The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (188 page)

At the sound of Maximilien’s cries, Julie, Emmanuel, Penelon and some servants ran up in fright. Morrel took them by the hands and, re-opening the door, gasped out in a voice stifled by sobs: ‘On your knees, on your knees! This is the benefactor, this is our father’s saviour, this is…’

He was about to say: ‘This is Edmond Dantès!’

The count stopped him by grasping his arm.

Julie seized the count’s hand, Emmanuel embraced him as he would a guardian angel and Morrel again fell to his knees, dashing his forehead against the ground.

At this, the man of bronze felt his heart swell in his breast, a devouring flame shot from his throat to his eyes, and he lowered his head and wept.

For a few moments the room was full of a chorus of tears and sublime sobs that must have seemed harmonious even to the dearest angels of the Lord!

Scarcely had Julie recovered from the deep emotion that had overwhelmed her than she rushed out of the room, went down one floor and ran into the drawing-room, with childish glee, to lift the glass dome protecting the purse given by the stranger in the Allées de Meilhan.

Meanwhile Emmanuel said to the count, in a voice choking with emotion: ‘Oh, Count, how – when you heard us so often speak of our unknown benefactor, when you saw us surround his memory with such gratitude and adoration, how could you wait until today to reveal yourself? Oh, this is cruel towards us – and, I might almost say, towards yourself.’

‘Listen, my friend,’ the count said. ‘And I can call you that because, without realizing it, you have been my friend for eleven years: the revelation of this secret has come about by a great event that you cannot know. God is my witness that I wished to conceal it for ever in my soul, but your brother Maximilien forced it out of me by violence which, I am sure, he now regrets.’

Then, seeing that Maximilien had thrown himself sideways on to a chair while still remaining on his knees, he said softly, squeezing Emmanuel’s hand in a significant manner: ‘Take care of him.’

‘Why?’ the young man asked in astonishment.

‘I cannot tell you; but watch over him.’

Emmanuel looked around the room and saw Morrel’s pistols. His eyes settled in alarm on the weapons, which he pointed out to
Monte Cristo by slowly raising his arm towards them. Monte Cristo nodded, and Emmanuel made a movement in the direction of the pistols. ‘Leave them,’ said the count.

Then, going to Morrel, he took his hand. The tumult that had briefly racked his heart had given way to a profound stupor.

Julie came back upstairs, holding the silk purse in her hands, and two shining and happy tears ran down her cheeks like two drops of morning dew.

‘Here is the relic,’ she said. ‘Do not think that it is any less dear to me since our saviour was revealed.’

‘My child,’ Monte Cristo said, blushing, ‘allow me to take back that purse. Now that you know the features of my face, I should not want to be recalled to your memory except by the affection that I beg you to give me.’

‘Oh, no!’ Julie said, pressing the purse to her heart. ‘No, I beg you, because one day you might leave us… because one day, alas, you will leave us, won’t you?’

‘You are right, Madame,’ Monte Cristo replied, smiling. ‘In a week, I shall have left this country where so many people who deserved the vengeance of heaven were living happily while my father was dying of hunger and grief.’

As he was announcing his forthcoming departure, Monte Cristo kept his eyes on Morrel and noticed that the words ‘I shall have left this country’ passed without rousing the young man from his lethargy. He realized that he must engage in a further bout against his friend’s grief and, taking the hands of Julie and Emmanuel and clasping them in his own, he told them, with the gentle authority of a father: ‘My dear friends, please leave me alone with Maximilien.’

For Julie this was an excuse to take away the precious relic which Monte Cristo had forgotten to mention again. She pulled her husband after her, saying: ‘Come, let’s leave them.’

The count remained alone with Morrel, who was as motionless as a statue.

‘Come, now,’ the count said, touching his shoulder with his fiery hand. ‘Are you once more becoming a man, Maximilien?’

‘Yes, because I am starting to suffer again.’

The count frowned, seemingly a prey to some grave dilemma.

