第23章

Ambient wouldn't appear.It was true the boy had developed diphtheritic symptoms, but he was quiet for the present and his mother earnestly watching him.She was a perfect nurse, Mark said, and Mackintosh would come back at ten.Our dinner wasn't very gay--with my host worried and absent; and his sister annoyed me by her constant tacit assumption, conveyed in the very way she nibbled her bread and sipped her wine, of having "told me so." I had had no disposition to deny anything she might have told me, and I couldn't see that her satisfaction in being justified by the event relieved her little nephew's condition.The truth is that, as the sequel was to prove, Miss Ambient had some of the qualities of the sibyl and had therefore perhaps a right to the sibylline contortions.Her brother was so preoccupied that I felt my presence an indiscretion and was sorry I had promised to remain over the morrow.I put it to Mark that clearly I had best leave them in the morning; to which he replied that, on the contrary, if he was to pass the next days in the fidgets my company would distract his attention.The fidgets had already begun for him, poor fellow; and as we sat in his study with our cigars after dinner he wandered to the door whenever he heard the sound of the Doctor's wheels.Miss Ambient, who shared this apartment with us, gave me at such moments significant glances; she had before rejoining us gone upstairs to ask about the child.His mother and his nurse gave a fair report, but Miss Ambient found his fever high and his symptoms very grave.The Doctor came at ten o'clock, and I went to bed after hearing from Mark that he saw no present cause for alarm.He had made every provision for the night and was to return early in the morning.

I quitted my room as eight struck the next day and when I came downstairs saw, through the open door of the house, Mrs.Ambient standing at the front gate of the grounds in colloquy with Mackintosh.She wore a white dressing-gown, but her shining hair was carefully tucked away in its net, and in the morning freshness, after a night of watching, she looked as much "the type of the lady" as her sister-in-law had described her.Her appearance, I suppose, ought to have reassured me; but I was still nervous and uneasy, so that Ishrank from meeting her with the necessary challenge.None the less, however, was I impatient to learn how the new day found him; and as Mrs.Ambient hadn't seen me I passed into the grounds by a roundabout way and, stopping at a further gate, hailed the Doctor just as he was driving off.Mrs.Ambient had returned to the house before he got into his cart.

"Pardon me, but as a friend of the family I should like very much to hear about the little boy."The stout sharp circumspect man looked at me from head to foot and then said: "I'm sorry to say I haven't seen him.""Haven't seen him?"

"Mrs.Ambient came down to meet me as I alighted, and told me he was sleeping so soundly, after a restless night, that she didn't wish him disturbed.I assured her I wouldn't disturb him, but she said he was quite safe now and she could look after him herself.""Thank you very much.Are you coming back?""No, sir; I'll be hanged if I come back!" cried the honest practitioner in high resentment.And the horse started as he settled beside his man.

I wandered back into the garden, and five minutes later Miss Ambient came forth from the house to greet me.She explained that breakfast wouldn't be served for some time and that she desired a moment herself with the Doctor.I let her know that the good vexed man 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 strange signs, she confessed herself immensely distressed, 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, opened to her by the nurse.This good woman had admitted her and she had found him quiet, but flushed and "unnatural," with his mother sitting by 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 only in recalling her words later did I notice the lapse.Mrs.Ambient had looked up from her reading with her finger on her lips--I recognised the gesture she had addressed 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 at that time the boy's state was far from reassuring--his poor little breathing so painful; and what change could have taken place in him in those few hours that would justify Beatrice in denying Mackintosh access? 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 and after the nurse had left her, turning and turning those pages of genius and wrestling with their magical influence.