If Pierre Hautefeuille's action had escaped the malicious eyes of Corancez, it had not, however, passed unperceived. Another person had seen the Baroness Ely sell the gold box, and the young man buy it; and this person was one whom the unfortunate lover should have most feared. For to be seen by her was to be seen by Madame de Carlsberg herself, as the witness of the two successive sales was no other than Madame Brion, the confidante of Baroness Ely, residing at the same villa, and sure to report what she had seen. But to explain the singular interest with which Madame Brion had observed these two scenes, and the attitude with which she was about to speak of it to her friend, it is necessary to relate the circumstances that had caused so close an intimacy between the wife of a Parisian financier of such low birth as Horace Brion, and a noble lady of the European Olympus, who figured in the Almanach de Gotha among the Imperial family of Austria. The peculiarity of the cosmopolitan world, the trait that gives it its psychological picturesqueness, in spite of the banal character inevitable to a society composed of the rich and the idle, is the constant surprises of connections like this. This society serves as the point of intersection for destinies that have started from the widest extremities of the social world. One may see there the interplay of natures so dissimilar, often so hostile, that their simplest emotions have a savor of strangeness, the poetry of unfamiliar things. Just as the love of Pierre Hautefeuille, this Frenchman so profoundly, so completely French, for a foreigner so charming as the Baroness Ely, with a charm so novel, so difficult for the young man to analyze, was destined to occupy a place of such importance in his sentimental life, so the friendship between the Baroness Ely and Louise Brion could not fail to be a thing of special and peculiar value in their lives, although its material circumstances were, like everything in the cosmopolitan world, as natural in their details as they were strange in their results.
This friendship, like most lasting affections, began early, when the two women were but sixteen. They had ended their girlhood together in the intimacy of a convent, which is usually terminated at the entrance into society. But when these attachments endure, when they survive through absence, unaffected by difference of surroundings, or by new engagements, they become as instinctive and indestructible as family ties. When the two friends first met, the name of one was Ely de Sallach, the other, Louise Rodier of the old family of Catholic bankers, now extinct, the Rodier-Vimal. Certainly from their birthplaces, one the Château de Sallach in the heart of the Styrian Alps, the other the Hôtel Rodier in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, it would seem that their paths of life must forever separate. A similar misfortune brought them together. They lost their mothers at the same time, and almost at once their fathers both married again. Each of the young girls, during the months that followed these second marriages, had had trouble with her step-mother; and each had finally been exiled to the Convent du Sacré-Cœur at Paris. The banker had chosen this establishment because he managed the funds and knew the superioress. General Sallach had been urged to this choice by his wife, who thus got rid of her step-daughter and gained a pretext for coming often to Paris. Entering the same day the old convent in the Rue de Varenne, the two orphans felt an attraction toward each other which their mutual confidences soon deepened into passionate friendship; and this friendship had lasted because it was based upon the profoundest depths of their characters and was strengthened by time.
The classic tragedy was not so far from nature as hostile critics pretend, when it placed beside its protagonists those personages whose single duty was to receive their confidences. There are in the reality of daily life souls that seem to be but echoes, ever ready to listen to the sighs and moans of others—soul-mirrors whose entire life is in the reflection they receive, whose personality is but the image projected upon them. On her entrance into the convent Louise Brion had become one of this race, whose adorable modesty Shakespeare has embodied in Horatio, the heroic and loyal second in Hamlet's duel with the assassin of his father. At sixteen as at thirty, it was only necessary to look at her to divine the instinctive self-effacement of a timidly sensitive character, incapable of asserting itself, or of living its own life. Her face was a delicate one, but its fineness passed unnoticed, so great was the reserve in her modest features, in her eyes of ashen gray, the simple folds of her brown hair. She spoke but little, and in a voice without accent; she had the genius for simplicity in dress, the style of dress that in the argot of women has the pretty epithet "tranquille." Whether man or woman, these beings, so weak and delicate, with their fine shades of sentiment, unfitted for active life, their desires instinctively attenuated, usually attach themselves, in a seeming contradiction which is at bottom logical, to some ardent and impetuous character, whose audacity fascinates them. They feel an irresistible desire to participate, through sympathy and imagination, in the joy and pain which they have not the force to encounter in their own experience. That was the secret of the relations between Madame Brion and the Baroness de Carlsberg. From the first week of their girlish intimacy, the passionate and fantastic Ely had bewitched the reasonable and quiet Louise, and this witchery had continued through the years, gaining from the fact that after their departure from the convent the two friends had once more experienced an analogous misfortune. They had both been in their marriage victims of paternal ambition. Louise Rodier had become Madame Brion, because old Rodier, having fallen into secret difficulties, thought that he could save himself by accepting Horace Brion as a son-in-law and partner. The latter, after his father had been ruined in the Bourse, had, in fifteen energetic years, not only made a fortune, but won a kind of financial fame by re-establishing affairs supposed to be hopeless, such as the Austro-Dalmatian Railway, so feloniously launched and abandoned by the notorious Justus Hafner (vide "Cosmopolis"). To efface the memory of his father Brion needed to ally himself with one of those families of finance whose professional honor is an equivalent of a noble title. The chief of the house of Rodier-Vimal needed an aide-de-camp of distinguished superiority in the secret crisis of his affairs. Louise, knowing the necessity of this union, had accepted it, and had been horribly unhappy.
