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She lived. There are sweeter and nobler words, but few that can encompass so much triumph and unexpected grace as these: that Mercédès lived.
It happened a little at a time and very much in spite of herself. Shaken and exhausted, she had felt that life was over for her, that there were no more choices to be made. Instead she continued to choose. Though wracked with grief her limbs still had strength in them; though wearied by tears her mind was still active; and all around her there were things to be done. She had been in the habit of doing for a long time; she found the habit curiously hard to leave by the wayside.
There was the garden, first. It had been well maintained over the years, but her taste was such that she could not look at it without seeing improvements to be made. For that she had to make the acquaintance of the gardener, and soon enough of the neighbors, to trade cuttings and advice. The neighbors were all new since the time she had come to that house as a visitor when Edmond's father had lived in it. They were curious about her, naturally, but she said little of herself and won them by gentleness and politeness.
She did a great deal of the work on the garden herself. There was little else to fill her time with, and she was not too proud to work with the earth. When the flowers bloomed she picked the most beautiful and filled her rooms with them; they would have gone to waste otherwise. With their beauty and fragrance all around her she could not help but feel her burden lightened, try as she might to cling to it.
One morning she heard through the open window, distantly, the unmistakable, the unrepeatable sounds of all Marseille going down to see a ship put into port, which was always everyone's business, even if everyone did not have business with the ship. Before she knew that she had made up her mind to go, her feet had taken her out the door and onto the Canebière. She thought at once of turning back. She had loved to go see ships coming in as a girl, in those immeasurably distant days before every ship could wound her merely by failing to be Edmond's. An echo of that old excitement struck a low chord in her; Mercédès, her face veiled and her step uncertain, found the crowd and went down with them to the quay.
The ship was a beautiful three-master, returning after a three months' absence. Mercédès listened to the gossip around her, saw the first boats being rowed to shore and the first eager reunions. It was too much; she returned to the Allées de Meilhan and shut herself up indoors, her back turned to the window, her heart pounding.
She had been sleeping badly for a long time; that night she hardly closed her eyes, lying awake full of an almost nostalgic longing to make plans and carry them out. Perhaps she would plant a peach tree to give shade to the too open corner of the garden; perhaps, instead, she would pack up her few belongings and leave. No doubt Edmond could find her anywhere she went, but if she went without leaving word she was sure he would understand and let her keep to her obscurity.
As it happened, she did not leave. She rose early and went out to the garden. The air was fresh, the light was rose and violet, dew glittered on every leaf, and Mercédès thought she might as well be here as anywhere. Later in the week she found a grower with a young peach tree to sell and oversaw its transplantation to the corner of the garden; and a couple of weeks later she went out to watch another ship coming in.
There had been, all this time, letters from Albert, frequent and voluminous, light-hearted and optimistic in tone as if he had understood, much as she tried to conceal it from him, how she needed comfort. "The men tease me," he wrote, "for being tied to my sweetheart's apron strings when they see me writing all the time. I have not the heart to tell them otherwise, for naturally none of them can have a mother like mine, and I would not wish to lure a fellow creature into the sin of envy." He had been made a sub-lieutenant, sooner even than his own sanguine expectations, as the result of some service he had rendered to the governor – of course Albert had made light of it, but Mercédès understood that he had been in danger and shown himself equal to it. She trembled to think of it, but rejoiced that her son's hopes had not been dashed.
When the summer heat had begun to fade, she received a letter from Edmond. He suggested – and it was a suggestion only, the letter hastened to add – that she might let one of the rooms in the house. He did not suppose her wanting money, with M. le sous-lieutenant Herrera so ably providing for her; but it would be a distraction and an object of industry. There was no need to notify him of her decision, the house was hers to do with as she wished. It was a respectful and a rather timid letter, as though he feared to offend her by writing it. Mercédès found it a marvel: that, wherever he was now, he was still thinking of her comfort, that he would sit down to write such a letter.
It was a few days before she could seriously consider Edmond's suggestion. Then she reflected that landlady was a respectable estate for a widow of limited means. She had been feeling, anyway, that she had more room than she could use. She walked up and down, considering each room in turn, already imagining the improvements that could be made, the new furniture that could be purchased; she was a rational woman, capable of economies in need, and however limited her means she had been living within them; she had what she needed to accomplish these plans. When they were all on the way to completion, she let it be known among her neighbors, who were by now friendly acquaintances, that she had a room to let, for the right tenants.
