The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (181 page)

It was about ten minutes since the night nurse had left. Valentine, a prey for the past hour to the fever which resumed every night, let her head continue beyond her control the active, monotonous and implacable operation of the brain, which exhausts itself by constantly reproducing the same thoughts or giving birth to the same images.

Thousands upon thousands of rays were leaping from the wick of the night-light, all imbued with strange meanings; but suddenly Valentine thought that in its quivering light she could see her bookcase, which stood beside the chimney in a recess in the wall, open slowly, without the hinges on which it appeared to be turning making the slightest sound.

At any other time Valentine would have grasped her silk bell-pull and tugged it, calling for help; but in her present situation nothing surprised her any longer. She was aware that all these visions around her were the product of her delirium, and she was convinced of it by the fact that in the morning no trace had ever remained of all those spirits of the night, which vanished with the coming of day.

A human figure appeared behind the door.

Thanks to her fever, Valentine was only too familiar with this kind of apparition to feel afraid. She merely opened her eyes wide, hoping to recognize Morrel.

The shape continued to approach her bed, then stopped and seemed to be listening attentively. At that moment a ray of light from the night-light played across the nocturnal visitor’s face. ‘It’s not him,’ she muttered; and she waited, convinced that she was dreaming and that the man, as happens in dreams, would disappear or change into someone else.

However, she felt her pulse and, feeling it beating rapidly, she remembered that the best way of making such unwanted visions disappear was to drink something. The coolness of the drink, which had been prepared specifically with the aim of calming such agitation, after Valentine had complained of it to the doctor, brought down her temperature and so revived the normal operation of the brain. For a short time, after drinking, she felt better.

For this reason, Valentine reached out to take the glass on the crystal saucer on which it was standing. But while she was extending her shaking arm outside the bed, the apparition took two steps towards the bed, with more determination than ever, and came so close to the young woman that she could hear his breath and thought she could feel the touch of his hand.

This time, the illusion – or, rather, the reality – went beyond anything that Valentine had experienced so far. She began to think she must really be awake and alive. She realized that she was in full possession of her faculties and began to tremble.

The purpose of the touch that Valentine had felt was to stop her hand. Valentine slowly brought it back towards her.

At this, the figure took the glass, went over to the night-light and looked at the potion, as if trying to assess its clarity and transparency. Valentine was unable to take her eyes off him, though he seemed protective rather than threatening.

The preliminary evidence given by the light was not enough. The man – or, rather, the ghost, for he walked so softly that the carpet muffled the sound of his steps – took a spoonful of the drink out of the glass and swallowed it. Valentine watched what was happening before her eyes with a deep feeling of astonishment. She was sure that all this would vanish and give place to another scene; but the man, instead of fading away like a ghost, came over to her, and held the glass out to her, saying in a voice that was full of emotion: ‘Now, drink!’

Valentine shuddered. This was the first time that one of her visions had spoken to her in this vibrant tone. She opened her mouth to cry out, but the man put a finger to his lips.

‘Monsieur le Comte de Monte Cristo!’ she muttered.

In the terror evident in the young woman’s eyes, in the trembling of her hands, in the rapid movement that she made to hide herself under the sheets, one might have seen the last struggle of doubt against certainty. However, the presence of the Count of Monte Cristo in her room at such an hour and his mysterious, fantastic, inexplicable entrance through one of the walls, seemed impossible to Valentine’s understanding.

‘Don’t call out, don’t be afraid,’ said the count. ‘Don’t even have the glimmer of a suspicion or the shadow of a doubt in your heart. The man whom you see before you, Valentine – and this time you are right, it is not an illusion – the man whom you see is the tenderest father and most respectful friend you could ever dream of…’

Valentine could not think of anything in reply. She was so frightened by the voice, which assured her of the real presence of the speaker, that she was afraid of adding her own to it. But her terrified look meant: if your intentions are pure, why are you here?

With his extraordinary wisdom, the count understood everything that was going on in the young woman’s heart. ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘Or, rather, look at me. See my red eyes and my face, which is even paler than usual. This is because for the past four nights I have not slept for a single moment. For the past four nights I have been watching over you, protecting you, guarding you for our friend, Maximilien.’

A rush of blood suffused the patient’s happy cheeks, for the name that the count had just uttered removed the last trace of suspicion that he had inspired in her.

‘Maximilien!’ Valentine repeated, so sweet did the name seem to her. ‘Maximilien! Has he confessed everything to you, then?’

‘Everything. He told me that your life was his and I promised him that you would live.’

‘You promised him that I should live?’

‘Yes.’

‘Monsieur, you have spoken of watching and protection. Are you a doctor, then?’

‘Yes, the best that heaven could send you at this moment, believe me.’

‘You say that you kept watch?’ Valentine said anxiously. ‘Where? I didn’t see you.’

The count waved towards the bookcase. ‘I was hidden behind that door, which leads into the house next door which I have rented.’

Valentine, overcome with pride and modest shame, turned away her eyes and said, in high alarm: ‘Monsieur, what you did was unexampled folly, and the protection you gave me is very like an insult.’

‘Valentine,’ he answered, ‘in all the long time that I watched, this is all that I saw: the people who came into your room, what food was prepared for you, what drinks were served to you. Then, if the drinks seemed dangerous to me, I entered as I have just done, emptied your glass and substituted a health-giving beverage for the poison; and that, instead of the death that had been prepared for you, made life run in your veins.’

‘Poison! Death!’ Valentine cried, once more imagining herself to be possessed by some feverish hallucination. ‘What are you saying?’

