XXII. Les contrebandiers.

XXII

The Smugglers.

Dantès had not been a day on board before he had already recognized what sort of men he had to deal with. Without ever having attended the school of Abbé Faria, the worthy captain of the _Jeune-Amélie_—such was the name of the Genoese tartan—knew nearly all the languages spoken around that great lake called the Mediterranean, from Arabic to Provençal. This, by sparing him interpreters—always tiresome and sometimes indiscreet people—gave him great facility of communication, whether with the ships he met at sea, the small boats he hailed along the coasts, or finally those nameless, nationless, apparently stateless men who are always to be found on the flagstones of the quays bordering seaports, and who live on those mysterious and hidden resources which must surely be believed to come to them directly from Providence, since they have no means of visible subsistence to the naked eye. It will be guessed that Dantès was aboard a smuggling vessel.

The captain had therefore received Dantès on board with a certain distrust. He was well known to all the coast customs officers, and as between those gentlemen and himself there was an exchange of wits, one more cunning than the other, he had at first thought Dantès was an emissary of the excise lady, who was employing this ingenious means of penetrating some of the secrets of the trade. But the brilliant way in which Dantès had extricated himself from the test when he had put the ship close to the wind had entirely convinced him; then afterwards, when he had seen that light smoke floating like a plume above the bastion of the Château d'If, and had heard the distant noise of the explosion, he had for an instant the idea that he had just received on board one to whom, as to the entrances and exits of kings, the honors of the cannon were accorded. This, it must be said, alarmed him less already than if the newcomer had been a customs officer; but this second supposition soon vanished like the first at the sight of the perfect tranquility of his recruit.

Edmond thus had the advantage of knowing what his captain was without the captain being able to know what he was. From whatever side the old sailor or his comrades attacked him, he held firm and made no confession, giving plenty of details about Naples and Malta, which he knew as well as Marseille, and maintaining, with a firmness that did honor to his memory, his first story. It was therefore the Genoese, subtle as he was, who allowed himself to be deceived by Edmond, in whose favor spoke his gentleness, his nautical experience, and above all his most learned dissimulation.

And then, perhaps the Genoese was like those clever people who never know anything but what they ought to know, and who believe only what they have an interest in believing.

It was therefore in this reciprocal situation that they arrived at Leghorn.

Edmond was to undergo there a new trial: it was to know whether he would recognize himself, after fourteen years of not having seen himself. He had kept a fairly precise idea of what the young man had been; he was going to see what he had become as a man. In the eyes of his comrades, his wish was fulfilled: twenty times already he had put in at Leghorn; he knew a barber in the Rue Saint-Ferdinand. He went in to have his beard and hair cut.

The barber looked with astonishment at this man with long locks and a thick black beard, who resembled one of those beautiful heads by Titian. It was not yet the fashion at that time to wear the beard and hair so luxuriant: today a barber would only be astonished that a man endowed with such great physical advantages should consent to deprive himself of them.

The Leghorn barber set to work without remark.

When the operation was finished, when Edmond felt his chin entirely shaved, when his hair was reduced to ordinary length, he asked for a mirror and looked at himself.

He was then thirty-three years old, as we have said, and those fourteen years of prison had, so to speak, brought a great moral change to his face.

Dantès had entered the Château d'If with that round, laughing, open face of the happy young man, to whom the first steps in life have been easy, and who counts on the future as on the natural deduction of the past: all that was much changed.

His oval face had lengthened; his laughing mouth had taken on those firm, decided lines that indicate resolution; his eyebrows had arched beneath a single pensive wrinkle; his eyes had become imbued with a deep sadness, from the depths of which there flashed from time to time dark gleams of misanthropy and hatred; his complexion, so long removed from daylight and the sun's rays, had taken on that matte hue which, when their face is framed in black hair, gives the aristocratic beauty of men of the North. This profound knowledge he had acquired had, moreover, reflected upon his whole countenance a halo of intelligent self-assurance; besides, although naturally of rather tall stature, he had acquired that squat vigor of a body always concentrating its forces within itself.

In place of the elegance of nervous, slender forms had come the solidity of rounded, muscular forms. As for his voice, prayers, sobbings, and imprecations had changed it, now into a tone of strange sweetness, now into a harsh and almost hoarse accentuation.

Moreover, constantly in half-light and darkness, his eyes had acquired that singular faculty of distinguishing objects at night, as do those of the hyena and the wolf.

Edmond smiled as he saw himself: it was impossible that his best friend, if indeed he still had one, should recognize him; he did not even recognize himself.

