beeches. “As regards most matters one can easily say what, in a given
situation, my sister-in-law will, or would, do. But in the present case
there are strange elements at work.”
“Strange elements? Do you mean in the constitution of the child?”
“No, I mean in my sister-in-law’s feelings.”
“Elements of affection of course; elements of anxiety,” I concurred.
“But why do you call them strange?”
She repeated my words. “Elements of affection, elements of anxiety.
She’s very anxious.”
Miss Ambient put me indescribably ill at ease; she almost scared me, and
I wished she would go and write her letters. “His father will have seen
him now,” I said, “and if he’s not satisfied he will send for the
doctor.”
“The doctor ought to have been here this morning,” she promptly returned.
“He lives only two miles away.”
I reflected that all this was very possibly but a part of the general
tragedy of Miss Ambient’s view of things; yet I asked her why she hadn’t
urged that view on her sister-in-law. She answered me with a smile of
extraordinary significance and observed that I must have very little idea
of her “peculiar” relations with Beatrice; but I must do her the justice
that she re-enforced this a little by the plea that any distinguishable
alarm of Mark’s was ground enough for a difference of his wife’s. He was
always nervous about the child, and as they were predestined by nature to
take opposite views, the only thing for the mother was to cultivate a
false optimism. In Mark’s absence and that of his betrayed fear she
would have been less easy. I remembered what he had said to me about
their dealings with their son—that between them they’d probably put an
end to him; but I didn’t repeat this to Miss Ambient: the less so that
just then her brother emerged from the house, carrying the boy in his
arms. Close behind him moved his wife, grave and pale; the little sick
face was turned over Ambient’s shoulder and toward the mother. We rose
to receive the group, and as they came near us Dolcino twisted himself
about. His enchanting eyes showed me a smile of recognition, in which,
for the moment, I should have taken a due degree of comfort. Miss
Ambient, however, received another impression, and I make haste to say
that her quick sensibility, which visibly went out to the child, argues
that in spite of her affectations she might have been of some human use.
“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.”
Her small nephew 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 a bit at his ease,” Mrs. Ambient said.
“Should you like to stand on your feet, my boy?” his father asked.
He made a motion that quickly responded. “Oh yes; I’m remarkably well.”
Mark placed him on the ground; he had shining pointed shoes with enormous
bows. “Are you happy now, Mr. Ambient?”
“Oh yes, I’m particularly happy,” Dolcino replied. But the words were
scarce out of his mouth when his mother caught him up and, in a moment,
holding him on her knees, 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.
IV
I REMAINED with Mrs. Ambient, but as a servant had brought out a couple
of chairs I wasn’t obliged to seat myself beside her. Our conversation
failed of ease, and I, for my part, felt there would be a shade of
hypocrisy in my now trying to make myself agreeable to the partner of my
friend’s existence. 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
felt small taste for her husband’s so undisguised disciple; and this of
course was not encouraging. She thought me an obtrusive and designing,
even perhaps a depraved, young man whom a perverse Providence had dropped
upon their quiet lawn to flatter his worst tendencies. She did me the
honour to say to Miss Ambient, who repeated the speech, that she didn’t
know when she had seen their companion 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 oppressive but quite sufficient,
of all this; though I must say that if it chilled my flow of small-talk
it yet didn’t prevent my thinking the beautiful mother and beautiful
child, interlaced there against their background of roses, a picture such
as I doubtless shouldn’t 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 the latter small mortal, who looked
constantly back at me, and that was enough to detain me. With these
vaguely-amused eyes he smiled, and I felt it an absolute impossibility to
abandon a child with such an expression. His attention never strayed; it
attached itself to my face as if among all the small incipient things of
his nature throbbed a desire to say something to me. If I could have
taken him on my own knee he perhaps would have managed to say it; but it
would have been a critical matter to ask his mother to give him up, and
it has remained a constant regret for me that on that strange Sunday
afternoon I didn’t even for a moment hold Dolcino in my arms. He had
said he felt remarkably well and was especially happy; but though peace
may have been with him as he pillowed his charming head on his mother’s
breast, dropping his little crimson silk legs from her lap, I somehow
didn’t think security was. He made no attempt to walk about; he was
content to swing his legs softly and strike one as languid and angelic.
Mark returned to us with his sister; and Miss Ambient, repeating her
mention of the claims of 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 and kept it while he stayed. “I think
Mackintosh ought to see him,” he said; “I think I’ll 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’s ill,” he
returned.
