My Friend Prospero by Henry Harland

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MY FRIEND
PROSPERO

By HENRY HARLAND

_Author of_

THE CARDINAL'S SNUFF-BOX.
Illustrated by G.C. Wilmshurst.
_One Hundred and Fifth Thousand_.

THE LADY PARAMOUNT.
_Fifty-fifth Thousand_.

COMEDIES AND ERRORS.
_Third Edition_.

GREY ROSES. _Third Edition_.

MADEMOISELLE MISS. _Second Edition_.

JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD

LONDON & NEW YORK. MDCCCCIV

1903

PART FIRST

My Friend Prospero

I

The coachman drew up his horses before the castle gateway, where their
hoofs beat a sort of fanfare on the stone pavement; and the footman,
letting himself smartly down, pulled, with a peremptory gesture that was
just not quite a swagger, the bronze hand at the end of the dangling
bell-cord.

Seated alone in her great high-swung barouche, in the sweet April
weather, Lady Blanchemain gave the interval that followed to a
consideration of the landscape: first, sleeping in shadowy stillness,
the formal Italian garden, its terraced lawns and metrical parterres,
its straight dark avenues of ilex, its cypresses, fountains, statues,
balustrades; and then, laughing in the breeze and the sun, the wild
Italian valley, a forest of blossoming fruit-trees, with the river
winding and glinting in its midst, with olive-clad hills blue-grey at
either side, and beyond the hills, peering over their shoulders, the
snow-peaks of mountains, crisp against the sky, and in the level
distance the hazy shimmer of the lake.

"It is lovely," she exclaimed, fervently, in a whisper, "lovely.--And
only a generation of blind-worms," was her after-thought, "could discern
in it the slightest resemblance to the drop-scene of a theatre."

II

Big, humorous, emotional, imperious, but, above all, interested and
sociable Lady Blanchemain: do you know her, I wonder? Her billowy white
hair? Her handsome soft old face, with its smooth skin, and the good
strong bony structure underneath? Her beautiful old grey eyes, full of
tenderness and shrewdness, of curiosity, irony, indulgence, overarched
and emphasized by regular black eyebrows? Her pretty little plump
pink-white hands, (like two little elderly Cupids), with their shining
panoply of rings? And her luxurious, courageous, high-hearted manner of
dressing? The light colours and jaunty fashion of her gowns? Her laces,
ruffles, embroideries? Her gay little bonnets? Her gems? Linda Baroness
Blanchemain, of Fring Place, Sussex; Belmore Gardens, Kensington; and
Villa Antonina, San Remo: big, merry, sociable, sentimental,
worldly-wise, impetuous Linda Blanchemain: do you know her? If you do,
I am sure you love her and rejoice in her; and enough is said. If you
don't, I beg leave to present and to commend her.

I spoke, by the bye, of her "old" face, her "old" eyes. She is, to be
sure, in so far as mere numbers of years tell, an old woman. But I once
heard her throw out, in the heat of conversation, the phrase, "a young
old thing like me;" and I thought she touched a truth.

III

Well, then, the footman, in his masterful way, pulled the bell-cord;
Lady Blanchemain contemplated the landscape, and had her opinion of a
generation that could liken it to the drop-scene of a theatre; and in
due process of things the bell was answered.

It was answered by a man in a costume that struck my humorous old friend
as pleasing: a sallow little man whose otherwise quite featureless suit
of tweeds was embellished by scarlet worsted shoulder-knots. With
lack-lustre eyes, from behind the plexus of the grille, he rather
stolidly regarded the imposing British equipage, and waited to be
addressed.

Lady Blanchemain addressed him in the language of Pistoja. Might one,
she inquired, with her air of high affability, in her distinguished old
voice, might one visit the castle?--a question purely of convention, for
she had not come hither without an assurance from her guide-book.

Shoulder-knots, however,--either to flaunt his attainments, or because
indeed Pistoiese (what though the polyglot races of Italy have agreed
upon it as a lingua franca) offered the greater difficulties to his
Lombardian tongue,--replied in French.

"I do not think so, Madame," was his reply, in a French sufficiently
heavy and stiff-jointed, enforced by a dubious oscillation of the head.

Lady Blanchemain's black eyebrows shot upwards, marking her surprise;
then drew together, marking her determination.

"But of course one can--it's in the guide-book," she insisted, and held
up the red-bound volume.

The sceptic gave a shrug, as one who disclaimed responsibility and
declined discussion.

"Me, I do not think so. But patience! I will go and ask," he said; and,
turning his back, faded from sight in the depths of the dark tunnel-like
porte-cochere.

