The Last Shot. Frederick Palmer
and he felt so faint. I brought him the rose—and he was dead!"
"Yes, yes!" Marta breathed. She, too, in her quick imagination, was seeing the young private and spatters of blood on the terrace. Lanstron feasted his eyes on her face, which mirrored her emotion.
"Oh, the groans of the dying in the night and the cheering when the news of victory came in!" Mrs. Galland continued. "I could not cheer. But that was, long, long ago—long ago, and yet only yesterday! And now we are to have it all over again. The young men must have their turn. They will not be satisfied by the experience of their fathers. Yes, all over again; still more horrible—and it was horrible enough then! I used to get giddy easily. I do yet. But I didn't faint—no, not once through the days of nursing, the weeks of suspense. I wondered afterward how I could have endured so much."
"Are we of the septicized-serum age equal to it?" Marta exclaimed.
"Yes, we of the matter-of-fact, automatic gun-recoil age!" put in Lanstron.
"Oh, mother," Marta went on, "I wish you would go with me to the class some morning, you who have seen and felt war, and tell it all as you saw it to the children!"
"But," remonstrated Mrs. Galland, "I'm an old-fashioned woman; and, Marta, your father was an officer, as your grandfather was, too. I am sure he would not approve of your school, and I could do nothing against his wishes."
She looked up with moistening eyes to a portrait on the opposite wall over the seat which her husband had occupied at table. Lanstron saw there a florid, jaunty gentleman in riding-habit, gloves on knee, crop in hand. The spirit of the first Galland or of the stern grandfather on the side wall—with Blücher tufts in front of his ears sturdy defiance of that parvenu Bonaparte and of his own younger brother who had fallen fighting for Bonaparte—would have frowned on the descendant who had filled the house with many guests and paid the bills with mortgages in the ebbing tide of the family fortunes. But Mrs. Galland saw only a hero. She shared his prejudices against the manufacturers of the town; she saw the sale of land to be cut up into dwelling sites, which had saved the Gallands from bankruptcy, as the working of the adverse fate of modern tendencies. Even as she had left all details of business to her husband, so she had of late left them to Marta's managing.
"Edward and I were just engaged before the outbreak of the war," she proceeded. "How handsome he was in his Hussars' uniform! How frightened I was and hew proud of his fine bravado when I heard him and a number of fellow officers drinking here in this room to quick death and speedy promotion! Do they still have that toast, Colonel?"
"Yes, in some regiments," Lanstron answered. He would not say that what was good form in the days of the beau sabreur was considered a little theatrical in the days of the automatic gun-recoil.
"And when he came—oh, when you came home," breathed Mrs. Galland to the portrait, "with the scar on your cheek, how tanned and strong your hands were and how white mine as you held them so fast! And then"—she smiled in peaceful content—"then I did faint. I am not ashamed of it—I did!"
"Without any danger of falling far!" said Lanstron happily.
"Or with much of a jar!" added Marta.
"You prattling children!" gasped Mrs. Galland, her cheeks flushing. "Do you think that I fainted purposely? I would have been ashamed to my dying day if I had feigned it!"
"And you did not faint in the presence of the dead and dying!" said Marta thoughtfully, wonderingly, leaning nearer to her mother, her eyes athirst and drinking.
"But I believe it is only a wispy-waspy sort of girl that faints at all these days. They're all so businesslike," said Mrs. Galland—"so businesslike that they are ceasing to marry."
How many girls she had known to wait a little too long! If anything could awaken Marta to action it ought to be war, which was a great match-maker forty years ago. The thought of a lover in danger had precipitated wavering hearts into engagements. Marta's mood was such that she received the hint openly and playfully to-day.
"Oh, I don't despair!" she exclaimed, straightening her shoulders and drawing in her chin with a mock display of bravery. "I believe it was in an English novel that I read that any woman without a hump can get any man she sets out for. It is a matter of determination and concentration and a wise choice of vulnerable objects."
"Marta, Marta!" gasped Mrs. Galland. In her tone was a volume of lamentation.
"Now that I'm twenty-seven mother is ready to take any risk on my behalf, if it is masculine. By the time I'm thirty she will be ready to give me to a peddler with a harelip!" she said mischievously.
"A peddler with a harelip! Marta, will you never be serious?"
"Some day, mother," Marta went on, "when we find the right man, you hold him while I propose, and together we'll surely—"
Mrs. Galland could not resist laughing, which was one way to stop further absurdities—absurdities concealing a nervous strain they happened to be this time—while Colonel Lanstron was a little flushed and ill at ease. She had a truly silvery laugh—the kind no longer in fashion among the gentry since golden laughs came in—that went well with the dimples dipping into her pink cheeks.
Contrary to custom, she did not excuse herself immediately after luncheon for her afternoon nap, but kept battling with her nods until nature was victorious and the fell fast asleep. Marta, grown restless with impatience, suggested to Lanstron that they stroll in the garden, and they took the path past the house toward the castle tower, stopping in an arbor with high hedges on either side around a statue of Mercury.
"Now!" exclaimed Marta narrowly. "It was you, Lanny, who recommended Feller to us as a gardener, competent though deaf!" With literal brevity she told how she had proved him to be a man of most sensitive hearing. "I didn't let him know that he was discovered. I felt too much pity for him to do that. You brought him here—you, Lanny, you are the one to explain."
"True, he is not deaf!" Lanstron replied.
"You knew he was not deaf, while we wrote our messages to him and I have been learning the deaf-and-dumb alphabet! It was pretty fun, wasn't it?"
"Not fun—no, Marta!" he parried.
"He is a spy?" she asked.
"Yes, a spy. You can put things in a bright light, Marta!" He found words coming with difficulty in face of the pain and disillusion of her set look.
"Using some broken man as a pawn; setting him as a spy in the garden where you have been the welcome friend!" she exclaimed. "A spy on what—on my mother, on Minna, on me, on the flowers, as a part of this monstrous game of trickery and lies that you are playing?"
There was no trace of anger in her tone. It was that of one mortally hurt. Anger would have been easier to bear than the measuring, penetrating wonder that found him guilty of such a horrible part. Those eyes would have confused Partow himself with the steady, welling intensity of their gaze. She did not see how his left hand was twitching and how he stilled its movement by pressing it against the bench.
"You will take Feller with you when you go!" she said, rising.
Lanstron dropped his head in a kind of shaking throb of his whole body and raised a face white with appeal.
"Marta!" He was speaking to a profile, very sensitive and yet like ivory. "I've no excuse for such an abuse of hospitality except the obesssion of a loathsome work that some man must do and I was set to do. My God, Marta! I cease to be natural and human. I am a machine. I keep thinking, what if war comes and some error of mine let the enemy know where to strike the blow of victory; or if there were information I might have gained and failed to gain that would have given us the victory—if, because I had not done my part, thousands of lives of our soldiers were sacrificed needlessly!"
At that she turned on him quickly, her face softening.
"You do think of that—the lives?"
"Yes, why shouldn't I?"
"Of those on your side!"