Edmond Dantès
"Monte-Cristo, my husband, where are you?" she said, in a broken voice.
"Here, Haydee," answered the Count, approaching.
He strove to appear calm, but could not control his emotion.
"Nearer, nearer, Edmond," said Haydee, growing weaker and weaker.
The Count sank on his knees beside his dying wife and put his arms about
her neck.
"Oh! Haydee, Haydee," he sobbed; "thrice accursed be the infamous wretch
who has done this!"
"Edmond, my children, farewell," gasped Haydee; "I am going to a better
land!"
The death rattle was in her throat; she raised herself with a mighty
effort, gazed lovingly at her husband and children, and strove to speak
again, but could not; then a flickering shade of violet passed over her
countenance, and she fell back dead.
Esperance and Zuleika stood as if stunned; Monte-Cristo was overwhelmed
with grief and despair.
"The whole palace is in flames! Save yourselves, save yourselves!"
cried a fisherman, rushing into the library, followed by his companions,
Ali and the servants.
Monte-Cristo leaped to his feet, seizing the corpse of Haydee and
raising it in his arms. Ali grasped Esperance and Zuleika, and the
entire party hastened from the burning edifice. They were not an instant
too soon, for as they quitted the library the tempest of fire burst into
it, accompanied by torrents of smoke. The fishermen and servants,
commanded by the Nubian, had made every effort to save the doomed
mansion, but in vain.
Monte-Cristo and his children found refuge in the hut of Alexis, to
which Haydee's body was reverently borne.
The wife of Monte-Cristo was buried on the Island of Salmis, and over
her remains her husband erected a massive monument.
Shortly afterwards the Count, Esperance and Zuleika, attended by the
faithful Ali, quitted the Island and took passage on a vessel bound for
France.
CHAPTER IV.
THE NEWS FROM ALGERIA.
Beauchamp, the journalist, sat at his desk in his editorial sanctum
early one bright morning in the autumn of 1841. He had gone to work long
before his usual hour, for important movements were on foot, the
political atmosphere was agitated and Paris was in a state of feverish
excitement; besides, Beauchamp had that day printed in his journal a
dispatch from Algeria that would be certain to cause a great sensation,
and, with the proper spirit of pride, the journalist desired to be at
his post that he might receive the numerous congratulations his friends
could not fail to offer, as the dispatch had appeared in his paper
alone.
The sanctum had not an attractive look; in fact, it was rather
dilapidated, while, in addition, the disorder occasioned by the previous
night's work had not been repaired, and all was chaos and confusion.
Beauchamp was busily engaged in glancing over the rival morning papers
when Lucien Debray entered and seated himself at another desk. The
Ministerial Secretary smiled upon the journalist in a knowing way, and
the latter, nodding to him with an air of triumph, silently pointed to
the pile of journals he had finished examining. Lucien took them up,
and without a word began scanning their contents.
"Glorious news that from the army in Algeria!" cried Chateau-Renaud,
rushing into the sanctum.
"Glorious, indeed!" replied the editor, looking up from the paper over
which he was hurriedly skimming. On the huge table at his side, as well
as beneath it, and under his feet and his capacious arm-chair, nothing
was to be seen but newspapers.
"Take a chair, Renaud, if you can find one, and help yourself to the
news. You see I have Lucien similarly engaged yonder."
The Ministerial Secretary glanced up from his papers, returned his
friend's salutation and resumed his reading. He was dressed with his
customary elegance and richness, but his form and face were fuller than
when last before the reader, and his brown hair was besprinkled with
gray.
"I congratulate you, Beauchamp, on being the first to give the news,"
continued Chateau-Renaud. "Not a paper in Paris but your own has a line
from the army this morning."
"Rather congratulate me and my paper on having a friend at court."
"Ha! and that explains the fact, otherwise inexplicable, that an
opposition journal has intelligence, which only the Bureau of War could
have anticipated! Treason--treason!"
The editor and the Secretary exchanged significant smiles.
"Oh! I don't doubt that your favors are reciprocal," continued the
young aristocrat, laughing. "I've half a mind to be something useful
myself--Minister--editor--anything but an idler and a law-giver--just to
experience the exquisite sensation of a new pleasure--the pleasure of
revealing and publishing to the world something it knew not before. Why,
you two fellows, in this dark and dirty little room, are the two
greatest men in Paris this morning--or were, rather, before your paper,
Beauchamp, laid before the world what only you and Lucien knew
previously. Oh! the delight, the rapture of knowing something that
nobody else knows, and then of making the revelation!"
"And this news from Algeria is really important," remarked the editor.
"Important! So important that it will be before the Chambers this
morning," replied the Secretary.
"So I supposed," said the Deputy, "and called to learn additional
particulars, if you had any, on my way to the Chambers."
"We gave all we had, my dear Lycurgus, and for that were indebted to an
official dispatch, telegraphed to the War Office, and faithfully
re-telegraphed to us by our well-beloved Lucien."
"It's true, then, as I have sometimes suspected, that the wires radiate
from the Minister's sanctum to the editor's?" was the laughing
rejoinder.
"It must be so, or there's witchcraft in it. There's witchcraft, at any
rate, in this new invention. Speed, secrecy, security and surety--no
eastern genius of Arabian fiction can be compared to the electric
telegraph; and how Ministers or editors continued to keep the world in
vassalage, as they always have done, without this ready slave, seems now
scarce less wonderful than the invention itself. Instead of detracting
from the power of the press, the telegraph renders it more powerful than
ever."
