In this note I mentioned that I should be absent but a few days.  I went to Treviso, to Bassano, to Castelfranco; I took walks and drives and looked at musty old churches with ill-lighted pictures; I spent hours seated smoking at the doors of cafés, where there were flies and yellow curtains, on the shady side of sleepy little squares.  In spite of these pastimes, which were mechanical and perfunctory, I scantily enjoyed my travels: I had had to gulp down a bitter draught and couldn't get rid of the taste.  It had been devilish awkward, as the young men say, to be found by Juliana in the dead of night examining the attachment of her bureau; and it had not been less so to have to believe for a good many hours after that it was highly probable I had killed her.  My humiliation galled me, but I had to make the best of it, had, in writing to Miss Tina, to minimise it, as well as account for the posture in which I had been discovered.  As she gave me no word of answer I couldn't know what impression I made on her.  It rankled for me that I had been called a publishing scoundrel, since certainly I did publish and no less certainly hadn't been very delicate.  There was a moment when I stood convinced that the only way to purge my dishonour was to take myself straight away on the instant; to sacrifice my hopes and relieve the two poor women for ever of the oppression of my intercourse.  Then I reflected that I had better try a short absence first, for I must already have had a sense (unexpressed and dim) that in disappearing completely it wouldn't be merely my own hopes I should condemn to extinction.  It would perhaps answer if I kept dark long enough to give the elder lady time to believe herself rid of me.  That she would wish to be rid of me after this - if I wasn't rid of her - was now not to be doubted: that midnight monstrosity would have cured her of the disposition to put up with my company for the sake of my dollars.  I said to myself that after all I couldn't abandon Miss Tina, and I continued to say this even while I noted that she quite ignored my earnest request - I had given her two or three addresses, as little towns, poste restante - for some sign of her actual state.  I would have made my servant write me news but that he was unable to manage a pen.  Couldn't I measure the scorn of Miss Tina's silence - little disdainful as she had ever been?  Really the soreness pressed; yet if I had scrupples about going back I had others about not doing so, and I wanted to put myself on a better footing.  The end of it was that I did return to Venice on the twelfth day; and as my gondola gently bumped against our palace steps a fine palpitation of suspense showed me the violence my absence had done me.

      I had faced about so abruptly that I hadn't even telegraphed to my servant.  He was therefore not at the station to meet me, but he poked out his head from an upper window when I reached the house.  'They have put her into earth, quella vecchia,' he said to me in the lower hall while he shouldered my valise; and he grinned and almost winked as if he knew I should be pleased with the news.

      'She's dead!' I cried, giving him a very different look.

      'So it appears, since they've buried her.'

      'It's all over then?  When was the funeral?'

      'The other yesterday.  But a funeral you could scarcely call it, signore: roba da niente - un piccolo passaggio bruto of two gondolas.  Poveretta!' the man continued, referring apparently to Miss Tina.  His conception of funerals was that they were mainly to amuse the living.

      I wanted to know about Miss Tina, how she might be and generally where; but I asked him no more questions till we had got upstairs.  Now that the fact had met me I took a bad view of it, especially of the idea that poor Miss Tina had had to manage by herself after the end.  What did she know about arrangements, about the steps to take in such a case?  Poveretta indeed!  I could only hope the doctor had given her support and that she hadn't been neglected by the old friends of whom she had told me, the little band of the faithful whose fidelity consisted in coming to the house once a year.  I elicited from my servant that two old ladies and an old gentleman had in fact rallied round Miss Tina and had supported her - they had come for her in a gondola of their own - during the journey to the cemetery, the little red-walled island of tombs which lies to the north of the town and on the way to Murano.  It appeared from these signs that the Misses Bordereau were Catholics, a discovery I had never made, as the old woman couldn't go to church and her niece, as far as I perceived, either didn't, or went only to early mass in the parish before I was stirring.  Certainly even the priests respected their seclusion; I had never caught the whisk of the curato's skirt.  That evening, an hour later, I sent my servant down with five words on a card to ask if Miss Tina would see me a few moments.  She was not in the house, where he had sought her, he told me when he came back, but in the garden walking about to refresh herself and picking the flowers quite as if they belonged to her.  He had found her there and she would be happy to see me.

