The second telegram arrived, and on the following Monday, at two o'clock, Pierre Hautefeuille was at the station at Cannes, awaiting the arrival of the express. It was the train he had taken to come from Paris in November, while still suffering from the attack of pleurisy that had been nearly fatal to him. Any one who had seen him getting out of the train on that November afternoon, thin, pale, shivering in spite of his furs, would never have recognized the invalid, the feverish convalescent, in the handsome young fellow who crossed the track four months later, supple and erect, rosy-cheeked and smiling, and with his eyes lit up with a happy reflection that brightened all his visage. Between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five, in that period of life when the vital principle is ripe and intact, the most timid of men have at times a keen joy in life which betrays itself in every gesture. It is a sign that they love, that they are beloved, that all around smiles upon their love. And the sensation that no obstacle stands between them and their passions fills them to overflowing with happiness. Their very physique seems to be transfigured, to be exalted. They have a different bearing, another look, a prouder attitude. It is as though some magnetic current emanated from happy lovers, that clothes them with a momentary beauty intelligible to every woman. They recognize at once the "enraptured lover," and hate him or sympathize with him, according as they are envious or indulgent, prosaic or romantic.
To this latter class belonged the two people whom Hautefeuille met face to face on the little central platform that serves as a sort of waiting-place at the Cannes station. One of these was Yvonne de Chésy, accompanied by her husband and Horace Brion. The other was the Marchesa Bonnacorsi,—as she still called herself,—escorted by her brother, Navagero. To reach them, the young man had to work his way through the fashionable crowd gathered there, as is usual at this hour, awaiting the train that is to carry them to Monte Carlo. The comments exchanged between the two women and their escorts during the few minutes that this operation took proved once more that the pettiness of malignant jealousy is not the characteristic of the gentler sex solely.
"Hallo! there is Hautefeuille!" said Madame de Chésy. "How pleased his sister will be to see him so wonderfully changed!—Don't you think he is a very handsome young fellow?”
"Yes, very handsome," assented the Venetian, "and the prettiest part of it is that he does not seem to be aware of it."
"He won't keep that quality long," said Brion. "It is 'Hautefeuille here, 'Hautefeuille' there! You hear of nothing but Hautefeuille at your house," addressing Yvonne, "at Madame Bonnacorsi's, at Madame de Carlsberg's. He was simply a good, little, inoffensive, insignificant youngster. You are going to make him frightfully conceited."
"Without considering that he will compromise one of you sooner or later if it continues," said Navagero, glancing at his sister.
Since the trip to Genoa the artful Italian had noticed an unusual air about Andryana and had been seeking the motive of it, but in the wrong direction.
"Ah! That's it, is it?" cried Yvonne, laughingly. "Well, just to punish you I am going to ask him to come into our compartment, and shall invite him to dine with us at Monte Carlo, so that he can take charge of Gontran—who needs some one to look after him. I say, Pierre," she went on, addressing the young man who was now standing before her, "I attach you to my service for the afternoon and evening.—You will report it to me if my lord and master loses more than one hundred louis.—He lost a thousand the day before yesterday at trente-et-quarante. Two affairs like that every week throughout the winter would be a nice income.—I shall have to begin thinking of how I am to earn the living expenses."
Chésy did not reply. He tugged at his mustache nervously, shrugging his shoulders. But his features contracted with a forced smile that was very different from the one his wife's witty sallies usually provoked. The catastrophe Dickie Marsh had predicted was slowly drawing near, and the unfortunate fellow was childish enough to try to offset the imminent disaster by risking the little means he had left upon the green cloth at Monte Carlo. Heedless to say, his wife was entirely ignorant of the truth. Thus Yvonne's remark was singularly cruel for him, and for her, uttered as it was, in the presence of Brion, the professional banker of needy mondaines. Hautefeuille, who had been enlightened by his conversations with Corancez and Madame de Carlsberg, felt the irony hidden in the pretty little woman's conversation at such a moment, and said:—
"I am not going to Monte Carlo. I am simply waiting for one of my friends—for Olivier du Prat—whom, I think, you know."
"What! Olivier! Why, he is an old sweetheart of mine, when I was staying with your sister.—Yes, I was crazy about him for at least a fortnight. Bring him along then and invite him to dine with us this evening. You can take the five o'clock train."
