The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (156 page)

‘You will say all that, won’t you, father?’

‘All that and much more.’

‘What more?’

‘I shall say that he doubtless gave you the plan of this house in the hope that the count would kill you. I will say that he sent a letter to the count to warn him, and I shall say that, in the count’s absence, I received this letter and lay in wait for you.’

‘And he will be guillotined, won’t he?’ said Caderousse. ‘Promise me he will be guillotined. I die in that hope; it will help me to die.’

‘I shall say,’ the count continued, ‘that he followed you here, that he watched you all the time and that when he saw you coming out, he ran up and hid behind a corner of the wall.’

‘Did you see all that, then?’

‘Remember what I said: “If you return home safe and sound, I shall believe that God has pardoned you and I shall do the same.” ’

‘And you didn’t warn me?’ Caderousse cried, trying to lift himself on his elbow. ‘You knew that I would be killed when I left here, and you didn’t warn me?’

‘No, because I saw the hand of Benedetto as the justice of God, and I thought I should be committing a sacrilege if I were to interfere with Fate.’

‘The justice of God! Don’t speak to me of that, Monsieur l’Abbé. If there was any divine justice, you know as well as anyone that there are people who would be punished but who are not.’

‘Patience!’ said the abbé, in a tone of voice that made the dying man shudder. ‘Be patient!’ Caderousse looked at him in amazement.

‘And then,’ the abbé continued, ‘God is full of mercy for everyone, as He has been towards you. He is a father before He is a judge.’

‘Oh, so you believe in God, do you?’ Caderousse asked.

‘Even if I were so unfortunate as not to have believed in Him up to now, I should do so on looking at you.’

Caderousse raised his clasped hands to heaven.

‘Listen,’ the abbé went on, extending a hand above the wounded man as if ordering him to believe. ‘Here is what He did for you, this God whom you refuse to recognize even in your last hour. He gave you health, strength, secure work and even friends; in short, life as it must appear sweet to a man, offering an easy conscience and the satisfaction of his natural desires. But, instead of making use of these gifts of the Lord, which He so rarely grants in all their fullness, what did you do? You abandoned yourself to idleness and drunkenness, and in your drunkenness you betrayed one of your best friends.’

‘Help!’ cried Caderousse. ‘It’s not a priest I need, but a doctor. Perhaps I am not mortally wounded, perhaps I am not yet going to die, perhaps I can be saved!’

‘You are mortally wounded, and so much so that, without the three drops of liquid which I gave you just now, you would already be dead. So listen.’

‘Oh!’ groaned Caderousse. ‘What a strange priest you are, who puts despair instead of comfort into a dying man’s heart.’

‘Listen,’ the abbé continued. ‘When you had betrayed your friend, God began, not by striking you down, but by warning you. You lapsed into poverty and you knew hunger. You had spent half a life in envy that you could have spent in profitable toil, and you were already thinking about crime when God offered you a miracle, when God, by my hands, sent you a fortune in the midst of your deprivation – a fortune that was splendid for you, who had never possessed anything. But this unexpected, unhoped-for, unheard-of fortune was not enough for you, as soon as you owned it. You wanted to double it. How? By murder. You did double it, and God took it away from you by bringing you to human justice.’

‘I didn’t want to kill the Jew,’ said Caderousse. ‘It was La Carconte.’

‘Yes,’ Monte Cristo replied. ‘So God, who is always – I shall not say “just” this time, because His justice would have awarded you death; but God, who is always merciful, allowed your judges to be touched by your words and let you live.’

‘Huh! To condemn me to prison for life! A fine pardon that was!’

‘You wretch: you did at least consider it a pardon when it was given. Your cowardly heart, trembling at the prospect of death, leapt with joy at the announcement of your perpetual shame because, like all convicts, you said to yourself: prisons have doors,
the tomb has none. You were right, because the door to your prison opened unexpectedly. An Englishman, visiting Toulon, has made a vow to free two men from infamy. He chooses you and your companion. A second fortune drops on you from heaven, you regain both money and ease, and you can once more live the life of other men, after having been condemned to live that of a convict. And at this, you wretch, you begin to tempt God for a third time. “I haven’t got enough,” you say, when you have more than you ever possessed, and you commit a third crime, motiveless, inexcusable. But God had grown tired; He has punished you.’

