 CHAPTER I I had taken Mrs. Prest into my confidence. In truth without her I should have made but little advance, for the fruitful idea in the whole business dropped from her friendly lips. It was she who invented the shortcut, who severed the Gordian knot. It is not supposed to be the nature of women to rise as a general thing to the largest and most liberal view, I mean of a practical scheme, but it has struck me that they sometimes throw off a bold conception such as a man would not have risen to with singular serenity. They asked them to take you in on the footing of a lodger. I don't think that unaided I should have risen to that. I was beating about the bush, trying to be ingenious, wondering by what combination of arts I might become an acquaintance, when she offered this happy suggestion that the way to become an acquaintance was first to become an inmate. Her actual knowledge of the Mrs. Bordero was scarcely larger than mine, and indeed I had brought with me from England some definite facts which were new to her. Their name had been mixed up ages before with one of the greatest names of the century, and they lived now in Venice in obscurity, on very small means, unvisited, unapproachable, in a dilapidated old palace on an out-of-the-way canal. This was the substance of my friend's impression of them. She herself had been established in Venice for fifteen years and had done a great deal of good there, but the circle of her benevolence did not include the two shy, mysterious, and as it was somehow supposed, scarcely respectable Americans. They were believed to have lost in their long exile all national quality, besides having had, as their name implied, some French strain in their origin, who asked no favors and desired no attention. In the early years of her residence she had made an attempt to see them, but this had been successful only as regards the little one, as Mrs. Prest called the niece, though in reality as I afterward learned she was considerably the bigger of the two. She had heard Miss Bordero was ill and had a suspicion that she was in want, and she had gone to the house to offer assistance so that if there were suffering, and American suffering, she should at least not have it on her conscience. The little one received her in the great, cold, tarnished Venetian salla, the central hall of the house, paved with marble and roofed with dim cross-beams, and did not even ask her to sit down. This was not encouraging for me who wished to sit so fast, and I remarked as much to Mrs. Prest. She, however, replied with profundity, ah, but there's all the difference. I went to confer a favour, and you will go to ask one. If they are proud, you will be on the right side. And she offered to show me their house to begin with, to row me thither in her gondola. I let her know that I had already been to look at it half a dozen times, but I accepted her invitation, for it charmed me to hover about the place. I had made my way to it the day after my arrival in Venice. It had been described to me in advance by the friend in England to whom I owed definite information as to their possession of the papers, and I had besieged it with my eyes while I considered my plan of campaign. Jeffrey Aspen had never been in it that I knew of, but some note of his voice seemed to abide there by a roundabout implication of faint reverberation. Mrs. Press knew nothing about the papers, but she was interested in my curiosity, as she was always interested in the joys and sorrows of her friends. As we went, however, in her gondola, gliding there under the sociable hood with the bright Venetian picture framed on either side by the movable window, I could see that she was abused by my infatuation, the way my interest in the papers had become a fixed idea. One would think you were expected to find in them the answer to the riddle of the universe, she said, and I denied the impeachment only by replying that if I had to choose between that precious solution and a bundle of Jeffrey Aspen's letters, I knew indeed which would appear to be the greater boon. She pretended to make light of his genius, and I took no pains to defend him. One doesn't defend one's God. One's God is in himself a defense. Hence today, after his long comparative obscuration, he hangs high in the heaven of our literature for all the world to see. He is a part of the light by which we walk. The most, I said, was that he was no doubt not a woman's poet, to which she rejoined aptly enough that he had been at least Miss Boardrose. The strange thing had been for me to discover in England that she was still alive. It was as if I had been told Mrs. Sidon's was, or Queen Carolyn, was a famous Lady Hamilton, for it seemed to me that she belonged to a generation as extinct. Why, she must be tremendously old, at least a hundred, I had said. But on coming to consider dates, I saw that it was not strictly necessary that she should have exceeded by very much the common span. Nonetheless, she was very far advanced in life, and her relations with Jeffrey Aspen had occurred in her early womanhood. That is her excuse, said Mrs. Press, half-sententiously, and yet also somewhat as if she were ashamed of making a speech so little in the real tone of Venice, as if a woman needed an excuse for having loved the Divine Poet. He had been not only one of the most brilliant minds of his day, and in those years when the century was young there were, as everyone knows, many, but one of the most genial men, and one of the handsomest. The niece, according to Mrs. Press, was not so old, and she risked the conjecture that she was only a grand niece. This was possible. I had nothing but my share in the very limited knowledge of my English fellow worshiper John Cumber, who had never seen the couple. The world, as I say, had recognized Jeffrey Aspen, but Cumber and I had recognized him the most. The multitude today flocked to his temple, but of that temple he and I regarded ourselves as the ministers. We held, justly as I think, that we had done more for his memory than anyone else, and we had done it by opening lights into his life. He had nothing to fear from us because he had nothing to fear from the truth, which alone at such a distance of time we could be interested in establishing. His early death had been the only dark spot in his life, unless the papers in Ms. Bordero's hands should perversely bring out others. There had been an impression about 1825 that he had treated her badly, just as there had been an impression that he had served, as the London populace says, several other ladies in the same way. Each of these cases, Cumber and I, had been able to investigate, and we had never failed to acquit him conscientiously of shabby behavior. I judged him perhaps more indulgently than my friend. Certainly any rate had appeared to me that no man could have walked straighter in the given circumstances. These were almost always awkward. Half the women of his time, to speak liberally, had flung themselves at his head, and out of this pernicious fashion many complications, some of them grave, had not failed to arise. He was not a woman's poet, as I said to Mrs. Prest, in the modern phase of his reputation, but the situation had been different when the man's own voice was mingled with his song. That voice, by every testimony, was one of the sweetest ever heard. Orpheus and the Menads was the exclamation that rose to my lips when I first turned over his correspondence. Almost all the Menads were unreasonable, and many of them insupportable. It struck me in short that he was a kinder, more considerate than in his place, if I could imagine myself in such a place I should have been. It was certainly strange beyond all strangeness, and I shall not take up space with attempting to explain it. That whereas in all these other lines of research we had to deal with phantoms and dust, the mere echoes of echoes, the one living source of information that had lingered on into our time, had been unheeded by us. Every one of Aspen's contemporaries had, according to our belief, passed away. We had not been able to look into a single pair of eyes into which his had looked, or to feel a transmitted contact in any age and hand that his had touched. Most out of all did poor Miss Bordero appear, and yet she alone had survived. We exhausted in the course of months our wonder that we had not found her out sooner, and the substance of our explanation was that she had kept so quiet. The poor lady on the whole had had reason for doing so, but it was a revelation to us that it was possible to keep so quiet as that in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the age of newspapers and telegrams and photographs and interviewers, and she had taken no great trouble about it either. She had not hidden herself away in an undiscoverable hole. She had boldly settled down in a city of exhibition. The only secret of her safety that we could receive was that Venice contained so many curiosities that were greater than she. And then accident had somehow favored her, as was shown, for example, in the fact that Mrs. Prest had never happened to mention her to me, though I had spent three weeks in Venice under her nose as it were five years before. Mrs. Prest had not mentioned this much to anyone. She appeared almost to have forgotten she was there. Of course she had not the responsibilities of an editor. It was no explanation of the old woman having eluded us to say that she lived abroad, for our researches had again and again taken us, not only by correspondence but by personal inquiry, to France, to Germany, to Italy, in which countries not counting his important stay in England, so many of the two few years of Asperin's career were spent. We were glad to think at least that at all our publishings, some people consider, I believe, that we have overdone them, we had only touched in passing and in the most discreet manner on Miss Bordero's connection. Only enough, even if we had had the material, and we often wondered what had become of it, it would have been the most difficult episode to handle. The gondola stopped, the old palace was there, it was the house of the class which in Venice carries even in extreme dilapidation the dignified name. How charming! It's gray and pink, my companion exclaimed, and that is the most comprehensive description of it. It was not particularly old, only two or three centuries, and it had an air not so much of decay as of quiet discouragement as if it had rather missed its career, but its wide front with a stone balcony from end to end of the Piano Nobile or most important floor was architectural enough with the aid of various palasters and arches. And the stucco with which in the intervals it had long ago been endued was rosy in the April afternoon. It overlooked a clean melancholy, unfrequented canal which had a narrow riva or convenient footway on either side. I don't know why there are no brick gables, said Mrs. Prest, but this corner has seemed to me before more Dutch than Italian, more like Amsterdam than like Venice. It's perversely clean for reasons of its own, and though you can pass on foot scarcely anyone ever thinks of doing so, it has the air of a protestant sundae. Perhaps the people are afraid of the Mrs. Bordero. I daresay they have the reputation of witches. I forget what answer I made to this. I was given up to two other reflections. The first of these was that if the old lady lived in such a big, imposing house, she could not be in any sort of misery and therefore would not be tempted by a chance to let a couple of rooms. I expressed this idea to Mrs. Prest, who gave me a very logical reply. If she