CHAPTER XV
Dmitrilaid aside his violin, his eyebrows lifted querulously.
“Now, why do you suppose that black-browed grenadier comes to my threshold at dead of night and scares my friend? Sit down, Griff, sit down. You shall have such a sup of coffee as you have never tasted before, purest Mocha straight from Medina in a sack. The boy was frightened, eh?”
“I didn’t notice his face,” Ames retorted. “God, but I’m tired!” He stretched out full length on the couch after throwing off both coats. “You are absolutely right, Dmitri. Society is the pitfall and delusion, the desert of mirages.”
“It is not a success, then, the opera? Where is Carlota?” Dmitri talked with a cigarette balanced unsteadily in one corner of his mouth, and poured off the top of the coffee deftly into small cups. “You like a dash of rose or orange water, yes?”
“I don’t care what you give me. I’d drink a Lethe cocktail to-night,” groaned Ames. “They took her away from me, Dmitri. She isn’t poor or friendless or anything of that sort. It’sa damned lie. She’s the granddaughter of the great Italian diva, Paoli, and Ogden Ward is her financial backer. It reeks, lad, it reeks of the commonplace, and the rose of romance is a wired fraud.”
“That is very good,” Dmitri responded cheerfully. “A wired fraud peddled by the fakir Hope on street corners to catch just such boys as yourself. I told you all about it and you would not listen to me. Each lover imagines he is completely original in his unique adventure when it is merely the same old rondel sung over again. She is too beautiful to doubt, but the more beautiful they are the more you should doubt.”
Ames sat up, his head bowed.
“You see, the worst of it is no one will believe I did not know who she was all the time. She is the accredited pupil of Guido Jacobelli, and yet she permitted me to introduce her publicly as my pupil. Why did she ever come down to the Square and let me make-believe teach her?”
Dmitri’s eyebrows again became expressively active. He shook a few drops of orange water from a tiny glass decanter into each cup of coffee, and his next remark was apparently a diversion.
“Have you tried to pluck this Rose of Romance?”
“Oh, she knows I love her, of course. You don’t have to tell those things outright when you are persons like Carlota and myself.”
“Ah, to be sure, you sing it to each other; you play it in divine harmonies on the piano. I forget.”
“Thank God, that is all.”
“Then you have not let her carry away your heart and offer of marriage in her little gold bonbon case?”
Ames shook his head miserably. “No one will ever believe I did not know who she was,” he repeated. “She merely told me that her people, her own people, were all dead back in Italy. Of course I thought she just came to me from some neighborhood around the quarter until you warned me where she really lived.”
“My boy,” Dmitri comforted him, “you love the indefinite. It would have dispelled the illusion to have trailed her into the bosom of her family. A family is so commonplace.”
“But she always dressed simply.”
“Simply? You do not recognize the art of the modiste and tailor. I have myself seen her wearing a coat or gown that must have cost all out of reason to her apparent circumstances, but I said nothing to dispel your happiness. There was also her voice, her hand, her verymanner. Griff, you were blind not to see and know you entertained an angel unawares.”
“I suppose she thought she was helping me, singing ‘Fiametta’ to-night, and instead, it will ruin my whole career. They will call it an unthinkable and gigantic piece of unpardonable impudence by the time Jacobelli finishes with me.”
“Stop thinking of yourself all the time. What of her?” warned Dmitri gently. “She did not want to go to Belvoir. She did not want ever even to sing in public, and you made her do it for you, you renegade. You get back to your own case. Do you not think she is suffering too?”
“If I thought she were, I’d be the happiest man alive,” Ames declared fervently. “If I thought she really cares anything for me, that this wouldn’t end everything, I mean.”
“You mean, if she is the girl you believe her to be, she will not give you up?” Dmitri blew wavery, violet ovals into the air and sighed. “I do not envy you people who eternally seek to win your ideal, to bring it to earth, and make it domesticated, so to speak. Possibly this is the greatest thing that could have happened to either of you. You will be like the most wonderful lovers in the world—Dante and Beatrice. To me they are the greatest ofall because they are divinely ideal. My dear boy, he had a wife and five children, yet he beheld her at the bridge over the Arno once, only once, in the crimson gown, and he immortalized her with his ideal love. Paolo possessed Francesca’s avowal, Abelard had his memories in his cell, yet Dante, in his poverty of earthly happiness attained the empyrean following his dream.”
