C. L'apparition.

C

The Apparition.

As the King's attorney had said to Mme Danglars, Valentine was not yet recovered.

Broken by fatigue, she kept to her bed indeed, and it was in her room, and from the lips of Mme de Villefort, that she learned the events we have just related, that is to say, the flight of Eugénie and the arrest of Andrea Cavalcanti, or rather of Benedetto, as well as the charge of murder brought against him.

But Valentine was so weak that this account perhaps did not produce upon her all the effect it would have produced in her usual state of health.

Indeed, there were only some vague ideas, some undecided forces mingled with the strange notions and fleeting phantoms that were born in her sick brain or that passed before her eyes, and soon even all faded to leave her personal sensations to recover all their strength.

During the day, Valentine was still held in reality by the presence of Noirtier, who had himself carried to his granddaughter and remained there, covering Valentine with his paternal gaze; then, when he had returned from the Palais, it was Villefort in his turn who spent an hour or two between his father and his child.

At six o'clock Villefort withdrew to his study, at eight o'clock M. d'Avrigny arrived, who himself brought the nocturnal potion prepared for the young girl; then Noirtier was taken away.

A nurse of the doctor's choosing replaced everyone, and did not withdraw herself until, toward ten or eleven o'clock, Valentine was asleep.

On going down, she gave the keys of Valentine's room to M. de Villefort himself, so that one could no longer enter the sick girl's room except by crossing Mme de Villefort's apartment and little Édouard's chamber.

Every morning Morrel came to Noirtier to ask for news of Valentine: but Morrel, a strange thing, seemed from day to day less anxious.

First, from day to day Valentine, though prey to a violent nervous exaltation, was better; then, had not Monte-Cristo told him, when he had rushed to him in utter dismay, that if within two hours Valentine were not dead, Valentine would be saved?

Now Valentine still lived, and four days had passed.

This nervous exaltation of which we have spoken pursued Valentine even in her sleep, or rather in the state of drowsiness that succeeded her waking: it was then that, in the silence of the night and the half-darkness left by the night-light placed on the mantelpiece and burning in its alabaster envelope, she saw pass those shadows that come to people the rooms of the sick and that fever shakes with its shuddering wings.

Then it seemed to her that she saw appear now her stepmother who threatened her, now Morrel who stretched out his arms to her, now beings almost strange to her habitual life, like the Count of Monte-Cristo; there was not even a piece of furniture which, in these moments of delirium, did not appear mobile and wandering; and this lasted thus until two or three in the morning, the moment when a leaden sleep came to seize the young girl and lead her to daybreak.

The evening that followed the morning on which Valentine had learned the flight of Eugénie and the arrest of Benedetto, and on which, after being for an instant mingled with the sensations of her own existence, these events began to pass little by little out of her thought, after the successive retirement of Villefort, of d'Avrigny and of Noirtier, while eleven o'clock was striking at Saint-Philippe-du-Roule, and the nurse, having placed within reach of the patient the draught prepared by the doctor, and closed the door of her room, listened shuddering, in the servants' hall where she had withdrawn, to the comments of the domestics, and filled her memory with the lugubrious tales which, for three months, had furnished the evenings of the antechamber of the King's attorney, an unexpected scene took place in that so carefully closed room.

It was already about ten minutes since the nurse had withdrawn.

Valentine, prey for an hour to that fever which returned each night, left her head, insubordinate to her will, to continue that active, monotonous and implacable work of the brain, which exhausts itself in incessantly reproducing the same thoughts or giving birth to the same images.

From the wick of the night-light there sprang a thousand and a thousand rays all imprinted with strange meanings, when suddenly, by its trembling reflection, Valentine thought she saw her bookcase, placed beside the fireplace, in a recess of the wall, open slowly without the hinges on which it seemed to turn producing the least noise.

At another moment Valentine would have seized her bell and pulled the silken cord calling for help: but nothing astonished her more in the situation in which she found herself. She was conscious that all these visions that surrounded her were the daughters of her delirium, and this conviction had come to her from the fact that, in the morning, no trace ever remained of all those phantoms of the night, which disappeared with the day.

Behind the door appeared a human figure.

Valentine was, thanks to her fever, too familiarized with these sorts of apparitions to be frightened; she only opened wide her eyes, hoping to recognize Morrel.

