The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [65]
“What the devil could this handkerchief mean?”
Placed where he was, d’Artagnan could not see Aramis’s face—we say Aramis, because the young man had no doubt that it was his friend who was carrying on a dialogue from inside with the lady outside. Curiosity won out over prudence, and, profiting from the distraction into which the sight of the handkerchief seemed to have plunged the two characters we have put on stage, he left his hiding place and, swift as lightning, but muffling the sound of his footsteps, went and flattened himself against a corner of the wall, from where his eye could perfectly well plumb the depths of Aramis’s apartment.
At that point, d’Artagnan nearly let out a cry of surprise: it was not Aramis who was talking with the visiting lady in the night; it was a woman. Only d’Artagnan could see well enough to recognize her clothing, but not to make out her features.
At the same instant, the woman in the apartment drew a second handkerchief from her pocket and exchanged it for the one she had just been shown. Then a few words were spoken between the two women. Finally, the shutter closed again. The woman who was outside the window turned around and passed within four steps of d’Artagnan, pulling down the hood of her cloak. But this precaution came too late; d’Artagnan had already recognized Mme Bonacieux.
Mme Bonacieux! The suspicion that it was she had already crossed his mind when she drew the handerchief from her pocket. But how probable was it that Mme Bonacieux, who had sent for M. de La Porte so that he could take her back to the Louvre, would be going through the streets of Paris alone after eleven o’clock at night, at the risk of being abducted a second time?
It must then have been on a very important matter. And what is the important matter for a woman of twenty-five? Love.
But was it on her own account or someone else’s that she was exposing herself to such dangers? That is what the young man asked himself, the demon of jealousy gnawing his heart no less than if he was an acknowledged lover.
There was, in any case, a very simple means of finding out where Mme Bonacieux was going; this was to follow her. This means was so simple that d’Artagnan employed it quite naturally and by instinct.
But, at the sight of the young man detaching himself from the wall like a statue from its niche, and at the sound of his footsteps, which she heard coming after her, Mme Bonacieux let out a little cry and fled.
D’Artagnan ran after her. It was not difficult for him to catch up with a woman hampered by her cloak. He thus caught up with her a third of the way down the street she had taken. The poor woman was exhausted, not from fatigue but from terror, and when d’Artagnan placed his hand on her shoulder, she fell to one knee, crying out in a stifled voice:
“Kill me if you want, but you’ll find out nothing.”
D’Artagnan put his arm around her waist and picked her up; but as he felt by her weight that she was on the point of fainting, he hastened to reassure her with protests of his devotion. These protests were nothing to Mme Bonacieux, for such protests can be made with the worst intentions in the world; but the voice was everything. The young woman thought she recognized the sound of that voice: she reopened her eyes, cast a glance at the man who had frightened her so much, and, recognizing d’Artagnan, gave a cry of joy.
“Oh! It’s you, it’s you!” she said. “Thank God!”
“Yes, it’s I,” said d’Artagnan, “whom God has sent to keep watch on you.”
“Was that the reason you followed me?” the young woman asked with a smile filled with coquetry. Her slightly bantering character gained the upper hand, and all her fear disappeared the moment she recognized a friend in the one she had taken for an enemy.
“No,” said d’Artagnan, “no, I confess, it was chance that placed me in your way. I saw a woman knocking at the window of a friend of mine…”
“A friend of yours?” Mme Bonacieux interrupted.
“Of course. Aramis is one of my best