Suiting the action to the word, the man grasped the artisan by the shoulder, and shook him roughly; which so alarmed the children, that, unable to restrain their terror, the three little boys emerged from their paillasse, and, half naked as they were, came in an agony of tears to throw themselves at the feet of the bailiffs, holding up their clasped hands, and crying, in tones of touching earnestness:
"Pray, pray don't hurt our dear father!"
At the sight of these poor, shivering, half-clad infants, weeping with affright, and trembling with cold, Bourdin, spite of his natural callousness and long acquaintance with scenes of this sort, could not avoid a feeling almost resembling compassion from stealing over him, while his pitiless companion, brutally disengaging himself from the grasp of the small, weak creatures who were clinging to him, exclaimed:
"Hands off, you young ragamuffins! A devilish fine trade ours would be, if we were to allow ourselves to be mauled about by a set of beggars' brats like you!"
As though the scene were not sufficiently distressing, a fearful addition was made to its horrors. The eldest of the little girls, who had remained in the paillasse with her sick sister, suddenly exclaimed:
"Mother! mother! I don't know what's the matter with Adèle! She is so cold, and her eyes are fixed on my face, and yet she does not breathe."
The poor little child, whose consumptive appearance we have before noticed, had expired gently, and without a sigh, her looks fixed earnestly on the sister she so tenderly loved.
No language can describe the cry which burst from the lips of the lapidary's wife at these words, which at once revealed the dreadful truth; it was one of those wild, despairing, convulsive shrieks, which seem to sever the very heart-strings of a mother.
"My poor little sister looks as though she were dead!" continued the child; "she frightens me, with her eyes fixed on me, and her face so cold!"
Saying which, in an agony of terror, she leaped from beside the corpse of the infant, and ran to shelter herself in her mother's arms, while the distracted parent, forgetting that her almost paralysed limbs were incapable of supporting her, made a violent effort to rise and go to the assistance of her child, whom she could not believe was actually past recovery; but her strength failed her, and with a deep sigh of despair she sunk upon the floor. That cry found an echo in the heart of Morel, and roused him from his stupor. He sprang with one bound to the paillasse, and withdrew from it the stiffened form of an infant four years old, dead and cold. Want and misery had accelerated its end, although its complaint, which had originated in the positive want of common necessaries, was beyond the reach of any human aid to remove. Its poor little limbs were already rigid with death. Morel, whose very hair seemed to stand on end with despair and terror, stood holding his dead child in his arms, motionlessly contemplating its thin features with a fixed bloodshot gaze, though no tear moistened his dry, burning eyeballs.