The Son Of Monte Cristo Part 94 (1/2)

CHAPTER LXIX

EPILOGUE

A man stood on a solitary rock Suddenly he uttered a shout of triumph

He had discovered the secret of immense wealth And thiserect, cried aloud:

”Oh! you whose infamy condemned me to fourteen years of imprisonment, and whose na and with confidence in the future, Edmond Dantes, the lover of Mercedes, returned to Marseilles, with the promise of a captaincy He was toof the betrothal when soldiers ca carried letters to Napoleon, at Elba In vain did he assert and even prove his innocence before de Villefort, a istrate Edmond Dantes was torn from his betrothed, and imprisoned for fourteen years in the Chateau d'If

Another prisoner was there, the Abbe Faria This prisoner was supposed to be mad, because he had offered to buy his liberty with millions The Abbe imparted to Dantes the secret of the treasure concealed by the Spadas in the caverns of the island of Monte-Cristo, a desolate rock in the Mediterranean And this was not all, the oldcompanion

And now Dantes was master of the treasure of the Spadas, and he started to find his old father and his fiancee He swore to avenge himself on those who had betrayed him He left the rock He went to his father's house His father had died of hunger Mercedes, his fiancee, was married to another--to one of the three men who had woven the plot that had cost Dantes fourteen years of his youth One was nalars, a rival claimant to the title of captain The second was a drunken o, a fisherman, who loved Mercedes And it was this Fernando who had married Mercedes, and was non by the title of the Comte de Morcerf Caderousse, still poor, kept a wine shop, and Danglars was one of the first bankers in Paris

Another eneistrate, de Villefort, who, knowing the innocence of Dantes, had nevertheless sentenced him to prison Because Dantes in his explanation used the name of Noirtier, as the father of Villefort, and said that the letters he brought froiven to him by this man, de Villefort, lest his own position should be coot rid of this person as soon as possible, and sent him to the Chateau d'If for fourteen years

These were the crilars the banker he ruined Fernando the fisherman, knohen Dantes returned as the Co betrayed Ali-Pacha of Jahter Haydee to a Turkish merchant His infao was for ever dishonored The wretchedthat the blow came from Monte-Cristo, went to him to provoke a quarrel Then Monte-Cristo said to him:

”Look me full in the face, Fernando, and you will understand the whole

I am Edmond Dantes” And the man fled Within an hour he blew out his brains

Then came the turn of de Villefort His wife, a perverse creature, to ensure an inheritance to her son, committed several murders with poisons De Villefort hilars and himself But the child was saved by a Corsican, Bertuccio The child, born of crime, had the most criminal instincts

And one day Monte-Cristo found him in the prison at Toulon He named him Benedetto He assisted him to escape, and Benedetto assassinated Caderousse And then Benedetto, tried for this murder, found himself face to face with his father Villefort, the Procureur de Roi Benedetto loudly flung his father's crimes in his face, and Villefort fled from the court-room When he reached home Villefort found that his wife had poisoned herself and his son, the only being he loved And then Monte-Cristo appeared before him and told him his real name, Edmond Dantes! Villefort becaeance was complete Monte-Cristo was so rich that he was all-powerful And yet he was terribly sad, for he was alone Then it was that the gentle Haydee consoled hiave the name of Esperance And Haydee was dead! Esperance was dead!

Ten years had elapsed since that awful night when Monte-Cristo, with blanched hair, carried away the body of his only son

A man stood alone on a rock on the island of Monte-Cristo And this man was Edmond Dantes For ten years he had lived on this rock In all that time he had not seen a human face nor heard a human voice, except at rare intervals when some shi+p, driven from her course by contrary winds, sent her boats to this island for water Then Monte-Cristo, concealing hihter

Once, when Monte-Cristo had been on the rock eight years, he saw a shi+p co toward it at full sail It was not driven there by contrary winds or by a stor the island through a glass Concealing himself he saw several men, whom he did not know, land, and search the island

It will be re before, Ali and Bertuccio had, by their es of the Spada treasures

He saw these men sound the rocks and try the of what the island had contained, but yet they found nothing Monte-Cristo contrived to get near the that the treasure was ”there,” and he laid his finger on a plan he had drawn

”Have you not heard,” said the other, ”that the island was inhabited?”

”Sailors say that they often see at sunset a tall form on these rocks”

”An optical delusion”