CHAPTER IV
LOVERS' RESOLUTIONS
The note which had thus brought Pierre's anxiety to its extreme represented the first act in a plan invented by Madame Brion to put an immediate and irreparable end to a sentiment for which her friendly insight had led her to predict frightful suffering, a possible tragedy, a certain catastrophe. After Madame de Carlsberg's sudden and passionate confidences, she had said to herself that if she did not succeed in immediately separating these two beings, drawn to each other by such an instinctive attraction, the young man would not be slow to discover the sentiment he inspired in the woman he loved. It was only thanks to his remarkable ingenuousness and candor that he had not already discovered it.
When he knew the truth, what would happen? Ingenuous and candid though she was herself, Louise Brion could not evade the true answer to this question. As soon as an understanding took place between Hautefeuille and Ely, she would go to the end of her desire. She had too clearly revealed in her confession the indomitable audacity of her character, her need of complying with the demands of her passions. She would become the young man's mistress. Although the conversation of the night before had imposed upon Louise the evidence of faults already committed by her friend, neither her mind nor her heart could entertain the thought of these faults. The mere idea of this liaison filled her with a shudder of fright, almost of horror. All through the night she had tried to think of some way to obtain the only escape she could see for Ely, the voluntary departure of Hautefeuille.
Her first thought was to appeal to his delicacy. The portrait Madame de Carlsberg had drawn of him, his interesting face, his frank and honest look, the naïveté of his amorous action in buying the gold box, all revealed an exquisite fineness of nature. If she should write him, bravely, simply, an unsigned letter, speaking of that action, of that purchase which might have been, and no doubt had been, seen by others too? If on this account she should beg him to leave in order to save Madame de Carlsberg from trouble? During her long and feverish insomnia she had tried to formulate this letter, without discovering expressions which satisfied her.
It was so difficult to make such a request without letting it signify, "Go, because she loves you!"
Then in the morning, when she had wakened from the tardy sleep that ended this night of agony, a chance accident, commonplace enough, but in which her piety saw something providential, gave her an unexpected excuse for pleading, not with the young man at a distance, but with Madame de Carlsberg herself and at once. While reading distractedly in bed one of those newspapers of the Riviera, journals of international snobbism which communicate information concerning all these arrant aristocrats, she discovered the arrival at Cairo, of M. Olivier du Prat, secretary of the Embassy, and his wife; and she rose at once to show Ely these two lines of mundane news, so insignificant, yet so full of menace for her.
"If they are at Cairo," she said to the Baroness, "it means that their Nile trip is over, and that they think of returning. What is the natural route for them? From Alexandria to Marseilles. And if he is so near his friend, this man will wish to see him."
"It is true," said Ely, her heart beating wildly as she read the letters of that name, Olivier du Prat.
"It is true," she repeated. "They will meet again. Was I not right last night?"
"See," cried Louise Brion, "what it would have been if you had not had thus far the strength to fight against your sentiment. See what it will be if you do not put an end to it forever."
And she continued describing with all the eloquence of her passionate friendship a plan of conduct which suddenly occurred to her as the wisest and most effectual.
"You must take this opportunity which is offered to you. You will never have a better one. You must have the young man come, and speak to him yourself about the purchase he made last night. Tell him that others have seen it; show him your astonishment at his indiscretion; tell him that his assiduity has been noticed. For the sake of your welfare and your reputation command him to go away. A little firmness for a few minutes and it will all be done. He is not what you paint him, what I feel him to be, if he does not obey your request. Ah! believe me, the one way to love him is to save him from this tragedy, which is not simply a far-off possibility, but an immediate and inevitable danger."
