Artist and Model (The Divorced Princess)

"No, it is not infamous," murmured Mme. Meyrin, "it was fated, and, on the part of God, it is justice. Twice married, I have now no husband. The mother of three children, all I have with me is the one in the cradle there. Dumesnil and you are the only friends I have left now."

"Lise, my dear Lise," said Mme. Daubrel.

"Listen to me, dear friend," continued the unhappy woman, in feverish excitement. "I am sure that soon you will have to watch by my pillow. Promise that you will hide my condition from everybody, above all from Monsieur Meyrin, and from my mother herself, until all hope is gone."

"I promise readily," replied Marthe, "so sure am I that a few days' rest will bring you calmness and health."

Mme. Daubrel was mistaken. In less than a week Mme. Meyrin, attacked by a severe fever, had to take to her bed, and the doctors summoned to a consultation regarded her state as critical. They were in doubt only about the cause of the malady. They did not guess that the innocent caresses of her little daughter were insufficient for the poor, despairing creature who was dying of unsatiated maternal love.

The ex-Princess Olsdorf, so courted of old, had near her only an old actor and Mme. Daubrel, whose social position we must now sketch more completely than we have yet done.

CHAPTER VII.
MADAME DAUBREL'S STORY.

Mme. Percier saw in the union a means of avoiding a separation from her daughter, her son-in-law having to remain at the head of the business house in Paris. As for Marthe, who was fancy free, notwithstanding that she had a tender heart and a rather romantic mind, she had accepted without enthusiasm, but also without repugnance, the first husband that was offered to her.

The death of her father having happened at the time when she was about to make her entry into the world as a woman, she had not up to that moment met with any one who especially pleased her. She could be certain that M. Daubrel was an excellent man, rather commonplace perhaps, but presentable enough, and even fairly good-looking, who would no doubt do his best to make her happy.

His means were far above those of his young wife. Her dowry was only about four thousand pounds, while he had in hand nearly twice as much, leaving out of account what his father would bequeath him at his death, and the considerable profits he derived from the commission house at the head of which he was in France.

After their marriage, M. and Mme. Daubrel set up housekeeping in a handsome suite of rooms in the Faubourg Poissonnière, hard by the merchant's office; and for three years everything went smoothly.

Raymond was neither very demonstrative nor very passionate in his love, and Marthe felt only a calm and honest affection for her husband; but this moderate conjugal sentiment seemed enough for both of them. Their temperament led them to dream of nothing more. Mme. Daubrel became the mother of a son that she worshiped. Her husband was consistently kind and attentive to her, refusing her none of the pleasures which his easy circumstances warranted him in allowing: in the winter, the theaters and an occasional ball, in the summer a couple of months at the sea-side at Dieppe or Trouville, outings during which Mme. Percier accompanied her daughter, so that she might not be left alone when M. Daubrel was kept in or called back to Paris by his business.

There was, therefore, in this middle-class but fairly refined and tolerably active life, all that was necessary for the happiness of a young woman reared simply and in good moral principles; or there would have been, had not its very monotony, regularity, and calmness roused in Marthe's mind aspirations, which she herself at first scarcely understood, for rather more stir and excitement. She was not likely to find with the Meyrins what she lacked.

Mme. Frantz, we know, was nothing if not staid. There was capital music at her house, but not much conversation; and the auditors at her matinées were changed too often for an enduring acquaintance to be formed among them. It resulted from this that the pretty Mme. Daubrel had not a single woman friend such as women love to tell their petty sorrows to, and that her life seemed to her very dull and drear.

As long, however, as her son was an infant, that is, while her care over and watchfulness of him were needed at every hour, Marthe triumphed over the weariness of her mode of life; but when the child was handed to the care of a nurse, the young mother felt herself alone; her husband was scarcely seen except at meal times, and not unfrequently he returned home at night so tired out that he would go straight from table to his bed.

Nor was Mme. Percier a very agreeable companion for her daughter. Being in poor health, she rarely left her home, and often several days would pass without Marthe seeing her. The widow, for that matter, would not have understood what there was for her daughter to complain of. She had led a very calm and passionless life. She would have laughed at, or perhaps sharply blamed, her daughter for not being perfectly happy.

It was inevitable that Mme. Daubrel should soon find the days long and the evenings endless. She took to reading, first the Parisian newspapers—echoes of the scandal of love affairs which up to now had been matters of indifference to her—then the novels of the day. She took a feverish interest in the heroines of love stories, comparing their lives with her own, and contrasted the male characters with her husband, always to his disadvantage.

M. Daubrel naturally saw nothing of what was going on. If he sometimes noticed the care-worn face or paler complexion of his wife, he attributed the change to a slight ailment, and would offer her some trifling amusement or outing, which Marthe would refuse with a constrained smile.

In this frame of mind, in this hunger of soul and weariness of everything, Mme. Daubrel was in the fourth year of her marriage when she went with her mother to Luchon.

M. Daubrel had hesitated about letting his wife go to take the waters at so distant a place, whither he could not run down to her by train every Saturday, as his wont was when she went to the sea-side, and was but a few hours distant from Paris, but Mme. Percier, whose doctor insisted upon her trying the Pyrenees, having declared that she would not have the courage to go alone, the worthy merchant had yielded. He kept his son Charles with him, whom Marthe, indeed, good mother though she was, had not spoken of taking with her. Besides, the stay was not meant to go beyond a month, and the child's health was perfect.

Mme. Percier and her daughter accordingly undertook the journey, and arriving at Luchon engaged rooms at one of the best hotels in this fashionable watering-place, where, salutary as the waters might be for certain ailments, people were wont to amuse rather than physic themselves.

At the beginning of July the season sets in. There are concerts, balls at the Casino and at private residences, besides hunting parties in the forests of fir-trees, boating parties on the Oo Lake, and excursions to the Devil's Cave, the port of Vénasque, and the romantic villages of Oneil and Lys. Here and there an occasional patient was to be found taking the waters with severe regularity, and likely to feel the benefit of the course when he came to return home, but at Luchon the treatment seemed to more commonly consist in pleasure and various amusements. Acquaintances were readily formed, as they are in all places of this sort. If the Americans had not invented flirting, it would have been born in the shades of the Alpine avenues of Etigny or on the banks of the Pique. What else was there to do if not to flirt, in a charming neighborhood where were found an Avenue of Sighs and a Fountain of Love, as in the days of the Queen of Navarre; where one could fancy one heard constantly retold, in the echoes of the bounding mountain torrents, the liveliest stories of Heptameron!

