A VOW
The most extraordinary results are always brought about by the simplest
causes, just as the most unexpected things are always logical
happenings. A little reflection would oftener than not have been
sufficient to prevent the one and to foresee the other. But the
characteristic of passion is that its object absorbs its attention
completely. It takes no note of the fact that other passions exist
outside itself, as furious as itself, as uncontrollable with which it
must come in contact. It is a train flying along under full steam, with
no signal to warn it that another train is coming in the opposite
direction on the same line.
Swept away by a torrent of suffering, wrapped up in his thoughts during
this week of mortal agony, Olivier had not noticed that there was a
being near him living, trembling, suffering also. Monomania is full of
such egoism, of such forgetfulness. He had not noticed the working of
his wife's mind, nor foreseen the natural possibility that, exasperated
by her suspicions, Berthe might appeal to her husband's friend for help,
that she might implore Hantefeuille to aid her! This was just what she
finally did, and the interview between them had as result one easy to
prognosticate--that the young wife's jealousy tore off the bandage that
covered the eyes of her husband's unwitting friend. In one minute Pierre
understood everything!
This tragedy--such an interview was one, and one that was big with a
terrible dénouement--was brought about by a last mad imprudence on
Olivier's part. The eve of his meeting with Madame de Carlsberg he had
manifested a more than usually feverish agitation. Not one of the
indications of this state of mind had escaped his wife's notice. He had
walked about in his room almost all the night, sitting down at intervals
to try and write the letter he was going to send to Ely in the morning.
Through the thin dividing partition of the room Berthe, awake and her
senses acutely tense, heard him walk, sit down, rise, sit down again,
crumpling up and tearing papers, walk about again, crush up and tear
other paper. She knew that he was writing. "To her," she thought. Ah!
how she longed to go, to open the door, which was not even locked, to
enter the room, and to know if the anxiety that had consumed her during
the last week was well founded or not, to learn if Olivier had really
met again the mistress he had known in Rome, to discover if this woman
was the cause of the agitated crisis he was going through, if, yes or
no, that former mistress was the Baroness Ely she had so much longed to
meet in one of the salons at Cannes.
But, without her being able to say anything, her husband arranged
something for every day, and they had not paid a single visit or dined a
single time with any of their friends. She was too intelligent not to
have understood at once that Olivier did not wish to mix with the
society of Cannes, and that he would not, on the other hand, go away
from the town. Why? A single premiss would have enabled Berthe to solve
the enigma, but she had not that premiss. Her wifely instinct, however,
was not to be deceived--there was a mystery. With an infallible
certainty all pointed to this fact.
By dint of thinking and observing, she came to this conclusion: "This
woman is here. He regrets her, and yet is afraid of her.--He longs for
her, and that is why we remain here and why he is so unhappy.--He is
afraid of her, and that is why he will not let me mix in society here."
How many times during the week she had been tempted to tell him that
such a situation was too humiliating, that he must choose between his
wife and his former mistress, that she had determined to go away, to
return to Paris, to be once more at home among her own people!
And then Hautefeuille was there, always making a third; Hautefeuille,
who certainly knew all the truth! She hated him all the more in
proportion as she suffered from her helpless ignorance. When alone with
Olivier an invincible timidity prostrated her. She had a shamed terror
of owning that she had discovered the name of the Baroness Ely. She
dreaded having to own she had seen the portrait, as though she had been
guilty of some vile spying. She trembled with fear lest some irreparable
word should be spoken in the explanation that must follow. The unknown
in her husband's character terrified her. She had often heard the
histories of households broken up forever during the first year of
married life. Suppose he should abandon her, return to the other in a
fit of rage? The poor child felt her heart grow cold at the mere idea.
She loved Olivier! And even without any question of love, how could she
accept the idea of seeing her conjugal happiness wrecked with the
scandal of a separation, she so calm, so reasonable, so truly pure and
simple-minded?
Again during the miserable night preceding Olivier's meeting with Ely
she had listened to the restlessness of her husband and had kept silent,
in spite of her suffering, of her sense of desertion, of her jealousy!
