“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 birdcages 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.”

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 winding through endless back-passages, at length led him out on a terrace above the gardens, the beauty of the sight swelled his little heart to bursting.

A Duke of Pianura had, some hundred years earlier, caused a great wing to be added to his palace by the eminent architect Carlo Borromini, and this accomplished designer had at the same time replanted and enlarged the ducal gardens.  To Odo, who had never seen plantations more artful than the vineyards and mulberry orchards about Pontesordo, these perspectives of clipped beech and yew, these knots of box filled in with multi-coloured sand, appeared, with the fountains, colonnades and trellised arbours surmounted by globes of glass, to represent the very pattern and Paradise of gardens.  It seemed indeed too beautiful to be real, and he trembled, as he sometimes did at the music of the Easter mass, when the hunchback, laughing at his amazement, led him down the terrace steps.

It was Odo’s lot in after years to walk the alleys of many a splendid garden, and to pace, often wearily enough, the paths along which he was now led; but never after did he renew the first enchanted impression of mystery and brightness that remained with him as the most vivid emotion of his childhood.