The imprudent young man expected to see surprise mixed with shame—a slight storm resolving itself into tears. But he was strangely mistaken, and his error was of brief duration.
Pale and terrible, milady started up, repulsed D’Artagnan with a violent blow on the chest, and leaped from the bed. It was then almost broad daylight.
D’Artagnan held her back by her nightdress, of fine India muslin, in order to implore her pardon, but by a powerful and determined effort she struggled to escape. Then the cambric gave way, leaving her neck bare, and on one of her beautiful, white, round shoulders D’Artagnan, with an indescribable shock, recognized the fleur-de-lis, that indelible stamp imprinted by the executioner’s debasing hand.
“Great God!” cried D’Artagnan, loosing his hold of her nightrobe; and he remained on the bed, mute, motionless, and frozen.
But milady felt herself denounced by his very terror. Doubtless he had seen all. The young man now knew her secret, her terrible secret, of which every one, except him, was ignorant.
She turned on him, no longer a furious woman, but like a wounded panther.
“Ah, wretch,” she cried, “you have basely betrayed me! And what is worse, you know my secret. You shall die!”
And she flew to a little marquetry casket standing on the toilet-table, opened it with a feverish, trembling hand, took out of it a small gold-handled poniard with a sharp, slender blade, and then half-naked flung herself on D’Artagnan with one bound.
Though the young man was brave, as we have seen, he was terrified at her wild face, her horribly staring eyes, her pale cheeks, her bleeding lips. He crept over to the farther side of the bed as he would have done if a viper had been crawling toward him, and as his hand, covered with sweat, touched his sword, he drew it from the scabbard.
But without heeding the sword, milady tried to climb on the bed again so that she might stab him, nor did she desist till she felt the keen point at her throat.
She then tried to seize the blade with her hands; but D’Artagnan kept it free from her grasp, and while presenting the point, sometimes at her eyes, sometimes at her breast, he slid off the bed, designing to make his escape by the door leading to Kitty’s apartment.
Milady meantime kept rushing at him with horrible fury, screaming in a blood-curdling manner.
As all this, however, was like a duel, D’Artagnan soon began to recover himself.
“Very well, pretty lady, very well,” said he; “but, by the gods, if you don’t calm yourself, I will mark you with a second fleur-de-lis on one of those pretty cheeks!”
“Scoundrel! scoundrel!” howled milady.
But D’Artagnan, while approaching the door, kept all the time on the defensive.
At the noise they made, she in overturning the furniture in her efforts to get at him, he in screening himself behind the furniture to keep out of her reach, Kitty opened the door. D’Artagnan, who had constantly man?uvred to gain this door, was not more than three paces from it. With one spring he flew from milady’s chamber into the maid’s, and, quick as lightning, shut the door, against which he leaned with all his weight, while Kitty bolted it.
“Quick, quick, Kitty!” said D’Artagnan, in a low voice, as soon as the bolts were fast, “let me get out of the h?tel; for if we leave her time to turn round, she will have me killed by the servants!”
“But you can’t go out so,” said Kitty; “you have hardly any clothes on.”
“That’s true,” said D’Artagnan, then, for the first time, taking note of the costume in which he appeared—“that’s true. But dress me as well as you are able, only make haste. Think, my dear girl, it’s life and death!”
Kitty was but too well aware of that. In a moment she muffled him up in a flowered dress, a capacious hood, and a cloak. She gave him some slippers, which he put on his naked feet, then she conducted him downstairs. It was time. Milady had already rung her bell, and roused the whole h?tel. The porter had just opened the street door as milady, only half-dressed, was shouting down from the window,
“Don’t open the door!”