‘My God! You terrify me! No matter, I am listening.’
‘You know the events of that unhappy night when you lay gasping on your bed in that room with the red damask, while I waited for you to be delivered, almost as exhausted as you. The child came and was handed to me, motionless, not breathing or crying. We thought it was dead.’
Mme Danglars made a sudden movement, as though to leap from the chair, but Villefort stopped her, clasping his hands as though begging her to listen.
‘We thought he was dead,’ he repeated. ‘I put him in a box that would serve as a coffin and went down to the garden, where I dug a grave and hastily buried it. I had just finished covering it with earth when the Corsican struck me. I saw a shape rise up and the flash of a blade. I felt a stab of pain and tried to cry out, but an icy shudder ran through my body and stifled the cry in my throat. I fell, dying; I thought I was dead. I shall never forget your sublime courage when, regaining my senses, I dragged myself with one final effort to the foot of the staircase where you, though you were yourself on the brink of death, came over to me. We had to hush up this awful catastrophe. You bravely returned home, supported by your nurse, while I used a duel as an excuse for my wound. Astonishingly, we both managed to keep the secret. I was carried to Versailles and, for three months, fought against death. Finally, when I seemed to be over the worst, I was prescribed the sun and air of the south. Four men carried me from Paris to Chalon, at a rate of six leagues a day. Madame de Villefort followed the stretcher in her carriage. In Chalon, I was put on the Saône, then on the Rhône and, carried by the current, I went down to Arles, where I once more took to my stretcher and continued to Marseille. My convalescence lasted six months. I heard nothing of you and did not dare ask after you. When I returned to Paris, I learned that Monsieur de Nargonne had died and you had married Monsieur Danglars.
‘What had been constantly on my mind from the moment I regained consciousness? Always the same thing: the child’s body which, every night in my dreams, rose up out of the earth and hovered over the grave, threatening me with its look and gesture. So, no sooner had I returned to Paris than I asked about the house. It had not been inhabited since we left, but it had just been leased for nine years. I went to find the tenant and pretended that I was most anxious that this house, which belonged to my wife’s parents, should not fall into the hands of strangers. I offered them compensation in exchange for the lease. They asked for six thousand francs; I would have given ten thousand or twenty thousand. I had the money on me and, there and then, got them to sign the papers. As soon as the lease was in my hands, I set off at a gallop for Auteuil. Since I had last been there, no one had entered the house.
‘It was five o’clock in the afternoon. I went up to the red room and waited for nightfall. While I was waiting, everything that I had thought during the past agonizing year rose up in my mind, more threatening than ever.
‘The Corsican who had declared a vendetta against me, who had followed me from Nîmes to Paris, who had hidden in the garden and struck me: this man had seen me dig the grave and bury the child. He might discover who you were, perhaps he knew it already. Would he not one day make you pay for his silence in this terrible business? Would that not be a sweet revenge for him, when he learned that I had not died from my wound? So it was urgent for me, first and foremost, to get rid of all traces of the past and destroy any material evidence. The reality was clearly enough present in my mind.
‘This is why I had bought the lease, why I had come here, why I was waiting.
‘Night fell and I waited until it was quite dark. I had no light in the room, and gusts of wind shook the doors, behind which I constantly thought I could see someone hiding. From time to time I shuddered, thinking that I could hear your groans behind me from the bed, and I dared not turn around to look. My heart beat so fast in the silence that I thought my wound would re-open. Then, finally, I heard all the noises of the country cease, one by one. I realized that I had nothing more to fear, that I could neither be seen nor heard, and I decided to go downstairs.
‘Believe me, Hermine, I consider myself as brave as the next man, but when I went to the chain around my neck and took out the little key to the staircase – which was so dear to both of us and which you had attached to a gold ring – when I opened the door and saw a pale moon through the windows casting a long streak of light across the spiralling steps, I had to lean against the wall and I almost cried out. I thought I was going mad.
