LXXXIX. La nuit.

LXXXIX

The Night.

M. de Monte-Cristo waited, according to his custom, until Duprez had sung his famous _Suivez-moi_! and only then did he rise and leave.

At the door, Morrel left him, renewing the promise to be at his house, with Emmanuel, the next morning at seven o'clock sharp. Then he climbed into his coupé, ever calm and smiling. Five minutes later he was home. Only one would have had to not know the count to be deceived by the expression with which he said to Ali on entering:

“Ali, my ivory-handled pistols!”

Ali brought the case to his master, and the latter began to examine these weapons with a solicitude quite natural to a man who is about to entrust his life to a little iron and lead. They were special pistols that Monte-Cristo had had made to shoot at a target in his apartments. A single cap was enough to discharge the ball, and from the next room one could not have suspected that the count, as the shooting term goes, was occupied in keeping his hand in.

He was fitting the weapon into his hand, and seeking the point of aim on a small sheet of tin that served him as a target, when the door of his study opened and Baptistin entered.

But, before he had even opened his mouth, the count perceived in the door, left open, a veiled woman, standing, in the half-light of the adjoining room, who had followed Baptistin.

She had caught sight of the count with pistol in hand, she saw two swords on a table, she rushed forward.

Baptistin looked to his master for direction. The count made a sign, Baptistin went out, and closed the door behind him.

“Who are you, madam?” said the count to the veiled woman.

The stranger cast a glance around her to assure herself that she was alone, then bowed as if she would kneel, and joining her hands with the accent of despair:

“Edmond,” she said, “you will not kill my son!”

The count stepped back, uttered a faint cry, and let fall the weapon he held.

“What name did you pronounce there, Madame de Morcerf?” said he.

“Yours!” she cried, throwing back her veil, “yours, which perhaps alone I have not forgotten. Edmond, it is not Mme de Morcerf who comes to you, it is Mercédès.”

“Mercédès is dead, madam,” said Monte-Cristo, “and I know no one of that name.”

“Mercédès lives, sir, and Mercédès remembers, for she alone recognized you when she saw you, and even without seeing you, by your voice, Edmond, by the sole accent of your voice; and since that time she has followed you step by step, she has watched you, she has feared you, and she had no need, she, to seek the hand from which came the blow that struck M. de Morcerf.”

“Fernand, do you mean, madam?” resumed Monte-Cristo with bitter irony; “since we are in the way of recalling our names, let us recall them all.”

And Monte-Cristo had pronounced that name of Fernand with such an expression of hatred, that Mercédès felt the shiver of dread run through her whole body.

“You see well, Edmond, that I was not mistaken!” cried Mercédès, “and that I am right to say to you: Spare my son!

“And who told you, madam, that I meant harm to your son?

“No one, my God! but a mother is gifted with double sight. I have guessed all; I followed him this evening to the Opera, and, hidden in a box, I saw everything.”

“Then, if you saw everything, madam, you saw that the son of Fernand publicly insulted me?” said Monte-Cristo with terrible calm.

“Oh! for pity’s sake!”

“You saw,” continued the count, “that he would have thrown his glove in my face if one of my friends, M. Morrel, had not stopped his arm.”

“Listen to me. My son has guessed you too, he; he attributes to you the misfortunes that strike his father.”

“Madam,” said Monte-Cristo, “you are confusing things: these are not misfortunes, it is a punishment. It is not I who strike M. de Morcerf, it is Providence that punishes him.”

“And why do you substitute yourself for Providence?” cried Mercédès. “Why do you remember when she forgets? What are Janina and its vizier to you, Edmond? What wrong did Fernand Mondego do you in betraying Ali-Tebelin?”

“Besides, madam,” answered Monte-Cristo, “all this is a matter between the French captain and the daughter of Vasiliki. It concerns me not, you are right, and if I have sworn to avenge myself, it is neither against the French captain nor the Count of Morcerf: it is against the sinner Fernand, husband of the Catalan Mercédès.”

“Ah! sir!” cried the countess, “what a terrible vengeance for a fault that fate made me commit! For the guilty one is I, Edmond, and if you have anyone to avenge yourself upon, it is upon me, who lacked strength against your absence and my isolation.”

“But,” cried Monte-Cristo, “why was I absent? why were you isolated?”

“Because you were arrested, Edmond, because you were a prisoner.”

“And why was I arrested? why was I a prisoner?”

“I do not know,” said Mercédès.

“Yes, you do not know, madam, I hope at least. Well, I will tell you. I was arrested, I was a prisoner, because under the arbor of the Réserve, on the very eve of the day I was to marry you, a man named Danglars had written the letter which the fisherman Fernand himself took charge of posting.”

And Monte-Cristo, going to a desk, opened a drawer from which he took a paper that had lost its original color, and whose ink had turned rust-colored, which he placed before Mercédès’s eyes.

