“It is!” murmured the shuddering husband.
“But shall we therefore shrink?” replied his wife. “Your ancestors, who were the first in Germany that embraced the reformed religion, have bled and blazed for it, as you have often told me—can there be a stronger attestation to it?”
“I believe there can,” said Walberg, whose eyes rolled fearfully—“that of starving for it!—Oh Ines,” he exclaimed, as he grasped her hands convulsively, “I have felt—I still feel, that a death at the stake would be mercy compared to the lingering tortures of protracted famine—to the death that we die daily—and yet do not die! What is this I hold?” he exclaimed, grasping unconsciously the hand he held in his.
“It is my hand, my love,” answered the trembling wife.
“Yours!—no—impossible!—Your fingers were soft and cool, but these are dry—is this a human hand?”
“It is mine,” said the weeping wife.
“Then you must have been famishing,” said Walberg, awakening as if from a dream.
“We have all been so latterly,” answered Ines, satisfied to restore her husband’s sanity, even at the expense of this horrible confession—“We have all been so—but I have suffered the least. When a family is famishing, the children think of their meals—but the mother thinks only of her children. I have lived on as little as—I could—I had indeed no appetite.”
“Hush,” said Walberg, interrupting her—“what sound was that?—was it not like a dying groan?”
“No—it is the children who moan in their sleep.”
“What do they moan for?”
“Hunger I believe,” said Ines, involuntarily yielding to the dreadful conviction of habitual misery.
“And I sit and hear this,” said Walberg, starting up—“I sit to hear their young sleep broken by dreams of hunger, while for a word’s speaking I could pile this floor with mountains of gold, and all for the risk of—”
“Of what?”—said Ines, clinging to him—“of what?—Oh! think of that!—what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?—Oh! let us starve, die, rot before your eyes, rather than you should seal your perdition by that horrible—”
“Hear me, woman!” said Walberg, turning on her eyes almost as fierce and lustrous as those of Melmoth, and whose light, indeed, seemed borrowed from his; “Hear me!—My soul is lost! They who die in the agonies of famine know no God, and want none—if I remain here to famish among my children, I shall as surely blaspheme the Author of my being, as I shall renounce him under the fearful conditions proposed to me!—Listen to me, Ines, and tremble not. To see my children die of famine will be to me instant suicide and impenitent despair! But if I close with this fearful offer, I may yet repent—I may yet escape!—There is hope on one side—on the other there is none—none—none! Your hands cling round me, but their touch is cold!—You are wasted to a shadow with want! Show me the means of procuring another meal, and I will spit at the tempter, and spurn him!—But where is that to be found?—Let me go, then, to meet him!—You will pray for me, Ines—will you not?—and the children?—No, let them not pray for me!—in my despair I forgot to pray myself, and their prayers would now be a reproach to me.—Ines!—Ines!—What? am I talking to a corse?” He was indeed, for the wretched wife had sunk at his feet senseless. “Thank God!” he again emphatically exclaimed, as he beheld her lie to all appearance lifeless before him. “Thank God a word then has killed her—it was a gentler death than famine! It would have been kind to have strangled her with these hands! Now for the children!” he exclaimed, while horrid thoughts chased each other over his reeling and unseated mind, and he imagined he heard the roar of a sea in its full strength thundering in his ears, and saw ten thousand waves dashing at his feet, and every wave of blood. “Now for the children!”—and he felt about
