The Last Shot Part 13

"We had a grand session of the school this morning, the largest cla.s.s ever!" she said. "And the points we scored off you soldiers! You'll find disarmament already in progress when you return to headquarters. We're irresistible, or at least," she added, with a flash of intensity, "we're going to be some day."

"So you put on your war-paint!"

"It must be the pollen from the hydrangeas!" She flicked her handkerchief from her belt and pa.s.sed it to him. "Show that you know how to be useful!"

He performed the task with deliberate care.

"Heavens! You even have some on your ear and some on your hair; but I'll leave it on your hair; it's rather becoming. There you are!" he concluded.

"Off my hair, too!"

"Very well. I always obey orders."

"I oughtn't to have asked you to do it at all!" she exclaimed with a sudden change of manner as they started up to the house. "But a habit of friendship, a habit of liking to believe in one's friends, was uppermost. I forgot. I oughtn't even to have shaken hands with you!"

"Marta! What now, Marta?" he asked.

He had known her in reproach, in anger, in laughing mockery, in militant seriousness, but never before like this. The pain and indignation in her eyes came not from the sheer hurt of a wound but from the hurt of its source. It was as if he had learned by the signal of its loss that he had a deeper hold on her than he had realized.

"Yes, I have a bone to pick with you," she said, recovering a grim sort of fellowship. "A big bone! If you're half a friend you'll give me the very marrow of it."

"I am ready!" he answered more pathetically than philosophically.

"There's not time now; after luncheon, when mother is taking her nap,"

she concluded as they came to the last step and saw Mrs. Galland on the veranda.

X

A LUNCHEON AT THE GALLANDS'

Seated at the head of the table at luncheon, Mrs. Galland, with her round cheeks, her rather becoming double chin, and her nicely dressed hair, almost snow-white now, suggested a girlhood in the Bulwer Lytton and Octave Feuillet age, when darkened rooms were favored for the complexion and it was the fashion for gentlewomen to faint on occasion.

She lived in the past; the present interested her only when it aroused some memory. To-day all her memories were of the war of forty years ago.

"I remember how Mrs. Karly collapsed when they brought word of the death of her son, and never recovered her mind. And I remember Eunice Steiner when they brought Charles home looking so white--and it was the very day set for their wedding! And I remember all the wounded gathered at the foot of the terrace and being carried in here, while the guns were roaring out on the plain--and now it's all coming again!"

"Why, mother, you're very blue to-day!" said Marta.

"We have had these crises before. We--" Lanstron began, rallying her.

"Oh, yes, you have reason and argument," she parried gently. "I have only my feelings. But it's in the air--yes, war is in the air, as it was that other time. And I remember that young private, only a boy, who lay crumpled up on the steps where he fell. I bandaged him myself and helped to make his position easier. Yes, I almost lifted him in my arms" She was looking at the flowers on the table but not seeing them. She was seeing the face of the young private forty years ago.

"He asked me to bring him a rose. He said the smell of roses was so sweet and he felt so faint. I brought him the rose--and he was dead!"

"Yes, yes!" Marta breathed. She, too, in her quick imagination, was seeing the young private and spatters of blood on the terrace. Lanstron feasted his eyes on her face, which mirrored her emotion.

"Oh, the groans of the dying in the night and the cheering when the news of victory came in!" Mrs. Galland continued. "I could not cheer. But that was, long, long ago--long ago, and yet only yesterday! And now we are to have it all over again. The young men must have their turn. They will not be satisfied by the experience of their fathers. Yes, all over again; still more horrible--and it was horrible enough then! I used to get giddy easily. I do yet. But I didn't faint--no, not once through the days of nursing, the weeks of suspense. I wondered afterward how I could have endured so much."

"Are we of the septicized-serum age equal to it?" Marta exclaimed.

"Yes, we of the matter-of-fact, automatic gun-recoil age!" put in Lanstron.

"Oh, mother," Marta went on, "I wish you would go with me to the cla.s.s some morning, you who have seen and felt war, and tell it all as you saw it to the children!"

"But," remonstrated Mrs. Galland, "I'm an old-fashioned woman; and, Marta, your father was an officer, as your grandfather was, too. I am sure he would not approve of your school, and I could do nothing against his wishes."