didn't live in a big house, how could it be a question of her having rooms to spare? If she were not amply lodged herself, you would lack ground to approach her. Besides, a big house here, and especially in this Carte de Pérdu, proves nothing at all. It is perfectly compatible with a state of penury. The lapidated old palazzi, if you will go out of the way for them, are to be had for five shillings a year. And as for the people who live in them, no, until you have explored Venice socially as much as I have, you can form no idea of their domestic desolation. They live on nothing, for they have nothing to live on. The other idea that had come into my head was connected with a high blank wall, which appeared to confine an expanse of ground on one side of the house. Blank, I call it, but it was figured over with the patches that please a painter, repaired breeches, crumblings of plaster, extrusions of brick that had turned pink with time, and a few thin trees with the poles of certain rickety trellises were visible over the top. The place was a garden, and apparently it belonged to the house. It suddenly occurred to me that if it did belong to the house, I had my pretext. I sat looking out on all this with Mrs. Pressed. It was covered with a golden glow of Venice from the shade of our felse, and she asked me if I would go in then while she waited for me or come back another time. At first I could not decide. It was doubtless very weak of me. I wanted still to think I might get a footing, and I was afraid to meet failure, for it would leave me, as I remarked to my companion, without another arrow for my bow. Why not another, she inquired, as I sat there hesitating and thinking it over? And she wished to know why even now, and before taking the trouble of becoming an inmate, which might be wretchedly uncomfortable after all, even if it succeeded, I had not the resource of simply offering them a sum of money down. In that way I might obtain the documents without bad nights. Dearest lady, I exclaimed, excuse the impatience of my tone when I suggest to you that you must have forgotten the very fact, surely I communicated it to you, which pushed me to throw myself upon your ingenuity. The old woman won't have the documents spoken of. They are personal, delicate, intimate, and she hasn't modern notions, God bless her. If I should sound that note first, I should certainly spoil the game. I can arrive at the papers only by putting her off her guard, and I can put her off her guard only by ingratiating diplomatic practices. Hypocrisy, duplicity are my only chance. I'm sorry for it, but for Jeffrey Aspen's sake I would do worse still. First I must take tea with her, then tackle the main job. And I told over what had happened to John Cumner when he wrote her. No notice had been taken of his first letter, and the second had been answered very sharply in six lines by the niece. Miss Bordero requested her to say that she could not imagine what he meant by troubling them. They had none of Mr. Aspen's papers, and if they had, should never think of showing them to anyone on any account whatever. She didn't know what he was talking about, and begged he would let her alone. I certainly did not want to be met that way. Well, said Mrs. Prest after a moment provokingly, perhaps after all they haven't any of his things. If they deny it flat, how are you sure? John Cumner is sure, and it would take me long to tell you how his conviction, or his very strong presumption, long enough to stand against the old lady's not unnatural fib, has built itself up. Besides he makes much of the internal evidence of the niece's letter. The internal evidence? Her calling him Mr. Aspen. I don't see what that proves. It proves familiarity, and familiarity implies the possession of mementos or relics. I can't tell you how that Mr. touches me. How it bridges over a gulf of time, and brings our hero near to me. Nor what an edge it gives to my desire to see Juliana. You don't say Mr. Shakespeare. Would I any more if I had a box full of his letters? Yes, if he had been your lover and someone wanted them. And I added that John Cumner was so convinced, and so all the more convinced by Miss Bordero's tone, that he would have come himself to Venice on the business, were it not that for him there was the obstacle that he would be difficult to disprove his identity with the person who had written to them, which the old ladies would be sure to suspect in spite of dissimulation and a change of name. If they were to ask him, point blank, if he were not their correspondent, it would be too awkward for him to lie, whereas I was fortunately not tied in that way. I was a fresh hand, and could say no without lying. But you will have to change your names, said Mrs. Prest. Diana lives out of the world as much as it's possible to live, but nonetheless she has probably heard of Mr. Aspen's editors. She perhaps possesses what you have published. I have thought of that, I returned, and I drew out of my pocketbook a visiting card neatly engraved with a name that was not my own. You are very extravagant. You might have written it, said my companion. This looks more genuine. Certainly you are prepared to go far, but it will be awkward about your letters. They won't come to you in that mask. My banker will take them in, and I will go every day to fetch them. It will give me a little walk. Shall you only depend on that? Ask Mrs. Prest. Aren't you coming to see me? Oh, you will have left Venice for the hot months long before there are any results. I'm prepared to roast all summer, as well as here after, perhaps you'll say. Meanwhile, John Cumner will bombard me with letters addressed in my faint name to the care of the patrona. She will recognize his hand, my companion suggested. On the envelope he can disguise it. Well, if you're a precious pair, doesn't it occur to you that even if you are able to say you are not Mr. Cumner in person, they may still suspect you of being his emissary? Certainly, and I see only one way to parry that. And what may that be? I hesitated a moment. To make love to the niece. Ah, cried Mrs. Prest, wait till you see her. End of chapter one. Chapter two of the Aspern Papers. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. I must work the garden. I must work the garden. I said to myself five minutes later, as I waited, upstairs in the long dusky sala, where the bare Scagliola floor gleamed vaguely in a chink of closed shutters. The place was impressive, but it looked cold and cautious. Mrs. Prest had floated away, giving me a rendezvous at the end of half an hour by some neighboring water steps. And I had been let into the house after pulling the rusty bell wire by a little red-headed, white-faced maid servant who was very young and not ugly, and wore clicking patterns and a shawl in the fashion of a hood. She had not contentured herself with opening the door from above by the usual arrangement of a creaking pulley, though she had looked down at me first from an upper window, dropping the inevitable challenge which in Italy precedes the hospitable act. As a general thing, I was irritated by this survival of medieval manners. Though, as I liked the old, I suppose I ought to have liked it, but I was so determined to be genial that I took my false card out of my pocket and held it up to her, smiling as if it were a magic token. It had the effect of one indeed, for it brought her, as I say, all the way down. I begged her to hand it to her mistress, having first written on it in Italian the words. Could you very kindly see a gentleman, an American, for a moment? The little maid was not hostile, and I reflected that even that was perhaps something gained. She colored, she smiled, and looked both frightened and pleased. I could see that my arrival was a great affair, that visits were rare in that house, and that she was the person who would have liked a sociable place. When she pushed forward the heavy door behind me, I felt that I had a foot in the citadel. She patted across the damp, stony, lower hall, and I followed up the high staircase, stonier still it seemed, without an invitation. I think she had meant I should wait for her below, but such was not my idea, and I took up my station in the salla. She flitted at the far end of it into impenetrable regions, and I looked at the place with my heart beating as I had known it to do in the dentist's parlor. It was gloomy and stately, but it owed its character almost entirely into its noble shape and to the fine architectural doors as high as the doors of houses, which, leading into the various rooms, repeated themselves on either side at intervals. They were surmounted with old faded painted discussions, and here and there in the spaces between them, brown pictures which I perceived to be bad in battered frames were suspended, with the exception of several straw-bottom chairs with their backs to the wall, the grand obscure vista contained nothing else to minister to effect. It was evidently never used save as a passage, and little even as that. I may add by the time the door opened again, through which the maid servant had escaped, my eyes had grown used to the want of light. I had not meant by my private ejaculation that I must myself cultivate the soil of that tangled enclosure which lay beneath the windows, but the lady who came toward me from the distance over the hard shining floor might have supposed as much from the way in which, as I went rapidly to meet her, I exclaimed, taking care to speak Italian. The garden, the garden, do me the pleasure to tell me if it's yours. She stopped short, looking at me with wonder, and then, nothing here is mine, she answered in English, coldly and sadly. Oh, you are English! How delightful, I remarked ingenuously, but surely the garden belongs to the house? Yes, but the house doesn't belong to me. She was a long, lean, pale person, habited, apparently, in a dull-colored dressing gown, and she spoke with a kind of mild literalness. She did not ask me to sit down any more than years before, if she were the niece. She had asked Mrs. Prest, and we stood face to face in the empty pompous hall. Well then, would you kindly tell me to whom I must address myself? I'm afraid you'll think me odiously intrusive, but you know I must have a garden. Upon my honor, I must. Her face was not young, but it was simple. It was not fresh, but it was mild. She had large eyes which were not bright, and a great deal of hair which was not dressed, and long, fine hands which were, possibly, not clean. She clasped these members almost convulsively, as with a confused, alarmed look she broke out. Oh, don't take it away from us, we like it ourselves. You have the use of it, then? Oh, yes, if it wasn't for that. And she gave a shy, melancholy smile. Isn't it a luxury, precisely? That's why, intending to be in Venice some weeks, possibly all summer, and having some literary work, some reading and writing to do so that I must be quiet, and yet, if possible, a great deal in the open air. That's why I have felt that a garden is really indispensable. I appealed to your own experience, I went on, smiling. Now, can't I look at yours? I don't know, I don't understand, the poor woman murmured, planted there and letting her embarrassed eyes wander all over my strangeness. I mean only from one of those windows, such grand ones as you have there, if you will let me open the shutters. And I walked toward the back of the house. When I had advanced halfway, I stopped and waited, as if I took it for granted she would accompany me. I had been of necessity very abrupt, but I strove at the same time to give her the impression of