Mme. Percier and her daughter found the place very pleasant, and the next morning after their arrival they began to make acquaintances, in the garden of the hotel, near the band-stand, and at the medicinal springs, which were especially welcome to Mme. Daubrel, who, as they left Paris, had dreaded that during their absence her part would simply be that of a nurse to her mother. It was, alas! to be otherwise, and one of the friendships began here was to have a fatal influence on Marthe's future. The friendship was formed one night at a concert, with a young poet, Robert Premontier.

He was a good-looking fellow of five- or six-and-twenty, full of conceit and literary pretensions, and posing, from taste, as a neglected genius, a sort of Gilbert or Chatterton. Mme. Daubrel, who had introduced him to her mother, too quickly let him see beyond a doubt the pleasure she took in listening to him; so much so that he soon came to think he had the right to pay close court to her.

This was not Robert's first appearance in the lists of gallantry. He began adroitly with the young woman by avowing his pure and platonic love for her. He wished only to regard her as a sister; he only besought that she would permit him to adore her on his knees. The poor, simple woman heard this sort of thing now for the first time; she believed it, and the affair ended as all encounters do between the inexperienced and the bold. Marthe fell, the excuse she found for herself being that she too, as well as others, had a right to a share of happiness in the world, and that the loneliness of her heart was the cause of her fault.

In a word, when Mme. Daubrel returned to Paris she had a lover. Her life henceforward was but a series of wild raptures, lies, and terrors. Little made, as a whole, for a great passion, too chaste, notwithstanding her sins, not to be more reserved than formerly with her husband, she was a poor dissembler; she gave rise to suspicions, and soon afterward the treachery of a maid in whom she had confided precipitated the inevitable discovery.

M. Daubrel was neither a violent nor a romantic man, but simply an honest fellow. At first he would not believe in the frightful misfortune with which he was so suddenly overwhelmed after four years of peaceful happiness; but he watched his wife, bought Robert's letters from the treacherous servant who had already sold her mistress, and, when he had acquired the certainty that he was deceived, being filled with contempt rather than anger for the guilty woman, he had her taken in flagrante delicto and lodged forthwith in St. Lazare.

A month afterward Marthe and Robert were sentenced to three months' imprisonment, and a judgment of the tribunal pronounced a decree of separation between M. and Mme. Daubrel, on the petition of the husband.

The decree was pronounced against M. Premontier in his absence, for he had fled the country, abandoning, like a coward, to her despair the woman he had ruined. Mme. Percier was nearly killed by the shame of the scandal.

She said she would never look upon her daughter again.

As for Marthe, she was still a prisoner in St. Lazare, in a state of moral and physical prostration impossible to describe, when she was told that her husband had left Paris to return to New York, intrusting to his cashier the liquidation of the business.

M. Daubrel took with him his son, not giving his mother the chance to embrace and say good-bye to the child.

When she heard this the poor woman thought she would go out of her mind. All was over; everything was falling with a crash around her; nothing was left to her in the world. Her lover, who had so hatefully deserted when he ought to have supported her, she did not wish to see again, understanding now the hollowness of the love she had so simply believed in; her mother cast her off; her son was taken from her. Her health was so seriously affected by all these trials that for some weeks her life was despaired of. Mme. Percier hurried to St. Lazare, and having got by telegraph from M. Daubrel the authority for Marthe's release, she had her carried to her house, where, four months afterward, the adulterous wife, weeping tears of shame, was brought to bed of a child that only lived a few weeks.

For many days the unhappy woman was in danger, but her youth mastered the illness. Little by little she regained health and strength, to live on with her regrets and remorse. Her lover, Robert Premontier, died abroad, after leading a life of debauchery and excess, not having written to her once. Her heart could not even regret him. Resolved thenceforward to live an exemplary life, caring nothing whether she were still young and handsome, Marthe hid herself away and broke with all her friends, except Mme. Frantz Meyrin, who had steadily shown great affection for her through all her trials, but whom Marthe did not visit, and only then at long intervals until more than two years after the conjugal drama of which she had been the miserable heroine.

There, as we have seen, she made the acquaintance of the Princess Olsdorf, toward whom she was drawn by an instinctive sympathy and the similarity between her past and the present circumstances of the great foreign lady.

Meanwhile Mme. Percier had won upon M. Daubrel to send her each month news of her grandson which she told to her daughter, whose only happy moments these were, though they recalled to her a dread time. Mme. Percier, touched by Marthe's repentance, never failed in replying to her son-in-law, to tell him how his wife was doing her utmost to expiate her sin, and M. Daubrel, after avoiding for several years any reference to this subject which was so painful to him, had come little by little to show that he was less indifferent as to what would become of the woman who bore his name.

Then Marthe began to hope that one day she would see her son again. At last, in reply to a letter from the adulterous wife imploring her husband's pardon he had written, "perhaps," and sent her kisses from her son, who had been reared in respect and love for his mother.

This was the state of things between the parted husband and wife when, in less than three years after her divorce and her marriage with Paul Meyrin, the ex-Princess Olsdorf found herself the deserted woman whose humiliation and sorrows we have tried to depict.

CHAPTER VIII.
ABANDONED.

From the early days of the autumn, Mme. Meyrin's condition became so quickly worse that the doctors summoned to a consultation pronounced her in danger. They had to deal with a case of anæmia from which nothing could rally the patient, and they feared grave complications affecting the lungs, as too often happens in cases of debility. The wasting away of the poor woman was frightful. Alas! all her dazzling beauty was gone. Her eyes were hollow, her face as pale as death, while there was from time to time a hectic flush on the height of her cheeks which augured the worst.

She could not walk more than a few steps, so great was her weakness. She scarcely left her bed but to lie on a sofa, by which Mme. Daubrel and Dumesnil passed part of their time, doing all they could to distract her thoughts and give her courage. Lise, touched as she was by their affection, scarcely answered them; and when, to make them believe that she did not despair, she tried to smile, the smile was heart-breaking and drew tears from these two friends, whose devotion was admirable. The old actor especially was deeply affected by the sorrowful sight he saw every day.

