She had heard; and the words, so homely and so familiar in the lives of all the poor, pierced the wild faiths and visions of her heated brain, as a ray of the clear daybreak pierces through the purple smoke from altar fires of sacrifice.
The words were so terrible, and yet so trite; they cleft the mists of her dreams as tempered steel cleaves folds of gossamer.
"To die—of hunger!"
She muttered the phrase after him—shaken from her stupor by its gaunt and common truth.
It roused her to the consciousness of all his actual needs. Her heart rebelled even against the newly-found immortal masters, since being in wrath they could not strike him swiftly with their vengeance, but had killed him thus with these lingering and most bitter pangs, and had gathered there as to a festival to see him die.
As she stooped above him, she could discern the faint earthy cavernous odor, which comes from the languid lungs and empty chest of one who has long fasted, almost unto death.
She had known that famine odor many a time ere then; in the hut of Manon Dax, and by the hedge-rows and in the ditches, that made the sick-beds of many another, as old, as wretched, and as nobly stubborn against alms; in times of drought or in inclement winters, the people in all that country-side suffered continually from the hunger torment; she had often passed by men and women, and children, crouching in black and wretched cabins, or lying fever-stricken on the cold stony fields, glad to gnaw a shred of sheepskin, or suck a thorny bramble of the fields to quiet the gnawing of their entrails.
She stood still beside him, and thought.
All light had died; the night was black with storm; the shadowy shapes were gone; there were the roar of the rushing river, and the tumult of the winds and rains upon the silence; all she saw was this golden head; this colorless face; this lean and nerveless hand that rested on the feebly beating heart;—these she saw as she would have seen the white outlines of a statue in the dark.
He moved a little with a hollow sigh.