She looked up with moistening eyes to a portrait on the opposite wall over the seat which her husband had occupied at table. Lanstron saw there a florid, jaunty gentleman in riding-habit, gloves on knee, crop in hand. The spirit of the first Galland or of the stern grandfather on the side wall--with Blucher tufts in front of his ears st.u.r.dy defiance of that parvenu Bonaparte and of his own younger brother who had fallen fighting for Bonaparte--would have frowned on the descendant who had filled the house with many guests and paid the bills with mortgages in the ebbing tide of the family fortunes. But Mrs. Galland saw only a hero. She shared his prejudices against the manufacturers of the town; she saw the sale of land to be cut up into dwelling sites, which had saved the Gallands from bankruptcy, as the working of the adverse fate of modern tendencies. Even as she had left all details of business to her husband, so she had of late left them to Marta's managing.

"Edward and I were just engaged before the outbreak of the war," she proceeded. "How handsome he was in his Hussars' uniform! How frightened I was and hew proud of his fine bravado when I heard him and a number of fellow officers drinking here in this room to quick death and speedy promotion! Do they still have that toast, Colonel?"

"Yes, in some regiments," Lanstron answered. He would not say that what was good form in the days of the _beau sabreur_ was considered a little theatrical in the days of the automatic gun-recoil.

"And when he came--oh, when you came home," breathed Mrs. Galland to the portrait, "with the scar on your cheek, how tanned and strong your hands were and how white mine as you held them so fast! And then"--she smiled in peaceful content--"then I did faint. I am not ashamed of it--I did!"

"Without any danger of falling far!" said Lanstron happily.

"Or with much of a jar!" added Marta.

"You prattling children!" gasped Mrs. Galland, her cheeks flushing. "Do you think that I fainted purposely? I would have been ashamed to my dying day if I had feigned it!"

"And you did not faint in the presence of the dead and dying!" said Marta thoughtfully, wonderingly, leaning nearer to her mother, her eyes athirst and drinking.

"But I believe it is only a wispy-waspy sort of girl that faints at all these days. They're all so businesslike," said Mrs. Galland--"so businesslike that they are ceasing to marry."

How many girls she had known to wait a little too long! If anything could awaken Marta to action it ought to be war, which was a great match-maker forty years ago. The thought of a lover in danger had precipitated wavering hearts into engagements. Marta's mood was such that she received the hint openly and playfully to-day.

"Oh, I don't despair!" she exclaimed, straightening her shoulders and drawing in her chin with a mock display of bravery. "I believe it was in an English novel that I read that any woman without a hump can get any man she sets out for. It is a matter of determination and concentration and a wise choice of vulnerable objects."

"Marta, Marta!" gasped Mrs. Galland. In her tone was a volume of lamentation.

"Now that I'm twenty-seven mother is ready to take any risk on my behalf, if it is masculine. By the time I'm thirty she will be ready to give me to a peddler with a harelip!" she said mischievously.

"A peddler with a harelip! Marta, will you never be serious?"

"Some day, mother," Marta went on, "when we find the right man, you hold him while I propose, and together we'll surely--"

Mrs. Galland could not resist laughing, which was one way to stop further absurdities--absurdities concealing a nervous strain they happened to be this time--while Colonel Lanstron was a little flushed and ill at ease. She had a truly silvery laugh--the kind no longer in fashion among the gentry since golden laughs came in,--that went well with the dimples dipping into her pink cheeks.

Contrary to custom, she did not excuse herself immediately after luncheon for her afternoon nap, but kept battling with her nods until nature was victorious and the fell fast asleep. Marta, grown restless with impatience, suggested to Lanstron that they stroll in the garden, and they took the path past the house toward the castle tower, stopping in an arbor with high hedges on either side around a statue of Mercury.

"Now!" exclaimed Marta narrowly. "It was you, Lanny, who recommended Feller to us as a gardener, competent though deaf!" With literal brevity she told how she had proved him to be a man of most sensitive hearing.

"I didn't let him know that he was discovered. I felt too much pity for him to do that. You brought him here--you, Lanny, you are the one to explain."

"True, he is not deaf!" Lanstron replied.