CHAPTER IX
FRIEND AND MISTRESS—Continued
The sentiment of perfect happiness that Ely experienced when she was convinced, in talking to Pierre, that Olivier had not disclosed anything to his friend did not continue long. She knew her former lover too well not to understand the constant danger threatening her. She knew that he still remembered her, and she realized the intensity of morbid passion of which the unhappy man was capable. It was impossible that he should not feel toward her now as in the past, that he should not judge her in the present as during the time of their liaison, with a savage cruelty allied to a suspicion that had so wounded her. She knew how dearly he loved Hantefeuille. She knew how solicitous, how jealous that friendship was. No, he would not suffer her to possess his beloved companion without a struggle, were it only to save him from her whom he judged so hardly.
Besides her tact, the intuition of the former mistress was not to be deceived. When the man whom she knew to suffer, as from a malady, from a sensuality that was almost ferocious, should learn the truth, his worst, most hideous jealousy would be aroused into action. Had she not counted upon this very thing in the first place when she had nourished a scheme of vengeance that to-day filled her with shame?
All these ideas crowded into her mind immediately Hautefeuille left her. Again, as after his first visit, she accompanied him as far as the threshold of the hothouse, clasping his hand and leading him through the salon plunged in darkness, with a feeling of terror and yet of pride when she felt that the hand of the young man, indifferent to danger, never trembled. She shuddered at the first contact of the cold night air. A last embrace, their lips united in a yearning final kiss, the kiss of farewell,—always heartrending between lovers, for fate is treacherous and misfortune flies swiftly,—a few minutes during which she stood listening to his steps resounding as he walked down the deserted pathways of the garden, and then she returned to her room, returned to find the place, now cold, where her beloved had reposed in her solitary bed. In the sudden melancholy mood caused by separation her intelligence awoke from its vision of happiness and forgetfulness, awoke to a sense of reality. And she was afraid.
Here fear was intense, but short-lived. Ely descended from a line of warriors. She was capable of carrying out actively an energetic policy. She could think out clearly a situation. Resourceful and proud natures like hers have no time for the feverish creations of an unsound imagination enfeebled by terror. She was one of those who dare to look upon approaching danger. Thus in the first flush of her dawning passion for Hautefeuille, as her confession to Madame Brion proved, she had foreseen with a clearness that was almost a certainty the struggle that would take place between her love and Olivier's friendship for Pierre.
But this power of courageous realization allows such natures to measure the danger once they are face to face with it. They lay bare, with the greatest clearness, the facts of the crisis through which they pass. They have the strength that comes from daring to hope, from having an exact idea of the danger in moments that appear desperate. Thus though Ely de Carlsberg was a victim to a return of her awful anxiety, after Hautefeuille's departure, when she again laid down her head upon the pillow, though she suffered from a disquietude that kept her awake, when she arose the following morning she again felt confidence in the future. She had hope!
She had hope, and for motives that she saw clearly, just as the General, her father, used to see a battlefield laid out in imagination definitely and accurately. She had hope, in the first place, in Du Prat's love for his wife. She had felt how refreshing to the heart is the love of a young, pure nature innocent of the world. She had experienced it herself. She knew how the moral nature is restored, reformed, re-created, is purified by contact with the belief in the good, the magnanimity of generous impulses, the nobility of a broad charity. She knew how such an association washes away all shameful bitterness, all evil sentiment, all traces of vice. Olivier had married the girl of his choice. She loved him and he loved her. Why should he not have felt all the beneficent influence of youth and purity? And in that case where would he find the strength to wreck the happiness of a woman whom he had loved, whom he judged severely, but in whose sincerity he could not fail to believe?
Ely had this basis for her hope. She trusted in the truth of her passion for Pierre, in the evidence that would confront Olivier of his friend's happiness. She said to herself: "Once his first moment of suspicion is passed, he will begin to observe, to notice. He will see that with Pierre I have been free from any of the faults that he used to magnify into crimes, that I have been neither proud nor frivolous nor coquettish."—She had been so single-minded, so upright, so true in her love! Like all people possessed by a complete happiness, she thought it impossible for any one to misunderstand the truth of her heart.
