The Last Shot Part 47

"Oh, no, no!" he protested laughingly, and found her glance flashing through her brows holding him fast in an indefinable challenge.

"I shall pour when you do us the honor to come to tea at the gardener's quarters in the tower," she said.

"No, no!" he objected. "The tea conditions are the same as before."

He was earnest for his point. It would please his masculine fancy to watch those firm, small fingers pausing over the cup before the plunge of a lump of sugar stirred the miniature ocean in waves; to watch the firm little hand in its grip of the handle of the pot.

"Conditions the same as before?" She laughed softly. "How can they be in my thoughts or yours?" she asked with a sudden show of seriousness.

"We did turn you out of house and home--I understand!" he exclaimed apologetically. "And that is the symbol of it to you!" He indicated the coat of arms.

"The symbol of the conqueror, isn't it?" he asked playfully, for in the company of women it pleased him to be playful.

"Conqueror? It's a big word!" she mused. "I hadn't thought of it in connection with pouring tea"--which might be another way of saying that she had just been thinking of it very hard and might be trying to find whether it had a pleasant or an unpleasant side. Clearly, here was a Marta different from any yet precipitated by the alchemy of war.

The resourceful variety of her! Oh, it was like the old days! It made him feel young, as young as when he had been a colonel commanding the garrison on the other side of the white posts. She had intelligence, yet was at the same time distinctly feminine, with the gift of as much talk about who should pour tea as about how to storm a redoubt. She did not carry her mental wares on her sleeve. She flashed them in a way that prompted curiosity as to the next exhibit. He had sought primarily, selfishly, to be entertained at tea, and he was being entertained. To want to win was his nature. He understood, too, that she wanted to win.

He liked that quality in her the more because it heightened the valve of victory for him.

"Then, if you don't think of it in connection with pouring tea, let me tell you what I think of when I sit on this veranda. I think of you as hostess. You refuse to play the part!" he exclaimed with that persistence, softened a little, perhaps, yet suggestive of the quality characterized by the firm jaw and still eyes, which won his point at staff councils. Again he was conscious of one of her sweeping glances of appraisal, with just a glint of admiration and even approval tucked away in the recesses of her smile.

"Suppose we compromise," she suggested thoughtfully, with the gravity of one making a great concession. "Suppose you do the heavy work, and pour, and I drop the sugar in the cups."

But Westerling always used a half concession as a lever to gain a full concession.

"I'd really better do it all--act out the host and the conqueror!" he declared. "One can't compromise principles."

"Oh! Why?" She was distinctly interested, leaning nearer to him and playing a tattoo with one set of fingers on the back of the other hand.

"Anything except your doing all the honors leaves me in the same invidious position," he answered. "It compounds my felony. It shows that you do think that we failed by our conduct to show respect for your property. It leaves me feeling that you think that I do not regard this as your veranda, your garden, your home, sacred by more than the laws of war--by an old friendship!"

He made his appeal finely, as he well knew how to do. A certain magnetic eloquence that went well with his handsome face and st.u.r.dy bearing had been his most successful a.s.set in making him chief of staff.

The tattoo of her fingers died down while she listened to his final, serious reasons about a subject that became peculiarly significant; and her brows lifted, her eyes opened in the surprise of one who gets a sudden new angle of light.

"You put it very well. In that case--" she said, and his glance and hers dropped, his to the capable hand on the handle of the teapot, hers into the cup. "With the honors of war and officers permitted to retain their side-arms?" she asked.

"Yes; oh, yes!" he answered happily.

She smiled her acknowledgment with just that self-respect of capitulation which flatters the victor with the thought that he has overcome no mean opponent--the highest form of compliment known to the guild of courtiers.

He was susceptible to it and, in turn, to the curiosity about her that had remained unsatisfied at the end of their talk in the hotel. Her own veranda was the natural, familiar place to judge the work of time in those character-forming years from seventeen to twenty-seven. She was not like what she had been in the artificial surroundings of a fortnight ago. She filled the eye and the mind now in the well-knit suppleness of figure and the finished maturity of features which bore the mark of inner growth of knowledge of life. She was not a species of intellectual exotic, as he had feared, too baffling to allow the male intellect to feel comfortable, but very much, as he noted discriminatingly, a woman in all the physical freshness of a woman in her prime.

"Just like the old days, isn't it?" he exclaimed with his first sip, convinced that the officers' commissary supplied excellent tea in the field.

"Yes, for the moment--if we forget the war!" she replied, and looked away, preoccupied, toward the landscape.

If we forget the war! She bore on the words rather grimly. The change that he had noted between the Marta of the hotel reception-room and the Marta of the moment was not altogether the work of ten years. It had developed since she was in the capital. In these three weeks war had been brought to her door. She had been under heavy fire. Yet this subject of the war was the one which he, as an invader, considered himself bound to avoid.

"We do forget it at tea, don't we?" he asked.

"At least we need not speak of it!" she replied.

