The Author of Beltraffio

I begged Miss Ambient to go up and try to have speech of her sister-in-law, and I drew Mark out into the garden.  “You’re exceedingly nervous, and Mrs. Ambient’s probably right,” I there undertook to plead.  “Women know; women should be supreme in such a situation.  Trust a mother—a devoted mother, my dear friend!”  With such words as these I tried to soothe and comfort him, and, marvellous to relate, I succeeded, with the help of many cigarettes, in making him walk about the garden and talk, or suffer me at least to do so, for near an hour.  When about that time had elapsed his sister reappeared, reaching us rapidly and with a convulsed face while she held her hand to her heart.

“Go for the Doctor, Mark—go for the Doctor this moment!”

“Is he dying?  Has she killed him?” my poor friend cried, flinging away his cigarette.

“I don’t know what she has done!  But she’s frightened, and now she wants the Doctor.”

“He told me he’d be hanged if he came back!”  I felt myself obliged to mention.

“Precisely—therefore Mark himself must go for him, and not a messenger.  You must see him and tell him it’s to save your child.  The trap has been ordered—it’s ready.”

“To save him?  I’ll save him, please God!” Ambient cried, bounding with his great strides across the lawn.

As soon as he had gone I felt I ought to have volunteered in his place, and I said as much to Miss Ambient; but she checked me by grasping my arm while we heard the wheels of the dog-cart rattle away from the gate.  “He’s off—he’s off—and now I can think!  To get him away—while I think—while I think!”

“While you think of what, Miss Ambient?”

“Of the unspeakable thing that has happened under this roof!”

Her manner was habitually that of such a prophetess of ill that I at first allowed for some great extravagance.  But I looked at her hard, and the next thing felt myself turn white.  “Dolcino is dying then—he’s dead?”

“It’s too late to save him.  His mother has let him die!  I tell you that because you’re sympathetic, because you’ve imagination,” Miss Ambient was good enough to add, interrupting my expression of horror.  “That’s why you had the idea of making her read Mark’s new book!”

“What has that to do with it?  I don’t understand you.  Your accusation’s monstrous.”

“I see it all—I’m not stupid,” she went on, heedless of my emphasis.  “It was the book that finished her—it was that decided her!”

“Decided her?  Do you mean she has murdered her child?” I demanded, trembling at my own words.

“She sacrificed him; she determined to do nothing to make him live.  Why else did she lock herself in, why else did she turn away the Doctor?  The book gave her a horror; she determined to rescue him—to prevent him from ever being touched.  He had a crisis at two o’clock in the morning.  I know that from the nurse, who had left her then, but whom, for a short time, she called back.  The darling got munch worse, but she insisted on the nurse’s going back to bed, and after that she was alone with him for hours.”

I listened with a dread that stayed my credence, while she stood there with her tearless glare.  “Do you pretend then she has no pity, that she’s cruel and insane?”

“She held him in her arms, she pressed him to her breast, not to see him; but she gave him no remedies; she did nothing the Doctor ordered.  Everything’s there untouched.  She has had the honesty not even to throw the drugs away!”

I dropped upon the nearest bench, overcome with my dismay—quite as much at Miss Ambient’s horrible insistence and distinctness as at the monstrous meaning of her words.  Yet they came amazingly straight, and if they did have a sense I saw myself too woefully figure in it.  Had I been then a proximate cause—?  “You’re a very strange woman and you say incredible things,” I could only reply.

She had one of her tragic headshakes.  “You think it necessary to protest, but you’re really quite ready to believe me.  You’ve received an impression of my sister-in-law—you’ve guessed of what she’s capable.”

I don’t feel bound to say what concession on this score I made to Miss Ambient, who went on to relate to me that within the last half-hour Beatrice had had a revulsion, that she was tremendously frightened at what she had done; that her fright itself betrayed her; and that she would now give heaven and earth to save the child.  “Let us hope she will!” I said, looking at my watch and trying to time poor Ambient; whereupon my companion repeated all portentously “Let us hope so!”  When I asked her if she herself could do nothing, and whether she oughtn’t to be with her sister-in-law, she replied: “You had better go and judge!  She’s like a wounded tigress!”

I never saw Mrs. Ambient till six months after this, and therefore can’t pretend to have verified the comparison.  At the latter period she was again the type of the perfect lady.  “She’ll treat him better after this,” I remember her sister-in-law’s saying in response to some quick outburst, on my part, of compassion for her brother.  Though I had been in the house but thirty-six hours this young lady had treated me with extraordinary confidence, and there was therefore a certain demand I might, as such an intimate, make of her.  I extracted from her a pledge that she’d never say to her brother what she had just said to me, that she’d let him form his own theory of his wife’s conduct.  She agreed with me that there was misery enough in the house without her contributing a new anguish, and that Mrs. Ambient’s proceedings might be explained, to her husband’s mind, by the extravagance of a jealous devotion.  Poor Mark came back with the Doctor much sooner than we could have hoped, but we knew five minutes afterwards that it was all too late.  His sole, his adored little son was more exquisitely beautiful in death than he had been in life.  Mrs. Ambient’s grief was frantic; she lost her head and said strange things.  As for Mark’s—but I won’t speak of that.  Basta, basta, as he used to say.  Miss Ambient kept her secret—I’ve already had occasion to say that she had her good points—but it rankled in her conscience like a guilty participation and, I imagine, had something to do with her ultimately retiring from the world.  And, apropos of consciences, the reader is now in a position to judge of my compunction for my effort to convert my cold hostess.  I ought to mention that the death of her child in some degree converted her.  When the new book came out (it was long delayed) she read it over as a whole, and her husband told me that during the few supreme weeks before her death—she failed rapidly after losing her son, sank into a consumption and faded away at Mentone—she even dipped into the black “Beltraffio.”