The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (93 page)

The baroness shrugged her shoulders with a look of profound contempt. Danglars appeared not to notice these less than wifely manners and turned to Monte Cristo, saying: ‘Sincerely, I am sorry that we did not meet earlier, Monsieur le Comte. Are you setting up your house?’

‘Indeed, I am,’ said the count.

‘I should have offered them to you. Believe me, I gave them away for nearly nothing; but, as I said, I wanted to be rid of them. They are a young man’s horses.’

‘Thank you,’ said the count. ‘But I bought some this morning which are serviceable and not too expensive. Come, Monsieur Debray, you are a connoisseur, I think? Take a look.’

While Debray was going over to the window, Danglars went to his wife.

‘You’ll never guess,’ he whispered to her. ‘Someone came and offered me a ridiculous price for the horses. I don’t know who the madman can be who is determined to ruin himself by sending his steward to me this morning, but the fact is that I made sixteen thousand francs on the deal. So don’t sulk. I’ll give you four thousand and two to Eugénie.’

Mme Danglars gave him a withering look.

‘Bless my soul!’ Debray exclaimed.

‘What is it?’ asked the baroness.

‘If I am not mistaken, those are your horses – your very own – harnessed to the count’s carriage.’

‘My dappled greys?’ Mme Danglars cried, running over to the window. ‘Yes, undoubtedly!’

Danglars was astonished.

‘Is it possible?’ said Monte Cristo, feigning astonishment.

‘Incredible!’ the banker muttered.

The baroness whispered something to Debray, who came across to Monte Cristo. ‘The baroness would like to ask you for how much her husband sold you the team.’

‘I really don’t know,’ said the count. ‘My steward meant it as a surprise to me… which cost me, I believe, thirty thousand francs.’

Debray conveyed this reply to the baroness.

Danglars was so pale and disconcerted that the count pretended to try to console him.

‘You see how ungrateful women are,’ he said. ‘The baroness is not in the slightest touched by your consideration for her safety. Indeed, the word is not ungrateful, but mad. Then, what do you expect? They always like what is harmful to them. So, the simplest answer, my dear Baron, believe me, is to let them have their heads; then, if they break them, they have only themselves to blame.’

Danglars did not answer. He could foresee a disastrous quarrel
looming on the horizon: already the baroness’s eyebrow was raised and, like that of Olympian Jove, it presaged a storm. Hearing the first rumble, Debray made some excuse and left. Monte Cristo, not wanting to compromise the position that he hoped to gain by staying any longer, bowed to Mme Danglars and retired, leaving the baron to his wife’s rage.

‘Very well, then!’ he thought as he left. ‘I have achieved my aim. I now hold the domestic bliss of this household in my hands, and I am simultaneously about to win the heart of the baron and that of his wife. How fortunate! But, in the meantime,’ he added, ‘I have not yet been introduced to Mademoiselle Eugénie Danglars, whom I should have been very pleased to meet. However,’ he continued, with a little smile that was all his own, ‘we are in Paris, and we have lots of time before us… It can wait!’ And, at this, he stepped into his carriage and returned home.

Two hours later, Mme Danglars received a charming letter from the Count of Monte Cristo, in which he told her that he did not wish to make his entry into Parisian society by upsetting a beautiful woman, and so begged her to accept her horses. They came in the same harness that she had seen on them that morning, except that the count had had a diamond sewn into the centre of each of the rosettes that they wore on their ears.

Danglars also had a letter. In it, the count asked his permission to convey this millionaire’s whim to the baroness and begged him to excuse the Oriental gesture that accompanied their return.

That evening, Monte Cristo left for Auteuil, accompanied by Ali.

The next day, at around three o’clock, Ali was summoned by a ringing of the bell. He came into the count’s study.

‘Ali, you have often told me of your prowess with a lasso.’

Ali nodded and proudly drew himself up to his full height.

‘Very well! With a lasso, could you bring down a bull?’

Ali nodded.

