"If she were not divorced I could not marry her."

"So much the better."

"What! You who are so strait-laced would rather that she should remain my--my-- What you say--than that she should become my wife?"

Seeing that the change of ground was not in her favor, Mme. Meyrin did not know what to answer. Frantz, a good sort of fellow, caring most of all for peace and quietness, did not wish to carry the discussion further. With a look he advised his brother to remain cool.

"Well, for that matter, let us wait; there is no harm done yet." He ended by saying like a coward, "When the princess is divorced, we shall see."

So saying, he left the room abruptly, and his sister-in-law in her astonishment.

Husband and wife kept silence for some moments; then Barbe said to her partner, who had prudently buried himself again in his paper:

"You make very little of this, do you? You may be sure your mother will look at it very differently."

"My dear," Frantz ventured to say, "the case is a delicate one. Here is a woman who has been visiting us for nearly a year back, from whom we have accepted all sorts of favors, and whom we knew very well to be my brother's mistress. Would you now shut the door in her face simply because she thinks of becoming his wife, as we suppose? That seems rather difficult to do."

"But think of Paul marrying a woman older than himself, accustomed to live in luxury, and already the mother of two children."

"One of which is his whom she wants to make her husband."

"It may be so; and it may not. There is no certainty."

"Oh Barbe, Barbe! I can't see anything so dreadful for my brother in all this. The princess is older than he, but by a few months only; and she certainly won't be dependent on him. I have heard him say that she has a good private fortune. Besides, her mother, still alive, is rich."

The worthy fellow emphasized these particulars, for he knew that what angered his wife more than the marriage of her brother-in-law was the change that it would cause in the household.

Paul gone, the income of the family would be greatly reduced. As a husband and the father of a family, the painter would necessarily cease to be the prospective rich uncle that they had hoped for Nadeje. And lastly, the princess herself when once she was Paul's wife would probably not be so open-handed with the Meyrins as she had been in the past.

As, without daring to acknowledge them, these were the thoughts that had moved the artist's sister-in-law, she blushed at finding them so well guessed by her husband.

She said no more for the moment, but as soon as her mother-in-law came in she told her all that had pa.s.sed, and Frantz's mother, who worshiped her younger son, though rather egotistically, at once agreed with her daughter-in-law that Paul ought not to marry.

Meanwhile the inquiry before the Holy Synod was going on, the prince was still living at Paris with Vera whom he loved deeply, though he had not yet told her so; and Lise Olsdorf, more infatuated than ever, was eager for the marriage with her lover, who had not been able to hide from her the opposition the idea met with in his family.

CHAPTER XII.

THE DIVORCE.

Money being in Russia, as elsewhere, a powerful aid, and Pierre Olsdorf not sparing it, matters moved forward with great speed. In less than a month the Holy Synod had closed its inquiry, and one morning the prince received intimation of the judgment p.r.o.nounced in favor of his wife and condemning him to two months' claustral retirement in a convent at Moscow. The judgment, however, left the children of the marriage under his care.

We know, as well, that according to the Russian law celibacy is a consequence of divorce in the case of the guilty husband or wife. Pierre Olsdorf, therefore, might not marry again without the authority of the czar; and it was his duty to go at once to St. Petersburg, and submit to the will of the Holy Synod.

That evening he told Vera that at last he was free, and a smile of ineffable joy played about her lips; but when he added that they must go back to Russia, the poor child's happiness changed to despair. In St.

Petersburg or at Pampeln she would not live with Pierre, who was now all in all to her, though her tenderness was and had been chaste.

This man, young, healthy, full of ardor, such as he had never felt before, had had the courage not to possess himself of this young maiden who awaited only the moment to yield herself to him. He loved and knew himself beloved; but faithful to the oath that he had sworn to himself he had mastered his pa.s.sions. His oath was that Vera should return pure to her father. After suffering himself to be condemned by the law as an adulterer to gain his end, he would not be one in reality, as much because his pride dictated the sacrifice to its end, without recompense or compensation, as for the satisfaction of his own conscience.

The struggle had been a painful and terrible one for him. Very often in pa.s.sing through Vera's room to his own he had avoided her glance so that he might not see in her eyes the fever that was burning within her; and he would bid her "good-night" by gesture, so that the trembling of his voice might not betray him.

How many times in the silence of the night he had listened at the door, softly half opened by him, of the young girl, to hear her gentle breathing, her sighs, and to aspire with delight the fragrance which floated from the couch of the adorable young sleeper.

But he had resisted his pa.s.sions, and was justly proud of conquering them.