Every footstep in the adjoining room made her pray, made her long for
strength to resist the temptation to have finished forever with all her
suffering. A dozen times she compelled herself to begin the comforting
prayer, "Our Father--" and every time when she arrived at the sentence,
"As we forgive them that have trespassed against us," her entire being
had revolted.
"Forgive that woman? Never! never! I cannot." An almost insignificant
detail--are there any insignificant details in such crises?--completed
the tension of her nerves. Toward nine o'clock her husband, ready
dressed for going out, entered her room. He had a letter in his hand
slipped between his gloves and his hat. Berthe could not read the
address on the envelope, but she saw that it bore no stamp. With her
heart beating wildly with expectation of the reply he would make to the
simple question, she said to her husband:--
"Do you want a stamp?--You will find one in my writing case on the
table."
"No, thank you," replied Olivier. "It is simply a line to be delivered
by hand. I will leave it myself."
He went out, adding that he would be back for luncheon. He never dreamed
that his wife burst into a passion of weeping the moment she was alone.
She was now certain the letter was for the Baroness Ely. Then, like
every jealous woman, she gave way to the irresistible, savage instinct
of material research which mitigates nothing, satisfies nothing--for,
suppose a proof of the justice of suspicion is discovered, does that
make the jealous suffering inspired by that suspicion any easier to
bear?
She went into her husband's room. In the wastepaper basket she saw the
fragments of a score of letters, thrown there by the feverish hand of
the young man. They were the drafts of the letters she had heard him
begin and crumple up and destroy the night before. With trembling hands
and burning cheeks, her throat parched with the horror of what she was
doing, she gathered together and rearranged. She thus reconstituted the
beginnings of a score of letters, letters of the most utter
insignificance to any one unaided by the intuition of wounded love, but
terribly, frightfully clear and precise to her.
They were all addressed to a woman. Berthe could read the incoherence of
Olivier's thoughts in them. The entire gamut of sentiment was gone
through, by turn ceremonious: "Madame, will you allow a visitor who has
not yet had the honor;" ironical, "You will not be surprised, madame,
that I cannot leave Cannes;" familiar, "I reproach myself, dear madame,
for not having called upon you before this."
How the young man's pen had hesitated over the form of asking such a
simple thing--the permission to pay a visit! This hesitation was, in
itself, the certain proof of a mystery, and one of the fragments thus
put together again revealed its nature: "Some vengeances are infamous,
my dear Ely, and the one you have conceived--"
Olivier had written this in the most cruel minute of his insomnia. His
suffering found relief in the insolent use of the Christian name, in the
insulting remembrance of an ineffaceable intimacy. Then he tore up the
sheet of paper into minute fragments which betrayed the rage consuming
him. After she had put together and deciphered this fatal phrase Berthe
saw nothing else. All her presentiments were well founded: Baroness Ely
de Carlsberg, of whom Corancez had spoken to Hautefeuille in the train,
was her husband's former mistress! He had only wanted to come to Cannes
because she was there, so as to see her again! The letter in his hand a
few minutes before had been for her! He had gone with it to her villa!
Face to face with this indisputable and overwhelming certainty, the
young woman was seized with a convulsive trembling that increased as the
hour for luncheon drew near.--It burst all bounds when, toward noon, she
received a card from Olivier upon which he had scribbled in
pencil--always the same handwriting!--that a friend whom he had met had
insisted upon keeping him for luncheon, and he begged her not to wait
for him!
"She has won him back from me! He is with her!"
When she had realized this thought, weighted with all the horrible pain
given by evidence that pierces to the heart, like some glittering, icy
cold knife, she felt that she could not support this physical suffering.
With the automatic action that comes upon such occasions she put on her
hat and veil and gloves. Then when she was dressed and ready for going
out a final gleam of reason showed her the folly of the project she had
conceived. She had thought of going to her rival's house, of surprising
Olivier, and of finishing with it all forever!
To finish with it all! She looked at herself in the mirror, her teeth
chattering, her face lividly pale, all her body convulsively trembling.
She realized that such a step in her present state with such a woman
would be absurd. But suppose some one else took this step? Suppose some
one else went to Olivier and said, "Your wife knows all. She is dying.
Come."
The idea of him whom she believed to be her husband's confidant had no
sooner occurred to the mind of the unhappy woman when she rang for her
chambermaid with the same automatic nervousness.
