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, by the window near the conservatory,
Flossie Marsh stood talking with a tall, blond young man, badly dressed,
by no means handsome, yet revealing under his dishevelled hair the
bright face of a savant, the frank smile, the clear meditative eyes. It
was Marcel Verdier, whom the young girl had boldly forewarned by a note,
in the American manner, and who, kept from lunching by the Archduke, had
escaped for ten minutes from the laboratory in order to get to her.
Neither was the Baroness seated. She was pacing the floor in an effort
to disguise the nervousness which was brought to its extreme by the
arrival of him she awaited. But how could he have suspected this? How
could he have divined from her classic, tailor-made walking dress of
blue serge that she had not been able that morning to remain indoors?
She had been within sight of his hotel, as he had so often been near the
Villa Helmholtz, to see the house and to return with beating heart. And
how could he have read the interest in the tender, blue eyes of Madame
de Bonnacorsi, or in the soft brown eyes of Madame Brion a solicitude
which to a lover capable of observing would have given reason for hope?
Hautefeuille saw distinctly but one thing,--the uneasiness which
appeared in Madame de Carlsberg's eyes and which he at once interpreted
as a sign of measureless reproach. That was almost enough to deprive him
of the force to answer in the commonplace phrases of politeness; he took
a seat by the Marquise at the invitation of the romantic Italian, who
was moved to pity by his visible emotion.
Meanwhile the gay Madame de Chésy, the pretty blonde, whose eyes were
as lively as those of Andryana Bonnacorsi were deep, was smiling on the
newcomer. This smile formed little dimples in her fresh, rounded face,
while under the cap of otter skin, and with her light figure in a jacket
of the same fur, her small hands playing with her muff, her slender feet
in their varnished boots, she was one of those charming little images of
frivolity toward whom the world does well to be indulgent, for their
presence suffices to render gay and frivolous as themselves the most
embarrassing occasions and the most ominous situations. With all that
Madame Brion knew, and all that Madame de Bonnacorsi thought, and with
all the feelings of the Baroness Ely and Pierre Hautefeuille, his
arrival would have made the conversation by far too difficult and
painful, if the light Parisienne had not continued her pretty bird-like
babble:--
"You! I ought not to recognize you," she said to Pierre Hautefeuille.
"For ten days," she added, turning to Madame de Carlsberg, "yes, ever
since I dined beside him here the night before your departure; yes, for
eight days, he has disappeared. And I did not write about it to his
sister, who entrusted him to me. For she entrusted you to me, that is
positive, and not to the young ladies of Nice and Monte Carlo."
"But I have not been away from Cannes for a week," Pierre replied,
blushing in spite of himself.
Madame de Chésy's remark had pointed too plainly to the significant
coincidence of his disappearance and the absence of Madame de Carlsberg.
"And what were you doing only last night at the table of
_trente-et-quarante_?" the young woman asked, teasingly. "If your sister
knew of that; she who thinks her brother is basking prudently in the
sun!"
"Don't scold him," interrupted Madame Bonnacorsi. "We brought him back
with us."
"And you didn't finish telling us of your adventure," Madame de
Carlsberg added.
The innocent teasing of Madame de Chésy had displeased her, because of
the embarrassment it had caused in Hautefeuille. Now that he was there,
living and breathing in the little room, she, too, felt that sensation
of a loved one's presence which overpowers the strongest will. Never had
the young man's face appeared more noble, his expression more
attractive, his lips more delicate, his movements more graceful, his
whole being more worthy of love. She discerned in his attitude that
mingling of respect and passion, of timidity and idolatry irresistible
to women who have suffered from the brutality of the male, and who dream
of a love without hate, a tenderness without jealousy, voluptuous
rapture devoid of violence.
