III. Les Catalans.

III

The Catalans.

A hundred paces from the spot where the two friends, eyes on the horizon and ear alert, were sipping the sparkling wine of La Malgue, there rose, behind a bare hillock gnawed by the sun and the mistral, the village of the Catalans.

One day, a mysterious colony set out from Spain and came ashore on the spit of land where it still is today. It arrived from no one knew where and spoke an unknown tongue. One of the chiefs, who understood Provençal, asked the commune of Marseille to give them that bare and arid promontory, onto which they had just hauled their vessels, like the mariners of antiquity. The request was granted, and three months later, around the twelve or fifteen craft that had brought these sea gypsies, a little village arose.

This village, built in a strange and picturesque fashion, half Moorish, half Spanish, is the one seen today inhabited by the descendants of those men, who speak the language of their fathers. For three or four centuries they have remained faithful to that little promontory upon which they had fallen, like a flock of seabirds, without mingling at all with the population of Marseille, marrying among themselves, and preserving the customs and costume of the motherland, just as they have preserved its speech.

Our readers must follow us through the single street of this little village, and enter with us one of those houses which the sun has given, without, that fine dead-leaf color peculiar to the monuments of the region, and, within, a coat of whitewash, that white tint which forms the only ornament of Spanish posadas.

A beautiful young girl, with hair black as jet, with eyes velvety like those of the gazelle, stood leaning against a partition, and crumbled between her slender fingers, of antique outline, an innocent heather whose flowers she plucked, and whose remnants already strewed the ground; moreover, her arms bare to the elbow, her browned arms, but which seemed modeled on those of the Venus of Arles, trembled with a sort of febrile impatience, and she struck the earth with her supple and arched foot, so that one caught a glimpse of the pure, proud and bold form of her leg, imprisoned in a red cotton stocking with grey and blue clocks.

Three paces from her, seated on a chair which he rocked with a jerky motion, his elbow resting on a worm-eaten old piece of furniture, a tall young man of twenty to twenty-two was looking at her with an air in which anxiety and vexation struggled; his eyes questioned, but the firm and fixed gaze of the young girl dominated her interlocutor.

"Come now, Mercédès," said the young man, "Easter is coming back, it is the time to have a wedding; answer me!"

"I have answered you a hundred times, Fernand, and indeed you must be a very great enemy to yourself to question me again!"

"Well, repeat it once more, I beg you, repeat it once more so that I may come to believe it. Tell me for the hundredth time that you refuse my love, which your mother approved; make me understand well that you trifle with my happiness, that my life and death are nothing to you. Ah! my God, my God! to have dreamed for ten years of being your husband, Mercédès, and to lose that hope which was the sole aim of my life!"

"It is not I, at least, who ever encouraged you in that hope, Fernand," replied Mercédès; "you have not a single coquetry to reproach me with toward you. I have always said to you: 'I love you as a brother, but never demand anything else of me than that fraternal friendship, for my heart belongs to another.' Have I not always said that to you, Fernand?"

"Yes, I know it well, Mercédès," answered the young man; "yes, you have given yourself, toward me, the cruel merit of frankness; but do you forget that among the Catalans it is a sacred law to marry among themselves?"

"You are mistaken, Fernand, it is not a law, it is a habit, that is all; and, believe me, do not invoke that habit in your favor. You fell in the conscription, Fernand; the liberty they leave you is a mere toleration; from one moment to another you may be called under the colors. Once a soldier, what would you do with me, that is to say with a poor orphan girl, sad, without fortune, possessing as her whole wealth a cabin almost in ruins, where hang some worn nets, miserable heritage left by my father to my mother and by my mother to me? Since she died a year ago, think, Fernand, that I live almost on public charity! Sometimes you pretend that I am useful to you, and that in order to have the right to share your purse with me; and I accept, Fernand, because you are the son of a brother of my father, because we were brought up together and more still because, above all, it would grieve you too much if I refused you. But I feel well that this fish which I go to sell and from which I draw the money with which I buy the hemp that I spin, I feel well, Fernand, that it is charity."

