It was so difficult to make such a request without letting it signify, "Go, because she loves you!"
Then in the morning, when she had wakened from the tardy sleep that ended this night of agony, a chance accident, commonplace enough, but in which her piety saw something providential, gave her an unexpected excuse for pleading, not with the young man at a distance, but with Madame de Carlsberg herself and at once. While reading distractedly in bed one of those newspapers of the Riviera, journals of international snobbism which communicate information concerning all these arrant aristocrats, she discovered the arrival at Cairo, of M. Olivier du Prat, secretary of the Embassy, and his wife; and she rose at once to show Ely these two lines of mundane news, so insignificant, yet so full of menace for her.
"If they are at Cairo," she said to the Baroness, "it means that their Nile trip is over, and that they think of returning. What is the natural route for them? From Alexandria to Marseilles. And if he is so near his friend, this man will wish to see him."
"It is true," said Ely, her heart beating wildly as she read the letters of that name, Olivier du Prat.
"It is true," she repeated. "They will meet again. Was I not right last night?"
"See," cried Louise Brion, "what it would have been if you had not had thus far the strength to fight against your sentiment. See what it will be if you do not put an end to it forever."
And she continued describing with all the eloquence of her passionate friendship a plan of conduct which suddenly occurred to her as the wisest and most effectual.
"You must take this opportunity which is offered to you. You will never have a better one. You must have the young man come, and speak to him yourself about the purchase he made last night. Tell him that others have seen it; show him your astonishment at his indiscretion; tell him that his assiduity has been noticed. For the sake of your welfare and your reputation command him to go away. A little firmness for a few minutes and it will all be done. He is not what you paint him, what I feel him to be, if he does not obey your request. Ah! believe me, the one way to love him is to save him from this tragedy, which is not simply a far-off possibility, but an immediate and inevitable danger."
Ely listened, but made no reply. Worn out by the terrible emotion of her confidence on the previous night, she had no strength left to resist the tender suggestions which appealed to her love itself, to struggle against her love. There is, in fact, in these complete passions an instinctive and violent desire for extreme resolutions. When these sentiments cannot find satisfaction in perfect happiness, they obtain a kind of grateful relief in their absolute frustration. Filling our soul to the exclusion of all else, they bear it incessantly to one or the other of the two poles, ecstasy and despair, without resting for a moment between them. Having come to this stage of her passion, it followed of necessity, as Louise Brion had clearly seen, that the Baroness Ely should either become the young man's mistress, or that she should put between herself and him the insurmountable barrier of a separation before theliaison—secret romance of so many women, both virtuous and otherwise. Yes! how many women have thus, in a delirium of renouncement, dug an abyss between them and a secretly idolized being, who never suspects this idolatry or this immolation. To the innocent ones, the anticipation of the remorse which would follow their fault gives the requisite energy; the others, the culpable, feel, as Madame de Carlsberg felt so strongly, the inability to efface the past, and they prefer the exalted martyrdom of sacrifice to the intolerable bitterness of a joy forever poisoned by the atrocious jealousy of that indestructible past.
Another influence aided in overcoming the young woman's spirit of revolt. Stranger as she was to all religious faith, she did not, like her pious friend, attach anything providential to this commonplace accident,—a newspaper account of a diplomatist's voyage,—but had acquired, through her very incredulity, that unconscious fatalism which is the last superstition of the sceptic. The sight of these fine printed syllables, "Olivier du Prat," a few hours after the night's conversation, had filled her with that feeling of presentiment, harder to brave than real danger for certain natures, like hers, made up of decision and action.
"You are right," she answered, in the broken accent of an irremediable renunciation, "I will see him, I will speak to him, and all will be finished forever."
It was with this resolution, made in truth with the fullest strength of her heart, that she arrived at Cannes on the afternoon of the same day, accompanied by Madame Brion, who did not wish to leave her; and, as soon as she arrived, she had, almost under the dictation of her faithful friend, written and despatched the letter which overwhelmed Hautefeuille. She truly believed herself to be sincere in her resolution to separate from him, and yet if she had been able to read to the bottom of her heart, she might have seen, from a very trifling act, how fragile this resolution was, and how much she was possessed by thoughts of love. No sooner had she written to him from whom she wished to separate forever than, at the same place, and with the same ink, she wrote two letters to two persons of her acquaintance, in whose love-affairs she was the confidante, and to some extent the accomplice,—Miss Florence Marsh and the Marquise Andryana Bonnacorsi.
She invited them to lunch with her on the morrow, thus obeying a profound instinct which impels a woman who loves and suffers to seek the company of women who are also in love, with whom she may talk of sentimental things, of the happiness which warms them, who will pity her sorrow, if she tells them of it, who will understand her and whom she will understand. Usually, as she had said the night before, the hesitation of the sentimental and timid Italian woman fatigued her, and in the passion of the American girl for the Archduke's assistant, there was an element of deliberate positivism, which jarred upon her native impulsiveness. But the young widow and the young girl were two women in love, and that sufficed, in this season of melancholy, to make it delightful, almost necessary, to see them. She little thought that this impulsive and natural invitation would provoke a violent scene with her husband, or that a conjugal conflict would arise from it, whose final episode was to have a tragic influence upon the issue of that growing passion, which her reason had sworn to renounce.
Having arrived at Cannes at three o'clock in the afternoon, she had not seen him during the rest of the day. She knew that he had been with Marcel Verdier in the laboratory, nor was she surprised to see him appear at the dinner hour, accompanied by his aide-de-camp, Comte von Laubach, the professional spy of His Highness, without a sign of interest in her health, without a question as to how she had spent the past ten days.
The Prince had been in his youth one of the bravest and most handsome of the incomparable cavaliers of his country, and the old soldier was recognizable in the figure of this scientific maniac, which had remained slender in spite of the fact that he was approaching his sixtieth year, in the tone of command which his slightest accents retained, in his martial face, scarred by a sabre at Sadowa, in his long mustache of grizzly red. But what one never forgot after seeing the singular man was his eyes—eyes of an intense blue, very bright and almost savagely restless, under the pale, reddish brows of formidable thickness. The Archduke had the eccentric habit of always wearing, even with his evening dress, heavy laced shoes, which permitted him, as soon as the dinner was over, to go out on foot, accompanied sometimes by his aide-de-camp, sometimes by Verdier, for an endless nocturnal walk. He prolonged them at times till three o'clock in the morning, having no other means of gaining a little sleep for his morbid nerves. This extreme nervousness was betrayed by his delicate hands, burned with acids and deformed by tools of the laboratory, whose fingers twitched incessantly in uncontrollable movements.
From all his actions could be divined the dominant trait of his character, a moral infirmity for which there is no precise term, the inability to continue any sensation or to persist in any effort of the will. That was the secret of the singular uneasiness which this man, so distinguished in certain ways, imparted to those around him, and from which he was the first to suffer. One felt that in the hands of this strangely irritable person every enterprise would fail, and that a kind of inward and irresistible frenzy prevented him from putting himself in harmony with any environment, any circumstance, any necessity. This superior nature was incapable of submission to facts.
Perhaps the secret of his unbalanced condition lay in the fixed idea that he had been at one time so near the throne and had lost it forever, that he had seen irreparable faults committed in politics and in war, that he had known of them while they were taking place and had not been able to prevent them.
Thus at the beginning of the war of 1866 he had, it was said, planned a campaign which might have changed the face of Europe at this end of the century. Instead he had to risk his life to execute manœuvres whose certain failure he foresaw. Every year, on the anniversary of the famous battle at which he had been wounded, he became literally insane for forty-eight hours. He was equally so whenever he heard mentioned the name of some great revolutionary soldier.
