The dangerous inheritance : Or, The mystery of the Tittani rubies

By Forrester

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Title: The dangerous inheritance
        Or, The mystery of the Tittani rubies

Author: Izola L. Forrester

Release date: February 16, 2025 [eBook #75383]

Language: English

Original publication: Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920

Credits: David E. Brown, Andrew Butchers, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DANGEROUS INHERITANCE ***





THE DANGEROUS INHERITANCE




  THE DANGEROUS
  INHERITANCE
  OR
  The Mystery of the Tittani Rubies

  BY
  IZOLA FORRESTER

  [Illustration]

  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
  The Riverside Press Cambridge
  1920




  COPYRIGHT, 1919 AND 1920, BY THE NEW IDEA PUBLISHING COMPANY
  COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY IZOLA FORRESTER PAGE
  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED




THE DANGEROUS INHERITANCE




THE DANGEROUS INHERITANCE

[Illustration]




CHAPTER I


The town studio of Signor Jacobelli faced the west. It was situated on
the top floor of an old eight-storied building in the West Fifties.
Thirty years ago this had been given over entirely to studios, but
now it was broken up into a more profitable mêlée of semi-commercial
establishments and light-housekeeping apartments.

The signor, having no doubt the Old-World propensity for permanency,
had maintained his studio here for over twenty years, without
regard for the changing conditions around him, if indeed he were
even conscious of them. His own immediate outlook and environment
had remained the same. The view to the west and south from the
deep, double-sized windows had varied little, and held a perpetual
fascination for him. Thin red chimneys in neighborly groupings on
adjacent roofs assumed delicate color values of amethyst and quivering
saffrons from Jersey sunsets that turned even the old buildings
down towards the riverfront into mystical genii palaces in the early
twilight.

Dust lay unnoted upon bookshelves and music-racks about the large,
friendly room. The Turkish rug that covered its floor had long since
lost all outline of pattern and was as exquisite a blur as the
rose-flushed sea mist that hung over the lower end of the island city.

Carlota stood in a window recess, her back to the signor and his
unexpected guest, her fingers tying and untying the faded purple silk
cord of the shade. From where he sat in the old winged armchair by the
piano, Ward caught a perfect silhouette of her profile against the glow
of western light. Listening to Jacobelli’s fiery protest in his usual
silent way, his mind dwelt upon the blossoming of this foreign flower
of girlhood who had so strangely attracted him from the first time he
had ever looked into her eyes.

The Marchese Veracci had called him up from the Italian Club two years
before, and had besought his good offices for the granddaughter of
Margherita Paoli. The following evening they had called on him by
appointment. He half closed his eyes, recalling the picture of the girl
as he had first seen her. They awaited him in the Florentine room.
Even then she had not thought of him, but had stood before a painting
of Sorrento, a view through the ravine looking seaward, one hand laid
on her breast, her eyes filled with the yearning of youth’s loneliness.
She had met him silently, her hand cold as it rested an instant in his
palm.

And the old Marchese had pleaded her cause with fervent eloquence.

“I have Jacobelli’s word on her voice,” he said. “What more would you?
If you but speak Guido Jacobelli’s name to any European director, he
bows to the old maestro’s dictum.”

“He has retired,” Ward returned.

“Retired, yes, from the money mart.” The Marchese had beamed upon the
great international banker almost tolerantly. “You cannot comprehend
his attitude. No amount of money could tempt him to teach the tyro, the
climber, but he has heard Carlota. He knew Paoli well in Italy. It was
her influence and friendship which first brought him fame and power.
Now he has said that her voice lives again in the child, but there must
be at least four years of incessant application and training. To keep
her voice divine, she must never be troubled by material cares. She
must have an abundance of everything that she needs that her whole
nature may relax and expand to give her the freedom to devote her whole
life to her career.”

Ward had understood. He knew Guido Jacobelli. While the old maestro was
a high priest of art, his price for teaching genius was in proportion
to his faith. It had been Carlota’s own attitude of indifference
which had dominated his decision. While the Marchese had argued and
pleaded for her future, and Maria Roma, her guardian, had hung upon the
final word from Ward’s lips, she had listened gravely, her attention
wandering constantly to the rare art treasures of the room. Once she
had met his eyes as he asked her a direct question.

“You are very young to study seriously. Do you realize the sacrifices
you must make?”

“I have always studied to be a singer, signor,” Carlota had told him,
her eyes even then disconcerting in their wide intensity. “There are no
sacrifices when you love your vocation.”

Ward had smiled back at the Marchese, quoting lightly,

  “I did renounce the world, its pride and greed
        ... at eight years old.”

“My dear,” he added, “one of your own countrymen has spoken so,
Fra Lippo Lippi. No parallel, though, eh, Veracci? Here we have the
consecration of genius. I will advance fifty thousand. Is it enough?”

Carlota had met his appraising eyes with the aloof resentment of an
influence that disturbed her.

“Speak, cara mia,” Maria Roma had cried, tears streaming down her plump
cheeks, as she clasped her arms enthusiastically around her charge.
“Have you no word of thanks?”

And Ward had never forgotten the flash of challenge in the girl’s dark
eyes as she had given him her hand.

“I will succeed and pay you back, signor,” she had said. He might have
been merely a money-lender to a princess of the de’ Medici.

He had made only one stipulation and that half in jest, though Maria
and the Marchese had agreed most earnestly. She was not to marry nor
become entangled in love affairs during the period of her tuition. The
concession had completely escaped Carlota’s attention. She had wandered
by them out into the wide corridor, stifled by the somber silence of
the great closed rooms. Not a single fountain falling in the distance,
not a living flower anywhere, nothing but age-old treasures in a
palatial, modern museum. He had not spoken to her again, only she had
heard his last words to Jacobelli.

“May the fruit fulfill the promise. I will come to see you now and
then.”

Through the two years of study he had kept his word. Every few months,
unawares, he would come to the old studio and sit for a while,
listening to Jacobelli and watching his pupil. Even while he never
spoke a word of direct intent to her, Carlota felt a vague uneasiness
in his presence, under the steady power of his gaze. He carried with
him the impression of a compelling, dominant masterfulness, all the
more irresistible through its silence and tireless patience. He was
in the late thirties at this time, tall and heavy-set, his head, with
its thick, close-cut blond hair, thrust forward from a habit of silent
intentness. There was the strongest suggestion of the leonine about
him. Once, when she was a child, Carlota remembered being taken to see
a captive Algerian lion that had just been brought across for the royal
zoo. With a city mob surging forward to stare at him, the lion had lain
with an imperial languor and indifference, gazing with unblinking eyes
beyond the crowd and the city, seeing only the desert that held his
whole life’s desire. Sometimes, in the studio, during one of Ward’s
visits, she would catch his eyes fixed upon her, while Jacobelli
flamed out into some argument or dissertation, and she would shrink
from the purpose that lay behind their patience.

To-day the voice of Jacobelli filled the studio, and Carlota’s delicate
dark brows contracted sharply as she listened.

“What more can I do? I have given her all that I know of technique and
harmony, and still her voice lacks that emotional quality which the
greatest alone possess. The divine voice must have dramatic feeling,
intensity. It must lose itself in the grandest passion of emotion. The
child tries, but what would you? She does not understand the lack in
her own nature. Her woman soul yet slumbers.”

Ward glanced at him with amused, quizzical eyes.

“Let it sleep, Jacobelli. Remember Paoli when she let love conquer her.”

For the moment the old maestro forgot the figure behind the window
curtain. With arms thrown upward he turned on the banker.

“You know not anything about Paoli! I, Jacobelli, tell you that! You
cannot speak of her with any understanding. She was a law to herself
in her own generation. Few women can be that. But I, who know what lay
behind the wall of Tittani, say to you I would rather this child lay
dead now, with no fulfillment in her life, than that she should know
the agony and failure as an artiste that her grandmother did when she
sacrificed her whole womanhood--for what? Love, pouf!”

“Can a woman’s nature reach its ripest fulfillment without love?”
Ward’s tone was lowered. “History proves that the greatest geniuses
have been those who suffered most.”

“But not the singer, signor.” Jacobelli paused in his march up and down
the studio. “The singer is something different. It is instinctive. I
have heard the most marvelous impassioned voices pour from the most
commonplace peasant types. I have heard the greatest tenor of all
times tear the emotions of thousands to pieces, and step into his
dressing-room to rail at his wife for not providing his favorite dish
for him after the opera, ravioli and lampreys. The most superb lyric
voice of to-day comes from a little, stout contadina who picked up
centimes around the flower-market in Naples when I was young. Do you
think she acquired divinity of soul and utterance from some supreme
emotion? Ridiculous. She is a gourmand, a virago, absolutely bourgeois,
yet she sings like a seraph. Why, then, is it not in Carlota’s voice?”

Ward rose leisurely. The old silken curtains hung motionless. The
shadows were heavy in the corners of the studio.

“She is a higher type,” he said in a low voice. “When you agree with
me, bring her to me.”




CHAPTER II


After Ward had gone the old Italian maestro seated himself at the
piano, improvising as he always did when he was disturbed. It was an
enormous old ebony instrument, mellow and vibrant in its response to
his touch. He did not even look up as Carlota leaned her elbows upon a
pile of dusty folios, watching him anxiously. Finally she drew a quick,
impatient breath.

“I wish he would never come here again.”

“It is customary,” Jacobelli shrugged his expansive shoulders. “You
are too sensitive, my dear. It is you who are conferring a favor in
permitting this person to provide the means for your education. You
will return to him, in the hour of your triumph, every penny it has
been his privilege to advance at this time.”

“Why does he come here and sit looking at me in such a way? In the
courtyard at home there were little lizards that came out early in the
morning, gray and cold, with eyes like his, green in the light. I was
always afraid of putting my hand on one of them around the fountain.”

Jacobelli struck a minor chord, avoiding her eyes.

“Because he is a man, and you are growing beautiful. You will become
accustomed to this sort of thing. All men will love you, or seem
to. It is the compliment paid to women who are great artistes. Your
grandmother was adored in her day. Kings and princes knelt at her
shrine, and fought for her favor. Even I was infatuated with her. You
must learn to smile impersonally and receive homage.”

“Then it is not--love?” Carlota asked doubtfully. “I heard what you
said to him about her. Why did you say that, about her suffering and
sacrifice? I never remember her like that. She was wonderful. She
seemed to give out radiance and warmth like the sunlight. Wasn’t she
happy?”

Jacobelli’s hands were flung up suddenly, and he laughed at her.

“My dear, who may say when a woman is happy or when she is not.
Sometimes they find their greatest happiness in their most supreme
suffering. She was divine, that is enough. As for love, Carlotina mia,
it is merely Life’s plaything. It is the toy we give to youth, but
never, never to genius. The rabble amuses itself with what it calls
love. But genius is sufficient unto itself. It is the celestial fire.
It does not seek a mortal torch upon its altar.”

“You said you would rather see me dead--” began Carlota slowly, when
the little electric bell at the outer door rang lightly, announcing
Maria Roma at her customary hour of five. As always, she followed it
by half opening the door, peering around with an arch, reconnoitering
glance.

“Do I intrude?” she asked, with her beaming smile, and entered
impressively, always with the dramatic action as if the orchestra had
sounded her motif. She shook one forefinger impressively at Carlota.
“You loiter and take up the maestro’s time, gossip and loiter when you
should be studying.”

But Jacobelli waved aside the admonition with one ample movement of his
large, plump hand. As Carlota went to the inner room for her cloak and
hat, he spoke in an undertone.

“Ward is becoming very much interested in her. She treats him with
indifference. You must teach her diplomacy. She has too much arrogance
of youth, and absolutely no gratitude for what he is doing for her.”

Maria’s brilliant dark eyes narrowed with comprehensive amusement.

“You ask the impossible, Guido. I who have known all three, Margherita,
Bianca, and this glorious child, tell you the truth, and you will
remember what I say. You can no more teach the heart of a Paoli to keep
its temperament within bounds than you can yoke the thunder-clouds and
lightning that sweep down over our Trentino.”

“And the responsibility is ours,” said Jacobelli, with a deep
exhalation of his cigarette. “Given this nature, we are to keep her a
prisoner behind the wall of Tittani, eh?”

Maria sank deeply into the velvet-cushioned chair beside him, and the
two smiled at each other reminiscently.

“It was a high wall,” she sighed at length. “I remember your last visit
there, Guido, before the child was born, five years I think it was.
Bianca was a flower then. Such flaming hair and dark eyes, the true
Florentine type. She was more like Tittani in her looks. Carlota is a
throwback to the grandmother. Ah, my Guido, was there ever a woman like
her? Even at the last, before he died, when her heart was torn with
agony of renunciation--”

“She lost her voice,” Jacobelli spoke with finality. “Yet Ward would
tell me love is the great fulfillment. Did she ever sing again? No.
She buried her art with her love in the grave of her poet after he had
denied her to the world. You and I, Maria Roma, who know of this, must
protect this child against the traitor in her own nature.”

Maria sighed doubtfully. She was the large, vivid type of the Italian
peasant, richly developed by success and circumstance. Years before,
Sforza, director of La Scala, had journeyed with friends to a mountain
section of the Trentino. In the purple twilight a voice had drifted
down to them from a band of vintage workers, homeward bound. It was
Maria Roma at eighteen, a buoyant, deep-breasted bacchante, her black
hair hanging in thick clusters of curls around her radiant face.

Enrico Sforza had loved her, more perhaps for her ardent faithfulness
and responsiveness. She had achieved a sensation in contralto rôles and
he had interested La Paoli in his peasant love. In middle age, after
his death, Maria had retired to live at the Villa Tittani with the old
diva. Here she had shared with her in the tragedy of her final years.
Fifty years before, the story of Margherita Paoli and her love for
John Tennant, the English poet, had been part of the romance of Italy.
Her beauty and genius had opened every door of success to her. Even on
the threshold of womanhood she had been given all that ambition could
demand from life, and turning in the highest hour of her triumphs, she
had forsaken the world for a year, giving the full gift of her love to
Tennant.

Suddenly she had returned, restless and hungering for her art. As Maria
knew, Tennant had been jealous of her voice and the life which he could
not share, had demanded that she give up her career for the sake of
their love, and return with him to England. And she had laughed at
him. Love could not bring full completeness and happiness to a woman
of genius, she had said. It could not satisfy her for the loss of the
divine fire. Tennant had left Italy, and five years later she married
Count Tittani. Bianca, the mother of Carlota, had been born at the old
villa overlooking the Campagna. She had spent her childhood here, and
in the convent of Maria Pietà at the head of the ancient ilex avenue
leading up from Mondragone. Tittani had died when she was nine, leaving
La Paoli the prestige of his name and wealth combined with her own full
measure of maturity in her art.

It was at this time that Maria had come nearest to her confidence. Word
came from England to them that Tennant had been stricken blind, and in
the midst of a gala performance of “Traviata,” La Paoli had left all
and gone to him. He had refused to see her when she reached London.
Bertrand Wallace, his closest friend, had told her simply enough that
he was without means, that he longed to go to Italy where “he might
feel the sun on his face,” and she had entered into the splendid
conspiracy that glorified the end of her life.

The Villa Tittani faced the Campagna with a lofty, blank wall. Beyond
it stretched terraced gardens, winding alleys of cypress and ilexes,
a place of enchantment, with the never-ending music of falling waters
in the distance, of hidden fountains in grottoes, and cascades that
fell over ancient steps in ripples of silver. Yet all its beauty was
dominated by its wall, blank on one side, terraced on the garden side
into long, steep depths of mystery, of infinite green vistas that lost
their way in the cypress gloom of the lower distances.

Here Wallace brought his friend, the blind poet, to the little house
near the end of the wall where the view opened seaward. Two old
servants of the Tittani had cared for him until his passing, and here
La Paoli could come and watch him from a distance, unseen or suspected
in the largesse of her love by the man whose faith she had betrayed for
fame. It was characteristic of her that even in her grief and isolation
from him, she seemed to find a supreme, almost fierce, satisfaction in
the tragic immolation of her own happiness for his sake. He had died
finally, unconscious, on her breast, and she had never sung again.

“You see, Maria, I have proved the truth of it in my own heart’s
blood,” she had said, “A woman cannot serve two gods. If Bianca has
my voice, help me to teach her this: no man is content with half of a
woman’s love or nature. If she desires to attain to the highest art,
she must sacrifice love.”

Within six months after she had left the shelter of the convent Bianca
had married Peppino Trelango, son of a dead patriot. The Contessa had
cared for him through his boyhood, because she had heard him playing on
his violin once on the old quay at Pontecova where centuries before the
body of the boy count, Giovanni Borgia, had borne witness against his
brother in the dawn. When Bianca came home, she had met him in the old
gardens, a boy of nineteen, like one of the marble fauns come to life
to teach her youth’s heritage. When the Contessa returned from a trip
to her favorite midsummer retreat at Isola Bella, she had found the two
gone, and Maria desolate with despair.

It was from this romance that Carlota had been born. After the death
of Peppino in an Algerian skirmish, Bianca had returned to the villa
behind the old rose-colored wall with her child. She had lived in the
gardens with the memories of her love, a silent, smiling, stately girl
who baffled the vivid, emotional La Paoli by the elusive sensitiveness
of her nature.

“She is the wraith of my passion for the love I denied,” the Contessa
would declare. “I starved for him, and trampled the desire with
my pride while I bore her to Tittani. She is the very spirit of
renunciation, Maria, and she will drive me to madness with her silence
and resignation. Carlota is not like her. She is a flame, a beautiful
rosebud, all light and movement. She is like I was, God keep her.”

Carlota was four when they bore her mother down to the old tomb of
the Tittani. She could remember her voice at night when she bent over
her to kiss her, and the fall of her long, soft hair over her face.
Sometimes in their walks through the gardens, in the quiet years of her
girlhood, she would come to the old tomb set into the hillside, its
iron gates overgrown with vines, and she would lean her cheek against
them. Assunta, her nurse, would scold her for not keeping her thoughts
on the spiritual.

“Ah, a little that was my mother lies here,” Carlota would answer. “I
may love it, Assunta, without sinning, may I not, just her beautiful
hair even?”

After Italy entered the war, the villa had been turned into a hospital,
and the fortune of the Contessa laid at the feet of “La Patria.”

“Still, there is some left,” she had told Maria at the time of her
own departure. Strong in spirit and dominant, she had ruled to the
end, planning and directing Carlota’s future. “I have given the child
a heritage and training that are priceless. If you have to, sell the
jewels in the cinque cento chest. They are for her. I have not even
looked at them since he died. Take her to America, Maria. Find there
Guido Jacobelli. He was a boy when I made my début, before your time,
the gala performance of ‘Rigoletto.’ I was a wonderful Gilda, Maria.
Later I gave him his first start. He is not one who forgets. You will
go to him in New York and he will find you a patron. I have written
to the Marchese Veracci to expect you and see that you are lodged
fittingly. No economy. Surround her with beauty and comfort while she
studies, but keep her from love until she has won success. Her mother
sacrificed all for Peppino’s kiss. If I were able I would keep her here
behind the wall of Tittani and never let her see the face of a man
whom she might love. Dust and ashes all, Maria. The greatest and most
enduring is the memory of a lost love.”

After the closing of the old villa, Carlota and Signora Roma had come
to New York. Maria had been prodigal in her expenditures. She had
taken an expensive studio and had lavished the tenderest care on her
charge.

“The art quarters of Europe, cara mia,” she would say to her airily
when Carlota protested, “have been filled for generations with
what?--failures. Boy and girl aspirants, pitiful little garret Pierrots
and Columbines, starving upon hopes that never materialized. Art is
greedy. It demands all of your nerve, force and vitality. To come
out of the training of the next four years a victor, you must pamper
yourself. Dress well, eat well, feed your love of beauty as well as
your stomach. Remember, ‘white hyacinths for the soul as well as bread
for the body.’ You will be a slave to your art, and must keep the fires
burning.”

“But you will use up all we have,” Carlota had protested.

“What then?” Maria had demanded proudly. “You have only a small fortune
left. You must have thousands, tens of thousands before you bow to your
first night’s audience.”

They had met the old Marchese Veracci the first week of their arrival.
Few there were in the Washington Square section of the city who were
not familiar with the stately Old-World figure of the Marchese. He
was as welcome in the crowded Sicilian quarter below Fourth Street
as in the corridors of the Brevoort or Lafayette. He held his court
daily at the fountain in the center of the Square. Always with a fresh
boutonnière and a smile and courtly word for every dark-eyed child
who laughed back at him. Sometimes, when he strolled past the bust of
Garibaldi, he would leave a little spray of flowers on the pedestal.
After dinner he never failed to stroll out into the twilight and lift
his soul in salute to the cross of light that gleamed on the memorial
tower above the trees.

“It is the one spot in the whole city,” he told them, “that holds the
Old-World glamour and charm, yet I would not have you and Carlota
living down here. The lines of demarcation are too blurred between the
workers and the dreamers. Then, too, there are the dancing shapes that
come to stare and ridicule. There is a contagion of play here that
breaks the concentration you must put into your study, my child. Keep
away from it at this period. Later, I could wish you nothing better
than to share in the spirit of comradeship in art and beauty, yes, and
most of all, in humanity. That you will find down here, no matter how
others try to detract from the atmosphere, like the very small boys who
will ever toss pebbles at the stained-glass windows of the saints.”

Maria Roma had agreed fervently to anything he said. His delighted
enthusiasm satisfied her that the old Contessa had chosen rightly in
making him joint guardian with her over Carlota. Guido Jacobelli had
retired, he had told her over their first luncheon en tête-à-tête at
the Italian Club. Money would never tempt him to teach. Nothing but
brilliant genius in a pupil could ever lure him from his retreat to
give them the full benefit of his years of experience and study.

“I know him well, and of them all he is still the wizard, the maestro.
Even now, his word on a voice would open the gates of opportunity to
any singer. Casanova, of the Opera here, bows to his dictum. If it were
anybody but Margherita Paoli who calls to me, I would say no, but as
it is, ma bella, we will go. Two places I know where we may find him,
at his old studio in town and his country home at Arrochar, on Staten
Island. We will go there.”

The visit had proven Carlota’s crucial hour. Maria had hovered over her
excitedly, feeling that upon the great old maestro’s verdict lay the
entire future fate of her career. The Marchese had called for them and
had accompanied them out to Jacobelli’s home. It was typical of his
simplicity and love of nature. On the wooded heights above Kill von
Kull at Arrochar, lay a small colony of Italian artists and musicians.
Their homes were like miniature villas perched above a smaller bay
of Naples when the myriad lights gleamed on the shipping and distant
Jersey hills.

As they walked up the quiet hill street from the station, Carlota’s
dark eyes had sparkled with memories. Surely in this perfect fall day,
with the vivid blue of a cloudless sky above the deep crimson and
gold of autumn foliage, there was a semblance of the Villa Tittani’s
beauty. A rock wall covered with brilliant red creeper vines surrounded
the garden. It seemed neglected, with shrubbery straggling in groups,
unclipped and straying. The stone flower urns were overgrown with rank,
clambering vines. In the southeast corner a dancing faun poised with
wary, pointed ears, as if listening seaward. When the Marchese tried
to open the outer vestibule door of the enclosed veranda, two stately
Italian greyhounds rose leisurely and eyed the callers questioningly.

Within they had found Jacobelli living alone with his memories. Carlota
never forgot the picture that he made, welcoming them into his wide,
sunlit studio. Swarthy, stout, curly-haired, frowning at her from heavy
eyebrows, he had seemed to gauge and grasp her whole capabilities in
one swift, cursory glance. She had been caressed and encouraged all of
her life, but now, for the first time, she felt her confidence shaken
as she waited by the piano, facing the piercing eyes and uncompromising
glare of the old maestro. Never once, during the two years of study
under him that followed that first visit, had she shaken off that first
impression. Eccentric, proud, profoundly conscious of his power to make
or unmake queens of the operatic world, he had been a revelation to her
from that day.

The Marchese had pleaded for her eloquently, showing the letter he
had received from La Paoli a few weeks before her death. Jacobelli
had listened to it in silence, staring fixedly at the girl. She was
very like her grandmother in appearance, he thought. Behind her stood
a towering old terra-cotta jar filled with scarlet autumn leaves. She
looked out at the sea view, her eyes filled with a dreaming longing.
Her hair was heavy and lustrous, growing back from a low, broad
forehead with the shell-like outline one sees in the portraits of
Beatrice or one of Del Sarto’s girl saints. Her eyes were long and
shadowy, heavy-lidded, aloof. When she was interested or startled, they
opened widely, a deep, warm brown color, their darkness made more vivid
by the rare rose red of her lips and the peculiar jasmine clearness
of her skin. But it was something beyond mere beauty and grace that
arrested Jacobelli’s interest. There was a sense of suppressed vitality
about her, the insistent promise of the unusual, of some compelling
magnetism that lay behind her silence and repression. Suddenly he
seated himself at the long bench, and struck a chord for her pitch.

“Sing,” he ordered. “First, a long scale.”

Carlota had hesitated, looking to Maria for sympathy. Might she not
sing, for this supreme trial, some famous aria? But Signora Roma
had raised both hands in hushed rebuke. They were before the final
tribunal. The outcome was on the knees of the gods. But as the full,
vibrant soprano rose to the scale, Jacobelli struck a crashing chord
and leapt from the bench, clasping his arms about the slim figure at
his side.

“Ah, Sanctissima Maria, it is there!” he shouted. “It is the voice of
Paoli come to life once more! My beautiful, my marvel, ah, what we will
not make of you! Sing, cara mia, sing again for me. No, so!”

For over an hour Carlota sang for him, while Maria sat by the deep bay
window, weeping from sheer happiness, and the old Marchese strolled to
and fro, stroking the greyhounds, and smoking incessantly, keeping
time as he smiled at the success of his experiment.

The fruition of that first visit had come richly in the two years that
followed it. Carlota was eighteen now, with not alone the years of her
grandmother’s careful teaching, but Jacobelli’s unceasing discipline
and watchfulness as her voice ripened and developed. One year more and
she would be ready for her début, he said. It was this final year she
dreaded, with Ward’s visits to the studio becoming more frequent and
his interest in her losing its cloak of patronage.

She was silent on this day, almost during the entire homeward walk
across the Park. Their apartment had been Maria’s choice, selected
against the better judgment of even the Marchese. He had advised a
smaller, less expensive suite farther uptown, but in a conservative
section. Maria had cast the suggestion from her scornfully. For the
struggling student any environment was of secondary consideration, but
for the sole pupil of Guido Jacobelli, the protégée of Ogden Ward,
there must be a gilded cage. Between Fifth Avenue and Madison in the
upper Sixties she had found one that suited her, a spacious apartment
that in its richness of tone satisfied her. It might have been from the
Villa Tittani itself, by the time Maria had finished its decoration.

“You had worried the maestro to-day,” she said severely, as they
approached the heavy bronze and crystal entrance. “He could not even
improvise. We are giving our whole hearts and souls to you for your
success, and you are not grateful.”

Carlota turned her head and smiled at her tenderly. She was used to the
scoldings of the old prima donna.

“I am grateful to you, tanta mia,” she said, slipping her hand under
the other’s arm. “But I sometimes think I hate Mr. Ward. When I hear
his footstep I cannot sing any more, and when he sits there and looks
at me I could jump from the window. I hate his eyes and his voice and
everything about him.”

Maria’s dark eyebrows arched in amazement. She glanced with quick
suspicion at the girl’s troubled face.

“But you have no reason--have you?”

Carlota’s eyes narrowed with amusement at her anxiety. As they
entered the lower hall, she stripped off her long gray suède gloves
impatiently. The lights were not switched on yet, and she let one fall
near the outer steps. It lay, a part of the twilight, unnoticed by
either herself or Maria, but one who came behind them picked it up.
It was a mere fleeting impression she caught of him. Maria had stepped
into the elevator when he reached her side to return it, a curious,
poster-like figure, with the uncertain light accentuating his foreign
features and half-closed, seeking eyes.

“Yes, it is mine, thank you,” she said gravely, and carried with her
upstairs an impression of restless, suppressed dissent and discontent
combined with a haunting fragrance of a new cigarette smoke. When she
reached the apartment, while Maria hurried to make Russian tea for
them, she stood by the window, looking down over the boxes of green.
Across the street in the mother-of-pearl gloom, she could see the glow
of the cigarette where the boy stood, waiting for something, and it
held her with almost a premonition of menace.




CHAPTER III


Over the tea she was unusually silent, while Maria, ensconced at last
on her favorite chaise longue, mellowed under the warmth. Carlota’s
voice, cool with daring, broke in on her relaxation.

“Maria, when will you treat me as a woman?”

Maria’s face flushed as she spilled the tea blindly on the rug.

“You are in love?” she gasped. “Never would you have thought of such a
thing if you were not in love.”

“Oh, you poor, old preciosa!” Carlota laughed richly, folding her arms
around the signora’s ample shoulders. “I wouldn’t know love if I met
him face to face this minute in your teacup. But I want to know so
much, Maria. I want to ask you about so many things. You love me, do
you not? Enough to tell me anything at all I ask you?”

“Ah, do I not,” sighed Maria uneasily. “Is it about Mr. Ward?”

Carlota drew up a low footstool of rose silk and ivory carving, and
laid her glossy head close to the one on the pillows.

“I have said I hate him,” she replied composedly. “Let us forget that
I ever have to see him again. I want you to listen and love me more
than you ever have so you will answer me truthfully. Why did Signor
Jacobelli tell Mr. Ward to-day that my grandmother sacrificed her whole
womanhood and that he would rather see me dead than have me like her.
What was behind the wall of Tittani that I never knew about?”

“He is a pompous old egoist,” Maria answered with amazing composure
considering the tumult in her mind. “You remember her? Did she not live
like a queen with her court even at her age? She was the most regal
person I ever knew. You can remember the life at the villa? Was it
somber or full of unhappiness? She was the Contessa Tittani. She had
everything she wanted. Some day when you have gained all that she did,
we will go back to the old villa, and spend our summers there. Remember
your goats, beloved, the little Nini and Cherubini--”

“They will be gone when we get back,” Carlota said slowly. “You have
lied to me as you always do, Maria, with love. I will tell you things
I remember that you do not know I know. I can remember my mother. She
was very white, with eyes like the lower pool in the moonlight, and
her hair was so soft and so long. I felt it always over my face in the
darkness when she bent to kiss me good-night. I have dreamt I felt it
since, and wakened reaching for her. You know Assunta?”

Maria murmured an inarticulate, doubtful injunction to Assunta’s
attendant dæmon, and made horns with her finger-tips with a
subconscious reversion to the old superstition of the Trentino fireside
tales.

“She had a rattling tongue. What has she told you?”

“It was about the wall.” Carlota clasped her hands around her knees,
and looked before her seeing the way of the old villa and the beauty of
it. “It was so high to me in those days. I have looked up at it, Maria,
until it seemed as if its highest terrace met the sky.”

“There were seven, built by Giovanni Fontana.”

“I loved them. The stone was so old and rose-colored with green and
violet streaking it. On the side towards the road it was so bare and
forbidding, and on our side it was all beauty and lavishness as if
it could not give us too much, of its bounty. There was no entrance,
you remember, Maria, there by the road, and I used to follow the wall
around the garden trying to see how you ever went out through it. And
Assunta told me, I suppose to keep me satisfied, that no one had ever
found the way over the wall excepting my mother--”

“Ah, the blind, cackling pullet. If I had known--” Maria nodded her
head with relish. “She was selling melons in Mondragone when your
mother lived.”

“And when I asked her how my mother ever climbed the wall”--Carlota’s
eyes closed and opened again with dreamy ecstasy--“she told me she
escaped with the wings of love. After that--don’t scold, dear, I love
to talk to you about it, and there is no one else now--after that
I loved the wall better than all the gardens and the fountains and
the grottoes even. Won’t you tell me what Jacobelli meant, now? What
meaning did he put into it all, the wall and the unhappiness of my
grandmother and the tragedy of it all?”

Maria Roma was silent for some time. Slowly she reached for a cigarette
and lighted it, drawing deeply on it as she stared upward at the
ceiling.

“I have waited for this,” she said finally, with a sigh of resignation.
“Some day I knew you would ask me, and out of all the world, I would
rather tell you, because I will discriminate between what you should
know and what is best buried in that old garden tomb. Wait.” She
pushed away Carlota’s reaching arms. “See what I have saved for you out
of the past.”

Impulsively she rose and crossed to the end of the studio. Hidden here
behind old strips of tapestry and mediæval embroidery were old locked
chests which had been brought from Italy with all the care the dower
treasures of a princess might have commanded. Carlota had never even
guessed at their contents. If she had given the matter a thought at
all, she had believed them filled with little household keepsakes,
linen, silver, bric-à-brac which Maria had managed to save for her.

Now she stood in amazement as the old singer lifted out costume after
costume from the chests, stage raiment and festive gowns of thirty and
forty years before. From carved and inlaid boxes she drew out gems and
decorations that had been lavished on the great diva and laid them
before Carlota, forgetting in the pride of the moment the discretion of
silence regarding the romance of genius. The girl’s eyes widened with
glowing wonder and delight as she fingered the old treasures, listening
to Maria’s vivid, picturesque recital of the reign of Margherita Paoli.

“She was taller than you, cara mia, majestic, a queen in carriage
and expression. She never wore other hair than her own. It was
golden bronze and hung in ripples to her knees. I have woven it in
Marguerita’s plaits with these strands of pearls, and coiled it high
into Fedora’s crown with this diamond and ruby tiara. The necklace is
here, too.” She piled the contents of the cases eagerly until she found
it. “Rubies and diamonds. They came from the crown jewels of Roumania,
a part of the Constantinople loot centuries ago. The crown prince was
exiled to a mountain garrison in the Caucasus for two years after he
gave them to her, but he never told where they were. This center ruby
in the tiara is from Persia, one of the finest in the world. Some day
you shall wear them. They will suit you as they did her. And this--ah,
my child, you should have seen her wearing this in ‘Semiramide.’” She
lifted out a heavy barbaric stomacher encrusted in rough, uncut jewels.
“This was given to her by the Rajah of Kadurstan. He tried to kill
himself after the performance one night in Paris when she refused to
see him. This necklace of opals and emeralds was from the Grand Duke
of Teklahava. It had been part of the Byzantine loot in the days of
Ivan the Terrible. Ah, but, Carlota, behold, this was ever about her
throat, the medallion hidden in her breast from all eyes. Never will
I forget the night when Tennant gave it to her. The king had given
a farewell banquet for her. She was decorated and fêted as never any
other singer was. And after it was over, I saw the two as they stood
out in the moonlit loggia of the palace, and he clasped this about
her white throat. His portrait is in the medallion. There is a secret
spring--wait--so it opens. Was he not a worthy lover for her?”

