tragedy of Miss Ambient’s view of things; but I asked her why she had
n’t urged such a necessity upon her sister-in-law. She answered me with
a smile of extraordinary significance, and told me that I must have very
little idea of what her relations with Beatrice were; but I must do
her the justice to add that she went on to make herself a little more
comprehensible by saying that it was quite reason enough for her sister
not to be alarmed that Mark would be sure to be. He was always nervous
about the child, and as they were predestined by nature to take opposite
views, the only thing for Beatrice was to cultivate a false optimism. If
Mark were not there, she would not be at all easy. I remembered what
he had said to me about their dealings with Dolcino,--that between them
they would put an end to him; but I did not repeat this to Miss Ambient:
the less so that just then her brother emerged from the house, carrying
his child in his arms. Close behind him moved his wife, grave and pale;
the boy’s face was turned over Ambient’s shoulder, towards his mother.
We got up to receive the group, and as they came near us Dolcino turned
round. I caught, on his enchanting little countenance, a smile of
recognition, and for the moment would have been quite content with it.
Miss Ambient, however, received another impression, and I make haste to
say that her quick sensibility, in which there was something maternal,
argues that, in spite of her affectations, there was a strain of
kindness in her. “It won’t do at all--it won’t do at all,” she said to
me under her breath. “I shall speak to Mark about the doctor.”
The child was rather white, but the main difference I saw in him was
that he was even more beautiful than the day before. He had been dressed
in his festal garments,--a velvet suit and a crimson sash,--and he
looked like a little invalid prince, too young to know condescension,
and smiling familiarly on his subjects.
“Put him down, Mark, he’s not comfortable,” Mrs. Ambient said.
“Should you like to stand on your feet, my boy?” his father asked.
“Oh, yes; I ‘m remarkably well,” said the child.
Mark placed him on the ground; he had shining, pointed slippers, with
enormous bows. “Are you happy now, Mr. Ambient?”
“Oh, yes, I am particularly happy,” Dolcino replied. The words were
scarcely out of his mouth when his mother caught him up, and in a
moment, holding him on her knees, she took her place on the bench where
Miss Ambient and I had been sitting. This young lady said something
to her brother, in consequence of which the two wandered away into the
garden together. I remained with Mrs. Ambient; but as a servant had
brought out a couple of chairs I was not obliged to seat myself beside
her. Our conversation was not animated, and I, for my part, felt there
would be a kind of hypocrisy in my trying to make myself agreeable to
Mrs. Ambient I didn’t dislike her--I rather admired her; but I was
aware that I differed from her inexpressibly. Then I suspected, what
I afterwards definitely knew and have already intimated, that the poor
lady had taken a dislike to me; and this of course was not encouraging.
She thought me an obtrusive and even depraved young man, whom a perverse
Providence had dropped upon their quiet lawn to flatter her husband’s
worst tendencies. She did me the honor to say to Miss Ambient, who
repeated the speech, that she didn’t know when she had seen her husband
take such a fancy to a visitor; and she measured, apparently, my evil
influence by Mark’s appreciation of my society. I had a consciousness,
not yet acute, but quite sufficient, of all this; but I must say that
if it chilled my flow of small-talk, it did n’t prevent me from thinking
that the beautiful mother and beautiful child, interlaced there against
their background of roses, made a picture such as I perhaps should not
soon see again. I was free, I supposed, to go into the house and write
letters, to sit in the drawing-room, to repair to my own apartment and
take a nap; but the only use I made of my freedom was to linger still in
my chair and say to myself that the light hand of Sir Joshua might have
painted Mark Ambient’s wife and son. I found myself looking perpetually
at Dolcino, and Dolcino looked back at me, and that was enough to
detain me. When he looked at me he smiled, and I felt it was an absolute
impossibility to abandon a child who was smiling at one like that. His
eyes never wandered; they attached themselves to mine, as if among
all the small incipient things of his nature there was a desire to say
something to me. If I could have taken him upon my own knee, he perhaps
would have managed to say it; but it would have been far too delicate a
matter to ask his mother to give him up, and it has remained a constant
regret for me that on that Sunday afternoon I did not, even for a
moment, hold Dolcino in my arms. He had said that he felt remarkably
well, and that he was especially happy; but though he may have been
happy, with his charming head pillowed on his mother’s breast, and his
little crimson silk legs depending from her lap, I did not think he
looked well. He made no attempt to walk about; he was content to swing
his legs softly and strike one as languid and angelic.
