"A base serpent."
"I would kill her like a dog, if she tried to do the same with my son."
"I would have her locked up and sent to the workhouse."
"In my days such women as that were put into the pillory as a punishment. I remember well."
"Be quiet! quiet!" whispered an old man trying to pacify the women.
"And for her he ran away to the comedians, for her he squandered so much money, for such a low-down thing as she, he beat his mother! May you perish, you base serpent!"
Such were the voices full of hatred and scorn that hissed all about Janina and the poisonous malignity that dripped from their words and glances flooded her heart with an ocean of pain and shame. She wanted to cry out: "Mercy, people! I am innocent," but her head bent ever lower on her breast and she had an ever dimmer consciousness of where she was and what was happening to her. Janina's soul had already been weakened too much by misery to resist this blow. An immense wave of fear began to shake her, for it seemed to her that the hand of the old woman which held her so tightly and those dreadful eyes bulging from their sockets were drawing her down into a dark abyss and that this was death and the end of everything.
Later, Janina no longer heard anything that was being said and saw no one but the dying woman. At moments, she still felt a desire to spring up and run away from there but it was a mere flicker of will that passed through her nerves without reaching her consciousness.
So many previous sufferings, and now this blow at her very heart, benumbed her brain with a quiet madness. She grew frightfully pale and sat as though dead, gazing at the face of the dying woman. Those same fragments of thoughts and visions now swarmed through her brain that had done so once before: that same vast mass of greenish waters seemed to submerge her consciousness. She was not even aware that they had torn her away from Niedzielska and shoved her into a corner where she stood immovable and bereft of her senses.
Niedzielska was dying. It seemed as though she had only been waiting for Janina before giving herself up to death, for anger and hatred kept her alive a few hours longer. Now, there followed a general dissolution. She lay there rigid and straight, with her hands upon the coverlet, which they tugged at automatically, and with her sad eyes gazing upward as though into the eternity into which she was entering.