The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (164 page)

‘Monsieur,’ he said to Monte Cristo. ‘A short time ago, as you will have observed, I accompanied Monsieur de Morcerf.’

‘That probably means,’ Monte Cristo said with a laugh, ‘that you had just had dinner together. I am happy to see that you are more sober than he was, Monsieur Beauchamp.’

‘I admit, Monsieur, that Albert was wrong to lose his temper and I have come on my own account to make my excuses to you. But now that my excuses have been made – and mine only, you understand, Count – I have come to tell you that I consider you too honourable a man to refuse to give me some explanation of your relations with the people in Janina; and I shall add a few words about that young Greek woman.’

With a gesture of the lips and eyes, Monte Cristo ordered silence. ‘Well now,’ he said with a laugh, ‘all my expectations are disappointed.’

‘What do you mean?’ Beauchamp asked.

‘No doubt you were in a hurry to give me a reputation for eccentricity: according to you, I am a Lara, a Manfred, a Lord Ruthwen.
²
Then, once the time for seeing me as eccentric has gone, the image is spoiled and you try to turn me into an ordinary man. You want me to be commonplace and vulgar. You even ask me for explanations. Come, come, Monsieur Beauchamp! You are joking!’

‘And yet,’ Beauchamp replied haughtily, ‘there are some occasions when honesty commands us…’

‘What commands the Count of Monte Cristo,’ the strange man interrupted, ‘is the Count of Monte Cristo. So, not a word of all this, I beg you. I do what I wish, Monsieur Beauchamp, and believe me, it is always very well done.’

‘Sir,’ said the young man, ‘an honourable person cannot be paid in such coin. One must have guarantees of honour.’

‘I am a living guarantee,’ said Monte Cristo, imperturbably, but with a threatening light in his eyes. ‘We both have blood in our veins which we wish to spill, there is our mutual guarantee. Take that reply back to the viscount and tell him that tomorrow, before ten o’clock, I shall have seen the colour of his.’

‘So there is nothing left for me but to make arrangements for the duel.’

‘All that is a matter of perfect indifference to me, Monsieur,’ said the count. ‘There was no need to come and interrupt the performance for such a slight thing. In France, one fights with sword or pistol; in the colonies they take carbines; in Arabia, a dagger. Tell your client that, though I am the injured party, to keep my eccentricity to the very end I shall let him have the choice of weapons and will accept any, without discussion or argument. Any, do you understand? Even a duel by drawing lots, which is always stupid. But with me, it is a different matter: I am sure of winning.’

‘Sure of winning!’ Beauchamp repeated, looking at the count with alarm.

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Monte Cristo, lightly shrugging his shoulders. ‘Otherwise, I should not fight Monsieur de Morcerf. I shall kill him, I must do it and so it will be. Simply send round to my house this evening to tell me the weapon and the place. I do not like to be kept waiting.’

‘Pistols, eight in the morning, in the Bois de Vincennes,’ said Beauchamp, somewhat put out, not knowing whether he was dealing with an impudent braggart or a supernatural being.

‘Perfect, Monsieur,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘And now that we have settled that, I beg you, let me watch the performance and ask your friend Albert not to come back this evening: he would do himself no good with all his ill-mannered aggression. Tell him to go home and get some sleep.’

Beauchamp left in astonishment.

‘And now,’ Monte Cristo said, turning to Morrel, ‘I can call on you, can’t I?’

‘Certainly, Count; I am at your disposal. Yet…’

‘What?’

‘It is important for me to know the true cause…’

‘Does this mean you are refusing me?’

‘Not at all.’

‘The cause, Monsieur Morrel?’ said the count. ‘The young man himself is going forward blindly, without realizing it. The true cause is known only to myself and to God; but I give you my word of honour that God, who does know it, will be on our side.’

‘That is enough, Count,’ said Morrel. ‘Who is your other second?’

‘I know no one in Paris whom I would wish to honour in that way apart from yourself, Morrel, and your brother-in-law, Emmanuel. Do you think he would perform this service for me?’