"But affairs in Algeria--is not the news splendid!" cried the editor.
"Why did we not all become Spahis and win immortality, as some of our
generals have?"
"As to immortality," said the Secretary, "we should have been far more
likely to win the phantom as dead men than as living heroes."
"Debray was at the raising of the siege of Constantine," said Beauchamp
laughing, "and knows all about the honors of war."
"Yes, indeed, and all about the raptures of starvation, of cold and
hunger, after victory, and the ecstatic felicity of being pursued by six
Bedouins, and after having slain five having my own neck encircled by
the yataghan of the sixth!"
"And how chanced it that you saved your head, Lucien?" asked the Count.
"Save it--I didn't save it; but a most excellent friend of mine--a
friend in need--galloped up and saved it for me."
"Yes," replied Beauchamp, "our gallant friend, Maximilian Morrel, the
Captain of Spahis--now colonel of a regiment, and in the direct line of
promotion to the first vacant baton--eh, Lucien? A lucky thing to save
the head of one of the War Office from a Bedouin's yataghan. Up--up--up,
like a balloon, has this young Spahi risen ever since."
"You are wrong, Beauchamp. Not like a balloon. Rather like a planet.
Maximilian Morrel is one of the most gallant young men in the French
army, and step by step, from rank to rank, has he hewn his own path with
his good sabre, in a strong hand, nerved by a brave heart and proud
ambition, to the position he now holds."
"His name I see among the immortals in the dispatch of this morning.
Well, well, Morrel is a splendid fellow, no doubt, but it's a splendid
thing to have friends in the War Office, nevertheless, who will give
that splendor a chance to shine--will plant the lighted candle in a
candlestick, and not smother its beams under a bushel."
"Morrel has now been in Africa five whole years," said the Secretary--"a
few months only excepted after his marriage with Villefort's fair
daughter, Valentine, (as was said) when he was indulged with a furlough
for his honeymoon."
"She is not in Paris?" asked Beauchamp.
"No; she leads the life of a perfect recluse with her child, during her
husband's absence, at his villa somewhere in the south--near Marseilles,
where the department forwards her letters."
"Yet she is said to be a magnificent woman," remarked the Count.
"Wonderful!" cried Beauchamp. "A magnificent woman and a recluse!"
"Oh! but it was a love-match of the most devoted species, you must
remember."
"True; she was to have married our friend, Franz d'Epinay."
"And died to save herself from that fate, I suppose--and afterwards was
resurrected and blessed Morrel with her hand and heart, and the most
exquisite person that even a jaded voluptuary could covet.
Happy--happy--happy man!"
"Apropos of dying," said the Secretary, "do you remember how fast people
died at M. de Villefort's house about that time?"
"Horrible! A whole family of two or three generations, one after the
other! First M. and Madame de Saint-Meran--then Barrois, the old servant
of M. Noirtier--then Valentine, and, last of all, Madame de Villefort
and Edward, her idol. No wonder that M. le Procureur du Roi himself went
mad under such an accumulation of horrors! By the by, Debray, is M. de
Villefort still an inmate of the Maison Royale de Charenton?"
"I know nothing to the contrary," replied the Secretary, who had resumed
his paper, and to whom the subject seemed not altogether agreeable. "He
is an incurable." Then, as if to turn the subject, he continued:
"Apropos of the immortals of Algeria, here is a name that seems destined
even to a more rapid apotheosis than that of the favored Morrel."
"You mean Joliette?" said the editor. "Who, in the name of all that is
mysterious and heroic, is this same Joliette? I have found it impossible
to discover, with all the means at the command of the press."
"And I, with all the means at the command of the Government. All we can
discover is this--that he is a man of about twenty-five; that he
enlisted at Marseilles, and in less than three years has risen from the
ranks to the command of a battalion. His career has been most
brilliant."
"And to whose favor does he owe his wonderful advancement, Beauchamp?"
asked the Deputy, laughing.
"To that of Marshal Bugeaud, Governor-General of Algeria."
"Ah!"
"Who has indulged him with an appointment in every forlorn hope!"
"Excellent!" cried the Count. "What more could a man resolved to be a
military immortal desire? Immortality the goal--two paths conduct to
it--each sure--death--life!--the former the shorter, and, perhaps, the
surer! But there is one name I never see in the war dispatches. Do you
ever meet with it, Messrs. editor and Secretary--I mean the name of our
brilliant friend, Albert de Morcerf? The rumor ran that, after the
disgrace and suicide of the Count, his father, he and his mother went
south, and he later to Africa."
"I have hardly seen the name of Morcerf in print since the paragraph
headed 'Yanina' in my paper, about which poor Albert was so anxious to
fight me."
"Nor I," said Debray. "But where now is Madame de Morcerf? Without
exception, she was the most splendid specimen of a woman I ever saw!"
"High praise, that!" cried the Count, laughing. "Who would suppose our
cold, calculating, ambitious, haughty, talented and opulent diplomat and
aristocrat had so much blood in his veins? When before was he known to
admire anything, male or female--but himself--or, at all events, to be
guilty of the bad taste of expressing that admiration?"