LXXI. Le pain et le sel.

LXXI

Bread and Salt.

Madame de Morcerf entered beneath the leafy vault with her companion: this vault was a walk of lime trees leading to a greenhouse.

“It was too hot in the salon, was it not, Count?” she said.

“Yes, madame; and your idea of having the doors and shutters opened is an excellent one.”

As he finished these words, the count noticed that Mercédès’s hand was trembling.

“But you, in that light gown and with no other protection about your neck than this gauze scarf, will perhaps be cold?” he said.

“Do you know where I am taking you?” the countess asked, without answering Monte-Cristo’s question.

“No, madame,” he replied; “as you see, I make no resistance.”

“To the greenhouse, which you see there, at the end of the walk we are following.”

The count looked at Mercédès as if to question her; but she continued on her way without a word, and for his part Monte-Cristo remained silent.

They reached the building, all hung with magnificent fruit which, from the beginning of July, had reached its ripeness under a temperature ever regulated to replace the heat of the sun, so often absent with us.

The countess left Monte-Cristo’s arm, and went to gather a bunch of muscat grapes from a vine.

“Here, Count,” she said with so sad a smile that one might have seen tears welling at the edge of her eyes, “here, our French grapes are not comparable, I know, to your grapes of Sicily and Cyprus, but you will be indulgent toward our poor northern sun.”

The count bowed, and took a step backward.

“You refuse me?” said Mercédès in a trembling voice.

“Madame,” answered Monte-Cristo, “I humbly beg you to excuse me, but I never eat muscat.”

Mercédès let the bunch fall with a sigh. A magnificent peach hung on a neighboring espalier, warmed, like the vine, by the artificial heat of the greenhouse. Mercédès approached the velvety fruit, and picked it.

“Take this peach, then,” she said.

But the count made the same gesture of refusal.

“Oh! again!” she said with so painful an accent that one felt the accent was stifling a sob; “truly, I am ill-fated.”

A long silence followed this scene; the peach, like the bunch of grapes, had rolled upon the sand.

“Count,” resumed Mercédès at length, looking at Monte-Cristo with a supplicating eye, “there is a touching Arab custom which makes eternal friends of those who have shared bread and salt beneath the same roof.”

“I know it, madame,” answered the count; “but we are in France and not in Arabia, and in France there are no more eternal friendships than there is sharing of salt and bread.”

“But after all,” said the countess, palpitating and her eyes fixed upon Monte-Cristo’s, whose arm she seized again almost convulsively with both hands, “we are friends, are we not?”

The blood rushed to the count’s heart, who grew pale as death, then, rising from the heart to the throat, it flooded his cheeks and his eyes wandered in vagueness for some seconds, like those of a man struck with dizziness.

“Certainly we are friends, madame,” he replied; “besides, why should we not be?”

This tone was so far from that which Madame de Morcerf desired, that she turned away to let escape a sigh that resembled a moan.

“Thank you,” she said.

And she began to walk again. They thus made the round of the garden without pronouncing a single word.

“Sir,” the countess suddenly resumed after ten minutes of silent walking, “is it true that you have seen so much, traveled so much, suffered so much?”

“I have suffered much, yes, madame,” answered Monte-Cristo.

“But you are happy, now?”

“Doubtless,” answered the count, “since no one hears me complain.”

“And your present happiness makes your soul gentler?”

“My present happiness equals my past misery,” said the count.

“Are you not married?” asked the countess.

“I, married,” answered Monte-Cristo with a start; “who could have told you that?”

“No one told me, but several times you have been seen at the Opera conducting a young and beautiful person.”

“She is a slave I bought at Constantinople, madame, a daughter of a prince whom I have made my daughter, having no other affection in the world.”

“You live alone thus?”

“I live alone.”

“You have no sister… no son… no father?…”

“I have no one.”

“How can you live thus, with nothing to attach you to life?”

“It is not my fault, madame. At Malta, I loved a young girl and was about to marry her, when war came and carried me far from her like a whirlwind. I had believed she loved me enough to wait for me, to remain faithful even to my tomb. When I returned, she was married. That is the story of every man who has passed the age of twenty. I perhaps had a weaker heart than the others, and I suffered more than they would have done in my place, that is all.”

The countess stopped a moment, as if she had need of this halt to breathe.

“Yes,” she said, “and this love remained in your heart…. One loves well but once…. And have you ever seen this woman again?”

“Never.”

“Never!”

“I have not returned to the country where she was.”

“At Malta?”

“Yes, at Malta.”

“She is at Malta, then?”

“I think so.”

“And have you pardoned her for what she made you suffer?”

“Her, yes.”

“But her only; you still hate those who separated you from her?”

The countess placed herself before Monte-Cristo; she still held in her hand a fragment of the perfumed bunch.

“Take it,” she said.

“I never eat muscat, madame,” answered Monte-Cristo, as if nothing had been in question between them on this subject.

The countess threw the bunch into the nearest thicket with a gesture of despair.

“Inflexible!” she murmured.

Monte-Cristo remained as impassive as if the reproach were not addressed to him. Albert came running up at that moment.

“Oh, mother,” he said, “a great misfortune!”

“What! what has happened?” asked the countess, straightening as if, after the dream, she had been brought back to reality: “a misfortune, did you say? Indeed, misfortunes must happen.”

“M. de Villefort is here.”

“Well?”

“He comes to fetch his wife and daughter.”

“And why is that?”

“Because the Marquise de Saint-Méran has arrived in Paris, bringing the news that M. de Saint-Méran died on leaving Marseille, at the first relay. Madame de Villefort, who was quite gay, would neither understand nor believe this misfortune; but Mademoiselle Valentine, at the first words, and whatever precautions her father took, guessed all: this blow struck her like lightning, and she fell fainting.”

“And what is M. de Saint-Méran to Mademoiselle de Villefort?” asked the count.

“Her maternal grandfather. He came to hasten the marriage of Franz and his granddaughter.”

“Ah! indeed!”

“There is Franz delayed. Why was not M. de Saint-Méran as well a grandfather of Mademoiselle Danglars?”

“Albert! Albert!” said Madame de Morcerf in the tone of a gentle reproach; “what are you saying there? Ah! Count, you for whom he has such great consideration, tell him he has spoken ill!”

She took a few steps forward.

Monte-Cristo looked at her so strangely and with an expression at once so dreamy and so full of tender admiration, that she came back.

Then she took his hand while pressing that of her son, and joining both:

“We are friends, are we not?” she said.

“Oh! your friend, madame, I have not that pretension,” said the count; “but, in any case, I am your most respectful servant.”

The countess departed with an inexpressible tightening of the heart; and before she had taken ten steps, the count saw her put her handkerchief to her eyes.

“Are you not in accord, mother and you?” asked Albert with astonishment.

“On the contrary,” answered the count, “since she has just told me before you that we are friends.”

And they regained the salon which Valentine and M. and Mme de Villefort had just left. It goes without saying that Morrel had gone out behind them.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”