‘I can answer for him as for myself, Count.’

‘Good! That’s all I need. Tomorrow at seven o’clock, at my house then?’

‘We shall be there.’

‘Hush! the curtain is just rising. Listen. I never miss a note of this opera. It’s such wonderful music,
William Tell
!’

Monte Cristo waited, as he usually did, until Duprez had sung his famous
‘Suivez-moi!’
,
¹
and only then did he get up and leave.

Morrel left him at the door, repeating his promise to be at the count’s, with Emmanuel, the next morning at exactly seven o’clock. Then the count got into his coupé, still calm and smiling. Five minutes later he was home. But one would have not to know the man to mistake the tone in which he said to Ali, as he came in: ‘Ali, my ivory-handled pistols!’

Ali brought his master the box, and the count started to examine the weapons with the natural concern of a man who is about to entrust his life to some scraps of lead and metal. These were private weapons that Monte Cristo had had made for target practice in his apartments. A percussion cap was enough to fire the bullet, and from the adjoining room no one could doubt that the count, as they say on the firing ranges, was engaged in getting his eye in.

He was just fitting the weapon in his hand and looking for the bull on a small metal plaque that served him as a target, when the door of his study opened and Baptistin came in. But, even before he had opened his mouth, the count noticed through the still-open door a veiled woman standing in the half-light of the next room. She had followed Baptistin.

She saw the count with a pistol in his hand, she had seen two swords on the table and she ran forward.

Baptistin looked enquiringly at his master. The count gestured to dismiss him and Baptistin left, closing the door behind him.

‘Who are you, Madame?’ the count asked the veiled woman.

The stranger looked all around her to make sure that she was quite alone then, bending forward as if she wanted to kneel down and clasping her hands, she said in a desperate voice: ‘Edmond! You must not kill my son!’

The count took one pace backwards, gave a faint cry and dropped the pistol he was holding.

‘What name did you say, Madame de Morcerf?’ he asked.

‘Yours!’ she cried, throwing back her veil. ‘Yours, which perhaps I alone have not forgotten. Edmond, it is not Madame de Morcerf who has come to you, it is Mercédès.’

‘Mercédès is dead, Madame,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘I do not know anyone of that name.’

‘Mercédès is alive, Monsieur, and Mercédès remembers, for she alone recognized you when she saw you, and even without seeing you, by your voice, Edmond, by the mere sound of your voice. Since that time she has followed you step by step, she has watched you and been wary of you, because she did not need to wonder whose was the hand that has struck down Monsieur de Morcerf.’

‘Fernand, you mean, Madame,’ Monte Cristo said, with bitter irony in his voice. ‘Since we are remembering one another’s names, let’s remember all of them.’

Monte Cristo had spoken Fernand’s name with such hatred that Mercédès felt a shudder of fear run through her whole body.

‘You see, Edmond, I was not mistaken!’ she cried. ‘I was right to say to you: spare my son!’

‘Whoever told you, Madame, that I had any quarrel with your son?’

‘No one! A mother has second sight. I guessed everything. I followed him to the opera this evening and, from the ground-floor box where I was hiding, I saw everything.’

‘If you saw everything, Madame, then you will have seen that Fernand’s son insulted me publicly,’ Monte Cristo said with dreadful impassivity.

‘Oh, have pity!’

‘You saw,’ he went on, ‘that he would have thrown his glove in my face if one of my friends, Monsieur Morrel, had not stayed his arm.’

‘Listen to me. My son also guessed what is going on and attributes his father’s misfortunes to you.’

‘You are confused, Madame,’ Monte Cristo said. ‘These are not
misfortunes, they are a punishment. I am not the one who has struck Monsieur de Morcerf: Providence is punishing him.’

‘So why do you take the place of Providence?’ Mercédès cried. ‘Why do you remember, when it has forgotten? What do they matter to you, Edmond – Janina and its vizier? What wrong did Fernand Mondego do to you by betraying Ali Tebelin?’