Then, again, she trusted in the honor of both—in Pierre's, to begin with. Not only was she sure he would not speak of her, she knew in addition that he would use all his strength to prevent his secret being suspected by even his most intimate friend. Then she trusted in Olivier. She knew him to be of a scrupulous delicacy in all things, to be careful in his speech, to be a perfect gentleman! He would certainly never speak. To utter the name of one who had once been his mistress when their relations had been conducted under certain unrevealed conditions would be an infraction of a tacit agreement, as sacred as his word of honor, would be to be disgraced in his own eyes. Olivier had too much self-respect to be guilty of such a fault, unless it were in a moment of maddening suffering. This condition was lacking in his case. He could never have this excuse under the circumstances in which he returned, married and happy, after an absence of months and months, almost two years! No, there could not arrive this crisis in his life now. And, above all, he would never cause his friend to suffer.—Besides—and this was the final motive upon which Ely's hopes were based, was the most solid of all, and only that proved how thoroughly she knew Olivier—if he spoke of her to Pierre it would place a woman between them, it would trouble the ideal serenity of their affection, which had never been dimmed by a cloud. Even should he lose his self-respect, Olivier would never lose his respect for his friendship.
It was in such thoughts that the unhappy woman sought relief upon the day following Olivier's arrival in Cannes. It was the very day that the young man's suspicions took bodily form, the day when all indications pointed to one thing only, accumulated around him and were condensed into absolute certainty by the well-meant but irreparable words spoken by Corancez!
Ely de Carlsberg hoped, and her reason confirmed her hopes. But that very same reason was to destroy, bit by bit, the ground for hoping in the week following Olivier's return. And this, also, without her once meeting him. She dreaded nothing so much as meeting him face to face, and yet she would have preferred an explanation, even a stormy one, to this total lack of intercourse. That they did not meet was evidently an intentional act upon the part of the young man, for it was an impoliteness that could not be accidental.
There was only one way left for Ely to learn the truth, the talks that she had with Hautefeuille. How her suffering was intensified, how her agony was increased! Only from Hautefeuille could she hear of Olivier during the week. Through Hautefeuille she followed the tragedy being enacted in the heart of her former lover. To Pierre it was quite natural to tell his dear confidante of all the anxiety that his friend caused him. He never dreamt that the least important detail was full of significance for her. In every conversation with Pierre during the first eight days she descended deeper and deeper into the dangerous abyss of Olivier's thoughts. She saw a possible catastrophe approaching from the first,—a possible catastrophe that became a probability, even a certainty, at last.
The first blow to Ely's hope was dealt upon the day following the dinner at Monte Carlo, when she again saw Pierre, not this time in the quiet intimacy of a nocturnal meeting, but at the big soirée which had been spoken about in the train. It was late when he arrived. The salons were quite full, for it was nearly eleven o'clock.
"Olivier insisted upon keeping me," he said, excusing the lateness to Madame de Carlsberg. "I began to think he would never let me go."
"He wanted to keep you for himself," she replied; "it is so long since he saw you."
With a beating heart she waited to hear if Du Prat had manifested any repugnance when he knew that Pierre was coming to her house.
"You must not wound the susceptibility of an old friend."
"He is not susceptible," replied Pierre. "He knows well enough how attached I am to him. He kept me talking about his married life."
And, he added, sadly:—
"He is so unhappy! His wife is so badly suited to him. She does not understand him He does not love her and she does not love him.—Ah! it is frightful!"
So the rejuvenation of Olivier's heart by the love of a girl, the sentimental renewal upon which his former mistress had counted, was only one of her illusions. The man was unhappy in the very marriage in which she would have liked to see a sure guarantee of forgetfulness, the effacing of both their pasts. The revelation was so full of menace to the future of her own happiness that she felt she must know more, and she kept Pierre in a corner of the little salon, questioning him. They were near the foot of the private staircase leading to her room. By one of those contrasts that re-vivify in two lovers the fiery sweetness of their secret this salon, traversed by them with peril, in complete obscurity, hand clasping hand, this little salon, witness of their secret meetings, was now blazing with light, and the crowd moving about gave, as it does to all the fêtes on the Riviera, the sensation of a worldly aristocracy.
It served as a passage between the brilliantly lighted hothouse and the rooms of the ground-floor, decorated with shrubs and flowers and overflowing with guests. The prettiest women in the American and English colonies were there, extravagantly displaying their wealth of jewels, talking and laughing aloud, with the splendid complexion that characterizes the race. And mingling with them were Russians and Italians and Austrians, all looking alike at the first glance: all different at the second. The ostentations elegance of toilets, all daringly bright-colored, spoke loudly of the preponderance of foreign taste.
Evening coats were sprinkled about among these women, worn by all the authentic princes in the wintering-place and also by the society men of the place. All the varieties of the kind were represented there. The most celebrated of sportsmen, renowned for his success as a pigeon shot, elbowed an explorer who had come to Provence in search of rest after five years spent in "Darkest Africa," and both were chatting with a Parisian novelist of the first rank, a Norman Hercules with a faunlike face, contented smile, and laughing eyes, who a few winters later was to die a death worse than death, was to see the wreck of his magnificent intellect.
