At first it seemed as if it must have been written in a language she did
not understand; but after the first few sentences a change appeared. Her
breath came and went more quickly than before--a kind of horror grew in
her eyes. At the last she uttered a low, struggling cry. The paper
was crushed in her hand, she cast one glance around the room as if
in bewildering search for refuge, and flung herself upon her mother’s
breast.
“Save me, mother!” she said. “Help me! If he dies now, I shall go mad!”
Afterward, in telling her story at home, good Mrs. Trent almost broke
down.
“Oh, Jenny!” she said. “Just to think of the poor fellow’s having had it
in his pocket then! Of course I did not see it, but one can fancy that
it was something kind and tender,--perhaps some little surprise he had
planned for her. It seemed as if she could not bear it.”
M. Villefort’s accident was the subject of discussion for many days. He
had purchased a wonderful pair of pistols as a gift for a young friend.
How it had happened that one had been loaded none knew; it was just
possible that he had been seized with the whim to load it himself--at
all events, it had gone off in his hands. An inch--nay, half an inch--to
the right, and Madame Villefort, who flew downstairs at the sound of the
report, would only have found a dead man at her feet.
“_Ma foi!_” said M. Renard, repressing his smile; “this is difficult for
Monsieur, but it may leave ‘_la petite Dame_’ at liberty.”
Madame de Castro flew at him with flashing eyes.
“Silence!” she said, “if you would not have me strike you with my cane.”
And she looked as if she were capable of doing it.
Upon his sick-bed M, Villefort was continually haunted by an
apparition--an apparition of a white face and white draperies, such
as he had seen as he fell. Sometimes it was here, sometimes there,
sometimes near him, and sometimes indistinct and far away. Sometimes he
called out to it and tried to extend his arms; again he lay and watched,
it murmuring gentle words, and smiling mournfully.
Mrs. Trent and the doctor were in despair. Madame Villefort obstinately
refused to be forced from her husband’s room. There were times when they
thought she might sink and die there herself. She would not even leave
it when they obliged her to sleep. Having been slight and frail from
ill health before, she became absolutely attenuated. Soon all her beauty
would be gone.
“Do you know,” said Mrs. Trent to her husband, “I have found out that
she always carries that letter in her breast? I see her put her hand to
it in the strangest way a dozen times a day.”
One night, awakening from a long sleep to a clearer mental consciousness
than usual, M. Villefort found his apparition standing over him.
She stood with one hand clinched upon her breast, and she spoke to him.
“Arthur!” she said,--“Arthur, do you know me?”
He answered her, “Yes.”
She slipped down upon her knees, and held up in her hand a letter
crushed and broken.
“Try to keep your mind clear while you listen to me,” she implored.
“Try--try! I must tell you, or I shall die. I am not the bad woman you
think me. I never had read it--I had not seen it. I think he must have
been mad. Once I loved him, but he killed my love himself. I could not
have been bad like that, Jenny!--mother!--Arthur! believe me! believe
me!”
In this supreme moment of her anguish and shame she forgot all else. She
stretched forth her hands, panting.
“Believe me! It is true! Try to understand! Some one is coming! Say one
word before it is too late!”
“I understand,” he whispered, “and I believe.” He made a weak effort to
touch her hand, but failed. He thought that perhaps it was the chill
and numbness of death which stole over him and held him bound. When the
nurse, whose footsteps they had heard, entered, she found him lying with
glazed eyes, and Madame Villefort fallen in a swoon at the bedside.
And yet, from this time forward the outside world began to hear that his
case was not so hopeless after all.
“Villefort will possibly recover,” it was said at first; then,
“Villefort improves, it seems;” and, at last, “Villefort is out of
danger Who would have thought it?”
Nobody, however, could say that Madame had kept pace with her husband.
When Monsieur was sufficiently strong to travel, and was advised to
do so, there were grave doubts as to the propriety of his wife’s
accompanying him.
But she would not listen to those doubts.
“I will not stay in Paris,” she said to her mother. “I want to be free
from it, and Jenny has promised to go with us.”
They were to go into Normandy, and the day before their departure Ralph
Edmondstone came to bid them good-bye.