"But he is married."
"Well, invite his wife as well," cried the giddy creature, gayly. "Come, Andryana, persuade him. You have more power over him than I have."
Continuing her teasing like a spoilt child, she took Navagero's arm, and turning away, nothing amused her more than to see the expression on the Italian's face when he saw his sister in conversation with some one of whom he was suspicious. She was ignorant of the service she was rendering her friend, who profited by the few instants of her brother's absence to say to Pierre:—
"He also arrives by this train. I only came down to see him. Will you tell him that I am going to meet Florence upon the Jenny to-morrow morning at eleven o'clock? And, above all, don't be annoyed if Alvise is not very polite. He has got the idea that you are paying me attentions.—But here is the train."
The locomotive issued out of the deep cutting that leads into Cannes, and Pierre saw Corancez's happy profile almost immediately. He jumped out before the train stopped, and, embracing Hautefeuille, said loudly, so that his wife could hear:—
"How good of you to come to meet me!" adding in a whisper, "Try to get my brother-in-law away for a minute."
"I cannot," replied Hautefeuille; "I am expecting Olivier du Prat. Did you not see him in the train? Ah! I see him."
He left the Provençal's side without troubling himself further about this new act in the matrimonio segreto which was being played upon the station platform, and ran toward a young man standing upon the step of the train looking at him with a tender, happy smile. Although Olivier du Prat was only the same age as Pierre, he looked several years older, so stern and strongly marked was his bronzed, emaciated face. His features were so irregular and striking that it was impossible to forget them. His black eyes, of a humid, velvety black, the whiteness of his regular teeth, his thick, flowing hair, gave a sort of animal grace to his physiognomy which counterbalanced the bitterness that seemed to be expressed in his mouth, his forehead, and, above all, his hollow cheeks. Without being tall, his arms and shoulders denoted great strength. Hardly had he stepped down from the carriage when he embraced Hautefeuille with a fervor that almost brought the happy tears to his eyes, and the two friends remained looking at each other for a few seconds, both forgetting to offer a helping hand to a young woman who was, in her turn, standing upon the high step awaiting with the most complete impassibility until one of the young men should think about her. Madame Olivier du Prat was a mere child of about twenty years of age, very pretty, very refined, and with a delicacy in her beauty that was almost doll-like and pretty. Her hair was of a golden color that was cold through its very lightness. In her blue eyes there was, at this moment, that indefinable impenetrable expression that can be seen on the faces of most young wives before the friends of their husband's youth. Did she feel sympathy or antipathy, confidence or suspicion, for Olivier's dearest friend, who had been her husband's groomsman at their marriage? Nothing could be gathered from her greeting when the young man came and excused himself for not having welcomed her before and assisted her to the platform. She hardly rested the tips of her fingers upon the hand that Pierre held out to her. But this might only be a natural shyness, as the remark she made when he asked her about the journey might express a natural desire to rest:—
"We had a very pleasant journey," she said, "but after such a long absence one longs to be at home again."
Yes, the remark was a natural one. But, uttered by the lips of the slender, chilly little wife, it also signified: "My husband wished to come and see you and I could not prevent him. But don't be mistaken, I am very dissatisfied about it." At any rate, this was the involuntary construction Hautefeuille placed upon the words in his inner consciousness. Thus he was grateful to Corancez when he approached and spared him the difficulty of replying. The train started off again, leaving the road clear for the passengers, and the Southerner walked up, holding out his hand and smiling.
"How do you do, Olivier?—You don't remember me?—I am Corancez. We studied rhetoric together. If Pierre had only told me that you were in the train, we could have travelled together and had a good gossip about old times. You are looking splendidly, just as you did at twenty. Will you present me to Madame du Prat?"
"As a matter of fact, I did not recognize him," Olivier said a few minutes later, when they were in the carriage that was rolling toward the Hôtel des Palmes. "And yet he has not changed. He is the type of the Southerner, all familiarity that is intolerable when it is real and is ignoble when it is affected. Among all the detestable things in our country—and there is a good assortment — the most detestable is the 'old schoolfellow.' Because he has been a convict with you in one of those prisons called French colleges, he calls you by your Christian name, he addresses you as though you were his dearest friend. Do you see Corancez often?"