This evening an air of gayety appeared to hang over the salons, lit by innumerable electric lamps and ventilated by the balmy breath of early spring. In a few more days this society would be dispersed to the four corners of the continent. Did the fête owe its animation to this sentiment of a season that was almost finished, to the approach of an adieu soon to be spoken?
In any case this spring seemed to have penetrated even as far as the master of the house—the Archduke Henry Francis—in person. It was his first appearance in his wife's salon since the terrible day when he came there in search of Verdier to take him off almost by force to the laboratory. Those who had assisted at his cavalier entrance upon that occasion, and who were again present this evening, Madame de Chésy, for example, Madame Bonnacorsi, Madame Brion, who had come from Monte Carlo for two days, and Hautefeuille, were astounded by the change.
The tyrant was in one of his rare moments of good humor, when it was impossible to dislike him. He went about from group to group with a kindly word for all. In his quality of Emperor's nephew, and one who had almost ascended the throne, he had the princely gift of an infallible memory for faces. This enabled him to call by their names people who had been presented to him only once. And he joined to this quality another, one that disclosed him to be a man of superior calibre, an astonishing power of talking with each upon his special subject. To a Russian general, famous for having built at great peril a railroad through an Asiatic desert, he spoke of the Trans-Caspian plains with the knowledge of an engineer, coupled to a thorough familiarity with hydrography. He recited a verse from the Parisian novelist's first work, a volume of poems now too little known. With a diplomatist who had been for a long time in the United States he discussed the question of tariffs, and immediately afterward recommended the latest model of gun, with all the knowledge of a maker, to the celebrated pigeon shot. He talked with Madame Bonnacorsi about her ancestors in Venice, like an archæologist from the St. Mark library; with Madame de Chésy about her costumes, like some habitué of the Opéra, and had a kindly and private word for Madame Brion about the Rodier firm and the rôle it was playing in an important Austrian loan.
This prodigious suppleness of intellect, assisted by such a technical memory, made him irresistibly seductive when he chose to be winning.
He had thus arrived, amid general fascination, at the last salon, when he saw his wife talking with Hautefeuille. At this sight, as though it were an additional pleasure to surprise Ely tête-à-tête with the young man, his blue eyes, which shone so brightly in his ruddy face, became even more brilliant still. Advancing toward the pair, who became silent when they saw him approaching, he said in an easy manner to the Baroness, the friendliness of the tone accentuating the irony of the words:—
"I do not see your friend Miss Marsh this evening. Is she not here?"
"She told me she would come," replied Madame de Carlsberg. "She is perhaps indisposed."
"Have you not seen her to-day?" asked the Prince.
"Yes, I saw her this morning.—Will Your Highness tell me why you ask the question?"
"Simply because I am deeply interested in everybody who interests you," replied the Archduke.
As he uttered the insolently mocking phrase, the eyes of the terrible man shot a glance at Hautefeuille that was so savage that he felt an almost magnetic thrill shoot through him. It was only a flash and then the Prince was in another group talking, this time about horses and the last Derby with the Anglomaniac Navagero, without paying any more attention to the two lovers, who separated after a couple of minutes, heavy with unuttered thoughts.
"I must go and speak to Andryana," said Madame de Carlsberg. "I know the Prince too well not to be sure that his good temper hides some cruel vengeance. He must have found some way of embroiling Florence with Verdier.—Good-by for the present.—And don't be cast down over the misery of your friend's married life.—I assure you there are worse."
As she spoke, she gently waved a big fan of white feathers. The perfume she preferred, the perfume that the young man associated with the sweetest emotions, was waved abroad by the feathers. She gently bowed as a sign of farewell, and her soft brown eyes closed with the tender look of intelligence that falls upon a lover's heart like an invisible kiss.
But at that moment Pierre was unable to feel its sweetness. Again he had experienced, in the presence of the Archduke, the pain that is one of the frightful penalties of adultery; to see the beloved one ill-treated by the man who has the right because he is the husband, see it, and to be unable to defend her. He watched her going away now with the bearing of a beautiful, graceful queen, so proudly regal in her costume of pink moiré shot with silver. Upon the beloved visage which he saw in profile as she crossed the room, he discerned traces of profound melancholy, and again he pitied her with all his heart for the bitterness of her married life. He never dreamt that the Archduke's sarcasm left Madame de Carlsberg completely indifferent, nor that the relations of Miss Marsh and Verdier did not interest her sufficiently to cause such a complete feeling of depression. No. It was this idea that was weighing upon the mind of the young woman, that was lying upon her heart like lead in the midst of the fête: "Olivier is unhappily married! He is miserable. He has not gained that gentleness of heart that he would have done had he loved his wife.—He is still the same.—So he hates me yet.—It was enough for him to learn that Pierre was to pass the evening with me for him to try to prevent him from coming here.—And yet he does not know all.—When he does!"