Ely listened, but made no reply. Worn out by the terrible emotion of her confidence on the previous night, she had no strength left to resist the tender suggestions which appealed to her love itself, to struggle against her love. There is, in fact, in these complete passions an instinctive and violent desire for extreme resolutions. When these sentiments cannot find satisfaction in perfect happiness, they obtain a kind of grateful relief in their absolute frustration. Filling our soul to the exclusion of all else, they bear it incessantly to one or the other of the two poles, ecstasy and despair, without resting for a moment between them. Having come to this stage of her passion, it followed of necessity, as Louise Brion had clearly seen, that the Baroness Ely should either become the young man's mistress, or that she should put between herself and him the insurmountable barrier of a separation before the liaison—secret romance of so many women, both virtuous and otherwise. Yes! how many women have thus, in a delirium of renouncement, dug an abyss between them and a secretly idolized being, who never suspects this idolatry or this immolation. To the innocent ones, the anticipation of the remorse which would follow their fault gives the requisite energy; the others, the culpable, feel, as Madame de Carlsberg felt so strongly, the inability to efface the past, and they prefer the exalted martyrdom of sacrifice to the intolerable bitterness of a joy forever poisoned by the atrocious jealousy of that indestructible past.
Another influence aided in overcoming the young woman's spirit of revolt. Stranger as she was to all religious faith, she did not, like her pious friend, attach anything providential to this commonplace accident,—a newspaper account of a diplomatist's voyage,—but had acquired, through her very incredulity, that unconscious fatalism which is the last superstition of the sceptic. The sight of these fine printed syllables, "Olivier du Prat," a few hours after the night's conversation, had filled her with that feeling of presentiment, harder to brave than real danger for certain natures, like hers, made up of decision and action.
"You are right," she answered, in the broken accent of an irremediable renunciation, "I will see him, I will speak to him, and all will be finished forever."
It was with this resolution, made in truth with the fullest strength of her heart, that she arrived at Cannes on the afternoon of the same day, accompanied by Madame Brion, who did not wish to leave her; and, as soon as she arrived, she had, almost under the dictation of her faithful friend, written and despatched the letter which overwhelmed Hautefeuille. She truly believed herself to be sincere in her resolution to separate from him, and yet if she had been able to read to the bottom of her heart, she might have seen, from a very trifling act, how fragile this resolution was, and how much she was possessed by thoughts of love. No sooner had she written to him from whom she wished to separate forever than, at the same place, and with the same ink, she wrote two letters to two persons of her acquaintance, in whose love-affairs she was the confidante, and to some extent the accomplice,—Miss Florence Marsh and the Marquise Andryana Bonnacorsi.
She invited them to lunch with her on the morrow, thus obeying a profound instinct which impels a woman who loves and suffers to seek the company of women who are also in love, with whom she may talk of sentimental things, of the happiness which warms them, who will pity her sorrow, if she tells them of it, who will understand her and whom she will understand. Usually, as she had said the night before, the hesitation of the sentimental and timid Italian woman fatigued her, and in the passion of the American girl for the Archduke's assistant, there was an element of deliberate positivism, which jarred upon her native impulsiveness. But the young widow and the young girl were two women in love, and that sufficed, in this season of melancholy, to make it delightful, almost necessary, to see them. She little thought that this impulsive and natural invitation would provoke a violent scene with her husband, or that a conjugal conflict would arise from it, whose final episode was to have a tragic influence upon the issue of that growing passion, which her reason had sworn to renounce.
Having arrived at Cannes at three o'clock in the afternoon, she had not seen him during the rest of the day. She knew that he had been with Marcel Verdier in the laboratory, nor was she surprised to see him appear at the dinner hour, accompanied by his aide-de-camp, Comte von Laubach, the professional spy of His Highness, without a sign of interest in her health, without a question as to how she had spent the past ten days.
The Prince had been in his youth one of the bravest and most handsome of the incomparable cavaliers of his country, and the old soldier was recognizable in the figure of this scientific maniac, which had remained slender in spite of the fact that he was approaching his sixtieth year, in the tone of command which his slightest accents retained, in his martial face, scarred by a sabre at Sadowa, in his long mustache of grizzly red. But what one never forgot after seeing the singular man was his eyes—eyes of an intense blue, very bright and almost savagely restless, under the pale, reddish brows of formidable thickness. The Archduke had the eccentric habit of always wearing, even with his evening dress, heavy laced shoes, which permitted him, as soon as the dinner was over, to go out on foot, accompanied sometimes by his aide-de-camp, sometimes by Verdier, for an endless nocturnal walk. He prolonged them at times till three o'clock in the morning, having no other means of gaining a little sleep for his morbid nerves. This extreme nervousness was betrayed by his delicate hands, burned with acids and deformed by tools of the laboratory, whose fingers twitched incessantly in uncontrollable movements.