It was the letter from Danglars to the king’s attorney that, on the day he had paid the two hundred thousand francs to M. de Boville, the Count of Monte-Cristo, disguised as agent of the house of Thomson and French, had withdrawn from the file of Edmond Dantès.

Mercédès read with dread the following lines:

“The king’s attorney is informed, by a friend of the throne and of religion, that the named Edmond Dantès, mate of the ship _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 this crime will be had by arresting him, for this letter will be found, either on his person, or at his father’s, or in his cabin aboard the _Pharaon_.”

“Oh! my God!” said Mercédès, passing her hand over her brow wet with sweat; “and this letter...”

“I bought it for two hundred thousand francs, madam,” said Monte-Cristo; “but it is still cheap, since it permits me today to clear myself in your eyes.”

“And the result of this letter?”

“You know it, madam, was my arrest; but what you do not know, madam, is how long that arrest lasted. What you do not know is that I remained fourteen years a quarter of a league from you, in a dungeon of the Château d’If. What you do not know is that each day of those fourteen years I renewed the vow of vengeance I had made the first day, and yet I knew not that you had married Fernand, my denouncer, and that my father was dead, and dead of hunger!”

“Just God!” cried Mercédès, staggering.

“But this is what I learned on leaving prison, fourteen years after entering it, and this is what makes that, upon living Mercédès and upon my dead father, I swore to avenge myself on Fernand, and... and I avenge myself.”

“And you are sure that the unhappy Fernand did this?”

“Upon my soul, madam, and he did it as I tell you; besides it is not much more odious than, French by adoption, having gone over to the English! Spanish by birth, having fought against the Spaniards; stipendiary of Ali, having betrayed and assassinated Ali. Faced with such things, what was the letter you have just read? a gallant mystification which the woman who married that man must pardon, I admit and understand, but which the lover who was to marry her does not pardon. Well, the French did not avenge themselves on the traitor, the Spaniards did not shoot the traitor, Ali, laid in his tomb, left the traitor unpunished; but I, betrayed, assassinated, also cast into a tomb, I came out of that tomb by the grace of God, I owe it to God to avenge myself; he sends me for that, and here I am.”

The poor woman let her head fall between her hands; her legs gave way under her, and she fell to her knees.

“Forgive, Edmond,” said she, “forgive for me, who still love you!”

The dignity of the wife checked the impulse of the mistress and the mother. Her brow bent almost to touch the carpet. The count sprang toward her and raised her. Then, seated in an armchair, she could, through her tears, look upon the manly face of Monte-Cristo, on which sorrow and hatred still imprinted a threatening character.

“That I crush not this accursed race!” he murmured; “that I disobey God, who raised me up for his punishment! impossible, madam, impossible!”

“Edmond,” said the poor mother, trying every means, “my God! when I call you Edmond, why do you not call me Mercédès?”

“Mercédès,” repeated Monte-Cristo, “Mercédès! Well! yes, you are right, that name is still sweet to me to pronounce, and this is the first time, for a long while, that it has sounded so clearly from my lips. Oh Mercédès, your name, I have pronounced it with the sighs of melancholy, with the moans of pain, with the rattle of despair; I have pronounced it, chilled by cold, crouched on the straw of my dungeon; I have pronounced it, devoured by heat, rolling on the flags of my prison. Mercédès, I must avenge myself, for fourteen years I suffered, fourteen years I wept, I cursed; now, I tell you, Mercédès, I must avenge myself!”

And the count, trembling at the thought of yielding to the prayers of her he had so loved, called his memories to the aid of his hatred.

“Avenge yourself, Edmond!” cried the poor mother, “but avenge yourself on the guilty; avenge yourself on him, avenge yourself on me, but do not avenge yourself on my son!”

“It is written in the Holy Book,” answered Monte-Cristo: “‘The faults of the fathers shall fall upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.’ Since God dictated these very words to his prophet, why should I be better than God?”

“Because God has time and eternity, these two things which escape men.”

Monte-Cristo uttered a sigh that resembled a roar, and seized his beautiful hair with both hands.

“Edmond,” continued Mercédès, her arms extended toward the count, “Edmond, since I have known you I have adored your name, I have respected your memory. Edmond, my friend, do not force me to tarnish that noble and pure image forever reflected in the mirror of my heart. Edmond, if you knew all the prayers I addressed to God for you, as long as I hoped you living and since I believed you dead, yes, dead, alas! I believed your corpse buried at the bottom of some dark tower; I believed your body hurled into the depths of one of those abysses where jailers let dead prisoners roll; and I wept! What could I do for you, Edmond, but pray or weep? Listen to me; for ten years I had each night the same dream. It was said that you had tried to flee, that you had taken the place of a prisoner, that you had slipped into the shroud of a dead man and that then the living corpse had been flung from top to bottom of the Château d’If; and that the cry you uttered breaking upon the rocks had alone revealed the substitution to your buriers, become your executioners. Well, Edmond, I swear to you upon the head of that son for whom I implore you, Edmond, for ten years I saw each night men who swung something shapeless and unknown at the top of a rock; for ten years I heard each night a terrible cry that woke me shivering and frozen. And I too, Edmond, oh! believe me, guilty though I was, oh! yes, I too have suffered greatly.”

