Part 44

It was one of those beautiful and rare winter days when England remembers that there is a sun. The pale, yet still splendid, star was setting on the horizon, tingeing both sky and sea with bands of fire and casting upon the towers and old houses of the city a last golden ray that made the panes sparkle like the reflection of a fire. Milady, breathing that ocean air, sharper and more balsamic as land approached, contemplating all the power of those preparations she was charged to destroy, all the power of that army she was to fight alone—she, a woman—with a few sacks of gold, mentally compared herself to Judith, the terrible Jewess, when she entered the camp of the Assyrians and saw the enormous mass of chariots, horses, men, and arms that a gesture of her hand was to dissipate like a cloud of smoke.

They entered the roadstead; but as they were preparing to drop anchor, a small cutter, formidably armed, approached the merchant vessel, giving itself out as a coast guard, and had its boat lowered, which headed toward the ladder. This boat contained an officer, a boatswain, and eight rowers; the officer alone came on board, where he was received with all the deference that the uniform inspires.

The officer conversed for a few moments with the captain, had him read a paper he was carrying, and, by order of the merchant captain, the entire ship's crew, sailors and passengers, was summoned on deck.

When this sort of roll call was made, the officer inquired aloud of the brig's point of departure, its course, its landfalls, and to all the questions the captain answered without hesitation or difficulty. Then the officer began to review all the persons one after another, and, stopping before Milady, regarded her with great care, but without addressing a single word to her.

Then he returned to the captain, said a few more words to him, and, as if henceforth the vessel were to obey him, he commanded a maneuver that the crew immediately executed. Then the vessel set off again, still escorted by the little cutter, which sailed alongside it, threatening its flank with the mouths of its six cannon, while the boat followed in the ship's wake, a small point near the enormous mass.

During the examination the officer had made of Milady, Milady, as may be imagined, had on her side devoured him with her gaze. But whatever habit this woman with the flaming eyes had of reading the hearts of those whose secrets she needed to divine, she found this time a face of such impassibility that no discovery followed her investigation. The officer who had stopped before her and had silently studied her with such attention might be twenty-five or twenty-six years old, had a white face with light blue eyes, rather deep-set; his mouth, fine and well shaped, remained motionless in its correct lines; his chin, vigorously pronounced, denoted that strength of will which, in the vulgar British type, is ordinarily only obstinacy; a somewhat receding forehead, as befits poets, enthusiasts, and soldiers, was scarcely shaded by short, sparse hair, which, like the beard covering the lower part of his face, was of a beautiful dark chestnut color.

When they entered the port, it was already night. The fog further thickened the darkness and formed around the beacons and lanterns of the jetties a circle like that which surrounds the moon when the weather threatens to become rainy. The air one breathed was gloomy, damp, and cold.

Milady, that woman so strong, felt herself shiver in spite of herself.

The officer had Milady's packages pointed out, had her luggage carried into the boat, and when this operation was done, he invited her to descend into it herself, offering her his hand.

Milady looked at this man and hesitated.

"Who are you, sir," she asked, "who have the kindness to concern yourself so particularly with me?"

"You must see, madame, by my uniform; I am an officer of the English navy," replied the young man.

"But, after all, is it the custom for officers of the English navy to put themselves at the orders of their compatriots when they land at a port of Great Britain, and to carry gallantry so far as to conduct them ashore?"

"Yes, Milady, it is the custom, not out of gallantry, but out of prudence, that in time of war strangers are conducted to a designated inn, so that until full information about them is obtained, they remain under the surveillance of the government."

These words were pronounced with the most exact politeness and the most perfect calm. However, they did not have the gift of convincing Milady.

"But I am not a stranger, sir," she said, with the purest accent that had ever resounded from Portsmouth to Manchester, "my name is Lady Clarick, and this measure—"

"This measure is general, Milady, and you would attempt in vain to evade it."

"Then I shall follow you, sir."

And accepting the officer's hand, she began to descend the ladder, at the foot of which the boat awaited her. The officer followed her; a large cloak was spread at the stern; the officer made her sit on the cloak and sat beside her.

"Row," he said to the sailors.

The eight oars fell into the sea, making but one sound, striking but one stroke, and the boat seemed to fly over the surface of the water.

In five minutes they touched land.

The officer jumped onto the quay and offered his hand to Milady.

A carriage was waiting.

"Is this carriage for us?" asked Milady.

"Yes, madame," replied the officer.

"Is the inn very far, then?"

"At the other end of the city."

"Let us go," said Milady.

And she resolutely got into the carriage.

