The Modern Library Children's Classics

by Kenneth Grahame

  “Can it be on account of the amours of Madame de Bois-Tracy?”

  “Higher, Monsieur, higher.”

  “Of Madame d’Aiguillon?”

  “Higher still, Monsieur.”

  “Of Madame de Chevreuse?”

  “Higher, much higher.”

  “Of the—” D’Artagnan checked himself.

  “Yes, Monsieur,” his terrified visitor replied so low as to be almost inaudible.

  “And with whom?”

  “With whom else could it be save with the Duke of—?”

  “The Duke of—?” D’Artagnan repeated, hiding his ignorance and bewilderment.

  “Yes, Monsieur,” the stranger interrupted, even more faintly than before.

  “But how do you know all this?”

  “How do I know it?”

  “Exactly: how do you know it? No half-confidences now, or—you understand?”

  “I know it through my wife, Monsieur, I heard it from her own lips!”

  “And your wife? Where did she learn this?”

  “From Monsieur de La Porte. Didn’t I tell you my wife is his goddaughter? And isn’t he Her Majesty’s most confidential retainer? Well, Monsieur de La Porte placed my wife near Her Majesty in order that our poor Queen might at least have someone she could trust, abandoned as she is by the King, spied upon by the Cardinal, and betrayed by everybody.”

  “Ah, your story is taking shape!”

  “Now, my wife came home four days ago, Monsieur. (I must explain that one of the conditions she made on accepting the position was that she should visit me twice a week, for, as I had the honor to tell you a moment ago, she loves me dearly.) Well, she came home and she told me that at that very moment Her Majesty was frightened.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Ay, His Eminence, it would seem, pursues and persecutes her more than ever. He cannot forgive her the incident of the Saraband. You know the story of the Saraband, Monsieur?”

  “Of course I know it!” D’Artagnan answered. Though he had never even heard of it, he must appear to know everything that was going on.

  “So the Cardinal’s feelings are stronger than hatred now; he is moved by the lust of vengeance.”

  “Is that so?”

  “And the Queen believes—”

  “Well, what does Her Majesty believe?”

  “She believes that someone has written to the Duke of Buckingham in her name.”

  “In the Queen’s name?”

  “Ay, in order to persuade him to come to Paris and, once here, to draw him into some trap.”

  “Devil take it, what a tale! But what has your wife to do with all this, Monsieur?”

  “Her devotion to the Queen is well known. Somebody therefore wishes either to remove her from her mistress or, by intimidating her, to learn Her Majesty’s secrets, or to win her over and use her as a spy.”

  “That seems plausible,” D’Artagnan agreed. “But what about the man who abducted her? Do you know him?”

  “As I said, I think I know him.”

  “His name?”

  “That, I do not know. But I do know he is a creature of the Cardinal’s, the tool of His Eminence’s will.”

  “You have seen him?”

  “Ay, my wife pointed him out to me one day.”

  “Is there anything particularly noticeable about him, any distinctive feature?”

  “Ay, certainly. He is a nobleman of lofty bearing … black hair … a swarthy complexion … eyes piercing as drills … very white teeth … and a scar on his temple.…”

  “A scar on his temple!” D’Artagnan murmured. “Very white teeth … eyes piercing as drills … a swarthy complexion … black hair … a lofty bearing.… Why, that’s my man of Meung!”

  “Your man, you say.”

  “Yes, yes! but that has nothing to do with it. No, I am wrong; on the contrary that simplifies matters considerably. If your man is mine, I shall avenge two wrongs at one blow, that’s all! But where can I find this man?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know.”

  “Would you happen to know where he lives?”

  “No. One day I was accompanying my wife back to the Louvre and he came out as she went in. That was when she pointed him out to me.”

  “Devil take it, blast and confound it! all this is very vague!” D’Artagnan cursed. Then: “Look here, how did you hear your wife had been abducted?”

  “Monsieur de La Porte told me.”

  “Did he give you any details?”

  “He knew none himself.”

  “Did you obtain any other information?”

  “Ay, Monsieur, I received—”

  “What?”

