He almost regretted these words on noticing the double effect that they had on the young man. First he became indignant. Had any one dared gossip about that great lady who had been such a saint in his eyes? But this protest was accompanied by a certain unconscious satisfaction, by childish pride, as though he were flattered, in spite of everything that his name should be connected in absurd conjecture with that of the Duchess. It seemed that Martinez had just been revealed to himself, giving substance and a name to the obscure sentiments that until then, in an embryonic stage, had pulsed unrecognized within him.
The jealous mind of the Prince guessed, with keen penetration, everything that the other man was thinking, and this added fuel to his wrath. What impudence in this little clerk to take up Alicia's defense? What a conceited show he was making of his love for her!
"If any one takes the liberty of talking about the Duchess," said the Lieutenant, "if anybody dares to gossip because she does me the honor of receiving me in her home—the greatest honor in my life!—I will take it on my shoulders to punish whoever invents such a lie, no matter how high up he may be, no matter how powerful he may think himself to be!"
Lubimoff listened impatiently. Now it was Martinez daring to attack him. Those last words had carried a threat for him.
Besides, the Prince felt irritated at his own clumsiness. His imprudent action had served merely to open this young man's eyes, and make him think of the possibilities of many things which he had never yet imagined, and which if he had imagined them, he would have cast aside immediately as foolish. And now no less than the Prince Lubimoff had elected to show this cheap Lieutenant that, in the opinion of gossips, such things were possible.
The tone in which the officer defended Alicia aroused his anger even more. He divined in it great pride, the vanity of a poor fellow who had known love adventures only in books, and who suddenly found himself in supposed relations with a Duchess, as the rival of a Prince. How glorious for an upstart!
"Boy ..." said Lubimoff, in a hard voice.
This simple word, which was the term in which waiters were addressed in the hotels, was followed by a haughty look of overwhelming superiority, which seemed to sweep away everything extraordinary which the war had given Martinez: his uniform, his decorations, and his glorious wounds. For the Prince the officer no longer existed: there only remained the poor vagabond of a few years before, wandering from one hemisphere to another in quest of bread. "Boy," he repeated in a tone that brought back all the class distinction and social gradations of dead centuries, so that the man whom he had accosted might realize the enormous separation between him and the man to whom he deigned to give advice——
"Boy, let's come to the point—. And if I were to order you not to return to that house? And if I demand that...?"
He was unable to finish the sentence. His threatening voice, harsh as a cry of command, roused the indignation of the man in uniform. To have faced death for three long years, among thousands of comrades who were now lying in the ground; to have learned to set little store on life, as something proved worthless at every moment on the battlefield; to have stripped himself forever, by dint of frightful adventures and awful wounds, of that fear which the instinct of self-preservation puts in all beings, only to the end that now, in a pleasure resort, at the door of the most luxurious of gambling houses, a man, rich and powerful, but who had never done anything useful in his whole life, should dare to threaten him!...