Читать книгу My Friend Prospero - Harland Henry - Страница 7

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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?