Artist and Model Part 27

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'a.s.sas, 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sions 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'a.s.sas 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 circ.u.mstances 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 pa.s.s 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. G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed, 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'a.s.sas 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.

CHAPTER V.

DIVORCE--SEPARATION.

For Mme. Paul Meyrin the days that followed this horrible scene in the Boulevard Clichy were very wretched.

Returning home in an indescribable state of sorrow and abas.e.m.e.nt, wounded in her pride as much as in her love, blushing at not having withstood with greater dignity the blow that had struck her, she refused to see anybody, even Mme. Daubrel and Dumesnil.

That evening when these faithful friends called, they were told that the mistress of the house was unwell and was lying down. She would not have them read the trace of suffering in her face; nor did she wish to sadden, by the tale of her sorrows, these two devoted hearts, resolved as she was to be silent and to drink to the dregs the cup of bitterness to which she had set her lips.

The next morning when Paul, refusing to take any denial, made his way almost by force into her bedroom, Lise took her child in her arms as if to make of it against her husband an impa.s.sable barrier, so that he should understand that the betrayed wife took refuge wholly in her maternal love. In vain he tried, piling lie upon lie, to excuse his fault; in vain he supplicated; he could not win a word from her. Her only reply was ironical smiles and the devouring of her daughter with kisses.

Humiliated at the check, for perhaps he had in his vanity imagined that at a word from him his wife would forget everything, the painter went away enraged. A few hours later he was with Sarah, who said:

"You are a poor sort of thing. Do you suppose I was afraid? If I ran away it was for your sake alone, because I did not want to be the cause of a scene which would have fetched out all the neighbors. But, you know, we can't have any more of that sort of thing. You must be good enough to make your choice between your wife and me. If you don't there is an end of my posing for you. I don't want to have a bullet through my head one of these fine days. Don't expect me any more at the Boulevard Clichy."