“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 suppose there might have been something ridiculous in a confession of this kind, but I liked my new friend so much that for me it did n’t detract from his dignity. “She tells me—from behind the door—that she will let me know if he is worse.”
“It’s very good of her,” said Miss Ambient
I had exchanged a glance with Mark in which it is possible that he read that my pity for him was untinged with contempt, though I know not why he should have cared; and as, presently, his sister got up and took her bedroom candlestick, he proposed that we should go back to his study. We sat there till after midnight; he put himself into his slippers, into an old velvet jacket, lighted an ancient pipe, and talked considerably less than he had done before.
There were longish pauses in our communion, but they only made me feel that we had advanced in intimacy. They helped me, too, to understand my friend’s personal situation, and to perceive that it was by no means the happiest possible. When his face was quiet, it was vaguely troubled; it seemed to me to show that for him, too, life was a struggle, as it has been for 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,—it was not finished, but he had indulged in the luxury, so dear to writers of deliberation, of having it “set up,” from chapter to chapter, as he advanced,—he gave me, I say, the early pages, the prémices, as the French have it, of this new fruit of his imagination, to take to my room and look over at my leisure. I was just quitting him when the door of his study was noiselessly pushed open, and Mrs. Ambient stood before us. She looked at us a moment, with her candle in her hand, and then she said to her husband that as she supposed he had not gone to bed, she had come down to tell him that 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 he were afraid she would seize him in his passage, and bounded upstairs, to judge for himself of his child’s condition. Mrs. Ambient looked slightly discomfited, and for a moment I thought she was going to give chase to her husband. But she resigned herself, with a sigh, while her eyes wandered over the lamp-lit room, where various books, at which I had been looking, were pulled out of their places on the shelves, and the fumes of tobacco seemed to hang in mid-air. I bade her good-night, and then, without intention, by a kind of fatality, the perversity which had already made me insist unduly on talking with her about her husband’s achievements, I alluded to the precious proof-sheets with which Ambient had intrusted me and which I was nursing there under my arm. “It is 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, round, well-bred utterance, “I dare say you attribute to me ideas that I have n’t got I don’t take that sort of interest in my husband’s proof-sheets. I consider his writings most objectionable!”
PART II.
I had some curious conversation 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 dustpans and feather-brushes, I almost hesitated to light a cigarette, and was doubly startled when, in the act of doing so, I suddenly perceived the sister of my host, who had, in any case, something of the oddity of an apparition, standing before me. She might have been posing for her photograph. Her sad-colored robe arranged itself in serpentine folds at her feet; her hands locked themselves listlessly together in front; and her chin rested upon 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 that she had heard he was better. She was able to gratify this hope, and spoke as if we might expect to see him during the day. We walked through the shrubberies together, and she gave me a great deal of information about her brother’s ménage, which offered me an opportunity to mention to her that his wife had told me, the night before, that she thought his productions objectionable.
“She does n’t usually come out with that so soon!” Miss Ambient exclaimed, in answer to this piece of gossip. “Poor lady, she saw that I am a fanatic.” “Yes, she won’t like you for that. But you must n’t mind, if the rest of us like you! Beatrice thinks a work of art ought to have a ‘purpose.’ But she’s a charming woman—don’t you think her charming?—she’s such a type of the lady.”
“She’s very beautiful,” I answered; while I reflected that though it was true, apparently, that Mark Ambient was mismated, it was also perceptible that his sister was perfidious. She told me that her brother and his wife had no other difference but this one, that she thought his writings immoral and his influence pernicious. It was a fixed idea; she was afraid of these things for the child. I answered that it was not a trifle—a woman’s regarding her husband’s mind as a well of corruption, and she looked quite struck with the novelty of my remark. “But there has n’t been any of the sort of trouble that there so often is among married people,” she said. “I suppose you can judge for yourself that Beatrice isn’t at all—well, whatever they call it when a woman misbehaves herself. And Mark does n’t make love to other people, either. I assure you he does n’t! All the same, of course, from her point of view, you know, she has a dread of my brother’s influence on the child—on the formation of his character, of his principles. It is as if it were a subtle poison, or a contagion, or something that would rub off on Dolcino when his father kisses him or holds him on his knee. If she could, she would prevent Mark from ever touching him. Every one knows it; visitors see it for themselves; so there is no harm in my telling you. Isn’t it excessively odd? It comes from Beatrice’s being so religious, and so tremendously moral, and all that and then, of course, we must n’t forget,” my companion added, unexpectedly, “that some of Mark’s ideas are—well, really—rather queer!”