CHAPTER 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.
"What's the matter, caro fratello mio?" Miss Ambient quavered,
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 relative and I, by a common
impulse, exchanging a glance of some alarm; and he continued to stare
into the garden. "In heaven's name what has got possession of
Beatrice?" he cried at last, turning round on us a ravaged face. He
looked from one of us to the other--the appeal was addressed to us
alike.
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!" he went on.
"She refused to let Mackintosh see him an hour ago!" Miss Ambient
promptly returned.
"Refused to let Mackintosh see him? By heaven I'll smash in the
door!" And Mark brought his fist down upon the sideboard, which he
had now approached, so that all the breakfast-service rang.
I begged Miss Ambient to go up and try to have speech of her sister-
in-law, and I drew Mark out into the garden. "You're exceedingly
nervous, and Mrs. Ambient's probably right," I there undertook to
plead. "Women know; women should be supreme in such a situation.
Trust a mother--a devoted mother, my dear friend!" With such words
as these I tried to soothe and comfort him, and, marvellous to
relate, I succeeded, with the help of many cigarettes, in making him
walk about the garden and talk, or suffer me at least to do so, for
near an hour. When about that time had elapsed his sister
reappeared, reaching us rapidly and with a convulsed face while she
held her hand to her heart.
"Go for the Doctor, Mark--go for the Doctor this moment!"
"Is he dying? Has she killed him?" my poor friend cried, flinging
away his cigarette.
"I don't know what she has done! But she's frightened, and now she
wants the Doctor."
"He told me he'd be hanged if he came back!" I felt myself obliged
to mention.
"Precisely--therefore Mark himself must go for him, and not a
messenger. You must see him and tell him it's to save your child.
The trap has been ordered--it's ready."
"To save him? I'll save him, please God!" Ambient cried, bounding
with his great strides across the lawn.
As soon as he had gone I felt I ought to have volunteered in his
place, and I said as much to Miss Ambient; but she checked me by
grasping my arm while we heard the wheels of the dog-cart rattle away
from the gate. "He's off--he's off--and now I can think! To get him
away--while I think--while I think!"
"While you think of what, Miss Ambient?"
"Of the unspeakable thing that has happened under this roof!"
Her manner was habitually that of such a prophetess of ill that I at
first allowed for some great extravagance. But I looked at her hard,
and the next thing felt myself turn white. "Dolcino IS dying then--
he's dead?"
"It's too late to save him. His mother has let him die! I tell you
that because you're sympathetic, because you've imagination," Miss
Ambient was good enough to add, interrupting my expression of horror.
"That's why you had the idea of making her read Mark's new book!"
"What has that to do with it? I don't understand you. Your
accusation's monstrous."
"I see it all--I'm not stupid," she went on, heedless of my emphasis.
"It was the book that finished her--it was that decided her!"
"Decided her? Do you mean she has murdered her child?" I demanded,
trembling at my own words.
"She sacrificed him; she determined to do nothing to make him live.
Why else did she lock herself in, why else did she turn away the
Doctor? The book gave her a horror; she determined to rescue him--to
prevent him from ever being touched. He had a crisis at two o'clock
in the morning. I know that from the nurse, who had left her then,
but whom, for a short time, she called back. The darling got munch
worse, but she insisted on the nurse's going back to bed, and after
that she was alone with him for hours."
I listened with a dread that stayed my credence, while she stood
there with her tearless glare. "Do you pretend then she has no pity,
that she's cruel and insane?"
"She held him in her arms, she pressed him to her breast, not to see
him; but she gave him no remedies; she did nothing the Doctor
ordered. Everything's there untouched. She has had the honesty not
even to throw the drugs away!"
I dropped upon the nearest bench, overcome with my dismay--quite as
much at Miss Ambient's horrible insistence and distinctness as at the
monstrous meaning of her words. Yet they came amazingly straight,
and if they did have a sense I saw myself too woefully figure in it.
Had I been then a proximate cause-- ? "You're a very strange woman
and you say incredible things," I could only reply.
She had one of her tragic headshakes. "You think it necessary to
protest, but you're really quite ready to believe me. You've
received an impression of my sister-in-law--you've guessed of what
she's capable."
I don't feel bound to say what concession on this score I made to
Miss Ambient, who went on to relate to me that within the last half-
hour Beatrice had had a revulsion, that she was tremendously
frightened at what she had done; that her fright itself betrayed her;
and that she would now give heaven and earth to save the child. "Let
us hope she will!" I said, looking at my watch and trying to time
poor Ambient; whereupon my companion repeated all portentously
"Let us hope so!" When I asked her if she herself could do nothing,
and whether she oughtn't to be with her sister-in-law, she replied:
"You had better go and judge! She's like a wounded tigress!"
I never saw Mrs. Ambient till six months after this, and therefore
can't pretend to have verified the comparison. At the latter period
she was again the type of the perfect lady. "She'll treat him better
after this," I remember her sister-in-law's saying in response to
some quick outburst, on my part, of compassion for her brother.
Though I had been in the house but thirty-six hours this young lady
had treated me with extraordinary confidence, and there was therefore
a certain demand I might, as such an intimate, make of her. I
extracted from her a pledge that she'd never say to her brother what
she had just said to me, that she'd let him form his own theory of
his wife's conduct. She agreed with me that there was misery enough
in the house without her contributing a new anguish, and that Mrs.
Ambient's proceedings might be explained, to her husband's mind, by
the extravagance of a jealous devotion. Poor Mark came back with the
Doctor much sooner than we could have hoped, but we knew five minutes
afterwards that it was all too late. His sole, his adored little son
was more exquisitely beautiful in death than he had been in life.
Mrs. Ambient's grief was frantic; she lost her head and said strange
things. As for Mark's--but I won't speak of that. Basta, basta, as
he used to say. Miss Ambient kept her secret--I've already had
occasion to say that she had her good points--but it rankled in her
conscience like a guilty participation and, I imagine, had something
to do with her ultimately retiring from the world. And, apropos of
consciences, the reader is now in a position to judge of my
compunction for my effort to convert my cold hostess. I ought to
mention that the death of her child in some degree converted her.
When the new book came out (it was long delayed) she read it over as
a whole, and her husband told me that during the few supreme weeks
before her death--she failed rapidly after losing her son, sank into
a consumption and faded away at Mentone--she even dipped into the
black "Beltraffio."
