"The awkwardness of that innocent boy," he murmured, while waiting for Madame de Carlsberg.
If the vanity of speaking to the wife—even morganatic—of an archduke of Austria had not absorbed him at this moment, he might have observed his companion making his way to the purchaser of the jewel so fantastically sold. And perhaps he would have found the bargain very clever which was made with this innocent boy, had he seen him take from his pocket-book two bank-notes and receive from the usurer the case which had a few moments ago sparkled on the table before the Baroness. The usurer had sold the jewel to the lover for twice the sum that he had paid. Such is the beginning of great business houses.
CHAPTER II
THE CRY OF A SOUL
If Pierre Hautefeuille's action had escaped the malicious eyes of Corancez, it had not, however, passed unperceived. Another person had seen the Baroness Ely sell the gold box, and the young man buy it; and this person was one whom the unfortunate lover should have most feared. For to be seen by her was to be seen by Madame de Carlsberg herself, as the witness of the two successive sales was no other than Madame Brion, the confidante of Baroness Ely, residing at the same villa, and sure to report what she had seen. But to explain the singular interest with which Madame Brion had observed these two scenes, and the attitude with which she was about to speak of it to her friend, it is necessary to relate the circumstances that had caused so close an intimacy between the wife of a Parisian financier of such low birth as Horace Brion, and a noble lady of the European Olympus, who figured in the Almanach de Gotha among the Imperial family of Austria. The peculiarity of the cosmopolitan world, the trait that gives it its psychological picturesqueness, in spite of the banal character inevitable to a society composed of the rich and the idle, is the constant surprises of connections like this. This society serves as the point of intersection for destinies that have started from the widest extremities of the social world. One may see there the interplay of natures so dissimilar, often so hostile, that their simplest emotions have a savor of strangeness, the poetry of unfamiliar things. Just as the love of Pierre Hautefeuille, this Frenchman so profoundly, so completely French, for a foreigner so charming as the Baroness Ely, with a charm so novel, so difficult for the young man to analyze, was destined to occupy a place of such importance in his sentimental life, so the friendship between the Baroness Ely and Louise Brion could not fail to be a thing of special and peculiar value in their lives, although its material circumstances were, like everything in the cosmopolitan world, as natural in their details as they were strange in their results.
This friendship, like most lasting affections, began early, when the two women were but sixteen. They had ended their girlhood together in the intimacy of a convent, which is usually terminated at the entrance into society. But when these attachments endure, when they survive through absence, unaffected by difference of surroundings, or by new engagements, they become as instinctive and indestructible as family ties. When the two friends first met, the name of one was Ely de Sallach, the other, Louise Rodier of the old family of Catholic bankers, now extinct, the Rodier-Vimal. Certainly from their birthplaces, one the Château de Sallach in the heart of the Styrian Alps, the other the Hôtel Rodier in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, it would seem that their paths of life must forever separate. A similar misfortune brought them together. They lost their mothers at the same time, and almost at once their fathers both married again. Each of the young girls, during the months that followed these second marriages, had had trouble with her step-mother; and each had finally been exiled to the Convent du Sacré-Cœur at Paris. The banker had chosen this establishment because he managed the funds and knew the superioress. General Sallach had been urged to this choice by his wife, who thus got rid of her step-daughter and gained a pretext for coming often to Paris. Entering the same day the old convent in the Rue de Varenne, the two orphans felt an attraction toward each other which their mutual confidences soon deepened into passionate friendship; and this friendship had lasted because it was based upon the profoundest depths of their characters and was strengthened by time.
