The Drums of Jeopardy, Harold MacGrath [great books for teens TXT] 📗

carried them with me to the office. The drums, Cutty! The drums! Tumpitum-tump! Look!"

She poured the stones upon the white linen tablecloth. A thousand fires!

"The wonderful things!" she gasped. "Oh, the wonderful things! I don't blame you, Cutty. They would tempt an angel. The drums of jeopardy; and that I should find them!"

"Lord!" said Cutty, in an awed whisper. Green stones! The magnificent rubies and sapphires and diamonds vanished; he could see nothing but the exquisite emeralds. He picked up one - still warm with Kitty's pulsing life - and toyed with it. Actually, the drums! And all this time they had been inviting the first comer to appropriate them. Money, love, tragedy, death; history, pageants, lovely women; murder and loot! All these days on the step of the fire-escape ladder! He must have one of them; positively he must. Could he prevail upon Hawksley to sell one? Had he carried them through sentiment?

He turned to broach the suggestion of purchase, but remained mute.

Hawksley's head was sunk upon his chest; his arms hung limply at the sides of his chair.

"He is fainting!" cried Kitty, her love outweighing her resolves. "Cutty!" - desperately, fearing to touch Hawksley herself.

"No! The stones, the stones! Take them away - out of sight! I'm too done in! I can't stand it! I can't - The Red Night! Torches and hobnailed boots!"


CHAPTER XXXIII


Her fingers seemingly all thumbs, her heart swelling with misery and loneliness, wanting to go to him but fearing she would be misunderstood, Kitty scooped up the dazzling stones and poured them hastily into the tobacco pouch, which she thrust into Cutty's hands. What she had heard was not the cry of a disordered brain. There was some clear reason for the horror in Hawksley's tones. What tragedy lay behind these wonderful prisms of colour that the legitimate owner could not look upon them without being stirred in this manner?

"Take them into the study," urged Kitty.

"Wait!" interposed Hawksley. "I give one of the emeralds to you, Cutty. They came out of hell - if you want to risk it! The other is for Miss Conover, with Mister Hawksley's compliments." He was looking at Kitty now, his face drawn, his eyes bloodshot. "Don't be apprehensive. They bring evil only to men. With one in your possession you will be happy ever after, as the saying goes. Oh, they are mine to give; mine by right of inheritance. God knows I paid for them!"

"If I said Mister - " began Kitty, her brain confused, her tongue clumsy.

"You haven't forgiven!" he interrupted. "A thoroughbred like you, to hold last night against me! Mister - after what we two have shared together! Why didn't you leave me there to die?"

Cutty observed that the drama had resolved itself into two characters; he had been relegated to the scenes. He tiptoed toward his study door, and as he slipped inside he knew that Gethsemane was not an orchard but a condition of the mind. He tossed the pouch on his desk, eyed it ironically, and sat down. His, one of them - one of those marvellous emeralds was his! He interlaced his fingers and rested his brow upon them. He was very tired.

Kitty missed him only when she heard the latch snap.

She was alone with Hawksley; and all her terror returned. Not to touch him, not to console him; to stand staring at him like a dumb thing!

"I do forgive - Johnny! But your world and my world -"

"Those stains! The wretches hurt you!"

"What? Where?" - bewildered.

"The blood on your waist!"

Kitty looked down. "That is not my blood, Johnny. It is yours."

"Mine?" Johnny. Something in the way she said it. "Mine?" - trying to solve the riddle.

"Yes. It is where your cheek rested when - I thought you were dead."

The sense of misery, of oppression, of terror, all fell away miraculously, leaving only the flower of glory. She would be his plaything if he wanted her.

Silence.

"Kitty, I came out of a dark world - to find you. I loved you the moment I entered your kitchen that night. But I did not know it. I loved you the night you brought the wallet. Still I did not understand. It was when I heard the lift door and knew you had gone forever that I understood. Loved you with all my heart, with all that poor old Stefani had fashioned out of muck and clay. If you held my head to your heart, if that is my blood there - Do you, can you care a little?"

"I can and do care very much, Johnny."

Her voice to his ears was like the G string of the Amati. "Will you go with me?"

"Anywhere. But you are a prince of some great Russian house, Johnny, and I am nobody."

"What am I, Kitty? Less than nobody - a homeless outcast, with only you and Cutty. An American! Well, when I'm that it will be different; I'll be somebody. God forgive me if I do not give it absolute loyalty, this new country! ... Never call me anything but Johnny."