In discovering in Mme. Meyrin the fruit of his amour with Madeleine Froment, the young girl whose mother's pride had made her a princess, and whom fate had brought to be the companion of a painter who was almost a celebrity, Dumesnil had perhaps at first been gratified merely in his vanity, and, without betraying his secret, had rather inflicted himself upon the house, where, however, as we have seen, he had always had a very affectionate welcome. But his paternal love, in the highest acceptation of the word, had already kindled at Lise's sufferings, and he accused himself now of all the misfortunes that had come upon her one after the other.

Why had he been silent when Mme. Froment married Count Barineff? Ought not he at that time to have claimed his daughter? Had it been really out of regard for her future that he had consented to her being adopted by the husband of his old mistress? Had not vanity had much to do with this abandonment of her? And, besides, had not he feared somewhat the burden of so young a child? He had been guilty at that time of a bad action for which he could not pardon himself. It was quite certain that had he reared Lise she would have become a great artiste, and he would not be watching her to-day, dying, alone, parted from her children, without a husband, and in despair.

This was what Dumesnil kept on repeating to himself remorsefully.

One might have fancied that Mme. Meyrin could read the good fellow's heart and that she knew more of the truth than he supposed, for every day, as if to punish herself somewhat for having thought him slightly ridiculous when first she knew him, she was more and more charming toward him.

Formerly when he came in she would only hold out her hand to him; now she offered him her forehead to kiss, and when she could dine at table it was near her that he must sit. She flattered his tastes and his habits, talking of theatrical matters and of his favorite authors, reminding him thus of his successes and his youth, and even leading him to give some of those poetical extracts at which he was so ready and so skilled.

Sometimes, too, incidentally, without seeming to attach much importance to what she said, Lise would go back upon the past and speak of the time when her mother was one of the stock company at the Odéon, in Dumesnil's time. At the mention of these by-gone days the old actor stammered and blushed, putting a curb on himself so that he might not say too much, and turning the conversation into another channel.

These were the best, or rather the only pleasant moments of the woman who had been the Princess Olsdorf, for when neither Mme. Daubrel nor Dumesnil was there, Lise sunk into a state of complete lethargy, taking interest in nothing and not even reading. When her brother-in-law and sister-in-law came to see her—Barbe coming out of shame—they could not get her to speak, except to beg them not ever to speak of her husband, which they sometimes ventured to do, partly out of pity and also to attempt a defense of Paul. He was young, had easily been led astray, and would return to her. Then she would pardon him. Unquestionably he must be suffering, too; it was nothing but his lack of energy that hindered him returning to France.

The deserted woman only replied by long, sad looks to these consoling words, which were hypocritical on the part of Mme. Frantz. Her husband was an honorable man and severely blamed the conduct of his brother, while Mme. Meyrin, the mother, dared never speak of her son. Lise's sad looks said, better than any words could have done: "I do not believe you; and if he were ever to return it would be too late."

While the ex-Princess Olsdorf was thus gently fading away, a strange change came over her: she was again coquettish and elegant as of old. One might have supposed that, only too certain that very little time remained for her to live, she wished to avenge the privations which the jealousy and avarice of her husband had imposed upon her since the second year of their marriage. She took delight in loosening her hair, which was still wondrously beautiful; she adorned her arms and wasted shoulders with the jewelry which had been so long put away; she affected to be cold, that she might wrap herself in splendid furs, as in the good old times, and she had taken again, with an undefinable sense of luxury, to the wearing of the wrappers trimmed with lace, and the excessively fine under-linen which had so greatly offended Mme. Frantz's sense of propriety.

"I don't want to die like a petty tradesman's wife, but like a princess," she said to Marthe, showing her embroidered coverlet and her pillow trimmed with rich lace. "If my mother were to come she would not know her daughter by my looks, but she shall find her again at least in all my surroundings."

And with childish pleasure and vanity she moved her little feet covered by silken hose, in their velvet slippers embroidered with pearls.

There was but one thing in the past that she would not hear spoken of, that she refused to see again—Paul's studio. Since her husband's departure she had not gone into it, and had given orders that it should be closed against everybody. She caused to be removed from her sight everything that could remind her of art and artists, never asking about the theaters, new books, or exhibitions of pictures.

Nevertheless, she had kept in her bedroom Paul's painting of her, half nude, as Diana the Huntress, before which Mme. Daubrel had surprised her one day, her eyes filled with tears, murmuring: "And I was as beautiful as that once!"

Marthe wanted them to have the picture taken away, but Lise opposed it, saying:

"No; I will see myself so to my dying hour. It will be my punishment."

At her friend's, so to speak, posthumous coquetries, Mme. Daubrel smiled courageously, but she could not without grief hear her speak of her mother, for if Lise still hoped to soon receive a visit from the general's wife, and attributed her silence to ignorance of her daughter's condition, Marthe knew that the ex-Countess Barineff was acquainted with the facts. Indeed, she had written to her at Carlsbad, where the newspapers had mentioned that she was with her husband, and the answer had been sharp and ill-natured, proving that she was far from having pardoned her daughter, as the latter might have reasonably hoped in view of the terms on which she had parted from her mother at Pampeln.

Marthe was careful not to read these sad lines to Mme. Paul Meyrin; she thought it better to let her fancy that the general's wife was ignorant of her illness, and to say, by way of reassuring her, that she had heard from St. Petersburg that Mme. Podoi was coming to Paris in or about November.

Mme. Daubrel had done more than this.

Acting in concert with Dumesnil, she had written to Prince Olsdorf a letter describing Lise's position, the disgraceful conduct of her husband, the desertion and loneliness in which she was living; then another to say that the doctors could give no hope of the unhappy young woman; she had but some months, perhaps only a few weeks to live, and it would be generous to let her embrace her children before she died.

Well acquainted with all the circumstances prior to the divorce of her friend, Marthe ended her second letter to Pierre Olsdorf thus:

The prince had not replied, and Mme. Daubrel feared that her letters had not reached him, for she learned from inquiries at the Russian Embassy in Paris that within the past three years Prince Olsdorf had not appeared again in either Courland or St. Petersburg.

All that was known was that after leaving Russia he had visited Egypt, Zanzibar, and Mozambique, and that he had sailed for Japan, by way of Bourbon, the Isle de France, and the Sunda Straits.