  “Er—I am afraid I am committing a serious indiscretion.”

  “There you are, back on the same tack. This time I must point out that you have gone too far to retreat now.”

  “Mordieu, I’m not retreating,” the other swore, hoping the blasphemy might bolster his courage. “Besides, as sure as I am Bonacieux—”

  “So your name is Bonacieux?”

  “Ay.”

  “You were saying: ‘As sure as I am Bonacieux—’ Forgive me for interrupting, but I think your name is not unfamiliar.”

  “Possibly, Monsieur; I am your landlord.”

  “Ah, you are my landlord!” said D’Artagnan, half-rising and bowing to his visitor.

  “Ay,” said the visitor pertinently. “You have been here three months, have you not, Monsieur? Of course I realize how with your important occupations, you have forgotten to pay me my rent. But since I have not bothered you about this, I thought you would appreciate my tact.”

  “Believe me, my dear Monsieur Bonacieux, I am truly grateful to you for your consideration. As I told you, if I can be of any service to you—”

  “I take you at your word, Monsieur, and, as I was about to tell you, as sure as I am Bonacieux, I believe in you implicitly.”

  “Go ahead, then; go on with what you were about to say.”

  Bonacieux took a sheet of paper from his pocket and presented it to D’Artagnan.

  “A letter?”

  “Ay, Monsieur, I received it this morning.”

  It was dusk; the room was swathed in shadows. D’Artagnan moved toward the window to read it, Bonacieux at his heels. Unfolding the paper, D’Artagnan read:

  Do not look for your wife. She will be sent back to you when her services will have ceased to be of use. Do you but take one step to attempt to find her, you are irremediably lost.

  “That is positive enough,” D’Artagnan remarked. “But after all it is merely a threat.”

  “Ay, but a threat that terrifies me, Monsieur. I am no soldier or duelist, and I dread the Bastille.”

  “Hm! I’m no keener on the Bastille than you are. Were it but a question of dueling—”

  “Ah, Monsieur, you cannot imagine how much I have been counting on you in this connection.”

  “Really.”

  “I have seen you constantly surrounded by musketeers, men of the proudest and most resolute bearing. I recognized them immediately as belonging to Monsieur de Tréville and therefore enemies of the Cardinal. Naturally, I supposed that you and your friends would be delighted at once to do the Queen Justice and the Cardinal an ill turn.”

  “Undoubtedly, we—”

  “I also bethought me that in view of the three months’ rental about which I have said nothing—”

  “Yes, yes, yes, you have already used that argument. I find it excellent.”

  “I also thought that so long as you remain under my roof, if I were never to mention the rent again—”

  “Very good! What else?”

  “Well … to go further … I thought I would make bold to offer you, say, about fifty pistoles … if it proved necessary … I mean if you should happen to be short of cash at the moment, which I am certain is not the case.…”

  “Admirable! So you are a rich man, my dear Monsieur Bonacieux.”

  “I am comfortabl
y off, Monsieur, that’s all. I have scraped together an income of something like two or three hundred thousand crowns: first in the haberdashery business—I started in small wares—but particularly in an investment I made. I ventured some funds in the most recent voyage of Jean Mocquet, the celebrated navigator. You can judge for yourself, then, Monsieur, how I—But look, look!”

  “What?”

  “Over there!”

  “Where?”

  “In the street, facing your house, on the doorsill opposite: a man wrapped in a cloak.”

  Suddenly both recognized their man:

  “It’s the man I told you about!” said Bonacieux.

  “It’s the man I’m after!” cried D’Artagnan, springing across the room for his sword. “This time he will not escape me.”

  Drawing his sword from its scabbard, he rushed out of the apartment. On the staircase he met Athos and Porthos; they separated as D’Artagnan sped between them like a dart.

  “What’s up? Where are you off to? What’s the matter?”

  “The man of Meung!” D’Artagnan cried as he disappeared.

  He had more than once told his friends about his adventure with the sinister stranger and the apparition of the beautiful English traveler to whom his enemy had confided some important missive. The musketeers had long since formed their own opinions about the incident.