“I know. They’ll tell her all that sort of thing, too. You people who make a fetish of the immaterial, who believe that realization kills, amuse me.”
“Amusement is the privilege of youth,” Dmitri answered. “What you do not wish to understand or enjoy, you laugh away, but I tell you, your love, if realized, will kill the genius of you both, and you will find yourselves with clipped wings, domesticated wild swans ever yearning after the blue lanes of flight.”
“Every philosopher loves the sound of his own voice better than that of any woman,” said Ames.
Dmitri chuckled. “That is possible, quite possible, my friend. I wish I might call myself a philosopher, but I am a poor marksman. Philosophers are men who shoot mental shafts at the bull’s-eye of truth. I have never hit the inner circle myself.”
Ames drank his coffee thirstily and reached his cup for more. “Don’t preach at me, Dmitri,” he said bitterly. “I have come to you for straight advice, not a lot of axioms. Tell me what to do. She has gone away with Ward and Jacobelli. They will keep her from me.”
“Wait patiently with confidence,” Dmitri told him. “You will hear from her. Women are that way. There is some divine sixth sense that tells them of the beloved’s sufferings. Stay here with me to-night.”
Ames refused. The coffee had rested and stimulated him. He merely wanted companionship and the talk with one who believed in his success. Dmitri’s optimism restored his own confidence in himself. He would walk on down to the Square, he said, and wait there for some word from Carlota.
“What a pity you can’t sit down in this mood and improvise,” Dmitri said regretfully. “This way you will only walk it off, when if you could but express it in music—ah, my friend, what we owe to the mad loves and erratic moods of genius. I drink to its suffering.”
He accompanied Ames to the door and waved his hand in comradely fashion to him, watching until he had turned the corner ofMadison Avenue. Then, with a quick sigh of relief, he ran his fingers through his hair and crossed the balcony to see if there was a light in Steccho’s window next door. It was dark, but as his hand touched the knob it came in contact with a letter which had been stuck in the door. He went back to his own quarters slowly, and relighted the brazier to make fresh coffee. The letter lay on the black walnut stand where he dropped it. It had been mailed in New York, the outer envelope attested, but when he examined it closely he was certain there was a second envelope inside. It was so that his own mail came to him, sent on through secret channels from Sofia. He mused speculatively on the news it might contain for the boy, Steccho. He would surely return to tell him what the midnight visitor had wanted of him. Possibly this letter had been a forerunner of the visit. News from the mother and little sister Maryna, no doubt. He lifted his head listeningly for a footfall along the silent street, but none came. And he leaned over the charcoal blaze as the moments passed, with a brooding look that was the very expectancy of fear.
Through the wooded drives of the north end of the Park Jurka’s car proceeded slowly. On the seat facing the Count, Steccho huddled.It was chilly in the early morning, and he was dressed scantily. The masterfulness of the other stole his vitality from him. He felt cowed and driven against his will. As they passed the penumbra of an arc light he would glance up at the handsome, easy-mannered figure opposite, his eyes filled with livid hatred.
“You have slipped a cog somewhere, I do not know just where yet, but it will come to me,” Jurka said. “You have been following the girl for a month and you tell me you do not know where the jewels are. Where were you last night when she left the house wearing them?”
“I had watched all day,” Steccho told him excitedly. “I was in Vorga’s tobacco store on the corner in the afternoon. You can see the entrance from his window. She could not have passed out without my having seen her.”
“You lie! You were with Dmitri Kavec. He is a known spy of the Internationals. Did you meet him in Sofia?”