      I went down and passed half an hour with poor Miss Tina.  She had always had a look of musty mourning, as if she were wearing out old robes of sorrow that wouldn't come to an end; and in this particular she made no different show.  But she clearly had been crying, crying a great deal - simply, satisfyingly, refreshingly, with a primitive retarded sense of solitude and violence.  But she had none of the airs or graces of grief, and I was almost surprised to see her stand there in the first dusk with her hands full of admirable roses and smile at me with reddened eyes.  Her white face, in the frame of her mantilla, looked longer, leaner than usual.  I hadn't doubted her being irreconcilably disgusted with me, her considering I ought to have been on the spot to advise her, to help her; and, though I believed there was no rancour in her composition and no great conviction of the importance of her affairs, I had prepared myself for a change in her manner, for some air of injury and estrangement, which should say to my conscience: 'Well, you're a nice person to have professed things!'  But historic truth compels me to declare that this poor lady's dull face ceased to be dull, almost ceased to be plain, as she turned it gladly to her late aunt's lodger.  That touched him extremely, and he thought it simplified his situation until he found it didn't.  I was as kind to her that evening as I knew how to be, and I walked about the garden with her as long as seemed good.  There was no explanation of any sort between us; I didn't ask her why she hadn't answered my letter.  Still less did I repeat what I had said to her in that communication; if she chose to let me suppose she had forgotten the position in which Miss Bordereau had surprised me and the effect of the discovery on the old woman, I was quite willing to take it that way: I was grateful to her for not treating me as if I had killed her aunt.

      We strolled and strolled, though really not much passed between us save the recognition of her bereavement, conveyed in my manner and in the expression she had of depending on me now, since I let her see I still took an interest in her.  Miss Tina's was no breast for the pride or the pretence of independence; she didn't in the least suggest that she knew at present what would become of her.  I forbore to press on that question, however, for I certainly was not prepared to say that I would take charge of her.  I was cautious; not ignobly, I think, for I felt her knowledge of life to be so small that in her unsophisticated vision there would be no reason why - since I seemed to pity her - I shouldn't somehow look after her.  She told me how her aunt had died, very peacefully at the last, and how everything had been done afterwards by the care of her good friends - fortunately, thanks to me, she said, smiling, there was money in the house.  She repeated that when once the 'nice' Italians like you they are your friends for life, and when we had gone into this she asked me about my giro, my impressions, my adventures, the places I had seen.  I told her what I could, making it up partly, I'm afraid, as in my disconcerted state I had taken little in; and after she had heard me she exclaimed, quite as if she had forgotten her aunt and her sorrow, 'Dear, dear, how much I should like to do such things - to take an amusing little journey!'  It came over me for the moment that I ought to propose some enterprise, say I would accompany her anywhere she liked; and I remarked at any rate that a pleasant excursion - to give her a change - might be managed: we would think of it, talk it over.  I spoke never a word of the Aspern documents, asked no question as to what she had ascertained or what had otherwise happened with regard to them before Juliana's death.  It wasn't that I wasn't on pins and needles to know, but that I thought it more decent not to show greed again so soon after the catastrophe.  I hoped she herself would say something, but she never glanced that way, and I thought this natural at the time.  Later on, however, that night, it occurred to me that her silence was matter for suspicion; since if she had talked of my movements, of anything so detached as the Giorgione at Castelfranco, she might have alluded to what she could easily remember was in my mind.  It was not to be supposed the motion produced by her aunt's death had blotted out the recollection that I was interested in that lady's relics, and I fidgeted afterwards as it came to me that her reticence might very possibly just mean that no relics survived.  We separated in the garden - it was she who said she must go in; now that she was alone on the piano nobile I felt that (judged at any rate by Venetian ideas) I was on rather a different footing in regard to the invasion of it.  As I shook hands with her for goodnight I asked if she had some general plan, had thought over what she had best do.  'Oh yes, oh yes, but I haven't settled anything yet,' she replied quite cheerfully.  Was her cheerfulness explained by the impression that I would settle for her?