In despair, Marthe decided to write to Vera Soublaieff and implore her to bring Alexander and Tekla to Paris. She had received an affecting letter from her in reply.

After mentioning that the latest account of the prince was dated from Calcutta, and that, according to his plans, he was to go straight to Bombay, the daughter of the farmer of Elva, still out of delicacy not calling by the name of her second husband her whom she had known as the Princess Olsdorf, wrote:

"What a good and pure girl," murmured Mme. Paul Meyrin, when this letter was read to her.

Then, after a short and useless struggle with the thoughts which took hold upon her, she sunk into Marthe's arms, adding:

"And how worthy to be loved."

CHAPTER IX.
FAR AWAY.

So Pierre Olsdorf had lived since his departure from Pampeln, and since, having acquired the certainty that Vera loved him, he was forced to confess to himself that he loved her with all his soul. They who have not loved say: "Out of sight, out of mind." The contrary is the fact with the true affections which are not born solely of sensual appetites which other objects can appease, for speedily, to the sorrow of parting and to the passion itself, are joined the torments of jealousy. One thinks naught of the imperfections of the loved one; only the good qualities are remembered. Having lost the satisfaction of his mistress's presence, the lover wonders, fearfully, whether he may not be already forgotten; whether he has indeed done and said all that was needful to be remembered.

The situation was the more painful for Prince Olsdorf inasmuch as to the regrets he felt was joined his remorse at having been the cause of the evil. He saw no escape from the consequences of his action and he regarded both himself and Vera as condemned to a life-long sorrow.

Whithersoever he fled, the memory of Soublaieff's daughter followed him. Through the distance that divided them he saw her, in fancy, at Pampeln, with the children he had intrusted to her; and her parting words, "Pierre Alexandrowich, you speak of happiness for me and you leave me," were always ringing in his ears.

When he had from her, at long intervals, letters that were adorable in their sweetness and resignation, in which only Alexander and Tekla were spoken of, he would be taken with a mad longing to hurry back to Courland and throw himself at the feet of the woman he had, without the right to do so, associated with his misfortunes.

Once, especially, he was on the point of putting the idea into execution, on finding awaiting his arrival at Singapore a telegram stating that his son was seriously ill; but as, following upon the first telegram which had been lying there for him a week, others came, first encouraging and then wholly reassuring, he had the courage to go on with his wandering travels, while regretting, in a sense, that his anxiety had not been prolonged, as then his fatherly love would have taken him back to Pampeln.

However, Prince Olsdorf had attempted the impossible in trying to weary his body and so bring peace to his soul. After traveling along the eastern coast of Africa, he crossed the Indian Ocean to China. There he saw Shanghai, Nankin, Amoy, the English colony of Hong Kong, and Macao, the old Portuguese possession where Camoens wrote the Lusiads. He went up the river to Wampoa, and thence to Canton, by way of the River of Pearls. Then he sailed south to Singapore, on the voyage to Batavia, through the Straits of Banca. But nothing could win him from the past, neither the strange manners of the inhabitants of the Celestial Empire, nor the fairy-like view of the Straits of Sunda, nor the terrible wild beast hunts in the interior of Java.

From the Malayan world he went to Ceylon, passing through its entire length from Point de Galle to Trincomalee, but neither the subterranean caverns of Candy, nor the splendor of the Valley of Rubies, nor the luxuriant vegetation of the jungle, had calmed his mind. At the top of Adam's Peak, before the foot-mark of Buddha, his eyes turned only to the north, where was his love, and where he was waited for.

He sailed up the coast of Coromandal, visiting in turn Tanjore, Trichinopoly, Pondicherry, Madras, and Melapore, where St. Thomas was martyred and where Christ perhaps lived during His absence from Judea, drawing from the books of the Brahmins the most perfect precepts of His divine teaching.

But neither the sight of the voluntary penitents, who torture themselves in honor of Shiva; nor the fantastical spectacle of the ruins of the city of the great Bali, the domes of the pagodas of which were still wholly visible at the beginning of this century at low tide; nor the chants of the victims of Juggernaut under the wheels of the car of Kali, the goddess of blood; nor the rumbling of the bear of Orissa—nothing had stifled the pain of his heart.

The Hooghly, with its floating corpses, had scarcely moved him. When, despising the iron road already open, at least in part, from Calcutta to Bombay, he crossed the peninsula of Hindoostan by the ancient routes which traverse the forests of Malwa, in the rude halting places where only shelter for the night and water are to be had, Vera Soublaieff's image never ceased to be before him. In the grottoes of Illora, in the depths of the caverns of Salcette, his ear was dulled to the roaring of the tigers, as it was to the hymns of the Hindoo priests, chanting verses of the Vedas, while he heard eternally the last adieu of Soublaieff's daughter.

His travels had lasted nearly three years, his only companion being the honest Yvan, whose sad and stern face reflected the state of his master's mind, when, returning from an excursion into the country of the Sikhs, the warrior people whom the English have never completely subdued, Pierre Olsdorf found at Bombay the last two letters from Mme. Daubrel.

The accent of truth in them struck him deeply, and, in the state of feeling he was in, a great pity possessed him for the woman he had cursed. She, too, suffered; then she, too, was pitiable. To this had come the woman once called the Princess Olsdorf. Was not the punishment too severe? Had not he abused his power in inflicting it on her? Would not it have been more humane to have avenged his honor in the blood of the guilty pair! Ought not he at least to have left Lise her child, whose presence would have softened her sorrows? And how had the man he had spared been punished for his hateful conduct? Could he suffer him to go longer unpunished? This Paul Meyrin had taken from him his honor, his wife, and, like a villain, he now deserted the home to which he should have felt himself bound by so many obligations. And he was living happy, careless of the misery he had caused. No, that must not be.

Three years ago the prince had condemned him to death unless he married the woman who had stooped to him. Ceasing to be the legal protector of this woman, forgetting his duty to her, he now exposed himself to the just revenge of the outraged husband; it was for him, Pierre Olsdorf, to avenge the woman who was so cruelly expiating her fault.

What the prince did not say, what he wished not to confess to himself, was that if these wretched events authorized the ending of his exile, he was less drawn to Europe again by all the sentiments of his heart than by the duty to play the rôle which he felt was his. Now it was Paul Meyrin he accused of the sufferings of the past three years. It was he alone who made so many tears fall from Vera's eyes; him alone he hated; him alone he would punish.

