LXXXV. Le voyage.

LXXXV

The Journey.

Monte Cristo uttered a cry of joy at seeing the two young men together.

“Ah! ah!” said he. “Well, I hope all is finished, cleared up, arranged?”

“Yes,” said Beauchamp, “absurd rumors which have fallen of their own accord, and which, were they to be renewed, would have me for their first antagonist. So let us speak of it no more.”

“Albert will tell you,” resumed the count, “that such was the advice I had given him. See,” he added, “you find me, besides, finishing the most execrable morning I believe I have ever passed.”

“What are you doing?” said Albert. “You are putting your papers in order, it seems to me?”

“My papers, thank God, no! there is always a wonderful order in my papers, seeing that I have no papers, but in the papers of M. Cavalcanti.”

“M. Cavalcanti?” asked Beauchamp.

“Eh yes! do you not know that he is a young man whom the count is launching?” said Morcerf.

“Not at all, let us understand one another,” replied Monte Cristo; “I launch no one, and M. Cavalcanti less than any other.”

“And who is to marry Mlle Danglars in my place; which,” continued Albert, endeavoring to smile, “as you may well suppose, my dear Beauchamp, affects me cruelly.”

“What! Cavalcanti marries Mlle Danglars?” asked Beauchamp.

“Come now! but do you come from the ends of the earth?” said Monte Cristo. “You, a journalist, the husband of Fame! All Paris is talking of nothing else.”

“And is it you, count, who have brought about this marriage?” asked Beauchamp.

“I? Oh! silence, Mr. Newsman, do not go about saying such things! I, good heavens! make a marriage? No, you do not know me; on the contrary, I opposed it with all my power, I refused to make the proposal.”

“Ah! I understand,” said Beauchamp, “on account of our friend Albert?”

“On account of me,” said the young man; “oh! no, by my faith! The count will do me the justice to attest that I always entreated him, on the contrary, to break off this project, which happily is broken off. The count pretends that it is not he whom I have to thank; be it so, I will raise, like the ancients, an altar to the _Unknown God_.”

“Listen,” said Monte Cristo, “it is so little myself, that I am on cool terms with the father-in-law and with the young man; there is only Mlle Eugénie, who does not appear to me to have a profound vocation for marriage, and who, seeing how little disposed I was to make her renounce her dear liberty, has preserved her affection for me.”

“And you say that this marriage is on the point of being concluded?”

“Oh! my God, yes, in spite of all I could say. I, I do not know the young man; he is said to be rich and well born, but for me these things are mere hearsay. I have repeated all this to satiety to M. Danglars; but he is infatuated with his Lucchese. I went so far as to mention to him a circumstance which, for me, was more serious: the young man was changed in his infancy, carried off by Bohemians or lost by his tutor, I do not quite know which. But what I do know is, that his father lost sight of him for more than ten years; what he did during those ten years of wandering life, God alone knows. Well, none of all that made any impression. I was charged to write to the major, to ask him for papers; here they are. I send them to them, but, like Pilate, washing my hands.”

“And Mlle d’Armilly,” asked Beauchamp, “what sort of face does she make to you, who are taking her pupil from her?”

“Why! I do not quite know: but it appears she is starting for Italy. Mme Danglars spoke to me of her and asked me for letters of recommendation for the impresarios; I gave her a line for the director of the Valle theatre, who owes me some obligations. But what is the matter with you, Albert? you look quite sad; is it that, without knowing it, you are in love with Mlle Danglars, for instance?”

“Not that I am aware,” said Albert, smiling sadly.

Beauchamp began looking at the pictures.

“But after all,” continued Monte Cristo, “you are not in your usual state. Come, what is the matter? speak.”

“I have the migraine,” said Albert.

“Well, my dear viscount,” said Monte Cristo, “I have in that case an infallible remedy to propose to you, a remedy which has succeeded with me every time I have met with any annoyance.”

“Which?” asked the young man.

“Change of place.”

“Indeed?” said Albert.

“Yes; and see, as at this moment I am excessively annoyed, I am changing my place. Shall we change ours together?”

“You, annoyed, count!” said Beauchamp. “And about what?”