Caderousse was weakening visibly. ‘Water,’ he said. ‘I’m thirsty, I’m burning.’

Monte Cristo gave him a glass of water.

‘That scoundrel Benedetto,’ Caderousse said, giving back the glass, ‘he’ll get away with it, even so!’

‘No one will escape: I am telling you that, Caderousse. Benedetto will be punished.’

‘Then you too will be punished,’ said Caderousse. ‘Because you did not do your duty as a priest. You should have stopped Benedetto killing me.’

‘I!’ said the count, with a smile that made the dying man shudder with fear. ‘I, stop Benedetto killing you, just after you had broken your dagger on the mail-coat protecting my chest! Yes, perhaps, if I had found you humble and repentant, then I should have stopped Benedetto killing you. But I found you arrogant and bloodthirsty, so I let God’s will be done!’

‘I don’t believe in God!’ Caderousse shouted. ‘Nor do you… You are lying… lying… !’

‘Be quiet,’ said the abbé. ‘You are urging the last drops of blood out of your body. Oh, so you don’t believe in God – yet you are dying at His hand! Oh, so you don’t believe in God; yet God only asks for a single prayer, a single word, a single tear to forgive you. God could have guided the murderer’s dagger so that you would die immediately, yet He gave you a quarter of an hour to reconsider. So look in your heart, you wretch, and repent!’

‘No,’ said Caderousse. ‘No, I do not repent. There is no God, there is no Providence. There is only chance.’

‘There is both Providence and God,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘The proof is that you are lying there, desperate, denying God, and I am standing before you, rich, happy, healthy and safe, clasping my
hands before the God in whom you try not to believe and in whom, even so, you do believe in the depths of your heart.’

‘But who are you then?’ asked Caderousse, turning his dying eyes towards the count.

‘Look carefully at me,’ Monte Cristo said, taking the candle and putting it next to his face.

‘Well: the Abbé… Busoni.’

Monte Cristo took off the wig that was disguising his features and let down the fine black hair that so harmoniously framed his pale face.

‘Oh!’ Caderousse exclaimed in terror. ‘If it were not for that black hair, I would take you for the Englishman, I would take you for Lord Wilmore.’

‘I am not Abbé Busoni, or Lord Wilmore,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘Look more carefully; go back further; look into your earliest memories.’ These words were spoken by the count with such a magnetic vibrancy that the man’s exhausted senses were awakened for one last time.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I think I did see you, I did know you once.’

‘Yes, Caderousse, you saw me. Yes, you did know me.’

‘Who are you then? And, if you saw me, if you knew me, why are you letting me die?’

‘Because nothing can save you, Caderousse: your wounds are mortal. If you could have been saved, I would have seen that as one last act of God’s mercy and, I swear it on my father’s grave, I should have tried to bring you back to life and to repentance.’

‘On your father’s grave!’ said Caderousse, fired by one last flickering spark of life and raising himself to look more closely at this man who had just made an oath sacred to all men. ‘Who are you, then?’

The count had watched every stage of Caderousse’s agony. He realized that this burst of life was the last. He bent over the dying man and, with a look that was both calm and sad, he said, whispering in his ear: ‘I am…’ And his lips, barely parting, let fall a name spoken so low that the count himself seemed to fear the sound of it.

Caderousse, who had pulled himself up to his knees, reached out his arms, made an effort to shrink back, then clasped his hands and raised them in one supreme final effort: ‘Oh, God,’ he said. ‘Oh, God, forgive me for denying You. You do indeed exist, You are the
father of men in heaven and their judge on earth. Oh, my Lord, I have long mistaken You! My Lord God, forgive me! My God, my Lord, receive my soul!’ And, closing his eyes, Caderousse fell backwards with a last cry and a final gasp.