"Beg Monsieur Hautefeuille to come here, if he is in his room," she
said, she who had never had a single conversation in her life
_tête-à-tête_ with the young man.
But she cared nothing for conventionality at the moment. Her nervousness
was so great that she had to sit down when the chambermaid returned, and
said that Monsieur Hautefeuille was coming. Her limbs would no longer
support her. When he entered the room about five minutes later she did
not give him the time to greet her, to ask why she had sent for him. She
sprang toward him like some wild creature seizing her prey, and, taking
his arm in her trembling hand with the incoherence of a madwoman who
only sees the idea possessing her and not the being to whom she speaks,
she said:--
"Ah! you have come at last.--You must have felt that I suspected
something.--You must go and tell him that I know all, you hear me,
all,--and bring him here. Go! Go! If he does not come back I shall go
mad.--You have an honorable heart, Monsieur Hautefeuille. You must think
it wrong, very wrong, that he should return to that woman after only six
months of married life. Go, and tell him that he must come back, that I
forgive him, that I will never speak about it again. I cannot show him
how I love him.--But I do love him, I swear that I love him.--Ah! my
head is reeling."
"But, Madame du Prat," said Pierre, "what is the matter? What has gone
wrong? Where must I go to find Olivier? What is it that you know? What
is it that he has hidden from you? Where has he returned to?--I assure
you I do not understand a single thing."
"Ah! you are lying to me again!" replied Berthe, more violent still.
"You are trying to spare me!--But I tell you I know all.--Do you want
proofs? Would you like me to tell you what you talked about in your
first conversation together the day we arrived, when you left me alone
at the hotel? Would you like to know what you talk about every time that
I am not present?--It is of the woman who was his mistress in Rome, of
whom he has never ceased thinking.--He travelled with her portrait in
his portfolio during our honeymoon! I saw that portrait--I tell you I
saw it! That was how I learned her name. The portrait was signed at the
bottom, signed 'Ely.'--You are satisfied now.--Do you think I did not
notice your agitation, the uneasiness of both of you, when some one
spoke of this woman before me the day we went to Monte Carlo?--You
thought I did not see anything, that I suspected nothing.--I know, I
tell you, that she is here. I will tell you the name of her villa if you
like. It is the Villa Helmholtz.--I know that he only came to Cannes to
see her again. He is with her now, I am certain.--He is with her now!
Don't tell me I am wrong. I have here the pieces of letters that he
wrote to her this past night asking for a meeting."
With her trembling hands, which had hardly strength enough to lift up
the sheets of paper upon which she had arranged the damning fragments
with such patience, she showed Pierre all the beginnings of a letter,
among them the irrefutable sentence that had another significance for
him. He was trembling so violently, his features expressed such anguish,
that Berthe was convinced of his complicity. This fresh proof, after so
many, that her suspicions were well founded, was so painful to the poor
woman that before Pierre's eyes she gave way to a fit of hysterics. She
made a sign to show that her breath was failing her. Her heart beat so
furiously that she felt she was suffocating. She pressed her hand upon
her heart, sobbing, "Oh, God!"--Her voice died away in her throat, and
she fell upon the floor, her head hanging loosely, her eyes gleaming
whitely, and with a little foam at the corners of her mouth as though
she were dying.
The young man recovered his senses before the necessity of helping the
poor woman, whose anguish terrified him, of succoring her by the
simplest means that could be imagined readily, of summoning the
chambermaid, of sending for the doctor and of awaiting his diagnosis.
These cares carried him through the frightful half hour that follows
every such revelation, the half hour that is so terrible.
He only recovered consciousness of the reality of his own misfortune
when the departure of the doctor had reassured him of the young woman's
state. The physician recommended antispasmodics and promised to come
again during the evening. Although he did not seem much alarmed, the
young wife's illness was serious enough to demand the presence of the
husband.
