Great Short Novels of Henry James

by Henry James

  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:

  “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 imply that she had transferred them.”

  “Oh, yes; they are not in the trunk,” said Miss Tita.

  “May I ask if you have looked?”

  “Yes, I have looked—for you.”

  “How for me, dear Miss Tita? Do you mean you would have given them to me if you had found them?” I asked, almost trembling.

  She delayed to reply and I waited. Suddenly she broke out, “I don’t know what I would 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 Tita added in a moment, as if she had guessed this and were sorry for me, but at the same time wished to explain that I did drive her on or at least did insist 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 have been guilty myself!”

  “You have been guilty?”

  “I have sailed under false colors.” I felt now as if I must tell her that I had given her an invented name, on account of my fear that her aunt would have heard of me and would refuse to take me in. I explained this and also that I had really been a party to the letter written to them by John Cumnor months before.

  She listened with great attention, looking at me with parted lips, 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 like your own best.”

  “So do I,” I said, laughing. “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 Mrs. Prest of course.

  She hesitated; I thought she was perhaps going to say that we had been very base. But she remarked after a moment, in a candid, wondering way, “How much you must want them!”

  “Oh, I do, passionately!” I conceded, smiling. 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 Tita, 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 Miss Tita 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 feel as if you were a new person, now that you have got a new name.”

  “It isn’t a new one; it is a very good old one, thank heaven!”

  She looked at me a moment. “I do like it better.”

  “Oh, if you didn’t I would almost go on with the other!”

  “Would you really?”

  I laughed again, but for all answer to this inquiry I said, “Of course if she can rummage about that way she can perfectly have burnt them.”

  “You must wait—you must wait,” Miss Tita moralized mournfully; 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 could not 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 said you would wait.”

  “Oh, you mean wait even for that?”

  “For what then?”

  “Oh, nothing,” I replied, rather foolishly, being ashamed to tell her what had been implied in my submissio
n to delay—the idea that she would do more than merely find out. I know not whether she guessed this; at all events she appeared to become aware of the necessity for being a little more rigid.

  “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!”

  I don’t think Miss Tita would have contested this event had she not 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 that Miss Bordereau was 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 Tita to go off with him alone, only asking her leave to come back later for news.

  I went out of the house and took a long walk, as far as the Piazza, where my restlessness declined to quit me. I was unable to sit down (it was very late now but there were people still at the little tables in front of the cafés); I could only walk round and round, and I did so half a dozen times. I was uncomfortable, but it gave me a certain pleasure to have told Miss Tita who I really was. At last I took my way home again, slowly getting 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 Tita 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 an intimation that my faltering friend had gone to bed, tired 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 me from going in, but it had no such effect. If I have candidly narrated the importunities, the indelicacies, of which my desire to possess myself of Jeffrey Aspern’s papers had rendered me capable I need not shrink from confessing this last indiscretion. I think it was the worst thing I did; yet there were extenuating circumstances. I was deeply though doubtless not disinterestedly anxious for more news of the old lady, and Miss Tita had accepted from me, as it were, a rendezvous which it might have been a point of honor with me to keep. It may be said that her leaving the place dark was a positive sign that she released me, and to this I can only reply that I desired not to be released.