It was the same year that Ely de Sallach, constrained by her father, married the Archduke Henry Francis, who had fallen in love with her at Carlsbad, with one of those furious passions that may overtake a blasé prince of forty-five, for whom the experience of feeling is so violent and unexpected that he clings to it with all the fever of youth momentarily recaptured. The Emperor, though very hostile on principle to morganatic marriages, had consented to this one in the hope that the most revolutionary and disquieting of his cousins would quiet down and begin a new life. General Sallach had looked to the elevation of his daughter for a field-marshalship. He and his wife had so persuaded the girl, that she, tempted herself by a vanity too natural at her age, had yielded.
Twelve years had passed since then, and the two old friends of Sacré-Cœur were still just as orphaned and as solitary and unhappy, one in the glittering rôle of a demi-princess, the other, queen of the great bank, as on the day when they first met under the trees of the garden by the Boulevard des Invalides. They had never ceased to write to each other; and each having seen the image of her own sorrow in the destiny of the other, their affection had been deepened by their mutual misery, by all their confidences, and by their silence, too.
The hardness of the financier, his ferocious egoism, disguised beneath the studied manners of a sham man of the world, his brutal sensuality, had made it possible for Louise to understand the miseries of poor Ely, abandoned to the jealous despotism of a cruel and capricious master, in whom the intellectual nihilism of an anarchist was associated with the imperious pride of a tyrant; while the Baroness was able to sympathize, through the depth of her own misery, with the wounds that bled in the tender heart of her friend. But she, daughter of a soldier, the descendant of those heroes of Tchernagora, who had never surrendered, was not submissive, like the heiress of the good Rodier and Vimal families. She had immediately opposed her own pride and will to those of her husband. The atrocious scenes she had passed through without quailing would have ended in open rupture if the young woman had not thought of appealing to a very high authority. A sovereign influence commanded a compromise, thanks to which the Baroness recovered her independence without divorce or legal separation, with what rage on the part of her husband may be imagined.
In fact, in four years this was the first winter she had spent with the Archduke, who, being ill, had retired to his villa at Cannes—a strange place, truly, made in the image of its strange master; half of the house was a palace, and half a laboratory.
Madame Brion had witnessed from afar this conjugal drama, whose example she had not followed. The gentle creature, without a word, had let herself be wounded and broken by the hard fist of the brute whose name she bore. This contrast itself had made her friend dearer to her. Ely de Carlsberg had served her as her own rebellion, her own independence, her own romance—a romance in which she was ignorant of many chapters. For the confidences of two friends who see each other only at long intervals are always somewhat uncandid. Instinctively a woman who confesses to a friend guards against troubling the image which the friend forms of her; and that image gradually acquires a more striking resemblance to her past than to her present.
