It offered to the outer world a long, rather low facade,
colored a dull, dark yellow, and pierced with windows of various sizes,
no one of which, save those on the ground floor, was on the same level
with any other. Within, it had a great, cool, gray cortile, with high,
light arches around it, heavily-corniced doors, of majestic altitude,
opening out of it, and a beautiful mediaeval well on one side of it.
Mrs. Hudson's rooms opened into a small garden supported on immense
substructions, which were planted on the farther side of the hill, as
it sloped steeply away. This garden was a charming place. Its south wall
was curtained with a dense orange vine, a dozen fig-trees offered you
their large-leaved shade, and over the low parapet the soft, grave
Tuscan landscape kept you company. The rooms themselves were as high as
chapels and as cool as royal sepulchres. Silence, peace, and security
seemed to abide in the ancient house and make it an ideal refuge for
aching hearts. Mrs. Hudson had a stunted, brown-faced Maddalena, who
wore a crimson handkerchief passed over her coarse, black locks and tied
under her sharp, pertinacious chin, and a smile which was as brilliant
as a prolonged flash of lightning.
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