"Will you not show me your tower?" said the sculptor one day to his
friend.
"It is plainly enough to be seen, methinks," answered the Count, with
a kind of sulkiness that often appeared in him, as one of the little
symptoms of inward trouble.
"Yes; its exterior is visible far and wide," said Kenyon. "But such
a gray, moss-grown tower as this, however valuable as an object of
scenery, will certainly be quite as interesting inside as out. It cannot
be less than six hundred years old; the foundations and lower story are
much older than that, I should judge; and traditions probably cling to
the walls within quite as plentifully as the gray and yellow lichens
cluster on its face without."
"No doubt," replied Donatello,--"but I know little of such things, and
never could comprehend the interest which some of you Forestieri take
in them. A year or two ago an English signore, with a venerable white
beard--they say he was a magician, too--came hither from as far off as
Florence, just to see my tower."
"Ah, I have seen him at Florence," observed Kenyon. "He is a
necromancer, as you say, and dwells in an old mansion of the Knights
Templars, close by the Ponte Vecchio, with a great many ghostly books,
pictures, and antiquities, to make the house gloomy, and one bright-eyed
little girl, to keep it cheerful!"
"I know him only by his white beard," said Donatello; "but he could
have told you a great deal about the tower, and the sieges which it has
stood, and the prisoners who have been confined in it. And he gathered
up all the traditions of the Monte Beni family, and, among the rest,
the sad one which I told you at the fountain the other day. He had known
mighty poets, he said, in his earlier life; and the most illustrious
of them would have rejoiced to preserve such a legend in immortal
rhyme,--especially if he could have had some of our wine of Sunshine to
help out his inspiration!"
"Any man might be a poet, as well as Byron, with such wine and such
a theme," rejoined the sculptor. "But shall we climb your tower The
thunder-storm gathering yonder among the hills will be a spectacle worth
witnessing."
"Come, then," said the Count, adding, with a sigh, "it has a weary
staircase, and dismal chambers, and it is very lonesome at the summit!"
"Like a man's life, when he has climbed to eminence," remarked the
sculptor; "or, let us rather say, with its difficult steps, and the dark
prison cells you speak of, your tower resembles the spiritual experience
of many a sinful soul, which, nevertheless, may struggle upward into the
pure air and light of Heaven at last!"
Donatello sighed again, and led the way up into the tower.