Hautefeuille said, "I am going for M. du Prat," and went off in the
direction of the Villa Helmholtz. It was on the way, while his carriage
was rolling along the road now so familiar to him, that he felt the
first attack of real despair. The news he had just heard was so
stunning, so unexpected, so disconcerting, and full of anguish for him
that he felt as though in the grasp of some hideous nightmare.--He would
awake presently and would find everything as it was only that
morning.--But no.--Berthe's words suddenly recurred to him. He saw again
in imagination the opening of the letter, written in the hand he had
known for twenty years: "Some vengeances are infamous, my dear Ely, and
the one you have conceived--"
In the light of the terrible sentence, Olivier's strange attitude since
his arrival in Cannes became quite comprehensible with a frightful
clearness. Indications to which Pierre had paid no attention crowded
pell-mell into his memory. He recalled glances his friend had cast at
him, his sudden silence, his half confidences, his allusions. All
invaded his recollection like a flood of certainty. It mounted to his
brain, which was stupefied by the fumes of a grief as strong and intense
as though by the influence of some poisonous alcohol. As his horse was
walking up the steep incline of Urie he met Yvonne de Chésy. He did not
recognize her, and even when she called to him he did not hear her. She
made a sign to the driver to stop, and laughing, even in all her
trouble, she said to the unhappy youth:--
"I wanted to know if you had met my husband, who was to have met me. But
I see that a herd of elephants might have gone by without your seeing
them! You are going to call upon Ely? You will find Du Prat there. He
even deigned to recognize me."
Although Pierre had not the least doubt that Olivier was at Madame de
Carlsberg's, this fresh evidence, gathered by pure chance, seemed to
break his heart. A few minutes later he saw the roofs and the terraces
of the villa. Then he came, to the garden. The sight of the hedge he had
passed through only the night before with so much loving confidence, so
much longing desire, completed the destruction of all the reason that
remained to him. He felt that in his present state of semi-madness it
was impossible for him to see his friend and his mistress face to face
with each other without dying with pain. This was why Olivier found him,
awaiting his arrival, at a turn of the road, livid with a terrible
pallor, his physiognomy changed, his eyes gleaming madly.
The situation of the two friends was so tragic, it presaged so painful
an interview, that both felt they could not, that they must not, enter
into an explanation there.
Olivier got into the carriage as though nothing were amiss, and took the
vacant place. As he felt the contact of his friend, Pierre shivered, but
recovered himself immediately. He said to the coachman:--
"Drive to the hotel quickly."
Then, turning to Du Prat, he continued:--
"I came for you because your wife is very ill."
"Berthe?" cried Olivier. "Why, when I left her this morning she seemed
so cheerful and well!"
"She told me where you were," went on Hautefeuille, avoiding a more
direct reply. "By accident she has found among your papers a photograph
taken in Rome and bearing a striking signature. She heard some one
mention this name here. She at once came to the conclusion that the
person bearing the name, and who lives at Cannes, was the original of
the portrait from Rome. She discovered the torn fragments of some
letters in which the same name occurred, and in which you asked for a
rendezvous. In fact, she knows all."
"And you also?" asked Olivier, after a silence.
"And I also!" assented Pierre.
The two friends did not exchange another word during the quarter of an
hour the carriage took to arrive at the Hôtel des Palmes. What could
they have said in such a moment to increase or diminish the mortal agony
that choked their utterance?
Olivier went straight to his wife's room the moment the carriage
arrived, without asking Pierre when they would meet again and without
Pierre asking him. It was one of those silences that happen at a
death-bed, when all seems paralyzed by the first icy impression of the
unchangeable, when all is stifled in the grip of the "nevermore"!
The crisis of weakness, the necessity of expansion that follows such
struggles, began for Du Prat on the threshold of Berthe's room. He was
saluted by the sickly odor of ether upon his entrance. Outlined, pale
and haggard, against the pillow, regarding him with eyes swimming in
tears, he saw the wasted face of the girl who had trusted him, who had
given him her life, the flower of her youth, all her hopes and
aspirations. How unyielding he must have been toward the suffering,
self-contained creature for her to have concealed all her feelings from
him, loving him as she did!
He could not utter a word. He sat down near the bed and remained for a
long time looking at the poor invalid. The sensation of the suffering
that enveloped all four--Berthe, Pierre, Ely, and himself--pierced him
to the heart. Berthe loved him and knew that her lave was not returned.
