Читать книгу A Fair Jewess - B. L. Farjeon - Страница 9

The child's moans aroused the mother from her lethargy. She had no milk to give the babe; Nature's founts were dry, and she went from door to door in the house in which she lived to beg for food. She returned as she went, empty-handed, and the child continued to moan.

Dr. Spenlove, her only friend, had bidden her farewell. She had not a penny in her pocket; there was not a crust of bread in the cupboard; not an ounce of coal, not a stick of wood to kindle a fire. She was thinly clad, and she did not possess a single article upon which she could have obtained the smallest advance. She had taken the room furnished, and if what it contained had been her property a broker would have given but a few shillings for everything in it.

The little hand instinctively wandered to the mother's wasted breast, and plucked at it imploringly, ravenously. The woman looked around in the last throes of an anguish too deep for expression except in the appalling words to which she gave despairing utterance.

"Come!" she cried, "we will end it!"

Out into the cold streets she crept, unobserved. She shivered, and a weird smile crossed her lips.

"Hush, hush!" she murmured to her babe. "It will soon be over. Better dead--better dead--for you and for me!"

She crept toward the sea, and hugged the wall when she heard approaching footsteps. She need not have feared; the night was too inclement for any but selfish considerations. The soft snow fell, and enwrapt her and her child in its pitiless shroud. She paused by a lamp post, and cast an upward look at the heavens, in which she could see the glimmering of the stars. Then she went on, and pressed her babe close to her breast to stifle its feeble sobs.

"Be still, be still," she murmured. "There is no hope in life for either of us. Better dead--better dead!"