The Last Shot Part 46

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

"Getting well of a wound," answered Hugo, looking frankly into the hawk eyes.

"Evidently!" said Bouchard, who was always irritated when told what he could see for himself. "Why aren't you at a hospital?"

"I was not wanted there!" said Hugo.

"What! what!" But Bouchard had wasted two words. "Your name and regiment?" he asked.

"Hugo Mallin, of the 128th," replied Hugo.

"Uh-h!" Bouchard's pigeonhole memory had retained the name.

"Charge--mutiny under fire; anarchism!" he went on, chopping out the words as if they were chips from a piece of granite. "Well, you have not escaped trial by hiding."

"I did not flatter myself that with one leg against a whole army I had much chance, sir!" Hugo replied respectfully.

"Uh-h!" The hawk eyes flashed their disapproval of such controversial freedom of language from a private. Had he had his way he would have hanged Hugo to the nearest tree; for Bouchard had truly a mediaeval soul.

But Hugo's case was so extraordinary that it had reached Westerling's ears, and Bouchard knew that Westerling wished to see Hugo when he was apprehended. It was not for Bouchard to consider this desire of a chief of staff to deal with the case of a private in person as singular. No request of the chief of staff was singular to him. It became a matter of natural law. He called to one of the staff guards who was pacing back and forth near by.

"Take this man in charge and watch him sharply until General Westerling sends for him!"

"And you will get justice from General Westerling!" It was Marta's voice. In approaching she had unavoidably overheard part of the conversation. "Justice is his first characteristic!" she added as the hawk eyes turned their scrutiny into hers, which were calm and smiling.

Hugo had not seen Marta since he had been carried to the coachman's quarters. Minna had visited him frequently, bearing inquiries from her mistress as well as custards. He had looked forward to a talk with Marta as a kindred spirit, yet it was difficult for him to reconcile the woman speaking now with the woman who had kissed him on the forehead.

But he said nothing as he was marched away.

"Miss Galland!" exclaimed Bouchard in a way that said he knew her story.

"Yes, that little monkey can depend on more justice than he deserves.

The unanswerable evidence is on the chief of staff's desk awaiting his arrival."

Bouchard's hawk eyes probed hers for an instant longer and seemed to find nothing to call further curiosity; then he lifted his cap and proceeded with his tour of inspection.

Marta smiled thoughtfully as she watched his receding figure, while her eyelashes narrowed and she inclined her head with a nod before she moved away in the direction of the tower. There was almost complete silence along the front. Since yesterday's action, which had checked the guns commanding the range of the house, there had been little firing. She guessed that the lull was only a recess of preparation for the grand attack on the first line of permanent defence, and that probably this would follow Westerling's arrival. He was due at four o'clock and he would be characteristically prompt to the minute.

"It must not be! Hugo Mallin is too fine a spirit to be sacrificed. I'll go on my knees, if need be, to Westerling," Marta was thinking as she paced back and forth in her room. On her knees to him! She stopped short, struck in revolt with a memory of the way he had looked at her once as she sat across the tea-table from him in the hotel reception-room. "No, I could not endure that except as a last resort. If ever there were a time to use all my wits it is now--to save Hugo Mallin, the one soldier who acted out the principles which I taught my children!"

x.x.xII

TEA ON THE VERANDA AGAIN

As it lacked one minute to four when Hedworth Westerling, chief of staff in name as well as power now, alighted from the gray automobile that turned in at the Galland drive, the chauffeur thought well enough of himself to forget the crush of supplies and ambulances that had delayed His Excellency's car for at least ninety seconds in the main street of the town. Though His Excellency had not occupied his new headquarters as soon as he expected, this could have no influence on results. If he had lost fifty thousand men on the first two days and two hundred thousand since the war had begun, should he allow this to disturb his well-being of body or mind? His well-being of body and mind meant the ultimate saving of lives.

The Grays were winning; this alone counted in the present. They would continue to win; this alone counted in the future. They had won by crowding in reserves till the positions attacked yielded to superior strength. Thus they would continue to win until the last positions had yielded.

