The Count of Monte Cristo

Chapter 3. The Catalans-1

Chapter 3. The Catalans

Beyond a bare, weather-worn wall, about a hundred paces from the spot

where the two friends sat looking and listening as they drank their

wine, was the village of the Catalans. Long ago this mysterious colony

quitted Spain, and settled on the tongue of land on which it is to this

day. Whence it came no one knew, and it spoke an unknown tongue. One of

its chiefs, who understood Provençal, begged the commune of Marseilles

to give them this bare and barren promontory, where, like the sailors of

old, they had run their boats ashore. The request was granted; and three

months afterwards, around the twelve or fifteen small vessels which had

brought these gypsies of the sea, a small village sprang up. This

village, constructed in a singular and picturesque manner, half Moorish,

half Spanish, still remains, and is inhabited by descendants of the

first comers, who speak the language of their fathers. For three or four

centuries they have remained upon this small promontory, on which they

had settled like a flight of seabirds, without mixing with the

Marseillaise population, intermarrying, and preserving their original

customs and the costume of their mother-country as they have preserved

its language.

Our readers will follow us along the only street of this little village,

and enter with us one of the houses, which is sunburned to the beautiful

dead-leaf color peculiar to the buildings of the country, and within

coated with whitewash, like a Spanish posada. A young and beautiful

girl, with hair as black as jet, her eyes as velvety as the gazelle’s,

was leaning with her back against the wainscot, rubbing in her slender

delicately moulded fingers a bunch of heath blossoms, the flowers of

which she was picking off and strewing on the floor; her arms, bare to

the elbow, brown, and modelled after those of the Arlesian Venus, moved

with a kind of restless impatience, and she tapped the earth with her

arched and supple foot, so as to display the pure and full shape of her

well-turned leg, in its red cotton, gray and blue clocked, stocking. At

three paces from her, seated in a chair which he balanced on two legs,

leaning his elbow on an old worm-eaten table, was a tall young man of

twenty, or two-and-twenty, who was looking at her with an air in which

vexation and uneasiness were mingled. He questioned her with his eyes,

but the firm and steady gaze of the young girl controlled his look.

“You see, Mercédès,” said the young man, “here is Easter come round

again; tell me, is this the moment for a wedding?”

“I have answered you a hundred times, Fernand, and really you must be

very stupid to ask me again.”

“Well, repeat it,—repeat it, I beg of you, that I may at last believe

it! Tell me for the hundredth time that you refuse my love, which had

your mother’s sanction. Make me understand once for all that you are

trifling with my happiness, that my life or death are nothing to you.

Ah, to have dreamed for ten years of being your husband, Mercédès, and

to lose that hope, which was the only stay of my existence!”

“At least it was not I who ever encouraged you in that hope, Fernand,”

replied Mercédès; “you cannot reproach me with the slightest coquetry. I

have always said to you, ‘I love you as a brother; but do not ask from

me more than sisterly affection, for my heart is another’s.’ Is not this

true, Fernand?”

“Yes, that is very true, Mercédès,” replied the young man, “Yes, you

have been cruelly frank with me; but do you forget that it is among the

Catalans a sacred law to intermarry?”

“You mistake, Fernand; it is not a law, but merely a custom, and, I pray

of you, do not cite this custom in your favor. You are included in the

conscription, Fernand, and are only at liberty on sufferance, liable at

any moment to be called upon to take up arms. Once a soldier, what would

you do with me, a poor orphan, forlorn, without fortune, with nothing

but a half-ruined hut and a few ragged nets, the miserable inheritance

left by my father to my mother, and by my mother to me? She has been

dead a year, and you know, Fernand, I have subsisted almost entirely on

public charity. Sometimes you pretend I am useful to you, and that is an

excuse to share with me the produce of your fishing, and I accept it,

Fernand, because you are the son of my father’s brother, because we were

brought up together, and still more because it would give you so much

pain if I refuse. But I feel very deeply that this fish which I go and

sell, and with the produce of which I buy the flax I spin,—I feel very

keenly, Fernand, that this is charity.”

“And if it were, Mercédès, poor and lone as you are, you suit me as well

as the daughter of the first shipowner or the richest banker of

Marseilles! What do such as we desire but a good wife and careful

housekeeper, and where can I look for these better than in you?”

“Fernand,” answered Mercédès, shaking her head, “a woman becomes a bad

manager, and who shall say she will remain an honest woman, when she

loves another man better than her husband? Rest content with my

friendship, for I say once more that is all I can promise, and I will

promise no more than I can bestow.”

“I understand,” replied Fernand, “you can endure your own wretchedness

patiently, but you are afraid to share mine. Well, Mercédès, beloved by

you, I would tempt fortune; you would bring me good luck, and I should

become rich. I could extend my occupation as a fisherman, might get a

place as clerk in a warehouse, and become in time a dealer myself.”

“You could do no such thing, Fernand; you are a soldier, and if you

remain at the Catalans it is because there is no war; so remain a

fisherman, and contented with my friendship, as I cannot give you more.”

“Well, I will do better, Mercédès. I will be a sailor; instead of the

costume of our fathers, which you despise, I will wear a varnished hat,

a striped shirt, and a blue jacket, with an anchor on the buttons. Would

not that dress please you?”

“What do you mean?” asked Mercédès, with an angry glance,—“what do you

mean? I do not understand you?”

