The Last Shot Part 48

The subjective enjoyment of the declaration kept him from any keen notice of the effect of his words. Lanny was right. It had been a war of deliberate conquest; a war to gratify personal ambition. All her life Marta would be able to live over again the feelings of this moment. It was as if she were frozen, all except brain and nerves, which were on fire, while the rigidity of ice kept her from springing from her chair in contempt and horror. She would always wonder how the bonds of her purpose to save Hugo held her tongue But still another purpose came on the wings of diabolical temptation which would pit the art of woman against the power of a man who set millions against millions in slaughter to gratify personal ambition. She was thankful that she was looking down as she spoke, for she could not bring herself to another compliment. Her throat was too chilled for that yet.

"The one way to end the feud between the two nations was a war that would mean permanent peace," he explained, seeing how quiet she was and realizing, with a recollection of her children's oath, that he had gone a little too far. He wanted to retain her admiration. It had become as precious to him as a new delicacy to Lucullus.

"Yes, I understand," she managed to murmur; then she was able to look up. "It's all so immense!" she added. "And you have yet another paper there?" she said with a little gesture that might have been taken as the expression of a hope that she was not overstaying her welcome.

"This is very interesting," he said, watching her narrowly now, "the case of a private, one Hugo Mallin, who refused to fight because he was against war on principle. Four charges: a.s.sault on a fellow soldier, cowardice, treason, and insubordination under fire."

"Enough, I should say!" said Marta in a low tone.

"A question of which one to press--of an example," continued Westerling, reading the full official statement for the first time.

"What is the punishment?" she asked.

"Why, of course, death!" he replied, somewhat absently, in preoccupation. "Extraordinary! And they have located him, it seems He is here at headquarters!"

"Yes; certainly," Marta said. "We found him under a tree, deserted and wounded, labelled coward, and we cared for him."

"Indeed!" exclaimed Westerling. "He must have appealed strongly to your sympathies."

There was no sharpness in the words, but he had lapsed from the personal to the official manner.

"To my sense of humanity!" Her reply was made in much the same tone as his remark, where he had expected emotion, even pa.s.sion. More than ever was he certain that she had undergone some revealing experience since he had seen her in the capital. "Yes, to any one's sense of humanity--a wounded, thirsty man in a fever!" There came, with a swift and mellowing charm, the look of a fervent and exalted tenderness and the pulse-arresting quiver of intensity that had swept over her at her first sight of Hugo under the tree. "I know that he was not a coward in one sense," she added, "for I saw him make the a.s.sault named in the first charge."

She proceeded with the story of what she had witnessed in the dining-room. There was no appeal on Hugo's account. Appraising the qualities of the Marta of the moment in contrast with the Marta of seventeen and the Marta of three weeks ago, Westerling was significantly conscious of her att.i.tude of impartiality, free of any attempt at feminine influence, and of her evident desire to help him with the facts that she knew.

"The charge of a.s.sault is only incidental," said Westerling. "But Mallin was in the right about his comrades entering the house; right about the destruction of property. It is our business to protect property, not only as a principle but as a matter of policy. We do not desire to make the population of the country we occupy unnecessarily hostile."

"I judged that from your kindness in repairing the damage done to ours,"

she a.s.sured him, and added happily: "Though I don't suppose that you go so far in most cases as to set uprooted plants back in their beds."

"No; that is a refinement, perhaps," he answered, laughing. She was not only more agreeable but also more sane than at the hotel. He liked the idea of continuing to despatch his work while retaining her company. "I must have a talk with Mallin," he said. "I must settle his case so that if similar cases arise subordinates will know what to do without consulting me. Would you mind if I sent for him?" He reached for the bell to call an orderly.

"Yes, I should like to hear what he says to you and what you say to him," she confessed with unfeigned interest, which brought a suggestion that he was to be put on trial before her at the same time as Mallin was on trial before Westerling. His fingers paused on the bell head without pressure. "I told him that you were a just man," she remarked, "that any one would be certain of justice from you."

He rang the bell; and after he had sent for Mallin, warming under the compliment of her last remark, he dared a reconnaissance along the line of inquiry which he had wanted to undertake from the first.

"Mallin's ideas about war seem to be a great deal like your own," he hinted casually.

"As I expressed them at the hotel, you mean!" she exclaimed. "That seems ages ago--ages!" The perplexity and indecision that, in a s.p.a.ce of silence, brooded in the depths of her eyes came to the surface in wavering lights. "Yes, ages! ages!" The wavering lights grew dim with a kind of horror and she looked away fixedly at a given point.

He was conscious of a thrill; the thrill that always presaged victory for him. He realized her evident distress; he guessed that terrible pictures were moving before her vision, and he changed the subject.

"I know how revolting it must have been to have seen those soldiers wantonly smashing your chandelier and gloating over their mischief," he said. "Really, the Captain was to blame for letting his men get out of hand. He seems not to have been a competent man. We can train and train an officer, but when war comes--well, no amount of training will supply a certain quality that must be inborn--the quality of command."

