When Pierre Hautefeuille had left Ely that night, she felt very cruelly the impression that a struggle was inevitable and that it was not only a struggle with a man, but with destiny! As long as her lover remained near, her tense nerves dominated this impression, but when he had gone she gave herself up to its contemplation. Alone, without sufficient strength to go to her bed, she crouched, thoroughly unnerved, upon a sofa. She began to weep, a crisis that lasted indefinitely, as though she felt herself trapped, threatened, conquered in advance! Her last hope had just been shattered. She could no longer doubt, after the scene that Pierre had told her of, that Olivier knew all. Yes, he knew all. And his nervousness, his fits of anger, his laughter, his despair, proved only too clearly that he would not accept the situation, and that a tempest of ungovernable desires were unchained within him. Now that he had arrived at such a point of exasperation and of knowledge, what was he going to do? In the first place, he would try to meet her again. She felt as certain of this as though he had been standing there before her laughing the cruel laugh that had wounded Hautefeuille's heart. In a few days—perhaps in a few hours—she would be in the presence of her mortal enemy, an enemy not only of herself but of her love. He would be there; she would see him, hear him moving, breathing, living! A shudder of horror ran through her frame at the idea. The thought that this man had once possessed her filled her with a kind of acute suffering that made her heart almost stop beating. The remembrance of caresses given and returned induced a feeling of nausea and crushed her with shameful distress. She had never felt so much as at this minute how her sincere, deep love had really changed her, had made of her another woman, a rejuvenated, forgiven, renewed creature!—But it could not be helped. She would accept, she would support the odious presence of her former lover. It would be the punishment for not having awaited her love of the present in perfect purity; for not having foreseen that one day she would meet Hautefeuille; for not having lived worthy of his love. She had arrived at that religion—she, the reasoner, the nihilist, atheist, had come to accept the mysticism of her happiness so natural to the woman truly in love, and which makes all previous emotions not provoked by the loved one a sort of blasphemous sacrilege. She would expiate the blasphemy by supporting his odious presence.—Alas! Olivier would not be content with simply inflicting the horror of his presence on her. He would speak with her. What would he say? What would he want? What would he ask?—She did not deceive herself for a moment. The sentiments of this man as regarded herself had not changed. As Hautefeuille had told her of the incident in his room, she had again heard his laugh, cruel and agonizing and insulting, that she knew so well. And with this laugh had come back to her all the flood of jealous sensuality that had sullied her formerly to so great an extent that the traces were still to be seen. After he had outraged her, trampled her under foot, left her, after having placed the irreparable obstacle of marriage and desertion between them, she felt and understood this monstrous thing, one impossible in any other man, but quite natural in him, that Olivier loved her still. He loved her, if it can be called love to have for a woman that detestable mixture of passion and hatred which calls forth incessantly the cruelty of enjoyment, the ferocity of pleasure.
He loved her. His attitude toward her would have been inexplicable without this anomalous, hideous sentiment which had lived in him through all and in spite of all! And, at the same time, he treasured his friend with that jealous, stormy, passionate friendship which was tearing his heart at this moment with unheard-of emotions and sufferings. To what extent might he not be led by the frenzy of such torture agonizing as a steel blade turned and re-turned in a wound? What could equal the pain of having loved, of still loving, a former mistress,—of loving her with such evil, sinister love,—and of knowing that woman was the mistress of his best, his most tenderly beloved friend, of a brother by adoption, cherished more than a brother by blood?
As clearly as she saw the first rays of dawn piercing the curtains at the end of this night of terrified meditation, Ely saw these sentiments at work in Olivier's heart.
"He who sows the wind shall reap the tempest," says an Austrian proverb. When she wished to meet Hautefeuille, to make herself dear to him, she wanted to strike Du Prat in the tenderest, most vulnerable spot in his organization, to wound him through his friendship, to torture him through it, to avenge herself in this way. She had succeeded only too well! What blow was he going to strike in the rage of suffering now consuming him? She had changed so much since the moment she had conceived the project of cruel vengeance that she asked herself what she was to do, what path she was to take? What if she appealed to this man, made supplication to him, sought to melt his mood?—Or would it be better to play with him, to cause him to think noliaisonexisted between her and Hautefeuille, for, after all, he had no proof.—Or better still, why not oppose a bold front, and when he dared to appear before her, drive him from her door, for he had no claim upon her.—Her pride revolted against the first, her nobility of character against the second, her reason against the third. In such a decisive crisis as the one through which the poor woman was passing, the mind calls instinctively upon all the most secret resources of nature, just as it collects, summons to the centre of the personality, all its hidden strength. Ely was remarkable by her need of truth and energy in the middle of a society that is refined to excess and composite to the verge of falsity. As she said to her confidante in the alleys of the Brions' garden, on that night that was so recent and seemed so distant, it was the truth in Hautefeuille's soul that had first of all attracted her, charmed her, seduced her. It was in order to live a true life, to feel true emotions, that she had entered the paths of this love, whose dangers she had foreseen. After having in thought taken up and laid down, accepted and rejected a score of projects, she finished by deciding within herself that she would trust to the simple truth in the redoubtable scene she felt was drawing near, thinking:—
"I will show him all my heart, just as it is, and he may trample on it if he can find the strength."
This was the policy that this woman, capable of any error but not of meanness or common calculation, arrived at after her wretched wakefulness. She did not find forgetfulness in it for a peril drawing near. But it gave her the courage that every human being feels in being completely, absolutely logical in thought, wish, and belief. She was not, therefore, as much surprised as she even expected when, about ten o'clock, she received a note that proved how accurately she had reasoned.
The letter was very short. But it was full of menace for her who read it in the same little salon where she had made up her mind to dismiss Pierre Hautefeuille,—a resolution that had been so weakly broken, and that had been prompted by the very terror of the catastrophe that the few lines announced:—
"MADAME—I shall have the honor of calling upon you to-day at two o'clock. May I hope that you will receive me? or if the hour does not suit you, that you will fix another? Let me assure you that your slightest wishes will always be commands for"Yours respectfully,"Olivier du Prat."
"MADAME—I shall have the honor of calling upon you to-day at two o'clock. May I hope that you will receive me? or if the hour does not suit you, that you will fix another? Let me assure you that your slightest wishes will always be commands for
"Yours respectfully,
"Olivier du Prat."
"Very well," she said, "I shall be at home this afternoon."
It was impossible for her to answer the letter in writing. Commonplace though it was, she could see that Olivier had written it in a singular state of agitation and decision. Ely knew his handwriting, and she could see from the few lines that the pen had been clenched, almost crushed in his hand.
"It is war!" she said to herself. "So much the better. I shall know what to expect in a few hours."
But in spite of her native energy, in spite of the power of resistance that her passion gave her, the hours seemed so long to her. Her nerves became more tense, painfully and unceasingly, as she counted the minutes. She had given orders that she was not at home to any one except her dreaded visitor. It seemed that she must regain her strength in a final solitary retirement before engaging in the duel upon which the future of her happiness depended.
For this reason she could not completely hide her disappointment when about half-past one she saw Yvonne de Chésy, who had insisted upon being admitted, enter the salon. She had only to give one glance at the face of the pretty little frivolous Parisienne to see that a tragedy was being enacted in her life also, a life that seemed created only to enjoy perpetual happiness. The childish countenance of the young woman was marked by an expression of astounded suffering. Her eyes, usually so sparkling and laughing, had in their blue depths an expression of terror, of stupefaction, as though brought suddenly face to face with some horrible vision. Her gestures betrayed a strained nervousness that was in strange contrast with her habitual gayety and butterfly frivolity.
