Odo had indeed met but one person who cared to listen to him, and that was the strange hunchback who had called himself Brutus.  Remembering how entertainingly this odd guide had explained all the wonders of the ducal grounds, Odo began to regret that he had not asked his mother to let him have Brutus for a body-servant.  Meanwhile no one attended to his questions and the hours were beginning to seem long when, on the third day, they set out from Vercelli toward the hills.  The cold increased as they rose; and Odo, though he had often wished to see the mountains, was yet dismayed at the gloomy and menacing aspect of the region on which they were entering.  Leafless woods, prodigious boulders and white torrents foaming and roaring seemed a poor exchange for the pleasantly-ordered gardens of Pianura.  Here were no violets and cowslips in bloom; hardly a green blade pierced the sodden roadside, and snowdrifts lingered in the shaded hollows.

Donna Laura’s loudly expressed fear of robbers seemed to increase the loneliness of the way, which now traversed tracts of naked moorland, now plunged again into forest, with no sign of habitation but here and there a cowherd’s hut under the trees or a chapel standing apart on some grassy eminence.  When night fell the waters grew louder, a stinging wind swept the woods, and the carriage, staggering from rut to rut, seemed every moment about to land them in some invisible ravine.  Fear and cold at last benumbed the little boy, and when he woke he was being lifted from his seat and torches were flashing on a high escutcheoned doorway set in battlemented walls.  He was carried into a hall lit with smoky oil-lamps and hung with armour and torn banners.

Here, among a group of rough-looking servants, a tall old man in a nightcap and furred gown was giving orders in a loud passionate voice.  This personage, who was of a choleric complexion, with a face like mottled red marble, seized Odo by the wrist and led him up a flight of stairs so worn and slippery that he tripped at every step; thence down a corridor and into a gloomy apartment where three ladies shivered about a table set with candles.  Bidden by the old gentleman to salute his grandmother and great-aunts, Odo bowed over three wrinkled hands, one fat and soft as a toad’s stomach, the others yellow and dry as lemon-skins.  His mother embraced the ladies in the same humble manner, and the Marquess, first furiously calling for supper, thrust Odo down on a stool in the ingle.

From this point of observation the child, now vividly awake, noted the hangings of faded tapestry that heaved in the draught, the ceiling of beams and the stone floor strewn with rushes.  The candle-light flickering on the faces of his aged relatives showed his grandmother to be a pale heavy-cheeked person with little watchful black eyes which she dropped at her husband’s approach; while the two great-aunts, seated side by side in high-backed chairs with their feet on braziers, reminded Odo of the narrow elongated saints squeezed into the niches of a church-door.  The old Marchioness wore the high coif and veil of the previous century; the aunts, who, as Odo afterwards learned, were canonesses of a noble order, were habited in a semi-conventual dress, with crosses hanging on their bosoms; and none spoke but when the Marquess addressed them.