The Count of Monte Cristo. Alexandre Dumas

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      “I!” said Caderousse, astonished; “who told you I was there?”

      The abbé saw he had overshot the mark, and he added quickly:

      “No one; but in order to have known everything so well, you must have been an eye-witness.”

      “True! true!” said Caderousse, in a choking voice, “I was there.”

      “And did you not remonstrate against such infamy?” asked the abbé; “if not, you were an accomplice.”

      “Sir,” replied Caderousse, “they had made me drink to such an excess that I nearly lost all perception. I had only an indistinct understanding of what was passing around me. I said all that a man in such a state could say; but they both assured me that it was a jest they were carrying on, and perfectly harmless.”

      “Next day,—next day, sir, you must have seen plain enough what they had been doing, yet you said nothing, though you were present when Dantès was arrested.”

      “Yes, sir, I was there, and very anxious to speak; but Danglars restrained me.”

      “‘If he should really be guilty,’ said he, ‘and did really put into the isle of Elba; if he is really charged with a letter for the Bonapartist committee at Paris, and if they find this letter upon him, those who have supported him will pass for his accomplice.’”

      “I confess I had my fears in the state in which politics then were, and I held my tongue; it was cowardly, I confess, but it was not criminal.”

      “I comprehend—you allowed matters to take their course, that was all.”

      “Yes, sir,” answered Caderousse, “and my remorse preys on me night and day. I often ask pardon of God, I swear to you, because this action, the only one with which I have seriously to reproach myself with in all my life, is no doubt the cause of my abject condition. I am expiating a moment of selfishness, and thus it is I always say to Carconte, when she complains, ‘Hold your tongue, woman, it is the will of God.’”

      And Caderousse bowed his head with every sign of real repentance.

      “Well, sir,” said the abbé, “you have spoken unreservedly, and thus to accuse yourself is to deserve pardon.”

      “Unfortunately Edmond is dead, and has not pardoned me.”

      “He was ignorant,” said the abbé.

      “But he knows it all now,” interrupted Caderousse; “they say the dead know everything.”

      There was a brief silence; the abbé rose and paced up and down pensively, and then resumed his seat.

      “You have two or three times mentioned a M. Morrel,” he said; “who was he?”

      “The owner of the Pharaon and patron of Dantès.”

      “And what part did he play in this sad drama?” inquired the abbé.

      “The part of an honest man, full of courage and real regard. Twenty times he interceded for Edmond. When the emperor returned, he wrote, implored, threatened, and so energetically, that on the second restoration he was persecuted as a Bonapartist. Ten times, as I told you, he came to see Dantès’ father, and offered to receive him in his own house; and the night or two before his death, as I have already said, he left his purse on the mantelpiece, with which they paid the old man’s debts, and buried him decently, and then Edmond’s father died as he had lived, without doing harm to any one. I have the purse still by me, a large one, made of red silk.”

      “And,” asked the abbé, “is M. Morrel still alive?”

      “Yes,” replied Caderousse.

      “In this case,” replied the abbé, “he should be rich, happy.”

      Caderousse smiled bitterly.

      “Yes, happy as myself,” said he.

      “What! M. Morrel unhappy!” exclaimed the abbé.

      “He is reduced almost to the last extremity,—nay, he is almost at the point of dishonour.”

      “How?”

      “Yes,” continued Caderousse, “and in this way: after five-and-twenty years of labour, after having acquired a most honourable name in the trade of Marseilles, M. Morrel is utterly ruined. He has lost five ships in two years, has suffered by the bankruptcy of three large houses, and his only hope now is in that very Pharaon which poor Dantès commanded, and which is expected from the Indies with a cargo of cochineal and indigo. If this ship founders like the others, he is a ruined man.”

      “And has the unfortunate man wife or children?” inquired the abbé.

      “Yes, he has a wife, who in all this behaved like an angel; he has a daughter, who was about to marry the man she loved, but whose family now will not allow him to wed the daughter of a ruined man; he has besides a son, a lieutenant in the army, and, as you may suppose, all this, instead of soothing, doubles his grief. If he were alone in the world, he would blow out his brains, and there would be an end.”

      “Horrible!” ejaculated the priest.

      “And it is thus Heaven recompenses virtue, sir,” added Caderousse. “You see, I, who never did a bad action but that I have told you of, I am in destitution: after having seen my poor wife die of a fever, unable to do anything in the world for her, I shall die of hunger as old Dantès did whilst Fernand and Danglars are rolling in wealth.”

      “How is that?”

      “Because all their malpractices have turned to luck, while honest men have been reduced to misery.”

      “What has become of Danglars, the instigator, and therefore the most guilty?”

      “What has become of him? why he left Marseilles, and was taken, on the recommendation of M. Morrel, who did not know his crime, as cashier into a Spanish bank. During the war with Spain, he was employed in the commissariat of the French army, and made a fortune; then with that money he speculated in the funds and trebled or quadrupled his capital; and, having first married his banker’s daughter, who left him a widower, he has married a second time, a widow, a Madame de Nargonne, daughter of M. de Servieux, the king’s chamberlain, who is in high favour at court. He is a millionaire, and they have made him a count, and now he is Le Comte Danglars, with a hotel in the Rue de Mont Blanc, with ten horses in his stables, six footmen in his antechamber, and I know not how many hundreds of thousands in his strong box.”

      “Ah!” said the abbé, with a peculiar tone, “he is happy.”

      “Happy! who can answer for that? Happiness or unhappiness is the secret known but to oneself, and the walls—walls have ears, but no tongue—but if a large fortune produces happiness, Danglars is happy.”

      “And Fernand?”

      “Fernand! why that is another history.”

      “But how could a poor Catalan fisher-boy, without education and resources, make a fortune? I confess this staggers me.”

      “And СКАЧАТЬ