Carlota looked long at the pictured face in the old gold and crystal
case. It was old-fashioned in style. The hair was worn long and curled
back thickly from his forehead. It was the head of an enthusiast,
boyish, too, in its eager intensity, passionate, unsatisfied.

“He does not look happy,” she said slowly. “I have never heard his name
before. Who was he, Maria?”

Signora slipped from the clouds with a shock of reality and caught the
medallion from her hand.

“No one, no one at all. See this ring, one single perfect solitaire
surrounded by black pearls, a gift from the Empress of France, my
child.”

Carlota rose, staring down at the wealth of jewels with puzzled, hurt
pride.

“Why have we accepted money from Mr. Ward to pay for my tuition when we
had these to sell?”

The vandalism of the suggestion horrified Maria. She replaced
everything with a resolute hand, locking each case from a small bunch
of keys suspended from a slender chain on her neck.

“You would market the trophies of your grandmother!” she said
haughtily. “America has commercialized you. They belong to the woman
you will be. I will give you the keys at your début.”

“I don’t care so very much for them. They are beautiful, but, after
all, they are only things you buy. I asked you for something richer.”
She laid her arms coaxingly about Maria’s throat. “Was my mother happy?”

“If love can make any woman happy, she was.” Signora Roma’s voice broke
with agitation. “Do not ask me anything further.”

“She was very young to die, was she not, only twenty-two? She was
younger than I am now when she first met my father, wasn’t she, Maria?”
No answer, but she felt the tears on her own cheek as she pressed it to
Maria’s face. “I think I know what it is you will not tell me. With all
the jewels and triumphs, my grandmother lost her love, and somehow, my
mother found love even though she died so young and was never famous.
Is that it?”

Maria suddenly reached her hands upward and framed the face above her
in a tremulous caress.

“You have the heritage of rebellion; how can I warn you or teach you to
fight it? Your worst enemy, Carlota, is your own heart. Distrust it. It
is the traitor to your individuality--your genius, whatever you like to
call it.”

Carlota stood erect, laughing suddenly, her arms outstretched widely.

“Listen to this that Assunta told me too,” she said teasingly. “Once,
hundreds of years ago, the Villa Tittani was part of an old castle. The
wall is all that is left of it, and the old tower above the grottoes.
And there was a Princess Fiametta--”

Maria made horns with her finger-tips hastily.

“Assunta was a scandalous waggle-tongue. Had I only guessed that she
was stuffing your ears with this sort of gunpowder, I would have known
how to finish her forever. I hear the bell.”

It was the Marchese, courtly and whimsical as he glanced shrewdly from
one to the other.

“I have come to entreat a favor,” he said happily. “After I have
partaken of your most excellent tea, ma bella Maria, I will ask it. I
have not the courage yet. How is our little one?”

Carlota’s brows drew together behind his back. She waited in silence,
listening while the Marchese brought Maria into a mellow mood with his
little buoyant stories and high lights of adventure.

“Ah, but I have seen sights to-day, a whole avenue of traffic held up
because a tiny goldfinch escaped from a bird store on Twenty-Third
Street. It alighted directly in the car track and shrank there panting
and terrified, and in this hard-hearted, prosaic city, not one would
drive over it. Is not that a fair sign of the times, my friend? And
again, I take the ’bus down the Avenue at dusk for the beauty of the
lights in perspective, like magnolia blooms if you but half close your
eyes. And yesterday I saw the conductor, a red-cheeked Irish boy,
reading a newspaper that had been left on a seat. What you think?
The baseball column? The sports? Not at all.” The Marchese chuckled
tenderly. “He reads the advice to young mothers. See? It is the brand
new bambino somewhere with its finger-tips rose-petaled, holding his
heart fast. And a pack of children on Thompson Street fighting--for
what? A trampled pink carnation. I would have turned them loose if I
could have, in that meadow of oleanders and the orange grove beyond,
you remember, Maria, as you come down from Frascati and below the
Campagna and the sea. Salute!” He sighed reminiscently, and reached
for his teacup. “I am an old romanticist, Carlota. Your youth must be
patient with my maunderings of sentiment.”

Maria retired to the kitchenette to prepare fresh tea, and Carlota
lighted the candles on the low table by the fire.

“You are happy, yes?” the Marchese asked, regarding her with the pride
he took no pains to conceal. “Jacobelli tells me it may only be for one
year more, and then, behold! I live for that first night of triumph.”

Carlota sighed impatiently. It was as though the sight of the jewels
and story of La Paoli’s life had wakened in her youth’s urge for
adventure. She looked up at the fine old face wistfully.

“I am lonely. Tanta keeps me as secluded as if I were in a convent.
Surely I am old enough to go out somewhere. Now that summer is over, it
seems as if I could not stand another winter. Aren’t they bleak here?
Every day when we walk in the Park, I want to turn and run from it all,
the stripped trees and caged animals, and Maria and Jacobelli, and
everything!” Her finger-tips stretched widely. “I am homesick.”

“No, you are just ennuied, that is all,” said the Marchese soothingly.
He pursed his lips until his silver-gray imperial and pointed mustache
took on the semblance of a crescent and scimitar. Yet his eyes twinkled
down at her understandingly. “Sunday evening I go, as is my custom, to
the home of my friend Carrollton Phelps. Many, many interesting people
drop in there at that time. It would be a beginning for you, but, mind,
I will not have you known for what you are. Not a whisper.”

“Are they all”--Carlota checked herself; not for worlds would she have
wounded the debonnair old courtier by even suggesting that he was past
the meridian of life--“famous?”

“No, no, no. They are all aspirants,” he corrected. “One must show some
signs of having the germ, at least, of genius before the door opens
widely, but you will find many who are young like yourself, many. I,
myself, will prepare Maria.”

But when the evening came the signora was indisposed, and insisted on
Carlota’s remaining with her. The Marchese waved her objections aside
tenderly.

“It is most informal and Mrs. Phelps is charming. Here in America,
Maria, we adjust the barriers of etiquette to the whim of the moment. I
will guard her from anything dangerous, you may be sure.”

They had taken a hansom down the avenue, instead of a taxi. It was the
Marchese’s choice.

“I never like to be hurried,” he told her. “I do not like this--what do
they call it?--joy of speeding. The aeroplane, yes. I have two boys in
the service at home, but not for amusement. I like to take my little
moments of outdoor enjoyment leisurely. You will see, my dear, how
beautiful this is. I call it my avenue of flower lights.”

The home of the Phelpses was on East Tenth Street, a tall four-storied
residence of dark brown stone. Above the low deep French doorway there
stretched across the entire second floor a great carved Moorish window
of exquisite fretwork which Phelps had transported from an old palace
in Seville.

Despite her indisposition Maria had given much thought and anxiety to
Carlota’s toilette for the occasion. Finally, she had laid out for her
a beautiful old scarf of Point Venise, so yellowed by age that it was
the tint of old ivory. It was encrusted with tiny seed pearls, and
with it she selected from one of the chests a girdle of gold links,
cunningly joined in serpentine fashion with pendent topaz here and
there.

“It is a trifle too barbaric,” she had mused, “but yet it suits you.
And you shall wear white velvet like Julietta.”

“Oh, no, I will not,” laughed Carlota, kissing her. “You would have me
perpetually making my début, tanta.” Accordingly she had chosen her own
gown, the hue of an oak autumn leaf, which fell close to her slender
young figure in mediæval lines. As she lingered before the mirror
before leaving, Carlota smiled back at her reflection almost with a
challenge. Back at the villa there was an old painting hanging at a
turn in a staircase, where the sunlight would fall full upon it from an
oriel window high above. It was the Princess Fiametta, her eyes wearied
with the weight of the golden crown that bound her brows, her gown the
same tint and style as the one Carlota wore to-night. She turned her
girdle sideways so that its line might correspond with that in the
painting, and rumpled her hair to make the resemblance more striking.

The old legend Assunta had told her recurred vividly to-night. She had
been merely a girl princess, imprisoned in the old garden and towered
castle by custom and precedent. And there had been a young fisherman
from the village at the foot of the mountain, Peppino, who had come
to the Castle. From her tower window she had seen and loved him, and
at a fête in the village she had dared to escape over the wall and
mingle with the people. Peppino had danced with her, and wooed her,
not knowing she was the princess in disguise, and his sweetheart had
stabbed her through jealousy. It was the tragedy of youth’s eternal
quest after romance and had lost nothing from Assunta’s impassioned
telling.

“To-night, maybe,” Carlota told herself, half laughingly, half in
earnest, as she looked back in the mirror, “we scale the wall of
Tittani.”




CHAPTER IV


They passed up a carven, squarely built staircase to the second floor.
The rooms were lofty and spacious. It seemed to Carlota, in the first
glance about her, there here prevailed something of the same spirit
that had marked her grandmother’s receptions. Little groups gathered
intimately in corners, a girl played something of Grieg’s at the
grand piano in the far room. Her hair had a golden sheen beneath the
lampshade of Chinese embroidery, bronze and yellow.

The Marchese was in his happiest mood, the smiling courtier to his
finger-tips. He left her with Mrs. Phelps, a little dark woman with
frankly graying hair, but as the other guests came up the staircase,
Carlota found herself on a low Moorish stool beside Carrollton
Phelps’s chair. He attracted her greatly. During the drive down the
Avenue the Marchese had told her his story with unction. It was a
favorite tale with him. Phelps had gone abroad in the earliest days
of the war, joining the Lafayette Escadrille. Only those who knew him
intimately before this happened, could appreciate what his personal
gift of service had meant at that time even in the great summing-up of
sacrifice that followed later. He had been a very successful artist,
painting portraits of celebrities and social leaders. He had always
been lavish in entertaining even then, and now, when he returned at
thirty-five, a helpless paralytic from his final fall, the most amazing
thing had been, as the Marchese expressed it, that “his wings were
unbroken.”

To Carlota, even the expression of his face brought a certain sense of
encouragement, as if he divined the strangeness that she felt among
all these new faces. His dark hair was prematurely whitened like his
wife’s, but she liked his lean, virile face, and keen, dark eyes. Even
while his friends came and went beside him, he kept her there, asking
her questions of her life in Italy.

“The Marchese has told me who you are--a glorious heritage. Mind you
keep the pace, but don’t let them starve you.” His thin, strong hands
gesticulated eagerly. “I know them. It was the same with me before I
went over, success and more success and then--husks. Do you know the
greatest thing that came to me from it all? My wife. We were married
just before I left, and she went also, down in Serbia, where it was
hell, you remember, nursing. I did not see her for four years, then
her face came out of a gray cloud in a London hospital and I found
the strength to live even to look at her. Don’t let them deceive you,
my dear. There is nothing at all in this thing called life but love
and ideals. Will you tell that fellow to come here, the one with the
violin.”

The man stood by the piano, smiling at something the girl had just said
as she turned from the keyboard. He bowed as Carlota gave her message,
looked at her with his quizzical, half-closed eyes near-sightedly, and
strolled to Phelps’s side. Presently he returned.

“I have to bring you back. He only wanted me to meet you.”

“I have been preaching your song of life,” Phelps said, drawing himself
up in his chair with the quick, restless movement that spoke of
pain-cramped muscles. “This is the spirit of Serbia and all burdened
peoples, Dmitri Kavec. Betty saved his life, and he has retaliated
by keeping me in a ferment of enthusiasm over his country in her
birth-pangs. He is not as sardonic as he appears. It is a pose.”

Dmitri’s face flushed eagerly, a queer, shy deepening in color like an
embarrassed boy.

“I never pose, Miss Trelango. My life is nothing, understand. I drop it
overboard anywhere at all, but I had forgotten how to laugh or look at
the sun, and Mrs. Phelps has shown it to me again, that is all. For her
sake I put up with the abuse from this person here. Do you live down
here?”

Carlota shook her head. Some one had taken the place of the girl at the
piano, she could not see whom, but at the first low, minor chords, she
was aware of a strange thrill of interest. Dmitri leaned back in the
winged armchair next to Phelps and closed his eyes.

“Now we have some dream pictures,” he said softly.

Carlota lifted her head eagerly to catch a glimpse of the player. The
other men in the studio, even Phelps himself, had all seemed to her
like the Marchese and Jacobelli, middle-aged, sophisticated, impervious
to romance or sentiment, tired of all emotion. But the boy at the piano
was different. He seemed to have forgotten the people around him, and
yet he led their fancy where he would with the magic of his melody and
tone pictures.

Looking from face to face Carlota saw the spell steal over each.
The Marchese smiled with half-closed eyes, living over the joyous
indiscretions of his youth. Mrs. Phelps had forgotten her guests as
she bent over Carrollton, her fingers clasped in his with mothering
tenderness. The girl who had played Grieg leaned back her head, her
eyes filled with moody unrest. Dmitri bent forward, his cigarette
burning itself to a neglected ash, a little smile on his lips. Almost
imperceptibly his eyes watched Carlota.

A strange troubled feeling stole over her. It was as if the music had
seized upon her own secret yearnings and was expressing them in all its
exotic cadence. Suddenly she caught the eyes of the musician watching
her as he played. The studio was dimly lighted from long, pendent
temple lamps. The shifting glow from a tall candelabra on the piano
showed her his face. It was young, with strong, lean lines, restless,
seeking eyes, the chin and mouth lacking the sensuous weakness of the
usual virtuoso. When he finished he crossed to her, pausing to answer a
few who stopped him on the way. Dmitri sighed heavily and rose.

“See now, he will come and tell you he has been waiting for æons to
see your face. He is all on fire. Do not extinguish the flame. He will
tread the star path in this mood if you do not pitch him down to earth.”

Carlota drew back from his amused eyes, behind a tall Moorish screen
of carved olive fretwork. Why did they all smile at things that were
sacred and beyond all sense of touch or sound? If the Marchese would
only come near, she would beg him to leave now, now while it was all
clear and fresh in her mind, the haunting, hurting sweetness of the
music and the long look between them. And as she found her breath,
he stood beside her. For the moment they were as isolated as if he
had found her alone in some glade of Fontainebleau, like Pierrot and
Columbine.

“Why did you try to hide from me?” His tone was low and broken with
embarrassment. “I played to you--you knew that, didn’t you? I tried
to get to you before, but Dmitri had you. Who are you, you pagan girl
with the wonder eyes? Tell me how you slipped in here to-night. Where I
come from, we have gorgeous night moths; I love them, brown and tawny.
Your eyes are that color, and your face is like a jasmine lifted to
the moon. A warm, amber moon in late August, don’t you know. You’ll
think I’m a crazy poet if I keep on, but it’s your own fault. You make
me want to be a poet and everything else that means adoration of you.
Can’t you speak to me?”

She closed her eyes as he gripped her hands in his. It was all so
strange, so wrong, she knew how Maria would banish any such mad
emotions, and yet she gloried in the tumult in her heart, in the swift
response to every word he uttered, the reckless urge within her to turn
to him. She strove to conquer it, and answer with composure.

“I think it is dangerous to speak so. Let us go to Mr. Phelps.”

“And your eyes say all the while, ‘I have found you,’” he laughed and
took the seat beside her. “That’s what I told myself when you looked
at me. I’ve found her. Tell me, truthfully, aren’t you glad to see me,
aren’t you?”

Carlota smiled up at him teasingly.

“The man you call Dmitri told me you would say this to me. You should
not let him spoil the surprise.”

“Did he? I didn’t think the old gray fra had such discernment. Did he
tell you my name? I know yours. It is all the sweethearts of the ages
in one. That last thing I played was a Celtic love song; I saw you in
a silver mist with the sea behind you and headlands and a girl moon
clambering up the stairway of desire.” He stopped short, eyeing her
with boyish curiosity. “I wonder just who you are really. You came with
old Veracci, didn’t you?”

“I am Italian,” Carlota answered gravely. “I have been here nearly
three years. I am a singer.”

“Are you?” he exclaimed eagerly. “That’s why everything in me called
out to you. I was in college, the third year, when the war came over
here. I had wanted to go with Carrollton, but I was just eighteen
then, so I promised my mother I’d wait. She’ll love you,” he added
ingenuously. “I went over the next spring and came through all right;
that’s how I met Dmitri. We were all wounded about the same time.”

“I thought you said you were all right?”

“I mean I didn’t get killed or anything like that. Isn’t Phelps a
wonder? He’d give a dying coyote courage to howl. He told me to stick
it out down here. I’m a composer. One of those kinks of fate put me
into a perfectly respectable, sane Colorado family. Father was head
of some smelter works out there. He started me through Columbia, with
a postgrad. in law ahead of me, but I met Carrollton and he heard me
play. Now I’m here until I make good.”

“You will be famous.” Carlota’s eyes shone as she looked up at him.
“Never have I heard such music, and I have listened to--” She checked
herself, a sudden spirit of mischief prompting her. Was he not Pierrot,
poor and struggling, with his heart a chalice of faith uplifted to the
stars, while she was a child of fortune with the pathway to success
fair and broad before her as the sea road to the Campagna back home.
But for to-night, only to-night, she would be Columbine for him,
straying, friendless Columbine, seeking shelter from the storm. “Some
day I hope to be a great singer,” she said softly.

“Do you? You beautiful, dreaming moth girl. And lessons cost like the
very devil here in New York.” He ran his fingers through his close-cut
blond hair doubtfully, Carlota watching him shyly, thinking how much
his profile was like that of a certain young emperor’s on an old
Roman coin she had. There was the same straight line from forehead to
nostril, the same touch of youth’s arrogance in his curving lips and
cleft, projecting chin. “Do you know,” he continued confidently, “I am
sure I can help you. I could start you on your lessons, you know. Don’t
refuse. I’d love to help you, to even think I was. I have a rocky old
studio down on the Square; nothing like this; it’s poverty’s back door
compared to it, but if you’ll come there, I will help you.”

“Oh, but it is impossible,” Carlota exclaimed, rising hurriedly. “I
never go anywhere alone, it is not the custom with my people. It is so
very kind of you, but”--she met his eyes wistfully--“I do not even know
your name.”

“I am Griffeth Ames. Ask Veracci, he knows me, so does Phelps. Listen,
if you won’t come for your own sake, for God’s pity, come for mine.
I’m starving down here for just what you gave me to-night when I first
looked into your eyes--inspiration. I must see you and talk to you
about my work; I need you. Will you come?”

“The heavens would fall if I did,” she laughed unsteadily, trying to
draw her hands from his clasp.

“Let them crash, who cares?” he said. “You’ll come to me, I know you
will. I’ll call to you with music till you hear.”




CHAPTER V


Maria was still indisposed on the following day. She asked many
questions about the evening before, who the guests had been, and which
ones had impressed Carlota. Always her eyes sought the girl’s, testing
her answers.

“I should have been happier if you had been there, tanta,” Carlota told
her tenderly. “You’re not worrying still, are you? Nobody carried me
away.”

Maria closed her eyes as if to shut out any telltale gleam they might
have held.

“I blame myself whatever happens,” she sighed dramatically. “I should
never have shown you the jewels. The ancient Hindoos are perfectly
right. They claim the evil spirits, when imprisoned in the earth,
produced gold and gems to ensnare the souls of mankind, especially
women. Ah, mia carina, I am growing old and careless. You have made no
further engagements?”

“The Marchese did not ask me to go anywhere else.” Carlota bent over a
low jar of cyclamen, her face turned away.

“Assuredly not. I am an old fool. Do not speak of the jewels to
anybody, not even Jacobelli. I must place them in a safety-deposit
vault; not keep them here. And while I am ill, you will not walk
through the Park to the studio. I prefer to have you ride always. Come
here to me.” She half raised herself as Carlota knelt beside the couch,
and framed her face in her palms. “You must not think I am harsh, my
dearest one, or trying to keep you from pleasures you should have.
It will all come to you in richest measure later on. Now we must be
careful of you. You understand it is only because of our great love for
you, do you not?”

“I know, surely, I understand.”

“Has no one ever spoken to you on your way to the studio?” Maria’s
voice trembled with eager insistence. “Have you ever imagined you were
followed? No, no, of course not. Do not be frightened at all. It is
only Maria’s old love of the extravagant, the dramatic situation,” she
laughed softly, sinking back. “But remember to ride always when you are
alone, and speak to no one.”

Wonderingly, guiltily, too, Carlota reassured her, but when she reached
the street she looked about her that day, with the first caution she
had ever felt since their arrival in New York. What could Maria have
meant? They knew no one in the city who could possibly have had any
sinister intent towards them, yet there had been a lurking, secret
fear in the eyes of the old signora.

At the corner of Fifth Avenue she hailed a taxicab, and arriving at the
studio pleaded a headache as an excuse for a short lesson. Jacobelli
was in a trying mood. Over and over again he railed at her, telling her
that after his months of training, she was not putting her whole heart
and soul into her singing. And suddenly Carlota leaned her chin on her
palms at the back of the old grand piano, and asked:

“I wonder, maestro, if I were poor and unknown, and came to you, would
you give me lessons because you had faith in my voice?”

“Certainly not,” exclaimed Jacobelli positively. “I could never give
you enough to win you the highest fame. The teaching is not sufficient.
The great artiste must have peace of mind. We do not exist upon air;
not even a bird with a celestial voice like yours. No, my dear, I would
have told you to forget your pride and do exactly as you have done.
Secure the financial backing of a man like Ogden Ward. I worship art.
It has always been my life, but I recognize, like a sensible man, that
in the times we live in we artists must still seek the patron even as
Angelo and Raphael did. The public is not strong enough to sustain us.
It cannot sustain itself, what would you? Some day, when the world
is all golden with peace and plenty and brotherhood, then the singer
will be the beloved prophet once again, and we shall delight in all
the milk and honey and oil and burnt offerings we require, without
the commonplace formality of contracts.” He laughed at her heartily,
leaning over to pat her hands. “Come early to-morrow; Mr. Ward will be
here.”

She left the studio with a sense of suffocating rebellion. They were
all the same, Jacobelli, Ward, even Maria. Only the gentle, chivalrous
old Marchese warmed her faith with his tender, hopeful philosophy,
and were not his friends like him, even Dmitri Kavec? What was it
this group had seemed to find in the fields of scarlet poppies that
lifted idealism and faith in humanity above the creed of success and
individual self-seeking?

As she stepped from the old red-brick building, a Greek flower vender
wheeled his pushcart to the curb. She looked over the brilliantly
tinted asters and chrysanthemums longingly, but purchased merely a
spray of autumn leaves and hurried to the corner where the Riverside
autobuses passed on their way crosstown to the Avenue.

Following after her leisurely came the man who had picked up her
gloves in the vestibule some nights before. It would have been
difficult to guess his age or nationality. He was slender, undersized,
yet with a strongly knit, athletic frame that told of military
training. Swarthy-skinned, dark-haired, with the brilliant black
eyes of the southern races, he seemed merely a boy until one saw the
somber, detached experience in his expression and eyes. As Carlota,
almost trembling at her own temerity, stepped into the interior of
a Washington Square ’bus, he followed her, swinging lightly up the
narrow, winding staircase to the top.

The number which Griffeth Ames had given her was on the south side of
the Square near MacDougal Street. It was an old four-story brownstone
building, the last of five of the same kind sitting back in small
flagged yards from the sidewalk. The paint which had scaled from its
iron portico and balconies merely imitated the stucco front which had
crumbled off in large patches. There were many names written on soiled
cards and slips of white paper above the rows of bells in the entrance,
and among them she found his. Just within the dim hall a young Italian
girl knelt on a marble-topped table, polishing the brass ornaments on
the old oval hall mirror. She smiled down absently as Carlota asked the
way.

“At the very top of the house. You have to knock hard or he won’t hear
you.”

She climbed the three flights quickly. The door at the top was ajar.
It was surprising to find such spaciousness here under the gabled
roof. As she hesitated on the threshold, her swift glance noticed how
he had tried to partition off his private life from his professional
with burlap draperies. It must have been a bleak place once, but Ames
had taken it and had performed all of the customary artistic marvels
to conceal its barrenness. Draperies dipped in eastern dyes, that he
had picked up in the Syrian quarter on Washington Street, softened the
angles of corners. The unsightly wooden partitions and beams below the
peaked ceiling had acquired under his deft touch a deep rare old oaken
hue the Pre-Raphaelites might have rested under. On the exterior of the
low door he had even placed a brass knocker, a real antique from a shop
uptown. Nobody, as Dmitri often said, but Fame would ever recognize it,
and she, the willful damosel, would never climb those three flights of
stairs unless she came en masquerade as a lark to tantalize him.

There was no fire in the deep, black grate. The windows above the broad
seats in the gable inglenooks were wide open. The view and the old
grand piano that stood crosswise in the room compensated for all other
lacks. Ames was visibly embarrassed at her unannounced descent upon
his quarters. He sat at a large, plain table drawn up before the south
light, coatless, collarless, his hair ruffled into a crest, and ashes
everywhere within his arm’s-length radius. Upon one corner of the table
there dozed a large yellow tomcat, palpably a nomad.

“I hope I have not come too soon?” she asked hesitantly.

He swept a pile of magazines and papers from a chair for her, but she
chose the high window-seat.

“It isn’t that, only I meant to set the stage for you,” he said
ruefully. “I wouldn’t have had you find me like this for anything. When
Ptolemy and I are alone here working, we just run a bachelor shop, and
forget there are any other beings in the world.”

“Make it a dress rehearsal, then. I like it up here very much.” She
looked out at the Square, the vivid autumn foliage accentuating the red
and gold of the foliage and the vari-colored dresses of the Italian
children playing there. It looked like some reckless, impressionistic
painting, worked out merely in effective, daring splashes of color
laid on with a palette knife. From the windows of Maria’s chosen
abode uptown, one gazed down upon an indefinite row of closed, chill,
characterless dwellings, with no gleam of color from street to street.

“I would like to live down here too,” she said thoughtfully. “It is
very different from anything I have seen in New York before.”

Ames watched her with eager appreciation. Her glossy, luxuriant hair
waved back from her low forehead into a loose knot at the nape of her
neck. Her face held the elusive appeal of La Cigale’s. The memory of
the old painting occurred to him with its appealing beauty and he felt
a sudden protective tenderness towards this waif of summer’s idleness.

“It is lonely; that’s the only thing about it,” he said, coming near
her. “If it wasn’t for Dmitri and the Phelpses I’d throw up the game
sometimes and go West to the smelter.”

“The smelter; what is that?” she asked curiously.

“Where they separate the ore from the quartz, you know, the real from
the slag.”

“Slag?” she repeated slowly. “Like the crucible? I know what you mean.
I think you are in it now, here, don’t you?”

“Dmitri would love you for that,” he exclaimed eagerly. “It’s all he
talks about, the inner meaning of things. Like the crucible, the
winepress, anything you like that means the big fight where you either
make good or go under. I hate to think it’s just chance. Sometimes
when we were over in France, you couldn’t help feeling that it was hit
or miss. No matter how clever you were or well trained, you might be
killed by any chance fragment of shell that strayed your way. It sort
of wiped out the old idea of the plan. Know what I mean?” He quoted
slowly, half under his breath:

  “Our times are in His hand,
   Who said, ‘A whole I planned,
     See all, be not afraid.’”

Then, turning quickly to the cat, he lit a cigarette.

“Ptolemy, she comes in here and demoralizes us, old man. I’m getting
sentimental.”

He sat down to the piano carelessly, striking low minor chords, and
then, unlike Jacobelli, he slipped into the first protesting strains of
the duet from “Bohème.” There was an enthusiasm and impulsive buoyancy
about him that inspired Carlota to sing even as she had not when she
had stood before the great maestro, Ames carrying Rudolpho’s answer.

“Look at me when you sing,” he commanded, and she shook her head in
confusion.

“Does she not look at the candle?” she asked. “I--I forget when I look
at you.”

But when she had finished, he was almost humble in his supreme
gratitude to whatever fate had sent her to his lone garret. With boyish
fervor and earnestness he told her the whole world lay at her feet if
only he could find a way to teach her.

“I can show you only the first steps of the way, and your voice is so
glorious now, so perfect. Who taught you how to use it?”

“Every one sings in Italy,” Carlota said evasively. “Even the girls at
the fountains and the boys when they go out in the fishing fleet. I
took only a few lessons there.”

Inwardly, she felt overjoyed at the success of her ruse, and agreed
to come to him twice a week for lessons if he would accept in payment
whatever she was able to give. But he would not listen to this.

“It’s enough to have you as my pupil. When other people hear you sing
and know that I have taught you, it will bring me all sorts of other
work. I know. Besides, you inspire me. Yes, you do. I don’t know what
it is.” He drew in a deep breath, watching her. “Guess we were just a
couple of old lazy dubs here, weren’t we, Ptolemy? I’ve wanted to work.
It’s all been here in my head, till I couldn’t sleep nights with the
themes rampant, but I couldn’t catch them. They were like fireflies.
Ever try to get them at night? I did when I was a little chap out West.
I always wanted to train them. Must you go so soon? I didn’t get your
full name the other night. Carlota, the Marchese called you, didn’t he?”

“Just call me that,” she told him gravely. “I would not be allowed to
come here if my people knew. They are very conservative.”

“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” he said confidently. “You’ll never use it
in your work. I don’t care just so long as you come. Dmitri said you
never would. He walked down here last night with me. Queer chap, isn’t
he? Did you like him?”

“I didn’t notice him,” Carlota spoke thoughtfully, not realizing the
purport of her own words as she looked up at him on the threshold of
the stairs. “I only remembered you.”




CHAPTER VI


The weeks following were filled with a romantic glamour for them both.
Ames never realized how much his pupil was teaching him. After he had
given her the benefit of what little knowledge he possessed, Carlota
would coax him from the piano, and letting her own fingers stray over
the keys, would suggest carelessly:

“Do you not like it better this way?”

He never suspected that she was giving him all of Jacobelli’s tricks in
teaching, all she knew of the great maestro’s art of technique. He only
knew that the fame of his pupil was spreading through the Quarter and
that people were coming up the narrow stairs to inquire his rates as
teacher of voice culture.

“If I can only get enough to keep the friendly wolf jolly and
contented, I can find time to work on my opera,” he told her happily.
“I owe it all to you, though. You’ve got such a perfect voice
naturally, you don’t need a teacher, and here everybody who hears you
sing will give me the credit for it.”

Carlota smiled at him silently, delighted that her visits to the studio
were bringing him even a glimmer of success. To her they were all that
filled her days now with expectancy. Maria’s ill health continued to
prevent her from calling for Carlota every day at the uptown studio,
and while she longed to tell the Marchese, she feared that even his
solicitude might put an end to the only gleam of romance or adventure
that had come to her. So far as she knew, no one had discovered her
visits to the Square, yet never did she leave the arched doorway of
her home that the nonchalant stranger did not follow her. Patiently,
without haste or apparent malevolence, he shadowed her to Jacobelli’s
or downtown. Sometimes in the morning, he would lounge at Cecco’s cigar
store around the corner on Madison Avenue, smoking his endless store of
curious, long, thin cigarettes. From Cecco’s one could look through the
middle of the block towards Fifth Avenue, over the tops of intervening
fences. The only apartment house was the one where Maria Roma and
Carlota lived. And while he chatted over the latest juggling with the
fates of nations and peoples overseas, he would forget to look at Cecco
rolling cigarettes, and eye the distant fire escapes like a bird of
prey, gauging the flight.

One day, as she came from Ames’s place, the impulse swept over Carlota
to see the old Marchese and tell him. He would understand, she was
sure, and she longed to have him know Griffeth well, to appreciate his
work and help him.

Through Maria and Jacobelli she knew that even in New York, where the
power of great wealth dominated the will of the people through its
manifold channels of politics, society, and charity, yet there was an
altar erected even here to the unknown god of truth, and the Marchese
stood ever as a high priest of the eternal verities.

“You must not be discouraged, my dear,” he had told her one afternoon
at tea beside Maria’s couch. “Look beneath the surface of things.
The brass band is always at the head of the procession. Once one has
escaped its clamor, one may pay attention to the motive behind the
parade, yes? There is always in any race, in any period, a certain
group of people, in all walks of life, who worship truth wherever
manifest, in art or the grace of right living. It is absurd to
claim that any class has a monopoly of this spirit. Ogden Ward is a
multi-millionaire, doubtless a thorough robber baron in his way, yet he
serves a certain purpose through his fascination for the beautiful and
rarest in art. Some day, when, God willing, he passes on, perhaps his
collections will be given back to the people. I can do little except
encourage this spirit wherever I find it. Casanova, of the Opera, is a
noble fellow, yet he must perforce kowtow when the mighty atoms on the
subscribers’ list say they will have this or that. But that does not
prevent Casanova from his personal worship of real art, you see. I know
him very well, indeed, and some day he will meet you.”

Remembering this, Carlota stepped into a shop on Eighth Street and
telephoned to the Lafayette. It was the one golden moment when she felt
she must see the Marchese and tell him everything, take him back with
her to the old studio and make him listen to Ames’s compositions for
the new opera. But at that particular instant the Marchese was meeting
Ogden Ward at his club by appointment, and the message was left on a
slip in his box at the hotel unheeded.

“I want you to meet Count Jurka; used to be with the Bulgarian
Legation, remember. He has proven to be a very valuable agent along the
new lines of readjustment. I met him in Egypt first in connection with
the Rhodopis emeralds. They were found in the royal mummy, and there
was some argument in connection with them. I had furnished the means
for the research work and I have the emeralds. He is quite a savant in
his way when it comes to the history of famous jewels.”

“I do not care for them,” returned the old Marchese blandly, as he
ensconced himself in a deep leather armchair and smiled. “Relics of
barbarism, my dear Ward; rings in noses and bangles on leaping toes,
merely a variation of the same impulse in humanity to decorate itself
that we see to-day in certain types of women.”

