‘And meanwhile do you propose to hide them – to lock them up in a drawer?’ Mrs Ambient had inquired.
‘Oh no; we must simply tell him that they are 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 would be very awkward when he was about fifteen, and I asked her husband if it was his opinion in general, then, that young people should not read novels.
‘Good ones – certainly not!’ said my companion. I suppose I had had other views, for I remember saying that, for myself, I was not sure it was bad for them – if the novels were ‘good’ enough. ‘Bad for them, I don’t say so much!’ Ambient exclaimed. ‘But very bad, I am afraid, for the novel.’ That oblique, accidental allusion to his wife’s attitude was followed by a franker style 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 making any kind of common ménage, since the beginning of time. They have 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 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 think too much about it. She’s always afraid of that – always on her guard. I don’t know what she has got on her back! And she’s so pretty, too, herself! Don’t you think she’s lovely? She was, at any rate, when I married her. 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 my novels. 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 exclaimed, 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 his house, and if it be thought that he was querulous, I am 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 very rarely complained. ‘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 which I should like to bring out. She is 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 is 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 are 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 are 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 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. ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter, after all,’ he said, laughing; which I was glad to hear, for I was reproaching myself with having excited him.
If I had, his excitement soon passed off, for at lunch 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 kindliness, 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 a very singular personage. I am obliged to say that the signs of a fanatical temperament were not more striking in my hostess than before; it was only after a while that her air of incorruptible conformity, her tapering, monosyllabic correctness, began to appear to be themselves a cold, thin flame. Certainly, at first, she looked like a woman with as few passions as possible; but if she had a passion at all, it would be that of Philistinism. She might have been, for there are guardian-spirits, I suppose, of all great principles – the angel of propriety. Mark Ambient, apparently, ten years before, had simply perceived that she was an angel, without asking himself of what. He had been quite right in calling my attention to her beauty. In looking for the reason why he should have married her, I saw, more than before, that she was, physically speaking, a wonderfully cultivated human plant – that she must have given him many ideas and images. It was impossible to be more pencilled, more garden-like, more delicately tinted and petalled.
If I had had it in my heart to think Ambient a little of a hypocrite for appearing to forget at table everything he had said to me during 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 reason enough for his sudden air of happiness. It may have come partly, too, from a certain remorse at having complained to me of the fair lady who sat there – a desire to show me that he was after all not so miserable. Dolcino continued to be much better, and he had been promised he should come down stairs after he had had his dinner. As soon as we had risen from our own meal Ambient slipped away, evidently for the purpose of going to his child; and no sooner had I observed this than I became aware that 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 – which led the young lady to smile at me, as if I now knew all the secrets of the place. I passed with her into the garden, and we sat down on a dear old bench which 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 seemed to me a place for genius to have every sanction, and not to encounter 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 said, smiling, though I remembered that we had not 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 p
articular, for Miss Ambient’s entertainment, to guess.
‘Do you think art is everything?’ she inquired in a moment.
‘In art, of course I do!’
‘And do you think beauty is everything?’
‘I don’t know about its being everything. But it’s very delightful.’
‘Of course it is difficult for a woman to know how far to go,’ said my companion. ‘I adore everything that gives a charm to life. I am 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, in a tone of stifled yearning which seemed to indicate that she had not yet arrived at her desire. ‘And one must be good, at any rate, must not one?’ she inquired, with a cadence apparently intended for an assurance that my answer would settle this recondite question for her. It was difficult for me to make it very original, and I am afraid I repaid her confidence with an unblushing platitude. I remember, moreover, appending to it an inquiry, equally destitute of freshness, and still more wanting perhaps in tact, as to whether she did not mean to go to church, as that was an obvious way of being good. She replied that she had performed this duty in the morning, and that for her, on Sunday afternoon, supreme virtue consisted in answering the week’s letters. Then suddenly, without transition, she said to me, ‘It’s quite a mistake about Dolcino being better. I have seen him, and he’s not at all right.’
‘Surely his mother would know, wouldn’t she?’ I suggested.
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 would do. But as regards this one, 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. Why do you call them strange?’
She repeated my words. ‘Elements of affection, elements of anxiety. She is very anxious.’
Miss Ambient made me vaguely uneasy – she almost frightened me, and I wished she would go and write her letters. ‘His father will have seen him now,’ I said, ‘and if he is not satisfied he will send for the doctor.’
‘The doctor ought to have been here this morning. He lives only two miles away.’
