The villa, with its long façade of many windows, its flanking towers, its enormous salons of the cinquecento, its splendid frescoes, its antique marbles, its grey old terraces and broken statuary, was indeed in a delightful situation. Perched on the summit of a lofty and broken eminence, it looked down upon the vale of the Arno and commanded Florence with all its domes, towers, and palaces, the villas that encircle it and the roads that lead to it. The recesses, swells, and breaks of the hill on which it stood were covered with groves of pines, ilex, and cypress. Behind, deep below, lay quiet old Pistoja in the distance, and still farther off swelled the giant Apennines.
From the villa ran a broad open road, straight to the ancient gate of the little walled village of San Donato itself—a remote, ancient place, almost the same to-day as when in the days of Dante it guarded the valley against the incursions of the Pisans. From its high brown walls, now crumbling to decay, the view was, like that from the villa of its lord, without rival in all Italy. Its tiny piazza was grass-grown, and outside the walls, in a shady cypress grove, stood a ruined calvary with some of Gerino’s wonderful frescoes.
San Donato, though only seven miles from Florence as the crow flies, was an un-get-at-able place, inaccessible to the crowd of inquisitive English, and therefore unchanged and its people unspoilt. Indeed, in winter a week often went by without communication with the world below; for the post did not reach there, and the little place was self-supporting. The people, descendants of the men who had shot their arrows from those narrow slits in the walls, were proud that they had the great Minister of War for their lord, and that the estate was not like that adjoining, going to decay through the neglect and gambling propensities of its owner, who had not visited it for twenty years! On the contrary, San Donato, still almost feudal, was prosperous under a generous padrone, and the few weeks each year which the Minister and his family spent there was always a time of rejoicing with the whole countryside. Then the contadini made excuse for many festas, and there was much dancing, playing of mandolines, and chanting of siomelli. The padrone delighted to see his people happy, and the signorina was always so good to the poor and the afflicted.
Out upon the great wide stone terrace that ran the whole length of the villa, where spread such a wonderful panorama of river and mountain, Mary was standing beneath an arbour of trailing vines; for even though the venti-tre was ringing, the sun’s rays were still too strong to stand in them bareheaded. She presented a slim, neat figure, delightfully cool in her plain white washing gown with a bow of pale blue tulle at the throat, yet, as her face was turned towards the far-distant heights of Vallombrosa, there was in her handsome countenance a look of deep anxiety.
Jules Dubard, leaning against the grey old wall at her side, noticed it and wondered. He too was dressed all in white, in a suit of linen so necessary in the blazing Tuscan summer, and as he folded his arms he smiled within himself at the effect of his words upon her.
“But you don’t really anticipate that my father’s enemies are plotting his downfall?” she asked seriously turning her great dark eyes upon him.
“Unfortunately, I fear they are,” was his reply. “What I heard in Paris is sufficient to show that here, in Italy, you are on the eve of some grave political crisis.”
“For what reason?” she inquired earnestly. “Tell me all you know, for your information may be of the greatest use to my father. I will write to him to-night,” she added, in a voice full of apprehension.
“No. Do not write,” he urged. “You will see him in a week or ten days, and then you can tell him the rumours I have heard. It seems,” he went on, “that there is a group of Socialists fiercely antagonistic to the Government, and that they have formed a most ingenious conspiracy to secure its downfall. Other men, rivals of the present Ministry, are eager for office and for the pecuniary advantages to be thereby obtained.”
“What is the character of the conspiracy?” she inquired seriously. “Perhaps my father can thwart it.”