“And men also. Say it.” Ward leaned forward on the polished table and
laid a small leather case before him. “I like to carry unset stones
around in my pockets, not for decoration. What would you call me,
Marchese?”

“An idolator, either of the beautiful or of the peculiar quality of
concentrated value that seems to lie in jewels.”

Ward lifted out two pearls, wrapped in tissue papers, and held them in
the hollow of his palm.

“You’re right. Here are the largest gems from the collections of the
murdered Empress Elizabeth of Austria. They always darkened when she
wore them. She had them dipped regularly in a perforated casket into
the sea to restore the luster. It is not alone the value of them that
interests me. I like stones that have tragic stories connected with
them. There was a necklace of pearls around the throat of Marie
Stuart as she was being led to execution. I have never been able
to find them. Jurka is also a collector and lover of gems from the
historic standpoint. He is standing by the desk now, the tall fellow,
fair-haired. Do you recognize him?”

The Marchese looked through the arched doorway at the man Ward had
designated. He was trying to place where he had seen him, and suddenly
smiled, one forefinger at his forehead.

“He was at the Lafayette a week ago Saturday, dining with Palmieri,
Collector of the Port, a delightful person.”

“Well posted on the valuation of jewels,” Ward remarked laconically. He
paused to light his favorite pipe with the air of assured bonhomie he
assumed when relaxed. “How is Carlota?”

“She progresses well.”

“Why not after two years under Jacobelli? He tells me her technique is
faultless, but she lacks temperament.”

“He does not know her,” the Marchese answered placidly. “The
temperament is there dormant. It needs but the awakening. She is still
a child.”

“Her mother married before she was her age.”

“And never sang at all. Waken the Paoli nature in a girl like Carlota
and you will lose her. We do not wish her to experience love, to run
the gamut of emotion--it is fatal to a woman of genius. Then, too,
afterwards, you always reach her through the husband. Husbands of
geniuses--ah, my dear Ward, I could tell you of many catastrophes.”

“Not marriage.” Ward knocked the tobacco from his coat sleeve that had
fallen there while he had filled his pipe. “An affair possibly. A quick
flurry of passion that might sweep over her like a clarifying fire,
burning out the underbrush in her nature. You might arrange a quiet
little dinner at my apartment with Signora Roma and Carlota. I do not
think I have heard her sing lately.”

He rose at the approach of Count Jurka and presented him. The old
Marchese was genial and full of welcome. Had he not seen him already
down in the haunt of the selective with Palmieri?

“I did not see you there.” Jurka spoke with a very clear, careful
enunciation, his large blue eyes never winking as he met the other’s
pleased scrutiny. “Palmieri is interested in some fête for Italian
child sufferers of the war--very worthy object. I wished him to meet
Mrs. Carrington Nevins, who has been most helpful to me in organizing
committees for my own stricken land.”

As they sat down Ward began without preamble, his fingers pressing
nervously on the small leather case containing the pearls.

“I told Jurka I thought you could assist him. He is gathering data on
rubies. Do you know of one called the Zarathustra? It is a perfect
pigeon blood, second to the largest in the world.”

“I am absolutely ignorant concerning jewels,” smiled the Marchese
indulgently. “Consider me a perverted mind.”

Jurka leaned slightly towards him.

“I have already traced it to Italy, but many years ago. It was part
of a collection, rubies and pearls. I thought it might have come over
here and been disposed of to Mr. Ward. It is almost impossible now to
find out what has become of most royal jewels, I mean the historic
ones. Sooner or later, I have understood, if their tale of tragedy is
terrible enough, they find their way here.”

Ward did not pick up the opening. Sauntering away from the club up the
Avenue, the Marchese pondered later, not upon the Zarathustra ruby,
but on Ward’s invitation. At first he hesitated at a crossing, wishing
he might talk it over with Maria, but finally contenting himself with
telephoning to her. Carlota caught the rising inflection of exultation
as Maria accepted for them both.

“Certainly I’m well enough to go,” she cried; then, hanging up the
receiver, “Ah, beloved child, you do not understand the conquest you
have made already. But it will not do to appear too eager. You must
learn to act like your grandmother, distant, gracious, always the
queen.”

But Carlota was supremely indifferent to the favor shown her by Ward.
For weeks she had been full of strange, gay little moods and sudden,
tempestuous caresses that left Maria breathless and speculative. She
smiled over her shoulder now, brushing her long dark curls before the
Venetian mirror.

“Surely, bella mia”--Signora Roma spoke with emphasis--“surely you
comprehend what this means to your progress. There are yet two years
before you, possibly more, before you make your début. Therefore, you
must be diplomatic and save your independence until you are assured
that the race is won. You must appear perfect at Mr. Ward’s dinner. I
will dress you like the starlight, like the pearl from the sea, très
ingénue, so he will see the great sensation you will make.”

Carlota laughed teasingly.

“I would love to make my début in some splendid barbaric opera, where
I could wear cloth of gold and armlets, bangles. I wish I could sing
Semiramide at the very beginning, or Fedora, and you, you adorable old
tanta, will probably persuade Jacobelli to make me bow as Juliette or
Marguerite.”

“The Veronese are very dark like you, and, thank God, you will still be
slender and maiden-like,” sighed Maria reflectively. “It is a wonderful
opportunity to impress Mr. Ward. You had better effect Juliette that
night.”

“I don’t like this thing you call opportunity. I like, as the Marchese
says, what is to be will be. I like the inevitable. It must have been
delightful to feel your destiny was written in the stars.” She pinned
her hair up carelessly. “Mr. Ward is the only person from whom we have
been compelled to borrow money. He will be repaid amply--in money.”

“Only a person who could appreciate the priceless value of such a voice
as yours could have had such faith. He is the greatest patron of the
arts in the world--”

“I hate patronage. It simply means that he can pay the highest price
for what he desires, that is all.” Carlota turned to her stormily.

“Another may have a million times more appreciation, more love, more
yearning to aid, and still stand with hands bound because he has
no money. I hate patronage. I would rather sell every jewel in your
treasure chests than give a man like Ogden Ward the right to order my
appearance at his dinner.”

At Maria’s gesture of despair her mood changed instantly to one of
coaxing tenderness. To please her only would she go, not because Ward
wished her to. She had hurried home after telephoning the Marchese, and
his message had come when she had felt most rebellious. It had become
increasingly difficult for her to get away for her lessons with Ames
twice a week. To-day Signora Roma had been more curious than ever, and
it had taken the most elusive of excuses to soothe her. All manner
she had made up so far, little necessary trips to the art shops, the
galleries, the quiet cathedral, feeling that she was indeed playing
Columbine in the garret studio down on the Square. Yet she was almost
forced to attend a dinner given by Ward as if it were an honor bestowed
by him. This they would urge her to do, Maria, Jacobelli, and even
the Marchese; yet, if they knew of her visits to Ames, she would be
compelled to stop them because they were unconventional.

Almost in a spirit of audacious bravado, she deliberately started for
the studio the following morning. It would be a surprise to Ames,
and she wanted to talk over the dinner with him. For the first time
in weeks the watching figure was absent from its customary post near
Cecco’s store. When she left the ’bus, it seemed as if she could have
lifted her whole heart to the Quarter in relief. It was like some
enchanted realm to her where hopes and dreams were tangible, and
only facts untrue. Spring stood tiptoe on the Arch and scattered her
soul-disturbing germs abroad. She knelt at the edge of the old fountain
and mimed at herself in the water that had just been permitted to
splash therein from the far-off springs of Askohan quite as if they
had flowed from Castalian founts. She flirted with the rainbow that
hangs over the leaping spray on sunny mornings, and wigwagged joyous
discontent to every possible shepherd in the distance.

From a flower-stand at the corner Carlota recklessly bought daffodils
and narcissus. They had grown in phalanxes along the wall of Tittani.
Almost she had decided to tell Maria and Jacobelli she would never go
to the dinner, never accept any more aid from Mr. Ward, when suddenly
she was arrested by the sight of a dark gray limousine standing at the
curb in front of Ames’s residence. Clinging around it was a flock of
little Italian children, trying to peer into the interior sanctum,
a study in suède leather with dark red Jacqueminot roses in slender
French gray silver vases in each corner.

She hesitated outside the studio door. A clear, well-modulated voice
came from within, a woman’s voice.

“Twice a week, then, Mr. Ames, and we will not speak of terms. I
have heard of your wonderful success with beginners, and Nathalie’s
temperament requires an environment like this, unusual and bizarre,
don’t you know? It wilts at any touch of the customary or mediocre
that you find in most musical studios uptown. Here you fairly radiate
atmosphere.”

She hesitated just as Ames opened the door. He looked flushed and
elated, and seized her hand to present her to his callers.

“Oh, but we have already heard of you, Miss--er--Carlota!” Mrs.
Carrington Nevins exclaimed. “This must be your little Italian pupil
who sings so charmingly, Mr. Ames. Chandos told us all about you at
his tea last week, how you came and went like a little flitting city
sparrow, and not even Mr. Ames knew your real name.”

Carlota stood in silence, her chin lifted, her long lashes downcast
as she drew off her gloves slowly. The daffodils and narcissus lay in
the curve of her arm. She caught a little smile on the face of the
girl standing with Ames, this tall, fair girl with the ice-blue eyes,
and a wave of fiery scorn swept over her at this invasion of her own
particular haunt, Columbine’s special chimney-pot.

“You must hear her sing,” Ames said positively, going to the piano.
“Lay off your things, Carlota. I want you just to try that little
barcarolle you taught me.”

“I cannot sing to-day, Mr. Ames.” Carlota met his surprised eyes
serenely. “It is impossible.”

“But just this one--” He stopped abruptly, warned by the expression of
her face.

Mrs. Carrington Nevins raised her lorgnette, the slenderest excuse for
one in carven tortoise shell and platinum, gazing at the girl amusedly.

“My dear, I believe you are temperamental like all singers should be.
It is your prerogative. But you must remember all that Mr. Ames is
doing for you, and try to obey him. Isn’t she a dear little thing,
Nathalie?”

“Do you live right down here in the Sicilian quarter?” asked Nathalie
eagerly. “It’s so funny. I made mother drive through there to-day and
the car made quite a sensation.”

Carlota turned her head and looked at her in a haughty, detached way.

“I have never been there. I am a Roman.”




CHAPTER VII


Carlota stood aside to let them pass down the narrow stairs. In the
half light from the dusty skylight overhead she seemed like a shadow
excepting for the light in her eyes. The sunlight from the studio’s
south window sent a lane of gold through the open door, and she watched
Nathalie as she laid her hand in Ames’s lingeringly.

“I shall love it here,” she heard her say, in her rather plaintive,
appealing way. “And I want you to be sure and stay for dinner Tuesday.
You can suggest things for our Italian fête next month, can’t he,
mother?”

“I shall be delighted if I can be of any service,” Ames told her, as he
followed down the four flights of stairs to the waiting car.

Even Ptolemy seemed to catch the contagion of trouble in the air and
leaped stealthily out of her way to the top of the piano. Carlota
waited, standing in the center of the floor, her eyes ablaze with scorn
as Ames entered.

“You were exactly like old Pietro, my grandmother’s courier,” she told
him. “I have never seen you like that before. Who are these people? Why
did you ask me to sing for them?”

He swept her a low bow jubilantly.

“Dear, it means ten dollars a lesson. That is the Mrs. Carrington
Nevins and her only daughter. She will bring me other pupils, too, from
her crowd out on the north shore. You’re my mascot.”

“Did you try her voice?” She spoke very softly. “Do you intend giving
her lessons?”

“I certainly do.” He began rummaging in the wall cupboard after his
stock of china. “We’re going to celebrate my first real success. I’m
going to the market and buy a spread and telephone Dmitri to come down,
and you shall preside and sing.”

“Did you try her voice?” demanded Carlota again, her voice a warning of
smouldering anger.

He nodded his head happily. “She has a very appealing quality, a light
lyric soprano, well pitched and true. Of course she has had a lot of
training.”

Carlota deliberately swept a jar of golden tulips from the top of the
piano to the floor in crashing fragments. She herself had bought the
jar for him, a squat plaster one, painted in dull-gold and Tuscan fruit
tints. It had been her whim to keep it filled with flowers. There
had been a small urn like it before a statue of Daphne in the garden
at Tittani, and she had always as a child kept fresh flowers there,
she told him. Now, it lay like a symbol of broken faith at her feet.
As Ames swung about in amazement, she drew on her gloves with superb
indifference.

“Will you kindly tell me the meaning of this?” he demanded hotly.

“It means--nothing, signor, nothing at all. I have an engagement
to-day. I cannot take my lesson from you.”

But he saw the trouble and pain in her eyes instantly and caught her
hands in his.

“Now, listen, Carlota, you know all this means to me--to us. They would
never have come at all if it hadn’t been for you. You heard what she
said. Chandos is the English painter downstairs. He’s heard you sing
and has told them about it.”

Slowly the tears gathered heavily to her lashes. She had given him the
full benefit of all she had learned from the great Jacobelli, and now
he would give it to this girl for a few paltry dollars.

“Why do you have to take her when she has everything? Go down through
the Quarter and find some poor singer. Take even the children. But give
it freely, not for money. I cannot bear to see you acting like old
Pietro before such people. Grateful? Do you think that Jacobelli was
ever grateful in his life?”

“What do you know about Signor Jacobelli?” he demanded teasingly.
“You’re angry because she called you a city sparrow, my nightingale,
and you’re right, but I can’t afford to turn down such a chance. I’ve
got to live here if I am to work on my opera and succeed, and this is
enough for me.”

“You may do as you like, but I shall not come here as long as that girl
takes lessons from you.”

“But can’t you see how it will benefit us both?” He stopped before her
impatiently. “You are my star pupil. Perhaps I might even persuade Mrs.
Nevins to let you sing at one of her musicales. If I could get her
interested in my opera, think what it would mean for me, dear--”

“I did not think you were of the kind who seek patronage,” she said
slowly. “I will not come again. Not for one instant would I sing
for that woman. You have no ideals. I believed you were altogether
different.”

“Carlota, come back,” he called after her; but the door shut with a
slam that sent Ptolemy scurrying for cover, and he stopped short,
frowning with a quick, boyish resentment at her suspicion of him.
Although there had never been a definite declaration of love between
them, yet their whole acquaintance had ripened in an atmosphere
of romantic glamour, a piquant, elusive mutual acceptance of each
other idealized. He could not have understood the surging resentment
in Carlota’s heart as she went uptown to take her real lesson from
Jacobelli. Once in the Square she had tossed the jonquils and daffodils
broadcast to the children around the fountain. Her mind was a tumult of
emotions, of hot rebellion against Ames’s acceptance of her coming as
a gift of Fate that was his due. She knew her identity was a mystery
to him. He had told her of asking Phelps, and being told she was a
protégée of the Marchese Veracci a young Italian singer in whom he was
interested; that was all.

He had all of the artist’s selfish point of view, she thought. He had
not even caught the personal side of her anger. He saw merely the
professional jealousy of one singer towards another in her antagonism
towards Nathalie Nevins, and this attitude added fuel to Carlota’s
raging indignation against him. He could not even grasp or understand
all that the visits had meant to her, all that she had given him
gladly. He had not even been musician enough to distinguish between
the quality of her voice and that of Nathalie. And suddenly it flashed
across her that possibly Jacobelli was right; that she did lack power
and dramatic force, feeling, passion, all that made the really great
singer.

When she reached the studio she flung the outer door wide even as Maria
might have done. Signor Jacobelli was at the piano amusing himself.
The taunting, passionate notes of the “Habanera” crashed upon her as
she stood a moment transformed utterly from the somber, unawakened
girl he had last met. And in an instant she had picked up the melody,
provocative, imperative, daring, sauntering into the room with all of
Carmen’s tricks at her finger-tips, at her tongue’s end. Jacobelli
turned quickly, catching the new note of passion and power. She did not
appear even to see him, but flung her whole soul into the song and the
underlying tragedy of its motif.

“Brava!” murmured the old maestro, huskily. “Try now the ‘Dance of the
Tambourines.’”

As she finished the gypsy song, he sprang from the bench, kissing her
hands in ecstasy.

“I do not know, I do not ask from whence this has come to you, but I
thank God it is there at last, the divine note for which I have prayed.
So you shall sing for Mr. Ward at his dinner, ma bella, and take him by
storm.”

Carlota’s eyes glowed with anger as she threw aside her cloak and hat.
She looked for the instant like a reincarnation of the youthful Paoli,
as he remembered her back at La Scala.

“I will not sing for him or be shown off to him any more,” she told him
hotly. “I detest him and all people like him.”

Jacobelli threw back his head, laughing delightedly.

“Aha! Temper?” he cried. “It is the beginning of temperament, thanks
be to God. We expect it, my dear, sooner or later. The artistic
temperament is like the resistless forces of nature, the storm, the
volcano, the tidal wave, the lightning. Life would be tame without them
in spite of the danger, would it not? We crave the thrill. Never have
I heard the great dramatic quality before in your voice. Ah, you shall
sing all the glorious colorful rôles they have had to shelve because
there was no one to sing them.”

Carlota had turned from him and gone to the west windows, the
tears blinding her sight. Even the agony of one’s heart, then, had
a commercial value. Life was merely the arena where one gave all
for applause, where human emotions merely added to the thrill of
suspense. The deeper the reality of the knife-thrust, the cleverer the
counterfeit acting.

“I hate it all,” she sobbed brokenly. “I wish we could go back to
Tittani. Tell them my voice is hopeless, maestro, and let me go.”

Jacobelli lit a cigarette deliberately, eyeing her thoughtfully. He
tipped a chair backwards and seated himself, rocking slowly on two of
its legs.

“Who is he?” he asked gently.

Carlota looked back at him in angry silence, startled into caution at
his words, but he waved one plump hand at her airily and reassuringly.

“Remember, my child, I have known both your mother and grandmother.
History moves in recurrent cycles, even the history of human hearts,
and particularly when we consider heredity. I talked with Margherita
Paoli when first she took Bianca from the convent. She told me her
theory of life for a woman of genius and I agreed with her perfectly.
Love in its perfection is the supreme sacrifice of self, art is the
elevation of self, the crowning of self. They are at war eternally. So
I told her, and she said she would keep Bianca safe behind the wall of
Tittani while she studied. Never should the danger of love approach her
until her success was assured, and this creed was impressed upon your
mother, my dear, with what result? Even while we two fools prated, she
was listening in the garden to the boy Peppino and was gone before her
mother even guessed their love.”

Carlota turned back into the room suddenly, her eyes brilliant with
eager appeal.

“Tell me who John Tennant was?” she asked him. “Why did my nurse use
to tell me that no woman could escape over the wall of Tittani without
meeting the tragic fate of the Princess Fiametta? Oh, you are all
so blind! You treat me like a baby, and never think I hear or see
anything. Don’t you suppose I ever think or reason? I used to go down
to the end of the garden looking seaward, to that little stone house
where they told me he had lived and died. Once I went in when I found
the door unlocked. Everything was just as he had left it, and while I
was wondering what it all meant, my grandmother came in from the little
walk along the terrace above and I knew she had been weeping. Then
Maria told me only his name. Who was he?”

Jacobelli made a magnificent gesture.

“I may not tell you. The secret of his being there was only known to
his friend Wallace, the Marchese, and myself. I found out by accident
when I sought her and implored her to return to the stage. She loved
him, and he never even knew that she was near him in the garden or that
it was her love and bounty he lived upon. Ah, the wonderful woman she
was! Only as he died, unconscious in her arms, could she speak to him
or caress him, and he never knew. Think of her pride, imperial in its
abnegation.”

“But my mother was happier.”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Who can say? Women are complex. Bianca was all tenderness, a flower
of love. She did not pass the walls to seek adventure, but to escape
from ambition. When I first met her fresh from La Pietà and heard your
grandmother’s plans, I thought, never, never, with such eyes and lips.
And I told her the lines from ‘Romeo et Juliette’; you know them?

  “‘With love’s light wing did I o’erperch these walls,
    For stony limits cannot hold love out.’”

“I am glad she escaped!” flamed back Carlota. “Even my grandmother, who
knew in her own heart that love was all to a woman, would have shut her
own child away from its beauty and truth--”

“From its agony and devastating influence,” Jacobelli protested
placidly. “To the woman of genius this is so, my dear. You cannot
discuss it logically because you have never experienced love. Even I
have never loved to distraction, always with reason, and I have been
most happy. I have buried two beautiful, gifted women who adored me.”

Carlota turned suddenly away, afraid of the flood of words on her lips
that she longed to pour out. It would only arouse suspicion against
her if she went too far, and already the reaction was setting in, and
she felt a great weariness of body and spirit. Were they not right,
after all, she thought, as she stood by the window looking riverward?
Somewhere she had read that the yearning after ideals was merely the
soul’s subconscious memory of another life. Was it then foolish to
seek a path to the stars through the world of everyday selfishness and
commercialism? Griffeth accepted patronage gladly for the sake of his
operetta. She would have had him finish it in the high seclusion of
the garret studio and win recognition and fame as his right once it
had been submitted to the directors of the Opera. Instead he must seek
the favor of persons like Mrs. Nevins, must add the weight of their
influence before the magic doors would open to him. And in order to
win Mrs. Nevins’s interest and friendship, he must give lessons to her
daughter and constantly flatter and compromise with his own critical
faculty.

She who loved directness and clarity of vision and the straight, white
road ahead, faced suddenly the devious, twisting path that led to
success and popularity. Yet there never was a straight road that led to
a mountain peak, she thought. Always the winding way, the compromise
with risk and danger until one reached the summit of desire. She smiled
slowly, and turned to Jacobelli, smoking in long, leisurely puffs until
she should have changed her mind.

“I will go to Mr. Ward’s dinner and sing for him,” she said.

He laid aside his pipe.

“The caprice and passion of the woman always move in a circle. Wait
but patiently, and behold, she is back at the starting-point, and is
willing. My dear, you show common sense and astuteness. Forget all this
love nonsense. I know not what had roused you, but put it away from
you. Ogden Ward can open every door for you in the operatic world. I
would not be too indifferent and petulant with him. Ah, if I could only
teach you your grandmother’s queenly way, the mingling of alluring
charm and condescension, the aloofness of her favor--”

Carlota drew on her gloves, watching him the while.

“I may toss roses from the top of the wall; that is it, signor?” she
said gravely. “I shall try to remember.”




CHAPTER VIII


Ward had handed over the details of the dinner to his Japanese butler,
Ishigaki, who presided over the town house of the millionaire.

In spite of her dislike of him and reluctance to accept favors, Carlota
felt a thrill of almost childish excitement over the novelty of it all
as she entered the upper salon which had been turned into a private
banqueting-hall for the occasion.

The walls were hung with dull-gold, Oriental draperies, weighted down
with embroidery. A glow from hidden shaded lights left the room in a
twilight haze of amethyst and saffron. The air was fragrant with faint,
strange perfumes. Brazier lamps burned somberly in stone lanterns half
revealed behind red and gold lacquered screens. On the surface of a
pool sunken in the center of the teakwood dining-table, half-opened
lotus buds floated, and curious, iridescent-plumaged waterfowl stood
amongst them, dazed and hesitating, goldfish darting at their feet, and
tiny turtles scrambling aimlessly up the sides of the pool.

“I hoped it might amuse you,” Ward said when he found Carlota bending
over the table in delight. He had never seen her in evening dress
before, and Maria had spared no pains or thought for this that might be
her night of conquest.

“You shall be Juliette in her triumph,” the old singer had said. “Cloth
of silver with a veil of lace from the Colonna wedding chests. And
the very cap of seed pearls which your grandmother bought from the
old antique dealer in Verona near the bridge as you leave the palace.
And just a girdle of filigree silver, set in pearls with tassels of
them. But for your throat, nothing at all. It is encircled by beauty
quite enough. First I thought to let you wear her chain of rubies with
the black cross. Then the necklace of opals. She loved them. It came
from Russia and was part of the great Catherine’s treasure. One of the
Orloffs gave it to Paoli. I would not have you wear anything to-night
that might bring the evil eye upon you.”

Carlota had laughed at her earnest insistence. She felt no interest in
Ward himself, only a deep-rooted resentment against the circumstances
which forced her to accept his hospitality when she disliked him. Even
now she merely smiled at his words, and turned eagerly to greet the
old Marchese. The latter’s gray eyebrows arched with approval when he
beheld the result of Maria’s costuming.

“So soon you grow into your kingdom, mia carina,” he exclaimed half
teasingly, half musingly. “Behold, yesterday, Mr. Ward, it was a child
whom I cajoled with chocolate almonds. I do assure you, she was the
utter gourmand for them, rummaging into my pockets like a squirrel, and
now we bow to her sovereignty, is it not so?”

“The bloom fulfills the promise of the bud,” Ward answered gravely,
and Carlota’s eyes held a startled wonderment as he gazed down at her.
It seemed to-night as if his glance even held a covert challenge that
aroused every element of resentment in her nature. Throughout the
dinner she was reticent and unresponsive. The Marchese, as always, was
so absorbed in his little anecdotes and sallies of wit that Ward’s
attentions escaped him. Maria observed, but gave no sign of annoyance;
rather, she was filled with pride at the influence of her beloved child
over so great a man as Ward. Jacobelli ate and drank as a connoisseur,
paying little attention to the conversation about him, but relaxing
under the mellowing influence of Ward’s wines and Ishigaki’s solicitous
ministrations. Finally he caught Carlota’s refusal to sing as her host
urged her after they rose from dinner.

“It is no time to-night to show caprice, cara mia,” he exclaimed
pompously. “Come, I would have you sing and prove to Mr. Ward how soon
you will triumph at the Opera.”

Carlota’s eyes sought the Marchese’s in swift appeal, but he merely
nodded to her encouragingly above the lifted rim of his glass of old
Amontillado.

“Miss Trelango is only afraid that you will put her through your
professional paces, Jacobelli,” Ward interposed easily. “Show the
Marchese and Signora Roma those new photographs in the east gallery of
the excavations at Rhodopis. You will find the emeralds we took from
the royal mummies there also. Ishigaki will open the case for you.”

Jacobelli smiled understandingly, and led the way. The Japanese moved
noiselessly about the salon, turning off a light here and there
until only those in the stone lanterns gave a nebulous glow. When
they were alone, Ward moved one of the lacquered screens from its
place, disclosing a tall panel of solid gold embroidery set in ebony.
Flamingoes moved through sunlit marshes.

“This will amuse you,” he said, stepping upon a convex spring set
in the floor. The panel slipped silently up. “This is my favorite
music-room.” He led the way through the narrow door into the interior.
It was domed with stained glass, a fan fretwork above the Empire grand
piano assuring perfect acoustics. The walls were in flat dull gold,
with peacocks and gray apes in conventionalized designs, hand-painted.
A rock crystal vase held irises, gold and purple. The light filtered
cunningly through the stained glass in rays of twilight splendor. “I
have kept this room for you the first time you should sing to me alone.”

Carlota closed her eyes as she seated herself at the piano, the memory
of the little garret studio of Ames a vivid, poignant hurt to her
pride. He to whom she had given all her faith and love, and he had held
it so lightly, where to this man no effort was too great to win her
favor.

“Jacobelli tells me you have gained. Sing what you love best yourself.”

And instead of choosing some grand-opera aria, she sang “O Sole Mio,”
as she had learned it from Ames. Over their lunches in the studio, he
would sing it to her, lunches of bread and fruit and salad, glorified
by love and song. Out in the east gallery Jacobelli caught the air and
frowned, but the Marchese inclined his head to listen contentedly. As
the last notes ended, Ward bent over her suddenly, his arms around her,
his lips seeking hers dominantly. Crushed in his powerful embrace, she
strove to free herself, but Ward had waited two years for this moment,
and she felt her strength leave her as he held her. The crystal vase
crashed behind him as he tripped backwards over the slender stand, her
hand holding his face from her.

“Maria!” she called. “Maria! Come to me!”

“Let her alone,” warned Jacobelli, placing himself at the door of the
gallery. “She must learn poise and command of herself.”

Maria glared at him, infuriated.

“Mother of God, when the child needs me!” she cried, and sped along the
salon to the inner room. The Marchese’s glance met that of the maestro
with troubled questioning.

“Surely, he would not attempt anything to alarm her. You do not
think--” The old Italian spread out his stout, expressive hands.

“I do not think when I am with such a man as Ogden Ward. He is a law to
himself.”

Veracci’s expression changed instantly. From the easy, genial old
diplomat there seemed to fall over his face the mask of the soldier.

“No man is that,” he answered. “I would hold him accountable if he has
annoyed the child.”

Before Maria had reached them, Carlota had released herself. She turned
to him with clenched hands, her face white with anger.

“Take me home, tanta!” she exclaimed. “I--I am not well.”

Ward regarded them both with amused speculation.

“You are temperamental, my dear, perhaps a trifle gauche also, too much
the gamine in your play.” He held out one hand to show the scratch that
ran like a scarlet thread along the skin. “Tell Jacobelli I say it is
time to prepare for her début.”

Carlota stood with her back to the piano, her eyes filled with quick
tears, Maria’s caressing hand on her arm to check her.

“I do not need your permission,” she said passionately. “I have the
voice and I will go to Casanova myself, and tell him who I am. He will
hear me. And I will pay you back everything. You do not know that I can
easily. I have my grandmother’s jewels--”

“But, my poor foolish one,” cried Maria, “Casanova would not give you
standing-room in his chorus if you went to him without the backing of
money and patronage.”

“Then I will go back to Italy. Where is the Marchese, Maria?” She spoke
with sudden quietness and dignity. “I am sorry, Mr. Ward. Doubtless the
fault is mine. I do not seem to have learned my part according to the
rôle expected of me.”

Ward bowed as she passed him, his own face tense with repression. Out
in the long gallery Jacobelli waited, detaining the Marchese over the
collection of emeralds. Carlota pleaded a sudden faintness to account
for her departure and he accompanied them down to Jacobelli’s waiting
car, returning for a final glass of his favorite cordial in Ward’s
library.

“You are not only the art lover supreme,” the old gentleman said
genially, ensconcing himself in a deep armchair, “but likewise you know
how to select the rare, the unusual. Before I had the enjoyment of our
personal acquaintance, I had heard of you as an eccentric, that you
carried about in your pockets loose pearls worth thousands, merely to
touch and gaze on them when you were in the critical moment of some
great financial deal. Is it so?”

Ward smiled non-committally.

“I have collected pearls amongst other things.”

“Then perhaps you noticed the cap our sweet protégée wore to-night,
the Juliette mode, a network of pearls? That is a bit of very delicate
craftsmanship, sixteenth-century work. Margherita Paoli’s collection
was thought marvelous in her day. Every piece has its own history. She
left it intact for Carlota.”

“Where is it?” The unwinking, light gray eyes of the financier watched
every shade of expression on his guest’s face.

“I was not in the confidence of the Contessa,” responded the Marchese
suavely, almost regretfully, as he touched the ash from his cigarette
tip and watched it fall on the curled leaf of gold repoussé.

Carlota leaned her head back on the suède cushion in Jacobelli’s car,
gazing out at the Avenue’s lights as they flashed by. It had been
raining, and they glowed through the wet glass in prismatic hues like
in a spectrum. Maria’s arm was close about her, but she was silent,
inwardly frightened and disturbed at the dénouement to the dinner.
But Jacobelli was elated and highly amused. He occupied the uptown
seat himself, and sat with a hand resting on each knee, complacent and
benignant.

“Cara mia, I salute!” he exclaimed happily. “You are an actress as well
as a singer. You could not possibly have entertained him better or
interested him more piquantly.”

“I did not try to interest him,” Carlota replied, wearily. “I hate him
and the look in his eyes.”

She drew in her breath sharply with a tremor of dread, and returned the
quick, understanding pressure of Maria’s hand. But the maestro merely
smiled at them both, smiled until his round, plump face seemed like a
caricature of himself sketched in upturned half-moons of mirth.

“That is quite all right,” he assured her. “You should be proud that
so great a man is attracted by your genius. So soon as you have signed
your first contract, my dear, and made your début, then you may refuse
to see him, if you like, if not before. What is the look in his eyes
to you? Thousands will gaze at you so. You must learn to accept homage
gracefully. Ward is a stepping-stone to success. To-morrow I shall see
Casanova for you as he ordered.”

Carlota closed her eyes as the car drew up under the heavy
porte-cochère at the Saint Germain apartments. Its rim of electric
lights was the sole illumination on the dark side street at that hour.

“No, I shall not come up with you,” protested Jacobelli. “Do not
tempt me, signora. I shall overeat if you set before me one of those
delightful suppers of yours, and, besides, the child must rest. We may
get a hearing to-morrow and she needs all her strength. Sleep well,
Carlota. Remember, smother the emotion that cripples your work.”

She did not speak until they reached their apartment, and Maria laid
her hands on her shoulders to look closely into her eyes under the
shaded lights.

“Ah, my dear one, they have hurt you to-night,” she sighed. “You are
not ready yet, not old enough to manage these men. Some day it will
be as nothing to you, their whims and notions, their mad passions and
threats. A man in love is the most helpless, pitiful thing in all the
world, never, never dangerous. You have him at your mercy. What did he
say to you?”

Carlota slipped out of her velvet cloak tiredly.

“I hardly know. It was so sudden and horrible, the touch of his hands
on my flesh, and his face close to mine. He was a dog to take advantage
of my being there as his guest--”

“Oh, hush! What did he say to you?” urged Maria shrewdly.

“Nothing at all. He asked me to sing, and when I had finished he seized
me in his arms and tried to kiss me.”

“I should not have left you alone. Opportunity makes the thief. It is
Jacobelli’s fault. He must have known that Ward desired a chance of
speaking to you. But it is all nothing, cara mia, nothing at all. It
was certain he would fall in love with you. No man could help it,
but he must be taught some gems are priceless. He did not ask you any
questions, then, about yourself, about the Paoli collection or the
jewels you wore?”

Carlota looked at her wonderingly.

“Of course not. Why should he?”

“I do not want any one to know they are here in America, out of the
Tittani vaults. Nobody is aware of it as yet excepting yourself and the
Marchese. He helped me with the customs when we came in, he and the
delightful Palmieri. But even to Palmieri they were merely jewels. He
did not know their histories.”

