XXIII. L'île de Monte-Cristo.

XXIII

The Island of Monte Cristo.

At last Dantès, by one of those unhoped-for strokes of fortune which sometimes befall those on whom the rigour of fate has long wearied itself, Dantès was about to reach his goal by a simple and natural means, and set foot upon the island without inspiring the least suspicion in anyone.

Only one night separated him from that long-awaited departure.

That night was one of the most feverish Dantès had ever passed. During that night, all chances, good and bad, presented themselves in turn to his mind: if he closed his eyes, he saw the letter of Cardinal Spada written in flaming characters upon the wall; if he dozed for an instant, the most senseless dreams came whirling through his brain. He descended into grottoes paved with emeralds, walled with rubies, hung with diamond stalactites. Pearls fell drop by drop like the underground water that ordinarily filters through.

Edmond, ravished, wonder-struck, filled his pockets with jewels; then he returned to daylight, and those jewels had changed into mere pebbles. Then he tried to re-enter those marvellous grottoes, only glimpsed; but the path twisted in infinite spirals: the entrance had become invisible again. He sought in vain through his weary memory for that magic and mysterious word which opened for the Arab fisherman the splendid caverns of Ali Baba. All was useless; the vanished treasure had become once more the property of the genii of the earth, from whom for one instant he had hoped to wrest it.

Day came, almost as feverish as the night had been; but it brought logic to the aid of imagination, and Dantès was able to fix a plan hitherto vague and floating in his brain.

Evening came, and with evening the preparations for departure. Those preparations were a means for Dantès of hiding his agitation. Little by little, he had assumed such authority over his companions as to command as though he were master of the vessel; and as his orders were always clear, precise, and easy to execute, his companions obeyed him not only with promptness, but even with pleasure.

The old sailor let him do as he would: he too had recognised the superiority of Dantès over his other sailors and over himself. He saw in the young man his natural successor, and regretted not having a daughter with whom to bind Edmond by that high alliance.

At seven in the evening all was ready; at ten minutes past seven they were rounding the lighthouse, just as the lighthouse was being lit.

The sea was calm, with a fresh wind from the south-east; they sailed beneath an azure sky, where God too was lighting, one by one, His lighthouses, each of which is a world. Dantès declared that all might turn in, and that he would take charge of the helm.

When the Maltese (as Dantès was called) had made such a declaration, that sufficed, and each went to bed in peace.

This happened sometimes: Dantès, thrown from solitude back into the world, felt from time to time an imperious need of solitude. Now, what solitude is at once more immense and more poetic than that of a vessel floating isolated upon the sea, during the darkness of night, in the silence of immensity and beneath the eye of the Lord?

This time, solitude was peopled with his thoughts, the night illumined by his illusions, the silence animated by his promises.

When the patron awoke, the vessel was sailing under all her canvas: there was not a scrap of sail that was not swollen by the wind; they were making more than two leagues and a half an hour.

The island of Monte Cristo was growing on the horizon.

Edmond gave the vessel back to her master and went in his turn to stretch himself in his hammock: but, despite his sleepless night, he could not close an eye for a single instant.

Two hours later, he came up again on deck; the vessel was in the act of rounding the island of Elba. They were off Marciana and above the flat and green island of Pianosa. One could see springing into the azure of the sky the flaming summit of Monte Cristo.

Dantès ordered the helmsman to put the tiller to port, so as to leave Pianosa on the right; he had calculated that this manoeuvre ought to shorten the route by two or three knots.

Towards five in the evening, they had a full view of the island. Its minutest details could be made out, thanks to that atmospheric limpidity which is peculiar to the light poured forth by the rays of the sun at its decline.

Edmond devoured with his eyes that mass of rocks which passed through all the twilight colours, from vivid pink to deep blue; from time to time, burning flushes mounted to his face; his brow reddened, a purple cloud passed before his eyes.

Never had a gamester with his whole fortune at stake felt, upon a throw of the dice, the anguish that Edmond felt in his paroxysms of hope.

Night came: at ten in the evening they came to land; the Young Amelia was the first at the rendezvous.

Dantès, despite his usual command over himself, could not contain himself: he was the first to leap upon the shore; had he dared, like Brutus, he would have kissed the earth.

It was close night; but at eleven the moon rose from the midst of the sea, silvering every ripple of its surface; then her rays, as she rose, began to play in white cascades of light upon the piled-up rocks of that other Pelion.

The island was familiar to the crew of the Young Amelia: it was one of their usual stations. As for Dantès, he had recognised it on each of his voyages to the Levant, but never had he landed there.

He questioned Jacopo.

“Where are we to pass the night?” he asked.

“Why, aboard the tartan,” answered the sailor.

“Should we not be better in the grottoes?”

“What grottoes?”

“Why, the grottoes of the island.”

“I know of no grottoes,” said Jacopo.