      I was glad the next morning that we had neglected practical questions, as this gave me a pretext for seeing her again immediately.  There was a practical enough question now to be touched on.  I owed it to her to let her know formally that of course I didn't expect her to keep me on as a lodger, as also to show some interest in her own tenure, what she might have on her hands in the way of a lease.  But I was destined, as befell, to converse with her for more than an instant on either of these points.  I sent her no message; I simply went down to the sala and walked to and fro there.  I knew she would come out; she would promptly see me accessible.  Somehow I preferred not to be shut up with her; gardens and big halls seemed better places to talk.  It was a splendid morning, with something in the air that told of the waning of the long Venetian summer; a freshness from the sea that stirred the flowers in the garden and made a pleasant draught in the house, less shuttered and darkened now than when the old woman was alive.  It was the beginning of autumn, of the end of the golden months.  With this it was the end of my experiment - or would be in the course of half an hour, when I should really have learned that my dream had been reduced to ashes.  After that there would be nothing left for me but to go to the station; for seriously - and as it struck me in the morning light - I couldn't linger there to act as guardian to a piece of middle-aged female helplessness.  If she hadn't saved the papers wherein should I be indebted to her?  I think I winced a little as I asked myself how much, if she had saved them, I should have to recognise and, as it were, reward such a courtesy.  Mightn't that service after all saddle me with a guardianship?  If this idea didn't make me more uncomfortable as I walked up and down it was because I was convinced I had nothing to look to.  If the old woman hadn't destroyed everything before she pounced on me in the parlour she had done so the next day.

      It took Miss Tina rather longer than I had expected to act on my calculation; but when at last she came out she looked at me without surprise.  I mentioned I had been waiting for her and she asked why I hadn't let her know.  I was glad a few hours later on that I had checked myself before remarking that a friendly intuition might have told her: it turned to comfort for me that I hadn't played even to that mild extent on her sensibility.  What I did say was virtually the truth - that I was too nervous, since I expected her now to settle my fate.

      'Your fate? said Miss Tina, giving me a queer look; and as she spoke I noticed a rare change in her.  Yes, she was other than she had been the evening before - less natural and less easy.  She had been crying the day before and was not crying now, yet she struck me as less confident.  It was as if something had happened to her during the night, or at least as if she had thought of something that troubled her - something in particular that affected her relations with me, made them more embarrassing and more complicated.  Had she simply begun to feel that her aunt's not being there now altered my position?

      'I mean about our papers.  Are there any?  You must know now.'

      'Yes, there are a great many; more than I supposed.'  I was struck with the way her voice trembled as she told me this.

      'Do you mean you've got them in there - and that I may see them?'

      'I don't think you can see them,' said Miss Tina with an extraordinary expression of entreaty in her eyes, as if the dearest hope she had in the world now was that I wouldn't take them from her.  But how could she expect me to make such a sacrifice as that after all that had passed between us?  What had I come back to Venice for but to see them, to take them?  My joy at learning they were still in existence was such that if the poor woman had gone down on her knees to beseech me never to mention them again I would have treated the proceedings as a bad joke.  'I've got them but I can't show them,' she lamentably added.

      'Not even to me?  Ah Miss Tina!'  I broke into a tone of infinite remonstrance and reproach.

      She coloured and the tears came back to her eyes; I measured the anguish it cost her to take such a stand, which a dreadful sense of duty had imposed on her.  It made me quite sick to find myself confronted with that particular obstacle; all the more that it seemed to me I had been distinctly encouraged to leave it out of account.  I quite held Miss Tina to have assured me that if she had no greater hindrance than that -!  'You don't mean to say you made her a deathbed promise?  It was precisely against your doing anything of that sort that I thought I was safe.  Oh I would rather she had burnt the papers outright than have to reckon with such a treachery as that.'

