The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [64]
D’Artagnan had just passed the rue Cassette and had already made out his friend’s door, buried under a mass of sycamores and clematis that formed a vast swelling over it, when he spied something like a shadow emerging from the rue Servandoni. This something was wrapped in a cloak, and d’Artagnan thought it was a man at first; but, by the smallness of the waist, the uncertainty of the gait, the timidity of the step, he soon recognized that it was a woman. What’s more, this woman, as if she was not at all sure of the house she was looking for, raised her eyes to get her bearings, stopped, turned around, then came back again. D’Artagnan was intrigued.
“What if I go and offer her my services!” he thought. “By the look of it, she’s young; perhaps pretty. Oh, yes! But a woman going through the streets at this hour would hardly be out except to meet her lover. Damn! if I went and disturbed their rendezvous, that would be entering into relations through the wrong door.”
However, the young woman was still approaching, counting the houses and windows. Nor was that a long or difficult task. There were only three hôtels on that portion of the street, and two windows looking onto the street; one was that of a house parallel to the one Aramis occupied, the other was that of Aramis himself.
“Pardieu!” d’Artagnan said to himself, as the theologian’s niece came back to his mind. “Pardieu, it would be funny if this belated dove was looking for our friend’s house! But, by my soul, it looks very much that way. Ah, my dear Aramis, this time I mean to get to the heart of it!”
And d’Artagnan, making himself as thin as possible, hid on the darker side of the street, near a stone bench at the back of a niche.
The young woman continued to approach, for besides the lightness of her footfall, which had given her away, she had just let out a little cough, which had revealed the freshest of voices. D’Artagnan thought the cough was a signal.
However, either because someone had responded to that cough with an equivalent signal that had settled the nocturnal seeker’s hesitations, or because she had recognized without foreign aid that she had reached the end of her journey, she went resolutely to Aramis’s shutter and tapped at three equal intervals with her bent finger.
“That’s Aramis’s window,” murmured d’Artagnan. “Ah! Mister hypocrite! I’ve caught you at your theology!”
The three knocks had barely been tapped when the inside casement opened and a light appeared through the slats of the shutter.
“Aha!” said the listener not at doors but at windows, “the visit was expected. Now the shutter will be opened and the lady will climb in. Very good!”
But, to d’Artagnan’s great astonishment, the shutter remained closed. What’s more, the light that had flared up for a moment disappeared, and everything fell back into darkness.
D’Artagnan thought it could not go on that way, and continued watching with all his eyes and listening with all his ears.
He was right: after a few seconds, two sharp knocks rang out from inside.
The young woman in the street responded with a single knock, and the shutter opened slightly.
One can imagine how avidly d’Artagnan watched and listened.
Unfortunately, the light had been taken to another room. But the young man’s eyes were accustomed to the dark. Besides, like the eyes of cats, the eyes of Gascons, as we have been assured, have the property of seeing in the dark.
D’Artagnan then saw the woman draw a white object from her pocket, which she unfolded quickly and which took the form of a handkerchief. Having unfolded the object, she pointed out the corner to her interlocutor.
This reminded d’Artagnan of the handkerchief he had found at