Manuelita raised her folded hands in entreaty—then came a last shriek, a hoarse laugh, and the boat sank, never to be seen again.
The next day the sea was serene and calm in the splendor of the rising sun, and a man engaged in fishing noticed a motionless body lying on the strand. Alarmed he hastened to lift up the body and recognized Jacopo!
Singularly enough, life was not quite extinct; the fisher brought the half-dead man to his house, and under the careful treatment of kind neighbors Jacopo soon revived as far as his body was concerned, but his mind remained affected.
A few days later the corpses of Parlo and Manuelita were driven on the strand, and now what had caused Jacopo to become insane was no more a riddle—had he not in one day lost the wife and the friend?
Jacopo's madness was of a quiet kind; for hours he could sit on the shore and watch the playful movements of the waves; sometimes he bent over the blue waters as if he were in search of something, and then he shook his head sorrowfully. One day he sat again during a heavy gale on the strand; he saw a boat in which two men and a woman were sitting fighting with the waves. In his eyes light began to dawn all at once. He plunged into the water and soon had reached the boat. Breathless stood the people who saw it and noticed all his movements, and now they found him swimming toward the shore, holding a human figure in his arms, and loud hurrahs and rejoicing met him for his courage.
He had succeeded in saving the woman; the two men found a watery grave. In expectation of something, he knelt down by the woman, and when she opened her eyes Jacopo uttered sorrowfully:
"It is not her," and then departed.
From this day Jacopo's madness was broken; he certainly roamed about for days on the strand, but the veil which had clouded his mind was torn, and only when a storm raged it came over him like inspiration, and he ventured courageously upon saving the lives of those in danger.
Thus not a week passed in which Jacopo had not found opportunity to save people from shipwreck: the inhabitants on the strand surrounded him with a godlike veneration, and whenever a vessel was in danger there he was on the spot. Heaven seemingly favored him; hundreds he saved from a watery grave, and soon his word on the strand became quite an authority.
In course of time Jacopo began clearly to remember the entire affair as it happened on that eventful morning, and in order to drown those recollections he became a drunkard. In this state he was found by the English sailor, in whom, no doubt, the reader must have recognized the Count of Monte-Cristo; also Jacopo knew the voice of his beloved master, and his heart became animated with fresh hopes when he called him to his help. As Jacopo knelt before the count, Monte-Cristo put aside the long, entangled hair which hung down over the Corsican's face, and, in a sorrowful tone and compassionately moved by the sight, said to him: