“You’re the cat and I’m your kitten,” thought her young daughter, but Boo, saucy and bold as she was, never dared to be impudent to her mother.
When they had left him Vanderlin went up to his bedchamber, unlocked a drawer in a cabinet, and took out of it two portraits, one of his divorced wife, the other of her dead child.
He looked at them long with slow, hot tears welling up into his eyes.
He would have given all the millions which men envied him to have had the child playing at his side, and the mother with her hand in his.
A sorrow of the affections may not affect the health, the strength, the mind, the occupations, or the general life of a man, but it embitters it as a single drop of wormwood can embitter the whole clearness and brightness of a bowl of pure water; the bowl may be of silver, may be of gold, but the water in it is spoilt for ever; and he who must drink from it envies the peasant the wooden cup which he fills and refills at a purling stream.
CHAPTER XL.
Prince Khris of Karstein was at Monte Carlo playing continuously, losing almost always, living in a miserable lodging over a small shop, and devoting, to that blind goddess with a thousand hands who is called Play, his clothes, his sustenance, his last rings and shirt studs. He did this every winter, and every spring he was supplied afresh through his daughter’s means, and went to Spa or Luchon and did the same. From Germany he was banned.
One day at the Casino he saw the Duchess of Otterbourne stretching out her slender hand between a Jew broker and a Paris cocotte to put some gold upon the red.
“Ah! blonde devil! blonde devil!” he thought to himself, and wished he might see her lose her last farthing and crawl under a hedge to drink her last dose of morphia. But this he knew he was not likely to see, nor anyone else, for she was not the kind of person who kills herself, and at play she generally won, for she kept quite cool at it and never let it run away with her judgment.
He hated her intensely; he had never liked her, but when she had shut Harrenden House to him, she had excited and merited his most bitter detestation. She had not played fair, and Prince Khris, though he might cheat, abhorred being cheated; he felt it an insult to his intelligence. He had discovered the Massarenes before she had done so; they had been his placer-claim, his treasure isle, his silver mine; she had come after him and profited and plundered. This he might have pardoned if she had kept faith with him and gone shares. But she had acted treacherously. She had mined the ground under his feet. She had taught these ignorant people to know him as he was. She had made them understand that they must drop him, shake him off; that to be seen with him did them social harm, not good. She had annexed them and made them hers; she had created a monopoly in them for herself. She had taken them with her into spheres the entrance into which had long been forfeited by himself. And all this had been done so skilfully, with so much coolness and acumen, that he had been powerless to oppose it. The dinners of Harrenden House had become to him things of the past; the Clodion falconer which he had found for them saw him no more pass up their staircase; they were ungrateful like all low-bred people, and she triumphed.