Edith Wharton: Complete Works. Edith Wharton

      “Holy Virgin!” said his mother with a laugh, “I perceive they have no dancing-master at Pontesordo. Cavaliere, you may kiss my hand. So—that’s better; we shall make a gentleman of you yet. But what makes your face so wet? Ah, crying, to be sure. Mother of God! as for crying, there’s enough to cry about.” She put the child aside and turned to the preceptor. “The Duke refuses to pay,” she said with a shrug of despair.

      “Good heavens!” lamented the abate, raising his hands. “And Don Lelio—?” he faltered.

      She shrugged again, impatiently. “As great a gambler as my husband. They’re all alike, abate; six times since last Easter has the bill been sent to me for that trifle of a turquoise buckle he made such a to-do about giving me.” She rose and began to pace the room in disorder. “I’m a ruined woman,” she cried, “and it’s a disgrace for the Duke to refuse me.”

      The abate raised an admonishing finger. “Excellency … excellency…”

      She glanced over her shoulder. “Eh? You’re right. Everything is heard here. But who’s to pay for my mourning the saints alone know! I sent an express this morning to my father, but you know my brothers bleed him like leeches. I could have got this easily enough from the Duke a year ago—it’s his marriage has made him so stiff. That little white-faced fool—she hates me because Lelio won’t look at her and she thinks it’s my fault. As if I cared whom he looks at! Sometimes I think he has money put away… All I want is two hundred ducats … a woman of my rank!” She turned suddenly on Odo, who stood, very small and frightened, in the corner to which she had pushed him. “What are you staring at, child? Eh, the monkey is dropping with sleep—look at his eyes, abate! Here, Vanna, Tonina, to bed with him; he may sleep with you in my dressing-closet, Tonina; go with her, child, go; but for God’s sake wake him if he snores. I’m too ill to have my rest disturbed—” and she lifted a pomander to her nostrils.

      The next few days dwelt in Odo’s memory as a blur of strange sights and sounds. The super-acute state of his perceptions was succeeded after a night’s sleep by the natural passivity with which children accept the improbable, so that he passed from one novel impression to another as easily and with the same exhilaration as if he had been listening to a fairy tale. Solitude and neglect had no surprises for him, and it seemed natural enough that his mother and her maids should be too busy to remember his presence. For the first day or two he sat unnoticed on his little stool in a corner of his mother’s room, while packing-chests were dragged in, wardrobes emptied, mantua-makers and milliners consulted, and troublesome creditors dismissed with abuse, or even blows, by the servants lounging in the antechamber. Donna Laura continued to show the liveliest symptoms of concern, but the child perceived her distress to be but indirectly connected with the loss she had suffered, and he had seen enough of poverty at the farm to guess that the need of money was somehow at the bottom of her troubles. How any one could be in want who slept between damask curtains and lived on sweet cakes and chocolate it exceeded his fancy to conceive; yet there were times when his mother’s voice had the same frightened angry sound as Filomena’s on the days when the bailiff went over the accounts at Pontesordo. Her excellency’s rooms, during these days, were always crowded; for besides the dressmakers and other merchants, there was the hair-dresser, or French Monsù, a loud important figure with a bag full of cosmetics and curling-irons, the abate, always running in and out with messages and letters, and taking no more notice of Odo than if he had never seen him, and a succession of ladies brimming with condolences, and each followed by a servant who swelled the noisy crowd of card-playing lacqueys in the antechamber. Through all these figures came and went another, to Odo the most noticeable, that of a handsome young man with a high manner, dressed always in black, but with an excess of lace ruffles and jewels, a clouded amber head to his cane and red heels to his shoes. This young gentleman, whose age could not have been more than twenty, and who had the coldest insolent air, was treated with profound respect by all but Donna Laura, who was forever quarrelling with him when he was present, yet could not support his absence without lamentations and alarm. The abate appeared to act as messenger between the two, and when he came to say that the Count rode with the court, or was engaged to sup with the prime-minister, or had business on his father’s estate in the country, the lady would openly yield to her distress, crying out that she knew well enough what his excuses meant, that she was the most cruelly outraged of women and that he treated her no better than a husband.

      For two days Odo languished in his corner, whisked by the women’s skirts, smothered under the hoops and falbalas which the dressmakers unpacked from their cases, fed at irregular hours, and faring on the whole no better than at Pontesordo. The third morning Vanna, who seemed the most good-natured of the women, cried out on his pale looks when she brought him his cup of chocolate.

      “I declare,” she exclaimed, “the child has had no air since he came in from the farm. What does your excellency say? Shall the hunchback take him for a walk in the gardens?”

      To this her excellency, who sat at her toilet under the hair-dresser’s hands, irritably replied that she had not slept all night and was in no state to be tormented about such trifles, but that the child might go where he pleased.

      Odo, who was very weary of his corner, sprang up readily enough when Vanna, at this, beckoned him to the inner antechamber. Here, where persons of a certain condition waited (the outer being given over to servants and tradesmen), they found a lean humpbacked boy, shabbily dressed in darned stockings and a faded coat, but with an extraordinary keen pale face that at once attracted and frightened the child.

      “There, go with him; he won’t eat you,” said Vanna, giving him a push as she hurried away; and Odo, trembling a little, laid his hand in the boy’s.

      “Where do you come from?” he faltered, looking up into his companion’s face.

      The boy laughed and the blood rose to his high cheek-bones. “I?—From the Innocenti, if your excellency knows where that is,” said he.

      Odo’s face lit up. “Of course I do,” he cried, reassured. “I know a girl who comes from there—the Momola at Pontesordo.”

      “Ah, indeed?” said the boy with a queer look. “Well, she’s my sister, then. Give her my compliments when you see her, cavaliere. Oh, we’re a large family, we are!”

      Odo’s perplexity was returning. “Are you really Momola’s brother?” he asked.

      “Eh, in a way—we’re children of the same house.”

      “But you live in the palace, don’t you?” Odo persisted, his curiosity surmounting his fear. “Are you a servant of my mother’s?”

      “I’m the servant of your illustrious mother’s servants; the abatino of the waiting-women. I write their love-letters, do you see, cavaliere, I carry their rubbish to the pawnbroker’s when their sweethearts have bled them of their savings; I clean the bird-cages and feed the monkeys, and do the steward’s accounts when he’s drunk, and sleep on a bench in the portico and steal my food from the pantry … and my father very likely goes in velvet and carries a sword at his side.”

      The boy’s voice had grown shrill and his eyes blazed like an owl’s in the dark. Odo would have given the world to be back in his corner, but he was ashamed to betray his lack of heart, and to give himself courage he asked haughtily: “And what is your name, boy?”

      The hunchback gave him a gleaming look. “Call me Brutus,” he cried, “for Brutus killed a tyrant.” He gave Odo’s hand a pull. “Come along,” said he, “and I’ll show you his statue in the garden—Brutus’s statue in a prince’s garden, mind you!” and as the little boy trotted at his side down the long corridors he kept repeating under his breath in a kind of angry sing-song, “For Brutus killed a tyrant—killed a tyrant…”

      The sense of strangeness inspired by his odd companion soon gave way in Odo’s mind to emotions of delight and wonder. He was, even at that age, unusually sensitive to external impressions, and when the hunchback, after descending many stairs and twisting through endless back-passages, at length led him out on a terrace above the gardens, the