We passed through the house, and into the grounds, as I should have called them, which extended into the rear. They covered but three or four acres, but, like the house, they were very old and crooked, and full of traces of long habitation, with inequalities of level and little 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 deepest verdure. They made, as I remember, a kind of curtain at the farther end, in one of the folds of which, as it were, we presently perceived, from afar, a little group. ‘Ah, there she is!’ said Mark Ambient; ‘and she has got the boy.’ He made this last remark in a tone slightly different from any in which he yet had spoken. I was not fully aware of it 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 is always in his mother’s pocket. She coddles him too much.’ It came back to me afterwards, too – the manner in which he spoke these words. They were not petulant; they expressed rather a sudden coldness, a kind of 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 looked up at the sound of his father’s voice, 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 he was too tightly held, and after two or three fruitless efforts he suddenly turned round and buried his head deep in his mother’s lap. There was a certain awkwardness in the scene; I thought it rather odd that Mrs Ambient should pay so little attention to her husband. But I would not for the world have betrayed my thought, and, to conceal it, I observed that it must be such a pleasant thing to have tea in the garden. ‘Ah, she won’t let him come!’ said Mark Ambient, 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 any trace of resentment at her detention of the child. The quickness of the transition made me vaguely ask myself whether he were hen pecked – a shocking conjecture, 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 great refinement. She was a little cold, and a little shy; but she was very sweet, and she had a certain look of race, justified by my afterwards learning that she was ‘connected’ with two or three great families. 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 incongruity in Mark Ambient’s union. Mrs Ambient, 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 a very pleasant greeting, and Dolcino – I thought this little name of endearment delightful – took advantage of her getting up to slip away from her and go to his father, who said nothing to him, but simply seized him and held him high in his arms for a moment, kissing him several times. I had lost no time in observing that the child, who was not more than seven years old, was extraordinarily beautiful. He had the face of an angel – the eyes, the hair, the more than mortal bloom, the smile of innocence. There was something touching, almost alarming, in his beauty, which seemed to be composed 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 pity for him, 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 ‘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 little better; I simply discovered that he was too charming to live, wondering at the same time that his parents should not have perceived it, and should not be in proportionate grief and despair. For myself, I had no doubt of his evanescence, having already noticed that there is a kind of charm which is like a death-warrant. The lady who had been sitting with Mrs Ambient was a jolly, ruddy personage, dressed in velveteen and rather limp feathers, whom I guessed to be the vicar’s wife – our hostess did not 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 good-natured but brilliant mockery. This proves 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 smiles and cigar-smoke, some wonderful comparisons for his clerical neighbours; but meanwhile the chrysanthemums were a source of harmony, for he and the vicaress were equally fond of them, and I was surprised at the knowledge they exhibited of this interesting plant. The lady’s visit, however, had presumably already been long, and she presently got up, saying she must go, and kissed Mrs Ambient. Mark started to walk with her to the gate of the grounds, holding Dolcino by the hand.
‘Stay with me, my darling,’ Mrs Ambient said to the boy, who was wandering away with his father.
Mark Ambient paid no attention to the summons, but Dolcino turned round and looked with eyes of shy entreaty at his mother. ‘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 little clear, new voice.
‘I must ask you when I want you. Come to me, my darling.’ And Mrs Ambient, who had seated herself again, held out her long, slender hands.
Her husband stopped, with 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 she looked at me, smiling very hard, in an extremely fixed, cheerful manner.
‘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 gravely 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 have been a great deal with mamma to-day,’ he added in a moment.
‘And very little with papa! My dear fellow, I think you have chosen!’ And 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 upon t
he ground, expressed for a few moments so much mute agitation that I felt as if almost any remark from my own lips would be a false note. But Mrs Ambient quickly recovered herself, and said to me civilly enough that she hoped I didn’t mind having had to walk from the station. I reassured her on this point, and she went on, ‘We have got a thing that might have gone for you, but my husband wouldn’t order it.’
‘That gave me the pleasure of a walk with him,’ I rejoined.
She was silent a minute, and then she said, ‘I believe the Americans walk very little.’
‘Yes, we always run,’ I answered, laughingly.
She looked at me seriously, and I began to perceive a certain coldness in her pretty eyes. ‘I suppose your distances are so great.’
‘Yes; but we break our marches! I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is for me to find myself here,’ I added. ‘I have the greatest admiration for Mr Ambient.’
‘He will like that. He likes being admired.’
‘He must have a very happy life, then. He has many worshippers.’
‘Oh yes, I have seen some of them,’ said Mrs Ambient, looking away, very far from me, rather as if such a vision were before her at the moment. Something in her tone seemed to indicate that the vision was scarcely edifying, and I guessed very quickly that she was not in sympathy with the author of Beltraffio. I thought the fact strange, but, somehow, in the glow of my own enthusiasm, I didn’t think it important; it only made me wish to be rather explicit about that enthusiasm.
‘For me, you know,’ I remarked, ‘he is quite the greatest of living writers.’
‘Of course I can’t judge. Of course he’s very clever,’ said Mrs Ambient, smiling a little.
‘He’s magnificent, Mrs Ambient! There are pages in each of his books that have a perfection that classes them with the greatest things. Therefore, for me to see him in this familiar way – in his habit as he lives – and to find, apparently, the man as delightful as the artist, I can’t tell you how much too good to be true it seems, and how great a privilege I think it.’ I knew that 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 that I should dare to say even so much as this to Ambient 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 with her lips a little compressed, as if there were no doubt, of course, that her husband was remarkable, but at the same time she had heard all this before and couldn’t be expected to be particularly interested in it. There was even in her manner an intimation that I was rather young, and that people usually got over that sort of thing. ‘I assure you that for me this is a red-letter day,’ I added.
She made no response, until after a pause, looking round her, she said abruptly, though gently, ‘We are very much afraid about the fruit this year.’
My eyes wandered to the mossy, mottled, garden-walls, where plum-trees and pear-trees, flattered and fastened upon the rusty bricks, looked like crucified figures with many arms. ‘Doesn’t it promise well?’ I inquired.
‘No, the trees look very dull. We had such late frosts.’
Then there was another pause. Mrs Ambient kept her eyes fixed on the opposite end of the grounds, as if she were watching for her husband’s return with the child. ‘Is Mr Ambient fond of gardening?’ it occurred to me to inquire, irresistibly impelled as I felt myself, moreover, to bring the conversation constantly back to him.
‘He is 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 character of it is that of certain places that he describes. Your house is like one of his pictures.’
‘It’s a pleasant little place. There are hundreds like it.’
‘Oh, it has got his tone,’ I said laughing, and insisting on my point the more that Mrs Ambient appeared to see in my appreciation of her simple establishment a sign of limited experience.
It was evident that I insisted too much. ‘His tone?’ she repeated, with a quick look at me and as lightly heightened colour.
‘Surely he has a tone, Mrs Ambient.’
‘Oh yes, he has indeed! But I don’t in the least consider that I am living in one of his books; I shouldn’t care for that, at all,’ she went on, with a smile which had in some degree the effect of converting my slightly sharp protest into a joke deficient in point. ‘I am afraid I am not very literary,’ said Mrs Ambient. ‘And I am not artistic.’
‘I am very sure you are not stupid nor bornée,’ 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 reflection that it was she, and not I, who had begun it. She had brought her idiosyncrasies into the discussion.
‘Well, whatever I am, I am 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.’