Pierre loved Ely, and was beloved by her, but his happiness had just
been poisoned forever by the most horrible of revelations. As for
himself, he was in the grasp of a passion for his former mistress, one
whom he had suspected, insulted, deserted, and who had now given herself
to his dearest friend.
Like a man who falls overboard in mid-ocean, who is swimming desperately
in the raging sea, and who sees the waves assembling that will swallow
him up, Olivier felt the irresistible power of the love he had so
yearned to know, rising all around, within him and on every hand. He was
in the influence of the storm, and he felt it sweeping him away. He was
afraid. While he sat near the bedside, listening to the irregular
breathing of his young wife, he felt for an instant the intellectual and
emotional vertigo that imparts to even the least philosophical natures
at such moments the vision of the fatal forces of nature, the implacable
workers-out of our destinies. And then, like a swimmer tossed about by
the palpitating ocean, making a feeble effort to struggle against the
formidable waves before they engulf him, he tried to recover himself--to
act. He wanted to speak with Berthe, to soften all that it was possible
to soften of her suffering.
"You are angry with me?" he said.--"And yet you see that I came the
moment I knew you were ill.--When you are well again I will explain all
that has taken place. You will see that things have not been what you
believe.--Ah! what suffering you would have spared us both if you had
only spoken during the past few days!"
"I do not condemn you," said the poor girl, "and I do not ask you to
explain anything.--I love you and you do not love me; that is what I
know. It is not your fault, but nothing can change it.--You have just
been very good to me," she added, "and I thank you for it. I am so worn
out that I would like to rest."
"It is the beginning of the end," thought Olivier, as he passed into the
salon in obedience to his wife's wish. "What will become of our
household?--If I do not succeed in winning her back, in healing her
wounded heart, it will mean a separation in a very short time, and for
me it will mean the recommencement of an aimless life.--Heal her heart
when my own is bleeding!--Poor child! How I have made her suffer!"
Through all the complications caused by his impressionability, he had
retained the conscience of an honorable man. It was too sensitive not to
shrink with remorse from the answer to this question. But--who does not
know it by experience?--neither remorse nor pity, the two noblest
virtues of the human soul, has ever prevailed against the dominating
frenzy of passion in a being who loves. Olivier's thoughts quickly
turned from the consideration of poor Berthe to the opposite side. The
fever of the kisses he had pressed on Ely's pale, quivering face burned
in his veins. The image of his friend, of the lover to whom the woman
now belonged, recurred to him at the same time, and his two secret
wounds began to bleed again so violently that he forgot everything that
did not concern Ely or Pierre, Pierre or Ely. And a keener suffering
than any he had yet experienced attacked him. What was his friend, his
brother, doing? What had become of the being to whom he had given so
large a part of his very soul? What was still left of their friendship?
What would there still be left to-morrow?
Face to face with a prospective rupture with Hautefeuille, Olivier felt
that this was for him the uttermost limit of anguish, the supreme stroke
that he could not support. The wreck of his married life was a blow for
which he was prepared. His frightful and desperate reflux of passion for
Ely de Carlsberg was a horrible trial, but he would submit to it. But to
lose his consecrated friendship, to possess no longer this unique
sentiment in which he had always found a refuge, a support, a
consolation, a reason for self-esteem and for believing in good, was the
final destruction of all. After this there was nothing in life to which
he could turn, no one for whom and with whom to live. It was the
entrance into the icy night, into total solitude.
All the future of their friendship was at stake in this moment, and yet
he remained there motionless, letting time slip by that was priceless. A
few minutes before, when they were in the carriage returning to the
hotel, he could not say a single word to Pierre. Now he must at all
costs defend this beloved, noble sentiment, take part in the struggle of
which the heart of his friend, so cruelly wounded, was the scene. How
would he receive him? What could they say to each other? Olivier did not
ask. The instinct that made him leave his room to go down to
Hautefeuille's was as unconscious, as irreflective, as his wife's appeal
to Hautefeuille had been, that appeal which had ruined all. Would
Olivier's advances be followed with as fatal results?