“Did you feel your father die in your absence?” cried Monte-Cristo, thrusting his hands into his hair; “did you see the woman you loved extend her hand to your rival, while you rattled at the bottom of the gulf?...”

“No,” interrupted Mercédès; “but I saw him I loved about to become the murderer of my son!”

Mercédès pronounced these words with a power of grief, with so desperate an accent, that at these words and that accent a sob tore the throat of the count.

The lion was tamed; the avenger was vanquished.

“What do you ask?” said he; “that your son live? well, he shall live!”

Mercédès uttered a cry that drew two tears from Monte-Cristo’s eyelids, but these two tears disappeared almost at once, for no doubt God had sent some angel to gather them, far more precious in the eyes of the Lord than the richest pearls of Gusarate and Ophir.

“Oh!” she cried, seizing the count’s hand and bearing it to her lips, “oh! thank you, thank you, Edmond! you are indeed as I have always dreamed you, as I have always loved you. Oh! now I may say it.”

“All the better,” answered Monte-Cristo, “since the poor Edmond will not long be loved by you. The dead man is going back into the tomb, the phantom is going back into the night.”

“What do you say, Edmond?”

“I say that since you command it, Mercédès, I must die.”

“Die! and who says that? Who speaks of dying? whence come these ideas of death to you?”

“You do not suppose that, publicly outraged, before a whole hall, in the presence of your friends and your son’s, provoked by a child who will glory in my pardon as in a victory, you do not suppose, I say, that I have for an instant the desire to live. What I have loved most after you, Mercédès, is myself, that is to say my dignity, that is to say that strength which made me superior to other men; that strength was my life. With a word you break it. I die.”

“But this duel will not take place, Edmond, since you forgive.”

“It will take place, madam,” said Monte-Cristo solemnly, “only, instead of your son’s blood, which the earth was to drink, it is mine that shall flow.”

Mercédès uttered a great cry and sprang toward Monte-Cristo; but suddenly she stopped.

“Edmond,” said she, “there is a God above us, since you live, since I have seen you again, and I trust in him from the depths of my heart. While awaiting his support, I rest upon your word. You said my son would live; he shall live, shall he not?”

“He shall live, yes, madam,” said Monte-Cristo, astonished that, without other exclamation, without other surprise, Mercédès had accepted the heroic sacrifice he made her.

Mercédès extended her hand to the count.

“Edmond,” said she, while her eyes moistened with tears in looking at him to whom she spoke, “how beautiful it is of you, how great what you have just done, how sublime to have pitied a poor woman who offered herself to you with every chance against her hopes! Alas! I am aged by sorrows more even than by years, and I can no longer even recall to my Edmond, by a smile, by a look, that Mercédès he once passed so many hours contemplating. Ah! believe me, Edmond, I told you that I too had suffered greatly; I repeat it to you, it is bleak indeed to see one’s life pass without recalling a single joy, without keeping a single hope, but that proves all is not finished on earth. No! all is not finished, I feel it by what still remains in my heart. Oh! I repeat to you, Edmond, it is beautiful, it is great, it is sublime to pardon as you have just done!”

“You say that, Mercédès; and what would you say then if you knew the extent of the sacrifice I make you? Suppose the Supreme Master, after creating the world, after fertilizing chaos, had stopped at the third of creation to spare an angel the tears our crimes were one day to draw from his immortal eyes; suppose that, after having prepared all, kneaded all, fertilized all, at the moment of admiring his work, God had extinguished the sun and thrust the world back with his foot into eternal night, then you will have an idea, or rather no, no, you will not yet be able to form an idea of what I lose in losing life at this moment.”

Mercédès looked at the count with an air that painted at once her astonishment, her admiration, and her gratitude.

Monte-Cristo leaned his brow upon his burning hands, as if his brow could no longer bear alone the weight of his thoughts.

“Edmond,” said Mercédès, “I have but one word more to say to you.”

The count smiled bitterly.

“Edmond,” she continued, “you will see that if my brow is pale, if my eyes are dim, if my beauty is lost, if Mercédès, in short, no longer resembles herself in the features of her face, you will see that it is still the same heart!... Farewell then, Edmond; I have nothing more to ask of Heaven... I have seen you again as noble and as great as of old. Farewell, Edmond... farewell and thank you!”

But the count did not answer.

Mercédès opened the door of the study, and she had disappeared before he had emerged from the painful and profound reverie into which his lost vengeance had plunged him.

One o’clock was striking from the clock of the Invalides when the carriage bearing Mme de Morcerf, rolling over the pavement of the Champs-Élysées, made the Count of Monte-Cristo raise his head.

“Fool,” said he, “that on the day I had resolved to avenge myself, I did not tear out my heart!”

“Stories of the world, in your language.”