Steccho closed his lips stubbornly. Dmitri was his friend. The car sped through a curving roadway round the base of a rocky precipice surmounted by an old blockhouse. In the darkness the locality lost all semblance of city scenery and might have been in the mountain fastnesses of Bulgaria. Jurka leaned forwardwith careless interest, and took note of their surroundings. “It is like the road to Monastir,” he said, half to himself. Steccho’s eyes stared at him through the gloom of the car’s interior like those of some wild animal held in leash. His mother had named it “The Trail of Tears,” that road from Monastir, where the weak and young had fled in the great retreat, and had been trampled to death, or had lingered for the slower fate from starvation. He himself had seen the babies, the young girls, the old people—and the memory was a veritable glut of butchery. Yet this Count smiled as he mentioned it as though it had been some tryst with pleasure which he had kept along that road from Monastir. And while the boy’s thoughts leaped from one avenging plan to another, the Count continued:
“I think you lie, Steccho. Perhaps you have lied to me from the beginning. Perhaps, like Dmitri, you are a Czech spy. Do you know why he is here in America?”
“I know nothing about him,” Steccho asserted, with a touch of bravado. “We were friends in Sofia. Both students at the University. I did not even know he was a spy. I had hoped he could give me news of my people.”
Jurka touched the bell and the car stoppedshort under the overhanging shadow of autumn foliage, and as the faint light from an arc lamp up the road reached the interior, Steccho saw the round bore of a revolver facing him, held steadily and easily in Jurka’s hand as it rested on his knee.
“I could kill you now and have your body thrown in the bushes yonder. It would be one way out. When I saved your life you gave in return certain assurances of faithful service.”
“Ah, but you promised me you would provide safety for my mother and sister,” Steccho broke in eagerly. “You hear from them, yes? I hear they have killed all the girls two years ago, cut their throats, thrown their bodies in wells, that they took them up to the mountains for the soldiers. Was Maryna among those, excellenza?”
“I have given you my word for her safety,” responded Jurka. “The war is past. You brood too much over fancied terrors. Listen to reality. This is what you may fear. If you do not procure the jewels from this girl to-night, I will have your throat wrung for you like a dead fowl. We save bullets for men, not cowards.”
“And after I get them, we go back, excellenza?” There was almost a whine in the query. The boy shrank back in the corner ofthe car. His cigarette had gone out. His face looked narrow and pinched in the darkness. “You will see that I go back to Rigl?”
“Rich for life,” Jurka assured him languidly. “You will be able to buy the yellow castle, if you fancy it, and many cattle and sheep. The queen is not one to forget such services, my Steccho, nor I. When I meet her in Switzerland and give her the jewels, I will tell her of you.”
The muscles of Steccho’s face relaxed. After all, he was a fool to doubt. It was all quite simple. He would get the jewels. There would be the journey back as they had come, Georges as the Count’s courier, he as groom, caring for the two riding-horses, Vriki and Etelka. Then the heaped-up honors from the exiled queen herself, and, yes, the yellow castle if the little tired mother and Maryna still fancied it.
The Count spoke to Georges through the tube. “Drive to the east entrance nearest Sixty-Fourth Street,” he ordered. “Stop inside the Park.”
He did not speak again until they came to the entrance. As Steccho swung down to the pavement, he nodded to him with debonair, care-free grace. The car turned down Fifth Avenue and Steccho paused at the corner to catch the last glimpse of it. Jurka had hummeda few bars from a favorite waltz back in Sofia. The tune touched the chords of memory and home longing as nothing else had done. It was a waltz of the people played often at the little village dances where he had met Katinka. As he walked east on Fifty-Ninth Street he remembered her as he had seen her kneeling in church, bathed in the long glow of purple light that flowed through the stained-glass aureole of Saint Genevieve. Always as he had followed Carlota from the very first she had reminded him of his dead sweetheart. Over and over, when he had been tempted to betray her visits to Ames’s studio, the words had been checked on his lips as he met Jurka’s eyes and remembered the day his excellenza’s soldiery had carried the body of the girl from his quarters above the inn.
Twice before he reached the Saint Germain he stopped dead short, and looked back. But the lure of the yellow castle drew him forward, and he finally faced the east, eager for the night’s work.