There is a necessity for conflict in the natural, logical issue of certain situations, a necessity so inevitable that even those who feel they will be destroyed by it accept the struggle when it comes without seeking to avoid it. It is thus, in public life, that peoples go to war, and in private life rivals accept the duel with a passive fatalism that often contradicts their complete character. They recognize that they have been caught in the orbit of action of a power stronger than human will.
When Pierre Hautefeuille had left Ely that night, she felt very cruelly the impression that a struggle was inevitable and that it was not only a struggle with a man, but with destiny! As long as her lover remained near, her tense nerves dominated this impression, but when he had gone she gave herself up to its contemplation. Alone, without sufficient strength to go to her bed, she crouched, thoroughly unnerved, upon a sofa. She began to weep, a crisis that lasted indefinitely, as though she felt herself trapped, threatened, conquered in advance! Her last hope had just been shattered. She could no longer doubt, after the scene that Pierre had told her of, that Olivier knew all. Yes, he knew all. And his nervousness, his fits of anger, his laughter, his despair, proved only too clearly that he would not accept the situation, and that a tempest of ungovernable desires were unchained within him. Now that he had arrived at such a point of exasperation and of knowledge, what was he going to do? In the first place, he would try to meet her again. She felt as certain of this as though he had been standing there before her laughing the cruel laugh that had wounded Hautefeuille's heart. In a few days—perhaps in a few hours—she would be in the presence of her mortal enemy, an enemy not only of herself but of her love. He would be there; she would see him, hear him moving, breathing, living! A shudder of horror ran through her frame at the idea. The thought that this man had once possessed her filled her with a kind of acute suffering that made her heart almost stop beating. The remembrance of caresses given and returned induced a feeling of nausea and crushed her with shameful distress. She had never felt so much as at this minute how her sincere, deep love had really changed her, had made of her another woman, a rejuvenated, forgiven, renewed creature!—But it could not be helped. She would accept, she would support the odious presence of her former lover. It would be the punishment for not having awaited her love of the present in perfect purity; for not having foreseen that one day she would meet Hautefeuille; for not having lived worthy of his love. She had arrived at that religion—she, the reasoner, the nihilist, atheist, had come to accept the mysticism of her happiness so natural to the woman truly in love, and which makes all previous emotions not provoked by the loved one a sort of blasphemous sacrilege. She would expiate the blasphemy by supporting his odious presence.—Alas! Olivier would not be content with simply inflicting the horror of his presence on her. He would speak with her. What would he say? What would he want? What would he ask?—She did not deceive herself for a moment. The sentiments of this man as regarded herself had not changed. As Hautefeuille had told her of the incident in his room, she had again heard his laugh, cruel and agonizing and insulting, that she knew so well. And with this laugh had come back to her all the flood of jealous sensuality that had sullied her formerly to so great an extent that the traces were still to be seen. After he had outraged her, trampled her under foot, left her, after having placed the irreparable obstacle of marriage and desertion between them, she felt and understood this monstrous thing, one impossible in any other man, but quite natural in him, that Olivier loved her still. He loved her, if it can be called love to have for a woman that detestable mixture of passion and hatred which calls forth incessantly the cruelty of enjoyment, the ferocity of pleasure.
He loved her. His attitude toward her would have been inexplicable without this anomalous, hideous sentiment which had lived in him through all and in spite of all! And, at the same time, he treasured his friend with that jealous, stormy, passionate friendship which was tearing his heart at this moment with unheard-of emotions and sufferings. To what extent might he not be led by the frenzy of such torture agonizing as a steel blade turned and re-turned in a wound? What could equal the pain of having loved, of still loving, a former mistress,—of loving her with such evil, sinister love,—and of knowing that woman was the mistress of his best, his most tenderly beloved friend, of a brother by adoption, cherished more than a brother by blood?
As clearly as she saw the first rays of dawn piercing the curtains at the end of this night of terrified meditation, Ely saw these sentiments at work in Olivier's heart.
"He who sows the wind shall reap the tempest," says an Austrian proverb. When she wished to meet Hautefeuille, to make herself dear to him, she wanted to strike Du Prat in the tenderest, most vulnerable spot in his organization, to wound him through his friendship, to torture him through it, to avenge herself in this way. She had succeeded only too well! What blow was he going to strike in the rage of suffering now consuming him? She had changed so much since the moment she had conceived the project of cruel vengeance that she asked herself what she was to do, what path she was to take? What if she appealed to this man, made supplication to him, sought to melt his mood?—Or would it be better to play with him, to cause him to think no liaison existed between her and Hautefeuille, for, after all, he had no proof.—Or better still, why not oppose a bold front, and when he dared to appear before her, drive him from her door, for he had no claim upon her.—Her pride revolted against the first, her nobility of character against the second, her reason against the third. In such a decisive crisis as the one through which the poor woman was passing, the mind calls instinctively upon all the most secret resources of nature, just as it collects, summons to the centre of the personality, all its hidden strength. Ely was remarkable by her need of truth and energy in the middle of a society that is refined to excess and composite to the verge of falsity. As she said to her confidante in the alleys of the Brions' garden, on that night that was so recent and seemed so distant, it was the truth in Hautefeuille's soul that had first of all attracted her, charmed her, seduced her. It was in order to live a true life, to feel true emotions, that she had entered the paths of this love, whose dangers she had foreseen. After having in thought taken up and laid down, accepted and rejected a score of projects, she finished by deciding within herself that she would trust to the simple truth in the redoubtable scene she felt was drawing near, thinking:—
"I will show him all my heart, just as it is, and he may trample on it if he can find the strength."
This was the policy that this woman, capable of any error but not of meanness or common calculation, arrived at after her wretched wakefulness. She did not find forgetfulness in it for a peril drawing near. But it gave her the courage that every human being feels in being completely, absolutely logical in thought, wish, and belief. She was not, therefore, as much surprised as she even expected when, about ten o'clock, she received a note that proved how accurately she had reasoned.
The letter was very short. But it was full of menace for her who read it in the same little salon where she had made up her mind to dismiss Pierre Hautefeuille,—a resolution that had been so weakly broken, and that had been prompted by the very terror of the catastrophe that the few lines announced:—
"MADAME—I shall have the honor of calling upon you to-day at two o'clock. May I hope that you will receive me? or if the hour does not suit you, that you will fix another? Let me assure you that your slightest wishes will always be commands for
"Yours respectfully,
"Olivier du Prat."
"Very well," she said, "I shall be at home this afternoon."