My Friend Prospero. Harland Henry
actually curl, and toward the edge its yellow burned to red. And his blue eyes were so very very blue, and so very keen, and so very frank and pleasant—"They are like sailors' eyes," thought Lady Blanchemain, who had a sentiment for sailors. He carried his head well thrown back, as a man who was perfectly sure of himself and perfectly unselfconscious; and thus unconsciously he drew attention to the vigorous sweep of his profile, the decisive angles of his brow and nose. His voice was brisk and cheerful and masculine; and that abruptness with which he spoke—which seemed, as it were, to imply a previous acquaintance—was so tempered by manifest good breeding and so coloured by manifest good will, that it became a positive part and parcel of what one liked in him. It was the abruptness of a man very much at his ease, very much a man of the world, yet it was somehow, in its essence, boyish. It expressed freshness, sincerity, conviction, a boyish wholesale surrender of himself to the business of the moment; it expressed, perhaps above all, a boyish thorough good understanding with his interlocutor. "It amounts," thought his present interlocutrice, "to a kind of infinitely sublimated bluffness."
And then she fell to examining his clothes: his loose, soft, very blue blue flannels, with vague stripes of darker blue; his soft shirt, with its rolling collar; his red tie, knitted of soft silk, and tied in a loose sailor's-knot. She liked his clothes, and she liked the way he wore them. They suited him. They were loose and comfortable and unconventional, but they were beautifully fresh and well cared for, and showed him, if indifferent to the fashion-plate of the season, meticulous in a fashion of his own. "It's hard to imagine him dressed otherwise," she said, and instantly had a vision of him dressed for dinner.
But what—what—what was he doing at Castel Sant' Alessina?
VI
Meanwhile he plainly knew a tremendous lot about Italian art. Lady Blanchemain herself knew a good deal, and could recognize a pundit. He illumined their progress by a running fire of exposition and commentary, learned and discerning, to which she encouragingly listened, and, as occasion required, amiably responded. But Boltraffios, Bernardino Luinis, even a putative Giorgione, could not divert her mind from its human problem. What was he doing at Castel Sant' Alessina, the property, according to her guide-book, of an Austrian prince? What was his status here, apparently (bar servants) in solitary occupation? Was he its tenant? He couldn't, surely, this well-dressed, high-bred, cultivated young compatriot, he couldn't be a mere employé, a steward or curator? No: probably a tenant. Antecedently indeed it might seem unlikely that a young Englishman should become the tenant of an establishment so huge and so sequestered; but was it conceivable that this particular young Englishman should be a mere employé? And was there any other alternative? She hearkened for a word, a note, that might throw light; but of such notes, such words, a young man's conversation, in the circumstances, would perhaps naturally yield a meagre crop.
"You mustn't let me tire you," he said presently, as one who had forgotten and suddenly remembered that looking at pictures is exhausting work. "Won't you sit here and rest a little?"
They were in a smaller room than any they had previously traversed, an octagonal room, which a single lofty window filled with sunshine.
"Oh, thank you," said Lady Blanchemain, and seated herself on the circular divan in the centre of the polished terrazza floor. She wasn't really tired in the least, the indefatigable old sight-seer; but a respite from picture-gazing would enable her to turn the talk. She put up her mother-of-pearl lorgnon, and glanced round the walls; then, lowering it, she frankly raised her eyes, full of curiosity and kindness, to her companion's.
"It's a surprise, and a delightful one," she remarked, "having pushed so far afield in a foreign land, to be met by the good offices of a fellow-countryman—it's so nice of you to be English."
And her eyes softly changed, their curiosity being veiled by a kind of humorous content.
The young man's face, from its altitude of six-feet-something, beamed responsively down upon her.
"Oh," he laughed, "you mustn't give me too much credit. To be English nowadays is so ingloriously easy—since foreign lands have become merely the wider suburbs of London."
Lady Blanchemain's eyes lighted approvingly. Afterwards she looked half serious.
"True," she discriminated, "London has spread pretty well over the whole of Europe; but England, thanks be to goodness, still remains mercifully small."
"Yes," agreed the young man, though with a lilt of dubiety, and a frown of excogitation, as if he weren't sure that he had quite caught her drift.
"The mercy of it is," she smilingly pointed out, "that English folk, decent ones, have no need to fight shy of each other when they meet as strangers. We all know more or less about each other by hearsay, or about each other's people; and we're all pretty sure to have some common acquaintances. The smallness of England makes for sociability and confidence."
"It ought to, one would think," the young man admitted. "But does it, in fact? It had somehow got stuck in my head that English folk, meeting as strangers, were rather apt to glare. We're most of us in such a funk, you see, lest, if we treat a stranger with civility, he should turn out not to be a duke."
"Oh," cried Lady Blanchemain, with merriment, "you forget that I said decent. I meant, of course, folk who are dukes. We're all dukes—or bagmen."
The young man chuckled; but in a minute he pulled a long face, and made big, ominous eyes.
"I feel I ought to warn you," he said in a portentous voice, "that some of us are mere marquises—of the house of Carabas."
Lady Blanchemain, her whole expansive person, simmered with enjoyment.
"Bless you," she cried, "those are the ducalest, for marquises—of the house of Carabas—are men of dash and spirit, born to bear everything before them, and to marry the King's daughter."
With that, she had a moment of abstraction. Again, her eyeglass up, she glanced round the walls—hung, in this octagonal room, with dim-coloured portraits of women, all in wonderful toilets, with wonderful hair and head-gear, all wonderfully young and pleased with things, and all four centuries dead. They caused her a little feeling of uneasiness, they were so dead and silent, and yet somehow, in their fixed postures, with their unblinking eyes, their unvarying smiles, so—as it seemed to her—so watchful, so intent; and it was a relief to turn from them to the window, to the picture framed by the window of warm, breathing, heedless nature. But all the while, in her interior mind, she was busy with the man before her. "He looks," she considered, "tall as he is, and with his radiant blondeur—with the gold in his hair and beard, and the sea-blue in his eyes—he looks like a hero out of some old Norse saga. He looks like-what's his name?—like Odin. I must really compel him to explain himself."
It very well may be, meantime, that he was reciprocally busy with her, taking her in, admiring her, this big, jolly, comely, high-mannered old woman, all in soft silks and drooping laces, who had driven into his solitude from Heaven knew where, and was quite unquestionably Someone, Heaven knew who.
She had a moment of abstraction; but now, emerging from it, she used her eyeglass as a pointer, and indicatively swept the circle of painted eavesdroppers.
"They make one feel like their grandmother, their youth is so flagrant," she sighed, "these grandmothers of the Quattrocento. Ah, well, we can only be old once, and we should take advantage of the privileges of age while we have 'em. Old people, I am thankful to say, are allowed, amongst other things, to be inquisitive. I'm brazenly so. Now, if one of our common acquaintances were at hand—for with England still mercifully small, we're sure to possess a dozen, you and I—what do you think is the question I should ask him?—I should ask him," she avowed, with a pretty effect of hesitation, and a smile that went as an advance-guard to disarm resentment, "to tell me who you are, and all about you—and to introduce you to me."
"Oh," cried the young man, laughing. He laughed for a second or two. In the end, pleasantly,