“I’m not ill, papa; I’m much better now,” sounded in the boy’s silver
pipe.
“Is that the truth, or are you only saying it to be agreeable? You’ve a
great idea of being agreeable, you know.”
The child 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 candour
of his age and with a look that made his father turn round to me laughing
and ask, without saying it, “Isn’t he adorable?”
“Then why don’t you hop about, if you feel so lusty?” Ambient went on
while his son swung his hand.
“Because mamma’s holding me close!”
“Oh yes; I know how mamma holds you when I come near!” cried Mark with a
grimace at his wife.
She turned her charming eyes up to him without deprecation or concession.
“You can go for Mackintosh if you like. I think myself it would be
better. You ought to drive.”
“She says that to get me away,” he put to me with a gaiety that I thought
a little false; after which he started for the Doctor’s.
I remained there with Mrs. Ambient, though even our exchange of twaddle
had run very thin. 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 an attempt to justify by a
strained logic after the fact a step which may have been on my part but
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 I speak of, which issued from the child’s eyes
and seemed to make him say: “The mother who bore me and who presses me
here to her bosom—sympathetic little organism that I am—has really the
kind of sensibility she has been represented to you as lacking, if you
only look for it patiently and respectfully. How is it conceivable she
shouldn’t have it? How is it possible that _I_ should have so much of
it—for I’m quite full of it, dear strange gentleman—if it weren’t also in
some degree in her? I’m my great father’s child, but I’m also my
beautiful mother’s, and I’m 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 ugly difference. 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 dividing them was well-nigh
bottomless? Nevertheless, a quarter of an hour after Mark had left us, I
observed to my hostess that I couldn’t get over what she had told me the
night before about her thinking her husband’s compositions
“objectionable.” I had been so very sorry to hear it, had thought of it
constantly and wondered whether it mightn’t be possible to make her
change her mind. She gave me a great cold stare, meant apparently as an
admonition to me to mind my business. I wish I had taken this mute
counsel, but I didn’t take it. I went on to remark that it seemed an
immense pity so much that was interesting should be lost on her.
“Nothing’s lost upon me,” she said in a tone that didn’t make the
contradiction less. “I know they’re very interesting.”
“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’d rather tell you some stories of my own,” I said. “I know some that
are awfully good.”
“When will you tell them? To-morrow?”
“To-morrow with pleasure, if that suits you.”
His mother took this in silence. 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 wasn’t possible the news could please her. This
ought doubtless to have made me more careful as to what I said next, but
all I can plead is that it didn’t. I soon mentioned that just after
leaving her the evening before, and after hearing her apply to her
husband’s writings the epithet already quoted, I had on going up to my
room sat down to the perusal of those sheets of his new book that 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 haven’t looked at them.
I think it’s such a pity you shouldn’t. Do let me beg you to take them
up. They’re so very remarkable. I’m sure they’ll convert you. They
place him in—really—such a dazzling light. All that’s best in him is
there. I’ve no doubt it’s a great liberty, my saying all this; but
pardon me, and _do_ read them!”
“Do read them, mamma!” the boy again sweetly shrilled. “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; after which she made no
remark, but attached her eyes thoughtfully to the ground. The tone of
these last words was such as to leave me no spirit for further pressure,
and after hinting at a fear that her husband mightn’t have caught the
Doctor 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
short time afterwards rose, holding him; it being now best, she said,
that she should take him upstairs. I offered to carry him and opened my
arms for the purpose; but she thanked me and turned away with the child
still in her embrace, his head on her shoulder. “I’m very strong,” was
her last word as she passed into the house, her slim flexible figure bent
backward with the filial weight. So I never laid a longing hand on
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 to the garden; the
sunny stillness, the mild light of the English summer, filled the room
without quite chasing away the rich dusky tone that was a part of its
charm and that abode in the serried shelves where old morocco exhaled the
fragrance of curious learning, as well as in the brighter intervals where
prints and medals and miniatures were suspended on a surface of faded
stuff. The place had both colour 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 I might learn to write as well
as the author of “Beltraffio.” This distinguished man still didn’t
reappear, and I rummaged freely among his treasures. At last I took down
a book that detained me a while 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 quite again in the
same noiseless way marking or disguising 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 recognised, as I had placed it on that spot at the early hour of
my descent from my room.
“Is this the new book?” she asked, holding it up.