So the Baroness had concealed from her confidante all of one side of her life. Beautiful as she was, rich, free, audacious, and unburdened with principles, she had sought vengeance and oblivion of her domestic miseries where all women who have her temperament and her lack of religious faith seek a like oblivion and a like vengeance. She had had adventures—many adventures—Madame Brion had no suspicion of them. She loved the life in Ely, not realizing that this movement, this vitality, this energy, could not exist in a creature of her race and her freedom without leading to culpable experiences. But is it not the first quality, even the very definition, of friendship, this inconsistent favoritism which causes us to forget with certain persons the well-known law of the simultaneous development of merits and faults, and the necessary bond that connects these contrary manifestations of the same individuality?
Yet, however blinded by friendship a woman may be, and however honest and uninitiated in the gallant intrigues that go on around her, she is none the less a woman, and as such apparently possesses a special instinct for sexual matters, which enables her to feel how her confidential friend conducts herself toward men. Louise could not have formulated the change in Ely, and yet for years, at every interview, she had perceived the change. Was it a greater freedom in manner and dress, a shade of boldness in her glance, a readiness to put an evil interpretation on every intimacy she noticed, an habitual disenchantment, almost a cynicism, in her conversation?
The signs that reveal the woman who has dared to overstep conventional prejudices, as well as moral principles, Madame Brion could not help remarking in Madame de Carlsberg; but she did not permit herself to analyze them, or even think about them. Delicate souls, who are created for love, feel a self-reproach, almost a remorse, at the discovery of a fault in one they love. They blame themselves and their impressions, rather than judge the person from whom the impressions were received. An uneasiness remains, however, which the first precise fact renders insupportable.
To Louise Brion this little fact had appeared in the recent attitude of her friend toward Pierre Hautefeuille. She chanced to be at Cannes when the young man was presented to the Baroness at the Chésy residence. On that evening she had been surprised at Ely, who had had a long talk with the young stranger en tête-à-tête in a corner of the drawing-room. Having left at once for Monte Carlo, she doubtless would not have thought of it again, if, on another visit to Cannes, she had not found the young man on a footing of very sudden intimacy at the Villa Carlsberg. Staying herself a few days at the villa, she was forced to recognize that her friend was either a great coquette or was very imprudent with Hautefeuille. She had chosen the hypothesis of imprudence. She told herself that this boy was falling wildly in love with Ely, and she was capable, out of mere carelessness or ennui, of accepting a diversion of that kind. Louise resolved to warn her, but did not dare, overcome by that inner paralysis which the strong produce in the weak by the simple magnetism of their presence.
The little scene which she had observed this evening in the Casino had given her the courage to speak. The action of Pierre Hautefeuille, his haste to procure the jewel sold by Madame de Carlsberg, had singularly moved this faithful friend. She had suddenly perceived the analogy between her own feelings and those of the lover.
Having herself mingled with the crowd of spectators to follow the play of her friend, whose nervousness had all day disquieted her, she had seen her sell the gold case. This Bohemian act had pained her cruelly, and still more the thought that this jewel which Ely used continually would be bought in a second-hand shop of Monte Carlo and given by some lucky gambler to some demi-mondaine. She had immediately started toward the usurer, with the same purpose as Pierre Hautefeuille; and to discover that he had been moved by the same idea touched a deep chord of sympathy in her. She had been moved in her affection for Madame de Carlsberg, and in a secret spot of her gentle and romantic nature, so little used to find in men an echo of her own delicacy.
"Unfortunate man," she murmured. "What I feared has come. He loves her. Is there still time to warn Ely, and keep her from having on her conscience the unhappiness of this boy?"
It was this thought that determined the innocent, good creature to speak to her friend as soon as she had an opportunity; and the opportunity presented itself at this moment.
They had come out of the Casino at about eleven o'clock, escorted by Brion, who had left them at the villa, and, when they were alone, the Baroness had asked her friend to walk a while in the garden to enjoy the night, which was really divine. Enveloped in their furs, they began to pace the terrace and the silent alleys, captivated by the contrast between the feverish atmosphere in which they had spent the evening and the peaceful immensity of the scene that now surrounded them. And the contrast was no less surprising between the Baroness Ely at roulette and the Baroness Ely walking at this hour.