At once the blood stopped on his lips and ceased to flow from his wounds. He was dead.

‘One!’ the count said, mysteriously, staring at the corpse already disfigured by its awful death.

Ten minutes later the doctor and the crown prosecutor arrived, the first with the concierge, the other with Ali. They found Abbé Busoni praying beside the body.

For a whole fortnight, no one in Paris spoke of anything except this daring attempted robbery at the count’s. The dying man had signed a statement naming Benedetto as his murderer. The police were asked to put all their agents on the criminal’s trail.

Caderousse’s knife, his shrouded lantern, his bunch of keys and his clothes, except for the waistcoat, which could not be found, were handed over to the clerk of the court, and the body was taken to the morgue.

The count told everyone that this adventure had happened while he was in his house in Auteuil and that, consequently, he knew only what he had been told by Abbé Busoni. By sheer chance, the abbé had asked the count if he might spend the night at his house in order to do some research into one or two of the precious volumes in his library.

Only Bertuccio went pale every time the name of Benedetto was mentioned in his presence, but there was no reason for anyone to notice the pallor on Bertuccio’s cheeks.

Villefort, called in to establish the facts of the crime, had allocated the case to himself and was pursuing the investigation with all the passionate enthusiasm that he gave to every criminal case in which he was involved. But three weeks had already elapsed without the most active enquiries bringing any result; and society gossips were
starting to forget about the attempted robbery at the Count of Monte Cristo’s and the murder of the thief by his accomplice, turning instead to the forthcoming marriage of Mlle Danglars to Count Andrea Cavalcanti.

The marriage was more or less arranged and the young man received at the banker’s as a future son-in-law.

The elder Cavalcanti had been contacted by letter and had warmly approved of the match. Expressing deep regret that his duties absolutely forbade him to leave Parma, where he then was, he stated his intention of releasing a capital sum sufficient to give an income of 150,000
livres
. It was agreed that the three million would be entrusted to Danglars, who would invest them. Some people had tried to sow doubt in the young man’s mind about the solidity of his future father-in-law’s position: Danglars had recently been making repeated losses on the Exchange; but the young man, with sublime confidence and disinterestedness, dismissed all these vain murmurings, and had the tact to say nothing about them to the baron.

The baron, consequently, adored Count Andrea Cavalcanti.

The same could not be said of Mlle Eugénie Danglars. Having an instinctive horror of marriage, she had welcomed Andrea as a means of repelling Morcerf; but now that Andrea was coming too close, she began to feel a visible repulsion towards him. The baron may perhaps have noticed it but, as he could only attribute this feeling to a whim, he had pretended not to notice it.

Meanwhile, the period of grace that Beauchamp had asked for had almost passed. During it, Morcerf had come to appreciate the value of Monte Cristo’s advice when he told him to let the matter clear itself up. No one had remarked on the note about the general and no one had thought to identify the officer who had betrayed the castle of Janina with the noble count who sat in the Upper House.

Even so, Albert felt insulted, because the intention to offend was quite obviously there, in the few lines that had wounded his honour. Moreover, the manner in which Beauchamp had ended their meeting had left a bitter taste in his mouth. For these reasons, he still harboured the idea of a duel but hoped, if Beauchamp would agree, that they might be able to disguise the real reason for it, even from their seconds.

As for Beauchamp, he had not been seen since the day of Albert’s
visit and, whenever anyone asked for him, the reply was that he had left for a few days’ journey. Where was he? Nobody knew.

One morning Albert was awoken by his valet, announcing Beauchamp. He rubbed his eyes and asked for the visitor to be shown into the little smoking parlour on the ground floor. Then he dressed quickly and went down.

Beauchamp was pacing up and down, but he stopped when he saw Albert.

‘Your decision to come and see me yourself, instead of waiting for the visit that I intended to pay on you today myself, seems to me like a good omen,’ said Albert. ‘Come, tell me straight away, can I offer you my hand and say: “Beauchamp, admit your mistake and keep your friend,” or should I simply instruct you to choose your weapons?’