The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) by Alexandre Dumas

quizzically, while Danglars feigned surprise.
    ‘How can I tell?’ he replied. ‘Like you, I can see what is happening, but I am at a loss to understand it.’
    Caderousse looked around for Fernand, but he had vanished. At that moment, the whole of the previous evening’s events flashed before his eyes with terrifying clarity. It was as though the catastrophe had lifted the veil that drunkenness had cast over his memory of the day before.
    ‘Oh! Oh!’ he exclaimed hoarsely. ‘Can this be a consequence of the joke you were speaking about yesterday, Danglars? If that is the case, damnation take the perpetrator, for it is a cruel one.’
    ‘Nothing of the sort!’ muttered Danglars. ‘Far from it: you know very well that I tore up the paper.’
    ‘That you did not,’ said Caderousse. ‘You merely threw it into a corner.’
    ‘Hold your tongue. You were drunk, you saw nothing.’
    ‘Where is Fernand?’ Caderousse asked.
    ‘How do I know?’ replied Danglars. ‘About his business, no doubt. But instead of worrying about that, why don’t we go and comfort these poor people.’
    While this conversation was taking place, Dantès had in effect been shaking the hands of all his friends, with a smile to each, and relinquished himself into captivity, saying: ‘Stay calm. The mistake will doubtless be explained and it is quite probable that I shall not even go as far as the prison.’
    ‘Certainly not, I guarantee it,’ Danglars said, coming across at that moment to the group, as he had indicated.
    Dantès went down the stairs, following the commissioner of police, with the soldiers surrounding him. A carriage, its door wide open, was waiting outside. He got in. Two soldiers and thecommissioner got up behind him, the door closed and the carriage set out on the road back to Marseille.
    ‘Farewell, Dantès! Farewell, Edmond!’ cried Mercédès, leaning across the balustrade.
    The prisoner heard this last cry, wrung like a sob from his fiancée’s tormented heart. He leant out of the carriage window and called: ‘Goodbye, Mercédès!’ as he disappeared round one corner of the Fort Saint-Nicholas.
    ‘Wait for me here,’ said the shipowner. ‘I shall take the first carriage I can find, hurry to Marseille and bring the news back to you.’
    ‘Yes!’ everyone cried. ‘Go on, and come quickly back.’
    After this double departure there was a dreadful moment of stunned silence among all who remained behind. For a time, the old man and Mercédès stayed apart, each immured in grief. But at length their eyes met. Each recognized the other as a victim stricken by the same blow and they fell into each other’s arms.
    Meanwhile Fernand returned, poured himself a glass of water, drank it and sat down on a chair. By chance, this happened to be next to the chair into which Mercédès sank when she parted from the old man’s embrace. Fernand instinctively moved his own chair away.
    ‘He’s the one,’ Caderousse told Danglars, not having taken his eyes off the Catalan.
    ‘I doubt it,’ Danglars replied. ‘He was not clever enough. In any case, let whoever is responsible take the blame.’
    ‘You are forgetting the person who advised him.’
    ‘Pah! If one were to be held to account for every remark one lets fall…’
    ‘Yes, when it falls point downwards.’
    Everyone else, meanwhile, had been discussing every angle of Dantès’ arrest.
    ‘And you, Danglars?’ someone asked. ‘What do you think about what has happened?’
    ‘My view is that he must have brought back some packets of prohibited goods.’
    ‘But if that was the case, you should know about it, Danglars, since you were the ship’s supercargo.’
    ‘That may be so, but the supercargo doesn’t know about any goods unless they are declared to him. I know that we were carryingcotton, that’s all, and that we took the cargo on at Alexandria, from Monsieur Pastret, and at Smyrna, from Monsieur Pascal. Don’t expect me to know anything more than