Carlota watched her anxiously, a quick reaction of tenderness and
solicitude for Maria sweeping over her, and making her forgetful of her
own trouble.

“You’re worried, dear. Why?” she asked.

“Why?” Maria laughed. “Because I am doubtless a superstitious old fool.
Paoli always said there was a curse about the rubies and pearls, rubies
for the blood of the people, pearls for the tears they shed. I wish we
had not brought them.”




CHAPTER IX


The following morning at nine-thirty, Signor Jacobelli stood bowing
on the threshold of Casanova’s small sanctum in the Opera building.
Armed with Ogden Ward’s influence and his own reputation, his welcome
was assured. Casanova, lean and dark, beamed on his visitor like some
comradely Mephisto luxuriating in dolce far niente.

“Come in, my friend,” he called. “You release me from the duty of
perusing the new opera of the great, unknown composer who insists that
I shall discover him. Do you bring me a new sensation?”

But Jacobelli was mysterious and secretive. For over an hour he sat
in the famous, three-cornered office, dilating upon the beauty and
genius of Paoli’s granddaughter until he knew he held the interest of
the impresario. Suddenly Alphonse, the slender, solicitous secretary,
peered around the door.

“Mrs. Carrington Nevins,” he whispered tentatively. “She is alone.”

“You will wait,” Casanova urged, as he nodded assent. “She is very
wealthy, one of our best subscribers. She wishes to secure some good
singers for her Italian fête. One cannot refuse, and then she has a
daughter whom she thinks is a Galli-Curci handicapped by position and
money.”

“I fly,” answered Jacobelli shortly, but as he turned about, he
encountered Mrs. Nevins. Somehow, with her elaborately arranged gray
hair, fine aquiline profile, and costume of gray velvet trimmed in
silver fox, she brought a memory of Marie Antoinette, or was it merely
the reminder of some famous actress in the part? The old maestro paused
before her, a half-comic air of having been captured on the point of
flight.

“I have heard often of you,” she said graciously. “My daughter Nathalie
sings. She is a wonderful child, and even you, signor, must recognize
genius, though you meet it handicapped.”

Casanova’s half-closed eyes twinkled at the inference, but Jacobelli
was in a mellow mood.

“I shall be charmed to hear her some time, madame. Let her not choke
her voice upon her golden spoon.”

“You must hear her soon,” insisted Mrs. Nevins. “I am getting up a
programme for my Italian fête, the milk fund for the children, you
know, a wonderful cause. Don’t you think Signor Jacobelli might be a
help to us, Signor Casanova? I do want to have everything in harmony,
authentic and still startling. I want a little operetta for Nathalie’s
sake, and have been talking over the libretto with a young composer I
just met, Griffeth Ames; perhaps you may know him.”

But Jacobelli was in a hurry to leave, and protesting his utter
ignorance of Mr. Ames’s existence, he departed, not realizing how the
grim sisters of fate had tangled his thread of life that moment with
Griffeth Ames’s destiny.

At the same moment Ames sat perched on the seat in the slanting dormer
window, staring down moodily at the street below. It was nearly eleven.
Sometimes she came in the morning, and they would have lunch together
after her lesson. He had not realized how deep an interest she had
become in his life until two days had elapsed without her. Ptolemy kept
vigil with him through the long evenings, while he smoked and told
himself all sophists and philosophers were bachelors and liars. Love
was a terrible, disconcerting truth. And he saw Carlota’s face in the
vanishing rings of his smoke.

At the corner stood a pushcart piled high with California grapes,
turned into a shrine of Bacchus. Upreared on a wooden framework
festoons of clusters dangled temptingly, and vine leaves were twined
about the base of the cart. The boy who tended it bartered with an old
sibyl-faced Sicilian grandmother, naming her a price, and whistling
until she came around to it. And suddenly Ames caught sight of Carlota
as she walked across the Square from the ’bus terminus, her slim,
youthful figure conspicuous among the vari-clad denizens of the park.
She paused at the stand and bought plentifully, not only of the grapes,
but of late rich-toned pears and golden-russet apples. He leaned far
out the window, watching her longingly, Ptolemy rubbing against his arm
as though he, too, sensed the return of Columbine.

At the foot of the last flight of stairs Carlota hesitated, listening.
From the studio came a new melody, a haunting, yearning strain that
she remembered. Ames had played it at the Phelpses that first night
when their eyes had met. He had named it the “Quest of Love,” “Cerca di
Amore.” As it ended, she opened the door softly, without knocking.

“I have come to prepare lunch, signor,” she said demurely, but with a
flash of mischief in her eyes. “If you are still angry, then Ptolemy
and I will eat it together.”

“Is it a lasting peace or merely an armistice?” he demanded, sweeping
the papers from the table. “You are afraid to look at me for fear you
will surrender.”

“It is an armistice,” she said sedately. “It is beneath your dignity
as a composer to take pupils who have not real genius. I still hold to
that. And I shall need celery and romaine and tomatoes and grapefruit
and almonds for my salad, so you may go out and find them.”

She tied a strip of drapery around her for an apron, and started
preparations for lunch. Ames leaned from a back window and hailed a
small and willing neighbor to go to the market, after the needs of the
queen, as he said.

They did not speak to each other for some time. Ames watched her as the
sunlight poured down on her bowed head. He held a melon in one hand,
uplifted absently, a length of scarlet and black art burlap around his
waist.

“You look exactly like one of the melon-sellers on the quay at Naples,”
she told him, with a little smile. “When the boat stops there, they
crowd around begging you to buy from them. Lift up your arm and call
out.”

“I will do no such thing,” responded Ames buoyantly. “I decline to pose
for your majesty. Will you deign to name your castle habitat, that I
may call on your most royal parents and interest them in my humble
self?”

She was serious in an instant.

“I have no people, signor. If you could go with me to the Villa
Tittani, you would find a very little village high up on the rocks
above the Campagna. You know where I mean? See?”

She dipped her finger-tips in the dregs of chianti remaining in the
bowl beside her where she had used it in the salad dressing, and traced
a map for him on the bare table-top.

“Here is the winding road from the shore, and here at the very top
there is a villa with rose-tinted stone walls all about it, very high
walls overgrown with flowers and vines. That is where the nobility
live.” Her eyes were sparkling with mischief. “Often when I was little
I have seen the Contessa walking on the terraces. She was so stately
and handsome, and her daughter Bianca was like a real princess should
be, a princess of dreams and fairy-tales, tall and slender and with
eyes like stars. Then, if you walk on, down through the ilex avenue,
you will come to a very quiet spot where the old tombs face the sea,
and there are my people, all of them.”

“I’m a brute!” exclaimed Ames, holding her hands in his with quick,
understanding tenderness. “The way I have let you come and go without
showing any real interest after all you have done for me.”

“What have I done? Come down here and let you teach me and in return
told you some fairy-tales.”

He stared down at her, puzzled as always. He was twenty-four, and the
coasts of chance and illusion were far more tangible to him than any of
Life’s ports of call. He wondered if he could make her understand all
that she had become to him. He wheeled about and found his pipe with
sudden disgust at his own impotence.

“Carlota, do you know, I’ve just discovered something about myself.
I’m a beastly poor amateur at making love. I want to tell you just how
I feel about you slipping in here like a sunbeam, or--or Ptolemy. You
know, I found him on the fire escape one morning, and he’s stayed here
ever since. There was a sparrow, too, last winter. I left my window
open there, and it flew in out of the storm and perched on the curtain
rod. Fought me every time I tried to feed it. You seemed to belong to
their crowd, the sunbeam and the sparrow and Ptolemy. You just came and
stayed, and I was a fool; I took you for granted.”

“You asked me to come, after we first met,” Carlota corrected him. “I
would not come without the invitation first.”

He bowed low before her.

“And I am honored by the royal presence. I have learned these last two
days the strangest thing. When you are here and we are friends, I can
work at my best, and when you are angry with me, it goes just like
that, all my inspiration. So you see you have me at your mercy.” He
turned and rummaged among the mass of papers and score-sheets on the
piano-top. “I’m going to finish my operetta in a week if you’ll stand
by me and not get temperamental, dear. The big chance is coming now.
Mrs. Nevins says she can get me an immediate hearing from Casanova if
she presents it first at her fête. Isn’t that great?”

Carlota’s lips pressed together firmly at the name. She did not answer.

“You must be glad with me because you gave me the idea for it. I had
been tormented with a mass of harmonies and tunes that would not shape
into anything. Remember how I played that first night you met me?
Listen to this and see if you remember it.”

He leaned over the piano towards her, reading aloud the synopsis of the
libretto.

“Fiametta is the lonely princess of the Castle Tittani. She loves
Peppino, a fisher-boy. There is a fête in the village. She disguises
herself to go down and mingle with the people, scaling the walls of
Tittani with love’s magic. She dances with Peppino, who does not know
that she is the princess. He is disguised as Harlequin. His sweetheart
stabs her through jealousy when Peppino avows his love for her. She
dies in his arms as the people recognize her as their princess. It is
the tragedy of youth’s eternal quest for love beyond all barriers.”

Her head was bent over the salad bowl as she listened.

“I call it ‘Fiametta.’ Do you like it?” he asked eagerly. “You don’t
mind my using the little story you told me, do you, Carlota? I may make
it immortal.”

“Why must she die, your princess?” she said wistfully. “I love it all
but that. How could you write it when you had not seen our beautiful
Tittani or known my people.”

“I had seen and known you. That’s the answer. Listen to this.” He flung
himself down at the piano, head back, striking into the melody that had
been his call to her. “This is your motif.”

Suddenly there came an imperative tap at the door.

“Open. My arms are full.”

“That’s only Dmitri. You met him at the Phelpses that night.” Ames
threw wide the door. “Enter and join the happy throng. Comes a Greek
bearing gifts.”

At sight of Carlota, Dmitri dropped his bundles and made obeisance with
sedate ceremony.

“I had not dreamt that any but myself would ever climb those stairs to
the house of Ptolemy.”

“I’m the luckiest man in the world. Listen, Dmitri; quit bowing and
understand. This is--” Ames hesitated and laughed. “I don’t even know
your last name, Carlota. You tell him. You met each other at Phelps’s.”

Carlota looked at the newcomer in her grave, measuring way. She had
not remembered him at all. He was older than Ames, and without any
claims whatever to good looks. Swarthy, thin, slight, stoop-shouldered,
careless in dress, there was still something indefinably distinguished
and reassuring about him. He might have sat for a bust of the youthful
Socrates with his blunt, uneven profile. A perpetual smile perched on
his wide mouth; not a propitiatory smile, but rather a tolerant one.
Here was a spirit that might have waited æons on the edge of chaos,
believing absolutely in the ultimate birth of cosmic harmony, even on
earth.

“Please! I beg you not to.” He interrupted her. “I do not wish to know
your name. Identity is the cloak of selfishness. They number convicts
and name hapless infants. Human consciousness is a universal lottery
where the lucky numbers win by drawing personality in lots of genius.
Griffeth is a genius. I am one. You, too, with that face, do not have
to be a genius. You are Woman, incarnate Love and Inspiration to us
poor devils.”

“Give him work to keep him quiet,” advised Ames.

But Dmitri picked up his bundles and began opening them with the air of
a high priest at his ritual.

“I shall prepare a feast for you to-day, a treat. The brigand stew of
Bulgaria. I have eaten it on mountain heights where even the goats die
of starvation.”

“I think I will go,” Carlota said in her quick, aloof way, and Dmitri
turned to her eagerly, his face full of a strange, beseeching charm.

“See, I have disappointed you!” he declared; “when for weeks I have
hoped to catch you here on one of your flights of passage. First when
I saw you at Mr. Phelps’s, you overlooked me absolutely for him.” He
nodded at Ames. “He is merely spectacular. He had no more vision, no
wider horizons than a mole. When he told me yesterday that you would
never come here again, I understood perfectly. I told him you would
surely return, but I knew also why you were angry with him. He stands
outside our range of perspective, so you must forgive him. He blunders
like a baby lamb; you know the kind with large knees and prodigious
ears, utterly hopeless.”

“Grand old Diogenes; all he needs is a tub and lantern to go into
business.” Ames patted him affectionately. “Put your old lamb on to
stew and stop spouting if we are to eat it to-day. What do you do
first, braise it?”

“Let it alone. He is become the plaything of the privileged classes.”
Dmitri seized his bundles and made for the kitchenette, where he
declaimed just the same. “How many times in three days have you motored
down to Long Island? Confess.”

Ames avoided Carlota’s questioning, accusing eyes.

“Twice, to give lessons.”

“Twice for lessons, and then you stay all the afternoon and have dinner
also there. The truth ye cannot bear.”

“When I believed that you were working hard on your opera and were
sorry I did not come back to you,” Carlota said softly.

“Son of discordance!” Ames flung a cushion headlong over the partition.
“You only want to set Carlota against me and seize her yourself.”

“See?” Dmitri’s head showed around the curtain delightedly. “He has
already the little social tricks. To be petty. Still, I like him, so I
will save him. You shall not become the Harlequin boy of the nouveaux
riches. They will but monopolize your time until a new warrior of ennui
shall appear and grasp the golden bough from your hand. They will
permit you to loll in their beautiful playgrounds until you imagine
yourself indispensable. You will think you are succeeding, getting in
on the inside, as they say. You will gain patronage. You are young
and might be popular, but time is your treasure, and they waste it as
nothing.”

Out of doors spring dallied in the old square, and Jacobelli, stepping
from the interior of a green motor ’bus just beyond the Arch, lingered
to regard almost paternally the toddling, black-eyed babies and
fluttering, dancing youngsters that played around the dry fountain.
A flock of pigeons swerved down from the Judson Memorial Tower and
he smiled at them benignly, seeing those that fed at noon below the
Campanile.

He had tried to induce Casanova to join him at luncheon down at the
Brevoort, but the director had another engagement and Jacobelli had
been forced to come alone, something he innately disliked. There
was the genial, gregarious instinct of the old Roman feaster in the
maestro. He loved to treat himself to a carefully chosen meal in a
favorite corner, with a friend opposite, and a chef on duty who knew
his name.

The beauty of the Square lured him. In late October it seemed to
rest like some gypsy dancer, garbed in rich attire of red and gold,
but silent and tense with expectation of the next twirl. He strolled
towards the south side leisurely, intending to circle the Square on his
way back to the hotel, trying to reason with himself on his duty to
Carlota. His experience with women had taught him the usual causes of
their temperamental moods. Something had undoubtedly aroused Carlota’s
nature into sudden and unexpected sensitiveness. It could not be merely
her dislike and resentment towards Ward. If this had been so, then why
had she not reacted under the stimulus during the past two years. No,
he mused, with toleration, somehow, the contagion of Love had touched
her in spite of their care, and lo, the walls of Tittani tumbled at the
magic bugle of some Childe Roland. Even so, it was nothing serious,
he told himself. Maria’s health was better now. She could watch her
closer. At eighteen a girl’s imagination will clothe some distant
object with all the splendor of heroism. Doubtless she was under the
spell of her own natural yearning for love.

And suddenly, even while he rambled and reasoned, the demigod of
Misrule wakened drowsily and took note of the excellent juxtaposition
of certain humans. Jacobelli stopped dead short, head uplifted like a
horse scenting fire as a voice floated out on the midday air singing
Mimi’s duet with a lilting, impetuous tenor for company. He could have
sworn it was Carlota. Never could there be two such voices in New
York. He tried to locate the sound, but it seemed to float from him
elusively. He cut hastily across the southwest end of the park, seeking
it, and gazed up at the row of brownstone old studio buildings across
Fourth Street.

At the same moment a young Bulgarian, smoking a thin long cigarette
in the exact center of his lips, rose from a seat and followed him.
When Jacobelli crossed the street, intent and purpose in every move
of his rotund figure, the boy waited, his seal-brown eyes mere
slits, half-lifted lids showing gleams of high lights as he stared
fixedly after him. Outside the narrow flagged plots, the old teacher
hesitated, then entered the dusty hallway of the house next to Ames’s
abiding-place. The Bulgarian smiled and followed after him, lingering
at the corner.

Up in the studio luncheon was over. So successful and opulent it had
been, this brigand feast, that Dmitri announced they were all suffering
from the ennui of satiety, that bête noire of the rich. Carlota was
happy once more. She had read over the libretto of the operetta
while the two argued over points in the score, had sat at the piano,
trying bits here and there of Fiametta’s rôle until, somewhere down
on Bleecker Street, a church chime reached her ears, and she rose
hurriedly. Maria would be home at two.

“I must leave you,” she said regretfully. “And all the dishes to wash!”

“I’ll do them gladly.” Dmitri donned an apron promptly. “Griff, you
take your inspiration to the ’bus while I do your work for you.”

“How do you know that I take the ’bus to my home?”

She looked back at him teasingly. He waved both hands comprehensively,
dismissing the query as superfluous.

“Everybody who comes down here takes the ’bus. It is part of the
thrill, the experience of the unusual. They are the land ferries that
cross the gulf between fact and fancy.”

He began the duet plaintively as he fished for a strip of drapery and
tossed it about his shoulders for a cloak. Carlota took up the reply of
Mimi while she pulled a black-velvet student cap over her close, glossy
ripples of hair. Out on the landing Ames waited for her eagerly.

“Listen. You will come again soon, won’t you, dear? Dmitri’s a curious
sort, but he’s all gold, no alloy. He thinks your voice is great.”

“I like him very much,” she said naïvely. “Much better than Mrs. Nevins
and her daughter. How many times must you go to see them this week?”

“Oh, don’t! It isn’t anything at all, her interest in my work. She’s
giving some sort of a fête for the Italian Relief Fund, a sort of
glorified musicale as I understand it, and she wants me to give my
operetta so her daughter can sing the mezzo part, Pippa. I intend that
you shall sing Fiametta, the princess.”

“Impossible!” exclaimed Carlota in hushed alarm. “I never, never could
do that, Mr. Ames.”

“You call me Griffeth,” he swung back happily. “You are going to sing
it just the same, and it may make your fortune. I know it will mine.
Dmitri’s all wrong, you know. He’s got some sort of a brain kink over
this hatred of the rich. I don’t dare tell him even who my father is
for fear he may cut my acquaintance.”

“Is your father, then, rich?” Her gaze never left his face.

“Well, they call him so where we live out in Colorado. You’re in the
bondholder class there after you pass fifty thousand, but I don’t think
Dad’s in danger of being counted an enemy of the people yet; just
comfortably dusted.”

He laughed down at her as they crossed the Square towards the ’bus
terminus. And at exactly the same instant Signor Jacobelli was bursting
without warning or ceremony into a studio on the second floor where a
model posed. He emerged, nonplussed and furious. On the third floor the
door was locked. He shook the handle imperatively, and a disturbed but
pleasantly modulated voice answered:

“Sorry, old man. Come Monday, will you?”

“It is impossible,” exclaimed the maestro to himself, when he reached
the street, and stood wiping his forehead with a sense of baffled
uncertainty. “Yet there are not two voices like hers in the world. I
shall not wait. Love is a madness.”

He retraced his steps towards the Brevoort, determined now to tell
Maria his suspicions. Up at the dormer window of the studio, Dmitri
leaned out, placing bread crumbs on the fire escape for the sparrows.

“Go to, greedy one,” he said gravely, to one brown vagrant struggling
after the largest piece. “You elbow for room in the bread-line. Beware
the Infinite overlooks your falling.”

He glanced at the picture ensemble of the Square, one eye half closed
to catch the light-and-shade effect and found a hindrance suddenly
to his enjoyment of life. Sauntering across the street and into the
park entrance was the Bulgarian. He paused to drink at the little iron
fountain, and Dmitri leaned forward, giving a low, peculiar whistle.
The boy lifted his head with a jerk and stared about him. He forgot his
thirst. The crafty, self-contained air fell from him. Dmitri laughed
down at him and waved his hand, beckoning him to come up. The other
shook his head and waited.

“Another sparrow,” Dmitri said to himself as he closed the studio and
went to join him. “He is too thin, much too thin.”




CHAPTER X


When Ames returned to the studio twenty minutes later, it was still
empty. In his own room over on East Twenty-Eighth Street, Dmitri sat on
a couch, smoking and listening to the boy Steccho talk of Sofia, of his
mountain home, of Maryna his sister, and the little smiling mother who
cooked so excellently.

“The last time we met, we dipped in the same drinking-bowl, remember?”
Dmitri smiled across at him. “You are too young to come here in these
times. Who has sent you? Do not tell me if you dare not. I am not
afraid. I will still open wide the door every time you care to visit
me, my friend. Are the little mother and sister quite safe, you are
sure?”

“Oh, absolutely.” Steccho’s dark face glowed with enthusiasm. “Before I
come here I see to that, and they will have more still, much more.”

“So? Then you are doing well. That is good. The times are changing
about, eh? Are there any of the others here? I have met no one since
I came. I was wounded and in the hospital for months, so I have lost
track of the old friends.”

“You did not return, then, afterwards?” Steccho’s glance was uneasy.

“No,” replied Dmitri, lying on his back, and blowing long, uneven
ovals into the air. “I do not like it all, frankly, my boy. They
compromise and barter first with this faction, then with the other.
Each is afraid to trust the other. It has become a great struggle for
self-preservation now that the masters twist the torture screws of
starvation. Life, after all, once you desert nature, becomes merely
a struggle for the dear old bread and butter in one form or another.
Commerce is built upon the necessities of human existence under modern
conditions. Personally, I am very radical on one point. I would kill
without mercy the man who gambles for his own profit on the necessities
of his brother man, his food, his fuel, his clothing. And I do not
believe in killing, as you know. I regard war as a subterfuge, an
exploitation of power. I object to persons infusing into my mind hatred
of my brother man merely because he happens to live on a different spot
of earth than I do, and belongs to a different branch of the same human
race.”

“There are robbers and murderers in the brotherhood as well as in the
privileged classes.”

“So, my Steccho has learned to perch safely and sensibly upon the
fence between the warring factions, yes? The rain falls on the just
and the unjust, therefore we must be merciful likewise.” He sat up and
reached for his violin, playing stray chords, bits of folk-songs and
haunting Czech melodies in minors.

Steccho listened moodily, his eyes almost closed as he clasped arms
about his knees, and bent his head on them. Dmitri played in silence
for nearly half an hour. When he stopped, the boy looked up at him
wistfully.

“When the cause is right, the way must be right too.”

“What do you mean by the cause?” Dmitri asked genially. “We live in
a day when causes are hung for sale in any market-place. You may buy
them like indulgences from pilgrim friars. I would pick my cause with
caution.”

“I mean this. No matter what we do, if it is for some great, beautiful
purpose, then it does not matter, eh?”

“You will stub your toe on that rock, the end that justifies the
means; that is all it comes to when you are through with reasoning and
sophistry. And I do not like any reasoning which may be diverted by the
idiot Chance, to his own blind folly. Can you tell me frankly why you
are here? I will keep silent and help you if I may.”

Steccho threw away his last cigarette and rose, stretching himself like
an animal impatient for a run.

“I am here so that my mother and Maryna may dwell in the yellow castle
forever,” he answered with a slow smile. “You cannot help, but I should
like to come here and rest now and then.”

“You will come again soon, my friend,” Dmitri laid both hands on his
shoulders warmly. “Come often, when you like. If I am out, look for me
over in the squares, or open the door and be happy as you can until I
return. Light the fire yourself. It awaits you. If you will come back
to-night, I can promise you such a meal of broiled lamb and rice as you
have not tasted since the home days.”

“Not to-night.” Steccho shook his head. “I might take you from your
friends. I could hear you singing while I stood in the park there
to-day. The girl had a fine voice.”

“She has genius and is poor. My friend is giving her lessons so she may
sing in his opera some day. He is very much interested in her. It is a
romance.” Dmitri smiled whimsically. “He does not even know her name,
but she is very beautiful. Ah, my Steccho, if you and I, who are older
than the ages in our outlook on life, could only receive this baptism
of joy, this love. You would forget your torches and rivers of blood
if the one woman would give you her lips, yes?”

The boy turned his back on him at the door, the face of Carlota before
his eyes as it had disturbed and bewildered his purpose ever since he
had first looked upon its beauty and innocence. His fingers shook as he
fumbled blindly for the doorknob.

“I will come again, Dmitri. Good-night.”

He went directly uptown in the subway. There is a small carriage
entrance to the Hotel Dupont. By it, you may enter most privately and
unostentatiously a low-ceiled, satin-walled corridor which leads past a
flower-stand and telephone booth to a single elevator, half concealed
in a recess.

Here the boy waited while his name was sent up to Count Lazio Jurka.
There was a delay, and presently down in the private elevator came
the valet and personal courier of the Count, a soldierly individual,
gray-haired and austere.

“You always blunder,” he said as he led the way to the servants’
elevator. “You come here as a tailor, not a guest. He does not expect
you to-night. Have you news?”

Steccho shrugged his shoulders sullenly. After the meeting with Dmitri
his mind was unsettled. As they passed by the palm-guarded tea-room,
the great paneled dining-room on the corner, the rotunda with its
rose-hued walls and marble columns, the leisurely parade of the late
afternoon frequenters, his memory traveled rapidly back to his old life
that Dmitri had been a part of.

It was a far cry to Rigl, his home village, eighteen miles out of Sofia
if you take the narrow mountain trail on horseback. There had been the
childhood there, and later, when he had worked in Sofia at the little
hand-press bindery, to enable himself to study evenings. He passed one
hand over his eyes restlessly as the valet opened the door of a corner
suite on the eighth floor and snapped the catch after them. The small
inner salon was empty. Excepting for scattered daily papers it bore no
trace of use. The door of the dressing-room was ajar, and Steccho bowed
low on its threshold, waiting the word to enter.

Before a large oval mirror Count Jurka tied his cravat with a
deliberate and distinct enjoyment of the artistry required by the
operation. Clad in underclothes and shirt, he resembled some French
courtier, one who might have just flung off his cloak and hat in a gray
dawn rendezvous, and, balancing his rapier, awaited his opponent.

He was youthful, blond, serene-eyed, the Count Jurka. Throughout
the war of nations those same blue eyes had witnessed unspeakable
atrocities with the utmost impersonal calm. The white, pink-nailed
hands that dallied over cravats had dipped in the blood of innocents
quite as artistically and deliberately as they handled the silk ends
now. He was an individual the guillotine would have licked its long
steel tongue over after devouring, but there were no guillotines in
Sofia, and firing-squads were out of date likewise. The hand of fate
deputed its blows to those who worked secretly and left no trace behind
save the victim.

“Come in, Steccho,” he called pleasantly. “How goes this merry world
with you? The cigarettes, Georges.”

Steccho accepted two from the long, narrow brown leather box the valet
extended to him, and held them unlighted in his fingers. There had been
a man in Sofia who had been extremely ill, even to the verge of death,
after smoking cigarettes from that brown leather box.

The cravat tied, Jurka seated himself in an amber satin armchair, a
black-velvet dressing-robe about his shoulders. He smiled musingly
across at the boy, noting his drawn, harassed face. The hand that held
the cigarettes shook slightly. The muscles around his lips twitched
under that amused scrutiny.

“Have you found them?”

The question came hard and short finally. Steccho shook his head.

“Excellenza,” he said eagerly, “the opportunity has not come. I have
followed them both unceasingly, day and night, and have seen nothing.”

“You have followed the girl. Day and night you have followed her, no
one else. You have not yet ascertained where the jewels are kept, nor
whether she has access to them. Are they in New York or in Italy?
Are they in the possession of Maria Roma in their apartment, or in a
safety-deposit vault? Why do you shadow the girl Carlota unless you are
perhaps in love with her?”

Steccho’s eyes were brilliant with resentment that he dared not express
in words.

“One must go slowly here, excellenza,” he said. “It is not Sofia. You
yourself would not have the power to shield me or hold the jewels if I
were caught. One must look the ground over thoroughly. Possibly, as you
say, they are not even here in America, but have been left in Italy.”

Jurka smiled slowly.

“I will satisfy you on that point, and relieve your doubt, my Steccho.
They are here. Duty was declared on the full collection, Palmieri tells
me. It passed as the private jewels of a non-resident alien. So far,
I do not believe Ogden Ward has even seen them, but I know the girl
has offered them to him in return for the sums he has advanced for her
musical education. She has no conception of their value.”

“You know she has offered them to him, excellenza!” Steccho’s head
was thrust forward eagerly, the emphasis in his tone conveying his
incredulity.

“Through Ward’s Japanese butler, Ishigaki. He overheard her the night
Ward gave the girl a dinner.”

“Excellenza, your eyes are everywhere,” murmured the boy.

“Not my eyes, Steccho,” smiled Jurka. “My gold. Georges here is an able
and cautious distributor, eh? Does the girl Carlota never wear her
jewels?”

He stretched out his feet carelessly for Georges to fasten his boots.
The boy watched him with unblinking eyes, thinking of how once he had
seen their high, hard heels grind into the dead face of a man lying in
the snow. He was the friend of Dmitri and his group then. The war had
seemed far from their little mountain village until there came a day
when Jurka’s troops came through. They had quartered at the inn and
scattered among the different homes. Levano, old Levano, who preached
liberty and peace from his blacksmith forge, had staggered out into
the road after his two daughters had been violated, and had thrust his
red-hot branding-irons into the face of the soldiery. Jurka had ground
his heel on his mouth that had stiffened under choked curses.

Later, in an upper room at the inn--He stared fixedly at the highly
polished boots of Jurka, and sought to fasten his memory solely on
Maryna and the little mother. The Count had said Maryna was a pretty
little thing the day he had saved Steccho from the troops. She had run
through the crowd in the village and had knelt to wipe her brother’s
bruised face. That was the first time he had seen her, and she was
barely fifteen. It had been later on, in the upper room at the inn,
that Steccho had sworn to enter the service of the Queen providing
safety might be assured the two left at Rigl. Whenever, as now, he was
tempted to spring at the white, self-assured throat, he forced himself
to think of them. He had come to-night primarily to ask if they were
still safe, if his excellenza had any news from Rigl, and to shake off
the disquieting effect of Dmitri’s philosophy.

“I have never seen her wear jewels, excellenza,” he answered slowly.
“She is very young, about sixteen. They would not permit it, probably.”

“She is nineteen and looks older,” returned the Count curtly.

“Pardon--you have then seen her?”

Jurka made no reply, but met the boy’s eager gaze with calculating
suspicion.

“You are feeling your way through the dark, Steccho. Beware of pricking
swords. You have been allotted a certain task, a very easy task,
merely to find out where these jewels are if they are concealed in
the apartment of Carlota Trelango, and to get them at all risks. You
have two women as opponents, and you crawl and creep and shadow them
for weeks. You were told to enter their abode and search it. You were
told to find out their associates, their circumstances. What have you
accomplished save the incessant following of the girl herself. Are you
then infatuated, my Steccho? It is the eternal failing of youth.”

Steccho’s face colored dully. Maryna was fifteen, the girl Carlota only
four years older. Most of the young girls of Rigl had been given to
the Jurka’s soldiery that week, excepting the three loveliest,--little
Roziska, the pale Wanda destined for the convent, and radiant Katinka
with eyes like Carlota’s, velvety, luminous. He had always watched her
in church when she knelt in the long shaft of purple light above the
aureole of Saint Genevieve. If there had been no war, he would have
married Katinka some day, but the three had been dragged to the rooms
above the inn, reserved for the high honor of his excellenza’s favor.
Were the jewels but part of his plan? If he had seen Carlota’s beauty,
would she not become like the three girls he had seen thrown out to the
soldiers after his excellenza had wearied of them? He lifted keen eyes
to the suave, smiling face.

“They go nowhere, save to the places I have already told you.”

Georges grimaced at his servility and protesting palms.

“Recount!” ordered Jurka. “The Marchese, Ward, Jacobelli. Are there
more?”

“No more.” The boy’s gaze never wavered. Dmitri had said it was a
romance, the affair in the Square, and they were his friends. It gave
him a curious, inmost thrill of happiness to feel that he was thwarting
the man who had killed the other girl, Katinka.

The bell of the suite rang lightly. Georges sprang to his feet, laying
an evening suit over the boy’s arm, and pushing him before him into
the reception-hall. As he opened the door, he gave voluble directions
to the tailor’s assistant for the evening garb of the Count. The hotel
page presented several letters on a silver tray and passed on down the
corridor.

“It is not safe for you to come here.” Jurka opened the letters with a
single thrust of a slender blade. His clean-cut dexterity fascinated
Steccho. “Where the devil do you live, anyway?”

“Twenty-Eighth Street, East,” he lied simply. “I change often. A friend
told me of this place.”

“Make no friends, I have told you.”

“A former friend whom I had known in Sofia. I but met him on the street
one day, a very old man, Boris--”

Georges held up his hand with a frown. The Count perused the first
letter he opened twice, and smiled. It was from Mrs. Carrington Nevins,
urgently requesting his presence and assistance in the success of her
entertainment at Belvoir, Long Island.

“The social ruse always wins out, Georges. We are the emissaries of
the queen’s mercy; we wish to study the methods for rehabilitating the
wounded, for salvaging the war wreckage of humanity. The exiled queen’s
heart is torn with remorse for her poor lost ones. It sounds well
and opens many doors, among them, Belvoir.” He laughed and tossed the
letter to Georges. “Accept. It is for a week from Saturday.”

Steccho waited his pleasure by the door. Timidly, as Jurka went through
his mail, he ventured to attract his attention once more.

“Excellenza, you have heard some news recently, perhaps from Sofia,
from Rigl?”

Georges motioned him to leave, but he lingered obstinately.

“You have news of my mother and sister, yes, of Maryna, excellenza? You
remember Maryna, the little girl who--”

The Count nodded his blond head towards the door.

“Out!” he said briefly. “Bring me the jewels by Saturday.”




CHAPTER XI


Signor Jacobelli was in a baffled mood. Every time Carlota came for
her lesson, he would regard her thoughtfully, dubiously, but found no
solution to his problem in her happy, serene face and dark eyes that
held a gleam of mirth nowadays.

Once she had just missed meeting Ward himself there. It had been his
first visit since the dinner, and after his departure a florist’s
messenger brought her a purple box filled with single-petaled Parma
violets. Under them lay a velvet case containing a pendant, two
perfect, pear-shaped pearls. She retained the messenger, writing on the
back of Ward’s own card in haste:

  SIGNOR: I thank you. The only jewels I ever wear are those of my
  grandmother!
                                                 CARLOTA TRELANGO.

