"Enter, sir," said the warder. Martial entered.
The veteran remained in the dungeon, the door of which was left open as a matter of precaution. Through the gloom of the corridor, half lighted by the increasing day and by a lamp, several soldiers were seen sitting or standing. Martial was as pale as his mother; his countenance expressed deep and profound anguish, his knees trembled under him. In spite of the crimes of this woman, in spite of the aversion that she had always shown for him, he had thought it a duty to obey her last wishes. As soon as he entered the dungeon, the widow cast on him a searching look, and said to him in a hollow and angry voice, as if to awaken in her son a feeling of revenge, "You see what they are going to do with your mother and your sister!"
"Ay! mother, it is frightful; but I warned you of it, alas!—I told you."
The widow bit her pale lips with rage; her son did not comprehend her; she resumed: "They are going to kill us, as they killed your father."
"Alas! I can do nothing—it is finished. Now, what would you have me do? Why did you not listen to me—you and sister? You would not have been here."
"Oh! it is so," answered the widow, with her habitual and savage irony; "you find it all right, do you?"
"Mother!"
"Now you are satisfied; you can say, without a lie, that your mother is dead; you shall no longer blush for her."
"If I were a bad son," answered Martial, quickly, shocked at the unjust harshness of his mother, "I should not be here."
"You came from curiosity."