Not even the clash of the wine-cups was now heard at the banqueting-table--nothing was audible but the sound, still fitfully rising and falling, of the voices of terror, ribaldry, and anguish from the street; and the hoarse convulsive accents of the hunchback, still uttering at intervals his fearful identification of the dead body above him: 'MY MOTHER! MY MOTHER!' At length Vetranio, who was the first to recover himself, addressed the terrified and degraded wretch before him, in tones which, in spite of himself, betrayed, as he began, an unwonted tremulousness and restraint.

'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.