‘Maximilien, Maximilien!’ he said. ‘The thoughts that obsess you are unworthy of a Christian.’

‘Have no fear, my friend,’ Morrel said, looking up with a smile of infinite sadness. ‘I shall no longer seek for death.’

‘So: no more weapons, no more despair?’

‘No, for I have something better than the barrel of a gun or the point of a knife to cure me of my grief.’

‘You poor, crazed man: what do you have?’

‘I have my grief itself: that will kill me.’

‘My friend,’ Monte Cristo said, in tones as melancholy as those of the man he was addressing, ‘listen to me. One day, in a moment of despair equal to your own, since it induced me to take a similar resolution, I too wanted to kill myself; and one day, your father, equally desperate, also wanted to do the same.

‘If anyone had said to your father, at the moment when he was lifting the barrel of the pistol to his head, and if anyone had said to me, at the moment when I was thrusting away from my bed the prison bread that I had not touched for three days, I say, if anyone had said to us at that climactic moment: Live! Because the day will come when you will be happy and bless life; then, wherever that voice had come from, we would have answered it with a smile of scepticism or with pained incredulity; and yet, how many times, when he embraced you, has your father not blessed life and how many times have I…’

‘Ah!’ Morrel cried, interrupting him. ‘But you only lost your freedom; my father only lost his fortune. I have lost Valentine.’

‘Look at me, Morrel,’ Monte Cristo said, with the solemnity that on certain occasions made him so great and so persuasive. ‘Look at me. I have no tears in my eyes, or fever in my veins, or dread beatings in my heart; yet I am watching you suffer, you, Maximilien, whom I love as I should my own son. Well, Maximilien, does that not tell you that grief is like life and that there is always something unknown beyond it? So, if I beg you, if I order you to live, Morrel, it is in the certainty that one day you will thank me for saving your life.’

‘My God!’ the young man exclaimed. ‘My God, what are you telling me, Count? Take care! Perhaps you have never been in love?’

‘Child!’ the count replied.

‘About love,’ Morrel said, ‘I do understand.

‘You see, I have been a soldier for as long as I have been a man. I reached the age of twenty-nine without ever being in love, because
none of the feelings that I experienced up to then deserved the name of love. Then, at twenty-nine I saw Valentine. For almost two years I have loved her, for almost two years I have been able to read the virtues of womanhood, inscribed by the hand of the Lord on that heart which was as plain to me as a book.

‘Count, for me with Valentine there could be an infinite, immense, unknown happiness, a happiness too great, too complete and too divine for this world. Since this world has not given it to me, Count, that means that there is nothing for me on earth except despair and desolation.’

‘I told you to hope, Morrel,’ the count repeated.

‘Then I too shall repeat: take care,’ said Morrel, ‘because you are trying to persuade me, and if you do persuade me, you will make me lose my mind, because you will make me believe I can see Valentine again.’

The count smiled.

‘My friend, my father!’ Morrel cried, in exultation. ‘For the third time I must tell you: take care, because I am terrified at the power you have over me. Beware of the meaning of your words, because my eyes are lighting up again, my heart is being born anew. Beware, or you will make me believe in the supernatural.

‘I should obey if you were to order me to raise the stone of the sepulchre in which the daughter of Jairus
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is entombed, I should walk on the water, like the apostle, if your hand were to signal to me to step on the waves. Take care: I should obey.’

‘Hope, my friend,’ the count repeated.

‘Oh!’ Morrel cried, crashing from the highest point of his exultation to the depths of sorrow. ‘Oh, you are toying with me: you are like one of those good mothers or, rather, like one of those selfish mothers who calm their children’s sorrows with honeyed words, because they are tired of hearing them cry.

‘No, my friend. I was wrong to tell you to beware. Fear nothing. I shall bury my grief with so much care in the depth of my heart, I shall make it so dark, so secret, that it will not even try your sympathy any more. Farewell, my friend! Adieu!’

