‘Nothing is lost upon me,’ said Mrs Ambient. ‘I know they are very beautiful.’
‘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 would rather tell you some stories of my own,’ I said. ‘I know some that are very interesting.’
‘When will you tell them – to-morrow?’
‘To-morrow, with pleasure, if that suits you.’
Mrs Ambient was silent at this. 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 is not probable that the prospect was agreeable to her. This ought, doubtless, to have made me more careful as to what I said next; but all I can say is that it didn’t. I presently observed that just after leaving her, the evening before, and after hearing her apply to her husband’s writings the epithet I had already quoted, I had, on going up to my room, sat down to the perusal of those sheets of his new book which 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 are so very remarkable. I’m sure they will convert you. They place him in – really – such a dazzling light. All that is best in him is there. I have no doubt it’s a great liberty, my saying all this; but excuse me, and do read them!’
‘Do read them, mamma!’ Dolcino repeated. ‘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; and after this she made no remark, but sat there looking thoughtful, with her eyes on the ground. The tone of these last words was such as to leave me no spirit for further aggression, and after expressing a fear that her husband had not found the doctor at home, 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 moment afterwards she rose, holding the child, and murmured something about its being better that he should go up stairs. I offered to carry him, and held out my hands to take him; but she thanked me and turned away, with the child seated on her arm, his head on her shoulder. ‘I am very strong,’ she said, as she passed into the house, and her slim, flexible figure bent backwards with the filial weight. So I never touched 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 into the garden, the sunny stillness, the mild light of the English summer, filled the room, without quite chasing away the rich, dusky air which was a part of its charm, and which abode in the serried shelves where old morocco exhaled the fragrance of curious learning, and in the brighter intervals where medals and prints and miniatures were suspended upon 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 that I might learn to write as well as the author of Beltraffio. This distinguished man did not turn up, 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 become conscious of another presence in the room, and, looking up from my quarto, saw that Mrs Ambient, having pushed open the door in the same noiseless way that marked – or disguised – 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 in that spot in the morning, on coming down from my room.
‘Is this the new book?’ she asked, holding it up.
‘The very sheets, 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 a smile; after which I settled down to my quarto again, with the reflection that Mrs Ambient was a queer woman. My triumph, too, suddenly seemed to me rather vain. A woman who couldn’t smile in the right place would never understand Mark Ambient. He came in at last in person, having brought the doctor back 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 ten 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 for an instant with surprise. ‘What has suddenly made her so curious?’ he exclaimed; 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 am 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 very much afraid she would burn up the sheets, with his emendations, of which 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 a strange little air of triumph. ‘He is 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 answered, much appalled.
‘He would be happy anywhere. I have no doubt he is happy now, with his poor little throat in a state—’ She dropped her voice as her brother came in, and Mark let us know that, as a matter of course, Mrs Ambient would not appear. It was true that Dolcino had developed diphtheritic symptoms, but he was quiet for the present, and his mother was earnestly watching him. She was a perfect nurse, Mark said, and the doctor was coming back at ten o’clock. Our dinner was not very gay; Ambient was anxious and alarmed, and his sister irritated 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 told me, and I could not see that her satisfaction in being justified by the event made poor Dolcino’s throat any better. The truth is that, as the sequel proved, 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 to be an indiscretion, and was sorry I had promised to remain over the morrow. I said to Mark that, evidently, I had better 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 be an extreme relief to him. 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 gone up stairs before
rejoining us, to ask after the child. His mother and his nurse gave a tolerable account of him; 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 at eight o’clock the next day, and as I came down stairs saw, through the open door of the house, Mrs Ambient standing at the front gate of the grounds, in colloquy with the physician. She wore a white dressing-gown, but her shining hair was carefully tucked away in its net, and in the freshness of the morning, 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 question about Dolcino. None the less, however, was I impatient to learn how the morning found him; and as Mrs Ambient had not 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 away. Mrs Ambient had returned to the house before he got into his gig.
‘Excuse me – but, as a friend of the family, I should like very much to hear about the little boy.’
The doctor, who was a stout, sharp man, looked at me from head to foot, and then he 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 that 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!’ exclaimed Dr Allingham, who was evidently very angry. And he started his horse again with the whip.
I wandered back into the garden, and five minutes later Miss Ambient came forth from the house to greet me. She explained that breakfast would not be served for some time, and that she wished to catch the doctor before he went away. I informed her that this functionary 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 ejaculations, she confessed that she was infinitely perplexed, 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, which was opened to her by the nurse. This good woman had admitted her, and she had found Dolcino quiet, but flushed and ‘unnatural’, with his mother sitting beside 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 it was only in recalling her words later that I noticed the lapse. Mrs Ambient had looked up from her reading with her finger on her lips – I recognised the gesture she had addressed to 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, then, Dolcino’s condition was far from reassuring – his poor little breathing was most painful; and what change could have taken place in him in those few hours that would justify Beatrice in denying the physician access to him? 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, after the nurse had left her, turning over those pages of genius and wrestling with their magical influence.
I must relate very briefly the circumstances of the rest of my visit to Mark Ambient – it lasted but a few hours longer – and devote but three words to my later acquaintance with him. That lasted five years – till his death – and was full of interest, of satisfaction, and, I may add, of sadness. The main thing to be said with regard to it is, that I had a secret from him. I believe he never suspected it, though of this I am not absolutely sure. If he did, the line he had taken, the line of absolute negation of the matter to himself, shows an immense effort of the will. I may tell my secret now, giving it for what it is worth, now that Mark Ambient has gone, that he has begun to be alluded to as one of the famous early dead, and that his wife does not survive him; now, too, that Miss Ambient, whom I also saw at intervals during the years 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 into breakfast after his sister and I had for some time been seated there. He shook hands with me in silence, kissed his sister, opened his letters and newspapers, and pretended to drink his coffee. But I could see that these movements were mechanical, and I was little surprised when, suddenly he 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 is the matter fratello mio?’ Miss Ambient inquired, 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 sister and I, by a common impulse, exchanging a glance of some alarm, while he stared for a moment into the garden. ‘In Heaven’s name, what has got possession of Beatrice?’ he cried at last, turning round with an almost haggard face. And he looked from one of us to the other; the appeal was addressed to me as well as to his sister.
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!’ Ambient went on.
‘She refused to let the doctor see him an hour ago!’ Miss Ambient remarked, with intention, as they say on the stage.
‘Refused to let the doctor see him? By Heaven, I’ll smash in the door!’ And Mark brought his fist down upon the table, 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 is probably right,’ I said to him. ‘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 listen at least to my own ingenuous chatter, for nearly an hour. At the end of this time Miss Ambient returned to us, with a very rapid step, holding her hand to her heart.
‘Go for the doctor, Mark; go for the doctor this moment!’
‘Is he dying – has she killed him?’ poor Ambient 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 would be hanged if he came back,’ I felt myself obliged to announce.
‘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 that I ought to have volunteered in his place, and I said as much to Miss Ambient; but she checked me by grasping my arm quickly, while we heard the wheels of the dog-cart rat
tle 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 my first impulse was to believe I must allow here for a great exaggeration. But in a moment I saw that her emotion was real. ‘Dolcino is dying then – he is dead?’