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."