The figure continued to advance toward her bed, then it stopped, and seemed to listen with profound attention.

At this moment, a reflection of the night-light played upon the face of the nocturnal visitor.

"It is not he!" she murmured.

And she waited, convinced that she was dreaming, that this man, as happens in dreams, would disappear or change into some other person.

Only she touched her pulse, and, feeling it beat violently, she remembered that the best means of making these importunate visions disappear was to drink: the coolness of the drink, composed besides with the aim of calming the agitations of which Valentine had complained to the doctor, brought, in lowering the fever, a renewal of the sensations of the brain; when she had drunk, for a moment she suffered less.

Valentine therefore extended her hand in order to take her glass on the crystal cup where it rested; but while she stretched out from the bed her shivering arm, the apparition made again, and more vividly than ever, two steps toward the bed, and arrived so near the young girl that she heard his breathing and that she thought she felt the pressure of his hand.

This time the illusion or rather the reality exceeded all that Valentine had experienced until then; she began to believe herself quite awake and quite alive; she was conscious that she enjoyed all her reason, and she trembled.

The pressure that Valentine had felt had for its object to stop her arm.

Valentine drew it slowly back to her.

Then this figure, whose gaze could not detach itself, and which besides appeared rather protective than threatening, this figure took the glass, approached the night-light and looked at the draught, as if he would judge its transparency and limpidity.

But this first test was not enough.

This man, or rather this phantom, for he walked so softly that the carpet smothered the sound of his steps, this man took from the glass a spoonful of the draught and swallowed it. Valentine looked at what was passing before her eyes with a profound sentiment of stupor.

She well believed that all this was about to disappear to make place for another tableau; but the man, instead of vanishing like a shadow, drew near her, and stretching the glass to Valentine, in a voice full of emotion:

"Now," said he, "drink!..."

Valentine started.

It was the first time that one of her visions had spoken to her with that living tone.

She opened her mouth to utter a cry.

The man placed a finger on her lips.

"M. the Count of Monte-Cristo!" she murmured.

By the fright that painted itself in the eyes of the young girl, by the trembling of her hands, by the rapid gesture she made to curl up under her sheets, one could recognize the last struggle of doubt against conviction; however, the presence of Monte-Cristo at her home at such an hour, his mysterious, fantastic, inexplicable entry, through a wall, seemed impossibilities to the shaken reason of Valentine.

"Do not call, do not frighten yourself," said the count, "do not even have at the bottom of your heart the flash of a suspicion or the shadow of an uneasiness; the man you see before you (for this time you are right, Valentine, and it is not an illusion), the man you see before you is the tenderest father and the most respectful friend you could dream of."

Valentine found nothing to reply: she had such great fear of this voice which revealed to her the real presence of him who spoke, that she dreaded to associate hers with it; but her frightened gaze meant: If your intentions are pure, why are you here?

With his marvelous sagacity, the count understood all that passed in the heart of the young girl.

"Listen to me," said he, "or rather look at me: see my reddened eyes and my face paler still than usual; it is that for four nights I have not closed an eye for a single instant; for four nights I have watched over you, I have protected you, I have preserved you for our friend Maximilien."

A joyful flood of blood rapidly mounted to the cheeks of the sick girl; for the name that the count had just pronounced took from her the rest of the distrust that he had inspired in her.

"Maximilien!..." repeated Valentine, so sweet did this name seem to pronounce; "Maximilien! he has then told you all?"

"All. He told me that your life was his, and I promised him that you would live."

"You promised him that I would live?"

"Yes."

"Indeed, sir, you have just spoken of vigilance and protection. Are you then a doctor?"

"Yes, the best that Heaven can send you at this moment, believe me."

"You say that you have watched?" asked Valentine anxiously; "where? I have not seen you."

The count extended his hand in the direction of the bookcase.

"I was hidden behind that door," said he; "that door gives into the neighboring house which I have rented."

Valentine, by a movement of modest pride, turned away her eyes, and with sovereign terror:

"Sir," said she, "what you have done is a madness without example, and this protection that you have granted me resembles strongly an insult."

"Valentine," said he, "during this long watch, here are the only things I have seen: what people came to you, what foods were prepared for you, what drinks were served you; then, when these drinks seemed dangerous to me, I entered as I have just entered, I emptied your glass and I substituted for the poison a beneficent draught, which, instead of the death that was prepared for you, made life circulate in your veins."