The Archduke did not forgive himself for his weakness in continuing the benefits attached to his title and rank when his tastes for abstract theories and the bitterness of his blighted destiny had led him to embrace the worst convictions of anarchistic socialism. With all that, prodigiously learned, a great reader, and a great conversationalist, he seemed to take revenge upon his own inconsistencies in conduct and in action by the acuteness of his criticism. Never did his lips express admiration without some disparaging and cruel reservation. Only scientific research, with its impregnable certitudes, appeared to communicate to this disordered intelligence a little repose, and, as it were, a steadier equilibrium.
Since the time when his disagreements with his wife had resulted in that species of moral divorce imposed by higher authority, his researches had absorbed him more than ever.
Retired at Cannes, where he was kept by the beginning of an attack of asthma, he had worked so hard that he had transformed himself from an amateur into a professional, and a series of important discoveries in electricity had given him a semi-reputation among specialists. His enemies had spread abroad the report, which Corancez had echoed, that he had simply published under his own name the work of Marcel Verdier, a graduate of the École Normale, attached for some years to his laboratory. In justice to the Archduke, it must be said that this calumny had not lessened the enthusiasm and jealous affection which the strange man felt for his assistant. For the final trait of this being, so wavering, uncertain, and, in consequence, profoundly, passionately unjust, was that his only attachments were infatuations. The story of his relations with his wife was the same as with all the relations formed in a life made up of alternations between passionate sympathy and inordinate antipathy for the same persons, and for no other cause than that incapacity of self-control, an incapacity which had made him, with all his gifts, tyrannical, unamiable, and profoundly unhappy, and, to borrow a vulgar but too justifiable epigram from Corancez, the great Failure of the Almanach de Gotha.
Madame de Carlsberg had had too long an experience with her husband's character not to understand it admirably, and she had suffered too much from it to avoid being, on her side, exceedingly unjust toward him. A bad temper is of all faults the one that women are least willing to pardon in a man, perhaps because it is the most opposed to the most virile of virtues, steadfastness.
She was too keen not to discern in that tormented face the approaching storm, as sailors read the face of the sky and the sea.
When on this evening of her return to Cannes, she found herself sitting at the table in front of the Archduke, she easily divined that the dinner would not end without some of those ferocious words with which he relieved his ill temper. At the first glance she understood that he had another violent grievance against her. What? Had he already been informed by that infamous Judas, in his feline manner, of how she had conducted herself at the gambling-table the night before, and was he, the democratic prince, with one of his customary resumptions of pride, preparing to make her feel that such Bohemian manners were not becoming to their rank? Was he offended—this inconsistency would not have astonished her any more than the other—because she had stayed at Monte Carlo all the week, without sending a word, except the despatch to themaître d'hôtelto announce her return.
Her heart was so full of pain at the thought of her resolution that she felt that kind of insensibility which follows moral suffering. So she did not pay attention during the dinner to the fierce sallies with which the Archduke, addressing Madame Brion, abused in turn Monte Carlo and the women of fashion, the Frenchmen on the coast, and the foreign colony—the wealthy class, in short, and all society. The livery servants were moving silently about the table, and their knee-breeches, silk stockings, and powdered wigs lent a contrast of inexpressible irony to the words of the master of this princely house. The aide-de-camp, with a wheedling mixture of politeness and perfidy, replied to the witticisms of the Archduke in such a way as to exasperate them, while Madame Brion, growing more and more red, submitted to the assault of insolent sarcasms, with the idea that she was suffering for Ely, who scarcely paid the slightest attention to such whimsical outbursts as this:—
"Their pleasures are the measure of a society, and that is what I like on this coast. You see in all their perfection the folly and the infamy of the plutocrats.—Their wives? They amuse themselves like jades, and the men like blackguards.—The taxes, the laws, the magistrates, the army, the clergy—all this social machinery which works for the profit of the rich, accomplishes what? The protection of a gilded debauchery of which we have a perfect specimen on this coast.—I admire the naïveté of socialists, who, before an aristocracy of this kind, talk of reforms! A gangrenous limb should simply be burnt and cut off. But the great fault of modern revolutionists is their respect. Happily the weakness and folly of the ruling class are exposing themselves everywhere with such magnificent ingenuousness that the people will end by perceiving them, and when the millions of workingmen who nourish this handful of parasites make a move—a move—ah! we'll laugh, we'll laugh!—Science will make it so easy to prepare for action. Make all the children of the proletariat electricians and chemists, and in a generation the thing will be done."
Whenever he proffered declarations of this order the Archduke glared around him with a physiognomy so menacing that no one thought of smiling at his paradoxes, as comical as they were ineffectual in these opulent surroundings. Those who were acquainted with the secrets of contemporary history remembered that a legend, though calumnious, associated the name of the "Red Archduke" with a mysterious attempt made upon the life of the head of his own family. The sanguinary dream of a demagogic Cæsarism was too plainly visible in those eyes, which never looked at one without a menace, and one felt one's self to be in the presence of a tyrant whom circumstances had thwarted, but by so little that one trembled.
Usually after he had thus thrown out some sinister witticism no one replied, and the dinner continued in a silence of embarrassment and oppression, in which the disappointed despot revelled for a time. Then it occasionally happened that, having relieved his spleen, he would show the seductive side of his nature, his remarkable lucidity of mind, and his immense knowledge of actual facts. This evening he was doubtless tormented by some peculiar agitation; for he did not disarm until, just as they returned to the parlor, a remark of Madame de Carlsberg to Madame Brion brought forth an outburst which revealed the true cause for this terrible mood.
"We shall ask Flossie Marsh about that. She will lunch with us to-morrow," the Baroness had said.
"May I have five minutes' conversation with you?" suddenly demanded the Prince; and, leading her aside, careless of the witnesses of this conjugal scene, "You have invited Miss Marsh to lunch to-morrow?" he continued.
"Certainly," she replied. "Does that annoy Your Highness?"
"The house is yours," said the Archduke, "but you will not be surprised if I forbid Verdier to be there.—Don't interrupt.—For some time I have observed that you favor the project of this girl, who has taken it into her head to marry that boy. I do not wish this marriage to take place. And it shall not take place."
"I am ignorant of Miss Marsh's intentions," replied the Baroness, whose pale cheeks had grown red as she listened to her husband's discourse. "I invite her because she is my friend, and I am pleased to see her. As for M. Verdier, he seems to be of an age to know whether or not it is best for him to marry, without taking orders from any one. Besides, if he wishes to talk to Miss Marsh, he has no need of my intermediation, and if he was pleased to dine with her this evening—"
"He has dined with her this evening?" interrupted the Prince in his violent exasperation. "You know of it? Answer. Be frank."
"Your Imperial Highness may entrust other persons with this espionage," said the young woman, proudly, throwing at Monsieur von Laubach a glance of mingled contempt and defiance.
"Madame, no ironies," exclaimed the Archduke. "I will not endure them. I wish to give you a message for your friend, and if you do not deliver it I will speak to her myself. Tell her that I am aware of all her intrigues. I know, understand me, I know that she doesn't love this young man, but is an instrument in the service of her uncle, who has heard of a discovery that we have made, Verdier and I, in my residence," and he pointed in the direction of the laboratory. "It is a revolution in electric railroads, this invention; but to have it, it is necessary to have the inventor. I am neither to be bought nor married. No more is Verdier to be bought, but he is young, he is innocent, and Mr. Marsh has employed his niece. I perceive that he has brought you to side with him, and that you are working for him. Listen to what I say: Visit them, the uncle and the niece, as much as you like; join their parties at Monte Carlo and anywhere. If you likerastaquouères, that is your affair. You are free. But do not mix with this intrigue or you will pay dearly for it. I shall know the point to strike you in. With her uncle's millions, let this girl buy a name and a title, as they all do. There is no lack of English marquises, French dukes, and "Roman princes to sell their armorial devices, their ancestors, and their persons. But this man of millions, my friend, my pupil—hands off! That Yankee would turn his genius into a new dollar-coining machine. Never that; never, never. This is what I beg you to say to that girl; and no remonstrance from you.—Monsieur von Laubach."
"Monseigneur?"
