The condition Miss Tita had attached to the possession of them no longer appeared an obstacle worth thinking of, and for an hour, that morning, my repentant imagination brushed it aside.
It was absurd that I should be able to invent nothing;absurd to renounce so easily and turn away helpless from the idea that the only way to get hold of the papers was to unite myself to her for life.I would not unite myself and yet I would have them.
I must add that by the time I sent down to ask if she would see me Ihad invented no alternative, though to do so I had had all the time that I was dressing.This failure was humiliating, yet what could the alternative be? Miss Tita sent back word that I might come;and as I descended the stairs and crossed the sala to her door--this time she received me in her aunt's forlorn parlor--I hoped she would not think my errand was to tell her I accepted her hand.
She certainly would have made the day before the reflection that I declined it.
As soon as I came into the room I saw that she had drawn this inference, but I also saw something which had not been in my forecast.Poor Miss Tita's sense of her failure had produced an extraordinary alteration in her, but I had been too full of my literary concupiscence to think of that.
Now I perceived it; I can scarcely tell how it startled me.
She stood in the middle of the room with a face of mildness bent upon me, and her look of forgiveness, of absolution, made her angelic.
It beautified her; she was younger; she was not a ridiculous old woman.
This optical trick gave her a sort of phantasmagoric brightness, and while I was still the victim of it I heard a whisper somewhere in the depths of my conscience: "Why not, after all--why not?"It seemed to me I was ready to pay the price.Still more distinctly however than the whisper I heard Miss Tita's own voice.I was so struck with the different effect she made upon me that at first I was not clearly aware of what she was saying; then I perceived she had bade me goodbye--she said something about hoping I should be very happy.
"Goodbye--goodbye?" I repeated with an inflection interrogative and probably foolish.
I saw she did not feel the interrogation, she only heard the words;she had strung herself up to accepting our separation and they fell upon her ear as a proof."Are you going today?" she asked.
"But it doesn't matter, for whenever you go I shall not see you again.
I don't want to." And she smiled strangely, with an infinite gentleness.
She had never doubted that I had left her the day before in horror.
How could she, since I had not come back before night to contradict, even as a ****** form, such an idea? And now she had the force of soul--Miss Tita with force of soul was a new conception--to smile at me in her humiliation.
"What shall you do--where shall you go?" I asked.
"Oh, I don't know.I have done the great thing.
I have destroyed the papers."
"Destroyed them?" I faltered.
"Yes; what was I to keep them for? I burned them last night, one by one, in the kitchen.""One by one?" I repeated, mechanically.
"It took a long time--there were so many." The room seemed to go round me as she said this, and a real darkness for a moment descended upon my eyes.
When it passed Miss Tita was there still, but the transfiguration was over and she had changed back to a plain, dingy, elderly person.
It was in this character she spoke as she said, "I can't stay with you longer, I can't;" and it was in this character that she turned her back upon me, as I had turned mine upon her twenty-four hours before, and moved to the door of her room.Here she did what I had not done when I quitted her--she paused long enough to give me one look.I have never forgotten it and I sometimes still suffer from it, though it was not resentful.
No, there was no resentment, nothing hard or vindictive in poor Miss Tita;for when, later, I sent her in exchange for the portrait of Jeffrey Aspern a larger sum of money than I had hoped to be able to gather for her, writing to her that I had sold the picture, she kept it with thanks;she never sent it back.I wrote to her that I had sold the picture, but I admitted to Mrs.Prest, at the time (I met her in London, in the autumn), that it hangs above my writing table.When I look at it my chagrin at the loss of the letters becomes almost intolerable.
End