The priest arrived with another who wore a stole and administered all
the rites of the extreme unction. After the vicar and the sacristan
had gone, Manuel looked at his mother and saw her livid features, her
drooping jaw. She was dead.
The youngster was left alone in the room, which was dimly lighted by
the oil lamp; there he sat on the trunk, trembling with cold and fear.
He spent the whole night thus; from time to time the landlady would
enter in her underclothes and ask Manuel something or offer some bit
of advice which, for the most part, he did not understand.
That night Manuel thought and suffered as perhaps he never thought and
suffered at any other time; he meditated upon the usefulness of life
and upon death with a perspicacity that he had never possessed.
However hard he might try, he could not stem the flood of thoughts
that merged one with the other.
At four in the morning the whole house was in silence, when there was
heard the rattle of a latchkey in the stairway door, followed by
footsteps in the corridor and then the querulous tinkling of the
music-box upon the vestibule-table, playing the Mandolinata.
Manuel awoke with a start, as from a dream; he could not make out
where the music was coming from; he even imagined that he had lost his
head. The little organ, after several hitches and asthmatic sobs,
abandoned the Mandolinata and began to roll off in double time the
duet between Bettina and Pippo from _La Mascotte_:
_Will you forget me, gentle swain,
Dressed in this lordly finery?_
Manuel left the bedroom and asked, through the darkness:
"Who is it?"
At the same moment voices were heard from every room.
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