Sooner than she could have imagined, an elderly merchant's widow fallen on hard times wrote to her; she and her companion, a very respectable woman, too, wished for a comfortable place to live at little cost to themselves; she had always dreamed, she wrote naïvely, of living by the sea in her old age. Mercédès wrote to welcome them, and in a few weeks they were established on the second floor. She charged them half what she might have, but then it was true that she did not want for money.
They were genteel, quiet women, and Mercédès had no difficulty getting along with them, though it was strange for her to realize that she had never before in her life come into close contact with women of this class: the merchant's wives and daughters had been too grand to notice a poor orphan from the Catalans, and later too proud to curry favor with a countess.
Twice a month she invited her new tenants to dinner. A girl from a neighboring house came to help her prepare the meal; Mercédès herself picked out more expensive wines than she required for daily use; and though she did not know it she was as gracious and accomplished a hostess in these reduced surroundings as ever the comtesse de Morcerf had been, and her guests looked forward to each dinner with keener interest than any of the members of Parisian high society who had once peopled her drawing rooms in the hôtel de Morcerf.
And so, little by little, she lived and filled her days, naturally and without effort, she who had thought despair and a bitter fading into nothingness were all that remained to her. There were beautiful things in the world; there was the happiness of others, which she knew better than to envy; there were all the little pursuits of life, flowerbeds to be weeded, shutters to be replaced, visits to be accepted and returned, dinners to be planned. She remembered how frantically she had searched for occupation in the early years of her marriage to Fernand, how she had thought she could fill the reproachful emptiness inside her with drawing and music and books. She was not sure that the same impulse was not driving her now, but if so it was a gentler master than it had been then.
On an evening nearly two years after she had returned to Marseille, Mercédès took a walk among the cliffs overlooking the town. Her eyes avoided, as though out of delicacy to her younger self, the spot where she had sat for hours, staring down at the rocks and contemplating suicide. She had thought afterwards that it would have been better if she had thrown herself off then, or if God had pitied her and let her simply fall.
She sat down on a flat rock and looked out to sea, idly following the movements of this or that small craft, trying to discern its purpose. She had sat perhaps ten minutes when she heard a soft tread coming up from the town behind her. She was not alarmed. She turned.
"May I sit with you, madame?" he asked, standing a few paces away with his hat in his hand. He was the same, always the same, and whatever names he wore he could have only one in her eyes.
"Of course, Edmond," she answered.
He sat, looking uneasy, and his gaze too went out to sea. He did not speak.
"I hope you did not go to the house to look for me?" asked Mercédès.
"No, I saw you walking. You seemed to want your solitude, so I took care not to follow too close behind."
There was that timidity once more, which had characterized his letter; she could not guess what it meant, and it troubled her. "I mean sometimes to go as far as my old house, to see if it is still there and if anyone lives in it now. I know better than to think anyone will recognize me, or remember me. I have not managed it yet, and I am now not sure I ever will. Edmond, why have you come?"
"To ask if there was any service I could do for you, madame." He paused and looked for a moment rather lost, then his searching gaze fixed on her. "And to see for myself if after all you had found some consolation, as I have wished and hoped you would."
"I want nothing," she began, quaking under his scrutiny. "The Lord be thanked, I have nothing to ask for. Albert is protected and aided in his career as though through the intercession of Providence." She hesitated, watching him, and was certain that a flicker of consciousness had gone through his attentive expression. "And the house, the house you left in my keeping, is still standing and whole. My income is enough for my needs, I am not extravagant. And I have tenants now, as you suggested. Two very respectable women." She told him about them, not at length so as not to tax his interest, but he listened as though fascinated.
"I need not ask how you use the little rent you charge them," he said at the end of her recitation, "for you have told me how it is: the old ladies eat and drink their own contribution at your table. That is well. They amuse you? Their company does not grow stale? You do not regret taking my advice?"
"No, not at all, they are harmless and well-meaning, and I think they are happy, too, though they have suffered some misfortunes, and that is good see. And then..." She smiled, faintly, and shook her head.
