As for his brother, he would bleed his brother to the very
last drop without any compunction. Every bottle of champagne that came
into the house was, to Mountjoy's thinking, his own, bought with his
money, and therefore fit to be enjoyed by him. But as for his father, he
doubted whether he could remain with his father without flying at his
throat.
The old man decidedly preferred his elder son of the two. He had found
that Augustus could not bear success, and had first come to dislike him,
and then to hate him. What had he not done for Augustus? And with what a
return! No doubt Augustus had, till the spring of this present year,
been kept in the background; but no injury had come to him from that.
His father, of his own good will, with infinite labor and successful
ingenuity, had struggled to put him back in the place which had been
taken from him. Augustus might, not unnaturally, have expressed himself
as angry. He had not done so but had made himself persistently
disagreeable, and had continued to show that he was waiting impatiently
for his father's death. It had come to pass that at their last meeting
he had hardly scrupled to tell his father that the world would be no
world for him till his father had left it.
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