The Three Musketeers (The Modern Library) - Alexandre Dumas [72]
“Why do you suppose you stand here accused of high treason?”
“High treason! High treason! Why do you suppose a wretched haberdasher who loathes the Huguenots and abhors the Spaniards stands here accused of high treason? Come, Monsieur, think it over. How could I possibly be suspected of anything?”
The Commissioner stared, cleared his throat, and:
“You have a wife, Monsieur Bonacieux, have you not?”
“Ay, Monsieur,” the haberdasher acknowledged. (Here’s where my troubles begin, he thought to himself.) “I mean I had a wife.”
“You had a wife? What do you mean? Where is she?”
“They took her away, Monsieur.”
“So: ‘they took her away!’ Humph!” (To Bonacieux the ‘Humph’ complicated matters all the more.)
“So they took her away. Who, Monsieur? Do you know who abducted her?”
“I think so.”
“Who?”
“By your leave, Monsieur le Commissaire, I would not dare accuse anyone . . . I only have suspicions. . . .”
“Whom do you suspect? Come on, speak out, man!”
This question put Monsieur Bonacieux in a very tight corner. Should he deny or should he confess? Denial would imply that he knew too much, confession that he was eager to co-operate; he therefore determined to tell everything. Eagerly he said:
“I suspect a tall dark man . . . a distinguished-looking gentleman . . . a great lord, I dare say . . . if I am not in error, it seems to me that he followed us . . . my wife and me . . . several times . . . when I waited for her at the Louvre to take her home. . . .”
At this point, Monsieur le Commissaire gave evidence of a certain anxiety:
“His name?”
“I wouldn’t know his name, Monsieur. But if ever I saw him, I could spot him out of a thousand.”
“Out of a thousand, eh?” The Commissioner frowned. “Out of a thousand, you say?”
Bonacieux, with a sense of past blunder and impending ruin, mumbled:
“What I mean is . . . I mean, Monsieur. . . .”
“You mean that you would recognize him out of a thousand. Very well, so much for today. Meanwhile, I shall report that you know who abducted your wife.”
“I didn’t say I knew him. On the contrary. . . .”
“Prisoner dismissed! Take him away.”
“Where, Monsieur le Commissaire?”
“Clap him into a cell!”
“What sort of cell?”
“Clap him into the handiest cell you find so but it be secure!”
The Commissioner’s indifference filled Bonacieux with horror:
“Alas, alas,” he mused, “misfortune has fallen upon my gray hairs. Undoubtedly my wife committed some horrible crime . . . I am suspected of being her accomplice . . . I shall pay for it, all on her account . . . she has probably confessed I know what all this is about . . . I shall suffer because woman is a weak vessel . . . the Commissioner said ‘the handiest cell you can find’ . . . I know: one night, twelve short hours, and then the wheel, the gallows . . . Ah God, have mercy on my soul! . . .”
The guards, hardened by use to the lamentations of prisoners, whisked Monsieur Bonacieux off while the Commissioner wrote a summary report of the proceedings.
Though his cell was not too disagreeable, Bonacieux could not sleep a wink. All night long he sat rooted to his stool, trembling at the slightest rumor; and, when the first rays of daylight crept into his cell, the dawn seemed to him dismal and funereal. Suddenly the bolts of his door shot back and he gave a terrible start. Yes, now surely they had come to take him to the scaffold. When, to his surprise, he saw no executioner but instead the Commissioner and the clerk of yesterday’s interview, he was ready to embrace them both.
“This trouble you are in has become ever so much more complicated overnight,” the Commissioner informed Bonacieux. “I advise you to tell the whole truth. Only full repentance will appease the Cardinal’s anger.”
“But I am ready to say everything, at least everything that I know. Won’t you please question me, Monsieur?”
“Well, in the first place: where is your wife?”
“She was abducted.”
“But at five-thirty yesterday afternoon, thanks to your efforts, she escaped.