Ely suddenly remembered Marsh's conversation on the boat. She at once guessed that Brion had begun his amorous blackmailing of the poor child. She reproached herself for her momentary impatience, and even with all her own anguish she welcomed the poor girl with all her accustomed grace. Yvonne stammered an excuse for her insistence.
"You were quite right in coming in," replied Ely; "you know that I am always at home for you.—But you are all upset. What is the matter?"
"Simply," replied Yvonne, "that I am lost unless I can find some one to help me.—Ah!" she continued, holding her face in her hands as though to shut out some dreadful nightmare, "when I think of all that has taken place since yesterday, I cannot help thinking that I am in a dream.—In the first place we are ruined, absolutely, irreparably ruined. I only heard of it twenty-four hours ago.—Poor Gontran did everything to keep me from learning the truth right to the end,—and I reproached him for gambling at Monte Carlo! Poor, dear fellow! He hoped that a lucky chance would give him a hundred or two hundred thousand francs, something of a capital with which to rebuild our fortune.—For he is going to work! He is determined to do something, no matter what.—If you only knew how good and courageous he is!—It is only on my account he feels the misfortune. It was for me, to obtain everything for me, that he entered into too risky investments. He does not know how little I care for wealth.—I can live on next to nothing, I have already told him.—All I want is a littlecouturièrewhom I can direct to make my costumes according to my ideas; a little establishment at Passy in one of those tiny English houses; a hired carriage or a coupé for my visits and for going to the theatre, and I should be the happiest woman. I would go to the market in the morning, and I am sure I should have a better table than we have now. And I know I should be happy in such a life.—As a matter of fact, I was not born to be rich—happily!"
She sketched out this little programme that she thought so modest and which would have necessitated at the least 50,000f. a year, with such a charming mixture of girlishness and courage that Madame de Carlsberg's heart ached. She took her by the hand and kissed her, saying:—
"I know your kind heart, Yvonne.—But I hope everything is not yet lost.—You have many friends, good ones, beginning with myself.—At first one is terrified, and then it is always discovered that the ruin is not as complete as was thought."
"This time it appears that the contrary is the case," said the young woman, shaking her head. "But it is precisely because I know you to be my friend," she went on, "that I have come to see you this morning. The other evening the Archduke spoke to my husband of the difficulty he experienced in finding some upright superintendent to look after his estates in Transylvania.—And as the Prince was so pleasant to us that evening we thought—"
"That Chésy could become his superintendent," interrupted Ely, who could not keep back a smile at her friend's naïveté. "I wouldn't wish such a fate for my worst enemy.—If things are really at such a point that your husband has to seek a position, there is only one man who can help him."
As she spoke, she saw Yvonne's infantile visage, which had brightened for a moment under the influence of her bright welcome, become again overclouded, and her look betrayed a feeling of pain and disgust.
"Yes," went on Ely, "there is only one man, and it is Dickie Marsh."
"The Commodore!" said Madame de Chésy, with manifest astonishment.
Then, shaking her head again, with her mouth closed in a bitter smile, she added:—
"No, I know now too well the value of these men's friendships and the price they place upon their services. I have only been ruined a short time, and already some one,"—she hesitated a second,—"yes, some one has offered me wealth.—Ah! dear Ely,"—and she clasped her hands over her eyes, blushing with indignation,—"if I would become his mistress. You do not know, you cannot know, what a woman feels when she suddenly discovers that for months and months she has been tracked and waited for by a man whom she thought her friend, like an animal tracked by a hunter.—Every familiarity she has allowed, without thinking, because she saw no harm in it, the little coquettishness that she has innocently shown, the intimacy that she has not guarded against, all return to her with shame, with sickening shame. The vile cleverness that was hidden under the comedy of friendliness she has not seen, and now it is as clear as daylight. She has not been culpable, and yet it seems as though she had been. I will never suffer another such affront! Marsh would make me the same ignoble proposition that the other did.—Oh! it is horrible, shameful!"
She had spoken no name. But by her trembling, by her look of outraged innocence, Madame de Carlsberg could imagine the scene that had taken place, that very morning, perhaps, between the good, if imprudent, creature and Brion, vile and despicable as he was. She understood for the second time that the Parisienne was really pure and innocent and that she was being initiated in the brutalities of life. There was something pathetic, something that was heartbreaking, in her remorse, her scruples, the sudden revulsion of a soul that had remained naïve by irrealism.
Threatened though she was by another man, Ely felt her soul go out toward the unhappy child. She determined to speak to her about Marsh, to tell her of the conversation on the yacht, of the promise made by the American, when, with that acuity of the senses that is awakened by our inquietude at certain moments, she heard the door of the outer salon open.
"It is Olivier," she said to herself.
At the same time, with instinctive superstition, she looked at the still trembling Yvonne and added mentally:—
"I will help her. Such an action will surely bring me good luck."
Turning away, she said:—
"Do not be alarmed. I cannot speak to you just now, as I am expecting some one. But come again to-morrow afternoon and I promise you I will have found the very thing you want for Gontran. Let me act as I think best,—and, above all, no weakness!—No one must suspect anything.—You must never let people know that you suffer!"
The heroic counsel was addressed to herself. And she illustrated the remark at the same moment, for the footman opened the door and announced Monsieur Olivier du Prat. Madame de Chésy could never have guessed, to see Ely so calm, with such a welcoming smile, what Hautefeuille's mistress felt as she saw the newcomer enter the little salon. Olivier, not less calm and polite than the two women, excused himself for not having called sooner.
"You are forgiven," said Yvonne, who had risen upon Olivier's entrance and had remained standing. "Really, if the society round had to be gone through on one's wedding journey, it would not be worth while having a honeymoon.—Make yours last as long as you can! That is the advice your old cotillon partner gives you—and excuse me for running away. Gontran was to come and meet me, and I don't want to miss him."
Then, turning to Ely, with a parting kiss, she said, in a whisper:—
"Are you satisfied with me?"
And the courageous little woman went off with a smile that her friend 'had hardly strength enough to return. Olivier's first glance had been a terrible trial to support for Madame de Carlsberg. She read in it so distinctly that brutality of a physical souvenir so intolerable for a woman after the breaking off of an intrigue, so intolerable, in fact, that they often prefer the scandal of an open rupture rather than undergo the torture of meeting a man whose eyes say plainly: "Go on with your comedy, my dear friend! Receive everybody's adulation, respect, affection! I know you, and nothing you understand, nothing can efface that souvenir."
In love, as she was, still glowing with the memory of Hautefeuille's caresses of the past night, Ely's soul was so wrung by this impression that she could have shrieked had she dared. She had only one idea, to cut his visit short. She felt that if it was prolonged to any extent she should faint before the end. But, suffering torture though she was, terrified to the verge of unconsciousness, she was still the woman of the world, the semi-princess, one who preserves her dignity in the midst of the most cruel explanations. And she had all the grace of a queen as she said to the man who had once been her lover and whom she so much dreaded:—
"You wished to see me? I might have refused to receive you, for I have that right. But I would not exercise it.—Still, I beg you to remember that this interview is hideously painful to me. Whatever you have to tell me, say it without a word that can increase my suffering, if it is possible.—You see, I have neither hostility, bitterness, nor distrust for you. Spare me any insinuations, any sarcasm, any cruelty.—It is all I ask, and it is my right."
