Fifteen days had passed since Madame de Carlsberg, in spite of her promises, her resolutions, her remorse, had confessed her passion to Pierre Hautefeuille. The date fixed for the cruise of the Jenny had arrived, and he and she were standing side by side on the deck of the yacht, which was bearing also the Marquise Bonnacorsi toward her fantastic marriage, and her confidante, Miss Marsh, and pretty Madame de Chésy and her husband for the entertainment of the Commodore. That was the nickname given by his niece to the indefatigable Carlyle Marsh, who, in truth, scarcely ever left the bridge, where he stood directing the course of the boat with the skill of a professional sailor.
This Marionville potentate would have had no pleasure in a carriage unless he drove it, or in a yacht unless he steered it. He said himself, without boasting:—
"If I should be ruined to-morrow I know twenty ways of making a living. I am a mechanic, coachman, carpenter, pilot."
On this afternoon, while the Jenny sailed toward Genoa, he was at his post on the bridge, in his gold braided hat, glass in hand, his maps open before him, and he directed the course with an attention as complete and scrupulous as though he had been occupied all his life in giving orders to sailors. He had to a supreme degree that trait common to all great workers,—the capacity for giving himself always and wholly to the occupation of the moment. And to him the vast sea, so blue and soft, whose calm surface scarcely rippled, was but a racecourse upon which to exercise his love of contest, of struggle, the one pleasure of the Anglo-Saxon. Five hundred yards to the right, ahead of the Jenny, was a low, black yacht, with a narrower hull, steaming at full speed. It was the Dalilah, of Lord Herbert Bohun. Farther ahead, on the left, another yacht was sailing in the same direction. This one was white, like the Jenny, but with a wider beam. It was the Albatross, the favorite plaything of the Grand Dukes of Russia. The American had allowed these two yachts to leave Cannes some time before him, with the intention, quickly perceived by the others, of passing them, and immediately, as it were, a tacit wager was made by the Russian prince, the English lord, and the American millionaire, all three equally fanatical of sport, each as proud of his boat as a young man of his horses or his mistress.
To Dickie Marsh, as he stood with his glass in his hand, giving orders to the men, the whole scene reduced itself to a triangle, whose corners were marked by the three yachts. He was literally blind to the admirable horizon that stretched before him; the violet Esterel, with the long, undulating line of its mountains, its dark ravines and jagged promontories, the port of Cannes and the mole, with the old town and the church rising behind it, all bathed in an atmosphere so transparent that one could distinguish every little window and its shutters, every tree behind the walls, the luxuriant hills of Grasse in the background, and along the bay the line of white villas set in their gardens; then the islands, like two oases of dark green, and suddenly the curve of another gulf, terminated by the solitary point of the Antibes. And the trees on this point, like those of the islands, bouquets of parasol pines, all bent in one direction, spoke of the eternal drama of this shore, the war of the mistral and the waves. But now the drama was suspended, giving place to the most intoxicating flood of light. Not a fleck of foam marred the immense sweep of liquid sapphire over which the Jenny advanced with a sonorous and fresh sound of divided water. Not one of those flaky clouds, which sailors call cattails, lined the radiant dome of the sky where the sun appeared to expand, dilate, rejoice in ether absolutely pure. It seemed as though this sky and sea and shore had conspired to fulfil the prophecy of the chiromancer, Corancez, upon the passage of the boat that was bearing his clandestine fiancée; and Andryana Bonnacorsi recalled that prediction to Flossie Marsh as they leaned on the deck railing, clothed in similar costumes of blue and white flannel—the colors of the Jenny's awning—and talked while they watched the Dalilah drawing nearer and nearer.
"You remember in the Casino at Monte Carlo how he foretold this weather from our hands, exactly this and no other. Isn't it extraordinary, after all?"
"You see how wrong you were to be afraid," replied Miss Marsh; "if he saw clearly in one case, he must have done so in the others. We are going to have a fine night on sea, and by one o'clock to-morrow we shall head for Genoa."
"Don't be so confident," said the Italian, extending her hand with two fingers crossed to charm away the evil fates; "you will bring us bad luck."
"What! with this sky, this sea, this yacht, these lifeboats?"
"How should I know? But suppose Lord Herbert Bohun decides simply to follow us to the end and go with us to Genoa?"
