"Well," she said, re-entering the salon about half an hour later, as she had said she would, "they are both here, and they do not leave for a few days. Madame du Prat is very ill. It cost me little to find that out," she added, with a little nervous smile. "I went to the Hôtel des Palmes and asked if Madame Nieul was there, and sent up my card. Then I looked through the list of visitors and questioned the secretary with an indifferent air. 'I thought Monsieur and Madame du Prat had already left,' I said to him. 'Do they stay much longer?' And his answer told me all I wanted to know."
"How good you were to take all that trouble for me!" replied Ely, taking her hand and stroking it lovingly. "How I love you! It seems to have given me a fresh lease of life. I feel that I shall see him again. And you will help me to meet him. Promise me that. I must speak with him once more, only once. I feel that I must tell him the truth, so that he may know at least how well I have loved him, how sincere and passionate and deep is my love for him! It is so hard not to know what he thinks of me."
Yes! What did Pierre Hautefeuille think of the mistress whom he had idolized only a few days before, of the mistress who had stood so high in his esteem, and who was suddenly convicted in his eyes so shamefully?
Alas! The unhappy youth did not even know himself. He was not capable of finding his way among the maze of ideas and of contradictory impressions that crowded, jostled, and succeeded each other in his soul. If he had been able to leave Cannes at once, this interior tumult might have been less intense. It was the only plan to be followed after the vow that Olivier and he had exchanged. They ought to have gone away, to have put distance and time and events between them and the woman they both loved, and that they had sworn to give up to their friendship. But what can the will do, no matter what its strength, against imagination, sentiment, against the emotion in the troubled depths of the heart? We are only masters of our acts. We cannot govern our dreams, our regrets, and our desires. They awake, quiver, and increase by themselves. They bring back memories until recollection becomes an obsession. All the charm of looks, of smiles, of a face, all the splendor of outline, the beauty of form of a beloved creature, is made a living reality, and the old fever once more burns in our veins. The mistress whom we have abandoned stands before us. She wishes for us, she calls for us, she recovers possession of us. And if we are in the same city with her, if it only requires a quarter of an hour's walk to see her again, what courage is needed in order not to yield!
Pierre and Olivier felt the necessity of this saving flight, and they had taken a resolution to go away. Then an unfortunate event kept them in the hotel. As the secretary had told Louise Brion, Madame du Prat was really ill. She had felt the influence of a shock too great for her strength, and she could not recover from it. A weakness of the heart remained, of such intensity that even when she could leave her bed and stand erect, the least movement brought on palpitations that seemed to suffocate her. The doctor studying her case forbade her to even attempt to travel for several days.
Under these circumstances, if Hautefeuille had been wise, he would have gone away alone. This he did not do. It was impossible for him to leave Du Prat alone in Cannes. He said to himself that it was because he could not leave his friend at such a moment. If he had gone down to the bottom of his heart, if he had probed the place where we dissemble thoughts of which we are ashamed, where lie hidden plans and secret egoism, he would have discovered that there were other motives that kept him there, motives that were much more degrading. Although he had the most complete confidence in Olivier's word, he trembled at the idea of his remaining alone in the same town as Ely de Carlsberg. In spite of the heroic effort to preserve a friendship that was so dear to them both, notwithstanding the esteem, the tenderness and pity they felt for each other, in spite of so many sacred recollections, in spite of honor, a woman stood between them. And that woman had introduced with her all the fatal influence that so quickly creeps into friendly relations, all the instinctive jealousy, the quivering susceptibility and uneasy taciturnity that destroys all.
They were not long in feeling this. Each understood how deeply the fatal poison had eaten into their souls. And soon they understood a thing that is both strange and monstrous in appearance, and yet is really so natural—they realized that the love whose death they had vowed in the name of their friendship was now bound up in that friendship by the closest ties!
Neither one nor the other could think of his friend, could look at him, or hear him, without immediately seeing Ely's image, without immediately thinking of the mistress who had belonged to them both. They were in the grasp of an idea that turned the few following days of intimacy into a veritable crisis of madness, a madness that was all the more torturing because they both avoided the name of the woman out of fidelity to their promise.
But was it necessary for them to speak of her, seeing that each knew the other was thinking of her? How painful these few days were! Although they were not many, they seemed interminable!
They met the morning following their conversation about ten o'clock in Olivier's salon. To hear them greet each other, to hear Pierre ask about Berthe, to listen to Olivier's replies, and then to hear the two speak of the paper they had been reading, of the weather, of what they were going to do, one would never have thought their first meeting so painful. Pierre felt that his friend was studying him. And he was studying his friend. Each hungered and thirsted to know at once if the other had had the same thoughts, or rather the same thought, during the hours they had been separated. Each read this thought in the eyes of the other, as distinctly as though it had been written upon paper like the horrible sentence that had enlightened Pierre. The invisible phantom stood between them, and they were silent. And yet they saw through the open window that the radiant Southern spring still filled the sky with blue, still beautified the roads with flowers and sweetened the air with perfume.