Page:The Count of Monte-Cristo (1887 Volume 5).djvu/194

174 room which now appeared like a sepulcher; to speak seemed like violating the silence of the tomb. His tongue clave to the roof of his mouth.

"Edward!" he stammered—"Edward!"

The child did not answer. Where, then, could he be, if he had entered his mother's room and not since returned? He stepped forward. The corpse of Madame de Villefort was stretched across the doorway leading to the room in which Edward must be; those glaring eyes seemed to watch over the threshold, and the lips expressed a terrible and mysterious irony. Through the open door a portion of the boudoir was visible, containing an upright piano, and a blue satin couch. Villefort stepped forward two or three paces, and beheld his child lying—no doubt asleep on the sofa. The unhappy man uttered an exclamation of joy; a ray of light seemed to penetrate the abyss of despair and darkness. He had only to step over the corpse, enter the boudoir, take the child in his arms, and flee far, far away.

Villefort no longer presented a type of civilized man; he more resembled a tiger wounded to death, whose teeth were broken in his last agony. He no longer feared realities, but phantoms. He leaped over the corpse as though it had been a furnace. He took the child in his arms, pressed him, shook him, called him.

The child replied not.

He pressed his burning lips to the cheeks, but they were icy cold and pale; he felt his stiffened limbs; he pressed his hand upon the heart, but it no longer beat; the child was dead.

A folded paper fell from Edward's breast. Villefort, thunderstruck, fell upon his knees; the child dropped from his arms, and rolled on the floor by the side of its mother. He picked up the paper, and, recognizing his wife's writing, ran his eyes rapidly over its contents; they were as follows:

Villefort could not believe his eyes, he could not believe his reason; he dragged himself toward the child's corpse, and examined it as a lioness contemplates its dead cub. Then a piercing cry escaped from his breast, and he cried:

"Still the hand of God!"

The two victims alarmed him; he could not bear the solitude only shared by two corpses. Until then he had been sustained by rage, by that strengthener of strong hearts; by despair, that supreme agony which led the Titans to scale the heavens, and Ajax to defy the gods. He now