The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  “I don’t suppose you came out here yourself. Miss Tita must have had to lend you a hand,” I interposed with a pacifying intention.

  “Oh, she insisted that we should push her; and when she insists!” said Miss Tita in the same tone of apprehension; as if there were no knowing what service that she disapproved of her aunt might force her next to render.

  “I have always got most things done I wanted, thank God! The people I have lived with have humored me,” the old woman continued, speaking out of the gray ashes of her vanity.

  “I suppose you mean that they have obeyed you.”

  “Well, whatever it is, when they like you.”

  “It’s just because I like you that I want to resist,” said Miss Tita with a nervous laugh.

  “Oh, I suspect you’ll bring Miss Bordereau upstairs next to pay me a visit,” I went on; to which the old lady replied:

  “Oh, no; I can keep an eye on you from here!”

  “You are very tired; you will certainly be ill tonight!” cried Miss Tita.

  “Nonsense, my dear; I feel better at this moment than I have done for a month. Tomorrow I shall come out again. I want to be where I can see this clever gentleman.”

  “Shouldn’t you perhaps see me better in your sitting room?” I inquired.

  “Don’t you mean shouldn’t you have a better chance at me?” she returned, fixing me a moment with her green shade.

  “Ah, I haven’t that anywhere! I look at you but I don’t see you.”

  “You excite her dreadfully—and that is not good,” said Miss Tita, giving me a reproachful, appealing look.

  “I want to watch you—I want to watch you!” the old lady went on.

  “Well then, let us spend as much of our time together as possible— I don’t care where—and that will give you every facility.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen you enough for today. I’m satisfied. Now I’ll go home.” Miss Tita laid her hands on the back of her aunt’s chair and began to push, but I begged her to let me take her place. “Oh, yes, you may move me this way—you shan’t in any other!” Miss Bordereau exclaimed as she felt herself propelled firmly and easily over the smooth, hard floor. Before we reached the door of her own apartment she commanded me to stop, and she took a long, last look up and down the noble sala. “Oh, it’s a magnificent house!” she murmured; after which I pushed her forward. When we had entered the parlor Miss Tita told me that she should now be able to manage, and at the same moment the little red-haired donna came to meet her mistress. Miss Tita’s idea was evidently to get her aunt immediately back to bed. I confess that in spite of this urgency I was guilty of the indiscretion of lingering; it held me there to think that I was nearer the documents I coveted— that they were probably put away somewhere in the faded, unsociable room. The place had indeed a bareness which did not suggest hidden treasures; there were no dusky nooks nor curtained corners, no massive cabinets nor chests with iron bands. Moreover it was possible, it was perhaps even probable that the old lady had consigned her relics to her bedroom, to some battered box that was shoved under the bed, to the drawer of some lame dressing table, where they would be in the range of vision by the dim night lamp. Nonetheless I scrutinized every article of furniture, every conceivable cover for a hoard, and noticed that there were half a dozen things with drawers, and in particular a tall old secretary, with brass ornaments of the style of the Empire—a receptacle somewhat rickety but still capable of keeping a great many secrets. I don’t know why this article fascinated me so, inasmuch as I certainly had no definite purpose of breaking into it; but I stared at it so hard that Miss Tita noticed me and changed color. Her doing this made me think I was right and that wherever they might have been before the Aspern papers at that moment languished behind the peevish little lock of the secretary. it was hard to remove my eyes from the dull mahogany front when I reflected that a simple panel divided me from the goal of my hopes; but I remembered my prudence and with an effort took leave of Miss Bordereau. To make the effort graceful I said to her that I should certainly bring her an opinion about the little picture.

  “The little picture?” Miss Tita asked, surprised.

  “What do YOU know about it, my dear?” the old woman demanded. “You needn’t mind. I have fixed my price.”

  “And what may that be?”

  “A thousand pounds.”

  “Oh Lord!” cried poor Miss Tita irrepressibly.

  “Is that what she talks to you about?” said Miss Bordereau.

  “Imagine your aunt’s wanting to know!” I had to separate from Miss Tita with only those words, though I should have liked immensely to add, “For heaven’s sake meet me tonight in the garden!”

  VIII

  As it turned out the precaution had not been needed, for three hours later, just as I had finished my dinner, Miss Bordereau’s niece appeared, unannounced, in the open doorway of the room in which my simple repasts were served. I remember well that I felt no surprise at seeing her; which is not a proof that I did not believe in her timidity. It was immense, but in a case in which there was a particular reason for boldness it never would have prevented her from running up to my rooms. I saw that she was now quite full of a particular reason; it threw her forward—made her seize me, as I rose to meet her, by the arm.

  “My aunt is very ill; I think she is dying!”

  “Never in the world,” I answered bitterly. “Don’t you be afraid!”

  “Do go for a doctor—do, do! Olimpia is gone for the one we always have, but she doesn’t come back; I don’t know what has happened to her. I told her that if he was not at home she was to follow him where he had gone; but apparently she is following him all over Venice. I don’t know what to do—she looks so as if she were sinking.”