A cold sweat passed over Dantès’ brow.

“Are there no grottoes at Monte Cristo?” he asked.

“No.”

Dantès remained for an instant bewildered; then he reflected that these grottoes might have been filled up since by some accident, or even stopped up, for greater security, by Cardinal Spada. The whole, in that case, was to find again that lost opening. It was useless to seek it during the night. Dantès therefore put off the search until the morrow. Besides, a signal hoisted half a league out at sea, and to which the Young Amelia replied at once with a like signal, indicated that the moment was come to set to work. The belated vessel, reassured by the signal which was to make known to the last arrival that there was full security in joining, soon appeared white and silent as a phantom, and came to cast anchor a cable’s length from the shore.

Straightway the unloading began.

Dantès, as he worked, thought of the shout of joy that by a single word he might provoke among all these men if he spoke aloud the unceasing thought that hummed low in his ear and at his heart. But, far from revealing the magnificent secret, he feared he had already said too much, and that by his comings and goings, his repeated questions, his minute observations and his continual preoccupation, he had aroused suspicion. Happily, for this circumstance at least, a past full sorrowful reflected upon his face an indelible sadness, and the gleams of gaiety seen beneath that cloud were in truth but lightning-flashes.

No one, then, suspected anything; and when on the morrow, taking a gun, shot, and powder, Dantès manifested a wish to go and kill some of those numerous wild goats that were seen leaping from rock to rock, this excursion of Dantès was attributed only to love of the chase or to a desire for solitude. There was only Jacopo who insisted on following him. Dantès would not oppose it, fearing lest this repugnance to being accompanied should inspire some suspicion. But scarcely had he gone a quarter of a league, when, having found occasion to fire and kill a kid, he sent Jacopo to carry it to his companions, inviting them to cook it and, when it was done, to give him the signal to eat his share by firing a shot; some dried fruits and a flask of Monte-Pulciano wine were to complete the ordering of the meal.

Dantès continued his way, turning from time to time. Arrived at the top of a rock, he saw a thousand feet below him his companions, whom Jacopo had just rejoined, and who were already busily engaged in the preparations for breakfast, increased, thanks to Edmond’s skill, by a capital dish.

Edmond looked at them for an instant with that sweet and sad smile of a superior man.

“In two hours,” said he, “these men will set sail again, rich with fifty piastres, to go, risking their lives, and try to earn fifty more; then they will return, rich with six hundred livres, squander that treasure in some town, with the pride of sultans and the confidence of nabobs. To-day, hope makes me despise their wealth, which seems to me the deepest misery; to-morrow, disappointment may perhaps force me to regard that deepest misery as supreme happiness.... Oh no!” cried Edmond, “that shall not be; the learned, the infallible Faria would not have been mistaken on this one thing. Besides, it were as well to die as to continue leading this miserable and inferior life.”

Thus Dantès, who but three months ago aspired only to liberty, already found liberty not enough and aspired to wealth; the fault was not Dantès’s, but God’s, who, in limiting the power of man, has given him infinite desires! Meanwhile, by a path lost between two walls of rock, following a track hollowed by the torrent and which, in all probability, no human foot had ever trodden, Dantès had drawn near to the spot where he supposed the grottoes must have been. As he skirted the shore and examined the slightest objects with serious attention, he thought he remarked upon certain rocks notches cut by the hand of man.

Time, which casts over all physical things its mantle of moss, as over moral things its mantle of oblivion, seemed to have respected these marks traced with a certain regularity, and probably with the aim of indicating a track; from time to time, however, these marks disappeared beneath clumps of myrtle, which blossomed in great bouquets laden with flowers, or beneath parasitic lichens. It was then needful that Edmond part the branches or lift the mosses to find again the guiding marks that led him into this other labyrinth. These marks had, moreover, given good hope to Edmond. Why should it not be the cardinal who had traced them, that they might, in case of a catastrophe he had not been able to foresee so complete, serve as a guide to his nephew? This lonely place was well that which would suit a man who wished to bury a treasure. Only, had not these faithless marks attracted other eyes than those for which they were traced, and had the isle of gloomy marvels faithfully kept its magnificent secret?

However, at some sixty paces from the port, it seemed to Edmond, still hidden from his companions by the inequalities of the ground, that the notches stopped; only, they led to no grotto. A great round rock resting on a solid base was the only goal to which they seemed to conduct. Edmond thought that instead of having arrived at the end, he was perhaps, on the contrary, only at the beginning; he took the opposite course accordingly and retraced his steps.

During this time, his companions prepared the breakfast, went to draw water at the spring, carried the bread and fruit ashore and cooked the kid. Just at the moment when they were taking it from its improvised spit, they caught sight of Edmond, who, light and bold as a chamois, was leaping from rock to rock: they fired a shot to give him the signal. The hunter changed his direction at once, and came running back to them. But at the moment when all were following him with their eyes in the kind of flight he was executing, taxing his skill with temerity, as if to justify their fears, Edmond’s foot slipped: they saw him stagger on the crest of a rock, utter a cry, and disappear.