When he had passed the threshold of the room, he saw Pierre sitting
before a table, his head resting on his hands. A sheet of paper before
him, still blank, showed that he had intended to write a letter, but had
not been able. The pen had slipped from his fingers upon the paper and
he had left it there. Through the window beyond this living statue of
despair Olivier saw the wonderful afternoon sky, a soft pile of delicate
hues in which the blue was deepened into mauve. Glorious masses of
mimosa filled the vases and filled with their refreshing and yet heavy
perfume the retreat in which the young lover had revelled during the
winter in hours of romantic reverie, in which he was now draining the
vast cup of bitterness that the eternal Delilah fills for her dearest
victims!
Olivier had suffered many a poignant shock during this tragic afternoon,
but none more agonizing than the silent spectacle of this deep, endless
suffering. All the virility of his friendship awoke and his own grief
melted in a fathomless tenderness for the companion of his childhood and
youth, who was dying before his eyes. He put his hand upon Pierre's
shoulder, gently and lightly, as though he divined that at his contact
the jealous body of the lover must rebel and shrink back in horror, in
aversion.
"It is I," he said; "it is I, Olivier.--You must feel that we cannot
remain with this weight upon our hearts. It is a load under which you
are reeling and which is stifling me. You are suffering; I am also in
torture. Our pain will be less if we bear it together, each supporting
the other.--I owe you an explanation, and I have come to give it you.
Between us there can be no secret now. Madame de Carlsberg has told me
all."
Hautefeuille did not appear to have heard the first words his friend
uttered. But at the sound of his mistress's name he raised his head. His
features were horribly contracted, betraying the dreadful suffering of a
grief that has not found relief in tears. He replied in a dry voice in
which all his repulsion was manifest.
"An explanation between us? What explanation? To tell you what? To
inform me of what? That you were that woman's lover last year, and that
I am your successor?" Then, as though lashing himself to fury with his
own words, he went on:--
"If it is to tell me again what you did before I knew whom you were
talking about, you may spare yourself the pain. I have forgotten
nothing.--Neither the story of the first lover, nor of the other, nor of
the one who was the cause of your leaving her.--She is a monster of
falsehood and hypocrisy. I know it, and you have proved it. Don't let us
begin again. It hurts me too much, and, besides, it is useless. She died
for me to-day. I no longer know her."
"You are very hard upon her," replied Olivier, "and you have no right to
be."
The cynicism of the insults Pierre was hurling at Ely was insupportable.
It betrayed so much suffering in the lover who was thus outraging a
mistress whom only the night before he had idolized! And then the
passionate, true tone of the woman was still ringing in his ears as she
spoke of her love. An irresistible magnanimity compelled him to witness
for her, and he repeated:--
"No, you have no right to accuse her. With you she has neither been
deceitful nor hypocritical! She loves you, loves you deeply and
passionately.--Be just. Could she tell you what you now know? If she has
lied to you, it was to keep you; it was because you are the first, the
only love of her life."
"It is a lie!" cried Hautefeuille. "There is no love without complete
sincerity.--But I would have forgiven her all, forgiven all the past, if
she had told me.--Besides, there was a first day, a first hour.--I shall
never forget that day and that hour.--We spoke of you that very day when
I first met her. I can still hear her uttering your name. I did not hide
from her how much I loved you. She knew through you how dearly you loved
me.--It was an easy matter to never see me again, to not attract me, to
leave me free to go my way! There are so many other men in the world for
whom the past would have been nothing more than the past.--But no; what
she wanted was a vengeance, a base, ignoble vengeance! You had left her.
You had married. She took me, as an assassin takes a knife, to strike
you to the heart.--You dare not deny it.--Why, I have read it; I know
you believe that, for I have read it in your handwriting! Tell me, yes
or no, did you write those words?"
"Yes, but I was wrong," said Olivier. "I believed it then, but I was
mistaken. Ah!" he continued with a tone of despair, "why must it be my
lot to defend her to you?--But if I did not believe that she loves you
do you not think that I should be the first to tell you, the first to
say, 'She is a monster'?--Yes, I thought she had taken you in a spirit
of revenge. I thought it from the day of my arrival, when we wandered in
the pine forest and you spoke of her. I saw so clearly that you loved
her, and oh! how I suffered!"
"Ah! You admit it!" cried Pierre.