From all his actions could be divined the dominant trait of his character, a moral infirmity for which there is no precise term, the inability to continue any sensation or to persist in any effort of the will. That was the secret of the singular uneasiness which this man, so distinguished in certain ways, imparted to those around him, and from which he was the first to suffer. One felt that in the hands of this strangely irritable person every enterprise would fail, and that a kind of inward and irresistible frenzy prevented him from putting himself in harmony with any environment, any circumstance, any necessity. This superior nature was incapable of submission to facts.
Perhaps the secret of his unbalanced condition lay in the fixed idea that he had been at one time so near the throne and had lost it forever, that he had seen irreparable faults committed in politics and in war, that he had known of them while they were taking place and had not been able to prevent them.
Thus at the beginning of the war of 1866 he had, it was said, planned a campaign which might have changed the face of Europe at this end of the century. Instead he had to risk his life to execute manœuvres whose certain failure he foresaw. Every year, on the anniversary of the famous battle at which he had been wounded, he became literally insane for forty-eight hours. He was equally so whenever he heard mentioned the name of some great revolutionary soldier.
The Archduke did not forgive himself for his weakness in continuing the benefits attached to his title and rank when his tastes for abstract theories and the bitterness of his blighted destiny had led him to embrace the worst convictions of anarchistic socialism. With all that, prodigiously learned, a great reader, and a great conversationalist, he seemed to take revenge upon his own inconsistencies in conduct and in action by the acuteness of his criticism. Never did his lips express admiration without some disparaging and cruel reservation. Only scientific research, with its impregnable certitudes, appeared to communicate to this disordered intelligence a little repose, and, as it were, a steadier equilibrium.
Since the time when his disagreements with his wife had resulted in that species of moral divorce imposed by higher authority, his researches had absorbed him more than ever.
Retired at Cannes, where he was kept by the beginning of an attack of asthma, he had worked so hard that he had transformed himself from an amateur into a professional, and a series of important discoveries in electricity had given him a semi-reputation among specialists. His enemies had spread abroad the report, which Corancez had echoed, that he had simply published under his own name the work of Marcel Verdier, a graduate of the École Normale, attached for some years to his laboratory. In justice to the Archduke, it must be said that this calumny had not lessened the enthusiasm and jealous affection which the strange man felt for his assistant. For the final trait of this being, so wavering, uncertain, and, in consequence, profoundly, passionately unjust, was that his only attachments were infatuations. The story of his relations with his wife was the same as with all the relations formed in a life made up of alternations between passionate sympathy and inordinate antipathy for the same persons, and for no other cause than that incapacity of self-control, an incapacity which had made him, with all his gifts, tyrannical, unamiable, and profoundly unhappy, and, to borrow a vulgar but too justifiable epigram from Corancez, the great Failure of the Almanach de Gotha.
Madame de Carlsberg had had too long an experience with her husband's character not to understand it admirably, and she had suffered too much from it to avoid being, on her side, exceedingly unjust toward him. A bad temper is of all faults the one that women are least willing to pardon in a man, perhaps because it is the most opposed to the most virile of virtues, steadfastness.
She was too keen not to discern in that tormented face the approaching storm, as sailors read the face of the sky and the sea.
When on this evening of her return to Cannes, she found herself sitting at the table in front of the Archduke, she easily divined that the dinner would not end without some of those ferocious words with which he relieved his ill temper. At the first glance she understood that he had another violent grievance against her. What? Had he already been informed by that infamous Judas, in his feline manner, of how she had conducted herself at the gambling-table the night before, and was he, the democratic prince, with one of his customary resumptions of pride, preparing to make her feel that such Bohemian manners were not becoming to their rank? Was he offended—this inconsistency would not have astonished her any more than the other—because she had stayed at Monte Carlo all the week, without sending a word, except the despatch to the maître d'hôtel to announce her return.
