I left Venice the next morning, as soon as I learned that the old lady had not succumbed, as I feared at the moment, to the shock I had given her--the shock I may also say she had given me.
How in the world could I have supposed her capable of getting out of bed by herself? I failed to see Miss Tita before going; I only saw the donna, whom I entrusted with a note for her younger mistress.
In this note I mentioned that I should be absent but for a few days.
I went to Treviso, to Bassano, to Castelfranco; I took walks and drives and looked at musty old churches with ill-lighted pictures and spent hours seated smoking at the doors of cafes, where there were flies and yellow curtains, on the shady side of sleepy little squares.In spite of these pastimes, which were mechanical and perfunctory, I scantily enjoyed my journey:
there was too strong a taste of the disagreeable in my life.
I had been devilish awkward, as the young men say, to be found by Miss Bordereau in the dead of night examining the attachment of her bureau;and it had not been less so to have to believe for a good many hours afterward that it was highly probable I had killed her.In writing to Miss Tita I attempted to minimize these irregularities; but as she gave me no word of answer I could not know what impression I made upon her.
It rankled in my mind that I had been called a publishing scoundrel, for certainly I did publish and certainly I had not been very delicate.
There was a moment when I stood convinced that the only way to make up for this latter fault was to take myself away altogether on the instant;to sacrifice my hopes and relieve the two poor women forever of the oppression of my intercourse.Then I reflected that I had better try a short absence first, for I must already have had a sense (unexpressed and dim)that in disappearing completely it would not be merely my own hopes that Ishould condemn to extinction.It would perhaps be sufficient if I stayed away long enough to give the elder lady time to think she was rid of me.
That she would wish to be rid of me after this (if I was not rid of her)was now not to be doubted: that nocturnal scene would have cured her of the disposition to put up with my company for the sake of my dollars.
I said to myself that after all I could not abandon Miss Tita, and I continued to say this even while I observed that she quite failed to comply with my earnest request (I had given her two or three addresses, at little towns, post restante) that she would let me know how she was getting on.
I would have made my servant write to me but that he was unable to manage a pen.It struck me there was a kind of scorn in Miss Tita's silence (little disdainful as she had ever been), so that I was uncomfortable and sore.I had scruples about going back and yet I had others about not doing so, for I wanted to put myself on a better footing.
The end of it was that I did return to Venice on the twelfth day;and as my gondola gently bumped against Miss Bordereau's steps a certain palpitation of suspense told me that I had done myself a violence in holding off so long.
I had faced about so abruptly that I had not telegraphed to my servant.
He was therefore not at the station to meet me, but he poked out his head from an upper window when I reached the house.
"They have put her into the earth, la vecchia," he said to me in the lower hall, while he shouldered my valise; and he grinned and almost winked, as if he knew I should be pleased at the news.
"She's dead!" I exclaimed, giving him a very different look.
"So it appears, since they have buried her.""It's all over? When was the funeral?"
"The other yesterday.But a funeral you could scarcely call it, signore; it was a dull little passeggio of two gondolas.
Poveretta!" the man continued, referring apparently to Miss Tita.
His conception of funerals was apparently that they were mainly to amuse the living.
I wanted to know about Miss Tita--how she was and where she was--but I asked him no more questions till we had got upstairs.
Now that the fact had met me I took a bad view of it, especially of the idea that poor Miss Tita had had to manage by herself after the end.What did she know about arrangements, about the steps to take in such a case? Poveretta indeed!
I could only hope that the doctor had given her assistance and that she had not been neglected by the old friends of whom she had told me, the little band of the faithful whose fidelity consisted in coming to the house once a year.
I elicited from my servant that two old ladies and an old gentleman had in fact rallied round Miss Tita and had supported her (they had come for her in a gondola of their own) during the journey to the cemetery, the little red-walled island of tombs which lies to the north of the town, on the way to Murano.
It appeared from these circumstances that the Misses Bordereau were Catholics, a discovery I had never made, as the old woman could not go to church and her niece, so far as I perceived, either did not or went only to early mass in the parish, before I was stirring.Certainly even the priests respected their seclusion; I had never caught the whisk of the curato's skirt.
That evening, an hour later, I sent my servant down with five words written on a card, to ask Miss Tita if she would see me for a few moments.She was not in the house, where he had sought her, he told me when he came back, but in the garden walking about to refresh herself and gathering flowers.
He had found her there and she would be very happy to see me.
I went down and passed half an hour with poor Miss Tita.
She had always had a look of musty mourning (as if she were wearing out old robes of sorrow that would not come to an end), and in this respect there was no appreciable change in her appearance.But she evidently had been crying, crying a great deal--simply, satisfyingly, refreshingly, with a sort of primitive, retarded sense of loneliness and violence.