The Count of Monte-Cristo/Volume 4/Chapter 89
CHAPTER LXXXIX
THE NIGHT
ONSIEUR de MONTE-CRISTO waited, according to his usual custom, until Duprez had sung his famous "Suivez-moi;" then he rose, and went out. Morrel took leave of him at the door, renewing his promise to be with him the next morning at seven o'clock, and to bring Emmanuel with him. Then he stepped into his coupé, calm and smiling, and was at home in five minutes. No one who knew the count could mistake his expression, when, on entering, he said:
"Ali, bring me my pistols with the ivory stock."
Ali brought the box to his master, who examined his arms with a solicitude very natural to a man who is about to intrust his life to a little powder and shot. These were peculiar pistols, which Monte-Cristo had had made to shoot at a target in his room. A cap was sufficient to drive out the ball, and from the adjoining room no one would have suspected the count was, as sportsmen would say, keeping his hand in.
He was just taking one in his hand and looking for the point to aim at, on a little iron plate, which served him as a target, when his cabinet-door opened, and Baptistin entered. Before he had spoken a word the count perceived in the next room a woman, veiled, who had followed closely after Baptistin, and now, seeing the count with a pistol in his hand and swords on the table, rushed in. Baptistin looked at his master, who made a sign to him, and he went out, closing the door after him.
"Who are you, madame?" said the count to the veiled lady.
The stranger cast one look around her, to be certain they were quite alone, then bending, as if she would have knelt, and joining her hands, she said, with an accent of despair: "Edmond, you will not kill my son?"
The count retreated a step, uttered a slight exclamation, and let fall the pistol he held.
"What name did you pronounce then, Madame de Morcerf?" said he.
"Yours," cried she, throwing back her veil, "yours, which I alone, perhaps, have not forgotten. Edmond, it is not Madame de Morcerf who is coming to you, it is Mercédès."
"Mercédès is dead, madame," said Monte-Cristo; "I know no one now of that name."
"Mercédès lives, sir, and she remembers, for she alone recognized you when she saw you, and even before she saw you, by your voice, Edmond,—by the simple sound of your voice, and from that moment she has followed your steps, watched you, feared you, and she needs not to inquire what hand has dealt the blow which now strikes M. de Morcerf."
"Fernand, do you mean?" replied Monte-Cristo, with bitter irony; "since we are recalling names, let us remember them all." Monte-Cristo had pronounced the name of Fernand with such an expression of hatred that Mercédès felt a thrill of horror run through every vein.
"You see, Edmond, I am not mistaken, and have cause to say, 'spare my son!'"
"And who told you, madame, I have any hostile intentions against your son?"
"No one, in truth; but a mother has a twofold sight. I guessed all; I followed him this evening to the Opera, and have seen all."
"If you have seen all, madame, you know that the son of Fernand has publicly insulted me," said Monte-Cristo, with awful calmness.
"Oh! for pity's sake!"
"You have seen that he would have thrown his glove in my face, if Morrel, one of my friends, had not stopped him."
"Listen to me: my son has also guessed who you are; he attributes his father's misfortunes to you."
"Madame, you are mistaken, they are not misfortunes,—it is a punishment. It is not I who strike M. de Morcerf; it is Providence which punishes him."
"And why do you represent Providence?" cried Mercédès. "Why do you remember, when it forgets? What are Janina and its vizier to you, Edmond? What injury has Fernand Mondego done you in betraying Ali Tebelin?"
"And, madame," replied Monte-Cristo, "all this is an affair between the French captain and the daughter of Vasiliki. It does not concern me, you are right; and if I have sworn to revenge myself, it is not on the French captain, nor on the Count de Morcerf, but on the fisherman Fernand, the husband of the Catalan Mercédès."
"Ah! sir," cried the countess, "how terrible a vengeance for a faultwhich fatality made me commit! for I am the only culprit, Edmond;and if you owe revenge to any one, it is to me, who had not fortitude to bear your absence and my solitude."
"But," exclaimed Monte-Cristo, "why was I absent? And why were you alone?"
"Because you had been arrested, Edmond, and were a prisoner."
"And why was I arrested? Why was I a prisoner?"
"I do not know," said Mercédès.
"You do not, madame; at least, I hope not. But I will tell you. I was arrested and became a prisoner, because under the arbor of La Réserve, the day before I was to marry you, a man named Danglars wrote this letter which the fisherman Fernand himself posted."
Monte-Cristo went to a secrétaire, opened a drawer by a spring, from which he took a paper which had lost its original color, and the ink of which had become a rusty hue; this he placed in the hands of Mercédès. It was Danglars' letter to the procureur du roi, which the Count of Monte-Cristo, disguised as a clerk from the house of Thomson and French, had taken from the docket of Edmond Dantès on the day he had paid the two hundred thousand francs to M. de Boville. Mercédès read with terror the following lines:
"How dreadful!" said Mercédès, passing her hand across her brow, moist with perspiration; "and that letter"
"I bought it for two hundred thousand francs, madame," said Monte-Cristo; "but that is a trifle, since it enables me to justify myself to you."
"And the result of that letter"
"You well know, madame, was my arrest; but you do not know how long that arrest lasted. You do not know that I remained for fourteen years within a quarter of a league of you, in a dungeon in the Château-d'If. You do not know that each day of those fourteen years I renewed the vow of vengeance which I had made the first day; and yet I knew not you had married Fernand, my calumniator, and that my father had died of hunger!"
"Can it be?" cried Mercédès, shuddering.
"That is what I heard on leaving my prison, fourteen years after I had entered it, and that is why, on account of the living Mercédès and my deceased father, I have sworn to revenge myself on Fernand, and—I have revenged myself."
"And you are sure the unhappy Fernand did that?"
"I am satisfied, madame, he did what I have told you; besides that is not much more odious than a Frenchman by adoption, having passed over to the English; a Spaniard by birth, having fought against the Spaniards; a stipendiary of Ali having betrayed and murdered Ali. Compared with such things, what is the letter you have just read? A lover's deception, which the woman who has married that man ought certainly to forgive, but not so the lover who was to have married her. Well! the French did not avenge themselves on the traitor; the Spaniards did not shoot the traitor; Ali, in his tomb, left the traitor unpunished; but I, betrayed, sacrificed, buried, have risen from my tomb, by the grace of God, to punish that man. He sends me for that purpose, and here I am."
The poor woman's head and arms fell; her legs bent under her, and she fell on her knees.
"Forgive, Edmond, forgive for my sake, who love you still!"
The dignity of the wife stopped the enthusiasm of the lover and the mother. Her forehead almost touched the carpet, when the count sprang forward and raised her. Then, seated on a chair, she looked at the manly countenance of Monte-Cristo, on which grief and hatred still impressed a threatening expression.
"Not crush that accursed race!" murmured he; "abandon my purpose at the moment of its accomplishment! Impossible, madame, impossible!"
"Edmond," said the poor mother, who tried every means, "when I call you Edmond, why do you not call me Mercédès?"
"Mercédès!" repeated Monte-Cristo; "Mercédès! Well! yes, you are right, that name has still its charm; and this is the first time for a long period that I have pronounced it so distinctly. O Mercédès! I have uttered your name with the sigh of melancholy, with the groan of sorrow, with the last effort of despair; I have uttered it when frozen with cold, crouched on the straw of my dungeon; I have uttered it, consumed with heat, rolling on the stone floor of my prison. Mercédès, I must revenge myself, for I suffered fourteen years,—fourteen years I wept, I cursed; now I tell you, Mercédès, I must revenge myself!"
The count, fearing to yield to the entreaties of her he had so ardently loved, recalled his sufferings to the assistance of his hatred.
"Revenge yourself then, Edmond," cried the poor mother; "but let your vengeance fall on the culprits; on him, on me, but not on my son!"
Monte-Cristo groaned, and seized his beautiful hair with both hands.
"Edmond," continued Mercédès, with her arms extended toward the count, "since I first knew you, I have adored your name, have respected your memory. Edmond, my friend, do not compel me to tarnish that noble and fine image reflected incessantly on the mirror of my heart. Edmond, if you knew all the prayers I have addressed to God for you while I thought you were living and since I have thought you must be dead! Yes, dead, alas! I thought your dead body was buried at the foot of some gloomy tower; I thought your corpse was precipitated to the bottom of one of those gulfs where jailers roll their dead prisoners, and I wept! What could I do for you, Edmond, besides pray and weep? Listen; during ten years I dreamed each night the same dream. I had been told you had endeavored to escape; that you had taken the place of another prisoner; that you had slipped into the winding-sheet of a dead body; that you had been precipitated alive from the top of the Château-d'If; and the cry you uttered as you dashed upon the rocks first revealed to your jailers that they were your murderers. Well! Edmond, I swear to you, by the head of that son for whom I entreat your pity,—Edmond, during ten years I have seen every night men balancing something shapeless and unknown at the top of a rock; during ten years I have heard each night a terrible cry which has awoke me, shuddering and cold. And I, too, Edmond—oh! believe me—guilty as I was—oh! yes, I too, have suffered much!"
