“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.