The Three Musketeers (The Modern Library) - Alexandre Dumas [153]
“Good God, Athos, a murder!”
“Exactly: a murder, no less!” Athos turned pale as a corpse. “But I seem to have no wine,” he added hastily, and, seizing the last remaining bottle by the neck, he drained it at a single draught as though it were an ordinary wineglass. Then he buried his head between his hands while D’Artagnan gazed at him, mute and horror-stricken. For a moment neither spoke. Presently Athos rose to his feet and forgetting to keep up the fiction of his friend the nobleman:
“That cured me of beautiful, poetical and loving women!” he wound up. “May God grant you the same enlightenment but less painfully! Come let us drink up.”
“So the Comtesse is dead?” D’Artagnan stammered.
“Of course, dead as a doornail. But give me your glass, D’Artagnan. Oh, I see! no more wine! Well, have some ham then, fellow my lad, we really can’t drink any more.”
“What about her brother?” D’Artagnan asked timidly.
“Her brother?”
“Yes, the priest?”
“Oh, I made inquiries about him in order to have him hanged too. But he stole a march on me. He had left his curacy just the day before.”
“Was it ever discovered who the wretch was?”
“Oh, he was probably the first lover and the accomplice of that angel of beauty, a worthy fellow who had pretended to be a priest in order to marry off his mistress and thus provide for her future. I trust he has been hanged, drawn and quartered since.”
“My God, what a ghastly tale!” D’Artagnan exclaimed, dazed by the relation of this gruesome adventure.
“Come, try some of this ham, D’Artagnan; it is delicious,” Athos said, cutting a slice which he placed on the young man’s plate. “What a pity there were not four more such hams in the cellar; then I might have downed fifty bottles more!”
D’Artagnan could endure this conversation no longer; it would have driven him crazy. Allowing his head to sink between his hands and screening his eyes, he pretended to fall asleep.
“These young fellows don’t know how to drink nowadays,” Athos said, looking at him pityingly, “yet this lad is one of the stoutest and best!”
XXVIII
THE RETURN
D’Artagnan was astounded by the recital of this terrible secret. More than one fact about this partial revelation seemed to him obscure. It had been made by a totally drunken man to one who was only half drunk, yet despite the vagueness which the fumes of two or three bottles of Burgundy impart to the brain, D’Artagnan, awaking the next morning, could recall word for word everything Athos had said. It was as though, while Athos spoke, sentence by sentence had been impressed upon D’Artagnan’s memory. The doubts D’Artagnan entertained only increased his eagerness to arrive at a certainty. Accordingly he repaired to his friend’s room, firmly resolved to renew the conversation of the evening before. But he found Athos fully himself again, in other words the shrewdest and most impenetrable of men. After they had exchanged a hearty handshake, the musketeer, anticipating D’Artagnan, broached the matter first.
“I was very drunk yesterday, my dear D’Artagnan,” he confessed. “I could tell it this morning from the feel of my tongue which was still very thick and from the beat of my pulse which was still very fast. I wager I must have talked an awful lot of nonsense.”
And he gazed at D’Artagnan with an earnestness that embarrassed our Gascon.
“No, Athos, I don’t think so. As I remember you said nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Well, you surprise me very much. I thought I had told you a most harrowing tale!”
And again Athos looked at the other as though to read his innermost thoughts.
“Upon my word, I must have been even drunker than you, Athos, for I remember nothing.”
Athos was not taken in.
“You cannot have failed to notice how every man has his particular kind of drunkenness, sad or gay. In my own case, wine engenders melancholy and when I am in my cups I am possessed by a mania to tell all the lugubrious