The Author of Beltraffio / Henry James

CHAPTER I

Much as I wished to see him I had kept my letter of introduction

three weeks in my pocket-book. I was nervous and timid about

meeting him--conscious of youth and ignorance, convinced that he was

tormented by strangers, and especially by my country-people, and not

exempt from the suspicion that he had the irritability as well as the

dignity of genius. Moreover, the pleasure, if it should occur--for

I could scarcely believe it was near at hand--would be so great that

I wished to think of it in advance, to feel it there against my

breast, not to mix it with satisfactions more superficial and usual.

In the little game of new sensations that I was playing with my

ingenuous mind I wished to keep my visit to the author of

"Beltraffio" as a trump-card. It was three years after the

publication of that fascinating work, which I had read over five

times and which now, with my riper judgement, I admire on the whole

as much as ever. This will give you about the date of my first

visit--of any duration--to England for you will not have forgotten

the commotion, I may even say the scandal, produced by Mark Ambient's

masterpiece. It was the most complete presentation that had yet

been made of the gospel of art; it was a kind of aesthetic war-cry.

People had endeavoured to sail nearer to "truth" in the cut of their

sleeves and the shape of their sideboards; but there had not as yet

been, among English novels, such an example of beauty of execution

and "intimate" importance of theme. Nothing had been done in that

line from the point of view of art for art. That served me as a

fond formula, I may mention, when I was twenty-five; how much it

still serves I won't take upon myself to say--especially as the

discerning reader will be able to judge for himself. I had been in

England, briefly, a twelve-month before the time to which I began by

alluding, and had then learned that Mr. Ambient was in distant lands-

-was making a considerable tour in the East; so that there was

nothing to do but to keep my letter till I should be in London again.

It was of little use to me to hear that his wife had not left England

and was, with her little boy, their only child, spending the period

of her husband's absence--a good many months--at a small place they

had down in Surrey. They had a house in London, but actually in the

occupation of other persons. All this I had picked up, and also

that Mrs. Ambient was charming--my friend the American poet, from

whom I had my introduction, had never seen her, his relations with

the great man confined to the exchange of letters; but she wasn't,

after all, though she had lived so near the rose, the author of

"Beltraffio," and I didn't go down into Surrey to call on her. I

went to the Continent, spent the following winter in Italy, and

returned to London in May. My visit to Italy had opened my eyes to

a good many things, but to nothing more than the beauty of certain

pages in the works of Mark Ambient. I carried his productions about

in my trunk--they are not, as you know, very numerous, but he had

preluded to "Beltraffio" by, some exquisite things--and I used to

read them over in the evening at the inn. I used profoundly to

reason that the man who drew those characters and wrote that style

understood what he saw and knew what he was doing. This is my sole

ground for mentioning my winter in Italy. He had been there much in

former years--he was saturated with what painters call the "feeling"

of that classic land. He expressed the charm of the old hill-cities

of Tuscany, the look of certain lonely grass-grown places which, in

the past, had echoed with life; he understood the great artists, he

understood the spirit of the Renaissance; he understood everything.

The scene of one of his earlier novels was laid in Rome, the scene of

another in Florence, and I had moved through these cities in company

with the figures he set so firmly on their feet. This is why I was

now so much happier even than before in the prospect of making his

acquaintance.

At last, when I had dallied with my privilege long enough, I

despatched to him the missive of the American poet. He had already

gone out of town; he shrank from the rigour of the London "season"

and it was his habit to migrate on the first of June. Moreover I

had heard he was this year hard at work on a new book, into which

some of his impressions of the East were to be wrought, so that he

desired nothing so much as quiet days. That knowledge, however,

didn't prevent me--cet age est sans pitie--from sending with my

friend's letter a note of my own, in which I asked his leave to come

down and see him for an hour or two on some day to be named by

himself. My proposal was accompanied with a very frank expression

of my sentiments, and the effect of the entire appeal was to elicit

from the great man the kindest possible invitation. He would be

delighted to see me, especially if I should turn up on the following

Saturday and would remain till the Monday morning. We would take a

walk over the Surrey commons, and I could tell him all about the

other great man, the one in America. He indicated to me the best

train, and it may be imagined whether on the Saturday afternoon I was

punctual at Waterloo. He carried his benevolence to the point of

coming to meet me at the little station at which I was to alight, and

my heart beat very fast as I saw his handsome face, surmounted with a

soft wide-awake and which I knew by a photograph long since enshrined

on my mantel-shelf, scanning the carriage-windows as the train rolled

up. He recognised me as infallibly as I had recognised himself; he

appeared to know by instinct how a young American of critical

pretensions, rash youth, would look when much divided between

eagerness and modesty. He took me by the hand and smiled at me and

said: "You must be--a--YOU, I think!" and asked if I should mind

going on foot to his house, which would take but a few minutes. I

remember feeling it a piece of extraordinary affability that he

should give directions about the conveyance of my bag; I remember

feeling altogether very happy and rosy, in fact quite transported,

when he laid his hand on my shoulder as we came out of the station.

I surveyed him, askance, as we walked together; I had already, I had

indeed instantly, seen him as all delightful. His face is so well

known that I needn't describe it; he looked to me at once an English

gentleman and a man of genius, and I thought that a happy

combination. There was a brush of the Bohemian in his fineness; you

would easily have guessed his belonging to the artist guild. He was

addicted to velvet jackets, to cigarettes, to loose shirt-collars, to

looking a little dishevelled. His features, which were firm but not

perfectly regular, are fairly enough represented in his portraits;

but no portrait I have seen gives any idea of his expression. There

were innumerable things in it, and they chased each other in and out

of his face. I have seen people who were grave and gay in quick

alternation; but Mark Ambient was grave and gay at one and the same

moment. There were other strange oppositions and contradictions in

his slightly faded and fatigued countenance. He affected me somehow

as at once fresh and stale, at once anxious and indifferent. He had

evidently had an active past, which inspired one with curiosity; yet

what was that compared to his obvious future? He was just enough

above middle height to be spoken of as tall, and rather lean and long

in the flank. He had the friendliest frankest manner possible, and

yet I could see it cost him something. It cost him small spasms of

the self-consciousness that is an Englishman's last and dearest

treasure--the thing he pays his way through life by sacrificing small

pieces of even as the gallant but moneyless adventurer in "Quentin

Durward" broke off links of his brave gold chain. He had been

thirty-eight years old at the time "Beltraffio" was published. He

asked me about his friend in America, about the length of my stay in

England, about the last news in London and the people I had seen

there; and I remember looking for the signs of genius in the very

form of his questions and thinking I found it. I liked his voice as

if I were somehow myself having the use of it.

There was genius in his house too I thought when we got there; there

was imagination in the carpets and curtains, in the pictures and

books, in the garden behind it, where certain old brown walls were

muffled in creepers that appeared to me to have been copied from a

masterpiece of one of the pre-Raphaelites. That was the way many

things struck me at that time, in England--as reproductions of

something that existed primarily in art or literature. It was not

the picture, the poem, the fictive page, that seemed to me a copy;

these things were the originals, and the life of happy and

distinguished people was fashioned in their image. Mark Ambient

called his house a cottage, and I saw afterwards he was right for if

it hadn't been a cottage it must have been a villa, and a villa, in

England at least, was not a place in which one could fancy him at

home. But it was, to my vision, a cottage glorified and translated;

it was a palace of art, on a slightly reduced scale--and might

besides have been the dearest haunt of the old English genius loci.

