IX. Le soir des fiançailles.

IX

The Evening of the Betrothal.

Villefort, as we have said, had taken the road back to the Place du Grand-Cours, and on re-entering the house of Mme de Saint-Méran, he found the guests whom he had left at table had moved into the salon to take coffee.

Renée was awaiting him with an impatience that was shared by the rest of the company. He was therefore greeted with a general exclamation:

“Well, head-chopper, pillar of the State, royalist Brutus!” cried one, “what is it? come, out with it!”

“Why, are we threatened with a new Reign of Terror?” asked another.

“Has the Corsican ogre crept from his cave?” demanded a third.

“Madame la Marquise,” said Villefort, approaching his future mother-in-law, “I come to beg you to excuse me if I am forced to leave you thus… Monsieur le Marquis, might I have the honour of a few words with you in private?”

“Ah! but is it then really serious?” asked the marquise, noticing the cloud that darkened Villefort’s brow.

“So serious that I am forced to take leave of you for some days; thus,” he continued, turning toward Renée, “you may judge whether the matter must be grave.”

“You are leaving, sir?” cried Renée, unable to conceal the emotion this unexpected news caused her.

“Alas! yes, mademoiselle,” answered Villefort; “it must be.”

“And where are you going?” asked the marquise.

“That is the secret of justice, madame; however, if anyone here has commissions for Paris, I have a friend who leaves this evening and will undertake them with pleasure.”

Everyone looked at one another.

“You asked me for a moment’s conversation?” said the marquis.

“Yes; let us step into your study, if you please.”

The marquis took Villefort’s arm and went out with him.

“Well,” said the latter, on reaching his study, “what is happening? speak.”

“Things that I believe to be of the utmost gravity, and which require my departure for Paris this very instant. Now, marquis, excuse the indiscreet bluntness of the question—have you government annuities?”

“All my fortune is in the funds; some six or seven hundred thousand francs, thereabouts.”

“Well, sell, marquis, sell, or you are ruined.”

“But how do you expect me to sell from here?”

“You have a stockbroker, do you not?”

“Yes.”

“Give me a letter to him, and let him sell without losing a minute, without losing a second; perhaps even I shall arrive too late.”

“The devil!” said the marquis. “Let us lose no time.”

And he sat down at the table and wrote a letter to his broker, ordering him to sell at any price.

“Now that I have this letter,” said Villefort, carefully placing it in his portfolio, “I need another.”

“For whom?”

“For the king.”

“For the king?”

“Yes.”

“But I dare not take it upon myself to write thus to His Majesty.”

“Nor is it from you that I ask it; rather, I charge you to obtain it from M. de Salvieux. He must give me a letter by means of which I may reach His Majesty, without being subjected to all the formalities of requesting an audience, which might make me lose precious time.”

“But have you not the Keeper of the Seals, who has his full entrée at the Tuileries, and through whom you may reach the king by day or by night?”

“Yes, doubtless; but it is useless that I should share with another the credit for the news I bear. Do you understand? The Keeper of the Seals would naturally relegate me to second place and rob me of all benefit of the affair. I tell you but one thing, marquis: my career is assured if I reach the Tuileries first, for I shall have rendered the king a service he will not be permitted to forget.”

“In that case, my dear fellow, go and pack; I will call de Salvieux and have him write the letter that is to serve you as a pass.”

“Good; lose no time, for in a quarter of an hour I must be in the post-chaise.”

“Have your carriage stopped at the door.”

“Assuredly; you will excuse me to the marquise, will you not? and to Mlle de Saint-Méran, whom I leave on such a day with the deepest regret.”

“You will find them both in my study, and you may take your leave of them.”

“A hundred thanks; attend to my letter.”

The marquis rang; a lackey appeared.

“Tell the Comte de Salvieux I am waiting for him… Go now,” continued the marquis, addressing Villefort.

“Very well; I shall but come and go.”

And Villefort went out at a run; but at the door he reflected that a deputy of the crown attorney seen walking with hurried steps risked disturbing the peace of an entire town; he therefore resumed his ordinary gait, which was wholly magisterial.

At his door, he perceived in the shadow, like a white phantom, someone waiting, standing and motionless.

It was the beautiful Catalan girl, who, having no news of Edmond, had slipped away at nightfall from the Pharo to come and learn for herself the cause of her lover’s arrest.

At Villefort’s approach, she detached herself from the wall against which she had been leaning and came to bar his path.

Dantès had spoken to the deputy of his betrothed, and Mercédès had no need to name herself for Villefort to recognise her. He was surprised by the beauty and dignity of this woman, and when she asked him what had become of her lover, it seemed to him that he was the accused and she the judge.

“The man of whom you speak,” said Villefort abruptly, “is a great criminal, and I can do nothing for him, mademoiselle.”

Mercédès let escape a sob, and as Villefort tried to pass on, she stopped him a second time.

“But where is he, at least?” she asked. “That I may learn whether he is dead or alive.”

“I know not; he is no longer mine,” answered Villefort.

And, embarrassed by that searching glance and supplicating attitude, he pushed Mercédès aside and went in, sharply closing the door, as if to leave outside the grief that was brought to him.

But grief is not to be thrust aside thus. Like the mortal dart of which Virgil speaks, the wounded man carries it with him. Villefort went in, closed the door; but once in his salon his legs gave way in their turn; he uttered a sigh that resembled a sob, and let himself fall into an armchair.