The moon, shining full in the vast sky, seemed to envelop her with light, to cast upon her a charm of languorous exaltation. Her lips were half open, as though drinking in the purity of the cold, beautiful night, and the pale rays seemed to reach her heart through her eyes, so intently did she gaze at the silver disk which illumined the whole horizon with almost the intensity of noon. The sea above all was luminous, a sea of velvet blue, over which a white fire, quivering and dying, traced its miraculous way. The atmosphere was so pure that in the bright bay one could distinguish the rigging of two yachts, motionless, at anchor by the Cape, upon whose heights stood the crenellated walls of the old Grimaldi palace. The huge, dark mass of Cape Martin stretched out on the other side; and everywhere was the contrast of transparent brilliancy and sharp, black forms, stamped on the dream-like sky. The long branches of the palms, the curved poignards of the aloes, the thick foliage of the orange trees hung in deep shadow over the grass where the fairy moonlight played in all its splendor.
One by one the lights went out in the houses, and from the terrace the two women could see them, white amid the dark olives sleeping in the universal sleep that had fallen everywhere. The quiet of the hour was so perfect that no sound could be heard but the crackling of the gravel under their small shoes, and the rustle of their dresses. Madame de Carlsberg was the first to break the silence, yielding to the pleasure of thinking aloud, so delicious at such a time and with such a friend. She had paused a moment to gaze more intently at the sky:—
"How pure the night is, and how soft. When I was a child at Sallach, I had a German governess who knew the names of all the stars. She taught me to recognize them. I can find them still: there is the Pole Star and Cassiopeia and the Great Bear and Arcturus and Vega. They are always in the same place. They were there before we were born, and will be after we are dead. Do you ever think of it—that the night looked just the same to Marie Antoinette, Mary Stuart, Cleopatra, all the women who, across the years and the centuries, represent immense disasters, tragic sorrows, and splendid fame? Do you ever think that they have watched this same moon and these stars in the same part of the heavens, and with the same eyes as ours, with the same delight and sadness; and that they have passed away as we shall beneath these motionless stars, eternally indifferent to our joy and misery? When these thoughts come to me, when I think of what poor creatures we are, with all our agonies that cannot move an atom of this immensity, I ask myself what matter our laws, our customs, our prejudices, our vanity in supposing that we are of any importance in this magnificent eternal and impassive universe. I say to myself that there is but one thing of value here below: to satisfy the heart, to feel, to drain every emotion to the bottom, to go to the end of all our desires, in short, to live one's own life, one's real life, free of all lies and conventions, before we sink into the inevitable annihilation.”
There was something frightful in hearing these nihilistic words on the lips of this beautiful young woman, and on such a night, in such a scene. To the tender and religious Madame Brion these words were all the more painful since they were spoken with the same voice that had directed the croupier where to place the final stake. She greatly admired Ely for that high intelligence which enabled her to read all books, to write in four or five languages, to converse with the most distinguished men and on every subject.
Trained until her seventeenth year in the solid German manner, the Baroness Ely had found, at first in the society of the Archduke, then in her life in Italy, an opportunity for an exceptional culture from which her supple mind of a demi-Slave had profited.
Alas! of what use was that learning, that facile comprehension, that power of expression, since she had not learned to govern her caprices—as could be seen in the attitude at the roulette table—nor to govern her thoughts—which was too well shown by the sombre creed that she had just confessed? That inner want, among so many gifts and accomplishments, once more oppressed the faithful friend, who had never brought herself to admit the existence of certain ideas in her companion of Sacré-Cœur. And she said:—
"You speak again as though you did not believe in another life. Is it possible that you are sincere?"
"No, I do not believe in it," the Baroness replied, with a shake of her pretty head, a breath of air lifting the long, silky fur of her sable cape. "That was the one good influence my husband had over me; but he had that. He cured me of that feeble-heartedness that dares not look the truth in the face. The truth is that man has never discovered a trace of a Providence, of a pity or justice from on high, the sign of anything above us but blind and implacable force. There is no God. There is nothing but this world. That is what I know now, and I am glad to know it. I like to oppress myself with the thought of the ferocity and stupidity of the universe. I find in it a sort of savage pleasure, an inner strength."