Scarcely had the aide-de-camp time to take leave of the two ladies, so precipitately did the Archduke depart, with the air of a man who could no longer contain himself.
"And that is the secret of his fury," said Madame Brion, when her friend had repeated the brutal discourse of the Prince. "It is very unjust. But I am glad it is only that. I was so afraid he had heard of your play last night, and especially that imprudence. You are going to cancel your invitation to Miss Florence?"
"I?" said the Baroness, shrugging her shoulders, and her noble face wore an expression of disgust. "There was a time when this boorishness crushed me; a time when it revolted me. To-day I care no more than that for this brute and all his rage."
While saying this she had lit a Russian cigarette, with a long paper stem, at a little lamp used for this purpose, and from her contemptuous lips she blew a ring of smoke, which rose, opening and stretching out till it was dissipated in the warm and perfumed atmosphere of the little room. It was an atmosphere of intimacy surrounding the two friends, in this bright parlor, with the soft shades of its tapestry, the old paintings, the precious furniture, the vague green of the conservatory behind one of the glass doors, and everywhere flowers—the beautiful living flowers of the South, interwoven with threads of sunlight. Lamps, large and small, veiled in shades of supple silk, radiated through this retreat an attenuated light which blended with the clear, gay fire. Ah, the unfortunate would little envy these surroundings of the rich, if they but knew the secret agony for which these surroundings so often serve as a theatre! Ely de Carlsberg had sunk upon a lounge; she was saying:—
"What do you suppose these wretched things matter to me, with the pain you know is in my heart? I shall receive Flossie Marsh to-morrow, and for several days after, and the Archduke may be as angry as he likes. He says he knows the place to attack me. There is only one, and I am going to strike it myself. It is as though he should threaten to fight a duel with some one who has determined to commit suicide."
"But do you not think he is right about Marsh's calculations?" asked Madame Brion to arrest the crisis of the revolt which she saw approaching.
"It is quite possible," said the Baroness. "He is an American, and for those people a sentiment is a fact like any other, and is to be utilized as much as possible. But admitting that he speculates on Flossie's passion for a savant and an inventor, does the uncle's speculation prove that the sentiment of the niece is not sincere? Poor Flossie," she added in a tone that once more vibrated with her inward torment. "I hope she will not allow herself to be separated from the man she loves. She would suffer too much, and if it is necessary to help her not to lose him, I will help her."
These two successive cries betrayed such distress, and in consequence so much uncertainty still remaining in the wise resolution they had made together, that the faithful friend was terrified. The thought which she had had the night before, and had rejected as being too difficult to execute, the thought of appealing directly to the magnanimity of the young man, seized her again with excessive force. This time, she gave free rein to it, and the next morning a messenger, found at the station, delivered at the Hôtel des Palmes the following letter, which Pierre Hautefeuille opened and read after a long night of anxiety and cruel insomnia:—
"MONSIEUR—I trust to your delicacy not to seek to know who I am, or the motive which leads me to write you these lines. They come from one who knows you, although you do not know her, and who esteems you profoundly. I have no doubt that you will listen to this appeal made to your honor. A word will suffice to show you how much your honor is concerned in ceasing to compromise, most involuntarily, I am sure, the peace and the reputation of a person who is not free, and whose elevated situation is exposed to much envy. You were seen, Monsieur, the night before last, in the roulette hall at Monte Carlo, when you bought an article which that person had just sold to a merchant. If that were an isolated circumstance, it would not have such a dangerous significance. But you must yourself perceive that your attitude during the last few weeks could not have escaped malignant comments. The person concerned is not free. She has suffered a great deal in her private life, and the slightest injury done to the one upon whom her situation depends might provoke a catastrophe for her. Perhaps she will never tell you herself what pain your action, of which she has been informed, has caused her. Be an honest man, Monsieur, and do not try to enter into a life which you can only trouble. Do not compromise a noble-hearted woman, who has all the more right to your respect from the fact that she does not distrust you. Have, then, the courage to do the only thing that can prevent calumny, if it has not already begun, and that can put an end to it if it had begun. Leave Cannes, Monsieur, for some weeks. The day will come when you will be glad to think you have done your duty, your whole duty, and that you have given to a noble woman the one proof of devotion that you could be permitted to offer—a consideration for her welfare and her honor."
"MONSIEUR—I trust to your delicacy not to seek to know who I am, or the motive which leads me to write you these lines. They come from one who knows you, although you do not know her, and who esteems you profoundly. I have no doubt that you will listen to this appeal made to your honor. A word will suffice to show you how much your honor is concerned in ceasing to compromise, most involuntarily, I am sure, the peace and the reputation of a person who is not free, and whose elevated situation is exposed to much envy. You were seen, Monsieur, the night before last, in the roulette hall at Monte Carlo, when you bought an article which that person had just sold to a merchant. If that were an isolated circumstance, it would not have such a dangerous significance. But you must yourself perceive that your attitude during the last few weeks could not have escaped malignant comments. The person concerned is not free. She has suffered a great deal in her private life, and the slightest injury done to the one upon whom her situation depends might provoke a catastrophe for her. Perhaps she will never tell you herself what pain your action, of which she has been informed, has caused her. Be an honest man, Monsieur, and do not try to enter into a life which you can only trouble. Do not compromise a noble-hearted woman, who has all the more right to your respect from the fact that she does not distrust you. Have, then, the courage to do the only thing that can prevent calumny, if it has not already begun, and that can put an end to it if it had begun. Leave Cannes, Monsieur, for some weeks. The day will come when you will be glad to think you have done your duty, your whole duty, and that you have given to a noble woman the one proof of devotion that you could be permitted to offer—a consideration for her welfare and her honor."
In the famous story of Daniel DeFoe, that prodigious epitome of all the profound emotions of the human heart, there is a celebrated page which symbolizes the peculiar terror we feel at revelations that are absolutely, tragically unexpected. It is when Robinson sees with a shudder the print of a bare foot on the shore of his island.
A like convulsive trembling seized Pierre Hautefeuille as he read this letter, in which he saw the proof after twenty-four hours of incertitude—the indisputable overwhelming proof—that his action had been seen. By whom? But what mattered the name of the witness, now that Madame de Carlsberg was informed? His secret instinct had not deceived him. She had summoned him in order to reprove his indiscretion, perhaps to banish him forever from her presence. The certainty that the subject of this interview would be the act for which he now reproached himself as for a crime was so intolerable to the lover that he was seized with the idea of not going to the rendezvous, of never seeing again that offended woman, of fleeing anywhere far away. He took up the letter, saying, "It is true; there is nothing but to go!" Wildly, yet mechanically, as though a mesmeric suggestion had emanated from the written words on that little sheet of paper, he rang, ordered the timetable, his bill, and his trunk. If the express to Italy, instead of leaving late in the afternoon, had left at about eleven, perhaps the poor young man, in that hour of semi-madness, would have precipitately taken flight—an action which in a few hours was to appear as senseless as it now appeared necessary.
But he was forced to wait, and, the first crisis once over, he felt that he should not, that he could not go without explaining himself. He did not think of justifying himself. In his own eyes he was unpardonable. And yet he did not wish Madame de Carlsberg to condemn him without a plea for the delicacy of his intentions. What would he say to her, however? During the hours that separated him from his rendezvous, how many discourses he imagined without suspecting that the imperious force that attracted him to the Villa Helmholtz was not the desire to plead his cause! It was toward the sensation of her presence that he was irresistibly moving, the one idea around which everything centres in that heart of a lover, at which everything ends, from the most justifiable bitterness to the extremest timidity.
When the young man entered the parlor of the Villa Helmholtz, the excess of his emotions had thrown him into that state of waking somnambulism in which the soul and body obey an impulse of which they are scarcely conscious. This state is analogous to that of a resolute man passing through a very great danger—a similitude which proves that the two fundamental instincts of our nature, that of self-preservation and that of love, are the work of impersonal forces, exterior and superior to the narrow domain of our conscious will.
At such times our senses are at once super-acute and paralyzed,—super-acute to the slightest detail that corresponds to the emotion that occupies us, paralyzed for everything else. Thinking afterward of those minutes so decisive in his life, Hautefeuille could never remember what road he had taken from the hotel to the villa, nor what acquaintances he had met on the way.
He was not roused from this lucid dream until he entered the first and larger of the two parlors, empty at this moment. A perfume floated there, mingled with the scent of flowers, the favorite perfume of Madame de Carlsberg,—a composition of gray amber, Chypre, and Russian cologne. He had scarcely time to breathe in that odor which brought Ely's image so vividly before him when a second door opened, voices came to him, but he distinguished only one, which, like the perfume, went to his heart.
A few steps further and he was before Madame de Carlsberg herself, who was talking with Madame Brion, the Marquise Bonnacorsi, and the pretty Vicomtesse de Chésy. Further on, by the window near the conservatory, Flossie Marsh stood talking with a tall, blond young man, badly dressed, by no means handsome, yet revealing under his dishevelled hair the bright face of a savant, the frank smile, the clear meditative eyes. It was Marcel Verdier, whom the young girl had boldly forewarned by a note, in the American manner, and who, kept from lunching by the Archduke, had escaped for ten minutes from the laboratory in order to get to her.
Neither was the Baroness seated. She was pacing the floor in an effort to disguise the nervousness which was brought to its extreme by the arrival of him she awaited. But how could he have suspected this? How could he have divined from her classic, tailor-made walking dress of blue serge that she had not been able that morning to remain indoors? She had been within sight of his hotel, as he had so often been near the Villa Helmholtz, to see the house and to return with beating heart. And how could he have read the interest in the tender, blue eyes of Madame de Bonnacorsi, or in the soft brown eyes of Madame Brion a solicitude which to a lover capable of observing would have given reason for hope? Hautefeuille saw distinctly but one thing,—the uneasiness which appeared in Madame de Carlsberg's eyes and which he at once interpreted as a sign of measureless reproach. That was almost enough to deprive him of the force to answer in the commonplace phrases of politeness; he took a seat by the Marquise at the invitation of the romantic Italian, who was moved to pity by his visible emotion.
Meanwhile the gay Madame de Chésy, the pretty blonde, whose eyes were as lively as those of Andryana Bonnacorsi were deep, was smiling on the newcomer. This smile formed little dimples in her fresh, rounded face, while under the cap of otter skin, and with her light figure in a jacket of the same fur, her small hands playing with her muff, her slender feet in their varnished boots, she was one of those charming little images of frivolity toward whom the world does well to be indulgent, for their presence suffices to render gay and frivolous as themselves the most embarrassing occasions and the most ominous situations. With all that Madame Brion knew, and all that Madame de Bonnacorsi thought, and with all the feelings of the Baroness Ely and Pierre Hautefeuille, his arrival would have made the conversation by far too difficult and painful, if the light Parisienne had not continued her pretty bird-like babble:—
"You! I ought not to recognize you," she said to Pierre Hautefeuille. "For ten days," she added, turning to Madame de Carlsberg, "yes, ever since I dined beside him here the night before your departure; yes, for eight days, he has disappeared. And I did not write about it to his sister, who entrusted him to me. For she entrusted you to me, that is positive, and not to the young ladies of Nice and Monte Carlo."
"But I have not been away from Cannes for a week," Pierre replied, blushing in spite of himself.
Madame de Chésy's remark had pointed too plainly to the significant coincidence of his disappearance and the absence of Madame de Carlsberg.
"And what were you doing only last night at the table oftrente-et-quarante?" the young woman asked, teasingly. "If your sister knew of that; she who thinks her brother is basking prudently in the sun!"
"Don't scold him," interrupted Madame Bonnacorsi. "We brought him back with us."
"And you didn't finish telling us of your adventure," Madame de Carlsberg added.
The innocent teasing of Madame de Chésy had displeased her, because of the embarrassment it had caused in Hautefeuille. Now that he was there, living and breathing in the little room, she, too, felt that sensation of a loved one's presence which overpowers the strongest will. Never had the young man's face appeared more noble, his expression more attractive, his lips more delicate, his movements more graceful, his whole being more worthy of love. She discerned in his attitude that mingling of respect and passion, of timidity and idolatry irresistible to women who have suffered from the brutality of the male, and who dream of a love without hate, a tenderness without jealousy, voluptuous rapture devoid of violence.
She felt like crying to Yvonne de Chésy, "Stop. Don't you see that you are wounding him?" But she knew well that the thoughtless woman had not an atom of malice in her heart. She was one of the modern women of Paris, very innocent with a very bad tone, playing childishly with scandal, but very virtuous at heart—one of those imprudent women who sometimes pay with their honor and happiness for that innocent desire to astonish and amuse. And she continued, revealing her whole character in the anecdote which Hautefeuille's arrival had interrupted:—
"The end of my adventure? I have already told you that this gentleman took me for one of those demoiselles. At Nice, a little woman, dining all alone at a little table in a little restaurant. And he was doing his best to call my attention with his 'hum! hum!'—I felt like offering him gumdrops—and his 'waiter!' perfectly useless to make me turn. And I did turn, not much, just enough, to let him see me—without laughing. I wanted to badly enough! Finally I paid, rose, and left. He paid. He rose. He left. I didn't know what to do to get to the train. He followed me. I let myself be followed.—Have you ever wondered, when you think of those demoiselles, what they say to them to begin with?"
"Things which I think I should be rather afraid to hear," said Madame Bonnacorsi.
"I don't think so any longer," Madame de Chésy replied; "for it is just as stupid as what these gentlemen say to us. I stopped before the window of a florist. He stopped beside me on my left. I looked at the bouquets. He looked at the bouquets. I heard his old 'hum! hum!' He was going to speak. 'Those are fine roses, madame,' he said. 'Yes, monsieur, they are fine roses.' 'Are you very fond of flowers, madame?' I was just going to say, 'Yes, monsieur, I am very fond of flowers,' when a voice on my right called out, 'Well, Yvonne, you here?' And I was face to face with the Grand Duchess Vera Paulovna, and at the same moment I saw my follower turning the color of the roses we had been looking at together, as he, stammering, bowed before Her Imperial Highness, and she, with her Russian accent, 'My dear, allow me to present the Count Serge Kornow, one of my most charming compatriots.' Tableau!"
The laughing woman had scarcely finished her account of this childish prank, told with the inexplicable but well-known pleasure which women of society find in the contact with thedemi-monde, when the sudden entrance of a new personage into the parlor arrested the laughter or the reproof of the friends who had been listening to this gay narrative.
It was no other than the Archduke Henry Francis, his face red as it usually was, his feet in heavy laced shoes, his tall, thin body in a suit of dark clothes whose stains and grime spoke of the laboratory. Faithful to his threat of the previous night, he had prevented Verdier from lunching at the table of the Baroness; neither had he been present himself. The master and the pupil had eaten, as they often did, between two experiments, standing in their working aprons beside one of the furnaces. Then the Prince had retired, ostensibly for a siesta, it not appearing whether he had really wished to rest, or had planned a decisive proof, by which to measure the intimacy already existing between Miss Marsh and his assistant. He had, of course, not mentioned the name of any guest to Verdier, nor had Verdier spoken of this matter. So when on entering the parlor he saw the American girl and the young man talking familiarly apart, a look of veritable fury came into his face.
His eyes glared from one group to the other. If he had had the power at that moment, he would have put them all in irons, his wife because she was certainly to blame for this treason, Madame Brion and Madame Bonnacorsi because Madame de Carlsberg loved them; Madame de Chésy and Hautefeuille because they were the complacent witnesses of thistête-à-tête! In his imperious voice, which he could scarcely control, he called from one end of the room to the other:—
"Monsieur Verdier!"