She felt like crying to Yvonne de Chésy, "Stop. Don't you see that you
are wounding him?" But she knew well that the thoughtless woman had not
an atom of malice in her heart. She was one of the modern women of
Paris, very innocent with a very bad tone, playing childishly with
scandal, but very virtuous at heart--one of those imprudent women who
sometimes pay with their honor and happiness for that innocent desire to
astonish and amuse. And she continued, revealing her whole character in
the anecdote which Hautefeuille's arrival had interrupted:--
"The end of my adventure? I have already told you that this gentleman
took me for one of those demoiselles. At Nice, a little woman, dining
all alone at a little table in a little restaurant. And he was doing his
best to call my attention with his 'hum! hum!'--I felt like offering him
gumdrops--and his 'waiter!' perfectly useless to make me turn. And I did
turn, not much, just enough, to let him see me--without laughing. I
wanted to badly enough! Finally I paid, rose, and left. He paid. He
rose. He left. I didn't know what to do to get to the train. He followed
me. I let myself be followed.--Have you ever wondered, when you think of
those demoiselles, what they say to them to begin with?"
"Things which I think I should be rather afraid to hear," said Madame
Bonnacorsi.
"I don't think so any longer," Madame de Chésy replied; "for it is just
as stupid as what these gentlemen say to us. I stopped before the window
of a florist. He stopped beside me on my left. I looked at the bouquets.
He looked at the bouquets. I heard his old 'hum! hum!' He was going to
speak. 'Those are fine roses, madame,' he said. 'Yes, monsieur, they are
fine roses.' 'Are you very fond of flowers, madame?' I was just going to
say, 'Yes, monsieur, I am very fond of flowers,' when a voice on my
right called out, 'Well, Yvonne, you here?' And I was face to face with
the Grand Duchess Vera Paulovna, and at the same moment I saw my
follower turning the color of the roses we had been looking at together,
as he, stammering, bowed before Her Imperial Highness, and she, with her
Russian accent, 'My dear, allow me to present the Count Serge Kornow,
one of my most charming compatriots.' Tableau!"
The laughing woman had scarcely finished her account of this childish
prank, told with the inexplicable but well-known pleasure which women of
society find in the contact with the _demi-monde_, when the sudden
entrance of a new personage into the parlor arrested the laughter or the
reproof of the friends who had been listening to this gay narrative.
It was no other than the Archduke Henry Francis, his face red as it
usually was, his feet in heavy laced shoes, his tall, thin body in a
suit of dark clothes whose stains and grime spoke of the laboratory.
Faithful to his threat of the previous night, he had prevented Verdier
from lunching at the table of the Baroness; neither had he been present
himself. The master and the pupil had eaten, as they often did, between
two experiments, standing in their working aprons beside one of the
furnaces. Then the Prince had retired, ostensibly for a siesta, it not
appearing whether he had really wished to rest, or had planned a
decisive proof, by which to measure the intimacy already existing
between Miss Marsh and his assistant. He had, of course, not mentioned
the name of any guest to Verdier, nor had Verdier spoken of this matter.
So when on entering the parlor he saw the American girl and the young
man talking familiarly apart, a look of veritable fury came into his
face.
His eyes glared from one group to the other. If he had had the power at
that moment, he would have put them all in irons, his wife because she
was certainly to blame for this treason, Madame Brion and Madame
Bonnacorsi because Madame de Carlsberg loved them; Madame de Chésy and
Hautefeuille because they were the complacent witnesses of this
_tête-à-tête_! In his imperious voice, which he could scarcely
control, he called from one end of the room to the other:--
"Monsieur Verdier!"
Verdier turned. His shock at seeing the Prince, his humiliation at being
summoned in this way before the woman he loved, his impatience with a
yoke borne so long, were audible in the accent with which he answered:--
"Monseigneur?"
"I need you in the laboratory," said the Archduke; "please come, and
come at once."
Now it was the eyes of the assistant that shone with fury. For a few
moments the spectators of this odious scene could observe the tragic
combat of pride and gratitude in the face of this superior man so
unworthily humiliated. The Archduke had been peculiarly kind to the
young man's family. A dog unjustly beaten has that way of looking at his
master; will he fly at his throat or obey him? Doubtless Verdier,
knowing the Archduke, feared to arouse the anger of that madman and a
burst of insulting insolence against Florence Marsh. Perhaps, too, he
thought that his position of an employee under obligations permitted but
one dignified course--to oppose his own correctness of deportment to the
unqualified roughness of his master.