"Do not talk like that," interrupted Madame Brion, clasping her arms around her friend as though she were a suffering sister or a child. "You make me feel too sad. But," she continued, pressing the hand of the Baroness while they resumed their walk, "I know you have a weight on your heart of which you do not tell me. You have never been happy. You are less so than ever to-day, and you blame God for your hard fate. You relieve yourself in blasphemy as you did to-night in play, wildly, desperately, as they say some men drink; don't deny it. I was there all the evening, hidden in the crowd, while you were playing. Pardon me. You had been so nervous all day. You had worried me. And I did not want to leave you five minutes alone. And, my Ely, I saw you sitting among those women and those men, playing so unreasonably in the sight of all that crowd whispering your name. I saw you sell the case you used so much. Ah, my Ely, my Ely!"
A heavy sigh accompanied this loved name, repeated with passionate tenderness. That innocent affection which suffered from the faults of its idol without daring to formulate a reproach, touched the Baroness, and made her a little ashamed. She disguised her feelings in a laugh, which she attempted to make gay, in order to quiet her friend's emotion.
"How fortunate that I didn't see you! I should have borrowed money from you and lost it. But do not worry; it will not happen again. I had heard so often of the gambling fever that I wished just once, not to trifle as I usually do, but really play. It is even more annoying than it was stupid. I regret nothing but the cigarette case." She hesitated a moment. "It was the souvenir of a person who is no longer in this world. But I shall find the merchant to-morrow."
"That is useless," said Madame Brion, quickly. "He no longer has it."
"You have already bought it? How I recognize my dear friend in that!"
"I thought of doing it," Louise answered in a low voice, "but some one else was before me."
"Some one else?" said Madame de Carlsberg, with a sudden look of haughtiness. "Whom you saw and whom I know?" she asked.
"Whom I saw and whom you know," answered Madame Brion. "But I dare not tell the name, now that I see how you take it.—And yet, it is not one whom you have the right to blame, for if he has fallen in love with you, it is indeed your fault. You have been so imprudent with him—let me say it, so coquettish!"
Then, after a silence: "It was young Pierre Hautefeuille."
The excellent woman felt her heart beat as she pronounced these last words. She was anxious to prevent Madame de Carlsberg from continuing a flirtation which she thought dangerous and culpable; but the anger which she had seen come into her friend's face made her fear that she had gone too far, and would draw down upon the head of the imprudent lover one of Ely's fits of rage, and she reproached herself as for an indelicacy, almost a treachery toward the poor boy whose tender secret she had surprised.
But it was not anger that, at the mention of this name, had changed the expression of Madame de Carlsberg and flushed her cheeks with a sudden red. Her friend, who knew her so well, could see that she was overcome with emotion, but very different from her injured pride of a moment before. She was so astonished that she stopped speaking. The Baroness made no answer, and the two women walked on in silence. They had entered an alley of palm trees, flecked with moonlight, but still obscure. And as Madame Brion could no longer see the face of her friend, her own emotions became so strong that she hazarded, tremblingly:—
"Why do you not answer me? Is it because you think I should have prevented the young man from doing what he did? But for your sake I pretended not to have seen it. Are you wounded at my speaking of your coquetry? You know I would not have spoken in that way, if I did not so esteem your heart."
"You wound me?" said the Baroness. "You? You know that is impossible. No, I am not wounded. I am touched. I did not know he was there," she added in a lower tone, "that he saw me at that table, acting as I did. You think that I have flirted with him? Wait, look."
And as they had reached the end of the alley, she turned. Tears were slowly running down her cheeks. Through her eyes, from whence these tears had fallen, Louise could read to the bottom of her soul, and the evidence which before she had not dared to believe now forced itself upon her.
"Oh! you are weeping." And, as though overcome by the moral tragedy which she now perceived, "You love him!" she cried, "you love him!"
"What use to hide it now?" Ely answered. "Yes, I love him! When you told me what he did this evening, which proves, as I know, that he loves me, too, it touched me in a painful spot. That is all. I should be happy, should I not? And you see I am all upset. If you but knew the circumstances in which this sentiment overtook me, my poor friend, you would indeed pity your Ely. Ah!" she repeated, "pity her, pity her!"
And, resting her head on her friend's shoulder, she began to weep, to weep like a child, while the other, bewildered at this sudden and unexpected outburst, replied—revealing even in her pity the naïveté of an honest woman, incapable of suspicion:—
"I beg you calm yourself. It is true it is a terrible misfortune for a woman to love when she has no right to satisfy it. But, do not feel remorseful, and, above all, do not think I blame you. When I spoke as I did it was to put you on your guard against a wrong that you might do. Ah! I see too well that you have not been a coquette. I know you have not allowed the young man to divine your feelings, and I know, too, that he will never divine them, and that you will be always my blameless Ely. Calm yourself, smile for me. Is it not good to have a friend, a real friend, who can understand you?"
