The Last Shot Part 55

"I didn't know but it would be a good place to hide our plate and other treasures," said Marta, offering rather methodically the first invention that came to mind as she threw open-the reflector of the lantern and turned down the wick. She was ashamed of the excuse. It warned her how easy it was becoming for her to lie--yes, lie was the word.

"Don't blow out the light, please," said Mrs. Galland. "I should like to see for myself if the tunnel is a good hiding-place for the plate."

"It's too damp for you down there--it's--" Marta blew out the flame with a sudden gust of breath and bolted across the room and into her chamber, closing the door and taking the lantern with her. In utter fatigue she dropped on the bed. Then came a gentle, prolonged knocking on the door.

"You forgot to leave the lantern," called Mrs. Galland. "I have come to get it, if you please."

Marta did not answer. Her head had sunk forward; her hands, bearing the weight of her body, were resting on her knees. All she could think was that one more lie would break the camel's back.

"Marta, please mayn't I come in?" rose the gentle voice on the other side of the door. "Marta, don't you hear me? I asked if I might come in."

"It's too childish and silly to remain silent any longer," thought Marta. Tired nerves revived spasmodically under another call to action.

"Yes, certainly, mother--yes, do!" she said in a forced, metallic tone.

Mrs. Galland entered to find her daughter before the mirror brus.h.i.+ng her hair with hectic vigor. She did not take up the lantern, which Marta had left in the middle of the floor, but seated herself. Her nice deliberation in smoothing out a wrinkle of her skirt over her knees indicated that she meant to stay a while. She folded her plump, white hands; a faint touch of color came into her round, pink cheeks; a trace of a smile knitted itself into the corners of her mouth. She was as she had been--_J'y suis! J'y reste_!--when the captain of engineers had pleaded with her at the outset of the war to leave the house. In the reflection of the mirror Marta's glance caught hers, which was without reproach or complaint, but very resolute.

"Do you like best to keep it all to yourself, Marta?" Mrs. Galland inquired solicitously.

"What? Keep what?" asked Marta crossly.

"Even if you have been all the way around the world, it might be easier if you allowed me to help you a little," pursued Mrs. Galland.

"Help! Help about what?" said Marta.

That reply, as Marta knew now as an expert in deceit, was a mistake. She was hedging and petulant when she ought to have whirled around gayly and kissed her mother on the cheek, while laughing at such solemnity over a trip of exploration through the tunnel. Mrs. Galland had caught her prevaricating. Not since Marta was a little girl of seven had she "fibbed" to her mother; and on that memorable and ethically instructive occasion her mother had regarded her in this same calm fas.h.i.+on.

"At all events," said Mrs. Galland, "I could help you a little if you would let me comb your hair. You are combing in a most unsystematic way, I must say. Systematic, gentle combing is very good for headaches and--"

There was a twinkle in Mrs. Galland's eye that was not exactly humor; a persistent twinkle that seemed to s.h.i.+ne out of every part of the mirror.

Her curiosity had come to stay; there was no escaping it. Marta brought her brush down with a bang on the bureau, only to be disgusted with this show of temper which the persistent twinkle had not missed. Her next impulse, una.n.a.lyzed because it was one of the oldest and simplest of impulses, made her spin round and drop on her knees at her mother's feet, which was just what had happened when she had started to brave out the last lie--the childhood lie.

Her head buried in her mother's lap, she was sobbing. It was many years since Mrs. Galland had known Marta to sob and she was glad that Marta had not forgotten how. She believed in the value of the law of overflow.

When Marta looked up with eyes still moist, it was with the joyous satisfaction that begins a confession. Not once during the recital did the smile fade from Mrs. Galland's lips. She was too well fortified for any kind of a shock to exhibit surprise.

"You see, I could not tell you--I--" Marta concluded, still uncertain what conclusion lay behind her mother's att.i.tude.

"Of course you could not," said Mrs. Galland. "As grandfather--my father, the premier--said; a man action cannot stop to explain everything he does. He must strike while the iron is hot. If you had stopped to discuss every step you would not have gone far--Yes, I should have argued and protested. It was best that I, being as I am--that I should not have been told--not until now."

"And I must go on!" added Marta.

"Of course you must!" replied Mrs. Galland. "You must for the sake of the Browns--the flag your father and grandfather served. They would not have approved of petty deceit, but anything for the cause, any sacrifices, any immolation of self and personal sensibilities. Yes, your father would have been happy, though he had no son, to know that his daughter might do such a service. And we must tell Minna," she added.

"Minna! You think so? Every added link may mean weakness."

"But Minna will see you going and coming from the tunnel, too. She is for the Browns with all her heart. They are her people and, besides,"

Mrs. Galland smiled rather broadly, "that giant Stransky is with the Browns!" So Minna was told.

"I'd like to kiss your skirt, Miss Galland!" exclaimed Minna in admiration.

"Better kiss me!" said Marta, throwing her arms around the girl. "We must stand together and think together in any emergency."