He rose, and, grasping his friend by the shoulder, he began to shake him
in a fury of rage, repeating:--
"You admit it! You admit it! You knew that I loved her, and yet you said
nothing. For an entire week you have been with me, been near me, you
have seen me giving all my heart, all that is good in me, all that is
tender and affectionate to your former mistress, and you said nothing!
And if I had not learned from your wife you would have let me sink
deeper and deeper in this passion every day, you would have left me in
the toils of some one you despise!--It was at the beginning you ought to
have said, 'She is a monster!'--not now."
"How could I?" said Olivier, interrupting. "Honor forbade it. You know
that very well."
"But honor did not forbid you writing to her," replied Pierre, "when you
knew that I loved her, to ask her for a meeting unknown to me; it did
not prevent you going to her house, when you knew I was not there."
He looked at Olivier with an expression in which shone a veritable
hatred.
"I see clearly now," he went on. "You have both been playing with
me.--You wanted to use what you had discovered to enter into her life
again. Judas! You have lied to me.--Traitor! Traitor! Traitor!"
With the cry of some stricken animal, he sank into a chair and began to
weep passionately, uttering among his sobs:--
"Friendship, love; love, friendship, all is dead. I have lost all. Every
one has lied to me, everything has betrayed me.--Ah! how miserable I
am!--"
Du Prat recoiled, paling under the influence of this flood of invective.
The pain caused by his friend's insult was deep enough. But there was no
anger, no question of egoism in his feelings. The terrible injustice of
a being naturally good, delicate, and tender only increased his pity. At
the same time the sentiment of the irremediable rupture of their
affections, if the interview finished like this, restored a little of
the sangfroid that the other had quite lost. With a voice that was full
of emotion in its gravity, he replied:--
"Yes, you must be suffering, Pierre, to speak to me in that way--me,
your old companion, your friend! your brother--I a Judas? I a
traitor?--Look me in the face. You have insulted me, threatened
me--almost struck me--and you see I have no feeling in my heart for you
except the friendship that is as tender, as sentient as it was
yesterday, as it was a year, ten years, twenty years ago! I have played
with you?--I have deceived you?--No, you cannot think that, you do not
believe it!--You know well enough that our friendship is not dead, that
it cannot die!--And all"--here his voice became agitated and
bitter--"because of a woman!--A woman has come between us, and you have
forgotten all, you have renounced all.--Ah! Pierre, arouse yourself, I
implore you; tell me that you only spoke in your anger; tell me that you
still care for me, that you still believe in our friendship. I ask it in
the name of our childhood, of those innocent moments when we met and
mourned because we were not really brothers. Is there a single
recollection of that time with which I am not connected?--To efface you
from my life would be to destroy all my past, all that part of it that I
turn to with pride, that I contemplate when I want to free myself from
the vileness of the present!--For God's sake, remember our youth and all
that it held of good and noble and pure affection. In 1870, the day
after Sedan, when you wanted to enlist, you came to seek me, do you
recollect? And you found me going off to your house. Do you remember the
embrace that drew us heart to heart? Ah! if any one had told us that a
day would arrive when you would call me traitor, that you would call me,
by whose side you wanted to die, a Judas; with what confidence we should
have replied, 'Impossible!' And do you remember the snowy night in the
forest of Chagey, toward the end, when we learned that all was lost,
that the army was entering Switzerland and that on the morrow we had to
give up our arms? And have you forgotten our oath, that if ever we had
to fight again, we would be together, shoulder to shoulder, heart to
heart, in the same line?--Suppose the hour should come, what would you
do without me?--Ah, you are looking at me again, you understand me, you
feel with me.--Come to my arms, Pierre, as on that third of
September, now more than ten years ago, and yet it seems like
yesterday.--Everything else in this life may fail us, but not our
friendship.--Everything else is passion, sensual, delirium, but that
feeling is our heart, that friendship is our very being!"
