De Marmont bowed quite ceremoniously to him, and the Comte—courtly and correct to the last—returned his salute with equal ceremony. Then the young man turned to Crystal.
For the first time, perhaps, since the terrible fracas had begun, he realised what it all must mean to her. She did not try to evade his look, or to turn away from him. On the contrary she looked him straight in the face, and watched him while he approached her, without retreating one single step. But she watched him just as one would watch an abject and revolting cur, that was too vile and too mean even to merit a kick.
Crystal's blue eyes were always expressive, but they had never been so expressive as they were just then. De Marmont met her glance squarely, and he read in it everything that she meant to convey—her contempt, her loathing, her hatred—but above all her contempt. So overwhelming, so complete was this contempt that it made him wince, as if he had been struck in the face with a whip.
He stood still, for he knew that she would never allow him to kiss her hand in farewell, and he had had enough of insults—he knew that he could not bear that final one.
A red mist suddenly gathered before his eyes, a mad desire to strike, to wound or to kill, and with it a wave of passion—he called it Love—for this woman, such as he had never felt for her before. He gave her back with a glance, hatred for hatred, but whereas her hatred for him was smothered in contempt, his for her was leavened with a fierce and dominant passion.
All this had taken but a few seconds in accomplishment. M. le Comte had not done more than give a sign to Hector to see M. de Marmont safely out of the castle, and Maurice de St. Genis had only had time to think of interposing, if de Marmont tried to take Crystal's hand.
Only a few seconds, but a lifetime of emotion was crammed into them. Then de Marmont, with Crystal's look of loathing still eating into his soul, caught sight of Clyffurde who stood close by—Clyffurde whose one thought throughout all this unhappy scene had been of Crystal, who through it all had eyes and ears only for her.
Some kind of instinct made the young girl look up to him just then: probably only in response to a wave of memory which brought back to her at that very moment, the words of devotion and offer of service which he had spoken awhile ago; or it may have been that same sense which had told her at the time that here was a man whom she could always trust, that he would always prove a friend, as he had promised, and the look which she gave him was one of simple confidence.
But de Marmont just happened to intercept that look. He had never been jealous of Clyffurde of course. Clyffurde—the foreigner, the bourgeois tradesman—never could under any circumstances be a rival to reckon with. At any other time he would have laughed at the idea of Mlle. Crystal de Cambray bestowing the slightest favour upon the Englishman. But within the last few seconds everything had become different. Victor de Marmont, the triumphant and wealthy suitor of Mlle. de Cambray, had become a pariah among all these ladies and gentlemen, and he had become a man scorned by the woman whom he had wooed and thought to win so easily.
The fierce love engendered for Crystal in his turbulent heart by all the hatred and all the scorn which she lavished upon him, brought an unreasoning jealousy into being. He felt suddenly that he detested Clyffurde. He remembered Clyffurde's nationality and its avowed hatred of the hero whom he—de Marmont—worshipped. And he realised also that that same hatred must of necessity be a bond between the Englishman and Crystal de Cambray.