Is there no eye to watch thee? Doth not thine own kin see thy foul deeds?
Desist!
'T is too late....
Open is the window, no grating noise has accompanied the unbolting of the shutter.... The evil spirits have taken care that the faintest sound shall die away... even the rough iron obeys their voices... it is they who have bidden: “Be silent; betray him not; he is one of us.”
Even the key in the door of the old bureau is turned lightly and without noise. Groping fingers are searching for a bulky volume. Have they found it? Is there none there to cry in a voice of thunder: “Cursed be the father who stretches forth his desecrating hand towards the things that are his children's”?...
They have found it, the greedy fingers! and now, but a spring through the open window, and out into the night....
At that moment a sudden ray of light shines through a crack in the door of the room.... Swiftly the door opens, a girlish figure appears on the threshold, a lighted lamp in her hand. . . .
“Gudule!” he shrieks, horror-stricken, and falls senseless at her feet.
Ascher was saved. The terrible blow which had struck him down had not crushed the life from him. He was awakened. But when, after four weeks of gruesome fever and delirium, his mind had somewhat regained its equilibrium, his hair had turned white as snow, and his children beheld an old, decrepit man.
That which Viola had denied her father when he returned to them in all the vigor of his manhood, she now lavished upon him in his suffering and helplessness, with that concentrated power of love, the source of which is not human, but Divine. In the space of one night of terror, the merest bud of yesterday had suddenly blossomed forth into a flower of rarest beauty. Never did gentler hands cool a fever-heated brow, never did sweeter voice mingle its melody with the gruesome dreams of delirium.