extreme courtesy. I have been looking at furnished rooms all over the place and it seems impossible to find any with a garden attached. Naturally, in a place like Venice, gardens are rare. It's absurd if you like for a man, but I can't live without flowers. There are none to speak of down there. She came nearer to me as if, though she mistrusted me, I had drawn her by an invisible thread. I went on again and she continued as she followed me. We have a few, but they are very common. It costs too much to cultivate them. One has to have a man. Why shouldn't I be the man? I asked. I'll work without wages, or rather I'll put in a gardener. You shall have the sweetest flowers in Venice. She protested at this with a queer little sigh, which might also have been a gusher rapture at the picture I presented. Then she observed, we don't know you. We don't know you. You know me as much as I know you. That is much more because you know my name. And if you are English, I am almost a countryman. We are not English, said my companion, watching me helplessly while I threw open the shutters of one of the divisions of the wide high window. You speak the language so beautifully, might I ask what you are? Seen from above the garden was certainly shabby, but I perceived at a glance that it had great capabilities. She made no rejoinder. She was so lost and staring at me. And I exclaimed, you don't mean to say that you were also by chance American? I don't know, we used to be. Used to be, surely you haven't changed. It's so many years ago, we are nothing. So many years that you have been living here? Well, I don't wonder at that, it's a grand old house. I suppose you all use the garden I went on, but I assure you I shouldn't be in your way. I would be very quiet and stay in one corner. We all use it, she repeated after me vaguely, not coming close to the window, but looking at my shoes. She appeared to think me capable of throwing her out. I mean all your family as many as you are. There is only one other. She is very old, she never goes down. Only one other in all this great house? I feigned to be not only amazed, but almost scandalized. Dear lady, you must have space then to spare. To spare, she repeated in the same dazed way. Why, you surely don't live, two quiet women. I see you are quiet at any rate, in 50 rooms. Then with a burst of hope and cheer I demanded, couldn't you let me two or three? That would set me up. I had not struck the note that translated my purpose and I need not reproduce the whole of the tune I played. I ended by making my interlocutress believe that I was an honorable person, though of course I did not even attempt to persuade her that I was not an eccentric one. I repeated that I had studies to pursue, that I wanted quiet, that I delighted in a garden and had vainly sought one up and down the city, that I would undertake that before another month was over, the dear old house should be smothered in flowers. I think it was the flowers that won my suit, for I afterward found that Miss Tita, for such the name of this high, tremulous spinster, proved somewhat incongruously to be, had an insatiable appetite for them. When I speak of my suit as one, I mean that before I left her, she had promised that she would refer the question to her aunt. I inquired who her aunt might be, and she answered, why, Miss Bordero, with an air of surprise, as if I might have been expected to know. There were contradictions like this in Tita Bordero, which as I observed later contributed to make her an odd and affecting person. It was the study of the two ladies to live so that the world should not touch them, and yet they had never altogether accepted the idea that it never heard of them. In Tita at any rate, a grateful susceptibility to human contact had not died out, and contact of a limited order there would be if I should come to live in the house. We have never done anything of the sort we have never had a lodger or any kind of inmate. So much as this she made a point of saying to me, we are very poor, we live very badly. The rooms are very bare that you might take, they have nothing in them. I don't know how you would sleep, how you would eat. With your permission I could easily put in a bed and a few tables and chairs. C'est la moindre des choses, and the affair of an hour or two. I know a little man from whom I can hire what I should want for a few months for a trifle, and my gondolier can bring the things round in his boat. Of course in this great house you must have a second kitchen, and my servant who was a wonderfully handy fellow. This personage was an evocation of the moment, can easily cook me a chop there. My tastes and habits are of the simplest, I live on flowers. And then I ventured to add that if they were very poor, it was all the more reason they should let their rooms. They were bad economists. I had never heard of such a waste of material. I saw in a moment that the good lady had never before been spoken to that way with a kind of humorous firmness which did not exclude sympathy but was, on the contrary, founded on it. She might easily have told me that my sympathy was impertinent, but this, by good fortune, did not occur to her. I left her with the understanding that she would consider the matter with her aunt and that I might come back the next day for their decision. The aunt will refuse. She will think the whole proceeding very loose. Mrs. Press declared shortly after this when I had resumed my place in her gondola. She had put the idea into my head and now, so little a woman to be counted on, she appeared to take a despondent view of it. Her pessimism provoked me and I pretended to have the best hopes. I went so far as to say that I had a distinct presentiment that I should succeed. Upon this, Mrs. Press broke out, oh, I see what's in your head. You fancy you have made such an impression in a quarter of an hour that she is dying for you to come and can be depended upon to bring the old one round. If you do get in, you'll count it as a triumph. I did count it as a triumph, but only for the editor in the last analysis, not for the man who had not the tradition of personal conquest. When I went back on the morrow, the little maid servant conducted me straight through the long sala. It opened there as before in perfect perspective and was lighter now, which I thought a good omen, into the apartment from which the recipient of my former visit had emerged on that occasion. It was a large shabby parlor with a fine old painted ceiling and a strange figure sitting alone at one of the windows. They come back to me now almost with the palpitation they caused, the successive feelings that accompanied my consciousness that as the door of the room closed behind me, I was really face to face with the Juliana of some of Asperin's most exquisite and most renowned lyrics. I grew used to her afterward, though never completely, but as she sat there before me, my heart beat as fast as if the miracle of resurrection had taken place from my benefit. Her presence seemed somehow to contain his, and I felt nearer to him at that first moment of seeing her than I had ever been before or have ever been since. Yes, I remember my emotions in their order, even including a curious little tremor that took me when I saw that the niece was not there. With her the day before, I had become sufficiently familiar, but it almost exceeded my courage much as I had longed for the event. To be left alone with such a terrible relic is the end. She was too strange, too literally resurgent. Then came a check with the perception that we were not really face to face in as much as she had over her eyes a horrible green shade, which for her served almost as a mask. I believed for the instant that she had put it on expressly so that from underneath it she might scrutinize me without being scrutinized herself. At the same time, it increased the presumption that there was a ghastly death's head lurking behind it. The divine Juliana is a grinning skull. The vision hung there until it passed. Then it came to me that she was tremendously old, so old that death might take her at any moment before I had time to get what I wanted from her. The next thought was a correction to that. It lighted up the situation. She would die next week. She would die tomorrow. Then I could seize her papers. Meanwhile, she sat there neither moving nor speaking. She was very small and shrunken, bent forward with her hands in her lap. She was dressed in black and her head was wrapped in a piece of old black lace which showed no hair. My emotion keeping me silent, she spoke first and the remark she made was exactly the most unexpected. End of chapter two. Chapter three of the aspirin papers. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Our house is very far from the center, but the little canal is very coming full. It's the sweetest corner of Venice and I can imagine nothing more charming. I hasten to reply. The old lady's voice was very thin and weak, but it had an agreeable, cultivated murmur and there was wonder in the thought that that individual note had been in Jeffrey Aspen's ear. Pleased to sit down there. I hear very well, she said quietly, as if perhaps I had been shouting at her and the chair she pointed to was at a certain distance. I took possession of it, telling her that I was perfectly aware that I had intruded, that I had not been properly introduced and could only throw myself upon her indulgence. Perhaps the other lady, the one I had had the honor of seeing the day before would have explained to her about the garden. That was literally what had given me courage to take a step so unconventional. I had fallen in love at sight with the whole place. She herself probably was so used to it that she did not know the impression it was capable of making on a stranger and I felt it was really a case to risk something. Was her own kindness in receiving me a sign that I was not wholly out in my calculation? It would render me extremely happy to think so. I could give her my word of honor that I was the most respectable, inoffensive person and that as an inmate they would barely be conscious of my existence. I would conform to any regulations, any restrictions if they would only let me enjoy the garden. Moreover, I should be delighted to give her references, guarantees. They would be of the very best, both in Venice and in England, as well as in America. She listened to me in perfect stillness and I felt that she was looking at me with great attention though I could see only the lower part of her bleached and shriveled face. Independently of the refining process of old age it had a delicacy which once must have been great. She had been very fair, she'd had a wonderful complexion. She was silent a little after I had ceased speaking. Then she inquired, if you are so fond of a garden, why don't you go to terra firma where there are so many far better than this? Oh, it's the combination I answered smiling and then with rather a flight of fancy. It's the idea of a garden in the middle of the sea. It's not in the middle of the sea, you can't see the water. I stared a moment wondering whether she wished to convict me of fraud. Can't see the water? Why, dear madam, I can come up to the very gate in my boat. She appeared inconsequent for she said vaguely and replied to this, yes, if you have got a boat, I haven't any, it's many years since I've been in one of the gondolas. She uttered these words as if the gondolas were a curious far away craft which she knew only by hearsay. Let me assure you of the pleasure with which I would put mine at your service, I exclaimed. I had scarcely said