      'No, it isn't a promise,' said Miss Tina.

      'Pray what is it then?'

      She hung fire, but finally said: 'She tried to burn them, but I prevented it.  She had hid them in her bed.'

      'In her bed-?'

      'Between the mattresses.  That's where she put them when she took them out of the trunk.  I can't understand how she did it, because Olimpia didn't help her.  She tells me so and I believe her.  My aunt only told her afterwards, so that she shouldn't undo the bed - anything but the sheets.  So it was very badly made,' added Miss Tina simply.

      'I should think so!  And how did she try to burn them?'

      She didn't try much; she was too weak those last days.  But she told me - she charged me.  Oh it was terrible!  She couldn't speak after that night.  She could only make signs.'

      'And what did you do?'

      'I took them away.  I locked them up.'

      'In the secretary?'

      'Yes, in the secretary,' said Miss Tina, reddening again.

      'Did you tell her you'd burn them?'

      'No, I didn't - on purpose.'

      'On purpose to gratify me?'

      'Yes, only for that.'

      'And what good will you have done me if after all you won't show them?'

      'Oh none.  I know that - I know that,' she dismally sounded.

      'And did she believe you had destroyed them?'

      'I don't know what she believed at the last.  I couldn't tell - she was too far gone.'

      'Then if there was no promise and no assurance I can't see what ties you.'

      'Oh she hated it so - she hated it so!  She was so jealous.  But here's the portrait - you may have that,' the poor woman announced, taking the little picture, wrapped up in the same manner in which her aunt had wrapped it, out of her pocket.

      'I may have it - do you mean you give it to me?' I gasped as it passed into my hand.

      'Oh yes.'

      'But it's worth money - a large sum.'

      'Well!' said Miss Tina, still with her strange look.

      I didn't know what to make of it, for it could scarcely mean that she wanted to bargain like her aunt.  She spoke as for making me a present.  'I can't take it from you as a gift,' I said, 'and yet I can't afford to pay you for it according to the idea Miss Bordereau had of its value.  She rated it at a thousand pounds.'

      'Couldn't we sell it?' my friend threw off.

      'God forbid!  I prefer the picture to the money.'

      'Well then keep it.'

      'You're very generous.'

      'So are you.'

      'I don't know why you should think so,' I returned; and this was true enough, for the good creature appeared to have it in her mind some rich reference that I didn't in the least seize.

      'Well, you've made a great difference for me,' she said.

      I looked at Jeffery Aspern's face in the little picture, partly in order not to look at that of my companion, which had begun to trouble me, even to frighten me a little -  it had taken so very odd, so strained and unnatural a cast.  I made no answer to this last declaration; but I privately consulted Jeffery Aspern's delightful eyes with my own - they were so young and brilliant and yet so wise and so deep: I asked him what on earth was the matter with Miss Tina.  He seemed to smile at me with mild mockery; he might have been amused at my case.  I had got into a pickle for him - as if he needed it!  He was unsatisfactory for the only moment since I had known him.  Nevertheless, now that I held the little picture in my hand I felt it would be a precious possession.  'Is this a bribe to make me give up the papers?' I presently and all perversely asked.  'Much as I value this, you know, if I were to be obliged to choose, the papers are what I should prefer.  Ah but every so much!'

      'How can you choose - how can you choose?' Miss Tina returned slowly and woefully.

      'I see!  Of course there's nothing to be said if you regard the interdiction that rests on you as quite insurmountable.  In this case it must seem to you that to part with them would be an impiety of the worst kind, a simple sacrilege!'

      She shook her head, only lost in the queerness of her case.  'You'd understand if you had know her.  I'm afraid,' she quavered suddenly - 'I'm afraid!  She was terrible when she was angry.'