"Follow us to the end on the Dalilah and we on the Jenny? I should like to see him try it!" said the American. "See how we gain on him. But be careful, Chésy and his wife are coming in this direction. Well, Yvonne," she said to the pretty little Vicomtesse, blond and rosy in her dress of white serge, embroidered with the boat's colors, "you are not afraid to go so fast?"
"No," said Madame de Chésy, laughing; and, turning toward the bow, she drew in a long breath. "This air intoxicates me like champagne!"
"Do you see your brother, Marquise?" asked Chésy, pointing to one of the persons standing on the deck of the Dalilah. "He is beside the Prince. They must not feel very well satisfied. And his terriers, do you see his terriers running around like veritable rats? I am going to make them angry. Wait." And making a trumpet of his hands he shouted these words, whose irony he did not suspect:—
"Ay, Navagero; can we do anything for you at Genoa?"
"He doesn't understand, or pretends not to," said Madame de Chésy. "But here's something he will understand. The Prince is not looking, is he?" And boyishly she stretched her two hands from her nose with the most impertinent gesture that a pretty woman ever made to a company containing a royal highness. "Ah! the Prince saw me," she cried, with a wild laugh. "Bah! he's such a good fellow! And if he doesn't like it," and she softly tapped her eye with the ends of her fingers, "et voilà!"
When the frolicsome Parisienne began this piece of disrespectful childishness the two yachts had come abreast of each other. For a quarter of an hour they went side by side, cutting through the water, propelled only by the force of their robust lungs of steel, vomiting from their chimneys two straight, black columns, which scarcely curved in the calm air; and behind them stretched a furrow of glaucous green over the blue water, like a long and moving path of emerald fringed with silver, and on it rolled and pitched a sailboat manned by two young men, sporting in the wake of the steamers.
On this wild race the deck was yet so motionless that the water did not tremble in the vases of Venetian glass placed on the table near a group of three women. The purple and saffron petals of the large roses slowly dropped upon the table. Beside the flowers, amid their perfume, Madame de Carlsberg was sitting. She had ungloved one of her beautiful hands to caress the bloom of the flowers, and she gazed, smiling and dreamily, from the Dalilah to the luminous horizon, from her fellow-voyagers out to the vast sea, and at Hautefeuille standing, with Chésy, beside her, and turning to her incessantly. The breeze of the boat's motion revealed the slender form of the young man under his coat of navy blue and trousers of white flannel, and softly fluttered the supple red stuff of Baroness Ely's blouse and her broad tie of black mousseline de soie, matched with the large white and black squares of her skirt. The young man and the young woman both had in their eyes a feverish joy in living that harmonized with the radiance of the beautiful afternoon. How little his smile—the tender and ready smile of a lover who is loved—resembled the tired laughter that the jokes of Corancez had won from him two weeks before. And she, with the faint rose that tinged her cheeks, usually so pale, with her half-opened lips breathing in the healthful odor of the sea and the delicate perfume of the flowers, with her calm, clear brow—how little she resembled the Ely of the villa garden, defying, under the stars of the softest Southern night, the impassive beauty of nature. Seated near her loved one, how sweet nature now appeared—as sweet as the perfume of the roses that her fingers deflowered, as caressing as the soft breeze, as intoxicating as the free sky and water! How indulgent she felt for the little faults of her acquaintances, which she had condemned so bitterly the other night! For the eternal hesitations of Andryana Bonnacorsi, for the positivism of Florence Marsh, for the fast tone of Yvonne Chésy, she had now but a complacent half-smile. She forgot to be irritated at the naïve and comic importance which Chésy assumed on board the boat. In his blue yachting cap, his little body stiff and straight, he explained the reasons of the Jenny's superiority over the Dalilah and the Albatross, with the technical words he had caught from Marsh, and he gave the orders for tea:—
"Dickie is coming down as soon as we pass the other yacht," he said, and, turning to a sailor, "John, tell the chef to have everything ready in a quarter of an hour;" then addressing Madame de Carlsberg: "You are uncomfortable here, Baroness. I told Dickie that he should change his chairs. He is so careless at times. Do you notice these rugs? They are Bokharas—magnificent! He bought five at Cairo, and they would have rotted on the lower deck if I had not discovered them and had them brought here from the horrible place where he left them. You remember? And these plants on deck — that is better, is it not? But has he taken too many cocktails this morning—See how close we are passing to the Albatross! Good evening, monseigneur."