this, however, before I became aware that the speech was in questionable taste and might also do me the injury of making me appear too eager, too possessed of a hidden motive. But the old woman remained impenetrable and her attitude bothered me by suggesting that she had a fuller vision of me than I had of her. She gave me no thanks for my somewhat extravagant offer but remarked that the lady I had seen the day before was her niece. She would presently come in. She had asked her to stay away a little on purpose because she herself wished to see me at first alone. She relapsed into silence and I asked myself why she had judged this necessary and what was coming yet. Also, whether I might venture on some judicious remark in praise of her companion. I went so far as to say that I should be delighted to see her again. She had been so very courteous to me considering how odd she must have thought me. A declaration which drew from Miss Bordero another of her whimsical speeches. She has very good manners. I bred her up myself. I was on the point of saying that that accounted for the easy grace of the niece but I arrested myself in time and the next moment the old woman went on. I don't care who you may be. I don't want to know. It signifies very little today. This had all the air of being a formula of dismissal as if her next words would be that I might take myself off now that she had had the amusement of looking on the face of such a monster of indiscretion. Therefore I was all the more surprised when she added with her soft, venerable quaver. You may have as many rooms as you like if you will pay a good deal of money. I hesitated but for a single instant long enough to ask myself what she meant in particular by this condition. First it struck me that she must have really a large sum in her mind. Then I reasoned quickly that her idea of a large sum would probably not correspond to my own. My deliberation I think was not so visible as to diminish the promptitude with which I replied. I will pay with pleasure and of course in advance whatever you may think it is proper to ask me. Well then a thousand francs a month she rejoined instantly while her baffling green shade continued to cover her attitude. The figure as they say was startling and my logic had been at fault. The sum she had mentioned was by the Venetian measure of such matters exceedingly large. There was many an old palace in an out-of-the-way corner that I might on such terms have enjoyed by the year. But so far as my small means allowed I was prepared to spend the money and my decision was quickly taken. I would pay her with a smiling face which she asked but in that case I would give myself the compensation of extracting the papers from her for nothing. Moreover if she had asked five times as much I should have risen to the occasion. So odious would it have appeared to me to stand chaffering with aspirants Juliana. It was queer enough to have a question of money with her at all. I assured her that her views perfectly met my own and that on the morrow I should have the pleasure of putting three months rent into her hand. She received this announcement with serenity and with no apparent sense that after all it would be becoming of her to say that I ought to see the rooms first. This did not occur to her and indeed her serenity was mainly what I wanted. Our little bargain was just concluded when the door opened and the younger lady appeared on the threshold. As soon as Miss Bordero saw her niece she cried out almost gaily, she will give 3,000, 3,000 tomorrow. Miss Tita stood still with her patient eyes turning from one of us to the other. Then she inquired scarcely above her breath. Do you mean Franks? Did you mean Franks or Dollars, the old woman asked me at this? I think Franks were what you said, I answered, smiling. That is very good, said Miss Tita, as if she had become conscious that her own question might have looked overreaching. What do you know you are ignorant, Miss Bordero remarked, not with a serbity but with a strange soft coldness. Yes, of money, certainly of money, Miss Tita hastened to exclaim, I am sure you have your own branches of knowledge, I took the liberty of saying, genially. There was something painful to me somehow in the turn the conversation had taken in the discussion of the rent. She had a very good education when she was young, I looked into that myself, said Miss Bordero. Then she added, but she has learned nothing since. I have always been with you, Miss Tita rejoined very mildly and evidently with no intention of making an epigram. Yes, but for that, her aunt declared with much more satirical force. She evidently meant that but for that, her niece would never have got on at all. The point of the observation, however being lost on Miss Tita, though she blushed at hearing her story reveal to a stranger, Miss Bordero went on addressing herself to me. And at what time will you come with the money? The sooner the better, if it suits you, I will come at noon. I am always here, but I have my hours, said the old woman, as if her convenience would not to be taken for granted. You mean the times when you receive? I never receive, but I will see you at noon when you come with the money. Very good, I shall be punctual, and I added, may I shake hands with you on our contract? I thought there ought to be some little form. It would make me really feel easier, for I foresaw that there would be no other. Besides, though Miss Bordero could not today be called personally attractive, and there was something even in her wasted antiquity that bad ones stand at one's distance, I felt an irresistible desire to hold it my own for a moment the hand that Jeffrey Aspern had pressed. For a minute she made no answer, and I saw that my proposal failed to meet with her approbation. She indulged in no movement of withdrawal, which I half expected. She only said coldly, I belong to a time when that was not the custom. I felt rather snubbed, but I exclaimed goodhumidly to Miss Tita, oh, you will do as well. I shook hands with her while she replied with a small flutter, yes, yes, to show it's all arranged. Shall you bring the money in gold? Miss Bordero demanded as I was turning to the door. I looked at her for a moment. Aren't you a little afraid, after all, of keeping such a sum as that in the house? It was not that I was annoyed at her avidity, but I was really struck with the disparity between such a treasure and such scanty means of guarding it. Whom should I be afraid of if I'm not afraid of you? She asked with her shrunken griveness. Ah, well, said I, laughing, I shall be in point of fact to protect her, and I will bring gold if you prefer. Thank you, the old woman returned with dignity, and with an inclination of her head which evidently signified that I might depart. I passed out of the room, reflecting that it would not be easy to circumvent her. As I stood in the sala again, I saw that Miss Tita had followed me, and I supposed that as her aunt had neglected to suggest that I should take a look at my quarters, it was her purpose to repair the omission. But she made no such suggestion. She only stood there with the dim, though not a language smile, and with an effect of irresponsible, incompetent youth, which was almost comically at variance with the faded facts of her person. She was not in firm like her aunt, but she struck me as still more helpless because her inefficiency was spiritual, which was not the case with Miss Border Rose. I waited to see if she would offer to show me the rest of the house, but I did not precipitate the question in as much as my plan was from this moment to spend as much of my time as possible in her society. I only observed at the end of a minute. I have had better fortune than I hoped. It was very kind of her to see me. Perhaps you said a good word for me. It was the idea of the money, said Miss Tita. And did you suggest that? I told her that you would perhaps give a good deal. What made you think that? I told her I thought you were rich. And what put that idea in your head? I don't know the way you talked. Dear me, I must talk differently now, I declared. I'm sorry to say it's not the case. Well, said Miss Tita, I think that in Venice the forestieri in general often give a great deal for something that after all isn't much. She appeared to make this remark with a comforting intention to wish to remind me that if I had been extravagant I was not really foolishly singular. We walked together along the salla and as I took its magnificent measure I said to her that I was afraid it would not form a part of my quartiere. Were my rooms by chance to be among those that opened into it? Not if you go above on the second floor, she answered with a little startled air as if she had rather taken for granted that I would know my proper place. And I infer that's where your aunt would like me to be. She said your apartments ought to be very distinct. That certainly would be best. And I listened with respect while she told me that up above I was free to take whatever I liked, that there was another staircase but only from the floor on which we stood and that to pass from it to the garden story or to come up to my lodging I should have an effect across the great hall. This was an immense point gained. I foresaw that it would constitute my whole leverage in my relations with the two ladies. When I asked Miss Tita how I was to manage it present to find my way up she replied with an access of that sociable shyness which constantly marked her manner. Perhaps you can't. I don't see unless I should go with you. She evidently had not thought of this before. We ascended to the upper floor and visited a long succession of empty rooms. The best of them looked over the garden. Some of the others had a view of the blue lagoon above the opposite rough-tiled house tops. They were all dusty and even a little disfigured with long neglect but I saw that by spending a few hundred francs I should be able to convert three or four of them into a convenient habitation. My experiment was turning out costly yet now that I had all but taken possession I ceased to allow this to trouble me. I mentioned to my companion a few of the things that I should put in but she replied rather more precipitately than usual that I might do exactly what I liked. She seemed to wish to notify me that the Mrs. Bordero would take no overt interest in my proceedings. I guessed that her aunt had instructed her to adopt this tone and I may as well say now that I came afterward to distinguish perfectly as I believed between the speeches she made on her own responsibility and those the old lady imposed upon her. She took no notice of the unswept conditions of the rooms and indulged in no explanations nor apologies. I said to myself that this was a sign that Juliana and her niece disenchanting idea were untidy persons with a low Italian standard but I afterward recognized that a lodger who had forced an entrance had no locus standee as a critic. We looked out of a good many windows for there was nothing within the rooms to look at and still I wanted to linger. I asked her what several objects in the prospect might be but in no case did she appear to know. She was evidently not familiar with the view. It was as if she had not looked at it for years and I presently saw that she was too preoccupied with something else to pretend to care for it. Suddenly she said the remark was not suggested. I don't know whether it will make any difference to you but the money is for me. The money? The money you are going to bring? Why, you'll make me wish to stay here two or three years. I spoke as benevolently as possible