is the bearer of a letter from Murat to the usurper, and of another
letter from the usurper to the Bonapartist club in Paris. Ample
corroboration of this statement may be obtained by arresting the
above-mentioned Edmond Dantes, who either carries the letter for Paris
about with him, or has it at his father's abode. Should it not be
found in possession of either father or son, then it will assuredly
be discovered in the cabin belonging to the said Dantes on board the
Pharaon."
"How dreadful!" said Mercedes, passing her hand across her brow, moist
with perspiration; "and that letter"--
"I bought it for two hundred thousand francs, madame," said Monte
Cristo; "but that is a trifle, since it enables me to justify myself to
you."
"And the result of that letter"--
"You well know, madame, was my arrest; but you do not know how long that
arrest lasted. You do not know that I remained for fourteen years within
a quarter of a league of you, in a dungeon in the Chateau d'If. You do
not know that every day of those fourteen years I renewed the vow of
vengeance which I had made the first day; and yet I was not aware that
you had married Fernand, my calumniator, and that my father had died of
hunger!"
"Can it be?" cried Mercedes, shuddering.
"That is what I heard on leaving my prison fourteen years after I had
entered it; and that is why, on account of the living Mercedes and my
deceased father, I have sworn to revenge myself on Fernand, and--I have
revenged myself."
"And you are sure the unhappy Fernand did that?"
"I am satisfied, madame, that he did what I have told you; besides, that
is not much more odious than that a Frenchman by adoption should pass
over to the English; that a Spaniard by birth should have fought against
the Spaniards; that a stipendiary of Ali should have betrayed and
murdered Ali. Compared with such things, what is the letter you have
just read?--a lover's deception, which the woman who has married that
man ought certainly to forgive; but not so the lover who was to have
married her. Well, the French did not avenge themselves on the traitor,
the Spaniards did not shoot the traitor, Ali in his tomb left the
traitor unpunished; but I, betrayed, sacrificed, buried, have risen from
my tomb, by the grace of God, to punish that man. He sends me for that
purpose, and here I am." The poor woman's head and arms fell; her legs
bent under her, and she fell on her knees. "Forgive, Edmond, forgive for
my sake, who love you still!"
The dignity of the wife checked the fervor of the lover and the mother.
Her forehead almost touched the carpet, when the count sprang forward
and raised her. Then seated on a chair, she looked at the manly
countenance of Monte Cristo, on which grief and hatred still impressed
a threatening expression. "Not crush that accursed race?" murmured he;
"abandon my purpose at the moment of its accomplishment? Impossible,
madame, impossible!"
"Edmond," said the poor mother, who tried every means, "when I call you
Edmond, why do you not call me Mercedes?"
"Mercedes!" repeated Monte Cristo; "Mercedes! Well yes, you are right;
that name has still its charms, and this is the first time for a long
period that I have pronounced it so distinctly. Oh, Mercedes, I have
uttered your name with the sigh of melancholy, with the groan of sorrow,
with the last effort of despair; I have uttered it when frozen with
cold, crouched on the straw in my dungeon; I have uttered it, consumed
with heat, rolling on the stone floor of my prison. Mercedes, I must
revenge myself, for I suffered fourteen years,--fourteen years I wept, I
cursed; now I tell you, Mercedes, I must revenge myself."
The count, fearing to yield to the entreaties of her he had so ardently
loved, called his sufferings to the assistance of his hatred. "Revenge
yourself, then, Edmond," cried the poor mother; "but let your vengeance
fall on the culprits,--on him, on me, but not on my son!"
"It is written in the good book," said Monte Cristo, "that the sins
of the fathers shall fall upon their children to the third and fourth
generation. Since God himself dictated those words to his prophet, why
should I seek to make myself better than God?"
