The Last Shot Part 14

"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 p.a.w.n; 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 G.o.d, 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!" she exclaimed, turning away.

"Yes, of those first," he replied. "And, Marta, I did not tell you why Feller was here because he did not want me to, and I was curious to see if he had sustained power enough to keep you from discovering his simulation. I did not think he would remain. I thought that in a week he would tire of the part. But now you must have the whole story. You will listen?"

"I should not be fair if I did not, should I?" she replied, with a weary shadow of a smile.

XI

MARTA HEARS FELLER'S STORY

To tell the story as Lanstron told it is to have it from the partisan lips of a man speaking for a man out of the depths of a friends.h.i.+p grown into the fibre of youth. It is better written by the detached narrator.

Gustave Feller's father had died when Gustave was twelve and his mother found it easy to spoil an only son who was handsome and popular. He suffered the misfortune of a mental brilliancy that learns too readily and of a personal charm that wins its way too easily. He danced well; he was facile at the piano; and he had so p.r.o.nounced a gift as an amateur actor that a celebrated professional had advised him to go on the stage.

The two entering the cadet officers' school at the same time, chance made them roommates and choice soon made them chums. They had in common cleverness and the abundant energy that must continually express itself in action, and a mutual attraction in the very complexity of dissimilar traits that wove well in companions.h.i.+p.

While they were together Lanstron was a brake on his friend's impulses of frivolity which carried him to extremes; but they separated after receiving their commissions, Feller being a.s.signed to the horse-artillery and Lanstron to the infantry and later to the staff. In charge of a field-battery at manoeuvres Feller was at his best. But in the comparative idleness of his profession he had much spare time for amus.e.m.e.nt, which led to gambling. Soon many debts hung over his head, awaiting liquidation at high rates of interest when he should come into the family property.

To the last his mother, having ever in mind a picture of him as a fine figure riding at the head of his guns, was kept in ignorance of this side of his life. With her death, when he had just turned thirty, a fortune was at his disposal. He made an oath of his resolution to pay his debts, marry and settle down and maintain his inheritance unimpaired. This endured for a year before it began to waver; and the wavering was soon followed by headlong obsession which fed on itself. As his pa.s.sion for gambling grew it seemed to consume the better elements of his nature. Lanstron reasoned with him, then implored, then stormed; and Feller, regularly promising to reform, regularly fell each time into greater excesses. Twice Lanstron saved him from court-martial, but the third time no intercession or influence would induce his superiors to overlook the offence. Feller was permitted to resign to avoid a scandal, and at thirty-three, penniless, disgraced, he faced the world and sought the new land which has been the refuge for numbers of his kind. Only one friend bade him farewell as he boarded a steamer for New York, and this was Lanstron.

"Keep away from cities! Seek the open country! And write me, Gustave--don't fail!" said Lanstron.

Letters full of hope came from a Wyoming ranch; letters that told how Feller had learned to rope a steer and had won favor with his fellows and the ranch boss; of a one-time gourmet's healthy appet.i.te for the fare of the chuck wagon. Lanstron, reading more between the lines than in them, understood that as muscles hardened with the new life the old pa.s.sion was dying and in its place was coming something equally dangerous as a possible force in driving his ardent nature to some excess for the sake of oblivion. Finally, Feller broke out with the truth.

"My hair is white now, Lanny," he wrote. "I have aged ten years in these two. With every month of this new life the horror of my career has become clear to me. I lie awake thinking of it. I feel unworthy to a.s.sociate with my simple, outspoken, free-riding companions. Remorse is literally burning up my brain. It is better to have my mind diseased, my moral faculties blurred, my body unsound; for to be normal, healthy, industrious is to remember the whole ghastly business of my dishonor.

"'Pay back! Pay back in some way!' a voice keeps saying. 'Pay back! Have an object in mind. Get to work on something that will help you to pay back or you will soon take a plunge to lower depths than you have yet sounded.'

"It is not the gambling, not the drinking--no! The thing that I cannot forget, that grows more horrible the more keenly awake clean living makes me to the past, is that I am inwardly foul--as foul as a priest who has broken his vows. I have disgraced the uniform--my country's uniform. I may never wear that uniform again; never look the meanest private in a battery in the face without feeling my cheeks hot with shame. While I cannot right myself before the service, I should like to do something to right myself with my conscience. I should like to see a battery march past and look at the flag and into the faces of the soldiers of my country feeling that I had atoned--feeling so for my own peace of mind--atoned by some real deed of service.

"I have been reading how j.a.panese volunteers made a bridge of their bodies for their comrades into a Russian trench, and when everybody else felt a horrible, uncanny admiration for such madness I have envied them the glorious exhilaration of the moment before the charge. That was a sufficient reward in life for death. So I come again to you for help.