though it had begun to act on my nerves that with these women so associated with aspirin the pecuniary questions had constantly come back. That would be very good for me, she replied, smiling. You put me on my honor. She looked as if she failed to understand this but went on. She wants me to have more. She thinks she is going to die. Ah, not soon I hope. I exclaimed with genuine feeling. I had perfectly considered the possibility that she would destroy her papers on the day she should feel her end really approach. I believed that she would cling to them till then and I think I had an idea that she read aspirin's letters over every night or at least pressed them to her withered lips. I would have given a good deal to have a glimpse of the latter spectacle. I asked Miss Tita if the old lady were seriously ill and she replied that she was only very tired. She had lived so very, very long. That was what she said herself. She wanted to die for a change. Besides all her friends were dead long ago. Either they ought to have remained or she ought to have gone. That was another thing her aunt often said. She was not at all content. But people don't die when they like, do they? Miss Tita inquired. I took the liberty of asking why if there was actually enough money to maintain them both there would not be more than enough in case of her being left alone. She considered this difficult problem a moment and then she said, oh well, you know she takes care of me. She thinks that when I'm alone I shall be a great fool. I shall not know how to manage. I should have supposed that you took care of her. I'm afraid she is very proud. Why have you discovered that already? Miss Tita cried with a glimmer of an illumination in her face. I was shot up with her there for a considerable time and she struck me. She interested me extremely. It didn't take me long to make my discovery. She won't have much to say to me while I'm here. No, I don't think she will, my companion a bird. Do you suppose she has some suspicion of me? Miss Tita's honest eyes gave me no sign that I had touched a mark. I shouldn't think so, letting you in after all so easily. Oh, so easily she has covered her risk. But where is it that one could take an advantage of her? I oughtn't to tell you if I knew ought I. And Miss Tita added before I had time to reply to this, smiling dolefully. Do you think we have any weak points? That's exactly what I'm asking. You would only have to mention them for me to respect them religiously. She looked at me at this, with that air of timid but candid and even gratified curiosity with which she had confronted me from the first. And then she said, there is nothing to tell. We are terribly quiet. I don't know how the days pass. We have no life. I wish I might think that I should bring you a little. Oh, we know what we want, she went on. It's all right. There were various things I desired to ask her. How in the world they did live? Whether they had any friends or visitors, any relations in America or in other countries. But I judged such an inquiry would be premature. I must leave it to a later chance. Well, don't you be proud, I contented myself with saying. Don't hide from me altogether. Oh, I must stay with my aunt, she returned, without looking at me. And at the same moment abruptly, without any ceremony of parting, she quitted me and disappeared, leaving me to make my own way downstairs. I remained a while longer, wandering about the bright desert the sun was pouring in, of the old house, sinking the situation over on the spot. Not even the pattering little serpa came to look after me, and I reflected after all, this treatment showed confidence. End of chapter three. Chapter four of the Aspern Papers. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Perhaps it did, but all the same six weeks later, I walked toward the middle of June, the moment when Mrs. Prest undertook her annual migration, I had made no measurable advance. I was obliged to confess to her that I had no results to speak of. My first step had been unexpectedly rapid, but there was no appearance that it would be followed by a second. I was a thousand miles from taking tea with my hostesses, that privilege of which, as I reminded Mrs. Prest, we had both had a vision. She approached me with wanting boldness, and I answered that even to be bold, you must have an opportunity. You may push on through a breach, but you can't batter down a dead wall. She answered that the breach I had already made was big enough to admit an army, and accused me of wasting precious hours and whimpering in her salon when I ought to have been carrying on the struggle in the field. It is true that I went to see her very often on the theory that it would console me. I freely expressed my discouragement from my want of success on my own premises, but I began to perceive that it did not console me to be perpetually chaffed for my scruples, especially when I was really so vigilant that I was rather glad when my derisive friend closed her house for the summer. She had expected to gather amusement from the drama of my intercourse with the Mrs. Bordero, and she was disappointed that the intercourse, and consequently the drama, had not come off. They'll lead you on to your ruin, she said, before she left Venice. They'll get all your money without showing you a scrap. I think I settled out of my business with more concentration after she had gone away. It was a fact that up to that time I had not, save on a single brief occasion, had even a moment's contact with my queer hostesses. The exception had occurred when I carried them according to my promise the terrible 3,000 francs. Then I found Miss Tita waiting for me in the hall, and she took the money from my hand so that I did not see her aunt. The old lady had promised to receive me, but she apparently thought nothing of breaking that vow. The money was contained in a bag of chamois leather of respectable dimensions, which my banker had given me, and Miss Tita had to make a big fist to receive it. This she did with extreme solemnity, though I tried to treat the affair a little as a joke. It was in no jocular strain, yet it was with simplicity that she inquired, weighing the money at her two palms. Don't you think it's too much? To which I replied that that would depend upon the amount of pleasure I should get for it. Hereupon she turned away from me quickly as she had done the day before, murmuring in a tone different from any she had used to the two, oh, pleasure, pleasure, there's no pleasure in this house. After this, for a long time, I never saw her, and I wondered that the common chances of the day should not have helped us to meet. It could only be evident that she was immensely on her guard against them, and in addition to this, the house was so big that for each other we were lost in it. I used to look out for her hopefully as I crossed the sally in my comings and goings, but I was not rewarded with a glimpse of the tale of her dress. It was as if she never peeped out of her aunt's apartment. I used to wonder what she did there week after week and year after year. I had never encountered such a violent pati-pris of seclusion. It was more than keeping quiet. It was like hunted creatures feigning death. The two ladies appeared to have no visitors whatever and no sort of contact with the world. I judged at least that people could not come to the house and that Miss Teter could not have gone out without my having some observation of it. I did what I disliked myself for doing, reflecting that it was only once in a way. I questioned my servant about their habits and let him divine that I should be interested in any information he could pick up. But he picked up amazingly little for a knowing Venetian. It must be added that where there is a perpetual fast there are very few crumbs on the floor. His cleverness in other ways was sufficient if it was not quite all that I had attributed to him on the occasion of my first interview with Miss Teter. He had helped my gondolier to bring me round a boatload of furniture and when these articles had been carried to the top of the palace and distributed according to our associated wisdom he organized my household with such promptitude as was consistent with the fact that it was composed exclusively of himself. He made me in short as comfortable as I could be with my indifferent prospects. I should have been glad if he had fallen in love with Miss Bordeaux's maid or failing this had taken her in aversion. Either event might have brought about some kind of a catastrophe and a catastrophe might have led to some parley. It was my idea that she would have been sociable and I myself on various occasions saw her flit to and fro on domestic errands so that I was sure she was accessible. But I tasted of no gossip from that fountain and I afterward learned that Pasquale's affections were fixed upon an object that made him heedless of other women. This was a young lady with a powdered face, a yellow cotton gown and much leisure who used often to come to see him. She practiced at her convenience the art of a stringer of beads. These ornaments are made in Venice in profusion. She had her pocket full of them and I used to find them on the floor of my apartment and kept an eye on the maiden in the house. It was not for me of course to make the domestic's tattle and I never said a word to Miss Bordeaux's cook. It seemed to me a proof of the old lady's determination to have nothing to do with me that she should never have sent me a receipt for my three months rent. For some days I looked out for it and then when I had given it up I wasted a good deal of time in wondering what her reason had been for neglecting so indispensable and familiar reform. At first I was tempted to send her a reminder after which I relinquished the idea against my judgment as to what was right in the particular case. On the general ground of wishing to keep quiet. If Miss Bordeaux suspected me of ulterior aims she would suspect me less if I should be business like and yet I consented not to be so. It was possible she intended her omission as an impertinence, a visible irony to show how she could overreach people who attempted to overreach her. On that hypothesis it was well to let her see that one did not notice her little tricks. The real reading of the matter I afterward perceived was simply the poor old woman's desire to emphasize the fact that I was in the enjoyment of a favor as rigidly limited as it had been liberally bestowed. She had given me part of her house and now she would not give me even a morsel of paper with her name on it. Let me say that even at first this did not make me too miserable for the whole episode was essentially delightful to me. I foresaw that I should have a summer after my own literary heart and the sense of holding my opportunity was much greater than the sense of losing it. There could be no Venetian business without patience and since I adored the place I was much more in the spirit of it for having laid in a large provision. That spirit kept me perpetual company and seemed to look out at me from the revived immortal face in which all his genius shone of the great poet who was my prompter. I had invoked him and he had come. He hovered before me half the time. It was as if his bright ghost had returned to earth to tell me that he regarded the affair as his own no less than mine and that we should see it fraternally, cheerfully to a conclusion. It was as if he had said, poor dear, be easy with her. She has some natural prejudices. Only give her time. Strange as it may appear to you she was very attractive in 1820. Meanwhile, are we not