“I suppose you will say next, that he had a manly figure? eh?” and the youth pulled his slouched hat fiercely over his right ear, and then halting on one leg, he threw the other forward, while with his arms placed akimbo, he seemed waiting for somebody or other to take his portrait.
“To be sure he had a manly figure,” returned Dolabella, glancing contemptuously at the bow-legged youth; “he was none of your whipper-snapping, strutting, and boasting postillions; he was none of your conceited—”
“Dolabella!” exclaimed the youth in a pathetic tone.
“Well, Signor Francisco?”
“Dolabella, do you see the convent of St. Benedict yonder?”
He pointed to the dark and time-worn walls of the monastery, it stood among the forest-trees on the western side of the lake, upon the summit of a precipitous cliff, which towered in rugged grandeur from the bosom of the mountain waters.
The cheerful sunbeam was shining over the dark towers of the monastery over the surrounding forest-trees, and along the recesses of the gardens, that varied the appearance of the wild wood beyond the ancient walls, and the white cliff gave its broad surface to the light of day, yet there was an air of gloom resting upon the entire view, the dark towers, the white cliff, and the luxuriant gardens; while the reflection of the scene in the deep and mirror-like waters of the lake, was so calm, so clear, so perfect in the faintest outline, that it looked more like the creation of an artist’s pencil, than a landscape of the living world.
As the pompous Francisco pointed to the dark walls of the monastery, an involuntary thrill ran around the group of peasant damsels, and there was a pause of strange silence for a single moment.
“The Monastery of St. Benedict!” murmured Dolabella, “Francisco, fear you not to make yon strange house the subject of your jest, even in broad daylight? The cheek of the boldest peasant of these mountains grows pale at the mention of yon gloomy fabric!”
“Tis said the ancient Dukes of Florence held strange festivals within those dark gray walls in the olden time.”