"And you would do well; it is all as—I disown you, coward! Your brother is at the galleys. Your grandfather and father have bravely finished on the scaffold, in defying the priest and the executioner. Instead of avenging them, you tremble!"
"Avenge them!"
"Yes, to show yourself a real Martial, spit on the knife of Jack Ketch and his red cap, and finish like father and mother, brother and sister."
Habituated as Martial was to the ferocious bombast of his mother, he could not refrain from shuddering.
She resumed, with increasing fury, "Oh! coward, still more 'creatur' than coward! You wish to be honest. Honest? is it that you shall not always be despised, as the son of a murderer, brother of a galley-slave; but you, instead of hugging vengeance, you are afraid; instead of biting, you fly; when they cut off your father's head, you left us, coward! And you knew we could not leave the island without being hunted and howled after like mad dogs. Oh, they shall pay for it, they shall pay for it!"
"One man—ten men can't make me afraid! but to be pointed at by everybody as the son and brother of condemned criminals—well, no! I could not stand it. I preferred to go and poach with Pierre the game-seller."
"Why did you not remain in your woods?"
"I came back on account of my affair with the guard, and above all, on account of the children, because they were of an age to be ruined by bad example!"
"What is that to you?"
"To me? because I do not wish to see them become like Ambrose,
Nicholas, and Calabash."