My Friend Prospero | Page 4

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, with a bow, "My name," he said, "if you can
possibly care to know, is Blanchemain."
His visitor caught her breath. She sat up straight, and gazed hard at
him.
"Blanchemain?" she gasped.

VII
There were, to be sure, reasons and to spare why the name should