The officer saw to it that the packages were carefully tied behind the coach, and when this operation was finished, he took his place near Milady and closed the door.

Immediately, without any order being given and without needing to be told his destination, the coachman set off at a gallop and plunged into the streets of the city.

Such a strange reception was ample matter for reflection for Milady; so, seeing that the young officer seemed by no means disposed to start a conversation, she leaned back in a corner of the carriage and reviewed one after another all the suppositions that presented themselves to her mind.

However, after a quarter of an hour, astonished at the length of the road, she leaned toward the door to see where she was being taken. No more houses were visible; trees appeared in the darkness like great black ghosts running one after another.

Milady shuddered.

"But we are no longer in the city, sir," she said.

The young officer remained silent.

"I will go no further, if you do not tell me where you are taking me; I warn you, sir!"

This threat obtained no response.

"Oh! this is too much!" cried Milady, "help! help!"

Not a voice answered hers; the carriage continued to roll rapidly; the officer seemed a statue.

Milady looked at the officer with one of those terrible expressions, peculiar to her face, which so rarely missed their effect; anger made her eyes sparkle in the darkness.

The young man remained impassive.

Milady tried to open the door and throw herself out.

"Take care, madame," said the young man coldly, "you will kill yourself by jumping."

Milady sat back down, foaming; the officer leaned forward, looked at her in turn, and seemed surprised to see that face, so beautiful a short while ago, convulsed with rage and become almost hideous. The astute creature understood that she was ruining herself by thus revealing her soul; she smoothed her features, and in a plaintive voice:

"In the name of Heaven, sir! tell me whether it is to you, to your government, or to an enemy that I must attribute the violence being done to me?"

"No violence is being done to you, madame, and what is happening to you is the result of a very simple measure that we are forced to take with all who land in England."

"Then you do not know me, sir?"

"This is the first time I have had the honor of seeing you."

"And, upon your honor, you have no cause for hatred against me?"

"None, I swear to you."

There was so much serenity, composure, even gentleness in the young man's voice that Milady was reassured.

Finally, after about an hour's drive, the carriage stopped before an iron gate that closed a sunken road leading to a castle severe in form, massive and isolated. Then, as the wheels turned on fine sand, Milady heard a vast roaring, which she recognized as the sound of the sea breaking against a steep coast.

The carriage passed under two archways, and finally stopped in a dark, square courtyard; almost immediately the carriage door opened, the young man jumped lightly to the ground and offered his hand to Milady, who leaned on it, and descended in turn with considerable calm.

"Still," said Milady, looking around her and then turning her eyes back to the young officer with the most gracious smile, "I am a prisoner; but it will not be for long, I am sure," she added, "my conscience and your politeness, sir, are my guarantees."

Flattering as the compliment was, the officer replied nothing; but, drawing from his belt a small silver whistle like those used by boatswains on warships, he whistled three times, on three different modulations: then several men appeared, unharnessed the steaming horses, and led the carriage away into a coach-house.

Then the officer, always with the same calm politeness, invited his prisoner to enter the house. She, always with the same smiling face, took his arm and entered with him through a low, arched door which, through a vault lit only at the far end, led to a stone staircase winding around a stone newel; then they stopped before a massive door which, after the insertion into the lock of a key that the young man carried on him, rolled heavily on its hinges and gave access to the chamber destined for Milady.

With a single glance, the prisoner took in the apartment down to its smallest details.

It was a room whose furnishings were at once very proper for a prison and very severe for a free man's dwelling; however, bars on the windows and external bolts on the door decided the case in favor of the prison.

For an instant, all the strength of soul of that creature, though tempered at the most vigorous sources, abandoned her; she fell into an armchair, crossing her arms, lowering her head, and expecting at any moment to see a judge enter to interrogate her.

But no one entered, except two or three marines who brought the trunks and boxes, deposited them in a corner, and withdrew without speaking.

The officer presided over all these details with the same calm that Milady had constantly seen in him, not pronouncing a word himself, and being obeyed by a gesture of his hand or a blow of his whistle.

It might have been said that between this man and his inferiors spoken language did not exist or had become useless.

At last Milady could bear it no longer; she broke the silence:

"In the name of Heaven, sir!" she cried, "what does all this that is happening mean? Fix my uncertainties; I have courage for any danger I foresee, for any misfortune I understand. Where am I and what am I here? Am I free, why these bars and these doors? Am I a prisoner, what crime have I committed?"

