It was a sad and solemn spectacle, as this train of noble ladies, clad in their habiliments of woe, and with bent heads and sorrowful faces, wound through the hostile camp, from which they were not excluded as the deputies had been. Even the Volscian soldiers watched them with pitying eyes, and spoke no scornful word as they moved slowly past.
On reaching the midst of the camp, they saw Coriolanus on the general's seat, with the Volscian chiefs gathered around him. At first he wondered who these women could be; but when they came near, and he saw his mother at the head of the train, his deep love for her welled up so strongly in his heart that he could not restrain himself, but sprang up and ran to meet and kiss her.
The Roman matron stopped him with a dignified gesture. “Ere you kiss me,” she said, “let me know whether I speak to an enemy or to my son; whether I stand here as your prisoner or your mother.”
He stood before her in silence, with bent head, and unable to answer.
“Must it, then, be that if I had never borne a son, Rome would have never seen the camp of an enemy?” said Volumnia, in sorrowful tones.
“But I am too old to endure much longer your shame and my misery. Think not of me, but of your wife and children, whom you would doom to death or to life in bondage.”
Then Virgilia, his wife, and his children, came forward and kissed him, and all the noble ladies in the train burst into tears and bemoaned the peril of their country.
Coriolanus still stood silent, his face working with contending thoughts. At length he cried out in heart-rending accents: “O mother! What have you done to me?”
Then clasping her hand he wrung it vehemently, saying: “Mother, the victory is yours! A happy victory for you and Rome! but shame and ruin for your son.”
Thereupon he embraced her with yearning heart, and afterward clasped his wife and children to his breast, bidding them return with their tale of conquest to Rome. As for himself, he said, only exile and shame remained.