Pierre Olsdorf, therefore, determined to set out as quickly as possible, and when Yvan, sent to make inquiries, returned and told him that one of the steamers of a regular service between Bombay and Brindisi was to sail next day, he at once engaged a cabin. Then he sent Mme. Daubrel the following telegram:

Then, also by telegraph, he begged Vera to be ready to go to Paris at the appointed time with Alexander and Tekla. She was to put up at the Grand Hotel, where she would receive his instructions, awaiting his own arrival there.

Next day, as the Russian nobleman was embarking on the "Osiris," for a voyage which was to be more trying and to seem longer than any that he had yet made, the two telegrams arrived at Paris and Pampeln, causing emotions easy to understand.

Mme. Daubrel was beginning to think that her letters to Prince Olsdorf would remain unanswered; and yet, the very morning that the telegram from Lise's first husband came to hand, her pretty face, usually so sad, betrayed heartfelt joy, great as her uneasiness was as to Mme. Paul Meyrin's health.

The fact was that her mother, Mme. Percier, had come to acquaint her with news, secretly and timidly longed for, and yet unexpected. M. Daubrel had written from New York, that, touched by the life of expiation and the penitence of his wife, he had almost forgiven the past.

At this news Mme. Daubrel threw herself, weeping, into her mother's arms. She was impatient to tell Lise, who loved her so much, of this new-born hope. But she had now something more and better to tell; she had to tell the poor mother that soon she would embrace her children.

However, when Marthe saw Mme. Meyrin, the patient's feebleness was such that she hesitated. She put the case to Dumesnil, who was there, and whom under some flimsy pretext she got into the little room adjoining the bed-chamber.

"People do not die of joy," exclaimed the old artist, having been told the facts. "Let us not lose a moment in giving our dear patient the only hope that can calm her grief a little."

And leading back Mme. Daubrel to Lise, he said to the latter:

"Our friend has good news to tell you, but she won't speak if you do not promise to be calm."

"Good news," said Mme. Meyrin, with the heart-breaking smile that always played about her discolored lips when they sought to console her. "Can there be any for me? The kisses of my children alone lighten my sufferings, and I shall never see them."

Her husband's name did not even occur to her.

"Well, well, perhaps," said Marthe, in her gentlest voice.

"Perhaps?" Lise repeated, raising herself suddenly with staring eyes. "Perhaps, you say. Ah! don't deceive me. It would kill me."

Her thin hands had drawn Mme. Daubrel to her with strange energy. Her eyes questioned not less than her voice.

Frightened by this excitement, Marthe dared not say another word.

Dumesnil saw that an end must be put to this agony, even at the risk of a dangerous crisis.

"Well, then, yes," said he, in his turn. "Your children will soon be with you. The prince has telegraphed to your friend that he will be in Paris within a month with Alexander and Tekla. If he has them brought to France, it won't be to deprive you longer of their caresses."

The poor woman's face betrayed that she could not believe what was told her.

"The prince," she stammered, "the prince? He will give me back my children? I shall see my son again—my daughter? Ah, no, it is impossible."

"Read this," said Marthe, giving her Pierre Olsdorf's telegram.

Mme. Meyrin seized it, and when she had read it slowly, in a low voice, several times, as if the better to take in the sense of these blessed words which had winged their way through space to bring her a crowning consolation, she grew deathly pale, crossed her hands and, with a sob, raising her eyes, brilliant from fever, to heaven, murmured:

"Oh, God, I pray that Thou wilt let me live a month longer."

Almost at the same moment, more than five hundred leagues distant, at Pampeln, there was passing another scene not less touching, though of another kind.

Vera Soublaieff had been two months without a letter from the prince, and her anxiety was great when she received his telegram from Bombay begging her to get ready to go to Paris.

At first she thought she must have misread and was dreaming; but soon she calmed herself, understood the truth, and felt her heart swell with a great joy. She was going to see again the man she loved, whom she had waited for three years, whose long absence had caused her such cruel sorrow.

Suddenly Vera reflected that if the prince charged her to take his children to Paris, some painful event must have happened. She who had been the Princess Olsdorf was doubtless dead, and Vera was ashamed of having thought of her own happiness alone. And yet, she thought, if Mme. Meyrin was dead, she would have been told of it by Mme. Daubrel. Without trying to fathom the mystery of what was going on, she ran out to Alexander and Tekla, who were playing a little way off before the main entrance to the château, and covered them with kisses, telling them they would soon see their father again. She dared not, however, in spite of their tenderly questioning looks, utter their mother's name; but she prepared to follow the instructions she had received.

CHAPTER X.
TWO HUSBANDS.

On arriving at Brindisi, twenty days after sailing from Bombay, Pierre Olsdorf sent a telegram to Vera Soublaieff, asking her to leave Pampeln for Paris at once. A few hours later he took train from Brindisi, arriving in Rome the next day, where a letter from Mme. Daubrel was awaiting him, in reply to the telegram he had sent her before embarking for Europe.

The gentle Marthe confirmed the bad news she had sent before. On learning that the prince was coming to Paris, Mme. Meyrin had expressed the deepest gratitude, but no hope was felt of her recovery. The doctors had given her up, and the patient knew the gravity of her illness. She only prayed of God that He would suffer her to live until the coming of the man whose forgiveness she wished to implore.

Pierre Olsdorf replied immediately to Mme. Daubrel that he would be in Paris in three or four days, as would his children. Then he went to the Russian Embassy. It was at the Palace Feoli, on the Corso. He sent his card in to Count Panen, the first secretary, who had been a school-fellow of his at the Institute of Nobles.

Having been introduced at once and most cordially received by the young diplomatist, the prince went straight to the object of his visit.

"My dear count," said he to his countryman, "I have a great favor to ask of you."

"I am quite at your orders, prince," replied the secretary to the embassy.

"I wish you to act as my second in a very serious business. If you require it, I will give you all the explanations that you have the right to ask for; but I should prefer to be silent."

"From a man such as you," replied the count, quickly, "no confidence is needed, for he could not desire anything contrary to the strictest propriety. Keep your secret and command me."

