第15章

I had an odd colloquy the next morning with Miss Ambient, whom Ifound 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 dust-pans and feather-brushes.I almost hesitated to light a cigarette and was doubly startled when, in the act of doing so, I suddenly saw the sister of my host, who had, at the best, something of the weirdness of an apparition, stand before me.She might have been posing for her photograph.Her sad-coloured robe arranged itself in serpentine folds at her feet; her hands locked themselves listlessly together in front; her chin rested on 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 she had heard he was better.

She was able to gratify this trust--she spoke as if we might expect to see him during the day.We walked through the shrubberies together and she gave me further light on her brother's household, which offered me an opportunity to repeat to her what his wife had so startled and distressed me with the night before.WAS it the sorry truth that she thought his productions objectionable?

"She doesn't usually come out with that so soon!" Miss Ambient returned in answer to my breathlessness.

"Poor lady," I pleaded, "she saw I'm a fanatic.""Yes, she won't like you for that.But you mustn'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?

I find in her quite the grand air."

"She's very beautiful," I produced with an effort; while I reflected that though it was apparently true that Mark Ambient was mismated it was also perceptible that his sister was perfidious.She assured me 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.Ianswered that it was in all conscience enough, the trifle of a woman's regarding her husband's mind as a well of corruption, and she seemed much struck with the novelty of my remark."But there hasn'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 kicks over! And poor Mark doesn't make love to other people either.You might think he would, but I assure you he doesn'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, his 'ideals,' poor little brat, his principles.It's as if it were a subtle poison or a contagion--something that would rub off on his tender sensibility when his father kisses him or holds him on his knee.If she could she'd prevent Mark from even so much as touching him.Every one knows it--visitors see it for themselves; so there's no harm in my telling you.Isn't it excessively odd? It comes from Beatrice's being so religious and so tremendously moral--so a cheval on fifty thousand riguardi.And then of course we mustn't forget,"my companion added, a little unexpectedly, to this polyglot proposition, "that some of Mark's ideas are--well, really--rather impossible, don't you know?"I reflected as we went into the house, where we found Ambient unfolding The Observer at the breakfast-table, that none of them were probably quite so "impossible, don't you know?" as his sister.Mrs.

Ambient, a little "the worse," as was mentioned, for her ministrations, during the night, to Dolcino, didn't appear at breakfast.Her husband described her, however, as hoping to go to church.I afterwards learnt that she did go, but nothing naturally was less on the cards than that we should accompany her.It was while the church-bell droned near at hand that the author of "Beltraffio" led me forth for the ramble he had spoken of in his note.I shall attempt here no record of where we went or of what we saw.We kept to the fields and copses and commons, and breathed the same sweet air as the nibbling donkeys and the browsing sheep, whose woolliness seemed to me, in those early days of acquaintance with English objects, but part of the general texture of the small dense landscape, which looked as if the harvest were gathered by the shears and with all nature bleating and braying for the violence.

Everything was full of expression for Mark Ambient's visitor--from the big bandy-legged geese whose whiteness was a "note" amid all the tones of green as they wandered beside a neat little oval pool, the foreground of a thatched and whitewashed inn, with a grassy approach and a pictorial sign--from these humble wayside animals to the crests of high woods which let a gable or a pinnacle peep here and there and looked even at a distance like trees of good company, conscious of an individual profile.I admired the hedge-rows, I plucked the faint-hued heather, and I was for ever stopping to say how charming Ithought the thread-like footpaths across the fields, which wandered in a diagonal of finer grain from one smooth stile to another.Mark Ambient was abundantly good-natured and was as much struck, dear man, with some of my observations as I was with the literary allusions of the landscape.We sat and smoked on stiles, broaching paradoxes in the decent English air; we took short cuts across a park or two where the bracken was deep and my companion nodded to the old woman at the gate; we skirted rank coverts which rustled here and there as we passed, and we stretched ourselves at last on a heathery hillside where if the sun wasn't too hot neither was the earth too cold, and where the country lay beneath us in a rich blue mist.Of course Ihad already told him what I thought of his new novel, having the previous night read every word of the opening chapters before I went to bed.