      'Yes, I saw something of that, that night.  She was terrible.  Then I saw her eyes.  Lord, they were fine!'

      'I see them - they stare at me in the dark!' said Miss Tina.

      'You've grown nervous with all you've been through.'

      'Oh yes, very - very!'

      'You mustn't mind; that will pass away,' I said kindly.  Then I added resignedly, for it really seemed to me that I must accept the situation: 'Well, so it is, and it can't be helped.  I must renounce.'  My friend, at this, with her eyes on me, gave a low soft moan, and I went on: 'I only wish to goodness she had destroyed them: then there would be nothing more to say.  And I can't understand why, with her ideas, she didn't.'

      'Oh she lived on them!' said Miss Tina.

      'You can imagine whether that makes me want less to see them,' I returned not quite so desperately.  'But don't let me stand here as if I had it in my soul to tempt you to anything base.  Naturally, you understand, I give up my rooms.  I leave Venice immediately.'  And I took up my hat, which I had placed on a chair.  We were still rather awkwardly on our feet in the middle of the sala.  She had left the door of the apartments open behind her, but had not led me that way.

      A strange spasm came into her face as she saw me take my hat.  'Immediately - do you mean today?'  The tone of the words was tragic - they were a cry of desolation.

      'Oh no; not so long as I can be of the least service to you.'

      'Well, just a day or two more - just two or three days,' she panted.  Then controlling herself she added in another manner: 'She wanted to say something to me - the last day - something very particular.  But she couldn't.'

      'Something very particular?'

      'Something more about the papers.'

      'And did you guess - have you any idea?'

      'No, I've tried to think - but I don't know.  I've thought all kinds of things.'

      'As for instance?'

      'Well, that if you were a relation it would be different.'

      I wondered.  'If I were a relation-?'

      'If you weren't a stranger.  Then it would be the same for you as for me.  Anything that's mine would be yours, and you could do what you like.  I shouldn't be able to prevent you - and you'd have no responsibility.'

      She brought out this droll explanation with a nervous rush and as if speaking words got by heart.  They gave me the impression of a subtlety which at first I failed to follow.  But after a moment her face helped me to see farther, and then the queerest of lights came to me.  It was embarrassing, and I bent my head over Jeffery Aspern's portrait.  What an odd expression was in his face!  'Get out of it as you can, my dear fellow!'  I put the picture into the pocket of my coat and said to Miss Tina: 'Yes, I'll sell it for you.  I shan't get a thousand pounds by any means, but I shall get something good.'

      She looked at me through pitiful tears, but seemed to try to smile as she returned: 'We can divide the money.'

      'No, no, it shall be all yours.'  Then I went on: 'I think I know what your poor aunt wanted to say.  She wanted to give directions that her papers should be buried with her.'

      Miss Tina appeared to weigh this suggestion; after which she answered with striking decision, 'Oh no, she wouldn't have thought that safe!'

      'It seems to me nothing could be safer.'

      'She had an idea that when people want to publish they're capable-!'  And she paused, very red.

      'Of violating a tomb?  Mercy on us, what must she have thought of me!'

      'She wasn't just, she wasn't generous!' my companion cried with sudden passion.

      The light that had come into my mind a moment before spread farther.  'Ah don't say that, for we are a dreadful race.'  Then I pursued: 'If she left a will, that may give you some idea.'

      'I've found nothing of the sort - she destroyed it.  She was very fond of me.'  Miss Tina added with an effect of extreme inconsequence.  'She wanted me to be happy.  And if any person should be kind to me - she wanted to speak of that.'

      I was almost awestricken by the astuteness with which the good lady found herself inspired, transparent astuteness as it was and stitching, as the phrase is, with white thread.  'Depend upon it she didn't want to make any provision that would be agreeable to me.'

