With this it was the end of my experiment--or would be in the course of half an hour, when I should really have learned that the papers had been reduced to ashes.After that there would be nothing left for me but to go to the station; for seriously (and as it struck me in the morning light) I could not linger there to act as guardian to a piece of middle-aged female helplessness.If she had not saved the papers wherein should I be indebted to her? I think I winced a little as I asked myself how much, if she HAD saved them, I should have to recognize and, as it were, to reward such a courtesy.
Might not that circumstance after all saddle me with a guardianship?
If this idea did not make me more uncomfortable as I walked up and down it was because I was convinced I had nothing to look to.
If the old woman had not destroyed everything before she pounced upon me in the parlor she had done so afterward.
It took Miss Tita rather longer than I had expected to guess that I was there;but when at last she came out she looked at me without surprise.
I said to her that I had been waiting for her, and she asked why I had not let her know.I was glad the next day that I had checked myself before remarking that I had wished to see if a friendly intuition would not tell her:
it became a satisfaction to me that I had not indulged in that rather tender joke.What I did say was virtually the truth--that I was too nervous, since I expected her now to settle my fate.
"Your fate?" said Miss Tita, giving me a queer look;and as she spoke I noticed a rare change in her.
She was different from what she had been the evening before--less natural, less quiet.She had been crying the day before and she was not crying now, and yet she struck me as less confident.
It was as if something had happened to her during the night, or at least as if she had thought of something that troubled her--something in particular that affected her relations with me, made them more embarrassing and complicated.
Had she simply perceived that her aunt's not being there now altered my position?
"I mean about our papers.ARE there any? You must know now.""Yes, there are a great many; more than I supposed."I was struck with the way her voice trembled as she told me this.
"Do you mean that you have got them in there--and that I may see them?""I don't think you can see them," said Miss Tita with an extraordinary expression of entreaty in her eyes, as if the dearest hope she had in the world now was that I would not take them from her.But how could she expect me to make such a sacrifice as that after all that had passed between us?
What had I come back to Venice for but to see them, to take them?
My delight in learning they were still in existence was such that if the poor woman had gone down on her knees to beseech me never to mention them again I would have treated the proceeding as a bad joke.
"I have got them but I can't show them," she added.
"Not even to me? Ah, Miss Tita!" I groaned, with a voice of infinite remonstrance and reproach.
She colored, and the tears came back to her eyes;I saw that it cost her a kind of anguish to take such a stand but that a dreadful sense of duty had descended upon her.
It made me quite sick to find myself confronted with that particular obstacle; all the more that it appeared to me Ihad been extremely encouraged to leave it out of account.
I almost considered that Miss Tita had assured me that if she had no greater hindrance than that--! "You don't mean to say you made her a deathbed promise? It was precisely against your doing anything of that sort that I thought I was safe.
Oh, I would rather she had burned the papers outright than that!""No, it isn't a promise," said Miss Tita.
"Pray what is it then?"
She hesitated and then she said, "She tried to burn them, but I prevented it.
She had hid them in her bed."
"In her bed?"
"Between the mattresses.That's where she put them when she took them out of the trunk.I can't understand how she did it, because Olimpia didn't help her.She tells me so, and I believe her.
My aunt only told her afterward, so that she shouldn't touch the bed--anything but the sheets.So it was badly made,"added Miss Tita simply.
"I should think so! And how did she try to burn them?""She didn't try much; she was too weak, those last days.
But she told me--she charged me.Oh, it was terrible!
She couldn't speak after that night; she could only make signs.""And what did you do?"
"I took them away.I locked them up."
"In the secretary?"
"Yes, in the secretary," said Miss Tita, reddening again.
"Did you tell her you would burn them?"
"No, I didn't--on purpose."
"On purpose to gratify me?"
"Yes, only for that."
"And what good will you have done me if after all you won't show them?""Oh, none; I know that--I know that."
"And did she believe you had destroyed them?""I don't know what she believed at the last.I couldn't tell--she was too far gone."
"Then if there was no promise and no assurance I can't see what ties you.""Oh, she hated it so--she hated it so! She was so jealous.
But here's the portrait--you may have that," Miss Tita announced, taking the little picture, wrapped up in the same manner in which her aunt had wrapped it, out of her pocket.
"I may have it--do you mean you give it to me?"I questioned, staring, as it passed into my hand.
"Oh, yes."
"But it's worth money--a large sum."
"Well!" said Miss Tita, still with her strange look.
I did not know what to make of it, for it could scarcely mean that she wanted to bargain like her aunt.She spoke as if she wished to make me a present.
"I can't take it from you as a gift," I said, "and yet I can't afford to pay you for it according to the ideas Miss Bordereau had of its value.
She rated it at a thousand pounds."
"Couldn't we sell it?" asked Miss Tita.
"God forbid! I prefer the picture to the money.""Well then keep it."
"You are very generous."
"So are you."
"I don't know why you should think so," I replied; and this was a truthful speech, for the singular creature appeared to have some very fine reference in her mind, which I did not in the least seize.