IV. Complot.
IV
Plot.
Danglars followed Edmond and Mercédès with his eyes until the two lovers had disappeared around one of the angles of the Fort Saint-Nicolas; then, turning around, he caught sight of Fernand, who had fallen back, pale and trembling, onto his chair, while Caderousse stammered the words of a drinking song.
“Well now, my dear sir,” said Danglars to Fernand, “here is a marriage that does not seem to make everyone happy!”
“It is driving me to despair,” said Fernand.
“So you were in love with Mercédès?”
“I adored her!”
“For a long time?”
“Since we have known each other, I have always loved her.”
“And there you are tearing your hair out, instead of seeking a remedy for the matter! The devil! I did not think that was how people of your nation behaved.”
“What would you have me do?” asked Fernand.
“And how should I know? Is it any concern of mine? It is not I, it seems to me, who am in love with Mademoiselle Mercédès, but you. Seek, says the Gospel, and ye shall find.”
“I had already found.”
“What?”
“I wanted to stab the man, but the woman told me that if any harm came to her fiancé, she would kill herself.”
“Bah! People say such things, but they do not do them.”
“You do not know Mercédès, sir: from the moment she threatened it, she would carry it out.”
“Imbecile!” muttered Danglars. “Whether she kills herself or not, what is it to me, provided Dantès does not become captain.”
“And before Mercédès dies,” resumed Fernand with the accent of an unshakable resolution, “I would die myself.”
“That is love for you!” said Caderousse in a voice growing more and more drunk. “That is love, or I know nothing about it!”
“Come now,” said Danglars, “you seem to me a fine fellow, and I should like—the devil take me!—to help you out of your trouble; but…”
“Yes,” said Caderousse, “come now.”
“My dear,” resumed Danglars, “you are three-quarters drunk: finish the bottle and you will be completely so. Drink, and do not meddle in what we are doing: for what we are doing, one must have all one’s wits about one.”
“Drunk, me?” said Caderousse. “Come now! I could drink four more of your bottles, which are no bigger than cologne bottles! Father Pamphile, wine!”
And to back up the proposal with proof, Caderousse struck the table with his glass.
“You were saying, sir?” resumed Fernand, awaiting with eagerness the continuation of the interrupted sentence.
“What was I saying? I no longer remember. That drunkard Caderousse has made me lose the thread of my thoughts.”
“Drunk as much as you like; so much the worse for those who fear wine—it is because they have some evil thought which they fear the wine will draw from their heart.”
And Caderousse began to sing the last two verses of a song very much in vogue at that time:
_All wicked men are drinkers of water. This was well proved by the flood._
“You were saying, sir,” resumed Fernand, “that you would like to help me out of my trouble; but you added…”
“Yes, but, as I was adding… to help you out of your trouble it is enough that Dantès does not marry the one you love, and the marriage can very well fail, it seems to me, without Dantès dying.”
“Only death will part them,” said Fernand.
“You reason like a shellfish, my friend,” said Caderousse, “and here is Danglars, who is a sharp one, a cunning one, a Greek, who is going to prove to you that you are wrong. Prove it, Danglars. I vouched for you. Tell him there is no need for Dantès to die; besides, it would be a pity if he died, Dantès. He is a good fellow, I like him, I do, Dantès. To your health, Dantès.”
Fernand rose with impatience.
“Let him speak,” resumed Danglars, holding back the young man, “and besides, drunk as he is, he is not so far wrong. Absence separates as well as death; and suppose there were between Edmond and Mercédès the walls of a prison—they would be separated no more and no less than if there were the stone of a tomb.”
“Yes, but one gets out of prison,” said Caderousse, who with the remnants of his intelligence was clinging to the conversation, “and when one gets out of prison and one is called Edmond Dantès, one takes revenge.”
“What does it matter!” murmured Fernand.
“Besides,” resumed Caderousse, “why would one put Dantès in prison? He has neither stolen, nor killed, nor murdered.”
“Be quiet,” said Danglars.
“I will not be quiet, I,” said Caderousse. “I want someone to tell me why one would put Dantès in prison. I love Dantès. To your health, Dantès!”
