Ely sprang to her feet as her implacable enemy flung the insulting words in her face. Her eyes were fixed on Olivier with a regard in which there was no anger or revulsion of feeling under his affront. Her eyes even seemed to have an expression of calmness in their sincerity. She took a few steps toward the young man and put her hand on his arm—the arm that menaced her—with a gesture so gentle, and at the same time so firm, that Olivier stopped speaking. And she began to reply to him in a tone of voice that he did not recognize. It was so simple, so human, that it was impossible to doubt the sincerity of her words. Her heart was really disclosed before him. He felt that her words penetrated to the very centre of his inner nature. He loved this woman more than he knew himself. He had sought, without being able to create it, to call into being exactly what he now saw in the woman whose beauty he idolized. The soul that he saw shining through her tender, sad eyes, the passionate, shy, ardent soul, capable of the greatest, the most complete, sacrifice to love, was what he had divined to exist in her, what he had pursued without ever capturing, what he had longed for and had never possessed in spite of all their caresses, of all the violence and brutality of his jealousy! Her real nature had been awakened by another! And that other was his dearest friend!—He listened to Ely, for she was now speaking.
"You are unjust, Olivier," she said, "very unjust. But you do not know all—you cannot know.—You saw that I did not try to contradict you when you reproached me, that I did not try to brave it out. I was not the proud woman with whom you fought so often in years gone by.—I seem to have no pride left! How could I have when I see, as I listen to you, what I was, what I should be still had I not met Pierre, and without the love that has taken possession of my soul like an honored guest?—When I told you that I at first thought only of making him love me to avenge myself upon you, I told you the truth. You ought to believe me when I tell you that the mere idea now fills me with the same horror that you feel.—When I got to know him, when I realized the beauty, the nobility, the purity of his nature, all the virtues that you have just been speaking of, I awoke to the sense of the infamy I was going to commit. You are quite right, I should have been a monster if I had been able to deceive a soul so youthful, so innocent, so lovable, so true! But I have not been such a monster.—I had not talked with Pierre more than twice when I had utterly renounced all idea of such a frightful revenge, when he had won my love entire. I loved him! I love him!—Do you think that I have not said, that I do not say every day, every hour, to myself all that you have just spoken? Do you think I have not felt it ever since I knew what my sentiments were for him? I loved him, and he was your friend, your brother. I have been your mistress, and I knew that a time must come when you would meet again, when he would speak to you of me—a time when he would perhaps know all. Do you think I did not dread that a time would come when I should see you again and you would speak to me as you have just been speaking?—Oh, it is horrible, agonizing!"
She dropped Olivier's arm and pressed her clenched hands upon her eyes with a movement of physical anguish. It was in her being that she suffered, in the body once abandoned completely to the man who heard her, as she continued:—
"But pardon me. I do not concern you. It is not what I have suffered that we have to think of, but of him.—You cannot doubt now that I love him with all there is in me that is noble, good, and true. You also must have realized how he loves me with all the wealth of affection that you know so well. All this week while he was speaking to me I saw you—with what agony!—I felt that you were laying bare our secret hour by hour.—Now you know that secret. Pierre loves me as I love him, with an absolute, unique, passionate love.—And now, if you choose, go and tell him that I was once your mistress. I will not defend myself any more than I did a few minutes ago. I have not strength enough to lie to him. The day he asks me, 'Is it true that Olivier has been your lover?' I shall reply, 'It is true!'—But it is not I alone whom you will have killed!"
She ceased speaking, and fell into her chair with her head resting on the back, as though exhausted by the effort of laying bare her thoughts, in which were mingled so many sad and bitter memories. She waited Olivier's reply with an anxiety so intense that her strength seemed to be ebbing away, and she closed her eyes as in dread. With the logic of a woman deeply in love, she had forced the man who had come there to threaten and insult her into a position where he must take one of the two courses that their wretched situation left open to him,—either to tell all to Hautefeuille, who would then decide for himself whether he loved Ely enough to trust her after he knew that she had been his friend's mistress; or, to spare him this torture, to leave Hautefeuille in ignorance with his happiness. In this latter case Olivier would have to go away, to put an end forever to his own misery, and to cease inflicting the pain of his presence upon Ely, a pain that, in itself, was the cause of a nervous state sufficient to reveal sooner or later their past relations.
What would he do? He did not reply; he, who only a few minutes before had been so eager to speak, so bitter in his reproaches. Through her half-closed eyes, quivering with the intensity of her anxiety to know the worst, Ely saw that he was regarding her with a strange, impassioned look. A struggle was going on within him. What was its cause? What would be its result? She was about to learn, and also what sort of a sentiment her heartbreaking appeal had awakened in the heart that had never been able to tear itself away from her entirely.
"You love him?" he said at last. "You love him?—But, why do I ask? I know you love him. I feel it, I see it.—It is only love that could have prompted such words—could have imprinted such an accent, such truth upon them.—Oh!" he went on bitterly, "if you had only been, when we were in Rome, what you are now; if only once I had felt that you vibrated with genuine emotion!—But you did not love me and you love him!" He repeated, "You love him!—I thought we had inflicted upon each other all the pain that is in a human being's power, and that I could never suffer any more than I did in Rome, than I have done during these past days when I felt that you were his mistress.—But beside this—that you love him—my sufferings were nothing.—And yet how could you help loving him?—How was it that I did not understand at once that you would be touched, penetrated, changed; that your heart would be imbued with the charm of his grace, of his youth, of his delicacy, of all that makes him what he is?—Ah! I see you now as I longed to see you once, as I despaired of ever seeing you, and it is through him, it is for him!"
Then, with a moan as of some stricken animal, he cried:—
"No! I cannot support it. I suffer too much, I suffer too much!"
And words of grief, mingled with words of rage and love, poured forth in a wild stream.