And hoping against hope, she forced herself to think, to say, to repeat: "Well! When he does know he will see that I am sincere; that I have not made his friend unhappy; that I never will make him suffer."
It was also Pierre who awoke her from the second illusion that Olivier would be touched by the truth and purity of her love. Three days passed after the soirée, during which the young man did not see his mistress. Cruel as were these separations, Ely judged it wisest to prolong them during Du Prat's stay. She hoped to make up for it later; for she counted upon passing the long weeks of April and May at Cannes with Hautefeuille, weeks that were so mild, so covered with flowers, so lonely upon the coast and among the deserted gardens. The idea of making a voyage to Italy, where they could meet, as they had done at Genoa, in surroundings full of charm, also haunted her. The prospect of certain happiness, if she could escape from the danger menacing her, gave her strength to support the insupportable; an absence that contained all the possibilities of presence, the torture of so great a love, of being so near and yet not seeing each other.
It was the one way, she believed, of preventing suspicion from awakening in Olivier. After these three weary days of longing, she appointed a meeting with Pierre one afternoon in the garden of the Villa Ellenrock, which recalled to both an hour of exquisite happiness. While her carriage rolled toward the Cap d'Antibes, she looked out upon the foliage of the climbing roses, peering over the coping of the walls, the branches, already long and full of leaves, falling under their heavy load, instead of standing out strong and boldly, and casting heavy, deep shadows. A conflagration of full-blown roses blazed upon the branches. At the foot of the silvery olive trees, a thick growth of young wheat covered the loose soil of the fields. All these were the visible signs that the year had passed from winter to springtide in the three weeks. And a shudder of melancholy shot through the young woman at the sight. It was as though she felt the time slipping away, bearing her happiness with it. In spite of a sky, daily warmer and of a softer azure; in spite of the blue sea, of the odors permeating the soft, balmy air; in spite of the fascination of the flowers, blooming all around, as she strolled down the alleys, still bordered with cinerarias, anemones, and pansies, she felt that her heart was not as light as when she had flown to the last rendezvous. She perceived Hautefeuille, in profile, awaiting her under the branches of the big pine, at the foot of which they had rested. She felt at the first glance that he was no longer the lover of that time, enraptured with an ecstatic, perfect joy, and without a hidden thought. It seemed as though a shade hovered before his eyes and enveloped his thoughts. It could not be that he was vexed with her. It could not be that his friend had revealed the dreaded secret. And yet Pierre was troubled about Olivier. He admitted it at once before Ely had time to question him.
"I cannot think," he said, "what has come between us. I have the strange impression that certain things in me irritate him, unnerve him, displease him.—He is vexed with me about trifles that he would not even have noticed formerly; as, for example, my friendship with Corancez. Would you believe it? He reproached me yesterday for having witnessed the ceremony at Genoa, as though it were a crime.—And all because we met poor Marius and his wife in the train at Golfe Juan yesterday!
"'Our nest is built there,' Corancez said to me, adding—these were his very words—that 'the bomb was going to explode,' meaning that Andryana was going to speak to her brother.—I told the story to Olivier to amuse him, and he flew into a temper, going so far as to talk of its being 'blackmail,' as though one could blackmail that abominable creature Navagero!—I replied to him, and he answered me.—You cannot imagine in what terms he spoke to me about myself, about the danger that I ran in frequenting the society of this place, of the unhappiness my change of tastes and ideas gave him.—He could not have talked more seriously had Cannes been tenanted by a gang of thieves who wished to enroll me in their ranks.—It is inexplicable, but the fact remains. He is pained, wounded, uneasy because I am happy here. Can you understand such madness in a friend whom I love so sincerely, who loves me so tenderly?"
"That is the very reason why you must not feel angry," replied Ely. "When one suffers, one is unjust. And he is unhappy in his married life. It is so hard to have made a mistake in that way."
She spoke in this way, prompted by a natural jealousy. Her passionate, ungovernable nature was too proud, too noble to employ the method of secretly poisoning the mind of husband or lover against friendships that are disliked, a method that wives and mistresses exercise with a sure and criminal knowledge. But to herself she said:—
"Olivier has discovered that Pierre loves some one. Does he suspect that it is I?"
