Do you wonder that a man bedeviled and obsessed after this fashion should grow moody and suspicious? That he should hear the snaky rattle of warning from under every clump of flowers or tuft of grass? That he should see in every man upon whom his lovely friend bestowed her smiles a possible rival? And does it surprise you that, after a succession of violent scenes of jealousy, Henriette should have seized an early opportunity of confiding her disillusions and anxieties to the sympathetic ear at the Élysée?
When it came to stretching a point to oblige a pretty woman, who was useful to him, that woman could depend upon the goodness of Monseigneur.
“Jealousy, dear friend,” said he, with his most oracular manner, “is a vice as incurable as crib-biting in a horse, once contracted. It was Othello who ought to have been smothered!... Desdemona would certainly have consoled herself with the attentions of M. Cassio....”
“Ah! but suppose Cassio in his turn had been bitten by the green-eyed monster,” suggested Henriette, to whom Dunoisse had read the tragedy of the lady and the Moor.
“To smother Cassio,” said Monseigneur, with his somewhat ponderous humor, “would have been what literary critics term an ‘anticlimax.’ I should suggest service with the Foreign Legion for the gentleman in question,—if you are quite certain that as soon as he has gone you will not wish him back again?”
As Henriette crumpled her beautiful eyebrows in doubt, bit her red lips, and hesitated, he added:
“Besides—would it be wise to banish from your side a young, attractive man who has brilliant expectations?... This question of the Widinitz Succession—are we to hear no more of that?”
She faltered:
“I fear not, Monseigneur!... You cannot imagine the strength of his prejudices.... He is quite convinced that to put himself at the head of the Catholic electors of the Principality would be an insult to Heaven, because his mother happened to be a professed nun. Ah! how I weary of his eternal arguments.”
“Indeed!” said Monseigneur, with a curious inflection. His dull eyes had a faded twinkle in them as they rested on the lovely speaker’s face. She crimsoned to the wreath of roses nestling in their leaves within her bonnet,—pulled down the flowered lace veil with a petulant jerk of the little hand. Monseigneur hastened to soothe the sensibilities he had ruffled.