The Three Musketeers (The Modern Library) - Alexandre Dumas [164]
“Then you no longer love me!” Madame Attorney asked in a slow, tragic voice.
Porthos maintained a majestic silence.
“And that is your only answer! Alas! I understand.”
“Think of how deeply you have offended me, Madame!” Porthos spread his hand over his heart. “That hurt rankles here!” he added thumping his chest.
“I will make amends, my dear Porthos, honestly I will.”
“Besides, what did I ask of you?” Porthos continued with a good-natured shrug of the shoulders. “A loan, nothing else. After all, I am not an unreasonable man. I know you are not rich, Madame Coquenard; I know your husband is forced to bleed his poor clients to squeeze a few paltry crowns from them. Oh, if you were a countess, a marchioness or a duchess, it would be something else again and you would be unpardonable.”
Madame Attorney was plainly piqued.
“Let me tell you, my dear Monsieur Porthos, that my safe—though it be the safe of an attorney’s lady—is probably better stocked than those of all your aristocratic minxes who are so long on affectation and so short on cash!”
“Then you have doubly offended me, Madame,” Porthos answered, releasing her arm from his own, “for if you are wealthy, Madame Coquenard, there is no excuse for your refusal.”
“When I implied I was wealthy,” the lawyer’s wife said cautiously, aware she had gone too far, “you must not take the word literally. I am not exactly wealthy, but I am comfortably well off.”
“Come, Madame, let us say no more about it, I beg you. You have misunderstood me and all sympathy and fellow-feeling we entertained is forever dead.”
“How ungrateful you are, Monsieur Porthos!”
“Those words come ill from you, Madame Coquenard.”
“Begone then to your beautiful duchess, I shall not detain you.”
“She is a comely woman as I recall.”
“Come, Monsieur Porthos, once and for all: tell me, do you still love me?”
“Alas, Madame,” Porthos sighed affecting the deepest melancholy, “we are about to go to the front in a campaign which I feel will cost me my life—”
“Oh, don’t even think of such things!” said the lawyer’s wife bursting into tears.
“Something tells me that in this lottery of life, my number is up,” Porthos continued even more melancholy.
“Be honest and confess that you have found a new love.”
“No, Madame, I am giving you the plain, unvarnished truth. No new-found lady stirs me; on the contrary, deep in my heart something speaks to me of you. But within a fortnight, whether you know it or not, this fatal campaign opens. I shall be frightfully busy acquiring my equipment; then I must visit my family in far away Brittany to obtain the sum necessary for my departure.” Porthos, watching Madame Attorney’s face, saw it as the final battleground upon which the forces of love and avarice struggled. “And,” he concluded sumptuously, “since the duchess you just saw in church has estates near ours, we purpose to travel together. Journeys, as you know, pass more quickly and more merrily in company than alone.”
“Have you no friends in Paris then, Monsieur Porthos?”
“I thought I had, but apparently I was mistaken.”
“Oh, but you have friends here, Monsieur Porthos, I vow you have.” She herself seemed considerably surprised at her vehemence. “Come to our house tomorrow. You will figure as the son of my aunt, therefore my cousin . . . you hail from Noyon in Picardy . . . you have several lawsuits to settle in Paris . . . and you seek an attorney to press them. . . . Can you remember all of that?”
“Perfectly, Madame.”
“Pray come at dinner time.”
“Very well.”
“Be sure, too, dear Monsieur Porthos, to stand upon your guard. Be wary. My husband is seventy-six years old but a shrewd man—”
“Seventy-six, God help us, there’s a noble age, Madame.”
“You mean an old age, Monsieur Porthos! And so you understand,” Madame Attorney cast a significant glance at Porthos, “fortunately my marriage contract makes me the inheritor of my husband’s fortune.”
“His whole fortune?”
“His whole fortune, Monsieur Porthos.”
“My dear Madame Coquenard, I clearly perceive that you are an eminently provident woman.” Porthos squeezed