"And what matter, Mercédès, if, poor and isolated as you are, you suit me thus better than the daughter of the proudest shipowner or the richest banker of Marseille! For us, what do we need? An honest woman and a good housewife. Where should I find better than you under those two heads?"

"Fernand," answered Mercédès, shaking her head, "one becomes a bad housewife and cannot answer for remaining an honest woman when one loves a man other than her husband. Content yourself with my friendship, for, I repeat to you, it is all that I can promise you, and I promise only what I am sure of being able to give."

"Yes, I understand," said Fernand; "you bear your poverty patiently, but you fear mine. Well, Mercédès, loved by you, I will tempt fortune; you will bring me luck, and I shall become rich: I can extend my fisherman's trade; I can enter as a clerk in a counting-house; I can myself become a merchant!"

"You can attempt none of that, Fernand; you are a soldier, and if you remain among the Catalans, it is because there is no war. Remain then a fisherman; do not dream dreams which would make reality seem yet more terrible, and content yourself with my friendship, since I cannot give you aught else."

"Well, you are right, Mercédès, I shall be a sailor; I shall have, instead of the costume of our fathers which you despise, a varnished hat, a striped shirt and a blue jacket with anchors on the buttons. Is it not thus that one must be dressed to please you?"

"What do you mean?" asked Mercédès, casting an imperious glance; "what do you mean? I do not understand you."

"I mean, Mercédès, that you are only so hard and so cruel to me because you are waiting for someone who is dressed thus. But he whom you await is perhaps inconstant, and, if he is not, the sea is so for him."

"Fernand," cried Mercédès, "I thought you good and I was mistaken! Fernand, you have a wicked heart to call to the aid of your jealousy the wrath of God! Well, yes, I hide it not, I await and I love him whom you speak of, and if he returns not, instead of accusing that inconstancy you invoke, you, I shall say that he died loving me."

The young Catalan made a gesture of rage.

"I understand you, Fernand: you will blame him for my not loving you; you will cross your Catalan knife against his poniard! What will that avail you? To lose my friendship if you are vanquished, to see my friendship turn to hate if you are victor. Believe me, picking a quarrel with a man is a poor means of pleasing the woman who loves that man. No, Fernand, you will not thus give way to your evil thoughts. Being unable to have me for wife, you will content yourself with having me for friend and sister; and besides," she added, her eyes troubled and wet with tears, "wait, wait, Fernand: you said but now the sea is treacherous, and it is already four months since he departed; for four months I have counted many storms!"

Fernand remained impassive; he sought not to wipe the tears which rolled down Mercédès's cheeks; and yet, for each of those tears, he would have given a glass of his blood; but those tears flowed for another.

He rose, made a turn in the cabin and came back, stopped before Mercédès, his eye dark and his fists clenched.

"Come, Mercédès," said he, "once more, answer: is it indeed resolved?"

"I love Edmond Dantès," said the young girl coldly, "and none other than Edmond shall be my husband."

"And you will love him always?"

"As long as I live."

Fernand lowered his head like a discouraged man, uttered a sigh that resembled a moan; then suddenly raising his brow, his teeth set and his nostrils half-open:

"But if he is dead?"

"If he is dead, I shall die."

"But if he forgets you?"

"Mercédès!" cried a joyful voice outside the house, "Mercédès!"

"Ah!" cried the young girl, blushing with joy and bounding with love, "you see well that he has not forgotten me, since there he is!"

And she sprang toward the door, which she opened, crying:

"To me, Edmond! here I am."

Fernand, pale and trembling, drew back like a traveler at sight of a serpent, and meeting his chair, he fell back seated upon it.

Edmond and Mercédès were in each other's arms. The ardent sun of Marseille, which pierced through the opening of the door, flooded them with a flood of light. At first they saw nothing of what surrounded them. An immense happiness isolated them from the world, and they spoke only in those broken words which are the outbursts of a joy so vivid that they seem the expression of pain.

