CHAPTER XVII
“Nowwhat?” demanded Dmitri cheerily. “You look as stark as a dead fish, my friend. Have some wine.”
Steccho took the full glass gratefully, drained it, his head thrown far back, and wiped his lips with a sweep of his hand.
“I thought it was the police,” he said unsteadily.
Dmitri lit the fire in the brazier before he spoke. His eyes were filled with brooding solicitude when he looked back at the boy. Steccho’s whole posture showed more than mere exhaustion. There were dejection and fear in the slouch of his body as he sat forward on the edge of the couch, his fingers crumpled in his hair.
“You have done something to-night?”
The boy nodded.
Dmitri measured powdered Arabian coffee into the copper pot carefully.
“It is a pitiful penalty of wrongdoing,” he said compassionately, “the little ghosts of fear one must forever entertain. You have been followed here?”
“I am not afraid. I am hungry.” A shudderlike a chill shook his narrow, stooped shoulders. Dmitri eyed him anxiously. “Let us go around to Barouki, some place where it is quiet and we can talk.”
“None better than here. Lay off your coat and lie down. I will have you such a meal in twenty minutes as you have not tasted in months, not since you left home. I have broth, wine, and lamb to broil; grapes and bread and coffee.” He set a pot of broth over the blaze, brought out lamb from the cupboard with a small, smooth board to cut it on, and sat cross-legged on the floor before the brazier while he cut the meat into slices and skewered it with slices of raw onion between. “I am no wanderer at heart, you see. I like my own hearth-fire even if it is merely a charcoal blaze like this. I prefer to cook my own meals and know what I feed upon. Drink that broth.”
Steccho obeyed in moody silence. The reaction had set in after his rebuff at the Dupont. He drank the broth in deep swallows. The peace and genial atmosphere of the room had begun to seep through his consciousness as it always did. He felt that here he might lie and sleep for hours, until the fear that dogged his heels should have lost the scent. He wondered if the blade had reached the heart. He had dropped without a cry, the man who desiredboth rubies and her who was more precious than rubies. If it had not killed him, then he would waken and accuse—whom would he accuse? He had seen no assailant in the darkness. Would he, perhaps, say that Carlota had stabbed him, would he dare when he knew she had been unconscious in his arms? Besides, they would discover the rubies were gone; that would prove she was innocent, that another had dealt the blow and had taken them. He yawned exhaustedly.
“You could hide me here, if it had to be, yes?”
“Doubtless.” Dmitri set a savory mess of browned lamb on the black oak table and poured boiled rice into the broth to simmer. “I could hide you, but you would have to tell me why you were hiding. In these days we must guard our friends against their own impulses. Whom have you killed, Ferad?”
The Bulgarian stretched out his palms excitedly.
“And what is that, the death-stroke, nowadays? Life is the cheapest thing in the world.”
Dmitri poured wine into two tall metal drinking-cups. From the Metropolitan Tower came the strokes of two. He served the rice in silence, reserving comment, waiting for the confidence of the other. And suddenly Stecchorose from the table. He had eaten with a ravening hunger; now his old air of sullen bravado returned. He turned pocket after pocket inside out, emptying the jewels on the table before Dmitri as if he had been a gamin rolling marbles. Dmitri lifted his brows in relief and amusement as he looked at them, rubies and diamonds, rubies and pearls, set in old silver and gold.
“So, you play with these, my friend,” he smiled. “I had thought you were grown to a man’s desire. These are the devil’s toys to catch the tinkling fancy of women and girls. Did you need money? I would have given you all I had.”
Steccho laughed, his heavy black hair rumpled over his forehead. He shook his head impatiently. After his long fast, the wine was stirring his brain to resentment against Jurka.
“I bring them to you that you may choose for me,” he said. “This is why I am here. They are the missing crown jewels, the rubies of the queen.”
Dmitri stared at him incredulously. Yet the gems lay there before him. The boy spoke the truth. These were imperial in their beauty and value. He lifted the pendant, gazing intently at the Zarathustra ruby, the second largest in the world.
“The queen?” he repeated incredulously. “She is in Switzerland. She sent you here?”
“Not I.” Steccho laughed in derision, tightening his belt. “I am Ferad Steccho, a dog to be kicked and denied, you understand. The queen will thank Count Jurka, but I—I, Steccho, am the one who got the jewels for her, and it is you, my Dmitri, who will decide whether we ever give these to the queen who waits for them. That is why I come to you, not to hide me, but to tell me what to do.”
Dmitri’s thoughts centered on the name he had spoken, Jurka. The former court chamberlain, the ex-attaché who had been given the favor and confidence of the queen herself in the cataclysm of fate that had swept her throne from under her, the suave, faithful, blond Jurka. He watched the dark, eager face of the boy, touched with vivid high lights along point of chin, cheek, and nose by the firelight in the open grate.
“Do you think for one moment a man like Jurka would undertake this mission out of any loyalty or desire to assist a queen in exile unless—I did not think you would help to feather the nest of such a bird as Jurka.”
He checked himself abruptly. Steccho struck his clenched fists upon the table between them, the jewels unheeded as he poured out his words.
