Dmitri laid 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’s a 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 very manner. 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 of all 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 of Madison 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 forward with 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 stopped short 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 of the 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 hummed a 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.