I passed across the corridor and down the stair to the first landing, where I lingered a moment. A covered gallery ran along the back of the house, and through the tall and dingy windows I could see a surging, unequal mass of old red roofs.
"How Jenny would love it all," I thought, as I turned away with a sigh.
As I reached the street door, Romeo emerged from that mysterious retreat of his on the ground-floor, where he appeared to pass his time in some solitary pursuit, looked at me, bowed, and withdrew.
"At last!" I cried, inwardly, as I sped down the steps. At last I could breathe again, at last I was out in the sunlight and in the wind, away from the musty chilliness, the lurking shadows of that stifling palace. Oh, the joy of freedom and of solitude! Was it only hours? Surely it must be years that I had been imprisoned behind those thick old walls and iron guarded windows. On, on I went with rapid foot in the teeth of the biting wind and the glare of the scorching sunlight, scarcely noticing my surroundings in the first rapture of recovered freedom. But by degrees the strangeness, the beauty of what I saw, began to assert themselves.
I had turned off from the Lung' Arno, and was threading my way among the old and half-deserted streets which led to the cathedral.
What a dead, world-forgotten place, and yet how beautiful in its desolation! Everywhere were signs of a present poverty, everywhere of a past magnificence.
The men with their sombreros and cloaks worn toga fashion; their handsome, melancholy faces and stately gait; the women bareheaded, graceful, drawing water from the fountain into copper vessels, moved before me like figures from an old-world drama.
Here and there was a little, empty piazza, the tall houses abutting on it at different angles, without sidewalks, the grass growing up between the stones. It seemed only waiting for first gentleman and second gentleman to come forward and carry on their dialogue while the great "set" was being prepared at the back of the stage.
The old walls, roughly patched with modern brick and mortar, had bits of exquisite carving imbedded in them like fossils; and at every street corner the house leek sprang from the interstices of a richly wrought moulding. A great palace, with a wonderful façade, had been turned into a wineshop; and the chestnut-sellers dispensed their wares in little gloomy caverns hollowed out beneath the abodes of princes. Already the nameless charm of Italy was beginning to work on me; that magic spell from which—let us once come under its influence—we can never hope to be released.