The Last Shot Part 6

"What fun it would be if we could visit back and forth with the fellows on the other side of the frontier!" said Hugo.

"What the--eh!" exclaimed the sergeant. "Will you never stop your joking, you, Hugo Mallin?"

"Never, sir," replied Hugo dryly. "It comes natural to me!"

VI

THE SECOND PROPHECY

In the reception-room, where he awaited the despatch of his card, Hedworth Westerling caught a glimpse of his person in a panel gla.s.s so convenient as to suggest that an adroit hotel manager might have placed it there for the delectation of well-preserved men of forty-two. He saw a face of health that was little lined; brown hair that did not reveal its sprinkle of gray at that distance; shoulders, bearing the gracefully draped gold cords of the staff, squarely set on a rigid spine in his natural att.i.tude. Yes, he had taken good care of himself, enjoying his pleasures with discreet, epicurean relish as he would this meeting with a woman whom he had not seen for ten years.

On her part, Marta, when she had received the note, had been in doubt as to her answer. Her curiosity to see him again was not of itself compelling. The actual making of the prophecy was rather dim to her mind until he recalled it. She had heard of his rise and she had heard, too, things about him which a girl of twenty-seven can better understand than a girl of seventeen. His reason for wanting to see her he had said was to "renew an old acquaintance." He could have little interest in her, and her interest in him was that he was head of the Gray army. His work had intimate relation to that which the Marta of twenty-seven, a Marta with a mission, had set for herself.

A page came to tell Westerling that Miss Galland should be down directly. But before she came a waiter entered with a tea-tray.

"By the lady's direction, sir," he explained as he set the tray on a table opposite Westerling.

Across a tea-table the prophecy had been made and across a tea-table they had held most of their talks. Having a picture in memory for comparison, he was seeing the doorway as the frame for a second picture.

When she appeared the picture seemed the same as of old. There was an undeniable delight in this first impression of externals. There had been no promise that she would be beautiful, and she was not. There had been promise of distinction, and she seemed to have fulfilled it. For a second she paused on the threshold rather diffidently. Then she smiled as she had when she greeted him from the veranda as he came up the terrace steps. She crossed the room with a flowing, spontaneous vitality that appealed to him as something familiar.

"Ten years, isn't it?" she exclaimed, putting a genuine quality of personal interest into the words as she gave his hand a quick, firm shake. Then, with the informality of old acquaintances who had parted only yesterday, she indicated a place on the sofa for him, while she seated herself on the other side of the tea-table. "The terrace there in the foreground," she said with conforming gestures of location, "the church steeple over the town, the upward sweep of the mountains, and there the plain melting into the horizon. And, let me see, you took two lumps, if I remember?"

He would have known the hand that poised over the sugar bowl though he had not seen the face; a brownish hand, not long-fingered, not narrow for its length--a compact, deft, firm little hand.

"None now," he said.

"Do you find it fattening?" she asked.

He recognized the mischievous sparkle of the eyes, the quizzical turn of the lips, which was her a.s.set in keeping any question from being personal. Nevertheless, he flushed slightly.

"A change of taste," he averred.

"Since you've become such a great man?" she hazarded. "Is that too strong?" This referred to the tea.

"No, just right!" he nodded.

He was studying her with the polite, veiled scrutiny of a man of the world. A materialist, he would look a woman over as he would a soldier when he had been a major-general making an inspection. She was slim, supple; he liked slim, supple women. Her eyes, though none the less luminous, and her lips, though none the less flexible, did not seem quite as out of proportion with the rest of her face as formerly, now that it had taken on the contour of maturity, which was noticeable also in the lines of her figure. Yes, she was twenty-seven, with the vivacity of seventeen retained, though she were on the edge of being an old maid according to the conventional notions. Necks and shoulders that happened to be at his side at dinner, he had found, when they were really beautiful, were not averse to his glance of appreciative and discriminating admiration of physical charm. But he saw her shrug slightly and caught a spark from her eyes that made him vaguely conscious of an offence to her sensibilities, and he was wholly conscious that the suggestion, bringing his faculties up sharply, had the pleasure of a novel sensation.

"How fast you have gone ahead!" she said. "That little prophecy of mine did come true. You are chief of Staff!"

After a smile of satisfaction he corrected her.

"Not quite; vice-chief--the right-hand man of His Excellency. I am a buffer between him and the heads of divisions. This has led to the erroneous a.s.sumption which I cannot too forcibly deny--"

He was proceeding with the phraseology habitual whenever men or women, to flatter him, had intimated that they realized that he was the actual head of the army. His Excellency, with the prestige of a career, must be kept soporifically enjoying the forms of authority. To arouse his jealousy might curtail Westerling's actual power.

