Milady looked at the man and hesitated.
“Who are you, sir,” she asked, “that you are so kind as to busy yourself so particularly on my account?”
“You must see, madame, by my uniform, that I am an officer in the English navy,” replied the young man.
“But is it the custom for officers in the English navy to give their services to their female compatriots who land at a port of Great Britain, and to carry their gallantry so far as to bring them ashore?”
“Yes, madame, it is our custom, not from gallantry, but prudence, in time of war, to bring foreigners to certain hotels, in order that they may be under the eye of the government until full information can be obtained about them.”
These words were spoken with the most exact politeness and the most perfect calmness. Nevertheless, they had not the power of convincing milady.
“But I am not a foreigner, sir,” said she, with an accent as pure as ever was heard between Portsmouth and Manchester; “my name is Lady Clarick, and this measure—”
“This measure is general, madame, and you would not succeed in escaping from it.”
“I will follow you, then, sir.”
And accepting the officer’s hand, she began to climb down the ladder, at the foot of which the gig was awaiting her. The officer followed her. A large cloak was spread in the stern. The officer had her sit down on the cloak, and placed himself beside her.
“Give way!” said he to the sailors.
The eight oars fell at once into the sea, making but a single sound, giving a single stroke, and the gig seemed to fly over the surface of the water.
At the end of five minutes they reached shore.
The officer sprang on the quay and offered milady his hand.
A carriage was in waiting.
“Is this carriage for us?” asked milady.
“Yes, madame,” replied the officer.
“So the hotel is at some distance?”
“At the other end of the town.”
“Very well,” said milady; and she got resolutely into the carriage.
The officer saw that the baggage was fastened carefully behind the carriage; and when this operation was over, he took his place beside milady, and shut the door.
Instantly, without any order being given, or place of destination indicated, the coachman set off at a gallop, and plunged into the streets of the town.
Such a strange reception naturally gave milady ample matter for reflection; so, seeing that the young officer did not seem at all disposed to talk, she reclined in her corner of the carriage, and passed in review all the suppositions which presented themselves, one after the other, to her mind.
At length, after nearly an hour’s ride, the carriage stopped before an iron gate, which shut in a sunken avenue leading to a castle severe in form, massive, and isolated. Then, as the wheels rolled over a fine gravel, milady could hear a dull roar, which she recognized as the noise of the sea dashing against a rock-bound coast.
The carriage passed under two arched gateways, and at length stopped in a dark, square court. Almost immediately the carriage door was opened, the young man sprang lightly to the ground, and gave milady his hand. She leaned on it, and in her turn alighted quite calmly.
“Still, the fact is I am a prisoner,” said milady, looking around her, and then fixing her eyes on the young officer with a most gracious smile; “but I feel assured it will not be for long,” added she. “My own conscience and your politeness, sir, are the guarantees of that.”
Flattering as this compliment was, the officer made no reply, but drawing from his belt a little silver whistle, such as boatswains use in ships of war, he whistled three times, with three different modulations. Several men then appeared, unharnessed the smoking horses, and put the carriage into a coach-house.
The officer, always with the same calm politeness, invited his prisoner to enter the house. She, always with the same smiling countenance, took his arm, and passed with him under a low arched door, which, by a vaulted passage, lighted only at the farther end, led to a stone staircase turning round a stone column. Then they paused before a massive door, which, after the young officer had inserted a key into the lock, turned heavily on its hinges, and disclosed the chamber destined for milady.
With a single glance the prisoner took in the apartment in its minutest details.
It was a chamber the furniture of which was at once suited to a prison or the dwelling of a free man; yet the bars at the windows and the outside bolts on the door decided the question in favour of the prison. For an instant all this creature’s strength of mind abandoned her. She sank into an armchair, with her arms folded, her head hanging down, and expecting every instant to see a judge enter to question her.
But no one entered except two marines, who brought in her trunks and packages, deposited them in a corner of the room, and retired without speaking.
The officer presided over all these details with the same calmness milady had always observed in him, never uttering a word, and making himself obeyed by a gesture of his hand or a sound of his whistle.
One might have said that between this man and his inferiors spoken language did not exist, or had become useless.
