CHAPTER IV.

SARAH'S REVENGE.

In view of the customary indiscretion of the world into which Paul had made his re-entry some months before, under conditions that would have been so hard to explain, the wonder was that his wife had not been told of his conduct sooner. In fact, among the brother artists whom Lise's husband met every day, were several of the visitors to the Rue d'Assas. All had kept silence--some out of indulgence for escapades such as they had often been guilty of themselves, and others out of respect for the wife deceived in so cowardly a manner.

Had it been otherwise, Mme. Meyrin, on the alert from the first, would doubtless have revolted, and would not, by yielding point after point, have encouraged her husband in, as it were, a disposition which some day would make him look upon unfaithfulness as his right.

In that case perhaps she would easily have regained possession of the fugitive, who had only the courage of the weak; that kind of energy in evil-doing which consists in not daring to acknowledge a fault, through cowardice, and in fear of deserved reproaches, or through vanity, from fear of being humbled: just as if, between two lovers, the guilty one did not rise the higher for imploring pardon.

Lise would have pardoned, for if at the time when Paul began to forget his duty the news of his inconstancy had surprised her in her easy security and full happiness, so, too, it would have done in the full tide of love; and her heart would have pleaded the cause of the unfaithful one. The wound might have been the more painful, but the loving woman would have been nerved by the shock to struggle and win back her rights.

Now it was not so. The neglected wife suffered as much in her pride as her love. To see the calmness she was able to command after a single moment of despair, it seemed that she was thinking more of avenging the outrage than of bewailing the betrayal.

He had lied to her--so devoted, and frank, and loyal. He preferred a girl of the town to the woman who had so freely and completely abandoned herself to him. And this had been going on for months--for months she, the daughter of the Countess Barineff, the ex-Princess Olsdorf, the former queen of Pampeln, the great lady whom the most brilliant noblemen had paid court to--she had been an object of scorn or pity for her husband's boon companions.

This husband, too, his lips still warm with another woman's kisses, had returned to her, seeking her legitimate kisses, and telling her that he loved her. At these thoughts her soul trembled with horror and her body shuddered with disgust.

She had no fixed purpose in going to the Boulevard Clichy either as to what she should do or what she should say. The one purpose in her mind was not to be for a day longer the plaything of a man for whose sake she had sacrificed everything.

From time to time amid these thoughts there rose another, through one of the changes frequent in lofty souls which are slow to believe in evil. What if she had been duped--if this letter were a lie, a calumny? Then, through her tears--tears of love and indignation at one and the same time--she read again the vile lines, and would no longer doubt.

This shameful letter, without a name to it, spoke the truth only too well.

Two or three weeks after this wife's confinement, at the time when he was timidly beginning to initiate some of the reforms advised by his sister-in-law, Paul Meyrin, whose brother artists came to see him less often than formerly, took to visiting their studios. When he was not under the influence of Mme. Frantz's ideas he was ill at ease at home, embarrassed, and ashamed of himself. The gentle obedience Lise showed to his slightest wishes, the pains she took to be nothing more than a middle-class mother of a family, the simplicity of her dress--all caused him a vague remorse; while his vanity, though he did not acknowledge it to himself, made him regret something of the past. As, however, as much through weakness as pride, he dared not recall what he had said, he absented himself from home.

At first it was strange to him to find himself again within the surroundings he had left three years before. He returned to them with the hesitation and surprise that a traveler feels when after a long absence he sees again places the language of which is no longer familiar to him, and the customs have been forgotten. He very soon found the old pleasure in the gossip, the freedom, and the movement of these studios, recalling to him, as they did, a merry and careless time.

Every day he met some former comrade, models he had employed, women who had posed before him. Some of them, indeed, had been his mistresses. He was received everywhere with open arms and heart. Old times were talked over, a jest was made of everybody and everything, time was killed by working a little. At these times Paul Meyrin forgot, for hours together, that he was a husband and a father. He quickly grew enamored again of the easy life he had lived before he went to Russia.

However, after these trespasses, the painter was none the less exact in returning home; indeed, after a day when he had been most forgetful of his home he was commonly so affectionate and attentive to Lise, as though he felt the need of excusing himself to himself, that she had not the shadow of a suspicion.

