XXII
The Villa Pandolfini leaned largely upon a grass-grown piazzetta at the top of a hill which sloped straight from one of the gates of Florence. It offered to the outer world an ample front, though not of rare elevation, coloured a dull dark yellow and pierced with windows of various sizes, no one of which save those on the ground floor was on the same level with any other. Within was a great cool grey cortile, graced round about with high light arches and heavily-corniced doors of majestic altitude and furnished on one side with a grand old archaic well. Mrs. Hudson's rooms opened into a small garden founded on substructions of immense strength, rising from the part of the hill that sloped steeply away. This garden was a charming place. Its southern wall was curtained with a screen of orange-blossoms, a dozen fig-trees here and there offered you their large-leaved shade, and over the low parapet the soft grave Tuscan landscape kept you company. The rooms themselves were as high as chapels and as cool as royal sepulchres. Silence, peace and security seemed to abide in the ancient house, to make of it a square fortress against further assault of fortune. Mrs. Hudson took into her service a stunted brown-faced Maddalena, who wore a crimson handkerchief passed over her coarse black locks and tied under her sharp pertinacious chin, and played over the domestic question in gen-
443
