The Project Gutenberg EBook of My Friend Prospero, by Henry Harland

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Title: My Friend Prospero

Author: Henry Harland

Release Date: January 13, 2005 [EBook #14682]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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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? H