      'No, not to you, but quite to me.  She knew I should like it if you could carry out your idea.  Not because she cared for you, but because she did think of me,' Miss Tina went on with her unexpected persuasive volubility.  'You could see the things - you could use them.'  She stopped, seeing I grasped the sense of her conditional - stopped long enough for me to give some sign that I didn't give.  She must have been conscious, however, that though my face showed the greatest embarrassment ever painted on a human countenance it was not set as a stone, it was also full of compassion.  It was a comfort to me a long time afterwards to consider that she couldn't have seen in me the smallest symptom of disrespect.  'I don't know what to do; I'm too tormented, I'm too ashamed!' she continued with vehemence.  Then turning away from me and burying her face in her hands she burst into a flood of tears.  If she didn't know what to do it may be imagined whether I knew better.  I stood there dumb, watching her while her sobs resounded in the great empty hall.  In a moment she was up at me again with her streaming eyes.  'I'd give you everything, and she'd understand, where she is - she'd forgive me!'

      'Ah Miss Tina - ah Miss Tina,' I stammered for all reply.  I didn't know what to do, as I say, but at a venture I made a wild vague movement in consequence of which I found myself at the door.  I remember standing there and saying, 'It wouldn't do, it wouldn't do!' - saying it pensively, awkwardly, grotesquely, while I looked away to the opposite end of the sala as at something very interesting.  The next thing I remember is that I was downstairs and out of the house.  My gondola was there and my gondolier, reclining the cushions, sprang up as soon as he saw me.  I jumped in and to his usual 'Dove comanda?' replied, in a tone that made him stare: 'Anywhere, anywhere; out into the lagoon!'

      He rowed me away and I sat there prostrate, groaning softly to myself, my hat pulled over my brow.  What in the name of the preposterous did she mean if she didn't mean to offer me her hand?  That was the price - that was the price!  And did she think I wanted it, poor deluded infatuated extravagant lady?  My gondolier, behind me, must have seen my ears red as I wondered, motionless there under the fluttering tenda with my hidden face, noticing nothing as we passed - wondered whether her delusion, her infatuation had been my own reckless work.  Did she think I had made love to her even to get the papers?  I hadn't, I hadn't; I repeated that over to myself for an hour, for two hours, till I was wearied if not convinced.  I don't know where, on the lagoon, my gondolier took me; we floated aimlessly and with slow rake strokes.  At last I became conscious that we were near the Lido, far up, on the right hand, as you turn your back to Venice, and I made him put me ashore.  I wanted to walk, to move, to shed some of my bewilderment.  I crossed the narrow strip and got to the sea-beach - I took my way toward Malamocco.  But presently I flung myself down again on the warm sand, in the breeze, on the coarse dry grass.  It took it out of me to think I had been so much at fault, that I had unwittingly, but nonetheless deplorably trifled.  But I hadn't given her cause - distinctly I hadn't.  I had said to Mrs Prest that I would make love to her; but it had been a joke without consequences and I had never said it to my victim.  I had been as kind as possible because I really liked her; but since when had that become a crime where a woman of such an age and such an appearance was concerned?  I am far from remembering clearly the succession of events and feelings during this long day of confusion, which I spent entirely in wandering about, without going home, until late at night: it only comes back to me that there were moments when I pacified my conscience and others when I lashed it into pain.  I didn't laugh all day - that I do recollect; the case, however, it might have struck others, seemed to me so little amusing.  I should have been better employed perhaps in taking in the comic side of it.  At any rate, whether I had given cause or not, there was no doubt whatever that I couldn't pay the price.  I couldn't accept the proposal.  I couldn't, for a bundle of tattered papers, marry a ridiculous pathetic provincial old woman.  It was a proof of how little she supposed the idea would come to me that she should have decided to suggest it herself in that practical argumentative heroic way - with the timidity, however, so much more striking than the boldness, that her reasons appeared to come first and her feelings afterward.

