One of these women directed Odo to the staircase
which ascended between damp stone walls to Gamba's door. This was opened
by the hunchback himself, who, with an astonished exclamation, admitted
his visitor to a scantily furnished room littered with books and papers.
A child sprawled on the floor, and a young woman, who had been sewing in
the fading light of the attic window, snatched him up as Odo entered.
Her back being turned to the light, he caught only a slender youthful
outline; but something in the turn of the head, the shrinking curve of
the shoulders, carried him back to the little barefoot figure cowering
in a corner of the kitchen at Pontesordo, while the farm-yard rang with
Filomena's call--"Where are you then, child of iniquity?"
"Momola--don't you know me?" he exclaimed.
She hung back trembling, as though the sound of his voice roused an echo
of fear; but Gamba, reddening slightly, took her hand and led her
forward.
"It is, indeed," said he, "your excellency's old playmate, the Momola of
Pontesordo, who consents to share my poverty and who makes me forget it
by the tenderness of her devotion."
But Momola, at this, found voice. "Oh, sir," she cried, "it is he who
took me in when I was half-dead and starving, who many a time went
hungry to feed me, and who cares for the child as if it were his own!"
As she stood there, in her half-wild hollowed-eyed beauty, which seemed
a sickly efflorescence of the marshes, pressing to her breast another
"child of iniquity" as pale and elfish as her former self, she seemed to
Odo the embodiment of ancient wrongs, risen from the wasted soil to
haunt the dreams of its oppressors.
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