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.
“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.
Some remorseful regret occasionally stirred in him when he thought of
his daughter’s lonely life, and when he remembered the passionate love
which had been ruptured when she and Vanderlin had parted. He was a
bad old man with a shrivelled heart and a numbed conscience, but he was
human.
Mouse was at that time especially irritated and depressed. There
had come to Cannes that week a young beauty, a mere child, but of
extreme loveliness and wonderful coloring, very much what Boo would
be in a few more years. This young girl, an Austrian just married
to a Russian thrice her age, had turned all heads and occupied all
tongues at Cannes, and Mouse, for the first time in her life, had the
uncomfortable sensation of being eclipsed, of being rather out of it,
as she would have said, in her own phraseology.
It was a dull and unpleasant feeling which filled her with resentment,
and made her stare into her mirror with an anxiety and uncertainty
wholly new to her.
She was in this kind of mood when Prince Khris walked up the steps of
her hotel.
She had come in from driving, fretful and disposed to think that life
was more trouble than it was worth, when they brought her a card, and
said the gentleman who owned it was waiting downstairs.
“Khris Kar! What can he possibly want with me?” she wondered. She was
disposed to let him remain downstairs, and she was in no mood for
visitors, especially those who could be of no possible use or amusement
to her.
Then she reflected that she had not behaved very well to him, that he
had at one time been very intimate at Harrenden House, and also that
he had been the father-in-law, at all events for a few years, of the
master of Les Mouettes.
“Show him up,” she said irritably to her servant. In another minute
the old man entered, frailer, thinner, with the gold dye on his hair
more visible, but bland and polished as before, and with the same
keen, intent gleam in his pale-blue eyes. She welcomed him sweetly,
suppressing a yawn, and seemed as if it were the most natural thing in
the world to receive a man against whom society had long closed all its
doors.
Who could tell what old Khris might know? She was well aware that she
had ousted him out of Harrenden House.
“You are not looking well, Prince,” she said with solicitude, offering
him her little silver tray of cigarettes.
“Old age, old age!” said Prince Khris airily, as he took a cigarette
and lighted it. “How happy are you, Duchess, who are in all the
wonder-blossoming of your youth!”
“That is a nasty one,” thought Mouse, for she knew that when your
children are growing up speeches of this kind have a sub-acid flavor
which it is intended should be distinctly tasted by you.
He settled himself comfortably in the lounging-chair he occupied, and
blew the perfumed smoke into the air.
“I am especially fortunate to find you alone,” he said. “May I at
once mention the purport of my visit, for I know how rare it is to
be favored by a _tête-à-tête_ with you when one is, alas, old and
uninteresting!”
“Pray say anything you like,” she replied, the sweetness beginning to
go out of her manner and the softness out of her voice, for she felt
that whatever his purpose might be it was not amiable.
“Allow me, then,” said the old man very suavely, “to ask you if it
be true what people say in these places--that you intend to marry my
ex-son-in-law, Adrian Vanderlin?”
She was silent from astonishment and annoyance. She did not want to
have the keen eyes of this old gambler watching her cards.
“There is not the smallest authority for such a statement,” she
answered with hauteur, “and I think you might phrase your inquiry more
courteously.”
He smiled and made a little gesture with the cigarette, indicative of
apology or derision, as she chose to take it.
“Why should not either or both of them marry again?” she asked, her
anxiety on the matter getting the better of her prudence and good taste.
“Dear lady,” replied Prince Khris, “it seems incredible to properly
constituted minds, but there are actually persons so disposed by nature
that they only love once! It is a lamentable limitation of what was
intended to be our most agreeable and varied pastime; but so it is. You
know there are some persons who take everything seriously, and drink
sparkling Moselle with a long face.”
“Perhaps they will re-marry each other? It is not against the law, I
believe.”
“No; it is not against the law, probably because no lawmakers ever
thought such a case possible.”
“How he dislikes them both!” she thought. “Perhaps because they didn’t
give him enough money, or perhaps because they are maintaining him now.”
It seemed to her experienced mind that you would naturally hate anybody
who maintained you.
“I heard of a boat upset beneath the terraces of Les Mouettes, of
an intrepid _sauvetage_ of your lovely little girl on your own fair
shoulders,” murmured Prince Khris. “I hope the master of the château
was grateful, but I doubt it; men of business are sceptical rather than
impressionable. I hope you took no cold?”
“None whatever,” said Mouse crossly and curtly, for she felt herself
_dévinée_, and this sensation is never soothing to the nerves.
“I am charmed to hear it. But is it true that you have an intention to
render still richer than he is the singularly ungrateful person who is
called the Christian Rothschild?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said sullenly; “and I don’t know
what this man, Christian or Jew, can matter to you. He divorced your
daughter.”
It was more than a rude thing, it was an ill-bred thing to say, and she
knew that it was so; but her temper got the better of her prudence, as
it had done in her interview with Beaumont.
Prince Khris remained unmoved.
“That is matter of history,” he said serenely. “The man, as you call
him (who is unquestionably a Christian), may have been touched by that
heroic spectacle of a modern Aphrodite battling with the waves. No
doubt it was intended that he should be touched. All that I wish to
say, dear Duchess, is this, that if the report be true that you intend
to marry him--and it may be, for millionaires are the only men worth
marrying--I merely venture to say that I--well, in a word, I should
prevent it. That is all.”
She stared at him in unaffected amazement, and her anger was as real as
her surprise.
