“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.