'Will you let me attend to your brother?'
'No, I will not.'
The shutter was dashed off its hinges, flung out into the yard, and the two ghastly hands were again seen strained through the bars. Again there rang out in the gathering night the piteous cry, 'Glory! Glory! Glory!'
'By God! you hound,' yelled Elijah, and he raised his whip to bring it down in all its cutting force on the white wrists.
'I cannot bear it. I will not endure it!' cried Mehalah, and she arrested the blow. She caught the stick and wrenched it out of the hand of Rebow before he could recover from his surprise, and broke it over her knee and flung it into the dyke that encircled the yard. There was, however, no passion in her face, she acted deliberately, and her brown cheek remained unflushed. 'I take his cry as an appeal to me, and I will protect him from your brutality.'
'You are civil,' sneered Elijah. 'What are you in this house? A servant, you say. Then you should speak and act as one. No, Glory! you know you are not, and cannot be, a servant. You shall be its mistress. I forgive you what you have done, for you are asserting your place and authority. Only do not cry out and protest if in future I speak to the workmen of you as the mistress.'
A hard expression settled on Mehalah's brow and eyes. She turned away.
'Are you going? Have you not a parting word, mistress?'
'Go!' she said, in a tone unlike that usual with her. 'I care for nothing. I feel for no one. I am without a heart. Do what you will with that brother of yours. I am indifferent to him and to his fate. Everything in the world is all one to me now. If you had let me think for the poor creature and feed him, and attend to him, I might have become reconciled to being here; I could at least have comforted my soul with the thought that I was ministering to the welfare of one unhappy wretch and lightening his lot. But now,' she shrugged her shoulders. 'Now everything is all one to me. I can laugh,' she did so, harshly. 'There is nothing in the world that I care for now, except my mother, and I do not know that I care very much for her now. I feel as if I had no heart, or that mine were frozen in my bosom.'
'You do not care now for your mother!' exclaimed Rebow. 'Then leave her here to my tender mercy, and go out into the world and seek your fortune. Go on the tramp like your gipsy ancestry.'