The Last Shot Part 15

She noted a metal b.u.t.ton painted gray, set at the side of one of the stones of the wall, which looked unreal. She struck the stone with her knuckles and it gave out the sound of hollow wood, which was followed, as an echo, by a little laugh from Lanstron. Pressing the b.u.t.ton, a panel door flew open, revealing a telephone mouthpiece and receiver set in the recess. Without giving him time to refuse permission, her thought all submissive to the prompting spirit of adventure, she took down the receiver and called: "h.e.l.lo!"

"The wire isn't connected," explained Lanstron.

Marta hung up the receiver and closed the door abruptly in a spasm of reaction.

"Like a detective play!" were the first words that sprang to her lips.

"Well?" As she faced around her eyes glittered in the lantern's rays.

"Well, have you any other little tricks to show me? Are you a sleight-of-hand artist, too, Lanny? Are you going to take a machine gun out of your hat?"

"That is the whole bag," he answered. "I thought you'd rather see it than have it described to you."

"Having seen it, let us go!" she said, in a manner that implied further reckoning to come.

"If out of a thousand possible sources one source succeeds, then the cost and pains of the other nine hundred and ninety-nine are more than repaid," he was saying urgently, the soldier uppermost in him. "Some of the best service we have had has been absurd in its simplicity and its audacity. In time of war more than one battle has been decided by a thing that was a trifle in itself. No matter what your preparation, you can never remove the element of chance. An hour gained in information about your enemy's plans may turn the tide in your favor. A Chinese peasant spy, because he happened to be intoxicated, was able to give the j.a.panese warning in time for Kuroki to make full dispositions for receiving the Russian attack in force at the Sha-ho. There are many other incidents of like nature in history. So it is my duty to neglect no possible method, however absurd."

By this time he was at the head of the steps. Standing to one side, he offered his hand to a.s.sist Marta. But she seemed not to see it. Her aspect was that of downright antagonism.

"However absurd! yes, it is absurd to think that you can make me a party to any of your plans, for--" She broke off abruptly with starting eyes, as if she had seen an apparition.

Lanstron turned and through the door of the tool-room saw Feller entering the sitting-room. He was not the bent, deferential old gardener, nor was he the Feller changed to youth as he thought of himself at the head of a battery. His features were hard-set, a fighting rage burning in his eyes, his sinews taut as if about to spring upon an adversary. When he recognized the intruders he turned limp, his head dropped, hiding his face with his hat brim, and he steadied himself by resting a hand on the table edge.

"Oh, it's you, Lanny--Colonel Lanstron!" he exclaimed thickly. "I saw that some one had come in here and naturally I was alarmed, as n.o.body but myself ever enters. And Miss Galland!" He removed his hat deferentially and bowed; his stoop returned and the lines of his face drooped. "I was so stupid; it did not occur to me that you might be showing the tower to Colonel Lanstron."

"We are sorry to have given you a fright!" said Marta very gently.

"Eh? eh?" queried Feller, again deaf. "Fright? Oh, no, no fright. It might have been some boys from the town marauding."

He was about to withdraw, in keeping with his circ.u.mspect adherence to his part, which he played with a sincerity that half-convinced even himself at times that he was really deaf, when the fire flickered back suddenly to his eyes and he glanced from Lanstron to the stairway in desperate inquiry.

"Wait, Feller! Three of us share the secret now. These are Miss Galland's premises. I thought best that she should know everything,"

said Lanstron.

"Everything!" exclaimed Feller. "Everything--" the word caught in his throat. "You mean my story, too?" He was neither young nor old now. He seemed nondescript and miserable. "She knows who I am?" he asked.

"Yes!" Lanstron answered.

"Lanny!" This almost reproachfully, as if the ethics of friendship had been abused.

"Yes. I'm sorry, Gustave. I--" Lanstron began miserably.

"But why not?" said Feller, with a wan attempt at a smile. "You see--I mean--it does not matter!" he concluded in a hopeless effort at philosophy.

