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, as 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 passeggio 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 on foot); they had had a collation there, brought in three baskets and spread out on the grass.
I asked her what people they had known and she said, Oh! very nice ones--the Cavaliere Bombicci and the Contessa Altemura, with whom they had had a great friendship.Also English people--the Churtons and the Goldies and Mrs.Stock-Stock, 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 avvocato Pochintesta, who wrote beautiful poems and had addressed one to her aunt.
These people came to see them without fail every year, usually at the capo d'anno, 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 lampshades or mats for the decanters of wine at dinner or those woolen 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 this 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, home-keeping, 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 lampshades 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 error of thinking of her too as one of Jeffrey Aspern'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 Cumnor 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, inasmuch as they had not heard of them; and Cumnor'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 promptness 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: