CXI. Expiation.

CXI

Expiation.

M. de Villefort had seen the ranks of the crowd open before him, dense though it was. Great sorrows are so venerable that there is no instance, even in the most unhappy times, when the first impulse of the assembled crowd was not one of sympathy for a great catastrophe. Many hated men have been assassinated in a riot; rarely has an unhappy wretch, even a criminal, been insulted by those who witnessed his condemnation to death.

Villefort therefore crossed the line of spectators, guards, and court officials, and withdrew, acknowledged guilty by his own admission, but protected by his grief.

There are situations that men grasp with their instinct, but cannot comment upon with their reason; the greatest poet, in such a case, is he who utters the most vehement and natural cry. The crowd takes this cry for an entire narrative, and it is right to be satisfied with it, and even more right to find it sublime when it is true.

Besides, it would be difficult to describe the state of stupor in which Villefort was upon leaving the Palais, to depict that fever which made every artery throb, every fibre stiffen, every vein swell to bursting, and dissected every point of his mortal body into millions of sufferings.

Villefort dragged himself along the corridors, guided only by habit; he threw from his shoulders the magisterial robe, not because he thought to lay it aside for propriety's sake, but because it was upon his shoulders an overwhelming burden, a tunic of Nessus fertile in tortures.

He reached the Cour Dauphine staggering, caught sight of his carriage, roused the coachman by opening the door himself, and let himself fall upon the cushions, pointing in the direction of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The coachman set off.

All the weight of his collapsed fortune had just fallen back upon his head; this weight crushed him, he did not know its consequences; he had not measured them; he felt them, he did not reason his code like the cold murderer who comments upon a known article.

He had God in the depths of his heart.

"God!" he murmured, without even knowing what he said. "God! God!"

He saw only God behind the landslide that had just taken place.

The carriage rolled swiftly; Villefort, tossing upon his cushions, felt something that bothered him.

He put his hand to the object: it was a fan forgotten by Mme de Villefort between the cushion and the back of the carriage; this fan awakened a memory, and that memory was a flash of lightning in the midst of the night.

Villefort thought of his wife...

"Oh!" he cried, as if a red-hot iron pierced his heart.

Indeed, for an hour he had had before his eyes only one face of his misery, and suddenly another presented itself to his mind, and one no less terrible.

This woman, he had just been with her the inexorable judge, he had just condemned her to death; and she, she, struck with terror, crushed by remorse, sunk beneath the shame he had just inflicted upon her with the eloquence of his irreproachable virtue, she, poor weak woman defenseless against an absolute and supreme power, she was perhaps even at that moment preparing to die!

An hour had already elapsed since her condemnation; no doubt at that moment she was reviewing all her crimes in her memory, she was asking God for mercy, she was writing a letter to implore upon her knees the pardon of her virtuous husband, a pardon she was buying with her death.

Villefort uttered a second roar of grief and rage.

"Ah!" he cried, rolling upon the satin of his carriage, "this woman became criminal only because she touched me. I sweat crime, I do! and she caught crime as one catches typhus, as one catches cholera, as one catches the plague!... and I punish her!... I dared to say to her: Repent and die... I! oh! no! no! she shall live... she shall follow me... We shall flee, leave France, go before us as long as the earth can bear us. I spoke to her of the scaffold!... Great God! how did I dare pronounce that word! But I too, the scaffold awaits me!... We shall flee... Yes, I shall confess to her! yes, every day I shall tell her, humbling myself, that I too have committed a crime... Oh! alliance of the tiger and the serpent! oh! worthy wife of a husband such as I!... She must live, my infamy must pale beside hers!"

And Villefort thrust rather than lowered the front window of his coupé.

"Quick, faster!" he cried in a voice that made the coachman bound upon his seat.

The horses, carried away by fear, flew to the house.

"Yes, yes," Villefort repeated to himself as he drew nearer home, "yes, this woman must live, she must repent and raise my son, my poor child, the only one, with the indestructible old man, who has survived the destruction of the family! She loved him; it is for him she has done everything. One must never despair of the heart of a mother who loves her child; she will repent; no one shall know she was guilty; these crimes committed in my house, and of which the world is already uneasy, they will be forgotten with time, or, if some enemies remember them, well, I shall take them upon my list of crimes. One, two, three more, what matter! my wife shall escape carrying gold, and above all carrying her son, far from the gulf into which it seems to me the world is falling with me. She shall live, she shall be happy still, since all her love is in her son, and her son shall not leave her. I shall have done a good deed; that lightens the heart."

And the king's attorney breathed more freely than he had for a long time.

The carriage stopped in the courtyard of the hôtel.

Villefort sprang from the step to the landing; he saw the servants surprised to see him return so soon. He read nothing else in their faces; no one addressed him; they stopped before him, as usual, to let him pass; that was all.

He passed before Noirtier's room, and, through the door, he did not concern himself with the person who was with his father; it was elsewhere that his anxiety drew him.

"Come," he said, mounting the little staircase that led to the landing where were his wife's apartment and the empty room of Valentine; "come, nothing is changed here."

Above all he closed the landing door.

"No one must disturb us," he said; "I must be able to speak to her freely, accuse myself before her, tell her everything..."

He approached the door, put his hand on the crystal knob, the door yielded.

"Not locked! oh! well, very well," he murmured.

And he entered the little salon where in the evening they set up a bed for Édouard; for, though at boarding school, Édouard came home every evening: his mother had never wished to be separated from him.

He embraced the whole little salon with a glance.

"No one," he said; "she is in her bedroom no doubt."

He sprang toward the door. There, the bolt was drawn. He stopped trembling.

"Héloïse!" he cried.

It seemed to him he heard a piece of furniture move.

"Héloïse!" he repeated.

"Who is there?" asked the voice of her he called.

It seemed to him that this voice was weaker than usual.

"Open! open!" cried Villefort. "It is I!"

But despite this order, despite the tone of anguish with which it was given, no one opened.

Villefort burst the door in with a kick.

At the entrance of the room opening into her boudoir, Mme de Villefort was standing, pale, her features contracted, looking at him with eyes of frightful fixity.

"Héloïse! Héloïse!" said he. "What is the matter? Speak!"

The young woman extended toward him her stiff and livid hand.

"It is done, sir," said she, with a rattle that seemed to tear her throat; "what more then do you want?"

And she fell from her full height upon the carpet.

Villefort ran to her, seized her hand. That hand convulsively clutched a crystal flask with a gold stopper.

Mme de Villefort was dead.

Villefort, drunk with horror, recoiled to the threshold of the room and looked at the corpse.

"My son!" he suddenly cried; "where is my son? Édouard! Édouard!"

And he rushed from the apartment crying:

"Édouard! Édouard!"

This name was pronounced with such an accent of anguish that the servants came running.

"My son! where is my son?" asked Villefort. "Have him taken from the house, that he may not see..."

"M. Édouard is not below, sir," answered the valet.

"He is playing in the garden no doubt; look! look!"

"No, sir. Madame called her son about half an hour ago; M. Édouard went into Madame's room and has not come down since."

A icy sweat flooded Villefort's brow, his feet stumbled on the flagstone, his ideas began to whirl in his head like the disordered wheels of a watch that breaks.

"In Madame's room!" he murmured. "In Madame's room!"

And he went slowly back, wiping his brow with one hand, leaning against the wall with the other.

In re-entering the room he must see again the body of the unhappy woman.

To call Édouard, he must awaken the echo of that apartment changed into a coffin; to speak was to violate the silence of the tomb.

Villefort felt his tongue paralyzed in his throat.

"Édouard, Édouard," he stammered.

The child did not answer; where then was the child who, according to the servants, had gone into his mother's room and had not come out?

Villefort took a step forward.

The corpse of Mme de Villefort lay across the door of the boudoir in which Édouard necessarily was; that corpse seemed to watch over the threshold with fixed and open eyes, with a frightful and mysterious irony upon its lips.

Behind the corpse, the raised portière revealed part of the boudoir, a piano and the end of a blue satin divan.

Villefort took three or four steps forward, and upon the couch he perceived his child lying.

The child was asleep no doubt.

The unhappy man felt a surge of unspeakable joy; a ray of pure light descended into that hell where he was struggling.

It was then only a matter of stepping over the corpse, entering the boudoir, taking the child in his arms and fleeing with him, far, very far.

Villefort was no longer that man whose exquisite corruption made him the type of civilized man; he was a tiger wounded to death who leaves his broken teeth in his last wound.

He no longer feared prejudices, but phantoms. He took his run and bounded over the corpse, as if it had been a matter of clearing a devouring brazier.

He lifted the child in his arms, clutching him, shaking him, calling him; the child did not answer. He pressed his eager lips to his cheeks, his cheeks were livid and icy; he felt his stiffened limbs; he laid his hand on his heart, his heart no longer beat.

The child was dead.

A paper folded in four fell from Édouard's breast.

Villefort, thunderstruck, let himself sink to his knees; the child slipped from his inert arms and rolled toward his mother.

Villefort picked up the paper, recognized his wife's writing and read it avidly.

This is what it contained:

"You know if I was a good mother, since it was for my son that I made myself criminal!

"A good mother does not depart without her son!"

Villefort could not believe his eyes; Villefort could not believe his reason. He dragged himself toward the body of Édouard, which he examined once more with that minute attention the lioness gives to looking at her dead cub.

Then a tearing cry escaped his breast.

"God!" he murmured; "always God!"

These two victims terrified him, he felt rising within him the horror of that solitude peopled with two corpses.

But a moment before he was sustained by rage, that immense faculty of strong men, by despair, that supreme virtue of agony, which drove the Titans to scale the heavens, Ajax to shake his fist at the gods.

Villefort bowed his head beneath the weight of sorrows, he rose upon his knees, shook his hair damp with sweat, bristling with fright, and he who had never pitied anyone went to find the old man, his father, to have, in his weakness, someone to whom to tell his misfortune, someone near whom to weep.

He descended the staircase we know and entered Noirtier's room.

When Villefort entered, Noirtier appeared attentive to listening as affectionately as his immobility permitted, to the Abbé Busoni, always as calm and as cold as usual.

Villefort, at the sight of the abbé, put his hand to his brow. The past came back to him like one of those waves whose anger raises more foam than the other waves.

He remembered the visit he had paid the abbé the day after the dinner at Auteuil and the visit the abbé had paid him on the day of Valentine's death.

"You here, sir!" said he; "but do you never appear except to escort Death?"

Busoni drew himself up; seeing the alteration of the magistrate's face, the wild gleam of his eyes, he understood or believed he understood that the scene of the assizes was accomplished; he was ignorant of the rest.

"I came to pray upon the body of your daughter!" answered Busoni.

"And today, what do you come to do?"

"I come to tell you that you have paid me your debt enough, and that from this moment I shall pray God that He be content as I am."

"My God!" said Villefort, recoiling, terror upon his brow; "that voice, it is not the voice of the Abbé Busoni!"

"No."

The abbé tore off his false tonsure, shook his head, and his long black hair, ceasing to be compressed, fell upon his shoulders and framed his manly face.

"It is the face of M. de Monte-Cristo!" cried Villefort, his eyes wild.

"That is not yet it, Mr. King's Attorney; look better and further."

"That voice! that voice! where did I hear it for the first time?"

"You heard it for the first time at Marseille, twenty-three years ago, the day of your marriage with Mlle de Saint-Méran. Look in your files."

"You are not Busoni? you are not Monte-Cristo? My God, you are that hidden enemy, implacable, deadly! I did something against you at Marseille, oh! woe to me!"