And he saluted the Grand Duke—a kind of giant, with the broad, genial face of a moujik—who applauded the triumph of the Jenny, calling out in his strong voice:—
"Next year I'll build another that will beat you!"
"Do you know I was frightened," said Chésy to Marsh, who, according to his promise, had descended from the bridge; "we just grazed the Albatross!"
"I was very sure of the boat," Marsh continued; "but I should not have done it with Bohun. You saw how far I kept away from him. He would have cut our yacht in two. When the English see themselves about to be beaten, their pride makes them crazy, and they are capable of anything."
"That is just what they say of the Americans," gayly replied Yvonne de Chésy.
The pretty Parisienne was probably the only person in the world that the master of the Jenny would have permitted such a pleasantry. But Corancez had been right in what he said to Hautefeuille—when the malicious Vicomtesse was speaking Marsh could see his daughter. So he did not take offence at this epigram against his country, susceptible as he usually was to any denial that in everything America "beat the Old World."
"You are attacking my poor compatriots again," he said simply. "That is very ungrateful. All of them that I know are in love with you."
"Come, Commodore," replied the young woman; "don't try the madrigal. It is not your specialty. But lead us down to tea, which ought to be served, should it not, Gontran?"
"They are astonishing," Miss Marsh whispered, when her uncle and the Chésys had started toward the stairway that led to the salon. "They act as though they were at home."
"Don't be jealous," said Madame Bonnacorsi. "They will be so useful to us at Genoa in occupying the terrible uncle."
"If it were only she," Florence replied; "she is amusing and such a good girl. But he—I don't know if it is the blood of a daughter of the great Republic, but I can't endure a nobleman who has a way of being insolent in the rôle of a parasite and domestic."
"Chésy is simply the husband of a very pretty woman," said Madame de Carlsberg. "Everything is permitted to those husbands on account of their wives, and they become spoilt children. You are going down? I shall remain on deck. Send us tea here, will you? I say us, for I shall keep you for company," she continued, turning to Hautefeuille. "I know Chésy. Now that the race is over he will proceed to act as the proprietor of the yacht. Happily, I shall protect you. Sit here."
And she motioned to a chair beside her own, with that tender and imperious grace by which a woman who loves, but is obliged to restrain herself before others, knows how to impart all the trembling passion of the caress she cannot give. Lovers like Pierre Hautefeuille obey these orders in an eager, almost religious, way which makes men smile, but not the women. They know so well that this devotion in the smallest things is the true sign of an inward idolatry. So neither Miss Marsh nor Madame Bonnacorsi thought of jesting at Hautefeuille's attitude. But while retiring, with that instinctive complicity with which the most virtuous women have for the romance of another, they said:—
"Corancez was indeed right. How he loves her!"
"Yes, he is happy to-day; but to-morrow?"
But to-morrow? He had no thought for the mysterious and dangerous morrow of all our peaceful to-days. The Jenny, free of her antagonists, continued with her rapid and cradling motion over this velvet sea. The Dalilah and the Albatross were already faint in the blue distance, where the coast also was disappearing. A few more strokes of the engines, a few more turns of the screw, and there would be nothing around them but the moving water, the motionless sky, and the sinking sun. The end of a beautiful winter day in Provence is really divine during that hour before the chill of evening has touched the air and darkened the sea and land. Now that the other guests of the yacht had gone down to the dining-room, it seemed as though the two lovers were all alone in the world on a floating terrace, amid the shrubbery and the perfume of flowers. One of the boat's servants, a kind of agile and silent genius, had placed the small tea-table beside them, with a complicated little apparatus of silver, on which, as well as on the cups and plates, was the fantastic coat of arms adopted by Marsh—the arch of a bridge over a swamp, "arch on Marsh"—this pun, in the same taste as that in which the boat had been baptized, was written under the scutcheon. The bridge was in or, the marsh in sable, on a field of gules. The American cared nothing for heraldic heresies. Black, red, and yellow were the colors of the deck awning, and this scutcheon and device signified that his railroad, celebrated in fact for the boldness of its viaducts, had saved him from misery, here represented by the marsh. Naïve symbolism which would have typified even more justly the arch of dreams thrown by the two lovers over all the mire of life. Even the little tea-set, with its improvised coat of arms, added to this fleeting moment a charm of intimacy, the suggestion of a home where they two might have lived heart to heart in the uninterrupted happiness of each other's daily presence; and it was this impression that the young man voiced aloud after they had enjoyed their solitude for a few moments in silence.