If things had gone no further, Paul's escapades would have been nothing more than venial sins; but he soon launched out into greater depths. He happened to meet Sarah Lamber one afternoon at the studio of one of his painter friends, Robert Aubrey. She was posing, half nude, for a Phryne, which the tenant of the studio intended sending in to the next exhibition.

Paul Meyrin had not seen the young woman again until now since the day when, breaking off abruptly with her, he had sacrificed her for the sake of the Princess Olsdorf, on the arrival of the latter in Paris.

We know how Sarah Lamber took her revenge by sending to Prince Pierre the denunciation, supported by a score of newspaper clippings, which had come as a surprise on him at Pampeln, where he was, nothing doubting his wife. But this hateful action had turned to the confusion of Paul's former mistress, since it had ended, instead of in the bloody drama that, perhaps, in her anger she had hoped for, with the divorce of the princess and her marriage with her lover--that is, in the happiness of both of them; or, at least, so she must suppose.

After this piece of deceit Sarah, enraged at her own non-success, was careful not to boast of what she had done, or ever to speak of Paul Meyrin, except to congratulate herself on having nothing more in common with such a man--an artist without talent, mind, or future, and good for nothing better than to be the husband of a repudiated woman; and she had avoided going into public places, such as the theaters, where she would have been likely to see him.

Nevertheless, no matter what indifference she affected when mention was made in her presence of the household in the Rue d'Assas and its charming "At Homes," she never forgot her old lover, for she had really loved him; and when she heard in the studios she posed in that the painter was often visiting several of his artist friends, her dream was to meet him again. With what end in view? She did not define it. Perhaps it was simply to pick a quarrel with him, and to make him think, by some violent outburst, that she had always been laughing at him and his fancy for her; and perhaps it was to try, if the chance offered, to set a trap for him, in which he would let himself be taken as of old.

Sarah, therefore, was not really surprised to see Paul walk into Robert Aubrey's studio; but for all that she made a gesture of offended modesty, wrapping her shoulders in the light and transparent drapery which had covered her only to the hips, and exclaiming:

"So, so, people are to come in here as if it were a market-hall. Very well, then, I have done. I won't pose before strangers."

And jumping down from the model's table, she ran behind the screen where her things were, for, as is well known, a woman who poses, nude as she may stand while the painter is at his work, and, perhaps, before ten or a dozen artists at a time, will neither undress nor dress before any of them.

Paul Meyrin stood on the threshold of the room, struck with surprise first at this unexpected meeting and the young woman's exclamation, and then at her beauty, which had never seemed more dazzling to him.

After this momentary hesitation, natural enough in the circumstances, he approached the master of the house, who laughingly accepted his apologies, while two other brother artists, Gaston Briel and Raoul Martel, whom he offered his hand to in turn, jested aloud on the flight of the model _ad salices_.

Sarah, from her hiding-place, replied to them in a sharp and biting tone, which caused Paul strange emotion.

A few minutes later she appeared completely dressed, and said to M. Meyrin, going up to him:

"My good sir, when you are coming here just send Robert word, and I will go somewhere else."

"Bah!" said Paul, affecting not to take her words seriously, "is that the way with us, my dear Sarah? I really thought you had more sense. Have you still a grudge against me?"

"Oh, why should I have a grudge against you, pray?" said the model, twisting up her hair with a movement full of grace, which showed the fine proportions of a bust that Lise's husband had not forgotten. "Thank goodness the past has been dead and buried this long while. It is just because I don't want to be reminded too much of days of misery that I am not anxious to fall across you. So it seems you are growing tired of family life and brats. The deuce! A honey-moon does not last forever, especially when one has used up the first week of it in advance. Besides, you see, princesses are much the same as other women. As soon as you marry them they begin to be a weight upon your shoulders, until they transfer it to your forehead. Raoul, are you coming? As for you, Robert, you will let me know in advance when you are going to have troublesome visitors. If not, you can get a fine lady to pose until you finish your Phryne, supposing you can find one handsome enough to serve as a model."

Having caught hold of Martel's arm, whom this little scene amused as much as it did his friends, though he was just now the favored lover, Sarah dragged him off, having made a formal bow to the husband of the ex-Princess Olsdorf as she got to the door.

Paul returned the bow with a similar one, and exclaimed, turning to his brother artists:

"There is a reception for you. The deuce! Our friend Sarah nurses malice."