All sprang with one bound, for all loved Edmond, despite his superiority; yet it was Jacopo who arrived first.

He found Edmond stretched bleeding and almost senseless: he must have rolled from a height of twelve or fifteen feet. They poured a few drops of rum into his mouth, and this remedy, which had already had such efficacy upon him, produced the same effect as the first time.

Edmond reopened his eyes, complained of suffering a keen pain in the knee, a great heaviness in the head, and insupportable twinges in the loins. They would have carried him to the shore; but when they touched him, though it was Jacopo who directed the operation, he declared, groaning, that he felt not the strength to bear the transport.

It is needless to say there was no question of breakfast for Dantès; but he insisted that his comrades, who had not the same reasons as he for fasting, should return to their post. As for him, he maintained that he needed only a little rest, and that on their return they would find him relieved.

The sailors did not need much pressing: sailors were hungry, the smell of the kid reached them, and one is not ceremonious among sea-wolves.

An hour later, they returned. All that Edmond had been able to do was to drag himself some ten paces to lean against a mossy rock.

But, far from calming, Dantès’s pains seemed to increase in violence. The old patron, who was forced to sail in the morning to land his cargo on the borders of Piedmont and France, between Nice and Fréjus, insisted that Dantès should try to rise. Dantès made superhuman efforts to comply with this invitation, but at each effort he fell back moaning and pale.

“His back is broken,” said the patron in a low voice: “no matter! he is a good comrade, and we must not abandon him; let us try to carry him to the tartan.”

But Dantès declared he would rather die where he was than suffer the atrocious pains that the slightest movement would cause him.

“Well,” said the patron, “come what may, but it shall not be said we left a brave comrade like you without help. We shall not sail until this evening.”

This proposal greatly astonished the sailors, though none of them opposed it, on the contrary. The patron was so strict a man, that it was the first time he had been seen renounce an enterprise, or even delay its execution.

So Dantès would not suffer so grave an infraction of the rules of discipline established aboard to be made in his favour.

“No,” said he to the patron, “I have been clumsy, and it is just that I bear the penalty of my clumsiness. Leave me a small provision of biscuit, a gun, powder and ball to kill kids, or even to defend myself, and a mattock to build me, if you are too long in coming for me, a kind of hut.”

“But you will die of hunger,” said the patron.

“I had rather that,” answered Edmond, “than suffer the unheard-of pains that a single movement makes me endure.”

The patron turned towards the vessel, which was rocking with a beginning of weighing anchor in the little port, ready to take the sea again as soon as her toilet was complete.

“What would you have us do then, Maltese,” said he, “we cannot abandon you thus, and yet we cannot stay?”

“Go, go!” cried Dantès.

“We shall be at least eight days absent,” said the patron, “and even then we must diverge from our route to come and fetch you.”

“Listen,” said Dantès; “if within two or three days you meet some fishing or other vessel that comes into these waters, recommend me to her, I will give twenty-five piastres for my return to Leghorn. If you meet none, come back.”

The patron shook his head.

“Listen, patron Baldi, there is a means of reconciling all,” said Jacopo; “you go; I will stay with the wounded man to nurse him.”

“And you will give up your share of the division?” said Edmond.

“Yes,” said Jacopo, “and without regret.”

“Come, you are a brave fellow, Jacopo,” said Edmond; “God will reward you for your good will; but I need no one, thank you: a day or two of rest will set me up, and I hope to find among these rocks certain herbs excellent against bruises.”

And a strange smile passed over Dantès’s lips; he pressed Jacopo’s hand with emotion, but remained unshaken in his resolution to stay, and to stay alone.

The smugglers left Edmond what he asked, and went away, not without turning back several times, each time making him, as they turned, all the signs of a cordial farewell, to which Edmond replied with his hand only, as though he could not move the rest of his body.

Then, when they had disappeared: “’Tis strange,” murmured Dantès, laughing, “that it is among such men one finds proofs of friendship and acts of devotion.”

Then he dragged himself with caution to the top of a rock that hid from him the face of the sea, and from there he saw the tartan finish her weighing anchor, lift her cable, balance gracefully like a gull about to take flight, and depart.

At the end of an hour, she had wholly vanished: at least, from the spot where the wounded man remained, it was impossible to see her.

Then Dantès rose, more supple and lighter than one of those kids that bounded among the myrtles and lentisks on those wild rocks, took his gun in one hand, his mattock in the other, and ran to that rock at which ended the notches he had remarked upon the rocks.

“And now,” cried he, remembering that tale of the Arab fisherman which Faria had told him, “now, Sesame, open!”

“Stories of the world, in your language.”