THE CRY OF A SOUL
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
to a duel between a rider and his horse, when each tries to get the
better of the other. I repeat it, I am sure I did not love him. I am not
certain that I did not hate him."
She spoke with a dryness that showed how deeply these memories were
implanted. She paused a moment, and, plucking a rose from a bush near
her, she began to bite the petals nervously, while Madame Brion
sighed:--
"Need I pity you for that also,--for having sought happiness out of
marriage, and for having met this man, this hard and capricious monster
of egoism?"
"I do not judge of him," Madame de Carlsberg answered. "If I had been
different myself, I should doubtless have changed him. But he had
touched me in an irritable spot; I wished to control him, to master him,
and I used a terrible weapon. I made him jealous. All that is a bitter
story, and I spare you the details. It would be painful to recall it,
and it does not matter. You will know enough when I say that after a day
of intimacy, when he had been more tender than ever before, Olivier left
Rome suddenly, without an explanation, without a word of adieu, without
even writing a letter. I have never seen him again. I have never heard
of him, except in a chance conversation this winter, when I learned that
he was married. Now you will understand the strange emotions I felt when
two months ago Chésy asked permission to present a son of a friend of
his mother, who had come to Cannes to recover from a bad cold, a young
man, rather solitary and very charming; his name was Pierre
Hautefeuille. In the countless conversations that Olivier and I had
together in the intervals of our quarrelling, this name had often been
spoken. Here again I must explain to you a very peculiar thing,--the
nature of this man's conversation and the extraordinary attraction it
had for me. This self-absorbed and enigmatic being had sudden hours of
absolute expansion which I have seen in no one else. It was as though he
relived his life aloud for me, and I listened with an unparalleled
curiosity. He used at these times a kind of implacable lucidity which
almost made you cry out, like a surgical operation, and which at the
same time hypnotized you with a potent fascination. It was a brutal yet
delicate disrobing of his childhood and his youth, with
characterizations of such vividness that certain individuals were
presented to me as distinctly as though I had really met them. And he
himself? Ah, what a strange soul, incomplete and yet superior, so noble
and so degraded, so sensitive and so arid, in whom there seemed to be
nothing but lassitude, failure, stain, and disillusionment--excepting
one sentiment. This man who despised his family, who never spoke of his
country without bitterness, who attributed the worst motive to every
action, even his own, who denied the existence of God, of virtue, of
love, this moral nihilist, in short, in so many ways like the Archduke,
had one faith, one cult, one religion. He believed in friendship, that
of man for man, denying that one woman could be the friend of another.
He did not know you, dear friend. He pretended--I recall his very
words--that between two men who had proved each other, who had lived,
and thought, and suffered together, and who esteemed each other while
loving each other, there arises a kind of affection so high, so
profound, and so strong that nothing can be compared with it. He said
that this sentiment was the only one he respected, the only one that
time and change could not prevail against. He acknowledged that this
friendship was rare; yet he declared that he had met with it several
times, and that he himself had experienced one in his life. It was then
that he evoked the image of Pierre Hautefeuille. His accent, his look,
his whole expression changed while he lingered over the memory of his
absent friend. He, the man of all the ironies, recounted with tenderness
and respect the naïve details of their first meeting at school, their
growing attachment, their boyish vacations. He related with enthusiasm
their enlisting together in 1870, and the war, their adventures, their
captivity in Germany. He was never tired of praising his friend's purity
of soul, his delicacy, his nobility. I have already said that this man
was an enigma to me. Such he was above all in his retrospective
confidences, to which I listened with astonishment, almost stupor, to
behold this anomaly in a heart so lamentably withered, in a land so
sterile this flower of delicate sentiment, so young and rare that it
made me think--and in spite of Olivier's paradox, it is the highest
praise I could give--of our own friendship."
"Thanks," said Madame Brion, "you make me happy. As I listened to you a
moment ago I seemed to hear another person speaking whom I did not
recognize. But now I have found you again, so loving, gentle, and good."
"No, not good," Madame de Carlsberg replied. "The proof is that no
sooner had Chésy pronounced the name of Pierre Hautefeuille than I was
possessed by an idea which you will think abominable. I shall pay for
it, perhaps, dearly enough. Olivier's departure and then his marriage
had stirred in me that hate of which I spoke. I could not hear to think
that this man had left me as he did, and was now happy, contented,
indifferent--that he had regained his serenity without my being
revenged. One acquires these base passions by living as I have so long,
unhappy and desperate, surrounded by pleasure and luxury. Too much moral
distress is depraving. When I knew that I was to meet the intimate
friend of Olivier, a possible vengeance offered itself to me, a refined,
atrocious, and certain vengeance. My life was forever separated from
that of Du Prat. He had probably forgotten me. I was sure that if I won
the affections of his friend, and he knew of it, it would strike the
deepest and most sensitive place in his heart; and that is why I
permitted Chésy to present Hautefeuille, and why I indulged in those
coquetries for which you blamed me. For it is true that I began thus.
