The Last Shot Part 12

"Still, she doesn't want to go, and it would be cruel to send her away."

"Cruel! Why, Marta, do you think I would be cruel? Oh, very well, then we will let her stay!"

"Both are away at church. Mrs. Galland ought to be here any minute, but Miss Galland will be later because of her children's cla.s.s," said Minna.

"Will you wait on the veranda?"

He was saying that he would stroll in the garden when childish footsteps were heard in the hall, and after a curly head had nestled against the mother's skirts its owner, reminded of the importance of manners in the world where the stork had left her, made a curtsey. Lanstron shook a small hand which must have lately been on intimate terms with sugar or jam.

"How do you do, flying soldier man?" chirruped Clarissa Eileen. It was evident that she held Lanstron in high favor.

"Let me hear you say your name," said Lanstron.

Clarissa Eileen was triumphant. She had been waiting for days with the revelation when he should make that old request. Now she enunciated it with every vowel and consonant correctly and primly uttered; indeed, she repeated it four or five times in proof of complete mastery.

"A pretty name. I've often wondered how you came to give it to her,"

said Lanstron to Minna.

"You do like it!" exclaimed Minna with girlish eagerness. "I gave her the most beautiful name I could think of because"--she laid her hand caressingly on the child's head and a madonna-like radiance stole into her face--"because she might at least have a beautiful name when"--the dull blaze of a recollection now burning in her eyes--"when there wasn't much prospect of many beautiful things coming into her life; though I know, of course, that the world thinks she ought to be called Maggie."

Proceeding leisurely along the main path of the first terrace, Lanstron followed it past the rear of the house to the old tower. Long ago the moat that surrounded the castle had been filled in. The green of rows of grape-vines lay against the background of a mat of ivy on the ancient stone walls, which had been cut away from the loopholes set with window-gla.s.s. The door was open, showing a room that had been closed in by a ceiling of boards from the walls to the circular stairway that ran aloft from the dungeons. On the floor of flags were cheap rugs. A number of seed and nursery catalogues were piled on a round table covered with a brown cloth.

"h.e.l.lo!" Lanstron called softly. "h.e.l.lo!" he called louder and yet louder.

Receiving no answer, he retraced his steps and seated himself on the second terrace in a secluded spot in the shadow of the first terrace wall, where he could see any one coming up the main flight of steps from the road. When Marta walked she usually came from town by that way. At length the sound of a slow step from another direction broke on his car.

Some one was approaching along the path that ran at his feet. Around the corner of the wall, in his workman's Sunday clothes of black, but still wearing his old straw hat, appeared Feller, the gardener. He paused to examine a rose-bush and Lanstron regarded him thoughtfully and sadly: his white hair, his stoop, his graceful hands, their narrow finger-tips turning over the leaves.

As he turned away he looked up, and a glance of definite and unfaltering recognition was exchanged between the two men. Feller's hat was promptly lowered enough to form a barrier between their eyes. His face was singularly expressionless. It seemed withered, clayish, like the walls of a furnace in which the fire has died out. After a few steps he paused before another rose-bush. Meanwhile, both had swept the surroundings in a sharp, covert survey. They had the garden to themselves.

"Gustave!" Lanstron exclaimed under his breath.

"Lanny!" exclaimed the gardener, turning over a branch of the rose-bush.

He seemed unwilling to risk talking openly with Lanstron.

"You look the good workman in his Sunday best to a T!" said Lanstron.

"Being stone-deaf," returned Feller, with a trace of drollery in his voice, "I hear very well--at times. Tell me"--his whisper was quivering with eagerness--"shall we fight? Shall we fight?"

"We are nearer to it than we have ever been in our time," Lanstron replied.

The hat still shaded Feller's face, his stoop was unchanged, but the branch in his hand shook.

"Honest?" he exclaimed. "Oh, the chance of it! the chance of it!"

"Gustave!" Lanstron's voice, still low, came in a gust of sympathy, and the pocket which concealed his hand gave a nervous twitch as if it held something alive and distinct from his own being. "The trial wears on you! You feel you must break out?"

"No, I'm game--game, I tell you!" Still Feller spoke to the branch, which was steady now in a firm hand. "No, I don't grow weary of the garden and the isolation as long as there is hope. But being deaf, always deaf, and yet hearing everything! Always stooped, even when the bugles are sounding to the artillery garrison--that is somewhat tiresome!"

