The Author of Beltraffio | Page 6

of, or into, pendent mats of ivy, and gables, and old red tiles, as
well as a general aspect of being painted in water-colours and inhabited
by people whose lives would go on in chapters and volumes. The lawn
seemed to me of extraordinary extent, the garden-walls of incalculable
height, the whole air of the place delightfully still, private, proper to
itself. "My wife must be somewhere about," Mark Ambient said as we
went in. "We shall find her perhaps--we've about an hour before dinner.
She may be in the garden. I'll show you my little place."
We passed through the house and into the grounds, as I should have
called them, which extended into the rear. They covered scarce three or
four acres, but, like the house, were very old and crooked and full of
traces of long habitation, with inequalities of level and little flights of
steps--mossy and cracked were these--which connected the different
parts with each other. The limits of the place, cleverly dissimulated,
were muffled in the great verdurous screens. They formed, as I
remember, a thick loose curtain at the further end, in one of the folds of
which, as it were, we presently made out from afar a little group. "Ah
there she is!" said Mark Ambient; "and she has got the boy." He noted
that last fact in a slightly different tone from any in which he yet had
spoken. I wasn't fully aware of this at the time, but it lingered in my ear
and I afterwards understood it.
"Is it your son?" I inquired, feeling the question not to be brilliant.
"Yes, my only child. He's always in his mother's pocket. She coddles
him too much." It came back to me afterwards too--the sound of these
critical words. They weren't petulant; they expressed rather a sudden
coldness, a mechanical submission. We went a few steps further, and
then he stopped short and called the boy, beckoning to him repeatedly.
"Dolcino, come and see your daddy!" There was something in the way
he stood still and waited that made me think he did it for a purpose.
Mrs. Ambient had her arm round the child's waist, and he was leaning
against her knee; but though he moved at his father's call she gave no
sign of releasing him. A lady, apparently a neighbour, was seated near
her, and before them was a garden-table on which a tea- service had
been placed.

Mark Ambient called again, and Dolcino struggled in the maternal
embrace; but, too tightly held, he after two or three fruitless efforts
jerked about and buried his head deep in his mother's lap. There was a
certain awkwardness in the scene; I thought it odd Mrs. Ambient
should pay so little attention to her husband. But I wouldn't for the
world have betrayed my thought, and, to conceal it, I began loudly to
rejoice in the prospect of our having tea in the garden. "Ah she won't let
him come!" said my host with a sigh; and we went our way till we
reached the two ladies. He mentioned my name to his wife, and I
noticed that he addressed her as "My dear," very genially, without a
trace of resentment at her detention of the child. The quickness of the
transition made me vaguely ask myself if he were perchance
henpecked--a shocking surmise which I instantly dismissed. Mrs.
Ambient was quite such a wife as I should have expected him to have;
slim and fair, with a long neck and pretty eyes and an air of good
breeding. She shone with a certain coldness and practised in intercourse
a certain bland detachment, but she was clothed in gentleness as in one
of those vaporous redundant scarves that muffle the heroines of
Gainsborough and Romney. She had also a vague air of race, justified
by my afterwards learning that she was "connected with the
aristocracy." I have seen poets married to women of whom it was
difficult to conceive that they should gratify the poetic fancy--women
with dull faces and glutinous minds, who were none the less, however,
excellent wives. But there was no obvious disparity in Mark Ambient's
union. My hostess--so far as she could be called so--delicate and quiet,
in a white dress, with her beautiful child at her side, was worthy of the
author of a work so distinguished as "Beltraffio." Round her neck she
wore a black velvet ribbon, of which the long ends, tied behind, hung
down her back, and to which, in front, was attached a miniature portrait
of her little boy. Her smooth shining hair was confined in a net. She
gave me an adequate greeting, and Dolcino--I thought this small name
of endearment delightful--took advantage of her getting up to slip away
from her