LXXX. L'accusation.

LXXX

The Accusation.

M. d'Avrigny soon brought the magistrate back to himself; he seemed a second corpse in that funeral chamber.

“Oh! death is in my house!” cried Villefort.

“Say rather crime,” replied the doctor.

“M. d'Avrigny!” cried Villefort, “I cannot express to you all that is passing within me at this moment; it is terror, it is grief, it is madness.”

“Yes,” said M. d'Avrigny, with imposing calm, “but I think it is time we acted; I think it is time we opposed a barrier to this torrent of mortality. As for me, I do not feel capable of bearing such secrets any longer, without hope of soon drawing from them vengeance for society and for the victims.”

Villefort cast a gloomy look around him.

“In my house!” he murmured, “in my house!”

“Come, magistrate,” said d'Avrigny, “be a man; interpreter of the law, honor yourself by a complete immolation.”

“You make me shudder, doctor—an immolation!”

“I have said the word.”

“You suspect someone, then?”

“I suspect no one; death knocks at your door, enters, goes, not blind, but intelligent as it is, from chamber to chamber. Well, I follow its trail, I recognize its passage, I adopt the wisdom of the ancients: I grope; for my friendship for your family, for my respect for you, are two bandages laid over my eyes; well….”

“Oh! speak, speak, doctor, I shall have courage.”

“Well, sir, you have in your house, in the bosom of your home, perhaps in your family, one of those frightful phenomena such as each century produces some one. Locusta and Agrippina, living at the same time, are an exception that proves the fury of Providence in destroying the Roman empire, stained by so many crimes. Brunhilda and Fredegunda are the results of the painful labor of a civilization in its genesis, in which man was learning to dominate the spirit, were it by the emissary of darkness. Well, all those women had been, or still were, young and beautiful. One had seen bloom upon their brow, or still blooming upon their brow, that same flower of innocence which is also found upon the brow of the guilty one who is in your house.”

Villefort uttered a cry, clasped his hands, and looked at the doctor with a supplicating gesture.

But the latter continued pitilessly:

“Seek to whom the crime profits, says an axiom of jurisprudence….”

“Doctor!” cried Villefort, “alas! doctor, how many times has the justice of men not been deceived by those fatal words! I know not, but it seems to me that this crime….”

“Ah! you confess, then, at last that the crime exists?”

“Yes, I recognize it. What would you have? It must be so. But let me continue. It seems to me, I say, that this crime falls upon me alone, and not upon the victims. I suspect some disaster for myself under all these strange disasters.”

“O man!” murmured d'Avrigny, “the most selfish of all animals, the most personal of all creatures, who always believes that the earth turns, that the sun shines, that death mows for him alone; an ant cursing God from the top of a blade of grass! And those who have lost life, have they lost nothing, then? M. de Saint-Méran, Mme de Saint-Méran, M. Noirtier….”

“How? M. Noirtier!”

“Why, yes! Do you believe, for instance, that it was that unhappy servant they were aiming at? No, no: like Polonius in Shakespeare, he died for another. It was Noirtier who was to drink the lemonade, it is Noirtier who drank it according to the logical order of things: the other drank it only by accident; and, though it is Barrois who is dead, it is Noirtier who was to die.”

“But then how is it that my father did not succumb?”

“I told you already, one evening, in the garden, after the death of Mme de Saint-Méran; because his body is made to the use of that very poison; because the dose insignificant for him was mortal for any other; because, in short, no one knows, not even the assassin, that for a year I have been treating the paralysis of M. Noirtier with brucine, while the assassin is not ignorant of it, and has assured himself by experience, that brucine is a violent poison.”

“My God! my God!” murmured Villefort, writhing his arms.

“Follow the march of the criminal; he kills M. de Saint-Méran.”

“Oh! doctor!”

“I would swear it; what I was told of the symptoms agrees too well with what I saw with my own eyes.”

Villefort ceased to struggle, and uttered a groan.

“He kills M. de Saint-Méran,” repeated the doctor, “he kills Mme de Saint-Méran: a double inheritance to gather.”

Villefort wiped the sweat that flowed upon his brow.

“Listen well.”

“Alas!” stammered Villefort, “I am losing not a word, not a single one.”

“M. Noirtier,” resumed M. d'Avrigny in his pitiless voice, “M. Noirtier had lately made a will against you, against your family, in favor of the poor at last; M. Noirtier is spared, nothing is expected from him. But he had no sooner destroyed his first will, he had no sooner made the second, than, for fear he should make, no doubt, a third, he is struck: the will is of the day before yesterday, I believe; you see, no time is lost.”

“Oh! mercy! M. d'Avrigny.”

“No mercy, sir; the physician has a sacred mission upon earth, it is to fulfill it that he has mounted to the sources of life and descended into the mysterious shadows of death. When the crime has been committed, and God, frightened no doubt, turns his gaze from the criminal, it is for the physician to say: There he is!”

“Mercy for my daughter, sir!” murmured Villefort.

“You see well that it is you who named her, you, her father!”

“Mercy for Valentine! Listen, it is impossible. I would as soon accuse myself! Valentine, a heart of diamond, a lily of innocence!”

“No mercy, Mr. King's Attorney, the crime is flagrant: Mlle de Villefort herself packed the medicines that were sent to M. de Saint-Méran, and M. de Saint-Méran is dead.