Verdier turned. His shock at seeing the Prince, his humiliation at being summoned in this way before the woman he loved, his impatience with a yoke borne so long, were audible in the accent with which he answered:—
"Monseigneur?"
"I need you in the laboratory," said the Archduke; "please come, and come at once."
Now it was the eyes of the assistant that shone with fury. For a few moments the spectators of this odious scene could observe the tragic combat of pride and gratitude in the face of this superior man so unworthily humiliated. The Archduke had been peculiarly kind to the young man's family. A dog unjustly beaten has that way of looking at his master; will he fly at his throat or obey him? Doubtless Verdier, knowing the Archduke, feared to arouse the anger of that madman and a burst of insulting insolence against Florence Marsh. Perhaps, too, he thought that his position of an employee under obligations permitted but one dignified course—to oppose his own correctness of deportment to the unqualified roughness of his master.
"I am coming, monseigneur," he replied, and, taking Miss Marsh's hand for the first time, he dared to kiss it. "You will excuse me, mademoiselle," he said, "for having to leave you, but I hope to be able to call before long—mesdames, monsieur."
And he followed his redoubtable patron, who had departed as abruptly as he had entered, when he saw Verdier raise to his lips the hand of Miss Marsh.
Every one remained standing in silence, the silence that follows a gross breach of politeness, which the company cannot criticise aloud. Neither Madame Brion nor Madame Bonnacorsi nor Madame de Chésy dared to look at Madame de Carlsberg, who had faced the Prince with defiance and now trembled with anger under the affront which her husband had inflicted upon her by so demeaning himself at the very doors of her own parlor.
Florence Marsh, bending over a table, pretended to be hunting for the gloves, handkerchief, and smelling salts which she had left there, doubtless endeavoring to hide the expression of her face. As for Hautefeuille, ignorant of the under side of this society, except for the indiscretions shrewdly measured out by Corancez, knowing absolutely nothing of the relations between Marcel Verdier and the American girl, he would not have been a lover if he had not connected this outburst of the Prince with the fixed idea which possessed him. Beyond doubt the espionage had done its work. The Archduke had learned of his indiscretion. How much this indiscretion was to blame for the ferocious humor of Madame de Carlsberg's husband, the young man could not tell. What appeared to him but too certain, after he had met the terrible eyes of the Prince, was that his presence was odious to this man, and whence could arise that aversion if not from reports, alas, but too well founded.
Ah, how could he beg pardon of the loved one for having added new troubles to all her others? But the silence was broken by Madame de Chésy, who, after looking at her watch, kissed the Baroness and said:—
"I shall be late for the train. I dine at Monte Carlo to-night. But that will be all over after the carnival! Adieu, dear, dear Ely."
"And we, too, must go," said Madame Bonnacorsi, who had taken Miss Marsh's arm while Yvonne de Chésy was leaving, "I shall try to console this tall girl a little."
"But I have consoled myself," replied Florence, adding with a tone that was singularly firm: "One always succeeds in anything that one wishes, if it is wished enough. Shall we walk?" she asked of the Marquise.
"Then you will go through the garden, and I'll accompany you for a little air," said Madame Brion. And, kissing Ely, she said aloud: "Dear, I shall be back in a quarter of an hour," and added, in a whisper, "Have courage."
The door through which they passed into the garden closed. Ely de Carlsberg and Pierre Hautefeuille were at last alone. Both of them had long meditated over the words they should speak at this interview. Both had come to it with a fixed determination, which was the same; for she had decided to ask of him precisely what he had decided to offer,—his departure. But both had been confused by the unexpected scene they had witnessed.
It had moved the young woman especially in every fibre of her being; the wild spirit of revolt, which had been dormant under her growing love, rose again in her heart. Her wounded pride, soothed, almost healed by that gentle influence, suddenly reopened and bled. She felt anew the hardness of the fate which placed her, in spite of all, at the mercy of that terrible Prince, the evil genius of her youth.
As for Hautefeuille, all the legends gathered here and there about the tyranny and jealousy of the Archduke had suddenly taken shape before his eyes. That vision of the man and wife, face to face, one menacing, the other outraged, which had been so intolerable even to imagine, had been realized in an unforgetable picture during the five minutes that the Prince was in the room. That was enough to make him another man in this interview. Natures like his, pure and delicate, are liable to hesitations and indecisions which appear feeble, almost childish, so long as they are not confronted by a clear situation and a positive duty. It is enough for them to think they could be helpful to one they love in order to find in the sincerity of their devotion all the energy which they seem to lack. Pierre had felt that he could not even bear the look of Baroness Ely the moment he read in it the knowledge of his action. But now he was ready to tell her himself of this action, naturally, simply, in his irresistible and passionate desire to expiate his fault, if it were to blame for her suffering, which he had witnessed with an aching heart.
"Monsieur," she began, after that silence which precedes an explanation, and which is more painful than the explanation itself, "I have written you that we must have a conversation upon a rather serious and difficult subject. But I wish you to be assured of one thing at the start—if in the course of our conversation I have to say anything that pains you, know that it will cost me a great deal;" she repeated, "a great deal."
"Ah, madame," he answered, "you are afraid of being hard on me when you have the right to be so severe. What I wish to assure you of at the start is that your reproaches could not equal my self-reproach! Yes," he continued, in a tone of passionate remorse, "after what I have seen and understood, how can I ever forgive myself for having caused you an annoyance, even were it but the slightest. I understand it all. I know (from an anonymous letter that came with yours) that what I did the night before last was seen,—my purchase of the case which you had just sold. I know that you have been told of it, and I may divine what you think. I do not ask you to pardon an indiscretion whose gravity I should have felt at once. But then I didn't think. I saw the merchant take that case, which I had seen you use so often. The thought of that object, associated with your image in my mind—the thought of its being sold the next day in a shop of that horrible locality, and being bought, perhaps, by one of those frightful women like those around me near the table—yes, this idea was too strong for my prudence, too strong for my duty of reserve regarding you. You see, I do not attempt to justify myself. But perhaps I have the right to assure you that even in my thoughtless indiscretion there was still a respect for you."
"I have never doubted your delicacy," said Madame de Carlsberg.
She had been moved to the bottom of her heart by this naïve supplication. She felt so keenly the contrast of his youth and tenderness with the brutal manners of the Prince a quarter of an hour before in this same place. And then, as she had recognized the hand of Louise Brion in the anonymous letter, she was touched by that secret proof of friendship, and she attempted to bring the conversation to the point which her faithful friend had so strongly urged—timid and fruitless effort now to conceal the trouble in her eyes, the involuntary sigh that heaved her breast, the trembling of her heart in her voice.
"No," she repeated, "I have never doubted it. But you know yourself the malice of the world, and you see by the letter that was written to you that your action was observed."
"They will not write to me twice," the young man interrupted. "It was not only from that letter that I understood the world's malice and ferocity. What I perceived still more plainly a few moments ago," he added, with that melancholy firmness which holds back the tears of farewell, "was that my duty is clear now. My indiscretion the night before last, and others that I might commit, it is happily in my power to redeem, and I have come to tell you simply, madame, that I am going; going," he repeated. "I shall leave Cannes, and if you permit me to hope that I may gain your esteem by doing this I shall leave, not happy, but less sad."
"You are going!" Ely repeated. "You wish to go?" She looked the young man in the face. She saw that delicate physiognomy whose emotion touched her in a way she had never known before, and that fine mouth, still trembling from the words just spoken. The thought of being forever deprived of his presence suddenly became real to her with a vividness which was physically intolerable, and with this came the certainty of happiness if they should yield to the profound instinct that drew them toward each other. She abandoned her will to the force of her irresistible desire, and, feeling aloud, she said:—
"You shall not go, you cannot go. I am so lonely, so abandoned, so miserable. I have nothing genuine and true around me; nothing, nothing, nothing. And must I lose you?"
