My Friend Prospero | Page 9

springtime in a spot all teeming with romance like this, and miss a love adventure. A castle in a garden, a flowering valley, and the Italian sky--the Italian sun and moon! Your portraits of these smiling dead women too, if you like, to keep your imagination working. And blackcaps singing in the mimosa. No, no. The lady of the piece is waiting in the wings--my thumbs prick. Give her but the least excuse, she'll enter, and ... Good Heavens, my prophetic soul!" she suddenly, with a sort of catch in her throat, broke off.
She turned and faced him, cheeks flushed, eyes flashing.
"Oh, you hypocrite! You monstrous fibber!" she cried, on a tone of jubilation, looking daggers.
"Why? What's up? What's the matter?" asked John, at fault.
"How could you have humbugged me so?" she wailed, in delight, reverting to the window. "Anyhow, she's charming. She's made for the part. I couldn't pray for a more promising heroine."
"She? Who?" asked he, crossing to her side.
"Who? Fie, you slyboots!" she crowed with glee.
"Ah, I see," said John.
For, below them, in the garden, just beyond the mimosa (all powdered with fresh gold) where the blackcap was singing, stood a woman.

IX
She stood in the path, beside a sun-dial, from which she appeared to be taking the time of day, a crumbling ancient thing of grey stone, green and brown with mosses; and she was smiling pleasantly to herself the while, all unaware of the couple who watched her from above. She wore a light-coloured garden-frock, and was bare-headed, as one belonging to the place. She was young--two or three and twenty, by her aspect: young, slender, of an excellent height, and, I hope you would have agreed, a beautiful countenance. She studied the sun-dial, and smiled; and what with her dark eyes and softly chiselled features, the pale rose in her cheeks and the deeper rose of her mouth, with her hair too, almost black in shadow, but where the sun touched it turning to sombre red,--yes, I think you would have agreed that she was beautiful. Lady Blanchemain, at any rate, found her so.
"She's quite lovely," she declared. "Her face is exquisite--so sensitive, so spiritual; so distinguished, so aristocratic. And so clever," she added, after a suspension.
"Mm!" said John, his forehead wrinkled, as if something were puzzling him.
"She has a figure--she holds herself well," said Lady Blanchemain.
"Mm!" said John.
"I suppose," said she, "you're too much a mere man to be able to appreciate her frock? It's the work of a dressmaker who knows her business. And that lilac muslin (that's so fashionable now) really does, in the open air, with the country for background, show to immense advantage. Come--out with it. Tell me all about her. Who is she?"
"That's just what I'm up a tree to think," said John. "I can't imagine. How long has she been there? From what direction did she come?"
"Don't try to hoodwink me any longer," remonstrated the lady, unbelieving.
"I've never in my life set eyes on her before," he solemnly averred.
She scrutinized him sharply.
"Hand on heart?" she doubted.
And he, supporting her scrutiny without flinching, answered, "Hand on heart."
"Well, then," concluded she, with a laugh, "it looks as if I were even more of an old witch than I boasted--and my thumbs pricked to some purpose. Here's the lady of the piece already arrived. There, she's going away. How well she walks! Have after her--have after her quick, and begin your courtship."
The smiling young woman, her lilac dress softly bright in the sun, was moving slowly down the garden path, towards the cloisters; and now she entered them, and disappeared. But John, instead of "having after her," remained at his counsellor's side, and watched.
"She came from that low doorway, beyond there at the right, where the two cypresses are; and she came at the very climax of my vaticination," said her ladyship. "Without a hat, you'll hardly dispute it's probable she's staying in the house."
"No--it certainly would seem so," said John. "I'm all up a tree."
"The garden looks rather dreary and empty, now that she has left, doesn't it?" she asked. "Yet it looked jolly enough before her advent. And see--the lizards (there are four of them, aren't there?) that whisked away from the dial at her approach, have come back. Well, your work's cut out. I suppose it wouldn't be possible for you to give a poor woman a dish of tea?"
"I was on the very point of proposing it," said John. "May I conduct you to my quarters?"

PART SECOND

I
Rather early next morning John was walking among the olives. He had gone (straight from his bed, and in perhaps the least considered of toilets: an old frieze ulster, ornamented with big buttons of mother-of-pearl, a pair of Turkish slippers, a bathing-towel over his shoulder, and for head-covering just his uncombed