‘At last I managed to control myself. I went down, step by step. The only thing that I was unable to master was a strange trembling in my knees. I clasped the stair-rail: if I had let it go for a moment, I should have fallen.
‘I reached the door at the bottom; beyond it there was a spade leaning against the wall. I had a covered lantern and stopped in the middle of the lawn to light it, then went on.
‘It was now the end of November and all the greenery of the garden had vanished. The trees were nothing but skeletons with long, bony arms, and the dead leaves crackled like the gravel under my feet. I was so terrified that as I came close to the bushes I took a pistol out of my pocket and primed it. I still expected to see the Corsican emerging from among the branches.
‘With the covered lantern, I lit up the cluster of bushes; there was no one there. I looked around and saw that I was indeed alone. No noise broke the silence of night except the sharp, lugubrious cry of an owl, calling up the ghosts of night.
‘I hung the lantern on a forked branch that I had already noticed a year earlier, at the very place where I had stopped to dig the grave. During the summer, the grass had grown thickly on the spot and there had been no one there in the autumn to mow it. However, one place where the grass was thinner attracted my attention. This was clearly where I had dug the ground. I set to work. I had at last reached the moment I had been waiting for for over a year!
‘So, how I hoped, how I worked and how I sounded out each tuft of grass, expecting to feel something solid beneath my spade. But, nothing! Yet the hole I made was twice as large as the first. I thought I must have been wrong and had mistaken the spot. I took my bearings, looked at the trees, tried to recognize the details that had struck me. A sharp, cold breeze was whining through the naked branches, yet my brow was covered in sweat. I remembered that the dagger had struck me just as I was stamping on the ground to cover the grave. As I did so, I leant against a laburnum-tree, and behind me was an artificial rock intended to serve as a bench, because, when I fell, my hand had gone from the laburnum to the cold of the stone. On my right was this same laburnum and behind me the rock. I fell in the same way, got up and began to dig again, enlarging the hole. Nothing! Still nothing! The box had vanished.’
‘The box had vanished?’ Mme Danglars muttered, barely able to speak for horror.
‘Don’t think that I left it at that,’ Villefort went on. ‘No. I looked all around. I thought that the assassin might have dug the box up and, thinking it was a treasure, wanted to steal it and had carried it off; then, realizing his mistake, had dug another hole and put it inside. But no: nothing. Then I had the idea that he would not have taken such precautions, but purely and simply thrown the box away somewhere. If that was right, I would have to wait for daylight to look for it, so I went back up to the room and waited.’
‘Oh, my God!’
‘When daylight came, I went down again. I walked directly across to the shrubbery, hoping to find some sign that I might have missed in the darkness. I had dug the earth over an area of more than twenty square feet and to a depth of more than two feet. A hired labourer would have taken at least a day to do what I had done in an hour. Nothing: there was nothing to be seen.
‘Consequently I set about looking for the box, on my earlier assumption that it had been discarded somewhere. It would have to be on the path leading to the way out, but this new search was as fruitless as the first and, with a heavy heart, I returned to the shrubbery, though I no longer had any hope even there.’
&n
bsp; ‘That was enough to drive you mad!’ Mme Danglars cried.
‘I did hope as much for a time,’ said Villefort, ‘but I did not have that good fortune. However, gathering my strength and my thoughts, I began to wonder why the man should have taken away a body.’
‘But you said it yourself: to have proof.’
‘No, Madame, that could no longer be it! A person does not keep a corpse for a year. He shows it to a magistrate and makes a statement. But nothing like that had happened.’
‘So? Then what?’ Hermine asked, trembling all over.
‘Then something more awful, more deadly and more terrifying for us, which is that the child may perhaps have been alive and the murderer saved it.’
Mme Danglars gave a fearful cry and grasped Villefort’s hands: ‘My child was alive!’ she said. ‘You buried my child alive! Monsieur, you were not sure that my child was dead, and yet you buried it… Ah!’ She was now standing in almost a threatening way before the crown prosecutor, grasping his wrists in her delicate hands.