She spoke with a simple dignity that astonished Olivier. He no longer noticed the air of defiance that formerly used to exasperate him with her. From the moment he entered the salon he had been struck by a change in the character of her beauty. Her countenance was always the same, with its noble, pure outline, with its delicate and proud features, lit up by those fathomless eyes, so charming with their touching languorousness. But there was no longer that mobile curious expression, that look of unquiet yearning there used to be imprinted on it.
This sensation was, however, too vague to impress her old lover, to change his hostility into tenderness. He had brooded over one idea too intensely during the last week, and an anger that was hardly restrained betrayed itself in his voice as he replied:—
"I will try to obey you, madame! Still, in order that the interview that I asked for may be understood, I shall have to say some things that you might perhaps wish unspoken."
"Say them," she said, interrupting him. "All that I ask is that you should not add anything that is not distinctly necessary."
"I will be very brief," said Olivier.
There was a moment's silence. Then, in a still more bitter tone, he said:—
"Do you remember about two years ago in Rome, at the Palazzo Savorelli,—you see I am being exact,—a young man being presented to you, a young man who did not even think about you, and with whom you were—How can I describe it without wounding you?"
"Say at once that I coquetted with him," Ely again interrupted, "and that I tried to make him love It is the truth."
"Since you have such a good memory," went on Olivier, "you surely recollect that these coquetries went so far that the young man became your lover."
What a shudder of horror shot through Ely, making her eyelids tremble with pain, as he accentuated the word with the cruelty that she had prayed him to spare her!
He continued remorselessly:—
"You remember also that this love was a very miserable one. The man was sensitive, suspicious, jealous. He had suffered very much in his life. A woman who loved him truly would have had but one thought,—to lull to slumber the horrible malady of distrust that raged in him. You did just the opposite. Close your eyes and look back in memory to a certain ball at the Countess Steno's, and that young man in the corner of the salon and you dancing—with whom?"
This allusion to a forgotten episode of the saddest part of their past brought a wave of blood to Ely's cheeks. She saw again, as her implacable questioner had asked her, one of the Princes Pietrapertosa paying his court to her. He was one of the imaginary rivals that Olivier had detested the most.
She replied—
"I know. I acted wrongly."
"You admit it," went on Du Prat, "and you will also admit that the young man with whom you played so cruelly had the right to judge you as he did, to leave you as he did, because when near you he felt all his worst impulses rise to the surface, because you made him evil, cruel, through his suffering. Is that also the truth?—And is it not also true that your pride was wounded by his desertion and that you determined to be revenged?—Will you deny that, having encountered later the most intimate, the dearest friend of that man, the deepest and most complete affection that had ever entered his life, you conceived a horrible idea? Will you deny that you determined to make his friend love you with the hope, the certainty, that he would learn, sooner or later, and would suffer horribly from the knowledge that his former mistress had become the mistress of his best, his only friend? Do you deny it?"
"No. It is true," she replied.
This time her beautiful face became livid. Her pallor, her aching head bowed as though under the weight of the blows it received, the fixed look in her eyes, her half-open mouth gasping for breath, the humble character of her replies, which proved how sincere she was in her firm resolve to not offer any defence of her action, ought to have disarmed Olivier.
But as he uttered the words "to the mistress of his friend" the image again rose before his eyes, the vision that had tortured him from the moment he had suspected the truth. He again saw Hautefeuille's face close to her lovely countenance, his eyes looking into hers, his lips pressed upon hers. Ely's avowal only increased the tangibility of the vision. It completed his madness. He had never thought he loved her so well, that he had such a desire for the woman he had treated so brutally. His passion took complete possession of him.
"And you admit it!" he cried; "calmly, frankly, you admit it? You do not see how infamous, how abominable, monstrous your vengeance is? Think of it; you take a being such as he is, pure, youthful, delicate, one incapable of distrust, one all simplicity, all innocence, and you make him love you at the risk of destroying him, of ruining his soul forever.—And for what?—To satisfy the miserable spite of a flirt angry at being deserted.—Even his freshness and nobility of soul did not make you hesitate. Did you never think that to deceive such a defenceless creature was infamous? Did you never think of what you were destroying in his soul? Knowing as you did the friendship that bound him to me, if there had been a spark of—I will not say nobility—a spark of humanity in your heart, you must have recoiled from this crime, from the loathsome infamy of soiling, of ravishing him from his noble, beautiful affection, to give him in exchange a frivolousliaisonof a few days, just long enough for you to find amusement in the vileness of your caprice!—He had done nothing to you! He had not deserted you! He had not married another!—Oh, God! What a cowardly, loathsome vengeance.—But at any rate I cry in your face that it was cowardly, cowardly, cowardly!"
Ely sprang to her feet as her implacable enemy flung the insulting words in her face. Her eyes were fixed on Olivier with a regard in which there was no anger or revulsion of feeling under his affront. Her eyes even seemed to have an expression of calmness in their sincerity. She took a few steps toward the young man and put her hand on his arm—the arm that menaced her—with a gesture so gentle, and at the same time so firm, that Olivier stopped speaking. And she began to reply to him in a tone of voice that he did not recognize. It was so simple, so human, that it was impossible to doubt the sincerity of her words. Her heart was really disclosed before him. He felt that her words penetrated to the very centre of his inner nature. He loved this woman more than he knew himself. He had sought, without being able to create it, to call into being exactly what he now saw in the woman whose beauty he idolized. The soul that he saw shining through her tender, sad eyes, the passionate, shy, ardent soul, capable of the greatest, the most complete, sacrifice to love, was what he had divined to exist in her, what he had pursued without ever capturing, what he had longed for and had never possessed in spite of all their caresses, of all the violence and brutality of his jealousy! Her real nature had been awakened by another! And that other was his dearest friend!—He listened to Ely, for she was now speaking.
"You are unjust, Olivier," she said, "very unjust. But you do not know all—you cannot know.—You saw that I did not try to contradict you when you reproached me, that I did not try to brave it out. I was not the proud woman with whom you fought so often in years gone by.—I seem to have no pride left! How could I have when I see, as I listen to you, what I was, what I should be still had I not met Pierre, and without the love that has taken possession of my soul like an honored guest?—When I told you that I at first thought only of making him love me to avenge myself upon you, I told you the truth. You ought to believe me when I tell you that the mere idea now fills me with the same horror that you feel.—When I got to know him, when I realized the beauty, the nobility, the purity of his nature, all the virtues that you have just been speaking of, I awoke to the sense of the infamy I was going to commit. You are quite right, I should have been a monster if I had been able to deceive a soul so youthful, so innocent, so lovable, so true! But I have not been such a monster.—I had not talked with Pierre more than twice when I had utterly renounced all idea of such a frightful revenge, when he had won my love entire. I loved him! I love him!—Do you think that I have not said, that I do not say every day, every hour, to myself all that you have just spoken? Do you think I have not felt it ever since I knew what my sentiments were for him? I loved him, and he was your friend, your brother. I have been your mistress, and I knew that a time must come when you would meet again, when he would speak to you of me—a time when he would perhaps know all. Do you think I did not dread that a time would come when I should see you again and you would speak to me as you have just been speaking?—Oh, it is horrible, agonizing!"
She dropped Olivier's arm and pressed her clenched hands upon her eyes with a movement of physical anguish. It was in her being that she suffered, in the body once abandoned completely to the man who heard her, as she continued:—
"But pardon me. I do not concern you. It is not what I have suffered that we have to think of, but of him.—You cannot doubt now that I love him with all there is in me that is noble, good, and true. You also must have realized how he loves me with all the wealth of affection that you know so well. All this week while he was speaking to me I saw you—with what agony!—I felt that you were laying bare our secret hour by hour.—Now you know that secret. Pierre loves me as I love him, with an absolute, unique, passionate love.—And now, if you choose, go and tell him that I was once your mistress. I will not defend myself any more than I did a few minutes ago. I have not strength enough to lie to him. The day he asks me, 'Is it true that Olivier has been your lover?' I shall reply, 'It is true!'—But it is not I alone whom you will have killed!"
She ceased speaking, and fell into her chair with her head resting on the back, as though exhausted by the effort of laying bare her thoughts, in which were mingled so many sad and bitter memories. She waited Olivier's reply with an anxiety so intense that her strength seemed to be ebbing away, and she closed her eyes as in dread. With the logic of a woman deeply in love, she had forced the man who had come there to threaten and insult her into a position where he must take one of the two courses that their wretched situation left open to him,—either to tell all to Hautefeuille, who would then decide for himself whether he loved Ely enough to trust her after he knew that she had been his friend's mistress; or, to spare him this torture, to leave Hautefeuille in ignorance with his happiness. In this latter case Olivier would have to go away, to put an end forever to his own misery, and to cease inflicting the pain of his presence upon Ely, a pain that, in itself, was the cause of a nervous state sufficient to reveal sooner or later their past relations.
What would he do? He did not reply; he, who only a few minutes before had been so eager to speak, so bitter in his reproaches. Through her half-closed eyes, quivering with the intensity of her anxiety to know the worst, Ely saw that he was regarding her with a strange, impassioned look. A struggle was going on within him. What was its cause? What would be its result? She was about to learn, and also what sort of a sentiment her heartbreaking appeal had awakened in the heart that had never been able to tear itself away from her entirely.
"You love him?" he said at last. "You love him?—But, why do I ask? I know you love him. I feel it, I see it.—It is only love that could have prompted such words—could have imprinted such an accent, such truth upon them.—Oh!" he went on bitterly, "if you had only been, when we were in Rome, what you are now; if only once I had felt that you vibrated with genuine emotion!—But you did not love me and you love him!" He repeated, "You love him!—I thought we had inflicted upon each other all the pain that is in a human being's power, and that I could never suffer any more than I did in Rome, than I have done during these past days when I felt that you were his mistress.—But beside this—that you love him—my sufferings were nothing.—And yet how could you help loving him?—How was it that I did not understand at once that you would be touched, penetrated, changed; that your heart would be imbued with the charm of his grace, of his youth, of his delicacy, of all that makes him what he is?—Ah! I see you now as I longed to see you once, as I despaired of ever seeing you, and it is through him, it is for him!"
Then, with a moan as of some stricken animal, he cried:—
"No! I cannot support it. I suffer too much, I suffer too much!"
And words of grief, mingled with words of rage and love, poured forth in a wild stream.
"Since you hate me enough to have thought of such a brutal vengeance," he cried, cruelly, savagely, "since you longed to make me jealous of him through you, enjoy your work.—Look at it.—You have succeeded."
"Spare me, spare me!" cried Ely. "Oh, God! do not talk like that!"
His sudden outburst, the strange betrayal of his feelings, even in her suffering, made her shudder. With a mingled feeling of indescribable terror and pity she had a glimpse into another secret recess in the heart of the tortured being who, during a half hour of mortal anguish, had insulted, humiliated, despised, then had understood, accepted, justified, pitied, and who now cursed her. She had felt, as she listened to Pierre's confidences on the subject of his friend, that a reflux of loathing sensuality still seethed in her former lover's heart. She saw it now. And she also saw that a deep, true passion had always lived, palpitated, germinated under his sensuality, under his hate. His passion had never developed, grown, put forth its blossom, because she had never been the woman he sought, the woman he yearned for, the woman he felt was in her. Thanks to the miracle worked by love for another, she had now become the woman he desired. What a martyrdom of suffering for the unhappy man! Forgetting her fears and inspired only by a movement of compassion, she said:—
"What! rejoice in your grief?—Think of my vengeance yet. Did you not feel how sincere I was, what shame I feel at ever having conceived such a hideous idea? Did you not see how bitterly I loathe, how I regret my life at Dome? Do you not feel that my heart bleeds at the sight of your suffering?"
"I am very grateful for your pity," interrupted Olivier.
His voice suddenly became dry and cold. Was he trying to recover his dignity? Was he wounded by her womanly pity, a pity that is humiliating when given in place of love? Was he afraid of saying too much, of feeling too deeply if the interview was prolonged?
"I beg your pardon for not having kept my nerves under better control.—There is nothing more to say. I promise you one thing: I will do everything in my power to keep Pierre from ever knowing. Don't thank me. I will keep silent on his account, on my own account, so as to preserve a friendship that has always been dear to me, that always will be dear. I did not come here to threaten you that I would disclose the past to him. I came to ask you to be silent, to not push your vengeance to its last extreme.—And now, as I bid you farewell forever, I still ask you that. You love Pierre, he loves you; promise me that you will never use his love against our friendship, to respect that feeling in his heart."
There was a supplicating humility in Olivier's voice. All the religious sentiment of his friendship, which Ely knew filled him, betrayed itself in his tone, sadly, almost solemnly! And with a solemn emotion she replied:—
"I promise you."
"Thank you again," he said, "and farewell."
"Farewell," she replied.
He took a few steps toward the door. Then he turned and approached her. This time she read in his eyes all the maddening vertigo of love and desire. She was seized with such a terror that she could not move. When he arrived at her chair, he took her head between his hands and frantically, passionately pressed it to his heart. He covered her brow, her hair, her eyes with kisses, and strove to kiss her lips with a mad frenzy that restored the woman all her strength. Thrusting him from her with all the vigor that her indignation gave her, she rose and took refuge in the corner of the salon, crying, as though appealing for help to the being who had the right to defend her:—
"Pierre! Pierre! Pierre!"
As he heard the name of his friend, Olivier seized a chair as though he were about to faint. And suddenly, without looking at Ely, who was crouching against the wall almost swooning, with her hand pressed upon her heart, without saying a single word either of adieu or to ask pardon, he left the salon.
She heard him traverse the bigger room and heard the second door close. He went away with the terrified air of a man who had almost succumbed to the temptation to crime and who flees from himself and his loathsome desire. He passed, without seeing them, the two footmen in the vestibule, who had to run after him with his cane and overcoat. He went along one of the alleys in the garden without knowing it. The rush of emotion that had flung him upon his former mistress, now the mistress of his dearest friend, now gave way to such a flood of remorse, he was so tossed about on the sea of conflicting emotions caused by the kisses pressed upon the face he had longed for so secretly, with such intensity, during the past few days, by the sensation of her lips seeking to avoid contact with his own, of the beloved figure thrusting him away with repulsion and horror, that he felt his reason was giving way.
All at once, as he turned round the corner of the railing surrounding the villa, he saw that some one was awaiting him in a carriage. The sight arrested him with the same ghastly terror he would have felt at seeing the spectre of some one he believed dead and resting in the bosom of the earth. It was the avenger whom Ely had called to her aid. It was Hautefeuille!