The combat had been less painful for Vera. Spared, by her ignorance and chast.i.ty, those desires of the flesh that burn like a brand, her love for Pierre, when she believed herself loved in return, was a long sweet dream, full of charming ecstasies and voluptuous tremors. She suspected that from this intimacy, from their exchange of tendernesses, the abandoning of herself at the fateful hour would follow; but she did not even blush at the thought. Full of confidence in the future, she awaited the great unknown, forgetful of all--her father, Russia, the past, and living in a sort of rapture that grew upon her more and more.

And it was at the time when she was in this frame of mind that Pierre Olsdorf came to tell her of their near return to St. Petersburg; that was, of the compulsory return to her former life, under the eyes of her family, perhaps far from the prince whom she would no longer see every day, almost every hour. At the words, the unhappy girl felt herself on the edge of an abyss, a terrible vertigo seized her upon looking into its depths, her face grew deathly pale, her eyes closed. If Pierre had not caught her in his arms she would have fallen like a stone to the ground.

The kisses of the prince, delighted and alarmed as he was at one and the same time, soon recalled the farmer's daughter to consciousness. His lips spoke such sweet words, laid to her lips, that they gave her full courage again, she trusted him so entirely; and the next day at the hour fixed by her master, she was ready to set out.

It was agreed that she should go alone with Yvan, at half past seven, to the Great Northern Railway Station, where the prince had reserved two compartments in the train, and that he would join them there.

While Pierre Olsdorf was making ready for his departure, Lise Barineff was hastening the preparations for her marriage with Paul. Knowing that the Russian law authorized her to marry, if she thought well, the very day after the decree of divorce, and being aware of the ill will of the Meyrins, she would scarcely suffer her lover to be a moment from her side; first because her love for him grew in proportion as obstacles were opposed to it, and next because she feared that Paul, whose feeble and wavering nature she knew, might escape her, yielding to the pressure brought to bear upon him by his family.

She had not hidden from the painter the oath the prince had sworn, to kill him if he did not become her husband; nor had she failed to tell him of the good position, monetarily, that her divorce left her in. Not only had the prince returned her dowry, eight thousand pounds, but he had left her his mansion in St. Petersburg, worth twelve thousand more.

She could count on an income, therefore, of from eight hundred to a thousand pounds a year. She thought, as Paul did, that here was a fact that would plead in her favor with the Meyrins. When she was informed, at the same time as he who had been her husband, of the decision of the Holy Synod, she began to hope that the family in the Rue de Douai would come to have a better feeling toward her.

The artist himself thought so. Moreover, humiliated at being treated as a mere boy by his mother and sister-in-law, he had quite made up his mind to do without a consent that he would have to win, if indeed he were ever to get it, by too long a struggle; and he had given them to understand that he would not wait until the day of his marriage to leave them and set up housekeeping for himself. After dinner one evening, therefore, he told his mother very plainly that the Princess Olsdorf being divorced, he was going to marry her as speedily as possible.

At this news, though it was expected, the storm that had been gathering for several weeks in the Meyrin family burst forth violently. Mme.

Frantz had repressed her feelings too long not to take a full revenge now.

Mme. Meyrin, who was completely under the domination of her daughter-in-law, only said to her son:

"I will never consent to your marrying a divorced woman, who is older than you and belongs to neither your rank nor your cla.s.s."

Mme. Frantz hastened to add:

"Not to mention that she is the mother of two children, and accustomed to an idle and luxurious life that would not fit in with ours. Do you imagine that with eight hundred a year she can keep up an establishment, when she is used to scattering her money about as she does?"

"Then I am good for nothing, I suppose?" Paul retorted. "Good years and bad, I make not less than eight hundred, and I hope to make more. I shall bring to the support of the household as much as my wife."

The artist could not have used a more unwelcome argument to his sister-in-law. Barbe had the best reason to know what her brother-in-law's resources were, as she had made herself his cashier. It was exactly this money that he threw into the common stock that she regretted, though she would not acknowledge as much. It was therefore a bad move to let her understand that she would not have it to count on in future. Beside herself with rage, she went on coa.r.s.ely:

"Very likely; but that won't alter the fact that your fine princess is a compromised woman. Do you suppose we don't know of her goings-on with you? She sha'n't set foot in here, that is certain."

"Ah, bah!" exclaimed Paul, provoked. "You will not receive her when she is my wife; but you received her--her and her presents--when she was my mistress. Very well, so be it. We shall each keep to ourselves, that is all."

"Paul!" said Mme. Meyrin, the mother, in a beseeching tone, frightened at the anger of her son, whom she had never seen other than gentle and submissive.

"Well, well, mother," said the painter, in a very different tone, "it is my sister-in-law that irritates me. One would think she was my guardian.

Besides, I won't have the woman I love insulted--the woman, who, for my sake, has lost the high position that she had in the world."

"Oh, for your sake," sneered Mme. Frantz.