"He seems to think a great deal of you, Monsieur' Hautefeuille," said the young wife. "He embraced you the instant he was on the platform."
"He is rather demonstrative," replied Pierre, "but he is really a very amiable fellow, and has been very useful to me."
"That surprises me," said Olivier. "But how is it you never spoke to me of him in your letters? I should have been more communicative."
This little conversation was also unimportant. But it was sufficient to establish that feeling of awkwardness that is often sufficient to destroy the joy felt in the most dearly desired meeting. Hautefeuille divined there was a little reproach in the remark made by his friend about his letters, and he felt again the sensation, of hostility in Madame du Prat's observation. He became silent. The carriage was ascending the network of roads that he had traversed with Corancez upon the morning of their visit to the Jenny, and the white silhouette of the Villa Helmholtz stood out upon the left beyond the silvery foliage of the olive trees. His mistress's image reappeared in the mind of the young man with the most vivid intensity. He could not help making a comparison between his dear beloved Ely and his wife's friend. The little Frenchwoman seated by his side, a little constrained and stiff in spite of her elegant correctness, suddenly appeared to him so poor, so characterless, such a nullity, so uninteresting beside the supple, voluptuous image of the foreigner.
Berthe du Prat was the embodiment of the quiet and somewhat negative distinction that stamps the educated Parisienne (for the species exists). Her travelling costume was the work of a famous costumier, but she had been so careful to shun the merest approach to eccentricity that it was completely impersonal. She was certainly pretty with the fragile, delicate prettiness of a Dresden china figure. But her visage was so well under control, her lips so close pressed, her eyes so devoid of expression, that her charming physiognomy did not provoke the least desire to know what sort of a soul it hid. It was so apparent that it would only be made up of accepted ideas, of conventional sentiments, of perfectly irreproachable desires. This is the sort of woman that men who have seen much life ordinarily seek for wives. After having corrupted his imagination in too many cases of irregularity, Olivier had naturally married the child whose beauty flattered his pride and whose irreproachable conduct was a guarantee against any cause for jealousy.
It was not less natural that Pierre, educated in the midst of conventional ideas, and who had suffered from the prejudices of his family, should remark in the composition of the young woman her very evident poverty of human sympathy, as well as all that was mean and mediocre, particularly by comparison.
Impressions of this kind quickly produced that shrinking, that retreat of the soul, that we call by a big word, convenient by reason of its very mystery; that is, antipathy. Pierre had not felt this antipathy at the first meeting with Mademoiselle Berthe Lyonnet, now Madame du Prat. And yet she ought to have displeased him still more, among her original surroundings, between her father, the most narrow-minded of solicitors, and her mother, a veritable dowager of the better class of Parisian middle life. But at that time the romantic side of the young man was as yet dormant. The intoxication of love had awakened him, and he was now sensitive to shades of feminine nature that had been hidden from him before. Being too little accustomed to analyzing himself to recognize how the past few weeks had modified his original ideas, he explained the sentiment of dislike that he felt for Berthe du Prat by this simple reason, one that helps us to justify all our ignorance on the subject of another's character.
"What is it that is changed in her?—She was so charming when she was married! And now she is quite a different woman.—Olivier has also changed. He used to be so tender, so loving, so gay! And now he is quite indifferent, almost melancholy. What has happened?—Can it be that he is not happy?"
The carriage stopped before the Hôtel des Palmes just as this idea took shape in Pierre's mind with implacable clearness. He kept repeating the question while watching Olivier and his wife in the vestibule. They walked about, chatting of the orders to be given about the luggage and to the chambermaid. Their very step was so out of harmony, so different, that by itself it opened up a vista of secret divorce between the two. It is in such minute, in the instinctive fusion, the unison in the gesture of both, that the inner sympathy animating two lovers, or husband and wife, must be sought. Olivier and his wife walked out of step metaphorically, for expressions have to be created to characterize the shades of feeling that can neither be defined nor analyzed, but which are attested by indisputable evidence. And what a world of evidence was contained in a remark made by Du Prat, when the hotel clerk showed him the rooms that had been kept for him. The suite was composed of a large room with a big bed, two cabinets de toilette, one of which was huge, and a drawing-room.
"But where are you going to put my bed?" he asked. "This dressing-room is very little."