‘Hush, child!’ said Monte Cristo, putting his finger to his lips. ‘I said poison, yes… I said death, and I repeat it; but first drink this.’ He took out of his pocket a phial containing some red liquid and poured a few drops into the glass. ‘And when you have drunk it, don’t take anything else this night.’

Valentine reached out her hand, but hardly had she touched the glass than she pulled back in terror.

Monte Cristo took the glass, drank half of the liquid in it, and offered it to Valentine, who smiled before drinking the remainder. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘I recognize the taste of my night-time drinks, that water which helped to cool my chest and calm my mind. Thank you, Monsieur, thank you.’

‘This is how you managed to live for four nights, Valentine,’ the count said. ‘But how did I manage? Oh, what painful hours I have spent! Oh, what dreadful torture you put me through, when I saw the deadly poison poured into your glass and was terrified lest you should have time to drink it before I could empty it into the fireplace.’

‘Monsieur,’ said Valentine, at the height of terror, ‘so you were tormented by the sight of the deadly poison being poured into my glass? But if you saw the poison being poured, then you must have seen the person who poured it?’

‘Yes.’

Valentine sat upright in bed and, drawing the embroidered lawn nightdress up over her breast (which was whiter than snow), still damp from the cold sweat of her delirium, now starting to mingle with the still icier sweat of terror, she said: ‘You saw this person?’

‘Yes,’ the count repeated.

‘What you are telling me, Monsieur, is frightful: you want me to believe in something hellish. What! In my father’s house, in my room, on my bed of pain, someone is still trying to kill me? No, Monsieur, begone! You tempt my conscience and blaspheme against the goodness of God! It is impossible! It cannot be!’

‘But are you the first person this hand has struck, Valentine? Did you not see Monsieur de Saint-Méran, Madame de Saint-Méran and Barrois all succumb? Would you not have seen Monsieur Noirtier follow them, if the treatment which he has been receiving over the past three years had not protected him, overcoming poison by the habit of poison?’

‘Good heavens!’ said Valentine. ‘That is why over the past month my dear grandfather has insisted on my sharing all his drinks?’

‘Those drinks,’ Monte Cristo asked urgently, ‘do they have a taste like that of partly dried orange peel?’

‘Bless us! Yes, they do!’

‘That explains everything,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘He, too, knows that there is a poisoner here – and perhaps who that poisoner is. He protected you, his dearly beloved grandchild, against the deadly substance, and this substance lost its power when it met this initial defence. That is why you are still alive, which I could not understand, after you were subjected four days ago to a poison which is usually unrelenting.’

‘But who is the poisoner, the murderer?’

‘I might ask you in your turn: have you never seen anyone come into your room at night?’

‘Yes, I have often thought I saw shadows pass, come close, go away, disappear. I thought they were hallucinations produced by my fever; just now when you came in, well… for a long time I thought I was delirious or dreaming.’

‘So you do not know who is trying to take your life?’

‘No,’ said Valentine. ‘Why should someone wish me dead?’

‘You will find out,’ Monte Cristo said, listening carefully.

‘How?’ Valentine asked, looking around in terror.

‘Because this evening your fever and delirium are gone, you are entirely awake and midnight is striking. This is the murderer’s hour.’

‘My God!’ Valentine said, wiping the sweat from her brow.

Midnight was indeed striking slowly and mournfully. It was as though each blow of the bronze hammer struck the young woman’s heart.

‘Valentine,’ the count went on, ‘call up all your strength, control your heart in your breast and your voice in your throat; pretend to be asleep, and you will see! You will see!’

Valentine grasped his hand. ‘I think I can hear a noise,’ she said. ‘Hide yourself!’

‘Farewell – or, rather, au revoir!’ the count replied. Then, with such a sad, fatherly smile that the young woman’s heart was filled with gratitude, he slipped back on tiptoe to the door in the bookcase. But, as he turned before closing it behind him, he said: ‘Not a movement, not a word. You must seem to be asleep, or you will be killed before I can reach you.’

And with this terrible warning, the count disappeared through the door, which closed silently behind him.

Valentine was left alone. Two other clocks, lagging behind that on Saint-Philippe-du-Roule, again struck midnight at different intervals. Then, apart from the noise of a few distant coaches, all was quiet once again.

Now Valentine’s attention was entirely concentrated on the clock in her room, as its pendulum marked off the seconds.

She began to count these seconds and noticed that they were only half as rapid as the beating of her heart. Yet she still had doubts. Inoffensive as she was herself, Valentine could not imagine that anyone wanted her dead. Why? To what end? What harm had she done that could have earned her an enemy?

There was no fear of her falling asleep.

One idea, one terrible idea, kept her mind on edge: there was in the world someone who had tried to kill her and would try again.

Suppose this time the person, tired of seeing the ineffectiveness of the poison, decided as Monte Cristo said to have recourse to cold steel! Suppose the count did not have enough time to reach her! Suppose her last moment had come and she would never again see Morrel!

At this thought, which made the blood drain from her face and covered her in a cold sweat, Valentine was ready to grasp the bell-pull and call for help. But it seemed that, through the door in the bookcase, she could see the count’s eyes shining; and the eyes weighed on her memory: when she thought about them, she was overwhelmed with such shame that she wondered whether gratitude could ever manage to efface this unfortunate aspect of the count’s indiscreet friendship.

Twenty minutes, twenty eternities passed in this way, then ten minutes more. Finally the clock, one second early, struck against the bell. At that moment, the faintest scratch on the wood of the bookcase told Valentine that the count was watching and advised her to do the same.

Now, indeed, from the opposite side, that is towards Edouard’s room, Valentine thought she heard the floor creak. She listened carefully, holding her breath. The door-handle squeaked and the door opened on its hinges.