‘So, Madame,’ Monte Cristo replied, ‘all this is an affair between the Frankish captain and Vasiliki’s daughter. You are right, it does not concern me, and, if I have sworn to take my revenge, it is not on the Frankish captain or on the Count of Morcerf, but on the fisherman Fernand, husband of Mercédès the Catalan.’

‘Oh, Monsieur!’ the countess exclaimed. ‘What a dreadful revenge for a sin which fate drove me to commit – because I am the guilty party, Edmond! If you must take revenge on anyone, let it be on me, because I did not have the strength to withstand your absence and my loneliness.’

‘And why was I absent? Why were you all alone?’ Monte Cristo cried.

‘Because you were arrested, Edmond, and taken prisoner.’

‘Why was I arrested? Why was I imprisoned?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mercédès.

‘Yes. You do not know, Madame, or at least I hope you do not. Well, I will tell you. I was arrested and imprisoned because in the café of La Réserve, the very day before I was due to marry you, a man called Danglars wrote this letter which the fisherman Fernand personally took it upon himself to post.’ And, going to his bureau, Monte Cristo took out a faded piece of paper, written on in ink the colour of rust, which he handed to Mercédès.

It was the letter from Danglars to the crown prosecutor which the Count of Monte Cristo had removed from the dossier of Edmond Dantès on the day when, disguised as an agent of the house of Thomson and French, he had paid the 200,000 francs to M. de Boville.

Appalled, Mercédès read the following lines:

The crown prosecutor is advised, by a friend of the monarchy and the faith, that one Edmond Dantès, first mate of the
Pharaon
, arriving this morning from Smyrna, after putting in at Naples and Porto Ferrajo, was entrusted by Murat with a letter for the usurper and by the usurper with a letter to the Bonapartist committee in Paris.

Proof of his guilt will be found when he is arrested, since the letter will be discovered either on his person, or at the house of his father, or in his cabin on board the
Pharaon
.

‘Oh, God!’ said Mercédès, wiping the sweat from her forehead. ‘And this letter…’

‘It cost me two hundred thousand francs to obtain it, Madame,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘But it was cheap at the price, since it has allowed me today to exonerate myself in your sight.’

‘What was the outcome of this letter?’

‘That, as you know, was my arrest; what you do not know is how long my imprisonment lasted. What you do not know is that I stayed for fourteen years a quarter of a league away from you, in a dungeon in the Château d’If. What you do not know is that every day during those fourteen years, I repeated the vow of revenge that I made on the first day, even though I did not know that you had married Fernand, the man who denounced me, and that my father was dead, starved to death!’

‘By God’s law!’ Mercédès exclaimed, staggering.

‘That, I learned when I left prison, fourteen years after I went in, and this is why I swore, on the living Mercédès and on my dead father, to be avenged on Fernand and… I am avenged…’

‘Are you sure that the unhappy Fernand did this?’

‘By my soul, Madame, and in the way I told you. In any case it is not much more disgraceful than having gone over to the English, when he was a Frenchman by adoption; having fought against the Spaniards, when he was one by birth; having betrayed and killed Ali, when he was in Ali’s pay. What was the letter that you have just read, compared with such things? An amorous ploy which, I confess and I can understand, might be forgiven by the woman who married the man, but which cannot be forgiven by the lover who was to marry her. Well, now: the French have not had vengeance on the traitor, the Spaniards did not shoot the traitor; and Ali, lying in his tomb, left the traitor unpunished; but I, who have also been betrayed, assassinated and cast into a tomb, I have emerged from that tomb by the grace of God and I owe it to God to take my revenge. He has sent me for that purpose. Here I am.’

The poor woman let her head fall into her hands, her legs gave way beneath her and she fell to her knees.

‘Forgive, Edmond,’ she said. ‘For my sake, forgive, for I love you still.’

The dignity of the wife reined back the impulse of the lover and the mother. Her forehead was bent nearly to the carpet. The count ran over to her and raised her up.

Then, seated on a chair, through her tears, she was able to look at Monte Cristo’s masculine features, still imprinted by sorrow and hatred with a threatening look.