"I have another suite with a salon and two contiguous bedrooms," said the clerk; "but it is on the fourth floor."
"That doesn't matter," replied Du Prat.
He and his wife went up in the elevator without even glancing at the beautiful flowers with which Pierre had embellished the vases. He had beautified the conjugal chamber of Olivier and Berthe in the way he would have liked the room to be decorated which he would have shared with Ely. Left alone breathing the voluptuous aroma of mimosa mingled with roses and narcissus, he looked through the window across the clear afternoon landscape, the Esterels, the sea, and the islands. The little sunny chamber, quiet and attractive, was a veritable home for kisses with such perfumes and such a view. And yet Olivier's first idea had been to go and seek two separate rooms! This little fact added to the other remarks, and, above all, to his involuntary, intuitive conclusions, made Hautefeuille become meditative. A comparison between the passionate joy of his sweet romance and the strange coldness of this young household again arose in his mind. He recalled the first night of real love, that night in heavenly intimacy on the yacht. He remembered the second night, the one Ely and he had passed at Genoa. How sweet it had been to slumber a brief moment, his head resting upon the bosom of his beloved mistress. He thought of the very preceding evening when Ely had yielded to his supplications to allow him to visit her that night at the Villa Helmholtz, and he had glided into the garden by means of an unprotected slope. At the hothouse he found the door open with his mistress awaiting him. She had taken him to her room by a spiral staircase which led to the little salon and which only she used. Ah! What passionate kisses they had exchanged under the influence of the double emotions of Love and Danger! This time he left the room with despair and heartburning. He had returned alone, along the deserted roads, under the stars, dreaming of flight with her, with his beloved, of flight to some distant spot, to live with her forever, husband living with his wife! Could it be that Olivier had not the same sentiments toward his young wife; that he could forego that right to rest upon her adored heart all the night and every night? Could he forego that precious right, the most precious of all, of passing all the night and every night, half the year to the end of the year, half a lifetime to the end of life, with her pressed close to him? Could he renounce the ecstasy of her presence when, with her dress, the woman had put off her social existence to become once again the simple, true being, beautified only with her youth, with her love, to become only the confiding, tender, all-renouncing creature that no other sees?
But if they loved each other so little after so short a married life, had he ever really loved her? And if he had never really loved her, why had he married her?—Pierre had got to this point in his reflections when he was abruptly aroused by a hand being laid upon his shoulder. Olivier was again standing before him, this time alone.
"Well," he said, "I have arranged everything. The rooms are rather high, but the view is all the more beautiful. Have you anything to do just now? Suppose we go for a walk."
"How about Madame du Prat?" asked Hautefeuille.
"We must give her time to get settled," replied Olivier, "and I admit that I am very glad to be alone with you for a few minutes. One can only talk when there are two. By one I mean 'us.'—If you only knew how glad I am to be with you again!"
"My dear Olivier!" cried Pierre, deeply moved by the sincere accent of the remark.
They took each other's hands and their glances met, as at the station. No word was spoken. In the Fioretti of St. Francis it is related how St. Louis one day, disguised as a pilgrim, came and knocked at the door of the convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli. Another saint, named Egidio, opened the door and recognized him. The king and the monk kneeled, the one before the other, and then separated without speaking. "I read his heart," said Egidio, "and he read mine." The beautiful legend is the symbol of the meeting of friends such as the two young people. When two men who know each other, who have loved each other since infancy, as Pierre and Olivier did, meet face to face again, they have no need of protestation, no need of fresh assurances of their reciprocal faithfulness, esteem, confidence, respect, devotion; all the noble virtues of male affection need no words to explain them. They shine and glow, their mere presence sufficing, like a pure and steady flame. Once again the two friends felt that they could count upon each other.—Once more they felt how closely they were united with the bonds of fraternal love.
"So you were good enough to think of putting flowers in the rooms to welcome us?" said Olivier, taking his friend's arm. "I will just give orders for them to be taken up to our apartments.—Let us go now.—Not to the Croisette, eh?—If it is like what it used to be when I stayed here before, it must be intolerable. Cannes was a real 'Snobopolis' at that time, with its army of princes and prince worshippers!—I remember some lovely spots between California and Vallauris, where the scenery is almost wild, where there are big forests of pines and of oaks—with none of those grotesque feather brushes they call palms, which I hate."