Vexed, perplexed, Lady Blanchemain fidgeted a little. To have taken this
long drive for nothing!--sweet though the weather was, fair though the
valley: but she was not a person who could let the means excuse the end.
She neither liked nor was accustomed to see her enterprises balked,--to
see doors remain closed in her face. Doors indeed had a habit of flying
open at her approach. Besides, the fellow's manner,--his initial stare
and silence, his tone when he spoke, his shrug, his exhortation to
patience, and something too in the conduct of his back as he
departed,--hadn't it lacked I don't know what of becoming deference? to
satisfy her amour-propre, at any rate, that the mistake, if there was a
mistake, sprang from no malapprehension of her own, she looked up
chapter and verse. Yes, there the assurance stood, circumstantial, in
all the convincingness of the sturdy, small black type:--

"From Roccadoro a charming excursion may be made, up the beautiful Val
Rampio, to the mediaeval village of Sant' Alessina (7 miles), with its
magnificent castle, in fine grounds, formerly a seat of the Sforzas, now
belonging to the Prince of Zelt-Neuminster, and containing the
celebrated Zelt-Neuminster collection of paintings. Incorporated in the
castle buildings, a noticeable peculiarity, are the parish church and
presbytery. Accessible daily, except Monday, from 10 to 4; attendant 1
fr."

So then! To-day was Wednesday, the hour between two and three. So--! Her
amour-propre triumphed, but I fancy her vexation mounted....

IV

"I beg your pardon. It's disgraceful you should have been made to wait.
The porter is an idiot. You wish, of course, to see the house--?"

The English words, on a key of spontaneous apology, with a very zealous
inflection of concern--yet, at the same time, with a kind of entirely
respectful and amiable abruptness, as of one hailing a familiar
friend,--were pronounced in a breath by a brisk, cheerful, unmistakably
English voice.

Lady Blanchemain, whose attention had still been on the incriminated
page, looked quickly up, and (English voice and spontaneous apology
notwithstanding) I won't vouch that the answer at the tip of her
impulsive tongue mightn't have proved a hasty one--but the speaker's
appearance gave her pause: the appearance of the tall, smiling,
unmistakably English young man, by whom Shoulder-knots had returned
accompanied, and who now, having pushed the grille ajar and issued
forth, stood, placing himself with a tentative obeisance at her service,
beside the carriage: he was so clearly, first of all--what, if it hadn't
been for her preoccupation, his voice, tone, accent would have warned
her to expect--so visibly a gentleman; and then, with the even pink of
his complexion, his yellowish hair and beard, his alert, friendly, very
blue blue eyes--with his very blue blue flannels too, and his brick-red
knitted tie--he was so vivid and so unusual.

His appearance gave her a pause; and in the result she in her turn
almost apologized.

"This wretched book," she explained, pathetically bringing forward her
_piece justificative_, "said that it was open to the public."

The vivid young man hastened to put her in the right.

"It is--it _is_," he eagerly affirmed. "Only," he added, with a vaguely
rueful modulation, and always with that amiable abruptness, as a man
very much at his ease, while his blue eyes whimsically brightened, "only
the blessed public never comes--we're so off the beaten path. And I
suppose one mustn't expect a Scioccone"--his voice swelled on the word,
and he cast sidelong a scathing glance at his summoner--"to cope with
unprecedented situations. Will you allow me to help you out?"

"Ah," thought Lady Blanchemain, "Eton," his tone and accent now nicely
appraised by an experienced ear. "Eton--yes; and probably--h'm? Probably
Balliol," her experience led her further to surmise. But what--with her
insatiable curiosity about people, she had of course immediately begun
to wonder--what was an Eton and Balliol man doing, apparently in a
position of authority, at this remote Italian castle?

V

He helped her out, very gracefully, very gallantly; and under his
guidance she made the tour of the vast building: its greater court and
lesser court; its cloisters, with their faded frescoes, and their
marvellous outlook, northwards, upon the Alps; its immense rotunda,
springing to the open dome, where the sky was like an inset plaque of
turquoise; its "staircase of honour," guarded, in an ascending file, by
statues of men in armour; and then, on the _piano nobile_, its endless
chain of big, empty, silent, splendid state apartments, with their
pavements of gleaming marble, in many-coloured patterns, their painted
and gilded ceilings, tapestried walls, carved wood and moulded stucco,
their pictures, pictures, pictures, and their atmosphere of stately
desolation, their memories of another age, their reminders of the power
and pomp of people who had long been ghosts.

He was tall (with that insatiable 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 employe, 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 employe? 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 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
sat up straight and stared; but with the eleventh her attitude relaxed.
She had regained her outward nonchalance, and resolved upon her system
of fence.

"Ah," she said, on a tone judiciously compounded of feminine artlessness
and of forthright British candour, and with a play of the eyebrows that
attributed her momentary suscitation to the workings of memory, "of
course--Blanchemain. The Sussex Blanchemains. I expect there's only one
family of the name?"

"I've never heard of another," assented the young man.