“Bless me! you talk of it very lightly, you; I should like to see you with a prosecution going on in your house!”

“A prosecution! what prosecution?”

“Eh! that which M. de Villefort is drawing up against my amiable assassin, then, a sort of brigand escaped from the galleys, it appears.”

“Ah! it is true,” said Beauchamp; “I read the fact in the journals. What is this Caderousse?”

“Well… but it appears he is a Provençal. M. de Villefort heard of him when he was at Marseilles, and M. Danglars remembers having seen him. The result is, that the king’s attorney takes the affair very much to heart, that it has, it appears, interested the prefect of police in the highest degree, and that, thanks to this interest, for which I am only too grateful, they have been sending me here for the last fortnight all the bandits they can lay hands on in Paris and its suburbs, under the pretext that they are the assassins of M. Caderousse; whence it results that, in three months, if this goes on, there will not be a thief or an assassin in this fine kingdom of France who does not know the plan of my house on his fingertips; so I take the part of abandoning it entirely to them, and of going away as far as the earth can carry me. Come with me, viscount, I am taking you away.”

“Willingly.”

“Then it is agreed?”

“Yes, but where to?”

“I have told you, where the air is pure, where noise lulls one to sleep, where, however proud one may be, one feels humble and finds one’s self small. I love that abasement, I, whom they call master of the universe like Augustus.”

“Where are you going, in short?”

“To the sea, viscount, to the sea. I am a sailor, you see; as a child I was rocked in the arms of old Ocean and on the bosom of fair Amphitrite; I have played with the green mantle of the one and the azure robe of the other; I love the sea as one loves a mistress, and when I have not seen her for a long time, I grow weary of her.”

“Come, count, come!”

“To the sea?”

“Yes.”

“You accept?”

“I accept.”

“Well, viscount, there will be this evening in my courtyard a travelling briska, in which one can stretch oneself as in one’s bed; that briska will be harnessed with four post-horses. Mr. Beauchamp, one can very easily hold four in it. Will you come with us? I am taking you.”

“Thanks, I come from the sea.”

“What! you come from the sea?”

“Yes, or thereabouts. I have just been making a little trip to the Borromean Isles.”

“What matters! come all the same,” said Albert.

“No, dear Morcerf, you must understand that from the moment I refuse, it is because the thing is impossible. Besides, it is important,” added he, lowering his voice, “that I remain in Paris, were it only to keep an eye on the journal’s box.”

“Ah! you are a good and excellent friend,” said Albert; “yes, you are right, watch, supervise, Beauchamp, and try to discover the enemy to whom this revelation must have owed its birth.”

Albert and Beauchamp parted: their last hand-clasp enclosed all the meanings which their lips could not express before a stranger.

“An excellent fellow, that Beauchamp!” said Monte Cristo after the journalist’s departure; “is he not, Albert?”

“Oh! yes, a man of heart, I answer for it; so I love him with all my soul. But, now that we are alone, though the thing is almost indifferent to me, where are we going?”

“To Normandy, if you will.”

“Admirably. We are quite in the country, are we not? no society, no neighbors?”

“We are tête-à-tête with horses to run, dogs to hunt, and a boat to fish, that is all.”

“That is what I want; I will let my mother know, and I am at your orders.”

“But,” said Monte Cristo, “will they allow you?”

“What?”

“To go to Normandy.”

“I? am I not free?”

“To go where you please, alone, I know well, since I met you escaped via Italy.”

“Well?”

“But to come with the man they call the Count of Monte Cristo?”

“You have a short memory, count.”

“How so?”

“Did I not tell you all the sympathy my mother felt for you?”

“Woman is fickle, said Francis I; woman is the wave, said Shakespeare; the one was a great king and the other a great poet, and each of them must have known woman.”

“Yes, woman; but my mother is not woman, she is a woman.”

“Will you permit a poor foreigner not to understand perfectly all the subtleties of your language?”

“I mean that my mother is sparing of her feelings, but that once she has bestowed them, it is for ever.”

“Ah! indeed,” said Monte Cristo, sighing; “and you believe she does me the honor of according me a sentiment other than the most perfect indifference?”

“Listen! I have already told you and I repeat it,” replied Morcerf, “you must really be a very strange and superior man.”