Edmond answered her with his own soft smile. "I will not press you, if would rather I didn't, but I think there is some story here."
"It is hardly worth telling." She found she did want to tell it, though, having thought of it, and it could hardly hurt Edmond now. "This winter gone past, my tenant's nephew visited Marseille. He stayed with friends in the country, but he was here often. A pleasant young man, well-educated, and very curious about Paris. He was rather ridiculous, though. He flirted with me most shamefully."
However great might be his control over himself, Edmond could not suppress a startled movement. "Did he?"
"Oh, yes. It is hard to believe, I know, and I could not account for it – what could he possibly mean by it?"
"And so, what did you do?" Edmond had recovered quickly from his surprise and posed the question eagerly.
"I told him he was a young fool, naturally, and that he would be better off pouring his charms into the ears of young women, who were their natural objects. He made a joke of it, about the age of the soul being determined by experience and not by the years lived. Not that there isn't truth in that, but he had not lived enough to know it. One can always tell. He must have read something like it in a novel."
Faint as this jest was, Edmond looked pleased with it. "And then?"
And then the young man had asked, what his aunt and her companion had been too considerate to venture: was she married, and where was her husband? For it was all very well to go about in black and be called the widow Herrera, as she had come to be known, but no one really knew a thing about that. Mercédès had imagined, not seriously, telling him that her husband was a sailor who had been away at sea for many years – ridiculously, she had had in mind Penelope and her suitors – but it would have been offering insult to God to say it. Instead she had told the truth: that she was widowed, indeed; and had a son not much younger than the impertinent young man; and that he ought to consider it before continuing to address her in such improper terms.
All she said to Edmond was: "He was well brought up enough that there was an end of it."
"The experience has not left a painful impression, I hope?"
"Painful? No, not the memory of it, though it was painful at the time." She had gone to her mirror, feeling foolish. It had told her what it always did: that activity may have brought the brightness back to her eyes, but it had failed to revive her beauty. "I had thought I was too old ever to have to deal with such things again."
"Perhaps after all you are not as old as you think."
She would not look at him, she thought. If she did, she would see, as she had already seen before during that painful interview she had believed would be their last meeting on earth, the reflection of her lost beauty in his face, see how little he believed his own words.
"My tenants laugh at me, indeed," she said, trying to keep her voice strong, "when I say that I am old, and I do not feel it so much, now."
"No doubt, madame, it is due to the salutary comparison to be drawn from having two examples of true old age before your eyes."
Mercédès caught herself on the point of laughing, and instead, more severely than she had meant, she said, "That is not what Edmond Dantès would say – that is a character you are playing, and there's no need for it with me." Before he could answer, before she could even see what his response would have been, she bit her lip and went on: "No ¬– no, wait, don't listen to that. I spoke in haste. What right have I to rebuke you?"
His air was embarrassed when he answered. "You were not altogether wrong. I hardly know what the right thing is to say to you, and I have said the wrong thing instead, it is easy to slip into. Perhaps..."
He was going to say that he should not have come, and Mercédès could not disagree. She waited, but he did not say it; he was silent, watching her again.
Seeing it fell to her to keep the conversation from flagging, she began uncertainly, "I wish... I wish you would tell me something of yourself, a true thing. You – have you found consolation, Edmond?"
He gave her a brief look of gratitude. "I am still not sure. I thought I had." A whole universe of pain and pride and confusion, thrown together and haphazardly mingled, came over his expression; she could read it all but not interpret it. "Not long after we last saw each other, a brave and noble woman saved me. I had come to the end of my path, had seen my vengeance accomplished, and it seemed, with my purpose fulfilled, all that was left to me was to fade from the stage. Had that woman not spoken, I would have let myself die, though I felt that life could be sweet again."
Mercédès was touched by this echo of her own thoughts, and her gaze went at last to that spot where she had sat waiting for her death to come and meet her. Without knowing it she let a small cry of anguish escape her.
"I should not have said that," Edmond said, voice full of concern and alarm. "It is my own trouble, it is selfish to make you share in it when it gives you pain."