"Yes, you are right, that is it," said the count, crossing his arms upon his broad chest; "search, search!"

"But what then have I done to you?" cried Villefort, whose mind already floated upon the limit where reason and madness mingle, in that mist which is no longer dream and is not yet awakening; "what have I done to you? speak!"

"You condemned me to a slow and hideous death, you killed my father, you took from me love with liberty, and fortune with love!"

"Who are you? who then are you? my God!"

"I am the specter of an unhappy man whom you buried in the dungeons of the Château d'If. To that specter, finally issued from his tomb, God put the mask of the Count of Monte-Cristo, and covered him with diamonds and gold so that you should not recognize him until today."

"Ah! I recognize you, I recognize you!" said the king's attorney; "you are..."

"I am Edmond Dantès!"

"You are Edmond Dantès!" cried the king's attorney, seizing the count by the wrist; "then, come!"

And he dragged him by the staircase, up which Monte-Cristo, astonished, followed him, himself ignorant of where the king's attorney was leading him, and presaging some new catastrophe.

"See! Edmond Dantès," said he, showing the count the corpse of his wife and the body of his son; "see! look, are you well avenged?..."

Monte-Cristo paled at that frightful spectacle; he understood that he had just exceeded the rights of vengeance; he understood that he could no longer say:

"God is for me and with me."

He threw himself with an inexpressible feeling of anguish upon the body of the child, reopened his eyes, felt his pulse, and sprang with him into Valentine's room, which he locked with a double turn...

"My child!" cried Villefort; "he is carrying off the corpse of my child! Oh! curse! woe! death upon you!"

And he would have sprung after Monte-Cristo; but, as in a dream, he felt his feet take root, his eyes dilate to bursting their sockets, his fingers curved upon the flesh of his breast gradually sank into it until the blood reddened his nails; the veins of his temples swelled with boiling spirits that went to lift the too-narrow vault of his skull and drowned his brain in a deluge of fire.

This fixity lasted several minutes, until the frightful overturning of reason was accomplished.

Then he uttered a great cry followed by a long burst of laughter and precipitated himself down the stairs.

A quarter of an hour later, Valentine's room reopened, and the Count of Monte-Cristo reappeared.

Pale, his eye dim, his chest oppressed, all the features of that face ordinarily so calm and so noble were overthrown by grief.

He held in his arms the child, to whom no aid had been able to restore life.

He knelt and deposited him religiously near his mother, his head resting upon her breast.

Then, rising, he went out, and meeting a servant upon the stairs:

"Where is M. de Villefort?" he asked.

The servant, without answering him, extended his hand toward the garden.

Monte-Cristo descended the steps, advanced toward the indicated spot, and saw, amid his servants making a circle around him, Villefort with a spade in his hand, digging the earth with a kind of rage.

"It is not yet here," said he; "it is not yet here."

And he dug further.

Monte-Cristo approached him, and in a low voice:

"Sir," said he, with an almost humble tone, "you have lost a son, but..."

Villefort interrupted him; he had neither listened nor heard.

"Oh! I shall find him," said he; "you may pretend he is not there, I shall find him, were I to search until the Day of Last Judgment."

Monte-Cristo recoiled with terror.

"Oh!" said he; "he is mad!"

And, as if he feared the walls of the accursed house might crumble upon him, he sprang into the street, doubting for the first time that he had the right to do what he had done.

"Oh! enough, enough of that," said he; "let us save the last."

On returning home, Monte-Cristo met Morrel, who wandered in the Hôtel des Champs-Élysées, silent as a shadow that awaits the hour fixed by God to return to its tomb.

"Prepare yourself, Maximilien," said he, with a smile; "we leave Paris tomorrow."

"Have you nothing more to do there?" asked Morrel.

"No," answered Monte-Cristo; "and God grant that I have not done too much there!"

“Stories of the world, in your language.”