She rose with a passionate movement, which brought Hautefeuille also to his feet, and, approaching him, her eyes close to his, supernaturally beautiful with the light that illuminated her admirable face in the rush of her soul into her lips and eyes, she took his two hands in her hands, and, as though by this pressure and these words she would mingle her being with his, she cried:—
"No, you shall not leave me. We will not separate. That is not possible since you are in love with me, and I with you."
Fifteen days had passed since Madame de Carlsberg, in spite of her promises, her resolutions, her remorse, had confessed her passion to Pierre Hautefeuille. The date fixed for the cruise of the Jenny had arrived, and he and she were standing side by side on the deck of the yacht, which was bearing also the Marquise Bonnacorsi toward her fantastic marriage, and her confidante, Miss Marsh, and pretty Madame de Chésy and her husband for the entertainment of the Commodore. That was the nickname given by his niece to the indefatigable Carlyle Marsh, who, in truth, scarcely ever left the bridge, where he stood directing the course of the boat with the skill of a professional sailor.
This Marionville potentate would have had no pleasure in a carriage unless he drove it, or in a yacht unless he steered it. He said himself, without boasting:—
"If I should be ruined to-morrow I know twenty ways of making a living. I am a mechanic, coachman, carpenter, pilot."
On this afternoon, while theJennysailed toward Genoa, he was at his post on the bridge, in his gold braided hat, glass in hand, his maps open before him, and he directed the course with an attention as complete and scrupulous as though he had been occupied all his life in giving orders to sailors. He had to a supreme degree that trait common to all great workers,—the capacity for giving himself always and wholly to the occupation of the moment. And to him the vast sea, so blue and soft, whose calm surface scarcely rippled, was but a racecourse upon which to exercise his love of contest, of struggle, the one pleasure of the Anglo-Saxon. Five hundred yards to the right, ahead of theJenny, was a low, black yacht, with a narrower hull, steaming at full speed. It was theDalilah, of Lord Herbert Bohun. Farther ahead, on the left, another yacht was sailing in the same direction. This one was white, like theJenny, but with a wider beam. It was theAlbatross, the favorite plaything of the Grand Dukes of Russia. The American had allowed these two yachts to leave Cannes some time before him, with the intention, quickly perceived by the others, of passing them, and immediately, as it were, a tacit wager was made by the Russian prince, the English lord, and the American millionaire, all three equally fanatical of sport, each as proud of his boat as a young man of his horses or his mistress.
To Dickie Marsh, as he stood with his glass in his hand, giving orders to the men, the whole scene reduced itself to a triangle, whose corners were marked by the three yachts. He was literally blind to the admirable horizon that stretched before him; the violet Esterel, with the long, undulating line of its mountains, its dark ravines and jagged promontories, the port of Cannes and the mole, with the old town and the church rising behind it, all bathed in an atmosphere so transparent that one could distinguish every little window and its shutters, every tree behind the walls, the luxuriant hills of Grasse in the background, and along the bay the line of white villas set in their gardens; then the islands, like two oases of dark green, and suddenly the curve of another gulf, terminated by the solitary point of the Antibes. And the trees on this point, like those of the islands, bouquets of parasol pines, all bent in one direction, spoke of the eternal drama of this shore, the war of the mistral and the waves. But now the drama was suspended, giving place to the most intoxicating flood of light. Not a fleck of foam marred the immense sweep of liquid sapphire over which the Jenny advanced with a sonorous and fresh sound of divided water. Not one of those flaky clouds, which sailors call cattails, lined the radiant dome of the sky where the sun appeared to expand, dilate, rejoice in ether absolutely pure. It seemed as though this sky and sea and shore had conspired to fulfil the prophecy of the chiromancer, Corancez, upon the passage of the boat that was bearing his clandestinefiancée; and Andryana Bonnacorsi recalled that prediction to Flossie Marsh as they leaned on the deck railing, clothed in similar costumes of blue and white flannel—the colors of theJenny'sawning—and talked while they watched theDalilahdrawing nearer and nearer.
"You remember in the Casino at Monte Carlo how he foretold this weather from our hands, exactly this and no other. Isn't it extraordinary, after all?"
"You see how wrong you were to be afraid," replied Miss Marsh; "if he saw clearly in one case, he must have done so in the others. We are going to have a fine night on sea, and by one o'clock to-morrow we shall head for Genoa."
"Don't be so confident," said the Italian, extending her hand with two fingers crossed to charm away the evil fates; "you will bring us bad luck."
"What! with this sky, this sea, this yacht, these lifeboats?"
"How should I know? But suppose Lord Herbert Bohun decides simply to follow us to the end and go with us to Genoa?"
"Follow us to the end on theDalilahand we on theJenny? I should like to see him try it!" said the American. "See how we gain on him. But be careful, Chésy and his wife are coming in this direction. Well, Yvonne," she said to the pretty little Vicomtesse, blond and rosy in her dress of white serge, embroidered with the boat's colors, "you are not afraid to go so fast?"
"No," said Madame de Chésy, laughing; and, turning toward the bow, she drew in a long breath. "This air intoxicates me like champagne!"
"Do you see your brother, Marquise?" asked Chésy, pointing to one of the persons standing on the deck of theDalilah. "He is beside the Prince. They must not feel very well satisfied. And his terriers, do you see his terriers running around like veritable rats? I am going to make them angry. Wait." And making a trumpet of his hands he shouted these words, whose irony he did not suspect:—
"Ay, Navagero; can we do anything for you at Genoa?"
"He doesn't understand, or pretends not to," said Madame de Chésy. "But here's something he will understand. The Prince is not looking, is he?" And boyishly she stretched her two hands from her nose with the most impertinent gesture that a pretty woman ever made to a company containing a royal highness. "Ah! the Prince saw me," she cried, with a wild laugh. "Bah! he's such a good fellow! And if he doesn't like it," and she softly tapped her eye with the ends of her fingers, "et voilà!"
When the frolicsome Parisienne began this piece of disrespectful childishness the two yachts had come abreast of each other. For a quarter of an hour they went side by side, cutting through the water, propelled only by the force of their robust lungs of steel, vomiting from their chimneys two straight, black columns, which scarcely curved in the calm air; and behind them stretched a furrow of glaucous green over the blue water, like a long and moving path of emerald fringed with silver, and on it rolled and pitched a sailboat manned by two young men, sporting in the wake of the steamers.
On this wild race the deck was yet so motionless that the water did not tremble in the vases of Venetian glass placed on the table near a group of three women. The purple and saffron petals of the large roses slowly dropped upon the table. Beside the flowers, amid their perfume, Madame de Carlsberg was sitting. She had ungloved one of her beautiful hands to caress the bloom of the flowers, and she gazed, smiling and dreamily, from theDalilahto the luminous horizon, from her fellow-voyagers out to the vast sea, and at Hautefeuille standing, with Chésy, beside her, and turning to her incessantly. The breeze of the boat's motion revealed the slender form of the young man under his coat of navy blue and trousers of white flannel, and softly fluttered the supple red stuff of Baroness Ely's blouse and her broad tie of blackmousseline de soie, matched with the large white and black squares of her skirt. The young man and the young woman both had in their eyes a feverish joy in living that harmonized with the radiance of the beautiful afternoon. How little his smile—the tender and ready smile of a lover who is loved—resembled the tired laughter that the jokes of Corancez had won from him two weeks before. And she, with the faint rose that tinged her cheeks, usually so pale, with her half-opened lips breathing in the healthful odor of the sea and the delicate perfume of the flowers, with her calm, clear brow—how little she resembled the Ely of the villa garden, defying, under the stars of the softest Southern night, the impassive beauty of nature. Seated near her loved one, how sweet nature now appeared—as sweet as the perfume of the roses that her fingers deflowered, as caressing as the soft breeze, as intoxicating as the free sky and water! How indulgent she felt for the little faults of her acquaintances, which she had condemned so bitterly the other night! For the eternal hesitations of Andryana Bonnacorsi, for the positivism of Florence Marsh, for the fast tone of Yvonne Chésy, she had now but a complacent half-smile. She forgot to be irritated at the naïve and comic importance which Chésy assumed on board the boat. In his blue yachting cap, his little body stiff and straight, he explained the reasons of theJenny'ssuperiority over theDalilahand theAlbatross, with the technical words he had caught from Marsh, and he gave the orders for tea:—
"Dickie is coming down as soon as we pass the other yacht," he said, and, turning to a sailor, "John, tell thechefto have everything ready in a quarter of an hour;" then addressing Madame de Carlsberg: "You are uncomfortable here, Baroness. I told Dickie that he should change his chairs. He is so careless at times. Do you notice these rugs? They are Bokharas—magnificent! He bought five at Cairo, and they would have rotted on the lower deck if I had not discovered them and had them brought here from the horrible place where he left them. You remember? And these plants on deck — that is better, is it not? But has he taken too many cocktails this morning—See how close we are passing to the Albatross! Good evening, monseigneur."