Now that you are chief of intelligence you must have many secret agents within the inner circle of the army's activities. In the midst of peace and the commonplaces of drill and manoeuvres there must be dangerous and trying work where the only distinction is service for the cause--our cause of three million against five. Find a task for me, no matter how mean, thankless, or dangerous, Lanny. The more exacting it is the more welcome, for the better will be my chance to get right with myself."

"Come!" was Lanstron's cable in answer.

At the time he had not chosen any employment for Feller. He was thinking only that something must be found. When he heard of the death of the Gallands' gardener he recollected that before the pa.s.sion for gambling overtook Feller he had still another pa.s.sion besides his guns. The garden of the Feller estate had been famous in its neighborhood. Young Lanstron had not been more fond of the society of an engine-driver than young Feller of a gardener's. On a holiday in the capital with his fellow cadets he would separate from them to spend hours in the botanical gardens. Once, after his downfall began, at a riotous dinner party he had broken into a temper with a man who had torn a rose to pieces in order to toss the petals over the table.

"Flowers have souls!" he had cried in one of his tumultuous, abandoned reversions to his better self which his companions found eccentric and diverting. "That rose is the only thing in the room that is not foul --and I am the foulest of all!"

The next minute, perhaps after another gla.s.s of champagne, he would be winning a burst of laughter by his mimicry of a gouty old colonel reprimanding him for his erring career.

Naturally, in the instinct of friends.h.i.+p, Lanstron's own account left out the unpleasant and dwelt on the pleasant facts of Feller's career.

"His colonel did not understand him," he said. "But I knew the depths of his fine spirit and generous heart. I knew his talent. I knew that he was a victim of unsympathetic surroundings, of wealth, of love of excitement, and his own talent. Where he was, something must happen. He bubbled with energy. The routine of drill, the same old chaff of the mess, the garrison gossip, the long hours of idleness while the busy world throbs outside, which form a privileged life to most officers, were stifling to him. 'Let's set things going!' he would say in the old days, and we'd set them. Most of our demerits were for some kind of deviltry. And how he loved the guns! I can see the sparkle of his men's eyes at sight of him. n.o.body could get out of them what he could. If he had not been put in the army as a matter of family custom, if he had been an actor, or if he and I had gone to build bridges, then he might have a line of capital letters and periods after his name, and he would not be a spy or I an employer of spies, doing the work of a detective agency in an officer's uniform because n.o.body but an officer may do it."

At first Marta listened rigidly, but as the narrative proceeded her interest grew. When Lanstron quoted Feller's appeal for any task, however mean and thankless, she nodded sympathetically and understandingly; when he related the incident of the rose, its appeal was irresistible. She gave a start of delight and broke silence.

"Yes. I recall just how he looked as he stood on the porch, his head bent, his shoulders stooped, twirling his hat in his hands, while mother and I examined him as to his qualifications," she said. "I remember his words. He said that he knew flowers and that, like him, flowers could not hear; but perhaps he would be all the better gardener because he could not hear. He was so ingratiating; yet his deafness seemed such a drawback that I hesitated."

Following the path to the tower leisurely, they had reached the tower.

Feller's door was open. Marta looked into the room, finding in the neat arrangement of its furniture a new significance. He was absent, for it was the dinner hour.

"And on my recommendation you took him," Lanstron continued.

"Yes, on yours, Lanny, on a friend's! You"--she put a cold emphasis on the word--"you wanted him here for your plans! And why? You haven't answered that yet. What purpose of the war game does he serve in our garden?"

His look pleaded for patience, while he tried to smile, which was rather difficult in face of her att.i.tude.

"Not altogether in the garden; partly in the tower," he replied. "You are to be in the whole secret and in such a way as to make my temptation clear, I hope. First, I think you ought to see the setting. Let us go in"

Impelled by the fascination of Feller's romantic story and by a curiosity that Lanstron's manner accentuated, she entered the room.

Apparently Lanstron was familiar with the premises. Pa.s.sing through the sitting-room into the room adjoining, where Feller stored his tools, he opened a door that gave onto the circular stone steps leading down into the dungeon tunnel.

"I think we had better have a light," he said, and when he had fetched one from the bedchamber he descended the steps, asking her to follow.

They were in a pa.s.sage six feet in height and about three feet broad, which seemed to lead on indefinitely into clammy darkness. The dewy stone walls sparkled in fantastic and ghostly iridescence under the rays from the lantern. The dank air lay moist against their faces.

"It's a long time since I've been here," said Marta, glad to break the uncanny sound of their footsteps in the weird silence with her voice.

"Not since I was a youngster. Then I came on a dare to see if there were goblins. There weren't any; at least, none that cared to manifest himself to me."

"We have a goblin here now that we are nursing for the Grays--an up-to-date one that is quite visible," said Lanstron. "This is far enough." He paused and raised the lantern. With its light full in her face, she blinked. "There, at the height of your chin!"