"Olivier!"
It was all he said. But his voice, his deadly pallor, his eyes, in which shone the suffering of a heartbreaking anguish, told his friend that he knew all.
The most extraordinary results are always brought about by the simplest causes, just as the most unexpected things are always logical happenings. A little reflection would oftener than not have been sufficient to prevent the one and to foresee the other. But the characteristic of passion is that its object absorbs its attention completely. It takes no note of the fact that other passions exist outside itself, as furious as itself, as uncontrollable with which it must come in contact. It is a train flying along under full steam, with no signal to warn it that another train is coming in the opposite direction on the same line.
Swept away by a torrent of suffering, wrapped up in his thoughts during this week of mortal agony, Olivier had not noticed that there was a being near him living, trembling, suffering also. Monomania is full of such egoism, of such forgetfulness. He had not noticed the working of his wife's mind, nor foreseen the natural possibility that, exasperated by her suspicions, Berthe might appeal to her husband's friend for help, that she might implore Hantefeuille to aid her! This was just what she finally did, and the interview between them had as result one easy to prognosticate—that the young wife's jealousy tore off the bandage that covered the eyes of her husband's unwitting friend. In one minute Pierre understood everything!
This tragedy—such an interview was one, and one that was big with a terrible dénouement—was brought about by a last mad imprudence on Olivier's part. The eve of his meeting with Madame de Carlsberg he had manifested a more than usually feverish agitation. Not one of the indications of this state of mind had escaped his wife's notice. He had walked about in his room almost all the night, sitting down at intervals to try and write the letter he was going to send to Ely in the morning. Through the thin dividing partition of the room Berthe, awake and her senses acutely tense, heard him walk, sit down, rise, sit down again, crumpling up and tearing papers, walk about again, crush up and tear other paper. She knew that he was writing. "To her," she thought. Ah! how she longed to go, to open the door, which was not even locked, to enter the room, and to know if the anxiety that had consumed her during the last week was well founded or not, to learn if Olivier had really met again the mistress he had known in Rome, to discover if this woman was the cause of the agitated crisis he was going through, if, yes or no, that former mistress was the Baroness Ely she had so much longed to meet in one of the salons at Cannes.
But, without her being able to say anything, her husband arranged something for every day, and they had not paid a single visit or dined a single time with any of their friends. She was too intelligent not to have understood at once that Olivier did not wish to mix with the society of Cannes, and that he would not, on the other hand, go away from the town. Why? A single premiss would have enabled Berthe to solve the enigma, but she had not that premiss. Her wifely instinct, however, was not to be deceived—there was a mystery. With an infallible certainty all pointed to this fact.
By dint of thinking and observing, she came to this conclusion: "This woman is here. He regrets her, and yet is afraid of her.—He longs for her, and that is why we remain here and why he is so unhappy.—He is afraid of her, and that is why he will not let me mix in society here."
How many times during the week she had been tempted to tell him that such a situation was too humiliating, that he must choose between his wife and his former mistress, that she had determined to go away, to return to Paris, to be once more at home among her own people!
And then Hautefeuille was there, always making a third; Hautefeuille, who certainly knew all the truth! She hated him all the more in proportion as she suffered from her helpless ignorance. When alone with Olivier an invincible timidity prostrated her. She had a shamed terror of owning that she had discovered the name of the Baroness Ely. She dreaded having to own she had seen the portrait, as though she had been guilty of some vile spying. She trembled with fear lest some irreparable word should be spoken in the explanation that must follow. The unknown in her husband's character terrified her. She had often heard the histories of households broken up forever during the first year of married life. Suppose he should abandon her, return to the other in a fit of rage? The poor child felt her heart grow cold at the mere idea.
She loved Olivier! And even without any question of love, how could she accept the idea of seeing her conjugal happiness wrecked with the scandal of a separation, she so calm, so reasonable, so truly pure and simple-minded?
Again during the miserable night preceding Olivier's meeting with Ely she had listened to the restlessness of her husband and had kept silent, in spite of her suffering, of her sense of desertion, of her jealousy! Every footstep in the adjoining room made her pray, made her long for strength to resist the temptation to have finished forever with all her suffering. A dozen times she compelled herself to begin the comforting prayer, "Our Father—" and every time when she arrived at the sentence, "As we forgive them that have trespassed against us," her entire being had revolted.
"Forgive that woman? Never! never! I cannot." An almost insignificant detail—are there any insignificant details in such crises?—completed the tension of her nerves. Toward nine o'clock her husband, ready dressed for going out, entered her room. He had a letter in his hand slipped between his gloves and his hat. Berthe could not read the address on the envelope, but she saw that it bore no stamp. With her heart beating wildly with expectation of the reply he would make to the simple question, she said to her husband:—
"Do you want a stamp?—You will find one in my writing case on the table."
"No, thank you," replied Olivier. "It is simply a line to be delivered by hand. I will leave it myself."
He went out, adding that he would be back for luncheon. He never dreamed that his wife burst into a passion of weeping the moment she was alone. She was now certain the letter was for the Baroness Ely. Then, like every jealous woman, she gave way to the irresistible, savage instinct of material research which mitigates nothing, satisfies nothing—for, suppose a proof of the justice of suspicion is discovered, does that make the jealous suffering inspired by that suspicion any easier to bear?
She went into her husband's room. In the wastepaper basket she saw the fragments of a score of letters, thrown there by the feverish hand of the young man. They were the drafts of the letters she had heard him begin and crumple up and destroy the night before. With trembling hands and burning cheeks, her throat parched with the horror of what she was doing, she gathered together and rearranged. She thus reconstituted the beginnings of a score of letters, letters of the most utter insignificance to any one unaided by the intuition of wounded love, but terribly, frightfully clear and precise to her.
They were all addressed to a woman. Berthe could read the incoherence of Olivier's thoughts in them. The entire gamut of sentiment was gone through, by turn ceremonious: "Madame, will you allow a visitor who has not yet had the honor;" ironical, "You will not be surprised, madame, that I cannot leave Cannes;" familiar, "I reproach myself, dear madame, for not having called upon you before this."
How the young man's pen had hesitated over the form of asking such a simple thing—the permission to pay a visit! This hesitation was, in itself, the certain proof of a mystery, and one of the fragments thus put together again revealed its nature: "Some vengeances are infamous, my dear Ely, and the one you have conceived—"
Olivier had written this in the most cruel minute of his insomnia. His suffering found relief in the insolent use of the Christian name, in the insulting remembrance of an ineffaceable intimacy. Then he tore up the sheet of paper into minute fragments which betrayed the rage consuming him. After she had put together and deciphered this fatal phrase Berthe saw nothing else. All her presentiments were well founded: Baroness Ely de Carlsberg, of whom Corancez had spoken to Hautefeuille in the train, was her husband's former mistress! He had only wanted to come to Cannes because she was there, so as to see her again! The letter in his hand a few minutes before had been for her! He had gone with it to her villa!
Face to face with this indisputable and overwhelming certainty, the young woman was seized with a convulsive trembling that increased as the hour for luncheon drew near.—It burst all bounds when, toward noon, she received a card from Olivier upon which he had scribbled in pencil—always the same handwriting!—that a friend whom he had met had insisted upon keeping him for luncheon, and he begged her not to wait for him!
