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The Author of Beltraffio
by
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’?”