“And the flowers--behold!” she flung up a window and leaned far out to
throw them down into the street. A street piano played below, the wife
of the owner turning the crank with a stout bambino on one hip. “You
throw her some money now, maestro, so that both soul and body are fed.
Who was it said, bread for the body, white hyacinths--” She checked
herself, recalling suddenly that it had been Dmitri who loved to chant
Mahomet’s axiom, but Jacobelli had not even noticed it. Grumblingly he
dropped a crumpled bill to the woman’s extended apron.

“You are not a spoiled child any longer,” he told Carlota. “You are
now a person of destiny. Why, then, do you persist in acting like a
petulant marionette instead of the dignified artiste. You cannot afford
to rebuff Ward. He is your patron. You are merely a little beggar on
the doorstep of hope, my child, and you take on the airs of a queen.”

“And here you have been telling me all along that I must learn to be
queenlike and aloof.” Carlota sat back in the winged armchair beside
the fireplace. It was far too deep and too high for her, having been
selected solely to accommodate the rotund proportions of Jacobelli, but
she preferred it. Some way, it had the significance of a throne chair
when she felt herself holding the balance of power, as now. “And if I
am a person of destiny, then how can anything that I do alter events?”
She laughed up at him softly, teasingly. He looked away from her in
somber disapproval. “Oh, my dear, dear good teacher and friend,” she
pleaded with swift reaction. “Forgive me. I will try, indeed I will.
What do you want me to do? Anything but see Mr. Ward alone.”

“You shall prepare for your début.” Jacobelli took up her challenge
instantly. “Casanova will place you on the list for next season. That
will give you an entire year for more study. And you shall flame forth
in glory as Margherita or Gilda--”

“Why not Santuzza or Aïda?” Carlota’s temper rose at his suggestion.
“Let me sing these, my maestro, when I am stout and placid some day,
but now, give me the new rôles.”

“You seek the spectacular,” he accused. “You would be like all of the
women. They must have the greatest rôle of all written for them alone,
dedicated to them. Ah, do I not know!”

Maria arrived in time to prevent his tirade against whims. She listened
in delight as he told of the interview with Casanova.

“After it is all settled, she will be sweet and docile once more,” she
promised. “She has not been the same even to me since that night at Mr.
Ward’s.”

“You think that is the reason, eh?” Jacobelli stared moodily before
him, feeling it was the proper time to enlighten Maria. And yet, how?
Were not his suspicions based on air? Only the voice down in the
Square was actually proof to himself, and how could he prove it to
others, when he had not even traced it?

“For one thing, she is studying too hard, I think,” Maria pursued
earnestly. “Four lessons a week and such long ones; are they not too
much for the child, signor?”

“Four?” repeated Jacobelli, one bushy eyebrow lifting in amazement.
“She tells you she has four lessons a week?”

“Two hours in the morning, two in the afternoon. It is very strenuous,
I think.”

“Doubtless so.” He rose and paced the floor with rising agitation.
Carlota had come to his studio three times each week, for a two-hour
lesson only. Here was proof positive that she was straying somewhere
into forbidden paths. “It is absolutely imperative, signora,” he began
huskily, when the suspected one came from the inner room, humming to
herself from the love tragedy of Mélisande. “Imperative that she make
her début next year,” he finished conclusively. “Delays are dangerous,
especially when one is overstudying.”

The hidden rebuke passed completely by Carlota, as she said good-bye,
sparkling and confident, and Jacobelli pondered, with a sense of
responsibility, feeling that he alone knew the real reason for her
deception. Possibly Ptolemy or Dmitri might have enlightened him still
further. Necessarily Carlota’s visits had become more frequent, since
she was to sing the leading rôle in Ames’s operetta. He had won her
consent after many arguments and stormy scenes. Six times in one week
he had been summoned to Belvoir to consult with Mrs. Nevins about her
fête. Four times the black car with its buff and old gold interior had
waited his convenience outside the old brownstone row on Fourth Street,
and when Carlota arrived for her lesson, she had found only Ptolemy
in possession. Yet Ames had argued her into agreeing with him, that
this was his great opportunity to present his operetta under the most
favorable auspices.

“And you are to sing Fiametta,” he told her positively. “You are the
perfect type for her, dear, a slim, aloof little princess, questing for
love. Can you get the two costumes, the peasant’s for the fête, and
the princess’s when she is in the castle? I suppose you could manage
the first out of your own wardrobe, and we will have to rent the other
royal raiment.”

He was like a boy over the fun of actually preparing the production.
Carlota looked at him unforgivingly, even appraisingly, if one could
appraise joy.

“I will never, never sing at the house of this Mrs. Nevins. She
has nothing in the whole world but money--nothing. She is utterly
impossible. She does not even know how to patronize graciously.”

“But, dear heart, you must forget her entirely. You are not doing this
for her. It is for your own home land and the people you love there,
for their relief.”

“But there is not a single person in your company with whom I care
to be seen. You have not one single artist, no one but these society
girls. I would never appear with them. I am a professional.”

He laughed at her vehemence and hauteur. It was as if Ptolemy had taken
offense and expostulated against the privileged classes. He held her
hands fast in his.

“You will, too. It will be over in no time, and I ask it for myself,
Carlota. I am absolutely selfish about it. You are my Fiametta. I wrote
it for you. No one else could ever sing it. You know you were its sole
inspiration. And who will know you out there? It is only to lend me
your wonderful voice for our success, and some day I shall see that you
sing it at the grand opera. Don’t you want me to win out?”

He placed his hand under her obstinate, pointed little chin. Who was it
had written,

        “her perfect, fruit-shaped chin,
  Such as Correggio loved to paint”?

And her small, thoroughbred head with its close, brown curls, the
splendid depth and luster of her dark eyes, the clean, fine curve of
chin and throat, they were an ever-new delight to him. She lifted her
lashes slowly and met his gaze with accusing eyes.

“Will--will this girl, your new pupil, sing a rôle also?”

“Surely, dear,” he told her confidently. “One must throw some sops to
Cerberus, three-headed monster of wealth and otherwise. She will only
have the mezzo rôle of Nedda. But you will be my princess girl, singing
my ‘Quest of Love’ for love of Italy and me. And some day, when we are
very rich, just we two, we will go to Italy and find your Villa Tittani
with its rose-tinted walls. Would you climb them to find me?”

Carlota smiled up at him, a flash of quick mischief in her glance.

“And what of your father who lives in Colorado? Would he allow you
to”--she hesitated for the word: he had not said to marry--“to go away
after love quests for rose-walled villas?”

“Dad wouldn’t say a word if I had produced several successful operas.”
Ames went over to the window and stared quizzically down at the Square.
“The verdict of your family rests solely on the world’s verdict first.
That’s the last word with Dad, success; whether you can change your
dreams into reality, kind of like the old alchemist’s trick with lead
into gold. The difference is that, to us, it is the dreams that are
more real than the consummation, eh, dear? Forget about him. Let’s
figure out about your costume.”

“I can get both, signor,” she promised demurely; “and they will be
perfectly correct, I promise.”

“Don’t call me that. Say Griffeth, or Griff. It isn’t exactly a pet
name, but I rather like it. I got it from some old Welsh forbear.
Listen, I know just what you should wear. Something with a straight
mediæval line like the velvet gown you wore at the Phelpses the first
night I met you. I thought then how much you were like some stray
princess girl like Rostand’s Lointaine. Remember, he called her his
remote princess.”

Carlota slipped aside from his disturbing nearness, and knelt by the
fire to pet Ptolemy.

“But that dress was not at all royal. I shall amaze you with one truly
magnificent.”

He laughed at her boasting and insisted on showing her his idea of the
gown, draping her with a long silken strip of piña cloth that made a
train from her slim shoulders. On the shelf above the door was a brown
casserole in a perforated silver stand, crown-shaped. It made a perfect
coronal, Ames declared gravely, setting it down low over her curls,
somewhat heavy and Byzantine, but most becoming. Dmitri came in to
acclaim her, bringing with him the first potted azalea he had happened
to see in the market. He set it down on the window-seat in triumph.

“See how much I love you!” he cried. “It was very heavy, but I
brought it, green tub and all. Do you know why? Of course not, my
poor simpletons. It is because these flowers grow wild in abundance
in my native land. They are like the roses of Sharon blossoming in
our mountain wildernesses, and the color is like the dawn flush, like
the maiden glow in the cheeks of our girls.” He regarded the plant
reflectively. “It is very strange how precious a symbol of memory
becomes. My heart leapt when I saw it in the window, all abloom. How do
you like it?”

“I always want to kneel before flowers,” Carlota said softly, as she
touched the petals with her finger-tips lingeringly. “In Italy you
find flowers before the wayside shrines, and I liked them better than
churches. We had a shrine in a grotto at the end of the garden--”
She stopped, but neither had noticed her words. Dmitri was in a fine
abstract mood.

“Shrines are the proper places of worship,” he stated positively.
“Groves first, no mountain-tops. All philosophers prefer the isolation
of the mountain-top; witness whoever thought first of Parnassus, also
Zarathustra and his taste for peaks. Every heart is in reality a secret
shrine where the spirit may worship beauty, truth, ideals, love,
without distraction. Why are you crowned to-day?” He broke off abruptly
to smile with a brooding tenderness over Carlota.

Ames answered for her, telling of the approaching fête and of the
production of his opera.

“And at last she has consented to sing Fiametta for me, isn’t that
great?” He spoke with a certain carelessness that always aroused Dmitri.

“For you? And who are you?” he demanded. “You are the eternal
Harlequin, the dancing, masked juvenile of all history and fiction, the
necessary evil in all romance. You always win, no matter what cards
Fate deals you. You play with a stacked deck, I tell you to your face,
and your dice are loaded too. You are a trickster, and none may win the
hand of Columbine from you. We, who are a million times more worthy of
her love, we, the thinkers, the stable, faithful adorers, are not even
seen by her when you flirt your rapier, and twirl before her eyes. I
hate you.” He turned to Carlota calmly. “Are you going to sing at this
fête?”

She smiled in confusion at his earnestness.

“I feel I must because its theme is all about my princess of Castle
Tittani. I am responsible for it and its success.”

“What name do you think would be good for her to take, Dmitri? You know
I do not even know her own to this day. It is her whim to hide it from
me. I think if it were really a beautiful one, she would tell, don’t
you?”

“Ignore him,” Dmitri told her gravely. “Names are nothing. I thank
God I was a foundling. No, you did not know that, eh? There is a
certain road that leads to a monastery. If I told you where it is and
its name, you would not know anything about it, but it is very old,
back to the Crusades, a place of sanctuary for kings and road knights
alike. There is a shrine to Saint Demetra below it. I was left before
it, and a brother found me and took me to the gray stone refuge.
That is quite all as a basis of fact, but I weave about it the usual
fantasy of desire. First, Demetra is only our pagan goddess disguised.
She is Demeter of the harvest, the mother of food for the world, the
bountiful, the ever-pitiful. And I was named Dmitri. Again, always
your foundling grows up, imagining he is the lost son of the king,
always of noble blood. But not I, Dmitri.” He perched himself on the
window-seat, one arm around the azalea tub, smoking peacefully. “I like
to think there were many of us, and before I came, my mother hoped to
save me, the unwanted one, from the crowded life. I like to think she
found courage, with my coming, to put me forth to high adventure and
give me what you call ‘the big chance.’ So I feel brotherhood with all
the world; and when I was fourteen, they put me out of the monastery
with a fair education and a fine digestion. They feed you very well
there. The only thing is, I was undoubtedly ruined for the seats of
the mighty. A good digestion makes a man an optimist, and I was taught
to choose my food wisely, without satiety. I paraphrase the prophet.
Behold, as a man eateth, so is he.”

“Perhaps they are all alive, your mother, and the others,” Carlota
almost whispered, as she leaned towards him, listening intently.

“See, I have made you believe in my fantasy, too,” he smiled down at
her. “Child, even if they had existed, they would have died under the
sword of the Turks like all the rest. I was called Kavec by my friends
later on. It has a pleasant meaning, the giver. I have not found out
yet what it is I give best to the world, but you could have all I have.”

“He is only trying to prove to you how selfish I am and what a
high-minded mountain dweller he is,” laughed Ames. “The car is
downstairs and my appointment is for one. You’ll go out with me to
rehearsal Tuesday, Carlota, then?”

She rose with a little sigh. When Dmitri talked she forgot the
inevitable to-morrow of reality.

“Have courage to refuse if you are doing it against your will,” urged
Dmitri. “He is merely a time-server.”

“No.” She shook her head, meeting Ames’s anxious eyes. “I will go
Tuesday.”




CHAPTER XII


The learning of Fiametta’s rôle was a delight to Carlota. Once she
resolved to sing it at the fête, she threw herself into it with all her
heart. Ames would turn from the piano and stare up at her in amazement
as she delivered the difficult passages with a perfection of tone and
harmony that seemed unbelievable to him, considering the training she
had received.

“You will be a sensation,” he told her. “The beautiful Signorita
Incognita. Sounds florid, doesn’t it? I want a stately, aloof name for
you. Listen, at the dress rehearsal, don’t be too distant with Mrs.
Nevins. She really can help you if she wants to.”

Carlota’s fine dark brows had lifted at this, but she had not revolted.
She had all of the true artist’s consistency and faithfulness to a
rôle, once assumed. When the day arrived, and she went out to Belvoir
to the dress rehearsal in the Nevins’s car, she played her part with a
vivid charm and adaptability that puzzled Ames. She had her peasant’s
costume with her for the fête, but not the royal raiment.

Mrs. Nevins picked her way through the transformed ballroom past
decorators and carpenters, more like the sprightly Queen of Trianon
at her amusements than ever. Her white curly hair was dressed in high
waves, her house-gown of black chiffon velvet trailing behind her, and
one bewildered Pekinese dog trying to rest itself on her train whenever
she paused.

“My dear Griff, it is wonderful the progress you have made!” she
exclaimed. “Nathalie is completely enthralled over her rôle. Such
a tender, appealing little part, isn’t it? One feels she is merely
the toy of fate, torn from her love by the caprice of the princess.
I have spoken to Casanova of the operetta and he has half promised
to come out. Such a delightful and distinguished audience for your
first effort, the Italian ambassador and his wife, Ogden Ward, Count
and Countess Triolini, court painter to Humbert years ago, and Count
Jurka, who was court chamberlain to the unhappy Queen Sophia. The most
charming and unexpected sequence of this fearful war business has been
the eager willingness of one-time enemies to coöperate now in these
little relief funds. We must all pull together, mustn’t we, and forget
now. Jurka is the handsomest thing you ever saw; looks like a Zenda
hero and all that sort of thing. He is studying our relief methods for
the rehabilitation of the wounded, a special mission for the exiled
queen; so dear of her, isn’t it?”

Carlota, sitting behind them, heard without noting the names. Her
mind was on Nathalie and her assumption of authority over Ames. It
was impossible for her to avoid seeing it. She had watched them
together constantly. Nathalie was beside him all the time, consulting,
directing, planning on every detail. She called him by his nickname
with a little, indolent proprietary intonation that enraged Carlota.
Yet she had kept her temper, and had sung her own rôle with ease and
surety.

“Are you quite sure,” Nathalie had asked her, “that your gown will be
of the period and quite appropriate? It is too bad you could not have
worn it to-day so we might be certain. You understand, of course, mamma
would be only too pleased to secure exactly the right one for you if
you wish.”

“It is most kind of you,” smiled back Carlota serenely. “I have my
gown. It is of the period and suitable for the princess.”

“What name did you wish on the programme? I didn’t quite catch it, and
we are correcting the last proof on them to-day.”

Carlota thought quickly and gave her new name with a flash of mischief.

“Paola Roma.”

“Oh, yes, you are really Italian, aren’t you? How interesting! Griff
told us that you had given him the little story that inspired the
operetta.” Nathalie’s slim fingers were busy with her hair, puffing out
the soft blond strands until it looked bobbed. “Of course,” she added
thoughtfully, “it’s one thing to give the idea, but quite another to
have made it a reality, isn’t it?”

“I do not consider this a reality of Mr. Ames’s hopes or inspiration.”
Carlota’s heavy-lidded eyes glanced over the ballroom interior as if it
had been the side-show of some carnival. “This is really nothing but a
dress rehearsal from start to finish for him. The reality will be at
the grand opera itself next year.”

“If mamma and Signor Casanova think it worth while,” Nathalie added
smilingly. “It was so nice of you to come out to-day. Griff has talked
of you a great deal but rather made you out a little tiger cat in
temperament. He told us how you broke the flower jar. You mustn’t have
any attacks out here to-morrow night, will you? We’ll all promise to
make everything easy for you.”

“Better to break the flower jar than to flat your B,” laughed Carlota
wickedly, and the girl flushed quickly.

Ames had pleaded with her for nearly fifteen minutes to beware of one
high note she always missed the purity of. The quick rap of his baton
called them to attention, but the sparkle did not leave Carlota’s eyes,
and on the way home she was silent and unresponsive.

She had planned a dozen different ways how to escape from Maria’s
watchfulness the following night. Almost she had decided to take the
Marchese into her confidence, and beg him to coax the signora away for
the evening. It could not possibly go on much longer, the deception,
nor did she wish it to. She would appear for him this once, secure the
triumph for him, and afterwards the visits to the Square would cease.
He was too absorbed, too selfish, she told herself passionately. He was
stupid, too, else he would never have been deceived by her voice. If he
had loved her, he would have found out about her at all hazards. She
had given him freely, all she knew of art, had even given him the theme
for his operetta, and he was thankless, as Dmitri said. He took it for
granted that she was a girl of the people, from the Italian quarter
below the Square, when, if he had merely thought twice, he might have
known, as the protégée of the Marchese Veracci that first night he had
seen her, she must have been somebody unusual.

“Shall I take you to the entrance?” Ames asked, as they neared the
apartment. “You are tired, aren’t you?”

She shook her head.

“Stop at the subway station in the Circle. I will take a taxi over from
there, and say I have been shopping. Maria is not home, anyway. She had
a call from her lawyer here--” Suddenly she turned and faced him. “How
did you know where I lived? I did not know what I was saying.”

He took both hands in his, drawing her to him tenderly.

“Dmitri told me you were from peacock land. That is what he calls it up
this way. He has a friend who knows you and gave it away.”

“A friend who knows me, Dmitri?” she repeated in surprise. “But I--we
have no friends here. What did he tell you?”

“Nothing at all, except that you lived in an apartment near Central
Park, when I had pictured you on Mulberry or Spring, enriching the
quarter with your sweetness. And I was tempted to go to the old
Marchese and ask him all about you.”

She drew her hands from his, shrinking from the mere mention of such
a possibility, foreseeing the excitement that would follow. Maria,
Jacobelli, would the Marchese deem it his duty to tell them?

“Listen to me,” she said, with the somber earnestness that sat so oddly
on her youth. “I forbid you ever to discuss me with any one. When I
wish you to know all about me, I myself will tell you. You understand?”

“And I am supposed to bow and say the queen can do no wrong,” laughed
Ames. “You will tell me yourself after the fête to-morrow night. There
will be a little time between the end of the operetta and the dancing.
Mrs. Nevins has arranged a special little celebration for a few and I
shall have to stay for that, but I’ll send you back in the car safely.”

“I wish you to leave me here,” she said abruptly.

The car had turned into Park Avenue from Fifty-Ninth Street, and
against every protest she left him, walking north towards the St.
Germain, hardly caring whether he watched her destination or not. As
she turned into the vestibule, the Marchese himself rose to greet her,
smiling, courtly, immaculately garbed as if he had just stepped from a
reception at the Quirinal. After Ames’s threat the sight of him almost
weakened her; and she gave him her hand in silence.

“I knew if I but waited long enough, you would surely come,” he said
jauntily. “And the time was not long. I have been loitering in the
tobacconist’s shop at the corner. There is a man whom one might talk
with over the coffee-cups in any famous center of the world, Cairo,
Bagdad, Calcutta, Constantinople, or a desert khan in Persia. He was a
worker in enamels before the war, then a spy, and now, behold, he sells
cigarettes with a good conscience to New Yorkers. An incipient seer.”

Carlota was relieved as he occupied himself with his own conversation.
Maria had not returned when they entered the apartment, and she threw
off her velvet cloak with relief.

“I’ll make us some Russian tea, just as you like it best,” she
promised--“slices of orange with whole cloves in them. Maria will come
soon. She went to see the lawyer about the mistake on the jewels,
something about the customs, I think it was.”

The Marchese sat erect.

“The customs on the jewels?” he repeated. “I saw to that myself when
you entered the port. There could be no possible error. Why did she not
consult me first? Who is this person?”

“A friend of Mr. Ward’s. Signor Jacobelli recommended him, I believe.
He thought she might have paid too much, and offered to go over the
list with her.”

“I do not care for our friend and good patron, Mr. Ward.” The
Marchese’s pointed mustache rose higher. “There is something sinister
about him. Ah,” as Carlota brought a tea-tray and set it beside him
on a low stool, “so did your beloved grandmother always serve it in
the terrace loggia. You have her way exactly, my child, and her lovely
hands.”

Carlota piled cushions beside him, and lighted the lamp beneath the
tea-kettle. Then she settled herself comfortably, and looked up at him
as she had so often in the days he spoke of. Always it had been the
Marchese who had been her confidant.

“Don’t you think that Maria is looking very tired?”

“I thought her never more attractive and charming than that evening at
Mr. Ward’s.”

“But since then. I don’t think that she goes out enough,” Carlota
insisted. “She is sacrificing herself too much for me. I beg her to go
and she will not. She says she has nowhere to go and she knows no one
here excepting yourself.”

“But, my dear child, it must not be!” exclaimed the Marchese warmly.
“Of course it has been for your sake that she has secluded herself here
in New York. You can see what a beauty she was in her day. Signora
Roma! I have heard La Scala resound with her praises, rise to her
triumph! She must not feel that she is neglected or lonely, such a
woman.”

“Perhaps if you would only tell her. She needs some one who has known
her at her great moments, don’t you know?”

“Certainly I know,” he reassured her. “It was quite right of you
to tell me. We will have a beautiful, quiet little dinner for her
to-morrow night down at the Brevoort or Lafayette, yes? Whichever
she likes, and afterwards the opera. The San Remo Company is here
from South America; not so wonderful as the Metropolitan, but very
delightful and intimate. You persuade her for me, and then at the
psychological moment, as they say over here, we will take her by storm
and make her say yes.”

The outer bell rang lightly.

“Don’t tell her about it now,” warned Carlota. “It must be done very
diplomatically or she will suspect us. Telephone to her later that you
have the seats and cannot take no for an answer.”

After he had gone Maria took her accustomed siesta. Veracci had sought
to interest her by talking of the customs matter coming up again, but
she waved him from her laughingly.

“I will not talk of anything disagreeable with you. It is quite all
right, merely a little formality to go through. I assured them we were
not remaining here permanently and the collection belongs in Italy. Mr.
Ward had insured me every courtesy there.”

The Marchese had elevated his expressive eyebrows, but did not press
the point. After his departure Carlota sat by the window, embroidering
a headband in rose and gold thread. How was she to open the jewel chest
without Maria’s knowledge. And she must have them for the princess’s
court costume. There was one gown of gold tissue over old-rose metal
cloth, an exquisite mediæval robe that lay like a web of sunlight in
one of the chests. The court train was of crimson velvet embroidered
in seed pearls, and with it she longed to wear the full set of the
Zoroaster rubies. Since she was to be his princess before these people,
she must bear herself royally for his sake.

She sighed, and laid aside her work to look down at the quiet street.
Below strolled a figure she recognized, Steccho, a belated sentinel.
He had lingered in the cigar-shop while the Marchese chatted to his
friend, the worker in enamels. Halfway through the night he had sat
with him and Dmitri in a basement coffee-house on East Twenty-Seventh
Street, listening to the new gospel of optimism which Dmitri loved
to spread, he who could see good in all things and believed that
service is the stabilizer of humanity’s caprice. Yet, while Steccho had
listened and smoked, he had watched the face of every newcomer eagerly,
hoping to find one fresh from Rigl. He was growing tired of playing
watchdog for Jurka.

Carlota drew the curtains together as she encountered his steady,
uplifted gaze. Why did this boy keep guard over her? she wondered,
and slowly smiled. He did not seem a menace. There had been a look
of admiration in his eyes the day he had returned her gloves to her.
Jacobelli had told her she must prepare to accept homage from all, and
Ames had said a friend of Dmitri’s had told him where she lived. She
looked out after him as he passed leisurely down the street. In all
the old-time romances that she loved, there was the “shepherd in the
distance,” the page who caroled unseen to Kate the queen, the gondolier
who dared to lift his heart to the rose that touched a closed lattice.
She wondered who he could be.

Maria sighed and stirred. The telephone rang on the little painted
stand, and Carlota answered it. It was the Marchese, calling the
signora. She laughed softly as he spoke to her, the color rising softly
in her cheeks.

“Cara mia, it is delightful of him,” she exclaimed, as she hung up
the receiver. “He is the most thoughtful, charming knight errant. Ah,
if you could have seen him thirty years ago! The handsomest man in all
Italy. He has asked us to dine to-morrow with him and go to see ‘The
Jewels of the Madonna.’ It will do you good. Jacobelli tells me you
will have it in your repertoire next year.”

A curious light came in Carlota’s dark eyes, a tender, half-penitent
light. “The Jewels of the Madonna,” and she was planning how to secure
the old jewels lying hidden away in the Florentine chest by the
fireplace. Even though they were her own, she felt a secret, guilty
thrill over deceiving those who loved her. Surely the “Quest of Love”
led one far astray and alone.

But the signora was in a gaysome mood, affectionate, pliable. She would
have everything en fête. Never was she so happy as when planning a new
costume that should charm and bewilder. For the dinner she would wear
black velvet with a scarf of Roumanian gypsy work, intricate embroidery
of orange and black that seemed made for her, Carlota said, as she
draped it around her statuesque shoulders.

“You should wear a heavy necklace of topaz with that, topaz and
emeralds, or just topaz set in silver.”

“Heart’s treasure, how you know the correct touch. Get me the key of
the small chest.”

“But--aren’t you wearing it, dear, around your neck?”

Maria smiled at her delightedly, archly.

“I find a new hiding-place for it daily, ever since I have feared
it was known we had them here. To-day it is in the pot of cyclamen.
Yesterday I put it in the back of the clock. Am I not wonderful?”

Carlota laughed and discovered the key planted carefully in the pot of
cyclamen as she said.

“To-night you shall hide it and show if you are a good mystifier. Look
in the third tray and get out the necklaces. They are in the large
tray.”

The lock gave rustily. Carlota sat on the floor with the tray on her
lap, lifting out the old necklaces in a dream. They were heavy and
old-fashioned, but set with perfect gems. She found the topaz one and
hung it around the signora’s throat gently.

“It is superb,” she sighed. “I was very attractive in my prime, carina,
but never like your grandmother. Ah, jewels were made for her as stars
for the night. Here, pile them in my drawer and pick out pearls for
yourself. You will wear white while you can. After thirty it is sad.”

The following day dragged slowly. Towards evening Carlota suddenly
pressed her cheek with one palm as she sat at the piano. It was nothing
at all, she protested, a little faintness and pain in her head.

“Nothing at all!” exclaimed Maria stormily. “When that miserable old
slave-driver Jacobelli is killing you! He thinks you are made of steel.
You must not go out to-night. I will telephone Veracci at once and he
will agree with me.”

But Carlota protested the Marchese would be broken-hearted if neither
of them put in an appearance. He had his seats for the opera, and had
even assured her he would order special delicacies from the chef he
knew they would enjoy. It would never do to disappoint him. Maria must
go, at all events.

It seemed hours before the last hum of the taxicab died away in the
street below, and she turned from the window after waving to Maria.
She was to go immediately to bed, relax utterly, breathe deep, forget
everything and sleep. She had promised compliance faithfully, and
now stood hesitant, feeling herself a traitor to all their love for
her and kindness. Only for this one night, she told herself, to make
sure of his success and she would never go to the Square again. It
was a twenty-minute run out to Belvoir once the Jamaica turnpike
was reached. She ordered a taxi softly over the house telephone, and
turned to the chest. Almost wistfully and regretfully she drew the key
from the hiding-place Maria had let her choose, in the back of an oval
silver frame that held her mother’s portrait. Would not Bianca Trelango
understand, more than any other, her daughter’s temptation to aid her
love?

“You would not think it wrong, would you?” she whispered, as she knelt
before the outspread treasures from the past. Maria kept each piece
of jewelry carefully separate and wrapped in chamois, the pearls in
one tray, the rubies in another, and so on. The largest pieces lay in
their velvet cases at the bottom, tiaras and stomachers. Carlota hunted
through the chest until she found all she longed for, the rubies her
grandmother had worn in “Semiramide.” There were three pieces, the
tiara, necklace, and heavy girdle, each set with the gems so thickly
that she caught her breath with delight. The rubies were clumsily
cut and needed polishing, but they glowed slumberously against the
black-velvet case, and the center stone of the tiara was the superb
Zarathustra jewel itself, part of the plunder of Persia. The necklace
was in sixteen strands of matched pearls with a double pendant of
rubies. As she stood up to try it around her neck, she let the heavy
golden girdle fall to the floor.

The sudden noise startled her, and she listened, one hand pressed
hard against her beating heart. The curtains were drawn at the front
windows, but were up here at the fire escapes. She drew them carefully,
and waited, but there was no sound, nothing but the occasional rumble
of a street car over on Madison Avenue.

The telephone bell rang and she barely kept back a cry of alarm,
forgetting the taxi call she had sent in. With the costumes in a
suitcase and the jewels in her traveling bag, she went downstairs,
whiter than usual, her eyes wide and expectant.

“Shall I take the bag outside, miss?” asked the chauffeur. He reached
for it solicitously, but she held it on her lap with both hands, and
leaned back with closed eyes.

“Thanks, no. Hurry, please. Belvoir, Mrs. Carrington Nevins’s residence
at Strathmore. It is down near the shore past the country club. Take
the shortest way after you leave the turnpike. How long will it take,
do you think?”

“About an hour.”

As the taxi turned into Park Avenue, she leaned forward and drew the
curtain hastily. Standing on the corner, with his back to the street,
was Steccho talking to Dmitri. Neither had seen her, but she left the
curtains down all the long, lonely way out to Strathmore, on the north
shore of Long Island. Already the rubies had laid their crimson fear on
her imagination, and she dreaded she knew not what from the two silent
figures that lingered near her home. Was Dmitri, too, one to be shunned
and doubted? Why did they seek her? She wished with all her heart that
she had taken the Marchese into her confidence.




CHAPTER XIII


It was after nine when the taxi wheeled around the crescent drive at
Belvoir. Carlota leaned forward, her sense of beauty thrilled at the
effect of the place in the full moonlight. It was modeled exactly, as
Mrs. Nevins loved to explain, after Diane de Poitiers’s love cote in
France, Chenonceaux.

The fête was in full swing. She did not see Ames anywhere, but told
one of the footmen who approached her that she was a singer on the
programme. He led the way back of the gay crowd in the flower-festooned
corridors to an inner court that had been transformed into an Italian
village en fête.

Standing at the head of a wide, curving staircase was Mrs. Nevins,
garbed as Vittoria Colonna, the noble lady who was Michelangelo’s
inspiration. Nathalie stood near, a silk domino only half concealing
her chic peasant dress. At sight of her Carlota caught her breath
involuntarily. Even as a child she had always loved the fêtes at the
Villa Tittani, and the distinguished guests who had flocked there
around the grand old Contessa. Here she was merely an unknown singer,
passing unnoticed through a throng of strangers. The whimsicality of
it touched her sense of humor and amused her. She was indeed Fiametta,
moving unknown among the villagers.

Jacobelli stood chatting with Count D’Istria, the ambassador. They were
almost within arm’s length of Carlota as she passed by them, unseen and
unseeing, her eyes seeking only for Ames.

“You are not overfond, then, of these society theatricals?” asked the
Count. “It is for an excellent object, the milk fund for Italy.”

Jacobelli lifted bored, deprecating eyebrows.

“It is torture to me, but what would you? The lady has a daughter with
a voice, and she will have none but Jacobelli’s opinion of its quality.
Therefore I come to-night to oblige. But, ah, Count, if you could but
hear my genius, my star of evening who will shortly, before another
season, burst into full splendor. You recall La Paoli?”

D’Istria nodded interestedly.

“Many times I have heard my father speak of her beauty and art. I have
myself been to her villa during her last years. She reigned there at
Tittani as an ex-empress might have done.”

“She was incomparable,” Jacobelli murmured contentedly. “Then possibly
you may recall the grandchild whom she adored, Bianca’s daughter.
Her father was the young artist from Florence whom Paoli befriended,
Peppino Trelango.”

The Count nodded and smiled. A child with eyes such as Del Sarto loved
to paint. Yes, he remembered her. Delightedly, then, the old maestro
launched into the romance of the old Contessa’s death, of how Maria
Roma had brought Carlota to America, of the Marchese’s interest in her,
and how Ogden Ward had insured her success with his patronage.

D’Istria shook his head at the mention of the financier.

“I would keep her out of his reach,” he advised. “She is too young to
parry the advances of such a man. Mind, I admire him greatly. He is a
power in the world, a very great patron of the arts if you will, but
likewise, Jacobelli, of the artistes. Arm’s length, I beg.”

“He will be here to-night.” Jacobelli scanned the crowd, his five feet
five overtopped by many. Suddenly his eyes glowed with interest, seeing
a newcomer enter the court enclosure. “Is that not Jurka? I have not
seen him since 1915. He was here on some government work, an attaché at
Washington. A very handsome fellow, isn’t he?”

D’Istria did not glance behind him. Arms folded, he stood almost at
attention, his lips compressed slightly, his eyes watching Mrs. Nevins
as she came down the wide staircase with Griffeth Ames.

“There is the type of man whom I admire,” he said. “He has life and
inspiration in his face, and he walks like one who has ridden the air.”