"You are here in the apartment destined for you, madame. I received the order to go and fetch you at sea and to conduct you to this castle: that order, I have fulfilled it, I believe, with all the rigidity of a soldier, but also with all the courtesy of a gentleman. There ends, at least for the present, the charge I had to discharge toward you; the rest concerns another person."

"And that other person, who is he?" asked Milady; "can you not tell me his name?...?"

At that moment a great jingling of spurs was heard on the stairs; a few voices passed and died away, and the sound of a single footstep drew near the door.

"That person, here he is, madame," said the officer, clearing the passage 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 was without a hat, wore a sword at his side, and crumpled a handkerchief between his fingers.

Milady thought she recognized that shadow in the shadow; she leaned on one hand on the arm of her chair, and thrust her head forward as if to meet a certainty.

Then the stranger advanced slowly; and as he advanced, entering the circle of light cast by the lamp, Milady involuntarily drew back.

Then, when she had no more doubt:

"What! my brother!" she cried, at the height of stupefaction, "it is you?"

"Yes, fair lady!" replied Lord de Winter, making a bow half courteous, half ironical, "myself."

"But then, this castle?"

"Is mine."

"This room?"

"Is yours."

"I am then your prisoner?"

"Pretty much."

"But that is a frightful abuse of force!"

"No big words; let us sit down and talk quietly, as befits a brother and sister."

Then, turning toward the door, and seeing that the young officer awaited his final orders:

"That is well," he said, "I thank you; now leave us, Mr. Felton."

CHAPTER L. CONVERSATION BETWEEN A BROTHER AND SISTER

During the time that Lord de Winter took to close the door, push a shutter, and draw a seat near his sister-in-law's armchair, Milady, pensive, plunged her gaze into the depths of possibility, and discovered the whole plot that she had not even been able to glimpse, as long as she was ignorant into whose hands she had fallen. She knew her brother-in-law as a good gentleman, a frank hunter, an intrepid gambler, enterprising with women, but of inferior strength to her in the matter of intrigue. How had he been able to discover her arrival? have her seized? Why was he detaining her?

Athos had indeed said a few words to her that proved that the conversation she had had with the cardinal had fallen upon strange ears; but she could not admit that he could have dug a counter-mine so prompt and so bold.

She rather feared that her previous operations in England had been discovered. Buckingham might have guessed that it was she who had cut the two diamond studs, and might be avenging that little treachery; but Buckingham was incapable of any excess against a woman, especially if that woman was supposed to have acted out of jealousy.

This supposition seemed to her the most probable; it seemed to her that they wanted to avenge the past, and not to forestall the future. However, in any case, she congratulated herself on having fallen into the hands of her brother-in-law, whom she hoped to get the better of easily, rather than into those of a direct and intelligent enemy.

"Yes, let us talk, my brother," she said with a sort of playfulness, determined as she was to draw from the conversation, despite all the dissimulation that Lord de Winter might bring to it, the explanations she needed to regulate her future conduct.

"You have then decided to return to England," said Lord de Winter, "despite the resolution you so often manifested to me in Paris never to set foot again on the soil of Great Britain?"

Milady answered one question with another question.

"First of all," she said, "tell me how you had me watched so strictly that you were forewarned not only of my arrival, but also of the day, the hour, and the port where I arrived."

Lord de Winter adopted the same tactic as Milady, thinking that since his sister-in-law employed it, it must be the right one.

"But tell me yourself, my dear sister," he resumed, "what you have come to do in England."

"But I come to see you," resumed Milady, not knowing how much she aggravated, by this answer, the suspicions that d'Artagnan's letter had aroused in her brother-in-law's mind, and wishing only to gain her listener's goodwill by a lie.

"Ah! to see me?" said Lord de Winter slyly.

"Doubtless, to see you. What is there astonishing in that?"

"And you have, in coming to England, no other purpose than to see me?"

"No."

"Thus, it is for me alone that you have taken the trouble to cross the Channel?"

"For you alone."

"Pest! what tenderness, sister!"

"But am I not your nearest relative?" asked Milady in the most touching tone of naivete.

"And even my sole heiress, are you not?" said Lord de Winter in his turn, fixing his eyes on those of Milady.

Whatever power she had over herself, Milady could not help starting, and since, in pronouncing the last words he had spoken, Lord de Winter had laid his hand on his sister's arm, this start did not escape him.

Indeed, the blow was direct and deep. The first idea that came to Milady's mind was that she had been betrayed by Ketty, and that the latter had told the baron of that interested aversion of which she had imprudently let signs escape before her maid; she also recalled the furious and imprudent outburst she had made against d'Artagnan, when he had saved her brother-in-law's life.

