“I can answer for it they do not.”
“Well, we won’t speak of it any more, then;” and Planchet took his place in D’Artagnan’s suite with that sublime confidence he had always had in his master, which even fifteen years of separation had not destroyed.
They had traveled onward about half a mile when Planchet came close up to D’Artagnan.
“Stop, sir, look yonder,” he whispered; “don’t you see in the darkness something pass by, like shadows? I fancy I hear horses’ feet.”
“Impossible!” returned D’Artagnan. “The ground is soaking wet; yet I fancy, as thou sayest, that I see something.”
At this moment the neighing of a horse struck his ear, coming through darkness and space.
“There are men somewhere about, but that’s of no consequence to us,” said D’Artagnan; “let us ride onward.”
At about half-past eight o’clock they reached the first houses in Noisy; every one was in bed and not a light was to be seen in the village. The obscurity was broken only now and then by the still darker lines of the roofs of houses. Here and there a dog barked behind a door or an affrighted cat fled precipitately from the midst of the pavement to take refuge behind a pile of faggots, from which retreat her eyes would shine like peridores. These were the only living creatures that seemed to inhabit the village.
Toward the middle of the town, commanding the principal open space, rose a dark mass, separated from the rest of the world by two lanes and overshadowed in the front by enormous lime-trees. D’Artagnan looked attentively at the building.
“This,” he said to Planchet, “must be the archbishop’s chateau, the abode of the fair Madame de Longueville; but the convent, where is that?”