"She has won him back from me! He is with her!"
When she had realized this thought, weighted with all the horrible pain given by evidence that pierces to the heart, like some glittering, icy cold knife, she felt that she could not support this physical suffering. With the automatic action that comes upon such occasions she put on her hat and veil and gloves. Then when she was dressed and ready for going out a final gleam of reason showed her the folly of the project she had conceived. She had thought of going to her rival's house, of surprising Olivier, and of finishing with it all forever!
To finish with it all! She looked at herself in the mirror, her teeth chattering, her face lividly pale, all her body convulsively trembling. She realized that such a step in her present state with such a woman would be absurd. But suppose some one else took this step? Suppose some one else went to Olivier and said, "Your wife knows all. She is dying. Come."
The idea of him whom she believed to be her husband's confidant had no sooner occurred to the mind of the unhappy woman when she rang for her chambermaid with the same automatic nervousness.
"Beg Monsieur Hautefeuille to come here, if he is in his room," she said, she who had never had a single conversation in her lifetête-à-têtewith the young man.
But she cared nothing for conventionality at the moment. Her nervousness was so great that she had to sit down when the chambermaid returned, and said that Monsieur Hautefeuille was coming. Her limbs would no longer support her. When he entered the room about five minutes later she did not give him the time to greet her, to ask why she had sent for him. She sprang toward him like some wild creature seizing her prey, and, taking his arm in her trembling hand with the incoherence of a madwoman who only sees the idea possessing her and not the being to whom she speaks, she said:—
"Ah! you have come at last.—You must have felt that I suspected something.—You must go and tell him that I know all, you hear me, all,—and bring him here. Go! Go! If he does not come back I shall go mad.—You have an honorable heart, Monsieur Hautefeuille. You must think it wrong, very wrong, that he should return to that woman after only six months of married life. Go, and tell him that he must come back, that I forgive him, that I will never speak about it again. I cannot show him how I love him.—But I do love him, I swear that I love him.—Ah! my head is reeling."
"But, Madame du Prat," said Pierre, "what is the matter? What has gone wrong? Where must I go to find Olivier? What is it that you know? What is it that he has hidden from you? Where has he returned to?—I assure you I do not understand a single thing."
"Ah! you are lying to me again!" replied Berthe, more violent still. "You are trying to spare me!—But I tell you I know all.—Do you want proofs? Would you like me to tell you what you talked about in your first conversation together the day we arrived, when you left me alone at the hotel? Would you like to know what you talk about every time that I am not present?—It is of the woman who was his mistress in Rome, of whom he has never ceased thinking.—He travelled with her portrait in his portfolio during our honeymoon! I saw that portrait—I tell you I saw it! That was how I learned her name. The portrait was signed at the bottom, signed 'Ely.'—You are satisfied now.—Do you think I did not notice your agitation, the uneasiness of both of you, when some one spoke of this woman before me the day we went to Monte Carlo?—You thought I did not see anything, that I suspected nothing.—I know, I tell you, that she is here. I will tell you the name of her villa if you like. It is the Villa Helmholtz.—I know that he only came to Cannes to see her again. He is with her now, I am certain.—He is with her now! Don't tell me I am wrong. I have here the pieces of letters that he wrote to her this past night asking for a meeting."
With her trembling hands, which had hardly strength enough to lift up the sheets of paper upon which she had arranged the damning fragments with such patience, she showed Pierre all the beginnings of a letter, among them the irrefutable sentence that had another significance for him. He was trembling so violently, his features expressed such anguish, that Berthe was convinced of his complicity. This fresh proof, after so many, that her suspicions were well founded, was so painful to the poor woman that before Pierre's eyes she gave way to a fit of hysterics. She made a sign to show that her breath was failing her. Her heart beat so furiously that she felt she was suffocating. She pressed her hand upon her heart, sobbing, "Oh, God!"—Her voice died away in her throat, and she fell upon the floor, her head hanging loosely, her eyes gleaming whitely, and with a little foam at the corners of her mouth as though she were dying.
The young man recovered his senses before the necessity of helping the poor woman, whose anguish terrified him, of succoring her by the simplest means that could be imagined readily, of summoning the chambermaid, of sending for the doctor and of awaiting his diagnosis. These cares carried him through the frightful half hour that follows every such revelation, the half hour that is so terrible.
He only recovered consciousness of the reality of his own misfortune when the departure of the doctor had reassured him of the young woman's state. The physician recommended antispasmodics and promised to come again during the evening. Although he did not seem much alarmed, the young wife's illness was serious enough to demand the presence of the husband.
Hautefeuille said, "I am going for M. du Prat," and went off in the direction of the Villa Helmholtz. It was on the way, while his carriage was rolling along the road now so familiar to him, that he felt the first attack of real despair. The news he had just heard was so stunning, so unexpected, so disconcerting, and full of anguish for him that he felt as though in the grasp of some hideous nightmare.—He would awake presently and would find everything as it was only that morning.—But no.—Berthe's words suddenly recurred to him. He saw again in imagination the opening of the letter, written in the hand he had known for twenty years: "Some vengeances are infamous, my dear Ely, and the one you have conceived—"
In the light of the terrible sentence, Olivier's strange attitude since his arrival in Cannes became quite comprehensible with a frightful clearness. Indications to which Pierre had paid no attention crowded pell-mell into his memory. He recalled glances his friend had cast at him, his sudden silence, his half confidences, his allusions. All invaded his recollection like a flood of certainty. It mounted to his brain, which was stupefied by the fumes of a grief as strong and intense as though by the influence of some poisonous alcohol. As his horse was walking up the steep incline of Urie he met Yvonne de Chésy. He did not recognize her, and even when she called to him he did not hear her. She made a sign to the driver to stop, and laughing, even in all her trouble, she said to the unhappy youth:—
"I wanted to know if you had met my husband, who was to have met me. But I see that a herd of elephants might have gone by without your seeing them! You are going to call upon Ely? You will find Du Prat there. He even deigned to recognize me."
Although Pierre had not the least doubt that Olivier was at Madame de Carlsberg's, this fresh evidence, gathered by pure chance, seemed to break his heart. A few minutes later he saw the roofs and the terraces of the villa. Then he came, to the garden. The sight of the hedge he had passed through only the night before with so much loving confidence, so much longing desire, completed the destruction of all the reason that remained to him. He felt that in his present state of semi-madness it was impossible for him to see his friend and his mistress face to face with each other without dying with pain. This was why Olivier found him, awaiting his arrival, at a turn of the road, livid with a terrible pallor, his physiognomy changed, his eyes gleaming madly.
The situation of the two friends was so tragic, it presaged so painful an interview, that both felt they could not, that they must not, enter into an explanation there.
Olivier got into the carriage as though nothing were amiss, and took the vacant place. As he felt the contact of his friend, Pierre shivered, but recovered himself immediately. He said to the coachman:—
"Drive to the hotel quickly."
Then, turning to Du Prat, he continued:—
"I came for you because your wife is very ill."
"Berthe?" cried Olivier. "Why, when I left her this morning she seemed so cheerful and well!"
"She told me where you were," went on Hautefeuille, avoiding a more direct reply. "By accident she has found among your papers a photograph taken in Rome and bearing a striking signature. She heard some one mention this name here. She at once came to the conclusion that the person bearing the name, and who lives at Cannes, was the original of the portrait from Rome. She discovered the torn fragments of some letters in which the same name occurred, and in which you asked for a rendezvous. In fact, she knows all."