"Johnny." Anywhere, whatever he willed her to be.

"I'm a child, Kitty. I want to grow up - if I can - to be an American, something like that ripping old thoroughbred yonder."

Cutty! Johnny wanted to be something like Cutty. Johnny would have to grow up to be his own true self; for nobody could ever be like Cutty. He was as high and far away from the average man as this apartment was from hers. Would he understand her attitude? Could she say anything until it would be too late for him to interfere? She was this man's woman. She would have her span of happiness, come ill, come good, even if it hurt Cutty, whom she loved in another fashion. But for Johnny dropping through that trap she might never have really known, married Cutty, and been happy. Happy until one or the other died; never gloriously, never furiously, but mildly happy; perhaps understanding each other far better than Johnny and she would understand each other. The average woman's lot. But to give her heart, her mind, her body in a whirlwind of emotions, absolute surrender, to know for once the highest state of exaltation
- to love!

All this tender exchange with half a dozen feet between them. Kitty had not stirred from the far side of the tea cart, and he had not opened his arms. She had given herself with magnificent abandon; for the present that satisfied her instincts. As for him, he was not quite sure this miracle might not be a dream, and one false move might cause her to vanish.

"Johnny, who is Olga?" The question was irrepressible. Perhaps it was the last shred of caution binding her. All of him or none of him. There must be no other woman intervening.

Hawksley stiffened in his chair. His hands closed convulsively and his eyes lost their brightness. "Johnny?" Kitty ran round the tea cart. "What is it?" She knelt beside the chair, alarmed, for the horror had returned to his face. "What did they do to you back there?" She clasped one of his hands tensely in hers.

"In my dreams at night!" he said, staring into space. "I could run away from my pursuers, but I could not run away from my dreams! Torches and hobnailed boots! ... They trampled on her; and I, up there in the gallery with those damned emeralds in my hands! Ah, if I hadn't gone for them, if I hadn't thought of the extra comforts their sale would bring! There would have been time then, Kitty. I had all the other jewels in the pouch. Horses were ready for us to flee on, loyal servants ready to help us; but I thought of the drums. A few more worldly comforts - with hell forcing in the doors!

"I didn't tell her where I was going. When I came back it was to see her die! They saw me, and yelled. I ran away. I hadn't the courage to go down there and die with her! She thought I was in that hell pit. She went down there to die with me and died horribly, alone! Ah, if I could only shut it out, forget! Olga, my tender young sister, Kitty, the last one of my race I could love. And I ran away like a yellow dog, like a yellow dog! I don't know where her grave is, and I could not seek it if I did! I dared not write Stefani; tell him I had seen Olga go down under Karlov's heels, and then ran away! ... Day by day to feel those stones against my heart!"

Nothing is more terrible to a woman than the sight of a brave man weeping. For she knew that he was brave. The sudden recollection of the emeralds; a little more comfort for himself and sister if they were permitted to escape. Not a cowardly instinct, not even a greedy one; a normal desire to fortify them additionally against an unknown future, and he had surrendered to it impulsively, without explaining to Olga where he was going.

"Johnny, Johnny, you mustn't!" She sprang up, seizing his head and wildly kissing him. "You mustn't! God understands, and Olga. Oh, you mustn't sob like that! You are tearing my heart to pieces!"

"I ran away like a yellow dog! I didn't go down there and die with her!"

"You didn't run away to-night when you offered your life for my liberty. Johnny, you mustn't!"

Under her tender ministrations the sobs began to die away and soon resolved into little catching gasps. He was weak and spent from his injuries; otherwise he would not have given way like this, discovered to her what she had not known before, that in every man, however strong and valiant he may be, there is a little child.

"It has been burning me up, Kitty."

"I know, I know! It is because you have a soul full of beautiful things, Johnny. God held you back from dying with Olga because He knew I needed you."

"You will marry me, knowing that I did this thing?"

Marry him! A door to some blinding radiance opened, and she could not see for a little while. Marry him! What a miserable wretch she was to think that he would want her otherwise! Johnny Two-Hawks, fiddling in front of the Metropolitan Opera House, to fill a poor blind man's cup!

"Yes, Johnny. Now, yesterdays never were. For us there is nothing but to-morrows. Out there, in the great country - where souls as well as bodies may stretch themselves - we'll start all over again. You