The Three Musketeers (The Modern Library) - Alexandre Dumas [26]
“At one o’clock, then, behind the Luxembourg.”
“Very well, then, at one o’clock.”
D’Artagnan turned the corner of the street, looking carefully ahead and up and down the cross street. Slowly though the stranger had walked, he must still have outdistanced D’Artagnan while the Gascon was being detained by Athos and Porthos or he must have entered some house nearby. D’Artagnan inquired of passers-by if they had seen a person answering his enemy’s description. He walked down as far as the ferry, came up again along the Rue de Seine and across the Croix-Rouse, but he found nothing, absolutely nothing. Yet this wild-goose chase helped him in a sense, for, fast as the beads of sweat ran down his forehead, his heart began to cool.
He retraced all the events that had occurred; they were numerous and ill-omened. It was scarcely eleven o’clock in the morning and yet in two short hours he had made three capital blunders. In the first place, he had disgraced himself in the eyes of Monsieur de Tréville, who could not but consider his withdrawal somewhat cavalier; in the second and third, he had invited dangerous duels with two men, each capable of slaying three D’Artagnans—with two musketeers, in short, with two of those heroes he admired so passionately that they throned it in his mind and heart over all others.
A sad plight! Certain of being killed by Athos, he was naturally unperturbed about Porthos. But as hope is the last thing a man will relinquish, D’Artagnan hoped against hope that he might survive both these duels, even though grievously wounded. Should this happen, he would profit by the following homily delivered by himself to himself.
“What a lunatic I was and what a clod I am! Poor brave Athos was wounded in the shoulder and I was fated to butt against it! Why he did not kill me then and there, God knows! He had ample cause to, I must have caused him fearful pain. As for Porthos—dear old Porthos!—my run-in with him was the drollest thing that ever happened to me!”
At the thought, the youth could not help roaring with laughter, but he looked very carefully about him to make sure lest his solitary laughter, unaccountable to any passer-by, be considered offensive.
“Funny it was, surely, but that doesn’t make me any less of a driveling idiot. People simply don’t go charging into others without warning and they don’t dive under their cloaks to search for what isn’t there. Porthos would certainly have excused me if I hadn’t alluded to his cursed baldric. To be sure I didn’t refer to it specifically; I employed subtle insinuation and hilarious innuendo. Ah, cursed Gascon that I am, I would crack a joke as I fried on the griddles of hell!”
His mirth spent, he continued to talk to himself with all the amenity he believed to be his due:
“Look here, D’Artagnan my friend, if you escape (which seems to me highly improbable) you must learn to be perfectly polite in the future. You must henceforth be admired and cited as a model of urbanity. To be mannerly and obliging does not make a man a coward. Look at Aramis, he is amiability and grace personified. Well, has anyone ever dreamed of calling him a coward? Certainly not, and I vow that from now on I shall take him as a model in everything. Ah, here he is!”
Walking forward and soliloquizing, D’Artagnan had arrived a few steps from the Hôtel d’Aiguillon and found Aramis by the main gate chatting gaily with three gentlemen of the Royal Guards. Aramis, for his part, perceived D’Artagnan too. But remembering that the youth had witnessed the angry scene with Monsieur de Tréville that morning, he felt loath to welcome one who had observed the Captain rebuking his musketeers. So he pretended not to see him. D’Artagnan, on the contrary, was still full of his plans of conciliation and courtesy, so with a deep bow and a most gracious smile, he approached the quartet. Aramis bowed his head slightly but did not smile. The four soldiers immediately broke off their conversation.
D’Artagnan at once perceived that he was intruding upon them, but he was not familiar