Chapter 171: Chapter 171

Villefort’s hands trembled. "I had to destroy every trace of the past, every material evidence. Too many memories would always remain in my mind, but at least I could eliminate the physical proof. That’s why I canceled the lease. That’s why I was there, waiting.

Night fell. I let it become completely dark. I had no light in that room. When the wind shook the doors, I kept expecting to see a spy behind them. I trembled. I seemed to hear your moans from the bed, and I was too afraid to turn around. My heart beat so violently I feared my wound would reopen. Finally, all the neighborhood noises stopped one by one. I understood I had nothing to fear, no one would see or hear me. I decided to go down to the garden.

Listen, Hermine. I consider myself as brave as anyone, but when I took that little key from my coat, the key to the staircase, the one we both treasured, the one you wanted on a golden ring, when I opened that door and saw pale moonlight streaming down the spiral stairs like a ghost, I nearly screamed. I felt like I was going mad. I finally mastered my fear and descended step by step. My knees trembled uncontrollably. I gripped the railing so tightly, if I’d let go for even a moment, I would have fallen.

I reached the lower door. A shovel was leaning against the wall outside. I took it and headed toward the thicket. I’d brought a covered lantern. In the middle of the lawn I stopped to light it, then continued.

It was late November. All the garden’s greenery had vanished. The trees were nothing but skeletons with long, bony branches, and dead leaves crunched under my feet. As I approached the thicket, my terror grew so intense that I pulled a pistol from my pocket and armed myself. I kept thinking I saw the Corsican’s figure between the branches. I examined the thicket with my lantern, it was empty. I looked around carefully. I was truly alone. The only sound was an owl’s piercing cry, which seemed to summon the phantoms of the night. I tied my lantern to a forked branch I’d noticed a year before, marking the exact spot where I’d dug.

The grass had grown thick there during summer, and no one had mowed it in autumn. But one patch where the grass was thinner caught my attention, clearly where I’d disturbed the ground. I began to dig. The moment I’d been waiting for all year had finally arrived. How I worked! How I hoped! I struck every piece of turf, expecting to feel resistance. But I found nothing, even though I’d dug a hole twice as large as the original. I thought I’d made a mistake, gotten the wrong spot.

I turned around, studying the trees, trying to recall every detail. A cold, sharp wind whistled through the bare branches, yet sweat dripped from my forehead. I remembered being stabbed just as I was trampling the ground to fill the hole. I’d been leaning against a laburnum tree. Behind me was decorative rockwork meant as a resting spot. When I fell, my hand had slipped from the tree and felt the cold stone. On my right was the tree; behind me, the rock. I positioned myself the same way and threw myself down to mark the spot. Then I rose and began digging again, enlarging the hole. Still nothing. The box was gone!"

"Gone?" Madame Danglars whispered, choking with fear.

"Don’t think I stopped with one attempt," Villefort continued. "No, I searched the entire thicket. I thought perhaps the assassin had discovered the box, mistaken it for treasure, tried to carry it off, then realized his error and buried it elsewhere. But I found nothing. Then I thought maybe he hadn’t been so careful, maybe he’d just tossed it aside somewhere. In that case, I’d need daylight to continue searching. So I stayed in the room and waited."

"When dawn came, I went back down. I returned to the thicket first, hoping to find traces I’d missed in darkness. I’d turned over more than twenty square feet of earth to a depth of two feet. A laborer wouldn’t have done in a full day what took me an hour. But I found nothing, absolutely nothing. I searched the path to the side gate, thinking it might have been thrown there. That search was equally useless. With a breaking heart, I returned to the thicket, which now held no hope for me."

"That would drive anyone mad!" Madame Danglars cried.

"I almost wished it had," Villefort said. "But I wasn’t granted that mercy. Still, recovering my strength and composure, I asked myself: ’Why would that man have taken the body?’"

"But you said he’d need it as proof," Madame Danglars replied.

"Ah no, madame. That’s not how it works. Dead bodies aren’t kept for a year. They’re shown to a magistrate immediately, and evidence is taken. Nothing like that has happened."

"Then what?" Hermine asked, trembling violently.

"Something more terrible, more fatal, more alarming for us. The child was perhaps alive, and the assassin may have saved them!"

Madame Danglars let out a piercing scream. She seized Villefort’s hands. "My child was alive? You buried my child alive? You weren’t certain they were dead, and you buried them anyway?"

The baroness stood before the prosecutor, clutching his hands in her weak grip.