“I do not know him.” Jacobelli overlooked the stranger blandly.
“Casanova told me Mrs. Nevins is a collector of celebrities. This is
some youngster whose operetta she is to give a little try-out to-night,
his first chance. I shall leave as soon as the daughter finishes her
aria.”

But the Count appeared interested in the blond youngster, and merely
followed with his gaze the slim, distinguished figure of the Bulgarian
ex-attaché, as the latter moved through the throng.

The suite reserved for the singers and other entertainers was on the
second floor. Carlota resented the line of demarcation between the
professionals and the society participants, but Ames came to her as
soon as he could relinquish Mrs. Nevins to Jurka. He was so happy and
buoyant, she dared not say anything to curb or quell his enthusiasm.

“Forget them all, dear,” he whispered to her. “Think of what this may
mean for us both. I wish Casanova were here. She tried to get him, but
he hates these society round-ups, and I don’t blame him. Did you find
your dressing-room? I got one for you alone.”

After he had gone one of the maids assisted her to unpack and slip into
the court costume. There was a full-length mirror in the inner door.
She regarded her reflection in it gravely as the woman arranged her
curls, combing them into soft full clusters around her shoulders. The
deep, vivid color of the gown was strikingly becoming to her.

“You should have some jewels--” she began.

“They are all there, in my handbag,” Carlota directed. As she opened
the cases the maid gave a smothered exclamation of surprise, and
glanced sharply at this girl pupil of Ames, who, she had heard the
other servants say, had come from the Italian quarter in New York.
Her experience told her these were real jewels and worth thousands of
dollars.

“You will wear them all, miss?” she asked curiously, lifting the heavy
stomacher of gold links, delicate as certain fragile shells.

Carlota nodded and set the tiara on her head herself. The great
Zarathustra ruby in its center glowed and sparkled as if it held a
heart of fire. She held out her hands for the necklace.

“Do you like them?” she asked simply, smiling for the first time at the
maid. “They came from Italy and were my grandmother’s.”

“From Italy?” The woman straightened back her shoulders. “I am from
Averna myself. You know Averna, near Roma?”

“Ah, do I not!” Carlota clasped her hands suddenly to her throat, the
tears rising hot and quick to her lashes. Averna, the little tiny
village one might see from the end of the gardens, Averna with its
songs lifting on the evening air, and its little children clambering up
the long steep rocky road, the young goats tumbling around them. “I--my
home was near there, the Villa Tittani.”

The woman knelt at her feet, folding her hands to her lips rapturously,
and back on her feet in an instant, calm-faced.

“See how small the sea and world are,” she said. “I do not work here. I
am an extra for to-night, and I find a face that has looked on Averna.
I know Tittani well--”

A rap came at the door and Ames’s voice, calling to her to hurry.
Carlota sighed, drawn back from the old days.

“Lay out the peasant dress, please, and don’t forget the scarf for the
head. It is hand-embroidered on old linen in red and yellow.”

Before the operetta she ventured to steal out of a small balcony from
the upper corridor, overlooking the inner court below. Although it was
still early, they were dancing in one of the smaller rooms. She saw
Ames enter with others, and recognized Nathalie even in her domino. All
of the débutantes who were to sing wore them. And was it not as Dmitri
warned her? He was a success with these people, she thought, wistfully.
He was to reap a triumph to-night, and she had been foolish enough to
risk her whole career for his, to jeopardize her future merely to make
his operetta a success.

The woman from Averna had struck a chord of memory that unnerved her.
She felt the lonely sorrow of Fiametta, the princess in disguise,
seeking her love at the festa, and finding him only as the dancing
Harlequin.

Ames sought her once more before the overture. The maid had thrown
a black silk domino around her when she was ready to go down to
the improvised stage, and she drew the hood closely over her head,
concealing the tiara.

“All right?” he whispered confidently. “Keep your nerve, dear. It all
depends on you, after all. Fiametta carries the action and sympathy.”

She smiled back into his eyes in silence, compliant to his wishes,
eager for his success. Nathalie pressed past them with several other
girls, and laid her hand on his arm.

“We’re looking everywhere for you, Griff!” she cried. “Mamma’s so
afraid you might forget the supper-dance afterwards. It’s only for a
few, and we want you to stay. Will you, just for me?”

He passed down the long stairs with them and she heard no more, but as
she followed the maid down to the stage, a flood of fiery rebellion
swept over her, and waiting for the music, there was the look of Paoli
in her pose and flashing eyes.

D’Istria and Jurka had avoided each other by tacit mutual consent.
One long look they had interchanged, and the ambassador’s eyebrow had
raised ever so slightly. He had given no sign of recognition, but even
to Jacobelli the enmity between the two men was unmistakable. He would
have been more interested in it, possibly, had not Ogden Ward arrived
late, and he remained with him, telling him of Casanova’s offer.

The first strains of opening music caught his ear. Ames did not call
it an overture. It was not pretentious enough for that. It was merely
a prelude, a mingled fantasy of Italian village-fête melodies, the
harmonies that spring involuntarily from the very life-blood of a
people. Jacobelli listened in alert surprise. This unknown composer had
caught the secret and had woven it into his opera. He hunted covertly
for his programme. The name on it, “Griffeth Ames,” meant nothing to
him nor did that of the soprano, Paola Roma. Had he been suspicious,
Carlota’s twirling about of names to suit her fancy might have given
him a clue, but as it was, his professional interest in the composer
absorbed him, and he passed the name by.

In the opening duet between Peppino and Nedda he suffered visibly,
whispering to D’Istria.

“Ah, money, what crimes are committed in thy name! They choke art,
these people; they strangle it to death with cash and coupons.”

The action of the operetta was swift. Peppino had come to the castle
with his daily catch. His sweetheart follows him, jealous of his
admiration for the princess and his lingering in her garden. From the
bower window in the tower, Fiametta watches him, and, half-hidden,
hears him sing his love for her, “a certain star beyond all love of
mine!” Peppino promises Nedda she shall be his choice at the festa
the following day, and their betrothal announced, and she leaves,
satisfied. The princess lingers in the garden after they have gone and
sings “Cerca d’Amore,” the quest of love.

It was on this aria that Ames based his greatest hope, and even as he
led the orchestra, he sensed back of him the thrill which ran over the
audience at the entrée of Carlota. He himself stared up at her in blank
amazement. She had worn her silk domino up to the final moment and
he had not seen her costume. But now, as she lifted her voice in the
opening strains of the “Quest” song, he stared and marveled.

Mrs. Nevins lifted her pince-nez and never lowered it until the curtain
fell on the interlude. Then she remarked to the woman next her in tones
which demanded an explanation from Mr. Ames, “That girl is wearing a
fortune in real jewels!”

Jacobelli was near-sighted. Hindered by the crowd from a clear view
of the stage, the Fiametta motif did not warn him of what was about
to happen, but the first notes of Carlota’s voice shocked him into
attention. She was singing as never before. The rôle appealed to her,
the lonely little princess planning her disguise at the fête, seeking
her fisher-boy love. Her rendering of the aria was a sensation. He
caught a glimpse of D’Istria’s face, of Ward’s, and trembled with
emotion. In front of him was a large, stately grande dame with opera
glasses. He reached for them out of her hand imperatively.

“You permit, if you please? I cannot see. It is most imperative that I
see, you understand?”

She stared at him ineffectually, but Jacobelli was far too engrossed to
notice her. He had recognized Carlota through the lenses, and the color
rose thickly to his face. The tragic truth burst upon him. His star
had been stolen from him by this young unknown composer, his flower
of genius was already plucked before his eyes, and flaunted at this
miserable society fête as the pupil of another.

Even while he stood with the glasses held close to his eyes, a hand
reached over his shoulder, a peremptory hand, accustomed to obedience,
and took the glasses from him.

“You will pardon me,” Count Jurka said gently. “It is very urgent that
I see closely.”

Impotently Jacobelli glared at him. The Count’s face was absolutely
expressionless. Possibly Georges might have guessed that his master
was laboring under sudden excitement from the extreme pallor which
accentuated his resemblance to a statue. Calm, youthful, and blond,
he seemed the embodiment of possibly Endymion or Ganymede, a slender,
effete godling, bored, as Dmitri had said, by the ennui of satiety.

Ward’s face as he watched Carlota wore an amused, satirical expression.
During the interlude Jacobelli started to speak to him, but was
silenced by the “Hush” of those nearest him. Ames’s music held society
under a spell, and Mrs. Nevins was conscious of a strange mingling of
satisfaction and resentment over the girl Carlota daring to appear with
an array of jewels not one woman in the crowd could have equaled.

The climax of the operetta was the stabbing of Fiametta at the feast.
Nathalie sang Nedda with an immature insouciance that was in character
with the rôle. Peppino was sung by Jolly Allan, a young bachelor
with a rich, reckless sort of voice. When he danced with the masked
princess at the festa, Nedda stopped him in a jealous fury, demanding
why he had neglected her. He answered with the “Quest of Love,” the
beautiful waltz song of the princess. Together, as they sing it, they
dance, until suddenly Nedda stabs her unknown rival, and as she dies in
Peppino’s arms, she is unmasked and the people recognize their princess.

The curtain fell in a tumult of acclamation. Count Jurka was already
bowing low over the hand of his hostess. It was with the utmost regret
he must take his leave thus early. Only the opportunity of attending
her fête could have brought him out from town. He congratulated her
on securing the services of--ah, what was the young girl’s name--Miss
Roma? He stepped back to make room for Ward.

Jacobelli had broken away from the crowd, and was finding his way to
the dressing-rooms beyond the balcony. Ames was already there before
him, proud and joyous, forgetting everything but Carlota and her
amazing triumph. At the entrance to the green and ivory salon off
the balcony, the maestro encountered Nathalie, and poured forth his
suspicions to her.

“This young singer, this girl, what do you call her?”

“You mean Miss Roma?” She smiled at him innocently. “Why, she’s a pupil
of Mr. Ames, I believe, from the Italian quarter back of where he lives
on Washington Square.”

Jacobelli stared at her. The memory of the duet from “Bohème” came back
to him with a jolt of pain. It had been her voice, then, that day. He
had not been mistaken.

“Ah, but everybody is crazy!” he exclaimed heatedly. “She is my pupil,
Carlota Trelango, the greatest coming singer of the age! Where is she?
See, I will confront her. I will show him up and prove that she is my
pupil.”

       *       *       *       *       *

With her hand drawn through his arm, Ames was leading Carlota down the
opposite flight of stairs into the court when she suddenly drew back.

“Please, I can’t go down there,” she whispered, pleadingly. “Let me go
home at once. I--I am not well; I want to leave now.”

Through the crowd came Ward towards them leisurely, with the abstracted
air that was his habitually, but he had already seen her, and she
shrank back from his amused, twisted smile that seemed to degrade all
that this had meant to her. Before Griffeth could detain her, she had
turned and sped back up the crimson carpeted staircase into the long
salon, and there came face to face with Jacobelli.

“Ingrate!” he gasped explosively, beating the air with both hands at
sight of her. He wheeled about on Ames. “You--you say you are the great
teacher--the maestro, when you take my greatest pupil from me--from
Jacobelli!”

“It’s a damned lie!” Ames retorted shortly. “She is not your pupil.
I’ve been teaching her for weeks, months, myself.”

“But she knows nobody here in America; it is utterly impossible!” cried
the old maestro. “For two years I have taught her all I know. You know
not what you say.”

Ames caught the glances of those around them and bit his lip to
keep back the words he longed to hurl at this wild-eyed, explosive
individual.

“Pardon,” he said curtly. “Miss Roma is my affianced wife. Now I am
sure you will give me credit for being aware of her identity.”

“Listen to him!” Jacobelli’s rage boiled over. He appealed to Nathalie
and her little group of girl friends, to Mrs. Nevins as she approached
them with Ward. “Mr. Ward, I beseech--I demand that you assist me in
denouncing this impostor. Is not Carlota Trelango my pupil and the
granddaughter of the great Margherita Paoli? Does she not make her
début at the Opera next season under Casanova?”

Mrs. Nevins moved forward deliberately, and addressed Carlota.

“Won’t you kindly end this distressing scene, Miss Roma, and leave as
soon as possible? I thank you for your services.”

Carlota stood an instant, hesitant and proud. Ames held the little cold
hand on his arm in a close grasp. Head up, he was her champion, but it
was a question now which adversary to engage first, so many assailed
her. In Nathalie’s blue eyes was lurking a challenging ridicule as her
gaze met his.

And suddenly D’Istria appeared at the head of the staircase with
several friends. He came forward into the salon and bowed low over the
hand Carlota extended to him wonderingly, gratefully.

“Oh, Count D’Istria,” she cried eagerly. “You are here!”

Perhaps D’Istria himself sensed the meaning of the silent group around
her. He answered gently, deferentially.

“After these years, signorina, it is with the greatest pride for our
Italy that I greet you to-night. The last time you were weaving chains
of rosebuds at the old Contessa’s knee in the garden of Tittani. Now, I
find you wearing a crown of laurel on your own little head.”

Mrs. Nevins caught her breath swiftly, but Jacobelli murmured over and
over, pacing the length of the salon alone, as if it gave him the only
inward relief, the one word,

“Ingrate!”




CHAPTER XIV


It was quarter of eleven when Jurka’s car left Belvoir. Along the shore
road it sped, a low, fleeting shadow lured by its own projecting rays,
as if some sinister genie of the night were drawing it irresistibly on
towards the city glow in the west.

The Count smoked thoughtfully, leisurely, selecting cigarettes from a
black and gold enameled case as one selects favorites from a seraglio.
Fate had tendered him the information he had come to America after,
and he already contemplated a pleasurable return to Switzerland first,
and then to Sofia with the profits from what he cleverly dubbed Love’s
plunder.

He had recognized them the instant Carlota had stepped into the full
light. First the tiara with its splendid center ruby, the Zarathustra,
and the curious Byzantine setting. The ruby was one of the three
greatest in the world. It had been taken, centuries before, from a
shrine of the Zoroastrians beyond the Caspian country. Slipping from
hand to hand it had brought untold carnage and horror to the land whose
queen wore it on her brow. Only half a century before it had been
coveted by a woman of the Balkans whose ambition led her throneward.
She had been maid of honor to an emotional, harassed queen, and had
stepped over her dead body to wed her son. The price of the ruby had
been one keen, swift knife-thrust through her heart and another for the
blundering, love-blind prince. Ten years after, the ruby had been found
in a Cairo curio-shop by one who knew its value, and had been sent
out to seek the jewel marts of Amsterdam. It had been returned to the
Bulgarian state coffers until Paoli, in the zenith of her beauty and
fame, had received it from the hands of the crown prince, mounted in
the tiara with other gems fit to bear it company.

The girl Carlota could not be aware of the value or tremendous
significance of the rubies, Jurka reflected, else why should she
subject herself to the danger of wearing them in public? Taken with the
necklace and stomacher, they represented an immense sum, entirely apart
from their peculiar antiquarian value. Yet she had donned them for this
charity fête as if they had been paste.

Touching the mother-of-pearl button concealed in the buff suède
cushions, he drew a small, black-belted card-case from his breast
pocket, and opened a folded oblong of thin tracing-paper. Drawn upon
it delicately was a perfect sketch of the settings holding the crown
rubies. Jurka held it close to the shaded bulb, studying the detail
carefully until the car approached the city.

“Choose quiet streets,” he ordered through the speaking-tube. “Make
haste!”

His early arrival was unexpected by Georges, and the valet stood on
guard as the key sounded in the outer lock.

“Pardon, excellenza,” he begged. “I did not know whom to expect.”

“Find me Steccho at once. Take him in a taxi to the Park entrance at
Columbus Circle. Dismiss the car there and walk into the shadows of
the Park. I will pick you up a hundred yards beyond the Monument at
twelve-thirty.” He paused to glance at his own reflection in the long
mirror, adding, as to his chauffeur, “Make haste!”

Back at Belvoir Carlota had dressed while Jacobelli paced up and down
outside her door. The maid assisted her excitedly, fondling the jewels
and gown as she packed them.

“You were a triumph, Miss Roma,” she said. “They talk of nothing but
you outside.”

Carlota did not answer. Her face was pale and determined. Jacobelli had
telephoned the Lafayette after demanding from her Maria’s whereabouts.
He had had the Marchese paged, and had asked him most sarcastically
where he imagined Carlota might be at that hour. Where, returned the
old Marchese genially, but in her own bed, reposing restfully, after a
most severe headache?

“She is not that,” stormed Jacobelli. “She is out here--at Belvoir,
Long Island, at the home of Mrs. Nevins, wasting her voice for charity
with a person who claims he is her teacher. I bring her back with me at
once.”

The Marchese protested that Carlota could not have any wrong
intentions, that Maria must not be alarmed.

“Alarmed!” repeated Jacobelli solemnly. “I would so alarm her that
never would she permit the girl out of her sight until her début.
I tell you this is not a joke, Veracci. She has scaled the wall of
Tittani, mark me. You will understand when you see this man. Meet us at
the apartment. Not only has she sung here to-night, but she has wasted
also the Paoli jewels. She has worn the priceless rubies of Margherita
as if they were garnets.”

He lingered in the corridor booth, and Ames watched eagerly for a
glimpse of Carlota before she left. Mrs. Nevins was delicately,
pointedly cynical and distant with him.

“My dear Mr. Ames, can’t you see that this is all rather unpleasant
for me? Of course the girl is very pretty and her voice is a rarity,
but, after all, was it not somewhat unprofessional and unsportsmanlike
of you to enter her in a race for amateurs, as it were?”

“But I never dreamt for an instant that she was from a famous or
professional family,” Ames denied earnestly. “I don’t believe that
ranting old rascal, anyway, not until I hear it from her own lips.”

“No?” she smiled. “Of course I did not know she was engaged to you. But
you believe Count D’Istria surely. It all places me in a most delicate
situation and jeopardized the success of the entire evening. Nathalie
will be prostrated to-morrow. She had such faith in you.”

“But I can explain everything,” Ames replied moodily. Why on earth was
Carlota lingering so long when Jacobelli might reappear any instant.

“I fear the opportunity is lost, although I do not doubt your aptitude
for explaining anything.” She gave him her hand with a little, pitying
smile. “She will be Jacobelli’s pupil after to-night, Mr. Ames. If
you will send me your bill for expenses and services of Miss Roma and
yourself, my secretary will mail you a check. Ah, my dear boy, you were
too promising a genius to have permitted a little infatuation for this
girl to ruin your career.”

She left him standing in the ivory and green salon, furious and
helpless. At length the door of Carlota’s dressing-room opened, and
she emerged, slim and demure in her long black velvet evening cloak.
It was made with a monk’s hood falling back from her head, and as
she hesitated, looking cautiously about for Jacobelli, he thought of
Juliet, awaiting the return of the nurse in the garden.

Before he could reach her Jacobelli appeared, and took her resolutely
under his care. Only one long look passed between them, but to Ames it
was a promissory note from hope drawn on to-morrow. As he stood alone
after they had gone, the Italian maid came from the room, and gave him
a note, her black eyes filled with mystery.

“It is from her,” she whispered. “My name is Assunta Rizzio. My home is
within sight of the tower windows of hers in Italy, and I love her. You
may call upon me if you need me. See, I live here.”

He smiled gratefully, and crumpled the card she gave him into his
pocket while he looked at Carlota’s last word:

  It is all quite true, but I am alone to blame. I thought Mr. Phelps
  might have told you, and you were but playing our little game with
  me, of Pierrot and Columbine. Now, it is all over, is it not? You
  will hate me for ruining your opera, and I do not blame you. I am
  sorry, it is all I can say. I thought I was helping you. Give my
  love to Dmitri. He was right, was he not?--and behold, the Princess
  Fiametta should never have left the wall of Tittani.

He passed down into the court. It was nearly empty, only the few who
remained for Mrs. Nevins’s private supper and dance. Ward talked with
the ambassador, listening as D’Istria told happily of his memories at
the old Contessa’s villa. As Ames approached, he turned to him eagerly,
his fine, lean face alert with appreciation.

“It was superb, Mr. Ames, a most beautiful little conception. I trust
that you may have a public production before long.”

The praise was unexpected, coming after the scene with Jacobelli and
Mrs. Nevins. Griffeth felt almost a boyish gratitude surge through him
warmly, and he thanked D’Istria with a break in his voice.

“The score is in Casanova’s hands now,” he told him, while Ward’s gray
eyes never left his face. “I had hoped he might be here to-night.”

“He could not. To-night he gives a large reception himself after
the concert at the Ritz. It will give me great pleasure to draw his
attention to the score when I see him, if you will permit.”

With the ambassador’s hand-clasp toning his new outlook on life and
opportunity, Ames passed the long half-circle of waiting cars in the
courtyard, and made for the station on foot. Dmitri had been right in
his estimate of patronage. In the reaction he longed for a quiet talk
and smoke with him beside the copper brazier.

As Carlota came into the glow of the porte-cochère’s spreading light,
Jacobelli took her handbag from her.

“Mr. Ward is kind enough to take you to your home,” he said
authoritatively. “He will be here presently.”

He set her two suitcases in beside her, but she neither answered him
nor even met his glance. Sinking back in the corner of the heavily
cushioned car, she closed her eyes, feigning utter weariness. It was
Griffeth’s last look that haunted her thoughts. Would the girl Assunta
give him her note. She knew that she had done wrong professionally,
that she had been guilty of almost an unpardonable error, yet it was
not of Ward she thought, nor of Casanova and the chance that she might
lose the financier’s patronage. The tender irresistible harmonies of
“Cerca d’Amore” filled her brain. She could barely resist humming
them, and smiling defiantly at the two moody faces after Ward joined
them, and the car turned towards the city. Ward smoked small black
cigars until the interior of the car was hazy with smoke and the
maestro coughed irritably, but the other man paid no attention to him,
merely watched Carlota. Jacobelli rambled on during the trip, but
always striking the same motif.

“This to me, to Jacobelli! My greatest pupil jeopardizes her whole
career by appearing prematurely at a charity fête for an unknown
composer.”

“I did it for love of Italy,” Carlota told him with sudden passion. “If
you were truly a patriot, you would be glad.”

“Love of Italy!” Jacobelli groaned at her stroke of diplomacy. “Bah!
Love, yes, but not for Italy. You are infatuated with this nobody,
this lapper from the saucer of cream people like Mrs. Nevins sets for
patronage. This is not the professional strain in you of the Paoli.
This is the Peppino Trelango strain. He delighted in the silken
cushion, the easy path of the rich patron. You are an ingrate!”

He folded his arms and leaned back austerely. Carlota forced herself
to keep silent before Ward. He moved, shifting his position so that he
might see her better. She had drawn the velvet monk’s hood over her
head, but every arc light they passed threw a flashing radiance into
the car and showed him her pure, beautiful profile, delicately Roman,
and the glamour of her near presence unnerved him.

“And those jewels which you have not the sense to value!” burst forth
Jacobelli again. “I shall warn the Marchese to act at once as your
guardian and place them in the safety-deposit vault. You shall not have
them to play with.”

“I do not want them in the vault. I shall sell them and pay you and Mr.
Ward for everything and return to Italy with Maria.”

“To Italy!” repeated Jacobelli dryly. “Ben trovato! With this boy here.”

Ward looked with musing eyes at the bag beside the maestro.

“When you are ready to dispose of them,” he said deliberately, “come to
me. I did not know you were in possession of these, but I have heard of
the rubies. I collect rare jewels. The Zarathustra would be brought to
me by dealers ultimately, and I prefer to pay you the full price if you
wish to part with it.”

“I will remember,” Carlota said clearly, meeting his eyes for the first
time.

They left him at the Fifth Avenue entrance to his club. He made no
further allusion to the rubies, and Carlota forgot them in listening
to Jacobelli’s flood of argument until they reached the apartment. She
would throw up her career after all they had done for her, merely in a
fit of pique because they objected to her throwing herself away. The
Marchese and Maria had not returned.

“I shall not trust you,” declared Jacobelli. “I shall guard you until
they come back.”

Carlota faced him suddenly, in the small vestibule, her eyes brilliant
with resentment and pride.

“I prefer to be alone, signor,” she told him. “I think even your
authority must end here in my own home.”

He stared at her in amazement, and bowed as he stepped back from the
door.

“I repeat the one word which fits you, ingrate!”

The door closed, and in the sudden reaction of nervous tension
Carlota sank on the low couch, her face on her arms. It was nearly
twelve by the clock on Maria’s desk. Surely they would come now any
minute, and she would have to confess everything before Jacobelli
had an opportunity of presenting his version. Somehow she felt the
old Marchese would sympathize with her, he who was still a faithful
voyageur along the coasts of romance, but Maria would see only the
wreck of her career and her ingratitude to Ward.

The memory of him brought back his offer to purchase the rubies. She
opened the bag, and drew them out on the velvet cushions of the couch.
Maria had called them priceless, these glowing bits of imprisoned
glory. Against the gray brocade of the cushion, their vivid, blood-red
hue fascinated her, but only with the thrill at their beauty. She was
like Paoli on whom they had been lavished. There was no craving in her
nature for outer ornamentation, no lure from wealth or jewels. She
touched them now curiously, half regretfully. Ward had said he would
become their purchaser at any time when she wished to dispose of them.
She rose with quick resolution and searched for his telephone number
in the book. The bell rang with startling sharpness in the still room.
She raised the receiver, expecting to hear Ames, but the suave, cheery
tones of the Marchese sounded over the wire.

“Maria would have me call you up before we went on to Casanova’s
reception, to be sure you were quite all right. You are, yes? The
headache better? Ah, that is good. We may be late, about two, I think.
You are to rest yourself, understand.”

“Oh, tell her I understand, and she is not even to think of me,”
Carlota exclaimed eagerly. “It was dear of you to call me up.”

She hung up after the Marchese’s laughing, courtly rejoinder. Two whole
hours before they would return. It seemed as if Fate had opened wide
the way for her to go. She called Ward’s number with surety. He had not
yet returned, Ishigaki informed her, but was expected at any moment. He
would give him the message.

At the same moment Georges paused before a row of low red-brick
buildings on East Twenty-Eighth Street, towards Lexington Avenue.
They were very quiet, private-appearing residences. Narrow, one-story
porches of iron grill-work clung to each, overhung with scrawny, rugged
vines that defied the city soil to make them vacate. In the basement of
one was a barber shop, discreet seeming and customerless. The second
floor of another bore a small sign, “Bulgarian Restaurant.” Each
carried over its entrance bell a slip of white paper, pasted to the
brick, “Furnished Rooms.”

Here, then, Georges hesitated, not knowing certainly which house held
the object of his quest. It was after midnight by five minutes. The
lights in the restaurant burned low. A footfall down the street towards
the subway station made him turn. The late pedestrian was young and
in evening dress, with a raincoat flapping back in the swirling autumn
wind. The air was damp and salty with the scent of the incoming tide
up the East River. He started up the steps of the house next to the
restaurant when Georges accosted him. Did he know where a man named
Steccho lived, Ferad Steccho?

“I don’t live around here,” Ames replied. “Wait a minute. I’ll ask my
friend.”

He tapped upon one of the windows opening on the narrow iron porch,
and both heard the sound of a violin within, a queer, soft harmony of
undertones. Dmitri sat cross-legged on his couch like a merchant in a
Bagdad bazaar, his head twisted over his violin as though it had been
the head of a girl he loved held in the curve of his arm.

On a stool beside the table was Steccho, brewing coffee in a
long-handled copper urn he held over a brazier of charcoal. He started
up at the sound of a step on the porch, but Dmitri calmed him.

“It is only Griff,” he said, rising to open the door. Ames stood on the
threshold, his hand on the knob. And the boy at the brazier heard him
ask where Ferad Steccho lived. Before he could warn Dmitri, Georges had
caught the answer and was bowing before him.

“I disturb you, I fear,” he said gravely. “I merely sought an old
friend.”

Steccho’s face was rigid with alarm and fear. The skin seemed to
tighten over his high, swarthy cheekbones. His eyes were brilliant, his
lips a mere line of red in the graying tan of his face.

“I come!” he responded.




CHAPTER XV


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.




CHAPTER XVI


Ward pushed his chair back from the table, lighting a cigarette from
the match Ishigaki held towards him.

“Miss Trelango’s call came about half an hour ago?”

“At five minutes past twelve.” The Jap gave the time with exactness.
Ward’s face was inscrutable.

“Get the car around. I shall want only you with me, tell Daniels.”

As Ishigaki left the room he stood smoking, a half smile on his lips.
In all probability to-night he would secure the Zarathustra ruby and
its attendant collection. Jurka, the Bulgarian he had met at the club,
had been after them, too, he remembered. He had been at the Nevins
fête and had seen them. Palmieri had ascertained that the collection
had been declared by Maria Roma as the personal property of Carlota
Trelango, a minor non-resident alien. This much his own agent had found
out. What Jurka knew, he had no idea, or his object in seeking the
rubies. Was he, too, infatuated with the girl herself, and used the
jewels merely as a blind to his own pursuit of her?

He drew three opals from his pocket and tossed them like dice before
him on the polished surface of the table. They were perfectly matched
and had come from the lacquered cabinet of the old empress whose
life-span had bridged the gulf from the rice-fields along the Yang-tse
to the peacock throne at Pekin. He gazed down at their changing luster
musingly. Carlota had been in her most alluring mood when he had spoken
with her on the telephone after Ishigaki had delivered her message.
Spirited, combative, aloof, as he liked her best. The temple chimes
in a corner recess sounded the half-hour. She had said she was alone.
Always, in his experience, every woman had her price. As he swept the
opals up in his hand at the Jap’s low voice, he knew there could be no
compromise now. She had dallied along the highway of romance and had
found the love of youth awaiting her. Remembering the look of perfect
understanding and faith between her and Ames as she had passed by him
on the arm of Jacobelli, Ward felt a conscienceless determination to
compel her to take his terms that night. She could do without the Paoli
gems. Possibly, it might be a rather suitable tribute, later at her
début, for him to present her with the necklace. He glanced into the
tall Florentine mirror as he folded his scarf beneath his cloak, and
followed Ishigaki to the car at the curb. The boy had only youth and
ambition as assets after all.

In her apartment Carlota had deliberately set the stage for his
reception. Slipping off her dressing-robe, she clad herself in a
straight-cut evening gown of chiffon velvet, ranging in color from
palest mauve to deepest rose, with long swaying sleeves of silver
metal cloth. Her face was paler than usual, her eyes brilliant as she
switched off the lights in the apartment, leaving only the one in the
hall and a spray of rose globes beneath a silken shade at the head of
the couch.

Kneeling before the gas-logs, she opened the leather bag to look alone
for the last time on the rubies. Behind her a window opened widely
to the keen night air. Once she raised her head, startled at a sound
that seemed to come from the balconied fire escape. The wind blew the
curtains toward her. It was dark outside. The city was sinking into a
few hours of sleep before the rattle of daybreak noises. As she rose
to look out of the window, the outer bell rang lightly. Standing flat
against the stone wall of the building, not half a yard from the room,
Steccho checked his leap, listening. If he were discovered now, they
would snare him, no matter what he told. Who would believe, unless
perhaps the girl herself out of the grace that was in all women, that
he had not come there to-night to rob her, but to warn her, to defraud
Jurka--not of the jewels, but of the slender, young purity of this
child woman who had eyes like Katinka. If he could save her, could keep
her for the boy who loved her, Dmitri’s friend in the Square, then
perhaps in some great, merciful way the knowledge of it would come to
that unseen Power for good which Dmitri held still ruled the world of
men and women in spite of the sea of crimson. Perhaps it might be they
would save his mother and Maryna, these unseen forces, without his
bargaining away his soul and life with a man like Jurka.

“You are still alone?” Ward’s eyes followed the lines of her figure
as she moved away from him. The changing silver and rose of her gown
reminded him of the opals.

“Maria has gone with the Marchese to Casanova’s reception. They
telephoned they would be back about two. We have not very much time,
you see.” She drew the jewels from the bag and laid them before him on
the round inlaid table at the head of the couch. The rose light shone
on their beauty almost hungrily, catching the varying gleams from the
deep red hearts of the rubies. “They are all there, all that I wore
to-night, the tiara, the necklace, and the girdle. They are worth
enough quite to pay you back for all you have given me, are they not?”

He looked at them quickly, and turned back to her as she stood beside
the table.

“I will give you my check for two hundred and fifty thousand. The
Zarathustra alone is worth half of that. You would find it out if I
cheated you, and hate me afterwards. I, too, hate a cheat.”

Something in his words and tone made her motionless, chilled and tense.
She met his eyes challengingly.

“You mean that I am not keeping my bargain, Mr. Ward. But it was not a
fair one that you made. You asked the impossible.”

“That you would not get into any affairs until you had made your
success.” He cut her short sharply. “I was right. To-night proved it.
Left to yourself you have made yourself a laughing-stock. You ruined
your own début for the sake of this fellow Ames, and smashed his career
by branding him an impostor.”

“I do not believe it. Count D’Istria--you yourself heard him when he
spoke to me--he would not have recognized me and praised the opera
if--if I had ruined him--Griffeth. You cannot kill art like that, not
when it is real.”

“You have the patter of his crowd at your tongue’s end,” sneered Ward.
“You would have nothing to do with me when I offered you my love that
night at dinner. You were insulted and fiery as some menaced nun, yet
you meet this Ames in his studio secretly and carry on an affair with
him brazenly, merely because you think you love him. Do you believe
that love is its own law, then?”

And Carlota, thinking only of the old rose-tinted wall that bounded the
domain of her dreams, closed her eyes and smiled.

“It is the highest law,” she answered.

“So?” His arms closed about her like a vise as he crushed her to him.
“I take you at your word. Do you think that I, Ogden Ward, would be
such a damned fool as to let another man take you or anything else that
I wanted away from me? Did you think you could throw me a few jewels
like bones to a dog, and call our deal off? I want those rubies because
they are like you. They are all fire and blood and passion, and I’ll
have you both.”

He stifled the scream on her lips with one hand, lifting her on one
arm easily while she fought like a captured wild animal. The table
overturned behind her, and the jewels slipped to the rug as the
electrolier broke its rose globes over them. The room was in darkness
as he felt her suddenly relax limply in his embrace. Her hands and
lips were cold, yet he told himself he had not hurt her badly, merely
the pressure on her mouth to keep back the alarm. As he laid her on the
couch Steccho’s curved Turkish blade caught him under the left shoulder
blade, and he rolled backward, reaching blindly into the darkness as he
fell.

