"Yes," replied Noirtier.
Morrel pulled the bell, but though he nearly broke the cord no one answered.
He turned towards Noirtier; the pallor and anguish expressed on his countenance momentarily increased.
"Oh," exclaimed Morrel, "why do they not come?
Is any one ill in the house?"
The eyes of Noirtier seemed as though they would start from their sockets.
"What is the matter? You alarm me.
Valentine? Valentine?"
"Yes, yes," signed Noirtier.
Maximilian tried to speak, but he could articulate nothing; he staggered, and supported himself against the wainscot.
Then he pointed to the door.
"Yes, yes, yes!" continued the old man.
Maximilian rushed up the little staircase, while Noirtier's eyes seemed to say,--"Quicker, quicker!"
In a minute the young man darted through several rooms, till at length he reached Valentine's.
There was no occasion to push the door, it was wide open.
A sob was the only sound he heard.
He saw as though in a mist, a black figure kneeling and buried in a confused mass of white drapery.
A terrible fear transfixed him.
It was then he heard a voice exclaim
"Valentine is dead!" and another voice which, like an echo repeated,--"Dead,--dead!"
Chapter 103.
Maximilian.
Villefort rose, half ashamed of being surprised in such a paroxysm of grief.
The terrible office he had held for twenty-five years had succeeded in making him more or less than man.
His glance, at first wandering, fixed itself upon Morrel.
"Who are you, sir," he asked, "that forget that this is not the manner to enter a house stricken with death?
Go, sir, go!"
But Morrel remained motionless; he could not detach his eyes from that disordered bed, and the pale corpse of the young girl who was lying on it.
"Go!--do you hear?" said Villefort, while d'Avrigny advanced to lead Morrel out.
Maximilian stared for a moment at the corpse, gazed all around the room, then upon the two men; he opened his mouth to speak, but finding it impossible to give utterance to the innumerable ideas that occupied his brain, he went out, thrusting his hands through his hair in such a manner that Villefort and d'Avrigny, for a moment diverted from the engrossing topic, exchanged glances, which seemed to say,--"He is mad!"
But in less than five minutes the staircase groaned beneath an extraordinary weight. Morrel was seen carrying, with superhuman strength, the arm-chair containing Noirtier up-stairs.
When he reached the landing he placed the arm-chair on the floor and rapidly rolled it into Valentine's room.
This could only have been accomplished by means of unnatural strength supplied by powerful excitement.
But the most fearful spectacle was Noirtier being pushed towards the bed, his face expressing all his meaning, and his eyes supplying the want of every other faculty.
That pale face and flaming glance appeared to Villefort like a frightful apparition.
Each time he had been brought into contact with his father, something terrible had happened.
"See what they have done!" cried Morrel, with one hand leaning on the back of the chair, and the other extended towards Valentine. "See, my father, see!"
Villefort drew back and looked with astonishment on the young man, who, almost a stranger to him, called Noirtier his father.
At this moment the whole soul of the old man seemed centred in his eyes which became bloodshot; the veins of the throat swelled; his cheeks and temples became purple, as though he was struck with epilepsy; nothing was wanting to complete this but the utterance of a cry.
And the cry issued from his pores, if we may thus speak--a cry frightful in its silence.
D'Avrigny rushed towards the old man and made him inhale a powerful restorative.
"Sir," cried Morrel, seizing the moist hand of the paralytic, "they ask me who I am, and what right I have to be here.
Oh, you know it, tell them, tell them!"
And the young man's voice was choked by sobs.
As for the old man, his chest heaved with his panting respiration.
One could have thought that he was undergoing the agonies preceding death.
At length, happier than the young man, who sobbed without weeping, tears glistened in the eyes of Noirtier.
"Tell them," said Morrel in a hoarse voice, "tell them that I am her betrothed. Tell them she was my beloved, my noble girl, my only blessing in the world.
Tell them--oh, tell them, that corpse belongs to me!"
The young man overwhelmed by the weight of his anguish, fell heavily on his knees before the bed, which his fingers grasped with convulsive energy.