‘How can I tell? I am telling you this as I might anything else,’ Villefort replied, staring in a manner that suggested this powerful man was nearing the limits of madness and despair.
‘My child! Oh, my poor child!’ the baroness cried, collapsing back into her chair and stifling her sobs in a handkerchief.
Villefort recovered his senses and realized that the maternal tempest gathering about his head could only be warded off by letting Mme Danglars share his own terror. He got up and went over to the baroness so that he could whisper to her: ‘Don’t you understand that if this is the case, we are lost. The child is alive, and someone knows he is alive, someone shares our secret. And since Monte Cristo was speaking to us about a child dug up at the spot where that child vanished, then he is the one who shares our secret.’
‘Oh, God! Just and vengeful God!’ Mme Danglars muttered; to which Villefort replied only with a sort of roar.
‘But the child, Monsieur, what about the child?’ the mother asked obstinately.
‘Believe me, I have looked for him,’ Villefort said, wringing his hands. ‘How many times have I called him in the long sleepless nights. How many times have I wanted a princely fortune to purchase a million secrets from a million men, so that I might discover mine in theirs. So finally, when day came and I picked up the spade for the hundredth time, I asked myself for the hundredth time what the Corsican could have done with the child. A child is burdensome for a fugitive. Perhaps, seeing that it was still living, he threw it in the river.’
‘Impossible!’ Mme Danglars exclaimed. ‘One may murder a man for revenge, but not drown an infant in cold blood.’
‘So perhaps,’ Villefort went on, ‘he put it in the foundling hospital.’
‘Yes, yes! Monsieur, my child is there,’ the baroness cried.
‘I went to the hospital and learned that that very night, the twentieth of September, a child was placed in the tower, wrapped in half a cloth of fine linen, deliberately torn. This piece of cloth bore half a baron’s coronet and the letter “H”.’
‘That’s it, that’s it!’ Mme Danglars exclaimed. ‘All my linen has that mark. Monsieur de Nargonne was a baron and my name is Hermine. Oh, God, thank you! My child did not die!’
‘No, he didn’t die.’
‘And you can tell me this. You tell me this without fearing that I shall die of happiness! Where is he? Where is my child?’
Villefort shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘How do I know? Do you think that, if I did, I would lead you to the answer inch by inch, like a dramatist or a novelist? No, alas, I can’t tell you. About six months before, a woman had come to claim that child with the other half of the cloth. She gave all the guarantees demanded by law, and they handed the child over to her.’
‘But you should have enquired after this woman, you should have found her.’
‘What do you think I did, Madame? I pretended it was for a criminal investigation and put all the finest sleuths and cleverest bloodhounds in the police force to look for her. She was followed as far as Chalon, then they lost trace of her.’
‘Lost trace?’
‘Yes, lost; lost for ever.’
Mme Danglars had heaved a sigh, let fall a tear or given a cry for every detail of this story. ‘Is that all?’ she asked. ‘Did you stop there?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Villefort. ‘I have never stopped looking, enquiring, investigating, except that, for the past two or three years, I have relaxed my efforts slightly. From today, I shall resume the hunt with more persistence and determination than ever and I shall succeed, because it is no longer my conscience that drives me, it is fear.’
‘But it seems to me that the Count of Monte Cristo can know nothing, or he would not seek our company in the way he does.’
‘The wickedness of men runs very deep,’ said Villefort, ‘since it is deeper than the kindness of God. Did you notice the man’s eyes while he was talking to us?’
‘No.’
‘But have you ever looked closely at him?’
‘Of course. He is odd, that’s all. I did, however, notice one thing which is that, throughout the whole of that exquisite meal which he gave us, he himself touched nothing from any dish.’
‘Yes, I too noticed that. If I had known what I know now, I should not have eaten anything myself. I should have thought he wanted to poison us.’