Her heart was so full of pain at the thought of her resolution that she felt that kind of insensibility which follows moral suffering. So she did not pay attention during the dinner to the fierce sallies with which the Archduke, addressing Madame Brion, abused in turn Monte Carlo and the women of fashion, the Frenchmen on the coast, and the foreign colony—the wealthy class, in short, and all society. The livery servants were moving silently about the table, and their knee-breeches, silk stockings, and powdered wigs lent a contrast of inexpressible irony to the words of the master of this princely house. The aide-de-camp, with a wheedling mixture of politeness and perfidy, replied to the witticisms of the Archduke in such a way as to exasperate them, while Madame Brion, growing more and more red, submitted to the assault of insolent sarcasms, with the idea that she was suffering for Ely, who scarcely paid the slightest attention to such whimsical outbursts as this:—
"Their pleasures are the measure of a society, and that is what I like on this coast. You see in all their perfection the folly and the infamy of the plutocrats.—Their wives? They amuse themselves like jades, and the men like blackguards.—The taxes, the laws, the magistrates, the army, the clergy—all this social machinery which works for the profit of the rich, accomplishes what? The protection of a gilded debauchery of which we have a perfect specimen on this coast.—I admire the naïveté of socialists, who, before an aristocracy of this kind, talk of reforms! A gangrenous limb should simply be burnt and cut off. But the great fault of modern revolutionists is their respect. Happily the weakness and folly of the ruling class are exposing themselves everywhere with such magnificent ingenuousness that the people will end by perceiving them, and when the millions of workingmen who nourish this handful of parasites make a move—a move—ah! we'll laugh, we'll laugh!—Science will make it so easy to prepare for action. Make all the children of the proletariat electricians and chemists, and in a generation the thing will be done."
Whenever he proffered declarations of this order the Archduke glared around him with a physiognomy so menacing that no one thought of smiling at his paradoxes, as comical as they were ineffectual in these opulent surroundings. Those who were acquainted with the secrets of contemporary history remembered that a legend, though calumnious, associated the name of the "Red Archduke" with a mysterious attempt made upon the life of the head of his own family. The sanguinary dream of a demagogic Cæsarism was too plainly visible in those eyes, which never looked at one without a menace, and one felt one's self to be in the presence of a tyrant whom circumstances had thwarted, but by so little that one trembled.
Usually after he had thus thrown out some sinister witticism no one replied, and the dinner continued in a silence of embarrassment and oppression, in which the disappointed despot revelled for a time. Then it occasionally happened that, having relieved his spleen, he would show the seductive side of his nature, his remarkable lucidity of mind, and his immense knowledge of actual facts. This evening he was doubtless tormented by some peculiar agitation; for he did not disarm until, just as they returned to the parlor, a remark of Madame de Carlsberg to Madame Brion brought forth an outburst which revealed the true cause for this terrible mood.
"We shall ask Flossie Marsh about that. She will lunch with us to-morrow," the Baroness had said.
"May I have five minutes' conversation with you?" suddenly demanded the Prince; and, leading her aside, careless of the witnesses of this conjugal scene, "You have invited Miss Marsh to lunch to-morrow?" he continued.
"Certainly," she replied. "Does that annoy Your Highness?"
"The house is yours," said the Archduke, "but you will not be surprised if I forbid Verdier to be there.—Don't interrupt.—For some time I have observed that you favor the project of this girl, who has taken it into her head to marry that boy. I do not wish this marriage to take place. And it shall not take place."
"I am ignorant of Miss Marsh's intentions," replied the Baroness, whose pale cheeks had grown red as she listened to her husband's discourse. "I invite her because she is my friend, and I am pleased to see her. As for M. Verdier, he seems to be of an age to know whether or not it is best for him to marry, without taking orders from any one. Besides, if he wishes to talk to Miss Marsh, he has no need of my intermediation, and if he was pleased to dine with her this evening—"
"He has dined with her this evening?" interrupted the Prince in his violent exasperation. "You know of it? Answer. Be frank."
"Your Imperial Highness may entrust other persons with this espionage," said the young woman, proudly, throwing at Monsieur von Laubach a glance of mingled contempt and defiance.
