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He was a fine, tall, slim young fellow of eighteen or twenty, with black eyes, and hair as dark as a raven’s wing; and his whole appearance bespoke that calmness and resolution peculiar to men accustomed from their cradle to contend with danger.
while the young man, going to his task, left the conversation to Danglars, who now came towards the owner. He was a man of twenty-five or twenty-six years of age, of unprepossessing countenance, obsequious to his superiors, insolent to his subordinates; and this, in addition to his position as responsible agent on board, which is always obnoxious to the sailors, made him as much disliked by the crew as Edmond Dantès was beloved by them.
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.
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.”
“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”—
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.
Danglars looked at the two men, one after the other, the one brutalized by liquor, the other overwhelmed with love. “I shall get nothing from these fools,” he muttered; “and I am very much afraid of being here between a drunkard and a coward. Here’s an envious fellow making himself boozy on wine when he ought to be nursing his wrath, and here is a fool who sees the woman he loves stolen from under his nose and takes on like a big baby.
Unquestionably, Edmond’s star is in the ascendant, and he will marry the splendid girl—he will be captain, too, and laugh at us all, unless”—a sinister smile passed over Danglars’ lips—“unless I take a hand in the affair,” he added.
“We are always in a hurry to be happy, M. Danglars; for when we have suffered a long time, we have great difficulty in believing in good fortune.
Absence severs as well as death, and if the walls of a prison were between Edmond and Mercédès they would be as effectually separated as if he lay under a tombstone.” “Yes; but one gets out of prison,” said Caderousse, who, with what sense was left him, listened eagerly to the conversation, “and when one gets out and one’s name is Edmond Dantès, one seeks revenge”—
“I know not why you meddle,” said Fernand, seizing his arm; “but this I know, you have some motive of personal hatred against Dantès, for he who himself hates is never mistaken in the sentiments of others.”
I have always had more dread of a pen, a bottle of ink, and a sheet of paper, than of a sword or pistol.” “The fellow is not so drunk as he appears to be,” said Danglars. “Give him some more wine, Fernand.”
“Well, then, I should say, for instance,” resumed Danglars, “that if after a voyage such as Dantès has just made, in which he touched at the Island of Elba, someone were to denounce him to the king’s procureur as a Bonapartist agent”—
But Dantès cannot remain forever in prison, and one day or other he will leave it, and the day when he comes out, woe betide him who was the cause of his incarceration!”
The morning’s sun rose clear and resplendent, touching the foamy waves into a network of ruby-tinted light.
joy takes a strange effect at times, it seems to oppress us almost the same as sorrow.”
happiness is like the enchanted palaces we read of in our childhood, where fierce, fiery dragons defend the entrance and approach; and monsters of all shapes and kinds, requiring to be overcome ere victory is ours. I own that I am lost in wonder to find myself promoted to an honor of which I feel myself unworthy—that of being the husband of Mercédès.”
every word the young man uttered convinced him more and more of his innocence. This lad,—for he was scarcely a man,—simple, natural, eloquent with that eloquence of the heart never found when sought for; full of affection for everybody, because he was happy, and because happiness renders even the wicked good—extended his affection even to his judge, spite of Villefort’s severe look and stern accent. Dantès seemed full of kindness.
In politics, my dear fellow, you know, as well as I do, there are no men, but ideas—no feelings, but interests; in politics we do not kill a man, we only remove an obstacle, that is all.
“Only seventeen months,” replied Dantès. “Oh, you do not know what is seventeen months in prison!—seventeen ages rather, especially to a man who, like me, had arrived at the summit of his ambition—to a man, who, like me, was on the point of marrying a woman he adored, who saw an honorable career opened before him, and who loses all in an instant—who sees his prospects destroyed, and is ignorant of the fate of his affianced wife, and whether his aged father be still living! Seventeen months’ captivity to a sailor accustomed to the boundless ocean, is a worse punishment than human crime ever
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“You will not accept my gold; I will keep it for myself. You refuse me my liberty; God will give it me.” And the abbé, casting away his coverlet, resumed his place, and continued his calculations.
