第86章 CHAPTER XXX(1)

Cutty arrived at the apartment in time to share dinner with Hawksley.

He had wisely decided to say nothing about the escapade of Hawksley and Kitty Conover, since it had terminated fortunately. Bernini had telegraphed the gist of the adventure. He could readily understand Hawksley's part; but Kitty's wasn't reducible to ordinary terms of expression. The young chap had run wild because his head still wobbled on his shoulders and because his isolation was beginning to scratch his nerves. But for Kitty to run wild with him offered a blank wall to speculation. (As if he could solve the riddle when Kitty herself could not!) So he determined to shut himself up in his study and shuffle the chrysoprase. Something might come of it. Looking backward, he recognized the salient, at no time had he been quite sure of Kitty. She seemed to be a combination of shallows and unfathomable deeps.

>From the Pennsylvania Station he had called up the office. Kitty had gone. Bernini informed him that Kitty was dining at a caf?on the way home. Cutty was thorough. He telephoned the restaurant and was advised that Miss Conover had reserved a table. He had forgotten to send down the operative who guarded Kitty at that end.

But the distance from the office to the Subway was so insignificant!

"You are looking fit," he said across the table.

"Ought to be off your hands by Monday. But what about Stefani Gregor? I can't stir, leaving him hanging on a peg."

"I am going into the study shortly to decide that. Head bother you?"

"Occasionally."

"Ryan easy to get along with?"

"Rather a good sort. I say, you know, you've seen a good deal of life. Which do you consider the stronger, the inherited traits or environment?"

"Environment. That is the true mould. There is good and bad in all of us. It is brought into prominence by the way we live. An angel cannot touch pitch without becoming defiled. On the other hand, the worst gutter rats in the world saved France. Do you suppose that thought will not always be tugging at and uplifting those who returned from the first Marne?"

"There is hope, then, for me!"

"Hope?"

"Yes. You know that my father, my uncle, and my grandfather were fine scoundrels."

"Under their influence you would have been one, too. But no man could live with Stefani Gregor and not absorb his qualities. Your environment has been Anglo-Saxon, where the first block in the picture is fair play. You have been constantly under the tutelage of a fine and lofty personality, Gregor's. Whatever evil traits you may have inherited, they have become subject to the influences that have surrounded you. Take me, for instance. I was born in a rather puritanical atmosphere. My environments have always been good. Yet there lurks in me the taint of Macaire. Given the wrong environment, I should now have my picture in the Rogues' Gallery."

"You?"

"Yes."

Hawksley played with his fork. "If you had a daughter would you trust me with her?"

"Yes. Any man who can weep unashamed over the portrait of his mother may be trusted. Once you are out there in Montana you'll forget all about your paternal forbears."

Handsome beggar, thought Cutty; but evidently born under the opal.

An inexplicable resentment against his guest stirred his heart. He resented his youth, his ease of manner, his fluency in the common tongue. He was theoretically a Britisher; he thought British; approached subjects from a British point of view. A Britisher - except when he had that fiddle tucked under his chin. Then Cutty admitted he did not know what he was. Devil take him!

There must have been something electrical in Cutty's resentment, for the object of it felt it subtly, and it fired his own. He resented the freedom of action that had always been denied him, resented his host's mental and physical superiority. Did Cutty care for the girl, or was he playing the game as it had been suggested to him? Money and freedom. But then, it was in no sense a barter; she would be giving nothing, and the old beggar would be asking nothing. His suggestion! He laughed.

"What's the joke?" asked Cutty, looking up from his coffee, which he was stirring with unnecessary vigour.

"It isn't a joke. I'm bally well twisted. I laugh now when I think of something tragic. I am sorry about last night. I was mad, I suppose."

"Tell me about it."

Cutty listened intently and smiled occasionally. Mad as hatters, both of them. He and Kitty couldn't have gone on a romp like this, but Kitty and Hawksley could. Thereupon his resentment boiled up again.

"Have you any idea why she took such a risk? Why she came here, knowing me to be absent?"

"She spoke of a problem. I fancy it related to your approaching marriage. She told me."

Cutty laid down his spoon. "I'd like to dump Your Highness into the middle of East River for putting that idea into my head. She has consented to it; and now, damn it, I've got to back out of it!"

Cutty rose and flung down his napkin.

"Why?" asked the bewildered Hawksley.

"Because there is in me the making of a first-rate scoundrel, and I never should have known it if you and your affairs hadn't turned up.

Cutty entered his study and slammed the door, leaving Hawksley prey to so many conflicting emotions that his head began to bother him.

Back out of it! Why? Why should Kitty have a problem to solve over such a marriage of convenience, and why should the old thoroughbred want to back out?

Kitty would be free, then? A flash of fire, which subsided quickly under the smothering truth. What if she were free? He could not ask her to be his wife. Not because of last night's madness. That no longer troubled him. She was the sort who would understand, if he told her. She had a soul big with understanding. It was that he walked in the shadow of death, and would so long as Karlov was free; and he could not ask any woman to share that.

He pushed back his chair slowly. In the living room he took the Amati from its case and began improvising. What the chrysoprase did for Cutty the fiddle did for this derelict - solved problems.