"The poison! death!" cried Valentine, believing herself again under the empire of some feverish hallucination; "what are you saying there, sir?"

"Hush! my child," said Monte-Cristo, again carrying his finger to his lips, "I said the poison; yes, I said death, and I repeat death, but drink this first. (The count drew from his pocket a vial containing a red liquor of which he poured some drops into the glass.) And when you have drunk, take nothing more during the night."

Valentine advanced her hand; but scarcely had she touched the glass, than she drew it back with fright.

Monte-Cristo took the glass, drank half of it, and presented it to Valentine, who swallowed smiling the rest of the liquor it contained.

"Oh! yes," said she, "I recognize the taste of my nocturnal draughts, of that water which brought a little freshness to my breast, a little calm to my brain. Thanks, sir, thanks."

"There is how you have lived four nights, Valentine," said the count. "But I, how did I live? Oh! the cruel hours you made me pass! Oh! the frightful tortures you made me suffer, when I saw poured into your glass the mortal poison, when I trembled lest you should have time to drink it before I had time to spill it into the fireplace!"

"You say, sir," resumed Valentine at the height of terror, "that you suffered a thousand tortures in seeing poured into my glass the mortal poison? But if you saw the poison poured into my glass, you must have seen the person who poured it?"

"Yes."

Valentine raised herself on her seat, and drawing over her breast paler than snow the embroidered cambric, still moist with the cold sweat of delirium, to which began to mingle the yet more frozen sweat of terror:

"You saw her?" repeated the young girl.

"Yes," said the count a second time.

"What you tell me is horrible, sir, what you would make me believe has something infernal. What! in the house of my father, what! in my chamber, what! on my bed of suffering they continue to assassinate me? Oh! withdraw, sir, you tempt my conscience, you blaspheme the divine goodness, it is impossible, it cannot be."

"Are you then the first that this hand strikes, Valentine? have you not seen fall around you M. de Saint-Méran, Mme de Saint-Méran, Barrois? would you not have seen fall M. Noirtier, if the treatment that he has followed for nearly three years had not protected him in combating the poison by the habit of the poison?"

"Oh! my God!" said Valentine, "it is for that that, for nearly a month, good papa requires that I share all his drinks?"

"And these drinks," cried Monte-Cristo, "have a bitter taste like that of a half-dried orange peel, do they not?"

"Yes, my God, yes!"

"Oh! that explains all to me," said Monte-Cristo; "he too knows that one poisons here, and perhaps whom one poisons.

"He has forewarned you, his well-beloved child, against the mortal substance, and the mortal substance has come to be blunted against this beginning of habit! there is how you still live, which I did not explain to myself, after having been poisoned four days ago with a poison which ordinarily does not pardon."

"But who then is the assassin, the murderer?"

"In my turn I will ask you: Have you then never seen anyone enter your chamber at night?"

"Yes. Often I have thought I saw pass like shadows, these shadows approach, withdraw, disappear; but I took them for visions of my fever, and just now, when you entered yourself, well, I long believed either that I had delirium, or that I dreamed."

"Thus you do not know the person who wants your life?"

"No," said Valentine, "why would someone desire my death?"

"You are going to know her then," said Monte-Cristo lending his ear.

"How so?" asked Valentine, looking around her with terror.

"Because this evening you have neither fever nor delirium, because this evening you are quite awake, because there is midnight striking and it is the hour of assassins."

"My God! my God!" said Valentine wiping with her hand the sweat that beaded on her forehead.

Indeed, midnight was striking slowly and sadly, one would have said that each blow of the bronze hammer struck the heart of the young girl.

"Valentine," continued the count, "call all your forces to your aid, compress your heart in your breast, stop your voice in your throat, feign sleep, and you will see, you will see!"

Valentine seized the count's hand.

"It seems to me that I hear a noise," said she; "withdraw!"

"Adieu, or rather au revoir," answered the count.

Then, with a smile so sad and so paternal that the heart of the young girl was penetrated with gratitude, he regained on tiptoe the door of the bookcase.

But, turning back before closing it upon him:

"Not a gesture," said he, "not a word, let them believe you asleep, otherwise perhaps you would be killed before I had time to run here."

And, upon this frightful injunction, the count disappeared behind the door, which closed silently upon him.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”