Comedies and Errors

by Henry Harland

I had recognised him. It was rather more than ten years since I had seen him last; and in ten years he had changed, he had decayed, terribly. But I was quite sure, quite sure.

“By Jove,” I thought, “it’s Ambrose—it’s Augustus Ambrose! It’s the Friend of Man!”

Augustus Ambrose? I daresay the name conveys nothing to you? And yet, forty, thirty, twenty years ago, Augustus Ambrose was not without his measure of celebrity in the world. If hardly any one had read his published writings, if few had any but the dimmest notion of what his theories and aims were, almost everybody had at least heard of him, almost everybody knew at least that there was such a man, and that the man had theories and aims—of some queer radical sort. One knew, in vague fashion, that he had disciples, that there were people here and there who called themselves “Ambrosites.”

I say twenty years ago. But twenty years ago he was already pretty well forgotten. I imagine the moment of his utmost notoriety would have fallen somewhere in the fifties or the sixties, somewhere between ’55 and ’68.

And if my sudden recognition of him in the Casino made my heart give a jump, there was sufficient cause. During the greater part of my childhood, Augustus Ambrose lived with us, was virtually a member of our family. Then I saw a good deal of him again, when I was eighteen, nineteen; and still again, when I was four- or five-and-twenty.

He lived with us, indeed, from the time when I was scarcely more than a baby till I was ten or eleven; so that in my very farthest memories he is a personage—looking backwards, I see him in the earliest, palest dawn: a tall man, dressed in black, with long hair and a long beard, who was always in our house, and who used to be frightfully severe; who would turn upon me with a most terrifying frown if I misconducted myself in his presence, who would loom up unexpectedly from behind closed doors, and utter a soul-piercing hist-hist, if I was making a noise: a sort of domesticated Croquemitaine, whom we had always with us.

Always? Not quite always, though; for, when I stop to think, I remember there would be breathing spells: periods during which he would disappear—during which you could move about the room, and ask questions, and even (at a pinch) upset things, without being frowned at; during which you could shout lustily at your play, unoppressed by the fear of a black figure suddenly opening the door and freezing you with a hist-hist; during which, in fine, you could forget the humiliating circumstance that children are called into existence to be seen and not heard, with its irksome moral that they should never speak unless they are spoken to. Then, one morning, I would wake up, and find that he was in the house again. He had returned during the night.

That was his habit, to return at night. But on one occasion, at least, he returned in the daytime. I remember driving with my father and mother, in our big open carriage, to the railway station, and then driving back home with Mr. Ambrose added to our party. Why I—a child of six or seven, between whom and our guest surely no love was lost—why I was taken upon this excursion, I can’t at all conjecture; I suppose my people had their reasons. Anyhow, I recollect the drive home with particular distinctness. Two things impressed me. First, Mr. Ambrose, who always dressed in black, wore a brown overcoat; I remember gazing at it with bemused eyes, and reflecting that it was exactly the colour of gravy. And secondly, I gathered from his conversation that he had been in prison! Yes. I gathered that he had been in Rome (we were living in Florence), and that one day he had been taken up by the policemen, and put in prison!

Of course, I could say nothing; but what I felt, what I thought! Mercy upon us, that we should know a man, that a man should live with us, who had been taken up and put in prison! I fancied him dragged through the streets by two gendarmes, struggling with them, and followed by a crowd of dirty people. I felt that our family was disgraced, we who had been the pink of respectability; my cheeks burned, and I hung my head. I could say nothing; but oh, the grief, the shame, I nursed in secret! Mr. Ambrose, who lived with us, whose standards of conduct (for children, at any rate) were so painfully exalted, Mr. Ambrose had done something terrible, and had been found out, and put in prison for it! Mr. Ambrose, who always dressed in black, had suddenly tossed his bonnet over the mills, and displayed himself cynically in an overcoat of rakish, dare-devil brown—the colour of gravy! Somehow, the notion pursued me, there must be a connection between his overcoat and his crime.

The enormity of the affair preyed upon my spirit, day after day, night after night, until, in the end, I could endure it silently no longer; and I spoke to my mother.