“I mean, Mercédès, that you are thus harsh and cruel with me, because

you are expecting someone who is thus attired; but perhaps he whom you

await is inconstant, or if he is not, the sea is so to him.”

“Fernand,” cried Mercédès, “I believed you were good-hearted, and I was

mistaken! Fernand, you are wicked to call to your aid jealousy and the

anger of God! Yes, I will not deny it, I do await, and I do love him of

whom you speak; and, if he does not return, instead of accusing him of

the inconstancy which you insinuate, I will tell you that he died loving

me and me only.” The young girl made a gesture of rage. “I understand

you, Fernand; you would be revenged on him because I do not love you;

you would cross your Catalan knife with his dirk. What end would that

answer? To lose you my friendship if he were conquered, and see that

friendship changed into hate if you were victor. Believe me, to seek a

quarrel with a man is a bad method of pleasing the woman who loves that

man. No, Fernand, you will not thus give way to evil thoughts. Unable to

have me for your wife, you will content yourself with having me for your

friend and sister; and besides,” she added, her eyes troubled and

moistened with tears, “wait, wait, Fernand; you said just now that the

sea was treacherous, and he has been gone four months, and during these

four months there have been some terrible storms.”

Fernand made no reply, nor did he attempt to check the tears which

flowed down the cheeks of Mercédès, although for each of these tears he

would have shed his heart’s blood; but these tears flowed for another.

He arose, paced a while up and down the hut, and then, suddenly stopping

before Mercédès, with his eyes glowing and his hands clenched,—“Say,

Mercédès,” he said, “once for all, is this your final determination?”

“I love Edmond Dantès,” the young girl calmly replied, “and none but

Edmond shall ever be my husband.”

“And you will always love him?”

“As long as I live.”

Fernand let fall his head like a defeated man, heaved a sigh that was

like a groan, and then suddenly looking her full in the face, with

clenched teeth and expanded nostrils, said,—“But if he is dead——”

“If he is dead, I shall die too.”

“If he has forgotten you——”

“Mercédès!” called a joyous voice from without,—“Mercédès!”

“Ah,” exclaimed the young girl, blushing with delight, and fairly

leaping in excess of love, “you see he has not forgotten me, for here he

is!” And rushing towards the door, she opened it, saying, “Here, Edmond,

here I am!”

Fernand, pale and trembling, drew back, like a traveller at the sight of

a serpent, and fell into a chair beside him. Edmond and Mercédès were

clasped in each other’s arms. The burning Marseilles sun, which shot

into the room through the open door, covered them with a flood of light.

At first they saw nothing around them. Their intense happiness isolated

them from all the rest of the world, and they only spoke in broken

words, which are the tokens of a joy so extreme that they seem rather

the expression of sorrow. Suddenly Edmond saw the gloomy, pale, and

threatening countenance of Fernand, as it was defined in the shadow. By

a movement for which he could scarcely account to himself, the young

Catalan placed his hand on the knife at his belt.

“Ah, your pardon,” said Dantès, frowning in his turn; “I did not

perceive that there were three of us.” Then, turning to Mercédès, he

inquired, “Who is this gentleman?”

“One who will be your best friend, Dantès, for he is my friend, my

cousin, my brother; it is Fernand—the man whom, after you, Edmond, I

love the best in the world. Do you not remember him?”

“Yes!” said Dantès, and without relinquishing Mercédès’ hand clasped in

one of his own, he extended the other to the Catalan with a cordial air.

But Fernand, instead of responding to this amiable gesture, remained

mute and trembling. Edmond then cast his eyes scrutinizingly at the

agitated and embarrassed Mercédès, and then again on the gloomy and

menacing Fernand. This look told him all, and his anger waxed hot.

“I did not know, when I came with such haste to you, that I was to meet

an enemy here.”

“An enemy!” cried Mercédès, with an angry look at her cousin. “An enemy

in my house, do you say, Edmond! If I believed that, I would place my

arm under yours and go with you to Marseilles, leaving the house to

return to it no more.”

Fernand’s eye darted lightning. “And should any misfortune occur to you,

dear Edmond,” she continued with the same calmness which proved to

Fernand that the young girl had read the very innermost depths of his

sinister thought, “if misfortune should occur to you, I would ascend the

highest point of the Cape de Morgiou and cast myself headlong from it.”

Fernand became deadly pale. “But you are deceived, Edmond,” she

continued. “You have no enemy here—there is no one but Fernand, my

brother, who will grasp your hand as a devoted friend.”

And at these words the young girl fixed her imperious look on the

Catalan, who, as if fascinated by it, came slowly towards Edmond, and

offered him his hand. His hatred, like a powerless though furious wave,

was broken against the strong ascendancy which Mercédès exercised over

him. Scarcely, however, had he touched Edmond’s hand when he felt he had

done all he could do, and rushed hastily out of the house.

“Oh,” he exclaimed, running furiously and tearing his hair—“Oh, who will

deliver me from this man? Wretched—wretched that I am!”

“Hallo, Catalan! Hallo, Fernand! where are you running to?” exclaimed a

voice.

The young man stopped suddenly, looked around him, and perceived

Caderousse sitting at table with Danglars, under an arbor.

“Well”, said Caderousse, “why don’t you come? Are you really in such a