"Or love still," retorted Robert Aubrey, leaving his easel. "If you had dropped her for another girl of the same sort, she would have forgotten and forgiven you long ago; but you gave her up to get married--to a princess, too; and, better still, an adorable and beautiful woman."

"How satisfied she must be at this moment with the little scene just over," said Gaston Briel, in his turn. "Guessing she would meet you some day, she had her course ready marked out. She is a splendid girl, is Sarah, but a little mad-headed. Besides, it is highly probable that she may be in love with you still."

"I could swear it," said Robert. "Girls of her sort who no longer care for a man are always good souls with their former lovers; they are ready to offer their hand, and are the first to laugh at their old passion. I conclude from this, my dear fellow, that Sarah adores you still. One of these days we shall have the door of your studio shut in our faces by her."

"Of my studio," replied Paul, laughing. "That would be pretty difficult. You know it is one of my suite of rooms."

As he was less easy in this discussion than he wished to seem, the painter adroitly turned the conversation, and they began talking of other things.

In the evening Paul returned home, his mind, or rather his senses, full of the thought of Sarah. Three months afterward, events proved that Robert Aubrey had not been mistaken. After several stormy, angry, or ironical meetings, after a thousand sharp things had been said on either side, Paul and Sarah had opened their arms to each other, and their passion had riveted them together anew.

In enjoying again with his former mistress the voluptuous intoxications that had been lacking so long, the artist had also taken again to the freedom of bearing, the vulgar ease of manner, the gross flashes which, native to him, were things unknown in the Rue d'Assas. He found the change charming, new, and exciting. His old tastes had returned to him. He was tired of the elegance, the distinction, and the intellectual qualities of his wife. It was the old, old story of satiation with good things.

Paul Meyrin's renewed relations with Sarah were restricted for a time to meetings at his friends' houses and appointments at her place; but soon she begged the painter to take a studio in addition to and apart from his home. He yielded to her wish, delighted at being able to live again, though it were but intermittently, the life of the past.

He became the tenant of a studio on the Boulevard Clichy, which he furnished very elegantly, thanks to the good taste he had learned from Lise, and by dismantling somewhat his rooms in the Rue d'Assas, under pretense of offering a picture or a work of art to a charity sale, or a handsome weapon to some comrade. Then he invented the story of the work on a panorama, as suggested by his mistress, so that he might not have the trouble of imagining a new lie every day to account for his absence.

Matters being thus arranged, Paul Meyrin, who could not pass all his afternoons in the arms or at the knees of Sarah, began work on a picture the subject of which was Cleopatra awaiting Marc Antony.

At the end of two months, in spite of the interruptions that the model was the cause of the painter making, the picture was well advanced and promised to be one of the best by a man whose brush his passions plainly often guided. His love for Sarah did not hinder him from sometimes returning to his wife, by way of contrast. The wretched man, lost to all moral reserve, liked to think at such moments that he was a successful lover.

But Sarah, jealous and envious too, before long suspected these legitimate infidelities. Her hate of Mme. Meyrin grew, and, caring only to work mischief between man and wife, one morning she sent to the Rue d'Assas the unsigned letter which was certain to effect her purpose.

After this infamous and cowardly action she went gayly to the studio where, like the female Machiavelli she was, she seemed tenderer than ever. She desired that that night, when his wife would denounce his infidelity, Paul should be still under the charm of her, his mistress's ardent caresses.

Meanwhile she was posing as Cleopatra, whom the painter represented nude, reclining on a lion's skin, and braiding pearls in her raven hair. Sarah was in these circumstances a marvelously beautiful creature, made without a fault. Her rosy flesh had here and there the gleam of pale amber. Her splendid arms, raised above the head, gave her breast the firmness of marble; a lascivious smile parted her sensual lips; her great eyes, the eyelids slightly darkened, glittered with a look full of luxurious promise.

The painter, in admiration, often lowered his brush to gaze at the model; then would apply himself feverishly to the work.

Suddenly Sarah started up, exclaiming:

"Paul, your wife."

The door of the studio had opened; Mme. Meyrin stood on the threshold.

The artist, turning to her, grew livid.

Without casting a look on her husband, Lise walked to the sofa on which the model's things were tossed in a heap, pushed them with her foot toward the owner and said, with a scornful gesture:

"Dress and go."

"Madame," replied Sarah, in a rebellious tone, covering herself as well as she could with some of the gilded drapery of the couch of the Queen of Egypt, "this is not your house."

"Monsieur Meyrin's house is the house, too, of his legitimate wife, who drives forth from it his mistress. Go, I tell you, or I will kill you."

She drew from her bosom the revolver she had laid hands on in her husband's studio, and took aim at the young girl, who flung herself back, uttering a scream of fear. Mme. Meyrin's calmness was terrifying.

Recovering himself, Paul, in affright, rushed to her to put an end to the horrible scene. Lise would not let him speak a word.

"Monsieur," she said, pointing the pistol at him, "an article in the French Code excuses, it seems, the murder by the husband of an adulterous wife found in her sin; perhaps it would excuse equally, in a similar case, the murder of the husband by his wife. I forbid you to speak a word to me before this creature has gone."

The painter was not a coward; but he stopped suddenly. Lise's face bespoke implacable determination. She seemed the incarnation of that unconquered Slavonic race to which he thought she owed her descent.

"This creature," retorted Sarah, who had taken advantage of the moment of respite that Mme. Meyrin had allowed, and had caught up her clothes in her bare arms, "this creature! You took away her lover and made him yours. She took your husband. We are quits."

With a spring firing this Parthian shot, she disappeared through a masked door that led into a room adjoining the studio.

At this merciless outrage Mme. Meyrin sunk into a chair, hiding in her hands the flush of shame that had surged to her face. She, the Countess of Barineff, the ex-Princess Olsdorf, had come to the pass of bandying taunts with a painter's model! To this point had her love brought her for a man of a lower social condition than her own. She recalled, too, the miserable part she had had to play in the Rue Auber when she had had to be a witness against her innocent husband of his alleged adultery, and the tears of humiliation that had streamed from her eyes.

Suddenly she shuddered and sprung up as if at the touch of some unclean thing.

Her husband, kneeling at her feet, had said, as he tried to take her hands:

"Why did you come? Forgive me, Lise."

"Oh, leave me," she cried, repulsing him in horror. "I despise more than I hate you. This year and more you have been lying to me. God is punishing me cruelly for the love I felt for you. You were here hour after hour while, watching over our child, my thoughts were yours alone and wholly. The happiness I tried to give you was insufficient; you must have other tendernesses than mine. With me inspiration failed you; another woman's kisses could restore it."

As she spoke in a quick, broken voice, Lise was pacing up and down the studio. Her excitement grew with every word. Her open mantle allowed a glimpse of the slight costume under which her heart was beating as if it would break.

Thus she came before the picture which represented the daughter of the Ptolemies under the form and features of Sarah; and she exclaimed as much in grief as in wounded pride:

"I, too, once posed nude before you. My love urged me to that shamefullness. Well, then, Monsieur Paul Meyrin, do you need only girls of her sort as models? Am not I beautiful enough to serve your purpose? Come, take your brush; go on with your work."

Flinging away her furred mantle, tearing open with trembling hands her silken dressing-gown, loosening with a movement of the head her luxuriant hair which fell in a golden flood over her shoulders, Lise Barineff sprung toward the couch that Sarah Lamber had occupied a few minutes ago.

Then, when she had reached it, she added, superb and quivering, fixing with her steely look the husband who stood dumb, motionless and overcome:

"Well! I am waiting."

But the unhappy woman was at the end of her strength, for, suddenly, with a cry of agony she bent backward and fell senseless to the ground.

Paul rushed toward her, took her in his arms, and through a feeling of delicacy surprising enough in him, carried her to a sofa instead of laying her on the couch used by the model.

In a few minutes Mme. Meyrin regained her senses and, recalling what had just passed, she seemed to have quite regained her calmness. She knotted up her hair, wrapped herself in her mantle, and said to her husband, who was hanging eagerly about her and wished to oppose her going:

"I need no help from you. It was a momentary, bodily weakness. It is enough for me to have come here, without staying. I shall not forget the depths I have lowered myself to through you. In the Rue d'Assas you will never again find a wife, but the mother alone of your daughter. Farewell or not, as it pleases you."

And with a commanding gesture, forbidding him to accompany her, she went from the room.