"Yes, yes!" breathed Marta softly, arching her eyebrows a trifle as she would when looking all around and through a thing or when she found any one beating about the bush. The little frown disappeared and she smiled understandingly. "You know I'm not a perfect goose!" she added. "Had you been made chief of staff in name, too, all the old generals would have been in the sulks and the young generals jealous," she continued. "The one way that you might have the power to exercise was by proxy."

This downright frankness was another reflection of the old days before he was at the apex of the pyramid. Now it was so unusual in his experience as to be almost a shock. On the point of arguing, he caught a mischievous, delightful "Isn't that so?" in her eyes, and replied:

"Yes, I shouldn't wonder if it were!"

Why shouldn't he admit the truth to the one who had rung the bell of his secret ambition long ago by recognizing in him the ability to reach his goal? He marvelled at her grasp of the situation.

"It wasn't so very hard to say, was it?" she asked happily, in response to his smile. Then, her gift of putting herself in another's place, while she strove to look at things with his purpose and vision, in full play, she went on in a different tone, as much to herself as to him: "You have labored to make yourself master of a mighty organization. You did not care for the non-essentials. You wanted the reality of shaping results."

"Yes, the results, the power!" he exclaimed.

"Fifteen hundred regiments!" she continued thoughtfully, looking at a given point rather than at him. "Every regiment a blade which you would bring to an even sharpness! Every regiment a unit of a harmonious whole, knowing how to screen itself from fire and give fire as long as bidden, in answer to your will if war comes! That is what you live and plan for, isn't it?"

"Yes, exactly! Yes, you have it!" he said. His shoulders stiffened as he thrilled at seeing a picture of himself, as he wanted to see himself, done in bold strokes. It a.s.sured him that not only had his own mind grown beyond what were to him the narrow a.s.sociations of his old La Tir days, but that hers had grown, too. "And you--what have you been doing all these years?" he asked.

"Living the life of a woman on a country estate," she replied. "Since you made a rule that no Gray officers Should cross the frontier we have been a little lonelier, having only the Brown officers to tea. Did you really find it so bad for discipline in your own case?" she concluded with playful solemnity.

"One cannot consider individual cases in a general order," he explained.

"And, remember, the Browns made the ruling first. You see, every year means a tightening--yes, a tightening, as arms and armies grow more complicated and the maintaining of staff secrets more important. And you have been all the time at La Tir, truly?" he asked, changing the subject. He was convinced that she had acquired something that could not be gained on the outskirts of a provincial town.

"No. I have travelled. I have been quite around the world."

"You have!" This explained much. "How I envy you! That is a privilege I shall not know until I am superannuated." While he should remain chief of staff he must be literally a prisoner in his own country.

"Yes, I should say it was splendid! Splendid--yes, indeed!" Snappy little nods of the head being unequal to expressing the joy of the memories that her exclamation evoked, she clasped her hands over her knees and swung back and forth in the ecstasy of seventeen.

"Splendid! I should say so!" She nestled the curling tip of her tongue against her teeth, as if the recollection must also be tasted.

"Splendid, enchanting, enlightening, stupendous, and wickedly expensive!

Another girl and I did it all on our own."

"O-oh!" he exclaimed.

"Oh, oh, oh!" she repeated after him. "Oh, what, please?"

"Oh, nothing!" he said. It was quite comprehensible to him how well equipped she was to take care of herself on such an adventure.

"Precisely, when you come to think it over!" she concluded.

"What interested you most? What was the big lesson of all your journeying?" he asked, ready to play the listener.

"Being born and bred on a frontier, of an ancestry that was born and bred on a frontier, why, frontiers interested me most," she said. "I collected impressions of frontiers as some people collect pictures. I found them all alike--stupid, just stupid! Oh, so stupid!" Her frown grew with the repet.i.tion of the word; her fingers closed in on her palm in vexation. He recollected that he had seen her like this two or three times at La Tir, when he had found the outbursts most entertaining. He imagined that the small fist pressed against the table edge could deliver a stinging blow. "As stupid as it is for neighbors to quarrel!

It put me at war with all frontiers."

"Apparently," he said.

She withdrew her fist from the table, dropped the opened hand over the other on her knee, her body relaxing, her wrath pa.s.sing into a kind of shamefacedness and then into a soft, prolonged laugh.