Mark came back to us with his sister; and Miss Ambient, making some
remark about having to attend to her correspondence, passed into the
house. Mark came and stood in front of his wife, looking down at the
child, who immediately took hold of his hand, keeping it while he
remained. “I think Ailingham ought to see him,” Ambient said; “I think
I will walk over and fetch him.”
“That ‘s Gwendolen’s idea, I suppose,” Mrs. Ambient replied, very
sweetly.
“It’s not such an out-of-the-way idea, when one’s child is ill.”
“I ‘m not ill, papa; I ‘m much better now,” Dolcino remarked.
“Is that the truth, or are you only saying it to be agreeable? You have
a great idea of being agreeable, you know.”
The boy seemed to meditate on this distinction this imputation, for a
moment; then his exaggerated eyes, which had wandered, caught my own
as I watched him. “Do _you_ think me agreeable?” he inquired, with the
candor of his age, and with a smile that made his father turn round to
me, laughing, and ask, mutely, with a glance, “Is n’t he adorable?”
“Then why don’t you hop about, if you feel so lusty?” Ambient went on,
while the boy swung his hand.
“Because mamma is holding me close!”
“Oh, yes; I know how mamma holds you when I come near!” Ambient
exclaimed, looking at his wife.
She turned her charming eyes up to him, without deprecation or
concession, and after a moment she said, “You can go for Allingham if
you like, I think myself it would be better. You ought to drive.”
“She says that to get me away,” Ambient remarked to me, laughing; after
which he started for the doctor’s.
I remained there with Mrs. Ambient, though our conversation had more
pauses than speeches. The boy’s little fixed white face seemed, as
before, to plead with me to stay, and after a while it produced still
another effect, a very curious one, which I shall find it difficult to
express. Of course I expose myself to the charge of attempting to give
fantastic reasons for an act which may have been simply the fruit of a
native want of discretion; and indeed the traceable consequences of that
perversity were too lamentable to leave me any desire to trifle with the
question. All I can say is that I acted in perfect good faith, and
that Dolcino’s friendly little gaze gradually kindled the spark of my
inspiration. What helped it to glow were the other influences,--the
silent, suggestive garden-nook, the perfect opportunity (if it was not
an opportunity for that, it was an opportunity for nothing), and the
plea that I speak of, which issued from the child’s eyes, and seemed to
make him say, “The mother that bore me and that presses me here to her
bosom--sympathetic little organism that I am--has really the kind of
sensibility which she has been represented to you as lacking; if you
only look for it patiently and respectfully. How is it possible that she
should n’t have it? How is it possible that I should have so much of
it (for I am quite full of it, dear, strange gentleman), if it were not
also in some degree in her? I am my father’s child, but I am also my
mother’s, and I am sorry for the difference between them!” So it shaped
itself before me, the vision of reconciling Mrs. Ambient with her
husband, of putting an end to their great disagreement The project was
absurd, of course, for had I not had his word for it--spoken with
all the bitterness of experience--that the gulf that divided them was
wellnigh bottomless? Nevertheless, a quarter of an hour after Mark had
left us, I said to his wife that I could n’t get over what she told
me the night before about her thinking her husband’s writings
“objectionable.” I had been so very sorry to hear it, had thought of it
constantly, and wondered whether it were not possible to make her change
her mind. Mrs. Ambient gave me rather a cold stare; she seemed to be
recommending me to mind my own business. I wish I had taken this mute
counsel, but I did not. I went on to remark that it seemed an immense
pity so much that was beautiful should be lost upon her.
“Nothing is lost upon me,” said Mrs. Ambient “I know they are very
beautiful.”
“Don’t you like papa’s books?” Dolcino asked, addressing his mother, but
still looking at me. Then he added to me, “Won’t you read them to me,
American gentleman?”
“I would rather tell you some stories of my own,” I said. “I know
some that are very interesting.” “When will you tell them? To-morrow?”
