“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 was n’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 must n’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 should n’t have shown visibly that he wondered what the deuce I knew about it But he did n’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, demonstrative, 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 does n’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 color 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 judgment, 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 downstairs 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 Ambients. 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 place 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 particular, for Miss Ambient’s entertainment, to guess.