"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
_pièce 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?