My Friend Prospero | Page 3

apartments, with their pavements of gleaming
marble, in many-coloured patterns, their painted and gilded ceilings,
tapestried walls, carved wood and moulded stucco, their pictures,
pictures, pictures, and their atmosphere of stately desolation, their
memories of another age, their reminders of the power and pomp of
people who had long been ghosts.
He was tall (with that insatiable curiosity of hers, she was of course
continuously studying him), tall and broad-shouldered, but not a bit
rigid or inflexible--of a figure indeed conspicuously supple, suave in its
quick movements, soft in its energetic lines, a figure that could with
equal thoroughness be lazy in repose and vehement in action. His
yellow hair was thick and fine, and if it hadn't been cropped so close
would have curled a little. His beard, in small crinkly spirals, did
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