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Updated: May 19, 2025
"Ali," said he, in a voice that sounded strangely in Zuleika's ear, "is everything in readiness?" The faithful Nubian, scarcely less affected than his master, bowed affirmatively. "Then farewell, ye grottoes of Monte-Cristo!" cried the Count, excitedly. "Farewell forever!" He hastily mounted the stairway, almost dragging Zuleika with him. Ali remained below.
"Yes, yes, but you must remember that last year, young as you were then, you attracted marked attention from several youthful Romans of the best families in the Eternal City, and that one of them, the Viscount Giovanni Massetti, went so far as to ask me for your hand." At the mention of Massetti's name the blush upon Zuleika's cheek deepened.
But economy, which was one of Zuleika's inherited instincts, vaguely appearing to him to be a virtue, interchangeable with chastity and abstemiousness, was certainly to be encouraged in a young girl. It hardly seems possible that with an eye single to the integrity of the larder she could ever look kindly on the blandishments of his sex, or, indeed, be exposed to them.
Zuleika's vacant smile changed to one of submission, and then, equally ignoring her brother in this double defeat, she hastened to the kitchen to do the visitor's bidding. The woman closed the door behind her, and took Zuleika's place before the fire. "Well?" she said, in a half-contemptuous toleration.
Its echoes followed her when she crossed the Atlantic, till they were lost in the louder, deeper, more blatant paean that rose for her from the shores beyond. All the stops of that "mighty organ, many-piped," the New York press, were pulled out simultaneously, as far as they could be pulled, in Zuleika's honour. She delighted in the din.
The raft was thronged with Old Judasians mostly clergymen who were shouting hearty hortations, and evidently trying not to appear so old as they felt or rather, not to appear so startlingly old as their contemporaries looked to them. It occurred to the Duke as a strange thing, and a thing to be glad of, that he, in this world, would never be an Old Judasian. Zuleika's shoulder pressed his.
And so, as they went side by side up the avenue, in the mellow light of the westering sun, preceded in their course, and pursued, and surrounded, by the mob of hoarse infatuate youths, Zuleika's face was as that of a little girl sulking. Vainly the Duke reasoned with her. She could NOT see the point of view.
Was it nothing to her to have cut those black shadows across the cloisters? Was it nothing to her that she so magically mingled her rays with the candle-light shed forth from Zuleika's bedroom? Nothing, that she had cleansed the lawn of all its colour, and made of it a platform of silver-grey, fit for fairies to dance on?
The happy occasion had the character of a public rejoicing, for the populace grateful to the Count of Monte-Cristo and Maximilian Morrel for the suppression of Luigi Vampa and his dangerous outlaws, who for years had been the terror of rich and poor alike, paraded the streets in vast bodies in honor of Zuleika's nuptials with the man whom the notorious brigand chief had so nearly succeeded in overwhelming with irretrievable ruin and disgrace.
Hateful had been the sight of them in the watches of the night, when he thought he had worn those robes for the last time. But now ! He opened Zuleika's letter. It did not disappoint him. "DEAR DUKE, DO, DO forgive me. I am beyond words ashamed of the silly tomboyish thing I did last night.
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