But ere long--awakening the attention which might otherwise never have
been aroused--the voice of the hunchback was heard, as the spirit of
repentance now moved within him, uttering, in wild, moaning tones, a
strange confession of degradation and sin--addressed to none;
proceeding, independent of consciousness or will, from the depths of his
stricken soul. He half raised himself, and fixed his sunken eyes upon
the dead body, as these words dropped from his lips: 'It was the last
time that I beheld her alive, when she approached me--lonely, and
feeble, and poor--in the street, beseeching me to return to her in the
days of her old age and her solitude, and to remember how she had loved
me in my childhood for my very deformity, how she had watched me
throughout the highways of Rome, that none should oppress or deride me!
The tears ran down her cheeks, she knelt to me on the hard pavement, and
I, who had deserted her for her poverty, to make myself a slave in
palaces among the accursed rich, flung down money to her as to a beggar
who wearied me, and passed on! She died desolate; her body lay
unburied, and I knew it not! The son who had abandoned the mother never
saw her more, until she rose before him there--avenging, horrible,
lifeless--a sight of death never to leave him! Woe, woe to the accursed
in his deformity, and the accursed of his mother's corpse!'
He paused, and fell back again to the ground, grovelling and speechless.
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