  According to Athos, D’Artagnan must have lost his letter in the skirmish. From D’Artagnan’s description, the stranger must have been a gentleman; no gentleman could possibly debase himself to pilfer a letter.

  According to Porthos, the imbroglio was due to love. A lady had given her cavalier a rendezvous or vice versa and D’Artagnan, yellow nag and all, had interrupted them.

  According to Aramis, affairs of this kind were buried in mysteries it was better not to fathom.

  Athos and Porthos understood, from D’Artagnan’s cry, what the young Gascon was about. He would either meet his man of Meung and dispatch him promptly or he would lose sight of him; in either case, he would return home. Accordingly, they continued to walk upstairs.

  When they entered D’Artagnan’s room, it was empty. Bonacieux, fearing the consequences that must inevitably attend the encounter between D’Artagnan and his arch-enemy, had judged it prudent to decamp.

  Which was quite in keeping with the description he himself had given of his character.

  IX

  D’ARTAGNAN TO THE FORE

  As Athos and Porthos had foreseen, D’Artagnan returned within a half-hour. Once again he had missed his man. Sword in hand, D’Artagnan had run up and down all the neighboring streets to no avail. He found nobody who looked like the prey he had hoped to stalk. The man of Meung had vanished, as by magic, into thin air. Baffled, he presently decided to do what he should perhaps have done in the first place, namely knock at the door against which his enemy had been leaning. But this proved useless; though he slammed down the knocker ten or twelve times, no one answered. Presently some of the neighbors, alerted by the noise he was making, appeared on their doorsteps or poked their heads out of the window, and D’Artagnan was variously assured that the house had been uninhabited for six months. He himself could see that doors and windows were tightly locked.

  While D’Artagnan was running through the streets and knocking at doors, Aramis had joined his companions. When D’Artagnan returned home he found his friends waiting in full force.

  “Well?” asked Athos with pessimistic calm as D’Artagnan burst in, his brow bathed in perspiration, his face black with anger.

  “Well?” said Porthos jauntily.

  “Well?” said Aramis in a tone of discreet encouragement.

  “Well—” D’Artagnan threw his sword on the bed, “well, that man must be the devil in person. He vanished like a phantom, a shadow, a spectre.”

  “Do you believe in apparitions, Porthos?” Athos inquired.

  “I believe only in what I have seen. I have never seen an apparition, therefore I do not believe in apparitions.”

  “The Bible orders us by law to believe in them,” Aramis remarked. “Did not the ghost of Samuel appear to Saul? Belief in apparitions constitutes an article of faith; I would deplore it if any doubts were cast on this matter, Porthos.”

  “At all events, man or devil, body or shadow, illusion or reality that man was born for my damnation,” said D’Artagnan. “His flight, gentlemen, has caused us to lose a wonderful piece of business by which we might have gained a hundred pistoles if not more.”

  “How so?” Porthos asked.

  “What!” Aramis exclaimed.

  Athos, true to his philosophy of reticence, merely cast D’Artagnan a questioning glance. Just then Planchet craned his neck through the doorway to try to catch some fragments of the conversation.

  “Planchet,” D’Artagnan ordered, “go down to my landlord, Monsieur Bonacieux, and tell him to send up half-a-dozen bottles of Beaugency wine. It is my favorite tipple.”

  “So you have credit with your landlord, eh?”

  “Yes, I established credit today. If his wine is bad, never mind; we will send him to find something more palatable.”

  “We must use and not abuse,” said Aramis sententiously.

  “I have always maintained that D’Artagnan was the most brainy of the four of us,” said Athos. D’Artagnan bowed at the compliment and Athos relapsed into his wonted silence.

  “Look here, why don’t you explain all this to us?” Porthos suggested.

  “Yes, tell us everything, my dear friend,” Aramis agreed. “Unless the honor of some lady is involved, in which case you would do better to keep your story to yourself.”

  “You may set your mind at rest, Aramis, my story will not harm anybody’s reputation.”

  Then word for word he related all that had passed between his landlord and himself, concluding with the startling information that Madame Bonacieux’s abductor and D’Artagnan’s enemy at the Sign of the Jolly Miller in Meung were one and the same man.

  Having sampled the wine like a connoisseur and nodded to indicate that he found it good, Athos declared:

  “You are in luck, D’Artagnan, your worthy landlord seems good for fifty or sixty pistoles. The only question to debate is whether these fifty or sixty pistoles are worth the risk of four heads.”

  “You forget there is a woman in the case,” D’Artagnan protested, “a woman who was carried off, a woman who is probably being threatened, and perhaps even being tortured, and all because she is faithful to her mistress.”

  “Careful, D’Artagnan, go easy! In my opinion, you are overzealous about Madame Bonacieux’s fate,” Aramis cautioned. “Woman was created for our destruction; it is from woman that we inherit all our afflictions.”

  As Aramis uttered this maxim, Athos frowned and bit his lips.

  “I’m not worried about Madame Bonacieux,” D’Artagnan answered, “but about the Queen. The King neglects her, the Cardinal persecutes her, and her friends are being killed one after the other.”

  “Why does she love what we hate most in the world, the Spaniards and the English?”

  “Spain is her native land,” D’Artagnan explained. “It is quite natural that she should love the Spaniards; are they not children of the same soil as herself? As for your second reproach, I have heard say that she does not love the English, but rather one Englishman.”

  “Upon my faith,” said Athos, “that Englishman deserves to be loved. I never saw a man of nobler aspect in all my life.”

  “And he dresses better than anyone in the world,” Porthos added. “I was at the Louvre the day he scattered his pearls. I picked up two that I sold for ten pistoles apiece. Do you know him, Aramis?”

  “Quite as well as you do, gentlemen. I was with those who arrested him in the gardens at Amiens. (Monsieur de Putange, the Queen’s equerry, had let me in.) I was at the seminary at the time. The whole adventure seemed to me to be a cruel blow for the King.”

  “If I knew where the Duke of Buckingha
m was,” said D’Artagnan, “nothing could prevent me from taking him by the hand and leading him to the Queen’s side, if only to enrage the Cardinal. After all, gentlemen, our true, sole and eternal enemy is His Eminence. If we could find some way to play him a cruel trick, I confess I would gladly risk my head.”

  “Please set me right about what your haberdasher-landlord told you,” said Athos slowly. “Did he say the Queen believed that Buckingham came to Paris on the strength of a forged letter?”

  “That is what the Queen fears.”

  “Wait, wait a minute!” Aramis commanded.

  “What for?” asked Porthos.

  “Go on talking; I shall try to recall the exact circumstances,” Aramis answered, falling into a brown study.

  “I am convinced,” D’Artagnan said, “that the abduction of the Queen’s seamstress is connected with what we have been discussing and perhaps even with the presence of Buckingham in Paris.”

  “That Gascon is full of ideas!” Porthos said admiringly.

  “I like to hear him speak,” said Athos, “his patois delights me.”

  “Gentlemen, please listen to what I am about to tell you,” Aramis broke in.

  “Go ahead!”

  “We are listening!”

  “We are all ears.”

  “Yesterday,” said Aramis, “I happened to be at the house of a learned doctor of theology whom I sometimes consult about my studies.”

  Athos smiled.

  “He lives in a quiet, unfrequented quarter; his tastes and profession require it,” Aramis continued. “Now, just as I was leaving his house.…”

  Aramis paused.

  “Well, just as you were leaving his house?”

  Aramis appeared to be making a great effort to master himself. He was like a man who, having launched full-sail into a lie, suddenly runs afoul of some unforeseen obstacle. But his three friends were staring at him, their ears were wide open, and he had no means of retreat.

  “This doctor has a niece,” Aramis went on.

  “Ah, he has a niece!” said Porthos meaningfully.

  “A very respectable lady,” Aramis insisted, as the others burst into peals of laughter. “If you laugh or if you doubt my word,” Aramis warned, “you shall hear nothing further.”