‘On the contrary,’ the count said. ‘From this moment onwards, Maximilien, you will live near me and with me. You will not leave my side and in a week we shall have left France.’

‘Do you still tell me to hope?’

‘I do because I have the means to cure you.’

‘Count, you are making me even sadder, if that were possible. All you can see, after the blow that has struck me, is an ordinary grief, which you intend to console by ordinary means – by travel.’ And Morrel shook his head, in contemptuous disbelief.

‘What can I say?’ Monte Cristo replied. ‘I have faith in what I promise, so let me try the experiment.’

‘Count, you are prolonging my agony, nothing more.’

‘So, feeble spirit that you are,’ said the count, ‘you do not even have strength enough to allow your friend a few days for the experiment he is trying. Come, do you know what the Count of Monte Cristo can do? Do you know that he commands many powers on earth? Do you know that he has enough faith in God to obtain miracles from Him who said that if a man has faith he can move mountains? Well, wait for the miracle I am hoping for, or…’

‘Or… ?’ Morrel repeated.

‘Or beware, Morrel, I shall call you ungrateful.’

‘Have pity on me, Count.’

‘I do, Maximilien, so much so that if I have not cured you in a month, day for day, hour for hour – do you hear? – I shall put you myself in front of those pistols, fully loaded, and a glass of the most deadly of Italian poisons, one more certain and quicker than the one that killed Valentine; remember that!’

‘Do you promise?’

‘Yes, for I am a man and I too, as I told you, wished to die. Ever since misfortune has deserted me, I have often dreamed of the delights of eternal sleep.’

‘Oh, surely, do you promise me this, Count?’ Maximilien asked, intoxicated.

‘Not only do I promise, I swear it,’ Monte Cristo said, extending his hand.

‘In a month, on your honour, if I am not consoled, you will leave me free to take my life and, whatever I do, you will not call me ungrateful?’

‘In a month, day for day, Maximilien; in a month, to the hour. The date is sacred: I don’t know if you have realized, but today is the fifth of September. Ten years ago today, I saved your father, who wanted to die.’

Morrel grasped the count’s hands and kissed them. The count accepted the homage as if such adoration were his due.

‘In a month,’ he went on, ‘you shall have, on the table in front
of which we shall both be sitting, fine weapons and an easy death. But, in exchange, do you promise me to wait until then?’

‘Oh, yes!’ cried Morrel. ‘In my turn, I swear it!’

Monte Cristo clasped the young man to his heart and held him there for a long time.

‘And now,’ he said, ‘from this day forth you will come and live with me. You will take Haydée’s rooms and my daughter will at least be replaced by my son.’

‘Haydée?’ Morrel said. ‘What has happened to her?’

‘She went away last night.’

‘To leave you?’

‘To wait for me… So be ready to join me in the Champs-Elysées, and smuggle me out of here without anyone seeing.’

Maximilien bent his head and obeyed, like a child or a disciple.

The first floor in the house on the Rue Saint-Germain-des-Prés
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which Albert de Morcerf had chosen for his mother and himself consisted of a little, self-contained apartment which was rented to a very mysterious character.

Not even the concierge had seen the man’s face, either when he was coming in or going out. In winter he buried his chin in one of those red scarves that high-class coachmen wear while they are waiting for their masters to leave the theatre; in summer he was always blowing his nose just at the moment when he might have been seen going in front of the lodge. It must be said that, contrary to all usual practice, this inhabitant was not being spied on by anyone and that the rumour going around that his alias disguised a most eminent personage – and one who could pull lots of strings – had led people to respect the mystery of his comings and goings.

His visits were usually at fixed times, though sometimes delayed or brought forward: but almost always, winter and summer, he took possession of the apartment at four o’clock, but never stayed the night there.

At half-past three, in winter, the fire was discreetly lit by the
servant who had charge of the little apartment; and at half-past three, in summer, the same girl would bring up ices.