“Jenny! Jenny!” she cried, “how I envy--how I envy you!”
The recollection of Jenny shining in her pretty gala dress, and delighting in her birthday presents, and everybody else’s pride and affection, filled her with a morbid misery and terror. She covered her face with her hands as she thought of it.
“Once,” she panted, “as I looked at her tonight, for a moment I almost hated her. Am I so bad as that?--am I?”
Scarcely two seconds afterward she had sprung to her feet and was standing by the side of her couch, her heart beating with a rapid throb of fright, her limbs trembling. A strange sound had fallen suddenly upon the perfect silence of the night--a sound loud, hard, and sharp--the report of a pistol! What dread seized her she knew not. She was across the room and had wrenched the door open in an instant, then with flying feet down the corridor and the staircase. But half-way down the stairs she began to cry out aloud, “Arthur! Arthur!” not conscious of her own voice--“Arthur, what is it?” The door of the drawing-room flew open before the fierce stroke of her palm.
M. Villefort stood where she had left him; but while his left hand supported his weight against the table, his right was thrust into his breast. One of the pistols lay at his feet.
She thought it was Death’s self that confronted her in his face, but he spoke to her, trying faintly to smile.
“Do not come in,” he said, “I have met with--an accident. It is nothing. Do not come in. A servant----”
His last recollection was of her white face and white draperies as he fell, and somehow, dizzy, sick, and faint as he was, he seemed to hear her calling out, in a voice strangely like Jenny’s, “Arthur! Arthur!”
In less than half an hour the whole house was astir. Upstairs physicians were with the wounded man, downstairs Mrs. Trent talked and wept over her daughter, after the manner of all good women. She was fairly terrified by Bertha’s strange shudderings, quick, strained breath, and dilated eyes. She felt as if she could not reach her--as if she hardly made herself heard.
“You must calm yourself, Bertha,” she would say. “Try to calm yourself. We must hope for the best. Oh, how could it have happened!”
It was in the midst of this that a servant entered with a letter, which he handed to his mistress. The envelope bore upon it nothing but her own name.