And he swallowed another glass of wine. Danglars followed in the dull eyes of the tailor the progress of his drunkenness, and turning to Fernand:
“Well, do you understand,” he said, “that there is no need to kill him?”
“No, certainly not, if, as you were saying just now, one had the means to have Dantès arrested. But do you have that means?”
“By searching well,” said Danglars, “one might find it. But,” he continued, “what the devil! why should I meddle in this; does it concern me?”
“I do not know if it concerns you,” said Fernand, seizing him by the arm, “but what I know is that you have some particular motive of hatred against Dantès: he who hates himself is not mistaken as to the feelings of others.”
“I, motives of hatred against Dantès? None, upon my word. I saw you unhappy and your unhappiness interested me, that is all; but from the moment you believe I am acting for my own account, farewell, my dear friend, get yourself out of it as best you can.”
And Danglars pretended to rise in his turn.
“Not so,” said Fernand, detaining him, “stay! Little do I care, in the end, whether you bear ill will to Dantès, or whether you do not; I bear him ill will, I: I avow it openly. Find the means and I will execute it, provided there is no loss of life, for Mercédès said she would kill herself if Dantès were killed.”
Caderousse, who had let his head fall onto the table, raised his brow, and looking at Fernand and Danglars with heavy, stupefied eyes:
“Kill Dantès!” said he. “Who is talking here of killing Dantès? I will not have him killed, I: he is my friend; he offered this morning to share his money with me, as I shared mine with him; I will not have Dantès killed.”
“And who is talking to you of killing him, imbecile!” resumed Danglars. “It is a simple joke; drink to his health,” he added, filling Caderousse’s glass, “and leave us in peace.”
“Yes, yes, to the health of Dantès!” said Caderousse, emptying his glass. “To his health!… to his health!… there!”
“But the means, the means?” said Fernand.
“Have you not found it yet, then, you?”
“No, you undertook it.”
“That is true,” resumed Danglars; “the French have this superiority over the Spaniards, that the Spaniards ruminate and the French invent.”
“Then invent,” said Fernand impatiently.
“Waiter,” said Danglars, “a pen, ink and paper!”
“A pen, ink and paper!” murmured Fernand.
“Yes, I am a bookkeeper: the pen, ink and paper are my tools; and without my tools I can do nothing.”
“A pen, ink and paper!” cried Fernand in his turn.
“There is what you desire there on that table,” said the waiter, pointing to the requested objects.
“Then give them to us.”
The waiter took the paper, ink and pen, and placed them on the arbor table.
“When one thinks,” said Caderousse, letting his hand fall on the paper, “that there is enough there to kill a man more surely than if one waited for him at the corner of a wood to assassinate him! I have always been more afraid of a pen, a bottle of ink and a sheet of paper than of a sword or a pistol.”
“The rogue is not yet as drunk as he seems,” said Danglars. “Do pour him something to drink, Fernand.”
Fernand filled Caderousse’s glass, and the latter, being the true drinker that he was, lifted his hand from the paper and carried it to his glass.
The Catalan followed the movement until Caderousse, almost overcome by this new attack, rested or rather let his glass fall back onto the table.
“Well?” resumed the Catalan, seeing that the remainder of Caderousse’s reason was beginning to disappear beneath that last glass of wine.
“Well, I was saying then, for example,” resumed Danglars, “that if, after a voyage such as Dantès has just made, and in which he touched at Naples and the island of Elba, someone were to denounce him to the King’s attorney as a Bonapartist agent…”
“I will denounce him, I!” said the young man quickly.
“Yes; but then you are made to sign your statement, you are confronted with him whom you have denounced: I furnish you with the means to support your accusation, I know well; but Dantès cannot remain in prison eternally, one day or another he will get out, and, the day he gets out, woe to him who put him there!”
“Oh, I ask but one thing,” said Fernand, “which is that he come pick a quarrel with me!”
“Yes, and Mercédès! Mercédès, who takes a hatred to you if you but have the misfortune to scratch the epidermis of her beloved Edmond!”
“That is just,” said Fernand.
