Page:The Count of Monte-Cristo (1887 Volume 3).djvu/268

248 open. At length, one by one, all the noises of the country ceased. I understood that I had nothing to fear, that I should neither be seen nor heard, so I decided upon descending to the garden.

"Listen, Hermine! I consider myself as brave as most men, but when I drew from my breast the little key of the staircase, which I had found in my coat,—that little key we both used to cherish so much, which you wished to have fastened to a golden ring,—when I opened the door, and saw the pale moon shedding a long stream of white light on the spiral staircase like a specter, I leaned against the wall, and nearly shrieked. I seemed to be going mad. At last I mastered my agitation. I descended the staircase step by step; the only thing I could not conquer was a strange trembling in my knees. I grasped the railings; if I had relaxed my hold for a moment, I should have fallen. I reached the lower door. Outside this door a spade was placed against the wall; I took it, and advanced toward the thicket. I had provided myself with a dark-lantern. In the middle of the lawn I stopped to light it, then I continued my path. It was the end of November; all the freshness of the garden had disappeared, and the trees were nothing more than skeletons with their long bony arms, and the dead leaves sounded on the gravel under my feet. My terror overcame me to such a degree as I approached the thicket, that I took a pistol from my pocket and cocked it. I fancied continually that I saw the figure of the Corsican between the branches. I examined the thicket with my dark-lantern; it was empty. I cast my eyes all round; I was indeed alone; no noise disturbed the silence of the night but the owl, whose piercing cry seemed as if calling up the phantoms of the night. I tied my lantern to a forked branch I had remarked a year before at the precise spot where I stopped to dig the hole. The grass had grown very thickly there during the summer, and when autumn arrived no one had been there to mow it. Still one place less thickly covered attracted my attention; it evidently was there I had turned up the ground. I returned to work. The hour, then, for which I had been waiting during the last year had at length arrived. How I worked, how I hoped, how I sounded every piece of turf, thinking to find some resistance to my spade! But no, I found nothing, though I had made a hole twice as large as the first. I thought I had been deceived—had mistaken the spot. I turned round, I looked at the trees, I tried to recall the details which had struck me at the time. A cold, sharp wind whistled through the leafless branches, and yet the drops fell from my forehead. I recollected that I was stabbed just as I was trampling the ground to fill up the hole; while doing so, I had leaned against a false ebony-tree; behind me was an artificial rock, intended to serve as a resting-place for persons walking in the