The reply to the question was not a doubtful one. Ely had too often noticed, when in Rome, the next to infallible perspicacity displayed by Olivier in laying bare the hidden workings of the love intrigues going on all around them. Although she continued, in spite of all, to hope in his honor, she dreaded, with a terror that became daily more intense, the moment when she would acquire the certitude that he knew. These two beings began to draw closer together by means of Hautefeuille, began to measure each other's strength, to penetrate each other's minds, even before the inevitable shock precipitated them into open conflict.
Again it was Pierre who brought to his suffering mistress the proof for which she longed and which she feared.—It was the seventh night after Olivier's arrival, and she was awaiting Pierre at half-past eleven, behind the open door of the hothouse. She had only seen him in the afternoon long enough to fix this nocturnal meeting which made her pulse throb as with a happy fever. The afternoon had been cloudy, heavy, stormy. And the opaque dome of clouds stretched over the sky hid every ray of moonlight, every twinkling star. Heavy lightning glowed upon the horizon at moments, lighting up the garden, disclosing everything to the eyes of the young woman who stooped forward to see the white alleys bordered with the bluish agaves, the lawns with their flowering shrubs, the green stems of the bamboos, a bunch of parasol pines with their red trunks whose dark foliage stood out for a moment in the sudden flash of light followed immediately by a darker, more impenetrable shadow. Was it nervousness caused by the approaching tempest, for a heavy gust of hot wind swept across the garden, announcing the advent of a hurricane, or was it remorse at the idea of exposing her friend to the violence of the storm when he parted from her, that made Ely already anxious, troubled, and unhappy? When she at last saw Hautefeuille, by the light of the cold and livid lightning, passing along the fringe of bamboos, her heart beat with anxiety.
"Heavens!" she said to him, "you ought not to have come upon such a night.—Listen."
Big drops of rain began to fall upon the glass of the hothouse. Two formidable thunderclaps were heard in the distance. And now the drops of rain became more and more general, so that around the two lovers under the protecting dome of glass there was a continuous, sonorous rattle that almost drowned the sound of their voices.
"You see our good genius protects us," answered the young man, pressing her passionately to his heart, "since I got here just in time.—And, besides, I should have come through the tempest without noticing it.—I have been too unhappy this evening. I felt I must see you to comfort me, to help me."
"You look disturbed," she replied. And touching his face in the darkness with her soft, caressing hands, she added, her voice changing: "Your cheeks are burning and there are tears in your eyes.—What is the matter?"
"I will tell you presently," Pierre answered, "when I have been comforted by feeling that you are near me.—God! How I love you! How I love you!" he repeated with an intensity in which she discerned suffering.
Then, later, when they were both in the solitude of her room, he said:—
"I think Olivier is going mad. These last few days he has been even stranger than ever.—This evening, for example, he regarded me with a look that was so curious, so insistent, so penetrating, that I feel positively uneasy. I have not reposed any confidence in him, and yet I had the impression that he read in me — not your name.—Ah! happily, not that—not that!—but how am I to explain it?—my impatience, my desire, my passion, my happiness, all my sensations? And I had a feeling that my sentiments filled him with horror.—Why?—Is he not unjust? Have I taken away from our friendship in loving you? I was very miserable about it. Finally at ten o'clock I bade good night to him and his wife.—A quarter of an hour later some one knocked at my door. It was Olivier.—He said, 'Would you mind coming for a walk? I feel that I cannot sleep until I have taken a stroll.'—I replied, 'I am sorry I cannot; I have some letters to write.' I had to find some excuse. He looked at me again with the same expression that he had had during dinner.—And all at once he began to laugh. I cannot describe his laugh to you. There was something so cruel in it, so frightfully insulting, so impossible to tolerate. He had not spoken a word, and yet I knew that he was laughing at my love. I stopped him, for I felt a sort of fury rising in me. I said, 'What are you laughing at?'—He replied, 'At a souvenir.' His face became perfectly pale. He stopped laughing just as brusquely as he had begun. I saw that he was going to burst into tears, and before I could ask him anything he had said 'Adieu' and gone out of the room."
There is a necessity for conflict in the natural, logical issue of certain situations, a necessity so inevitable that even those who feel they will be destroyed by it accept the struggle when it comes without seeking to avoid it. It is thus, in public life, that peoples go to war, and in private life rivals accept the duel with a passive fatalism that often contradicts their complete character. They recognize that they have been caught in the orbit of action of a power stronger than human will.
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 f