"And you also?" asked Olivier, after a silence.
"And I also!" assented Pierre.
The two friends did not exchange another word during the quarter of an hour the carriage took to arrive at the Hôtel des Palmes. What could they have said in such a moment to increase or diminish the mortal agony that choked their utterance?
Olivier went straight to his wife's room the moment the carriage arrived, without asking Pierre when they would meet again and without Pierre asking him. It was one of those silences that happen at a death-bed, when all seems paralyzed by the first icy impression of the unchangeable, when all is stifled in the grip of the "nevermore"!
The crisis of weakness, the necessity of expansion that follows such struggles, began for Du Prat on the threshold of Berthe's room. He was saluted by the sickly odor of ether upon his entrance. Outlined, pale and haggard, against the pillow, regarding him with eyes swimming in tears, he saw the wasted face of the girl who had trusted him, who had given him her life, the flower of her youth, all her hopes and aspirations. How unyielding he must have been toward the suffering, self-contained creature for her to have concealed all her feelings from him, loving him as she did!
He could not utter a word. He sat down near the bed and remained for a long time looking at the poor invalid. The sensation of the suffering that enveloped all four—Berthe, Pierre, Ely, and himself—pierced him to the heart. Berthe loved him and knew that her lave was not returned. Pierre loved Ely, and was beloved by her, but his happiness had just been poisoned forever by the most horrible of revelations. As for himself, he was in the grasp of a passion for his former mistress, one whom he had suspected, insulted, deserted, and who had now given herself to his dearest friend.
Like a man who falls overboard in mid-ocean, who is swimming desperately in the raging sea, and who sees the waves assembling that will swallow him up, Olivier felt the irresistible power of the love he had so yearned to know, rising all around, within him and on every hand. He was in the influence of the storm, and he felt it sweeping him away. He was afraid. While he sat near the bedside, listening to the irregular breathing of his young wife, he felt for an instant the intellectual and emotional vertigo that imparts to even the least philosophical natures at such moments the vision of the fatal forces of nature, the implacable workers-out of our destinies. And then, like a swimmer tossed about by the palpitating ocean, making a feeble effort to struggle against the formidable waves before they engulf him, he tried to recover himself—to act. He wanted to speak with Berthe, to soften all that it was possible to soften of her suffering.
"You are angry with me?" he said.—"And yet you see that I came the moment I knew you were ill.—When you are well again I will explain all that has taken place. You will see that things have not been what you believe.—Ah! what suffering you would have spared us both if you had only spoken during the past few days!"
"I do not condemn you," said the poor girl, "and I do not ask you to explain anything.—I love you and you do not love me; that is what I know. It is not your fault, but nothing can change it.—You have just been very good to me," she added, "and I thank you for it. I am so worn out that I would like to rest."
"It is the beginning of the end," thought Olivier, as he passed into the salon in obedience to his wife's wish. "What will become of our household?—If I do not succeed in winning her back, in healing her wounded heart, it will mean a separation in a very short time, and for me it will mean the recommencement of an aimless life.—Heal her heart when my own is bleeding!—Poor child! How I have made her suffer!"
Through all the complications caused by his impressionability, he had retained the conscience of an honorable man. It was too sensitive not to shrink with remorse from the answer to this question. But—who does not know it by experience?—neither remorse nor pity, the two noblest virtues of the human soul, has ever prevailed against the dominating frenzy of passion in a being who loves. Olivier's thoughts quickly turned from the consideration of poor Berthe to the opposite side. The fever of the kisses he had pressed on Ely's pale, quivering face burned in his veins. The image of his friend, of the lover to whom the woman now belonged, recurred to him at the same time, and his two secret wounds began to bleed again so violently that he forgot everything that did not concern Ely or Pierre, Pierre or Ely. And a keener suffering than any he had yet experienced attacked him. What was his friend, his brother, doing? What had become of the being to whom he had given so large a part of his very soul? What was still left of their friendship? What would there still be left to-morrow?
Face to face with a prospective rupture with Hautefeuille, Olivier felt that this was for him the uttermost limit of anguish, the supreme stroke that he could not support. The wreck of his married life was a blow for which he was prepared. His frightful and desperate reflux of passion for Ely de Carlsberg was a horrible trial, but he would submit to it. But to lose his consecrated friendship, to possess no longer this unique sentiment in which he had always found a refuge, a support, a consolation, a reason for self-esteem and for believing in good, was the final destruction of all. After this there was nothing in life to which he could turn, no one for whom and with whom to live. It was the entrance into the icy night, into total solitude.
All the future of their friendship was at stake in this moment, and yet he remained there motionless, letting time slip by that was priceless. A few minutes before, when they were in the carriage returning to the hotel, he could not say a single word to Pierre. Now he must at all costs defend this beloved, noble sentiment, take part in the struggle of which the heart of his friend, so cruelly wounded, was the scene. How would he receive him? What could they say to each other? Olivier did not ask. The instinct that made him leave his room to go down to Hautefeuille's was as unconscious, as irreflective, as his wife's appeal to Hautefeuille had been, that appeal which had ruined all. Would Olivier's advances be followed with as fatal results?
When he had passed the threshold of the room, he saw Pierre sitting before a table, his head resting on his hands. A sheet of paper before him, still blank, showed that he had intended to write a letter, but had not been able. The pen had slipped from his fingers upon the paper and he had left it there. Through the window beyond this living statue of despair Olivier saw the wonderful afternoon sky, a soft pile of delicate hues in which the blue was deepened into mauve. Glorious masses of mimosa filled the vases and filled with their refreshing and yet heavy perfume the retreat in which the young lover had revelled during the winter in hours of romantic reverie, in which he was now draining the vast cup of bitterness that the eternal Delilah fills for her dearest victims!
Olivier had suffered many a poignant shock during this tragic afternoon, but none more agonizing than the silent spectacle of this deep, endless suffering. All the virility of his friendship awoke and his own grief melted in a fathomless tenderness for the companion of his childhood and youth, who was dying before his eyes. He put his hand upon Pierre's shoulder, gently and lightly, as though he divined that at his contact the jealous body of the lover must rebel and shrink back in horror, in aversion.
"It is I," he said; "it is I, Olivier.—You must feel that we cannot remain with this weight upon our hearts. It is a load under which you are reeling and which is stifling me. You are suffering; I am also in torture. Our pain will be less if we bear it together, each supporting the other.—I owe you an explanation, and I have come to give it you. Between us there can be no secret now. Madame de Carlsberg has told me all."
Hautefeuille did not appear to have heard the first words his friend uttered. But at the sound of his mistress's name he raised his head. His features were horribly contracted, betraying the dreadful suffering of a grief that has not found relief in tears. He replied in a dry voice in which all his repulsion was manifest.
"An explanation between us? What explanation? To tell you what? To inform me of what? That you were that woman's lover last year, and that I am your successor?" Then, as though lashing himself to fury with his own words, he went on:—
"If it is to tell me again what you did before I knew whom you were talking about, you may spare yourself the pain. I have forgotten nothing.—Neither the story of the first lover, nor of the other, nor of the one who was the cause of your leaving her.—She is a monster of falsehood and hypocrisy. I know it, and you have proved it. Don't let us begin again. It hurts me too much, and, besides, it is useless. She died for me to-day. I no longer know her."
"You are very hard upon her," replied Olivier, "and you have no right to be."
