Page:The Count of Monte-Cristo (1887 Volume 5).djvu/68

48 ment, she was better; and moreover, Monte-Cristo had told him when, half distracted, he had rushed to his house, that if she was not dead in two hours she was saved. Now four days had elapsed, and Valentine still lived.

The nervous excitement of which we speak pursued Valentine even in her sleep, or rather in that state of somnolence which succeeded her waking hours; it was, then, in the silence of night, in the dim light shed from the alabaster lamp on the chimney-piece, that she saw those shadows pass and repass which people the sick-room, and shake fever from their rustling wings. First she fancied she saw her stepmother threatening her, then Morrel stretched his arms toward her; sometimes mere strangers, like the Count of Monte-Cristo, appeared to visit her; even the very furniture, in these moments of delirium, seemed to move; and this state lasted till about three o'clock in the morning, when a deep, heavy slumber overcame the young girl, from which she did not awake till morning.

On the evening of the day on which Valentine had learned the flight of Eugénie and the arrest of Benedetto, and when, after mingling for an instant in the sensations of her own existence, these events began to stand out clearly in her thoughts; after the withdrawal of Villefort, d'Avrigny, and Noirtier, while the clock of Saint-Philippe-du-Roule struck eleven, and when the nurse, having placed the beverage prepared by the doctor within reach of the patient and locked the door, was listening with terror to the comments of the servants in the kitchen, and storing her memory with all the horrible stories which had for some months past amused the occupants of the antechambers in the house of the procureur du roi, an unexpected scene was passing in the room which had been so carefully locked.

Ten minutes had elapsed since the nurse had left; Valentine, who for the last hour had been suffering from the fever which returned nightly, incapable of controlling her ideas, was forced to yield to the monotonous action of the brain which exhausted itself in producing and reproducing a succession and recurrence of the same fancies and images. The night lamp threw out countless rays, each resolving itself into some strange form, when suddenly, by its flickering light, Valentine thought she saw the door of her library, which was in the recess by the chimney-piece, open slowly, though she in vain listened for the sound of the hinges on which it turned. At any other time Valentine would have seized the silken bell-pull and summoned assistance, but nothing astonished her in her present situation. She was conscious that all the visions she beheld were but the children of her imagination, and the conviction was strengthened by the fact that in the morn-