Suddenly Edmond perceived the dark face of Fernand, which stood out in the shadow, pale and threatening; by a movement of which he was not himself aware, the young Catalan held his hand on the knife passed through his belt.

"Ah! pardon," said Dantès, frowning in his turn, "I had not noticed that we were three."

Then, turning toward Mercédès:

"Who is that gentleman?" asked he.

"That gentleman shall be your best friend, Dantès, for he is my friend, he is my cousin, he is my brother; it is Fernand; that is to say the man whom, after you, Edmond, I love most in the world; do you not recognize him?"

"Ah! yes indeed," said Edmond.

And, without releasing Mercédès, whose hand he held clasped in one of his, he held out with a cordial motion his other hand to the Catalan.

But Fernand, far from answering this friendly gesture, remained mute and motionless as a statue.

Then Edmond let his investigating gaze wander from Mercédès, moved and trembling, to Fernand, dark and threatening.

That single glance taught him all.

Anger rose to his brow.

"I knew not I came with such haste to your house, Mercédès, to find an enemy."

"An enemy!" cried Mercédès with a glance of wrath at her cousin; "an enemy in my house, say you, Edmond! If I believed that, I would take you under the arm and go off to Marseille, leaving the house never to enter it again."

Fernand's eye flashed lightning.

"And if harm befell you, my Edmond," she continued with that same implacable composure which proved to Fernand that the young girl had read to the bottom of his sinister thought, "if harm befell you, I would mount the cape of Morgion, and would cast myself head foremost on the rocks."

Fernand became frightfully pale.

"But you were mistaken, Edmond," she pursued; "you have no enemy here; there is only Fernand, my brother, who is going to shake your hand like a devoted friend."

And at these words, the young girl fixed her imperious face upon the Catalan, who, as if fascinated by that gaze, approached slowly toward Edmond and held out his hand.

His hatred, like an impotent wave, though furious, came to break against the ascendancy this woman exercised over him.

But scarcely had he touched Edmond's hand, than he felt he had done all he could do, and he rushed out of the house.

"Oh!" he cried, running like a madman, burying his hands in his hair, "oh! who then will deliver me from that man? Woe to me! woe to me!"

"Eh! Catalan! eh! Fernand! where are you running?" said a voice.

The young man stopped short, looked around him, and perceived Caderousse seated at table with Danglars under a leafy arbor.

"Eh!" said Caderousse, "why do you not come? Are you then in such haste that you have not time to say good day to friends?"

"Especially when they still have a bottle almost full before them," added Danglars.

Fernand looked at the two men with a bewildered air, and answered nothing.

"He seems quite crestfallen," said Danglars, nudging Caderousse with his knee; "should we have been mistaken, and that, contrary to what we had foreseen, Dantès triumphs?"

"Well! we must see," said Caderousse.

And turning back to the young man:

"Well, come, Catalan, are you making up your mind?" said he.

Fernand wiped the sweat that streamed from his brow and entered slowly under the trellis, whose shade seemed to restore some calm to his senses and whose coolness some ease to his exhausted frame.

"Good day," said he; "you called me, did you not?"

And he fell rather than sat on one of the seats which surrounded the table.

"I called you because you were running like a madman, and I was afraid you might go throw yourself into the sea," said Caderousse, laughing. "What the devil, when one has friends, it is not only to offer them a glass of wine, but also to keep them from drinking three or four pints of water."

Fernand uttered a groan that resembled a sob and let his head fall upon his two wrists, crossed on the table.

"Well, shall I tell you, Fernand," resumed Caderousse, opening the conversation with that coarse brutality of common folk to whom curiosity makes all diplomacy forgotten; "well, you look like a discomfited lover!"

And he accompanied this jest with a loud laugh.

