After considerable hesitation, she at length said—
“You do not treat me right!—you hold my life in your hands—yet you are cold—you do not come near me—you are leaving me to die!”
Here then was another long pause.
“What more is there?” at length asked Manton; “this is not all.”
This time the choking and hesitation, before pronouncing the words, seemed greater than ever. At length, however, out they came.
“They complain of you in Heaven, that you let me suffer—that you do not care for my necessities—that—that you do not—not—give me money now.”
This was too much—Manton literally roared with scornful laughter, as he spurned her from him—
“Ha! ha! ha! here is illumination for you with a vengeance! Alas! poor Zschokke! ‘to what base uses do we come!’ The divine inspiration of the Sleep-Walker raising the wind! Vive la bagatelle! Hurrah! hurrah!” He fairly danced about the floor, in an ecstacy of enjoyment—the scene seemed to him so irresistibly ludicrous.
During this time, the woman, who had staggered towards the bed, and fallen across it, lay perfectly immovable and white, without the change of a muscle, or the quiver of a nerve. Manton, however, paid no attention to her, and half an hour afterwards, taking his hat, left the room, without again approaching her. But what was his astonishment on returning, two hours afterwards, to meet the sobbing Elna, and the pale, troubled face of Moione, in the passage. Elna, at the sight of him, seemed wild with grief, and sprang, with her arms about his neck, screaming—
“Oh, mother is dead! mother is dead! My dear mother is dead!”