“To-morrow, with pleasure, if that suits you.” Mrs. Ambient was silent
at this. Her husband, during our walk, had asked me to remain another
day; my promise to her son was an implication that I had consented, and
it is not probable that the prospect was agreeable to her. This ought,
doubtless, to have made me more careful as to what I said next; but all
I can say is that it did n’t. I presently observed that just after
leaving her the evening before, and after hearing her apply to her
husband’s writings the epithet I had already quoted, I had, on going up
to my room, sat down to the perusal of those sheets of his new book
which he had been so good as to lend me. I had sat entranced till nearly
three in the morning. I had read them twice over. “You say you have n’t
looked at them. I think it ‘s such a pity you should n’t Do let me beg
you to take them up. They are so very remarkable. I ‘m sure they will
convert you. They place him in--really--such a dazzling light. All that
is best in him is there. I have no doubt it’s a great liberty, my saying
all this; but excuse me, and _do_ read them!”
“Do read them, mamma!” Dolcino repeated; “do read them!”
She bent her head and closed his lips with a kiss. “Of course I know he
has worked immensely over them,” she said; and after this she made no
remark, but sat there looking thoughtful, with her eyes on the ground.
The tone of these last words was such as to leave me no spirit for
further pressure, and after expressing a fear that her husband had not
found the doctor at home, I got up and took a turn about the grounds.
When I came back, ten minutes later, she was still in her place watching
her boy, who had fallen asleep in her lap. As I drew near she put her
finger to her lips, and a moment afterwards she rose, holding the
child, and murmured something about its being better that he should go
upstairs. I offered to carry him, and held out my hands to take him;
but she thanked me and turned away with the child seated on her arm, his
head on her shoulder. “I am very strong,” she said, as she passed into
the house, and her slim, flexible figure bent backwards with the filial
weight So I never touched Dolcino.
I betook myself to Ambient’s study, delighted to have a quiet hour to
look over his books by myself. The windows were open into the garden;
the sunny stillness, the mild light of the English summer, filled the
room, without quite chasing away the rich dusky tone which was a part
of its charm, and which abode in the serried shelves where old
morocco exhaled the fragrance of curious learning, and in the brighter
intervals, where medals and prints and miniatures were suspended upon a
surface of faded stuff. The place had both color and quiet; I thought it
a perfect room for work, and went so far as to say to myself that, if it
were mine to sit and scribble in, there was no knowing but that I might
learn to write as well as the author of _Beltraffio_. This distinguished
man did not turn up, and I rummaged freely among his treasures. At last
I took down a book that detained me awhile, and seated myself in a fine
old leather chair by the window to turn it over. I had been occupied
in this way for half-an-hour,--a good part of the afternoon had
waned,--when I became conscious of another presence in the room, and,
looking up from my quarto, saw that Mrs. Ambient, having pushed open the
door in the same noiseless way that marked, or disguised, her entrance
the night before, had advanced across the threshold. On seeing me she
stopped; she had not, I think, expected to find me. But her hesitation
was only of a moment; she came straight to her husband’s writing-table
as if she were looking for something. I got up and asked her if I could
help her. She glanced about an instant, and then put her hand upon a
roll of papers which I recognized, as I had placed it in that spot in
the morning on coming down from my room.
“Is this the new book?” she asked, holding it up. “The very sheets, with
precious annotations.” “I mean to take your advice;” and she tucked the
little bundle under her arm. I congratulated her cordially, and
ventured to make of my triumph, as I presumed to call it, a subject of
pleasantry. But she was perfectly grave, and turned away from me, as she
had presented herself, without a smile; after which I settled down to my
quarto again, with the reflection that Mrs. Ambient was a queer woman.
My triumph, too, suddenly seemed to me rather vain. A woman who could
n’t smile in the right place would never understand Mark Ambient. He
came in at last in person, having brought the doctor back with him. “He
was away from home,” Mark said, “and I went after him, to where he was
supposed to be. He had left the place, and I followed him to two or
three others, which accounts for my delay.” He was now with Mrs. Ambient
looking at the child, and was to see Mark again before leaving the
house. My host noticed, at the end of ten minutes, that the proof-sheets
of his new book had been removed from the table; and when I told him,
in reply to his question as to what I knew about them, that Mrs. Ambient
had carried them off to read, he turned almost pale for an instant with
surprise. “What has suddenly made her so curious?” he exclaimed; and I
was obliged to tell him that I was at the bottom of the mystery. I had
had it on my conscience to assure her that she really ought to know
of what her husband was capable. “Of what I am capable? _Elle ne s’en
dottie que trop!_” said Ambient, with a laugh; but he took my meddling
very good-naturedly, and contented himself with adding that he was very
much afraid she would burn up the sheets, with his emendations, of which
he had no duplicate. The doctor paid a long visit in the nursery, and
before he came down I retired to my own quarters, where I remained till
dinner-time. On entering the drawing-room at this hour, I found Miss
Ambient in possession, as she had been the evening before.
