Olivier surveyed the forest with its northern aspect with all the pleasure of a traveller returning from the East, tired of sandy horizons, weary of that monotonous, implacably burnished nature, and who feels a keen joy at the sight of a variegated vegetation and in the multitudinous colors of the European landscape.
Hautefeuille, for his part, looked at Olivier. Disquieted to the verge of anxiety by the enigma of a marriage that he had formerly accepted without remark, he began to study the changing shades of thought, grave and gay, that flitted across his friend's candid physiognomy. Olivier was plainly more at ease in the absence of his wife. But he retained the expression of scorn in his eyes and the bitter curve on his lips that his friend knew so well. These signs were the invariable forerunners of one of those acrimonious fits of which Madame de Carlsberg had told Madame Brion. Pierre had always suffered for his friend when these crises attacked Olivier, and when he began to speak about himself and about life in a tone of cruel scorn that disclosed an abnormal state of cynical disillusion, he suffered doubly to-day; for his heart was unusually sensitive by reason of the love that filled it. What would his suffering have been could he have understood the entire significance of the remarks in which his companion's melancholy sought relief!
"It is strange," Olivier began musingly, "how complete a presentiment of life we have while still very young! I remember, as clearly as though it were this very moment, a walk we took together in Auvergne.—I am sure you do not recall it. We had returned to Chaméane from La Varenne, during the vacation after our third year. I had spent a fortnight with your mother, and upon the morrow I was to return to that abominable rascal, my guardian. It was in September. The sky was as soft as it is to-day, and the atmosphere was as transparent. We sat down at the foot of a larch for a few minutes' rest. I could see you before me. I saw the sturdy tree, the lovely forest, the glorious sky. All at once I felt a nameless languor, a sickly yearning for death. The idea suddenly came over me that life held nothing better for me, that I need expect nothing.—What caused such an idea? Whence did it come, for I was only sixteen then?—Even now I cannot explain it. But I shall never forget the intense suffering that wrung my soul that mild afternoon under the branches of the huge tree, with you by my side. It was as though I felt in advance all the misery, all the vanity, all the disasters of my life."
"You have no right to speak in that way," said Hautefeuille. "What miseries have you? What failures? What disasters?—You are thirty-two. You are young. You are strong. Everything has smiled upon you. You have been lucky in fortune, in your career,—in your marriage. You have an income of eighty thousand a year. You are going to be First Secretary. You have a charming wife—and a friend from Monomotapa," he added laughingly.
Olivier's deep sigh pained him keenly. He felt all the melancholy that had prompted his outbreak, which to others would have seemed singularly exaggerated! And, as he had often done before, he combated it with a little commonplace raillery. It was rare that Du Prat, with his delicate, critical turn of mind, sensitive to the least lack of good taste, did not also change his mood when his friend spoke in such a way. But this time the weight upon his heart was too heavy. He continued in a duller, more hopeless tone:—
"Everything has smiled upon me?" and he shrugged his shoulders. "And yet it seems so when one makes up the account with words.—But in reality, at thirty-two youth is over, the real, the only youth is finished.—Health and good fortune still preserve you from a few worries, but for how long?—They are not additional happinesses.—As to my career.—Don't let us speak on that idiotic subject.—And my marriage?"
He paused for a second as though he recoiled from the confidence he had been about to make. Then with a bitterness in his voice that made Pierre shudder, for it revealed an interior abscess that was full to bursting with an evil, malignant substance:—
"My marriage? Well, it is a failure like all the rest, a frightful, sinister failure.—But," he added, shaking his head, "what does it matter, either that or anything else?"
And he went on while Pierre listened without further interruption:—
"Did you never wonder what decided me to marry? You thought, I suppose, like everybody else, that I was tired of a solitary life, and that I wanted to settle down, that I had met a match that fulfilled all the conditions requisite for a happy alliance. Nothing was lacking. There was a good dowry, an honorable name, a pretty, well-educated girl. And you thought the marriage the most natural thing in the world. I don't wonder at it. It was simply an illustration of ordinary ideas. We are the slaves of custom without even knowing it. We ask why so-and-so has not married like every one else. But we never think of asking why so-and-so has married like every one else when he is not every one else.—Besides, you did not know, you could not know, what bitter experiences had brought me to that point.—We have always respected each other in our confidences, my dear Pierre. That is why our friendship has remained so noble, so rare, something so different from the loathsome companionship that most men designate by the name. I never spoke to you about my mistresses, about my loves. I never sought to hear of yours. Such vilenesses, thank God, have always remained outside our affection."