  “May I see her, may I judge?” I asked. “Of course I shall be delighted to bring someone; but hadn’t we better send my man instead, so that I may stay with you?”

  Miss Tita assented to this and I dispatched my servant for the best doctor in the neighborhood. I hurried downstairs with her, and on the way she told me that an hour after I quitted them in the afternoon Miss Bordereau had had an attack of “oppression,” a terrible difficulty in breathing. This had subsided but had left her so exhausted that she did not come up: she seemed all gone. I repeated that she was not gone, that she would not go yet; whereupon Miss Tita gave me a sharper sidelong glance than she had ever directed at me and said, “Really, what do you mean? I suppose you don’t accuse her of making believe!” I forget what reply I made to this, but I grant that in my heart I thought the old woman capable of any weird maneuver. Miss Tita wanted to know what I had done to her; her aunt had told her that I had made her so angry. I declared I had done nothing— I had been exceedingly careful; to which my companion rejoined that Miss Bordereau had assured her she had had a scene with me— a scene that had upset her. I answered with some resentment that it was a scene of her own making—that I couldn’t think what she was angry with me for unless for not seeing my way to give a thousand pounds for the portrait of Jeffrey Aspern. “And did she show you that? Oh, gracious—oh, deary me!” groaned Miss Tita, who appeared to feel that the situation was passing out of her control and that the elements of her fate were thickening around her. I said that I would give anything to possess it, yet that I had not a thousand pounds; but I stopped when we came to the door of Miss Bordereau’s room. I had an immense curiosity to pass it, but I thought it my duty to represent to Miss Tita that if I made the invalid angry she ought perhaps to be spared the sight of me. “The sight of you? Do you think she can SEE?” my companion demanded almost with indignation. I did think so but forebore to say it, and I softly followed my conductress.

  I remember that what I said to her as I stood for a moment beside the old woman’s bed was, “Does she never show you her eyes then? Have you never seen them?” Miss Bordereau had been divested of her green shade, but (it was not my fortune to behold Juliana in her nightcap) the upper half of her face was covered by
the fall of a piece of dingy lacelike muslin, a sort of extemporized hood which, wound round her head, descended to the end of her nose, leaving nothing visible but her white withered cheeks and puckered mouth, closed tightly and, as it were consciously. Miss Tita gave me a glance of surprise, evidently not seeing a reason for my impatience. “You mean that she always wears something? She does it to preserve them.”

  “Because they are so fine?”

  “Oh, today, today!” And Miss Tita shook her head, speaking very low. “But they used to be magnificent!”

  “Yes indeed, we have Aspern’s word for that.” And as I looked again at the old woman’s wrappings I could imagine that she had not wished to allow people a reason to say that the great poet had overdone it. But I did not waste my time in considering Miss Bordereau, in whom the appearance of respiration was so slight as to suggest that no human attention could ever help her more. I turned my eyes all over the room, rummaging with them the closets, the chests of drawers, the tables. Miss Tita met them quickly and read, I think, what was in them; but she did not answer it, turning away restlessly, anxiously, so that I felt rebuked, with reason, for a preoccupation that was almost profane in the presence of our dying companion. All the same I took another look, endeavoring to pick out mentally the place to try first, for a person who should wish to put his hand on Miss Bordereau’s papers directly after her death. The room was a dire confusion; it looked like the room of an old actress. There were clothes hanging over chairs, odd-looking shabby bundles here and there, and various pasteboard boxes piled together, battered, bulging, and discolored, which might have been fifty years old. Miss Tita after a moment noticed the direction of my eyes again and, as if she guessed how I judged the air of the place (forgetting I had no business to judge it at all), said, perhaps to defend herself from the imputation of complicity in such untidiness:

  “She likes it this way; we can’t move things. There are old bandboxes she has had most of her life.” Then she added, half taking pity on my real thought, “Those things were THERE.” And she pointed to a small, low trunk which stood under a sofa where there was just room for it. It appeared to be a queer, superannuated coffer, of painted wood, with elaborate handles and shriveled straps and with the color (it had last been endued with a coat of light green) much rubbed off. It evidently had traveled with Juliana in the olden time— in the days of her adventures, which it had shared. It would have made a strange figure arriving at a modern hotel.

  “WERE there—they aren’t now?” I asked, startled by Miss Tita’s implication.