“No, no,” resumed Danglars, “if one were to decide upon such a thing, you see, it would be much better to take quite simply, as I do, this pen, dip it in the ink, and write with the left hand, so that the writing may not be recognized, a little denunciation conceived thus.”
And Danglars, joining example to precept, wrote with the left hand and in a reversed hand, which had no analogy with his usual writing, the following lines, which he passed to Fernand, and which Fernand read half aloud:
_Mr. the King’s attorney is informed, by a friend of the throne and of religion, that the named Edmond Dantès, mate of the vessel the Pharaon, arrived this morning from Smyrna, after touching at Naples and Porto-Ferrajo, was charged by Murat with a letter for the usurper, and, by the usurper, with a letter for the Bonapartist committee of Paris._
_Proof of his crime will be had by arresting him, for this letter will be found either upon him, or at his father’s, or in his cabin aboard the Pharaon._
“Very good,” continued Danglars; “thus your vengeance would have common sense, for in no way then could it fall back upon you, and the thing would go of itself; there would be nothing left but to fold this letter, as I am doing, and to write upon it: ‘To Mr. the King’s Attorney.’ All would be said.”
And Danglars wrote the address playfully.
“Yes, all would be said,” cried Caderousse, who by a last effort of intelligence had followed the reading, and who understood instinctively all the misfortune such a denunciation might entail; “yes, all would be said: only, it would be an infamy.”
And he stretched out his arm to take the letter.
“Also,” said Danglars, pushing it out of reach of his hand, “also, what I say and what I do, is in jest; and, first of all, I should be very sorry if anything happened to Dantès, that good Dantès! So, here…”
He took the letter, crumpled it in his hands and threw it into a corner of the arbor.
“Very good,” said Caderousse, “Dantès is my friend, and I will not have any harm come to him.”
“Eh! who the devil thinks of harming him! It is neither I nor Fernand!” said Danglars, rising and looking at the young man, who had remained seated, but whose oblique eye was brooding over the denunciatory paper thrown into a corner.
“In that case,” resumed Caderousse, “let them give us wine: I want to drink to the health of Edmond and of the fair Mercédès.”
“You have already drunk too much, drunkard,” said Danglars, “and if you continue you will be obliged to sleep here, seeing that you will no longer be able to keep on your legs.”
“I,” said Caderousse, rising with the self-importance of a drunken man; “I, not able to keep on my legs! I wager I could climb the steeple of the Accoules, and without even hesitating!”
“Well, so be it,” said Danglars, “I wager, but for tomorrow: today it is time to go in; come give me your arm and let us go in.”
“Let us go in,” said Caderousse, “but I have no need of your arm for that. Are you coming, Fernand? Are you coming home with us to Marseilles?”
“No,” said Fernand, “I am going back to the Catalans, I.”
“You are wrong, come with us to Marseilles, come.”
“I have no need to be at Marseilles, and I do not wish to go there.”
“How did you say that? You do not wish to, my good man! Well, suit yourself! Liberty for everyone! Come, Danglars, and let us leave the gentleman to go back to the Catalans, since he wishes it.”
Danglars profited by this moment of good will on Caderousse’s part to draw him toward Marseilles; only, to open a shorter and easier path for Fernand, instead of returning by the quay of the Rive-Neuve, he returned by the Saint-Victor gate.
Caderousse followed him, all unsteady, hooked onto his arm.
When he had taken about twenty steps, Danglars turned round and saw Fernand precipitate himself upon the paper, which he put into his pocket; then, immediately springing out of the arbor, the young man turned in the direction of the Pillon.
“Well, what is he doing?” said Caderousse. “He lied to us: he said he was going to the Catalans, and he is going to the town! Hola! Fernand! You are mistaken, my boy!”
“It is you who see double,” said Danglars. “He is following straight the road of the Vieilles-Infirmeries.”
“In truth!” said Caderousse. “Well, I would have sworn he turned to the right; decidedly wine is a traitor.”
“Come, come,” murmured Danglars, “I believe that now the thing is well launched, and that there is nothing left but to let it go on by itself.”
“Stories of the world, in your language.”