"My thoughtlessness, my callousness, my obsession with my work! I should not have told your story," said Lanstron.

"His story!" exclaimed Marta, with a puzzled look to Lanstron before she turned to Feller with a look of warm sympathy. "Why, there is no story!

You came with excellent recommendations. You are our very efficient gardener. That is all we need to know. Isn't that the way you wish it, Mr. Feller?"

"Yes, just that!" he said softly, raising his eyes to her in grat.i.tude.

"Thank you, Miss Galland!"

He was going after another "Thank you!" and a bow; going with the slow step and stoop of his part, when Lanstron, with a masculine roughness of impulse which may be a sublime gentleness, swung him around and seized his hands in a firm caress.

"Forgive me, Gustave!" he begged. "Forgive the most brutal of all injuries--that which wounds a friend's sensibilities."

"Why, there is nothing I could ever have to forgive you, Lanny," he said, returning Lanstron's pressure while for an instant his quickening muscles gave him a soldierly erectness. Then his att.i.tude changed to one of doubt and inquiry. "And you found out that I was not deaf when you had that fall on the terrace?" he asked, turning to Marta. "That is how you happened to get the whole story? Tell me, honestly!"

"Yes"

"Had you suspected me before that?"

"Yes, if you must know. I observed you speak to a b.u.mblebee you could not see," she said frankly, though she knew that her answer hurt him.

There was no parleying with the insistence of his pale, drawn face and his fingers playing in nervous tension on the table edge. Suddenly he smiled as he had at the b.u.mblebee.

"There you are again, confound you!" he exclaimed, shaking his finger at the imaginary intruder on the silence of the garden. "Did anyone else suspect?" he asked in fierce intensity.

"No, I don't think so."

He drew back with a long breath of relief, while his fingers now beat a merry tattoo.

"You saw so much more of me than the others, Miss Galland," he said with a charming bow, "and you are so quick to observe that you are hardly a fair test. That little thunderer will not get me again. I'll fool the ones I want to fool. And I'm learning, Lanny, learning all the time--getting a little deafer all the time. Miss Galland," he added, struck in visible contrition by a new thought, "I am sorry"--he paused with head down for an instant--"very sorry to have deceived you."

"But you are still a deaf gardener to me," said Marta, finding consolation in pleasing him.

"Eh? eh?" He put his hand to his ear as he resumed his stoop. "Yes, yes," he added, as a deaf man will when understanding of a remark which he failed at first to catch comes to him in an echo. "Yes, the gardener has no past," he declared in the gentle old gardener's voice, "when all the flowers die every year and he thinks only of next year's blossoms--of the future!"

Now the air of the room seemed to be stifling him, that of the roofless world of the garden calling him. His face spoke pitifully a desire for escape as he withdrew. The bent figure disappeared around a turn in the path and they listened without moving until the sound of his slow, dragging footfalls had died away.

"When he is serving those of his own social station I can see how it would be easier for him not to have me know," said Marta. "Sensitive, proud, and intense--" and a look of horror appeared in her eyes. "As he came across the room his face was transformed. I imagine it was like that of a man giving no quarter in a bayonet charge!"

"His secret was at stake!" Lanstron said in ready championship.

She put up her hand as if to shut out a picture.

"Don't let us think of it!" she exclaimed with a shudder. "He did not know what he was doing. His is one of the natures that have moments when an impulse throws them off their balance and ruins the work of years.

No, we must think only of his sacrifice, his enforced humiliation, in order to try to make amends for the past according to his light. No one could refuse him sympathy and respect."

Feller had won the day for himself where a friend's pleas might have failed. This was as it should be, Lanstron thought; and he smiled happily over the rare thing in Marta that felt the appeal which Feller had for him.

"The right view--the view that you were bound to take!" he said.

"And yet, I don't know your plans for him, Lanny. Pity is one thing; there is another thing to consider," she replied, with an abrupt change of tone. "But first let us leave Feller's quarters. We are intruders here."

XII

A CRISIS WITHIN A CRISIS