About thirty yards within the gateway rose a square tower, lofty
enough to be a very prominent object in the landscape, and more than
sufficiently massive in proportion to its height. Its antiquity was
evidently such that, in a climate of more abundant moisture, the ivy
would have mantled it from head to foot in a garment that might, by this
time, have been centuries old, though ever new. In the dry Italian air,
however, Nature had only so far adopted this old pile of stonework as to
cover almost every hand's-breadth of it with close-clinging lichens
and yellow moss; and the immemorial growth of these kindly productions
rendered the general hue of the tower soft and venerable, and took away
the aspect of nakedness which would have made its age drearier than now.
Up and down the height of the tower were scattered three or four
windows, the lower ones grated with iron bars, the upper ones vacant
both of window frames and glass. Besides these larger openings, there
were several loopholes and little square apertures, which might be
supposed to light the staircase, that doubtless climbed the
interior towards the battlemented and machicolated summit. With this
last-mentioned warlike garniture upon its stern old head and brow,
the tower seemed evidently a stronghold of times long past. Many a
crossbowman had shot his shafts from those windows and loop-holes, and
from the vantage height of those gray battlements; many a flight of
arrows, too, had hit all round about the embrasures above, or the
apertures below, where the helmet of a defender had momentarily
glimmered. On festal nights, moreover, a hundred lamps had often gleamed
afar over the valley, suspended from the iron hooks that were ranged for
the purpose beneath the battlements and every window.
Connected with the tower, and extending behind it, there seemed to be
a very spacious residence, chiefly of more modern date. It perhaps owed
much of its fresher appearance, however, to a coat of stucco and
yellow wash, which is a sort of renovation very much in vogue with the
Italians. Kenyon noticed over a doorway, in the portion of the edifice
immediately adjacent to the tower, a cross, which, with a bell suspended
above the roof, indicated that this was a consecrated precinct, and the
chapel of the mansion.
Meanwhile, the hot sun so incommoded the unsheltered traveller, that he
shouted forth another impatient summons. Happening, at the same moment,
to look upward, he saw a figure leaning from an embrasure of the
battlements, and gazing down at him.
"Ho, Signore Count!" cried the sculptor, waving his straw hat, for he
recognized the face, after a moment's doubt. "This is a warm reception,
truly! Pray bid your porter let me in, before the sun shrivels me quite
into a cinder."
"I will come myself," responded Donatello, flinging down his voice out
of the clouds, as it were; "old Tomaso and old Stella are both asleep,
no doubt, and the rest of the people are in the vineyard. But I have
expected you, and you are welcome!"