"Madame, no ironies," exclaimed the Archduke. "I will not endure them. I wish to give you a message for your friend, and if you do not deliver it I will speak to her myself. Tell her that I am aware of all her intrigues. I know, understand me, I know that she doesn't love this young man, but is an instrument in the service of her uncle, who has heard of a discovery that we have made, Verdier and I, in my residence," and he pointed in the direction of the laboratory. "It is a revolution in electric railroads, this invention; but to have it, it is necessary to have the inventor. I am neither to be bought nor married. No more is Verdier to be bought, but he is young, he is innocent, and Mr. Marsh has employed his niece. I perceive that he has brought you to side with him, and that you are working for him. Listen to what I say: Visit them, the uncle and the niece, as much as you like; join their parties at Monte Carlo and anywhere. If you like rastaquouères, that is your affair. You are free. But do not mix with this intrigue or you will pay dearly for it. I shall know the point to strike you in. With her uncle's millions, let this girl buy a name and a title, as they all do. There is no lack of English marquises, French dukes, and "Roman princes to sell their armorial devices, their ancestors, and their persons. But this man of millions, my friend, my pupil—hands off! That Yankee would turn his genius into a new dollar-coining machine. Never that; never, never. This is what I beg you to say to that girl; and no remonstrance from you.—Monsieur von Laubach."
"Monseigneur?"
Scarcely had the aide-de-camp time to take leave of the two ladies, so precipitately did the Archduke depart, with the air of a man who could no longer contain himself.
"And that is the secret of his fury," said Madame Brion, when her friend had repeated the brutal discourse of the Prince. "It is very unjust. But I am glad it is only that. I was so afraid he had heard of your play last night, and especially that imprudence. You are going to cancel your invitation to Miss Florence?"
"I?" said the Baroness, shrugging her shoulders, and her noble face wore an expression of disgust. "There was a time when this boorishness crushed me; a time when it revolted me. To-day I care no more than that for this brute and all his rage."
While saying this she had lit a Russian cigarette, with a long paper stem, at a little lamp used for this purpose, and from her contemptuous lips she blew a ring of smoke, which rose, opening and stretching out till it was dissipated in the warm and perfumed atmosphere of the little room. It was an atmosphere of intimacy surrounding the two friends, in this bright parlor, with the soft shades of its tapestry, the old paintings, the precious furniture, the vague green of the conservatory behind one of the glass doors, and everywhere flowers—the beautiful living flowers of the South, interwoven with threads of sunlight. Lamps, large and small, veiled in shades of supple silk, radiated through this retreat an attenuated light which blended with the clear, gay fire. Ah, the unfortunate would little envy these surroundings of the rich, if they but knew the secret agony for which these surroundings so often serve as a theatre! Ely de Carlsberg had sunk upon a lounge; she was saying:—
"What do you suppose these wretched things matter to me, with the pain you know is in my heart? I shall receive Flossie Marsh to-morrow, and for several days after, and the Archduke may be as angry as he likes. He says he knows the place to attack me. There is only one, and I am going to strike it myself. It is as though he should threaten to fight a duel with some one who has determined to commit suicide."
"But do you not think he is right about Marsh's calculations?" asked Madame Brion to arrest the crisis of the revolt which she saw approaching.
"It is quite possible," said the Baroness. "He is an American, and for those people a sentiment is a fact like any other, and is to be utilized as much as possible. But admitting that he speculates on Flossie's passion for a savant and an inventor, does the uncle's speculation prove that the sentiment of the niece is not sincere? Poor Flossie," she added in a tone that once more vibrated with her inward torment. "I hope she will not allow herself to be separated from the man she loves. She would suffer too much, and if it is necessary to help her not to lose him, I will help her."
