The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [68]
“By five minutes.”
“Yes, but in certain circumstances, five minutes are five centuries.”
“When one is in love.”
“Well, who told you I’m not meeting a lover?”
“So it’s a man who’s waiting for you?” cried d’Artagnan. “A man!”
“Come, the discussion’s going to start up again,” said Mme Bonacieux with a half smile that was not without a certain shade of impatience.
“No, no, I’m going, I’m off; I believe you, I want to have all the merit of my devotion, even if it should be a stupid devotion. Good-bye, Madame, good-bye!”
And as if he did not have strength enough to separate himself from the hand he was holding except by a jolt, he set off at a run, while Mme Bonacieux knocked three times slowly and evenly, as on the shutter; then, at the corner of the street, he turned around: the door had opened and closed again; the pretty mercer’s wife had disappeared.
D’Artagnan continued on his way. He had given his word not to spy on Mme Bonacieux, and if his life had depended on the place she was going to or the person who would accompany her, d’Artagnan would still have gone home, because he had said he would. Five minutes later, he was in the rue des Fossoyeurs.
“Poor Athos,” he said, “he won’t know what to make of it. He’ll have fallen asleep waiting for me, or he’ll have returned home, and on going in, will have learned that a woman had been there. A woman at Athos’s! After all,” d’Artagnan went on, “there certainly was one at Aramis’s. This is all very strange, and I’d be curious to know how it’s going to end.”
“Badly, Monsieur, badly,” replied a voice that the young man recognized as Planchet’s, for while soliloquizing aloud, as very proccupied people do, he had gone down the alley at the bottom of which was the stairway leading to his room.
“How, badly? What do you mean, imbecile?” asked d’Artagnan. “What’s happened?”
“All sorts of troubles.”
“Which?”
“First of all, M. Athos has been arrested.”
“Arrested? Athos arrested? Why?”
“He was found at your place; they took him for you.”
“And who arrested him?”
“The guards summoned by the men in black you chased away.”
“Why didn’t he give his name? Why didn’t he say he had nothing to do with the matter?”
“He was careful not to do that, Monsieur; on the contrary, he came over to me and said: ‘It’s your master who needs his freedom at the moment, and not me, since he knows everything and I know nothing. They’ll think he’s arrested, and that will give him time; in three days I’ll say who I am, and they’ll have to let me go.’”
“Bravo, Athos! Noble heart,” murmured d’Artagnan, “that’s just like him! And what did the beagles do?”
“Four of them took him away, I don’t know where, to the Bastille or the Fort-l’Évêque;56 two stayed with the men in black, who ransacked the place and took all the papers. Finally, the last two stood guard at the door during the expedition. Then, when it was all over, they went away, leaving the house empty and wide open.”
“And Porthos and Aramis?”
“I didn’t find them, they never came.”
“But they may come at any moment, because you left word for them that I was expecting them?”
“Yes, Monsieur.”
“Well, then, don’t budge from here. If they come, tell them what has happened to me and that they should wait for me at the Pomme de Pin; it’s dangerous here, the house may be watched. I’ll meet them there, after I run over to M. de Tréville’s to inform him of all this.”
“Very good, Monsieur,” said Planchet.
“But you’ll stay, you won’t be afraid?” said d’Artagnan, coming back to enjoin courage on the lackey.
“Rest assured, Monsieur,” said Planchet, “you don’t know me yet. I’m brave when I set myself to it, you’ll see. All I have to do is set myself to it. Besides, I’m a Picard.”
“It’s agreed, then,” said d’Artagnan, “you’ll get yourself killed rather than quit your post.”
“Yes, Monsieur, and there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to show Monsieur how attached I am to him.”
“Good,” d’Artagnan said to himself, “it seems the method I’ve employed with the lad is decidedly the right