"The Ventmere Blanchemains," she pursued pensively. "Lord Blanchemain of
Ventmere is your titled head?"

"Exactly," said he.

"I knew the late Lord Blanchemain--I knew him fairly well," she
mentioned, always with a certain pensiveness.

"Oh--?" said he, politely interested.

"Yes," said she. "But I've never met his successor. The two were not, I
believe, on speaking terms. Of course,"--and her forthright British
candour carried her trippingly over the delicate ground,--"it's common
knowledge that the family is divided against itself--hostile branches--a
Protestant branch and a Catholic. The present lord, if I've got it
right, is a Catholic, and the late lord's distant cousin?"

"You've got it quite right," the young man assured her, with a nod, and
a little laugh. "They had the same great-great-grandfather. The last
few lords have been Protestants, but in our branch the family have never
forsaken the old religion."

"I know," said she. "And wasn't it--I've heard the story, but I'm a bit
hazy about it--wasn't it owing to your--is 'recusancy' the word?--that
you lost the title? Wasn't there some sort of sharp practice at your
expense in the last century?"

The young man had another little laugh.

"Oh, nothing," he answered, "that wasn't very much the fashion. The late
lord's great-grandfather denounced his elder brother as a Papist and a
Jacobite--nothing more than that. It was after the 'Forty-five. So the
cadet took the title and estates. But with the death of the late lord, a
dozen years or so ago, the younger line became extinct, and the title
reverted."

"I see," said my lady. She knitted her eyebrows, computing. After an
instant, "General Blanchemain," she resumed, "as the present lord was
called for the best part of his life, is a bachelor. You will be one of
his nephews?" She raised her eyes inquiringly.

"The son of his brother Philip," said the young man.

Lady Blanchemain sat up straight again.

"But then," she cried, forgetting to conceal her perturbation, "then
you're the heir. Philip Blanchemain had but one son, and was the
General's immediate junior. You're John Blanchemain--John Francis Joseph
Mary. You're the heir."

The young man smiled--at her eagerness, perhaps.

"The heir-presumptive--I suppose I am," he said.

Lady Blanchemain leaned back and gently tittered.

"See how I know my Peerage!" she exclaimed. Then, looking grave, "You're
heir to an uncommonly good old title," she informed him.

"I hope it may be many a long day before I'm anything else," said he.

"Your uncle is an old man," she suggestively threw out.

"Oh, not so very old," he submitted. "Only seventy, or thereabouts, and
younger in many respects than I am. I hope he'll live for ever."

"Hum!" said she, and appeared to fall a-musing. Absently, as it seemed,
and slowly, she was pulling off her gloves.

"Feuds in families," she said, in a minute, "are bad things. Why don't
you make it up?"

The young man waved his hand, a pantomimic _non-possumus_.

"There's no one left to make it up with--the others are all dead."

"Oh?" she wondered, her eyebrows elevated, whilst automatically her
fingers continued to operate upon her gloves. "I thought the last lord
left a widow. I seem to have heard of a _Lady_ Blanchemain somewhere."

The young man gave still another of his little laughs.

"Linda Lady Blanchemain?" he said. "Yes, one hears a lot of her. A
highly original character, by all accounts. One hears of her
everywhere."

Linda Lady Blanchemain's lip began to quiver; but she got it under
control.

"Well?" she questioned--eyes fixing his, and brimming with a kind of
humorous defiance, as if to say, "Think me an impertinent old meddler
if you will, and do your worst,"--"Why don't you make it up with _her_?"

But he didn't seem to mind the meddling in the least. He stood at ease,
and plausibly put his case.

"Why don't I? Or why doesn't my uncle? My uncle is a temperamental
conservative, a devotee to his traditions--the sort of man who will
never do anything that hasn't been the constant habit of his forebears.
He would no more dream of healing a well-established family feud than of
selling the family plate. And I--well, surely, it would never be for me
to make the advances."

"No, you're right," acknowledged Lady Blanchemain. "The advances should
come from her. But people have such a fatal way--even without being
temperamental conservatives--of leaving things as they find them.
Besides, never having seen you, she couldn't know how nice you are. All
the same, I'll confess, if you insist upon it, that she ought to be
ashamed of herself. Come--let's make it up."

She rose, a great soft glowing vision of benignancy, and held out her
hand, now gloveless, her pretty little smooth plump right hand, with
its twinkling rings.

"Oh!" cried the astonished young man, the astonished, amused, moved,
wondering, and entirely won young man, his sea-blue eyes wide open, and
a hundred lights of pleasure and surprise dancing in them.

The benignant vision floated towards him, and he took the little white
hand in his long lean brown one.

VIII

When the first stress of their emotion had in some degree spent itself
Lady Blanchemain, returning to her place on the ottoman, bade John sit
down beside her.

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