The Last Shot Part 79

"The madness of it! The whole slope is peppered with the fallen!"

"What a cost! Magnificent, but not war. Carrying their flag in the good old way, right at the front!"

"Heavens! I hope they do it!"

"The flag's down!"

"Another man has it--it's up!"

"Now--now--splendid! They're in!"

"So they are! And the flag, too!"

"Yes, what's left are in!"

"And Lanstron was there--in that!"

"What if--"

"Yes, the chief of staff, the head of the army, in an affair like that!"

"The mind of the army--the mind that was to direct our advance!"

"When all the honors of the world are his!"

Their words were acid-tipped needles knitting back and forth through Marta's brain. Was Lanny one of those black specks that peppered the slope? Was he? Was he?

"Telephone and--and see if Lanny is--is killed!" she begged.

She knew not how she uttered that monstrous word killed. But utter it she did in its naked terror. Now she knew a simpler feeling than that of the grand sympathy of the dreamer with the horrors of war as a whole.

She knew the dumb, helpless suspense of the womenfolk remaining at home watching for the casualty lists that Westerling had suppressed. What mattered policies of statesmen and generals, propagandas and tactics, to them? The concern of each wife or sweetheart was with one--one of the millions who was greater to the wife or the sweetheart than all the millions. Marta was not thinking of sending thousands to death. Had she sent _him_ to death? The agony of waiting, waiting there among these strangers, waiting for that little instrument at the end of a wire to say whether or not he were alive, became insupportable.

"I'll go--I'll go out there where he is!" she said incoherently, still looking toward the knoll with glazed eyes. She thought she was walking fast as she started for the garden gate, but really she was going slowly, stumblingly.

"I think you had better stop her if you can," said the general to his aide.

The aide overtook her at the gate.

"We shall know about His Excellency before you can find out for yourself," he said; and, young himself, he could put the sympathy of youth with romance into his tone. "You might miss the road, even miss him, when he was without a scratch, and be for hours in ignorance," he explained. "In a few minutes we ought to have word."

Marta sank down weakly on the tongue of a wagon, overturned against the garden wall in the melee of the retreat, and leaned her shoulder on the wheel for support.

"If the women of the Grays waited four weeks," she said with an effort at stoicism, "then I ought to be able to wait a few minutes."

"Depend on me. I'll bring news as soon as there is any," the aide concluded, and, seeing that she wished to be alone, he left her.

For the first time she had real oblivion from the memory of her deceit of Westerling, the oblivion of drear, heart-pulling suspense. All the good times, the sweetly companionable times, she and Lanny had had together; all his flashes of courtship, his outburst in their last interview in the arbor, when she had told him that if she found that she wanted to come to him she would come in a flame, pa.s.sed in review under the hard light of her petty ironies and sarcasms, which had the false ring of coquetry to her now, genuine as they had been at the time.

Through her varying moods she had really loved him, and the thing that had slumbered in her became the drier fuel for the flame--perhaps too late.

Her thought, her feeling was as if he were not chief of staff, but a private soldier, and she were not a woman who had girdled the world and puckered her brow over the solution of problems, but a provincial girl who had never been outside her village--his sweetheart. All questions of the army following up its victory, of his responsibilities and her fears that he would go on with conquest, faded into the fact of life--his life, as the most precious thing in the world to her. For him, yes, for him she had played the spy, as that village girl would for her lover, thinking of warm embraces; for him she had kept steady under the strain.

Without him--what then? It seemed that the fatality that had let him escape miraculously from the aeroplane accident, made him chief of staff, and brought him victory, might well choose to ring down the curtain of destiny for him in the charge that drove the last foot of the invader off the soil of the Browns.... A voice was calling.... She heard it hazily, with a sudden access of giddy fear, before it became a cheerful, clarion cry that seemed to be repeating a message that had already been spoken without her understanding it.

"He's safe, safe, safe, Miss Galland! He was not hit! He is on his way back and ought to be here very soon!"

She heard herself saying "Thank you!" But that was not for some time.

The aide was already gone. He had had his thanks in the effect of the news, which made him think that a chief of staff should not receive congratulations for victory alone.

Lanny would return through the garden. She remained leaning against the wagon body, still faint from happiness, waiting for him. She was drawing deeper and longer breaths that were velvety with the glow of sunshine. A flame, the flame that Lanny had desired, of many gentle yet pa.s.sionate tongues, leaping hither and thither in glad freedom, was in possession of her being. When his figure appeared out of the darkness the flame swept her to her feet and toward him. Though he might reject her he should know that she loved him; this glad thing, after all the shame she had endured, she could confess triumphantly.

But she stopped short under the whip of conscience. Where was her courage? Where her sense of duty? What right had she, who had played such a horrible part, to think of self? There were other sweethearts with lovers alive who might be dead on the morrow if war continued. The flame sank to a live coal in her secret heart. Another pa.s.sion possessed her as she seized Lanstron's hand in both her own.

"Lanny, listen! Not the sound of a shot--for the first time since the war began! Oh, the blessed silence! It's peace, peace--isn't it to be peace?" As they ascended the steps she was pouring out a flood of broken, feverish sentences which permitted of no interruption. "You kept on fighting to-day, but you won't to-morrow, will you? It isn't I who plead--it's the women, more women than there are men in the army, who want you to stop now! Can't you hear them? Can't you see them?"

In the fervor of appeal, before she realized his purpose, they were on the veranda and at the door of the dining-room, where the Brown staff was gathered around the table.

"I still rely on you to help me, Marta!" he whispered as he stood to one side for her to enter.

XLVI

THE LAST SHOT

"Miss Galland!"

Blinking as she came out of the darkness into the bright light, with a lock of her dew-sprinkled dark hair free and brushing her flushed cheek, Marta saw the division chiefs of the Browns, after their start when Lanstron spoke her name, all stand at the salute, looking at her rather than at him. The reality in the flesh of the woman who had been a comrade in service, sacrificing her sensibilities for their cause, appealed to them as a true likeness of their conceptions of her. In their eyes she might read the finest thing that can pa.s.s from man's to woman's or from man's to man's. These were the strong men of her people who had driven the burglar from her house with the sword of justice.

Their tribute had the steadfast loyalty of soldiers who were craving to do anything in the world that she might ask, whether to go on their knees to her or to kill dragons for her.

"I may come in?" she asked.

"Who if not you is ent.i.tled to the privilege of the staff council?"

exclaimed the vice-chief.

The others did not propose to let him do all the honors. Each murmured words of welcome on his own account.

"We are here, thanks to you!"

"And, thanks to you, our flag will float over the Gray range!"

She must be tired, was their next thought. Four or five of them hurried to place a chair for her, the vice-chief winning over his rivals, more through the exercise of the rights of rank than by any superior alacrity.

"You are appointed actual chief of staff and a field-marshal!" said the vice-chief to Lanstron. "The premier says that every honor the nation can bestow is yours. The capital is mad. The crowds are crying: 'On to the Gray capital!' To-morrow is to be a public holiday and they are calling it Lanstron Day. The thing was so sudden that the speculators who depressed our securities in the world's markets have got their due--ruin! And we ought to get an indemnity that will pay the cost of the war."

Seated at one side, Marta could watch all that pa.s.sed, herself un.o.bserved. She noted a touch of color come to Lanstron's cheeks as he made a little shrug of protest.

"It never rains but it pours!" he said. "We were all just as able and loyal yesterday as to-day when we find ourselves heroic. We owe our victory to Partow's plans, to the staff's industry, the spirit of the people and the army, and--" He threw a happy smile toward Marta.