A Tragic Idyl

by Paul Bourget

"Chésy is simply the husband of a very pretty woman," said Madame de Carlsberg. "Everything is permitted to those husbands on account of their wives, and they become spoilt children. You are going down? I shall remain on deck. Send us tea here, will you? I say us, for I shall keep you for company," she continued, turning to Hautefeuille. "I know Chésy. Now that the race is over he will proceed to act as the proprietor of the yacht. Happily, I shall protect you. Sit here."

And she motioned to a chair beside her own, with that tender and imperious grace by which a woman who loves, but is obliged to restrain herself before others, knows how to impart all the trembling passion of the caress she cannot give. Lovers like Pierre Hautefeuille obey these orders in an eager, almost religious, way which makes men smile, but not the women. They know so well that this devotion in the smallest things is the true sign of an inward idolatry. So neither Miss Marsh nor Madame Bonnacorsi thought of jesting at Hautefeuille's attitude. But while retiring, with that instinctive complicity with which the most virtuous women have for the romance of another, they said:—

"Corancez was indeed right. How he loves her!"

"Yes, he is happy to-day; but to-morrow?"

But to-morrow? He had no thought for the mysterious and dangerous morrow of all our peaceful to-days. The Jenny, free of her antagonists, continued with her rapid and cradling motion over this velvet sea. The Dalilah and the Albatross were already faint in the blue distance, where the coast also was disappearing. A few more strokes of the engines, a few more turns of the screw, and there would be nothing around them but the moving water, the motionless sky, and the sinking sun. The end of a beautiful winter day in Provence is really divine during that hour before the chill of evening has touched the air and darkened the sea and land. Now that the other guests of the yacht had gone down to the dining-room, it seemed as though the two lovers were all alone in the world on a floating terrace, amid the shrubbery and the perfume of flowers. One of the boat's servants, a kind of agile and silent genius, had placed the small tea-table beside them, with a complicated little apparatus of silver, on which, as well as on the cups and plates, was the fantastic coat of arms adopted by Marsh—the arch of a bridge over a swamp, "arch on Marsh"—this pun, in the same taste as that in which the boat had been baptized, was written under the scutcheon. The bridge was in or, the marsh in sable, on a field of gules. The American cared nothing for heraldic heresies. Black, red, and yellow were the colors of the deck awning, and this scutcheon and device signified that his railroad, celebrated in fact for the boldness of its viaducts, had saved him from misery, here represented by the marsh. Naïve symbolism which would have typified even more justly the arch of dreams thrown by the two lovers over all the mire of life. Even the little tea-set, with its improvised coat of arms, added to this fleeting moment a charm of intimacy, the suggestion of a home where they two might have lived heart to heart in the uninterrupted happiness of each other's daily presence; and it was this impression that the young man voiced aloud after they had enjoyed their solitude for a few moments in silence.

"How delicious is this hour," he said, "more delicious than I had ever dreamed! Ah! if this boat belonged to us, and we could go thus on a long voyage, you and I, to Italy, which I would not see without you, to Greece, which gave you your beauty. How beautiful you are, and how I love you! Dieu! if this hour would never end!"

"Every hour has an end," answered Ely, half shutting her eyes, which had filled with ecstasy at the young man's impassioned words, and then, as though to repress a tremor of the heart that was almost painful in its tenderness, she said, with the grace and gayety of a young girl: "My old German governess used to say, as she pointed to the eagles of Sallach, 'You must be like the birds who are happy with crumbs'; and it is true that we find only crumbs in life.—I have sworn," she went on, "that you, that we, will not fall into the 'terrible sorrow.'"

She emphasized the last two words, which were doubtless a tender repetition of a phrase often spoken between them, and which had become a part of their lovers' dialect. And playfully she turned to the table and filled the two cups, adding:—

"Let us drink our tea wisely, and be as gemüthlich as the good bourgeois of my country."

She handed one of the cups to Hautefeuille while she said this. As the young man took it, he touched with his fingers the small and supple hand that served him with the delight in humble indulgences so dear to women who are really in love. His simple caress caused them to exchange one of those looks in which two souls seem to touch, melt together, and absorb each other by the magnetism of their desire. They paused once more, rapt in the sense of their mutual fever so intoxicating to share amid that atmosphere, mixed with the scent of the sea and the perfume of the roses, with the languid palpitation of the immense waters sleeping around them in their silence. During the two weeks that had passed since the sudden avowal of Madame de Carlsberg they had repeated their vows of love, they had written passionate, wild letters, and had exchanged their souls in kisses, but they had not given themselves yet wholly to each other. As he looked at her now on the deck of the yacht he trembled again from head to foot to see her smile with those lips, whose fresh and delicious warmth he still felt on his own. To see her so supple and so young, her body quivering with all the nervousness of a creature of fine race, recalled the passionate clasp with which he had enfolded her in the garden of her villa two days after the first vows. She had led him, under the pretext of a conversation, to a kind of belvedere, or rather cloister, a double row of marble columns, overlooking the sea and the islands. In the centre was a square space thick planted with gigantic camellias. The ground was all strewn with blossoms, buried in the large petals of red and rose and white fallen from the trees, and the red, rose, and white of other flowers gleamed above amid the sombre and lustrous foliage. It was there that he had for the second time held her close in his arms, and again still more closely in an obscure spot of the adorable villa of Ellenrock, at Antibes, where he had gone to wait for her. She had come to him, in her dress of mauve, along a path bordered with blue cineraria, violet heart's-ease, and great anemones. The neighboring roses filled the air with a perfume like that around them now, and sitting on the white heather, beneath the pines that descended to a little gray-rocked cove, he rested his head upon the heart of his dear companion.