The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [259]
Felton made no reply, took the book with the same feeling of repugnance he had already shown, and pensively withdrew. Lord de Winter came at around five o’clock in the evening. Milady had had time during that whole day to draw up a plan of conduct. She received him as a woman who has already recovered all her advantages.
“It seems,” said the baron, sitting down in an armchair facing the one occupied by Milady, and casually stretching his feet out towards the fire, “it seems we’ve made a little apostasy.”
“What do you mean, Monsieur?”
“I mean that, since the last time we saw each other, we have changed religion. Might you have married a third husband—a Protestant, by chance?”
“Explain yourself, Milord,” the prisoner replied with majesty, “for I declare to you that I hear your words but do not understand them.”
“Or else it’s that you have no religion at all. I like that better,” Lord de Winter said with a snicker.
“It certainly accords better with your principles,” Milady replied coldly.
“Oh, I confess to you that it’s all quite the same to me!”
“Oh, you may as well confess to this religious indifference, Milord, since your debauches and crimes bear it out!”
“Eh? You speak of debauches, Mme Messalina,183 you speak of crimes, Lady Macbeth? Either I heard wrongly, or, pardieu, you are quite impudent.”
“You speak that way because you know we are being overheard, Monsieur,” Milady answered coldly, “and you want to turn your jailers and hangmen against me.”
“My jailers? My hangmen? Oh, yes, Madame, you are adopting a poetic tone, and yesterday’s comedy is turning into a tragedy this evening. However, in eight days you will be where you belong, and my task will be finished.”
“An infamous task! An impious task!” Milady replied, with the exaltation of the victim provoking the judge.
“On my word of honor,” de Winter said, getting up, “I believe the wench is going mad. Come, come, calm yourself, Mme Puritan, or I’ll put you in the dungeon. Pardieu! it’s my Spanish wine going to your head, isn’t it? But don’t worry, that sort of drunkenness isn’t dangerous and will not have any consequences.”
And Lord de Winter went off cursing, which at that time was a perfectly gentlemanly habit.
Milady had guessed right.
“Yes, go! go!” she said to her brother. “The consequences are coming, on the contrary, but you won’t see them, imbecile, until it’s too late to avoid them.”
Silence ensued; two hours went by. Supper was brought, and Milady was found occupied with saying her prayers aloud, prayers she had learned from an old servant of her second husband’s, a most austere Puritan. She seemed in ecstasy and appeared to pay no attention to what went on around her. Felton made a sign for her not to be disturbed, and when everything was in order, he left noiselessly with the soldiers.
Milady knew she might be spied on, so she continued her prayers to the end, and it seemed to her that the soldier who was on sentry duty at her door was no longer pacing in the same way and seemed to be listening.
For the moment, she wanted nothing more. She got up, went to the table, ate little, and drank only water.
An hour later they came to remove the table, but Milady noticed that this time Felton did not accompany his soldiers.
He was afraid, then, of seeing her too often.
She turned to the wall in order to smile, for there was in this smile such an expression of triumph that the smile alone would have given her away.
She let another half hour go by, and as at that moment all was silence in the old castle, as one heard only the eternal murmur of the swell, that immense breathing of the ocean, in her pure, harmonious, and vibrant voice she began the first verse of a psalm that was then in great favor among the Puritans:
If Thou abandon us, O Lord,
It is to see if we can stand,
But after that Thou dost award
The palm to us with Thine own