"I am coming, monseigneur," he replied, and, taking Miss Marsh's hand
for the first time, he dared to kiss it. "You will excuse me,
mademoiselle," he said, "for having to leave you, but I hope to be able
to call before long--mesdames, monsieur."
And he followed his redoubtable patron, who had departed as abruptly as
he had entered, when he saw Verdier raise to his lips the hand of Miss
Marsh.
Every one remained standing in silence, the silence that follows a gross
breach of politeness, which the company cannot criticise aloud. Neither
Madame Brion nor Madame Bonnacorsi nor Madame de Chésy dared to look at
Madame de Carlsberg, who had faced the Prince with defiance and now
trembled with anger under the affront which her husband had inflicted
upon her by so demeaning himself at the very doors of her own parlor.
Florence Marsh, bending over a table, pretended to be hunting for the
gloves, handkerchief, and smelling salts which she had left there,
doubtless endeavoring to hide the expression of her face. As for
Hautefeuille, ignorant of the under side of this society, except for the
indiscretions shrewdly measured out by Corancez, knowing absolutely
nothing of the relations between Marcel Verdier and the American girl,
he would not have been a lover if he had not connected this outburst of
the Prince with the fixed idea which possessed him. Beyond doubt the
espionage had done its work. The Archduke had learned of his
indiscretion. How much this indiscretion was to blame for the ferocious
humor of Madame de Carlsberg's husband, the young man could not tell.
What appeared to him but too certain, after he had met the terrible eyes
of the Prince, was that his presence was odious to this man, and whence
could arise that aversion if not from reports, alas, but too well
founded.
Ah, how could he beg pardon of the loved one for having added new
troubles to all her others? But the silence was broken by Madame de
Chésy, who, after looking at her watch, kissed the Baroness and said:--
"I shall be late for the train. I dine at Monte Carlo to-night. But that
will be all over after the carnival! Adieu, dear, dear Ely."
"And we, too, must go," said Madame Bonnacorsi, who had taken Miss
Marsh's arm while Yvonne de Chésy was leaving, "I shall try to console
this tall girl a little."
"But I have consoled myself," replied Florence, adding with a tone that
was singularly firm: "One always succeeds in anything that one wishes,
if it is wished enough. Shall we walk?" she asked of the Marquise.
"Then you will go through the garden, and I'll accompany you for a
little air," said Madame Brion. And, kissing Ely, she said aloud: "Dear,
I shall be back in a quarter of an hour," and added, in a whisper, "Have
courage."
The door through which they passed into the garden closed. Ely de
Carlsberg and Pierre Hautefeuille were at last alone. Both of them had
long meditated over the words they should speak at this interview. Both
had come to it with a fixed determination, which was the same; for she
had decided to ask of him precisely what he had decided to offer,--his
departure. But both had been confused by the unexpected scene they had
witnessed.
It had moved the young woman especially in every fibre of her being; the
wild spirit of revolt, which had been dormant under her growing love,
rose again in her heart. Her wounded pride, soothed, almost healed by
that gentle influence, suddenly reopened and bled. She felt anew the
hardness of the fate which placed her, in spite of all, at the mercy of
that terrible Prince, the evil genius of her youth.
As for Hautefeuille, all the legends gathered here and there about the
tyranny and jealousy of the Archduke had suddenly taken shape before his
eyes. That vision of the man and wife, face to face, one menacing, the
other outraged, which had been so intolerable even to imagine, had been
realized in an unforgetable picture during the five minutes that the
Prince was in the room. That was enough to make him another man in this
interview. Natures like his, pure and delicate, are liable to
hesitations and indecisions which appear feeble, almost childish, so
long as they are not confronted by a clear situation and a positive
duty. It is enough for them to think they could be helpful to one they
love in order to find in the sincerity of their devotion all the energy
which they seem to lack. Pierre had felt that he could not even bear the
look of Baroness Ely the moment he read in it the knowledge of his
action. But now he was ready to tell her himself of this action,
naturally, simply, in his irresistible and passionate desire to expiate
his fault, if it were to blame for her suffering, which he had witnessed
with an aching heart.
