“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 recognized 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 in to 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.