Page:The Count of Monte-Cristo (1887 Volume 5).djvu/297

 not fallen into the hands of the police, for even a single gendarme would not have taken such extraordinary precautions, as a shout would have brought to his aid the sentinels stationed near. Was it a robber who was carrying him off? What a strange robber! It could not be a joke. In any case, Picaud had fallen into a trap; this was the only conclusion that could be drawn by the murderer Picaud.

When the man on whose shoulders he was borne finally stopped, Picaud estimated that about half an hour had elapsed. Picaud, still wrapped in the cloak, had seen nothing of the road traversed. When he was released, he found himself laid on a truckle-bed with a straw mattress; the atmosphere of the place was thick and heavy; he thought he recognized it as a subterranean passage belonging, to all appearances, to an abandoned quarry.

The almost total darkness of the place, the natural agitation of Picaud, the change that ten years of want and despair had effected in the stranger's look, did not permit the murderer of Loupian to recognize the individual who had appeared so like a phantom. He examined him in dull silence, waiting for some word to explain the fate he had to expect. Ten minutes thus passed before a single word was uttered.

"Well, Picaud!" he said, "what name do you go by now, the one your father gave you, or the one you assumed when you quitted Fenestrelles? Are you the Abbé Baldini or the waiter Prosper? Cannot your ingenuity supply you with a fifth? You think that revenge is a good joke, I suppose; it is a furious madness, which you yourself would hold in horror if you had not sold your soul to the devil. You have sacrificed the ten last years of your life to the pursuit of three wretches whom you ought to have spared. You have perpetrated horrible crimes. You are lost forever; and you have dragged me, too, into the abyss!"

"You! you! Who are you?"

"I am your accomplice, a scoundrel who, for money, sold the life of my friends! Your money was deadly; the cupidity which you kindled in my soul has never been extinguished. The greed of riches made me mad and wicked. I slew the man who deceived me. I and my wife had to fly; she died in our exile, and I, arrested, tried, and condemned to the galleys, have endured the pillory and the branding-iron, and dragged the ball and chain. At length, when in my turn I escaped, I resolved to punish that Abbé Baldini who knew so well how to punish others. I hastened to Naples; no one knew him there. I looked for the grave of Picaud; I heard Picaud was alive. How did I learn that fact? Neither you nor the pope will tear the secret from me. I resumed my pursuit of the feigned dead man; but when I found him, two murders had already marked his vengeance; the children of Loupian