My Friend Prospero Read online

  V

  He helped her out, very gracefully, very gallantly; and under hisguidance she made the tour of the vast building: its greater court andlesser court; its cloisters, with their faded frescoes, and theirmarvellous outlook, northwards, upon the Alps; its immense rotunda,springing to the open dome, where the sky was like an inset plaque ofturquoise; its "staircase of honour," guarded, in an ascending file, bystatues of men in armour; and then, on the _piano nobile_, its endlesschain of big, empty, silent, splendid state apartments, with theirpavements of gleaming marble, in many-coloured patterns, their paintedand gilded ceilings, tapestried walls, carved wood and moulded stucco,their pictures, pictures, pictures, and their atmosphere of statelydesolation, their memories of another age, their reminders of the powerand pomp of people who had long been ghosts.

  He was tall (with that insatiable curiosity of hers, she was of coursecontinuously studying him), tall and broad-shouldered, but not a bitrigid or inflexible--of a figure indeed conspicuously supple, suave inits quick movements, soft in its energetic lines, a figure that couldwith equal thoroughness be lazy in repose and vehement in action. Hisyellow hair was thick and fine, and if it hadn't been cropped so closewould have curled a little. His beard, in small crinkly spirals, didactually curl, and toward the edge its yellow burned to red. And hisblue eyes were so very very blue, and so very keen, and so very frankand 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 perfectlyunselfconscious; and thus unconsciously he drew attention to thevigorous sweep of his profile, the decisive angles of his brow and nose.His voice was brisk and cheerful and masculine; and that abruptness withwhich he spoke--which seemed, as it were, to imply a previousacquaintance--was so tempered by manifest good breeding and so colouredby manifest good will, that it became a positive part and parcel of whatone 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 boyishwholesale surrender of himself to the business of the moment; itexpressed, perhaps above all, a boyish thorough good understanding withhis interlocutor. "It amounts," thought his present interlocutrice, "toa kind of infinitely sublimated bluffness."

  And then she fell to examining his clothes: his loose, soft, very blueblue flannels, with vague stripes of darker blue; his soft shirt, withits rolling collar; his red tie, knitted of soft silk, and tied in aloose sailor's-knot. She liked his clothes, and she liked the way hewore them. They suited him. They were loose and comfortable andunconventional, but they were beautifully fresh and well cared for, andshowed him, if indifferent to the fashion-plate of the season,meticulous in a fashion of his own. "It's hard to imagine him dressedotherwise," she said, and instantly had a vision of him dressed fordinner.

  But what--what--what was he doing at Castel Sant' Alessina?