The Three Musketeers (The Modern Library) - Alexandre Dumas [280]
LVII
HOW MILADY EMPLOYED THE TECHNIQUE OF CLASSICAL TRAGEDY TO PREPARE A MODERN ONE
There was a moment of silence which Milady employed in observing her young listener. Then she continued her recital.
It was more than three days, she related, since she had touched food or drink . . . she was suffering atrocious tortures . . . at times clouds passed over her, dimming her eyes and pressing heavily down on her forehead as through a haze she realized this was delirium. . . . When evening came she was so weak that she kept fainting at every moment and each time she fainted she thanked God because she believed she was about to die. Suddenly, in the midst of one of these fainting spells, she heard the door open. Terror brought her back to consciousness.
“And then,” Milady told her rapt listener, “he came in. He was masked but I recognized his step, I knew his voice and that proud, impressive air which hell bestowed upon his person for the ruin of humanity.”
He was followed, she added, by a companion, also masked. Her persecutor spoke up:
“Well!” he asked, “have you made up your mind to swear the oath I asked of you?”
To which Milady replied that her torturer had himself admitted that Puritans have but one word . . . that he had heard hers . . . and that she meant to pursue him on earth before the tribunals of men until she could do so before the Court of God in Heaven.
“So you persist?”
“I swear it before the God Who now hears me. I will call all earth to bear witness to your crime—that is, until I shall have found an avenger!”
“You are a whore,” he thundered, “and you shall submit to the punishment of common whores. Branded in the eyes of the world you hope to appeal to, how will you prove that you are neither guilty nor insane?”
Then, turning to his companion;
“Executioner,” he said, “do your duty.”
“His name, his name,” Felton pleaded. “Please tell me his name.”
“Then in spite of my cries, in spite of my resistance—for I realized I was facing something worse than death—the executioner seized me, threw me to the floor and pinned me down. I was choking with sobs, almost unconscious, calling for help from a God who did not heed me. Suddenly I shrieked for pain and humiliation. A burning fire, a red-hot iron, and the executioner had branded his mark upon my shoulder.”
Felton groaned.
“Look for yourself,” Milady said, rising with the majesty of a queen, “here, Felton, behold the new martyrdom invented for a pure young girl, the victim of a scoundrel’s brutality. Learn to know the hearts of men and henceforth do not offer yourself so readily to serve as the instrument of their iniquitous vengeance.”
With a swift gesture, Milady opened her dress, tore aside the cambric which covered her breast and, blushing with feigned anger and simulated shame, bared the ineffaceable imprint which marred her beautiful shoulder.
“But that is a fleur-de-lis!” Felton cried.
“That is the most shameful part of it all,” Milady answered. “Had the brand been the brand of England, it would have been necessary to prove what court had sentenced me; I could have made a public appeal to every court in the kingdom. But the brand of France! Ah, here was truly the brand of infamy!”
This was too much for Felton. Pale, stock-still, aghast at the horror of this revelation and dazzled by the beauty of this woman who bared herself before him with an immodesty which he found sublime, he finally fell on his knees before her. With just such fervor, the early Christians were wont to fall on their knees before the Virgin martyrs whom the emperors delivered in the circus to the bloodthirsty lubricity of the populace. The brand disappeared, beauty alone remained.
“Forgive me, forgive me,” Felton cried.
“Love me, love me!” Milady read in his glance as:
“Forgive you for what?” she asked.
“Forgive me for having joined with your persecutors.”
Milady held out her hand.
“So young! so beautiful!