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 would 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 never have 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 armful; 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 Icould 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, than 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:
1
Miss Tita made no resistance to this.We found a bench less secluded, less confidential, as it were, than the one in the arbor; and we were still sitting there when I heard midnight ring out from those clear bells of Venice which vibrate with a 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 at my 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 Imight 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 formerly she gave at intervals 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--one 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 to 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 arriere-pensee.