“I did not take them for him or for the queen. It was the price he demanded of me for the safety of my mother and sister.”
Dmitri glanced to the mantel where the letter lay. He had forgotten it in the surprise of Steccho’s coming, but now he waited to hear him out before he gave it to him.
“Jurka sent for me in Sofia. He was working with the relief committee there, a mask to hide behind merely. He remains an agent of the royalists. He told me these were part of the crown jewels. They had been stolen years ago by some Italian woman loved by the crown prince. He said they had traced them here to New York. What do I care for them?” He pushed the rubies from him resentfully. “I tell you they are unlucky. The rubies are for blood, the pearls for tears, always I hear my mother tell that. Here they were worn by an innocent girl—”
He stopped. Would he tell Dmitri all the truth, of the girl Carlota, whom his friend had loved, of her peril, and why he had taken the jewels from the keeping of the man who jeered at love?
“How did you first meet Jurka? How did he know these were here? Whom have you killed to get them for him?”
Dmitri strove to speak calmly. Behind theboy’s story lay some conspiracy of Jurka’s, another undercurrent to reckon with in the great crimson tidal wave.
“I was suspected of being a revolutionist and ordered shot.” Steccho spoke jerkily, between his teeth, his head back as he smoked. “My father was head gamekeeper, before the war, on the Count’s estate north of Rigl where our home was. You know the place? On the mountain road from Moritza there is a castle of yellow rock standing high above the town.” He drew long inhaled puffs from his cigarette. The castle in the sun glow! The strange, numb, unsteadiness swept over him again as it had back there on the fire escape when he had watched the man seize Carlota. Lust and youth, even as Jurka had ravished the sweetness and laughter and pure joyousness of Katinka.
Dmitri and the room slipped out of his vision, submerged in a gray ocean of restfulness beyond which gleamed the castle of his dreams. How it had stood as an eternal symbol to his boyhood of the pomp and majesty of kings! Then had come the schooling at Sofia, and the smouldering fires of revolution that crept through the dry rotting underbrush and mould of oppression, unnoted by those who saw only the bravery of waving green boughs in the sunlight.
He had met Dmitri Kavec there, a teacher of political economy and sociology, tutoring younger men to pay his way, writing for certain Continental papers, talking always of the day when freedom should dawn. He was a Czech, with a mingling of Romany blood in his veins. It showed in his mastery of the violin, in his dark skin, not swarthy like Steccho’s, but clear and pale as yellow wine with the underlay of red. The boy’s eyes were furtive, restless, Dmitri’s like those of some captive eagle that sits motionless, watching passing crowds, alert and fearless. He, Steccho, had felt proud when he had been asked to join the group of men who assembled nightly in Dmitri’s quarters above the old coffee-house in the lower square. He had sat and listened to them, learning much of the underground wiring of secret diplomacy, much of the patience of the thinkers and workers.
Then had come dissension and a break in the university club ranks. Dmitri was called a dreamer, one of those who believed the end might be reached by brotherhood and teaching of the people. Even Steccho had chafed at such doctrine. Rather he liked the fighting, the carrying of blazing flambeaux in the race, the song of the torch, as Dmitri called their propaganda. After the outbreak of war he had become aspy for the Internationals. It had ended with that winter day when the royalist troops had caught him hiding in Rigl. A troop occupied the town on its way up to the mountain passes above Moritza. Personages of importance sat in conference with Jurka in the old smoke-stained room at the inn, and Steccho had found a way of listening, half-wedged down the side flue of an old rock chimney.
He had overheard much, gossip mostly from Jurka, of the vacillating, ambitious king who craved the title of Czar, of his wife, the sour-visaged queen, whom he had never loved, the stool pigeon of William. They had chatted of these, speculating on who would head the royalist cause if some day Ferdinand chanced to oversleep, found like his old friend Abdul Hamid with a five-inch blade parting his ribs.
Steccho had listened eagerly. There was a trickle of truth here and there through the talk. They placed more confidence in Sophia than in the king. The soldiers were grumbling for back pay. Some officers had been shot in the back by their own men. They had been caught fraternizing with the enemy, exchanging food and tobacco under the very noses of the nobles. Stores of supplies for the officers’ mess had been broken open and scattered to the wounded by their comrades.
Straws in the wind, Jurka said, his back to the fireplace, but signs to the wise. The people wearied of oppression. They must be taught to dance to a new tune. With victory Bulgaria would swallow up her enemies, she would sit like a brooding lioness, her cubs about her, renegade Greece, recreant Roumania, Servia crawling, the Slovacs whipped to heel. And eager to hear more, Steccho had leaned like a fool too far forward to catch the low-spoken words, and a rumble of loosened bricks had startled the soldiers into action.
He had been forced down by a dozen pricking, reaching sword-points as if he had been a porcupine in a hole, and had been condemned to be shot at once against the stable wall in the courtyard below.
He had heard the scream of his mother as the old women held her back, and had tried to reach her. The soldiers had beaten and kicked him as he lay in the snow, and Maryna, the little sister, had burst through the line, and by some miracle of grace he had been granted his life at her plea. Jurka had said with grave gallantry, as he smoothed back her heavy silken flaxen hair, that Saint Ginevra herself had surely intervened in his behalf.
