"We killed him to-night, Stefani, in your rooms. We threw out the food so he would have to seek something to eat. The last of that breed, stem and branch! We are no longer the mud; we ourselves are the heels. We are conquering the world. Today Europe is ours; to-morrow, America!"
A wintry little smile stirred the lips of the man in the chair.
America, with its keen perceptions of the ridiculous, its withering humour!
"No more the dissolute opera dancers will dance to your fiddling, Stefani, while we starve in the town. Fiddler, valet, tutor, the rivers and seas of Russia are red. We roll east and west, and our emblem is red. Stem and branch! We ground our heels in their faces as for centuries they ground theirs in ours. He escaped us there - but I was Nemesis. He died to-night."
The body in the chair relaxed a little. "He was clean and honest, Boris. I made him so. He would have done fine things if you had let him live."
"That breed?"
"Why, you yourself loved him when he was a boy!"
"Stem and branch! I loved my little sister Anna, too. But what did they do to her behind those marble walls? Did you fiddle for her?
What was she when they let her go? My pretty little Anna! The fires of hell for those damned green stones of yours, Stefani! She heard of them and wanted to see them, and you promised."
"I? I never promised Anna! . . . So that was it? Boris, I only saw her there. I never knew what brought her. But the boy was in England then."
"The breed, the breed!" roared the squat man. "Ha, but you should have seen! Those gay officers and their damned master - we left them with their faces in the mud, Stefani; in the mud! And the women begged. Fine music! Those proud hearts, begging Boris Karlov for their lives - their faces in the mud! You, born of us in those Astrakhan Hills, you denied us because you liked your fiddle and a full belly, and to play keeper of those emeralds. The winding paths of torture and misery and death by which they came into the possession of that house! And always the proletariat has had to pay in blood and daughters. You, of the people, to betray us!"
"I did not betray you. I only tried to save those who had been kind to me."
A cunning light shot into Karlov's eyes. "The emeralds!" He struck his pocket. "Here, Stefani; and they shall be broken up to buy bread for our people."
"That poor boy! So he brought them! What are you going to do with me?"
"Watch you grow thin, Stefani. You want death; you shall want food instead. Oh, a little; enough to keep you alive. You must learn what it is to be hungry."
The squat man picked up the bundle from the table and tore off the wrapping paper. A violin the colour of old Burgundy lay revealed.
"Boris!" The man in the chair writhed.
"Have I waked you, Stefani?" - tenderly. "The Stradivarius - the very grand duke of fiddles! And he and his damned officers, how they used to call out - 'Get Stefani to fiddle for us!' And you fiddled, dragged your genius though the mud to keep your belly warm!"
"To save a soul, Boris - the boy's. When I fiddled his uncle forgot to drag him into an orgy. Ah, yes; I fiddled, fiddled because I had promised his mother!"
"The Italian singer! She was lucky to die when she did. She did not see the torch, the bayonet, and the mud. But the boy did - with his English accent! How he escaped I don't know; but he died to-night, and the emeralds are in my pocket. See!" Karlov held the instrument close to the other's face. "Look at it well, this grand duke of fiddles. Look, fiddler, look!"
The huge hands pressed suddenly. There was brittle crackling, and a rare violin became kindling. A sob broke from the prisoner's lips.
What to Karlov was a fiddle to him was a soul. He saw the madman fling the wreckage to the floor and grind his heels into the fragments. Gregor shut his eyes, but he could not shut his ears; and he sensed in that cold, demoniacal fury of the crunching heel the rising of maddened peoples.
