XX. Le cimetière du château d'If.

XX

The Cemetery of the Château d'If.

On the bed, lying lengthwise and faintly lit by a misty daylight that filtered through the window, could be seen a sack of coarse canvas, beneath whose broad folds a long, stiff shape was vaguely outlined: it was Faria's last shroud, that shroud which, according to the jailers, cost so little. Thus, all was ended. A material separation already existed between Dantès and his old friend; he could no longer see his eyes, which had remained open as if to gaze beyond death; he could no longer clasp that industrious hand which had lifted for him the veil covering hidden things. Faria, the useful, the good companion to whom he had grown so strongly accustomed, existed now only in his memory. Then he sat down at the head of that terrible bed, and sank into a dark and bitter melancholy.

Alone! he had become alone again! he had fallen back into silence, he found himself face to face with nothingness!

Alone, no longer even the sight, no longer even the voice of the single human being who still bound him to the earth! Was it not better, like Faria, to go and ask of God the riddle of life, at the risk of passing through the gloomy door of sufferings!

The idea of suicide, banished by his friend, driven away by his presence, then returned to rise like a phantom beside Faria's corpse.

"If I could die," said he, "I should go where he goes, and should certainly find him again. But how to die? That is easy enough," he added, laughing; "I will stay here, I will throw myself on the first who enters, I will strangle him, and they will guillotine me."

But, as happens that in great sorrows as in great storms the abyss lies between two crests of waves, Dantès recoiled at the idea of that infamous death, and passed precipitately from this despair to an ardent thirst for life and liberty.

"Die! oh, no!" he cried, "it is not worth having lived so much, suffered so much, to die now! To die was well enough when I had resolved upon it, formerly, years ago; but now it would be truly too much to aid my wretched destiny. No, I will live, I will struggle to the end; no, I will reconquer the happiness that has been taken from me! Before I die, I forgot that I have my tormentors to punish, and perhaps too, who knows? some friends to reward. But now they will forget me here, and I shall leave my dungeon only as Faria did."

But at these words, Edmond remained motionless, his eyes fixed like a man struck by a sudden idea, but whom that idea terrifies; suddenly he rose, put his hand to his brow as if he were dizzy, made two or three turns about the room, and came back to stop before the bed....

"Oh! oh!" he murmured, "who sends me this thought? is it you, my God? Since only the dead leave here freely, let us take the place of the dead."

And without losing time to return upon this decision, as if not to give thought the leisure to destroy that desperate resolution, he bent over the hideous sack, opened it with the knife Faria had made, drew the corpse from the sack, carried it to his own room, laid it in his bed, covered its head with the rag of linen he was himself accustomed to wear, drew his coverlet over it, kissed that icy brow once more, tried to close those rebellious eyes which continued to remain open, frightful in their absence of thought, turned the head along the wall so that the jailer, bringing his evening meal, might think he was lying down, as was often his habit, went back into the gallery, drew the bed against the wall, returned into the other chamber, took from the cupboard the needle and thread, threw off his rags so that beneath the canvas the bare flesh might be plainly felt, slipped into the slit sack, placed himself in the attitude of the corpse, and sewed up the seam from within.

One might have heard his heart beat had anyone unhappily entered at that moment.

Dantès might well have waited until after the evening visit, but he feared lest before then the governor should change his mind and have the corpse removed.

Then his last hope would be lost.

In any case, his plan was now fixed.

This is what he counted on doing.

If, during the passage, the gravediggers recognized that they were carrying a living man instead of a dead one, Dantès gave them no time to recognize it; with a vigorous knife-stroke he opened the sack from top to bottom, profited by their terror and escaped; if they tried to stop him, he used the knife.

If they conducted him to the cemetery and laid him in a grave, he let himself be covered with earth; then, as it was night, scarcely had the gravediggers turned their backs than he opened a passage through the loose soil and fled: he hoped the weight would not be too great for him to lift.

If he were mistaken, if on the contrary the earth were too heavy, he died suffocated, and so much the better! all was ended.

Dantès had not eaten since the day before, but he had not thought of hunger in the morning, and thought of it not yet. His position was too precarious to leave him time to fix his mind on any other idea.

The first danger Dantès ran was that the jailer, bringing his seven o'clock supper, might perceive the substitution that had been made; happily, twenty times, whether from misanthropy or from fatigue, Dantès had received the jailer lying down; and in that case, usually, the man set down his bread and soup on the table and withdrew without speaking to him.

