He well understood the sort of tacit bargain that his mother had made with him.

She had seen her advantage in his loathing of the proposed union with Tressan, and she had used it to the full.

Either he must compel Valerie to wed him this side of Saturday or resign himself to see his mother--his beautiful, peerless mother--married to this skin of lard that called itself a man.
Living, he had never entertained for his father a son's respect, nor, dead, did he now reverence his memory as becomes a son.

But in that hour, as he sat at table, facing this gross wooer of his mother's, his eyes were raised to the portrait of the florid-visaged haughty Marquis de Condillac, where it looked down upon them from the panelled wall, and from his soul he offered up to that portrait of his dead sire an apology for the successor whom his widow destined him.
He ate little, but drank great draughts, as men will when their mood is sullen and dejected, and the heat of the wine, warming his veins and lifting from him some of the gloom that had settled over him, lent him anon a certain recklessness very different from the manner of his sober moments.
Chancing suddenly to raise his eyes from the cup into which he had been gazing, absorbed as gazes a seer into his crystal, he caught on the Seneschal's lips so odious a smile, in the man's eyes so greedy, hateful a leer as he bent them on the Marquise, that he had much ado not to alter the expression of that flabby face by hurling at it the cup he held.
He curbed himself; he smiled sardonically upon the pair; and in that moment he swore that be the cost what it might, he would frustrate the union of those two.

His thoughts flew to Valerie, and the road they took was fouled with the mud of ugly deeds.