These two successive cries betrayed such distress, and in consequence so much uncertainty still remaining in the wise resolution they had made together, that the faithful friend was terrified. The thought which she had had the night before, and had rejected as being too difficult to execute, the thought of appealing directly to the magnanimity of the young man, seized her again with excessive force. This time, she gave free rein to it, and the next morning a messenger, found at the station, delivered at the Hôtel des Palmes the following letter, which Pierre Hautefeuille opened and read after a long night of anxiety and cruel insomnia:—
"MONSIEUR—I trust to your delicacy not to seek to know who I am, or the motive which leads me to write you these lines. They come from one who knows you, although you do not know her, and who esteems you profoundly. I have no doubt that you will listen to this appeal made to your honor. A word will suffice to show you how much your honor is concerned in ceasing to compromise, most involuntarily, I am sure, the peace and the reputation of a person who is not free, and whose elevated situation is exposed to much envy. You were seen, Monsieur, the night before last, in the roulette hall at Monte Carlo, when you bought an article which that person had just sold to a merchant. If that were an isolated circumstance, it would not have such a dangerous significance. But you must yourself perceive that your attitude during the last few weeks could not have escaped malignant comments. The person concerned is not free. She has suffered a great deal in her private life, and the slightest injury done to the one upon whom her situation depends might provoke a catastrophe for her. Perhaps she will never tell you herself what pain your action, of which she has been informed, has caused her. Be an honest man, Monsieur, and do not try to enter into a life which you can only trouble. Do not compromise a noble-hearted woman, who has all the more right to your respect from the fact that she does not distrust you. Have, then, the courage to do the only thing that can prevent calumny, if it has not already begun, and that can put an end to it if it had begun. Leave Cannes, Monsieur, for some weeks. The day will come when you will be glad to think you have done your duty, your whole duty, and that you have given to a noble woman the one proof of devotion that you could be permitted to offer—a consideration for her welfare and her honor."
In the famous story of Daniel DeFoe, that prodigious epitome of all the profound emotions of the human heart, there is a celebrated page which symbolizes the peculiar terror we feel at revelations that are absolutely, tragically unexpected. It is when Robinson sees with a shudder the print of a bare foot on the shore of his island.
A like convulsive trembling seized Pierre Hautefeuille as he read this letter, in which he saw the proof after twenty-four hours of incertitude—the indisputable overwhelming proof—that his action had been seen. By whom? But what mattered the name of the witness, now that Madame de Carlsberg was informed? His secret instinct had not deceived him. She had summoned him in order to reprove his indiscretion, perhaps to banish him forever from her presence. The certainty that the subject of this interview would be the act for which he now reproached himself as for a crime was so intolerable to the lover that he was seized with the idea of not going to the rendezvous, of never seeing again that offended woman, of fleeing anywhere far away. He took up the letter, saying, "It is true; there is nothing but to go!" Wildly, yet mechanically, as though a mesmeric suggestion had emanated from the written words on that little sheet of paper, he rang, ordered the timetable, his bill, and his trunk. If the express to Italy, instead of leaving late in the afternoon, had left at about eleven, perhaps the poor young man, in that hour of semi-madness, would have precipitately taken flight—an action which in a few hours was to appear as senseless as it now appeared necessary.
But he was forced to wait, and, the first crisis once over, he felt that he should not, that he could not go without explaining himself. He did not think of justifying himself. In his own eyes he was unpardonable. And yet he did not wish Madame de Carlsberg to condemn him without a plea for the delicacy of his intentions. What would he say to her, however? During the hours that separated him from his rendezvous, how many discourses he imagined without suspecting that the imperious force that attracted him to the Villa Helmholtz was not the desire to plead his cause! It was toward the sensation of her presence that he was irresistibly moving, the one idea around which everything centres in that heart of a lover, at which everything ends, from the most justifiable bitterness to the extremest timidity.
When the young man entered the parlor of the Villa Helmholtz, the excess of his emotions had thrown him into that state of waking somnambulism in which the soul and body obey an impulse of which they are scarcely conscious. This state is analogous to that of a resolute man passing through a very great danger—a similitude which proves that the two fundamental instincts of our nature, that of self-preservation and that of love, are the work of impersonal forces, exterior and superior to the narrow domain of our conscious will.
At such times our senses are at once super-acute and paralyzed,—super-acute to the slightest detail that corresponds to the emotion that occupies us, paralyzed for everything else. Thinking afterward of those minutes so decisive in his life, Hautefeuille could never remember what road he had taken from the hotel to the villa, nor what acquaintances he had met on the way.
He was not roused from this lucid dream until he entered the first and larger of the two parlors, empty at this moment. A perfume floated there, mingled with the scent of flowers, the favorite perfume of Madame de Carlsberg,—a composition of gray amber, Chypre, and Russian cologne. He had scarcely time to breathe in that odor which brought Ely's image so vividly before him when a second door opened, voices came to him, but he distinguished only one, which, like the perfume, went to his heart.
A few steps further and he was before Madame de Carlsberg herself, who was talking with Madame Brion, the Marquise Bonnacorsi, and the pretty Vicomtesse de Chésy. Further on,