The boy waited a few moments, ready for another thrust, but there was
utter silence in the room, and he drew a deep soft breath of relief.
Kneeling, he gathered up the jewels carefully, without haste or dread,
placing them in his inner coat pockets, the necklace with its priceless
pendant next to his body where it was safest, the tiara curving under
the belt at his wait, the girdle looped like a pet serpent in his
pocket. Something else had fallen where the firelight caught its
sparkle. He picked up one of the old empress’s opals and smiled over
its perfect beauty. This might please Maryna.

Before he passed back out of the window, he bent over Carlota. She lay
as if sleeping, with spent, broken breathing. Ah, he would have taken
her as a wolf, even as Jurka himself, this man who lay at her feet, but
not now, not after the stroke he had learned in Rigl. She was safe,
quite safe to leave alone with him. He lighted a cigarette calmly,
buttoned his raincoat close around his throat, and swung out of the
window and down the fire escape.

Those who place faith in the symbols and cabals of coincidence might
have traced a triangle at that moment with Steccho at one point,
Dmitri’s room the apex, and the other the unlighted studio where
Griffeth sat by the open window, staring out at the Square. The
Bulgarian felt oddly exhilarated now that he had made his get-away
safely. He paused at Fifty-Ninth Street and Madison Avenue, like a
racer, sure of his victory, resting at the first lap.

It had been strange, fate forcing the possession of the rubies upon
him. He was fatalist enough to accept. And it would be better for the
girl Carlota. They would find her in time. Ward had terrified her, but
she was unhurt, he felt certain, except for the marks on her throat.
He looked back over the way he had come. There was no sign of alarm
yet, no shrill blowing of police whistles, nothing but the customary
flow of crosstown traffic at that hour. He bought an early paper, and
took a car bound downtown. The jewels themselves reminded him, as he
touched them in his pockets, that he had not failed when the hour of
fate had struck for him. He bore the wealth of a rajah on his body,
and the knowledge gave him a suppressed braggadocio as if he had
picked up life’s challenge and had won his first prize in the lists of
opportunity. If only the girl, as she lay there, had not looked like
Katinka, more like her than ever with the pallor and look of pain on
her face. He shook off the sentiment and focused his attention on Jurka.

He had given him until morning. Good; then he should have the jewels
three hours before dawn. Georges’s black eyes would show smouldering
fires of envy when he, Ferad Steccho, carelessly poured forth the
missing rubies from his pockets, the rubies of the queen, as if they
had been pebbles. Doubtless another night, and they would all be on
their way back. He shut his eyes, half imagining the lurch of the car
was the first roll of the ship as it touched the deep sea, and the
far-off city noises were the distant surge of ocean waves.

True, there would be an outcry when they found the body of Ward,
but there was no one to tell who had stabbed him. The girl had been
unconscious. His eyes narrowed suddenly. Would they, then, possibly
accuse her? Would Ward, if by any chance the blow had not killed him,
dare to revenge himself on her by swearing that she had stabbed him?

As the car reached Thirty-Fourth Street he shook off the depression
and made direct for the Dupont, confident of his welcome. There was
no response, he was told at the desk. He demanded that they call the
Count’s private room. It was impossible, the clerk told him. Count
Jurka’s orders were he was not to be disturbed. Would he send up a
card with a message? He shrugged his shoulders, and wrote rapidly in
Bulgarian:

  They will not let me up to you. Send Georges at once. I fancy the
  yellow castle, excellenza.

The triangle of coincidence had become an isosceles. He walked over to
Lexington Avenue, and walked down to Twenty-Eighth Street, taking his
time, his usual surliness settling in a fog of resentment over his mood
of happiness. So he must wait, wait while the Count had his unbroken
rest, while the workers, the doers, waited on the whims of such as
he like dogs on doormats. Well, they might come to him now, to him,
Steccho, if they wanted the jewels. He would go to Dmitri’s room and
stretch out by the fire and sleep the hours before daylight. He had
not touched food since the previous day, nothing but black coffee and
cigarettes. The plan struck him with pleasure, as a sort of revenge on
Jurka. He would not tell Dmitri what he had done; merely sit and chat
with him to prove he did not do the bidding of the Count.

When he mounted the steps of the red-brick house with the iron railing
around its balcony, there came the low sound of violin-playing from
within. Dmitri then was still awake. His grate was ablaze with a good
fire of boxwood and charcoal. His coffee waited the whim of his desire,
over the unlighted brazier. Meanwhile, he said hello, as he expressed
it, to his consort, “Madame Harmony.”

“Behold, she never deserts me,” he would say to Ames. “She is the most
patient yet alluring of mistresses, my madame. And when I caress her,
ah, what she tells to me!”

There was no pathos in his music to-night. A Czech folk-dance spun from
his fingers in curling, whirling, leaping strains of melody like some
strange, intangible confetti of vibration expressed in notes. The lure
of it held the boy and he waited in the doorway, his dark eyes filled
with a passion of home yearning. So often he had danced with her,
Katinka, to that same music. At the instant some one on another street
blew a car whistle, and he slammed shut the door, locking it with
shaking fingers.




CHAPTER XVII


“Now what?” 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 shudder like 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 desired both 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 Steccho rose 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 the boy’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 a spy 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 work for
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 you revolutionists, 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.




CHAPTER XVIII


Carlota stood on the threshold. Her face was white in the
semi-darkness. In the east a faint quiver of radiance showed in the sky
like the reflection of moonlight on dark waters. Dmitri stared at the
girl in wonderment.

“I want Griffeth,” she said eagerly. “I went to his house and he has
not been there. Oh, I must see him, Dmitri! Tell me he is here with
you!”

The underlying note of intense repression in her voice struck him, and
yet he hesitated, fearful of Steccho’s safety.

“He is not here. He left after midnight. Are you alone, my dear?”

“Surely I am alone; what do you suppose I came for? Would you rather I
went first to the police? I came to you because you are his friend and
I need him.”

She brushed past him into the narrow hallway. He almost smiled at this
twist to Griffeth’s romance. With all the ardor and recklessness of her
temperament and race, Carlota had flung discretion to the winds and had
come to seek the man she loved at all hazards. Once inside his door,
she let her cloak slip from her shoulders and stood in the center of
the room, a slender, isolated figure.

“You are all afraid for yourselves,” she said slowly, scornfully. “Even
you, Dmitri, with all the brotherliness you profess, think only of
yourself. Griffeth will not be like that. He will understand that I
never can go back there.”

“You are excited and nervous.” Dmitri took her cold hands in his with
the whimsical, cheery way that never failed to soothe. “Why should you
go to the police? Tell me what has happened. It is surely a night of
witchcraft when foul fiends prowl. So, now sit down and be very calm. I
can always make you smile, with my nonsense, you see?”

She tried to meet his eyes, but her own filled with tears and she bit
her lip to keep control of herself.

“Oh, Dmitri, I am frightened, after all. Did Griffeth tell you about
the fête at Mrs. Nevins’s and--and how I had deceived you both, when
you were so good to me? I only sang for his sake, so his opera would
surely be a success. I never dreamt that any one would be there who
would recognize me; you believe me, don’t you?”

Dmitri lit a fresh cigarette with musing eyes, tossed away the match,
and hummed Fiametta’s motif softly under his breath.

“So you yourself have scaled the castle wall to seek your love,” he
said. “Did they try to hold you from him?”

“It is worse than you can think, Dmitri. To-night when I returned there
was no one in the apartment. I called up Ogden Ward; do you know him?”

Dmitri’s level eyebrows contracted at the name. He eyed her oddly,
remembering Griffeth’s words that the banker had been her patron.

“I know him; what then?”

“He was stabbed in my apartment a little while ago,” she whispered.
“I sent for him to come so that I might pay him back the money he had
advanced for three years. I offered him some jewels that belonged to my
grandmother. He laughed at me when we were alone, and said I had ruined
my career by singing in the opera and had broken my word to him by
meeting Griffeth and caring for him. I offered him the rubies--”

Dmitri bent over her suddenly.

“Rubies?” he repeated quickly. “What were they?”

“They belonged to Margherita Paoli, my grandmother. He had seen me wear
them at the fête, and told me on the way home he wanted to buy them.
But when I offered them to him, he--he refused. We were alone and I
tried to fight him off. The lamp crashed to the floor and I felt his
arms close about me; then I fainted.”

Dmitri watched the long green curtains at the bedroom door. They were
motionless, yet he crossed over and parted them casually to glance
within.

“So,” he said in relief. “And then? Do not hurry.”

“I was unconscious for a while, and when I recovered the room was
still in darkness. I found the push-button in the wall and turned on
the lights. Mr. Ward lay on the floor by the couch. He made a sound of
moaning and it frightened me. Oh, Dmitri, it was horrible to be alone
with him there. I gave him water to drink and saw that he was wounded
in the back. He told me to go quietly down and tell Ishigaki who was
waiting for him in his car. I must be very careful and give no alarm,
he said. He had been stabbed and the jewels were gone. After I had
sent the Japanese up to help him, I was afraid to go myself. I wanted
Griffeth. I knew they would try to keep me from him.”

“Why did you not call him at the house on the Square?”

“I did,” she protested. “He had not come in yet, they told me. I left
word for him that I must see him.”

Dmitri gazed at her glowing, expressive face with half-closed,
retrospective eyes. Surely Fate had sent her to his door at the one
hour of opportunity. He would save the boy Steccho from folly and
crime, and give Griffeth back his love.

“Then he must have received your message after he left here,” he said
cheerily. “And he will surely seek you at your own home. You must go
back there.”

“I never will go back to them. I will wait for him here,” she insisted.
“They will blame me for everything, for sending to Mr. Ward, for the
loss of the jewels, everything, and I will not listen to them. I do not
care for anything in the whole world but Griffeth.”

“Then you must safeguard him,” Dmitri urged. “They may suspect him
since he knew of the jewels, and we who live and think as nomads are
ever under suspicion. Have you not heard it said that all genius is
insanity? It is enough that he lives in the temperamental zone of the
village. Now, my dear child, you are cold and nervous. You will see how
well I can take care of you. You shall sit here and drink coffee for a
few moments while I go and telephone to Griffeth. And then”--he knelt
before the brazier, stirring and blowing the embers to a blaze--“then
we will have the surprise. When you were very little, did you not
always love the surprise, eh? Sometimes Life is still indulgent to us;
even in our greatest extremity, she grants us the surprise, and it is
this that keeps up our faith, that somehow, somewhere, our own shall
come to us, see?”

“If he is there when you call up, will you tell him to come here to
me?” She looked at him with longing eyes, and Dmitri smiled back at her.

“Surely I will. Fate shuffles the cards, remember; man only deals
them. I have ever found that we move in circles of coincidence drawn
together like the particles in the spectrum by some immutable unseen
force of attraction to form a cosmic harmony. You like that, do you?
For, see, you go forth in the night to seek your well-beloved, like the
Shulamite of old. Do you know her, my dear, among the immortal lovers?”
He measured level spoonfuls of pulverized coffee into the little copper
pot carefully. “Yet you remind me of her. So. When this boils up the
third time, then you shall drink it while I go for your surprise.”

Out in the street a car drew up before the house next door. Count
Jurka alighted, scanned the small brass numbers on the door carefully,
and ascended the narrow steps. He wore a cloak over his evening suit,
the cape thrown back over one shoulder, and as he waited he hummed a
waltz air from the last opera he had heard in Bucharest. Surely the
road of fortune lay free to the intrepid traveler. They had thought,
with the sop of peace thrown to her, that Bulgaria would lie still
like a whipped cur. The royalist cause was denied recognition save as
the latest king licked the hand that fed him. Only in the old queen,
rebellious and restless in her exile, was the spirit of dominion. He
smiled as he recalled her favors.

“A straight line--a goal!”

The line from Nietzsche swam through his head. He felt supremely
satisfied with life. The message from Steccho had reached him at
the hotel and he had come himself. As he was directed by the sleepy
houseman to the room at the top of the first flight of stairs, he
balanced the boy’s destiny for him. Was it wiser to silence him now
or on the voyage back? He would leave it to Georges. Yet not even to
him would he give the pleasure of receiving the royal rubies. He lit a
cigarette at the head of the stairs and tapped on the door.

There was dead silence within. He tried the knob, and found the key
turned on the inner side.

“Open,” he said curtly. “It is I.”

Steccho obeyed slowly. He had been sitting on the narrow cot, his
head buried in his hands. His shirt was open at the throat as if it
had choked him. In the dim light from the one gas-jet his face looked
haggard and yellow under his long, straight, disheveled hair.

“You have kept me waiting.” Jurka closed the door behind him, standing
with his back to it. “Where are the jewels?”

The blood rushed to Steccho’s head. He threw back his hair with a quick
movement of his head, and smiled in the old servile way.

“I have them all, excellenza. One moment only. You can swear to me by
your own life that I shall find all well at Rigl, that they will be
there to greet me, my mother and little Maryna?”

Around the lips of the Count there curved an amused smile.

“I swear to you I will send you where they are,” he said slowly.

As the meaning of his words flashed upon the boy, he flung himself
forward, his fingers seizing his throat.

“Go thou before me!” he gasped. “Liar and murderer, see who it is that
kills you! Look deep in my eyes! I, Ferad Steccho, send you out of
life! Think on my mother!” His fingers choked the thin, white neck of
Jurka relentlessly, but the Count fought back with all the advantage
of a trained body and mind. They fell on the couch together, locked in
a death-grapple. Almost without sound, save for the stifled breathing,
they fought until Jurka wrenched himself free, and staggered back.

“Excellenza!” Steccho breathed, his face the very mask of hate, “I have
heard the truth. They are dead these five months, my mother cut down
by famine, my sister--Oh, God, hear me!--Maryna is dead, a woman thing
thrown to your soldiers to be done to death at their pleasure; you hear
me! You swore to me by the cross you would protect them, and you knew
this all the time you lied to me. You knew when you sent me last night
to rob and kill for you.”

“If I call for help, what then?” sneered Jurka. “I will swear you
robbed me.”

“Call! Call on your queen to save you.” The boy leaped upon him
like a panther and bore him to the floor, his bare hands gripping
remorselessly at the white, slim throat. He bent over the mottled,
horror-stricken face, forcing the glazing eyes to stare into his, and
laughed softly. “See, I could kill you with the knife, but I will have
you look at me, so, straight to the door of death. Excellenza, the
rubies are red. Think on the blood of the innocents you have killed,
thousands and thousands. They wait for you--”

He felt the figure beneath him twist and strain with one last
tremendous effort to force him off. The Count’s hands fumbled blindly,
searchingly, and there came a dull report. Hardly had Steccho felt
the touch of the automatic as it was pressed to his side. The pain
was deadened by the joy of watching the light die out of the staring,
maddened eyes. His fingers loosened their grasp unwittingly. The form
of Jurka crumpled to the floor, and Steccho pressed his hands against
his side, looking at them curiously. Sinking into the chair by the
low table, he pulled the jewels from his pockets. They were moist and
dulled. What was it Dmitri had warned him?

“They are accursed. Red for the blood of your people, pearls for the
tears they have shed.”

He picked up the heavy tiara and dashed it down into the dead face upon
the floor.

“Excellenza,” he whispered, “think on them, they wait for you--” His
head fell forward on his breast. The lines of the wall-paper seemed
to dance and entwine as life slipped from his reach. “The sun shines
on the yellow castle,” he murmured huskily. “Maryna’s hair, yellow in
the sun, yellow like gold, excellenza, and wet with blood.” He sighed
heavily, groping for something with the seeking touch of the blind,
something he had let fall when he had seized the white throat of Jurka.
And suddenly there was utter silence in the room, the curious silence
where there is no breath of life stirring.

Next door Dmitri paused on the steps as he closed the door behind him.
In the east a glow of deepest rose flushed the mother-of-pearl clouds
into shells of trembling, lambient radiance. He eyed it happily. It
was a symbol, that promise of the daybreak. So in the earth-lands
overseas the dawn of humanity was coming despite the upheavals of class
struggles. He would come back and pack after he had returned Carlota
safely to Griffeth, together with the jewels. Then he and Steccho
would take the homeward way together. He glanced down the shadowy
street. There was no one in sight. He entered the house by the basement
door. The houseman smiled and nodded to him as he set out empty milk
bottles. He mounted the stairs with a light, buoyant step and knocked
at Steccho’s door. There was no response, and he pushed the door open.
Something there was inside that lay close against it, impeding his
entrance, and he peered around, thinking the boy had slept there in
heavy exhaustion.

“Ferad!” he called cheerily. “It is daybreak. You sleep late.”

But the boy did not stir. He slept well in the last bivouac, and,
turning, Dmitri beheld the other stark form beside him, he who had
been the court chamberlain, the debonair Jurka, the queen’s messenger.
Crushed in the hand of Steccho was the letter from Sofia. He unclenched
the stiffened fingers gently and read it with half-closed eyes and
contracted muscles. Placing it in his own inner pocket, he searched
both bodies. On Jurka he found a leather wallet filled with bank-notes
and documents. There was no time to examine them. He noticed only the
Count’s personal card and the address, the Hotel Dupont. In another
pocket was a bunch of keys which he took. Not a sign was there in the
room of the jewels. Only in Steccho’s raincoat pocket he discovered a
large unset opal, one of those toys Ward had played with, kept by the
boy to please Maryna. He went out as he had come, nodding again to the
houseman.

There was no time to waste. There would be the hue and cry of the
police and newspapers. He would be brought into it inevitably. Outside
the house he paused and lighted a cigarette deliberately, then
sauntered to the corner where a light burned all night in the little
Bulgarian café of Barouki. It was part of the creed of life to Barouki
not to ask questions of any one, which attribute rendered his place
popular among those who came from Sofia. Dmitri greeted the sleepy-eyed
old man, and entered the dusty booth at the end of the café. His voice
was pleasant and comradely as he called the apartment of Ogden Ward.

“But you will be kind enough to disturb him, nevertheless,” he urged
upon Ishigaki. “Tell him I have an opal to return to him.”

Dmitri came from the café with a little smile on his lips. He hailed a
becalmed taxi in front of a chop-house near the elevated station, and
drove back for Carlota.

“I should never have come to you, should I?” she asked, tiredly, as she
leaned her head back on the cushions. “What was the surprise?”

“My very dear child,” he said tenderly, “you must trust me. I believe
in fate and opportunity, in what we call in my land the hour appointed,
and never in my life have I been permitted to watch the gods at work
so much as now. Sleep awhile as we drive uptown. I will waken you at
Fifty-Ninth Street, where I leave you. And you must not be afraid. Love
is eternal. Nothing can kill it. Remember that. Only keep faith with
yourself.”

He watched her lips relax and her lashes droop. As the car hurried
uptown through silent streets the hum of the city gradually began, the
far-off call of the ferry-boats sounded in the gray sea mist, a fire
engine clanged down Fourth Avenue. Dmitri folded his arms, looking
straight ahead of him, and seeing two set faces under the flickering
gaslight. They had passed out of the play, Jurka and the boy Ferad. Who
had profited by their death? The queen’s rubies still lured with their
unholy splendor another’s feet along the trail of death.




CHAPTER XIX


The telephone bell rang in the living-room. Carlota lifted her head
eagerly from the pillow to listen as Maria answered.

“It is quite impossible. Miss Trelango is ill and cannot come to the
telephone herself.”

“Oh, Maria, but I can--please--” Carlota called breathlessly from the
inner bedroom, but the voice went on inexorably and with chill finality.

“I regret I cannot listen any further. It is impossible for her to see
you.”

Carlota sat up in bed, slim and tragic, her wealth of dark hair
tumbling about her shoulders.

“Was that Mr. Ames? You begged me to come and talk to Jacobelli not
five minutes ago, and now you say that I am too ill to get up.”

“Cara mia, you are not to excite yourself with anger,” Maria soothed
her. “Lie very still, my preciosa, relax your nerves. Remember
agitation is very bad for your voice.”

“But you will not understand, Maria,” she protested. “This is the man I
love, the man I shall surely marry, and you will not even let me speak
to him when I know how troubled he is. I must see him, Maria. If you
really loved me, you would not keep us apart.”

“Would I not?” Maria repeated fervently. “How did he know this number?”

“I do not know,” Carlota asserted proudly. “I did not even tell him my
name, nothing at all.”

“So? Then it is maybe--the Marchese. He is soft-hearted. He regards
this as a romance when it is a calamity. Do you realize what it means,
Jacobelli saying Ward insists everything is to be canceled if you
persist in jeopardizing your career?”

“Mr. Ward?” Carlota smiled. “When did he say that? Not to-day surely?”

“You are concealing something from me.” Maria bent over her with wide,
accusing eyes, even while her fingers stroked her hair fondly. “Ah,
if I had never gone to Casanova’s reception, I might have saved you
everything, the wild escapade at this Mrs. Nevins’s, the exposé, the
loss of the jewels, the horror of last night--Now, behold, your career
is ruined.”

Carlota was silent, her eyes bright with anger. It was all they thought
of, the money which Ward had given for her musical education, the door
which he might have opened for her to success. They thought that life
was made up only of achievement. Even Maria, whom she had loved and
leaned upon always, had veered completely over to the enemy, and found
a sacred obligation in keeping her thus, behind the wall of Tittani.
She closed her eyes as Maria’s voice declaimed solemnly:

“With the world at her feet, Paoli tossed it aside like a withered
flower and retired to her villa with only her friends and her memories.
Bianca, your beloved mother, fled with her love and died, still half a
child. This is only the very first false dawn of love, carina. You will
forget him in a month. Ah, if I could but take you back, for even a
little while, to the garden.”

“If you try to part us, I will never sing again,” Carlota told her
tragically. “I will never accept any aid from Mr. Ward again.”

“Then you are what Jacobelli called you, an ingrate, after all the love
and hope we have lavished upon you.” Maria was weeping plenteously,
helplessly, as she realized the power behind Carlota’s words.

The outer bell rang, silencing the argument. Hurriedly she went to
open it, while the girl slipped from the bed, flung a silk robe over
her shoulders, and slipped her feet into satin mules. If it should be
Griffeth, if he had really dared to come again to penetrate her tower
of durance, she would force them to let her see him. She listened
eagerly for his voice. Instead it was a messenger boy, bearing Ames’s
first shell into the enemy’s camp. He had gone from the telephone
booth, and had spent all he had in an orgy of roses from a flower-stand.

“Return them. There is no answer,” Maria said firmly.

But the boy was loyal. Stolidly he insisted there was no place to
return them. The gentleman had gone on his way. In the doorway Carlota
appeared suddenly and Maria stepped back from the look in her eyes as
she took the long box as if it had been a tiny bambino. Holding it
close to her breast, she went back to her bed, her chin pressed against
it.

“I shall not even speak to you or look at you, if you treat me like
this, Maria. I am not a child,” she said haughtily. “Whatever he sends
to me, you will regard it as sacred.”

“You are not responsible. You are unreasonable and reckless, and I
shall lock you in your room. The Marchese and Jacobelli will be here
later, and then you will tell them the truth about last night.”

“I will tell them nothing.” Carlota held her breath, listening to
the turn of the lock in the door, and shrugged her shoulders as she
laid her face on the red roses. It would not do to break her heart in
solitude, not when she knew he was thinking of her and trying to reach
her. Dmitri would surely find him and tell him all that had occurred
the previous night. He would clear him of any charge Ward might lodge
against him. What charge could they bring, save that he had befriended
the boy Steccho and had loved her? Ingrate, they called her. The word
puzzled her. She found her little red morocco dictionary in her desk
drawer and looked it up in deepest interest. The definition was brief
and to the point:

“Ingrate: One who is ungrateful.”

Sitting up in bed, girl fashion, she leaned her elbows on her knees,
and thought seriously. The melody of “Cerca d’Amore” ran through her
mind, the quest of love, and all her being seemed to become, in some
mystical sense, a chalice to hold this divine essence of love that
had glorified her life. Impulsively she turned the pages to the word
“love.” The definition was vague and unsatisfactory.

“Love: to have affection.”

She pursed her lips, and gravely sought another route to knowledge.

“Husband: a man who marries a woman.”

This was utterly absurd to a seeker after life’s greatest, sweetest
mystery. She hurried to “wife,” and found merely an echo.

“Wife: a woman who marries a man.”

Last of all, she found “marriage.” It was positively trite.

“Marriage: wedlock.”

Under “wedlock” she discovered “marriage.” She hurled the little book
from her, and seized a pencil and pad from the stand beside her.

“Love,” she dashed off impetuously, “the divine gift that joins two
hearts for eternity.”

This looked nearer the ecstasy of real truth. Not that one could even
approach in words the expression of the miracle of love, but this was
closer. In the next room Maria sang a tender old chant of the nuns
at Leguna Marino, the tiny town that clung to the cliffs below Villa
Tittani. This was a ruse, to lift her mind from earthly things, she
knew, and yet she tried again, her own improvements in the lexicon of
love.

“Marriage,” she wrote carefully. “The blessed union of two souls who
love perfectly.”

It was an inspired improvement on the dictionary definition, she
thought, and after “love” she added, “the divine gift that awakens
souls to life’s meaning.”

Maria would never understand. She would smile at her pityingly and
guard her from the passion that was her heritage. Jacobelli would rage
and beat the air and denounce all romance as a detractor of art, but
the old Marchese, he would sympathize with her. Sometimes, when he sat
at dinner with them, smoking leisurely, a smile of content on his fine
old face, she had often wondered what memories lay behind his charm of
manner and unfailing understanding with youth’s heritage of yearning.
With the rose on the pillow beside her and the little pad in her hand,
she fell asleep.

In the living-room Maria Roma knelt beside the Florentine chest,
selecting the remainder of the Paoli collection to be deposited in the
safety vault. It was true, as Ward had told Jacobelli the previous
night, coming from the Nevins fête, neither Carlota nor she had
appreciated the full value of the royal gems. The stolen rubies alone
were worth several hundred thousand dollars, yet Carlota had worn
them as if they had been paste. There was not another stone in the
world that could compare in purity with the Zarathustra ruby. Maria
knew the story of how it had come into the possession of Margherita
Paoli, nearly half a century before. She had heard of the impassioned
young Balkan prince who had cast all he owned at the feet of the most
beautiful woman in Europe. When she would have returned the rubies, he
had refused them, even with the knowledge of her affair with Tennant.

“You deny me your love. Let the rubies tell you ever of mine. I may not
hold you in my arms. Let them rest on your glorious hair, your throat,
your breast, telling you forever that Boris loved you.”

Yet it was doubtful whether Paoli herself had even grasped the great
value of the jewels. She had never been the type of woman to seek the
price of anything. It belittled rather than enhanced the value of a
thing to have it rated. So the rubies had lain for years in the old
chest with her other jewels, half forgotten as the years went by,
and Crown Prince Boris had long since lain upon his gold and purple
catafalque.

Delicately and precisely Maria placed each remaining piece in its
separate velvet case, sighing heavily over her task. The burden of
responsibility laid by the old Contessa upon her shoulders, weighed
heavily in the present crisis. Love or ambition? Which pathway was the
feet of girlhood to follow when genius had given wings for flight? It
would be fatal for Carlota, on the threshold of her career, to marry
as her mother had done, flinging all into the balance of romance. Yet
there came a thrill to Maria’s Trentino blood as she realized how the
old Marchese sympathized with such recklessness.

It was all quite simple, he had told her the previous night when they
had returned and found Carlota gone, the jewels stolen, and Ishigaki
caring for Ward. While Ward had smiled at her inscrutably as she wept
and demanded the truth, the old Marchese had ignored him, and had
calmed her gently.

“Whatever has happened, there is no cause for alarm. Youth and art, a
boy and girl singing love duets together, pouf! What would they have
come from such a tragedy, she and Jacobelli, and Mr. Ward himself?
Compel a girl like Carlota to don gray and walk softly to set measures
like some little novice, a girl with the Trelango and Paoli blood
beating love’s tempo in her veins!”

“But her voice, her career?” she had protested wildly. “Is it nothing,
all we have done and hoped for her?”

The Marchese had smiled tenderly.

“Jacobelli is a great teacher,” he said, “but there is one greater than
he. His heartstrings are insulated copper wires, my dear Maria. And for
the rubies--remember what the old Contessa herself used to say of them,
that they were accursed, pearls for the tears of an oppressed people,
rubies for the blood of the innocent? Regret them not. I have never
craved such things myself, not while there is truth and beauty and love
left to us to cherish.”

Carlota slept heavily, dreamlessly, the sleep of utter exhaustion of
mind and body after the long night. Through her windows the late autumn
sunlight poured an amber glow. A mellow stillness seemed to lie over
the city as if the hush of Indian summer had already laid a finger upon
the laughing lips of Manhattan. Even the ringing of the outer bell when
the Marchese arrived failed to rouse her. He was smiling and debonair
as ever, bearing his customary votive offering of flowers. Laying his
gloves upon his hat on the piano, he beamed upon Maria’s anxious face.

“Cheer up, my friend,” he exclaimed. “The world is very beautiful this
afternoon. Where is Carlota? So, asleep.” He lowered his voice. “That
is better, for you and I, Maria, have seen life, have looked it in the
face and not quailed, have we not, and we are not afraid, where she is
very young and tender.”

“Ah, what now?” Maria whispered, her hands pressed to her temples. “He
is not here?”

“He? Who, the boy Griffeth? No, no, my dear, he is not here. In fact,
he may be quite safe behind prison bars by night. That would please
you, yes?”

“In prison? For persecuting her with his attentions?”

“No, for complicity in the attempt to murder Ogden Ward and the robbery
of the jewels. I have just come from Ward himself. He is not injured
seriously. The ribs deflected the blow. His greatest wish is to avoid
all publicity--naturally.”

The sardonic note in his tone struck Maria.

“You surely do not place any reliance in what she said last night? She
was excited and distraught. A child like that would mistake the fervor
of love for an attack--”

She stopped short. Carlota stood in the doorway, slim and erect in a
hasty toilette. She had overheard their voices and arisen. With the
long refreshing sleep had come high resolve. The Marchese, looking
at her arrayed in a long, clinging négligé of creamy lace, with its
borders of rich fur, thought of the young Paoli in her first fire of
love.

“Ah, cara mia,” exclaimed Maria eagerly, “you have rested. Kiss your
old cross Maria, so. We dine with the Marchese to-night; you will like
that, yes?”

Carlota shook her head, her eyes brilliant with resentment and
determination.

“I will not go,” she said passionately. “You have treated me as if I
were a spoiled child, locking me in my room. What is this about Ward
accusing Griffeth, Marchese? He was not even here last night.”

“But where was he, then, my child? The night doorman tells another
story. He was here after you had left.”

Carlota’s eyes closed and opened again widely, fearlessly.

“Mr. Ward dares to accuse Griffeth of the robbery and attack on
himself, does he?”

“No. He is very considerate, my dear, very kind,” Veracci assured her
tenderly. “You are over-anxious and must not lose the perspective
of things. Mr. Ward has silenced the news of the robbery. There is
nothing at all in the papers. He is handling the entire affair most
diplomatically, with private detectives, and the police commissioner
muzzled. Ah, he is very clever. His own wound is nothing to him, but
the loss of the jewels is everything. His theory is this, you have been
meeting friends of Ames, no doubt, in his studio. You may have spoken
of the jewels--”

“I did not!” flashed Carlota.

“Possibly without intent. You wore them at the fête. There has been a
secret search going on for these royal gems, it appears, for months.
Ward knew all about it. He did not know they were in your possession
until the night of the fête, he says. They are part of the crown jewels
of Bulgaria.”

“But they were given to Margherita outright by Boris himself,”
protested Maria; “there was no theft. They were hers.”

“He had no right to give them.” The old Marchese spoke gently. “When
the revolution came and Ferdinand fled, Sophia took the crown jewels
with her. Since then, Ward tells me, parts of them have been turning up
at every jewel mart in the world, where she has sought to raise funds
for the royalist cause. These were traced to America from Italy by a
man named Count Jurka, the queen’s chamberlain. Ward knew him. He was
found dead this morning.”

Maria stared at him in silence. Carlota came to his side quickly, her
face white with dread, as she remembered Dmitri’s promise to find the
jewels.

“Where?”

“In a room on East Twenty-Eighth Street. It is in the Bulgarian
quarter, next door to where a man lives named Dmitri Kavec, the closest
friend of Griffeth Ames. My dear,” as his arm encircled her swaying
figure, “you must be strong. He was found with another, a Bulgarian
boy called Steccho, also a friend of Ames and Kavec’s. Have you met
them at his studio?”

“I know Dmitri Kavec,” she said brokenly, her hands covering her face.
“Has he accused Griffeth?”

“He has not been found himself. That is why they are going to hold the
boy as witness against him, and for possible complicity in the crime.
Did you see the man who entered this room last night and took the
jewels?”

Carlota stared up at him almost beseechingly, and shook her head.

“I fainted when Mr. Ward’s arms touched me.” She shuddered at the
memory of that moment. “But I know Dmitri is not guilty.” She
hesitated. Dmitri, Griffeth’s friend, to whom she had gone last night
in her trouble. His buoyant words rang in her mind when he had left
her. She was to have no fear. He would recover the jewels for her and
bring them to her. Did he have them in his possession at that very
moment? Was it all part of some secret conspiracy to escape with them
himself, defrauding not only her, but Jurka as well? She lifted her
head with swift resolution.

“I am going to Griffeth. No, you cannot hold me, Maria. Come with me if
you like, but I am going to him. He will need me greatly. If you will
not, then I must ask the Marchese to take me to him.”

And Maria Roma, looking into her eyes, knew the days of girlhood had
passed and the feet of Paoli’s grandchild had scaled the wall of
Tittani in her quest for love.




CHAPTER XX


Sauntering from the elevated station at Eighth Street over to the
Square, Jacobelli mused upon the vagaries of a golden voice. His point
of view was changing with the speed of an Alpine tourist. Maria had
acquainted him with the decision of Carlota.

