"The prison of my father!" said he to himself.
"But what is in the sound of a word, when the fact is already present."
With unbreathing silence, and a heart into which all that was man within him was summoned, he followed his conductor. They reached a heavy door, studded with iron, and traversed with massy bars. The deputy drew a huge key from his breast, and opened it.
As it grated horribly in the guards of the lock, and the damp and dreariness of the passages struck on the shuddering senses of Lorenzo, the affectionate youth exclaimed:
"Oh, my honoured Lord! Is it in such a place I find you!"
Louis turned at the exclamation, and looked on the faithful servant; but no tear was in his eye, no sound on his lip.
The door was opened; and the deputy stood back, while the son of the Duke entered the vestibule of the prison. The unoccupied pallet of Martini lay in one corner of this miserable anti-room. Louis saw nothing but the door that led to the interior apartment; and passing through the vestibule with one step, though with an awful sense of his father's fallen dignity, and of the dignity whose affliction even a son must not break on too abruptly; he gently pushed forward the half-open door, and found himself in a large and dripping dungeon. He started, and gazed around; for all was horrible, but all was solitude. "Where is my father?"
"In his bed," cried the deputy, who now entered, "He is ill."
Louis hastily, but with a light tread, passed across the pavement to the mattrass, which lay behind a woollen curtain in a low vaulted part of the cell. The officer, with less delicacy of attention to the supposed slumbers of an invalid, followed him. Lorenzo glided in also; and at the very moment in which the deputy had pressed before Louis, to announce to the sleeping Ripperda, the arrival of his son, the page's eye fell on a letter which lay on the table. In the instant the officer's appalled ejaculation proclaimed that no Duke was in the bed, Lorenzo saw it was directed to the Marquis de Montemar, and snatching it up, put it in his breast.
"Then, where is he?" exclaimed Louis, throwing himself between the door and the deputy, who was hastily moving towards it; "You pass not here, till you tell me, to what deeper dungeon you have removed him; for no power on earth shall keep me from my father."