And he saluted the Grand Duke—a kind of giant, with the broad, genial face of a moujik—who applauded the triumph of theJenny, calling out in his strong voice:—
"Next year I'll build another that will beat you!"
"Do you know I was frightened," said Chésy to Marsh, who, according to his promise, had descended from the bridge; "we just grazed theAlbatross!"
"I was very sure of the boat," Marsh continued; "but I should not have done it with Bohun. You saw how far I kept away from him. He would have cut our yacht in two. When the English see themselves about to be beaten, their pride makes them crazy, and they are capable of anything."
"That is just what they say of the Americans," gayly replied Yvonne de Chésy.
The pretty Parisienne was probably the only person in the world that the master of the Jenny would have permitted such a pleasantry. But Corancez had been right in what he said to Hautefeuille—when the malicious Vicomtesse was speaking Marsh could see his daughter. So he did not take offence at this epigram against his country, susceptible as he usually was to any denial that in everything America "beat the Old World."
"You are attacking my poor compatriots again," he said simply. "That is very ungrateful. All of them that I know are in love with you."
"Come, Commodore," replied the young woman; "don't try the madrigal. It is not your specialty. But lead us down to tea, which ought to be served, should it not, Gontran?"
"They are astonishing," Miss Marsh whispered, when her uncle and the Chésys had started toward the stairway that led to the salon. "They act as though they were at home."
"Don't be jealous," said Madame Bonnacorsi. "They will be so useful to us at Genoa in occupying the terrible uncle."
"If it were only she," Florence replied; "she is amusing and such a good girl. But he—I don't know if it is the blood of a daughter of the great Republic, but I can't endure a nobleman who has a way of being insolent in the rôle of a parasite and domestic."
"Chésy is simply the husband of a very pretty woman," said Madame de Carlsberg. "Everything is permitted to those husbands on account of their wives, and they become spoilt children. You are going down? I shall remain on deck. Send us tea here, will you? I say us, for I shall keep you for company," she continued, turning to Hautefeuille. "I know Chésy. Now that the race is over he will proceed to act as the proprietor of the yacht. Happily, I shall protect you. Sit here."
And she motioned to a chair beside her own, with that tender and imperious grace by which a woman who loves, but is obliged to restrain herself before others, knows how to impart all the trembling passion of the caress she cannot give. Lovers like Pierre Hautefeuille obey these orders in an eager, almost religious, way which makes men smile, but not the women. They know so well that this devotion in the smallest things is the true sign of an inward idolatry. So neither Miss Marsh nor Madame Bonnacorsi thought of jesting at Hautefeuille's attitude. But while retiring, with that instinctive complicity with which the most virtuous women have for the romance of another, they said:—
"Corancez was indeed right. How he loves her!"
"Yes, he is happy to-day; but to-morrow?"
But to-morrow? He had no thought for the mysterious and dangerous morrow of all our peaceful to-days. TheJenny, free of her antagonists, continued with her rapid and cradling motion over this velvet sea. TheDalilahand theAlbatrosswere already faint in the blue distance, where the coast also was disappearing. A few more strokes of the engines, a few more turns of the screw, and there would be nothing around them but the moving water, the motionless sky, and the sinking sun. The end of a beautiful winter day in Provence is really divine during that hour before the chill of evening has touched the air and darkened the sea and land. Now that the other guests of the yacht had gone down to the dining-room, it seemed as though the two lovers were all alone in the world on a floating terrace, amid the shrubbery and the perfume of flowers. One of the boat's servants, a kind of agile and silent genius, had placed the small tea-table beside them, with a complicated little apparatus of silver, on which, as well as on the cups and plates, was the fantastic coat of arms adopted by Marsh—the arch of a bridge over a swamp, "arch on Marsh"—this pun, in the same taste as that in which the boat had been baptized, was written under the scutcheon. The bridge was in or, the marsh in sable, on a field of gules. The American cared nothing for heraldic heresies. Black, red, and yellow were the colors of the deck awning, and this scutcheon and device signified that his railroad, celebrated in fact for the boldness of its viaducts, had saved him from misery, here represented by the marsh. Naïve symbolism which would have typified even more justly the arch of dreams thrown by the two lovers over all the mire of life. Even the little tea-set, with its improvised coat of arms, added to this fleeting moment a charm of intimacy, the suggestion of a home where they two might have lived heart to heart in the uninterrupted happiness of each other's daily presence; and it was this impression that the young man voiced aloud after they had enjoyed their solitude for a few moments in silence.
"How delicious is this hour," he said, "more delicious than I had ever dreamed! Ah! if this boat belonged to us, and we could go thus on a long voyage, you and I, to Italy, which I would not see without you, to Greece, which gave you your beauty. How beautiful you are, and how I love you!Dieu! if this hour would never end!"
"Every hour has an end," answered Ely, half shutting her eyes, which had filled with ecstasy at the young man's impassioned words, and then, as though to repress a tremor of the heart that was almost painful in its tenderness, she said, with the grace and gayety of a young girl: "My old German governess used to say, as she pointed to the eagles of Sallach, 'You must be like the birds who are happy with crumbs'; and it is true that we find only crumbs in life.—I have sworn," she went on, "that you, that we, will not fall into the 'terrible sorrow.'"
She emphasized the last two words, which were doubtless a tender repetition of a phrase often spoken between them, and which had become a part of their lovers' dialect. And playfully she turned to the table and filled the two cups, adding:—
"Let us drink our tea wisely, and be asgemüthlichas the goodbourgeoisof my country."
She handed one of the cups to Hautefeuille while she said this. As the young man took it, he touched with his fingers the small and supple hand that served him with the delight in humble indulgences so dear to women who are really in love. His simple caress caused them to exchange one of those looks in which two souls seem to touch, melt together, and absorb each other by the magnetism of their desire. They paused once more, rapt in the sense of their mutual fever so intoxicating to share amid that atmosphere, mixed with the scent of the sea and the perfume of the roses, with the languid palpitation of the immense waters sleeping around them in their silence. During the two weeks that had passed since the sudden avowal of Madame de Carlsberg they had repeated their vows of love, they had written passionate, wild letters, and had exchanged their souls in kisses, but they had not given themselves yet wholly to each other. As he looked at her now on the deck of the yacht he trembled again from head to foot to see her smile with those lips, whose fresh and delicious warmth he still felt on his own. To see her so supple and so young, her body quivering with all the nervousness of a creature of fine race, recalled the passionate clasp with which he had enfolded her in the garden of her villa two days after the first vows. She had led him, under the pretext of a conversation, to a kind of belvedere, or rather cloister, a double row of marble columns, overlooking the sea and the islands. In the centre was a square space thick planted with gigantic camellias. The ground was all strewn with blossoms, buried in the large petals of red and rose and white fallen from the trees, and the red, rose, and white of other flowers gleamed above amid the sombre and lustrous foliage. It was there that he had for the second time held her close in his arms, and again still more closely in an obscure spot of the adorable villa of Ellenrock, at Antibes, where he had gone to wait for her. She had come to him, in her dress of mauve, along a path bordered with blue cineraria, violet heart's-ease, and great anemones. The neighboring roses filled the air with a perfume like that around them now, and sitting on the white heather, beneath the pines that descended to a little gray-rocked cove, he rested his head upon the heart of his dear companion.