“So you became a royalist, a serf—rather than join the gray marchers to the shades?”Dmitri smiled at the boy. “Better to have remained up the chimney and wakened singing in a chorus of victory. See how your hand shakes. You have bad nerves, my boy. You rush down here in a fit of pique like an emotional girl because Jurka desires to sleep and not be disturbed. If he refused to see you to-morrow, you might throw the playthings into the river and become revolutionist again. That way lies madness.”
Steccho picked up the necklace, staring at the rubies with dreamy eyes. The warmth of the fire and the good meal with wine filled him with a glow of relaxed nerves and a sense of well-being and safety.
“I am no revolutionist. I hate to kill. I hate strife and turmoil and change. Yet I hate Jurka, too, and his kind. I was his bondman because he swore to protect my mother and Maryna. Do you know what they did after the uprising in Poltenza, twelve miles from us? They shot the villagers down against the gray wall of the market-place, two hundred of them, and the girls were given first to the officers, then to the soldiery, and we found their bodies piled in the wells, a trick from the Turks. It serves two purposes. We have been patient, Dmitri. See, I ask you. Shall we sell these and give the money to those who workfor freedom? How much could I get for them, two hundred thousand, three, five?”
“More,” replied Dmitri gently, “and your throat slit. Listen, my boy. Revolution is a mad dog. Who will thrust a lighted torch into the hands of a maniac or idiot? I do not think the hour has struck when men are content with the creed of violence. They weary of bloodshed. They ask, Is this all, bodies, bodies, more bodies until the whole horizon is filled with them, and one may not find the sky?”
“Ah, you talk,” Steccho muttered drowsily. “Jurka says you are a spy of the Internationals.”
Dmitri smiled, slowly stirring the charcoal embers beneath the brazier into a glow.
“I am no spy,” he said. “I am a watcher on the outer walls, my Ferad. I am an opportunist, not aristocrat nor socialist nor even democrat. I do not like a beaten path, but I love the ideals of tradition. I love opportunity. That is why America fascinates me. Life is a game, and all games lose their zest if one plays with a cheat, he who ignores the rules and sets up his own. One objects to the stacked deck and loaded dice. Also, each man should have a chance to deal. The trouble with your Jurkas, your aristocrat, he deals all the hands and gives himself the best. The trouble with yourevolutionists, you would deal everybody the same kind of a hand, and that makes the game stupid and uninteresting. There is no law of chance, no thrill to your game. You fatalists believe that man deals, but Fate shuffles the cards. Have more to eat.”
“No one can play a fair game with such as Jurka.”
Steccho ignored the proffered food, his face on his hands.
“Then use his own tricks against him. Look you, my friend, the gambling instinct is the keenest in all men, for we have learned that, after all, life is a great gamble. The only thing you are sure of is that you are sure of nothing. If I took up this sport, this gambling with human lives, I would do so for the pure thrill of it. I like the plunger, the good loser always. But your Jurka type, he who plays the game doggedly, who merely wants something for nothing, you will find him a bad loser. He plays to win only; the other type of man plays for the thrill of achievement. Your anarchist, too, he takes a hand. If he loses, he will say the game is crooked, and demand a new deal. If he wins, he plays safe and stops, taking all the winnings. He is like your aristocrat, after all; he will amuse himself with solitaire forever if you give him the chance.”
Steccho rose moodily, walking up and down the floor.
“You have stolen to please the lust of empire,” Dmitri resumed, smoking leisurely. “You are like the man who is afraid to play the game, to take a chance himself, so he turns the wheel for others. If he fares well from the man who wins, he likes him; if not, then he is for the man who loses. He listens to what this man says, Let us break up this house and do away with gambling forever. We will all play safe, then, eh? But it is not possible, Ferad. All philosophy fails to reconcile human nature. We are all gamblers. The trouble is that your Jurkas give the game a bad odor, and then the losers cry out that the whole game is not worth while. We are too selfish. We forget that we all lay up riches but for the heirs of to-morrow. I would make the way easy. I would strive to clear away the barriers that all might reach the goal of opportunity. Yet I would not hobble the swift that the slow may keep pace with them. Will you sleep here to-night?” He laid his arm around the boy’s shoulders. “Do not think me unsympathetic. It is dangerous to play the game here, and the weak go under. There are some that cheat. I think Jurka is a cheat. We did not fight to make the world safe; that would be a bore. We fought to make it livable.”
“I do not care for anything but to see my mother and sister again,” said Steccho.
Dmitri’s brow cleared. “Ah, and I am forgetting all the good news for you!” he cried, seizing the letter from the mantel. “Here is word from home. We will pour more wine and plan to send you back free from the talons of the black eagle.”
Steccho’s face softened in a glow of tenderness as he caught the letter. There came the noise from without of a footfall on the steps, hesitant, doubtful. As the boy swept the jewels from the table, a tapping sounded on the outer door. Dmitri flung back the drapery before the door of his bedroom.
“There is the window,” he whispered. “Watch out before you drop from it.”
The knock came again, this time louder. He lowered the light and went to answer it.