"Understand me? Poor Louise! You love me, yes, you love me well. But you do not know me."
Then, in a kind of transport, she took her friend's arm, and, looking her in the face, "Listen!" she said, "you believe me still to be, as I was once, your blameless Ely. Well, it is not true. I have had a lover. Hush, do not answer. It must be said. It is said. And that lover is the most intimate friend of Pierre Hautefeuille, a friend to him as you are to me, a brother in friendship as you are my sister. That is the weight that you have divined here," and she laid her hand upon her breast. "It is horrible to bear."
Certain confessions are so irremediable that their frankness gives to those who voluntarily make them something of grandeur and nobility even in their fall; and when the confession is made by some one whom we love, as Louise loved Ely, it fills us with a delirium of tenderness for the being who proves her nobility by her confession while the misery of her shame rends her heart. If a few hours before, in some house at Monte Carlo, the slightest word had been said against the honor of Madame de Carlsberg, what indignation would Madame Brion have not felt, and what pain! Pain she indeed had, agonizing pain, as Ely pronounced these unforgetable words; but of indignation there was not a trace in the heart which replied with these words, whose very reproach was a proof of tenderness, blind and indulgent to complicity:—
"Just God! How you must have suffered! But why did you not tell me before? Why did you not confide in me? Did you think that I would love you less? See, I have the courage to hear all."
And she added, in that thirst for the whole truth which we have for the faults of those who are dear to us, as though we looked to find a pardonable excuse in the cruel details:—
"I beg you, tell me all, all. And first, this man? Do I know him?"
"No," replied Madame de Carlsberg, "his name is Olivier du Prat. I met him at Rome two years ago when I was spending the winter there. That was the period of my life when I saw you least, and wrote to you least frequently. It was also the time when I was the most wicked, owing to solitude, inaction, unhappiness, and my disgust with everything, especially with myself. This man was the secretary of one of the two French embassies. He was much lionized because of the passion, he had inspired in two Roman ladies, who almost openly disputed his favors. It is very ignoble, what I am going to tell you, but such was the truth. It amused me to win him from them both. In that kind of an adventure, just as in play, one expects to find the emotions that others have found in it, and then the result is the same as in roulette. One is bored with it, and one throws one's self into the game from wilfulness and vanity, in the excitement of an absurd struggle. I know now," and her voice became graver, "that I never loved Olivier, but that I so persisted in this liaison that he would have the right to say that I wished him to love me, that I wished to be his mistress, and that I did all I could to retain him. He was a singular character, very different from those professional lovers, who are for the most part frightfully vulgar. He was so changeable, so protean, so full of contrasts, so intangible, that to this day I cannot tell whether he loved me or not. You hear me in a dream, and I am speaking as in a dream. I feel that there was something inexplicable in our relations, something unintelligible to a third person. I have never met a being so disconcerting, so irritating, from the endless uncertainty he kept you in, no matter what you did. One day he would be emotional, tremulous, passionate even to frenzy, and on the morrow, sometimes the same day, he would recoil within himself from confidence to suspicion, from tenderness to persiflage, from abandonment to irony, from love to cruelty, without it being possible either to doubt his sincerity or to discover the cause of this incredible alteration. He had these humors not only in his emotions, but even in his ideas. I have seen him moved to tears by a visit to the Catacombs, and on returning as outrageously atheistical as the Archduke. In society I have seen him hold twenty people enraptured by the charm of his brilliant fancy, and then pass weeks without speaking two words. In short, he was from head to foot a living enigma, which I penetrate better at a distance. He had been early left an orphan. His childhood had been unhappy, and his youth precociously disenchanted. He had been wounded and corrupted too soon. Thence came that insatiability of soul, that elusiveness of character which appeared as soon as I became interested in him in a kind of spasmodic force. When I was young at Sallach I loved to mount difficult horses and try to master them. I cannot better describe my relations with Olivier than by comparing them