The captain of the _Jeune-Amélie_, who was very anxious to keep among his men a man of Edmond's worth, had proposed to him some advances on his share of future profits, and Edmond had accepted; his first care, on leaving the barber who had just wrought this first metamorphosis upon him, was therefore to enter a shop and buy a complete sailor's outfit: this outfit, as we know, is very simple; it consists of white trousers, a striped shirt, and a Phrygian cap.

It was in this dress, returning to Jacopo the shirt and trousers he had lent him, that Edmond reappeared before the captain of the _Jeune-Amélie_, to whom he was obliged to repeat his story. The captain could not recognize in this dandy and elegant sailor the man with the thick beard, the hair matted with seaweed, and the body drenched with seawater, whom he had taken aboard naked and dying on the deck of his ship.

Carried away by his good looks, he renewed his offers of engagement to Dantès; but Dantès, who had his plans, would accept them only for three months.

Besides, it was a very active crew that of the _Jeune-Amélie_, and subject to the orders of a captain who had formed the habit of not losing his time. He had scarcely been eight days at Leghorn when the rounded flanks of the vessel were filled with painted muslins, prohibited cottons, English powder, and tobacco on which the excise had forgotten to put its stamp. It was a question of getting all this out of Leghorn, a free port, and landing it on the shore of Corsica, whence certain speculators undertook to pass the cargo into France.

They set out; Edmond cleft anew that azure sea, the first horizon of his youth, which he had so often seen again in the dreams of his prison. He left Gorgona on his right, Pianosa on his left, and advanced toward the homeland of Paoli and Napoleon.

The next day, on coming on deck—which he always did rather early—the captain found Dantès leaning against the bulwark of the vessel and looking with a strange expression at a heap of granite rocks that the rising sun was flooding with rosy light: it was the island of Monte-Cristo.

The _Jeune-Amélie_ left it about three-quarters of a league to starboard and continued on her way toward Corsica.

Dantès mused, as he coasted this island with a name so resonant for him, that he had only to leap into the sea and in half an hour he would be on that promised land. But there, what would he do, without instruments to discover his treasure, without arms to defend it? Besides, what would the sailors say? what would the captain think? He must wait.

Happily, Dantès knew how to wait: he had waited fourteen years for his liberty; he could well, now that he was free, wait six months or a year for wealth.

Would he not have accepted liberty without wealth if it had been offered him?

Besides, was not this wealth wholly chimerical? Born in the sick brain of poor Abbé Faria, had it not died with him?

True, that letter of Cardinal Spada was strangely precise.

And Dantès repeated from end to end in his memory that letter, of which he had not forgotten a word.

Evening came; Edmond saw the island pass through all the tints that twilight brings with it, and lose itself for everyone in darkness; but he, with his gaze accustomed to the darkness of the prison, no doubt continued to see it, for he remained the last upon the deck.

The next day, they awoke abreast of Aleria. All day they ran on tacks; in the evening fires were lit upon the coast. From the disposition of these fires it was no doubt recognized that they might land, for a signal lantern went up in place of a flag at the peak of the little vessel, and they drew within musket shot of the shore.

Dantès had remarked, for these solemn circumstances no doubt, that the captain of the _Jeune-Amélie_, as he approached the land, had mounted on pivots two small swivel guns, like rampart rifles, which, without making much noise, could send a pretty four-pound ball a thousand paces.

But, for that evening, the precaution was superfluous; everything passed in the gentlest and most polite manner in the world. Four longboats approached noiselessly the vessel, which, no doubt to do them honor, put her own longboat to sea; so it was that the five longboats plied so well that at two in the morning the whole cargo was passed from the side of the _Jeune-Amélie_ to the mainland.

That very night, so orderly a man was the captain of the _Jeune-Amélie_, the distribution of the prize money was made: each man had a hundred Tuscan livres as his share, that is to say about eighty francs of our money.

But the expedition was not finished; they set course for Sardinia. It was a question of going to reload the vessel they had just unloaded.

The second operation was done as well as the first; the _Jeune-Amélie_ was in luck.

The new cargo was for the duchy of Lucca. It consisted almost entirely of Havana cigars, Xeres and Malaga wines.

There they had a brush with the excise, that eternal enemy of the captain of the _Jeune-Amélie_. A customs officer remained on the ground, and two sailors were wounded. Dantès was one of those two sailors; a ball had passed through the flesh of his left shoulder.

Dantès was almost happy at this skirmish and almost content at this wound; these rough instructresses had taught him, in his own regard, with what eye he looked upon danger and with what heart he bore pain. He had looked upon danger laughing, and in receiving the blow he had said like the Greek philosopher: "Pain, thou art not an evil."

