"You came but from curiosity! Own the truth if you dare!"
"No, mother! You desired to see me, and I obeyed your wish."
"Ah, Martial," cried Calabash, unable longer to struggle against the agonising terror she endured, "had I but listened to your advice, instead of being led by my mother, I should not be here!" Then losing all further control of herself, she exclaimed, "'Tis all your fault, accursed mother! Your bad example and evil counsel have brought me to what I am!"
"Do you hear her?" said the widow, bursting into a fiendish laugh. "Come, this will repay you for the trouble of paying us a last visit! Your excellent sister has turned pious, repents of her own sins, and curses her mother!"
Without making any reply to this unnatural speech, Martial approached Calabash, whose dying agonies seemed to have commenced, and, regarding her with deep compassion, said:
"My poor sister! Alas, it is now too late to recall the past!"
"It is never too late to turn coward, it seems!" cried the widow, with savage excitement. "Oh, what a race you are! Happily Nicholas has escaped; François and Amandine will slip through your fingers; they have already imbibed vice enough, and want and misery will finish them!"
"Oh, Martial," groaned forth Calabash, "for the love of God, take care of those two poor children, lest they come to such an end as mother's and mine!"
"He may watch over them as much as he likes," cried the widow, with settled hatred in her looks, "vice and destitution will have greater effect than his words, and some of these days they will avenge their father, mother, and sister!"
"Your horrible expectations, mother, will never be fulfilled," replied the indignant Martial; "neither my young brother, sister, nor self have anything to fear from want. La Louve saved the life of the young girl Nicholas tried to drown, and the relations of the young person offered us either a large sum of money or a smaller sum and some land at Algiers; we preferred the latter, and to-morrow we quit Europe, with the children, for ever."