"Have you felt your father die in your absence?" cried Monte-Cristo, again thrusting his hands in his hair: "have you seen the woman you loved giving her hand to your rival while you were perishing at the bottom of a dungeon?"
"No," interrupted Mercédès, "but I have seen him whom I loved on the point of murdering my son."
Mercédès pronounced these words with such deep anguish, with an accent of such intense despair, that Monte-Cristo could not restrain a sob. The lion was daunted; the avenger was conquered.
"What do you ask of me?" said he,—"your son's life! Well! he shall live!"
Mercédès uttered a cry which made the tears start from Monte-Cristo's eyes; but these tears disappeared almost instantaneously, for, doubtless, God had sent some angel to collect them; far more precious were they in his eyes than the richest pearls of Guzerat and of Ophir.
"Oh!" said she, seizing the count's hand, and raising it to her lips; "oh! thank you, thank you, Edmond! now you are exactly what I dreamt you were, such as I always loved you. Oh! now I may say so."
"So much the better," replied Monte-Cristo; "as that poor Edmond will not have long to be loved by you. Death is about to return to the tomb, the phantom to retire in darkness."
"What do you say, Edmond?"
"I say, since you command me, Mercédès, I must die."
"Die! and who told you so? who talks of dying? whence have you these ideas of death?"
"You do not suppose, that publicly outraged in the face of a whole theater, in the presence of your friends and those of your son— challenged by a boy, who will glory in my pardon as in a victory—you do not suppose I can for one moment wish to live. What I most loved after you, Mercédès, was myself, my dignity, and that strength which rendered me superior to other men; that strength was my life. With one word you have crushed it, and I die."
"But the duel will not take place, Edmond, since you forgive?"
"It will take place," said Monte-Cristo, in a most solemn tone; "but instead of your son's blood which will stain the ground, mine will flow."
Mercédès shrieked, and sprang toward Monte-Cristo, but suddenly stopping: "Edmond," said she, "there is a God above us, since you live, and since I have seen you again; I trust to him from my heart. While waiting his assistance I trust to your word; you have said my son should live, have you not?"
"Yes, madame, he shall live," said Monte-Cristo, surprised that, without more emotion, Mercédès had accepted the heroic sacrifice he made for her. Mercédès extended her hand to the count.
"Edmond," said she, and her eyes were wet with tears while looking at him to whom she spoke, "how noble it is of you, how great the action you have just performed; how sublime to have taken pity on a poor woman who offered herself to you with every chance against her! Alas! I am grown old with grief more than with years, and cannot now remind my Edmond by a smile, or by a look, of that Mercédès whom he once spent so many hours in contemplating. Ah! believe me, Edmond, I told you, I too had suffered much; I repeat it, it is melancholy to pass one's life without having one joy to recall, without preserving a single hope; but that proves that all is not yet over. No; it is not finished, I feel it by what remains in my heart. Oh! I repeat it, Edmond; what you have just done is beautiful—it is grand, it is sublime."
"Do you say so, now, Mercédès, and what would you say if you knew the extent of the sacrifice I make to you? Suppose the Creator, after having made the world and vivified chaos, had stopped at the end of one-third of his work, in order to spare an angel the tears which the crimes of man would one day evoke from heavenly eyes; suppose that when all was prepared, ready, quickened, God at the time when he saw his work was good had extinguished the sun and kicked aside the earth into endless night, then you might have some idea of my sacrifice. But, no, no, you cannot imagine what I lose in sacrificing my life at this moment."
Mercédès looked at the count with an air which depicted at the same time her astonishment, her admiration, and her gratitude. Monte-Cristo pressed his forehead on his burning hands, as if his brain could no longer bear alone the weight of its thoughts.
"Edmond," said Mercédès, "I have but one word more to say to you."
The count smiled bitterly.
"Edmond," continued she, "you will see if my face is pale, if my eyes are dull, if my beauty is gone; if Mercédès, in short, no longer resembles her former self in her features, you will see her heart is still the same. Adieu, then, Edmond; I have nothing more to ask of Heaven—I have seen you again—and have found you as noble and as great as formerly you were. Adieu, Edmond, adieu, and thank you."
But the count did not answer. Mercédès opened the door of the cabinet and had disappeared before he had recovered from the painful and profound reverie into which his thwarted vengeance had plunged him.
The clock of the Invalides struck one when the carriage which conveyed Madame de Morcerf rolled away on the pavement of the Champs Elysées, and made Monte-Cristo raise his head.
"What a fool I was," said he, "not to tear my heart out on the day when I resolved to avenge myself!"