"Bah!" answered Danglars, "a fellow built like that is not made to be unhappy in love; you are joking, Caderousse."

"Not at all," replied the latter; "listen rather how he sighs. Come, come, Fernand," said Caderousse, "lift your nose and answer us: it is not friendly not to answer friends who ask after our health."

"My health is well," said Fernand, clenching his fists but without raising his head.

"Ah! see you, Danglars," said Caderousse, making a sign with his eye to his friend; "here is the thing: Fernand, whom you see, and who is a good and brave Catalan, one of the best fishermen of Marseille, is in love with a fair girl called Mercédès; but unfortunately it appears that the fair girl, for her part, is in love with the mate of the Pharaon; and, as the Pharaon entered the port this very day, you understand?"

"No, I do not understand," said Danglars.

"The poor Fernand will have got his dismissal," continued Caderousse.

"Well, after?" said Fernand, raising his head and looking at Caderousse, like a man seeking someone on whom to let fall his anger; "Mercédès depends on no one? is she not free to love whom she will?"

"Ah! if you take it thus, it is another thing," said Caderousse; "I thought you a Catalan; and I had been told that the Catalans were not men to let themselves be supplanted by a rival; it had even been added that Fernand especially was terrible in his vengeance."

Fernand smiled with pity.

"A lover is never terrible," said he.

"Poor boy!" resumed Danglars, feigning to pity the young man from the bottom of his heart. "What would you have? he did not expect to see Dantès return thus all at once; he perhaps believed him dead, faithless, who knows? These things are the more keenly felt as they come upon us all at once."

"Ah! faith, in any case," said Caderousse, who drank as he spoke and on whom the heady wine of La Malgue was beginning to take effect, "in any case, Fernand is not the only one whom the happy arrival of Dantès thwarts, is he, Danglars?"

"No, you say true, and I would almost dare say that it will bring him ill luck."

"But no matter," resumed Caderousse, pouring a glass of wine for Fernand, and filling for the eighth or tenth time his own glass, while Danglars had scarce touched his; "no matter, meanwhile he is marrying Mercédès, the fair Mercédès; he returns for that, at least."

Meanwhile Danglars enveloped with a piercing gaze the young man, upon whose heart the words of Caderousse fell like molten lead.

"And when is the wedding?" asked he.

"Oh! it is not yet made!" murmured Fernand.

"No, but it will be," said Caderousse, "as surely as Dantès shall be captain of the Pharaon, is it not, Danglars?"

Danglars started at this unexpected thrust, and turned toward Caderousse, whose face in his turn he studied to see if the blow was premeditated; but he read nothing there but envy on that face already almost besotted by drunkenness.

"Well," said he, filling the glasses, "let us drink then to Captain Edmond Dantès, husband of the fair Catalan!"

Caderousse raised his glass to his mouth with a heavy hand and swallowed it at a draught. Fernand took his and broke it against the ground.

"Eh! eh! eh!" said Caderousse, "what do I see yonder, at the top of the hillock, in the direction of the Catalans? Look there, Fernand, you have better sight than I; I think I begin to see dimly, and, you know, wine is a traitor: one would say two lovers who walk side by side and hand in hand. God forgive me! they little suspect that we see them, and there they are kissing!"

Danglars lost not one of the anguishes of Fernand, whose face was decomposing visibly.

"Do you know them, Mr. Fernand?" said he.

"Yes," answered the latter in a hollow voice; "it is Mr. Edmond and Miss Mercédès."

"Ah! do you see!" said Caderousse, "and I who did not recognize them! Ho there! Dantès! ho there! fair girl! come here a moment, and tell us when the wedding is, for here is Mr. Fernand who is so stubborn that he will not tell us."

"Will you hold your tongue!" said Danglars, affecting to restrain Caderousse, who, with the tenacity of drunkards, leaned out of the arbor; "try to keep on your feet and leave the lovers to love in peace. See, look at Mr. Fernand, and take example: he is reasonable, he."