"Thank you. The man whom honor calls upon me to fight to the death, until one or the other of us falls, is Monsieur Paul Meyrin, a painter living in Rome."

"Paul Meyrin, the husband—"

Count Panen was going to exclaim, "The husband of the ex-Princess Olsdorf;" for like the rest of the Russian nobility he was not ignorant of the divorce pronounced a few years ago.

"Yes, he himself," said the prince, bitterly; "he himself."

"Forgive me."

"I should beg your pardon. Later on you shall know more. Meanwhile I must kill Monsieur Paul Meyrin. I don't know where he is living, but you will easily get his address at the Ecole Française, at the Villa Medici. Be so good as to take a friend with you, to whom you can answer for me if I am unknown to him. Whatever conditions Monsieur Meyrin stipulates for accept, provided that they are of a kind to give a fatal issue to our encounter. I only desire one thing—that this affair may be over quickly, to-morrow morning, if possible. I mean to leave for Paris immediately afterward, if I do not fall."

"In a couple of hours, unless Monsieur Meyrin meets us with a refusal, all will be arranged. A good friend of mine—Baron Zamoieff, our second secretary—-will feel it his duty to join with me. Besides, he has the honor of knowing you."

"It is true, indeed; we are distantly related. I remember that in happier days I had the pleasure of receiving him in Courland."

"As for Monsieur Meyrin, I think I know where to find him. But what if he should ask us for explanations?"

"I hope he will understand with half a word. If he does not, you may tell him I will hesitate at no provocation, no matter what scandal may follow upon it. This man, in the past, has done me the deepest outrage possible; it has suited me to wait until now before demanding reparation from him, that is all."

"I understand."

"Thank you once more, dear count. I shall see you again soon, shall I not?"

"As soon as I have seen Zamoieff and we have been to Monsieur Meyrin's, who lives near the Pia Gate, I take it. If you will go back to the Minerva we will join you there as soon as our mission is fulfilled."

"Yes, I will go back to the hotel. Good-bye for a short time."

In less than two hours' time, at the Minerva, a footman announced to Prince Olsdorf the two visitors he was expecting.

Pierre went forward quickly to meet them, offering his hand to Baron Zamoieff, and thanking him for kindly acting as his other second.

The Russian noblemen responded cordially to the grasp of his hand, and the first secretary spoke at once.

"My dear prince," he said, seating himself on a divan with his colleague of the embassy, "we had no trouble in finding Monsieur Paul Meyrin, whom we both know slightly. He was in his studio on the Via Venti Settembri, close to the Pia Gate. I told him the object of our visit, and I must say that he seemed astounded for a moment. At first he could not understand what to think. However, recovering himself after a few moments' reflection, he replied: 'Very well, gentlemen; I ask no explanation, singular as this challenge is, coming from a man whom I have not seen for four years, and who has kept silence all this time. Two of my friends will have the honor to present themselves at the Palace Feoli within an hour.' We are going back to the embassy to wait for them. As soon as we have arranged everything we will come back and tell you about it."

"Thanks, gentlemen," said Pierre Olsdorf, "I feared Monsieur Meyrin might escape me. Let me remind you I accept in advance his conditions, provided they are of the kind I have mentioned; if they are not, make your own: four balls at twenty paces, with the right for each of us to advance five paces; and in default of result we fight with swords until it is absolutely impossible for one of the combatants to hold his weapon."

"Depend upon us, prince, all shall be arranged as you wish," said Count Panen. "Until this evening."

"Until this evening, count; until this evening, cousin, for we are relatives, my dear baron."

"I have that honor," replied Zamoieff, "and I thank you for the further one you do me in accepting me as a second. Until this evening."

In a few moments Pierre Olsdorf, left alone again, was putting his affairs in order, writing to Mme. Daubrel, to Vera, and to his son Alexander, letters which would be forwarded by Count Panen, if the writer should be killed in the duel with Paul Meyrin.

The Russian nobleman wrote these letters with a firm hand, with all the calmness and courage of a soldier who, in advance, makes the sacrifice to duty of his life.

To Mme. Daubrel he commended the unhappy Lise Barineff; to his son he said in simple and touching terms that he must never forget he was the heir to a stainless name, and that honor was priceless; to Vera he again avowed his love, praying her to forgive him for failing in his promise to return to her.

Meanwhile Paul Meyrin received the two friends he had sent for—-two artists they were, like himself; one an Italian, Giacomo Rimaldi; the other a Frenchman, a student at the Ecole de Rome, Alfred Bertin—and he explained what service he claimed of them.

Less discreet than Prince Olsdorf with his countrymen, he told them the story of his amour and marriage with the wife of the man who now came, at the end of four years, to ask for satisfaction for an outrage effaced, one would have supposed, by the marriage with the divorced wife.

"I could well refuse any satisfaction to the prince," he said, "but I won't have it that he shall be able to say a Roumanian was afraid of a Russian. So settle this affair as you please with his seconds; sword or pistol, whichever he likes."

Paul Meyrin did not add, though he understood, that what the prince wished to avenge was not the past but the present. And it was precisely the present that the painter hoped to free himself from in accepting the proposed duel. It seemed to him that in challenging him Pierre Olsdorf furnished him with a weapon against his wife whom he would then have the right to abandon altogether.

The wretched man had not heard anything of her for two months. His brother had indeed written to him that she was ill; but he did not know her condition was desperate. Like all men without energy, not daring to face the tears and the reproaches of the woman he had basely deserted, he shrunk from learning anything about her, in fear of being forced to return to the Rue d'Assas, if it were but out of common humanity and to avoid making himself a scoundrel in the eyes of even the most indulgent.

It is probable, however, that had he known the true situation of his wife, Paul would have left Rome; but at the time we have reached, Sarah, with whom he lived wholly, was intercepting all the letters from Paris, which she did not even read, out of womanly cunning, that she might have an excuse in reserve for the future. She simply put them on one side.

The painter was also urged on by another reason to finish with Pierre Olsdorf, of whom he could not be jealous, for he knew through Mme. Daubrel that Lise had not met him at Pampeln when she went thither to nurse her son.