"Monsieur," she began, after that silence which precedes an explanation,
and which is more painful than the explanation itself, "I have written
you that we must have a conversation upon a rather serious and difficult
subject. But I wish you to be assured of one thing at the start--if in
the course of our conversation I have to say anything that pains you,
know that it will cost me a great deal;" she repeated, "a great deal."
"Ah, madame," he answered, "you are afraid of being hard on me when you
have the right to be so severe. What I wish to assure you of at the
start is that your reproaches could not equal my self-reproach! Yes," he
continued, in a tone of passionate remorse, "after what I have seen and
understood, how can I ever forgive myself for having caused you an
annoyance, even were it but the slightest. I understand it all. I know
(from an anonymous letter that came with yours) that what I did the
night before last was seen,--my purchase of the case which you had just
sold. I know that you have been told of it, and I may divine what you
think. I do not ask you to pardon an indiscretion whose gravity I should
have felt at once. But then I didn't think. I saw the merchant take that
case, which I had seen you use so often. The thought of that object,
associated with your image in my mind--the thought of its being sold the
next day in a shop of that horrible locality, and being bought, perhaps,
by one of those frightful women like those around me near the
table--yes, this idea was too strong for my prudence, too strong for my
duty of reserve regarding you. You see, I do not attempt to justify
myself. But perhaps I have the right to assure you that even in my
thoughtless indiscretion there was still a respect for you."
"I have never doubted your delicacy," said Madame de Carlsberg.
She had been moved to the bottom of her heart by this naïve
supplication. She felt so keenly the contrast of his youth and
tenderness with the brutal manners of the Prince a quarter of an hour
before in this same place. And then, as she had recognized the hand of
Louise Brion in the anonymous letter, she was touched by that secret
proof of friendship, and she attempted to bring the conversation to the
point which her faithful friend had so strongly urged--timid and
fruitless effort now to conceal the trouble in her eyes, the involuntary
sigh that heaved her breast, the trembling of her heart in her voice.
"No," she repeated, "I have never doubted it. But you know yourself the
malice of the world, and you see by the letter that was written to you
that your action was observed."
"They will not write to me twice," the young man interrupted. "It was
not only from that letter that I understood the world's malice and
ferocity. What I perceived still more plainly a few moments ago," he
added, with that melancholy firmness which holds back the tears of
farewell, "was that my duty is clear now. My indiscretion the night
before last, and others that I might commit, it is happily in my power
to redeem, and I have come to tell you simply, madame, that I am going;
going," he repeated. "I shall leave Cannes, and if you permit me to hope
that I may gain your esteem by doing this I shall leave, not happy, but
less sad."
"You are going!" Ely repeated. "You wish to go?" She looked the young
man in the face. She saw that delicate physiognomy whose emotion touched
her in a way she had never known before, and that fine mouth, still
trembling from the words just spoken. The thought of being forever
deprived of his presence suddenly became real to her with a vividness
which was physically intolerable, and with this came the certainty of
happiness if they should yield to the profound instinct that drew them
toward each other. She abandoned her will to the force of her
irresistible desire, and, feeling aloud, she said:--
"You shall not go, you cannot go. I am so lonely, so abandoned, so
miserable. I have nothing genuine and true around me; nothing, nothing,
nothing. And must I lose you?"
She rose with a passionate movement, which brought Hautefeuille also to
his feet, and, approaching him, her eyes close to his, supernaturally
beautiful with the light that illuminated her admirable face in the rush
of her soul into her lips and eyes, she took his two hands in her hands,
and, as though by this pressure and these words she would mingle her
being with his, she cried:--
"No, you shall not leave me. We will not separate. That is not possible
since you are in love with me, and I with you."