Artist and Model Part 19

This was too much for the artist.

"Look here," he exclaimed, "you will never be anything better than a backbiter and selfish. What maddens you is my shaking myself free from you. You don't care for the morality of the thing, but for your pocket.

You thought I should make a good fortune-leaving uncle. I love my niece, I know; but I love Tekla, my dear little baby daughter, better. I shall marry Lise whether you like it or not. As for you, mother, you know my affection for you. It won't change, you may be sure, because I am not living with you. From this night I shall live here no longer. I will give you timely notice of my marriage, and I hope, in spite of my sweet sister-in-law, that you will be present at it."

Leaving then his mother and Mme. Frantz, who had not looked for such determination in him, Paul hurried to the ex-Princess Olsdorf to tell her what had pa.s.sed.

Chance had prepared for him in the Rue Lafitte an unexpected and fateful meeting.

The door had been opened for him, and, without asking any question of the footman, he was pa.s.sing through the anteroom to the room where he expected to find Lise, when the servant stopped him, saying:

"Pardon me, monsieur, but Madame la Princess is with her mother."

"Her mother!" exclaimed Paul, in surprise.

He remembered suddenly that he too, as well as Lise, had ignored rather too much the woman whose son-in-law he was to be.

Left by her daughter in complete ignorance of the conjugal drama in which Lise was the heroine, Mme. Podoi had only heard of the divorce at St. Petersburg as everybody else had, through the talk that the scandal gave rise to. The news had come upon her like a clap of thunder. It was the destruction of her dream of ambition, the realization of which she had striven for so ardently; and, though she knew that the decree of divorce had been p.r.o.nounced against Prince Olsdorf, she suspected a mystery and wished to fathom it.

Not saying a word to anybody of her intended journey, she had left St.

Petersburg, and suddenly appeared before her daughter in Paris.

She had been there but a short time when Paul called. There had been a violent scene between the two women.

Attacked unexpectedly, and feeling a sort of pride in hiding nothing, Lise had told her mother everything--her love for the painter, the prince's ultimatum, what had happened since, and lastly, her intention to marry again at once.

The general's wife, having listened frowningly to her daughter's story, broke out at this latter part, exclaiming:

"You are mad. Whether you have deceived your husband, concerns, perhaps, yourself alone; but that you should become Madame Meyrin after having been the Princess Olsdorf! No, that you never shall! What! have I lived for twenty years with this one object before me, that you should be a great lady, and am I to see you turned into a miserable little artist's wife? Never! Monsieur Meyrin is a scoundrel. He loved you through vanity, and would now marry you through interest. I will speak to him plainly, depend upon me."

Lise tried vainly to calm her mother.

"He knows you are rich," she went on, "and that after my death you will be richer. That is his sort of love. If you were poor he would not dream of making you his wife. I swear that neither of you need expect anything from me. Is it possible that after my training of you, you can be in love with this showy fellow, a dauber of no name or talent? Ah! you are your father's own daughter."

"What do you mean?" said Lise, quickly, in great surprise.

"Nothing, nothing," said Mme. Podoi, biting her lips.

She had almost forgotten in her anger that for everybody, and above all for Lise herself, her daughter was the daughter of Count Barineff.

She went on a moment afterward:

"Have you thought nothing of your children who will be taken from you?"

"The prince will not dream of taking Tekla from me. He knows she is not his child."

"But your son Alexander? What will he be to you when you are called Madame Meyrin? You don't suppose Pierre will ever let you see him or speak to him? What will they tell him when he asks where his mother is?

If he is sick who will care for him?"

Lise Barineff turned very pale. As we have said, she had always been a good mother. Her head drooped; she answered nothing. It was plain that she suffered.

"Is your marriage fixed?"

"Yes," said the young woman. "In the first place, I love Monsieur Paul Meyrin."

"A fine reason!"

"Besides, if he does not marry me--of course, you can't have known this--the prince will kill him."

"And a good thing, too."

"Oh, mother, mother!"

"Do you suppose I can easily fall in with this ridiculous change in your life? If my pride could bear it, would not my motherly love take the alarm! Think of the society you have lived in, and compare it with that which you will have to live in."

"Monsieur Meyrin is a great artist, and artists, in France, as elsewhere, are received by everybody."

"To make a Madame Meyrin of a Princess Olsdorf! It is shameful. Any way, I warn you everything is at an end between us. Adieu. I will never see you again, until you can tell me that you have made up your mind to remain Lise Barineff."

As she suddenly opened the door of the room Mme. Podoi found herself face to face with Paul Meyrin, whom she recognized at once.

"So it is you, Mr. Painter," she said in a haughty voice. "My sincere compliments. I have paid dearly for my patronage of you in Russia. After betraying the prince who honored you by his hospitality, you carry off his wife and part a mother and her child. It is as an honorable man would have acted--exactly. To pay some debts a man must risk his life.

You prefer marrying. Well, it is your business and my daughter's. Before a year has pa.s.sed she will sing a different song."

Paul, hat in hand, let the flood sweep over him.

The young woman, who had followed her mother, put an end to the scene by drawing her future husband into the room.

The general's wife looked at them for a moment with angry eyes, muttering, "The idiots!" and disappeared.

"Forgive me," said Lise to Paul, winding her arms about his neck.

"Forgive you?" said Paul, laughing. "Why, I've been hearing worse than that at home. They are all densely stupid. I beg your pardon for saying so. If I do not love you as much as I do they would make me adore you."

He crushed her in his arms, covering her eyes and lips with kisses.

A sudden ring was heard at the bell, and almost immediately the footman brought a letter to his mistress which a commissionaire had brought from the Great Northern Railway Station.

The letter was from the prince.

After reading the first few lines, Lise cried out and fell back on the sofa.

"Madame," wrote Pierre Olsdorf to the woman who was once his wife, "the decree of divorce having left me guardian of my children--I am taking away Tekla. When you receive this letter we shall be on our way to Russia, which is closed against you by my order."

The outraged husband avenged himself on the mother. At least, in her despair, so Lise Barineff interpreted his action.

The prince concluded thus:

"Remember your undertaking to marry again as soon as possible, if you wish that I should not return to Paris and keep the oath I have sworn.