“Hate you, blame you – you, Edmond! Hate – reproach the man that has spared my son’s life! For was it not your fatal and sanguinary intention to destroy that son of whom M. de Morcerf was so proud? Oh! look at me well, and discover, if you can, even the semblance of a reproach in me.”
The count looked up, and fixed his eyes on Mercedes, who, partly rising from her seat, extended both her hands toward him.
“Oh, look at me,” continued she, with a feeling of profound melancholy; “my eyes no longer dazzle by their brilliancy, for the time has long fled since I used to smile on Edmond Dantes, who anxiously looked out for me from the window of yonder garret, then inhabited by his old father. Years of grief have created an abyss between those days and the present. I neither reproach you nor hate you, my friend! Oh, no, Edmond, it is myself that I blame, myself that I hate! Oh, miserable creature that I am!” cried she, clasping her hands, and raising her eyes to heaven. “I once possessed piety, innocence, and love, the three ingredients of the happiness of angels, and, wretch that I am, I have doubted God.”
Monte-Cristo approached her, and silently took her hand.
“No,” said she, withdrawing it gently – no, my friend, touch me not. You have spared me, yet of all those who have fallen under your vengeance I was the most guilty. They were influenced by hatred, by avarice, and by self-love; but I was base, and, for want of courage, acted against my judgment. Nay, do not press my hand, Edmond; you are thinking of some kind expression, I am sure, to console me, but do not bestow it on me, for I am no longer worthy of kindness. See” (and she exposed her face completely to view), –“see, misfortune has silvered my hair, my eyes have shed so many tears that they are encircled by a rim of purple, and my brow is wrinkled. You, Edmond, on the contrary, you are still young, handsome, dignified; it is because you have had faith, because you have had strength, because you trusted in God, and he has supported and strengthened you in all your trials; I have been cowardly, I have denied, abandoned God, and – look at me now!”
As Mercedes spoke, the tears chased each other down her wan cheeks; the unhappy woman’s heart was breaking, as memory recalled the changeful events of her life. Monte-Cristo, however, took her hand and imprinted a kiss on it; but she herself felt that it was with no greater warmth than he would have bestowed one on the hand of some marble statue of a saint.
“There are predestined existences,” continued she, “in which a first fault destroys the prospects of a whole life. I believed you dead; why did I survive you? What good has it done me to mourn for you eternally in the secret recesses of my heart? – only to make a woman of nine-and-thirty look like one fifty years of age. Why, having recognized you, and I the only one to do so – why was I able to save my son alone? Ought I not also to have rescued the man that I had accepted for a husband, guilty though he were? Yet I let him die! What do I say? Oh, merciful heavens! was I not accessory to his death by my supine insensibility, by my contempt for him, not remembering, or not willing to remember, that it was for my sake he had become a traitor and a perjurer? In what am I benefited by accompanying my son so far, since I now abandon him, and allow him to depart alone to the baneful climate of Africa? Oh, I have been base, cowardly, I tell you; I have abjured my affections, and, like all renegades, I am of evil omen to those who surround me!”