At length milady could hold out no longer. She broke the silence.
“In the name of Heaven, sir,” cried she, “what is the meaning of all this? Put an end to my doubts. I have courage enough for any danger I can foresee, for any misfortune I can comprehend. Where am I, and why am I here? If I am free, why these bars and these doors? If I am a prisoner, what crime have I committed?”
“You are here in the apartment destined for you, madame. I received orders to go and take charge of you at sea, and to conduct you to this castle. This order, I believe, I have accomplished with all a soldier’s strictness, but also with all the courtesy of a gentleman. Here ends, at least for the present, the duty I had to fulfil toward you; the rest concerns another person.”
“And who is this other person?” asked milady. “Can you not tell me his name?”
At that moment a great jingling of spurs was heard on the stairs. People talking together went by, the sounds of voices died away, and the noise made by a single footstep approached the door.
“Here he is, madame,” said the officer, leaving the entrance clear, and drawing himself up in an attitude of respect and submission.
At the same time the door opened; a man appeared on the threshold.
He had no hat on, wore a sword at his side, and was crushing a handkerchief in his hand.
Milady thought she recognized this shadow in the gloom; she leaned with one hand on the arm of the chair, and protruded her head as if to meet a certainty.
Then the stranger advanced slowly, and as he advanced into the circle of light projected by the lamp, milady involuntarily drew back.
Then, when she had no longer any doubt—
“What! my brother!” cried she, at the culmination of her amazement; “is it you?”
“Yes, fair lady,” replied Lord Winter, making a bow, half courteous, half ironical; “it is I, myself.”
“Then this castle?”
“Is mine.”
“This room?”
“Is yours.”
“I am your prisoner, then?”
“Nearly so.”
“But this is a frightful abuse of power!”
“No high-sounding words. Let us sit down and talk calmly, as brother and sister ought to do.”
Then turning toward the door, and seeing that the young officer was waiting for his last orders,
“It is all right,” said he; “I thank you. Now leave us alone, Mr. Felton.”
Chapter 45 - Brother and Sister
While Lord Winter was shutting the door, closing a shutter, and drawing a chair near to his sister-in-law’s armchair, milady was thoughtfully plunging her glance into the depths of possibility, and discovered the whole plot, not even a glimpse of which she could get so long as she was ignorant into whose hands she had fallen. She knew her brother-in-law was a worthy gentleman, a bold huntsman, an intrepid player, enterprising with women, but with less than average skill in intrigues. How could he have discovered her arrival and caused her to be seized? Why did he detain her?
Athos had indeed said some words which proved that the conversation she had had with the cardinal had fallen into others’ ears; but she could not suppose that he had dug a counter-mine so promptly and so boldly. She feared, rather, that her preceding operations in England had been discovered. Buckingham might have guessed that it was she who had cut off the two studs, and avenged himself for that little treachery. But Buckingham was incapable of going to any excess against a woman, particularly if that woman was supposed to have acted from a feeling of jealousy.
This supposition appeared to her the most reasonable: it seemed to her that they wanted to revenge the past, and not to anticipate the future. At all events, she congratulated herself on having fallen into the hands of her brother-in-law, with whom she reckoned she could come off easily, rather than into the hands of an avowed and intelligent enemy.
“Yes, let us talk, brother,’ said she, with a kind of springhtliness, now that she had decided to get from the conversation, in spite of all dissimulation Lord Winter could bring to it, the information of which she stood in need for regulating her future conduct.
“So you decided to come to England again,” said Lord Winter, “in spite of the resolutions you so often manifested in Paris never to set your foot again on British soil?”
Milady replied to this question by another question.
“Before everything,” said she, “tell me how you had me watched so closely as to be aware in advance not only of my arrival, but, still more, of the day, the hour, and the port at which I should arrive?”
Lord Winter adopted the same tactics as milady, thinking that as his sister-in-law employed them they must be good.
“But tell me, my dear sister,” replied he—“what have you come to do in England?”
“Why, to see you,” replied milady, without knowing how much she aggravated by this reply the suspicions which D’Artagnan’s letter had given birth to in her brother-in-law’s mind, and only desiring to gain her auditor’s good-will by a falsehood.