"I don’t know for certain," Villefort said, his fixed stare showing his powerful mind teetering on the edge of despair and madness. "I’m only supposing, as I might suppose anything else."

"My child! My poor child!" the baroness cried, collapsing into her chair and stifling her sobs in her handkerchief.

Villefort, somewhat steadier now, realized he needed to make her share his terror to prevent her from breaking down completely. "Don’t you understand?" he said, standing and approaching her to speak in a lower tone. "If this is true, we’re ruined. This child lives, and someone knows it. Someone possesses our secret. And since Monte Cristo spoke to us about a child discovered when no child could be found, he must be the one who knows our secret."

"Just God, avenging God!" Madame Danglars murmured.

Villefort only groaned in response.

"But the child, the child, sir?" the agitated mother repeated.

"How I’ve searched!" Villefort said, wringing his hands. "How I’ve called out for them in my long, sleepless nights! How I’ve longed for unlimited wealth to buy a million secrets from a million people, hoping to find mine among them! Finally, one day, as I picked up my shovel for the hundredth time, I asked myself what the Corsican could have done with the child. A child would encumber a fugitive. Perhaps when he realized it was still alive, he threw it in the river."

"Impossible!" Madame Danglars cried. "A man might murder another out of revenge, but he wouldn’t deliberately drown a child."

"Perhaps," Villefort continued, "he left it at the orphanage."

"Yes, yes!" the baroness cried. "My child must be there!"

"I ran to the orphanage and learned that on that same night, September 20th, a child had been brought there, wrapped in part of a fine linen cloth that had been deliberately torn in half. That piece of cloth was marked with half a baron’s crown and the letter H."

"Yes!" Madame Danglars said. "All my linen is marked that way. Monsieur de Nargonne was a baron, and my name is Hermine. Thank God, my child wasn’t dead then!"

"No, it wasn’t dead."

"And you can tell me this without fearing I’ll die of joy? Where is my child?" Fresh chapters posted on noveⅼfire.net

Villefort shrugged. "Do you think I know? Do you believe that if I knew, I’d tell you the whole story like some novelist? Alas, no, I don’t know. About six months later, a woman came to claim the child with the other half of the cloth. She provided all the necessary details, and the child was entrusted to her."

"But you should have investigated this woman! You should have traced her!"

"What do you think I did? I pretended there was a criminal case and employed the most skilled investigators to search for her. They traced her to Châlons, and there they lost her trail."

Madame Danglars had listened with a sigh, a tear, or a gasp at every detail. "Is that all?" she said. "You stopped there?"

"Oh no," Villefort said. "I never stopped searching and investigating. However, in the last two or three years, I’d allowed myself some rest. But now I’ll begin again with more determination than ever, because now fear drives me, not just conscience."

"But the Count of Monte Cristo can’t know anything," Madame Danglars said, "or he wouldn’t seek our company as he does."

"The wickedness of man is very great," Villefort said, "surpassing even the goodness of God. Did you observe that man’s eyes while he spoke to us?"

"Have you ever watched him carefully?"

"He seems eccentric, but that’s all. One thing did strike me though, of all the exquisite foods he served us, he touched nothing himself. I might have thought he was poisoning us."

"And you see you would have been wrong."

"But believe me, that man has other plans. That’s why I wanted to see you, to speak with you, to warn you against everyone, but especially against him." Villefort fixed his eyes on her more intently than ever before. "Tell me, did you ever reveal our connection to anyone?"

"You understand what I mean," Villefort said urgently. "When I say anyone, forgive my insistence, I mean any living person?"

"Yes, yes, I understand perfectly," the baroness said. "Never, I swear to you."

"Have you ever written down in the evening what happened during the day? Do you keep a diary?"

"No. My life has been spent in triviality. I want to forget it myself."

"Do you talk in your sleep?"

"I sleep soundly, like a child. Don’t you remember?"

Color rose to the baroness’s face, and Villefort turned deathly pale.

"It’s true," he said in a barely audible voice.

"Well?" said the baroness.

"Well, now I understand what I must do," Villefort replied. "Within a week, I’ll discover who this Monte Cristo really is, where he comes from, where he’s going, and why he speaks in our presence about children dug up from gardens."

He spoke these words with such intensity that the count himself would have shuddered to hear them. Then he pressed the baroness’s reluctant hand and respectfully led her back to the door.

Madame Danglars returned in another cab to the passage, where she found her own carriage waiting with her coachman sleeping peacefully on his seat.