The classic tragedy was not so far from nature as hostile critics pretend, when it placed beside its protagonists those personages whose single duty was to receive their confidences. There are in the reality of daily life souls that seem to be but echoes, ever ready to listen to the sighs and moans of others—soul-mirrors whose entire life is in the reflection they receive, whose personality is but the image projected upon them. On her entrance into the convent Louise Brion had become one of this race, whose adorable modesty Shakespeare has embodied in Horatio, the heroic and loyal second in Hamlet's duel with the assassin of his father. At sixteen as at thirty, it was only necessary to look at her to divine the instinctive self-effacement of a timidly sensitive character, incapable of asserting itself, or of living its own life. Her face was a delicate one, but its fineness passed unnoticed, so great was the reserve in her modest features, in her eyes of ashen gray, the simple folds of her brown hair. She spoke but little, and in a voice without accent; she had the genius for simplicity in dress, the style of dress that in the argot of women has the pretty epithet "tranquille." Whether man or woman, these beings, so weak and delicate, with their fine shades of sentiment, unfitted for active life, their desires instinctively attenuated, usually attach themselves, in a seeming contradiction which is at bottom logical, to some ardent and impetuous character, whose audacity fascinates them. They feel an irresistible desire to participate, through sympathy and imagination, in the joy and pain which they have not the force to encounter in their own experience. That was the secret of the relations between Madame Brion and the Baroness de Carlsberg. From the first week of their girlish intimacy, the passionate and fantastic Ely had bewitched the reasonable and quiet Louise, and this witchery had continued through the years, gaining from the fact that after their departure from the convent the two friends had once more experienced an analogous misfortune. They had both been in their marriage victims of paternal ambition. Louise Rodier had become Madame Brion, because old Rodier, having fallen into secret difficulties, thought that he could save himself by accepting Horace Brion as a son-in-law and partner. The latter, after his father had been ruined in the Bourse, had, in fifteen energetic years, not only made a fortune, but won a kind of financial fame by re-establishing affairs supposed to be hopeless, such as the Austro-Dalmatian Railway, so feloniously launched and abandoned by the notorious Justus Hafner (vide "Cosmopolis"). To efface the memory of his father Brion needed to ally himself with one of those families of finance whose professional honor is an equivalent of a noble title. The chief of the house of Rodier-Vimal needed an aide-de-camp of distinguished superiority in the secret crisis of his affairs. Louise, knowing the necessity of this union, had accepted it, and had been horribly unhappy.
It was the same year that Ely de Sallach, constrained by her father, married the Archduke Henry Francis, who had fallen in love with her at Carlsbad, with one of those furious passions that may overtake a blasé prince of forty-five, for whom the experience of feeling is so violent and unexpected that he clings to it with all the fever of youth momentarily recaptured. The Emperor, though very hostile on principle to morganatic marriages, had consented to this one in the hope that the most revolutionary and disquieting of his cousins would quiet down and begin a new life. General Sallach had looked to the elevation of his daughter for a field-marshalship. He and his wife had so persuaded the girl, that she, tempted herself by a vanity too natural at her age, had yielded.
Twelve years had passed since then, and the two old friends of Sacré-Cœur were still just as orphaned and as solitary and unhappy, one in the glittering rôle of a demi-princess, the other, queen of the great bank, as on the day when they first met under the trees of the garden by the Boulevard des Invalides. They had never ceased to write to each other; and each having seen the image of her own sorrow in the destiny of the other, their affection had been deepened by their mutual misery, by all their confidences, and by their silence, too.
The hardness of the financier, his ferocious egoism, disguised beneath the studied manners of a sham man of the world, his brutal sensuality, had made it possible for Louise to understand the miseries of poor Ely, abandoned to the jealous despotism of a cruel and capricious master, in whom the intellectual nihilism of an anarchist was associated with the imperious pride of a tyrant; while the Baroness was able to sympathize, through the depth of her own misery, with the wounds that bled in the tender heart of her friend. But she, daughter of a soldier, the descendant of those heroes of Tchernagora, who had never surrendered, was not submissive, like the heiress of the good Rodier and Vimal families. She had immediately opposed her own pride and will to those of her husband. The atrocious scenes she had passed through without quailing would have ended in open rupture if the young woman had not thought of appealing to a very high authority. A sovereign influence commanded a compromise, thanks to which the Baroness recovered her independence without divorce or legal separation, with what rage on the part of her husband may be imagined.