“The blonde devil! the blonde devil!” he said with a curse.
But for her they would in all likelihood have remained unknown to immaculate society, and would to the end of time have believed in himself as a semi-royal divinity, knowing nothing of the stains on his purples, nothing of the cankered breast which rotted under the ribbons of his orders.
She had not been so clever as the groom of the chamber at Harrenden House had thought her; she had not gone shares fairly with her predecessor in the exploitation of the Massarene vein.
She had made an enemy of him. She thought his enmity was of no consequence because he was a person wholly discredited and despised, but in this she was greatly mistaken; because water is muddy it is not therefore incapable of drowning you.
Khris Kar, who was a person of extreme intelligence, guessed all her motives and all her modes of action, and divined exactly all she said against him.
It is always a dangerous and difficult thing to “drop people,” and neither the master nor the mistress of Harrenden House had tact and experience enough to do it in the least offensive manner. Indeed, Massarene himself enjoyed doing it offensively; it made him feel a greater swell than ever to be able to be rude and slighting to a person of the original rank of Prince Khris. It afflicted the tenderer heart of his wife, but she did not dare to disobey orders, and despite his rage the old prince could not be otherwise than amused to note the elaborate devices with which she shifted her parasol so as not to see him in the Park, and fumbled with her handkerchief or her fan as he approached at a concert or a theatre to avoid offering him her hand.
He read his fair foe’s tactics in the stiff and frightened manner of the Massarenes toward him; he saw that they had been warned he was a bird of prey, that they were afraid to say anything to his face, and could only clumsily draw away from him. He was used to this treatment from his equals, but in these low creatures it stung him painfully; he felt like a disabled hawk having its eyes pecked out by a crow. As he watched, as time went on, the upward progress of these people into that higher world for ever closed to himself, he knew that she had done for them what he had lost all power of doing for them or for anyone. He acknowledged her superiority, but her treachery he intended to repay at the earliest opportunity. One does not pull a ferret out of a rabbit-burrow without being bitten.
As it chanced there came into his hands a weekly journal published at Nice which contained such items of social intelligence as it was thought would interest the visitors to the Riviera, and amongst these was a paragraph which spoke of the boating accident to the Duchess of Otterbourne and the coolness and courage displayed by that lady; it mentioned that the accident had happened off the terraces of the Mouettes. As he read, he thought he saw between the lines; he suspected the accident was one of design; he suspected the rescue of the child by her mother was a brilliant coup de théâtre, done with intention to arouse the interest of a solitary.
He made a few careful discreet inquiries; he found that Vanderlin had been to see her at her hotel; he learned that the circumstances of the fair swimmer were embarrassed, which did not surprise him; he heard some gossiper laugh and say that she was intending to marry the great banker; he saw as completely into her mind and soul as if he had been Mephistopheles.
He promised himself that she should not succeed.