“How dare you say such things to me?” she said in great offence. “You
would venture to imply that the boat was upset on purpose!”
He laughed a little softly.
“The unaided _à propos_ is rarely of occurrence in this life. But
perhaps M. Vanderlin was impressed by the accident; men of finance
are sometimes children in matters outside their counting-houses.
However, all I desired, Duchess, is to intimate to you that if you have
any intention of marrying the man who, as you remarked, divorced my
daughter, I shall not permit the marriage to take place.”
“How can you prevent it?”
“That is my affair. Rest assured only that I can and that I shall.”
She was silent, intensely irritated and uncertain how to treat him;
she was aware that there was something ludicrous and undignified in
her position; she could not allege that Vanderlin had any intention to
marry her; she had been taken off her guard and placed in a position of
absurd embarrassment.
What could this old man mean? He was too keen and experienced a person
to menace what he had not the ability to carry out. Had he known
anything of her relations with Massarene?
She knew that he had a long score against her to pay off, that he must
hate her and would make her feel its hatred if he could; but he was not
a man to indulge in unprofitable rancor.
She said between her teeth: “Do you suppose, if I wished to marry any
man, I shouldn’t do it?”
“It is impossible to say,” murmured Prince Khris. “There are some
persons so perverted that they do not like new-mown hay or early
strawberries. There may be also persons so dead to beauty and to virtue
that they do not appreciate the exquisite qualities of the Duchess of
Otterbourne.”
“You old wretch!” she thought, with difficulty controlling herself
from ordering him out of the room. “I had not the remotest intention
of annexing your _ci-devant_ son-in-law,” she said aloud; “but as you
have put the idea in my head, perhaps I shall do it.”
“Are you sure it is I who put it there?” said Prince Khris, smiling.
“Then allow me to take it out again. I do not intend you to marry
Adrian Vanderlin.”
“What business would it be of yours if I did? He disgraced your
daughter before all Europe.”
His face remained impassive. “You cannot wonder, then, if only out of
vengeance I shall deny him the paradise of your embrace! Be my motive
what it will, dear lady, take this for certain: I shall not allow you
to carry out your present scheme.”
“Sir!” Anger flashed from her sapphire eyes, her voice was stifled
by rage. Her “scheme”!--as if she were an intriguing horizontale, a
nameless adventuress!
He laid down the cigarette which he had appreciated and finished.
“Remember,” he said serenely--“I can say that to Vanderlin which will
prevent him from marrying you or any other woman.”
“I shall tell him that is your boast.”
“You can tell him if you like. He will not believe you, and he
certainly will not question me.”
“But what could his marriage, were there any question of it, matter to
you?” Her curiosity got the better of her rage.
“That is my affair,” he replied. “To be quite frank with you, it does
not matter to me in the least, but I do not intend you to step into my
daughter’s place. She is my daughter, though many years have passed
since I saw her; and you, madame, shall not sit where she sat, love
where she loved, sleep where she slept; you shall not do her that
injury. A sentimentalism, you think. No, I am not sentimental, though
I come of the land of Werther. But a few years ago you did me a bad
turn when I was weak enough to trust you, and I do not forget easily.
I can prevent you from reaching the Canaan of Vanderlin’s wealth, and
I intend to do so. I know what you would do; you would entice him with
exquisite skill, and it is possible that you would make him your dupe;
in finance he is clever, but in the affections he is a child. Well,
take warning; let him alone, for if you attempt to succeed with him,
I shall intervene. That is all. I have told you to desist because I am
not desirous of approaching the man who, as you observed, dishonored my
daughter before all Europe. But if you do not listen to good counsels I
shall do so, for I repeat I do not intend you ever to reach the Canaan
of his riches.”
Then, without waiting for any reply from her, he rose, bowed with
the courtly grace which to the last distinguished him, and left her
presence walking with that feebleness which infirmity and years
entailed, but with a pleased smile upon his face and as much alacrity
as he could command, for he was in his haste to return to the tables of
Monte Carlo.
She remained in a sort of stupor, staring at the smoked-out cigarette
which he had left behind him on the ash tray.
She had been so utterly astonished, humiliated, and disgusted that she
had not had presence of mind enough to charge him with having brought
about his daughter’s ruin by his own intrigues and falsehoods.
Unfortunately too she knew so little, so very little, only what the
Archduke Franz had hinted to her, and with that weak weapon of mere
conjecture she could not have discomfited so skilled and accomplished a
master of fence as was Prince Khristopher of Karstein.
How she wished, oh! how she wished that she had let him have his fair
share of the spoils of Harrenden House! There are few things more
utterly painful than to have done mean, ungenerous, and dishonorable
acts, and find them all like a nest of vipers torpid from cold which
have been warmed on your hearth and uncurl and hiss at you.
“My greatuncle came to call on you!” said young Prince Woffram with
astonishment and curiosity. “I saw him in the hall; I don’t speak to
him, you know--we none of us do. But I felt sorry----”
“So do I whenever I see him,” said Mouse in her frankest and sweetest
manner. “I have always stood by him, you know. He is so courtly and
charming and now so old. It is horribly cruel, I think, to shut one’s
doors on a man of that age. He may have been all they say--I suppose
he has--but his sins must have been over before we were born, and when
anybody is so old as that I, for one, really cannot be unkind.”
What an angel she was! thought the young grandnephew of Prince Khris;
an angel of modern make, with wings of chiffon, which would not perhaps
stand a shower of rain or a buffet of wind, but still an angel!