Page:The Count of Monte-Cristo (1887 Volume 5).djvu/196

176 The past came to him like one of those waves whose wrath foams fiercer than the others.

He recollected the call he had made upon him after the dinner at Auteuil, and then the visit the abbé had himself paid to his house on the day of Valentine's death.

"You here, sir!" he exclaimed; "do you, then, never appear but to act as an escort to death?"

Busoni turned round, and perceiving the excitement depicted on the magistrate's face, the savage luster of his eyes, he understood that the scene of the assizes had been accomplished; but beyond this he was ignorant.

"I came to pray over the body of your daughter."

"And, now, why are you here?"

"I come to tell you that you have sufficiently repaid your debt, and that from this moment I will pray to God to forgive you as I do."

"Good heavens!" exclaimed Villefort, stepping back fearfully, "surely that is not the voice of the Abbé Busoni!"

"No!" the abbé threw off his false tonsure, shook his head, and his hair, no longer confined, fell in black masses around his manly face.

"It is the face of the Count of Monte-Cristo!" exclaimed the procureur du roi, with a haggard expression.

"You are not exactly right, M. le Procureur du Roi; you must go farther back."

"That voice! that voice!—where did I first hear it?"

"You heard it for the first time at Marseilles, twenty-three years ago, the day of your marriage with Mademoiselle de Saint-Méran. Refer to your papers."

"You are not Busoni?—You are not Monte-Cristo? Oh, heavens! you are, then, some concealed, implacable, and mortal enemy! I must have wronged you in some way at Marseilles. Oh! woe to me!"

"Yes; you are, indeed, right," said the count, crossing his arms over his broad chest; "search! search!"

"But what have I done to you?" exclaimed Villefort, whose mind was balancing between reason and insanity, in that cloud which is neither a dream nor reality, "what have I done to you? Tell me, then! Speak!"

"You condemned me to a horrible, tedious death,—you killed my father—you deprived me of liberty, of love, and happiness."

"Who are you, then? Who are you?"

"I am the specter of a wretch you buried in the dungeons of the Château-d'If. The form of the Count of Monte-Cristo was given to