"I do not understand, my lord," she said, to gain time and make her adversary speak. "What do you mean? and is there some hidden meaning beneath your words?"

"Oh! my God, no," said Lord de Winter with apparent good nature; "you have a desire to see me, and you come to England. I learn of this desire, or rather I suspect that you feel it, and in order to spare you all the bother of a night arrival in a port, all the fatigue of a landing, I send one of my officers to meet you; I put a carriage at his orders, and he brings you here to this castle, of which I am governor, where I come every day, and where, so that our mutual desire to see each other may be satisfied, I have a room prepared for you. What is there in all that I am saying that is more astonishing than what you have told me?"

"No, what I find astonishing is that you were forewarned of my arrival."

"That is however the simplest thing, my dear sister: did you not see that the captain of your little vessel had, upon entering the roadstead, sent ahead, and in order to obtain his entry into the port, a small boat carrying his log book and his crew register? I am the commandant of the port, this book was brought to me, I recognized your name. My heart told me what your mouth has just confided to me, that is to say, with what purpose you were exposing yourself to the dangers of so perilous a sea, or at least so fatiguing at this moment, and I sent my cutter to meet you. You know the rest."

Milady understood that Lord de Winter was lying, and was only the more frightened.

"My brother," she continued, "is it not Lord Buckingham that I saw on the jetty, in the evening, upon arriving?"

"Himself. Ah! I understand that his sight struck you," resumed Lord de Winter: "you come from a country where they must concern themselves greatly with him, and I know that his armaments against France greatly preoccupy your friend the Cardinal."

"My friend the Cardinal!" cried Milady, seeing that on this point as on the other, Lord de Winter seemed informed of everything.

"Is he not then your friend?" resumed the baron negligently; "ah! pardon, I thought he was; but we will return to His Grace the Duke later, let us not stray from the sentimental turn the conversation had taken: you came, you said, to see me?"

"Yes."

"Well, I have answered you that you would be served to your liking and that we would see each other every day."

"Am I then to remain eternally here?" asked Milady with a certain fright.

"Do you find yourself badly lodged, sister? ask for whatever you lack, and I will hasten to have it given you."

"But I have neither my maids nor my servants—"

"You shall have all that, madame; tell me on what footing your first husband had established your household; although I am only your brother-in-law, I will establish you on a similar footing."

"My first husband!" cried Milady, looking at Lord de Winter with wild eyes.

"Yes, your French husband; I am not speaking of my brother. However, if you have forgotten him, as he is still alive, I could write to him and he would send me information on this subject."

A cold sweat beaded on Milady's forehead.

"You are jesting," she said in a hollow voice.

"Do I look it?" asked the baron, rising and stepping back.

"Or rather you are insulting me," she continued, pressing the two arms of the armchair with her clenched hands and raising herself on her wrists.

"Insult you, I!" said Lord de Winter with contempt; "truly, madame, do you think that possible?"

"Truly, sir," said Milady, "you are either drunk or mad; leave and send me a woman."

"Women are very indiscreet, sister! Could I not serve you as a lady's maid? in that way all our secrets would remain in the family."

"Insolent!" cried Milady, and, as if moved by a spring, she bounded upon the baron, who awaited her with impassibility, but with one hand however on the hilt of his sword.

"Ah! ah!" said he, "I know you have a habit of assassinating people, but I will defend myself, I warn you, even against you."

"Oh! you are right," said Milady, "and you seem to me cowardly enough to lay hands on a woman."

"Perhaps I am; moreover I would have my excuse: my hand would not be the first man's hand that had been laid upon you, I imagine."

And the baron indicated with a slow, accusing gesture Milady's left shoulder, which he almost touched with his finger.

Milady uttered a low roar, and recoiled into the corner of the room, like a panther that wants to back into a corner to spring.

"Oh! roar as much as you like," cried Lord de Winter, "but do not try to bite, for I warn you, the thing would turn to your disadvantage: there are no attorneys here to settle successions in advance, there is no errant knight to come and pick a quarrel with me for the fair lady I hold prisoner; but I have ready judges who will dispose of a woman shameless enough to come and slip, a bigamist, into the bed of Lord de Winter, my elder brother, and those judges, I warn you, will send you to an executioner who will make both your shoulders alike."

Milady's eyes flashed such lightning that, although he was a man and armed before an unarmed woman, he felt the chill of fear creep to the bottom of his soul; he continued nevertheless, but with increasing fury:

“Stories of the world, in your language.”