It nestled under a cluster of magnificent beeches, it had little

creaking lattices that opened out of, or into, pendent mats of ivy,

and gables, and old red tiles, as well as a general aspect of being

painted in water-colours and inhabited by people whose lives would go

on in chapters and volumes. The lawn seemed to me of extraordinary

extent, the garden-walls of incalculable height, the whole air of the

place delightfully still, private, proper to itself. "My wife must

be somewhere about," Mark Ambient said as we went in. "We shall

find her perhaps--we've about an hour before dinner. She may be in

the garden. I'll show you my little place."

We passed through the house and into the grounds, as I should have

called them, which extended into the rear. They covered scarce

three or four acres, but, like the house, were very old and crooked

and full of traces of long habitation, with inequalities of level and

little flights of steps--mossy and cracked were these--which

connected the different parts with each other. The limits of the

place, cleverly dissimulated, were muffled in the great verdurous

screens. They formed, as I remember, a thick loose curtain at the

further end, in one of the folds of which, as it were, we presently

made out from afar a little group. "Ah there she is!" said Mark

Ambient; "and she has got the boy." He noted that last fact in a

slightly different tone from any in which he yet had spoken. I

wasn't fully aware of this at the time, but it lingered in my ear and

I afterwards understood it.

"Is it your son?" I inquired, feeling the question not to be

brilliant.

"Yes, my only child. He's always in his mother's pocket. She

coddles him too much." It came back to me afterwards too--the sound

of these critical words. They weren't petulant; they expressed

rather a sudden coldness, a mechanical submission. We went a few

steps further, and then he stopped short and called the boy,

beckoning to him repeatedly.

"Dolcino, come and see your daddy!" There was something in the way

he stood still and waited that made me think he did it for a purpose.

Mrs. Ambient had her arm round the child's waist, and he was leaning

against her knee; but though he moved at his father's call she gave

no sign of releasing him. A lady, apparently a neighbour, was

seated near her, and before them was a garden-table on which a tea-

service had been placed.

Mark Ambient called again, and Dolcino struggled in the maternal

embrace; but, too tightly held, he after two or three fruitless

efforts jerked about and buried his head deep in his mother's lap.

There was a certain awkwardness in the scene; I thought it odd Mrs.

Ambient should pay so little attention to her husband. But I

wouldn't for the world have betrayed my thought, and, to conceal it,

I began loudly to rejoice in the prospect of our having tea in the

garden. "Ah she won't let him come!" said my host with a sigh; and

we went our way till we reached the two ladies. He mentioned my

name to his wife, and I noticed that he addressed her as "My dear,"

very genially, without a trace of resentment at her detention of the

child. The quickness of the transition made me vaguely ask myself

if he were perchance henpecked--a shocking surmise which I instantly

dismissed. Mrs. Ambient was quite such a wife as I should have

expected him to have; slim and fair, with a long neck and pretty eyes

and an air of good breeding. She shone with a certain coldness and

practised in intercourse a certain bland detachment, but she was

clothed in gentleness as in one of those vaporous redundant scarves

that muffle the heroines of Gainsborough and Romney. She had also a

vague air of race, justified by my afterwards learning that she was

"connected with the aristocracy." I have seen poets married to women

of whom it was difficult to conceive that they should gratify the

poetic fancy--women with dull faces and glutinous minds, who were

none the less, however, excellent wives. But there was no obvious

disparity in Mark Ambient's union. My hostess--so far as she could

be called so--delicate and quiet, in a white dress, with her

beautiful child at her side, was worthy of the author of a work so

distinguished as "Beltraffio." Round her neck she wore a black

velvet ribbon, of which the long ends, tied behind, hung down her

back, and to which, in front, was attached a miniature portrait of

her little boy. Her smooth shining hair was confined in a net. She

gave me an adequate greeting, and Dolcino--I thought this small name

of endearment delightful--took advantage of her getting up to slip

away from her and go to his father, who seized him in silence and

held him high for a long moment, kissing him several times.

I had lost no time in observing that the child, not more than seven

years old, was extraordinarily beautiful. He had the face of an

angel--the eyes, the hair, the smile of innocence, the more than

mortal bloom. There was something that deeply touched, that almost

alarmed, in his beauty, composed, one would have said, of elements

too fine and pure for the breath of this world. When I spoke to him

and he came and held out his hand and smiled at me I felt a sudden

strange pity for him--quite as if he had been an orphan or a

changeling or stamped with some social stigma. It was impossible to

be in fact more exempt from these misfortunes, and yet, as one kissed

him, it was hard to keep from murmuring all tenderly "Poor little

devil!" though why one should have applied this epithet to a living

cherub is more than I can say. Afterwards indeed I knew a trifle

better; I grasped the truth of his being too fair to live, wondering

at the same time that his parents shouldn't have guessed it and have

been in proportionate grief and despair. For myself I had no doubt

of his evanescence, having already more than once caught in the fact

the particular infant charm that's as good as a death-warrant.

The lady who had been sitting with Mrs. Ambient was a jolly ruddy

personage in velveteen and limp feathers, whom I guessed to be the

vicar's wife--our hostess didn't introduce me--and who immediately

began to talk to Ambient about chrysanthemums. This was a safe

subject, and yet there was a certain surprise for me in seeing the

author of "Beltraffio" even in such superficial communion with the

Church of England. His writings implied so much detachment from that

institution, expressed a view of life so profane, as it were, so

independent and so little likely in general to be thought edifying,

that I should have expected to find him an object of horror to vicars

and their ladies--of horror repaid on his own part by any amount of

effortless derision. This proved how little I knew as yet of the

English people and their extraordinary talent for keeping up their

forms, as well as of some of the mysteries of Mark Ambient's hearth

and home. I found afterwards that he had, in his study, between

nervous laughs and free cigar-puffs, some wonderful comparisons for

his clerical neighbours; but meanwhile the chrysanthemums were a

source of harmony, he and the vicaress were equally attached to them,

and I was surprised at the knowledge they exhibited of this

interesting plant. The lady's visit, however, had presumably been

long, and she presently rose for departure and kissed Mrs. Ambient.

Mark started to walk with her to the gate of the grounds, holding

Dolcino by the hand.

"Stay with me, darling," Mrs. Ambient said to the boy, who had

surrendered himself to his father.

Mark paid no attention to the summons but Dolcino turned and looked

at her in shy appeal, "Can't I go with papa?"

"Not when I ask you to stay with me."

"But please don't ask me, mamma," said the child in his small clear

new voice.

"I must ask you when I want you. Come to me, dearest." And Mrs.

Ambient, who had seated herself again, held out her long slender

slightly too osseous hands.

Her husband stopped, his back turned to her, but without releasing

the child. He was still talking to the vicaress, but this good lady,

I think, had lost the thread of her attention. She looked at Mrs.

Ambient and at Dolcino, and then looked at me, smiling in a highly

amused cheerful manner and almost to a grimace.

"Papa," said the child, "mamma wants me not to go with you."

"He's very tired--he has run about all day. He ought to be quiet

till he goes to bed. Otherwise he won't sleep." These declarations

fell successively and very distinctly from Mrs. Ambient's lips.

Her husband, still without turning round, bent over the boy and

looked at him in silence. The vicaress gave a genial irrelevant

laugh and observed that he was a precious little pet. "Let him

choose," said Mark Ambient. "My dear little boy, will you go with me

or will you stay with your mother?"

"Oh it's a shame!" cried the vicar's lady with increased hilarity.

"Papa, I don't think I can choose," the child answered, making his

voice very low and confidential. "But I've been a great deal with

mamma to-day," he then added.

"And very little with papa! My dear fellow, I think you HAVE

chosen!" On which Mark Ambient walked off with his son, accompanied

by re-echoing but inarticulate comments from my fellow-visitor.

His wife had seated herself again, and her fixed eyes, bent on the

ground, expressed for a few moments so much mute agitation that

anything I could think of to say would be but a false note. Yet she

none the less quickly recovered herself, to express the sufficiently

civil hope that I didn't mind having had to walk from the station. I

reassured her on this point, and she went on: "We've got a thing

that might have gone for you, but my husband wouldn't order it."

After which and another longish pause, broken only by my plea that

the pleasure of a walk with our friend would have been quite what I

would have chosen, she found for reply: "I believe the Americans

walk very little."

"Yes, we always run," I laughingly allowed.

She looked at me seriously, yet with an absence in her pretty eyes.

"I suppose your distances are so great."

"Yes, but we break our marches! I can't tell you the pleasure to me

of finding myself here," I added. "I've the greatest admiration for

Mr. Ambient."

"He'll like that. He likes being admired."

"He must have a very happy life, then. He has many worshippers."

"Oh yes, I've seen some of them," she dropped, looking away, very far

from me, rather as if such a vision were before her at the moment.

It seemed to indicate, her tone, that the sight was scarcely

edifying, and I guessed her quickly enough to be in no great

intellectual sympathy with the author of "Beltraffio." I thought the

fact strange, but somehow, in the glow of my own enthusiasm, didn't

think it important it only made me wish rather to emphasise that

homage.

"For me, you know," I returned--doubtless with a due suffisance--

"he's quite the greatest of living writers."

"Of course I can't judge. Of course he's very clever," she said with

a patient cheer.

"He's nothing less than supreme, Mrs. Ambient! There are pages in

each of his books of a perfection classing them with the greatest

things. Accordingly for me to see him in this familiar way, in his

habit as he lives, and apparently to find the man as delightful as

the artist--well, I can't tell you how much too good to be true it

seems and how great a privilege I think it." I knew I was gushing,

but I couldn't help it, and what I said was a good deal less than

what I felt. I was by no means sure I should dare to say even so

much as this to the master himself, and there was a kind of rapture

in speaking it out to his wife which was not affected by the fact

that, as a wife, she appeared peculiar. She listened to me with her

face grave again and her lips a little compressed, listened as if in

no doubt, of course, that her husband was remarkable, but as if at

the same time she had heard it frequently enough and couldn't treat

it as stirring news. There was even in her manner a suggestion that

I was so young as to expose myself to being called forward--an

imputation and a word I had always loathed; as well as a hinted

reminder that people usually got over their early extravagance. "I

assure you that for me this is a red-letter day," I added.

She didn't take this up, but after a pause, looking round her, said

abruptly and a trifle dryly: "We're very much afraid about the fruit

this year."

My eyes wandered to the mossy mottled garden-walls, where plum-trees

and pears, flattened and fastened upon the rusty bricks, looked like

crucified figures with many arms. "Doesn't it promise well?"

"No, the trees look very dull. We had such late frosts."

Then there was another pause. She addressed her attention to the

opposite end of the grounds, kept it for her husband's return with

the child. "Is Mr. Ambient fond of gardening?" it occurred to me to

ask, irresistibly impelled as I felt myself, moreover, to bring the

conversation constantly back to him.

"He's very fond of plums," said his wife.

"Ah well, then, I hope your crop will be better than you fear. It's

a lovely old place," I continued. "The whole impression's that of

certain places he has described. Your house is like one of his

pictures."

She seemed a bit frigidly amused at my glow. "It's a pleasant little

place. There are hundreds like it."

"Oh it has his TONE," I laughed, but sounding my epithet and

insisting on my point the more sharply that my companion appeared to

see in my appreciation of her simple establishment a mark of mean

experience.

It was clear I insisted too much. "His tone?" she repeated with a

harder look at me and a slightly heightened colour.

"Surely he has a tone, Mrs. Ambient."

"Oh yes, he has indeed! But I don't in the least consider that I'm

living in one of his books at all. I shouldn't care for that in the

least," she went on with a smile that had in some degree the effect

of converting her really sharp protest into an insincere joke. "I'm

afraid I'm not very literary. And I'm not artistic," she stated.

"I'm very sure you're not ignorant, not stupid," I ventured to reply,

with the accompaniment of feeling immediately afterwards that I had

been both familiar and patronising. My only consolation was in the

sense that she had begun it, had fairly dragged me into it. She had

thrust forward her limitations.

"Well, whatever I am I'm very different from my husband. If you like

him you won't like me. You needn't say anything. Your liking me

isn't in the least necessary!"

"Don't defy me!" I could but honourably make answer.

She looked as if she hadn't heard me, which was the best thing she

could do; and we sat some time without further speech. Mrs. Ambient

had evidently the enviable English quality of being able to be mute

without unrest. But at last she spoke--she asked me if there seemed

many people in town. I gave her what satisfaction I could on this

point, and we talked a little of London and of some of its

characteristics at that time of the year. At the end of this I came

back irrepressibly to Mark.

"Doesn't he like to be there now? I suppose he doesn't find the

proper quiet for his work. I should think his things had been

written for the most part in a very still place. They suggest a

great stillness following on a kind of tumult. Don't you think so?"

I laboured on. "I suppose London's a tremendous place to collect

impressions, but a refuge like this, in the country, must be better

for working them up. Does he get many of his impressions in London,

should you say?" I proceeded from point to point in this malign

inquiry simply because my hostess, who probably thought me an odious

chattering person, gave me time; for when I paused--I've not

represented my pauses--she simply continued to let her eyes wander

while her long fair fingers played with the medallion on her neck.

When I stopped altogether, however, she was obliged to say something,

and what she said was that she hadn't the least idea where her

husband got his impressions. This made me think her, for a moment,

positively disagreeable; delicate and proper and rather

aristocratically fine as she sat there. But I must either have lost

that view a moment later or been goaded by it to further aggression,

for I remember asking her if our great man were in a good vein of

work and when we might look for the appearance of the book on which

he was engaged. I've every reason now to know that she found me

insufferable.

She gave a strange small laugh as she said: "I'm afraid you think I

know much more about my husband's work than I do. I haven't the

least idea what he's doing," she then added in a slightly different,

that is a more explanatory, tone and as if from a glimpse of the

enormity of her confession. "I don't read what he writes."

She didn't succeed, and wouldn't even had she tried much harder, in

making this seem to me anything less than monstrous. I stared at her

and I think I blushed. "Don't you admire his genius? Don't you

admire 'Beltraffio'?"

She waited, and I wondered what she could possibly say. She didn't

speak, I could see, the first words that rose to her lips; she

repeated what she had said a few minutes before. "Oh of course he's

very clever!" And with this she got up; our two absentees had

reappeared.

CHAPTER II

Mrs. Ambient left me and went to meet them; she stopped and had a few

words with her husband that I didn't hear and that ended in her

taking the child by the hand and returning with him to the house.

Her husband joined me in a moment, looking, I thought, the least bit

conscious and constrained, and said that if I would come in with him

he would show me my room. In looking back upon these first moments

of my visit I find it important to avoid the error of appearing to

have at all fully measured his situation from the first or made out

the signs of things mastered only afterwards. This later knowledge

throws a backward light and makes me forget that, at least on the

occasion of my present reference--I mean that first afternoon--Mark

Ambient struck me as only enviable. Allowing for this he must yet

have failed of much expression as we walked back to the house, though

I remember well the answer he made to a remark of mine on his small

son.

"That's an extraordinary little boy of yours. I've never seen such a

child."

"Why," he asked while we went, "do you call him extraordinary?"

"He's so beautiful, so fascinating. He's like some perfect little

work of art."

He turned quickly in the passage, grasping my arm. "Oh don't call

him that, or you'll--you'll--!"

But in his hesitation he broke off suddenly, laughing at my surprise.

Immediately afterwards, however, he added: "You'll make his little

future very difficult."

I declared that I wouldn't for the world take any liberties with his

little future--it seemed to me to hang by threads of such delicacy.

I should only be highly interested in watching it.

"You Americans are very keen," he commented on this. "You notice

more things than we do."

"Ah if you want visitors who aren't struck with you," I cried, "you

shouldn't have asked me down here!"

He showed me my room, a little bower of chintz, with open windows

where the light was green, and before he left me said irrelevantly:

"As for my small son, you know, we shall probably kill him between us

before we've done with him!" And he made this assertion as if he

really believed it, without any appearance of jest, his fine near-

sighted expressive eyes looking straight into mine.

"Do you mean by spoiling him?"

"No, by fighting for him!"

"You had better give him to me to keep for you," I said. "Let me

remove the apple of discord!"

It was my extravagance of course, but he had the air of being

perfectly serious. "It would be quite the best thing we could do. I

should be all ready to do it."

"I'm greatly obliged to you for your confidence."

But he lingered with his hands in his pockets. I felt as if within a

few moments I had, morally speaking, taken several steps nearer to

him. He looked weary, just as he faced me then, looked preoccupied

and as if there were something one might do for him. I was terribly

conscious of the limits of my young ability, but I wondered what such

a service might be, feeling at bottom nevertheless that the only

thing I could do for him was to like him. I suppose he guessed this

and was grateful for what was in my mind, since he went on presently:

"I haven't the advantage of being an American, but I also notice a

little, and I've an idea that"--here he smiled and laid his hand on

my shoulder--"even counting out your nationality you're not destitute

of intelligence. I've only known you half an hour, but--!" For

which again he pulled up. "You're very young, after all."

"But you may treat me as if I could understand you!" I said; and

before he left me to dress for dinner he had virtually given me a

promise that he would.

When I went down into the drawing-room--I was very punctual--I found

that neither my hostess nor my host had appeared. A lady rose from a

sofa, however, and inclined her head as I rather surprisedly gazed at

her. "I daresay you don't know me," she said with the modern laugh.

"I'm Mark Ambient's sister." Whereupon I shook hands with her,

saluting her very low. Her laugh was modern--by which I mean that it

consisted of the vocal agitation serving between people who meet in

drawing-rooms as the solvent of social disparities, the medium of

transitions; but her appearance was--what shall I call it?--medieval.

She was pale and angular, her long thin face was inhabited by sad

dark eyes and her black hair intertwined with golden fillets and

curious clasps. She wore a faded velvet robe which clung to her when

she moved and was "cut," as to the neck and sleeves, like the

garments of old Italians. She suggested a symbolic picture,

something akin even to Durer's Melancholia, and was so perfect an

image of a type which I, in my ignorance, supposed to be extinct,

that while she rose before me I was almost as much startled as if I

had seen a ghost. I afterwards concluded that Miss Ambient wasn't

incapable of deriving pleasure from this weird effect, and I now

believe that reflexion concerned in her having sunk again to her seat

with her long lean but not ungraceful arms locked together in an

archaic manner on her knees and her mournful eyes addressing me a

message of intentness which foreshadowed what I was subsequently to

suffer. She was a singular fatuous artificial creature, and I was

never more than half to penetrate her motives and mysteries. Of one

thing I'm sure at least: that they were considerably less

insuperable than her appearance announced. Miss Ambient was a

restless romantic disappointed spinster, consumed with the love of

Michael-Angelesque attitudes and mystical robes; but I'm now

convinced she hadn't in her nature those depths of unutterable

thought which, when you first knew her, seemed to look out from her

eyes and to prompt her complicated gestures. Those features in

especial had a misleading eloquence; they lingered on you with a far-

off dimness, an air of obstructed sympathy, which was certainly not

always a key to the spirit of their owner; so that, of a truth, a

young lady could scarce have been so dejected and disillusioned

without having committed a crime for which she was consumed with

remorse, or having parted with a hope that she couldn't sanely have

entertained. She had, I believe, the usual allowance of rather vain

motives: she wished to be looked at, she wished to be married, she

wished to be thought original.

It costs me a pang to speak in this irreverent manner of one of

Ambient's name, but I shall have still less gracious things to say

before I've finished my anecdote, and moreover--I confess it--I owe

the young lady a bit of a grudge. Putting aside the curious cast of

her face she had no natural aptitude for an artistic development, had

little real intelligence. But her affectations rubbed off on her

brother's renown, and as there were plenty of people who darkly

disapproved of him they could easily point to his sister as a person

formed by his influence. It was quite possible to regard her as a

warning, and she had almost compromised him with the world at large.

He was the original and she the inevitable imitation. I suppose him

scarce aware of the impression she mainly produced, beyond having a

general idea that she made up very well as a Rossetti; he was used to

her and was sorry for her, wishing she would marry and observing how

she didn't. Doubtless I take her too seriously, for she did me no

harm, though I'm bound to allow that I can only half-account for her.

She wasn't so mystical as she looked, but was a strange indirect

uncomfortable embarrassing woman. My story gives the reader at best

so very small a knot to untie that I needn't hope to excite his

curiosity by delaying to remark that Mrs. Ambient hated her sister-

in-law. This I learned but later on, when other matters came to my

knowledge. I mention it, however, at once, for I shall perhaps not

seem to count too much on having beguiled him if I say he must

promptly have guessed it. Mrs. Ambient, a person of conscience, put

the best face on her kinswoman, who spent a month with her twice a

year; but it took no great insight to recognise the very different

personal paste of the two ladies, and that the usual feminine

hypocrisies would cost them on either side much more than the usual

effort. Mrs. Ambient, smooth-haired, thin-lipped, perpetually fresh,

must have regarded her crumpled and dishevelled visitor as an

equivocal joke; she herself so the opposite of a Rossetti, she

herself a Reynolds or a Lawrence, with no more far-fetched note in

her composition than a cold ladylike candour and a well-starched

muslin dress.

It was in a garment and with an expression of this kind that she made

her entrance after I had exchanged a few words with Miss Ambient.

Her husband presently followed her and, there being no other company,

we went to dinner. The impressions I received at that repast are

present to me still. The elements of oddity in the air hovered, as

it were, without descending--to any immediate check of my delight.

This came mainly, of course, from Ambient's talk, the easiest and

richest I had ever heard. I mayn't say to-day whether he laid

himself out to dazzle a rather juvenile pilgrim from over the sea;

but that matters little--it seemed so natural to him to shine. His

spoken wit or wisdom, or whatever, had thus a charm almost beyond his

written; that is if the high finish of his printed prose be really,

as some people have maintained, a fault. There was such a kindness

in him, however, that I've no doubt it gave him ideas for me, or

about me, to see me sit as open-mouthed as I now figure myself. Not

so the two ladies, who not only were very nearly dumb from beginning

to end of the meal, but who hadn't even the air of being struck with

such an exhibition of fancy and taste. Mrs. Ambient, detached, and

inscrutable, met neither my eye nor her husband's; she attended to

her dinner, watched her servants, arranged the puckers in her dress,

exchanged at wide intervals a remark with her sister-in-law and,

while she slowly rubbed her lean white hands between the courses,

looked out of the window at the first signs of evening--the long June

day allowing us to dine without candles. Miss Ambient appeared to

give little direct heed to anything said by her brother; but on the

other hand she was much engaged in watching its effect upon me. Her

"die-away" pupils continued to attach themselves to my countenance,

and it was only her air of belonging to another century that kept

them from being importunate. She seemed to look at me across the

ages, and the interval of time diminished for me the inconvenience.

It was as if she knew in a general way that he must be talking very

well, but she herself was so at home among such allusions that she

had no need to pick them up and was at liberty to see what would

become of the exposure of a candid young American to a high aesthetic

temperature.

The temperature was aesthetic certainly, but it was less so than I

could have desired, for I failed of any great success in making our

friend abound about himself. I tried to put him on the ground of his

own genius, but he slipped through my fingers every time and shifted

the saddle to one or other of his contemporaries. He talked about

Balzac and Browning, about what was being done in foreign countries,

about his recent tour in the East and the extraordinary forms of life

to be observed in that part of the world. I felt he had reasons for

holding off from a direct profession of literary faith, a full

consistency or sincerity, and therefore dealt instead with certain

social topics, treating them with extraordinary humour and with a due

play of that power of ironic evocation in which his books abound. He

had a deal to say about London as London appears to the observer who

has the courage of some of his conclusions during the high-pressure

time--from April to July--of its gregarious life. He flashed his

faculty of playing with the caught image and liberating the wistful

idea over the whole scheme of manners or conception of intercourse of

his compatriots, among whom there were evidently not a few types for

which he had little love. London in short was grotesque to him, and

he made capital sport of it; his only allusion that I can remember to

his own work was his saying that he meant some day to do an immense

and general, a kind of epic, social satire. Miss Ambient's perpetual

gaze seemed to put to me: "Do you perceive how artistic, how very

strange and interesting, we are? Frankly now is it possible to be

MORE artistic, MORE strange and interesting, than this? You surely

won't deny that we're remarkable." I was irritated by her use of the

plural pronoun, for she had no right to pair herself with her

brother; and moreover, of course, I couldn't see my way to--at all

genially--include Mrs. Ambient. Yet there was no doubt they were,

taken together, unprecedented enough, and, with all allowances, I had

never been left, or condemned, to draw so many rich inferences.

After the ladies had retired my host took me into his study to smoke,

where I appealingly brought him round, or so tried, to some

disclosure of fond ideals. I was bent on proving I was worthy to

listen to him, on repaying him for what he had said to me before

dinner, by showing him how perfectly I understood. He liked to talk;

he liked to defend his convictions and his honour (not that I

attacked them); he liked a little perhaps--it was a pardonable

weakness--to bewilder the youthful mind even while wishing to win it

over. My ingenuous sympathy received at any rate a shock from three

or four of his professions--he made me occasionally gasp and stare.

He couldn't help forgetting, or rather couldn't know, how little, in

another and drier clime, I had ever sat in the school in which he was

master; and he promoted me as at a jump to a sense of its penetralia.

My trepidations, however, were delightful; they were just what I had

hoped for, and their only fault was that they passed away too

quickly; since I found that for the main points I was essentially, I

was quite constitutionally, on Mark Ambient's "side." This was the

taken stand of the artist to whom every manifestation of human energy

was a thrilling spectacle and who felt for ever the desire to resolve

his experience of life into a literary form. On that high head of

the passion for form the attempt at perfection, the quest for which

was to his mind the real search for the holy grail--he said the most

interesting, the most inspiring things. He mixed with them a

thousand illustrations from his own life, from other lives he had

known, from history and fiction, and above all from the annals of the

time that was dear to him beyond all periods, the Italian cinque-

cento. It came to me thus that in his books he had uttered but half

his thought, and that what he had kept back from motives I deplored

when I made them out later--was the finer and braver part. It was

his fate to make a great many still more "prepared" people than me

not inconsiderably wince; but there was no grain of bravado in his

ripest things (I've always maintained it, though often contradicted),

and at bottom the poor fellow, disinterested to his finger-tips and

regarding imperfection not only as an aesthetic but quite also as a

social crime, had an extreme dread of scandal. There are critics who

regret that having gone so far he didn't go further; but I regret

nothing--putting aside two or three of the motives I just mentioned--

since he arrived at a noble rarity and I don't see how you can go

beyond that. The hours I spent in his study--this first one and the

few that followed it; they were not, after all, so numerous--seem to

glow, as I look back on them, with a tone that is partly that of the

brown old room, rich, under the shaded candle-light where we sat and

smoked, with the dusky delicate bindings of valuable books; partly

that of his voice, of which I still catch the echo, charged with the

fancies and figures that came at his command. When we went back to

the drawing-room we found Miss Ambient alone in possession and prompt

to mention that her sister-in-law had a quarter of an hour before

been called by the nurse to see the child, who appeared rather

unwell--a little feverish.

"Feverish! how in the world comes he to be feverish?" Ambient asked.

"He was perfectly right this afternoon."

"Beatrice says you walked him about too much--you almost killed him."

"Beatrice must be very happy--she has an opportunity to triumph!"

said my friend with a bright bitterness which was all I could have

wished it.

"Surely not if the child's ill," I ventured to remark by way of

pleading for Mrs. Ambient.

"My dear fellow, you aren't married--you don't know the nature of

wives!" my host returned with spirit.

I tried to match it. "Possibly not; but I know the nature of

mothers."

"Beatrice is perfect as a mother," sighed Miss Ambient quite

tremendously and with her fingers interlaced on her embroidered

knees.

"I shall go up and see my boy," her brother went on." Do you suppose

he's asleep?"

"Beatrice won't let you see him, dear"--as to which our young lady

looked at me, though addressing our companion.

"Do you call that being perfect as a mother?" Ambient asked.

"Yes, from her point of view."

"Damn her point of view!" cried the author of "Beltraffio." And he

left the room; after which we heard him ascend the stairs.

I sat there for some ten minutes with Miss Ambient, and we naturally

had some exchange of remarks, which began, I think, by my asking her

what the point of view of her sister-in-law could be.

"Oh it's so very odd. But we're so very odd altogether. Don't you

find us awfully unlike others of our class?--which indeed mostly, in

England, is awful. We've lived so much abroad. I adore 'abroad.'

Have you people like us in America?"

"You're not all alike, you interesting three--or, counting Dolcino,

four--surely, surely; so that I don't think I understand your

question. We've no one like your brother--I may go so far as that."

"You've probably more persons like his wife," Miss Ambient desolately

smiled.

"I can tell you that better when you've told me about her point of

view."

"Oh yes--oh yes. Well," said my entertainer, "she doesn't like his

ideas. She doesn't like them for the child. She thinks them

undesirable."

Being quite fresh from the contemplation of some of Mark Ambient's

arcana I was particularly in a position to appreciate this

announcement. But the effect of it was to make me, after staring a

moment, burst into laughter which I instantly checked when I

remembered the indisposed child above and the possibility of parents

nervously or fussily anxious.

"What has that infant to do with ideas?" I asked. "Surely he can't

tell one from another. Has he read his father's novels?"

"He's very precocious and very sensitive, and his mother thinks she

can't begin to guard him too early." Miss Ambient's head drooped a

little to one side and her eyes fixed themselves on futurity. Then

of a sudden came a strange alteration; her face lighted to an effect

more joyless than any gloom, to that indeed of a conscious insincere

grimace, and she added "When one has children what one writes becomes

a great responsibility."

"Children are terrible critics," I prosaically answered. "I'm really

glad I haven't any."

"Do you also write, then? And in the same style as my brother? And

do you like that style? And do people appreciate it in America? I

don't write, but I think I feel." To these and various other

inquiries and observations my young lady treated me till we heard her

brother's step in the hall again and Mark Ambient reappeared. He was

so flushed and grave that I supposed he had seen something

symptomatic in the condition of his child. His sister apparently had

another idea; she gazed at him from afar--as if he had been a burning

ship on the horizon--and simply murmured "Poor old Mark!"

"I hope you're not anxious," I as promptly pronounced.

"No, but I'm disappointed. She won't let me in. She has locked the

door, and I'm afraid to make a noise." I daresay there might have

been a touch of the ridiculous in such a confession, but I liked my

new friend so much that it took nothing for me from his dignity.

"She tells me--from behind the door--that she'll let me know if he's

worse."

"It's very good of her," said Miss Ambient with a hollow sound.

I had exchanged a glance with Mark in which it's possible he read

that my pity for him was untinged with contempt, though I scarce know

why he should have cared; and as his sister soon afterward got up and

took her bedroom candlestick he proposed we should go back to his

study. We sat there till after midnight; he put himself into his

slippers and an old velvet jacket, he lighted an ancient pipe, but he

talked considerably less than before. There were longish pauses in

our communion, but they only made me feel we had advanced in

intimacy. They helped me further to understand my friend's personal

situation and to imagine it by no means the happiest possible. When

his face was quiet it was vaguely troubled, showing, to my increase

of interest--if that was all that was wanted!--that for him too life

was the same struggle it had been for so many another man of genius.

At last I prepared to leave him, and then, to my ineffable joy, he

gave me some of the sheets of his forthcoming book--which, though

unfinished, he had indulged in the luxury, so dear to writers of

deliberation, of having "set up," from chapter to chapter, as he

advanced. These early pages, the premices, in the language of

letters, of that new fruit of his imagination, I should take to my

room and look over at my leisure. I was in the act of leaving him

when the door of the study noiselessly opened and Mrs. Ambient stood

before us. She observed us a moment, her candle in her hand, and

then said to her husband that as she supposed he hadn't gone to bed

she had come down to let him know Dolcino was more quiet and would

probably be better in the morning. Mark Ambient made no reply; he

simply slipped past her in the doorway, as if for fear she might

seize him in his passage, and bounded upstairs to judge for himself

of his child's condition. She looked so frankly discomfited that I

for a moment believed her about to give him chase. But she resigned

herself with a sigh and her eyes turned, ruefully and without a ray,

to the lamplit room where various books at which I had been looking

were pulled out of their places on the shelves and the fumes of

tobacco hung in mid-air. I bade her good-night and then, without

intention, by a kind of fatality, a perversity that had already made

me address her overmuch on that question of her husband's powers, I

alluded to the precious proof-sheets with which Ambient had entrusted

me and which I nursed there under my arm. "They're the opening

chapters of his new book," I said. "Fancy my satisfaction at being

allowed to carry them to my room!"

She turned away, leaving me to take my candlestick from the table in

the hall; but before we separated, thinking it apparently a good

occasion to let me know once for all since I was beginning, it would

seem, to be quite "thick" with my host--that there was no fitness in

my appealing to her for sympathy in such a case; before we separated,

I say, she remarked to me with her quick fine well-bred inveterate

curtness: "I daresay you attribute to me ideas I haven't got. I

don't take that sort of interest in my husband's proof-sheets. I

consider his writings most objectionable!"

CHAPTER III

I had an odd colloquy the next morning with Miss Ambient, whom I

found strolling in the garden before breakfast. The whole place

looked as fresh and trim, amid the twitter of the birds, as if, an

hour before, the housemaids had been turned into it with their dust-

pans and feather-brushes. I almost hesitated to light a cigarette

and was doubly startled when, in the act of doing so, I suddenly saw

the sister of my host, who had, at the best, something of the

weirdness of an apparition, stand before me. She might have been

posing for her photograph. Her sad-coloured robe arranged itself in

serpentine folds at her feet; her hands locked themselves listlessly

together in front; her chin rested on a cinque-cento ruff. The first

thing I did after bidding her good-morning was to ask her for news of

her little nephew--to express the hope she had heard he was better.

She was able to gratify this trust--she spoke as if we might expect

to see him during the day. We walked through the shrubberies

together and she gave me further light on her brother's household,

which offered me an opportunity to repeat to her what his wife had so

startled and distressed me with the night before. WAS it the sorry

truth that she thought his productions objectionable?

"She doesn't usually come out with that so soon!" Miss Ambient

returned in answer to my breathlessness.

"Poor lady," I pleaded, "she saw I'm a fanatic."

"Yes, she won't like you for that. But you mustn't mind, if the rest

of us like you! Beatrice thinks a work of art ought to have a

'purpose.' But she's a charming woman--don't you think her charming?

I find in her quite the grand air."

"She's very beautiful," I produced with an effort; while I reflected

that though it was apparently true that Mark Ambient was mismated it

was also perceptible that his sister was perfidious. She assured me

her brother and his wife had no other difference but this--one that

she thought his writings immoral and his influence pernicious. It

was a fixed idea; she was afraid of these things for the child. I

answered that it was in all conscience enough, the trifle of a

woman's regarding her husband's mind as a well of corruption, and she

seemed much struck with the novelty of my remark. "But there hasn't

been any of the sort of trouble that there so often is among married

people," she said. "I suppose you can judge for yourself that

Beatrice isn't at all--well, whatever they call it when a woman kicks

over! And poor Mark doesn't make love to other people either. You

might think he would, but I assure you he doesn't. All the same of

course, from her point of view, you know, she has a dread of my

brother's influence on the child on the formation of his character,

his 'ideals,' poor little brat, his principles. It's as if it were a

subtle poison or a contagion--something that would rub off on his

tender sensibility when his father kisses him or holds him on his

knee. If she could she'd prevent Mark from even so much as touching

him. Every one knows it--visitors see it for themselves; so there's

no harm in my telling you. Isn't it excessively odd? It comes from

Beatrice's being so religious and so tremendously moral--so a cheval

on fifty thousand riguardi. And then of course we mustn't forget,"

my companion added, a little unexpectedly, to this polyglot

proposition, "that some of Mark's ideas are--well, really--rather

impossible, don't you know?"

I reflected as we went into the house, where we found Ambient

unfolding The Observer at the breakfast-table, that none of them were

probably quite so "impossible, don't you know?" as his sister. Mrs.

Ambient, a little "the worse," as was mentioned, for her

ministrations, during the night, to Dolcino, didn't appear at

breakfast. Her husband described her, however, as hoping to go to

church. I afterwards learnt that she did go, but nothing naturally

was less on the cards than that we should accompany her. It was

while the church-bell droned near at hand that the author of

"Beltraffio" led me forth for the ramble he had spoken of in his

note. I shall attempt here no record of where we went or of what we

saw. We kept to the fields and copses and commons, and breathed the

same sweet air as the nibbling donkeys and the browsing sheep, whose

woolliness seemed to me, in those early days of acquaintance with

English objects, but part of the general texture of the small dense

landscape, which looked as if the harvest were gathered by the shears

and with all nature bleating and braying for the violence.

Everything was full of expression for Mark Ambient's visitor--from

the big bandy-legged geese whose whiteness was a "note" amid all the

tones of green as they wandered beside a neat little oval pool, the

foreground of a thatched and whitewashed inn, with a grassy approach

and a pictorial sign--from these humble wayside animals to the crests

of high woods which let a gable or a pinnacle peep here and there and

looked even at a distance like trees of good company, conscious of an

individual profile. I admired the hedge-rows, I plucked the faint-

hued heather, and I was for ever stopping to say how charming I

thought the thread-like footpaths across the fields, which wandered

in a diagonal of finer grain from one smooth stile to another. Mark

Ambient was abundantly good-natured and was as much struck, dear man,

with some of my observations as I was with the literary allusions of

the landscape. We sat and smoked on stiles, broaching paradoxes in

the decent English air; we took short cuts across a park or two where

the bracken was deep and my companion nodded to the old woman at the

gate; we skirted rank coverts which rustled here and there as we

passed, and we stretched ourselves at last on a heathery hillside

where if the sun wasn't too hot neither was the earth too cold, and

where the country lay beneath us in a rich blue mist. Of course I

had already told him what I thought of his new novel, having the

previous night read every word of the opening chapters before I went

to bed.

"I'm not without hope of being able to make it decent enough," he

said as I went back to the subject while we turned up our heels to

the sky. "At least the people who dislike my stuff--and there are

plenty of them, I believe--will dislike this thing (if it does turn

out well) most." This was the first time I had heard him allude to

the people who couldn't read him--a class so generally conceived to

sit heavy on the consciousness of the man of letters. A being

organised for literature as Mark Ambient was must certainly have had

the normal proportion of sensitiveness, of irritability; the artistic

ego, capable in some cases of such monstrous development, must have

been in his composition sufficiently erect and active. I won't

therefore go so far as to say that he never thought of his detractors

or that he had any illusions with regard to the number of his

admirers--he could never so far have deceived himself as to believe

he was popular, but I at least then judged (and had occasion to be

sure later on) that stupidity ruffled him visibly but little, that he

had an air of thinking it quite natural he should leave many simple

folk, tasting of him, as simple as ever he found them, and that he

very seldom talked about the newspapers, which, by the way, were

always even abnormally vulgar about him. Of course he may have

thought them over--the newspapers--night and day; the only point I

make is that he didn't show it while at the same time he didn't

strike one as a man actively on his guard. I may add that, touching

his hope of making the work on which he was then engaged the best of

his books, it was only partly carried out. That place belongs

incontestably to "Beltraffio," in spite of the beauty of certain

parts of its successor. I quite believe, however, that he had at the

moment of which I speak no sense of having declined; he was in love

with his idea, which was indeed magnificent, and though for him, as I

suppose for every sane artist, the act of execution had in it as much

torment as joy, he saw his result grow like the crescent of the young

moon and promise to fill the disk. "I want to be truer than I've

ever been," he said, settling himself on his back with his hands

clasped behind his head; "I want to give the impression of life

itself. No, you may say what you will, I've always arranged things

too much, always smoothed them down and rounded them off and tucked

them in--done everything to them that life doesn't do. I've been a

slave to the old superstitions."

"You a slave, my dear Mark Ambient? You've the freest imagination of

our day!"

"All the more shame to me to have done some of the things I have!

The reconciliation of the two women in 'Natalina,' for instance,

which could never really have taken place. That sort of thing's

ignoble--I blush when I think of it! This new affair must be a

golden vessel, filled with the purest distillation of the actual; and

oh how it worries me, the shaping of the vase, the hammering of the

metal! I have to hammer it so fine, so smooth; I don't do more than

an inch or two a day. And all the while I have to be so careful not

to let a drop of the liquor escape! When I see the kind of things

Life herself, the brazen hussy, does, I despair of ever catching her

peculiar trick. She has an impudence, Life! If one risked a

fiftieth part of the effects she risks! It takes ever so long to

believe it. You don't know yet, my dear youth. It isn't till one

has been watching her some forty years that one finds out half of

what she's up to! Therefore one's earlier things must inevitably

contain a mass of rot. And with what one sees, on one side, with its

tongue in its cheek, defying one to be real enough, and on the other

the bonnes gens rolling up their eyes at one's cynicism, the

situation has elements of the ludicrous which the poor reproducer

himself is doubtless in a position to appreciate better than any one

else. Of course one mustn't worry about the bonnes gens," Mark

Ambient went on while my thoughts reverted to his ladylike wife as

interpreted by his remarkable sister.

"To sink your shaft deep and polish the plate through which people

look into it--that's what your work consists of," I remember

ingeniously observing.

"Ah polishing one's plate--that's the torment of execution!" he

exclaimed, jerking himself up and sitting forward. "The effort to

arrive at a surface, if you think anything of that decent sort

necessary--some people don't, happily for them! My dear fellow, if

you could see the surface I dream of as compared with the one with

which I've to content myself. Life's really too short for art--one

hasn't time to make one's shell ideally hard. Firm and bright, firm

and bright is very well to say--the devilish thing has a way

sometimes of being bright, and even of being hard, as mere tough

frozen pudding is hard, without being firm. When I rap it with my

knuckles it doesn't give the right sound. There are horrible sandy

stretches where I've taken the wrong turn because I couldn't for the

life of me find the right. If you knew what a dunce I am sometimes!

Such things figure to me now base pimples and ulcers on the brow of

beauty!"

"They're very bad, very bad," I said as gravely as I could.

"Very bad? They're the highest social offence I know; it ought--it

absolutely ought; I'm quite serious--to be capital. If I knew I

should be publicly thrashed else I'd manage to find the true word.

The people who can't--some of them don't so much as know it when they

see it--would shut their inkstands, and we shouldn't be deluged by

this flood of rubbish!"

I shall not attempt to repeat everything that passed between us, nor

to explain just how it was that, every moment I spent in his company,

Mark Ambient revealed to me more and more the consistency of his

creative spirit, the spirit in him that felt all life as plastic

material. I could but envy him the force of that passion, and it was

at any rate through the receipt of this impression that by the time

we returned I had gained the sense of intimacy with him that I have

noted. Before we got up for the homeward stretch he alluded to his

wife's having once--or perhaps more than once--asked him whether he

should like Dolcino to read "Beltraffio." He must have been unaware

at the moment of all that this conveyed to me--as well doubtless of

my extreme curiosity to hear what he had replied. He had said how

much he hoped Dolcino would read ALL his works--when he was twenty;

he should like him to know what his father had done. Before twenty

it would be useless; he wouldn't understand them.

"And meanwhile do you propose to hide them--to lock them up in a

drawer?" Mrs. Ambient had proceeded.

"Oh no--we must simply tell him they're not intended for small boys.

If you bring him up properly after that he won't touch them."

To this Mrs. Ambient had made answer that it might be very awkward

when he was about fifteen, say; and I asked her husband if it were

his opinion in general, then, that young people shouldn't read

novels.

"Good ones--certainly not!" said my companion. I suppose I had had

other views, for I remember saying that for myself I wasn't sure it

was bad for them if the novels were "good" to the right intensity of

goodness. "Bad for THEM, I don't say so much!" my companion

returned. "But very bad, I'm afraid, for the poor dear old novel

itself." That oblique accidental allusion to his wife's attitude was

followed by a greater breadth of reference as we walked home. "The

difference between us is simply the opposition between two distinct

ways of looking at the world, which have never succeeded in getting

on together, or in making any kind of common household, since the

beginning of time. They've borne all sorts of names, and my wife

would tell you it's the difference between Christian and Pagan. I

may be a pagan, but I don't like the name; it sounds sectarian. She

thinks me at any rate no better than an ancient Greek. It's the

difference between making the most of life and making the least, so

that you'll get another better one in some other time and place.

Will it be a sin to make the most of that one, too, I wonder; and

shall we have to be bribed off in the future state as well as in the

present? Perhaps I care too much for beauty--I don't know, I doubt

if a poor devil CAN; I delight in it, I adore it, I think of it

continually, I try to produce it, to reproduce it. My wife holds

that we shouldn't cultivate or enjoy it without extraordinary

precautions and reserves. She's always afraid of it, always on her

guard. I don't know what it can ever have done to her, what grudge

it owes her or what resentment rides. And she's so pretty, too,

herself! Don't you think she's lovely? She was at any rate when we

married. At that time I wasn't aware of that difference I speak of--

I thought it all came to the same thing: in the end, as they say.

Well, perhaps it will in the end. I don't know what the end will be.

Moreover, I care for seeing things as they are; that's the way I try

to show them in any professed picture. But you mustn't talk to Mrs.

Ambient about things as they are. She has a mortal dread of things

as they are."

"She's afraid of them for Dolcino," I said: surprised a moment

afterwards at being in a position--thanks to Miss Ambient--to be so

explanatory; and surprised even now that Mark shouldn't have shown

visibly that he wondered what the deuce I knew about it. But he

didn't; he simply declared with a tenderness that touched me: "Ah

nothing shall ever hurt HIM!"

He told me more about his wife before we arrived at the gate of home,

and if he be judged to have aired overmuch his grievance I'm afraid I

must admit that he had some of the foibles as well as the gifts of

the artistic temperament; adding, however, instantly that hitherto,

to the best of my belief, he had rarely let this particular cat out

of the bag. "She thinks me immoral--that's the long and short of

it," he said as we paused outside a moment and his hand rested on one

of the bars of his gate; while his conscious expressive perceptive

eyes--the eyes of a foreigner, I had begun to account them, much more

than of the usual Englishman--viewing me now evidently as quite a

familiar friend, took part in the declaration. "It's very strange

when one thinks it all over, and there's a grand comicality in it

that I should like to bring out. She's a very nice woman,

extraordinarily well-behaved, upright and clever and with a

tremendous lot of good sense about a good many matters. Yet her

conception of a novel--she has explained it to me once or twice, and

she doesn't do it badly as exposition--is a thing so false that it

makes me blush. It's a thing so hollow, so dishonest, so lying, in

which life is so blinked and blinded, so dodged and disfigured, that

it makes my ears burn. It's two different ways of looking at the

whole affair," he repeated, pushing open the gate. "And they're

irreconcilable!" he added with a sigh. We went forward to the house,

but on the walk, half-way to the door, he stopped and said to me:

"If you're going into this kind of thing there's a fact you should

know beforehand; it may save you some disappointment. There's a

hatred of art, there's a hatred of literature--I mean of the genuine

kinds. Oh the shams--those they'll swallow by the bucket!" I looked

up at the charming house, with its genial colour and crookedness, and

I answered with a smile that those evil passions might exist, but

that I should never have expected to find them there. "Ah it doesn't

matter after all," he a bit nervously laughed; which I was glad to

hear, for I was reproaching myself with having worked him up.

If I had it soon passed off, for at luncheon he was delightful;

strangely delightful considering that the difference between himself

and his wife was, as he had said, irreconcilable. He had the art, by

his manner, by his smile, by his natural amenity, of reducing the

importance of it in the common concerns of life; and Mrs. Ambient, I

must add, lent herself to this transaction with a very good grace. I

watched her at table for further illustrations of that fixed idea of

which Miss Ambient had spoken to me; for in the light of the united

revelations of her sister-in-law and her husband she had come to seem

to me almost a sinister personage. Yet the signs of a sombre

fanaticism were not more immediately striking in her than before; it

was only after a while that her air of incorruptible conformity, her

tapering monosyllabic correctness, began to affect me as in

themselves a cold thin flame. Certainly, at first, she resembled a

woman with as few passions as possible; but if she had a passion at

all it would indeed be that of Philistinism. She might have been

(for there are guardian-spirits, I suppose, of all great principles)

the very angel of the pink of propriety--putting the pink for a

principle, though I'd rather put some dismal cold blue. Mark

Ambient, apparently, ten years before, had simply and quite

inevitably taken her for an angel, without asking himself of what.

He had been right in calling my attention to her beauty. In looking

for some explanation of his original surrender to her I saw more than

before that she was, physically speaking, a wonderfully cultivated

human plant--that he might well have owed her a brief poetic

inspiration. It was impossible to be more propped and pencilled,

more delicately tinted and petalled.

If I had had it in my heart to think my host a little of a hypocrite

for appearing to forget at table everything he had said to me in our

walk, I should instantly have cancelled such a judgement on

reflecting that the good news his wife was able to give him about

their little boy was ground enough for any optimistic reaction. It

may have come partly, too, from a certain compunction at having

breathed to me at all harshly on the cool fair lady who sat there--a

desire to prove himself not after all so mismated. Dolcino continued

to be much better, and it had been promised him he should come

downstairs after his dinner. As soon as we had risen from our own

meal Mark slipped away, evidently for the purpose of going to his

child; and no sooner had I observed this than I became aware his wife

had simultaneously vanished. It happened that Miss Ambient and I,

both at the same moment, saw the tail of her dress whisk out of a

doorway; an incident that led the young lady to smile at me as if I

now knew all the secrets of the Ambients. I passed with her into the

garden and we sat down on a dear old bench that rested against the

west wall of the house. It was a perfect spot for the middle period

of a Sunday in June, and its felicity seemed to come partly from an

antique sun-dial which, rising in front of us and forming the centre

of a small intricate parterre, measured the moments ever so slowly

and made them safe for leisure and talk. The garden bloomed in the

suffused afternoon, the tall beeches stood still for an example, and,

behind and above us, a rose tree of many seasons, clinging to the

faded grain of the brick, expressed the whole character of the scene

in a familiar exquisite smell. It struck me as a place to offer

genius every favour and sanction--not to bristle with challenges and

checks. Miss Ambient asked me if I had enjoyed my walk with her

brother and whether we had talked of many things.

"Well, of most things," I freely allowed, though I remembered we

hadn't talked of Miss Ambient.

"And don't you think some of his theories are very peculiar?"

"Oh I guess I agree with them all." I was very particular, for Miss

Ambient's entertainment, to guess.

"Do you think art's everything?" she put to me in a moment.

"In art, of course I do!"

"And do you think beauty's everything?"

"Everything's a big word, which I think we should use as little as

possible. But how can we not want beauty?"

"Ah there you are!" she sighed, though I didn't quite know what she

meant by it. "Of course it's difficult for a woman to judge how far

to go," she went on. "I adore everything that gives a charm to life.

I'm intensely sensitive to form. But sometimes I draw back--don't

you see what I mean?--I don't quite see where I shall be landed. I

only want to be quiet, after all," Miss Ambient continued as if she

had long been baffled of this modest desire. "And one must be good,

at any rate, must not one?" she pursued with a dubious quaver--an

intimation apparently that what I might say one way or the other

would settle it for her. It was difficult for me to be very original

in reply, and I'm afraid I repaid her confidence with an unblushing

platitude. I remember, moreover, attaching to it an inquiry, equally

destitute of freshness and still more wanting perhaps in tact, as to

whether she didn't mean to go to church, since that was an obvious

way of being good. She made answer that she had performed this duty

in the morning, and that for her, of Sunday afternoons, supreme

virtue consisted in answering the week's letters. Then suddenly and

without transition she brought out: "It's quite a mistake about

Dolcino's being better. I've seen him and he's not at all right."

I wondered, and somehow I think I scarcely believed. "Surely his

mother would know, wouldn't she?"

She appeared for a moment to be counting the leaves on one of the

great 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.

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."