The Last Shot Part 45

Marta stepped down from the veranda in response to the call of the open air to physical vigor renewed after sweet sleep. Rather than return directly to the kitchen, where breakfast was waiting, she would go around the house. She stopped before a j.a.panese maple which had been split by a sh.e.l.l striking in a crotch. Was there any hope of saving it?

No. She turned white about the lips, with red spots on her cheeks, and at length nodded her head as if in answer to some inward question.

Over the sward, cut by sh.e.l.l fragments, lay torn limbs and bits of bark, and in the shade of a tree near the road she had a glimpse of the shoulder of the gray uniform of a prostrate man. The rest of him was hidden by the low-hanging branches of one of the Norway spruces which bordered the estate at this point. Another step and she saw a circular red spot on a white leg bandage; another, and a white square of paper pinned to a blouse; another, and she identified the wounded man as her hero of the scene in the dining-room.

Hugo's eyes were closed, his breaths slow, in restless sleep. His face, flushed with fever, was winningly boyish and frank. He who had had the courage to speak alone against the opinion of his fellows, to voice a belief that made every sympathetic chord in her own mind sing with praise and understanding, the courage to say that invasion was wrong even when made by his own people, had been labelled coward and left to die!

The exaltation of his features when he had been the champion of her beliefs and her impulse against the barbarism of his comrades and the charm of their resignation now, the pitifulness of his condition--all had an appeal as she bent over him that called for an expression having the touch of the sublimely feminine. She took his hand in hers and pressed it gently. He awoke and brought himself jerkily to a sitting posture. The effort made a crash in his head that sent his senses swimming. She thought that he was going to swoon and slipped her arm behind him in support and, the Marta of impulse, pressed her lips to his brow. After the first racking throb of his temples he was able to steady himself, and as she drew away she saw his blue eyes starting in wonder at her act.

"I--I had to do it to thank you for what you did in the dining-room!"

she stammered.

"Oh! Oh! It was very beautiful of you, but I couldn't help being surprised, for it was rather unusual--from a stranger." He smiled, and Hugo had a gift in smiles, as we know: smiles for laughter, smiles for rea.s.surance, and smiles to cure embarra.s.sment. "It was almost as refreshing as a drink of water," he concluded impersonally.

"You are thirsty?"

"This--this is morning, isn't it?" Hugo went on quizzically.

"Yes, yes!"

"Then it must be the next day," he pursued, still quizzically. "You see, I said I would not kill any more--and I will not--and I was shot and got tagged without even being shipped as freight. I was thirsty last night, very thirsty, and some one--I think it was Jake Pilzer--some one said to go to the fountain of h.e.l.l for a drink, but I--I don't think that a very good place to get a drink, do you?"

Weak and faint as he was, he put a touch of drollery into the question which made her laugh, her eyes sparkling through a moist haze.

"You're real, aren't you?" he inquired in sudden perplexity. "I'm not dreaming?"

"As real as the water I shall bring you."

Soon Marta was back, holding a gla.s.s to his lips.

"There's no doubt about it; you are real!" said Hugo.

"I feel as if the chimney were still hot but that you had drenched the fire in the grate."

"Who put this on you?" she asked as she unpinned the placard.

"I've a vague idea, from a vague overhearing of the colonel's remarks, that it is public opinion," he replied, and seeing, that she was about to tear it up, he arrested her action. "No, I think I'd like to save it as a souvenir--the odds are so greatly against me--as a sort of souvenir to keep up my courage."

His tone, the way he drew the muscles of his face, ironed out her frown of disgust at public opinion with a smile. For he made his kind of courage no less light-hearted and free of pose than Dellarme had made his.

Directly the coachman, whom Marta had summoned when she went for the water, appeared with an improvised litter, and the two bore in at the kitchen door a guest for breakfast whose arrival gave Mrs. Galland a distinctly visible surprise. His uniform was gray, and in her heart of hearts she hated gray as the symbol of an enemy whom her husband had fought. But when Marta told the story of the part he had played in defence of the chandelier, personal partisanship abetted the motherly impulse that was already breaking down prejudice. She was busy with a dozen suggestions for his comfort, quite taking matters out of Marta's hands.

"I know more about the care of the sick than you do!" she insisted. "One lump or two in your coffee, sir? There, there, you had better let me hold the cup for you. You are sure you can sit up? Then we must have a pillow."

"I'll fetch one from the other room," put in Minna.

"Two will be better!" Marta called after her.

"It is delightful to have breakfast in your kitchen, madame," said Hugo to Mrs. Galland in a way that ought to have justified her in thinking herself the most charming and useful person in the world.

x.x.xI

UNTO CaeSAR

It was more irritating than ever for Mrs. Galland to keep pace with her daughter's inconsistencies. There was a Marta listening in partisan sympathy to Hugo's story of why he had refused to fight and telling the story of her school in return. There was a Marta seizing Hugo's hand in a quick, impulsive grasp as she exclaimed: "Your act personified what I taught my children!" There was a Marta planning how he should be secreted in the coachman's quarters over the stable, where he would be reasonably free from discovery until his strength was regained. Then here was another Marta, after Hugo had been carried away on the litter, saying coolly to her mother:

"'Unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's!' We have our property, our home to protect. Perhaps the Grays have come to stay for good, so graciousness is our only weapon. We cannot fight a whole army single-handed."