“The very sheets,” I smiled; “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
relaxing her rigour; after which I settled down to my quarto again with
the reflexion that Mrs. Ambient was truly an eccentric. My triumph, too,
suddenly seemed to me rather vain. A woman who couldn’t unbend at a
moment exquisitely indicated would never understand Mark Ambient. He
came back to us at last in person, having brought the Doctor 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 two 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 with
surprise. “What has suddenly made her so curious?” he cried; 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’m capable? Elle ne s’en doute que
trop!” said Ambient with a laugh; but he took my meddling very
good-naturedly and contented himself with adding that he was really much
afraid she would burn up the sheets, his emendations and all, of which
latter 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 an air
of triumph that struck me as the climax of perversity. “He’s 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 oughtn’t to have
been brought into the garden.”
“My dear lady, he was very happy there,” I protested with horror.
“He would be very happy anywhere. I’ve no doubt he’s very happy now,
with his poor little temperature—!” She dropped her voice as her brother
came in, and Mark let us know that as a matter of course Mrs. Ambient
wouldn’t appear. It was true the boy had developed diphtheritic
symptoms, but he was quiet for the present and his mother earnestly
watching him. She was a perfect nurse, Mark said, and Mackintosh would
come back at ten. Our dinner wasn’t very gay—with my host worried and
absent; and his sister annoyed 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 might
have told me, and I couldn’t see that her satisfaction in being justified
by the event relieved her little nephew’s condition. The truth is that,
as the sequel was to prove, 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 an indiscretion
and was sorry I had promised to remain over the morrow. I put it to Mark
that clearly I had best 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 distract his attention. 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 before rejoining us gone upstairs to
ask about the child. His mother and his nurse gave a fair report, 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 as eight struck the next day and when I came downstairs
saw, through the open door of the house, Mrs. Ambient standing at the
front gate of the grounds in colloquy with Mackintosh. She wore a white
dressing-gown, but her shining hair was carefully tucked away in its net,
and in the morning freshness, 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
challenge. None the less, however, was I impatient to learn how the new
day found him; and as Mrs. Ambient hadn’t 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 off. Mrs. Ambient had returned to the
house before he got into his cart.
“Pardon me, but as a friend of the family I should like very much to hear
about the little boy.”
The stout sharp circumspect man looked at me from head to foot and then
said: “I’m sorry to say I haven’t seen him.”
“Haven’t seen him?”
“Mrs. Ambient came down to meet me as I alighted, and told me he was
sleeping so soundly, after a restless night, that she didn’t wish him
disturbed. I assured her I wouldn’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!” cried the honest practitioner
in high resentment. And the horse started as he settled beside his man.
I wandered back into the garden, and five minutes later Miss Ambient came
forth from the house to greet me. She explained that breakfast wouldn’t
be served for some time and that she desired a moment herself with the
Doctor. I let her know that the good vexed man 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 strange signs, she confessed herself immensely
distressed, 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, opened to her by the
nurse. This good woman had admitted her and she had found him quiet, but
flushed and “unnatural,” with his mother sitting by 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 only in recalling her words later
did I notice the lapse. Mrs. Ambient had looked up from her reading with
her finger on her lips—I recognised the gesture she had addressed 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 at that time the boy’s state was far from reassuring—his
poor little breathing so painful; and what change could have taken place
in him in those few hours that would justify Beatrice in denying
Mackintosh access? 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 and after the nurse had left
her, turning and turning those pages of genius and wrestling with their
magical influence.
I must be sparing of the minor facts and the later emotions of this
sojourn—it lasted but a few hours longer—and devote but three words to my
subsequent relations with Ambient. They lasted five years—till his
death—and were full of interest, of satisfaction and, I may add, of
sadness. The main thing to be said of these years is that I had a secret
from him which I guarded to the end. I believe he never suspected it,
though of this I’m not absolutely sure. If he had so much as an inkling
the line he had taken, the line of absolute negation of the matter to
himself, shows an immense effort of the will. I may at last lay bare my
secret, giving it for what it is worth; now that the main sufferer has
gone, that he has begun to be alluded to as one of the famous early dead
and that his wife has ceased to survive him; now, too, that Miss Ambient,
whom I also saw at intervals during the time 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 this lady and I had for some time been
seated there. He shook hands with me in silence, kissed my companion,
opened his letters and newspapers and pretended to drink his coffee. But
I took these movements for mechanical and was little surprised when he
suddenly 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.