In the early days of his marriage with the ex-Princess Olsdorf he had been applauded and envied. Flattered that one of them had carried off the wife of a great Russian lord, Paul's brother artists congratulated him; for several months he was quite a romantic hero, but when they saw him so soon wreck his home, when they knew he had taken up again with Sarah Lamber, there was surprise that this love which had made so much noise had passed so quickly. Inquiries were made, and in a short time there came whispers from St. Petersburg which gave a handle to the jealous and the envious.

It was told that it was Prince Olsdorf himself who had made the princess sue for a divorce and forced Paul to marry her. He was thrown down from the pedestal he had been planted on; there was much laughter at the quite novel revenge of the outraged husband; Paul was nicknamed "the husband by order," and, being questioned by his mistress, he lied so poorly that she, in the midst of a quarrel about his household in Paris, retorted upon him, not knowing she had hit the mark so exactly:

"Ah, don't bother me. You won't dare to be away from Paris a couple of days. Your wife's former husband would look you up and lead you back by the ear to your lawful home."

It was after this that Paul Meyrin, to prove he was free and his own master, had left Paris with Sarah and established himself in Rome, where his feebleness, his cowardice, and also his passion for the model, soon made so complete a slave of him that he gave up all idea of going back to Lise, and scarcely thought of his child.

During the first month of his absence he wrote to Mme. Meyrin once or twice to tell her that important commissions were detaining him in Italy; then, when he did not know how to explain his prolonged absence, he rarely answered the letters Mme. Daubrel wrote to him unknown to Lise, for she, too proud to complain, wrapped up in her maternal love, and not desiring to furnish her husband with new occasions for lying, had given up writing to him.

Receiving no replies now from the husband of her poor friend, Marthe told her that Paul had left Rome and was traveling East, where his letters had doubtless not reached him; but the deserted wife did not believe this pious fib; she knew then how unworthy had become the man she had loved so well; and she begged Mme. Daubrel not only to address not another line to him, in any circumstances, but not even to utter his name before her.

It was from this time forth that Sarah had ventured on hiding away all letters from France. The miserable creature began to hate the woman she had inflicted such torments on. To excuse herself to herself she said that Mme. Meyrin's sickness was a farce, got up by her friends with the idea alone of bringing back Paul to his wife.

Being thus without news, the painter soon came to think it was so himself. Then he fell under the absolute sway of this girl who flattered his vanity and satisfied his senses.

The husband of poor Lise Barineff had rented on the Via Venti Settembri, a couple of hundred yards from the Pia Gate, a small villa, one of the rooms of which he had made into a studio. There he was living with Sarah, not knowing what was really going on in Paris in the Rue d'Assas, when he received the visit he so little looked for from Prince Olsdorf's seconds, and replied to the challenge as has been written above.

A man of stronger fiber than Paul would have been careful to say nothing to his mistress, from self-respect and even from affection. The painter, on the contrary, hurried to tell her all, and then there was a torrent of abuse poured out by the model on the Russian nobleman and the woman who had borne his name.

Sarah loved Paul as a master loves a slave, as a female a male. Even so, but, after all, she loved him with her violent and passionate nature; besides, she was jealous of the past, and as her ignorance in matters of honor did not allow her to suppose that Pierre Olsdorf was desirous of avenging the outrage done to him four years ago, she interpreted the challenge in quite another sense. Either the prince again in love with the wife, wanted to kill her husband to regain her, or his duel with M. Meyrin was nothing but a means of intimidation to force him to return to Lise.

"You see," she exclaimed, when her lover had told her everything, "all these people are against you. After making you marry his wife that he might be rid of her, here is the prince come now to call you to account. And what for? Does he suppose he has the right to govern your present conduct? Are not you free to live as you please? Do your household affairs concern him? It would be too absurd. A divorced woman sending for her first husband to help her! If it is not so, he wants to fight you because you—betrayed him in the olden time. That would be a still more absurd idea. He has taken time for reflection, and you may be sure that he has not come without some urging on. Well, if I were you I should send this Cossack off about his business. It is simply his former wife who has plotted all this. If you fight you are a fool."

"I can not do otherwise," said Paul, when Sarah let him get in a word, "Prince Olsdorf would say everywhere that I was frightened of him."

"And if he did?"

"If he did? You don't consider that if I refuse to fight, my friends, to begin with, would call me a coward, and I should be the scoff of every studio in Paris; besides, my foreign patrons, who are mostly Russians, would desert me. Moreover, I have a grudge to pay off. I should not have gone to look for him, but since he challenges me— Well, we shall see. It is time that there was an end put to people saying I married his wife by order. I am not quite so unskilled as I was four years ago. If he thinks I am he makes a mistake, as I will prove to him."

Paul Meyrin spoke the truth. Like all artists, he had devoted a portion of his time to fencing, which had been brought into vogue by some of his most eminent brother painters, first and foremost being Carolus Duran, and had acquired a respectable skill in the use of the weapon. Tall, muscular, active, and robust as he was, he would not be cowed by this undersized, delicately built Russian noble. In a word, he wished to put an end to all the tittle-tattle about, and to have his full liberty.

Sarah in the end agreed that his view was the right one, and the painter, as we have shown, then gave his seconds a free hand, partly from anger and more out of boastfulness.

Everything was soon arranged between the seconds, and next morning, at eight o'clock, the two adversaries were to fire twice, beginning at twenty paces distance and having the right to advance five paces toward each other; and if this first encounter were without result it was to be followed by one with the sword until one or other of the combatants could no longer defend himself.

So Count Panen told the prince in reply to the question put to him on entering the prince's room with Baron Zamoieff.

The first secretary added:

"I will bring our countryman, Doctor Saniative, physician to the embassy. As to the place of meeting, I will inform Monsieur Paul Meyrin's seconds of it after I have seen Prince Charles B——, who, I do not doubt, the princess and their children being away from home, will let us use one of the avenues of the park in which his villa stands near the Pia Gate. It is essential that the duel should be fought on private ground, for before midnight all Rome will have heard of what is going to happen. I know the police here; we shall be watched from day-break to-morrow."

Pierre Olsdorf warmly expressed his gratitude and accompanied his two friends to the Corso. He returned then to the Minerva where, a couple of hours later, a message from Count Panen reported that all was arranged and that he would be with the prince by seven next morning.

Prince Charles B——, a type of good-heartedness, honor and simplicity, had granted the request of the Russian nobleman, whom he had known intimately for some time, and he had given orders to the gate porter to be ready at day-break to admit the party.