But, this time, the jailer might depart from his habits of silence, speak to Dantès, and seeing that Dantès answered him not, approach the bed and discover all.

When seven in the evening drew near, Dantès's anguish truly began. His hand, pressed upon his heart, strove to check its beating, while with the other he wiped the sweat from his brow that streamed down his temples. From time to time shivers ran through his whole body and clutched his heart as in a frozen vice. Then, he believed he was going to die. The hours passed without bringing any movement in the castle, and Dantès understood that he had escaped that first danger; it was of good omen. At length, toward the hour fixed by the governor, steps were heard on the stair. Edmond understood that the moment had come; he recalled all his courage, holding his breath; happy had he been able to hold likewise, and as easily, the precipitate pulsations of his arteries.

They stopped at the door; the step was double. Dantès guessed that they were the two gravediggers come to fetch him. This suspicion turned to certainty when he heard the noise they made in setting down the bier.

The door opened, a shaded light reached Dantès's eyes. Through the canvas that covered him, he saw two shadows approach his bed. A third stood at the door, holding a lantern in his hand. Each of the two men who had approached the bed seized the sack by one of its ends.

"Why, he is still heavy, for such a lean old man!" said one of them, lifting him by the head.

"They say that each year adds half a pound to the weight of the bones," said the other, taking him by the feet.

"Have you tied your knot?" asked the first.

"I should be a fool to burden ourselves with useless weight," said the second; "I will do it yonder."

"You are right; let us go, then."

"Why that knot?" Dantès asked himself.

They transported the pretended dead man from the bed to the bier.

Edmond stiffened himself to play the better his part of a corpse.

They laid him on the bier; and the procession, lighted by the man with the lantern, who walked before, ascended the stair.

Suddenly, the fresh, sharp air of night flooded him. Dantès recognized the mistral. It was a sudden sensation, full at once of delight and of anguish.

The bearers made some twenty steps, then stopped and set the bier upon the ground.

One of the bearers went away, and Dantès heard his shoes resound upon the flagstones.

"Where can I be?" he asked himself.

"You know he is not light at all!" said he who remained near Dantès, sitting on the edge of the bier.

Dantès's first feeling had been to escape; happily, he restrained himself.

"Come, light me, you brute," said he of the two bearers who had gone away, "or I shall never find what I am looking for."

The man with the lantern obeyed the injunction, though, as has been seen, it was couched in unbecoming terms.

"What can he be looking for?" Dantès asked himself. "A spade, no doubt."

An exclamation of satisfaction indicated that the gravedigger had found what he sought.

"At last," said the other, "it is not without trouble."

"No," he answered, "but he will have lost nothing by waiting."

At these words, he came near Edmond, who heard deposited beside him a heavy, resounding body; at the same moment, a rope encircled his feet with a keen and painful pressure.

"Well, is the knot tied?" asked he of the gravediggers who had remained idle.

"And well tied," said the other; "I warrant you."

"In that case, on the road."

And the bier, lifted, resumed its way.

They made some fifty steps, then stopped to open a door, then set out again. The noise of the waves breaking against the rocks on which the castle is built reached Dantès's ear more distinctly as they advanced.

"Bad weather!" said one of the bearers; "it will not be good to be at sea tonight."

"Yes, the abbé runs a great risk of being wet," said the other—and they burst out laughing.

Dantès did not very well understand the jest, but his hair stood up on his head none the less.

"Good, here we are!" resumed the first.

"Farther, farther," said the other; "you know the last one stopped on the way, broken on the rocks, and the governor told us next day we were lazy fellows."

They made four or five steps more, still ascending, then Dantès felt himself taken by the head and by the feet and swung.

"One," said the gravediggers.

"Two."

"Three!"

At the same time, Dantès felt himself launched, in fact, into an enormous void, traversing the air like a wounded bird, falling, ever falling, with a terror that froze his heart. Though drawn downward by something heavy that precipitated his rapid flight, it seemed to him that this fall lasted a century. At length, with a frightful noise, he entered like an arrow into an icy water that made him give a cry, stifled at once by the immersion.

Dantès had been flung into the sea, to the bottom of which a thirty-six-pound shot attached to his feet was dragging him.

The sea is the cemetery of the Château d'If.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”