"No... No, Edmond, that is not it. I was remembering a time I too would have let myself die, and yet I did not, though I had no hope that life would be anything but bitter. Here again on my return I tried – I said that I would die – but where I thought all was emptiness there is something in me still stubbornly resisting. I do not know whether I should be grateful for it."
Wordlessly Edmond took her hand and held it for a moment; then, as though he had not meant to and could not understand why he had done it, he slowly let it fall again. "Madame, I hope you do not feel that I have interfered beyond my claims. If it is against your inclination that you stay here, if you would rather... That is, I would by no means have you live your life as a penance, and if it is that..."
"Enough, enough!" Mercédès could not easily go on. She had felt the brief tremor of his hand in hers. "I have been gone longer than usual, soon it will be growing dark and the old ladies will be worried. Walk with me a little, Edmond."
They walked some way in silence, side by side, Mercédès lost in reflection but all the while aware that Edmond was studying her as though searching for the answer to a riddle. It grew unendurable.
"The woman," she said, hurriedly, "the brave and noble woman who saved you. She is waiting somewhere for you now?"
He answered slowly. "No... I do not know."
"There was... a misunderstanding?"
"Not that – rather, an understanding, of sorts. It is I who am waiting – though to tell the truth, I half hope that I am waiting in vain."
Of all this Mercédès understood just enough to feel how unusual, how full of danger the conversation was: Edmond, speaking of the woman he loved, to the woman who still loved him against hope. It was painful, but, curiously, it was not unbearable.
"I may venture to say," she said, her voice unsteady, "that I hope you will both understand what you want in time, and that it will be within your reach. I wish you both very well."
"You are generous, madame."
"No, not that... Why won't you call me by my name? Are we not friends, Edmond?"
"Indeed we are, Mercédès. I hope we are. But I should leave you now. I have taken enough of your time."
"A moment longer, please." Mercédès spoke so quietly she hardly heard her own voice, but Edmond stopped and waited. "This has not been an easy meeting, but it has been good to see you, Edmond, after all. I hope you will not hesitate to visit again, though perhaps not too soon."
"Of course..."
"You will let me know how to reach you if there is ever anything I want? Not for myself, I have everything, as I've said, but... for Albert."
"Yes, I understand, of course. Mercédès... Word from you will always reach me as soon as possible. Don't hesitate to turn to me in need, though God forbid you should ever have reason for it."
It had grown dark, and they stood looking into each other's faces for a long, silent moment, each searching for the next thing to say. Then Edmond bowed and made his excuses, and Mercédès said what was proper, and they parted.
Mercédès made more noise than usual coming through the door on purpose so that the old ladies would be sure to hear and not miss her and come looking. She wished to be alone, to cry, and to pray, and to think.
The following summer Albert came to visit her. He had been granted leave on previous occasions, but she had encouraged him to take it elsewhere. She had wanted to see him, but not enough to invite his observation of her new mode of life. As long as it was for herself, she did not mind it, even at times enjoyed it, but if Albert had seen it and suffered because he believed it to be a shaming descent for her, it would have spoiled all of Mercédès's comfort. But at last she could not bring herself to put him off again, and he arrived, resplendent in his lieutenant's uniform, brown from the sun, proudly delivering his most recent earnings.
"Now there will be no need for you to live here in retirement, mother!"
"I get on very well as I am, thank you. And what about you, Albert? It is enough money for you to have another career. Can you truly be happy, fighting and killing your fellow men?"
"There is less of that than you imagine, mother, quite a lot more of marching, or riding if one happens to have a horse and the horse is by chance not lame, or digging, or building, or trying to make something eatable of one's rations... But anyway, I hope you do not think your son is a coward and afraid of killing?"
"No, it is because I know my son to be brave, truly brave, that I worry that constant, customary violence disgusts him."
"There is, perhaps, more truth than you know in those words. Again you prove that you are the wisest woman on earth, mother."
He had changed, but at the same time he had not. It was a pleasure to have him before her, safe and visibly undamaged, laughing and at ease. She knew Albert was watching her for signs of unhappiness as carefully as she watched him for signs of injury, physical or moral, and she found she had little to dissimulate. If she could not have sworn to perfect happiness, she might quietly have attested to enough of comfort to be worth safeguarding.
