Great Short Novels of Henry James

by Henry James

  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.

  “Do you think art is everything?” she inquired in, a moment.

  “In art, of course I do!”

  “And do you think beauty is everything?”

  “I don’t know about its being everything. But it’s very delightful.”

  “Of course it is difficult for a woman to know how far to go,” said my companion. “I adore everything that gives a charm to life. I am intensely sensitive to form. But sometimes I draw back—don’t you see what I mean?—I don’t quite see where I shall be landed. I only want to be quiet, after all,” Miss Ambient continued, in a tone of stifled yearning which seemed to indicate that she had not yet arrived at her desire. “And one must be good, at any rate, must not one?” she inquired, with a cadence apparently intended for an assurance that my answer would settle this recondite question for her. It was difficult for me to make it very original, and I am afraid I repaid her confidence with an unblushing platitude. I remember, moreover, appending to it an inquiry, equally destitute of freshness, and still more wanting perhaps in tact, as to whether she did not mean to go to church, as that was an obvious way of being good. She replied that she had performed this duty in the morning, and that for her, on Sunday afternoon, supreme virtue consisted in answering the week’s letters. Then suddenly, without transition, she said to me, “It’s quite a mistake about Dolcino being better. I have seen him, and he’s not at all right.”

  “Surely his mother would know, wouldn’t she?” I suggested.

  She appeared for a moment to be counting the leaves on one of the great beeches. “As regards most matters, one can easily say what, in a given situation, my sister-in-law would do. But as regards this one, there are strange elements at work.”

  “Strange elements? Do you mean in the constitution of the child?”

  “No, I mean in my sister-in-law’s feelings.”

  “Elements of affection, of course; elements of anxiety. Why do you call them strange?”

  She repeated my words. “Elements of affection, elements of anxiety. She is very anxious.”

  Miss Ambient made me vaguely uneasy; she almost frightened me, and I wished she would go and write her letters. “His father will have seen him now,” I said, “and if he is not satisfied he will send for the doctor.”

  “The doctor ought to have been here this morning. He lives only two miles away.”

  I reflected that all this was very possibly only a part of the general tragedy of Miss Ambient’s view of things; but I asked her why she hadn’t urged such a necessity upon her sister-in-law. She answered me with a smile of extraordinary significance, and told me that I must have very little idea of what her relations with Beatrice were; but I must do her the justice to add that she went on to make herself a little more comprehensible by saying that it was quite reason enough for her sister not to be alarmed that Mark would be sure to be. He was always nervous about the child, and as they were predestined by nature to take opposite views, the only thing for Beatrice was to cultivate a false optimism. If Mark were not there, she would not be at all easy. I remembered what he had said to me about their dealings with Dolcino,—that between them they would put an end to him; but I did not repeat this to Miss Ambient: the less so that just then her brother emerged from the house, carrying his child in his arms. Close behind him moved his wife, grave and pale; the boy’s face was turned over Ambient’s shoulder, towards his mother. We got up to receive the group, and as they came near us Dolcino turned round. I caught, on his enchanting little countenance, a smile of recognition, and for the moment would have been quite content with it. Miss Ambient, however, received another impression, and I make haste to say that her quick sensibility, in which there was something maternal, argues that, in spite of her affectations, there was a strain of kindness in her. “It won’t do at all—it won’t do at all,” she said to me under her breath. “I shall speak to Mark about the doctor.”

  The child was rather white, but the main difference I saw in him was that he was even more beautiful than the day before. He had been dressed in his festal garments,—a velvet suit and a crimson sash,—and he looked like a little invalid prince, too young to know condescension, and smiling familiarly on his subjects.

  “Put him down, Mark, he’s not comfortable,” Mrs. Ambient said.

  “Should you like to stand on your feet, my boy?” his father asked.

  “Oh, yes; I’m remarkably well,” said the child.

  Mark placed him
on the ground; he had shining, pointed slippers, with enormous bows. “Are you happy now, Mr. Ambient?”

