“Kind! to make you enter into such a bargain!”
“Listen! I wished to leave the cardinal’s service. M. d’Herblay spoke on my behalf to Louviere and Tremblay—they objected; I wished to have the appointment very much, for I knew what it could be made to produce; in my distress I confided in M. d’Herblay, and he offered to become my surety for the different payments.”
“You astound me! Aramis become your surety?”
“Like a man of honor; he procured the signature; Tremblay and Louviere resigned their appointments, I have paid every year twenty-five thousand francs to these two gentlemen; on the thirty-first of May every year, M. d’Herblay himself comes to the Bastile, and brings me five thousand pistoles to distribute between my crocodiles.”
“You owe Aramis one hundred and fifty thousand francs, then?”
“That is the very thing which is the cause of my despair, for I only owe him one hundred thousand.”
“I don’t quite understand you.”
“He came and settled with the vampires only two years. To-day, however, is the thirty-first of May, and he has not been yet, and to-morrow, at midday, the payment falls due; if, therefore, I don’t pay to-morrow, those gentlemen can, by the terms of the contract, break off the bargain; I shall be stripped of everything; I shall have worked for three years, and given two hundred and fifty thousand francs for nothing, absolutely for nothing at all, dear M. d’Artagnan.”
“This is very strange,” murmured D’Artagnan.
“You can now imagine that I may well have wrinkles on my forehead, can you not?”