As Olivier spoke Pierre's attitude began to change. His sobs stopped and
in his eyes, still wet with tears, a strange gleam appeared. His
friend's voice betrayed such poignant emotion, the vision evoked by his
brotherly love recalled such ideal thoughts to the unhappy man--visions
of heroic deeds and courageous efforts--that, after the first shock of
horrible pain, all his manly energy was called to life by the appeal of
his old brother in arms. He rose, hesitated a second, and then seized
Olivier in his arms. And they embraced with one of those noble
sentiments that dry the tears in our eyes, that strengthen the wavering
will and renew the strength of generosity in our hearts. Then briefly
and simply Pierre replied:--
"I beg your pardon, Olivier; you are better than I am. But the blow was
such a terrible one, and came so suddenly!--I had such entire, complete
confidence in that woman. And I learned all in five minutes, and in that
way!--I knew nothing, suspected nothing.--Then came the two lines in
your handwriting after what your wife had told me, and on the top of
your confidences!--It was like a ship upon the ocean at midnight cut in
two by another vessel, and plunging beneath the waves forever.--A man
could go mad in such a moment.--But let us say nothing more about that.
You are right. We must save our friendship from this shipwreck."
He put his hand before his eyes as though to shut out another vision
that was paining him.
"Listen, Olivier," he said, "you may think me very weak, but you must
tell me the truth.--Have you ever seen Madame de Carlsberg since you
parted in Rome?"
"Never!" replied Olivier.
"You wrote a letter to her this morning. Not the one of which I read the
beginning, but another. What did you write about?"
"To ask for an interview, nothing more."
"And she? Did she reply?"
"Not personally. She sent word that she was at home."
"Why did you ask for this meeting? What did you say to her?"
"I said what I then thought was the truth. I was overwhelmed by the idea
that she was trying to revenge herself upon me through you, and I felt I
must arouse a sense of shame in her. She replied to my reproaches and
proved to me that she loved you."
And he added:--
"Do not ask me anything more."
Pierre looked at him. The fever of such an interrogation began to scorch
him again. A question was burning his lips. He longed to ask, "Did you
speak of your past? Did you speak of your love?"
Then his native nobility recoiled before the baseness of such a
degrading inquisition. He became silent and began to walk up and down
the room, the living scene of a struggle which his friend watched in
mortal anguish. The questions that he had just put brought Ely present
before him with a too cruel vividness. They had reanimated the
sentiments Olivier's manly and apologizing appeal had exorcised a few
minutes before. Love, despising, disabused, vilified, and cruel, but
still love, struggled with friendship in his aching heart. Suddenly the
young man stopped. He stamped upon the floor, shaking his clinched fist
at the same time. He uttered a single "Ah!" full of repulsion, of
disgust, and of deliverance, and then, looking straight into his
friend's eyes, he said:--
"Olivier, give me your word of honor that you will not see this woman
again, that you will not receive her if she comes to see you, that you
will not answer if she writes to you, that you will never ask after her
no matter what may happen, never, never, never."
"I give you my word of honor," said Olivier.
"And I," said Hautefeuille, with a deep sigh that betrayed both despair
and relief, "I give you my word of honor to do the same, that I will
never see her again, that I will never write to her.--There is not room
for you and her in my heart. I feel it now, and I cannot lose you."
"Thank God!" said Olivier, taking his friend's hand. An inexpressible
emotion overcame him, a mixed feeling of joy, of gratitude, and of
terror--joy because of their beloved friendship, gratitude for the
delicacy which had made Pierre save him the pangs of the most horrible
jealousy, terror of the terrible agony imprinted upon his friend's face
as he made his vow of self-sacrifice.
Hautefeuille seemed eager to escape from the room where such a terrible
scene had taken place, and opened the door.
"You have a patient upstairs," he said. "You ought to be near her. She
must get better quickly so that we can go away, to-morrow if possible,
but the next day at the very latest.--I will come with you and will
await you in the salon."
The two friends had hardly stepped into the corridor when they were met
by a servant of the hotel. The man had a letter upon a tray, which he
held out to Pierre, saying:--
"The bearer is waiting for a reply, Monsieur Hautefeuille."
Hautefeuille took the letter and looked at the superscription. Then,
without opening it, he handed it to Olivier, who recognized Ely's bold
handwriting. He returned the letter to Pierre and asked:--
"What are you going to do?"
"What I promised," replied Hautefeuille.
Re-entering his room, he put the unopened letter in another envelope. He
then wrote on it Madame de Carlsberg's name and the address of her
villa. Returning to the corridor he handed it to the servant, saying:--
"There is the reply."
And when he again took Olivier's arm he felt it trembled more than his
own did.