“I was right about Dolcino,” she said, as soon as she saw me, with a
strange little air of triumph. “He is really very ill.”
“Very ill! Why, when I last saw him, at four o’clock, he was in fairly
good form.”
“There has been a change for the worse, very sudden and rapid, and when
the doctor got here he found diphtheritic symptoms. He ought to have
been called, as I knew, in the morning, and the child ought n’t to have
been brought into the garden.”
“My dear lady, he was very happy there,” I answered, much appalled.
“He would be happy anywhere. I have no doubt he is happy now, with his
poor little throat in a state--” she dropped her voice as her brother
came in, and Mark let us know that, as a matter of course, Mrs. Ambient
would not appear. It was true that Dolcino had developed diphtheritic
symptoms, but he was quiet for the present, and his mother was earnestly
watching him. She was a perfect nurse, Mark said, and the doctor was
coming back at ten o’clock. Our dinner was not very gay; Ambient was
anxious and alarmed, and his sister irritated me by her constant tacit
assumption, conveyed in the very way she nibbled her bread and sipped
her wine, of having “told me so.” I had had no disposition to deny
anything she told me, and I could not see that her satisfaction in being
justified by the event made poor Dolcino’s throat any better. The truth
is that, as the sequel proved, Miss Ambient had some of the qualities
of the sibyl, and had therefore, perhaps, a right to the sibylline
contortions. Her brother was so preoccupied that I felt my presence
to be an indiscretion, and was sorry I had promised to remain over the
morrow. I said to Mark that, evidently, I had better leave them in the
morning; to which he replied that, on the contrary, if he was to pass
the next days in the fidgets, my company would be an extreme relief to
him. The fidgets had already begun for him, poor fellow; and as we
sat in his study with our cigars after dinner, he wandered to the door
whenever he heard the sound of the doctor’s wheels. Miss Ambient, who
shared this apartment with us, gave me at such moments significant
glances; she had gone upstairs before rejoining us to ask after the
child His mother and his nurse gave a tolerable account of him; but Miss
Ambient found his fever high and his symptoms very grave. The doctor
came at ten o’clock, and I went to bed after hearing from Mark that
he saw no present cause for alarm. He had made every provision for the
night, and was to return early in the morning.
I quitted my room at eight o’clock the next day, and, as I came
downstairs, saw, through the open door of the house, Mrs. Ambient
standing at the front gate of the grounds, in colloquy with the
physician. She wore a white dressing-gown, but her shining hair was
carefully tucked away in its net, and in the freshness of the morning,
after a night of watching, she looked as much “the type of the lady” as
her sister-in-law had described her. Her appearance, I suppose, ought to
have reassured me; but I was still nervous and uneasy, so that I shrank
from meeting her with the necessary question about Dolcino. None the
less, however, was I impatient to learn how the morning found him;
and, as Mrs. Ambient had not seen me, I passed into the grounds by a
roundabout way, and, stopping at a further gate, hailed the doctor just
as he was driving away. Mrs. Ambient had returned to the house before he
got into his gig.
“Excuse me, but as a friend of the family, I should like very much to
hear about the little boy.”
The doctor, who was a stout, sharp man, looked at me from head to foot,
and then he said, “I’m sorry to say I have n’t seen him.”
“Have n’t seen him?”
“Mrs. Ambient came down to meet me as I alighted, and told me that he
was sleeping so soundly, after a restless night, that she did n’t wish
him disturbed. I assured her I would n’t disturb him, but she said he
was quite safe now and she could look after him herself.”
“Thank you very much. Are you coming back?”
“No, sir; I ‘ll be hanged if I come back!” exclaimed Dr. Allingham, who
was evidently very angry. And he started his horse again with the whip.
