The Three Musketeers (The Modern Library) - Alexandre Dumas [315]
With increasing fright, Milady stared up at him. Then, noting his haggard face framed by sable-black hair and beard, she shuddered. The stranger maintained an icy impassiveness.
“No, no, no!” Milady sobbed. Rising she shrank back to the wall. “You are a figment of my imagination, an apparition from Hell! Help, help!” she screamed, tearing at the wall as though to pull it down with her hands.
“But how do you know this woman?” Aramis asked discreetly.
“This woman will tell you,” the stranger replied. “As you see, she appears to have recognized me.”
“The executioner of Lille!” Milady moaned, clutching at the wall to avoid falling. The whole company stepped back; now the man in the red cloak stood alone in the middle of the room.
“Forgive me!” Milady sobbed, falling to her knees and mumbling incoherently.
The stranger waited for silence, then continued very evenly:
“As I said, this woman recognized me. I am the executioner of Lille.”
His audience looked raptly at him, eager for the solution of the enigma. Staring straight before him the man in the red cloak stated in a monotonous voice that the accused was once as beautiful a girl as she was now a beautiful woman, that she had been a nun in the Benedictine Convent at Templemar, and that in this convent she had seduced a candid sincere young priest.
“He was all innocence and all duty but she gained her ends. She would have seduced a saint.”
The vows of both priest and nun were sacred and irrevocable; their love affair could not last long without bringing them both to ruin. The woman therefore persuaded her lover to leave that part of the country and to go with her where no one knew them. But for this, money was necessary and neither of them had a sou. So the young priest stole the sacred vessels and sold them. But as the pair were preparing to abscond, they were apprehended.
A week later, the woman seduced the jailer’s son and thus escaped; the young priest was condemned to serve ten years in irons and to be branded.
“I was the executioner of Lille,” the speaker insisted. “I was forced to brand the guilty man, and the guilty man, gentlemen, was my own brother!
“I did my duty. This woman had ruined my brother; she was more than a party to the crime, she had instigated it. Then and there, I swore that she should not go unpunished. I found out where she was hiding, I caught up with her and I marked upon her shoulder the same brand my brother bore. That, gentlemen, is why there are no records of this sentence; it was unofficially executed by the official executioner of the City of Lille.”
Returning to Lille next day, the executioner discovered that his brother, too, had broken out of jail. He was therefore held in prison in his brother’s place until the other gave himself up.
“My poor brother knew nothing of this,” the plaintiff said. “He had joined this woman. They had fled southward to the province of Berry, where he found a small living. This woman passed herself off as his sister.
“The lord of the estate where they settled met the young priest’s alleged sister and fell madly in love with her. They married and she forsook the man she had ruined for him she was about to ruin. As Comtesse de La Fère—”
All eyes turned toward Athos who simply nodded assent.
The young priest, out of his senses and desperate, resolved to put an end to an existence of which this woman had robbed honor, happiness and all else.
“My poor brother returned to Lille,” the man in the red cloak said, “and learning of the judgment which had condemned me in his stead, he gave himself up. He took my place. That evening he hanged himself on the vent of his cell. To give them their due, the men who had sentenced me kept their word. I was at once set free.” Milady cowered at his glance. “I have stated why I punished this woman before and why I seek to punish her again.”
When he had moved aside, Athos turned to D’Artagnan:
“Monsieur d’Artagnan, what sentence should be passed upon this woman?