Albert praised the garden in immoderate terms; it was a triumph, he pronounced, an earthly paradise, and he would spend the whole of his visit in it, taking care not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge should he find it, expecting any moment to see a dryad peeping out from among the shrubbery. When Mercédès protested that there had been no dryads in the garden where the first people had walked, Albert remarked that she was certainly not old enough to remember, and beyond that who could say?
The merchant's widow had inherited a small fortune and gone away with her companion to live in more luxurious surroundings; in their place had come a young couple with two small daughters. The elder was delighted to have a soldier staying in the house, and begged Albert for bloody stories and became rather rowdy. In private Albert wondered whether the noise of the children was not a strain on Mercédès's nerves, but she was able to assure him that, for the most part, it did her no harm.
Albert stayed a full week and did not, whatever he had said, spend all that time in the garden. He insisted on being taken all over Marseille, on having all the sights of his mother's youth pointed out to him and stories told about them. It was in his company that Mercédès first returned to the Catalans; the two of them received curious looks, and she fancied that it was because, however far removed by time and circumstance, they still looked as though in another life they both would have belonged there. She marveled yet again, walking with her son beside her through the sunlit town all overshadowed with ghosts of the past, that fate should have brought her back to Marseille after all she had passed through.
Still it was hard to be too downcast or thoughtful: Albert brought to the visit the holiday air of their former trips, trips to the seaside or the country with only each other for company. It was through no lack of consideration towards her that he insisted on seeing all these old places and having them spoken of; in the end the pain was not as great as she would have feared; and in some measure it was a relief to talk. She thought Albert must have known or sensed that it would be so.
The past was gone; the times since were drowned in darkness; but they had both survived to walk in the sun.
"Well, mother, you look better than I had feared to find you," Albert confessed the day before he was to depart. "It was an excellent notion to have tenants, though I never would have thought of it myself."
"Nor did I think of it. Your friend the count wrote to suggest it."
"My friend the count!" cried Albert. "Of course, of course, I should have guessed. There is nothing surprising in it. He is looking after us both, though so much time has passed. I should have known, having been so recently reminded."
"Why, Albert, have you seen him?"
"I have, though he did not know it. It was only a glimpse. Now, mother, do not be alarmed by what I tell you, for you see me here before you, alive and well..."
"My God! What are you going to tell me?"
"A curious little tale, nothing more, I assure you. It was more than a year ago now. I was wounded quite seriously in battle. My captain only held back from sending word to you because everyone was certain I would die... There, but you can see for yourself that I did not, so please do not look so grave, mother, for not even the memory of pain troubles me now. Then – then I lay for days in a delirium, until one night a man came, as if by chance, who claimed he was a doctor. They gave me into his care because there was nothing else to be done, and two days later he departed, saying that I would live. And so, you see, I did."
Mercédès tried to get the better of her horror; it should have been enough that Albert was alive now, but the mere thought that he had again come so near death threatened to freeze her heart. "Yet the man could have been anyone, some holy wanderer..."
"Ah! A holy wanderer, that is just what he was, but not any wanderer. On the night my fever broke, I awoke, too feeble to move or call out, but entirely conscious and with my wits about me. And looking around the room I saw him, sitting at my bedside – my friend the count, as you call him. He had fallen asleep! Curious! I had imagined, still, that he was not exactly human enough to need sleep... I wonder how he ever came to hear of my misadventure."
Mercédès could not let this account pass without weeping over it, and Albert must have understood, for he admonished her no further and waited while she cried into his shoulder.
"Truly," he remarked, when she had grown calm again, "I believe that man would fly from the ends of the earth and back to do a good deed, especially if he had the certainty of going unthanked and unrecognized. How fortunate we are, mother!"
"We are fortunate indeed," Mercédès answered, believing it, "to have the friendship of Edmond Dantès."
"Ah, it is like the old days," Albert said. "We can talk of no one else. I suppose," he ventured, suddenly doubtful, "you do not mind it, mother? After all..."
"No, Albert, I don't mind."
Only once more did Mercédès try to raise the possibility of Albert resigning his commission and choosing another career.
"In another year or two," he said, "they will make me a captain, and that will carry a beautiful pension. That will be enough for anything, we'll be rich. We will take a house somewhere..."