"How delicious is this hour," he said, "more delicious than I had ever dreamed! Ah! if this boat belonged to us, and we could go thus on a long voyage, you and I, to Italy, which I would not see without you, to Greece, which gave you your beauty. How beautiful you are, and how I love you! Dieu! if this hour would never end!"
"Every hour has an end," answered Ely, half shutting her eyes, which had filled with ecstasy at the young man's impassioned words, and then, as though to repress a tremor of the heart that was almost painful in its tenderness, she said, with the grace and gayety of a young girl: "My old German governess used to say, as she pointed to the eagles of Sallach, 'You must be like the birds who are happy with crumbs'; and it is true that we find only crumbs in life.—I have sworn," she went on, "that you, that we, will not fall into the 'terrible sorrow.'"
She emphasized the last two words, which were doubtless a tender repetition of a phrase often spoken between them, and which had become a part of their lovers' dialect. And playfully she turned to the table and filled the two cups, adding:—
"Let us drink our tea wisely, and be as gemüthlich as the good bourgeois of my country."
She handed one of the cups to Hautefeuille while she said this. As the young man took it, he touched with his fingers the small and supple hand that served him with the delight in humble indulgences so dear to women who are really in love. His simple caress caused them to exchange one of those looks in which two souls seem to touch, melt together, and absorb each other by the magnetism of their desire. They paused once more, rapt in the sense of their mutual fever so intoxicating to share amid that atmosphere, mixed with the scent of the sea and the perfume of the roses, with the languid palpitation of the immense waters sleeping around them in their silence. During the two weeks that had passed since the sudden avowal of Madame de Carlsberg they had repeated their vows of love, they had written passionate, wild letters, and had exchanged their souls in kisses, but they had not given themselves yet wholly to each other. As he looked at her now on the deck of the yacht he trembled again from head to foot to see her smile with those lips, whose fresh and delicious warmth he still felt on his own. To see her so supple and so young, her body quivering with all the nervousness of a creature of fine race, recalled the passionate clasp with which he had enfolded her in the garden of her villa two days after the first vows. She had led him, under the pretext of a conversation, to a kind of belvedere, or rather cloister, a double row of marble columns, overlooking the sea and the islands. In the centre was a square space thick planted with gigantic camellias. The ground was all strewn with blossoms, buried in the large petals of red and rose and white fallen from the trees, and the red, rose, and white of other flowers gleamed above amid the sombre and lustrous foliage. It was there that he had for the second time held her close in his arms, and again still more closely in an obscure spot of the adorable villa of Ellenrock, at Antibes, where he had gone to wait for her. She had come to him, in her dress of mauve, along a path bordered with blue cineraria, violet heart's-ease, and great anemones. The neighboring roses filled the air with a perfume like that around them now, and sitting on the white heather, beneath the pines that descended to a little gray-rocked cove, he rested his head upon the heart of his dear companion.
All these memories—and others as vivid and troubling—mingled with his present emotion and intensified it. The total unlikeness of Ely to all the women he had met served to quiet the young man's naïve remorse for his past experiences, and to make him forget the culpability of that sweet hour. Ely was married, she had given herself to one man, and had no right while he lived to give herself to a second. Although Pierre was no longer sufficiently religious to respect marriage as a sacrament, the imprint of his education and his memories of home were too deep, and above all he was too loyal not to feel a repugnance for the stains and miseries of adultery. But Ely had been careful to prevent him from meeting the Archduke after that terrible scene, and to the lover's imagination the Prince appeared only in the light of a despot and a tormentor. His wife was not his wife; she was his victim. And the young man's pity was too passionate not to overcome his scruples; all the more since he had, for the last two weeks, found his friend in an incessant revolt against an outrageous espionage—that of the sinister Baron von Laubach, the aide-de-camp with the face of a Judas. And this voluntary policeman must really have pursued Ely with a very odious surveillance for his memory to come to her at this moment when she wished to forget everything except this sky and sea, the swift boat, and the ecstatic lover who was speaking by her side.