“Ah, to see me?” said Lord Winter craftily.
“Yes.”
“Well, I reply that your every wish should be fulfilled, and that we should see each other every day.”
“Am I, then, to remain here eternally?” demanded milady in some terror.
“Yes, at present,” continued Lord Winter, “you will remain in this castle. The walls of it are thick, the doors strong, and the bars solid. Moreover, your window opens immediately over the sea. The men of my crew, who are devoted to me for life and death, mount guard around this apartment, and watch all the passages leading to the castle yard. The officer who commands alone here in my absence you have seen, and therefore already know him. As you must have observed, he knows how to obey orders, for I am sure you did not come from Portsmouth here without trying to make him speak. What do you say to that? Could a statue of marble have been more impassive and more mute? You have already tried the power of your seductions on many men, and, unfortunately, you have always succeeded. Try them on him. By God! if you succeed with him, I pronounce you the demon himself.”
He went to the door and opened it hastily.
“And now, madame, try to make your peace with God, for you are judged by men!”
Milady let her head sink, as if she felt herself crushed by this sentence. Lord Winter went out and shut the door.
An instant after, the heavy step of a marine was heard in the corridor, serving on sentinel’s duty, with his axe in his girdle and his musket on his shoulder.
Milady remained for some minutes in the same position, for she thought they might perhaps be watching her through the keyhole. Then she slowly raised her head, and assuming a formidable expression of menace and defiance, ran to the door to listen, looked out of her window, and returning to bury herself again in her large armchair, she reflected.
Chapter 46 - Officer
Meanwhile the cardinal was anxiously looking for news from England; but no news arrived, except what was annoying and threatening.
One day when the cardinal, oppressed by mortal weariness of mind, hopeless of the negotiations with the city, without news from England, had gone out with no other aim than to ride, accompanied only by Cahusac and La Houdinière, skirting the beach and mingling the immensity of his dreams with the immensity of the ocean, he came ambling along to a hill, from the top of which he perceived, behind a hedge, reclining on the sand, in the sun so rare at this period of the year, seven men surrounded by empty bottles. Four of these men were our musketeers, preparing to listen to a letter one of them had just received. This letter was so important that it caused them to abandon their cards and their dice on a drumhead.
The other three were occupied in uncorking an enormous demijohn of Collioure wine; they were the gentlemen’s lackeys.
The cardinal was, as we have said, in very low spirits; and when he was in that state of mind, nothing increased his depression so much as gaiety in others. Besides, he had another strange fancy, which was always to believe that the causes of his sadness created the gaiety of others. Making a sign to La Houdinière and Cahusac to stop, he alighted from his horse, and went toward these suspected merry-makers, hoping, by means of the sand which deadened the sound of his steps, and of the hedge which concealed his approach, to catch some words of a conversation which seemed so interesting. Ten paces from the hedge he recognized the Gascon prattle, and as he had already perceived that these men were musketeers, he had no doubt that the three others were those called “the inseparables”—that is to say, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis.
As may well be supposed, his desire to hear the conversation was increased by his discovery. His eyes took on a strange expression, and with the step of a cat he advanced toward the hedge. But he had not been able as yet to make out anything more than vague syllables without any positive sense, when a short, sonorous cry made him start, and attracted the attention of the musketeers.
“Officer!” cried Grimaud.
“I believe you are speaking, you rascal!” said Athos, rising on his elbow, and fascinating Grimaud with his flashing eyes.
Grimaud therefore said not a word more, but contented himself with pointing his index finger at the hedge, signifying by this gesture the presence of the cardinal and his escort.
With a single bound the musketeers were on their feet, and saluted respectfully.
The cardinal seemed furious.
“It seems that the musketeers set sentinels for themselves,” said he. “Are the English expected by land, or do the musketeers consider themselves officers of rank?”
“Monseigneur,” replied Athos, for amidst the general alarm he alone had preserved that calmness and sang froid which never forsook him —“monseigneur, the musketeers, when they are not on duty, or when their duty is over, drink and play at dice, and they are officers of very high rank to their lackeys.”
