FullReads

There was genius in his house too I thought when we got there; there was imagination in the carpets and curtains, in the pictures and books, in the garden behind it, where certain old brown walls were muffled in creepers that appeared to me to have been copied from a masterpiece of one of the pre-Raphaelites. That was the way many things struck me at that time, in England–as reproductions of something that existed primarily in art or literature. It was not the picture, the poem, the fictive page, that seemed to me a copy; these things were the originals, and the life of happy and distinguished people was fashioned in their image. Mark Ambient called his house a cottage, and I saw afterwards he was right for if it hadn’t been a cottage it must have been a villa, and a villa, in England at least, was not a place in which one could fancy him at home. But it was, to my vision, a cottage glorified and translated; it was a palace of art, on a slightly reduced scale–and might besides have been the dearest haunt of the old English genius loci. It nestled under a cluster of magnificent beeches, it had little creaking lattices that opened out 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.