'Béthune!' echoed Othmar with astonishment and some displeasure. 'How came he here?'
She told him, and added 'He has come back on different days. He brought me a jewel once; it was very handsome. It was because I attended to his horse's sprain; I asked him to take it back again and he did so. Since that he has brought me flowers. Those flowers are some of his.'
He looked where she looked and saw a group of hothouse blossoms of value and rarity. He felt an annoyance which he did not dissimulate. 'Do he and his flowers please you?' he asked, not wisely as he knew.
But the perfect candour of her eyes remained unclouded.
'I do not think about him,' she replied in that tone which was an echo of her free and fearless life upon the island. 'He is kind, and M. Rosselin says he is good. He is a great friend of hers, is he not?'
'Of my wife's?' said Othmar, with irritation. 'Yes. She likes him, he is often with her; he is one of those persons whom great ladies care to chain to their thrones.'
He had himself always had a vague jealousy of Gui de Béthune; the intimacy which his wife allowed him, although only, he knew, in accordance with the habits and usages of a woman of the world, yet was always more intimate than he cared to see. He knew the solidity and nobility of Béthune's character and the hopeless devotion which had so long absorbed his heart, but sometimes he thought that his wife might have found better ways of rewarding the one and of curing the other than the constant attendance on her which she permitted to a man who had adored her before the death of Napraxine, and had offered her his hand after it. He had said little against it, because he had known how absurd and vulgar a passion jealousy had always seemed in her sight, but there had never been any cordiality of intercourse between himself and Béthune, and it irritated him to hear that Béthune of all men should, by an accident of sport, have found his way to Les Hameaux.
The idea had caused him uneasiness, and associated with the remembrance of Blanche de Laon, made him conscious that the secret of the vale of Chevreuse had been very rashly and consciously kept by him from his wife. The Duc was a man of chivalrous honour and fastidious delicacy; he would in all likelihood feel bound to respect a secret which he had accidentally suppressed, but the influence of Nadège was unbounded with him, and if by any chance through the malice of Blanchette, or any other means, her suspicions should be in any way aroused, she would turn the mind of Béthune inside out as easily as a child can empty a bird's nest. He knew her great power over men, and the tenacity with which she would at times follow out an idea if it were one which appeared to elude her, or which others sought to conceal from her.
'Does he know your story?' he asked, with some embarrassment. 'Have you mentioned me to him?'
'Oh no!'—the colour flushed into her face, there was indignation in her denial. 'Do you think that I would talk of—of—of that time and of you?'