"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 gush of 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 in staring at me, and I exclaimed, "You don't mean to say you are 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 YOUare quiet, at any rate) in fifty 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 won 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 Bordereau!"with an air of surprise, as if I might have been expected to know.
There were contradictions like this in Tita Bordereau which, as Iobserved 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.