The cynicism of the insults Pierre was hurling at Ely was insupportable. It betrayed so much suffering in the lover who was thus outraging a mistress whom only the night before he had idolized! And then the passionate, true tone of the woman was still ringing in his ears as she spoke of her love. An irresistible magnanimity compelled him to witness for her, and he repeated:—
"No, you have no right to accuse her. With you she has neither been deceitful nor hypocritical! She loves you, loves you deeply and passionately.—Be just. Could she tell you what you now know? If she has lied to you, it was to keep you; it was because you are the first, the only love of her life."
"It is a lie!" cried Hautefeuille. "There is no love without complete sincerity.—But I would have forgiven her all, forgiven all the past, if she had told me.—Besides, there was a first day, a first hour.—I shall never forget that day and that hour.—We spoke of you that very day when I first met her. I can still hear her uttering your name. I did not hide from her how much I loved you. She knew through you how dearly you loved me.—It was an easy matter to never see me again, to not attract me, to leave me free to go my way! There are so many other men in the world for whom the past would have been nothing more than the past.—But no; what she wanted was a vengeance, a base, ignoble vengeance! You had left her. You had married. She took me, as an assassin takes a knife, to strike you to the heart.—You dare not deny it.—Why, I have read it; I know you believe that, for I have read it in your handwriting! Tell me, yes or no, did you write those words?"
"Yes, but I was wrong," said Olivier. "I believed it then, but I was mistaken. Ah!" he continued with a tone of despair, "why must it be my lot to defend her to you?—But if I did not believe that she loves you do you not think that I should be the first to tell you, the first to say, 'She is a monster'?—Yes, I thought she had taken you in a spirit of revenge. I thought it from the day of my arrival, when we wandered in the pine forest and you spoke of her. I saw so clearly that you loved her, and oh! how I suffered!"
"Ah! You admit it!" cried Pierre.
He rose, and, grasping his friend by the shoulder, he began to shake him in a fury of rage, repeating:—
"You admit it! You admit it! You knew that I loved her, and yet you said nothing. For an entire week you have been with me, been near me, you have seen me giving all my heart, all that is good in me, all that is tender and affectionate to your former mistress, and you said nothing! And if I had not learned from your wife you would have let me sink deeper and deeper in this passion every day, you would have left me in the toils of some one you despise!—It was at the beginning you ought to have said, 'She is a monster!'—not now."
"How could I?" said Olivier, interrupting. "Honor forbade it. You know that very well."
"But honor did not forbid you writing to her," replied Pierre, "when you knew that I loved her, to ask her for a meeting unknown to me; it did not prevent you going to her house, when you knew I was not there."
He looked at Olivier with an expression in which shone a veritable hatred.
"I see clearly now," he went on. "You have both been playing with me.—You wanted to use what you had discovered to enter into her life again. Judas! You have lied to me.—Traitor! Traitor! Traitor!"
With the cry of some stricken animal, he sank into a chair and began to weep passionately, uttering among his sobs:—
"Friendship, love; love, friendship, all is dead. I have lost all. Every one has lied to me, everything has betrayed me.—Ah! how miserable I am!—"
Du Prat recoiled, paling under the influence of this flood of invective. The pain caused by his friend's insult was deep enough. But there was no anger, no question of egoism in his feelings. The terrible injustice of a being naturally good, delicate, and tender only increased his pity. At the same time the sentiment of the irremediable rupture of their affections, if the interview finished like this, restored a little of the sangfroid that the other had quite lost. With a voice that was full of emotion in its gravity, he replied:—
"Yes, you must be suffering, Pierre, to speak to me in that way—me, your old companion, your friend! your brother—I a Judas? I a traitor?—Look me in the face. You have insulted me, threatened me—almost struck me—and you see I have no feeling in my heart for you except the friendship that is as tender, as sentient as it was yesterday, as it was a year, ten years, twenty years ago! I have played with you?—I have deceived you?—No, you cannot think that, you do not believe it!—You know well enough that our friendship is not dead, that it cannot die!—And all"—here his voice became agitated and bitter—"because of a woman!—A woman has come between us, and you have forgotten all, you have renounced all.—Ah! Pierre, arouse yourself, I implore you; tell me that you only spoke in your anger; tell me that you still care for me, that you still believe in our friendship. I ask it in the name of our childhood, of those innocent moments when we met and mourned because we were not really brothers. Is there a single recollection of that time with which I am not connected?—To efface you from my life would be to destroy all my past, all that part of it that I turn to with pride, that I contemplate when I want to free myself from the vileness of the present!—For God's sake, remember our youth and all that it held of good and noble and pure affection. In 1870, the day after Sedan, when you wanted to enlist, you came to seek me, do you recollect? And you found me going off to your house. Do you remember the embrace that drew us heart to heart? Ah! if any one had told us that a day would arrive when you would call me traitor, that you would call me, by whose side you wanted to die, a Judas; with what confidence we should have replied, 'Impossible!' And do you remember the snowy night in the forest of Chagey, toward the end, when we learned that all was lost, that the army was entering Switzerland and that on the morrow we had to give up our arms? And have you forgotten our oath, that if ever we had to fight again, we would be together, shoulder to shoulder, heart to heart, in the same line?—Suppose the hour should come, what would you do without me?—Ah, you are looking at me again, you understand me, you feel with me.—Come to my arms, Pierre, as on that third of September, now more than ten years ago, and yet it seems like yesterday.—Everything else in this life may fail us, but not our friendship.—Everything else is passion, sensual, delirium, but that feeling is our heart, that friendship is our very being!"
As Olivier spoke Pierre's attitude began to change. His sobs stopped and in his eyes, still wet with tears, a strange gleam appeared. His friend's voice betrayed such poignant emotion, the vision evoked by his brotherly love recalled such ideal thoughts to the unhappy man—visions of heroic deeds and courageous efforts—that, after the first shock of horrible pain, all his manly energy was called to life by the appeal of his old brother in arms. He rose, hesitated a second, and then seized Olivier in his arms. And they embraced with one of those noble sentiments that dry the tears in our eyes, that strengthen the wavering will and renew the strength of generosity in our hearts. Then briefly and simply Pierre replied:—
"I beg your pardon, Olivier; you are better than I am. But the blow was such a terrible one, and came so suddenly!—I had such entire, complete confidence in that woman. And I learned all in five minutes, and in that way!—I knew nothing, suspected nothing.—Then came the two lines in your handwriting after what your wife had told me, and on the top of your confidences!—It was like a ship upon the ocean at midnight cut in two by another vessel, and plunging beneath the waves forever.—A man could go mad in such a moment.—But let us say nothing more about that. You are right. We must save our friendship from this shipwreck."
He put his hand before his eyes as though to shut out another vision that was paining him.
"Listen, Olivier," he said, "you may think me very weak, but you must tell me the truth.—Have you ever seen Madame de Carlsberg since you parted in Rome?"
"Never!" replied Olivier.
"You wrote a letter to her this morning. Not the one of which I read the beginning, but another. What did you write about?"
"To ask for an interview, nothing more."
"And she? Did she reply?"
"Not personally. She sent word that she was at home."
"Why did you ask for this meeting? What did you say to her?"
"I said what I then thought was the truth. I was overwhelmed by the idea that she was trying to revenge herself upon me through you, and I felt I must arouse a sense of shame in her. She replied to my reproaches and proved to me that she loved you."