  She was going to answer, but at that moment the doctor came in— the doctor whom the little maid had been sent to fetch and whom she had at last overtaken. My servant, going on his own errand, had met her with her companion in tow, and in the sociable Venetian spirit, retracing his steps with them, had also come up to the threshold of Miss Bordereau’s room, where I saw him peeping over the doctor’s shoulder. I motioned him away the more instantly that the sight of his prying face reminded me that I myself had almost as little to do there— an admonition confirmed by the sharp way the little doctor looked at me, appearing to take me for a rival who had the field before him. He was a short, fat, brisk gentleman who wore the tall hat of his profession and seemed to look at everything but his patient. He looked particularly at me, as if it struck him that I should be better for a dose, so that I bowed to him and left him with the women, going down to smoke a cigar in the garden. I was nervous; I could not go further; I could not leave the place. I don’t know exactly what I thought might happen, but it seemed to me important to be there. I wandered about in the alleys— the warm night had come on—smoking cigar after cigar and looking at the light in Miss Bordereau’s windows. They were open now, I could see; the situation was different. Sometimes the light moved, but not quickly; it did not suggest the hurry of a crisis. Was the old woman dying, or was she already dead? Had the doctor said that there was nothing to be done at her tremendous age but to let her quietly pass away; or had he simply announced with a look a little more conventional that the end of the end had come? Were the other two women moving about to perform the offices that follow in such a case? It made me uneasy not to be nearer, as if I thought the doctor himself might carry away the papers with him. I bit my cigar hard as it came over me again that perhaps there were now no papers to carry!

  I wandered about for an hour—for an hour and a half. I looked out for Miss Tita at one of the windows, having a vague idea that she might come there to give me some sign. Would she not see the red tip of my cigar moving about in the dark and feel that I wanted eminently to know what the doctor had said? I am afraid it is a proof my anxieties had made me gross that I should have taken in some degree for granted that at such an hour, in the midst of the greatest change that could take place in her life, they were uppermost also in Miss Tita’s mind. My servant came down and spoke to me; he knew nothing save that the doctor had gone after a visit of half an hour. If he had stayed half an hour then Miss Bordereau was still alive: it could not have taken so much time as that to enunciate the contrary. I sent the man out of the house; there were moments when the sense of his curiosity annoyed me, and this was one of them. HE had been watching my cigar tip from an upper window, if Miss Tita had not; he could not know what I was after and I could not tell him, though I was conscious he had fantastic private theories about me which he thought fine and which I, had I known them, should have thought offensive.

  I went upstairs at last but I ascended no higher than the sala. The door of Miss Bordereau’s apartment was open, showing from the parlor the dimness of a poor candle. I went toward it with a light tread, and at the same moment Miss Tita appeared and stood looking at me as I approached. “She’s better—she’s better,” she said, even before I had asked. “The doctor has given her something; she woke up, came back to life while he was there. He says there is no immediate danger.”

  “No immediate danger? Surely he thinks her condition strange!”

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

  “It will do so again then, because she excites herself. She did so this afternoon.”

  “Yes; she mustn’t come out any more,” said Miss Tita, with one of her lapses into a deeper placidity.

  “What is the use of making such a remark as that if you begin to rattle her about again the first time she bids you?”

  “I won’t—I won’t do it any more.”

  “You must learn to resist her,” I went on.

  “Oh, yes, I shall; I shall do so better if you tell me it’s right.”

  “You mustn’t do it for me; you must do it for yourself. It all comes back to you, if you are frightened.”

  “Well, I am not frightened now,” said Miss Tita cheerfully. “She is very quiet.”

  “Is she conscious again—does she speak?”

  “No, she doesn’t speak, but she takes my hand. She holds it fast.”

  “Yes,” I rejoined, “I can see what force she still has by the way she grabbed that picture this afternoon. But if she holds you fast how comes it that you are here?”

  Miss Tita hesitated a moment; though her face was in deep shadow (she had her back to the light in the parlor and I had put down my own candle far off, near the door of the sala), I thought I saw her smile ingenuously. “I came on purpose—I heard your step.”

  “Why, I came on tiptoe, as inaudibly as possible.”

  “Well, I heard you,” said Miss Tita.

  “And is your aunt alone now?”

  “Oh, no; Olimpia is sitting there.”

  On my side I hesitated. “Shall we then step in there?” And I nodded at the parlor; I wanted more and more to be on the spot.

  “We can’t talk there—she will hear us.”

  I was on the point of replying that in that case we would sit silent, but I was too conscious that this would not do, as there was something I desired immensely to ask her. So I proposed that we should walk a little in the
sala, keeping more at the other end, where we should not disturb the old lady. Miss Tita assented unconditionally; the doctor was coming again, she said, and she would be there to meet him at the door. We strolled through the fine superfluous hall, where on the marble floor—particularly as at first we said nothing— our footsteps were more audible than I had expected. When we reached the other end—the wide window, inveterately closed, connecting with the balcony that overhung the canal— I suggested that we should remain there, as she would see the doctor arrive still better. I opened the window and we passed out on the balcony. The air of the canal seemed even heavier, hotter than that of the sala. The place was hushed and void; the quiet neighborhood had gone to sleep. A lamp, here and there, over the narrow black water, glimmered in double; the voice of a man going homeward singing, with his jacket on his shoulder and his hat on his ear, came to us from a distance. This did not prevent the scene from being very comme il faut, as Miss Bordereau had called it the first time I saw her. Presently a gondola passed along the canal with its slow rhythmical plash, and as we listened we watched it in silence. It did not stop, it did not carry the doctor; and after it had gone on I said to Miss Tita: