Part 4

“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 prémices, 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!”

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.”