  “Oh, yes, I am particularly happy,” Dolcino replied. The words were scarcely out of his mouth when his mother caught him up, and in a moment, holding him on her knees, she took her place on the bench where Miss Ambient and I had been sitting. This young lady said something to her brother, in consequence of which the two wandered away into the garden together. I remained with Mrs. Ambient; but as a servant had brought out a couple of chairs I was not obliged to seat myself beside her. Our conversation was not animated, and I, for my part, felt there would be a kind of hypocrisy in my trying to make myself agreeable to Mrs. Ambient I didn’t dislike her—I rather admired her; but I was aware that I differed from her inexpressibly. Then I suspected, what I afterwards definitely knew and have already intimated, that the poor lady had taken a dislike to me; and this of course was not encouraging. She thought me an obtrusive and even depraved young man, whom a perverse Providence had dropped upon their quiet lawn to flatter her husband’s worst tendencies. She did me the honor to say to Miss Ambient, who repeated the speech, that she didn’t know when she had seen her husband take such a fancy to a visitor; and she measured, apparently, my evil influence by Mark’s appreciation of my society. I had a consciousness, not yet acute, but quite sufficient, of all this; but I must say that if it chilled my flow of small-talk, it didn’t prevent me from thinking that the beautiful mother and beautiful child, interlaced there against their background of roses, made a picture such as I perhaps should not soon see again. I was free, I supposed, to go into the house and write letters, to sit in the drawing-room, to repair to my own apartment and take a nap; but the only use I made of my freedom was to linger still in my chair and say to myself that the light hand of Sir Joshua might have painted Mark Ambient’s wife and son. I found myself looking perpetually at Dolcino, and Dolcino looked back at me, and that was enough to detain me. When he looked at me he smiled, and I felt it was an absolute impossibility to abandon a child who was smiling at one like that. His eyes never wandered; they attached themselves to mine, as if among all the small incipient things of his nature there was a desire to say something to me. If I could have taken him upon my own knee, he perhaps would have managed to say it; but it would have been far too delicate a matter to ask his mother to give him up, and it has remained a constant regret for me that on that Sunday afternoon I did not, even for a moment, hold Dolcino in my arms. He had said that he felt remarkably well, and that he was especially happy; but though he may have been happy, with his charming head pillowed on his mother’s breast, and his little crimson silk legs depending from her lap, I did not think he looked well. He made no attempt to walk about; he was content to swing his legs softly and strike one as languid and angelic.

  Mark came back to us with his sister; and Miss Ambient, making some remark about having to attend to her correspondence, passed into the house. Mark came and stood in front of his wife, looking down at the child, who immediately took hold of his hand, keeping it while he remained. “I think Allingham ought to see him,” Ambient said; “I think I will walk over and fetch him.”

  “That’s Gwendolen’s idea, I suppose,” Mrs. Ambient replied, very sweetly.

  “It’s not such an out-of-the-way idea, when one’s child is ill.”

  “I’m not ill, papa; I’m much better now,” Dolcino remarked.

  “Is that the truth, or are you only saying it to be agreeable? You have a great idea of being agreeable, you know.”

  The boy seemed to meditate on this distinction this imputation, for a moment; then his exaggerated eyes, which had wandered, caught my own as I watched him. “Do you think me agreeable?” he inquired, with the candor of his age, and with a smile that made his father turn round to me, laughing, and ask, mutely, with a glance, “Isn’t he adorable?”

  “Then why don’t you hop about, if you feel so lusty?” Ambient went on, while the boy swung his hand.

  “Because mamma is holding me close!”

  “Oh, yes; I know how mamma holds you when I come near!” Ambient exclaimed, looking at his wife.

  She turned her charming eyes up to him, without deprecation or concession, and after a moment she said, “You can go for Allingham if you like, I think myself it would be better. You ought to drive.”

  “She says that to get me away,” Ambient remarked to me, laughing; after which he started for the doctor’s.

  I remained there with Mrs. Ambient, though our conversation had more pauses than speeches. The boy’s little fixed white face seemed, as before, to plead with me to stay, and after a while it produced still another effect, a very curious one, which I shall find it difficult to express. Of course I expose myself to the charge of attempting to give fantastic reasons for an act which may have been simply the fruit of a native want of discretion; and indeed the traceable consequences of that perversity were too lamentable to leave me any desire to trifle with the question. All I can say is that I acted in perfect good faith, and that Dolcino’s friendly little gaze gradually kindled the spark of my inspiration. What helped it to glow were the other influences,—the silent, suggestive garden-nook, the perfect opportunity (if it was not an opportunity for that, it was an opportunity for nothing), and the plea that I speak of, which issued from the child’s eyes, and seemed to make him say, “The mother that bore me and that presses me here to her bosom—sympathetic little organism that I am—has really the kind of sensibility which she has been represented to you as lacking; if you only look for it patiently and respectfully. How is it possible that she shouldn’t have it? How is it possible that I should have so much of it (for I am quite full of it, dear, strange gentleman), if it were not also in some degree in her? I am my father’s child, but I am also my mother’s, and I am sorry for the difference between them!” So it shaped itself before me, the vision of reconciling Mrs. Ambient with her husband, of putting an end to their great disagreement. The project was absurd, of course, for had I not had his word for it—spoken with all the bitterness of experience—that the gulf that divided them was wellnigh bottomless? Nevertheless, a quarter of an hour after Mark had left us, I said to his wife that I couldn’t get over what she told me the night before about her thinking her husband’s writings “objectionable.” I had been so very sorry to hear it, had thought of it constantly, and wondered whether it were not possible to make her change her mind. Mrs. Ambient gave me rather a cold stare; she seemed to be recommending me to mind my own business. I wish I had taken this mute counsel, but I did not. I went on to remark that it seemed an immense pity so much that was beautiful should be lost upon her.

  “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 pressure, 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 upstairs. 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.