The Fair-haired Alda - 1880 Author:Florence Marryat Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XII. "may The Curse Of Heaven Come Down Upon Your Marriage!" The Villa Candesi was situated in the open and desolate country about three miles from... more » Florence. It was built upon a slope, and from its windows you looked down upon sunny vineyards blushing with purple grapes, upon groves of olive and citron trees, and acres of thyme-scented and flower-besprinkled grass. But these natural beauties did not render the villa less lonely or unprotected. There was but one narrow, white road that wound up to its gates from the city, and that was chiefly used by the sunburnt labourers going backwards and forwards to their work. When the great family of Candesi had occupied their villa, its desolate position had been of little consequence. Then the house had been full of servants, and the stables of horses, so that it was equally easy for the marchesa to drive into Florence or to sleep in peace at home. But the family had died out, or been transplanted long before this time; and the ruinous old villa, which no one cared to live in, had fallen into the hands of the De Beriots, who were French refugees, for a mere song. Hitherto it had suited both mother and son. Claude, on whom, since his father's death, the burden of his family had entirely fallen, found the solitude and surrounding scenery favourable to his work, and the trifling cost an immense consideration when he was compelled to leave home to pursue his profession. For Madame de Beriot, his mother, too, the Villa Candesi possessed its charms. She was an unsociable woman, of a hard and irascible nature, which seemed to have but one soft spot in it—her love for her two sons, which was like the blind, unreasoning, savage love of a tigress for her cubs. There was some great grudge against her own sex rankling i...« less