The Three Musketeers (The Modern Library) - Alexandre Dumas [51]
When they entered D’Artagnan’s room, it was empty. Bonacieux, fearing the consequences that must inevitably attend the encounter between D’Artagnan and his arch-enemy, had judged it prudent to decamp.
Which was quite in keeping with the description he himself had given of his character.
IX
D’ARTAGNAN TO THE FORE
As Athos and Porthos had foreseen, D’Artagnan returned within a half-hour. Once again he had missed his man. Sword in hand, D’Artagnan had run up and down all the neighboring streets to no avail. He found nobody who looked like the prey he had hoped to stalk. The man of Meung had vanished, as by magic, into thin air. Baffled, he presently decided to do what he should perhaps have done in the first place, namely knock at the door against which his enemy had been leaning. But this proved useless; though he slammed down the knocker ten or twelve times, no one answered. Presently some of the neighbors, alerted by the noise he was making, appeared on their doorsteps or poked their heads out of the window, and D’Artagnan was variously assured that the house had been uninhabited for six months. He himself could see that doors and windows were tightly locked.
While D’Artagnan was running through the streets and knocking at doors, Aramis had joined his companions. When D’Artagnan returned home he found his friends waiting in full force.
“Well?” asked Athos with pessimistic calm as D’Artagnan burst in, his brow bathed in perspiration, his face black with anger.
“Well?” said Porthos jauntily.
“Well?” said Aramis in a tone of discreet encouragement.
“Well—” D’Artagnan threw his sword on the bed, “well, that man must be the devil in person. He vanished like a phantom, a shadow, a spectre.”
“Do you believe in apparitions, Porthos?” Athos inquired.
“I believe only in what I have seen. I have never seen an apparition, therefore I do not believe in apparitions.”
“The Bible orders us by law to believe in them,” Aramis remarked. “Did not the ghost of Samuel appear to Saul? Belief in apparitions constitutes an article of faith; I would deplore it if any doubts were cast on this matter, Porthos.”
“At all events, man or devil, body or shadow, illusion or reality that man was born for my damnation,” said D’Artagnan. “His flight, gentlemen, has caused us to lose a wonderful piece of business by which we might have gained a hundred pistoles if not more.”
“How so?” Porthos asked.
“What!” Aramis exclaimed.
Athos, true to his philosophy of reticence, merely cast D’Artagnan a questioning glance. Just then Planchet craned his neck through the doorway to try to catch some fragments of the conversation.
“Planchet,” D’Artagnan ordered, “go down to my landlord, Monsieur Bonacieux, and tell him to send up half-a-dozen bottles of Beaugency wine. It is my favorite tipple.”
“So you have credit with your landlord, eh?”
“Yes, I established credit today. If his wine is bad, never mind; we will send him to find something more palatable.”
“We must use and not abuse,” said Aramis sententiously.
“I have always maintained that D’Artagnan was the most brainy of the four of us,” said Athos. D’Artagnan bowed at the compliment and Athos relapsed into his wonted silence.
“Look here, why don’t you explain all this to us?” Porthos suggested.
“Yes, tell us everything, my dear friend,” Aramis agreed. “Unless the honor of some lady is involved, in which case you would do better to keep your story to yourself.”
“You may set your mind at rest, Aramis, my story will not harm anybody’s reputation.”
Then word for word he related all that had passed between his landlord and himself, concluding with the startling information that Madame Bonacieux’s abductor and D’Artagnan’s enemy at the Sign of the Jolly Miller in Meung were one and the same man.
Having sampled the wine like a connoisseur and nodded to indicate that he found it good, Athos declared:
“You are in luck, D’Artagnan, your worthy landlord seems good