“Ah, signor, believe me, she does not feign illness. Her heart is not
breaking. It is freezing, which is worse. Never will she sing again,
she declares, if you deny her the one whom she loves. She spoke his
name in her sleep. It is the romance beautiful, the divine fire from
heaven alighted upon the altar of a woman’s heart, it is--”

“Enough!” exclaimed Jacobelli. “I capitulate. Doubtless she is right.
Two--three years nearly I have taught her all I know, and yet what is
it? She cannot sing the wonderful heart-throb music as the great woman
artiste must. Not all the technique in the world can put it into her
voice; yet one day she meets the man she loves, and lo! it is there,
she excels. I knew it when she came to me that day at the studio
after she had quarreled with him. I heard it then in her voice, the
glory--the abandon--the power of the woman who claims the universe for
her love. And I am a fool, Maria, I lose my head entirely. I am jealous
of this unknown teacher who has opened the heart of my star. I hate
him. At the Nevins fête I make the grand fool of myself, signora. But
now, I see, I bow. Let her have her love if she will. I have lunched
with the Marchese, and am at peace with the world. After the honeymoon
tell her we will resume her lessons.”

He felt marvelously benevolent as he made his way towards Ames’s
studio. Possibly his luncheon chat with the Marchese had much to do
with it, also the fact that later he had seen Casanova. Count D’Istria
had kept his word to Griffeth, and Casanova, ever ready to observe
the way of the wind with managerial straws, had promised to bring the
operetta to the immediate attention of the Metropolitan directors with
his sanction on its production the coming season.

Finding his way up the three flights of stairs, Jacobelli knocked upon
the door with his cane. Griffeth lay full length upon the cushions of
the dormer window-seat, depressed and miserable. He had been awake
all night, striving to get into communication with Carlota or Dmitri,
and had missed them at every point. Still his flowers had not been
returned. He had ascertained that much from the lad at the flower-stand
in the old market. He had sent twice to Dmitri’s house and he had not
returned since daybreak, they said.

The rap on the outer door made him spring to unlock it, expecting
either Dmitri or a message from Carlota. Instead there stood upon his
threshold Guido Jacobelli, from whom he had been parted by interested
friends only a night before, the one man in New York whom he regarded
as his enemy. He gave him no invitation to enter, but stood like
a glowering, expectant young stag, ready for the onslaught of his
adversary.

Jacobelli waved him aside airily, and entered the room, making himself
at home in the large oak armchair, and stroking Ptolemy who strolled
over to inspect him.

“We make friends, what you say, my boy?” he asked genially. “I forgive
you from my heart all you do to me in the past, see? Why? Because I,
Jacobelli, make the great discovery. You speak the truth. She is your
pupil.”

“What do you mean?” asked Griffeth suspiciously. “I heard all that you
said of her last evening. I understand perfectly that she is Paoli’s
granddaughter and backed by the patronage of Ogden Ward. I do not know
why it was her whim to come down here and play at being my pupil. It
has ruined my work and broken my heart, but I wish her all the success
and happiness in the world.”

Jacobelli beamed at him archly, his black eyebrows rising in crescents,
his lips a smiling, close curve above his two double chins.

“She came here because she loves you, my boy, because she longed to
give you her wonderful voice in your operetta. She is Love’s pupil. One
day she opens her mouth to sing for me, and, my God! it is there, the
temperament I have prayed for, it is there, and you have given it to
her. I salute you.”

“Has she sent you to me?” asked Griffeth eagerly. “May I see her at
once?”

Jacobelli chuckled, stroking the yellow fur of Ptolemy until it
crackled.

“I know nothing of her. I have not seen her since last night, but the
Signora Roma tells me she has tormented them all because they would not
permit her to see you. In fact, she tried to reach you last night; you
knew this?”

“I found her message when I returned. I tried to see her and walked
back home through the Park.”

“Which is just as well.” The old maestro smiled significantly. “Youth
is utterly mad. You rave now, and say your career is ended. My poor
boy, you have not heard from Casanova, no? This very hour he tells me
they will surely produce your operetta next season. Is not that enough?”

“The operetta?” repeated Griffeth grimly. “I had forgotten all about
it. When I lost her everything went out of my life. I felt like using
the world for a football and kicking the stars up a little higher out
of reach. You don’t know how blank life seemed to me until she came
down here. I had been across during the war with Carrollton Phelps in
the Aerial Service. We fell about the same time, and after months of
being patched up, I was sent home, excess baggage on the war wagon. I
was twenty then, and when I had my grip back, my father let me do as I
pleased, and I came here to work out some of the things I had always
hoped to do. I’ve felt like an idler beating out harmonies in this
bird’s-eye castle until she came.”

“Then I will tell you something to comfort you and light the path
again. Always remember the path is there even though you are in
darkness.” Jacobelli pressed his finger-tips together, his eyes
brilliant with the fire of enthusiasm. “One of your own great men
has said he would rather write the songs of a nation than its laws.
We are but teachers, my boy. You who compose music are the living
current between humanity and those mighty, immutable laws of harmony
and vibration which move the universe, is it not so?--and love is the
greatest of all divine laws.”

From a street piano at the curb below the studio windows the melody
of the “Barcarole” came to them in ascending volume. A taxicab drew
up beside it. Carlota could almost have blown kisses to each dear,
remembered spot along the Square as she alighted with Maria. Only
forty-eight hours since she had been to the studio, yet the tidal wave
of circumstance had nearly swept the happiness of her life out to sea.
She smiled at the Greek boy beside the pushcart, smiled at the children
playing in the patches of ground before the old brownstone row of
houses, smiled almost in the face of Sergeant Lorrie, of the Central
Detective Bureau, as she passed him on the steps.

Maria followed her, resigned and tragic. She had called up the Marchese
at the final moment, even after he had left them and returned to the
Lafayette, to tell him Carlota’s ultimate choice, and to her amazement
the old Italian courtier had congratulated her on her own defeat.

“Remember, signora,” he had urged buoyantly, a “certain ancient
gentleman of varied experience in matrimony, one King Solomon, has
stated as his opinion that love is stronger than death and many
waters cannot quench it. I agree with him perfectly. Request our
beloved Carlota that she will permit my presence at her nuptials with
Pierrot. I have a penchant for romantic weddings. They recall to me the
fragrance of roses abloom at Vallombrosa. Once, as we two walked under
the olive grove years ago, you refused me, Maria mia. When you are
tempted to be unyielding and forbidding to these children, these two
lovers, remember Vallombrosa, I implore you. Had you said yes, I should
not have carried the fragrance of roses as a bitter-sweet memory all my
life long.”

So it happened that, despite her sense of duty to the last wishes
of the old Contessa, Maria felt a thrill of sympathy in the great
adventure as she followed Carlota into the studio on the top floor.

“We have come for Carlota’s sake,” she said majestically. “It is
against my wishes and judgment, but we are here, signor. You have won.”

“What is it, dear?” exclaimed Griffeth, as he held Carlota’s hands in
his. “You are cold as ice, and trembling.” He drew her favorite Roman
chair forward to the open grate fire, but Carlota drew back.

There were shadows beneath her eyes and entreaty in the glance she gave
him.

“Have you heard from Dmitri?”

“Not a word since midnight. I left him then; why?”

She sank into the chair as he stooped eagerly to rouse the fire to a
blaze. “Why, it is almost laughable to find you here just as always,
perfectly safe, and you even seem happy.”

“I am happy. Jacobelli has just left me and we are great friends. He
came to tell me the operetta is accepted by Casanova. Isn’t that great
news, dear?”

“And you have heard nothing at all of what--what happened last night?
No one has been here?”

“No one. What do you mean?” He rose as Maria crossed to the window and
watched the Square below.

“The Marchese came and told us. Oh, Griffeth, it is all so horrible,
and I know, I know that you had nothing to do with it. You do not need
to tell me so.”

He held her close in his arms as she reached out to him, and Maria told
the news quickly, of the robbery and attack on Ward.

“They have implicated you because of your association with one of the
men who is dead and the man who is missing, Dmitri.”

“Dmitri!” repeated Griffeth. “What do you mean? Dmitri is my friend.
Who is dead?”

“Griffeth, do you remember”--Carlota lifted her head from his
shoulder--“the young Bulgarian I told you always followed me? The one
Dmitri recognized from the window here and told me I was never to fear
him? This morning we heard from the old Marchese that a double murder
had been committed next door to where Dmitri lived. No, please do not
speak yet,” as he gave a startled exclamation. “One of the men was the
Bulgarian boy, and they suspect Dmitri.”

“And you yourself, because you are his friend,” Maria added solemnly.
“The Marchese assured us you would be arrested for complicity.”

“But why did you come here last night?”

Carlota hesitated, but Maria’s eyes were tender.

“Because I wanted you to help me,” she said slowly. “There was no one
else to go to, and I was in trouble. Mr. Ward came to the apartment to
buy my rubies and while he was there he was assaulted and robbed.”

“Were you hurt?”

“I fainted.” Carlota’s lashes drooped before his steady gaze. “And
afterwards I was afraid to go back.”

“Why?” he demanded.

Maria’s hands fluttered out eagerly.

“You must not ask her disturbing questions when she is so nervous. It
is all very terrible, and mostly so for me. I was to have protected and
guarded her, and now, behold, it is as if she was utterly alone and
friendless.”

“Oh, do not even think about me!” Carlota cried passionately. “Where is
Dmitri, Griffeth? You believe in him, do you not? Maria, leave me here
alone. I must speak to him in confidence. Forgive me, tanta mia, I love
and trust you, but this concerns his friend. You will go, just for a
little while, won’t you?”

The roses of Vallombrosa. Signora Roma met the pleading look in
her eyes and the words of the old Marchese rang in her mind like a
sacred charge. Romance and youth and Vallombrosa. If she had not been
ambitious too, and had set her art ahead of love, what a long fair
road of companionship and happiness life might have been with Bernardo
Dinari, Marchese di Veracci. The tears rushed to her eyelids, and she
sighed heavily in surrender as she folded Carlota to her breast.

“Take her from us,” she said to Griffeth. “Ah, I am no longer blind and
hard of heart. You have taught her well, signor, and after all, it is
life’s sweetest and richest song. I will go and walk in the Square and
think I am back in Italy.”

Ames closed the door behind her, leaning against it, looking longingly
at the girl standing in the light from the dormer windows. Ptolemy
leaped up to her, rubbing his tawny length affectionately against her,
his eyes gleaming like topaz.

“Dear, look at me,” he said eagerly. “You came to me again, just as
you did that first day, my wonder girl. Even after everything, you had
faith in me--”

She held her hands out to him, giving them to his clasp, yet holding
him back.

“Have we any right to take our own happiness when it makes so many
wretched? Maria, who brought me up and gave me all her love and care,
and dear old Jacobelli--”

“But they are all willing now. It isn’t selfish, dear. It is our right.
Remember how Dmitri always said we were the inheritors of all the love
dreams of the past, and must hold the torch high for those who come
after us. You know all you have been to me for months, what it meant
to both of us that first night at Phelps’s when you met my eyes, and
it seemed as if everything in my whole being called out to you in
gladness. Carlota, don’t keep me from you! Why did you come here last
night to find me, why are you here to-day, why did Jacobelli come and
tell me frankly it was our love that had given your voice its power and
new beauty? Yet I’ve never even kissed you once, never held you in my
arms--”

Her eyes closed as his arms clasped about her and he turned her towards
him in a silent, tense embrace. When she lifted her head, she was
smiling, her lashes wet with tears.

“This is not the right ending for the opera. I have passed the wall of
Tittani and found you and there is no peril or suspense at all, just
the two of us here in the dear old studio, and Ptolemy to turn his back
and not look at us. He is a gentleman, isn’t he, Griffeth?”

Across the Square along the diagonal path to the old studio building
Dmitri walked with an easy, long-stepped gait. The troops that had
surged over the Belachrista Pass had the same stride. The collar of
his coat was turned up, his brown felt hat pulled low over his eyes,
his cigarette pointing upward. He had passed a pleasant and profitable
night. So engrossed he was in smiling at the future that he failed to
observe Signora Roma waiting in the circle by the fountain, failed to
notice three loiterers about the old studio row. One watched the dormer
windows of the garret. One stood at the corner of MacDougal Street to
take note of possible exits over adjacent roofs in case of need. One
leaned against the iron railing in the front yard and chatted with the
unwitting caretaker, and Dmitri passed them all by jauntily. Would it
be wiser, he mused, to tell Griffeth Ames everything? He had trained
him for months in the new law of humanity’s rights, yet was he not too
young to recognize the imperative need for silence. The breaking dawn
called to Dmitri’s imagination. The chant of the oppressed sounded in
his ears, not the old galley chorus that had kept time to the rhythm
of an Attic boatswain’s flute, nor the call from the steppe prisons
that had been the newborn wail of Russia’s freedom. The old order had
already changed. The heavens were rolling away as a parchment before
the new dayspring. A little struggling here and there, he told himself,
over the earth’s surface, a little blindness in the new light from eyes
long used to darkness, but steadily, inevitably the daybreak would
sweep on and in the full sunlight men should find themselves gazing
into one another’s eyes without fear and hatred and greed.

He mounted the three flights rapidly, two steps at a time, tapped on
the door, and opened before Griffeth could reach it.

“Aha!” cried Dmitri. “And so we may be sure that spring will come
again! Are you Harlequin or Pierrot this afternoon, or all the immortal
lovers of romance at once? And have you coffee for a wayfarer? I have
walked all over the city since daybreak. I see that in spite of my
precautions, Columbine has found her way right straight back to the
chimney-pot and the cat and the melody of one Pierrot.”

He sank down in the old dusty velvet chair by the fireplace, his hair
tousled into curls. Carlota gazed at him with wondering, questioning
eyes. Dmitri, no subtle, terrified criminal hiding from the law, but
as she had ever known him, the happy, confident, scholarly friend. She
forgot everything but his danger.

“Why”--she turned appealingly to Griffeth--“it’s almost laughable--it’s
like some horrible dream--that I am here with you both just as always,
and you are safe, Dmitri--”

“Why should I not be safe?” He smiled at her with keen, brilliant eyes.
“It is a most charming surprise to find you here, I admit. I was only
going to drop in and see my favorite friend before I leave. I was going
to entrust to him a commission, but since you are here--”

The door of the studio opened noiselessly. Dmitri’s lips were
silenced by the sight behind Griffeth and the girl. Lorrie, of the
Central Bureau, was not a person of dramatic instincts or emotional
possibilities. He stood in the patch of sunlight from the hall
skylight, his hands in his pockets, his hat pushed back on his head.
The hands grasped two automatics, but Lorrie never obtruded them on the
sensibilities of those he was sent to find until he found it necessary.
He stepped into the room, a slight smile on his lips as he took in the
group. Behind him stood two of his men.

“Kavec,” he said curtly, “you’re under arrest for the double murder of
Jurka and Steccho.”

Dmitri never stirred.

“But he is my friend, Carrollton Phelps’s friend!” exclaimed Griffeth
hotly. “I was with him up to midnight myself.”

“Don’t worry, you’re in too,” returned Lorrie laconically. “Complicity
in the robbery, accessory to the crime, and then some. Search them.”

“But I was with Mr. Kavec myself until early this morning,” Carlota
declared suddenly, her face lifted high, her eyes avoiding Griffeth’s.
“He had nothing to do with the robbery. He did not even know about it
until I told him myself. It is impossible that he could have done this
thing--”

She stopped dead short, the color leaving her lips. From Dmitri’s
pockets the detectives drew the rubies of the exiled queen. One by one
the separate pieces were laid upon the table, the necklace, the loosely
linked pendants, the girdle ornament.

Dmitri lit a cigarette with steady fingers.

“The tiara is inside my other coat,” he said. “It would be a shame to
break the set.”

“Dmitri, my God, what have you done!” gasped Griffeth. “Carlota, go to
Maria, out of this. I swear I knew absolutely nothing. Dmitri, tell her
Steccho gave them to you, didn’t he? Say something, man, can’t you?”

“He’s got nothing to say,” Lorrie answered. “Look here.” He threw out
papers on the table from Dmitri’s coat pockets. “Passage engaged for
Naples, sailing to-morrow. A quick get-away, eh, Kavec.”

“I do not believe one word of it!” flashed Carlota. “Who ordered this
arrest? The jewels were mine. I have made no complaint of being robbed.
Oh, I do not want any of them back. I hate the sight of them.”

She sank down in a chair, her face covered by her hands, her shoulders
shaken with sobs, deep, tearless, broken sobs of hopelessness. As Ogden
Ward entered the room hers was the first form his eyes rested on.
Leaning heavily upon a cane and Ishigaki’s arm, he walked slowly, and
with evident pain. Behind him was the tall, dignified figure of the
Marchese, his kindly face troubled and keen when he beheld the group
within the studio.

“My dear child”--he was beside Carlota instantly. “I am so very sorry
for you. I never dreamt of all this. I deemed it my duty to acquaint
Mr. Ward with your intention to come here as proof of your finality,
and he would come also, therefore I am with him.”

Dmitri’s gaze never left the face of Ward. Steadily he looked at him,
not sardonically nor with any animosity, but rather whimsically and
pityingly.

“You brought this on yourself, Ames,” Ward said slowly. “I did it to
protect the interests of Miss Trelango. Through the criminal associates
she met in your place here, she lost hundreds of thousands of dollars
worth in jewels. I resolved, after hearing her decision from the
Marchese, to tell her myself of your deliberate sacrifice of her to get
possession of these gems. From the first moment that I learned of the
double murder, I myself took up the pursuit of the guilty parties with
the commissioner himself, and this is the result.”

“Pardon.” Ward started at the first sound of Dmitri’s voice, suave and
evenly pitched, as if he had heard it before. “When was that first
moment, if one may ask, Mr. Ward?”

Ward’s face set in deeper lines. Only Dmitri and he himself of all
those in the room knew the menace behind the words. Until that instant
he had not known of the presence there of one who had spoken to him
over the wire at daybreak that morning. Lorrie looked at the banker
sharply, waiting for his reply.

“You don’t have to be annoyed by him, you know, Mr. Ward. My orders are
to bring them both down to headquarters.”

Ward lifted his hand.

“I will be responsible, sergeant,” he said coldly. “Wait below.”

With the Marchese’s arm around her, Carlota watched in amazement the
man she loved, the man who hated him, and Dmitri last of all. He was
smiling, courteous as ever, thoroughly at ease and even enjoying the
situation.

“May I draw your attention, Mr. Ward,” he remarked, motioning to the
table where the jewels lay. “See, they are there. I was bringing them
here to give them to their rightful owner, Miss Trelango. It was best
that she should not see me, so I was about to transfer them to the care
of my friend, Mr. Ames. They are all there, not one missing. Stay.
There is one the genial sergeant overlooked, but it is not of that
set.” He reached in his pocket and drew out his tobacco pouch. “For
safe-keeping,” he smiled, and produced the opal which Steccho had saved
for the golden-haired Maryna to play with.

Ward’s eyes stared at it fixedly, seeing instead the room at Carlota’s
apartment, the shattered lamp, the scattered gems, and one lithe,
leaping figure in the dim oblong of light from the open window.

“I have seen that before,” murmured the Marchese thoughtfully, “a
beautiful gem.”

“When I spoke to you on the telephone this morning I asked you if you
had lost a jewel?” Dmitri’s tone took on a keener edge as he leaned his
hands upon the bare ebony table between them, and addressed Ward. “I
also told you that I had just discovered a most unfortunate accident
which had cost Count Jurka his life. I suggested, in view of certain
papers which I had found in the Count’s notebook regarding--”

“You are a criminal now in the eyes of the law,” Ward cut in. “You know
the value of a criminal’s testimony.”

“I am not speaking in court. I speak to my friends,” said Dmitri
gently. “And I am no criminal, save at your own good pleasure, Mr.
Ward. Would you prefer that I state the facts here, or wait until we
arrive at police headquarters or possibly the grand jury?”

Ward’s face seemed to turn gray as they looked upon him.

“You can’t prove a damned word.” His eyes, bright and round, met
Dmitri’s in sudden challenge.

“Can I not?” laughed the latter cheerily. “Ah, my dear Mr. Ward, life
is so very strange and so amusing, and so unexpected, and yet it is all
one grand harmony. I show to you the jewels, the rubies and pearls of
the royal collection. You know where I got them from, and yet you can
sit there and threaten me. You are a fool, because I have the proof
against you!”

Ward rose heavily.

“Call Lorrie,” he gasped. “Marchese, I demand it.”

“You will not call any one until you have heard me out,” Dmitri said
deliberately. “I have the signed confession and all the correspondence
that passed between you and Georges Yaranek.”

The Marchese moved away from Carlota to the table. She turned to
Griffeth in relief, both of them listening in silent amazement to
Dmitri’s story.

“This man, Ogden Ward, is not the person he seems to be,” he said
almost gayly, yet with accusation. “He is not your silent, stern
capitalist and banker, your international pawn-broker who can kill or
save a nation by his munificent charity. He is also of a most exquisite
artistic temperament, a nature which responds to the richest and
priceless in art and beauty. He will have only the best, your Mr. Ward.
And this is known all over the world by those who live upon loot for
gold. It was not enough that Count Jurka should recover the missing
crown jewels. He must convert them into cash for use in the royalist
cause. And through his own researches he discovered another on the same
trail, the trail of the Zarathustra ruby. This was Ogden Ward, who
wished to add it to his collection, together with the Orient pearls and
other rubies of the set. Jurka had not been dispatched upon this secret
mission alone. Always, in such cases, there are two set forth together,
that one may succeed if one should fail. Steccho had told me this,
and of the court chamberlain’s trusted attendant and courier, Georges
Yaranek. He is very clever, but he is nervous. When he discovered
the two dead bodies he lost his nerve. And he left behind two most
important things, the wallet of Jurka, and this letter in the dead hand
of my friend.”

From the inner hatband of his soft felt hat he removed the crumpled
paper Steccho’s hand had groped for in death, and smoothing it out,
he read it gently, from a student comrade. He had written briefly,
fatalistically. There could be nothing worse than all that had gone
before.

  Your mother is dead these five months, one of many aged who died from
  starvation. Maryna is lost. I have made careful inquiries, but can
  only ascertain that she appealed to Jurka’s agent in this district
  at the time of the demonstration made by the royalist faction, and
  was taken with other girls from Rigl and adjacent villages to the
  mountain camps by the soldiers. None returned alive.

“Jurka tricked the boy,” Dmitri said quietly. “He needed him in the
work here and promised in return full protection to his mother and
sister by the queen’s own secret agents. This letter came to Steccho
through my hands the night he took the jewels. He came to me and told
what he had seen in the Trelango apartment. Shall I speak in detail?”
He smiled most courteously at Ward.

“What you say is immaterial. I was called by Miss Trelango herself
that night to complete a business transaction. I had advanced certain
sums for her musical education and training under certain conditions
to which she had agreed. She broke these conditions. It was her own
suggestion that she pay back in full her obligations to me with the
jewels.”

“Which were worth, let us say, about fifty times the amount you had
advanced, eh?” Dmitri supplemented. “Ah, you are a financier and a very
fine appraiser of values, Mr. Ward, in jewels and--otherwise. With Miss
Trelango’s own testimony and my own as to what my friend told me he
saw and heard, there might be a difference of opinion on the price of
rubies, yes?”

“Dmitri, let me end this,” demanded Griffeth hoarsely. “I can’t be
quiet any longer.”

“My boy, you are under arrest, and one call from Mr. Ward will bring
his friends below. Not that I think he would call, but he might. Let
me finish my story first that all may be clear to Mr. Ward, so he will
not think we are deceiving him in any way. I myself told Steccho to
give the jewels back to whomever he had stolen them from and to leave
the service of Count Jurka. He said he could not afford to jeopardize
the safety and lives of his mother and sister. This letter cleared
up that point in his mind. I know he had called at the Hotel Dupont
before coming to me and had left word for Jurka that he had fulfilled
his mission. As you know, their two bodies were found dead in the boy
Steccho’s room. I myself notified Mr. Ward of this as soon as I found
it out, did I not?”

Ward’s face was a perfect blank. He stared at Dmitri in silence.

“I told Mr. Ward so that he would understand what had happened, and
requested him to keep the entire matter silent with the police until he
heard from me.”

“Why did you call Mr. Ward instead of the police?” asked the Marchese
sternly.

“It was not a matter for the hands of the city police. It was
international in its import and should have been kept absolutely
secret, but Mr. Ward thought otherwise. Doubtless he did not believe
me, that I held the proofs.”

“What proofs?” Carlota’s hand closed over that of the old Marchese,
feeling his sympathy for her.

“The proofs of Mr. Ward’s private business with the queen’s
chamberlain. Doubtless they were not criminal; mind, I do not say they
were, but I do not think that they were diplomatically ethical, shall
we say, Mr. Ward?”

Ward waited, still silent and immobile, never relaxing his gaze on the
face of Dmitri.

“So, and now we come to the unexpected part, when, as I tell you often,
Griffeth, the gods lean down and deal the cards themselves. When I
come out of my door to cross to where Steccho lived, in the gray dawn
I see a closed limousine turn the corner of Third Avenue. That is most
unusual for the quarter where I live, and I notice it particularly.
Then I find in my friend’s room the two dead bodies, both warm. Jurka
was strangled by the boy and shot him in the side as they struggled.
No mystery there. But the jewels for which they fought were gone, only
one opal belonging to Mr. Ward in Steccho’s coat pocket. I always
search pockets. They are so handy for hiding things. And I find out
first that whoever took those jewels did not have time or sense to
look through the pockets of the dead men. Possibly he was nervous.
I did look and I found several interesting things in Count Jurka’s
possession, his personal wallet and notebook, his keys and a letter
which he had doubtless written himself to Mr. Ward before he left the
hotel to find Steccho. I have that letter; it escaped the attention
of the gentlemen of the police when they searched me. Carlota, my old
leather music folder is there on the piano behind you, if you please,
my dear.” Wonderingly Carlota gave the old brown flat bag to him. He
produced from it the gold-capped wallet of Jurka and several letters
and documents.

“I was most fortunate in arriving at the Dupont at an hour when
vigilance is relaxed. The number of the Count’s suite was on his hotel
key. I made my way up to that floor by the back stairs, as you say,
the servants’ way, and I found myself alone in his rooms. I hurried
in my search of his locked trunk and desk, and I found all I wanted.
And suddenly there was another key inserted in the door and Georges
Yaranek came in. I stepped back behind a door and when he passed me I
seized him. He is very much the stronger and I am no fighter at all,
but I have to get the better of him just the same, so I use tricks. It
is always permissible, is it not, Mr. Ward, when your cause is just?
I take and tie him up with the heavy silk portière cords so he can do
no damage, and then I find all the jewels on him, all of them. You
see what a very clever precaution that is to send two out on a secret
mission, and if one fails, the other he will carry it out. Georges
Yaranek is no servant. He is of the Bulgarian secret service, a spy of
the queen, and when Jurka came to get the jewels from Steccho, Yaranek
came likewise lest the Count come not back from that house next to
mine. I have his written and sworn confession of all he did, so that
Mr. Ward would not feel the slightest doubt or suspicion of my word.”

“Where is Yaranek?” demanded Ward. “Why was his written confession
necessary? Why did you not turn him over to the police?”

“I have already told you this was an international affair, not for the
city police which is very friendly to Mr. Ward, I believe. And mind,
I would say this, there is something we all lose sight of in this day
of upheavals. To every man his country and its cause. What is criminal
to one is patriotism to another. Both Jurka and Yaranek acted most
honorably according to their code. They are of the old régime, the
royalists; they kill, they make war, they rob the poor, they do forever
as they like, you see, and it is not wrong to them. Jurka was loyal
to the old queen’s interests. She ordered him to come here and find
the missing jewels. For what? Not for her to wear--one wears no crowns
in exile--but to convert into ready money, into gold, for immediate
use. This is the hour of opportunity, mind, in Europe. Your watcher of
signs sees all sorts of maneuvers not on battle-fields. The people are
so hungry and harassed and deceived that they waver and do not know
which side God is on. A suave and promising tongue can sway them in any
direction that promises rest and safety. So with gold at her command
instead of paper money, the exiled queen might seize Bulgaria. And
there was only one man who would pay in cash the price of the royal
rubies, so Jurka dickered with him, once he struck the right trail.
That man was Ogden Ward. Oh, I have the correspondence between you,
Mr. Ward,” as Ward rose threateningly. “It is quite authentic, and
nothing missing. Jurka had to protect himself in case of discovery, and
doubtless saved the evidence in order to command your full protection.
Mr. Ward agreed in writing to pay $750,000, in full for the five pieces
of the collection, including the Zarathustra ruby, which is the finest
pigeon-blood ruby in the world, they claim. Of course, when he found he
could get them so very much cheaper, he tried himself and failed.”

“But on the face of it, it is absurd,” sneered Ward. “Marchese, how
could these men have conveyed that amount in gold at this time to
Europe without discovery?”

“Ah, that was most cleverly provided for also, by Mr. Ward,” exclaimed
Dmitri jocularly. “It was to have been shipped by Mr. Ward’s own
bankers as part of a consignment for the relief of stricken, starving
Bulgaria. Count Jurka himself suggested this plan, since he was here as
one of the relief committee. It was all really very touching.”

“What if I say that I was aware of the whole secret plot, and merely
acted as I did to betray these men, and save the rubies for Carlota
Trelango?”

“It is very apt, but I am afraid it will not pass,” sighed Dmitri. “The
dates on these letters show your dealings with Jurka and Yaranek before
you even knew that she owned the rubies.”

“And where is Yaranek?” asked Ward. “Why was he not handed over to the
police by you? Why was it necessary for you to have his sworn statement
when he might give his own testimony? Since you were accumulating
evidence against me, why not go the limit?”

“Well, I will tell you, Mr. Ward, although I do not think you will ever
comprehend my motives.” Dmitri sat lightly on the edge of the table
and smoked slowly, happily. “I am a propagandist, but I only propagate
my own propaganda, see? I have my own creed of right living and it is
based upon our mutual responsibility for other people’s welfare and
happiness. I believe in the right to live, but I do not believe that
any human group of people has any right to govern others against their
will. So I fight in my own way for the small, helpless races that get
crushed in the great stampede. And when I can I like to talk this way.
So when I get Georges Yaranek tied and bound and I do not know what
to do with him, I talk to him. First, I trust him. I loosen his hand
and give him cigarettes so that we may both talk while we smoke. And
I prove to him by all of Jurka’s letters how he has lied to the boy
Steccho and deceived him, how he has played his own game and cheated
everybody else, even him, Yaranek. For look, Jurka is ambitious. The
queen is old and fond of him. He wants to share the glory with no one,
and so he had planned to get rid of Yaranek himself. Even while he
was working with him to recover the jewels for the royalist cause, as
emissary to the country from the queen to study the relief methods for
starving Bulgaria, he was ready to report Yaranek to Washington for
the very crime he was committing himself, collecting secret funds to
promote a royal reactionary uprising. Thus he could go back alone and
regret most profoundly that Yaranek, through some indiscretion, had
been apprehended.”

“Where is Yaranek?” asked Ward again.

“He awaits me at a certain place.” Dmitri smiled at him. “We were
to have sailed together. I am so very glad to announce his entire
conversion to my propaganda, Mr. Ward. Of course, if you would rather
we remained and conveyed our testimony to the proper government
authorities, we will do so. We will not permit our plans to interfere
with your wishes.”

Ward strode to the window and stared out at the Square below, a
conflict in his mind. He had played and lost. Not alone the jewels, but
the girl he had wanted. All his life he had purchased anything that was
necessary to success. He had weighed the issues of life itself in terms
of gold. When he turned from the window, he asked, tersely: “What do
you want?”

“I want to go back free and unhampered to my country,” returned Dmitri,
“with Yaranek. I want the rubies to be left unqualifiedly with Miss
Trelango--”

“Dmitri, I do not want them!” Carlota cried entreatingly. “They only
bring misery. You give them back for me to the people you love. They
are not mine or the queen’s. They belong to the children who are
starving.”

“The heirs of to-morrow?” smiled Dmitri whimsically. “I will gladly
do so if it is your wish. Mr. Ward, you are fond of rubies. You are
not interested as we are in international aspirations, shall we say,
or perhaps ideals. It matters not one iota to you whether the money
for these jewels goes to the royalist cause or to the feeding of those
starving ones, those little victims of diplomacy, shall we call it?
Will you buy these gems from Miss Trelango, and I will most gladly
convey the consignment of gold to the little ones that are left alive.”

“Is this your wish?” asked Ward, looking at Carlota.

Her eyes overflowed with tears. She could hardly answer as she stood
between the Marchese and Griffeth.

“I should love it more than anything,” she told him. “The Marchese will
attend to everything for me if you are willing.”

Suddenly in the doorway stood Maria, alarmed and prepared to defend her
charge at any price. But Dmitri met her with one of his low, courtly
bows that soothed her pride.

“Signora, you are just in time. Mr. Ward is being the bountiful fairy
godfather to us all. He grants us each one what we like the best.
I have a rendezvous with a friend. Mr. Ward, after you. Carlota,
Griffeth, I salute love immortal!”

Jauntily he gathered up the papers and wallet into the old brown
leather bag again, and handed it to the Marchese.

“Will you not personally hold these until I have sailed, and then
destroy them? I make you our neutral receiver, yes? And will you not
also kindly place the jewels in safe-keeping until Mr. Ward has paid
for them?”

Ward passed without a word down the winding staircase ahead of him,
without a backward glance at the four left in the old studio. Carlota
turned to Griffeth’s close embrace, weeping in deep soft sobs of
relief, and the Marchese smiled at Maria.

“The leaves lie thick in the Square. They are sweeping them up to
burn. Will you walk with me, Maria, and remember Vallombrosa while
these children follow their own path of gold? Then we will take up the
business of life once more, and put the rubies and papers in safety
deposit, but for now--”

He held the door open for her, and they passed down the way that Ward
had gone. Carlota lifted her head from Griffeth’s shoulder.

“Heirs of to-morrow, he said,” she whispered.

He kissed her lips. There seemed in their love almost a symbol of the
fulfillment of years of war, of tears and bloodshed and oppression and
intolerance, in what would be the dawn of a new world to those who were
indeed the heirs of to-morrow.


THE END


  The Riverside Press
  CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
  U . S . A




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.





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