All these memories—and others as vivid and troubling—mingled with his present emotion and intensified it. The total unlikeness of Ely to all the women he had met served to quiet the young man's naïve remorse for his past experiences, and to make him forget the culpability of that sweet hour. Ely was married, she had given herself to one man, and had no right while he lived to give herself to a second. Although Pierre was no longer sufficiently religious to respect marriage as a sacrament, the imprint of his education and his memories of home were too deep, and above all he was too loyal not to feel a repugnance for the stains and miseries of adultery. But Ely had been careful to prevent him from meeting the Archduke after that terrible scene, and to the lover's imagination the Prince appeared only in the light of a despot and a tormentor. His wife was not his wife; she was his victim. And the young man's pity was too passionate not to overcome his scruples; all the more since he had, for the last two weeks, found his friend in an incessant revolt against an outrageous espionage—that of the sinister Baron von Laubach, the aide-de-camp with the face of a Judas. And this voluntary policeman must really have pursued Ely with a very odious surveillance for his memory to come to her at this moment when she wished to forget everything except this sky and sea, the swift boat, and the ecstatic lover who was speaking by her side.
"Do you remember," he was saying, "our uneasiness three days ago, when the sea was so rough that we thought we could not start? We had the same idea of going up to La Croisette to see the storm. I could have thanked you on my knees when I met you with Miss Marsh."
"And then you thought that I was angry with you," she said, "because I passed with scarcely speaking to you. I had just caught a glimpse of that foxlike Iago von Laubach. Ah! what a relief to know that all on board are my friends, and incapable of perfidy! Marsh, his niece, Andryana, are honor itself. The little Chésys are light and frivolous, but there is not a trace of ill-nature about them. The presence of a traitor, even when he is not feared, is enough to spoil the most delightful moments. And this moment, ah! how I should suffer to have it spoiled!"
"How well I understand that!" he answered, with the quick and tender glance of a lover who is delighted to find his own ways of feeling in the woman he loves. "I am so much like you in that; the presence of a person whom I know to be despicable gives me a physical oppression of the heart. The other evening at your house, when I met that Navagero of whom Corancez had so often spoken, he poisoned my visit, although I had with me that dear, dear letter which you had written the night before." Then, dreamily following this train of thought, he continued: "It is strange that every one does not feel the same about this. To some people, and excellent ones too, a proof of human infamy is almost a joy. I have a friend like that—Olivier du Prat, of whom I spoke to you and whom you knew at Rome. I have never seen him so gay as when he had proved some villainy. How he has made me suffer by that trait of his! And he was one of the most delicate of men, with the tenderest of hearts and finest of minds. Can you explain that?"
The name of Olivier du Prat, pronounced by that voice which had been moving Ely to the heart—what an answer to the wish sighed by the amorous woman that this divine moment should not be spoiled! These simple words were enough to dissipate her enchantment, and to interrupt her happiness with a pain so acute that she almost cried aloud. Alas! she was but at the very beginning of her love's romance, and already that which had been predicted by Louise Brion, her faithful and too lucid friend, had come true—she was shut in the strange and agonizing inferno of silence which must avoid, as the most terrible of dangers, the solace of confession. How many times already in like moments had a similar allusion evoked between her and Pierre the image of that other lover! Pierre had very soon alluded lightly and gayly to his friend, and as the Baroness had thought it best not to conceal the fact that she had met him in Rome, he continued to recall memories of Du Prat, without suspecting that his words entered like a knife into the poor woman's heart. To see how much Hautefeuille loved Du Prat—with a friendship equal to that which the latter had for him—how could she help feeling anew the constant menace hanging over her? And then, as at the present, she was filled with an inexpressible anguish. It was as though all the blood in her veins had suddenly flowed out through some deep and invisible wound. At other times it was not even necessary that the redoubtable name should be mentioned in their conversation. It sufficed that the young man, in the course of the intimate talks which she encouraged as often as her social servitude permitted, should ingenuously express his opinion on some of the love-affairs reported by the gossips of the coast. She would then insist upon his talking in order to measure his uncompromising morality. She would have been pained if he had felt differently, for then he would not have been that noble and pure conscience unspotted by life; and she suffered because he did feel thus, and so unconsciously condemned her past. She made him open his mind to her, and always she found at the bottom this idea, natural to an innocent soul, that if love may be pardoned for everything, nothing should be pardoned to caprice, and that a woman of noble heart could not love a second time. When Hautefeuille would make some remark like this, which revealed his absolute and naïve faith in the singleness and uniqueness of true love, inevitably, implacably, Olivier would reappear before the inward eye of the poor woman. Wherever they were, in the silent patio strewn with camellia leaves, under the murmuring pines of the Villa Ellenrock, on the field at La Napoule, where the golf players moved amid the freshest and softest of landscapes, all the marvellous scenery of the South would vanish, disappear—the palms and orange trees, the ravines, the blue sky and the luminous sea, and the man she loved. She would see nothing before her but the cruel eyes and evil smile of her old lover at Rome. In a sudden half hallucination she would hear him speaking to Pierre. Then all her happy forces would suddenly be arrested. Her eyelids would quiver, her mouth gasp for air, her features contract with pain, her breast shudder as though pierced by a knife; and, as at present, her tender and unconscious tormentor would ask, "What is the matter?" with an eager solicitude that at the same time tortured and consoled her; and she would answer, as now, with one of those little falsehoods for which true love cannot forgive itself. For hearts of a certain depth of feeling, complete and total sincerity is a need that is almost physical, like hunger and thirst. What an inoffensive deception it was! And yet Ely had once more a feeling of remorse at giving this explanation of her sudden distress:—
"It is a chill that has come over me. The night comes so quickly in this country, with such a sudden fall of temperature."
And while the young man was helping to envelop her in her cloak, she said, in a tone that contrasted with the insignificance of her remark:—
"Look how the sea has changed with the sinking sun; how dark it has grown—almost black—and what a deep blue the sky is. It is as though all nature had suddenly been chilled. How beautiful it is yet, but a beauty in which you feel the approach of shadows."
And, indeed, by one of those atmospheric phenomena more general in the South than elsewhere, the radiant and almost scorching afternoon had suddenly ended, and the evening had come abruptly in the space of a few minutes. TheJennymoved on over a sea without a wave or a ripple. The masts, the yards, and the funnel threw long shadows across the water, and the sun, almost at the edge of the horizon, was no longer warm enough to dissipate the indistinct and chilly vapor that rose and rose, already wetting with its mist drops the brass and woodwork of the deck. And the blue of the still sea deepened into black, while the azure of the clear sky paled and waned. Then, as the disk of the sun touched the horizon abruptly, the immeasurable fire of the sunset burst from the sky over the sea. The coast had disappeared, so that the passengers of the yacht, now returned to the deck, had nothing before them but the water and the sky, two formless immensities over which the light played in its fairy fantasies—here spread in a sheet of tender and transparent rose, like the petals of the eglantine; there rolling in purple waves, the color of bright blood; there stretching like a shore of emerald and amethyst, and farther, built into solid and colossal porticos of gold, and this light opened with the sky, palpitated with the sea, dilated through infinite space, and suddenly as the disk disappeared beneath the waves, this splendor vanished as it came, leaving the sea again a bluish black, and the sky, too, almost black, but with a bar of intense orange on its verge. This bright line vanished in its turn. The earliest stars began to come out, and the yacht lights to appear, illumining the dark mass which went on, bearing into the falling night the heart of a woman which had all day reflected the divine serenity of the bright hours, and which now responded to the melancholy of the rapid and fading twilight.