"Or you will find a wife," Mercédès suggested.
"Anything might happen," Albert allowed, "though surely you must know that any wife I choose would be only too happy to have you live with us, mother."
She understood that he would not be reasonable on the subject and abandoned it.
The following day there was another parting, in spite of everything not less painful than the first, and it was weeks before Mercédès recovered from it.
In the winter Edmond visited her again. He came to the house this time, introduced himself to the tenants merely as an old friend of hers.
"It has been long enough since my last visit, I hope? Or am I playing a character if I ask that?"
"It is wrong of you to tease me about that," Mercédès said, though she did not think she minded, "and to remember it, after all this time!"
"I would not forget a single word we spoke that evening, madame, not for all the world."
He spoke very seriously, too seriously for Mercédès to be easy about. She had no ready answer, only asked him once more not to be so formal. "I was surprised to see you," she admitted, "though it has been long enough. You have always reappeared in the summer until now, and I believe I had started to think of you as a figment of the long days and the heat... But here you are again, and you are real."
They sat out in the garden, fallen from its full glory at this season but not too cold for a brief visit, and Mercédès faithfully repeated Albert's raptures about it – "I am sorry," said Edmond, "to have missed it at its height, and another time I will not be so remiss." – and then mentioned, almost calmly, that Albert had caught a glimpse of him in North Africa, about a year and a half ago.
"I am sorry to hear that," Edmond said, vexed. "He should never have found out."
"You would deny me the opportunity to thank you and bless you for the good you've done us! Oh, heartless..."
"No, no, only ashamed, for without me Albert's prospects would not have been blighted."
"Without you... I would rather not think of it." Mercédès made a gesture, dismissing it all. "Enough of it, now. Let us say that I have thanked you, from both of us, and you have accepted, and we can go on. Albert woke and saw you sitting there, having fallen asleep watching over him. He said he had not believed you human enough to sleep."
"My friend Albert is still a clown, I see... Though meanwhile he has brought honor to his grandfather's name, as no one could have doubted."
"I didn't tell him you came to see me. I thought perhaps he would be jealous."
"Oh, I'm sure you wrong him, and I am sure Albert does not want to see me."
Mercédès shrugged and did not argue, wondering how Edmond could be so great and noble – and yet at times so very mistaken.
She told him more of Albert's visit, and of her plans for the future of the garden, and of some local happenings that might yet interest him as pertaining to the city he had once called home. Expecting nothing, she asked if he would stay to have dinner with her and her tenants, and after a thoughtful pause he accepted. When they sat down to the table Mercédès watched Edmond not without anxiety, but he ate her food without a hint of hesitation. When she took a sip of wine to cover up her relief, she found his glance seeking her out, a knowing smile touching his lips, and she smiled back, feeling foolish but no less pleased.
The young couple were charmed by his conversation, of course, though somewhat alarmed; it could not be said for certain that they did return to their rooms and caution their daughters against vampires. Happily, Mercédès had no idea of these or any other speculations.
After dinner Edmond offered Mercédès his arm, and together they strolled down to the quay, not hurriedly. He praised her hospitality, and she waved it away, and then for a time they were silent.
"Last time we spoke," Edmond began, "that time, I mentioned a woman..."
Mercédès waited. She could not quite admit to curiosity, but she was relieved he had started the subject himself.
"She has gone her own way. It was her choice, and it was the choice I wanted for her. We will always understand each other, and I think – I hope – she will be happy."
"But you, Edmond?"
"I?" He sighed. "I am still alive."
"One day, perhaps, you will tell me what happened."
"One day, I would like that very much."
They said little more before they parted and Mercédès returned home by herself. How strange, she was thinking; who would ever have guessed that one day they would have such conversations?
It was some months after this that she received another letter. There were no suggestions this time, and no timidity. He wrote in fact a confession of sorts: "I was not entirely honest with you, I fear, that evening I spoke to you on the cliffs. I had come to Marseille on business of my own, and after taking news of you I would have gone away again without coming near you. Instead I saw you walking though the town. I wondered what to do and thought I had better leave you in peace. But when I had seen you sit I almost fancied you were waiting for me, and so I spoke to you. Perhaps you knew this, or suspected it? I cannot account for my impulse, but I would say it directed me rightly."