Soon after dark the attack began. Flashes of bursting sh.e.l.ls and flashes from gun mouths and glowing sheets of flame from rifles made ugly revelry, while the beams of search-lights swept hither and thither. This kept up till shortly after midnight, when it died down and, where h.e.l.l's concert had raged, silent darkness shrouded the hills. Marta knew that Bordir was taken without having to ask Lanstron or wait for confirmation from Westerling.

She was seated in the recess of the arbor the next morning, when she heard the approach of those regular, powerful steps whose character had become as distinct to her as those of a member of her own family. Five Against three! five against three! they were saying to her; while down the pa.s.s road and the castle road ran the stream of wounded from last night's slaughter.

Posted in the drawing-room of the Galland house were the congratulations of the premier to Westerling, who had come from the atmosphere of a staff that accorded to him a military insight far above the a.n.a.lysis of ordinary standards. But he was too clever a man to vaunt his triumph. He knew how to carry his honors. He accepted success as his due, in a matter-of-course manner that must inspire confidence in further success.

"You were right," he said to Marta easily, pleasantly. "We did it--we did it--we took Bordir with a loss of only twenty thousand men!"

_Only_ twenty thousand! Her revulsion at the bald statement was relieved by the memory of Lanny's word over the telephone after breakfast that the Browns had lost only five thousand. Four to one was a wide ratio, she was thinking.

"Then the end--then peace is so much the nearer?" she asked.

"Very much nearer!" he answered earnestly, as he dropped on the bench beside her.

He stretched his arms out on the back of the seat and the relaxed att.i.tude, unusual with him, brought into relief a new trait of which she had been hitherto oblivious. The conqueror had become simply a companionable man. Though he was not sitting close to her, yet, as his eyes met hers, she had a desire to move away which she knew would be unwise to gratify. She was conscious of a certain softening charm, a magnetism that she had sometimes felt in the days when she first knew him. She realized, too, that then the charm had not been mixed with the indescribable, intimate quality that it held now.

"In the midst of congratulations after the position was taken last night," he declared, "I confess that I was thinking less of success than of its source." He bent on her a look that was warm with grat.i.tude.

She lowered her lashes before it; before grat.i.tude that made her part appear in a fresh angle of misery.

"There seems to be a kind of fatality about our relations," he went on.

"I lay awake pondering it last night." His tone held more than grat.i.tude. It had the elation of discovery.

"Look out! Look out, now!" Not only the voices of Lanny and Feller and Hugo warned her, but also those of her mother and Minna.

"He is going to make it harder than I ever guessed!" echoed her own thought, in a flutter of confusion.

"Yes, it was strange our meeting on the frontier in peace and then in war!" she exclaimed at random. The sound of the remark struck her as too subdued; as expectant, when her purpose was one of careless deprecation.

"I have met a great many women, as you may have imagined," he proceeded.

"They pa.s.sed in review. They were simply women, witty and frail or dull and beautiful, and one meant no more to me than another. Nothing meant anything to me except my profession. But I never forgot you. You planted something in mind: a memory of real companions.h.i.+p."

"Yes, I made the prophecy that came true!" she put in. This ought to bring him back to himself and his ambitions, she thought.

"Yes!" he exclaimed, his body stiffening free of the back of the seat.

"You realized what was in me. You foresaw the power which was to be mine. The fate that first brought us together made me look you up in the capital. Now it brings us together here on this bench after all that has pa.s.sed in the last twenty-four hours."

She realized that he had drawn perceptibly nearer. She wanted to rise and cry out: "Don't do this! Be the chief of staff, the conqueror, crus.h.i.+ng the earth with the tread of five against three!" It was the conqueror whom she wanted to trick, not a man whose earnestness was painting her deceit blacker. Far from rising, she made no movement at all; only looked at her hands and allowed him to go on, conscious of the force of a personality that mastered men and armies now warm and appealing in the full tide of another purpose.

"The victory that I was thinking of last night was not the taking of Bordir. It was finer than any victory in war. It was selfish--not for army and country, but born of a human weakness triumphant; a human weakness of which my career had robbed me," he continued. "It gave me a joy that even the occupation of the Browns' capital could not give. I had come as an invader and I had won your confidence."

"In a cause!" she interrupted hurriedly, wildly, to stop him from going further, only to find that her intonation was such that it was drawing him on.

"That fatality seemed to be working itself out to the soldier so much older than yourself in renewed youth, in another form of ambition. I hoped that there was more than the cause that led you to trust me. I hoped--"

Was he testing her? Was he playing a part of his own to make certain that she was not playing one? She looked up swiftly for answer. There was no gainsaying what she saw in his eyes. It was beating into hers with the power of an overwhelming masculine pa.s.sion and a maturity of intellect as his egoism admitted a comrade to its throne. Such is ever the way of the man in the forties when the clock strikes for him. But who could know better the craft of courts.h.i.+p than one of Westerling's experience? He was fighting for victory; to gratify a desire.

"I did not expect this--I--" The words escaped tumultuously and chokingly.