'I do not understand to what you allude,' said Othmar, with coldness and irritation.
She laughed; a little short incredulous laugh.
'My cousin! If you do not want people to talk about it, why do you stand in the middle of a hay-field with your uncle's legacy?—if it be your uncle's.'
Othmar was irritated and more embarrassed than he showed. Blanchette was the last person on earth whom he would have chosen to know anything of the more intimate details of his life. He knew her unsparing tongue, the exaggerated colour she could give to the slightest story, the smallest incident; the malicious pleasure in mischief-making and in scandal which she took at all times from mere natural malice and love of caustic words. Whatever she saw, or knew, or guessed, she dressed up in colours of her own invention, and made into comedies, to divert herself and her world. Was it possible that she had recognised Damaris? He thought not. Many months had gone by since the evening at St. Pharamond, and it was scarcely probable that so great a lady, with her multiform interests, excitement, and intrigues, had ever remembered the peasant girl of Bonaventure.
He was silent because he was for the moment too amazed to trust himself to speak, and Blanchette gazed at him over her fan, with cruel satisfaction and entertainment at his visible irritation.
'The open air is always so dangerous,' she said, maliciously. 'Even if you be sure there is nobody near, how can you be sure there is not a balloon somewhere above you? or a field-glass half a mile off? I had a field-glass; I was driving from Versailles. If the Baron left you many legacies like that one, your affairs must be more agreeable than legal successions often are.'
Then she laughed again, and rose and took her elegant person, her shrill, cruel, little laugh, her pale, keen, penetrating eyes into an adjoining room, where she gathered her adorers about her to play at chemin de fer, and win or lose, in breathless alternations, gold enough to dower fifty dowerless maidens, or stock a score of farms, whilst without the still, cool, dewy night lay soft as a blessing on the gardens and the woods and the great distant river, with the shadowy vessels gliding to and fro, and the little villages, dusky and noiseless, hidden away under the vineyards and the pear trees.
She cared in nothing what he did; he was profoundly indifferent to her when she did not remember her dead cousin, and then she hated him. She had not seen the features of his companion in the fields of Les Hameaux, nor would she have recognised them had she done so. The evening at St. Pharamond was blotted and blurred into oblivion under the heaps of forgotten things of a past year which could have no place in a mind engrossed in its own vanities and excitations, and living wholly in the present. But she had recognised Othmar himself as her carriage had passed yards off, and she had put up her field-glass at the towers of the château of Dampierre; and it had amused her to find that he was just like other men, though he affected such absurd, undivided devotion to one.
No doubt it was only an amourette; but it pleased her to have something with which she could tease him when she felt so disposed; and it pleased her more strongly still to reflect that his wife was losing her power over him, which she probably was, she reasoned, if another woman were gaining any. Pure malice was an integral part of her nature; to irritate, torment, and dominate people through their various little secrets seemed to her the best part of the comedy of life. She had nothing of the supreme indolent disdain of the woman she hated, or of her absolute indifference. She loved to fourrer son nez in all holes and corners. Her theory was that all knowledge was useful, especially when it was knowledge to your friends' detriment; and a lively and insatiable curiosity was her strongest guarantee against ennui.
She thought complacently of the trouble she had cast into his mind as she sat and played her game of hazard, the light flashing on her rings and the gold she handled. No doubt the thing was only an amour en village, an absurdity, a caprice, some rosy-limbed, coarsely-built nymph of La Beauce, who pleased him for the hour because of her utter unlikeness to the great ladies he lived amongst.