It took Mercédès some time, and cost her some pain, to answer this letter, but when she had answered it she felt stronger. From that time it was understood that they would exchange letters. It was a slow correspondence. Mercédès never knew what to write at first, and once she did she hesitated over how to word it. Sometimes the letters were a long way reaching their destinations – when she knew in what distant places some of her missives found him, she was surprised that they had arrived at all; but then he had said that word from her would always reach him.
What struck her most of all was that with all that had passed, all the misery and suffering, the recriminations and misunderstandings, the sheer incalculable distance between the man and woman who wrote these words and the young lovers who had made of Marseille their garden of delights, after all that, they still knew each other. Not in the way Mercédès had known his voice from the first – simply it was, that when she read Edmond's letters she recognized the mind that had composed them; and the thoughts in them had been addressed to the person that Mercédès, deep down, had always known herself to be. It was a kind of magic that brought together the sundered past and present, and, when she felt brave, Mercédès tried, in her own hand and in her own words, to explain this magic to Edmond.
She put each of his letters away once she had read it and rarely looked at any of them again; it was enough to have them in the house, it was enough to wait for the next one to arrive, after a span of weeks or months.
He visited from time to time, never announcing his visits, never staying more than a few hours. From some details he had mentioned she knew he had other friends, other business in the neighborhood of Marseille, but it was not spoken of between them. For whatever reason it seemed to suit him, though he had already confessed it was otherwise, to give the impression that he came only to see her, to exchange a few stories, to comment on the garden, to delight and mystify her tenants. Perhaps he enjoyed knowing that she saw through the little artifice.
Once he arrived while she was having the walls cleaned and new paper put up – it had been long enough, she had been thinking of it for some time and putting a little money away towards it.
"Do you approve?" she asked.
"Approve?" Edmond shook his head. "It's not for me to approve or disapprove. If it needed to be done, it is good that it should be, and I rely on your taste absolutely."
"Thank you." She thought a moment. "If? If it needed to be done, Edmond? What are you thinking of?"
"Only that perhaps you are making work for yourself where there is none to be done..."
"Merely in order to be doing? I did have that habit once, and I still return to it sometimes. This time – who can say? I don't think it is that, though. It is a mark of unhappiness, and I'm not unhappy, not just now. I am not driven. There were days once when I could never seem to do enough. Before, in Paris, when I was trying to escape things, and I did not even understand what I was escaping..."
He waited, quiet and attentive, while she reined in her thoughts. He understood her so well these days; they ran up against obstacles in conversation rarely.
"All that time..." she began, after a minute or two had passed. "I was unhappy, yes, but I believed it was my fault that Fernand was unhappy, too. He was, always, desperately unhappy. I thought I understood. I thought that in marrying him I had wronged him, as well as you – as well as myself – perhaps, still, it was that. But I would rather believe it was his conscience turning his earthly joys to ashes in his mouth. I would not like to believe Fernand so evil that he could betray you, betray us both, marry me knowing what he had done, without being pursued by remorse... without being eaten away by it."
Edmond did not answer. She could see by his expression, which was severe and distant, that there would be no pity for Fernand, not now, not ever, but he did not contradict her either.
They were friends, of a sort, and that was almost as alarming as it was comforting, and Mercédès dared not ask anything more of it. And if Edmond's visits became slowly more frequent over the years, if she in time learned to depend on them instead of receiving each one as a fresh surprise, she did not choose to dwell on that either, seemed not even to note it.
After some years, when the young couple had moved to their own house in another street, when their oldest girl was wearing long skirts and talking of putting together dances, when they had been succeeded by an ailing old priest and his widowed sister and they in turn by a single young woman who claimed she was writing a novel, when the garden had outgrown all of Mercédès's plans for it and she was searching for fresh occupation – that year, Edmond came to see her in March, and she saw, what had likely been there for some time, the gray growing thick at his temples, the lines around his eyes and mouth – yet even then she would have sworn he looked, to her eyes, just the same as ever.