      As the day went on I grew to wish I had never heard of Aspen's relics, and I cursed the extravagant curiosity that had put John Cumnor on the scent of them.  We had more than enough material without them, and my predicament was the just punishment of that most fatal of human follies, our not having known when to stop.  It was very well to say it was no predicament, but the way out was simple, that I had only to leave Venice by the first train in the morning, after addressing Miss Tina a note which should be placed in her hand as soon as I got clear of the house; for it was strong proof of my quandary that when I tried to make up the note to my taste in advance - I would put it on paper as soon as I got home, before going to bed - I couldn't think of anything but 'How can I thank you for the rare confidence you've placed in me?'  That would never do; it sounded exactly as if an acceptance were to follow.  Of course I might get off without writing at all, but that would be brutal, and my idea was still to exclude brutal solutions.  As my confusion cooled I lost myself in wonder at the importance I had attached to Juliana's crumpled scraps; the thought of them became odious to me and I was as vexed with the old witch for the superstition that had prevented her from destroying them as I was with myself for having already spent more money than I could afford in attempting to control their fate.  I forget what I did, where I went after leaving the Lido and at what hour or with what recovery of composure I made my way back to my boat.  I only know that in the afternoon, when the air was aglow with the sunset, I was standing before the church of Saints John and Paul and looking up at the small square-jawed face of Bartolomeo Colleoni, the terrible condottiere who sits so sturdily astride of his huge bronze horse on the high pedestal on which Venetian gratitude maintains him.  The statue is incomparable, the finest of all mounted figures, unless that of Marcus Aurelius, who rides benignant before the Roman Capitol, be finer: but I was not thinking of that; I only found myself staring at the triumphant captain as if he had an oracle on his lips.  The western light shines into all his grimness at that hour and makes it wonderfully personal.  But he continued to look far over my head, at the red immersion of another day - he had seen so many go down into the lagoon through the centuries - and if he were thinking of battles and stratagems they were of a different quality from any I had to tell him of.  He couldn't direct me what to do, gaze up at him as I might.  Well it was before this or after that I wandered about for an hour in the small canals, to the continued stupefaction of my gondolier, who had never seen me so restless and yet so void of purpose and could extract from me no order but 'Go anywhere - everywhere - all over the place'?  He reminded me that I had not lunched, and expressed therefore respectfully the hope that I would dine earlier.  He had had long periods of leisure during the day, when I had left the boat and rambled, so that I was not obliged to consider him, and I told him that till the morrow, for reasons, I should touch no meat.  It was an effect of poor Miss Tina's proposal, not altogether auspicious, that I had quite lost my appetite.  I don't know why it happened that on this occasion I was more than ever struck with that queer air of sociability, of cousinship and family life, which makes up half the expression of Venice.  Without streets and vehicles, the uproar of wheels, the brutality of horses, and with its little winding ways where people crowd together, where voices sound as in the corridors of a house, where the human step circulates as if it skirted the angles of furniture and shoes never wear out, the place has the character of an immense collective apartment, in which Piazzo San Marco is the most ornamental corner, and palaces and churches, for the rest, play the part of great divans of repose, tables of entertainment, expanses of decoration.  And somehow the splendid common domicile, familiar, domestic and resonant, also resembles a theatre with its actors clicking over bridges and, in straggling processions, tripping along fundamentals.  As you sit in your gondola the footways that in certain parts edge the canals assume to the eye the importance of a stage, meeting it at the same angle, and the Venetian figures, moving to and fro against the battered scenery of their little houses of comedy, strike you as members of an endless dramatic troupe.