"Do you remember," he was saying, "our uneasiness three days ago, when the sea was so rough that we thought we could not start? We had the same idea of going up to La Croisette to see the storm. I could have thanked you on my knees when I met you with Miss Marsh."
"And then you thought that I was angry with you," she said, "because I passed with scarcely speaking to you. I had just caught a glimpse of that foxlike Iago von Laubach. Ah! what a relief to know that all on board are my friends, and incapable of perfidy! Marsh, his niece, Andryana, are honor itself. The little Chésys are light and frivolous, but there is not a trace of ill-nature about them. The presence of a traitor, even when he is not feared, is enough to spoil the most delightful moments. And this moment, ah! how I should suffer to have it spoiled!"
"How well I understand that!" he answered, with the quick and tender glance of a lover who is delighted to find his own ways of feeling in the woman he loves. "I am so much like you in that; the presence of a person whom I know to be despicable gives me a physical oppression of the heart. The other evening at your house, when I met that Navagero of whom Corancez had so often spoken, he poisoned my visit, although I had with me that dear, dear letter which you had written the night before." Then, dreamily following this train of thought, he continued: "It is strange that every one does not feel the same about this. To some people, and excellent ones too, a proof of human infamy is almost a joy. I have a friend like that—Olivier du Prat, of whom I spoke to you and whom you knew at Rome. I have never seen him so gay as when he had proved some villainy. How he has made me suffer by that trait of his! And he was one of the most delicate of men, with the tenderest of hearts and finest of minds. Can you explain that?"
The name of Olivier du Prat, pronounced by that voice which had been moving Ely to the heart—what an answer to the wish sighed by the amorous woman that this divine moment should not be spoiled! These simple words were enough to dissipate her enchantment, and to interrupt her happiness with a pain so acute that she almost cried aloud. Alas! she was but at the very beginning of her love's romance, and already that which had been predicted by Louise Brion, her faithful and too lucid friend, had come true—she was shut in the strange and agonizing inferno of silence which must avoid, as the most terrible of dangers, the solace of confession. How many times already in like moments had a similar allusion evoked between her and Pierre the image of that other lover! Pierre had very soon alluded lightly and gayly to his friend, and as the Baroness had thought it best not to conceal the fact that she had met him in Rome, he continued to recall memories of Du Prat, without suspecting that his words entered like a knife into the poor woman's heart. To see how much Hautefeuille loved Du Prat—with a friendship equal to that which the latter had for him—how could she help feeling anew the constant menace hanging over her? And then, as at the present, she was filled with an inexpressible anguish. It was as though all the blood in her veins had suddenly flowed out through some deep and invisible wound. At other times it was not even necessary that the redoubtable name should be mentioned in their conversation. It sufficed that the young man, in the course of the intimate talks which she encouraged as often as her social servitude permitted, should ingenuously express his opinion on some of the love-affairs reported by the gossips of the coast. She would then insist upon his talking in order to measure his uncompromising morality. She would have been pained if he had felt differently, for then he would not have been that noble and pure conscience unspotted by life; and she suffered because he did feel thus, and so unconsciously condemned her past. She made him open his mind to her, and always she found at the bottom this idea, natural to an innocent soul, that if love may be pardoned for everything, nothing should be pardoned to caprice, and that a woman of noble heart could not love a second time. When Hautefeuille would make some remark like this, which revealed his absolute and naïve faith in the singleness and uniqueness of true love, inevitably, implacably, Olivier would reappear before the inward eye of the poor woman. Wherever they were, in the silent patio strewn with camellia leaves, under the murmuring pines of the Villa Ellenrock, on the field at La Napoule, where the golf players moved amid the freshest and softest of landscapes, all the marvellous scenery of the South would vanish, disappear—the palms and orange trees, the ravines, the blue sky and the luminous sea, and the man she loved. She would see nothing before her but the cruel eyes and evil smile of her old lover at Rome. In a sudden half hallucination she would hear him speaking to Pierre. Then all her happy forces would suddenly be arrested. Her eyelids would quiver, her mouth gasp for air, her features contract with pain, her breast shudder as though pierced by a knife; and, as at present, her tender and unconscious tormentor would ask, "What is the matter?" with an eager solicitude that at the same time tortured and consoled her; and she would answer, as now, with one of those little falsehoods for which true love cannot forgive itself. For hearts of a certain depth of feeling, complete and total sincerity is a need that is almost physical, like hunger and thirst. What an inoffensive deception it was! And yet Ely had once more a feeling of remorse at giving this explanation of her sudden distress:—
"It is a chill that has come over me. The night comes so quickly in this country, with such a sudden fall of temperature."