They never lacked for subjects to speak of now, and there were very few things that could not be brought out into the light. Some things indeed Mercédès preferred not to allude to, though Edmond had written of them in his letters – but still, conversation was easy. There were all her own small doings, stories about the neighbors and the tenants and the recalcitrant rosebushes on the south wall; and, always a fruitful topic, Albert had resigned his commission at last some little time ago and had taken the whim to set himself up as a gentleman farmer. It should not have been funny, but when she spoke of it Mercédès laughed; Edmond assured her that it was from quite natural maternal relief at having her son's safety secure after so much anxiety – but then, Albert wrote of his troubles with cabbages and cows and all-knowing farmhands in such a style that Edmond's gallantry did not altogether convince either of them.
Walking together at the end of his visit, at the quay where she would ordinarily have left him, Edmond made no sign of stopping and instead walked on. They had gone beyond the crowds, beyond the streets, before Mercédès suggested that they should turn back.
Edmond stopped and stood for a moment silent and distracted. Then he turned to her, took her hands in his, and said in an indescribable tone of voice, "Mercédès, wait."
Her heart leapt at his touch, then in the next breath a heavy weight fell over her. She bowed her head. "Please, Edmond, don't do this. We have been going on so well, two old friends who understand each other very well. I want nothing more – I wouldn't have this little that we have salvaged spoiled. I'm almost happy, sometimes – please stop, now."
Softly, Edmond said, "Won't you look at me, Mercédès?"
Slowly she raised her head, her eyes already filling with tears, and met his gaze, gentle and unafraid.
"Will you listen to me?" he asked.
"To anything you would tell me, Edmond."
"Not tell, Mercédès – ask."
She took a breath and then another, too quick. She could not answer. She knew what he would say – of course she knew. She had not thought she had a heart left to break, but she was certain it would break if she heard this; she stood, frozen, listening because he had asked her to.
"Mercédès, more than thirty years have passed since, not far from this spot, a very young man, a child, asked you to marry him." His voice was thick with unshed tears; he cleared his throat before going on. "You accepted him, then, and he thought his happiness was assured. So many things have changed, whole worlds of dreams and aspirations have been toppled. We have both learned many painful lessons, lessons no human creature should have to know. We have been deeply unhappy for a long time... but after all I believe our hearts are still the same, and I know you have felt that, just as I have. Mercédès, having accepted the child once, will you now accept the man?"
It was said. It was said, and though she felt stifled with pain she must respond. "Edmond – Edmond, you don't love me. You're only being kind, but it's not a true kindness to either of us... Not to me, to make me bear this, too..."
"Not love you?" he repeated. "You don't believe that, Mercédès. You can't. Look at me. Feel my heart. If I have had a purpose, an aim in these last years, it has been to see your peace restored, to see you happy if possible. There is nothing dearer to me in this moment. I admit that at the first I never intended, never suspected... Mercédès, I've seen you find peace, here, on your own. I could not witness such grace without understanding my own heart. It has seemed to me, speaking to you today, reading your most recent letters, that you were ready for a change. If you tell me now that it won't make you happy, at long last, to marry me, I'll go and never speak of it again, we can go on as we have, if that is your wish..."
"Stop, Edmond. Please, stop." Mercédès closed her eyes, the tears rolling down her cheeks. With her hand against Edmond's chest she felt the pounding of his heart. She could not doubt the truth of his words, could not deny the understanding of their years of slow, careful progress back towards each other, each waiting for the other to heal. But had Mercédès healed enough? Enough to be happy – enough to believe she deserved happiness?
When she opened her eyes Edmond was watching her with a look composed of equal parts hope and patience, the whole made radiant with gentleness and love. It was an expression that belonged to the man, not the child, who had been gentle, but who had not known enough of life to look at her like this; he believed that she deserved happiness; Edmond had not only forgiven her. He loved her, again or still.
"Yes," Mercédès whispered, "yes, it would make me very happy. Yes, Edmond."
For an instant she saw the tears spill from his eyes. Then at last, after so many years during which she had scarcely allowed herself to dream of it, she was in his arms again, their hearts beating together...
After a little time they returned arm in arm to the house in the Allées de Meilhan, not laughing, but smiling.
So Mercédès lived. She had not expected it; she had not wished it; but it had happened all the same.