Safely, then, at first, their conversation ran not on the present but on an intimate past, free of any possible b.u.mpers. The train of memories once started, she herself gave it speed if it stopped at a way station; cargo if it went empty. p.r.o.ne to avoid recollections that made him feel old--to feel old was to be out of date in his profession---he found these livening with the youth of thirty-two and gratifying as youth's dreams become reality. Feeling as young as a colonel, he had the consciousness of being chief of staff. This was enough to make any soldier enjoy the place and the company and to drink his tea slowly so as to prolong the recess from duty. His second cup growing cold, he was reminded of the value of time, and with a playfully reproachful look at Marta he put a warning finger of conscience on the papers that lay beside the bread plate.

"There's work--always work for a chief!" he declared. "I--"

Marta was quick to act on the hint. Her hands flew to the arms of her chair as she spoke.

"There's always the garden for me! But first--" Yes, first there was poor Hugo.

Westerling flushed guiltily that she should have taken his words as a hint, which was only half of his emotion. The other half shot out his hand in a restraining, companionable touch on her forearm, while his eyes--his calculating gray eyes--glinted a youthful entreaty.

"Please! I didn't finish my sentence!" he begged. "You remember that often I used to wait after tea until the sunset--"

"And reached your quarters late for dinner, I also remember!" she put in. But she remained in the same position, his finger-tips on her arm, her hands holding her body free of the chair. "That is, when you did not stay to dinner!" she added.

"I am staying to-night. I was going to ask if you wouldn't remain on the veranda while I go over these papers. It--it would be very cosey and pleasant."

One of these papers, she knew, must be the evidence against Hugo Mallin.

She preferred not to make a direct appeal but to have Westerling bring up the subject himself. His smile and the look with which he regarded her spoke his appreciation of the picture she made and his fear of losing it. Very cosey and pleasant, yes, the company of a prophetess, with a ray of sunlight making her hair an aurora of flashing bronze overtopping a brown face, the eyes holding answers to an increasing number of unasked questions about the new forces that he had found in her.

"Why, yes," she agreed with evident pleasure, for she was thinking of Hugo.

Turcas now came, in answer to Westerling's ring. The orders and suggestions on the table seemed to be the product of this lath of a man, the vice-chief, but a lath of steel, not wood, who appeared a runner trained for a race of intellects in the scratch cla.s.s. One by one, almost perfunctorily, Westerling gave his a.s.sent as he pa.s.sed the papers to Turcas; while Turcas's dry voice, coming from between a narrow opening of the thin lips, gave his reasons with a rapid-firer's precision in answer to his chief's inquiries.

With each order somewhere along that frontier some unit of a great organism would respond. The reserves from this position would be transferred to that; such a position would be felt out before dark by a reconnaissance in force, however costly; the rapid-firers of the 19th Division would be transferred to the 20th; despite the 37th Brigade's losses, it would still form the advance; General So-and-So would be superseded after his failure of yesterday; Colonel So-and-So would take his place as acting major-general; more care must be exercised in recommendations for bronze crosses, lest their value so depreciate that officers and men would lack incentive to win them.

Marta was having a look behind the scenes at the fountainhead of great events. Power! power! The absolute power of the soldier in the saddle, with premier and government and all the inst.i.tutions of peace only a dim background for the processes of war! Opposite her was a man who could make and unmake not only generals but even the destinies of peoples. By every sign he enjoyed his power for its own sake. There must be a chief of the five millions, which were as a moving forest of destruction, and here was the chief, his strength reflected in the strong muscles of his short neck as he turned his head to listen to Turcas. Marta recalled the contrast between Westerling and Lanstron as they faced each other after the wreck of the aeroplane ten years ago: the iron invincibility of the elder's st.u.r.dy, mature figure and the alert, high-strung invincibility of the slighter figure of the younger man.

"The evidence you asked for in that Mallin mutiny case," said Turcas, indicating the only remaining paper.

"Yes, I want to go into that--it's a question of policy," said Westerling.

He had taken up the paper thoughtfully after Turcas withdrew, when he looked up to Marta in answer to a movement in her chair. She had bent forward in a pose that freed her figure from the chair-back in an outline of suppleness and firmness; her lips were parted, showing a faint line of the white of her teeth, and he caught her gazing at him in a kind of wondering admiration. But she dropped her eyelids instantly and said deliberately, less to him than to herself:

"You have the gift!"

No tea-table flattery that, he knew; only the reflection of a fact whose existence had been borne in on her by observation.

"The gift? How?" he inquired, speaking to the fringe of hair that half hid her lowered face.

She looked up, smiling brightly.

"You don't know what gift! Not the pianist's! Not the poet's!" (Oh, to save Hugo! The method she had chosen to save him, alien to all her impulses, born of the war's stress on her mind, seemed the wise one in view of her knowledge of the man before her) "Why, of course, the supreme gift of command! The thing that made you chief of staff! And the war goes well for you, doesn't it?"

Delicious morsel, this, to a connoisseur in compliments! He tasted it with the same self-satisfied smile that he had her first prophecy. To her who had then voiced a secret he had shared with no one, as his chest swelled with a full breath, he bared another in the delight of the impression he had made on her.

"Yes, as you foresaw--as I planned!" he said. "Yes, I planned all, step by step, till I was chief of staff and ready. I convinced the premier that it was time to strike and I chose the hour to strike; for Bodlapoo was only a convenient excuse for the last of all the steps"