in Venice together and what better place is there for the meeting of dear friends? See how it glows with the advancing summer. How the sky and the sea and the rosy air and the marble of the palaces all shimmer and melt together. My eccentric private errand became a part of the general romance and the general glory. I felt even a mystic companionship, a moral fraternity with all those who in the past had been in the service of art. They had worked for beauty, for a devotion. And what else was I doing? That element was in everything that Jeffrey Aspen had written and I was only bringing it to light. I lingered in the sala when I went to and fro. I used to watch as long as I thought decent. The doors had led to Miss Bordero's part of the house. A person observing me might have supposed I was trying to cast a spell upon it or attempting some odd experiment in hypnotism. But I was only praying it would open or thinking what treasure probably lurked behind it. I hold it singular as I look back that I should never have doubted for a moment that the sacred relics were there. Never have failed to feel a certain joy at being under the same roof with them. After all, they were under my hand. They had not escaped me yet and they made my life continuous in a fashion with the illustrious life they had touched at the other end. I lost myself in this satisfaction to the point of assuming in my quiet extravagance that poor Miss Tita also went back, went back as I used to phrase it. She did indeed the gentle spinster but not quite so far as Jeffrey Aspen who was simply hearsay to her quite as he was to me. Only she had lived for years with Juliana. She had seen and handled the papers and even though she was stupid some esoteric knowledge had rubbed off on her. That was what the old woman represented. Esoteric knowledge and this was the idea with which my editorial heart used to thrill. It literally beat faster often of an evening when I had been out as I stopped with my candle in the re-echoing hall on my way up to bed. It was as if at such a moment as that in the stillness after the long contradiction of the day Miss Bordero's secrets were in the air the wonder of her survival more palpable. These were the acute impressions. I had them in another form with more of a certain sort of reciprocity during the hours that I sat in the garden looking up over the top of my book at the closed windows of my hostess. In these windows no sign of life ever appeared. It was as if for fear of my catching a glimpse of them the two ladies passed their days in the dark. But this only proved to me that they had something to conceal which was what I had wished to demonstrate. Their emotionless shutters became as expressive as eyes consciously closed. And I took comfort in thinking that at all events though invisible themselves they saw me between the lashes. I made a point of spending as much time as possible in the garden to justify the picture I had originally given of my horticultural passion that I not only spent time but hang it as I said I spent money. As soon as I had got my rooms arranged and could give the proper thought to the matter I surveyed the place with a clever expert and made terms for having it put in order. I was sorry to do this for personally I liked it better as it was with its weeds and its wild rough tangle its sweet characteristic Venetian shabbiness. I had to be consistent to keep my promise that I would smother the house and flowers. Moreover I formed this grateful project that by flowers I would make my way. I would succeed by big nose gaze. I would batter the old women with lilies. I would bombard their citadel with roses. Their door would have to yield to the pressure when a mountain of carnations should be piled up against it. The place in truth had been brutally neglected. The Venetian capacity for dawdling is of the largest and for a good many days unlimited litter was all my gardener had to show for his ministrations. There was a great digging of holes and carting about of earth and after a while I grew so impatient that I had thoughts of sending for my bouquets to the nearest stand. But I reflected that the ladies would see through the chinks of their shutters that they must have been bought and might make up their minds from this that I was a humbug. So I composed myself and finally, though the delay was long, perceived some appearances of bloom. This encouraged me and I waited serenely enough till they multiplied. Meanwhile the real summer days arrived and began to pass and as I look back upon them they seem to me almost the happiest of my life. I took more and more care to be in the garden whenever it was not too hot. I had an arbor arranged and a low table and an armchair put into it and I carried out books and portfolios. I had always some business of writing in hand and worked and waited and mused and hoped while the golden hours elapsed and the plants drank in the light and the inscrutable old palace turned pale and then as the day waned began to flush in it and my papers rustled in the wandering breeze of the Adriatic. Considering how little satisfaction I got from it at first it is remarkable that I should not have grown more tired of wondering what mystic rites of Henri the Mrs. Bordero celebrated in their darkened rooms. Whether this had always been the tenor of their life and how in previous years they had escaped elbowing their neighbors. It was clear that they must have had other habits and other circumstances, that they must once have been young or at least middle-aged. There was no end to the questions it was possible to ask about them and no end to the answers it was not possible to frame. I had known many of my country people in Europe and was familiar with the strange ways they were liable to take up there but the Mrs. Bordero formed altogether a new type of the American absentee. Indeed it was plain that the American name had ceased to have any application to them. I had seen this in the ten minutes I spent in the old woman's room. You could never have said whence they came from the appearance of either of them wherever it was they had long ago dropped local accent and fashion. There was nothing in them that one recognized and putting the question of speech aside they might have been Norwegian's or Spaniards. Mrs. Bordero after all had been in Europe nearly three quarters of a century. It appeared by some verses addressed to her by Asperin on the occasion of his own second absence from America verses of which Cumner and I had after infinite conjecture established solidly enough to date that she was even then as a girl of 20 on the foreign side of the sea. There was an implication in the poem I hope not just for the phrase that he had come back for her sake. We had no real light upon her circumstances at that moment any more than we had upon her origin which we believed to be of the sort usually spoken of as modest. Cumner had a theory that she had been a governess in some family in which the poet visited and that in consequence of her position there was from the first something unavowed or rather something positively clandestine in their relations. I on the other hand had hatched a little romance according to which she was the daughter of an artist, a painter or a sculptor who had left the Western world when the century was fresh to study in the ancient schools. It was essential to my hypothesis that this amiable man should have lost his wife should have been poor and unsuccessful and should have had a second daughter of a disposition quite different from Juliana's. It was also indispensable that he should have been accompanied to Europe by these young ladies and should have established himself there for the remainder of a struggling saddened life. There was a further implication that Ms. Bordero had in her youth a perverse and adventurous albeit a generous and fascinating character and that she had passed through some singular vicissitudes. By what passions had she been ravaged? By what sufferings had she been blanched? What store of memories had she laid away for the monotonous future? I asked myself these things as I sat spinning theories about her in my arbor and the bees droned in the flowers. It was incontestable that, whether for right or for wrong, most readers of certain of aspirin's poems, poems not as ambiguous as the solets, scarcely more divine I think of Shakespeare had taken for granted that Juliana had not always adhered to the steep footway of renunciation. There hovered about her name a perfume of reckless passion, an intimation that she had not been exactly as the respectable young person in general. Was this a sign that her singer had betrayed her? Had given her a way, as we say nowadays, to posterity? Certain it is that it would have been difficult to put one's finger on the passage in which her fair fame suffered an imputation. Moreover, was not any fame fair enough that was so sure of duration and was associated with works immortal through their beauty? It was a part of my idea that the young lady had had a foreign lover and an unedifying, tragical rupture before her meeting with Jeffrey Aspin. She had lived with her father and sister in a queer, old-fashioned, expatriated, artistic bohemia in the days when the aesthetic was only the academic and the painters who knew the best models for a contadina and a piferado wore peaked hats and long hair. It was a society less furnished than the coteries of today in its ignorance of the wonderful chances, the opportunities of the early bird with which its path was strewn, with tatters of old stuff and fragments of old crockery so that Miss Bordero appeared not to have picked up or to have inherited many objects of importance. There was no enviable bric-a-brac with its provoking legend of cheapness in the room in which I had seen her. Such a fact as that suggested bareness, but nonetheless it worked happily into the sentimental interest I had always taken in the early movements of my countrymen as visitors to Europe. When Americans went abroad in 1820, there was something romantic, almost heroic in it, as compared with the perpetual ferretings of the present hour when photography and other conveniences have annihilated surprise. Miss Bordero sailed with her family on a tossing brig in the days of long voyages and sharp differences. She had her emotions on the top of yellow diligence, past the night at Inns where she dreamed of traveler's tales and was struck on reaching the eternal city with the elegance of Roman pearls and scarves. There was something touching to me in all that and my imagination frequently went back to the period. If Miss Bordero carried it there, of course, Jeffrey Asperin at other times had done so a great deal more. It was a much more important fact if one were looking at his genius critically that he had lived in the days before the general transfusion. It had happened to me to regret that he had known Europe at all. I should have liked to see what he would have written without that experience by which he had incontestably been enriched. But as this fate had ordered otherwise, I went with him. I tried to judge how the old world would have struck him. It was not only there, however, that I watched him. The relations he had entertained with the new had even a livelier interest. His own country, after all, had had most of his life and his muse, as they said at the time, was essentially American. That was originally what I had loved him for. That at a period when our native land was nude and crude and provincial, when the famous atmosphere it is supposed to lack was not even missed, when literature was lonely there and art and form almost impossible, he had found means to live and write like one of the first to be free and general and not at all afraid to feel, understand, and express everything. End of chapter four. Chapter five of the Aspirin Papers. