"I don't believe you often have lived in such a house, eh?""I can't often afford to!" I said.
"Well then, how much will you give for six months?"I was on the point of exclaiming--and the air of excruciation in my face would have denoted a moral face--"Don't, Juliana; for HIS sake, don't!" But I controlled myself and asked less passionately:
"Why should I remain so long as that?"
"I thought you liked it," said Miss Bordereau with her shriveled dignity.
"So I thought I should."
For a moment she said nothing more, and I left my own words to suggest to her what they might.I half-expected her to say, coldly enough, that if I had been disappointed we need not continue the discussion, and this in spite of the fact that I believed her now to have in her mind (however it had come there) what would have told her that my disappointment was natural.But to my extreme surprise she ended by observing:
"If you don't think we have treated you well enough perhaps we can discover some way of treating you better." This speech was somehow so incongruous that it made me laugh again, and I excused myself by saying that she talked as if I were a sulky boy, pouting in the corner, to be "brought round."I had not a grain of complaint to make; and could anything have exceeded Miss Tita's graciousness in accompanying me a few nights before to the Piazza?
At this the old woman went on: "Well, you brought it on yourself!"And then in a different tone, "She is a very nice girl."I assented cordially to this proposition, and she expressed the hope that I did so not merely to be obliging, but that I really liked her.
Meanwhile I wondered still more what Miss Bordereau was coming to.
"Except for me, today," she said, "she has not a relation in the world."Did she by describing her niece as amiable and unencumbered wish to represent her as a parti?
It was perfectly true that I could not afford to go on with my rooms at a fancy price and that I had already devoted to my undertaking almost all the hard cash I had set apart for it.
My patience and my time were by no means exhausted, but I should be able to draw upon them only on a more usual Venetian basis.
I was willing to pay the venerable woman with whom my pecuniary dealings were such a discord twice as much as any other padrona di casa would have asked, but I was not willing to pay her twenty times as much.
I told her so plainly, and my plainness appeared to have some success, for she exclaimed, "Very good; you have done what I asked--you have made an offer!"
"Yes, but not for half a year.Only by the month.""Oh, I must think of that then." She seemed disappointed that I would not tie myself to a period, and I guessed that she wished both to secure me and to discourage me; to say severely, "Do you dream that you can get off with less than six months?
Do you dream that even by the end of that time you will be appreciably nearer your victory?" What was more in my mind was that she had a fancy to play me the trick of making me engage myself when in fact she had annihilated the papers.
There was a moment when my suspense on this point was so acute that I all but broke out with the question, and what kept it back was but a kind of instinctive recoil (lest it should be a mistake), from the last violence of self-exposure.She was such a subtle old witch that one could never tell where one stood with her.
You may imagine whether it cleared up the puzzle when, just after she had said she would think of my proposal and without any formal transition, she drew out of her pocket with an embarrassed hand a small object wrapped in crumpled white paper.
She held it there a moment and then she asked, "Do you know much about curiosities?""About curiosities?"
"About antiquities, the old gimcracks that people pay so much for today.
Do you know the kind of price they bring?"I thought I saw what was coming, but I said ingenuously, "Do you want to buy something?""No, I want to sell.What would an amateur give me for that?"She unfolded the white paper and made a motion for me to take from her a small oval portrait.I possessed myself of it with a hand of which I could only hope that she did not perceive the tremor, and she added, "I would part with it only for a good price."At the first glance I recognized Jeffrey Aspern, and I was well aware that I flushed with the act.As she was watching me however I had the consistency to exclaim, "What a striking face!
Do tell me who it is."
"It's an old friend of mine, a very distinguished man in his day.
He gave it to me himself, but I'm afraid to mention his name, lest you never should have heard of him, critic and historian as you are.
I know the world goes fast and one generation forgets another.
He was all the fashion when I was young."She was perhaps amazed at my assurance, but I was surprised at hers; at her having the energy, in her state of health and at her time of life, to wish to sport with me that way simply for her private entertainment--the humor to test me and practice on me.This, at least, was the interpretation that Iput upon her production of the portrait, for I could not believe that she really desired to sell it or cared for any information I might give her.
What she wished was to dangle it before my eyes and put a prohibitive price on it."The face comes back to me, it torments me," I said, turning the object this way and that and looking at it very critically.
It was a careful but not a supreme work of art, larger than the ordinary miniature and representing a young man with a remarkably handsome face, in a high-collared green coat and a buff waistcoat.
I judged the picture to have a valuable quality of resemblance and to have been painted when the model was about twenty-five years old.There are, as all the world knows, three other portraits of the poet in existence, but none of them is of so early a date as this elegant production.
"I have never seen the original but I have seen other likenesses," I went on.
"You expressed doubt of this generation having heard of the gentleman, but he strikes me for all the world as a celebrity.Now who is he?