Perhaps Fernand, pushed to the limit, goaded by Danglars like the bull by the banderilleros, was about to spring at last, for he had already risen and seemed to gather himself together to leap upon his rival; but Mercédès, laughing and erect, raised her fair head and made her clear gaze shine; then Fernand remembered the threat she had made, to die if Edmond died, and he fell back all discouraged on his seat.

Danglars looked successively at those two men: the one stupefied by drink, the other dominated by love.

"I shall get nothing out of those fools," he murmured; "and I much fear I am here between a drunkard and a coward: here is a jealous man who makes himself drunk with wine, whereas he should intoxicate himself with gall; here is a great imbecile from whom they have just taken his mistress under his very nose and who contents himself with weeping and complaining like a child. And yet, these fellows have flaming eyes like those Spaniards, those Sicilians and those Calabrians, who avenge themselves so well; these fellows have fists to crush an ox's head as surely as would a butcher's mallet. Decidedly, the destiny of Edmond prevails; he shall marry the fair girl, he shall be captain and shall mock at us; unless..." a livid smile traced itself on Danglars's lips—"unless I meddle in it," added he.

"Hola!" Caderousse kept crying, half risen and fists on the table; "hola! Edmond! do you not then see friends, or are you already too proud to speak to them?"

"No, my dear Caderousse," answered Dantès; "I am not proud, but I am happy, and happiness blinds, I believe, even more than pride."

"That is a good explanation," said Caderousse; "eh! good day, Madame Dantès."

Mercédès saluted gravely.

"That is not yet my name," said she, "and in my country it brings ill luck, they say, to call girls by their betrothed's name before that betrothed is their husband; call me Mercédès, then, I pray you."

"You must forgive him, good neighbor Caderousse," said Dantès; "he is wrong by so little!"

"Thus the wedding is to take place shortly, Mr. Dantès?" said Danglars, saluting the two young people.

"As soon as possible, Mr. Danglars; today the agreements at Papa Dantès's, and tomorrow or the day after at latest, the betrothal dinner, here, at La Réserve. Friends will be there, I hope; that is to tell you that you are invited, Mr. Danglars; that is to tell you that you are, Caderousse."

"And Fernand," said Caderousse, laughing a pasty laugh, "is Fernand invited too?"

"My wife's brother is my brother," said Edmond; "and we should see him with profound regret, Mercédès and I, withdraw from us at such a moment."

Fernand opened his mouth to answer; but his voice expired in his throat, and he could not articulate a single word.

"Today the agreements, tomorrow or the day after the betrothal... the devil! you are in great haste, captain."

"Danglars," resumed Edmond, smiling, "I shall say to you as Mercédès said but now to Caderousse: do not give me the title which does not yet belong to me, it would bring me ill luck."

"Pardon," answered Danglars; "I was saying simply that you seemed in great haste; the devil! we have time: the Pharaon will scarce put to sea again before three months."

"One is always in haste to be happy, Mr. Danglars, for when one has suffered long one has great difficulty in believing in happiness. But it is not selfishness alone that moves me: I must go to Paris."

"Ah! indeed! to Paris: and is it the first time you go there, Dantès?"

"Yes."

"You have business there?"

"Not for my own account: a last commission of our poor captain Leclère to fulfill; you understand, Danglars, it is sacred. Besides, be easy, I shall take only time to go and return."

"Yes, yes, I understand," said Danglars aloud.

Then under his breath:

"To Paris, to deliver no doubt to his address the letter the grand marshal gave him. Pardieu! that letter sets me hatching an idea, an excellent idea! Ah! Dantès, my friend, you are not yet entered in the Pharaon's register under number 1."

Then turning back toward Edmond, who was already moving away:

"Good journey!" he cried to him.

"Thanks," answered Edmond, turning his head and accompanying that motion with a friendly gesture.

Then the two lovers continued their road, calm and joyous like two chosen ones ascending to heaven.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”