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. I was seldom at home in the evening for when I attempted to occupy myself in my apartments, the lamp light brought in a swarm of noxious insects and it was too hot for closed windows. Accordingly, I spent the late hours either on the water, the moonlight of Venice is famous, or in the splendid square which serves as a vast forecourt to the strange old basilica of St. Mark. I sat in front of Florian's cafe, eating ices, listening to music, talking with acquaintances. The traveler will remember how the immense cluster of tables and little chairs stretches like a promontory into the smooth lake of the piazza. The whole place of a summer's evening, under the stars and with all the lamps, all the voices and light footsteps on marble, the only sounds of the arcades that enclose it is like an open air saloon dedicated to cooling drinks and to a still finer degustation that of the exquisite impressions received during the day. When I did not prefer to keep mine to myself, there was always a stray tourist, this encumbered of his betaker, to discuss them with, or some domesticated painter rejoicing in the return of the season of strong effects, the wonderful church with its low domes and bristling embroideries, the mystery of its mosaic and sculpture, looking ghostly in the tempered gloom and the sea breeze past between the twin columns of the piazzetta, the lintels of a door no longer guarded as gently as if a rich curtain were swaying there. I used sometimes on these occasions to think of the Mrs. Bordero and of the pity of their being shut up in apartments which in the Venetian July, even Venetian vastness did not prevent from being stuffy. Their life seemed miles away from the life of the piazza and no doubt it was really too late to make the austere Giuliana change her habits. But poor Miss Tito would have enjoyed one of Florian's ices, I was sure. Sometimes I even had thoughts of carrying one home to her. Fortunately, my patience bore fruit and I was not obliged to do anything so ridiculous. One evening about the middle of July, I came in earlier than usual. I forget what chance had led to this but instead of going up to my quarters made my way into the garden. The temperature was very high. It was such a night as one would gladly have spent in the open air and I was in no hurry to go to bed. I had floated home in my gondola listening to the slow splash of the oar in the narrow dark canals and now the only thought that solicited me was the vague reflection that it would be pleasant to decline at one's length in the fragrant darkness on a garden bench. The odor of the canal was doubtless at the bottom of that aspiration and the breath of the garden as I entered it gave consistency to my purpose. It was delicious, just such an air as must have trembled with Romeo's vows when he stood among the flowers and raised his arms to his mistress's balcony. I looked at the windows of the palace to see if by chance the example of Verona, not being far off, had been followed but everything was dim as usual and everything was still. Juliana, on summer nights in her youth might have murmured down from open windows at Jeffrey Aspen but Miss Tita was not a poet's mistress any more than I was a poet. This however did not prevent my gratification from being great as I became aware on reaching the end of the garden that Miss Tita was seated in my little mower. At first I only made out an indistinct figure not in the least counting on such an overture from one of my hostesses. It even occurred to me that some sentimental maid servant had stolen in to keep a trist with her sweetheart. I was going to turn away, not to frighten her when the figure rose to its height and I recognized Miss Bordero's niece. I must do myself the justice to say that I did not wish to frighten her either and much as I had longed for some such accident I should have been capable of retreating. It was as if I had laid a trap for her by coming home earlier than usual and adding to that eccentricity by creeping into the garden. As she rose she spoke to me and then I reflected that perhaps secure in my almost inveterate absence it was her nightly practice to take a lonely airing. There was no trap in truth because I had had no suspicion. At first I took it for granted that the word she uttered expressed discomforture at my arrival but as she repeated them I had not caught them clearly. I had the surprise of hearing her say, oh dear, I'm so very glad you've come. She and her aunt had in common the property of unexpected speeches. She came out of the arbor almost as if she were going to throw herself into my arms. I hastened to add that she did nothing of the kind. She did not even shake hands with me. It was a gratification to her to see me and presently she told me why because she was nervous when she was out of doors at night alone. The plants and bushes looked so strange in the dark and there were all sorts of queer sounds. She could not tell what they were like the noises of animals. She stood close to me looking about her with an air of greater security but without any demonstration of interest in me as an individual. Then I guessed that nocturnal prowlings were not in the least her habit but I was also reminded I had been struck with a circumstance in talking with her before I took possession that it was impossible to overestimate her simplicity. You speak as if you were lost in the backwoods I said laughing. How you managed to keep out of this charming place when you have only three steps to take to get into it is more than I have yet been able to discover. You hide away mighty well so long as I am on the premises I know but I had a hope that you peeped out a little at other times. You and your poor aunt are worse off than carvalite nuns in their cells. Should you mind telling me how you exist without air, without exercise, without any sort of human contact? I don't see how you carry on the common business of life. She looked at me as if I were talking some strange tongue and her answer was so little of an answer that I was considerably irritated. We go to bed very early, earlier than you could believe. I was on the point of saying that this only deepened the mystery when she gave me some relief by adding, before you came we were not so private but I have never been out at night. Never in these fragrant alleys blooming here under your nose? Ah, said Miss Tita, they were never nice till now. There was an unmistakable reference in this and a flattering comparison so that it seemed to me I had gained a small advantage. As it would help me to follow it up to establish a sort of grievance, I asked her why, since she thought my garden nice, she had never thanked me in any way for the flowers I had been sending up in such quantities for the previous three weeks. I had not been discouraged. There had been, as she would have observed, a daily harmful but I had been brought up in the common forms and a word of recognition now and then would have touched me in the right place. Why, I didn't know they were for me. They were for both of you. Why should I make a difference? Miss Tita reflected as if she might by thinking of a reason for that but she failed to produce one. Instead of this, she asked abruptly, why in the world do you want to know us? I ought, after all, to make a difference, I replied. That question is your aunt's. It isn't yours. You wouldn't ask it if you hadn't been put up to it. She didn't tell me to ask you, Miss Tita replied without confusion. She was the oddest mixture of the shrinking and the direct. Well, she has often wondered about it herself and expressed her wonder to you. She has insisted on it so that she has put the idea into your head that I am insufferably pushing. Upon my word, I think I have been very discreet and how completely your aunt must have lost every tradition of sociability to see anything out of the way in the idea that respectable, intelligent people living as we do under the same roof should occasionally exchange a remark. What could be more natural? We are of the same country and we have at least some of the same tastes. Since like you, I am intensely fond of Venice. My interlocutress appeared incapable of grasping more than one clause in any proposition and she declared quickly, eagerly, as if she were answering my whole speech. I am not in the least fond of Venice. I should like to go far away. Has she always kept you back so? I went on to show her that I could be as irrelevant as herself. She told me to come out tonight. She has told me very often, said Miss Tita. It is I who wouldn't come. I don't like to leave her. Is she too weak? Is she failing? I demanded with more emotion, I think that I intended to show. I judged this by the way her eyes rested upon me in the darkness. It embarrassed me a little and to turn the matter off, I continued genially. Do let us sit down together comfortably somewhere and you will tell me all about her. Miss Tita made no resistance to this. We found a bench less secluded, less confidential as it were, than the one in the armor. And we were still sitting there when I heard Midnight Ring out from those clear bells of Venice, which vibrate with the solemnity of their own over the lagoon and hold the air so much more than the chimes of other places. We were together more than an hour and our interview gave, as it struck me, a great lift to my undertaking. Miss Tita accepted the situation without a protest. She had avoided me for three months, yet now she treated me almost as if these three months had made me an old friend. If I had chosen, I might have inferred from this, that though she had avoided me, she had given a good deal of consideration to doing so. She paid no attention to the flight of time, never worried about keeping her so long away from her aunt. She talked freely, answering questions and asking them, and not even taking advantage of certain longish pauses with which they inevitably alternated to say she thought she had better go in. It was almost as if she were waiting for something, something I might say to her and intended to give me my opportunity. I was the more struck by this as she told me that her aunt had been less well for a good many days and in a way that was rather new. She was weaker at moments it seemed as if she had no strength at all, yet more than ever before she wished to be left alone. That was why she had told her to come out, not even to remain in her own room, which was alongside. She said her niece irritated her, made her nervous. She sat still for hours together as if she were asleep. She had always done that, musing and dozing, but at such times formally, she gave it interval some small sign of life, of interest, liking her companion to be near her with her work. Miss Tita confided to me that at present her aunt was so motionless that she sometimes feared she was dead. Moreover, she took hardly any food when couldn't see what she lived on. The great thing was that she still on most days got up. The serious job was to dress her to wheel her out of her bedroom. She clung to as many of her old habits as possible and she had always little company as they had received for years, made a point of sitting in the parlor. I scarcely knew what to think of all this, of Miss Tita's sudden conversion to sociability and of the strange circumstance that the more the old lady appeared the decline