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Signorina! venga venga lei. And beckoning to Lucy she pulled open a door that had remained unnoticed in the corner of the room. Lucy and Eleanor followed. Even Eleanor joined her cry of delight to Lucy's. 'Ecco! said the massaja proudly, as though the whole landscape were her chattel, 'Monte Amiata!
Beyond soared Amiata in all its breadth and blue air-blackness, bearing on its mighty flanks the broken cliffs and tufted woods of Castiglione and the Rocca d'Orcia; eagles' nests emerging from a fertile valley-champaign, into which the eye was led for rest.
These informal little notes were written probably in the autumn of 1377 while Catherine was making a visit to the feudal stronghold of the Salimbeni family, about twenty-three miles from Siena, among the foothills of Monte Amiata.
'Ah! mais vraiment, Marie, tu es merveilleuse! What is certain is that neither that glass nor Torre Amiata is worthy of it. N'importe. One must keep up standards. 'Certainly, madame, you look better to-day. 'I slept. Why did I sleep? I can't imagine. After all, Torre Amiata is not such a bad place is it Marie? And with a laugh, she lightly touched her maid's cheek.
On his visit to the villa, and on her first meeting with him at Torre Amiata, he had been under the influence of a shock which had crushed the child in him and broken down his reserve. Yet that reserve was naturally strong, together with certain despotic instincts which Eleanor perceived with surprise beneath his exquisite gentleness. She sometimes despaired of taming him.
It is still circled with the wall and gates built by the Sienese in 1366, and is a fair specimen of an intact mediæval stronghold. Here we leave the main road, and break into a country-track across a bed of sandstone, with the delicate volcanic lines of Monte Amiata in front, and the aërial pile of Montalcino to our right.
Lucy also walked down some three or four of the innumerable zig-zags of the road. Presently she found a rocky knoll to the left of it. A gap in the trees opened a vision of the Amiata range, radiantly blue under a superb sky, a few shreds of moving mist still wrapped about its topmost peaks. She took her seat upon a moss-covered stone facing the road which mounted towards her.
But when, after several miles of climbing, I neared the summit, it was already beginning to be light. The bareness and desert grey of the distance I had crossed stood revealed in a colourless dawn, only the Mont' Amiata, now somewhat to the northward, was more gentle, and softened the scene with distant woods. Between it and this height ran a vague river-bed as dry as the stones of a salt beach.
What Lucy's attitude implied was that she had in some unwitting and unwilling way brought trouble on Eleanor; that she was at Torre Amiata to repair it; and that in general she was at Eleanor's orders. Of herself she would not allow a word. Beyond and beneath her sweetness Eleanor divined a just and indomitable pride. And beyond that Mrs. Burgoyne could not penetrate.
'Last night, just before the dawn, I looked out; and there was the vision again, sweeping over the forests, and up into the clouds that hung over Monte Amiata. And I hated it no more. There was no accompanying horror. It seemed to me as natural as the woods; as the just-kindling light.
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