My Friend Prospero | Page 3

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 employ��, 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 employ��? 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