"The idea of being deaf was yours, you know, Gustave," said Lanstron.

"Yes, and the right plan. It was fun at first going through the streets and hearing people say, 'He's deaf as a stone!' and having everybody work their lips at me while I pretended to study them in a dumb effort to understand. Actors have two hours of it an evening, and an occasional change of parts, but I act one part all the time. I get as taciturn as a clam. If war doesn't come pretty soon I shall be ready for a monastery of perpetual silence."

"Confound it, Gustave!" exclaimed Lanstron. "It's inhuman, old boy! You shan't stay another day!" Discretion to the winds, he sprang to his feet.

An impulse of the same sort overwhelmed Feller. His hand let go of the branch. The brim of the hat shot up, revealing a face that was not old, but in mercurial quickness of expressive, uncontrollable emotion was young, handsomely and attractively young in its frame of prematurely white hair. The stoop was wholly gone. He was tall now, his eyes sparkling with wild, happy lights and the soles of the heavy workman's shoes unconsciously drawn together in a military stance. Lanstron's twitching hand flew from his pocket and with the other found Feller's hand in a strong, warm, double grip. For a second's silence they remained thus. Feller was the first to recover himself and utter a warning.

"Miss Galland--Minna--some one might be looking."

He drew away abruptly, his face becoming suddenly old, his stoop returning, and began to study the branch as before. Lanstron dropped back to his seat and gazed at the brown roofs of the town. Thus they might continue their conversation as guest and gardener.

"I didn't think you'd stick it out, but you wanted to try--you chose,"

said Lanstron. "Come--this afternoon--now!"

"This is best for me--this to the end of the chapter!" Feller replied doggedly. "Because you say you didn't think I'd stick it out--ah, how well you know me. Lanny!--is the one reason that I should."

"True!" Lanstron agreed. "A victory over yourself!"

"How often I have heard in imagination the outbreak of rifle-fire down there by the white posts! How often I have longed for that day--for war!

I live for war!"

"It may never come," Lanstron said in frank protest. "And, for G.o.d's sake, don't pray for it in that way!"

"Then I shall be patient--patient under all irritations. The worst is,"

and Feller raised his head heavily, in a way that seemed to emphasize both his stoop and his age, "the worst is Miss Galland."

"Miss Galland! How?"

"She is learning the deaf-and-dumb alphabet in order the better to communicate with me. She likes to talk of the flowers--gardening is a pa.s.sion with her, too--and all the while, in face of the honesty of those big eyes of hers and of her gentle old mother's confidence, I am living a lie! Oh, the satire of it! And I have not been used to lying.

That is my only virtue; at any rate, I was never a liar!"

"Then, why stay, Gustave? I will find something else for you."

"No!" Feller shot back irritably. "No!" he repeated resolutely. "I don't want to go! I mean to be game--I--" He shifted his gaze dismally from the bush which he still pretended to examine and suddenly broke off with: "Miss Galland is coming!"

He started to move away with a gardener's shuffling steps, looking from right to left for weeds. Then pausing, he glanced back, his face in another transformation--that of a comedian.

"La, la, la!" he clucked, tossing his head gayly. "Depend on me, Lanny!

They'll never know I'm not deaf. I get my blue fits only on Sundays! And deafness has its compensations. Think if I had to listen to all the stories of my table companion, Peter, the coachman! La, la, la!" he clucked again, before disappearing around a bend in the path. "La, la, la! I'm the man for this part!"

Lanstron started toward the steps that Marta was ascending. She moved leisurely, yet with a certain springy energy that suggested that she might have come on the run without being out of breath or seeming to have made an effort. Without seeing him, she paused before one of the urns of hydrangeas in full bloom that flanked the third terrace wall, and, as if she would encompa.s.s and plunge her spirit into their abundant beauty, she spread out her arms and drew the blossoms together in a ma.s.s in which she half buried her face. The act was delightful in its grace and spontaneity. It was like having a page out of her secret self. It brought the glow of his great desire into Lanstron's eyes.

"h.e.l.lo, stranger!" she called as she saw him, and quickened her pace.

"h.e.l.lo, pedagogue!" he responded.

As they shook hands they swung their arms back and forth like a pair of romping children for a moment.