“Oh!”

“Yes, for my mother has allowed herself to be caught, I will not say by curiosity, but by the interest you inspire. When we are alone, we talk of nothing but you.”

“And she told you to mistrust this Manfred?”

“On the contrary, she says to me: ‘Morcerf, I believe the count to be a noble nature; try to make yourself loved by him.’”

Monte Cristo turned away his eyes and uttered a sigh.

“Ah! indeed?” said he.

“So, you understand,” continued Albert, “instead of opposing my journey, she will approve it with all her heart, since it falls in with the recommendations she gives me every day.”

“Go, then,” said Monte Cristo; “this evening. Be here at five o’clock; we shall arrive there at midnight or one o’clock.”

“What! at Tréport?…”

“At Tréport or in the neighborhood.”

“You need only eight hours to do forty-eight leagues?”

“That is still a great deal,” said Monte Cristo.

“Decidedly you are the man of wonders, and you will arrive not only at surpassing the railways, which is not very difficult in France especially, but even at going faster than the telegraph.”

“Meanwhile, viscount, as we always want seven or eight hours to get there, be punctual.”

“Be easy, I have nothing else to do in the meantime but to prepare myself.”

“At five o’clock, then?”

“At five o’clock.”

Albert went out. Monte Cristo, after having made him a sign with the head, smiling, remained for an instant thoughtful and as if absorbed in a deep meditation. At length, passing his hand over his brow, as if to dispel his reverie, he went to the bell and struck twice.

At the sound of the two strokes struck by Monte Cristo on the bell, Bertuccio entered.

“Master Bertuccio,” said he, “it is not to-morrow, it is not the day after to-morrow, as I at first thought, it is this evening that I start for Normandy; from now till five o’clock is more time than you want; you will have the grooms of the first relay warned; M. de Morcerf accompanies me. Go!”

Bertuccio obeyed, and a rider ran to Pontoise to announce that the post-chaise would pass at six o’clock precisely. The groom at Pontoise sent an express to the next relay, who sent another; and, six hours after, all the relays disposed along the road were warned.

Before starting, the count went up to Haydée, announced his departure, told her the place he was going to, and placed his whole establishment at her orders.

Albert was punctual. The journey, gloomy at its commencement, soon cleared up by the physical effect of rapidity. Morcerf had no idea of such speed.

“Indeed,” said Monte Cristo, “with your post making its two leagues an hour, with that stupid law which forbids a traveller to pass another without asking his permission, and which makes a sick or spleenish traveller have the right to drag at his heels the merry and healthy travellers, there is no locomotion possible; I avoid that inconvenience by travelling with my own postilion and my own horses, is it not, Ali?”

And the count, thrusting his head through the carriage door, gave a little cry of excitement which gave wings to the horses; they no longer ran, they flew. The carriage rolled like thunder over that royal pavement, and every one turned aside to see the flaming meteor pass. Ali, repeating that cry, smiled, showing his white teeth, holding in his robust hands the foaming reins, spurring the horses, whose beautiful manes scattered in the wind; Ali, the child of the desert, found himself in his element again, and with his black face, his ardent eyes, his snowy burnous, he seemed, amid the dust he raised, the genius of the simoom and the god of the hurricane.

“There,” said Morcerf, “is a voluptuousness I did not know; it is the voluptuousness of speed.”

And the last clouds on his brow dispersed, as if the air he clove bore those clouds away with it.

“But where the devil do you find such horses?” asked Albert. “Do you have them bred on purpose?”

“Exactly,” said the count. “Six years ago, I found in Hungary a famous stallion renowned for his speed; I bought him I know not for how much: it was Bertuccio who paid. In the same year, he had thirty-two children. It is all that progeny of the same father that we are going to pass in review; they are all alike, black, without a single spot, except a star on the forehead, for to this privileged one of the stud they chose mares, as to pachas they choose favorites.”

“That is admirable!… But tell me, count, what do you do with all those horses?”

“You see, I travel with them.”

“But you will not always travel?”

“When I shall have no further need of them, Bertuccio will sell them, and he pretends he will make thirty or forty thousand francs by them.”