"Edmond," continued Mercedes, with her arms extended towards the count,
"since I first knew you, I have adored your name, have respected your
memory. Edmond, my friend, do not compel me to tarnish that noble and
pure image reflected incessantly on the mirror of my heart. Edmond, if
you knew all the prayers I have addressed to God for you while I thought
you were living and since I have thought you must be dead! Yes, dead,
alas! I imagined your dead body buried at the foot of some gloomy tower,
or cast to the bottom of a pit by hateful jailers, and I wept! What
could I do for you, Edmond, besides pray and weep? Listen; for ten
years I dreamed each night the same dream. I had been told that you had
endeavored to escape; that you had taken the place of another prisoner;
that you had slipped into the winding sheet of a dead body; that you had
been thrown alive from the top of the Chateau d'If, and that the cry you
uttered as you dashed upon the rocks first revealed to your jailers that
they were your murderers. Well, Edmond, I swear to you, by the head
of that son for whom I entreat your pity,--Edmond, for ten years I saw
every night every detail of that frightful tragedy, and for ten years
I heard every night the cry which awoke me, shuddering and cold. And
I, too, Edmond--oh! believe me--guilty as I was--oh, yes, I, too, have
suffered much!"
"Have you known what it is to have your father starve to death in your
absence?" cried Monte Cristo, thrusting his hands into his hair; "have
you seen the woman you loved giving her hand to your rival, while you
were perishing at the bottom of a dungeon?"
"No," interrupted Mercedes, "but I have seen him whom I loved on the
point of murdering my son." Mercedes uttered these words with such deep
anguish, with an accent of such intense despair, that Monte Cristo could
not restrain a sob. The lion was daunted; the avenger was conquered.
"What do you ask of me?" said he,--"your son's life? Well, he shall
live!" Mercedes uttered a cry which made the tears start from Monte
Cristo's eyes; but these tears disappeared almost instantaneously, for,
doubtless, God had sent some angel to collect them--far more precious
were they in his eyes than the richest pearls of Guzerat and Ophir.
"Oh," said she, seizing the count's hand and raising it to her lips;
"oh, thank you, thank you, Edmond! Now you are exactly what I dreamt you
were,--the man I always loved. Oh, now I may say so!"
"So much the better," replied Monte Cristo; "as that poor Edmond will
not have long to be loved by you. Death is about to return to the tomb,
the phantom to retire in darkness."
"What do you say, Edmond?"
"I say, since you command me, Mercedes, I must die."
"Die? and why so? Who talks of dying? Whence have you these ideas of
death?"
"You do not suppose that, publicly outraged in the face of a
whole theatre, in the presence of your friends and those of your
son--challenged by a boy who will glory in my forgiveness as if it were
a victory--you do not suppose that I can for one moment wish to live.
What I most loved after you, Mercedes, was myself, my dignity, and that
strength which rendered me superior to other men; that strength was my
life. With one word you have crushed it, and I die."
"But the duel will not take place, Edmond, since you forgive?"
"It will take place," said Monte Cristo, in a most solemn tone; "but
instead of your son's blood to stain the ground, mine will flow."
Mercedes shrieked, and sprang towards Monte Cristo, but, suddenly
stopping, "Edmond," said she, "there is a God above us, since you live
and since I have seen you again; I trust to him from my heart. While
waiting his assistance I trust to your word; you have said that my son
should live, have you not?"
"Yes, madame, he shall live," said Monte Cristo, surprised that without
more emotion Mercedes had accepted the heroic sacrifice he made for her.
Mercedes extended her hand to the count.
"Edmond," said she, and her eyes were wet with tears while looking at
him to whom she spoke, "how noble it is of you, how great the action you
have just performed, how sublime to have taken pity on a poor woman who
appealed to you with every chance against her, Alas, I am grown old with
grief more than with years, and cannot now remind my Edmond by a smile,
or by a look, of that Mercedes whom he once spent so many hours in
contemplating. Ah, believe me, Edmond, as I told you, I too have
suffered much; I repeat, it is melancholy to pass one's life without
having one joy to recall, without preserving a single hope; but that
proves that all is not yet over. No, it is not finished; I feel it by
what remains in my heart. Oh, I repeat it, Edmond; what you have just
done is beautiful--it is grand; it is sublime."
"Do you say so now, Mercedes?--then what would you say if you knew the
extent of the sacrifice I make to you? Suppose that the Supreme Being,
after having created the world and fertilized chaos, had paused in the
work to spare an angel the tears that might one day flow for mortal sins
from her immortal eyes; suppose that when everything was in readiness
and the moment had come for God to look upon his work and see that it
was good--suppose he had snuffed out the sun and tossed the world back
into eternal night--then--even then, Mercedes, you could not imagine
what I lose in sacrificing my life at this moment." Mercedes looked at
the count in a way which expressed at the same time her astonishment,
her admiration, and her gratitude. Monte Cristo pressed his forehead on
his burning hands, as if his brain could no longer bear alone the weight
of its thoughts. "Edmond," said Mercedes, "I have but one word more to
say to you." The count smiled bitterly. "Edmond," continued she, "you
will see that if my face is pale, if my eyes are dull, if my beauty is
gone; if Mercedes, in short, no longer resembles her former self in her
features, you will see that her heart is still the same. Adieu, then,
Edmond; I have nothing more to ask of heaven--I have seen you again,
and have found you as noble and as great as formerly you were. Adieu,
Edmond, adieu, and thank you."
But the count did not answer. Mercedes opened the door of the study and
had disappeared before he had recovered from the painful and profound
revery into which his thwarted vengeance had plunged him. The clock
of the Invalides struck one when the carriage which conveyed Madame
de Morcerf away rolled on the pavement of the Champs-Elysees, and made
Monte Cristo raise his head. "What a fool I was," said he, "not to tear
my heart out on the day when I resolved to avenge myself!"
Chapter 90. The Meeting.
After Mercedes had left Monte Cristo, he fell into profound gloom.
Around him and within him the flight of thought seemed to have stopped;
his energetic mind slumbered, as the body does after extreme fatigue.
"What?" said he to himself, while the lamp and the wax lights were
nearly burnt out, and the servants were waiting impatiently in the
anteroom; "what? this edifice which I have been so long preparing, which
I have reared with so much care and toil, is to be crushed by a single
touch, a word, a breath! Yes, this self, of whom I thought so much, of
whom I was so proud, who had appeared so worthless in the dungeons of
the Chateau d'If, and whom I had succeeded in making so great, will be
but a lump of clay to-morrow. Alas, it is not the death of the body I
regret; for is not the destruction of the vital principle, the repose to
which everything is tending, to which every unhappy being aspires,--is
not this the repose of matter after which I so long sighed, and which
I was seeking to attain by the painful process of starvation when Faria
appeared in my dungeon? What is death for me? One step farther into
rest,--two, perhaps, into silence.
"No, it is not existence, then, that I regret, but the ruin of projects
so slowly carried out, so laboriously framed. Providence is now opposed
to them, when I most thought it would be propitious. It is not God's
will that they should be accomplished. This burden, almost as heavy as a
world, which I had raised, and I had thought to bear to the end, was too
great for my strength, and I was compelled to lay it down in the middle
of my career. Oh, shall I then, again become a fatalist, whom fourteen
years of despair and ten of hope had rendered a believer in providence?
And all this--all this, because my heart, which I thought dead, was only
sleeping; because it has awakened and has begun to beat again, because
I have yielded to the pain of the emotion excited in my breast by a
woman's voice. Yet," continued the count, becoming each moment more
absorbed in the anticipation of the dreadful sacrifice for the morrow,
which Mercedes had accepted, "yet, it is impossible that so noble-minded
a woman should thus through selfishness consent to my death when I am in
the prime of life and strength; it is impossible that she can carry to
such a point maternal love, or rather delirium. There are virtues which
become crimes by exaggeration. No, she must have conceived some pathetic
scene; she will come and throw herself between us; and what would be
sublime here will there appear ridiculous." The blush of pride mounted
to the count's forehead as this thought passed through his mind.
"Ridiculous?" repeated he; "and the ridicule will fall on me. I