“Mlle de Villefort prepared the herbal teas of Mme de Saint-Méran, and Mme de Saint-Méran is dead.

“Mlle de Villefort took from the hands of Barrois, who had been sent out, the carafe of lemonade that the old man usually empties in the morning, and the old man escaped only by miracle.

“Mlle de Villefort is the guilty one! she is the poisoner! Mr. King's Attorney, I denounce Mlle de Villefort to you, do your duty.”

“Doctor, I resist no longer, I defend myself no more, I believe you, but, for pity's sake, spare my life, my honor!”

“M. de Villefort,” resumed the doctor with growing force, “there are circumstances in which I overstep all the limits of foolish human circumspection. If your daughter had committed only a first crime, and I saw her meditating a second, I would say to you: Warn her, punish her, let her pass the rest of her life in some cloister, in some convent, weeping, praying. If she had committed a second crime, I would say to you: ‘Here, M. de Villefort, here is a poison that has no known antidote, swift as thought, rapid as lightning, mortal as thunder, give her this poison, recommending her soul to God, and thus save your honor and your days, for it is you she is aiming at.’ And I see her approaching your bedside with her hypocritical smiles and her gentle exhortations! Woe to you, M. de Villefort, if you do not hasten to strike the first! That is what I would say to you if she had killed but two persons; but she has seen three agonies, she has contemplated three dying persons, has knelt near three corpses; to the executioner with the poisoner! to the executioner! You speak of your honor, do as I tell you, and it is immortality that awaits you!”

Villefort fell upon his knees.

“Listen,” said he, “I have not that strength which you have, or rather which you would not have if, instead of my daughter Valentine, it were a question of your daughter Madeleine.”

The doctor grew pale.

“Doctor, every man, son of woman, is born to suffer and die; doctor, I shall suffer, and I shall await death.”

“Take care,” said M. d'Avrigny, “it will be slow… that death; you will see it approach after having struck your father, your wife, your son perhaps.”

Villefort, suffocating, clutched the doctor's arm.

“Listen to me!” cried he, “pity me, help me…. No, my daughter is not guilty…. Drag us before a tribunal, I shall say again: ‘No, my daughter is not guilty’—there is no crime in my house…. I will not, do you hear, that there be a crime in my house; for when crime enters anywhere, it is like death, it does not enter alone. Listen, what matters it to you that I die assassinated?… are you my friend? are you a man? have you a heart?… No, you are a physician!… Well, I say to you: ‘No, my daughter shall not be dragged by me into the hands of the executioner!’… Ah! there is an idea that devours me, that drives me like a madman to dig my breast with my nails!… And if you were mistaken, doctor! if it were another than my daughter! If, one day, I came, pale as a specter, to say to you: Assassin! you have killed my daughter…. See, if that happened, I am a Christian, M. d'Avrigny, and yet I would kill myself!”

“Very well,” said the doctor after a moment of silence, “I shall wait.”

Villefort looked at him as if he still doubted his words.

“Only,” continued M. d'Avrigny in a slow and solemn voice, “if any person of your house falls ill, if you yourself feel struck, do not call me, for I shall come no more. I am willing to share with you this terrible secret, but I will not have shame and remorse go to my house fructifying and growing in my conscience, as crime and misfortune are going to grow and fructify in your house.”

“So you abandon me, doctor?”

“Yes, for I cannot follow you further, and I stop only at the foot of the scaffold. Some other revelation will come which will bring the end of this terrible tragedy. Farewell.”

“Doctor, I beseech you!”

“All the horrors that soil my thought make your house hateful and fatal. Farewell, sir.”

“One word, one word more only, doctor! You withdraw leaving me all the horror of the situation, horror which you have increased by what you have revealed to me. But of the instant, sudden death of that poor old servant, what will they say?”

“That is just,” said M. d'Avrigny, “show me out.”

The doctor went out first, M. de Villefort followed him; the servants, uneasy, were in the corridors and on the stairs by which the physician was to pass.

“Sir,” said d'Avrigny to Villefort, speaking in a loud voice so that all might hear him, “poor Barrois had been too sedentary for some years: he, who with his master loved so much to ride or drive to the four corners of Europe, killed himself at that monotonous service around an armchair. The blood became heavy. He was corpulent, he had a thick short neck, he was struck with a fulminating apoplexy, and they came to warn me too late.

“By the way,” he added in a low voice, “take good care to throw that cup of violets into the ashes.”

And the doctor, without touching Villefort's hand, without returning for a single instant upon what he had said, went out escorted by the tears and lamentations of all the people of the house.

That very evening, all the servants of Villefort, who had assembled in the kitchen and talked long among themselves, came to ask Mme de Villefort permission to retire. No entreaty, no offer of increased wages could retain them; to all words they answered:

“We want to go because death is in the house.”

They departed therefore, despite the prayers made to them, testifying that their regrets were keen at leaving such good masters, and above all Mlle Valentine, so good, so charitable and so gentle.

Villefort, at these words, looked at Valentine.

She was weeping.

Strange thing! through the emotion that these tears caused him, he also looked at Mme de Villefort, and it seemed to him that a fleeting and gloomy smile had passed over her thin lips, like those meteors one sees glide, sinister, between two clouds, in the depths of a stormy sky.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”