Being told by his seconds of the conditions of the meeting with Prince Olsdorf, Paul Meyrin, from pride, dared not make any remark to them; nor did he say anything to Sarah about the exchange of shots which was to begin and perhaps end the duel. Next morning, having embraced the young woman with tolerable composure, he accompanied MM. Rimaldi and Bertin. It had been agreed between these gentlemen and the two Russian noblemen that the latter should provide the weapons.

The painter and his seconds had little further to go than across the street. Prince Charles B——'s villa was on the other side of the avenue, not a hundred yards off. When they reached the gate the porter opened it a little way for them and saluted them as they passed. They soon caught sight of two men awaiting them under the trees forming the entrance to the avenue on the left of the park.

They were Baron Zamoieff and Dr. Saniative.

A little further off was the prince, walking with Count Panen, to whom he was giving his final instructions.

Seeing M. Meyrin's seconds approach, the count left Pierre Olsdorf after pressing his hand, and went to MM. Rimaldi and Bertin, whom Baron Zamoieff had drawn a little on one side, to arrange the last conditions of the duel and load the pistols.

This task having been done with scrupulous care, Count Panen and M. Rimaldi drew deep marks in the sand of the avenue at the points where the two combatants were to take their stand, and also the lines they might advance to before firing. It had been agreed that either might fire instantly upon the signal being given by the count, or wait until he had advanced the five paces stipulated for.

Baron Zamoieff and M. Bertin handed the loaded and cocked pistols to Pierre Olsdorf and Paul Meyrin, and led them to the marks which they were not to overpass until Count Panen had said "Fire!"

The adversaries being opposite to each other, their seconds stood aside to the right and the left. The prince was as calm as if he were in a shooting gallery, and kept his pistol lowered. The painter, clothed in black from top to toe, without an edging of linen at neck or wrist to serve as a mark, and presenting as little as possible of his body by standing sideways, grasped his weapon, on the contrary, with a nervous hand, pointing it straight at his foe.

Lying in their green serge scabbards, a few paces off, were the swords ready to play their part when the time came.

With a last look Count Panen satisfied himself that all was in order, and, breaking the silence that reigned under the lofty trees he said, in a firm voice:

"Are you ready, gentlemen?"

Then immediately he gave the order:

"One, two, three! Fire!"

At the last word of the signal Paul Meyrin, aiming at his enemy, advanced quickly toward him, but before he had taken two steps a shot was heard and, with a half turn, the painter fell forward on his face like a log.

Dr. Saniative and his seconds rushed to him, but it was to hear his last sigh. Pierre Olsdorf's bullet had pierced the heart of Lise Barineff's second husband.

The prince understood, from the gesture of the doctor and the consternation of MM. Rimaldi and Bertin, that all was over. Then, and not till then, his face grew ghastly pale, and for a moment his eyes rested on the corpse that his justice had made. Then he uncovered respectfully, and walked away without a word, leaning on Count Panen's arm.

That day Mme. Daubrel and Vera each received in Paris a telegram to say that Prince Pierre Olsdorf would be at the Grand Hotel by the evening of the next day.

CHAPTER XI.
LISE AND MARTHE.

The interview between Lise and her mother had been heart-breaking. In seeing her daughter deserted, aged, in danger of her life, she felt changed in her that maternal love which for so long had been only pride; and, in spite of her efforts to seem calm and not agitate the patient, despair was in her face.

Mme. Meyrin had been unable to leave her bed for several days. She had had her little daughter brought to her, and at the moment when Marthe entered the bedroom she was saying to her mother, and pointing to Marie, who was playing with the lace of the pillows:

"You will love her dearly, will you not, when I am no more, and you will rear her strictly as you reared me? But you will not try to make a fine lady of her; try to make of her no more than a happy woman. Above all things, do not marry her where divorce can follow. Divorce, mother, is nothing but a legal prostitution—a sort of challenge to adultery. It is an outrage on the laws of the Church and on modesty. Has any woman the right to pass from the arms of a living husband into those of another husband? Must not the divorced woman's brow redden at the thought of a possible, perhaps of an inevitable meeting between the two men who have possessed her? And her mother's heart, when she has to make two parts of it, one for the children who are no longer hers even in name, and one for those who come to her—must not it bleed mortally? If ever my daughter marries, let it be without the possibility of divorce, I beseech you."

"My dear Lise," said the general's wife, forcing a smile, "I promise to follow your wishes in every respect; but why look so far into the future, why despair? Oh, I am sure you will get better; Marie will have no need of a second mother; you will be here to watch over her, having come forth brave and beautiful from your present trials. You are no longer alone; Alexander and Tekla will soon be here, and who knows but that your husband, ashamed and penitent, will soon return to you? It is an every-day occurrence."

At these last words of her mother, Mme. Meyrin shivered with horror, and in a strange voice said:

"My husband! Never speak of him to me. And your hopes are but dreams. Yes, if God spares me, I shall see Alexander and Tekla again, since the man I deceived has taken pity on me; but it will be too late. I lived for my passion, I die of maternal love. God is full of mercy in His justice."

As she spoke Lise closed her eyes. When she opened them again in a few moments she saw Mme. Daubrel, who had softly drawn near the bed.

"See," she said to her mother, designating her friend with a grateful look, "here is my guardian angel. For four months Marthe has been by me. I owe to her my power to live to see you."

The general's wife offered her hand to Mme. Daubrel, without speaking, however, for she felt that sobs would hinder her. She knew the young woman already by what her daughter had said of her at Pampeln, and from the touching letters she had sent to Vera Soublaieff at the time of Alexander's sickness.

"My dear Lise," said Marthe, after returning the pressure of the ex-Countess Barineff's hand, "I bring you good news."

"My children?" asked Mme. Meyrin, with an accent of indescribable tenderness.

"Yes, your children and Prince Olsdorf. He telegraphs that he will be in Paris in less than forty-eight hours, at the same time as your son and daughter. They were to have left Pampeln two days ago."

"Heaven be praised! Where did the prince telegraph from?"

"From Rome."

"From Rome? Rome? Why did he go there? It was not on his way from Brindisi to Paris. Marthe, you are hiding something from me."

Lise had started up in bed, her eyes dilated.

"No, I swear it," replied Mme. Daubrel. "Read for yourself."