"You have found that out, Marta?" said Mrs. Galland.

"We have four rooms in the baron's tower and a kitchen stove," Marta proceeded. "With Minna we can make ourselves very comfortable and leave the house to the staff."

"The Gallands in their gardener's quarters! The staff of the Grays in ours! Your father will turn in his grave!" Mrs. Galland exclaimed.

"But, mother, it is not quite agreeable to think of three women living in the same house with a score of strange men!" Marta persisted.

"I had not thought of that, Marta. Of course, it would be abominable!"

agreed Mrs. Galland, promptly capitulating where a point of propriety was involved.

When Marta informed the officer--the same one who had rung the door-bell on his second visit--of the family's decision he appeared shocked at the idea of eviction that was implied. But, secretly pleased at the turn of events, he hastened to apologize for war's brutal necessities, and Marta's complaisance led him to consider himself something of a diplomatist. Yes, more than ever he was convinced of the wisdom of an invader ringing door-bells.

Meanwhile, the service-corps men had continued their work until now there was no vestige of war in the grounds that labor could obliterate; and masons had come to repair the walls of the house itself and plasterers to renew the broken ceilings.

All this Marta regarded in a kind of charmed wonder that an invader could be so considerate. Her manner with the officers in charge of preparations had the simplicity and ease which a woman of twenty-seven, who is not old-maidish because she is not afraid of a single future, may employ as a serene hostess. She frequently asked if there were good news.

"Yes," was the uniform reply. An unexpected setback here or resistance there, but progress, nevertheless. But she learned, too, that the first two days' fighting along the frontier had cost the Grays fifty thousand casualties.

"In order to make an omelet you must break eggs!" she remarked.

"Spoken like a true soldier--like a member of the staff!" was the reply.

In her constraint and detachment they realized her conscious appreciation of the fact that in earlier times her people had been for the Browns; but in her flashes of interest in the progress of the war, flashes from a woman's unmilitary mind, they judged that her heart was with the Grays. And why not? Was it not natural that a woman with more than her share of intellectual perception should be on the right side?

From her a.s.sociations it was not to be expected that she would make an outright declaration of apostasy. This would destroy the value and the attractiveness of her conversion Reverence for the past, for a father who had fought for the Browns, against her own convictions, made her att.i.tude appear singularly and delicately correct.

Though everything was ready for them, the staff delayed coming owing to the stubbornness of some heavy guns of the Browns, which, while they had directed no sh.e.l.ls against the house, had shown that they had the range by unexpectedly playing havoc with infantry in close order on the pa.s.s road at the foot of the garden and with transportation on the castle road. But at last the battery was silenced and the mind of the army might establish itself in its offices on the ground floor and its quarters on the second floor without being in danger.

The war was a week old--a week which had developed other tangents and traps than La Tir--on the morning that the first instalment of junior officers came to occupy the tables and desks. Where the family portraits had hung in the dining-room were now big maps dotted with brown and gray flags. Portable field cabinets with sectional maps on a large scale were arranged around the walls of the drawing-room. In what had been the lounging room of the old days of Galland prosperity, the refrain of half a dozen telegraph instruments made medley with the clicking of typewriters. Cooks and helpers were busy in the kitchen; for the staff were to live like gentlemen; they were to have their morning baths, their comfortable beds, and regular meals. No twinge of indigestion or of rheumatism from exposure was to interfere with the working of their precious intellectual processes. No detail of a.s.sistance would be lacking to save any bureaucratic head time and labor The bedrooms were apportioned according to rank--that of the master awaited the master; the best servant's bedroom awaited Francois, his valet.

When Bouchard, the chief of intelligence, who fought the battle of wits and spies against Lanstron, came, two hours before Westerling was due, the last of the staff except Westerling and his personal aide had arrived Bouchard, with his iron-gray hair, bushy eyebrows, strong, aquiline nose, and hawk-like eyes, his mouth hidden by a bristly mustache, was lean and saturnine, and he was loyal. No jealous thought entered his mind at having to serve a man younger than himself. He did not serve a personality; he served a chief of staff and a profession.

The score of words which escaped him as he looked over the arrangements were all of directing criticism and bitten off sharply, as if he regretted that he had to waste breath in communicating even a thought.

"I tell nothing, but you tell me everything!" said Bouchard's hawk eyes.

He was old-fashioned; he looked his part, which was one of the many points of difference between him and Lanstron as a chief of intelligence.

After he had gone through the house he went for a flyspecking tour of the grounds, where he came upon a private of the Grays on crutches. With rest and good food the tiny hole in Hugo's leg from the merciful small-calibre bullet had healed rapidly. Confinement was irksome on a sunny day. He had grown strong enough in spirit to face his fate, whatever it might be, and in the absence of the watchful coachman he had risked the delight of a convalescent's adventure in the open, clad in his uniform, the only clothes he had. Bouchard saw instantly that this private did not wear the insignia of staff service.