I don’t think I can choose,” the child answered, making his voice very low and confidential. “But I’ve been a great deal with mamma to-day,” he then added.
“And very little with papa! My dear fellow, I think you have chosen!” On which Mark Ambient walked off with his son, accompanied by re-echoing but inarticulate comments from my fellow-visitor.
His wife had seated herself again, and her fixed eyes, bent on the ground, expressed for a few moments so much mute agitation that anything I could think of to say would be but a false note. Yet she none the less quickly recovered herself, to express the sufficiently civil hope that I didn’t mind having had to walk from the station. I reassured her on this point, and she went on: “We’ve got a thing that might have gone for you, but my husband wouldn’t order it.” After which and another longish pause, broken only by my plea that the pleasure of a walk with our friend would have been quite what I would have chosen, she found for reply: “I believe the Americans walk very little.”
“Yes, we always run,” I laughingly allowed.
She looked at me seriously, yet with an absence in her pretty eyes. “I suppose your distances are so great.”
“Yes, but we break our marches! I can’t tell you the pleasure to me of finding myself here,” I added. “I’ve the greatest admiration for Mr. Ambient.”
“He’ll like that. He likes being admired.”
“He must have a very happy life, then. He has many worshippers.”
“Oh yes, I’ve seen some of them,” she dropped, looking away, very far from me, rather as if such a vision were before her at the moment. It seemed to indicate, her tone, that the sight was scarcely edifying, and I guessed her quickly enough to be in no great intellectual sympathy with the author of “Beltraffio.” I thought the fact strange, but somehow, in the glow of my own enthusiasm, didn’t think it important it only made me wish rather to emphasise that homage.
“For me, you know,” I returned—doubtless with a due suffisance—“he’s quite the greatest of living writers.”
“Of course I can’t judge. Of course he’s very clever,” she said with a patient cheer.
“He’s nothing less than supreme, Mrs. Ambient! There are pages in each of his books of a perfection classing them with the greatest things. Accordingly for me to see him in this familiar way, in his habit as he lives, and apparently to find the man as delightful as the artist—well, I can’t tell you how much too good to be true it seems and how great a privilege I think it.” I knew I was gushing, but I couldn’t help it, and what I said was a good deal less than what I felt. I was by no means sure I should dare to say even so much as this to the master himself, and there was a kind of rapture in speaking it out to his wife which was not affected by the fact that, as a wife, she appeared peculiar. She listened to me with her face grave again and her lips a little compressed, listened as if in no doubt, of course, that her husband was remarkable, but as if at the same time she had heard it frequently enough and couldn’t treat it as stirring news. There was even in her manner a suggestion that I was so young as to expose myself to being called forward—an imputation and a word I had always loathed; as well as a hinted reminder that people usually got over their early extravagance. “I assure you that for me this is a red-letter day,” I added.
She didn’t take this up, but after a pause, looking round her, said abruptly and a trifle dryly: “We’re very much afraid about the fruit this year.”
My eyes wandered to the mossy mottled garden-walls, where plum-trees and pears, flattened and fastened upon the rusty bricks, looked like crucified figures with many arms. “Doesn’t it promise well?”
“No, the trees look very dull. We had such late frosts.”
Then there was another pause. She addressed her attention to the opposite end of the grounds, kept it for her husband’s return with the child. “Is Mr. Ambient fond of gardening?” it occurred to me to ask, irresistibly impelled as I felt myself, moreover, to bring the conversation constantly back to him.
“He’s very fond of plums,” said his wife.
“Ah well, then, I hope your crop will be better than you fear. It’s a lovely old place,” I continued. “The whole impression’s that of certain places he has described. Your house is like one of his pictures.”
She seemed a bit frigidly amused at my glow. “It’s a pleasant little place. There are hundreds like it.”
“Oh it has his tone,” I laughed, but sounding my epithet and insisting on my point the more sharply that my companion appeared to see in my appreciation of her simple establishment a mark of mean experience.
It was clear I insisted too much. “His tone?” she repeated with a harder look at me and a slightly heightened colour.
“Surely he has a tone, Mrs. Ambient.”
“Oh yes, he has indeed! But I don’t in the least consider that I’m living in one of his books at all. I shouldn’t care for that in the least,” she went on with a smile that had in some degree the effect of converting her really sharp protest into an insincere joke. “I’m afraid I’m not very literary. And I’m not artistic,” she stated.
“I’m very sure you’re not ignorant, not stupid,” I ventured to reply, with the accompaniment of feeling immediately afterwards that I had been both familiar and patronising. My only consolation was in the sense that she had begun it, had fairly dragged me into it. She had thrust forward her limitations.
“Well, whatever I am I’m very different from my husband. If you like him you won’t like me. You needn’t say anything. Your liking me isn’t in the least necessary!”
“Don’t defy me!” I could but honourably make answer.
She looked as if she hadn’t heard me, which was the best thing she could do; and we sat some time without further speech. Mrs. Ambient had evidently the enviable English quality of being able to be mute without unrest. But at last she spoke—she asked me if there seemed many people in town. I gave her what satisfaction I could on this point, and we talked a little of London and of some of its characteristics at that time of the year. At the end of this I came back irrepressibly to Mark.
“Doesn’t he like to be there now? I suppose he doesn’t find the proper quiet for his work. I should think his things had been written for the most part in a very still place. They suggest a great stillness following on a kind of tumult. Don’t you think so?” I laboured on. “I suppose London’s a tremendous place to collect impressions, but a refuge like this, in the country, must be better for working them up. Does he get many of his impressions in London, should you say?” I proceeded from point to point in this malign inquiry simply because my hostess, who probably thought me an odious chattering person, gave me time; for when I paused—I’ve not represented my pauses—she simply continued to let her eyes wander while her long fair fingers played with the medallion on her neck. When I stopped altogether, however, she was obliged to say something, and what she said was that she hadn’t the least idea where her husband got his impressions. This made me think her, for a moment, positively disagreeable; delicate and proper and rather aristocratically fine as she sat there. But I must either have lost that view a moment later or been goaded by it to further aggression, for I remember asking her if our great man were in a good vein of work and when we might look for the appearance of the book on which he was engaged.