I reflected that all this was very possibly only a part of the general tragedy of Miss Ambient’s view of things; but I asked her why she hadn’t urged such a necessity upon her sister-in-law. She answered me with a smile of extraordinary significance, and told me that I must have very little idea of what her relations with Beatrice were; but I must do her the justice to add that she went on to make herself a little more comprehensible by saying that it was quite reason enough for her sister not to be alarmed that Mark would be sure to be. He was always nervous about the child, and as they were predestined by nature to take opposite views, the only thing for Beatrice was to cultivate a false optimism. If Mark were not there, she would not be at all easy. I remembered what he had said to me about their dealings with Dolcino – that between them they would put an end to him; but I did not repeat this to Miss Ambient: the less so that just then her brother emerged from the house, carrying his child in his arms. Close behind him moved his wife, grave and pale; the boy’s face was turned over Ambient’s shoulder, towards his mother. We got up to receive the group, and as they came near us Dolcino turned round. I caught, on his enchanting little countenance, a smile of recognition, and for the moment would have been quite content with it. Miss Ambient, however, received another impression, and I make haste to say that her quick sensibility, in which there was something maternal, argues that in spite of her affectations there was a strain of kindness in her. ‘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.’
The child 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 comfortable,’ Mrs Ambient said.
‘Should you like to stand on your feet, my boy?’ his father asked.
‘Oh yes; I’m remarkably well,’ said the child.
Mark placed him on the ground; he had shining, pointed slippers, with enormous bows. ‘Are you happy now, Mr Ambient?’
‘Oh yes, I am particularly happy,’ Dolcino replied. The words were scarcely out of his mouth when his mother caught him up, and in a moment, holding him on her knees, she 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. I remained with Mrs Ambient; but as a servant had brought out a couple of chairs I was not obliged to seat myself beside her. Our conversation was not animated, and I, for my part, felt there would be a kind of hypocrisy in my trying to make myself agreeable to Mrs Ambient. 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 had taken a dislike to me; and this of course was not encouraging. She thought me an obtrusive and even depraved young man, whom a perverse Providence had dropped upon their quiet lawn to flatter her husband’s 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 her husband 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 yet acute, but quite sufficient, of all this; but I must say that if it chilled my flow of small-talk, it didn’t prevent me from thinking that the beautiful mother and beautiful child, interlaced there against their background of roses, made a picture such as I perhaps should not 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 Dolcino, and Dolcino looked back at me, and that was enough to detain me. When he looked at me he smiled, and I felt it was an absolute impossibility to abandon a child who was smiling at one like that. His eyes never wandered; they attached themselves to mine, as if among all the small incipient things of his nature there was a desire to say something to me. If I could have taken him upon my own knee he perhaps would have managed to say it; but it would have been far too delicate a matter to ask his mother to give him up, and it has remained a constant regret for me that on that Sunday afternoon I did not, even for a moment, hold Dolcino in my arms. He had said that he felt remarkably well, and that he was especially happy; but though he may have been happy, with his charming head pillowed on his mother’s breast and his little crimson silk legs depending from her lap, I did not think he looked well. He made no attempt to walk about; he was content to swing his legs softly and strike one as languid and angelic.
Mark came back to us with his sister; and Miss Ambient, making some remark about having to attend to 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, keeping it while he remained. ‘I think Allingham ought to see him,’ Ambient said; ‘I think I will 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 is ill.’
‘I’m not ill, papa; I’m much better now,’ Dolcino remarked.
‘Is that the truth, or are you only saying it to be agreeable? You have a
great idea of being agreeable, you know.’
The boy 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 smile that made his father turn round to me, laughing, and ask, mutely, with a glance, ‘Isn’t he adorable?’
‘Then why don’t you hop about, if you feel so lusty?’ Ambient went on, while the boy swung his hand.
‘Because mamma is holding me close!’
‘Oh yes; I know how mamma holds you when I come near!’ Ambient exclaimed, looking at his wife.
She turned her charming eyes up to him, without deprecation or concession, and after a moment she said, ‘You can go for Allingham if you like. I think myself it would be better. You ought to drive.’
‘She says that to get me away,’ Ambient remarked to me, laughing; after which he started for the doctor’s.
I remained there with Mrs Ambient, though our conversation had more pauses than speeches. 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 attempting to give fantastic reasons for an act which may have been simply 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 that I speak of, which issued from the child’s eyes and seemed to make him say, ‘The mother that bore me and that presses me here to her bosom – sympathetic little organism that I am – has really the kind of sensibility which she has been represented to you as lacking; if you only look for it patiently and respectfully. How is it possible that she shouldn’t have it? how is it possible that I should have so much of it (for I am quite full of it, dear strange gentleman), if it were not also in some degree in her? I am my father’s child, but I am also my mother’s, and I am 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 great disagreement. 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 that divided them was well-nigh bottomless? Nevertheless, a quarter of an hour after Mark had left us, I said to his wife that I couldn’t get over what she told me the night before about her thinking her husband’s writings ‘objectionable’. I had been so very sorry to hear it, had thought of it constantly, and wondered whether it were not possible to make her change her mind. Mrs Ambient gave me rather a cold stare – she seemed to be recommending me to mind my own business. I wish I had taken this mute counsel, but I did not. I went on to remark that it seemed an immense pity so much that was beautiful should be lost upon her.