‘A tiger?’

Again, Ali nodded.

‘A lion?’

Ali imitated the motions of a man throwing a lasso and produced a strangled roar.

‘Yes, I understand,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘Have you ever hunted a lion?’

Ali nodded proudly.

‘But could you stop two horses in their tracks?’

Ali smiled.

‘Good. Then listen to me. In a short while, a carriage will go by, drawn by two dapple-grey horses, the same ones that I had yesterday. Even at the risk of being run over, you must stop that carriage in front of my door.’

Ali went down into the street and drew a line on the cobbles. Then he came back and showed the line to the count, who had been watching him. The count tapped him gently on the shoulder, which was his way of expressing his thanks. Then the Nubian went to smoke his chibouk on the corner-stone between the house and the street, while Monte Cristo paid no further heed to the matter.

However, at about five o’clock, which was the time when the count expected the carriage to arrive, one might have observed in him some almost imperceptible signs of impatience. He walked up and down in a room overlooking the street, listening out from time to time and occasionally going across to the window, through which he could see Ali expelling puffs of smoke with a regularity that showed he was entirely absorbed in the important business of smoking his chibouk.

Suddenly there was a distant sound of rumbling, which approached at thunderous speed, then a barouche appeared, drawn by horses which the coachman was vainly trying to restrain as they dashed wildly forward, bristling and lunging madly this way and that.

In the barouche was a young woman, clasping a child of seven or eight years old in such an excess of terror that she had even lost the strength to cry out. A stone under the wheel or the branch of a tree would have been enough to smash the coach to pieces. It was already disintegrating as it drove down the middle of the street, and you could hear the terrified shouts of the onlookers as it approached.

Suddenly Ali put down his chibouk, took the lasso out of his pocket, threw it and wrapped it three times round the front legs of the left-hand horse. He was pulled three or four yards by the shock but, after these few yards, the lassoed horse came down, falling against the shaft, which it broke, thwarting the efforts of its companion to continue racing forward. The coachman took advantage
of the momentary pause to leap off his box, but Ali had already grasped the nostrils of the second horse in his iron fingers and the animal, whinnying in pain, had dropped, shuddering, to the ground beside its fellow.

All this was accomplished in the time that it takes a bullet to find its mark.

The interval was enough, however, for a man to rush out of the house opposite which the accident happened, followed by several servants. Just as the coachman was opening the door of the coach, the man lifted out the lady, one of whose hands was grasping the upholstery of the seat while the other clasped her son, who was senseless with fear. Monte Cristo carried both of them into the drawing-room and set them down on a sofa, saying: ‘Have no fear, Madame. You are safe.’

The woman recovered her senses and, in reply, indicated her son, with a look more eloquent than any entreaty. The boy was still unconscious.

‘Madame, I understand you,’ the count said, examining the child, ‘but rest assured, he is unhurt, and fear alone has left him in this state.’

‘Oh, Monsieur!’ the mother cried. ‘Perhaps you are just saying this to reassure me? Look how pale he is. Edouard, my son, my child! Answer your mother! Oh, please, Monsieur, send for a doctor. My fortune to the man who can save my son!’

Monte Cristo made a reassuring gesture to calm her and, opening a chest, took out a flask of Bohemian glass, encrusted with gold. It contained a blood-red liquid, a single drop of which he put on the child’s lips. Although still pale, the boy immediately opened his eyes.

At this, the mother became almost delirious with joy. ‘Where am I?’ she cried. ‘To whom do I owe such happiness after so frightful an ordeal?’

‘Madame, you are in the house of a man who could not be more delighted to have relieved you of your woe,’ the count replied.

‘Accursed curiosity!’ the lady said. ‘All Paris was speaking about those magnificent horses of Madame Danglars, and I was crazy enough to wish to try them out.’

‘What!’ the count exclaimed, making a splendid appearance of surprise. ‘Are those the baroness’s horses?’

‘Yes, Monsieur. Do you know her?’

