All these memories—and others as vivid and troubling—mingled with his present emotion and intensified it. The total unlikeness of Ely to all the women he had met served to quiet the young man's naïve remorse for his past experiences, and to make him forget the culpability of that sweet hour. Ely was married, she had given herself to one man, and had no right while he lived to give herself to a second. Although Pierre was no longer sufficiently religious to respect marriage as a sacrament, the imprint of his education and his memories of home were too deep, and above all he was too loyal not to feel a repugnance for the stains and miseries of adultery. But Ely had been careful to prevent him from meeting the Archduke after that terrible scene, and to the lover's imagination the Prince appeared only in the light of a despot and a tormentor. His wife was not his wife; she was his victim. And the young man's pity was too passionate not to overcome his scruples; all the more since he had, for the last two weeks, found his friend in an incessant revolt against an outrageous espionage—that of the sinister Baron von Laubach, the aide-de-camp with the face of a Judas. And this voluntary policeman must really have pursued Ely with a very odious surveillance for his memory to come to her at this moment when she wished to forget everything except this sky and sea, the swift boat, and the ecstatic lover who was speaking by her side.
"Do you remember," he was saying, "our uneasiness three days ago, when the sea was so rough that we thought we could not start? We had the same idea of going up to La Croisette to see the storm. I could have thanked you on my knees when I met you with Miss Marsh."
"And then you thought that I was angry with you," she said, "because I passed with scarcely speaking to you. I had just caught a glimpse of that foxlike Iago von Laubach. Ah! what a relief to know that all on board are my friends, and incapable of perfidy! Marsh, his niece, Andryana, are honor itself. The little Chésys are light and frivolous, but there is not a trace of ill-nature about them. The presence of a traitor, even when he is not feared, is enough to spoil the most delightful moments. And this moment, ah! how I should suffer to have it spoiled!"
"How well I understand that!" he answered, with the quick and tender glance of a lover who is delighted to find his own ways of feeling in the woman he loves. "I am so much like you in that; the presence of a person whom I know to be despicable gives me a physical oppression of the heart. The other evening at your house, when I met that Navagero of whom Corancez had so often spoken, he poisoned my visit, although I had with me that dear, dear letter which you had written the night before." Then, dreamily following this train of thought, he continued: "It is strange that every one does not feel the same about this. To some people, and excellent ones too, a proof of human infamy is almost a joy. I have a friend like that—Olivier du Prat, of whom I spoke to you and whom you knew at Rome. I have never seen him so gay as when he had proved some villainy. How he has made me suffer by that trait of his! And he was one of the most delicate of men, with the tenderest of hearts and finest of minds. Can you explain that?"
The name of Olivier du Prat, pronounced by that voice which had been moving Ely to the heart—what an answer to the wish sighed by the amorous woman that this divine moment should not be spoiled! These simple words were enough to dissipate her enchantment, and to interrupt her happiness with a pain so acute that she almost cried aloud. Alas! she was but at the very beginning of her love's romance, and already that which had been predicted by Louise Brion, her faithful and too lucid friend, had come true—she was shut in the strange and agonizing inferno of silence which must avoid, as the most terrible of dangers, the solace of confession. How many times already in like moments had a similar allusion evoked between her and Pierre the image of that other lover! Pierre had very soon alluded lightly and gayly to his friend, and as the Baroness had thought it best not to conceal the fact that she had met him in Rome, he continued to recall memories of Du Prat, without suspecting that his words entered like a knife into the poor woman's heart. To see how much Hautefeuille loved Du Prat—with a friendship equal to that which the latter had for him—how could she help feeling anew the constant menace hanging over her? And then, as at the present, she was filled with an inexpressible anguish. It was as though all the blood in her veins had suddenly flowed out through some deep and invisible wound. At other times it was not even necessary that the redoubtable name should be mentioned in their conversation. It sufficed that the young man, in the course of the intimate talks which she encouraged as often as her social servitude permitted, should ingenuously express his opinion on some of the love-affairs reported by the gossips of the coast. She would then insist upon his talking in order to measure his uncompromising morality. She would have been pained if he had felt differently, for then he would not have been that noble and pure conscience unspotted by life; and she suffered because he did feel thus, and so unconsciously condemned her past. She made him open his mind to her, and always she found at the bottom this idea, natural to an innocent soul, that if love may be pardoned for everything, nothing should be pardoned to caprice, and that a woman of noble heart could not love a second time. When Hautefeuille would make some remark like this, which revealed his absolute and naïve faith in the singleness and uniqueness of true love, inevitably, implacably, Olivier would reappear before the inward eye of the poor woman. Wherever they were, in the silent patio strewn with camellia leaves, under the murmuring pines of the Villa Ellenrock, on the field at La Napoule, where the golf players moved amid the freshest and softest of landscapes, all the marvellous scenery of the South would vanish, disappear—the palms and orange trees, the ravines, the blue sky and the luminous sea, and the man she loved. She would see nothing before her but the cruel eyes and evil smile of her old lover at Rome. In a sudden half hallucination she would hear him speaking to Pierre. Then all her happy forces would suddenly be arrested. Her eyelids would quiver, her mouth gasp for air, her features contract with pain, her breast shudder as though pierced by a knife; and, as at present, her tender and unconscious tormentor would ask, "What is the matter?" with an eager solicitude that at the same time tortured and consoled her; and she would answer, as now, with one of those little falsehoods for which true love cannot forgive itself. For hearts of a certain depth of feeling, complete and total sincerity is a need that is almost physical, like hunger and thirst. What an inoffensive deception it was! And yet Ely had once more a feeling of remorse at giving this explanation of her sudden distress:—
"It is a chill that has come over me. The night comes so quickly in this country, with such a sudden fall of temperature."