They were by this time leaving the hotel garden, and Du Prat pointed, as he spoke, to the alley of trees that gave its name to the fashionable caravansary. His friend began to laugh, as he replied:—
"Don't throw too much sepia over the gardens of poor Cannes. They are very excellent hotbeds for an invalid! I know something about it."
This was an allusion to an old joke that Pierre had often made in their youth when he would liken the wave of bitterness that seemed to sweep over Olivier in his evil moments to the jet of black liquid projected by the cuttlefish to hide its whereabouts. Olivier also laughed at the memories the souvenir recalled. But he continued:—
"I don't recognize you in your present state. You fraternize with Corancez, you the irreconcilable! You, the master of Chaméane, love these paltry gardens, with their lawns that they turn up in spring, with their colored metallic trees and with their imitation verdure!—I prefer that."
And he pointed, as he spoke, to the turning of the road, where the mountain showed itself covered with a fleece of dark pines and light larch trees. At its foot the line of villas from Cannes to Golfe Juan continued for a little distance and then ceased, leaving nothing upon the mountain side right up to the peak but a growth of primitive forest. To the right spread the sea, deserted, unbroken by even a single sail. The sense of isolation was so complete that for a moment, glancing from the verdant mountain to the shimmering sea, the illusion of what the landscape must have been before it had become a fashionable wintering-place was startlingly complete.
The two young men walked on for a few hundred yards further and plunged into mid-forest. The red trunks of the pines were now growing so thickly around them that the azure brilliancy of the waves could only be seen fitfully. The black foliage above their heads was outlined against the open sky with singular distinctness. The refreshing, penetrating odor of resin, mingled at intervals with the delicate perfume of a large, flowing mimosa, enveloped them in a balmy atmosphere.
Olivier surveyed the forest with its northern aspect with all the pleasure of a traveller returning from the East, tired of sandy horizons, weary of that monotonous, implacably burnished nature, and who feels a keen joy at the sight of a variegated vegetation and in the multitudinous colors of the European landscape.
Hautefeuille, for his part, looked at Olivier. Disquieted to the verge of anxiety by the enigma of a marriage that he had formerly accepted without remark, he began to study the changing shades of thought, grave and gay, that flitted across his friend's candid physiognomy. Olivier was plainly more at ease in the absence of his wife. But he retained the expression of scorn in his eyes and the bitter curve on his lips that his friend knew so well. These signs were the invariable forerunners of one of those acrimonious fits of which Madame de Carlsberg had told Madame Brion. Pierre had always suffered for his friend when these crises attacked Olivier, and when he began to speak about himself and about life in a tone of cruel scorn that disclosed an abnormal state of cynical disillusion, he suffered doubly to-day; for his heart was unusually sensitive by reason of the love that filled it. What would his suffering have been could he have understood the entire significance of the remarks in which his companion's melancholy sought relief!
"It is strange," Olivier began musingly, "how complete a presentiment of life we have while still very young! I remember, as clearly as though it were this very moment, a walk we took together in Auvergne.—I am sure you do not recall it. We had returned to Chaméane from La Varenne, during the vacation after our third year. I had spent a fortnight with your mother, and upon the morrow I was to return to that abominable rascal, my guardian. It was in September. The sky was as soft as it is to-day, and the atmosphere was as transparent. We sat down at the foot of a larch for a few minutes' rest. I could see you before me. I saw the sturdy tree, the lovely forest, the glorious sky. All at once I felt a nameless languor, a sickly yearning for death. The idea suddenly came over me that life held nothing better for me, that I need expect nothing.—What caused such an idea? Whence did it come, for I was only sixteen then?—Even now I cannot explain it. But I shall never forget the intense suffering that wrung my soul that mild afternoon under the branches of the huge tree, with you by my side. It was as though I felt in advance all the misery, all the vanity, all the disasters of my life."
"You have no right to speak in that way," said Hautefeuille. "What miseries have you? What failures? What disasters?—You are thirty-two. You are young. You are strong. Everything has smiled upon you. You have been lucky in fortune, in your career,—in your marriage. You have an income of eighty thousand a year. You are going to be First Secretary. You have a charming wife—and a friend from Monomotapa," he added laughingly.
