And as he watched her his thin, sallow face slowly relaxed into a sinister smile, when he reflected within himself the real reason why he was sending the pretty spy to England.
Chapter Thirteen.
The Villa San Donato.
The sky was aflame in all the crimson glory of the Tuscan sunset.
The Angelus of a sudden clashed forth from the high castellated tower of the village church away over the Arno, winding deep in its beautiful fertile valley, that veritable paradise of green vale and purple mountain, and was echoed by a dozen other bells clanging discordantly from the hillsides, while from afar came up the deep-toned note of the big bell in the campanile of brown old Florence.
It was the hour of the venti-tre, and those patient toilers, the contadini, in the vineyards, who had been busy since dawn plucking the rich red grapes that hung everywhere in such luscious profusion, crossed themselves with a murmured prayer to the Madonna, and prodded their ox-teams homeward with the last load for the presses. All day long “babbo,” with his wife and children of all ages, had worked on beneath that fiery sun, singing as they laboured; for the grape harvest was a rich one, the wine would be abundant, and they, sharing half the profits with the padrone in lieu of payment, would receive a good round sum.
Like most of the great estates in Tuscany, that of San Donato, the property of His Excellency Camillo Morini, was held by the peasantry on what is known as the messeria system, by which the whole of the land was divided into a number of fields, or poderi, half the produce of which was retained by the mezzadro, or peasant who cultivated the soil, and the other half went to the landlord as rent. The poderi varied in size, but were usually about thirty acres in extent, each with its contadino’s house colour-washed in pale pink, and upon the wall, painted in distemper, a heraldic shield bearing the bull’s head erased argent, the arms of the proprietor.
The estate of San Donato, with its huge old fourteenth-century villa—a great castellated place with high, square towers, that would in England be called a castle, on the crest of a hill—and its fattoria, or residence of the bailiff, another great rambling place with its oil mills and wine-presses, in the valley below, was one of the largest in Tuscany.