'What, Reburrus!' he cried, 'are you already drunken to insanity, that
you call the first dead body which by chance I encountered in the
street, and by chance brought hither, your mother?
Was it to talk of your mother, whom dead or alive we neither know nor
care for, that you were admitted here? Son of obscurity and inheritor
of rags, what are your plebeian parents to us!' he continued, refilling
his cup, and lashing himself into assumed anger as he spoke. 'To your
dialogue without delay, or you shall be flung from the windows to mingle
with your rabble-equals in the street!'
Neither by word nor look did the hunchback answer the senator's menaces.
For him, the voice of the living was stifled in the presence of the
dead. The retribution that had gone forth against him had struck his
moral, as a thunderbolt might have stricken his physical being. His
soul strove in agony within him, as he thought on the awful fatality
which had set the dead mother in judgment on the degraded son--which had
directed the hand of the senator unwittingly to select the corpse of the
outraged parent as the object for the infidel buffoonery of the reckless
child, at the very close of his impious career.
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