‘Madame Danglars? Yes, I have had the honour; and I am all the more delighted at seeing you safe from the danger in which these horses put you, since you might have blamed me for it. I bought them yesterday from the baron, but the baroness seemed to regret losing them so much that I sent them back to her the same day, begging her to accept them as a present from me.’

‘This means that you must be that Count of Monte Cristo about whom Hermine spoke so much to me yesterday?’

‘Yes, Madame,’ said the count.

‘And I, Monsieur, am Madame Héloïse de Villefort.’

The count bowed, like a man on hearing a name that was completely unknown to him.

‘Oh, how grateful Monisieur de Villefort will be to you!’ Héloïse continued. ‘He owes you the lives of both of us: you have given him his wife and his son. Assuredly, without your noble-hearted servant, both this dear child and myself would have been killed.’

‘Alas, Madame, I still shudder to think of the danger you were in.’

‘I do hope you will allow me to give a suitable reward to the man for his determined action.’

‘Please, Madame,’ said Monte Cristo, ‘don’t spoil Ali for me, either with praise or with gifts. I don’t want him to learn bad ways. Ali is my slave. In saving your life, he was merely serving me, which it is his duty to do.’

‘But he risked his own life,’ said Mme de Villefort, much impressed by the count’s masterful tone.

‘He owes me that life,’ the count replied. ‘I saved it, so it belongs to me.’

Mme de Villefort said nothing. Perhaps she was thinking about this man who made such a strong first impression.

In the momentary silence, the count had time to look at the child, whom the mother was smothering in kisses. He was small and lanky, with a whiteness of skin more common in redheads. However, an unruly forest of black hair covered his domed forehead and, falling across his shoulders on each side of his face, doubled the light of juvenile cunning and spitefulness that shone from his eyes. His broad mouth and slender lips were just recovering their colour; this eight-year-old’s features were those of a child of twelve, at least. His first movement was brusquely to shake himself free of his mother’s arms and to go across to the chest from which the count
had taken the phial of elixir. Immediately he opened it and, without asking permission, like a child used to having his every whim satisfied, began to take the stoppers off the bottles.

‘Don’t do that, my young friend,’ the count said sharply. ‘Some of those liquids are dangerous, not only to drink, but even to breathe in.’

Mme de Villefort paled and clasped her son’s arm, pulling him back to her. Yet the count noticed that, once relieved of her fear, she cast a brief but significant glance at the chest. At that moment, Ali came in.

Mme de Villefort made a gesture of joy and drew her son even closer to her.

‘Edouard,’ she said. ‘Look at this good servant. He is most brave, because he risked his own life to stop the horses that were bolting with us and the carriage, which was about to crash. So, thank him, because it is probable that without him we should both be dead at this moment.’

The child pouted and scornfully turned away. ‘He’s too ugly,’ he said.

The count smiled as if the child had just done precisely what he hoped. As for Mme de Villefort, she rebuked her son with a moderation that would surely not have pleased Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
²
if little Edouard had been called Emile.

‘You see, now,’ the count said in Arabic to Ali. ‘This lady asked her son to thank you for saving both their lives, and the child answered that you were too ugly.’

For a moment Ali’s intelligent head turned away and he looked blankly at the boy, but a slight trembling of his nostril told Monte Cristo that the Arab had suffered a mortal wound.

‘Tell me, Monsieur,’ said Mme de Villefort, getting up to leave, ‘is this house your usual home?’

‘No, Madame,’ the count replied. ‘This is a sort of pied-à-terre that I have bought. I live at number thirty, Avenue des Champs-Elysées. But I see that you have entirely recovered and would like to leave. I have just ordered these same horses to be harnessed to my carriage. This ugly boy, Ali,’ he said, smiling at the child, ‘will have the honour of driving you back home, while your coachman will stay here to arrange for the repairs to your barouche. As soon as the necessary work has been done, one of my own teams will take it back to Madame Danglars.’