And while the young man was helping to envelop her in her cloak, she said, in a tone that contrasted with the insignificance of her remark:—
"Look how the sea has changed with the sinking sun; how dark it has grown—almost black—and what a deep blue the sky is. It is as though all nature had suddenly been chilled. How beautiful it is yet, but a beauty in which you feel the approach of shadows."
And, indeed, by one of those atmospheric phenomena more general in the South than elsewhere, the radiant and almost scorching afternoon had suddenly ended, and the evening had come abruptly in the space of a few minutes. The Jenny moved on over a sea without a wave or a ripple. The masts, the yards, and the funnel threw long shadows across the water, and the sun, almost at the edge of the horizon, was no longer warm enough to dissipate the indistinct and chilly vapor that rose and rose, already wetting with its mist drops the brass and woodwork of the deck. And the blue of the still sea deepened into black, while the azure of the clear sky paled and waned. Then, as the disk of the sun touched the horizon abruptly, the immeasurable fire of the sunset burst from the sky over the sea. The coast had disappeared, so that the passengers of the yacht, now returned to the deck, had nothing before them but the water and the sky, two formless immensities over which the light played in its fairy fantasies—here spread in a sheet of tender and transparent rose, like the petals of the eglantine; there rolling in purple waves, the color of bright blood; there stretching like a shore of emerald and amethyst, and farther, built into solid and colossal porticos of gold, and this light opened with the sky, palpitated with the sea, dilated through infinite space, and suddenly as the disk disappeared beneath the waves, this splendor vanished as it came, leaving the sea again a bluish black, and the sky, too, almost black, but with a bar of intense orange on its verge. This bright line vanished in its turn. The earliest stars began to come out, and the yacht lights to appear, illumining the dark mass which went on, bearing into the falling night the heart of a woman which had all day reflected the divine serenity of the bright hours, and which now responded to the melancholy of the rapid and fading twilight.
Although she was not at all superstitious, Ely could not help feeling, with a shudder, how this sudden invasion of the radiant day by the sadness of evening, resembled the darkening of her inward heaven by the evocation of her past. This analogy had given an added poignancy to her contemplation of the tragic sunset, the battle of the day's last fire with the shadows of night, and happily the magnificence of this spectacle had been so overwhelming that even her light companions had felt its solemnity. No one had spoken during the few minutes of this enchantment in the west. Now, when the babble recommenced, she felt like fleeing from it—fleeing even from Hautefeuille, whose presence she feared. Moved as she was, she was afraid of breaking into tears beside him; tears that she would not be able to explain. When he approached her she said, "You must pay some attention to the others," and she began to pace the deck from end to end in company with Dickie Marsh. The American had the habit, while on board, of taking a certain amount of exercise measured exactly by the watch. He looked at the time, then paced over a measured distance until he had complied with his hygienic rules. "At Marionville," he would say, "it was very simple; the blocks are each exactly a half mile long. When you have walked eight of them, you know you have done four miles. And your constitutional is finished." Usually, when thus engaged in the noble duty of exercise, Marsh remained silent. It was the time when he invented those schemes that were destined to make him a billionaire. Ely, knowing of this peculiarity, counted upon not exchanging ten words while walking with the potentate of Marionville. She thought that the silent promenade would quiet her overwrought nerves. They had paced thus for perhaps ten minutes, when Dickie Marsh, who appeared more preoccupied than usual, suddenly asked:—