As far as the child liked anyone, she was attached to her cousin; since her marriage Yseulte had been extremely generous and kind to her, and the selfish little heart of Blanchette had been won, as far as ever it could be won, by its affections which were only another form of selfishness. She had been unable to resist the temptation of telling her news, and saying what was unkind; and yet in her way she was compassionate.
‘Why are you so very still and grave?’ she said now after a pause. ‘They say it is because the child died, but that cannot be it; it is nonsense; you would not care like that. Do you know now what I think? Do not be angry. I think that you are so unhappy because—because—now Prince Napraxine is dead, you fancy that she would have been his wife if you had not been here!’
‘Silence!’ said Yseulte, with imperative command. Her face grew scarlet under the inquisitive, searching gaze of the child. She suffered an intolerable humiliation beneath that impertinent and unerring examination which darted straight into her carefully-treasured secret, and dragged it out into the light of day.
‘Ah!’ said Blanchette, with what was, for her, almost regret and almost sympathy, ‘ah, I was sure of it! I have always been sorry that I said anything to you that day. But why do you care? If I were you, I should not care. What does it matter what he wishes? Men always wish for what they cannot get; I have heard that said a hundred and a thousand times. And you are his wife, and you have all the houses, and all the jewels, and all the horses; and all the millions; and as he is always thinking of her, so people say, he will not mind what you do. You may amuse yourself just as you like. If I were you, I should go and play at the tables.’
‘Silence! You are insolent; you hurt me; you offend me,’ said Yseulte, with greater passion than she had ever yielded to in all her life. All the coarse consolations which the world would have given her, repeated and exaggerated on the worldly-wise lips of Blanchette, seemed to her the most horrible parody of her own sacred and intolerable woe, so carefully buried, as she thought, from any human eye.
‘It is true,’ said the child, offended and sullen. ‘Everyone knew he never loved you; he always loved her. Even in Paris last year——. But what does it matter? You have got everything you can want——’
But Yseulte had left her standing alone in the golden-coloured drawing-room of S. Pharamond, with the irises and roses so gaily broidered on the panels of plush.
Blanchette shrugged her shoulders as she glanced round the room. ‘What idiots are these sensitives!’ she thought, with wondering contempt. ‘What can it matter? She has all the millions——’
The mind of the little daughter of the latter half of the nineteenth century could go no farther than that.
She had all the millions!