toward her end, the less she should desire to be looked after. The story did not hang together and I even asked myself whether it were not a trap laid for me, the result of a design to make me show my hand. I could not have told why my companions, as they could only by courtesy be called, should have this purpose, why they should try to trip up so lucrative a lodger. At any rate, I kept on my guard so that Miss Tita should not have occasion again to ask me if I had an arrière-pensée. Poor woman, before we parted for the night, my mind was at rest as to her capacity for entertaining one. She told me more about their affairs than I had hoped. There was no need to be prying, for it evidently drew her out simply to feel that I listened, that I cared. She ceased wondering why I cared and at last she spoke of the brilliant life they had led years before. She almost chattered. It was Miss Tita who judged it brilliant. She said that when they first came to live in Venice years and years before, I saw that her mind was essentially vague about dates and the order in which events had occurred. There was scarcely a week that they had not some visitor or did not make some delightful passegio in the city. They had seen all the curiosities. They had even been to the Lido in a boat. She spoke as if I might think there was a way there on foot. They had had a collation there, brought in three baskets and spread out on the grass. I asked what people they had known and she said, oh, very nice ones. The Cavaliere Bambici and the Contessa Altimura with whom they had had a great friendship. Also English people, the Chertons and the Goldies and Mrs. Stockstock whom they had loved dearly. She was dead and gone poor dear. That was the case with most of their pleasant circle. This expression was Miss Tita's own. Though a few were left, which was a wonder considering how they had neglected them. She mentioned the names of two or three Venetian old women. Of a certain doctor, very clever, who was so kind, he came as a friend he had really given up practice. Of the Avocato Pocintesta, who wrote beautiful poems and had addressed one to her aunt. These people came to see them without fail every year, usually at the Capodano. And of old, her aunt used to make them some little present, her aunt and she together. Small things that she, Miss Tita, made herself. Like paper lamp shades or mats for the decanters of wine at dinner. Or those woollen things that in cold weather were worn on the wrists. The last few years there had not been many presents. She could not think what to make and her aunt had lost her interest and never suggested. But the people came all the same. If the Venetians liked you once, they liked you forever. There was something affecting in the good faith of the sketch of former social glories. The picnic at the Lido had remained vivid through the ages and poor Miss Tita evidently was of the impression that she had had a brilliant youth. She had, in fact, had a glimpse of the Venetian world in its gossiping, homekeeping, parsimonious professional walks. For I observed for the first time that she had acquired by contact something of the trick of the familiar, soft-sounding, almost infantile speech of the place. I judged that she had imbibed this invertebrate dialect from the natural way the names of things and people, mostly purely local, rose to her lips. If she knew little of what they represented, she knew still less of anything else. Her aunt had drawn in. Her failing interest in the table mats and lamp shades was a sign of that. And she had not been able to mingle in society or to entertain it alone, so that the matter of her reminiscences struck one as an old world altogether. If she had not been so decent, her references would have seemed to carry one back to the queer Rococo Venice of Casanova. I found myself falling into the era of thinking of her too as one of Geoffrey Asperin's contemporaries. This came from her having so little in common with my own. It was possible, I said to myself, that she had not even heard of him. It might very well be that Juliana had not cared to lift, even for her, the veil that covered the temple of her youth. In this case, she perhaps would not know of the existence of the papers, and I welcomed that presumption. It made me feel more safe with her. Until I remembered that we had believed the letter of disavowal received by Cummner to be in the handwriting of the niece. If it had been dictated to her, she had, of course, to know what it was about. Yet, after all, the effect of it was to repudiate the idea of any connection with the poet. I held it probable at all events that Miss Tita had not read a word of his poetry. Moreover, if, with her companion, she had always escaped the interviewer, there was little occasion for her, having got it into her head that people were after the letters. People had not been after them in as much as they had not heard of them, and Cummner's fruitless feeler would have been a solitary accident. When midnight sounded, Miss Tita got up, but she stopped at the door of the house only after she had wandered two or three times with me round the garden. When shall I see you again? I asked before she went in, to which she replied with proppeness that she should like to come out the next night. She added, however, that she should not come. She was so far from doing everything she liked. You might do a few things that I like, I said with a sigh. Oh, you, I don't believe you, she murmured at this, looking at me with her simple solemnity. Why don't you believe me? Because I don't understand you. That is just the sort of occasion to have faith. I could not say more, though I should have liked to as I saw that I only mystified her, for I had no wish to have it on my conscience that I might pass for having made love to her. Nothing less should I have seemed to do had I continued to beg a lady to believe in me in an Italian garden on a midsummer night. There was some merit in my scruples, for Miss Tita lingered and lingered. I perceived that she felt that she should not really soon come down again and wished, therefore, to protract the present. She insisted, too, on making the talk between us personal to ourselves and altogether her behavior was such as would have been possible only to a completely innocent woman. I shall like the flowers better now that I know they are meant also for me. How could you have doubted it? If you will tell me the kind you like best, I will send a double lot of them. Oh, I liked them all best. Then she went on, familiarly. Shall you study, shall you read and write when you go up to your rooms? I don't do that at night, at this season. The lamp light brings in the animals. You might have known that when you came. I did know it. And in winter, do you work at night? I read a good deal, but I don't often write. She listened as if these details had a rare interest and suddenly a temptation quite at variance with the prudence I had been teaching myself associated itself with her plain, mild face. Ah, yes, she was safe and I could make her safer. It seemed to me from one moment to another that I could not wait longer, that I really must take a sounding. So I went on. In general, before I go to sleep, very often in bed, it's a bad habit, but I confess to it, I read some great poet. In nine cases out of 10, it's a volume of Jeffrey Aspirin. I watched her well as I pronounced that name, but I saw nothing wonderful. Why should I indeed? Was not Jeffrey Aspirin the property of the human race? Oh, we read him. We have read him," she quietly replied. He is my poet of poets. I know him almost by heart. For an instant Miss Tita hesitated. Then her sociability was too much for her. Oh, by heart, that's nothing," she murmured, smiling. My aunt used to know him, to know him. She paused an instant and I wondered what she was going to say, to know him as a visitor. As a visitor, I repeated, staring. He used to call on her and take her out. I continued to stare. My dear lady, he died a hundred years ago. Well, she said mirthfully, my aunt is a hundred and fifty. Mercy on us, I exclaimed. Why didn't you tell me before? I should like so to ask her about him. She wouldn't care for that. She wouldn't tell you, Miss Tita replied. I don't care what she cares for. She must tell me. It's not a chance to be lost. Oh, you should have come twenty years ago. Then she still talked about him. And what did she say? I asked eagerly. I don't know that he liked her immensely. And she, didn't she like him? She said he was a god. Miss Tita gave me this information flatly, without expression. Her tone might have made it a piece of trivial gossip. But it stirred me deeply as she dropped the words into the summer night. It seemed such a direct testimony. Fancy, fancy, I murmured. And then, tell me this please, has she got a portrait of him? They are distressingly rare. A portrait? I don't know, said Miss Tita. And now there was discomfort in her face. Well, good night, she added, and she turned into the house. I accompanied her into the wide, dusky, stone-paved passage, which on the ground floor corresponded with our grand sala. It opened at one end into the garden, at the other upon the canal, and was lighted now only by the small lamp that was always left for me to take up as I went to bed. An extinguished candle, which Miss Tita, apparently, had brought down with her, stood on the same table with it. Good night, good night, I replied, keeping beside her as she went to get her light. Surely you would know, shouldn't you, if she had one? If she had what, the poor lady asked, looking at me clearly over the flame of her candle. A portrait of the god. I don't know what I wouldn't give to see it. I don't know what she has got. She keeps her things locked up. And Miss Tita went away toward the staircase with the sense, evidently, that she had said too much. I let her go. I wished not to frighten her. And I contented myself with her markings that Miss Bordero would not have locked up such a glorious possession as that. A thing a person would be proud of and hang up in a prominent place on the parlor wall. Therefore, of course, she had not any portrait. Miss Tita made no direct answer to this and candle in hand with her back to me ascended two or three stairs. Then she stopped short and turned round, looking at me across the dusky space. Do you write? Do you write? There was a shake in her voice. She could scarcely bring out what she wanted to ask. Do I write? Oh, don't speak of my writing on the same day with aspirants. Do you write about him? Do you pry into his life? Ah, that's your aunt's question. It can't be yours. I said in a tone of slightly wounded sensibility. All the more reason that you should answer it. Do you please? I thought I had allowed for the falsehoods I should have to tell, but I found that in fact, when it came to the point, I had not. Besides, now that I had an opening, there was a kind of relief in being frank. Lastly, it was perhaps fanciful, even fatuous. I guessed that Miss Tita personally would not in the last resort be less, my friend. So after a moment's hesitation, I answered, yes, I have written about him, and I am looking for more material. In Heaven's name, have you got any? Santo Dio, she exclaimed, without heeding my question, and she hurried upstairs and out of sight. I might count upon her in the last resort, but for the present she was visibly alarmed. The proof of it was that she began to hide again, so that for a fortnight I never beheld her. I found my patience ebbing, and after four or five days of this, I told the gardener to stop the flowers. End of chapter five.