And while the young man was helping to envelop her in her cloak, she said, in a tone that contrasted with the insignificance of her remark:—
"Look how the sea has changed with the sinking sun; how dark it has grown—almost black—and what a deep blue the sky is. It is as though all nature had suddenly been chilled. How beautiful it is yet, but a beauty in which you feel the approach of shadows."
And, indeed, by one of those atmospheric phenomena more general in the South than elsewhere, the radiant and almost scorching afternoon had suddenly ended, and the evening had come abruptly in the space of a few minutes. The Jenny moved on over a sea without a wave or a ripple. The masts, the yards, and the funnel threw long shadows across the water, and the sun, almost at the edge of the horizon, was no longer warm enough to dissipate the indistinct and chilly vapor that rose and rose, already wetting with its mist drops the brass and woodwork of the deck. And the blue of the still sea deepened into black, while the azure of the clear sky paled and waned. Then, as the disk of the sun touched the horizon abruptly, the immeasurable fire of the sunset burst from the sky over the sea. The coast had disappeared, so that the passengers of the yacht, now returned to the deck, had nothing before them but the water and the sky, two formless immensities over which the light played in its fairy fantasies—here spread in a sheet of tender and transparent rose, like the petals of the eglantine; there rolling in purple waves, the color of bright blood; there stretching like a shore of emerald and amethyst, and farther, built into solid and colossal porticos of gold, and this light opened with the sky, palpitated with the sea, dilated through infinite space, and suddenly as the disk disappeared beneath the waves, this splendor vanished as it came, leaving the sea again a bluish black, and the sky, too, almost black, but with a bar of intense orange on its verge. This bright line vanished in its turn. The earliest stars began to come out, and the yacht lights to appear, illumining the dark mass which went on, bearing into the falling night the heart of a woman which had all day reflected the divine serenity of the bright hours, and which now responded to the melancholy of the rapid and fading twilight.
Although she was not at all superstitious, Ely could not help feeling, with a shudder, how this sudden invasion of the radiant day by the sadness of evening, resembled the darkening of her inward heaven by the evocation of her past. This analogy had given an added poignancy to her contemplation of the tragic sunset, the battle of the day's last fire with the shadows of night, and happily the magnificence of this spectacle had been so overwhelming that even her light companions had felt its solemnity. No one had spoken during the few minutes of this enchantment in the west. Now, when the babble recommenced, she felt like fleeing from it—fleeing even from Hautefeuille, whose presence she feared. Moved as she was, she was afraid of breaking into tears beside him; tears that she would not be able to explain. When he approached her she said, "You must pay some attention to the others," and she began to pace the deck from end to end in company with Dickie Marsh. The American had the habit, while on board, of taking a certain amount of exercise measured exactly by the watch. He looked at the time, then paced over a measured distance until he had complied with his hygienic rules. "At Marionville," he would say, "it was very simple; the blocks are each exactly a half mile long. When you have walked eight of them, you know you have done four miles. And your constitutional is finished." Usually, when thus engaged in the noble duty of exercise, Marsh remained silent. It was the time when he invented those schemes that were destined to make him a billionaire. Ely, knowing of this peculiarity, counted upon not exchanging ten words while walking with the potentate of Marionville. She thought that the silent promenade would quiet her overwrought nerves. They had paced thus for perhaps ten minutes, when Dickie Marsh, who appeared more preoccupied than usual, suddenly asked:—
"Does Chésy sometimes speak to you of his affairs?"
"Sometimes," answered the young woman, "as he does to everybody. You know he has an idea that he is one of the shrewdest on the Bourse, and he is very glad to talk about it."
"Has he told you," Marsh continued, "that he is speculating in mining stocks?"
"Very likely. I do not listen to him."
"I heard him say so," the American said, "and just a moment ago, after tea, and I am still upset by it. And there are not many things that can worry me. A