Of the three he was by far the most haggard figure, and when Bertha came
down to meet him in the empty drawing-room, he became a wretched figure
with a broken, hopeless air, For a few seconds Bertha did not speak,
but stood a pace or two away looking at him. It seemed, in truth, as she
waited there in her dark, nun-like dress, that nearly all her beauty had
left her. There remained only her large sad eyes and pretty hair, and
the touching look of extreme youth. In her hand she held the crushed
letter.
“See!” she said at last, holding this out to him. “I am not so bad--so
bad as that.”
He caught it from her hand and tore it into fragments. He was stabbed
through and through with shame and remorse. After all, his love had been
strong enough here, and his comprehension keen enough to have made him
repent in the dust of the earth, in his first calm hour, the insult he
had put upon her.
“Forgive me!” he cried; “oh, forgive me!”
The few steps between them might have been a myriad of miles.
“I did love you--long ago,” she said; “but you never thought of me. You
did not understand me then--nor afterward. All this winter my love has
been dying a hard death. You tried to keep it alive, but--you did not
understand. You only humiliated and tortured me--And I knew that if I
had loved you more, you would have loved me less. See!” holding up her
thin hand, “I have been worn out in the struggle between my unhappiness
and remorse and you.”
“You do not know what love is!” he burst forth, stung into swift
resentment.
A quick sob broke from her.
“Yes I do.” she answered. “I--I have seen it”
“You mean M. Villefort!” he cried in desperate jealous misery. “You
think that he----”
She pointed to the scattered fragments of the letter.
“He had that in his pocket when he fell,” she said, “He thought that I
had read it. If I had been your wife, and you had thought so, would you
have thought that I was worth trying to save--as he tried to save me?”
“What!” he exclaimed, shamefacedly. “Has he seen it?”
“Yes,” she answered, with another sob, which might have been an echo of
the first. “And that is the worst of all.”
There was a pause, during which he looked down at the floor, and even
trembled a little.
“I have done you more wrong than I thought,” he said.
“Yes,” she replied; “a thousand-fold more.”
It seemed as if there might have been more to say, but it was not said.
In a little while he roused himself with an effort.
“I am not a villain!” he said. “I can do one thing. I can go to
Villefort--if you care.”
She did not speak. So he moved slowly away until he reached the door.
With his hand upon the handle he turned and looked back at her.
“Oh, it is good-bye--good-bye!” he almost groaned.
“Yes.”
He could not help it--few men could have done so. His expression was
almost fierce as he spoke his next words.
“And you will love him--yes, you will love _him_.”
“No,” she answered, with bitter pain. “I am not worthy.”
*****
It was a year or more before the Villeforts were seen in Paris again,
and Jenny enjoyed her wanderings with them wondrously. In fact, she
was the leading member of the party. She took them where she chose,--to
queer places, to ugly places, to impossible places, but never from first
to last to any place where there were not, or at least had not been,
Americans as absurdly erratic as themselves.
The winter before their return they were at Genoa, among other places;
and it was at Genoa that one morning, on opening a drawer, Bertha came
upon an oblong box, the sight of which made her start backward and put
her hand to her beating side. M. Villefort approached her hurriedly. An
instant later, however, he started also and shut the drawer.
“Come away,” he said, taking her hand gently. “Do not remain here.”
But he was pale, too, and his hand was unsteady. He led her to the
window and made her sit down.
“Pardon me,” he said. “I should not have left them there.”
“You did not send them to your friend?” she faltered.
“No.”
He stood for a moment or so, and looked out of the window at the blue
sea which melted into the blue sky, at the blue sky which bent itself
into the blue sea, at the white sails flecking the deep azure, at the
waves hurrying in to break upon the sand.
“That”--he said at length, tremulously, and with pale lips--“that was
false.”
“Was false!” she echoed.
“Yes,” hoarsely, “it was false. There was no such friend. It was a
lie--they were meant only for myself.”
She uttered a low cry of anguish and dread.
“Ah, _mon Dieu!_” he said. “You could not know. I understood all, and
had been silent. I was nothing--a jest--‘_le Monsieur de la petite
Dame_,’ as they said,--only that. I swore that I would save you. When I
bade you adieu that night, I thought it was my last farewell. There was
no accident. Yes--there was one. I did not die, as I had intended. My
hand was not steady enough. And since then----”