The King during these remarks was walking hurriedly to and fro, his hand thrust into the breast of his coat, his head haughtily raised, his eyes blazing with wrath. “Monsieur,” he cried suddenly, “if I acted towards you as the King, you would be already punished; but I am only a man, and I have the right to love in this world every one who loves me,- a happiness which is so rarely found.”
“You cannot pretend to such a right as a man any more than as a king, Sire; or if you intended to exercise that right in a loyal manner, you should have told M. de Bragelonne so, and not have exiled him.”
“I think I am condescending to dispute with you, Monsieur!” interrupted Louis XIV, with that majesty of air and manner which he alone was able to give to his look and his voice.
“I was hoping that you would reply to me,” said the count.
“You shall know my reply, Monsieur, very soon.”
“You already know my thoughts on the subject,” was the Comte de la Fere’s answer.
“You have forgotten you are speaking to the King, Monsieur. It is a crime.”
“You have forgotten you are destroying the lives of two men, Sire. It is a mortal sin.”
“Go!- at once!”
“Not until I have said to you: Son of Louis XIII, you begin your reign badly, for you begin it by abduction and disloyalty! My race- myself, too- are now freed from all that affection and respect towards you to which I bound my son by oath in the vaults of St. Denis, in the presence of the relics of your noble forefathers. You are now become our enemy, Sire; and henceforth we have nothing to do save with Heaven, our sole master. Be warned!”
“Do you threaten?”
“Oh, no!” said Athos, sadly; “I have as little bravado as fear in my soul. The God of whom I spoke to you is now listening to me. He knows that for the safety and honor of your crown I would even yet shed every drop of blood which twenty years of civil and foreign warfare have left in my veins. I can well say, then, that I threaten the King as little as I threaten the man; but I tell you, Sire, you lose two servants,- for you have destroyed faith in the heart of the father, and love in the heart of the son: the one ceases to believe in the royal word, the other no longer believes in the loyalty of man or the purity of woman; the one is dead to every feeling of respect, the other to obedience. Adieu!”
Thus saying, Athos broke his sword across his knee, slowly placed the two pieces upon the floor, and saluting the King, who was almost choking from rage and shame, quitted the cabinet.
Louis, who sat near the table, completely overwhelmed, spent several minutes in recovering himself, then suddenly rose and rang the bell violently. “Tell M. d’Artagnan to come here,” he said to the terrified ushers.
Chapter XX: After the Storm
OUR readers will doubtless have been asking themselves how it happened that Athos, of whom not a word has been said for some time past, arrived so very opportunely at court. Our claim, as narrator, being that we unfold events in exact logical sequence, we hold ourselves ready to answer that question.
Porthos, faithful to his duty as an arranger of affairs, had immediately after leaving the Palais-Royal set off to join Raoul at the Minimes in the Bois de Vincennes, and had related everything, even to the smallest details, which had passed between De Saint-Aignan and himself. He finished by saying that the message which the King had sent to his favorite would not probably occasion more than a short delay, and that De Saint-Aignan, as soon as he could leave the King, would not lose a moment in accepting the invitation which Raoul had sent him.
But Raoul, less credulous than his old friend, had concluded, from Porthos’s recital, that if De Saint-Aignan was going to the King, De Saint-Aignan would tell the King everything, and that the King would therefore forbid De Saint-Aignan to obey the summons he had received to the hostile meeting. The consequence of his reflections was that he had left Porthos to remain at the place appointed for the meeting, in the very improbable case that De Saint-Aignan would come there; and had urged Porthos not to remain there more than an hour or an hour and a half. Porthos, however, formally refused to assent to that, but on the contrary installed himself in the Minimes as if he were going to take root there, making Raoul promise that when he had been to see his father, he would return to his own apartments, in order that Porthos’s servant might know where to find him in case M. de Saint-Aignan should happen to come to the rendezvous.