The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [189]
“I have no tomorrow to wait for.”
“Quiet! I hear my brother. There’s no use in him finding you here.”
She rang; Kitty appeared.
“Leave by this door,” she said, pushing open a little hidden door, “and come back at eleven. We’ll finish our discussion. Kitty will show you to my room.”
The poor child thought she would fall over when she heard these words.
“Well, what are you doing, Mademoiselle, standing there motionless as a statue? Come, show the chevalier out. And this evening, at eleven, you heard me!”
“Eleven o’clock seems to be her time for appointments,” thought d’Artagnan. “It’s an acquired habit.”
Milady held out a hand, which he kissed tenderly.
“Now, then,” he said, going out, and scarcely responding to Kitty’s reproaches, “now then, let’s have no foolishness. This woman is decidedly a great villain: let’s be careful!”
XXXVII
MILADY’S SECRET
D’Artagnan had left the hôtel instead of going up at once to Kitty’s, despite the solicitations the young girl had made to him, and that for two reasons: first, because in that way he avoided reproaches, recriminations, entreaties; second, because he was not sorry for the chance to examine his own thoughts a little, and, if possible, that woman’s as well.
What was clearest in it all was that d’Artagnan loved Milady madly and that she did not love him in the least. D’Artagnan instantly understood that the best thing to do would be to go home and write Milady a long letter confessing that up to now he and de Wardes were one and the same, and that consequently he could not take it upon himself, under pain of suicide, to kill de Wardes. But he was also spurred on by a fierce desire for vengeance. He wanted to possess this woman once more under his own name, and as this vengeance seemed to him to have a certain sweetness, he was unwilling to renounce it.
He made the tour of the place Royale five or six times, turning every ten steps to look at the light in Milady’s apartment, which could be seen through the blinds. It was obvious that this time the young woman was in less of a hurry to go to her room than she had been the first time.
At last the light went out.
Along with that glimmer, the last irresolution was extinguished in d’Artagnan’s heart. He recalled the details of the previous night, and, his heart leaping, his head on fire, went back to the hôtel and hurried to Kitty’s room.
The young girl, pale as death, trembling all over, wanted to stop her lover; but Milady, her ears pricked up, had heard the noise d’Artagnan made. She opened the door.
“Come,” she said.
All this was so incredibly impudent, so monstrously brazen, that d’Artagnan could scarcely believe what he saw and heard. He thought he was being dragged into one of those fantastic intrigues such as are fulfilled in dreams.
He rushed to Milady nonetheless, yielding to that attraction which a magnet exerts upon iron.
The door closed behind them.
Kitty threw herself against it from her side.
Jealousy, fury, offended pride, all the passions, finally, that struggle over the heart of a woman in love, urged her to give him away. But she would be lost if she admitted having lent a hand in such a machination; and, above all, d’Artagnan would be lost to her. This last loving thought advised her to make this last sacrifice.
D’Artagnan, for his part, had reached the fulfillment of all his wishes: it was no longer a rival that was loved in him, it was he himself who seemed to be loved. A secret voice told him at the very bottom of his heart that he was only an instrument of vengeance that one caressed while waiting for it to kill, but pride, but vanity, but madness silenced that voice, stifled that murmur. Then our Gascon, with the dose of confidence we know in him, compared himself with de Wardes and asked why, when all was said, he, too, should not be loved for himself alone.
He thus abandoned himself entirely to the sensations of the moment. For him, Milady was no longer that woman of fatal intentions who had frightened him momentarily, she was an ardent and passionate mistress abandoning