"But, signorina, say what you will, Costanza does put wadding in her stays because she is so thin, and then pretends to have a fine figure. And she has a bad temper, as every one knows...."
"Bianca, you are incorrigible!" I put my hand across her mouth, and ran down the corridor to my own room.
CHAPTER VII. THE HOME-COMING OF THE REBEL.
The covered gallery which ran along the back of the house was flooded in the afternoon with sunshine. Here, as the day declined, I loved to pace, basking in the warmth and rejoicing in the brightness, for mild and clear as the day might be out of doors, within the thick-walled palace it was always mirk and chill.
The long, high wall of the gallery was covered with pictures—chiefly paintings of dead and gone Brogi—most of them worthless, taken singly; taken collectively, interesting as a study of the varieties of family types.
Here was Bianca, to the life, painted two centuries ago; the old Marchese looked out from a dingy canvass 300 years old at least, and a curious mixture of Romeo and his sister disported itself in powder amid a florid eighteenth century family group. Conspicuous among so much indifferent workmanship hung a genuine Bronzino of considerable beauty, representing a young man, whose charming aspect was scarcely marred by his stiff and elaborate fifteenth century costume. The dark eyes of this picture had a way of following one up and down the gallery in a rather disconcerting manner; already I had woven a series of little legends about him, and had decided that he left his frame at night, like the creatures in "Ruddygore," to roam the house as a ghost where once he had lived as a man.
Opposite the pictures, on which they shed their light, was a row of windows, set close together deep in the thick wall, and rising almost to the ceiling. They were not made open, but through their numerous and dingy panes I could see across the roofs of the town to the hills, or down below to where a neglected bit of territory, enclosed between high walls, did duty as a garden.
In one corner of this latter stood a great ilex tree, its massive grey trunk old and gnarled, its blue-green foliage casting a wide shadow. Two or three cypresses, with their broom-like stems, sprang from the overgrown turf, which, at this season of the year, was beginning to be yellow with daffodils, and a thick growth of laurel bushes ran along under the walls. An empty marble basin, approached by broken pavement, marked the site of a forgotten fountain, the stone-crop running riot about its borders; the house-leek thrusting itself every now and then through the interstices of shattered stone. Forlorn, uncared for as was this square of ground, it had for me a mysterious attraction; it seemed to me that there clung to it through all change of times and weathers, something of the beauty in desolation which makes the charm of Italy.