"What a cad," thought Michael, "peddling around a lot of female gossip, just because he has a grouch against women in general."
He understood how Alicia might feel interested in the soldier. His youth and his uniform reminded her of her son. Besides, Martinez was alone in the world, a foreigner, a piece of wreckage from the war, a man whom every one considered irrevocably condemned to death.
Yet Michael could not avoid an immediate feeling of jealousy toward the poor young fellow who was friendless and ill. Martinez was living constantly by Alicia's side, while he himself was unable to gain admittance to the Villa, even as a mere visitor. Why?
He had spent several weeks making conjectures, and watching for a chance to meet Alicia. Since the afternoon when he had held her in his arms, drying her tears and restraining her from hurting herself, as she writhed in grief, and kissing her on the brow, with brotherly compassion, the gate of Villa Rosa had closed behind him forever. "Come to-morrow," groaned Alicia on saying good-by to him. And the following day Valeria had halted him with the embarrassed look of a person telling a lie. "The Duchess cannot receive you. The Duchess wants to be alone." And this inexplicable refusal had been repeated each successive day, with increasing sharpness. At present the gardener, who was the only one who came to answer the bell, talked with him through the gate.
This rejection caused him to commit a great number of childish and humiliating actions. He circled about the neighborhood of the Villa like a jealous husband, facing the curiosity of the passersby, and taking advantage of the most absurd pretexts to disguise the real object of his vigil, hurriedly concealing himself whenever the gate opened, and any one left the house. This vigilance had only served to arouse his anger. Twice Michael had been obliged to hide himself while Lieutenant Martinez, erect in the old uniform which the Prince had given him and which was rather a bad fit, steadied his weak sick body in a desire to appear proud and healthy, and entered Villa Rosa through the wide-open gate, as though he were the owner.
One afternoon he had seen them from a distance, the Lieutenant and Alicia, in a hired carriage, which was going in the other direction, on the opposite side of the street, toward the Heights of La Turbie. She was looking after the wounded man, taking him, in maternal solicitude, to a spot where he could breathe the upland air. And the Prince might just as well have not existed!
In vain he wrote her letters, and his torment was even greater owing to the fact that he could not talk openly with his friends. The Colonel, obedient to his veiled suggestions, had unavailingly paid several calls on the Duchess.
"What unexplainable grief!" said Don Marcos. "It is impossible to understand such despair over a young aviator who was merely a protégé of hers. Unless, perhaps, he were her...." But his sense of delicacy would not allow him to insist on such an ignoble suspicion.
Nor could the Prince talk with Atilio. In the latter's eyes, the prisoner who had died in Germany was the same young man he had known in Paris before the war: the Duchess' lover, who followed her everywhere and danced with her at the Tango teas. Besides, Michael felt afraid of what Castro might add, reflecting the "General's" way of thinking.
The latter, at first, on learning of Alicia's despair, had felt like forgetting the quarrels of the past, and had gone of her own accord to Villa Rosa to console the Duchess. Since the "General" was very patriotic, the boy who had died in Germany seemed to her a hero. But the sudden monopolizing of the Spanish Lieutenant, and the passionate sympathy which obliged Martinez to spend all day with the Duchess, renewed Doña Clorinda's cool hostility.