Chapter 22

CHAPTER XXII

On one of the first days of May, some six months after old Mr.
Touchett's death, a small group that might have been described by
a painter as composing well was gathered in one of the many rooms
of an ancient villa crowning an olive-muffled hill outside of the
Roman gate of Florence. The villa was a long, rather
blank-looking structure, with the far-projecting roof which
Tuscany loves and which, on the hills that encircle Florence,
when considered from a distance, makes so harmonious a rectangle
with the straight, dark, definite cypresses that usually rise in
groups of three or four beside it. The house had a front upon a
little grassy, empty, rural piazza which occupied a part of the
hill-top; and this front, pierced with a few windows in irregular
relations and furnished with a stone bench lengthily adjusted to
the base of the structure and useful as a lounging-place to one
or two persons wearing more or less of that air of undervalued
merit which in Italy, for some reason or other, always gracefully
invests any one who confidently assumes a perfectly passive
attitude--this antique, solid, weather-worn, yet imposing front
had a somewhat incommunicative character. It was the mask, not
the face of the house. It had heavy lids, but no eyes; the house
in reality looked another way--looked off behind, into splendid
openness and the range of the afternoon light. In that quarter
the villa overhung the slope of its hill and the long valley of
the Arno, hazy with Italian colour. It had a narrow garden, in
the manner of a terrace, productive chiefly of tangles of wild
roses and other old stone benches, mossy and sun-warmed. The
parapet of the terrace was just the height to lean upon, and
beneath it the ground declined into the vagueness of olive-crops
and vineyards. It is not, however, with the outside of the place
that we are concerned; on this bright morning of ripened spring
its tenants had reason to prefer the shady side of the wall. The
windows of the ground-floor, as you saw them from the piazza,
were, in their noble proportions, extremely architectural; but
their function seemed less to offer communication with the world
than to defy the world to look in. They were massively
cross-barred, and placed at such a height that curiosity, even on
tiptoe, expired before it reached them. In an apartment lighted
by a row of three of these jealous apertures--one of the several
distinct apartments into which the villa was divided and which
were mainly occupied by foreigners of random race long resident
in Florence--a gentleman was seated in company with a young girl
and two good sisters from a religious house. The room was,
however, less sombre than our indications may have represented,