_Dieu_! how recent it was, and how long ago it seems!"
"But," interrupted Madame Brion, "does Pierre Hautefeuille know of your
relations with Olivier?"
"Ah! you touch me in the sorest spot. He is ignorant of them, as he is
of all the base realities of life. It is by his innocence, his
simplicity of heart, of which his friend so often spoke--his youth, in
short--that this boy, against whom I began so cruel a plot, has won me
completely. Never has a doubt or a suspicion entered that heart, so
young and so innocent of evil, for which evil does not even exist. I had
not spoken with him three times before I understood all that Olivier had
said in our conversations at Rome, which left me incredulous and
irritated. That respect, that veneration almost, which he professed for
this candor and goodness, I felt also in my turn. All the expressions he
had used in speaking of his friend came back to me, and at every new
encounter I perceived how just they were, how fine, and how true. In my
surprise I relinquished my plan of vengeance at the contact of this
nature so young and delicate, whose perfume I inhaled as I do that of
this flower."
And she lifted to her face the rose with its half-nibbled petals.
"If you only knew how the life I lead wearies and oppresses me! How
tired I am of hearing about nothing but the breakfasts that Dickie Marsh
gives on his yacht to the grand dukes, of Navagero's bezique with the
Prince of Wales, of Chésy's speculations at the Bourse, and the
half-dozen titled fools that follow his advice! If you only knew how
even the best of this artificial society tires me! What does it matter
to me whether Andryana Bonnacorsi decides to marry the Sire de Corancez,
or any of the countless subjects of gossip at the five o'clock teas in
Cannes? And I need not speak of the inferno my house has become since my
husband suspects me of favoring the marriage of Flossie Marsh with his
assistant. To meet in this artificial atmosphere, made up of _ennui_ and
vanity, folly and stupidity, a being who is at the same time profound
and simple, genuine and romantic, in fact archaic, as I like to call
him, was a delight. And then the moment came when I realized that I
loved this young man and that he loved me. I learned it through no
incident, no scene, no word--just by a look from him which I
accidentally caught. That is why I have taken refuge here for the last
eight days, I was afraid. I am still afraid--afraid for myself a little.
I know myself too well, and I know that once started on that road of
passion I would go to the end, I would stake my whole life upon it, and
if I lost, if--"
She did not finish, but her friend understood her terrible forebodings
as she continued: "And I am afraid for him, too, ah, much afraid! He is
so young, so inexperienced! He believes so implicitly in me. I cannot
better show you how I have changed than by saying this: six weeks ago,
when Hautefeuille was presented to me, I had but one desire,--that
Olivier should learn of my acquaintance with his friend. To-day, if I
could prevent these two men from ever meeting, or from ever speaking of
me to each other, I would give ten years of my life. Now do you
understand why the tears came to my eyes when you told me what he did
this evening, and how, without speaking to me, he had seen the way I
spend my time away from him? I am ashamed, terribly ashamed. Think what
it would be if he knew the rest!"
"And what are you going to do?" Madame Brion mournfully exclaimed.
"These men will meet again. They will talk about you. And if Olivier
loves his friend as you say he does, he will tell him all. Listen," she
continued, clasping her hands, "listen to what the tenderest and most
devoted affection advises you to do. I do not speak of your duty, of the
opinion of the world, or the vengeance of your husband. I know you would
brave all that, as you did before, to win your happiness. But you will
not win it. You could not be happy in this love with that secret on your
heart. You will be tortured by it, and if you speak--I know you, you
must have thought of it--if you speak--"
"If I told him, I would never see him again," said Madame de Carlsberg.
"Ah! without that certitude--"
"Well! Have the courage to do it," interrupted the other. "You had the
strength to leave Cannes for a week. You should have enough to leave for
good. You will not be alone. I will go with you. You will suffer. But
what is that, when you think of what otherwise would happen,--that you
would be everything to this young man, and he everything to you, and he
would know that you had been the mistress of his friend!"
"Yes, I have thought of all that," replied the Baroness, "and then I
remember I might have had six months, a year, and perhaps more. And that
is to have lived, to have been in this hard world for a year one's self,
one's true self, the being that one is in one's innermost and deepest
reality."
And as she spoke she gazed at the sky with the same look that she had
had at the beginning of the walk. She seemed once more to bathe her face
in the moonlight, and to absorb the impassive serenity of the mountains
and the stars, as though to gather force to go to the end of her desire.
And as they resumed again in silence their promenade among the obscure
palms, by the fragrant rose-beds, and beneath the sombre shadow of the
orange trees, the faithful friend murmured:--
"I will save her in spite of herself."