"Such as Dellarme had!" she exclaimed absently, under her breath.

She had forgotten her part and Westerling's presence. The given point of her gaze was exactly where Dellarme lay when he died. She was unconsciously smiling in the way that he had smiled. But to Westerling it seemed that she was smiling at s.p.a.ce. He was puzzled; his perception piqued.

"Who was Dellarme?" he was bound to ask.

"The officer in command of the company of infantry posted behind the sand-bags in the yard--he was killed!" she answered, turning her face toward Westerling without the smile, singularly expressionless.

"Yes, he must have had the quality from the defence he made," agreed Westerling, in the hearty tribute of a taxable soldier to a capable soldier. So very well had that one small position been held that every detail was graven on the mind of a chief of staff who was supposed to leave details to his brigade commanders. It was he himself who had ordered the final charge after the brigade commander had advised delaying another attack until the redoubt could be hammered to pieces by heavy guns brought up from the rear. "But he had to go!" Westerling exclaimed doggedly; for he could not resist this tribute, in turn, to his own success in making an example for timid brigade commanders in the future by driving in more reserves until the enemy yielded.

"Yes!" she agreed without any change in the set face and moody eyes.

"You saw something of the defence?"

"Yes!" Marta replied in a way that aroused his imagination.

This, he recalled, had always been her gift. The slow-drawn monosyllable was pregnant with revelations which his knowing mind could readily supply. She had been in the midst of the fury of the most tenacious fighting within a small s.p.a.ce that the war had yet to chronicle. She had been an intimate of the splendid desperation of the Browns; known their thoughts and feelings. What a mult.i.tude of impressions were stored in her sensitive mind, impressions which, for the moment, seemed to benumb her! How she could make them speak from her eyes and quiver from her very finger-tips when she chose! He would yet hear her vivid account of all that she had seen. It would be informatory--a reflection of the spirit of the Browns. Her quietness itself was compelling in its latent strength, and strength was the thing he most admired. More and more questions winged themselves into his thoughts, while his next one served the purpose of pa.s.sing the time until Hugo came.

"There was a man out of uniform, in a gardener's garb, in charge of the automatic," he remarked. "It was so puzzling that I heard of it. You see, there is no limit to what a chief of staff may know."

"Yes, our gardener," she replied.

"Your gardener! Why, how was that? Wasn't he in the reserves if he were a Brown? Wasn't he called to the colors at the outbreak of the war?"

In spite of himself the questions were somewhat sharp. They seemed to take Marta by surprise, which, however, was evanescent.

"I wonder!" she said, as interested as Westerling in the suggestion.

"Something a soldier would think of immediately and a woman wouldn't. I know that we lost our gardener."

That was all. She did not attempt any further explanation or enlarge on the subject, but let it go as an inquiry unexplained in the course of conversation.

Had Westerling been inclined to pursue it further he would have been interrupted by the arrival of a figure with a bandaged leg and head which came hobbling cheerfully around the corner of the house on crutches, escorted by an infantryman. The guard saluted and withdrew into the background. Hugo saluted and removed his cap and looked at Westerling with the faintest turn of a smile on his lips, which plainly spoke his quizzical appreciation of the fact that he was in the presence of dazzling heights for a private.

Marta had a single glance from him--a glance of peculiar inquiry and astonishment, sweeping over the tea things fairly into her eyes. Then it was gone. He might have been the most dutiful and respectful soldier of the five millions as he waited on the head of the five millions to speak.

Westerling read the four charges. Then he asked the stereotyped question:

"What have you to say to them?"

When he looked up from the paper he saw a face that was a mask, a gentle, pleasant mask, and blue eyes looking quite steadily into his own with a sort of well-established and dreamy fatalism.

"Nothing, sir," said Hugo respectfully.

Westerling frowned. Though a confession of guilt simplified everything, perhaps he frowned to find no embarra.s.sment in his presence in the private; perhaps he apprehended impertinence in the soft blue eyes.

"You know what that means--the charges sustained?"

"Yes, sir!"

"And you have nothing to say?" Westerling's frown deepened. There was an undercurrent of urgency in his tone. This mild culprit, waiting for the wheels of justice to roll over him without a protest, gave him no light as to a policy that should apply to other cases. He resented, too, any suggestion of readiness for martyrdom No man of power who is anything of a politician and not a fool likes to make martyrs. "Nothing?" he repeated. "Nothing at all in your own behalf?"

A faint expression appeared on the mask. So insistently could Hugo's mask hold attention that Westerling noted even a slight, thoughtful drawing down of the brow and one corner of the mouth. He could not conceive that the laws of gravity could be upset or that a private would undertake to have fun at the expense of a chief of staff.

"Nothing, sir, unless I should make a long speech," he said. "Do you want me to do that, sir?"