‘But you would have been wrong, as you can see.’
‘Certainly, but that man, believe me, has some other plans. This is why I wanted to see you, why I asked to speak to you and why I wanted to warn you against everyone, but especially against him. Tell me,’ he said, staring harder at the baroness than ever, ‘have you mentioned our affair to anyone?’
‘Never, not a soul.’
‘You will understand,’ Villefort said affectionately, ‘if I repeat: no one – forgive me for insisting – no one in the world?’
‘Yes, I do fully understand,’ the baroness said, blushing. ‘Never, I swear.’
‘You don’t write down every evening what has happened during the day: you don’t keep a diary?’
‘No. Alas, my life is spent in frivolous trifles, which I even forget myself.’
‘And, as far as you know, you don’t talk in your sleep?’
‘I sleep like a baby. Don’t you remember?’ The blood rushed to her face and out of Villefort’s. ‘That’s true,’ he said in a barely audible voice.
‘Well, then?’ asked the baroness.
‘Well, then, I know what has to be done. Within a week, I shall know what this Monte Cristo is, where he comes from, where he is going and why he tells us about children dug up from his garden.’
Villefort spoke these words in a tone of voice that would have made the count shudder if he could have heard them. Then he shook the hand which the baroness reluctantly gave him and respectfully showed her to the door. Mme Danglars hailed another cab, which took her back to the passage, at the far end of which she found her own carriage and her coachman who had been sleeping peacefully on his seat while waiting for her return.
LXVIII
A SUMMER BALL
The same day, at about the time when Mme Danglars was engaged as we have seen in the study of the crown prosecutor, a travelling coach drove into the Rue du Helder, through the gate of No. 27 and into the courtyard, where it stopped. After a moment the door opened and Mme de Morcerf stepped down, leaning on her son’s arm.
Hardly had Albert brought his mother home than he called for a bath and then his horses. After allowing his valet to attend to him, he had himself driven to the Champs-Elysées, to the Count of Monte Cristo’s.
The count greeted him with his usual smile. It was a strange thing: one never appeared to take a step forward in the heart or mind of this man. Those who wished, so to speak, to force their way into intimacy with him found the path blocked.
Morcerf was running over to him with open arms, but, on seeing him, despite the count’s friendly smile, he l
et his arms fall and dared at most to offer his hand. The count touched it, as he always did, but without shaking it.
‘Well, my dear Count, here I am,’ Morcerf said.
‘Welcome.’
‘I have just got back.’
‘From Dieppe?’
‘From Le Tréport.’
‘Oh, yes. That’s right.’
‘And you are the first person I have visited.’
‘That’s charming of you,’ said Monte Cristo, as casually as he might have said anything.
‘Well, then. What news?’
‘News! You are asking me, a foreigner, for news!’
‘When I ask for news, I mean: have you done anything for me?’
‘Did you give me some job to do?’ the count said, with a pretence of concern.
‘Come now,’ said Albert. ‘Don’t pretend not to care. They say that there are sympathetic warnings that cross distances: well, in Le Tréport, I had an electric shock. Even if you didn’t do anything on my behalf, you did think of me.’
‘That’s possible,’ Monte Cristo said. ‘I did, indeed, think of you. But the magnetic current which I served to conduct was, I have to admit, generated independently of my will.’
‘Really? Elucidate, I beg you.’
‘Easy. Monsieur Danglars had dinner with me.’
‘I know, because the reason my mother and I left Paris was to avoid him.’
‘And he dined with Monsieur Andrea Cavalcanti.’
‘Your Italian prince?’
‘Let’s not exaggerate. Monsieur Andrea only awards himself the title of viscount.’
‘Awards himself?’
‘As you say.’
‘So he isn’t one?’
‘How do I know? He awards himself, I award him, they award him: isn’t that all the same as if he had it?’
‘Come now, you are behaving strangely! So then?’
‘Then, what?’