I wandered back into the garden, and five minutes later Miss Ambient
came forth from the house to greet me. She explained that breakfast
would not be served for some time, and that she wished to catch the
doctor before he went away. I informed her that this functionary had
come and departed, and I repeated to her what he had told me about his
dismissal. This made Miss Ambient very serious, very serious indeed,
and she sank into a bench, with dilated eyes, hugging her elbows with
crossed arms. She indulged in many ejaculations, she confessed that she
was infinitely perplexed, and she finally told me what her own last
news of her nephew had been. She had sat up very late,--after me, after
Mark,--and before going to bed had knocked at the door of the child’s
room, which was opened to her by the nurse. This good woman had admitted
her, and she had found Dolcino quiet, but flushed and “unnatural,” with
his mother sitting beside his bed. “She held his hand in one of
hers,” said Miss Ambient, “and in the other--what do you think?--the
proof-sheets of Mark’s new book! She was reading them there, intently:
did you ever hear of anything so extraordinary? Such a very odd time to
be reading an author whom she never could abide!” In her agitation Miss
Ambient was guilty of this vulgarism of speech, and I was so impressed
by her narrative that it was only in recalling her words later that I
noticed the lapse. Mrs. Ambient had looked up from her reading with her
finger on her lips--I recognized the gesture she had addressed to me in
the afternoon--and, though the nurse was about to go to rest, had not
encouraged her sister-in-law to relieve her of any part of her vigil.
But certainly, then, Dolcino’s condition was far from reassuring,--his
poor little breathing was most painful; and what change could have taken
place in him in those few hours that would justify Beatrice in denying
the physician access to him? This was the moral of Miss Ambient’s
anecdote, the moral for herself at least. The moral for me, rather, was
that it _was_ a very singular time for Mrs. Ambient to be going into a
novelist she had never appreciated, and who had simply happened to be
recommended to her by a young American she disliked. I thought of her
sitting there in the sick-chamber in the still hours of the night, after
the nurse had left her, turning over those pages of genius and wrestling
with their magical influence.
I must relate very briefly the circumstances of the rest of my visit to
Mark Ambient,--it lasted but a few hours longer,--and devote but three
words to my later acquaintance with him. That lasted five years,--till
his death,--and was full of interest, of satisfaction, and, I may add,
of sadness. The main thing to be said with regard to it, is that I had
a secret from him. I believe he never suspected it, though of this I
am not absolutely sure. If he did, the line he had taken, the line of
absolute negation of the matter to himself, shows an immense effort of
the will. I may tell my secret now, giving it for what it is worth, now
that Mark Ambient has gone, that he has begun to be alluded to as one of
the famous early dead, and that his wife does not survive him; now, too,
that Miss Ambient, whom I also saw at intervals during the years that
followed, has, with her embroideries and her attitudes, her necromantic
glances and strange intuitions, retired to a Sisterhood, where, as I am
told, she is deeply immured and quite lost to the world.
Mark came in to breakfast after his sister and I had for some time been
seated there. He shook hands with me in silence, kissed his sister,
opened his letters and newspapers, and pretended to drink his coffee.
But I could see that these movements were mechanical, and I was little
surprised when, suddenly, he pushed away everything that was before him,
and, with his head in his hands and his elbows on the table, sat staring
strangely at the cloth.
“What is the matter, _fratello mio?_” Miss Ambient inquired, peeping from
behind the urn.
He answered nothing, but got up with a certain violence and strode to
the window. We rose to our feet, his sister and I, by a common impulse,
exchanging a glance of some alarm, while he stared for a moment into the
garden. “In Heaven’s name what has got possession of Beatrice?” he cried
at last, turning round with an almost haggard face. And he looked from
one of us to the other; the appeal was addressed to me as well as to his
sister.
Miss Ambient gave a shrug. “My poor Mark, Beatrice is always--Beatrice!”
“She has locked herself up with the boy--bolted and barred the door; she
refuses to let me come near him!” Ambient went on.
“She refused to let the doctor see him an hour ago!” Miss Ambient
remarked, with intention, as they say on the stage.
“Refused to let the doctor see him? By heaven, I ‘ll smash in the
door!” And Mark brought his fist down upon the table, so that all the
breakfast-service rang.