Moreover, he had examined the customs officer mortally wounded, and, whether from heat of blood in action or chill of human feelings, this sight had produced on him only a slight impression. Dantès was on the path he wished to travel, and marched toward the goal he wished to attain: his heart was in train of petrifying in his breast.

Besides, Jacopo, who, on seeing him fall, had believed him dead, had thrown himself upon him, had raised him, and finally, once raised, had nursed him like an excellent comrade.

This world was therefore not so good as Dr. Pangloss saw it; but it was therefore not so wicked as Dantès saw it either, since this man, who had nothing to expect from his companion but to inherit his share of prizes, felt so lively an affliction at seeing him killed?

Happily, as we have said, Edmond was only wounded. Thanks to certain herbs gathered at certain seasons and sold to the smugglers by old Sardinian women, the wound soon closed. Edmond then wished to tempt Jacopo; he offered him, in exchange for the care he had received from him, his share of the prizes, but Jacopo refused with indignation.

It had resulted from this sort of sympathetic devotion that Jacopo had vowed to Edmond from the first moment he had seen him, that Edmond accorded Jacopo a certain measure of affection. But Jacopo asked no more; he had instinctively divined in Edmond that supreme superiority to his position, a superiority Edmond had managed to hide from the others. And with this little that Edmond accorded him, the brave sailor was content.

So, during the long days at sea, when the vessel, running securely upon that azure sea, needed, thanks to the favorable wind swelling her sails, only the help of the helmsman, Edmond, a marine chart in hand, made himself tutor to Jacopo, as poor Abbé Faria had made himself tutor to him. He showed him the bearing of the coasts, explained to him the variations of the compass, taught him to read in that great book open above our heads, which is called the sky, and where God has written upon the azure with letters of diamond.

And when Jacopo asked him:

"What is the use of learning all these things for a poor sailor like me?"

Edmond answered:

"Who knows? you may one day be a captain of a vessel: your compatriot Bonaparte did become emperor!"

We have forgotten to say that Jacopo was Corsican.

Two months and a half had already passed in these successive cruises. Edmond had become as skilled a coaster as he had formerly been a bold sailor; he had made acquaintance with all the smugglers of the coast; he had learned all the masonic signs by which these half-pirates recognize one another.

He had passed and repassed twenty times before his island of Monte-Cristo, but in all that he had not once found the occasion to land there.

He had therefore taken a resolution:

It was, as soon as his engagement with the captain of the _Jeune-Amélie_ should have ended, to hire a small boat on his own account (Dantès could do it, for in his different cruises he had amassed a hundred piastres), and, under some pretext or other, to go to the island of Monte-Cristo.

There, he would make his researches in full liberty.

Not in full liberty, for he would, without doubt, be spied upon by those who had conveyed him.

But in this world one must needs risk something.

Prison had made Edmond prudent, and he would have been glad to risk nothing.

But however much he searched in his imagination, fertile as it was, he found no other means of arriving at the long-wished-for island than to have himself conveyed there.

Dantès was floating in this hesitation, when the captain, who had placed great confidence in him, and who had great desire to keep him in his service, took him one evening by the arm and led him into a tavern in the via del Oglio, where the best of the smugglers at Leghorn used to gather.

It was there that the affairs of the coast were usually treated. Already two or three times Dantès had entered this maritime exchange; and in seeing those bold scourers furnished by a whole littoral of some two thousand leagues around, he had asked himself of what power a man would not dispose who should succeed in giving the impulse of his will to all those convergent or divergent threads.

This time, it was a question of a great affair: it was a matter of a vessel laden with Turkish carpets, Levant and Cashmere stuffs; it was necessary to find neutral ground where the exchange could be made, then to attempt to throw these objects upon the coasts of France.

The prize was enormous if one succeeded; it was a matter of fifty to sixty piastres per man.

The captain of the _Jeune-Amélie_ proposed as landing place the island of Monte-Cristo, which, being completely deserted and having neither soldiers nor customs officers, seems to have been placed in the midst of the sea in the time of pagan Olympus by Mercury, that god of merchants and thieves—classes which we have made separate, if not distinct, and which antiquity, it appears, ranked in the same category.

At that name of Monte-Cristo, Dantès trembled with joy: he rose to hide his emotion and took a turn in the smoky tavern where all the idioms of the known world came to mingle in the lingua franca.

When he drew near the two speakers again, it was decided that they would put in at Monte-Cristo and that they would set out for this expedition the very next night.

Edmond, consulted, was of the opinion that the island offered all possible securities, and that great enterprises, to succeed, needed to be carried out swiftly.

Nothing was therefore changed in the agreed program. It was settled that they would sail the next evening, and that they would try, the sea being fine and the wind favorable, to be the evening after next in the waters of the neutral island.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”