      I went to bed that night very tired and without being able to compose an address to Miss Tina.  Was this failure the reason why I became conscious the next morning as soon as I awoke of a determination to see the poor lady again the first moment she would receive me?  That had something to do with it, but what had still more was the fact that during my sleep the oddest revulsion had taken place in my spirit.  I found myself aware of this almost as soon as I opened my eyes: it made me jump out of bed with the movement of a man who remembers that he has left the house-door ajar or a candle burning under a shelf.  Was I still in time to save my goods?  That question was in my heart; for what had now come to pass was that in the unconscious cerebration of sleep I had swung back to a passionate appreciation of Juliana's treasure.  The pieces composing it were now more precious than ever and a positive ferocity had come into my need to acquire them.  The condition Miss Tina had attached to that act no longer appeared an obstacle worth thinking of, and for an hour this morning my repentant imagination brushed it aside.  It was absurd I should be able to invent nothing; absurd to renounce so easily and turn away helpless from the idea that the only way to become possessed was to unite myself to her for life.  I mightn't unite myself, yet I might still have what she had.  I must add that by the time I sent down to ask if she would see me I had invented no alternative, though in fact I drew out my dressing in the interest of my wit.  This failure was humiliating, yet what could the alternative be?  Miss Tina sent back word I might come; and as I descended the stairs and crossed the sala to her door - this time she received me in her aunt's forlorn parlour - I hoped she wouldn't think my announcement was to be 'favourable'.  She certainly would have understood my recoil of the day before.

      As soon as I came into the room I saw that she had done so, but I also saw something which had not been in my forecast.  Poor Miss Tina's sense of her failure had produced a rare alteration in her, but I had been too full of stratagems and spoils to think of that.  Now I took it in; I can scarcely tell how it startled me.  She stood in the middle of the room with a face of mildness bent upon me, and her look of forgiveness, of absolution, made her angelic.  It beautified her; she was younger; she was not a ridiculous old woman.  This trick of her expression, this magic of her spirit, transfigured her, and while I still noted it I heard a whisper somewhere in the depths of my conscience: 'Why not, after all - why not?'  It seemed to me I could pay the price.  Still more distinctly, however, than the whisper I heard Miss Tina's own voice.  I was so struck with the different effect she made on me that at first I wasn't clearly aware of what she was saying; then I recognised she had bade me goodbye - she said something about hoping I should be very happy.

      'Goodbye - goodbye?' I repeated with an inflection interrogative and probably foolish.

      I saw she didn't feel the interrogation, she only heard the words: she had strung herself up to accepting our separation and they fell upon her ear as a proof.  'Are you going today?' she asked.  'But it doesn't matter, for whenever you go I shall not see you again.  I don't want to.'  And she smiled strangely, with an infinite gentleness.  She had never doubted my having left her the day before in horror.  How could she, since I hadn't come back before night to contradict, even as a simple form, even as an act of common humanity, such an idea?  And now she had the force of soul - Miss Tina with her force of soul was a new conception - to smile at me in her abjection.

      'What shall you do - where shall you go?' I asked.

      'Oh I don't know.  I've done the great thing.  I've destroyed the papers.'

      'Destroyed them?' I wailed.

      'Yes; what was I to keep them for?  I burnt them last night, one by one, in the kitchen?'

      'One by one?' I coldly echoed.

      'It took a long time - there were so many.'  The room seemed to go round me as she said this and a real darkness for a moment descended on my eyes.  When it passed, Miss Tina was still there but the transfiguration was over and she had changed back to a plain dingy elderly person.  It was in this character she spoke as she said, 'I can't stay with you any longer, I can't'; and it was in this character she turned her back upon me, as I had turned mine upon her twenty-four hours before, and moved to the door of her room.  Here she did what I hadn't done when I quitted her - she paused long enough to give me one look.  I have never forgotten it, and I sometimes still suffer from it, though it was not resentful.  No, there was no resentment, nothing hard or vindictive in poor Miss Tina; for when, later, I sent her, as the price of the portrait of Jeffery Aspern, a larger sum of money than I had hoped to be able to gather for her, writing to her that I had sold the picture, she kept it with thanks; she never sent it back.  I wrote her that I had sold the picture, but I admitted to Mrs Prest at the time - I met this other friend in London that autumn - that it hangs above my writing-table.  When I look at it I can scarcely bare my loss - I mean of the precious papers.

 

 

 

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