Then, in the depths of that sick heart, was born the first germ of a mortal ulcer. This man whom he sacrificed to his ambition, this innocent man who paid for his guilty father, appeared to him pale and threatening, giving his hand to his betrothed, pale like himself, and dragging after him remorse—not that remorse which makes the sufferer leap like the frenzied ones of antique fate, but that dull and painful tolling which, at certain moments, strikes upon the heart and bruises it at the memory of a past deed; a bruising whose gnawing pains hollow out a malady that deepens unto death.

Then in the soul of this man there was yet an instant of hesitation. Already several times he had demanded, and that with no other emotion than the struggle of judge against accused, the death penalty against the charged; and those accused, executed thanks to his thunderbolt eloquence that had swept along either the judges or the jury, had not even left a cloud upon his brow, for those accused were guilty, or at least Villefort believed them so.

But this time it was quite another matter: this sentence of perpetual imprisonment, he had just applied it to an innocent man, an innocent man who was about to be happy, and whose liberty he destroyed, and whose happiness he destroyed; this time, he was no longer judge, he was executioner.

Thinking of this, he felt that dull beating we have described, unknown to him until then, resounding in the depths of his heart and filling his breast with vague apprehensions. Thus, by a violent instinctive suffering, is warned the wounded man, who shall never approach without trembling the finger to his open and bleeding wound before that wound is closed.

But the wound Villefort had received was of those that close not, or that close only to reopen more bloody and more painful than before.

If, in this moment, the sweet voice of Renée had sounded in his ear to ask him for mercy; if the beautiful Mercédès had entered and said to him: “In the name of the God who sees us and who judges us, give me back my betrothed,” yes, that brow half-bowed beneath necessity would have bowed wholly, and with his icy hands he would doubtless, at the risk of all that might result for him, have signed the order to set Dantès free; but no voice murmured in the silence, and the door opened only to admit Villefort’s valet, who came to tell him the post-horses were harnessed to the travelling calash.

Villefort rose, or rather sprang up, like a man who triumphs over an inward struggle, ran to his desk, poured into his pockets all the gold found in one of the drawers, turned for an instant in bewilderment about the room, his hand upon his brow, uttering disconnected words; then at last, feeling his valet had just laid his cloak upon his shoulders, he went out, sprang into the carriage, and ordered in a brief voice to drive to the Rue du Grand-Cours, to M. de Saint-Méran’s.

The unhappy Dantès was condemned.

As M. de Saint-Méran had promised, Villefort found the marquise and Renée in the study. At sight of Renée, the young man trembled; for he thought she was going to ask him again for Dantès’ liberty. But, alas! it must be told to the shame of our selfishness, the beautiful young girl was preoccupied with but one thing: Villefort’s departure.

She loved Villefort, Villefort was about to leave at the very moment of becoming her husband. Villefort could not say when he would return, and Renée, instead of pitying Dantès, cursed the man who, by his crime, separated her from her lover.

What, then, should Mercédès have said!

The poor Mercédès had found, at the corner of the Rue de la Loge, Fernand, who had followed her; she had returned to the Catalans, and, dying, despairing, had thrown herself upon her bed. Before that bed, Fernand had knelt, and pressing her icy hand, which Mercédès did not think to withdraw, he covered it with burning kisses that Mercédès did not even feel.

She passed the night thus. The lamp went out when there was no more oil: she saw the darkness no more than she had seen the light, and day returned without her seeing the day.

Grief had placed before her eyes a bandage that left her to see only Edmond.

“Ah! you are there!” she said at last, turning toward Fernand.

“Since yesterday I have not left you,” answered Fernand with a painful sigh.

M. Morrel had not considered himself beaten: he had learned that, following his examination, Dantès had been taken to prison; he had then run to all his friends, had presented himself to the persons of Marseille who might have influence, but already the rumour had spread that the young man had been arrested as a Bonapartist agent, and as, at that time, the most reckless regarded any attempt of Napoleon to remount the throne as a senseless dream, he had found everywhere only coldness, fear, or refusal, and had returned home in despair, yet admitting that the position was grave and that no one could do anything.

For his part, Caderousse was much troubled and much tormented: instead of going out as M. Morrel had done, instead of attempting something in favour of Dantès, for whom besides he could do nothing, he had shut himself up with two bottles of cassis wine, and had tried to drown his unease in drunkenness. But, in the state of mind he was in, two bottles were too little to extinguish his judgment; he had therefore remained, too drunk to go for more wine, not drunk enough that drunkenness had extinguished his memories, leaning on a rickety table facing his two empty bottles, and seeing dance, in the light of his long-wicked candle, all those spectres that Hoffmann has scattered through his manuscripts damp with punch, like a black and fantastic dust.

Danglars alone was neither tormented nor uneasy; Danglars was even joyful, for he had avenged an enemy and secured, aboard the Pharaon, the place he had feared to lose; Danglars was one of those calculating men who are born with a pen behind the ear and an inkwell in place of a heart; all was for him in this world subtraction or multiplication, and a figure seemed to him far more precious than a man, when that figure could increase the total that man could diminish.

Danglars had therefore gone to bed at his usual hour and slept tranquilly.

Villefort, after receiving M. de Salvieux’s letter, kissing Renée on both cheeks, bowing over Mme de Saint-Méran’s hand, and clasping the marquis’s, was posting at full speed on the road to Aix.

Old Dantès was dying of sorrow and anxiety.

As for Edmond, we know what had become of him.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”