Five million mothers' sons against three million mothers' sons! Five to three pounds of fles.h.!.+ Five to three ounces of blood! With equal skill, superior strength must always tell. Westerling and his staff were responsible for the skill. If their minds would work better for it, the nation could well afford to feed them on nightingales' tongues.

Confidence is the handmaiden of skill. Confidence is the edge on the sword; confidence brings the final charge that wins the redoubt.

Confidence was reflected in Westerling's bearing and in his smile of command as he pa.s.sed through the staff rooms, Turcas and Bouchard in his train, with tacit approval of the arrangements. Finally, Turcas, now vice-chief of staff, and the other chiefs awaited his pleasure in the library, which was to be his sanctum. On the ma.s.sive seventeenth-century desk lay a number of reports and suggestions. Westerling ran through them with accustomed swiftness of sifting and then turned to his personal aide.

"Tell Francois that I will have tea on the veranda."

From the fact that he took with him the papers that he had laid aside, subordinate generals, with the gift of unspoken directions which is a part of their profession, understood that he meant to go over the subjects requiring special attention while he had tea.

"Everything is going well--well!" he added in a way that said that everything must be if he said so and that he knew how to make everything go well. "And we shall be up pretty late to-night. Any one who feels the need had better take a nap"--the implication being that he did not.

"Well!" ran the unspoken communication of confidence through the staff.

So well that His Excellency was calmly taking tea on the veranda! For the indefatigable Turcas the detail; for Westerling the front of Jove.

"Well!" The thrill of the word was with him in a flight of sentiment as he stood on that veranda where a certain prophecy had been made to a young colonel. Sight of the rippling folds of the flag of his country on the outskirts of the town prolonged the thrill. His eyes swept the pale horizon of the distances of plain and Mountain and lowered to the garden. Above the second terrace he saw a crown of woman's hair--hair of a jet abundance, radiant in the sunlight and shading a face that brought familiar completeness to the scene.

He had told Marta only two weeks ago that he should see her again if war came; and war had come. With the inviting prospect of a few holiday moments in which to continue the interview that had been abruptly concluded in a hotel reception-room, he started down the terrace steps.

Their glances met where the second terrace path ended at the second terrace flight; hers shot with a beam of restrained and questioning good humor that spoke at least a truce to the invader.

"You called sooner than I expected," she said in a note of equivocal pleasantry.

"Or I," he rejoined with a shade of triumph, the politest of triumph. He was a step above her, her head on a level with the pocket of his blouse.

His square shoulders, commanding height, and military erectness were thus emphasized, as was her own feminine slightness.

"I want to thank you," she said. "As becomes a soldier, your forethought was expressed in action. It was the promptness of the men you sent to look after the garden which saved the uprooted plants before they were past recovery."

"I wished it for your sake and somewhat for my own sake to be the same that it was in the days when I used to call," he said graciously. "Tea was from four to five, do you remember? Will you join me? I have just ordered it."

A generous, pleasant conqueror, this! No one knew better than Westerling how to be one when he chose. He was something of an actor. Leaders of men of his type usually are.

"Why, yes. Very gladly!" she a.s.sented with no undue cordiality and no undue constraint, quite as if there were no war.

"It was the Browns who cut the lindens?" he suggested significantly.

"They said that it was necessary as part of the defence," she replied.

"We shall plant new ones and have the pleasure of watching them grow."

Neutrality could not be better impersonated he thought, than in the even cleaving of her lips over the words. They seemed to say that a storm had come and gone and a new set of masters had taken the place of the old. As they approached the veranda Francois was placing the tea things.

"Quite the same! That was your chair, as I remember," said Westerling after indicating to Francois that he might go, "and this was mine."

But the teapot was not Mrs. Galland's--it belonged to the staff.

"This is different," observed Marta, touching her finger-tip to the coat of arms of the Grays on the side of a cup.

"Yes, my own field kit," he answered, thinking that the novelty of tea from a soldier's service had appealed to her; for she was smiling.

"So, you being the host and I the guest now, why, you pour!" she said.

There was a touch of brittleness in her tone--of half-teasing, half-serious brittleness.