The Keepers of the People

CHAPTER III

THE EMPRESS WITH THE EMERALD EYES

189Prince Melinsky’s dislike of Ralph Falcon was growing to a feeling little short of hate: of a nervous temperament himself, easily impressed, and quick to reveal every impression, Ralph Falcon’s inscrutable eyes and imperturbable calm jarred on him without ceasing. He had, too, a suspicion that this younger, colder, stronger man despised him; and it irritated his vanity beyond endurance. But above all he was enraged by the friendship between Lady Lisdor and Ralph Falcon; for the admiration of her which had brought him to Quivern Court had not failed, under the impulsion of the continual sight of her beauty, to grow into a passion which tortured him. It was not a fine passion by any means: her fine qualities of mind and spirit were beyond the reach of his appreciation: but what it lost in fineness it gained in strength; and it tortured him.

190For her part she disliked him with all her heart: his essential, repugnant coarseness of nature was very plain to her; and she despised him for a mere seeker of common pleasure. She had divined too his passion for her; and though Lord Lisdor’s common-sense companionship had destroyed in her any unhealthy sentimentality in the matter of the duel of sex, his passion was hateful to her: it asked so little of all that she had to give, that it shocked her self-esteem. He amused her husband, however, and she disdained to be at the pains to bring about his leaving Quivern Court.

191Every day she was thrown more and more with Ralph Falcon; every day she learned more and more of his thought; and believing him to have a broader and wider knowledge of life, gained she knew not how, than her other friends, she sought more and more his judgment on the things that awakened her interest. All the while his fine face and great bodily strength were appealing, little as she was aware of it, to her senses.