“But there will be no king in Europe rich enough to buy them of you.”

“Then he will sell them to some simple Eastern vizier, who will empty his treasury to pay for them and will refill his treasury by administering blows with a stick under the soles of his subjects’ feet.”

“Count, will you let me communicate a thought that has come to me?”

“Do so.”

“It is that after you, M. Bertuccio must be the richest private individual in Europe.”

“Well, you are mistaken, viscount. I am sure that if you turned Bertuccio’s pockets inside out, you would not find ten sous in them.”

“Why so?” asked the young man. “Is M. Bertuccio then a phenomenon? Ah! my dear count, do not push me too far into the marvellous, or I shall believe you no longer, I warn you.”

“Never any marvellous with me, Albert; figures and reason, that is all. Now, listen to this dilemma: A steward steals, but why does he steal?”

“Why, because it is in his nature, it seems to me,” said Albert; “he steals for the sake of stealing.”

“Well, no, you are mistaken: he steals because he has a wife, children, ambitious desires for himself and his family; he steals especially because he is not sure of never leaving his master and he wishes to make a future for himself. Well, M. Bertuccio is alone in the world, he draws from my purse without accounting to me, he is sure of never leaving me.”

“Why so?”

“Because I should not find a better.”

“You are turning in a vicious circle, that of probabilities.”

“Oh! not at all; I am in certainties. The good servant for me is he over whom I have a right of life or death.”

“And you have a right of life or death over Bertuccio?” asked Albert.

“Yes,” replied the count coldly.

There are words which close a conversation like a door of iron. The count’s _yes_ was one of those words.

The rest of the journey was accomplished with the same rapidity, the thirty-two horses, divided into eight relays, did their forty-eight leagues in eight hours.

They arrived in the middle of the night, at the gate of a fine park. The porter was up and held the gate open. He had been warned by the groom of the last relay.

It was half-past two in the morning. Morcerf was conducted to his apartment. He found a bath and a supper ready. The servant, who had made the journey on the back seat of the carriage, was at his orders; Baptistin, who had made the journey on the front seat, was at those of the count.

Albert took his bath, supped and went to bed. All night long, he was rocked by the melancholy noise of the surge. On rising, he went straight to the window, opened it and found himself on a little terrace, whence one had before one the sea, that is to say immensity, and behind one a pretty park looking out upon a little wood.

In a creek of some size a little corvette was swinging, with narrow keel, slender masting, and bearing at the peak a flag with the arms of Monte Cristo, arms representing a mountain of gold resting on a sea of azure, with a cross gules in the chief, which might as well be an allusion to his name recalling Calvary, which the passion of Our Lord has made a mountain more precious than gold, and the infamous cross which his divine blood has made holy, as to some personal remembrance of suffering and regeneration buried in the night of the mysterious past of that man. Around the schooner were several small fishing-boats belonging to the fishermen of the neighboring villages, and which seemed humble subjects awaiting the orders of their queen.

There, as in all places where Monte Cristo stopped, were it but for two days, life was organized at the thermometer of the highest comfort; so life, at that very instant, became easy there.

Albert found in his antechamber two guns and all the utensils necessary to a sportsman; a higher room, placed on the ground floor, was devoted to all the ingenious machines which the English, great fishermen because they are patient and idle, have not yet been able to get adopted by the routine-bound fishermen of France.

The whole day passed in those various exercises in which, besides, Monte Cristo excelled: they killed a dozen pheasants in the park, caught as many trout in the brooks, dined in a kiosk overlooking the sea, and took tea in the library.

Towards the evening of the third day, Albert, broken with fatigue at using a life which seemed to be a game to Monte Cristo, was sleeping near the window while the count was making with his architect the plan of a conservatory he wished to establish in his house, when the noise of a horse crushing the pebbles of the road made the young man raise his head; he looked through the window and, with a most unpleasant surprise, perceived in the courtyard his valet de chambre, whom he had not wished to take with him, to embarrass Monte Cristo the less.

“Florentin here!” he cried, bounding in his armchair; “is my mother ill?”

And he precipitated himself towards the chamber door.

Monte Cristo followed him with his eyes, and saw him accost the valet who, still quite out of breath, drew from his pocket a little sealed packet. The little packet contained a journal and a letter.

