"A few more imprudences," he added, "must cost him his post; and if your
excellency has any influence with him I would urge its being used to
restrain him from such excesses."
Odo, on taking his leave of the librarian, ran across Gamba at the first
street-corner; and they had not proceeded a dozen yards together when
the eye of the Duke's kinsman fell on a snatch of doggerel scrawled in
chalk on an adjacent wall.
"Beware (the quatrain ran) O virtuous wife or maid,
Our ruler's fondness for the shade,
Lest first he woo thee to the leafy glade
And then into the deeper wood persuade."
This crude play on the Belverde's former title and the one she had
recently acquired was signed "Carlo Gamba."
Odo glanced curiously at the hunchback, who met the look with a composed
smile. "My enemies don't do me justice," said he; "I could do better
than that if I tried;" and he effaced the words with a sweep of his
shabby sleeve.
Other lampoons of the same quality were continually cropping up on the
walls of Pianura, and the ducal police were kept as busy rubbing them
out as a band of weeders digging docks out of a garden. The Duchess's
debts, the Duke's devotions, the Belverde's extortions, Heiligenstern's
mummery, and the political rivalry between Trescorre and the Dominican,
were sauce to the citizen's daily bread; but there was nothing in these
popular satires to suggest the hunchback's trenchant irony.
It was in the Bishop's palace that Odo read the first lampoon in which
he recognised his friend's touch.
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