My Friend Prospero | Page 4

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 make her sit up straight. Her curiosity had turned the key, and lo, with a click, here was an entirely changed, immensely complicated, intensely poignant situation. But our excitable old friend was an Englishwoman: dissimulation would be her second nature; you could trust her to pull the wool over your eyes with a fleet and practised hand. Instinctively, furthermore, she would seek to extract from such a situation all the fun it promised. Taken off her guard, for the span of ten heart-beats she