“From whom is this letter?” asked Albert quickly.

“From M. Beauchamp,” replied Florentin.

“It is Beauchamp, then, who sends you?”

“Yes, sir. He had me come to his house, gave me the money necessary for my journey, had a post-horse got for me, and made me promise not to stop until I had overtaken you, sir: I made the journey in fifteen hours.”

Albert opened the letter trembling: at the first lines, he uttered a cry, and seized the journal with a visible tremor.

Suddenly his eyes grew dark, his legs seemed to give way under him, and, ready to fall, he leaned on Florentin, who stretched out his arm to support him.

“Poor young man!” murmured Monte Cristo, so low that he himself could not have heard the sound of the words of compassion he uttered; “it is then decreed that the faults of the fathers shall fall upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.”

Meanwhile Albert had recovered his strength, and, continuing to read, he shook his hair upon his sweat-moistened head, and, crushing letter and journal:

“Florentin,” said he, “is your horse in a state to take the road back to Paris?”

“It is a poor foundered post-nag.”

“Oh! my God! and how was the house when you left it?”

“Quite calm; but in coming back from M. Beauchamp’s, I found madame in tears; she had me asked to know when you would return. Then I told her I was going to fetch you from M. Beauchamp’s behalf. Her first movement was to stretch out her arm as if to stop me; but after a moment’s reflection:

“‘Yes, go, Florentin,’ said she, ‘and let him return.’”

“Yes, mother, yes,” said Albert, “I am returning, be tranquil, and woe to the infamous!… But, before all, I must depart.”

He took the way back to the chamber where he had left Monte Cristo.

He was no longer the same man and five minutes had sufficed to operate in Albert a sad metamorphosis; he had gone out in his usual state, he came in with altered voice, face furrowed with feverish redness, eye sparkling under eyelids veined with blue, and staggering gait like that of a drunken man.

“Count,” said he, “thanks for your good hospitality, of which I should have liked to enjoy longer, but I must return to Paris.”

“What has happened then?”

“A great misfortune; but permit me to depart, it is a matter far more precious than my life. No questions, count, I beseech you, but a horse!”

“My stables are at your service, viscount,” said Monte Cristo; “but you will kill yourself with fatigue in riding post on horseback; take a calash, a coupé, some carriage.”

“No, that would be too long, and then I need that fatigue you fear for me, it will do me good.”

Albert made a few steps turning like a man struck by a ball, and went to fall on a chair near the door.

Monte Cristo did not see that second weakness, he was at the window and crying:

“Ali, a horse for M. de Morcerf! make haste! he is in haste!”

Those words gave life back to Albert; he sprang out of the chamber, the count followed him.

“Thanks!” murmured the young man, springing into the saddle. “Come back as fast as you can, Florentin. Is there a password to get horses?”

“None but to return the one you are riding; they will saddle you another instantly.”

Albert was about to spring away, he stopped.

“You will perhaps find my departure strange, senseless,” said the young man. “You do not understand how a few lines written in a journal can throw a man into despair; well,” added he, throwing him the journal, “read this, but only when I am gone, so that you may not see my blush.”

And while the count picked up the journal, he dug the spurs, which had just been buckled to his boots, into the horse’s belly, who, astonished that there should exist a rider who thought he needed such a stimulant with him, set off like a crossbow bolt.

The count followed with his eyes the young man with a feeling of infinite compassion, and it was only when he had completely disappeared that, turning his gaze back upon the journal, he read what follows:

“This French officer in the service of Ali, pacha of Janina, of whom _L’Impartial_ spoke three weeks ago, and who not only delivered up the castles of Janina, but also sold his benefactor to the Turks, was indeed called at that time Fernand, as our honorable contemporary has said; but, since then, he has added to his baptismal name a title of nobility and a territorial name.

“He is called to-day M. the Count of Morcerf, and is a member of the Chamber of Peers.”

Thus this terrible secret, which Beauchamp had buried with so much generosity, reappeared like an armed phantom, and another journal, cruelly informed, had published, the day after Albert’s departure for Normandy, the few lines which had well-nigh driven the unhappy young man mad.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”