CHAPTER X
A VOW
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 life tête-à-tête with 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 h