Olivier's deep sigh pained him keenly. He felt all the melancholy that had prompted his outbreak, which to others would have seemed singularly exaggerated! And, as he had often done before, he combated it with a little commonplace raillery. It was rare that Du Prat, with his delicate, critical turn of mind, sensitive to the least lack of good taste, did not also change his mood when his friend spoke in such a way. But this time the weight upon his heart was too heavy. He continued in a duller, more hopeless tone:—
"Everything has smiled upon me?" and he shrugged his shoulders. "And yet it seems so when one makes up the account with words.—But in reality, at thirty-two youth is over, the real, the only youth is finished.—Health and good fortune still preserve you from a few worries, but for how long?—They are not additional happinesses.—As to my career.—Don't let us speak on that idiotic subject.—And my marriage?"
He paused for a second as though he recoiled from the confidence he had been about to make. Then with a bitterness in his voice that made Pierre shudder, for it revealed an interior abscess that was full to bursting with an evil, malignant substance:—
"My marriage? Well, it is a failure like all the rest, a frightful, sinister failure.—But," he added, shaking his head, "what does it matter, either that or anything else?"
And he went on while Pierre listened without further interruption:—
"Did you never wonder what decided me to marry? You thought, I suppose, like everybody else, that I was tired of a solitary life, and that I wanted to settle down, that I had met a match that fulfilled all the conditions requisite for a happy alliance. Nothing was lacking. There was a good dowry, an honorable name, a pretty, well-educated girl. And you thought the marriage the most natural thing in the world. I don't wonder at it. It was simply an illustration of ordinary ideas. We are the slaves of custom without even knowing it. We ask why so-and-so has not married like every one else. But we never think of asking why so-and-so has married like every one else when he is not every one else.—Besides, you did not know, you could not know, what bitter experiences had brought me to that point.—We have always respected each other in our confidences, my dear Pierre. That is why our friendship has remained so noble, so rare, something so different from the loathsome companionship that most men designate by the name. I never spoke to you about my mistresses, about my loves. I never sought to hear of yours. Such vilenesses, thank God, have always remained outside our affection."
"Stop," broke in Hautefeuille, hurriedly, "don't sully your souvenirs in that way. I don't know them, but they must be sacred. If I have never questioned you about the secrets of your sentiments, my dear Olivier, it is through respect for them and not through any respect for our friendship.—Our affection would not have been limited by association with a true, deep love. Do not calumniate yourself. Do not tell me that you have never loved truly and deeply, and do not blaspheme."
"True love!" interrupted Olivier, with singular irony. "I don't even know what the two words taken together mean. I have had more than one mistress. And, when I think of them, they all represent wild desire, followed by deeper disgust; bitter sensuality, saturated with jealousy, much falsehood understood, much falsehood uttered, and not an emotion, not one, do you understand? Not one that I would wish to recall, not a happiness, not a noble action, not a satisfaction! Whose fault is it? Is it due to the women I have met or to myself, to their vileness or to my poverty of heart?—I cannot say."
"The heart is not poor," interrupted Hautefeuille, with just as much earnestness, "in him who has been the friend that you have been to me."
"I have been that friend to you because you are yourself, my dear Pierre," replied Olivier, in a tone of absolute sincerity. "Besides, the senses have no place in friendship. They have a big one in love, and my senses are cruel. I have always suffered from evil desires, from wicked voluptuousness. And I cannot tell you what leaven of ferocity has worked in the deepest depths of my soul every time that my desires have been strongly aroused.—I do not justify myself. I do not explain the mystery. It exists, that is all. And all my liaisons, from the first to the last, have been poisoned by this strange, fermenting mixture of hatred."
"Yes," he went on, "from the first to the last.—Above all, the last!—It was at Rome, two years ago. If ever I thought I could love it was at that time. In that unique city I met a woman, herself unique, different from the others, with so much unflinching courage in her mind, so much charm in her heart, without any meanness, without any smallness, and beautiful!—Ah! so beautiful!—And then our pride clashed and wounded us both. She had had lovers before me.—One at least, whom I was sure about.—He was a Russian, and had been killed at Plevna. I knew she had loved him. And although he was no more, that unreasoning jealousy, the unj