The Author of Beltraffio | Page 9

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. I've every reason now to know that she found me
insufferable.
She gave a strange small laugh as she said: "I'm afraid you think I
know much more about my husband's work than I do. I haven't the least
idea what he's doing," she then added in a slightly different, that is a

more explanatory, tone and as if from a glimpse of the enormity of her
confession. "I don't read what he writes."
She didn't succeed, and wouldn't even had she tried much harder, in
making this seem to me anything less than monstrous. I stared at her
and I think I blushed. "Don't you admire his genius? Don't you admire
'Beltraffio'?"
She waited, and I wondered what she could possibly say. She didn't
speak, I could see, the first words that rose to her lips; she repeated
what she had said a few minutes before. "Oh of course he's very
clever!" And with this she got up; our two absentees had reappeared.
CHAPTER II

Mrs. Ambient left me and went to meet them; she stopped and had a
few words with her husband that I didn't hear and that ended in her
taking the child by the hand and returning with him to the house. Her
husband joined me in a moment, looking, I thought, the least bit
conscious and constrained, and said that if I would come in with him he
would show me my room. In looking back upon these first moments of
my visit I find it important to avoid the error of appearing to have at all
fully measured his situation from the first or made out the signs of
things mastered only afterwards. This later